Category Archives: undead

Is this EVIL Real or is it a “Deathdream” reviewed! “(Blue Underground / 4K UHD and Blu-ray Combo)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

The Nightmare is Here. “Deathdream” on 4K UHD Blu-ray!

The Brooks family just sat down for dinner before receiving a personal house call by a military commander, conveying the tragic killed in action telegram of their son Andy during a Vietnam War skirmish.  Very early next morning, Andy inexplicably arrives at their doorstep and the whole family is elated with his return and relieved in the military’s gross error about his death.  But something isn’t right with Andy; he isn’t the same affable young man his family and friends knew.  All day, every day Andy sits in his room, gliding back and forth in his rocking chair, won’t eat or drink anything, and has the social personality of a slug.  While his father can’t grasp Andy’s bizarre behavior, his mother defends him, being overjoyed, comforted, and relieved by her son’s safe return.  Anybody who comes close to discovering what Andy has done or has become is preyed upon by Andy’s need for concealment and need for blood. 

If there was ever the quintessential anti-Vietnam War film, Bob Clark’s “Deathdream” is it.  The 1974, Alan Ormsby (“Cat People,” “The Substitute”) scribed grindhouse classic introduces combat shock to audiences through a macabre and ghoulish lens as the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War came to an official end in 1973.  Before becoming one of the holidays’ household names with “A Christmas Story” and “Black Christmas,” Bob Clark sat in what would be one of his first films as a director, a film that wasn’t sold in taking just one title having also been bestowed “Dead of Night,” “The Veteran,” “Night Walk,” and “It Came from the Grave.”  The U.S.-based shot and crewed feature, filmed in and around Brooksville, Florida, is a production of Quadrant Films and Impact Films with United Kingdom producers Gerald Flint-Shipman, Peter James (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”), and Geoffrey Nethercott (“Blue Blood”) with John Trent and Bob Clark coproducing.  

For the ambiguous terror of “Deathdream” to work without baffling audiences to a nonsensical death, the cast had to really give it their all and not only that but also sell the deteriorating dynamics of an American nuclear family when the son returns home strangely different from then when he left for war.   The debut film of Richard Backus, playing the reclusive and uncharacteristic Andy who has returned home from the battlefield, is complimented by the heart-wrenching performances miseries of his onscreen parents in John Marley (“The Dead Are Alive!”), as the distraught father over Andy’s peculiar behavior, and Lynn Carlin (“Superstition”), as the denialist mother who can’t or won’t see the issues with Andy, the gift of her little boy returning home. Not only does Andy’s return ignite a slow-burning divisive wedge between parents and child but it also exposes pre-war schisms that were long established years ago.  We’re initially introduced the family sitting around the dinner table filled with compassion, hope, and happiness but Andy’s return kicks the wasp’s nest and we can see their true nature.  The father is a crotchety, dogged man who can’t connect with a more sensitive son and the mother spoils his only boy the point where Andy must enlist himself voluntarily to prove something to toward his father’s disappointment.  Then, there’s sister Cathy.  Poor sister Cathy, the gentle, positive, and sweet daughter who is all buy nearly forgotten by her parents as they push her out of the way by her father stating to mind her own business or is exclaimed in so many words of her little worth in compared to her brother by her mother.  Yet, Cathy, played softly and attractively by Alan Ormsby’s then wife, Anya Ormsby (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”), continues a cool and level head about her shoulders as the only true family member willing to give Andy time, to let him be himself, while acclimating back into society, let alone his family.  However, the family’s opposing forces is ultimately what destroys them in conjunction with Andy’s terrible, morbid secret.  Henderson Forsythe, Jane Daly, Arthur Anderson, Michael Mazes, and David Gawlikowski fill out the cast.

All of the costly signs of shell shock and PTSD are present within the context of “Deathdream,” blanketed under a sensationalized, representational guise, but the film’s cinematic façade of Tom Savini’s rot and decay special effects and the appalling imagery of living death doesn’t alleviate or even dilute the horror of the revenant in the actual disorder.  In fact, it pales in comparison if you ruminate on it for a while.  Andy’s withdrawn from the likes of acquaintances, friends, and family alike and is severely impassive at signs of cordiality.  Director Bob Clark emphasizes the effect even further in one scene where a World War II veteran anecdotally describes in nonchalant detail the death of a brother in arms and this flashes images in Andy’s mind of him and his friend’s own mortal wounds in the jungles of Nam, sending the young man into a minor fight or flight moment, two of the associated signs of shell shock:  fight and flight.  Within the sensationalized horror context, Andy requires blood to keep his body from decaying, like a reanimated corpse trying to hang on a little long before his skin and muscle tissue just seep and ooze off, and in one scene of attack, Andy shoots up his victim’s blood with a hypodermic needle in a reminiscent drug addiction scene of shooting up narcotics right into the vein of one’s arm, an experience afflicted on many PTSD vets. Ormsby’s script might be specific in the anti-Vietnam War propaganda but is not so detailed in the narrative’s whys and wherefores as much of Andy’s unlikely, and undead, return to his family falls into that inexplicable, ambiguous, “Twilight Zone,” and “Tales from the Crypt” category to foster a greater cloud of mysticism and darkness around the story, one in which has a hopeful, desperate mother conjure will and desire in order to see her son come home again.

In continuing to upgrade their catalogue to the best possible format currently available, “Blue Underground” pulls an Andy and returns “Deathdream” from the dead, heading home to the nearest ultra high-definition player. The 2-disc 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray combo set arrives with a brand-new restoration, scanned in 4K 16-bit from the 35mm negative with Dolby Vision HDR in honor of its 50th anniversary. The UHD is HVEC encoded onto a 66GB Blu-ray with 2160p resolution while the Blu-ray is AVC encoded, 1080p resolution, on a BD50, both presented in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio. A grainy 35mm print is ingrained with superior color saturation and understanding of how to manage the perceptibility of image. Blue Underground’s previous restorations show a spectrum, step-by-step improvement to get to where the film is today in a higher, upgraded format. “Deathdream” can be a very dark film at times and often, but this release eliminates speculation of events without collapsing the contrast integrity, providing a clear and concise image for its spot in history. Blu-ray is a step down albeit only minorly and with some color stability shimmer, more notably in the finale with a less than standardized and wear-showing deleted scene that is integrated back into the story. A single, English DTS-HD master audio mono track is available. The lossless option doesn’t need any more or any less to effectively be the overlaid track. Distinction runs through the single channel with managed assurances that dialogue, ambience, and soundtrack divide and conquer their respective uniquities. English SDH, Spanish, and French subtitles are available. Due to space on 4K UHD disc, all of the package’s special features are encoded onto the standard Blu-ray. The UHD Blu-ray includes an archival commentary from director Bob Clark, a commentary by writer Alan Ormsby, and a brand-new commentary with a pair of film historians Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson, plus the theatrical trailer. All that and a slew of previously recorded content, including a recollection featurette with Alan Ormsby and star Anya Liffey (Ormsby), an interview with composter Carl Zittrer Notes for A Homecoming, an interview with production manager John “Bud” Cardos Flying Down to Brooksville, an interview with star Richard Backus Deathdreaming, an interview with Tom Savini regarding his early years in special effects, a screen test of the original Andy actor Gary Swanson, an alternate opening title sequence, Alan Ormsby’s student film, theatrical trailer and still galleries. The only other new content is an interview with the original Andy actor Gary Swanson The First Andy. The same illustrated cover art composite from the 2017 Blue Underground Blu-ray is recycled for the 4K UHD Blu-ray with tactile elements of a raised title and taglines on the cardboard slipcover. The primary art also resides on the black UHD Amary but the reverse side has retro traits of the film’s starkly contrasted yellow and blue poster art and the “Dead of Night” title to which, once again, is preferrable for me to have diverging slipcover and case cover arts. The two discs reside on their respective sides of the interior with the 4K UHD pressed with the illustrated art and the Blu-ray going contrarily retro like the reverse cover art. There are no loose insert materials. With an 88-minute runtime, Blue Underground release comes region free and is rated R.

Last Rites: Andy didn’t destroy his family. He was only the last straw, a catalyst that tipped the boat over into a sea of slowly brewing tempest. Doesn’t help that he was also decaying right before their eyes as the embodiment of walking death and looked good doing it too with the help from Blue Underground’s sharp-edged and solidly sound 4K upgrade.

The Nightmare is Here. “Deathdream” on 4K UHD Blu-ray!

Blind, EVIL, Undead Templar Knights Hunt for a Bite to Eat! “Tombs of the Blind Dead” reviewed! (Synapse / Special Edition 2-DiscBlu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Tombs of the Blind Dead” 2-Disc Blu-ray Available for Purchase Here!

Maria, Betty and Roger take a train across the Spanish countryside to see the landscape sights.  When Maria feels like a third wheel stuck in between Betty and Roger’s flirtations, she jumps off the moving train, leaving her friends aboard, and camping out under the ruins of an old countryside Church.  There’s only one problem, the Church was home to the ancient order of the Knights of Templar who took a blood oath for Satan by sacrificing young virgins by drinking their blood and lynched by the Church for their crimes against man and God.  The Cursed Knights, reduced to rags, bones, and without eyes, rise from underneath their graves every night and roam the countryside on the hunt for anybody in proximity they can feast upon.  Betty and Roger learn of Maria’s strange demise without knowing the details and form a four-person search party only to step into the same dangerous den of the Knights of Templar. 

“Tombs of the Blind Dead,” or as known as the U.S. as just “The Blind Dead,” is the first in a series of four undead Templar Knights films that would come to be known as The Blind Dead collection by Spanish filmmaker Amando de Ossorio.  Natively titled “La noche del terror ciego” was released in 1971 and penned by Ossorio who laid a new path of Spanish horror that didn’t involve Paul Naschy or Jess Franco with undoubtedly slow dread of the undead that resembled more of the Italian-bred beyond the grave films where ghouls and ghosts return to life and wreak bloody havoc on the living, a guise for social context and for political dictatorship.  Themes of rebellions, rape, and bisexuality course through the feature’s necrotic veins as the film receives Spanish and Portugal co-production support from Plata Films and Interfilme with executive producer Salvadore Romero (“The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman”) spearheading pre-production and behind the scenes.   

Following of a newly formed trio of friends traveling the countryside to take in the sights, an underlying green-eyed trouble brews right from the moment when an enchanted Roger, the debut film and character of 1973’s “Green Inferno’s” César Burner, meets gorgeous red head Betty, “It Happened at Nightmare Inn’s” Lone Fleming,” and Roger’s travel companion and Betty’s Catholic boarding school roommate/best friend, Virginia, “The House that Screamed’s Maria Elena Arpón, feels the twinges of jealousy as her amorous covets for Roger never materializes and she sees her future with relationship with roger forever in the friend zone.  Virginia becomes so intolerant of Roger and Betty’s innocent flirtations that she’s willing to hop off a not-so-speeding train and camp inside the creepy, ruined structures at centerstage of a burial ground.  Arpón’s passive aggressive behavior is quite convincing, even the part where she tucks and rolls off a moving train in what stupid things do when people are frustrated, especially in the gray territory of love.  The love triangle is so simplistically arranged, each behavioral component goes without being farfetched.  From Virginia’s first sexual experience at the caressive, soft hands of her roommate/best friend Betty while at boarding school to Roger and Betty’s blameless attraction to one another that spurs Virginia’s irrational, self-serving behavior, Ossorio’s characters are written very well when homogeneously compared to other outside of cinema love triangles.  José Thelman (“Night of the Sorcerers”) indulges as the smuggler swine Pedro who’s roped into the reconning of the Templar tomb to clear his name with authorities by proving someone else had murdered Roger and Betty’s friend.  Joined by his floosy sidepiece María, played by another María in the iconic Spanish B-horror actress.  María Silva (“The Awful Dr. Orlof”), Pedro brutishly flaunts arrogance and confidence, taking what he wants, especially with the women uncharmed by the male sex, and that’s curious, fluid attribute when he attacks Betty but in the wake of the moment, the two of them are silently surfeited as they share the scene and that’s severely different from what anyone other filmmaker was doing at that time.  Andrés Isbert (“The Kovak Box”), Antonio Orengo (“Love Letters of a Nun”), Francisco Sanz (“Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!”), Rufino Inglés, and Verónica Llimerá (“Hatchet for the Honeymoon”) round out the cast.

Performances give “Tombs of the Blind Dead” credibility in anxiety-riddled survival and turbulent human interactions but where those performances start to give way coincides with Ossorio’s building of dread.  No doubt the use of slow-motion sets the ghoulish, harrowing tone of the depraved, unabating, skeletally-cursed Templar Knights giving chase on horseback as they track down their flailing fresh meat, but in the process of that spinetingling, in between the Knights self-unearthing and the eventual snare and snack of their human victims, Ossorio doesn’t quite know how to flesh out formidable trepidation.  Pursued, screaming characters stand in the face of danger as if their feet are hardened in cement, stopping at every brief moment when out of sight of the hooded decaying bones and rags with dusty swords, and absentmindedly run right into the exposed radius and ulnas of the slow-moving and blind medieval damned maniacs in sequences that run out too long to be wholly gratifying.  Ossorio better pedestals the ingrained Spanish themes of never escaping your gruesome, haunting past, as seen with the circular narrative of always return back to the Knight’s ruins, and the sexual taboos of bisexuality and rape that lead to destruction.  These course through a more classically presented gothic horror. Perhaps explaining the fervent melodramatics of flamboyant fear, under the dictatorship regime of Francisco Franco and his cult-like ritualization in fascism oversight of Spain.

The sightless, flesh-feasting Templar Knights have found a new home in the Synapse Films’ tomb of terror with a new restoration transfer on a 2-Disc Blu-ray. Refurbished from the uncut original camera negative, the AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50 capacity suppresses any compression issues to display polychromatic decadence in front of a backdrop of steely graded blues. Plenty of a darker scenes to be affected by artefact corruption but the blacks are greatly dyed-in-the-wood saturated and not delineated or in spectrum of lesser decoding. Scenes never approach being flat, in color tone and in field depth, as beads of glistening sweat can be visually elaborated on and the distinction between color, shadow, and scale discern wonderfully. Two audio option tracks are available: a lossless Spanish PCM 2.0 mono track and a lossless hybrid of Spanish-English (Spanglish?) PCM 2.0 mono track. Both tracks are of a post-production dub with the Spanish option having greater synchrony with the articulating native Spanish actors of this Spanish coproduction. Audibly clean with little-to-no hissing, popping, or crackling, Synapse’s singular restoration is in good company with a high impact, high clarity, and low distortion dialogue track that meets eye-to-eye with the visual components as well as the film’s ambience cluster and Antón García Abril’s breathy and discordant, Gothically canticle score. Option subtitles are available in English on both tracks. Special features on the first disc contains individual audio commentaries by horror film historian Troy Howarth, Betty actress Lone Fleming, and the NaschyCast podcasters Troy Guinn and Rod Barnett. A feature-length documentary Marauders from the Mediterranean go from head-to-toe on not just detail Ossorio’s “Tombs of the Blind Dead” as the Spanish stamp in the juggernauting zombie genre of the times but also going in depth with the Spanish laid in horror from the 1960s to 1980s, featuring interviews with Lone Fleming, John Russo (“Night of the Living Dead”), director Jorge Grau (“The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue”), Sitges Film Festival director Mike Hostench, critics Kim Newman and John Martin, film academics Steve Jones and Calum Waddell, actors Helge Line, Manuel de Blas, Antonio Mayans, and Jack Taylor, and even Paul Naschy’s son, Sergio Molina. An alternate U.S. opening sequence Revenge of Planet Ape gives expositional insight on how the success of “The Plant of the Apes” films influenced the American distribution market to rebrand “Tombs of the Blind Dead” as an ape rebellion piece to ride the coattails of the series’ success on a lower, foreign budget. Rounding out the special features is a featurette Awakening of Spanish Horror Cinema, Salem Pop’s “Templar Tears” music video, the original theatrical trailer, and a still gallery. While Synapse has 3-Disc limited-edition set of only 4000 copies made with all the bells-and-whistles of the visual elements of new artwork, a slipcover, and a 3rd disc audio CD, the 2-Disc standard edition comes with all the same special features and all three versions of the film inside the black Amaray Blu-ray case and classic “Tombs of the Blind Dead” poster for cover art. Inside, you’ll get Synapse’s physical media catalogue and a disc on each side of the Amaray’s interior with disc 1 “Tombs of the Blind Dead” and disc 2 “The Blind Dead,” housing the shortened 83-minute U.S. re-edit on a BD25, that sport their own pressed artworks. The uncut disc 1 has a runtime of 101-minutes and has region free playback.

Last Rites: “Tombs of the Blind Dead” is Spain’s answer to “Night of the Living Dead” with discerning individualities ingrained by director Amando de Ossorio to include his country’s own social and political subtext and while Blue Underground’s The Blind Dead DVD collection is an impressive physical media crown jewel of upscaled 720p, the Blu-ray gods favor Synapse with an impressive hi-def A/V release with stellar bonus features.

“Tombs of the Blind Dead” 2-Disc Blu-ray Available for Purchase Here!

Necrophiliac EVIL Until the Eyes Open Awake. “The Corpse of Anna Fritz” reviewed! (Invincible / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Get “The Corpse of Anna Fritz” While Available! Purchase here!

Renowned actress Anna Fritz steals the hearts of millions as fan adorn her beauty and her acting performances that invite her to galas and red-carpet events.  Young and promising, Anna’s career is at its peak until her untimely death upon discovering her lifeless body in the bathroom of a private party.  This is where we begin Anna Fritz’s story, at her death as her body is wheeled and stored into a hospital morgue, naked on a metal gurney and under a white sheet.  In the hands of a late-night shift orderly, Pau, Anna’s beauty and body becomes the ultimate temptation as he sends his party rowdy friends Ivan and Javi pictures.  As soon as Ivan and Javi show up, curious and eager to see the once famous Anna Fritz in all her glory, Pau leads them down to the basement morgue where Ivan and Pau decided to have a once in a lifetime experience of molesting and penetrating her corpse at the disagreement and discouragement of Javi, but in the middle of the necrophiliac act, Anna wakes up in a temporary paralyzed state of shock.  Now that she has seen their faces, the three men have to come together to decide on her fate or theirs. 

By the very title alone, you know “The Corpse of Anna Fritz” is going into the dark territory of sick perversion with unnatural molestation of a human corpse.  The 2015 Spanish film, natively titled “El cadáver de Anna Fritz,” is the debut feature written and directed by Hèctor Hernández Vicens (“Day of the Dead:  Bloodline”) and cowritten with Isaac P. Creus.  An unofficial re-envision or just reminiscent of Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel’s “Deadgirl” where young hormonally aggressive young men find themselves immorally pants down with a presumed dead body of a beautiful young woman without the supernatural element, and sprinkled with similar imagery and energy to that of the following year’s “The Autopsy of Jane Doe,” even with the DVD cover art and film title, “The Corpse of Anna Fritz” is more grounded in reality in comparison but still retains the theme of what aberrant people will do when they believe no one is watching, no one is getting hurt, and believe they’re doing nothing wrong when in fact everything they’ve done is completely deviant and a price has to be paid.  Produced by Bernat Vilaplana, Marc Gomez del Moral, Xavier Granada, and Marta and Albert Carbó, the film is a co-production of Silendum Films, Plató de Cinema, and the Instituto de la Cinematografia y de las Artes Audiovisuales. 

Like most of these autopsy or morgue pictures, they come standard with intimate casting of less than a handful of actors to create a sense of dreadful isolation and loneliness far from public view and safety.  Vicens’s basement of dead body debauchery follows suit with a quad-principal of three men – Cristian Valencia (“Atrocious”), Albert Carbó (“Beach House”), Bernat Saumell (“Eloïse’s Lover”) – and the one lone woman Alba Ribas (“Diary of a Nymphomaniac,” “Faraday”) mainly secluded to the morgue and its cramped backroom.  Valencia, Saumell, and Ribas have worked previously together a couple of years prior on the rom-com “Barcelona Summer Night” and that possible familiarity may have contributed to a feeling of ease when shooting the disturbingly portrayed necrophilism scenes where Ribas’s amazingly still life proneness is physically being rocked back and forth until her head eventually slides off the back of the gurney in a truly sub-rose moment of a cold-fact reality in one point in time, I’m sure.  The three men run the gamut of being trio of separate personalities to which the respective actors deliver the tension into with Ivan (Valencia) as the coked up party boy game for anything except being caught, the orderly Pau (Carbó) has a deep, dark yet timid obsession with molesting the dead of the fairer sex, and Javy (Saumell) exacting some measure of level-headedness and reason despite going along in the first place.  Opinions and concern perspective clash between them with Anna Fritz’s undead consciousness comes around yet the whole back-and-forth does become too long in what is a crap-or-get-off-the-pot stymie of progression in the second act.

Other confounding instance continuous slip banana peels under the feet of “The Corpse of Anna Fritz’s” extreme depravity and violence.  Aside from waltzing right into the hospital morgue without being spotted by personnel or security cameras (there’s CCTV in Spain, right?), Anna Fritz being dead for hours and then suddenly wake up could be considered a medical miracle. With no signs of brain damage other than a temporary nerve paralysis that alleviates segments of her body at a time, Anna appears to be completely recovered and showing no signs of being dead for hours.  She’s even noted as being cold to the touch before the turning point.  If you can stomach the indecent touching of a dead body and then the subsequent risen of said dead body, in what could be considered a parallel to the resurrection of Christ as Anna is this beloved figure killed by self-destruction by her own fame, the Spanish thriller picks up with the ever-growing cascade of bad decisions and no-turning-back moments and with that, those obfuscated moments can be pushed aside with the shocking, disturbing, if not sickening basement-dwelling behavior that’s sought taboo television. For a near stationary storyline, “The Corpse of Anna Fritz” paces particularly well within limited oscillation, especially with the first act and half without Anna Fritz being, lack of a better word, alive.

The 2015 released Spanish film finally sees its day back in the U.S. market with a re-release DVD from Invincible Entertainment. The MPEG-2 encoded, 480p, on a DVD-9 that decodes the data decently at an average of 7Mbps and presenting it in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio. Yet, therein lies still some evident compression issues such as banding in the darker image regions. Skin tones and details, however, are favorable and delineated nicely. The Spanish uncompressed PCM stereo 2.0 has and shows no trouble of making itself heard with a lively dialogue track overtop an ambient secondary that’s a little on the softer side for an echoey basement, if you ask me. English subtitles are forced with no optional menu. In fact, there is no menu at all as the film starts up from the very moment you hit play on your physical media device. Translation appears accurate and errorfree with my knowledge of the language and the Spanish dialect. Aforementioned, there is no DVD menu, resulting in no special features to peruse. I quite like the simplistic, yet provocative cover image on Invincible Entertainment’s release; it may not be as graphically explicit as the Dutch Blu-ray but does still immediately direct one’s brain to the depravity to come with an eye-opening twist. Inside holds a nearly identical image on the disc press with only a slight facial change. There is also no inserts, booklets, or slipcovers with this release. Invincible’s release comes not rated, has a playback of region 1, and has welcomingly brisk runtime of 76 minutes.

Last Rites: “The Corpse of Anna Fritz” doesn’t sprinkle a coating of sugar over what it set out to do – to gorge viewers with real world ghoulish, post-mortem coprolagnia and necrophilia – and like those very few titles in existence across cinema land, a universal theme of those who mess with the dead get theirs in the end.

Get “The Corpse of Anna Fritz” While Available! Purchase here!

Re-Electrifying a Dead Cop to Stop EVIL! “The Blue Jean Monster” reviewed! (88 Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Click Here to Purchase “The Blue Jean Monster” available on Blu-ray!

Soon-to-be first-time dad Tsu Hsiang can’t wait to meet his son.  Often times, his cop vocation intrudes on being there for his wife during her pregnancy as his torn between work and family, trying to be a good man in both regards, but when a tip comes through of a suspected bank robbery, Hsiang can’t neglect his duty and pursues the thieves in a high speed and gun-blazing chase that ends in his death as a construction site pile of steel rebar crushes him during the arrest.  His corpse left under the rebar overnight, a storm causes a transformer to fall on top of him and a cat providing a mystical lifeforce.  The electrical currents course through his dead body, reanimating him with the superhuman strength and invulnerable to pain, but with a cost as Tsiang is slowly rotting away, unable to heal or enjoy any of his senses.  Tsiang also has to recharge his body with electrical volts direct to body in order to continue being reanimated.  With time running out, the cop’s two goals are to meet his unborn child and to capture the gang responsible for him becoming an undead monster. 

While “The Blue Jean Monster” is not the eminent representation of comedy-action with elements of science fictional horror to come out of the Hong Kong movie industry, the early 90’s Category III film does rank high marshalling an entertaining “Dead Heat” (1988) interpretation for Eastern audiences.  The sophomore film of director Ivan Lai, aka Kai-Ming Lai, (“Daughter of Darkness,” “The Peeping Tom”) and the last script credit for Kam-Hung Ng emerges as a bucket list imbroglio of the inexplicable mysticisms at play as well as the good die young but win in the end.  The Jonathan Chow (“Haunted Jail House”) produced film is a coproduction of Golden Harvest Films, Diagonal Pictures, and Paragon Films. 

Not just a mindless killing machine resurrected like an electrified phoenix for revenge and murderous rout, Tsu Hsiang’s rebirth out of death arouses complications around fleeting special moments.  Playing exactly his profile of a mid-30-year-old is the late “Her Vengeance” and “The Killer” actor Fui-on Shing as a cop torn between life and death, literally.  Struggling to comprehend what’s happened to him, Tsu Hsiang has no time to explore the root cause; instead, Hsiang instantly moves forward, learning on the fly, his newfound postmortem powers of invulnerability, immense strength, and to be exasperated right into a pale-eyed version of the angry Hulk.  Shing’s duality on levity and fierce cleaves “The Blue Jean Monster” into its well-intended multifaceted of genres with soft buttery ease.  Shing’s square jaw and large frame doesn’t quell the lighter touch he brings an even softer side to Tsu Hsiang with his intake of Power Steering (Wai-Kit Tse, “Mr. Vampire 1992”), a street nickname for a former hooligan took under Hsiang’s wing after killing his father, in a supposed criminal altercation gone awry.  Power Steering best friend Gucci (“Gloria Yip, “Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky”) becomes the primary target for the gang as she inadvertently becomes a hostage and winds up with the thieves’ hard stolen loot.  The circular, trifold connection between Hsiang, the troublesome young acquaintances, and the gang, helmed by Japanese actor Jun Kunimura (“Audition”) creates double edged complications Hsiang has to juggle and manage while being undead and a soon-to-be father.  Mei-yee Wu, Bei-Dak Lai, and “Mr. Vampire’s” Siu-Fung Wong playing Fui-on Shing’s wife Chu along with “Sex and Zen” star Amy Yip as the lustfully bosomed Death Ray, a gay man conversion therapy seductress, fill out the cast. 

The 1991 film has fast-paced action, politically incorrect humor, and spectacular physical and hand-drawn visual effects.   “The Blue Jean Monster” relied heavily on the skill of the cast and crew to elevate a staggering, fast-and-loose story that barely bridges gaps of its presaged plot holes.  There’s also some fast-and-loose editing slips that expose oversights, such as reused unmasking scene of Jun Kunimura’s head robber and showing five members of a five-member gang huddled behind a flipped van in a scene that was supposed to be sans Kunimura as his character was chasing after Gucci and the money through a construction zone.  Yet, “The Blue Jean Monster” is too enjoyable, too funny, and too drop-dead neat that any and all flaws can be written off as negligible.  Heedless humor encapsulates an antiquated way of thinking that shapes “The Blue Jean Monster” into a time bygone novelty.  When Tsu and Power Steering are suspected gay lovers, as they’re physically intertwined in electrocution to recharge Tsu undeadness, and AIDs becomes the center of the joke, casually tossed in a handful of times even by the brief portrayal of two colorfully sweater-wearing, feminine-displayed men wanting nothing to do with Tsu and Power Steering’s misperceived actions for fear of the deadly virus.  That just epitomizes the slapstick wackiness this not typical but warranted Cat III feature that transfixes with a lot of borderline insensitive satire kneaded into the modish action and special effects of every other Hong Kong film in a saturated market. 

“The Blue Jean Monster” takes over United States and North America courtesy of the UK distributor 88 Films, through MVD Visual from the Fortune Star Media Limited catalogue, with a new AVC encoded, 1080p high definition, Blu-ray.  The BD50 comes top of the line within the limits of the format with a bitrate decoding the original aspect ratioed widescreen 1.85:1 presented and newly restored 2K scanned film an average of at or just under 35Mbps.  Nearly being a non-issue coinciding with a pristine original print, the dual layer disc offers plenty of breathing room to display “The Blue Jean Monster’s’ range of motion, sufferable color palette, painted composite effects, and masterstrokes in lighting a fast-paced pressing without the blight of artefacts.  A few darker scenes are not as rich because of compositional effects but still render significantly with detail under a slightly more penetrating grain.  The overall grain naturally infuses with the 35mm print and translates nicely to a transferred digital scan.   The original, uncompressed Cantonese LPCM 2.0 mono track is the sole offering that, in truth, is all this comical, cosmic caper needs with agreeable action Foley and ambience and some looney absurdity tacked on for good measure.  None of the assortment ever sounds pressed and squished through the single channel suggesting a pretty clean, well-kempt sound design from over the years.  ADR dialogue favors less spatial position but that’s expected with 90’s Hong Kong cinema and is also well-preserved in its fidelity with a clear and damage free recording.  English subtitles are optionally available.  This special edition includes a new interview with assistant director Sam Leong Man Made Monster, the original Hong Kong trailer, and image gallery.  The limited-edition set comes with reflective and glistening slipcase sheathing the same but lusterless composite illustration, artwork created by James Neal.  Inside the green Amaray Blu-ray case, the reverse side of the cover art sports the original Hong Kong one sheet illustration stretching both ends, inferring nearly all the action and characters in the story, along with a doubled-sided cardboard poster of the reversible cover art.  The not rated release comes region locked on A and B and has a runtime of 96 minutes.

Last Rites: If a fan of “Dead Heat,” “The Blue Jean Monster” can prolong the action-caffeinated, narcotized high with supercharged unrest, necropsy humor, and the walking, talking, inexplicable undead in another stellar package and quality release from 88 Films!

Click Here to Purchase “The Blue Jean Monster” available on Blu-ray!

EVIL’s Coaxial Cord Right into Your TV Set! “HeBGB TV” reviewed! (Scream Team Releasing / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Contact Your Local Cable Provide to Upgrade Your Box for “HeBGB TV” on DVD!

In a world of streaming devices, the cable box era has become nothing but a memory until mysterious HeBGB cable boxes sudden appear on retail shelves and on homeowner doorsteps.  The what looks to be a brain in a box with some wiring quickly self-installs right into the cable jack and manifests a gaudy-dressed tangible host, The Purple Guy, right into your living room.  Promising a guaranteed fun time, The Purple Guy is eager for souls, I mean viewers, to subscribed to the endless commercial content of HeBGB TV, promising nothing but the best entertainment from the other side of the dimension has to offer.  Sordid horror, 90s-inspired carving infomercials, grotesque commercials, monstrous sexy hotlines, demonic feature films, and more provide a source of endless brain-rotting consumerism over the TV broadcast waves.  Eye-glued patrons of senseless horrors become slave to the screens that send their very souls to a machination machine from another world.  Who can stop the evils of doom channel surfing? 

Those who are now in their late 30s, early 40s likely remember how awesome and nearly uninhibited cable television was back in the day.  Money and creative talent were invested in turning the most ordinary retail product into a mini-movie of ostentatiousness, imbued with vividly stark colors and an insanity of pure energy.  Television didn’t coddle, it shaped the very fabric of impressionable children of that era, resulting in imagine and inspiration.  That is what comes to mind when speaking of “HeBGB TV,” a comedy-horror anthology of sorts of shorts written-and-directed by Eric Griffin, Adam Lenhart, and Jake Mcclellan.  The trio’s initial concept, prior to the creation of “HeBGB TV,” was something along the lines of an interactive variety show with short films, standup comedy, and puppetry held in front of a live audience.  When COVID hit in 2020, their idea pivoted toward a movie, eventually a script evolved into a drivable wraparound narrative chalked-full of some of the prefabbed material as well as some other new zany, horror-inspired skits, shorts, and string-pulling puppetries.  Griffin, Lenhart, and Mcclellan produce the feature under their LLC of HeBGB TV productions and PatchTown Films, based right in my regional backyard of Lancaster, PA.

Credited in the film as Knucklehead, Jake Mcclellan may act to the very definition of pseudonym but, in the lack of better words, is the face of “HeBGB TV” by having scores of roles and personalities at his disposable to dress up and become a totally new and grotesquely phantasmagoric character.  Whether be The Purple Guy, PU News’ greasy anchorman, the Blue Monster, or just desperate dieter with a health-hazard late night snacking problem, Mcclellan goes all out with makeup, costuming, and prosthetics in what could be considered a one man drag show and its gorgeously panache and over-the-top but doesn’t stray terribly too far from the outrageous era the horror-comedy emulates.  “HeBGB TV” is full of caricatures of late-night television and oddities of live TV and marketing campaigns, even Eric Griffin and Adam Lenhart get involved in front of camera as a hobo watching a portable antenna TV and as Smokie, the exterminator of potheads with noxious weed, as seen on TV, or rather “HeBGB TV.”  Most of the enthusiasm, and eccentrics, are within film’s faux television programming but the cast of performances flesh out with Ian Sanchez, Curtis Proctor-Artz, Josh Dorsheimer, Zenobia Decoteau, Michael Garland, Mike Madrigall, Ellen Tiberio-Shultz, Kristie Ohlinger, Colleen Madrigall, and Willow and Van Reiner as the kids who The Purple Guy connivingly entertains and Andrew Bowser reprising his most beloved YouTube persona, Onyx the Fortuitous.

Cut from the same cloth as Weird Al’s “UHF, Peter Hyams’s “Stay Tuned,” and Jeff Lieberman’s “Remote Control,” the cable box antics of the 80s-90s TV is quickly fading the analog years into nothing more than static snow of broadcast noise.  However, “HeBGB TV” is the answer, the recollection, and the nostalgia-driven film that delivers better than trying to get a glimpse of the vague outlines of adult actresses in the static noise of premium adult channels.  Directors Griffin, Lenhart, and Mcclellan combine their creative geniuses, incorporate their sentimental love of 90’s media, and integrate their own other interests into a cinematic cannonball of colorful comedy-horror.  While the wraparound stories outside the HeBGB TV box proves able with the inexplicable mass rollout of the brain-in-a-box cable program provider and rotting, killing, and transfiguring viewers into mindless gawkers, overdosed smokers, and malevolent demons, the real star of the feature is flipping through the channels for the go-hard mock-commercials and other putrid programming laced with horror themes and capturing the spirit of television culture of 20-to-30 years ago.  While most of the visual effects reside around the wraparound story, contributing to the alloying of the story, Adam Lenhart’s practical effects more than make up for it a DIY initiative of can-do sculpting, molding, and crafting ingenuity below the embraced realm of unreality.

Don’t touch that dial as Scream Team Releasing delivers cable television like never before with “HeBGB TV” now on DVD! Though the Scream Team Releasing DVD back cover lists the format as a Blu-ray, the data file is actually a MPEG2 encoded, singer-layer DVD5 that has a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio presentation. A combination blend of interlaced and digital video swirl “HeBGB TV” into a time warp of the past and present. The filmmakers captured not only the feel of rambunctious, eccentric, and vividly brilliant 90’s commercials but were also able to capture the look of it too with the interlacing horizontal lines indicative of video frame rates of the time. The wraparound narrative portions are digitally cleaner in juxtaposition, factionalizing present and TV programming with distinction until the culminating plan comes to conclusion. Some of the digital visual effects gags crumble under the practical elements of an analog airing, proving once again that the tangible and practical outstage the digital composition, but the crumbling doesn’t stem from compression issues. The English language Dolby Digital 2.0 mix is a symphony of frenzied chaos, pinpoint advert jingles, and deliciously distasteful horror gags facsimiled perfectly, as if it was plucked straight from the pre-millennium. Dialogue is quick but renders clean and clear in a blend of inset and ADR vocal recording, per the commentary. No issues with depth, range, or any kind of compression side effects. Well scored with a catchy main theme and topnotch sound designed to add to “HeBGB TV’s” romp commercial content. English subtitles are optionally available. Bonus features are aplenty with a retrospective interview with the three directors and short clips going in-depth with behind-the-scenes movie magic, a HeBGB TV video installation guide, a world-premiere pre-show, the first interactive show prior to COVID, and the theatrical trailer in the motion menu option shaped like a retro tube television with right side buttons. Inside the setup option along with the English Subtitle toggle, a directors’ commentary can be selected and played from there. The standard edition encased inside an Amaray comes with faded hues on an illustrated composition cover art of most of the “HeBGB TV’s” wacky pastiches and a disc pressed with the pulsing brain-loaded cable box. The release comes not rated, region free, and has a copasetic runtime of 78 minutes. ”HeBGB TV” is couch potato worthy that syndicates together hilarious travesties and transvestites for timeless television touting, stitched together from previously shot short films, puppetry depravities, and a new sci-fi fiction.

Contact Your Local Cable Provide to Upgrade Your Box for “HeBGB TV” on DVD!