Category Archives: dvd

Snuff is the New EVIL Industry Fad! “Snuff Queen” reviewed! (Dark Arts Entertainment / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Snuff Queen” on DVD from Dark Arts Entertainment!

Snuff, a hot commodity amongst patrons of the black market and dark web provides real violence and real death for real morbid viewers.  Laws are challenged and circumvented by consent of women willing to die for money through various ways of asphyxiation in front of the camera and sold under the controversial snuffing genre.  A Ten-minute window of revival separates the actors and actresses from permanent brain damage or certain expiration.  A snuff performer interfaces with the complexity of thrills and easy money that counterbalances against relationship troubles, social stigma, and the constant threat of actually dying hanging over their heads, or more literally, pressed against their throats.  A handful of willing performances lets a documentarian illustrate their niche profession, lifestyle, and personal struggles to the world with included behind-the-scenes footage on set and in their private spaces as they put on their line mind, body, and soul have to survive.

Those who seek out snuff, even if represented in a sensationalized, fictious way to glorify gore, violence, violence against women, and a fascination, obsession need to satisfy murder lust, likely need to have their heads thoroughly scoured for the tiniest ounce of sociopathic tendencies.  Films like “Effects,” “Faces of Death,” “8MM,” “A Serbian Film,” and the like all contribute to that black desire of control of another person’s existence and getting off perversely on the sadism.  Films like Sean Russell’s “Snuff Queen” are nothing like those more aberrant productions of cruel reproductions.  The 2023 pseudo-documentary and mockumentary hybrid began in 2008 with AVN interviews with porn stars and their take the matter of snuff or overall rough sex.  Shelved for many years because no producer at the time deemed the material worth making a movie out of it, Russell is approached by Dark Arts Entertainment’s Brian Yuzna and John Penney to finish the film with new scenes based off the 2008 script but cut most of the comedy out for a darker tone.  David Navarro producers the film.

Previously shot 2008 AVN interview footage with some of the then biggest talent in the industry, such as Sasha Grey, Bree Olson, Stormy Daniels, Jenna Haze, Stoya, Faye Reagan, Jesse Jane, Belladonna, Aurora Snow, Jessica Drake, Sunny Lane, and even Larry Flynt, is cut into snippets of a montage as they comment on death and sex in various contexts.  The series of comments and quips puts into perspective individual limitations, mindsets, behaviors, and an unfiltered truth underneath the layers of makeup, fake breasts, and forged happiness in the adult entertainment industry masked in glitzy red lights, supersized sex drives, and a prospecting tease of getting laid.  As the 2008 prologue interviews ends, the 2023 interviews begin with mostly scripted talk following the daily lives of a handful of snuff performing women, 4 principal female characters to be exact.  Moxie Owens (“Girl Lost:  A Hollywood Story”) as Jane Doe, Lexie Leone (“It Don’t Bother Me at All”) as Amy Doe, Juliet Kennedy as Angela, and Lindsay Normington (“Anora”) as Audrey Doe become the diverse batch of short-listed actresses of controversial and law-bending snuff films. These core cast of women are joined by gap-filling support, ranging from gays, to blacks, to Asians, and so forth by extenuating out from just a white female dominated industry in touching cultural and race by the less promoted numbers of adult entertainment. Much of “Snuff Queen’s” inauthenticity garb comes from the acting that’s densely overplayed and exaggerated because of the less-comedic directive by shot-calling distributors and performances stand out amongst a darker theme as too watery and less potent, like off-brand prescription drugs. Ironically enough, IMDB.com gives in the title’s controversial nature by not listing the film under any of the actor’s individual credits as to say or allure “Snuff Queen” documentary as real evidence and content based. Tuesday Knight (“A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Master”), Josie Hung (“Staycation”), Gina DeFlilippo, Captain Dare, Zac Mendoza, Neill Flemming (“It Kills at Midnight”), Christopher Parker (“Spider”) and Jake Holley costar.

Much of what is laid out in “Snuff Queen,” all the provocative and debatable ethics, legality, and portentous aspects of Snuff, is all a load of crap and the director, Sean Russell, would be the first person to tell you that.  What Russell intends to convey is an allegorical emotional evaporation in adult entertainment performers and how apathetic the industry is toward the safety and responsibility for its talent who battle with low self-esteem and anger issues that either drive wedges between friend and family or ensue verbal spouts.  There’s also the treatment or being seen as just a bag of meat for the slaughter when getting the shot is important than the person taking all the risk for little reward.  Russell achieves that endgame message despite the cuts of levity humor that do squeeze through every so often but with that squeeze-in of a dark humor chuckle, coincided with a reserved approach to a documentary surrounding Snuff of all things extreme, in lies an off-putting characteristic going against the grain of the film’s black toned nature and Russell’s indelicate undercurrent theme.  “Snuff Queen” is nowhere near the shock level its required to have, especially being bestowed a taboo title, with little-no-effort in the thickness of the story’s creative girth; instead, the 2008 interviews, snipped scenes from previous controversial films, and one atypical scene at the heart of the story teases with stark nudity and blood are the only edgier content of a rather dull feature length pseudo-documentary. 

Presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio, Dark Arts Entertainment distributes the home release of “Snuff Queen” on DVD.  The MPEG2, 720p and 1080p, DVD9 has stark grade resolutions due to the 2008 recorded interviews and footage shoot 15-years later in 2023 with the former a blockier, less-pixelated digital camcorder for ease of AVN, working the crowd, person-to-person use.  Recent footage has the polished look of a high-dollar digital recording sans any artistic grading or stylistic lens.  No issues with compression codec that produces a very fine, detailed image reproduction that sinks into inky blacks and retains a natural color palette.  “Snuff Queen” is authored with a LPCM English stereo mix that’s an imitation of a hot mic of continuous dialogue, as many real, pseudo, and mock documentaries are, that renders cleanly through from one bookend to the other.  There’s also not a ton of interference other than in the 2008 interviews at the AVN with perhaps more commercial equipment or audio setup.  The onboard mic snags the milieu sounds with the raw range and depth.  English subtitles are available.  Encoded special features include a director’s commentary that goes through the first planned steps for the film and its subsequent rejections from producers back in 2008, deleted scenes, and the film’s trailer.  Physical features are stark and spartan with a convention DVD Amaray that has a mock polaroid border and the redacted eyes and mouth of a faceless, chest high naked woman that draws attention in conjunction with the title.  Dark Arts Entertainment presents the release not rated, region free, and has a runtime of 92 minutes. 

Last Rites: “Snuff Queen” might have worked 15-years ago with the old footage that contained real pornstars and real enough gore effects that could have turned this concept onto a creative machination in illusion of the truth or a clever black comedy that really pokes the porn industry in the ribs, but instead time and too many hands the creative pot has relinquished any power “Snuff Queen” may have wielded, dethroning it definitly out of shock contention.

“Snuff Queen” on DVD from Dark Arts Entertainment!

A Memory Fuels EVIL’s Sexualized Resurrection. “Scream of the Blind Dead” reviewed! (Full Moon Features / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Scream of the Blind Dead” Now on DVD!

Arriving by train to the deserted, medieval ruins of a once great 14th century town, a woman wanders aimlessly through the dilapidated structures left standing and eventually finding a peaceful resting spot on a church pew before the Holy Trinity.  Alone with her amorous thoughts for another woman, her very presence stirs the awakening a blind undead corpse out from the slumbering, Earthly tomb, the resting place of a once righteous Templar knight of a prestigious order once assigned to protect Christian values with sword and shield but disbanded and accused of occult heresy.  Being chased from dark corner to dark corner inside the ruins’ isolated, labyrinth wall, the woman narrowly escapes the relentless knight’s bloodlust blade.  She is not only frightened by the razor-sharp sword of the ghostly, ghastly figure, a dirtily shrouded, mummified corpse, but what evokes within her, her own dark, secretive past of love, murder, and vengeance, will haunt her to death.  

Director Chris Alexander has settled himself in the realm of the homage.  The Canadian filmmaker is well-known for his tribute films toward specific directors and trope styles within the creepshow genre that allow him to express his own artistic take on a classic.  “Scream of the Blind Dead” is Alexander’s latest to follow suit based off the original concept and characters by Amando de Ossorio and the Spanish director’s Blind Dead series, beginning with “Tombs of the Blind Dead” in 1972 which is the featured inspiration of Alexander’s short remake film.  The 2021 homage is penned by the “Girl with a Straight Razor” director but is also progresses forward without dialogue in what is like a music video for Ossorio’s original film, slimmed down to the principal character and one blind undead knight for much of the story.   Alexander created Delirium Films, a Full Moon sublabel to release his own productions under, conjoining the once Fangoria editor to the hip of Charles Band, as coproducer, to stretch the imagination of terror even further.  Kevin Cormier and Cheryl Singleton also coproduce the short.

You won’t see a herd of horses or a horde of blind, rotting knights on horseback in the “Scream of the Blind Dead” nor will you there be a collective degree of humans fighting for against the dead for their very lives.  Instead, two women and one knight consist of the entire cast, pared down to the two chief female characters Betty and Virginia, though they’re not explicitly named in the story, but the gist of designation is there.  Betty is played by Ali Chappell, a mainstay regular in many of Chris Alexander directorial repertoire, having roles in “Necropolis:  Legion,” “Girl with a Straight Razor,” and “It Knows Your Alone” while also being quite the scream queen in other horror projects from the 2019 anthological “The Final Ride” to last year’s “Malediction” which she debuted as a director as well.  As Betty, the short-lived role sets the dark synth soundtrack-driven tone lengthened by use of slow-motion and additional edits to build suspense and does harp back to the premise and spirt of Ossorio’s brand of Spanish horror.  Not as seasoned as Chappell in credits, the casting of Virginia goes to Stephanie Delorme, a brunette in contrast to Chappell’s blonder shade, who finds herself being chased, melodramatically I might add, by an undead knight.  Delorme’s frightful face and lumbering getaway cadence have the hallmarks of a good final victim being pursued on common horror of past, present, and future but her direction to stop and stare, almost waiting in frozen terror, is reminiscent of yore when the act of escape is negated by the sheer shock.  These are the moments audiences yell at the screen, pleading for movement, to do something other than just stand there and gape at the monster before them.  Chasing Virginia is no ordinary templar knight but a female templar knight, played by all-things-horror enthusiast, musician, and another of Alexander’s on-screen regulars Thea Faulds, under her showbiz name of Thea Munster.  Munster dons two parts connected by death as Virginia’s lover in flashback and the ghoulish knight chasing Virginia. 

“Scream of the Blind Dead” has haunting connotations of past guilt or along the lines of the soul-touching past catching up to one’s beleaguered conscious, hence why Virginia wanders the countryside in search for answers, stopping or resting along the way into a state of pain or melancholy of a memory, and comes upon a church, perhaps unintentionally to confess her darkest sins or find solace in forgiveness.  However, it wouldn’t be a horror show without some fort of graveside penance from an unearthing corpse, slowly sauntering to seek eviscerating Virginia’s regret from her exposed, beach chic-cladded abdomen.  Right before being engrossed in the standard chase fair, scenes of Virginia self-groping from fantasizing the physical touch her female lover add a layer of sensuality yet to have context other than a strong passion within Virginia, whether it’s in her heart or loins is indeterminable, but shortly after singlehandedly pleasuring herself, a female knight, with pursed mummified lips, resurrects from inside the church where Virginia rests and the slow-motion macabre begins, moving about different backdrops within the ruins and field exteriors that are basked in neon gelled key lighting that creates a smokey psychedelic, or hallucinogenic, fever dream atmosphere, a nightmare experience only fabricated in deep-seeded guilt-trips.

“Scream of the Blind Dead” short salute to Amando de Ossorio and the “Blind Dead” series is honorable enough to keep the always nitpicking fanbase from picketing. Full Moon Features distributes the MPEG2 encoded DVD5 presented in 720p resolution and a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio. Picture quality through a lower resolution and a patchwork of sizzling vibrant neon lights scores across a refined image with fuzzy details and indiscernible outlines. On the color scale, there’s plenty of range through the assortment of abrasive key lighting that illuminates the rustic, rundown church and surrounding area of mostly greens and browns. Sound selection offers a lossy English Dolby Digital 5.1 and Stereo 2.0 that absolutely has a soundtrack that trades the tings of a fortepiano for a theremin but still digs into the familiar tones of Antón García Abril’s ominous industrial-synth score that lingers eerily with resonating vocals. Very few moments do in-frame sounds from the actresses come over, entirely all screams in what was mostly done in post with a clear separation from action. Because of the music video approach with no dialogue, the lossy format is nulled by what’s really a psychosexual visual experience. English closed captioning is available. Special features a feature-length director’s commentary with Chris Alexander, two music videos including Thea Munster with her thermin solo entitled Werewolfry and the other track Burial Ground from her band Night Chill, the official trailer, and the Delirium Films’ trailers. Full Moon’s No. 355 title comes in a standard DVD Amary with a mixed illustration and live photo cover art that befits the body of work. There are no slipcovers, inserts, or other tangible materials set next to the disc pressed with the same knight silhouette but with a buzzing blue outline. At feature length, “Scream of the Blind Dead” would have been too long with Alexander’s stylistic outlet but at a crisp 40 minutes has a greater success rate for a not rated, region free releases that mostly lambent lights and ethereally evil sans actor dialogue.

Last Rites: “Scream of the Blind Dead” is not blind to the Ossorio source material and captures the core center of the Spanish director’s picture of history crusades on the ignoble never dies while Chris Alexander twists into it a fever dream of sexual fervor, slenderized for a post-impressionist style.

“Scream of the Blind Dead” Now on DVD!

The Apex Predator of the Sea is Now the EVIL From Beyond the Stars! “Space Sharks” reviewed! (Wild Eye Releasing / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Your Daily Dose of Sharksploitation with “Space Sharks” on DVD!

Interstellar scientists voyage home after discovering and retrieving a new species of shark and carnivorous plant from the planet Crypt-X.  When a rogue meteoroid field strikes the hull and sends their ship careening toward the Nevada desert, only one human survivor emerges from the wreckage to face off as the only resistance against a deadly combinational species of highly technological and predatory sharks and the piranha-like swarm of hungry vegetation.  At the same time, a group of recovering addicts are led onto a scenic desert trail for a spiritual nature hike while a conspiracy theorist, toyed with by clandestine organizations, makes his way west to locate the crash and uncover the truth connecting the space sharks with every other conspiracy theory known to man.  Man versus space shark versus killer plant in an extraterrestrial showdown on Earth’s terrain and only one will survive in what’s surely be a massive Government coverup.

Tornadoes whip man-eating sharks through the air in “Sharknado.”  Engineering virtuosos yet undead World War II Nazi soldiers ride monstrous, flying sharks to wreak havoc on modern civilization in “Sky Sharks.”  Now, outer space is no longer quiet and safe as a newly, deadly breed of predator is brought to Earth in “Space Sharks.”   Director Dustin Ferguson, a director with an oeuvre of low-budget horror going back as far as 2010, pens and helms the adjunct indie horror-comedy under his pseudonym of Dark Infinity and his latest is to infinity and beyond being right up there at the top of the schlockiest of sharksploitation.  Filmed and around Burbank California, doubling with no much likeness to the deserts of Nevada near the Grand Canyon, the team behind “5G Zombies” and “Amityville in the Hood” SCS Entertainment in a co-joint effort with Wild Eye Releasing, who also distributes the title, releases “Space Sharks” with Wild Eye Releasing’s founder Rob Hauschild producing and associate produced by Julie Ann Ream and Joe Williamson.

For all of roughly five minutes and a couple of lines of dialogue, Eric Roberts secures top bill on this what’s sure to be lost in the sharksploitation pit of nonsense.  The once formidable 1980s and 1990s star, and brother to the high-powered and elegant Julia Roberts, “Best of the Best” and “Runaway Train” star has ebb-and-flowed vertically between mainstream Hollywood films and the lowest-of-the-low indies.  “Space Sharks” is definitely in the latter category and doesn’t showcase much of Roberts’ given talent that has in recent years strayed to the more eccentric in a countless number of Dick, Jane, and Harry productions.  Longtime scream queen Brink Stevens is another familiar who you’ve might not even known existed in the film if it wasn’t for the credits.  Playing the nature hike leader but enveloped under the shade of a large sun hat, hidden behind large black sunglasses, and, too, with very little screentime, Stevens comes and goes like the snap of a finger.  Other cult film actors are added to this ridiculous recipe with Mel Novak (“Game of Death,” “RoboWoman”) and Scott Schwartz (“A Christmas Story,” ‘Café Flesh 2”) folded into a cheap, B-movie run cast batter of Ferguson regulars to give this tasteless schlock some spice.  If “Space Sharks” had to select a true principal lead, Allie Perez (“Amityville Emanuelle”) would be the closest as the lone surviving scientist with arms training to fend against the upright and muscularly athletic sharks while trying to make her way home to dad, Mel Novack, but tasked to protect desert lost civilians Nick Caisse (“Apex Predators 2:  The Spawning”), Traci Burr (“Death Bitch”), Janet Lopez (“Liza: Warden from Hell”), Ben Anderson (“Witchblossom”), Breana Mitchell (“Cocaine Couger”), Daniel Joseph Stier (“The Clown Chainsaw Massacre”), Christine Twyman (“It Wants Blood!”) and Joshua Mooney (“Axed to Pieces”) from being chum. 

An “Alien” and “Predator” rip-off integrated into the multifaceted farce that has become sharksploitation.  As premises go, “Space Sharks” has a promising plotline of a newly discovered, extraterrestrial species of shark being returned to Earth for scientific, governmental weaponization or examination and then runs amok the desert when things go terribly South.  That story is far more lucid than previous low-rent, quick-produced features of a supernatural shark emerging jaws first out of a toilet bowel.  Also, the way the trailer was cut had “Space Sharks” perk ears of interest with a very similar appearance to “Street Sharks,” a mid-1990s Saturday morning, animated television series of muscular man-eaters that were half-man, half-shark heroes running around beating up bad guys on a weekly basis.  Then, we see the film and we were wrong, dead wrong.  “Space Sharks” is a half-cocked mashup of too much, too little of unwanted knockoffs and crisscrossing ideas.  Computer-generated designs of the brawny tech-sharks are not terrible for budget but do borrow quite an uncomfortable bit from our favorite jungle and urban hunter, the Predator, with heat vision, cloaking ability, and the methods of skinning and suspending corpses upside down.  The pull from “Alien” is more subtle with an opening credit title that comes about in the same gradual style as the Xenomorph films.  Ferguson is no stranger in his cache of flattery and audiences likely wouldn’t have minded the echoes that entail if it wasn’t for the nonsensical chasing of conspiracy theories, a space mission stemmed with little-to-no details, explanation of tiny alien sharks grown to be elite hunters, man-eating plants, giant spaceship crash that befell no concern, zero character developments, dynamics, and arcs, and a story edit too perfunctory to keep focus.  

“Space Sharks” invades retail shelves with a Wild Eye Releasing DVD. The MPEG-2 encoded, upscaled 1080p, DVD5 houses essentially the encircling feature presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio. The upscale barely registers with a mid-range decoding rate at approximately 5 Mbps. Textures are not as defined inside the context of tangible captured frames whereas any post-production object, computer generated with commercial animation software, is about as backwards realistic as an early 90s source coded video games, such as the blockiness, square-pegged Doom or Duke Nukem 3D. “Space Sharks” has an ungraded, unpolished overlay that leaves colors desaturated or muted and the compression seizes control with blatant aliasing issues when characters run around like free range chickens evading foxes. The long opening through galaxy is the best “Space Sharks” will get that exposes colors, multi-shaped object, and an ease of poorly rendered animation burden with a rather decent composition of visuals and soundtrack to kick off the film. The English language stereo 2.0 mix too rides that sliding scale of independent filmmaking with a low-frequency, heavily saturated audio mix that can’t harness and real in isolated elements, and without that even diffusion of sound, every exterior noise maker attaches itself to the dialogue and the intended ambient sound. Dialogue renders through anemically but has enough strength to be heard and intelligible, even if what’s scripted is not. English subtitles are not available. DVD unfolds as a feature-only product with an al carte selection of Wild Eye trailers that are usually on every Wild Eye home video releasing, special features withstanding. A time warping 70-minutes runtime has this just over hour long feature feel much longer in is unrated, region free format.

Last Rites: Simply put, if you’re looking to watch something jawsome, “Space Sharks” is more space junk and not worth going anywhere near its orbit.

Your Daily Dose of Sharksploitation with “Space Sharks” on DVD!

This EVIL Thanksgiving Bird Has Been Overcooked. “Amityville Turkey Day” reviewed! (SRS Cinema / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Amityville Turkey Day” – That’s No Cranberry Sauce! Check Out the DVD Here!

Rocco, a sleazy indie film director, is given one last project to director with the stipulation of not to squander the funds and to make a competent hit movie without completely making principal photography a nightmare for the cast and crew.  Having landed a large estate to shoot his film, the house comes with a manservant named Bram to take care of their needs and see to the estate grounds.  When a man-eating Turkey from Hell, embodied by the evil soul of once infamous doctor, comes home for Thanksgiving dinner, Bram aims to curate a fine feast for the abrasive, wicked bird from the indie film production.  As cast and crew begin to dwindle down and disappear, the show-running producer takes charge to motivate and take care of the slipping through the cracks mess of, yet again, another Rocco botched production.  Yet, the turkey still hungers and when all the excess meat is consumed, he will then find a human mate to reincarnate himself for human form. 

After promising myself, swearing up and down, that I would never, ever watch and review another Amityville titled infused film again, “Amityville Turkey Day” had sucked me right back in, like a moth to the flame into another mindless and pointless, could I even call it this, money-grabbing exploitation of the Amityville title letdown of a holiday-comedy horror film.  The 2024, microbudget Thanksgiving themed sequel to “Amityville Thanksgiving” brings back the writing-and-directing duo of Will Collazo Jr. (“Amityville Shark House,” “Amityville Apocalypse”) and Julie Anne Prescott (indie film scream-queen of “The Amityville Harvest” and “Amityville Thanksgiving”) to add a little more sanguine stuffing in their continuation of a terrorizing wild Turkey.  Alternatively known as “Amityville Thanksgiving 2,” the feature is an indiegogo crowdfunded campaign that raised the $10,000 goal and became a Will Collazo Jr.’s Cult Cinema production.

The sequel doesn’t return most of the cast from the film.  Most sequels don’t, right?  Instead, a whole new batch of rough puff principals are basted over the story to try and moisten the flavor of a rather rough-and-ready follow-up.  Amongst the medley filled in with B-movie talent, there doesn’t seem to be a one standout lead role to take charge in what is more of convergence of counterproductive parts that overlap and overstep each other’s storyline.  Characters also disappear and reappear without context to about where they were and where they go, for example the sleazy director Rocco (Michael Ruggiere) vanishes for most of the story’s midriff and then just reappears in the third act without a sense of where he’s been.  Erica Dyer (“The Town Without Halloween,” “Attack of the Corn Zombies”) plays one of the few characters with an actual intact arc as the pissed off producer Ivy who storms in and takes charge of Rocco’s quickly deteriorating production, proving to be a competent leader to quickly organize the film crew into action, but as cast and crew begin to drop like flies and vanishing from the estate set within the Thanksgiving week, Ivy’s honed in focus doesn’t register the killer Turkey, voiced by Steven Kiseleski (“Amityville Karen,” “Amityville Bigfoot”), and it’s righthand caretaker Bram (Dino Castelli, “Screamwalkers”) slowly filleting the filmmakers for feasting.  A large portion of the character pie is throwaway fodder for the Turkey with only a couple of others to stand out with pointed out substance, that also point back to “Amityville Thanksgiving, with Kevin (Tim Hatch, “Amityville in Space, and the other actor to return from “Amityville Thanksgiving) on a mission to find out what happened to his sister from “Amityville Thanksgiving,” and his planted actress friend Jessica (Jen Elyse Feldy, “The Elder Hunters,” “Camp Blood 666 Part 2”), but their roles do get lost in the fray of the frenzied packed, plot hole-riddled storyline that crams in too much too hastily inside a jerry-built and unnecessary tale.  David Perry, Clint Beaver, Amanda Flowers, Shannon Hall, Jeff Webb, Thomas J. O’Brien, Ralph Rey, James Janso, Stephen Bloodworth, and the late Mark C. Fullhardt, to which this film is dedicated to, fill out as the at will Turkey fodder. And I hope all my listings of “Amityville” named films has brought awareness to this exploitative issue!

“Amityville Turkey Day” is no “Thankskilling.”  Jordan Downey has mastered the smack-talking, rude-with-tude, killer Turkey in style, substance, and outrageous kills.  Will Collazo Jr.’s film feels more like a cheap knockoff to the likes of the Italian unauthorized remakes, sequels, and spinoffs of American films of the 1980s, attaching the Amityville name to draw attention and sponge off the legitimate franchise that has now become a disgusting and disheartening running joke and parody of unoriginality. “Amityville Turkey Day” mirrors every ounce of that last sentiment with a shoddy, low rent feature that not only drags the Amityville title deeper into the overkill mud but also hurts the exposure of Jordan Downey’s “Thankskilling” to those viewers who do get their unsuspecting hands onto Collazo’s film first and leaves a residual bad taste toward more competent Turkey trot terrorizers.  That bitterness is contributed by the lack of story structure and coherency, a lost sense of unique personality and entertainment, and a brutal monotone flow that stagnates upon just one setting over the course of a few days, which is a major gap considering the film crew disappearing here and there during that time and no one happens to care or even hardly notice.  Comedy elements fall flat, reduced to fart and sexual gags and missing-the-mark cheap insults surrounded by dull kills, especially for a Turkey that goes for the juggler.  Very few moments of levity and intrigue can be pulled from “Amityville Turkey Day” with the puppeteered evil Turkey lobbing an occasional humorous one liner – “Look at all that blood!  She’s a squirter!” – and the manifested closet gimp is too strange of a guilty-allure to ignore, and these few and far in between bright spots add a layer of color to what is dull overall. 

The crowdfunded clucker had arrived just in time for this year’s Thanksgiving courtesy of indie film friendly distributor SRS Cinema.  “Amityville Turkey Day” is housed on an MPEG2 encoded, 480p resolution, 5 gigabyte DVD-R.  According to the crowdfunding page, Collazo offered an all-around bigger and better experience from the bareboned, nearly no-budget, precursor, yet the sequel didn’t live up to expectations and appeared to be more of the same slapdash as the first and this translates to a writeable DVD disc with a fuzzy picture, smoothed edges, and plenty of posterization and banding that digs the grave deeper for this overdone bird.  The ungraded picture produces unnatural lighting from a series of gelled flood lights, more so with deep red, aimed upward to evoke thicker upper shadow positions.  What the result constitutes with the unhelpful lower resolution camera is an overly hot and overly diffused image in what would be Turkey and Bram basement scheming scenes that renders any leftover details washed away from the effect.  The English LPCM 2.0 mono track is a flat fixture via the onboard microphone on the digital camera that creates an anemic dialogue presence with subtle distortion.  Range consists of post-production sound effects and the close quartered rooms of the “estate” has depth pretty much nonexistent.  I will say dialogue is prominent and clear though higher decibels overtake and clip the microphone’s volume intake.  English subtitles are optionally available. The release’s special features include a director’s commentary, a making-of behind-the-scenes, the original trailer, and other SRS Cinema prevuews. Aside from an enticing illustrated cover art, the DVD has no other supplemental cover art, inserts, and etc. “Amityville Turkey Day” has a runtime of 93 minutes, is region free, and comes not rated.

Last Rites: “Amityville Turkey Day” is difficult to gobble up. In fact, “Amityville Turkey Day” is much like having to go to your great Aunt’s house for a third Thanksgiving dinner of the day, the one that is the family’s black sheep, wears a muumuu, and her house smells like cheap cigarettes and cat dandruff, it’s a hard no thank you.

“Amityville Turkey Day” – That’s No Cranberry Sauce! Check Out the DVD Here!

The Jack-O-Lantern of EVIL Curses! “The Pumpkin Man” reviewed! (Scream Team Releasing / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Don’t Accidently Curse Yourself by Not Owning “The Pumpkin Man” on DVD!

The town of Cromwell lives and breathes off the demonic urban legend known as Pumpkin Man during the town’s full embracement of the Halloween season. College student Catherine, the town’s biggest savant of Pumpkin Man lore, has been given a tidbit of information of where to look for clues in discovering the lost book of spells that can summon the demon. After Catherine incantates the book’s passages, the frenetic young woman receives the intended reaction out of her friends, to scare the living daylights out of them with a legendary prank, but as true legend goes, those who read the words and summon Pumpkin Man back from the depths of Hell will become cursed to die by the demon’s elongated claws. Now, Catherine and her friends are haunted while they sleep, and their reality is twisted while awake as the Pumpkin Man toys with them until those who evoke his name is dead.

Halloween may be over, Thanksgiving too, but the spirit and the fear will always remain, especially when we all embark into the jolliest times of year.  There would be no shame in watching “The Pumpkin Man” while drinking hot cocoa and basking in the warm glow of your red, white, and green tree lights as you sit in the dark.  The glow of the television setup will keep you cozy and warm as a tall, pumpkin-headed demon literally rips the faces off cursed kids in director Ryan Sheets’ first feature-length film based off his short films series of the titular, iconic character.  Sheets’ inconspicuous indie franchise has spawned 5 short film sequels from the original 2016, 4-minute short, including a versus pitted against another Ryan Sheets’ regular character Kreepy the Clown.  Sheets cowrites the feature with Nick Romary, the original Pumpkin Man actor Jeff Rhodes, and his wife Janae Muchmore, pieced together by the central Florida team’s production company South Ridge Films with Sheets’ daytime colleague, fellow attorney Jason P. Herman, footing most of the bill as executive producer. 

Unlike the shorts, the feature features a whole new cast of carefully crafted victims for the demon to shake up and slaughter.  Even the Pumpkin Man himself is not played by Jeff Rhodes, who previous played the titular villain by more slasher-esque means with a butcher’s knife and a slow gait.  Instead, Ryan Sheets reimagines Pumpkin Head’s supernatural aesthetic and bearing by playing the demon gourd himself, in stilts, with less Michael Myers essence, and providing a proper name for the demon of Fall known as Kürbis.  The holiday spirited demon with a Cromwell history of whomever summons him will be cursed to die by him plagues a new set of fool-hearted conjurers nearly three centuries after a supposed Cromwell witch took her own life to stop the demon.  The film introduces the first-time principal role for Barbara Desa, a social media influencer and Orlando-based actress with a ton of a spunk, as Catherine Quinn, a quirky, Kürbis-obsessed Cromwell denizen with no real substantial motivation for finding the lost book of Kürbis other than to play a Halloween trick on her friends and be heedless to the consequential power it holds.  This makes Catherine dangerously unstable, and she feels more like a villain than the Pumpkin Head when irresponsibly meddling with something she truly doesn’t understand, compromising not only her own life but her friends too for fun at their expense.  The development of supporting characters outshines the simpleton needs of the principal Catherine as her friends, and outside the clique but stay in close proximity, find themselves having to make choice, such examples lie with Catherine’s best friend Jenny (“Stephanie Kirves) who chooses the demise of another just to save her own skin while Cather’s cop older brother Tim (Estaban Abanto) can’t ignore the gruesome facts of his little sister’s involvement in a couple of Cromwell murders and disappearances.  There’s also Michael (Matthew Beaton), a potential love-interest for Catherine being pulled from out of the friend zone and into more flirtatious foundations but is quickly blocked by the presence of Pumpkin Man’s uncanny ability to enter dreams and stir their existence into an unbalanced waking nightmare.  “The Pumpkin Man” rounds out with more local Floridian casting with Ariel Taylor, Krysti Reif, and Josh Rutgers.

This isn’t the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. “The Pumpkin Man” doesn’t start off super strong with a tattered accumulation of characters and backstory that barely carve out the shinier surface’s meatier pith that provides traces of sympathy and capability for situations and characters before the turning point turns dour.  Yet, if you stick around through “The Pumpkin Man’s” missteps, what you get is a progressively better reconstruction of a supernatural slasher that sees some decently gore-soaked effects for an independent production.  The added bonus being the cost-saving aspects of Sir Henry’s Haunted Trail, a Florida Halloween walk-through attraction that provides the spooky atmospherics and ghoulishly made-up cast of jump-scare actors as background or pop-in macabre aesthetics.  What starts as a demon resurrecting, potentially unleashing Hell on Earth represented by Halloween synecdoche, the story hits a turning point and switches gears toward slasher properties that work more ideally with a Freddy Krueger inspired killer, embodying the spirit of Halloween in a different and welcoming way than other Samhain-centric killers with a high seasonal watch repeat and an unforgettable antagonist.

Scream Team Releasing shows what happens when the pumpkin smashes back in “The Pumpkin Man” on DVD home video.  Presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio, the MPEG2, upscaled 1080p, single-layered DVD5 has lower image resolution because of the single layer compression that’s encoded with not only the feature but also a fair amount of bonus pumpkin batch content.  Black areas are not as clean and void with some noticeable posterization, details and overall picture crispness are not as sharp with a smoother contour between interior and exterior scenes, and coloring is often muted with missed opportunities for a punchier palette as the cinematography is completely ungraded, appearing as mostly raw, jittery footage underneath a more dynamic audio layer.  The lossless English Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo levels range from an anemic muffled to just at the edge of overextending the audio capacity but keep in line for better precision.  The diverse band soundtrack livens up downtime sequences to evoke a Halloween and rock or rockabilly mood and the sound design digs into the atmospherics with bug chirps, floorboard creaks, clock ticks, and the intertwinement of the brief ominous minor keys.  Dialogue is clean and clear, but Pumpkin Head’s post-added dialogue doesn’t ride parallel to the actor’s which is slightly isolated and boxy but is not terribly sync to make an audible make-or-break difference.  Extras include a director’s feature accompanying audio commentary with Ryan Sheets, a making-of featurette Carving a Pumpkin, Tales from the Book of Kürbis an 8-part short horror anthological series directed by Ryan Sheets, and two trailers.  The DVD comes with a Casey Booth designed cover art that’s yells diabolical autumn harvest with a disc pressed with a more traditional, evil-cut pumpkin head overtop the orange-colored, rough-carved, and spikey “The Pumpkin Man’ font.  The not rated DVD has a runtime of 91 minutes and is region free for all.

Last Rites: Could “The Pumpkin Man” be worth exploring deeper into the mythos? After many successful short films in the last decade, Ryan Sheets has perfected the formula for his own temporal-traversing, gourd-headed demon and with a little more refining and stamina, we wouldn’t mind seeing “The Pumpkin Man” more on screen, or in our nightmares.

Don’t Accidently Curse Yourself by Not Owning “The Pumpkin Man” on DVD!