Tag Archives: Studio 71

The 90’s Played Videotapes by a Different Set of EVIL Rules. “V/H/S/94” reviewed! (Acorn Media International / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

V/H/S/94 Blu-ray Can be Purchased Here!

A police S.W.A.T. team raid a large warehouse where suspected drug storage and trafficking is being conducted.  Tagging along a camera man for code of conduct review, what the team discovers inside is more alarming than a stash of street narcotics.  The nearly empty warehouse is filled with gruesomely recorded VHS tapes, snowy television sets in every room, and recently deceased bodies with their eyes plucked from their heads.  As the investigation frantically continues through the labyrinth corridors that turns the capture and arrest mission into a mission of escape, the pre-recorded tapes they come across show vivid, nightmare-fueling horrors, including footage of a sewer-dwelling rat man, a near empty funeral home on a dark-and-story night, inhuman surgeries joining man and machine, and a militia preparing themselves to unleash true evil onto the government establishment.  What the officers see can’t be unseen as analog madness ensues them spurred by the motivations of a deadly cult.

The fourth installment of the David Bruckner and Brad Miska created analog-influenced V/H/S horror anthology.  Known as V/H/S/94, as in 1994 to mark the period of social and cultural influence, six new directors take the short movie helm in a new line of videotape terror.  “Night’s End” director Jennifer Reeder tackles the wraparound story “Holy Hell” that fills in between and shepherds in four frightening tales with “Watcher’s” Chloe Okunols “Storm Drain,” “V/H/S/2’s Simon Barrett’s “The Empty Wake,” “May the Devil Take You’s” Timo Tjahjanto’s “The Subject,” and “Lowlife’s” Ryan Prows’ “Terror.”  “Psycho Gorman” and “Manborg” filmmaker Steven Kostanski also directs a mini-pseudo infomercial entitled “The Veggie Masher.”  Together, the filmmakers for a new lot of under-the-radar talent to showcase an eclectic blend of 90’s set scary stories with Josh Goldboom, Kurtis David harder, and Brad Miska producing, Studio 71, Cinepocalypse Productions, and Hangar 18 Media as the production credits, and Bloody Disgusting and Raven Banner Entertainment presenting the production.

With any type of anthology, a variety of roles are laid out for different scenarios.  From newscasters (Anna Hopkins, “Tin Can”) and cameramen (Anthony Christian Potenza, “Bad Dreams”) to body-transfiguring mad scientists (Budi Ross), to greenhorn funeral home attendants (Kyal Legend), “V/H/S/94 reaches into the far corners of world while also breeding home grown terror right into suburban America.  Each episode develops and nurtures layered characters with fast-setting concrete, quickly building who and what they are in a matter of minutes to which some full-length features have to build in a whole act or in all three acts.  The writing of and the colorful depiction of each character sets the tone for the rest of short and whether the short will be a success hit or not.  An example of this would be in Timo Tjahjanto’s “The Subject” with The Creator, played renationalized and crazy by Budi Ross.  An eccentric acute accent in Ross’s Creator apexes the overall expectation of a mad scientist and in that there is an understanding of what’s coming while there’s still a simultaneous shroud of mystery of how batshit crazy things can really become. The episode that didn’t quite flesh out enough, in character and in story, was the wraparound “Hell Hole” segment that sees a S.W.A.T. team (Kimmy Choi, Nicholette Pearse, Dru Viergever, Thomas Mitchell) and ride-a-long cameraman (Kevin P. Gabel) storm a suspected drug warehouse and find nothing but death and VHS.  Tremendous pandemonium as the team charging into the multi-layered complex is roughly cleaved to not smoothly segue in-and-out with the intercut VHS episodes that also hinder the characters from really being built upon to relate any interest in them.  “Holy Hell’s” climatic reveal has little weight to then stand on without that much needed seething of every detailed bubble that pops in between the short films.  However, the wraparound story doesn’t snuff out the rest of eye-gluing terror you’re witnessing with solid, edge-of-your-seat performances from Donny Alamsyah, Tim Campbell, Brian Paul, Conor Sweeney, Devin Chin-Cheong, Juan Blone Subiantoro, Christian Lloyd, Cameron Kneteman, Steven McCarthy, Brenand McMurtry-Howlett, Slavic Rogozine, and Daniel Willston.

Zombies, cults, body horror, vampires, subterranean creatures, and much more are the selected subgenres that invade insidiously into our visual receptors and straight down to shake and scare stiff our stable core, each one idiosyncratically crafted and tailored by the filmmakers tastes to deliver a unique tale under the guise of those beautiful VHS artefacts.  Whether ran through a VHS recorder or filters are applied, each era-idolized short has a distinct visual approach and feel how the 1990s tape decks presented the goods that can be saturated in horizontal noise strips, tracking lines, and image ghosting.  Granted, and likely subjectively by yours truly, some shorts are better than others with a narrative outline and in special effects.  “Holy Hell” doesn’t let time to breath and let the dust setting to effectively lay in fear and frights because of the constant cacophony of the S.W.A.T. team’s frantic ambling through the complex, seeing each disturbing scene as if breezing through a museum and glimpsing at the exhibits.  I’m fully aware of the short film time crunch Reeder was under but breakneck pacing didn’t have time to elicit any type of reaction or setup a story.  “The Empty Wake,” “The Subject,” and “Terror,” reel in and piece together all the components of their tales and find room to make them thriller and terrifying.  Barrett’s is one of the simplest yet most anxiety-riddled shorts to come out of the V/H/S anthology run, creating a couped up Funeral home atmosphere, the background threat of a tornado out of the story night, and a coffin that goes bump-bump with a sole wake service attendant on the edge of fright for fear of what’s inside trying to get out.  Ryan Prows puts a spin on the whole vampire trope by never mentioning the creature as the living dead bloodsucker held captive by a radical, ring-wing militia under the influence of its power to destroy.  Instead, the creature is just plain and pure evil that, as the militia men find out by the flaws in themselves, can’t be contained.

Acorn Media, the United Kingdom subsidiary label of RLJ Entertainment, releases the Shudder exclusive anthology on Blu-ray home video.  THE AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition, BD50 of “V/H/S/64” goes by the oxymoronic details in the videotape artefacts.  Through various VHS filters and VHS recording deck converter, the widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio image is purposefully distorted, worn, and in standard definition to meet the standards of the V/H/S series, providing an anomalous analog outer shell so if you’re expect fine delineation, natural skin tones, or any clear details of any sorts, then the V/H/S franchise is not for you.  For the rest of us, “’94” parades the paltry resolution like gold in a true celebratory style, embracing the chroma spectrum for a maximum retro throwback.  However, the color bands on a couple shorts appear too vibrant, creeping more into digital age with flusher hues rather than tape degraded coloring.  The English and Indian language tracks are ran through a lossless DTS-HD 5.1 surround sound mix that offers punchy kbps decoding filtering through the appropriate side and back channels and right into your ears. The sonic palette has great depth and range in the midst of the crackling and warp-pops of damaged tape. Dialogue is clean, clear, and concise and there’s synched-well, error-free English subtitles for “The Subject.” Bonus features include a behind-the-scenes featurette with the directors speaking about how they were approached and crafted each of their respective shorts, a panel interview at the San Diego Comic Con, deleted and extended scenes, the special effects discussed by Patrick Magee, a quick glimpse at “The Wake’s” visual effects piece to the pie, the full-length Steven Kostanski “Veggie Masher” commercial, behind-the-scenes images, and Hail Raatma!, a special look at the sewer-dwelling creature. There are also two commentaries: a feature-length commentary track with the filmmakers and producers hosted by The Boo Crew and a second commentary track on “The Empty Wake” with writer-director Simon Barrett. There is no mid-credit or after-credit stingers. Sheathed inside a thicker UK Blu-ray casing is the “V/H/S/94” blocky cover art of a face screaming while tape emerges from their mouth and eyes. Inside lies bare with no insert but the disc art is different with a snow-static tube televisions outlining a techno-skull. With PAL encoded playback, the Acorn Media Blu-ray comes region free (tested) despite not proclaiming so on the back cover. The UK certified 18 releases has a runtime of approx. 104 minutes.

Last Rites: If anthologies get your horror rocks off, the “V/H/S” franchise continues to disturb, disgust, and dread with new filmmakers, new stories, and new horrors, but with the same amount of thirst-quenching blood shot on video!

V/H/S/94 Blu-ray Can be Purchased Here!

On the Verge of a New Millennium, New Faces and Stories Tell Their Terror on the Same Old EVIL Video Format! “V/H/S/99” reviewed! (Acorn Media International / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Found Footage is all the 90’s Craze These Days! “V/H/S/99” Available at Amazon!

The year:  1999.  The format:  VHS.  The theme:  The most horrifying experiences caught on found footage camera.  A horror anthology for the turn of the century puts together five of the most terror-drenched short films that resurrects the punk-rock dead, turns urban legends into vindictive playthings, televises Lovecraftian game show frights, peers into the stone-cold eyes of a Gorgon neighbor, and goes to Hell and back!  All caught on camera from a first-person view as VHS vicariously relives the glory days through a digital world, capsulated by the horror realm and all its fanatical acolytes for the analogue video format to live undead forever. 

Living in the age of a VHS comeback is admittedly kind of weird.  VHS has become a hot collectible, especially and obvious the rate and obscure that mostly resides in the horror and cult genre.  Most recently, a discovery on a Brazilian VHS cut of Jaws 2 has a couple of minutes of shot footage that no other release holds to this day.  That, being just one example, is sought after power of VHS that saw various versions of one film be disperse far and wide across continents, which the same could be said about DVD that too saw a variety of different cuts due to the diversity of playback formats, distribute cuts, and numerous levels of censorship between countries.  VHS is also making a comeback in format style with gritty, faded, flat colored image veneer and tracking lines and the absent transmission signal of snow statically adorning the screen with beautifully hypnotical and flickering white dots.  So, it’s now surprise that on the heels of 2021’s “V/H/S/94,” another analog anthology is greenlit in 94’s wake with “V/H/S/99” for 2022, written and helmed by newcomers to the series but not necessarily newcomers to the horror scene.  The movie’s sequential lineup Is as follows:  Short filmmaker Maggie Levin writes-and-directors “Shredding,” taking a break from killer sharks is Johannes Roberts to oversee his “Suicide Bid” entry, musician Flying Lotus directs and co-writes with Zoe Cooper with “Ozzy’s Dungeon,” “Tragedy Girls’” director Tyler Macintyre writes-directs “The Gawkers” along with co-writer and fellow “Tragedy Girls’” screenwriter Chris Lee Hill, and the husband and wife tag team of Joseph and Vanessa Winter, filmmakers of “Deadstream,” helms-and-pens “To Hell And Back.”  The Shudder exclusive series latest is produced by Josh Goldbloom (“V/H/S/94”), David Bruckner (director of “Hellraiser” ‘22), Chad Villella (producer of the of 2022’s “Scream”), Bloody Disgusting’s Brad Miska, and “Scream” ’22 and “Scream VI” director Matt Bettinelli-Olpin under the production banner of Studio 71 and presented by Cinepocalypse Productions and Bloody Disgusting.

A new set of five tales of analog rendered terror invoke a new set of actors in each short film that carrier with them a broad range of experience. While a couple of the stories shred the narrative with hectic editing (I’m looking at you “Shredding”), performances throughout come over with blistering consternation and definitely a late 90’s grunge attitude with “Shredding” and “The Gawkers” delivering the full blunt force of period, heckling away in their baggy clothing, bohemian hairstyles, and a penchant for skateboard thrashing. The other films are merely timeless with only mere mentions of date, or their timestamped on the video tape recording, or are just a thematical proverbial nod to the specific point in time, lacking the keep it real essence that is quite idiosyncratic to the hop from a phasing out decade and into a whole new other. The cast of these shorts play their roles with exuberance and wackiness, which if you have lived in or can look back to the converging decades/millennium and see some of the gameshows or cultural shenanigans that defined America as people or, if you want to go smaller, just the pop culture, wacky is a pinpoint descriptor. The short films’ of “V/H/S/99” are comprised of a cast including, selectively, Steven Ogg (“The Walking Dead”), Ally Ioannides (“Synchronic”), Keanush Tafreshi, Jesse LaTourette (“There’s Someone In Your House”), Dashiell Derrickson, Isabelle Hahn, Sonya Eddy (“Blast”), Emily Sweet (“Castle Freak” ’20), Melanie Stone (“Deadstream”), Archelaus Crisanto, Luke Mullen, and Ethan Pogue.

Anthologies have been around for decades and are a great medium to showcase a multitude of individual storytelling from a variety of filmmakers walking different paths in life.  Fans can often salivate over these types of jump-the-shark formats that can start off with the zombie undead, transition 10 minutes later into a supernatural spooky, and then segue into a creature feature with a wraparound bonus story that may or may not connect them all and squeeze each episodic terror vision in a full-length feature runtime.  Though I enjoy a good collection of short and sheer frightful films, anthologies are not my cup of sanguinary tea.  Hopefully, no partisan takes seep out of this review as I attempt to examine “V/H/S/99” objectively.  Out of the five segments, three have landed strong with a right amount combination of style, gore, performance, narrative logic, and, of course, terror, and if you like comedic sugar in your black cup of horror then “To Hell And Back” is a perfect Venti-sized, well-blended mulatto of choice that thrusts two dimwitted demonic ritual documentarians into the pits of dark, gloomy, and malformed creature Hell and fight their way back to their own plane of existence.  Though one flaw some make catch when watching the caboose film of the anthology is that it doesn’t particularly reflect 1999 other than the small caveat, which is pivotal to the story, that at the turn of the millennia is when the veil between our world and Hell is as it’s thinnest.  The other two better entries capture more infinitesimally in detail of the late 90s, early 2000s clothing and discourse.  “The Gawkers” taps hard into the weird aggressive hormones of a teenage boy while exploring the newfound ways to use technology as spyware.   Webcams aboard big boxy desktops chauffeur in a whole new way to be creepy that lands them in hot water not by the law but by the wrath of ancient femme fatale of Greek mythology.  Johannes Roberts rounds out the better half with a sorority haze gone wrong that evokes an urban legend to become more than just a story and Roberts “Suicide Bid” offers, again, that period presence that feels like a tribute throwback to the 1998 “Urban Legend” film itself, but adds a supernatural surprise that utterly creepy and not as deep with only 6 feet underground rather than a 47 meters down, the director is slowing raising his fear to the surface.  The shorts left hanging below the bar are “Shredding” and “Ozzy’s Dungeon” and for reasons that have to do with their style and story. “Shredding” promising premise is plagued not by punk phantasms back from the dead but simply pilfered of focus with a hectic, if not severely chaotic, VHS-graded editing scheme that shocks the perception senses while “Ozzy’s Dungeon” is inspired by Nickelodeon’s Legends of the Hidden Temple gameshow where kids have to compete in toned down ancient society games to race up the temple to win the big prize. “Ozzy’s Dungeon” definitely is weird, sadistic, and Lovecraftian-inspired for sure but its story design loses motivation and often cheats rounding the bases in order to reach the shocking climatic finale.

Acorn Media International brings tape to the United Kingdom with a Blu-ray home entertainment release of “V/H/S/99.” Presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio, though doesn’t cater to the standard 4:3 ratio of video tape, the provided image quality purposefully varies to give audiences the titular analog experience. Faded grading, tracking lines, static and that jittery playback is all part of the visual environmental experience and even a few of the filmmakers shoot the film digitally to then run it through VHS to garnish with unnatural base video turbulence. The English DTS-HD 5.1 surround sound mix heightens the exposure and familiarity to of being that person behind the camera as all of these shorts of short POV. Intense and, often, cacophonous, the audio tracks still manage to level out, be discerned, and manage to relay the chaos no matter how much bedlam is thrown at the screen. From the zoom in-and-outs of the video tape recorder, there’s a clean sense of depth and the range is bountiful as the ambient track runs the gamut of omnifarious sounds that give each episode an individualized stamp. English SHD is optional. Bonus content includes an exclusive panel from New York’s Comic Con with guests producer Josh Goldbloom, “The Gawkers'” Tyler Macintyre, and “To Hell And Back’s” Joseph and Vanessa Winter as well as a total arc gag reel. After that encompassing project feature, the girth of the bonus content breaks down into the individual shorts with “Shredding” having a deleted scene and the complete fictious band BitchCat music video, “Ozzy Dungeon” has two deleted scenes, “The Gawkers” has a deleted scene as well as bloopers, camera tests, and The Making of Medusa, and “To Hell And Back” rounds out the features with a hefty look at the raw footage, scouted location, and a storyboard and blocking rehearsals. There are no bonus features for Johannes Roberts’ “Suicide Bid.” Physical features include a slightly thicker traditional Blu-ray snapper, a Europe standard, with a cover art that matches the North American RLJE release, a city being loomed over by skull made out of colorful galactic stars and a pair of video lenses for blank eyes. The disc art is pressed with the same front cover image. Though no mention of a region playback on the back cover, I suspect a region B encoded release as per usual with Acorn Media Interntional. “V/H/S/99” has a total runtime of 109 minutes and is UK certified 18 for strong blood violence/gore. “V/H/S/99” is not my kind of off the heasy subgenre, but the latest series anthology packs a punch and I would never discourage anyone from not experiencing firsthand an homage trip through terror.

Found Footage is all the 90’s Craze These Days! “V/H/S/99” Available at Amazon!