Category Archives: psychological horror

Experimental, Recreational Drug Use in College has Killer, EVIL Effects! “Blue Suneshine” reviewed! (Synapse Films / 3-Disc 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and CD Limited Edition Set)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Trip Out on Synapse’s Limited Edition “Blue Sunshine”

A party between friends turns deadly when one of them goes into a violent frenzy after being reveled his loss of all his hair.  Blamed for the murders, floating through life Jerry Zipkin is evading police investigators while also trying to connect the pieces on why a good friend of his would suddenly turn into a madman with no body hair and with five times the strength of any ordinary man.  His own investigation leads him to Blue Sunshine, an LSD variant connected to every transgressive event similar to the party, and at the center of it all is congressional frontrunner Edward Flemming who peddled Blue Sunshine 10 years ago at Stanford.  The latent consequence is now slowly surfacing to a head and more people are starting to experience the aggressive, alopecia effects, all Zipkin has to do to prove his innocent and a major ticking timebomb is to take a sample from a living specimen to show aberrant chromosome damage caused by the designer drug. 

Before becoming outed and investigated that the U.S. government experimented LSD on human subjects and it’s unknown but possible dormant side effects of years later, writer-director Jeff Lieberman put theory into sensationalized practicality with his post-psychedelic horror “Blue Sunshine” that turned ordinary, friendly people into headache-induced phonophobia sufferers and hairless, homicidal maniacs with super strength.  Lieberman’s 1977 released film snugs in between his killer Earthworm creature feature “Squirm” and one of the better backwoods slashers titled “Just Before Dawn,” tackling with themes of adverse effects from manmade drugs, political corruption, and to never judge a book by its cover.  The film is produced by “Squirm’s” George Manasse with “He Knows Your Alone” and “The Clairvoyant” producers Edgar Lansbury and Joseph Beruh serving as executive producers on the Ellanby Films production.

While the plot point that pushes Jerry Zipkin in the direction of investigation of the sudden fury and death surrounding his friend treads a threadbare rope with little background to suggest Zipkin is characteristically dedicated, loyal, curious, or all of the above to find out what happened, Zalman King’s overall performance as the path unaffixed Zipkin overshadows those missing background pieces and motivations.  In more key precise terms, Lieberman’s misdirection toward King’s erratic and strange behavior puts a lot of the focus on Zipkin rather than obvious derangement of the latent LSD maniacs with corrupted chromosomes in what was meant to puzzle the audiences in believing Zipkin himself might be the loose cannon cause behind the murders or, even perhaps, another ignorant victim of blue sunshine, which the latter would have been more intriguing and powerfully motivating for the Zipkin character as what drives him to solve the mystery and save himself.  None of the relationship resolve any type of secure or genuine interactions, specifically with Alicia Sweeney (Deborah Winters, “Tarantulas:  The Deadly Cargo”) with an unrealistic strong undying love for Zipkin despite only knowing him for a couple of months and the entire Stanford contingent from a decade earlier who Zipkin was able to easily link together within a matter of seconds of either examining a bloody crime scene or meeting a pair of the blue sunshine fiends.  One of the better, solid bonds is between the will-do-what-it-takes congress candidate Ed Flemming (Mark Goddard, Lost in Space) and his towering former college football buddy Wayne Mulligan (Ray Young, “Blood of Dracula’s Castle”) who becomes Flemming’s 6’6” advisor and bodyguard.  While might not seem like a well-rounded bond, Flemming and Mulligan have something tangible one can grab and understand when compared to other dynamic relationships that float in arbitrary.   Robert Walden (“Rage”), Charles Siebert (“Tarantulas:  The Deadly Cargo”), Ann Cooper, and Stefan Gierasch (“Carrie”) costar. 

“Blue Sunshine’s” premise has long stood the test of time because its more relatable now than ever as scientists and medical experts are in a fluid state of studying the effects of drugs digested, snorted, injected, or smoked weeks, months, years, and decades ago.  This premise also translates over to contaminants that cause sicknesses, such as the link between asbestos and cancer were tumors form years after exposure.  Lieberman catches wind early of the dangerous latent effects and manipulates it for the basis his film that is more fact than fiction.  Lieberman’s ability to minimize assurances on who is transfiguring into a killer is all in his characterizing nuances, shading in gray areas with excellently crafted character profile vignettes in between the opening credits that instill suspicion, fear, and some unknown stemmed danger ahead.  The unique setup is the filmmaker’s only real unconventional course in the narrative that plays out mostly a routine hand in a natural style albeit the surrealism of extreme closeups and angles on bald headed balefulness when the rage takes over or the slow, insidious madness that seeps into Zipkin’s mind causing hallucinations to exact an audience experiencing disturbance in the envisaged air.  Engaging and self-security eviscerating, “Blue Sunshine” is carbonated madness in a bottle, shook up and ready to pop. 

Synapse continues to upgrade their catalogue with Blue Sunshine next on the augmentation block with a new and mighty 3-disc Blu-ray and 4K UHD restoration release.  Presented in Dolby Vision HDR10, the restoration of the original 35mm camera negative sees it’s 4K transfer compressed with a HEVC codec that produces 2160p and is stored onto a BD100 while the Blu-ray is a compressed AVC, 1080p resolution, on a BD50.  The restoration will blow you away with diffused color palette and organic details that by far are the best they’ve ever looked with a balanced, natural grain level that keeps the speckling down in darker portions of the film to retain inkiness while securing the authenticity of the film stock without any smoothing over and artificial enhancements.  Vivid coloring, immersive details, and natural skin tones, when not softly grayed by the drug’s effects, throughout are appreciatively stable with no qualitative loss between cuts, creating a pleasurable and seamless visual experience on both formats.  Each format comes with two English audio options, a lossless DTS-HD master audio 5.1 surround sound, supervised and approved by director Jeff Lieberman, and a lossless DTS-HD master audio original theatrical mono 2.0.  While the amplification of the same sound output through the dual channels is inviting for purist, I highly recommend the immersive 5.1 surround sound that retains the genuine article of audio fidelity.   Charlie Gross’s orchestral strings instruments, percussive gongs, and synthesizing score fully engrosses the characters and audiences alike into a fold of unnerving, lingering tingles that evoke the monstrous maniac effect possibilities beyond the Jerry Zipkin tale.  Dialogue renders over with fine precision that hangs on every word and sentence with no hissing and crackling to obstruct it’s sweeping clarity.  A bountiful amount of Mind-Altering special features that fill this limited to 4000 copies set that include a new feature prologue introduction with director Jeff Lieberman.  There are two audio commentaries, an archived 2003 interview with Lieberman, a Channel Z Fantasy Film Festival ”Lieberman on Lieberman” interview with the director hosted by “Sleepwalkers” Mick Garris, a Q&A video from the Fantasia Film Festival 4K premiere moderated by Michael Gingold and Lieberman, an anti-drug scare-film “LSD-25” from 1967 and “LSD:  Insight or Insanity?” From 1968 from the American Genre Film Archive, Jeff Leiberman’s first film “The Ringer” with two cuts of the film, the original uncut version from the projection print source and the final release from the remastered Synapse Films 4K transfer with audio commentary included on the uncut version by Jeff Leiberman and moderator Howard S. Berger, still gallery and theatrical trailers. Synapse’s limited-edition boxset is nothing you’ve ever seen before from the company with not only a rigid slipbox case but there’s also a cardboard O-slipcover, both housing the clear, inch-thick Blu-ray Amaray case and both showcasing new illustrative, compositional, air brushed artwork of some of the key character scenes and expressions by Wes Benscoter, which is a real thing of beauty. The Amaray cover art is the regular 70’s grade cover art seen on previous releases from DVD to Blu-ray with a reverse side an image of the tripped-out Ed Flemming icon photo of his drug peddling days at Stanford. Overlapping 4K and Blu-ray discs display graphic presses in story moment compositions, though I don’t recall a half-naked woman in the film yet is on the cover. Not quite yet done with the bonus material, the 3rd disc is a 13-track Soundtrack CD of the score and laid overtop is the 11-page liner note booklet from Jeff Lieberman’s 2020 memoir “Day of the Living Me: Adventures of a Subversive Cult Filmmaker From the Golden Age,” plus the CD track listing, production credits, and special thanks on the backside. A reproduction of the original one sheet poster is stored in the insert as a mini-folded poster along with Synapse’s 2024 catalogue for your perusing pleasure. The rated-R film has a runtime of 95 minutes, and the limited edition doesn’t limit itself to a confined playback with region free decoding.

Last Rites: In order to snag a copy of this stellar Synapse set, muscles are required as this heavy boxset feels like 5lbs of software and hardware special features regarding Jeff Leiberman’s drugs-are-bad thriller “Blue Sunshine” with chrome dome, blank-stare killers doing the dormant bidding of 10-years-old recessed LSD.

Trip Out on Synapse’s Limited Edition “Blue Sunshine”

Next Step in Evolution Leads to EVIL’s War Against the Common Man. “Scanners” reviewed! (Second Sight / 4K UHD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Scanners” 4K is Head Popping Good! Buy it Here!

Dr. Paul Ruth is a ConSec scientist, the head of the private contract weapons department on the “Scanner” project.  A Scanner is a highly developed human with psychic and telekinetic powers able to control and damage the minds of others through the nervous system.   Ruth’s latest case is Cameron Vale, a vagrant helped by Ruth to control his self-detriment powers with the use of a scanning suppressive drug known as ephemerol.  When one of Ruth’s past subjects, a renegade Scanner known as Revok, infiltrates and assassinates a live public demonstration of the Scanner project with the intent to wage war on non-Scanners, Ruth’s only hope is to convince to conscript Vale to join the fight and infiltrate against Revok who kills any Scanner who doesn’t join his growing army.  Vale’s search for Revok leads him to learn of a treacherous mole within ConSec and that ephemerol is being weaponized against the normal human race.

On the heels of our Second Sight 4K review of David Cronenberg’s 1979 film “The Brood,” Cronenberg’s following film “Scanners” released two years later in 1981 ups the ante in elaborate special effects and high conceptual themes twirling around in a bowl of body horror soup and is now also available on 4K UHD from the UK Second Sight label!  Like “The Brood,” Cronenberg writes-and-direct a dysphoric film in his birth country of Canadian, per his normal track record of principal production countries, specifically shooting in in the urban and greater areas of Québec, Canada.  The first film of a trilogy, to which Cronenberg did not return to direct the subsequent sequels with both films released a decade later in 1991 and helmed by “Screamers” director Christian Duguay, is a production of the  CFDC (Canadian Film Development Corporation), Filmplan International, and Montreal Trust Company of Canada with Pierre David and Claude Héroux both returning from “The Brood” as executive producer and producer, respectively. 

The face of Scanners has been and always will be Michael Ironside, included on most poster and home video release stills and artworks of a flaringly distorted Ironside as Revok deep in a frighteningly milky-white eyed scanner turbulence.  The “Total Recall” and “Starship Troopers” actor has a face the camera loves, especially in an antagonistic role with Ironside’s gifted devilish grin, dagger eyes, and sarcastic stoic expressions.  However, he is not the heroic lead of Cronenberg’s “Scanners.”  Ironside is not even in the top three headlining credits.  That foremost distinction is consumed by Stephen Lack (“Perfect Strangers,” “Dead Ringers”) in the Cameron Vale role and Lack’s performance is indicative of his name in a completely overshadowed protagonist role.  Lack’s monotonic bordering dangerously to catatonic presence is swallowed up by Ironside who has fewer scenes but instills punchier passion toward his character’s rebellion against humanity cause, plus the contour control over his mannerism and expressions are impeccably cinematic  There are other actors credited ahead of Ironside, beginning with the greatly dramatical Patrick McGoohan (“Escape from Alcatraz”) as the pro-scanner ally Dr. Paul Ruth whose commanding the Vale assignment, “The Clown Murders’” Lawrence Dane as a traitorous ConSec company man Keller in Revok’s pocket lining, and “The Psychic’s” Jennifer O’Neill as fellow pacificist scanner and Vale love interest Kim Obrist.  Each actor finds their individual, attributable, character voice while giving into the required performance with commitment, a sentiment that was not shared by Lack in a strong leading man contender against the forces that face him or scan his mental space.  “Scanners” rounds out the cat with Robert A. Silverman (“The Brood,” “Jason X”), Mavor Moore (“Heavy Metal”),  Fred Doederlein (“Shivers”), Adam Ludwig (“Short Circuit 2”), and Victor Desy (“Rabid”) with that iconic head explosion scene.

To follow up “The Brood” almost right on its heels with “Scanners,” David Cronenberg’s creative synapses were just thunder stroking on all cylinders with ways to evolve mankind into next level grimdark science fiction.  The simple premise of the advanced human condition sparking a potential war between normal man and Scanner man with a private weapons developer in the middle, perhaps inadvertently or intentionally coaxing a new breed of man, is elevated by the special effects of Gary Zeller (“Visiting Hours, “Amityville II: The Possession”) and the makeup alley-oop by Dick Smith (“The Exorcist”) to give audiences those head-exploding, vein-popping, fire-starting special effects that are sear so well into the mind they’re virtually unerasable from the mind, as if real life scanners were implementing the reel into the occipital lobes themselves.  Plot devices like these inarguably saturate the cloak-and-dagger, on-the-run, and species-eradicating storyline with leadup anticipation, building suspense through the truth and lies of Vale’s assignment as well as Vale understanding and, ultimately, accepting his gift rather than seeing it as a burden or a blight to his being.  Unlike “The Brood,” “Scanners” leans more into the physical method of effects with not only the pulsing veins and the white contact lenses but Cronenberg amps up the pyrotechnics with violent and fiery explosions, both of which do a number of the body with blunt invisible force ravaging soft tissue, and also sets ablaze characters’ specific, isolated areas for visual awe and a presentation of a whole new possibility dimension plane of the mind and body that can create, endure, and eventually destroy.   

“Scanners” rounds out the pair of Second Sight’s David Cronenberg releases onto 4K UHD, in conjunction with “The Brood.” The HEVC encoded, 2160p ultra high-definition, BD100 houses the director approved 4K restoration transfer, presented in Dolby Vision HDR10 and in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio. Previous HD releases favored a slightly anemic image with a tilted color grading that never approached the aesthetics of the cinematic era. Second Sight improves on this with a present in time natural grading true to the late 70s into the early 80s. Healthy, organic grain filter through with an agreeable measure, never overtaking the details that effect upon texture and substance, such as from the massive head explosion with all the intricate gory bits of hair and flesh flying splattering about make for ideal visual immersion to the more macrolevel of inside circuitry when Vale enters the computerized nervous system through scanning. Skin tones render over organically with no flashes of a slightly orange tinge as in previous releases, corrected to overall completed neatness on the finer points. An English DTS-HD 5.1 master audio and a LPCM 1.0 mono consummate the release with fidelity honoring mixes. The surround sound offers a constructed immersive dynamic riddled with explosions and a feverish Howard Shore score engulfing the echoing of the scanner waves to denote the telekinetic or psychic use, but the mono track offers something far greater than any retroactive designed immersion track could offer, a genuine, unforced mix. Both tracks offer clean, robust dialogue with a clarity to match. English subtitles are available on both. Special features include a new audio commentary by Canadian film writer Caelum Vatnsdal and a second audio commentary by film academic William Beard. If comprehensive interviews straight for the horses’ mouths are your thing, than Second Sight has you covered with new and archive interviews with Stephen Lack My Art Keeps Me Sane, Michael Ironside A Method in His Madness, Lawrence Dane Bad Guy Dane, cinematographer Mark Irwin The Eye of Scanners, composer Howard Shore Mind Fragments, executive producer Pierre David The Chaos of Scanners, makeup artist Stephen Duplus Exploding Brains & Popping Veins, and with makeup effects artist Chris Walas Monster Kid. A new visual essay by Tim Coleman Cronenberg’s Tech Babies cabooses the special features. Encased in a traditional back UHD Amaray, the new artwork also sports a prominent and looming Michael Ironside as a raging scanner Revok but now Stephen Lack has presence space with his own iconic and disturbing moment from the film now on the front cover, as the little spoon of course. The companion standard Second Sight release of “Scanners” is UK certified 18, has a runtime of 103 minutes, and is region free!

Last Rites: “Scanners” never looked so good. An exceptional inception of a release from Second Sight Films that continues to aim high and raise the bar with every title they touch, like King Midas without being cursed by their success.

“Scanners” 4K is Head Popping Good! Buy it Here!

Rage EVIL Leads to A Legion of Drone Dwarfs! “The Brood” reviewed! (Second Sight / 4K UHD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“The Brood” Available Now from Second Sight!

After a series of mentally abusive behavior, Frank Carveth’s wife Nola resides under the unorthodox psychology of Dr. Hal Raglan whose controversial impersonation techniques to break down his patients’ dissociative psychological hangups and destructive blocks.  After months of therapy and witnessing Dr. Raglan’s methods in action, Frank is ready to pull the plug on the doctor’s sideshow sessions he deems are doing more harm than good when his daughter shows signs of physical abuse after a visit with her mother.  The prolonged verbal bout to get his wife out of Raglan’s care leads to Frank confiding in Nola’s mother who is found brutally murdered soon after.  When Nola’s estranged father comes into town to oversee the burial arrangements, he’s also brutally murdered.  Frank begins to connect pieces, theorizing that Dr. Raglan’s procedures and the murders may be linked and as he investigates further, the truth is more terrifying than he could ever imagine. 

Surging with emotional turmoil through a bitter divorce with ex-wife Margaret Hindson, Canadian body-horror director David Cronenberg pulled the rancorous inspiration from that turbulent time to write the originial screenplay for “The Brood,” a 1979 released thriller between an estranged couple, the effect of their ascending troubles upon their only child during the separation, and the sort of radical and systematic behaviors and practices used to reform a relationship bond that actually divides the emotional expanse even further.  Sprinkle a little of the unknown and grotesque abilities of unnatural corporeal world in there and you have yourself one hell of a dysfunctional and undomesticated horror only the unconventional David Cronenberg could conjure.  “The Brood” is produced by Claude Héroux, who would go on to produce Cronenberg’s next series of films, “Scanners” and “Videodrome,” and the Ontario filmed production is a studio venture from the CFDC (Canadian Film Development Corporation), Elgin International Films, and Mutual Productions.

Art Hindle is in the role of Frank Carveth, a father initially skeptical and frustrated with his wife’s supervised treatment and care.  The “Black Christmas” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” actor Hindle plays the role of a hinged investigative husband-parent involved into something far more unbelievable than initially imagined.  Next to his on screen dazed and mentally tarnished wife by Samantha Eggar, of “The Exterminator” and “Demonoid,” Hindle enacts normal responses that carry over into extreme situations when those around him – his mother-in-law (Nuala Fitzgerald, “Obsession”), his father-in-law (Henry Beckman, “Side Roads”), and his daughter’s teacher (Susan Hogan, “Phobia”) who might have had a little something-something with while on the rocks with the misses – dies a violent death at the hands of kid-sized mutants that resemble, partially, his own daughter Candace (Cindy Hinds, “The Dead Zone”).  As Nola Carveth, Eggars is only present in a few scenes alongside Dr. Raglan, played by the formidable British actor Oliver Reed (“Paranoiac,” “Gladiator”), as a staring into space, emotionally compromised woman struggling to cope with her past that makes her angry and upset and, in turn, makes her inexplicably conjure do-bidders in the birthing means of advanced evolution or in a parallelism to eusocial insects, like bees or ants.  Reed is the monkey in the middle of all of this between fending off Frank Carveth who challenges the results of his unorthodox psychological methods while also using those methods to unearth the root cause of Nola Carveth’s strange and unusual behavior and, eventual, psychic abilities.  Reeds delivers his typical stoic indifference which makes him ideal for a confident character of the scientific community eager for results rather than feeding his motivations with emotional fodder by empathizing with Carveth’s concerns.  Gary McKeehan (“Rabid”) and Robert A. Silverman (“Naked Lunch”) costar.

In his 50-year plus career, David Cronenberg has evolved in style, substance, and story that dip into more of alternate universes and deliver new ways to blend the future into an organic composite with commercial and social sub context.  While technology and personal and professional growth have developed the director into what he has accomplished and known for today, especially on the verge of his latest release with the living and dead connection theme in “The Shrouds,”  the core of what David Cronenberg does best and still does today has an etiology leading back to his earlier work and “The Brood” is definitely an archetype of his niche.  Cronenberg works the narrative up to his reveal of body horror, and “The Brood” is dangerously on the edge of being atypical, subjecting audiences to more of a buildup in the story and the delimitation of character  disclosure without a steady course of the maladjusted, mutated or modified human body as the villain or the escape, only for that theme to be quasi hinted and then unveiled at the end in a shocking reveal.  “The Brood” plays more of the slasher tones, using the children, dwarfs, or however you want to describe the little, mutant minions to be unknown villain tropes, even when one is laid up on a morgue slab for examination of its biology, or lack thereof.  Cronenberg’s directed ambiguity tees up one of the best endings of his career and, perhaps, even horror cinema as “The Brood” is queen sized stomach-churner, literally.

David Cronenberg’s “The Brood” arrives in 4K on a Ultra HD Blu-ray from UK boutique label Second Sight Films.  The BD100 is HEVC encoded with a 4K resolution or a pixel count of 2160 with Dolby Vision HDR10 and presented in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio.  On the back cover, the 4K restoration is approved by David Cronenberg.  There’s definitively a more positive treatment of the restored transfer that brightens with a slightly tweaked color grading compared to other DVD or Blu-ray releases, improving delineation as well as rectifying intended details to burst through what’s been long frustrating by a darkened wall of low-resolution definition.  Retaining and sustaining cinema coarse grain, the picture looks and feels incredibly natural without the presence of compromising touchups and smoothing overs that do more harm than good in the plastic-like approach to restoration.  The UHD reinforces the coloring with vibrant richness and range, boosting the once little Canadian film that could into an expensive-appearing optical overhaul that puts to shame previously shelved videos.  Audio fidelity is too retained with a LPCM 1.0 mono that although funnels through a single output is more than an adequate mix all in thanks to the competent sound engineering of Peter Burgess and team to amalgamate recorded sound and post-production ADR into a brawny singular unit that meshes nicely.  Dialogue foots the bill as a clean and clear presentation, the ambient sound design renders distinctly over without ambiguity, and longtime David Cronenberg collaborator and friend Howard Shore conducts an orchestra score that breaks through and keeps the course with an unforgettable amount of tension build.  English subtitles are available.  Special features are aplenty with a new audio commentary by film critics and historians Martyn Conterio and Kat Ellinger, a second commentary with film academic William Beard, interviews with actors Art Hindle and Cindy Hinds moderated by Fangoria’s editor Chris Alexander Meet the Carveths, an interview with executive producer Pierre David Producing the Brood, interview with cinematographer Mark Irwin The Look of Rage, interview with composer Howard Shore Scoring the Brood, an interview with actor Robert A Silverman Character for Cronenberg, a new video essay by film journalist Leigh Singer Anger Management: Cronenberg’s Brood and Shapes of Cinematic Rage, and an archived David Cronenberg interview The Early Years.  The standard Second Sight release comes in the traditional 4K UHD black Amaray case with new unnamed, unsigned illustrated cover art.  The UK certified 18 film is presented region free in this release and has a runtime of 92 minutes. 

Last Rites:  Cronenberg’s play on the word Brood is next level genius with litter rage as a result of mental health and a broken home.  The director’s filmic roots have proved time-and-time again his mastery of moviemaking as his body horror and thought-inducing stories, intermixed with social commentary, are complex visual and narrative devices braised an organic edge. 

“The Brood” Available Now from Second Sight!

Milan Has All the Best Short Film EVIL! “Drag Me To Fest” reviewed! (Rustblade / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Hurry! Grab the Limited Edition Copy of “Drag Me to Fest” Before Its Gone!

An outpatient nurse is requested by an old woman leaving by her lonesome.  Always forgetting and troubling eccentric, the humble nurse finds he’s in way over his head with a clearly unstable, possibly delusion woman, until the truth of her hidden secret unveils a web of horror.  A young couple looking to help a lonely farmer find themselves erecting a sheep fence as well as maintaining the upkeep of a strange rock formation known as a Tursemorkel that emits ooze out of black orifices and soon find the psychological and physiological energy from the Tursemorkel is more than they can withstand.  An elderly couple, tucked away inside their roadside camper trailer, whips up a finger-licking meaty stew made from all natural, locally sourced ingredients as they watch the nightly news’ top story of a missing person.  A man answers the doorbell and finds a package on his step, scratching and crawling out is a festering corpse eager to play with him.  A priest with an obsessive bug collection has him turnaround when a recently caught rare beetle toys with his mind.  Dafne, a young woman lost in another state of mind, is in the presence and in the arms of her own, personal demon. 

These bloodcurdling tales are the latest batch of horror shorts from the annual Milan, Italy hosted Drag Me to Fest.  The festival brings together Italy and international filmmakers to submit their unique brand of terror.  The 2024 lineup were submitted to the Milan collection in 2023, hit the festival the following year, and has now been compiled onto a home video release for North American audiences to enjoy and cower in teeth chattering fear under its namesake title, “Drag Me to Fest,” from Italian distributor Rustblade Records in association with MVD Visual, a subsidiary of MVD Entertainment Group.  Norway’s “Vevkjerring,” or “The Weaving” by Øyvind Willumsen and “Tistlebu” by Matthew Valentine kick off the anthology followed by Italian filmmaker’s Riccardo Suriano’s “Long Pig”, Julie Gun’s “Dafne is Gone,” and Jacopo Vismara’s “Il Coleottero” and finally rounding out with Japanese director Nori Uchida’s “For What the Doorbell Tolls,” all of which are self-produced.

Three countries, six distinct films, and all packed into the unusual side of ambiguously horrifying elements contained inside six short films.  Each character is curated to fit inside the narrative design, no matter how outrageous or avant grade the message is.  Willumsen’s “The Weaver” is a more straight forward, common structured horror of building up tension in an already uncomfortable situation of a friendly, living assisted male nurse Henrik (Fredrik Hovdegård) knocking on the doorstep of a haggard and kooky old croon named Gudrun, played devilishly and disgustingly by Isa Belle.  The next four episodes become a bit vaguer in their intentions of madness, purgatory, survival, and obsession that intends to either harm or transfigure into something beyond the dimensional standard.  “Tistlebu” aims to transfigure as a young city couple (Sascha Slengesol Balgobin and Sjur Vatne Brean) look to connect with nature and their curiosity, coupled by intrusive misuse and sexuality, toward an earthy pillar of energy inside a widow’s (Oda Schjoll) barn enraptures them into something more primordial, literally connecting them to an omnipresent natural world that’s much bigger than their insignificant need.  Uchida provides his own one-of-a-kind performance based immensely off Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” by playing not only the hero but also the decaying plaything that arrives at the hero’s doorstep in one’s mirrored rotting of loneliness.  “Il Coleottero’s” Don Antonio (Mimmo Chianese) has a crisis of faith that become sidetracked by his diligent hobby of entomology when his prized find, a rare beetle, suddenly disappears from his collection.  Chianese finds the balance between being a disenchanted priest and an anxious man hunting for the beetle that got away and that will eventually destroy him.  Julie Gun’s “Dafne is Gone” is more operatically finessed with interpretive dance between Dafne (Giulia Gonella) and a demon (Jason Marek Isleib) that’s completely absent of dialogue, stagecraft visualized, and characteristically naked to showcase Dafne’s descent into the Demon’s spellbinding movements.

The collected and presented works are not the highest dollar productions but do encase a prosthetic practicality as seen in Willumsen’s “The Weaver” with a shedding of an exterior layer into a more grotesque freak of nature while Uchida takes the tribute route using filleted flesh and milky contacts, along with LFE tones and grading, modulated vocals, to accomplish his own version of “Evil Dead” without the presence of Ashley Williams.  The others are not as cut and dry with their infinite interpretational insights that likely will speak more on a personal level than a glossy buttered popcorn one that requires little effort to absorb.  “Tistlebu” and “Dafne is Gone” entrench themselves in their respective unknown and modern art by providing very little in the one thing they both have in common, a shared sense of unsettlement.  There’s also an undertone of sexualism as if it equates to the very beast that entrances, which in these shorts is the Tursemorkel, which is a large surface growth that emits an allurement of safety and gratification, and, in comparison, to the demon, perhaps her own visceral demon, that frolics to breach Dafne’s temptation, drawing her closer to his own colorfully neon netherworld in a production of warmly dark euphemism.  “Il Coleottero” is perhaps the best understated undercurrent between the skepticism that plagues man and his faith.  Shot mostly naturally, tension is built on Father Antonio continuous deviations from his religious duties, distracted in his homilies and divine surroundings, by the mere fact of a lost beetle, a beetle, similar to the appearance of a Stag Beetle, that toys with him.  One could assume the beetle represents a test from God to challenge the priest’s diversification balancing his faith between realism against spirituality, to quote biologist J.B.S. Haldane, and I paraphrase, if the creator had made life, it must have been inordinate fondness for beetles because of their profound species diversity.

“Drag Me to Fest” has now hit DVD home video for the first time in its 3rd annual run with a limited edition to 500 copies courtesy of Rustblade Records, routed through the North American distribution channels of MVD Entertainment Group under their MVDVisual label.  The region free release, presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio, is encoded onto a MPEG2, upscaled 1080p, DVD5 with palatable average of image quality in its varying degrees of filming equipment, lighting, and technical know-how to get the intended look without suffering cinematography faux pas.  Compression wise can be a different story but, generally, “Drag Me to Fest” has an adequate presentation albeit a less-than-desirable color saturation, especially Gun’s “Dafne is Gone” that implements warm neon primary coloring in a high contrast, hard light emulsion.  Skin and pattern textures vary from short-to-short, but the delineation is there to not blend depth nor create solid, smoothed out surfaces.  Valentine’s “Tislebu” relies heavily on the rolling hills and greenery farmscape to enact its character qualities for an Earthy or terrestrial mystery important to the sentient and engrossing formation.  The Italian, Japanese, and Norwegian language Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo offers a passable mix that doesn’t elevate the atmospherics or construct tension to the max but neither does it flounder or lay waste to the support of the shorts.  There’s not a profound amount of leveled depth or creative sound design to fabricate space as much of the dialogue and environment resides in the foreground, and the dialogue does render over clean and clearly with forced errorfree English subtitles, but the focus is primarily on moving the story in a matter of minutes for some of the shorts, leaving narrative devices, such as characters and the effects, to drive the story and its tension.  The DVD is a barebones released that does not come with any encoded extra content, but the slim, trifold jewel case does depict a grouping of cherry-picked ideas from the shorts in a green bath illustration from graphic artist Gonz and has individual taglines and color stills for each short.  The 92-minute anthology is unrated. 

Last Rites: Abroad anthology with a goal to highlight and amplify short filmmaker voices, “Drag Me to Fest” finishes up from the main screen and extends to home video for the first time! Rustblade and MVDVisual illuminate the cinema obscure for the general public and we’re all the richer for it!

Hurry! Grab the Limited Edition Copy of “Drag Me to Fest” Before Its Gone!

Who is This EVIL Named “Dariuss” reviewed! (SRS Cinema / DVD – Extreme and Unrated)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Find Out Who “Dariuss” Is With this SRS Release!

An experimental vision quest of loss, grief, and death takes refuge in a small English town, inside an old and quaint English house.  A mother grieves for the loss of her child, sobbing uncontrollably and mindlessly wanders with distant stares as the heart pains for her child.  The grandmother, doing what she can, comforts her daughter’s newfangled distraught nature while the husband, grieving in his own isolated way, stays out late at night to drink himself into a stupor.  When madness lurks about their home and intrudes upon their privacy, a vile and heinous loss of life bathes a depraved lunatic in their fluids.  Neither mother, father, nor grandmother is safe from terrific travesty in corporeal form.  A sickness has arrived to cure the inconsolable, eradicating them slowly of the pain in the most painful of ways imaginable, and doing it all with a bloodstained maniacal grin stretching from ear-to-ear.

A hellish loop of defeating pessimism, “Dariuss” fringes the black void areas around reality and escapism that evoke the uncomfortable nature of people and the unpredictable tides that turn for the worst when already at rock bottom.  “Dariuss’s” brackish, brainsick narrative is the brainchild of Guerrilla Metropolitana, an Italian artist crafting his underground and dark cinemaverse of misanthropic mayhem and esoteric eroticism.  The writer-director Metropolitana lives and creates out of London, UK and “Dariuss” is his 2023, debut feature-length film behind an oeuvre of distressing shorts of human imperfection and immortality encroached by a constant line of madness.  Metropolitana not only self-funds and produces his film, where he achieves total control to push back against not only major studio norms but also conventional independent stratagem, but provides the avant-garde cinematography, unorthodox editing, an experimental score and sound design, and even costars the trench coat covered naked body of the antagonistic killer. 

One element to not forget to mention before going through the cast is that “Dariuss” is completely without dialogue.  Metropolitana’s sound design manipulates and repeats many sound clips, such as the plops of water droplets or the high-pitch lip trilling, to fashion an uncomfortable audio sensation sporadically strung throughout that parallel’s the coupled low tumbling score and baby laughter, the later more so when referring to child loss or the abhorrent reincarnation of the child.  Ila Argento holds the majority screen time, especially since the pregnant woman credited as Sarah Isabèl is also Argento as well in some sort of meta crafting or illusion, and she plays the grieving, depressed wife wailing, screaming, and just distantly starring in vast quantities and in a daze of mirrored or painted inversions about the English home.  “Dariuss” is more than just extreme performance art as it embodies interval wretchedness associated with trauma, or in this case more specifically, loss through a reverse world looking glass.  As the wife is tended to by the grandmother, played with apneic conditions and posturing concern is Marie Antoinette de Robespierre, Archibald Kane’s the husband role is scantily around for a father who just lost a child and when the father is in frame, he’s idling in his car drinking, or rather gulping, from a bottle.  Both the grandmother and father roles are a part of Metropolitana’s message of a shattered family structure of insincerity and disconnect. Feeding on that dysfunction is the childlike maniac, played by Metropolitana himself, with rapacious amusement off the back of the household’s suffering.  Almost as if the maniac is a reincarnation of the lost child, perceived by play like antics in a nearly naked and hairless state and audible by the babylike, post-introduced laughter, returning home to exact horrific horseplay on his family involving rape and murder and cannibalism alongside the frolicking and breast milk chugging.  

Let’s preface with an important fact that “Dariuss” will not be everybody’s cup of tea; in fact, Metropolitana’s film is more like bitter black coffee with a pungent, sour smell as a narrative series of images, like a splayed, taped together string of polaroids, giving godawful glimpses of grief and gore.  Sounds and images repeat that beg for madness to emerge out of the nouvelle vague filming style, experimenting with various inverted images, mirrored and angled shots, different types of aged filters and strange lighting, various camera speeds, and oddly framed shots will subject audiences to pricklier sensory sensations than the depicted violence and gore, which is graphically ghastly and extreme with necrophilia and cannibalism.  Story structure also veers into non-linear territory but the gist of the acts is present, if not loose and equivocal for open interpretation and choice cinema characteristics that stray from normal convention, to mold a beginning, middle, and end in only a way Metropolitana can construct by contrasting melancholic grief with stagnating indifference, with a maniacal pleasure of a sandbox of sinew, and, in way, comical by way of the insanity with disturbing imagery mixed with playful mischievousness. 

Just who is Dariuss?  That’s the obstruse person perhaps at the centermost of this ghastly, grisly story that’s now on DVD from SRS Cinema as a part of their Extreme and Uncut label.  The DVD comes MPEG2 encoded, 480p standard definition, 5-gigabyte DVDR that showcases a wide-range of filters, inversions, lighting designs, grading, and you name it, “Dariuss” likely did it of cinematography techniques that stay in the rough patches of eccentricity rather than being comfortable in the fairways.  Picture quality fluctuates and varies depending on the aesthetic chaos methods being deployed, leaving behind not the sharpest looking picture with noticeable pixelation on anything above a 32″ television but not enough of an eyesore to be an imperceptibly deterrent.  Depth has fair spatial qualities but range and saturation is pretty limited to an anemic neutral palette to only when the monochrome or higher contrasts are not in play. The LPCM 2.0 stereo contains no organic matter, meaning that none of the sound is captured within the scenes, as Metropolitana modulates, manipulates, and modifies singular notes and tones for creepy and ear-splicing effect. This also pertains to the soundtrack being completely devoid of dialogue to give the auteur complete authority of how his film she be heard and every bit of that sound design is front loaded and high-powered but to an intended unrefined audio art. English captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing is available. Special features encoded are a behind-the-scenes still gallery and SRS trailers while the standard Amaray comes with an SRS illustration of the film’s original one-sheet, transposed to the disc pressing. There are no inserts included nor slipcover. SRS Cinema’s release is region free and has a runtime of 62, ideal, or even a tad bit too long, for this type of experimentation.

Last Rites: Not to be confused as a nail-biting, popcorn thriller, “Dariuss” will only speak to a select few able to bend the mind to impressionistic, dark eroticism and savagery, both qualities of which Guerrilla Metropolitana has and depicts in droves.

Find Out Who “Dariuss” Is With this SRS Release!