Podcast on Fire: Black Mask
Podcast on Fire watches Black Mask (1996)! “Jet Li is a super soldier Kato lookalike in Hong Kong’s superhero actioner Black Mask. With Kenny B and Michael Scott of the Admins Undisputed podcast.”
An Ode to Herioc Bloodshed
At Strange Harbors, Jeffrey Zhang reviews Benny Chan’s Raging Fire (2021). “Chan, with his swan song, has crafted an ode to the ‘heroic bloodshed’ genre of Hong Kong action cinema. A maelstrom of melodramatic concepts: redemption, brotherhood, duty, honor–and of course–copious amounts of bloodletting, this sub-genre was a […]
Choose Your Fighter: Mortal Kombat (2021) and The Night Comes for Us (2018)
This week’s Guest Star is Sachin Hingoo. Sachin is a Toronto-based writer and editor at biffbampop.com. He has never had a superpower, but would like to think that if he did it would be more interesting than an armoured sweater. ~~~ [Warning: The following contains copious spoilers for […]
Karate!
When I last investigated this film in the early 2010s, it wasn’t on youtube, and I was distraught: when you hear that there is such a thing as a 1983 disco karate movie, you need to see it right now and then immediately share it with an appreciative […]
Some Things I Liked in 2020
In normal times, I’d be writing about ten comics I read that I liked this year and haven’t written about yet. But it is, as is so often said, not normal times and I am not entirely sure what the new normal will be both here at the […]
How Tsui Hark refreshed wuxia film with The Butterfly Murders (1979)
“Hong Kong director Tsui Hark’s debut film, The Butterfly Murders, didn’t make much of a dent on the box office when it was released in July 1979, but it did garner some good reviews. Today it is regarded as a minor masterpiece for its creative and unique approach to […]
The Cultural Gutter 