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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!

Master Chen and his EVIL, Alien Clan Try to Take Over the Powers of the Astral Plane! “Furious” (Visual Vengeance / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Get “Furious” Now on Blu-ray from Amazon.com!

After the murder of his sister who sought pursuit and protection of the astral plane power, the mourning and grief-stricken Karate instructor Simon is summoned to Master Chan’s space-age dojo where’s he’s tasked to track down four connecting pieces of a necklace artifact that will lead him to his sister’s murderer.  As soon as Simon leaves the building, his friends join his quest only to be confronted by Howard, a martial arts henchman with a throng of skilled fighter to descend upon Simon and killing his friends.  Simon finds himself in constant battle against not only Howard but also other highly skilled sub-bosses with ties to Master Chan in a devious and traitorous plot to obtain the power of the astral plane for himself.  Simon uses his Karate discipline to kick and punch his way through hordes of trained fighters to reach Master Chan to stop him and exact revenge for his sister. 

A martial arts movie with aliens, astral plans, a dragon’s head, evil fire-shooting magicians, and more, “Furious” lives up to the moniker as one punch after another action and completely ambitiously and guerrilla style on a miniscule 30K budget.  Entirely helming “Furious’s’” creative control and securing actors and stuntmen willing to take risks on their own accord and dime are USC film students Tim Everitt (visual effects animator and composite artist who would go on to work on “Deep Blue Sea” and “Red Planet”) and Tom Sartori (a career film editor) looking to break into the film industry with their own rapscallion production of a marketable chopsocky genre film at the tail end of its string of success coming out of the 1970s and into the early 1980s when horror began it’s rise.  Everitt and Sartori produced the all-American made martial arts production with funding from a motel entrepreneur.

At the center of “Furious” are two Korean-American brothers, Simon and Phillip Rhee, experts in Karate and dojo sensei who, like Everitt and Sartori, were looking break into the business.  The California-born Rhee brothers play the protagonist and antagonist roles with Simon playing the namesake hero thrust into doing evil’s biding while avenging his sister’s death and Phillip donning Master Chen’s white hair and manically, ruthless plot to exploit not only Simon to obtain astral plane summoning necklace pieces but also his henchmen who carry the pieces that must hold the essence of death.  Virtuosos in karate, the Rhee brothers show and pull off incredible difficult moves done practically, especially in the early 1980s without the help of high-flying wires and only a little help with some camera angle movie magic.  The sparring is fast and realistic without being pull-punching obviousness.  All of the sound was done in post, so the Rhee’s real voices are not used to either replicate the martial arts jagged voice synchronicity or sound design was not in the budget.  Likely, a little of both.  The lower-level bosses are a medley bunch and have a range of talents from a staff wielding wilderness man (Bob Folkard), to a tiger style soul fighter (Howard Jackson, “The Delta Force”), to a crazed wizard (Mika Elkan) with flaming projectiles Simon has deal with, one-on-one, in order to reach the pyramidal top, Master Chen.  “Furious” is purely an action film, casting no love interest for Simon resulting in no emotional or romantical arch.  The former is emphasized more intently by Simon’s lack of expressiveness for revenge; there’s a sliver of poignant energy when Simon has visions of his dead friends’ severed heads served to him on a food platter that could warrant retribution attributions.  Jon Dane, John Potter, and Joyce Tilley who are quicky established as character friends to Simon and are equally as quickly dispatched to place Simon in a world of loneliness against an aliens and evil karate master alliance for astral plane domination.

From the depths of Tubi comes a curation for the ages release of “Furious” for the first time ever having a proper package that’s not related to pornography, as was the first and only VHS issuance by VCII, a well-known adult film distributor at the time who released “Debbie Does Dallas.”  “Furious” is an odd, unpredictable, mashup of throwing darts to see what sticks and in that volatility, anticipation of what’s to come next is considerably high, especially when a shoestring budget production surprisingly opens with incredible helicopter shots tracking a foot chase sequence.  From there, “Furious’ keeps astonishment alive with high-level increments of bizarre alien in human skin behavior, punitive human to animal transformations, talking pigs, astral plane battles, Superman flying, and Devo band mania coupled with extensive and coherent editing to flesh out a feature on the front and back ends.  Granted, the plot’s very puzzling and motives are dubious at best to why Master Chen would task a competent fighter like Simon to track down pieces of a unifying necklace when Chen’s own men possess all of them and could easily have killed them himself for the death essence.  There’s also the alien aspect that goes by the wayside in a lack of explanation or exposition by jumping into assumption just by weird behaviors and flashy, ultra-modern buildings to serve as extraterrestrial evidence.  Even with that ambiguity, seeing Simon Rhee perform a triple-hit kick amongst a slew of other highly impressive stunts and special effects relative to the budget has “Furious” become a cult fan favorite. 

Visual Vengeance curates another title from out of the shadows and into our Blu-ray players with “Furious,” encoded with AVC, presented in a high-definition 1080p of the original fullscreen aspect ratio 1.33:1, on a BD50.  Sourced from the original tape elements, which I’m assuming was the original VHS release a few years later as the film was shot on an Arriflex camera that used film stock, the Blu-ray contains a new, director-approved SD master print.  Cleaned up to get some color saturation into the anemic picture, the image doesn’t look as washed as the monochromic qualities of VHS and this is a vast improvement in picture quality as well with some better delineation around objects.  There’s quite a bit of aliasing and ghosting that leaves object trails and rough edging but not enough to warrant visual concern for texture properties, such as the pig stubble or the decapitated heads on a pater that show coarseness where it matters.  Print damage, such as virtual scratches and some rough editing room splices and re-tapings, are present but not profound.  All of this is covered in the technical forewarning, regularly at the beginning of ever Visual Vengeance film so the expectation is set.  The English language LPCM stereo is all postproduction additions with ADR and foley artistry.  The first instances of dialogue don’t come up in the mix until the 13-minute mark, leaving much of the opening left to Foley work to build kinetic and atmospheric sound.  With any early postproduction work, three will always be space in between the synchrony and that can be said here but on slightly jagged edge which says something positive about Everitt and Sartori’s handling of the audio track.  Optional English subtitles are available.  Obscurity doesn’t mean less supplement goodies either and Visual Vengeance has proved that over time again and again with their amazing stockpile of exclusive and archived special features.  New interviews with directors Tom Sartori, High Kicking in Hollywood, and Tim Everitt, The Kung Fu Kid begin the exclusive content with length editing discussions from the directors about their time before, during, and after “Furious.”  Filmmaker and podcaster Justin Decloux provides a slew of material, including a feature length commentary, cohosted with Peter Kuplowsky of Toronto International Film Festival.  Decloux does a pair of video essays – North American No-Budget Martial Arts Cinema Primer and Rhee Brothers career overview. The buck doesn’t stop there with an archive commentary with co-director Tim Everitt, an archive podcast with Everitt circa 2013, Super 8 behind-the-scenes footage of “Furious,” Scorched Earth Policy 1987 EP with full six tracks, Cinema Face live in concert, Tom Sartori’s 80’s music video reel and Super 8 short films, original film trailers, and Visual Vengeance trailers. That’s not all! New slipcover artwork brings together an illustrated compilation of what to expect with the same art on the inside Amaray case. The cover art is reversible, depicting the original VHS cover art that’s not as charismatic, or good. Insert section houses a folded mini-poster reproduction of the original one sheet, a double-sided acknowledgement advert with alternate art, Visual Vengeance’s retro VHS sticker sheet, and a ninja star keychain accessory! The 17th Visual Vengeance title comes region free, has a runtime of 73 minutes, and is unrated.

Last Rites: Anomalously action-packed with a fantasy element, “Furious” is a one-of-a-kind, indie martial arts production that has everything, even the kitchen sink, thrown at with a journeyman tale of alien butt-kicking, astral plane dogfighting, and anthropomorphic black arts.

Get “Furious” Now on Blu-ray from Amazon.com!

Not a Plague of Rats Could Stop EVIL’s Obsession. “Nosferatu” reviewed! (Universal Films / Extended Cut Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Experience “Nosferatu” in 4K UHD or Blu-ray. Purchase Here!

Wisborg, Germany, 1838 – Thomas Hutter is a promising real estate apprentice appointed travel six weeks to the Carpathian Alps to settle on Wisborg real estate for the reclusive and mysterious Count Orlok.  Thomas Hutter is also a newlywed, married to the lovely Ellen Hutter whom together Thomas plans to solidify their proper social status with the wealth of this trip away from his wife despite her pleas for him to stay.  Upon meeting Count Orlok in his dark castle, Thomas is overcome by his host’s undying evil presence that confines him to the grounds while Orlok psychically holds spellbound Ellen’s mind to a fretful state.  When Thomas escapes, he makes it back home at the same time Orlok arrives by ship that brings a plague of rats to the city of Wiseborg as well as a nasty blood-loss disease affecting population.  As Thomas warns of Orlok’s intentions, discredited Prof. Albin Eberhart von Franz knowledge of the occult sees through the rat-plague and into the dark heart that has cast its shadow over the city and into Ellen Hutter’s soul.   

The acclaimed folkloric horror director of “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” sinks his teeth into one of the most renowned classical villains of our time, a vampire known to most as Dracula and revised, at times, up to the Robert Eggers take on the timeless “Nosferatu” tale.  Eggers’s 2024 adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel and the 1922 F.W. Murnau silent picture, “Nosferatu:  A Symphony of Horror,” written by Henrik Galeen, is also penned by the director, revamped to tell both classic narratives in a way that is his own and that’s reflective of his slow burn gothic dread style.  “Nosferatu” is a Focus Features presentation from the productions of Birch Hill Road Entertainment and Studio 8 as well as produced by Eggers alongside the industry esteemed Chris Columbus (“Home Alone,” “Harry Potter”) and daughter Eleanor Columbus under their Maiden Voyage Pictures co-founded company.

Stepping into the tall, slender, blood slurping role of the titular character, under a full-body prosthetic suit of what is essentially a rotting corpse with a wicked mustache, is Bill Skarsgård, the actor who is quickly rising to the top of heavy makeup and effects characters while making the star-studded Skarsgård name synonymous with horror in his breakout film playing the maniacal demon-clown Pennywise in the film remake adaptation of Stephen King’s “It.”  Skarsgård’s baby face is completely enveloped in the ancient Transylvania nobleman Count Orlok with a high-bridge nose, protruding and high cheekbones, a vertically elongated face, and a sparse hair straggling through presumably a latex mock of decaying skin.  Skarsgård also modulates his vocal chords to reach deep, resonating levels that gives Count Orlok an additional tier of terror.  Undoubtedly, Count Orlok is an omnipotent, powerfully entrenched presence brought to existence by Skarsgård and accentuated and elevated even further by Lily-Rose Depp in Orlok’s obsessive muse of Ellen Hutter.  Through choreographed body manipulation and control, the daughter of Johnny Depp has since put the gum-chewing, wise-cracking, convenient story clerk “Yoga Hosers” role behind to redefine herself as an austere period and physical role actress willing to go the extra mile for the story.  Nicholas Hoult (“Warm Bodies,” “Mad Max:  Fury Road”) updates his Dracula film resume with another after having just come off the heels of playing the titular character in “Renfield” to Nicholas Cage’s grotesquely campy version of the Prince of Darkness, but there’s nothing intentionally campy about this Stoker story nor his role as Thomas Hutter with first-hand experience of Count Orlok’s monstrous dysphoric plague in what would be, too, another physical, yet less so, role for Hoult as a concerned husband fighting for his wife.  Speaking of roles, or films, that come around again for certain actors, Willem Dafoe passes the torch of Count Orlok from his Max Schreck performance in “Shadow of a Vampire” and takes on the elder Professor von Franz, a once esteemed learned man of science and knowledge now a discredited scientific explorer of the occult brought in to see to Ellen Hutter’s feverish nightmares and hallucinations.  Dafoe’s just as spasmodic and expressive as ever to be a part of those knowledgeable opposition of the vampyr realm, giving prominence to the character Dafoe has bordering as a mad genius of sorts with eccentric behavior that never allows to be compassionate or otherwise emotionally driven, like a true scientist.  Principal cast rounds out with Aaron Taylor-Johnson (“Kickass”), Ralph Ineson (“The Witch”), Emma Corrin (“Deadpool & Wolverine”), and Simon McBurney (“The Conjuring 2”).

As much as Eggers wanted to make “Nosferatu” a scary film while staying to the themes of obsession and Stoker and Munrau’s core elements, the film only manages to scare up a couple of true moments of hold-your-breath terror with panning shots and swelling scores that composition a seat jumping jolt.  Like most of Egger’s previous work, a continuous course of dread, which the filmmaker produces well in droves, meanderingly streams through the narrative that slowly builds with each closing in step Count Orlok takes toward obtaining Ellen Hutter’s willing submission to him.  Between the 1922 and 2024, both films play the love-triangle card of a married couple’s happiness being compromised by a tall and dark outsider entrancing, enthralling the wife, diverting her loyalty by any means possible.  In this case, those means are to blackmail her by holding the city hostage to plague of rats and draining her of the loved ones surrounding her.  However, the genesis of Orlok’s obsession is built upon brittle sticks with a prologue that hamstrings a powerful, psychic ability unwittingly used by Ellen Hutter to awaken the ancient evil.  The whole origin of events feels threadlike and happenstance, perhaps to instill more mysterioso of the antediluvian universe on a smaller scale obsession story.   Aesthetically, “Nosferatu” follows the Robert Eggers’ cinematography trend of blacks, grays, and a reduction to dull of primary colors for a gloomy period piece of cold weathered melancholy and bleakness under the continuous collaboration camerawork eye of Jarin Blaschke, marking their fourth feature together that implements inventive, complicated shots to sell practicality as fantasy in an early 19th century European context.  Blaschke’s aesthetic style would not have worked without the makeup and prosthetics for Count Orlok as a decrepit evil nobleman juxtaposed against the period costuming and elevated higher by the massive set designs of creating the Wisborg city as well as all of the other sets built to scale on acres of movie lot land. 

Robert Eggers and “Nosferatu” is the match made in dark heaven to give that classical rebirth the kick in the Dracula cape it desperately needed for Universal.  The at-home, Blu-ray release brings the darkness into living room television sets and other media players with an AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50.  Eggers is also so fine and particular on detail, such as with all the production value listed above and the retro design company opening credits, “Nosferatu” is also presented in a European widescreen 1.66:1 aspect ratio used in antiquated times of the 60s to early 90s in Europe, to which this story is fictionally set.  The Universal Films release houses both the theatrical version and extended cut at their respective runtimes of 132 minutes and 136 minutes, which is pretty incredible being both versions compressed onto one disc and, in the same breadth, had me concerned for artefacts in what’s surely a beautifully dark and tenebrous veneered Egger feature.  However, low and behold, no signs of posterization or banding to speak of with a saturated void to keep the shadows menacing rather than murky or milky.  The overall grading is quite dark with a deep bluish hue that enriches the time piece as well as the gothic tones.  The unnatural density of color saturation leaves natural skin tones to sake of reality, but the details do emerge here and there when shadow play, mostly around the presence of Count Orlok, is abridged for quotidian life without the encroaching dread of supernatural omnipotence.  Both formats are encoded with lossy audio mixes, a quite of a bit of them actually, with an English Dolby Atmos, Spanish Dolby Digital Plus 7.1, a French Dolby Digital Plus 7.1, and, lastly, an English Dolby Virtual Speaker (DVS) 2.0.  The Dolby Atmos is tuned for a 7.1 configuration, emitting immersive and resonating sound to which “Nosferatu” laps up in luxury.  The most notable aspect of the entire design goes, without question, to Skarsgård voice modulation for Count Orlock, a deep, guttural, European-accented assertion of all-encompassing faculty highlighted in every scene when, even more so when Orlock is not physically in frame.  I like to think Robert Eggers is the Wes Anderson of horror when it comes to dialogue and entourage of ensemble casts and with dialogue range and depth that’s dynamic to flow with the ever-presence of physical change or to swell or diminish a moment.  Dialogue is also stable, clear, and without dodgy interference, the spatial environment diffuses and disperses nicely through side, back, and even upper channels in Atmos and, the illusion provided, in DVS, and LFE finds a proper level without overwhelming cataclysmic plagues, fever dreams, or Orlok’s dreadful lust.  Opted subtitles are available in English SDH, Spanish, and French.  Bonus content includes a feature length parallel commentary with writer-director Robert Eggers, a lengthy behind-the-scenes featurette with interviews from cast and crew, and deleted scenes that can be seen in the extended cut.  The Blu-ray, plus digital code, release comes with white-black and grayscale in between cardboard O-slip with the same Lily-Depp Rose’s face being caressed by Orlok’s sharp-nailed and decrepit hand image also as the cover art on the Amaray case.  Inside, you’ll find the digital code stage right while the disc is pressed like most of all of Universal’s home video Blu’s with a near translucent quality to them.  Theatrical cut is rated R for bloody/violent content, graphic nudity and some sexual content and the extended cut comes not rated.  Though not listed anywhere on the cover or disc, the Blu-ray is encoded with region A playback only.

Last Rites: Robert Eggers shoots his shot working his dream story under a major Hollywood studio providing him with a major Hollywood sized budget. “Nosferatu” is every bit of Eggers, carved out and etched to the gothic and folkloric perfection that has quickly skyrocketed his brief career and the eclectic cast stuns in their own right with otherworldly and creepy performances that revives ole’ Count Orlok back to from the celluloid dead.

Experience “Nosferatu” in 4K UHD or Blu-ray. Purchase Here!

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

Posted by Steven Lewis on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Steven Lewis on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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