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Psychological and Psychotic EVIL Descend Upon a High School Boy! “Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker” reviewed! (Severin Films / 2-Disc 4K UHD and Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

The 2-Disc UHD and Blu-ray Available for Pre-Order. Due to Release 5/28!

Orphaned Billy Lynch has raised by his Aunt Cheryl after his parents are tragically killed in a motor vehicle accident.  On the verge of his 17th birthday, Billy is ready to move on from his old life living under the overly caring Aunt to building a relationship with girlfriend Julia and possibly moving to Denver on a basketball scholarship, but the threatened Aunt Cheryl will do anything to keep Billy home, even if that means murder.  A brutal, stabbing incident of a local television repair man in their home leads to Detective Joe Carlson to suspect Billy as the main culprit and begins digging into the young man’s life that, coincidently, unearths the dead repair man had a homosexual relationship with Billy’s basketball coach.  Bigotry and intimidate course through Detective Carlson being as he prejudicially hounds and interrogatingly paints Billy as a gay, jealous lover without an ounce of hesitation.  Between his crazy Aunt and an intolerant cop, Billy’s life spirals dangerously out of his control. 

‘Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker,” also known as “Momma’s Boy,” “Night Warning,” or just “Nightmare Maker,” is the 1981 queer awareness and maturing suppression horror-thriller from “Bewitched” TV-series director William Asher.  Trying his hand at an edgier storyline with plenty of graphic violence and subversive themes, Asher helms the picture working off a script by a trio of debuting writers in Steven Breimer, Alan Jay Glueckman (“The Fear Inside”), and Boon Collins (“The Abducted”).  The American-made production brought considered taboo topics to the table when homosexuality was becoming more prominent in American culture in light of the AIDs epidemic and while the sexually transmitted disease has no part in this story, the derogatory fear of same-sex coupling is mercilessly present.  “Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker” is a Royal American Pictures production, distributed theatrically under Comworld Pictures, and is produced by screenwriter Steve Breimer and “Class of 1999” producer Eugene Mazzola.

Hardly does any film ever made have the perfect cast.  “Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker” does not reside in that genus of imperfection.  Every performance is spot on and fitting for this early 80’s video nasty, each actor playing the singular part ingrained into their act that deciphering if their behavior is actually like that in real life can be tremendously difficult and a completely disorienting.  The story focuses on Jimmy McNichol’s 17-year-old high schooler Billy Lynch who, until recently, has been living moderately comfortable under his Aunt Cheryl’s roof.  That is until school sis nearly over and the prospect of college and girls sows the seeds of springing him from his childhood home.  Though the story is supposed to be centrically Billy Lynch, it’s the quirky and unusuality of Susan Tyrrell as the undefined obsessed Aunt Cheryl with a thick undertone of sexual tension toward her nephew that just makes McNichol and Tyrrell’s scenes enormously uncomfortable.  The late actress, who starred in Richard Elfman’s “Forbidden Zone” and would later have roles in “Flesh+Blood” and “From a Whisper to a Scream,” could charm audiences with perky provocativeness and scare into submission with the ability to pivot to a crazed madwoman.  And while we’re slightly turned on and also frightened by Tyrrell, we’re completely in disgust of “The Delta Force’s” Bo Svenson’s one-train-thought, homophobic detective strongarming high school teens, coaches, and even his sergeant (Britt Leach, “Weird Science”) into being cocksure of his own short-sighted homicide theory driven by hate for homosexuality.  Marcia Lewis (“The Ice Pirates”), Steve Eastin (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), Julia Duffy (“Camp X-Ray”), and before he was a big superstar, a young Bill Paxton (“Aliens,” “Predator 2”) bring up the supporting cast rear.

For an early 80s video nasty, “Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker” is without a doubt intense and provocative with timeless themes that nearly table the trenchant violence for corrosive mental issues, systematic homophobia, and pressures of maturity.  The two prong antagonistic sides bear down on Billy Lynch and the one principal who still technically a child and learning all the facets of adulthood has his own good being thwarted by conventional adult role models of family and law enforcement.  Director William Asher, through the script, inlays a pro-queer avenue where the gay basketball coach displays immensely more wit, sense, and compassion than that of Aunt Cheryl and Detective Carlson, awarding the coach with more likeability and favor to come out of this ugly business unscathed.  Asher’s very intent on defining the personalities and the actors deliver tenfold under a surly environment of not only the brusque characters but also Cheryl’s home that is a tomb for one of Aunt Cheryl’s past lovers and is becoming a tomb for Billy who will either bend to Aunt Cheryl’s sexually-toned obsessiveness or die a terrible a death.  “Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker” also predates the infamous “Final Destination 2” log truck scene with its own that’s equally hard hitting and macabre, the latter also being expressed thoroughly throughout the entire narrative with a morose overhang that’s simmering to explode. 

Arriving onto a 2-disc UHD and Blu-ray set, “Butcher, Bake, Nightmare” is Severin’s latest title to go ultra-high definition, first for the William Asher film, with an HVEC encoded, 2160p 4K resolution, BD100 and an AVC encoded, 1080p high definition, BD50 for the Blu-ray.  Presented in an anamorphic widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio, “Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker” favors a stark and naturally vibrant color scheme with low profile compression issues on a pristine transfer, scanned in 4K from the original camera negative.  I could not detect any compression artefacts with the dark spots retaining their inky cohesion and the details retain superior depth in a slightly more saturated contrast of a healthy-looking, grain-appropriate picture quality, even elevated more definitively with the extra pixels.  The English uncompressed PCM mom track has lossless appeal with some foremostly faint dialogue hissing and crackling that’s more of given with age rather than a flaw in the mix.  The mix also doesn’t establish depth all too well with one channel doing all the heavy lifting, but the layers are well-balanced in proportional volume that make the audio composition effective and scary.  English subtitles are available. Encoded special features include 6 hours of content. On the UHD in lies three audio commentaries: one with star Jimmy McNichol, one with cowriters Steve Breimer and Alan Jay Glueckman, moderated by Mondo Digital’s Nathaniel Thompson, and the last one with co-producer and unit production manager Eugene Mazzola. The theatrical trailer cabooses the UHD special features. All of the above are also on the Blu-ray special features with additional content that includes a new interview with Bo Svenson Extreme Prejudice, a new interview with director of photography Robbie Greenberg Point and Shoot, a new interview with editor Ted Nicolaou (“Don’t Let Her In”) Family Dynamics, archival cast and crew interviews with Susan Tyrrell, Jimmy McNichol, Steve Eastin, make-up artist Allan A. Apone and producer Steve Breimer, and a TV spot as the cherry on top of some sweet special features. However plentiful and well-curated the special features are, my favorite attribute of this Severin release is the exterior with a dual-sided cardboard slipcover that has new illustrated compositional art and tactile features. Underneath, a reversable cover art featuring the film’s one-sheet poster art with a more Severin Film’s retro constructed “Nightmare Maker” arrangement that’s more red-blood heated. Inside does not contain any insert goodies or booklets and a disc on either side of the interior featuring the slipcase and black UHD Amaray case cover art. Both formats are region free, have a runtime of 93 minutes, and are not rated.

Last Rites: Seriously messed up on so many levels, if being a teenage boy isn’t pressurized enough right before manhood, becoming an adult can be arrantly deadly in this superbly packaged shocker “Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker” now on 4K UHD for the first time ever on May 28th!

The 2-Disc UHD and Blu-ray Available for Pre-Order. Due to Release 5/28!

Return Home to Discover Dad’s An EVIL SOB! “The Abandoned” reviewed! (Unearthed Films / Limited-Edition Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Don’t Be Left Behind. Get Your LE Blu-ray Copy of “The Abandoned” from Unearthed Films

Marie Jones never knew her parents.  Born in Russian, raised in the London, and now lives in the U.S., the low-budget movie producer receives news from a Russian estate notary providing her details on her murdered mother back in 1966 and her existence entitles her to the isolated family farm.  Unable to resist the urge to find out about her mysterious past, Marie travels to her parents’ dilapidated farm settled on an island encircled by a river.  There she meets Nicolai claiming to be her twin brother and that he also, after a similar call from the notary, felt pulled to their family home on the verge of their upcoming birthday, but they’re not totally alone.  Trapped on land that won’t allow them to leave, Marie and Nicolai run into their undead doppelgangers that impel them to dig into their family history and uncover the gruesome truth to what happened to their mother.  All the while, the house around them rewinds back in time before age and weather have taken a toll and the souls living in what was once a home return to bring the family back together again.

A past drawing near story stretching from 1966 and 2008, “The Abandoned” is a haunted house, supernatural, and circular tale that bears down a forlorn ancestry nightmare onto ensnared curious lineage wanderers, bringing them back into a vicious cycle of a family history that should have been left alone.  “Aftermath” and “Genesis” short film director Nacho Cerdá tries his hand at less necrophilia and gore for more daring, open-to-interpretation horror with the Karim Hussain (“Subconscious Cruelty”) original script with some rewrites and sprucing done by “Dust Devil” and “Hardware’s” Richard Stanley.  Filmed in Bulgaria to double as the scenic landscapes and to use the country’s looming, enveloping trees as another margining aspect of being trapped, “The Abandoned,” initially title as “The Bleeding Compass” on Hussain’s original script, is produced by Julio and Carlols Fernández, Kwesi Dickson, Stephen Margolis, and Alexander Metodiev under Castelao Producciones, Filmax International, and Filmstudio Bojana with Future Films’ Carola Ash and Albert Martinez Martin serving as associate producers.

“The Abandoned’s” modest budget regulates casting to, at that time, relative unknowns for the U.S. market but certainly not an experienced lot between English actress Anastasia Hille (“Snow White and the Huntsman,” “Martyrs Lane”) and Karel Roden (“Orphan,” “Hellboy’) playing reunited brother and sister Marie and Nicolai who have not been together since infancy.  Separated at the demise of their mother, Marie and Nicolai have undoubted hesitation to their relation, especially both are met by grisly versions of themselves in the old family homestead.  The double versions of themselves represent a dual life, one connected to their current path, and one connected to their past, and Hille and Roden play into that theme with fortitude and fear in how the past haunts their characters connected to a shadow world in a very “Silent Hill” way.   Hille brings complexity to Marie’s own troubled relation with her daughter, a character we don’t necessarily see physically on screen, but we understand through phone conversations and brief interactions with Uncle Nicolai that the foundation the mother-daughter relationship stands on is shaky and that pushes Marie to pursue the truth about her own mother to avoid that disconnection with her daughter.  For Nicolai, Roden instills a more tragically inclined façade without overcompensating with tremendous evidence in the loss of a woman he loved, aside from their matching tattoos, and his melancholic state is staid by the newfound opportunity to discover his past until unless it also becomes his downfall.  Again, we’re back to the past should stay dead, or in the past.  Hille and Roden underpin “The Abandoned” and its ghostly enigma with brief interjections of supporting ancillaries in Valentin Ganev, Carlos Reig-Plaza, Paraskeva Djukelova, and Marta Yaneva. 

“The Abandoned” is one of those circular narrative stories working toward a revelational end, one that likely won’t be pleasant.  An endless loop of trying to leave Marie and Nicolai’s childhood home only for them to be brought right back into the same room from which they started lend into a couple of preconceived notions of their ringlet wretchedness, both in circumstance and in life, and that being either they’re already dead and in a purgatory or their grieved existence has warped them into a psychological break when returning to a decaying land left in the memories of the heinous death of their mother.  Both theories incorporate a supernatural element where time reverses and, coinciding with the twins’ upcoming birthday, a clock ticks down that will bring the family whole again, this time in the afterlife if the unnatural powers to be have anything to say about it.  That’s the definitive beauty of “The Abandoned’s” open air forbidding allegories with the more than one interpretational rivulets spreading in different directions, shaped idiosyncratically by Marie or Nicolai’s life.  What helps the impervious fate outcome of the principals is that “The Abandoned” also has strong, poignant visuals as a foothold into keeping audiences intrigued on what could be a slippery slope of symbolism.  A mix of practical and composite effects, done amazingly through the editing process, sell duality on every layer as if we’re experiencing two worlds during a collision and waiting with anticipation for one to engulf the other. 

Unearthed Films brings “The Abandoned” home on a limited-edition Blu-ray home video. The AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50 capacity houses plenty of breathing room for the claustrophobia details to writhe within. Middle-to-higher contrast levels that throw out good shadows without being extremely inky, there’s spectrum discoloration from blotchy-banding, suggesting a good encoded transfer that deciphers more details rather than squeezing everything in under a lossy codec. Range of the darker graded feature does favor a generous bluish green for the interiors while natural light swarms and illuminates into the exteriors, brighten up Anatasia Hille’s already blonde enough hair to almost pure yellow. Fine details pervade over much of the duration, only relinquishing details for dark, cavernous moments to scare up apprehension levels. The English DTS-HD 5.1 and the PCM 2.0 give viewers lossless fidelity and flexibility with audio setups. I preferred the stereo with robust dual channel dialogue; however, the 5.1 showed signs of directional awareness – rustling of leaves, ghostly voices, etc. – through the back and side channels. Dialogue is prominent and clear on both audio options and free of intrusion and interference. English and Spanish subtitles are optionally available. Special features include an abundant of new material exclusively produced by and curated from Unearthed Films, including new, individual interviews with director Nacho Cerdá, screenwriter Karim Hussain, and screenwriter Richard Stanley; there are also new furnished for this release alternate endings that more so involve Marie’s daughter, deleted and extended scenes cut for timing and flow, and outtakes. Archived bonus content has a Making of featurette, location vision in “The Abandoned’s” den, a featurette of Nacho Cerdá: The Trail of Death that looks at the director’s earlier horror inspirations of his trilogy of death shorts, The Little Secrets of Nacho Cerdá goes further into the director’s insights for his varied take on “The Abandoned” story, Nacho Cerdá has a conversational horror discussion with friend Douglas Buck, director of 2006’s “Sisters,” promotional and storyboards gallery, trailers, and a BD-ROM storyboard collection. The limited-edition release has a lissome cardboard slipcover with original poster art of the blood-crying doll from “The Abandoned” on the front. Inside, a standard Blu-ray Amary case has the same cover art image that’s also pressed on the disc. There are no inserts included. The rated-R release has region A playback only and a runtime of 99 minutes.

Last Rites: A step back from the gore and revulsion, Nacho Cerdá is able to scare stiff with “The Abandoned,” a dead and buried family abstrusity squaring the score for lost time by reversing time to welcome back those left living, and Unearthed Films’ limited-edition release is the best version to date that deserves a warm homecoming for its icy, taciturn atmosphere.

Don’t Be Left Behind. Get Your LE Blu-ray Copy of “The Abandoned” from Unearthed Films

This Spy’s Sex Serum Will Drive Men EVILLY Mad! “Blue Rita” reviewed! (Full Moon Features / Blu-ray – DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Own “Blue Rita” on Blu-ray and DVD Combo Set Today!

Misandrist Blue Rita owns a high-end gentlemen’s cabaret.  Her renowned nightclub is also a front for espionage activities.  With the help of a Bergen, her handling, and her right-hand club manager Gina, she’s fed male targets that are affluent and powerful to kidnap and torture to extract sensitive intelligence information.  As a side hustle, a perk that comes with exploiting the naked and chained up men in her underground boxed cells, Blue Rita uses her chemical powers of seduction to sexually torture her captives into withdrawing their bank accounts dry.  When new girl Sun is hired in to not only titillate the nightclub client with her erotic Pippi Longstocking performances, the Blue Rita pledger works her first mission to reel in a wealthy, international boxer as the next target but Sun’s own conflictions collide with Rita’s sworn hate for all men, cracking the door open ajar just enough for Interpol and the Russian intelligence agencies to try and undermine Blue Rita’s confrontational spy operations. 

What’s renowned most about eurotrash filmmaker Jesus (Jess) Franco is his diverse contributions to the European and American movie-making markets.  Though most of his work is regarded as schlocky, beneath the sleaze and sordidness is a carefully calculating psychotronic director.  True, Franco may not be famously esteemed as, let’s say Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg, but his infamy should not be ignored amongst the present company of similar filmmakers like Tinto Brass or even Roman Polanski.  One of the late Franco’s few spy game theme films, “Blue Rita” is a hot house of sleaze and deceit, written by the director.  Filmed in Germany with German actors and actresses, the film went under the original title “Das Frauenhaus” translated as “The House of Women,” referring to the Blue Rita’s distaste for men and keeping an all-femme fatale, and mostly nude, workforce for her clandestine affairs.  Elite Film is the production company with Erwin C. Deitrich (“Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun,” “Swedish Nympho Slaves”) producing.

Much like Franco’s diverse dips into a variety of subgenres, “Blue Rita’s” cast is also quite an assorted lot in talent from sexploitation, horror, and the XXX industry.  The German production also garnered not just homefield advantage with German actors but also lured into the fold some of the French cast cuisine to spice up the affair.  Martine Fléty is one of those French foreigners, embodying the lead role of Blue Rita.  An adult actress of primarily the 70s, “Blue Rita” became Fléty only titular role but wasn’t her last Jess Franco feature, having continued her X-rated run with the director in “Elles Font Tout,” “I Burn All Over,” and “Claire.”  Either half or entirely naked for the entire narrative, Fléty’s comfortability bare-bottom relays power in her performance as an unwavering femme fatale agent that has men begging for sex and begging for their very lives.  Back then, the lines blurred between porn and sexploitation, often times melding into European coalescence hitting the same marquee theaters until it’s eventual separation.  Esther Moser (“Around the World in 80 Beds,” “Ilsa, The Wicked Warden”), Angela Ritschard (“Jack the Ripper,” “Bangkok Connection”), Vicky Mesmin (“Dancers for Tangier,” “Love Inferno”), Roman Huber (“Girls in the Night Traffic,” “Sex Swedish Girls in a Boarding School”), Olivier Mathot (“Diamonds of Kilimandjaro,” “French Erection”) and Pamela Stanford (“Sexy Sisters,” “Furies sexuelles”) rode, among other things, that fine line between grindhouse gauche and the taboo and certainly do well to incorporate both traits in Franco’s equally indeterminate genre film.  German actor and one of the principal leads Eric Falk (“Caged Women,” Secrets of a French Maid”) too dappled between crowds as a tall, dark, and chiseled chin but the actor chiefly sought limelight in sexploitation and as the haughty boxer Janosch Lassard, who karate chops at lightning speed, Falk adds to “Blue Rita’s” sexy-spy thriller.  Opposite the titular vixen is “Wicked Women’s” Dagmar Bürger who, like the rest of the cast, have crossed paths in a handful of exploitation exciters.  Bürger has perhaps the least built-up character Sun as she’s subtly folded into Blue Rite’s innermost circle without as much as a single ounce of doubt in her character, perhaps due in part to Bergen, Blue Rita’s handler, was once Sun’s direct-to, but Sun becomes the impetus key to everything falling apart at the seams and her role’s framework feels unsatisfactory just as her crumbling infatuation that’s more arbitrary than motivationally centric.

“Blue Rita” doesn’t necessarily broach as a film by Jess Franco whose typical undertakings are coated with sleazy gothic and historical context.  The 1979 feature, set around the extraction of international intelligence data by way of chemical approach, not terribly farfetched considering how the CIA once used LSD as a truth serum, is about as sordid and sexually graphic as any Jess Franco film gets but brings about a futuristic air laced with not just super cool spy gadgets and weaponry, to which there are really none to speak of as an example, there lies a more ultramodern verge upon unseen in much of the earlier, Spanish-born director’s work.  A futuristic holding pen with a capacity no bigger than an industrial-sized washing machine with a descending spiked barred ceiling, a hyper-aphrodisiac goo that makes men so horny it puts them on the edge of insanity and death, and the sleek, contemporary sex room with translucent furniture and stark white walls all in the routine hustle and bustle of Paris, France. “Blue Rita’s” contrarian patinas add to the film’s colorful charisma of avant-garde stripteases and a black operations nightclub, two of which combined play more into the “Austin Powers” funky 1970s ecosphere rather than in the high-powered espionage world of James Bond, the Roger Moore years.

For the first time on Blu-ray in the North American market, Full Moon Features puts out into the world a fully remastered, high-definition, 2-disc Blu-ray and DVD set. The AVC encoded, 1080p, BD25 entails picture perfect image quality that sharpen “Blue Rita” with greater resolution in comparison to previous DVD versions with full-bodied color, in setting tones and in body tones, and a contour-creating delineation that establishes depth and texture better, presented in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio. Not flawless mind you with soft spots rearing up every so often in the variety of interior and exterior, organically and inorganically lit scenes but there’s distinct contrast that delivers a recognizing lighting scheme that deepens the shadows in the right places without signs of an inadequate compression, especially on a single layer Blu-ray, and the Full Moon release retains natural grain with no DNR or other image enhancements. The release comes with two audio options, a lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 and a French Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo, both of which have a horrendously acted burned-in English dub of not the original actors’ voices. Banal dub does take the quality of Franco’s dialogue down a good peg or two, which the original dub track was likely spoken in native German and some French judging by the cast list nationalities and where the bigger distribution market was for the planned; yet, though the dialogue is verbose and ploddingly straightforward to make do, losing some of the depth in the process, the quality is voluminous to ensure no mistake is made in underemphasizing the story’s outline when necessary. Ambience and other design markers hit more than well enough to sell the surroundings and the action to make those qualities palpable. English subtitles are option but not available on the setup; they will have to added in per your setup’s options. The Blu-ray extras come with a rare photo gallery, an archived interview with Chris Alexander with Peter Strickland discussing Franco circa 2013, and a vintage Jess Franco Trailer Reel. The DVD houses a different set of special features, separate from the Blu-ray’s, with Slave in the Women’s House interview with Eric’s Falk plus the DVD also offers Eurocine trailers. Those interested in supplementary content will be forced to pop in both discs to fully abreast of all bonus material. What’s eye-catching about the Full Moon Feature’s release is the erotic front cover on the cardboard O-slipcover, sleekly illustrated for your kink and perversive pleasure. The Blu-ray Amary inside has a NSFW story still of Dagmar Bürger walking down a spiral staircase in the buff. The same Dagmar Bürger image graces the DVD cover while a new illustrated luscious lips are pressed on the Blu-ray disc opposite side. There is no insert or booklet included. The region free release has a runtime of 78 minutes and is not rated.

Last Rites: The late Jess Franco may have a cache full of sleaze in his repertoire, but the director had a sense of panache and intensity that’s sorely underrated outside his fanbase. “Blue Rita” shows Franco’s range, stylistically and genre, and Full Moon’s sultry release is now high-definition gold in the color blue.

Own “Blue Rita” on Blu-ray and DVD Combo Set Today!

Might Be Dressed as a Fool, but EVIL Can’t Outwit This Jester! “The Wrong Door” reviewed! (Visual Vengeance / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“The Wrong Door” Collector’s Set Available at Amazon!

Ted, a radio sound design student, has to perform a singing telegram dressed in a jester costume on the very evening of having to pull an all-nighter to finish his final college class project.  After his melodic duties are fulfilled and the guests are entertained, he discovers a girl’s unconscious, bleeding body in an adjacent, dark apartment, a girl that he recognizes from campus.  Frightened by the sight and the shadowy figure in the apartment with him, Ted goes for help only to discover the girl vanished with no one else inside the apartment.  His drive back home is full of contemplation on the shocking memory when he notices the girl lying lifeless in the backseat of his car.  From then on out, Ted becomes embroiled into a murder mystery and pursued by the killers who are hellbent on tracking down the Jester-cladded man to cover up incrimination evidence and tie up loose ends.

Even though our unlucky protagonist wears a court jester outfit, there’s nothing funny about the 1990 thriller, an intense bird-dogging murder-mystery, known as “The Wrong Door.”  Helmed by the creative ensemble of friends, the film is written and directed by James Groetsch, Shawn Korby, and Bill Weiss who eagerly sought to make a feature film on a strapped for cash budget after success of their Super 8 short films.  Contemplating using tape for their inaugural throes into feature film land, the auteurs revert their thinking back to film, settling on a faithful celluloid format to which they have experience with in, the ever gritty Super 8.  What results is a tenebrous yet effectively taut confrontation of frenetic hunting and a shocking homicide driven more with ambient sound than character dialogue.  The three creative minds behind “The Wrong Door” formed Sandman Films and coproduced alongside John Schonebaum for the Minneapolis Twin Cities’ production.

Cast locally around Minneapolis area, “The Wrong Door” is chock full of directors’ acquaintances who turned out to be really quite good at the parts they play.  Matt Felmlee stars in his debut performance as Ted, the class assignment under the gun student looking to knock out one last paying singing telegram gig before cutting and splicing audio for a final exam.  Felmlee isn’t given much dialogue to work with and his credibility relies burdensomely on nearly a vocally silent rundown from Jeff Tatum and Chris Hall respectively as deranged stalker and ransacking lunatic Jeff and his accomplice Vic.  Jeff Tatum makes for a good hardnosed psycho in a subtle yet menacing take of a trench coat robed coup de grâce kind of thug but the thug’s partner Vic is left as an nearly obscured sidekick and we don’t get to see Chris Hall ever come out and shine independently from Tatum’s enormous shadow.  Concluding on the three talking roles, unless you consider Loreal Steiner’s mostly dead body popping up performance where she speaks only in Ted’s nightmares, “The Wrong Door” instruments of interaction circulate around the three male principals peppered with Steiner’s maybe lifeless, maybe lively body stringing Ted along in order to slip him damning evidence on who and why she is being brutally murdered, in a nod of Hitchcockian hamboning.  A cast of supplementary, locally sourced pop-ins, including Jeanine Bourdaghs as Ted’s Radio classmate bestie, Stephanie.

Obscured to the depths of regional relevance, “The Wrong Door” is opened only to adventurous cinephiles who are willing to spend hours upon hours scouring through the vastly lower-to-no budget, independent films lost behind the borders of zonal solitude  A Hitchcockian thriller venerated on a humble scale in regard to the storytelling’s use of focused sound design to narrate a chased protagonist under the gun, literally and figuratively, that turns a studious radio sound design student with a final exam project to complete into a marked man hunted down in a foolish jester suit.  Bookend by dialogue setup and a tense, skirmishing climax, the near omission of dialogue in order for sound to reign supreme as atmospheric tensions force viewers, and force them appealingly I might add, into Ted’s chest-tightening, alone-in-fear experience with not only being incognizant of the particulars of the murder surrounding the young woman he was once smitten with but also to his being pursued by goons that hangs us on tenterhooks.  There’s also pulsing paranoia of where the dead set antagonists are hot on his trail and will suddenly appear unforeseen out of the blanketing darkness of an exterior cat-and-mouse game.  This leads into ambiguity near the end that asks the question, did Ted experience all of this strife or was it a clever cut and splice of imaginative audio files to create a whodunit thriller?  A brief sense of hesitation brings a sigh of relief from the nightmare and also onsets a different kind of anxiety of not knowing what truly went down until the very last shot that explains it all. 

Wrong place at the wrong time is the theme for “The Wrong Door” which is the right door to open if looking to walk-through to an understudied tensioner. Well versed in greatly misunderstood, profound stepped over, and overall underdog pictures is the smaller picture championing Visual Vengeance, the distributor behind the collector’s edition Blu-ray release of “The Wrong Door” with an AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50 product presented in a full screen 1.33:1 aspect ratio. For the first time on disc anywhere, the Super 8mm film receives a brand new, director approved 2K HD transfer from the original elements. The perception of Super 8mm does not hold water here with a relatively pristine image quality for the sized celluloid with a mighty clean image. Other than the white speckles of dust, other signs of minute debris, and the natural amount of grain of Super 8mm, no cigarette burns, light emitting on the frame edges due to perforation alignment, and hardly any scratches hinder quality. Poor lighting conditions in the exterior, and even some interiors, plays to the strengths of negative voids but, in my opinion, adds to the gloomy puzzler filled with action, suspense, and acrimony. While 8mm’s grasp on a grittier saturation, the tonal shading refuses to pop inside the faded film stock. The English Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo doesn’t do the new transfer justice. The lossy format likely not the best choice on a sound gimmicky, indie film that uses more innate ambient sound and Foley to tell the story rather than through dialogue. Though manageably capable to pull through to the end, the already lo-fi standard now compressed audio file has anemic energy through the dual channels but while the distinctions are dainty, some distinct distancing between more than two effects does convey. Switching between ADR and boom, there’s never a sense of uniformity with the dialogue that can sounds lively and volumes with post-production recordings yet also be frail within natural earshot of a recording device. Optional English subtitles are available. What’s most impressive about this 14th release from Visual Vengeance amongst 13 titles before it is the seemingly incalculable number of special features within the submenu of the flat, rodded colorful cutouts on the fluid main screen. New grouped audio commentaries with directors Bill Weiss and Shawn Korby in one and the third director James Groestsch and John Schonebaum on the second kick off the content followed by a new documentary with interviews from all three directors in Men Make Movie, If Not Million$, individual interviews with James Groetsch, Shawn Korby, Bill Weise, and actor Bill Felmlee, an interview with Film Threat founder Chris Gore who was one of the few in the field to put the film in his magazine, an alternate, director’s cut of “The Wrong Door” coming in as a second feature, Super 8 shorts: Raiders of the Lost Bark and The Pizza Man, a 20-minute television episode from The Gale Whitman Show, the original unedited Muther Video VHS intro, image gallery, original storyboard gallery, the original ran print from Film Threat, a Visual Vengeance 2023 cut trailer of “The Wrong Door,” and other Visual Vengeance trailers. Tangibly, the release comes with a rigid O-slipcover hypnotically graded in Jester colors of subtle pink and purple. Inside is a clear Amary Blu-ray case with the illustrated cover art that also does double duty for the motion menu and the folded mini-poster insert. Also inserted is a double-sided Blu-ray acknowledgment one sheet, a Visual Vengeance exclusive “Do Not Disturb …The Disturbed!” doorknob hanger, and a retro sticker sheet that’s come standard with every release to date. Reversible cover art displays the original VHS cover, and the disc is pressed as a mock play of a cassette tape’s supply reel teeth – neat! The region free Blu-ray comes unrated and has a runtime of 73 minutes.

Last Rites: Do you hear what I hear? No longer lingering in the vacuous space of radio static, “The Wrong Door” was once another shamefully sidestepped film that has been resurrected by Visual Vengeance for the first time anywhere on disc and, all I can say is, it’s about damn time.

“The Wrong Door” Collector’s Set Available at Amazon!

‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, When All Through the EVIL “A Creature Was Stirring” reviewed! (Well Go USA Entertainment / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Purchase “A Creature Was Stirring” Here at Amazon.com

During the height of a 6-day Christmas blizzard, nurse Faith remains home to care for her mysteriously afflicted daughter Charm.   Faith diligently stays vigilant over her daughter’s inexplicable condition with test after test and maintaining Charm’s constant body temperature between 102 to 104.4 degrees, seemingly stabilizing Charm’s condition.  If the temperature exceeds beyond, Charm transmogrifies into a barbed humanoid creature.  While Faith works on a compound cure, Liz and Kory, a sibling pair of Jesus zealots, break into the house seeking shelter out of the deadly snowstorm.  Faith has no other choice but to let them stay the night until the storm subsides but the appearance of Charm’s at-home care and the young girl’s sudden seizures and erratic behavior sends Liz into savior mode, meddling into more than she can comprehend.  Yet, something else lurks inside the house, between the shadows, and beneath the veil of reality that is way more terrifying. 

Even though Christmas might be long over and all the gaudy and brilliantly lit decorates are stowed away back into Grandma’s attic that doesn’t mean the holiday horror train has to depart the station.  And I’m not talking about no Polar Express with the edging on creepy motion capture animation.  I’m talking about “The Cleansing Hour’s” Damien LeVeck’s Twas the Night Before Christmas-inspired titled “A Creature Was Stirring.”  The equivocal creature feature set in the throes of a raging blizzard and inside a very decked the halls house is penned by debut screenwriter Shannon Wells under the original title of “Good Luck, Nightingale.”   Aimed to be more than what meets the eye, “A Creature Was Stirring” blends the involuntary struggles of drug addiction with potent secretions of supernaturalism.  The U.S. production was shot in Louisville, Kentucky, produced by LeVeck, wife Natalie, as well as “Scare Package” producers Aaron B. Koontz and Cameron Burns with Vladislav Severtsev (“The Bride”) under the production companies Skubalon, 10/09 Films, and Paper Street Pictures. 

Topping the bill as Faith is “This Is Us” star Chrissy Metz, portraying a nurse practitioner and mother desperate on concocting a cure to her daughter’s strange, monstrous manifesting condition.  Metz brings the multifaceted mania between being rock solid and stringent with medical checks and procedures and being able to turn aggressive when the moment calls for it, especially swinging a screwed-spiked baseball bat.  This underlines an underlying secret or hidden predicament viewers will be dipped into and begin processing all the little traces of one-offs that don’t necessary make sense to an already peculiar narrative.  Then, there’s Charm, played by Annalise Basso (“Oculus”), in constant oversight, constantly mutable, and urging to constantly be free from her mother’s impervious iron grip to lighten up.   Basso retains angsty opposition while tossing moments of reflective consideration for her mother and for herself, disquieting the teetering tranquility when Liz and Kory come into play.  Respectively played by “Halloween” ‘07’s Scout Taylor-Compton and “Stake Land’s” Connor Paolo, siblings Liz and Kory stir the pot that’s slowly simmering to a boil as one religious dogmatist and one eager to break the constraints of his sister’s purity with sex and drugs complicate the strained mother-daughter relationship with their intrinsic quirks that expose a deeper, rooted-to-reality problem.  The now generational scream queen Compton dons colorful dreads and a large Messiah back tattoo amongst a high and mighty attitude while Paolo can be praised for the sarcasm brought out from the scripted dialogue.  Each of the four principals are inherently different and clash, in a good way, to provoke complications. 

Drug addiction has infiltrated horror years ago and have been the basis of many notable films such as Abel Ferrara’s “The Addiction,” Larry Fessenden’s “Habit,” and Frank Henelotter’s “Brain Damage” to name a few from the massive lot.  “A Creature Was Stirring” taps into that same vein as LeVeck’s injects and shoots up his own interpretation of horrors with withdrawals.  Long time addicts suffer through agonizing, powerful withdrawals that screenwriter Shannon Wells incorporates symptomatically with a figurative approach and while Wells’ story invokes colorfully rich characters and enigmatic tale of terror, brought to life by LeVeck’s vibrantly warm and glow Christmas adorned and atmospheric house, the finished feature, that really has nothing to do with Christmas oddly enough, feels uneven when revealing the irony of surprise doesn’t become catchall illumination.   The most ambiguous part about the tale is the spiny-signified creature, a mutated, zoomorphic porcupine of sorts, to represent ferocity of the withdrawn drug with its hypodermic needle-like defense mechanism and malevolence nature.  The shadowy man-thing is given such a threadbare association between Charm’s anecdotal encounter with large rodent and its manifestation metamorphosis into the fold that the hostile has hardly any staying power as a villain and, like a rodent, really does feel just like a mouse was stirring as it scurries arbitrarily throughout the house but not all is negative as there are scenes that make you go holy crap when recollecting character and creature interactive moments that suddenly click and make sense, often coinciding and juxtaposed against really neat interior cinematography bathed in mixture of hard light and soft glows. 

Well Go USA Entertainment presents “A Creature Was Stirring” on a high-definition Blu-ray home video.  The AVC encoded, 1080p, BD25 has soft illumination but a grading design that’s befits the ’tis the season paradigm with the primary color warmth radiating out from Christmas lights strung up around the house and the beaming brilliance of white battery-operated light-up decorations. Between the crude adornment lighting, some lighter translucent gels, and with a splash of black-and-white, Alexander Chinnic cinematography, presented in an anamorphic widescreen 1.78:1, resembles a rave clad fitting into the drug theme as an echo of the one character’s pill-popping, molly-dropping past. Details become diffused by the varying, indiscriminate incandescence and shadowy fields that play into the creature’s tenebrific threat, but those same shadows are often deep without posterization. The English 5.1 DTS-HD master audio achieves the goal of the very title of something stirring inside creating rustling movements and spiny-shifting clacking, coursing through the back and side channels and maintaining an even keeled LFE. Space awareness is key for close quartered tension and that’s rendered well in the design. Dialogue comes off without a hitch and is elevated above the rest of the tracks with no issues with compression faults or a fractured recording. English SDH subtitles are available. Like most Well Go USA releases, “A Creature Was Stirring” shoulders only Well Go USA preview trailers with no real bonus features of its own in the semi-static main menu but what we do get is a better than modest laid out standard Amaray Blu-ray package with a lightly titled embossed cardboard O-slipcover and on the back two different texture types, a polaroid slick abutted against the smooth cardboard. Image design is a greatly detailed silhouette of the porcupine creature looming over the house. The same image is also on the Blu-ray cover with a simple red-beaded or red-string light encircling the title on the disc. There is no insert inside. Rated R for violence, bloody images, drug context, language, and some sexual suggestion, the 96-minute Blu-ray comes region A locked. 

Last Rites: Chrissy Metz battling a deformative disease, drug addiction, an angsty teen, two home invasive siblings, and a large porcupine monstrosity all in the name of “A Creature Was Stirring” is the prickly cold turkey suspenser this side of the New Year.  

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