‘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 February 14, 2024

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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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Slavic Folklore EVIL Goes Full Amber Alert in “Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest” reviewed! (Digital Screener / Shout! Studios)

Posted by Steven Lewis on August 22, 2020

Still reeling over the loss of his mother, a disheartened Egor has moved to a new apartment on the forested outskirts of the city with his father, step mother, and infant half-sister. A nanny is hired for house upkeep and to look after him and his sister, but the nanny’s strange behavior borders hostility toward him while also bewitching his father with her beauty and charm. Since her hire, the nanny cameras alert Egor of movement in the nursey, projecting an unknown and disfigured woman in the room hovering over the baby. When his parents don’t believe him, there’s nothing more the older boy can do until his baby sister goes missing and his parents don’t remember her, as if she never existed. Egor, along with his friends, track down a man living in the woods who seems to have an inkling about the mysterious disappearances of children and why everyone forgets about them as he has experienced the loss of his daughter and can barely remember her. Based off the man’s ramblings, their search for Egor’s baby sister leads them to an old and abandoned power shack that serves as conduit to the world of Baba Yaga, a Slavic witch with the influencing ability in kidnapping and devouring children’s souls for power and Egor’s sister, along with the rest of the nearby children population, have been abducted to lure in the pivotal pure child to set her free into their world.

“Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest” is the second part of this unintentional two part Russian horror film appraisal following our extrospective look into Olga Gorodetskaya’s psyche serrating “Evil Boy” that just happens to have another protagonist by the name of Igor, but in this case, the spelling is Egor and, instead of a middle-aged doctor, Egor is a pre-teen boy with pre-teen issues – just to jazz it up a little. Also originally known as “Yaga. Koshmar tyomongo lesa,” the supernaturally Slavic folklore tale, directed by Snyatoslav Podgaevskiy (“Mermaid: The Lake of the Dead”), was released February in motherland Russia and is making a distributive second coming toward the States on September 1st courtesy of a collaboration between Shout! Studios and Leda Films. Penned by Podgaevskiey as well as Ivan Kapitonov and Natalya Dubovaya, the scribing trio pickup right where the wrote off form the gritty mysticism of fabled creatures beginning with “Mermaid: The Lake of the Dead” and into a classically frightening and morose villain salivating for juvenile souls spurred from one of the numerous variations of one of the more popular, if not grotesque, Russian mythological being. “Baba Yaga” is a production of the Cinema Foundation of Russia, Central Partnership Productions, Non-Stop Productions, and QS Films.

In much of the reverse from “Evil Boy,” Podgaevskiy’s “Baba Yaga” rocks the cradle in a “Goonies” approach with a condiment and courageous group of pre-teen, developmentally spongy, angsty, and hormonal driven children to solve the big bad witch mystery that not only afflicts the very lives of their brethren age group, but also the parental halfwits who have their minds erased like a chalkboard with nothing more than tiny dust particles to cling to to keep their missing children alive in their memories. From the visually powerful alien invasion thriller “The Blackout” (ItsBlogginEvil review here), Oleg Chugunov spearheads a trio of adolescents on the cusp of being witch-fodder. Chugunov plays Egor, a dispirited youth unhappy with his father’s remarriage to another woman and the target of bullies at his new school before becoming the chosen meal plan for Baba Yaga’s unholy escape for an ethereal world. Egor’s experience of an afterthought to a savior of child-kind isn’t represented well through Chugunov and how the character is written as Egor just falls into the “pure” child role without much explanation to why, staying flat on the personal growth scale for 113 minute runtime. Egor’s followed by a love interested in Dasha (Glafira Golubeva) and lead bully Anton (Artyom Zhigulin) who both have bouts with their parental caretakers; Dasha’s mother is a scorned beauty hellbent on controlling Dasha’s life form outside influences while Anton is a parentless brute with a guardian who is equally as callous as him, if not more. Svetlana Ustinova (“Hardcore Henry”) has two roles in this film and both are bad guys: Baba Yaga and Baba Yaga’s half-bird, half-human hench-thing. Ustinova shows immense range by fielding human to hybrid to full out witch qualities, inching the insidious intentions through the storyline that requires varying degrees of discourse with other characters along the way. The cast list rounds out with Aleksey Rozin (“Leviathan”), Maryana Spivak (“The Outbreak” TV series), Igor Khripunov (“The Bride”) and Marta Timofeeva (“Welcome to Mercy”).

Out of the two terror inducers from Russia, “Baba Yaga” inches out “Evil Boy” on the supernatural spectrum. Between Anton Zenkovich’s colorfully prismatic photography, Vlad Ogay’s sleek-straight and modernally tight architectural designs juxtaposed against a vastly rustic and chaotic woodland lore, and topped off with Podgaevskiy’s highly effective misdirection jump scares, “Baba Yaga” inveigles to a palatable lore horror invigorated by a two-timing enchantress with a sweet tooth for kid blood. Despite not being exact to the Baba Yaga’s tale, as the creature’s house is supposed to erected by actual chicken legs, Podgaesvkiy shoots a fear-laden heartstopper where anything can happen in any scene at any moment. Yet, something is indubitably missing from “Baba Yaga.” Perhaps, what’s missing is that meaningful message about rekindling that spark between parent and child, patching up the tears in the relationship that’s been strained by XYZ reason. Perhaps, what’s missing is the unsatisfactory ending of easily dethroning of a powerful and mighty mage. Perhaps, what’s missing is the explanation on why Egor is the key to Baba Yaga’s tyrannical freedom from cursed exile. I’d say all three contribute to the cause and not much, not even a wonderfully animated s storybook prologue depicting the phantasmal enterprise and downfall of Baba Yaga, could save the heartache in wanting more substance from the already loaded story but, then, we would be looking at another hour of runtime though its sorely warranted. In sum, “Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest” slips in a variant version dispersing a tingling tale of Russian folklore with stunning visuals and dutiful scares that ends deficiently and mediocrely.

Hide your children! “Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest” will be unleashed on VOD, digital, and on Blu-ray and DVD September 1st from Shout! Studios and Leda Films. You can look for it digitally or on-demand from the following providers: AppleTV, Amazon, VUDU, GooglePlay, PlayStation®, XBOX, hoopla, Fandango Now, DirecTV, Comcast Xfinity, Spectrum, Cox, Charter, and AT&T U-verse. Since the review is based off a digital screener, the A/V aspects will not be examined but the Scream Factory Blu-ray and DVD release will be region A/1, presented in a widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio, and will include a powerful Russian language Dolby Digital 5.1 audio mix with English subtitles and will also include a dubbed English Dolby Digital 5.1 mix. Unlucky for me, I had to screen the movie with the dubbed version. Lucky for you, I can confirm that though obvious, the dubbing isn’t horrendously overly-hyperbolized or too asynchronous. There were no bonus features or bonus scenes included nor none announced on the press release. Grab a bottle of Vodka, pop some Zefir candies, turn off the lights, and sink into an Eastern European mythos horror with Svyatoslav Podgaevskiy’s “Baba Yaga: Terror of the Dark Forest” that’ll scare the Ushanka right off your head.