Category Archives: cult

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!

Elizabeth Bathory Evokes the Birth of EVIL! “Blood Bitch Baby” reviewed! (Blood Sick Productions / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Blood Bitch Baby” Now Available!

What if Countess Elizabeth Bathory, the Hungarian noblewoman and serial killer who bathed in virgin women blood to obtain youth, didn’t die in a prison cell?  What if Bathory was alive and well, living agelessly as one of the demon Asmodeus’s handmaiden to do his bidding, such as selecting a chosen woman to birth the Antichrist?  The countess does just that by posting a job position of caregiver with Jenny, a unemployed woman with an abusive, greedy boyfriend, responding to the ad.  Selected as the chosen one, Jenny is marked with Asmodeus’s symbol that grants her the power of strength and a craving for human flesh and blood.  After devouring her boyfriend, she meets Iris, a homeless lesbian who witnesses the expedited birth of the antichrist soon after meeting her.  Can Iris and a professor of parapsychology stop the second coming of Satan or will the world be condemned to the Hell on Earth. 

The professional relationship between long time schlocky, low-budget horror director Donald Farmer (“Cannibal Hookers”) and the independent, modern day scream queen Jessa Flux (“Murdercise”) has gone beyond the limitations of a working relationship and into more along the lines of friendship and respect as the two have collaborated on a total of six completed productions from 2023 to date with “Amityville Aliens,” “Darbie’s Scream House,” “Debbie Does Demons,” “Bigfoot Exorcist” and “Shark Exorcist 2:  Unholy Waters.”  The sixth film is the one we’re going to look at today, “Blood Bitch Baby,” aka “Wicked Witch,” provides Flux the opportunity to play a notorious historical figure, the Blood Countess herself, Elizabeth Bathory.  The 2024 released film is also written by Donald Farmer and, if you’re familiar with the cult director’s work, there’s very little money invested into what’s considered a horror spirited feature that takes some liberties with the story.  “Blood Bitch Baby” is produced by the “Coven of the Black Cube” director Brewce Longo under his Blood Sick Productions company.

Jessa Flux might headline the movie but that doesn’t make “Blood Bitch Baby” a solo effort as the energetic cast is entirely occupied by Donald Farmer alternative and willing regulars.  Angel Nichole Bradford takes the protagonist lead as the abused and job-seeking Jenny who falls into Bathory’s classifieds trap, ensnared and bewitched to be the biological mother of the Antichrist.  Bradford co-stars in “Crackcoon” and “Darbie’s Scream House” alongside Flux and the petite, auburn-haired actress, in contrasts the voluptuous, curly-blond Flux and who also has a hand in special effects and makeup on these multi-hat productions, has a knack for acting that isn’t monotonic, flat, forced, or with limited range as often some of these cult B-movie actors can produce in attempt to be melodramatic.  When there’s usually Flux and Bradford in the same film together, Mel Helfrin isn’t too far behind as the third into this triple threat of titillating terror.  Helfrin, a vet of horror schlock, also starred in “Darbie’s Scream House” as well as “Night of the Dead Sorority Babes” with Jessa Flux.  The trio really do live up and liven up every scene with enthusiasm for budget horror, hamming it to death for the sake of blood, guts, and sex within its thin plotline structure that often veers off course.  More Farmer regulars in Claude D. Mills (“Debbie Does Demons”) and Joe Casterline (“Shark Exorcist 2:  Unholy Waters”) find themselves in the mix as bite victims of demonic forces.  There’s overperforming, bad performing, and some decent enough thespian to keep progression from staling but there’s definitely a comfortability and jelling within the troupe that sets expectations on a low-level production and a horrendously hackneyed and expositional script.  Jessie Youngs, Ronnie George (“Deadly Dealings”), Fallon Vendette, Marilyn Paige, and Kimberly Cole Zemke (“Debbie Does Demons”) costar. 

“Blood Bitch Baby” is an alliteration title that makes about as much as the film’s original alliteration title of “Wicked Witch” when considering the story has Jessa Flux in a prologue setup surrounding Elizabeth Bathory’s life post-virginal blood bathing.  Bathory’s deal with demonic forces gives the 16th-century woman what she’s always wanted, youth and beauty, but the agreement is never spoken of again in what’s an integral piece of important backstory to volley the immaculate conception (unless you consider Jenny’s nightmare of a demon raping her the act) of the antichrist.  That’s the theme for the entirety of the film as the story veers and swerves off-course away from a film setup to be about Bathory when really it’s about Jenny as a vessel for antichrist and those around succumbing to the infernal forces that dragon-headed hand puppets in this cost-efficient production.  The film is so strapped for cash that flesh wounds that should result in gaping hole actually grow a slab a raw and discolored meat overtop.  When Jenny eats her boyfriend’s eye, there should be an empty eye socket but what’s there is tumor growth.  The same can be said about Bathory being slashed or bitten in the face by the demon baby as instead of perforating scratches down her face, she too grows a bulbous mass.  Other randomized are added to try and add depth but are terribly too threadbare to fully attach itself with any kind of impression or influence, such as Keller, a Professor of Parapsychology who just randomly shows up at the right place, right time, and Iris, the dope-smoking lesbian who happenstance into a relationship with the recently unattached yet devilishly tranced and impregnated Jenny.  Iris isn’t essential to the story which makes her essentially just a body for sex appeal and for the kill counter.

Blood Sick Productions gives Elizabeth Bathory a lifelong change at more malevolence and death in “Blood Bitch Baby” now available on Blu-ray home video.  The AVC encoded, 1080p resolution, BD25 is riddled with colorful gel tints that play havoc in the details, reducing skin and fabric textures with smooth splotches of image posterization.  When using natural lighting or unfiltered key lighting, the details better render through to illuminate the little details, such as skin imperfections and granulated texturing on all surfaces.  Hue changes run rampant with cinematographer Curtis Everitt can’t pin down a singular style, relying heavily on a multi-color use of tinted lighting to feign supernatural surrealism but when edited, the colors change and there are times when there is no coloring at all in certain frames.   The English LPCM 2.0 Stereo is adequate for the release with clear dialogue until the amplified volume static, that’s not filtered out, comes into play, losing some fidelity out of the dual channel.  The audio is overall flat but that’s expected with the mostly closeup and extreme closeup shots that innately don’t have depth.  Range is limited as well with mostly a talking head narrative and ADS demonic creature sounds.  Mike Treblicock and Tim Ritter’s soundtrack pours into the channels nicely, overtaking when needed, such as the dream sequence, and balanced where needed to be defined.  There are no English subtitles available.  Bonus features include a Donald Farmer video introduction with Kasper Meltedhair standing adjacent to him as agreeable arm candy, behind-the-scenes photo gallery, and Blood Sick Productions trailers for other distributed and produced films.  There’re also bloopers in the after credits.  The standard Amaray Blu-ray comes with killer gory artwork by graphic artist Rick Melton.  There is no image on the reverse side of the sleeve, and the disc is pressed with Jessa Flux’s colorfully tinted Bathory face.  Not rated and region free, the Blood Sick “Blood Bitch Baby” has a runtime of 68 minutes. 

Last Rites: Donald Farmer has always been a king of underground, independent schlock horror but over the years, Farmer’s work has tapered from passion projects to more undistinguishable indies with hammy performances and shoddy effects that has “Blood Bitch Baby” cribbed.

“Blood Bitch Baby” Now Available!

C-Cups, D-Cups, and EVIL-Cups All Must Pay! “Big Boobs Buster” reviewed! (Whole Grain Pictures / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Own “Big Boobs Buster” on Blu-ray Home Video!

Masako is well-liked amongst her high school peers, has an above average grades, and is a cyclist athlete with a killer body.  The one thing Masako doesn’t have but desperate wants is the popular boy Bando to be her boyfriend.  When Masako asks Bando to be his girlfriend, Bando rejects her requests on the account of her washboard chest.  Assigning blame to all her well-endowed classmates beyond a B-cup, Masako transforms into the chesty vigilante, Big Boobs Buster, by subduing targets from a pervert’s stolen list of girls with large breasts and making spray casts of their chests to blackmail them with exposure if they ever date Bando or any other boys on campus.  When she’s finally caught and discovered by a track and field competitor with big boobs, one who also might like girls more than boys, Masako is ironically herself blackmailed into being a substitute in a sprint competition her competitive blackmailer can’t compete in due to injury. During vigorous train, Masako begins to develop friendship feelings and questions the reasons for her body image crusade.

For all you flat chested women out there, don’t fear!  “Big Boobs Buster” is here!  Hailing from Japan, the adult-oriented comedic has a superhero Marvel has yet to call to the frontline!  Director Hisashi Watanabe embraces his debut directorial with burlesque eroticism that touches upon the breast of society’s biggest problems – body shaming and body positivity.  Watanabe pens the script based off a Manga by Kôichirô Yasunaga of the same title with the film adaptation and its sequel, “Big Boobs Buster 2,” released the same year, 1990 directly onto home video, or what’s called in Japan, V-Cinema.  Released by the Tohokushinsha Film Corporation, the company behind the anime-turned-live-action film “Shark Skin Man and Peach Hip Girl” and produced a feature film out of the Android Kikaider series with  Mechanical Violator Hakaider, as well as being a part of video game series, such as Sonic and Final Fantasy, the producing team consists of “Appleseed’s” Tarô Maki and “Wild Zero’s” Katsuaki Takemoto.

The live-action OAV, aka Live Action Original Animated Video, has a game cast of lesser-known actor and Japanese AV idols that really perk up the story.  Harumi Kai leads the charge as the titular character, and the “Oona Rambo” actresses pulls off the sugar-and-spice Masako by being an all-around good schoolgirl scorned by a superficial boy named Bando (Masakazu Arai, “Shigatsu kaidan”) who moonlights is in a tight outfit and disguise being a shakedown artist against girls a C-cup or larger.  In the process of snaring them and spray casting a mold of their chest, she inadvertently turns them on denoting a bit of homoeroticism between the women that continues when she meets field and track star Kyoko Mitoizumi who calls her bluff and becomes uncomfortably touchy-feely with Masako.  Played by Uran Hirosaki, Kyoto is a form of positivity and no fear that puts Masako in a corner of uncertainty but the two eventually become friends with quid pro quo arrangements both will benefit from.  The rest of the case, which in this case are the big-chested highschoolers Masako seeks to humiliate because of her own insecurities, are comprised of Japanese AV idols with Mariko Itsuki (“Groper Train:  Push It Deep!”), Marina Matsumoto (“Stepmother Slave”), and Natsuko Kayama (“Big Boobs Sisters:  The Yellow Panties of Happiness”) as well as a few AV actors in the sought after and large breast-loving role with Masakazu Arai and Tôru Minegishi (“Godzilla vs. Biollante”) and Aya Katsuragi (“Evil Dead Trap”) as Masako’s parents who have this unexplained odd relationship in the peripheral that doesn’t contribute much, or anything at all, to the core elements. 

With a title like “Big Boobs Buster,” audiences can expect an outrageous comedy that lives up to live-action anime standards with an off-the-cuff superheroine on a crusade against one of the most arbitrary and non-threatening to society foci that only affects a flat-chested girl’s ego – big boobs.  Having never read Kôichirô Yasunaga’s manga and with only director Hisashi Watanabe’s film to provide my Johnny-Five Alive input data center, “Big Boobs Buster” is intoxicated with Masako’s character arc of self-deprivation toward body positivity through a minefield of scorn-driven retribution against the wrong and innocently lot of larger than C-cups.  Through this zany premise, that’s about as innocently wanton as cold be, director Watanabe and cinematographer Jun Abe spruce and polish this knob with mood abstracting backlighting and vivify scenes with power poses and interesting framing to closely resemble manga panel moments and the editing by Shigeru Okuhara (“Orgasm:  Mariko”) is multifaceted to tell a quick action narrative with ease of scene cuts and transitions that make “Big Boobs Buster” a breeze to digest it’s melon-sized mania.  The story doesn’t glide through with a single flightpath of the superheroine picking off well-endowed girls one-at-a-time only to be discovered to enact a plot point problem with the antagonist; instead, the story takes a 180 degree turn toward a whole new level of thematic dilemma in trying to win a sprint race for an enemy-turned-friend.  Summarized with a montage of tough exercises that culminate toward Masako being a beast at sprinting strength, the “Big Boobs Buster”  campaign goes into hibernation until the race is done, a subplot that insidiously takes over as the main plot, cleaving the already less than a full-length feature film in half. 

Catalogued at number four on the Whole Grain Pictures label, “Big Boobs Buster” is one large cup size of comedic body positivity done in the style of live action anime.  The new 4K remaster is pulled stems from the original camera 5mm negative and AVC encoded on a single-layered BD25, decoding at approx. 30Mbps.  Presented in high-definition, 1080ps, and in an European aspect ratio of 1.77:1 widescreen, “Big Boobs Hunter” is like being motorboated from your television screen with the rich look of a converted celluloid transfer that elevates Jun Abe’s luminous fogged night scenes, a glowing arura around the titular titillating heroine, and a contrasting shots of day time that offer warmer, slightly yellowis-tan tinted tones.  Skin textures and tones are reflected within the same softer glow but the rigid-contouring, around what can be delineated when shooting close up on a pair of breasts, do define a nice bulging image.  There are scenes, mostly a result of the cinematographer, that look flat between the foreground and background, suggesting possibly an aspherical lens that provides less curvature and less compressed, stretched image.  The release comes with two lossless DTS-HD 2.0 tracks with the original Japan mix and an English dub.  Clarity and a solid amount of punchiness come through nicely enough on the Japanese track that’s review covered but there’s not a ton of depth here with mostly frontloaded dialogue and action and nothing to note in the background or any environmental ambience.  Special features include a blooper reel that doubles as a behind-the-scenes featurette done in a traditional pop culture Japanese style with a gameshow announcer overlay track and translucent title cards in Japanese.  Also included are the original Japanese DVD trailers.  What catches the eye is the very pinku film and retro stylized cover with an in-your-face panty-covered butt overtop thigh high boots set in the foreground framing a scared schoolgirl between the legs.  Who wouldn’t want to watch this based solely off the cover!?  The reverse side of the sleeve contains an enlarged image still of another character and the backside acts humorously like “nutritional facts guide” superimposed onto the back cover.  The release comes in a standard Blu-ray Amaray.  With a runtime of 45 minutes, “Big Boobs Buster” is a breezy microfeature for a region free encoded Blu-ray that is not rated. 

Last Rites: Busting out with body positivity and sexual orientation themes, “Big Boobs Buster” brings out the big guns on a new Blu-ray release, animating manga to life on the big screen to experience Japan’s wildest cinema at its finest.

Own “Big Boobs Buster” on Blu-ray Home Video!

Keep an Eye on EVIL Unloved Ones with a Camera in the Coffin! (Wild Eye Releasing / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Watch Me Sleep” Now Available on DVD!

After the death of his abusive mother, recovering alcoholic Sean returns to his hometown with ulterior motives other than attend her funeral.  He hires a webcam company service to install a camera inside her coffin to ensure that his mother, who would repeated micro-stab him in the back with knives, is, in fact, dead.  As he struggles with his addiction and plagued by nightmares of random occult images involving his mother, Sean can barely hold it together to watch the video fee but when he does, what he sees often horrifies him – a rotting skeletal corpse with maggots, brief movements caught in a glimpse, and even her staring right back at him.  He implores a town friend to check his sanity, but all seems normal as normal can be with a coffin-cam facing directly at a corpse.  As the nightmares intensify, a presence takes hold of Sean, a familiar presence that hasn’t terrified him since he was a child. 

“Watch Me Sleep” might sound like a ploy phrase your kids would say to get you to stay with them at night or during nap time but for John Williams – the director of the 2023 film and not the “Jaws” and “Star Wars” composer – the lingering effect of trauma can be a powerful, often adjacent to being supernaturally scary, and is nowhere near being child’s play.  The director of 2015’s “The Slayers” and “Creatures of the Night” writes and directs the British voyeuristic graveside thriller that concentrates on the lasting aftermath effects of trauma despite our past being buried six feet underground.  Filmed in Staffordshire England, “Watch Me Sleep” is an independent production with Williams and Claire Ward as their third production together since 2021, behind “Creatures of the Night” and “There Something in the Shadows,” and executive producer Volker Plassmann, producer behind “Next Door” and “The Beast of Riverside Hallow.” 

Small production equals small cast but that doesn’t equate to poor performance as “Watch Me Sleep’s” cast is brilliant within the oversimplification explanation of the plotline which is more or less a traumatized man obsessed with watching his dead mother on camera to ensure she stays dead.  That doesn’t sound too exciting but with the actors’ performances and with Williams evolving of the plot to keep Sean’s sanity teetering on edge, “Watch Me Sleep” is more fleshed out with richer than expected character backstory and development of Sean, played intently and without hesitation by William’s go-to actor Darren McAree, and his problems with alcohol, a tormented childhood, and his blinding spite for his mother.  Mum is played by Sarah Wynne Kordas in a dialogue-free peripheral of psychological spookiness as a lifeless head on a webcam for most of the picture but is able to shine in the shadows of Sean’s vivid imagination and be diabolically on point when that lifeless head moves unexpectedly in a not-so-subtle manner for the chill and thrill triggered moments.  While the mum is certainly a presence, Sean is basically a one-man show of bopping between his struggles with drinking, his affliction of nightmares, his hesitation of webcam voyeurism, and trying to blow off steam and showcase his questionable sanity to townie friend Tom (James Whitehurst, “Creature of the Night”) who humors his friend’s hysteria with rather tranquil patience that is unusual.  The rest of the characters support where needed with brief interactions surrounding Sean’s cam setup and AA meetings with  Zane Hopkins (“The Beast of Riverside Hollow”), Steve Wood (“Cannibals and Carpet Fitters’), Charles O’Neill (“The Jack in the Box Rises”), Katie Elliff, and David Tunstall (“Beyond the Witching Hour”) as a mysterious man once friend to Sean’s mother. 

Despite the budget and some unpolished areas, there’s surprisingly more bang for your buck in “Watch Me Sleep” with a thrilling storyline that houses competent performances, editing, and one hell of a movie magic accomplishment in its special effects.  The black and white dream sequences of randomized occult and supernatural imagery are reminiscent of “Ringu’s” the contents of VHS tape with more visceral sound design to give it a lasting, haunting discord and the editing done an all accounts of these dreams are spliced perfectly into Sean’s sleeping and waking nightmares.  Between this reoccurring onslaught of mixt pernicious phantasmagoria and the out of left field special effects that reap the success for “Watch Me Sleep,” John Williams’ little English film is a bit a sleeper itself we should watch in a statement that’s ironically punned.  Keeping it mysteriously ambiguous, Williams doesn’t define the context that is kept open to be obscure and confusing for Sean who’s trying to pieces his dreams, evidence, and his mother’s curious connections together, a puzzle that could be an explanation why she tortured him with a knife, but the gist of the story delves into the occult as his mother dabbled in ritual and paganistic indoctrinations in the layer much more satanists or demonology driven.  Yet, those details are never verbal explained and that keeps you guessing whether his mum had dark dealings with the Devil or is the trauma, stress, and alcohol withdraw doing a number on his fractured psyche.  

You never know what kind of film you’re going to unearth at Wild Eye Releasing with its mysterious grab bag of horror schlock and independent ambition.  There have been titles of questionable taste that not even the sleaziest or gorehound fans would touch with a ten foot pole, but titles like the now out-of-print first-person-shooter occult-actioner “Hotel Inferno” and the satirical crude-humor of “Race Wars:  The Remake” are absolute low-budget gold held in high esteem.  “Watch Me Sleep” ranks up in that small layered stratosphere for the company who releases it on DVD.  The MPEG2 encoded DVD5 leaves much on the table technically with fuzzy detail on its standard 720p definition.  There’s no intricate picture quality nor does it have textural achievement but what you see is what you get, a picture constant and watchable B-horror you may catch on USA’s Up All Night hosted by Rhonda Shear and guest starring Gilbert Godfrey on cable television, broadcasting in analog through a tube set.  I will say the special effects are damn good for money and with no signs of how they’re achieved, such as wires, CGI, nor other.  The UK English language PCM Stereo 2.0 has its problems as well with a boxy, depth-less dual channel output that has a subtle layer of interference static, likely due to inexperience or poor equipment, but the dialogue track remains front and center with prominence and the sound design, the jarring clicks and pops along with the discord sounds of Sean’s nightmares and the overall brooding score, shoulders a lot of the weight by carrying the film’s technical problems.  There are no available subtitles.  Bonus features include only an image gallery, the trailer, and other Wild Eye Releasing previews.  The clear DVD Amaray comes with Wild Eye Releasing’s on brand exaggerated artistic rendition of an intense and scary old woman emerging from her coffin.  It’s a bit hyperbolic but eye-catching.  The reversible sleep has a sheet spanning, bloody depicted still from the film and no other bonus inserts.  The region free DVD is not rated and has encoded a 91-minute runtime.

Last Rites: Definitely one Wild Eye Releasing titles to pick up and enjoy, “Watch Me Sleep” has mother issues, alcoholic issues, trust issues, relationship issues, paranoia issues, and supernatural issues in what is a sleeper hit from the writer-director John Williams.

“Watch Me Sleep” Now Available on DVD!

Romance, Arsenic, and EVIL from the “Coven of the Black Cube” reviewed! (Blood Sick Productions / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Don’t Take a Drink from “The Coven of the Black Cube!” See On Blu-ray!

In a romantic tale brewed in turmoil and death metal, Violet’s relationship with girlfriend Gumby has spiraled into rocky territory.  Meanwhile, a coven of witches, the coven of the black cube, use a façade storefront to sell their arsenic infused potions to women who patron the store looking for spells, elixirs, or anything they can get their hands on to give them their just desserts.  Along with a steep price for the potion, the coven’s intent is to also extract the hearts from the corpses for black ritual purposes.  When Violet meets Clover, one of the coven witches, she’s smitten with their newfangled friendship, entrusting Clover enough to naively purchase the potion that only truly works if the other person actually loves them back.  Violet’s plan backfires when the potion takes Gumby’s life but in tragedy she finds solace, warmth, and love from Clover as the two find a stronger connection than before.  Yet, Clover’s coven doesn’t see their amorousness as conducive and plot against Violet and her inner circle who know a little too much of their murderous plans. 

“Coven of the Black Cube” is the 2025 alternative-goth romance horror from Brewce Longo.  The 2024 released film is Longo’s third full-length feature film behind “Blood Sick Psychosis” and that timeless – or was it tasteless – holiday classic, “A Corpse for Christmas.”  Longo pens the shooting script from a story concept by Longo, the film’s costar Zoe Angeli, and Josh Schafer, a VHS aficionado with producing involvement in the VHS documentary “Adjust Your Tracking” and videotaped themed adult animation film in “The Magnificent Kaaboom!!! VHS.”  “Coven of the Black Cube” takes a shine to Schafer’s enthusiasm for the antiquated media format as Longo devises an analog appearance from shooting with a VHS camcorder.  Longo and cinematographer Michael DiFrancesco serve as executive producing financiers of the lo-fi and underground horror production with “Busted Babies’” X Menzak and Charles Smith as co-producers. 

At the dark heart of the story, two women devoid of true love are a piece of a larger pie of characters and while Morrigan Thompson-Milam (“Debbie Does Demons,” “XXX-mas”) and Zoe Angelis (“Flesh Eater X,” “A Corpse for Christmas”) play the characters on opposing sides of the morality scale who find a connection of desire for each other’s comfort and company, there is often a focus on Milo, the laissez faire pot shop, VHS, and pizza-making entrepreneur, and his frustrated wife looking for husband humiliation.  Milo’s a long haired, mustached, glass-wearing, dope smoker with a penchant for Carl J Sukenick movies and the finest college combo of cold pizza and warm beer.  “Pigshit’s” Josh Schafer cowrites in his character’s love for the underground and obscure horror in a retro-VHS format and instills an uncouth yet gentle behavior for a likeable Milo, but Milo’s is benign to “Coven of the Black Cube’s” theme as well as his wife’s (Annie Mitchell, “A Corpse for Christmas”) distaste for his uncivilized and disinterested spousal conduct.  There’s segment has little value other than to be another coven case of trying to get rid of one’s husband and to be not a good friend, but just a floating friend to Violet and Gumby (Kasper Meltedhair, “Darbie’s Scream House”) that supplies them weed from time to time.  We’ve seen Angelis before in more X-rated material from extreme indie filmmaker SamHel’s short films “Vania” and “LoveDump” but her role as Clover takes it down a notch by only going full nude for a steamy moment, exposing just enough yet plenty for a lead into sex scene that fades to a black transition just before getting down with Violet.  Clover and Violet relate to effectual romance that’s organically not sustainable due to the coven’s strict unwritten policies on privacies with Luna (Aja Long) as the representational face of the coven head who will do what is necessary to keep their practices a secret.  The cast fills in with Tina Krause (“Bloodletting”), Joe Swanberg (“You’re Next”), David ‘The Rock’ Nelson (“Blood Sick Psychosis”), and Chris Seaver (“Scrotal Vengeance”).

Underneath the darkling foundation and it’s deathrocker-and-hillbilly rock scene, “Coven of the Black Cube” has perfected the notes of being an analog horror in the modern, digital age by actually using era specific filming equipment to achieve a natural aesthetic with tracking lines, interlaced blocking, and a low-bandwidth process with magnetic tape decay resulting in color shifting and bleeding of the warmer tones produces a nostalgic exactness, an infinite times better aged look through proper medium than a digital image could ever try to reproduce through  being played back through a VHS recorder or any VHS filter.  High praise for a more than accomplished film aesthetic can only push its success so far as the story, a dark-and-grim queer romance, struggles to keep focus with a disjointed narrative, diluting too much of the Violet and Clover rising relationship within the killer-coven context.  Sidebar scenes of Milo’s substory, subjecting his wife’s disdain for his change over the course of the marriage and the subsequent consequence of her plot to do harm to him, dissent the story’s core queer love affair tone too much and too heavy-handily while keeping an overtop cloud of wicked witchcraft whirling about between murdering men, selling pernicious beauty products and services, and holding dark rituals involving a coffin, torture of manhood, and ill-effect open-heart surgery.  Gore effects are moderately effective, especially with the back alley penile canal probing that’ll have all the men cross their legs in fear but also include disemboweling and heart removals.  One item that really digs under the skin, nagging for it to be further explained, is the significance of the black cube.  It’s symbol is worshipped but is still an ambiguous cause or idol the coven sees fit to follow; however, a little research suggest Longo’s story pulls inspiration from the occultist and magical religion Cult of the Black Cube that has been segmented over he course of time, one of those segmentations being blood sacrifices in order to harvest souls for possibly Satan and that closely resembles the filmic plot. 

Blood Sick Productions receives the high-definition Blu-ray treatment for “Coven of the Black Cube,” distributed by MVD Visual.  Encoded onto a BD25, the AVC encoded, 1080p Blu-ray, presented in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, is an analog enthusiasts wet dream being shot on magnetic tape rather than digital, creating all sorts of color bleeding, interlacing issues, and fuzzy imaging that can both be an instilling nostalgia of reminiscent low-budget 1980s horror and a videophile’s ultimate night for apex image quality.  Longo’s intentions were for the former, a love letter to the VHS era, under the cinematography of Michael DiFrancesco who knew how to correctly light and angle certain shots ot appear vivid, such as in the nightclub scene where Violent and Clover meet eyes, and for the rest of the film use the inherent camcorder’s constraints to let the low resolution and limited color range to take the wheel.  The English PCM 2.0 stereo has a stronger mix than expected in contrast to the video quality, filling in the dual output with unrefined and flat but clear and prominently forefront dialogue, nonetheless.  A killer metal soundtrack is the film’s pride and joy, dispersed throughout appropriately emotionalizing and accentuating the type of scene, with performances from Sing Slavic, Fishgutzzz, Slasher Dave, ShitFucker, Blank Spell, Xarissa, Sorrow Night, deleter, Heavy Temple, Soft Teeth, and more, a full list is inside on an inserted one-sided sheet in their respective band fonts.  Other physical properties of include a harsh pastel and crudely demonic illustration by Paul Barton.  Inside with the insert sheet, the disc is pressed with a giant black cube, bordered with archaic rue figures in a bloodred backsplash.  Encoded special features include a commentary writer-director Brewce Longo, writer-star Zoe Angeli, writer-star Josh Schafer, and director of photography Michael DiFrancesco, a behind the scenes look, and the trailer.  The region free encoded disc has a runtime of 97 minutes and is not rated.

Last Rites: An alternative witchy tale for the alt-scene, “Coven of the Black Cube’s” nostalgia for the analog and the misandrist femme-fatales marks a different kind of cauldron-stirred potion for the black cat and broomstick subgenre but there’s an imbalance of story here that’s difficult to ignore with its wandering path that takes focus away from the significance of the black cube, trading defining substance around the coven’s existence for a quick cementing romance.

Don’t Take a Drink from “The Coven of the Black Cube!” See On Blu-ray!