The Next WWII Hero to Tommy Gun Down Nazi EVIL Experimenters is “Dick Dynamite: 1944” reviewed! (Epic Pictures Group / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on March 26, 2025

“Dick Dynamite: 1944” is actioned-packed and now on Blu-ray!

In an effort to extinguish and conquer the American people during World War II in 1944, depraved Nazis develop a transatlantic bomber to plane a devastating, zombifying, nuclear weapon to the U.S. shores. A special operation is devised by the U.S. command and intelligence to send their most prized, as well as disgraced, Nazi killer, Sargent Dick Dynamite, to be released from military prison and head a motley crew of rough and ready soldiers to destroy the bomber before taking off from Germany. Under heavy fire and losing already a couple of soldiers, Dick must make contact with a British operative and an enemy infiltrating dame to root out the details and whereabouts of SS Colonel Schtacker’s diabolical plan for Hitler. A score of bullets and blood wash over an already bloodied European battlefield as Dick Dynamite will stop at nothing to kill every single Nazi he can get his hands on to complete his mission.

“Dick Dynamite: 1944” is the first of possibly a string of blackly satirical, gory, and horrors of war and of creature World War II films to the uncouth tune of “Dirty Dozen” and “Inglorious Basterds,” or “inglorious Bastards.” The 2023 released Scottish-made feature is written-and-directed by Robbie Davidson as the musician’s first feature film following a pair of shorts from the last decade in 2012’s “Vamplifier” and 2017’s “Radge Land.” “Dick Dynamite” is a much larger film full of practical and visual effects, multiple locations, props, voiceover work, large cast and a lot more to create a mockup of wartime Europe of the mid-1940s. The indigogo crowdfunded campaign accumulated $3500+ from 74 backers but that total may have increased to approx. $7500 per external review of the budget costs; either way, crowdfunding backed Davison, Ian Gordon, Alexander Henderson, and Adrian Smith cofounded Square Go Film production, produced fully by Davidson and Jeffrey J. Ellen, a serial campaign contributor.

So, whose to play the titular hero filled to the brim with machoism? That role would fall upon Snars. Snars? What the hell is a Snars? That would be the very large stature of Gary Snars Allen channelling his best Scharzenegger voice for the bomber jacket-donning, punch first ask questions later role of Dick Dynamite. Dynamite’s an extremely faced-value character with not a lot of depth and Snars doesn’t bring much to the character in a way that makes the war action hero that remarkable, especially amongst the clandestine missions behind enemy line characters in war films, like Brad Pitt as Lt. Aldo Raine with a noose neck scar and his idiosyncratic way of saying Nazi. Dick’s surrounded by a bunch of off-color, off-beat, dirty-dozen types that beam their leader tenfold but, in themselves, are a beacon of curiosity and comedy. Between the wise guy, motormouth of Brooklyn (Mark Burdett), a pyromanic with a flamethrower in Naplam Jeff (Andy Moore) and a loud and overconfident British Agent in Dash Dalton (Shaun Davidson), there’s support dialogue and action to take the edge off of Dick Dynamite being the sole primary muscle and that’s a good thing because while Snars is okay as the role, he’s not exactly charismatic and having backup characters keep Dick Dynamite from a lot of wear and tear of being in every frame or sequence. Unfortunately, there is a downside of an ensembled cast in an action war film and a few will be quickly axed off before being unraveled, even some of your favorites from the character’s title card rundown at command operations, such as with drug-addicted, old timer medic (Robert Williamson) as well as Lukas from Tuchus (Brian Jamieson), Tam the Bam (Leftie Wright), and, fan-favorite who gets a little more action, Motherfucker to say only say Motherfucker through the entire time. Valerie Birss and Adam Harper deserve to be separated from the pack because of their broader arc with Harper playing timid war photographer Officer Wakowski popping his combat cherry after being pushed to the extreme limit and Birss in covert clothing as Agent Jennings pretending to be a Nazi socialite and though not explicit, she serves as potential love interest for Dick without a fling of amorous to be had. Irvine Welsh, Graham Scott, Athol Fraser, Nigel Buckland, Erik Grieve, David R. Montgomery, and Colin Mcafferty, as the notorious war crime Nazi leader Hitler, rounding out the cast.

“Dick Dynamite” is modern day grindhouse that pays homage to the days over-the-top, suicide mission carnage. Visual effects and practical gore elements are compositely tied but for the budget, VFX is surprisingly sound to match up against the layered objects or landscapes in the pith of grindhouse. I found balloon toss squibs an effective choice for bullet-riddling, bloody body shots that explode with gusto and the editing is on point to not show the moment of balloon impact. A large cast with extras in full Allies and Axis uniforms and weaponry, plus military vehicles, such as Ford GPWs and German vintage aircraft, are garnered and used to add not only to the realism side of the World War II film but also adds to the scale of Robbie Davidson’s debut feature. Davidson’s story is uber lean for a very cut-and-dry shoot’em up, zombie-laden, Nazisploitation film with not a ton of depth by relying solely on black comedy gags that either hit or miss comedic marks but the gags that do land are outrageous and warrant laughs. The finale definitively sets up the return of “Dick Dynamite” for a sequel with the hope this film generates enough revenue in conjunction with, perhaps, another crowdfunded campaign to see Dynamite back to smashing the faces of swastika-heiling goons again.

My first Epic Pictures release that isn’t a Dread sublabel, “Dick Dynamite: 1944” is released on standard Blu-ray, encoded AVC, 1080p high-definition in a 1.78:1 widescreen aspect ratio, onto a BD25, which is nothing new in comparison to the Dread catalogue. Filled in with plenty of composite, visual effects shots, the feature has a plastic pulpy profile, especially in its plastique explosions overtop real and artificial layers, but the detail leveling, despite some smoothed-out areas of posterization, rides the cohesive imaging with singularity, keeping true to the grindhouse or pulp look all way through. All the real scenes have a raw touch with not a ton of filters, gels, or distinct lighting techniques and that surfaces and houses skin tones and granular textures a lot more. No issues with aliasing, ghosting, banding, or other compression eyesores on this lower capacity Hi-Def format nor anything that affect the deep black areas. The English language audio mixes are either a Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound or a Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo, both of which are lossy formats for a machine gun heavy, explosion-laden, exposition and dialogue-saturated, and war-atmospheric-envelope ranged film. Depth struggles with long shots and wider scenes inside the context of post-production sound effects where everything audibly comes to the front and the lossy format has pale gunfire renditions and ambient uproar but there’s also a lot of Scottish or UK English yelling and screaming with caricature German accents accompaniments to ] add to the already amplified bangarang. English subtitles are optional but for one Scottish character, they are forced for comic, translation effect. One of the few Epic Pictures’ releases to be packed with extras, including a Robbie Davidson director’s audio commentary, a nearly hour long making-of documentary with cast-and-crew interviews, raw footage behind the camera, bloopers, and production stages, and post-production footage with ADR and visual effects, an interview with Leftie Wright, an Adam Harper audition tape, a slew of deleted scenes, an F/X breakdown around explosions, a faux ad for Dick Dynamite action figures and toys, a Zombie Child ad, the Indigogo.com campaign ad, Dick Goes to Japan, Dick Dynamite & Company go to the Isle of Butel, Gloirous Basterts gungho advert, the official “Dick Dynamite: 1944” trailer, and the production trailer. The standard Blu-ray Amaray keepcase depicts Snars in soldier gear with a BAR across his back shoulders and a lot of explosive chaos behind him. Inside the disc pressed with faux bullet holes and there are no other physical extras. The region free release has a runtime of 95 minutes and is not rated.

Last Rites: “Dick Dynamite: 1944” is the World War II grindhouse picture that gets in your face and doesn’t let up. Robbie Davidson renders fans expectations by turning their contributions into a bloody, visual effects blitz of zombies, Nazis, and kickass allies with the hope for a sequel to follow.

“Dick Dynamite: 1944” is actioned-packed and now on Blu-ray!

A Troubled Family’s EVIL Dynamic. “Kindred” reviewed! (IFC Midnight / Digital Screener)

Posted by Steven Lewis on November 2, 2020

When Ben and Charlotte declare a decision to move from the English countryside to Australia, Ben’s ardent mother, Margaret, refuses to let her son move away from his family and responsibility in overseeing the massive manor property that’s been in his family for generations. Despite friction between mother and son, even after the unsuspected announcement of Charlotte with child, the young couple are eager to start their new lives abroad. An accident causes the sudden death of Ben that takes a psychological toll on Charlotte. Margaret, and Ben’s aim-to-please brother-in-law, abruptly move Charlotte into the grand manor home as she floats through grief, but their overwhelming generosity turns into obsession with her every move, corralling her to do what’s best for the unborn child with undue stress based off her own family’s mental history. As Charlotte resists more against the family’s insistence she stay, the stronger their grip on her tightens.

Sometimes, meeting your partner’s family can be uncomfortably standoffish. In Joe Marcantonio’s psychological thriller “Kindred,” reticent of personal gain and admission of truth becomes a thick, abrasive wall of tension that crimps the fringes of family relations and mental instability. The writer-director’s debut feature film hailing from the United Kingdom, releasing this November 6^th, tampers with the control over one’s own body through the traumatized perception of a pregnant woman with predispositions on having children in the first place and on her dead boyfriend’s unusual family, coursing with unsettling mental and emotional warfare that’s already tipped in one side’s favor. The 101 minute, English-made thriller is a co-production of Reiver Pictures and Serotonin Films in association with the makers of “Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies,” Phil Hunt and Tom Harberd of Head Gear Films and Compton and Elliot Ross of UK based Kreo Films.

The players in this tumbling mix of disturbing cat and mouse antics are more or less confined to a skewed variation of an immediate family though none of characters are exactly blood relatives. Neither Charlotte, Margaret, or Thomas share an smidgen of the same DNA, but have become entangled, in one way or another, into Margaret’s hampering incubator that shelter’s their distinct and varied, sometimes uncooperative, personalities. Margaret is beholden to memory to her late son, Ben, and exposing Margaret’s egotistic manipulations so wonderfully subtle and true is Fiona Shaw of the “Harry Potter” saga in a role that isn’t so dissimilar to the blunt nastiness of her Aunt Petunia character, but renders a more fierce, enshrouding malice that’s less caricature. The Irish born Shaw and “DunKirk’s” Jack Lowdon dance a beguiling routine of mother and son as Lowdon plays Margaret’s step-son, Thomas. Thomas tends to Margaret’s every snippy whim, being a charming and gleaming host, and an overall nice guy, but deep in the recesses of our minds we know something is just not right with Thomas’s polished veneer that soon will explode with true intentions out of dormancy. Yet, things might not be okay with our seeming heroine either in Charlotte. Charlotte is very weary of Margaret and Thomas who indirectly, through her eyes, hold hostage the mother-to-be from fleeing the family now that the connection is broken with Ben’s death. In her debut principle feature film performance, Tamara Lawrance’s Charlotte scribbles outside the lines that smudges the contours of perception reality, adding a complexity component to her character that may or may not being suffering from parental depression commingled with external stress that treats Charlotte like a child in herself. Chloe Pirrie, Anton Lesser (“Game of Thrones”), and Edward Holcroft (“Vampire Academy”) round out “Kindred’s” strong supporting cast.

Marcantonio’s “Kindred” splits the focal point of isolating tension, dividing the source into two distinct paths from the point of a view of the self-protective besieged. In one hand, the pregnant and mentally vulnerable Charlotte experiences apprehension of being forcibly, and manipulatively, instructed by Margaret and Thomas to do what’s best for the baby…Ben’s baby. Having never seen eye-to-eye or felt comfortable around Ben’s instable mother and peculiar brother-in-law, Charlotte has no Ben as a buffer against their coarse personas, overpowering her as a tag-team of self-interest, but most of everything Charlotte experiences is filtered by past judgements about them. Alternatively, Margaret, Thomas, and even her boyfriend Ben, note directly to Charlotte her mother’s history with postpartum depression. The undercurrent theory that it produces brings an under the table perception of how audiences will then try to solve Charlotte’s predicamental puzzle. On the surface level, Charlotte is being held captive and drugged by her late boyfriend’s estranged family; obscurely, Charlotte’s terror is manifested by a loathed family lineage of mental illness and when your observations goes in one direction per the mind’s pre-wired setup, but all the evidence points to the contradiction, audiences will begin to empathize more closely to the harrowing experiences, through childlike control, of an unstable mind on the brink of a break. Marcantionio very clearly makes things unclear of an in-between reality that challenges not only audiences, but also Charlotte, on what’s real and not real of the mind’s emphasis. However, not everything is teed up perfectly as some of the abstract visuals, i.e. Charlotte’s dreams of ravens and horses, fall more into the rigors of psychological concepts that become lost in the affect of either pathway toward what could be considered a Schrodinger’s Cat finale as Charlotte, stuck inside a manor house that’s symbolically a box, could be both sane and insane.

Family can be a finicky thing and “Kindred” is a fastidious look at the instability of family and mental illness which can be, in filmmaker Joe Marcantonio’s eye, interchangeable. Setting up shop before families get together for the impending holiday season, IFC Midnight will release “Kindred” in select theaters, on digital platforms, and on VOD November 6^th. In regards to the look of the film, director of photography, Carlos Catalan, hones in on a series of medium to medium-closeup shots while grasping very little toward widescreen shots, especially being shot mostly in a grand manor house in Scotland. When Catalan has symmetrical framing, the allusion is gesturing grand with loneliness, but the cinematographer rarely has the frame centered, often creating an unnerving amount of space in the depth when juxtaposed with an uncentered character in the closeup all the while in natural light to not feign cynicism through use of color or filter. The only time filters are used are in the purple hued airy dream sequences with the raven and horses that become a metaphorical motif of Charlotte’s embattled dreams. The score is composed by a UK collaboration of multi-instrumental composers in Natalie Holt and Jack Halama. Holt’s harsh violin chords with Halama’s drama-fueling classical style produced hints of Mark Korven’s “The Witch” in similar tones, but explode with targeted dissensions that spur equally emotional dissensions amongst the characters. There were no bonus features included with the digital screener nor were there any bonus scenes during or after the credits. “Kindred” is relationally disjointing, disturbingly psychological, and textbook taut with tension as one of the best familiar thrillers to come out of the United Kingdom in the last quarter of the year.

High School Musical Meets EVIL in “Anna and the Apocalypse” reviewed!

Posted by Steven Lewis on December 17, 2019

Anna’s a senior at Little Haven high school whose not thinking about what University to attend after she graduates. Instead, Anna focuses on working all the time as a shoe counter girl at the local bowling alley to pay off a year’s worth of traveling despite her father’s wishes, even working through Christmas, but when a sudden zombie apocalypse derails her and the worlds’ plans, Anna’s friends and father are her first priority. With her father trapped at the high school, Anna and her closest friends must trek and battle through a horde of the undead from the bowling alley before striking out dead themselves. Despite social differences and teenage angst, they must dance and sing to put now frivolous juvenile issues aside and work together if to not become one of the living dead.

Timed just right from 2019’s Christmas holiday season is Second Sight Films’s two-disc set of “Anna and the Apocalypse,” a contagiously fun, well performed, and cheekily gory musical comedy-horror by the United Kingdom’s John McPhail directing a script written by Alan McDonald and the late Ryan McHnery, based off McHenry’s short student film “Zombie Musical.” As true to the marketing behind the film, “Anna and the Apocalypse” is certainly the “High School Musical” with teeth-gnashing, putrid-walking, and flesh hungry zombies. The Scottish bred production comes from Blazing Griffin Films, Parkhouse Productions, Constellation Creatives and Creative Scotland to flash mob dance and sing in chorus through the apocalyptic melee while figuring out their complicated adolescent troubles, such as what to do after graduation, turbulent romantic emotions, and being different and alone.

The ensemble cast is heftily made up of unknown talent beginning with, then 17 year old, Ella Hunt in her debut lead performance as the titular character. Hunt’s a fresh, young face with an astonishing amount of acting range with Anna whose defiant against the wishes of her father, but, deep down inside, still wholeheartedly cares for him as he’s her only parent left alive, and Hunt has natural poppin’ dance moves and pop-star vocals. In Anna’s core group of friends, Sarah Swire’s Steph North stands amongst them as the LGBTQ representative whose strongly portrayed as courageous, caring, and independent while her characterization at the beginning of the films focuses on downing her life to the pit of despair with parents, who Steph claims wants nothing to do with her, are on holiday in Mexico and her romantic partner won’t be spending the holiday with her. Swire’s choreographic and musician background, along with an edgy look, make her a perfect fit for Steph. There’s also Anna’s best friend, a boy named John, played by Malcolm Cummings in his first feature film. Cummings has to be the hapless friend zone boy that remains sidelined when trying to find the opportune time in expressing his true feelings for Anna, but finds himself the third wheel in a high school love triangle conscripted with Nick, a hot-to-trot prick and bully colorfully depicted by Ben Wiggins. Christopher Leveaux and Marli Siu are the gang’s love birds, Mark Benton is Anna’s custodian father, and “Game of Thrones'” Paul Kaye antagonizes with a power hungry assistant headmaster gone crazy!

Honesty, I wasn’t sure how “Anna and the Apocalypse” was going to work, or be successful, or be entertaining at all as a horror movie. Horror-musicals are a rare breed that come with a mind-boggling quantitative algorithm to make them truly work wonders and, somehow, John McPhail dusted off his abacus, powered up his TI calculator, and put note to pen to paper and delivered a holiday spectacular on a horror scale stage. The horror, though very prominent and unmistakable, takes a backseat to the powerful soundtrack by the ensemble cast, ranging from caricatured with Fish Wrap to the desolation of personal connectivity with Human Voice to a couple of Christmas satires to bring a little joy with the merry mayhem. The mayhem is absolute with all the trimmings of a zombie apocalypse, even right down to the military being the butt of a joke when they’re overrun by a slow-moving force, but while there’s some gore early on with a dead head decapitated by a see-saw and a pair of bowling balls pop the top of one alleyway corpse, the blood flows downward to a little more than a dribble and “Anna and the Apocalypse” cobbles together a mere mediocre zombie film from then on out.

Already seen a couple of standard releases from other distributors, Second Sight Films reserved “Anna and the Apocalypse” to the royal treatment with a special features heavy region B, two-disc Blu-ray set containing two versions of the film – the theatrical release cut and the extended version which will include a musical number that didn’t make the theatrical cut. The Arri Alexa SXT shot film is presented in 1080p and in the film’s original aspect ratio, a widescreen 2.37:1, with a featured ProRes 3.2k format that allows upscaling to UHD quality providing a high resolution output that’s clean and bright. The color palate has real vibrancy under the director of photography’s, Sara Deane, direction to use colorful outfits and neoned and darkened sets. Some scenes become a little choppy with some sloppy editing work, but as a whole, the story remains coherent. The English language DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 vivaciously energizes the soundtrack with alternative pop numbers, harmonious melodies, and a synchronized chorus, but there are times the dialogue falls into a lossy grey area. A stereo 2.0 track is also available as well as optional English SDH subtitles. The Second Sights Films’ release is chock full of extras with disc one including an audio commentary with director John McPhail, writer Alan McDonald, composers Roddy Hart and Tommy Reilly, a behind-the-scenes featurette, an alternate opening scene, a deleted song “What Side Are You On?”, a deleted bathroom scene, the Hollywood Ending cast and crew lip dub, footage from the EdinBurgh Film Festival, and, of course outtakes. Disc two includes a brand new feature-length documentary with new interviews by the actors and filmmakers. Plus, the original short film – “Zombie Musical.” A definite definitive two-disc set from Second Sight Films goes hand-in-hand with “Anna and the Apocalypse’s” feel good charm and unruly undead charisma complete with catchy tunes and bloody zombie goons in a modern day holiday cult classic.