Tag Archives: horror

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

Posted by Steven Lewis on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Return Home to Discover Dad’s An EVIL SOB! “The Abandoned” reviewed! (Unearthed Films / Limited-Edition Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Don’t Be Left Behind. Get Your LE Blu-ray Copy of “The Abandoned” from Unearthed Films

Marie Jones never knew her parents.  Born in Russian, raised in the London, and now lives in the U.S., the low-budget movie producer receives news from a Russian estate notary providing her details on her murdered mother back in 1966 and her existence entitles her to the isolated family farm.  Unable to resist the urge to find out about her mysterious past, Marie travels to her parents’ dilapidated farm settled on an island encircled by a river.  There she meets Nicolai claiming to be her twin brother and that he also, after a similar call from the notary, felt pulled to their family home on the verge of their upcoming birthday, but they’re not totally alone.  Trapped on land that won’t allow them to leave, Marie and Nicolai run into their undead doppelgangers that impel them to dig into their family history and uncover the gruesome truth to what happened to their mother.  All the while, the house around them rewinds back in time before age and weather have taken a toll and the souls living in what was once a home return to bring the family back together again.

A past drawing near story stretching from 1966 and 2008, “The Abandoned” is a haunted house, supernatural, and circular tale that bears down a forlorn ancestry nightmare onto ensnared curious lineage wanderers, bringing them back into a vicious cycle of a family history that should have been left alone.  “Aftermath” and “Genesis” short film director Nacho Cerdá tries his hand at less necrophilia and gore for more daring, open-to-interpretation horror with the Karim Hussain (“Subconscious Cruelty”) original script with some rewrites and sprucing done by “Dust Devil” and “Hardware’s” Richard Stanley.  Filmed in Bulgaria to double as the scenic landscapes and to use the country’s looming, enveloping trees as another margining aspect of being trapped, “The Abandoned,” initially title as “The Bleeding Compass” on Hussain’s original script, is produced by Julio and Carlols Fernández, Kwesi Dickson, Stephen Margolis, and Alexander Metodiev under Castelao Producciones, Filmax International, and Filmstudio Bojana with Future Films’ Carola Ash and Albert Martinez Martin serving as associate producers.

“The Abandoned’s” modest budget regulates casting to, at that time, relative unknowns for the U.S. market but certainly not an experienced lot between English actress Anastasia Hille (“Snow White and the Huntsman,” “Martyrs Lane”) and Karel Roden (“Orphan,” “Hellboy’) playing reunited brother and sister Marie and Nicolai who have not been together since infancy.  Separated at the demise of their mother, Marie and Nicolai have undoubted hesitation to their relation, especially both are met by grisly versions of themselves in the old family homestead.  The double versions of themselves represent a dual life, one connected to their current path, and one connected to their past, and Hille and Roden play into that theme with fortitude and fear in how the past haunts their characters connected to a shadow world in a very “Silent Hill” way.   Hille brings complexity to Marie’s own troubled relation with her daughter, a character we don’t necessarily see physically on screen, but we understand through phone conversations and brief interactions with Uncle Nicolai that the foundation the mother-daughter relationship stands on is shaky and that pushes Marie to pursue the truth about her own mother to avoid that disconnection with her daughter.  For Nicolai, Roden instills a more tragically inclined façade without overcompensating with tremendous evidence in the loss of a woman he loved, aside from their matching tattoos, and his melancholic state is staid by the newfound opportunity to discover his past until unless it also becomes his downfall.  Again, we’re back to the past should stay dead, or in the past.  Hille and Roden underpin “The Abandoned” and its ghostly enigma with brief interjections of supporting ancillaries in Valentin Ganev, Carlos Reig-Plaza, Paraskeva Djukelova, and Marta Yaneva. 

“The Abandoned” is one of those circular narrative stories working toward a revelational end, one that likely won’t be pleasant.  An endless loop of trying to leave Marie and Nicolai’s childhood home only for them to be brought right back into the same room from which they started lend into a couple of preconceived notions of their ringlet wretchedness, both in circumstance and in life, and that being either they’re already dead and in a purgatory or their grieved existence has warped them into a psychological break when returning to a decaying land left in the memories of the heinous death of their mother.  Both theories incorporate a supernatural element where time reverses and, coinciding with the twins’ upcoming birthday, a clock ticks down that will bring the family whole again, this time in the afterlife if the unnatural powers to be have anything to say about it.  That’s the definitive beauty of “The Abandoned’s” open air forbidding allegories with the more than one interpretational rivulets spreading in different directions, shaped idiosyncratically by Marie or Nicolai’s life.  What helps the impervious fate outcome of the principals is that “The Abandoned” also has strong, poignant visuals as a foothold into keeping audiences intrigued on what could be a slippery slope of symbolism.  A mix of practical and composite effects, done amazingly through the editing process, sell duality on every layer as if we’re experiencing two worlds during a collision and waiting with anticipation for one to engulf the other. 

Unearthed Films brings “The Abandoned” home on a limited-edition Blu-ray home video. The AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50 capacity houses plenty of breathing room for the claustrophobia details to writhe within. Middle-to-higher contrast levels that throw out good shadows without being extremely inky, there’s spectrum discoloration from blotchy-banding, suggesting a good encoded transfer that deciphers more details rather than squeezing everything in under a lossy codec. Range of the darker graded feature does favor a generous bluish green for the interiors while natural light swarms and illuminates into the exteriors, brighten up Anatasia Hille’s already blonde enough hair to almost pure yellow. Fine details pervade over much of the duration, only relinquishing details for dark, cavernous moments to scare up apprehension levels. The English DTS-HD 5.1 and the PCM 2.0 give viewers lossless fidelity and flexibility with audio setups. I preferred the stereo with robust dual channel dialogue; however, the 5.1 showed signs of directional awareness – rustling of leaves, ghostly voices, etc. – through the back and side channels. Dialogue is prominent and clear on both audio options and free of intrusion and interference. English and Spanish subtitles are optionally available. Special features include an abundant of new material exclusively produced by and curated from Unearthed Films, including new, individual interviews with director Nacho Cerdá, screenwriter Karim Hussain, and screenwriter Richard Stanley; there are also new furnished for this release alternate endings that more so involve Marie’s daughter, deleted and extended scenes cut for timing and flow, and outtakes. Archived bonus content has a Making of featurette, location vision in “The Abandoned’s” den, a featurette of Nacho Cerdá: The Trail of Death that looks at the director’s earlier horror inspirations of his trilogy of death shorts, The Little Secrets of Nacho Cerdá goes further into the director’s insights for his varied take on “The Abandoned” story, Nacho Cerdá has a conversational horror discussion with friend Douglas Buck, director of 2006’s “Sisters,” promotional and storyboards gallery, trailers, and a BD-ROM storyboard collection. The limited-edition release has a lissome cardboard slipcover with original poster art of the blood-crying doll from “The Abandoned” on the front. Inside, a standard Blu-ray Amary case has the same cover art image that’s also pressed on the disc. There are no inserts included. The rated-R release has region A playback only and a runtime of 99 minutes.

Last Rites: A step back from the gore and revulsion, Nacho Cerdá is able to scare stiff with “The Abandoned,” a dead and buried family abstrusity squaring the score for lost time by reversing time to welcome back those left living, and Unearthed Films’ limited-edition release is the best version to date that deserves a warm homecoming for its icy, taciturn atmosphere.

Don’t Be Left Behind. Get Your LE Blu-ray Copy of “The Abandoned” from Unearthed Films

Blind, EVIL, Undead Templar Knights Hunt for a Bite to Eat! “Tombs of the Blind Dead” reviewed! (Synapse / Special Edition 2-DiscBlu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Tombs of the Blind Dead” 2-Disc Blu-ray Available for Purchase Here!

Maria, Betty and Roger take a train across the Spanish countryside to see the landscape sights.  When Maria feels like a third wheel stuck in between Betty and Roger’s flirtations, she jumps off the moving train, leaving her friends aboard, and camping out under the ruins of an old countryside Church.  There’s only one problem, the Church was home to the ancient order of the Knights of Templar who took a blood oath for Satan by sacrificing young virgins by drinking their blood and lynched by the Church for their crimes against man and God.  The Cursed Knights, reduced to rags, bones, and without eyes, rise from underneath their graves every night and roam the countryside on the hunt for anybody in proximity they can feast upon.  Betty and Roger learn of Maria’s strange demise without knowing the details and form a four-person search party only to step into the same dangerous den of the Knights of Templar. 

“Tombs of the Blind Dead,” or as known as the U.S. as just “The Blind Dead,” is the first in a series of four undead Templar Knights films that would come to be known as The Blind Dead collection by Spanish filmmaker Amando de Ossorio.  Natively titled “La noche del terror ciego” was released in 1971 and penned by Ossorio who laid a new path of Spanish horror that didn’t involve Paul Naschy or Jess Franco with undoubtedly slow dread of the undead that resembled more of the Italian-bred beyond the grave films where ghouls and ghosts return to life and wreak bloody havoc on the living, a guise for social context and for political dictatorship.  Themes of rebellions, rape, and bisexuality course through the feature’s necrotic veins as the film receives Spanish and Portugal co-production support from Plata Films and Interfilme with executive producer Salvadore Romero (“The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman”) spearheading pre-production and behind the scenes.   

Following of a newly formed trio of friends traveling the countryside to take in the sights, an underlying green-eyed trouble brews right from the moment when an enchanted Roger, the debut film and character of 1973’s “Green Inferno’s” César Burner, meets gorgeous red head Betty, “It Happened at Nightmare Inn’s” Lone Fleming,” and Roger’s travel companion and Betty’s Catholic boarding school roommate/best friend, Virginia, “The House that Screamed’s Maria Elena Arpón, feels the twinges of jealousy as her amorous covets for Roger never materializes and she sees her future with relationship with roger forever in the friend zone.  Virginia becomes so intolerant of Roger and Betty’s innocent flirtations that she’s willing to hop off a not-so-speeding train and camp inside the creepy, ruined structures at centerstage of a burial ground.  Arpón’s passive aggressive behavior is quite convincing, even the part where she tucks and rolls off a moving train in what stupid things do when people are frustrated, especially in the gray territory of love.  The love triangle is so simplistically arranged, each behavioral component goes without being farfetched.  From Virginia’s first sexual experience at the caressive, soft hands of her roommate/best friend Betty while at boarding school to Roger and Betty’s blameless attraction to one another that spurs Virginia’s irrational, self-serving behavior, Ossorio’s characters are written very well when homogeneously compared to other outside of cinema love triangles.  José Thelman (“Night of the Sorcerers”) indulges as the smuggler swine Pedro who’s roped into the reconning of the Templar tomb to clear his name with authorities by proving someone else had murdered Roger and Betty’s friend.  Joined by his floosy sidepiece María, played by another María in the iconic Spanish B-horror actress.  María Silva (“The Awful Dr. Orlof”), Pedro brutishly flaunts arrogance and confidence, taking what he wants, especially with the women uncharmed by the male sex, and that’s curious, fluid attribute when he attacks Betty but in the wake of the moment, the two of them are silently surfeited as they share the scene and that’s severely different from what anyone other filmmaker was doing at that time.  Andrés Isbert (“The Kovak Box”), Antonio Orengo (“Love Letters of a Nun”), Francisco Sanz (“Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!”), Rufino Inglés, and Verónica Llimerá (“Hatchet for the Honeymoon”) round out the cast.

Performances give “Tombs of the Blind Dead” credibility in anxiety-riddled survival and turbulent human interactions but where those performances start to give way coincides with Ossorio’s building of dread.  No doubt the use of slow-motion sets the ghoulish, harrowing tone of the depraved, unabating, skeletally-cursed Templar Knights giving chase on horseback as they track down their flailing fresh meat, but in the process of that spinetingling, in between the Knights self-unearthing and the eventual snare and snack of their human victims, Ossorio doesn’t quite know how to flesh out formidable trepidation.  Pursued, screaming characters stand in the face of danger as if their feet are hardened in cement, stopping at every brief moment when out of sight of the hooded decaying bones and rags with dusty swords, and absentmindedly run right into the exposed radius and ulnas of the slow-moving and blind medieval damned maniacs in sequences that run out too long to be wholly gratifying.  Ossorio better pedestals the ingrained Spanish themes of never escaping your gruesome, haunting past, as seen with the circular narrative of always return back to the Knight’s ruins, and the sexual taboos of bisexuality and rape that lead to destruction.  These course through a more classically presented gothic horror. Perhaps explaining the fervent melodramatics of flamboyant fear, under the dictatorship regime of Francisco Franco and his cult-like ritualization in fascism oversight of Spain.

The sightless, flesh-feasting Templar Knights have found a new home in the Synapse Films’ tomb of terror with a new restoration transfer on a 2-Disc Blu-ray. Refurbished from the uncut original camera negative, the AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50 capacity suppresses any compression issues to display polychromatic decadence in front of a backdrop of steely graded blues. Plenty of a darker scenes to be affected by artefact corruption but the blacks are greatly dyed-in-the-wood saturated and not delineated or in spectrum of lesser decoding. Scenes never approach being flat, in color tone and in field depth, as beads of glistening sweat can be visually elaborated on and the distinction between color, shadow, and scale discern wonderfully. Two audio option tracks are available: a lossless Spanish PCM 2.0 mono track and a lossless hybrid of Spanish-English (Spanglish?) PCM 2.0 mono track. Both tracks are of a post-production dub with the Spanish option having greater synchrony with the articulating native Spanish actors of this Spanish coproduction. Audibly clean with little-to-no hissing, popping, or crackling, Synapse’s singular restoration is in good company with a high impact, high clarity, and low distortion dialogue track that meets eye-to-eye with the visual components as well as the film’s ambience cluster and Antón García Abril’s breathy and discordant, Gothically canticle score. Option subtitles are available in English on both tracks. Special features on the first disc contains individual audio commentaries by horror film historian Troy Howarth, Betty actress Lone Fleming, and the NaschyCast podcasters Troy Guinn and Rod Barnett. A feature-length documentary Marauders from the Mediterranean go from head-to-toe on not just detail Ossorio’s “Tombs of the Blind Dead” as the Spanish stamp in the juggernauting zombie genre of the times but also going in depth with the Spanish laid in horror from the 1960s to 1980s, featuring interviews with Lone Fleming, John Russo (“Night of the Living Dead”), director Jorge Grau (“The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue”), Sitges Film Festival director Mike Hostench, critics Kim Newman and John Martin, film academics Steve Jones and Calum Waddell, actors Helge Line, Manuel de Blas, Antonio Mayans, and Jack Taylor, and even Paul Naschy’s son, Sergio Molina. An alternate U.S. opening sequence Revenge of Planet Ape gives expositional insight on how the success of “The Plant of the Apes” films influenced the American distribution market to rebrand “Tombs of the Blind Dead” as an ape rebellion piece to ride the coattails of the series’ success on a lower, foreign budget. Rounding out the special features is a featurette Awakening of Spanish Horror Cinema, Salem Pop’s “Templar Tears” music video, the original theatrical trailer, and a still gallery. While Synapse has 3-Disc limited-edition set of only 4000 copies made with all the bells-and-whistles of the visual elements of new artwork, a slipcover, and a 3rd disc audio CD, the 2-Disc standard edition comes with all the same special features and all three versions of the film inside the black Amaray Blu-ray case and classic “Tombs of the Blind Dead” poster for cover art. Inside, you’ll get Synapse’s physical media catalogue and a disc on each side of the Amaray’s interior with disc 1 “Tombs of the Blind Dead” and disc 2 “The Blind Dead,” housing the shortened 83-minute U.S. re-edit on a BD25, that sport their own pressed artworks. The uncut disc 1 has a runtime of 101-minutes and has region free playback.

Last Rites: “Tombs of the Blind Dead” is Spain’s answer to “Night of the Living Dead” with discerning individualities ingrained by director Amando de Ossorio to include his country’s own social and political subtext and while Blue Underground’s The Blind Dead DVD collection is an impressive physical media crown jewel of upscaled 720p, the Blu-ray gods favor Synapse with an impressive hi-def A/V release with stellar bonus features.

“Tombs of the Blind Dead” 2-Disc Blu-ray Available for Purchase Here!

Underneath the Pulpit Waits an EVIL Difficult to Stomach! “The Borderlands” reviewed! (Second Sight Films / Limited Edition Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Order the Limited Edition Blu-ray of “The Borderlands” Here at Amazon.com

After exposing phony divine miracles at a Catholic Church in Brazil that resulted in the death of fellow Catholics, including a Cardinal, Vatican investigator and religious brother Deacon starts to lose faith with every fraud upon fraud case that points to the non-existence of a higher being.  Having fallen on the drink, the skeptical Deacon is dispatched to the English countryside of Devon where a Father Crellick had reopened a 13th century abandoned church and has been experiencing, in the Father’s words, miracles from God.  Joined by a Gray, a hired technology expert with agnostic beliefs, and a stern Father Mark, eager to disprove another false hope, the three men descend upon the Church with full, unequivocal examination to swiftly reveal the hoax and part ways.  Tensions rise between when logical explanation can’t be unearthed during Church rumblings, disembodied baby cries, and a behind-the-wall, shifting scratch sound that leads them to an underground labyrinth that will swallow them whole. 

Released in the U.S. under the title “Final Prayer,” Elliot Goldner’s 2013, found-footage UK horror “The Borderlands” is the director’s debut, and only, feature that places you right into the belly of the beast at POV level.  In a sea of found footage horror, “The Borderlands” seizes the opportunity to separate itself from the overwhelming portions of shaky camera, purposeful variable video and audio quality, and practical, obscured effects to put into question the strength of faith, specifically here in the Catholic setting, and what ultimately brings about the inevitable in that no matter what religious denomination or outlook you might have, no one is exempt from the grim reality that awaits.  Filmed mostly on location in Devon, UK, as well as West Ogwell and Chislehurst, London for many of the interior scenes, “The Borderlands” is a production of Metrodome Distribution and is produced by Jennifer Handorf (“Prevenge”) with Jezz Vernon (“They’re Outside”) serving as executive producer. 

Our team of Vatican investigators follows three men with starkly differing handles on religious faith.  Coinciding on their stance on the existence of a higher power, individualistically, they’re also incompatible to each other which makes for palpable tension and livens up the dynamic when predictability and patterns can be discerned with likeminded characters.  On the scale of human compositions, polar opposite of both spirituality and comportment is Father Mark (Aidan McArdle, “Metamorphosis”), a by-the-book priest unamused by the elaborate ruses created by those swimming in the same faith pool as himself, and Gray (Robin Hill, “Meg 2:  The Trench”), an untroubled, exuberant, hired techie eager to believe the face-value of the supposed miracles before him.  Aidan McArdle’s tenacity for dogma character comes through well enough to know that good Irish Catholic Father Mark is about as numb as the next investigating Catholic never on the verge of a true miracle as the frustration just oozes out him after one after another hoax divine ephiphany.  Robin Hill, on the other hand, could be the best John Oliver, of Max’s “Last Week Tonight,” impersonator I’ve ever seen and heard.  In all serious, Hill exacts a man looking for religion through the lens of paycheck and a fanboy of the supernatural, like as if the average horror movie enthusiastic came upon the real Freddy Kruger and just geeks the Hell out.  Then, there’s Deacon (Gordon Kennedy, (“T2 Trainspotting”) and like Father Mark, Deacon’s faith hangs in the balance after a botched investigator inadvertently sees the death of a Cardinal at the hands of pious locals.  Kennedy doubles down with Deacon’s wavering faith by drowning the character in alcohol and doubting every inexplicable Devon church oddity.  Yet, Deacon and Gray meld together to a near swap of credence, seesawing in their religious principles, when the things that go bump in the church can’t be explained.  Luke Neal (“Wilderness”) and Patrick Godfrey (“The Count of Monte Cristo”), who’s been practicing the acting craft for over half a century, play a couple of dissimilar priests lured by the Church’s mysterious forces.

What’s noticeably different about this particular bleak found footage nailbiter is the audience is integrated into story by the investigator’s strapped-on headcam, not just some schmo glued to a handheld camcorder running, yelling, and hiding for his life while still depressing the record button.  There’s also the element of a shrouded backstory that becomes unraveled overtime and speaks volumes to a couple of the character’s colorful conducts.  Those elements are then intensified by the cinematic crux, an archaic, resurrected small church’s unexplainable, mostly terrifying, daily disturbances the local priest indiscriminately deems miracles.  Not a single character has arbitrary or useless purpose for the sake of being an in-frame victim of circumstance as each exhibit a radical change over the course of investigation, adding copious ground to the big question, the question that’s on every character’s mind, is there an almighty presence beyond our corporeal plane and cerebral understanding really exist?  Come to find out, the characters are not asking the right question and get sucked into a terror on the terra the more curious they become in finding God amongst them.  Often times, found footage doesn’t fit into the storyline, whether be the aforesaid necessarily handling of the camera through the an insane ordeal or just doesn’t work with a regularly structured narrative, but “The Borderlands” couldn’t be received with success without the stunt of seeing through the eyes of the characters that subsequently emits a trick of light or an overactive imagination that smooths out solid jump scares when needed in what is a definitely watch in the dark type diabolical goosebumper. 

Second Sight Films takes charge with curating a definitive, all-expense paid trip to Elliot Goldner’s “The Borderlands” on Blu-ray home video.  The AVC encoded, high definition 1080p, BD50, hovering around 24 FPS and presented in an anamorphc widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio, leverages the capacity and the encoding to sharpen a relatively dark picture with more clarity without losing the unsettling spookiness with overreaching contrast.  Image presentation resembles closer to an upscaled 720p because of the found footage piece, and so we experience patchy spots, static ripples, and other miscellaneous plays into the supernatural sarcophagus that is the Devon church.  Skin tones and grading stays in tune with a brightly lit infusion of handheld torches as well as delineating the necessary with night vision cameras.  Goldner does a fine job with depth with the viewers being the foreground and using a lot of the peripheral and background to keep things hair-raising and interesting.  The English DTS-HD 5.1 audio track has lossless compression and really does throb with a wallop of balanced LFE and to-scaled dialogue.  What throws me off about this particular found footage, as well as some select others, that I find more a bothersome nuisance than a technical gaffe is an inlaid soundtrack.  A slow burn industrial score is used for “The Borderlands” to promote a greater sense of ominous omniety, like a background, repetitive, and sometimes swelling drone you might hear in certain first-person shooters from 20 to 30 years back. Dialogue tops the audio layers without being diluted by poor onboard cameras or having to contend with too much with the score, suggesting well-placed mics and sound design to achieve appropriate range and depth inside the frame configuration or even off-frame, behind or to the side of camera. Optional English subtitles are available. Like most Second Sight Films limited editions, “The Borderlands'” set packs a punch with encoded special features, such as a new audio commentary with actors Robin Hill and Gordon Kennedy, producers Jennifer Handorf, and special effects designer Dan Martin, a new interview that brings Robin Hill and Gordon Kennedy recollecting the behind-the-scenes and their characters in Dressed the Part, a new interview with producer Jennifer Handorf in Losing Faith, a new interview with special effects artist Dan Martin in Monster Goo, and a behind-the-scenes archival featurette. The limited-edition portion of this set includes a rigid slipcase with gorgeously bleak and grim illustrated artwork by Christopher Shy, a thick, 70-page color and black and white book with pictorials and new perspective and analytical essays from Tim Coleman, Martyn Conterio, Shellie McMurdo, and Johnny Walker, and 6 collector’s art cards, mostly resembling a distorted interlaced video and in an imperial purple-ish appearance from haunting scenes of the film. The artwork sheathed inside the translucent green Amaray case is the same as slipcase with no reverse cover work; it’s also pressed on the disc art. This release came with no inserts. One of the few Second Sight limited edition pieces to be licensed with a region free playback and the film itself has a runtime of 89 minutes and is UK certified 15 for strong language and threat.

Last Rites: Second Sight’s filmic selection pool for major league limited editions has been nothing short of stellar with “The Borderlands” being their latest, but definitely not their last, to be knighted worthy of physical media acclaim. Yet, it’s not like “The Borderlands” needed the boost as the film itself has a cult following for its shuddering tale and its monstrous ending that will have you reeling, maybe even screaming, in horror.

Order the Limited Edition Blu-ray of “The Borderlands” Here at Amazon.com

He’s a Beast. He’s Ferocious. He’s EVIL! “Mad Dog Killer” reviewed! (Cheezy Movies / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Mad Dog Killer” Unleashed onto DVD!

A daring hostage-taking breakout of an Italian prison puts four of the most ruthless killers back on the streets.  Sadistic and full of revenge, Nanni Vitali, the leader of the gang, has one thing of his mind before he begins a reign of outlawing terror, to find and exact due mortal punishment on a stool pigeon that cemented his incarcerated fate during the trial.  Hot on his trail is officer Giulio Santini who will stop at nothing to bring Vitali back into custody or even put a bullet between his eyes, that is until a young woman, Giuliana Caroli, girlfriend of the police informant, becomes caught unwillingly in Vitali’s web of sexual obsession and deviant plans as she’s raped and exploited for Vitali’s personal pleasure and robbery schemes.  When the frightened Caroli betrays Vitali’s trust, she becomes a kill target while Santini’s family also falls into the miscreant’s violence coursing crosshairs. 

“Mad Dog Killer,” aka “Beast with a Gun,” aka “Ferocious Beast with a Gun,” aka “La Belva col mitra,” is an Italian action-crime thriller from the late “The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine” and “Violence for Kicks” director Sergio Grieco in what would be his last directorial before his death five years later.  The Rome-born filmmaker also writes the 1977 exploitative and violent caper with additional dialogue from fellow Roman screenwriter, and furthermore director, Enzo Milioni who has had a hand in “The Sister of Ursula” and “Escape of Death.”  A part of the larger, multi-faceted Euro Crime subgenre, or better known as Poliziotteschi, “Mad Dog Killer” hits all the trademark elements, squeezing in a packed lot of similar content as well as stretching out for breathing room by elbowing out the era popular Italian subgenre of the phasing-out Spaghetti Western and bracing for impact against the up-and-coming Giallo films which starts get a footing with Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci paving the way.  The Supercine production is produced by Armando Bertuccioli (“The Sister of Ursula”).

In the crazed-eyed, take-no-prisoners, sandy-blonde shoes of a handsome yet hardnosed criminal in Nanni Vitali is the Austrian born Helmut Berger.  The “Salon Kitty” and “The Bloodstained Butterfly” star is another international actor who found modest success in the Italian film industry of the 1960s-1970s as well as the German movie industry afterwards, but as Nanni Vitali, the rugged actor with piercing eyes doesn’t hold back in a defining performance that’s nowhere near a one-time paltry pass over.  Vitali is so animated and over-the-top, the hot-headed character completely overshadows Inspector Giulio Santini as a counterpart, played by American actor Richard Harrison of “Orgasmo Nero” and portraying many Ninja Master Gordon films in Hong Kong in the late 80s.  No Ninja kicks or ostentatious smoke screens with officer Santini in a rather matter of fact, routine chaser of escape convicts.  The personal connection he has with Nanni, where Santini’s Judge father (Claudio Gora, “The Nun and the Devil”) was Nanni’s convicting judge, is greatly underused to extrude the ferocity needed to match Nanni’s, as so he is described in one of the many titles – a ferocious beast.  This beastly criminal takes captive and tries to psychologically manipulate through sex and threat the wrong place, wrong time victim Giuliana Caroli by the chiseled facial features of Marisa Mell (“Violent Blood Bath”), a fellow Austrian actress.  Caroli’s tall and beautiful on screen but lacks that damsel in distress in initially helpless apprehension of a woman who must restructure her bearings to take matters into her own hands.  Mell’s acting is forced throughout her span, and without that frightened bird despondency in her eyes, she looks as if she could handle Nanni Vitali by herself with ease in stature, broad shoulders, and a fierce look, diminishing Richard Harrison’s Santini role almost out of the picture entirely.  “Mad Dog Killer” rounds out the cast with Marina Giordana, Luigi Bonos, Ezio Marano, Albert Squillante, Nello Pazzafini, Antonia Basile, Sergio Smacchi, and Vittorio Duse.

“Mad Dog Killer” lives up to the designation that attentively develops the lengths the titular principal will go to achieve a wrongful debt that must be paid in full with excessive violence to spare.  Sergio Grieco lays Nanni’s nihilistic sleaze and transgressions on thick, coating the character with monolithic and enduring characteristics of a sordid and lawless bandido with Spaghetti Western type intensity, especially inside a compositional scene where he slowly walks back to the car toward a frightened Giuliana Caroli, eyes affixed onto her soul, and the all-pervading, debut score by Umberto Smaila just swallows you into the moment.  Like a true mad dog, the story never lets up on an unpredictable temperament and trajectory; it foams at the mouth with rabid blackguard that is true Euro Crime fashion, but unlike most Euro Crimes, “Mad Dog Killer” ends on an unconventional note, perhaps an unsatisfactory to some, but definitely askew yet fresh compared to the genre’s dominantly preordained doppelgangers. 

A film that goes by many names usually suggests numerous releases from around the world.  “Mad Dog Killer” receives a cheapie DVD release from our friends at Cheezy Movies with a MPEG-2 encoded, standard definition 480i, DVD5.  Not an upscaled presentation, the transfer used retains the lower quality pixel count that bleeds the definition, often better in brighter contrast scenes than in the darker settings. The forced English dub LPCM mono track, though you can clearly lip read that most principals actors are speaking English, has auditory value; the lossless quality removes compression from the table, offering a clean and robust dialogue and Smaila score through just a thin, faint even, layer of interferential static, and pops. The English dub track is the only audio option available with no optional English, or any other language, subtitles. Cheezy Movies primary goal favors a feature only release so there are no special features encoded or tangible supplementary content. Cheezy Movies pulls the stark front cover image, laced intently with suspense, sex, and violence, from one of the marketing one sheets, used by other labels such as foreign companies like 88 Films and Polar. The disc is pressed with the same image. Not rated and region free, “Mad Dog Killer” has a runtime of 91 minutes.

Last Rites: An enjoyable sadist manhunt romp, “Mad Dog Killer” does criminals gone wild Italian style. Without a higher resolution release, quality of life with this Euro Crime actioner is not at peak levels but the film, by itself, lays waste to many counterparts with a fiercer hand and a charismatic leading villain in Helmut Berger that tips the scale in the film’s favor.

“Mad Dog Killer” Unleashed onto DVD!