As one of the first hip hop movies, this groundbreaking film, directed and produced by Charlie Ahearn, features a legendary cast of scene figures, including Adam “Ad-Rock” Horowitz, Fab Five Freddy, Lee Quiñones, Lady Pink, The Rock Steady Crew, The Cold Crush Brothers, Rammellzee with Shockdell, Queen Lisa Lee of Zulu Nation, Grandmaster Flash, and ZEPHYR.

Raymond Zoro (Lee Quiñones) doesn’t want to sell out like other graffiti artists who are taking hip hop culture to the masses and becoming part of New York City’s trendy art scene. But that’s pretty much just the basics that the story revolves around, as it is a ramshackle narrative that gets into dance, art and music, all elements of the scene. It’s a hangout more than a story.

Debbie Harry was going to play Virginia, which would have made the scenes of her driving around to Blondie’s “Pretty Baby” and the use of “Rapture” mean something more than they did. Chris Stein from Blondie also helped create the soundtrack, collaborating with Fab Five Freddy to produce the actual breakbeats used in the film, “an inspired decision that would provide a source of obsession among crate diggers for decades to come.”

The Arrow Video 4K UHD of this film has a perfect bound collector’s book featuring new and archival essays and articles, alongside an extensive collection of stills and artwork from the film, a reversible sleeve featuring two original artwork options, a double-sided foldout poster featuring two original artwork options, an exclusive mini-version of the Wild Style issue of Hip-Hop Family Tree comic book by Ed Piskor and three Wild Style logo stickers. There’s a new 4K restoration from the original 16mm negative by Arrow Films, new audio commentary with Jeff “Chairman” Mao and Andrew “Monk One” Mason, legacy commentary featuring director Charlie Ahearn and Fred “Fab 5 Freddy” Brathwaite, a feature on the soundtrack, a trailer and an image gallery, as well as interviews with most of the cast, panel discussions and exhibits from the anniversary event and videos, as well as a CD that has a Wild Style Megamix by Jorun Bombay, original radio commercials by Fab 5 Freddy and Queen Lisa Lee, rare alternate mixes of Subway Rap and Wild Style Theme, audio outtakes from the film and soundtrack and a 1983 radio interview with Charlie Ahearn. You can get it from MVD.

I think I’ve seen all the Shaw Brothers non-supernatural films, and the HK Database says that this is a drama, so…let’s just agree that it may have demons and magic, but it’s kind of its own thing.

Long Fei (Jason Piao Pai) left behind the world of martial arts fisticuffs and now lives in a secluded mountain studio, where he and his assistant, Fatty (Wong Chun), have spent five years carving a woman out of crystal. Long Fei wishes that his woman had a soul, so he adds some blood because, you know, nothing bad would happen, and of course, everything bad in this movie happens as the crystal woman (Yu-Po Liu) starts killing people.

Masked Poison Yama (Wei Hao Ting) and his son (Yu Hsiao) want to kill Long Fei, so they spend much of the movie inside a treehouse lab where they mix plants, snake venom — yes, the film shows us it being extracted, it’s a Shaw Brothers movie — and animals to make a poison that blows people up from inside their stomach. Yes, they show it. You know you want it.

Yet the son is soon killed by the crystal female, and Yama declares revenge on everyone, first using poison gas to kill everyone in the family of former fighter Prince Tian Di (Jung Wang). As this is all going on, he sends his men, White Judge and Black Judge, after Long Fei and Fatty, who are hiding out in an inn where the owner decapitates people and serves their flesh.

This movie is, well, absolutely wild. There are battles in a graveyard, a school of masked female assassins, wire-assisted swordplay and every character coming together for one final battle. I just realized that Hus Shan also directed Inframan, Kung Fu Zombie and Dynamo. Yeah, that makes sense even if this movie doesn’t — like, how is the crystal woman related to the assassin academy? — but who cares? It looks good, it moves fast, and it’s super weird.

The Arrow Video release of this film, part of the Shaw Scope Volume 4 set, has a high definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentation, newly restored in 2K from the original negatives by Arrow Films. You can get this set from MVD.

Made two years before Ghostbusters, this early Lau Kar-Wing supernatural comedy (one of two he did for Shaw Brothers) has Bao Tuo (Hsiao Ho) and his cousin Zhou Peng (Cheung Chin-Pang) scamming people as fake ghostbusters. As you can imagine, they end up fighting real apparitions. A screwed up exorcism leads to the death of a client and her haunting them…and that’s just the beginning.

This may be wackier than some like, and the script is totally all over the place, but hiding ghosts inside umbrellas, possessed gamblers using that supernatural event to cheat and win money, and supernatural spectral battles should keep you on board. Sure, Golden Harvest did these sorts of movies better — Mr. Vampire, Encounter of the Spooky Kind — but this should at the very least keep you interested.

The Arrow Video release of this film, part of the Shaw Scope Volume 4 set, features a high-definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentation, newly restored in 2K from the original negatives by Arrow Films. You can get this set from MVD.

There are three Hex movies, but they aren’t all that connected, other than the fact that the protagonist of this film, Ma Su (Lo Meng), is the neighbor of the main character in Hex vs. Witchcraft. He finds the same bag of gold that was behind all of the supernatural moments of that film, including the tablet of Liu Ah Cui, whose spirit possesses Yeung Suk Yi (Nancy Lau Nam-Kai) and has her seduce Ma Su.

Kuei Chi-Hung has created a movie in which Yoda randomly shows up, and then Darth Vader appears with a lightsaber that removes clothing. There’s also a real estate developer who hires Ma Su and plans to complete his development by June 30, 1997, which is when Hong Kong became part of China again. In fact, this evil landowner even gets branded with what was supposed to say ‘1997,’ but Shaw Brothers replaced it with their logo.

Eventually, Ma Su fades into the background, and Yeung Suk Yi goes on the offensive to get back at the developer for kicking everyone out of their apartment. By the end, Ma Su has fallen for the ghost and invokes a monkey god to battle an animated statue of Thomas Jefferson because, well, why not at this point? What if it also turns into a slot machine and makes everyone rich with the gold it spews out? Let’s do that too.

They could have made twenty of these movies, and I would watch every one.

The Arrow Video release of this film, part of the Shaw Scope Volume 4 set, has a high definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentation, newly restored in 2K from the original negatives by Arrow Films. You can get this set from MVD.

Directed by John Landis, who wrote it with Mick Garris, this takes trailers of old Universal horror movies to explain why the horror genre is so amazing. While this played theaters for a limited run, I first saw it on video, back in the pre-internet days when finding movie trailers wasn’t as easy as it is now.

Jamie Lee Curtis’s scenes were filmed at Universal Studios locations like Dracula’s Castle, European Street and the Psycho House.

With clips from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Phantom of the Opera, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Mummy, The Bride of Frankenstein, The Mummy’s Hand, The Wolf Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Invisible Agent, The Mummy’s Tomb, Captive Wild Woman, Son of Dracula, Weird Woman, The Mummy’s Ghost, The Mummy’s Curse, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Revenge of the Creature, Tarantula, This Island Earth, Curucu, Beast of the Amazon, The Mole People, The Creature Walks Among Us, The Deadly Mantis, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Psycho, Brides of Dracula, King Kong vs. Godzilla, The Birds and The Night Walker, this also shows a lot of E.T. and trailers for Jaws 3D, Halloween 3 and Videodrome, as well as See You Next Tuesday, an ongoing Landis joke.

While you can find any of these trailers easily today, this is a great time capsule.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Five Elements Ninjas was on USA Up All Night on June 5, 1992 as Super Ninjas.

Chang Cheh directed ninety movies from 1965 to 1993* as well as wrote all the lyrics to the songs featured in his films. The majority of his most well-known movies in the West feature the Venom Mob of Kuo Chui, Lu Feng, Chiang Sheng, Sun Chien, Lo Mang (along with Wei Pai), a group of martial arts masters who appeared together and separately across numerous Shaw Brothers films.

Also known as Super Ninjas, Chinese Super Ninjas and Chinese Super Ninja, this movie seems as if the weirdest and most violence-obsessed kid in your grade school class was suddenly given enough money to stop scribbling in his notebooks and instead allowed to make a movie that is pretty much non-stop ninjas horribly murdering one another.

This is, quite frankly, the highest praise that I can give to a movie.

I mean, let me sum up the first five minutes: Chief Hong (Chan Shen) has challenged his rival Yuan Zeng (Kwan Fung) for the title of martial arts master, which mainly entails sending each other’s students after one another in battles to the death. Hong has cheapened these wars of honor by inviting a foreign samurai to the contest. He kills one of Zeng’s students before being stopped by Liang Zhi Sheng (Lo Mang). Before he commits seppuku, he throws a spiked ring to Zeng, which poisons the master and keeps him from doing kung fu until he heals.

There’s no time to heal, as a new challenge arises from the Five-Element Ninjas. Zeng asks Sheng and Tian Hao (Cheng Tien Chi) to fortify the school while ten of his best men answer the challenge. What follows is a series of increasingly brighter colored ninjas, basically showing you every Mortal Kombat fatality nearly a decade before the game came out. The ninjas also send Senji (Chen Pei-Hsi) to infiltrate the school. Yes, Hong and Mudou (Michael Chan, who didn’t just play triad gangster roles, but left the police to become one), the leader of the ninjas, are pretty much the winners before the fight even gets started.

Within a few weeks, she has mapped out the entire school and Mudou’s ninjas attack as she offers herself to Sheng. He refuses her, but allows her to play the flute for him. As she entertains him, everyone in the school except for Ha escapes and visits his old ninja master. Joined by four other fighters, he challenges the Five-Elements Ninjas and Mudou, who has killed Hong and taken the title of master.

This movie is quite frankly fantastic. It blew my mind throughout and never lets up, like a children’s show that has wall-to-wall gore. As the first movie in our week of Hong Kong films, it has set a high bar that other films will really have to battle to scale and exceed.

You can watch this on Tubi.

*The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, Five Deadly Venoms and Crippled Avengers, to name a few.