Tag Archives: John Saxon

EVIL Wants You Tour Your Own Personal Hell! “Trapped Ashes” reviewed! (4K UHD and Blu-ray / Deaf Crocodile)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

4K and Blu-ray “Trapped Ashes” from Deaf Crocodile. Available Here!

The VIP package for a historical studio backlot tour gives seven strangers a behind-the-scenes look at how movies were made and the background behind them.   When their cart pulls up to one of the more infamous movie houses for Desmond Hacker’s fright flick Hysteria, the tour group are eager to explore what’s typically off limits for normal, non-VIP tour attractions.  Once inside the backlot house, much of the Hacker’s funhouse tricks and odd designs are although covered in cobwebs are still very functionally practical as the group separates and goes room-by-room to peruse a movie house.  When they all gather in what looks to be the commune dining area, they find themselves unable to locate the way out no matter which unlocked door they choose, which circles them back.  The tour guide mentions Hacker’s movie had similar parallels and that the only way to free themselves would be to tell their own personal horror story.  With nowhere to go and nothing to lose, the stories begin their descent into terror. 

For someone who doesn’t go out of their way to watch horror anthologies, I’ve been on a kick lately with a decent string of short film compilation feature, starting with the latest entry from the popular “V/H/S” franchise, “V/H/S/Beyond.”  Next up takes us back to 2006 with “Trapped Ashes,” a campy horror anthology that not only brought together legendary genre directors, such as “Friday the 13th’s” Sean S. Cunningham, “Gremlins’s” Joe Dante, “The Matrix” visual effects arts John Gaeta, “Silent Night, Deadly Night 3:  Better Watch Out’s” Monte Hellman, and the late director of “Altered States,” Ken Russell, but also brings together aged, yet still legendary, familiar faced actors that have since past that short time between 2006 and 2025   Dennis Bartok wrote the anthology piece and is his brainchild, producing the film.

Those aforesaid actors have a combined nearly centuries (plural!) of experience with careers spanning an average of 50 years each.  Henry Gibson (“The ‘burbs”), John Saxon (“A Nightmare on Elm Street”), and Dick Miller (“Gremlins”) all together in one film.  Granted, Dick Miller’s cameo was so short that all three were only together for a brief scene but the trio alone should bring in genre fans to witness Henry Gibson in a persona he does best, a round faced under stark white hair and with puppy dog eyes that draws one closer to his innocence only to have the rug snatched right from under you when he turns sinisterly dark as the seemingly harmless tour guide.  Saxon also plays true to his conventional character archetype as a wise-cracking tough guy too cool for school; this time, he plays a screenwriter haunted by his own betrayal toward his best friend while being infatuated with a bewitching beautiful woman.  Unlike most horror anthologies, “Trapped Ashes’” individual tales contain mostly the same cast as the wraparound with Saxon, Jayce Bartok (“Founder’s Day”), Lara Harris (“The Dogfighters”), Rachel Veltri (“Pray for Morning”), Michèle-Barbara Pelletier (“Brainscan”), and Scott Lowell as the tour guests with personal hell to tell.  The heterogeneous group convey their supernatural-laced anecdotes that mingle inside the context of their being or life whether body image, marriage, friendships, and childhood, subjective intimacies that shape their excruciating experiences that, if audiences see them on screen for the first time, wouldn’t be clear how deeply burdened or troubled they are at first glance.  Once the story is told, moods and personalities shift, or perhaps seemingly normal habits are made clearer, and this is made possible by the eclectic bunch of actors to carve away their characters’ exterior shells to see who they really portray.  Ryo Ishibashi (“Audition”), Yoshinori Hiruma, Mina E. Mina (“Eastern Promises”), Winston Rekert (“Eternal Evil”), Ken Russell, Tahmoh Penikett (“Trick r’ Treat”), Tygh Runyan (“Disturbing Behavior”), Amelia Cooke (“Species III”), Luke Macfarlane, Deanna Milligan, and Matreya Fedor (“Slither”).

Riffling through the obvious camp “Trapped Ashes” touts very proudly, there are nuggets surrounding the unsavory themes.  Body dysphoria within “The Girl with Golden Breasts” is one of these topics, where an actress feels compelled to enhance her bosom for better, younger roles, and that speaks the relevance ill of the movie industry’s perverse tidings of late as actors and actresses continue to fill, inject, scar, and manipulate themselves into being their unnatural self to satisfy producers, execs, and audience likes and expectations when, in reality, hurts nothing but themselves.  Dissatisfaction marriage, or perhaps better labeled stagnant marriage, leads into invasive third party to sate long neglect passion and in this case, that third party is an ancient Japanese demon named Seishin (Japanese for Spirit) who lures the wife’s sexual appetite down to the pits of the netherworld.  From there, themes love triangles, obsession, cheating, and dysfunctional family structures formulate a pod of personal pate smeared with victimization, the victims being the storytellers stuck in the Desmond Hacker’s Hysteria backlot house.  “Trapped Ashes” isn’t about being victim, it’s more about playing the victim and those playing may not be victims of their own tales at all that adds a morsel of supernaturality to the recipe that changed the course of the idiosyncratic anecdotes that are close to their emotions and mental well-beings as well as proximally physically hazardous. 

Our first time covering the Dennis Bartok and Craig Rogers founded Deaf Crocodile release and it doesn’t disappointment with a sleek new 2-Disc 4K UHD and Blu-ray of “Trapped Ashes,” scanned and restored in 4K for its Blu-ray debut.  Presented in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio, the Deaf Crocodile UHD is HVEC encoded, 2160p Dolby Vision, BD66 and the Blu-ray is AVC encoded, 1080p high definition, BD50.  For an early 2000 production, “Trapped Ashes” doesn’t have the digital veneer of early 2000s film besides some visual effects work of the image manipulation drooping effect.  The extra pixels of UHD really brighten and elevate the image to today’s standards to surface the most inconspicuous details lost in standard definition.  Color saturation and skin tones appear natural and organic with no signs of compression issues or imbedded problems with the digital equipment.  Depth has really opened up in areas like the funhouse illusions of the Hysteria house in the wraparound segment and or in “Twin” when reality of the situation is made clear to put the explanation in one single medium-to-medium closeup frame.  Blu-ray copy mimics a lot same UHD accolades with a less fine tune edge around the background.  The English DTS-HD 5.1 surround sound is the only audio option available on both formats.  More than ample, the lossless provides a deepening immersion the deeper you go into stories with balanced side and back channels complimented by an even-keeled LFE to register the bass near the front while whispery events hover around a surrounding backside, such as with Cunningham’s “Jibaku’s” drawing-in hallucination moment of a Japanese painting that instills reverberating echoes and Shepherd tones.  English SDH subtitles are available.  Bonus features include threw new interviews – Dennis Bartok moderates a feature-length, online platform interview with director John Gaeta, cast members Jayce Bartok, Scott Lowell, and Lisi Tribble, producers Yuki Yoshikawa and Yushifumi Hosoya, and cinematographer Zoran Popvic, a second feature-length interview with cast members Tahmoh Penikett and Tygh Runyan and production designer Robb Wilson King, and the last approx. 40-minute interview is with producers Mike Frislev of Nomadic Pictures.  Extras do not stop there with a director’s cut of Monte Hellman’s “Stanley’s Girlfriend,” the original full-length cut of Ken Russell’s “The Girl with the Golden Breasts,” and a 5-part making-of with cast and crew archive interviews, a new visual essay Hollywood Parasite:  Hysteria in Trapped Ashes by journalist and physical media expert Ryan Verrill and film professor Dr. Will Dodson.  This is the so-called standard release compared to its Deluxe Limited Edition companion release, but this release is also pretty deluxe physically.  There’s no limited O-slipcover but the unique, almost 70’s-eseque cover design is appealing yet simple with a reverse side depicting an image of the wrapround characters inside the Hysteria house dining room or commune area.  The UHD and Blu-ray overlap each other in their differentiated locking mechanism on the ride of the clear Amaray case while the left insert portion holds a Deaf Crocodile QR code for access of the transcribed bonus content.  This release has the rated R cut with a runtime of 104 minutes and is region encoded A playback only.

Last Rites: Anthologies can be the antithesis of horror – building and dropping tension, an innate broken narrative, different stylistic choices that disunify the entire film, etc., but if campy enough, if not taken too seriously, if cast John Saxon, Henry Gibson, and Dick Miller, “Trapped Ashes” can find a home in the genre and in our collections with a new and extra-loaded Deaf Crocodile 4K UHD and Blu-ray set.

4K and Blu-ray “Trapped Ashes” from Deaf Crocodile. Available Here!

Cheese Isn’t the Only Snack on this EVIL Rodent’s Diet! “Rat Man” reviewed! (Cauldron Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

See Nelson de la Rosa as the “Rat Man” on Blu-ray!

On the Caribbean Island of Santo Domingo, a genetic fiend scampers on the streets.  By injecting the sperm of a rat into a Monkey embryo, one fervent geneticist’s desires to be globally renowned creates a small yet deadly human rat.  Intelligent, agile, and with a lethal poison under its fingernails that could kill a normal size human in a matter of seconds, the creature escapes confines and roams the streets looking for fresh meat to eat.  One of the victims is a photoshoot supermodel from New York City that prompts an unofficial investigation of the mistaken sister to the supermodel and a mystery writer who are now on the hunt for the whereabouts of the others from the photoshoot group.  As the bodies pile up, the rat man wreaks havoc on the small island villages where the survivors and investigators must fight for their life to avoid being gnawed upon.

“Rat Man,” aka “Quella villa in fondo al parco,” translated to “That Villa at the End of the Park,” is the 1988 the Italian-made, creature feature of predominant spaghetti western and poliziotteschi director Giuliano Carnimeo in what would become one of his last feature films  Credited as Anthony Ascot, the western “Sartana” franchise and “The Exterminators of the Year 3000” director tackles the horrors of genetic manipulation with survivalist rodent given primate intelligence, a far cry from Carnimeo’s usual genres.  The screenplay comes from “Demons” and “The Ogre” writer Dandano Sacchetti under the penname David Parker Jr.  Carnimeo and Sacchetti Americanize their credits to appeal more to western audiences who, in the late 80’s, were lapping up Italian horror and creature features starring known international actors in tropical republics and “Rat Man” falls perfectly into that category.  “Zombie” and “The Beyond” producer Fabrizio De Angelis produces the film from production companies Surf Film and Fulvia Film.

While usually Italian productions go after American names, like John Saxon, Christopher George, or Robert Vaughn, “Rat Man” looked elsewhere amongst the surrounding Anglo-Saxon countries and plucked a few names that lead the charge in what would become a cluster of principals to become ensnared by tropical bred, genetically tainted vermin standing just over 2-feet tall, with elongated sharp teeth, and poisonous fingernails.  Without a defined lead, the script swirls through possible hero and heroine tropes, such as the investigating team-up between New Zealand actor David Warbeck (“The Beyond”) and Swedish actress Janet Agren (“Eaten Alive”) who are no strangers starring Italian productions.  Agren plays Terry who flies into Santo Domingo under the impression her supermodel sister was brutally murdered, and she happenstance meets at the same hailed cab Warbeck’s character, work vacationing mystery writer Fred Williams, who for some reason, some how becomes involved in helping Terry without significant cause or benefit other than possibly the mysterious case being a good plot for his next book.  There’s also the case of the false hero and final girl with the pursuit of photoshop photographer Mark, played by Austrian actor Werner Pochath (“Devil in the Flesh”) and his hot model Marilyn, by Italian actress Eva Grimaldi (“Covent of Sinners”).  These intended, or perhaps not intended, red herrings do make “Rat Man” favorably unpredictable as well as grim in regard to centric characters.  Grimaldi becomes the object of obsession with gratuitous nudity and a showcase of her other assets.  In more forgiving times when the diverging physical differences subjected actors into selective roles, the film employed one of the shortest men in our lifetime with Nelson de la Rosa.  Standing all of 2’ 4 ¼” because of Seckel Syndrome, the Dominican Republic born actor donned the makeup, false teeth, glued-on nails, and the ratty clothes to be transformed into the titular villain.  Limited movements and with no dialogue, de la Rosa’s underrated, give-it-his-best performance reveals to be a bright spot in story about a rat spliced with a monkey with the assistance of some movie magic; that one scene where he climbs up the window drapes and looks over his shoulder at Eva Grimaldi as she sleeps in a dark room and he’s slipping into the shadows gives proper chills.  Cast rounds out with Anna Silvia Grullon, Luisa Menon, Pepito Guerra, and Franklin Dominguez. 

Out in the cinema land, there have been worse genetical abomination movies through the decades.  “Rat Man,” surprisingly enough, champions for the middle ground as a solid, campy, man-made creature-on-the-loose feature with, dare I say it, okay performances, competent camerawork, and a villain unlike any other scampering around.  Sure, there are cheesy moments, but rats do like cheese, or so the stereotype goes, and that adds a layer of relaxation and ease knowing Giuliano Carnimeo had a sense of acceptability rather than trying to make a absolute, serious horror movie.  The one aspect I will mention where there was difficulty in swallowing was the scattered story flow.  “Rat Man” seemed to be everywhere all at once from beaches to the jungle to the vacant streets of Santo Domingo without rhyme or reason.  For a while I ran with the theory the Rat Man followed the photoshoot group, targeting the eye candy for its own perverse desires, but that promising concept was blown to smithereens when the little village of St. Martin had been terrorized and abandoned in a moment of exposition awareness.  Carnimeo’s jump from out of the western pot and into the horror fire translates his eye for the lingering and peripheral dread, much like a showdown of glares that has revolutionized to the lie and wait of the rat man cometh but if only the director could yoke the loose story for a straighter edge, “Rat Man” would have been acute as pestilence in the Italian horror mercati.

The “Rat Man” chews its way onto a brand-new Blu-ray release from Cauldron Films.  The restored in 4K transfer is pulled from the 35mm original negative and presented on an AVC encoded, high-definition 1080p, dual-layered BD50, exhibited in the original European widescreen aspect ratio of 1.66:1.  Primarily in low key, shadows run the range of a creature lurking in every nook and cranny, turning “The Naked Doorwoman’s” Roberto Girometti’s, credited as Robert Gardner, cinematography from darkened eyesore to a penetrating thriller of what’s scuttering beneath the shadows.  Emerging from the color is the perfect diffusion of color and texture underneath the natural looking stock grain.  There also isn’t a compression blemish insight or any kind of unnecessary enhancements from this good-looking print.  The only audio optional available is an English dub 2.0 mono track.  Despite an assortment of nationalities, the English dub does make the distinct accents go away with language uniformity.  Foley strength lies principally in the forefront but does champion the beast with a low growl always at your feet, or face depending on the camera angle.   English subtitles are optionally available and synch well with no errors in spelling or in grammar. Cauldron Films exclusive bonus features include an audio commentary, also available on the audio setup portion of the fluid menu, with film historians Eugenio Ercolani, Troy Howarth, and Nathaniel Thompson, and three Italian language with English subtitles interviews with cinematographer Robert Girometti, camera operator Federico Del Zoppo, and post-production consultant Alberto De Martino. “Rat Man’s” trailer rounds out the special features encoded content. The standard release comes in a clear Amaray Blu-ray case with new illustrated artwork that gives a real sense of what to expect by Justin Coffee. The reverse has the original, and if I might add beautiful, poster art that’s less surmising but more intriguing. Authored for region free playback, Cauldron Films’ “Rat Man” scurries with an 82-minute runtime and is not rated.

Last Rites: Forget setting out the poison, “Rat Man” can’t be exterminated with a phenomenally invincible release from Cauldron Films. In the slim pickings of the killer rat subgenre, “Rat Man” leads the pack rats as one of the more bizarre, degrading, and omnipotent villains ever to be on prowl.

See Nelson de la Rosa as the “Rat Man” on Blu-ray!

This EVIL, Straight-Razor Killer Has a Novel Idea! “Tenebrae” reviewed! (Synapse / 4K-Blu-ray Combo Set)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

2-Disc 4K UHD and Blu-ray Set Now Available of Dario Argento’s “Tenebrae”

While on a media book tour for his latest popular crime thriller novel, “Tenebrae,” American novelist Peter Neal is swiftly entangled in a killer’s puritanical wrath shortly after landing in Rome.  Using Neal’s story as an inspirational guideline to rid the world of what the fictional book labels as depraved people, the killer brutally murders women closely resembling characters in Neal’s book with a straight razor and sends Neal a deranged poetic message shortly after each death.  Police are on the case but always once step behind, even when the murders have seemingly stop connecting to the pages of Neal’s novel.  When the writer investigates by running through the list of possible suspects, the writer in him goes rogue by setting off to solve the case himself that would sensationalize and authenticate him as a crime writer, but the deeper Neal directly involves himself, the more the grislier the murders become and they’re starting to come closer to home than before. 

Dario Argento is unequivocally one of the best masters of horror for half a century, writing and directing not only some of the best Italian crime-mystery Giallos, splashed with hue vibrancy and caked in gruesome blood splatter, but also writing and directing those same films with major success internationally as his films connect with a global audience.  “The Bird with the Crystal Plumage,” “Deep Red,” and “Suspiria” have skyrocketed the filmmaker within the first decade of movie-crafting and Argento would not have been who is now without the guidance and the financial foundation constructed by father, Salvatore Argento.  Before his death in 1987, Salvatore produced one more of his son’s ventures in 1982 with “Tenebrae,” an emblematic mystery that brings Italian and American actors into the fold of Argento’s violent pulp puzzler.  Argento’s younger brother, Claudio, co-produced the feature under the Sigma Cinematografica Roma production company.

The Italiano-Americano production casts a pair of native New Yorkers in Anthony Franciosa (“Death Wish II,” “Curse of the Black Widow”) and John Saxon (“A Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Black Christmas”) who regularly crossed over the Atlantic for roles in international pictures.  Franciosa plays the novelist Peter Neal with Saxon as Neal’s newly hired agent Bullmer.  Their portrayed amicable relationship succeeds expectations of client and manager professionalism, but a good publicity campaign can be torpedoed by a sadistic killer with a throat cutting fetish and Roma’s best officers on the case intruding into the Neal’s personal promotion with Detective Germani, played by spaghetti western regular Giuiliano Gemma (“Day of Anger”), and his partner, Inspector Altieri, played by Carola Stagnaro (“Phantom of Death”).  The third English speaker is John Steiner (“Caligula”), a proper Englishman setup as an Italian television host on the docket to interview Peter Neal’s latest release success.  Steiner becomes an early favorite as the suspected killer with his odd pre-show questioning that falls in line with the Killer’s motives, but he isn’t the only person of interest as Neal’s estranged lover Jane (Veronica Lario) holds a lover’s quarrel with the writer who has seemingly become intimately close with his personal assistant Anne (Daria Nicolodi, “Deep Red”).  A conglomerate of characters gyrate Argento’s maelstrom mystery, each exhibiting profound performances that make each rich in their own right, and fill out with an assemblage of robust supporting characters diffusing through the story with Ania Pieroni (“The House by the Cemetery”), Lara Wendel (“Ghosthouse”), Eva Robins (“Eva man”), and Mirella Banti (“Scandal in Black”), the model most infamously on the front cover of most home video releases and poster one sheets with the iconic neck-sliced open and dripping blood along with her wavy hair suspended in a pose of vivid void and color.

“Tenebrae,” in Latin translates to darkness, describes Argento’s post-“Suspiria” feature intently.  Giallo lives within this time capsulated enigmatic madness, color-coated and visually complex to become an easy pill to swallow amongst all others in the Italian-reared niche.  Accompanying all the hallmarks of a Giallo construct – the killer’s gloved hands in POV, psychosexual tropes, mental instability exposures, violent and gory – Argento also impresses us with baroque mise-en-scene of lavish houses, detailed interiors, and extremely broad, emotionally phrenic individuals.  We also receive technical style wonders like a long boom shot that cranes up a house exterior to follow the idiosyncratic and opposing activities of two presently quarrelling lesbian lovers on a dark, stormy night in a tensely presage moment mixed with the synth-rock sounds of the “Goblin” theme track.  “Tenebrae” is chic in its ugliness and the patience Argento shows is formidably impenetrable without being flawed with lingering stagnancy.  While wallowing into what we’re led to believe, red herrings and other subterfuges to throw off audiences’ keen-to-solve sniffers, the story stirs a cauldron of coherent progression that is, more often than desired, lost in most gialli trying to weave through an intelligible punchy crime-mystery without becoming disoriented by the twists, turns, and topsy-turvy outcomes.   

“Tenebrae” hits 4K onto a 2-Disc, UHD and Blu-ray combo set from the genre-leading distributor, Synapse Films. The HEVC, mastered in Dolby Vision, encoding 2180p UHD and the AVC encoded 1080p high-definition Blu-ray are presented in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio in both the English and Italian versions of the feature.  One of the more gorgeously restored versions ever to be presented, with sharp delineation and organic popping colors within the narrow margins of infrequent gel lighting, the near flawless original negative is greatly elevated by Synapse’s ultra high-def facelift that resound the lavish textures of various sets, the expressional details of the characters’ face, and the glistening shine of the spraying blood.  There’s real balance between the colors in this presentation, offering not only a wide variety of hues but a great display of the mix.  Gels are not overly used and are more key lighting spotlights to heighten tension or introduce moods on an almost subconscious level.  Both English and Italian versions score a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono.  This release caters to the very suspense Argento acoustically and phonically propounds that, in the same regard to the eyes, places viewers’ ears right in the middle of the action.  Every sound is distinct and unassuming during the throes of violence, a cleanly serrating effect that compounds killer consternation of being everything, everywhere, all at once.  Typical of the time and cost-efficient ADR usually retains some dubbing disharmony, but “Tenebra’s” tracks are neatly synchronous with Anthony Franciosa and John Saxon’s recordings timed exact and as if captured in the scene.   Some of the dubbing isn’t as in the bag, such as with Giuliano Gemma’s recording that’s does denote that space in between intensified by likely another voice actor’s reading overtop Gemma’s actual dialogue.  UHD offers English SDH on the English version while the Italian version has just regular English subtitles; the Blu-ray disc has the same.  Hours of bonus content, identical on both formats, begin with an audio commentary by Dario Argento: the Man, the Myths, the Magic author Alan Jones and film critic/historian Kim Newman, a second audio commentary by Dario Argento expert Thomas Rostock, and a third audio commentary by Maitland McDonagh, author of Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds:  The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento.  The fun doesn’t end there with a 2016 feature-length documentary “Yellow Fever:  The Rise and Fall of the Giallo” with interviews from Dario Argento, Umberto Lenzi, Luigi Cozzi, and Ruggero Deodato amongst the biggest names in film critic authoritarians, a newly edited archival interview with actor John Steiner, a newly edited archival interview with Maitland McDonagh, an archival featurette Voices of the Unsane with “”Tenebrae’s” Dario Argento, Daria Nicolodi, Eva Robins, Luciano Tovoli, Claudio Simonetti, and Lamberto Bava interviews, an archival interview with actress Daria Nicolodi, an archival interview with writer-director Dario Argento, an archival interview with composer Claudio Simonetti, an archival introduction from Daria Nicolodi, an international theatrical trailer, the Japanese Shadow trailer, an alternate opening credits sequence, “Unsane” end credits sequence, and an image gallery to wrap things up.  Inside the rigid O-slipcover, graced with a high quality and beautifully macabre illustration rendered by Nick Charge, is a Synapse Films’ black, 4K UHD labeled Amaray case with a double side disc lock and a reversible cover art with the Nick Charge graphic as default underneath the slipcover with the reverse side the Synapse Films’ standard Blu-ray cover art pulped with a famous death scene in pop art color. The insert houses a Synapse Films’ catalogue, and the discs are pressed with two notable kill scene frozen moments pulled in still image form. Feature runs at 101-minutes with an uncut presentation of the feature with a region free playback on both formats. ”Tenebrae” is Dario Argento in a cracked-up nutshell, paradoxically beautiful and horrible and burgeoning with suspense and color. The restored and remastered Synapse Films’ UHD and Blu-ray set is equally as such in its gorgeously grotesque packaging of film, its director, and its legacy that will outlive us all.

2-Disc 4K UHD and Blu-ray Set Now Available of Dario Argento’s “Tenebrae”