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They Went To Look For Their Parents. They Found EVIL Instead. “Feed the Gods” reviewed (MVD Visual / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on



Brothers Will and Kris just lost their foster mother to a sudden stroke but the bereaving moment between their clashing personalities only lasts a minute of solace before they’re back at each other’s throats.  When Will finds a strange VHS tape in their foster mother’s last will and testament belongings, recorded in a remote mountain town, they witness their parents on the tape.  The brothers, along with the encouragement and accompaniment of Kris’s girlfriend Brit, travel to the small tourist-sparse town that seems to have been all but forgotten and abandoned by the local residents.  Instead of locating their parents, the strange, remaining locals hoodwink them in believing their quaint backwoods town is quiet and unsuspecting as they chain the brothers and Brit to a sacrificial pole then waiting until a town-terrorizing beast that craves an offering for the townsfolk’s freedom feasts upon them. 

Always on the hunt for a good, or at this point even a mediocre, bigfoot horror, coming across Braden Croft’s “Feed the Gods” seemed like an stimulating option that dabbled in quasi-bigfoot lore rather than a full blown assault of Sasquatch bombardment.  The 2014 Canadian film is written and directed by the “Hemorrhage” filmmaker as Croft stays steadfast in the thrills and chills genre.  The elusive bigfoot is not only hard to capture sight of in the deep forest undergrowth, but also difficult to find sight of in a coherent, well-made film without an inglorious narrative that doesn’t respect Bigfoot’s towering eternal myth and legend.  Hard to believe, I know, but the hairy humanoid has crumbled down to nearly a gutless pelt of its former big screen self.  Every rare blood red moon, a fiercely gory 2006 “Abominable” or a kid-friendly and effects driven “Harry and the Hendersons” comes to our salivating attention and scratches the itch until the next dumpster fire Sasquatchsploitation crapper.  Keep reading for how Croft’s “Feed the Gods” fairs amongst the fray on the Bleiberg Entertainment subdivision, Compound B (“Dahmer,” “Monster Man”), presented Random Bench (“Sisters of the Plague”) production.

Having a hand in producing “Feed the Gods” as well as having a lead role is Albert Wesker himself, Shawn Roberts (“Resident Evil” franchise), playing the half-wit older brother, Will.  Roberts’s simpleton performance can be amusing, even when dangling nonsense like his bad German swashbuckler accent, as he runs around half the film with barely any clothes on which I’m sure will give some audience a thrill that’s not horror related.  I prefer Roberts when he’s “Tucker & Dale-ing” bad guys left and coolly wriggles his way through the forest and cabins to save his more common sensed younger brother, Kris, played by Tyler Johnston.  Will and Kris constantly butt heads and Roberts and Johnston make good on the sibling rivalry effectively communicating verbally and in body language their characters’ unsatisfactory levels with each other.  Some character developments, for example Kris medicating to relieve stress, never properly fleshes out after Will and Brit discover the medicine bottle, bringing no turmoil to his relationship with the obviously pissed Brit (“Kingdom Hospital’s” Emily Tennant).  In fact, neither character grows beyond their already initially established selves, leaving a lot on the table to be desired.  Characters are interesting enough, the plight is there, the need for growth is there, actors have unearthed the personalities with an X-Acto knife and yet the narrative executive fails them, revving us up only to hit the brakes right when the light turns green.  We definitely gain more out of townsfolk in Emma (Britt Irvin, “She Who Must Burn”), Hank (Lane Edwards, “Mortal Remains”), Curtis (Edward Witzke, “The Predator”), and Pete (Aleks Paunovic, “Snowpiercer” television series) who have either root themselves as they are or struggle with a change of heart that innately arc the character completely.  Rounding out the cast is Tara Wilson, Christine Willes, Garry Chalk, Robin Nielson, and Bill Croft.

Well, my search continues for exceptional bigfoot tales of terror after my viewing of “Feed the Gods” raised a mountain of questions without sating the curiosity.  The story itself is interesting of a dilapidated and antiquated town, on the cusp of timeless ruin, are hostage to a wilderness beast that requires a human meal and for each sacrifice, a ticket is granted to a local to decamp the town, but who physically grants the ticket?  Who are the people enforcing the barrier around the town?  These are just a couple of examples that go unanswered against the backstory of the wild forest creature who was fed small animals by the natives long ago, but when the white settlers purged the land of the red plague, the beast starting devour the white man ever since.  “Feed the Gods” becomes a that classic tale of lifelong consequence where the sins of ancestors becomes the sins of their children, but there had to be this covert group, who we never meet aside from a mean ole rifle-toting farmer at the preface scene, that kept the townspeople in check for generations.  Death special effects are routine but soluble to digest and are well done, though too dark at times the locations are aplenty between cabins, caves, and forests, and, as said, the acting holds its own, but Croft’s story feels terribly unfinished with an acute cut to credits.  As soon as creature presents itself, a man in full furball suit complete with passable prosthetics and teeth, standing face-to-face with our heroes for the first time ever, the protagonists run away in separate directions and that is where the practically ends.  After you pick your jaw up off the ground in disbelief, you’re quickly try to piece together what, where, when, why and how of how Croft that this route was plausible enough to properly finish a film.  After scoping out the bonus content’s behind-the-scenes, even the creature designer Travis Shewchuk was taken aback by Croft’s sudden alterations to have a shadowy monster, silhouetted mostly in the dark, become brilliantly lit up in day sequences at the last minute and had to scramble to figure out how to make it work.  Adding another noticeable layer is the heroes and the revealed creature obviously never share the same scene with slapdash editing to make the appearance as such. 

Serve up “Feed the Gods” as your main course plated with Sasquatch mystery and with a side dish of buff Shawn Roberts in his underwear coming to you as a MVD Visual Blu-ray release on the distributor’s Marquee Collection sublabel.  The region free BD25 is presented in HD, 1080p, of a widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio.  For a 2014 film, the contrast between day and night scenes are, frankly, day and night with the darker framed action less than desirable discernibility. You really have to have every single light source completely turned off to spy the faint silhouettes. Day scenes settle for better but the high definition in the detail personally feels a little soft, feeding into more of upper tier standard levels of resolution experience with lush foliage surrounding. Picture is not bad, but it’s not great is the end message here. The English language DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround sound mix bare little to separate itself from the other audio option, a 2.0 LPCM stereo. You hear the difference in a more vivacious, if not voracious, soundtrack, but the hike never extends beyond that to the dialogue or ambient tracks. Aside from the soundtrack that oversteps at times, dialogue is rather clean and clear. No apparent damage to either audio or visual aspects but that’s fairly expected with any digital playback. Special features include writer-director Braden Croft and associate producer-creature designer Travis Shewchuk on a feature overlay commentary track, a “Feed the Gods” behind the scenes featurette in HD which plays out reminiscently between Croft and Shewchuk, the original theatrical trailer, and reversible Blu-ray cover art. Call me jaded by my previous down in the dumpster Bigfoot film reviews, but “Feed the Gods” has none of that deity staying power to rise the Sasquatch game out of the pits of despair; in fact, “Feed the Gods” only adds more fuel to the fire in another pernicious hit to our mean and nasty, rarely lovable, man-thing, Bigfoot.

“Feed the Gods” on Blu-ray.  Click here to purchase at Amazon.com!

Watch William Shatner Shell EVIL With Explosive Munition! “Devil’s Revenge” reviewed!

Posted by Steven Lewis on


Obsessed in locating a relic that has cursed his family for generations, archeologist John Brock desperately searches the cave his difficult father’s dispatches him to to locate and destroy the artifact that has plagued his lineage. His last expedition kills a man and John begins to question his father’s ranting and whether a curse actually exists, but when a mysterious accident sends him to the hospital, horrifyingly devilish visions nearly kills him in the unconscious state. As he snaps back to reality, John is hellbent on ridding the relic’s clinging evil and his family joins him for one last expedition to the cave that’s also a portal to hell and the Devil is waiting for him.

The above synopsis sounds terribly convoluted for such a rectilinear plot of the William Shatner story of demonic spelunking entitled, “Devil’s Revenge,” from 2019. The “Devil’s Domain” and “Halloween Pussy Trap Kill! Kill!” director, Jared Cohn, tackles the position’s obstacle of frustrations working with a rumored overly difficult Shatner as well as flushing out a cohesive story suited strappingly as can be on establishing a hell bound narrative with little backstory mythology from a script by Maurice Hurley, a writer on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” What’s unusual is Hurley isn’t credited at the end or on the backcover of the Blu-ray and it’s a project he supposedly collaborated with Shatner up until his death in 2014 at the age of 75. Luckily, Cohn’s on the record saying Shatner was professional and precise, a true credit to his skill. “Star Trek” does become a constant motif not inside the frames, but more behind the camera with the cast, including Shatner, and Hurley who is the creative parent of one of outer space’s biggest nemesis, The Borg. “Devil’s Revenge” is a far cry from the final frontier, seizing on the border fringes of the underworld that seeps above ground.

Trekkie fans will appreciate the Captain Kirk star’s uncharacteristic doomsday pessimism and grand finale grenade launching that turns demons into canon fodder. Shatner is a savage as John’s fanatical father, bombarding his grown, near middle-aged, son with constant disappointment and disparagement that becomes one source of John’s (“Blood Lake: Attack of the Killer Lamprey’s” Jason Brooks) dire motivations to risk his family inside the gaping mouth of the netherworld, a questionable and ill-advised move especially when death is evident. Brooks is a career television and TV movie actor who can settle right into a third rate production with ease without batting a condemnatory eye lash. While Shatner and Brooks’ one-sided family role quibbles over languishing curses and John’s inability to man-up for the situation goes into the hilariously bad category, the second “Star Trek” star, Jeri Ryan from the “Voyager” series, lands a subdued role as John’s foot mat wife who just goes with the punches without making too much of a wake serving as John’s better half and reasonable conscious. Ryan and Brooks’ on-screen relationship is a supposed marital one, but the chemistry just isn’t present and wanders into questionability with their relationship status. The script’s backstory on John and wife is obliquely exposed through exposition without any of the visual depth and discharge of fleshing out a better dynamic for Ryan and Brooks to work with in building their characters. The remainder of the cast list includes Ciara Hanna (also from “Blood Lake: Attack of the Killer Lamprey”) and Robert Scott Wilson (“American Fright Fest”) as John’s college(?) aged kids who add little substance to the narrative.

Without a better way of putting this, there’s much to demerit against “Devil’s Revenge.” The concept is sound: a disarrayed and browbeaten archeologist must locate an evil transmitting relic from destroying his family with a everlasting demonic curse. Sounds good, right? Combine that with Shatner blasting demons to smithereens with a multi-barrel grenade launcher, the potential for a solid and fun viewing experience would be a no-brainer. However, what’s sold is the made in China version of what’s being marketed. Hard to imagine Maurice Hurley’s, the man who helped re-pioneered space exploration and developed The Borg adversaries, script was so out of whack and had gone into various limp curvatures that I don’t expect all blame should point to him for the posthumous misstep as the direction is emphatically coarse and incoherent of too many ideas without any connective tissue much unlike boldly going where no man has gone before. In fact, many filmmakers have gone this route before by taking all sense of a rounded script and dissolving it the way Cohn does. The path Cohn ultimately takes is to splice loads of unnecessary and repetitive flash backs into the story to try and retain into viewers over and over again the events that conjured hell’s minions to surface. I’m sure we saw the same scenes at least five or six times from beginning to end, even during the opening credits. There’s also a looseness about how this curse attaches itself to John’s family from long ago that inexplicably goes without being conveyed and we find ourselves asking, why these people? What have they’ve been suffering through all these years? What makes them important? The curse seems rather recent rather than historic and for John’s family legacy to go uncharted just poses too many unanswered questions. What’s fundamentally right is Inan, the head demon, who represents the best parts of the “Devil’s Revenge’s” netherworld rock and roll presence with a large and ghastly humanoid with blank, fiery eyes and a protruding clasping mouth and the visual effects surrounding Inan are pretty good despite their some minuscule glossy bad aftertaste. An aftertastes that extends into Shatner using the grenade launcher with the goofiest of detonations in an unrealistic distance between him and his targets without so much of a single piece of shrapnel grazing his well postured gun-toting stance.

MVDVisual distributes “Devil’s Revenge,” a Cleopatra Entertainment production, onto a region free, special edition Blu-ray and soundtrack CD combo. The Blu-ray is presented in a widescreen, 2.78:1 aspect ratio, in a BD-25 with a 1080p transfer. “Devil’s Revenge” implores more than the natural lighting used through much of the 98 minute runtime and while natural lighting isn’t a flaw in any sense, Ryan Broomberg’s cinematography falls flat, uninspired that doesn’t represent well the presentiment eventualities past, present, or future. Technically, “Devil’s Revenge” isn’t soft around the details albeit minor banding in closer quarters of the cave. Practicality versus the computer imagery really do go head-to-head between Vincent Guastini’s (“Art of the Dead”) special effects and the visual effects team of Eric Chase (“The Black Room”) and Mike Rotella (“The Predator”). The detailed rubber body suits and the composited explosions akin to the military hellfire creatures were bombarded with in monsters movies from the 50’s are of the campy independent film culture and purgative of any expectations of the Devil actually making good on revenge. The English language Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound audio is not as lossy as the usual Cleopatra Entertainment Blu-ray releases and certainly regales with the theatrics of a William Shatner monologue (can’t you tell I love me some Shatner). Range and depth are concurrent appropriate with each other and dialogue is clean and clear. Surprisingly and rarely does a Cleopatra Entertainment releases goes without a soundtrack intertwined with the score that contracts their signed artists from parent company Cleopatra Records; instead, we receive a brooding industrial score composed by Jürgen Engler, co-founder of German punk band “Male” and “Die Krupps,” which can be gorged on as the film’s coveted silver-lining. Luckily and conventionally for a Cleopatra special edition release, an un-cursed 13-track CD of Jürgen Engler’s score accompanies the feature Blu-ray. That being the height of the special features, other bonus material includes a picture slideshow and theatrical trailer. “Devil’s Revenge” won’t shudder your bones to milky pigments of sawdusts and will likely strikeout with fans, as perhaps the Devil’s actual revenge for portraying him so ill-conceived. Still, I suggest checking out the Jürgen Engler’s gnawing and insidious industrial score, a gleaming highlight for sure.

Check it out for yourself! “Devil’s Revenge” on Blu-ray.

One Tough Cop Taking on Evil Cyborgs! “Nemesis” review!

Posted by Steven Lewis on


In the year 2027, enhanced humanistic cyborgs virtually run the planet with the renowned L.A.P.D. being no exception. Alex Rain, one of L.A.’s finest brute cops, is partially cyborg himself, but the essence of his soul remains human intact while his synthetic flesh cloaks the icy machine beneath. After tracking down suspected cyborg terrorists and almost losing his life in the struggle to stop them, Alex questions his dwindling humanity, leading him down a path of unfulfilling revenge and botched smuggling before his former employer, the L.A.P.D. commissioner named Farnsworth, tracks him down and uses deadly coercion to force Alex as a pawn in dangerous covert mission. The burnt out cop is thrusted back into the fray of his former life when Farnsworth orders him to retrieve data from the treacherous female cyborg, Jared, who was once Alex’s partner and lover, before she hands over the sensitive information to a group of cyborg terrorists who call themselves The Red Army Hammerheads. With a micro bomb implanted near his heart as insurance, Alex has no choice but to accept the assignment before detonation in 3 days and with his time running out, finding Jared isn’t the problem as Alex comes to realize that deception has convoluted the stakes and nothing is who or what they seem.

Albert Pyun’s 1992 cyberpunk action-thriller “Nemesis” is an explosive-heavy, science fiction existentialism film never before seen, or even aware of, by this reviewer, but the ground-worked narrative has remained a constant piece of foundation in being the byproduct of inspiration extracted from other cyberpunk films of its kind, such as “Robocop,” “Blade Runner,” and “The Terminator.” “Nemesis” has a presence much to the tune of another film, “Cyborg,” starring John-Claude Van Damme and that inclination would inevitably make a world of sense when the awe-striking epiphany lands that Pyun also directed that film, also utilizing some of the same actors for his early 90’s cybernetic dystopian feature. In reviewing Pyun’s credits, the assumption can be made that the filmmaker has a sturdy hard-on for the intertwining of mankind and machine as not only did the director write and direct “Cyborg” and helmed “Nemesis,” but went on to be a part of, whether director, writer, or producer, of four more “Nemesis” sequels with a fifth being produced and shot, but scrapped in post-production due to Pyun’s flailing mental health. Rebecca Charles fed the scribal beast as “Nemesis’” screenwriter, along with penning “Nemesis 2: Nebula” and “Nemesis 3: Time Lapse.”

Alex Rain is a cold cut character, sliced thick like a cool cucumber on top of a hard to wedge salad. Rain’s iciness symbolizes his downtrodden humanity status and with each part of his body shattered from destruction, he becomes one step closer to being an automaton with eye brows. B-movie action star Olivier Guner essentially make a big career breakthrough with “Nemesis” as his sophomore feature. Guner’s military background suitably solidifies his physique as a workaholic cyborg cop while also presenting a rough cut speech impediment that’s very straight forward and without emotion. Some would say that Gruner’s approach fits his half-human, half-toaster oven character and I would say that would be correct. The 80’s and 90’s saw a crowded entry list of action stars, including Jean-Claude Van Damme, Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and many others in various degrees of success – and Olivier Gruner became one of those faces that had since then been lost over the years; Gruner’s performance in “Nemesis” lacked pizazz which could have been the contributing factor to his success, but the monotonic, unflattering one-liners and blank face stare didn’t spark any fires on top of his average muscular frame. His performance, to keep with the fire motif, didn’t provide the oxygen, a combustible, or a flammable source to quickly set ablaze a trail for semi-popularity amongst his peers and that’s where “Nemesis” falters in entertainment value. Comparatively, “Trancers” franchise actor, Tim Thomerson, is full of range and vigor as an concealing Commissioner Farnsworth. Thomerson, in his early 40’s at the time of filming, displayed an impressive physicality to his role, keeping up nicely with his onscreen rival. Farnsworth, from the get-go, reeks of desperation when pressuring Alex to do his bidding and Thomerson really nails the part and can switch on the proverbial dime as an egocentric field operative when chasing Alex through the jungles on the Hawaii set. The night and day performance is a stark contrast between the two actors. What’s mostly disappointing about “Nemesis’” cast that favorable characters come and go; some the characters a pinned with terrific actors such as Shang Tsung himself, “Mortal Kombat’s” Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, as the leader of The Red Army Hammerheads and the late, great Brion James (“Red Heat”) chirping a lousy German accent of the Commissioner’s right hand man. The cast has many other recognizable names that, again, come and go, including a strung out looking Merle Kennedy (“Night of the Demons 2”) as Max Impact, Marjorie Monaghan as the algorithmic beauty Jared, Vincent Klyn (“Cyborg”) as a disposable bodyguard, an extremely fit and nude Deborah Shelton (“Body Double”), voice actor Nicholas Guest (“Dollman”), brief cameo by Jackie Earle Haley (“Watchmen”), a fresh faced version of “The Predator’s” Thomas Jane, and Thomas Jane’s bare ass.

The financial backing was obviously designated for a particular department in the “Nemesis” workshop and that department was special effects. Explosions, rotoscoping, stop-motion, sculpture, implosions, practical effects and makeup are just the tip of the iceberg. Frayed wires and eye ball cannons are the elegant touch that makes “Nemesis” a cult favorite and bring substance to a clunky storyline and divisively dynamic acting. However, not all the specials are pinpoint precision and grounded by reality. The one scene that stands above the rest when Farnsworth is hot in pursuit of Alex and Max and he’s shelling off rounds of a shotgun, standing relatively still, blasting away without moving the barrel around to compensate for his prey’s length of distance gained or even when they decided to make quick pivots in direction. Somehow, the rounds hit very close to Alex and Max and that’s not all, they even explode like a single stick of TNT. ACME must have had a hand in the special effects department because the scene sure was loony. Yet, the implosion of a monolithic silo was uber-impressive, well-executed, and really ritzy for the silver screen.

Imperial Entertainment’s “Nemesis” infiltrates onto another home video release, a region free, dual DVD and Hi-Def 1080p Blu-ray format release, from MVDVisual under their MVD Rewind Collection series. Sheathed by a slick, retro-grade slipcover with familiar art, reminiscent of the now decade old Sterling DVD release, the special collector’s edition provides two aspect ratios, an anamorphic widescreen 2.35:1 and a widescreen 1.78:1. This MVDVisual Release has stellar detail in the texture and in framing that are exhibited in various tint shades, such as yellow and blue, and eventually cough up toward a more natural look into the second act when Alex reaches the rough neighborhood of Shang Loo, Java. Even though the visual compositions and mold work doesn’t pop with color and are a bit fuzzy, “Nemesis” is a product of it’s time, the early 1990’s and you can’t fault Pyun’s film for that. The English 5.1 surround sound is beautiful. So beautiful and potent, in fact, that you can actually understand Olivier Gruner’s mumbling, putting dialogue for all characters right into the front row while offering a stimulating range and depth of ambience sound, an unlimited variety of explosions, and plenty of miscellany cyborg hubbub. Other language are available, including French, German, as well as English in 2.0 stereo and there are English and German SDH subtitles available The Blu-ray bonus features include new interviews with producer Eric Karson and director Albert Pyun, “Nemesis 2.0” the director’s cut with Albert Pyun audio commentary, and original theatrical trailer. The DVD is the director’s cut and also includes the Japanese cut with Japanese subtitles burnt-in. Bonus features for the DVD include introductions by the director Albert Pyun and star Olivier Gruner, an afterword by Albert Pyun, a behind-the-scenes featurette, an interview with star Olivier Gruner, the making of segment involving the hefty special effects, stunt work, and visual effects, a featurette entitled “Killcount,” a behind-the-scenes photo gallery, TV spots, Key Art Photo gallery, and, top it all off, a mini-poster inside the casing. Inside a killer definitive, two-format and disc set from MVDvisual, “Nemesis” hones in on the existentialism notion of what being human actually means to each and every one of us through the bombardment of gun fights and jumbo explosions on top of a conglomerate cyborg coup that peaks with hard bodies and even harder viewer contemplation.