This EVIL Thanksgiving Bird Has Been Overcooked. “Amityville Turkey Day” reviewed! (SRS Cinema / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on December 9, 2024

“Amityville Turkey Day” – That’s No Cranberry Sauce! Check Out the DVD Here!

Rocco, a sleazy indie film director, is given one last project to director with the stipulation of not to squander the funds and to make a competent hit movie without completely making principal photography a nightmare for the cast and crew. Having landed a large estate to shoot his film, the house comes with a manservant named Bram to take care of their needs and see to the estate grounds. When a man-eating Turkey from Hell, embodied by the evil soul of once infamous doctor, comes home for Thanksgiving dinner, Bram aims to curate a fine feast for the abrasive, wicked bird from the indie film production. As cast and crew begin to dwindle down and disappear, the show-running producer takes charge to motivate and take care of the slipping through the cracks mess of, yet again, another Rocco botched production. Yet, the turkey still hungers and when all the excess meat is consumed, he will then find a human mate to reincarnate himself for human form.

After promising myself, swearing up and down, that I would never, ever watch and review another Amityville titled infused film again, “Amityville Turkey Day” had sucked me right back in, like a moth to the flame into another mindless and pointless, could I even call it this, money-grabbing exploitation of the Amityville title letdown of a holiday-comedy horror film. The 2024, microbudget Thanksgiving themed sequel to “Amityville Thanksgiving” brings back the writing-and-directing duo of Will Collazo Jr. (“Amityville Shark House,” “Amityville Apocalypse”) and Julie Anne Prescott (indie film scream-queen of “The Amityville Harvest” and “Amityville Thanksgiving”) to add a little more sanguine stuffing in their continuation of a terrorizing wild Turkey. Alternatively known as “Amityville Thanksgiving 2,” the feature is an indiegogo crowdfunded campaign that raised the $10,000 goal and became a Will Collazo Jr.’s Cult Cinema production.

The sequel doesn’t return most of the cast from the film. Most sequels don’t, right? Instead, a whole new batch of rough puff principals are basted over the story to try and moisten the flavor of a rather rough-and-ready follow-up. Amongst the medley filled in with B-movie talent, there doesn’t seem to be a one standout lead role to take charge in what is more of convergence of counterproductive parts that overlap and overstep each other’s storyline. Characters also disappear and reappear without context to about where they were and where they go, for example the sleazy director Rocco (Michael Ruggiere) vanishes for most of the story’s midriff and then just reappears in the third act without a sense of where he’s been. Erica Dyer (“The Town Without Halloween,” “Attack of the Corn Zombies”) plays one of the few characters with an actual intact arc as the pissed off producer Ivy who storms in and takes charge of Rocco’s quickly deteriorating production, proving to be a competent leader to quickly organize the film crew into action, but as cast and crew begin to drop like flies and vanishing from the estate set within the Thanksgiving week, Ivy’s honed in focus doesn’t register the killer Turkey, voiced by Steven Kiseleski (“Amityville Karen,” “Amityville Bigfoot”), and it’s righthand caretaker Bram (Dino Castelli, “Screamwalkers”) slowly filleting the filmmakers for feasting. A large portion of the character pie is throwaway fodder for the Turkey with only a couple of others to stand out with pointed out substance, that also point back to “Amityville Thanksgiving, with Kevin (Tim Hatch, “Amityville in Space, and the other actor to return from “Amityville Thanksgiving) on a mission to find out what happened to his sister from “Amityville Thanksgiving,” and his planted actress friend Jessica (Jen Elyse Feldy, “The Elder Hunters,” “Camp Blood 666 Part 2”), but their roles do get lost in the fray of the frenzied packed, plot hole-riddled storyline that crams in too much too hastily inside a jerry-built and unnecessary tale. David Perry, Clint Beaver, Amanda Flowers, Shannon Hall, Jeff Webb, Thomas J. O’Brien, Ralph Rey, James Janso, Stephen Bloodworth, and the late Mark C. Fullhardt, to which this film is dedicated to, fill out as the at will Turkey fodder. And I hope all my listings of “Amityville” named films has brought awareness to this exploitative issue!

“Amityville Turkey Day” is no “Thankskilling.” Jordan Downey has mastered the smack-talking, rude-with-tude, killer Turkey in style, substance, and outrageous kills. Will Collazo Jr.’s film feels more like a cheap knockoff to the likes of the Italian unauthorized remakes, sequels, and spinoffs of American films of the 1980s, attaching the Amityville name to draw attention and sponge off the legitimate franchise that has now become a disgusting and disheartening running joke and parody of unoriginality. “Amityville Turkey Day” mirrors every ounce of that last sentiment with a shoddy, low rent feature that not only drags the Amityville title deeper into the overkill mud but also hurts the exposure of Jordan Downey’s “Thankskilling” to those viewers who do get their unsuspecting hands onto Collazo’s film first and leaves a residual bad taste toward more competent Turkey trot terrorizers. That bitterness is contributed by the lack of story structure and coherency, a lost sense of unique personality and entertainment, and a brutal monotone flow that stagnates upon just one setting over the course of a few days, which is a major gap considering the film crew disappearing here and there during that time and no one happens to care or even hardly notice. Comedy elements fall flat, reduced to fart and sexual gags and missing-the-mark cheap insults surrounded by dull kills, especially for a Turkey that goes for the juggler. Very few moments of levity and intrigue can be pulled from “Amityville Turkey Day” with the puppeteered evil Turkey lobbing an occasional humorous one liner – “Look at all that blood! She’s a squirter!” – and the manifested closet gimp is too strange of a guilty-allure to ignore, and these few and far in between bright spots add a layer of color to what is dull overall.

The crowdfunded clucker had arrived just in time for this year’s Thanksgiving courtesy of indie film friendly distributor SRS Cinema. “Amityville Turkey Day” is housed on an MPEG2 encoded, 480p resolution, 5 gigabyte DVD-R. According to the crowdfunding page, Collazo offered an all-around bigger and better experience from the bareboned, nearly no-budget, precursor, yet the sequel didn’t live up to expectations and appeared to be more of the same slapdash as the first and this translates to a writeable DVD disc with a fuzzy picture, smoothed edges, and plenty of posterization and banding that digs the grave deeper for this overdone bird. The ungraded picture produces unnatural lighting from a series of gelled flood lights, more so with deep red, aimed upward to evoke thicker upper shadow positions. What the result constitutes with the unhelpful lower resolution camera is an overly hot and overly diffused image in what would be Turkey and Bram basement scheming scenes that renders any leftover details washed away from the effect. The English LPCM 2.0 mono track is a flat fixture via the onboard microphone on the digital camera that creates an anemic dialogue presence with subtle distortion. Range consists of post-production sound effects and the close quartered rooms of the “estate” has depth pretty much nonexistent. I will say dialogue is prominent and clear though higher decibels overtake and clip the microphone’s volume intake. English subtitles are optionally available. The release’s special features include a director’s commentary, a making-of behind-the-scenes, the original trailer, and other SRS Cinema prevuews. Aside from an enticing illustrated cover art, the DVD has no other supplemental cover art, inserts, and etc. “Amityville Turkey Day” has a runtime of 93 minutes, is region free, and comes not rated.

Last Rites: “Amityville Turkey Day” is difficult to gobble up. In fact, “Amityville Turkey Day” is much like having to go to your great Aunt’s house for a third Thanksgiving dinner of the day, the one that is the family’s black sheep, wears a muumuu, and her house smells like cheap cigarettes and cat dandruff, it’s a hard no thank you.

“Amityville Turkey Day” – That’s No Cranberry Sauce! Check Out the DVD Here!

Open Up Your Mind to EVIL! “Conjuring the Beyond” reviewed! (DVD / Breaking Glass Pictures)

Posted by Steven Lewis on October 20, 2022

“Conjuring the Beyond” on DVD at Amazon.com!

Divorced and left to wallow in her own self-pity, Wanda Fulcia moves into her brother and wife’s house but her inability to secure a job and act responsible has proved difficult with her hosts as she continues to ask for favors, such as borrowing her brother’s car to drive to a paid sleep study in the middle of a nearly deserted small town. Dr. Pretorious, the head clinician of the study, seeks to hypnotize his four, sleep paralysis unaffected, participants to open their portion of the brain to produce night terrors and sleepwalking in order to treat the condition. What the participants are really opened to is a nightmare state of being paralyzed while aware of an old, animalistic hag surveying them as they lie powerless to move. At dawn, they all convey recalling the same dream and realize one of them is missing. The recorded video shows the missing participant sleepwalking from his room without a trace of where they’ve gone. The next night, the ordeal repeats itself and another member of their party goes missing. Wanda and those left must uncover the mystery behind their night terrors before they back to sleep again.

Borrowing from the tall story superstitions that sleep paralysis was the work of demons while also plucking ideas from Stuart Gordon’s perceptually other-dimensional horror film, “From Beyond” and James Wan’s spirit-investigating “The Conjuring,” Calvin Morie McCarthy writes and directs his own unofficial, unauthorized, and unsanctioned sublevel spinoff with “Conjuring the Beyond.” The Vancouver, Washington born 30-year-old filmmaker has been through his fair share of direct-to-video horror refuse, even etching himself into the running joke of “Amityville” titled cheapies with his entry “The Amityville Poltergeist” that has garnered a general public rating of 2.2 on IMDB.com. That low score doesn’t tarnish our objective goal to look at “Conjuring the Beyond” impartially without the blatant cash-in title affecting our sound judgement because, trust me, we’ve seen our lion’s share of reused, reworked, and rehashed titles. The film marks the first 2022 release for McCarthy and is produced by Chad Buffet of the Renton, Washington based special effects and props company, Raptor FX Studio, along with Joe Dietrich’s co-created company 7th Street Productions with McCarthy and Richard Wolff of Breaking Glass Pictures who distributes the film with an at-home release.

At the heart of the story is Wanda Fulcia played by Victoria Grace Borrello in her feature film debut. The Loyola University graduate of the arts, Borrello offers a new face and a serious craft performance toward a recently divorced person who has become lost in themselves. Wanda’s written to be entrenched into any kind situation that befalls her whether be with her own troubles of self-discovery or the beleaguering troubles of a cerebral doorway opened to let a malevolent entity into her subconscious. Who opened that mental gateway is the potentially guileful psyche-physician, Dr. Richard Pretorious. Pretorious, as all horror fans know, is a homage to “From Beyond’s” Dr. Edward Pretorious, the main antagonist who used a machine called The Resonator to expand a person’s mind into other dimensions. “Mutant Vampire from the Planet Neptune’s” Steve Larkin certainly does not portray the diabolism in her version of a Pretorious Doctor but there is this underlining itch that can’t exactly be scratched regarding the character’s true intentions. This unfinished business happens between both Wanda Fulcia and Dr. Richard Pretorious and that takes away from completing well-rounded characters who never see themselves cross that arc finish line. Essentially, both are stuck in a disappointing stasis of unfulfillment, and their morals and their emotional baggage are carelessly left to the wind. I found the secondary principals more impressive and a little more understandable with tidbits of themselves being dropped like breadcrumbs through the variable time on screen. Cocky boxer Porter (Jon Meggison, “The Haunting of Ravenwood”), a tarot card floozie Margo (Jax Kellington, “Cross Hollow”), and midwestern drunkard Theo (Tim Coyle, “I Need You Dead!”) are the other three participants of the sleep study and each provide a unique image that continues to keep us interested and where they possible might end up retired on the runtime scale. Neil Green, Erik Skybak, and Chynna Rae Shurts as the skulking Sleep Demon.

With an amusing banter of well-written dialogue, a passable night terror demoness, and a nodding homage or two to a couple of horror powerhouse films, “Conjuring the Beyond” has scrappy potential to be something a touch more than just a capitalizer of better and already completed novel ideas. “Conjuring the Beyond” ends like an unfinished thought that asks more questions than provides answers in its thematic night terror framework. Shurts’ Sleep Demon is sorely underused and mostly not present to be invoking scares from the feature. Shurts is cladded on a budget but well adequate to eerie up the antagonist enough with fake long nails, fake gnarly teeth, and a dark shawl or robe attire that slinks and creeps in-and-out of alert sleep paralysis patients. McCarthy also dives into another theme of shared experiences or mutual dreams that then send a shiver of petrifying terror zipping through a collective’s inner being. More precisely in that theme is one’s person’s affliction affects or infects the surrounding others; we also see this at the beginning with a Wanda’s brother Nick and his wife negatively feeling Wanda’s ability to rebound from an ugly divorce. However, not all scenes make complete sense. The prologue of a man trembling in his bed and watching the Sleep Demon slither into his room before snatching him from his bed is detached from the trunk of the story much like a dead branch lying next to not it’s tree provenance. Yes, the branch part of a tree, just not this tree. Other aspects of the film also don’t make much sense or lack explanation is the participants who disappear reappear as sleep walking zombies under the control, possession, or will of the Sleep Demon and to what purpose is far from being seen.

“Conjuring the Beyond” evokes images of demons and terror onto a DVD home video from the Philadelphia based, provocative independent film distributor Breaking Glass Pictures. The MPEG-4 encoded DVD5 is a NTSC, region 1, unrated U.S. release presented in a CinemaScope widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The lossy codec compression appears to sustain a relatively good picture throughout the 90-minute runtime with little-to-no banding or issues and toned-down artifacts concentrated more so around darker scenes around the delineation of objects in the background. Noticeable post-production issues don’t go unnoticed when the visual effect of compositing CCTV footage on a computer screen was left undone and so there is a scene where the sleep study participants and Dr. Pretorious are huddled around a laptop staring at a blank, black screen while providing commentary on the disappearance of a fellow member of their group. The lossy English dual-channel stereo mix offers a mediocre, yet still strongly inclusive, audio output that has slight issues maintaining consistent decibel levels at times. Dialogue can sound muted at times or distant and then suddenly be more robust in the same breath. English subtitles are available if opted. Depth and range work well with the fear atmospherics and environments. The release is feature only with only a static menu on the DVD that’s encased in a normal black snapper case with egregiously deceptive artwork of a woman floating above her bed; no floating happens in the film. Perhaps less misrepresentative if titled something more original, “Conjuring the Beyond” holds tightly to the coattails of other iconic horror films but tweaks the story just enough to tease a fresh take toward the unharnessed and terrifying dimensions stemmed by the power of the mind.

“Conjuring the Beyond” on DVD at Amazon.com!

Evil Goes Silent! “The Unspoken” review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on September 11, 2016

In September of 1997, the Anderson family vanished from their remote home on Briar road, leaving behind scores of scattered blood, a lynched dead body, and a house keeper in mental shambles. Seventeen years later, Jeanie and her son Adrian move into the Briar home with the legendary and infamous reputation for being ghastly haunted. Living on hard times with her father being laid off from the region business, Angela reluctantly accepts a good paying caretaker position for Adrian at the notorious Briar home. When a local drug runner gets wind that his stash’s repository is no longer vacant, a dangerous game of retrieval pits the desperate small time dabblers against a supernatural force living inside the home that puts Angela, consequently, in the middle of a terrifying standoff.

Sheldon Wilson. A name that’s under the horror radar for most horror fans, but for this particular reviewer, this particular fan, Sheldon Wilson has had a major influential role in bringing a wealth of horror to my life. The director’s 2004 film “Shallow Ground” was the first domino piece to fall that a started landslide of independent horror cinema to come flooding into my presence and opening up my world, my eyes, to the many facets of the genre. I fell hard for “Shallow Ground” that led to the foundation of a grand and glorious horror collection that would be acknowledged Rob Zombie, who’ve I’ve heard, has an extensive film collection. Wilson’s latest venture “The Unspoken” has reminded me that horror can live in the restraints of the past and can be bold with an unforeseen twist.

Now, “The Unspoken” epitomizes the very definition of generic titles, but the premise goes far beyond being geriatric with similarities, but not on the same elaborate scale, to the 2012’s “The Cabin in the Woods” by exploiting the genre’s familiar tropes but shifting, at the very last moment, to an ending that’s well received and a breath of fresh air. From the Wilson films that I’ve experienced, his story structure is orchestrated in a detailed manner making the subtleties pop with saturated intensity. With “The Unspoken,” Wilson’s indirect jump-scare style is very much engrained and effect goes without diluting the entire film as some, examples such as some of the recent Halloween films, have done in the past to the point of tiresome and ungratifying.

A satisfying cast genetically makes up the captivating story with young and upcoming scream queen Jodelle Ferland in as the lead role of Adrian’s desperate caretaker Angela. Ferland has quite the stint in horror starring in such memorable films as the recently referenced “The Cabin in the Woods,” “The Messengers,” and as the young child in 2006’s strong video game adaptation of “Silent Hill.” Ferland possesses that scared and innocent persona and she leaves nothing on the table when forcing to battle against a supernatural danger that can animate a decaying, jaw-severing dog corpse. Pascale Hutton, Anthony Konechny, Chanelle Peloso, Lochlyn Munro (Freddy Vs. Jason) and a passing-through role for “The Hitcher” remake’s Neal McDonough as a local sheriff rounds out the rest of the “The Unspoken” cast. Sunny Suljic, who portrays the unspoken Adrian, solidly performs as the creepy and mute, Damian resembling child even with his bad young Elijah Wood haircut. Together, the ensemble plays their respective roles with as much as earnest as the next film with more of the focus on Angela and Adrian throughout with supporting characters driving much of the storyline, funneling toward a surprising catalytic event.

For the majority of the film, “The Unspoken” meets the harsh criteria fans need and desire from their horror films with some solid practical effects, no CGI effects, a story-driven plot, and a haunted house full of good scares with tidbits of blood and gore in between them all. There’s even a little nod of respect for the “Amityville” series. Only insignificant character underdevelopments raise a few unanswered questions about situations perhaps more pertinent to the motivation of the story such as the forbidden relationship between Angela and best friend Pandy which floundered a bit out of place within the confines of the plot and went stagnant when more about the Briar home became revealed or when Pandy’s more-or-less boyfriend Lutheran and his drug scheme goes through the sharp blades of a blender.

The Lighthouse Pictures produced and Arrow Films UK distributed paranormal disturbance feature “The Unspoken” hit retail shelves and online markets September 5th. I’m unable to review video and audio quality with a region 2 DVD-R and there were no bonus material available from the static menu. However, Wilson’s film fairs with a sharp and clean appearance without the bedazzling of a Hollywood budget; the director’s use of the slow panning method and focusing on unsettling camera angles to transform an ordinary mountain home into a menacing dark presence doesn’t require much touchup in order to terrify audiences. If you’re a fan of quiver inducing, nail biting horror with a good M. Night Shyamalan twist at the end, “The Unspoken” will leave you completely terrified and utterly speechless.