Tag Archives: thriller

Death Penalized EVIL Returns to Wreak Havoc on Young Women. “The Stay Awake” reviewed! (Cheezy Movies / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Can You Keep Your Eyes Open at “The Stay Awake?”  On DVD now!

America, 1969. William John Brown brutally slays and sexually assaults 11 women. Before a judge, the serial killer is sentenced to death by gas chamber where his last words proclaim him as the Angel of Darkness sent Earthbound to ravage women. Nearly 20-years later in 1988, the St. Mary’s School for Girls in Europe is holding a stay awake event where a handful of students and one chaperone stay up the entire night as a fundraiser for their school. Dark and nearly vacant, the school basks in an eerie haven for the murderous William John Brown’s returning spirit seeking new souls of the softer sex. Determined to protect the girls at all costs, chaperone Trish Walton will not stop protecting the frightened girls until the entity is destroyed but when the ethereal malevolent spirit takes shape of a monstrous rodent with outstretching attack tentacles and psychokinetic glowing eyes, chances of survival are bleak.

Malevolent forces crossing oceans to death grip the innocent are films that are few and far in between as most transatlantic terror usually stays put, regionalized and localized to keep an authentic aural blend of superstition and history. Director John Bernard attempts to go against the grain with a small crowd of filmmakers who either overcame the parochial provenance and succeeded tenfold or became lost in foreign land narrative and failed miserably.  Bernard and, assumed brother, Johan Bernard co-write “The Stay Awake,” a South African mixed lot of horror elements brewed together into a supernatural schlocker that’s one-half dark and stormy night, gloomy Church Gothicism and one-half final girl survival slasher but equal parts outlandishly overexerted ghost thriller stretching across multiple continents.  “The Stay Awake” is a product of Heyns Film & Television Productions, produced by Thys Heyns of South African action-thriller flicks, as well as produced by Paul Raleigh, the producer of the “From Dusk Till Dawn” and the notable Millennium Films cofounder Avi Lerner, of “American Ninja” and “The Expendables” franchises, in one of his earliest credits from 1988.

Though the story begins in America and mostly takes place in Europe, the cast is comprised of mostly South Africans trying to pass their accents for British English that is more like a rotating centrifuge of South African sub-accents.  Shirley Jane Harris (“The Most Dangerous Woman Alive”) spearheads the cast of principals with an extremely proclaiming protagonist, delivering lines with flatfeet and flat inflection that makes her one of the more forgettable final girls.  Her foe compares just as bland with a grunting, bodiless entity floating through corridors and hiding behind indoor plants (why would an imperceptible spirit need to hide behind anything at all?) before manifesting into what looks like a giant, big-eyed, and built on steroids rodent that then shows the William John Brown (Lindsay Reardon, “The Masque of the Red Death”) in side profile speaking in omnipresent and menacingly through the beast to taunt his prey.  The script allows just enough the group of young, private school girls to standout cliquishly, contain an ounce of contempt for each other, and underpin some form of individualism to make them retain some interest in their wellbeing.  However, most of the buildup that’s created to antagonize or unify between their personalities ultimately fizzle out into resembling something along the lines of kowtowing sheep or lemmings in more ways than one.  “The Stay Awake” caffeinates with a sizeable cast including Tanay Gordon (“Hellgate”), Jayne Hutton, Michelle Carey, Maxine John (“Howling IV: The Original Nightmare”), Hellie Oeschger, Joanna Rowlands (“Armageddon: The Final Challenge”) as the damsels, Bart Fouche (“Monster Hunter”), Clinton Ephron, Warren Du Preez, and Pierre Jacobs as the imposing boys, and Ken Marshall (“Return of the Family Man”) as the school’s night caretaker.

John and Johan Bernard’s logline for “The Stay Awake” likely looked appealing on paper but a full story treatment begs to differ with an inscrutable concept from start-to-finish.  “The Stay Awake” wades in generalities, oversimplifying locations and periods such as “America, 1969” and “Europe, 1988.”  The setup meat in between the disjointed times periods sets up a standard yet effective backstory for the killer, William John Brown, with a Judge’s voiceover of all his brutal transgressions, flashbacks of his victims at the death scene, and a slow walk down the corridor to the gas chamber that clearly denote him as the villain but then accentuates his supernatural supervillainy with a demonic voice screaming his return before the gas engulfs him.  However, why move from America to Europe and why in the span of 19 years does an unexplained possessed version of William John Brown return and select a group of religious school girls while his previous victims look to be a pact of randoms from off the street?  From the start, “The Stay Awake” has little to stay our fictional plausibility.  Couple the perplexation with dry performances, a possibly Hell originated monstrous, burning eyes rat creature, and the gratuitous horror nudity rug being pulled from under our feet as the schoolgirls tease with a shower scene only to be shown showering with towels wrapped around them and what has looked to be a promising possession of perpetual pandemonium  has quickly turned into a deflated disappointment with the only really good thing to come out of the film is the stationary man in a creature suit rat monster built like a bodybuilder.

“The Stay Awake” arrives onto DVD distributed by Cheezy Movies in a direct rip of the standard definitional 480i VHS transfer with a letterbox 1.33:1 aspect ratio.  Don’t expect a detailed transfer in a jittery and smoothed over standard definition that’s covered in a harsh blue tinted lens, but the condition of the interlaced video is surprisingly close to being damage free in a well-cared for print.  However, delph and range is difficult to determine due to the obvious lack of delineation but mostly because of the blue tint, poorly lit scenes, and contrast levels that make this presentation nearly pitch-black unwatchable in corridors, classrooms, and in the room of the like, but darkness is seriously enhanced and meshed together by Bernard stylistic choices of backlighting characters or using soft light to center the focus to offer a darkened horror picture. An English Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo serves as the only audio option which differentiates the soundtrack from the rest of the tracks.  Dialogue mostly separates itself to the top of the audio dogpile but is also well imbedded into the other track fighting to be heard that renders the dialogue dull and flat behind a wall of constant and diffused feedback static.  There’s also hissing at the tail end of sentences and faint crackling throughout.  Subtitles are not available.  The only extras on the static menu are back-to-back, quasi-grindhouse style trailers for two Cheezy Movies distributed titles of the blaxploitation “The Man from Harlem” and a “Dirty-Dozen”-esque “Commandoes.”  The physical aspects include a standard black DVD snapper with a rather enticing original title being sandwich with the demon’s glowing eyes on top and four schoolgirls ready to fight at the bottom.  The disk art is the same image except the four schoolgirls are cropped out and an unfortunate placement on the “The” from the title finds it punched out by the disc center/disc lock to just reveal “Stay Awake.”  The rated-R DVD has a region free playback and a runtime of 85 minutes.  “The Stay Awake” has all the indications of a cheap imitation on an established horror formula and this particular physical release doesn’t help the feature’s cause with an extremely dark and nebulous image to match its narrative.

Can You Keep Your Eyes Open at “The Stay Awake?”  On DVD now!

https://vimeo.com/814964711

Feminism Fights EVIL The Only Way Possible in “Broken Mirrors” reviewed! (Cult Epics / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

The Best Depiction of the Unpleasant Side of Brothels.  “Broken Mirrors” on Blu-ray.

An Amsterdam brothel Happy House Club clings to the good girls that remain employed to pleasure the reprobate and insensitive johns that visit.  Dora, a virtual working girl lifer, brings in new blood, Diane, a young mother desperate in need of financial support because of her drug addicted husband.  Night after night, customers select through the ever-growing service list the club’s owner deems profitable while the women and the matron manager naively cope with a profession that’s quick, easy cash.  They create a process, a standard of procedure so to speak, that tries to make the work that much less degrading but with each client, a little piece of their humanity is chipped away.  Simultaneously, a methodical serial killer abducts the women he previously surveillances from off the street, chains them to a bed in a remote room, takes snapshots of them in confinement, and slowly starves them to death, which could last months.  The two stories are intertwined and connected by a gender dominance disease in which a slow resistance begins to build to an explosive head.

The unofficial sobriquet of the Queen of Feminism Marleen Gorris had made a name for herself as a staunch supporter of feminism and lesbianism with her controversial and provocative films.  Her acclaimed 1982 debut written-and-directed “A Question of Silence” show oppressed gender solidarity and mutiny against a systematically enslaved masculine society.  Continuing her crusade against the patriarchal grain, Gorris followed up “A Question of Silence” with another powerfully messaged, social commentary film that, again, places women emotions and safety under the unyielding thumb of men two years later with “Broken Mirrors.”  Natively known in the Netherlands as “Gebroken Spiegels,” the film marks the return of select cast from her inaugural feature, marshalling in a new narrative in the neo-feminism cinema under the returning production company Sigma Film Productions with producer Matthijs van Heijningen (“A Woman Like Eve,” “The Cool Lakes of Death.”).

As mentioned, a pair of actresses have carried over from “A Question of Silence” to maintain a principal performance in “Broken Mirrors,” beginning with Henriëtte Tol who played the outwitting secretary in Gorri’s debut returns as a woman working in Amsterdam’s red-light district as a seasoned employee of the Happy House Club.  Tol ups the ferocity levels of her previous performance while still maintaining a gradually steady sex appeal.  Another returning actress who nearly didn’t have any dialogue in her previous role as a mother without a voice is Edda Barends now in a character that can’t stop screaming for her life as the latest abductee chained to a cruddy bed in a cruddy room with a coming-and-going, polaroid-enthused sociopath. In Barends starkly different rage against the man machine archetype, the actress finds herself discomposed in the face man she can’t understand but eventually recognizes his nasty need and withdraws it.  Both women excel beyond the unsavory current conditions and transfer the power that’s been dangling over their heads into themselves.  Newcomer Diane, played by Lineke Rijxman, becomes the key to initiate the unraveling of power of a man-owned brothel that subjugates women not as mere employees of a man-owned business but as nothing more than moneymaking ass-shakers and back-layers.  Rijxman puts in the work of having her character be resilient at work and at home as she juggles a wide variety of disgusting clients to please their whims while coming home to deal with a junkie husband’s mess.  As the story progresses and the women fall deeper under life’s heel, Dora and Diane spark what begins as a mutual friendship that slips gradually into sexual tension, giving them more assurances when they need it the most as the brothel parties become bigger and more intense.  The parallel story runs along the same oppressive path but in unconventional, unlawful, and inhuman way with the kidnap and starvation torture of a young mother.  Eddie Brugman is also a returning “A Question of Silence” actor who now finds himself in the shoes of Jean-Pierre, a mild-manner husband and by all rights societally normal seemingly man who visits the brothel for a quickie, easy money as Francine (Marijke Veugelers) would proclaim, but his dark hobby is to snatch unsuspecting women for his own perverse pleasure of watching and hearing them plea for their lives.  By the end of both stories, connected by Jean-Pierre and who finds himself at the end of the disappointing stick for his kicks, crafts more than one way to not give in and to stand up against male malarkey and nastiness.  The cast rounds out with Carla Hardy, Coby Stunnenberg, Anke van ‘t Hof, Elja Pelgrom, Hedda Oledzky, Arline Renfurm, Johan Leysen, Wim Wama, and Elsje de Wiljn.

Not only is “Broken Mirrors” another contentious and provocative incendiary story that wedges apart men and women, with the latter being victimized and justified in their actions, but Marleen Gorris also directs one hell of a boiling point intertwining between parallelisms that almost have no link to each other until the reveal.  Gorris doesn’t necessarily employ red herrings to keep audiences guessing but rather keep the killer obscure, as all that we are exposed to see is from behind the man, who doesn’t speak much either and if he does speak, his responses are to the point with as little descriptors and adjectives as possible.  Not only is the editing between simultaneous stories organic but also the other editing techniques that materialize the characters’ emotional decaying befit the mostly linear structure, such as with the student party montage at the brothel that does a roundtable of individualized scenarios between the women and their slimeball clients in an emotionally painful grin-and-bear it series that culminates to which one character best describes the ordeal as feeling like a human lavatory.  The feeling is very much mutual with viewers as well, like a used wet nap to scrub off a soul staining filth covering head to toe, as Gorris represents a thematic exactitude of fiercely dividing feminism that would define her career. A clear understanding of how brothels operate is greatly depicted with that flimsy layer of excitement and efficiency to mask the ugliness underneath.

“Broken Mirrors” arrives on a Blu-ray home video from Cult Epics and, once again, resurrects and restores a pièce de résistance of Netherland celluloid. The new 4K high-definition transfer from the original 35mm negative is presented in European widescreen 1.66:1 aspect ratio on an AVC encoded, 1080p, BD50. 35mm print looks none worse the wear over the course of father time with a mint print. Restored color graded has freshened up the natural print palette of the brothel story while the kidnapper’s tale sustains a grayscale to bisect the narrative and the delineation for both presents a palatable depth. The aplenty natural grain doesn’t swarm and takeover the higher pixelations to award us with a satisfying vintage image that now enriched without any smoothing enhancements nor any compression issues to note. The Danish language release comes with two audio tracks: A DTS-HD MA 2.0 Mono and a LPCM 2.0 Mono. “Broken Mirrors” fair well from both dual channel formats with the DTS-HD aggrandizing the Lodewijk de Boer razor synth score with intent that in itself is a character. Comparatively elsewhere, the two outputs offer little differences and sate with forefront dialogue, balanced in front an equally balanced ambient track. Optional error-free English subtitles are available with haste text to keep up with the fast-paced Dutch. Special features include an audio commentary by Leiden University film scholar Peter Verstraten, an archived 1984 interview with U.S. sex worker and activist Margo St. James with Cinema 3 host Adriaan van Dis, a promotional still gallery, and trailers. The Cult Epics Blu-ray comes in a clear, traditional snapper sporting the film’s most iconic and titular moment, displayed also on the disc art, while the reverse side of the cover depicts a still image of Carla Hardy. The region free Blu runs at a not rated 110 minutes. A good double bill against “A Question of Silence,” “Broken Mirrors” makes for a morosely on the trot sister feature in more ways than one to further a Marleen Gorris artfully aired agenda.

The Best Depiction of the Unpleasant Side of Brothels.  “Broken Mirrors” on Blu-ray.

Ever Get the Feeling that Your Downhill Relationship is an Endless EVIL Loop? “Brightwood” reviewed! (Cinephobia Releasing / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Brightwood” available on DVD August 22nd!  

Jen and Dan have been a couple for a long time.  A stupid long time.  Such a long time, Jen has come to loathe Dan for everything he is worth.  On the other hand, Dan self-deprecates himself into submission despite his love for Jen, even a loveless, spit firing Jen.  When the two go for a run, hashing out the contentious night before, Jen heads for the pond to run laps around Dan in avoidance.  Having circled around a few times, Jen realizes the once exit trail from the pond, the trail she run through to the pond, is now no longer visible.  Perplexed, she voices her concern to Dan who also can’t seem to find the exit trail and every attempt to navigate through the surrounding forest reverts in them being brought back to the pond.  With no way to escape a dead cell service zone, the couple realize their not alone when they come across different versions of themselves stuck on a time loop from the very beginning moment the quarreling couple first ran onto the pond circuit to the future, disheveled versions that no longer have humanity.

Strained relationships and cosmic horror go hand-in-hand.  Or, at least, sometimes they feel like they do with an endless and revolving stagnation of being one with another as the hatred for the other and the fear of being alone cancel out any promise of an amiable or favorable solution.  Instead, staying put seems safe albeit the loop around effect of revising old and reoccurring snags that keep the relationship stale and hopeless instead of moving forward.  That’s possibly how writer-director Dane Elcar sees the suffocating time warping scenario playout symbolized in his debut cosmic horror feature “Brightwood.”  Based off and remade from Elcar’s 2018 20-minute short film entitled “The Pond,” anxiety riddles an already one-sided contempt couple who can’t find the path out of not only the pond but also their relationship in the thriller that’s peppered with dark comedy.  The 2022 feature, filmed around Egbert Lake in New Jersey, is produced by the director as well as star Max Woertendyke under Noble Gas Media productions presented by Media Moove and the LLC, Pond Pictures. 

“Brightwood” has a whopping cast of two and, honestly, the story doesn’t require the need for more and the principals, who may be better described as neutral characters or possibly as far as anti-protagonists, run the gamut of moral principles depending on which in-time version of them we’re witnessing.  Dana Berger and Max Woertendyke play the beleaguered and one-sided cantankerous couple Jen and Dan who are unable to escape the mysterious circumstances of being trapped around and forced to endured permanent residence at the trail that encircles a nearby pond.   The couple’s relationship dilemma relates irreconciled differences once adoring lovers cross beyond into when the romance goes stale.  Jen notes this by saying how she hates Dan’s smell as if it just lingers in her nasal cavity.  Hate is sowed deep after years of living with the person she has come to despise because of Dan’s lack of gumption to be anything but mediocre.  Like a puppy trying to keep up with an odiously pissed off owner, Dan mostly fears losing the one woman who likely puts up with his inadequacies.  Berger and Woertendyke really do nail the exposition history while feeding into these dynamics to setup their characters’ climatic, life-altering stuck in an invisible cosmic cage.  Stuck, the word that best describes both a worn-out relationship and the unnatural situation they’re in.  Jen and Dan are stuck together, possibly forever, to work out couple complications or to give up and just terminate it all.  The actors tap into that cathartic back-and-forth by giving a range of therapeutic emotion performances that purges truth and guilt from their characters, like any relationship would in order to grow and/or move forward.

“Brightwood” is one diabolical tale of torment of being indefinitely stuck in relationship Hell.  Analogies and metaphors compile along the way in a parallel stream of unfavorable situations.  To add more layers, Dane Elcar throws them for a loop, literally.  Jen and Dan are copied over-and-over again in a replay of moments and time and each time they’re copied, new developments emerge in the time loop that were different from before, ascertained by previous versions of themselves.  Conceptionally, the idea has it’s convoluted moments in trying to make the characters appear derived from a particular staring point and interact with each other in various behavioral outcomes, but this particular subtenant, niche layer of the cosmic horror genre is innately difficult to represent but a moderate degree of success can be conveyed or extracted depending on how much you’re willing to be opened minded, or stretched the limits of reasonability, or just don’t plain give a damn about it making sense.  Films like Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s saturated cosmic horror “The Endless” or not-so-cosmic but tantamount to the concept is George Moïse’s “Counter Clockwise” are examples that work and work well to entertain a coherency and a consistency of repeated time.  If expecting a flashy and full-fledged effects driven feature, “Brightwood” is the opposite with a low-key approach that relies on staggering scenes to eventually overlap them, keeping the common core element of the pond as a center focus and turning it instantly in our minds as an undercurrent source of evil despite’s its serenity and idyllic nature.  Little do we know, our instincts might be more on point than lead to believe.

Psychotic endlessness is synonymous with loveless relationships in Dan Elcar’s “Brightwood” available on the 3rd DVD distributed by Cinephobia Releasing come August 22nd.  The single layer, interlaced DVD is presented in a widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio.  Image quality on the release displays a subtle overexposure, shot mostly with natural daylight, and desaturated video image not terribly rich with coloring.  Basic detail renders over nicely, exhibiting fair delineating and depth within a nature coloring scheme that micro blends characters into the foliage and mirror pond landscape.  Minor aliasing shows within the frame but the overall compression artefacts end there, decoding data at the higher end of where DVD’s can perform around 7-8 Mbps. “Brightwood” comes equipped with two English audio options – Dolby Digital Stereo 2.0 and a Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound.   Between the tracks, dialogue transcends the others in a very line heavy narrative to push the small cast along but there’s a suffice amount of leaf rustling and trail running ambience and range to expand the sound into the back channels.  Jason Cooks composed score a lightly melodious score mixed with harsh tones to keep viewers edgy with suspense.  English subtitles are available.  Bonus features include a feature commentary from director Dane Elcar and stars Max Woertendyke and Dana Berger, 11-minutes of deleted scenes, the original 17-minute short “The Pond,” and Cinephobia Releasing trailers.  The standard DVD sports “Brightwood” poster art with no insert on the inside and the disc art the same as the poster with release spec, which are a not rated feature and a runtime of 84 minutes with an unlisted regionality of region 1 playback.  “Brightwood” endures the subgenre’s stumbling blocks with concentrated acting stability and synergy between the 100% invested Dana Berger and Max Woertendyke who could literally perpetuate Dane Elcar’s vision endlessly.

“Brightwood” available on DVD August 22nd!  

House Music is EVIL’s Jam! “Rave” reviewed! (Scream Team Releasing / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Get High and Get Pumped for “Rave” on Blu-ray.

Free flowing Mimmi and her timid pal Lina are invited to an underground night club for one more illegal rave party before the building is vacated for unlawful occupation.  As the two dance the night away, Lina becomes steadily ill and as she tries for the bathroom, she begins to bleed from her skin.  Other rave goers begin to feel the same effects, spewing blood, dripping skin, and a melting away existence while the strobe lights unceasingly flicker and the deep house music pulsates into a fixed one-note bass.  Mimmi and another friend escape the party before even the first signs of the illness, hiding away to do a line cocaine, but when they’re followed by those turned into slow walking bags of oozing flesh, no longer resembling something human, her friend is brutal killed and she barely eludes the ill-fated ravers, becoming trapped inside by those liquifying creatures and a pair of masked individuals seemingly unaffected by what’s occurring around them.

Often times there comes a film that sneaks under the radar and may warrant a second watch for it to sink under the skin or into the recesses the brain’s grey matter.  For writer-director Nils Alatalo, his Swedish melt horror “Rave” is the epitome of context.  The 2020 released independent production, known as “Svartklubb” in the Swedish language, is Alatalo’s debut feature that catapults the filmmaker into the same melt movie categories held in reverence by fans of “Body Melt” or “Street Trash” while kissing the outer edges of vintage and cult iconic eurotrash from the 80’s.  “Rave” will be our consecutive watch, analyze, and review into body horror, following the more gore-gorging merge of man and machine of Davide Pesca’s “Re-Flesh” released last year.  “Rave” proclaims a more stylized and abstruse approach compared to Pesca’s grossly unconcealed transgressions of the body.  Haveri Film is the production company behind “Rave.”

“Rave” asynchronously follows two central characters beginning with the rave-reserved and dry-hesitant Lina before a switcheroo into dipping into the carefree, go-with-the-flow, drug-positive Mimmi.  Played correspondingly by Tuva Jagell (“Girls Lost”) and Isabelle Grill (“Midsommar”), the main principals are a dichotomizing pair of personalities mutually connected to each other by friendship and though Alatalo ultimately decides not to fully explore the intimacies of a cherished bond in post-climax, there’s certainly a relatability audiences will be able to understand amongst their own friendship terms, such as seemingly tired of the meekness or revel in being the dominating friend, as being fostered with empowerment, or on the opposite side of the spectrum, needing a friend to take charge, provide reassures, and be a beacon of exuberance.   However, all the letting go on inhibitions come at a cost, a deadly one at that, and when they essentially are the peak of being identical for perhaps the first time in their lives together, the closeness of Lina and Mimmi become mortally unraveled by what could be described as pure, unadulterated Hell.  What also unravels is their friendship in the midst of drugs coursing through their bloodstream and their minds have shutoff with the trance rhythm of the house music, both aspects of which put up walls to deflect the danger from within and around them, making them clueless to the clues.  Jagell and Grill’s performances have more physical importance than whatever come be extracted from their slim dialogue written for the characters and the two young actresses convert themselves into the roles of psychedelic terror. “Rave’s” partygoers round out with Victor Iván, Sophie Lücke, Ebba Gangoura, Sebastian Norén, Christer Wahlberg, and Celina Braute.

“Rave” is a flash of brilliance tightly confined and bottlenecked to not be bigger than needed by squeezing to contain its claustrophobic purgatory that’s wrapped like a nightmare on molly.  “Rave” is also not a straightforward line of coke, glow sticks, and fleshy fluid fiends within what is an ambiguous narrative that requires an open mind to its reverence for elder Euro horror.  That’s what I suspect Alatalo was shooting for here, an immense adoration and respect for European horror peppered with inspirations from American filmmakers as well.  Soft brilliance of Dario Armento lighting, silhouette eeriness of Lamberto Bava cinematography, and the slow bloodletting of Lucio Fulci’s gore represent the best qualities of same continental yore while including a John Carpenter story-ingrained synth score and paying homage to American melt horror filmmakers, such as J. Michael Muro, Gregory Lamberson, and Philip Brophy to name a few, with his own rendition of what it means to have skin slink and blood secrete from inside the body out.  While the first viewing doesn’t quite stimulate immediately the senses with its slow burn dread, ambiguous cause and effect, and dialogue adverse script, “Rave” glues itself to the psyche and lingers in that cranial netherworld that nags and gnaws at the subconscious and does it enough that a second viewing becomes necessary.  Instantly, piecing together the puzzle through a second visual overlay can jumpstart the engines on what exactly we’re witnessing – Alatalo’s patience with the structure, meticulous details in the scene, and admiration for the genre.  “Rave” is also an indie picture on a budget but considering the composition of the final product, “Rave” strongly accomplishes a persistent uneasiness without exposition that parallels subtle strikes of sharp, startling dread only seen by a handful of filmmakers.    

A whole new version of neon dead arrives onto a special edition Blu-ray of Nils Alatalo’s “Rave” from Scream Team Releasing.  The AVC encoded, 1080p high definition, BD25 presents the film in a widescreen 1:78:1 aspect ratio, scaled down from the original aspect ratio of Univision 2.00:1 causing some minor compressed looking scenes.  Not to be deterred, the range of scene setups under the cinematography trio of Jakob Ivar Ekvall, Amelia Finngåård, and Gustav Råström offer an eclectic mix often in the humblest of fashions, such as using just a camera flashlight in a windowless room or the red and blue neon lighting through fog machine.  Silhouettes delineate nicely on screen with the use of backlighting and camera angles.  Framing is a hit or miss coupled with energetic editing, but the overall atmosphere is agreeably chafed with tension.  Minor banding and some aliasing creep out as artifact side effects of a dark-laden story with some of the quicker moments evading the slimy-secretors through the building trying to keep up through the decoding of data.  The compression issues are not terribly invasive during viewing, but they are annoying consistent and notifiable.  The Swedish uncompressed LPCM 5.1 surround mix has lossless binding and sounds really good environmentally albeit many of the tracks are done in post, such as some of the exterior dialogues, which sound natural but softer in the scene, and the itemized milieu ambience.  The Joakim Martinsson and Christer Wahlberg house music and soundtrack are the real victors here integrated into “Rave’s” overall sound design of having the discordant industrial rhythms and irregularities become an antagonistic competitor breathing through the back and side channels, reminiscent of how intrinsic Giuliano Sorgini’s score heightened the intensity of the impending zombie attack.  English subtitles are optionally available.  Bonus features include an English commentary by director Nils Alatalo providing insight on nearly every shot, a soundtrack featurette alternating between Joakim Martinsson and Christer Wahlberg discussing and sample their individualized tracks, a making of montage with soundtrack only, and the film’s trailer.  The physical characteristics of the release contain a beautifully macabre composite in neon coloring and lace slipped into a standard Blu-ray snapper with latch.  Front cover is reversible with a more disheveled and strung-out Isabelle Grill looking blankly upward, which has a variation of her facial posture on the factory-distributed cover.  Disc art contains one of the gloppy ghouls bathed in red with a black background.  “Rave” release comes region free, not rated, and has a runtime of a brisk 72 minutes.  A slow burn melt movie capturing the essence of “Rave” to the grave.

Get High and Get Pumped for “Rave” on Blu-ray.

When Machine and Man Merge, Which EVIL Will Emerge? “Re-Flesh” reviewed! (SRS Cinema / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Re-Flesh” DVD Available Now to Replace Your Old Skin!  

In a dystopian future, machine and man have merged into an asymmetrical symbiosis where machine is preponderantly present to corrupt man’s benevolent humanity.  Such corruption removes compassion at the core level with the use of neurol inhibitors of technological ascendency over mankind in a gruesome, unpleasant fashion.  The exhibited process is exampled with a masked nurse pushing a wheelchair bound masked man down a dank and dark hallway and into a reprocessing room where he’s plugged with a cable attached to his arm.  From there, the man is fitted with a virtual viewfinder displaying five short reprocessing-to-repair files, transmitted before his eyes to incite organic machinery violence that’ll absorb and eradicate years of human psychological evolution.  Slowly through the images and videos of visceral excision does the man morph into an automaton of flesh, blood, and commingled organic cabling and mechanical veins that will render him resolved as biologically re-fleshed.

Japanese splatter punk Body horror inspired “Re-Flesh” becomes “Deep Web XXX” and “Suffering Bible’s” director Davide Pesca’s tribute to the very distinctive denaturalization of the man-machine mix cinematic movement from the unabashed narrative risktakers hailing from land of the rising sun, Japan.  Made popular by the likes of auteurs Shinya Tsukamoto and Shozin Fukui and cult favorites like “Tetsuo:  The Iron Man” and “Tokyo Gore Police,” “Re-Flesh” adds to the niche palate with an unconfined, Italianized take to ambiguate that blurry line between the soul and the soulless as man comes to terms with a terror-inducing technological takeover.  Writer-director Pesca’s underground anthological tale pits the human condition, it’s mortal coil if you will, up against the cold and heartless tech to create coded layers of neova carne, or new flesh.  Pesca and fellow coproducer Massimo Bezzati reteam after “Night of Doom” to collaborate the 2020 released production under their respective indie companies Demented Gore Productions and M.B. Productions.

The five-story anthology with the interweaving wraparound of a man being reprogrammed casts a lot of visual performances without the need for dialogue.  Dialogue is reduced to only a pseudo medical television advert or surgical endorsements for a better, prosperous life to eliminate human flaws, advancement in new, and improved, flesh, and can even cure homeless afflictions like drugs and addictions.  Pesca keeps a simplicity about his scenes by keeping sullying dialogue removed to just retain the beauty of body horror and a sonorously cacophonous industrial soundtrack.  Each story’s characters are also fairly simplified.  Without dialogue, individual complexities and depth remain shallow in what is “Re-Flesh’s” sole celebration of horror based cybernetic organisms.  This creates no emotional attachment to any of the characters being violated by fiber optic cables and experimentally operated on with crude animatronic gizmos, but Pesca does implant an imploration of at least one emotional response from his audience through gratuitous nudity on half of the female protagonists going through a rapture and ruination of bodily rape and mutate connected by inhumane sentient cybernetics.  Most of the women protagonists are half-naked women ensnared by the inescapable new world of merged new flesh but the tail end episodes dig a little deeper, perhaps even stretch the theme to the limits of cyberpunk horror, to where women are more than just ravaged victims.  “Re-Flesh” sees skin in the game from Alessandra Pellegatta (“Night of Doom”), Giacomo Clerici, Mery Rubes (“Rage Killers’), Reiko Nagoshi (“Devil Times Two – Quando le Tenebre escono dal Bosco”), Giulia Reine, Paolo Salvadeo, Amira Lucrezia Lamour (Devil Times Two – Quando le Tenebre escono dal Bosco), Alessandro Davoili (“Alice Was My Name”), Ivan Brusa (“7 Days, 7 Girls”), and Marco Cinque.

David Pesca is no stranger to short, gore-laden, underground films having been a featured segment director on a pair of anthologies in the last decade from “A Taste of Phobia” and “After Midnight.”  For “Re-Flesh,” Pesca doesn’t have to share the spotlight in his very own tech-themed, feature length compilation that narrates transmitted computer files as tech insidiously infiltrating our insubstantial innards.  The first three episodes revolve around phones and solitary women become enslaved to the devices with a link of invading their bodies with a foreign object, whether be adopted a virtual, grotesque pet to being the reason for infection that spreads throughout the body like a flesh-eating disease, to being beamed up and constrained for a thorough, if not sexual, examination of one of mother nature’s creatures.  I’m intentionally skipping the review of fourth short and head straight into the terminal episode that is more dystopian splatter punk than the others with an experimental bio-cybernetics company called Neo Vita, or New Life, ridding the world of lowlifes by module implants that turn them into society-controlled puppets.  Yet, all these stories are not terribly straight forward with the rub being the ambitious nature of interpretation and the fact there isn’t a dialogue track for most of the runtime.  Taking a step backwards to the fourth short, I found this particular short doesn’t fit “Re-Flesh’s” theme with a demonic woman damning three inert souls to a black void of pain and death.  Perhaps, a construal could be constructed to lay in code into the technology sequence strand, but the code would be a fractional stretch in comparison to the surrounding system.  As a whole, “Re-Flesh” may side more with gory sanguine than an illuminating story but does depict the scourged with a front row seat in this bloodcurdling network of body horror.

Befitting to be distributed on SRS Cinema’s Nightmare Fuel – Extreme and Unrated sublabel, “Re-Flesh” emerges as a bizarre aghast mix of tentacle erotica and technical dysfunction onto a 480p DVD, presented in a widescreen 1.85:1 aspect ratio.  Technical dysfunction also applies to the image quality.  Though combating some lossy compression issues, the standard definition resolution and budget filming equipment sustain a level of image softness under a desaturated color palette.  Depth and delineation range from hazily outlined to a complete wash out from the frame’s JPEG conversation.  Pesca operates under a wide-stylistic format that incorporates varied black-and-white schemes (a gritty B&W wraparound story compared to a more defined desaturated monochrome for the fourth segment), natural lighting, harsh gel lighting and tint, and green screen for CGI backdrops.  The English dub stereo 2.0 mix will obliterate your sound setup if not careful and without a subwoofer with a booming LFE industrial soundtrack that has produced an inherent crackle and since there is no in-scene dialogue or ambience, all of which is 100% done in ADR, the lower frequencies engulf the other channels that may pop in for phone effects or squishy surgery sounds.  “Re-Flesh” is an Italian film, but the cybernetic implant advert shot, originally spoken in Italian, is dubbed in a burned-in expeditious English dub that is what it is.  Bonus features include a promo and original trailer, a behind-the-scenes featurette entitled Backstage which is a look at some of the gory scene effects the first two segments, the short “Electric Dreams” which is an alternate graded version of the second segment, and other SRS trailers.  The traditional DVD snapper case comes with the illustrated front cover art of the man plugged in under a faux harsh white neon glow with the disc art containing the same art but superimposed with a red hue layer.  There is no insert inside the casing.  The unrated feature has a runtime of 72 minutes, more than enough time for this type of anthology, and has a region free playback.  A kitschy and schlocky graft of “Re-Flesh” will get under your skin, but this anthology quickly grinds gears toward a blue screen of death.      

“Re-Flesh” DVD Available Now to Replace Your Old Skin!