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

Posted by Steven Lewis on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This Spy’s Sex Serum Will Drive Men EVILLY Mad! “Blue Rita” reviewed! (Full Moon Features / Blu-ray – DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

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Misandrist Blue Rita owns a high-end gentlemen’s cabaret.  Her renowned nightclub is also a front for espionage activities.  With the help of a Bergen, her handling, and her right-hand club manager Gina, she’s fed male targets that are affluent and powerful to kidnap and torture to extract sensitive intelligence information.  As a side hustle, a perk that comes with exploiting the naked and chained up men in her underground boxed cells, Blue Rita uses her chemical powers of seduction to sexually torture her captives into withdrawing their bank accounts dry.  When new girl Sun is hired in to not only titillate the nightclub client with her erotic Pippi Longstocking performances, the Blue Rita pledger works her first mission to reel in a wealthy, international boxer as the next target but Sun’s own conflictions collide with Rita’s sworn hate for all men, cracking the door open ajar just enough for Interpol and the Russian intelligence agencies to try and undermine Blue Rita’s confrontational spy operations. 

What’s renowned most about eurotrash filmmaker Jesus (Jess) Franco is his diverse contributions to the European and American movie-making markets.  Though most of his work is regarded as schlocky, beneath the sleaze and sordidness is a carefully calculating psychotronic director.  True, Franco may not be famously esteemed as, let’s say Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg, but his infamy should not be ignored amongst the present company of similar filmmakers like Tinto Brass or even Roman Polanski.  One of the late Franco’s few spy game theme films, “Blue Rita” is a hot house of sleaze and deceit, written by the director.  Filmed in Germany with German actors and actresses, the film went under the original title “Das Frauenhaus” translated as “The House of Women,” referring to the Blue Rita’s distaste for men and keeping an all-femme fatale, and mostly nude, workforce for her clandestine affairs.  Elite Film is the production company with Erwin C. Deitrich (“Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun,” “Swedish Nympho Slaves”) producing.

Much like Franco’s diverse dips into a variety of subgenres, “Blue Rita’s” cast is also quite an assorted lot in talent from sexploitation, horror, and the XXX industry.  The German production also garnered not just homefield advantage with German actors but also lured into the fold some of the French cast cuisine to spice up the affair.  Martine Fléty is one of those French foreigners, embodying the lead role of Blue Rita.  An adult actress of primarily the 70s, “Blue Rita” became Fléty only titular role but wasn’t her last Jess Franco feature, having continued her X-rated run with the director in “Elles Font Tout,” “I Burn All Over,” and “Claire.”  Either half or entirely naked for the entire narrative, Fléty’s comfortability bare-bottom relays power in her performance as an unwavering femme fatale agent that has men begging for sex and begging for their very lives.  Back then, the lines blurred between porn and sexploitation, often times melding into European coalescence hitting the same marquee theaters until it’s eventual separation.  Esther Moser (“Around the World in 80 Beds,” “Ilsa, The Wicked Warden”), Angela Ritschard (“Jack the Ripper,” “Bangkok Connection”), Vicky Mesmin (“Dancers for Tangier,” “Love Inferno”), Roman Huber (“Girls in the Night Traffic,” “Sex Swedish Girls in a Boarding School”), Olivier Mathot (“Diamonds of Kilimandjaro,” “French Erection”) and Pamela Stanford (“Sexy Sisters,” “Furies sexuelles”) rode, among other things, that fine line between grindhouse gauche and the taboo and certainly do well to incorporate both traits in Franco’s equally indeterminate genre film.  German actor and one of the principal leads Eric Falk (“Caged Women,” Secrets of a French Maid”) too dappled between crowds as a tall, dark, and chiseled chin but the actor chiefly sought limelight in sexploitation and as the haughty boxer Janosch Lassard, who karate chops at lightning speed, Falk adds to “Blue Rita’s” sexy-spy thriller.  Opposite the titular vixen is “Wicked Women’s” Dagmar Bürger who, like the rest of the cast, have crossed paths in a handful of exploitation exciters.  Bürger has perhaps the least built-up character Sun as she’s subtly folded into Blue Rite’s innermost circle without as much as a single ounce of doubt in her character, perhaps due in part to Bergen, Blue Rita’s handler, was once Sun’s direct-to, but Sun becomes the impetus key to everything falling apart at the seams and her role’s framework feels unsatisfactory just as her crumbling infatuation that’s more arbitrary than motivationally centric.

“Blue Rita” doesn’t necessarily broach as a film by Jess Franco whose typical undertakings are coated with sleazy gothic and historical context.  The 1979 feature, set around the extraction of international intelligence data by way of chemical approach, not terribly farfetched considering how the CIA once used LSD as a truth serum, is about as sordid and sexually graphic as any Jess Franco film gets but brings about a futuristic air laced with not just super cool spy gadgets and weaponry, to which there are really none to speak of as an example, there lies a more ultramodern verge upon unseen in much of the earlier, Spanish-born director’s work.  A futuristic holding pen with a capacity no bigger than an industrial-sized washing machine with a descending spiked barred ceiling, a hyper-aphrodisiac goo that makes men so horny it puts them on the edge of insanity and death, and the sleek, contemporary sex room with translucent furniture and stark white walls all in the routine hustle and bustle of Paris, France. “Blue Rita’s” contrarian patinas add to the film’s colorful charisma of avant-garde stripteases and a black operations nightclub, two of which combined play more into the “Austin Powers” funky 1970s ecosphere rather than in the high-powered espionage world of James Bond, the Roger Moore years.

For the first time on Blu-ray in the North American market, Full Moon Features puts out into the world a fully remastered, high-definition, 2-disc Blu-ray and DVD set. The AVC encoded, 1080p, BD25 entails picture perfect image quality that sharpen “Blue Rita” with greater resolution in comparison to previous DVD versions with full-bodied color, in setting tones and in body tones, and a contour-creating delineation that establishes depth and texture better, presented in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio. Not flawless mind you with soft spots rearing up every so often in the variety of interior and exterior, organically and inorganically lit scenes but there’s distinct contrast that delivers a recognizing lighting scheme that deepens the shadows in the right places without signs of an inadequate compression, especially on a single layer Blu-ray, and the Full Moon release retains natural grain with no DNR or other image enhancements. The release comes with two audio options, a lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 and a French Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo, both of which have a horrendously acted burned-in English dub of not the original actors’ voices. Banal dub does take the quality of Franco’s dialogue down a good peg or two, which the original dub track was likely spoken in native German and some French judging by the cast list nationalities and where the bigger distribution market was for the planned; yet, though the dialogue is verbose and ploddingly straightforward to make do, losing some of the depth in the process, the quality is voluminous to ensure no mistake is made in underemphasizing the story’s outline when necessary. Ambience and other design markers hit more than well enough to sell the surroundings and the action to make those qualities palpable. English subtitles are option but not available on the setup; they will have to added in per your setup’s options. The Blu-ray extras come with a rare photo gallery, an archived interview with Chris Alexander with Peter Strickland discussing Franco circa 2013, and a vintage Jess Franco Trailer Reel. The DVD houses a different set of special features, separate from the Blu-ray’s, with Slave in the Women’s House interview with Eric’s Falk plus the DVD also offers Eurocine trailers. Those interested in supplementary content will be forced to pop in both discs to fully abreast of all bonus material. What’s eye-catching about the Full Moon Feature’s release is the erotic front cover on the cardboard O-slipcover, sleekly illustrated for your kink and perversive pleasure. The Blu-ray Amary inside has a NSFW story still of Dagmar Bürger walking down a spiral staircase in the buff. The same Dagmar Bürger image graces the DVD cover while a new illustrated luscious lips are pressed on the Blu-ray disc opposite side. There is no insert or booklet included. The region free release has a runtime of 78 minutes and is not rated.

Last Rites: The late Jess Franco may have a cache full of sleaze in his repertoire, but the director had a sense of panache and intensity that’s sorely underrated outside his fanbase. “Blue Rita” shows Franco’s range, stylistically and genre, and Full Moon’s sultry release is now high-definition gold in the color blue.

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EVIL Has Now Been Digitized. “August Underground’s Penance” reviewed! (Unearthed Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“August Underground’s Penance” on Blu-ray/DVD Combo Set. Purchase Here!

Armed with a digital camcorder and a dark desire to kidnap and brutally torture, rape, and murder random people, deranged serial killers Peter Mountain and his girlfriend Crusty are now a gruesome twosome after the demise of Crusty’s brother Maggot.  The couple’s documentarized carnage continues forward near Pittsburgh where fooling around in metal clubs and on the isolated outskirts of city is balanced out with a healthy dose of basement snuff as body after body after body begins to strain their warped relationship.  What unveils is a descent of their paired destruction as Peter’s rage and undying fascination with female flesh, and internal organs, gaslights Crusty’s simmering and unhinged toxicity.  During the stretch of the Christmas holiday season, the gift of gory packages will be unwrapped and sexualized cookies will be enjoyed before the festive filleting of body parts and December dismemberments trail off into a tale of grim totality. 

Fred Vogel’s third and final film to shut the book on the story around the atrocious Peter Mountain and his extreme exploitation and degrading of people is back on limited-edition physical media for snuff salivating audiences as “August Underground’s Penance.”  Nothing short of gratuitous ultraviolence, the final chapter of “August Underground” marks another successful viscerally visual installment in a clearly digitized effort, elevating the graphic nature with ooey-gooey detail in a vividly discernible image resolution.  A reuniting four years later between Fred Vogel and his cowriter/costar Cristie Whiles after their collaboration on “August Underground’s Mordum,” the second sequel provides a level of continuity, a very low level at that, not seen between the 2001 series starter and “Mordum.”  Under Vogel’s Toe Tag Pictures banner, the company behind the trilogy, the shock realism filmmaker co-produces the film with wife, Shelby Lyn, and Cristie “Crusty” Whiles and special effects artist Jerami Cruise servce as associate producers. 

Aforementioned, Peter Vogel and Cristie Whiles lace up yet again for the Peter Mountain and Crusty show of sadism.  Vogel returns as the mania screaming and overall brute Peter Mountain, a juggernauting maverick amongst murderers with no moral principles, a cynical constitution, and a weak-ish stomach that can’t handle his own gutting of bodies as Mountain, like in the first two features, wretches and coughs and nearly loses his lunch in most graphically intense scenes of spilled blood and guts and other appalling perversities.  Whiles’s Crusty is a carbon copy counterpart, a demented love interest under a loveless veneer, but the Crusty character certainly has evolved between “Mordum” and “Penance” as the coquettish amoralities at the beginning devolve shown in an unconventional narrative way with rough-hewn rough cuts that avoid structuring time and guiding in segues.  It also doesn’t help that the two often have screaming matches or are yelling at their lifeless victims to get a better understanding of melting down mutual relationship based on common callousness and, probably, rough sex, just the way they individually like it.  This is how Peter Vogel circumvents a “Mordum” repeat; not that “Mordum” was terrible as it did convey a Mountain, Crusty, and Crusty’s on the suicidal brink brother Maggot breaking down whatever threadbare bond that kept them for killing each other, but “Mordum” departs with uncertainties surrounding the characters in that memorably haunting final sequence.  “Penance” then takes the two remaining nihilists out in the backyard to basically shoots them, figuratively speaking, to put them out of their misery in an artistic way, as if to say, “that’s it.  I’m done.”  Like previous “August Underground” films, killers are centrically focused with not a lot of repeat characters popping in and out (because they’re all being snuffed out by the killers)  but those played victims round with Selby Lyn Vogel, Jeremi Cruise, Anthony Matthews, Rob Steinbruegge, Ed Laughlin, Matt Rizzutto, Autumn Smith, and Trevor Collins.

While Vogel and Whiles psychopathic performances will make your skin crawl, the real star of “Penance” spurts onto the floor, oozes from the entrails, and has a nasty crunch sound when being sawed into.  I’m speaking of none other than Jerami Cruise’s nauseating blood, guts, and all the colorful viscera in between practical effects that extinguish any kind of comfortability you might have had going into the scene.  Animal intestines are once again used to for seamless builds.  The lines between what’s real and what’s not has no definition, is smoothed over well into the folds, or is vaguely blurry at worst that when the cutting, gouging, severing, perforating, slicing, or whatever other harmfully human puncturing wound words come into the scene, your mind is your greatest enemy unable to tell the differences in the gruesomeness acts all of which are accentuated by Vogel’s dry heaves.  While the story itself begins to shutdown “August Underground’s” pseudo snuff run, the third entry is as much as a regurgitation of the previous two installments peppered with noticeable yet minor differences that less often than more separate themselves from each other.  One of the biggest, advantageous differences in “Penance” is the move away from the fuzzy standard definition analog tape and into the digital world with a widescreen ratio camcorder that details more of the ghastly dissections and without any modifications to the camera, a cleaner sense of raw realism is better conveyed. 

I remember a time, not too long ago, when the “August Underground” films were nothing more than rumor, urban legends of the physical media world, lost archetypes of extreme horror seemingly nonexistent to the everyday joe, like me, and only those who are close to Vogel and his Toe Tag family or willing to fork over large amount of money for a long out of print and rate copy were the lucky ones to ever experience the trilogy. Yet, now, we’re living in the golden age of physical media, paradoxically smackdab at the height of new age and ever-growing streaming platforms, and Unearthed Films has released all three films onto a 2-disc Blu-ray and DVD limited collector’s set. The Blu-ray is an AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, 2K scan on a BD50 while the DVD is a MPEG2 encoded, dual-layered, DVD9. Obviously, switch from tape to digital video makes is a tremendous step for image processing and clarity as “Penance” tops the trilogy with a better pixel resolution, a wider angle (1.78:1 aspect ratio), and much less quality degradation than analog. All the nasty bits and pieces are visual described in great realistic detail in what is an ungraded showing of a full-on display not for the weak of stomach. The raw image, even with all it segued pauses in between scenes, punctuates practicality over the conceptual nihilistic serial killer construct. Unearthed Films preserves that through the looking glass, unfiltered video with more than sufficient capacity. The English language uncompressed PCM 2.0 stereo mirrors the same caliber with a home video disharmony of an onboard camera mic that manages well to create distance where needed also while capturing every innate surrounding sound element, such as the whooshing of passing cars, Mountain’s echoed screams in a confined basement, or the overburdening decibels of daunting death metal. There’s a steady amount of low-level interference too that doesn’t hurt the variable levels of dialogue depending on where the principals are and what they’re doing. Between the Blu-ray and DVD, the hi-def format has more capacity for bonus features with most of the new bonus material on the Blu-ray. What’s on both formats are a new audio commentary by special effects artist Jerami Cruise, producer Shelby Lyn Vogel, director Fred Vogel, and Ultra Violent Magazine editor Art Ettinger, a second commentary with Vogel and editor Logan Tallman, a third commentary with the Toe Tag Team, and a fourth commentary with just Fred Vogel. Also included of both formats are a behind-the-scenes documentary Disemboweled and the feature’s very own commentary track, deleted and extended scenes, music video Poppa Pill – “The Murderer is Back,” music video Rue – “The Locust,” original trailer, and new extended photo gallery and teaser outtakes. Exclusively to the Blu-ray is a conversational interview with editor Logan Tallman, going through the nuts and bolts of the most disturbing scene with Peter Vogel, superfan Rob Steinbruegge’s experience and bit role in “Penance,” a new Zoë Rose Smith, creator of “Zobo with a Shotgun” and editor-in-chief of Ghouls Magazine, interview with Peter Vogel, a second new interview with Peter Vogel Voyage to Perdition with Severed Cinema’s Chris Mayo, a discussion roundtable with Peter Vogel, wife Shelby, Logan Tallman, and Ryan Logsdon moderated by Dave Parker, and Unearthed Films’ Stephen Biro’s new interview with Peter Vogel to wrap it up. The physical presence of the release clearly states its homicidal intentions with the thin cardboard O-slipover of Peter Mountain caressing power of his bound and bloodied victim. The clear Blu-ray Amary case displays new, religious art spoofed cover illustration by San Diego artist Paul Naylor; the religious art also continues on the reverse side of the cover with a marred icon of the Virgin Mary being engulfed by the darkness. With the DVD punch-locked at the right and Blu-ray at the left, there’s really no room for an insert to be crammed in but the silver lining there is the pseudo data-cast captures of notable scenes that are the disc pressed art. Unearthed Films’ release is region A locked (region for the DVD is not listed but assumed to be region 1), is not rated, and has a runtime of 81 minutes.

Last Rites: While ever so slightly different from the previous films, “Penance” is more of the same snuff but in its truest, purest form legally allowed on video. Unearthed Films are match made in a human abattoir, like the tacky peanut butter and bloodred jelly. Their collaborated, limited collector’s set release of “August Underground Penance” is nothing short of phenomenal and, if you’re lucky and quick enough, grab all three before they disappear back into obscurity.

“August Underground’s Penance” on Blu-ray/DVD Combo Set. Purchase Here!

This One Has the EVIL Touch! “The Hand” reviewed! (Synergetic / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“The Hand” Pops Onto DVD at Amazon! Click Here to Purchase.

After a night of heavy drinking, Bong-soo wakes up from a strange nightmare.  The nightmare continues when he habitually walks into the bathroom and discovers a grotesque hand sticking up and out of the toilet bowl.  The confused yet calm Bong-soo wakes his wife who passes out at the sight after the hand twitches right in front of them.  Bong-soo calls 911 to report the strange occurrence and when his residence’s security guard and the dispatched EMTs check out the scene and see his wife passed out on the floor and a supposed severed hand sticking out of the toilet, the unbelievable scenario spirals into suspicion and Bong-soo is detained for suspected gruesome acts of foul play, but when the hand violent moves again and the bathroom door suddenly becomes stuck, those left standing, out of the hand’s deadly reach, are left with only toiletries at their disposal to do battle against the a force their unable to flush.

Preying on one of the more irrational fears that something will slither up the toilet while you make the business, “The Hand” extends that fear with a supernatural startlement.  Shot in 2020 but released in 2023, “The Hand,” or “The Hand:  Attack of the Things” is to the degree of a ghostly-demonic thriller sprinkled with dry humor from South Korea by writer-director Choi Yun-ho, claustrophobically shot inside an apartment bathroom which, and let’s be being honest, is roomier than most bathrooms in two-story houses.  Toilet horror is a subgenre that’s not everyone’s cup of eau de toilette but has resiliently found a niche audience and continues to live quietly in the indie shadows, such as with Evan Jacob’s “Death Toilet” films, Matthew Mark Hunter’s “Killer Poop” franchise, and the Asian market, specifically, has an interest in potty horror-humor, “Zombie Ass:  Toilet of the Dead” instantly comes to mind.  However, the absurdity of these titles doesn’t infect Choi Yun-ho’s less feces-filled horror, focusing more on the curled, demonically-skinned hand from out of the toilet.  “The Hand” is a feature presented by Korea Creative Content Agency and Inoi Media and a production of Spooky House, and R202 studio.

With an intimate setting comes an intimate cast to do battle with the mysteriously unknown monstrous hand.  Lee Jae-won is up to the task, or, well, placidly taking in the situation with subtle caution, as the expressionless alcoholic husband Bong-soo.  The regular Korean television actor infiltrates into his first leading man feature, or perhaps barely a feature with a film runtime of under 60-minutes, tackling close-quarter dynamics and a computer-generated thing with finger fingers, elongated fingernails, and a reach that turns the already compact bathroom into practically the size of a coat closet.  Considering the mention of his drinking problem more than once, Bong-soo’s alcoholism isn’t one of the more centric elements, especially at the chagrin of his wife Joohee (Jeong Seo-ha) to create a dynamic hurdle to arc over.  Once the building security guard (Soo-ho Ahn) and 3-person 911 team, with Park Sang-wook portraying lead paramedic, the energy devolves to a humorous suspicion of Bong-soo and the pigeon-hearted presence of the lead paramedic as the two men ever so lightly buttheads in a confounding position and through the progression of the ordeal, the squabbling pair form along the way a bond out of insta-desperation.  When the wife finally revives, another breakthrough moment between Bong-soo and his wife becomes realized that they’ll never take each other for granted again as they do slow motion poses and battles with an army of apartment wall-protruding hands who carry a deadly touch.  The jagged line graph tone maintains a comedic constant right through the heart of “The Hand” that lets the characters sway freely in various complexions without jarring their principles too flippantly. 

The titular hand is a fully operational character in itself.  A complete CGI mockup straight from the backstory sewers of Hell, conceived from a threadbare anecdote of a woman found dead in a nearby sewer tunnel with her arm missing a few days prior told by the paramedic leader.  That arm, with gnarled hand attached, is thought and assumed to be the same wretched one sticking ominously straight up and out from the toilet bowl.  Texturally, the synthetically composited hand looks pretty darn good with barely a trace of smoothed over plastic-splash veneer.  These scenes are also intermixed with a rubber hand cast with obvious contrast against the CGI hand.  That is until the arm extends feet beyond its chamber pot dwelling to tightly grip unsuspecting prey, like a crocodile lying in wait.  When in more a realistic scale, the hand’s movements are tremendously naturally looking with the help of green-suited animator and between appearance and mobility, the captured result, though miniscule in size appropriate for the indie film, has realistic attraction that edges “The Hand” out of the absurdity of circumstances and into more thrilling territory while still focus lit by comedic lighting.  The characters themselves are the more farcical models in comparison with representatives often aloof or arrogantly confident with ostentation as terror responses straddling between nonsensical and pragmaticism.  

“The Hand” arrives onto DVD home video from Synergetic, presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio on a MPEG2 encoded, standard definition, DVD5.  Decoding at a fairly high compression rate of 7 to 8Mbps, image quality has a fair amount of detail and color saturation from off the lesser disc capacity.  Facial details can appear soft throughout, sometime blotchy or waxy that fuses the contours and skin without delineation, and the CGI hand, though textured nicely, can have an early day video game blockiness about it in a handful of scenes.  The surround locations, such as bathroom and apartment, are hue balanced and display distinct visual variation.  The Korean Dolby Digital 2.0 mix is the only audio option available that comes with burned in English subtitles.  Dialogue renders over clearly inside the natural digital recording and prominent amongst the rest of the mix, isolating the changing levels of inflections and tones of what the moment calls for.  The English subtitles synch consistently with the action, but there are spot grammatical errors.  Aside from the play and chapter menu selection on the static menu, there are no selectable bonus features.  The after credits contains how the CGI scenes are composited together so stay tuned after the movie.  The scroll-like artwork with a monstrous hand, illustrated with a mock age-fading, is really neat visually and well-done.  Inside the bendy Amary case is just the disc with the same artwork in concise form.  With the region free playback, the Synergetic release runs at 62 minutes and, assumingly, comes unrated, as the rating is not listed on the back cover.

Last Rites:  Comedy and horror create stationary white-knuckle tension in “The Hand” despite not reining in a tightfisted backstory on the hand itself which ultimately turns the five fingered paw into more of a marginal footnote. 

“The Hand” Pops Onto DVD at Amazon! Click Here to Purchase.

EVIL Explains EVILThings! “Mansplained” reviewed! (SRS Cinema / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Mainsplained” on DVD. Do You Need Me to Explain It To You?

Middle class professional Sara has just been mansplained how to be better at her job.  Numb by the experience, the humiliating moment eats at Sara’s sanity like a nagging drip of a leaky pipe.  In fact, drip sounds of a leaky sink invade her mental space as she nonchalantly places a towel and bucket under the constant dribble.  When her boyfriend Ryan comes home, his exasperation is triggered by Sara’s acute indifference and he breaks up with her, mansplaining in bullet points the reasons this relationship has failed.  Her blank stares send him off only to return later at the behest of his sister to make amends, but when he notices the leak and starts to mansplain and nitpick her solution, even though she called a plumber, the fed-up Sara stabs him in the eye and hides his body in the closet.  When the plumber arrives and begins mansplaining and making gross advances, she stabs him as well and hides his body in the closet.  Sara descends further into madness as the mansplaining and the dripping continue, and continue, and continue….

Mansplaining.  The newly conjoined word, that’s combines man and explaining is defined as a man condescendingly explaining a process or a subject they, themselves, know little about and assume the knowledge extent of the other person is less than their own, was officially added to the U.S. dictionary in March of 2018 during the height of the #MeToo movement.  Evan Jones, the man responsible for write and directing the substandard classics “Death Toilet” and its numerous killer commode sequels, is now behind “Mansplained,” a bareboned, indie psychological thriller self-described as Roman Polanski-esque and inspired from a story concept by SRS Cinema’s Ron Bonk who also produces the derogatory pejorative term and wokeness themed film alongside Jacobs’ microbudget production company Anhedenia Films.

One aspect of microbudget is a micro cast.  Not only is Evan Jacobs the writer, director, and producer, the filmmaker with 52 directorial projects under his belt since 1995 also dons four different characters mansplaining to Sara, played vacantly by Angelique Flores, to show masculinity similarity as well as to save a little mullah on the production bottom line.  Jacobs in multi-roles wouldn’t be so much of an issue if there putting in more variety of persona; instead, Jacobs just puts his own off-camera fundamentals into each role, rehashing the same guy, with the same inflections, with the same gestures, and with the same face and bald head.  Perhaps that carbon copy plays into the formula of a faceless man creeping into Sara’s one bedroom apartment to tell her how it is and how it should be.  I would like to think that’s how Evan Jacobs conveys this story but without any other real indicator that’s the vehicle we’re supposed to be taking a ride in, we’re still stuck at the curb waiting for our elucidation Uber to arrive.  As Sara, a woman internally cracking under ignorant male chauvinism, Flores is given no lines nor direction to do anything but to stay virtually silent with a 1000-yard stare.  Even when at a boiling spillage point where stabbing is the only way to mute mansplaining, there’s no fire in Flores’s eyes nor any searing-red anger people sometimes go blind to when up to their eyeballs in fury.  Sara stultifies about her apartment, looking out the window, looking the drip under the sink, meandering around the square footage, and this goes on for the allotted runtime.  “Mansplained” rounds out the cast with an experienced bunch typecasting themselves as various media talking heads, mostly men in newscasters, vloggers, etc., roles, with Clint Beaver (“Woods Witch”), Erica Dyer (“Macabre Mountain”), Brandon Farmer (“Amityville Apocalypse”), Francis Erdman (“Yule Log”), Paul Bradford (“Amityville Karen”), Rudy Ledbetter (“Night of the Tommyknockers”), and Jeffrey Wolf (“Motorboat”) with Lindy Hartsfield and Erin Hickman providing the telephone voice and physical presence of Michelle in a mixed up of associations with Sara.

To be honest, “Mansplained” is a slog which is more Polanski-lite than Polanski-esque.  The channeled madness Sara displays only nibbles the bait of being in the deluge of mansplaining by what is, essentially, the same person in her eyes and even the titular mansplaining comes off slightly feeble, never pushing the condescending boundaries of Sara’s limits and is more repetitive nonsense than patronizing prodding.  Without Sara reacting or trying to get a word in edge wise against Evan Jacob’s motor-mouthing salvo, a one-sided approach to a two-person dynamic renders the madness useless and impotent, especially when there are no other devices to support it.  Only in the very end does sanity crack open for us to peer into Sara’s disturb nature but even that moment of clarity has its legs cut out from under it, erasing the acrid accumulation of Sara’s stoically murderous, pent-up rage from the past hour in a quickly summed up way of an unexpected twist-like ending.  The periodic splice-ins of news reporters, vloggers, podcasters, and the like plant seeds of the philosophical sense around objective and subjective views, posing questions and raising awareness as if speaking to the audience watching the movie rather than to drive the characters in the story.  What Jacobs set out to accomplish was woman empowerment over condescending men in an enough-is-enough, kill-the-man way but what results is more the opposite with the heroine cracking under the bombardment of man’s sexist spew, succumbing to a catatonic and deranged state as she’s unable to handle the pressure. 

Produced by Ron Bonk, it comes to surprised that the home video rights would fall under Bonk’s SRS Cinema, a safe haven distributor for DIY indies.  The DVD is a MPEG2 encoded, standard definition, dual-layered DVD9, plenty of format space for adequate compression outcome as the bitrate maintains an average of 7.7Mbps.  Yet, the not as sharp quality stems from commercial grade video equipment that’s jittery, possible motion blur with the handheld and compounded by the slow-motion frame rate for stylistic effect and doesn’t produce finer details in the electronics’ finite capabilities.  Aside from some flashbacks and inner thoughts denoted by black and white imagery, “Mansplained” stays the natural color course without any strategic lighting to jazz up the appeal.  The English language Dolby Digital 2.0 mono has no complains inside a one location set with no vigorous action.   Overlaid telephone and podcast conversation audio, dripping/leak soundbites, and the brooding, discordant string soundtrack clearly come through with in-frame recording being very satisfactory, like ASMR satisfactory, in the minor, around-the-apartment hubbub as well as the dialogue albeit the audibly innate elbowroom echo.  There are no subtitles available.  Special features include a feature audio commentary with Evan Jacobs going into the genesis of the idea and his explanation for his methods and style choices, a 22-minute making-of featuring interviews with Evan Jacobs, Angelique Flores, and Lindy Hartsfield with crew including cinematographer Mike Hartsfield, “Mansplained” rehearsals that’s chiefly a PJ’ed Evan Jones acting alone in his residence, and the trailer.  The standard DVD Amaray case carries no ancillary material with the disc that has the same disc art as the DVD front cover, photoshopped with a maniacal Evan Jacob’s face grinning ear-to-ear between the opening of a chained lock door. The feature has a runtime of 74 minutes, comes not rated, and the SRS DVD has a region free playback.  Too much ambiguity on the table and not enough production value trumps the underlying expression as we actually need to be “Mansplained” to fully understand the endgame. 

“Mainsplained” on DVD. Do You Need Me to Explain It To You?