Tag Archives: Cole Payne

There’s No EVIL Treat with This EVIL Trickster! “The Jester 2” reviewed! (Dread Present / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“The Jester 2” Blu-ray Is a Must-Get Sequel!

15-year-old Max is a girl without friends and with her bordering the edge of maturity that leaves her too old for trick-or-treating.  Dressed as magician with an enthusiasm for card tricks and slight of hand, Max tries unsuccessfully to make the best of her Halloween night as school peers mock and tease her until the animated and sinister Jester comes before her to show her a trick of his own.  When Max foils his trick, the Jester’s undertaking to contractually collect souls for Devil every All Hollows Eve comes into jeopardy as he loses his power to trick others.  The Jester forces Max’s hand to play tricks on others for their souls to be collected by the end of the night before his own soul burns in the internal inferno.  As the night goes on, Max must outplay the supernatural killer whose desperate game to spill as much blood as possible before the end of the night is coming to a full carnage head.

Our review of Colin Krawchuk’s “The Jester” called it “clever, entertaining, and devilish,” concluding out the review with “The Jester” acts the whimsical clown of conscience-stricken torment with an indelible joker different from the rest of the villainy pool. Yeah, we liked it.  Krawchuk and team return for a sequel, simply entitled “The Jester 2,” that opens backstory doors for the mischievous maniac whose mask grins from ear-to-ear and knows all of the tricks of the soul reaping trade.  Only one problem lies in his path, a 15-year-old girl who may be better a deceiving than he is.  The standalone sequel doesn’t segue with the original film, creating a new whole installment that anyone could enjoy without watching the original 2023 film or it’s viral short films both films are based off of.  Krawchuk writes-and-directs to be inherently different not only from the first film but from the large slasher genre that’s seen its fair share of clownish killers as of late.  Traverse Terror and Epic Picture Group collab once again for another Dread Presents release with Epic Picture Group leadership of Patrick Ewald coproducing side-by-side with “Bag of Lies” producing team of Victoria McDevitt, Jake Heineke, and Cole Payne. 

Michael Sheffield returns with his top hat and cane as the manically mute and mischievous Jester but with a slightly different approach to the Jester’s appearance.  Instead of a Venetian mask strapped around his head by an elastic band, the sequel’s Jester has a mask that’s seemingly an extension of his face, delineated by the rivulet of exposed under flesh between where skin ends and where mask begins.  Without Sheffield’s enthusiastic harlequinade and long, drawn out glares and motionless menace through empty, black eyes of the mask, “The Jester” films and shorts would without a doubt not be as entertaining and terrifying.  This time around, the Jester has a new foe in a 15-year-old girl with puerile dreams of magic and trick-or-treating.  It’s safe to say this girl, Max, is a loner with her peers making fun at her expense, but Max, as a final girl against the Jester, is intelligent and crafty in the face of pure evil despite her ounce of fear to live and be free of his threat against those she cares for – mother (Jessica Ambuehl, “Black Mold”) and sister – and strangers, even the ones that bully her.   Making her feature film debut, the then early 20-something Kaitlyn Trentham has a convincible foot in the door of “The Jester’s” awkward teen being the equalizer against supernatural Hell spawn.  Trentham can pivot between dejected loner to confident talent to the improvising fighter in the matter of circumstances, and when one of those circumstantial events involves Max’s family, a game of wits opens the chessboard for the next few moves.  Forced to align before “Halloween” night comes to close, “The Jester 2” is exclusively between Max and The Jester, good versus evil, for most of the narrative with filler, supporting characters weaved into the pattern to support the threat of tension and a high body count a sequel can be proud of.

Sequels tend to do everything bigger with their inlaid bigger budget off the back of a successful first film.  Big name talent, bigger effects, higher body count, etc., but character and story creator Colin Krawchuk doesn’t take the bait for a bigger boat and pushes that need to multiply tenfold “The Jesser’s” presence amongst audiences down to a suppressed level.  While that might seem counterintuitive to the idea of sequels, “The Jester “thrives on story and sf/x simplicity, letting Sheffield and Trentham battle it out and drive the story of certainly a different scenario from the first film.  The original “The Jester” embodies a similar tone but the control was imbalanced to “The Jester” with a supernatural upper hand always on the pulse of his tricked prey.  The sequel kinks the hose, stopping the Jester’s paranormal flow of life and soul snatching to be humbled by his need from a mortal who ultimately has his existence hanging in this teen girl’s sleight of hands.  This creates a perceptional shift from the Jester’s omnipresence, omnipotent immortality to he’s scraping by with desperation and longshot dependency on a young teen magician with a homemade costume.  This is not to say this new installment into the Jester’s ethos and extended qualities is downgraded or is riding the exact same original wave toward a mundane surf as the kills do have incremental whimsical value and there’s certainly more of a visual effects presence than before and it’s done well to push the sequel to be a step up and forward in conjunction with the good versus evil alliance storyline.

Epic Picture Group and Dread Presents returns the Jester for another go-around of illusionary ill intention with a Blu-ray release.  AVC encoded with 1080p, high-definition resolution on a BD25 and presented in a widescreen 1.78:1, the standard for video metrics supplies “The Jester 2” with adequate levels of a color saturation on a graded scale that leans toward ever so slightly a piano black finish.  Details hover between great depth to vague depending on the focus which Krawchuk and “2 Lava 2 Lantula’s” cinematographer Kevin Duggan who play with the perspective focus in the realm of an already detail-vague and hard-lit night shoot that’s contrast heavy, obtaining nice shadows around the contours of the Jester’s mask.  Duggan is not the returning cinematographer from the original 2023 film but really channels Joe Davidson’s (“President’s Day”) style that’s near raw with graded elements and focus precision.  “The Jester 2” offers an English Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound and a Dolby Digital 2.0.  Much of the 5.1 is frontloaded with a trickle of atmospheric coming through side and back channels in a watery compressed copy of the track, that was likely recorded in Dolby.  Dialogues rendered clearly and cleanly, the Jester doesn’t speak anyway so much of his diegetic sounds are the ruffling swifts of his suit and hat with some walking cane taps, and the supernatural and killing ambient action has a punchy quality of a slight toon quality.  English subtitles are available for selection.  Special features include a director’s commentary, a making of featurette which is of Colin Krawchuk speaking on camera about the genesis and fruition of creating a sequel and sustaining villain with clips intercut into the interview footage, and the trailer as well as other Dread Presents’ previews.  The 87-minute Blu-ray is open to all regions for playback and is the film is not rated.

Last Rites: “The Jester 2” is the same but different and kills as a context sequel for a villain on the right path to being a successful franchise.

“The Jester 2” Blu-ray Is a Must-Get Sequel!

An EVIL Cult Summons Back “The Hangman” reviewed! (Dread / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“The Hangman” Now Available on Blu-ray!

Turbulent connecting father and teenage son, Leon and Jesse, retreat to the West Virginia wilderness for a little rekindling before Jesse goes off to college.  Still reeling after his mother’s death five years ago, Jesse blames his father’s inactivity and his rebuff mismanagement of their family’s pain.  The next morning, Jesse has disappeared, the car has been sabotaged, and Leon fears his son might be in the hands of a pair of racist rednecks encountered the day before.  However, what Leon finds himself in the middle of is much worse when a demon summoning cult retrieves The Hangman from the depths of one of Earth’s seven gates of hell and needs a fresh, young, and angst-riddled body to continue his unharnessed hell on Earth.  Jesse becomes the unfortunate soul at stake and it’s up to his father, and a few local God-fearing allies, to try and stop The Hangman’s noose from gripping tighter.

New York City-based director Bruce Wemple has teamed up again with Dread Production to bring another terrifying tale.  The “Monstrous” and “Island Escape” director cowrites the script with frequently collaborator, actor LeJon Woods (“Baby Oopsie:  The Series,” “Island Escape,” to deliver “The Hangman,” a demonic horror thriller that catapults a father and son’s dysfunctionality into the throes of Hell.  Filmed in the rural regions of upstate New York, doubling as the rural Appalachian wilderness of West Virginia, which makes filming having occurred likely around the Adirondack Mountains instead, “The Hangman” carries with it a longstanding racial infamy attached to a father’s supernatural pickle, being the middle of a demon conjuring cult and the lynching-loving demon itself.  Traverse Terror productions, a division of executive producers Cole Payne Traverse Media, in association with Dread Presents sees executive producer Patrick Ewald from the Epic Pictures Group back “The Hangman” feature while Daniel Booker and Vincent Conroy coproduce.

LeJon Woods not only cowrites the script but the actor for Cleveland, Ohio essentially customizes the role of the father, Leon.  What starts as a man looking to just escape into the great outdoors quickly closes in around him as he feels the pressures of latent hostility when son Jesse (Mar Cellus, making his feature film debut) accuses him of running from his past after the death of his mother, Leon’s wife.  What exactly happens to her is not yet apparent other than an offscreen gunshot but the palpable tension between Woods and Cellus is worth noting in a handwringing moment of enmity around the first night’s campfire; a good tall tale sign that this camping trip is going to be doomed from the start.  This tension sets the stage for what’s to come, a missing son, aggressive bigots, murderous cultists, and a Netherworld lyncher, showcased with an awfully underutilized purpose and screentime appeal, especially being the titular villain.  “An Angry Boy’s” Scott Callenberg gets his chance to shine as an inhuman character, prosthetically made-up with burn scars, greasy strands of hair, and cladded darkly in country chic, but doesn’t have the room to spread havoc or really build the character who’s mostly reduced to lurking the background and letting the telekinesis-driven rope to asphyxiate those not in the know of cult activity.  There’s also a slew of throwaway characters that either are too short-lived to really flesh out their role, such as the eye-gouged, bedridden clairvoyant and the tied-up local Leon saves and becomes a flirtatious love interest/gun-toting assassin (see what I mean by not really understanding the character?) in Lindsay Dresbach (“Pitchfork”).  Except for LeJon Woods, the rest of the cast is comprised of mostly short film or background actors and actresses given the opportunity for an expanded principal performance, including Kaitlyn Lunardi, Rob Cardazone, Jefferson Cox, Daniel Martin Berkley, William Shuman, Ameerah Briggs, Jessy Holtermann, and Richard Lounello.

Riding parallel to “The Hangman’s” resurrected demon on Earth, a father and son’s struggle to grow in postmortem of the only woman in their lives, and the fact that there is one of the gates of Hell located in the West Virginia’s Appalachians premise, the story entails a rather barefaced, as well as slightly overtone, racism theme coursing through its veins.  The Confederate flag sporting rednecks and the all-white, Southern accent contingent of white people against a black man and his son shout bigotry as louds as possible through your personal media setup.  Yet, the Hangman himself is the very representation of lynching, a heinously taboo act that has become a stain on America history, typically executed by racially prejudice Southerners on black people when that simmering, seething hate turns red and vigilante justice rears its ugly head.   Though the villain doesn’t don a white hood and gown or perform any gesture of white power, to say Leon, a black man, who must stop the evilly monikered hangman from taking his son’s soul to Hell, is too big a coincidence to not call a spade a spade.  Wemple and Woods make it clear that Leon’s calling is to be a savior, the chosen heroic that can destroy the Hangman, but while the first two acts climb the ladder of an naïve hero, all the indicating signs point to arbitrary means met with arbitrary characters for Leon with no concrete reasoning why his being deceived into the gateway to Hell area is more than just serendipitous destiny, turning the last act of “The Hangman” into just a one man wrecking ball of hillbilly hell spawn that loses that fate-driven connotation.

“The Hangman” nooses a high-definition, 1080p Blu-ray from Epic Picture Group, the at-home distribution label of Dread Presents.  The AVC encoded, single-layered, BD25 has good curb appeal with negligible compression issues in the feature’s 2.00:1 widescreen aspect ratio, so we get a deeper, broader picture with less resolution flaws.  While the certain background or tree-top scenes present a good visual intake of a bird’s eye views, the grading resides to just above a flat overlay, likely within the 10th percentile of grading possibilities, resulting in a more natural tone.  Details are generally fine when in focus or out of the shadows, which is where the Hangman lurks most of his screentime.  The presented audio options are a lossy English Dolby Digital 5.1 and a Dolby Stereo 2.0.  Dialogue has clear and prominent staying power throughout the stock soundtrack that slightly chintzy the ambience audio works of self-acting rope and other mystical milestones whenever the hangman comes calling.  There’s not a ton of spatial volume to diffuse the audio with balance, leaving a lot of the milieu and action resonances as lopsided near the foreground.  English and Spanish subtitles are optionally available.  The Blu-rays special features include a Bruce Wemple commentary track, a making of featurette with interview snippets with LeJon Woods, a lengthier interview with writer-star LeJon Woods, and a deleted scene.  Physically, the deep scar recesses of “The Hangman”s” white-eyed face and long, unkempt hair becomes the front cover face of Dread’s conventional Blu-ray with a disc pressed with more fascination of a coiled hangman’s noose working down the center ring.  There are no tangible bonus materials included. The region free release comes not rated and has a runtime of 90 minutes. 

Last Rites: “The Hangman” won’t snap the neck of novelty and wanders off the path of the tangent, but does instill a strength of cause, a father-son bond that’s being challenged and motivated when threatened, backdropped by systemic racism.

“The Hangman” Now Available on Blu-ray!

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