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Never Steal EVIL’s Dead Body and Think to Get Away Scot-Free! “Frightmare” reviewed! (Troma / Tromatic Collector’s Edition)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

It’s not a Nightmare. It’s a “Frightmare” on Blu-ray!

Aging horror icon Conrad Radzoff is on the verge of being forgotten by all except for a few handfuls of diehard fans who gather around a horror society that appreciate classics that are quickly fading from public view.  Arrogant and conceited, Radzoff doesn’t take criticism all too well.  In fact, he kills over it.  After murdering a commercial director and his longtime collaborating director, both of whom loathed his tyrannical, prima donna attitude, Radzoff dies of heart failure shortly after.  The youthful members of the horror society steal his body from Radzoff’s elaborate decorated and booby-trapped mausoleum on a whim and spends the night dining, dancing, and photographing with his lifeless corpse until Radzoff’s wife uses a medium to locate her late husband’s body and inadvertently resurrects him from dead with supernatural psychic powers to pick off his naïve graverobbers one-by-bone in what will be his last great horror performance. 

“Frightmare,” aka “The Horror Star,” is the supernatural slasher that tears into the fabric of being forgotten with a lasting impression, one with deadly consequences for a mischievous teens disrespecting the past in order to live with impunity in the present.  The 1983 picture is written-and-directed by Norman Thaddeus Vane, co-director of “The Black Room” and the Elvira-inspired 1988 film “Midnight.”  Shot mostly in the Los Angeles area, “Frightmare’s” principal photography and wrap was completed during 1981 but the film itself was not released until two years later and is not a remake of and has no connection to the Pete Walker film of the same title years earlier in 1974, which focuses on a seemingly mentally disturbed rehabilitated woman released years after committing deadly crimes.  This more necromancing and resurrecting slasher “Frightmare” is produced by Callie and Patrick Wright and with “Shadow of the Hawk’s” Henry Gellis serving as executive producer under the Screenwriters Production Company. 

“Frightmare” would undoubtedly become director Norman Thaddeus Vane’s first attempt at replicating a horror icon shell that would later inspire him to direct “Midnight” that pulls influences off horror hostesses, such as Elvira or Vampira.  The centralized character, one who’s prim-and-proper snobbish attitude and flair for the theatrical in film and in life, is loosely, in Conrad Radzoff is loosely based off the Vincent Prices and the Christopher Lees of the genre, classically trained method actors astute to the craft.  Radzoff is, however, embellished with a hellish soul, unlike Price or Lee who sustained a rather indifferent or benevolent character.  There’s a lot to take in and enjoy from Ferdy Mayne’s performance as Radzoff.  Mayne’s first role of it’s kind for the actor with its meta intent to be an actor playing a horror actor reawakened as psychic sociopath from the depths of Hell groomed and garbed as a Vincent Price/Christopher Lee-like gothic vampire, in which Mayne was quite trained for having starred in vampiric films such as “The Vampire Lovers” and “The Fearless Vampire Hunters” in the 1970s, and he crushes the performance with profound effect with Vane’s Euro-style slasher that keeps tabs on the killer as he lurks through the property of the horror society, consisting of going from contravening teens to the unfortunate victims played by Luca Bercovici (“Parasite”), Jennifer Starrett (Run, Angel, Run!”), Alan Stock (“Poison Ivy”), Scott Thomason (“Ghoulies”), then Michael Biehn’s now ex-wife Carlene Olson, Donna McDaniel (“Angel”), and one Jeffrey Combs that would be one of his first films pre-“Re-Animator.”   Narratively, this laid out is the core cast of characters but there are peripheral support characters that are introduced and have key moments but are quickly diminished or erased from completing their story arc.  Radzoff’s wife Ette (Barbara Pilavin, “Maniac Cop 3:  Badge of Silence”) barely has five minutes of screentime but provides the undead Radzoff the key, go-ahead directive to kill his body snatchers but after that intense moment where they psychically connect, her scenes are no more other than one moment with a lightly knotted loose end.  Same can about the intensity of Mrs. Rohmer (Nita Talbot, “Puppet Master II”) that it pops clean off after connecting with Radzoff.  Leon Askin (Doctor Death:  Seeker of Souls”), Chuck Mitchell (“Porky’s”), and Peter Kastner (“Steambath”) fill in the cast.

If only one element stood out as “Frightmare’s” most redeeming characteristic, Joel King’s cinematography takes the top spot on the podium with a diffused fog machine backlighting that’s out of this world, angles and movements that complex the simplest and most stationary scenes, and an ingenuity that manifests the magic of a macabre movie also assisted by both of the aforementioned lighting techniques and the camera placements.  “Frightmare’s” also heavily infused with Gothic nuances that pay tribute to the subgenre as well as add to the sinister and oppressive tone of a rapidly enclosing atmosphere of darkness, shadow, and vaulted architecture from Radzoff’s Victorian-era, aristocratic black and white attire to the wood dark-toned and concreated exterior, two-story mansion that becomes the prison to the horror society they can’t escape from, in life with their hobby and in death with Radzoff hunting them through secret passages, dumbwaiters, and its delicately antiquatedly trimmed rooms and hallways.  Blood is accentuated with slow motion and splatter along walls and out of gash wounds with practical effects constructed by “Critters’” Chuck E. Stewart who can build a ghastly looking burned up and smoking body dead on the ground.  “Frightmare” isn’t a narrative that’ll strike fear around every corner but is rather a campy, supernatural slasher with hammed performances and a solid method for one-by-one offing.  The story’s a bit thin with motivations that keep Radzoff’s egocentric boasting about his last performance in death, his deathtrap mausoleum as if the actor knew there would be intruders, and the whole stealing of the corpse that just seemed to be a fruitless, ill-advised whim where there would be no escape from authorities or even the smell of an actively rotting corpse being stowed away in a non-climate controlled attic. 

Troma re-releases the Vinger Syndrome transfer onto their own Blu-ray through a partnership contract where Vinegar Syndrome receives first dibs on the upgraded, high definition 1080p, 2K transfer from the original amera negative with the title holding partner, Troma, releasing their own Blu-ray upon after the agreed term and the VS edition now out of print circulation.  The identical AVC encoded onto a BD50 “Frightmare” is presented on a Tromatic Special Edition set that retains the same quality as the Vinegar Syndrome 2021 release even, carrying over some Vinegar Syndrome special features.  Graded toward a dark tone, Joel King’s diffused backlighting and primary color tint elevates “Frightmare’s” kitschy, campy posture toward saturated spooky atmospherics.  Details are more than generally reproduced with deep absorbing in the smaller aspects of eliciting skin surfaces and object textures, such as the mansion wood-grain aesthetic and cobweb strung attic.  There are darker scenes that have unavoidable crush outside the colorful haze key lighting, but most retain pitchy space in the 1.78:1 aspect ratioed framing.  The English audio mix is a DTS-HD Master Audio Mono mix that also the same as Vinegar Syndrome’s release that has adequate audio propagation and diffusion without the lift of distinct layer and multi-channeling.  All through single channel can collide at times, especially between Jerry Mosely’s (“Bloodtide”) inclusively gothic score and the dialogue, but despite the rough audio patches, the single-conduit tracks are constructively discernible for a better part of the runtime.  English subtitles are available.  Special features are blend between Vinegar Syndrome produced historical commentary with David Del Valle and David DeCoteau, a now historical commentary by The Hysteria Continues podcast hosts, an archived interview with director Normal Thaddeus Vane, and a video interview featurette with director of photography Joel King and Troma exclusive supplementaries that are not entirely related to the feature, those include an old Debbie Rechon and Lloyd Kaufman generic intro from the original DVD version (Rechon and Kaufman a years younger), Lloyd Kaufman gives his personal lesson opinion to aspire indie filmmakers from the set of “Meat for Satan’s Ice Box,” the music video for “INNARDS!,” an artwork gallery, the original theatrical trailer, and the ever included Troma Radiation March.  “Frightmare” receives new Troma sleeve art that covers the macabre more than the usual campy slapstick with a horror flair, slipped inside a Blu-ray Amaray with no extra accoutrements inside or on the reverse side the sleeve.  The 86-minute Troma release is region free and is like the R-rated version, much like the Vinegar Syndrome was, but is unlisted on the backside or on the disc.

Last Rites: A supernatural slasher gothic in tone and crude around the edges, “Frightmare” is one of Troma’s more earnest acquirements into the horror genre that looks now leagues better in high-definition with Joel King’s hazy effervescent lighting, Norman Thaddeous Vane’s looping self-referential narrative, and reliable physical gore.

It’s not a Nightmare. It’s a “Frightmare” on Blu-ray!

EVIL Just Wants Their Heads Back! “The House of Lost Souls” reviewed! (Cauldron Films / Standard Edition Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Don’t Lose Your Head in “The House of Lost Souls” on Blu-ray!

A group of geological fossil hunters spend their time researching in what is supposed to be the ideal climate of the Italian mountains but inclement, rainy weather has produced all kinds of inconvenient havoc and challenges that have slowed down their darting research.  Mudslides caused by the constant rain makes mountain roads impassable.  They encounter such a mudslide impasse on the way to their next research grounds and do an emergency detour to a remote, vacant hotel to spend the night out of the cold damp night.  Greeted without a single word from their unusual host, they’re given room keys get some rest before the next day’s hike up the cleared mountain road, resuming course toward the fossil hunt, but the geologists quickly discover something isn’t right with the hotel that has a dark history.  Trapped inside the abandoned hotel, murderous spirits appear and aggressively seek more souls to fill the hotel’s vacancy.

The fourth and final entry in The Houses of Doom series produced from Italian television in 1989, “The House of Lost Souls” is the second Umberto Lenzi (“Nightmare City,” “Ghosthouse”) film of the Lucio Fucli and Lenzi stint from the coproduction of Dania Film and Reteitalia with producers Massimo Manasee and Marco Grillo Spina, behind Lenzi’s “The House of Witchcraft” and Fucli’s “The House of Clocks” and “The Sweet House of Horrors.”  Lenzi also created the story concept and wrote the script that feels like a blend of the American-produced, supernatural thrillers “House on Haunted Hill” and “13 Ghosts” but with more bloodshed, color encoded and has that Italian violence flair too graphic for public television.  Italian-titled “La casa delle anime errant,” the film is also a production of the National Cinematografica that produced other Italian Umberto Lenzi cult classics “Seven Bloodstained Orchids,” “Eaten Alive,” and “Cannibal Ferox.” 

Trapped inside the gruesome lore of the hotel’s deadly history and as the focus of the overall dilemma is the group of geology students and friends, plus one adolescent boy tagging along with his older brother.  Further more concentrated on inside the group is Carla who’s been diagnosed, yes – medically identified, as having clairvoyancy with her psychic nightmare visions, sporadic and jumbled frightening images that yet don’t make sense, but guess what?  To no surprise, they will soon! Stefania Orsola Garello, who went on to have a role in the Antoine Fuqua’s period epic “King Arthur,” played the third eye sensorial Carla investigating the hotel’s sordid past along with quasi-boyfriend Kevin, donned by “The Slumber Party Massacre” American actor Joseph Alan Johnson.  Johnson is the extent of international casting, unless you count the hotel host, or rather head ghost who we’ll touch upon later, and the distinct facial features and the significant height of Japan-born Hal Yamanouchi (“2019:  After the Fall of New York,” “The Wolverine”) as a zombified Hare Krishna ghost, one of his many Italian roles while residing within the country since mid-1970s.  The remaining fill out with Garello countrymen counterparts with Matteo Gazzolo (“Specters”) as the group leader, Constantino Melon (“Who Killed Pasolin?”i as the leader’s little brother Giancarlo, and young lovers Guido and Mary, played by Gianluigi Fogacci and Laurentina Guidotti (“Dark Glasses”), as the victimized geologists being hunted down and tricked into slaughter by, too, victims of a hotel proprietor madman, the key perpetrator to all this madness but reduced to only a reflected role through Carla’s flashbacks.  Aside from Yamanochi, there are a handful of former guests and voiceless ghosts, some stuck in a bloodied stasis at the time of their death, some pristine as if nothing happened at all, haunting and hunting down the warm bodies, including Scottish actor Charles Borromel (“Absurd”), Marina Reiner, Dino Jaksic (“Little Flames”), and Beni Cardoso (“Barbed Wire Dolls”).

A different ghost house picture than Lucio Fulci’s “The Sweet House of Horrors’ but still contributes the same inhuman intensity of one person (or one ghost person) can against another person.  Yet, for Umberto Lenzi, his story thrives through the house’s, or rather hotel’s, ability to dispatch the innocent with household items.  Decapitating dumbbell waiters, a cabinet with a ripping chainsaw blade, a head-eating washing machine, and almost even a walk-in freezer become the tools of fatal terror.  Lenzi depicts little in the way of person-on-person violence with only implied deaths at the hands of another person; instead, the personification of ghost house miscellany is definitely more exciting, very unexpected, and a lot of fun to watch the hapless have their heads fall prey to household items that are supposed to be helpful, not hurtful.  Perhaps, Lenzi’s intentions were to explore the negative dependency of gadgets or appliances and how easily we’re allured by their safe nature marketing and profound assistance to our daily lives that it makes us easy targets with our guard down.  Lenzi also doesn’t believe in nepotism when casting young actors as the two child characters become fair game for the house’s thirst for slaughtered souls, dooming them with an equal risk to a brutal death.  The storied hotel’s notoriety serves as the vessel that drives ghosts to go berserk but the story’s miss is bringing back to the killer hotel owner who chopped the heads off of his guests to rob them, stowing them away to hide his transgressions, only for them to be the root of the ghosts’ reason for revenge against any and all who trespass through the lobby.  As the origin of the ordeal, the omitted owner serves as just flashback fodder that fuels the floor-by-floor fiends. 

Spiders, skeletons, and severed heads make up, but are not limited to, Umbero Lenzi’s “The House of Lost Souls” now on Blu-ray as the last The Houses of Doom release from Cauldron Films.  Presented in the European widescreen aspect ratio 1.66:1, the new 2K scan was restored and released uncut from the original film negative, inviting a clean and beautifully vibrant pictures for a dark, haunted hotel feature.  However, like with many Lenzi pictures of the time, the final product has softer image detail that’s brilliant for producing color but relaxes the stringent textures to a still better than mild palpability that’s more than enough beyond the bar of image quality.  There are no compression anomalies to speak of as Cauldron Films, again, produces an excellent high-definition encoding, much like with the other three Houses of Doom installments.  Audio setup includes an encoded English and Italian 2.0 mono with optional English subtitles for the English track and forced English subtitles on the Italian.  The ADR hits and misses the mark with vocal ranges seemingly too mismatch with the actors, such as with Massimo who looks like a tenor but has a bass voice, or the boy Giancarlo with an unsettling falsetto and you can lipread those who are actually speaking English compared to those who are not native English speakers.  The overall track has no compression issues with a powerful dialogue projection and an adequate ambience that hits every keynote to bring the composition together.  “Demons” and “Tenebrae” composer Claudio Simonetti produces a charming little synch rock trap-threat and of a score that becomes essential to “The House of Lost Souls” snare and stalk of the geologists caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Special features include Cauldron Films’ exclusive interviews with FX artist Elio Terribili Working with Umberto and composer Claudio Simonetti The House of Rock along with two audio commentaries, one with Samm Deighan and the second with Rod Barnett and Adrian Smith, and bringing up the rear is a 2001 interview with Lenzi going through points in his lustrous independent career of exploitation, poliziotteschi, and giallo contributions to Italian cinema in The Criminal Cinema of Umberto Lenzi.  The not rated, region free Cauldron Films standard Blu-ray release, encased in a clear Scanova Blu-ray case with original Matthew Therrien and Eric Lee illustration cover art and logo design, has a runtime of 87 minutes.

Last Rites: That’s a wrap on the fourth and last film on The Houses of Doom collection from Cauldron Films and it’s a beauty scanned onto a new high-definition transfer that brings doomed television features back to life, to live again, to breathe its hot breath of death all over a new generation of viewer unfamiliar to Lucio Fulci, Umberto Lenzi, and even Italian horror!

Don’t Lose Your Head in “The House of Lost Souls” on Blu-ray!

Digging Up the EVIL Disentombs the Past! “Exhuma” reviewed! (Well Go USA Entertainment / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Open the Blu-ray Coffin on “Exhuma” Today!

A shaman and her assistant recruit a geomancer and a mortician to investigate the case of an American newborn boy’s distressing grave calling that has also haunted every patriarch member of the family for generations.  The large paying job sends them to remote forest where the unmarked grave of the boy’s great, great grandfather lies beneath the dirt.  For the geomancer, all signs point to not disturbing the grave but the father’s eagerness to cure his son’s troubles and the shaman’s persistence for a big payday goes against the wise geomancer’s better judgement.  All is seemingly well after exhuming and transferring the ancestral coffin to be cremated at a nearby hospital the next day until a greedy, hospital official pries open the sealed casket, releasing a long-awaited evil, and digging up out of the same burial ground another malevolent and mysterious ancient force that reaches far beyond the borders of Korea. 

Here as of late, ItsBlogginEvil.com’s last three reviews have taken readers on a genre-diverse tour of Asia, from Japan with Yu Nakamoto’s meta-slashers in “Ikenie Man” and “Harawata Man,” to Hong Kong with David Chung’s affrayed police actioner “Royal Warriors,” to conclude in South Korea with the supernatural horror in the realm of cultural superstitions of P’ungsu, or geomancy, in Jang Jae-hyun’s latest written-and-directed thriller “Exhuma.”  The 2024 film follows a string of religious related, supernatural themes Jae-hyun has put out in his prior two directed projects with “The Priests” and “Svaha:  The Sixth Finger,” and like “Ikenie Man,” “Harawata Man,” and “Royal Warriors,” a portion of Jae-hyun’s films are touched by Japanese culture.  “Exhuma” amounts to the same standard of crisscrossing the two cultures with dangerous results with “Exhuma” digging up a past better left alone.  Park Hyeong Jin and Kwon Ji Yong (“Ghost Mansion”) produce the spiritually turbulent story under Showbox Entertaiment and Pinetown Productions. 

“Exhuma” encircles four culturally inclined characters that entrench themselves into an unorthodox means of exhuming a disturbed essence for what is essentially an exorcism variant to alleviate living perturbation beyond the grave.  The superstition here revolves around the land temperament.  Geomancers find good sites to lay people to rest, ones that exert extrasensory, or grave call, troubles onto family members that place upon them a grief, anxious, and other mentally uneasy state, and it’s the “Exhuma’s” Geomancer who has story predominance, shared only with the young and beautiful shaman woman with tagalongs who resemble more of assistants than coequals.  In an age-old and cautionary tale of wisdom and inexperience, Choi Min-sik (“Oldboy”) and Kim Go-eun (“Monster”) play the respective roles of the reluctant and experienced Geomancer Kim Sang-deok and the naïve eager yet gifted shaman Lee Hwa-rim.  Receiving character voice over monologue introductions and becoming the ultimate deciding factors of this new job is worth the pay, they completely overshadow the Shaman apprentice (Lee Do-hyun,) and the mortician (Yoo Hae-jin) who works with the Geomancer.  Pivotal as these support characters are to the story, not only buffers for the evil that beleaguers them but also as latched on friends and family of the isolating weird and strange subculture to most but normalized in Korea, the shaman apprentice and mortician definitely take a back seat to the more prominent players to the point where they almost seem contributorily worthless to the task.  As a whole, the dynamic works because the shaman and geomancer alone would not be sufficient for diabolical misadventures of an exhumation gone wrong and supplement only when necessary to aid the fight against an ancient evil twice over.  The cast fills out with Hong Seo-jun, Jeon Jin-ki, Kim Jae-Cheol, and Lee Jong-goo.

The wafting back and forth between Korean and Japanese culture, the fraternization of beliefs and superstitions, tells “Exhuma” differently than most hilltop haunts and horrors.  Themes of a haunted past and inexplicable guilt riddle holes through family lineage, resulting rancorous ripples in the form of mental illness, and devised as a story vehicle device of supernatural subverting trauma from the sins of the father.  In America, Shamanism and Geomancy don’t exist, especially in the history, but for Korea and its people, the country is rich in transcendent ritual and mythology that shapes society, even in their cinematic culture as regularly do we see period films of feudal Korea.  History also dictates “Exhuma’s” need to be a representation of purging the long Japanese occupation of Korea for nearly three and half decades from 1910 to 1945.  The occupation was a disruption in Korean way of life with oppression and war machinations stitched into Korean’s fabric, hence the Korean plot of land being very spoiled with vileness in “Exhuma’s” tale of one historically troubled family’s course to remove that uneasiness that has plagued and followed them to America.  Yet, the past is rooted deep and Jang Jae-hyun’s understands the difficulty of eradicating a sullied ancestry by dichotomizing his darkly toned, folklore valued, and occult twisted story into two parts with sublayers as deep as the dirt surrounding the coffin, or rather, coffins with a formidable presence created and conjured by malicious Japanese Yōkai and represented in one of the most iconic Japanese figures as remnants of an Imperial Japan occupation.

Lying in wait underneath the high-definition terra firma is Well Go USA Entertainment’s “Exhuma” on an AVC encoded, 1080p resolution, BD25, presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio. Accompanied by no information on the video vehicle, IMDB.com lists Jang Jae-hyun and cinematographer Lee Mo-gae shoot with an Arri Alexa Mini which offers the ease of use of multiple lenses, and that shows here with a vast stretch to encompass the Korean mountains into the frame as well as keeping tight on characters while keeping in focus the immediate surroundings. Details are sharp under a flinty tone of saturated grays and blacks with spot pops and glows of in-scene lighting and under the capacity’s umbrella, finer textural elements suffuse through the darkness and into the fold. Audio options include the original Korean language DTS-HD 5.1 and an English dub DTS-HD 5.1. Crystal clear dialogue runs through parallel with the visual counterpart and is well timed and potent, touching the side and back channels with the eerie callings of the grave and its inhabited spirits running rampant free while harnessing focus on the character on scene to create a ranging discarnate of deep, ominous sounds that stalk and haunt the principals. English translation paces well and appears to be translated grammatically and is error free. Well Go USA Entertainment releases are feature focused and this one too containing only a making of featurette in the bonus content along with the trailer. The interior of the traditional Blu-ray Amaray comes with a disc pressing of the four principal characters peering into a dug grave. The exterior has a two-tone, subsoil profile forming a face out of a grave with the four principals on the topsoil and the same image also graces the cardboard O-slip that has a pseudo-lenticular sheen. Authored to have a region A playback, “Exhuma” runs just over two hours long at 135 minutes and is not rated.

Last Rites: The addition of learning authentic, practiced rituals benefits “Exhuma’s” folklore frights tenfold and with neat, grounded performances and a superb blend of visual and practical effects, this original, supernatural thriller raises the Korean movie industry up a notch on the global scale.

Open the Blu-ray Coffin on “Exhuma” Today!

Gaudy, Superfluous EVIL Sits in Your Living Room and Destroys Your Family. “The Coffee Table” reviewed! (Cinephobia Releasing / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“The Coffee Table” Would Look Good in Your Living Room! Purchase It Here Today!

Jesús and Maria are new parents with a beautiful baby boy.  Maria has been eager for a baby and sent through several medical treatment for the bundle of joy while Jesús continuous rides the fence about being a father.  When the baby arrives, the boy becomes a source of usually one-sided bickering and jabbing contention as Maria feels Jesús could be a better father to their newborn son.  When they move into a new apartment, they find themselves in a furniture store looking at a gaudy glass coffee table Maria can’t stand the sight of, but Jesús very much can’t live without.  While Maria steps out to shop for an upcoming luncheon with Jesús’s brother and young girlfriend, Jesús briefly stops assembling the table to take care of the baby until a tragic accident happens that reshapes everything and everyone Jesús cares about, and impels him to bottle in the tragedy, hiding it in extreme guilt from his wife and guests, as he struggles to find the right moment to relieve his soul. 

Marriage is hard.  Parenting is even harder.  Choosing a coffee table should be a delicious piece of decision-making cake but for director Caye Casas choosing living room décor can be deadly.  The “Killing God” director follow up his debut feature with the 2022 released domestic disturbing comedy-horror “La Mesita Del Comedor,” aka “The Coffee Table.”   Casas cowrites the film with Cristina Borobla, her first screenwriting credit but not her first collaborative effort working with the director as the vocational Art Director has been involved in Cases’s other works, such as “Killing God,” his 2017 short “RIP,” and amongst others.  Maria José Serra (“Amigo Invisible”) and Norbert Llaràs (“Killing God,” “The Perfect Witness”) put their producer café mugs onto “The Coffee Table” with the hailing from Spain production companies La Charito Films, Alhena Production, and Apocalipsis Producciones. 

Much of “The Coffee Table” is set inside the tiny, newly moved into apartment of Jesús and Maria who even though rag on each other’s opinions and one of them don’t necessarily favor being a parent, deep down the unlikely pair do have a strong love attraction that swims upstream against the repelling.  In the roles of Jesús and Maria are David Pareja, whose worked with Casas inner circle before with “Killing God,” and Estefanía de los Santos with an unforgettable, characteristic raspy voice that magnifies the role tenfold.  Both Pareja and de los Santos are comedically bred with a long list of hilarious Spanish features to prep them to see the gut-punching, black humor of what’s to come in “The Coffee Table.”  Frankly, there’s nothing negatively to report in Pareja and de los Santo’s flawless, funny, and unfortunate family dysfunctional performances surrounding their love-hate relationship and the knot of culpability and the bliss ignorance contrast that’s delineated between them.  Floating into the mix of repressiveness are side stories that become assimilated by the untold tragedy, such as the neighbor’s daughter (Gala Flores) with an intense belief Jesús loves her, the smarmy coffee table salesman (Eduardo Antuña, “Killing God”) who also have an interest in Jesús, and Jesús’s brother Carlos (Josep Maria Riera, “RIP”) and his barely 18-year-old girlfriend (Claudia Riera, “The Communion Girl”) being ribbed for their own odd couple relationship and giving a surprise announcement of their own. 

Though a comedy and a horror, I didn’t find “The Coffee Table” all that funny but more so quirky, outrageously bold, and shockingly hard-hitting instead.  Horror, definitely without a doubt, comes through but not in a typical to be scared or to exact fear way with any of the conventional themes to support its harrowing weight.  The horror that uncoils is every parent’s worst scenario, the underlying nightmare that grabs the soul and squeezes until every drop of anxiety is wrung out of our wet bag of bones and meat.  The incident itself is gnarly and unspeakable but the post-trauma slithers in a nasty case of guilty conscious, shame, and fear that can freeze someone to the spot to where they clam up, sweat profusely, stomach twisted, and have self-harming thoughts from the conjoined cause and effect of having to tell your partner the most terrible of news and see their composure, their affection flush away in a blink of an eye.  Casas able to string along the aftermath to extract a feature length film without it ever approaching critically forced or farfetched, adding on and expanding upon the luncheon or Jesús’s wiggling through painfully with excuses on why Maria should leave the baby sleeping peacefully in their room.  The passively aggressive sparring atmosphere quickly turns into colossal tension and hopelessness through the mechanism of dark black comedy.  As a parent myself, “The Coffee Table” evokes great sadness and mental strife of the situational possibility, the greatest horror of all time.    

The cruel film by Caye Casas arrives onto a Cinephobia Releasing DVD. The MPEG2 encoded, upscaled 720p, DVD5 comes in at being the eleventh release for the Philadelphia based, eclectic independent film distributor. And, boy, is it a doozy. For “The Coffee Table’s” image, not the two, artificially gilded naked women holding an oval shape, unbreakable pane of glass, the feature’s picture quality renders about as good as any single layer capacity unit can decode in a digital age with modest details, muted hues, hard lit, and a good amount of spectrum banding in the darker areas. Not to fret, however, as there’s plenty to discern with a film that isn’t reliant on details but more reliant on hitting you wear it hurts, heavyheartedly. The Spanish language Dolby Digital 5.1 uses a lossy compression that, again, suitable to the movie’s means of conveying a contortioned, ruthless story defining the very meaning of a no way-out, no-win situation. Dialogue really is key for this type of narrative to work and progress and does come through fine without an ounce of earshot hinderance. Also, not that type of film that provides a breadth of range or depth as much of the layers express in a very near arrangement, as expected in a concentrated setting of Jesús and Maria’s apartment home. English subtitles are optionally available, and they synch up and pace well with only one noticeable grammatical error. Not much in the way of special features as only Cinephobia Releasing trailers fill that spot and there is not mid or end credits scene. The 90-minute film’s DVD release comes not rated and has region 1 playback. Other regions are untested, and the back cover does not state the official region playback capacity.

Last Rites: Caye Casas and Cinephobia Releasing has the cajónes to not table this wonderfully bleak black comedy-horror from reaching audiences far and wide. “The Coffee Table” is a painful reminder of just how fragile life can be, much like a cheapy made piece of tawdry decor from China.

“The Coffee Table” Would Look Good in Your Living Room! Purchase It Here Today!

Sadomasochism and Decapitation Seen by a Child Turns Him into An EVIL Adult! “Nightmare” reviewed! (Severin / 4K UHD – Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Your “Nightmare” Should Be in 4K! Own it Here!

A schizophrenic patient continues to have reoccurring dreams of a young boy chopping the head of a woman in the midst of rough sexual fetishism.  The intense nightmares send him into violent stints, delusional states, and severe seizures.  As a test subject for an experimental behavior drug, the troubled man shows promise of recovery and enough so that he’s released from the mental hospital with continued outpatient therapy sessions.  Not long after his release does he skip his sessions to hightail it from New York City to Daytona Beach, Florida, killing people along the way after decapitating nightmare continues to plague and force him to murder.  In Daytona Beach, single mother of three becomes his obsession as he stalks the youngest boy, a mischievous troublemaker, and even breaks into their house when it’s not occupied , but as the bodies begin to pile up on the hands of his need to kill, the more brazen he becomes to entering while they’re home alone. 

Based loosely on the improprieties of government spy agencies using drugs to bend the minds of home and oversee terrorism to their wills, “Nightmare” sensationalizes the concept for the public sector involving a mental patient, experimental drugs, and exasperating an already instable person’s constitution into a hyperdrive of bloodletting carnage.  The U.S. production is written-and-directed by Italian filmmaker Romano Scavolini who came to America to shop around his scripts having failed to secure financial support in Europe, including, you guessed it, “Nightmare.”  Shot in New York and mostly around the Cocoa Beach Florida, the crime thriller filmmaker flexes his muscle with his first attempt at horror and the outcome is nothing short of unadulterated madness.  Once considered to be titled “Dark Games,” and goes loosely by “Blood Splash” and “Nightmare in the Damaged Brain,” the 1981 film is a feature of Goldmine Productions with John Watkins and Bill Milling (“Silent Madness”) producing.

The man behind the nightmare is George Tatum and the man behind George Tatum is Baird Stafford in one of his only two roles as an actor.  “Nightmare” wouldn’t be as skin-crawlingly shocking if it wasn’t for Stafford’s distressing performance of a man whose psychology is being peeled away and you can see Tatum physically fighting the urge, fighting to stay sane, but losing the battle as the grisly terror replays over and over inside his mind.  Stafford’s asunder of Tatum’s equilibrium has unequivocal transference to the audience.  Parallel Stafford is a child, a young child by the name of C.J. Cooke who essentially played his own version of himself in C.J. Temper, a mischievous prankster that ran babysitters up a wall mad and frightened and frustrated the living daylights out of his mother.  C.J. is part of the family Tatum is hellbent on driving down from New York to Florida to see for a reason that isn’t made clear yet until the shocking reveal.  C.J.’s single parent, a mother desperate for love and affection, is played by Sharon Smith who has become romantically involved with nice guy, and yacht owner, Bob Rosen, with Mik Cribben in the role.  Cribben was actually part of the cast but the original actor for Bob Rosen dropped out and Cribben quickly filled into the role that suited him well enough as a suitable suitor for C.J.’s mother.  “Nightmare” rounds out the cast with Danny Ronan, Scott Praetorius, Christina Keefe, William Kirksey, Tammy Patterson, Kim Patterson, Kathleen Ferguson, Candese Marchese, Tommy Bouvier, and producers John L. Watkins and Bill Milling as drug trial executive and psychologist tracking down Tatum to clean up their mistake. 

“Nightmare” combines excellent U.S. thespianism with an Italian way of suspense and violence glued together by the success of the late Leslie Larraine and team’s special effects albeit the controversial assertion on the film’s posters that Tom Savini (“Dawn of the Dead” ’78, “Friday the 13th, ’80) had been the effects supervisor on the film albeit Savini’s adamant claims of the opposite and denying the credit being false and liable for using his name to draw in audiences.  Savini continues to state his contribution “Nightmare” was limited to best to the action of a decapitating swing of the axe.  Ultimately, the whole ordeal mars Larraine’s due recognition for some of the more up-close and personal gory effects this side of the early 80s.  Scavolini also deserves well-received credit for his narrative vision of Tatum’s psychosexual struggles that drive him to kill.  Robert Megginson’s editing and the re-recording mixing team tackle a form of character plummeting that’s unlike any other from the intercut concatenation of events between Tatum’s horrific, blood-soaked nightmares and his antagonizing, sweat-inducing impulses that propel him without a choice.  The simultaneous parallels between Tatum and young C.J., as Scavolini aims to connect the two against-the-grain personalities as a singular link with back-and-forth subplots, leach the shock out of Sharon Smith’s acme line as mother Susan Temper that uncovers the truth when the chaotic smoke clears.  Why Tatum would drive so far from New York City to Daytona Beach, Florida with reason to stop and make roost on this one particular family fails to form mystery around what’s often crafted to be an arbitrary target with some minute hints that may provide clues to the audience is because even without those inklings, the shooting script defines the rationale right from the beginning thus bringing the viewers out from a shrouded suspenser and into being buckled in just along for the ride. 

Severin Films’ 4K scan of the 35mm internegative compositions the print with various foreign element sources for a comprehensive version of Romano Scavolini’s “Nightmare” on a 4K UHD and Blu-ray 2-dsic set.  The UHD is on a HEVC encoded, ultra high-definition 2160p with a 4K resolution, BD66 and the Blu-ray is housed on an AVC encoded, high-definition 1080p, BD50.  What’s released is a very enriched saturation of the technicolor process that defines and differentiates the innate hues.   Details are more than consistent throughout as we’re able to pinpoint the beads of sweat down Tatum’s face or feel the palpable slick sinew of a decapitated head amongst the examples.  Blood is a deep, glossy red and contrasts strikingly in the more sopping moments despite Savini’s claim that it needed more green dye to better pop for the camera.  A consistent layer of agreeable grain runs throughout from the 35mm film stock, as it should, without any inimical dust, dirt, scratches, flares, or of the like to obstruct viewing or cause lapse in the narrative, as it shouldn’t.  Between the resolution diverse formats, there’s a slightly more grindhouse look to the Blu-ray whereas the HDR10 crisps the image for better vibrancy.  Both formats retain inky blacks without shimmering or banding.  The English language audio tracks are available in two lossless options:  DTS-HD 5.1 and a DTS-HD Stereo 2.0.  The surround mix’s dialogue has resounding infusion, spread through the multi-channels to encompass a multi-directional approach to centralize.  The design is effective as it’s prominent to not understate the vocals but leaves little room for spatial distant to which no matter where characters stand, they are almost audible on the same audio plane.  Jack Eric Williams warping harmonica and twangy guitar, intrinsically integrated with piano notes, a variety of percussion, interjecting funk bass chords, and hints of string instruments, that ebb and swell with great intensity and favorable discordance is a real celebration of Williams’ score on Severin’s latest restorative edition of “Nightmare.”  English subtitles are optionally available.  The Ultra HD release comes the film’s trailers and a pair of audio commentaries as the only accompanying special features; commentary one has features star Baird Stafford and special effects assistant Cleve Hall with Lee Christian and David Decoteau and commentary two features producer William Paul.  The Blu-ray also has the commentaries and trailers plus an extended lot of interviews, such as a feature length (71-minute) Kill Thy Father and Thy Mother interview with director Romano Scavolini (Italian with English subtitles), Dreaming Up A Nightmare interview with cast and crew, a brief interview with Tom Savini discussing his role, or rather his not role, in The Nightmare of Nightmare to which Savini looks a little tired of answer the same question about his inaccurate involvement, an interview with makeup artist Robin Stevens The Stuff that Nightmares Are Made of.  Also included is an open matte peepshow as well as untouched deleted scenes, extending beyond the already newly achieved 99-minute runtime for the film.  “Nightmare” from Severin comes in a standard 4K Amaray case with original poster art used for the front cover.  The discs are separated and tab locked on either side of inner casing and this particular release, the 2-disc set, does not come with any insert or content.  The front cover is reversible with the European title “Nightmares in a Damaged Brain” and a different image composition of the European poster art. The disc has region free playback and is not rated.

Last Rites: “Nightmare” on a new, extended restoration in 4K and Blu-ray is a dream of a release. A nerve-wracking performance in Baird Stafford’s schizo vilifies the very classification of the mentally ill in what is sure to go down in history as one of the most disturbing, and disturbed, characters of the video nasty era.

Your “Nightmare” Should Be in 4K! Own it Here!