Category Archives: gore

Amongst the EVILs of Digital, Analog Rises from the Grave! “Night of the Zodiac” reviewed! (SRS Cinema / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

A Mock VHS Retro on a Mock VHS Retro DVD!  “Night of the Zodiac” from SRS Cinema!

A bizarre and grotesque dream about the once notorious Zodiac killer inspires Richard Gantz to create a movie worthy of his idol’s praise.  With little income and having just lost his girlfriend and his job, Gantz is on the brink of being homeless and unable to materialize his dream into reality until he receives a mysterious, unexpected phone call.  The Zodiac killer got wind of his project and is offering support to finance and bestow guidance to Gantz’s film as long as the struggling, yet eager, filmmaker can crack Zodiac’s cipher and stomach the enigmatic task before him.  Gifted the Zodiac’s iconic mask and murder knife, Gantz sets out to record his first kills that pays homage to his aging idol but his mentor wants him to be creative with the new chapter worthy of the Zodiac name and gathering a whole new set of slaves for his paradisal afterlife.  When Gantz hits a barrier of inspiration, he solely becomes reliant on the Zodiac’s encouragement that has become few and a far in between. 

Susana Kapostasy is who I like to label a mad genius.  Many filmmakers have attempted to create antiquated formats of yore with watered down imitations, but for the Michigan-born videographer and editor-by-trade Kapostasy, what has been a challenge to most to faithfully recreate has simply become second nature for the video production enthusiast.  Scraping up any and all elderly video camcorders she could find, the “Metal Maniac” director wrote-and-directed her sophomore feature film “Night of the Zodiac,” pulling inspiration from one of the most notorious unsolved murder cases in America by the Zodiac Killer in San Francisco.  From the West Coast to the Midwest, “Night of the Zodiac” is filmed in and around the backdropped Detroit area for the Zodiac’s next round of sliced-up slaves – only in the creative, moviemaking sense, of course.  The 2022 film has the spitting image of a 1980s/1990s SOV with ghastly, gory effects, a killer hair metal soundtrack, and video characteristics that’ll have you trying to adjust the tracking setting on your DVD/Blu-ray player.  The Johnny Braineater Production is produced by star Philip Digby with Kapostasy serving as executive producer alongside co-cinematographer Apollo David Zimmerman.

Stepping into the shoes of the infamous serial killer to embark on a theoretical continuance of the real life mass murdering character is Philip Digby.  Channeling his best Jeffrey Dahmer vibe in looks alone with a crazed and obsessive personality suited for Charles Manson, Digby plays a hodgepodge of America’s most notorious killers, adding his own flare for film into the fold to make him a full-fledged psychopath, as he internally celebrates the moniker after his disparaging roommate/Landlord (Victor-Manuel Ruiz) labels him with an ear-to-ear grin and a nearly whoopie jump for joy.  Digby’s eccentric mania thrusts us beyond a threshold we didn’t even realized we had crossed from the very first opening dream sequences of a rotting, coffin-thronged corpse oozing maggots and putrid viscera and, believe it not, my opinion is this thrust doesn’t do justice to Gantz’s character because of the lack of foundation of setting up viewers with an inbred psychosis that puts into question, how did he survive this long without killing someone before?  Dreams are power but are they powerful enough to twist a seeming normal film lover into a frantic frenzy of vile fates and videotapes?  I think only Freddy Krueger can answer that.  Gantz goes around town slaughtering people in parks, in their driveways, and even makes one very bad magician (Derek Dibella) wish he requested to hire Gantz as a videographer for a promotional video disappear as Gantz strangles him to death.  “Night of the Zodiac” completes the cast with Logan O’Donnell, Mark Polonia (director of “Splatter Farm”), Tim Ritter (director of “Truth or Dare?”), and Benjamin Linn as the voice of the Zodiac.

From the video production veneer to the set decorations and locations to the characters themselves, “Night of the Zodiac” perfectly captures SOV horror in this modern day time capsule.  Not until the credits, when I see master craftsman of SOV horror filmming, Tim Ritter and Mark Polonia, appear in the cast credits did it dawn on me that what Susana Kapostasy had accomplished was a labor of love for the niche market, resurrected four decades later and revered by horror fans who were likely still in diapers or weren’t even born yet – maybe to go as far as not even a twinkle in their parents’ eyes.  Yet, there were clues to “Night of the Zodiac’s” contemporary construction, such as the opening title which had a clean, well-polished illustration and Kapostasy’s film is very self-aware by slathering horror in every recessed corner with mountainous stacks of VHS tapes, posters, and  and often, perhaps every other scene, displayed tribute to filmmakers, like Ritter and Polonia, who were still counterparts and establishing themselves as independent videotape artists during the 80s-90s.  This self-awareness harnesses more comedic relief than horror, accentuated by Gantz’s matter-of-fact imbalance, and the humor loosens the reins on “Night of the Zodiac’s” cold cruelty a tad but what the gore spools back in audiences by spilling lots of blood. 

SRS Cinema releases “Night of the Zodiac” onto DVD with a single layer encoding and presented in a throwback letterbox 1:33:1 aspect ratio.  Kapostasy uses a slew of equipment – Cannon XL2, Sony Video 8 AF, Panasonic AG 450, JVC GY X2BU, JVC GY X3, Panasonic AG 456, Panasonic AG 196, Sony CCD FX 330, and a Sony VO 4800 U-Matic S VTR – with some be more present-time cams run through U-matic VHS playback to degrade for SOV quality.  The intentional SOV has a variety of distinct looks with distinct quirks that flexes higher magenta levels in earlier scenes as well as tracking lines and aliasing artefacts.  Detail levels also vary but the overall VHS brands generally remain the same with soft, indistinguishable contours with also a surprising amount of depth and hue range.  The English Dolby Digital 2-channel (2.0) mix can sound boxy at times and come accompanied with a piercing, underlining interference.   Telephone conversations have no distortion depth so the other person on other line sounds present in the room.   The soundtrack from Anguish, Locust Point, and the brunt of it provided by Stoker is metal madness but does overshadow the dialogue when shredding through the scenes.  Dialogue is often clear, but again, no depth and echoey.  There are no subtitles available for this release.  Bonus Features include an audio commentary by director Susana Kapostasy, star Philip Digby, and costar Victor-Manuel Ruiz that goes over a lot of technical aspects of “Night of the Zodiac’s” look and how they obtained the gore and blood for the film, a Tim Ritter conversation about how he became involved with Kapostasy’s video enthusiasm and provided analog input, a blood cannon showcase that’s instructionally descriptive as well as you’ll see Kapostasy’s foot accidently go into the 5 gallon Homer bucket, a gore score Ouija board gag, recreating the Zodiac cipher, and the trailer.  SRS Cinema’s release dons a retro VHS design front cover with an exact and beautiful illustration of Gantz’s copycat Zodiac attire with a cropped version of the front cover on the disc art inside the traditional black snapper case.  “Night of the Zodiac” has a runtime of 86 minutes, is not rated, and has an all-region NTSC playback. Difficult to immerse oneself into a half-a-century old unsolved murder while sticking to glorifying merely the guts and gore, “Night of the Zodiac” stuns more qualitatively with video techniques thought archaic and obsolete but Susana Kapostasy steadfast proves otherwise in her undying love for the flawed, yet nostalgic format.

A Mock VHS Retro on a Mock VHS Retro DVD!  “Night of the Zodiac” from SRS Cinema!

Cicadas’ EVIL Song Will Test Your Sanity! “The Sound of Summer” reviewed! (Unearthed Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

If You Can’t Take The Heat, Watch “The Sound of Summer” instead!  

A coffee shop employee is over the Summer’s relentless heat.  She’s also over Summer’s Cicada call of vibrational chorusing when the winged insects glide their tymbals across their abdomens to attract the season’s female sex.  In working one shift, a strange local man patrons her shop, bringing in his Cicada nets and enclosures, feeding his snared insects right in the middle of his hot coffee break.  Revolted by who she dubs The Cicada Man, and by cicadas themselves, insidious nightmare dreams and an intense itching sensation drives the girl into scratching and terrified fit.  The obsession to scratch the itch wears out spots on her skin to the point of creating open wounds to excavate the bugs she believes have burrowed their way into her body because a dream of The Cicada Man planting them inside her.  Reality begins to crumble  and delusions set in as her and The Cicada man have unfinished business that begin a downward spiral of Summertime insanity. 

The Summer season isn’t for everybody.  The oppressive heat, the swarming insects, the uncomfortable stickiness of sweat-inducing humidity, and the very essence of an overwhelming nature that can be engulfing toward a devolved transfiguration.  That’s the premise behind the 2022 Japanese extreme shock and gore horror “The Sound of Summer,” the first feature length film by a United Kingdom-born writer-director known only as Guy (aka Guy Fragments) who has lived and worked in Japanese since 2016.  Influenced prolifically by Japanese underground filmmaker Shozin Fukui (“Rubber’s Love,” “964 Pinocchio”), Guy follows Fukui’s extreme experimental horror with his own tastes and experiences built into the framework of what becomes an antithetical liking to the widely popular season that usually provides outdoor fun and sun.  In “The Sound of Summer,” the sun is the enemy and the cicadas are the siren song humming foot soldiers that infest the mind.  The body horror is a production of the director’s indie production company Sculpting Fragments, the same company used to produce the Guy’s shorts, “The Rope Maiden” and “Difficulty Breathing.”

“The Sound of Summer” runs a cast of nameless characters and at the center of the cicada madness, we’re individually tailgating one of the two women who work at the coffee shop.   Kaori Hoshino enacts the young woman’s displeasure for the Summer with constant vocal grouchiness of the heat and her visible disgust and detest of the surrounding cacophonous cicada chirping.  Hoshino works lathering loathsome into the character’s routine as a single working woman, living alone, with a daily schedule.  There’s never ostentatious gesticulation that overplays her hot hating hand.  Intermittent with seemingly mundane tasks provides a more down to earth and normal person, juxtaposed greatly with more contrast in the later extremely disturbed version of herself.  Her delusional disorder stalks her in the physical form of The Cicada Man, a rather odd, older man involved in what she considers to be childish bug-catching activities, and his presence, or maybe just the image of him, invades her mental space coinciding with everything else she dislikes about the Summertime.  The Cicada Man becomes the epitome of everything she finds repulsive yet every element of his being and the Summer sink underneath her skin, in a literal figurative combination.  In the metamorphizing macabre role of The Cicada Man is Shinya Hankawa who also has a tangent sub-story of feeding his precious insects, as well as himself, blood from the sickle opened young women he has hidden away in a derelict building.  This expresses The Cicada Man as morosely deranged but the narrative has up until now been latched onto the young woman from the coffee shop, which begs the question, is this how the young woman perceives The Cicada Man, even as far as labeling him with a slasher-esque moniker to further demonize him into being a part of a culmination toward her worst nightmare?  “The Sound of Summer’s” cast comprises of Kiyomi Kametani, Shiori Kawai, Kuromi Kirishima, Keita Kusaka, and Yuina Nagai.

Like renowned painters Edvard Munch or Vincent van Gogh, a madness quality lies within every stroke of Guy’s ‘The Sound of Summer.”  Guy pulls inspiration from his own experiences of a moderately pleasant English Summer being eradicated by the same season in Japan and it’s Hellish temperatures become a reconfiguration of the psyche when the once comfortable becomes oppressed by the uncomfortable surroundings of sensory overload.  A cultural physical representation of the season in Japan is the cicada, like the recognizable and sought after Cherry Blossoms of the insect world.  Guy uses the spellbinding cicada song with a fear-inducing frequency that vessels in psychological harm or delusional parasitosis with a visual goad of an enigmatic old man having them as pets that mixes the brain’s signals into a freefall into madness.  Yet, the audience is never outrightly explained what’s happening to the young coffee shop barista as a limited number of The Cicada Man’s spliced in scenes chauffeur in a more supernatural and macabre side separate from the woman’s narrative preponderance.  Are we supposed to be inside the barista’s disordered brain that’s going mad or is The Cicada Man offshoot sub-narrative an inside look at his bizarre insect consumed little world that slowly seeps under the Barista’s skin?   “The Sound of Summer” might be open for one’s own personal interpretation, but it’s clear in message as an anti-Summer film, an anti-bug film, and an anti-sane film with a prosthetic effects edge and a hyper-sensitive gore impact that’ll leave you scratching the most insignificant itch – just in case.

Ring in the approaching Summer season with “The Sound of Summer” on Blu-ray from extreme horror label Unearthed Films.  The AVC encoded single layer BD25 presents the film in a 1080p, high-definition resolution with a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio.  Image quality is relatively stable throughout with spot areas of compression concern, such as splotching, around the darker, grittier scenes inside The Cicada Man’s rundown squat.  Details maintain their sharpness as we receive some gooey bits and pieces of unidentifiable flesh and muscular tissue.  Plus, the prosthetic applications display a coarse texture comes through the decoding well, despite a jumpy Mbps.  Guy’s approach to the cinematography takes a steady devolutionary downfall from the brightly lit and sterile to the darkly embracing and infested as if the two contrasting elements are linked by the psychological supporting wall between safety and danger, easily to crumble under natural pressures with the simple prod of gentle persuasion.  The Japanese language PCM 2.0 track distributes a fine dual channel mix that favors the sound design with cicada chorusing and the constant scratching and open wound tissue removal churning out an audible force of discord.  Dialogue is the other suitable track that’s remains clear, clean and in the forefront of the action, soundtrack, and robust sound design.  No signs of hissing, popping, or strength with the digital recording.  The optional English subtitles synch well with error free translation.  Extras include a behind-the-scenes that’s more of a blooper reel of the cast and crew making faces and messing around during principal photography, the Tokyo live-stream premiere after screening interview with director Guy and cyberpunk horror director Shozin Fukui, the Japanese premier with director and cast, and the film’s trailer.  Front cover is a grainy look at The Cicada Man in full metamorphic bloom slipped into a traditional Blu-ray snapper case with a disc art pressed with the illustrative, flesh-wounded flesh of the young victim.  The Unearthed Films release is not rated, has gore-friendly pacing at 75 minutes, and is locked with region A coding.  Special effects by “Versus’s” Susumu Nakatani and an original soundtrack by the Singaporean electronic-experimenter, Microchip Terror, “The Sound of Summer” buzzes with body horror boudoir in Guy’s directorial feature length extremity. 

If You Can’t Take The Heat, Watch “The Sound of Summer” instead!  

To Do EVIL, You Must Pay EVIL a Ton of Euro. “La Petit Mort 2: Nasty Tapes” reviewed! (Unearthed Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Step Back into La Maison de “La Petit Mort” for a Sequel that’s Hard to Stomach!  

La Maison de la Petit Mort’s doors remain open under new management, continuing to serve the dark web public interest with a wide variety of snuff services.  For the right price, a fantasy-driven in-person torture show can be arranged for your liking, and one can be an commanding observer or one can get their hands dirty in participatory play where anything goes and pleasures are on-demand.  The German snuff house expands their reach to a global level with live webcam shows that can be directed by the high price paying patron and the leather-cladded vixen staff carry out their illicit instructions exactly.  A robust menu of dark pleasures, displayed on a new showreel of select gruesome services, are available at the simple transfer of a money wire or cash in hand for the depraved to make their fantasies a reality.

In 2009, German born director Marcel Walz helmed a linear, three-act narrative of tourists laid over in the big city winding up at patronizing a dark and dingy dive bar, La Maison de la Petit Mort, only to be abducted as inventoried stock for the rich to exploit in a slew of murder perversions.  Five years later in 2014, Walz returns for a sequel, “La Petit Mort 2:  Nasty Tapes,” with reprising principal actress Annika Strauss co-writing the film alongside Walz as well as stepping back into the sadistic black platform shoes of Dominique, one of the two lovely ladies with a lecherous and violent vocation.  The direct sequel that follows a day-in-a-life of the snuff house’s employees making an advert showreel does not follow suit in the way the first film was structured.  Instead of a linear, chronological narrative, “Nasty Tapes” evolves into an anthology of different kill archetypes for the marketing video. Walz’s Matador Films serves the production oversight with Harald Schmalz (“Collar”) coproducing the anthological torture porn feature.

“La Petit Mort 2: Nasty Tapes” doesn’t seen a whole lot of return on the original cast.  The tourists were all mangled, mutilated, and murdered, the original Monique bit the dust in an escape attempt, and the first Maman rode off into the sunset rich with blood money.  Instead, and among other things, “Nasty Tapes” folds a new treatment of terror with the same old eggs and flour by reinventing itself into an anthology type, introducing a new, blonde Monique (Yvonne Wölke, “Bad End”) into the batter, and disclosing the new owner of the freaky, fetish club, a feminine man by the name Monsieur Matheo Maxime (Mika Metz, “The Curse of Doctor Wolffenstein”).  Annika Strauss is the only original cast member to reprise her original role of Dominique, the brunette to Monique’s blonde and who showed slight inkling of hesitation before being summoned to torture and murder.  Strauss doesn’t buck the character trend as Dominque still displays disgust on her face when slicing a man’s facial features in a Picasso style portrait.  Yet, Dominique remains loyal to the Monsieur and to the La Maison de la Petit Mort by committing the atrocities without question, unlike the regular administrative bookkeeping and housecleaning she regularly remains vocal in opposition in what’s a slither of dark humor contrast between her gruesome work compared to mundane work.  Unlike Cyanide Savior singer Manoush, who was a very convincing merciless club owner Maman, Mike Metz plays a very different, more layered proprietor portrayed as someone who sees the work as a paycheck to fund his deepest desire – to be a beautiful woman just like his wife Jade Maxime (Micaela Schäfer, “Sky Sharks”).  That’s about the gist of complexity the sequel has to offer with much of the thinly laid foundation is bricked up by a compilation of back-to-back kill scenarios that involve some extreme genre directors as special guests, such as Uwe Boll (“House of the Dead”), Dustin Mills (“Bath Salt Zombies”), Mike Mendez (“Big Ass Spider!”), and the late Ryan Nicholson (“Gutterballs”), taking part in the clandestine, underground activities in-person or on the web.  The film fills out the cast with victims and victimizers in Armin Barwich (“The Terror Stalkers”), Bea La Bea, Babriela Wirbel (“Plastic”), Nichol Neukirch, Marc Rohnstock (“Necronos”), Thomas Pill (“Moor-Monster!”), Kai Plaumann, Markus Hettich (“No Reason”) and the twins, Barbara and Patrizia Zuchowski.

When going into a German gore film, such as “La Petit Mort 2:  Nasty Tapes,” you have to go into It having an affinity for, or at least an understanding of, complete shameless representation of torture and killing of another human being for the simple and pure joy of the act.  In other words, you have to be somewhat sick in the head.  For me, personally, the sickness is rooted out of admiration for special effects and how the F/X artist(s) can create a realistic depiction of an unofficial autopsied anatomy. Filmmaker Ryan Nicholson, who passed away in 2019 of brain cancer, not only had a role in the Marcel Walz sequel, but was also the special effects artist, following in the footsteps of one of the notable German underground special effects artists, Olaf Ittenbach (“Premutos:  The Fallen Angel”) who had done the graphic gags on the first film with head turning results.  Nicholson, with a credit list that has a foot in independent productions and more mainstream, Hollywood productions, such as “Final Destination” and the remake of “Blair Witch” from 2016, doesn’t disappoint and keeps the blood, guts, and stringy sinew seamless in a gruesome pageantry of death that rivals and continues Olaf’s original stamp.  Beyond the glossy surface of a blood glaze, “Nasty Tapes” is nothing more than a kill-after-kill anthology with no concrete premise for either of the individual slaughter vignettes.  Title cards setup the kill moments with basic victim descriptors, such as married status, age, and how much their life has been paid for, but doesn’t humanize them in the least, creating zero compassion for the unsuspecting abductee fated for something far worse than death.  Instead, Walz flips the script with more background on the clients with ipre-and-post interviews of their most intimate time at La Petit Mort.  This structure can be monotonous as there’s nothing else to look forward to or to absorb empathetically as a viewer in an anthology that simply glorifies the leisure time of an undisturbed murder.  

As a nail-pulling, nose-cutting, drill-holing, lip-stitching, dick-scissoring, gut-stabbing anthology, “La Petit Mort 2: Nasty Tapes” is a gory, good time and is even better now in high-definition with a 1080p Blu-ray release from Unearthed Films The AVC encoded BD25 looks as good as can expected for a shaky cam, hectically edited, and filthy dark German gore film presented in a 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio.  Details are oleaginous wet with blood and tissue that incongruently with the Roland Freitag’s gloomy yet suppressed cinematography and Kai E. Bogatzki discordance and chaotic editing technique that is supposed to elicit extreme shock but consequently results in a loss of the intended grisliness.  Unearthed Films‘ release exhibits no issues with compression, but the hues and tones appear to fuse in the near eliminate of some contours where there should be some.  The German-English DTS-HD 5.1 mix can be score heavy, especially a hard and energized Tekkno title credits from composer Klaus Pfreundner that’s distinctive German, but “Nasty Tapes” has profound focus on its core selling point – torture.  The very few scenes of intercut dialogue shots spliced into the client’s sociopathic session are well understood and do have prominence over the score, as well as the ambient milieu of screams and the integrated flesh destroying Foley, despite the cam-esque quality of the pseudo-testimonials.  The burned-in English subtitles under the German Language only are synced well without error and with consistently good pacing.  Disc extras include a behind-the-scenes making of cut out from the main camera, an alternate torture scene, a behind-the-scenes still gallery, a short advert of a naked woman strung up by her arms and being stapled with signs, and Unearthed Films trailers.  The Blu-ray physical features don’t stray to far from normal Unearthed Films releases with a standard Blu-ray snapper case with grisly cover art of a marred victim’s plucked out eye and a Jade Maxime holding a bone saw and wearing ripped fishnet stockings and black lingerie.  The pressed disc art has the rehashes the back cover image of Monsieur Maxime wearing a venetian mask.  The Blu-ray comes unrated, region A locked, and has a manageably sufficing runtime of 83 minutes to not overkill the overkilling.  Transparent in its surreptitious atrocities, “La Petit Mort II: Nasty Tapes” subsists as Marcel Walz charnel house of horrors with a new revamped anthology approach to razzmatazz special effects wetwork without any due remorse. 

Step Back into La Maison de “La Petit Mort” for a Sequel that’s Hard to Stomach!  

Break a Promise with EVIL And Pay the Little-Big Price! “Unwelcome” reviewed! (Well Go USA Entertainment / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Not the Leprechauns This Time.  It’d Be Goblins that “Unwelcome” You!  

Trying desperately to become pregnant for some time, Jamie and Maya celebrate the news of learning they’re expecting but their jovial rejoice is cut short when three thugs break into their city apartment home, nearly bringing an end to their lives and the baby.  When Jamie’s great aunt Maeve wills him a rural cottage in Ireland, the married couple jump at the chance to start afresh away from the urban chaos and the trauma in hopes for a peaceful life with their child.  The friendly village residents take in Jamie and Maya unconditionally but one stipulation is highly encouraged to be met if living at great aunt Maeve’s cottage:  they must leave out a blood offering for the little people, the Redcaps, of the forest butted up against their home.   Just happy to be out of the city, Jamie and Maya shrug off what they believe to be folkloric wives tales of old Ireland and on such short notice, they hire Mr. Whelan and his children, who come with an unfavorable village reputation, to do much-needed repairs around the house.  When dealings with the Whelan clan go violently sideways, Maya invokes superstitious belief to draw the Repcaps out of hiding and implore their murderous mischievousness for dire neighborly assistance. 

Welcome to the “Unwelcome!”  Pint-sized evil continues to be mondo popular around the world, especially in the Full Moon empire that’s built a kingdom off the backs of supernatural ankle biters.  However, “Unwelcome” is not a Charles Band production that’s rushed straight through to a fast-tracked, direct-to-video release of shoddy, schlocky proportions.  Instead, this release comes from overseas, the UK specifically, with some quality production footing that lands the 2023 released film into a limited theatrical run before hitting the home entertainment market.  Behind the film is Jon Wright, director of dark humored revenge against high school bullies in the “Tormented,” who directs and co-writes “Unwelcome’s” grim fairytale-like narrative of personal growth, inner fight, and underfoot goblins gone wild with Mark Stay, reuniting with Wright for the first time since their script collaboration on the 2014 automaton invasion epic, “Robot Overlords.”  Under the once working title of “The Little People,” “Unwelcome” is a production of the Yorkshire based Tempo Productions Limited, with cofounders by Jo Bamford and Piers Tempest as executive producer and producer, and the private equity investment group, Ingenious Media, with producer Peter Touche along with Warner Bros. and Well Go USA Entertainment distributing. 

“Unwelcome” has such unusual casting in a good way.  The entire Whelan clan consists of actors plucked from successful, multi-seasonal television shows that have essentially shaped their careers from their well-known, fan-adored roles, but the unintended adverse effect in such triumph stamina is being recognized only for that performance.  In my mind, Colm Meaney will forever be embedded in my hippocampus as Engineer Chief Miles O’Brien from “Star Trek:  Deep Space Nine.”  “Con Air,” “Under Siege,” and even as a British Airways pilot doomed for landing in “Die Hard 2,” Chief O’Brien, I mean Colm Meaney, is still in space tinkering with transporter buffers.  Here in “Unwelcome,” Meany is Daddy, aka Mr. Whelan, a rough around the edge contractor who beats his kids, let them get away with whatever they please, and has a real notoriety around town.  When I say kids, I mean grown adults stuck in Daddy’s hooligan wake and are played by more outstanding and familiar faces from Ireland, such as Hodor from “Game of Thrones,” Kristian Naim, Netflix’s “Derry Girls’s” Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, and the “1917” actor and upcoming principals of “Last Voyage of the Demeter,” Chris Walley, make up the trio of terribly laid construction workers who have really no business being around a hammer, a ladder, or anybody’s valuables.  That brings me to “Unwelcome’s” lead actors as the scarred couple who hires out Whelan’s band of delinquent spawns to do the handiwork repairs.  I realize Wright and Stay wrote Douglas Booth (“Pride, Prejudice, & Zombies”) to be an overly optimistic and fairly useless good guy with Jamie, but the insecurities are just ostentatiously oozing out of the husband without a clue.  Jamie’s arc also doesn’t quite flesh out by the end of the film as he’s blocked by the baby mama instincts of Maya, played by “Resident Evil:  Welcome to Raccoon City’s” Hannah John-Kamen, with an unspoken I’ll-do-it-my-damn-self attitude that sends the narrative into a knife-brandishing gob of Redcaps eager to do her bidding for an unfavorable exchange.  Maya sacrifices all for a good man with good intentions who can’t do diddlysquat to save her and, in the end, that doesn’t seem balanced for this ferocious fairytale. 

If there is one aspect, above all us, to note about “Unwelcome’s” shin kicking goblins as a takeaway is that the rambunctious and ravenous Redcaps are not computer generated, are not puppets, and are not even animatronics.  Actors and stuntmen fill those small shows with a little help of disproportionate movie magic, heeding to the ways of a lost art in miniaturizing actors, such as in “Willow” or “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” and touching up with some CGI on the tangible face molds for a layered composition that’s super fun to see come to life on screen.  Unfortunately, the Redcaps make a late appearance into a yarn unspooled with mostly the pent up pile of frustrations of Jamie and Maya as an unlucky couple without a chance of peace in the world.  Trouble finds them wherever they go in what’s essentially a trade for city thugs for unfriendly country versions of the same type of ill-mannered.  “Unwelcome” plays very much into it’s title that no place feels welcoming for a couple on the verge of the already daunting premise of parenthood life and everything appears now alien as the world is being upended by concessions for your child in what has turned terrifying in what was supposed to be a warm, welcoming of a new adventure.  That’s the sensation setup for the pair who trust dip into trusting superstitions and magical beings to be their guardians.  Folklore then takes over; its has, in fact, been welcomed to save the day no matter how maligned the backstories.  Wright and cinematographer Hamish Doyne-Ditmas do, in fact, construct an ocular stage crafted out of an ethereal red and yellow fire lit sky with an overall color theory toned to contrast as a mystical storybook set in what is usually flush with greenery around an Irish village, reminiscent of late 70s-early 80’s European horror sets built to detailed scale, built with vibrant backlighting, and yet built to feel distant, apprehensively off, and strange like another world, a Redcap ecosphere.  “Unwelcome’s” ending also pulls from that unabashed time to be creatively mad in an innately mad universe with an unexpected Redcap reason that doesn’t clarify so much their hunger for blood offers, which the diet includes raw store-bought meat and the frothy flesh of felonious individuals, but better explains their twisted promises and intentions for their knife-jabbing services rendered.

With Goblins, there’s always a price to pay but for the Blu-ray release of “Unwelcome,” the price is worth the admission.  The single-layered, AVC encoded, high-definition 1080p Well Go USA Entertainment release presents the film in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio.  Slightly squeeze onto a BD25, there’s some minor irregular compression patches that degrade solid darker colors and the image loses a bit of sharpness in the background – you can see an example when the Redcaps pop up out of the keep tower appearing more like moving globules than well-defined humanoids.  Goblin facial features and skin and clothes textures have tactile appeal during closeups with the same being said with the cast in their natural color tones.  Computer-generated facial movements have seamless pertinence to the surrounding action and the motion of the Goblin actors themselves with layering of frames looking clean to create their smallness around principal characters.  The English DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio mix maintains a stout dialogue track but deploys no depth into recordings resulting in all the dialogue tracks to be at the forefront, even when characters are in the background in the scene.  The weird spatiality with the dialogue doesn’t translate over to ambient noise as those tracks are well designed into the scheme with levels of depth that add richness to the storybook atmospherics.  English SDH are optionally available.  Bonus features include a behind-the-scenes cast and crew interviews discussing their time forming the idea and working on the project, a making the Redcaps segment with special effects supervisor Shaune Harrison (“Nightbreed,” “Attack of the Adult Babies”) discussing the step-be-step process of bringing these little devils to life, including showcasing their head and body molds, and the theatrical trailer. The physical property comes in a standard Blu-ray snapper with latch with one-sided cover art of a knife-out Goblin starring up at the new mistress of the house.  Inside, a single-leaf advert of Well Go USA films and the disc pressed art with a blue-graded Goblin looking menacing makeup the inner contents. “Unwelcome” runs at 101 minutes, is rated R for strong violence and gore, pervasive language, some drug use, and sexual material. From an ironic perspective, “Unwelcome” uses the mythological mischievous of Goblins as a gas pedal accelerator to mature a pair of genteel gulls faced with a parlous reality and to be factotum in life in general told inside in the linings of a dark and gory fairytale universe.

Not the Leprechauns This Time.  It’d Be Goblins that “Unwelcome” You!  

EVIL Will Suck on Your Menstrual Soaked Tampon. “The Hood Has Eyez” reviewed! (SRS Cinema / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

An Early 2000s Exploitation With Lots of Infamy!  “The Hood Has Eyez” on DVD!

Attending a school ditch party was the last thing the obedient Kimmy wanted to do but the peer pressure from her fellow Catholic schoolgirl friends convinced her to the other side of the tracks of town.  On the way, a half-naked woman runs out in front of their car and in attempt to flee the scene on foot, to protect their innocent repute status, they run into two gangsters holding them at gunpoint in an alley.  The now frightened teens are forced into an isolated park area, joined by the now fully-clothed and not injured woman they hit earlier in what has been revealed to be a ruse to rob them, but the gang leader, Psycho, has more distasteful and violent plans to squeeze more out of his prize than cash.  Psycho brutally rapes Kimmy and is left for dead by not only the gangsters but also the one other surviving girl she had considered to be her friend.  Battered and broken, Kimmy’s morality and reality snaps, sending her down an unmerciful vengeful path against those who condemned her to die.

If filmmaker Terrence Williams set out to make an exploitation film of genital mutilation, forced sodomy, and a man sucking on a bloody tampon, then mission accomplished!  The straight-to-video, SOV rape-and-revenger of monstrosities, “The Hood Has Eyez,” pulls no punches, knows no limits, and cares to give no concern for the atrocities it depicts.  A bastardized yet familiar rephrasing of an early Wes Craven classic, “The Hills Have Eyes,” Williams uses Craven’s basic setup plot to write-and-direct his own version of uncivilized lowlifes exploiting and murdering out-of-their-element travelers in the most graphic and appalling ways.  Williams takes the fear out of the hills and drops it into a remote park plopped in-between the suburbs and urban grounds, swapping out inbred hillbillies for Latino gangsters and a nuclear family for schoolgirls in short skirts and one unlucky white dude.  Collaborating producer and wife of Terrence Williams, Nicole Williams, has previously and subsequently worked together other films, such as “Curse of La Llorona” and “Horno,” under their now defunct joint company, Cinema Threat Productions in Los Angeles. 

The 2007 released “The Hood Has Eyez” reunites a good chunk of the cast from Williams’ “The River:  Legend of La Llorona,” “Revenge of La Llorona, “Llorona Gone Wild” and “Curse of La Llorona” films completed and released within a couple years previously which created a certain level of comfortability and trust amongst the cast as well as the cast and director.  With some of the intimately graphic content of “The Hood Has Eyez,” those warm and cozy congenialities play key to selling a broken bottle scene being rammed up a vaginal cavity or a nail hammered down into penis urethra.  Without that delicate easiness in the air, scenes like the aforementioned won’t work, resulting in the entire project collapsing upon itself even before wrapping up principal photography.  At the tip of the spear are Cyd Chulte and Antonia Royuela as the principled Kimmy and her antithesis, the deranged Psycho.   Chulte, who cut her teeth with roles in “Curse of La Llorona,” takes one-half the lead of a young woman broken by the barbarity and succumbs to justified vehemence for torture, dismemberment, coat hanger abortions, and eventual death but before being pushed to the edge of her life and into a state of insanity, Kimmy’s presence melds into the group of a lemming unit and takes a backseat to the other lead half behind Royuela’s unhinged ultra-violence of a gangster gone rouge from the plan.  Psycho’s posse – Joker (Carlos Javier Castillo, “Axeman”) and She Girl (Anne Stinnett, “Revenge of La Llorona”) – truly reflect their handles as Psycho’s devil and angel on his shoulder, trying to either egg him on or have him withdrawal while withdrawing is still in his favor but, of course, we wouldn’t have a debauchery and savage movie if the angel over the shoulder had prevailed and so Psycho has his perverse way with Kimmy and friends – Susan (Jesselynn Desmond, “Horno”), Rachel (Jamielyn Lippman, “The Absent”), and Jerry (Tom Curitore, “Llorona Gone Wild”). 

The way I see it, Terrence William’s trashy exploitation nod “The Hood Has Eyez” has three distinct parts, much like the three-act structure of any narrative archetype.  Terrence Williams defines these acts tremendously clear in an almost too simple of a way that it feels rudimentary, maybe even old fashioned.  The setup is simple:  overweening teens doing what they’re not supposed to be doing become caught up in an unfavorable part of town with a maladjusted gang.  The confrontation squares the two factions to a literal position of facing each other while the teens coward in fright and disadvantage as they forcibly bend to the will of the gun-toting gang calling all the shots.  The resolution pivots the story 180 degrees, like any good rape-revenge thriller should, after misdeeds thin out whose left for dead and who’s intractable impulses are fully left satisfied and goes right into execution mode without passing go, without collecting $200, and without pause of a trauma processing moment as Terrence Williams wastes no time digging deep into the sludge of psychiatric stability with a hasty move right to rectifying an eye-for-an-eye balance.  Up until a point, “The Hood Has Eyez” carries a lot of dire weight within the confrontational girth that can be hard to stomach.  There’s a few casually lighthearted and fun witty moments peppered beforehand, such as a jokes at the expense of airhead Susan and her player boyfriend, but then after the grave assault that leaves Kimmy left to suffer all the post-traumatic syndrome results, things really go dark, and I’m’ talking black comedy dark.  Kimmy goes into full Rocky Balboa training mode, doing pushups and enthusiastically practicing staff spinning in the light of the falling sun.  Terrence Williams actually gives Kimmy a rousing montage before ripping the dick off a two-bit thug.  Where am I getting to with all this?  Well, I’m not sure how Terrence Williams wanted audiences to digest his brutal film that goes through touchpoints of opposing genres.  Usually, if comedy and gore are present in one narrative, slapstick typically is the go-to conduit – think “Evil Dead II” or “Dead Alive.”  For “The Hood Has Eyez,” the gore effects are hearty, the characters are vicious and victimizable, and Williams maintains an intact beginning-to-end narrative, but confounds with a few choice character actions that sully the overall presentation.

The Cinema Threat Production has now been integrated into SRS Cinema’s Extreme and Unrated Label – Nightmare Fuel – and unquestionably is underground extreme horror at its foulest.  Released with a widescreen aspect ratio of 1.85:1 of the 420p standard definition, camcorder tape footage and in a new director’s alternative cut, “The Hood Has Eyez” has relatively decent image clarity with a very subdued amount of lossy compression results, especially for progressive scan 480 pixels.  Details are soft as expected with the commercial equipment and lower resolution but though a slightly faded color scale, the coloring range renders intense enough for higher marks and can play a trick on the eyes by falsely delineating the objects to create a space based off the hue edging alone.  The English Dolby Digital 2.0 track props up the quality even more with Terrence Williams using a boom mic attachment instead of the built-in mic to gather meticulously the intended dialogue and skirmish kerfuffle.  As a result, dialogue is really sharp here, especially during Psycho’s off-the-rail verbal abuse, rants, and one-liners.  The post-production Foley stands apart from the inhouse sound with prefabricated sound bytes but that’s the way of micro-independent filmmaking.  The alternate cut includes a newly shot opening scene that was originally intended for the original script that was added back in to actualize the Williams’ vision after a cast sudden dropout departure.  Bonus features include a commentary with Terrence and Nicole, a raw, secondary cam behind the scenes footage in making certain scenes, a blooper reel, image slide show, two original cut trailers, a new trailer, and a Women in Horror vignette featuring Nicole Williams discussing the importance of women in horror and her contribution to the genre.  The release is presented in a traditional DVD snapper with a beautifully illustrated cover art based off the shoddy composited “The Hood Has Eyez’s” one sheet.  In the past few years, SRS has upped their game with cover arts and continue to impress with their new branding campaign that makes these films feel no longer cheap at first glance.  Inside, the DVD press art is the same as the cover with much of the RGB removed to a single layer red. There is no insert inside the case.  Terrence Williams set out to capture the inelegant essences of nitty-gritty exploitation and hits the nail on the head, literally, with this passion project of perversity. 

An Early 2000s Exploitation With Lots of Infamy!  “The Hood Has Eyez” on DVD!