Category Archives: Just fucking awesome

Ever Get the Feeling that Your Downhill Relationship is an Endless EVIL Loop? “Brightwood” reviewed! (Cinephobia Releasing / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Brightwood” available on DVD August 22nd!  

Jen and Dan have been a couple for a long time.  A stupid long time.  Such a long time, Jen has come to loathe Dan for everything he is worth.  On the other hand, Dan self-deprecates himself into submission despite his love for Jen, even a loveless, spit firing Jen.  When the two go for a run, hashing out the contentious night before, Jen heads for the pond to run laps around Dan in avoidance.  Having circled around a few times, Jen realizes the once exit trail from the pond, the trail she run through to the pond, is now no longer visible.  Perplexed, she voices her concern to Dan who also can’t seem to find the exit trail and every attempt to navigate through the surrounding forest reverts in them being brought back to the pond.  With no way to escape a dead cell service zone, the couple realize their not alone when they come across different versions of themselves stuck on a time loop from the very beginning moment the quarreling couple first ran onto the pond circuit to the future, disheveled versions that no longer have humanity.

Strained relationships and cosmic horror go hand-in-hand.  Or, at least, sometimes they feel like they do with an endless and revolving stagnation of being one with another as the hatred for the other and the fear of being alone cancel out any promise of an amiable or favorable solution.  Instead, staying put seems safe albeit the loop around effect of revising old and reoccurring snags that keep the relationship stale and hopeless instead of moving forward.  That’s possibly how writer-director Dane Elcar sees the suffocating time warping scenario playout symbolized in his debut cosmic horror feature “Brightwood.”  Based off and remade from Elcar’s 2018 20-minute short film entitled “The Pond,” anxiety riddles an already one-sided contempt couple who can’t find the path out of not only the pond but also their relationship in the thriller that’s peppered with dark comedy.  The 2022 feature, filmed around Egbert Lake in New Jersey, is produced by the director as well as star Max Woertendyke under Noble Gas Media productions presented by Media Moove and the LLC, Pond Pictures. 

“Brightwood” has a whopping cast of two and, honestly, the story doesn’t require the need for more and the principals, who may be better described as neutral characters or possibly as far as anti-protagonists, run the gamut of moral principles depending on which in-time version of them we’re witnessing.  Dana Berger and Max Woertendyke play the beleaguered and one-sided cantankerous couple Jen and Dan who are unable to escape the mysterious circumstances of being trapped around and forced to endured permanent residence at the trail that encircles a nearby pond.   The couple’s relationship dilemma relates irreconciled differences once adoring lovers cross beyond into when the romance goes stale.  Jen notes this by saying how she hates Dan’s smell as if it just lingers in her nasal cavity.  Hate is sowed deep after years of living with the person she has come to despise because of Dan’s lack of gumption to be anything but mediocre.  Like a puppy trying to keep up with an odiously pissed off owner, Dan mostly fears losing the one woman who likely puts up with his inadequacies.  Berger and Woertendyke really do nail the exposition history while feeding into these dynamics to setup their characters’ climatic, life-altering stuck in an invisible cosmic cage.  Stuck, the word that best describes both a worn-out relationship and the unnatural situation they’re in.  Jen and Dan are stuck together, possibly forever, to work out couple complications or to give up and just terminate it all.  The actors tap into that cathartic back-and-forth by giving a range of therapeutic emotion performances that purges truth and guilt from their characters, like any relationship would in order to grow and/or move forward.

“Brightwood” is one diabolical tale of torment of being indefinitely stuck in relationship Hell.  Analogies and metaphors compile along the way in a parallel stream of unfavorable situations.  To add more layers, Dane Elcar throws them for a loop, literally.  Jen and Dan are copied over-and-over again in a replay of moments and time and each time they’re copied, new developments emerge in the time loop that were different from before, ascertained by previous versions of themselves.  Conceptionally, the idea has it’s convoluted moments in trying to make the characters appear derived from a particular staring point and interact with each other in various behavioral outcomes, but this particular subtenant, niche layer of the cosmic horror genre is innately difficult to represent but a moderate degree of success can be conveyed or extracted depending on how much you’re willing to be opened minded, or stretched the limits of reasonability, or just don’t plain give a damn about it making sense.  Films like Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s saturated cosmic horror “The Endless” or not-so-cosmic but tantamount to the concept is George Moïse’s “Counter Clockwise” are examples that work and work well to entertain a coherency and a consistency of repeated time.  If expecting a flashy and full-fledged effects driven feature, “Brightwood” is the opposite with a low-key approach that relies on staggering scenes to eventually overlap them, keeping the common core element of the pond as a center focus and turning it instantly in our minds as an undercurrent source of evil despite’s its serenity and idyllic nature.  Little do we know, our instincts might be more on point than lead to believe.

Psychotic endlessness is synonymous with loveless relationships in Dan Elcar’s “Brightwood” available on the 3rd DVD distributed by Cinephobia Releasing come August 22nd.  The single layer, interlaced DVD is presented in a widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio.  Image quality on the release displays a subtle overexposure, shot mostly with natural daylight, and desaturated video image not terribly rich with coloring.  Basic detail renders over nicely, exhibiting fair delineating and depth within a nature coloring scheme that micro blends characters into the foliage and mirror pond landscape.  Minor aliasing shows within the frame but the overall compression artefacts end there, decoding data at the higher end of where DVD’s can perform around 7-8 Mbps. “Brightwood” comes equipped with two English audio options – Dolby Digital Stereo 2.0 and a Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound.   Between the tracks, dialogue transcends the others in a very line heavy narrative to push the small cast along but there’s a suffice amount of leaf rustling and trail running ambience and range to expand the sound into the back channels.  Jason Cooks composed score a lightly melodious score mixed with harsh tones to keep viewers edgy with suspense.  English subtitles are available.  Bonus features include a feature commentary from director Dane Elcar and stars Max Woertendyke and Dana Berger, 11-minutes of deleted scenes, the original 17-minute short “The Pond,” and Cinephobia Releasing trailers.  The standard DVD sports “Brightwood” poster art with no insert on the inside and the disc art the same as the poster with release spec, which are a not rated feature and a runtime of 84 minutes with an unlisted regionality of region 1 playback.  “Brightwood” endures the subgenre’s stumbling blocks with concentrated acting stability and synergy between the 100% invested Dana Berger and Max Woertendyke who could literally perpetuate Dane Elcar’s vision endlessly.

“Brightwood” available on DVD August 22nd!  

House Music is EVIL’s Jam! “Rave” reviewed! (Scream Team Releasing / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Get High and Get Pumped for “Rave” on Blu-ray.

Free flowing Mimmi and her timid pal Lina are invited to an underground night club for one more illegal rave party before the building is vacated for unlawful occupation.  As the two dance the night away, Lina becomes steadily ill and as she tries for the bathroom, she begins to bleed from her skin.  Other rave goers begin to feel the same effects, spewing blood, dripping skin, and a melting away existence while the strobe lights unceasingly flicker and the deep house music pulsates into a fixed one-note bass.  Mimmi and another friend escape the party before even the first signs of the illness, hiding away to do a line cocaine, but when they’re followed by those turned into slow walking bags of oozing flesh, no longer resembling something human, her friend is brutal killed and she barely eludes the ill-fated ravers, becoming trapped inside by those liquifying creatures and a pair of masked individuals seemingly unaffected by what’s occurring around them.

Often times there comes a film that sneaks under the radar and may warrant a second watch for it to sink under the skin or into the recesses the brain’s grey matter.  For writer-director Nils Alatalo, his Swedish melt horror “Rave” is the epitome of context.  The 2020 released independent production, known as “Svartklubb” in the Swedish language, is Alatalo’s debut feature that catapults the filmmaker into the same melt movie categories held in reverence by fans of “Body Melt” or “Street Trash” while kissing the outer edges of vintage and cult iconic eurotrash from the 80’s.  “Rave” will be our consecutive watch, analyze, and review into body horror, following the more gore-gorging merge of man and machine of Davide Pesca’s “Re-Flesh” released last year.  “Rave” proclaims a more stylized and abstruse approach compared to Pesca’s grossly unconcealed transgressions of the body.  Haveri Film is the production company behind “Rave.”

“Rave” asynchronously follows two central characters beginning with the rave-reserved and dry-hesitant Lina before a switcheroo into dipping into the carefree, go-with-the-flow, drug-positive Mimmi.  Played correspondingly by Tuva Jagell (“Girls Lost”) and Isabelle Grill (“Midsommar”), the main principals are a dichotomizing pair of personalities mutually connected to each other by friendship and though Alatalo ultimately decides not to fully explore the intimacies of a cherished bond in post-climax, there’s certainly a relatability audiences will be able to understand amongst their own friendship terms, such as seemingly tired of the meekness or revel in being the dominating friend, as being fostered with empowerment, or on the opposite side of the spectrum, needing a friend to take charge, provide reassures, and be a beacon of exuberance.   However, all the letting go on inhibitions come at a cost, a deadly one at that, and when they essentially are the peak of being identical for perhaps the first time in their lives together, the closeness of Lina and Mimmi become mortally unraveled by what could be described as pure, unadulterated Hell.  What also unravels is their friendship in the midst of drugs coursing through their bloodstream and their minds have shutoff with the trance rhythm of the house music, both aspects of which put up walls to deflect the danger from within and around them, making them clueless to the clues.  Jagell and Grill’s performances have more physical importance than whatever come be extracted from their slim dialogue written for the characters and the two young actresses convert themselves into the roles of psychedelic terror. “Rave’s” partygoers round out with Victor Iván, Sophie Lücke, Ebba Gangoura, Sebastian Norén, Christer Wahlberg, and Celina Braute.

“Rave” is a flash of brilliance tightly confined and bottlenecked to not be bigger than needed by squeezing to contain its claustrophobic purgatory that’s wrapped like a nightmare on molly.  “Rave” is also not a straightforward line of coke, glow sticks, and fleshy fluid fiends within what is an ambiguous narrative that requires an open mind to its reverence for elder Euro horror.  That’s what I suspect Alatalo was shooting for here, an immense adoration and respect for European horror peppered with inspirations from American filmmakers as well.  Soft brilliance of Dario Armento lighting, silhouette eeriness of Lamberto Bava cinematography, and the slow bloodletting of Lucio Fulci’s gore represent the best qualities of same continental yore while including a John Carpenter story-ingrained synth score and paying homage to American melt horror filmmakers, such as J. Michael Muro, Gregory Lamberson, and Philip Brophy to name a few, with his own rendition of what it means to have skin slink and blood secrete from inside the body out.  While the first viewing doesn’t quite stimulate immediately the senses with its slow burn dread, ambiguous cause and effect, and dialogue adverse script, “Rave” glues itself to the psyche and lingers in that cranial netherworld that nags and gnaws at the subconscious and does it enough that a second viewing becomes necessary.  Instantly, piecing together the puzzle through a second visual overlay can jumpstart the engines on what exactly we’re witnessing – Alatalo’s patience with the structure, meticulous details in the scene, and admiration for the genre.  “Rave” is also an indie picture on a budget but considering the composition of the final product, “Rave” strongly accomplishes a persistent uneasiness without exposition that parallels subtle strikes of sharp, startling dread only seen by a handful of filmmakers.    

A whole new version of neon dead arrives onto a special edition Blu-ray of Nils Alatalo’s “Rave” from Scream Team Releasing.  The AVC encoded, 1080p high definition, BD25 presents the film in a widescreen 1:78:1 aspect ratio, scaled down from the original aspect ratio of Univision 2.00:1 causing some minor compressed looking scenes.  Not to be deterred, the range of scene setups under the cinematography trio of Jakob Ivar Ekvall, Amelia Finngåård, and Gustav Råström offer an eclectic mix often in the humblest of fashions, such as using just a camera flashlight in a windowless room or the red and blue neon lighting through fog machine.  Silhouettes delineate nicely on screen with the use of backlighting and camera angles.  Framing is a hit or miss coupled with energetic editing, but the overall atmosphere is agreeably chafed with tension.  Minor banding and some aliasing creep out as artifact side effects of a dark-laden story with some of the quicker moments evading the slimy-secretors through the building trying to keep up through the decoding of data.  The compression issues are not terribly invasive during viewing, but they are annoying consistent and notifiable.  The Swedish uncompressed LPCM 5.1 surround mix has lossless binding and sounds really good environmentally albeit many of the tracks are done in post, such as some of the exterior dialogues, which sound natural but softer in the scene, and the itemized milieu ambience.  The Joakim Martinsson and Christer Wahlberg house music and soundtrack are the real victors here integrated into “Rave’s” overall sound design of having the discordant industrial rhythms and irregularities become an antagonistic competitor breathing through the back and side channels, reminiscent of how intrinsic Giuliano Sorgini’s score heightened the intensity of the impending zombie attack.  English subtitles are optionally available.  Bonus features include an English commentary by director Nils Alatalo providing insight on nearly every shot, a soundtrack featurette alternating between Joakim Martinsson and Christer Wahlberg discussing and sample their individualized tracks, a making of montage with soundtrack only, and the film’s trailer.  The physical characteristics of the release contain a beautifully macabre composite in neon coloring and lace slipped into a standard Blu-ray snapper with latch.  Front cover is reversible with a more disheveled and strung-out Isabelle Grill looking blankly upward, which has a variation of her facial posture on the factory-distributed cover.  Disc art contains one of the gloppy ghouls bathed in red with a black background.  “Rave” release comes region free, not rated, and has a runtime of a brisk 72 minutes.  A slow burn melt movie capturing the essence of “Rave” to the grave.

Get High and Get Pumped for “Rave” on Blu-ray.

EVIL Has the Right to Remain Dead! “Magic Cop” reviewed! (88 Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

No Two-Bit Magician In ‘Magic Cop” on Blu-ray!  

Hong Kong cops are confounded by a chaotic drug bust when learning that their female suspect, who had managed to overpower an entire unit of male officers and even take a bullet ambling deadpan into the streets, had died 7 days prior.  An outlying officer, and practicing Taoist, Uncle Feng is called to Hong Kong to not only quickly solve the narcotic crime but also investigate the unnatural properties of the case.  Feng is accompanied by his city eager niece Lin and two Hong Kong cops, a Taoist devotee and skeptic of Ancient Chinese spiritual mythologies.  Together, they track the drug trail to The Sorceress, a Japanese witch with powers that rival Feng and that can resurrect the dead into zombies and vampires to do her bidding, such as trafficking narcotics.  When the investigation closes in her business, The Sorceress and her right arm, skilled fighter plan to remove the only man worthy of stopping her.

Fans of Ricky Lau’s “Mr. Vampire” will once again be amazed and entertained by the fantastical and mystical action of Stephen Tung Wai’s “Magic Cop.”  Tung, a fellow martial artist and stunt man who had roles in “The Fatal Flying Guillotine” and John Woo’s “Hard Boiled,” helms his debut directorial penned by Chi-Leung Shum (“Vampire vs Vampire”) and the longtime Stephen Chow script writer Kan-Cheung Tsang (“Shaolin Soccer,” “Kung-Fu Hustle”).  The screenwriting duo brought lighting quick comedy to the mostly fictionally invented yet sprinkled with slivers of hard-pressed veracity and definitive entertaining occultism and what resulted resurrected “Mr. Vampire” semblance out of the being a period piece and into the modern day, backdropped in the year of 1990 when the film was released.  Long rumored to be the fifth sequel of the “Mr. Vampire” franchise, “Magic Cop” is a coproduction between Movie Impact Limited, Millifame Productions Limited, and Media Asia Film with star Ching-Ying Lam producing.

“Magic Cop,” and even “Mr. Vampire,” wouldn’t have such a cult following if it wasn’t for the Vulcan eyebrows and thin mustache of Ching-Ying Lam in costume.  The short-statured, Shanghai-born Lam delivers the same vigorous choreography and tranquil demeanor to this particularly stoic character of Uncle Feng, a Taoist practitioner to essentially wrangle unruly entities and please the spirits in the in-between our world.  Feng is old world and finds himself in surrounded by modernism when in Hong Kong, goaded by the young lead sergeant attached the case.  Practical as well as disrespectful, Sgt. Lam (Wilson Lam, “Ghost for Sale”) epitomizes today’s, or rather back then the 1990’s, modern man who has forgotten tradition and deference to those who came before.  Though padded with a fair amount of comedy coursing throughout, balanced against the impeccably edited tango fight sequences, Sgt’ Lam’s partner, known only as Sgt. 2237 played by “Centipede Horror’s” Kiu-Wai Miu, risibly wants to understudy Uncle Feng’s powers while Feng’s niece Lin, played by Mei-Wah Wong of “The Chinese Ghostbusters,” provides the subtle and quirky opposite sex that catches of the philandering eyes of Sgt. Lam.  The ragtag quartet of influx mindsets and personalities become challenged by their single common goal, to stop whoever is behind breathing life into the formidable dead and stop the unorthodox method of drug smuggling.  Former Japanese bodybuilder Michiko Nishwaki (“City Cops”) embodied that very dark magic antagonist.  Nishiwaki handles The Sorceress character with ease despite not having a surfeit army under her thumb; instead, this forces Nishiwaki to become the entire villain body with the slight, full-contact support for her right-hand bodyguard (Billy Chow, “Future Cops”) and a couple of undead lackeys, including Frankie Chi-Leung Chan of “Riki-Oh.”  “Magic Cop’s” cast rounds out completely with well-versed and seasoned, late actor Wu Ma (“Mr. Vampire,” “Return of the Demon”) as the chief inspector polarized in a complicated history with Uncle Feng.

What director Stephen Tung Wai boils down in essence is another variation of good executants of spirit humbled caretakers versus the wicked necromancers existing inside the fabric of the highly praised and cult-following “Mr. Vampire” universe.  Frankly, there’s nothing wrong with that derivativity since Ching-Ying Lam, Mr. Vampire himself, produces and stars as the titular hero.  Lam can conjure whatever-the-hell he wants in order to battle Hell itself.   “Magic Cop” is also a well-made, entertaining story, balanced between the contest wizardry, slapstick comedy, and the character dynamics, and stacked with improbable yet gratifying step-intensive fight orchestration that has gawked early martial arts films a wonder to behold and continues to do so to today but now trickles with pizzazz more-after-more due to put in place industry safety measures.  “Magic Cop” contains that lost art of potentially hazardous palatable physicality that beguiles more than the movie’s faux magic exhibited on screen.  To add to the authenticity, very little painted composited visual effects were used with makeup and the actors doing much of the heavy lifting with the editing team of Ting-Hung Kuo and Kee Charm Wu in full cut-and-paste fortifying mode to button up each sequence with comprehendible continuity of each punch, kick, and magical chopsocky.  One overtone made well known in “Magic Cop” is the unfillable chasms between old and new, respect and disrespect, and myth and science from whence solves no problems until some unified common ground can be reached in order to succeed, in this case, to stop a bitch of a witch.    

An age-resistance 35mm print scanned onto a buffed 2K Blu-ray that extracts the best print elements to-date. The AVC encoded, 1080p, Blu-ray presents Stephen Tung Wai’s picture in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio. A fine-tooth comb through the celluloid couldn’t unveil any major issue with the 88 Films release. Colors are richly grafted within the sabulous surfaces that are exceedingly defined with delimited, shadow-creating depth. Decoding speeds average around 35Mbps on a BD50, securing categorical choiceness amongst other releases and formats (that is until the potential 4K release). The release comes packed with four audio options to explore: The original Cantonese DTS-HD master audio 2.0 mix, a Cantonese DTS-HD 2.0 home video mix, an English DTS-HD 5.1 master audio dub, and an English DTS-HD 2.0 dub. Between the variated audio mixes, we preferred the original Cantonese DTS-HD 2.0 due to its cadence with the image and welcoming exactness through the lossless compression process. You can make do with the other three options, but the fidelity is much better with the original mix and only anti-subtitle sectarians would be pleased with an English dub. English subtitles are optional and synch well the dialogue but be prepared to speed read as the pacing is quick much like the dialect. Software special features include an audio commentary with Hong Kong film experts Frank Djeng and Marc Walkow, an alternate, standard definition Taiwanese cut of the film with alternate score, an interview with director Stephen Tung Wai, image gallery, and trailer. Endowed with a limited-edition, cardboard slipcover, the dark green Blu-ray snapper has newly illustrated, front cover artwork by Manchester graphic designer and 88 Films resident artist Sean Longmore, which is also on the cardboard O-slip. The reversible cover art has a reproduction of the original Hong Kong poster art. Stuffed in the insert is a mini-folded poster of Longmore’s front cover and a disc art, a scene moment captured in spherical rotunda, of the opening sequence. Available with a regional playback limited to A and B, the 88 Films release is not rated and has a runtime of 88 minutes. ‘Magic Cop, perhaps, wasn’t the sole proprietor of influence but certainly had a black talisman plying hand in the substrata of more Western favorites like “Big Trouble in Little China” and is a crucial cornerstone in representing the best of the Hong Kong Golden Age of cinema.

No Two-Bit Magician In ‘Magic Cop” on Blu-ray!  

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!  

The Stillness, the Quiet, and the Darkness evokes EVIL to Home In. “Skinamarink” reviewed! (Acorn Media International / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

The Kids Aren’t All Right in “Skinamarink” on Blu-ray!

A night of silence is disturbed when a young boy, Kevin, falls down the stairs of his two story home.  Rushed to the hospital to return to the same silence-soaked house, the restless boy and his sister Kaylee search for their dad who has suddenly vanished from his bedroom.  Doors, windows, and even the bathroom toilet has strangely disappeared right from sight.  Feeling scarred under the cover of isolated darkness, the siblings head downstairs to sleep on the couch softly lit b0 the fluorescent glow of the television set.  As they watch old cartoons, crayon, and build with large Legos, while catching a few ZZZs in between, strange noises resonate through the home, floor based objects are found stuck onto the walls and ceilings, and a twisted, omnipresent voice slips the siblings commands that exposes them the darkness from within the house.

Schismatically different from any other spine-taut chills ever experienced before, Kyle Edward Ball’s written-and-directed 2022 Shudder exclusive “Skinamarink” is no joyful and innocent children’s song in the filmmaker’s debut feature film.  Based and expanded upon Ball’s 2020 short film entitled “Heck,” viewers will be enveloped and swallowed by the very core of childhood fears that plays like a fever dream, or a distant nightmare, where faces are a blur, spatial direction is nothing more than theoretical concept, and the voices around us are distorted, muffled, and cold.  “Skinamarink” offers little warmth under constant blanket of darkness and leaves no room for hope when parents are removed from the picture.  What’s Ball leaves behind is primordial and innate terror that rarely can be seen straightforward and lucid.  The Canadian picture, which was filmed in Ball’s childhood home in Alberta, is a micro-budget production of ERO Picture Company, distributed by Bayview Entertainment, Shudder, and IFC Midnight, crowdfunded by Seed & Spark contributors and produced by “Texas Road” producer, Dylan Pearce.

Shot over the course of a week’s time, “Skinamarink” works more like CCTV footage recording the static surroundings within the scope of the lens.  The cast is small, rarely visible, and when visible, they are often obscured or never directly focused upon to mint atmospheric dread.  Two parents.  Two children.  A nuclear family becomes the objective of an omnipresent, ominous presence, but there are concerning questions about the integrity of the family that Ball incites with clues of broken household.  Father and mother briefly make an appearance, or with one of them just their voice, throughout the course of the night, restricted their attendance exclusively around the children’s perspective that makes viewers shrink and become engulfed in childish fears – sometimes they are adult fears as well – of the dark and of being separated from parents.  Lucas Paul and Dali Rose Tetreault as kids Kevin and Kaylee kill their seldomly seen performances with the patter of little feet running through the house and up-and-down stairs, their soft, angelic voices whispering to each other and calling out for their father, and when briefly in frame, or at least the back of their heads, they manage to complete the succinct shot just in the way Ball intends to secrete fear from our every pore amongst the quiet and stillness.  “Skinamarink” is not a character-driven film in the least as Ball cherishes a chilling atmospheric horror so father (Ross Paul, Lucas’s real life dad) and mother (Jamie Hill, “Grotesque”) receive what essentially is cameo roles to establish a feeling of lost when they’re gone and are perhaps the easiest roles the two actors have ever taken and turn out to be the most eerily effective on screen and over the audio track.

“Skinamarink” experiments more with surroundings, audio and visual senses, and common inborn anxieties rather than progressed by traditional methods of character dynamics and that is where the film will be conflict-ridden and divisive amongst the niche group of diehard horror fans.  General audiences will find “Skinamarink” to be a bore without much popcorn pageantry to keep short-attention spans entertained and a disembodied villain.  Slow burn horror usually has an elevated element to it and Kyle Edward Ball certainly incorporates an open for interpretation access door for the deep-dive genre conspiratorialists to work overtime on reasoning and explaining “Skinamarink” to the masses still trying to process what they just experienced themselves after watching the film.  Theories will run amok with the most prominent being Kevin’s fall that reduced him to a coma state and what we experience is all in Kevin’s conscious-cracked cerebrum trying attempting interpret, at best guess, the dissolution of mom and dad’s relationship.  Again, this is just a theory as Ball aims for ambiguity to fester fathomable, one-solution explanations.   Perhaps in a type of narrative the world is not ready for, but in my opinion, “Skinamarink” fills in what is void from modern day horror, a uniquely fresh and chance-taking pervasive eidolon scare package to revitalize genre numbness with slow burn phobias.

An original parapsychological paralyzer, “Skinamarink” arrives on a Blu-ray home video courtesy of Acorn Media International, the acquired UK distribution company of RLJ Entertainment.  Presented in a widescreen aspect ratio of 2.39:1, the AVC encoded BD25 sustains a purposefully intended lo-fi A/V feature, set to the date tune of 1995, much like when SOV quality films were abundantly popular because of their cost value and accessibility.  If you’re expecting depth of detail, you won’t get it from “Skinamarink’s” dense static approach that all but eliminates object definition.  Delineation is scarce to an effective scare tactic to which Ball tones the film; yet, the static is not, for lack of a better word, static as the current changes within the blips, increasing and decreasing visibility for desired poltergeist potency, if poltergeist is what we want to call it.  Set entirely in nighttime, sleepy home, the basking glow of tube television is the only semblance of color that emits a faint blue luminous while antiquated cartoons provide flat caricature coloring.  Certain scenes are shot in obvious night vision with the spherical focus that becomes unnatural in the frame, but there’s really nothing natural about Ball’s auteur style.  The lo-fi style choice continues into the English DTS-HD 5.1 surround mix that doesn’t exercise every channel.  Instead, we’re back to canned content with intentional hissing, popping, and distorted tracks.  Aside from a couple of innate audio recordings of a squeaking closet door, all the other ambient audio and dialogue is done after the fact in post-production to be rendered appropriately misshaped and muddled.  There’s also no score, retaining realism of a hushed house sound design to pay heed to soft footsteps and other delicate and mortifying milieu noises.  Depending on your audio setup, subtitles may be your friend here as the whispers are so low, they’re nearly inaudible.  There are a handful of scenes that have burned in English subtitles for that very reason, but full menu English captioning is available too for the minute amount of dialogue.  Special features only include an audio commentary track with the director and director of photography Jamie McRae.  Acorn Media’s release mirrors the U.S.’s RLJ Entertainment’s Blu-ray with the exception of a slightly thicker Blu-ray snapper. The front cover denotes essentially what to expect in the future, a low-resolution and a blue-toned, dark, inverted screenshot image of the young boy; this scene also translates to the disc art.  Encoded with a region B playback, “Skinamarink” comes UK certified 15 for strong horror and sustained threat in its 100-minute runtime.  Take my advice:  there’s nothing quite like “Skinamarink” outside the experimental gallimaufry but it’s sleepy time nature should not be viewed at the late-night weary hours or else it’ll lull you into a nightmare of your own.

The Kids Aren’t All Right in “Skinamarink” on Blu-ray!