Tag Archives: movie-review

This Little Pit Stop of EVIL Doesn’t Have Gumdrops and Lollipops. “Candy Land” reviewed! (MVD Visual / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Visit “Candy Land” On Blu-ray. Purchase Here!

Candy Land is the bestowed designation of a truck stop at one of the last exits through Bible Belt country.  The monikered hotspot is home to four prostitutes, Sadie, Riley, Levi, and Liv, who work for ends meet, servicing all the needs of commercial truckers, those passing through, and even the local sheriff as long as they can cough up the cash.  The only ones not seeking pitstop sex worker services at Candy Land is a religious cult trying to spread the world of the lord around the same stretch of space.  When one of the members, a young and naïve Remy, shows up ostracized from the zealot sect, the sex workers take her in, treat her with kindness, and convince her to be worked into their profession.  Shortly after, gruesomely murdered bodies are found in and around the truck stop turning the once desired Candy Land into a life-threatening place to work, and enlightening the lot lizards that Candy Land is more seedy than once believed.

Shot in the foreground of the scenic Montana mountains, John Swab’s “Candy Land” is a lewd offering that screams the ugly part of something beautiful.  The 2022 USA horror-thriller is a written-and-directed by the “Run with the Hunted” and “Body Brokers” filmmaker Swab in the director’s first go at fringe horror that involves sex work, crazy cults, and hidden knife sheathed inside a large wooden cross.  Swab’s script takes a path less trodden perspective to most similar narratives and pulls inspiration heavily from the 70’s grindhouse era with lots of skin and lots of blood.  Swab produces his own film alongside fellow “Run with the Hunted” and “Body Brokers” producer Jeremy Rosen (“I Am Fear”), with Robert Ogden Barnum (“31”) and Michael Reiser (“Abandoned”) as executive producers, under the production banner of Roxwell Films.

The ensemble cast is comprised of Hollywood veterans, up-and-coming actors, and even a famous last name.  The latter would be then 29-year-old Eden Brolin, daughter of Josh Brolin (“No Country for Old Men”) and granddaughter of James Brolin (“The Amityville Horror”), who is quickly paving her own path having landed as a season regular on the widely popular modern western series “Yellowstone.”  The “Blood Bound” actress is joined by equally young and hungry talent of Sam Quartin, a multi-time John Swab collaborator with roles in “Run with the Hunted” and “Body Brokers,” Virginia Rand (“I Am Fear”), and Owen Campbell (“X”) who are definitely not shy showing of their bodies, simulating explicit sex acts, and step into a compromising prostitute’s shoes as “Candy Land’s” unashamed lot lizards, or that’s what they portray for their characters on screen.  Together, a bond is formed between the working stiffs of sex workers, leaning on each other for support while seemingly living a free and uninhibited life with a good chunk of change in their pocket, but their profession is no walk in the truck lot as taxing moments in sidestepped affairs of the main plot show the darker side of prostitution, mostly involving Owen Campbell’s Levi as a straight man willing to anything for cash in a male dominated over-the-road trucking industry.  Their chimera’s end of the beginning is when Remy strolls into their lives like a lost puppy.  “It Follows’” Olivia Luccardi plays the meek and underestimated cult girl turning tricks as a way get a foot-in the door to cleanse damned souls to send to Gods’ pearly gates in Heaven and while Luccardi has the substantial feign madness well set in her eyes and actions, her story slips below that of the original four truck stop hookers as much of Luccardi’s backstory or even her perpetual motion through her perspective loses to the arbitrary wanes of killing for the sake of killing when the chance is at hand.  Cast rounds out with Guinevere Turner (“American Psycho”), Brad Carter (“The Devil to Pay”), Bruce Davis (“Agnes”), Billy Blair (“What Josiah Saw”), Mark Ward, and another famous last name from William Baldwin (“Flatliners”) as the daunting, downlow Sheriff Rex who has a strong, affectionate thing for Levi. 

The very first opening scene and montage of a sandy-blond Sadie going truck-to-school bus-to-bathroom stall to give a sense of what to expect and the down-and-dirty daily workload for our principal prostitutes sets the tone of Swab’s lickerish thriller with grindhouse endowments.  “Candy Land” is more than just a nutso cult film with all the hallmarks of sordidness as the interpretation received from the story is this temporariness in these characters’ lives.  From the transient paying clients of a truck stop, to living in the impermanence of a hotel room, to even the things they ingest, such as the smoke of incessant drags of cigarettes as a brief coping mechanism and the food they eat with the Hostess Snowballs that have fleeting substance in them to stave off hunger for a little while and only provide negligible nutrition, the temporarily speaks volumes toward the plot of a killer under the influence of a radicalized cleansed ideology wasting away those in provisional moments.  Swab finely sets up character quirks, an unsavory, realistic world, and distinct dynamics to enmesh the characters in a life they attempt to put a pretty face on only that pretty face is a pig wearing lipstick, forcing them into uncertainty and wearing them down to a point they can’t face what’s important and dangerous right in front of them – a young, confused girl led astray and looking for answers.  Instead, that girl, teetering on the edge of purity and dissolution having nowhere to call home, is not safeguarded and is folded into their own licentious lives and, like a Trojan horse, she ultimately become their downfall. 

For “Candy Land’s” inaugural home video release, VMI Distribution and MVD Visual releases the John Swab horror onto Blu-ray.  The AVC encoded, high definition 1080p, BD25 conscripts not a single compression issue in the breathtaking, mountainous landscapes of Montana, affixing great distance between Candy Land and the rest of the world to describe the troubled brief getaway from reality without actually saying it. Presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio, details are greatly appreciated here with the graphic and vulgar markings inside the restrooms, skin tones fair a natural coloring, and a good amount of the whole film is lit naturally with the occasional greenish-yellow gel work to enhance the dinginess of a seedy truck stop. The English language, lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 surround track settles the best fidelity that it can muster, reining in unbridled tracks for a more subdued approach that befits more the lowkey motel suspenser than a fueled high-rise stimulator. Dialogue is clean and clear enough; a few instances cause for mumbling concern but quickly pass and that link is quickly made in the off word that’s missed. Soundtrack contains well-blended, well-intermingled snippets of classic rock, alternative and R&B from the 90s, and a quaint Christmas selection. Yes, “Candy Land” could be considered a Christmas movie! English subtitles are optionally available. Special features are limited by the disc capacity that houses only John Swab’s commentary track and retroesque, in-character stills of a digital zine. The standard Blu-ray Amaray snapper case for this limited-edition release is nothing short of pedestrian with a homage cover art that, I must admit, made me suspect Candy Land” was more a vampire film than a cultist’ coup of truck stop sex workers because of my lack of doing any kind of film prep for any of the screeners I receive – keeps me objectively aligned. You’ll find the same image pressed on the disc itself with no insert accompanying. Not rated and locked on a region A playback, this release has the film clocked in at 93 minutes.

Last Rites: “Candy Land’s” sweetness derives from its in-your-face sexual audacity that rings a certain truth inside the unsavory cash-making aspects of the oldest profession and Swab takes us out from the game’s usual vivarium of the darkened streets and the dingy underpasses into the brightly lit and very populated desert with a different breed of the species. The instilled cult angle feels more slapdash in comparison that sunders the acts more acutely and without a clear reason, leaving the finale unsatisfactory like a $20 handy.

Visit “Candy Land” On Blu-ray. Purchase Here!

Might Be Dressed as a Fool, but EVIL Can’t Outwit This Jester! “The Wrong Door” reviewed! (Visual Vengeance / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“The Wrong Door” Collector’s Set Available at Amazon!

Ted, a radio sound design student, has to perform a singing telegram dressed in a jester costume on the very evening of having to pull an all-nighter to finish his final college class project.  After his melodic duties are fulfilled and the guests are entertained, he discovers a girl’s unconscious, bleeding body in an adjacent, dark apartment, a girl that he recognizes from campus.  Frightened by the sight and the shadowy figure in the apartment with him, Ted goes for help only to discover the girl vanished with no one else inside the apartment.  His drive back home is full of contemplation on the shocking memory when he notices the girl lying lifeless in the backseat of his car.  From then on out, Ted becomes embroiled into a murder mystery and pursued by the killers who are hellbent on tracking down the Jester-cladded man to cover up incrimination evidence and tie up loose ends.

Even though our unlucky protagonist wears a court jester outfit, there’s nothing funny about the 1990 thriller, an intense bird-dogging murder-mystery, known as “The Wrong Door.”  Helmed by the creative ensemble of friends, the film is written and directed by James Groetsch, Shawn Korby, and Bill Weiss who eagerly sought to make a feature film on a strapped for cash budget after success of their Super 8 short films.  Contemplating using tape for their inaugural throes into feature film land, the auteurs revert their thinking back to film, settling on a faithful celluloid format to which they have experience with in, the ever gritty Super 8.  What results is a tenebrous yet effectively taut confrontation of frenetic hunting and a shocking homicide driven more with ambient sound than character dialogue.  The three creative minds behind “The Wrong Door” formed Sandman Films and coproduced alongside John Schonebaum for the Minneapolis Twin Cities’ production.

Cast locally around Minneapolis area, “The Wrong Door” is chock full of directors’ acquaintances who turned out to be really quite good at the parts they play.  Matt Felmlee stars in his debut performance as Ted, the class assignment under the gun student looking to knock out one last paying singing telegram gig before cutting and splicing audio for a final exam.  Felmlee isn’t given much dialogue to work with and his credibility relies burdensomely on nearly a vocally silent rundown from Jeff Tatum and Chris Hall respectively as deranged stalker and ransacking lunatic Jeff and his accomplice Vic.  Jeff Tatum makes for a good hardnosed psycho in a subtle yet menacing take of a trench coat robed coup de grâce kind of thug but the thug’s partner Vic is left as an nearly obscured sidekick and we don’t get to see Chris Hall ever come out and shine independently from Tatum’s enormous shadow.  Concluding on the three talking roles, unless you consider Loreal Steiner’s mostly dead body popping up performance where she speaks only in Ted’s nightmares, “The Wrong Door” instruments of interaction circulate around the three male principals peppered with Steiner’s maybe lifeless, maybe lively body stringing Ted along in order to slip him damning evidence on who and why she is being brutally murdered, in a nod of Hitchcockian hamboning.  A cast of supplementary, locally sourced pop-ins, including Jeanine Bourdaghs as Ted’s Radio classmate bestie, Stephanie.

Obscured to the depths of regional relevance, “The Wrong Door” is opened only to adventurous cinephiles who are willing to spend hours upon hours scouring through the vastly lower-to-no budget, independent films lost behind the borders of zonal solitude  A Hitchcockian thriller venerated on a humble scale in regard to the storytelling’s use of focused sound design to narrate a chased protagonist under the gun, literally and figuratively, that turns a studious radio sound design student with a final exam project to complete into a marked man hunted down in a foolish jester suit.  Bookend by dialogue setup and a tense, skirmishing climax, the near omission of dialogue in order for sound to reign supreme as atmospheric tensions force viewers, and force them appealingly I might add, into Ted’s chest-tightening, alone-in-fear experience with not only being incognizant of the particulars of the murder surrounding the young woman he was once smitten with but also to his being pursued by goons that hangs us on tenterhooks.  There’s also pulsing paranoia of where the dead set antagonists are hot on his trail and will suddenly appear unforeseen out of the blanketing darkness of an exterior cat-and-mouse game.  This leads into ambiguity near the end that asks the question, did Ted experience all of this strife or was it a clever cut and splice of imaginative audio files to create a whodunit thriller?  A brief sense of hesitation brings a sigh of relief from the nightmare and also onsets a different kind of anxiety of not knowing what truly went down until the very last shot that explains it all. 

Wrong place at the wrong time is the theme for “The Wrong Door” which is the right door to open if looking to walk-through to an understudied tensioner. Well versed in greatly misunderstood, profound stepped over, and overall underdog pictures is the smaller picture championing Visual Vengeance, the distributor behind the collector’s edition Blu-ray release of “The Wrong Door” with an AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50 product presented in a full screen 1.33:1 aspect ratio. For the first time on disc anywhere, the Super 8mm film receives a brand new, director approved 2K HD transfer from the original elements. The perception of Super 8mm does not hold water here with a relatively pristine image quality for the sized celluloid with a mighty clean image. Other than the white speckles of dust, other signs of minute debris, and the natural amount of grain of Super 8mm, no cigarette burns, light emitting on the frame edges due to perforation alignment, and hardly any scratches hinder quality. Poor lighting conditions in the exterior, and even some interiors, plays to the strengths of negative voids but, in my opinion, adds to the gloomy puzzler filled with action, suspense, and acrimony. While 8mm’s grasp on a grittier saturation, the tonal shading refuses to pop inside the faded film stock. The English Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo doesn’t do the new transfer justice. The lossy format likely not the best choice on a sound gimmicky, indie film that uses more innate ambient sound and Foley to tell the story rather than through dialogue. Though manageably capable to pull through to the end, the already lo-fi standard now compressed audio file has anemic energy through the dual channels but while the distinctions are dainty, some distinct distancing between more than two effects does convey. Switching between ADR and boom, there’s never a sense of uniformity with the dialogue that can sounds lively and volumes with post-production recordings yet also be frail within natural earshot of a recording device. Optional English subtitles are available. What’s most impressive about this 14th release from Visual Vengeance amongst 13 titles before it is the seemingly incalculable number of special features within the submenu of the flat, rodded colorful cutouts on the fluid main screen. New grouped audio commentaries with directors Bill Weiss and Shawn Korby in one and the third director James Groestsch and John Schonebaum on the second kick off the content followed by a new documentary with interviews from all three directors in Men Make Movie, If Not Million$, individual interviews with James Groetsch, Shawn Korby, Bill Weise, and actor Bill Felmlee, an interview with Film Threat founder Chris Gore who was one of the few in the field to put the film in his magazine, an alternate, director’s cut of “The Wrong Door” coming in as a second feature, Super 8 shorts: Raiders of the Lost Bark and The Pizza Man, a 20-minute television episode from The Gale Whitman Show, the original unedited Muther Video VHS intro, image gallery, original storyboard gallery, the original ran print from Film Threat, a Visual Vengeance 2023 cut trailer of “The Wrong Door,” and other Visual Vengeance trailers. Tangibly, the release comes with a rigid O-slipcover hypnotically graded in Jester colors of subtle pink and purple. Inside is a clear Amary Blu-ray case with the illustrated cover art that also does double duty for the motion menu and the folded mini-poster insert. Also inserted is a double-sided Blu-ray acknowledgment one sheet, a Visual Vengeance exclusive “Do Not Disturb …The Disturbed!” doorknob hanger, and a retro sticker sheet that’s come standard with every release to date. Reversible cover art displays the original VHS cover, and the disc is pressed as a mock play of a cassette tape’s supply reel teeth – neat! The region free Blu-ray comes unrated and has a runtime of 73 minutes.

Last Rites: Do you hear what I hear? No longer lingering in the vacuous space of radio static, “The Wrong Door” was once another shamefully sidestepped film that has been resurrected by Visual Vengeance for the first time anywhere on disc and, all I can say is, it’s about damn time.

“The Wrong Door” Collector’s Set Available at Amazon!

Killed by Your Monstrous, EVIL Twin Set on Repeat. “Island Escape” reviewed! (Dread / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Island Escape” Available Here at Amazon.com

Chase, a washed up mercenary with touch of amnesia regarding his past, is hired to round out a six-person team for a rescue mission on the Isle of Grand Manan where a top secret TSL research facility has gone dark and a high-level CEO’s daughter has gone missing.  Ordered to retrieve the daughter inside a 48-hour window, the team arrives on the seemingly deserted island to find multiple dead scientists having been torn to shreds.  The team soon learns they’re not alone when attacked by bigger, aggressive, monstrous versions of themselves.  Unable to believe their eyes, the one scientist left on the island has determined they’ve been trapped inside an encircling wormhole that resets the island and it’s inhabitants every 3 days, turning those left alive after the third day into these humongous, blood-hungry creatures.  With the mission quickly dissolution, it’s quickly being pieced together that the rescuing mercenaries are the ones who actually need rescuing and their only way to escape would nearly destroy them all.

I’ve said this once before and I’ll say it again.  Weaving wormholes, time loops, time travel, and the like into a narrative is a tricky, tricky business.  Bending time and space can calamitously collapse a story so bad that every internet warrior and science fiction nerd, including myself, will pick apart and ridicule the film until the end of time, but if the portent collapse can be averted and little-to-no complaints with the time travel aspect of the story can go unscathed for a better part of the runtime, then the power of the multi-dimensional space time continuum can be magical and enthralling.  Writer-director Bruce Wemple (“Altered Hours,” “My Best Friend’s Dead”) wraps his hand around a wormhole-driven action-horror “Island Escape” to grasp ahold of the unruly concept of time.   The Traverse Terror production, a division of producers Cole Payne and Mason Dwinell’s Traverse Media in association with Wemple’s 377 Films, and presented and produced by Patrick Ewald’s Dread Central, “Island Escape” rounds out the producer set with Vincent Conroy.

Bruce Wemple carries with him a cast entourage, a staple of actors who have worked years with the filmmaker through a number of project.  “Island Escape” is no different as Wemple signs aboard his trusted troupe to tackle the terror on TLS island with a rescue gone wormhole wrong.  The story has a trifold focus Chase (James Liddell, “Hell House LLC Origins:  The Carmichael Manor”) as the washed up gun for hire with memory loss, Addison (Ariella Mastroianni, “My Best Friend’s Dead”) as team lead and recruit of the Isle of Gran Manan mission, and Russ (Grant Schumacher, “My Best Friend’s Dead”) as the dithery team member not in Chase’s good graces based of fragmented memories of a failed mission.  Between the three characters there lies a fleeting tautness that’s not tremendous carried out as expected from initial introductions.  Instances such as Chase expressing his distrust for Russ never has the tension reach open air in any time they’re together or in the case of Addison as a melancholic memory for Chase that eventually evolves into mid-misison romance that’s more spontaneous than building momentum to in the first and second act.  The undercooked characters fail to establish boundaries, positions, and progressing or regressing dynamics and arcs.  There’s more headway with supporting staff in Tag, a self-penancing father doing dirty, dangerous work to support his young daughter and this consistently shows throughout his screen span, hitting upon the nerve of a father trying his best for the sake of his child.  The cast rounds out with a handful more of mercenaries and scientists to become minced meat by their devilish doppelgangers with Chris Cimperman (“First Contact”), Michael L. Parker (“First Contact”), Andrew Gombas (“The Tomorrow Job”), William Champion (“The Tomorrow Job”), and the feature length debut of Renee Gagner filling those roles. 

Wormholes.  The suspended openings in space let the Dominion race invade Star Fleet in the Alpha Quadrant of “Deep Space Nine,” dropped a fiery plane engine on top of the titular character “Donnie Darko,” and brought back something alien and terribly evil in the titular ship “Event Horizon.”  For Bruce Wemple and his “Island Escape,” wormholes have become more earthbound thanks to a shady research corporation delving into dangerous methods and unscrupulous science practices for the go-to cover up slogan of a better world tomorrow.  While Wemple spins an intriguing yarn needled quick to be full of cankerous clones coming from all corners of the island to attack their uncorrupted selves while trying to survive and flee, the filmmaker skip stitches during his knitting of a tight narrative, fashioning an uneven story that can’t quite get the pattern right for in some of the more restlessly difficult areas of trouble island.  Fleshing out Chase’s blank slate produces no reason to light, Russ’s lack of motivation in divulging life-and-death information, the deep dive into Island experiments fall to the wayside, the CEO’s daughter seemingly dead to all of a sudden be alive, and I could go on with all the loose ends that kneecap the better parts of story, such as the creature action and the wormhole aspect, but the fact won’t escape that there’s a mishandling of the island’s treacherous overgrowth that’s severely underplayed and the epic scale Wemple tries to impress is torpedoed by omitted small cogs that turn the bigger, weight-bearing gears. 

Dread presents Island Escape onto a high-definition Blu-ray distributed by Epic Pictures.  The AVC encoded, 1080pm, BD25, presenting the film in an anamorphic 2.35:1 aspect ratio, is a slurry of personal style and cinematography issues.  Capacity-wise, not a ton of wall-bearing issues that would make the visuals crumble; a few fleeting areas of dark side banding and quick movement aliasing pop up occasionally.  Where most of the issues stem are stylistically with poor VFX compositions that stymie any high-action utile climaxes.  The light pink/fuchsia grading replaces much of the island’s, or island-like setting’s, innate green foliage for a broad one-tone that has an adverse effect of unnaturally darkening the characters.  Two English audio options are available to select:  a Dolby Digital 5.1 and a Dolby Stereo 2.0.  Both lossy formats offer what this particular films needs, a fast and loose sufficient mix that gets the job done without causing too many waves.  Most of the dialogue has a ADR pretense that I would take a wild guess and say is more a sound design issue of not creating space in the depth field.  Each character sound to be on the same audio plane that forces a full-on push of dialogue right to the front of the audio layering that makes ever channel in the 5.1 the same.  Ambience Foley is harshly isolated from other tracks so if a character is walking through the forest, you hear nothing else but the lonely crunching the tree litter that doesn’t mesh with onscreen movements.  With most digital recording, no interference and damage flaws are present.  Optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles are available.  Special features include a roundtable commentary with writer-director Bruce Wemple at the helm with most of the cast speaking through Zoom or some kind of video chat program.  In addition, the commentary is greatly colorful with more jokes and jabs at one another and at themselves that reflect how much of a good time they have working with each other on this film and previous Wemple credits.  Also included in the special features are a few deleted scenes, the making of “Island Escape,” feature trailer, and other Dread presented film trailers.  Like most Epic Releasing products, a standard Blu-ray Amaray case displays an intriguing cover art for Dread’s 47th at-home title with a wormhole opening to an skull-faced Island and a helicopter and four soldiers walking toward it.  Disc art renders the same image and there’s no insert included opposite side of the case.  With a region free playback, “Island Escape” has a runtime of 86-minutes and is not rated. 

Last Rites:  The haphazardly executed science-fictional survival film “Island Escape” has good plot bones underneath the shambled edifice of an ambitious façade with only decent monster mayhem and creature effects dwelling inside. 

“Island Escape” Available Here at Amazon.com