Silverstein Films

For the revised and expanded edition of These Fists Break Bricks, we’ve added four new entries to our Directory of Distributors section — and we were going to add a fifth, but because we’d already used all five poster images for Silverstein Films’ martial arts releases elsewhere in the book, we decided to run this entry on the website instead.

*The Dynamite Trio* (1981) - U.S. release in 1984 as *Dynamite Dragon*

SILVERSTEIN FILMS LTD.

Sam Silverstein joined the sales department of Cambist Films in 1967, where he worked on many of their European and homegrown sexploitation features as well as John G. Avildsen's Cry Uncle! and two unsuccessful George Romero movies, There's Always Vanilla and The Crazies. He left the company not long before the release of Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, but joined Monarch Releasing in time to find himself in the middle of their Snuff controversy. He had formed Silverstein Films while still at Cambist, but by the end of 1976 was ready to work full time on his own company. He started with Italian tax shelter deals like Valentina–The Virgin Wife and two spaghetti western comedy reissues starring Eli Wallach, Turn the Other Cheek and Sergio Corbucci's Samurai Sword (aka The White, The Yellow, and The Black), before gaining some arthouse traction with two French comedies, The Bottom Line and Run After Me Until I Catch You. When martial arts came back into fashion in the '80s, he released two Toei karate movies (Karate Warriors, Sonny Chiba's Dragon Princess), two Dragon Lee movies (The Deadly Silver Ninja, The Dragon's Showdown), and Dynamite Dragon (aka The Dynamite Trio). After a long illness, Silverstein died on January 16, 1986 while his company was readying the release of a 1981 Canadian science-fiction movie, The Intruder. Silverstein Films vp Irene Levy took over after his death and changed the name to Filmworld Distributors a year later. They continued with some theatrical releases – Luggage of the Gods, Bad Girls Dormitory, Thou Shalt Not Kill...Except – before sending subsequent films like Doom Asylum, Riot on 42nd Street, and Zombie Nightmare direct to video and folding into Alex Kogan's company, Films Around the World, by the start of the '90s.

Sir Run Run Shaw Kung-Fu Festival in Times Square, 1983

Ku Feng 1930-2025