Including reviews of 200 films, plus information about U.S. theaters, video stores, and mail-order sources that specialize in this white-hot, new genre, this is the first guide to an exploding popular culture phenomenon. Includes 75 photos.

How and why did films from Hong Kong — a former British Crown Colony and map-speck — become so popular? Post-WWII, creative freedom was scarce in Asia, but Hong Kong was a safe space for filmmakers seeking to profit from overseas Chinese markets and Chinatowns worldwide. Both Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest set up massive operations in Hong Kong and let the celluloid slip. By the 1980s, Hong Kong's Sammo Hung and Jackie Chan were famous throughout Asia. Their winning formula of humour and martial arts prowess ripped through kung fu stereotypes, while filmmakers like Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam served up fantasy, horror and noir crime dramas for rabid cinemagoing hordes in the grindhouses of Kowloon. It was a glorious time. This book is the nonpareil true story of the Hong Kong film industry, one that doesn’t skimp on the good bits: the hyperkinetic films themselves. Included are intrepid firsthand accounts of the culture and international fanbases to have emerged around these movies. More Sex, Better Zen, Faster Bullets contains the best bits of Sex and Zen & A Bullet in the Head (1996) and Hollywood East (2000) — the two best known tomes on Hong Kong films of the twentieth century — revised and with the inclusion of new material. The result is the most comprehensive encyclopedia of Hong Kong film available anywhere.

The visually striking, lightning-fast action movies of Hong Kong used to be a favorite only of cult film enthusiasts -- these days, however, stars such as Sammo Hung, Jet Li, and Jackie Chan are household names. This book offers an inside look at the explosive Hong Kong film industry, its skyrocketing popularity, and its sometimes controversial relationship with Hollywood.

Incredibly Strange Films is a functional guide to important territory neglected by the film-criticism establishment, spotlighting unhailed directors -- Hershell Gordon Lewis, Russ Meyer, Larry Cohen, Ray Dennis Steckler, Ted V. Mikels and others -- who have been critically consigned to the ghettos of gore and sexploitation films. In-depth interviews focus on philosophy while anecdotes entertain as well as illuminate theory. The guide includes biographies, genre overviews, filmographies, bibliography, quotations, an A-Z of film personalities, lists of recommended films, sources, index, as well as 172 photos.

Breathtaking swordplay and nostalgic love, Peking opera and Chow Yun-fat's cult followers -- these are some of the elements of the vivid and diverse urban imagination that find form and expression in the thriving Hong Kong cinema. All receive their due in At Full Speed, a volume that captures the remarkable range and energy of a cinema that borrows, invents, and reinvents across the boundaries of time, culture, and conventions. At Full Speed gathers film scholars and critics from around the globe to convey the transnational, multilayered character that Hong Kong films acquire and impart as they circulate worldwide. These writers scrutinize the films they find captivating: from the lesser known works of Law Man and Yuen Woo Ping to such film festival notables as Stanley Kwan and Wong Kar-wai, and from the commercial action, romance, and comedy genres of Jackie Chan, Peter Chan, Steven Chiau, Tsui Hark, John Woo, and Derek Yee to the attempted departures of Evans Chan, Ann Hui, and Clara Law. In this cinema the contributors identify an aesthetics of action, gender-flexible melodramatic excesses, objects of nostalgia, and globally projected local history and identities, as well as an active critical film community. Their work, the most incisive account ever given of one of the world's largest film industries, brings the pleasures and idiosyncrasies of Hong Kong cinema into clear close-up focus even as it enlarges on the relationships between art and the market, cultural theory and the movies.

Cinemas from East Asia are among the most exciting and influential in the world. They are attracting popular and critical attention on a global scale, with films from the region circulating as art house, cult, blockbuster and 'extreme' cinema, or as Hollywood remakes. This book explores developments in the global popularity of East Asian cinema, from Chinese martial arts, through Japanese horror, to the burgeoning new Korean cinema, with particular emphasis on crossovers, remakes, hybrids and co-productions. It examines changing cinematic traditions in Asia alongside the 'Asianisation' of western cinema. It explores the dialogue not only between 'East' and 'West', but between different cinemas in the Asia Pacific. What do these trends mean for global cinema? How are co-productions and crossover films changing the nature of Hollywood and East Asian cinemas? The book includes in-depth studies of Park Chan-wook, 'Infernal Affairs', 'Seven Samurai', and 'Princess Mononoke'.

Through a series of detailed, illustrated essays,on key flms within the genre, Lost Highways,explores the history of the road movei.Bringin in,other, until now neglected, genres such as the,western, film noir, horror, and even science,fiction, this is the definitive guide to a diverse,body of film that incorporates some fo the most,dominant themes and most popular films of this,century.