Tag Archives: What Keeps You Alive

An Expedition to Hunt EVIL is now EVIL Hunting the Expedition. “The Yeti” reviewed! (Well Go USA Entertainment / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“The Yeti” Stomping Its Way onto Blu-ray!

Alaska, 1947 – an oil tycoon’s expedition goes missing after the team doesn’t report to the return boat and a SOS is transmitted days later.  The oilman’s son gathers his own team of uniquely skilled experts to track down the whereabouts of his father and the rest of the missing expedition.  Ellie Bannister, a washed out of cartographer and explorer, is hired to lead the trip because her estranged father Hollis was a part of the first expedition.  Despite her own self-doubting hesitations, Ellie agrees to aid her services but when they arrive, they’re met with a force of evil long thought of urban legend.  One-by-one, they’re being picked off, chewed apart, and spat out in a heap of blood and guts as the creature after them is hunting them down as intruders and pillagers of their snowy forest land.  It’s up to Ellie and the remaining survivors had to contact the boat in the midst of a storm in order to escape with their lives and bodies still intact. 

Horror films about the Abominable Snowman, or even his forestry cousin Big Foot, are always hit or miss, with most of them being duds that don’t do the urban legendary big fellas justice.   And don’t even get me started on those grandiose-embellished documentaries.  Co-writers-and-directors Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta are taking their shot on the snowy sasquatch with their latest 2026 film, “The Yeti.”  The film is Gallerano and Pisciotta’s first feature length film after having a decent, more than a decade’s worth of short film credits to their name.  The U.S. production builds snowy, forest-filled stages inside Buffalo, New York’s Buffalo FilmWorks to double as the harsh, snowy landscape of Alaska, avoiding long and wide shots in full light to make it more claustrophobic while and contained to effectively represent a location in the 49th state. Torfoot Films and Hardscrabble Film Company serve as the film studios with Johnathan Browniee (“Satanic Panic”), Frank Coppola (“Givers of Death”), Ross Meyerson, and Romano Natale producing. 

“The Yeti” is compromised of an ensemble cast of mostly rescue expeditioners heading into the unknown parts of Alaska to make contact with another expedition team who fell off the radar.  The story is female-led by Brittany Allen (“Jigsaw,” “What Keeps You Alive”) as an afraid of failure Ellie Bannister with haunted history and a bum leg due to polio.  Though deeply flawed in a traditional sense, this doesn’t stop Bannister from accepting the position of expedition leader and cartographer-explorer and while Bannister is rising to the challenges to meet her character arc, Allen doesn’t exude the attributes of heroism with freezing in fear, drifting off with music, and never really coming toe-to-toe with the titular villain and, instead, having more complex conversations and actions with her estranged father as part of a rekindling process.  The rest of her team shows more guts – literally and figuratively – without much of a backstory to them and that wastes the potential to have some sort of strong feelings toward their characters, such as war vet Leander Coates (Linc Hand, “The Other Side”)) who wears a half-mask painted with a crude imitation of a human face, Daniel ‘Dynamate’ Hewitt (Gene Gallerno) as a spacy, good ol’boy drunk and explosive expert, Booker (Jim Cunnings, “Halloween Kills”) as the silent and stoic radio ma, Merriell Sunday (Eric Nelsen, “Nightmare Cinema”) as the missing Tycoon’s son who either has a hidden agenda or has ants in his pants, Margaret Lamb (Christina Bennett Lind, “Calico Skies”) as an animal expert who doesn’t get to use much of her skills and knowledge, and Belle Parker (Elizabeth Cappuccino, “Super Dark Times”) as…well…I don’t really know, assistant to the Tycoon’s son possibly?  Parker’s contribution to the expedition team is never really explained.  The film rounds out with two big hitters in Corbin Bersen (“Major League”) as the oil Tycoon who does have a hidden agenda and William Sadler (“The Shawshank Redemption”) as Ellie’s father trying to stop that agenda. 

Yeti centric stories should exhibit the ugliest, ferocious, hairiest, tallest, and meanest, white furred primate to ever walk the Earth in folklore.  “The Yeti” accomplishes that in a modest level that tries to meet eye-to-eye with Ryan Schifrin’s 2006 film “Abominable” that truly does have a ruthless creature in its blood soaked and gory entrails.  Gallerano and Pisciotta’s Yeti, brought to life by Wayne Anderson (“The Predator”) and Ali Gordon (“Hellraiser” ’22), is tall, stringy and matted hair, large mouth with razor teeth, sharp claws, and an overall, an oversized, white gorilla on steroids.  Couple this beast’s design with gory practical effects by Anderson and Gordon as well and you have potential breathing down your neck!  Yet, “The Yeti” fails to impress despite a visually visceral creature and buckets of bloodshed as the story can’t hold the pieces together even in its rudimentary and predictable state.  Characters are never given the opportunity to make an impact, becoming quick Yeti fodder for the sake of impressive on-screen kills – one man eaten in half, another perforated by a claw, and another’s arm is ripped right off as the Yeti compresses his foot down onto his chest.  There’s little to like about the actions taken and the lack of empathy in their behavior that snag “The Yeti’s” success for an indie product that tries, and to the point, succeeds being larger than its creature mythology.  The creature has more depth and understanding, holding onto a rationality universally understandable, while the characters, who are supposed to be the protagonist and principal good guys on the side of nature or humanity are terribly murky to the point trying to relate to them felt futile. 

Well Go USA Entertainment brings Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta’s “The Yeti” to physical media with an AVC encoded, 1080p Hi-Def resolution, BD25 Blu-ray.  I’m curious why the decision was made for a smaller capacity Blu-ray because aesthetically, “The Yeti” uses low light, fog, has plenty of tenebrous portions that tend to wreak havoc on the compression decoding.  Same can be said here as “The Yeti” suffers from obscurity infractions that reduce the detail considerably.  If looking at the backside of the physical release, as we’ll also go over later, the stills are quite sharp, suggesting the master to have peak quality whereas the Blu-ray sees a reduction in quality.  Joel Froome’s cinematography is an initial mix bag of harsh lighting, black-and-white, and lower color saturation to be more a period pieces of the 1940s-1950s but once the rescue team is out in the field, Froome switches gears quickly to a claustrophic and cold color mise-en-scene that doesn’t expand landscapes, keeping the area tight amongst the trees with poor visibility due to the blizzard-lite conditions.  The film’s aspect ratio is a widescreen 1.78:1.  The release comes with two English audio tracks, a primary DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and a Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo.  The lossless 5.1 is hands down the option to go with with plenty of atmospherics wind gusts, tree rustles, and off-screen Yeti sounds to build tension and isolation.  Dialogue renders over nice and clear with prominence amongst the rest of the layers.  The soundtrack is also equally balanced and integrated but also camouflages in the background, never really becoming a character itself nor being remarkably memorable.  English and French subtitles are optionally available.  Other than trailers and Well Go USA Entertainment previews, the Blu-ray is a feature-only release with no bonus content or stinger scene.  An O-ring slipcover with a telling image of size and ferocity sheaths the standard Blu-ray Amaray.  The same slipcover image art is also the single-sided sleeve and there are no tangible extras within.  Rated R for bloody violence content and some gore, “The Yeti” Blu-ray from Well Go USA Entertainment has a feature runtime of 93 minutes and is region A locked.

Last Rites: “The Yeti’s” a strong enough entry to viciously vilify the snowbound mythical urban legend but directors Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta don’t finish the job giving the narrative feeble legs on the stand where it counts as blood and guts alone can’t make an abominable snowman film worth watching.

“The Yeti” Stomping Its Way onto Blu-ray!

Only EVIL Can Be Constructive Therapy for EVIL! “Dark Nature” reviewed! (Dread / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

Battle Your Inner Demons By Battle The Exterior Ones in “Dark Nature” now on Blu-ray!

Joy walks on eggshells around hot-headed and explosive boyfriend Derek.  Almost having been killed by Derek’s eruption into anger one night, Joy manages to flee his wrath for six months.  Long time good friend and weary ally Carmen convinces the haunted Joy to join a therapy group overseen by a psychologist with unconventional healing methods.  One of those methods is backpacking into the mountain wilderness for a therapeutic getaway to face personal fear with three other women who also experience the familiar paralyzing and manifesting symptoms of towering trauma.  Miles away from civilization, the group treks for two days until an unsettling feeling of being watched and their supplies being stolen forces them into a face-to-face with a mysterious influence that reconjures their individual terror through sight and sound, leaving them incapacitated with anxiety.  When realizing the amount of danger mounding against them, the fear-facing trip through the wilderness will put that aspiration to the survivalist test.

“Dark Nature” is a women-led psychological creature feature surrounded by themes of abuse, trauma, and the handling of the psychosomatic stress when at rock bottom and faced with internal, or external, demons figuratively for traditional storytelling and literally for cinematic storytelling.  Calgary filmmaker Berkley Brady writes and helms her first feature length film in 2022 from a storyteller’s collaboration with Tim Cairo, screenwriter of “Lowlife.”  Shot in the copious thicket of the picturesque and idyllic Canadian Rockies that stretch the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, Brady’s scenic beauty parallels a skin deep exterior amongst a character group seemingly okay in the open-air while within the wayward withholding of crises becomes too burdensome to bear alone.  Brady and Michael Peterson co-produce “Dark Nature” under Nika Productions and Peterson Polaris in association with the Indigenous Screen Office and Telefilm Canada in this this Dread presentation, the production company subsidiary of Dread Central, and Tim Cairo, Kalani Dreimanis (“Polaris”), Jason R. Ellis (“Mother, May I?”), Patrick Ewald (“Turbo Kid”), and Katie Page (“The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot”) serving as executive producers.

The cast comprises of five women at the core and one man hovering around the peripheral like a lingering, festering open sore.  At centerstage is Hannah Emily Anderson (“Jigsaw,” “What Keeps You Alive”) in character throes of relationship lamentation and a cracking psyche over the tumultuously violent and rarely passionate ex-boyfriend Derek, played convincingly cynical of his partner by Daniel Arnold (“Even Lambs Have Teeth”).  First meeting Joy, over a stove of a steaming dish and on the phone in an exchange of concerns and pseudo-comforts, audiences will already be in bed with the young woman’s nervous fraught when a sullen Derek steps into the apartment as she tries to appease him with his favorite food and positive inquisitively around his day.  A tense exchange of words turns into a lust entanglement of pre-sex kisses and touches that spirals into a physical aggression that has nothing to do with foreplay or sex.  The abusive opening act sets the tone for Joy’s edgy mindset into the early and middle acts as she’s standoffish and verbally combative and questioning everything about the group’s choice to venture into the wild under the unconventional means of one Dr. Carol Dunnley, casted by an over the years, well-versed television and movie doctor, or authoritative mentoring figure, Kyra Harper (“Hellmington”), with others continuing to rake over an unpleasant past.   Métis raised actress Roseanne Supernault (“Rhymes for Young Ghouls”) joins Helen Belay and “Don’t Say his Name’s” Madison Walsh as the other nature walking companions seeking a renewed lease on life.  While Belay broods in secrecy with a jaggedly defined backstory of a possible abduction or maybe something worse with Tara, Supernault adds a coping comedy mechanism with her former military background that has caused Shaina intense flashbacks.  “Dark Nature” might not be their characters’ exclusive story but certainly they’re components serve a pieces of the psychology behind it as well as fodder for the forest-dwelling fiend as the narrative aims to fragmentally unfold more of Joy’s affliction that not only cull reasons why this trip may or may not be a good idea but also challenges the friendship strength between her and Carmen until Joy can face down and take responsibility for her unprincipled stance on the seared in fear that renders her powerless and controls her.

“Dark Nature’s” adianoeta works excellently to service both the reclusive avoidance in seeking desperately needed help and the sinister presence lurking and stalking through the lush mountain weald.  Yet, audiences will identify more with the latter because like the principal Joy people tend to avoid their own problems and redirect to another pressing issue that has really nothing to do with them or affects those as a whole, turning a person’s dark nature into not a generally relatable theme no matter how intrinsically installed it is into the incorporated picture.  While seemingly sweeping with Joy’s entire circumstances, we’re led to believe the anxious woman remains haunted by her past, her abuser having this hold over her akin to Stockholm syndrome, as while on the trek through the mountainside she can hear his voice, hear the repetitive clicks of his Zippo lighter, and even experience his tight grip around her throat but Brady winds up the narrative with a few vacillating curveballs that pull toward difference directions to swing-and-miss from being squarely hit until the grand reveal of explanation.  Even then, the explanation retains some purposeful vagueness with an antecedent anecdote of an ancient indigenous people once offering sacrifices to a spirit on the very land the group is treading on.  The tale doesn’t offer much detail and certainly isn’t a full-proof explanation of what ensues but adds that comforting layer of setup into what becomes madness erupted from a furtive, cave-dwelling creature shellacked in a black muck and with supernatural abilities of emerging a person’s most personal fear.

A psychological creature feature that offers worse things in the world than one’s own personal demons comes to Blu-ray home video from Dread’s physical distribution partner, Epic Pictures.  The AVC encoded, high-definition 1080p, BD25, presented in a widescreen 2.39:1 aspect ratio, of “Dark Nature” looks undoubted sharp with details even if the color graded is somewhat desaturated.  The decoding of data details nicely around the foliage, skin features, and even in darker scenes with black levels not succumbing to any compression artefacts.  “Dark Nature” has two English audio options with a Dolby Digital 5.1 surround and a Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo of crisp sound design with a surround the wagon barrage of audio cues casting out through the back channels to denote an autonomic attack when alone in the woods.  Dialogue is clean, clear, and sorted out through the chaos with a perfect depth and reverberation from outside-to-cave-to-cave-to-outside.  An eclectic range is spread-out through the tale from the flashbacks adding explosions and whizzing gunfire to the guttural roars and bush movements of the creature that resemble an enclosing chill of being watched.  “Dark Nature” marks the debut score for the Canadian band Ghostkeeper and while the additional of delicate broodiness sweeps over the images, creating an ominous overhang for much of the picture, I wouldn’t say the score adds to the film’s soul in the subtilty of the low, whispery tones. English subtitles are available.  Special features include an audio commentary track, also hidden within the audio setup, with director Berkley Brady, makeup artist Kyra Macpherson (“Red Letter Day”), and costume designer Jennifer Crighton, a handful of deleted scenes cut for timing, Ghostkeeper stop-motion music video (1.33:1), and an oddly incorporated short film from “Dark Nature’s” editor David Hiatt (“Bloodthirsty”) entitled “Peanut Butter Pals,” a Scooby-Doo mystery solving trio comically and melodramatically tracking down a cave monster, “Dark Nature” trailers with a countdown list of a theatrical, 30-second, and 15-second trailer, and Epic Pictures trailers including “Colonial,” “Satanic Hispanics,” “Tomorrow Job,” “The Lake,” and “Woman of the Photographs.” Physical features are slimmer with a traditional snapper and a rather generic cover art of Joy and Carmen covered in blood superimposed in the foreground of a forest. Disc pressing has the two actresses, still covered in blood, reappear but this time within the jaws of a creature. The region free Blu-ray clocks in at 86 minutes and is not rated. Berkley Brady’s woodland set neurosis knot never says die in the face of adversity no matter the form in the filmmaker’s female-driven debut.

Battle Your Inner Demons By Battle The Exterior Ones in “Dark Nature” now on Blu-ray!