Tag Archives: cannibalism

Eating Disorder? More Like EVIL Disorder! “Binge and Purge” reviewed! (SRS Cinema / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Binge and Purge” on SRS DVD Home Video!  This One Is Hard to Keep Down!

Three former police officers now private sector detectives find themselves embroiled in a cannibalistic frame up by the police state in a near dystopian future.  Their no choice, self-preservation investigation leads them to a group of models who consume people in order to stay vibrant and young as if frozen in time.  The mastermind behind the models’ ravenous new diet is a former Nazi science experiment-turned-fashion designer who has not only spread his indelicacies throughout the fashion world but also into a corrupt authoritarian police department helmed by a sordid chief.   As more and more people succumb to the ghastly craving of human beings, the rebellious detectives embark on an ambitious plan to cut off the head of the snake by working up the fashion designer’s human-hungry hierarchy but are they too late to stop the meat-eating madness?  Has the world been forever infected by the touch of pure evil? 

The first Christmas horror film review of 2023!  Brought to you by the Canadian-born, “Meat Market” trilogy director Brian Clement, the filmmaker’s written-and-directed third feature, “Binge and Purge,” is the 2002 genre melting pot of action, horror, and comedy set in an undisclosed urban jungle of North America where a person’s legal rights no longer exist, beauty and fashion insidiously influence, and normalcy becomes rebel factions’ reason to fight tooth and nail to hang on to it despite the coursing corruption and taking refuge from repressive authorities on their tail.  While sounding glum and despondent, Clement’s addition of black humor adds a loose layer of lurid levity to the bizarro-world society mirroring our own that teeters toward a path of culture and humanity deterioration with radical political and influential figures.  Once considered being the third film in the “Meat Market” series and alternatively known as “Catwalk Cannibals” in other countries, “Binge and Purge” is produced by Clement under Frontline Films. 

One thing to note about SOV independent production is the impressive number of cast involved.  The large cast helps manifest Clement’s ambitious dystopia and chaos-riddled world.  Without it, “Binge & Purge” would have been too anorexic to sustain selling grandiose on the cheap.  Typical formula for flesh-eater films persists with secluding a handful of principal roles, majority only speaking roles, fleshed out with an epic apocalypse contextualization of little-to-no dialogue, story arc, or any other sort of prominent screen time stock or background characters in a horde of the undead in crude bloodstained suits.  Clement establishes good guys and bad guys clearly but doesn’t necessarily the focal characters with an ebb and flow pattern between the three detectives May (Tamara Barnard), Vanzetti (Stephan Bourke, “Exhumed”), and Number 11 (Fiona Eden-Walker), who we gather was a former highly trained operative so engrained into the training and operations that her name was lost or forgotten, reduced to a number and the troupe of man-eating models under the eternal fashion designer Karl Helfringer (Gareth Gaudin). The models consist of not your slender-hip vixens with shaved down noses and hungry-looking figures but rather the curvy, pin-up types to wet a seemingly heathy appetite. Moira Thomas, Samara Zotzman, Amy Emel, Becky Julseth, Terra Thomsen and Melissa Evans lavish in so much delight over the sticky glop and spilling intestinal scenes of shoulder-to-shoulder cannibal chow downs that there isn’t an ounce of hesitation or disgust before enamel stabs into the fresh viscera but where the enthusiasm mostly falters is with the monotone dialogue deliveries with hardly any swing in inflection, tone fluctuations, or any kind of gesturing during the more emotive occurrences. “Binge and Purge” rounds out with Robert C. Nesbitt and Chuck Depape respectively as a fashion magazine reporter turned human hungry minion and the coke-snorting corrupt police captain.

“Binge and Purge” is more than just a Christmas horror.  Amidst the meandering storyline of touching points in time and space with numerous characters and flashbacks skating on thinly laid context ice, such as the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, Nazi experiments of the 1940s, and how America became a police state, the girth of “Binge and Purge’s” main coarse actually spans across the end of the holiday season in that week between Christmas and New Year’s, approximating a Y2K scare vibe of total chaos and confusion by way of cannibalism contagion instead of a feared computer bug, but that’s one area lacking in Brian Clement’s production laced with insatiable consumerism and consumption with in regard to really hyping up the cheerful holiday atmosphere to become besmirched by the corrupted filth of dirty cops, a plague of death, and a conspiratorial coup by high fashion.  The occasional Santa hat makes an appearance in a model shoot and the end of the year countdown denotes the pinnacle of a MP5 massacring finale, and though I can’t be certain, even the soundtrack sound to be distorted versions of the perennial Christmas classics, but that’s the extent of Clement’s holiday backdrop that would have easily fissure a chasm between “Binge and Purge” and the next low-budget cannibal shocker.  If you’re going to set the film during Christmas, deck the freaking halls, man!  Where Clement bedecks the film is with blood and gore that sees stringy sinew and a high body count’s insides become outsides over an encircling of edible entrails and on literally finger food trays.  Another shining highlight area is the action with agreeable submachine gunfire and the creative pyrotechnic-flares for explosion special effects that does rich up production value, inching the film more toward a magnetic, practical effect-laden, SOV spectacle worth the viewing calories. 

Shot on S-VHS, SRS Cinema gets their hands on the best master print director Brian Clement could carve out of his body of work. The MPEG2 encoded DVD presents the feature in 1.33:1 pillarbox aspect ratio in a 480p resolution. S-VHS master looks pretty darn good despite the caliginous reflection that produces more shadows and illumination on the tape, even if S-VHS offered better illumination as a format, and a lower, poor resolution than S-VHS’s Betamax predecessor. Still, this print has enough delimiting factors to produce a well-oiled image suitable for public distribution with a mix of neon warm and soft color capturing and crude lighting for maximum gritty-palpable product. The English LPCM mono track also has admirable lossless fidelity with a bitrate decoding of 192kbs, that has come typically standard, and greatly appreciated for audiophiles, on SRS releases. Some scenes are better than others, but the dialogue does retain some tail-end hissing and can be soft in spot. Otherwise, dialogue renders clearly enough. The release offers no subtitles. Bonus features include an archived audio commentary and a new SRS cinema produce audio commentary both of which include a self-deprecating Brian Clement going through his “least favorite” work’s production wishful do-overs, where the cast are nowadays, and his favorite gags and setups, a handful of deleted scenes, a slideshow, a new SRS cut trailer, and other previews for other SRS distributions. SRS Home Video release is mocked up with a retro VHS box-impression Amaray DVD case complete with graphically printed-in Please Be Kind, Rewind and Horror stickers. The not rated film has a runtime of 83 minutes and is region free. Nowhere near being a bulimic gorge for expulsion to empty one’s cinematic capacity, “Binge and Purge” is fully digestible grubby grub of horror, action, and comedy. 

“Binge and Purge” on SRS DVD Home Video!  This One Is Hard to Keep Down!

Congratulations! You Won an All-Inclusive EVIL Trip to “Terror at Red Wolf Inn” reviewed! (Cheezy Movies / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Come for the Dinner, Stay to be Eaten at the Red Wolf Inn on a Cheezy Movies’ DVD!

When riffling through her mail, Regina McKee opens a letter informing her she has won a marvelous prize, an all-expenses paid vacation at the quaint resort of Red Wolf Inn.  The young college student is escorted on a charter plane to a quiet town where the historic 1891 resort house resides and to greet her re hosts Evelyn and Henry Smith along with their grandson Baby John Smith.  Occupied with two other guests, Regina finds the old house luxuriously relaxing, her hosts cordially jovial, and the food as about as fantastically delicious as it is seeming endless when the Smiths introduce course-after-course of beautifully cut fillets and delectable desserts.  The Smiths don’t like to skip a meal.  When the other guests’ planned departure feels abrupt without them saying goodbye, Regina begins to suspect something isn’t quite right with The Smiths, something hidden behind the doors of the walk in refrigerator and is being incorporated into all those fatteningly delicious meals. 

Before Papa Jupitar and his children terrorize and cannibalize the Carter family on their way to Los Angeles through the rural, desert roads of Nevada in 1977 and even before a group of young friends stumble upon a demented family abiding by the slaughterhouse rules of people in the backwaters of Texas in 1974, there was the elderly couple and resort owners named The Smiths who entertained young women for dinner to wet their appetites by plumping those same young women into dinner in 1972.  The Late director Bud Townsend, who helmed a limited filmography in his short feature film tenure between 1970 and 1985 with such titles as “Nightmare in Wax” and “Alice in Wonderland:  An X-Rated Musical Fantasy,” took the only credited Allen Actor script and fashioned it into a dissembling macabre for the silverscreen.  Also known as “Secrets Beyond the Door,” “Club Dead,” “Terror on the Menu,” and “Terror House,” which the latter was likely the version experienced for this review due in part to cuts made, “Terror of Red Wolf Inn” is a production of Far West Films and Red Wolf Productions LLC with “Count Yorga, Vampire’s” Michael Macready producing and Allen Actor and Herb Ellis associate producing.

Would you ever answer the letter to a strange solicitation about winning an all-expenses paid vacation in a sleepy little town?  No, neither would I, but that’s what the heroine principal Regina McKee (Linda Gillen, “Black Rain”) did on a whirlwind, excited whim during a time when scammers had only the United States Post Office to importune their tricks upon the gullible.  The 1970s are obviously not as clued in or as technological savvy as the modern times of today with caller Ids, tall tell signs robo-recordings, and all the news stories and documentaries about telemarking boiler rooms; instead, we’re transported back in time where the gift of deceit can be achieved too terribly easy.  Linda Gillen, a freckled face, auburn-haired actress looks like the girl next door with a realness about her modest appearance as a leading lady and when compared to the likes and looks of Mary Jackson (“The Exorcist III,” “Skinned Alive”) and Arthur Space (“Mansion of the Doomed,” “The Swarm”), as innkeepers Evelyn and Henry Smith, the elderly couple reel in that realness even further by being not overly ruthless in their confidence game of cooking with cannibalism and instead bring warmth and hospitality that results in a slow burning dread that can be just as terrifying as an open cookbook cannibal.  The one character I struggle with is Baby John Smith played by John Neilson (“Honky”) and is method toward an unhinged grandson Regina recklessly falls for in record time of knowing him.  Baby John Smith very much plays into his moniker with childlike tantrums and glistening eye wonderment under a tall and chiseled frame of a man, but his infatuation with Regina, that ultimately plays deeper into the story and to foul up his family’s usual dinner plans, feels ingeniously forced as a device just deployed without justification as there is nothing inherently special about Regina compared to the two other lovely guests with more interesting backgrounds and appearances in characters played by Janet Wood (“Ice Cream Man”) and Margaret Avery (“Night Trap”). 

Allen Actor’s script is overall just plain ludicrous.  Who in their right mind would jet off to an unknown small town for a vacation getaway they won out of the blue from a resort that somehow, someway received their name and address?  Was it just a name randomly picked by pointing to that person in the national phonebook?  Who knows because the exact why and how doesn’t see light within the framework that has Regina be the crab who doesn’t know they’re boiling in a pot of hot water until it’s too late.  There are also two good-looking female guests who are also invited for a 2-week staycation until a party and celebration are given by the host for what is ultimately their guest’s last meal to become a meal for the remaining, unsuspecting guests and the devious entertainers.  Aside from a questionable story setup, I found “Terror at Red Wolf Inn” to be well-made and acted.  Townsend obviously knew what he wanted and how to do along with cinematographer John McNichol (“Private Duty Nurses”) to effectively turn around a fly-by-the-seams script into something far more polished on the surface and that adds that layer of suspense when our heroine discovers the truth about her hosts and her newfound love interest.  There’s also an interesting angle of letting Regine free range the house and grounds after the unveiling of anthropophagy because the whole town is essentially in own the caper or the town’s just  one big family, the character pilot who dropped off Regina and the police offer who turns out to be Baby John Smith’s brother or cousin.  Not a lot of detail explores this angle but enough is said and done to know that Regina is trapped without being shackled to her room in a pretty surreal and scary variable of the Inn’s history.

The USA thriller has many titles, been released on many formats, and now Cheezy Movies and Trionic Entertainment presents “Terror at Red Wolf Inn” on a standard definition DVD.  The 480p transfer print is an anemically graded rip from the VHS, digitized to DVD with all the excessive noise, speckled dropouts, mistracking, and blocking included and on top of the original 35 mm print that had typically celluloid grain and, perhaps, its own age and wear issues by the time this print made it to tape.  The print used for VHS appears visibly clean if removing the VHS defects but with the lower resolution, the Cheezy Movies DVD looks pale and dark with very little detail in what is basically slapping together a DVD without any augmentation and restoration to the print.  This is very conventional for this distributor so no I’m not surprised.  The English language mono mix has an enervated strength being ripped from the VHS audio track. Dialogue meets bare standard being out-front and intelligible and can be rambunctious at times with the unpropitious parties for every guest sendoff but doesn’t have space or depth around them under the brittle unbridled bitrate that offers crackling and some hissing throughout. There are no subtitles available with this release. With most of Cheezy Movies’ catalogue, only within the static menu is a chapter selection in its near-nude dressing. The region free release comes with a, supposed cut, R-rated print and has a runtime of 90 minutes. Behind the exemplar 1970’s color graded and arranged poster art for the front cover, one of Evelyn and Henry Smith looking stern over a girl laid out in bikini, inside the standard Amaray DVD case is a disc printed with the same artwork, but title and tagline cropped with just the elderly Smiths and the bikini-bottomed gal. There is not an insert included. “Terror at Red Wolf Inn” is the precursor to a family of cannibal crazies subgenre that has, for the better part of its existence, exploded rather than imploded all due in part to Bud Townsend and his modest directorial.

Come for the Dinner, Stay to be Eaten at the Red Wolf Inn on a Cheezy Movies’ DVD!

Friends for Dinner is EVIL’s Table Setting! “Gnaw” reviewed! (MVD Visual / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Gnaw” on this DVD from MVD Visual, Danse Macabre, and Jinga FIlms!

A holiday away in the English countryside might not be the perfect relaxation for six prickly friends.  Quarrelsome and unfaithfulness run rampant through their fragile friendship on the verge of collapse.  Everything at first was manageably enticing – a quaintly rustic countryside house, a quietly isolated surrounding woodland, and the matron house owner who whips up meaty delicacies for them to enjoy breakfast, lunch, and dinner – but when darkness falls amidst a heated love triangles, lustful romps, and frustrated behaviors, the divisive friends become blind to the ever watchful eye that’s hungry for what the group of young people have to offer – as fleshy comestibles.  A cannibalistic cook lurks in the shadows and in between the walls, waiting for the opportune moment to strike, fillet, ground, and prepare the tender meat for seasoning and baking, but his observant eye has set it’s sights on one whose expecting child that could be a tasty morsel for later. 

Cannibalism subgenre has been a staple in horror for decades the under the vastly wide dog-eat-dog umbrella that pits human beings against each other in one of the many gruesome reasons of unwittingly engaging into a form of Darwinism.  People considered as food are lower-shelf commodities to those who need to feed of human flesh and organs, regarding their placement in the food chain as superior amongst the rest despite being in the same category of the animal kingdom.  Every filmic narrative contains a tweaked difference in justification for cannibalism and in Gregory Mandry’s 2008 English horror, simply known as “Gnaw,” in lies that sense of definite worth in craving someone else’s entrails, boiling the viscera down into a hot soup or baking it into a meat and potato Cornish pastry.   The script, penned between first time screenwriters Michael John Bell and Max Waller from a story by independent horror producer Rob Weston (“Antibirth,” “The Thompsons”), contrasts people’s life-consuming narcissism and pettiness against something truly terrifying and waiting to sink its teeth in you.  Weston and Simon Sharp produce the film under Weston’s production company, Straightwire Entertainment Group, as well as The Big Yellow Feet Productions.

Being that “Gnaw” was released in 2008 and is a low-budget indie film, a novice bunch of English first timers trying to break into the acting game and industry overall comprises the story’s cast of victims and cannibals, but that isn’t to necessarily say the meat and bones are rotten from the very unwrapping of DVD case plastic.  As a whole, the fresh cast undertakes the pessimistic angles of a souring love triangle between established couple Jack and Jill, yes, like the nursery rhyme, played by Nigel Croft-Adams and Rachel Mitchem in a slowly sink ship that symbolizes their relationship, torpedoed by an unknown undercurrent in Jack’s fling with Lorrie (Sara Dylan, “Mandrake”).  Between the three, suspicion is entrenched in Jill with sarcastic lashings on Jack’s recent temperament and behavior that suggests she’s aware of wandering playboy antics, but what Jill is unaware of is the other woman, a hopeless romantic who can’t seem to see through Jack’s philandering, self-assured ways.  One thing “Gnaw” does to spoil this wonderfully taught threesome is not bring the tension to a head and, instead, deflects to the butchering head chef of human bodies, played gruntingly by a muted and snarky-looking Gary Faulkner attempting his best to imitate a killer from the very best of the 80’s slasher renaissance and only to come up short of the current slasher renaissance a decade and a half later.  Masked half the time with some kind of black felt cloth with an attached pelt, Faulkner looks more like a half-wit brandishing a two-prong pitchfork than an large, formidable intimidator you’d be scared of just by looking over your shoulder while running as fast as you can to get away.  Granted, the character is tough to kill, able to take punches and stabs as if they were mosquito bites, but his connection to cannibalism often feels lost in the chase rather than knee deep in guts and a frying pan.  The rest of the cast rounds out with a trope-horny couple in Julia Vandoorne and Hiram Bleetman (“Zombie Diaries”) and the matronly yet unnerving face and voice of Carrie Cohen as the house owner.

In the grand canon scheme of cannibalism films, “Gnaw” places on the generic neighborhood scale.  The small time indie picture rides the line of equivalence, neither being absolutely terrible or outstanding gruesome, with a less-is-more story that more-or-less been done before in the subgenre.  Yet, “Gnaw” doesn’t give audiences anything new to squirm about with its peanut long-pigs who arbitrary abduct locals for their bone-licking appetites.  “Gnaw’s” in frame gore generally consists of goring with that aforementioned puny pitchfork and we’re quickly skirted from the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” inspired moment of Faulkner revving the two-stroke engine for maximizing terror in the eyes of a soon-to-be-in-bits victim   Gore should be a staple motif for any cannibal film where one deranged person has to either sauté, stew, bake, or grill the parts of a hacked up totally emotion-regulated person and Mandry’s film seldomly shows the sickening, sordid sloppy Joe-makings of a flesh eater, except for one scene of a severed foot being ground into hamburger meat that fits the bill while most of the rest happens implied off screen or unshown.  Mandry’s approach to telling the story has the inklings of a 80s-90s vintage made-for-TV movie with an unpolished dark veneer and snooping camera angles to obtain a POV sense of prowling prey while also keeping us engaged with the frustratingly unresolved melodramatics of the group that can stifle our concern for the characters in the last act, infectiously affecting the crude final scenes that literally drops a baby into our laps and expects us to know what to do with that information. 

Personally, my second time around with Gregory Mandry’s “Gnaw” but a lot has changed in between the more than 10-year span of now-and-then.  Hell, even I’ve changed in regard to taste and with now having consumed more cinematic wisdom over the years, from what I recall, “Gnaw” was a rememberable off-industry shocker to a limit and it’s gratifying to see the little cannibal film that could receive a revisit on DVD from MVDVisual in association with Danse Macabre and Jinga Films.  The film is housed on a DVD5 that presents the 35 mm stock in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio and in a rather chaotic upscaled transfer that may be more commercially equipment caused than artefact, but compression macro blocking is evident during the majority of night scenes as it phases in and out of overlapping darker shades. Tom Jenkins’s cinematography can be nicely fore focused to center the characters in front of a background out of focus, but there are other instances where the lighting is extremely binary with not a splash of other color to liven up the image. The only audio option is an English Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound mix with an overkill statement on a film that doesn’t require it.  The back and side channels hardly become utilized for any back brush movement or creaky old house shifting so a lot of the sound is in the anterior which is where the dialogue most rightfully aggressive and clearest.  No issues with the digital recording that offers a balance between the placid moments and the screaming hysteria without being too much intake on the speakers.  There’s not much in the way of ambience, some chewing of the meat pies, steaming of pots, and the revving of a chainsaw is most character-driven sounds that overtake any kind of natural environment along the background landscape.  English subtitles are optionally available.  The DVD does not list special features, but extras appear on the static menu with a director’s commentary that can be toggled off/on.  There is also a trailers selection with previews for the feature plus “Midnight Son,” “After,” and “Red Latex.”  Physical features offer an alternate cover from the other releases with a man opening wide to take a bite out of a literal hand sandwich in the photoshopped composition.  The DVD case does not contain an insert and the disc art contains the same image as the front cover.  With a region free playback, the movie come not rated and has a manageable runtime of 84 minutes.  The second time around with “Gnaw” proves to appreciate the work that goes into a stably fixtured indie horror from the UK but with the copious entries of the cannibal subgenre, especially in the early 2000s with more theatrical pieces in “Wrong Turn” and “The Hills Have Eyes” remake, “Gnaw” treads mediocre waters just enough to sate the man-eater hunger.

“Gnaw” on this DVD from MVD Visual, Danse Macabre, and Jinga FIlms!

The EVIL Fat Man Delivers a Sack Full of Slaughter in “Christmas Cruelty!” reviewed! (Unearthed Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Oh, Its Starting To Look a lot Like “Christmas Cruelty! on Blu-ray!

Eline, Per-Ingvar, and Magne are three close and eccentric friends preparing for the jolliest time of year, Christmas. Concocting a unique Christmas spirit of their own with scarring passers dressed as Krampus and brewing an alcohol infused cocktail, the unconventional celebration reflects their individual perspectives on the holiday: a knowledgeable Eline embraces more traditional values, Magne goes against the grain with a loose grasp on the concept of it all, and the lack of mental acuity for wheelchair bound Per-Ingvar leaves him in naive, gullible belief. All the while the friends prep the groundwork for a Christmas party, a homicidal sociopath tracks and records their every movement, habits, and personal attributes and when Christmas comes, the meticulous and brutal serial killer dresses as Santa and infiltrates what turned from being a joyous bash into Santa bashing in heads with a hammer, decapitates party guests, and rip-roars a chainsaw with blood splattering apathy.

It’s that time of year again to ride the Christmas slay down the hills covered with blood-red snow. Santa, usually a sign of pure good and jovial togetherness, is transformed to embody terror and evil across the holiday season. In 2013, Norwegian filmmaker Per-Ingvar “PIT” Tomren (“Bonzai Motherfucker!”) and his co-director Magne Steinsvoll (producer of “Killungard” and “Lyst”) not only star in another Yuletide horror that yields itself to violence and blood but also adds their perspective entry into the vast Scandanavian subgenre of ole’ Saint Nick, or an imposter of the jolly fat guy, going postal in the worst possible way. Tomren and Steinsvioll work into their debut feature film off a script penned by principal co-star Eline Aasheim as well as Janne Iren Holseter, Anita Nyhagen, and directors Tomren and Steinsvoll. Originally entitled “O’Hellige Jul!” in Norwegian, the 2013 released “Christmas Cruelty” is a Stonewall Productions and presented by DC Medias under the producing credits of Magne Steinsvoll, Kim Haldoersen, and Raymond Volle (“Saga”).

Instead of hiring an outside cast for a serial rapist and killer Santa flick, why not just star in the film yourself? In order to get their feet wet in film production as well as learning the rigors of acting, Per-Ingvar Tomren, Magne Steinsvoll, and Eline Aasheim essentially portray themselves as the three friends spending unique quality time together during Christmas. Per-Ingvar works into the script the corporeal truth of this delicate skeletal structure that battles brittle bone disease aka osteogenesis imperfecta. Confined almost entirely to his wheelchair, Tomren curbs his wellbeing for the sake of art as the filmmaker doesn’t exempt himself from the various physical altercation scenes to have a stuntman take the glory. The same kind of sentiment can be said for Eline Aasheim whose character must endure an invasive attack, one that’s deeply uncomfortable and intimate in nature surrounded by a virtually an all-male cast which includes offscreen friendships. Then there’s Magne. If Per-Ingvar and Eline embodied metaphorically everything that is good about the Christmas spirit, Magne was the complete opposite as a complaining, sexist, and indelicate sourpuss living in the moment rather than grasping his own barbed attitude. The malarky between the three friends on screen is perhaps very mirrorlike offscreen as there is a comfortability level with each other performances that keeps the dynamic on the edge of combusting but yet you never feel like a change in their relationship will ever mount, keeping their friendship close, tight, and compact. The outsider, the Serial Santa, is played mid-50’s Norway actor Tormod Lien. I mention Lien’s age because he is older than the other principal characters and that plays into his character’s wisdom as a family man who takes notes on who’s halls he will soon deck. Calm, organized, and deviant, Lien plays into the apathy without a twinkle of empathy and engineers a bloody show of planned homicide with some comedic bits put on by Lien when Serial Santa has to go off script because of interruptions.

In my mind, there are two types of Christmas horror films: the uncanny universe where Santa, or something related to Santa, such as his toyshop elves or Krampus, world’s lives and breathes in a twisted malevolency while the other type resides in fact with sociopathic and mentally unstable Santa impersonators who go on a merry murdering spree. “Christmas Cruelty!” falls in that latter category with serial killer, dressed as Santa and a grotesque mask, gatecrashes the good protagonists’ party for the nefarious primordial urge to hurt, rape, and kill. Maybe even dabble in a little cannibalism. “Christmas Cruelty!” is a lump of extreme exploitation for next level nihilism. I’ve seen my fair share of messed up movies, but the Tomren and Steinsvoll defiling picture doesn’t even have a millimeter of morality. Without a theme, a message, or a basic point, “Christmas Cruelty!” is hollow atrocity for the sake of shock and slaughter. The principal goods are either too afraid to help each other, too unwilling to help each other, or are too conceited to even take notice that something is amiss. Instead, it’s the Serial-Santa who has his ducks in order, unabashed to simply walk into a room and start his plan of cold-hearted perversion, but before even getting to that moment with deliciously diabolical practical special effects that can produce a gut-wrenching impact, the story goes static with the principal goods chitchatting about history of Christmas, their likes and dislikes of the season, and nursing a hangover from hell. This portion to build character doesn’t actually build character as we’re skirted around victimized trio’s reason for to deserving of our sympathy. Yeah, there’s a person with learning disabilities in a wheelchair and a young woman with an inkling of a moral compass but I find them aimless, sleepwalking through life, and without purpose.

Christmas comes early with the release of “Christmas Cruelty” on Blu-ray home video from our friends at Unearthed Films and MVD Visual. Presented in 1080p with a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio on an AVE encoded BD50, Unearthed Films rendering of the transfer goes without a hitch, but the stylistic choices of Tomren and Steinsvoll are an eyesore with a mustard yellow overlay intended for a grindhouse veneer that also correlates with the large font and embossed opening credits. Much of the details and natural look are lost in the yellow tint. The erratic editing is supposed to reflect Serial Santa’s fragmented mind which idiosyncratically finds footing but can be off-putting to its experimental quality. The Norwegian language DTS-HD 5.1 surround sound mix reflects no issues with depth and range despite having limited need for both and has mostly clear dialogue albeit some obstruction from the soundtrack that is heavily integrated into the sound design and becomes a character in itself with a blend of English-lyrical Christmas themed tunes, instrumental string melodies, acoustic solos by Magne Steinsvoll, generic rock tracks, and folksy jamming that ends with the loud roaring of a chainsaw slicing through body parts. The bonus features include an audio commentary with co-director Per-Ingvar Tomren and producer Raymond Volle, retrospective interviews in How Cruelty Changes Our Lives featurette, blooper outtakes, photo gallery, The Last Rebels hit “Endless Highway,” an interview with Morten Haagensen, “Tradition” short film, Press Conference, a watch-a-long session with Flesh Wound Horror, and teaser trailer. The Unearthed Films menu options were a bit cumbersome to navigate when trying to play the movie as the next screen goes to the three audio options – either two commentaries that run along with the film and the play movie without commentary, but the options are not terribly intuitive and had to go through the options before I was able to play just the movie. The physical release comes in a traditional blue snapper case with the soulless, dead eyes of the Santa mask illustrated with liver sports and aged wrinkles on the front cover. Unearthed Films’ release comes not rated, region A encoded, and has a runtime of 94 minutes. Probably not the perfect holiday gift for the conventional horror filmgoer, “Christmas Cruelty” is difficult to ingest and digest as not only an extreme exploitation film but as a film as whole, but with the callous chunks of coal and the striped blood red candy cane of scrumptious special effects, the Norwegian definitely offers a good stocking stuffer.

Oh, Its Starting To Look a lot Like “Christmas Cruelty! on Blu-ray!

Hypothermia is EVIL’s Coldest Best Friend. “Frost” reviewed! (Cleopatra Entertainment and MVD Visual / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Get the Bluray and Soundtrack for “Frost!”

Seeking to reconnect with her estranged father, Grant, after five years, pregnant Abby drives up the mountainous rural cabin.    Though not the warmest welcome she was expecting with the sudden pregnancy announcement dropped into her father’s lap, the two manage to find common ground and connect again while reliving memories of Abby’s mother.  Their threadbare bond sparks an impromptu finishing trip to the local creek and as the begin to open up a little more with each other, their car accidently runs off the road and declines down a gradual mountain decline before becoming wedged in a thicket of tree branches.   Abby, stuck in the passenger seat facing a steep cliffside dropoff, is trapped and injured.  As Grant goes for help up the mountain, a severe storm rolls in bringing harsh weather and freezing temperatures down upon Abby who desperately tries to keep warm and prays to not go into early labor before emergency rescue can come to her aid. 

Snowy winter thrillers can be harrowingly exciting as much of the plot is fused with the icy and treacherous environment that make lives at stake higher. The snow and the ice become threatening characters and when combined with, at times, a more conventional and concentrated story antagonists, foreseeing path for survival can often feel frigidly impossible. There’s little room for error, there’s little room for warmth, but there’s always an unpredictable heap of bone-chilling snow as far as the eye can see and the elements are only but nature’s natural attributes man has yet to confidently conquer. “Frost” plays into mother nature’s strength when squalling down below freezing wind and snow upon a woman trapped in her own car. The 2022 released, Brandon Slagle (“Attack of the Unknown”) directed “Frost” goes for the jugular in a woman versus nature survival suspenser penned by frequent Slagle aide-de-camp Robert Thompson. The “Aftermath” and “Crossbreed” screenwriter adapts “Frost” from a story by “From Jennifer” writer-director James Cullen Bressack. Shot during the winter in the San Bernardino mountains, “Frost” is produced by the film’s star Devanny Pinn and Cleopatra Music’s Vice President Tim Tasui under the bankroll and production support of Bressack’s JCB Pictures, Inc., Snow Leopard Entertainment, Sandaled Kid Productions, Multiverse Cinema, and Cleopatra Entertainment founders Brian and Yvonne Perera along with Pinn’s co-star Vernon Wells and The Asylum’s Jarrett Furst serving as associate producers.

“Frost” fits into the solo survivalist subgenre category and only characterizes with three actors and a trained wolf. At the tip of the cast spear is independent film producer and broad-brush horror actress and filmmaker Devanny Pinn (“Nude Nuns with Big Guns,” “The Dawn”) in the principal role of Abby, a woman seeking to rekindle her relationship with her reclusive father living in the mountains because of her pregnancy. Genre legend actor Vernon Wells (“Innerspace, “Commando”) opposites Pinn as Abby’s estranged father who’s happy to see his daughter but feels initially threatened by the pregnancy announcement. Understanding the dynamic between Abby and her father was easy as we’ve seen this type of teetering relationship before from a slightly rebellious, new age child returning home to find familiarity with a widowed and waning parent. Pinn and Wells pull off the several stages of reconnecting from the heated exchanges to the sappy moments of loss to the unexpected joy the two characters can bring out of each other, but what’s more difficult to comprehend is the source material. What causes the father and daughter to divide in the first place and how does that division’s role play out in the perilous predicament of an isolating car crash during a severe winter storm? For the sake of critique, one could say that their dissolving disputable divisiveness ends in irony as if the cosmos ultimately pulls them a part in a fitful storm of rage. Wells does what he can to make the initial crash scene comforting while exuding a positive outcome, but the veteran actor appears blank to severity, especially as a woodsman father soon to be a grandfather. Much of “Frost’s” edge of your seat trepidation is shouldered upon Devanny Pinn to take reins of providing the emotional embattlement against the unforgiving weather elements and animal food chain. Armed with nothing more than the dwindling car’s battery to provide heat and a charged lighter as well as whatever lures and first aid accompaniments in her father’s tacklebox, a rather lightly dressed, nearly to term pregnant Abby is pinned to her seat, backed to the edge of a cliff, and must face the cold and wolves until her father retrieves a rescue party. Pinn does what she can to fill in a quivering battle between life and death with a story that’s heavily reliant on a cigarette outlet to ward off a snarling wolf and can burn through seat belts in a single charge. That’s independent move magic for you, folks!

Any kind of solo act surrounding a single location, remote at that, with no other actor or other mobile organic object to feed off and bounce off its energy is a difficult task to undertake, especially on a hyper cost-efficient production.  Slagle’s “Frost” is certainly not immune to the difficulties and the filmmakers, and his crew and cast are well aware of the challenges to make the survival thriller engaging despite fluffing and padding the story with filler clichés and needless setup.  The production and location value are comparatively impressive against the limitations of the budget with a practical and computer-generated encroaching tundra of snow, ice, and wind that can insidiously invade a cold snap into the viewers bones, creating that intended atmospheric of a hell freezing over complete with the teeth of a hungry wolf, a biting rime, and deadly falling icicles.  More obvious than what perhaps Slagle and creative team realize is that “Frost” relies terribly on the shocking climatic scene, a scene so unimaginable and so appalling that it hits all the right gut-checking spots, but the setup to the scene and all the trials and trepidation Abby has to endure doesn’t quite mesh with a well-rounded plight that usually cradles an emotional pull string for the viewer to continuously root for and support those in the thick of the predicament.   Honestly, that heaviness for empathy never provides the emotional weight toward the character and never sparks that flame of hope to keep us warm and fuzzy on the inside to then quickly be extinguished by merciless mother nature. There’s also the plausibility of survival and the way that survival instinct is applied that makes “Frost” too far-fetched to be a strong contender in the subgenre. At near subzero temps, Hypothermia can set in in under an hour. In “Frost,” three days of severe snowstorm pummeling has past, segued by scene time stamps, before Abby becomes a popsicle and is delusional. I’m pretty sure with almost nothing to eat and very little warmth, Abby would have expired in under 48 hours. Yet, the 72-hour mark becomes the most chilling, literally and figuratively, in “Frost’s” invigorating third act snack that’s more abominable than it is nutritional!

Cleopatra Entertainment, the cinematic subsidiary of Cleopatra Records delivers a 2-disc Blu-ray set for Brandon Slagle’s icy thriller “Frost.” Presented in a widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio, the 91-minute film has a crisp, lively picture compressed without much to complain about. Banding issues are held to barely any and the details don’t whiteout during the wintery whiteout, leaving key delineations to be present in bold contrasts, especially during the severe snowstorm scenes. Foliage looks thick and green before for the storm with a lot of good textural details on the impaling branches that perforate the car and Abby. The English language 5.1 surround mix conveys the problematic sound design issues that have been consistently found in many of Cleopatra’s releases. Mostly in regard to the dialogue tracks, the dialogue tracks pick up static and other minute ambient noise during microtonal intervals, creating an unwelcoming and stark contrast with a dialogue mix that cuts obviously cuts in and out between character speak and isn’t simultaneous with the score. However, much like with other Cleopatra releases, the score is production and distributor company’s best trademark with a full album including music from various artists, such as L. Shankar, Big Electric Cat, Terry Reid, Rick Wakeman, and amongst others. The 2nd disc, an audio CD, contains the 15-song soundtrack. Other physical noteworthy aspects of the release include the double-sided cover art – one filmic and the other CD listing with both include different variations of the front cover as well as a translucent Blu-ray snapper cast that adds to the snowy theme. Software bonus features include only the theatrical trailer and a still gallery slideshow. Exposure to “Frost” is deep freezing frills for most of the picture but if able to withstand the coldshoulder of cliches, the mare peaks with a blood-filled and tasty horrific morsel that makes the frippery first half worth the wait.

Get the Bluray and Soundtrack for “Frost!”