Lionsgate Home Entertainment presents the classic “Waxwork” and “Waxwork II: Lost in Time” on Blu-ray for $39.99 coming this October 18th!
“Waxwork” Synopsis
Inside the wax museum a group of teenagers are aghast at the hauntingly lifelike wax displays of Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, and other character members of the Horror Hall of Fame. Each display is perfectly grotesque, yet each is missing one thing . . . a victim! Admission to the WAXWORK was free but now they may pay with their lives! One by one, the students are drawn into the settings as objects of the blood thirsty creatures. They are now part of the permanent collection.
“Waxwork II: Lost in Time” Synopsis
Having escaped the fiery destruction of the original Waxwork, Marl (Zach Galligan, Gremlins) and Sarah (Monika Schnarre, TV’s “Beverly Hills, 90210”) face another grueling ordeal in WAXWORK II, when Sarah is accused of murdering her stepfather. Fleeing through the doors of time in a desperate search for proof of her innocence, the two lovers find themselves caught in the eternally recurring battle between good and evil. Together they must stop one of the most powerful and demonic figures of all time — Lord Scarabus.
“Waxwork” Special Features include:
· Audio Commentary with Anthony Hickox & Zach Galligan
· Featurettes:
o “The Waxwork Chronicles” (Parts 1–6)
o Vintage “Making of” Featurette
· Theatrical Trailer
· Still Gallery
“Waxwork II: Lost in Time” Special Features include:
· Audio Commentary with Anthony Hickox & Zach Galligan
· Theatrical Trailer
· Still Gallery
Pre-Order your copy by clicking the linked image below!
Lionsgate Home Entertainment presents “6 Plots” starring Andrew Clarke, Alice Darling, and Ryan Corr (Wolf Creek 2) onto a Rated-R DVD, On Demand, and Digital Download this October 4th!
Synopsis
After passing out at a party, Brie wakes up to a strange phone message: a lunatic has abducted her six friends and buried them in boxes around the city. Each box has its own deadly terror — water, gasoline, insects — waiting to kill its occupant. To add to the sadistic thrills, the killer is streaming footage of the trapped kids on the Internet — and to each other. Forbidden to call parents or police, Brie must use her wits to locate her friends’ six death traps before their time runs out.
DVD Special Features
· “The Making of 6 Plots” Featurette
Pre-Order your copy of 6 Plots over at Amazon for slightly cheaper!
Starting digging into your Pre-Order for 6 Plots today!
Set a few years after the 1620 arrival of the Mayflower ship, a faith-entrenched Puritan family becomes ostracized by a tightly knit plantation community and leave their home to settle near a woodland landscape. The family of seven build upon their quaint home, growing crops for food and for trade, but when the youngest child, an infant, disappears into the depths of the dark woods, the family slowly starts to unravel at the inexplicableness of their loss. The once tranquil and beauty of the woods dreadfully alter into a coven for dark and fear inducing figures that root themselves between the family binds, untying their sanity and faith that once held them close and separating them toward a Godless path of destructive witchery.
Writer-director Robert Eggers’s “The Witch” steps into a time machine and travels back in time to the New World era and delivers an American Folklore horror film that’s honestly genuine and deeply haunting. Eggers constructs a mood and tone stripped of comfortable commodities from the moment the family takes on the New World for the very first time away from the plantation. The isolation is immense, the tension is thick, and the cast and crew dynamic squeezes tight around the heart, ripping out every raw emotion and turning the display into a gut-wrenching performance. Eggers had done the appropriate leg work by researching various diaries, folklore tales, and recorded accounts of the time to achieve elaborate detail; even the dialect is true to the period.
The film’s devil worshipping namesake ghastly conjures a simple, yet legendary form. Without the use of glossy special effects, “The Witch” mesmerizes with practical makeup, slight of hand editing, and implied black enchantment while pulling at our internal sinful desires of the flesh, lust and deceit. Eggers kept the mainly nude Bathsheba Garnett in the shadows to give the menacing Witch a closing-in threatening appeal that corners an easy prey, such as children. The Witch’s power, a contractual perk with the devil, is vast and unholy that becomes a fierce antagonist to the family’s unnerving, yet powerless faith.
Eggers and his team uses a sepia visual to devoid much of the color as possible from a naturally bleak mid-17th century community style that’s more binary and cramped, setting the stage for doom and gloom. To continue with the adverse affect, an everlasting current of formidable abstracts are implemented for uneasiness. These signs of inauspiciousness can be as obvious as Ralph Ineson’s sonorous voice as the family’s patriarch and resonating religious leader William or can be as opaque as their corn crop turning suddenly rotten or the reoccurrence of a toying hare and an unsteady, long-horned goat named “Black Phillip, who may or may not be the devil himself.
In the midst of the family being torn apart, the eldest daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) desperately tries to keep her family together, but with her mother Katherine (Kim Dickie) in severe grief after the loss of her newborn son, Thomasin absorbs the blame and disdain from her mother. Thomasin’s abuse doesn’t end with her mother, which the story mainly touches upon with each of Thomasin’s parents and siblings, in one way or another, demeaning her. The oldest brother Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) under the spell of hormones repeatedly stares at his sister’s chest, lusting after the female form. Thomasin’s sibling twins Mercy and Jonas remorselessly believe her and label her a witch from the time of Samuel’s disappearance. Even her father, who stood up for her honor and her dignity when neither her mother or siblings would, eventually broke with a misguided view of trust. Thomasin’s world of faith, family, and, basically, everything she once believed in has been stripped away and without that barrier of ideals, a contract with the devil tempts her weakened will.
Lionsgate home distribution releases the horror sub-genre reviving “The Witch” on DVD and Blu-ray. This review covers the Blu-ray release that consists of a MPEG-4 AVC encoded disc that delivers a stunning high definition 1080p picture in a rare 1.66:1 original aspect ratio. The intentional reddish-brown coloring properly dates the era the film is set and the picture is detailed to display the grit, the dirt, and the muck that further enhances the foreboding of calamity. The DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 is crisp and clear, favoring more on the shocking and slightly experimental soundtrack, but still manages to place the dialogue in the forefront, steering clear from the cacophony. Still, I found the dialogue hard to follow because of the puritanical dialect of that time. Bonus features include an audio commentary with director Robert Eggers, the featurette “The Witch: A Primal Folklore,” Salem Panel Q&A, and a design gallery.
Folklore horror hasn’t died just yet. In fact, the sense of a witchcraft resurrection is on the horizon, possessing now a new high profile inside the horror community that’s sure to pick up steam. Newcomer Robert Eggers puts new life into gothic, despondent horror with contrast characters living in a stark reality. “The Witch” will launch Eggers into horror orbit and keep Lionsgate as a friend to the genre.
Tim Weber returns to his childhood home in Somerset to take claim over the family business from his father who recently deceased. When Somerset residents start to disappear and severed body parts are discovered, the idyllic and peaceful lands of the small village are stirred, whisking together an agitated hornets’ nest of confusion and trouble. The truth surfaces when two Nile crocodiles reveal themselves, snapping off the heads of ewes and shredding the shriveled bodies of elderly ladies. Hunting parties form and traps are set to snare and kill the semiaquatic predator, but are the crocodiles just a facade for something more nefarious? The crocodiles must be stopped at all cost, but the hidden beneath the very noses of the townsfolk stealths the true danger.
While Lionsgate’s distributed UK film “The Hatching” may sound like a serious creature feature, the Michael Anderson directed 2014 film, shot on the Somerset location, is actually a horror-comedy with tea kettle loads of dry English charm and wit. “The Hatching’s” cheekiness stems from deploring a misconception that it’s actually a creature feature story of two crocodiles lurking prey from the watery ditches of Somerset and does a good job at it. The tension stagnates of something far more sinister about Somerset is quite evident, but doesn’t slap you square in the face until the obvious pivot. Anderson is able to keep the attention on the crocodiles with the help of the story’s preface of young Tim Weber and his mate Baghi stealing two crocodile eggs from a zoological establishment and witnessing their other friend becoming crocodile dinner during the process. Yet, the farce still plays out until act three when the town masks a real threat to their residents.
To quickly sum up the impression of “The Hatching” is to be frank that if “Jaws” and “An American Werewolf in London” had a crack baby, “The Hatching” would be the epitome of that said crack baby. I had a strong inkling that “The Hatchling” felt too familiar with the John Landis’ iconic and pioneering werewolf comedy of an American backpacker becoming attacked by an English werewolf. That suspicion revealed to be more physically prominent as to learn that director Michael Anderson had worked on “An American Werewolf in London” as a clapper loader, so there may lie some inspiration. Even the townies Russell and Lardy discuss the possibility of werewolves in Somerset responsible for the killings of sheep and maybe even the disappearances and a few shots of the moment eerily donned that retro homage, an oral sign of respect to the Landis movie.
To get down to the brass tax, “The Hatching” may have the intentions to bite hard like a giant crocodile, but lacks coherency at times, as if time and space were not something considered for the sake of clarity and storytelling. The Nick Squires inaugural script is all over the place with transitions not quite hitting the mark as intended. Characters were also not set up well; point in case with Tim Weber and his employees loathing him for an unknown reason. I get why his uncle Stan despises him, but why Russell and Lardy? The butcher’s boy was the biggest exposition faux pas as his story was nothing more than a brief explanation to catch up on the events at hand.
“The Hatching” is listed as rated R with violence and gore, accompanied with brief sexuality and drug use. The crocodile gore is modest at best with more of the gore being delivered by way of other means and not by the two beasts. The overall horror related effects weren’t shabby or shoddy as most of it, if not all, were practical effects and, by the grace of God, not computer generated. Granted, scenes of the crocodile out of water were obviously of not a real creature, but still real looking enough to scare the bejesus out of some poor soul. Real enough to parade around the streets of Somerset on a shopping cart, as in one scene with Russell and Lardy.
Lionsgate presents “The Hatching” DVD in a 1.85:1 widescreen presentation with an English 5.1 Dolby Digital audio mix. The DVD also comes with an digital ultraviolet that can be played on any device. Bonus features include a behind-the-scenes segment entitled “Beneath The Surface of The Hatching” and a trailer gallery. “The Hatching” may not be for everybody; with the dry English comedy and the sub-genre identity complex, the film may even piss off some hardcore horror fanatics, but I firmly believe “The Hatching” has more respect for it’s elder films than it does in itself and that’s the quality most films seem to hone into for a quick stint of popularity.
By now I imagine we’re all, by all I mean avid movie-goers, familiar with the director Robert Rodriguez. The balls-to-the-wall flare for action Rodriguez has written and directed some of the most memorable movies in nearly the last two decades – Desperado, From Dusk till Dawn, Planet Terror and, yes, even Spy Kids. Rodriguez is now a well-known household name now that he has his own production company – Troublemaker Studios – and is a hot-shit friend of Django Unchained writer and director Quentin Tarantino (they’re always in each other films if you haven’t noticed). Now, I had thought that I’ve seen all of Rodriguez’s work with the exception of Spy Kids, but I was wrong. Curandero: Dawn of the Demon is a latest release from Lionsgate; however, the movie was completed and released in 2005 – why such a delay? Perhaps the delay was a product of the film being made in and using the language spoken in Mexico. I wouldn’t doubt this as El Mariachi was not known to the American audience until Antonio Banderas and Selma Hayek starred in Desperado, a sort of sequel or remake of El Mariachi, and an American DVD of El Mariachi was released later.
Curandero, which translate to The Healer, follows the healer Carlos – a practical man who uses his knowledge of healing on those he think are weak minded fools just so they feel better about their lives. That is until he meets Mexican Federale Magdalena who hires him to become involved a case where a satanic cult terrorizes Mexico City. Carlos beliefs will be challenged as black magic becomes ultimately real and the forces against him are closer to home than what he could ever imagine.
Curandero grabs you right from the start as we’re thrown into Carlos’s simple hometown world where he competes with another curandero named Alex Munez who is more popular around town, but even though Carlos thinks his line of work is a bit of a sham, he still makes an effort to please other people making him well liked in the community and has been given respect due to his father’s healing services. The horrifying action begins when Agent Magdalena enters the story; the saucy tall Latina is a realist and doesn’t much in the mumbo-jumbo that is black magic, but her story makes a complete 180 degree turn at the finale and so does Carlos. The story is well written by Rodriguez giving the both Carlos and the federale the same view on spirituality yet making both reason completely different.
Robert Rodriguez’s style directorial feels implemented into Curandero even though Robert Rodriguez didn’t direct the film. It is another Rodriguez who takes the credit for Curandero’s fast-paced, over-exaggerated action. Director Eduardo Rodriguez tries to recreate Robert Rodriguez, but does molds his own take to reconstruct the elements and add great horror qualities that contribute to the action.
This 2005 cult/possession film should have had a much earlier release in the U.S. There is definitely an appeal here for niche horror fans. Would Curandero have done well with mainstream audiences? No because there is just too much working against Curandero when considering American mainstream audiences – it’s in Spanish, it’s lost in translation with the dialogue, and it deals with some Mexican traditions. Certainly pick this up from Lionsgate Home Entertainment. Curandero will fill your cup of blood and horror.
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