Director Lau Kar-Leung trained in martial arts under the strict instruction of his father Lau Cham, who studied Hung Gar under Lam Sai-wing, who was a student of Wong Fei-hung, the man that this movie is all about. After working as an extra and choreographer, Lau Kar-Leung became one of Shaw Brothers’ main choreographers and worked often with director Chang Cheh.

His best known movies would be 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Return to the 36th Chamber, Aces Go Places 5, Drunken Master 2, Legendary Weapons of China, Tiger on the Beat and Heroes of the East.

Teenager Wong Fei-hung (Gordon Liu) has been sent to train in the art of hung gar kung fu from his father’s teacher, Luk Ah-choy, after entering — and losing — a tournament on his own and causing his father’s school to be dishonored.

The true beauty of this film is the knowledge that martial arts bring one a centered feeling and can take a brash and angry young man and create a tempered adult. Luk Ah-choy continues to remind the hero that he must give more forgiveness and less aggression. These may seem alien concepts for those that only see these films as poorly dubbed fights, but to those that love the genre and have taken their own fighting journies, it will ring with absolute sincerity.

The Arrow Video Shaw Scope Volume One box set has a brand new 2K restoration of Challenge of the Masters from the original negative by Arrow Films. There’s uncompressed Mandarin, Cantonese mono and English original mono audio, as well as newly translated English subtitles and English hard-of-hearing subtitles for the English dubs.

There’s also alternate textless opening credits, a Hong Kong trailer and interviews with Gordon Liu and Chen Kuan-tai, as well as an appreciation of director Lau Kar-leung by film critic and historian Tony Rayns.

You can get this set from MVD.

You can also stream this movie on the Arrow player. Visit ARROW to start your 30-day free trial. Subscriptions are available for $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly. ARROW is available in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland on the following Apps/devices: Roku (all Roku sticks, boxes, devices, etc), Apple TV & iOS devices, Android TV and mobile devices, Fire TV (all Amazon Fire TV Sticks, boxes, etc), and on all web browsers at https://www.arrow-player.com.

The Old School Kung Fu Fest is back and the Museum of the Moving Image and Subway Cinema will co-present eight newly restored films and one fan favorite classic by Kuo on glorious 35mm. Four titles will be available exclusively online, December 6–13, and another five films for in-person big-screen viewing at MoMI, December 10–12. 

To see any of these shows, visit the Museum of the Moving Image online or Subway Cinema.

Carter Wong may be the star while Tien Peng and Polly Shang Kwan show up — in different roles for each of them — but Return of the 18 Bronzemen isn’t a direct sequel to The 18 Bronzemen. Wong is Ai Sung-Chueh, a murderous prince who leaves behind the throne to study the rebels up close by studying at the Shaolin temple. He’s at once determined to pass the tests of the temple to gain their skills and to destroy it.

This installment has way less story, but the real reason to watch it is the nearly hour-long sequence where Wong studies and then challenges the Bronzemen. It’s literally a movie based around one long fight and it’s just as great as it sounds. There’s not much more of a story than that. Really, you expect Wong to get some kind of change of heart or become a better person and he never does, which is odd for someone who has devoted three years of his life to being part of the Shaolin.

The titular fighting masters remain the real draw of this film and the scenes where they battle Wong are worth whatever price of admission that you pay. Kuo would tell further stories of the Shaolin and the Bronzemen in another film made in 1976, Blazing Temple.

The Old School Kung Fu Fest is back and the Museum of the Moving Image and Subway Cinema will co-present eight newly restored films and one fan favorite classic by Kuo on glorious 35mm. Four titles will be available exclusively online, December 6–13, and another five films for in-person big-screen viewing at MoMI, December 10–12. 

To see any of these shows, visit the Museum of the Moving Image online or Subway Cinema.

Shaolung’s family was murdered before he was able to escape to the Shaolin Temple, a place where he has learned to become a pretty strong fighter. Before he can get the revenge that he needs, he must face one final challenge: battling and defeating the titular 18 men of bronze.

What makes this movie — beyond how great it always is to see Carter Wong — is the battle scenes between the students of the Shaolin and the golden army. Some of them look like robots, others look like men just painted gold and no matter how silly that sounds, it’s completely awesome. So is Polly Shang Kwan, who plays the potential future wife of Shaolung who instead dresses as a man and continually defends his life.

This has the best budget I’ve seen in a Joseph Kuo film and he makes the best use of it possible. What an absolute blast.

One look this film’s ’70s drive-in retro one-sheet and you can see that Canadian writer and director Ryan Glover is one of us: raised on those classic horror films from the early days of video stores filled with wares from the ’70s. Primarily a cinematographer with 20 credits to his resume, The Strings is his third dual credit. He made his debut with a short, The Key (2008), and a Toronto-based drama, Hills Green (2013). Both films are collaborative efforts from Glover and his screenwriting partner, Krista Dzialoszynski.

A cross-pollination of horror and thriller, as the one sheet says: Catherine, a Toronto, Ontario, musician, will have her eyes opened in the dead of winter. As she stays at her Aunt’s remote cabin on Prince Edwards Island to work on new material for her next album. That is until a mysterious presence of an urban legend makes itself known. There’s nothing like a break up with a boyfriend to send you running to an island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence (one that empties out during the dead of winter) to make you easy pickings for a victim of a religious-based suicide by self-freezing in the cold, Atlantic-fed waters.

Glover accomplishes a lot with his slight location and small cast, expertly capturing the cold, barren isolation of the off-season island. However, if you’re in the horror market for “shock scares,” this isn’t your film. Be prepared for a well-written and acted character study buoyed by Teagan Johnston’s performance that brings Dzialoszynski’s scripted chills to fruition and only adds to Glover’s crafty camerawork.

Horror fans my recognize the names — for some additional streaming incentive — of producers Robert Menzies and Paul Moyer from The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015), and Dave Conlon and Bruce Fleming, known for A Nightmare Wakes (2019).

You can now stream The Strings exclusively on Shudder.

When you’re an unknown writer/director with an up-and-coming cast of actors and you want to entice those to stream your film: cast horror icon Tony Todd in your comedy homage to “unsolved mystery” shows, most famously, the Robert Stack-hosted Unsolved Mysteries.

A meta-retro film, the story takes a look back on Myths & Mysteries, a ’90s-era reality-reenactment series hosted by Tony Todd. Their latest assignment is at an abandoned, haunted home connected to a pair of infamous bank robbers. The home’s haunting came result of the Wallach Brothers not knowing the home was sold and they murdered the newlywed couple-owners. The mystery comes not from the murders . . . but what happened to the Wallach Brothers.

Needless to say, Tony Todd — in an extended cameo — is the best actor of the cast. The production is on the weak side, but expected for an ultra low-budget indie. What the film lacks in those departments, it more than makes up in the writing. So while the horror aspects aren’t all that effective, the humor hits the mark and keeps you watching.

The Nashville, Tennessee-shot horror comedy stars Megan Duffy (Showtime’s The Affair), James Cox (aka, wrestling champion James Storm), and Kaitlyn Bausch (HBO’s Power and NBC’s Law and Order:SVU). Writer and director Andrew Ford and his partner Eli Osman are the veterans of four short films produced since 2008.

The Reenactment is their debut feature film and becomes available on Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, YouTube Movies, Cable and Satellite On Demand on December 7 through Freestyle Digital Media. You can follow the film on Facebook and easily access all of the platforms where it streams at Link Tree.

Back when this site was young, I wrote something called “Kim Basinger: Professional idiocy, circa 1987 and 1988” in which I wondered why the very capable Basinger resigned herself to playing morons in movies like Blind Date and this movie.

But man — I watched this tonight and maybe I was in the right mood, but when Basinger is giggling and imitating Jimmy Durante? That’s some prime romantic comedy material and it made my heart sing.

Widowed astronomer Steve Mills (Dan Aykroyd) screws up and causes a gravitational disruption in deep space, sending a race of hyper-advanced alien lifeforms to investigate. That would be Celeste (Basinger), who wins over the scientist in a day. But even though she’s been sent to get his research, she falls for him.

The film’s screenplay was written by Herschel Weingrod, Timothy Harris (Weingrod and Harris wrote Trading Places, Twins, Kindergarten Cop and Space Jam together) and Jonathan Reynolds based on an earlier script by Jerico Stone, who originally pitched the film to Paramount Pictures as a drama called They’re Coming that would serve as an allegory about child abuse.

But hey, it gets weirder than that.

Jerico would tell the Los Angeles Times that as a kid in Brooklyn, he had a friend — that he pretended to be a superhero with and they called each other the Black Jacks — showed up badly beaten. “He said we couldn’t do anything to stop his father because he was an alien. And he said he couldn’t see me again–and he never did.” This would happen to him again years later, when he made friends in Los Angeles with another street kid who had a similar story. Jerico said he followed him to a supermarket parking lot, where the boy hopped into an abandoned car. “It didn’t have any wheels and its windows were spray-painted black,” Jerico recalled. “I rushed up and started kicking the car when the door opened and it was an alien. It wasn’t a man. It wasn’t a person. It looked so strange I couldn’t even describe it. I just froze. The next thing I knew this huge hand leaped out and dug into my stomach, grabbing a hold of my spine. The pain was so intense I just collapsed to the ground. The alien creature stood over me and said, very gently, “Sorry, Black Jack.” Then the car started to shimmer, very brightly, and I blacked out from the pain. When I came to, the car — and any traces of it — was gone.”

The next paragraph of this story sends me into fits of ecstatic happiness: Not long afterwards, Jerico had a chance meeting with Orson Welles: “I cornered him walking into Ma Maison and he told me, ‘My boy, “The War of the Worlds” was just a dress rehearsal.”

Stone would also write the movie Matinee.

The film debut of Juliette Lewis, as well as the first time Alyson Hannigan and Seth Green would pair up, My Stepmother is an Alien is silly fun that I probably thought too much about the first time I wrote about it. Also, if you’re making a Letterboxd list of movies where Aykroyd has supernatural sex and then gets a weird smile on his face, you can add this one.

The Arrow Video blu ray of My Stepmother is an Alien has a brand new 2K restoration from the original camera negative, along with brand new audio commentary by critic Bryan Reesman a new interview with director Richard Benjamin, the trailer, an image gallery, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Colin Murdoch and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Amanda Reyes. You can get it from MVD.

BONUS: You can listen to our podcast on this movie too!

Montevideo, Uruguay-based filmmaker Maximiliano “Max” Contenti has been at it since his first short released in 2001. He’s since made eight shorts, two features — Meneco viviente V and Neptunia — and one documentary.

An ’80s slasher meets ’70s giallo throwback that is set in the Wes Craven-Scream ’90s, The Last Mantinee, aka Al morir la matinée (Red Screening) is a movie for fans of both genres — especially giallos — as we are treated to over-the-top, creative kills. As with those giallos of old that we love: it’s not the plot we came for: all the colors of the dark are what we came for. And The Last Matinee has more color and style that several of the recent horror streamers we’ve watched put together.

The plot is simple and it’s set up quickly and it just gets on with it: it’s a dreary, soaking wet day with nothing to do — so you go to the comforting refuge of a grand ol’ theater to watch a showing of Frankenstein. The thing is: serial killers don’t like the rain either and get bored as well. Hey, why should our “Norman Bates” have to collect eyeballs in the pouring down rain when there’s a nice, warm theater filled with plenty of orbs to pluck so as to fill his bottle?

This is the type of sick, clever film that, when one of the victims is smoking and the killer slits their throat: cigarette smoke comes out of their throat.

Yeah, while it may be derivative to some — oh, let’s say Michael Soavi’s Stage Fright and Lamberto Bava’s Demons and Dario Arento’s Opera and Bigas Luna’s Anquish comes to mind — but I can’t recall the last time cigarette smoke puffed out of a slit throat. As with Luna’s cinema-with-cinema effort: the bloody events in the theater mirror the film on the screen.

Hey, we enjoyed it . . . more so than a not-so-clever Rob Zombie Xerox joint.