Posts Tagged ‘Horror’


Sennentuntschi

January 27th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Michael Steiner
2010 / 115′
written by Michael Steiner, Stefanie Japp and Michael Sauter
cienmatography by Pascal Walder
music by Adrian Frutiger
starring Roxane Mesquida, Nicholas Ofczarek, Andreas Zogg, Carlos Leal and Joel Basman

1975. Just after a small village in the Swiss Alps has buried its sacristan after his suicide, a bloody and battered young woman (Roxane Mesquida) appears in town. The woman doesn’t seem to be able to speak, and is clearly either heavily traumatized or mentally ill, but the villagers at once blame her for the sacristan’s death. After all, one of the villagers saw what he thinks was a woman in a monk’s robe in the mountains the day before, so witchcraft must be afoot! This must make some kind of sense to the villagers, even though it’s the sort of logic that’s only logical if you’re a surrealist. It sure doesn’t help improve the situation when the local priest brandishes his crucifix in the poor woman’s face and provokes her into a fit of panic.

Confronted with that sort of superstition, and a little bit infatuated with the mysterious stranger, the local constable Reusch (Nicholas Ofczarek), seemingly the only man in town who isn’t batshit insane, takes charge of the woman and attempts to find out who she is and where she came from. He stumbles upon something strange: his new ward looks exactly like a woman who disappeared twenty-five years ago during the burning of a mountain cabin that killed three men.

While Reusch is away talking to the retired cop who worked the case in the 50s, the priest attacks the nameless girl with a knife, and drives her to flight. On her way, she accidentally causes a miscarriage (her fear of crosses is again to blame) in Reusch’s former girlfriend (now the mayor’s wife), which conclusively proves to anyone not Reusch that she is in fact a witch.

Next time we see the girl again, she arrives at the mountain cabin of farmer Erwin (Andrea Zogg), his son-who-thinks-he’s-his-nephew Albert (Joel Basman), and their newly arrived helper Martin (Carlos Leal), who is on the run for the murder of his wife, and therefore just as insane as everyone else in the movie. Because they were just having an orgy with home-made absinth, the men kinda-sorta assume the girl’s a Sennentuntschi like in the old story about a straw doll brought to life by the devil. Clearly, the girl’s suffering won’t end with her arrival.

All the while, Reusch discovers the dark secret of his village.

  
  
  

So, the classic continental European artful exploitation movie, horror department, is alive and well and living in Switzerland, it seems. Even though director Michael Steiner deconstructs most (yet not quite all) potential supernatural aspects of his story and the Sennentuntschi legend, he’s doing everything else I’ve come to expect in and hope from this kind of film.

As the plot synopsis should have made clear, the film is heavily over-written, full of preposterous plot ideas (only about half of which I’ve mentioned) and melodramatic explanations for everything that’s happening, populated by (predominantly male) characters who are all so clearly out of their minds as to make a girl who can’t speak, acts like a child and turns dead guys into straw dolls look positively normal. In addition Sennentuntschi is told with a structural trick I’m not going to spoil that I don’t think makes the film any better, but clearly makes it a hell of a lot weirder; in fact, I’m utterly unsure if Steiner wants his audience to be surprised by that trick or not – his film is sending very mixed messages about it.

This may sound as if Sennentuntschi weren’t a good movie at all, but the opposite is true. There’s much to be said for the film’s over-serious rediscovery of much of what was good about European genre cinema of the 70s, the rediscovery of a combination of strangeness, metaphorical overload, and classic exploitational values, as well as for its the willingness to be nasty and cruel to its characters, even those it clearly doesn’t hate. I, for one, can’t help but respect a film that gives up clarity for the possibility to surprise its audience. But then, that’s what I would say.

On the film’s metaphorical level, Steiner seems to be quite obsessed with dualities. At least, the film is stuffed full with them, from the boring man-woman and rationality-superstition ones to the structural one I’m still not willing to spoil. As is good and well-loved tradition, the film’s narrative logic and the reasons for its narrative logic can get a bit confusing, which seems to be a fitting way to construct a narrative about characters who are all not exactly mentally healthy.

Not confusing at all is Steiner’s visual mastership. The director uses the impressive Swiss landscape to build a mood of overwhelming strangeness, and to intensify the already over-heated feelings of his characters, grounding the strangeness of what is happening in the very real, yet also very strange mountain landscape of a place whose harshness seems to influence the state of mind of the characters populating it for the worse.

I also found myself very impressed by Roxane Mesquida’s acting. Her combination of childlike body language, the visible remnants of hurt and pain, a peculiarly innocent sexuality and a very calm sort of madness dominate the film’s best moments without being showy. If not for Mesquida’s performance, the part of the film’s metaphorical level that’s all about contrasting “maleness” and “femaleness” would probably be quite annoying, but the actress turns what could be a mere symbol – and a symbol of various conflicting things, by the way – into a person. Plus, most of the male characters’ problem isn’t their maleness, but their being murderous rapist assholes, a fact the film seems to realize about half of the time. Which again puts Sennentuntschi directly in the tradition of classic European exploitation movies, where the subversive, the uncomfortable and the conservative have always been entwined in the most interesting, yet also often very uncomfortable, manner.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


Mr Wrong

January 20th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. Gaylene Preston
1986 / 83′
written by Geoff Murphy, Gaylene Preston and Graeme Telly
from a story by Elizabeth Jane Howard
cienmatography by Thomas Burstyn
original music by Jonathan Crayford
starring Heather Bolton, David Letch, Margaret Umbers, Gary Stalker and Danny Mulheron
Mr Wrong is available on OOP VHS under the American title of Dark of the Night

Meg (Heather Bolton perfectly embodying a mixture of inexperience/naivety and hidden strength) has left her country home for the big city (I’d insert a joke about what “big city” means in New Zealand here, but that would be oh so inappropriate seeing where I live), where she works in an antiquities store. To make it easier to visit her parents over the weekends – and probably as a symbol of her freshly won independence – the young woman buys a used Jaguar.

Her first long drive with the car does not go quite as well as Meg would have hoped for. When she stops by the side of the road to take a night nap, she’s awoken by hard and pretty unhealthy sounding breathing noises from the back seat of the car that start whenever she turns off the interior lights. Worse, or at least even more frightening to her, there’s nothing and nobody to see on the back seat.

After that experience, Meg becomes increasingly nervous and afraid of the car, a state of affairs that is certainly not improved by further peculiar happenings surrounding it. After Meg has had a nightmare centring on a long-haired woman, she sees the exact same woman standing by the side of the road trying to hitch a ride in her waking life. For whatever reason, Meg stops for her.

However, the woman isn’t alone. A man (David Letch) gets in together with her, but he doesn’t seem to actually be together with the woman as Meg assumes. In fact, he doesn’t seem to know about the woman’s presence at all, which becomes understandable but not exactly less peculiar when she suddenly just disappears from the car. The guy is more than just a bit creepy too, and Meg has a hard time getting rid of him.

This experience is nearly enough to convince Meg of getting rid of her car as soon as possible, and when she learns that its last owner was a young woman about her age who was murdered, and whose killer has never been caught, our heroine does try to sell it off.

That, however, is much easier said than done, for the car begins to sabotage Meg’s efforts in ways that could be explained away by bad luck, if it weren’t clear to the young woman her car was haunted.

While all this is going on, a mysterious someone begins to send Meg roses – surely, this won’t have anything to do with the rather more horrible things going on in her life right now?

  
  
  

I know little about the movie scene in New Zealand (with the exception of being quite intimate with the films of Peter Jackson and Jane Campion), so I can’t really say how typical Gaylene Preston’s Mr Wrong is for the cinematic output of the country in the mid-80s. What I can say is that it is a pretty fantastic little film in mode and mood of the clever – and quite weird – ghost story. Given that this is based on one of the handful of supernatural tales Elizabeth Jane Howard wrote, the “clever and weird” part isn’t too much of a surprise; it is, however, quite a positive surprise how well the Weirdness of Howard’s story and Preston’s naturalistic eye on the New Zealand of the 80s complement each other.

As frequent readers of my ramblings will know by now, I am an admirer of low budget films that make use of the cheapest of all special effects – local colour – to set the mood of their stories, and am even more of an admirer of films that are letting the very real of a specific place and time collide with the Weird and the peculiar, so I am predisposed to liking Mr Wrong, as it is a film whose whole modus operandi is very much based on these techniques. Even better, Preston really knows what she’s doing in this regard, showing herself to be equally at home with taking a – slightly sarcastic – look at her central character’s live and times (I wouldn’t be too surprised if there were a certain autobiographical element at work here, either) and with slowly showing the seams and cracks of Meg’s existence where the disquiet and the strange can enter through, cracks, the film seems to say, even the most unspectacular of lives has. Are, after all, Meg’s life and that of her unhappy predecessor in car ownership all that different from each other? Preston doesn’t overstretch the parallels between the woman and the haunt. In fact, if you don’t want to see this aspect of the movie – that is most probably there to demonstrate something about the way a woman still has to fight for her independence (in the sense of self-ownership) – you will probably never notice it at all. It’s always excellent when a director is subtle with the treatment of her film’s metaphorical level.

From time to time, Mr Wrong is a bit rough around the edges, but it’s the kind of roughness that comes with the territory of making movies for little money in a place where making a movie can’t have been all that easy to begin with, and is offset by a direction that can be creative and imaginative without feeling the need to show off. After all, it’s clear to see for everyone that the director really knows how to use the idiom of the ghost story and the thriller without any need for her to point it out to her audience like a bad Hollywood actor trying once in his life for actual acting. Instead, Preston’s film impresses through an unassuming intelligence.

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan

January 17th, 2012 | article by | 1 Comment »
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dir. Nobuo Nakagawa
1959 / Shintoho Co. / 76′
written by Masayoshi Onuki and Yoshihiro Ishikawa
from the play by Nanboku Tsuruya IV
director of phogoraphy Tadashi Nishimoto
music by Michiaki Watanabe
starring Shigeru Amachi, Noriko Kitazawa, Katsuko Wakasugi, Shuntaro Emi and Ryuzaburo Nakamura
Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan is available for online streaming through the Criterion Collection channel on Huluplus

Before he shocked audience sensibilities with the bizarre and inimitably grotesque Jigoku in 1960 veteran Japanese director Nobuo Nakagawa sent shivers down their spines with this stylish tale of ghostly revenge. Early on a director of everything from comedies to war-time documentaries, Nakagawa is most remembered for a number of supernatural horrors directed for Shintoho Co. in the latter half of the ’50s. Among those films 1959′s Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan may well be the best. Adapted from the famed (and oft-filmed) 19th century kabuki by playwright Nanboku Tsuruya IV, Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan tells the classic story of innocence tormented, only to rise up from beyond the grave to grant evil its just deserts.

The first half of Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan operates as a catalogue of atrocities perpetuated against a woman and her family from without and within. Central to the drama is ronin Tamiya Iemon (Shigeru Amachi), a samurai of ill-repute whose intentions of marrying Iwa (Katsuko Wakasugi), daughter of the Yotsuya family, are thwarted by his would-be father-in-law Samon. One dreary evening, enraged by the elder’s insults, Iemon slaughters both Yotsuya Samon as well as the father of Sato Yomoshichi (Ryuzaburo Nakamura), a talented young swordsman betrothed to Iwa’s sister Sode (Noriko Kitazawa). Witnessed by ne’er-do-well Naosuke (Shintaro Emi), who is himself obsessed with Sode, Iemon finds himself in an alliance of convenience, and following a plan by Naosuke to blame the deaths of fathers Yotsuya and Sato on a local rough who had troubled the families in the past. Yomoshichi quickly joins up with the two schemers, believing that they wish to help avenge the families by hunting down those responsible, only to find himself at the edge of their swords as well.

Some time later, all obstacles to their success seemingly overcome, Iemon and Naosuke each take up residence in Edo with their respective sister. While Sode refuses to marry Naosuke, demanding that her family be avenged before such can come to pass, Iemon settles uncomfortably into a married life with Iwa and has a son. It doesn’t take long for Iemon to grow tired of his pedestrian lifestyle, doing unsatisfying work to support his wife and child and losing most of his earnings to gambling. When a chance encounter finds him in the good graces of the wealthy Ito’s, and their beautiful daughter Ume, he sees a chance for escape. Soon Iemon, the Ito’s, Naosuke and even a local masseuse are scheming to absolve Iemon of his familial obligations, but when Iwa proves too devoted to her husband he takes drastic, irreversible action.

Convincing masseuse Takuetsu to seduce his wife so that he might have proper grounds to divorce her, Iemon secretly plots to kill the pair as adulterers – his right, by law. Knowing that Iwa will never willingly accept Takuetsu’s advances, Iemon instead guarantees her demise by feeding her a deadly, disfiguring poison. Iwa discovers too late her husband’s treachery, and the depth of his crimes against her family, but before throwing both herself and her child on a blade curses his name, vowing to avenge her misfortunes with nothing less than the eradication of the Tamiya family line. Takuetsu becomes collateral damage, killed to support the facade of adultery, and is dumped along with Iwa into a canal. Convinced that all obstacles have again been overcome Iemon commences with his marriage to Ume, blind to the possibility that his late wife’s spirit might seek revenge…

  
  
  

Adapted in a streamlined fashion by Masayoshi Onuki and Yoshihiro Ishikawa to fit the fiscal and temporal constraints of Shintoho Co.’s typically low-budget fare, Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan nevertheless crams a lot of complex character-driven drama into its first few acts. Those unprepared for director Nakagawa’s brisk pacing may find themselves a bit lost in it all, as schemes build upon schemes and ever more outwardly upstanding citizens conspire against young Iwa. It can feel quite chaotic at times, though I dare say that was likely the point. As quickly as things develop it seems improbable, if not impossible, that Iwa could ever have understood the awful depth of human cruelty amassing against her until it was too late, something that makes her plight all the more sympathetic and her eventual revenge all the more satisfying. Katsuko Wakasugi (Ghost of the Girl Diver) lends the role a necessary frailty, seeming a truly helpless victim until the truth of things is revealed to her. From that moment her characterization changes into that of a driven monstrosity, the inhumanity pitted against her giving rise to a suitably inhuman instrument of vengeance.

The versatile and underrated Shigeru Amachi (Black Line, Jigoku), here appearing as the scheming Iemon, plays in pitch-perfect contrast to both iterations of the Iwa character. In the film’s early acts, when Iemon has the upper hand, Amachi is positively psychopathic, utterly remorseless in his actions and forever distant, cold, dangerous. In his day-to-day torments of Iwa he is wantonly despicable, but in his scheme to poison her, playing the dutiful and loving husband all the while, he disturbs, becoming nothing but a murderous beast masquerading as a man. Even the pretense of humanity is dropped once the tables ultimately turn, and the cornered Iemon reverts to a state of frightened, caged animalism.  Only at death’s door does a glimmer of genuine humanity shine from within him, the damned Iemon praying too late for his slaughtered wife’s forgiveness.

Director Nobuo Nakagawa skillfully manages the film’s breezy but complex drama, complementing it with a variety of interesting visual motifs (like a recurrence of vertically striped imagery and a notable emphasis on the color red) and otherworldly compositions that often feel like paintings-in-motion. By contrast the latter half of Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan is positively alive with indelible fantasy imagery – a corpse carried across a field of yellow flowers, a body rising from a pool of murky red, Iemon lost on a sea of shutters, a man falling, slowly, onto the flooded floor of an impossible room-turned-marshland. At its height Nakagawa’s work here is absolutely haunting, glimpses of half-remembered nightmares obscured by shadow and punctuated with rich primary color. The style here is highly reflective of that seen in Jigoku and elsewhere throughout Nakagawa’s career, and this flair for the fantastic served the director well as he transitioned to the Toei Co. payroll following Shintoho Co.’s bankruptcy in 1961.

As could be said of so much of the great genre cinema, it would have been easy for Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan to be a mundane outing, another in a long line of adaptations of a story all too familiar, but a favorable confluence of just the right elements have conspired to make it something far greater than that. While Jigoku, with its abstract proclivities and abundant gore (a real rarity in 1960), remains the best known of his films in the West the more substantively accessible Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan may well be Nakagawa’s masterpiece, a classic tale retold in a manner that’s thrilling and unique and oh so spooky. This is vintage Japanese genre cinema at its absolute best, and a must-see for anyone keen on the same.

Though currently unavailable on domestic home video, Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan is available for online streaming through the Criterion channel on Huluplus


Grave Encounters

January 6th, 2012 | article by | No Comments »
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dir. The Vicious Brothers
2011 / Twin Engine Films / 95′
written by The Vicious Brothers
cienmatography by Tony Mirza
original music by Quynne Craddock
starring Sean Rogerson, Ashley Gryzko, Merwin Mondesir, Mackenzie Gray, and Juan Riedinger
available on dvd through Amazon.com

(Don’t) stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The footage Grave Encounters consists of is purportedly edited down from footage shot by the team of the ghost hunting TV show “Grave Encounters” during the filming of their rather fatal sixth episode.

An appropriately smug and somewhat cynical team of five (Sean Rogerson, Ashleigh Gryzko, Merwin Mondesir, Mackenzie Gray and Juan Riedinger) sets out to spend a night locked in one of those creepy former asylums for the mentally ill that dot the US landscape (at least if I can believe what the horror movies – who clearly wouldn’t lie to me – tell me). The ghost hunters don’t go in expecting to actually find anything supernatural, obviously, but as long as they can pretend to be creeped out, it’ll be good, successful reality TV, right?

Fortunately for the movie’s audience, and very unfortunately for the film’s protagonists, they will encounter quite a bit more paranormal activity than they ever could have expected or wished for. And while the things the crew first encounters, like doors moving by themselves, may only be a little creepy, later developments have a much more dangerous and disturbing bend. Clearly, not everybody – if anybody – will make it out of the place alive.

By now, I think, there are enough found footage/fake documentary/POV horror movies about ghost hunting TV people around to make up their own little sub-sub-genre. Unlike the other films of this sort I had the dubious honour of watching, Grave Encounters is actually a pretty good film.

  
  

The film does of course have its share of flaws. I think the interview parts before the crew is locked in could have been cut down a little, to make the film’s start a little pacier. As it stands, the actual meat of the narrative begins about forty minutes into the film, just at the point when I was beginning to lose my patience with it a little.

I also could have gone without the overuse of the jerky zoom lens style in the interview sequences – it’s the sort of thing nobody holding a camera in a professional or semi-professional capacity actually does (not even the directors of photography of ghost hunting reality shows), and it threatens the poor helpless audience with seasickness. Once the interview segments are over, the zoom lens is fortunately retired forever, so I’m not even sure why it’s used this extensively early on at all.

Grave Encounter‘s biggest problem is probably the quality of its special effects. About half of the effects do actually look pretty decent to my eyes, but the other half (let me just say big-mouthed ghosts) looks too much like bad digital fakery and too little like terrible things from beyond. On the other hand, it is pretty clear that this is strictly a low budget affair, and even when the execution of the effects seems problematic, they’re usually trying to show something creepy or conceptually interesting. When in doubt, I take a badly realized but interesting thing over something that looks slick but is basically boring.

As far as flaws in independently produced horror go, these are rather minor ones, and they are overshadowed by the things Grave Encounters‘ directors – going under the somewhat silly moniker The Vicious Brothers – do right.

  
  

Prime among things that the film does right, is the way it treats its characters. Even though they are presented as slightly pompous and deeply dishonest towards their audience (I think this is what people call realism), the film still allows them more than enough sympathetic traits to make it easy enough for an audience (or at least me) to empathize with them. I’m not talking great character depth here – I doubt great character depth is anything POV horror can even achieve – but enough depth to make the characters human. The script certainly gets help here by actors who may be a little broad in their approach sometimes but are pretty good at switching from their early on-camera ghost hunting pomposity to people completely out of their depth and scared out of their wits.

Some of the things our not so intrepid protagonists have to face are pretty scary on a conceptual and on a concrete level, but even when they only encounter standard ghosts, these are standard ghosts doing ghostly things thematically appropriate for an empty asylum setting. These activities can’t help but add a historical dimension to the ghosts, making them not just disquieting or frightening for the things they do to others, but also the things that have been done to them; a victim turned into a monster by outside forces is often more effective than a mere monster.

Aside from ghosts, though, there are also a few things making the protagonists’ lives harder that come from the Weirder side of the tracks than mere dead people walking around being rude. The Vicious Brothers do some very effective things with temporal and spatial anomalies that suggest the influence of Daniel Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. It’s exactly elements like these nods to Danielewski what most films of the contemporary (post-crappy-Paranormal-Activity, in contrast to the post-Blair Witch one) POV horror genre are too often missing for my taste. Hauntings of this kind are visually cheap to realize and give a film an added dimension of the frighteningly strange and unreal that rubs nicely against the hyper-realism of the POV-form, but I’m afraid too many horror directors working right now are in love with the straightforwardly scary.

Consequently, I’m glad that Grave Encounters dares to be this decisive bit different from its brethren. Now, where did I leave that EMP-meter?

The Horror!? is a regular cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.


Fright Night

December 13th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1985  Company: Columbia Pictures   Runtime: 106′
Director: Tom Holland   Writer: Tom Holland
Music: Brad Fieder   Cinematography: John Kiesser
Cast: Chris Sarandon, William Ragsdale, Amanda Bearse, Roddy McDowall, Stephen Geoffreys, Jonathan Stark, Dorothy Fielding, Art Evans, Stewart Stern, Nick Savage, Ernie Holmes, Heidi Sorenson, Irina Irvine
Disc company: Twilight Time   Video: 1080p 2.41:1   Audio: DTS HD-MA 5.1 English
Subtitles: English SDH   Disc: BD25 (All Region)   Release Date: 12/13/2011
Fright Night is now officially SOLD OUT
Reviewed from a screener provided by Twilight TIme

“What would you do if you accidentally discovered the house next door was occupied by something not human… something horrifying… something unspeakably evil? No one believes you – not your mom, not your girlfriend, not even the police. It knows that you know. You’ll do anything to protect yourself, but it’ll do anything to protect it’s secret…”

It’s not often that one can rely on a theatrical trailer to give an honest description of the film it represents, but in the case of Tom Holland’s 1985 horror opus Fright Night the advertising makes such excellent work of it that I feel no remorse in letting it do that part of my job for me. With inspirations ranging from Hammer to Hitchcock, a smart script, and a superb cast of players, Fright Night ranks as one of the very best of the ’80s genre revivals and a damn fine film in its own right. In theme it recalls the distinct brand of sci-fi terrors Universal’s B-picture department specialized in some thirty years before (epitomized by 1955′s Tarantula!), in which all manner of fantastic horrors were visited upon small-town America, though in practice it’s a different beast all together. Standing in for the Cold War paranoia of then is a sexual anxiety fitting of Fright Night‘s teen leads, while the usual atom-born menace is lost in favor of one of the oldest fantasy threats of all – the vampire.

Taking place in an anonymous slice of Reagan-era suburbia, Fright Night follows the exploits of veritable every-teen Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale), a high school kid with a beer light in his room, porno mags shoved between his encyclopedias, a doting single mother, and a girlfriend named Amy (Amanda Bearse) who loves him to bits even if she’s horrified to go “all the way“. Charley idolizes his local horror icon Peter Vincent, washed-up host of the late-night schlock marathons from which the film takes its name, stumbles through his trigonometry homework, and oh yeah – he has a vampire living next door who knows Charley knows about him and wants to kill him for his troubles. With no one believing his story, not even Vincent, Charley rightfully fears for his life, but things get even more personal when the suave bloodsucker next door takes a shine to his virginal girlfriend…

It is with that last point that Fright Night, a terrific horror film on its surface merits alone, reveals what’s really on its mind – sex. Some (including Julie Kirgo, who contributes the excellent liner notes for this release) have read homosexual undertones into the vampire Jerry Dandridge (Chris Sarandon as the ultimate in sensual and be-sweatered yuppie menace) and his relationships with troubled young outsider “Evil” Ed (Stephen Geoffreys, who made a career of gay porn in the ’90s) and his live-in familiar Billy Cole (Jonathan Stark), but the most overt of the film’s sexual substance is of the straight variety. Indeed, Holland pushes the subject from the very start, opening with a bit of intercourse that is not to be between Charley and his beloved. The vampire attack witnessed by Charley that starts all the trouble is an overtly sexualized affair and a later encounter between Dandridge and Amy (the spitting image of Jerry’s long-dead lover) is even more so, with Amy cooing in orgasmic bliss as blood trickles down her back. In this context the growing conflict between Charley and the dastardly Dandridge becomes less about survival than about who will collect the sexy spoils, and control the fate of Amy’s freshly-awakened sexuality.

Fright Night may have sex on the brain, but it’s still out for thrills and chills, first and foremost. Holland and company don’t disappoint. Though bolstered by terrific practical effects and creature design from Randall William Cook and Richard Edlund (Oscar-winning alumni of such productions as Ghostbusters and Raiders of the Lost Ark), Fright Night‘s most effective moments remain its simplest, like Charley investigating suspicious noises in the night, Dandridge suddenly appearing in the corner of a darkened bedroom, or “Evil” Ed running into the stalking menace in a misty alleyway. Holland shows a keen understanding for the genre throughout, both in his taught direction (this, his debut as director, remains his best work in that regard) and in the intelligence of his screenwriting, and never neglects the horror of the situation. Much more importantly, he never neglects the characters who make that horror tick.

To that end it’s impossible not to discuss Fright Night without also discussing its cast, perhaps the best in practice of any of the decade’s revival horrors. Roddy McDowall gives the performance of his later career (one he would reprise in Fright Night Part 2 three years later) as down on his luck horror icon Peter Vincent, whose career as cinema’s preeminent vampire killer has collapsed into a low-pay hosting gig on a late night television film show. Initially paid to help cure Charley of his vampire delusions, Vincent soon finds himself the unlikely ally of the child, and forced to summon the courage of a role he’d played so many times before to combat an evil all too real. McDowall balances Vincent’s tremendous charm and ego (his reaction to discovering Charley and his friends don’t want his autograph is priceless) with underlying insecurity and, ultimately, courage, and practically owns the picture in the process.

At the more malignant end of the spectrum lies Chris Sarandon as the devilish Jerry Dandridge, who, along with Kinski, Schreck, Lugosi, and Lee, exists as one of film’s most memorable vampires. Dandridge – who eschews the traditional cape for snazzy cable knit sweaters and has a taste for fresh fruit (fruit bat?) just as strong as his taste for the supple necks of prostitutes – is every bit a product of the decade in which the film was made, an upper crust yuppie bloodsucker with a penchant for remodeling homes and antiquing. He keeps up with the pop music scene, looks perfectly adept in the neon haze of a discotheque, and keeps a dark, wry sense of humor about himself that makes him seem all the more dangerous (“What’s the matter Charley? Afraid I’d never come over without being invited first?”). But Dandridge is more than just yuppie trappings and a handsome smirk, whistling “Strangers in the Night” as he stalks his prey. Sarandon’s ace performance lends the character an attractive outsider mystique and a feral magnetism that’s difficult to ignore. He’s a perfect villain, made all the more effective by just how tempting he makes the evil he represents appear.

Like Dandridge, Fright Night itself is very much a product of its time, though it’s no less successful a picture today for the polka dotted linoleum on its floors or the Ian Hunter on its soundtrack. It remains the best film of writer and director Tom Holland’s career (is that really The Langoliers I see in your filmography? Oy.), and easily makes my short list for most satisfying genre efforts of the ’80s. Among its often lamentable brethren Fright Night manages to be something different, something special, and for those keen on horror it’s an absolute must-see.

Fright Night proved a surprise success upon its release, becoming the second highest grossing horror film of 1985 (behind A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge), but times have clearly changed. Though still a popular cult item Fright Night has become just another among many victims of waning big-studio confidence in deeper library titles, however successful they may have been initially, and the lackluster returns of the recent remake (also to be released on Blu-ray today) have sealed its fate as far as owners Columbia / Sony are concerned. With no interest on the part of the owners to release the film to Blu-ray themselves, niche label Twilight Time have stepped in to take up their slack. While many may find the arrangement less than ideal, with Fright Night released as a limited edition of 3000 at a price point higher than might be expected of a wider issue, you’ll hear no complaints from me. If this is the future of library titles on Blu-ray then I’m in full support of it, and those wishing to see more marginal big-studio properties available on the format would do well to do the same.

But what of the disc, eh? Fright Night arrives on Blu-ray with an honest 1080p transfer in the original Panavision ratio that serves the intended aesthetics of its modest production quite dutifully. From the neon-drenched interiors of the discotheque and a beer-light illuminated teenage bedroom to the starker, more natural exteriors, the latest Sony-produced master of the title looks very good throughout. Damage is minimal, limited to some baked-in white marks and a bit of minor dust and debris, and while the level of detail can vary greatly from scene to scene the end results never appear unfaithful to the original photography. There’s a lovely layer of natural grain in evidence throughout, and though the modest encode (single layer AVC at an average video bitrate of 21.5 Mbps) results in some (very) minor artifacts there’s nothing here that’s so dramatic as to distract from viewing. This is another strong showing from Twilight Time, and fans of Fright Night should be very pleased.

Blu-ray screenshots were taken as uncompressed .png at full resolution in Totem Movie Player, and compressed to .jpg at a quality setting of 95% using the ImageMagick command line tool.

Originally a Dolby Stereo show, Fright Night‘s visuals are served well by a new lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1 mix. Those expecting directional effects to be bouncing about like ping-pong balls will be out of luck – what you get is occasional LFE umph and some minor separation, but a track that remains faithful to the overall aesthetics of the original recording. The moody synth score, dialogue and effects all sounded excellent to these ears, and appropriately vintage for a film now in its 26th year. I dig it. The most robust addition to the contractually-limited supplemental package (which otherwise includes only a pair of theatrical trailers, both in HD with lossless audio) is the isolated Brad Fieder score in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0 stereo which, though lacking the notable pop songs included in the film (I assume they were omitted due to the lofty expense of licensing them), sounds quite robust. Twilight Time leave very little to complain about here, and even include a set of optional English SDH subtitles in the mix.

In the short period Twilight Time have been active in the Blu-ray market expectations have already grown quite high for them, and Fright Night does not disappoint. Another excellent set of liner notes (remember when these were included with practically everything?) from Julie Kirgo round out the package, and even include the URL for a pair of Fright Night ’pirate’ audio commentaries (available from Icons of Fright) featuring much of the cast and crew. Awesome stuff! Whatever your thoughts on these limited edition niche releases, the bottom line is that you won’t find Fright Night looking or sounding better than it does here, and isn’t that what really matters? Fans and genre junkies are heartily encouraged to indulge.

in conclusion
Film: Excellent  Video: Excellent –  Audio: Excellent
Supplements: Isolated Brad Fieder score track. two theatrical trailers in HD, liner notes by Julie Kirgo.
Packaging: Standard Blu-ray case with booklet.
Fright Night is now officially SOLD OUT

The Invisible Man vs. The Human Fly

December 2nd, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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a.k.a.: Tomei Ningen To Hae Otoko
Year: 1957  Runtime: 96′  Director: Mitsuo Murayama
Writer: Hajime Takaiwa   Cinematography: Hiroshi Murai   Music: Tokujiro Okubo
Cast: Yoshiro Kitahara, Ryuji Shinagawa, Junko Kanau, Ikuko Mori

A strange and increasingly violent series of burglaries and murders shakes Japan. The murder victims are usually found stabbed in the back, and killed in tightly controlled or completely locked places. Or on an airplane toilet. Additionally, nobody ever sees or hears any sign of the perpetrator or perpetrators. Why, you could think the killer is invisible! That’s at least what the lead investigator of the case, well-respected young cop Wakabayashi, says in a moment of weakness.

When the policeman utters this rather absurd theory while interviewing some scientists he is friendly with about the airplane toilet business one of them witnessed, they aren’t laughing about his flights of fancy. Ironically, the men are working on some scientific ray stuff whose by-product is invisibility, or, as they prefer it to be called, imperceptibility. They haven’t tested it on a human being yet, though, out of fear that it might be dangerous.

Apart from putting the idea of an invisible copper into his brain, this isn’t getting Wakabayashi anywhere right now. Fortunately, the continuing murder spree gives our hero and his team a lot to distract them. The last few victims have been pointing in the air and swatting at something during their last moments, and witnesses heard the buzzing of a fly. Why, you could think the killer can turn into a fly! Which is nearly, but not quite what is happening. In truth, the killer is using an experimental reagent made during the war to facilitate his escapes. This reagent, you see, can shrink down a man until he is not quite as small as a fly. As SCIENCE(!) teaches, all small creatures are able to float through the air while making the buzzing noise of a fly, so that’s the explanation for the noises the witnesses heard.

About half of the murders are connected by this reagent too, because the victims have all been part in the war crimes committed during its creation, though none of them have been punished for them. This part of the killing spree is vengeance for and by the only man who did get punished, and is now using a rather mad gentleman with an addiction to the reagent to commit the murders. The other half of the killings has something to do with the madman’s obsession with a nightclub singer on whom he likes to perv when he is shrunk down, but let’s not go there.

Obviously, this is the sort of case that can only be cracked if someone is willing to take the risk of becoming an invisible man.

  
  
  

Even though this plot description sounds as awesome as it is dumb, Daiei’s IM vs HF is not quite as awe-inspiring as I would have liked it to be. The film has two major problems it is only just able to conquer to my satisfaction. The first one is scriptwriter Hajime Takaiwa’s peculiar decision to frame much of the movie’s first two thirds as a slightly weird police procedural, with many scenes of earnest looking men doing earnest police business that are only from time to time broken up by the insanity that waits in the plot’s background. The second problem is also one belonging to the script. Takaiwa seems hell-bent to stuff Human Fly as full of elements of the police procedural, the slightly sleazy exploitationer and the mad science horror film as possible. This, however, leaves even the more patient viewer (like me) with a film full of ideas and plot-threads that are never really explored nor explained and in the end more often than not just stop with a hand-waving gesture when Takaiwa is getting bored of them.

Characterization-wise, there’s never a clear through-line for why people act like they do. Just to take some obvious examples, why does the film’s villain suddenly turn from a man out for vengeance and a bit of money into the sort of bad guy more fitting into an issue of The Spider? What does he need the invisibility ray for when he already can turn into a flying, buzzing little man? And, while I’m at it, why doesn’t he just steal it (he is the Human Fly, after all) instead of going for a semi-apocalyptic blackmail plan? And why does the elder scientist’s daughter decide that the invisible scientist already at work isn’t enough and turns into the invisible woman?

I sure could make up some reasons for the characters’ behaviour, and some of the film’s obvious plot holes, but I do think that’s the responsibility of the script, not the audience. Especially the film’s last third gives the impression of Takaiwa giving up and just making stuff up as it goes along without any thought for coherence or sense. Come to think of it, hero pulps like The Spider with their usually heated and sloppily constructed narratives seem like an excellent point of comparison to what Taikawa does here writing-wise.

Comparable to many of the hero pulps, the writing flaws that hinder IM vs HF from becoming the goodSF/crime/horror hybrid movie with a subtextual line about the violence committed by war-touched people in post-war Japan it could have been, are also making it enjoyably nutty and near impossible to dislike for viewers like me who can get excited about a film that’s just full of silly stuff for no good reason other than the clear awesomeness of all silly stuff. This is, after all a film that doesn’t want to realize that flies have wings for a reason, a film that also makes up some nonsense about face and hands of an invisible person getting visible quite fast again because of the rays of the sun while the rest of it doesn’t (no nudity for Japanese people who want to turn visible again, it seems), only to then forget that for the rest of its running time. It also presents turning back from an invisibility by means of SCIENCE(!) as very dangerous, until it’s time to wrap everything up, when it’s not only possible to turn visible again and live, but to seemingly go from one state to the other at will. It’s all very dumb, and reeks of lazy writing as much any modern blockbuster I’ve seen, but it sure is fun to watch what nonsense Takaiwa is going to come up with next.

The film’s other big plus point is Mitsuo Murayama’s (whom I know as one of the Japanese directors who’d go on to work a bit for Hong Kong’s Shaw Brothers) direction. For my taste, Murayama isn’t a very consistent stylist, but he is the kind of director always going for the most interesting angle from which to shoot the more boring police procedural scenes, making the parts of IM vs HF most in need of not looking square and boring look much weirder than their actual content and context deserve; if you’re the generous type, you might even suggest Murayama is hinting at the strangeness surrounding his square policemen right from the beginning by way of his stylistic tics. Be that as it may, Murayama’s often peculiarly cramped, close-up and Dutch angle heavy visual style keeps the movie’s rather slow beginning interesting, and helps the mess that is its script stay a mess that is fun to watch even in its worst moments.

The Horror!? is a weekly cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, an aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.

Island of the Living Dead

November 12th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 2006  Runtime: 94′  Director: Bruno Mattei
Writer: Antonio Tentori   Cinematography: Luigi Ciccarese   Music: Bruno Mattei, Daniele Campelli
Cast: Yvette Yzon, Gaetano Russo, Ydalia Suarez, Jim Gaines, Alvin Anson

After accidentally depositing the treasure they were trying to take from the bottom of the sea deeper on it, a hapless yet heavily armed gang of treasure hunters lead by a certain Captain Kirk (Gaetano Russo) gets into even more trouble. While piloting their ship through a thick fog, our heroes (cough) collide with rocks where there shouldn’t be any, and will have to do a few repairs before they can get anywhere else again.

Fortunately there’s an uncharted island nearby where the crew will try to scavenge provisions and do a bit of treasure hunting while one lone idiot stays behind to do the repairs. Little do they expect that the island has been populated by the undead for a long time now. Soon enough, our heroes by default find themselves under attack. Oh, and the treasure hunters’ boat explodes when repair guy pushes its self destruct button once he is attacked and surrounded by zombies.

At first, our now well and truly stranded heroes have only minor problems surviving the attentions of the zombies who may have been running around since the 17th century but still look pretty good for their age. Later on, scriptwriter Antonio Tentori decides that normal zombies are boring, and so the undead start getting pretty darn talkative, trying to drive the characters to kill each other by playing dumb mind games. Or something. From your standard zombies we then go to skeleton monks, hallucinations, a curse, and what might be vampires, too. How will designated final girl Sharon (Yvette Yzon) survive?

After a pause of half a decade, Italian movie god Bruno Mattei resumed his work of blowing minds and keeping under budget with the beginning of the 21st century, shooting as many movies until his death in 2007 as the direct to DVD market would allow. Even though late period Mattei isn’t quite as mind-blowingly crazy as he was when he was still working with Claudio Fragasso, Island of the Living Dead (shot in the Philippines like in the good old times of AIP) has much to recommend it, at least to an audience consciously seeking out Bruno Mattei films; in short, people like me.

Instead of ripping off plot, structure and dialogue of his movie wholesale from a single, artistically slightly more successful source – that technique will have to wait for the sequel – this ripe effort sees Mattei stealing bits and pieces from other movies in a way that could be construed as homages by an alien unsure of how homages work. Apart from a translation of the early graveyard scene from Night of the Living Dead into scenery-chewerish and dumb, there are scenes and set-ups lifted from Zombi and really everything else with a zombie in it, as well as the Demoni movies. John Carpenter’s The Fog is the source for the backstory to the whole undead invasion, with the little difference that Carpenter’s curse makes a certain degree of sense where Mattei’s doesn’t. Instead of making sense, Island‘s curse produces a tinted sea-to-land battle that I suspect to be stolen from a much older feature.

  
  
  

In his many years of experience as a director of crap, Mattei has mastered some impressive techniques. I especially admire the anti-dynamic editing that seems to be designed to create a structure for the film that consciously destroys tension. Zombie attacks are intercut with hot Latin reading action, and scenes of “characterisation” are broken up by shots of zombies crawling around somewhere else for no good reason whatsoever, as if the whole affair had been directed by a highly distractible child.

The film’s action scenes are nearly as great as the editing, seeing as they are clearly staged to suggest that most of the characters have the ability to teleport (which fits in nicely with the film’s utterly random day and night cycle that suggests that the whole film takes place over either one day or five, possibly just four – it’s difficult to say when day and night are this random). Alas, the characters are always teleporting towards the zombies instead of away from them, but usually only get killed once they’ve decided to sacrifice themselves for their friends in situations that don’t afford this kind of suicide at all. But hey, somehow the ridiculous action movie one-liners need to get on screen, right? (It CAN be done). It’s pretty awesome, really.

Equally awesome and/or awe-inspiring is the collective inability of the cast to emote even in the slightest like normal humans beings do. Dialogue is mangled as if the speakers were trying to fight off a man in a gorilla suit, and scenery is not chewed, but head-butted until it stops moving. I especially approve of the effort of Ydalia Suarez who plays Victoria. Never has she met a line she does not want to shout in an overenthusiastic fashion. Look Ma, she’s in a real movie now!

As if all this wasn’t enough to kill the few brain cells that survived my encounters with other Mattei films,Island is filled to the brim with compellingly idiotic details. Early on, there’s a random martial arts versus zombie scene that doesn’t end well for the martial artist because he decides to sacrifice himself for no good reason while kicking one single zombie in the crotch. This is followed by scenes featuring zombie conquistadors wearing plastic conquistador helmets as probably found by the production team in a souvenir shop, zombies that take naps and growl into the camera, characters willing to drink wine from an open cup that must have been standing around openly for a few centuries, that boat self-destruct button, an eye patch-wearing head rotating inside of a treasure chest, really religious undead skeleton monks, the all-important Lovecraft shout-outs, a zombie flamenco dancer, and music that often sounds as if somebody were just playing musical cues from other films (even Star Wars for a few seconds) on a cheap synthesizer, which is exactly what’s happening.

Island of the Living Dead truly is everything one could hope for in a movie directed by Bruno Mattei: it’s dumb, it’s inept, it’s utterly shameless, it makes no sense at all – it’s like a bad photocopy of a crassly commercial movie that is just too stupid to actually know how commercial movies work and nearly becomes experimental filmmaking through sheer wrong-headedness. In any case, Mattei’s film is entertaining in a crazy way Italian movies have seldom been in the last decades. It might be great for all the wrong reasons, but as Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham say: if loving a Mattei movie is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

The Horror!? is a weekly cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, an aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.

Horror Express

November 5th, 2011 | article by | 1 Comment »
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a.k.a. Panico en el Transiberiano
Year: 1972  Company: Benmar Productions / Granada Films   Runtime: 87′
Director: Eugenio Martin   Writers: Arnaud d’Usseau, Julian Zimet   Music: John Cacavas
Cast: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Alberto de Mendoza, Silvia Tortosa, Julio Pena, Angel del Pozo, Telly Savalas, Helga Line, Alice Reinhart, Jose Jaspe, George Rigaud, Victor Israel, Faith Clift, Juan Olaguival
Disc company: Severin Films   Video: 1080p / 480p 1.66:1   Audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 (English, Spanish)
Subtitles: None   Disc: BD25 / DVD9   Release Date: 11/29/2011
Reviewed from a screener provided by Severin Films (thanks Nicole!).
Available for purchase through Amazon.com

The last of a three picture deal between American producer Philip Yordan (Crack in the World, 55 Days in Peking) and Spanish director Eugenio Martin (The Ugly Ones), and conceived largely as a means of making use of the expensive passenger train sets devised for the epic Poncho Villa, 1972′s Horror Express is a compact and economical slice of Euro-cult mayhem that benefits from the recycled illusion of production value and a magnificent headline cast. The inimitable duo of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing join forces once more as a pair of catty, big-headed men of science who must contend with a supernatural sci-fi menace on the Trans-Siberian Express.

The story, penned by the men behind the devilish British actioner Psychomania, follows professor Sir Alexander Saxton’s (Lee) discovery of a 2 million year old ape-man frozen in the chilly north of Manchuria. Determined to provide the remains as proof-positive of the theory of evolution, Saxton loads the crated beast onto the next train towards Europe – a train populated not only with hundreds of disposable personalities, but Saxton’s professional rival Doctor Wells (Cushing) as well.  Soon after the train departs on its long snowbound journey the baggage man is found dead, his eyes a boiled to a ghastly white. Saxton’s empty crate provides ample evidence for the cause – his 2 million year old specimen was not so dead as had been presumed, and had awakened from its frosty slumbers and murdered the baggage man. With the creature at large a concerted, but quiet, effort to find and detain it is mounted, but it soon becomes obvious that there’s more to the monster than meets the eye.

Once the beast is tracked down and killed things take a turn for the decidedly silly. An impromptu dining room investigation of its eye fluid reveals a host of unlikely images suspended there – images of our planet’s biological past, including a brontosaurus and pterodactyl, and a mysterious view of Earth from space. Further autopsies on the creature’s victims, whose brains appear to have been scrubbed clean of all knowledge, leads to an astounding conclusion: The ape-man discovered by Saxton was not the monster, but merely a shell for some malignant alien force capable not only of absorbing the intelligence of others but of possessing their bodies as well.  With the truth of the matter revealed doctors Saxton and Wells are faced with a terrifying fact – not only is the extraterrestrial menace  quite comfortably alive, but it’s hiding in the guise of one of the Trans-Siberian’s passengers!


This film’s got stars, and dinosaurs, in its eyes…

Playing a bit like They Came From Beyond Space by way of Who Goes There by way of Murder on the Orient Express, Horror Express is an uneven genre pastiche that never really capitalizes on its own capacity for thrills, chills, mystery and paranoia. Rather than focus on the mechanics of the genre, writers d’Usseau and Zimet instead lead viewers on a string of oddball diversions that include a bit of international espionage and the ravings of a mad monk in the mold of Rasputin (coincidentally, a part played by star Christopher Lee in an earlier Hammer production). None of it ever amounts to much, but it does pass the time between the various monster attacks and ludicrous plot developments. To be fair, d’Usseau, Zimet, and indeed the whole cast and crew, seem perfectly aware of the absurd nature of the project, and an underlying sense of good humor on the part of all involved goes a long way towards keeping Horror Express from feeling so tired, pointless, and repetitive as it easily might have.

Indeed, stars Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing look to have had a wonderful time with the alternately strange and hilarious material, particularly when it offers them an opportunity to needle one another. The two also bring a wealth of genuine thespian ability to the production, largely occupied with overdubbed Spanish performers otherwise, and each is possessed of that unique talent for making even the dumbest of lines sound reasonable – a skill that’s indispensable to a film that so frequently asks its audience to believe the darnedest things. The supporting cast is largely disposable with the exception of Alberto de Mendoza, who all but steals the show as an insane monk who drops his godly ways and starts following the alien “devil” at the drop of a hat. Telly Savalas (TV’s Kojak) received high billing in the films advertising and is listed third on this video edition, but only appears briefly as the memorably crazy Cossack Captain Kazan. Savalas’ dialogue is perhaps the most ungainly of the whole script, and while none of it makes much sense on its own terms the actor’s unhinged delivery gives it plenty of oomph.

Horror Express will never be confused for great filmmaking, and is possessed of the same cold and languid quality that makes much of the Spanish exploitation of the time so unappealing to me, but its excellent casting and proclivity for the humorously bizarre make all the difference. As a film about an eye-boiling brain-stealing alien intelligence loosed upon long-distance rail travelers it remains the best, and only, of its kind, and genre aficionados should find it well worth checking out.


There’s something about that guy that just doesn’t look right to me…

Taking a cue from a good number of independent English video labels, Severin Films have chosen to present Horror Express as a combination Blu-ray and DVD package. While we’ll be covering the latter later in this section it is the former, with which the film makes its high definition debut, that rightfully commands the most attention. Severin present Horror Express on Blu-ray in full 1080p at its native theatrical aspect ratio of 1.66:1, sourced from a positive 35mm Spanish print of some dubious lineage (provided you believe the packaging, it was unearthed in a Mongolian film depot…). The print is in decent shape if far from pristine, though I don’t know that anyone was honestly expecting better.

In addition to some printed white damage and splice marks, the print also presents with a healthy assortment of darker debris, scratching, and even the odd tear here or there. This may distract some viewers, but I’d argue that it’s just part and parcel for this sort of low budget exploiter. The source also has its weaknesses with regards to color reproduction and contrast, the latter of which can vary quite a lot depending on the original photography. The image has obviously aged a good deal in the nearly 40 years since Horror Express was originally produced, with the color shifting, at times quite heavily, to the red. I’m not sure what the original photographic intentions were on the part of the director and cinematographer, but it’s impossible for me to believe the flat, over-warm appearance Horror Express currently exudes is accurate. An ounce of restorative attention – some color grading here, some tweaking of the contrast levels there - could well have helped to mitigate the issues with the color and contrast, but these film-based limitations are still far from fatal flaws.  Unfortunately that’s not the end of the story.

Limited though Horror Express‘ source materials may be Severin Films look to have managed a decent high definition transfer of them, particularly in terms of detail. It’s all the more a shame, then, that they’ve bungled things so badly with regards to its presentation on-disc. The numbers hint at the bad things to come – Horror Express limps onto Blu-ray at a total disc size of 21 GB, with a paltry 11.7 GB of that dedicated to the feature and its three accompanying audio tracks. The AVC encoded video averages out at a middling bitrate of just 17.2 Mbps, well less than half of the format’s potential, but even that low figure doesn’t  account for such dreadful results. This is one of the poorest high definition encodes I’ve seen in a while, and it presents with a laundry list of defects that distracted from my viewing at every turn. Most notable in motion are aliasing artifacts that are every bit as frequent as they are ugly. The hounds tooth patterning on Christopher Lee’s suit provides the most obvious examples, with the encoder failing time and again to properly resolve it.


A rough approximation of how this disc’s encode made me feel.

More frustrating on closer examination is the encode’s treatment of the transfer’s grain structure, and vicariously its fine detail. The long and short of it is that there just isn’t much grain or fine detail, as the majority of it has been obliterated by persistent blotchy digital artifacting. The final comparison set below demonstrates the problem most obviously, with the details of the wooden floor disappearing into blotchy artifacts and patches of digital noise, but it is evident to some degree in every shot in the film. There are even some chroma aberrations to be found, tucked away in the lines and patterning of people’s clothing. It’s a hell of a mess all told, and certainly not what I was expecting for a release so oft-delayed as this one – surely in all the months since Horror Express was officially announced someone could have been bothered to check the disc encode? It’s impossible not to feel as though Severin have dropped the ball here, and hard, leaving the video side of the Blu-ray’s feature presentation a very tough sell in spite of some modest improvements over the DVD.

The accompanying DVD is something of a technical improvement given the constraints of its format, but still far from ideal. The disc is sourced from the same hi-def transfer at the same aspect ratio (16:9 enhanced 1.66:1) and features the same inherent deficiencies with regards to color and contrast. Fortunately this disc is dual-layered, a step in the right direction, and while the image still looks substantially weaker than I’d have expected it to (things just aren’t as well resolved as they should be) at least it doesn’t show its artifacting to the same degree as the Blu-ray.  Unfortunately both editions showcase many of the same ugly digital pox marks, as evidenced by Christopher Lee’s suit in the first and next-to-last comparison sets. I’d say it’s a draw as to which is the better way to view the film – the better encoded but visually flat DVD, or the better-resolved but awfully encoded Blu-ray – with neither being particularly appealing in the long run. Amusingly (or distressingly, depending on your frame of mind) both the DVD and Blu-ray share the same menu designs to the point of failure – whoever authored the Blu-ray either forgot or purposefully neglected to include even the most rudimentary pop-up menu during feature playback. That alone is barely worth mentioning, but it is indicative of the breadth of shortcomings that hamper what had the promise of being a fine release.

Blu-ray screenshots were captured as .png at full resolution in MPlayer and compressed to .jpg using the ImageMagick command line tool.  DVD screenshots were captured as uncompressed .png in VLC media player, and are provided here in both their native resolution (compressed to .jpg using the ImageMagick command line tool) as well as upscaled 1920×1080 (scaled in GIMP, saved as .png, and converted per the rest to .jpg) to offer the best range of comparison.
DVD 480p | DVD 1080p | Blu-ray 1080p

While the Blu-ray video was impaired to the point of distraction, at least it got the bump to HD. No such luck is to be had with the audio. Horror Express is accompanied in each of its video iterations by lossy Dolby Digital tracks, either 2.0 monophonic English or 2.0 stereophonic Spanish, each at 192 kbps. John Cacavas’ interesting musical score is served best by the better-preserved 2.0 Spanish track, but both sound flat and unremarkable otherwise. I’m not sure that a lossless encoding could have improved much upon that in the Blu-ray edition, but as things stand now I’ll never know. Adding to the disappointment is Severin’s failure to include any subtitles whatsoever, making the secondary Spanish audio track more a vestigial feature than a legitimate viewing option for the majority of the release’s potential audience.

With the feature presentation a disappointment on practically every front, I’m very happy to report that the supplemental package is quite exceptional. Things begin with Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express, a 14 minute interview with director Eugenio Martin. Though Martin’s accent is thick and his handling of English at times lacking, the information he provides is all quite good. Next up is a wonderful half-hour archival interview with late screenwriter Bernard Gordon (The Day of the Triffids), who served as producer on Horror Express, in which he discusses the Hollywood blacklist, his involvement with producer Philip Yordan and his work on the Samual Bronston epics of the ’60s. There’s nothing whatever about Horror Express here, but I couldn’t be bothered by that – it’s a fantastic interview. Telly and Me grants composer John Cacavas a few minutes to talk about his friendship with actor and singer Telly Savalis and their work toghether on this film and elsewhere. The undisputed king of the supplements is an interview and question and answer session with the inimitable Peter Cushing, circa 1973, which runs for a whopping 80 minutes (!) and serves as a sort of commentary track for the feature presentation. I’ll not spoil any of the goods here, but Cushing fans will be over the moon – the disc may be worth picking up for this alone. An introduction to Horror Express by Fangoria editor Chris Alexander (6 minutes), a theatrical trailer, and three trailers for other Severin titles (Psychomania, The House That Dripped Blood and Nightmare Castle) round out the disc.

Horror Express is a fun little footnote in the annals of Euro-horror, and one that I remember seeing many, many times on discount video racks as a kid. I had exceedingly high hopes for this release from Severin Films, hopes that were effectively dashed as soon as the Blu-ray disc began to play.  The issues with the feature presentation are so distracting as to make a recommendation on its merits difficult, but the supplemental package certainly makes this release tempting.  Given the low asking price it currently commands (just $13.99) fans will likely want to indulge for that reason alone.

in conclusion
Film: Good silly fun  Video: Fair +  Audio: Fair   Supplements: Excellent
Harrumphs: You’d do better to ask what isn’t wrong here.  The wealth of supplements is the saving grace.
Packaging: Standard two-hub Blu-ray case.
Available for purchase through Amazon.com

Dead Alive

November 2nd, 2011 | article by | 2 Comments »
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a.k.a. Braindead   Year: 1992  Company: Wingnut Films   Runtime: 97′
Director: Peter Jackson   Writers: Stephen Sinclair, Fran Walsh, Peter Jackson
Music: Peter Dasent   Cast: Timothy Balme, Diana Penalver, Elizabeth Moody, Ian Watkin, Brenda Kendall, Stuart Devenie, Jed Brophy, Stephen Papps, Murray Keane, Glenis Levestam, Lewis Rowe
Disc company: Lionsgate   Video: 1080p 1.78:1   Audio: DTS HD-MA 2.0 English
Subtitles: English, English SDH, Spanish   Disc: BD25 (Region A)   Release Date: 10/04/2011
Available for purchase through Amazon.com

Before he found himself tooling around Middle Earth in the most expensive and protracted LARP session in history, writer and director Peter Jackson was cutting his cinematic teeth on genre-bending exploiters the likes of which the world had never seen.  It may be difficult for some to grasp that the man behind The Fellowship of the Ring was also responsible for the demented The Muppets take-off Meet the Feebles and the drive-through alien insanity of Bad Taste, but there are just as many of us who became Jackson fans strictly because of his unhinged past works.  After working with tiny budgets in the latter part of the previous decade Jackson’s company Wingnut Films finally came into some substantial financing in the early ’90s, and the immediate result was the director’s first film to receive any real worldwide exposure – the gloriously outrageous gross-out masterpiece Dead Alive (or Braindead to all of you lucky enough to have the film in its original title).

Written by Jackson, his wife Fran Walsh and their sometimes collaborator Stephen Sinclair, Dead Alive follows the budding relationship of reclusive mother’s boy Lionel and the lovely Pequita – a romance pre-ordained by a stack of tarot cards and Pequita’s creepy grandmother.  Standing in the way of any hope of happiness for the young lovers is Lionel’s mother, an insufferable nag who’s not quite herself these days.  After an unfortunate run-in with a vicious and purportedly cursed Sumatran Rat-Monkey at the city zoo, mum devolves into a putrescent sack of homicidal idiocy that Lionel deals with as best he can.  Veterinary tranquilizers do the job for a while, but unexpected encounters with punks, nurses and the local clergy soon find Lionel stuck with a basement-full of troublesome stiffs, and the arrival of estate-hungry uncle Les and his gaggle of hard partying cohorts only makes things worse.  As the situation spirals further and further out of control Lionel and Pequita are forced into drastic action to save both themselves and their fated romance…

If there’s one thing that leaps out at me every time I sit down to revisit Dead Alive, it’s how obvious it is that Jackson and his co-conspirators love film – Dead Alive is the sort of production that really wears its inspirations on its sleeve.  The film begins on King Kong‘s Skull Island, far west of Sumatra, with an asshole explorer running afoul of superstitious natives in his quest for a rare beast – the bothersome Sumtran Rat-Monkey – which is brought to life, naturally, through stop-motion animation.  Back in Wellington, Lionel hearkens to Anthony Perkin’s portrayal of immortal screen Psycho Norman Bates, albeit with a potential for heroism taking the place of homicidal mania, while Jackson and company hint at secrets in his past with flashes of Deliverance-style hand-out-of-the-water illusions.  Once Lionel’s mum is infected the film treats audiences to a veritable parade of zombie genre homage, referencing everything from the Dead works of Romero to Raimi’s more slapstick take on the material – Jackson and effects man Richard Taylor take particular relish in the “total bodily dismemberment” of the latter.  There are broader references as well, like the famed cemetery-bound kung fu battle between some zombie punks and the inimitable Father MacGruder (“I kick ass for the Lord!”), and one bit for the real nerds among us – a brief glimpse of a poster for Johnny Weismuller in Jungle Moon Men that foreshadows Lionel’s final act of macho heroism, swinging to safety by belt as he and his beloved share a kiss.

More than just paying lip service to their inspirations, Jackson and crew were also clearly enamored with the very act of making film.  Dead Alive often feels a though it were handled by a hyper-active grade-schooler who’d finally been given the opportunity to figure out his latest toy.  The camerawork, care of photographer Murray Milne (Meet the Feebles), is brimming with vitality, with the camera swishing or panning or craning in any number of directions and as often as was possible.  The compositions themselves are just as variably vivid, from the diffused soft-palette exteriors of fantasy Wellington circa 1957 to the eccentric neon-hued, comic-inspired interiors of the more horrific later segments.  Perhaps the greatest example of the enthusiasm of the men behind Dead Alive can be found in the breadth of technical effects exemplified throughout – more than just the eccentric splatter that comes to dominate the film, Jackson toys with conventional and large-scale puppetry, suit-mation, and even a bit of clever miniature work to expand his retro Universe.  Carefully photographed miniatures of a vintage Wellington no longer extant, complete with cable cars decorated in period-appropriate advertisements (and at least one building baring the Wingnut company name), merge perfectly with the modern location photography.  The temptation now seems to be to go overboard in creating a sense of location, with loads of CGI overproduction and perhaps a bit of gimmicky 3D immersion.  Dead Alive‘s old-hat techniques manage the feat without drawing too much attention to themselves, and are all the more satisfying for it.


The house where evil dwells…

All of that is good and well, but with a hyperbolic blurb like “The goriest fright film of all time” flaunted across the top of the box art it’s impossible to discuss Dead Alive without also discussing the excesses that have made it (in)famous.  While I might contest the “fright film” designation (this is comedy born of horror rather than any kind of horror outright) the rest of the statement is hard to argue with.  Dead Alive dishes out its visceral delights in such quantity that adjectives fail it – this may well be the bloodiest show on Earth.  While early gags are geared towards gross-out giggles – mention “pudding” in the context of this film and most anyone who’s seen it will give you a laughing, half-shuddering reaction – Dead Alive quickly transitions towards one-upping itself with its own over-the-topness.  This is, after all, a film famous for a scene in which a priest with a taste for the martial arts unceremoniously rips the limbs from his zombie opponent and beats him with them, and that’s just a start.

Those attempting to find logic or reason in Dead Alive‘s zombie hordes are out of luck as any sense there was to the thing quickly falls victim to the all-important gag.  It’s a welcome change in a subgenre that enjoys strangling itself in rules and regulations – “aim for the brain” doesn’t seem such a helpful piece of advice when the critter creeping your way has a lawn gnome for a head!  While some of the violence is undeniably rooted in genre conventions, as in the case of a neck-bite or two, the vast majority aims for hitherto unseen levels of absurdity.  Jackson’s creativity flourishes here in a ways that it just hasn’t in his more recent work, and its these demonstrations of his imagination unchecked that attracted so much of us to his filmmaking in the first place.  Faces and scalps are ripped whole from screaming skulls while men devoured up to their waists kick bloodied skeleton legs – one victim is so mangled that he comes back from the grave looking more than a little like a brachiosaurus.  In perhaps the classic attack of the film a young woman has her face ripped literally in two by a fiendish infant who then uses her corpse as a sort of full-body puppet!

If the zombie violence itself is extreme then that perpetrated against them is even more so, with heads and whole bodies exploding blood and nameless pulp about Lionel’s respectable Victorian abode.  One poor chap, having been cut in two, is reduced to using his legs for stilts while his whole set of internal organs, which have been granted their own bizarre life, are left to chase people about on their own!  Lionel eventually decides that he’s had enough of all that nonsense and takes matters into his own hands.  With most of the zombies gathered in the foyer, Lionel enters with a lawnmower draped over his neck and shoulders with a bit of rope.  ”Party’s over!” he announces, and so begins the single most epic scene of wanton bodily destruction in the history of film.  Here the effects are thrilling in their efficacy, with assorted limbs, faces, and torsos butchered by the rumbling blade of the mower and spewed out in a stream of vivid red glop.  Never missing an opportunity for another gag, the film allows Lionel to reach the other end of the room safe and satisfied, only to look back and realize that he’s only mowed down one row of zombies and that there’s a whole horde of them left behind.  Mowing down the dead is evidently every bit as tedious and time consuming as mowing the lawn, and as Lionel turns to finish the job Peter Dasent’s synthesizer accompaniment swells into something melodious and balletic.  This is grand guignol as it might have been directed by Vincent Minnelli, and in its own way it’s every bit as genius as any of those other revered moments in cinema.

On their own gore and gags do not a terrific film make, and Dead Alive earns audience sympathies by packaging its more eccentric material within an old fashioned love story that’s actually quite touching and sweet.  In this way Dead Alive plays as the sort of pitch-perfect escapism only film can provide, offering up a happy ending that never feels trite or condescending.  We want Lionel and Pequita to be together, not because some goofy cards told us it would happen but because our investment in the characters makes us think it should.  In the end Dead Alive may be the most hopeful horror picture ever made – if these two can fend off the forces of darkness amassing against them then surely there’s a little hope for us all.  Just be sure to keep your lawnmower handy, as you never know when you might need it.


Grrrrrrrrr…

Dead Alive creeps, leaps, and splats onto Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate who, to be perfectly fair, have dropped the ball on a couple of key points.  Firstly, the cut of the film included is the slightly abbreviated 97 minute version (allegedly preferred by Jackson, though I could find no primary source for this – help!) that premiered at the 1992 Toronto Film Festival.  I’m not especially bothered by this – it’s the version that I have become most familiar with over the years – but the opportunity to include both the longer 104 minute version and this unrated 97 minute cut, preferably as seamlessly branched viewing options, was sorely missed.  Secondly, Dead Alive‘s high definition home video debut is woefully lacking in supplemental heft.  All that is included is the original American trailer in upconverted HD, and an interminable slate of Lionsgate previews that starts the disc.  A special edition this isn’t, though at least the packaging (a slight update of that for the Trimark DVD from over a decade ago) is honest enough not to lead consumers into thinking otherwise.

With no uncut version  and effectively no supplemental content to distract from it, the presentation of the 97 minute feature is very much front and center, and while I wasn’t expecting much by virtue of the low pricetag I found myself reasonably impressed, if with some reservations.  My apologies in advance for the paltry DVD comparison in this review – I no longer own the Trimark DVD and was forced to scrounge around online for the grand total of two uncompressed .png captures sourced below.  I’ve included two captures from the horrifically encoded Laser Paradise ‘Blood Edition’ for posterity, so that a more precise comparison can be made with regards to the film’s proper framing.

Lionsgate present Dead Alive under its American export title by way of a gritty 1080p transfer at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 – slightly cropped from the intended 1.66:1.  Compared to the DVD editions this new transfer adds, substantially at times, to the left and right of the frame, as well as to the top and bottom in comparison to the 1.85:1-cropped Trimark DVD.  A marginal amount of headroom is lost compared to the 1.66:1 “Blood Edition”, but not to the extent that it proves catastrophic to the framing, and while I’d have preferred a more open presentation the Blu-ray does offer a reasonable middle ground compared to what has been available before.  While the 1080p transfer can appear quite weak at times, overly grainy and softly focused with a subtle color palette and plenty of pox marks, I don’t think there’s much here that can’t be explained away by the source materials themselves.  The soft and grainy qualities of the image appear for the most part to be a product of the original photography, which is often done with wide-angle lenses and heavy diffusion filtering – this is not something that’s ever going to export a terrific amount of clarity and detail.  There are exceptions to the the norm here, with some effects takes appearing quite clear, apparently having been shot through different lenses and possibly on entirely different stock.


Case in point – the grain in this effects close-up is still visible, but much less pronounced. The darker areas of the frame seem especially crisp and clear compared to other samples from the film.

Then there is the frequent damage, which offers viewers a persistent parade of minor speckles and larger blemishes that seem excessive for even this modestly budgeted production, which is less than 20 years old as of this writing.  While there are black bits of dirt and dust to contend with the majority of the damage appears printed right into the materials themselves, showing as white flecks of varying sizes, including the odd white printed hair.  It’s all frame-specific, but the quantity was a bit surprising, and those sensitive to such things should note that Lionsgate have obviously attempted no restoration.  Color and contrast will likely also fall below most’s expectations.  With the exception of the over-the-top conclusion, with its wealth of vibrant reds, colors can appear quite flat, and while I suspect that much of this is intentional on the part of the filmmakers (looking to create a sort of soft fantasy version of 1957 Wellington) the flatness has been compounded by the transfer’s low level of contrast.  Black levels are quite weak for the most part, with plenty of grain (and a bit of noise as well) lurking behind every shadow.  A bit of tweaking could easily have resolved this situation, resulting in an image that looked just that much more healthy and robust.

Technically the disc is only middling, occupying  around 17 Gb of a single layer BD-25 with the AVC-encoded feature sporting an average video bitrate of just 19.6 Mbps.  I was hard pressed to find any fatal encoding flaws, but the image still doesn’t hold up as well in close examination as I’d like.  All said, I’m not really that put off by any of the above – in motion I’d say Dead Alive looks pretty decent, particularly in the final twenty minutes or so.  While I believe Lionsgate could have improved a bit, either by sourcing from the original negative or by tweaking the transfer they had, I’m hard-pressed to think they could have improved upon it drastically. For the $13 it presently demands I’d say this looks good enough, and substantially more accurate to the source materials than some other recently lauded presentations (I’m looking at you Zombie and House By the Cemetery).

HD screenshots were captured as .png at full resolution in MPlayer and compressed to .jpg using the ImageMagick command line tool.  Screenshots from the German Laser Paradise “Blood Edition” DVD were captured in .png format in VLC, upconverted to 1920×1080 (black bars were added to the left and right to fill the frame, and the original 4:3 letterboxing removed – note that the original letterboxing is very imprecise, with warping along the top and bottom of the frame, and that thin amounts of black information were left in some areas to prevent the loss of image information in others) in GIMP and compressed to .jpg format at a quality setting of 95%.  The two Trimark DVD comparison shots were found online in their original uncompressed .png, then upconverted and compressed at the same settings as the “Blood Edition” DVD (excluding the de-letterboxing and addition of black bars).
Blood Edition 4:3 letterboxed PAL DVD | 16:9 1.85:1 Trimark NTSC DVD | Lionsgate Blu-ray

More Blu-ray Screenshots

Gore!

In the absence of any appreciable funding having been thrown at this disc’s production, at least I don’t have an underwhelming 5.1 bump to contend with in the audio department.  What the disc does offer is the film’s original stereo recording, soundly related in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0.  The icky sound effects, which are every bit as delightfully sickening as the visuals, shine, as does Peter Dasent’s (Meet the Feebles) alternately cheesy and inspired synthesizer score.  There’s a bit of depth and even some appreciable stereo separation to be had, and Lionsgate manage to one-up many of their competitors by complimenting the track with three sets of subtitles – English, English SDH, and Spanish.

So there you have it – Dead Alive in its slightly shorter American cut (at least it’s not the bastardized 85 minute R-rated version) on Blu-ray in a somewhat uninspired but relatively source accurate presentation with strong lossless audio and no supplements beyond the theatrical trailer.  Were the asking price more than that of a modest lunch out I might have been more compelled to complain, but as things are I find myself reasonably pleased.  Yeah it could have been better, but the DVDs can’t touch it and I know damned well it could have been much, much worse (Near Dark anyone?).  For fans this is tough not to recommend, weaknesses and all.

in conclusion
Film: Excellent  Video: Very Good –  Audio: Excellent   Supplements: Poor
Harrumphs: No supplemental weight whatever, and a transfer that likely could have been improved upon a bit in more capable, or loving, hands.
Packaging: Standard-size Blu-ray Eco case.

Heavy Metal

October 30th, 2011 | article by | 3 Comments »
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Year: 1981  Company: Columbia Pictures   Runtime: 90′
Director: Gerald Potterton   Writers: Daniel Goldberg, Len Blum, Dan O’Bannon,
Richard Corben, Bernie Wrightson, Angus McKie, Jean Giraud
Music: Elmer Bernstein, Riggs, Blue Oyster Cult, Donald Fagen, Stevie Nicks, Journey,
Cheap Trick, Nazareth, Don Felder, Sammy Hagar, Trust, Black Sabbath, Devo
Cast: Rodger Bumpass, John Candy, Jackie Burroughs, Joe Flaherty, Don Francks, Martin Lavut,
Marilyn Lightstone, Eugene Levy, Alice Playten, Harold Ramis, Susan Roman, August Schellenberg,
Richard Romanus, John Vernon, Caroline Semple, Al Waxman, Harvey Atkin, Glenis Wootton Gross
Disc company: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment   Video: 1080p 1.85:1
Audio: DTS HD-MA 5.1 English, DTS HD-MA 5.1 French   Subtitles: English, English SDH, Spanish, French
Disc: BD50 (All Region)   Release Date: 06/14/2011   Available for purchase through Amazon.com

The Wtf-Film Guide to Essential Blu-ray is the record of one man’s eclectic journey to uncover the very best of the weird and wonderful that Blu-ray has to offer.  This edition is also our contribution to the Skeletons in the Closet roundtable, the inaugural group-think event of online pop culture consortium M.O.S.S.

A fleet of bombers slice through occupied airspace in the last Great War, ack-ack blooming about them and fighter fire riddling them, and their unfortunate crews, with holes.  The bomb bay doors open, the payload is dropped, and the bombers – crippled and leaden with the dead-weight of expended flesh – creep back towards the safety of Allied territory.  We focus in on one bomber in particular, in which all but the pilot and co-pilot have been killed.  As the co-pilot inspects the damage a strange, green-glowing sphere approaches and enters the plane, bathing the dead crewmen in its unnatural, unholy radiation.  We see one of the dead men’s hands in close-up – it boils and bursts, oozing fluids and dissolved flesh until only a menacing skeletal claw remains.  As the co-pilot makes his way back to the cockpit he realizes that the bodies of his comrades have vanished, leaving no trace of themselves behind.  Where could they possibly have gone, and how?

When he hears a rustling in the bomber’s central ball turret his curiosity gets the better of him.  He opens the hatch, expecting one of his fellow men to emerge.  Instead he is grappled by a pair of monstrous arms, and his body splattered lifeless about the turret’s walls.  The pilot, suspecting too late that something is wrong, opens the cockpit door to see what has become of his fellow soldiers – on the other side he is greeted by a gang of inhuman things, piles of bones and organs stuffed into bomber jackets and creeping with grim determination towards his position.  The pilot slams the door to isolate himself from the horror and fires his side arm into the approaching horde, but it’s no use.  The creatures pummel the door to pieces, and as it falls from its hinges a mass of zombified flesh-hungry ghouls spill into the cockpit.  The pilot survives only barely, escaping the doomed bomber by parachute in the nick of time.  As the plane plummets into the Pacific he lands safely on the shores of a tropical atoll – but the safety is only illusory.  Awaiting him is a graveyard of aircraft of all generations, as well as the damnable creatures their passengers have become.  The pilot screams, but it’s too late.  The beasts surround him, leaving no possibility for escape…

These images, etched indelibly into my brain during my impressionable youth, were my first encounter with the alternative animated 1981 vignette-epic Heavy Metal - as they filtered out of my family’s seemingly monolithic tube set (a 32″ Sharp in an oversized black plastic box – huge to me at the time, but soon replaced with a 54″ monstrosity) into my unsuspecting, unprepared mind, I was horrified.  I’d never seen anything like it before, and nor had I expected to, particularly not from a cartoon.  As the scene’s nihilistic conclusion loomed I slammed my prepubescent fist into the power button, thus saving myself from what promised to be more such terror.  Even at that young age I knew I had seen something strange and different, and something I knew darn well I shouldn’t have.  One thing I could hardly have fathomed was that, had I only left the television running, I’d have likely seen a few other things that would have blown my growing male mind1…

It is only with the above experience related that one should judge the unflappable adoration the present I holds for Ivan Reitman and Leonard Mogel’s alternately crude, juvenile, prurient, and fantastic production – itself modeled on Mogel’s magazine of the same name, the domestic answer to the French publication Metal Hurlant.  Reitman and Mogel’s Heavy Metal was hardly the first alternative animation to burst forth into the American social consciousness (I can only imagine what things might have replaced the writings on these pages had I chanced first upon Ralph Bakshi’s Felix the Cat or Coonskin instead) but it remains one of the most accessible and popular, likely a result of its sidestepping of the sharp satire  and cultural observations of Bakshi’s work in favor of knock-down drag-out pulp madness.  More than once have I earned perplexed glares from Disney fans after they discover that my favorite of the studio’s work is the grim live action fantasy DragonSlayer - how much more disgusted those reactions might have been had those same people only known that my favorite animated film was Heavy Metal!


So beautiful and so dangerous. Who could ever say no to a face like that?

Comprised of a series of stand-alone vignettes, some original and some adapted from stories which had appeared in the magazine, Heavy Metal flirts with a variety of styles and genres – science fiction, film noir, western, fantasy, horror – with little but an overriding sense of adolescent glee holding it all together.  The individual segments – each farmed out to its own team of talented independent animators – are never quite in harmony with one another, even though a framing device in which an evil green orb relates the film’s six stories certainly tries, but the incongruousness of it all quickly becomes part of the film’s charm.  Heavy Metal shifts willfully and wildly in tone and style from one segment to the next, from the eroticized Burroughs-ian universe of Den to the futuristic scum-metropolis of Harry Canyon to the vast, inhospitable fantasy wastes of Taarna, and yet it works, both as an oddball assortment of self-contained narratives and as a jubilant celebration of genre excesses.  The sum experience is the cinematic equivalent of thumbing through the magazine from which the film takes its name – no more and no less than what Reitman and Mogel had always intended – and, much like the ancient Loc-Nar, the magnitude of its appeal and influence should not be underestimated.

Nowhere is this more obvious than the future-noir Harry Canyon.  Set in the rundown sprawl of New York, New York circa 2031, the story follows a world-weary street-smart cabbie who runs afoul of the Venusian mob after saving a red-headed show stopper from a shootout on the front steps of the Museum of Natural History.  The mobsters want the ancient Loc-Nar, the red-head wants to sell it, and Canyon just wants her.  The story by Daniel Goldberg (Cannibal Girls) and Len Blum (Stripes) is a 10-15 minute reduction of the narrative sensibilities of Taxi Driver and the MacGuffin-fueled drama of The Maltese Falcon with plenty of fantastic violence, raunchy cartoon sex and contemporary rock tracks thrown in for good measure.  If the story – a cab driver and a red-head on the run from unseemly elements on the hunt for an ancient artifact in future New York – sounds familiar, it should.  Whether credited or not, Harry Canyon plays like a step-by-step blueprint for much of Luc Besson’s later pop sci-fi epic The Fifth Element - a film which also prominently features a talking orb that is the embodiment evil.  Recently Heavy Metal ‘s influence has been glimpsed in other high-profile projects, notably in the bleak and over-contrived SuckerPunch (whose writer and director, among others, has been mentioned in association with a new Heavy Metal feature) and, more directly, in the 12th season South Park parody Major Boobage.

To that latter end, Heavy Metal is often negatively criticized for its decidedly adolescent sensibilities, including its grade school attention span and subject matter that seems culled straight from the doodlings of a 14 year old boy.  While I can hardly argue with the point – this is, after all, an exceedingly adolescent film - I’m similarly hard pressed to see it as a burden to the production.  Heavy Metal is a film in which cars drive home from outer space, cheeky alien robots have sexual affairs with Earth secretaries, and a pair of intergalactic hippies take a stoned-out trip around the Universe in a giant flying smiley face.  It’s an out and out celebration of whooshing rockets, spurting blood, and bouncing bare breasts – the very staples of the young male imagination brought to life in vivid, living color.  I certainly can’t fault anyone for not liking it, but to hold Heavy Metal‘s juvenile proclivities against it, when they are the very thing it exists to serve, seems more than a little silly2.

Every bit as senseless as you could possibly imagine but more intelligently conceived than you likely thought, this one makes about as good an argument as can be made for smart people making dumb entertainment.  The fun factor here is through the roof even twenty years on, and I’m sure that producers Ivan Reitman and Leonard Mogel are plenty pleased with their crass animated legacy.  The late Dan O’Bannon’s short horror segment B-17 still appeals to me most here, if only for the childhood memories it recalls, but there are more than enough fantastic developments along the way to appeal to genre fanatics of all kinds.  One could go on interminably about how Heavy Metal isn’t for all tastes, but that’s really the point of it all.  I say give it a try – the worst you can do is hate it.

1 Live and learn, I suppose, but the thin static haze separating family fun from outright pornography in old-school satellite programming would expose me to that other forbidden world soon enough…
2 Yes, I know. I’m sure I’ve made similar arguments against other films.  Then again, I never said I wasn’t silly.

Boo!

Heavy Metal was actually the first DVD I ever purchased, and to be perfectly honest that 1999 Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment edition has held up pretty well over the years with its decent anamorphic image, healthy encode, and substantial slate of supplemental content.  While I’ll be keeping that disc on the shelf for nostalgia’s sake it’s safe to say that it’s not going to be getting much play in the future – this Sony Pictures Home Entertainment Blu-ray blows it right out of the water.  Originally released as a Best Buy exclusive, the disc is now out in wide release and well worth picking up.

Given the highly variable nature of its animation, all of which was produced outside of any major film animation outlets, I had very grounded expectations going into Heavy Metal‘s Blu-ray debut, but I needn’t have worried.  Presented in 1080p at its original theatrical 1.85:1 aspect ratio, this new HD transfer is a modern marvel as far as I’m concerned.  Perhaps the greatest beneficiary of the upgrade is the color reproduction, with both saturation and the depth of hues taking some huge steps forward – the 1999 DVD can look quite faded and yellow in comparison.  The colors here really have some pop (just look at the sky in the first comparison or Taarna’s lips in the final one below), and are backed by a richer, darker contrast and a substantial uptick in clarity and detail.  Each segment is a revelation, from the trash-noir Harry Canyon to the brilliantly bizarre Den to the all-too-brief B-17, and while the crudeness of some sequences is all the more obvious the more awesome moments shine all the brighter.

The overall quality of the film elements seems to have improved a bit as well, and while there is still some damage to contend with (mostly speckling and dust, much of it a product of the original animation and effects process, still more the result of age) the image here is considerably cleaner than on the DVD edition.  The delicious texture of the original photography is also maintained, much to my delight, with variable levels of legitimate film grain present throughout.  It’s refreshing to see that Sony haven’t skimped on the technical front, either.  The AVC-encoded image receives substantial bitrate support at an average of 34.2 Mbps, and the feature spreads comfortably into dual-layer territory.  I noted nothing in the way of artifacting or other encode troubles, and the image retains its lovely film-like aesthetic even under close examination.  The bottom line is that Heavy Metal looks better here than I’d have ever thought it could, and I doubt most theatrical screenings could touch it.

For the sake of full disclosure, HD screenshots were captured as .png at full resolution in MPlayer and compressed to .jpg using the ImageMagick command line tool.  After comparing to the original .png files the results appeared quite transparent to these eyes, even when zooming in 2-3x.  DVD screenshots were captured in .png format in VLC from the 1999 Columbia Tristar Home Video edition (I don’t own the Superbit edition to compare), upconverted to 1920×1080 in GIMP and compressed to .jpg format at a quality setting of 95%.  In the five comparisons below DVD screen shots appear first, followed by the Blu-ray.  The rest should be self-explanatory.

More Blu-ray screenshots:

The all-important audio receives a healthy bump to DTS HD-MA 5.1 in the original English (a second DTS HD-MA 5.1 track in dubbed French is also included), and I’ve never heard Heavy Metal sound better.  The crude sound effects have a wonderful vintage about them, and sound very much of their time, as does the voice recording.  The HD track offers considerably more breathing room than on past editions, sounding neither so muffled as the Dolby Surround 2.0 stereo track or as frail as the Dolby Digital 5.1 included on the 1999 DVD, and feels considerably more substantial for the trouble.  The vintage rock tracks have great punch, with Felder’s Heavy Metal (Takin’ a Ride) and Hagar’s Heavy Metal both sounding hilariously awesome in their lossless iterations.  Benefiting even more so from the bump is Elmer Bernstein’s tremendous score, which offers some of the best genre work of its kind in segments Den and Taarna.  Heavy Metal finally sounds as big as it should on home video, and while I’d have loved a lossless track in the original stereo for posterity’s sake I’m hard-pressed to complain.  The disc comes with a decent array of subtitling options – English, English SDH, French and Spanish – and, according to the back of the case, should be playable in all Blu-ray regions.

The only area in which the disc seems to be lacking is in the supplemental department, and those who already own the Collector’s Series edition from 1999 won’t find anything new here.  Included is the original feature-length rough cut of Heavy Metal, which runs 90 minutes in 480p and is available both with or without commentary from Carl Macek, a small selection of deleted scenes – the unfinished Neverwhere Land sequence (3 minutes, 480p) and the alternate carousel framing story (2:38, 480p, and with or without Carl Macek commentary) – and the excellent documentary featurette Imagining Heavy Metal (36 minutes, 480p).  While all this is retained, a large selection of material was also left behind.  Lost, but available on the 1999 DVD, are a host of image galleries, including portfolios of pencil art, cell animation, production photos, and a massive gallery of Heavy Metal magazine covers spanning from 1977 to 1999, as well as an audio recording of Carl Macek reading from his book The Art of Heavy Metal: Animation for the Eighties that originally accompanied the feature presentation.

While Sony Pictures Home Entertainment have clearly skimped on the supplements, which is a real shame with regards to the art galleries (these would have looked fantastic bumped to HD), they have spared no expense with regards to the feature presentation, and given the low price this release currently commands that’s more than enough for me.  If I had my way this disc would be sitting on a shelf in every home in America, but finding myself in the absence of godly powers of influence I’ve added it to our shortlist of Blu-ray essentials instead.  So there you have it.  Heavy Metal on Blu-ray is an essential.  That means you have to buy it, right?

in conclusion
Film: Awesome  Video: Excellent  Audio: Excellent   Supplements: Good +
Harrumphs: Limited supplemental weight.
Packaging: Standard Blu-ray case.

Cannibal Girls

October 25th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Year: 1973  Company: Scary Pictures   Runtime: 83′
Director: Ivan Reitman   Writers: Ivan Reitman, Daniel Goldberg, Robert Sandler
Cinematography: Robert Saad   Music: Doug Riley   Cast: Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Ronald Ulrich,
Randall Carpenter, Bonnie Neilson, Mira Pawluk, Bob McHeady, Alan Gordon, Allan Price, Earl Pomerantz
Disc company: Filmswelike, Warner Music Canada   Video: 1080p 1.78:1
Audio: Dolby TrueHD 2.0 monophonic English   Subtitles: None   Disc: BD25 (Region A)
Release Date: 10/26/2010   Available for purchase through Amazon.ca and Amazon.com

“Gloria, do whatever makes you happy, and I’ll do whatever makes me happy.  And you know what’s going to make me really happy right now?  A big chocolate milkshake.”

Produced for a pittance in 1971 and released by exploitation megalith A.I.P. in 1973 with the classic tagline “These girls do exactly what you think they do!”, Ivan Reitman and Daniel Goldberg’s Cannibal Girls plays like Canada’s answer to the Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman gore fantasies of a decade past.  Featuring SCTV regulars Eugene Levy (Best in Show) and Andrea Martin (Black Christmas) and largely improvised from a 13-page treatment, the film blends overt comedy with exploitation staples and throws in a hefty dollop of the just plain weird for good measure.  The results won’t be to everyone’s taste, but those with a soft spot for genre oddballs are in for a real treat.

The story, such as it is, follows young couple Cliff and Gloria as they head off for a bit of rest and relaxation in small-town Canada.  After a bit of car trouble they settle in quaint little Framhamville, a place where people – especially woman – have a habit of disappearing.  While checking in at the local motel Cliff and Gloria here the legend of the cannibal girls, three devilish young ladies who lured men to their country home with the promise of sexual delights, only to feast on them instead.  As luck would have it their country estate has since become the town’s must-visit tourist destination – a bizarre bed and breakfast run by a demented reverend (Ronald Ulrich) that’s just dying to have Cliff and Gloria over for dinner.  Soon the cannibal legend is looking more like a lesson in recent history, and the entire town seems to be in on the man-eating conspiracy!

Though it reminds heavily of Friedman and Lewis’ Two Thousand Maniacs, in which a village of cannibal Confederates conspires against a carload of Yankee passers by, Cannibal Girls offers more than enough of its own brand of the schlocky and strange to stand apart.  Case in point is the good reverend Alex St. John, Farmhamville’s resident cannibal guru and hypnotist extraordinaire, and leader of the eponymous pack of man-eating nymphets.  As played by Ronald Ulrich the character is hilariously bizarre, a tuxedo-donning Shakespeare-reciting weirdo who leads his girls in hymns and is prone to mumbling about the “rich, red, warm blood of life”.  Ulrich takes to the role with a deadly earnest that makes it all the more hysterical, leaving it unclear as to whether he was actually in on the gag or just doing his best by the material.


Ouch.

More transparent in their roles are Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin as bickering young lovers whose relationship is imperiled by their stopover in Farmhamville.  Levy and Martin play mostly as two archetypes – the man who just wants to get laid, and the woman who takes things much more seriously – but become quite endearing as time wears on.  Levy, though more than adept at delivering both scripted lines and improvisation, is here best remembered for his numerous crimes against good fashion sense.  From his bulky furs to a knitted tie (these exist??) there’s little he wears that isn’t cringe-worthy, though it’s his hair that really takes the prize – the actor is all but unrecognizable beneath his sideburns, Bollywood-villain mustache, and monstrous bobbling mane.  Martin may be the only member of the cast whose performance speaks for genuine talent, and while she carries the lighter early drama well it’s her believable late-film paranoia that really makes an impression.  It also builds perfectly to the film’s ludicrous step-frame twist ending, a stupefying turn of events I’ll not spoil here.

Though its trappings are largely comedic Cannibal Girls still works as bread-and-butter exploitation, offering up plenty of exposed flesh and stage blood (and some combinations thereof as well) before its 83 minutes are up.  Reitman and Goldberg offer up a cannibal girl for every taste here – blonde, brunette and red-head – each of whom are given their own dim-witted beau to attend to.  The majority of the more salacious material is limited to a lengthy pseudo flashback early on in the film, in which the girls are given ample opportunity to do “exactly what you think they do”, though there are lovingly tasteless flourishes to be found throughout.  The uber-exploitative opening is a prime example, dishing out a helping of gratuitous nudity, blood, and hypnotic weirdness before the credits even roll.  There’s little in the way of overt gore to be had, separating Cannibal Girls still further from its inspirations, but the shocks are handled pretty well given the paucity of the production and the limited experience of its crew.  The appearance of a pair of bloodied scissors still gives me a jolt, particularly when a bit of well-conceived phallic imagery hints further at what they had been used for…

Cannibal Girls never quite decides whether it wants to be outright exploitation or a spoof of the same, but it works well enough on both levels to keep this reviewer happy.  Silly and sexy and just violent enough to pack a punch, Cannibal Girls grows on me a little more each time I see it – it’s quickly becoming a personal favorite!  The long list of familiar names attached to it will give Cannibal Girls plenty of niche appeal, but it’s really best appreciated on its own strange terms.  Schlock aficionados, trash connoisseurs, and fans of the generally bizarre owe it to themselves to give this oddball genre flunky a run – they just might like it.


If I can’t convince you to give this film a chance, perhaps Bonnie Neilson can…

Just how well you take to Filmswelike and Warner Music Canada’s Blu-ray edition of Cannibal Girls will largely depend on how well you take to the film itself – I happen to adore it, in no uncertain terms, which has put me in a more forgiving mood than the usual with regards to this review.  Released day and date with Shout! Factory’s domestic DVD edition, this hi-def sister package from north of the border is sourced from the same transfer and features much of the same supplemental content.  The difference, as ever, is in the details, and while this Blu-ray package is inarguably imperfect fans of the film and its famous progenitors should still find plenty to love therein.

Though listed as 1.85:1, Filmswelike and Warner Music Canada present Cannibal Girls at the marginally more open aspect ratio of 1.78:1 via a freshly minted 1080p transfer from the “newly restored original film elements”.  Restored or no, the film elements in question have clearly seen better days, though that’s far from unexpected given the nature of the film in question.  Cannibal Girls is an overflowing font of visual imperfections from start to finish, with a host of white flecks and blemishes, persistent scratches and baked-in black specks that will warm the hearts of those who, like myself, enjoy this sort of patina in their grindhouse entertainment.  Your mileage may vary.  There’s also a good deal of grain on display, though it’s honestly not so intense as I was anticipating.  This aspect of the image tightens up nicely compared to the DVD, and help it to export a more faithfully film-like aesthetic.

Otherwise Cannibal Girls improves only modestly, when at all, and I suspect which image is preferred will honestly be a matter of personal taste.  The Blu-ray presents with a broader range of black levels than the comparatively boosted DVD, and they can appear strong during some sequences and a bit milky in others – I’d say that the Blu-ray is just less forgiving of the source elements’ inconsistencies in this regard.  Colors vary only slightly, most notably in red shades, while detail can actually appear less pronounced, a product of the minor edge enhancement and contrast boosting applied to the DVD.  Be it because of Cannibal Girls‘ so-so original photography or weaknesses inherent in the sourced elements the differences in real-world detail are negligible for the most part, though the Blu-ray appears more accurate overall.

All of the above is honestly fine with this reviewer, who had minimal expectations for this presentation going in – Cannibal Girls was never going to be the kind of thing you throw in to show off your home theater anyway, and those expecting otherwise may well have lost all touch with reality.  More problematic are the technical limitations imposed on the product, which has been relegated to a single-layer BD25.  The feature takes up just 10.5 GB of space on-disc, with the AVC-encoded video suffering from a low average bitrate of 15.7 Mbps.  The deficiencies show up as blocking artifacts and inconsistent support of the film’s  natural grain structure, which can appear quite digital and noisy on close inspection.  In motion I didn’t find the issues to be too distracting, and the disc definitely has its stronger moments, but the specter of poor encoding is lurking all the while, and could well have been exorcised had this disc been bumped into dual layered territory.

For the sake of full disclosure, HD screenshots were captured as .png at full resolution in MPlayer and compressed to .jpg using the ImageMagick command-line tool.  After comparing to the original .png files the results appeared quite transparent to these eyes, even when zooming in 2-3x.  The sample DVD snapshots in comparison sets one through four were captured in .png format in VLC, upscaled to 1080 resolution from their native resolution and exported as .png in GIMP. These captures were then also compressed to .jpg using the ImageMagick command-line tool.
In the first four sets of captures the Shout! Factory DVD is represented first, followed by the Filmswelike / Warner Music Canada Blu-ray.

More Blu-ray Screenshots:

The audio, whether you choose to go with or without the “warning bell” gimmick, fares much better.  Both tracks receive Dolby TrueHD 2.0 monophonic encodes in the original English with results that are perfectly satisfactory.  Dialogue sounds as flat as it always has, as do many of the canned sound effects, but it’s all perfectly intelligible.  The original score by Doug Riley (alumnus of Reitman’s earlier Foxy Lady) offers a bit more opportunity for expansion, and presents with some modest depth.  Both tracks stay true to their bottom-dollar roots, and remain free of unnecessary modern remixing, which is all I really ask of them.  As is the case with the Shout! Factory DVD, there are no subtitles.

Supplements duplicate the Shout! Factory package for the most part, but all benefit from a bump to HD video (more so than the film itself!) and Dolby TrueHD audio.  Included are two substantial interview featurettes – Cannibal Guys (26′) with director Ivan Reitman and producer Daniel Goldberg, and Meat Eugene (19′) with star Eugene Levy – and the original theatrical trailer, which I’d say is sourced from better elements than the feature it advertises.  Lost from the Shout! Factory package are a 60 second television spot and two radio spots (30 and 60 seconds) and a nice reversible cover.  Gained, however, is the 22 minute Reitman and Goldberg short film Orientation, an amusing artifact from their days at McMaster University presented in 1080p in its original 4:3 aspect ratio.  Though most definitely not a horror film (beyond the horrors of starting college, I suppose) it does make for an excellent companion piece, and the score is pretty groovy too!  Cannibal Girls also exemplifies one of the unsung benefits of the Blu-ray format, in that all of the disc’s content is accessible at any point in playback, even during the supplements, via a simple pop-up menu.  While it may not be a big deal to some it makes my job that much easier, and I heartily approve.

Unless you’re the kind of person for whom the simple act of owning Cannibal Girls on Blu-ray is its own reward (guilty!), this really isn’t must-buy material.  The biggest benefit over the Shout! Factory DVD edition is in the high definition supplements and the addition of the short student film Orientation, but the feature presentation is pretty much a wash.  Both have their downsides, be it the DVD’s limited resolution and digital boosting or the Blu-ray’s paltry encoding, and with the difference in retail price so minor ($22.97 DVD, or CDN$24.99 Blu-ray) it’s impossible for me to recommend one over the other.  I’m perfectly happy to have both sitting on my shelf, but anything beyond that is down to personal preference.

in conclusion
Film: One of a kind  Video: Good  Audio: Excellent   Supplements: Excellent
Harrumphs: No subtitles, iffy video encode for the feature.
Packaging: Standard Blu-ray case.

The Thing

October 15th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 2011   Company: Universal Pictures   Runtime: 103′
Director: Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.   Writer: Eric Heisserer    Cinematography: Michel Abramowicz
Music: Marco Beltrami   Cast: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Joel Edgerton, Ulrich Thomsen, Eric Christian Olsen
Out Now in wide release.
In the interest of fair play, blah blah blah SPOILERS blah blah.

It’s heading towards 12:30 in the morning here as I start to write this, and it’s been roughly half an hour since the credits rolled on my late night screening of The Thing - the new Universal production based upon events hinted at, but never fully revealed, in the 1982 John Carpenter film of the same name.  Living in the city I have no car, and thus enjoyed a leisurely walk back from the theater with two friends, sharing a few social cigarettes and taking measure of what we had just witnessed as we went.  We had all been bright-eyed and hopeful as we shuffled into the theater, but we had emerged beaten, heart broken.  As I said my goodbyes and entered my apartment lobby I knew I had to start writing, and soon.  What’s more, I knew this was to be no ordinary review piece.  It was to be an exorcism.

John C. Campbell’s serialized 1938 novella Who Goes There?, a frightfully original tale of alien paranoia in the cold wastes of Antarctica, has led a charmed life with regards to its cinematic legacy – one that rivals that of Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers, itself adapted successfully, and numerous times to boot.  Famed Hollywood producer and director Howard Hawks did his friend and sometimes editor Christopher Nyby a favor in granting him the role of director on Who Goes There?‘s first screen adaptation, 1951′s The Thing From Another World.  One of the most successful genre productions of its time in terms of craftsmanship and entertainment value, The Thing From Another World nevertheless altered much of the substance of the source story and, frankly, bares little direct relation Universal’s newest iteration.  It’s still a fantastic film, and anyone reading this article owes it to themselves to track it down.

Tenuous as its relationship to the 2011 film may be, The Thing From Another World cements its place in the paternal heritage of it by virtue of its influence on one man – John Carpenter, who for his first major Hollywood production was given the green light to craft Who Goes There?‘s second cinematic interpretation.  Rather than source from the 1951 screenplay, though several of its points are homaged, Carpenter’s screenwriter Bill Lancaster sought inspiration directly from the Campbell novella.  The results were phenomenal in their own right, a gruesome exercise in paranoia and body horror whose disgustingly imaginative creature effects put Rob Bottin on the map.  Carpenter’s The Thing replicates Campbell’s original shape-shifting alien menace with genuinely disturbing results, horrifying its audience through a palpable sense of isolation and by concealing its terrors beneath ordinary human skin.  Who can the audience trust when the cast of the film can’t trust itself, and anyone might be a “thing”?

It may seem strange to spend such a goodly part of an article purportedly devoted to a new release by praising its predecessors, but this new The Thing positively demands such comparison by virtue of its existence alone.  Directed by feature newcomer Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. and penned by Eric Heisserer (A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 and Final Destination 5) this new The Thing foregoes any attempts at further adapting the Campbell story (though it is credited) and instead takes the Carpenter film as its jumping off point, choosing to relate events that occurred prior to that film’s narrative start but whose aftermath is shown therein.  As such The Thing 2011 exists as a willful companion piece to the 1982 film, even going so far as to repeat some of the footage from that film in its final reel, and doesn’t so much invite as necessitate comparisons between itself and its selfsame predecessor / successor.

Things become more complicated when one tries to classify just what this The Thing actually is.  In terms of its timeline it is clearly a prequel, a film that takes place before the narrative of an earlier film.  Simple enough, right?  Unfortunately screenwriter Heisserer lacked the imagination necessary to craft any sort of original story from the key points of the 1982 The Thing - a creepy cremated inhuman corpse, a helicopter chasing a dog, an unearthed spaceship and a shack full of dead Norwegians – that it insists upon following.  The result is a prequel that repurposes so much of the narrative arc of the film that it purportedly precedes, going so far as to replicate not just events but whole groups of characters,  that it actually becomes a remake of it as well.  And so this The Thing comes full circle, becoming an allegory for itself – a hollow cinematic monstrosity that tries very hard to convince audiences it’s something that it isn’t.

To anyone at all familiar with the 1982 The Thing a relation of the plot here is mostly pointless, as only the trappings are different.  Paleontologist Mary Elizabeth Winstead and her disposable mop-haired associate are contracted by a Norwegian scientist to travel to an isolated Antarctic geological research site and dig up the thing of the title.  Along the way they meet up with two American helicopter pilots – one channeling Keith David, the other Kurt Russel.  Once there the thing, the survivor of a gigantic crashed flying saucer, is quickly dug out of the ice and moved to a Norwegian camp full of disposable bearded men of dubious purpose.  A bit of brazen stupidity on the part of the team’s resident baddie, an egotistical scientist of something or other who wants to ride his discovery all the way to a Nobel prize, results in the thing getting loose, leading to the expected monster antics but little else.  Winstead eventually discovers the thing’s devilish shape-shifting secret and quickly sets about checking the fillings in everyone’s teeth (the thing is evidently incapable of growing and too stupid to fake inorganic features), though she needn’t have bothered – it takes every opportunity to spoil the fun and pop out of its warm and people-y hiding places.

On that note let’s talk special effects, and why the “anything is possible” promise of computer animation has let this particular vehicle down so badly.  Contrary to what many unflinching adherents to the old ways may think, my problem here is not one of methods, and as such I’ll not argue that Rob Bottin’s traditional latex and karo syrup techniques are any more acceptable than the CGI that gluts the market today.  The problem here is with frequency, and the “anything is possible” tendency to whip up any batshit idea that comes to mind regardless of whether or not it serves the story.  Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing is a certifiable gross-out affair, but a sparing one, and its limited number of outrageous effects set-pieces are both appropriate for the titular menace (which only emerges in defense of itself or in secret) and allow the film to build and at times subvert audience expectations.  In one famous bit the head of a human impostor, in a show of mad self preservation, creeps off a medical table and propels itself about a room by its tongue before sprouting a set of slender insectine legs and skittering towards freedom.  It’s an effect that still prompts an ick reaction from this jaded viewer.

There are attempts at similar occurrences in The Thing 2011, with a multitude of people’s arms sloughing off (I’m honestly not sure where all the arms come from) and becoming skittery lobster monsters, but the film insists upon repeating them until they are devoid of even the minimal impact they had to start with.  The joy of the 1982 The Thing is that the creature’s form is all together unpredictable – each appearance is different from the last, with the beast’s true nature, if any, remaining obscure.  What’s more, the creature’s more monstrous forms are granted a purpose - self preservation in the face of certain annihilation.  The Thing 2011 can’t be bothered with such silliness as that and instead shows its monsters early and often and with little rhyme or reason.  Muscular and be-tentacled torsos and heads careen from one end of the Norwegian camp to the other with much growling and gnashing of teeth, but it’s all so obvious.  Of what possible evolutionary benefit is shape-shifting if the creature keeps exposing itself to that from which it is attempting to hide?  Don’t ask The Thing 2011, as it doesn’t have a clue.

Similarly clueless are The Thing 2011′s multitude of under-developed sub-characters, who wander off alone and in pairs even after the alien’s penchant for hiding in people skins is made abundantly clear (if you know a shape-shifting alien is afoot and someone asks you to wander off with them for some dubious purpose, don’t do it – you will be killed).  Heisserer’s scripting seems mostly to blame, though one might well ask how such bunk was ever green lit in the first place.  It’s difficult to gauge the level of proficiency of the cast, as even Winstead is given little to do but state the obvious and look stern.  The various Norwegians grumble a lot and shout a bit, but mostly just die.   Of some note is Heisserer’s odd fixation on birth-related horrors, which is reflected in the special effects production – an autopsy of an alien creature reveals a “womb”, and man after man is engulfed by toothy vaginal whatsits.  It’s the sort of thing that might make for an interesting article if The Thing 2011 could be bothered to make the viewer care.  As such it’s just so much trapping.

The Thing 2011 eventually devolves into a standard chase scenario, with Winstead pursuing the last inhuman holdout across the ice and into the alien ship for an action sequence of inept proportions.  I was hoping for one last gasp of originality, perhaps a whole ship-load of anomolous alien monstrosities, but no dice.  As the credits cranked up the beginning of the 1982 film began to roll, complete with Ennio Morricone’s sparse and haunting score – their tarnished memories were a final insult.  For Heijningen, Heisserer, and all of the producers who had a say in this The Thing coming to pass I had but a single parting thought:


Color Me Blood Red

October 14th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1964  Company: Jacqueline Kay / Friedman – Lewis Productions   Runtime: 87′
Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis   Writer: Herschell Gordon Lewis
Cinematography: Herschell Gordon Lewis   Cast: Gordon Oas-Heim (as Don Joseph), Candi Conder,
Elyn Warner, Pat Lee, Jerome Eden, Scott H. Hall, Jim Jaekel, Iris Marshall, William Harris, Cathy Collins
Disc company: Something Weird / Image Entertainment   Video: 1080p 1.78:1   Audio: LPCM 2.0 English
Subtitles: None   Disc: BD50 (Region A)   Release Date: 09/27/2011   Released as part of the Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Blood Trilogy Blu-ray collection, and available for purchase through Amazon.com
This review is part three of three of our coverage of the Something Weird / Image Entertainment Blu-ray release of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Blood Trilogy – reviews of Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs have already been published.

To paraphrase an old proverb, all good things must come to an end.  Not only did the luck of exploitation dynamos Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman run out with Color Me Blood Red, a bland little shocker produced in 1964 but not released until late 1965, but their partnership did as well.  Lewis would go on to direct a few hillbilly adventures and a host of other gore classics (like The Gruesome Twosome, Wizard of Gore and The Gore Gore Girls) before embarking on a successful career in direct marketing, while Friedman would continue peddling his own peculiar brands of entertainment (Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS, Love Camp 7 and She-Freak).  Color Me Blood Red never turned much business for either party, and would likely have faded into obscurity all together had drive-in entrepreneurs not been so cunning as to re-release it, triple-billed with the infinitely more amusing Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs.

Clearly inspired by Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood, a fusion of comedy and horror in which Dick Miller turns a penchant for murder into a thriving sculpting career, Color Me Blood Red follows the dead-serious misadventures of struggling painter Adam Sorg (Minnesota’s own Gordan Oas-Heim, as Don Joseph), who finds a cure for his color woes in human blood.  As Sorg earns praise from a persnickety local critic the bodies start piling up, and its not long before the teen-aged daughter of Sorg’s biggest fan and her assortment of obnoxious friends find themselves in the artist’s murderous sights.

From the stock musical cues right on up, Color Me Blood Red is a dull and monotonous affair.  The screenplay by Lewis is below even his usual standards, and the concept inspires too little gruesome action and far, far too much forgettable filler.  The primary narrative of Sorg’s decline from struggling artist to homicidal maniac often plays second fiddle to a lot of paddle boating and general mucking about by Jerome Eden (a sort of poverty row Frankie Avalon who, thankfully, never sings) and his gaggle of beach-bound fans, mind-numbing in-action that never expands beyond Sorg’s beach front home and the beach itself.  The sum experience is not unlike being forced to sit through reels upon reels of your lamest friend’s vacation videos, and the minimal gore payoff hardly makes it worth the effort.  Some may find solace in the dialogue’s occasional lapses into absurdity (“Holy Bananas! It’s a girl’s leg!” is a perennial favorite), but I found the fast-forward button to be more appealing.

There is gore to be found here, and of the same brilliantly low-tech variety one should expect of vintage Lewis, but it’s also in much shorter supply than in companion pieces Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs.  The lone standout sequence has Sorg menacing a pair of unassuming young paddle-boaters with a fire poker, one of whom he later bleeds for artistic inspiration in the back room of his home.  Otherwise there’s a stabbing and a lot of painting with red corpuscles to look forward to, but not much else.  From a story filled to tipping point with ripe and disposable anonymous youth I was expecting a lot more.

Far more entertaining than the film itself is its advertising campaign, which prominently featured a devil standing before an easel and promised audiences “A Blood-Spattered Study in the Macabre… Drenched in Crimson Color!”.  The theatrical trailer offers even more to love, its narrator gravely intoning “You must keep reminding yourself: It’s just a movie… It’s just a movie… It’s just a movie…”  It’s more the pity, then, that Color Me Blood Red turned out to be so forgettable.  Skip it.


Adam Sorg, tortured artist and dresser.

Something Weird, through distributor Image Entertainment, presents Color Me Blood Red for the first time on Blu-ray by way of The Blood Trilogy collection (along with Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs, all housed on a single dual layer BD50).  Like Blood Feast and Two Thousand Maniacs before it, Color Me Blood Read is transferred from a positive theatrical source, with results neither as surprising as the former or distressing as the latter.  Print quality here is strictly middle of the road, with frequent dirt, grit and speckling, reel change markers, and the odd splice and photochemical damage.  I was overall pleased with the quality of the source, which ranks as more than “good enough” for the film in question.

Presented in 1080p, Color Me Blood Red‘s matted aspect ratio of 1.78:1 makes for a decent viewing experience but is not without controversy.  Quick comparisons between an older SD variant and this new HD transfer show that the image typically loses information at the bottom of the frame, to the point that information is occasionally gained at the top.  Of course this isn’t consistent, and there are at least a few instances in which more is matted from the top than from the bottom.  There is very little to no head room in the original full frame photography, leaving me to wonder whether this was ever meant to be shown at a widescreen aspect ratio at all, and the new transfer’s selective matting amounts a new brand of pan-and-scanning, with the top and bottom falling victim as opposed to the sides.  Those touchy on the subject will want to hold onto their older DVDs, which retain a more open full frame aspect ratio.

Colors and contrast are again a sticking point.  The all-important reds again take a shift for the magenta, leading the artificial blood to look especially so and unnaturally purple / pink.  Here the trouble looks to be present across the board, meaning that a modicum of hue tweaking could have resolved it from the start.  Contrast is, as with the rest of the transfers on this disc, flat, and while not so bothersome as the color situation could just as easily have been remedied.  Color Me Blood Red lacks any appreciable sharpness due to the frequent focusing woes of the original photography (check out that final close-up), with few moments of exceptional detail.  Film texture is evident throughout, and the AVC encode at an average video bitrate of 19.6 Mbps does a reasonable if imperfect job of supporting it – I noted no flagrant encoding deficiencies.  The issues of the aspect ratio aside this transfer really doesn’t look that bad, and the improvement over SD iterations is obvious even if the color and contrast levels leave something to be desired.

For the sake of full disclosure, HD screenshots were captured as .png at full resolution in MPlayer and compressed to .jpg using the ImageMagick command-line tool.  After comparing to the original .png files the results appeared quite transparent to these eyes, even when zooming in 2-3x.

Audio is once again presented in uncompressed 16-bit Linear PCM monophonic English.  There’s no sign of restoration in sight but I can’t see too many complaining, as the library music, sound effects and dialogue all come through just fine.  There are no accompanying subtitles.

Supplements are sourced from past editions and mirror those of the other features in the collection, starting off with another excellent  commentary track with director Herschell Gordon Lewis, producer David F. Friedman, and Something Weird’s Michael Vraney.  Lewis and Friedman’s partnership dissolved during the production of Color Me Blood Red, and though the two’s friendship later recovered that subject is the focus of much of the discussion here.  Next up is a 10 minute collection of silent outtakes and alternate footage in SD, with a theatrical trailer in SD and a few images in the Lewis / Friedman art gallery rounding out the film-specific extras. (Each of the other films in the collection is also accompanied by a feature audio commentary, outtake footage, and an original trailer, with short subjects Carving Magic and Follow That Skirt and a trailer for the Something Weird documentary Godfather of Gore finishing off the disc)

Two Thousand Maniacs may be this disc’s low water mark with regards to its technical deficiencies, but Color Me Blood Red is easily its lowest in terms of entertainment value.  The bland A Bucket of Blood-inspired narrative is pumped so full of dull youth filler that its few high points are easily lost in the shuffle.  Something Weird’s high definition revisit is not without its problems, particularly when it comes to the questionable 1.78:1 framing, but for a snoozer like this I’m not one to complain too loudly.  For $4 per film it could certainly have been worse.

in conclusion
Film: Pretty Bland  Video: Good +  Audio: Very Good   Supplements: Very Good
Harrumphs: Limited video bitrate, with all three films plus extras cohabiting one dual layer BD50, compromised framing and no subtitles.
Packaging: Standard Blu-ray case.

Miami Golem

October 14th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1985  Runtime: 85′  Director: Alberto De Martino
Writers: Gianfranco Clerici, Alberto De Martino, Vincenzo Mannino
Cinematography: Gianlorenzo Battaglia, Paolo D’Ottavi   Music: Detto Mariano
Cast: David Warbeck, Laura Trotter, John Ireland, Loris Loddi, Giorgio Favretto, Giorgio Bonora

War correspondent turned local TV reporter in Florida Craig Milford (David Warbeck) is sent to film the newest experiment of scientist Dr. Schweiker (Sergio Rossi), whom everyone calls – smiling as if it were the best of jokes – “that filthy Nazi”. Schweiker has cloned and somehow genetically manipulated cells that were found inside of a meteorite. Schweiker’s goal is to, um, you got me there.

A malfunction during Craig’s highly scientific looking attempt at filming the alien cells nearly ends the film early by killing the poor dears. Fortunately, the cells miraculously revive and Craig is distracted from that particular strangeness by vague looking projections swirling around the lab, talking to him in a language he doesn’t understand.

Our hero’s not too fazed by stuff like this, shrugs the David Warbeck shrug, and goes home. Shortly after he’s gone, Schweiker and his whole team are assassinated by the henchmen of evil rich guy Anderson (John Ireland), and the cells are stolen. Anderson has a fiendish and absolutely sensible plan: to grow the cells into a monstrous creature completely under his control he will then use to blackmail governments into doing whatever he wants them to do, like giving him contractual work. I think bribery would be an easier way to achieve that goal, but then I’m not an evil capitalist. For some reason, Anderson thinks Craig – and not sanity – is a threat to these plans and commands further henchmen to kill the reporter too.

But Craig, once he’s heard of the murders, gets himself a gun and demonstrates that shooting down helicopters with a revolver and being an all-around action hero are among the skills you learn as a war reporter.

When Craig’s not involved in chases and shoot-outs, he tries to find out what the strange swirling things were trying to tell him. Fortunately, he meets Joanna Fitzgerald (Laura Trotter), a very helpful woman who recognizes the message as being in the language of sunken Atlantis. Or aliens. Or both.

In fact, Joanna is secretly working for a group of benevolent aliens who give her fantastic psychic abilities (none of them protecting her from a gratuitous shower scene, alas). The aliens have decided that Craig is The Chosen One™, destined to destroy the cells which of course belong to the most horrible and destructive creature ever to live. It’s all in a day’s work for David Warbeck, I suppose.

  
  
  

Quite at the end of his career, Italian director Alberto De Martino had to work from confusing scripts bizarrely unfit for someone who was always at his best when directing straight action material. Miami Golem‘s confusing and generally random mix of Science Fiction, horror, action, and all kinds of 70s crackpottery (in the mid 80s to boot) isn’t as drugged up as that of De Martino’s Pumaman was – but what is? – yet it’s still pretty darn weird.

The film’s first fifty minutes or so consist of cheap and silly but also pleasantly tightly realized action scenes, which are regularly broken up by long sequences of characters talking reams of ridiculous poppycock at each other. There’s bad science, Atlantis, telepathy, telekinesis and people talking in that lovely Italian dub job manner that makes everyone sound as if they had learned cursing by watching Ed Wood movies. It’s enough to let anyone who has a heart and a brain cry tears of laughter and delight.

After those first fifty minutes are over, though, Miami Golem gets really weird. De Martino still shakes things up with decent action sequences, but most of the rest of the film is dedicated to melting its audience’s brains with as much dead-pan ridiculousness as it can possibly offer.

Among the film’s greatest moments belong a scene where an alien explains Craig’s role as The Chosen One™ by stopping time and drawing our hero into a mirror dimension (or something) where it can take on Craig’s appearance to talk to him, making the film’s main expository scene one of (an obviously pretty amused) David Warbeck discussing THE END OF ALL CREATION with himself. No no no, I’m sure he’s completely sane. Other high points of this phase of the film are many, many, many shots of actors and the embryo rubber doll in a jar that is the titular Miami Golem using mental powers at each other – leading to some lovely facial expressions and much VERY HARD STARING. And a blinking rubber embryo.

Even better are probably the scenes where the Golem/rubber embryo attacks Craig and Joanna with telekinesis, which is of course mostly demonstrated by the actors jumping around in the style of mildly excited St. Vitus’s dance sufferers and stunt doubles looking nothing like the actors catapulting themselves against walls. This, dear friends and readers, is exactly what movies were invented for.

Miami Golem‘s air of heart-warming wonder is further strengthened by an acting ensemble willing and able to say the most ridiculous things with the straightest of faces and what looks like real enthusiasm to me. His enthusiasm is of course what made David Warbeck such a likeable leading man in most films of the Italian phase of his career. He clearly realized that he was usually acting in ridiculous nonsense, but didn’t let that hinder him from putting as much energy into what he did on screen as possible, seemingly always having fun with his lot. If there’s an ability ideally suited to letting a grown man upstage a rubber embryo in a jar, as Warbeck does here so beautifully, it is the man’s gift of throwing himself into the job of having serious fun on screen.

The Horror!? is a weekly cult cinema column by Denis Klotz, an aficionado of the obscure and operator of the film blog of the same name.

Two Thousand Maniacs

October 13th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1964  Company: Jacqueline Kay / Friedman – Lewis Productions   Runtime: 87′
Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis   Writer: Herschell Gordon Lewis
Cinematography: Herschell Gordon Lewis   Music: Larry Wellington, Herschell Gordon Lewis
Cast: William Kerwin, Connie Mason, Jeffrey Allen, Shelby Livingston, Ben Moore, Jerome Eden, Gary Bakeman
Disc company: Something Weird / Image Entertainment   Video: 1080p 1.78:1   Audio: LPCM 2.0 English
Subtitles: None   Disc: BD50 (Region A)   Release Date: 09/27/2011   Released as part of the Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Blood Trilogy Blu-ray collection, and available for purchase through Amazon.com
This review is part two of three of our coverage of the Something Weird / Image Entertainment Blu-ray release of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Blood Trilogy – a review of Blood Feast has already been published, and Color Me Blood Red will follow shortly.

With the 1963 release of their influential inaugural gore effort Blood Feast proving an epic success (a quarter million in film rentals - 10 times the film’s meager budget – were recorded in its Southeastern regional release alone), it was only natural that producer David F. Friedman and director Herschell Gordon Lewis should try to make their peculiar brand of crimson lightning strike twice.  Granted nearly three times the budget ($60,000 baby!) and filmed on location in St. Cloud, Florida, Blood Feast‘s more accomplished thematic progeny Two Thousand Maniacs would have its premiere just 8 months further on.  Though its success was limited compared to what had come before, more than enough proceeds rolled in to ensure that blood would flow forever after.

Largely inspired by MGM’s big-budget Cinemascope musical Brigadoon, in which a mystical village emerges from the mists of the Scottish countryside once every hundred years, Two Thousand Maniacs offers up Southern-style exploitation escapism by way of a small town that reappears on the centennial of its Civil War-era destruction so that its slaughtered residents might take revenge on their Yankee aggressors.  The details of the premise known, the story proves a simple no-nonsense affair.  The temporarily revivified citizenry of sleepy Pleasant Valley lure two carloads of Yankees (identified by license plate) to town as the “guests of honor” of their centennial celebration.  Teacher Tom and tag-along Terry (William Kerwin and Connie Mason in the starring roles) soon begin to think that there’s more to their hosts than meets the eye and set about investigating, while their anonymous compatriots find themselves the unwitting star attractions of the town’s gruesome retribution.

Say what you will for its entertainment value, but there’s little denying that Blood Feast isn’t a very good film by most qualifying standards.  With a town-worth of production value, a huge cast of local extras, and more general competence to be had in pretty much every department, Two Thousand Maniacs not only excels beyond its predecessor as film but also maintains the uneasy balance between the grisly and the goofy that helped make it so much fun.  There’s a carnival atmosphere that pervades throughout, with the residents of Pleasant Valley perpetually singing and dancing and waving their commemorative Confederate flags.  It’s all quite charming in a subversive sort of way, like a Gone With the Wind for exploitation devotees.  Hell, it’s hard not to want the South to rise again after a few repetitions of the catchy “Rebel Yell” (complete with an inspired vocal turn by director Herschell Gordon Lewis himself).

Adding to the insidiously cheerful atmosphere are the unhinged dramatics of Jeffrey Allen (Something Weird, This Stuff’ll Kill Ya!) as Pleasant Valley’s boisterous Mayor Buckman.  He’s a legitimately imposing figure, with his deep, booming voice and devilish ulterior motives, but is ultimately as lovable a murderous madman as ever has been.  Even after all the un-pleasantries he dishes out to his Yankee guests – and there are plenty – he’s just impossible to hate.  Less effectual is the performance of Gary Bakeman as town cut-up and events organizer Rufus, an over-the-top be-overalled caricature whose scenery chewing would have left the film coated in chaw and tooth marks had the saying any literal merit.  William Kerwin maintains his usual level of professionalism, and does far better by his role than most would ever credit him for, while Connie Mason’s physical presence again makes up for whatever she lacks in thespian charms.  The rest of the cast (including Jerome Eden, who would be prominently featured in the following year’s Color Me Blood Red) more or less fades into the background, which says more for their talents than any individual assessment could.

In direct comparison to its predecessor the all-important gore quotient for Two Thousand Maniacs seems more restrained, though thanks to more thoughtful direction on the part of Lewis that’s never really a problem.  Rather than just flinging audiences headlong into its ludicrous gore set pieces, a la Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs makes a concerted effort to build a sense of suspense and dread in advance of its shocks.  When at its best, as when a young Yankee woman has her thumb removed by a local beau, only to face greater dismemberment at the hands of those from whom she seeks help, the extra effort here really pays off.  The gore effects themselves are of the same stuff as before, and the Kaopectate-laced stage blood and appropriated bits of mannequin every bit as obvious, but they’re undeniably colorful (“Gruesomely stained in Blood Color!” proclaimed the ad campaign) and the added emphasis on build-up renders them more effective than they have any right to be.

As with its companion Blood Feast there’s not much to Two Thousand Maniacs that’s likely to shock audiences these days, but its quaintness in comparison to modern horrors is a large part of why I find it so endearing.  Director Herschell Gordon Lewis has been known to list this as his favorite of his films, and I can’t argue with that sentiment.  Of course I’m also a Southerner at heart (displaced though I may be in the far-flung north), so perhaps I’m biased to this particular myth of the South, however preposterous.  Bias or no, Two Thousand Maniacs‘ place as a classic of drive-in exploitation has long been secure, and unlike so many of its peers it retains a genuine capacity to entertain.  I’ll not ask for more.


Another trustworthy, stable personality from the H.G. Lewis stable.

Something Weird, through distributor Image Entertainment, present Two Thousand Maniacs for the first time on Blu-ray by way of The Blood Trilogy collection (along with Blood Feast and Color Me Blood Red, all housed on a single dual layer BD50).  Like Blood Feast before it, Two Thousand Maniacs is transferred from a positive theatrical source, though in this case the results are considerably less appealing.  The state of the source elements for Two Thousand Maniacs leave a lot to be desired from the outset, and while I’m not one to complain too much about the sad state of source prints (particularly in the case of a film for which better elements simply may not exist) the damage here is still quite striking.  Aside from the expected dirt, speckling and reel change markers, there are also persistent green emulsion scratches, printed-in black damage, and more than a few jump cuts.  This is likely a more ragged appearance than most will be expecting, even for a low budget film of this vintage, and I’ve done nothing to conceal the source defects in the images below.

Presented in 1080p at a matted widescreen aspect ratio of 1.78:1, Two Thousand Maniacs also provides a softer, less detailed presentation than its two co-features by virtue of its source limitations.  The framing here is more problematic than on Blood Feast, and seems to selectively matte from either the top or bottom (or both) of the frame depending on the situation.  Two prime examples can be found in the famed barrel roll scene, in which the 6th sample frame below is matted along the bottom, while the 7th sample frame is matted along the top.  This is a case where an open matte presentation would have been vastly preferred over the matted 1.78:1, as the framing for the original photography is all over the place, though the new transfer does add substantially to the left and right of the frame.  Perhaps the most egregious misstep with this film is that it is granted the least impressive of the disc’s encodes (AVC at an average video bitrate of only 15.7 Mbps), and it shows.  The variable grain structure of the print is simply not supported, and on close inspection reveals clumping artifacts and an unnaturally digital appearance.  It’s far from the worst encode I’ve seen, and it undoubtedly has its stronger moments, but with 8 unused GB of space on the dual layered disc there was quite literally room for improvement.

In other areas the transfer is similarly lackluster.  The quality of color reproduction varies on a scene-by-scene and sometimes shot-by-shot basis, and while some fluctuation is expected a modicum of color tweaking here or there could have safely laid this issue to rest.  That said, colors are for the most part healthy, if a little flat, but there are times when the blues and all-important reds take a shift for the magenta with unsavory results (see the 2nd and 6th samples below).  Black levels, as was the case with Blood Feast, also fall flat and, just like the color inconsistencies, could easily have been remedied through minor tweaking of the transfer.  Overall I’d say that Two Thousand Maniacs on Blu-ray offered me an okay but thoroughly unremarkable viewing experience, and while it undeniably excels in ways beyond the previous DVD edition its limitations are really too numerous, and at times too egregious, to ignore.

For the sake of full disclosure, HD screenshots were captured as .png at full resolution in MPlayer and compressed to .jpg using the ImageMagick command-line tool.  After comparing to the original .png files the results appeared quite transparent to these eyes, even when zooming in 2-3x.  I’ve made no effort to avoid the considerable damage and other weaknesses present in this transfer, as should be obvious.

Far less problematic than the video is the audio, presented in uncompressed 16-bit Linear PCM monophonic English.  All of the warts and imperfections of the original recording and subsequent aging of the source master are present and accounted for, which is just fine by me – I love this sort of lo-fi patina.  You can expect plenty of background crackle, as well as the nasty pops that accompany the frequent splices, with nary a hint of restorative work in sight.  As with Blood Feast the dialogue (including some hysterically boomy post dub work), sound effects and score (in this case a mix of memorable and appropriate folksy numbers) come across just fine, and I’ve no complaints with it.  There are no accompanying subtitles.

Supplements are sourced from past editions and mirror those of the other features in the collection, starting off with an exceptional commentary track with director Herschell Gordon Lewis, producer David F. Friedman, and Something Weird’s Michael Vraney.  For the collaborative team of Lewis and Friedman, which would end with the following year’s Color Me Blood Red, this seems to be their proudest achievement, and they have more than enough to say on the subject.  Next up is a modest 16 and a half minute collection of silent outtakes and alternate footage in SD, which have been sourced from an earlier tape transfer.  A theatrical trailer in SD and a few images in the Lewis / Friedman art gallery round out the film-specific extras. (Each of the other films in the collection is also accompanied by a feature audio commentary, outtake footage, and an original trailer, with short subjects Carving Magic and Follow That Skirt and a trailer for the Something Weird documentary Godfather of Gore rounding out the disc)

The framing of the transfer and an iffy encode keep this third of The Blood Trilogy Blu-ray from ever really getting off the ground, and I’d say that the old axiom “you get what you pay for” certainly applies here.  As with almost any inaugural product this disc mixes good with bad, and Two Thousand Maniacs is its lowest point (a real pity since I’d argue it’s the best film of the three), but with a going rate of a little over $4 per film at present it’s hard to argue too much against Something Weird’s efforts.  I just hope they learn from their freshman flubs, and that future Something Weird Blu-rays, if there are to be any, improve upon them.

in conclusion
Film: Excellent  Video: Good –  Audio: Very Good   Supplements: Very Good
Harrumphs: Limited video bitrate, with all three films plus extras cohabiting one dual layer BD50, compromised framing and encode, and no subtitles.
Packaging: Standard Blu-ray case.

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