Category Archives: Creature Features

Three Men, a Boat, and One Giant, EVIL “Crocodile” reviewed! (Synapse Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Crocodile” on Blu-ray and Lurking Behind the Wates of Thailand’s Film Industry!

Along the serene Thailand shores, a doctor and his young colleague take their family and fiancé to a beach resort for some much-needed time away after a massive casualty natural catastrophe on a nearby island swallows the entire village with seismic volcano bedlam.  Little do they know that a component of the disaster has swam to their very watery spot on the beach resort and gnashed without remorse on the doctor’s family and fiancé.  Not knowing what kind of creature could do such carnage, they soon discover through first hand witness accounts and the evidence gathered that a large crocodile, mutated by man’s own disregard for mother nature, is the culprit.  The men, along with a fisherman who believes in a destiny of a beastly showdown, swear to track down the killer croc and kill it.  The crocodile’s bloodlust on mankind is seeming unstoppable as it wreaks havoc swimming down river, destroying entire villages in its destructive and hungry path.

Thailand’s reptilian “Jaws” equivalent, “Crocodile” wriggles with wayward ferocity in this giant creature feature horror that rivals Bruce the shark.  “Computer Superman” director Sompote Sands oversees the enormous amphibious aggressor versus frantic and frightened man film that merged or morphed from Won-se Lee’s “Crocodile Fangs” into a blending of the two productions of the same film of one seamless man versus animal hunt above and below the surface of the water.  Sompote Sands produces the venture along with a postdated credit toward exploitation producer Dick Randall (“Pieces,” “Escape from Women’s Prison”) from “Crocodile Fangs.”  Coproduced by Robert Chan and Pridi Oonchitti, “Crocodile,” or rather “Crocodile Fangs,” was a multi-national undertaking with Thailand and Korean actors and crew and a Japanese special effects company bringing the giant, carnivorous maneater to cinematic actualization.  The Chaiyo Productions spliced feature was distributed into the U.S. under Cobra Media. 

Doctors Tony Akom and John Stromm have it all; Akom (Nard Poowanai, “Ghost Hotel”) has a beautiful wife and child and leads a charmed life despite his vocation challenges of being a doctor always on call. and Stromm (Min Oo) is recently and happily engaged to Angela (Ni Tien, “Black Magic” 1 & 2).  Their vacation doses audiences with a picturesque double date plus one child but does a rough patch setup of Dr. Akom’s family neglecting workaholism that isn’t crafted to be a strain on the relationship he has with his family but rather bring upon him tremendous guilt and inset the good doctor into a studious montage of crocodile research after his family becomes crocodile chow.  Sympathy toward the doctors is incurred but the level of sympathy falls low as the ladies’ death scene falters in the editing room, or perhaps was only partially shot, as only one of them is visually attacked while the others are grieved over in postmortem.  Character will is strong enough to carry the anticipated revenge but the giant crocodile is truly the main star stud, a vicious, village-obliterating mammoth of armor and teeth goes full Godzilla on the riverside communities and dining buffet style on anyone, land or sea, who makes a splash in his kill radius.  Unlike in “Jaws,” “Crocodile” is back-and-forth without the mysteriousness of the shark’s lurking underneath the glassy surface, snatching swimmers and boaters to a watery, gory grave, and this really solidifies the crocodile as an intended principal figure as a well-known, full-visible, antagonistic killing machine spurred by man’s own atomic-making hand; an idea that’s only theorized in exposition and not practically fleshed out.  “Crocodile’s” cast fills out with Kirk Warren, Angela Wells, Hua-Na Fu, Bob Harrison, and Nancy Wong.

“Crocodile” very much embodies the “Godzilla” and “Jaws” with deference without being a total negligent rip of either more widely successful hit.  The crocodile, in the form of its oversized whipping tail and rather big and detailed puppet head, raze miniaturized villages, much the same way Godzilla tramples over Tokyo in the 50s through the 80s, and the storyline for “Crocodile” parallels portions of Steven Spielberg’s 25-foot man-eating Great White tale of three men boarding a boat to hunt down a formidable creature, complete with yellow barrels and a sinking ship to an exploding finale.  Antiquated by today’s standards, for late 70’s, the special effects are a marvel to behold.  Kazuo Sagawa, of the special effects company, Tsuburaya Productions, lead the department with size-mattering scale and detailed depictions of villages and boats being quickly and violent undone by either a crocodile puppeteer or a mini-croc circling the boat and even, at times, being wire-flown through the air, bombarding the model ship with WWF elbows (do crocodiles have elbows?).  Action sustains an intensity that’s wrathful and keeps the heart palpitating with excitement.  The same thing can’t be said about the story through the choppy editing style, often times revisiting cut scenes being spliced into progressive context, but the setting, exterior weather, and clothing haven’t changed.

Synapse Films obtains the original Cobra Media distributed U.S. release and meticulously restores “Crocodile” in a 2K scan from the original 35mm camera negative, premiere the film for the first time on Blu-ray worldwide.  With an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, the AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50 is a deathroll of beauty and when Synapse says meticulously restored, the poof is in the details and coloring.  Not a ton of age wear or damage, a nearly pristine print for some intricate touchups to invigorate the content.  One brief series of scenes appeared as if the film cell was folded with a blended vertical line down the right side, much like a scratch would appear on the film but this looked different; however, the line did not substantially affect viewing.  Between the rapid severity of the crocodile thrashing and the reduced frames of select slow-motion sequences, there is nothing to fault about Synapse’s compression with objects keeping intact and away from ghosting or aliasing.  Blacks are generally faded but don’t show signs of posterization or banding.  The English print audio spec is a DTS-HD MA 2.0 mono dub.  Fidelity of the original audio is retained, uncompressed for lossless sound in all areas of the ADR, Foley ambience, and the cue soundtrack of the impending or attacking crocodile, with a hint of John Williams theme in the opening credit track.  English subtitles are available, but the dub is perfectly clear and prominent.  Special features include an audio commentary with writer and film historian Lee Gambin, a video interview with Won-se Lee, director of “Crocodile Fangs,” deleted and alternate scenes from different country versions of the film, and the original theatrical trailer.  The standard release comes in a green Blu-ray Amaray without the “nude” slipcover but has the same original, clothed illustrated artwork.  Inside, the disc is pressed with a toothy faceless creature versus and a scantily cladded bikini woman.  Opposite side is the usually accompanying Synapse catalogue for this year, 2024.  The R-rated feature has a runtime of 92 minutes and is region free! 

Last Rites:  A Thailand terrorizing monster movie with unrelenting savagery and terrific special effects for circa late 70s.  if you can withstand the story’s choppy waters, “Crocodile” is a fun and fierce swim through predatory, blood-suspended waters. 

“Crocodile” on Blu-ray and Lurking Behind the Wates of Thailand’s Film Industry!

Invisible As They May Be, Their EVIL is Palpable. “Imaginary” reviewed! (Lionsgate / 2-Disc Blu-ray and DVD Combo)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Chauncy Wants You To Be his Friend! “Imaginary” on Blu-ray DVD/Combo set!

Jessica purchases her family home, moving in with her new husband and stepchildren where she reminisced being happy once as a child up until her father’s mental breakdown forced her to move out of the house and live with her grandmother.  Returning to her childhood home might have suppressed most of memory but has also spurred a few good recollections she aims to share with the conflicting attitudes of her stepdaughters, the angsty, teenager Taylor and her little sister, Alice, who suffers from a traumatic past.  When Alice discovers a stuffed bear in the basement and conjures up an imagery friend named Chauncy, Jessica feels content knowing Alice is coping with a new friend outside intense therapy sessions but when Chauncy’s seeming innocent scavenger hunt turns to hurt Alice, all the forgotten, difficult memories of her past surface and Chauncy is more than an Alice’s imaginary friend but spurned entity seeking to reconnect to Jessica, feed off her unique creativity, and keep her always in the Never Ever world of imagination.

At least once during our childhood, we all had an imagery friend to lean on, to play with, to cope with difficult situations.  For me, my imagery friend was an 8-foot white teddy bear I would snuggle into its lap and read my adventurous stage one or two books to.  For Lionsgate and Blumhouse, their imagery friend is much, much more sinister!  “Imaginary’s” dark twist on the juvenile fantasy is the brainchild of writer-director Jeff Wadlow, the filmmaker behind 2018’s “Truth or Dare” and 2020’s “Fantasy Island.”   The Charlottesville, Virginia native seemingly has thing for spinning games and fantasies into crooked, ill-fated variants.  “Princess and the Frog” writers Greg Erb and Jason Oremland cowrite the script with Wadlow, adding their experiencing in writing children stories for Wadlow’s eviscerating of childhood joy.  Lionsgate Films and Blumehouse Productions distributor the Tower of Babble Entertainment film with Jason Blum, Sean Albertson, Paige Pemberton, Paul Uddo, Jennifer Scudder Trent, and Jeff Wadlow producing.

In the crosshairs of a targeting imaginary friend is Jessica, a successful children’s book author on the outside of trying to assimilate herself into a new family while, at the same time, struggling to understand her nightmares and troubled childhood past.  DeWanda Wise (“Jurassic World:  Dominion”) stars the struggling, but good-natured stepmother Jessica who’s married to “The Walking Dead’s” Jesus, I mean Tom Payne.  Taegen Burns and Pyper Braun play Payne’s sibling daughters in their respective roles of Taylor and Alice as they make their horror film debut.  Detrimental to “Imaginary’s” silkiness of a happy couple is the artificial interactions between Wise and Payne who appear to be just going through conventional motions of a very awkwardly scripted and painfully garish couple.  When Payne departs the entire climatic acts for his character’s musical tour, other characters begin to flourish more naturally from between Wise, Burns, and Braun who become entwined into a certain teddy bear’s revengeful plan and this fountains a pleasant range of character arcs with overcoming fears, building character emotions, and settling the tension between them within the context of a common foe narrative.  One crucial, tell-all character goes critically by the wayside because, at the very last possible moment, Betty Buckley (“Carrie”) as the longtime neighbor Gloria becomes a deluge of exposition and she’s only introduced in full much later into the story because the writers had no idea how to integrate her earlier and make the information Gloria sits make sense until desperate moments arise.  Buckley, though monotone at times, makes for a good crazy lady.  “Imaginary’s” cast fills out with Veronica Falcón (“The Wind of Fear”), Samuel Salary, Matthew Sato, and Alix Angelis (“The Cleansing Hour”).

Audiences will need to expand their imaginations to get immersed into “Imaginary’s” interdimensional, child creativity-eating plot that careens through the specifics and details.  “Imaginary” suggests children have this invisible pal that snake tongues into their ears, feeding them childish ploys and harrying shame to get them to do what they want, and, inevitably, suck them into the Never Ever world through a checklist bizarre ritual.  The story suggests a globally subversive circle of these entities have been explains that every culture has a take on the imaginary friend concept and even throws into the dialogue other children having disappeared shortly after speaking of the Never Ever but the shorted change of the widespread disappearances background and the fact that crazy old, neighbor lady Gloria somehow surmised a pile of information on the subject, self-published knowledgeability on the ritual, being, and even the Newer End world, provides threadbare, credulous support for the storyline.  Stylistic and visually, “Imaginary” endorses its own title with tactile manifestations of the entity’s power.  Men in nightmare costumes is always preferable over overly silky-smooth and impalpable computer-generated monsters and the work done by the effects crew greatly engenders childish fears with an overgrown, toothy, scary teddy bear and a topsy-turvy world that are magical yet foreboding. 

Snuggle up with your Teddybear and get ready to be scared in “Imaginary” on a 2-Disc DVD and Blu-ray set from Lionsgate Films. The AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50, presenting the film in a 2.39:1 widescreen aspect ratio, is a solid showing of image integrity with crafty cinematography from James McMillan (“Twisted Metal“) that avoids the seams of the monster suits, keeping them in a considerable degree of low-level shadows, and using odd angles to make contradictory scenes flush in the Never Ever. Yet, despite the max storage capacity of a 50-gigabyte disc, compression banding still rears its ugly between gradient tones contrasting dark and lit scenes; problematic areas are not entirely throughout the picture but intermittently spotty to say the least. The DVD9 is MPEG-2 encoded with an upscaled 1080p. The English language option is a three-dimensional Dolby Atmos surround sound and if Dolby Atmos was going to be used for anything feature, “Imaginary” would be that feature with tons of range and depth mechanicals to float audio into the spatial fields above and below. When Never Ever doesn’t formulate a logical structure and up is down and down is up, Atmos caters and evolves to the fluid environment, emitting pinpoint ambience to be shaped to the size of television room. Dialogue comes over clean and clear, established in the forefront amongst the other audio layers. Spanish and French 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound are also available audio options with English, Spanish, and French subtitles to select from. Special features include a feature length audio commentary by director, and cowriter and producer, Jeff Wadlow with producer-actress DeWanda Wise. Also, encoded into one long featurette, are four medium-short mini-featurettes of Meet Your New Imaginary Friends of getting to know the characters of “Imaginary,” Frills and Thrills of taking a child’s joyous creativity and twisting it into a creature-laden nightmare, Crafting the Beast of Imaginary is a look at the tangible creations of “Imaginary’s” monsters, and Bringing Nightmares to Life looks at how the Never Ever is constructed and shot to get the illusion of an upside down interior slice of another dimension. Sheathed inside a glinty, nearly lenticular, cardboard slipcover is the traditional Blu-ray Amary, both with the innocently, ominously looking Chauncy bear on the front cover. In the interior, each side houses a respective format within a push lock. A digital copy does come with the release within the insert clasps. “Imaginary” is a PG-13 horror (are they trying to appeal to kids?) with a runtime of 104-minutes and a region A playback.

Last Rites: I Imagine “Imaginary” could have gone over ten times as smoothly and more coherent with a longer runtime time to flush out more characters and a better designed narrative. Instead, pacing is quickened to race through unpacking more complex themes: childhood abuse, childhood trauma, the division of the original and regluing of a new nuclear family, family history of mental illness, the concept of imaginary friends, and so forth. The result is a less than desirable bastardization of an imaginary friend that leaves us high and dry for more context and substance than just a puppeteered scare bear.

Chauncy Wants You To Be his Friend! “Imaginary” on Blu-ray DVD/Combo set!

To Be EVIL, It Takes a Little Backbone. “The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra” reviewed! (IndiePix Unlimited / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Own “The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra” on DVD. Purchase Here!

In the Gyeongbuk region of South Korea, a brand-new mattress is being delivered to a young couple’s new apartment but upon arrival, the fed-up delivery men take off when no one answers the door and leave it for the job endeavoring girlfriend who must lug up the mattress herself as she finds her boyfriend asleep on the floor. After more than year together, the threadbare relationship inevitably ends and the girlfriend vacates the apartment, but during all that time together, a mysterious mold formulates from within the mattress and surfaces on the pillow top. The mold turns sentient and uses an outgrowth protuberance to latch onto and extract the boyfriend’s vertebra for nourishment. From then on, the mattress is discarded into the world, being picked up and used by unsuspecting nourishments for the interior mold. Travelling across Korea land to difference providences, feasting on the vertebrae that becomes the building blocks of a new being, the growing mold digests to integrate itself into a human world. Absorbing the miscellanea range of emotions from its victims, what was once small fry fungi has become self-aware, compassionate, and even more hungry to live.

How do you write-up the depth of a film that’s undeniably indescribable? Syeyoung Park’s “The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra” trembles on the edge of being the epitome of that very sentiment with an abstract creature feature concept bred out of people’s raw emotions. The 2022 South Korean phantasmagoric horror, fattening itself off the dysphoric and euphoric morsels, is written-and-directed by Park as the filmmaker’s debut feature film credit that tackles life birthed out of death, such as the symbolic end of relationships and literal death, and becomes a metaphor stemmed by the natural growth phenomena of fungi, a new lifeform that grows out of rot. The Moonstone Productions indie picture is a festival favorite amongst the Fantasia Film Festival and others and is distributed onto physical media by the s streaming platform IndiePix Unlimited.

“The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra” doesn’t hone into and latch onto one core group of principals characters; instead, the travelling, moldy mattress has episodic events with interactions to various emotionally-turbulent or charged people that the being inside the dingy mattress not only cuts out and extracts a physical piece of who these characters are but also absorbs their emotional weight, in what could be considered as an incident in molding the mold into what it itself can come to be.  One-sided care and love, a tempestuous connection, contempt, amorous spontaneity, loneliness, and death feed the fungus and shape its mildewy putrescence on the mattress like the coating of an incubation chamber to ensure growth, maturity, and nutrition.  The episodic events hit and miss the gravitational pull needed land firmly on what’s being conveyed.  The woman on death’s bed was perhaps the most impactful written with regret left unsaid, unaccounted for, and is shouldered by the thing in the mattress to fulfill with a letter to the woman’s daughter to let her know about the mother’s definitive adoration.  Other instances are fleeting, perhaps lost in translation, of the evocative impression intended as the mattresses does a reach around for a clean vertebrae excision.  In either case, the now-vertebrae-less don’t even notice when a large part of their backbone is literally ripped from them in the moment; only in post-snatch do they double over in pain and unable to stand and straighten from their crippling past.  The film’s cast includes Mun Hye-in, Ham Sukyoung, On Jeong Yeon, Jung Soo-min, Kim Ye-na, and Park Jihyeon as the humanoid creature.

The fifth thoracic vertebrae, the T-5 spine part and not the film’s title, is located near the top-center of the spine in the thoracic grouping and it supports the abdominal muscles and feeds into the chest wall coinciding with the muscles around the rib cage, lungs, and diaphragm, to assist with breathing.  In Sye-young’s abstract, “The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra” does not brace audiences for metaphorical monsters surrounded by dreamlike imagery and esoteric purposes.  With no explanation, visual or verbally articulated, piecing together the strange circumstances is heavily relied upon our own personal experiences in life, our past mistakes, our relationship fails, our giddy fondness, and so forth to interpret Sye-young’s theoretical philosophy on the unfinished leftovers of a kaput relationship.  I believe Sye-young also felt the need to explain his film in a director’s statement on the back of a DVD that questions the whereabout “bits and scraps” of a failed relationship by anthropomorphism means and relating it all to the cycle of fungus.  While a difficult conceptual pill to swallow, “the Fifth Thoracic Vertebrae” can display beauty and disgust in a composite of odd juxtaposition in a peculiar world where a dirty, moldy mattress is an acceptable roadside pickup and debilitating excised bones of the body go without being questioned.   There’s an aloof presence that speaks symbolic volumes to the relationships depicted and with an open mind and broad, thoughtful strokes, one may see through the director’s expressionism.

Indiepix Unlimited, an online streaming service dedicated to independent films, also caters to the physical media market with a DVD release of “The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra.”  Encoded onto a single layered 5GB DVD-R, it’s been a while since I’ve seen an official release on the recordable DVD format and for the visual picture quality that’s already on a standard definition 720p resolution, we receive a middle-of-the-road 1.78:1 widescreen aspect ratio presentation. Posterization, in voids and on the skin, is the main artefact culprit in a stylish context of warm gel yellows and greens and the seldomly naturally lit hues which are not as richly saturated but can hold its own for a DVD-R.  There’s not a ton of detail in the mattress mold and any clear view frames are obscured by distance, the cover of darkness, and the cover of blankets as, much like all else, the contours are nicely delineated but the overall color scheme of the film blend together. The South Korean uncompressed LPC 2.0 mix has a pleasing enough unassuming range and depth field that hits all the notes and presents ambience with basically what is needed to envelope the immediate surroundings around the principal objects, all balanced through the dual channels.  The burned in English subtitles are not flawless but are synched well and seemingly translated okay.  The release comes feature only and the standard DVD Amary casing comes with an eye-catching, or rather eye-starring, front cover with no outer coverings or inserts.  The disc art deliberately yells DVD-R with a plain white, barely unique logoed, ring splay.   The release comes not rated with a runtime of 65 minutes and is confirmed to play on region 1 playback.  Untested for other regions. 

Last Rites: “The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra” impresses with forlorn residue in what is an offbeat creature feature where the creature is inside the mattress rather than under it.  Yet, the story stretches the imagination too far and near a snapping point that allows for no breathing room in what is a tale of lamentable remnants that creepingly germinates spores into a melancholic mycelium overtime. 

Own “The Fifth Thoracic Vertebra” on DVD. Purchase Here!

The 90’s Played Videotapes by a Different Set of EVIL Rules. “V/H/S/94” reviewed! (Acorn Media International / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

V/H/S/94 Blu-ray Can be Purchased Here!

A police S.W.A.T. team raid a large warehouse where suspected drug storage and trafficking is being conducted.  Tagging along a camera man for code of conduct review, what the team discovers inside is more alarming than a stash of street narcotics.  The nearly empty warehouse is filled with gruesomely recorded VHS tapes, snowy television sets in every room, and recently deceased bodies with their eyes plucked from their heads.  As the investigation frantically continues through the labyrinth corridors that turns the capture and arrest mission into a mission of escape, the pre-recorded tapes they come across show vivid, nightmare-fueling horrors, including footage of a sewer-dwelling rat man, a near empty funeral home on a dark-and-story night, inhuman surgeries joining man and machine, and a militia preparing themselves to unleash true evil onto the government establishment.  What the officers see can’t be unseen as analog madness ensues them spurred by the motivations of a deadly cult.

The fourth installment of the David Bruckner and Brad Miska created analog-influenced V/H/S horror anthology.  Known as V/H/S/94, as in 1994 to mark the period of social and cultural influence, six new directors take the short movie helm in a new line of videotape terror.  “Night’s End” director Jennifer Reeder tackles the wraparound story “Holy Hell” that fills in between and shepherds in four frightening tales with “Watcher’s” Chloe Okunols “Storm Drain,” “V/H/S/2’s Simon Barrett’s “The Empty Wake,” “May the Devil Take You’s” Timo Tjahjanto’s “The Subject,” and “Lowlife’s” Ryan Prows’ “Terror.”  “Psycho Gorman” and “Manborg” filmmaker Steven Kostanski also directs a mini-pseudo infomercial entitled “The Veggie Masher.”  Together, the filmmakers for a new lot of under-the-radar talent to showcase an eclectic blend of 90’s set scary stories with Josh Goldboom, Kurtis David harder, and Brad Miska producing, Studio 71, Cinepocalypse Productions, and Hangar 18 Media as the production credits, and Bloody Disgusting and Raven Banner Entertainment presenting the production.

With any type of anthology, a variety of roles are laid out for different scenarios.  From newscasters (Anna Hopkins, “Tin Can”) and cameramen (Anthony Christian Potenza, “Bad Dreams”) to body-transfiguring mad scientists (Budi Ross), to greenhorn funeral home attendants (Kyal Legend), “V/H/S/94 reaches into the far corners of world while also breeding home grown terror right into suburban America.  Each episode develops and nurtures layered characters with fast-setting concrete, quickly building who and what they are in a matter of minutes to which some full-length features have to build in a whole act or in all three acts.  The writing of and the colorful depiction of each character sets the tone for the rest of short and whether the short will be a success hit or not.  An example of this would be in Timo Tjahjanto’s “The Subject” with The Creator, played renationalized and crazy by Budi Ross.  An eccentric acute accent in Ross’s Creator apexes the overall expectation of a mad scientist and in that there is an understanding of what’s coming while there’s still a simultaneous shroud of mystery of how batshit crazy things can really become. The episode that didn’t quite flesh out enough, in character and in story, was the wraparound “Hell Hole” segment that sees a S.W.A.T. team (Kimmy Choi, Nicholette Pearse, Dru Viergever, Thomas Mitchell) and ride-a-long cameraman (Kevin P. Gabel) storm a suspected drug warehouse and find nothing but death and VHS.  Tremendous pandemonium as the team charging into the multi-layered complex is roughly cleaved to not smoothly segue in-and-out with the intercut VHS episodes that also hinder the characters from really being built upon to relate any interest in them.  “Holy Hell’s” climatic reveal has little weight to then stand on without that much needed seething of every detailed bubble that pops in between the short films.  However, the wraparound story doesn’t snuff out the rest of eye-gluing terror you’re witnessing with solid, edge-of-your-seat performances from Donny Alamsyah, Tim Campbell, Brian Paul, Conor Sweeney, Devin Chin-Cheong, Juan Blone Subiantoro, Christian Lloyd, Cameron Kneteman, Steven McCarthy, Brenand McMurtry-Howlett, Slavic Rogozine, and Daniel Willston.

Zombies, cults, body horror, vampires, subterranean creatures, and much more are the selected subgenres that invade insidiously into our visual receptors and straight down to shake and scare stiff our stable core, each one idiosyncratically crafted and tailored by the filmmakers tastes to deliver a unique tale under the guise of those beautiful VHS artefacts.  Whether ran through a VHS recorder or filters are applied, each era-idolized short has a distinct visual approach and feel how the 1990s tape decks presented the goods that can be saturated in horizontal noise strips, tracking lines, and image ghosting.  Granted, and likely subjectively by yours truly, some shorts are better than others with a narrative outline and in special effects.  “Holy Hell” doesn’t let time to breath and let the dust setting to effectively lay in fear and frights because of the constant cacophony of the S.W.A.T. team’s frantic ambling through the complex, seeing each disturbing scene as if breezing through a museum and glimpsing at the exhibits.  I’m fully aware of the short film time crunch Reeder was under but breakneck pacing didn’t have time to elicit any type of reaction or setup a story.  “The Empty Wake,” “The Subject,” and “Terror,” reel in and piece together all the components of their tales and find room to make them thriller and terrifying.  Barrett’s is one of the simplest yet most anxiety-riddled shorts to come out of the V/H/S anthology run, creating a couped up Funeral home atmosphere, the background threat of a tornado out of the story night, and a coffin that goes bump-bump with a sole wake service attendant on the edge of fright for fear of what’s inside trying to get out.  Ryan Prows puts a spin on the whole vampire trope by never mentioning the creature as the living dead bloodsucker held captive by a radical, ring-wing militia under the influence of its power to destroy.  Instead, the creature is just plain and pure evil that, as the militia men find out by the flaws in themselves, can’t be contained.

Acorn Media, the United Kingdom subsidiary label of RLJ Entertainment, releases the Shudder exclusive anthology on Blu-ray home video.  THE AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50 of “V/H/S/64” goes by the oxymoronic details in the videotape artefacts.  Through various VHS filters and VHS recording deck converter, the widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio image is purposefully distorted, worn, and in standard definition to meet the standards of the V/H/S series, providing an anomalous analog outer shell so if you’re expect fine delineation, natural skin tones, or any clear details of any sorts, then the V/H/S franchise is not for you.  For the rest of us, “’94” parades the paltry resolution like gold in a true celebratory style, embracing the chroma spectrum for a maximum retro throwback.  However, the color bands on a couple shorts appear too vibrant, creeping more into digital age with flusher hues rather than tape degraded coloring.  The English and Indian language tracks are ran through a lossless DTS-HD 5.1 surround sound mix that offers punchy kbps decoding filtering through the appropriate side and back channels and right into your ears. The sonic palette has great depth and range in the midst of the crackling and warp-pops of damaged tape. Dialogue is clean, clear, and concise and there’s synched-well, error-free English subtitles for “The Subject.” Bonus features include a behind-the-scenes featurette with the directors speaking about how they were approached and crafted each of their respective shorts, a panel interview at the San Diego Comic Con, deleted and extended scenes, the special effects discussed by Patrick Magee, a quick glimpse at “The Wake’s” visual effects piece to the pie, the full-length Steven Kostanski “Veggie Masher” commercial, behind-the-scenes images, and Hail Raatma!, a special look at the sewer-dwelling creature. There are also two commentaries: a feature-length commentary track with the filmmakers and producers hosted by The Boo Crew and a second commentary track on “The Empty Wake” with writer-director Simon Barrett. There is no mid-credit or after-credit stingers. Sheathed inside a thicker UK Blu-ray casing is the “V/H/S/94” blocky cover art of a face screaming while tape emerges from their mouth and eyes. Inside lies bare with no insert but the disc art is different with a snow-static tube televisions outlining a techno-skull. With PAL encoded playback, the Acorn Media Blu-ray comes region free (tested) despite not proclaiming so on the back cover. The UK certified 18 releases has a runtime of approx. 104 minutes.

Last Rites: If anthologies get your horror rocks off, the “V/H/S” franchise continues to disturb, disgust, and dread with new filmmakers, new stories, and new horrors, but with the same amount of thirst-quenching blood shot on video!

V/H/S/94 Blu-ray Can be Purchased Here!

Make Do With Your God-Given EVIL! “Bad Biology” reviewed! (Severin Films / 4K UHD – Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Bad Biology” on 4KUHD and Blu-ray Combo Set. Purchase Here!

Jennifer and Batz don’t know each other and live two totally different lives but they have one thing in common, they are enslaved by their abnormal sexual organs.  Jennifer, a young provocative photographer, embraces her vagina’s biological differences and immensely magnified hormones whereas Batz suffers monstrously from his radical rehabilitation of a once limp manhood.  The contrasts continue as Jennifer must scratch the inflamed itch to be penetrated, luring men with her insatiable lust that ultimately end in their demise with an irrepressible emotional sway, whereas the botted-up Batz’s love life is virtually bankrupt due in fear of his conscious and uncontrollable enlarged penis.  When Jennifer happens upon Batz in her peripheral during a photoshoot, she finds him intriguing enough to break into his home and watch him with a prostitute.  The experience left the prostitute with a continuous orgasm long after penetration was over and left Jennifer with an impression that her vagina has finally found it’s match in life. 

Seventeen years.  That’s how long the inactivity span was between Frank Henenlotter’s last directed film and his next.  Not since 1991 did Henenlotter, the madcap mastermind behind some of the more than unusual creature-esque concepts surrounding sexuality, addiction, and childbirth in a way that sheds light on society’s blatant distaste for the odd and grotesque,  profess his creative talents with his trademark dark humor and unabashed practical effects that campy the content toward much to our enjoyment again until returning to the director’s chair with the 2008 shlock-sleazy horror-comedy “Bad Biology,” cowritten alongside American rapper R.A. “The Rugged Man” Thorburn as the musicians first taste of the film industry.  Shot in and around the New York metropolitan area, “Bad Biology” is also produced by Thorburn alongside associate producers Dario Correale, Nicholas Deeg, Antonia Napoli, Vinnie Paz, and star Anthony Sneed under the LLC created for Bad Biology. 

Not many would take on a role with heightened sexual absurdity, especially one with a puppeteered penis on the hunt for feminine pelvic regions or where a numerous clitorises ramp up sexual drive into murderous overdrive.  Yet, first time actors Charlee Danielson and Anthony Sneed seem game for the roles as lonely sexual misfits Jennifer and Batz.  To debut right out the gate as a character proclaiming to have 7 clits in the very first scene can’t be easy and I’m sure a deluge of thoughts questioning just what in the ridiculous Hell did I get myself into accelerated through her thoughts but Charlee Danielson doesn’t pull punches or need a second to rethink life choices in the feed the need role of lust, sex, kill, labor, birth and repeat.  Same can be said about Anthony Sneed’s slinking and desperate peculiarities for Batz and Sneed’s willingness to browbeat his own anaconda trouser snake to assert back in being control.  Danielson and Sneeds have tough jobs but pull off Henenlotter and Thorburn’s grotesquely envisioned gallows humor and body horror.  While the confidence is there, the experience is not resulting in a stiff, monotone performances in nearly every scene and that can dampen the story’s eccentrical principals who are just delivering the lines instead of taking the lines to heart.  Being that “The Rugged Man” is a rapper, the cast is comprised of other likeminded musical artists, mostly rappers as well, with Remedy, J-Zone, Vinnie Paz, and Reef the Lost Cause along with cameos from other artists and music producers.  And being a film mostly about sex, “Bad Biology” fills out the cast with models and actors very comfortable showing their skin in Vivian Sanchez, Carolyn Thompson, Brittany Moyer, Vicky Wiese, Ginger Starr, Vladislav S., and well-verse indie horror scream queen Tina Krause (“Crimson Nights”, “The Fappening”).

Outrageous with bad taste, “Bad Biology” prides itself with point-blank profaneness and kitschy special effects, a resounding typical Frank Henenlotter production as the director hasn’t seemingly lost a step in 17 years between films.  Yet, the story’s infiltrated by the need to incorporate strong personality cameos and is uneven in a way that hyper focuses on Jennifer’s quest, with inner monologuing, flashbacks, and direct camera speaking surrounding her spiritual search of a satiable schlong for her specialized snatch, becomes subverted by Batz’s less significantly told story quickly summed up in introspection while being pleasured by a homemade, industrial-sized masturbator.  Doesn’t quite feel Batz receives the same valued introduction in contrast to his female counterpart, but he quickly forges a more interesting path having a roid-raging, self-aware, monster cock that’s addicted to large animal anabolic steroids and is isolated from the rest of the world.  As polar opposite in the way Jennifer and Batz view and handle their sexual anomalies, the pair make the perfect odd couple, like “Ghostbusters’ Key Master and Gatekeeper, but at the cost of their own stories and their inevitable hookup that becomes flattened by a steamrolling climatic slasher-esque moment that doesn’t really involve them at all, segregating the leads momentarily from their own catalytic arc that deflates the finale into a flaccidity.  Most of the comedy also falls flat but the dialogue is well bulbous in the skilled rhapsody and written dialogue that shocks and awes with every depraved bluster.

Scanned in 4K from the camera negative, “Bad Biology” receives a UHD plus Blu-ray 2-disc set from Severin Films. The HEVC encoded, ultra high-definition 2160p, BD100 and the AVC encoded, high-definition 1080p, BD50 are both presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio. The 4K scan fills in the gaps of next stage video evolution though the gaps filled are minuscule at best. What makes the real difference is Henenlotter shooting in Super 35mm that provides a gritty grain overlay and similar, if not identical, saturation as film stock. Finer details more in the setting aspects, around darker areas, that are more illuminated by the pixel increase. Skin tones and grading are naturally set without much of a stylistic presence other than the gels used for the giant penis vision and the peering from inside-out Jennifer’s Uterine cavity. I do think facial details are not as firm, possibly smoothed too much during the restoration. The English language audio options include a lossless DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio and a 2.0 stereo. Presenting flawless dialogue within the heavy soapboxing monologues and philosophical diatribes, “Bad Biology” promenades dialogue as an important part to the film’s machination. This doesn’t mean everything is flounders with a range of outrageous sound effects, including the gushings of childbirth, the whooshing whips of a conscious monster male member, and the squishy ins-and-outs of copulation. Spatial depths have finite proportions that relinquishes true depth to keep audiences near the action audibly. Closed caption English subtitles are optionally available. The 4K disc might have a capacity of 100 gigabytes but the format’s space on this release is quickly depleted for the feature and two audio commentary tracks – one with director Frank Henenlotter, director of photography Nick Deeg, and actor Anthony Sneed while the second commentary also includes Henenlotter and cowriter/producer R.A. The Rugged Man Thorburn. Both commentaries are also on the Blu-ray, housing over 5+ hours of special features which includes interviews with a Spook House entitled segment featuring interviews with Henenlotter, Thorburn, Deeg, production coordinator Michael Shershenovich, production manager Chaz Kangas, and David Henenlotter, an unorthodox interview between a basketball and actress Charlee Danielson In the Basement with Charlee Danielson, a lengthy back and forth question and answer between actor Anothy Sneed and cinematographer Nicholas Deeg, an interview with special effects artist Gabe Bartalos (“Frankenhooker,” “Basket Case 3”) Swollen Agenda, a behind the scenes of the film, photographer Clay Patrick McBride snapping cast and crew O-faces around Henenlotter’s apartment in F*ck Face, short film “Suck” directed by Anthony Sneed, R.A. The Rugged Man Thorburn music video for “Legendary Loser,” an imagine gallery, behind-the-scenes shots, and video covers and death stills. The standard 4K UHD release comes in the traditional black Amary case with an O-face compilation compositional cover art and has a lock-tabbed disc on each side. The release does not come with a reversible covert art or insert. Both idiosyncratic disc arts have whimsically crude caricatures of the main characters. The region free release has a runtime of 84 minutes and unrated.

Last Rites: “Bad Biology” marks a return to ungovernable psychotronic cinema for filmmaker Frank Henenlotter with new blood, a new story, and the same old objectionable orifices and organs of monstrous body horror.

“Bad Biology” on 4KUHD and Blu-ray Combo Set. Purchase Here!