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Eventually, You’ll Have to Stand Up to EVIL. “The Retaliators” reviewed! (Quiver Distribution / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Man Up and Take Back Your Life with “The Retaliators” on Blu-ray!  Click to Purchase from Amazon.

Having recently lost his wife, Pastor Bishop tries hard to keep his two school age daughters safe with an oversight thumb, but when his oldest daughter, Sarah, begs him for the car, God himself knows that the Pastor’s children can’t stay children forever. Bishop fears come reality when Sarah is chased by a sadistic man, ran off the road, and zip tied to her steering wheel as her car is pushed into a nearby ravine. Destroyed by another loss, there is seemingly no way out of the grief hole for the man of the cloth until a Detective, who once shared Bishop’s pain and suffering with a similar, personal experience, introduces him to his isolated former fallout bunker turned torture cabin in the woods with the man who killed Bishop’s daughter chained captive in the basement and next to him sits a variety of melee tools of affliction. Deeper into the Detective’s subterranean dwelling lies a more terrible, caged secret, one that is incidentally unleashed upon the world, and will wreak carnage upon the land and it’s up to the grin and bear it Pastor to take a stand against pure evil.

Frighting for yourself and for special persons in your life is crucial for any self-respecting person to be able to look at themselves in the mirror and say, “I did all I could.” Those who believe in understanding and forgiveness ultimately fall into being trampled on and biting the bullet because just surviving the other end of a contentious situation can be a false sense of security and an opaque veil to the ever-present dangers lurking in every crevice. The 2021 release of “The Retaliators” accouters that theme of following one’s combative conscious to protect what’s dear while also sporting a hefty amount of violence, blood, subhuman psychopaths, and a nearly all nu metal musician cast. Co-directed between from short and music video filmmaker, Samuel Gonzolas Jr., the film’s star and “Central Park” actor, Michael Lombardi, and music video director, Bridget Smith, “The Retaliators” aims to show an ugly, real truth that can affect and twist good men into the same abhorrence and villainy they’ve struggled to repel and resolve. “The Retaliators” mark the first screenplay from the Geare Brothers, Darren and Jeff Allen, is shot across various locations in the U.S., including states Nevada, New Jersey, and Connecticut, and is a production of Lombardi’s Better Noise Films with the company’s CEO, Allan Kovac, and Philly Born Film’s Mike Walsh also producing.

As a company that’s half part a music record label, the film was destined to showcase some of the independent rooted musical and elemental talent of the rock genre, but the narrative is convoyed by a fellow musician, who will humbly admit they are not trained or experienced actors, but rather actors who are rock artist sympathizers, in the case of principal leads Michael Lombardi and Marc Menchaca of Peacock’s new horror thriller “Sick” and who you may not have recognized in the third season of Amazon’s “Tom Clancy’s Jack Reason” as a high-and-tight, clean-cut naval captain. Menchaca is anything but burred cut as a bearded and wavy-haired, somber detective assigned to Pastor Bishop’s (Lombardi) case of his murdered daughter. Menchaca does his work in feeding off the dark energy cocktail of Lombardi’s grief, despair, and vengeance-stricken neo-pastor. Lombardi’s heartfelt performance definitely deserves praise for how one should react in losing a child and also reflects the helplessness that burdens the parent into a black hole of sorrow. As a character, Bishop struggles morally with seeping into and being swallowed by the grim circumstances gifted for him despite however the circumstances may seem to be in his favor. The gears Lombardi has to switch from a faithful person, to rancorous, to then finally a path of soul changing redemption goes smoothly enough to justify his position as principal lead. Menchaca’s demented detective almost feels left out to an extent, but the audience will get enough of a taste to satiate his unglued righteousness. While no love interest makes it into the fold of characters, the narrative does house spots for the nu metal and rock musicians in supporting or minor roles. Papa Roach’s Jacoby Shaddix, Mötley Crüe’s Tommy Lee, Ice Nine Kills Spencer Charnas, Escape the Fate’s Craig Mabbitt, From Ashes to New’s Matt Brandyberry, Lance Dowdle, Danny Case, and Matt Madiro, and Five Finger Death Punch’s Ivan L. Moody, Zoltan Bathory, and Chris Kael are just a select few of rockers you’ll see in “The Retaliator’s” lineup. Personally, I wanted to see more of Jacoby Shaddix as Quinn Brady, a homicidal madman in a horrific cat-and-mouse lark with the detective. Who knows, maybe we’ll see a prequel with Shaddix returning to the role. For the most part, like Shaddix, the musicians are well integrated with diverse roles that range from biker club, to strip club DJs, to bartenders, and to AA participants. “The Retaliators” round out the cast with Katie Kelly (“Deadly Seduction”), Abbey Hafer, Cree Kelly (“Aftermath”), and the massively built and scary-looking Joseph Gatt (“Titanic 666”) as the child-killer strapped and prepped for Pastor Bishop to physically and mentally break.

Better Noise Films is comparable to another divisional filmic offshoot of a larger parent music record label. Cleopatra Entertainment, of Cleopatra Records, often builds film structures and narrative plots around the company’s signed ensembles to promote and market their lyrical and thrash-heavy material as well as putting names to faces and thrusting them out into the world to those who may not have heard of their music. Aside from likely being a huge cost-savings benefit, these films are often scored by their artists, leading to a diverse sounding and electric soundtrack that typically works out less than desired. What the directors end up implementing, musically, yields result only half of the time while the other half is forced unto the audience for the sheer effect of promotion despite the off-putting composition. Not every intense scene needs a band backdrop to flourish raw emotion and pump up the blood but that’s what films, like “The Retaliator’s,” is bred to show off in a marbled genre that has categorical plot pivots all along the way to the grand finale of an all-out brawl, fight for your life skirmish with the criminally and tortured insane. That latter concept is perhaps one of the more interesting and original ideas of reinventing the psychopath that I’ve seen in a long time and the anticipatory excitement and thrills of their release to wreak havoc like barbaric rippers had found moments of great gore excess when Paster Bishop finds his divine strength to help the savage sadists meet their maker by way of machete, a shovel, and a woodchipper. “The Retaliators” make use of familiar horror tropes, such as the fog machine and a blend of lowkey and neon flushed lighting, to conjure an unconventional crypt of rock and homicide, putting its own unique stamp of indirect evil leading to up to another bigger, badder bedlam of things.

Chalked up to be an 80’s-stylized 90’s cinematic horror pulp, with early 2000’s soundtrack, “The Retaliators” arrives onto Blu-ray home video courtesy of Quiver Distribution. The AVC encoded, high definition, 1080p BD50 has a CinemaScope, aka anamorphic, widescreen 2.39:1 aspect ratio. The large storage formatted disc offers more variety as the capacity can handle the expansion of color and range of content. From complex, diversly lit, and heavily foot trafficked interiors to the great outdoors with trees fields, gravel terrain, and watery brooks, the quite a bit that’s going on looks pretty good on screen and the anamorphic widescreen doesn’t have that squeeze-it-in feel either but can’t escape a few scenes of lens flare. Details provide a tactile enamel, but the colors are quite soft with a lower dialed in color grading. The English DTS-HD 5.1 surround sound has more teeth in the soundtrack that overlaps and snuffs out any ambient sound design, essentially making “The Retaliators” a 96 minute, give-or-take a few scenes, music video. Dialogue doesn’t suffer the same backseat fate as the script-to-screen exchanges are in the forefront and though the soundtrack is a bit flat, the original, nebulous-electronic score in between by “Stranger Things” composers Kyle Dixon and Michel Stein does stand out to add a nice underlayer of questionability and suspense. Special features include cast interviews with actors and music artists speaking to their experience on the film, “The Retaliator’s” music video, and theatrical trailer. The physical release comes with a cardboard slipcover on the first pressing with a rendered pseudo-illustrated mockup of pyramid arranged character heads with Pastor Biship standing bloody and machete in hand right smack in the middle. The standard Blu-ray snapper includes the same cover arrangement art as the slipcover. Not listed on the back, the unrated film does support region A playback. “The Retaliators” pumps up the blood as well as the jams during an overhaul of one’s convictions in a baptism by hellfire.

Man Up and Take Back Your Life with “The Retaliators” on Blu-ray!  Click to Purchase from Amazon.

Online Bullies Deserve All the EVIL in the World! “The Columnist” reviewed! (Vertigo Releasing / Digital Screener)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Columnist Femke Boot is a damn good writer backed by her publication. Yet, Femke feel unsatisfied and unsettled by the extremely harsh social media comments aimed to not only torpedo her career in the column section but also discredited and publicly shamed by twisting events in her past. The barrage of nasty comments, determined to bully her into oblivion, plug up Femke’s creativity, causing severe writer’s block on an upcoming book her editor continues to pressure her on. When she discovers that her next door neighbor has disparaged her online as well, the struggling writer snaps, taking revenge on her neighbor and an army of internet trolls by pursuing their true identities, tracking them down, and takes her revenge, plus takes a little more for an indulging gratification.

Relevant. Chimeric. A social war on words that can be fatally influential from anonymous patrons of the world wide web is Ivo van Aart’s black comedy of retribution entitled “The Columnist.” Also known originally titled as “De Kuthoer,” roughly translated as “The Pussy Whore,” a way better and in your face title in my opinion, the Netherland tongue-and-cheek-and-severed-finger comedy-thriller is the third feature, first beyond the 60-minute mark, clocking in at 86 minutes, for Aart from a screenplay penned by Daan Windhorst. Aart and Windhorst last paired up for a Dutch miniseries, “Suspicious Minds,” and Aart’s debut film, “Quantum Zero,” two years prior. Their concrete foundation of collaboration sets up an engrossing insight on masked mindsets of internet bullying that backfires but not in the typical way and also indorses a freedom of speech theme caught in a vicious circle of death. Sabine Brian and Ronald Versteeg serve as producers under the Benijay capital investment group’s NL Films.

Katja Herbers (HBO’s “Westworld”) gives a stress-inducing performance as the tormented-to-insanity columnist.  Absorbing, like a sponge, of all the scornful negativity, Herbers leaves little room for writer Femke Boots to expand and breathe as a normal person who can filter out the harsh criticism as the “Loft” actress can tune into a louded, distracted mindset of delusion and have an underscored inkling twinkle in her eyes as her character muddles around in life normalcy of being a good mother to her free-speech advocating daughter Anna (Claire Porro) and be in a radically unlikely relationship with a gothically-cladded, fellow writer, Steven Dood aka Steven Death (Bram van der Kelen).  Journalist are trained to accept the harshest criticism as long as they can back up their stories with facts and references, but for a columnist, who makes a living off opinions, the same can not be said and it’s in that gray area where “The Columnist” likes to dwell that someone’s subjective living is under attack and the enemy is the entire world who thrives off being antagonistic just for the hell of it.  Herbers plays right into that soul sucking anger, directing all her energy into those who mask themselves in anonymity as they bombard her character with comments of ill-intent.  The frustration mounts, especially when Femke attempts to file police reports about the death threats, but is shrugged off by an unsympathetic uniform, and the pressure blows her top off in a silent switch into swift vengeance of a variety misogynistic trolls.  Genio de Groot, Rein Hofman, Seno Sever, and Achraf Koutet round out “The Columnist’s” cast.

Though not written, shot, or produced by women, “The Columnist” follows in suit with a string of strong pro-feminism films, coursing with the same blood of the feminist revolution in cinema that has empowered women to exhibit their artistry, such works include Brea Grant’s dual female-lead, black comedy about an opioid addicted nurse’s mafia entanglement in “12 Hour Shift,” Jill Gevargizian’s gothic trip into hairstyles and isolating madness of “The Stylist,” and Emerald Fennell’s 5-Academy Award nominated revenge-thriller about the social system’s gender double-standards in “Promising Young Woman.”  “The Columnist” topicality revolves around a woman writer being bashed, sometimes just for kicks of callous community fun, by a plethora of trolling men who hide behind self-attributing epithets and nicknames.  With only her their commenting handles, Google, and her wit,  Femke tracks them down comment-by-comment for confrontation with her weapon of choice, usually a state forestry bag full of gardening tools, and this is where the good writing and directing comes into the fold by establishing a complete smorgasbord of different male personalities to circulate with Femke’s rage against the unwarranted slanderous and malicious of their own doing. Where “The Columnist” also gets you thinking is the freedom of speech movement that Femke’s daughter, Anna, so tenaciously hammers into her stern high school’s administrative hierarchy, helmed by a, you guessed it, a male principal. While Anna’s story is relatively tongue-and-cheek in comparison to Femke’s more serial killer storyline, there’s a whole lot of irony happening between the two paralleling, mother and daughter narratives with Anna battling the school system singlehandedly to allow her words to ring true and free from principal oppression and repression while Femke, on the other side of coin, is permanently silencing the cataclysmic of social media hate mail in an act with a killer, survivalist instinct. “The Columnist’ is speechlessly brilliant under a candy-coated, caustic-comedy cover.

Opt into “The Columnist’s” op-ed with your own periling opinion as the film circulates around UK and Ireland theaters, and on various digital platforms, courtesy of Vertigo Releasing. Martijn Cousijn is credits as the cinematographer for the film whose mostly bright and buoyant scheme is peppered just enough with darker, minimalist lighting, askew in most case, to capture Femke’s sinister half of this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde duality with pessimism at the door being the altering elixir. Cousijn doesn’t play too much with the lighting, keeping true to a soft and bright air that doesn’t drop “The Columnist” acutely into a dismal perspective tale of a killer. My only disappointment with the film lies with the gore effects when it’s time to dispatch some rude keyboard-knuckleheads from the comforts of their own safe haven. Much of Femke’s desires to keepsake parts of her tormentors is nothing more than a slight of editing to achieve and that kind pelts holes in the freedom of speech aspect that’s perhaps one-third of the story. “The Columnist” is by no means made for young teens, but Femke Boots deserved to reign hellfire in a fiery display of well unexploitable violence. Having just released March 12th in the UK, there are obviously no bonus material, but there are also no before or after credit bonus scenes to keep you anxiously waiting to the end. Writers will undoubtedly hail Ivo van Aart’s “The Columnist” as a win against stony critics with the film’s profuse display for social change against cyberbullying and the reaffirmation of free speech or else there will be blood.