Throw Down: An Action Cinema Podcast

Where must we go, we who wander this wasteland in search of our buffer selves? In a bleak, post-apocalyptic shell of a world, cities crumbling and the wastes ruled by violent warlords, everything is left to sheer strength. Muscle is all that matters, and to ascend to godhood your only option is to become so powerful that you become an immense giant, towering over the meek and willing to crush them...

Starting out by directing low budget horror and Category III exploitation films, Wilson Yip made a name for himself in '90s Hong Kong with breakout hits like Bio-Zombie , a Dawn of the Dead influenced zombie film taking place in a claustrophobic Hong Kong mall, and Bullets Over Summer , a buddy cop hangout film that earned him enough credibility to start directing for studios like Golden Harve...

This week on Throw Down, Jack and Vaughn open Pandora's box - the world of 90s SOV B-movie action, this time featuring Patrick G. Donahue's maniacal Parole Violators . The host of a vigilante public access television series is desperate to keep his program on air, putting himself in absurd danger for absolutely no reason to document himself apprehending recently released criminals violatin...

Hot off the international success of Ong-Bak (2003), stunt choreographer and Thai action veteran Panna Rittikrai set out to make another no holds barred stunt showcase, featuring a cast of his Muay Thai Stunt team and a group of Thai national athletes. A loose remake of his debut film, Born to Fight commits itself entirely to its mind boggling action and death defying stunts wrapped around a simpl...

Nearly two decades after the conclusion of the original Matrix trilogy, after initially expressing an explicit intent to leave the story where it ended, Lana Wachowski returned to her world of cyberpunk and philosophy as a way to process grief and to protect her IP from corporate bastardization. The result is a massive swing as beautifully earnest and idiosyncratic as anything either of the Wachow...

Picking up mere moments from where The Matrix Reloaded left off, the sweeping conclusion to the Matrix trilogy weaves a now expansive mythology into its towering climax. Unexpected and dizzying in its complex narrative developments and operatic action sequences that fulfill the destiny of Neo, the triumph of love over the oppressive threat of a seething corporate-coded maniac who cannot accept or...

While in Japan promoting The Matrix , the Wachowskis met many of the legendary animators whose work had influenced their cyberpunk masterpiece, and began a journey to collaborate with them on a series of animated shorts that would expand the universe of The Matrix. The Animatrix , released in 2003 between The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, is a nine part anthology that weaves a new my...

Following up The Matrix seems like an impossible task. A flawless film blending decades of influence with spellbinding cinematic energy and stunningly inventive filmmaking technique, what more is there to do? For the Wachowskis, the only thing to do is craft a startlingly idiosyncratic two part cinematic epic that completely inverts the binary philosophy of the first film and replaces it with a de...

Opening with studio logos turned into malleable green code, The Matrix immediately signaled its ethos of rebellion against corporate systems. A verdant haze blankets the film, a visual coding of a false reality, a world that must be shattered, an oppressive existence without freedom or agency. A hapless software developer lives one life as a cog in the machine, feeding into structures of systemic...

Mechanical Harryhausen monstrosities, heroic feats of strength, ancient neon cities, and bears flung into space: the atmosphere of Luigi Cozzi's Hercules is unlike any other interpretation of the mythological journey. Even within the confines of its swords and sandals genre trappings it manages to find ways to be a consistently inventive and fascinating kind of filmmaking - the kind that only...

Joseph Sargent's 1974 action crime thriller based on Morton Freedgood's original novel released to critical and audience acclaim, a scuzzy '70s B-thriller punched up by David Shire's stunning jazz fusion score, Gerald Greenberg's inventive editing, and the rapid fire back and forth of Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw. 35 years later, vulgar auteur Tony Scott reimagined the film a...

Mambo mambo, this week king of cult movies Albert Pyun makes his first appearance on the show with action battle royale Mean Guns. 100 thugs, a mysterious Christophe Lambert, platinum grilled mambo fan Ice-T, a lot of bullets, and a single location that could not be disturbed in the production of the film. How do you make a dynamic, kinetic, convincing action film out of that? Jack and Vaughn dive...

One of Hong Kong's most prolific and acclaimed masters of cinema, Johnnie To has produced and directed over 70 films. Known for his powerhouse cinema that serves to deconstruct and reframe any genre or cinematic expression imaginable, there's little To hasn't done - but for an action podcast with the namesake of one of his films, it's time for Jack and Vaughn to dive into his work...

Closing out the month of March, In The Line of Duty 4 continues the story of Cynthia Khan's Inspector Yeung and features the most established director of the series to date - Hong Kong choreography legend Yuen Woo-ping. A stone cold martial arts classic, the fourth entry in the franchise features a tight, dialed in script and non-stop action, from brutal fights at the docks featuring wrenches...

Now truly capitalizing on the success of Royal Warriors and Yes, Madam! , D&B Films move on to the first directly titled sequel of the franchise, only Michelle Yeoh has moved on and there's no longer an established director attached. The result may lack the inventive whimsy of the previous two films but instead it's replaced with pure aggression, a gritty brutality that overtakes the a...

Traveling back in time to the second film in the In The Line of Duty series, it's the genre-pioneering buddy cop martial arts comedy stunner Yes, Madam! starring Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock. A much more comedic, slapstick effort than Royal Warriors, this girls with guns game-changer sees the gritty, intense action from Yeoh and Rothrock set against the Three Stooges antics of Tsui Hark,...

As the late, great Jean-Luc Godard once said, "All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun." 1980s Hong Kong action and D&B studios' In The Line Of Duty series supposes that the only way to elevate this idea is to invent an entirely new subgenre based entirely around putting women at the forefront of high octane crime thrillers. Born from the four films to be covered on Throw...

As the height of blaxploitation collides with the cultural discovery of eastern martial arts cinema, stars like Jim Kelly came from appearing against Bruce Lee to being steely protagonists of cheap B exploitation cinema. With Black Samurai , Al Adamson crafts a scuzzy, sleazy actioner that pulls as much from the likes of Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung as it does from that of cheesy James Bond espionag...

Inspired by the blisteringly violent mania encased within the final sequence of John Woo's Hard Boiled , Michael Davis cooked up his own piece of towering action mayhem, only twisted into an absurdist live-action translation of Bugs Bunny versus Elmer Fudd with blood, bullets, babies, and carrots. Join Jack and Vaughn as they share in their appreciation of the ridiculous masterpiece and its sl...

Blurry '00s low budget action sensibilities meet an explosion of comic-book visuals, a grungy nu metal soundtrack, giant swords, fantasy motorcycles, bazookas, and more in Yuji Shimomura's 2005 manga adaptation. Jack and Vaughn may be a little late to their final Japanuary pick but their dedication will not be stopped, so tune in this week as they discuss the deluge of wild violence and ch...

A full force cinematic barrage of action influence, Norifumi Suzuki's Roaring Fire is one of the great hidden gems of '80s martial arts stunt showcases. Starring a young Hiroyuki Sanada as an orphaned drifter raised in Texas returning to his estranged family in Japan only to find a villainous plot involving stolen diamonds and fascist uncles, it's a non-stop deluge of bruiser action, c...

The first thread in a rich cinematic tapestry of adventures following blind masseur and unassuming master swordsman Zatoichi, a series that now spans 26 films and hundreds of TV episodes, starts here, with Kenji Misumi's The Tale of Zatoichi. Following the titular swordsman and establishing his character as a nonchalant zen master capable of leveraging people's prejudices and assumptions,...

Coming off of two wacky, globe-trotting Hollywood oddities, Hong Kong legend Tsui Hark returned home in 2000 to make Time and Tide , a bombastic action film so elusive and oblique that it seems futile to even begin piecing it together. Star-crossed brotherhood, overcranked deconstruction of heroic bloodshed, dizzyingly turn of the century hyperstylization, all bundled up and packaged into a thunde...

Merry Christmas and happy holidays, listeners, this week Jack and Vaughn came out to the coast, got together, and had a few laughs discussing John McTiernan's festive action classic. Starring a beaten and bruised Bruce Willis turning in an all time performance as John McClane, up against a blisteringly cool and calmly evil Alan Rickman as Hans Gruber, there's no film this podcast's hos...

When John Woo first took his signature style of wanton explosive action fervor international, he teamed up with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Lance Henriksen to trade the neon painted rain-slicked pavement of Hong Kong for a muggy, dusty town of drifters and lawless chaos. Hard Target proved that Woo could take his towering vision of action anywhere and turn in a brutal face melter. 23 years later, DT...