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EVIL’s Brew Just Needs a Severed Head! “The House of Witchcraft” reviewed! (Cauldron Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“The House of Witchcraft,” a part of The Houses oof Doom series, Now on Blu-ray!

Luca Palmer has experienced the same reoccurring nightmare for months of him finding shelter from being chased inside a large countryside house with an ugly hag boiling his severed head in a large cauldron.  The dreams have required him to find professional help in a psychiatric ward but without any real mental or physical health concerns, he’s released to his incompatible, witchcraft practicing wife Martha who sets up a country house getaway in a last ditch effort to save their dwindling marriage.  When they pull up to the house, Luca immediately recognizes it from his nightmares.  From then on Luca believe he’s seeing the malicious old woman from his dreams around on the estate grounds and urges his psychiatrist, who is also his late brother’s wife, to visit him to assess his state of mind, but the visions keep coming and those around him keep dying a horrible death with his wife being the key suspect of witchcraft related deaths.

“La casa del sortilegio,” aka “The House of Witchcraft” is a made-for-television, witch-centric movie for the four-film series The Houses of Doom concept created under the companies of Dania Films and Reteitalia’s producing team Massimo Manasse and Marco Grillo Spina.  The 1989 witchy-slasher hybrid and the third film of the series is helmed by another notable Italian schlock and shock director, Umberto Lenzi (“Seven Blood-Stained Orchids,” Cannibal Ferox”), as well as Lenzi writing the script from the story of The Houses of Doom envisaging duo Gianfranco Clerici and Daniele Stroppa.  “The House of Witchcraft” speaks the very essence of what to expect in a traditional sense regarding witches while really stepping up with Italian nastiness inside the slasher principles, filmed in the heart of Italy in the popular Chianti wine municipality of Rufina where the landscape is lined with vineyards, churches, and castles.

Luca Palmer is committed to his mental health by committing himself to his sister-in-law’s psychiatric hospital after months of nightmares involving a witch and his severed head as the main ingredient for her boiling stew.  Perhaps, because of his rocky relationship with wife Martha, played by French actress Sonia Petrovna (“Flashing Lights”), Luca just needed a break from her witchcraft obsession and loveless aloofness to clear his head.  Either way, the American-born and ‘Naked Rage” actor Andy J. Forest is one of Umberto Lenzi’s go-to action stars, of such Lenzi’s war films “Bridge to Hell” and “The Kiss of the Cobra”, whose taken off the film battlefield and positioned as the confounded centerpiece of a cackling witch tale, completing his task as a the tall, handsome, and flawed hero of a man haunted and driven by unpleasant night terrors of the long face, broad features of the fittingly named Maria Cumani Qausimodo as the dolled-down witch.  Quasimodo is no stranger to the filth and frights of Italian schlock with roles in “Behind Convent Walls,” “Five Women for the Killer,” and even the notoriously porn augmented “Caligula” and her physical traits, long stare of blue eyes, and pandering of character’s wickedness transform her into an ideal archetype of the original folk-acholic Brewmeisters.  Characters for the slaughter tin this supernatural slasher and to be intertwined into the suspect and innocent pool are played by Paul Muller (“Lady Frankenstein”), as the sixth sense blind homeowner Andrew Mason, Marina Giulia Cavalli (“Alien from the Deep”) as Andrew’s visiting niece Sharon, Susanna Martinkova (“Fracchia Vs. Dracula”) as the psychiatrist sister-in-law Dr. Elsa Palmer, and Maria Stella Musy as the doctor’s daughter Debra tagging along with her mother to visit the barely mentally managing Luca. 

Umberto Lenzi’s rollercoaster career has seen its fair share of misses overtop what are today considered trashy, cult triumphs that lure fans to seek out his even lesser known, poorly critiqued titles more often than required for any more than the casual horror moviegoer. However, “The House of Witchcraft” is not one of those latter, threadbare produced pictures as Lenzi instills more aesthetic style and cinematic substance of searing phantasmic enthrall and danger with an unwavering villainess vile down to her very rotten teeth and scraggly, gray hair.  Offing houseguests left and right is the witch’s supernatural birthright but why exactly Luca Palmer, a stressed out journalist, to be the target of precognitive events is more opaque than it is clairvoyantly evident but we get some great malevolent manipulation and sleight of hand with black cat familiars, bulgy maggot-infested corpses, unusual indoor freezing precipitation, severed heads, and a face transfiguration that’s pretty damn good that has no right to be in a Lenzi film, mostly in part to special f/x and makeup artist Giuseppe Ferranti (“Anthropophagus,” “Nightmare City’), his favorable, collaborative relationship with Lenzi, and the fact he’s locked into the 4-part film series The Houses of Doom provides him creative freedom, flexibility, and fluctuation in diversity.  “The House of Witchcraft” is not the one-all, be-all witch story but does scratch that warty itch in the foulest of cloak-wearing evils without flying a broomstick! 

The second of four Blu-rays for The Houses of Doom lineup produced by Cauldron Films, “The House of Witchcraft” is an AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50 with a transfer scanned into 2K, uncut and restored, from the original film negative.  Very similar to Lucio Fulci’s “The House of Clocks,” Cauldron Films scan is quite impeccable.  A pristine picture with no wear or tear and age deterioration, “The House of Witchcraft” is deep and rich with immense coloring timing efforts, defining an authentic look without overcorrecting to a fault.  There’s no perfunctory enhancing or extreme variability with contrasting, retaining a smooth, consistent picture quality throughout its European aspect 1.66:1 presentation.  Even in the more stylistic lighting work that creates clear tone of how the indoor snow should feel cold or the lightning strikes and wind brings a chill of ominous doom, there’s plenty of delineation to provide space and demarcations of depth between objects.  There are two DTS-HD 2.0 mono mixes with an ADR Italian and an ADR English dialogue.  Synchronously smooth, a noticeable dialogue separation between audio and video is not easily perceptible, which is kudos to the post work on the post-crew efforts, and Cauldron’s mixes have clarity without a fault in the compression means.  The two channel funneling of the mono output separates the dialogue and ambience/score.  Backing of the boiling cauldron stew or the knife swipes that severe heads and stab fleshy trunks, leaving impacting thuds and thwacks, are good examples of the conveyed foley audio that leaves a lasting impression through component construction in the audio design.  There are optional English subtitles on both language tracks.  Special features include Cauldron Films’ produced interviews with FX artist Elio Terribili Artisan of Mayhem, cinematographer Nino Celeste The House of Professionals, and a commentary track with Eugenio Erolani, Nathaniel Thompson, and Troy Howarth.  Also like “The House of Clocks” release, Matthew Therrien and Eric Lee compose a composition of illustrative graphic artistry of film’s decomposing and maniacally laughing madness and logo design for The Houses of Doom series on the front cover inside the clear Scanavo case.  Reverse cover has a still image of the black cat and the disc is pressed with the same front cover artwork but cropped to focus primarily of the witch with title and company logos at the bottom half.  The region free release has a runtime of 89 minutes.

Last Rites: Umberto Lenzi’s “The House of Witchcraft” casts a spell over the hex canon, beguiling it with mystery, enchanting it with surrealism, and bewitching it with blood. Cauldron Films’ Blu-ray is topnotch for an obscure made-for-TV Lenzi production.

“The House of Witchcraft,” a part of The Houses oof Doom series, Now on Blu-ray!

Who Would Have Thought Something So Tiny Could Create So Much EVIL! “Cannibal Tick” reviewed! (SRS Cinema / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Get Bit by the “Cannibal Tick” Blu-ray! Now Available!

Jeb believes his late father’s purloined gold is stashed underground in his densely wooded backyard.  What’ Jeb unearths is not gold, but barrels of chemicals Jeb believes to be just as valuable.  What Jeb doesn’t know about the pinched drums is the ooze inside leaking from them turns the local tick population into diseased carriers, transmitting a sickness upon biting their hosts and transforming the hosts into ravaging flesh eaters that continue to spread the disease with one single bite.  All hell quickly breaks loose amongst a sleepy backwoods around Big J’s outdoor food truck until a retired vampire hunter, Alec, turns his skillset onto the zombified undead when twin brother Roscoe becomes patient zero.  Big J’s famous menu items pig dicks and beer won’t save the rustic hillbillies from a fast-spreading contagion but one kilt wearing son of a bitch aims to take on all of them with a help of local and his vampire slaying colleague.  

If Lyme disease wasn’t already bad enough, chemically diseased ticks being the parasitic harbingers of the zombie apocalypse might just be the worst.  Like a premise straight out of Valve Corp.’s Half-Life series, co-directors Ross Carlo and William Long’s low budget, running zombie-comedy film, “Cannibal Tick” will leave more than just a bull’s eye symptom in its bloody, outrageous wake.  Mostly derivative from other running undead features, the 2020 feature length film is the debut and first collaboration efforts of the Eastern Ohio-Western Pennsylvania filmmaking duo with Long running solo in penning the screenplay of rednecks running rampantly through a serious case of tick-induced rabies.  “Cannibal Tick” is a production of indie companies Poo House Productions located in Youngstown, Ohio and of William Long’s Dark Long Productions of Northern Cambria, Pennsylvania.  William Long and Ross Carlo retain the producing credits as well as taking on principal characters as per standard in the microbudget, everybody-pitches-in productions.

In the spirit of low-budget creativity, Ross Carlo (“Rotten, Welcome to the Freak Show”) accepts his dual role fate playing twin Scottish brothers Roscoe and Alec.  Carlo invests himself into the accent while getting physical when the ticking timebomb explodes and all zombie hell unfolds in the armpit of Nowheresville, Pennsylvania.  His presenting of Alec and Rosco couldn’t be more different but still oddly the same as Alec’s has more of an interesting background as a retired vampire hunter visiting his brother, or rather just dozing off on Roscoe’s couch.  Roscoe, on the other hand, is purely just a boondock alcoholic without much of anything else going on other than the next pint and a handful of used tissues from his personal pleasuring.  William Long (“The Devil’s Wasteland”) also has a role in the film but just one as the gold feverish Jeb looking for his late pop’s buried treasure.  Jeb’s quiet nature is not imposing and he’s terribly forgetful or just doesn’t listen to his wife but neither scenario is really relevant to the story, much like most of the carrier scenarios and backgrounds other than Alec’s vampire killing skills translating over to zombie dispatching.  So many characters are quickly tossed into the mix of a 73-minute story that they’re unfortunately not well fleshed out nor provided enough substance to even instill an impression upon and what they reduce to is simply just fodder for the carnage for the sake of a high body count.  John Catheline (“Deadly Numbers”) is and plays a forlorn former wrestler Curtis lost in beer and solitude for his prime fight days and has become a local mechanic, Maurandis Berger (“Chronicles of a Serial Killer”) and Sheneefah Johnson (“3 A.M”) are a black married couple who find themselves broken down in a white hick town, and Lena Devinney and the late Jimmy Barber Sr. (“Deadly Numbers”) are the couple who arrive at the wrong place, wrong time as they drive up to Big J’s for some pig dick and beer.  The aforesaid descripts don’t go any further with no progressive dynamism that usually establishes either a love or hate development with audiences.  “Cannibal Tick” also feeds upon Greg Bailey, Allison Devinney, Donnie Lawrence, Tene Gossard, RahZhee Emmaunel, Lisa Dapprich, Iesha Guzzo, Jana Ferris, and Michelle Dominique Buxton to be bigger in the slaughter and in the slaughtering. 

“Cannibal Tick’s” concept is sound – a tick becomes affected by a barrel of leaking toxic chemicals that causes their bite to inject the zombie creating substance directly into the bloodstream.  Yet, the problem is there is only one scene with a tick bite and the Rosco-Long production goes from interesting to run-of-the-mill zombie chaos with zero principal protagonist power.  Another knock down is the substandard traits of an extreme indie production that relies heavily on the character captivation and special effects caliber to be successful in a demanding market driven by those factors.  The former has been touched upon in great detail, but the special effects pull ahead as Michelle Dominique Buxton, who not only has a character role but is also the special effects makeup artist, is able to pull off a few interesting prosthetic monster looks as well as a decapitation death that in all honesty is really well done in framing and effect.  While the solid zombie carnage infects survivors left and right with a ferocious appetite, the narrative then evolves with Jeb’s direct ooze contact, transforming him into some similar to a zombie king that sets up “Cannibal Tick” to a potential sequel in the future.  However, that sequel hasn’t crawled its way to fruition just quite yet.

The blood thirsty arachnid with a zombifying bite buries itself onto a new Blu-ray release from SRS Cinema.  The AVC encoded, mastered 720p resolution, 25 gigabyte BD-R with the purple underbelly.  While typically unusual for a Blu-ray to be in standard definition, SRS Cinema’s certainly no stranger to their films being filmed in 720p, thus the format, but video, as well as audio, suffer quality buckling, especially when encoded onto a one-time writable disc that has its own technical limitations.  “Cannibal Tick” sees quite a bit of those technical woes in its compression codec from banding, splotchy macroblocking, and loss of overall finer details.  Many of the action scenes are done at night with little lighting and decoding struggles with delineation and details, especially when the use of commercial filming equipment was used.  The film is at least presented in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio.  The English audio isn’t written or displayed on back cover, but this does render through the receiver output as an uncompressed 2.0 mix that channels a dialogue and ambience stream through to another channel of a stock score.  Obvious lack of refinement housed in a lower bitrate captures less isolation efforts on the dialogue, leaving disruption to run interference that spike and subdues pitches and tones, but the dialogue strength has solid recorded quality from a well-placed boom.  Other than that, there’s not a good dynamic range other than zombie growl and gurgle to give “Cannibal Tick” a semblance of audio body.  Special features include raw footage of behind-the-scenes of stunt sequences and makeup effects without narrative context, the original trailer, the official SRS trailer, and trailers of other SRS Cinema catalogued films.  The standard Blu-ray contains original artwork of a large, translucent, yellow tick overtop a blood smeared, presumably, zombie woman that speaks greatly to and has intrigue appeal of an ultra-indie film.  With a runtime of a little over an hour, marking at 73-minutes, SRS Cinema’s release comes region free.

Last Rites: Ultra low-budget, rough-and-ready, and imitative in a rustic sense, “Cannibal Tick” drains interest and captivation with the film’s throwaway moonshine characters caught and released in the throes of a backwoods zombie outbreak.

Get Bit by the “Cannibal Tick” Blu-ray! Now Available!

Fulci Turns Back Time to Bring EVIL Back from the Dead! “The House of Clocks” reviewed! (Cauldron Films / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“The House of Clocks” Delivers Time as an Illusion. Blu-ray now available!

An isolated Italian villa becomes the looting target for three thieves looking for an easy score.  Villa residents, an elderly couple, are tricked into letting them into their estate adorned with elegant clocks of all shapes and sizes but as the plane unfolds it goes awry when the imposing grounds man arrives and both homeowners are killed.  Yet, the villa owners were no saints and no ordinary couple as soon as the husband’s heart stops, the clocks begin to move counterclockwise and that’s when the peaceful villa turns into a strange nightmare where time goes in reverse and those short and long dead come back to life with wounds miraculously healed as if it never happened.  As time continues to reverse, the thieves find themselves trapped inside the house and on estate grounds being hunted down by the merciless grounds man, but the skeletons in the elderly couple’s closet will soon resurrect and be thirsty for vengeance.

“The House of Clocks” is the Lucio Fulci made-for-TV movie that never saw the light of television programing.  Deemed too gory and violent for public broadcast, Fulci’s 1989 Italian film, to which he created the concept for and the screenplay treated by the duo team of Gianfranco Clerici  of “Cannibal Holocaust” and Daniele Stroppa of “Delirium,” was shelved for many years until it’s eventual home video release because, as you can tell just from the high-powered Italian horror names attached to the project, the finished film would certainly frighten those general audiences with easy turn-of-the-knob and bunny ear-antenna access.  Also known natively as “La casa nel Tempo,” was a part of a four-film horror special surrounding a theme of the houses of doom and was a production of Dania Film and Reteitalia production companies with “You’ll Die at Midnight” and “Delirium” producers Massimo Manasse and Marco Grillo Spina serving as executive producers.

The film initially opens with Maria, the nosy for her own good housemaid, discovering two rotting corpses ostentatiously displayed in the villa’s chapel.  Why Maria (Carla Cassola, “Demonia” and “The Sect”) decides to snoop around is not explained but the act does start a chain events, leading up to elder Villa owners in Sara Corsini and her clock obsessed husband Vittorio, played by the role age appropriate Bettine Milne (“The King’s Whore”) and Paolo Paoloni (“Cannibal Holocaust”) in a lot more makeup and prosthetics to make him appear as an older man.  As mysterious senior citizens go, Milne and Paoloni are the malevolently cryptic under a façade of geniality, possessing and maintaining the corpses of their niece and nephew they’ve murdered in order to keep their wealth.  The backstory between the two pairs has vague clarity but there’s enough to keep the pistons pumping toward the crux of why the uncanny time about-face.  While, again, no sense of explanation on why time reverses, we’re under the assumption Paolo is essentially Father Time, a personification of the time concept represented as an old, bearded man with an hour glass and a scythe to represent a span from life to death.  When thieves Paul (Peter Hintz, “Zone Troopers”), Tony (Keith Van Hoven, “Black Demons”), and Sandra (Karina Huff, “Voices from Beyond”) put an end to the Corsinis, that is when time stops and reverses itself, affecting the once dead to return back to life, and creating a nightmare scenario for now three trapped thieves under the chase of not only the Corsinis but those also killed by the Corsinis as their deteriorating bodies rejuvenate into active flesh and bone as well as flesh and blood.  “The Beyond” and “Zombie’s” Al Cliver rounds out the principal cast and the overall cast with his menacingly evil, Corsini’s jack-of-all-trades grounds man with a scarred over eye and a double barrel shotgun to hunt down the thieves.

“The House of Clock’s” is quite an interesting concept without a durably designed reason for all the madnesses.  At its core, three thieves home invade an older couple for their valuable objects and accidently kill them in the process when the standoff goes bad.  With that oversimplified version of events, a hellish cog in the pocket watch gearbox links the old man’s ticker with the tons of tickers that adorn his villa home, causing a chain reaction of turn back the clock proportions to which audiences never receive a proper understanding and while this may bother a sample size few, most will find the story too weird, gory, and trepidatious tense to care in what becomes a fair-game free-for-all against all characters who don’t have an ounce of virtue.  The lot of thieves, schemers, and murders are all trapped inside time’s ill-reverse affect without a sign of slowing down and while it might seem advantageous at first for some, as time continues to revert, the worse the situation becomes as old adversaries emerge from their graves and tombs.  Fulci’s visualized gore also emerges through with the fantastic effects by Guiseppe Ferranti, including a high right through the crotch impalement.  Ferranti would also be behind the effects for two other the house of doom television movies.

“The House of Clocks” may not have been safe for television but for a new Cauldron Films Blu-ray, the Lucio Fulci film fits right in and comes in the nick of time!  Restored from a 2K scan of the 35mm film negative, the AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50 offers a visually invigorated, audibly astounding, and special features saturated release that presents Fulci’s lesser known and once previously shelved work!  Presented in a European widescreen 1.66:1, color saturation is beyond reproach with a beautifully natural grading that pops textures and objects right off the screen, adding density and tangibility to each.  Disc capacity affords the codec compression with no artefact issues in the reproducing of the encoded image that nearly replicates an ideal exhibition and appearance of a made-for-TV movie, especially in the macabre moment where extra slimy ooziness of the decaying corpses or the perforation of the servant’s crotch area is as clear as clear can get without misinterpretation.  Skin tones aren’t flared and are naturally set within a healthy, though smoother, grain layer.  The release comes with two audio mixes – a PCM English 2.0 mono and a PCM Italian 2.0 mono.  Both tracks are produced from ADR and have been scrubbed with no issues of hissing or crackling.  There’s a brilliant touch of echoing within the estate to create reverberations and a range, open quality to the exterior dialogue.  Vince Tempera’s synth piano is a ticking measure of modified vocals and integrated milieu elements with a organ tone like quality that’s ghoulishly soft.  English subtitles are optional on both mixes.  Special features include a handful of new interviews from behind-the-camera with cinematographer Nino Celeste Lighting the House of Time, composer Vince Tempera Time and Music, first assistant director Michele De Angelis Working with a Master, FX artist Elio Terribili Time with Fulci, as well as unmentioned archival interviews with actors Paolo Paoloni, Al Cliver, and Carla Cassola.  There’s a parallel audio commentary with film historians and critics Eugenio Ercolani, Nathaniel Thompson, and Troy Howarth who regularly step in to commentate on Italian horror.  Graphic artist Matthew Therrien designs an illustrative composition artwork, pulling inspiration from the film’s most iconic and chaotic moments, while Eric Lee designs the titular logo sitting pretty dead center.  The reverse side of the cover art displays a rotting hand still from the movie.  The 19th title has a clear Amaray that houses a cropped version of the front cover image pressed onto the disc, which is region free, uncut, and has an 83-minute runtime.

Last Rites: Most people wish they could turn back time. For Lucio Fulci and his penchant for beyond death, going counterclockwise in “The House of Clocks” is more frightening and deadly as time can’t be owned and controlled. Simply put, there’s just no stopping the sands of time, forwards or backwards, for the past will catch up to you and the future is mercilessly uncertain.

“The House of Clocks” Delivers Time as an Illusion. Blu-ray now available!

Luther the Berserk has EVIL Plans in the Bayou! “The Naked Witch” reviewed! (VCI / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

A string of horrific murders of beautiful women becomes the study of a six-person team of paranormal researchers who head down to the Louisiana swamplands surrounded by notorious superstition and urban legend for once being the home of witchcraft.  One of the researches, Tasia, is a sensitive, a highly psychic receptive woman and student of team leader, Dr. Hayes, to sense the area’s extrasensory waves thought to be behind the murders, especially the ones of a satanic ritualized nature.  On the isolated island, encircled by swamp and gators, a powerful Satan acolyte known as Luther the Berserk seeks to spellbound Tasia to complete his coven of witches and evokes the help of Jessie, a haggard crone with the ability of mind control over those with sensitive abilities.  One-by-one, the researchers are being picked off for the blood ritual and it’s up to the survivors to stop Luther before it’s too late.

A bold psychotronic of the 1960s, “The Naked Witch” has a tingly macabre aura about it that’s not swinging, swanky, nor is it groovy.  Also known primarily as “The Witchmaker,” there’s a thick circumference of dread and darkness surrounding the William O. Brown written-and-directed picture.  Brown’s sophomore film behind the 1965 “One Way Whaine” comedy about Hawaiian babes and bank robbers is a stark 180 degrees four years later that showcased the filmmaker’s range from laughs to terror on the cusp of the early days of the Satanic scare.    “The Naked Witch” has also been reissued as “Witchkill,” The Witchmaster,” and “The Legend of Witch Hollow” and while Brown’s film goes by many monikers, one thing is for certain is the film was shot partially on location in the mucky swamps of Louisiana during exterior locations whie the remaining interiors were in a Los Angeles studio.  The U.S.A. made film was produced by Brown with L.Q. Jones serving as executive producer and released independently under LQ/JAF Productions.

Personally, horror films like “The Naked Witch” that were produced through the 1950s and into the 1960s always share mixed feeling that can only be described as from “the content is revolutionary for Americana horror post-World War II cinema” to “the stiff, exposition acting just doesn’t work with the grim nature of the ahead of its time story,” and as Marty McFly once said back in 1955, “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet.”  There’s nothing inherently bad about “The Night Witch’s” acting other than the lack of emotional weight from the troupe needed to lift up and be on the same level as the story that includes hanging half-naked women upside, slitting their throats, and drinking their blood out of chalices in a coven on satanic confluence.  “Revenge is my Destiny’s” John Lodge is the exception that goes against the stagey type of stilted acting grain as lead satanist apostle Luther the Berserk, flashing devil hand gestures and acting like a wild man in his ravaging role that’s ambitiously true to character and subtly perverse in blood and in lust. The same passion portrayal of character is not extended the principal leads of “Green Acres’” Alvy Moore and “Deep Space’s” Anthony Eisley playing a pair of opposing scientists – Moore as the more supernaturally open-minded Dr. Ralph Hayes and Eisley has the rigid in rationality Dr. Victor Gordon.  Their conflict of beliefs creates another subplot satellite that abides by superstition and lore as well as the division it produces, a decent representation of the overall contrarianism inside people as a group, then you have Tasia, a medium struggling with her powers being pulled in two different directions.  The European heritage and Canadian born blonde knockout Thordis Brandt steps out of the saucy side role and into one of her more prominent performances as the Sensitive who is manipulated by Luther’s unholy powers over the coven.   The coven and researcher cast rounds out with Shelby Grant, Tony Benson, Robyn Millan, Burt Mustin, Warrene Ott, Helene Winston, Carolyn Rhodimer, Larry Vincent, Patricia Wymer, Del Kaye, Diane Webber, Valya Garanda, Gwen Lipscomb, Nancy Crawford, and Sue Bernard. 

“The Naked Witch” is not as graphic as one would assume with such a scandalous, provocative title.  Again, you must remember, the film is originally titled “The Witchmaker.”  Yet, for a 1960’s horror, William O. Brown’s satanic sorcery picture is too advanced for the era’s mostly puritanical audience.  I’d even go as far as saying “The Naked Witch” borders the line between the foggy and gloomy atmospherics and set productions of Gothic Hammer and the ever-close-to-the-edge designed no nudity or graphic death coverups of an early Russ Meyer production sans the zany cartoon sounds and the rapid-fire editing.  An abundant of dread hangs in the air of starched collars and secretary skirts that conjures more than just the Devil’s presence in the bayou but a heavy dealt hand of a no-win situation full of desperation and death.  The story itself evolves from the brutal, ritualistic killings of strung up and stripped naked young, beautiful women to a more focused objective of converting Sensitive Tasia into a full-fledged witch that completes Luther’s coven and resurrects his master for a diabolical Hell on Earth.   The broader strokes of “The Naked Witch’s” narrative places the fate in the hands of a group of students and naïve ignoramuses playing catchup to what’s really happening under their noses.  Of course, alarm bells never go off and panic never really sets in for the group of survivors after each death in what is more like an aw-shucks and move on reaction.  Granted the team is stuck on the island for a few days with no way to call for help but that doesn’t mean being not proactive or being crippled by fear doesn’t have a place amongst them and in the story, especially missing opportunities within the researchers to turn on each other by way of Luther’s manipulating witch, Jesse, who herself has her own drastic motivation with a blood ritual that make her young again. 

“The Naked Witch” is fairly cladded with atmosphere and ghoulish intentions instead of the mentioned nudity but the new VCI 2-Disc Format Blu-ray and DVD release provides the bare essentials with a restored 35mm archival print into 4K-UHD scan.  Presented in a widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio, the grading is rich and overall image and details look pleasing with depth in most scenes and grain is era appropriate appeasing.  Skin tones shade a little more toward orange but maintain within spec but on the higher end of a RGB.  The print has sustained some damaged with a slew of scratches, dust and dirt, and cell burns peppered throughout and can be a nuisance but nothing terribly critical to warrant narrative loss or a complete loss of viewing pleasure.  The English Dolby Digital Mono track offers little to try and immerse viewers into the swampy bayou and that’s a real shame since visual elements are detailed.  There’s minor background noise is palpable but not distinct to warrant attention.  Dialogue and the Bolivian born and “The Town that Dreaded Sundown’s” Jaime Mendoza-Nava’s gypsy-esque and minor key brass and percussion score are the heavy hitters in this presentation.  Dialogue has insignificant hissing and crackling but as a whole, the track comes over clean enough to firm pass well over grade.  Option subtitles are available.  The only encoded bonuses are a 2024 commentary track by film enthusiast and artist Robert Kelly and a poster gallery that include not just “The Naked Witch” but other 60’s horror pictures.  VCI’s standard Blu-ray incasement has one-sided still picture and illustrated compositional artwork that roughly produces the madness incarnated with the DVD on right and the Blu-ray on the left inside, individual pressed with images from the front cover.  The region free disc has a runtime of 99 minutes and the film is rated R.

Last Rites: “The Naked Witch” has no skin in the game in its necromancy ways but finds the fog of dread easy to become lost in with interesting characters and a ghoulish witch and ritual vise gripping it on both ends on a verge of being something more.

“The Naked Witch” on Dual Format DVD/Blu-ray from VCI!

EVIL Sinks Its Teeth into the Reach of the Worldwide Web! (Full Moon Features / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Death Streamer” Now on Blu-ray!

A trio of struggling horror video podcasters stumble across a dark web stream while content mining for their derelict house of God set macabre show Church of Chills.  When they stumble upon a bloodcurdling ritual of drugging women and man vampirically ripping out and feasting on their necks, the footage is all too real based on their research and investigation into the underground live streams that rack up thousands of views and subscribers.  Eager to piggyback off the streams’ success, the Church of Chills reveals the callous, artery puncturing content to the world.  The live streaming ancient vampire master, seeking sacrifices to bring the end of days upon the world, is none too happy with the intruders doxing his content that has amassed a large following and warns them with omnipotent power, sending the three into flight or fight for their very lives and the for the sake of the world.

As the famous chorus line from the legendary rock-n-roll band AC/DC once sang, If you want nudity, you got it!  Or was it blood?  Either way, Charles Band’s “Death Streamer” you get plenty of both!  The new tech, modernized vampire lurks from out of the classic, gothic shadows and becomes the next inspirational concept from the longtime, distinguished founder and filmmaker of Full Moon Entertainment and the “Trancers” and “Head of the Family” director, Charles Band.  The 2024 feature is written from Band’s concept into story detail and dialogue by Neal Marshall Stevens, the screenwriter behind “Thir13en Ghosts” remake “Hellraiser:  Deader” and who has since become a Full Moon staff writer with credits going from touching the “Puppet Master” franchise with “Blade:  The Iron Cross” to new content with “AIMEE:  The Visitor,” penned under Stevens’ pseudonym of Roger Baron as so too with “Death Streamer.”  Full Moon Entertainment’s Charles Band and Nakai Nelson produce their latest with a budget aid alley-oop by a crowdfunding campaign.

“Death Streamers” core cast has small but mighty with Aaron Michael McDaniel debuting in his feature film role as Alex Jarvis, the egocentric host of Church of Chills, and his two beautiful assistants in Emma Massalone as Edwins and Kaitlin Moore as Juniper struggling in a power dynamic over who has creative control over the show while staying financially afloat being unhoused living inside test in a defunct house of God.  Convincing audiences the trio of being adept and meticulous with computers and a video podcast is a hard sell when they live in popup tents and rariely leave the church grounds without much background other than short spats of the show’s brief history, but nonetheless, the three M’s – McDaniel, Massalone, and Moore – make their character emotions and pangs work to the story’s advantage rarther than have it feel like a detrimental free for all for the spotlight.  Creeping into that bright circle is the dark heart of vampire streamer Arturo Valenor, played Sean Ohlman.  The sex club proprietor, operating in the underground markets, drugs beauties with his own blood, rips their clothes off, and has his way sucking the lifeforce from their tender necks.  This dark web act is unearthed by the Church of Chills team and becomes the focal point for them to piggyback and drive-up subscribers with real life macabre only to be discovered and threatened by Valenor’s ever-present powers. Ohlman makes for a good hip vampire but doesn’t exact that gothic depravity of a classic bloodsucker in Valenor’s more erotically inclined sacrifices.  Only in the very showdown end do all four principals find themselves in the same scene together, previous working separately across the worldwide dark web or through Valenor’s giant floating eyes of foreboding.  Yes, floating giant eyes is pretty trippy and old school.  The rest cast constitutes as one half of Valenor’s vampiric acolytes with Chili Jean as the blood serving barkeep and Travis Stoner as the gimp-masked muscle and the other half half-naked Valenor victims in Llana Barron, Piper Parks, and it wouldn’t be a Full Moon Feature without an adult actress making an appearance with Maddy May going fully nude.

“Death Streamer” follows the same formula Full Moon has been following the last few years by pulling inspiration from the latest and greatest, perhaps even from the ugliest, flavor of the month cultural impact item has to offer.  2020 saw the release of “Corona Zombies” to bank off the pandemic, also from 2020 was “Barbie & Kendra Save the Tiger King” spun from the popular Netflix documentary of the same “Tiger King” title surrounding convicted felon Joe Exotic, “AIMEE:  The Visitor” featured sensationally the dangers of A.I. during the artificial intelligence concern of rise, especially amongst the arts industry, and, lastly, a slew of video content infused storylines as TikTok, Facebook Live, X Live, and many other platforms become an overconsumption of media with “Bad Influencer,” “Attack of the 50ft Camgirl,” and “Subscriber” being a few examples.  “Death Streamer” fits in the latter category as well by following a what seems to be an endless horizon of streaming content from music, to vidcasts, to live feeds in today’s highly consumable media world where everybody, and their brother, has streams to be viral.  “Death Streamer” using today’s tech to try and modernize the mythos of one of man’s longstanding lores, vampires.  Charles Band’s two-prong locations keep costs of the crowdfunded dollars down while pushing much of the cashflow toward effects, both practical with off-screen trickery and blood spurts, and compositional VFX that sees large floating eyes and thousands of chirping bats, as well as getting essentially all the female actresses at least to a bare-chested level with even one using her holy cross chest tattoo, nested right between her mammaries, as the final nail in the coffin for one unlucky, or maybe very luck, vampire with a death by a gratuitous emblematic exposure.  Hands down, “Death Streamer” has the best kill scene I’ve seen this year!

Be a subscriber to the end of the world with Full Moon Feature’s “Death Streamer” now available on Blu-ray. The AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD25 seems adequate for the presentation flushed with warm red, blue, and green color filters. Details are sparse depending on the artistic alleyway inside Valenor’s club or inside his POV camera-specs, brighter the gels, lesser the finer points to the textures. The church setting, or the Church of Chills HQ, puts together a better angled lighting and a starker contrast by way of deeper shadows. Insignificant compression issues despite the single layer format but we’re not receiving the cleanest, most refined, looking picture image that’s presented in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. Two English encoded audio outputs are both Dolby Digital compressed with a 5.1 surround sound mix and a dual channel 2.0 stereo. Not the strongest or dynamic reproduction of the original, raw audio as it suppresses the action and removes the multiple channel pathways, rendering over mostly in the front channels in what the listing is more 5.1 in name only. Dialogue comes over clean and clearly enough without a spark of obstruction and is layered above the environment as well as what’s usually an overpowering Full Moon carnivalesque or Gothic score. English closed captioned subtitles are available. Special features include a behind-the-scenes of the regularly archived and accompanying Videozone specials, the “Death Streamer” premiere held in Los Angele was cast, crew, and a few select Full Moon friends, such as Barbara Crampton, with a Charles Band pre-movie few words, and a lineup of Full Moon trailers. The standard release of the Blu-ray Amaray has a pulpy illustrative cover art of a bloodied mouth Valenor and his two acolytes splayed in red, blues, and purple. The region free release comes not rated and has a just above an hour runtime of 72 minutes.

Last Rites: As the vampire canon expands with age, new grooves are etched into the classical monster’s lineage tree and “Death Streamer” is a cyber-ghoul knot ready to leave its influential mark only to have its fangs nulled down and overshadowed by the all-powerful naked female figure in another fair-weather Full Moon Feature.

“Death Streamer” Now on Blu-ray!