Tag Archives: Michael Baker

Forest Hike Lands Four Friends Right in the Middle of Drug Smuggling EVIL! “Cascade” reviewed! (Breaking Glass Pictures / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Cascade” Available on DVD! Click Here to Purchase Your Copy!

The small town of Clearview offers little opportunity and for four teenage friends, they’re diverging, life-affirming paths will either cement their relationship stronger or obliterate it completely.  Looking to do something epic before everything changes and most will put Clearview in the rearview mirror, they decide to hike an unrestricted, waterfall area of the locale state park.  What they find at the bottom of the falls is a crashed personal plane, a bag full of drugs, and a dead body.  Half of the group seeing an opportunity to make a small fortune splits ties between them and leave them blindsided by the drug dealers’ sudden appearance and guns drawn interrogation to find the downed plane and their narcotics.  A series of scuffles leaves one friend dead and two others injured, pitting a sole, unconstrained teenage woman against multiple armed and dangerous narcotraffickers hellbent on retrieving their lost goods.  Determined to not go down without a fight and free her friends, she’ll use every advantage, no matter how desperate, to outwit her pursuers.

The adage there’s no such thing as a free lunch applies to the latest film from director Egidio Coccimiglio (“Compulsion”).  Coccimiglio, who puts out one film roughly every decade since the mid-1990s, begins the story of “Cascade” with two, smalltown young couples on the verge of entering adulthood, figuring out their relationships and their lives one indecisive moment at a time, until that decision is made for them when a group no good drug smugglers roadblock their grownup rite of passage.  The debut script of Ed Mason is shot in the scenic Crystal Creek forests trails and waterfalls in Sault Ste. Marie, Canada.  “The Void’s” Rosalia Chilelli and Jennifer Pun produce with Michael Baker (“Depraved Mind”), Bruno Marino (“Tormented”), and Anders Palm (“Trench 11”) executive producing the Edge Entertainment independent production and Blue Fox Entertainment presentation.

“Cascade’s” plot is split between two perspectives, the teens and the traffickers, but we’re mostly aborded into the teens’ backstory and imminent concerns:  Vince (Stephen Kalyn), a carefree, immature cut-up and army prospect aiming to leave Clearview by any means possible,  Em (Sadie Laflamme-Snow), Vince’s girlfriend whose keeping her newfound pregnancy with him a secret because of their uncertain future, Jesse (Joel Oulette), a by choice Clearview lifer who just landed the job of shop mechanic, and Alexis (Sara Waisglass), daughter to an estranged ruthless biker gang leader and who is uncertain a college opportunity is the right choice for her.  What’s admirable about the character list is that none of them are throwaway characters with ample, individual emotional weight for relatability and substance.   Compared to the adversary drug smugglers, there’s little to be known about them as their backstories are purposefully kept in the dark, evoking a dangerous impression upon first meet and scenes.  As the story unfolds, the two groups clash, and things get ugly, true natures emerge within both factions that turn once established sympathies into traitorous duplicity and vice versa.  Amid the switcheroo of moral standards, the fight for friendship and survival becomes a one-woman show with Sara Waisglass at the wheel, showcasing Alex as good as college material by outsmarting cruel yet hesitating foes.  Coccimiglio and Mason put in the trouble of frontloading meanness and calculated brutality only to fizzle into backpedaling renegers on their ill-fated promises toward Alexis’s captured and hurt friends.  We get a pretty good showing of bad guy mentality from a creepy looking Josh Cruddas (“Resident Evil:  Welcome to Raccoon City”) and a no-nonsense leader in Allegra Fulton (“The Shape of Water”), a not good showing from the bearded oldster Matt Connors (“Kicking Blood”), and a modest teetering of morality performance from James Cade (“Antiviral”).  “Cascade” rounds out the cast with Mark Brombacher (“The Kingdom of Var”), Joanna Douglas (“Saw 3D”), Bart Rochon (“Bloodslinger”), and Greg Bryk (“Rabid”) as the leader of the biker gang The Saints and Alexis’s father. 

Under the bank check of a humble budget, serviced with one primary, exterior location, and limited ostentatious stunt work, “Cascade” is forced into a character-driven corner, carried by a pack of toothsome personalities to keep the story wet with insatiability.  For the better part of the narrative, Coccimiglio successfully stacks the blocks of sympathy, disparage, and a rough action scheme and comes out on top for an independent action-thriller.  Contrarily, a few scenes stand out being too big for the film’s skinny jean britches.  Gun shot wound effects work with compelling impact with a fair amount of gruesomeness in the makeup and how the shooter and victim react; however, other stunts, such as the car collision, dampens the believability in which one person dies, one person suffers a compound fracture, and neither vehicle has flipped or sustained substantial wreckage to cause that much damage during a shaky-cam, car-crash simulation sequence.  These moments really announce, and announce very prominently, the weak points of the production which can be looked past considering how solid this indie feature generates the big picture story on a small budget scale.

From Breaking Glass Pictures, a Philadelphian based independent distributor delivering the thrills and the chills as well as LGBQT+ films of the world, brings a Blue Fox Entertainment release, “Cascade,” onto DVD.  The MPEG-2 encoded, upscaled 720p, DVD5 presents the feature in an anamorphic widescreen 2.39:1 that has a slight wrap around lens to capture a wider frame without feeling squeezed.  This works toward the director of photography Diego Guijarro’s advantage to enclose Crystal Creek falls and forest into the optical lens without being limited to medium-to-closeup shots.  The upscaled 720 resolution holds its own to decipher details distinctly between the lush greenery, white water spray of the falls, and the actors skin tones and clothing.  Since “Cascade” has limited stunt work there’s not much room for novel or innovative camera techniques but it’s a solidly organic colored film that looks professional rather than commercially graded.  The English language LPCM 5.1 surround sound, again, doesn’t have the range to really be necessary for an all-channel assault but diffuses well enough to carry a midrange peak tone. Dialogue is clearly and cleanly expressed with adequate prominence and depth is opportune but not key for any scenes except for some radio communication. English closed captioning is optionally available. The Breaking Glass Pictures DVD release is a barebones product with no special features or stingers during or after the credits. Physically, “Cascade” models much of the same splendor to keep in tune with a feature only release in a standard DVD Amaray with a decent gun-toting mockup cover. The disc is pressed with the same image art with no included inserts or other tchotchke material. The not rated release has a runtime of 95 minutes and region 1 encoded playback.

Last Rites: If in a mood for a third-tier thriller from Canada, “Cascade” checks all the necessary car chasing, gun-shooting, double-dealing, and no-frills boxes with the hunted becoming the hunter of do-no-good drug smugglers who’ll stop at nothing until thousands of dollars’ worth of their lost in a plane wreckage nose snow is recovered.

“Cascade” Available on DVD! Click Here to Purchase Your Copy!

Biding Time Can Be Dystopianlly EVIL and Claustrophobic. “Tin Can” reviewed! (Dread / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Tin Can” on Sale Now at Amazon.com!

A viral fungus pandemic has plagued the world.  Fret, a parasitologist, has worked toward a cure to stop the spread of a virus that grows Clavaria-like basidiocarps from inside out the body that’ll eventually enclose the victim to death in an organic cocoon.  Before Fret can develop and distribute the recently discovered global cure for the virus, she awakes in a confined metal container constructed to suspend life duration for those who contracted the illness.  Confused and disoriented, Fret learns she’s not alone as others awake around her and able to talk with through the containers, including your infected husband John.  Unaffected by the virus and believed to be encapsulated in error, Fret works desperately on an escape from her well-intended prison in order to save humanity before it’s too late.   

By now, most of us can relate to a pandemic-driven storyline because, well, you know, COVID.  The 2020 sci-fi body horror “Tin Can” is no exception despite having been filmed prior to all the pandemic induced deaths and lockdowns.  Perhaps premise creator and director Seth A. Smith had a little foresight into coming events that inspired the Canadian project co-written with Darcy Spidle.  “Tin Can” is the fourth pen-to-paper collaboration between Smith and Spidle who previously completed two feature films (“Lowlife,” 2010 / “The Crescent,” 2017) and one short (“The Brym,” 2016) along with “The Willows,” the duo’s fourth feature film and revolving once again around preternatural events, that is currently in pre-production. For “Tin Can,” Smith and Spidle entangle a science fictional, dystopian, Hell in a handbasket world with selfish motives that outweigh saving the world. Seth A. Smith’s Nova Scotia based production company, Cut/Off/Tail Pictures, develops the story produced by company producer Nancy Ulrich and financially backed by the executive producing team of Michael Baker, Marc Savoie, Tim Lidster, and Rob Cotterill (“Possessor”).

“Tin Can” might evoke a sense that one main character will be the focus point for the entire storyline, such as with “Buried” that stays put on the singular person trapped in this very tight, very claustrophobic-inducing soda can. Yet, that is not such the case with “Tin Can” that does circle around a centerpiece character in Fret (Anna Hopkins, “V/H/S/94”) but the cure-all scientist waking up in a life-extending canister while on the edge of saving mankind isn’t alone. Surrounding Fret are strangers, colleagues, and even her husband, some of whom, such as her husband, are suffering the protruding fungal fairy fingers of the virus. Anna Hopkins fields a hefty, difficult role after an initially a humble beginning as a scientist that more so-or-less feels the pangs of a low rent indie, but as Hopkins’ Fret transcends time by waking up weeks (or maybe months…years?) later, her environment becomes frantically imprisoning. The tight confines of the titular object with medical tubes dangling from the ceiling, a Tracheostomy tube down the throat, a malfunction video screen, and mysterious bars that light up one-by-one set a stronger stage for the actress to be put up against and Hopkins nails the mindset of a woman vehement and determined with escape to not only save her own life but the life of billions across the planet. In the cans beside Fret, providing Hopkins with more serve-and-volley fuel, is her husband John (Simon Mutabazi) inflicted by disease but becomes more than just a victim, Wayne (Michael Ironside, “Starship Troopers”) who I couldn’t really grasp as a component in the story as he’s like a project financier in the tin can project to save his own skin from being reskinned by fungus, Darcy (Amy Trefry) as a colleague-friend of John and Fret, Whistler (Tim Dunn, “The ABCs of Death”) who is the most interesting and weird doomsayer of the bunch, and a fist banging mute (Sara Campbell) also inflicted. For much the back-and-forth in the cannister talk, the dynamic is more of a talking head roundtable of initial discussions of popping open a small air vent so they sce outside their enclosed cell and eventually lead to more depth and deception that narrows the story with the what, when, why, and how.

“Tin Can” aspires to be a chaptered three-act conundrum. I don’t mean that in a negative perspective. What Smith brings into existence is a polished independent film of Cronenberg-esque and has ensuing weirdness act-after-act only paralleled by the double-crossing exoneration or a retaliating impugn of keeping one alive after being severely scorned. The first act plays out like the world of today, a devastating pandemic that has ravaged the human population. The second act unsheathes the mystery of waking up inside the tin can device with people she knows and is eager to discharge herself from a capsule that’s supposed to sustain her life. Then, the third act rolls in, the third and final chapter, and time has officially been corrupted as we know it with a futuristic beings suited in various colored alloys. Alloys are definitely a theme beginning with title “Tin Can.” Fret discovers a cure for the diseases by commingling it with an alloy and each containment artificer is suited in a different metal and are credited as Copper, Gold, Silver, etc. What Smith could be suggesting is the element that could cure us could also incapacitate or, even worse, transfigure our existence with a lifesaving, yet life altering, solution to the extreme. Cinematographer Kevin Fraser industrializes the look of “Tin Can’s” existential view and is a glorious rusty bucket of a cheerless life. If Smith wanted to convey a life of nihility and automaton, Fraser nailed down the oxidation state. “Tin Can’s” a cold hard look at the cost of saving the world that, in the end, might not be worth saving.

A part of the Dread Central at home release line, “Tin Can” arrives onto a high-definition Blu-ray distributed by Epic Pictures and MVD Visual. The region free Blu-ray is presented in a throwback 3:2 with letterboxing and has a color reduction implemented to give it that demoded depiction. Image looks amazing without an inkling of any kind of compression issues especially with many of the scenes shot in darker and bleaker circumstances. Fraser delivers some awe-inspiring, creative angles that produce a how-did-they-do-that response to get a 360-degree single take of Anna Hopkins in the cannister or the rotation of a limp body on a large wheel door. The Dolby Digital 5.1 English audio mix has solid sound design as more than half of the picture is off the principals talking through their metallic cylinder containers that created a muffled depth and low range flickering in the backorder, the mechanized hum mixed with scraping metal, does wonders to sell the dystopian effect that borders steampunk. No inherent or noticeable flaws in the final product. English subtitles are available. Special features include a commentary with Seith A. Smith, The Last Bell Doe Toll – the making of “Tin Can'” exhibits the construction and creation of the displaced subsequent future, how to achieve a few of those crazy Kevin Fraser shots, and provide cast and crew interview insights, and the bonus content rounds out with two music videos – The Last Bell Does Toll and ZAUM – The Enlightenment (Part I). “Tin Can” runs at 104 minutes and is not rated. “Tin Can” is ingenious on a level many will not fully understand and, frankly, I barely can tether my impression and have it make sense, but there’s a unique ore core to this science fictional, ill-fated fantasy that can be so odd at times you can’t help but not look away.

“Tin Can” on Sale Now at Amazon.com!