Tag Archives: dvd

Vampires Can Be Your Evil Saviors! The Caretaker Review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on

The-CaretakerDon’t quite count out the vampire genre just yet.  Like the blood thirsty undead, the vampire genre just keeps resurrecting.  Vampire films might be critically castrated for the majority of the time, but there are times when a vampire film just had a lot of heart, especially in a no to low-budget project like the film I’m reviewing in this article – The Caretaker.  Directory Tom Conyers has no feature film directing experience.  Actor Mark White has no feature film acting experience.  Must can be said about the rest of the cast while a couple of them also worked in shorts and television series, but The Caretaker is a real test for the cast on such a venturous storyline.

Mosquito bites cause what many believe to be an epidemic of the flu in the area of Melbourne, Australia.  What the residents of Melbourne believed were wrong…dead wrong.  The bites cause the victims to turn into vampires that reaches out beyond the lines of Melbourne and spread across the world.  A small, on-edge group of four humans hold up on a small vineyard plantation where a vampire has claimed his nest.  In exchange for their protection during the day, the vampire offers his protection against his own kind at night.  The tension is thick not only between human and vampire, but also between human and human.

Now not to rain down on The Caretaker’s parade even though I do like the movie, but I feel there is always too much melodrama.  Melodrama seems to be a plague for many low-budget horror films just because the crew can’t add in top dollar special effects to entertain leaving a “talking head” movie syndrome inevitable.  But I can divulge that the fact that in spite there being melodrama spewing from every orifice, this doesn’t make The Caretaker a bad movie.  The characters are complex enough to welcome some of the “talking head” script.  There are internal conflicts in the characters themselves and they are also projected upon the other survivors causing turmoil in the house or “nest.”

When I said that many low-budget horror films just don’t have the dough to afford high-tech special effects, I didn’t intend on that to mean that The Caretaker’s effects were awful.  I rather enjoyed the effects as they were minimal and believable.  Some effects make a movie campy, but The Caretaker was all serious business and took the vampire story on a different level with an earnest commitment.  Mark White’s as the protective vampire Dr. Ford Grainger who never reveals a good side or an evil side.  We just know he is a bad ass vampire vampire slayer.  The human characters give off the same complexities with only Colin McPherson’s character Lester portraying anything that resembles a villain as the 50-year-old creepy vineyard owner who loves to chase after young women and that young woman happens to be the manic depressed Annie played by Anna Burgess.  Guy and Ron round out the last of the characters played by Clint Dowdell and Lee Mason and these two are buddy buddy at first until Annie’s secret comes to the forefront and then it is game on between the four humans and the lone vampire.

The Caretaker won’t knock your socks off, but comes off as a decent vampire genre flick.  Don’t expect flying body parts or gruesome scenes of vampire attacks with blood squirting in every direction.  Take it in like a worth seeing television soap drama and try to see the heart in the center like I did.  Then, after it is all over and you still didn’t care for The Caretaker, you can rip out that heart and eat with a side of lima beans and wash it down with a nice cold beer, but hey, at least you gave it a try, right?

Trailer for The Caretaker

Wild Child of Evil! Shiver review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on

When a story becomes too fantastic and passing the point of belief when it’s suppose to feel true, doesn’t speak very highly of the story’s quality.  The draining feeling of being sucked into such can only leave a bad taste in a viewer’s mouth.  Why does this happen, you ask?  The story starts to stretch, reaching a highly unobtainable goal to which we’re suppose to believe that can happen when we know for a fact that there is about a zero to null chance of that event from ever occurring in real time.  If a fantastic story done correctly, your brain doesn’t have to stretch beyond it’s belief and accept the novel nature of the story’s reason or direction.  Isidro Ortiz’s Shiver, not to be confused with David Cronenberg’s Shivers, is exactly the correct method in suspending our disbelief below our threshold of reason.

Santi is a tormented high school kid with an over protective mother.  His severe physical allergic reaction to sunlight and his teeth deformity has labeled him forever a vampire boy by the school bullies.  When the doctor suggests moving Santi to a dimmer part of the country, he and his mother waste no time settling into a small village nestled deep with in the crevice of mountains.  Peace and quiet is far from achieved as local murders have been pinned to Santi who quickly believes he is the next victim of a monstrous forest killer.

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Dig the Evil out of your Ears! Scream of the Banshee review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Lauren Holly.  Oh, sweet Lauren Holly.  My, my how have you tripped and stooped to such films that are way under your more gifted talents (or assets for that matter).  From your Turbulence flight of terror to your sweet, Angel Boris lookalike sweet piece of round booty in Dumb and Dumber to your short-lived stint of empowering women roles in NCIS and, now, you’ve dropped to so called “originals” presented by the After Dark collection.  Whats next, Lauren Holly?  Will we see you next on Soap Operas and Nickelodeon shows?  Scream of the Banshee, part of After Dark collection, should be considered as a Nickelodeon TV show!

A university professor and her understudies are sent a mysterious package with no return address.  The contents of the box are that of a gauntlet, a suited metal armor that covers the forearm and hand.  A note with the gauntlet directs them to Section 3 where a box has been hidden behind a deteriorating wall.  The professor uses the gauntlet to open the box releasing a ear-piercing, blood thirsty terror that will haunt them and kill them if they so much as scream!

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Darabont’s TV Evil! Buried Alive review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Being a nostalgia fiend has some advantages.  I’m not just rehashing old material you’ve probably seen or read a billion times before, spewing the muck and bile that’s been regurgitated and swallowed down again only to be regurgitated once more.  Hardly do you see another, run-of-the-mill review about Scream, Friday the 13 VIII: Jason Takes Manhatten or Bride of Chucky.  Most horror fans are familiar with the bodies of these works; my realm of interest scratches at the indie circuit and those lesser known films that, perhaps, folks are aware of but never seen, or have witnessed them in the past and their minds can’t piece together what that film was in the present.  The latter happened to me with an old Frank Darabont TV movie Buried Alive.  You know Darabont, right?  He only did some of the most prolific work of the last decade and half adapting works from Stephen King and kicking off the hit AMC TV show The Walking Dead!

Clint Goodman lives a humble town with his high maintenance wife Joanna.  Her love for Clint has been long gone ever since he constructed, what he thought, was their two story dream home in his home town.  Joanna strings along an affair with a city doctor; they plot to kill Clint with a fish secretion that causes a fatal heart attack.  When Joanna pulls off the caper, she collects what she thinks is her dues:  sells the house, sells the business and is ready to leave town to start her new life.  However, Clint awakens.  Trapped inside his own coffin, he manages dig himself out, discover Joanna’s dastardly doings and plans his own revenge against his wife and her lover.

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Werewolf evil? More like Puppy Love! Face of the Screaming Werewolf review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on

My mindset on vintage horror flicks goes a little something like this – they’re without a shadow of a doubt all classics.  There will be always be films that are more popular and stand out more than other black and white labeled pioneers of earlier film-hood, but the question begs, have you’ve ever seen a horrible horror movie from the Lon Chaney Jr. or Boris Karloff days?  Before tonight, I can honestly say no.  Then, I had to go and watch Cheezy Flicks version of Face of the Screaming Werewolf starring Lon Chaney Jr. and was directed by three directors.  Remember what I’ve always said about having multiple directors – the shit never works!

Dr. Redding and his team use hypnosis on a Cali girl named Ann Taylor in discovering ancient forms of life in the Yucatan pyramids.  When him and his team go exploring through the deep dark tunnels of the ruins, a living-ish breathing-ish mummy attacks them, but falls when the team fights back.  They also discover a more modern individual also mummified for unknown reasons.  Dr. Redding takes both mummified subjects back to America, but is soon killed and the modern mummy is stolen when Redding attempts to showcase his finds.  When the modern man is revived by a bolt of lightning (Frankenstein reference anyone?), his uncanny secret of being a werewolf is revealed when the full moon just happens to be out at the same time as his revival.  The werewolf and the mummy are both reanimated and walk the city, stalking and killing innocent folk.  Who will stop them?  Hell if I know.

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