Tag Archives: from dusk till dawn

Oh, Unholy, EVIL Night! Oh, “Silent Bite” reviewed! (Cleopatra Entertainment / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Santa Clauses vs Vampires in “Silent Bite” Now Available!

Four armed bank robbers hold up in a sleepy hotel on a snowy Christmas night as they hunker down and wait for their police-diverting and getaway driver to double back for them.  With the front deskman on the take, a quiet place to shelter, and no cops in sight, the eclectic bunch of thieves believe they’ve escaped scot-free from the long arm of the law with $1 million dollars in cash.  Unbeknownst to them, the desk clerk didn’t disclose the other guests staying at the hotel, a vampire mistress and her three daughters who have been hidden away waiting for the felons’ arrival to feed on their blood.  Refuge becomes an inescapable trap as the nearly unstoppable and ruthless force of beautiful, deadly women bear down on the scantily armed thieves whose automatic rifles are no match against the vampiric bloodsuckers.  With options limited, they rely on each other and a bitten young woman to survive the night.

Christmas time is upon us.  Joy to the world!  While cheerful idols of Saint Nick and Jesus Christ are erected for one of world’s holiest of days, while candy-canes, gumdrops, mistletoes, and wreath deck the brilliantly warm, primary-punchy colored lights, and while neatly wrapped presents present themselves under the garishly garnished evergreen tree with neat little tied ribbons and bows for all the good little boys and girls, the rest of us unsavory lot have blood red and scary monsters still on the brain.  This is where Christmas themed horror movies come in handy, a little blend of both worlds and holidays to sate our dueling desire to enjoy each holiday.  To begin this year off right, Taylor Martin’s 2024 vampire horror, Christmas comedy, “Silent Bite,” is the first genre-splitting seasonal movie to come across our desk!  Martin, actress of “Till Death Do We Rot” and “Anathema” turned director of short films, helms her first feature from a script by British writer-actor Simon Phillips, who is no stranger to the possible malevolence of a good Christmas horror film having penned and starred in a serial killer couple Mr. and Mrs. Clause “Once Upon A Time in Christmas” and it’s sequel “The Nights Before Christmas.”  Filmed at the Jolly Roger Inn & Resort hotel of Otter Lake, Ontario, Phillips produces the feature alongside Mem Ferda (“K-Shop,” “Bonehill Road”) and executive producers Ern Gerardo and Anubandh Lakhera under the Nox Luna Media Group, 9I Studios, EAG Enterprises, and Dystopian Films labels.

Not only does Phillips write and produce, he stars in the principal role of Father Christmas, the leader of the armed thieves who perhaps is the most even-keeled to bear the competency of a bad guy constitution.  The British national adds a morsel of mercenary radiancy to his role but can’t quite be all that he can be because Father Christmas is too busy babysitting a squabbling, bambino-acting crew too hopped up on booze, drugs, insults, and their social awkward hangups to level up to Father Christmas cool, calm, and collected.  The randomly selected pool of eclectic elves with codenames for hired robbery include the monolith muscle of the feral Snowman (Michael Swatton, “Snow and Blood”), the rootin-tootin’ hardnose Grinch (Nick Biskupek, “Until Death”), and the technological-savvy and brilliantly awkward Prancer (Luke Avoledo, feature film debut).  Phillips, Swatton, and Biskupek have collaborated in more recent projects, such as “What Lurks Beneath” and “The Mouse Trap,” with all three men also having a piece of the two Adrian Langley “Butchers” films pie in their own regard between original and sequel, evoking a comfortability in line and action delivery dynamic when they bicker amongst each other.  There’s a fifth member of the crew, Rudolph (Dan Molson, also from “Butchers Book Two:  Raghorn”), who is not directly described as the leader but led us to believe the decoy driver hand selected all members of Santa’s purloining party pitted against a stronger, deadlier, and more conniving coven of women vampires with Sayla de Goede (“The Nights Before Christmas”) playing the matriarch.  Goede really hams up the performance of a Victorian vampire who’s snobby and seducing by leaving threatening and opposing at the door.  Mother rears three women turned vampires turned daughters in Lucia (Louisa Capulet, “Butchers Book Three:  Bonesaw”), Selene (Sienne Star, “Fear Street:  Prom Queen”), and Victoria (Kelly Schwartz, “The Bermuda Triangle Project”) and, once again, are failed characters to bring the intensity required as hungry seductress for blood and sex, said as much in the exposition between Mother and daughters.  The caboose of the “Silent Bite” cast has Camille Blott and Paul Whitney (“Blood and Snow”) play the recent bitten, love interest of Prancer and a graceless Renfield-type hotel clerk, respectively.  

What started out as a high energy concept of a comic-book style opening credits, providing audience the background bank robbery and chase epilogue, quickly decelerates to brisk walk of more-or-less the two groups intermingling amongst themselves until what basically becomes the climax of the story.  For a tale that plot parallels the Robert Rodriguez-directed, Quentin Tarantino-penned “From Dusk till Dawn,” a severe lack of ceaseless combustible action gives way to just a bunch of roundabout buildup to avoid spending bank on blank cartridges, violent effects, and choreography.  Instead, the AR-15s and handguns are rarely fired, gory effects are reduced to CGI spurts and theatrical blood rivulets down the chin, and a bunch of exposition, which in all fairness is written well and has concentrations of amusing tongue-and-cheek wit.  Developing the characters to their full potential is wasted because conflict between mortal and immortal arrives too late into the story and all that rev-exciting, rock soundtrack-blasting title card illustration at the beginning pseudo-fed a spoonful of high-octane snake oil.  The overall aesthetic of the story indulges in the festivities of the yuletide season of snowy exteriors, garish garlands and other Christmastime decorations, and our five anti-heroes in Santa themed suits but the visual themes and motifs are limited to such and are interrupted by grinchier clunkers of the aforesaid blood spurts and UV light incineration visual effects.

Arriving on an AVC encoded, 1080p, single-layer BD25 on a bloodsucking sleigh is not Santa Clause but Santa Clause with fangs in Cleopatra Entertainment’s “Silent Bite.”  Presented in a widescreen 2.39:1 aspect ratio, the wider lens isn’t put to good use for a story that’s mostly set inside the tight confines of a hotel interior.  Even the pool room, where an opportunity to expand across a full-length swimming deck, is an opportunity that’s missed.  There are some exterior scenes of the Jolly Roger Resort & Inn as well as Rudolph’s eluding of the law that take the wider aspect ratio for a ride but are limited to these peripheral portions.  What really stands out are the colorful Christmas motifs of brilliant red, greens, and blues amongst the scantily cladded seasonal décor and while those areas are limited, the palette is vibrant and saturated to create a warm and cozy atmosphere contrasted against the dark snow.  Details are generally pleasing albeit select scenes where speckling occurs, such as Snowman dunking himself underwater that loose quite a sum of the previously clean image.  Two English audio options are available, a lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 mix and an uncompressed LPCM 2.0 Stereo.  Once again, Cleopatra Entertainment, the movie entertainment subsidiary of Cleopatra Records, continues to restrain their releases from full fidelity potential with not only a lossy surround sound format but also, compositionally, with combined tracks that rise and dive in bitrate, suppressing the audio quite a bit and then, randomly at varying intervals, relieves the pressure to provide a full-bodied, atmospheric contingent of diegetic sounds.  The notifiable difference is staggering and greatly exampled by Simon Phillips voice that sounds anemically high at a lower decoding rate then, all of the sudden, booms with accented resonation and vitality in it’s true uncompressed state. The uncompressed audio layer may not be as expansive but contains no stark erroneousness.  English captions are optional.  A scene clip fluid Blu-ray menu, framed by that same dark red, jet-black delimitation has a special features section only to offer little of said special features with a theatrical trailer and pictorial slideshow.  The physical release has a nice and simplistic black and red illustrative cover that’s a tell-all of what to expect.  The Blu-ray Amaray that holds the disc pressed with the same front cover art has no other supplements.  The region free Blu-ray has a runtime of 90 minutes and is unrated.

Last Rites: “Silent Bite” may not be the main present in Santa’s sack of sordid slayers but it’s definitely a stocking stuffer worthy of kicking off the Christmas season.

Santa Clauses vs Vampires in “Silent Bite” Now Available!

Death Penalized EVIL Returns to Wreak Havoc on Young Women. “The Stay Awake” reviewed! (Cheezy Movies / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Can You Keep Your Eyes Open at “The Stay Awake?”  On DVD now!

America, 1969. William John Brown brutally slays and sexually assaults 11 women. Before a judge, the serial killer is sentenced to death by gas chamber where his last words proclaim him as the Angel of Darkness sent Earthbound to ravage women. Nearly 20-years later in 1988, the St. Mary’s School for Girls in Europe is holding a stay awake event where a handful of students and one chaperone stay up the entire night as a fundraiser for their school. Dark and nearly vacant, the school basks in an eerie haven for the murderous William John Brown’s returning spirit seeking new souls of the softer sex. Determined to protect the girls at all costs, chaperone Trish Walton will not stop protecting the frightened girls until the entity is destroyed but when the ethereal malevolent spirit takes shape of a monstrous rodent with outstretching attack tentacles and psychokinetic glowing eyes, chances of survival are bleak.

Malevolent forces crossing oceans to death grip the innocent are films that are few and far in between as most transatlantic terror usually stays put, regionalized and localized to keep an authentic aural blend of superstition and history. Director John Bernard attempts to go against the grain with a small crowd of filmmakers who either overcame the parochial provenance and succeeded tenfold or became lost in foreign land narrative and failed miserably.  Bernard and, assumed brother, Johan Bernard co-write “The Stay Awake,” a South African mixed lot of horror elements brewed together into a supernatural schlocker that’s one-half dark and stormy night, gloomy Church Gothicism and one-half final girl survival slasher but equal parts outlandishly overexerted ghost thriller stretching across multiple continents.  “The Stay Awake” is a product of Heyns Film & Television Productions, produced by Thys Heyns of South African action-thriller flicks, as well as produced by Paul Raleigh, the producer of the “From Dusk Till Dawn” and the notable Millennium Films cofounder Avi Lerner, of “American Ninja” and “The Expendables” franchises, in one of his earliest credits from 1988.

Though the story begins in America and mostly takes place in Europe, the cast is comprised of mostly South Africans trying to pass their accents for British English that is more like a rotating centrifuge of South African sub-accents.  Shirley Jane Harris (“The Most Dangerous Woman Alive”) spearheads the cast of principals with an extremely proclaiming protagonist, delivering lines with flatfeet and flat inflection that makes her one of the more forgettable final girls.  Her foe compares just as bland with a grunting, bodiless entity floating through corridors and hiding behind indoor plants (why would an imperceptible spirit need to hide behind anything at all?) before manifesting into what looks like a giant, big-eyed, and built on steroids rodent that then shows the William John Brown (Lindsay Reardon, “The Masque of the Red Death”) in side profile speaking in omnipresent and menacingly through the beast to taunt his prey.  The script allows just enough the group of young, private school girls to standout cliquishly, contain an ounce of contempt for each other, and underpin some form of individualism to make them retain some interest in their wellbeing.  However, most of the buildup that’s created to antagonize or unify between their personalities ultimately fizzle out into resembling something along the lines of kowtowing sheep or lemmings in more ways than one.  “The Stay Awake” caffeinates with a sizeable cast including Tanay Gordon (“Hellgate”), Jayne Hutton, Michelle Carey, Maxine John (“Howling IV: The Original Nightmare”), Hellie Oeschger, Joanna Rowlands (“Armageddon: The Final Challenge”) as the damsels, Bart Fouche (“Monster Hunter”), Clinton Ephron, Warren Du Preez, and Pierre Jacobs as the imposing boys, and Ken Marshall (“Return of the Family Man”) as the school’s night caretaker.

John and Johan Bernard’s logline for “The Stay Awake” likely looked appealing on paper but a full story treatment begs to differ with an inscrutable concept from start-to-finish.  “The Stay Awake” wades in generalities, oversimplifying locations and periods such as “America, 1969” and “Europe, 1988.”  The setup meat in between the disjointed times periods sets up a standard yet effective backstory for the killer, William John Brown, with a Judge’s voiceover of all his brutal transgressions, flashbacks of his victims at the death scene, and a slow walk down the corridor to the gas chamber that clearly denote him as the villain but then accentuates his supernatural supervillainy with a demonic voice screaming his return before the gas engulfs him.  However, why move from America to Europe and why in the span of 19 years does an unexplained possessed version of William John Brown return and select a group of religious school girls while his previous victims look to be a pact of randoms from off the street?  From the start, “The Stay Awake” has little to stay our fictional plausibility.  Couple the perplexation with dry performances, a possibly Hell originated monstrous, burning eyes rat creature, and the gratuitous horror nudity rug being pulled from under our feet as the schoolgirls tease with a shower scene only to be shown showering with towels wrapped around them and what has looked to be a promising possession of perpetual pandemonium  has quickly turned into a deflated disappointment with the only really good thing to come out of the film is the stationary man in a creature suit rat monster built like a bodybuilder.

“The Stay Awake” arrives onto DVD distributed by Cheezy Movies in a direct rip of the standard definitional 480i VHS transfer with a letterbox 1.33:1 aspect ratio.  Don’t expect a detailed transfer in a jittery and smoothed over standard definition that’s covered in a harsh blue tinted lens, but the condition of the interlaced video is surprisingly close to being damage free in a well-cared for print.  However, delph and range is difficult to determine due to the obvious lack of delineation but mostly because of the blue tint, poorly lit scenes, and contrast levels that make this presentation nearly pitch-black unwatchable in corridors, classrooms, and in the room of the like, but darkness is seriously enhanced and meshed together by Bernard stylistic choices of backlighting characters or using soft light to center the focus to offer a darkened horror picture. An English Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo serves as the only audio option which differentiates the soundtrack from the rest of the tracks.  Dialogue mostly separates itself to the top of the audio dogpile but is also well imbedded into the other track fighting to be heard that renders the dialogue dull and flat behind a wall of constant and diffused feedback static.  There’s also hissing at the tail end of sentences and faint crackling throughout.  Subtitles are not available.  The only extras on the static menu are back-to-back, quasi-grindhouse style trailers for two Cheezy Movies distributed titles of the blaxploitation “The Man from Harlem” and a “Dirty-Dozen”-esque “Commandoes.”  The physical aspects include a standard black DVD snapper with a rather enticing original title being sandwich with the demon’s glowing eyes on top and four schoolgirls ready to fight at the bottom.  The disk art is the same image except the four schoolgirls are cropped out and an unfortunate placement on the “The” from the title finds it punched out by the disc center/disc lock to just reveal “Stay Awake.”  The rated-R DVD has a region free playback and a runtime of 85 minutes.  “The Stay Awake” has all the indications of a cheap imitation on an established horror formula and this particular physical release doesn’t help the feature’s cause with an extremely dark and nebulous image to match its narrative.

Can You Keep Your Eyes Open at “The Stay Awake?”  On DVD now!

https://vimeo.com/814964711

An Evil Hangover is No Match Against…”Rotgut” review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on

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Six patrons become trapped inside a dilapidating New Mexico drinking hole when tainted Mexican tequila infests an unlucky boozer, turning him into a host for flesh-eating larvae and into an unwilling hand against the rest in seeking desperately for more flesh to feast upon. With the back and front doors inoperable and the phone lines dead due to lack of payment, the bar regulars must use every ounce of their fleeting sobriety and every aspect of the small hole in the wall bar to keep hope carbonated and afloat if they want to escape alive.
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If you’re a fan of “Night of the Creeps,” “Slugs,” or “Slither,” this campy creepy-crawler will be your go-to session brew of choice because, finally, 2012’s “Rotgut” infests inside a home video distributor, courtesy of always delightful Camp Motion Picture. Director Billy Garberina helms the charge collaborating with another of Devin O’Leary’s scribed films involving a drinking establishment’s handful of thirsty-allured anti-heroes finding themselves literally fighting through their inebriated state against almost exactly the same intoxicating liquid they so desperately crave. Sure beats the hell out of an AA meeting.
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“Rotgut,” simply put, is just not another run-of-the-mill creature film, oozing a path toward lovers of the said genre while still managing to follow a familiar suit within a typical bar location that becomes the death ensnarement, but this time around, a congregation of alcoholics are the hapless victims that are pitted up against the odds, similar to that of Robert Rodriguez’s “From Dusk till Dawn” and John Gulager’s “Feast,” but with more enticing and gross body horror and less antagonizing vampires and monsters.
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Structurally, O’Leary individually sets up the players – Leon, Tom, Sloppy, Verna, Deena, Allen, and The Professor – to instill a developing persona or just provide an interesting backstory into each body that adds flavor to their character that would evidently punch you in the face when that character bites the fateful bullet and instead of creating good natured, outstanding personalities to fight a ghastly force, as if to underline good versus evil, the roster consists of deplorable and degenerative drunks embodied with past, present, and future hiccups and are on the cusp of not being redeemable toward being a part of society until faced with life and death choices to expose their true nature. Then, there is trio of ATF officers who are literal to each of the words of the acronym they represent; one officer smokes cigarettes, another drinks out of a flask, and the last official carries a sidearm. The dialogue-stricken characters need no exposition as they’re cleverly written into the story that’s already exchanges heavy in confabulation amongst the main roles mentioned above.
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The impressiveness with Hank Carlson and teams’ practical effects don’t go unnoticed while, at the same time, the composite shots from visual effects artist Luke Fitch were just as effective. Both departments relayed the visceral consuming nature of the worms, splattering eye-popping blood everywhere, and transmitting their antibiosis organism through some fairly gnarly ways. Working with sluggishly minuscule organisms, whether digital, inanimately practically, or real, can be problematic, but Gaberina and team had the precision and the talent that made “Rotgut” outlandishly enjoyable with a half gallon handle of smeared blood slicked over the cast including Jeremy Owen, Aaron Worley, Megan Pribyl, Paul Alsing, Merritt Glover, Isreal Wright, and Whitney Moore.
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Four years have swiftly gone by since this film quietly made debut in 2012 and has finally landed onto DVD from the fine folks at Camp Motion Pictures! “Rotgut” has undeservingly gone under the radar, but it shall no more, gifting audiences with supreme worm mayhem and bloodshed. The not rated DVD is presented in a 16×9 widescreen format with bonus features including a trailer vault and a lengthy behind-the-scenes featurette that displays the good times, and sometimes stressful times, of independent filmmaking. In the end, “Rotgut” come out on top with the gooiest, slimiest, and stickiest creature feature this side of the 2010.

You can BUY “Rotgut” at Amazon! Let it slither into your soul!

Seeing Evil! Curandero: Dawn of the Demon review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on

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By now I imagine we’re all, by all I mean avid movie-goers, familiar with the director Robert Rodriguez. The balls-to-the-wall flare for action Rodriguez has written and directed some of the most memorable movies in nearly the last two decades – Desperado, From Dusk till Dawn, Planet Terror and, yes, even Spy Kids. Rodriguez is now a well-known household name now that he has his own production company – Troublemaker Studios – and is a hot-shit friend of Django Unchained writer and director Quentin Tarantino (they’re always in each other films if you haven’t noticed). Now, I had thought that I’ve seen all of Rodriguez’s work with the exception of Spy Kids, but I was wrong. Curandero: Dawn of the Demon is a latest release from Lionsgate; however, the movie was completed and released in 2005 – why such a delay? Perhaps the delay was a product of the film being made in and using the language spoken in Mexico. I wouldn’t doubt this as El Mariachi was not known to the American audience until Antonio Banderas and Selma Hayek starred in Desperado, a sort of sequel or remake of El Mariachi, and an American DVD of El Mariachi was released later.

Curandero, which translate to The Healer, follows the healer Carlos – a practical man who uses his knowledge of healing on those he think are weak minded fools just so they feel better about their lives. That is until he meets Mexican Federale Magdalena who hires him to become involved a case where a satanic cult terrorizes Mexico City. Carlos beliefs will be challenged as black magic becomes ultimately real and the forces against him are closer to home than what he could ever imagine.
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Curandero grabs you right from the start as we’re thrown into Carlos’s simple hometown world where he competes with another curandero named Alex Munez who is more popular around town, but even though Carlos thinks his line of work is a bit of a sham, he still makes an effort to please other people making him well liked in the community and has been given respect due to his father’s healing services. The horrifying action begins when Agent Magdalena enters the story; the saucy tall Latina is a realist and doesn’t much in the mumbo-jumbo that is black magic, but her story makes a complete 180 degree turn at the finale and so does Carlos. The story is well written by Rodriguez giving the both Carlos and the federale the same view on spirituality yet making both reason completely different.

Robert Rodriguez’s style directorial feels implemented into Curandero even though Robert Rodriguez didn’t direct the film. It is another Rodriguez who takes the credit for Curandero’s fast-paced, over-exaggerated action. Director Eduardo Rodriguez tries to recreate Robert Rodriguez, but does molds his own take to reconstruct the elements and add great horror qualities that contribute to the action.
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This 2005 cult/possession film should have had a much earlier release in the U.S. There is definitely an appeal here for niche horror fans. Would Curandero have done well with mainstream audiences? No because there is just too much working against Curandero when considering American mainstream audiences – it’s in Spanish, it’s lost in translation with the dialogue, and it deals with some Mexican traditions. Certainly pick this up from Lionsgate Home Entertainment. Curandero will fill your cup of blood and horror.

Sofia Vergara’s Big Evil Guns! Machete Kills poster!

Posted by Steven Lewis on

To be honest with you, I was not a very big fan of Machete. Robert Rodriguez’s concept of a vengeful former Mexican Federale out for blood came off as a neat idea when previewed as a spoof trailer from Grindhouse. And having the hard-ridden look of Danny Trejo portray the character is a match made in hell! What was not to love when the news broke that Rodriquez would actually be writing and directing a feature film a few years later. Yet, I was let down and the sort of slap-stick, roughly edited film just didn’t hold the same thrill as the trailer had spun into me.

Machete must have done well enough to warrant a sequel that I will surely grant audience, but the new poster feature Sofia Vergara and her machine gun tits just screams bland, same old exploitation by Robert Rodriequez, feeling the same similarity with From Dusk till Dawn and the crotch gun worn by Tom Savini. Does Robert Rodriguez feel that privates are ultimately dangerous and should be considered hands off in the eyes of a good Catholic? See the poster below.

Sofia Vergara and her heavy artillery.

Sofia Vergara and her heavy artillery.

Machete Kills does sport a motley crew of a cast that includes fallen angels as Charlie Sheen and Mel Gibson. Also appearing would be William Sadler, Cuba Gooding Jr, Amber Heard and Lady Gaga. But of course this would not be a Robert Rodriguez film without his usual cast of actors such as Michelle Rodriguez, Jessica Alba, Tom Savini, Antonio Banderas, and Electra and Elise Avellan. Machete Kills is slated for a September 13, 2013 release.