Donnie Yen isn’t the only actor appearing in two films (The Lost Bladesman and Wu Xia) this year. Jiang Wen plays Cao Cao to Yen’s Guan in The Lost Bladesman and causes Chow Yun-Fat no end of consternation in Let The Bullets Fly as Zhang Muzhi and probably as the director of the same. A [...]

    Printing Genius and friend of ActionFest, James Rheem Davis has two new cool poster designs! First up: A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET- UK poster design:  ”This poster was approached as a sequel poster to the first ANOES poster I did for Mondo. It is one of the most requested posters from fans. Hopefully, this new [...]

Get ready for righteous, rowdy, full-on face-kicking action with two downloadable tracklists that have everyone at ActionFest punch-dancing.  Whether you’re in the dance battle of your life, training for the ultimate showdown or driving your convertible Ferrari through a post-apocalyptic dystopia with streets of fire reflected in your Ray-Bans, just click and go! “Blood Brothers:  [...]

Last year, the run-up to ActionFest coincided with the campaign to bring a statue of RoboCop home to the Motor City. Now The Detroit News is reporting that RoboCop will be coming to Detroit.  The statue will be cast by Detroit’s Venus Bronze Works and might find a home near the iconic Michigan Central Depot. [...]

Happy Birthday to Roger Corman, director and producer of countless films! He created a model of indie filmmaking that’s still used today.  Born in Detroit, educated at Stanford and Oxford, Corman brought all his knowledge and creativity to bear in making and producing amazing movies:  the Edgar Allan Poe films with Vincent Price; the original [...]

If you’re a chanbara or Japanese swordfight film fan, you’ve probably seen Seizo Fukumoto.  Fukumoto has died over 50,000 times on film.  He’s an actor who specializes in the art of death, or kirareyaku. NPR’s Morning Edition has more on Fukumoto and performers from chanbara films. Toronto J-Film Pow-Wow has a 2010 story back in [...]

  Austrian Death Machine kindly requests the use of your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle. Actually, they don’t–and neither does T One Million. They do not ask. In fact, the T One Million hears your lamentations, ignores them, AND spikes your drink with protein powder. As I Lay Dying’s Tim Lambesis founded Austrian Death [...]

Desperate chances were taken by escape-artist Harry Houdini in the 1919 silent film, The Grim Game. After framing Harvey Handford for murder, murderous fiends have absconded with Hanford’s fiancee, but not even their taking to the skies will deter the young man! According to unsourced material on IMDb, Houdini was not the man who jumped [...]

Happy Birthday to one cool cat, Steve McQueen. Whether it’s bringing back desperados dead or alive, battling an interplanetary menace, jumping a fence in a Triumph motorcycle or roaring over the hills of San Francisco in a Mustang GT, Steve McQueen brought a rush of pure adrenaline cut with sangfroid and sardonic humor. So rev [...]

Today’s the 102nd birthday of Akira Kurosawa, the legendary director and screenwriter of films such as, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Hidden Fortress, Drunken Angel,  High and Low, Stray Dog, and the man who brought the action back to Shakespeare with Throne of Blood and Ran. The world of action wouldn’t be the same without him–from [...]

Filmmakers from Paramount’s Sports in Action visited the De Pasquale Yoshitsune Dojo in 1966 for a short film about karate and judo called, “Chop Chop.” They mixed in some excellent 1960s narration–“Heaven help the masher who picks the wrong victim”–some classic 1960s action music and “The Karate Creed.” The dojo was founded in 1961 by [...]