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The “Despiser” Collector Edition Blu-ray Is a Must Own!

Gordon Hauge is an inspirating artist with little motivation. Having just lost his contract work, being evicted from his home, and his wife leaving him, Gordon is left with virtually nothing, even no purpose. While speeding home late a night, Gordon swerves to avoid pedestrians in the road and crashes his car, waking up in a nightmare-scape purgatory reigned by a malevolent monster known only as The Despiser. The Despiser’s ragmen minions, governed by The Shadow Men, wreak havoc on the land by stealing nuclear warheads with the objective to rip a dimensional, absconding hole in their world that’ll lead into Gordon’s. The Despiser’s only obstacle is a ragtag group of pious, historical fighters stuck too in purgatory after sacrificing their lives for a greater good and now are missioned to release everyone from The Despiser’s malicious hold over the Ragmen souls, as well as escape limbo themselves. When The Despiser threatens his wife, Gordon joins the fight against evil and takes the battle head on.

Unlike anything you’ve ever seen before in the movie category, “Despiser” is the dark fantasy, action-thriller from 2003. “Beyond the Rising Moon” and “Invader” Philip J. Cook’s own written-and-directed sci-fi odysseys distill the genre game by challenging the visual inside a unique story on a low-budget. “Despiser” is no different digging into the horror building blocks of a soul-swallowing netherworld with a goliath creature having dominion. Testing the waters with computer generated scenes still in their infancy and shot on the stringent, temperamental, and ever quality fluctuating video tape, the pre-millennium feature was shot in Cooke’s own home and makeshift production studio in Virginia of 1998, running against the wind and against the odds of coming out top with a promising product that audiences will like. Cooke’s Eagle Film’s serves as the production company that naturally puts the filmmaker in the producer’s chair.

In the role of the disoriented artist down on his luck Gordon Hague is Mark Redfield (“Dark and Stormy Night,” “Chainsaw Sally,” and the producer of the Redfield Arts Audio Podcast “The Midnight Matinee”). Brassy and cocky, Gordon Hague feels very much like a classic character browbeaten into being cheap ground coffee, diluted by his own lack of ambition with a flavorless future. That is until Gordon dies unexpectedly and becomes the prophesized champion of gung-ho, gun-toting good doers at the edge of oblivion and obliteration. Guided by Carl Nimbus, an early 1900s cavalry soldier played rather convincingly cool by Doug Brown, the group is contrived with different era, different walks-of-life, and different skillset individuals fighting the good fight against a soul-damning manipulator, whom in itself is alien to the purgatory topography of fire, brimstone, lave, and apparently littered with nuclear missiles. Fumie Tomasawa (Frank Smith), Charlie Roadtrap (Tara Bilkins), and Jake Tulley (Michael Weitz) form what’s left of the crusading squad, and each have their own personalities, backgrounds, and views toward eliminating the threat of otherworldly damnation. On the opposite side of the spectrum are the Shadow Men, the Despiser’s right hands overseeing the mindless henchmen known as the Ragmen. Shadow Men inhabit corporeal bodies and are a wild bunch of frenzy determination. In the story, there are only two individualized Shadow Man but one of those goonish souls sees three embodiments in a variety of acting styles by Dan Poole, Richard Dorton, and Mark Hyde with Jeff Rathner giving us first taste for the Shadow Men’s near indestructibility. Gage Sheridan, Mike Diesel, Chris Hahn, and Brian Neary fill in the supporting cast.

Early PlayStation graphics interlaced and spliced with live action shots of a doom and gloom purgatorial world is great way to surmise “Despiser.” Just on the precipice of fine tuning the gaming-changing visual effects at the turn of the century, movie worlds go from tangible mattes, practical backgrounds, and hand-painted compositions to simply a green or, in “Despiser’s” case, a blue backdrop screen that allows actors to do their thespian work without anything around them to interact with or bounce off a certain emotion or reaction and visual effects artists will add-in and blend worlds, creatures, and effects in post-production. Cook, along with Cory Collins, chiefly constructed an anhedonia embodied layer in between the plane of existence and the eternal beyond without losing a step with a seamless live actor application. The whole film feels like the introduction prologue short in the first “Resident Evil” game, a mix exchanging edit of virtual and physical, but Cook doesn’t just switch frames between the two formats to tell the story, the imaginative animator and filmmaker adds life into his virtual landscape without being terribly clunky or be an ostentatious show his stitchwork. Naturally with early VFX graphics, not every computer modeling element is forgiving and much of that expression lies with the antagonist, the Despiser himself. The water-dwelling, dungeon being with limited movements and remains mostly in the shadows and for good reason with a scale that likely couldn’t be conceived or achieved in a technology that hasn’t yet be refined for the desired quality and public acceptance, and while the limited scope of the Despiser is bothersome, especially having to sit through it’s same motions over and over, Cook’s engaging story eases the pain tremendously with a suicide mission enlisted with likeable characters you really don’t want to see perish in purgatory.

Evil Dam Trolls, holy light ammunitions, and nuclear missiles are only the tip of the iceberg in the new Visual Vengeance Blu-ray release of “Despiser.” The Wild Eye Releasing subsidiary label prologues with the usual A/V disclaiming but the director-supervised transfer from the standard definition master of the original tape element holds up remarkably well on an AVC encoded, 1080p, BD50. Perhaps a little radiantly effervescence, the frothy-rimmed and delicate in detail final product enhances the presentational submerged in sardonic storyline. Besides, much of the early computer-generated imagery is smooth anyway and, in contrast, the palpable pieces often standout with deeper, textured nuances. Bood spurts and muzzle flashes are, too, fashioned neatly into the frames. Presented in a pillarbox full screen 1.33:1 aspect ratio, Cook balances the coloring and lighting inside the CGI world to roughly match the out-of-the-CGI-box steely tones of blue, green, and silver tints under softer shadows. The lossless LPCM stereo mix offers up a pretty true to self fidelity that could, one day, receive an extensive channel and refining upgrade. Machine gun fire, and there’s a ton of it, spatters off with an ingrained rat-a-tat force that’s more polished than your typical indie production whose discharges sound more like cap guns. Dialogue plays to the makeshift setting strengths, providing echoes where needed in more cavernous locales to the muffled notes of long-range speak. Optional English subtitles are available. With a Visual Vengeance release you know you’re getting topnotch exclusive special features and packaging as well as archival goodies encoded onto the larger capacity disc, including two commentary tracks with director Philip J. Cook and actors Gage Sheridan and Mark Redfield on one and cult movie enthusiasts Sam Panico and Bill Van Ryn on the other, a making of “Despiser” featurette with Cook and Mark Hyde that goes deep within the nuts and bolts of it all, a handful of deleted scenes with title cards, a running blooper reel, outtakes, a storyboard to animation, the original lava-road DVD animated intro menu, a behind-the-scenes and art gallery, “Despiser” trailers, the Visual Vengeance advert trailer, and Cook’s “Outerworld” and “Invader” film trailers just beyond the fluid, cardboard cutout animated menu. But wait, that’s not all! Andrei Bouzikov’s illustrated compositional machine guns, mushroom clouds, and the four-armed Despiser, nearing Ghana-poster level but keeps in line with the filmic material, is a sight to behold on the cardboard O-slipcover. Inside, on the primary cover of the clear Blu-ray Amaray case, you get even more new art from Stefan “STEMO” Motmans that’s less tapestry art and more iconic as it is epic. The reverse side holds “Despiser'” original poster arrangement that’s simple yet effective. The disc is whimsically labeled with encircling blue, purple, green, and red evil trolls while the opposite, insert side has a folded mini poster of Bouzikov’s art, a colorful, dual-sided synopsis and Blu-ray acknowledgement sheet, and no release would be complete without the retro VHS sticker sheet. The 16th Visual Vengeance release is region free, unrated, and has a runtime of 105 minutes.

Last Rites: The soul wants what the soul wants and that is “Despiser” on a Visual Vengeance, collector’s edition Blu-ray. An out of pocket, retro-modeled, and portentous hell on Earth from beyond the stars movie too good to skip the bad parts.

The “Despiser” Collector Edition Blu-ray Is a Must Own!

From being stuck in stand still Floridian hurricane traffic to waking up in a hospital without any recollection of how she got there, Amy Barrett finds herself in a seemingly evacuated sanitarium on the verge of being hit by a category 5 hurricane. When she finally makes contact with the limited hospital staff, Amy discovers that the staff are not in the position to help, but desire to perform unnecessary surgeries. Then, she finds herself in traffic again. Then, she wakes up in hospital…again. Amy, and other patients, find themselves trapped in a nightmare loop forged by the powers of the massive hurricane. Before the storm passes over, Amy must find a way to end the corkscrew of timelines that propel her limbo hell or else she will be trapped in the hospital forever.

To the O.R. stat! From writer-director Christopher Lawrence Chapman comes “Inoperable,” the horror equivalent to Bill Murray’s exceptional dark comedy “Groundhog Day.” As Chapman’s sophomore directorial, first in the realm of horror, the director takes “Inoperable” to rebrand the quantum paradoxical plight by introducing a medical butchers with hours upon hours, days upon days, years upon years of experience with exploratory surgery and ghastly invasion procedures. Behind the wormhole of terror script with Chapman is co-writer, the b-horror screenwriter, Jeff Miller whose extensive credits include “Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan” and “Jolly Roger: Massacre at Cutter’s Cove.” In this go-around, Miller explores the space-time-continuum, or does he, with Amy reliving the same moment, experienced slightly differently, in an endless loop of grisliness.

Starring in “Inoperable” is the “Halloween’s” franchise third favorite star, behind Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleseance, being Danielle Harris (“Halloween 4,” “Halloween 5,” and Rob Zombie’s “Halloween” remakes). Harris keeps and maintains the tension, supplementing an increasing annoying and frustrating tone with each and every reset, and does superbly in extended takes running through the hospital’s dark corridors. Amy’s center storied character really puts Harris to work on her ability to flex in sequentially illogical scenes that go in various tangents and come to a dead halt in the end, flipping the script that forces the modern day scream queen to relive some of those killer “Halloween” moments. Harris is accompanied by Katie Keene and Jeff Denton, both whom worked with Chapman previously on the clownsploitation slasher “ClownTown.” Keene and Denton’s characters are also caught up in the same situation as a Denton plays a beefy good looking cop named Ryan who brings in a witness, Keene’s JenArdsen, a dolled up blonde who while in his custody, to the hospital following a multi-vehicle pile up; the very exact incident Amy in which Amy was involved. The two fall for each other more and more with each and every restart and that pain coldly passes over when to bare witness to each other’s demise over and over again is disturbingly twisted. Rounding out the cast is Chris Hahn “Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan”), Cher Hubsher (“The Amityville Terror”), Michelle Marin (“Bloody 27”), Philip Schene, and Crystal Cordero.

The trio of resetters formulate a wildly speculated theory that a nearby military compound, experimenting in spatial physics, was ravaged by the hurricane that oozed out their experiments that disrupted timelines, affecting this particular hospital, and the only way to escape the madness is by displacing the same energy that was put into it; so for example, since Ryan and JenArdsen arrived together, they would have to escape together. As long as Amy doesn’t die, every trapped soul is eligible for escape. Wait, what? Like aforementioned, Amy is the centerpiece to the puzzle and the whole entire situation actually revolves around Amy, intentional or not. Even though clues try to put a monkey wrench in that notion, the story always seems to revert back to Amy much like the loop she’s caught in. That in itself is the biggest hint of all that funnels to a underwhelming ending in null and voids the rest of the story.

ITN Distribution presents “Inoperable” onto DVD and VOD. The DVD is presented in a widescreen to “preserve the aspect ratio of its original exhibition” and, yes, this was done so. Nothing too particularly to note about the image quality being a modern release, but the color palette is balanced and vivid. The English language 5.1 Dolby Digital track has some good range and clear dialogue that effective communicate all theories and explanations on why this is happen to Amy, Ryan, and JenArdsen. Extras are slim that include a cast and crew commentary and the theatrical trailer. The Zorya Films and Millman Productions’ “Inoperable” is open heart surgery gory and is unique in a deadfall environment that’s sublimely refreshing for the over saturated genre, but culminates flaccidly with a conventional finale too predictable for comfort.