EVIL’s the Bacon, the Pork Roll, and the Scrapple All Mixed and Slashed together! “Butcher’s Bluff” reviewed! (Breaking Glass Pictures / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on October 21, 2025

“Butcher’s Bluff” on DVD from Breaking Glass Pictures!

Film students Rodger, Nicole, and Derrick decide to head to the rural Texas town of Emerald Falls and make their class project documentary around the 28 missing persons over the years and the Hogman, an urban legend of an escaped killer now roaming the woods of Butcher’s Bluff. Bringing along their friends to make it concurring party getaway at Rodger’s family vacation cabin, the trio conduct interviews with the eccentric town locals to build a story around the Hogman myth, even ascertaining the original location for the mask Hogman wore during his first kills before escaping psychiatric prison. The more they investigate into the Hogman, the more the locals warn them to stay away from Butcher’s Bluff but in a case of curiosity killed the cat, the documentary film students and their drug-fueled, sexed-up friends find themselves being hunted with no cell service, no help within miles, and no way out of the Hogman’s kill radius.

Co-directors William Instone and Matt Rifley helm their first collaborative feature “Butcher’s Bluff,” a 2023 small town slasher reminiscent of the renaissance slasher movement of the 1980s, packed with practical gore effects, odd backwoods characters, a campy party of vice-riddled youth, and, moist importantly – excuse me – most importantly, T&A. Instone, whose all-in director, writer, and producer debut horror “Jon” from 2012 brings one man’s delusions into horrifying reality, cowrites his latest grim story with writer, painter, and overall liberal arts connoisseur Renfield Rasputin. Filmed in Texas with principal locations taking place in Bastrop, New Braunfels, and San Marcos to composition a story set in the fictional town of Emerald Falls and its rural woodland of Butcher’s Bluff. The film is a crowdfunded venture that raised an approximate $60K to cover principal shooting and post-production costs with Instone and Rifley serving as primary producers amongst an amalgamation of crowdfunded producing backers Instone’s Thunder Mountain Films, in association with Dull Knife Productions and Spicey Ramen Productions, go hog wild with their slasher horror.

As if he doesn’t have enough on his plate writer, directing, and producing “Butcher’s Bluff,” Instone also portrays the main antagonist Hogman, masked with a stitched together pig head complete with cockeyed tusks and garbed with a dingy mechanic jumpsuit and tan jacket. The Hogman is a walk-and-run chaser with a duel-sided axe and rusty, broad curved knife as main melee weapons though he’ll get his bare hands dirty from time-to-time. Instone’s not flashy with the villain and doesn’t key-light any iconic poses, stances, or stares to incite a nerve coursing fear. Hogman’s victims are anyone and everyone who enters the Butcher’s Bluff forest, from necking lovers (Jacqueline Hays and “Mallrats’s” Jeremy London), to lost pot farm thieves (“You’re Next’s” L.C. Holt, “Scare Package’s’” Christopher Winbush, “Girls Gone Dead’s” Shawn C. Phillips), to finally, but not limited to, the Rodger’s friends and classmates on their excursion investigation and party. Fortunately, the group displays different caricature tropes without going full-blown cliché. Between them you have the exuding sexy yet overly bitchy duo of Sam and Tina (a cut pixie cut but broodingly built Samantha Holland and a slender yet high-end platinum blonde Kayla Anderson), Rodger’s sex-driven, dweeb cousin Bobby (Dakota Millett) who Sam and Tina torment, the polar opposite to Bobby stud with Jake (Santiago Sky) and of course the three documentarians: Rodger (Michael Fischer), Derrick (Johnny Huang), and Nicole (Paige Steakley), each reside in their own attribute world consistently, dying the way they live, that’s very telling of their moral fiber. In additional to Jeremy London and Shawn C. Phillips, who have worked themselves into being staples of the indie genre films, other notable names to mention for their brief but key roles are Brinke Stevens (“Nightmare Sisters”), Paul T. Taylor (“Hellraiser: Judgement”), Bill Oberst Jr. (“3 From Hell”), and Bill Johnson (“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II”) peppered into the rest of the supporting cast to draw in fandom.

“Butcher’s Bluff” has the necessary bone structure to be a digestible slasher, checking all the elemental boxes, and Instone and Rifley manage to technically pull off a nearly 2-hour film on a crowdfunded budget. The problem is “Butcher’s Bluff” has a hackneyed routine about it. Instead of creating something new and wonderfully, gory and diabolical, under a distinct flag of novelly progressive storytelling, every scene feels all too familiar, a telltale sign to horror fans that we’ve seen this kind of story before. From Hogman’s stony silence and indiscriminate aggression bores him as a Michael Myers carbon copy, a family in cahoots with a s flesh-stitched maniac plays the tune of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” and there’s even a character moment of yelling What Are You Waiting For? aimlessly into the dark forest while spinning around with arms wide apart that oozes Jennifer Love Hewitt vibes. Add in some rather uninspiring frame, shot design, and editing and “Butcher’s Bluff” very much embodies the crowdfunded costs rather than the intended crowdfunded spirit. Now while all of this portion of the review sounds grossly negative, don’t just run for the hills to the next slasher film in line just yet as Instone and Rifley still manage to keep an engagement lock on what makes the slasher film enjoyable to behold with some decently inlaid practical gore effects, including a pleading head being sliced horizontally through from mouth to hair or a posthumous, lawn chair display of one fine girl’s nipples and eyes plucked from her body and posed on her eye-gouged out person as if giving a blood offering to the audience Gods. There’s also the inviting gratuitous T&A from Samantha Holland, Kayla Anderson, and Jacqueline Hays that keeps the old theme motif alive within the campy slasher genre as well as keeping young boys’ dreams from becoming dry.

Breaking Glass Pictures distributes the archetypical slasher “Butcher’s Bluff” onto DVD home video. The MPEG2 encoded, 720p upscaled standard definition, DVD9 really has a tough go with the compression capabilities as there’s quite a bit of data to encode/decode within a near full-time night shoot picture and color accompaniments that blend right into the darkness, melding out of a clean definition. Presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio, banding and splotching render a difficult deciphering of data in inkier fields. When colors do contrast or arise into lighter hues, there’s a pop of demarcation with its full potential held back by an ungraded layer. Textures are extremely fluid throughout with the prominent skin scenes offering a decent, natural look but most scenes are fuzzy as if the upscale fights the downscaling for supremacy. The English Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound offers an adequate compression for a routine slasher with mid-level range with clear and clean dialogue overtop eerie forest soundscape of breaking branches, tree knocks, and leave crunching footsteps. The mix doesn’t convey much depth with dialogue and ambience hanging around the front channels while medium shots and some tree knocking flirt with the side channels. A mainstay slasher should have a memorable, tense-riddles soundtrack for the chase or create omnipresence fear but “Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Dinner with Leatherface” composer’s Alexander Taylor’s insipid inspiration can’t be held in the memorable bank and fails to elevate the Hogman’s imposing sheer terror. English closed captioning is available. Special features include a proof on concept trailer for the crowdfunding campaign that stars a handful of the actors from the feature film, such as Michael Fischer and Paige Steakley, and a behind-the-scenes music video that contains behind-the-scenes footage. The DVD presence is standard fair for Breaking Glass Pictures with a DVD Amaray and a one-sided front cover art, which subjectively pleasing in its retrograde mockup of an illustrated Hogman looming over a scared, running Steakley (supposedly) in her white tank top and high cut shorts. There is at least one noticeable error on the back cover that spells Paige Steakley’s name incorrectly in the credits, listing her last name as Steakely. The Not Rated release is hard encoded with region 1 and has a two-hour runtime which can appear quite long, but the pacing was not terrible and the long runtime for an indie slasher didn’t feel overly immeasurable.

Last Rites: “Butcher’s Bluff’s” has little to offer as far as the next novel and generational slasher but scratches the genre itch with a large body count, solid kills, and campy campers looking to buy, sell, and trade their vices for being violated.

“Butcher’s Bluff” on DVD from Breaking Glass Pictures!

Spiraling Vloggers Seal Their Fate When Face-to-Face with the “Woods Witch” reviewed! (SRS Cinema / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on May 15, 2024

“Woods Witch” Available on DVD from SRS Cinema!

Vloggers Jonah and Jocelyn struggle to sustain a healthy dose of followers for their internet channel. To spice things up and increase follow traffic, the two embark on a 48-hour challenge to stay in the nearby haunted woods of Allensville where a number of people have gone missing, even a fellow, more popular, vlogger named Garrett Gasper after he was self- recording and suddenly vanished when stumbling upon the blood tree, a tree that oozes a blood-like substance from the trunk. Tagging along are vlogging, ambivalent friends Dacia and Eugene to help capture the spooky essence of what should be an easy, follower-increasing stunt for the impulsive influencers. They’re also joined, reluctantly I might add, by a local cowboy, two bar patrons, and a father looking for his daughter who don’t know what they’re instore for as what ensues the unorganized, slapdash survey of the woods is far from being simple and safe when they stumble into the area of a seemingly hippie commune that’s actually a sex cult devoted to the woods witch Melora.

If you’re a diehard horror fan, or even just a physical media movie aficionado, you might have heard of the name Shawn C. Phillips. The eccentric, high-energy, social media personality buys, watches, and reviews the latest and greatest on home video weekly on this Youtube channel under the handle Coolduder. Aside from being also a movie actor with a range of roles in mostly low-budget, independent, B-to-Z grade horror films, such as “Girls Gone Dead,” “Blood Orgy at Beaver Lake,” and “WTF!,” Phillips’s social media presence further extends to an inspirational weight loss journey, shedding over 235 lbs. Having been a longtime actor and producer, one of the Baltimore, Maryland native’s newest ventures is directing having shot mostly self-recorded videos to be inserted into other filmmakers’ movies. Phillips’s latest is “Woods Witch,” a found footage comedy-horror that’s one-part “Blair Witch Project,” two-parts ADHD (Attention Deficit, Hyperactivity Disorder). He codirects the film with costar and “Amityville Karen” actress Lauren Francesca in her debut directorial and cowrites with Julie Anne Prescott, writer of many more recent “Amityville” inspired budget horrors like “Amityville Karen,” “Amityville Shark House,” and “Amityville Bigfoot.” DRAX Films (“Bae Wolf,” “Acorn”) is the production company behind feature that provided most of the funding in conjunction with crowdfunded portion.

Obviously infatuated about being in front of the camera, taking a backseat to his own co-directed film wouldn’t be enough for the nearly 40-year-old personality who costars alongside Lauren Francesca as social media influencing boyfriend and girlfriend Jonah and Jocelyn. Loud and opinionated, the couple struggle with maintaining viewership but, before that, they also they also struggle with the foulmouthed, death-threatening volley between Jonah and Jocelyn’s robbing-the-cradle by robbing-Jonah’s-cameraman mother, played by Sally Kirkland (“Fatal Games,” “Two Evil Eyes”). And that sort of leads into a couple of themes “Woods Witch” harps on. One theme is the constant bickering, shouting, and squabbling between anyone and everyone in a free-for-all of one-upping each other or to not take humility very well in front of others. None of the characters side with one another, steadying a position of satellite attitudes and courses that lead the story into all different types of unhinged and unfocused directions. The second theme connects with Sally Kirkland and the other in-and-outs of overripe star power for what crowdfunded money could afford and while there are some likeable and decent names in the cast, such as the late Tom Sizemore (“Relic,” “Saving Private Ryan”) in his last role before his death, James Duvall (“May,” “Donnie Darko”), Robert LaSardo (“Strangeland,” “Death Race”), and Lisa Wilcox (“A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master”), they used to headline the attraction with only minutes to shine in their respective scenes. The cast fills in with Kelly Lynn Reiter, David Perry, Carl Soloman, Bill Dawes, Lorelei Linklater, Nicole Butler, Ken Davitian, Bryant Smith, Eva Hamilton, G. Larry Butler, Mary Jones, Tom Harold Batchelder, Jake Pearlman, Brian Metcalf and Sadie Katz.

“Woods Witch” uses multi-media found footage to tell the story where a bunch of egregiously entitled vloggers trek into infamously mysterious woods for hits, likes, subscribers, and e-revenue. Not an original bone in its narrative body by any means, Antoine Le’s “Followed” comes to mind, but “Woods Witch” doesn’t hit where it should as a heavily improv comedy-horror that lampoons found footage horror in the woods and, instead, has undeniably become massively cacophonous of in all areas. Going into the feature familiar with some of the cast and the distributing banner, expectations of a Shawn C. Phillips directed film were all fastened at the lower screwball level with horror elements tacked in here and there, aptly fitting the mold the social media influencer has established for himself with the eccentric personality of a physical media farceur who adores horror, but nothing can prepare audiences for how much confused noise is strewn about with the constant yelling, backbiting, and randomizing introduction of characters that turns what should have been an entertainingly crass and witchy film into just being a completely crass and witchy yawner. Being completely flat and unfunny wouldn’t be a totally fair statement as “Woods Witch” does have its moments, such as the tree blood being rubbed all over Phillips’s naked torso and him, as Jonah, proclaiming naively Dascia’s kinkiness can be found humorous, but these funny bit moments are far and few in between and there’s just not enough new, fresh, or actor-driven comically-inclined wit and materially to feast on to support the lack of horror despite a few morsels of gore that are left in the dust, overshadowed by an immense pre-trip setup of interviews and infighting that ruins the rest of the reel.

Enter the world wide web and wacky world of Shawn C. Phillips with his co-directed film with Lauren Francesca in “Woods Witch” on an SRS Cinema DVD. The MPEG2 encoded, 480i upscaled to 720p, DVD9 pulls the differing, clashing video qualities together, mostly earlier on and near the finale, for a coherent beginning, middle, and end narrative telling. If only I could say the same about the story, themes, and character roles. Anyway, not a lot of banding as there’s not a lot of dark scenes in what mostly is fill lighting that brightens up what’s in the scene. Details are okay enough when not implementing shaky cam’s in-and-out focusing found footage and lighting doesn’t completely washout the miniscule bits of texture. The coloring also has a naturally graded look as well as the objects’ organic color palette as budget doesn’t allow for too much fancy cinematography to also evoke a sense of realism. The English language PCM 2.0 stereo mix is consistent as it is coherent with the clarity and the dialogue. Even with pandemonium breaks out, which is often with the screaming and snappy conversations between each other, dialogue remains unscathed without audible squashing feedback or other interferences. English closed captioning is optionally available in the extras. Special features include a behind-the-scenes raw footage from fellow Youtuber Kenneth Ramone who has a small part in the film, a handful of cut scenes, theatrical trailer, funny trailer, an audio commentary by director/star Shawn C. Phillips going deep into the casting, locations, backstories, script and improv moments, etc., and there’s a Lisa Wilcox stinger in the post-credits as the mayor for an additional or extended scene with some improv. The SRS Cinema package comes in a standard DVD Amaray case with eye-catching illustrated artwork, disc pressed with the same artwork, and is an unrated, region free release with a 96-minute runtime.

Last Rites: Humor and horror underperform in the film “Woods Witch” that’s sole purpose is to be a comedy-horror. What the film does do is parody other found footage features and their filmmakers under a misguided sense that in-the-woods horror, from a camera lens point of view, is past its prime when in reality, the long-in-the-tooth subgenre is better than this parody by far.

“Woods Witch” Available on DVD from SRS Cinema!

EVIL Knows No Off-Limits! “Restricted Area” reviewed! (ITN Distribution/DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on March 5, 2020

Four blue-collar friends are being laid off from their steel mill jobs; family generations are engrained with the blood and sweet of the mill, but the somber moment is humbling and harsh when responsibilities come to collect. They decided to throw one last hurrah, a boozy camping trip into the rocky wilderness, before life hits them hard. The calm and tranquil getaway turns deadly when acolytes of Unionology, a cult secluded to the restricted areas, sets sights on trespassing campers with the four friends right in the middle of the hunt. After teaming up with another hiker and the disappearance of one of the friends, a fight for survival ensues against armed masked men and an unhinged cult leader along the mountainside where it’s not only man versus nature, it’s also man versus man.

The great outdoors continues to be synonymous with a hot spot for murder, mayhem, and overall doom and gloom in Christopher M. Don’s debut backwoods cult thriller of survival entitled “Restricted Area.” Dons pens as his second script behind the savagery, snowy slopes of his ski-sploitation horror, “Minutes to Midnight,” where masked men with a cryptic agenda hunt down patrons of a ski lodge set upon a mountain. Don must have an fondness for producing screenplays where masked killers stalk in wilderness elements as “Minutes to Midnight” plot is essentially the same as “Restricted Area” without the sound-damping snow. Produced by Gear Up Productions, which I assume is Christopher Don’s company, climbs very little up to being a modest budget feature and retains around camping along the super low financial terrain based off the already exaggerated beliefs of Scientology that, if at all, lightly treads to more escalating and thrilling heights.

With being an indie feature on a microbudget, Don implements his cast to being his actors as well, including himself as Cody, the nearly silent onscreen brother to his real life brother, Robert Don, as the film’s lead, Tyler. Tyler’s a rough and tough steel mill worker with his biceps bulging from his sleeveless, black puffer jacket and hunting knife strapped to his waist side, but as far as depth goes, Tyler lacks significant worth from little backstory and no character arc. Whatever Tyler does isn’t exactly bursting with energy by Robert Don’s deadpan manner. Who recoils from inexpressiveness is West Murphy playing Axel, the goofy and boastful friend whose really blowhard, and though Murphy sprinkles flavoring upon and around most of the monotonically adrift slop, Axel’s one-trick pony can’t even offer much else to the story, not even a glorious death that would be redeeming for such droll stereotypes. “Restricted Area” houses random entries and exits of characters that can make viewers anxious, concerned, and down right frustrated with the arbitrary fates of Harold (“Big Bad Bugs’” Phillip Andrew Botello) who disappears with only a little sliver of where he might be in the closing scene and the blank white masked cultist with a machete who leaves more intrigue of a boss level villain than is actually divulged in the story. Paige Lindsay Betts, Ross Britz (“Ozark Sharks”), Emily Gardt (“Satan’s Seven”), Nicholas Cole (“Stripped”), Randy Wayne, Gus Moore, Wilmer Hernandez, and schlock horror internet pundits and, Shawn C. Phillips and Danny Filaccio fill out the cast list.

“Restricted Area” already has a zillion things going against the meek and humble feature albeit the aforesaid above from the mishandling of characters, but the bearings, picked from the litter of many categories, never comes into focal clarity and shimmy their way to eek by toward a rather enigmatic end. Out of the 112 minute runtime, Christopher Don’s screenplay couldn’t consists of more than 60 to 70 pages of dialogue and scenes with the remaining footage for the feature being supplemented with overkilled filler scenes of Tyler and his band of survivalists wandering around an idyllic traipse, dysfunctional and unnecessary segue edits repeat nearly themselves and just extend into filler scenes themselves, and the bombardment of landscapes – lots and lots of landscapes. There was even one faux pas of a wooded mountainside that was shamelessly shot straight from a magazine advertisement with the advertised site text very visible in the scene. There’s also a scene with a real rattlesnake that, by chance, wandered into production and Don decided misplace this miracle amongst inside another wandering group montage. To continue on the script, the convoluted nature of the cult wanted to kill a young boy becomes lost as this boy comes and goes as he pleases, pleading without any dire sense of urgency for Tyler to save his life. Yet, this dubious boy never seems to be frightened, frantic, or even in cahoots when considering the cult’s dastardly plan to end his time on this Earth.

ITN Distribution and Mill Creek Entertainment’s call to the wild is a survivalist nightmare in Christopher Don’s “Restricted Area,” pitching a tent into the DVD market with a home video release. The DVD is presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio on a single layer, region one disc. Perhaps one of the worst presentations I’ve seen lately with the low bit rate, big compression artifact issues that denounces detail clarity right from the get-go, settling into a fuzzy and blotchy 112 minute, from start-to-finish, runtime. The color palette doesn’t pop either inside the parameters of a faded natural scheme that bares no attempt to use any shade of tint to offer more than just the bare minimum to survive. The English language Dolby Digital stereo dual channel mix plays the same rugged tune with lossy quality in dialogue, ambience, and Michael Levinson’s synthy soundtrack, which is perhaps one of the film’s few highlights in lieu of his debut. Still, a harsh feedback echo on the dialogue dampens the authenticity of the ordeal and poor mic placement dilutes the fidelity even more. Optional English SDH is available. Bonus features includes an audio commentary, trailer, and a quaint blooper and outtake reel. “Restricted Area” doesn’t have the authority required to be a gouging survival horror as all sides of the cinematic terrain are too rough for an visual and audio trek and the script lays to waste with drone dispositions and careless considerations that needs to be post noted and restricted from itself.