Tag Archives: Bill Johnson

EVIL’s the Bacon, the Pork Roll, and the Scrapple All Mixed and Slashed together! “Butcher’s Bluff” reviewed! (Breaking Glass Pictures / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Butcher’s Bluff” on DVD from Breaking Glass Pictures!

Film students Rodger, Nicole, and Derrick decide to head to the rural Texas town of Emerald Falls and make their class project documentary around the 28 missing persons over the years and the Hogman, an urban legend of an escaped killer now roaming the woods of Butcher’s Bluff.  Bringing along their friends to make it concurring party getaway at Rodger’s family vacation cabin, the trio conduct interviews with the eccentric town locals to build a story around the Hogman myth, even ascertaining the original location for the mask Hogman wore during his first kills before escaping psychiatric prison.  The more they investigate into the Hogman, the more the locals warn them to stay away from Butcher’s Bluff but in a case of curiosity killed the cat, the documentary film students and their drug-fueled, sexed-up friends find themselves being hunted with no cell service, no help within miles, and no way out of the Hogman’s kill radius. 

Co-directors William Instone and Matt Rifley helm their first collaborative feature “Butcher’s Bluff,” a 2023 small town slasher reminiscent of the renaissance slasher movement of the 1980s, packed with practical gore effects, odd backwoods characters, a campy party of vice-riddled youth, and, moist importantly – excuse me – most importantly, T&A.  Instone, whose all-in director, writer, and producer debut horror “Jon” from 2012 brings one man’s delusions into horrifying reality, cowrites his latest grim story with writer, painter, and overall liberal arts connoisseur Renfield Rasputin.  Filmed in Texas with principal locations taking place in Bastrop, New Braunfels, and San Marcos to composition a story set in the fictional town of Emerald Falls and its rural woodland of Butcher’s Bluff.  The film is a crowdfunded venture that raised an approximate $60K to cover principal shooting and post-production costs with Instone and Rifley serving as primary producers amongst an amalgamation of crowdfunded producing backers   Instone’s Thunder Mountain Films, in association with Dull Knife Productions and Spicey Ramen Productions, go hog wild with their slasher horror. 

As if he doesn’t have enough on his plate writer, directing, and producing “Butcher’s Bluff,” Instone also portrays the main antagonist Hogman, masked with a stitched together pig head complete with cockeyed tusks and garbed with a dingy mechanic jumpsuit and tan jacket.  The Hogman is a walk-and-run chaser with a duel-sided axe and rusty, broad curved knife as main melee weapons though he’ll get his bare hands dirty from time-to-time.  Instone’s not flashy with the villain and doesn’t key-light any iconic poses, stances, or stares to incite a nerve coursing fear.  Hogman’s victims are anyone and everyone who enters the Butcher’s Bluff forest, from necking lovers (Jacqueline Hays and “Mallrats’s” Jeremy London), to lost pot farm thieves (“You’re Next’s” L.C. Holt, “Scare Package’s’” Christopher Winbush, “Girls Gone Dead’s” Shawn C. Phillips), to finally, but not limited to, the Rodger’s friends and classmates on their excursion investigation and party.  Fortunately, the group displays different caricature tropes without going full-blown cliché.  Between them you have the exuding sexy yet overly bitchy duo of Sam and Tina (a cut pixie cut but broodingly built Samantha Holland and a slender yet high-end platinum blonde Kayla Anderson), Rodger’s sex-driven, dweeb cousin Bobby (Dakota Millett) who Sam and Tina torment, the polar opposite to Bobby stud with Jake (Santiago Sky) and of course the three documentarians:  Rodger (Michael Fischer), Derrick (Johnny Huang), and Nicole (Paige Steakley), each reside in their own attribute world consistently, dying the way they live, that’s very telling of their moral fiber.  In additional to Jeremy London and Shawn C. Phillips, who have worked themselves into being staples of the indie genre films, other notable names to mention for their brief but key roles are Brinke Stevens (“Nightmare Sisters”), Paul T. Taylor (“Hellraiser:  Judgement”), Bill Oberst Jr. (“3 From Hell”), and Bill Johnson (“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II”) peppered into the rest of the supporting cast to draw in fandom.

“Butcher’s Bluff” has the necessary bone structure to be a digestible slasher, checking all the elemental boxes, and Instone and Rifley manage to technically pull off a nearly 2-hour film on a crowdfunded budget.   The problem is “Butcher’s Bluff” has a hackneyed routine about it.  Instead of creating something new and wonderfully, gory and diabolical, under a distinct flag of novelly progressive storytelling, every scene feels all too familiar, a telltale sign to horror fans that we’ve seen this kind of story before.  From Hogman’s stony silence and indiscriminate aggression bores him as a Michael Myers carbon copy, a family in cahoots with a s flesh-stitched maniac plays the tune of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” and there’s even a character moment of yelling What Are You Waiting For? aimlessly into the dark forest while spinning around with arms wide apart that oozes Jennifer Love Hewitt vibes.  Add in some rather uninspiring frame, shot design, and editing and “Butcher’s Bluff” very much embodies the crowdfunded costs rather than the intended crowdfunded spirit.  Now while all of this portion of the review sounds grossly negative, don’t just run for the hills to the next slasher film in line just yet as Instone and Rifley still manage to keep an engagement lock on what makes the slasher film enjoyable to behold with some decently inlaid practical gore effects, including a pleading head being sliced horizontally through from mouth to hair or a posthumous, lawn chair display of one fine girl’s nipples and eyes plucked from her body and posed on her eye-gouged out person as if giving a blood offering to the audience Gods.  There’s also the inviting gratuitous T&A from Samantha Holland, Kayla Anderson, and Jacqueline Hays that keeps the old theme motif alive within the campy slasher genre as well as keeping young boys’ dreams from becoming dry.

Breaking Glass Pictures distributes the archetypical slasher “Butcher’s Bluff” onto DVD home video.  The MPEG2 encoded, 720p upscaled standard definition, DVD9 really has a tough go with the compression capabilities as there’s quite a bit of data to encode/decode within a near full-time night shoot picture and color accompaniments that blend right into the darkness, melding out of a clean definition.  Presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio, banding and splotching render a difficult deciphering of data in inkier fields.  When colors do contrast or arise into lighter hues, there’s a pop of demarcation with its full potential held back by an ungraded layer.  Textures are extremely fluid throughout with the prominent skin scenes offering a decent, natural look but most scenes are fuzzy as if the upscale fights the downscaling for supremacy.  The English Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound offers an adequate compression for a routine slasher with mid-level range with clear and clean dialogue overtop eerie forest soundscape of breaking branches, tree knocks, and leave crunching footsteps.  The mix doesn’t convey much depth with dialogue and ambience hanging around the front channels while medium shots and some tree knocking flirt with the side channels.  A mainstay slasher should have a memorable, tense-riddles soundtrack for the chase or create omnipresence fear but “Scream, Queen!  My Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Dinner with Leatherface” composer’s Alexander Taylor’s insipid inspiration can’t be held in the memorable bank and fails to elevate the Hogman’s imposing sheer terror.  English closed captioning is available.  Special features include a proof on concept trailer for the crowdfunding campaign that stars a handful of the actors from the feature film, such as Michael Fischer and Paige Steakley, and a behind-the-scenes music video that contains behind-the-scenes footage.   The DVD presence is standard fair for Breaking Glass Pictures with a DVD Amaray and a one-sided front cover art, which subjectively pleasing in its retrograde mockup of an illustrated Hogman looming over a scared, running Steakley (supposedly) in her white tank top and high cut shorts.  There is at least one noticeable error on the back cover that spells Paige Steakley’s name incorrectly in the credits, listing her last name as Steakely.  The Not Rated release is hard encoded with region 1 and has a two-hour runtime which can appear quite long, but the pacing was not terrible and the long runtime for an indie slasher didn’t feel overly immeasurable. 

Last Rites: “Butcher’s Bluff’s” has little to offer as far as the next novel and generational slasher but scratches the genre itch with a large body count, solid kills, and campy campers looking to buy, sell, and trade their vices for being violated.

“Butcher’s Bluff” on DVD from Breaking Glass Pictures!

Dark Force Rides into the Sunset with EVIL Flannel, Stirrups, and a Brothel Full of Stolen Women! “Ride a Wild Stud” reviewed! (Dark Force Entertainment / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

About as Obscure as They Come! “Ride a Wild Stud” on Blu-ray!

During the Civil War, the Wild West lives up to the name between advantaging exploiting gangs of bandidos running rampant alongside the Southwest terrain and the hard-pressed law outmanned and outgunned to never be able to gain apprehending ground.  One determined law man, Lieutenant Mike McDermott, has a plan to infiltrate William Quantrill’s plundering murders, thieves, and sex traffickers and take them down from the inside-out by portraying to be a likeminded criminal escaping the law.  Successfully penetrating Quantrill’s ranks, McDermott takes young Marsha under his watch; Marsha has become enslaved in Quantrill’s house of pleasure brothel, supervised by his right-hand man Bill Doolin after Doolin mercilessly guns down her father and rape and murders her older sister in a home invasion of their simple life assets.  When another of McDermott’s steady female informants is shot dead by Doolin, the lawman becomes judge, jury, and executioner on a gang of no-good Western raiders and sexual profiteers. 

A western exploitation epitomizing B-movie babes, brawls, and bad guys, “Ride a Wild Stud” surmounts as sleazy cowpoke overtop classic, 1960s Western vibes of machoism, duty, and exciting gunfights.  Profound Western film filmmaker Oliver Drake during the Golden Age of cinema (“Bordering Buckaroos,” “Deadline”) quietly transitioned from run-of-the-mill westerns to a handful of grindhouse and exploitation B-movies by the 1960s under the pseudonym of Revilo Ekard, Drake’s name spelled backwards, who produced under that credit this 1969 adult-oriented oater as well as the even saucier and scandalous “Angelica:  The Young Vixen” where the titular young woman seeks older man comforts.  “Ride a Wild Stud” is penned by the assumed husband and wife due of Rachel and William Edwards of the sex-schlocker “Dracula (The Dirty Old Man)” released the same year.  The writing pair also served as producers of the film under the production of Vega International. 

Director: Oliver Drake

“Ride a Wild Stud” is an interesting oddity of it’s time.  Usually in exploitation pictures, the lead male actor has his get busy share with the ladies but for Hale Williams, as the gang-infiltrating Lt. McDermott, there’s no hanky-panky with the actress lot.  Williams, whose role is his only listed credit, plays a respectable and honorable law-abiding man without any inkling of perversion of sensuality in his most defining John Wayne respect.  Instead, romping in the haystack is no stranger to the transgressing Quantrill gang in quite a handsy show of rough, unwanted affection with those characters unwilling to go along with the brothel or are being raided invaded elsewhere.  Frenchy Le Boyd does a lot of fondling and groping as second in command Bill Doolin along with an assortment of bandido backdrop actors really getting into the sleazy deviant role.  This sets a clear hardline of contrast between good versus evil, respect versus the disrespectable, to never blend the characters even when McDermott becomes the sheep in wolves clothing.  Josie Kirk plays as one of those unfortunate pilfered women in Marsha and is, in a way, the leading or mainstay characters Doolin’ drools over and McDermott fights for but it’s the blonde C.C. Chase as house of pleasure vet Irene who has is deeper into the dredges and is has complexities as McDermott’s informant rather than just a chest-bearing pretty face being taken advantage of and succumbing to Doolin’s woos when it fits her need.  The rest of the cast rounds out with a bunch of no-names, yet get protracted screen time for coldhearted perversities, with William Fosterwick, Burke Reynolds (“The Mummy and the Curse of the Jackals”), Helga Hanshue, Cliff Alexander, Chuck Alford (“Corpse Grinders 2”), Richard Smedley (“The Suckers”), Bill Johnson, Tex Gates, S.T. Alexander Sr. and Bob Goldfarb. 

“Ride a Wild Stud” has all the hallmarks of a typical exploitation picture with a double entendre title, unprovoked and gratuitous violence, and plenty of feminine skin.  Yet, the story leaves much to be desired.  The lawman infiltrating the criminal organization, becoming one of their own to take down from the inside out, tale is no Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed.”  In fact, the story is rather lazy akin to low-rent porn or softcore titles with a story garnish.  Focally, “Ride a Wild Stud” harnesses the men-take-want-men want mentality with rarely any Western damsel enjoying herself in the arms of musky flannel and gun-belt thrust grizzled by a scruffy 5 o’clock shadow and for the story, there’s too little progression to compel with empathy or be at the edge of your seat with intense anticipation for the in the lions’ den hero and heroines and the gunfights are grotesquely tame after the initial film opener of a multi-horseback chase gunfight.  The whole good versus bad cowboy roundup is stiffer than normal of its era heading into the time of the famed and profound spaghetti western.  The exploitation action has some noteworthy clout with busty, slender women being manhandled like a hogtying a pig at a rodeo and the ample scuffle between Doolin and McDermott might be bordering repetitive but scratches the itch of a good ole fashion fist fight, but by the telltale strum of a rhythmic and recurring guitar riff, that is when the salacious sex ensues and without that change or evolution in the score, that plays every a few minutes with another intertwinement of two bodies, not even the charge of gratuitous nudity can re-spark “Ride a Wild Stud’s” Western-exploitation mojo back on the snakebitten and dysentery-riddled Oregon trail. 

An Adult Adventure awaits in this womanizing Westerner released by Dark Force Entertainment for the first time in high-definition.  The film was originally shot in 16mm, but Dark Force Entertainment unearths the rare blown up 35mm reel for their Hi-Def transfer that produced decent picture quality from the AVC encoded, 1080p resolution, BD25.  Preserved to the extent where the 16mm could be on the fence of being native 35mm if it wasn’t for the degrading emulsion layer and the lower contrast with exterior lighting that creates washed out blacks.  There are the typical speckle blips and faint vertical scratching in the one-off scene that seems low-carb for a stock that’s vulnerable to exposure, storage, and handling elements.  Dark Force Entertainment Blu-ray back cover lists the film being displayed in an anamorphic widescreen but with a 1.33:1 aspect ratio.  This is likely a misprint as the film is definitely presented in a full frame format with no sign of a compressed image.  Color grading falls flat but is touched up enough to see some semblance of the spectrum and that’s always pleasant with an ISO 100-200 stock that doesn’t absorb contrast very well.  The English PCM mono track simply does the job handling the pale dialogue, ambient, and soundtrack layers.  Dialogue receives recognition amongst the limited array, but the post-provided scores is right behind it, breathing down the dialogue’s neck, with the incessantly low toned rhythm guitar that denotes upcoming deviant sexual encounters.  It literally sticks with you even when the credits roll and long after.  Moments in the dialogue do experience some faint crackling and muffled interference but, as well as some intermittent pops, but nothing to warrant overly critical marks.  There are no subtitles available.  Dark Force’s release is a feature only.  Physical artwork includes an illustrated action rendition that’s grindhouse include and sleazy just a smidgen inside the traditional Blu-ray Amaray.  The disc is pressed with three of the actresses in plain-looking clothes looking smug and curious from their line of sight, though we don’t really know what they’re looking at.  The region free release has a sexually coincidental runtime of 69-minutes and is rated R.

Last Rites: “Ride a Wild Stud” is the perverse cowboy caper you’ve never seen, but will watching it enrich your life? No. Will it salivate your taste for sleazy exploitation? Absolutely. Giddy-up!

About as Obscure as They Come! “Ride a Wild Stud” on Blu-ray!