Tag Archives: 2024

Digging Up the EVIL Disentombs the Past! “Exhuma” reviewed! (Well Go USA Entertainment / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Open the Blu-ray Coffin on “Exhuma” Today!

A shaman and her assistant recruit a geomancer and a mortician to investigate the case of an American newborn boy’s distressing grave calling that has also haunted every patriarch member of the family for generations.  The large paying job sends them to remote forest where the unmarked grave of the boy’s great, great grandfather lies beneath the dirt.  For the geomancer, all signs point to not disturbing the grave but the father’s eagerness to cure his son’s troubles and the shaman’s persistence for a big payday goes against the wise geomancer’s better judgement.  All is seemingly well after exhuming and transferring the ancestral coffin to be cremated at a nearby hospital the next day until a greedy, hospital official pries open the sealed casket, releasing a long-awaited evil, and digging up out of the same burial ground another malevolent and mysterious ancient force that reaches far beyond the borders of Korea. 

Here as of late, ItsBlogginEvil.com’s last three reviews have taken readers on a genre-diverse tour of Asia, from Japan with Yu Nakamoto’s meta-slashers in “Ikenie Man” and “Harawata Man,” to Hong Kong with David Chung’s affrayed police actioner “Royal Warriors,” to conclude in South Korea with the supernatural horror in the realm of cultural superstitions of P’ungsu, or geomancy, in Jang Jae-hyun’s latest written-and-directed thriller “Exhuma.”  The 2024 film follows a string of religious related, supernatural themes Jae-hyun has put out in his prior two directed projects with “The Priests” and “Svaha:  The Sixth Finger,” and like “Ikenie Man,” “Harawata Man,” and “Royal Warriors,” a portion of Jae-hyun’s films are touched by Japanese culture.  “Exhuma” amounts to the same standard of crisscrossing the two cultures with dangerous results with “Exhuma” digging up a past better left alone.  Park Hyeong Jin and Kwon Ji Yong (“Ghost Mansion”) produce the spiritually turbulent story under Showbox Entertaiment and Pinetown Productions. 

“Exhuma” encircles four culturally inclined characters that entrench themselves into an unorthodox means of exhuming a disturbed essence for what is essentially an exorcism variant to alleviate living perturbation beyond the grave.  The superstition here revolves around the land temperament.  Geomancers find good sites to lay people to rest, ones that exert extrasensory, or grave call, troubles onto family members that place upon them a grief, anxious, and other mentally uneasy state, and it’s the “Exhuma’s” Geomancer who has story predominance, shared only with the young and beautiful shaman woman with tagalongs who resemble more of assistants than coequals.  In an age-old and cautionary tale of wisdom and inexperience, Choi Min-sik (“Oldboy”) and Kim Go-eun (“Monster”) play the respective roles of the reluctant and experienced Geomancer Kim Sang-deok and the naïve eager yet gifted shaman Lee Hwa-rim.  Receiving character voice over monologue introductions and becoming the ultimate deciding factors of this new job is worth the pay, they completely overshadow the Shaman apprentice (Lee Do-hyun,) and the mortician (Yoo Hae-jin) who works with the Geomancer.  Pivotal as these support characters are to the story, not only buffers for the evil that beleaguers them but also as latched on friends and family of the isolating weird and strange subculture to most but normalized in Korea, the shaman apprentice and mortician definitely take a back seat to the more prominent players to the point where they almost seem contributorily worthless to the task.  As a whole, the dynamic works because the shaman and geomancer alone would not be sufficient for diabolical misadventures of an exhumation gone wrong and supplement only when necessary to aid the fight against an ancient evil twice over.  The cast fills out with Hong Seo-jun, Jeon Jin-ki, Kim Jae-Cheol, and Lee Jong-goo.

The wafting back and forth between Korean and Japanese culture, the fraternization of beliefs and superstitions, tells “Exhuma” differently than most hilltop haunts and horrors.  Themes of a haunted past and inexplicable guilt riddle holes through family lineage, resulting rancorous ripples in the form of mental illness, and devised as a story vehicle device of supernatural subverting trauma from the sins of the father.  In America, Shamanism and Geomancy don’t exist, especially in the history, but for Korea and its people, the country is rich in transcendent ritual and mythology that shapes society, even in their cinematic culture as regularly do we see period films of feudal Korea.  History also dictates “Exhuma’s” need to be a representation of purging the long Japanese occupation of Korea for nearly three and half decades from 1910 to 1945.  The occupation was a disruption in Korean way of life with oppression and war machinations stitched into Korean’s fabric, hence the Korean plot of land being very spoiled with vileness in “Exhuma’s” tale of one historically troubled family’s course to remove that uneasiness that has plagued and followed them to America.  Yet, the past is rooted deep and Jang Jae-hyun’s understands the difficulty of eradicating a sullied ancestry by dichotomizing his darkly toned, folklore valued, and occult twisted story into two parts with sublayers as deep as the dirt surrounding the coffin, or rather, coffins with a formidable presence created and conjured by malicious Japanese Yōkai and represented in one of the most iconic Japanese figures as remnants of an Imperial Japan occupation.

Lying in wait underneath the high-definition terra firma is Well Go USA Entertainment’s “Exhuma” on an AVC encoded, 1080p resolution, BD25, presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio. Accompanied by no information on the video vehicle, IMDB.com lists Jang Jae-hyun and cinematographer Lee Mo-gae shoot with an Arri Alexa Mini which offers the ease of use of multiple lenses, and that shows here with a vast stretch to encompass the Korean mountains into the frame as well as keeping tight on characters while keeping in focus the immediate surroundings. Details are sharp under a flinty tone of saturated grays and blacks with spot pops and glows of in-scene lighting and under the capacity’s umbrella, finer textural elements suffuse through the darkness and into the fold. Audio options include the original Korean language DTS-HD 5.1 and an English dub DTS-HD 5.1. Crystal clear dialogue runs through parallel with the visual counterpart and is well timed and potent, touching the side and back channels with the eerie callings of the grave and its inhabited spirits running rampant free while harnessing focus on the character on scene to create a ranging discarnate of deep, ominous sounds that stalk and haunt the principals. English translation paces well and appears to be translated grammatically and is error free. Well Go USA Entertainment releases are feature focused and this one too containing only a making of featurette in the bonus content along with the trailer. The interior of the traditional Blu-ray Amaray comes with a disc pressing of the four principal characters peering into a dug grave. The exterior has a two-tone, subsoil profile forming a face out of a grave with the four principals on the topsoil and the same image also graces the cardboard O-slip that has a pseudo-lenticular sheen. Authored to have a region A playback, “Exhuma” runs just over two hours long at 135 minutes and is not rated.

Last Rites: The addition of learning authentic, practiced rituals benefits “Exhuma’s” folklore frights tenfold and with neat, grounded performances and a superb blend of visual and practical effects, this original, supernatural thriller raises the Korean movie industry up a notch on the global scale.

Open the Blu-ray Coffin on “Exhuma” Today!

EVIL Backwoods Cannibals Are Back for Seconds! “Butchers Book Two: Raghorn” reviewed! (Breaking Glass Pictures / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Ready to Eat? “Butchers Book Two: Raghorn” Available Here on DVD!

The abduction of a wealthy family’s daughter drives the four kidnappers onto the backroads of rural America toward their way to riches.  However, things turn south as their vehicle strikes a large raghorn, instantly dissolving their escape route and their previously teetering plan.  A festering betrayal and greed divide the group that leads them into the cannibalistic hands of the sadistic, backwoods inhabitant Clyde and his monstrous freak of a brother Crusher.  Always looking for a good piece of meat and with a brutal penchant for playing with his food, Clyde takes them hostage at gunpoint, ties them up, and has fun torturing and tenderizing his foraged prize before chopping them up to pieces on a bloody stump for stew makings.  Yet, the abducted woman refuses to be the victim and let terrible, awful atrocities happen to her, and not even let it happen to her kidnappers, by escaping her confines and managing to get ahold of a double barrel shotgun.  A standoff ensues but nothing gets in between Clyde and his food. 

“Butchers Book Two:  Raghorn” is director Adrian Langley’s 2024 standalone sequel to his lowkey breakout 2020 hit, the indie backwoods cannibal-survivor picture, “Butchers”.  The sequel doesn’t stray too far from the precursory film’s primary premise with a family of degenerate provincials with a taste for human flesh whisking away stranded travelers in some kind deranged version of roadside assistance.  Langley directs and writes the script for the film based off a story conceived by Langley and Kolin Casagrande, who previously collaborated with Langley as a producer on his 2010 crime thriller directed feature entitled “Donkey.”  More than a decade later, Casagrande and Langley are again making beautiful violence together with Blue Fox Entertainment’s James Huntsman (“Bunker”), a parent company of the film’s distributor, Red Hound Entertainment, and “Butcher’s” Doug Phillips as producers and another “Butcher” producer, Kevin Preece, as associate producer.

Aforementioned, “Butchers Book Two:  Reghorn” doesn’t subsequently follow the first feature and introduces new set of paltry protagonists versus a new set of insatiable and vile cannibals deep within the middle of the woods of Nowheresville, America.  The party forcibly partook in the cannibals’ cruelty isn’t necessarily all an innocent party as they’re mostly kidnappers looking to score big from their captive.  Dave Coleman (“Ghoul House”), Miguel Cortez, Sam Huntsman (“Bunker”), son of producer James Huntsman, and Hollie Kennedy portray the ensnared antiheros with the latter two being most of the focus amongst them, seeing that they are cousins that evoke more empathy than the less empathic former.  The wild car outside of that and who are not the viciously outweighing outliers is the girl in the trunk, who is actually a man named Corgand Svendsen.  The androgynous model from Canada hikes up a skirt and wears a tight top crop to become the damsel Ash but Ash is no damsel in distress.  The story shifts from Ash’s bagged head and wrists tied helplessness to become the infiltrating protagonist to take up Clyde and Crusher to do what’s right, even if that means saving the skin, literally, on a couple of her captors.  Svendsen gives a calm and subdued performance, especially as a hostage in the money scheme and in the bloody mitts of cannibals, but perhaps there’s more than what meets the eye for Ash.  Perhaps, Ash is a part of the kidnapping scheme in a theorized plot between Ash and Sam Huntsman character Josh who frequently tries to make Ash comfortable in the whole ordeal and Ash is just trying to salvage her investment, but the strength of that theory never fully materializes in Ash’s motivation to go against two ruthless killers rather than to flee free with her life.  Clyde and Crusher are the two mysteriously originated characters who live in the woods and eat people.  Their background is not specified or shared in any minute way but “What Lurks Beneath’s” Nick Biskupek plays a mean, man-eating son of a bitch in Clyde while Michael Swatton, who previously played one of the Watson brothers in original “Butchers,” compliments his “little” brother as a colossal, head-crushing freak of a nature left in the audience’s peripheral view.  The sequel’s casts ends with Mark Templin (“We Are the Missing”) as a moment of reprieve stopgap sheriff tracking down the vehicular accident victims who may not be victims after all.

Watching “Butchers Book Two:  Raghorn” is like watching in a déjà vu fog.  The similar premise to the 2020 film peruses familiar aisles of country-chic cannibals chopping careless characters who stumble into their killing grounds.  What the sequel drops is the perversive and family legacy angle, reducing the story to just two brothers living isolated on the outskirts and barbequing people as they happenstance wander by.  Langley also doesn’t up the graphic nature but sustains the same amount of gore and mordacious violence.  Even when cutting down the killer contingent down half its size, violence remains taut and palpable for shock effect as Langley does make the savagery purposeful rather than just gratuitous.  “Raghorn” is by no means a bigger, badder sequel, as most sequels tend to try and exceed expectations and outdo the first, i.e. more blood, bigger body count, detailed special effects, etc., but the indie roots that made the original film palpable are still firmly grounded with a, literally, grab-it-by-the-balls, suit yourself story without the poking and prodding influences of a rapacious producer or studio with flashing dollar signs in their eyes. 

Breaking Glass Pictures’ “Butchers Book Two:  Raghorn” would have been a perfect fit for the distributor’s short-lived extreme horror sublabel, Vicious Circle Films.  However, we’re still glad the sequel made the home video market under one of Philadelphia’s most prominent indie distributor labels with a DVD release.  The MPEG-2, single layered, DVD5 is presented in an upscaled 1080p with a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio.  While not receiving high-definition resolution, you’ll be fairly pleased with the quality of this release that retains some faithful reproductions in textural details, such as Clyde’s cutoff jean jacket and overall grimy attire that does highlight the jacket’s frayed ends and the outlined dirt patches or the engulfing variety of foliage that naturally exhibited innate green shades, but also the general appearance is soft in the more depth of details.  Langley, who wears multiple production hats between editing, directing, and writing, also is behind the cinematographer lens to create the space of depth and to be stylistic with a few pan and track occurrences.  The English Dolby Digital 5.1 surround mix is the only lossy option available that renders a traversable diffusion of sound throughout with balanced layers between dialogue, ambience, and soundtrack layers.  Clyde’s intelligent intelligibility under a twang tongue clearly finds the audio receptors with the remaining dialogue denoting clarity in the same fashion. English subtitles are available for optional use. While Breaking Glass Pictures’ releases do not have a wealth of bonus content, most have some content to peruse; however, this particular release is feature only. The region 1 playback DVD has a runtime of 89 minutes and is not rated.

Last Rites: From the book of Andrian Langley’s cannibal misfits, a second story lives and breathe in “Butchers Book Two: Raghorn,” a gruesome, miscreant fanned, survival of the hungriest for their cravings tale wrapped just a tad too lightly for proper consumption.

Ready to Eat? “Butchers Book Two: Raghorn” Available Here on DVD!

The Itsy-Bitsy EVIL Crawled Down Your Throat and Ate Your Insides! “Sting” reviewed! (Well Go USA Entertainment / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Sting” Is Available for Pre-Order for a Blu-ray July 30th Release!

A rebellious, preteen girl wading through the stepfather muck of new family dynamics befriends a small spider she discovers while snooping around a neighbor’s room in her apartment building.  The unique, small spider can mimic her every vocal sound, quickly captivating the girl’s interest as she seeks solace from her upended life, and the spider is constantly hungry being sequestered to a jar as the girl’s newfound pet.  The more she feeds the spider she’s named Sting the bigger it grows in a short period of time.  During the night, Sting unconfines itself and roams the airducts, immobilizing apartment residing animals and people alike with a potent paralyzing bite, to then web-encase them in the ducts and feast upon her captured prizes while still alive.  When Sting threatens the girl’s family, she must put her angsty squabbles and feelings aside and take the fight to her once beloved pet that has now become a giant, flesh-eating, arachnid.

There hasn’t been this much fun in a giant spider movie since “Eight Legged Freaks!”  “Sting” is a 2024, Australian creature feature from “Wyrmwood” franchise director Kiah Roache-Turner who pours portions of his own experiences in life into the script, metamorphosing “Sting” from being not only just a monstrous amount of arachnophobia but also a personally purging of multitude of fears rolled up into one web-slinging scary movie.  The story is set inside a slum apartment building in New York City at the centric mercy of a Northeastern blizzard; however, “Sting” is actually shot on a production stage in Sydney, in the New South Wales province of Australia, that has taken on the doubling duty for The Big apple.  “Sting” is a coproduction between Align Films, Pictures in Paradise, and See Pictures with “Wyrmwood:  Road of the Dead’s” Michael Potin, Jaimie Hilton, and “Daybreakers’” Chris Brown producing.

The cast is comprised of mostly Australian actors modulating their voices to the American accent and doing a rather impeccable job at it with only a slight slip of a slower drawl.  The principal nuclear family opens in the middle of new dad throes, the building’s handyman Ethan (Ryan Corr, “Wolf Creek 2”) struggling to not only meet the demands on his slumlord boss / stern aunt by marriage named Gunter (Robyn Nevin, “The Matrix Reloaded”) but also navigate a path toward a better, more-to-his-liking job while also reaching through and connecting with his defiant stepdaughter Charlotte (Alyla Browne, “Furiosa:  A Mad Max Saga”).  Sting, the spider, runs through the apartment tenants that include a depressed and alcoholic widower (Silvia Colloca, “Van Helsing”), a monotone marine biology grad student (Danny Kim), and even a spirited exterminator (the only American in the film in Jermaine Fowler, “The Blackening”) who holsters a nail gun for NYC protection as well as vermin gas bombs on his utility belt.  All-in-all, diversity is rich if not slightly stereotyped, but Roache-Turner does a really good job at telling their backstories through the camera shots and without the need for much expositional dialogue, such as the unsaid death of the widower’s family but enough visuals and grief expressions do formulate what happened.  Components of backstory life heighten the tension, or even share awkward moments, collectively between neighbors and family members that lead to presumptions and to, eventually, an explosion of distrust and anger that makes the perfect screener to blind them what’s really creepily-crawlingly around.  Noni Hazlehurst and Penelope Mitchell (“Hellboy” ’19) conclude the casting as immigrant mother with Alzheimer’s and her first-generation daughter married to Ethan and trying to also navigate a precarious life out from under her slumlord aunt’s grasp.

“Sting” is one of those movies that reminds horror fans why the genre is great and beloved.  Titular spider named after the “Lord of the Ring’s” sword that injured Shelob, the giant spider, in “Return of the King” and a definitive “Alien” inspired film, complete with a viciously blood-thirsty extraterrestrial bug that suspends prey with webbing and a badass female heroine, “Sting” masters the giant spider effect by mostly using practical means.  That’s right, a giant spider puppet, manned by eight puppeteers, checks most of the computer-imagery at the door and enters with confidence from master of effects Sir Richard Taylor and his team from Wētā Workshop, who has help build effects for the recent “Mortal Kombat,” Ti West’s “MaXXXine” films, and has had a helping hand in the MCU.  Skulking on ceilings, stealthily silking down, locomoting with smooth, natural movements as the spider, approximately the size of large black Labrador, has manipulated properties to lurk and hunt to visually feed the need and scare the phobia right into your once comforted being.  The story’s struggling family and honesty-is-the-best-policy themes ground “Sting’s” rabid arachnida with relatable turmoils, especially from a parenting and child point of views and anyone who has had children or parents, like the majority of us do, will understand preteen problems.  Ultimately, Sting represents childish hidden secrets, something they can control of their own volition, and a rebellious cause that’s ironically not good for them, turns uncontrollable, and is an obvious problem, akin to doing drugs for an extended period.  Sting might not be a line of cocaine or a hypodermic needled filled with narcotic poison, but space spider does have toxicity that courses a paralyzing agent conveyed by a single bite. 

Spiders are the demonized sharks of the land and continue to string webs of fear inside audiences.  Well Go USA Entertainment Blu-ray of “Sting” proves spiders still secrete a damn good monster movie that’s one part “Aliens” and one part “Charlotte’s Web” with an AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD25 release presented in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio.  For a Well GO USA product, “Sting” is one of their better compressed discs that I’ve seen, retaining unexpurgated blacks and fling out glistening, texture palpable details throughout, and there were a plenty of black and low-lit areas to what afflicts most of the label’s releases, a potentially image sidelining obstacle. Coloring is a tad soft but moderately sound when juxtaposed against an enormously, slick gun-metal toned spider. The English DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio surround sound mix renders with strength, a solid, multi-channel testing sound design when the spider creates a clatter in the airducts for back, side, and front localization. Depth appropriate is fine as well as a wide range of audio action onomatopoeia. No issues or obstacles obstructing the clean and clear dialogue, layered in the forefront and level weaved into the action where needed. English subtitles, as well as English SDH and French subtitles, are optionally available. Typically, we do not usually receive in-depth special features from Well Go USA due in part of his long history with Eastern films where bonus content seems nearly nonexistent. For “Sting,” there’s a substantial behind-the-scenes featurette taking a long look on the Roache-Turner’s concept and inspiration, the Creation of the Monster sizes up how the special effects were completed by Sir Richard Taylor’s company, interviews with the cast and crew on making the film, and the theatrical trailer. Encased inside a conventional Blu-ray Amaray, Sting has, in my opinion, a very effective, genuinely creepy poster of a spider walking across the floor next to a body, graded in a blue hue and working deep with the shadow angle for potency. Well Go USA surprises again with the fun disc pressed art of a toon-ish illustration that doesn’t seemingly fit the rest of the package marketing but becomes clear from the storyline. An advert for the company’s other newer releases, “The Flying Swordsman,” “Your Lucky Day,” and “A Creature Was Stirring,” is adjacently tucked in. “Sting” has a well-paced 91-minute runtime, is region A encoded for playback, and is rated R for violent content, bloody images, and language.

Last Rites: No doubt about it. “Sting” is fang-tastic! A modern spidersploitation film that flexes hard, built upon the strong backs of some great pop culture and science-fiction horror moments as an endearing tribute.

“Sting” Is Available for Pre-Order for a Blu-ray July 30th Release!