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The Most Dangerous EVIL Isn’t the Hunter! “Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity” reviewed! (Full Moon Features / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

The future for beautiful women holds little promise as they are slaves across a patriarchal-oppressed galaxy.  Daria and Tisa are two of those women, scantily cladded and stowed away in shackles on a galactic starship.  Their harrowing escape crash lands them on the shores of a jungle planet where they’re recovered and hosted by game hunter Zed and his two robot servants in his lavish castle abode.  Dressing, feeding, and providing them comfortable room accommodations, Zed appears to be Daria and Tisa’s savior against those who have enslaved them and from the wreckage of their getaway ship, but along with another couple of salvaged survivors from another ship, Zed has nefarious plans for each one of them.  Plans that put the survivors back into the mutant-infested jungle where fervent game hunter Zed’s need for worthy sport aims to capture and kill his pampered and mount their heads on his trophy room wall.

In a male-controlled universe, the battle of the sexes rages on!  “Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity” takes gender warfare into the jungle thicket with assumed male insuperability going up against the strength and will of woman.  The amalgamating sex, violence, and horror director Ken Dixon, known for his credits in exploitation with “The Erotic Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” “Filmgore,” and the documentary “The Best of Sex and Violence,” helmed his last entry in 1987 with this underclothed and campy science-fiction chase of human game.  Dixon, along with John Eng, Mark Wolf, and Don Daniel produce progressive gender boundaries with the film’s opposition to the laid ideology of Charles Darwin who once said man have a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up while woman intuition powers are characteristic of a lower race.  “Slaves Girl from Beyond Infinity” worked to balance the scale with women who won’t lie down and die because of man-favored gifts of sexual selection.  Beyond Infinity and Titan Productions served as the co-production companies and distributed theatrically by then Charles Band’s Full Moon Entertainment subsidiary, Urban Classics, until It’s sequential acquisition by Band and its assimilation into the Full Moon collective.

With the title like “Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity,” there better be a skimpy garbed cast of gorgeous women pew-pewing with futuristic laser guns and using their sexual promiscuity as a dangerous weapon.  Fortunately for us, Ken Dixon doesn’t drop the ball fulfilling the fantasy or, how I see it, is necessary for such a midnight showing title.  The film follows the imprisonment, escape, and into the hands of a human hunting madman story of Daria and Tisa, played by the super fit, super sexy blondes Elizabeth Kaitan (“Necromancer,” “Friday the 13th:  The New Blood”) and Cindy Beal (“My Chauffeur”).  Kaitan edges out Beal as the lead set early with Daria’s relentless confidence and better adept at taking advantage of a situation but both women play into the strong female heroine as they knock out well-armed and body-armored male guards, intoxicate the male, and even to the implied extent of a male identifying robot, gaze, and take on the murderous Zed in his own devious game albeit both barely having any clothes on for most of the duration in the cold of space and in the heat of the jungle.  Kaitan and Beal are not the only bodacious bods in the cast with the 80’s household scream queen Brinke Stevens (“The Slumber Party Massacre,” “Sole Survivor”) puts a foot out of the girl in a shower and other unnamed nude girl role and into a more principal character with Shala, a fellow planet stranded survivor from a previous crash told anecdotally, and in an opening, nonspeaking minor role, but definitely bursting with screams, and at the seams, of a barely covered flesh, is the unknown beauty Sheila White.  Stevens is sister to whom would become the “The Dark Half’s” special and visual effects supervisor, Carl Horner, as he plays Rik, a handsome, young man with a sneaking suspicion about their too-gracious of a host and a toying, on-the-brink love interest to a firm and more confident Daria in a steamy show sex scene to throw Zed off their conniving scent toward his do-no-good plans.  Zed’s a hard card to turn over and understand his true nature.  Played with impeccably classy and sporting glittery adorned, gun metal leather like a Niel Diamond on-stage outfit, Don Scibner has a traditional charm about him that he’s carried with him from his debut role in this Dixon film to other B-pictures laced with cult impression, such as “Moon of Scorpio,” “Night Shade,” and “Witchcraft XI: Sisters in Blood,” and really sells it as a game hunter giddy with the opportunity for new blood to track – male and female.  Between starship guards, robots, and planetoid mutants, Kirk Graves, Randolph Roehbling, Bud Graves, Jeffery Blanchard, Fred Tate, Jacques Schardo, Mike Cooper, and Gregory Lee Cooper fill in the supporting role gaps. 

“Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity” sounds like a busty-bust-up from the likes of Jim Wynorski but whereas Wynorski goes after a blend of buffoonery and boobs, and we’re talking about to the likes of really big, Russ Meyer-sized voluptuousness, Ken Dixon’s takes on a more earnest and natural approach, to an extent that “Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity” feels like a science fiction film of yore, circa 1950s with starship models, impractical attire, men in creature suits, and a timeless tone that is at odds with a futuristic setting.  A subtle whiff of campiness keeps the film from being monotonically stale.  The story itself is constructed from a historical literary framework, loosely based off the 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell with a big Russian aristocrat and game hunter, bored out of his gourd hunting animals, has turned to hunting shipwrecked people that find themselves stranded on his island.  Dixon replaces the Russian aristocrat with a lavishly leathered bachelor served by robots and skilled with a laser crossbow and the prey is technically shipwrecked but no longer worthy game man bur rather half-naked women comfortable in their loincloths and confident in their survival in an alien jungle amongst mutants, zombies, and a deranged hunter.  “Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity” certainly has that sublevel of sexual objectification and fantasy, or even perhaps is on par level with the murder of another human for sport premise as Kaitan, Beal, and Stevens not only bare most of their bodies, but their bodies are used as tools to subvert Zed’s snooping and are used by Zed in an exploitational sex act stemmed for this post-hunt thrill.

Full Moon delivers the most dangerous game in space down to insatiable fans of 80’s sex symbols and sci-fi oddities with a new Blu-ray release.  Unlike previous re-issue catalogue releases, either from standard definition to high-definition or high-definition to high-definition, “Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity” does not notify of any restoration or remastered efforts onto the AVC encoded, 1080p resolution, BD25.  However, not much needed to be improved on the already stellar picture from a virtually clean 35mm film.  I will say that the transfer did buffer out the natural grain of the film stock, but the details appear greatly featured amongst bronze and near blemish free skin tones from the model-esque actresses with big, teased hair down to the stubble and scarred faces of Rik and Zed, respectively.  Fabrics also come out on top with Zed’s outfit showing the stress marks of a leathery hide to the entirety of jungle epidermis, and even the forced perspective effects of composite mattes to enlarge the jungle setting, though an obvious matte effect, looks positively punctuated in detailed.  The soft lighting used to make the women stargazing eye candy does go against the detail grain but more accentuates the warm tones of a portrayed early science-fiction capture-and-kill.  The English LCPM audio comes in two formats:  a 2.0 stereo and a 5.1 surround sound mix.  The latter immerses you quite effectively but keeping the bass level and handled by the subwoofer reigns, dialogue comes over clean and clear in the front channels, and the sides offer atmospheric chitter of a strong world jungle.  Plus, all the laser fodder presents a satisfactory electric discharge familiar with the genre over the decades.  This suggests an optimization of the audio design for a full package of a sci-fi sonic palette.  This release does not contain a subtitle option.  The modest special features bundled with the feature include a skin-idolizing tribute to Elizabeth Kaitan that showcase her most memorable clothes-on and clothes-off moments from her film credits, the original theatrical trailer, and other Full Moon Features trailers.  The new HD suffers from the company’s consistent business structure of re-issue the film onto just a standard release with barely an encoded special features and little-to-no physical content, but the original film one sheet for the one-sided cover art offers an illustrated sexy and science-fiction splendor and the disc is pressed with select faces from the cover art floating amongst the stars in near translucency.  “Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity” Blu-ray is the R rated cut with a well-paced 75-minute runtime and is region free for global players, presented in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio.

Last Rites: Entertaining and easy on the eyes, “Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity” is an homage to the old science fiction psychotronic that’s vixenly sexy and savagely saucy under the guise of a cruel and deadly hunt on another world.

“Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity” Blu-ray Now Available! Order Here!

To be a Rich and Famous Rockstar, You Must Sign with EVIL! “Hell’s Bells” reviewed! (SRS Cinema / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Sign Your Soul To Satan for the “Hells Bells” on Blu-ray!

A pair of middle-aged best friends and rockers named Arthur and Herb have minimum waged jobs, no ambitions, and two level-headed wives on the brink of divorcing them if nothing changes.  All the friends have is their band, Devil Music, and their glam rock music. Out of the blue, a music talent agent signs them in a heartbeat and before they know, Devil Music is rocking out to a packed-full arena full of adoring fans and obsessed groupies, raking in money beyond their capabilities of higher counting.  What they’re oblivious to is the band’s collective souls now belong to the Devil under the contract terms with the servile music agent doing the Devil’s fear-based bidding and whose life and soul hangs in the balance.  When the Devil comes to collect, sending his demonic minions to slay each member of the band, Arthur and Herb must find a way to save themselves from the Devil cancelling their life show forever. 

For over a decade now, filmmakers Jim O’Rear, who’s minor zombie role in George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” has launched a career in indie horror in front and behind the camera with “Hayride Slaughter,” “Three Tears of Bloodstained Flesh,” and the “Cruel Summer” trilogy,” and Scott Tepperman, who’s more recent filmography into the indie market also saw highlights of horror, have been in business together ever since co-starring in the 2013 haunted hospital flick, “Hospital.”   From then on, the two had formed their own production company, Los Bastardz Production, specializing in low-budget horror with a select entourage of talent.  The devil and his contract film, underscored with a rock-n-roll fame theme, released in 2020 is duo’s “Hell’s Bells,” a horror-comedy built around if it seems too good to be true, it probably is narrative.  “Hell’s Bells” is also produced by the two filmmakers.

Like most of their produced product, it comes to no surprise that the Los Bastardz themselves, Jim O’Rear and Scott Tepperman step in the principal leads of a Beavis & Butthead or Bill & Ted type of heavy metal music centric duo who are daft beyond repair.  Any innovation aimed for the setup is instantly dissolved by the derivative tepidness as we’ve seen these characters before over the decades now, but O’Rear and Tepperman make for a good dimwitted and guileless pair with a gullibility and an innocence that makes them appear sympathetically simpatico, even when their levelheaded wives (Rebekah Erb, “Death Care,” and pornstar Layla Dawn. “Slumber Party Slaughter Party”) use threatening divorce language to motivate their one-track mind toward another desire in life.  The jokes are a bit long in the tooth and there are a handful of needless fart jokes, but the overall gags do land even if the terrain they contextually touch down on is rocky at best as they play to their individual character strengths of being a grocery bagger enthusiastic about making it big and a loafer who actualy has some intelligence underneath his Jesus hairstyle.  Their band mates, the cocky loudmouth drummer Vic (Paul Van Scott), the butch backup singer Shirley (Lisa Kirk), and the catatonic bassist Gary (Cameron Scott), all have their own quirks, and all are played by actors familiar with El Basterdz having donned roles in previously produced films from the company, such as the “Cruel Summer” series.  As the band Devil Music, they are targeted for soul reaping as a part of a contract byproduct against their music agent Caleb (Tom Komsar), drawn up by the devil himself in Marc Price (“Trick or Treat”) by duplicitous means with deceitful promises.  Without the horns, pitchfork, and red skin, Marc Price makes for a good Devil in human skin with only the economized visual effects fashioned glowing eyes.  Harold McLeod II preludes the story as a victim of contract, Cayt Feinics draws attention with a show of toplessness as Shirley’s lover, Jerry Reeves plays the demon x many going after Devil Music, and a sorely underutilized Jimmy Maguire, as the exasperated grocer manager tired of Arthur and Herb’s lack of common sense, fill out “Hell’s Bells” cast.

To preface with my previous experience with El Basterdz films, “Cruel Summer” didn’t do it for me with a dowdy slasher that’s didn’t leave impression.  Yet, “Cruel Summer” has two sequels plus a 4th soon to be on home video, making this series their most popular commodity.  What can I say?  Cinema is subjective.  That bad taste didn’t deter “Hell’s Bells” from the ever-growing review pile and a second chance to get this long-time horror fan aboard with Jim O’Rear and Scott Tepperman’s blithe outlook toward the horror genre, one that doesn’t take itself too seriously.  With that understanding, going into “Hell’s Bells” was rather easy with no expectations for commentative material and top-notch gags and laughs, but what El Basterdz provides has been long appreciated and continuously favored in genre films:  decent VFX, decent practical effects, and, of course, the provocation of nudity.  There may be times when films can get away with having only one of those key elemental pieces present with great immensity and intense projection that the film can’t be denied it’s due right to seen and heard as a well-made film but have all three and the formula works like a charm amongst genre fans no matter how bad the storyline gets and no matter how bad the acting is portrayed, leveling up a mediocre production to potentially the penthouse of the independent skyscraper.  To be fair, neither the story nor the acting in “Hell’s Bells” is atrocious but the technical aspects during principal photography and post-production throw the film off-balance into slapdash hogwash and that can be rather off-putting right out the gate for most audiences.

“Hell’s Bells” finds itself being a story having been told before, many times over in its airheaded budding duo faced with great task none think possible to complete, but O’Rear and Tepperman manage to befit themselves satisfactorily in archetype with a rock-n-roll nightmare by sticking to their character quirks and incorporating the backbone preferences of shoestring genre filmmaking.  SRS Cinema is a distributing house built on shoestring films and “Hell’s Bells” is another brick in its schlock-sturdy foundation with a Blu-ray release.  Encoded with AVC compression, presented with 1080p high-resolution, on a 25GB BD-R with the purple underbelly, “Hell’s Bells” looks pretty good for commercial grade encoding and minimal capacity.  Details are sharp enough to cause no concern to capture skin variations, the contrasting wardrobe textures, and the shifting compositions between reality and fantasy stemmed from visual effects and fade-in/fade-out montage sequences.   Scenes are mixed bag of grading, some more intense than others that are set with a brighter natural veneer, but all retain their intended quality without any substantial issues from compression.  The English language LPCM 2.0 stereo renders a mix of feeble commercial equipment and green technical knowledge that permits a large noticeable swing in all areas of principal sound recording with most of the pain points affecting dialogue with retreated vocal presence in certain scenes while robust in others, and even an in-moment change of the same scene at times.  Post sound design isn’t marred by the same scenarios that’s a clear as crystal with the added rock soundtrack, crowd cheers, and demonic gutturals.  No English subtitles are offered.  Special features include a commentary track with writer-directors Jim O’Rear and Scott Tepperman, a behind-the-scenes featurette, Arthur and Herb’s Devil Music music video, blooper reel, the feature trailer, and SRS Cinema catalogue trailers.  SRS Cinema’s Blu-ray mirrors their limited 100 count release without the director’s signatures, retailed with a regular Blu-ray Amaray case with illustration composition artwork of mostly the chief principal characters, and as always, the graphic artistry SRS uses is always 100x better the film.  There are no other physical accompaniments.  The not rated release has a runtime of 80 minutes and has region free playback. 

Last Rites: Throw up the sign of the devil horns for “Hell’s Bells’s” comedic contract with a hair metal Satan, but don’t let this narrative fool you by hawking new something old and done before.

Sign Your Soul To Satan for the “Hells Bells” on Blu-ray!

EVIL Versus EVIL to the Death! “Mad Foxes” reviewed! (Cauldron Films / Limited Edition 4K UHD and Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Mad Foxes” LE 4K UHD and Blu-ray Still Available to Get Before X-Max!

Playboy Hal drives fast cars and enjoys a good time.  While driving his girlfriend out for a night on the town, a road rage run-in with a Nazi biker gang leaves one of biker’s dead and Hal continues on his way to the nightclub for bubbly and music.  The bikers track him down, beating Hal to a pulp and raping his date as the night ends.  Not to roll over and be passive take to insult, Hal recruit’s a friend’s dojo class for an all-out brawl during the outside funeral ceremony for the biker’s fallen comrade, taking violence to the extreme by castrating the gang leader.  In retaliation, the entire dojo class is gunned down in a vengeful massacre days later.  Hal and the biker gang continue their back-and-forth as they embark on a short-term blood feud aimed to annihilate each other’s lives, spilling violence beyond friends and into family ties without mercy. 

A tale of perpetual revenge and exploitation from Spain, “Mad Foxes” takes one-upping to a whole new grotesque level.  After production manager Paul Grau worked on the tantalizing pictures “Secrets of the French Maid,” “Caged Women,” and “The Amorous Sisters” and before helming the comedic sexploitation “Six Swedish Girls in the Alps,” the Nordic born filmmaker debuted with tit-for-tat terror in the streets film cowritten between Grau and softcore, erotic film producers Hans R. Walthard (“Six Swedes in Paradise”) and Jaime Jesús Balcázar (“The Couple’s Sexual World”), leaving no surprise to the shocking and provocative nature of this Euro-nasty that castrates Nazi bikers, shotguns old ladies in wheelchairs, and blows up entire apartment buildings all in the name of spite.  Erwin C. Dietrich and Hans R. Walthard serve as producer and executive producer under the production collaboration of Jaime Jesús Balcázar’s  Balcázar Producciones Cinematográficas and Reflection Film.

A biker gang revenge story sounds right up there with “Death Wish” starring Charles Bronson, but instead of Bronson’s character going up against the impossible odds by way of an organized and self-controlled planning, executing, and removing the threat for good, “Mad Foxes” strikes impulsively while the iron is hot with such ferocity it’ll make your head spin right off the neck.  José Gras (“Hell of the Living Dead,” “Conquest”) envelopes himself to the solo side as Hal in contra the larger Neo-Nazi biker gang.  Hal’s a bit of a philanderer though it’s not entirely explicit but his raped date Babsy (Andrea Albani aka Laly Espinet, “The Hot Girl Juliet”) is a quickly and inexplicably out of the picture before he picks up free-spirited nomad Silvia (Laura Premic) and, by then, Hal seemingly doesn’t have any other care in the world though the aforesaid date Babsy, or perhaps it was his young girlfriend, was raped, and his good friend’s entire dojo, plus said friend (Paul Grau), are massacred in an open fire execution of bullets after they wipe the floor with the Neo-Nazis in a karate skirmish that ends in the gang leader being gratuitously castrated.  Having already cross paths with the gang at least four times, Hal hops in his fast car and drives to the countryside to get away from it all, picking up Silvia on the way, but he inadvertently leads the ruthless camo and leather-cladded gang, led by character played by Peter Saunders and Eric Falk (“Blue Rita,” “Ilsa:  The Wicked Warden”), to his wealthy, elderly, and impaired parents and their house servants.  From there you can imagine the bloodshed that quickly spirals into payback but all throughout the retaliatory strikes, one begins to question who the actually is the good guy in all of this because Hal actually initially ran one of the biker’s off the ran and to his death, driving away with speed and a serene sense of no remorse or concern.  Does Hal bring an ill-fated war upon himself?  One could argue a case for it.  “Mad Foxes” rounds out with Helmi Sigg, Brian Billings, Garry Membrini, Ana Roca, Hank Sutter, Iren Semmling, Hans R. Walthard, Esther Studer and Guillermo Balcazar.

“Mad Foxes” is a gratuitous showcase of trashy Euro cinema, the grindhouse champagne of Spanish sleaze, and has little worth toward elevated commentary or technical grandeur.  Yet, within our miniscule cinema-thirsty molecules and riding along our less trodden synapse highways, a spark of interest can’t keep our eyes off the lurid lunacy that’s unfolding before us.  Paul Grau has invested, produced, and released an entertaining indelicate that won’t bore, won’t tire, and won’t be a total waste of time in its eye-for-an-eye format.  Does one man’s need for revenge need to make self-preservation sense?  No.  Does a bike gang have the wherewithal to track down one man from city-to-rural without breaking a sweat?  No.  One aspect of the story that holds relatable consistency through the years, decades, or even millennia is that violence remains a universal truth, and “Mad Foxes” has plenty of teeth to tout when an act of pettiness turns into the next World War for one man and a biker gang.  The story is no “Death Wish” or “Death Sentence” but it does remove rationality from the shackles of a rancorous reality and plops viewers into the throes of an odd quarrel that won’t seemingly end until the very last standing have turned vertical, and all signs of life has ceased.  Hal’s no rogue ex-cop or former elite marine, just a regular playboy with friends in karate places and has a stubborn will to take on the gang singlehandedly on their own sordid turf.  Grau’s unabashed violence never stumbles or wanes to be implied with the Switzerland director helming a Spanish produce movie that churns out Italian-like shock with the closeup carnage and the cynical nature of a fatalistic bout. 

Cauldron Films proudly presents “Mad Foxes” Ultra High-Definition debut to the world featuring a new 4K restoration with Dolby Vision HDR color grading on an HVEC encoded BD66 with 2164p.  This limited-edition 2-disc set also includes a standard Blu-ray presentation that’s AVC encoded on a BD50 with a 1080p resolution.  The Dolby Vision HDR 10 offers extensive and immense saturation that’s balanced, stable, and more vibrant in it’s support of a wider pixel range.  Without compromising the story’s gritty nature with an unflexed amount of detail, textures retain their respective fabric types from the sheen of Hal’s silveresque bomber jacket to the taut leather of the neo-Nazi bikers.  The skin tones appear organic with a surface appeal that denotes and defines body hair, wrinkles, and other skin imperfections, more notably in close ups.  Focal depth does not completely wash out objects or landscapes with careful delineating a sandy beach and wavy ocean with distinction while the cityscape has the light and tone range in clarity of the object.  Only the UHD was covered for the image review, but the Blu-ray pulls from the same 4K restoration that I suspect has most of the same results but with a lesser pixel count in the quality that may be not as perceptible.  Both formats include an English DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio, a DTS-HD 2.0 mono, and a Spanish DTS-HD 2.0 mono mix.  All include optional English subtitles in, what I consider horrendous, ADR mixing.  Dialogue has clarity and is clean throughout, but the voice acting is just beyond reproach with drab inflection to express the right emotion during the scene, its all fairly monotonic and automaton deliveries through the asynchronous matching of voice and mouth.  With no innate recording during filming, the milieu sounds are limited to the immediate action of post-production kick and punch skirmishes, a volley of gunshots, car and motorcycle engines, and murderous snikts of blade strikes.  This, in turn, limits and relegates the surround sound channels to mostly the front with only a flutter of immersive quality, mostly with the revving car engines and the occasional gunfire.  Special features on the UHD only include the commentary by film critics Nanni Cobretti and Merlyn Roberts.  The commentary is also on the standard Blu-ray along with additional content in The Untold Story of Robert O’Neal:  a near feature-length interview with leading man José Gras discussing his career in Europe, Erwin and the Foxes offers interviews with producer Erwin C. Dietrich and actors Eric Falk and Helmi Sigg discussing their roles and the production, an additional interview Mad Eric has a second interview with actor Eric Falk, and Troy Howarth provides a video essay with stills and video snippets in Nazi Fox Bikers Must Die.  The special features round out with an image gallery and a feature trailer.  The curated packaging comes in a rigid slipbox with new compositional artwork by Justin Coffee.  Inside, is a clear Amaray Blu-ray case that display same primary artwork and is accompanied with an adjacent folded mini poster, also of Coffee’s art.  The UHD is region free and the Blu-ray is region A for playback as both films carry an unrated designation and have na 80-minute runtime in their widescreen, 1.85:1 aspect ratio, presentation. 

Last Rites: Revenge films are often formulaic but “Mad Foxes” is no ordinary payback thriller that continues to the hit back well into last man standing. The new Cauldron Films’ limited-edition boxset pushes the media technology to max superiority sure to squash any rival, unlike Paul Grau’s ceaseless chaos.

“Mad Foxes” LE 4K UHD and Blu-ray Still Available to Get Before X-Max!

Football, God, Family, and EVIL! “Him” reviewed! (Universal Pictures / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Him” Collector’s Edition Now Available from Universal Pictures!

Cameron Cade’s father has been firmly preparing his son to be a football GOAT since Cam was a young boy.  Inspired by the 8-time champion Isaiah White, star quarterback of the Saviors, Cam had trained and played through the years and ranks to be the game’s next promising rising superstar athlete.  When a mascot-dressed manic derails Cam with a head trauma-induced attack, Cam takes a step back from competing in the football showcase but receives hope when he receives an invitation from the Saviors to work with Isiah White at his isolated training camp deep in the desert.  Before long, a dream-come-true turns into a terrifying nightmare as the training sessions go deeper into something far more sinister and Isiah’s greatness may be contributed to unnatural forces bound by limited contracts.  How far and how much will Cam have to sacrifice to be the best football player ever and to live up to his idolized hero before the game and those who control it swallow his own soul. 

Jordan Peele, once skit comedian with Keegan-Michael Key in “Key and Peele” turned provocative social commentary director of such films as “Get Out” and “Us,” produces the next potshot at cultural critiquing with 2025 released “Him,” a football themed psychological horror that puts sacrifice for the game over family, intensifies the pressures of equating performance with success, and a misguidance from fatherhood/mentorship that intends on grooming a young person into superstardom.  “Him” is the sophomore feature length film for Justin Tipping who also cowrite the script along with Two-Up Productions cofounders Skip Bronkie and Zack Akers as the first major movie release for the company associated with Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions that not only produces his Peele’s own films but also invests into minority-driven projects, such as “The Candyman” remake, “Monkey Man” with Dev Patel, and Spike Lee’s the “BlacKKKlansman.” 

At top bill of “Him’s” roster is an established comedian, writer, and producer with an even more well-established and famous last name.  Marlon Wayans’s breakout project was the sketch comedy TV show “In Living Color” that also highlighted and rocketed the career of Jamie Fox and Jim Carrey but was also considered a family affair as Marlon’s siblings, Shawn, Kim, Keenan Ivory and Damon Wayans, cohosted with him the African-American centric comedy show.  In “Him,” Marlon plays the 8-time champion quarterback for a football team that is as venerated as his character Isiah White playing for the Saviors.  Wayans, known for his comedic role stints in favorites “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood,” “Scary Movie,” and “White Chicks,” has a surface scratched darker side to his onscreen personas that leave him no stranger to a role like Isaiah White that’s dispassionate yet ferocious – his drug addiction role in  “A Requiem for a Dream” is one of those examples.  Opposite Wayans is the strong, muscular facial features underneath soft, piercing eyes of Tyriq Withers.  The then mid 20-year-old is in peak physical condition for his rising star quarterback Cameron Cade under the pressure cooker of family, agents, and a football league that expects greatness on every level.  Withers’ recent principal parts in perceptively pointless and under-the-radar remakes of classic cult films, “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter is Dead” and “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” didn’t elevate the Florida born actor into the spotlight, preparing him for an upcoming lead in a more visible original psychological horror themed around one of America’s favorite sports, but Withers meets the challenge with a promising performance for his promising character that makes “Him” standout above the rest and being his biggest role of his career catalogue.  Wayans and Withers battle out with testosterone trumping into a gray area of occultism that’s not so unlikely from the reality of professional sports.  The principal leads are supported by an eclectic supporting cast of eccentric oddities of the isolated training camp with Julia Fox (“Presence”) as Isiah White’s fast-and-loose, high-end wife Elise, standup comedian Jim Jefferies as White’s personal athletic physician Marco with baggage regrets, Tom Heidecker (“Us”) as Cade’s hype manager Tom, Indira G. Wilson (“The Perfect Host”) as Cam’s mother, and Richard Lippert (“Scare Us”) as the saviors behind-the-scenes owner. 

“Him” came and went from its theatrical run so fast it feels like only yesterday trailers were being played on commercial breaks and on online previews, denoting Justin Tipping’s movie offering not finding a significant audience for the anti-pro sports treatment of players message.  That’s what “Him” powerfully engrosses with is an anti-football message of dog-eat-dog cruelty that cannibalizes itself for what’s best of the sport and discard those who give the sport it all once their eliteness has been completely emaciated, as if the sport is a vampire and drains their athleticism through the carnivorous canines of fans, team, and ownership.  Tipping and his cowriters integrate religious and Roman motifs that relate the gridiron as Church or the blood of the GOAT coursing through another that offers divine playing sacrifice and supremacy while certain aspects of the film regard the football fields as coliseum with players being gladiators with even the finale reenacting scenes similar to that of “Gladiator.”  Along with those strong imageries, iconographies, and representations, Tipping’s linear telling of the story feeds off the phantasmagory and being on the edge of experimental that, in turn, puts into question Cameron Cade’s reality as everything he experiences from the ominous weirdness pulsating his path forward in football to the macabre training and cultish indoctrinations of Isiah White’s desert training camp don’t come about until Cam’s whacked over the head with a long handled and ornate hammer.  Then, the question becomes, is Cam in dead and a warped purgatory?  Is Cam hallucinating?  Or is Cam actually experiencing the darker side of a game he’s been bred to believe in and be the best at.  All of those existential and surreal components overload “Him’s” highbrow and social commentary horror that will fly over the audiences’ head like pre-game ceremony fighter jets. 

“Him” arrives onto a collector’s edition Blu-ray and digital combo set from Universal Pictures.  The AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, film is stored on a BD50, ensuring room for a visually and audibly stimulating tryout of pigskin piety.  Infused darker tones of shadows, Brunswick greens, and plenty variations of brown from the football to the desert located training camp, there are a very few contrasting moments that embolden cinematographer Kira Kelly (“Skin in the Game”) to emerge out from the hefty draping shadows that obscure much of the compounding and confounding irrationality of the insular football fanaticisms.  Kelly utilizes an array of long to closeup shots from different scenes or even the same scene to throw off the balance and provide depth when needed for the moment.  In addition, the same moments can be implanted with a personal bubble of surrealism through Cameron’s perception of events, never leaving other characters to define the atmosphere or the behaviors that are inherently set by the principal lead character, who or who may not be suffering from an intense concussion untreated unintentionally by the internal turmoil of family politics.  Detailed textures and skin tones have organic qualities, and the X-ray vision has seamless segue with all its intensified bone crunching hits.   “Him” is presented in a widescreen 2.39:1 for an extra stretch of spherical sighted surroundings that work to enclose on Cameron the deeper he’s in with the mentor’s program as well as to fully embrace his destiny with obstinance in the grandest of finales.  The Blu-ray has encoded four audio option a with English Dolby Atmos, a Dolby Virtual Speaker 2.0, a Spanish Dolby Digital Plus 7.1, and a French Dolby Digital 7.1.  All options offer extended reach into the audio localization areas of the compressed, multiple channel formats, and even the DVS adds a little extra to throw sound inside a three-dimensional space which is important for “Him’s” haunting and bizarre oneiric structure.  The Atmos provides more depth and richer lagniappe effort where it comes with Cameron’s perceptive discords of racing arguments and whispering inceptions.  Dialogue is clean and clear throughout, and no issues imposed on The Haxan Cloak aka Bobby Krlic’s subtle descent of a score.  English, French, and Spanish subtitles are available.  Bonus contents include feature commentary with director Justin Tipping touching upon production areas and the cast to create his footprint as a movie artist, an alternate ending, a removed end credits scene, a handful of deleted scenes, two deconstruction of scenes on how they’re made, Becoming Them looks at Tyriq Withers and Marlon Wayans transformation into elite athletes, The Sport of Filmmaking featurette offers a behind-the-scenes look at production of “Him,” and the Hymns of a G.O.A.T. has composer Boby Krlic’s detailing the elements in creating his movie score for the film.  The collector’s edition also comes with a digital code insert to stream or download from anywhere on any device.  The physicality of the collector’s edition is more to the tune of a play fake that doesn’t allow the release to run with an overloaded package.  Instead, Universal laterally passes with a cardboard slipcover with an embossed title for some smooth font texture.  Instead, the standard VIVA case houses the same artwork as the slipcover without the raised lettering and the disc is translucently pressed with the title and film and format technical credits.  “Him” has a runtime of 97 minutes, region A encoded playback, and is rated R for strong bloody violence, language, sexual material, nudity, and some drug use.

Last Rites: If you’ve ever thought professional sport players were commodities before, “Him” brings the blitz of putting football above it all by bringing divine blood, sweat, and tears into a cult of sadists and stardom.

“Him” Collector’s Edition Now Available from Universal Pictures!

The Key to EVIL is to Kill Each Other For It! “A Hyena in the Safe” reviewed! (Celluloid Dreams / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“A Hyena in the Safe” is on Black Friday sale! Get It at Amazon.com

Eleven months after a jewelry safe heist at the Bank of Amsterdam, a group of specialized international thieves from all over Europe reunite at an Italian mansion estate during a city carnival celebrate used as a distracting facade for their gathering.  Each have a key that form a coalescence to open the safe to ensure not one of them will swindle the others and make off with the jewels worth millions.  Their ringleader Boris, who’s now deceased, hid the safe in his mansion with this wife Anna overseeing his plan and portion of their lifted prize.  When one of the keys end up missing, a series of deceptions and murders begin a feisty vying for the each of the keys.  One-by-one, the criminals fall for inconspicuous laid deadly traps and engage in murderous rendezvous until there’s only one left standing as the old saying goes, there is no honor amongst thieves.

Italy director Cesare Canevari, notable for his contribution to the exploitation subgenre with “A Man for Emmanuelle,” “The Nude Princess,” and the notoriously renowned “The Gestapo’s Last Orgy,” wrote-and-direct a post-caper, bordering giallo in 1968 titled “Una iena in cassaforte,” aka “A Hyena in the Safe.”  Coming in on the incline toward giallo’s height of success, Canevari’s whodunit has less the conventional murder mystery elements but does have arouse that lack of trust amongst the principal characters, a high body count, a vaguely mysterious killer, and definitely a highly stylization of camera angles and visuals that’s correlates with the time period and give this giallo less of a terror firming shape and more of a “Clue” like profile.  Canevari cowrites the script with Alberto Penna and is a production of Fering SRL based in Milano, Italy where the film was shot.

“A Hyena in the Safe” is carried by an eclectic, ensemble cast of international actors and actresses playing the roles that are not of their respective nationalities.  Going around the horn first with the keyholding thieves begins with Stan O’Gadwin’s Klaus, the German, Ben Salvador’s Juan, the Spaniard, Karina Kar’s Karina, the Tangerine and the only non-European of the group, opera singer Dimitri Nabokov’s Steve, The Englishman, and “The Slasher … Is a Sex Maniac!’s” Sandro Pizzchero’s Albert, the Frenchman.  The aforementioned cast primarily reduces to Italian and German actors in a virtually performance only role to exact and exude their character personality types in with Salvador, who gives Juan a thinking man’s confidence within a patient self and has a way of seducing women to extract information, or with Klaus, who’s aggressive pressing as an authoritarian German leans toward pursuit efficiency, or Steve, who’s quietly plotting multiple reserved schemes to deploy later.  Those not a part of the heist crew from the Bank of Amsterdam is Anna, the criminal mastermind’s wife portrayed by Maria Luisa Geisberger, and she, too, is a keyholder but only because the attractive femme fatale takes over the helm with the storage of the jewel vault and implants her own brand of deception after announcing her husband’s demise from an illness.  Jeanine (Cristina Gaioni) and Callaghan (Otto Tinard) are the last two who round out the ensemble in their corresponding roles of Albert’s blonde bombshell girlfriend who’s folded into the scheme at the chagrin of the others, and boy does she take a humiliating beating when Albert comes up short on his key, and the jewel appraiser who watches all the backstabbing unfold from the sidelines and counts down the bodies with the metaphorical removal of their party favor baggies, ones that would have been used to split the jewels between them upon opening the safe.

What’s interesting about “A Hyena in the Safe” is the beginning of the story plotted at the act of reassembling the team and only provide expositional context to a heist well after it’s been done, eleven months ago in fact.  All the characters are fresh and unknown to the audiences, we don’t know their personalities, their skills, their habits, or their attitudes toward one another, and all that dynamical odds and ends has processed, forcing those new to the film to watch, listen, and learn their way through the personality types and the situation at hand.  The tension is quickly laid out amongst the already side-eying and suspicious group of sophisticated thieves that react no differently from the lower class of thief with same cutthroat intent.  Keeping up with Canevari’s edited pacing and unconventional angle shots that squeeze out the tension with taut framing on expression-filled cutting of eyes and fear-induced faces, the mounting intriguing factors wet story hungry appetites with playful catering of the imagery that also consists of fixed and tracking shots.  Considering the film’s more conservative decade, Canevari builds tasteful implied sexual acts between conniving characters and is only explicitly, in physical means, when the scene calls for it, leaving gratuitousness begging to be let in.   One aspect with the pacing that hurts the enticingly heightening pressure cooker between the first act’s slow trot through choppy seas of character dynamics to elucidate taciturn behaviors and backdoor alliances and the last act’s spit firing and cutdown of those who are left standing, there is seemingly no middle act to funnel the trepidation and mystery from one end to the other in an abrupt ease into a quickly diminishing situation that goes from murder mystery to battle royale with switchblade umbrellas, electrifying door handles, and an indoor garage that can turn into an asphyxiating fish tank in a matter of minutes.  There’s an early James Bond campiness to the story’s temperament that can’t be ignored while be positively and simultaneously interesting.

Celluloid Dream’s third release title today “A Hyena in the Safe” arrives onto a new high-definition Blu-ray for the first time that’s AVC encoded onto a BD50 and presented in 1080p and in its televised pillar boxed full screen 1.33:1 aspect ratio.  The restoration of the original, likely, 35mm film stock was done by Rome’s Cinelab Services from the original camera negative, which also included the color grading.  The resulting transfer is peak restoration quality with a fresh coat of brilliant paint, a clear coating of texture producing details, and a virtually flawless image within the spherical lens picture.  Perhaps slightly on the orange side, skin tones come through a variety of shades to match the nationalities of the criminal enterprising collective.  Juan’s dinner jacket evokes tweed textures while Jeanine’s high, golden hair style never loses individual strands in the near all-bright-and-golden wash.  The original Italian mono mix was secured from the optical sound negatives attached to the filmstrip.  The mix had processed the Italian ADR in post and attached to synch to the celluloid, creating a near perfect pace and synchronicity with the conversational action though the lips doesn’t exactly match the actual words being spoken.  Speaking of dialogue, for a mono track the nice and robust with clarity from an untarnished negative albeit it’s lack of depth and not from the true source, and that goes for ambience as well.  English closed captioning is available.  Special features pack the encoding with a commentary track by Celluloid Dreams found and film critic Guido Henkel, interview featurette 7 Guests for a Massacre with Cesare Canevari (misspelled Canevaro on the back cover), Albert actor Sandro Pizzochero, Nini Della Misericordia, journalist/critic Adriana Morlacchi, and journalist/critic Diego Pisati discussing the film’s influence and pizzas from cast, crew, and critic perspective, a video essay by Andy Marshall-Roberts Schrodinger’s Diamonds:  The Duplicitous Mystery of Hyena in the Safe, a location featurette of the shooting setting The Mysteries of Villa Toeplitz, an image gallery, and the theatrical trailer.  The two-faced cover art, same art of dead bodies falling out of a safe, is set with the primary English language on the cover with the Italian language title cover on the reverse side.  The cover art on the encasing O-slip with a character composition design of a shadow-induced, high-contrast illustration by graphic artist Thu-Lieu Pham of Covertopia.com has slip art similarities with same art on both sides but with the title in either in English or Italian.  In the insert is advert for Celluloid Dream’s previous two releases – “The Case of the Bloody Iris” and “Short Night of Glass Dolls” and its upcoming fourth release “The Black Belly of the Tarantula” while the reverse side gives credits and acknowledgement in regard to the film restoration.  “A Hyena in the Safe” comes not rated, clocks in at 92 minutes, and is region locked for A, North America.

Last Rites: “A Hyena in the Safe” is a no laughs, all bite giallo caper once obscured from the public view now brought to the forefront of our attentions with a new Blu-ray release worth backstabbing for!

“A Hyena in the Safe” is on Black Friday sale! Get It at Amazon.com