EVIL Doesn’t Take Rejection Well. “Village of Doom” reviewed! (Unearthed Films / Collector’s Edition Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on November 22, 2024

“Village of Doom” now on Unearthed Film’s Collector’s Edition Blu-ray!

Tsugio Inumaru is considered the smartest young man in his village. Illness took the life of his parents, and he raised by his grandmother and lives off her land’s income, looking after him and dreading the day Tsugio becomes drafted as a soldier in war service, which bestows great honor from the villagers. While husbands are away serving their country, bored and lonely housewives and bachelorettes desire the carnal company of the men remaining and with Tsugio’s youth and his own sexual yearnings bubbling to the surface, he’s prime Kobe beef for the hungry village women. When Tsugio’s health examination reveals a tuberculosis diagnosis, he’s acutely shunned by the villagers, drying up his sexual escapades, as well as potential betrotheds. Rejection by his village, and even his country, sends the young man into plotting a massive killing spree, targeting all of those who’ve forsaken or scorned him to a life not worth living.

In the Tsuyama outskirt village of Kamo of 1938, 21-year-old Mutsuo Toi cut the village’s electricity, strapped flashlights to the side of his head, and took a mini arsenal that included a Browning shotgun, a katana, and an axe to 30 villagers, including his grandmother, in an act to revenge killing for being rejected socially and sexually because of his tuberculosis diagnosis. What is known as the Tsuyama Massacre, Mutsuo Toi’s cold and merciless act of carnage was the basis for Noboru Tanaka’s “Village of Doom.” The pinkupsloitation director of “Rape and Death of a Housewife” and “Angel Guts: Nami” helms the Japanese, semi-biographical tale, penned by Takuya Nishioka (“Tattoo,” “Female Teacher: Chain and Bondage”), that follows closely the bullet point events of Mustuo Toi but with different named characters and a strong pink eiga touch. “Village of Doom” is one of Kazuyoshi Okuyama’s (“R100,” “Self-Bondage: All Tied Up with My Own Rope”) first produced ventures and is a production of the Fuji Eiga and Shochiku Eizo Companies.

While Mutsuo Toi is not directly portrayed, his downward spiraling steps are indirectly followed by Tsugio Inumaru, played by the late Nikkatsu actor Masato Furuoya. Furuoya’s relationship with director Noboru Tanaka is well established within their director-actor collaborating context with Furuoya having roles in Tanaka’s previous credits of “Rape and Death of a Housewife” and “Angel Guts: Nami.” There’s a blanket of comfortability within Furuoya who must treat his character as one-part pink paramour and one-part biographical massacrer, seducing with a tantamount tease of fantasy and authenticity. Furuoya’s beleaguered performance is a jagged mountainous range of emotions from confidence and compassion to hormonal desires, to the stressed misgivings from cold shoulders and bad fortune mishandled by Tsugio’s own sense of worth to his himself and the village that has turned its back on him. In keeping with the simulated practice of Yobai, the night crawling sexual escapades amongst young men and women, typically unmarried men and women, Tanaka portions heavily toward Tsugio’s internal grievances with the suddenly thrusted into the primitive and stimulated needs of a young man’s novice sex drive awaken with a morsel nude photograph. Furuoya’s costars are the collective antagonist from the perspective of Tsugio with their geniality turned hostility of the TB diagnosis. Sexualized warmth and freedom run rampant, peppered in between with subdued duty to village and country, that cradles an shy Tsugio’s into his manhood but when his manhood is threatened and the village neglects and rejects his contributions, Tsugio’s acute ostracization from within the only community circle he’s ever known disfigures his rationality into revenge. The cast is surprisingly pink vet lite with the actors coming from other Japanese oriented popular subgenres like samurai films, erotic but tasteful comedies and romance, and horror with Misako Tanaka, Isao Natsuyagi (“Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion,” Kumiko Ôba (“Hausu”), Shino Ikenami (“Evil Dead Trap 2”), Midori Satsuki, Yashiro Arai, Renji Ishibashi, and Izumi Hara (“Island of the Evil Spirits”).

“Village of the Doom” is a two-toned down spiral to build up only to crash down the hopes of an impressionable young person. Similarly seen in later works like Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant” where the visually intense, raw, and viscerally slicing culmination of enough-is-enough points back to the series of occurrences that significantly mile mark every step lead to the slaughter. Set inside a valley surrounded by green mountains, the idyllic and rural riverside village impresses more backdrop tranquility than doom with slower pace and dutiful lifestyles but like most cutoff societies, the slow, insidious corruption of morality courses with infectious infidelity under the guise of Yobai, upends rightful justice and trades in for lynch mobs, and wanes promises for easy streets and exploitation run out dates that run its course for one but not the other. All these aspects have relevant translatability to today’s cliques and inner circles that oust the unusual to where a sense of belonging feels hopelessly frustrating. The isolation is so engrained that it highlights, in a very matter-of-fact way but does speak to it quite a bit, is the incestuous relationships between related villagers with the instances of Tsugio and cousin Kazuko’s flirtatious meetups and talk of marriage as well as Tsugio accidental arousal around his cousin’s aunt. This adds to the tension and the corruption of that old idiom of don’t shit where you eat and the evident sourness spoils relationship ties when family is important to lessen the blows of life’s subsidiary problems. For Tsugio, who is already dealt a bad hand with both parents deceased and his illness, the whole village rots what’s left of his innocence and ambitions and, in turn, aims to exterminate those who’ve foiled his purity.

A wicked, notorious true crime story now for the rest of the world to visual in “Village of Doom” on Blu-ray, courtesy of Unearthed Films on their Unearthed Classics sublabel. The new Collector’s Edition Blu-ray is format encoded onto an AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50. The picture is tempered with the muted colors, or rather the scaled grays, of an archaic Japanese village coupled by the browns and straw hued housing set amongst in and surrounded by a sea of green foliaged valley, and while objects are delineated nicely without any saturation bleeding or compression issues, the colors don’t necessary pop. What does pop are the textures of the same articles mentioned above. The groves of thatched wooden abodes are remarkable deep, the greens, though seamless, are nicely touched upon in the foreground, and skin consistencies vary person-be-person within idiosyncratic personal brackets with dynamic sweatiness and emotion-delivery contouring to accentuate. The Japanese LPCM 1.0 mono has no problem discerning elements. Though all funneling through a single channel, the dialogue and ambience works together thanks to the clean, more immersive ADR. Mashanori Sasaji’s tests the soundscapes of traditional Japanese drum rhythms of Oo-daiko with then modernized synthesized notes to create a forebodingly, entrancing composition. With any post-production voiceover work, dialogue is very robust, and the synchronized English subtitles offer an error-free and organic translation. The original audio file is compressed cleanly with no issues with crackling, hissing, or any other damage for noting. Unearthed Film’s 17th spined Classics title supplements with an audio commentary by Asian film experts Arne Venema and Mike Leeder, a look at the Tsuyama Massacre in Dark Asia with Megan: Case #57 Japan’s Darkest Night, a promotional gallery, and the theatrical trailer. The Amary Blu-ray case is housed in a cardboard O-slipcover featuring Mutsuo’s iconic night-crawlin’ getup on Masato Furuoya’s Tsugio in colorless black-and-white. The case has the same image used for the cover with no reversible sleeve and the inside does not contain any tangible inserts or materials. The disc is pressed with not the same image but the same head flashlight Tsugio, this time looking right at you in unison with his shotgun barrel. The not rated feature has a runtime of 106 minutes and is region A locked.

Last Rites: “Village of Doom” depicts the same sad story that strikes the hearts of today’s mass shootings, spurred by the dispel from those in proximity, intimate, and friendly. “Village of Doom” is a true classic of casted out carnage relit by Unearthed Films to retell the notorious narrative of Japan’s deadliest mass killing ever.

“Village of Doom” now on Unearthed Film’s Collector’s Edition Blu-ray!

Beer Can Stuff Boots Give EVIL a New Height! “The Lost” reviewed! (Ronin Flix / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on January 27, 2024

Click Here to Purchase “The Lost” on Blu-ray!

Sociopathic teen-adult Ray Pye guns down two young women he suspects are romantically involved with each other and wants to feel the thrill of the kill for the first time with his two friends, Jennifer and Tim, as frightened, reluctant witnesses and abettors to his heinous crime. Four years later, police investigation can’t pinpoint Pye as the culprit when the only surviving victim succumbs to her wounds after being in a coma all this time. Pye, the slicked haired, pathological liar and assistant manager of his mother’s motel, continues his nice boy act as he peddles drugs and tries to woo any girl into bed while having a firm, feared grip on best friend Tim and girlfriend Jennifer to keep them in line. As Pye chases after new women that enter in his world, the police continue their unofficial investigation, waiting for Pye to slip up and make a mistake but as his manipulation backfires and things don’t go his way, Pye’s already unstable nature morphs into an all-in, serial killer rampage and kidnapping of the three prominent women that have recently challenged his masculinity.

A real down spiral of machoism and growing up out of the adolescent fantasy world, “The Lost” is the 2006, loosely based biopic thriller inspired by real-life serial killer, the Pied Piper of Tucson, Charles Schmid interpreted from the book of the same title by late horror novelist Jack Ketchum. This part II of our serial killer film review coverage, following the Robert “Willy” Pickton Canadian murders inspiring “Pig Killer,” “The Lost” bring us back to American murderers and is the first solo feature run for writer-and-director Chris Sivertson. The father-son duo Mike and Lucky McKee, the filmmakers behind “May” and “Roman” co-produce “The Lost” alongside Sivertson and Shelli Merrill under the production company banners of Silver Web Productions.

To play Ray Pye, the actor must incarnate being on the edge of principles and be crazed to the point of no return. For Marc Senter, Ray Pye was a means to break from minor television roles and star as a leading man defying principal conventions in being the best bad guy he could cook up. Senter, who went on to be in credited roles of “Wicked Lake,” “Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever,” and “Old Man,” will forever be seen as the crushed soda can-filled boot wearing and greaser veneered Ray Pye as the boyish-looking Colorado native brings the ferocity, the energy, and the killer instinct of a high-strung teen teetering the line of losing it all. Senter’s approach rides on insecure masculinity of being a short man showing teeth to appear larger than life and exacts a screen perforating fear that holds friends Jennifer (Shay Aster, “Ernest Scared Stupid”) and Tim (Alex Frost, “Elephant”) in a tail-between-the-leg stasis of his end all, be all despot presence. Aside from the Ray Pye storyline, a trio of sub-stories add more development and substance to other principal characters, such as Tim and Jennifer hooking up dictated by them inching out from under Ray Pye’s reach, a washed out midlife Detective (Ed Lauter, “Cujo”), who was formerly on the Ray Pye investigation, and his romantic involvement with a Pye pursuant Sally (Megan Henning, “I Know Who Killed Me”), who is approx. 40-years the Detective’s junior that creates an intriguing, struggling dichotomy between love and appearance, and with the alluring Katherine Wallace (Full Moon regular actress Robin Sydney, “Evil Bong” franchise) in a love-hate, obstinate relationship with an absent psychotic mother and her fondness for Ray in who on some levels mirrors the same qualities as Katherine’s mother. Michael Bowen (“Deadgirl”), Dee Wallace (“Cujo”), Tom Ayers (“Bloody Bridget”), Cynthia Cervini, Richard Riehle (“3 From Hell”), and to compound skin scenes, soft-core erotic starlets Erin Brown (aka Misty Mundae, “An Erotic Werewolf in London”), and Elise Larocca (“Blood for the Muse”) co-star.

What first struck me about Sivertson’s “The Lost” is it doesn’t define a period in time. Charles Schmid’s reign of terror coursed the span of a year in the mid-to-late 60s, which follow’s Ketchum’s timeline in the novel. Yet, the books’ characters follow the movie’s scheme without clearly stating the years, stringing the connection between the three like step-relationships. Pye’s greaser finish, drive-in burger joints, boxy-rectangle cars and VW Beetles, and a motel as one of the principal shooting locations float in the very essence of the title itself, as a Lost in time story that stretches the decades. What’s not lost is the aggressive sexual nature that drives the nihilistic Ray Pye’s bedding scorecard by feigned compassion and romance; yet there’s plenty depth behind his sleazy cockiness that warrants more discussion into his problematic psyche, such as how he’s able to charm the pants of these women and how he’s able to keep those who fear him, close to him. Sivertson’s unafraid to make a statement in “The Lost’s” sexuality with plenty of skin from a number of the principal actresses to the simulated sexual acts in and out the vein of style and in and out of Pye’s sociopathic tantrums that’s more self-doubting bullying than actual power. At a young age, Pye aims high for machohood by the misguided dealings of the cards he’s dealt, augmenting himself with shoe stuffers and makeup to make him taller and more attractive. “The Lost” is very much a deconstruction of masculinity mania in the way we see Pye’s worlds comes crashing down and he loses everything when his guard is down by one swift moment of real, tangible love with Katherine and the only way to gain back control, like a hissy-fitting baby, is to go berserk in a if I can’t have it, nobody will tear.

Evil never looked so dapper as “The Lost” receives a new 2K remaster produced from a 4K scan of the original camera negative by the boutique label Ronin Flix. The AVC encoded, 1080p, high-definition BD50 contains the presented anamorphic widescreen 2.35:1 film with pixel-by-pixel coherence exacting extensive details and chromatic fidelity. What stuck out the most from the 4K scan was the night scenes blanked in near sheer darkness with minimal direction illumination from natural and unnatural lighting in a positive, well, light. In night forest scenes, especially around the lake, objects are lost in the void of shadows, tenebrously covered in obscurity, and that’s accomplished and accentuated in the opening moments of Ray Pye’s debut double murder, creating a better illusion of reality rather than creating an illusion out of often folly fabrication of dark blue gels or immense random key lighting. Textures are strong through, greatly defined by the delineating of edges on striking clothing, cars, and the amount of skin displayed. Two lossless English audio options are available to select from: a 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio and a 2.0 Stereo DTS-HD Master Audio. “The Lost’s” audio/video design produces a high fidelity and contains a blend of unprocessed and stylistic expression that stretch the audio range depending on the current Ray Pye Richter scaled mood. Pye’s occasional rapid-fire rants are unmistakable and clear as the decoding unfolds every syllable without sounding seamless or garbled. English SDH are optionally available. Ronin Flix delivers new and previously owned special features. New content like an audio commentary with director Chris Sivertson and Lucky Mckee serve as a trip down memory lane with new, pondered upon insights and recalled tales and new individualized interviews with principal actors Marc Senter, Robin Sydney, and Shay Astar in regard to auditioning, prepping for the role, and recalling their experience on the shoot expand more into “The Lost’s” attention and what it took to illuminate focus on the Pied Piper of Tucson. A second, archival commentary with writer Monica O’Rourke moderating conversation with late novelist Jack Ketchum, audition tapes, outtakes, storyboard sequence, and the original “Jack and Jill” short film directed by Chris Sivertson fill out the special features. A new front cover design, replacing the bland bullet hole-riddled and blood-puddled eyes cover on the Anchor Bay DVD and Blu-ray, on the trio of cardboard O-slipcover, translucent Blu-ray Amaray case, and disc art spruces up the Ronin Flix’s lifted release with a sense of hep threads and fatal knuckle sandwiches.; however, that’s about the extent of its physical beauty and tangible adjuncts. The region free Blu-ray comes not rated and has a runtime of 119 minutes. Marc Senter’s tour de force burns rubber, a ferocity of friction and perpetual anger sculps one of the best true-to-life silver screen villains from the last two decades.

Click Here to Purchase “The Lost” on Blu-ray!

You Shouldn’t Pick On Evil! “All American Bully” review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on July 18, 2015

Three high school friends live in an online gaming and comic book world making them easy targets for sinister bullies. When one of them, Devon (Alexander Fraser), becomes the victim of extreme bullying, the gaming friends are forced to come together and cope with the brutal and aggravated assault laid upon their friend Devon. Becky (Alicia Rose), whose had a long lasting love for Devon, plans the ultimate revenge by teasing to expose a hidden secret on the world wide web about Devon’s bully neighbor John Brooks (Daren Ackerman). The circle of violence and secrets wildly spirals out of control to an extremely car-crash of a finale that will put Devon, Becky, and John in a trio of devastating destruction.

“All American Bully,” formally titled “The Innocent,” serves as not the typical bully-revenge film we’re aware of in such films as Gus Van Sant’s “Elephant” or Jason Buxton’s “Blackbird” and that creates a misleading film title, but doesn’t necessarily hurt the film’s integrity. Director-writer John Hawkins intentionally creates an unexpected twist that’ll take the film into a totally different direction. With the help of the elusive, yet recently fan-revived cult “Friday the 13th” heroine Andrienne King and the superb acting by Daren Ackerman who portrays complex character John Brooks, “All American Bully” becomes a unique hybrid with a cultural and social timeliness that will surely strike the core like a bully punching you in the gut and kicking you while you’re down all for just your lunch money.

The John Hawkins film is not solely about high school bullying, but also about mental illness and childhood abuse to which all comes to the forefront to bring the house down at the end. The repercussions from years of bullying results in kidnapping, rape, and murder. Actor Daren Ackerman’s has a wide range playing the disturbing character John Brooks by never backing down from the character’s various stages. Ackerman complete shadows his peers such as Alexander Fraser who can’t strain from a monotone tone, Alicia Rose who has range but just not enough girth, and even Adrienne King who, I felt, played an overacting Principal.

There seems to be a side story that goes unexplained to which we have to make our own conclusion. Adrienne’s Principal Kane doesn’t trust her employed teacher Mr. Taylor that’s somehow related to her son being gay. I concluded that Mr. Taylor and her son had some kind of relationship that’s not being explicitly explained and this drives Principal King unhinged, but her breakdown doesn’t feel connected to the story, feeling separate from the body and not bring the film to closure. Perhaps Principal Kane’s mental break parallel’s the psychotic break that John Brooks suffers, displaying and defining two various scenarios of pain.

Speaking of homosexuality, Hawkins hits many gay undertones and not only with Principal Kane’s son and Mr. Taylor. There’s also a past relationship, even if only one sided, between Devon and John when they were tiny kids playing army in the woods. The overuse of the word fag becomes repulsive and that might be intended to reveal the true ugliness of the word. I had always thought fag might have faded into oblivion, especially in the film industry, but I guess in independent ventures the word still thrives to bring out the tensions and angers out of the viewers. Lastly on the topic, John becomes the plaything to all his mother’s friends and some of them being men, creating more taboo and disturbing qualities that make me think Hawkins is one warped individual. When Becky, played by an absolute beauty named Alicia Rose, and Devon actually have a heterosexual scene together, the mood becomes ruined when John gets a hold of them, to punish them, almost for being happy because his life turned out tragic and hopeless.

Forget the misleading title “All American Bully” (as I believe “The Innocent” works better) and the misleading Wild Eye Releasing DVD cover where a person gripping a firearm at their side in a student filled hallway; instead, focus on the film as a whole where the acting is solid and the direction tells a stunning story of various facets of bullying. Check out this Wild Eye Releasing DVD and also take a gander at the cast interviews as you’ll learn more about the actors backstory and how their take on bullying motivated them to create this film.