Though the ‘Asia Extreme’ moniker has only been around since 2005, Asian cinema, particularly from Hong Kong and Japan, has a long and illustrious history with cutting edge genre fare, and has been producing and distributing envelope-pushing films for nearly fifty years. While these films rarely found a home outside of their native countries, their taboo-busting efforts were not unnoticed at home where they had loyal and dedicated followers.

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Vengeance as a core theme is no stranger to Asian cinema, and it’s been employed by directors working in genre cinema (Shunya Ito’s FEMALE PRISONER #701: SCORPION) as well as those catering to the arthouse crowd (Akira Kurosawa’s THE BAD SLEEP WELL). Quentin Tarantino’s KILL BILL films were an amalgam of Asian revenge films; everything from Hong Kong Kung-Fu flicks of the 70s to Toshiya Fujita’s LADY SNOWBLOOD series.

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