Category Archives: anthology

An Indie Anthology Worth an EVIL Look! “Creatures of the Night” reviewed! (Wild Eye Releasing / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Wild Eye Releasing’s “Creatures of the Night” Now Available on DVD!

A hitman is summoned to arrive an old manor home and offered to be paid to babysit an elderly wheelchair bound man.  The disabled, eccentric loner only gives the hitman one task, to keep him alive until 3 A.M.  The task is easier said than done as the client has the gift for gab that pulls ever so roughly on the strings of the hitman’s already agitated patience, threatening the man with harm from his double barrel shotgun if his playfully doting name calling and persistent chit chat continues through into the night.  In order to pass the time, the old man pulls out of a scrapbook filled with news clippings of mysterious deaths around the surrounding area, regaling a presumptive truth around the circumstances of the victim’s demise:  a Halloween party guest finds himself in the clutches of an aristocratic, demonic cult, a man collects fresh dead bodies to host at his apartment as part of an exclusive club, a work retreat turned into a frightening alien abduction, and bingo night results in a monstrous transformation of screams and blood.

Wild Eye Releasing has a hallmark of putting forth at the same time a string of films helmed by the same director.  We also see this theme in their subsidiary boutique label Visual Vengeance that specializes in underground, SOV films deserving a second, or third, chance by giving them a Hi-Def release.  British director John Williams is one of those repeated filmmakers.  We’ve recently reviewed and approved positively the dead mother and occult tensioner “Watch Me Sleep” from 2023 and now we’re overtop the microscope again looking at another Williams’ production, a horror anthology from a year earlier, entitled “Creatures of the Night.”  Originally and more commonly known as “Tales of the Creeping Death,” the 2022 anthology too tackles the occult but also branches out to divergent purposes of the dead, extraterrestrial interests, and werewolves with mother issues.  Williams wrote the screenplay for the crowdfunded Kickstarter indie with Williams co-producing with Clair Ward (“There’s Something in the Shadows,” “Watch Me Sleep”).

The unnamed wraparound begins with Michael Socha (“As Dead As It Gets”) as a fast car-driving, black cloth-cladded hitman hired to oversee the inexplicable life-or-death of the invalid but chatty Harold, played by television actor Andrew Readman in an over-the-top showcase of uncomfortable friendliness.  With no board games or show of kinetic entertainment afoot, Harold goes into his stories stemmed from the newspaper clippings of unsolved deaths that bring us to four individual tales to pass the time between the two men.  Halloween night proves to be a dud when Billy and his friends can’t find a good, alcoholic party to attend.  Dressed in zombie attire, Billy Cook (“Eat Locals”) is the centric principal amongst on-screen friends Sophie (Solaya Rowley) and Jon (John Solomonides, “There’s Something in the Shadows”) who make him aware of a private invitation to an exclusive party where they meet the formally dressed elders, known as the Gentlemen and named only by their individual numbers, with sinister plans surrounding demons and an unborn twin brother.  The second segment is less serious with a seemingly unstable man collecting bodies of the recently deceased to stage his own exclusive friends club.  Kev, played by the distinct face of Dean Ackerman (“Crispy’s Curse”), caters a performance around being the entertainment host at an old folks home but doesn’t quite seem to fit the loser loner narrative with having friends that are living and dead but Ackerman’s ported derangement is cheeky fun it the playful yet ghastly tale.  Rebecca Parsons is one of a trio of actors whose characters are travelling to a work-related team building retreat but along the way they stop to check out a touristy cave exhibit when the outside world essentially changes as people have disappeared, nothing mechanical works, and the blue glow of alien visitors reveals the terrible truth of an otherworldly abduction.  There’s not much to note performance wise here as the workplace banter, within the confines of the car, quickly evolves into mysterious situations and visuals that leave the group into a dumbfounded and confused what-happened-here state.  The last segment is more visceral in its violence as Steve Wood (“Watch Me Sleep”) plays a disabled son grieving the death of his viciously attacked mother in the woods with her boyfriend but also practices as the new bingo hall host in lieu of his mother demise.  His debut is cut short when a monstrous lycanthrope continues the bloody rampage that began with his mother.  Like his performance in “Watch Me Sleep,” Wood’s range of emotions and precise, performative acting nails his character Peter to the narrative board, fastening a great finale segment to “Creatures of the Nights’” favorable anthology format.  The cast rounds out with Ricky Tomlinson, Darren McAree, James Whitehurst, Wesley Martin, and George Newton.

Just from looking at the cover and reading the synopsis, without doing any research prior to viewing, “Creatures of the Night” doesn’t appear to be an anthology until you get the meat and bone of story where the wheelchair bound Harold opens his book to amuse with darkly grim tales and that’s the moment you know you’re in for a multi-short story fright with a diverse lot of horror.  What’s impressive about this Kickstarter production is its practice effects that produces a disintegrating body and werewolf destruction with detailed suit and deep lacerations.  Visual effects are limited to areas where they’re needed for a smaller production, such as the third story of an alien abduction that composites scenes together to create an unsettling environment.  While the effects are neat and not overbearing, each story is mostly driven by the story structure and acting to establish and flesh out idiosyncrasies in character and in scenarios, adding that something extra to the segments rather than rely heavily on the glitzy yet shallow terror and chase of horrifying situations without an ounce of personality.  On more a negative note, the stories do have a disjointed way about them with the stories, especially more so in stories 2 through 4 that limit exposition to heighten that mystery factor that puts that small morsel of fear in our cerebral nodes.

Those who gravitate to anthologies should find their way to “Creatures of the Night,” a Wild Eye Releasing DVD now available.  The MPEG2 encoded, 720p standard definition, DVD5 is fashioned just as it’s spec’d in a fair reproduction of quality based on the storage capacity and compression codec.  Certainly not polished with a slick grading, there’s a bit of tired veneer on it but the cinematography and special effects more than makes up for the dull grading with a cozy lighting, natural lighting, a slick-and-sick werewolf design, and seamless practical effects.  Depth sates special range and plenty of contrast to set the mood and scene appropriately.  The English LPCM Stereo 2.0 shows no signs of qualms or problematic areas of concern with a clear and presently forth dialogue of the UK dialect.  Range and depth work fine and no issues in the balancing of layers.  Sound design is able to fill in the monstrous roars or the breaking down of biological matter within the context of the scene at the right distance from the camera, never seemingly distant or misplaced.  Bonus features include segment outtakes and the trailer along with other Wild Eye Releasing trailers.  The DVD cover presents an accurate representation of what’s inside which is surprising because usually Wild Eye embellishes the cover to make a more visceral or large-than-life draw toward the film but the “Creatures of the Night” receives an accurate account.  The reverse side of the cover art pulls a shocking scene into a still image.  The DVD houses in a clear Amaray, eco-lite case.  The film is not rated and the DVD is region free with a runtime of 100 minutes.

Last Rites: “Creatures of the Night” holds its own as an anthology, one that can get horror fans behind it, offering a variety of occult tales to surely be mortally hazardous!

Wild Eye Releasing’s “Creatures of the Night” Now Available on DVD!

It’s in Human Nature to be EVIL! “Cradle of Fear” reviewed! (Unearthed Films / 2-Disc Limited Edition Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Cradle of Fear” Available on a 2-Disc Unearthed Films Release!

Occultist and hypnotician Kemper has been locked away in a criminal asylum for years for a gruesome series of murders, involving not only men and women but also some children.  Kemper seethes against the arresting and prosecuting team who = put him away.  Able to sneak out a list of targets and their addresses, Kemper uses his black magic lineage to carry out revenge on his behalf, a violent revenge on the loved ones of who incarcerated him to a life in imprisonment.  Four gruesome assassins through Kemper’s supernatural means leaves a body trail for eccentric Inspector Neilson whose unusual investigative methods has him highly sensitive to the case and his temper has him in the crosshairs of his commanding supervisor.  With no leads on how Kemper is committing a new string of gruesome crimes, Neilson pieces together that all the victims are related to the case that put Kemper away and when his son becomes the last target, Neilson goes to extreme lengths to see the serial killer is put down for good. 

A gory and cynical narrative of indelicate irony, “Cradle of Fear” is the British, anthological horror that speaks to the insidiously widespread evil that courses through the inevitable fallible and immoral side of human nature, leaving no good deed unpunished in its circumference of supernatural punitive karma.  The early 2000s anthology is written and directed by Alex Chandon, director behind the 1980s sex comedies “The Perv Parlor” and “Pervirella” as well as directing select music videos for the UK extreme black metal band Cradle of Filth, whose Goth-cladded lead signer Dani Filth stars in the film and is the poster boy for film art, hence the title’s similarity to the band’s name.  Eddie Kane, Ciska Faulkner, and Nico Rilla produced the film with Paul Luke and Andy Skivington serving as executive producers for the Pragmatic Pictures production. 

Aforementioned, Dani Filth stars as the ghoul with the ultimate evil of transforming his human form into a demonic creature that can rip to shreds those unlucky to be in his path, the opening gives us a glimpse into his power by viciously terminating two would-be, back-alley muggers.   From there, the story goes into the gruesome crime scene of two young women (Emily Bouffante, “Evil Aliens,” and Melissa Forti) laid strewn with their innards outwards and inspector Neilson (Edmund Dehn, “The Containment”) copping a feel as his way of rain-manning the scene.  Their end first storyline begins the moment the two goth club women were fated for untimely demise when they spotted Filth’s more-goth-then-they-are The Man.  Eventually, Inspector Neilson figures out the victims are connected by their last names and those related to trial participants with the next tales of sharing ill-fated death in the ghastliest and most gruesome ways, anthological style.  Another two women (Rebecca Eden, “Pervirella,” and Emma Rice) try to nick an old-timer of his bed stashed savings but find there is no honor between the combination of friends and thieves, an amputee (Louie Brownsell) murders an acquaintance to use his leg for longshot transplant only to have his leg reject in the most horrifying way, and a officer man (Stuart Laing, “Lie Still”) risks everything in life to get his rocks off gawking at online snuff films only to find himself in one!  There’s also the wrap around story that peppers transition scenes in between to bridge gaps and bring the short stories together into one long feature.  Kemper is the story’s chief antagonist but isn’t the only bad guy in the narrative but is our resemblance of a hero Inspector Neilson’s force to stop as the inspector doesn’t really just how purely symbolizing the embodied of pure evil Kemper really is perhaps even the Devil himself, as the orchestrator is the marionette pulling the strings that leaves Neilson chasing his tale.  Performances all around are gritty, apathetic, cynical, and mean that leaves no ounce of hope or feel-good intentions.

The early short films are not set up with Kemper as the man behind the curtain and this can put some confusion into the mix with seemingly rough transitions from one story to the next.  Plus, the non-linear first film isn’t mirrored into the other three, leaving the first third of the movie wandering, or grasping, to cling to something whole.  By the end of the second short, “Cradle of Fear” levels and becomes clear that an anthology is playing out with each tale containing a formula narrative:  a setup, the rising action or transgression, a brief, jovial high, and then it all comes crashing with gory horror.  The gore is a blend between practical and composite VFX that gets away with a range of simple stab wounds to more complicated head popping deaths while the visual effects has obvious green screen incongruity but dishes some devilish effects from deformed spider-like legs sprawled out from a half-severed head to some shoddy-level effects like a European car flying through and crashing through traffic.  What’s ingrained in the gore and horror is the sex, an element that’s immensely weighed in “Cradle of Fear’s” content that showcases scenes of sensual romance, to gratuitous nudity, to tasteful moments but keep the skin touched upon at least once in every episode.  “Cradle of Fear’s” circulated theme speaks toward the persistence and ever-present evil that’s within us all and from within it can’t be contained as human nature is ultimately fallible and every soul can be conditioned to expel the verhy worst in us all. 

Unearthed Films “Credle of Fear” arrives onto Blu-ray home video with a new 2-Disc, limited-edition collector’s set release encoded with AVC onto a BD25 and presented in an European widescreen of 1.66:1 aspect ratio with 1080p, high-definition resolution.  The 2-Disc set has for a long time seemingly vanished out of Unearthed Films’ newly released lineup, aside from the dual-format releases but it’s nice to see a comeback that’s more special features driven rather than playback format.  The dark grading leads to plenty of finer detail loss but the film has clear delineation and when it is key lit, textures flourish.  With a color scheme of mostly darker shades, keeping in line with its bleak noir tone and the gothic model, this early 2000’s horror fashions a polished veneer as one of the earlier pioneers of digital capturing.  The CGI is not at its finest being that it’s early early 2000’s VFX tech and on a budget too nonetheless and you can the shift in reality whenever the effect is composited into a scene.  Depth is mostly retained for closeups and medium closeup shots as Chandon’s does stylize quite a bit with fade in and outs, negative images, lighting, slow-motion, and various edits to make a swirl of designer continuity.  The British English audio is encoded with an uncompressed PCM 2.0 stereo.  Strong dialogue track doesn’t clash with the imposed, arterial soundtrack comprised of industrial goth and rock bands including Cradle of Filth, for obvious reasons, and The Dark Poets, Jezebel, Slacker, Lungworm, Intense, Quicksilver, and Crotchet.  Often, the ambience and Foley has chaotic aversion to one another that disrupt the audiological flow of the film, except for a few excellently crafted scenes such as Mel’s walk Emily Bouffante’s walk through the downtown area and see demon faces is harmonized very well.  The Foley can be slapstick at times with hits to the body being overexaggerated with cartoonish tones.  English subtitles are available on the feature disc. Disc one contains some ride-along aspecial features, including a brief making-of, a second behind-the-scenes Important Words that has direct Alex Chandon and cast members rambling about other topics rather than being topically relevant to the film, the German DVD making-of the feature, a behind-the-scenes gallery, and three original trailers for the film.  Disc two is mainlhy comprised off Alex Chandon’s short films – “Chainsaw Scumfuck,” “Bad Manor,” “Bad Karma,” “Drillbit,” “Night Pastor,” “Bullshit News,” and “Borderline.”  Also included is a promo for Film Extremes 3, outtakes for the shorts, a behind-the-scenes gallery for the shorts, and their trailers.  Packaging includes a traditional Blu-ray Amaray with new composition cover art on a one-sided sleeve.  The limited-edition O-ring slipcover contains the same primary image.  The discs are held in place on the inner layer of the Ameray with snaplocks and pressed with controversial and provocative imagery including a bloodied baby head and an illustrated eviscerated naked woman.  The region A locked film has a runtime of 120 minutes and is unrated. 

Last Rites: “Cradle of Fear” rocks the anthological horror subgenre not to sleep but to give rise to the killer instinct from within and to show the self-inflicted suffering from the innate debasement in the dark recesses of our soul.

“Cradle of Fear” Available on a 2-Disc Unearthed Films Release!

Add This EVIL SOV to Your Halloween Watch List! “V/H/S/Halloween” reviewed! (Acorn Media International / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Spend Halloween With What Scares You on Blu-ray!

A new soda from the Octagon company is about to hit commercial retail shelves but before it does, voluntary testing is recorded for posterity with test subjects examined as they drink Diet Phantasma, a spirt-infused carbonate drink surely to die for.  In between the mopping up of test subjects, four more tales of terror penetrate the safety of the soul.  Two high school seniors go out trick-r-treating for one last mischievous hurrah only to find themselves trapped inside with Mommy, a matriarchal creature from the afterlife that kidnaps bad children on Halloween and makes them her own kids.  A night of revelry trespass onto the mansion grounds of a past gone necromancer who communicated with the dead and when the partygoers pickup the calls from the dead, a tremendous terror can’t go unanswered nor unseen.  Another group of adult trick-r-treater comes upon an unattended bowl full of obscure chocolates only to find themselves suck into the bowl itself and inside a desolate factory where the candymaker toys with his new fun size ingredients.  A media service aims to protect children with their videography services, especially from an unidentified abductor who mutilates and kills kids, but the service may be doing much more harm than good collecting children’s information as they walk through the store.  Lastly, a waning father-and-son bond over their makeshift Halloween maze turns into a nightmare when a record incantation brings to life each of the maze’s horrifying scenarios from ghosts to zombies, to child-eating witches.

For over a decade, the horror anthology series “V/H/S” has been terrifying audiences with short, original tales that break the scale of reality and enter a new dimension of horror that illuminated the careers of modern horror directors Ti West (“X”), Adam Wingard (“Godzilla vs Kong”), and David Bruckner (“Hellraiser” ’22), to name a select few.  The concept created by Bloody Disgusting’s founder Brad Miska in 2012 has one more installment with a new focus, Halloween.  All Hallow’s Eve already has a spooky air about it with a bit of treat to counteract its trick but in the 2025’s “V/H/S/Halloween,” there’s more sinister means than there are chocolates and sweets for new blood enters the series with filmmakers Bryan M. Ferguson writing-and-director “Diet Phantasma,” Anna Zlokovic writing-and-directing “Coochie Coochie Coo,” Paco Plaza directing and co-writing “Ut Supra Six Infra” with Alberto Marini, Casper Kelly writing-and-directing “Fun Size,” Alex Ross Perry writing-and-director “Kidprint,” and R.H. Norman helming a cowritten script of House Haunt” with Micheline Pitt-Norman.  Miska returns as producer alongside Michael Schreiber (“V/H/S/94,” “V/H/S/99”), Steven Schneider (“V/H/S/Beyond), Roy Lee (“V/H/S/Beyond),, James Harris (“V/H/S/85”), Josh Goldbloom (“V/H/S/94,” “V/H/S/99”), and Derek Dauchy (“Late Night with the Devil”) making his producing debut into the franchise.  “V/H/S/Halloween” is a coproduction of Shudder Films, Cinepocalypse Productions, Imagenation Abu Dhabi, and Spooky Pictures. 

In true “V/H/S” fashion, the anthological shorts include a cast few would be familiar with, fresh faces for the grinder as each short touches Halloween night in a different, diabolical way than what we’re use to seeing.  The wraparound story “Diet Phantasma” opens with the Octagon corporate COO Blaine Rothschild being escorted into the manufacturing and testing plant devising the experiment.  David Haydn takes charge of his COO character that flashes a false grin but conveys an authenticity directive while doing it that leads a number of testers to their carbonated demise, from a cast comprised of UK and American actors.  In “Coochie Coochie Coo,” mother knows best as minor hooligan high school friends Lacie (“Samantha Cochran) and Kaliegh (Natalia Montgomery Fernandez) embark on their last night of mischief before moving away to college and stumble upon a light-pulsating house where they discover milk-induced deform adults acting like babies and their six-breasted mother has more milk to give!  Cochran and Fernandez are in the shoes of characters you wouldn’t root for as they’re more rulebreakers than young women with healthy goals and desires as they smoke weed, steal candy from children, and overall take life for granted and the two actresses do criminal-type behavior with justice, pun intended.   Underneath Mommy’s unnatural milkers, talk stature, and evil grin, all underneath a white nightgown and bonnet, is Elena Musser’s phenomenally creepypasta take on fictional lore for the short.  The Spanish-language “ Ut Supra Sic Infra” opens with a back and forth between an interrogation of sole survivor Enric and his eye-removed, bone-crushed friends strewn about a medium’s sacred chamber where Enric, detectives, and his lawyer return to unearth what went down that night.  Spaniard Teo Planell runs polar opposite with his centralized character Enric who begins in fear and ends in wicked confidence as the re-enactment of events turns into a repeat of that fateful night.   One of the more unfavorable performance stories is “Fun Size,” a quirky, corporate consuming double entendre that teleports four friends into a human meat manufacturer that turns their smallest body parts into chocolate covered goodies.  Lawson Greyson (“Herman”), Jenna Hogan (“Surviving the Sleepover”), Riley Nottingham (“The Demoness”), and Jake Ellsworth’s (“Party of Darkness”) performances hit the nail of artificiality and not-so-fun sized corniness.  The cringe acting coupled with stilted dialogue will have audiences root for the antagonist, a candy-headed, crown-wearing, suit-sporting supernatural entity named Fun Size provided with his best “Terrifier” like playfully menacing movements by Michael J. Sielaff with “V/H/S/Halloween” not being his first rodeo with the series having played Pale Face & Babysitter in the “Stork” segment of “V/H/S/Beyond.”  “Kidprint” perhaps has the most disturbing and realistic tale of a child abductor and murderer with a storyline set in the late 80s-early 90s.  Stephen Gurewitz (“The Scary of Sixty-First”) plays Tim Kaplan, owner of Kaplan’s video services where parents can record VHS tapes containing their children’s appearance and information in case they go missing for XYZ reason, and the do-gooder shop owner becomes intertwined with the real killer, someone close to him, who has access to all the tapes and all the information needed to indulge his sociopathic whims, a role “Hostile’s” Carl Garrison was born to play.  Last short shows through home video the decaying stability of a son’s bond with his father over a shared interest in what is a natural progression of coming of age with the now teen boy who’s tired of being bullied by his peers for his dad’s obsession over a Halloween haunt maze he builds every year.  Jeff Harms and Noah Diamond are father-son Keith and Zack in the throes of phasing out their once beloved bond because of teenage angst and peer pressures.  That tension and rebinding of affection is interrupted by the sudden personification of their inanimate horror show that goes straight for the throat in a show of supernatural and classically-creaturfied blood shedding within a homemade maze, leaving teenage angst to be wiped up with a mop. 

Like most “V/H/S” installments, each entry has hits, and each has misses, and this first of its kind holiday-themed ‘V/H/S” anthology produces the same effect.  Spanning across decades from the 80’s to the 2000’s with a series no longer cornered by a particular era, each SOV production produces an original tale all of which grab a handful of disturbing and unsettling content, most with a gore edge.  “Coochie Coochie Coo” and “Fun Size” are two good examples with each carrying opposite elements that make horror horrifying.  Though both shorts are my personally my least favorite of the six, “Fun Size” offers that grossly disturbing factor that invades a person’s private parts for candy making satisfaction but the while the story is short and sweet, there’s nothing shuddering about it where as “Coochie Coochie Coo” trades the vulgar gore for another unsettling factor, pure creepiness that feels like one of those cheap survival horror PC games but can jump scare the hell out of you.  “Ut Supra Six Infra,” “Kidprint,” and “House Haunt” seize a more traditional inlaid suspense with a properly encased twist moment, quickly downgrading a tense by calm story evolution to spiral out of control with madness of monsters, maniacs, and mayhem violently gnashing what’s left of a good around the campfire spooky tale.  “Diet Phantasma” is also a neat premise with an evil spirit infused soda under a corporation eager for obedience and mind control, a metaphor for soda companies running the world as we see such situations in other countries where Coca-Cola is the leading provider of clean purchasable water.  Ferguson also treats fans with an homage to Tommy Lee Wallace’s “Halloween III” by riding a similar plot but with trick-or-treat masks that kill children to resurrect Gaelic, or Samhain, sacrifices.  The COO is also seen reading a Fangoria magazine with hee John Carpenter penned off-shoot sequel on the front cover, suggesting further the idolizing connection.

Acorn Media International distributes the Shudder production onto an AVC encoded, 1080p high-def resolution, BD50.  Like it’s predecessors, the imitated and authentic SOV shoots go through periods of interlaced distortions and static snow that simulate the signal interference, tape artefacts, and low quality, low-graded detail and saturation with some shorts elbowing their way into the cleaner digital camcorder era.  No issues with the true compression of the Blu-ray format; audiences will be pleased to see they will get exactly what the filmmakers’ intended, a harried shaky cam first person view that has it’s monsters looking right back at you under a veil of vagueness and to be a hostage to the purposed angles that translate immense fear just out of frame, presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio rather than the organic 4:3 framing for the stories from the 80s to mid-90s with videotape.  The English and Spanish language DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio has no issue delivering a vigorous and balanced mixed layers of sound depth based on design short that may contain areas of static, a weaker strength, and certainly a lot of screaming that reaches the mics physical limits to capture and reproduce the sound.  Dialogue is clear and prominent but, like I said, lots of screaming and wailing when events turn southward that it doesn’t matter often what is being said when it all just comes out of as chaotic cacophony.  I will say that “V/H/S/Halloween” is one of the better sound designed productions with more attention to the individual layering.  English subtitles are optionally available as well as French.  Special features include a director’s commentary for each short, a behind-the-scenes featurette for “Diet Phantasma” and “Coochie Coochie Coo” that’s is a swing between mostly raw footage during in between shots and some during shots with commentary here and there, a deleted scene from “Kidprint,” “Diet Phantasma” uninterrupted without the cut-to other shorts, “Diet Phantasma” faux commercial, and a gallery for the Ferguson short.  The physical appearances have the traditional “V/H/S” themed skull front and center on its one-sided sleeve art, sheathed inside the plastic of a Blu-ray Amaray.  There are no other tangible accompaniments.  The UK certified 18 film is region B locked and has a runtime of approx. 115 minutes. 

Last Rites: “V/H/S/Halloween” has original spooky tales centered around the holiday but as a collection, this anthology is a mixed bag of often great knee-buckling terror with considerable absurd tailspin that tries too hard to be scary out of the most unalloyed.

Spend Halloween With What Scares You on Blu-ray!

Midnight Showing of the Lost EVIL Tape Will Be the Last Thing You’ll Ever See! “Transmission” reveiwed! (Jinga Films, Danse Macabre, MVDVisual / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Transmission” Transmitting to Your Television on DVD!

A Santa Mira elderly man sits in a dark room with a glowing television illuminating his silhouette.  As he channels surfs through the night, amongst what’s being broadcast over the airwaves is a bible-thumping televangelist, a children’s puppet show, an 80’s teen romance comedy, a live local news broadcast of a hostage situation and a documentary on the investigation of the disappearance of notorious cult horror film director Frank Tadross Roth pursued by his granddaughter Rachel and her boyfriend.  Going deeper into Ross’s disappearance through archived interviews with the director and crew, on set raw behind-the-scenes footage, and the examination of Ross’s quest for an obscurely treasured videotape by an occult group, the director’s pursuit of, and his eventual unearthing, of the tape become the push for his last and recently discovered film Transmission, thought to have been lost in a building fire after his suspected involvement of the film’s lead actress murder.  Going back and forth between the channel programs builds a sinister, terrible dread that will soon be revealed to terrorize all those glued to the set. 

Late night television has never been so bodingly evil!  Channel surfing transmits an anthological approach between mockumentary and found footage in this uniquely crafted scrolling of boob tube terror entitled “Transmission.”  The 2023 horror is from writer-director Michael Hurst, the English director behind a pair of franchise sequels in “House of the Dead 2” and “Pumpkinhead 4:  Blood Feud.”  His latest venture takes twist to a whole new level different from his repertoire of linear independent horror with backlot dark legend surrounding an occult obsessed horror filmmaker.  Hurst also produced the film, his first in over a decade since 2017 with Andy Hurst’s (“Are You Scared?,” “Wild Things: Foursome”), alongside other self-employed filmmakers with the How to Kill Your Roommates and Get Away with It” producing duo Robbie Dias and Pat Kusnadi.  New Blood Productions serves as the production studio.

“Transmission” traverses in guile under TV guide pretenses of local channels, channeling the horror through the back and forth of unsettling, televised channels that have a familiarity of broadcast shows – sponsor subsidized children shows, perfunctory local news, and black and white sitcoms – but there’s more than what meets the eye.  The film uses recognizable genre names to get the message across with “Sleepaway Camp’s” Felicia Rose in her most vanilla action news reporter role, “Scary Movie’s” Dave Sheridan as an over-the-top protective father caricature in a teen romance comedy, and “The Road Warrior’s” Vernon Wells at the center of the amassing occult suspense as the missing notorious horror director Frank Tadross Roth.  Over the years, Wells’ performance has tapered to a subtle crawl of expression as if the veteran actor is now just running through the motions of the everyday hired gig that’ll headline his name, unlike his former wide-eyed and eccentrically villainous roles in “Commando” and “Innerspace,” but “Transmission” suits his stern act portrayed in video flashback as an occult maniac and peculiar director gripped by the search of an arcane, dark sect’s perniciously videotape.   Spearheading the effort to track down the filmmaker is his granddaughter Rachel, played by Nicole Cinaglia (“Death House”) with an inexplicable character shifting of gears from curiosity and intrigue from the documentary to the frantic and fearful ramblings of a paranoid hostage taker in the new story stemmed by her findings surrounding her grandfather’s disappearance.  There’s potential gap there in the lack of development, or rather the lack of acknowledgement overall, with Rachel’s parents as it’s just a grandfather and granddaughter affair without the recognition of those in between.  There’s also a gap in Rachel’s attained information about the sect, the videotape, and her grandfather’s endgame as she seemingly has more knowledge about the insurmountable otherworld evil on the horizon but how she got there is a few clicks short to fully bridge.  Sadi Katz, Del Howison, Marcella Di Pasquale, Ben Kaplan, Hunter Johnson, Raymond Vinsik Williams, Jennifer Nangle, McKensie Lane, Jessica Cameron, Charles Chudabala, Michael Glenny, Christopher Bryan Gomez, Ruby Reynolds, Ben Stobber, Mark Schaefer, and Robin Hill fill out the channel surfin’ cast of characters.

“Transmission” has a neat story structure built upon components with the premise being a movie inside a documentary while amongst a flipping through the broadcast waves that coincide with another movie as well as television shows, podium preaching, puppet skits, etc., to which is then wrapped up inside and latched onto another movie, a metanarrative with a preamble setup.  The Roth directed Transmission, presented for the first time on Malvolia’s spooky late night show (an Elvira rip) is a space horror off-brand for the filmmaker that mirrors vaguely the reality outside the boob tube but told through the Rachel Roth investigative documentary that builds the timeline pieces while flipping back and forth between the late night movie and the documentary as well as the scroll through every other broadcastings of paralleling programming in what feels like an antiquated prelude to the cable guide button on a tube television with depicted content that resembles much like what programmed over-the-air decades ago down to the very staticky outlines of porn stars expertly doing their fleshy vocational craft in snowy pixelations.  The edited series of a varietal shows creates an erratic unsettlement with an atmosphere churning over the idiosyncrasy content of what’s eventually to spoil or come to chaos by Transmission’s, or rather ”Transmission’s,” twist ending and what a fairly good twist ending it is, even with the slightly ham-fisted acting, by pulling off misdirection as you think you know where the finale is heading but the forces of evil seep through with a backup plan. 

Jinga Films, Danse Macabre, and MVDVisual present “Transmission” onto a MPEG-2 encoded, upscaled 720p (but upconverted on my player but since this title is shot digitally the image appears fairly good to begin with), DVD5 and presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio.  As stated, imagine quality has a fair amount of detail and intended panache interference amongst a broad range of different aesthetic styles and gels through the varied televised broadcasts from static and grain filters to colorless sepia, to filming scenes on television screens, and to other mock-electrical afflictions inside a digitally shot story truck to intermittently snap normality and cause a rising fear of curiosity amongst the TV goers.  Throughout the picture, there were no noticeable true compression issues with the picture.  Some scenes felt slightly stretched by that I chalked that up to filmmaker style when rendering various programming for the narrative.  Though not listed which format is used, the player registers an English Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo.  With imitating the perspective of someone watching television, audio tracks are distinguished with a flat concave that elevates the pitch but disperse through a single channel.  Emitting through a dual channel stereo, the audio can discern potently through, providing clarity.  When looking at the perspective, we’re either the old man watching the television or when inside the show itself watching from the fourth wall in and subsequently the strength and tone change often quite a bit, creating a rich depth when done correctly.  English subtitles are optionally available through the moving menu.  The DVD is essentially a feature release but there are other Jinga Film trailers that include, “Iconic,” “Tonight She Comes,” “The Protos Experiment,” and this film, “Transmission.”  The DVD comes in a standard single, push-lock, black DVD case with single-side cove art that I personally found gratifying when considering the film as it speaks to the abnormal and drawing glow of a brightly illuminated television in place of a head on top of the shoulders of an opened-armed cultist with a pleasingly red and black contrast.  The DVD is pressed with the same yet cropped image.  “Transmission” has a R rating (no singled-out rationales but there is some language and nudity), has a runtime of 74 minutes, and is region free for all players.

Last Rites: There are no mixed signals from “Transmission’s” gradual rise to impending cosmic doom with an exceptional Lovecraftian twist to nightcap this Michael Hurst channel-hopping and ominous occult production.

“Transmission” Transmitting to Your Television on DVD!