Tag Archives: JoJo draven

Poor Quality Dynamic Effects That Have a Horrendously EVIL Bite! “Bad CGI Gator” reviewed! (Full Moon Features / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Bad CGI Gator” is an Amazon Choice item! Order it Here!

Six college students end the schoolyear with a long weekend at a lakeside cabin in rural Georgia.  Looking forward to the youthful debauchery of drinking themselves into a stupor and engaging in lots of sexual hanky-panky, they each throw their school issued laptops into an alligator’s lake habitat for an Instagram moment to go viral and also in a moment of jovial release to be finally done with school and kick off Summer.  When the small gator encounters the laptop’s electrical current, the gator grows into a monstrosity and has the unique ability to float through the air.  Now larger than man, the gator is ravenous for his next meal and the college students are an easy, convenient dish.  Trapped inside the cabin, brawn stupidity won’t save them against the mutated reptilian that circles outside, and they have to use every ounce of their brainpower to outsmart the insatiable beast. 

You’ve (probably) heard of “Bad CGI Sharks!”  Now, get ready to sink your horribly rendered jaws into “Bad CGI Gator,” the latest alligator creature feature comedy-horror from Charles Band’s camp of Full Moon Features.  Helmed by resident Full Moon filmmaker, “Deathbed” and “Dark Walker” director Danny Draven, the 2023 film removes practicality and plausibility for the sake of following in the wake of the badly rendered shark film from brothers Jason and Matthew Ellsworth.  “Bad CGI Gator” is also a family affair with Charles Band’s son, Zalman Band, in his first full-length feature writing credit that, like “Bad CGI Sharks, gives into itself and doesn’t take itself seriously with genre tropes, the gore and nudity one-two punch, and, of course, bad computer-generated imagery.  Shot in the location state of Georgia as well as in Charlie Band’s Full Moon estate in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, “Bad CGI Gator” is produced by the father-son duo of Charlie and Zalman with Nakai Nelson (“Evil Bong 420,” “Don’t Let Her In”) picking up the rest of the producing slack. 

If there was ever a time to root for a visually vexing constructed alligator and not the young people trying to save their lives from its floating ferocity, the time would be now.  The cast is compromised of the very worst caricatures of millennial youth with their “bros,” Instagram virality, and overall toxic behavior.  As a whole it’s all purposefully scripted to be painted like pure putrid of personas that sodomize the very essence of heroic protagonists.  Ben VanderMey (“Malicious”) and Cooper Drippe are impeccable at being gym bro chads, even VanderMey’s character is named Chad, and their on screen slay honeys, in Rebecca Stoughton and Sarah Buchanan, are social media influencing prejudgers with thigh-high skirts and low cut blouses.  The obnoxiously coarse foursome becomes grounded by contrasted counterparts in Sam and Hope, played by Michael Bonini (“#ChadGetstheAxe”) and Maddie Lane (“Monster Mash”), and this clues in audiences of the two more level-headed potential gator bait as the likely, predictable heroes who will either survive with their life or end up destroying the floating gator.  While the Chads and Paisleys are an exaggeration of arrogantly crass people, led with the worst of qualities for easy kill digestion, Sam and Hope are also to the extreme in a polar opposite manner.  Sam’s cautious philosophy makes him the butt of many jokes while the neutral Hope, a rival hottie shoulder-to-shoulder with the other ladies, can whip Chad into place with almost a stare being his stepsister.  The common dislike for tasteless jerks force Sam and Hope together with the gator being a keynote in closing the door on the once ajar flirtations.  Lee Feely rounds out the cast as a fisherman badmouthing the gator’s size, but the opening scene doesn’t do much for the rest of story nor does it come back to bite, literally, with the lack of Feely’s return in his short-lived moment. 

A title like “Bad CGI Gator” doesn’t come with any strings attached; there is no subtext, no character development, or convoluted storyline to really tickle and tease the brain in a sophistication of foreplay.  What you get are dumb, unlikeable characters for a deathroll of laughs and gnarly kills.  What you also get is a badly rendered giant floating alligator that on a one to ten on the badly rendered scale, this poor design is a four, resulting in a not too terribly layered and not the worst we’ve seen to date but obviously stands outs as a cut and pasted fake with animated movements.  Also entailed, in complete Full Moon fashion, is the alligator’s transmogrified size and supplied new abilities that allows it to chomp heads clean off, savagely gnaw on half-naked beauties, and swallow hole it’s biggest, most arrogant opponent.  What castrates the story is the limited locations with much of the cat and mouse play at the house and around the only vehicle for escape.  The adjacent lake is virtually untapped for watery carnage, an area of helplessness for prey, aka people, to float in suspension while something more dangerous lurks below the surface or meets them at eye level.  “Bad CGI Gator” is swampy camp at its best and, at the same time, at its worst but never pretends to be anything more.

Not only an ode to the monster movies of yore and a lampoon hit to the gross, schlocky creature features of more modern times, “Bad CGI Gator” emerges onto an AVC encoded, high-definition Blu-ray from Full Moon Features. The 1080p resolution on the single-layered BD25 of Full Moon’s feature number 395 has no digital discord regarding sharpness around the details. Gator POVs remark good pixel counts under and above water, delineating around the aquatic ecosystem including the plants and lake’s mucky floor. Night sequences bathed in a softer, illuminatingly spreading blue see equal amount of definition where the, what is considered to be, moon light hits and transition into the exterior cabin juxtapositions nicely with a warmer, shadowy outlined tone. The release’s audio mixes include a LPCM 5.1 surround sound and a LPCM Stereo 2.0. Early on, dialogue has a conical sound with reverberations that seemingly bounce back almost immediately. Though not totally free of audio fallibility, the dialogue does come across prominent and clean of distortion. Conical echoing dissipates later in the runtime and is replaced with the impenetrable sounds of a growling gator and its stomping around the cabin property that doesn’t seem to occupy the same space, much like the gator, ridiculing this particular creature feature sub-subgenre even more. English subtitles are optionally available. Special features include an audio commentary from director Danny Draven and screenwriter Zalman Band, a Screams from the Basement Podcast interview with the director, A second director interview on the Dead Talk Live Podcast, an isolated Jojo Draven musical score that sounds just as carnivalesque, humorous horror blend as Richard Band would compose, a blooper reel, a cast table read at the Full Moon mansion in Ohio, and the original trailer. The standard Blu-ray comes a fairly telling illustration of a savage-looking gator mouth agape just below a bitten-ripped Spring Break banner. There are no insert or other tangible bonus content alongside a humorously standing upright gator, slight smirking with the catalogue film number. “Bad CGI Gator” Blu-ray comes region free, has a runtime just under an hour at 58 minutes, and is not rated.

Last Rites: Full Moon’s satirical take on lousy alligator anarchy is spot on and though the cast of characters deserve every rendered tooth ripped into their flesh, the glossy gator pales in comparison to practical effects of its predecessors, and the story stinks as much as gator bait, “Bad CGI Gator” doesn’t false advertise this uncanny predator’s X-factors and that’s brownie points in my book.

“Bad CGI Gator” is an Amazon Choice item! Order it Here!

This EVIL Santa is Ho, Ho, Horrible. “Slayed” reviewed! (Terror Films / Digital Screener)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Five years after a murderous, Santa Claus-cladded maniac massacred a couple of young women in the dank basement of a water treatment plant in Harris County, AZ, the stigma of the plant being open has caused enough controversy, heartache, and notoriety for the local residents and will soon close the chained-link gate forever to soon transform into a car dealership. On the last day of operation, Christmas Eve night, the lone survivor of that night five years ago walks vigilantly around the perimeter with a tingled sense that something just isn’t right as he stashes weapons around the facility…just in case. With the last administrative staff gone for the night and a novice guard at the helm of watch, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse, until there arose such a clatter and who did the guard and the survivor find? It was the return of Jolly Old Saint Nick with an axe to grind.

Merry Christmas, readers! You can’t spread Christmas fear without watching at least one, count them one, homicidal Holidays flick starring our favorite Yuletide strangler, Santa Claus. This year, the Fatman reins down upon a few unfortunate recipients on his coal gifting list in Jim Klock and Mike Capozzi’s “Slayed” that was released digitally this last month of 2020. The script is penned by Jim Klock following another Klock and Capozzi collaboration, the 2019 released Devil trickery detective-thriller, “Red Letters,” that has the unconventional atmospherics of a Christmas themed slasher set in the fictional location of Harris County, Arizona even though the climate of Arizona is semiarid and “Slayed” appears to be taking place in a lush, semi-tropic climate that’s perhaps more in tune with a Floridian winter. However, production company, Jim Klock and Darrell Martinelli”s Code 3 Films, is based out of New Jersey with offices in Los Angeles, suggesting a summer shoot with the cut off shorts, short sleeves t-shirts, and the wicking sporty running attire being worn amongst the limited primary characters.

Klock not only directs, writes, and produces the serial killer Santa but also co-stars as a new-to-the-area, aspiring actor standing in for a regular security guard. Klock enacts a classic clueless constitution for a baffled and bumbling outsider caught in the middle of historical notoriety having returned from the grave. Standing side-by-side and opposite is co-director, Mike Capozzi, who institutes a doomsday prepper’s fantasy come to fruition as the lone survivor of the 5-year bygone Harris County water plant massacre. The role of a water plant operator turned lone wolf of misanthropy never truly fleshes out of a state of rigid inflexible measures that stagnant the character’s mysterious backstory of surviving Santa’s bloody red-handed carnage and extend his development into an explanation of his long-awaited revenge obsession. Klock and Capozzi only bookend the film being in the same scene together, leaving much of the midsection, essentially the second act, for distressing females as hunting game for Santa’s slay. Coel Mahal and Kyra Kennedy, who have previously worked with Klock and Capozzi on previous projects, adequately fill in those rolls to an extent. Mahal’s masculine bity, water plant administrator acutely shifts into trope slasher-fodder of hapless articles of loosely bound prey. Things worsen with Kyra Kennedy’s rando abductee with an uncontrollably irritating sniveling in unprompted immediate danger as she sits in the passenger seat of a truck and just inconsolably cries, cries, and cries. Luckily, “Slayed” is a indie-reined in production that doesn’t swarm with halfhearted and ill-deserving characters as the film rounds out with minor roles casted to Delton Goodrum, Chuck Roberts, and Jennifer Meakin and Crystal Cameron as half-naked, strung up torture toys for a deranged Kris Kringle.

In a peeve already mentioned, “Slayed” rarely invokes as a Christmas chronicled horror film, striking lukewarm resemblances to that of “Silent Night, Deadly Night” or “Christmas Evil,” to which those films set a very low bar to emulated, unless you’re a trash-loving, so-bad-it’s-good, cult film enthusiastic, like yours truly, than its nothing but top shelf quality. However, the unexplained warm weather upholstery cripples “Slayed’s” genre-blend construct that’s been in august status of next level output over the last few years to dispel the happiest time of year into a certifiable time of fear in an apparent hostile seasonal takeover in a return of spite that Halloween shortens every year with Christmas nipping at the heels as soon as the first brown leaf hits the ground. If the shooting location is truly set in Arizona, winter months typically hover around a light jacket and shorts 60 degrees during the day and nippy 40 degrees at night, but the sweaty, wintery deficient clothing worn suggests a sweltering otherwise. Klock and Capozzi’s good faith effort into “Slayed’s” festive fare is in the garish Holiday decorations and ornamental lighting production design denotes the showy display of Christmas spirit, held in which season is not exactly clear. To speak more on the lighting, Emily Adam, another patron believer of Klock’s work, uses a restrained soft fuchsia lens tint, among other vivid primary colors, to elevate the seasonal veneer and Adam’s lighting is especially a favorable hallmark of the season with the use of the soft, but brilliant glow of Christmas string bulbs utilized to lash and tie up up naughty listers. Yet, up to scratch cinematography can’t fix what’s inherently broken with a story penned as a sequel structure that assumes the audiences’ knowledge of past events when, in fact, leaves viewers in blackout darkness with many questions: Why the Harris County water plant? Where did maniacal Santa go for five years? How did the water plant survivor make it out alive and is now determined to end not only maniacal Santa’s life but also his own? Why did maniacal Santa kidnap this random young lady from her house? What’s the significance of Christmas for maniacal Santa and why this period in time to return? I enjoy Christmas horror as much as the next genre votary but wrapping your head around “Slayed” topples any chance of actually enjoying the disgruntled, menacingly muttering “Ho Ho Ho” catch-phrasing, maniacal Santa terrorizing an unjolly skeleton crew on Christmas Eve night.

Ho Ho Horror! Santa delivers the gift of sufferable tidings and killjoys in the Terror Films distributed “Slayed” digitally only onto Prime Video. If you didn’t catch “Slayed” before Christmas when released on December 18th, then no worries! Quickly nosedive into your laptop or television set and catch Santa axing away on Prime Video today! An interesting tidbit about the crew of “Slayed” comes from the music department with composer Jojo Draven, former guitarists for a number of Las Vegas shows such as performance artists, the Blue Man Group, and Gothic street illusionist, Chris Angel. The Indonesian-American female rocker’s agreeable experimental-industrial sound comes across professionally astute toward the context with unbuckling tension baked right into the scene. There were no bonus material included with the screener nor where there bonus scenes during or after the credits. Instead of racing down the stairs, excited by the prospect of unwrapping that one main horror-inspired Christmas movie on Christmas Day, “Slayed” turns out to be a disappointing hefty lump of coal with a few diamond patches sparkling through the sedimentary rock and catching our eye in a rather humbug holiday horror falling short of that so-bad-its-good set bar.

Watch “Slayed” on Prime Video by clicking the poster!