Category Archives: Creature Features

Sucked Into Hell. Surrounded By EVIL! “Vampires and Other Stereotypes” reviewed! (Visual Vengeance / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Hell Wants You To Stay for Dinner!  “Vampires and Other Stereotypes” on Blu-ray!

Ivan and his hard-nose partner Harry work between the shadows as protectors of the Earth realm.  The pair of paranormal guardians battle demons attempting to sneak from the Netherworld for more domain and power in the human world.  After thwarting a demon’s reneging plans with a wealthy businessman, they find themselves sucked into a portal to Hell after a group of young partygoers become lost and inadvertently crossover everyone in the abandoned warehouse to the underworld, including the warehouse itself.  Confined to a room with the portal opening, they must band together to survive the night where gnarly demons roam behind every door and are master tricksters with one goal in mind – to breed human women with half-breed demons to procreate more of Hell’s minions.  Its up to Ivan and Harry to see the survivors through until dawn but not everyone is who they seem and when the masks are dropped, real Hell will pounce upon them.  

The northeastern American horror-comedy, “Vampires and Other Stereotypes” is the topsy-turvy and totally-transcendental SOV feature from first-time writer-director Kevin J. Lindenmuth (“Twisted Tales,” “Monsterdocom”).  Shot primarily in Cherry Hill, New Jersey with some exterior city shots of New York City, the film alternatively known as “Hell’s Belles” sought ambitious Hell below Earth undertakings, creating a maze-like dwelling for disfigured dwellers of the demonic kind, and a down-the-rabbit hole story where the head-lopping queen is actually the devil in a leatherjacket playing procreator matchmaker and the Cheshire Cat is a overgrown rat looking to nibble on human flesh rather than cheese.  The rat, as ostentatiously cool as it sound, is simply a slither of one of “Vampires and Other Stereotypes” few themes, which is fear.  Kevin J. Lindenmuth’s production Brimstone Media Productions serves as the studio and Lindenmuth serves as sole producer of his self-funded venture into the vile mouth of the demon world.

“Vampires and Other Stereotypes” follows two difference groups related to the existence of Hell, the demons that inhabit it, and the rogue demons splicing themselves into the human world. One group is the guardians Ivan (Billy White) and Harry (Ed Hubbard) who are very much aware of the esoteric magnitude of the abysmal situation and background while the other group, young Generation X’ers oblivious to the signs of Satan’s underworld seeping into their own. Lead by serial-dater and college girl Kirsten (Wendy Bednarz, “There’s Nothing Out There”) and her two tagalong best friends Linda (Anna Dipace) and Jennifer (Suzanne Scott, “Child of the Sabbat), the ready-to-party trio provide the state of affairs with Kirsten’s nonchalant taste in bad boy boyfriends, believing her courting apathy, treated as an impulse indulgence for the sake of fun, will one day run her out of luck. Enter Erik (Mike McCleery, “Deep Undead”), another misfit miscreant unearthed by Kirsten in her ever unquenching need to be wined, dined, and spoiled by the bottom layers of the dating pool. The two parties clash walking into the epicenter of an open investigation, denoted by an aperture in the middle of the room, where dead, decapitated bodies are strong upside down and Kirsten and her businessman father (Rick Poli, “Blitzkrieg: Escape from Stalag 69) are unexpectedly reunited in an air of something more happening behind the scenes other than Kirsten’s father’s flailing dealings with the demons and Erik’s party-sniffing nose leading them to astray and lost. The rest of the cast comes together with Laura Vale as Rosa the psychic, Monica Batavanis as the wife lost to the dark side, Mike Memphis as the Elvis impersonator, Bean Miller as the Lizard King aka Jim Morrison impersonator, and Sally Narkis as the demon waitress.

Lindenmuth’s dragged to Hell premise is a neat enough concept to peak the interests of the casual and diehard horror fan. However, the executed result is a whole other animal that tends to claw back, trying to maul away your viewership.  The special effects Scotts – Scott Hart and Scott Sliger – pull off practical prosthetics and latex with some side curb appeal that helps lift up “Vampires and Other Stereotypes” as best as possible, but the effects have a difficult time keeping up with the film’s innate ambitious concept to where much of the story relies on character exposition to fill in the gaps and where I note the exposition has a few cracks and leaks in themselves is in the very first word you see in the title that sets the expectation right off the bat before going far into a narrative that constantly and hurriedly builds upon the demonic construct.  That edifice evolves so high and so quick that the air becomes thin when the very first presence of a vampire insert comes late into the third act.  You nearly forget that the word Vampire was ever in the title.  Where Lindenmuth succeeds in this frenzy of fiends and folly is passively providing verbal cues of one of the character’s monotone-delivered pangs of extreme hunger.  Being a New Yorker and a rather large individual, you believe a NYC pizza or a greasy burger would be in mind here to feed the need but then the gag drops with well-timed revelation albeit the severe tardiness inside the narrative framework that suggests maybe the title should have been reworked or better thought through to really add upon that element of surprise and not sit waiting and waiting until bloodsuckers join the jittery jamboree.  While the demons are jovially wicked, their wily ways are playful to a fault compared to an “Evil Dead” Kandarian demon or a twisted and ugly demon from “Night of the Demons,” a class of demons that craft a special kind of deviance that maniacally fun as they rip you to shreds.  Not to say the “Vampires and other Stereotypes” demons are painfully dull or too good to be terrible, quite the opposite in the variety of severed head yappers or an oversized rodent, but they don’t offer that same fear-inducing merriment of playing with their food before they eat it. 

The 12th release on the Visual Vengeance line of dusted off sidelined SOV horror and cult films with a brand-new Blu-ray release with an AVC encoded, 1080p (note: off the original standard definition master 1-inch tape), BD50 presented in the original pillarbox of a 1.33:1 aspect ratio. Visual Vengeance provides the usual prefatory statement about the using the best possible elements out of consumer grade equipment, but I do think “Vampires and Other Stereotypes” has the best details within the Betacam SP camcorder, which was, at the time, the crème de la crème of videotape, and then have the video run through a millimeter gauge emulator to give it a 16, or even stretched to a 35 mm, appearance at times. Tullio Tedeschi cinematography is soft, light, and dreamy that forsakes stark details but does offer a sheen along the surfaces and textures that size up and adds to depth to the objects, even more so with the film’s hard lighting and deep shadows to provide a diversion away from the cheap sets but also a diversion away from what could be lurking from the horror-set tropes. The English language stereo 2.0 has decent dynamism between the dialogue, ambience, and soundtrack. Dialogue has a voice above the other sublayers, separating its prominence in front of the batty surroundings of a demon-riddled rodeo and against a soundtrack, or lack thereof, that’s repetitively uninspiring to takes away from the spirt of the level Lindenmuth attempts to reach with his debut. Optional subtitles are available. Special features include three new audio commentaries with director Kevin Lindenmuth, actor Mike McCleery and Lindenmuth, and Weng’s Chop Magazine’s Tony Strauss. Also included are new, brief interviews with Lindenmuth on the technical tangents of his film, actress Laura McLauchlin surrounding her role as Rosa and various recollection of principal photography, actor Mike McCleery as bad boy Erik fitting into his skintight, nonbreathable demon mask and having a good time on set overall, Suzanne Turner on playing Jennifer, Sally Narkis in her brief role as demon waitress and her sidetracking fashion career, and plus interviews with makeup effects artist Ralis Kahn, special effects artist Scott Sliger, photographer Sung Pak, and publicist Joe Mauceri with behind-the-scenes image gallery, original trailer, Visual Vengeance trailers, and Lindenmuth early Super 8 films along with commentary by the director. As always, the physical presentation is nothing short of a thing of pure beauty with a rigid slipcover graced with new illustration by Tom “The Dude Designs’ Hodge with a traditionally sized clear Blu-ray amaray case with reversible front cover that includes more new looming demon heads art and the original one-sheet on the reverse side that really relates to the dreaminess of the photography. In the insert pocket is stuffed a color trifold essay from Tony Strauss with behind-the-scene stills, a folded mini poster of the Blu-ray case cover art, and retro VHS stickers. Disc art is pressed with the slipcover art. Region free for the world to see, the Blu=ray is unrated and has a 87 minutes. Nominal and ambitious, “Vampires and Other Stereotypes” fights an uphill battle coming off the heels of an extremely gorified video nasties of the 1980s, but Lindenmuth fulfills with an indiscriminate spread of insanity at every turn with some vivid and vibrant vanward effects to drive this one home to the great people at Visual Vengeance, a boutique distributor of lost, but not forgotten, SOV buried treasure ready to be rediscovered.

Hell Wants You To Stay for Dinner!  “Vampires and Other Stereotypes” on Blu-ray!

A Thousand EVIL Little Legs Wriggle Inside You! “Creepy-Crawly” reviewed! (Well Go USA / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Get Wigged Out by “Creepy Crawly” on Blu-ray!

During the COVID lockdown, a group of tourists are confined to a quarantine appointed hotel in a Thailand city. Fielded by skeleton hospitality, the hotel aims to make the tourists comfortable as possible with the limited number of staff and security on hand. Though frustrated and displaced, the quarantined few feel ultimately satisfied by their popup accommodates spearheaded by the Thai government. However, one amongst the staff and tourists is a shapeshifting monster of local legends, jumping from body to body in hopes to find a person with unique blood in order to survive for eternity. Forcibly detained by a sleazy and easily persuadable hotel manager, Leo, Fame, and their families hardly trust anyone, even themselves, as a hidden creature invades a new host to become closer to living forever. It’s true shape like a centipede, the creature summons its smaller, poisonous brethren to wreak havoc inside every crevasse of an inescapable shelter.

Tapping into the same slithery vein as “Night of the Creeps,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” or even “Slither” itself, co-writers-and directors Chalit Krileadmongkon and Pakphum Wongjinda channel their inner spirit animal, the thousand-legged wriggler, back to their home country of Thailand for a new creature feature sure to have your skin recoil with formication.  Also co-written alongside, Charoen Kaithitisuwan, “Creepy Crawly,” or better known in Thailand as “The One Hundred,” is the second feature for Krileadmongkon behind another unearthing creature construction in “The Beast Below” that was released the same year as “Creepy Crawly.”  For Wongjinda, the 2022 released film marks the 9th feature in the filmmaker’s 20+ year-long career who began in 2001 with a script surrounding a feminist ghost killing men victims in “Body Jumper.  “Wongjinda has been once around the horror subgenre carousel to now collaborate with the fresh perspective and ideas from the up-and-coming Krielandmongkon to extend Thai’s catalogue of cinematic chills and thrills.  Neramitnung Film and Fatcat Studios serve as production studios with producers Natchanok Kamonrattananan, Punyanet Tanaprapass (“The Beast Below”), and Kamonwan Kanaraksunti. 

Perhaps better if told in the perspective of an ensemble cast, “Creepy Crawly” reduces is principal character pool to just two, a hot-headed Taekwondo champion named Leo and a social media influencer aptly named Famed.  The two cross paths while being COVID quarantined, sharing a smoke in the stairwell while sharing breaking the hotel rules of remaining locked in their rooms.  There’s not much in the way of connection between the two characters, played by one half of the Golf & Mike musical group Mike Angelo (“The Misfits”) and the mixed heritage of English, Chinese, and Thai actress Chanya McClory, as the progressive action teases something more than just stairwell strangers as Leo frequently comes to Fame’s aid whenever he his sixth sense senses danger.  Both principals carry collateral damage weight with family members also being in quarantine with them; Fame has her brother and social media partner Fiew (Benjamin Joseph Varney, “The Promise”) while Leo has a slightly more extensive circle and greater family drama with sister Lena (Kulteera Yordchang) and their mute, widowed father (Paramej Joiam, “407 Dark Flight 3D”) to which with the latter Leo has an aversion in connecting with periodical flashbacks of Leo and Lena’s dying mother and somehow, which is revealed later, their father is to blame.  This creates more of an arc for Leo with an imbalanced, shared protagonist lead with Fame who we don’t get to know as intimately other than she has an incurable blood disorder that could be fatal if not treated with meds.  “Creepy Crawly’s” cast is beautifully eclectic, and I don’t mean with appearances but rather their interesting, robust with personal motivations, and not terribly dull or overtly bland with performances from Wanpiya Omsinnopphakul, Chanidapa Pongsilpipat, Sita Chutipaworakarn, Chutaporn Chaikawin, and David Asavanond as the slimy hotel owner.

As I sit down to gather my thoughts about this review squirming with venomous centipedes, a house centipede, or what we like to call in our house a thousand-legger, steps hundreds of feet-over-feet on the wall in front of me. Talk about good timing, bad omens, or just a straight up coinkydink when a cousin of the deadly antagonist you just bore witness in a film crawls up the wall in front of you. Despite the inspiration that scuttles in front of me, “Creepy Crawly” has a more fantastically gigantesque infestation. The story has a COVID-19 backdrop and is supposedly based off the story of Battambang told by King Chulalongkorn, aka King Rama V. I, unfortunately, can’t elaborate much about the story as I couldn’t dig up anything that closely resembles the analogy between a centipede invasion and a French conflict. Or are the centipedes a metaphor for the European encroachment? Or are they a metaphor for the COVID pathogen that’s hidden amongst the atypical carriers? Either way, “Creepy Crawly” is visual effects driven with a crevasse-trenched and many-moving-leg scaled arthropod with a pincher-laden head but before the monstrosity makes face, the mega-centipede can hop from body to body, able to protrude tentacled pinchers like spears, impaling victims as well as transposing itself into another body before sucking and skinning the host dry of life and flesh – very reminiscent of an Edgar suit. The jutting spears from the host never harms the body, alloying to-and-fro the skin, and clothing, in a compatibility of supernaturality that fits the folklore mold explained during the opening credits. That’s where I imagine the lore ends and the exoskeleton evil begins as we’re sucked into Leo’s daddy issues, the hotel manager’s self-preservation, and Fame’s bad blood that’s good for the big bad bug. Though Leo’s emotional pull the right heart chords and the hotel manager selfishness and greed adds tension and conflict to an already imposing no way-out scenario, the blood disorder plot device is skimmed to be barely tolerable without diving into the science of why a 10-foot centipede can survive on a compromised blood.

As far as COVID-theme foreign productions, “Creepy Crawlers” checks out as a roach motel monster movie from Well Go USA Entertainment. The distribution company’s Blu-ray is an AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, and presented in a 2.39:1 aspect ratio. Visual effects conducted by Thailand’s Matchmove team have remarkable detail in the composited scenes with the exception of one latter scene that compromises the blacks of reality to a darker shade of gray or blue when overlaying it with the digitally added creature. Details are generally delineated nicely, color grading pops natural tones, and the BD25 offers sufficient space to suppress compression artefacts. The Thai DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio with optional English subtitles greatly exudes the centipede click-marching and pinch clips to effectuate an army of killer scurrying arthropods swarming onto, into confined quarters and those suspected of sickness, COVID-19 to be exact. Dialogue cleanly renders, especially between the majority of Thai and the medley of minority languages, such as Chinese and English. Bonus features are limited to just Well Go USA previews/trailers in what has become another barebones release for the company. The Blu-ray comes in a standard amary case with snapper with fantastically to truth image of the creature on the front cover while the inside has a paper advert for three Well Go USA films with the disc art displays warm shades red and yellow in what is a very culturally appropriated Thai coloring. “Creepy Crawly” scritch-scratches the lousy sensation of a buggy creature feature with loads of action that tries to add and induce more into the narrative beyond what’s innately there and that can be a great repellant to this wecl invasive species of Thai genre films.

Get Wigged Out by “Creepy Crawly” on Blu-ray!

EVIL Knocks, A Child Listens. “Cobweb” reviewed! (Lionsgate / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Cobweb” on Blu-ray at Amazon.com!

Eight-year-old Peter isn’t allowed out on the forthcoming Halloween night.  Frightened by a neighborhood girl who went missing years ago, his strict parents keep a very close eye on their only son who’s social life has been squashed like one of the rotten pumpkins growing in his family’s backyard patch.  Relentlessly bullied and severely sheltered at home, Peter spends most of his time isolated from others until he hears knocking from the inside of his wall in the middle of the night.  Frightened at first in hearing the ensuing young girl’s whispering voice behind the wall, Peter’s loneliness entices a friendly, conversational voice after his parents dismiss the occurrence as Peter’s overactive imagination.  As the two talk through the nights, Peter learns the mysterious voice behind the wall is a terrible secret his parents have been hiding since before Peter was born, but the truth is much more darker and scarier than Peter could ever over imagine.  

Following the success of his written-and-directed 2019 French horror series “Marianne” on Netflix, surrounding the manifesting nightmares of a young writer who returns to her home town, director Samuel Bodin dives right into the spooky season with a Halloween-themed dysfunctional family horror feature that metaphors helicopter parenting as a harmful detriment that eats itself from within the nuclear structure.  The French director builds his vision off the back of the creepy children subgenre and off of the script by Chris Thomas Devlin, an American screenwriter behind the 2022 direct from the original sequel, “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” that happens to be another Netflix debut release.  Devlin trades in rip-roaring chainsaws for rickety old houses lined with gaudy, antiquated-pattern wallpaper in this what’s-behind-the-walls thriller, produced by the Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg company Point Grey Pictures (Amazon’s “The Boy’s” and “Invincible”) with Josh Fagen alongside producers Roy Lee (“Barbarian,” “It”) and Andrew Childs of Nu Boyana Productions and Vertigo Entertainment with Lionsgate distributing. 

Ironically at the center of attention is the loneliest boy Peter casted with UK child actor Woody Norman (“The Small Hand,” “The Last Voyage of the Demeter”) to ensure Peter’s anemic spirit with a head full of shoulder length brown hair, downcast eyes, and melancholic demeanor. Yet, like most child dependent horror schemes, Normal can thrust out a gutsy sprint to survive and save the day against not only his oddly adjusted parents who quarterly channel the onscreen unionization of Wendy Robie and Evertt McGill in fiercely fearful “The People Under the Stair’s,” but also something far more secretive and far more sinister.  Anthony Starr, who has worked with Seth Rogen’s Point Grey Productions in “The Boy’s,” is aptly a father suppressing to fold and diminuendo his son’s curiosity and venture with scary stories of disappearing children and a stern childrearing with a sinister smile only Anthony Starr can produce.  Then, there’s Lizzy Caplan as the austere-dressed matron with a retractable badge for her small set of keys, which are an underemphasized plot device for all the doors in the house, both unconcealed and concealed.  I struggled with Caplan’s mother that borders being simplistically prose, like speaking in a fairytale without the elegance of being a dainty princess or the maniacal barbs of an evil sorceress.  The “Cloverfield” actress’s take on how a reticent mother is overly proper and out of place even in this tale that stretches the imagination and even beyond the film’s other flawed portions, which lead me into Cleopatra Coleman’s benignant substitute teacher Ms. Divine, a name not abashed in its metaphorical properties.  Ms. Divine overreaches herself secondary educational authority by interjecting her nosiness into what she mistakenly thinks is Peter’s subconscious cry for help.  The “Infinity Pool” actress goes unnecessarily lone wolf into the lion’s den that would make any parent understandably concerned and angry whether hiding something or not.  “Cobweb’s” cast fills out with Jay Rincon and Gary Busey (“Predator 2”) and Stephanie Sampson’s (“Sharknado 4:  The 4th Awakens”) preteen son Luke Busey who I must say is the spitting image of his father. 

Funny and coincidently enough, this is my second Grey Point Production film watched back-to-back with “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem,” “Cobweb” is not children’s film but resembles more like a Grimm fairytale with elements pulled from various volumes, some from more popular stories such as the long locks of Rapunzel or the pretense of a wolf in planned deceit of the eager youth, and the film certainly embodies the charmingly dark and rustic patina of such tales.  From the words on a page to the visual effects of the screen, “Cobweb” introduces us to a new kind of terror co-bred out of bigotry and fear of a polar difference so severe, so monstrous, that it warrants a shameful imprisonment and a simultaneous misappropriation of tutelage of starkly unalike children because, as parents, we can have this innate fear for ourselves being replaced with the creation transcending the creator threat.  Pour these twisted tales and themes together into a cauldron of storytelling and we can easily overlook how flawed “Cobweb” can appear on the surface, as if to say the story’s phantasmal qualities exempt narrative structural norms.  “Cobweb” has repetitive use of the imagination as an excuse for Peter’s hearing something, someone beyond walls or could even stretch to the parent’s feigning ignorance or diverting tactics as part of making believe whatever they’re secretly hiding doesn’t exist.  Aside from the title, other allusions to an arachnid theme suggests Peter might have an overactive power of invention, integrating his already schoolyard bullied mind and body to form an embodiment of fear. His rigid parents mixed with an overwhelming fear of spiders creates, or wills, a person or creature of shared relations, someone he can converse with quietly and share his concerns but, in the same breath, be frightened of when out from the wall.  Peter has the same reaction between the spider that crawls on his desk in the class and see the wall dweller’s floating out from a hole in a wall, signifying a one-in-the-same fear.  When inevitably revealed, the creature skulks with the movement of an eight-legged arthropod, has hair like a large, draping web, a face with bulging eyes and fangs, lives within and between walls, and has tiny spiders crawling through its hair.  Intense and portentous, “Cobweb’s” creepy-crawlies are sure to be hair-raising with a shocking turn of events.

Become caught up in Lionsgate’s release of “Cobweb” on the Blu-ray + Digital release. The AVC encoded, high-definition 1080p, BD50 has a Mbps decode rate of low 30s and presented in a 2.39:1 widescreen aspect ratio. Centered around the Fall season, “The Transporter’s” Philip Lazano’s cinematography lives in the dichotomy of shadows and a cool blue-green grading. Exteriors look potently seasonal in a dreary-overcast kind of way that fits “Cobweb’s” austere approach to an atypical straightforwardness in such a dark fairytale theme. Unostentatious, Lazano does a remarkable job with shadows, and dim lighting in general, to convey just enough to make the creature’s skuttling a double dose of undetectable dread before you know what hits you. The main audio option is an English DTS-DS 5.1 master audio with Spanish and French Dolby Digital 5.1 alternatives. Again, the skuttling around the house, the faint scraping of dry, old hair on the wood floors, the creaks, oh the creaks, of every inch of that house make “Cobweb” cue every traditional trope of audible terror right to your sensory receptors. Dialogue is clean, clear, and prominent with the only issue being the behind the wall speak that renders more like whispering in the same room than a muffled subdued voice as the layered dialogue overlap in volume. English subtitles are optionally available. Special features are not in-depth with a to the point featurettes with Becoming the Girl that express Bodin’s vision of the person behind the wall and contortionist Aleksandra Dragova’s efforts to bring that vision to life, Through the Eyes of a Child focuses on a small child in a bigger, uglier world through one-sided interviews with the cast and director and how those differences translates an uneasiness not only with the child but also the viewers who are engrossed by the contras, and A Primal Fear rounds out the specials with underlining fears of creaky house sounds, amongst other combined sounds, and how they’re arranged into a design that innate scare us. Physical aspects of the release come in a traditional Blu-ray amaray case housed with a beautifully composition shot that immediately grabs the eyes on a sturdy O-slipcover laced with a slight embossed spine title. Disc art goes for the less is more visage of a blueberry blue background with white font “Cobweb” at the top. In the insert slot is the digital copy waiting for you to either download and discard the physical release (which I hope you don’t) or neglect for way longer than the expired date allows. “Cobweb” is rated R for horror violence and some language, has a runtime of 88 minutes, and is region locked on A. Lionsgate has distributed the boogeyman, or in this case, the boogeywoman in the fretfully concentrated “Cobweb” that turns every scurry or scratch behind your own walls worth your undivided attention.

“Cobweb” on Blu-ray at Amazon.com!

Only EVIL Can Be Constructive Therapy for EVIL! “Dark Nature” reviewed! (Dread / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Battle Your Inner Demons By Battle The Exterior Ones in “Dark Nature” now on Blu-ray!

Joy walks on eggshells around hot-headed and explosive boyfriend Derek.  Almost having been killed by Derek’s eruption into anger one night, Joy manages to flee his wrath for six months.  Long time good friend and weary ally Carmen convinces the haunted Joy to join a therapy group overseen by a psychologist with unconventional healing methods.  One of those methods is backpacking into the mountain wilderness for a therapeutic getaway to face personal fear with three other women who also experience the familiar paralyzing and manifesting symptoms of towering trauma.  Miles away from civilization, the group treks for two days until an unsettling feeling of being watched and their supplies being stolen forces them into a face-to-face with a mysterious influence that reconjures their individual terror through sight and sound, leaving them incapacitated with anxiety.  When realizing the amount of danger mounding against them, the fear-facing trip through the wilderness will put that aspiration to the survivalist test.

“Dark Nature” is a women-led psychological creature feature surrounded by themes of abuse, trauma, and the handling of the psychosomatic stress when at rock bottom and faced with internal, or external, demons figuratively for traditional storytelling and literally for cinematic storytelling.  Calgary filmmaker Berkley Brady writes and helms her first feature length film in 2022 from a storyteller’s collaboration with Tim Cairo, screenwriter of “Lowlife.”  Shot in the copious thicket of the picturesque and idyllic Canadian Rockies that stretch the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, Brady’s scenic beauty parallels a skin deep exterior amongst a character group seemingly okay in the open-air while within the wayward withholding of crises becomes too burdensome to bear alone.  Brady and Michael Peterson co-produce “Dark Nature” under Nika Productions and Peterson Polaris in association with the Indigenous Screen Office and Telefilm Canada in this this Dread presentation, the production company subsidiary of Dread Central, and Tim Cairo, Kalani Dreimanis (“Polaris”), Jason R. Ellis (“Mother, May I?”), Patrick Ewald (“Turbo Kid”), and Katie Page (“The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot”) serving as executive producers.

The cast comprises of five women at the core and one man hovering around the peripheral like a lingering, festering open sore.  At centerstage is Hannah Emily Anderson (“Jigsaw,” “What Keeps You Alive”) in character throes of relationship lamentation and a cracking psyche over the tumultuously violent and rarely passionate ex-boyfriend Derek, played convincingly cynical of his partner by Daniel Arnold (“Even Lambs Have Teeth”).  First meeting Joy, over a stove of a steaming dish and on the phone in an exchange of concerns and pseudo-comforts, audiences will already be in bed with the young woman’s nervous fraught when a sullen Derek steps into the apartment as she tries to appease him with his favorite food and positive inquisitively around his day.  A tense exchange of words turns into a lust entanglement of pre-sex kisses and touches that spirals into a physical aggression that has nothing to do with foreplay or sex.  The abusive opening act sets the tone for Joy’s edgy mindset into the early and middle acts as she’s standoffish and verbally combative and questioning everything about the group’s choice to venture into the wild under the unconventional means of one Dr. Carol Dunnley, casted by an over the years, well-versed television and movie doctor, or authoritative mentoring figure, Kyra Harper (“Hellmington”), with others continuing to rake over an unpleasant past.   Métis raised actress Roseanne Supernault (“Rhymes for Young Ghouls”) joins Helen Belay and “Don’t Say his Name’s” Madison Walsh as the other nature walking companions seeking a renewed lease on life.  While Belay broods in secrecy with a jaggedly defined backstory of a possible abduction or maybe something worse with Tara, Supernault adds a coping comedy mechanism with her former military background that has caused Shaina intense flashbacks.  “Dark Nature” might not be their characters’ exclusive story but certainly they’re components serve a pieces of the psychology behind it as well as fodder for the forest-dwelling fiend as the narrative aims to fragmentally unfold more of Joy’s affliction that not only cull reasons why this trip may or may not be a good idea but also challenges the friendship strength between her and Carmen until Joy can face down and take responsibility for her unprincipled stance on the seared in fear that renders her powerless and controls her.

“Dark Nature’s” adianoeta works excellently to service both the reclusive avoidance in seeking desperately needed help and the sinister presence lurking and stalking through the lush mountain weald.  Yet, audiences will identify more with the latter because like the principal Joy people tend to avoid their own problems and redirect to another pressing issue that has really nothing to do with them or affects those as a whole, turning a person’s dark nature into not a generally relatable theme no matter how intrinsically installed it is into the incorporated picture.  While seemingly sweeping with Joy’s entire circumstances, we’re led to believe the anxious woman remains haunted by her past, her abuser having this hold over her akin to Stockholm syndrome, as while on the trek through the mountainside she can hear his voice, hear the repetitive clicks of his Zippo lighter, and even experience his tight grip around her throat but Brady winds up the narrative with a few vacillating curveballs that pull toward difference directions to swing-and-miss from being squarely hit until the grand reveal of explanation.  Even then, the explanation retains some purposeful vagueness with an antecedent anecdote of an ancient indigenous people once offering sacrifices to a spirit on the very land the group is treading on.  The tale doesn’t offer much detail and certainly isn’t a full-proof explanation of what ensues but adds that comforting layer of setup into what becomes madness erupted from a furtive, cave-dwelling creature shellacked in a black muck and with supernatural abilities of emerging a person’s most personal fear.

A psychological creature feature that offers worse things in the world than one’s own personal demons comes to Blu-ray home video from Dread’s physical distribution partner, Epic Pictures.  The AVC encoded, high-definition 1080p, BD25, presented in a widescreen 2.39:1 aspect ratio, of “Dark Nature” looks undoubted sharp with details even if the color graded is somewhat desaturated.  The decoding of data details nicely around the foliage, skin features, and even in darker scenes with black levels not succumbing to any compression artefacts.  “Dark Nature” has two English audio options with a Dolby Digital 5.1 surround and a Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo of crisp sound design with a surround the wagon barrage of audio cues casting out through the back channels to denote an autonomic attack when alone in the woods.  Dialogue is clean, clear, and sorted out through the chaos with a perfect depth and reverberation from outside-to-cave-to-cave-to-outside.  An eclectic range is spread-out through the tale from the flashbacks adding explosions and whizzing gunfire to the guttural roars and bush movements of the creature that resemble an enclosing chill of being watched.  “Dark Nature” marks the debut score for the Canadian band Ghostkeeper and while the additional of delicate broodiness sweeps over the images, creating an ominous overhang for much of the picture, I wouldn’t say the score adds to the film’s soul in the subtilty of the low, whispery tones. English subtitles are available.  Special features include an audio commentary track, also hidden within the audio setup, with director Berkley Brady, makeup artist Kyra Macpherson (“Red Letter Day”), and costume designer Jennifer Crighton, a handful of deleted scenes cut for timing, Ghostkeeper stop-motion music video (1.33:1), and an oddly incorporated short film from “Dark Nature’s” editor David Hiatt (“Bloodthirsty”) entitled “Peanut Butter Pals,” a Scooby-Doo mystery solving trio comically and melodramatically tracking down a cave monster, “Dark Nature” trailers with a countdown list of a theatrical, 30-second, and 15-second trailer, and Epic Pictures trailers including “Colonial,” “Satanic Hispanics,” “Tomorrow Job,” “The Lake,” and “Woman of the Photographs.” Physical features are slimmer with a traditional snapper and a rather generic cover art of Joy and Carmen covered in blood superimposed in the foreground of a forest. Disc pressing has the two actresses, still covered in blood, reappear but this time within the jaws of a creature. The region free Blu-ray clocks in at 86 minutes and is not rated. Berkley Brady’s woodland set neurosis knot never says die in the face of adversity no matter the form in the filmmaker’s female-driven debut.

Battle Your Inner Demons By Battle The Exterior Ones in “Dark Nature” now on Blu-ray!

Death Penalized EVIL Returns to Wreak Havoc on Young Women. “The Stay Awake” reviewed! (Cheezy Movies / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Can You Keep Your Eyes Open at “The Stay Awake?”  On DVD now!

America, 1969. William John Brown brutally slays and sexually assaults 11 women. Before a judge, the serial killer is sentenced to death by gas chamber where his last words proclaim him as the Angel of Darkness sent Earthbound to ravage women. Nearly 20-years later in 1988, the St. Mary’s School for Girls in Europe is holding a stay awake event where a handful of students and one chaperone stay up the entire night as a fundraiser for their school. Dark and nearly vacant, the school basks in an eerie haven for the murderous William John Brown’s returning spirit seeking new souls of the softer sex. Determined to protect the girls at all costs, chaperone Trish Walton will not stop protecting the frightened girls until the entity is destroyed but when the ethereal malevolent spirit takes shape of a monstrous rodent with outstretching attack tentacles and psychokinetic glowing eyes, chances of survival are bleak.

Malevolent forces crossing oceans to death grip the innocent are films that are few and far in between as most transatlantic terror usually stays put, regionalized and localized to keep an authentic aural blend of superstition and history. Director John Bernard attempts to go against the grain with a small crowd of filmmakers who either overcame the parochial provenance and succeeded tenfold or became lost in foreign land narrative and failed miserably.  Bernard and, assumed brother, Johan Bernard co-write “The Stay Awake,” a South African mixed lot of horror elements brewed together into a supernatural schlocker that’s one-half dark and stormy night, gloomy Church Gothicism and one-half final girl survival slasher but equal parts outlandishly overexerted ghost thriller stretching across multiple continents.  “The Stay Awake” is a product of Heyns Film & Television Productions, produced by Thys Heyns of South African action-thriller flicks, as well as produced by Paul Raleigh, the producer of the “From Dusk Till Dawn” and the notable Millennium Films cofounder Avi Lerner, of “American Ninja” and “The Expendables” franchises, in one of his earliest credits from 1988.

Though the story begins in America and mostly takes place in Europe, the cast is comprised of mostly South Africans trying to pass their accents for British English that is more like a rotating centrifuge of South African sub-accents.  Shirley Jane Harris (“The Most Dangerous Woman Alive”) spearheads the cast of principals with an extremely proclaiming protagonist, delivering lines with flatfeet and flat inflection that makes her one of the more forgettable final girls.  Her foe compares just as bland with a grunting, bodiless entity floating through corridors and hiding behind indoor plants (why would an imperceptible spirit need to hide behind anything at all?) before manifesting into what looks like a giant, big-eyed, and built on steroids rodent that then shows the William John Brown (Lindsay Reardon, “The Masque of the Red Death”) in side profile speaking in omnipresent and menacingly through the beast to taunt his prey.  The script allows just enough the group of young, private school girls to standout cliquishly, contain an ounce of contempt for each other, and underpin some form of individualism to make them retain some interest in their wellbeing.  However, most of the buildup that’s created to antagonize or unify between their personalities ultimately fizzle out into resembling something along the lines of kowtowing sheep or lemmings in more ways than one.  “The Stay Awake” caffeinates with a sizeable cast including Tanay Gordon (“Hellgate”), Jayne Hutton, Michelle Carey, Maxine John (“Howling IV: The Original Nightmare”), Hellie Oeschger, Joanna Rowlands (“Armageddon: The Final Challenge”) as the damsels, Bart Fouche (“Monster Hunter”), Clinton Ephron, Warren Du Preez, and Pierre Jacobs as the imposing boys, and Ken Marshall (“Return of the Family Man”) as the school’s night caretaker.

John and Johan Bernard’s logline for “The Stay Awake” likely looked appealing on paper but a full story treatment begs to differ with an inscrutable concept from start-to-finish.  “The Stay Awake” wades in generalities, oversimplifying locations and periods such as “America, 1969” and “Europe, 1988.”  The setup meat in between the disjointed times periods sets up a standard yet effective backstory for the killer, William John Brown, with a Judge’s voiceover of all his brutal transgressions, flashbacks of his victims at the death scene, and a slow walk down the corridor to the gas chamber that clearly denote him as the villain but then accentuates his supernatural supervillainy with a demonic voice screaming his return before the gas engulfs him.  However, why move from America to Europe and why in the span of 19 years does an unexplained possessed version of William John Brown return and select a group of religious school girls while his previous victims look to be a pact of randoms from off the street?  From the start, “The Stay Awake” has little to stay our fictional plausibility.  Couple the perplexation with dry performances, a possibly Hell originated monstrous, burning eyes rat creature, and the gratuitous horror nudity rug being pulled from under our feet as the schoolgirls tease with a shower scene only to be shown showering with towels wrapped around them and what has looked to be a promising possession of perpetual pandemonium  has quickly turned into a deflated disappointment with the only really good thing to come out of the film is the stationary man in a creature suit rat monster built like a bodybuilder.

“The Stay Awake” arrives onto DVD distributed by Cheezy Movies in a direct rip of the standard definitional 480i VHS transfer with a letterbox 1.33:1 aspect ratio.  Don’t expect a detailed transfer in a jittery and smoothed over standard definition that’s covered in a harsh blue tinted lens, but the condition of the interlaced video is surprisingly close to being damage free in a well-cared for print.  However, delph and range is difficult to determine due to the obvious lack of delineation but mostly because of the blue tint, poorly lit scenes, and contrast levels that make this presentation nearly pitch-black unwatchable in corridors, classrooms, and in the room of the like, but darkness is seriously enhanced and meshed together by Bernard stylistic choices of backlighting characters or using soft light to center the focus to offer a darkened horror picture. An English Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo serves as the only audio option which differentiates the soundtrack from the rest of the tracks.  Dialogue mostly separates itself to the top of the audio dogpile but is also well imbedded into the other track fighting to be heard that renders the dialogue dull and flat behind a wall of constant and diffused feedback static.  There’s also hissing at the tail end of sentences and faint crackling throughout.  Subtitles are not available.  The only extras on the static menu are back-to-back, quasi-grindhouse style trailers for two Cheezy Movies distributed titles of the blaxploitation “The Man from Harlem” and a “Dirty-Dozen”-esque “Commandoes.”  The physical aspects include a standard black DVD snapper with a rather enticing original title being sandwich with the demon’s glowing eyes on top and four schoolgirls ready to fight at the bottom.  The disk art is the same image except the four schoolgirls are cropped out and an unfortunate placement on the “The” from the title finds it punched out by the disc center/disc lock to just reveal “Stay Awake.”  The rated-R DVD has a region free playback and a runtime of 85 minutes.  “The Stay Awake” has all the indications of a cheap imitation on an established horror formula and this particular physical release doesn’t help the feature’s cause with an extremely dark and nebulous image to match its narrative.

Can You Keep Your Eyes Open at “The Stay Awake?”  On DVD now!

https://vimeo.com/814964711