A pair of procrastinating college students decide to make an aged old legend of a local serial killer named Dorchester Stewart, aka Crinoline Head, into their final research project, knowing that their teacher, Professor Paul Donner, was traumatically to close to being one of Crinoline Head’s fatal victims. With other invited and uninvited students tagging along, the trip to the isolated Stewart lake house grounds turns into a booze and sex filled getaway for most with an irritable and lustful female grounds keeper maintaining an ever close eye on them. As those interested in the legend of the doll obsessed Crinoline Head become closer to whether the infamous murderer still exists, students are disappearing one by one solidifying Crinoline Head’s homicidal come back.
“Dollface” is the latest all-American slasher parody film from director Tommy Faircloth and is the long awaited sequel to Faircloth’s “Crinoline Head” in 1995. Now, I’ve never experienced the first “Crinoline Head” film myself and reviewing the sequel might be challenging to undertake. Any time when solely working with sequels, portions of the sequels go unexplained because they assume that audiences are all caught up on the original premise. Tommy Faircloth really tries to put an effort into catching viewers up on the 20-year-old story with a classroom monologue told by the first film’s surviving character Paul, who is now a college professor. A backstory introduction also recounts the reason on how young Dorchester Stewart becomes the monstrous murderer with the untimely death of his doll-making and over protecting mother, but the exposition becomes boggling and doesn’t necessarily feel like enough to warrant Stewart’s homicidal tendencies.
For a campy horror-comedy slasher flick, “Dollface” comes off slightly conservative with the death scenes, leaving much to the imagination with quick scene cuts and off screen kills. Practical effects are left in the dust while the use of blood splatter becomes a hot commodity and I’m not positive how much special effects and makeup supervisor Michael R. Smith was involved except for a obvious dummy head in a crab trap, a knife planted in someone’s chest, and a cocaine snorter stuck up a strangled one’s nostril. Crinoline Head, portrayed by former pro-wrestling body guard John Kap, appears minacious enough being a giant lumbering individual in a jumper suit while sporting the half broken porcelain doll mask and Faircloth’s kill scenes seemed interesting enough in concept, but why they’re not fully developed and executed to revel in shock value is beyond comprehension.
The horror-comedy does live up to being extremely campy and stars the one and only legendary B-horror movie scream queen Debbie Rochon to headline as the raunchy and bored grounds keeper held up in an old RV, propositioning the young male students. “Abraham Lincoln vs. Zombies” star Jason Vail portrays Prof. Paul Donner and with alongside Debbie Rochon, the veteran actors are sprinkled into the story to offset their rather fresh faced co-stars. However, raw talent lies within the silver lining with lead male Christian James who brought strength aspects and an even keeled mentality to the lead character David and also with Jim, David’s friend played by the naturally funny man Gunner Wills, was another character that was a joy when on screen. Despite some solid performances, the cast comes and goes to make body count and are not able to expand and develop on their characters, leaving a teetering feeling about whether the character should be liked or disliked when finally receiving the ultimate axe.
Breaking Glass Pictures and Vicious Circle Films brings “Dollface” to DVD home video in a brilliant widescreen format, providing a clean picture with only a hint of aliasing during more action scenes and one off-colored scene that went completely into a blue tone as if to convey the twilight hour, but the next scene was bright daylight again. The audio is way unbalanced with the metal genre soundtrack goes overbearing the dialogue; LFE oppresses much of the other audio tracks, causing the dialogue to be nearly inaudible and moot to the story. “Dollface” has the basic slasher attitude and gets the slack and hack job bluntly done, but it’s not pretty nor perfect when considering prior slasher parodies. Once I experience Tommy Faircloth’s first film “Crinoline Head” and get the full effect of the fictional serial killer, maybe then this sequel of the doll-faced killer will bare more inauspicious teeth. If anything, Debbie Rochon screaming, “Can you pop a fucking squat!?!?” is well worth the viewing.
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Below Us Doesn’t Live Evil. “Above Us Lives Evil” review!
After the tragic and accidental death of their young son, Richard and Doreen escape from their painful memories by moving to a quick-sell, rundown house with their two children, Jen and Ben. The house holds a unfathomable mysterious past with the previous family disappearing without a trace, leaving many of their possessions behind in the house’s desolate rooms. Ben, who hasn’t spoken much after the untimely death of his twin brother, encounters humanoid creatures in the attic at night when they roam the house. Ben becomes unsuccessful communicating about the horrifying creatures to his parents and even his older sister, shrugging his warnings off as a sign of his continuous grief. When Richard and Doreen leave Jen and Ben home alone in order to go to all night work function, the creatures descend from their attic abode and seek to devour people they can get their hungry hands on.
“Above Us Lives Evil” is the freshman film of Jason Mills circa 2009 and transpires to be a visually interesting piece of creature feature horror cinema even though the story is a bit undercooked and the acting more than often feels like watching a robotic cluster, monotonously reading the script line-by-line. The story opens ambiguously enough with a glum looking man, sitting in his car with a young boy laying motionless at the foot of man’s front bumper while Doreen cries hysterically over him and another boy, Ben, stands in tragic shock over the dead body of his brother. The opening only connects the rest of the story by the segue of the family driving, moving away antagonistically from their tragic past, but the melodramatically written opening needs being revisited, perhaps in the third act, but doesn’t make a reappearance, missing the opportunity to explore deeper into the family’s separation, and becomes sorely adrift from the rest of story’s girth.
The story continues to plug along of a supposedly grieving family, starting a new life in a new home where we’re informed by the strange neighbors that the previous family just up and vanishes. That sums up the complete backstory revealed of the previous inhabitants. Similar types of voids also rear their ugly little heads. The development upon the creature’s existence isn’t forthright nor is there any explanation into their background, making their existence to be fixtures of the house. These human devouring beings could have been born in the house and lived in that house since the beginning of time for all we’re led to understand.
The Canadian based produced film stars 30 year old Vancouver native Nicola Elbro as the eldest sister Jen. Nicola maintains a solid performance throughout to pull off this low key creature feature and with a little elbow grease added on, I can see Nicola moving from low budget features to the major leagues of horror Hollywood. However, the rest of the cast shares similar generic performances that painfully lead us by the hand, as if we’re not-yet-ready-for-horror-movie toddlers, through the exposition of everything that could have been just simply implied. Even though being one of the more experienced actors on this project, Robert Duncan’s monotony only suffers more drastically from his dimwitted, excuse-ridden character as Nicola’s father Richard. Richard neglects his children’s immediate needs and fears, dismissing them as if they’re too young and naive to know how the world works. Combine everything said here about Richard and he becomes the worst character amongst the rest of underdeveloped characters and there are quite a few.
The creatures had more personality with their caveman-like gaits and ghastly limber appendages, chasing down quickly disposable characters (which inconsequentially are also the main characters). Jason Mills and his relative Simon and Johnny take on “The Strain” resembling creature roles; the Mills’ lanky builds added that extra something to the overall appearance of the creature. Jason Mills took the creature look and ability a bit further with the adjunct mandibles that cover the snake-like tentacles; the construction of this achievement is a mixture of practical effect and CGI. Usually, I’m not a big fan of CGI, but Mills strategically, and successfully at that, obscures much of the creature, hiding the full overlook in the shadows, in the quick cuts, and in the low-light. Many of the effects are obscured; the special effects team mainly uses slight CGI and a bucket of blood or two to create their desired creature attacking effect. Most of the attacks are implied or too far in a long shot, creating the allusion of vicious creature film.
The Sector 5 Films and Chemical Burn distributed home DVD release technically suffers. Digital interference plays havoc, graining certain portions of night scenes while also causing digital waves on other night scenes. The loss of frame rate during other night time moments result in an awkward slow motion. “Above Us Lives Evil,” much like the creatures, should store itself in the attic until ready to descend for blood and to be more captivating with the characters. Jason Mills and Nicola Elbro show promising attributes that can contribute to the horror community and while their contribution may not be with this particular Jason Mills film starring Nicola Elbro, I’m sure we’ll see more of the two in the near future either on another collaboration or separate projects that could, and probably should, begin to turn some heads.
Evil Dwells in Your Nightmares! “Horsehead” review!
Jessica is plagued by recurring horrific and lucid nightmares of a horse-headed figure that brings death to her dreams. When she has a nightmare about her grandmother being impaled to death by the horsehead monster, she’s immediately phoned by her mother Catelyn informing Jessica that her grandmother has passed away. Jessica travels to the family’s countryside estate for the funeral and is welcomed by her stern mother. Jessica’s nightmares worsen the first night and she becomes trapped in her own dreams as she can feel the haunt of the horse-head figure in the corner’s of her mind. When Jessica soon realizes that her’s grandmother’s death and her mother’s cruelty might be more involved and connected with the horse-head creature, she attempts to stay in a semi-conscious sleep state to puzzle together the mysterious pieces and to control her nightmares once and for all.
The freshman feature film from Romain Basset contains such promise and maturity and Basset shows daring courage to create a horror-fantasy of this caliber thats very aesthetically symbolic and worthy of being awarded qualities of early Dario Argento’s films with intensive surreal and haunting facets. “Horsehead” embodies the character Jessica’s head in creating and blending an atmospheric jigsaw and visceral puzzle of a world while being a mirror in which you can glance back into time, far back beyond your own existence. “Horsehead’s” unique tribute blend contains the bizarre and frightening worlds of Tarsem Singh’s 2000 film “Cell” intertwined with one’s life story similar to the past and present tales of “A Christmas Carol” with Ebenezer Scrooge. However, Jessica’s past is much more dark and grim than Scrooge’s will ever be and her future won’t end in her being generous and kind to a crippled poor boy named Tiny Tim.
Certainly a visually stunning film, “Horsehead” tries turn the mind on it’s end, leaving the suspended muscle dangling near the edge of insanity. Jessica’s reality becomes no more real than her nightmares as the horse-headed monster is has comparable dream-bending qualities to the the same effect as Freddy Krueger of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” but “Horesehead” is a lot more gothic and whole lot less sarcastic than the fedora sporting child murderer. The creature has haunted Jessica’s lineage for at least three generations, presumably starting with her late grandmother and is a symbol of Jessica’s strict-bible-following grandfather who becomes the epicenter of all the family’s issues. Her dreams hold a dark mystery to her family’s continuous cycle of troubles and use horrific symbolism to express, in stages, the truth behind their ancestral secrets.
As much as I love the symbolism in this film, I’m worried about the psycho-sexual portion the film markets, splashed as a tagline right on the Blu-ray cover. Yes, the once little girl from Robert De Niro’s “Ronin” actress Lilly-Fleur Pointeaux does become involved briefly in highly sexual situations in her electric dance music soundtrack nightmares in a down the rabbit hole type of situation, but really serve no purpose to Pointeaux’s character in reality because no much is conveyed except for her profession as a dream psychologist and she has quarrels with her mother, especially on why her mother refuses to informer on the identity of her father. Gala Besson, who plays a younger version of Jessica’s grandmother, also briefly bares skin for a more gruesome and twisted scene that would make Pinhead smile with such pleasure. Perhaps the psycho-sexual scenes stem from the heavily implied incest relationships in the story between father and daughter, sister and sister, and mother and daughter. If incest is the answer to my question on why the film blatantly markets psycho-sexual, than the taboo subject matter makes “Horsehead” that much more risque and that more interestingly ambitious, creating a film that’s hard to swallow and shocking to behold when put into that perspective. Some dream interpreters believe that being chased by a white horse, in which case the horse-headed creature is of off-white color, may represent chaste or having issues with intimacy. This might explain some of Jessica’s unusual sexual scenes in her dream sequences involving relatives.
You might recognize a name from the past in the Italian horror genre: Catriona MacColl, an United Kingdom actress who portrays Jessica’s uptight mother Catelyn. MacColl is best known for her early 1980’s rolls in the Lucio Fulci films “The Beyond,” “City of the Living Dead,” and “House by the Cemetery.” With MacColl and Pointeaux’s as the overpowering female characters, “Horsehead” rounds out with weak male characters such as Jessica’s stepfather Jim, played by Murray Head, and an estate servant George, played by French acting vet Vernon Dobtcheff.
Overall, “Horsehead” delivers solid acting, dons great editing, and has better than average makeup and effects making “Horsehead” a winning release, yet again, for Artsploitation Films. The Blu-ray release is perfectly graced with a stunning 2.35:1 widescreen transfer with a 5.1 Dolby Digital mix, evenly balanced with appropriate LFE during the EDM nightmares. The picture is quite clear with some digital noise interference but only on some minor facial closeup scenes and no damage on the prints. Even though “Horsehead” is a French film and most of the cast is French, the movie is in English and it’s not dubbed English either. Bonus features also include “Inside Horsehead Making of” and four short films that have a total runtime of 81 minutes – a movie in itself.
Satan’s Cult Seeks to Raise the Dead! “All Sinners Night” review!
An investigative reporter witnesses right in front of him his wife commit a gruesome suicide in their bedroom. Lana searches for her lost brother whose been missing for over a year. The two combine forces in Taylorsville believing their loved one were connected to a group of satanic followers led by the Reverend Hiram Graves. When the local authorities prematurely close the case on Lana’s missing brother, Lana and the reporter seek the truth and the truth might be more deadly than they’ve ever imagined. Halloween night brings the satanic sect to kidnap five innocent and random women, five sacrificial lambs, in order to bring death back to life.
As a little piece of Independent cinema from writer-director Bobby Easley, “All Sinners Night” comes from the production company Horror Wasteland Pictures and is brought to DVD by the multi-genre distributor World Wide Multi-Media. Now, if you haven’t heard of filmmaker Bobby Easley, the company Horror Wasteland Pictures, or the distributor World Wide Multi-Media, then now you’re one step closer to being caught up on micro-budget filmmaking and one step closer to viewing lesser known film titles that you won’t normally screen at a theater or even come across in a Redbox inventory. Now, while budget films aren’t necessarily for everyone, I have to say that “All Sinners Night” isn’t the best ease-into segue, but if your mind is open and your cinematic palate is vast then Easley’s film might be right up your alley.
Easley’s film involves a satanic cult collecting female sacrifices to raise the dead has a slow, unfocused beginning that slightly picks up and gains more focus a long the way, but the momentum begins a little too late to obtain entertainment value and much of the other sorts of value, such as the film’s budget, falls right onto the finale where characters die, faces explode, and blood spills when the black magic ritual begins. The bloodletting is creative, but various scenes, which could have been explored further with death exploitation, use editing techniques to convey and imply death when in reality there needs to be more visceral visual stimulants to show the brutality and mercilessness, especially for satanic cults because they’re one of the realistic forms of horror that exist in the world today and displaying the violence on screen, making it breathe on screen, would scare people more than implied violence.
The acting is a bit clunky from the lead actors and that drag the story’s motivation down a bit. Brittany Jesse as Lana and Tom Sparx as the reporter try to build a dynamic duo that more or less fizzles and their characters are to partly to blame for their characters bring no real spark to their quest and cause of discovering the truth behind Taylorsville’s secrets. The evangelical preacher Hiram Graves played by Bill Levin has grand on screen physical characteristics to pull off a satan fanatical cult leader, but Levin’s acting doesn’t quite have the range of a twisted lord of darkness pastor and just stays on that horizontal plane throughout the film’s duration. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s original grandpa actor John Dugan and horror and sci-fi genre fanboy Sal Lizard headline “All Sinners Night” even though their cameo scenes are short and sweet. I found the one cameo of Indianapolis born and based horror host Sammy Terry, an Elvira type host of sorts, to be welcoming and well-fitting for the film’s gloomy nature and to be a nice shout out to the local Indianapolis horror scene. Lets not also forget about actress Sam Alford and her two courageous scenes of exploited nudity. Alford’s character is of generic and lesser value – like a Star Trek minor character labeled for certain death – and she is the sole kidnapped to bare her chest. I’m sure Easley didn’t mind shelling out a couple more bucks for the Alford’s assets.
After reading a number of reviews online about the film, the consensus on the Bobby Easley’s shooting style is that “All Sinners Night” resembles the visual stylistics of Italian directors such as Mario Bava or Dario Argento’s with their surrealistic or brooding atmospheres. I would venture more toward a duller hue with the right in your face shot-on-video style cinematography of those from such directors as Brad Sykes or Donald Farmer where as Bava or Argento focused more on vivid and popping colors and symbolic suggestions within their mise-en-scenes.
The DVD screener is presented in a 4:3 ratio with Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo mix and a 5.1 stereo mix. The full screen video, like I mentioned before as a shot-on-video style, has significant grainy interference, but the video is still watchable as if you’re watching straight from VHS quality. Not necessarily a bad thing but in today’s day and age or unless your intentions were to create a throwback, the video quality should be clean. The coloring is all off too with overused darks making certain scenes incomprehensible. The 2.0 mix and the 5.1 mix stiffens the unbalanced sound quality. Some dialogue emits too low of a range and then in the next scene the screaming is overbearing and crackling out of the speakers. The glam, goth rock or punk rock soundtrack is fairly decent, but the preference and priority should be on the dialogue or the story becomes lost without it. The disc did pack quite a few extras including a gag reel, music video from the band Dead Dick Hammer, interviews, and a trailer for the film and also :Atah Saia”.
Overall, “All Sinners Night” wears a lot of masks – literally, a large number of extras wear masks as if they raided a Halloween party store, but trying to piece together a story that tends to omit key elements or strays away from trunk of the plot is difficult and, basically, one would just need to take the film for what it’s worth, the epitome of independent filmmaking. The effort of introduce homage and the effort to construct a brooding atmosphere makes the Dr. Jekyll side of me admire this film, but the technical and educated Mr. Hyde side of me can’t ignore the obtrusive flaws. In short, rent this title to be adventurous on a forlorn night.
Evil Wears a Clown Mask! “Blood Slaughter Massacre” review!
The sleepy town of Havenwood becomes rocked by the mass murder of some of the town’s most prominent residents attending a joyous celebration. When two local cops, James Fincher and Walter Cobb, first arrive to investigate the horrendous massacre scene, Fincher comes face-to-face with the maniacal killer known by the moniker of The Ripper and barely survives the night. Ten years later, a string of new murders fall upon young high school girls of Havenwood and Detective Fincher starts to piece together that The Ripper might back. To unravel why The Ripper’s ten year hiatus, Fincher must look into his and Havenwood’s past in order to find the answer and stop The Ripper from killing.
“Blood Slaughter Massacre” is a nostalgia driven slasher film with a convoluted and murky plot, but the Manny Serrano directed film manages to rejuvenate the 80’s unstoppable killing machine character in The Ripper. Heavily inspired by the John Carpenter “Halloween” franchise when considering the gloomy atmosphere of the town and Michael Myers-esque antagonist, “Blood Slaughter Massacre” originality is certainly unoriginal, yet there’s something to be said about enjoying someone’s, like Serrano’s, tribute or admiration work that sparks a bit of excitement and allows entertainment to be let in to the soul, especially in the third act when The Ripper’s homicidal chaos ensues and he lays waste to teenagers left and right. Also, the title lacks creativity and doesn’t help build a case of separating itself from the pack. Maybe, a simple title such as “The Ripper” would have honed into that old saying “less is more.”
However, the blood and gore effects have sheer bite. The impressive effects for the budget give The Ripper character that desired aggressive murderer persona, warning all to stay the hell out of his way. Blood flies and flesh shreds created by buckets of bloods and well edited scenes. To showcase such effects you need a pile of bodies and “Blood Slaughter Massacre” piles high the corpses. With great kills, you need a great killer and the film’s “Shish-Kabober,” The Ripper, is a memorable slasher which can only be described as a giant fellow with an old man clown mask that displays no emotion in the hollow eyes, show’s no mercy when hovering above an easy kill, and owns a supernatural ability to be at the right place at the right time, ready to stick his blade right in the heart of his prey.
The rest of the characters didn’t stand out above The Ripper and emitted low caliber dialogue and persona all around. The acting becomes terribly melodramatic within serious and tense-filled toned scenes. Matt Cody as Fincher tried to embody a Donald Pleasence Dr. Loomis character, but Cody came off a bit to desperate in comparison and Fincher’s isn’t a strong male character able to pull off cutting down the brutal legacy that is so natural to The Ripper. The female characters with exploitive nudity, even if only for a few minutes, had more practicability because, while over stating the obvious, “Blood Slaughter Massacre” is a horror slasher movie making nudity a natural being or even a minor, disposable character. Also, many of the characters show up just to be filler for The Ripper to rip apart. Not a terrible thing, but it’s difficult to care about certain characters without being able to develop into a character we care about and in the end, all underdeveloped fillers must be six feet under ground in five or more pieces.
Technically, Serrano’s films suffers major obstacles. Scenes annoying go overboard on the grayscale with a heavy gray tint switching back-and-forth from scene to scene taking away the little coloring the film had and creating a haze blanket of the mise-en-scene as if in a dream. Continuously going in and out of focus and slight blotchy posterizing are also problematic during darker. Dark scenes and day scenes also suffer from heavy digital interference. The unbalanced audio in the 2.0 stereo mix doesn’t channel the dialogue very well, making it secondary to more inaudible parts of the film. What I can positively comment on about the DVD is the detailed cover art of The Ripper. The retro 1980s or early 1990’s feel of Wild Eye Releasing’s DVD release cover shows great promise for a film that flounders during the first two acts.
It's Bloggin Evil! 