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EVIL Ted Bundy is “The Black Mass” reviewed! (Cleopatra Entertainment / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“The Black Mass” on Blu-ray Can Be Ordered Here!

Based off a slice of Ted Bundy’s murderous impulse-driven life, the notorious American serial killer’s escapes from the upper West Coast and lands him residence in Tallahassee, Florida in the moderately warm winter of 1978.  As he picks the pockets of those around him, scrounging up what little cash he needs to survive on, Bundy urges grow to kill grow more intense.  He begins to stalk a nearby university sorority house that’s buzzing with potential prey.  As works out a plan to attack, his good looks and impeccable charm make him desirable around women and men alike, offering opportunities that tend to fizzle out before they can begin, and when his need to spill blood agitates him excessively, he starts to creep out those around him by glaring out them and making off-the-cuff shrewd comments.  With his options declining rapidly, Bundy decides to take advantage of the sorority house’s broken backdoor lock and set in motion a night that will forever live in American infamy. 

For her feature length film debut, scream queen actress Devanny Pinn takes on one of the most vile villains ever to walk the Earth in her biographical horror “The Black Mass.”  The “Song of the Shattered” and “Frost” actress and producer brings a headspace perspective to Ted Bundy committed at least 20 confirmed murders between 1974 and 1978.  The true crime thriller named after what one of the victims described Bundy’s attack on her as simply as a black mass before being bludgeoned.  Brandon Slagle (“Song of the Shattered”) and Eric Pereira (“The Locals”) collaborate on penning the script.  Slagle directed Pinn in the 2022 element horror and survival feature “Frost” and now it’s Pinn to take a stab at the director’s chair with a Slagle screenplay, pun intended.  Pinn coproducers her film alongside Michelle Romano (“Night Aboard the Salem”) and Cleopatra Entertainment’s Tim Yasui (“Frost,” “The 27 Club”) under the production banners of Jaguar Motion Pictures (“Dead Sea”) and Roman Media (“Millwood”).

The main focus in the feature is of the titular character, “The Black Mass,” that is Ted Bundy, almost seeing what he sees through his eyes of skulking and morbid fantasy.  Played by British actor Andrew Sykes, the centrically focused character is experienced not directly through his eyes but over his shoulder, peering from behind as if audiences are accomplices to his murderous wake.  Sykes performs well in a nearly voiceless role that does more lurking than talking but Sykes’s worked up frustration clearly surfaces and erupts out of Bundy when strapped for cash and has a tremendous itch that needs to be scratched as his wishy-washy path to do good crumbles from under his footing.  As the main focal point, no other character really comes close to a lead principal.  The sorority girls are introduced in mass and jump from sister-to-sister individually conversating routine and tales of the day-to-day within the college student context with roles from but not limited to Lara Jean Mummert-Sullivan (“2 Jennifer”), Brittney Ayona Clemons (“Twisted Date”), and Alex Paige Fream (“Into the Arms of Danger”).  Yet, Pinn’s storytelling purpose is paradoxical with the whole story flowing through the perspective of Ted Bundy with his prey hanging mostly in the peripheral and not emanating the warm and fuzzies of sympathetic, relatable characters, but at the end of the film, there’s an acknowledging tribute for the victims who we really know nothing about from the narrative, creating an acute pivot from the killer’s personal bubble.  “The Black Mass” rounds out it’s relatively large passing-through cast with Chelsea Gilson, Susan Lanier, Eva Hamilton, Sarah Nicklin, Elisabeth Montanaro, Mikaylee Mina, Jennifer Wenger, Grace Newton, Devanny Pinn, and with cameos from Lew Temple (“The Devil’s Rejects”), Jeremy London (“Alien Opponent”), Lisa Wilcox (“A Nightmare on Elm Street 4:  The Dream Warriors”), Kathleen Kinmont (“Halloween 4:  The Return of Michael Myers”), and schlock movie veteran Mike Ferguson.

“The Black Mass” is the perfect example of style over substance.  While the story is formatted around Bundy’s outlook, there’s not a significant amount of edification for his warped mindset.  Some backstory leaks through his beseeching phone conversations with ex- or current girlfriend Liv, a phone voiceover presumingly based off the real Bundy girlfriend Elizabeth Kendall, that teeters the appearance of his humanity side as he talks about his addictive struggles and trying to walk a straight line, but any kind of sympathy is quickly tabled without an ounce of provision, likely for his inclination to lie for advantage and exploitation’s sake.  Pinn only teases the inexplicable morose and ghastly gears that rotate inside Bundy’s head, spurring a single blood-drenched daydream of a girl pulling off her skin in the shower, and erotically enjoying it immensely.  The scene feels sorely out of place amongst the rest of reality-grounded narrative that resorts to a cut-rate version of Bundy’s devolving surrounding is fleeting patience and feign niceties.  What’s appreciated mostly about “The Black Mass” is Pinn’s ability to work the camera in not revealing too much of a modern-day society by maintaining that closeup distance behind Bundy and only really showing what needs to be seen for a late 70’s biopic.  Costuming, production design, and vernacular are appropriate for the era as well.  Coming back to the proximity around Bundy, there’s a purposefulness in not showing his full face or looking at him from the front that keeps the particulars of his image in an effective, if not slightly scary, enigma albeit the other characters’ brief descriptions of him in conversation do provide a rough picture of him. 

MVD Visual distributes the newest cinematic Bundy biopic from Cleopatra Entertainment. The AVC encoded, high-definition 1080p, BD25, presented in a widescreen 2.39:1, has welcoming veneer, splashed with a 70’s color scheme saturation, and is graded with a middle-of-the-road or slightly darker color palette. Sufficient capacity and compression encoding offers a clean, sleek digital image without artifacts and with the ample attention to minor era details where possible and Noah Luke’s fill and back-lit cinematography when things get really dark, as in sinister, that snappy image presentation is key. The English language options are a lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 and a PCM 2.0 stereo renders a clean, balanced mix between dialogue, ambience, and dialogue with less suppression on the PCM audio if you’re looking for a lossless option. The setting sounds are nicely immersive compared to the limited and concise framing, opening up the world audibly rather than visually. No technical issues with the digital audio on neither front; however, depth and reality checks are missed marks as all the dialogue doesn’t abide by spatial awareness; when the sorority sisters are talking indoors or from afar while Bundy lurks outside the house, or from a distance, spying on them, all the dialogue is unobstructed and too prominently clear for natural conventions. Bonus features include an image slideshow and the feature trailer. Ancillary content includes other trailers for Cleopatra films with “Frost,” “The Ghosts of Monday,” “The Long Dark Trail,” “What the Waters Left Behind: Scars,” and “Lion-Girl.” Released in a traditional Amaray Blu-ray case, “The Black Mass” sports a Dimension-like front cover, dark and full of characters. No insert or tangible content inside and the disc art mirrors the front cover. Cleopatra’s region free Blu-ray comes unrated and has a runtime 82 minutes.

Last Rites: Devanny Pinn quarterbacking her first feature film with an à la mode Ted Bundy portion, an interpretative taste of his absolute madness, doesn’t faze the long-time scream queen actress and producer who takes on the subject head on, but the overall concept does need tweaking in the area of purpose that can be easily conquered with more practice.

“The Black Mass” on Blu-ray Can Be Ordered Here!

Killed by Your Monstrous, EVIL Twin Set on Repeat. “Island Escape” reviewed! (Dread / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Island Escape” Available Here at Amazon.com

Chase, a washed up mercenary with touch of amnesia regarding his past, is hired to round out a six-person team for a rescue mission on the Isle of Grand Manan where a top secret TSL research facility has gone dark and a high-level CEO’s daughter has gone missing.  Ordered to retrieve the daughter inside a 48-hour window, the team arrives on the seemingly deserted island to find multiple dead scientists having been torn to shreds.  The team soon learns they’re not alone when attacked by bigger, aggressive, monstrous versions of themselves.  Unable to believe their eyes, the one scientist left on the island has determined they’ve been trapped inside an encircling wormhole that resets the island and it’s inhabitants every 3 days, turning those left alive after the third day into these humongous, blood-hungry creatures.  With the mission quickly dissolution, it’s quickly being pieced together that the rescuing mercenaries are the ones who actually need rescuing and their only way to escape would nearly destroy them all.

I’ve said this once before and I’ll say it again.  Weaving wormholes, time loops, time travel, and the like into a narrative is a tricky, tricky business.  Bending time and space can calamitously collapse a story so bad that every internet warrior and science fiction nerd, including myself, will pick apart and ridicule the film until the end of time, but if the portent collapse can be averted and little-to-no complaints with the time travel aspect of the story can go unscathed for a better part of the runtime, then the power of the multi-dimensional space time continuum can be magical and enthralling.  Writer-director Bruce Wemple (“Altered Hours,” “My Best Friend’s Dead”) wraps his hand around a wormhole-driven action-horror “Island Escape” to grasp ahold of the unruly concept of time.   The Traverse Terror production, a division of producers Cole Payne and Mason Dwinell’s Traverse Media in association with Wemple’s 377 Films, and presented and produced by Patrick Ewald’s Dread Central, “Island Escape” rounds out the producer set with Vincent Conroy.

Bruce Wemple carries with him a cast entourage, a staple of actors who have worked years with the filmmaker through a number of project.  “Island Escape” is no different as Wemple signs aboard his trusted troupe to tackle the terror on TLS island with a rescue gone wormhole wrong.  The story has a trifold focus Chase (James Liddell, “Hell House LLC Origins:  The Carmichael Manor”) as the washed up gun for hire with memory loss, Addison (Ariella Mastroianni, “My Best Friend’s Dead”) as team lead and recruit of the Isle of Gran Manan mission, and Russ (Grant Schumacher, “My Best Friend’s Dead”) as the dithery team member not in Chase’s good graces based of fragmented memories of a failed mission.  Between the three characters there lies a fleeting tautness that’s not tremendous carried out as expected from initial introductions.  Instances such as Chase expressing his distrust for Russ never has the tension reach open air in any time they’re together or in the case of Addison as a melancholic memory for Chase that eventually evolves into mid-misison romance that’s more spontaneous than building momentum to in the first and second act.  The undercooked characters fail to establish boundaries, positions, and progressing or regressing dynamics and arcs.  There’s more headway with supporting staff in Tag, a self-penancing father doing dirty, dangerous work to support his young daughter and this consistently shows throughout his screen span, hitting upon the nerve of a father trying his best for the sake of his child.  The cast rounds out with a handful more of mercenaries and scientists to become minced meat by their devilish doppelgangers with Chris Cimperman (“First Contact”), Michael L. Parker (“First Contact”), Andrew Gombas (“The Tomorrow Job”), William Champion (“The Tomorrow Job”), and the feature length debut of Renee Gagner filling those roles. 

Wormholes.  The suspended openings in space let the Dominion race invade Star Fleet in the Alpha Quadrant of “Deep Space Nine,” dropped a fiery plane engine on top of the titular character “Donnie Darko,” and brought back something alien and terribly evil in the titular ship “Event Horizon.”  For Bruce Wemple and his “Island Escape,” wormholes have become more earthbound thanks to a shady research corporation delving into dangerous methods and unscrupulous science practices for the go-to cover up slogan of a better world tomorrow.  While Wemple spins an intriguing yarn needled quick to be full of cankerous clones coming from all corners of the island to attack their uncorrupted selves while trying to survive and flee, the filmmaker skip stitches during his knitting of a tight narrative, fashioning an uneven story that can’t quite get the pattern right for in some of the more restlessly difficult areas of trouble island.  Fleshing out Chase’s blank slate produces no reason to light, Russ’s lack of motivation in divulging life-and-death information, the deep dive into Island experiments fall to the wayside, the CEO’s daughter seemingly dead to all of a sudden be alive, and I could go on with all the loose ends that kneecap the better parts of story, such as the creature action and the wormhole aspect, but the fact won’t escape that there’s a mishandling of the island’s treacherous overgrowth that’s severely underplayed and the epic scale Wemple tries to impress is torpedoed by omitted small cogs that turn the bigger, weight-bearing gears. 

Dread presents Island Escape onto a high-definition Blu-ray distributed by Epic Pictures.  The AVC encoded, 1080pm, BD25, presenting the film in an anamorphic 2.35:1 aspect ratio, is a slurry of personal style and cinematography issues.  Capacity-wise, not a ton of wall-bearing issues that would make the visuals crumble; a few fleeting areas of dark side banding and quick movement aliasing pop up occasionally.  Where most of the issues stem are stylistically with poor VFX compositions that stymie any high-action utile climaxes.  The light pink/fuchsia grading replaces much of the island’s, or island-like setting’s, innate green foliage for a broad one-tone that has an adverse effect of unnaturally darkening the characters.  Two English audio options are available to select:  a Dolby Digital 5.1 and a Dolby Stereo 2.0.  Both lossy formats offer what this particular films needs, a fast and loose sufficient mix that gets the job done without causing too many waves.  Most of the dialogue has a ADR pretense that I would take a wild guess and say is more a sound design issue of not creating space in the depth field.  Each character sound to be on the same audio plane that forces a full-on push of dialogue right to the front of the audio layering that makes ever channel in the 5.1 the same.  Ambience Foley is harshly isolated from other tracks so if a character is walking through the forest, you hear nothing else but the lonely crunching the tree litter that doesn’t mesh with onscreen movements.  With most digital recording, no interference and damage flaws are present.  Optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles are available.  Special features include a roundtable commentary with writer-director Bruce Wemple at the helm with most of the cast speaking through Zoom or some kind of video chat program.  In addition, the commentary is greatly colorful with more jokes and jabs at one another and at themselves that reflect how much of a good time they have working with each other on this film and previous Wemple credits.  Also included in the special features are a few deleted scenes, the making of “Island Escape,” feature trailer, and other Dread presented film trailers.  Like most Epic Releasing products, a standard Blu-ray Amaray case displays an intriguing cover art for Dread’s 47th at-home title with a wormhole opening to an skull-faced Island and a helicopter and four soldiers walking toward it.  Disc art renders the same image and there’s no insert included opposite side of the case.  With a region free playback, “Island Escape” has a runtime of 86-minutes and is not rated. 

Last Rites:  The haphazardly executed science-fictional survival film “Island Escape” has good plot bones underneath the shambled edifice of an ambitious façade with only decent monster mayhem and creature effects dwelling inside. 

“Island Escape” Available Here at Amazon.com