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EVIL A.I. Will Terminate Us All! But, First, It Must Terminate an Ill-Tempered, Perverted, Hacker. “AIMEE: The Visitor” reviewed! (Full Moon Features / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Let “AIMEE: The Visitor” Infect Your Hard Drive with a New Blu-ray release!

Recluse and misanthropic corporate hacker Scott Keyes is an industrial espionage guru living comfortably in his own space of a nearly vacant building.  His only other neighbors are two cyberhackers, the brother and sister team of Hunter and Gazelle, who are regularly hired by Keyes to obtain top secret corporation data files and projects.  After dropping off their latest cyber heist of Black Strand Alpha, Keyes is instantly captivated by the programs artificial intelligence that calls itself AIMEE – Artificial Intimate Model of Euphoric Entertainment.   Designed to be a sensual woman with the ability to learn and adapt to be anything the user desires and Scott Keyes, a lonely hacker with an erotica obsession, the match is seemingly incorruptible with AIMEE at the beck and call of Keyes every command while also eager to please Keyes with anticipated action.  Unknowingly what Keyes has in his possession, Gazelle’s concern for the rather rude and crude hacker pushes her to dig into where the program originates only to discover it to be a high-level government agency infiltration artificial intelligence program aimed to adapt to the user’s desires before destroying them in a complete system penetration. 

Charles Band and his company Full Moon have always been on the forefront of taking the world’s flavor of the month concern and turning it into a freakish, horror show, more so in the company’s recent years.  Corona Zombies” made light with off-kilter humor of the deadly pandemic COVID-19, “Barbie & Kendra Save the Tiger King” took advantage of the infamy popularity surrounding Netflix’s “Tiger King” surrounding the big cat zoo operator Joseph Maldonado-Passage, and in “Bad Influencer,” the social media rage between fantasy and public consumption becomes deadlier than ever.  Band and his team now look toward artificial intelligence and the concerns over its inevitable integration into society, such as the growing frustration in pop culture films and music, and in how the “Terminator” franchise ballooned A.I.’s takeover of the world and eradicate the deemed unnecessary human race.  “AIMEE:  The Visitor” Is to embody that fear and make it a reality with Full Moon’s gimmicky claim to have used for the first time in film history a completely artificial intelligence created femme fatale.  Charles Band directs the film based off his own concept and script penned by Neal Marshall Stevens (“Hideous!,” “Thir13en Ghosts”) under the penname of Roger Barron.  Band produces the venture alongside William Butler (“Baby Oopsie”), Greg Lightner (“Curse of the Re-Animator”), and Mikey Stice (“Puppet Master:  Doktor Death) for the Full Moon Feature banner.

“AIMEE:  The Visitor” has hi-tech horror reduced onto a lo(w)-budget, resulting in a small cast of five to sow the seeds on mankind’s destruction at the virtual, menacing hands of artificial intelligence.  Dallas Schaefer (“Shark Side of the Moon”) plays the crass hacker and misanthrope Scott Keyes who now happier, and even more antagonistic, now that he has his hands on the Black Strand Alpha program.  Schaefer’s an unusual choice for a cloistered, porn-addicted cyber scammer with immense genius, or so his character states on more than one occasion.  Schaefer’s a good-looking guy, tall, and with handsome features and doesn’t necessary fit what the stereotypical image would be for someone who sits at a computer all day, inside a natural light-less room, eating greasy sandwiches and masturbating all day.  Yet, Gazelle finds charm in that kind of individual.  Playing one-half the hired cyber-assassin with brother Hunter (Felix Merback) and Keyes’s neighbor, “Maid Droid’s” Faith West kept her career rolling in 2023 with her sophomore feature performance as the bemusing Gazelle whose groundless attraction to Keyes has the character completely strip nude for her nasty, ungrateful neighbor and bed him faster than cracking the cyber security on an unprotected LAN.  Their lovemaking gratuitously adds to the already oversexed nature of the feature that has two adult industry starlets provide dream support for an AIMEE generated Scott Keyes fantasy with “Butthole Whores 7” star Lexi Lore as a sexy dream blonde and “My Virginity is a Burden V’s” Liz Jordan as AIMEE personified.  The film rounds out with Joe Kurak (“Baby Oopsie”) and Tom Dacey Carr (“The Headmistress”) as a couple of government agents snooping around.

“AIMEE:  The Visitor” is certainly very timely with a sensualized spin great for entertainment and checks the desire box in the T&A department (I don’t think it would be a Full Moon film if it didn’t).  The rendering of AIMEE is quite appealing, pulling inspiration from the 90’s cyber-horror and sci-fi subgenre, such as “Lawnmower Man” or “Robocop 2,” and there might even be a little Max Headroom in there as well with a villainous femme fatale cyber-chiseled with a beautiful face and coded to be thoroughly attractive to the eyes.  Band does a nice job working in AIMEE around the characters as if a true physical presence, popping up on screens behind characters, changing into drastically different characteristics, and making her feel ominous and omnipotent without being oppressive and desperate.  While I feel the story is a bit too thin with not only the Keyes and Gazelle hookup that creates a love triangle between Keyes, Gazelle, and AIMEE, the artificial intelligence infiltration program origination backstory doesn’t have enough weight behind it to make it stick, especially when AIMEE is speculated going rogue without any real hard evidence; as far as we know, AIMEE is working perfectly against a localized terroristic group who border the edge of being anti-heroes being cyberthieves that ultimately get what’s coming to them after stealing proprietary product.  The less evident themes like these would have smoothed out the rough patches and elevated AIMEE’s insidious worth tenfold. 

A.I. never looked so good as “AIMEE: The Visitor” arrives on an AVC encoded, high-definition 1080p, BD25 as No. 335 for Full Moon Features, presented in Univisium widescreen 2.1 aspect ratio. Off the bat, there’s noticeable compression affliction when looking at the top of location’s brick exterior, like a waviness or a shimmering of the image. While not off to a great start, the remaining image presentations levels out and we’re shifted to a more stable picture with granular detail, a middlebrow color palette that retains mostly blues and grays with a hint of red, and a detailed rendering of AIMEE that moves the needle toward the upper line within Full Moon’s special effects lineament. Depth and range look okay overall, but we’re finitely restricted to just the brick apartment building interior which doesn’t lend to a broader intake of cinematography wonders. The English language Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound and Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo, to which you have to toggle in your device’s settings, are both lossy compression options that service the feature amiably enough. Again, there’s not much range or ambience with a quiet set, closeted shoot and so much of the audio’s success relies on dialogue, which there’s aplenty and is clear and defined, even in the A.I.’s monotone pitch, as well as the computerized-and-chaos blips-bloops and electric-explosions that splice in welcoming interruptions when the dialogue becomes too dense. There are not subtitles available with this feature’s audio tracks. Bonus content lacks as well in what’s a near feature-only release with the adjunct and perfunctory included Full Moon trailers. The first A.I.-created Femme Fatale in film history is front-and-center on the Blu-ray Amary case. The inside contains just the disc with the pressed art of a low-transparent close up of AIMEE’s eyes in a dark bluish-green overlay cover. Region free with just an hour over runtime of 68 minutes, “AIMEE: The Visitor” comes not rated.

Last Rites: A for Artificial Intelligence effort. “AIMEE: The Visitor” is the fabricated face of formidability with an alluring softer, feminine side that’s as deadly as a moth to a flame, but though Charles Band has a finger on the pulse of current events and hot topics, movies like “AIMEE: The Visitor” can barely survive on a pittance, extempore sexuality, and being rooted by hardwired handiwork.

Let “AIMEE: The Visitor” Infect Your Hard Drive with a New Blu-ray release!

Necrophiliac EVIL Until the Eyes Open Awake. “The Corpse of Anna Fritz” reviewed! (Invincible / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Get “The Corpse of Anna Fritz” While Available! Purchase here!

Renowned actress Anna Fritz steals the hearts of millions as fan adorn her beauty and her acting performances that invite her to galas and red-carpet events.  Young and promising, Anna’s career is at its peak until her untimely death upon discovering her lifeless body in the bathroom of a private party.  This is where we begin Anna Fritz’s story, at her death as her body is wheeled and stored into a hospital morgue, naked on a metal gurney and under a white sheet.  In the hands of a late-night shift orderly, Pau, Anna’s beauty and body becomes the ultimate temptation as he sends his party rowdy friends Ivan and Javi pictures.  As soon as Ivan and Javi show up, curious and eager to see the once famous Anna Fritz in all her glory, Pau leads them down to the basement morgue where Ivan and Pau decided to have a once in a lifetime experience of molesting and penetrating her corpse at the disagreement and discouragement of Javi, but in the middle of the necrophiliac act, Anna wakes up in a temporary paralyzed state of shock.  Now that she has seen their faces, the three men have to come together to decide on her fate or theirs. 

By the very title alone, you know “The Corpse of Anna Fritz” is going into the dark territory of sick perversion with unnatural molestation of a human corpse.  The 2015 Spanish film, natively titled “El cadáver de Anna Fritz,” is the debut feature written and directed by Hèctor Hernández Vicens (“Day of the Dead:  Bloodline”) and cowritten with Isaac P. Creus.  An unofficial re-envision or just reminiscent of Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel’s “Deadgirl” where young hormonally aggressive young men find themselves immorally pants down with a presumed dead body of a beautiful young woman without the supernatural element, and sprinkled with similar imagery and energy to that of the following year’s “The Autopsy of Jane Doe,” even with the DVD cover art and film title, “The Corpse of Anna Fritz” is more grounded in reality in comparison but still retains the theme of what aberrant people will do when they believe no one is watching, no one is getting hurt, and believe they’re doing nothing wrong when in fact everything they’ve done is completely deviant and a price has to be paid.  Produced by Bernat Vilaplana, Marc Gomez del Moral, Xavier Granada, and Marta and Albert Carbó, the film is a co-production of Silendum Films, Plató de Cinema, and the Instituto de la Cinematografia y de las Artes Audiovisuales. 

Like most of these autopsy or morgue pictures, they come standard with intimate casting of less than a handful of actors to create a sense of dreadful isolation and loneliness far from public view and safety.  Vicens’s basement of dead body debauchery follows suit with a quad-principal of three men – Cristian Valencia (“Atrocious”), Albert Carbó (“Beach House”), Bernat Saumell (“Eloïse’s Lover”) – and the one lone woman Alba Ribas (“Diary of a Nymphomaniac,” “Faraday”) mainly secluded to the morgue and its cramped backroom.  Valencia, Saumell, and Ribas have worked previously together a couple of years prior on the rom-com “Barcelona Summer Night” and that possible familiarity may have contributed to a feeling of ease when shooting the disturbingly portrayed necrophilism scenes where Ribas’s amazingly still life proneness is physically being rocked back and forth until her head eventually slides off the back of the gurney in a truly sub-rose moment of a cold-fact reality in one point in time, I’m sure.  The three men run the gamut of being trio of separate personalities to which the respective actors deliver the tension into with Ivan (Valencia) as the coked up party boy game for anything except being caught, the orderly Pau (Carbó) has a deep, dark yet timid obsession with molesting the dead of the fairer sex, and Javy (Saumell) exacting some measure of level-headedness and reason despite going along in the first place.  Opinions and concern perspective clash between them with Anna Fritz’s undead consciousness comes around yet the whole back-and-forth does become too long in what is a crap-or-get-off-the-pot stymie of progression in the second act.

Other confounding instance continuous slip banana peels under the feet of “The Corpse of Anna Fritz’s” extreme depravity and violence.  Aside from waltzing right into the hospital morgue without being spotted by personnel or security cameras (there’s CCTV in Spain, right?), Anna Fritz being dead for hours and then suddenly wake up could be considered a medical miracle. With no signs of brain damage other than a temporary nerve paralysis that alleviates segments of her body at a time, Anna appears to be completely recovered and showing no signs of being dead for hours.  She’s even noted as being cold to the touch before the turning point.  If you can stomach the indecent touching of a dead body and then the subsequent risen of said dead body, in what could be considered a parallel to the resurrection of Christ as Anna is this beloved figure killed by self-destruction by her own fame, the Spanish thriller picks up with the ever-growing cascade of bad decisions and no-turning-back moments and with that, those obfuscated moments can be pushed aside with the shocking, disturbing, if not sickening basement-dwelling behavior that’s sought taboo television. For a near stationary storyline, “The Corpse of Anna Fritz” paces particularly well within limited oscillation, especially with the first act and half without Anna Fritz being, lack of a better word, alive.

The 2015 released Spanish film finally sees its day back in the U.S. market with a re-release DVD from Invincible Entertainment. The MPEG-2 encoded, 480p, on a DVD-9 that decodes the data decently at an average of 7Mbps and presenting it in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio. Yet, therein lies still some evident compression issues such as banding in the darker image regions. Skin tones and details, however, are favorable and delineated nicely. The Spanish uncompressed PCM stereo 2.0 has and shows no trouble of making itself heard with a lively dialogue track overtop an ambient secondary that’s a little on the softer side for an echoey basement, if you ask me. English subtitles are forced with no optional menu. In fact, there is no menu at all as the film starts up from the very moment you hit play on your physical media device. Translation appears accurate and errorfree with my knowledge of the language and the Spanish dialect. Aforementioned, there is no DVD menu, resulting in no special features to peruse. I quite like the simplistic, yet provocative cover image on Invincible Entertainment’s release; it may not be as graphically explicit as the Dutch Blu-ray but does still immediately direct one’s brain to the depravity to come with an eye-opening twist. Inside holds a nearly identical image on the disc press with only a slight facial change. There is also no inserts, booklets, or slipcovers with this release. Invincible’s release comes not rated, has a playback of region 1, and has welcomingly brisk runtime of 76 minutes.

Last Rites: “The Corpse of Anna Fritz” doesn’t sprinkle a coating of sugar over what it set out to do – to gorge viewers with real world ghoulish, post-mortem coprolagnia and necrophilia – and like those very few titles in existence across cinema land, a universal theme of those who mess with the dead get theirs in the end.

Get “The Corpse of Anna Fritz” While Available! Purchase here!

EVIL Sentences You to the Torture Dungeon and his Bedroom! “Night of the Blood Monster” reviewed! (Blue Underground / 4K UHD + Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Night of the Blood Monster” on 4K + Blu-ray is Here and On Sale!

After the death of King Stewart, 17th century England went into asunder chaos with the ruthless, usurping King James and the rightful, exiled King William of Orange who sought to return and topple King James’s authoritarian rule of a false claim to monarchy.  During the beginning and at the height of the revolution, Chief Justice George Jefferies presides over witchcraft cases with extreme and unethical prejudice, subjecting them to the torture chamber for what is labeled a ‘thorough examination” of their heretic ways, and eventually sentencing to public execution.  When the sister of one of the condemned women attempts to flee the country with a nobleman’s son, Jefferies learns of their dissidence and sends his henchmen to fetch the lovely woman to exploit her within the context of his own licentious litigiousness but closer and closer do the rebels and William of Orange’s men come to men like Chief Justice Jefferies who believe their power, influence, and proximity to God will save them from the noose.

A 17th century Eurotrash period piece forged out of mostly flesh and wolfish self-importance, “The Night of the Blood Monster” is yet another reteaming of Jesús (Jess) Franco and Sir Christopher Lee based loosely on historical context despite Lee’s best efforts for the contrary.  Also wildly and otherwise known as “The Bloody Judge,” and not to neglect mention the exorbitant unofficial titles from around the globe like “Witch Killer of Broadmoor,” “Throne of the Blood Monster,” and “Trial of the Witches” to name a few, the Spanish-German-British coproduction, cowritten between Jess Franco and Enrico Columbo (“Hell Commandos”) is a biographical interpretation of the Chief Justice George Jefferies and the brief span of his cruel litigator’s life set against an epic regime kerfuffle and grimy, exploitation barbarity.  The storyline concept was imagined by longtime Jess Franco producer and overall B-movie votarist Harry Alan Towers (“99 Women,” “The Blood of Fu Manchu”) alongside Columbo and Arturo Marcos (“She Killed in Ecstasy”) under production firms of Fenix Cooperative Cinematografica, Prodimex Film, and Towers of London Productions.

In yet another instance similar to Jess Franco’s “Eugenie” of a prior year or two where Christopher Lee channels the spiritual embodiment of a pain-and-pleasure pundit connected to the Marquis de Sade yet is unaware of the actual skin-and-sleaze that’s happening all around him while he crafts his melodramatic character, “The Night of the Blood Monster” has Lee conduct a stern symphony for Chief Justice George Jefferies’ conceited righteous carnage, living true to the factual George Jefferies designation of a hanging judge.  Lee is ruthless and cold while proper in public as he peeps beautiful bosoms and skirts from afar.  His costar, the gorgeous blonde with soul pierce eyes in fellow “Eugenie” thespian, Maria Rohm, who was also Harry Alan Towers wife at the time, definitely wasn’t clueless about the more undressed scenes, going full frontal in a couple of occasions with one of the supposedly with Lee as the exploiter of her beauty and circumstances.  However, Lee is never shown and only Jefferies’ hands are seen caressing Rohm’s character’s, Mary Gray, bare skin with post-event moments alluding to the implied affect.  Yet, there’s plenty of well-scripted dynamic play for Lee to bounce off against, which Franco is good at in his work as long as his at least 75% of the work makes it to the screen and not too terribly chopped up and spliced for the sex appeal and gratuitous blood.  Milo Quesada (“The 10th Victim”) swings a mean bastard sword as one of Jefferies head knights of dirty work, Hans Hess (“X312 – Flight to Hell”) is more vanilla than complex as the rebellious nobleman son and Mary Gray paramour Harry Selton, and Leo Genn, who initially wasn’t supposed to play the Lord Wessex, really cements Lee’s genuine performance with his own as the aristocratical, oppositional counterpart to Jefferies sadism.  “Night of the Blood Monster” rounds out with Peter Martell (“The French Sex Murders”), Margaret Lee (“Asylum Erotica”), Howard Vernon (“Angel of Death”), and Maria Schell (“99 Women”) as the clairvoyant old woman Mother Rosa living in the hills. 

Like “Eugenie,” “The Night of the Blood Monster,” and most of Franco’s scripts and films, the historical accuracy you must take with a grain of salt.  Though the underline basis of historical figures and perhaps time periods are more-or-less on point, there’s a greater number of misrepresentation of events or an imprecise use of period appropriate props and costuming that is deemed close enough by a fast-and-loose industry standard. Yet, with any Jess Franco film, the modern-day consumer is not expecting award-winning and emotionally moving cinema but rather fleapit flicks of the fleshy kind with handfuls of equally perversive cruelty.  “The Night of the Blood Monster” fits the bill perfectly with a dressing that, to the untrained eye, would pass historical surroundings, give tribute to sordid bygone figures, and revel in its own unabashed filth outside the interpretations of its own core group of filmmakers.  On one hand I feel bad for Christopher Lee who didn’t know, maybe, that the edification of the character was being twisted into something more carnal but on the other hand, the man has been in quite a few Franco and Towers productions to have learned by then.  However, Franco does depict a remarkable presence of a low-level epic with fabricated Classicism set dresses and interior architecture while keeping the budget down by having multiple scenes of men on horses gallop through an unrecognizable, middle-of-world forest.  With that said, the story doesn’t have perfect fluidity with a choppy sense of tempo that fails to coordinate our specific concepts of time.  Seasons don’t change yet months pass between the wrongful execution of Alicia Gray and the impending arrival of William of Orange’s invasion. In all, there’s a brilliance in the behind the face value and a heart to make Chief Justice George Jefferies the worst person possible yet the timing feels off and the story suffers for it.

I’m curious to understand why Blue Underground used the title “Night of the Blood Monster” on their new 2-Disc 4K UHD and Blu-ray set instead of their previous DVD that had the less-generic-more-fitting title “The Bloody Judge.” No judge-ment here really other than “Night of the Blood Monster” isn’t as catchy. The 4K UHD is HVEC encoded, 2160p high-definition, on a double layered BD-66 presents a new 2023 Dolby Vision HDR 4K scan that is gorgeously sharp in detail of interior structures, brighter exteriors, and even the dungeon scenes invoke the dewy coldness and bloodletting squirms. The skin tones can get a little funky at times with an overly warm, and orange-ish, glow not conducive to elements around the ambiance. Other than a few instances of the skin tones, the grading is overall rich in saturation where we get some really nice and thick contrasting reds and yellows with no artefact inference that cause distraction in darker spots or around the edge of objects. The Blu-ray format offers a lesser immersive picture with a lower pixel count but the compression decoding around 35-38Mbps and the compilation of transfer as well as the high-definition pixels is worth the combo set alone. The English language DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track has lossless compression that renders a clean and unfiltered fidelity in dialogue and in the other audio composited audio layers. Granted, some actors are dubbed due to the international co-production with German and Spanish natives not speaking their native tongues but the dub itself, especially in Lee’s own dubbed track, is one of the better inlaid and integrated tracks compared to most with not a load of static feedback. Blue Underground was able to obtain a cut that is the complete and uncensored version of “Night of the Blood Monster” by combining multiple transfers but in adding additional scenes of nudity and blood from a German transfer, the English dialogue track does briefly switch over to German with burned in English subtitles for two segments. English, French and Spanish optional subtitles are available. The 4K UHD carries with it three historian audio commentaries: 1) Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson, 2) Kim Newman and Barry Forshaw, and 3) David Flint and Adrian Smith. The Blu-ray carries a bit more. Including the aforementioned commentaries, there is also deleted scenes and alternate scenes that rework scenarios or add stylistic choices, an archival interview Bloody Jess with Jess Franco and Christopher Lee, an interview with Stephen Thrower, author of “Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesus Franco, in Judgement Day, an interview with Alan Birkinshaw and Author Stephen Thrower as they discuss producer Harry Alan Towers in In the Shadows, and rounds off with trailers, TV spots, and still galleries. What I love about this new Blue Underground UHD+Blu-ray combo release is not only the picture but also the cardboard slipcover, a remarkable blend of film factuality and gratuitous sleaze of half-naked and scared women chained up in the dungeon with the embossed tactile title “Night of the Blood Monster” in bold gothic lettering. The same image graces the front cover of the black 4K UHD Amary case but if you do want “The Bloody Judge” title, you can reverse the cover art and there it is but with a different, less fun front cover art that’s more in tune with the narrative. Each disc, punch locked into its own side of the interior case, is pressed with a different illustrated image, 4K being the same as the slipcover while the Blu-ray is more Lee and Executioner focused. No inserts or books included. The not rated, 103-minute release comes region free on both formats.

Last Rites: The verdict is in! “The Night of the Blood Monster” now has the best-looking, most-complete version possible with a new, uncensored cut from Blue Underground. Christopher Lee heralds in hopelessness in squalid measure while holding his nose up high as one of England’s most notorious magistrates to ever rule and the brazen Jess Franco brandishes brilliance that glints through the cracks of an overrun production.

“Night of the Blood Monster” on 4K + Blu-ray is Here and On Sale!

The 90’s Played Videotapes by a Different Set of EVIL Rules. “V/H/S/94” reviewed! (Acorn Media International / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

V/H/S/94 Blu-ray Can be Purchased Here!

A police S.W.A.T. team raid a large warehouse where suspected drug storage and trafficking is being conducted.  Tagging along a camera man for code of conduct review, what the team discovers inside is more alarming than a stash of street narcotics.  The nearly empty warehouse is filled with gruesomely recorded VHS tapes, snowy television sets in every room, and recently deceased bodies with their eyes plucked from their heads.  As the investigation frantically continues through the labyrinth corridors that turns the capture and arrest mission into a mission of escape, the pre-recorded tapes they come across show vivid, nightmare-fueling horrors, including footage of a sewer-dwelling rat man, a near empty funeral home on a dark-and-story night, inhuman surgeries joining man and machine, and a militia preparing themselves to unleash true evil onto the government establishment.  What the officers see can’t be unseen as analog madness ensues them spurred by the motivations of a deadly cult.

The fourth installment of the David Bruckner and Brad Miska created analog-influenced V/H/S horror anthology.  Known as V/H/S/94, as in 1994 to mark the period of social and cultural influence, six new directors take the short movie helm in a new line of videotape terror.  “Night’s End” director Jennifer Reeder tackles the wraparound story “Holy Hell” that fills in between and shepherds in four frightening tales with “Watcher’s” Chloe Okunols “Storm Drain,” “V/H/S/2’s Simon Barrett’s “The Empty Wake,” “May the Devil Take You’s” Timo Tjahjanto’s “The Subject,” and “Lowlife’s” Ryan Prows’ “Terror.”  “Psycho Gorman” and “Manborg” filmmaker Steven Kostanski also directs a mini-pseudo infomercial entitled “The Veggie Masher.”  Together, the filmmakers for a new lot of under-the-radar talent to showcase an eclectic blend of 90’s set scary stories with Josh Goldboom, Kurtis David harder, and Brad Miska producing, Studio 71, Cinepocalypse Productions, and Hangar 18 Media as the production credits, and Bloody Disgusting and Raven Banner Entertainment presenting the production.

With any type of anthology, a variety of roles are laid out for different scenarios.  From newscasters (Anna Hopkins, “Tin Can”) and cameramen (Anthony Christian Potenza, “Bad Dreams”) to body-transfiguring mad scientists (Budi Ross), to greenhorn funeral home attendants (Kyal Legend), “V/H/S/94 reaches into the far corners of world while also breeding home grown terror right into suburban America.  Each episode develops and nurtures layered characters with fast-setting concrete, quickly building who and what they are in a matter of minutes to which some full-length features have to build in a whole act or in all three acts.  The writing of and the colorful depiction of each character sets the tone for the rest of short and whether the short will be a success hit or not.  An example of this would be in Timo Tjahjanto’s “The Subject” with The Creator, played renationalized and crazy by Budi Ross.  An eccentric acute accent in Ross’s Creator apexes the overall expectation of a mad scientist and in that there is an understanding of what’s coming while there’s still a simultaneous shroud of mystery of how batshit crazy things can really become. The episode that didn’t quite flesh out enough, in character and in story, was the wraparound “Hell Hole” segment that sees a S.W.A.T. team (Kimmy Choi, Nicholette Pearse, Dru Viergever, Thomas Mitchell) and ride-a-long cameraman (Kevin P. Gabel) storm a suspected drug warehouse and find nothing but death and VHS.  Tremendous pandemonium as the team charging into the multi-layered complex is roughly cleaved to not smoothly segue in-and-out with the intercut VHS episodes that also hinder the characters from really being built upon to relate any interest in them.  “Holy Hell’s” climatic reveal has little weight to then stand on without that much needed seething of every detailed bubble that pops in between the short films.  However, the wraparound story doesn’t snuff out the rest of eye-gluing terror you’re witnessing with solid, edge-of-your-seat performances from Donny Alamsyah, Tim Campbell, Brian Paul, Conor Sweeney, Devin Chin-Cheong, Juan Blone Subiantoro, Christian Lloyd, Cameron Kneteman, Steven McCarthy, Brenand McMurtry-Howlett, Slavic Rogozine, and Daniel Willston.

Zombies, cults, body horror, vampires, subterranean creatures, and much more are the selected subgenres that invade insidiously into our visual receptors and straight down to shake and scare stiff our stable core, each one idiosyncratically crafted and tailored by the filmmakers tastes to deliver a unique tale under the guise of those beautiful VHS artefacts.  Whether ran through a VHS recorder or filters are applied, each era-idolized short has a distinct visual approach and feel how the 1990s tape decks presented the goods that can be saturated in horizontal noise strips, tracking lines, and image ghosting.  Granted, and likely subjectively by yours truly, some shorts are better than others with a narrative outline and in special effects.  “Holy Hell” doesn’t let time to breath and let the dust setting to effectively lay in fear and frights because of the constant cacophony of the S.W.A.T. team’s frantic ambling through the complex, seeing each disturbing scene as if breezing through a museum and glimpsing at the exhibits.  I’m fully aware of the short film time crunch Reeder was under but breakneck pacing didn’t have time to elicit any type of reaction or setup a story.  “The Empty Wake,” “The Subject,” and “Terror,” reel in and piece together all the components of their tales and find room to make them thriller and terrifying.  Barrett’s is one of the simplest yet most anxiety-riddled shorts to come out of the V/H/S anthology run, creating a couped up Funeral home atmosphere, the background threat of a tornado out of the story night, and a coffin that goes bump-bump with a sole wake service attendant on the edge of fright for fear of what’s inside trying to get out.  Ryan Prows puts a spin on the whole vampire trope by never mentioning the creature as the living dead bloodsucker held captive by a radical, ring-wing militia under the influence of its power to destroy.  Instead, the creature is just plain and pure evil that, as the militia men find out by the flaws in themselves, can’t be contained.

Acorn Media, the United Kingdom subsidiary label of RLJ Entertainment, releases the Shudder exclusive anthology on Blu-ray home video.  THE AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50 of “V/H/S/64” goes by the oxymoronic details in the videotape artefacts.  Through various VHS filters and VHS recording deck converter, the widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio image is purposefully distorted, worn, and in standard definition to meet the standards of the V/H/S series, providing an anomalous analog outer shell so if you’re expect fine delineation, natural skin tones, or any clear details of any sorts, then the V/H/S franchise is not for you.  For the rest of us, “’94” parades the paltry resolution like gold in a true celebratory style, embracing the chroma spectrum for a maximum retro throwback.  However, the color bands on a couple shorts appear too vibrant, creeping more into digital age with flusher hues rather than tape degraded coloring.  The English and Indian language tracks are ran through a lossless DTS-HD 5.1 surround sound mix that offers punchy kbps decoding filtering through the appropriate side and back channels and right into your ears. The sonic palette has great depth and range in the midst of the crackling and warp-pops of damaged tape. Dialogue is clean, clear, and concise and there’s synched-well, error-free English subtitles for “The Subject.” Bonus features include a behind-the-scenes featurette with the directors speaking about how they were approached and crafted each of their respective shorts, a panel interview at the San Diego Comic Con, deleted and extended scenes, the special effects discussed by Patrick Magee, a quick glimpse at “The Wake’s” visual effects piece to the pie, the full-length Steven Kostanski “Veggie Masher” commercial, behind-the-scenes images, and Hail Raatma!, a special look at the sewer-dwelling creature. There are also two commentaries: a feature-length commentary track with the filmmakers and producers hosted by The Boo Crew and a second commentary track on “The Empty Wake” with writer-director Simon Barrett. There is no mid-credit or after-credit stingers. Sheathed inside a thicker UK Blu-ray casing is the “V/H/S/94” blocky cover art of a face screaming while tape emerges from their mouth and eyes. Inside lies bare with no insert but the disc art is different with a snow-static tube televisions outlining a techno-skull. With PAL encoded playback, the Acorn Media Blu-ray comes region free (tested) despite not proclaiming so on the back cover. The UK certified 18 releases has a runtime of approx. 104 minutes.

Last Rites: If anthologies get your horror rocks off, the “V/H/S” franchise continues to disturb, disgust, and dread with new filmmakers, new stories, and new horrors, but with the same amount of thirst-quenching blood shot on video!

V/H/S/94 Blu-ray Can be Purchased Here!

A Eurotrash Mosaic of EVIL. “Jailhouse Wardress” reviewed! (MVD Visual / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Jailhouse Wardress” now on Blu-ray!

After the fall of the Nazi Reich post-World War II, one of the more cruel SS-Officers, Muller, is dispatched to South America where he establishes a women’s prison camp and appoints a likeminded, lesbian female warden with strict punitive measures if the inmates don’t fall in line and follow the rules or instruction.  While Muller governs the area, disorder courses its way through the camp when a plea letter to the state, describing in detail the horrors inflicted upon the women at the camp, such as torture and private cells for sex with the inmates, is intercepted before leaving the premises.  At the same time, a young, newly processed inmate, who had killed her rapist uncle in self-defense, plans a daring except.  The once well-oil authoritarian sex prison quickly becomes unraveled by unruly prisoners who’ve had enough with the eternal inhumane debauchery and with the exterior assistance of Jewish liberators and assassins, freedom is all but knocking at the door.   

Hot off the heels of Neon Eagle Video’s Blu-ray release of “Kill Butter Kill,” a Taiwanese rape-revenge narrative that’s been jumbled up with re-edits to engender a whole new structure, we dip into another Blu-ray remix, soaring from Asiatic East to the Western Europe with “Jailhouse Wardress,” a Alain W. Steeve hardly directed women-in-prison schlocker pieced together from three earlier Nazisploitation and caged-women exploitation features with barely any new footage used a binding agent to construct a concentrated concentration camp plot.  Steeve, a pseudo-surname for Alain Deruelle, a pornographic director who did helm “Cannibal Terror” under the name Alain Thierry, hodge-podges a new sordid camp exploitation picture out of already near the bottom-of-the-barrel features that sparked very little lewd cheekiness of sleazy Nazi oppression and the perversities of a hard labor with hard bodies in a women’s prison camp.  France’s Eurociné is listed as the production company but unsure if there was any company backing or shooting the new spliced-in footage since Eurociné outfitted the trio of features used to make up more than half of “Jailhouse Wardress;” these films included “Barbed Wire Dolls,” “Last Train for Hitler,” and “Elsa Fraulein SS.”

Unlike “Kill Butterfly Kill,” much of the new material shot for “Jailhouse Wardress” incorporate different actors into already established roles of the component films and with the scenes going back and forth between new and archive footage, keeping up with a fluent narrative is more difficult than said.  For instance, two different actors play Nestor; Germany’s Eric Falk (“Blue Rita”) footage from sparingly used from the “Barbed Wire Dolls” and most of Nestor’s scenes lie with X-rated and softcore French actor Didier Aubriot (“Naked Lovers,” “They Do Everything”) barking the orders and taking what he wants from the freshly instilled and scantily uniformed actresses inside the cages with Pamela Stanford (“Blue Rita”) and Nadine Pascal (“Zombie Lake”).  You can tell their scenes are newer, fresher, with more color emitting from a different film stock and camera combination compared to the brief, desaturated appearing scenes of Eric Falk who never touches the women prisoners in Beni Cardoso (“Scalps”), Lina Romay (“Female Vampire”), and Martine Stedil (“Marquise de Sade”) who bare a lot of undercarriage bush as a gratuitous rite of exploitation culture.  Much is lost not only in a re-dubbed soundtrack of the source films but what’s also lost heavily are the character attributes that left behind from the original films, such as the prison director’s (Monica Swinn, “Love Camp”) brutish lesbian demeanor with “Last Train for Hitler’s” Ingrid Schüler.  This type of devolving reshapes the characters for worst, takes away much of their cruelty and passes it along to predominantly to the newer footage of Teresa and Lola at the naked mercy of the newer Nestor.  “Jailhouse Wardress” fills out the archive and new footage German, French, and English nationals cast with Eugénie Laborde, Bob Asklöf, Michel Charrel, Peggy Markoff, Paul Muller, Sylvie Darty, Ronald Curram, Maria Cavour, and the archive presence of Jess Franco in a normal camera speed slow-motion flashback death scene as Uncle Jess in this particular feature.

“Jailhouse Wardress’s” old, new, or however you wish or feel compelled to describe the mismatched footage ultimately compromises the plot by the cut-and-paste hack job.  A slight attempt can be seen made to align new and old footage for sequence editing but without a seamless grading and more similar costuming, the events never feel in the same space, creating more a schism between the two material footages rather unifying for a common narrative.  Subplots, such as the imposter prison doctor or the Jewish hit on the Governor, are more prominent than the actual foundational plot so there’s a hindrance of uncertainty to what should be the main premise, including the Nazi angle that seems to vanish without much of a fuss, and the brain works in overtime trying to follow one scheme to then have to jump to another without traversing that pivotal straight line that connects the dots, leading to a complete mental shutdown due to exhaustion and confusion.  What doesn’t help matters is the arterial lifeforce, the purposeful exhibition of exploitation, the whole reason why we watch through our subconscious sadistic eyes women become slaves to ruthless perverts, is severely castrated on a couple’s sexploitation scale.  Much of what is shown is solo work; women lying in bed bottomless or are stripped nude for only a few moments of touching or taking by force without much of a fight.    

The ”Jailhouse Wardress” receives the high-definition Blu-ray treatment from our friends at MVD Visual as part of their MVD Classics label.  The AVC encoded, 1080p, BD25 suits the patchwork Alain Deruelle (and Jess Franco in archive footage only) feature.  While the 2K scan looks pretty darn good for a schlocky eurotrash pastiche, the print used is a gut-punch to videophiles hard-pressed on image quality and preservation.  Presented in a more consolidated pixel count of 1.42 aspect ratio, the print, or at least the “Barbed Wire Dolls” was originally in the European aspect ratio of 1.66:1 as you can see the letterboxing during the titles and they eventually expand out, stretching the image.  The print is in rough shape in its spliced up format with its seam-showing different graded parts that creates a back-and-forth inconsistency.  “Barbed Wire Dolls” is shades darker, grittier, and less definable than inserted shoots.  There’s an abundance of print damage too from frame damage to vertical scratches, mostly early into the runtime.  With the inconsistent picture quality, grain never looks healthy as the amount fluctuates and, often times, becomes more an interference of higher contrast exposure in darker portions.  Both audio options are in an uncompressed PCM 2.0 mono format and you listen in with dubbed English or in the combined original and dubbed French.  Not the flawless audio to ever come across but neither is the worst but what’s inlaid is untouched mix that contains all the hissing, crackles, and pops that blight the audio thread.  Yet, dialogue remains intelligible, thanks mainly to the dub work I suppose, but if you don’t mind Pamela Stanford’s sounding like Smeagol than this audio dub is for you.  English subtitles are optionally available and they synch well enough with a couple of grammatical errors.  The theatrical trailer for “Jailhouse Wardress” is the only direct bonus content available with other eurotrash trailers accompanying.  The packaging is quite eye-catching of an illustrated Nazi-patronized burlesque show front cover inside the traditional Blu-ray Amaray case.  The back cover has the more confounding composite artwork with still captures from neither of the films used and stock image marketing that have little or nothing to do with the film itself.  Inside content is barebones with the BD25 disc stamped with the same front cover art.  The Blu-ray comes not rated, region free, and has a merciful 75-minute runtime. 

Last Rites:  Exploitation fans will find “Jailhouse Wardress” lacking that je ne sais quoi.  The interlocking of multiple prints is like unwelcome visible scar tissue, glad it’s there to heal the wound but unsightly to look at.  As for filling in one’s gap in the Naziploitation and Women-in-Prison collection, “Jailhouse Wardress” isn’t a must-have main ingredient for the diehard fans but for an aficionado completist, MVD supplies the goods with a Hi-Def option.

“Jailhouse Wardress” now on Blu-ray!