Tag Archives: The Matrix

EVIL Wants You Tour Your Own Personal Hell! “Trapped Ashes” reviewed! (4K UHD and Blu-ray / Deaf Crocodile)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

4K and Blu-ray “Trapped Ashes” from Deaf Crocodile. Available Here!

The VIP package for a historical studio backlot tour gives seven strangers a behind-the-scenes look at how movies were made and the background behind them.   When their cart pulls up to one of the more infamous movie houses for Desmond Hacker’s fright flick Hysteria, the tour group are eager to explore what’s typically off limits for normal, non-VIP tour attractions.  Once inside the backlot house, much of the Hacker’s funhouse tricks and odd designs are although covered in cobwebs are still very functionally practical as the group separates and goes room-by-room to peruse a movie house.  When they all gather in what looks to be the commune dining area, they find themselves unable to locate the way out no matter which unlocked door they choose, which circles them back.  The tour guide mentions Hacker’s movie had similar parallels and that the only way to free themselves would be to tell their own personal horror story.  With nowhere to go and nothing to lose, the stories begin their descent into terror. 

For someone who doesn’t go out of their way to watch horror anthologies, I’ve been on a kick lately with a decent string of short film compilation feature, starting with the latest entry from the popular “V/H/S” franchise, “V/H/S/Beyond.”  Next up takes us back to 2006 with “Trapped Ashes,” a campy horror anthology that not only brought together legendary genre directors, such as “Friday the 13th’s” Sean S. Cunningham, “Gremlins’s” Joe Dante, “The Matrix” visual effects arts John Gaeta, “Silent Night, Deadly Night 3:  Better Watch Out’s” Monte Hellman, and the late director of “Altered States,” Ken Russell, but also brings together aged, yet still legendary, familiar faced actors that have since past that short time between 2006 and 2025   Dennis Bartok wrote the anthology piece and is his brainchild, producing the film.

Those aforesaid actors have a combined nearly centuries (plural!) of experience with careers spanning an average of 50 years each.  Henry Gibson (“The ‘burbs”), John Saxon (“A Nightmare on Elm Street”), and Dick Miller (“Gremlins”) all together in one film.  Granted, Dick Miller’s cameo was so short that all three were only together for a brief scene but the trio alone should bring in genre fans to witness Henry Gibson in a persona he does best, a round faced under stark white hair and with puppy dog eyes that draws one closer to his innocence only to have the rug snatched right from under you when he turns sinisterly dark as the seemingly harmless tour guide.  Saxon also plays true to his conventional character archetype as a wise-cracking tough guy too cool for school; this time, he plays a screenwriter haunted by his own betrayal toward his best friend while being infatuated with a bewitching beautiful woman.  Unlike most horror anthologies, “Trapped Ashes’” individual tales contain mostly the same cast as the wraparound with Saxon, Jayce Bartok (“Founder’s Day”), Lara Harris (“The Dogfighters”), Rachel Veltri (“Pray for Morning”), Michèle-Barbara Pelletier (“Brainscan”), and Scott Lowell as the tour guests with personal hell to tell.  The heterogeneous group convey their supernatural-laced anecdotes that mingle inside the context of their being or life whether body image, marriage, friendships, and childhood, subjective intimacies that shape their excruciating experiences that, if audiences see them on screen for the first time, wouldn’t be clear how deeply burdened or troubled they are at first glance.  Once the story is told, moods and personalities shift, or perhaps seemingly normal habits are made clearer, and this is made possible by the eclectic bunch of actors to carve away their characters’ exterior shells to see who they really portray.  Ryo Ishibashi (“Audition”), Yoshinori Hiruma, Mina E. Mina (“Eastern Promises”), Winston Rekert (“Eternal Evil”), Ken Russell, Tahmoh Penikett (“Trick r’ Treat”), Tygh Runyan (“Disturbing Behavior”), Amelia Cooke (“Species III”), Luke Macfarlane, Deanna Milligan, and Matreya Fedor (“Slither”).

Riffling through the obvious camp “Trapped Ashes” touts very proudly, there are nuggets surrounding the unsavory themes.  Body dysphoria within “The Girl with Golden Breasts” is one of these topics, where an actress feels compelled to enhance her bosom for better, younger roles, and that speaks the relevance ill of the movie industry’s perverse tidings of late as actors and actresses continue to fill, inject, scar, and manipulate themselves into being their unnatural self to satisfy producers, execs, and audience likes and expectations when, in reality, hurts nothing but themselves.  Dissatisfaction marriage, or perhaps better labeled stagnant marriage, leads into invasive third party to sate long neglect passion and in this case, that third party is an ancient Japanese demon named Seishin (Japanese for Spirit) who lures the wife’s sexual appetite down to the pits of the netherworld.  From there, themes love triangles, obsession, cheating, and dysfunctional family structures formulate a pod of personal pate smeared with victimization, the victims being the storytellers stuck in the Desmond Hacker’s Hysteria backlot house.  “Trapped Ashes” isn’t about being victim, it’s more about playing the victim and those playing may not be victims of their own tales at all that adds a morsel of supernaturality to the recipe that changed the course of the idiosyncratic anecdotes that are close to their emotions and mental well-beings as well as proximally physically hazardous. 

Our first time covering the Dennis Bartok and Craig Rogers founded Deaf Crocodile release and it doesn’t disappointment with a sleek new 2-Disc 4K UHD and Blu-ray of “Trapped Ashes,” scanned and restored in 4K for its Blu-ray debut.  Presented in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio, the Deaf Crocodile UHD is HVEC encoded, 2160p Dolby Vision, BD66 and the Blu-ray is AVC encoded, 1080p high definition, BD50.  For an early 2000 production, “Trapped Ashes” doesn’t have the digital veneer of early 2000s film besides some visual effects work of the image manipulation drooping effect.  The extra pixels of UHD really brighten and elevate the image to today’s standards to surface the most inconspicuous details lost in standard definition.  Color saturation and skin tones appear natural and organic with no signs of compression issues or imbedded problems with the digital equipment.  Depth has really opened up in areas like the funhouse illusions of the Hysteria house in the wraparound segment and or in “Twin” when reality of the situation is made clear to put the explanation in one single medium-to-medium closeup frame.  Blu-ray copy mimics a lot same UHD accolades with a less fine tune edge around the background.  The English DTS-HD 5.1 surround sound is the only audio option available on both formats.  More than ample, the lossless provides a deepening immersion the deeper you go into stories with balanced side and back channels complimented by an even-keeled LFE to register the bass near the front while whispery events hover around a surrounding backside, such as with Cunningham’s “Jibaku’s” drawing-in hallucination moment of a Japanese painting that instills reverberating echoes and Shepherd tones.  English SDH subtitles are available.  Bonus features include threw new interviews – Dennis Bartok moderates a feature-length, online platform interview with director John Gaeta, cast members Jayce Bartok, Scott Lowell, and Lisi Tribble, producers Yuki Yoshikawa and Yushifumi Hosoya, and cinematographer Zoran Popvic, a second feature-length interview with cast members Tahmoh Penikett and Tygh Runyan and production designer Robb Wilson King, and the last approx. 40-minute interview is with producers Mike Frislev of Nomadic Pictures.  Extras do not stop there with a director’s cut of Monte Hellman’s “Stanley’s Girlfriend,” the original full-length cut of Ken Russell’s “The Girl with the Golden Breasts,” and a 5-part making-of with cast and crew archive interviews, a new visual essay Hollywood Parasite:  Hysteria in Trapped Ashes by journalist and physical media expert Ryan Verrill and film professor Dr. Will Dodson.  This is the so-called standard release compared to its Deluxe Limited Edition companion release, but this release is also pretty deluxe physically.  There’s no limited O-slipcover but the unique, almost 70’s-eseque cover design is appealing yet simple with a reverse side depicting an image of the wrapround characters inside the Hysteria house dining room or commune area.  The UHD and Blu-ray overlap each other in their differentiated locking mechanism on the ride of the clear Amaray case while the left insert portion holds a Deaf Crocodile QR code for access of the transcribed bonus content.  This release has the rated R cut with a runtime of 104 minutes and is region encoded A playback only.

Last Rites: Anthologies can be the antithesis of horror – building and dropping tension, an innate broken narrative, different stylistic choices that disunify the entire film, etc., but if campy enough, if not taken too seriously, if cast John Saxon, Henry Gibson, and Dick Miller, “Trapped Ashes” can find a home in the genre and in our collections with a new and extra-loaded Deaf Crocodile 4K UHD and Blu-ray set.

4K and Blu-ray “Trapped Ashes” from Deaf Crocodile. Available Here!

The Dying Baltic Traditions Live in the Ashes of EVIL. “Cult Girls” (Umbrella Entertainment / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

The pagan Cult, the Golden Path, remains nearly all that is left of the ancient practice as Lithuania becomes one of the last countries to be converted to Christianity in the late 14th century.  Led by an archaic, yet powerful, goddess named Ragana, the Golden Path promises to flourish once again with the power of death, reincarnation, and control through sordid misdeeds.  When Dalia and her two young sisters become prepped for a ritual of an important role in the cult, potentially leading them down the path of sex and sacrifice, a traitorous follower helps the sisters attempt to escape their emmeshing fate as the police raid the Golden Path compound ensuing a firefight that leads to the death Ragana and Dalia’s getaway, but her sisters are kidnapped and held captive by the remaining cult members.  Years later and riddled with guilt, Dalia must know what happened to her sisters and she tracks down a death metal cultist, Moloch, who seemingly has a connection to Golden Path, with the help of Samoth, a black metal fanatic, but Moloch forestry hermit lifestyle cuts off Dalia and Samoth from the rest of the world and the convicted arsonist against all things Christianity may have more up his sleeve than what meets the eye.

With a title that sounds like an all-girl goth band from the grunge era of the 1990’s, or maybe even more so from the “Scooby Doo” franchise (Hex Girls anyone?), “Cult Girls” summons the actuality of being an acute quasi-historical and dark fantasy thriller hailing from the Ozploitation capital of the world, Australia.  “Cult girls” is the second, non-documentary film from “The Matrix’ inspired “Narcosys” director, Mark Bakaitis, who directed, wrote, and edited his the multi-location sophomore film that has on location scenes from not only in Australia, but also in Lithuania, at the notable Hill of Crosses landmark, and in the indiscernible urban locations of Germany.  Bakaitis serves as producer alongside executive producer Douglas Kaplan of the diverse arts platform production company, All Edge Entertainment, based in Santa Monica, California. 

The Australian production casts an American to star as Ragana, the brood matriarch destined to rejuvenate Golden Path’s permanence, with “V’s” very own Jane Badler.  Badler brings an international presence to the feature and isn’t a stranger to films from the down under.  With the actress’s soul-seducing cutting eyes and demonic empress allure, the New York born Badler exacts Ragana’s clutching strength as an underground Pagan seeking unlimited decadent power.  However, Badler is overshadowed by the timorousness of Dalia whose polar opposite presence is granted a more favorable chunk of screen time.  Finnish born Saara Lamberg plays the humbled Dalia, living her life out of a covenant while searching out the cult that once almost stitched her into the sew of sleazy affairs to unearth the whereabouts of her younger sisters.  Dalia’s a bit of a dull principle with no substantiated efforts in finding her siblings and it isn’t until Samoth stalks her one night, recognizing the Golden Path’s symbol tattooed on her wrist and offering his manhunt services to find the expelled Moloch, an exaggerated black metal anti-Christianity anarchist in a saturating performance by Albert Goikhman.  In the middle, masked brutes, half naked women, and, fallen by the waist side, Dalia’s sisters in standalone plot point narratives that, as far as story structure goes, does nothing to motivate the narrative other than be an ostentatious aesthetic of locations and debauchery.  “Cult Girls” rounds out the cast with Tony Markulin (“MurderDrome”), Algias Karazija, Dean Kirkright, a handful of Bakaitis’s family, and Simay Argento, a distant relative to Dario Argeno playing a Cult Auntie in the film.

“Cult Girls” borders being avant-garde of an unfiltered auteur’s will in a mesh of artistic polishes and prose dialogue, but the film slides into being more of an 83 minute music video over staying it’s welcome and drudges through a repetitive stylistic cycle to an almost nearly unwatchable extent.  Yet, “Cult Girls” somehow manages to retain attention despite the chewy acting and it’s ambling story that hits a dam wall of uncertainly of where the script should head. Bakaitis shoulders the story for modern Gothicism tapped with half naked occultist, sometimes bathing in blood, and a plague of nightmare imagery that director of photography Trent Schneider tunes into well with noir vitality despite being the cinematographer’s debut feature film, but through the shiny exterior of a handful of solid mise-en-scene work, “Cult Girls” numbs the impact of the soul corrupting Pagan syndicate, that may or may not be shrouded with supernatural foundations, and the anti-Christian propaganda with half-baked violence from geriatric men, masked with Dia de los Muertos style masks, able to be kingpins of an untouchable prostitution ring façade for their occult sacrifices in broad public without a bat of an eyelash.  Granted, prostitution is likely legal in Germany and Lithuania so authorities might turn a blind eye, but brothels are a convenient opportunity for police investigations. “Cult Girls” treasures the fact of Lithuania’s languishing heritage without being overly filmic heresy by blending in shaded sleaze and death, but there lies no story in Dalia’s unenthusiastic search for her sisters in a much more preacherly themed death metal horror that confuses cult with religion.

 

Apocalyptic reincarnations and traditional folklores collide in Mark Bakaitis’s “Cult Girls” on DVD now from Umbrella Entertainment. The Australian release is a single layer DVD with region 4, PAL encoded format, presented in a widescreen 2.40:1 aspect ratio. Trent Schneider’s keen eye captures a grim fairytale surface of black magic masochism and, at the same time, breathtaking in the pure nature scenes, but the imagery is mostly in devoid of richer color that lingers around a bluish-gray monochrome tone and struggles with hazy details, especially around facial features, that smoothly fuzz over. The English, German, and Lithuanian Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound mix battens down with shiplap genres of traditional Lithuania folk and modern metal from composing sound designer Erin McKimm, implementing the traditional songs of Lithuania sung by the Melbourne-Lithuania community singers, The Lost Clogs. Industrial action fills in every nook and cranny of the remaining score with decent range and depth of ambiance. While the dialogue is prominent and clear, there are spelling errors and tiny text issues with the English subtitles when the narrative lands in Germany and Lithuania. The DVD’s bonus features includes audio commentary, making of featurettes with cast and crew interviews, Bakaitis’s short film, “Mercy Kill” that serves one of the founding themes for “Cult Girls,” and music videos directed by Mark Bakaitis. For an Australian film, “Cult Girls” will feel more worldly, unlike anything else that comes out of Australia, and have partisan propaganda against Christianity, but in the end, the insidious Pagan evil, on the precipice of resurrecting, wearies on, like a tireless sermon of doom.