Be Careful Of Your Friends. They May Be EVIL! “Stabbed in the Face” reviewed! (Wild Eye Releasing / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on December 19, 2023

A high school Halloween party becomes the catalytic event for a motley of friends that plan a party in a remote haunted house where the urban legend of the three legged lady had brutally slain her husband and his mistress before her own insanity was gunned down by local authorities. Simultaneously, a prison escaped murderer roams free around the same area, living a few friends on edge but reassured by the others that nothing will happen. As the party begins, sex, drugs, and alcohol fuel the night away until one of the girls winds up missing and all that is left is a blood-stained bathroom where she was last seen heading. Fingers begin pointing at each other as panic and anxiety sets in but as the thought of a deranged escape convict overtakes as best suspect, the others quickly split up to find more of their roll-in-the-hay and pothead friends only to discover the hard way that splitting up is a bad idea when hidden agendas come to light.

A character trope loaded slasher forms the foundational framework and sets up filmmaker Jason Matherne’s 2004 feature with a killer-thriller twist. With an unambiguous forthcoming of brutality right smack-dab in the middle of the title of “Stabbed in the Face,” Matherne, the low-budget director of the franchised “Goreface Killer,” an if-you-can-believe-it less profane name to the film’s true title of “the Cockfaced Killer,” helms his sophomore gruesome gorescape off a script by fellow “Goreface Killer” writer and collaborator Jared Scallions. The independent gore-and-shocker set in the late 1980s lands a setting in Louisiana and Mississippi, specifically around the off-beaten trails and areas of New Orleans, under Matherne’s New Orleans-based horror and exploitation yielding Terror Optics Films, under the copyright of CFK (Cockface Killer) Enteratinment, which innately chairs Matherne with the executive producer hat as well as with Jaren Scallions co-executive producing and having a principal role in the story.

Character clichés clutter the chain of events with your typical pot smokers (Jared Scallions and André Le Blanc), bad boy (Eric Fox), jock (Bill Heintz), nerd (Steve Waltz), slut (Kristen McCrory), bitch (Dana Kieferle) and goody two-shoe virgin (Amanda Kiley). The gang is all here for the slaughter, initiating formulaic conventionalisms that would make any horror aficionado cringe with an internal “here we go again” snide rippling through their gore-bore heads at the lack of originality and creativeness from another indie production. Yet, if you stick with the story and pay attention (instead of doom scrolling your phone), Scallion’s script evolves out of being a simplistic carbon-copy primate and into a singular, secerning Homo Sapien with idiosyncrasies because though most characters remain on the routine attribute course, more than one don’t in an an uncommon but rarely explored concept that puts audience theories and callouts to bed before the unsuspecting reveal. If needing a comparison, think about the “Scream” franchise as those films are really good at playing out the whodunit in complicated pairings with a big surprise at the very end. In “Stabbed in the Face,” the unmasking is not as potent but the possible advents serpentine the story, some more obvious than others, and each carry a different motivation crashing head-on with each other after a few Matherne measured red herrings to throw off the plot predictable scent as well as building up tropes to the max of their mechanics, such examples would be the overly unchaste Starr who bed hops men without shame or overstating Bruce’s money and smarts with talks of getting into Harvard and his girlfriend is only with him for his family’s wealth. Scallion slathers principals thick with stenciled overflow and when that bottom drops and all hell breaks loose, the ostensible outcome dissolves like wet paper. Katheryn Aronson, Samantha M. Capps, Matt Mitkevicious, Bonnie W. Picone, Jerry Paradis, Helen Whiskey, Betsy Fleming, and J.C. Pennington complete the cast.

“Stabbed in the Face” is about as savage as it sounds. Perhaps not as graphic or intense as the Wild Eye DVD illustrated cover art (we secretly wished it was), kills that amount to the titular act has a mortality rate of only two and those pair of perforations don’t live up to the wonderfully ghastly illustrated cover but, overall, fulfills the promise. It’s quite evident that Matherne has no qualms about using splatter and sex, two of the biggest keys to a successful slasher, in his punk-scored abjection of lewd-laced murder. Yet, it would be very remiss of me if I didn’t point out that “Stabbed in the Face’s” blade strikes air at times with the story. Disconnection between the first couple of scenes and the haunted house party planning and then on completely omits the transpiring moment of the jock’s sister’s murder as scenes progress, passing through the event without as much of a whisper. She’s just there in a scene and then she’s not and that isn’t explained until after the planning of the haunted house trip when the virgin naively asks while settling into his car about the girl who apparently was hacked to pieces on school grounds two months prior. The heavy weight of that loss isn’t there for the jock, not even a fleeting moment of sadness or shock, as everything continues as if nothing happened. The other characters are not struck by the loss either and this sweeps the character’s death under the rug and insignificant to the plot, but does a film entitled “Stabbed in the Face” really care about emotional scarring? Or is the intention to leave open wounds to fester with more knife strikes, decapitations, and eviscerations? If I was a magic eight ball, all signs would be point to yes toward the latter as special effects team Jason Bradford, Robert Masters, and Richie Roachclip pull their weight (professionally, not emotionally) creating better than anticipated morbid scenes of murder albeit the one or two obvious CGI blood splatter.

An 80’s teen slasher incarnate, “Stabbed in the Face” glorifies gratuitous sex, drugs, and gore, appropriately curated and displayed by our friends at Wild Eye Releasing on their Raw & Extreme sublabel. The 78^th released title on the sublabel is presented in a blown-up aspect ratio of 1.85:1 widescreen, eliminating the horizontal bars, on a MPEG2 encoded DVD5. Resolution retains the image tautness with only a handful of scenes cropped and zoomed in even more that reduces pixels to a more granular façade. Matherne owns the softer presentation with instances of posterization, especially when creating a period piece using stark colored gels and less light for positioning thicker shadow that hazily defines objects, as if lurking in the dark. The English language Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo track has great dialogue strength that does sound boxy. I suspect a ADR dub but highly unlikely with the really good synch and might just be more carefully attained specified audio with key boom placement. Eric Fox’s electron and punk soundtrack parallel “Stabbed in the Face’s” indie-grunge horror with synthesizing tells of inspiration from the 80’s era. Punk and hillbilly rock bands on the soundtrack include multiple tracks from The Poots, The Projections and The Pallbearers – the three Ps. The static menu features full-length tracks from the soundtrack overlaying its static menu with the only bonus feature being a “Stabbed in the Face” Featurette, a behind-the-scenes look in raw and polished form at the film’s genesis and production with discussions from cast and crew. Along with the feature’s own trailer, also included but separate from the bonus features are other Raw & Extreme trailers of “Crimewave,” “Goregasm,” “Whore,” “Video Killer,” “Blood Slaughter Massacre,” “Hotel Inferno,” and “Acid Bath.” This portion of the menu options does not include a music track. To turn consumers onto the film, more so the gore fans than popcorn film goers, the ultraviolent cover keeps in accordance with the Raw & Extreme profile. The cover art is also semi-reversible with magnified bloody image on the inside of the frosted Amaray DVD case. The disc is printed with the same cover art image, just downsized. The unrated DVD has a runtime of 81 minutes and is region free. Just hearing the title can induce the sensation of a sharp edge going through soft flesh and with that phantom impression of pain, “Stabbed in the Face” is horny, bloody, and punk!

“Stabbed in the Face” is now on DVD!

Norwegian EVIL Has Women Issues! “The Thrill of a Kill” reviewed! (Wild Eye Releasing / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on March 20, 2023

Enjoy the “Kill” on DVD now Available on Amazon.com

Out of work Kimsy and her irritated mother butt heads over Kimsy’s lack of effort in trying to find a job and help out with responsibilities around the house. After a particularly nasty argument, Kimsy storms out to walk off her frustration in the quiet surrounding woods. Instead of lowering her blood pressure, Kimsy’s blood runs scarred and runs down her head as she’s knocked out and picked up by a playful serial killer with an irreparable hate for women and takes gratification in degrading them by any means possible. Sadistically bred by unconditional motherly abuse, the killer treats each of his prized possessions like dogs to submit to his every beckon and call. Kimsy’s mother and sister, Camilla, grow concern for Kimsy who hasn’t returned home and set off to find her. When they realize she’s been abducted, they’re able to track her to a remote, vacant cabin used as a kill house and as they set foot inside the cabin to save Kimsy, a killer lies and waits to strike.

Lars-Erik Lie’s Norwegian torture porn, “The Thrill of a Kill,” resonates with the old and true proverb, what comes around, goes around. Filmed in and around Norway’s largest ski destination and resort, the Scandinavian mountain town of Trysil becomes the backwoods abattoir for the director to set his exploitation workshop for the bleak Norse horror. “The Thrill of a Kill” is the first feature length fictional film from the Norway-Born Lie who has digs into the indie underground and gory storytelling, self-funded by his own banner, Violence Productions, and is coproduced by Morten K. Vebjørnsen and Arve Herman Tangen, Morten Storjordet, and Linda Ramona Nattali Eliassen serve as executive producers.

Dichotomizing “The Thrill of a Kill” into two stories set during two different time periods, Lars-Erik Lie’s focal point is not the hapless victims caught in a deadly spider’s web of perversities. Instead, Lie’s story formulates the theory on how the sociopathic killer was ill-nurtured into a monster with an interweaving plot set in 1968 of a young boy (Carl Arild Heffermehl) neglected and abused, verbally and physically, by an alcoholic and sexually promiscuous about town mother (Sonja Bredesen) who would bring home another town drunk to bed. Missing his (deceased?) father and tired of being bullied by his own mother, the boy mental state snaps like a twig under immense emotional, family-oriented pressure and descends into a murderous madness. Years later and all grown up, the maniac mountain man abducts young women as a direct result of the hate toward his mother and her mistreatments. Arve Herman Tangen becomes the goateed face of the grown man gone haywire. Tangen develops his character with purposeful intent and with a nonaggressive tone to persuade his bound quarry to remain subdued. The role is nothing short of typical that we’ve seen in other films of its genus where a screwed-up child-turned-adult runs a deviancy amok sweatshop of imprisoned flesh and torture devices and Tangen really adds nothing meaningful to derangement. In her debut and only credited role, Kirsten Jakobsen, former Model Mayhem model from Oslo, succumbs to being the unlucky alternative girl, Kimsy, that runs into the big, overwhelming man while strolling through the forest. One would think Kimsy would have suffered brain damage after being struck and knocked unconscious not once, not twice, but three times by the killer who undresses her after each time with the third and final blow putting the final touches on his toying with the girl and bringing her back for a visit to his hen house of brutalized women. After the first blow or two, Jakobsen doesn’t show that much concern for Kimsy’s attentive wellness or concern as Kimsy continues to just wander as if nothing major has happened. Camilla Vestbø Losvik is a much more reliable and realistic rendition of the situation as Kimsy Sister, Camilla. As another alternative and attractive woman, Camilla shares a strong kinship with Kimsy despite their mother’s disciplinary differences toward them, to which eventually their mother (Toril Skansen) comes around as the patron saint of motherly worriment that’s likely a contrasting parallel to the killer’s unaffectionate mother. With an ugly-contented subgenre, “The Thrill of a Kill” has various compromising positions for its cast with rape and genital mutilation that there’s some shade of respect give to those who can mock play the unsettling moments we all are morbidly curious to see. The film rounds out with a lot of half-naked women strung up in bondage or chained to the wall with Linda Ramona Nattali Eliassen, Veronica Karlsmoen, Veronica Karlsmoen, Madicken Kulsrud, and Ann Kristin Lind with Raymond Bless, Niclas Falkman, and Jarl Kjetil Tøraasen as drunk, male suitors.

“The Thrill of a Kill” recreates the simulacrum of SOV horror as Lars-Erik Lie pulls out his handheld video to follow Kimsy’s journey through the jollies of a madman and the mother and sister’s rout out for their lost Kimsy. The beginning starts off with a zombie-laden dream sequences that places Kimsy in a field with a killer and his mutilated corpses that reanimate in a bit of foreshadowing of what’s in store for the spikey haired damsel. By dismissing her vividly horrifying dream of diminutive meaning, just like she does with everything else, Kimsy falls easily into the killer’s hands signifying one of the films’ themes to never take things for granted, especially those things that are important to you as exampled later on in the story. That’s about as much purpose I could pull from out of Lie’s film that floats like a feather on surface level waters. There is one other tangential offshoot Lie attempts to explored but never fleshes out fully is the unbeknownst to Kimsy and Camilla’s perverted hermit of a father who lives on the outskirts of town. Their mother thought he would have insight on Kimsy’s whereabouts but instead he tries to forcibly coerce Kimsy into his shack for involuntary lovemaking and then the exposition ensues after Camilla barely escapes his axe-chopping in (sexual?) frustration clutches. That exposition literally goes into a tunnel leading to nowhere and doesn’t alter the actions of Camilla or her mother to do anything different, expunging any kind of knowledge to utilize for a complete character arc and just comes to show Lie’s written bit parts don’t define the narrative of learned opportunities or gained instinct but rather are just additional sleazy show. The same sleazy show can be said about the rape scenes as they won’t ascertain the intended reaction of squeamish uncomfortableness. Now, while rape is no laughing matter or accustomed at any degree, there’s a level of numbness to these scenes that carry a severe flat affect to doesn’t display the anguish, the terror, or the hurt these women are going through as the killer decides upon himself to violate them. There’s literally no fight in these undrugged, still vigorous, young women who have just been snatched and made into his plaything and while some seasoned BDSM partisans may get aroused, the emotional receptor in me wants to empathize what their strife agony, but maybe that’s why the film is titled “The Thrill of a Kill,” to be an emblem of fun, cheap thrills.

Coming in at number 70 on the spine, the Norway schlocker-shocker, “The Thrill of a Kill” lands appropriately onto the Wild Eye Releasing’s Raw & Extreme banner. The 2011 released film finds a vessel for its North American debut over a decade later after its initial release and presented in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, with vertical letterboxing on 16×9 televisions, despite the back cover listing a widescreen format and being released in 4:3 is a bit surprising as other countries display in anamorphic widescreen and the lens used in the film is definitely anamorphic as you can tell with flank falloff that distorts the image and makes the picture appear rounded. Color grading is slightly washed and lives in a low contrast. Again, I have to wonder how aesthetically different the transfer is on the outer region product. Soft, SOV-equivalent details don’t necessarily kill the image quality, but you can obviously notice some pixelation in the frame inside the shack and in wider shots of the landscape amongst the low pixelated bitrate. The Norwegian Golby Digital Stereo 2.0 comes out clean, clear, and about as full-bodied as can be with a two-channel system. Some of the Foley is overemphasized production which comes off sillier than the deserving impact of a thrown punch or a meat hook going through the lower mandible. English subtitles are burned/forced into the picture but are synched well without errors though the grasp maybe lost a little in translation. Bonus content is only a trailer selection warehousing select Raw & Extreme titles, such as “Hotel Inferno,” “Acid Bath,” “Morbid,” “Bread and Circus,” “Absolute Zombies,” “Whore,” and “Sadistic Eroticism.” Continuing to achieve maximum controversial covers, Wild Eye Releasing doesn’t hold back for “The Thrill of a Kill” DVD with a crude, yet fitting DEVON illustrated cover art that is a platterful of unclasped splatter while in the inside is a still frame of one of the more tongue biting scenes. No cuts with this unrated release and the film clocks in at 85 minutes with a region free playback. A grating gore gorger with mother issues, “A Thrill for a Kill” redundantly recalls our attention back to the subservience of what makes horror horrifying and while what terrifies us is pushed aside, the free-for-all fiend-at-play treats the death-obsessed to a buffet of blood and defilement.

Enjoy the “Kill” on DVD now Available on Amazon.com

Press Start to Play EVIL. “First Person Shooter” reviewed!

Posted by Steven Lewis on December 22, 2019

A nasty viral plague eats and decays victims from the inside out, blood oozes from every poor in the skin and boils fester, and can be transmitted through the saliva and blood. The hot zone spreads fast among the nation’s crumbling society, but one isolated clinic, the also epicenter of the disease, experiments with a cure, testing the trials on the infected. Young, wife Linda, a nurse at the clinic, goes suddenly missing and her husband gears up to search for her at the clinic to only find out that his wife has fell into the grasps of a maniacal scientist exploiting the cure as a baleful booster to create the already plagued-ridden with another side effect – extreme violence. The playing level turns increasingly difficult with maximum carnage when finding himself trapped deep inside the callous clinic straight from hell and must use any melee weapon to his advantage in each ghastly stage if he wants to save his wife from the deranged creatures and the complete governmental noxious gas eradication of the disease in the next 24 hours.

For those of us who’ve fired up a DELL computer with Radeon gaming hardware installed, sat large noise-reduction earphones over our ears, and ran a CD-ROM through the disc drive to start up a MS-DOS video game, a bit of nostalgia will revert the senses back to a more primordial time of a young gaming culture and evoke the obsessive behaviors of our adolescent selves. A game that will inherently put you into the player’s shoes with a weapon at hand and many antagonists to cut down at the whim of a mouse click as the priding first person shooter. That’s what one German filmmaker, Andreas Luetzelschwab, who goes by the credit Andreas Tom, titled his script now film project, “FPS: First Person Shooter,” that harks back to the good, yet not so old days of 8-bit blood, command cheat codes, and with a hero bestowing a snarky, snide tongue. The 2014 action-horror recalls the disk operating system gaming graphics of the early 1990s that’s been long lost and seemingly forever forgotten for nearly 20 years.

Now, since Andreas Tom’s “First Person Shooter” puts the viewer in place as the player, a BDSM gimp dressed hero ready to face the mutated virus head on. No real character takes the stage with only the voice of the iconic voice actor, Stephan Weyte, resurrecting his distinctive and black vocal quips for the player hammering away at the ghoulish zombies. Weyte’s a famous name in the world of first person shooter games being the voice of the antihero Caleb in the excessively violent and demonic “Blood” and “Blood II: The Chosen” horror inspired FPS PC games from the late 90s. Weyte’s deep, sometimes raspy, tone suits the film’s temperament much the same of those gloriously carnage cult classic PC games and he’s essentially doing all the dialogue for the film, with the exception of some in and out characters. The genetic makeup of the remaining cast are relatives of Andreas Tom, including co-producer Atlanta Lützelschwab as the attic’s nurse zombie complete with barbed wire around the eyes, Hans Lützelschwab as a boss-level surgeon zombie, and assistant director Achim Lützelschwab as the cook who whips vats of stew made of human chunks. Obviously, these are German actors being voiced with an overlay language from English speaking actors, such as Stephen Weyte, and so other vocal and action performances come from Tobias Winkler as a tall clown zombie, Sebastian Kettner, Ines Klein, Rick Whelan, Rob Banks, Jürgen Sütterlin, and Sascha Strack.

This past August, another first person shooter was reviewed, Giulio De Santi’s “Hotel Inferno,” which delivered an energetic and chaotic run amuck bloodbath that really sold the experience of playing a FPS and though “First Person Shooter” was released after, the film still provides the same kind of gun-toting, ass-kicking euphoria while on a smaller scale and focusing more on making that connection to the audience that you’re the gamer playing the game. For example, the movie begins with the DOS game’s screen of a static menu and once all your difficult settings are set and in place and the press start button is pressed, a virtual newscaster delivers the backstory of the viral outbreak and dons a principal figure, in the form of a 8-bit man, going to the clinic to search for his missing wife. The, the video game seamlessly transitions into live action, but the attributes of the game are still abound with a life bar, the gaining of objects, autosave, and disappearing bodies (that are a symptom of the virus). At the surface level comparison of “First Person Shooter” and “Hotel Inferno,” both films are akin to characterization, but differ in executions with “Hotel Inferno” just outright more violent without referring to itself outside the context of just another movie whereas the focus here is centered on video game idiosyncrasies inside that very context. The patients in developing scenes out of the virtual combat simulation ethos exhibits remarkable talent to fathom-to-fruition all the nuances like weapon caching, ominous camera angles and interpersonal communications to push the story along menacingly, and splicing the recording of level playing video with the composition of a pair of gesturing and weaponized hands to simulate that type of game play. For a loyal gamer, “First Person Shooter” bares the berserk survival horror instincts while for the loyal cinema goer, the ostentatious design is unique and graphic, even for the casual horror fan.

For the first time on US DVD home video, “First Person Shooter” is distributed by Wild Eye under the Raw & Extreme banner, the same as “Hotel Inferno,” with a widescreen, 16:9 aspect ratio, presentation that’s clean and composed of a double recording, along with an 8-bit Wolfenstein or Doom gameplay edited in for some extracurricular slaughter activity. The colors reduced some, I’d say by 20-30%, to exact a bit of bleakness atmospherics and some details are smoothed over due exact a true video game effect, like in muzzle flashes. The English language stereo dialogue track is an obvious dub on the German made film and another good dead giveaway is that all actors have their mouths covered by surgical masks, gas masks, hockey masks, etc., but Stephen Weyte’s crystal clear derogatory comments show no sign of being muddled. The ambient track’s a little soft at times, especially with the gatling gun, that should be ripping bullets and fling casings with puncturing hundreds of holes into zombie girth. Bonus features include behind-the-scenes outtakes, a walkthrough examination of the set, composing the looming score, and trailers. Wild Eye’s illustrated DVD front cover also pays homage to Duke Nukem with a tall standing and beefy dark hero blasting holes through zombies at his feet. “First Person Shooter” markets goods sold as advertised of intense game play without the need for a single controller and without omitting one single ounce of blood to shed in this mercurial fascination of when gory cinema magic meets gory computer gaming.

Come Get Some!!! Available on DVD today!

EVIL Wants to Feed Off Your Pain & Suffering in “Hotel Inferno” Reviewed!

Posted by Steven Lewis on August 8, 2019

Gulf War decorated soldier Frank Zimosa uses his particular set of skills as a professional contracted hitman. Frank’s current assign takes him oversees to a luxurious hotel to eliminate a couple of marks, a man and a woman, who are itemized as atrocious serial killers who’ve murdered over 150 people and Frank’s employer seeks to provide the same gruesome retribution in a certain kind of way – remove the brain the skull and the guts from the body. The relatively simple task for Frank turns into a fight for his life and his very soul as he finds himself trapped inside the hotel, owned by a secret organization swarming with putrefying acolytes of an ancient, fire breathing demon known as The Plague Spreader. Frank was ordered to kill to satisfy her pain and suffering hunger pangs, but his tenacious refusal awakens the demon who now hunts him, craving his pain, his suffering, his eternal soul for her own sated gratification and disrupts the organization’s creed to keep her dormant for the sake of humanity.

More, more, more! My internal fireworks outpouring and wanting more from a fire and brimstone gore forged finale from the action-packed first person view feature length horror film, “Hotel Inferno,” could not quell the embodied explosiveness wanting more from writer-director Giulio De Santi! Hailing from Italy, “Hotel Inferno” pulls little-to-no punches when dishing out uber-violence and non-stop carnage that invigorates the sensory and corporeal experience in the first installment of what’s called the Epic Splatter Saga that will total over six films. Two have already been produced with the third in production! De Santi, who is no stranger to the fervid gore film, teams his visual effects knowledge with long time, special effects collaborator, David Borg Lopez (“The Mildew from Plant Xonader”), and makes something shockingly beautiful that’s only been wrongfully teased in predecessors.

What’s also unique about “Hotel Inferno,” other than its first person perspective, is nearly the entire dialogue is layered with a voice over track. Unique as well as cleverly cool, we’ll touch on why later, faces with distinctive dialogue pinpoint main characters, but their faces are either shrouded by some sort of horror-esque mask, turned away toward another direction, or fed through a communication conduit, such as a portable television-radio device. Same goes with lead character Frank Zimosa whose vision never goes eye line with a mirror, never gaining a glimpse see his frantic mug, though Zimosa sounds like a chisel chin, hard-nose, angry-looking ass kicker, especially when voiced vehemently by Rayner Bourton. Playing the arch nemesis that’s quickly established and continuously prominent through duration is not the all-powerful Plague Spreader, but, in fact, the faceless Jorge Mistrandia. Donning the voice is English born actor Micahel Howe (“Solo”) who has one of the more sinister intonations amongst the few; an attribute that can be cool, calm, and inviting and can suddenly transform into a treacherous, malevolent, and vile performance that amplifies the intensity tenfold. Bourton and Howe are essentially the sole two main characters inside a melee of supernatural goons and goblins, amongst them in the cast is the introduction of Jessica Carroll who went on to do more voice work in video games and actors from De Santi’s inner film circle with Christian Riva and Wilmar Zimosa, who without a doubt was the moniker inspiration for Frank.

What sets “Hotel Inferno” apart from other splatter films? The first person shooter style, or FPS, video game structure is it! In literally the first of it’s cinematic kind, “Hotel Inferno” looks, sounds, and feels like a FPS from start to finish, a blended progeny from the ultra-violent horror survival games like DOOM or BLOOD; honestly, everything about De Santi’s film feels like a BLOOD rendition minus the shirtless, axe-wielding zombies and the robe hooded, tommy gun shooting cultists, though the rotting henchmen due speak in a high pitch dialect. Think about it. In BLOOD, a game built on a foundation of iconic horror, the anti-hero, Caleb, is a gunslinger against a unholy cult he once was a part of and then becomes his opposition. Same goes with “Hotel Inferno’s” own anti-hero Frank Zimosa, a hitman hired by an organization who then deceives him for nefarious reasons and then Frank has to blast his way out to save his soul. The story goes right for the throat, throwing Frank almost immediately into peril, and from room to room, layout to layout, the anti-hero has to slice through henchmen and ghastly demons in a very HOUSE OF THE DEAD kind of face-off, weaponizing everything against foes with armaments in the anterior of a cultish backdrop. Super. Fucking. Cool.

MVDVisual distributes Giulio De Santi’s “Hotel Inferno” onto DVD from the Wild Eye Releasing’s Raw and Extreme label. Presented in a widescreen, 16:9 aspect ratio, the Necrostorm produced “Hotel Inferno” engages the viewer into battle, but also invokes slight vertigo and turbid at times, especially the cave-like dungeon that’s almost absolute pitch-black. Again, atmospheric video games are much of the same regard for instant jump-scares and De Santi pulls that off here by not illuminating much of the scenes. The English language Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo audio track is in an opposing stratum to how the film plays out; doesn’t quite sync with the action as the audio track is an obvious track laid on top to emphasis how much “Hotel Inferno” is like a FPS storyline. There’s an array of depth and range from each tier Frank has to painfully endure and willfully live through. English and Italian subtitles are available. Bonus material includes a secret bonus film entitled “Hallucinations,” a rough cut SOV, direct-to-video supernatural gore feature from twin brothers John Polonia (“Feeders”) and Mark Polonia (“Sharkenstein”) and Todd Michael Smith (“Splatter Farm”). Giulio De Santi’s “Hotel Inferno” is only part one of the highly anticipated Epic Splatter Saga, with part 2 and 3 very high on my to-do list The blood splatter is in a doom of mayhem, will quench gore hounds from any walks of life, and reap the collective FPS gamer from their stationary consoles and blow their mind with the most seriously berserk action-horror of this decade. Crudux cruo!