Tag Archives: thriller

Friends for Dinner is EVIL’s Table Setting! “Gnaw” reviewed! (MVD Visual / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Gnaw” on this DVD from MVD Visual, Danse Macabre, and Jinga FIlms!

A holiday away in the English countryside might not be the perfect relaxation for six prickly friends.  Quarrelsome and unfaithfulness run rampant through their fragile friendship on the verge of collapse.  Everything at first was manageably enticing – a quaintly rustic countryside house, a quietly isolated surrounding woodland, and the matron house owner who whips up meaty delicacies for them to enjoy breakfast, lunch, and dinner – but when darkness falls amidst a heated love triangles, lustful romps, and frustrated behaviors, the divisive friends become blind to the ever watchful eye that’s hungry for what the group of young people have to offer – as fleshy comestibles.  A cannibalistic cook lurks in the shadows and in between the walls, waiting for the opportune moment to strike, fillet, ground, and prepare the tender meat for seasoning and baking, but his observant eye has set it’s sights on one whose expecting child that could be a tasty morsel for later. 

Cannibalism subgenre has been a staple in horror for decades the under the vastly wide dog-eat-dog umbrella that pits human beings against each other in one of the many gruesome reasons of unwittingly engaging into a form of Darwinism.  People considered as food are lower-shelf commodities to those who need to feed of human flesh and organs, regarding their placement in the food chain as superior amongst the rest despite being in the same category of the animal kingdom.  Every filmic narrative contains a tweaked difference in justification for cannibalism and in Gregory Mandry’s 2008 English horror, simply known as “Gnaw,” in lies that sense of definite worth in craving someone else’s entrails, boiling the viscera down into a hot soup or baking it into a meat and potato Cornish pastry.   The script, penned between first time screenwriters Michael John Bell and Max Waller from a story by independent horror producer Rob Weston (“Antibirth,” “The Thompsons”), contrasts people’s life-consuming narcissism and pettiness against something truly terrifying and waiting to sink its teeth in you.  Weston and Simon Sharp produce the film under Weston’s production company, Straightwire Entertainment Group, as well as The Big Yellow Feet Productions.

Being that “Gnaw” was released in 2008 and is a low-budget indie film, a novice bunch of English first timers trying to break into the acting game and industry overall comprises the story’s cast of victims and cannibals, but that isn’t to necessarily say the meat and bones are rotten from the very unwrapping of DVD case plastic.  As a whole, the fresh cast undertakes the pessimistic angles of a souring love triangle between established couple Jack and Jill, yes, like the nursery rhyme, played by Nigel Croft-Adams and Rachel Mitchem in a slowly sink ship that symbolizes their relationship, torpedoed by an unknown undercurrent in Jack’s fling with Lorrie (Sara Dylan, “Mandrake”).  Between the three, suspicion is entrenched in Jill with sarcastic lashings on Jack’s recent temperament and behavior that suggests she’s aware of wandering playboy antics, but what Jill is unaware of is the other woman, a hopeless romantic who can’t seem to see through Jack’s philandering, self-assured ways.  One thing “Gnaw” does to spoil this wonderfully taught threesome is not bring the tension to a head and, instead, deflects to the butchering head chef of human bodies, played gruntingly by a muted and snarky-looking Gary Faulkner attempting his best to imitate a killer from the very best of the 80’s slasher renaissance and only to come up short of the current slasher renaissance a decade and a half later.  Masked half the time with some kind of black felt cloth with an attached pelt, Faulkner looks more like a half-wit brandishing a two-prong pitchfork than an large, formidable intimidator you’d be scared of just by looking over your shoulder while running as fast as you can to get away.  Granted, the character is tough to kill, able to take punches and stabs as if they were mosquito bites, but his connection to cannibalism often feels lost in the chase rather than knee deep in guts and a frying pan.  The rest of the cast rounds out with a trope-horny couple in Julia Vandoorne and Hiram Bleetman (“Zombie Diaries”) and the matronly yet unnerving face and voice of Carrie Cohen as the house owner.

In the grand canon scheme of cannibalism films, “Gnaw” places on the generic neighborhood scale.  The small time indie picture rides the line of equivalence, neither being absolutely terrible or outstanding gruesome, with a less-is-more story that more-or-less been done before in the subgenre.  Yet, “Gnaw” doesn’t give audiences anything new to squirm about with its peanut long-pigs who arbitrary abduct locals for their bone-licking appetites.  “Gnaw’s” in frame gore generally consists of goring with that aforementioned puny pitchfork and we’re quickly skirted from the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” inspired moment of Faulkner revving the two-stroke engine for maximizing terror in the eyes of a soon-to-be-in-bits victim   Gore should be a staple motif for any cannibal film where one deranged person has to either sauté, stew, bake, or grill the parts of a hacked up totally emotion-regulated person and Mandry’s film seldomly shows the sickening, sordid sloppy Joe-makings of a flesh eater, except for one scene of a severed foot being ground into hamburger meat that fits the bill while most of the rest happens implied off screen or unshown.  Mandry’s approach to telling the story has the inklings of a 80s-90s vintage made-for-TV movie with an unpolished dark veneer and snooping camera angles to obtain a POV sense of prowling prey while also keeping us engaged with the frustratingly unresolved melodramatics of the group that can stifle our concern for the characters in the last act, infectiously affecting the crude final scenes that literally drops a baby into our laps and expects us to know what to do with that information. 

Personally, my second time around with Gregory Mandry’s “Gnaw” but a lot has changed in between the more than 10-year span of now-and-then.  Hell, even I’ve changed in regard to taste and with now having consumed more cinematic wisdom over the years, from what I recall, “Gnaw” was a rememberable off-industry shocker to a limit and it’s gratifying to see the little cannibal film that could receive a revisit on DVD from MVDVisual in association with Danse Macabre and Jinga Films.  The film is housed on a DVD5 that presents the 35 mm stock in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio and in a rather chaotic upscaled transfer that may be more commercially equipment caused than artefact, but compression macro blocking is evident during the majority of night scenes as it phases in and out of overlapping darker shades. Tom Jenkins’s cinematography can be nicely fore focused to center the characters in front of a background out of focus, but there are other instances where the lighting is extremely binary with not a splash of other color to liven up the image. The only audio option is an English Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound mix with an overkill statement on a film that doesn’t require it.  The back and side channels hardly become utilized for any back brush movement or creaky old house shifting so a lot of the sound is in the anterior which is where the dialogue most rightfully aggressive and clearest.  No issues with the digital recording that offers a balance between the placid moments and the screaming hysteria without being too much intake on the speakers.  There’s not much in the way of ambience, some chewing of the meat pies, steaming of pots, and the revving of a chainsaw is most character-driven sounds that overtake any kind of natural environment along the background landscape.  English subtitles are optionally available.  The DVD does not list special features, but extras appear on the static menu with a director’s commentary that can be toggled off/on.  There is also a trailers selection with previews for the feature plus “Midnight Son,” “After,” and “Red Latex.”  Physical features offer an alternate cover from the other releases with a man opening wide to take a bite out of a literal hand sandwich in the photoshopped composition.  The DVD case does not contain an insert and the disc art contains the same image as the front cover.  With a region free playback, the movie come not rated and has a manageable runtime of 84 minutes.  The second time around with “Gnaw” proves to appreciate the work that goes into a stably fixtured indie horror from the UK but with the copious entries of the cannibal subgenre, especially in the early 2000s with more theatrical pieces in “Wrong Turn” and “The Hills Have Eyes” remake, “Gnaw” treads mediocre waters just enough to sate the man-eater hunger.

“Gnaw” on this DVD from MVD Visual, Danse Macabre, and Jinga FIlms!

Just Because Your EVIL Dad Says Its Okay, It’s Probably Not. “Netherworld” reviewed! (Blu-ray / Full Moon Features)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Enter the Netherworld on Blu-ray!

A wealthy owner of the Thorton plantation bequeaths to his willfully neglected son, Corey, his large Louisiana estate. He’s welcomed by the estate’s unusual lawyer, a house caretaker with an affinity for birds, and her beautiful daughter Diane who, despite her teenage muliebrity, immediately takes an interest and liking to the handsome young man. Corey is also met with his shirker father’s penned testament, to be resurrected from the dead by a sexually alluring brothel woman and necromancer named Delores who works at the local bordello and bar named Tonks. Fascinated by the idea, Corey hangs around the bar and becomes just as engrossed with Delores as his father as he seeks to abide by his father’s supernatural wishes but there’s a warbler cult connected to Delores and Corey’s father with an underhanded scheme that doesn’t favor the new, young estate owner trying to save and possibly get to know the father he never knew, the same one who abandoned him as a small child.

One of the more stranger Charles Band productions to every come out of Full Moon Entertainment, and that’s saying something for a media empire that made killing on hawking killer dolls amongst other oddity-saturated, carnivalesque sci-fi and horror for many decades, “Netherworld” is the early 90’s, Cajun-encrusted, occulter of the Full Moon legacy director of “Tourist Trap” and “Puppet Master,” David Schmoeller, who also cowrote the film alongside Charles Band. “Netherworld” harkens to a time before Band became visionally crazed by dolls, or miniaturized maniacs in general, with a plot that promises Cajun black magic beyond the traditional spells and curses of Louisiana Voodoo, a son desperate to reconnect with his long-lost father who abandoned him, and a flying stone hand with finger extremities that turn into vicious snake-like creatures when attacking the quarried head, but is “Netherworld” too extrusive of the regular and in vogue poured cement of solidified psycho-dolls? ‘Netherworld” is executively produced by Charles Band, produced by Ty Bradford (“Trancers II”) and is a part of the vast Full Moon Entertainment catalogue of productions.

Unsuspectingly walking into between the veil of the living and the dead is predominately television actor Michael Bendetti (“21 Jump Street”) embarking on his first ever horror feature as Corey Thorton, the city boy, or so we assume as he leisurely journeys down a windingly steamy Louisiana tributary in a button-down shirt and tie, who learns his deadbeat, rich father has left him a large amount of property. For having been left fatherless for all of his life, the pill that read as Corey’s deep-rooted longing to familiarize with a flake of a father is a hard one to swallow. The angle that Schmoeller should have attacked more resurrection motivation is the one that involves Corey searching for answers in his father’s disfavor, choosing to live without the flesh and blood legacy of a son, and why now, posthumously, does his father want to reconnect? Audiences will find the answer overly obvious, but Corey Thorton’s thickness proves more difficult to penetrate, especially when he’s beguiled by an enchantress who can summon a flying, snake-fingered hand that emerges an affixing binding wire out from its stony skin and can turn whorehouse johns into caged birdies, literally, if they misbehave or become indelicately frisky. The house keeper’s horseback riding daughter Diane is marred by Holly Floria (“Bikini Island”) with an excessive Southern Belle accent when her character’s status doesn’t stem from sophistication and affluency but rather from the blue collared starry eyes of Anjanette Comer’s (“The Baby”) motherly and hospitality position. When the climax arrives in grand temps and we’re face-to-face with Corey’s ghostly pops, living in the titular Netherworld, the story takes a sudden branch drop that executes any voyage into the void between worlds and there’s quite a bit of neglect for Robert Sampson (“Re-Animator”) as Corey’s father who barely has any scenes to live up to being the film’s primo antagonist pulling the strings of the marionette of his flesh and blood. “Netherworld” fills out the cast with Robert Burr (“Ghost Story”), Alex Datcher (“Passenger 57”), Holly Butler (“Vendetta”), George Kelly (“Jugular Wine: A Vampire Odyssey”) and Denise Gentile (“Ordinary Madness”) as the super-sexy, premium prostitute Delores with parapsychological powers that connect her to the land of the dead.

Off the tip of a gator’s nose, “Netherworld” offers a taste of Full Moon’s 90’s production, promising radically outlandish F/X with a monstrous airborne hand, saucy sexual content, and gore. Corey’s inner thoughts exposition and waterway introduction tends to be more private eye monologuing in the explanation setup of his unplanned inheritance and it also feels like the brittle beginnings of a trashy romance novel: young man travels down the river to his inherited late father’s estate, torn between a pubertal young daughter of the long-standing estate housekeeper and the haram brothel seductress with an eldritch, supernatural inveiglement. Corey’s past lacks backstory, leaving an even playing field across the board of all characters and participating audiences in what to expect from the wild card that is Corey. Immediately drawn to the wanton Tonks not for carnal desires but rather the one woman who her father says can restore his past expiration, Corey’s not a wild card of ambiguity as his role lacks the pull of tough decisions, often between character versus character conflict, with basically a mind already made up to visit the bar-and-bordello despite the ominous warning signs between George Kelly’s sloppy bayou cajuner wanting to dance with Corey at Tonks, Diane’s strong opposition for Tonks in general, and amongst others dubious gratifying points. “Netherworld” very much lives in a world of opposition, like Superman’s bizarro world that defies logic. Logic such as the transition of people into birds, or being inducted into a clan of avian cultists, or ciphering who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy, or, and this is the most important or, the suddenly cleaved ending that not only doesn’t allow a satisfying ending but also doesn’t explain much, in dialogue or in action, what came into existence once Corey was stuck in the Netherworld other than the obvious trade his father wanted to force.

Full Moon Features brings Hell to Blu-ray with an uncut and remastered from the original camera negative transfer of “Netherworld” in the continuous effort by the empire to upgrade all their classics for a new wave of format availability. Scanned into 2K from the 35mm negative, the AVC encoded, 1080p, high-definition Blu-ray looks pretty darn good. Well kempt over the years, the negative appears to have sustained little age or wear that progresses the hi-def upgrade with relative ease. Color grading is warm and stoked with detail that encrusts every object – the lushy bayou forest, the stony power of a flying hand, Michael Bendetti’s layered curly-perm mullet – all of it is greatly textured and delineated for depth, presented in the 1:78:1, widescreen aspect ratio. Compression doesn’t appear to be an issue despite a lower storage BD25 but that might be due to the utter lack of bonus accompaniments. The release offers two audio options: an English Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound and an English Dolby Digital 2.0 mix. Both options are equally suitable as the there’s not much more environmental oomph through the extra channels despite the full-bodied cacophonous cicada singing, which unfortunately doesn’t open up depth in the back channels despite the prevalence of the singing in the story’s background sonance. However, dialogue doesn’t feel cheated with a dominating layer and decent range to go with it. Along with essentially what is a bare bones disc, there are also no subtitles available with this release. What is available to view outside the feature is other Full Moon trailers and the original VideoZone segment that covers this particular 1992 gem. Physical features don’t stray too far from VHS, to DVD, to Blu-ray with the same flinty hand rocketing outward in a 3D-like position on the front cover. There are no inserts included with this release. “Netherworld” Blu-ray comes region free, with a runtime of 82 minutes, and, for the first time ever, uncut! An opposition to the usual spun of Louisiana voodoo-hoodoo, there’s another dark magic brewing in the bayou in “Netherworld,” but the promising story can’t coherently piece together down river in an uneven quagmire of quandaries.

Enter the Netherworld on Blu-ray!

EVIL Preys on the Goodness of the Weak. “Lady Terror” reviewed! (Sector 5 Films / DVD)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Lady Terror” is on the Prowl.  Now on DVD!  

Jake Large, a shrewd personal injury lawyer, finds himself in a loveless engagement that’s full of contempt, especially with his finance who makes up excuses to not be around or intimate with him.  When Jake foils a thief’s grab and dash of Candice’s purse, the lawyer and the exotic dancer quickly fall into a relationship that rekindles Jake’s vivacity of work and life.  Breaking off the engagement to his equally two-timing finance, Jake pours every ounce of emotion into the sexually tempest romance that’s rapidly become more than just courtship when Candice suggests the murder of her frequently threatening and abusive stepfather.  Witnessing first hand some of his behavior, Jake agrees to take out her stepfather in a fiery explosion during one of his rabbit hunting trips.  When the dust settles and all seems to be going well with Candice, a watershed moment reveals Candice’s intentions are not what they seem to be and in the middle of taking the fall for everything is Jake. 

An enticingly fervid thriller, “Lady Terror” is the latest directorial from the 30-year industry producer, writer, and director, Nathan Hill.   Filmed in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, “Lady Terror” harks back to the early 90’s erotic suspenser of sex, deceit, and murder where seduction and predatory persuasion are welded tools to accomplish unscrupulous acts.  Hill has submersed himself chiefly in low-budget genre films from his first feature, a sewer creature that craves Cartel drug pushers in the SOV shot “The Hidden” released in 1993, to more recent and gamut gorging Australian documentary pictures, such as “Bigfoot Down Under” and “Sex Down Under,” as well as keeping tethered to his horror roots with his short film work contributed to compilated anthologies in “Clownsploitation,” “Previews of Coming Attractions,” and “Schlock-O-Rama.”  Hill produces his “Lady Terror” under his company NHProductions with the Alien enthusiastic documentarian, executive producer Warren Coyle, and marks the reconnection of Hill and director of photography Dia Taylor following their debut, feature film collaboration on Hill’s “I, Portrait” and the various filmic vignettes from before. 

Not only does Hill write, direct, and produce, the filmmaker with a penchant for creating J-named characters is also the lead principal personal injury lawyer Jake Large, owner-proprietor of Large Lawyers.  Though successful in his legal craft, Jake’s has developed depression when his once endearing fiancé Celine has turned against him as she sneaks around his back with a mixed martial artist.   A loathing Celine is played severely cutting by Tritia DeViSha who has previous chemistry alongside Hill during their time on Hill’s “Revenge of the Gweilo” production and while the chemistry between their characters is palatably thick with contempt, there’s not much backstory in gain traction for sympathy, compassion, or any other emotive expression.  Jake has a single flashback of his and Celine’s happiness in simpler times during a moment of what could be regret or longing, but there’s simply not enough breadcrumbs for their history to take shape of any form.  Instead, their turmoil feeds into Jake’s unquestionable willingness to concede to a beautiful exotic dancer and damsel in distress named Candice (Phillyda Murphy).  The attention is good, the sex is good, why not just give a little back by murdering her crooked stepfather (Anton Kormoczi – who also goes by Anton Trejo because he mildly looks like Danny Trejo)?  Well, Jake’s lovestruck blindness obscures the real intent but, luckily for Jake, he has what he describes as a lucky rabbit’s foot in his secretary who aspires to be a private investigator and when she’s not punching keys, she’s clandestinely tailing Candice in a spying and snapping pictures behind trashcans and around corners caricature kind of way.  The platinum blonde and distant relative of horror maestro, Dario Argento, Simay Argento is the peripheral probing dick Ayla Harp that initially doesn’t have this close-knit relationship with her boss until the third act when she happens to take it upon herself, after examining Jake’s behavior and reading his desk notes, to snoop into his private life on his behalf.  It’s not entirely clear how she unearthed who exactly Jake became intimate with but she managed track down Candice’s exact location to snap a few black and whites.  “Lady Terror’s” remaining cast feels very much like Ayla Harp in the disconnection of each other’s narratives, ridden along in choppy succession that leaves too many plot holes to fill.  The cast rounds out with Leslie Lawrence, Anthony Cincotta, Robert Rafik Awad, Challise Free, and Adam Ramzi – the 40-year-old Melbourne actor, not the gay porn star.

Perhaps that character disconnection stems from the distracting filler from in between dialogue scenes.  A slew of these filler scenes are of Jake Large driving around town, pulling up into driveways, and entering his home, Candice’s home, or his office, eating into a runtime that could be better suited for character exploration or assembling the fragments of a deceptive thriller involving the key players.  The current design dulls the run-of-the-mill and insubstantial story with nothing new to offer audiences to facelift the core element, a rope-a-dope of relationship pretense in order to con a fall guy into another’s dirty work.  Though I know the answer in the back of my mind, a considerable amount of struggling happens in the deductive logic and complex problem solving regions of my brain for the missteps of what’s supposed to happen after Jake commits to the hit.  Ultimately, the worst outcome to happen to Jake is not what I suspected; in fact, we should be expecting a more disastrous, run-for-your-life fall from grace, but, instead, there’s no sense of urgency or consequence in the unravelling of Jake’s newfound and glorious prospects with Candice.  In fact, police presence is reduced to informing Candice her stepfather had died and that’s the extent of it, not mentioning the gunshot, a gasoline fueled explosion, or any other kind of suspicious death pursuits.  The awkwardness continues to bleed into the narrative continuity.  “Lady Terror” has a time span of at least a week or two, or longer as it’s not entirely clear, but Jake’s outfit rarely differs from the white pants, blue button-up shirt, tan sport jacket, and fedora.  The same goes with his lacy see-through topped assistant Ayla, suggesting that many of the scenes were shot on the same day or two without a wardrobe change.  When Jake does have a different outfit on, the subsequent scenes revert right back to that then by now stale getup. 

“Lady Terror” arrives onto DVD courtesy of Sector 5 Films, long overdue revisit of the distributor’s line of product since our last review from 2016.  Presented on a DVD-R, with DVD5 capacity, in a widescreen 1:78:1 aspect ratio, “Lady Terror” retains an unhewn image that appears soft, smooth, and with slight aliasing.  Overexposure wipes a fair amount of background sky, such as with approx. ten minutes into the story a plane just flies off into a bright void, but the overcast grading leaves this modern noir consistently dreary to where the only thing that stimulatingly pops is Phillyda Murphy in her skimpy intimates.  Again, there’s not a ton of landscape range, especially being set around Melbourne and not taking advantage of the city skyline or it’s Port Phillip harbor with the drone to gain urban rookery.  Sector 5 DVD’s back cover states the film has a 5.1 surround sound mix, but what my player tells me, “Lady Terror” actually comes supplied with an English Dolby Digital 2.0 mix.  The dual channel output would have been a sufficiently adequate mix albeit unpolished, echoey dialogue but for the entire length of the film, a harsh gargle undercuts the sharpness in the dialogue and the Jamie Murgatroyd (“No Such Things as Monsters”) soundtrack.  This also creates faint whispery-hissing.  There are no optional subtitles included.  Bonus features include doomsday, extraterrestrial, and anthropology hypothetical or alternative fact-doc trailers for “Occult of the Secret Universe,” “Nostradamus:  Future Revelations and Prophecy,” “Ancient Origins:  Extraordinary Evidence,” “Alien Paradox:  Legacy of the UFO,” “Demonic Aliens,” “Breaking Free of the Matrix,” “Ancient Origins:  Mankind’s Mysterious Past,” and “Elusive Bigfoot Abroad.”  The Sector 5 DVD is housed in standard black snapper with trashy romance novel resembling front cover of two who are not Nathan Hill and Phillyda Murphy in throes of passion.  The cropped top portion of the cover art that includes Murphy’s face in composited in 3 hues is also pressed onto the disc art.  The release comes not rated with an 80-minute runtime and a region 1 encoded playback.  Though performances are solid, “Lady Terror” ultimately feels underwhelming and unable to live up to the attractive title with an unadventurous noir thriller hamstrung stake to the heart from the DVD-R’s anemic technical and fidelity issues.

“Lady Terror” is on the Prowl.  Now on DVD!  

Recalled to Nam is a Return Tour of EVIL! “Kill Zone” reviewed! (MVDVisual / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Enter the “Kill Zone” on a New Blu-ray Home Video!

Combat POWs are captured by enemy forces, imprisoned in an outdoor internment camp.  Tortured for information, the prisoners are held without water in the scorching heat, strung up for hours on posts, beaten to a pulp, and stowed away in a hotbox if they do not cooperate with interrogators.  When Lt. Jason McKenna snaps and loses grip on reality, he breaks free from his confinement and kills four guards during the process when the soldier believes he’s back in Vietnam.  The only problem for McKenna is that the enemy imprisonment was a his own military’s roleplay training exercise for POW-survivalist.  The commanding officer, Colonel Crawford, had pushed McKenna too hard, making the exercise realistic as possible despite the warnings of fellow trainee and McKenna’s friend, Mitchell.  Now, the incensed Colonel is out for blood, covering his tracks with military leadership as he and the gung-ho soldiers seek to put an end to McKenna and it’s up to Mitchell to find his troubled friend first. 

The high-body count film that became the launching point for what would form Action International Pictures, 1985’s “Kill Zone,” an American-made, military actioner written and directed by the late David A. Prior (“Sledgehammer,” “Killer Workout”), opened the production door for a string of both action and horror ventures that spawned cult followings over the decades to come, especially when obscure titles such as “Kill Zone” never made it passed the release of its VHS format – until now.  John Saxon’s “Death House,” “Teenage Exorcist” with scream queen Brinke Stevens, and even the pint-sized creature feature “Elves” are just a few titles that owe “Kill Zone” some ounce of ground working thanks.  Prior cowrote the script with Jack Marino, who also produced the film under the limited formation of Spartan Films, and was shot in and around what is now Prado Regional Park in Chino, California.

Trekking from internment camp to civilization, aka the kill zone, and fighting and fleeing for their very lives from their own crooked military unit are McKenna and Mitchell, played correspondingly by “Killer Workout’s” Fritz Matthews and Ted Prior, younger brother of director David Prior.  Though Matthews has the emotional range of a tree stump, the leading man more or less fits the bill as a tall and stocky soldier protagonist while Mitchell does all the emotive heavy lifting of the pair, reflected in his large and muscular Stallone-sized biceps.  The comrades’ necks fall under the boot of Colonel Crawford from an aging David Campbell (“Scarecrows”) whose ridicule onslaught is dousing and his ruthlessness remains constant but can’t top the baseline he cemented early on into the story, diluting his villainy with not much formidableness, and becomes a feeble opposition.  Colonel Crawford is backed by his equally inadaqute military unit, former fellow trainees that divide themselves into a clique against the diverging outliers McKenna and Mitchell who separate themselves from the apathetic herd thinking either by post-traumatic mental illness or for concrete concern for a life-saving friend.  Either way, the rest of the unit bully their way into Crawford’s good graces albeit the Colonel’s lack of interest in the lives or death of his men in a nationally organized armed force that breathes the creed to keep the peace, but the Colonel’s men are just as complicit to their commanding officer’s callousness when they begin to rough up and snuff civilians in what is the most cold-blooded aspect of “Kill Zone’s” torrent.  Dennis Phun (“Surf Nazis Must Die”), Rick Massery, Richard Brailford, William Zipp (“Mankillers”), Richard Bravo (“Killer Workout”), and Larry Udy fill out the Colonel’s men while Ron Pace, Tom Baldwin, Jack Marino, and Sharon Young round out the civilian contingent.

On the surface, “Kill Zone” has the presentation of a direct-to-video, low-budget rip of “First Blood” but like the Sylvester Stallone John Rambo thriller, commentary undertones rise to the top with an additional few bobbing and freestanding from 1982 film.  Producer Jack Marino admits watching “First Blood” prior to writing the script that obviously become appropriated from the Ted Kotcheff picture in what is an underlining post-traumatic syndrome plagued individual in a dormant stage of the affliction then becomes pried open by aggressive, misapprehending authority with no time for a condition they’re ignorant too.  What follows is a deadly resistance against a barbaric enemy and the starkly different situations both characters John Rambo and Jason McKenna find themselves caught up in parallel their hellacious Nam tour in many synapse-snapping and physically scarring aspects to a point where the line blurs between being back in that Hell in reality and being back in that Hell in the mind.  What “Kill Zone” adds to its own version of the tale is no pedestrian anti-war pushback like we see with Brian Dennehy’s Podunk sheriff and his deputies but rather a shift in commentary toward the military’s once push harder and neglectful treatment on PTSD in what becomes an anti-military production to the extreme.  John Rambo had military sympathizers in Richard Crenna’s Colonel Trautmann but Jason McKenna’s Colonel spat flak with nothing but contempt for what he considers a weak soldier.  While military criticism is large and in charge, what negatively impacts “Kill Zone” is the no flare for technical military behavior or jargon.  The opening combat scene exemplifies the inexactitudes with Mitchell and his team storming through brush and across a river toward an unseen enemy’s stronghold guns blazing like little boys with popguns and mouthy explosions sounds of amateurism splayed all over as he and his team run wildly, hop like a bunny into fire stances, and point rifles with no line of sight.  Prior is able to achieve some nice shots of ammunition exchange with slow profile pans and aerial assaults filmed up from the ground, but there’s too much downplay to take this low-rung action film seriously and to really get a viewer the headspace of “Kill Zone’s” deathtrap montage that warrants more respect than what the rest of the presentation layout provides.

Missing in action from contemporary formats for over three decades, “Kill Zone” finally becomes rescued from inferior definition captivity and arrives onto DVD and Blu-ray (reviewed) courtesy of MVDVisual’s Rewind Collection series.  The Blu-ray is an AVC encoded, 1080p high-definition transfer scanned and restored in 4K from the 35mm interpositive print.  Presented in a widescreen 1.78:1 aspect ratio, the new transfer breathes new life into the lost but not forgotten feature with an enriched color grading and a sharpening of details, especially textures of the foliage and rocky terrains and assorted skin features.  Not entirely impeccable, contrast often teeters in the same frame and there’s an abundance of saturating grain, like large raindrop grain, in nighttime image that wash out details to great extent, but we’re always reeled back in with warm and pleasant color palette that flushes the previous VHS release quality down the core memory exiting drainpipe.  There’s one or two moments of vertical scratches, indelicately faint, and rough editing patches that distort to a blip that may be more problematic and age-related from the interpositive print than the dynamic restoration that was done.  The English language LPCM 2.0 mono track suffers from the low-quality sound recording equipment or placement that renders dialogue soft and nearly unintelligible as volume levels severely spike depending on how much the actors are projecting their voices.  There is some minor, unobtrusive popping throughout the fidelity faithful ambient and dialogue track, the latter, though softly wavering at times, does ultimately prevail to the forefront.  Optional subtitles are available.  Special features include a new audio (and optional video) commentary with producer Jack Marino, moderated by Cereal at Midnight host Heath Holland, a new Making-Of Kill Zone” featurette with clips interview with Jack Marino moderated by “Kill Zone” restoration project producer Steve Latshaw, the Vestron Video VHS version of the feature in standard definition, a photo gallery, and the original theatrical trailer redone with restoration elements.  The action-packed original poster art obtains a renewed look for the Blu-ray’s retro cardboard O-slip that resembles a torn, scuffed, and stickered VHS box art. Underneath the slipcover, the same poster art is on the front of the clear Blu-ray snapper case with latch and on the reverse side a back-the-scenes still images of Ted Prior and costars in character form.  The insert holds a folded mini-poster of the original poster art and the disc is pressed with the ridged gridlines of a VHS shell cassette with insert this side directions at the top.  Pretty neat design that further leans into “Kill Zone” VHS cult following purgatory.  MVD’s 50th release of the Rewind Collection is rated R feature has a runtime of 91 minutes and the Blu-ray is region unlocked for everyone’s viewing pleasure.  No longer destined to live out its shelf life on VHS, the wonderful contributors to obscure movie restoration brings “Kill Zone” back into action with a rejuvenated hi-def release that’ll blow you away. 

Enter the “Kill Zone” on a New Blu-ray Home Video!

What Russian EVILS Lie Beneath in “The Lair” reviewed! (Acorn Media International / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“The Lair” Has a Deadly Secret!  Blu-ray Now Available!  

Royal air force Captain Kate Sinclair is shot down over the arid planes of Afghanistan.  Swarming with Taliban insurgents and her command officer killed, Sinclair takes shelter in an old, abandoned Russian bunker from the Russian Afghanistan invasion of the 1980s.  What she stumbles into is an experiment lair housing numerous stasis chambers and dark secrets.  Sinclair manages to barely escape with her life when one of the creatures inside the capsules is released, tearing to shreds her well-armed pursuers.  Rescued by a ragtag team of U.S. military outcasts based in the middle of nowhere as peripheral punishment and joined up by a trio of British special forces in the area, the Captain attempts to warn her rescuers what’s out in the desert only to be on the receiving end of a monstrous invasion that sees the slaughter of nearly everyone in camp, including the camp commander.  Miles from anywhere and not enough supplies to withstand another attack, those soldiers left alive band together to stage their own last stand assault on the creatures’ Russian bunker lair to ensure hostile eradication.

Acclaimed horror director Neil Marshall (“Dog Soldiers”) returns to his roots with a claustrophobic, high-energy, and violent creature feature known as “The Lair.”  Having experienced underwhelming success with the fiery Dark Horse antihero “Hellboy” remake in 2019, Marshall returns to independent scene for the 2022 released film having been shot in the barren lands of Budapest, Hungary to create the illusionary Afghanistan territory backdrop.  Marshall co-writes the script with “The Lair” star Charlotte Kirk, a reteaming affair from Marshall’s last feature “The Reckoning” from two years prior in which Kirk also produced and starred.  Also returning from “The Reckoning” and into the producer’s chair is Daniel-Konrad Cooper along with “Infinity Pool” producers, Jonathan Halperyn and Daniel Kresmery, and “Lords of Chaos’s”, Kwesi Dickson in this Shudder exclusive collaboration from Rather Good Films, Scarlett Productions Limited, Highland Film Group, and Ashland Hill Media Finance with Neil Marshall and Peter Shawyer’s private equity investment group, Ingenious Media, providing financial support.

Star Charlotte Kirk and Neil Marshall have a seemingly natural rapport that has transposed well from their collaboration on “The Reckoning” to the “The Lair,” crossing subgenre that involve the equivocal occult to a more plainspoken physical presence of foreign experiments gone wildly bloodlust.  Instead of being hunted by a 17th century witch hunters just for being a woman saying no to man, Kirk steps into a role of authority as military captain with loads of smarts and adept at close combat as she’s being, once again, chased by predators, but these uber-predators are unearthly, unremorseful, and ugly.  Marshall provides just enough character backstory for understanding the stakes and strengths of each of them but to reach a little more into their history might have been key to stronger motivations and for something to prove in not just being jarhead screwups.  Sinclair finds commonality and sympathy from Sgt. Tom Hook (Jonathan Howard, “Godzilla:  King of the Monsters”) who bears the guilt of losing men in battle and punishes himself to do better.  Psyche profiles for each soldier makes them rise above being flat by providing depth of flaw but what is vexing and irking about each, and this element may very well be intentional as an international thespian bout of poking fun, is the cast is nearly all British playing Americans with stereotypical drawls, ebonics, and punctuating southern accents so overexaggerated it’s downright sickening to hear, like watching a bad old war film, but what’s even worse and what drives a sharp claw talon into the inane heart of trite-tired audiences is the group slow walk before embarking into the battle of no return.  Again, this might be the work of intentional satire.  Some accents are gargantuanly worse than others, such as with “Titanic 666’s” Jamie Bamber’s pirate-patched Major Roy Finch and the Mark Arend’s Carolina-born Private Dwanye Everett.  From there, the elocution grades get better with less cliché but not by much with a cast rounding out of Leon Ockenden (“The Reckoning”), who I couldn’t understand because his accent was so Scottish-ly thick, Troy Alexander, Mark Strepan, Hadi Khanjanpour, Kibong Tanji, Adam Bond, Harry Taurasi, and Alex Morgan.

Neil Marshall not only returns to his horror origins but he also returns to the heyday of prime practical effects with inset creatures of a spliced appearance between the build, the dark full body achromia, and the facial configural layout of Marvel’s extraterrestrial antihero Venom with the eye-less, tongue-lashings and grabbings of Resident Evil’s staple adversaries, the Lickers.  Obvious a man in a prosthetic suit, the simplistic, brawny-framed humanoid basks in nostalgia despite being in a modern day movie, pining for the days when large or small men in full body, head-to-toe, terrifying imagery suits were the antagonists of our youthful nightmares while also providing the cast something to act against for a more realistic and rancorous on screen rendezvous.  The smaller scale production limits Marshall’s possibilities with his Kevlar-fleshed and razor-toothed creatures but the veteran director sells every act of “The Lair’s” story with trenchant action with hardly any downtime to catch one’s breath in between because the next blood-laden blitz rollout is upon us in a blink of an eye.  Between the action, the anomalous characters, and the pulsating, downbeat synthesizer score that courses through its veins, “The Lair” leans itself toward being a callback to the late 80s-early 90’s last stand dogfight subgenre and you can’t one second cease your attention for a director who appreciates the narrative surprise more than anticipated predictability.

Become lured into “The Lair” now on Blu-ray home video from Acorn Media International, a UK distribution subsidiary of RLJ Entertainment.  The AVC encoded, 1080p high definition release is presented in a widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio.  The BD25 offers sold flexibility for a film with hefty amount of night shoots and action as potential compression problems seem to stay at bay without any severe noticeable banding, blocking, mosquito noise, etc., however, the details are quite flat with a smoother finish, often in the blur of the fast camera workflow and editing because of the action sequences, leaving depth on characters, as well as in the scene, at arm’s length with monocular vision.  The warm hint of chartreuse embedded grading offers industrials color tones with a rich grit of oxidized bunker steel.  Don’t adjust your audio dial on the release’s English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround sound track, the dialogue only sounds wonky because its deliberate Americanized dialect set at the forefront and prominent amongst the audio layers which has significant range and depth with explosions, rapid gunfire from different calibers, and the guttural growls of the creatures that echo nicely through the rear and side channels when under the bunker or even affixed in a slightly decreased volume of its form in the attack of the basecamp.  There were no interference blights with the audio track, such as hissing, popping, or other discernible issues.  Special features included only a making-of featurette with clipped interviews during the shoot with director Neil Marshall, actors Charlotte Kirk, Mark Strepan, Jamie Bamber, Jonathan Howard, Leon Ockenden, and others regarding their admiration for the project in different aspects.  Acorn Media’s physical release comes in a slightly larger Blu-ray snapper, typical of the UK releases, with the cover art featuring an up-close and personal look at the creature’s ugly mug.  The same art is also on the disc with no insert inside the snapper case.  The release comes region B locked with a runtime of 97 minutes and is certified 15 for strong gory violence, language, and threat.  If you can stomach the fatuity at times, “The Lair” is a fast paced and staunch creature feature with a bunker full of gore.

“The Lair” Has a Deadly Secret!  Blu-ray Now Available!