Tag Archives: Nightmare Fuel

Prancing Forest EVIL Will Seduce You to Death! “Devil Times Two” reviewed! (SRS Cinema / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Devil Times Two” on DVD from SRS Cinema

A forest encircled convent hidden away from the Milan population undertakes an occult responsibility to keep bloodthirsty and callous demons from entering the human world.  On the verge of retiring, Father Ernesto Taro, a once formidable force for good who exorcised a powerful demon decades ago that cost the lives of many in his fellow cohort except for Mother Dolores, takes on a younger understudy to be his replacement, the ambitious Father Chuck Bennet.  Father Taro and Bennet were summoned by Mother Dolores when grisly body of a young hiker is discovered.  A pair of former Nazi sadists turned Netherworld demons come to Father Bennet in a vision and are suspected to be the carnage culprits.  Souls are at stake and the world is on the brink of falling into darkness as the Returnees are only the right hand of a more profound evil itching for complete and utter omnipotence. 

“Devil Times Two” is an Italian-made, demonology-contextualized horror from Italy writer-director Paolo del Fiol.  Having purveyed grindhouse horror in anthological means with previous films “Connections” and “Sangue Misto,,” del Fiol branches out into his solo feature-length narrative set in the 1970s as a faux lost film recovered onto VHS from the only known syndicate televised program on Telelaguna to account the terrible tale full of profane hostilities, sexual stimulating supremacy, and, of course, gore in the interlacing recognition between the popular devil, demon, or hell on Earth inspired movies and the obscenities connected to eurotrash and sleaze movement of the 70s topped a hint of Japanese adulation, a motif heavily sprinkled into the film carried over from the director’s previous work as well.  Underscored by the tagline Quado le Tenebre escono al Bosco, or When Darkness comes out of the Woods, “Devil Time Two” once again pits religious good versus irreligious evil in this Himechan Movie Production self-produced by Paolo del Fiol.

Characterized as the titular pair, Returnees Jasmine and Umeko are the ethereally evil duet of diabolical detriment who seemingly float in and out of the material world as alluring succubi, seducing prey into their web of demonic lust and languish.  Some turn up grotesquely inside out while some others disappear, saved for later for special ritualistic planning.  Erika Saccà, an Italian fitness instructor in her debut role, plays the blonde Returnee Jasmine in a sleeveless, lowcut gown and with nearly ever kill, exposes and massages her augmented bosom with underboob scarring in a change to showoff her toned physique, and Reiko Nagoshi (“Re-Flesh”) wears a kimono without any unveiling of skin but does a bit of thrust-damage on her quarry that initially and inexplicable appears to be a strange phenomena when everyone in the scene is a woman but becomes apparent there’s something unholy and very “War of the World’s” alien under that traditional Japanese garb.  Saccà and Nagoshi wear many hats in this product but also don’t have the dialogue to hoist their demonesses higher.  The dialogue is left with the trio of convent gatekeepers in Father Taro (Enrico Luly), Father Bennet (Paolo Salvadeo, “Occultus”), and Mother Dolores (Amira Lucrezia Lamour, “Re-Flesh”) in what becomes a deeper understanding of their backstories around Father Taro’s deadly bittersweet exorcism decades ago, his on the sly and subtle affection for Mother Dolores, and Father Bennet’s questionable rise to supersede Father Taro, laying a foundation of doubt within the current gatekeeper.  While I like the contrasting dynamics of the two factions within the cast, I found the discourse overly bulk and tedium between the trio of piety that strung on scenes way too long with way too much talk that it ultimately suppresses the pacing when every little detail has been uncovered and explained. All the casted bits in between are slaughter fodder with Denise Brambillasca, Alessandro Carnevale Pellino (“The Wicked Gift”), and Martina Vuotti in non-defying death roles.

Paolo del Fiol’s unaccompanied and independent deluge of demonian debut has doses of phantasmagorical imagery sublet by its more shocking and odd immolation of incognizant individuals unlucky enough to cross paths with the Returnees. Likely to have never seen, Fiol’s film very similarly compares to James Sizemore’s “The Demon Rook” by creating unique mythos not reliant on a religious bedrock and use independency as an advantage for showcasing practical makeup and effects and while “The Demon Rook” would overwhelm with prosthetic made-up characters, “Demon Times Two” focuses attention more on the guts of the matter, the gore, but though not pernicious enough to the story, the eyeball sucking, throat lacerating, or intestine exposing bloodshed is prosaic panoply that won’t outshine in the sea of subgenre synonyms. Aforementioned dialogue scenes can be a slog to get through with many exchanges overstaying its course between the pious gatekeepers, especially between Father Taro and Dorlores, and that hurts the pacing to pick up the gore more frequently for more potency. Instead, exchanges are more elucidations that go around-and-around to where we’re lost on the mounting reveal of the Returnees’ mission and master which turns out to be visually more stimulating and visceral in the last ten minutes than in the first 100 minutes of runtime. The backlot lore is Fiol’s greatest achievement simulating a 70’s style grainy movie caveated as only broadcasted once on December 8th, 1983 (a few days before this reviewer’s birthday) and never seen again until it’s VHS recording is recovered.

Under a pretense of being a buried lost film, under the tribute of a grainy and scratched psychotronic celluloid, and under the falsity of genuine huge knockers, “Devil Times Two” is twice baked into a classic contemporary dish served by SRS Cinema on DVD. Arriving on the SRS Cinema: Extreme and Unrated Nightmare Fuel label, “Devil Times Two” is nothing short of being a modern-day emulator of once was with suitable grain overlay, a hazy, if not washed, overcast grading, and trope-laden atmospherics with dense fog, unnerving dissonances within earshot, and blood brilliantly cut with pseudo Telelagua commercial programming of brief adverts until returning to regular scheduled programed checked in and out by a gondola and it’s gondolier in dusk silhouette. Presented in a pillar box 1.33:1 aspect ratio, the fuzzy and non-delineated details are not a punch to the salient gut as the intent here is to be obscure, opaque, and ominous in nature and in technique bathed in 480p. The Italian PCM is the exact recreation of a time period post-dubbing with the actors re-dialoguing their performances as it was common practice in most motion picture industries, especially Europe, at the time. ADR is clear but not necessarily clean to recreate that shushing and crackling of an older recording. The subtitles are also forced or burned into the film with the sole Italian audio option. Bonus content includes what is called Backstage, a raw filming look into the production shoots and behind-the-scenes footage with no real direction or cosmetics, a photo gallery, a trailer with English subtitles, and other SRS Cinema released trailers. The SRS Cinema DVD front cover resembles mock-70’s, thick-red font with a bare woman’s back dressed in a painted Satanic symbol within the border of a VHS-esque rental casing with rental stickers. Inside the amaray case is a pressed disc with an extreme close up and crop of the same front cover with no insert in the adjacent slot. Pacing burdens this release, especially in its near 2-hour runtime with a clock-in at 114 minutes which is approx. 24-minutes too long in my opinion and the film comes not rated and has region free playback. No matter how much arcane the content is, or how grotesque the horror show, or how much perversity and skin can be unclothed, “Devil Times Two” has difficulty retaining a flow of fascination in a rather windbag approach to a rather devilishly good salvo construction.

“Devil Times Two” on DVD from SRS Cinema

When Machine and Man Merge, Which EVIL Will Emerge? “Re-Flesh” reviewed! (SRS Cinema / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Re-Flesh” DVD Available Now to Replace Your Old Skin!  

In a dystopian future, machine and man have merged into an asymmetrical symbiosis where machine is preponderantly present to corrupt man’s benevolent humanity.  Such corruption removes compassion at the core level with the use of neurol inhibitors of technological ascendency over mankind in a gruesome, unpleasant fashion.  The exhibited process is exampled with a masked nurse pushing a wheelchair bound masked man down a dank and dark hallway and into a reprocessing room where he’s plugged with a cable attached to his arm.  From there, the man is fitted with a virtual viewfinder displaying five short reprocessing-to-repair files, transmitted before his eyes to incite organic machinery violence that’ll absorb and eradicate years of human psychological evolution.  Slowly through the images and videos of visceral excision does the man morph into an automaton of flesh, blood, and commingled organic cabling and mechanical veins that will render him resolved as biologically re-fleshed.

Japanese splatter punk Body horror inspired “Re-Flesh” becomes “Deep Web XXX” and “Suffering Bible’s” director Davide Pesca’s tribute to the very distinctive denaturalization of the man-machine mix cinematic movement from the unabashed narrative risktakers hailing from land of the rising sun, Japan.  Made popular by the likes of auteurs Shinya Tsukamoto and Shozin Fukui and cult favorites like “Tetsuo:  The Iron Man” and “Tokyo Gore Police,” “Re-Flesh” adds to the niche palate with an unconfined, Italianized take to ambiguate that blurry line between the soul and the soulless as man comes to terms with a terror-inducing technological takeover.  Writer-director Pesca’s underground anthological tale pits the human condition, it’s mortal coil if you will, up against the cold and heartless tech to create coded layers of neova carne, or new flesh.  Pesca and fellow coproducer Massimo Bezzati reteam after “Night of Doom” to collaborate the 2020 released production under their respective indie companies Demented Gore Productions and M.B. Productions.

The five-story anthology with the interweaving wraparound of a man being reprogrammed casts a lot of visual performances without the need for dialogue.  Dialogue is reduced to only a pseudo medical television advert or surgical endorsements for a better, prosperous life to eliminate human flaws, advancement in new, and improved, flesh, and can even cure homeless afflictions like drugs and addictions.  Pesca keeps a simplicity about his scenes by keeping sullying dialogue removed to just retain the beauty of body horror and a sonorously cacophonous industrial soundtrack.  Each story’s characters are also fairly simplified.  Without dialogue, individual complexities and depth remain shallow in what is “Re-Flesh’s” sole celebration of horror based cybernetic organisms.  This creates no emotional attachment to any of the characters being violated by fiber optic cables and experimentally operated on with crude animatronic gizmos, but Pesca does implant an imploration of at least one emotional response from his audience through gratuitous nudity on half of the female protagonists going through a rapture and ruination of bodily rape and mutate connected by inhumane sentient cybernetics.  Most of the women protagonists are half-naked women ensnared by the inescapable new world of merged new flesh but the tail end episodes dig a little deeper, perhaps even stretch the theme to the limits of cyberpunk horror, to where women are more than just ravaged victims.  “Re-Flesh” sees skin in the game from Alessandra Pellegatta (“Night of Doom”), Giacomo Clerici, Mery Rubes (“Rage Killers’), Reiko Nagoshi (“Devil Times Two – Quando le Tenebre escono dal Bosco”), Giulia Reine, Paolo Salvadeo, Amira Lucrezia Lamour (Devil Times Two – Quando le Tenebre escono dal Bosco), Alessandro Davoili (“Alice Was My Name”), Ivan Brusa (“7 Days, 7 Girls”), and Marco Cinque.

David Pesca is no stranger to short, gore-laden, underground films having been a featured segment director on a pair of anthologies in the last decade from “A Taste of Phobia” and “After Midnight.”  For “Re-Flesh,” Pesca doesn’t have to share the spotlight in his very own tech-themed, feature length compilation that narrates transmitted computer files as tech insidiously infiltrating our insubstantial innards.  The first three episodes revolve around phones and solitary women become enslaved to the devices with a link of invading their bodies with a foreign object, whether be adopted a virtual, grotesque pet to being the reason for infection that spreads throughout the body like a flesh-eating disease, to being beamed up and constrained for a thorough, if not sexual, examination of one of mother nature’s creatures.  I’m intentionally skipping the review of fourth short and head straight into the terminal episode that is more dystopian splatter punk than the others with an experimental bio-cybernetics company called Neo Vita, or New Life, ridding the world of lowlifes by module implants that turn them into society-controlled puppets.  Yet, all these stories are not terribly straight forward with the rub being the ambitious nature of interpretation and the fact there isn’t a dialogue track for most of the runtime.  Taking a step backwards to the fourth short, I found this particular short doesn’t fit “Re-Flesh’s” theme with a demonic woman damning three inert souls to a black void of pain and death.  Perhaps, a construal could be constructed to lay in code into the technology sequence strand, but the code would be a fractional stretch in comparison to the surrounding system.  As a whole, “Re-Flesh” may side more with gory sanguine than an illuminating story but does depict the scourged with a front row seat in this bloodcurdling network of body horror.

Befitting to be distributed on SRS Cinema’s Nightmare Fuel – Extreme and Unrated sublabel, “Re-Flesh” emerges as a bizarre aghast mix of tentacle erotica and technical dysfunction onto a 480p DVD, presented in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio.  Technical dysfunction also applies to the image quality.  Though combating some lossy compression issues, the standard definition resolution and budget filming equipment sustain a level of image softness under a desaturated color palette.  Depth and delineation range from hazily outlined to a complete wash out from the frame’s JPEG conversation.  Pesca operates under a wide-stylistic format that incorporates varied black-and-white schemes (a gritty B&W wraparound story compared to a more defined desaturated monochrome for the fourth segment), natural lighting, harsh gel lighting and tint, and green screen for CGI backdrops.  The English dub stereo 2.0 mix will obliterate your sound setup if not careful and without a subwoofer with a booming LFE industrial soundtrack that has produced an inherent crackle and since there is no in-scene dialogue or ambience, all of which is 100% done in ADR, the lower frequencies engulf the other channels that may pop in for phone effects or squishy surgery sounds.  “Re-Flesh” is an Italian film, but the cybernetic implant advert shot, originally spoken in Italian, is dubbed in a burned-in expeditious English dub that is what it is.  Bonus features include a promo and original trailer, a behind-the-scenes featurette entitled Backstage which is a look at some of the gory scene effects the first two segments, the short “Electric Dreams” which is an alternate graded version of the second segment, and other SRS trailers.  The traditional DVD snapper case comes with the illustrated front cover art of the man plugged in under a faux harsh white neon glow with the disc art containing the same art but superimposed with a red hue layer.  There is no insert inside the casing.  The unrated feature has a runtime of 72 minutes, more than enough time for this type of anthology, and has a region free playback.  A kitschy and schlocky graft of “Re-Flesh” will get under your skin, but this anthology quickly grinds gears toward a blue screen of death.      

“Re-Flesh” DVD Available Now to Replace Your Old Skin!  

EVIL Will Suck on Your Menstrual Soaked Tampon. “The Hood Has Eyez” reviewed! (SRS Cinema / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

An Early 2000s Exploitation With Lots of Infamy!  “The Hood Has Eyez” on DVD!

Attending a school ditch party was the last thing the obedient Kimmy wanted to do but the peer pressure from her fellow Catholic schoolgirl friends convinced her to the other side of the tracks of town.  On the way, a half-naked woman runs out in front of their car and in attempt to flee the scene on foot, to protect their innocent repute status, they run into two gangsters holding them at gunpoint in an alley.  The now frightened teens are forced into an isolated park area, joined by the now fully-clothed and not injured woman they hit earlier in what has been revealed to be a ruse to rob them, but the gang leader, Psycho, has more distasteful and violent plans to squeeze more out of his prize than cash.  Psycho brutally rapes Kimmy and is left for dead by not only the gangsters but also the one other surviving girl she had considered to be her friend.  Battered and broken, Kimmy’s morality and reality snaps, sending her down an unmerciful vengeful path against those who condemned her to die.

If filmmaker Terrence Williams set out to make an exploitation film of genital mutilation, forced sodomy, and a man sucking on a bloody tampon, then mission accomplished!  The straight-to-video, SOV rape-and-revenger of monstrosities, “The Hood Has Eyez,” pulls no punches, knows no limits, and cares to give no concern for the atrocities it depicts.  A bastardized yet familiar rephrasing of an early Wes Craven classic, “The Hills Have Eyes,” Williams uses Craven’s basic setup plot to write-and-direct his own version of uncivilized lowlifes exploiting and murdering out-of-their-element travelers in the most graphic and appalling ways.  Williams takes the fear out of the hills and drops it into a remote park plopped in-between the suburbs and urban grounds, swapping out inbred hillbillies for Latino gangsters and a nuclear family for schoolgirls in short skirts and one unlucky white dude.  Collaborating producer and wife of Terrence Williams, Nicole Williams, has previously and subsequently worked together other films, such as “Curse of La Llorona” and “Horno,” under their now defunct joint company, Cinema Threat Productions in Los Angeles. 

The 2007 released “The Hood Has Eyez” reunites a good chunk of the cast from Williams’ “The River:  Legend of La Llorona,” “Revenge of La Llorona, “Llorona Gone Wild” and “Curse of La Llorona” films completed and released within a couple years previously which created a certain level of comfortability and trust amongst the cast as well as the cast and director.  With some of the intimately graphic content of “The Hood Has Eyez,” those warm and cozy congenialities play key to selling a broken bottle scene being rammed up a vaginal cavity or a nail hammered down into penis urethra.  Without that delicate easiness in the air, scenes like the aforementioned won’t work, resulting in the entire project collapsing upon itself even before wrapping up principal photography.  At the tip of the spear are Cyd Chulte and Antonia Royuela as the principled Kimmy and her antithesis, the deranged Psycho.   Chulte, who cut her teeth with roles in “Curse of La Llorona,” takes one-half the lead of a young woman broken by the barbarity and succumbs to justified vehemence for torture, dismemberment, coat hanger abortions, and eventual death but before being pushed to the edge of her life and into a state of insanity, Kimmy’s presence melds into the group of a lemming unit and takes a backseat to the other lead half behind Royuela’s unhinged ultra-violence of a gangster gone rouge from the plan.  Psycho’s posse – Joker (Carlos Javier Castillo, “Axeman”) and She Girl (Anne Stinnett, “Revenge of La Llorona”) – truly reflect their handles as Psycho’s devil and angel on his shoulder, trying to either egg him on or have him withdrawal while withdrawing is still in his favor but, of course, we wouldn’t have a debauchery and savage movie if the angel over the shoulder had prevailed and so Psycho has his perverse way with Kimmy and friends – Susan (Jesselynn Desmond, “Horno”), Rachel (Jamielyn Lippman, “The Absent”), and Jerry (Tom Curitore, “Llorona Gone Wild”). 

The way I see it, Terrence William’s trashy exploitation nod “The Hood Has Eyez” has three distinct parts, much like the three-act structure of any narrative archetype.  Terrence Williams defines these acts tremendously clear in an almost too simple of a way that it feels rudimentary, maybe even old fashioned.  The setup is simple:  overweening teens doing what they’re not supposed to be doing become caught up in an unfavorable part of town with a maladjusted gang.  The confrontation squares the two factions to a literal position of facing each other while the teens coward in fright and disadvantage as they forcibly bend to the will of the gun-toting gang calling all the shots.  The resolution pivots the story 180 degrees, like any good rape-revenge thriller should, after misdeeds thin out whose left for dead and who’s intractable impulses are fully left satisfied and goes right into execution mode without passing go, without collecting $200, and without pause of a trauma processing moment as Terrence Williams wastes no time digging deep into the sludge of psychiatric stability with a hasty move right to rectifying an eye-for-an-eye balance.  Up until a point, “The Hood Has Eyez” carries a lot of dire weight within the confrontational girth that can be hard to stomach.  There’s a few casually lighthearted and fun witty moments peppered beforehand, such as a jokes at the expense of airhead Susan and her player boyfriend, but then after the grave assault that leaves Kimmy left to suffer all the post-traumatic syndrome results, things really go dark, and I’m’ talking black comedy dark.  Kimmy goes into full Rocky Balboa training mode, doing pushups and enthusiastically practicing staff spinning in the light of the falling sun.  Terrence Williams actually gives Kimmy a rousing montage before ripping the dick off a two-bit thug.  Where am I getting to with all this?  Well, I’m not sure how Terrence Williams wanted audiences to digest his brutal film that goes through touchpoints of opposing genres.  Usually, if comedy and gore are present in one narrative, slapstick typically is the go-to conduit – think “Evil Dead II” or “Dead Alive.”  For “The Hood Has Eyez,” the gore effects are hearty, the characters are vicious and victimizable, and Williams maintains an intact beginning-to-end narrative, but confounds with a few choice character actions that sully the overall presentation.

The Cinema Threat Production has now been integrated into SRS Cinema’s Extreme and Unrated Label – Nightmare Fuel – and unquestionably is underground extreme horror at its foulest.  Released with a widescreen aspect ratio of 1.85:1 of the 420p standard definition, camcorder tape footage and in a new director’s alternative cut, “The Hood Has Eyez” has relatively decent image clarity with a very subdued amount of lossy compression results, especially for progressive scan 480 pixels.  Details are soft as expected with the commercial equipment and lower resolution but though a slightly faded color scale, the coloring range renders intense enough for higher marks and can play a trick on the eyes by falsely delineating the objects to create a space based off the hue edging alone.  The English Dolby Digital 2.0 track props up the quality even more with Terrence Williams using a boom mic attachment instead of the built-in mic to gather meticulously the intended dialogue and skirmish kerfuffle.  As a result, dialogue is really sharp here, especially during Psycho’s off-the-rail verbal abuse, rants, and one-liners.  The post-production Foley stands apart from the inhouse sound with prefabricated sound bytes but that’s the way of micro-independent filmmaking.  The alternate cut includes a newly shot opening scene that was originally intended for the original script that was added back in to actualize the Williams’ vision after a cast sudden dropout departure.  Bonus features include a commentary with Terrence and Nicole, a raw, secondary cam behind the scenes footage in making certain scenes, a blooper reel, image slide show, two original cut trailers, a new trailer, and a Women in Horror vignette featuring Nicole Williams discussing the importance of women in horror and her contribution to the genre.  The release is presented in a traditional DVD snapper with a beautifully illustrated cover art based off the shoddy composited “The Hood Has Eyez’s” one sheet.  In the past few years, SRS has upped their game with cover arts and continue to impress with their new branding campaign that makes these films feel no longer cheap at first glance.  Inside, the DVD press art is the same as the cover with much of the RGB removed to a single layer red. There is no insert inside the case.  Terrence Williams set out to capture the inelegant essences of nitty-gritty exploitation and hits the nail on the head, literally, with this passion project of perversity. 

An Early 2000s Exploitation With Lots of Infamy!  “The Hood Has Eyez” on DVD!

Become Wrapped Up in EVIL with “The Shroud” reviewed! (SRS Cinema / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“The Shroud” now available on DVD from SRS Cinema!

Centuries before, an evil witch is brutally tortured and killed while covered in a white shroud. In present day, a nun, part of a special sect vowed to never let the unholiness of the shroud deviltries be unearthed from the forgotten rubble of a divine stupa, is raped by two men wearing masks. With the help of a hired obtainer, the nun will stop at nothing to get her hands on, even at the defiance of her brother’s advice, but the shroud’s a bewitching mistress and its power are intoxicating. Breaking her piety pact with God and her sworn duty to protect man from wickedness, the nun succumbs to the sin that drips from the shroud’s blood-soaked fabric and exploits its personification powers of evil doings by not only exacting revenge on her attackers, sending the shroud to assassinate her attackers without an ounce of mercy, but also converting her devout habit to a shameless, promiscuous one of immorality.

A made-in-Italia possession film about a killer burial garment and a nun with big guns giving out the last rites. What could go wrong? The immediate impression arises a lot of interest in this 2022 released inanimate killer object flick from writer-director Fabrizio Spurio. As Spurio’s third feature in the horror genre, “The Shroud” envelopes the 50-year-old, Rome-born director’s first ambitious single story length venture behind the more episodic anthology, “Innesti,” and the more obscure “Vanity,” that taps into the willingness participation to do anything for stardom. “The Shroud” embarks into a more religious and supernatural discourse that clashes the sin and the sinner with a blurry line of empowerment. Made with pennies, or rather made on the Italian centismos on the Euro, “The Shroud,” or “Sindome,” is a production of the Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci inspired Goreproduction company, cofounded by Spurio with Francesco Lagonigro tacked on as a fulltime collaborator in shooting low-budget, independent, free-thinking cinema of underground horror.

The last time I saw the sultry lead Italian actress and extreme indie horror luminary, Chiara Pavoni, was in the avant garde “Xpiation” helmed by one of, if not the dominant, underground horror filmmaker, Domiziano Cristopharo.  In her motherly-voyeuristic role, Pavoni radiated with dark, sphinxlike desire in her well-dressed, pin-up sex-symbol performance of longing and control.  Pavoni doesn’t stray far from that archetype with her latest role in Spurio’s “The Shroud” as she plays a woman of virtue, a nun to be more exact, who has quickly turned lubricious and vindictive after her being raped.  Pavoni is certainly bodacious on screen as she adorns tight-fitting outfits that barely contain her snugly-packed large chest, exposing a Mariana Trench deep cleavage in a Spirit Halloween sexy nun getup for much of her role’s sordid side.  As a thespian performer, Pavoni has the subtle moves of a temptress who knows what she wants but dialogue deliveries are something left to be desired as the “Demonium” actress goes through the motions of plain speak as does much of the other cast, including the Goreproduction producer costar Francesco Lagonigro. Lagonigro plays her object obtainer who, by the seducing forces of the shroud, turns into her sex-slave or gothic lackey as visions of death please feed him the sensation of guilty pleasures. Lagonigro’s version of a factotum is about as cheesy as they come with a glaring lowered brow and white and black face paint to embellish something that looks nowhere near sinisterism. If we’re supposed to take Lagonigro’s maniacal manservant role seriously than Spurio, and Lagonigro for that matter, misses the mark badly in a poorly sized up rendition of a Renfield like stooge. “The Shroud” rounds out the cast with many miniscule, nearly nonspeaking roles with Paolo Di Gialluca (“7 Sins”), Andrea Pucci, Allesandro Massari, Giuseppe Andreozzi, Sara Lagonigro, Monica Rondino, and Andrea Pacilli and Samuele Lagonigro who composed the score for the film under the moniker, Sam and Andy.

As you can see, “The Shroud” is a family production for the Lagonigros who won’t hesitate to pitch in to make Francesco’s lewd and crude extreme horror on a bar tab’s worth. Conceptually, “The Shroud’s” an appealing idea of religious hypocrisy and the natural human desire to be immoral. Rules are meant to be broken as Spurio seizes control the very one thing a woman should have control over – her body. By introducing rape by two masked men, Spurio rips away that control and for a nun who whole schtick is to abide by God by maintaining purity in keeping her holy temple intact, she must seethe with humiliation in front of her Lord and inevitable turn away from him because there is nothing left unadulterated to give. She has sinned, whether intentional or not, and so the tainted nun must keep on sinning in various ways: lust, revenge, and murder. Despite being on a budget, Spurio’s ability to liven up a plain white tablecloth is what making movies is all about as the shroud lives and breathes on screen, moving in an agile manner, and becomes a physical presence that can gore a man through. Sleight of hand scene reversals bestows the shroud with a life of its own, creating a slithering dolman of death that looks great in the humble presentation. That kind of DIY special effects translates the same across the slender 76-minute with practical gore gags that rest above mediocracy, and I can say that with a straight face. “The Shroud” will have very few claims to cult fame with a slew of sloppiness that takes the zero-dollar expenditure and makes it appear even cheaper than pocket change. There’s even a scene where the director is clearly reflected into the frame, not even an attempt to hide or review for need to reshoot.

“The Shroud” is warm and cozy when it’s not trying to kill you! SRS Cinema, a leading purveying of underground cinema, releases Fabrizio Spurio’s “The Shroud” on DVD as part of the company’s extreme and unrated nightmare fuel label. Distributed through MVD Visual, the region free DVD5 is presented in an unmatted widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio with a commercial grade quality of a standard definition camcorder that maxes out on the higher side of output of a 720p resolution and so the final result looks fairly okay for DVD. For much of the natural lighting, the high contrast works extremely well, creating deep shadows that make the film feel richer than its actual value, but the details and textures are often soft and bleary, washing out any kind of tactile material. Luminescence of green and blue gels as well as double overlays are used to symbolize nightmares and shroud vision are more headache inducing than a stylish solution when mingled with an industrial engine rumble or high-pitched and stretched vocal score with some piano keys tossed in to mix it up. The Italian language dual-channel stereo is a lossy, unbridled catchall. As much as the audio is purely soundtrack, there is still an insurmountable of sounds being captured by the camcorder mic that softens the desired prominent audiles, such as dialogue which becomes trapped in a cavernous state of echos and various levels of pitch inconsistences. The subtitles on the SRS DVD appear to be translated by a person with English as not their primary language as a tone of grammatical errors, punctuation mistakes, and absolutely zero capitalization tarnish an already low-rent feature. If you can work your way through the strangely designed menu options to the bonus features, you’ll find included raw take bloopers, photo gallery, music videos starring Chiara Povani and Francesco Lagonigro, and SRS trailers. The physical package is perhaps the best part of “The Shroud” with a true-to-form beautifully dark illustration of the most memorable character faces to exhibit in the film, crafted and designed by Avery Guerro. “The Shroud” is an estimable underground piece of the extreme horror art pie but slacks in unnecessary places and becomes an exemplar of a shoddy and careless production that ultimately hurts the overall value of its genus.

“The Shroud” now available on DVD from SRS Cinema!

Cannibals’ EVIL Break a Family’s Bond. “Blood for Flesh” reviewed! (SRS Cinema / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on



“Blood for Flesh” has a healthy amount of both!

Primitive cannibals sexually violate a brother and sister by a campfire ritual while feasting on entrails.  A family in the throes of hatred and forbidden incest is torn apart between death and mercy.  When these two powerful moments spur friction amongst the family, blood and betrayal runs like an unstoppable torrent.  Animalistic urges take over and neither brother, sister, or father are safe from the cannibals or each other in a landscape of barren and sociopathic madness.  Who will survive and come out on top of the internal upheaval when bloodlust is at its highest?

“Sangre Para la Carne,” or for the single-lingual, English-comprehending audiences, “Blood for Flesh,” is the 2019 ultraviolent and in your face gore-and-shock short-feature film from Mexican director Alex Hernández.  Though completed in 2019, “Blood for Flesh” gains traction into the at-home market three years later, finding distribution on multiple independent physical media distributors as well as video streaming services.  In his debut directorial, which doesn’t list the filmmaker as the screenwriter but is likely the architect of its abstract, Hernández caught the eye of another extreme auteur in “House of the Flesh Mannequins” and “Xpiation” director Domiziano Cristopharo and Italian-based TetroVideo to lift “Blood for Flesh,” fitting right into TetroVideo’s cache of erotic and extreme horror, into production and home video distribution. Shot in the arid depths of Tlaxcala, Mexico, labeled the epicenter in internationally trafficking female sex slaves to the United States, “Blood for Flesh” deluges itself with more unsavoriness, produced by Porfirio Hernández and Rodrigo Tellez Pérez.

To put it simply, “Blood for Flesh” is madness of unchecked immorality and to make something this deranged, Hernández would have needed a likeminded cast small enough to pull off callous scenes of rape, torture, and merciless death as well as aberrant scenes of incest surrounding three members of a truly messed up family. Beginning with the patriarch who is only know as the Father, played by Juan Manuel Martínez, whose subsequently becomes the violently persecuted by his own spawn after groveling at his daughter’s feet in a moment of bawling seeking forgiveness. Bound and gagged, beaten, and hung upside, the Father receives no mercy from his children and there’s no real revelation to why he’s become a subject of torture. Brother (Luis Navarro) and Sister (Erika López) fashion a complex relationship of courtship and collusion. As the Brother notes more than once in a divulging of truth the longing for his sister and his regretful reluctance in continuing the mistreatment of his father, its the Sister who seemingly has the upper hand, the hypnotic spell, over her love stricken brother and as Hernández dives into Sister’s unhinged scenes, especially where she marks her face and body with makeup, we come to realize that Sister just might not be right in the old cabeza. Now, how the cannibals – played by Christian Camara, Daniel Cruz, Enrique Diaz Duran, Aldo Palacios, and Marisela Plaza – fold into the family’s unraveling is a bit of a mystery but I’d like to think their naked savagery represents the rupture and hate between family and the cannibalism is kind of this dog-eat-dog mentality to come out on top by exploiting the other.

No matter which way you slice it, no matter how sharp the blade divides the skin, the muscle, the meat, or the bone, making sense of “Blood for Flesh” will never, ever happen as the almost an hour runtime feature, setup into chapters, is a bundle of biting brutality possibly representing a wide variety of real-world complications. The non-linear structure formulates no sensical path from beginning to end as you’re plopped right into the family’s madness from minute one and though I’m no stranger to undisguised abstract art in indie film, I can usually piece together to symbolic impressions or the weave a clear justification for most scenes in arthouse horror. With “Blood for Flesh,” I’m about as lost as a 5-year-old in a mall whose wander off from his inattentive shopaholic mother perusing the hot deal clothes racks at JCPenney’s the day after Christmas. I watch as Erika López strip away her clothes and her character’s mortality in every scene, I ponder and consider Juan Manuel Martínez’s Father’s compulsive reactions to seek forgiveness as well as to be vindictive toward his off-color and off-their-rocker offspring, and I am beguiled by Luis Navarro’s need to be inside his sister and, yet I feel nowhere near grounded to “Blood for Flesh’s” message if there is even one to be grounded to. Maybe we’re not supposed to connect with such corrosive content in what’s supposed to be just purely unabated shock content to rock the core of typicality. The cannibal scenes seem to be just an object of the director’s fascination with the ugly side of tribal horrors in a stereotyped rendition that depict them as nothing more than basal beasts that take what they want without an out of compassion and my mind continues to lean toward that high degree of barbarism to equate to a family built upon by hate, loathing, and individual interests.

“Blood for Flesh” could have easily fit in the catalogue of other extreme and underground horror labels, but this experimental purge of images and sins has found a home at SRS Cinema on the company’s Nightmare Fuel banner DVD distributed by MVD Visual. The single layer, region free, and unrated DVD is presented in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio that decompresses content around 5-6 Mbps, hovering around par for the course when considering DVD picture quality. Generally, the cinematography is bleak, like it’s content, with muted coloring or shot in the dark to avoid any colorful hues. Only when stark red filters are used, which is only one or two scenes, is when color unloads in every inch and corner of the frame. There’s some aliasing and banding in certain scenes that cause momentary distortion that make it hard to delineate exactly what you’re looking act – is it an open and bloody slit or gash or is a cheeseburger? That’s always a fun game to play. The Spanish language audio tracks come in two formats – a PCM Stereo 2.0 and a Dolby Digital 2.0. The PCM is, again, muted with a lack of robust quality the Dolby Digital has much more vigor in all the sub-tracks. Unfortunately, the pieced together soundbites lack creativity and are poorly spliced together that continuously drop off in an instant on the backend. The forced English subtitles synch okay and are captioned well. Bonus features include a filmmaker’s commentary track, interviews with the cast that come with awful Spanglish translations, and the film’s trailer. If Domiziano Cristopharo saw something unique in Alex Hernández, I have yet to see it as I’m not sold on the director’s fringe horror film that aims to just be randomize acts of violence for 59 minutes.

“Blood for Flesh” has a healthy amount of both!