Category Archives: Evil Reviews

Reviews are important to read because what if you want to pick up an off-the-wall film and have no idea what to expect? Well, I just might have it in the review vault….

EVIL Tossing Back an EVIL Hail Mary! “The Last Match” reviewed! (Cauldron Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“The Last Match” is Now on Blu-ray From Cauldron Films!

A sovereign, Latin American banana republic is a beautiful paradise for those seeking tropical getaways, such as with 18-year-old Susan Gaylor and her boyfriend George indulging in paradisial romance, but paradise turns into hell when Susan is accused of smuggling drugs out while going through the departure gate at airport security.  George flees the scene to evade capture and phones Susan’s father, famous football quarterback Cliff Gaylor, to help administer talks to release Susan.  When negotiations fall on deaf ears, the American consul is handcuffed by little-to-no relations with the incarcerating nation, and the local counsel are nothing more than greedy exploiters, Cliff and George have no one and nowhere else to turn to except for Cliff’s team of broad shoulder teammates and a gameplan-calling coach dedicating their lives to suit up and extract Cliff’s daughter from the cruel grip of Warden Yashin and his miscarriage of the law and order with an all-out offensive assault.

Italian filmmakers directed a football movie.  No, I don’t mean fútbol, aka soccer.  I’m talking about American football with face-masked helmets, shoulder pads, and a prolate spheroid shaped ball with laces you kick through the uprights.  The contradictory idea isn’t so much of a theorotical concept as it is a reality with Fabrizio De Angelis’s directorial attempt at pigskin gridiron in the early 1990s.  The “Killer Crocodile” director helms the jailhouse break picture entitled “The Last Match, or “L’ultima meta,” released in 1991, from a script by fellow Italians Gianfranco Clercic (“Cannibal Holocaust,” “The New York Ripper”) and Vincenzo Mannion (“Murder-Rock,” “The Last Shark”) that blitzes hardnosed foreign opponents with not only high caliber assault rifles and ammo but also done in full team gear, right down to the numbered jerseys and cleats.  Angelis produces the shot in the Dominican Republic film with Mark Young serving as executive producer with Fulvi Films as the production company.

Not only does “The Last Match” have a theme around an American sport, but it also employs a nearly all-American cast, a popular course of casting once the Italian industry started to gain traction and making films in The Boot proved to be more costly at the time, plus American actors were also far more marketable than Italian actors.   Ernest Borgnine (“Escape from New York,” “The Poseidon Adventure”) plays the fair-weather looking coach who knows common football terms, about as generic as coaching on screen comes without dipping into play strategies and being inundated by the game.  Borgnine’s cruise control motivation is equaled by Charles Napier (“Supervixens,” “Rambo:  First Blood Part II”) in the performance of a hands-tied American Consul stationed in the unnamed tropical country.  While Borgnine and Naiper act in natural nationality aspects, there are also another pair of Americans who transition their talents to be native islanders who are subsequently more deviously portrayed in what becomes a pro-American, anti-foreigner perception.  The actors, whom are also both New York City born, are Martin Balsam (“Death Wish 3,” “The Delta Force”), as a greedy local defense attorney who tries to exploit Cliff Gaylor’s desperation, and Henry Silva (“Almost Human,” “Allan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold”) with his wide face stretching a maniacal grin as the sadist warden Yashin and though Balsam and Silva tout the root of evil archetype, molded to their individualized immorality, they barely fit in the framework of Latin American men with a less than convincing swarthy spray tan.  In the middle of it all is German-born “’Tis Pity She’s A Whore” actor Oliver Tobias as football star father, Cliff Gaylor, determined to try every line of legal offense to acquit his daughter for the firm hand of the country’s tight authoritarian, punitive system.  Gaylor’s arc possess a line of natural progression through anger, confidence, and desperation, and perhaps even a little bit of all hope is lost but does become stymied, or neutralized, but Coach’s unconventional jailbreak playbook that sends Gaylor into the backseat though he still quarterbacks the mission, at least on paperwork.  Melissa Palmisano as the Gaylor’s wrongfully incarcerated daughter Susan and Rob Floyd playing her determined to help but pretty much young and useless boyfriend George fill out the remaining principal cast alongside bit part support from Jim Klick, Jim Jensen, Jim Kelly, Mike Kozlowsky, Mark Rush, Bart Schuchts and Elmer Bailey as Gaylor’s football brethren in arms. 

As for escape from foreign prison/work camp films go, “The Last Match” ranks at mid-range with a plausible conflict involving being a foreign tourist patsy to mule drugs through airport customs only to be caught, charged, and sentenced to be condemned without fair due process and entitled to incorruptible legal representation.  The scenario enacts frightening destabilizations of a pre-CCTV and security vigilance airport situation, evokes hopelessness of relief or assistance within a near lawless republic, and you can feel Gaylor being drained of all avenues where even his fame and fortune can’t even muster any type of traction in releasing his daughter.  Being a father myself, there’s a compelling aspect to see an expat father helpless in strange surroundings, suppled by indifferent and aggressive native blockades in a corrupt system, with his only choice then being to extract his only child with violent force.  This is the point where the compelling subjugation stops and the gaminess of the story begins to unravel when Coach brings the boys to the yard, yard being the tropical island, to acquire an arsenal, helicopter, and suit up in their conspicuous gridiron gear for an all-out prison assault.  Garbed in bumblebee yellow football pants, black helmets, and white jerseys, the elite wildcat formation commando unit isn’t dressed to blend into the background, foliage, or even the night with their reflective color gametime getup.  Coaching from the sky, Borgnine is perched high in the helicopter calling off plays while his offensive team makes quick and dirty work of the island prison defense without nearly a fumblerooskie.  Conceptual neat for the movies, but practically asinine for reality, “The Last Match” favors the fortunate heroes with a near obliteration of the entire prison camp without a single loss to their own, especially when they’re not in any kind of bullet resistance helmets or vests.  Fabrizio De Angelis runs the ball with confidence in his mildly amusing sports themed actioner as he’s able to blend footage of a national police bowl game into his narrative by fashioning matching football uniforms.  About as surprising as a fleaflicking trick play to win the game, “The Last Match” is worth going for the endzone on 4th and long.

A pulled-pin pigskin grenade explosion thrill ride in the tropics is “The Last Match’s” hard-hitting American football done the Italian way. Cauldron Films’ new Blu-ray release is the U.S. home video and worldwide debut from a new 4K restoration from the camera negative.  The AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50 presents the film in the original aspect ratio, the European widescreen 1.66:1.  There’s hardly anything to fault in this clean, sharp, diffused color saturated picture from a well-stored camera negative that has seemingly suffered no time or external wear and tear.  Grain appears naturally disseminating into a favorable detailed reproduction print with skin tones that are organic and don a nice sheen and rivulets of sweat when things get heated in football and in armed assault.  Tropical landscape remains focused in back and foregrounds, especially in instances of Giuseppe Ruzzolin’s (“Hitch-Hike,” “Firestarter”) mirror reflection shots, but not a ton of wide or long shots to take in the scope of the Caribbean battleground, limiting scenes to medium-to-closeups that crop the milieu quite a bit when you’re trying to sell a large-scale football bowl game or an ambiguous kakistocracy tropic nation.  The English language DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 provides lossless fidelity with full range diffusing evenly through the dual-channel output, separating decisively the dialogue and the action.  With a majority of the cast native English speakers and having been filmed party in the U.S. and in the western hemisphere, ADR is not the main source of recorded dialogue with boom work providing and capturing the distinct voices and personalities of some of the more recognizable voice talent, such as Ernest Borgnine and, especially, Charles Napier’s Kentuckian twang.  However, there’s quite a bit of hissing feedback sporadically throughout.  Action depth is a bit front loaded, naturally with any dual channel, with the explosions and gunfire that never quite hit the same distance markers but do excel in being robust where needed.  English SDH subtitles are available.  Cauldron conjures new and exclusive special features with an interview with special effects artist Roberto Ricci Blown Away, a minidoc about American actors in Italian cinema narrated and directed by Mike Malloy, Italian film aficionado Eugenio Ercolani provides a video essay Understanding the Cobra, a commentary by Italian exploitation critic Michael A. Martinez, an image gallery, and the film’s trailer.  Cauldron Films has continued to provide eye-catching artwork with reversible cover sheets and “The Last Match” is no exception with dual compositional illustrations of football players wielding AR15 rifles and bazookas, though I’m not so confident the illegal purchase of Island armory would be police issued AR15s and bazookas.  Just sayin’.  There are no other tangible supplements with this release.  The region free Blu-ray is not rated and has a 94-minute runtime.

Last Rites: An Italian film using big named American actors pitting an armed, American football-cladded, rescue team against a hostile and sinister island prison, creating “The Last Match’s” action extraction of hairbreadth escape and pulling it off!

“The Last Match” is Now on Blu-ray From Cauldron Films!

A Man Looking for Answers Finds EVIL in Tijuana Instead! “Cursed in Baja” reviewed! (Anchor Bay Entertainment / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Jeff Daniel Phillips’s “Cursed in Baja” on Blu-ray!

Ex-narcotics cop Pierlli is now a formerly incarcerated, rehabilitated man after suffering a mental breakdown from discovering the love of his life dead during a drug-fueled, kidnapping ordeal that sent him spiraling rogue.  Listless under medication and dragging his feet through the motions of a low paying maintenance man and janitorial job, Pierlli is contacted by his lover’s wealthy, depressed and dying parents to investigate and track down the disappearance of their grandson.  Reluctant to fall back into psychological swirl of pandemonium, he agrees to the case that leads him to Mexico despite the grandfather’s warnings of unsavory unlawful dealings with criminals .  After a few interviews with the grandson’s known associates, gathered by previous detectives who have since disappeared, he’s able to locate the now young man, living in cohabitation with a peculiar pair of outlying summoners who sacrifice the unwelcomed to a native beast of the land, a vicious chupacabra.

Out from under the cinematic and musical thumb the Rob Zombie rockabilly show, Jeff Daniel Phillips emerges with a project his shocking rocking collaborator and friend is not attached to in any way, shape, or form.  “Curse in Baja” is Phillips’s sophomore feature-length film in over a decade since the 2009 jailhouse thriller “Convict,” starring Kevin Durand, and too like his debut film, Phillips also provides the screenplay for the 2024 film that’s described as crime noir meets surrealist horror from Los Angeles to Tijuana.  “Curse in Baja” is a Camp Lee and Indigo Vision production with Kent Isaacs coproducing with Phillips as well as having a role and the revitalized Anchor Bay Entertainment execs Brian Katz and Thomas Zambeck supplying financials in support to release the movie on home video, co-presented with Traverse Terror, a company we’ve seen light of recently and covered films with “Bag of Lies” being the most recent.

Phillips not only produces, writes, and directs, he also stars as the troubled Pierlli, opening up his introduction in a non-linear fashion under a character self-describing, self-loathing voiceover narration revolving around the woman he fell for, hinting at her forlorn fate, his own transgressions stemmed for lost, and how belittled his once formidable self has become after being released from prison.  Inner monologuing picks up here-and-there where narrative leaves off in a quasi-glint of personal elucidation about the characters and situations he finds himself amid, troubleshooting his own inners demons that could destroy him if he goes down the rabbit hole of grief again.  Yet, besides Pierlli’s vague thoughts and descriptions, characters brought not the fold have a prefabrication establishment that’s already patched them into narrative blanket and, for audiences, understanding these characters and see where they piece into the noir pie becomes very dense and chewy, tough to work out their role because much of the backstory is loaded into the chamber before viewers can digest everything mentioned in Pierlli’s opening narration of elongated events.  Jim Storm (“Trilogy of Terror”) and Constance Forslund (John Carpenter’s “Village of the Damned”) are tragic-saturated grandparents who will do anything to find their grandson, but their subtle persona richness filled with terminal illness, alcoholism, grief stricken, and a sordid past is greatly deprecated by little involvement in the rest of the story and their unexplained bad history in the network of how things came to be how they are now.  Instead, their retained lawyer (Mark Fite) has more skin and dialogue in the game of tracking down the grandson, played by the front man Finnegan Seeker Bell of alternative rock band Love Ghost in another character that’s spotty being sensical.  Kent Isaacs as a chupacabra keeper, Jacqueline Wright as a dancing evoker of the beast, Jacely Fuentes as a double dipping girlfriend, and Jose Conejo Martin as a Mexican music mogul and hardcore gangster, too, had shapelessness around defining themselves in character to serve what is a fever dream of past guilt and present lore clashing into a surreal tailspin from Pierlli’s visceral viewpoint.  The only character I could truly make sense and understand is “Re-Animator’s” Barbara Crampton’s short-stint warden role. 

I get “Cursed in Baja” is an indie production with nearly a zero-dollar budget and limited, on-hand advantages.  I get Jeff Daniel Phillips has a knack for the obscure, the off-putting, and the odd.  I get horror is subjective and you make what you get out of it.  With all that being said, “Cursed in Baja” doesn’t speak to me on a level I can fully appreciate, understand, or decipher through the opaque narrative stuck in its own adrift design.  Aspects of the nonlinear course and often repeating multiple same scenes doesn’t beat one down into following along but there’s also a rhythm that does denote Pierlli’s neurosis.  Though chaotic at times, Marc Cohen’s editing captures Pierlli’s agitational anarchy that plagues his nightmares and splits his reality seemingly down the middle of an already drug-and-crime fuel Mexicali affair the ex-con and lawman tries desperate not to repeat, but like any good sage person will tell you, we’re all given the opportunity to repeat dooming ourselves and relive past mistakes.  That’s Pierlli’s Pandora’x box and his Achillies heel, no matter how much he attempts to deflect himself out of the physically crippling investigation, he must sally forth again to find answers for the love he let down.  If he doesn’t, that do-nothing stagnation will ultimately destroy him faster.  I’m sure there are merits to Phillips’ first feature in over a decade, but “Curse in Baja” is all over the place, missing key interlocking points of the nomadic concepts to cement better coherency when switching gears between genres.

Anchor Bay’s third film of the first three releases released by the revitalized company by Brian Katz and Thomas Zambeck, “Cursed in Baja” receives exclusive at-home video rights with an AVC encoded, high-definition 1080p, BD25. The single layer is all this story requires with low-impact, mostly psychological thriller that relies heavily on Marc Cahon’s overlapping fade in-fade out and rough-cut, around-again editing to shoulder the burden of entertaining with Pierlli’s meandering mental melancholy. The compressed image quality provides no qualms for a standard, under-bedazzled indie production in widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio. Color saturation varies depending on toggling contrast levels, likely a result of the when-we-can shoot scenes methodology of low budget films. Blacks are not as deep as desired but there’s no signs of artefacts in the void and that suppresses any of kind of resentment toward a lighter shade of the grayscales darker side. The audio comes with an English Dolby Digital 5.1 surround mix. Though lossy, the format retains consistency in a rather heavily vague gumshoe of exposition with not too much crime centric and chupacabra chomping bytes to make or break the fidelity. Dialogue is clean in voiceover as well as in-scene with a favorable soundscape under Vaaal’s eclectic clouded haunt of industrial and discordant string. English subtitles are optional. Special features are limited to feature length commentary by Jeff Daniel Phillips and a making-of featurette with Phillips walking through a shooting location and discussing his ventured process. The Amaray case sports a grindhouse cover art character compilation with no other physical attributes included. The 80-minute, unrated feature is encoded with region free playback.

Last Rites: Jeff Daniel Phillips’s personal stick-and-glue “Cursed in Baja” works to a point off of the auteur’s ambition and who’s in his back pocket network of talented friends eager to lend their niche or locations to create noir delirium a la mode.

Jeff Daniel Phillips’s “Cursed in Baja” on Blu-ray!

Gimme an E. Gimme a V. Gimme an I. Gimme a L. What’s that Spell? EVIL! “Cheerleaders’ Wild Weekend” reviewed! (MVD Rewind Collection / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Cheerleader’s Wild Weekend” Now Back Available on Blu-ray!

Three rival school’s cheerleader squads board a school bus heading to Sacramento to face off in an annual cheer competition.  Detoured to an isolated, less-traveled road late at night, the bus is hijacked by members of the National American Army of Freedom, a group of ex-football players given the shaft for their individualized reasons.  The play caller leading the group is Wayne Mathews, former star quarterback cut loose from his team because of a bum arm, kidnaps the bus full of teenage girls to extort a handsome ransom to get him and four of his terroristic teammates back into the game of life.  Not looking to harm one hair on girls’ heads, Wayne attempts to keep his colleagues from exploiting their bargaining chips while also keeping to the well-designed plan to evade capture and still obtain the cash prize, but when Wayne’s away, it’s up to the cheerleaders to put their differences aside, come together with their own plan, and give the kidnapper a school spirited taste of their own devious medicine.

An odd hybrid of a sexualized teen comedy, blackmail crime thriller, and sleazy exploitation, “Cheerleaders’ Wild Weekend,” also known as “The Great American Girl Robbery,” hails as a full out filching and fleshy feature from Jeff Werner as his debut feature before helming the dark comedy surrounding the atomic bomb formula-carrying monkey of “Die Laughing,” starring Charles Durning and Peter Coyote, and his subsequent move from fictional film to documentary for the remainder of his career.  The 1979 film is cowritten between D.W. Gilbert and costar and cult actor Jason Williams, “Flesh Gordon” himself.   Adult film executive producer Bill Osco (“Tijuana Blue,” “The Incredible Body Snatchers”) finances the lesser explicit skin flick after the success of “Flesh Gordon” and intense crime spree thriller “Cop Killers,” both films of which have Jason Williams in significant roles in their long time collaboration, and is produced by an onset Chuck Russell who would later go on to write and direct “The Blob” remake and “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3:  Dream Warriors.”

On the cusp adult film actor Jason Williams who didn’t mind showing some skin for “Flesh Gordon” or the parodical tune of the Lewis Carroll kid’s story with “Alice in Wonderland:  An X-Rated Musical Fantasy,” but “Cheerleaders’ Wild Weekend” was different for Williams who not only kept his clothes on for most of the picture but also tried to keep others from taking their clothes off as well.  As quarterback gone quintessential eyes-on-the-prize kidnapper Wayne Mathews, Williams co-drives the narrative from the perspective of the heist in a focused attention on staying one step ahead of the bumbling and birdbrain detectives (Marc Isaacs and Hugh Brennenman).  Kristine DeBell, who co-starred with Williams as the titular character Alice in “Alice in Wonderland:  An X-Rated Musical Fantasy, copiloted as Debbie Williams who became the representative portion of the defenseless, scared, and quite cheeky cheerleaders held captive in a rural cabin as Matthews hones in on the $2 million in ransom money.  While the black and white plan for Mathews is just that, crime comes in many shades of color, and sexuality, and in intelligence within his accomplice network of failed football teammates, a sexually pent-up buxom chaperone, and even the fleeting desires of his younger brother, Billy (Robert Houston, 77’s “The Hills Have Eyes”).  Mathews right hand man George Henderson (Anthony Lewis), Big John Hunsacker (John Albert), and Frankie (Courtney Sands) become the ultimate problem that buries the original crux of the kidnapping with sordid inclinations for physical abuse toward the girls than what Mathews has in mind and becomes the spur for the cheerleaders, including LaSalle (Tracy King, “Mansion of the Doomed”), Wally Ann Wharton (“Up In Smoke”), Deslyn Bernet, and others, to fight back against their deviant, hornier captors. 

Werner’s debut is literally a wavy rollercoaster of pulled back levity with good-time voluptuousness and a strong browbeating back-and-forth rivalry amongst of a few honkytonk barrels of laughs while, in the same breath, can be deeply troubling with its side dishes of attempted rape, verbal abuse, and sexual grooming of what’s supposed to be high school cheerleaders (or maybe College cheerleaders…it’s not very clear in the narrative).  You don’t know whether to laugh in relief or be tense with the unsettling advances.  Plenty of gratuitous nudity doesn’t help the matter as a handful of select leaders of the school packs are willing to bare skin albeit being held at gunpoint in this twofaced tale.  With lead principals Wayne Mathews and Debbie Williams, a firm position is held, a genuine felt love interest is formed, and their unspoken body language is clear to the end, providing much needed release from the grip of ebb-and-flow emotions.  Another push toward the accolades of comedy are the two detectives and a blatennt archetype of undercover cops who, in football terms, fumble their way through a sting operation to catch the crooks while the crooks, meaning the Mathews brothers, find reward and redemption, such as Wayne’s bum arm comes through tossing a bag full of $2 million through the air and into the getaway car, with their indifferent yet simultaneous compassion for the held cheerleaders.  $2 Million in $20 dollar notes is about 220lbs per my calculations so that’s one heck of a throwing arm! 

Rewind back to 1979 with MVD’s Rewind Collection label and check out “Cheerleaders’ Wild Weekend” on their new Blu-ray release.  The 1080p high-definition presentation comes onto an AVC encoded, BD25 with the widescreen aspect ratio of 1.78:1, cropped slightly from the original 1.85:1.  The print used for the transfer looks to be print from the now defunct label, Scorpion Releasing, for the company’s 2009 Blu-ray that’s been out of print for some time now.  Print care helps define a broader color palette with the occasional pop of red or yellow moments of higher contrast moments and details, such as glass speckling, groove shadows and textures of a varietal of hair color and consistencies, and other miniscule points of the milieu that emerge through, or pork through according to Courtney Sands’ large white shirt pokies, but leading into lesser light lends to a crushed blacks that swallow object definition and shape.  However, there is some print damage in the form of dust and dirt, a few instances of vertical scratching, and what looks to be cutting damage during a scene transition.  Unlike the Scorpion Releasing Blu-ray that encoded the DTS-HD MA audio codec, the MVD release uses an uncompressed English LPCM mono that sizes up fidelity of the original track.  Surprising being a 25Gig capacity, the uncompressed files appear to maximize the audio without compromising quality.  The verbose dialogue has elevated appeal without steeping to an imbalance, making every individual voice seem like they’re on the same plane of existence in the clean and clear rendition.  Ambience noise is inlaid with consideration for medium range and depth that’s required of this production, mostly close-range gunfire, tire screeches, engine noise, and chases through the brush, that are within arm’s length or a stone’s throw from the camera.  English subtitles are available for selection.  Special features are from the Scorpion Releasing’s archive with an audio commentary with director Jess Werner, actress Tracey King, and editor Gregory McClatchy, a second audio commentary with principal actress Kristine DeBell, an interview with Debell, an interview with principal actor Jason Williams, an interview with Tracey King aka Marilyn Joi, an interview with Leon Isaac Kennedy, an alternate title card sequence with “The Great American Girl Robbery,” a photo gallery, and the original theatrical trailer.  The primarily white and red colored, O-slip cover art has a retrograde façade of a VHS rental complete with mock peeling stickers and dirty edges overtop the film’s marketing of a half-naked cheerleader covered just in pom-poms.  Blu-ray Amaray case sports same image but cleaner without the faux VHS trappings. Inside is a folded mini poster of said art in the insert field and the disc is labeled pressed with the textured grooves of a VHS cassette.  The region free release comes not rated and has a runtime of 96 minutes.

Last Rites: Jeff Werner’s first feature is full of spirit and shapely misguided youth and frustrated former football players in this light sex comedy concealing darker, predatory behavior beneath the surface. “Cheerleaders’ Wild Weekend” will cause snickering and titillating excitement while also tense your gut in what’s an amalgamation of a jest and jostling, bare-chested, good-old-fashion American heist film.

“Cheerleader’s Wild Weekend” Now Back Available on Blu-ray!

No One Can Hear You Scream in EVIL Found Footage Space! “V/H/S/Beyond” reviewed! (Acorn Media International / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Go Beyond the Limit with “V/H/S/Beyond.” Now on Blu-ray!

Six new tapes push the boundaries of what we know is true and what we know as reality.  Six new tapes confirm that we are not alone on this Earth or even in this universe.  Sex new tapes shows the horrors beyond our plane of existence and into another dimension of fear of the unknown.  A special tasked police force raids a house horded by violent, brainless baby-nappers only to discover the horrible creature lurking in the attic.  A megastar under the pressures to perform breaks from the mortal chains of human greed and power.  Skydiving friends encounter an alien attack miles above the Earth surface.  A doggie-daycare aims to transfigure and train people to sit, rollover, and behave like good, obedient hybrid canine creatures, a woman determined to find proof of extraterrestrial’s in the Mojave desert found curiosity didn’t just kill the cat, it also brought it back to life to kill it again and again and again, and a two flea market bought VHS self-tapings quite possibly reveal the horrifying truth of if we are alone in the world.

The next grand tour through “V/H/S” horror has entered orbit!  “V/H/S/Beyond” abducts and probes our fear receptors with invasive and terrifying cold instruments of science-fictional horror tales.  “Beyond” marks the 7th entry into the found-footage anthological franchise formed over a decade ago in 2012, created and produced by genre devotee Brad Miska under his founded, longstanding horror website Bloody Disgusting, and this entry’s theme “Beyond” denotes a sci-fi flare from the hellish man-made creations to vicious visitors from the void above.  Miska returns as producer alongside Josh Goldbloom, James Harris, and Michael Schreiber all of whom have been a part of the series since 2022’s “V/H/S/99.”  Cinepocalypse Productions, Studio71, Spooky Pictures, and Shudder serve as coproduction companies for the shorts directed by Jay Cheel “Abduction/Adduction,” Jordan Downey “Stork,” Virat Pal “Dream Girl,” Justin Martinez “Live and Let Dive,” Christian and Justin Long (yes, that Justin long from “Jeepers Creepers” and “Tusk”) “Fur Babies,” and Kate Siegal “Stowaway.”

“Beyond” introduces a variety of situations, mostly flipping between man-made mistakes to alien encounters, with a medley of spirited characters to shepherd the shorts where they need to end in a timely outcome.  Each found footage story is inherently different with no two situations nearly alike, keeping to the same synonymous rhythm that has garnered fandom for the “V/H/S” anthologies.  The wraparound segment has the facsimile of a mystery documentary of two flea market purchased tapes that are believed to be evidence of alternate life beyond this universe with mock interviews given by the actors casted in the film – Brian Baker, Gerry Eng, Sam Gorski, Mitch Horowitz, Wren Weichman, and Trevor Dow discussing the history of tapes and the house they’re filmed in, social alien background and perception, and determining if the tapes are authentic.  Like all the other wraparounds, story progression is interspersed between the five other shorts with the first being “Stork” where the special police task force W.A.R.D.E.N. takes the fight to the paranormal.  Officers Broome (Thom Hallum, “Bull Shark”), Aubert (James C. Burns, “Lake Dead”), Bennet (Jolene Andersen, “Doctor Death”), Ivy (Tyler Andrews), and E.T. (Vas Provatakis, “Children of the Pines”) storm an infested monster house with rookie Segura (Phillip Andrew Botello, “Devil’s Revenge”) to save stolen infants.  From here, paparazzi Arnab (Sayandeep Sengupta) and Sonu (Rohan Joshi) find themselves at the mercy of an all-powerful and vengeful goddess in megastar Tara (Namrata Sheth), birthday boy Zach (Bobby Slaski, “White Terror”) finds himself free-falling into an alien invasion, doggie daycare owner Becky (Libby Letlow) is dead serious about Frankensteining the purrfect fur babies, and UFO researcher Halley (Alanah Pearce) will find that discover the truth will be a painful purgatorial experience.  “Beyond” brings a wide range of talent to the table with ensemble casts, streamers, Bollywood actors, and solo preformists to exact another side of fear for the franchise with a principal supporting cast rounding the anthology with Virat Pal, Rhett Wellington, Hannah McBride, Matthew Layton, Braedyn Bruner, Phillip Lundquist, and Kevin Bohleber.

One would think an anthology series built upon the idea of a found footage would eventually become stale amongst the public who are feeling the fatigue of an overused subgenre, much like the zombie subgenre in the early 2000s to early 2010 where every George Romero wannabe with a handheld camera set out to either homage or hit it big with the next undead head success.  Found footage is currently, or rather vaguely, in the throes of being overworked because of how cost efficient and effective films of its ilk can be to those inspired to create.  However, the “V/H/S” series hits differently.  For one, it’s an anthology series that brings a fan of imagination to its whole and we’re not subjected the one type of found footage narrative as dissimilar styles, tastes, direction, writing, etc., converge by means of short films.  Another element of “V/H/S” staying power is the series created and developed by genre admirers, such as Brad Miska whose veins course with literally nothing else but the blood cells of the horror.  Lastly, “V/H/S” continues to evolve by colliding past and present, nostalgia and current, and myth and fact together with a serrated surrealism that can thrill you with, often times, hell on Earth entertainment as well as scare the living bejesus out of you.  “Beyond” maintains the trend by coming out of the 80’s and 90’s vibe from the last three installments and diving headfirst into beyond the scope of traditional monsters, terrestrial creatures, and iconic monsters for nothing born of his Earth, such as with the wraparound story, “Stork,” “Live and Let Dive,” and “Stowaway,” and nurturing more a mad-science madness in “Dreamgirl” and “Fur Babies.”  A possible detriment to “Beyond’s” ability to connect with fans of fear and frights with the latest entry leaning heavily on the physical side of action-gore that sometimes is a tall order of campiness rather than the instillation of underlaying, psychological terror aside from the Mike Flanagan (“Oculus,” “Doctor Sleep”) penned “Stowaway” that evokes some segregated space isolation and a death-defying situation that still feels the repetitive painful sting.

“V/H/S/Beyond” lights up the night sky with blood red intergalactic splatter and takes mad science to a whole new abominable level with a new Blu-ray from the UK label Acorn Media International.  The AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50 presents the film in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio with an occasion retro-slip into pillar box 4:3 for that VHS façade.  Image presentation ranges because of the home movie, handheld camera, and body cam found footage trope that’s this series bread-and-butter.  Through the intended static, interlacing and tracking lines, fuzzy darkness, quick movements, and mostly whichever video interference objects one can think of, minus authentic celluloid print damage, to pseudo-sell found footage realism.  The outcome is superbly effective and highly captivating albeit moments that are too agitated to understand and connect objects and sounds in the narrative, another part of the collective that makes it effective yet also makes it wasted runtime space for viewers.  What’s not wasted is the chainsaw point of view in “Stock” where ripping through and decapitating monsters has DOOM inspiration all over it. A majority English with some Hindi DTS-HD 5.1 surround sound mix is, too, designed to mimic the gimmick of handheld found footage. Distortions and other audio mic cuts and external interference on the audio system are included to sell the illusion and are often done at great detail in time, overlay, and spatial fractions in-between viewer and what the view is experiencing on screen. Depth is mostly front loaded within the context of first-person viewpoints while the surrounding channels take a subtle backseat but whisper through when there’s a sound behind the camera. LFE charges in during more rambunctious moments, which there are a lot of, and are not quelled for the sake of dialogue that’s mostly discernible when necessary. English subtitles are available. The encoded special features on a static menu include the pre-visuals of explosions, disintegrations, and free-falling bodies on the practical skydiving of the cameraman explain how many jumps were needed to put the pieces altogether for that breathtaking scene at 20,000 miles in the sky, actress Libby Letlow’s audition tape for Becky in the “Fur Babies” short, the making of “The Dreamgirl,” a behind the scenes of “Stork” with IGN, and the how the timelapse was created in “Stowaway.” Physical areas of the releases are about the same other Acorn Media Releases with the thicker UK Amaray casing that has the illustrated cover art of the “V/H/S” thematic skull worked into the swirling steller-laden of scary space. Inside is just the disc pressed with the same image art. UK certified 18 for strong violence and injury detail, “V/H/S/Beyond” has a runtime of 114 minutes and is not noted on the back cover in regard to the region playback, usually Acorn Media releases are hard encoded with region B, but this particular release play on a Region A setting and could be very well region free.

Last Rites: The “V/H/S” team continues to maintain a sustainable supply of fresh meat for the grinder in relation to its current theme. Plenty of splatter, mayhem, lunacy, and backbone quivering chills to get lost in “Beyond’s” cosmic Hell. Can’t wait to see what’s next in store for the anthology!

Go Beyond the Limit with “V/H/S/Beyond.” Now on Blu-ray!

EVIL Manga to EVIL Movie! “Liverleaf” reviewed! (SRS Cinema / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“LIverleaf” Pushes Through the Bleak to Shine. On DVD Now!

The move from Tokyo to a dwindling rural town hasn’t been easy for middle schooler Haruka.  Most of her classmates have grown up with each other and formed vicious cliques that bully her relentless during and after school.  Mitsuru Abu, a photography enthusiast and Haruka’s classmate is also an outsider but has family ties to the area, is about her only friend and whom she finds attractive.  Upon returning home after spending the day together, Haruka finds her family home engulfed in flames, her mother and father dead, and her little sister severely burned over her entire body.  The loss of her family, her only emotional support, mentally compromises Haruka’s self-control and sends her spiraling into a revenge fueled murdering spree, targeting her bullying classmates who had a hand in the inferno of her family home.  The root of malevolence is not as it appears on the surface, and it will be up to Haruka to kill her way in finding the truth and reveal the secrets.

Adapted from the popular manga series, “Misu Misō,” written by Oshikiri Rensuke, the film version incorporates the indelicate dramas of being a school age teen in while reproducing faithfully the graphic gore, violence, and disturbing nature of character of the series in great detail.  Titled “Liverleaf,” as in the resilient, mountainous found three-lobe leafed flower that resembles the human liver and can withstand harsh winter conditions, is helmed by “Let’s Make the Teacher Have a Miscarriage Club” director Eisuke Naitô and penned by Miako Tadano of “The World of Kanako,” another manga-based film adaptation.  The 2018 film, which can be described as a revenge-drama with particle elements of horror, is shot in one of the snow-covered foothills of Japan’s mountain regions and is produced by Shigeto Arai (“We Are Little Zombies”) under the production banners of the Nikkatsu Corp. and the L’espace Film Co.

Anna Yamada is in the lead role that’s very familiar and culturally significant to Japanese cinema.  A scorn-born femme fatale that’s merciless and personnel, the kind of role that Quentin Tarantino exacted in his tribute to Asian revenge narrative with “Kill Bill,” starring Uma Thurman, hunting down the offending party and dispatching the scum from the Earth in a one-by-one fashion.  The “Suicide Forest Village” actress Yamada headlined “Liverleaf” as mid-to-late teen portraying the manga series’ preteen or early teenage girl Haruka Nozaki.  She isn’t the only nearly adult woman to play a teen in the throes of hormones, peer pressures, and angsty conditions sideswiped by wickedness and a taste for dominance as the whole student body pretends to be a youthful waste in a snowy, mountainside village on the verge of collapse.  Howling Village’s Rinka Ôtani, as Taeko Oguro, stands out with her bright orange hair and a sense of indifferent authority being the supposed head of the gaggle of bullying girls.  “Liverleaf” is Ôtani debut picture and Ôtani would eventually reteam with Yamada on “Suicide Forest Village,” but their first dichotomized performance as protagonist and antagonists brings a palpable tension to the screen.  Throw a boy both girls stoically can’t admit with a lot of expression and that pressure pot grows into an ugly shape of jealousy spurred love triangle.  Mitsuru Aibe is tall, handsome, kind, and a photography buff always looking for the raw and beautiful moment to capture on film.  Played by Hiroya Shimizu, “The World of Kanako” and “Sadako” actor instills that hope for the future and a glance of stability amongst the opposing craziness that has ensued between the rebirthed revenger Nozaki and the horrible highschoolers now fearing for their lives because of their responsible part for the monster they’ve created but does he really provide a safer, greener pasture Nozaki needs to return to once her retribution is complete?  Kenshin Endô, Masato Endô, Reiko Kataoka, Seina Nakata, Arisa Sakura, Aki Moita, Minoir Terada, Kazuki Ôtomo, and ReRena Ôtsuka are cast in one messed up and depressive high school student body that ends in a blizzard of bloodshed.

One thing about “Liverleaf,” if looking at and considering all the components of the feature as a whole, to take away from the adaptation is how Eisuke Naitô facsimiles the plot points of a manga series or, in more general terms, Naitô” has plucked the rudimentary concepts straight from any regular extreme manga series, not just from Oshikiri Rensuke’s Misu Misō.  Yet, “Misu Misō” is very faithfully extracted from the illustrated pages for live action execution down to many of the details with very few changes to the story’s original design. Gore has an extreme graphic nature juxtaposed against the snow, contrasting in homage to those historical revenge genre films set in the same harsh, white blanket, and like all the heroines, or anti-heroines, Haruka Nozaki speaks her soul in her outfit, dressed in a continuously deepening red after each gruesome dispatch of her classmates.  This saturation into crimson extends into this belief that Nozaki is bordering being supernatural, like most condemned women done wrong, who somehow find the superhuman strength, endurance, know-how, and resilience in their own disdain for blood and violence to slay beyond their normal means without batting an eyelash.  “Liverleaf” is not the chippiest of narratives with a coursing core of grim doom and gloom through a quickly dilapidating little town with an austere school, junk pits, and modest structures that inhabit indifferent teachers, brooding teens, and a mental illness that ranges from inherent sociopathy to social sociopathy of peer pressures and bullying. 

SRS Cinema brings manga pen and paper to the big screen with their unrated DVD release of the film adaptation titled “Liverleaf.”  The MPEG2 encoded, upscaled 1080p, DVD9 release is presented in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio.  “Liverleaf” stands out unusual from the other SRS releases, a company that prides itself on standard definition 480 and 720 resolutions and compressing features and their special features onto a packed DVD5 that creates eye artefacts on already low budget, commercial grade, inexperienced film.  Instead, “Liverleaf” has punchier colors and distinction on that segregates the austere from the vibrancy and the extra space helps allow for this decoding to be as smooth as possible on what some may now consider an antiquated format.  Decoding at a higher range of 7-9Mbps, compression imprudence doesn’t show itself here with a clean picture that retians inky voids, charted snow mounds and footprints in a white sheet of snow, and the colors and details on objects that natural enlarge themselves when in contrast, such as Nozaki’s red jacket or the red, orange, and yellow glow of house flames against the night sky.  The Japanese LPCM 2.0 stereo renders a clean mix of dialogue, ambience, and soundtrack.  Dialogue’s clean, crisp, and clearly upfront of a subdued diegetic sound mixed from the boom mic or from post and a Hisashi Arita soundtrack that scores Japanese revenge in non-traditional Japanese notes.  Post mix and action does create some separation that uncouples the visual onomatopoeia of the activity but remains negligible throughout.  The burned-in English subtitles synch well and are error-free.  Extras include a featurette from Manga to Movie that goes into the history of manga and the adaptation concept which most thought the film couldn’t be adapted, Elijah Thomas supplements with his own thoughts and opinions on “Liverleaf” as well as another featurette titled Liverleaf’s Obsession that looks at the character’s dangerous obsessive qualities, the trailer, a Oshikiri Rensuke, biography The Comically Twisted Mind of Oshikiri Rensuke with narrator voiceover going into the writer’s family history and “Misu Misō” genesis, the trailer, and talent files on Anna Yamada, Eisuke Naito, Hiroya Shimizu, Miako Tadano, and Rinka Otani.  These features house behind a static menu, that only has a play option alongside the extras, with a neat art illustration of a murderously ominous Naruka Nozaki.  The cover art hints at the film’s stark contrast aesthetics with a Naruka Nozaki wrapped her red coat and jetblack hair sprawled out on the white snow.  The Amaray does not come with a reversible cover nor any tangible extras inside.  DVD has region A only playback and has a runtime of 114 minutes. 

Last Rites: “Liverleaf” is a surprising, better-than-no budget teen revenge thriller that deals with obsession, depression, and a consternation that Haruka’s tragic journey through the pits of a lowly high school hierarchy will only get worse before it gets better.

“LIverleaf” Pushes Through the Bleak to Shine. On DVD Now!