Category Archives: gore

The Only Fire This EVIL Monster is Afraid of is the One in His Pants! “Frankenstein ’80” reviewed! (Cauldron Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Frankenstein ’80” on Blu-ray from Cauldron Films!

At a renowned German hospital, Professor Schwarz has pioneered a new serum that has proven animal-testing results on stopping or reducing the process of organ transplant rejection.  Also, at the same hospital in another wing, a disgraced surgeon, now a posthumous examiner, named Dr. Otto Frankenstein toils away in the morgue, dismembering bodies and piecing together the limbs and organs into a new being he has named Mosiac.  The scarred and lumbering monster has an increase sexual libido and is always in pain from organ rejection, driving him to sexually assault and kill women in the shadows.  Frankenstein steals his colleague’s only batch of serum that could have saved reporter Karl Schein’s ill sister from organ failure.  Now, Karl is on the hunt for the thief along with hot headed police Inspector Schneider that have pieced together a connection between the stolen serum and the grisly deaths of young women. 

Straight from the pages of Mary Shelley’s timeless book, the Frankenstein monster was born out of mad science, or rather the fear of science gone too far, and the deep shadows of Gothic romanticism and tragedy.  The Italian took the creature and patchworked a new take on the reborn monster giving life from expired flesh and jolts of electricity.  Frankenstein took shape as a caricature, a wildly exaggerated shell of the original exterior with an increase sexual appetite and murderous rage that shifts the story from the conflictions of mad scientist to solely the exploits of his mad creation.  That’s what is Frankenstein and his creature succumb to in the 1972 Mario Mancini film “Frankenstein ’80.”  Also known by other various titles such as “Midnight Horror,” “Frankenstein 2000,” and “Mosaic,” the short stinted cinematographer, whose works include “French Sex Murders” and “Vengeance is My Forgiveness,” tackles his own directorial from a co-written treatment penned with Ferdinando De Leone.  M.G.D. Film banners as production company with Benedetto Graziani and Renato Romano (“Seven Blood-Stained Orchids”) producing the sewn-skin and flesh-exposed feature with a concupiscent creature. 

“Frankenstein ‘80” is full of colorful characters that clash literally and figuratively on screen with grandiose personalities that seek to topple over another.  The only normie of the bunch the truth-seeking reporter Karl Schein, played by British actor John Richardson (“Black Sunday,” “Torso”), in the aftermath of a criminal act and tragedy when miracle serum vanishes and his sister (Gaby Veruksy) dies on the operating room table due to potentially her unnecessary organ failure.  Bearing a lookalike tinge of schlock genre director Jess Franco, Roberto Fizz stiffens up to the be academic and scientific creator of the serum in Prof. Schwarz.  His mad science intending to make the world a better place is balanced by Dr. Otto Frankenstein’s sordid abomination and his own self-interest, a wonderfully portentous and arrogantly calm role filled to the brim by the distinguished faced genre veteran and America-born bodybuilder Gordon Mitchell (“Emanuelle, Queen of Sados,” “Malevolence”).  Mitchel doesn’t display his brawniness here as an extinguished gentleman, disgraced surgeon but his unique face with an 1000-yard stare and his tall height made him for a good imposing puppeteer on the brink of losing control of his erratically around and constantly in pain creation Mosaic by Xiro Papas.  With his behavior performance, Papas blended Golden Age horror with new wave violence by being voiceless face of stoic fear who would eventually ravage his beautiful prey.   With all these characters creating havoc and abnormalities, it’s Inspector Schneider that causes the most distress with a cocaine level high performance Renato Romano on the verge of stroking out with him and his men’s own incompetence sleuthing in solving the murder cases.  The diverse nationality cast rounds out with Dalila Di Lazzaro (“Phenomena”) as Karl’s love interest and adopted niece of Dr. Frankenstein, Inspector’s two leading investigators in Fulvio Mingozzi (“Deep Red”) and Enrico Rossi, Lemmy Carson as the suspicious male nurse, and Dada Gallotti (“The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine”) as the Bucher with hardly any clothes underneath the butcher frock.

Frankenstein of the future!  Or, at least, that was the idea for the 1972 released sleazy-schlocker to be conceived as “Frankenstein ’80,” a new generational and bastardized terror with speckles of the original Mary Shelley vision stuffed with horrid-sex aggression and grim depravity.  Blindly held together by it’s key actors, “Frankenstein ‘80” has a pervasive perversity against the unrationalized cowboy science.  We never know just why this particular Dr. Frankenstein is so keen on creating a jerry-rigged juggernaut of mixed-bag blood types and assorted body parts.  Is it because his discredited shame has driven him delusional and mad?  Or is Dr. Frankenstein hellbent on showing the world what abnormal science can accomplish?  Jolting electricity and hunchback henchmen are taken out of the equation altogether in his water version of Frankenstein; we don’t even know where Dr. Frankenstein’s disasterpiece is source from or how the body was brought to be assembled, dismantled, and assembled again over and over as there’s no mention of grave robbery or is just a slabbed soul who fell in the unfortunate hands of a crazed surgical practitioner.  “Frankenstein ‘80’s” has plenty of mania, sleaze, and misshapen aspects that not only include it’s scared and fragmentally pieced together monster that promote Italian ostentation inside the country’s own modern genre elements rather than originating English Gothicism. 

“Frankenstein ‘80” rises alive for the first time North American Blu-ray home video release from Cauldron Films.  The high-definition, 1080p, AVC encoded Blu-ray is pulled from a 35mm print restoration and is presented in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio.  Stored amply on a BD50, the original print is elevated to a rich color palette that buoys, never dipping below the natural appearing skin tones, compromising the vivid warm grading, or shying away from the inky black voids.  There are spot horizontal scratches that are transparently faint and infrequent.  The release comes with two audio ADR-produced options, an English DTS-HD 2.0 Master Audio and an Italian DTS-HD 2.0 Master Audio.  The ADR razes the spatial depth a bit but the overall general clarity and prominence is excellent albeit insubstantially faint hissing.  “Frankenstein ‘80” has a nationality diverse cast between the Italian majority and peppered with British and American principals and you’ll see the dub synch better with the native English or Italian proficient depending on the audio track selected.  Range concentrates around the immediate surroundings, limiting the environment to virtually around just the character actions. English subtitles and English SDH are optionally available. Special features include Dalila Forever, an Italian audio recorded message from actress Dalila Di Lazzaro over a still gallery of what is essentially her life as she reminisces about her career, Little Frankensteins, a featurette that pays homage through Italian audio host Domenico Monetti on the assortment of Italian-made Frankensteins that stray from the original story and into a culture phenomenon through a time warp of Italian entries surrounding the creature, and last is an English audio commentary by film historian Heather Drain. The Cauldron Films’ clear-cased Blu-ray displays new art on the front cover, or from at least I can tell without digging up only a handful of one sheets and original posters., with the reverse providing the art from previous DVD versions. Beautifully blood red macabre and psychotronic, both colorfully cover contrasted cover illustrations are a testament to the film’s era and living up what’s on the encoded disc inside, pressed in pure black with a dripping blood red title. The region free Blu-ray comes with an 88-mintue, uncensored final product. Forget what you already know of the stitched together flat-top with pale skin and towering stature of resurrection and death after life as “Frankenstein ’80” embarks on savagery pieced together in the natural stink of science’s putrid decay with an unnatural libido leap into the arms of the unwilling, unsuspecting woman.

“Frankenstein ’80” on Blu-ray from Cauldron Films!

Limited Edition EVIL to the Extreme! “August Underground” reviewed! (Unearthed Films / DVD/Blu-ray Combo)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Limited Edition “August Underground” Ready to be Received! 

A young farm owner invites his quirky, video-taping friend into the soiled and confined basement of his home where he keeps a nude, young woman gagged and rope bound to a chair, previously been tortured, and covered in her own blood and filth.  Both feeling giddy with excitement over their new plaything, the two sociopaths revel inflicting more torment and pain on the woman while her boyfriend’s mutilated and dead corpse is being dismembered in the next room.  When their basement plaything expires after days of neglect, the two joy killers hit the New Jersey and Pennsylvania turnpikes and backroads to continue a merciless killing spree of whomever stands in their path.  Convenient store clerks, hitchhikers, prostitutes, even their tattoo artist and his twin comic book enthusiastic brother are not safe from their chockful of callous carnage and every moment is recorded via videotape for reliving the moment in posterity. 

As far as underground horror goes, Fred Vogel’s “August Underground” is about as extreme and underground as they come and still be recognizable amongst the most casual of horror fandom.  Vogel’s inaugural written-and-directed, pitilessly violent, exploitation begins a direct-to-video trilogy of torture-on-tape with SOV quality, imparting grisly shudders to the unfathomable amount of blank-labeled VHS cassettes through man’s stowage, collecting dust bunnies and remaining unseen over the years to the horrors the magnetic tape just might behold.  What “August Underground” essentially boils down to is a raw day-to-day look of two maniacal serial killers on a free-for-all of a butcher’s market, the shooting locations stretch from the recesses of Vogel’s hometown of Warren, New Jersey and all the way to the surrounding back roads and isolated areas of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  Self-produced by Fred Vogel and co-producer John A. Wisniewski, “August Underground” set inaugural voyage on the blood red sea for Vogel’s Toe Tag Productions in 2001.

There is a severe lack of story for Vogel’s debut and that’s no oversight or a sign of omission of a subconscious creativity.  Most normal, everyday people video-record with the intent on not making a feature-length film but rather to capture memories and store them away for another day.  Vogel strives for that realism here where a plot is, for lack of a better word, pointless for the depicted atrocities where the sole purposes is to exhibit dementedness and insanity.  The same can be said about the cast of nameless characters.  The freeform recording does not spout off introductions or make references to monikers to, again, portray as much as organic conversation or realism as possible to further skewer an already gore and violence skewed imagination into thinking what we’re seeing is authentic and inconclusive of its entertainment purpose.  Fred Vogel, under his so-called porno stage name of Peter Mountain, plays the main principal dressed in arrogance and apathy as he’s recorded in a thumbed selection of runtime filmed by an equally bad-natured, sociopathic friend behind the camera, played by a post-release distancing actor under the pseudonym of Allen Peters.  The two complement each other in a Beavis and Butthead friendship kind of way with Vogel in synch with his character’s bloodlust as well as the burly bulk while camera buddy perversely watches, giggling to his friends’ blood shedding exploits.  Their relationship feels like a lonesome outlet to do harm and senseless killing makes the connection firmer, more enjoyable, in the easiest opportunities of a rural area where bored people do evil just to pass the time.  Vogel sets up a series of scenarios rather than plotting acts of a linear story in what becomes an anthology of anarchy that has us climbing down the manhole of maniacal mischief.  Mania is soaked into every inch of “August Underground” and that fits snug and makes warm the scattered story into a much more coagulated coherency.  “August Underground” rounds out the victims, I mean cast, with AnnMarie Reveruzzi, Erika Risovich, Randi Stubbs, Aaron LaBonte, Ben LaBtone, Victoria Jones, Alexis Iris, Stephen Vogel, Dan Friedman, Casey Eganey, Kyle Dealman, and Andy Lauer.

“August Underground” is ugly, nasty, grimy, sordid, perverse, tasteless, callous, and not shot with technical or detailed perfection.  “August Underground” is also unique, bold, unafraid, successful, gory, realistic, practical, and not shot with technical or detailed perfection that’s actually, in its own way, gorgeous.  “August Underground” is all those things and more with its rough-and-ready, extreme exploitation that will be polarizing amongst horror fans and not be a film for everyone’s taste or collection.  Frankly, there are worse underground and extreme horror films out there in the world, but “August Underground,” through the disgusting trices of dismemberment, force feeding of feces, and vomit inducing snuff, has somehow ,at least in this reviewer’s humble opinion, who like in a Dr. Seuss line, has been here, there, and everywhere within the horror spectrum, slipped through the veil of obscurity, having a foot well positioned in the land of the universal acknowledgement where many genre fans putter around with the same old formulas.  The depth of this story is so shallow that digging any deeper into the themes and the possibilities isn’t necessary with its home-made movie facade of people joyfully torturing and killing people being already horrific enough. 

For certain to go out of stock and out of print into physical release obscurity once again, Unearthed Films’ limited-edition collector’s edition of “August Underground” is the 2-disc DVD/Blu-ray combo set to act on right now. The AVC encoded, high definition 1080p, BD50 comes from a MiniDV print, often considered the transitional format from analog and to digital in a tape format with lossy compression. Presented in the original aspect ratio of 1.33:1 aspect ratio, don’t expect image quality to be pristinely detailed and sharp as the MiniDV maxes out at 720p resulting in both, standard and Hi-Def formats, having indistinguishable presentations. Resembling the amateur, at-home movie, scaled down tape quality renders ghosting which shapes and details are bleary and the coloring resembles ember or incandescent with a warm, red-and-yellow layer. What we don’t see much of is a ton of tracking, static, or a ton of noticeable interlace but blacks can be prominently spotty with the horizontal bars. The lossless on-board MiniDV English audio is a PCM 2.0 that doesn’t extend beyond the limits of the camera’s microphone, but the clarity fairs well with clean and commanding dialogue with a natural range between the proximitous cameraman and his killing machine star of a friend in front of the camera. Also, equally interchangeable between the physical formats with what’s made to be a rough recording, discernible differences are minute at best. The Blu-ray and DVD have many of the same special features with the Blu-ray containing a few more frills over its format counterpart with a new Dave Parker interviewing Fred Vogel as well as a separate interview with Vogel and Mike Watt of Rue Morgue Magazine, another new interview with Fred Vogel from Severed Cinema Revisiting Infamy. The formats shared bonus content includes never before seen and new material, such as the original screener version of the film that comes with watermark and a slightly different color grading, a new audio commentary by Fred Vogel and Ultra Violent Magazine’s creator Art Ettinger, a new 10 questions with Fred Vogel answering some of the longstanding queries surrounding the film’s realism achievements and behind-the-scenes permissions and achievements, and a new Toe Tag Masterclass that compares storyboards with the screen version. Archived bonus content include audio commentary with Vogel and actors-producers-brothers Aaron and Ben LaBonte, another commentary track with Fred Vogel alone, an audio commentary by the witty, giggly “Killer,” Hammer to the Head closer look at “August Underground,” on location behind-the scenes, a behind-the-brutality of the film, outsiders’ perspective take in a Too Real for Comfort discussion, an introduction by director Fred Vogel, photo gallery, and trailers. The limited-edition collector’s set comes with a cardboard slipcover with a blurry, interlaced still of Vogel’s character wrapping a forearm around a gagged-girl’s throat while peering into the camera, but it’s the clear snapper case’s front cover that’s more developed with a graphic pencil-graphite illustration of the same slipcover image with more visible mutilated skin and visual weapon of human body destruction. Front cover is also reversible with an interlacing black-and-white image of the main killer. Both discs also sport two different art presses with the Blu-ray mirroring the slipcover image while the DVD has nearly the identical position of killer and victim but with a whole new victim. The region A locked edition has a digestible 70-minute runtime and is, of course, not rated. I would never say Unearthed Films has been diluting their pool of extreme underground gore and guts horror, but their “August Underground” release puts the brazen company back on the mondo-macabre map with definitely a too real for comfort twisted depravity and an au naturel sense of debauchery.

Limited Edition “August Underground” Ready to be Received! 

Friends for Dinner is EVIL’s Table Setting! “Gnaw” reviewed! (MVD Visual / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Gnaw” on this DVD from MVD Visual, Danse Macabre, and Jinga FIlms!

A holiday away in the English countryside might not be the perfect relaxation for six prickly friends.  Quarrelsome and unfaithfulness run rampant through their fragile friendship on the verge of collapse.  Everything at first was manageably enticing – a quaintly rustic countryside house, a quietly isolated surrounding woodland, and the matron house owner who whips up meaty delicacies for them to enjoy breakfast, lunch, and dinner – but when darkness falls amidst a heated love triangles, lustful romps, and frustrated behaviors, the divisive friends become blind to the ever watchful eye that’s hungry for what the group of young people have to offer – as fleshy comestibles.  A cannibalistic cook lurks in the shadows and in between the walls, waiting for the opportune moment to strike, fillet, ground, and prepare the tender meat for seasoning and baking, but his observant eye has set it’s sights on one whose expecting child that could be a tasty morsel for later. 

Cannibalism subgenre has been a staple in horror for decades the under the vastly wide dog-eat-dog umbrella that pits human beings against each other in one of the many gruesome reasons of unwittingly engaging into a form of Darwinism.  People considered as food are lower-shelf commodities to those who need to feed of human flesh and organs, regarding their placement in the food chain as superior amongst the rest despite being in the same category of the animal kingdom.  Every filmic narrative contains a tweaked difference in justification for cannibalism and in Gregory Mandry’s 2008 English horror, simply known as “Gnaw,” in lies that sense of definite worth in craving someone else’s entrails, boiling the viscera down into a hot soup or baking it into a meat and potato Cornish pastry.   The script, penned between first time screenwriters Michael John Bell and Max Waller from a story by independent horror producer Rob Weston (“Antibirth,” “The Thompsons”), contrasts people’s life-consuming narcissism and pettiness against something truly terrifying and waiting to sink its teeth in you.  Weston and Simon Sharp produce the film under Weston’s production company, Straightwire Entertainment Group, as well as The Big Yellow Feet Productions.

Being that “Gnaw” was released in 2008 and is a low-budget indie film, a novice bunch of English first timers trying to break into the acting game and industry overall comprises the story’s cast of victims and cannibals, but that isn’t to necessarily say the meat and bones are rotten from the very unwrapping of DVD case plastic.  As a whole, the fresh cast undertakes the pessimistic angles of a souring love triangle between established couple Jack and Jill, yes, like the nursery rhyme, played by Nigel Croft-Adams and Rachel Mitchem in a slowly sink ship that symbolizes their relationship, torpedoed by an unknown undercurrent in Jack’s fling with Lorrie (Sara Dylan, “Mandrake”).  Between the three, suspicion is entrenched in Jill with sarcastic lashings on Jack’s recent temperament and behavior that suggests she’s aware of wandering playboy antics, but what Jill is unaware of is the other woman, a hopeless romantic who can’t seem to see through Jack’s philandering, self-assured ways.  One thing “Gnaw” does to spoil this wonderfully taught threesome is not bring the tension to a head and, instead, deflects to the butchering head chef of human bodies, played gruntingly by a muted and snarky-looking Gary Faulkner attempting his best to imitate a killer from the very best of the 80’s slasher renaissance and only to come up short of the current slasher renaissance a decade and a half later.  Masked half the time with some kind of black felt cloth with an attached pelt, Faulkner looks more like a half-wit brandishing a two-prong pitchfork than an large, formidable intimidator you’d be scared of just by looking over your shoulder while running as fast as you can to get away.  Granted, the character is tough to kill, able to take punches and stabs as if they were mosquito bites, but his connection to cannibalism often feels lost in the chase rather than knee deep in guts and a frying pan.  The rest of the cast rounds out with a trope-horny couple in Julia Vandoorne and Hiram Bleetman (“Zombie Diaries”) and the matronly yet unnerving face and voice of Carrie Cohen as the house owner.

In the grand canon scheme of cannibalism films, “Gnaw” places on the generic neighborhood scale.  The small time indie picture rides the line of equivalence, neither being absolutely terrible or outstanding gruesome, with a less-is-more story that more-or-less been done before in the subgenre.  Yet, “Gnaw” doesn’t give audiences anything new to squirm about with its peanut long-pigs who arbitrary abduct locals for their bone-licking appetites.  “Gnaw’s” in frame gore generally consists of goring with that aforementioned puny pitchfork and we’re quickly skirted from the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” inspired moment of Faulkner revving the two-stroke engine for maximizing terror in the eyes of a soon-to-be-in-bits victim   Gore should be a staple motif for any cannibal film where one deranged person has to either sauté, stew, bake, or grill the parts of a hacked up totally emotion-regulated person and Mandry’s film seldomly shows the sickening, sordid sloppy Joe-makings of a flesh eater, except for one scene of a severed foot being ground into hamburger meat that fits the bill while most of the rest happens implied off screen or unshown.  Mandry’s approach to telling the story has the inklings of a 80s-90s vintage made-for-TV movie with an unpolished dark veneer and snooping camera angles to obtain a POV sense of prowling prey while also keeping us engaged with the frustratingly unresolved melodramatics of the group that can stifle our concern for the characters in the last act, infectiously affecting the crude final scenes that literally drops a baby into our laps and expects us to know what to do with that information. 

Personally, my second time around with Gregory Mandry’s “Gnaw” but a lot has changed in between the more than 10-year span of now-and-then.  Hell, even I’ve changed in regard to taste and with now having consumed more cinematic wisdom over the years, from what I recall, “Gnaw” was a rememberable off-industry shocker to a limit and it’s gratifying to see the little cannibal film that could receive a revisit on DVD from MVDVisual in association with Danse Macabre and Jinga Films.  The film is housed on a DVD5 that presents the 35 mm stock in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio and in a rather chaotic upscaled transfer that may be more commercially equipment caused than artefact, but compression macro blocking is evident during the majority of night scenes as it phases in and out of overlapping darker shades. Tom Jenkins’s cinematography can be nicely fore focused to center the characters in front of a background out of focus, but there are other instances where the lighting is extremely binary with not a splash of other color to liven up the image. The only audio option is an English Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound mix with an overkill statement on a film that doesn’t require it.  The back and side channels hardly become utilized for any back brush movement or creaky old house shifting so a lot of the sound is in the anterior which is where the dialogue most rightfully aggressive and clearest.  No issues with the digital recording that offers a balance between the placid moments and the screaming hysteria without being too much intake on the speakers.  There’s not much in the way of ambience, some chewing of the meat pies, steaming of pots, and the revving of a chainsaw is most character-driven sounds that overtake any kind of natural environment along the background landscape.  English subtitles are optionally available.  The DVD does not list special features, but extras appear on the static menu with a director’s commentary that can be toggled off/on.  There is also a trailers selection with previews for the feature plus “Midnight Son,” “After,” and “Red Latex.”  Physical features offer an alternate cover from the other releases with a man opening wide to take a bite out of a literal hand sandwich in the photoshopped composition.  The DVD case does not contain an insert and the disc art contains the same image as the front cover.  With a region free playback, the movie come not rated and has a manageable runtime of 84 minutes.  The second time around with “Gnaw” proves to appreciate the work that goes into a stably fixtured indie horror from the UK but with the copious entries of the cannibal subgenre, especially in the early 2000s with more theatrical pieces in “Wrong Turn” and “The Hills Have Eyes” remake, “Gnaw” treads mediocre waters just enough to sate the man-eater hunger.

“Gnaw” on this DVD from MVD Visual, Danse Macabre, and Jinga FIlms!

What Russian EVILS Lie Beneath in “The Lair” reviewed! (Acorn Media International / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“The Lair” Has a Deadly Secret!  Blu-ray Now Available!  

Royal air force Captain Kate Sinclair is shot down over the arid planes of Afghanistan.  Swarming with Taliban insurgents and her command officer killed, Sinclair takes shelter in an old, abandoned Russian bunker from the Russian Afghanistan invasion of the 1980s.  What she stumbles into is an experiment lair housing numerous stasis chambers and dark secrets.  Sinclair manages to barely escape with her life when one of the creatures inside the capsules is released, tearing to shreds her well-armed pursuers.  Rescued by a ragtag team of U.S. military outcasts based in the middle of nowhere as peripheral punishment and joined up by a trio of British special forces in the area, the Captain attempts to warn her rescuers what’s out in the desert only to be on the receiving end of a monstrous invasion that sees the slaughter of nearly everyone in camp, including the camp commander.  Miles from anywhere and not enough supplies to withstand another attack, those soldiers left alive band together to stage their own last stand assault on the creatures’ Russian bunker lair to ensure hostile eradication.

Acclaimed horror director Neil Marshall (“Dog Soldiers”) returns to his roots with a claustrophobic, high-energy, and violent creature feature known as “The Lair.”  Having experienced underwhelming success with the fiery Dark Horse antihero “Hellboy” remake in 2019, Marshall returns to independent scene for the 2022 released film having been shot in the barren lands of Budapest, Hungary to create the illusionary Afghanistan territory backdrop.  Marshall co-writes the script with “The Lair” star Charlotte Kirk, a reteaming affair from Marshall’s last feature “The Reckoning” from two years prior in which Kirk also produced and starred.  Also returning from “The Reckoning” and into the producer’s chair is Daniel-Konrad Cooper along with “Infinity Pool” producers, Jonathan Halperyn and Daniel Kresmery, and “Lords of Chaos’s”, Kwesi Dickson in this Shudder exclusive collaboration from Rather Good Films, Scarlett Productions Limited, Highland Film Group, and Ashland Hill Media Finance with Neil Marshall and Peter Shawyer’s private equity investment group, Ingenious Media, providing financial support.

Star Charlotte Kirk and Neil Marshall have a seemingly natural rapport that has transposed well from their collaboration on “The Reckoning” to the “The Lair,” crossing subgenre that involve the equivocal occult to a more plainspoken physical presence of foreign experiments gone wildly bloodlust.  Instead of being hunted by a 17th century witch hunters just for being a woman saying no to man, Kirk steps into a role of authority as military captain with loads of smarts and adept at close combat as she’s being, once again, chased by predators, but these uber-predators are unearthly, unremorseful, and ugly.  Marshall provides just enough character backstory for understanding the stakes and strengths of each of them but to reach a little more into their history might have been key to stronger motivations and for something to prove in not just being jarhead screwups.  Sinclair finds commonality and sympathy from Sgt. Tom Hook (Jonathan Howard, “Godzilla:  King of the Monsters”) who bears the guilt of losing men in battle and punishes himself to do better.  Psyche profiles for each soldier makes them rise above being flat by providing depth of flaw but what is vexing and irking about each, and this element may very well be intentional as an international thespian bout of poking fun, is the cast is nearly all British playing Americans with stereotypical drawls, ebonics, and punctuating southern accents so overexaggerated it’s downright sickening to hear, like watching a bad old war film, but what’s even worse and what drives a sharp claw talon into the inane heart of trite-tired audiences is the group slow walk before embarking into the battle of no return.  Again, this might be the work of intentional satire.  Some accents are gargantuanly worse than others, such as with “Titanic 666’s” Jamie Bamber’s pirate-patched Major Roy Finch and the Mark Arend’s Carolina-born Private Dwanye Everett.  From there, the elocution grades get better with less cliché but not by much with a cast rounding out of Leon Ockenden (“The Reckoning”), who I couldn’t understand because his accent was so Scottish-ly thick, Troy Alexander, Mark Strepan, Hadi Khanjanpour, Kibong Tanji, Adam Bond, Harry Taurasi, and Alex Morgan.

Neil Marshall not only returns to his horror origins but he also returns to the heyday of prime practical effects with inset creatures of a spliced appearance between the build, the dark full body achromia, and the facial configural layout of Marvel’s extraterrestrial antihero Venom with the eye-less, tongue-lashings and grabbings of Resident Evil’s staple adversaries, the Lickers.  Obvious a man in a prosthetic suit, the simplistic, brawny-framed humanoid basks in nostalgia despite being in a modern day movie, pining for the days when large or small men in full body, head-to-toe, terrifying imagery suits were the antagonists of our youthful nightmares while also providing the cast something to act against for a more realistic and rancorous on screen rendezvous.  The smaller scale production limits Marshall’s possibilities with his Kevlar-fleshed and razor-toothed creatures but the veteran director sells every act of “The Lair’s” story with trenchant action with hardly any downtime to catch one’s breath in between because the next blood-laden blitz rollout is upon us in a blink of an eye.  Between the action, the anomalous characters, and the pulsating, downbeat synthesizer score that courses through its veins, “The Lair” leans itself toward being a callback to the late 80s-early 90’s last stand dogfight subgenre and you can’t one second cease your attention for a director who appreciates the narrative surprise more than anticipated predictability.

Become lured into “The Lair” now on Blu-ray home video from Acorn Media International, a UK distribution subsidiary of RLJ Entertainment.  The AVC encoded, 1080p high definition release is presented in a widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio.  The BD25 offers sold flexibility for a film with hefty amount of night shoots and action as potential compression problems seem to stay at bay without any severe noticeable banding, blocking, mosquito noise, etc., however, the details are quite flat with a smoother finish, often in the blur of the fast camera workflow and editing because of the action sequences, leaving depth on characters, as well as in the scene, at arm’s length with monocular vision.  The warm hint of chartreuse embedded grading offers industrials color tones with a rich grit of oxidized bunker steel.  Don’t adjust your audio dial on the release’s English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround sound track, the dialogue only sounds wonky because its deliberate Americanized dialect set at the forefront and prominent amongst the audio layers which has significant range and depth with explosions, rapid gunfire from different calibers, and the guttural growls of the creatures that echo nicely through the rear and side channels when under the bunker or even affixed in a slightly decreased volume of its form in the attack of the basecamp.  There were no interference blights with the audio track, such as hissing, popping, or other discernible issues.  Special features included only a making-of featurette with clipped interviews during the shoot with director Neil Marshall, actors Charlotte Kirk, Mark Strepan, Jamie Bamber, Jonathan Howard, Leon Ockenden, and others regarding their admiration for the project in different aspects.  Acorn Media’s physical release comes in a slightly larger Blu-ray snapper, typical of the UK releases, with the cover art featuring an up-close and personal look at the creature’s ugly mug.  The same art is also on the disc with no insert inside the snapper case.  The release comes region B locked with a runtime of 97 minutes and is certified 15 for strong gory violence, language, and threat.  If you can stomach the fatuity at times, “The Lair” is a fast paced and staunch creature feature with a bunker full of gore.

“The Lair” Has a Deadly Secret!  Blu-ray Now Available!  

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!