Posts Tagged ‘Horror’


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 | 1 Comment »
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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.

The Colossus of New York

October 7th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1958   Runtime: 70′  Director: Eugene Lourie
Writers: Thelma Schnee, Willis Goldbeck   Cinematography: John F. Warren   Music: Van Cleave
Cast: John Baragrey, Mala Powers, Otto Kruger, Robert Hutton, Ross Martin, Charles Herbert, Ed Wolff

When altruistic scientific genius Jeremy Spensser (Ross Martin) is run over by a truck – which is the sort of thing that can happen when you’re running onto a street chasing your son’s toy plane – his father, genius brain surgeon William (Otto Kruger) takes the personal loss and the loss to humanity extremely badly. Once I had spent some on-screen time with his surviving son, the semi-genius electronics scientist Henry (John Baragrey), I could understand the old man’s feelings quite well, for his father’s very pronounced preference for Jeremy has turned Henry into a giant prick.

So disturbed by Jeremy’s loss is William that he uses his own scientific talents to steal and save his son’s brain. It’s all for the best of humanity, you see, and certainly hasn’t anything at all to do with William’s inability to face the death of his son. After some SCIENCE(!) using water tanks, electrodes and other very scientific implements, the brain is as good as new. Now it’s time to build a new body for Jeremy’s brain, and who better to help out there than Henry? Henry has spent the months in between trying to take his brother’s place with Jeremy’s wife Anne (Mala Powers) and son Billy (Charles Herbert), but has been met with a polite indifference he has been unable to parse or wear down; Anne is drawn to the (comparatively) least prickish man in the film, Jeremy’s former partner in science John Carrington (Robert Hutton), but that’s not something Henry realizes. Do I even need to mention the Spenssers don’t find it necessary to tell Anne they’re playing with her dead husband’s brain?

So William and Henry build a huge, lumbering robot body with a face like an expressionist sculpture for Jeremy, because we couldn’t have the man look into a mirror and not have a breakdown, right?

Given how his brand new body looks, and that his dear family tells him his wife and son are dead, the newly mechanized Jeremy takes quite well to the whole situation. Sure, he has a complete breakdown and asks his father to destroy him until the old arse convinces him otherwise, but afterwards he starts on his new experiments that are supposed to make the poles usable for food growth, or something of that sort. Science(!), I dare say. All this does obviously take place in William’s lab right in the cellar of the house Anne and Billy live in, too, but hey, when Anne hears something like the horrible screams of her husband when he first sees what he’s been turned into, the charming Spenssers can just tell her she’s hallucinating because of the strain she has been under, right?

But then, in a development nobody could have seen coming, Robo-Jerry develops fantastic ESP powers, like random precognition, hypnosis and later on the ability to shoot death rays out of his eyes, as you do. I’m sure he won’t put the mind whammy on his father to be able to visit his own grave on the first anniversary of his death where he surely won’t repeat a scene from a Frankenstein movie with his son.

And surely, the knowledge that his father and brother not only haven’t bothered to build him a decent robot body but have also lied to him about his wife and kid won’t turn our Jerry a wee bit mad! Man, this transplanting brains into robot bodies business really is pretty difficult.

  
  
  

As you know, Jim, art director and production designer Eugene Lourie did occasionally – and quite successfully – dabble in the direction of 50s giant monster movies. The “monster” in The Colossus of New York is, despite what the film’s title and marketing tagline (“Towering above the skyline – an indestructible creature whose eyes rain death and destruction!”) might suggest, not one of the giant kind trampling New York into tiny pieces, but rather a brother to the misunderstood creature Frankenstein created. Interestingly, Jeremy, with his ability to speak and think coherently and his planned acts of destruction late in the film is closer to the creature of Mary Shelley’s novel than the more childlike creature of the Universal movies, something that I have difficulty seeing as an accident in a script as clearly literary as that Thelma Schnee delivered for the movie.

Schnee’s script is a very interesting effort, managing to surround the silly parts and the plot holes you’d expect (and demand) of a film like The Colossus with more complex characters than you’d generally find in a 50s SF/horror film and some pretty poignant scenes concerning the most dysfunctional family I’ve seen in a genre movie from the 50s. Quite contrary to the traditions of the time, where acting the dick usually makes you the hero of the piece, The Colossus actually seems to realize how dysfunctional and horrific its characters actually are, and makes their flaws the true reason for the minor catastrophe the film’s plot culminates in. Sure, there’s a short discussion (acted with great gusto by Kruger, who seems to have quite a bit of fun with his mad scientist role throughout the film) about the soul early on in the film, and some of the mandatory “tampering in god’s domain” speechifying at its end, but it’s also clear that the film’s heart isn’t in these explanations. Everything bad that happens here comes from the characters’ inability to treat each other like actual, complete human beings.

Of course, a complex, yet heavily flawed (and a bit too short), script like this could be easily ruined by the wrong direction style. I’m pretty happy to report that the script at hand wasn’t adapted by a poverty row point and shoot director like – say – William Beaudine, but the clearly more art conscious Lourie, who had no problem recognizing a Freudianized version of Frankenstein when he saw it and used the opportunity to turn his film into as much of a visual homage to early Universal horror movies as a film set in the New York of the 50s (not that we get to see much of it – most of the film takes place in three rooms and a graveyard) can be. For my tastes, Lourie is very successful at it too – at least so successful that most of his film’s theoretical silliness turned out to not feel silly at all while I was watching, because the film’s finely developed atmosphere turned most of what it surrounded into something serious and riveting.

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.

Blood Feast

October 3rd, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1963  Company: Box Office Spectaculars   Runtime: 67′
Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis   Writers: Allison Louise Downe   Cinematography: Herschell Gordon Lewis
Music: Herschell Gordon Lewis   Cast: William Kerwin, Connie Mason, Mal Arnold, Lyn Botton, Scott H. Hall
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 just part one of three for the Something Weird / Image Entertainment Blu-ray release of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Blood Trilogy – coverage of Two Thousand Maniacs and Color Me Blood Red will follow shortly.

Here it is, folks, the film that single-handedly revolutionized the relationship between exploitation filmmaking and gooey, graphic violence and made a mint for production duo David F. Friedman and Herschell Gordon Lewis in the process.  Produced in Miami for the measly sum of $24,500, word of Blood Feast‘s carnal excesses spread like wildfire upon its release, drawing millions to the flicker of the drive-in screen for their first taste of hard gore.

That’s not to say that violence, occasionally of a graphic variety, had not been seen in film before, as it most certainly had.  In the years leading up to Blood Feast‘s release directors like Mario Bava (Black Sunday, Caltiki the Immortal Monster) and Georges Franju (Eyes Without a Face) had treated audiences to a variety of gruesome set-pieces in black and white, while Britain’s Hammer Films (themselves responsible for a choice selection of classic black and white shocks) had upped the gothic horror ante with splashes of blood in brilliant color.  Blood Feast took things several steps further with its over-the-top gore flourishes, but where it really served as a revolutionary was in its intent.  Where earlier films had used violence as a means to tell a story Blood Feast existed solely for the sake of its own violent excesses.  Everything about Blood Feast, from its blood-drenched title card on, is subservient to the gore, and while critics were quick to deride the film as unadulterated trash audiences ate it up.

The sparse narrative for Blood Feast is pure hokum, and played with such delightful earnest that it’s tough not to love it.  Well-to-do Mrs. Fremont is throwing a party for her daughter Suzette (Playmate Connie Mason in her first credited film appearance), but wants to forego the usual fare for something more unusual.  Thusly she crosses paths with Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold, Scum of the Earth), a local caterer with a taste for the bizarre who sells Mrs. Fremont on the notion of holding an ‘Egyptian Feast’ for her daughter.  All seems hunky-dory with the plan save for one minor hitch: Fuad Ramses is actually a modern-day cultist of the ancient Egyptian Goddess Ishtar, and his ‘Egyptian Feast’ is actually a blood offering crafted from mutilated human flesh!  As the day of the feast draws near the bodies start piling up, and detective Pete Thornton (Will Kerwin, Impulse) is at a loss for catching the killer until he happens into a lecture on Egyptology at the local community college…

It’s difficult to impart in writing just how silly and contrived the plot for Blood Feast really is, but if the fact that Miami’s star detective just happens to be taking a community college course on Egyptology (which just happens to be focusing on the blood feast of Ishtar, and whose professor just happens to know a book written on the subject by none other than Fuad Ramses, caterer extraordinaire!) doesn’t give you some inkling of it then I don’t know what will.  Credited to Allison Louise Downe (an actress in some of Lewis and Friedman’s ‘nudie-cuties’) but actually a collaborative effort between Downe, Lewis, Friedman and others, the screenplay here is positively ridiculous stuff from start to finish, and is a big part of what keeps Blood Feast from being so nasty and indigestible as the dreadfully serious or dully self-referential horrors of today.  Perhaps the most surprising thing about it is just how much intentional humor there is to it, much of it sourced from the broad caricatures (a detective, a matron, a maniac) that dominate it.  Case in point is the upper-crust Mrs. Fremont who, after discovering the near-murder of her daughter and that the feast prepared for her gathering is comprised of human flesh, glibly remarks, “Oh dear – the guests will have to eat hamburgers for dinner tonight”!


Best. Title card. Ever.

Most memorable among the characters is easily Fuad Ramses himself, thanks to a combination of gross over-acting and the frequent idiocies of the scripting.  Though often cited as the prototype for the blade-wielding cut-up artists who would become the face of the burgeoning slasher subgenre, Ramses has more in common with the mad doctors and maniacs of the ’30s and ’40s than anything modern, with only the graphic nature of his murders really separating him.  Fuad slowly wanders the wastes of Miami with a hysterically overplayed limp and varying degrees of gray hair, toting a machete and his appropriated body parts with him in a sack and speaking with such wide eyes and pronounced Lugosi-ese that even the most magnanimous of Miamians would find it difficult to ignore his psychopath credentials.

Contrary to popular conception not all of the acting in Blood Feast is bad, though the vast majority of it certainly fits the bill (Friedman and Lewis’ associate Scott H. Hall, playing detective Thornton’s superior officer, can often be seen checking his left hand for hints to his dialogue, and he’s far from the worst).  The one constant talent of the show is star William Kerwin, who plays his role believably even when the scripting frequently fails him.  Though by no means a name star Kerwin certainly had experience, having kicked around television, shorts, and feature films since the early ’50s, and his varied acting career (from stuff like this to episodes of Land of the Lost) would continue on until his death in 1989.  Kerwin’s co-star Connie Mason, best known for her appearances in Playboy, was essentially hired as a pretty face, and looks suitably Barbie Doll-esque in her bawdy ’60s fashions.  Mason would go on to make numerous appearances in film and television, many of them uncredited, and would also star in Blood Feast‘s Southern style follow-up Two Thousand Maniacs.

Much like the performances, the other aspects of this poverty-row production are hit or miss.  Blood Feast was filmed both on 35mm and in color, but very economically.  Most dialogue scenes are carry on as uninterrupted master shots, and Lewis and Friedman evidently limited themselves to a 3-take maximum due to the limited amount of film stock available to them.  Much of the cast and crew played multiple roles throughout the production, with no one being more indicative of the trend than director Herschell Gordon Lewis himself.  In addition to serving as director and photographer, Lewis also co-produced, composed and, in part, performed the film’s musical score, devised the numerous special effects, and can even be heard, briefly, as a radio announcer at the beginning of the film!   That most of the footage is in focus and intelligibly framed and that the dialogue and sound effects are all clear is likely as much as Lewis, Friedman and their associates ever asked of Blood Feast, and the dedication to just getting the film finished on-budget and by whatever means necessary overrides the paucity of the production value in my mind, particularly when the end results are such a riot.

The gore effects here are part and parcel with the rest and aren’t likely to shock anyone in a day and age when the average cop drama offers more in the way of realistic carnage, but to hold them up to today’s standards is to completely miss the point.  No, the Kaopectate-laced fake blood syrup doesn’t look real and yes, the bits of mannequin masquerading as dismembered body parts are obvious, but Blood Feast was never about realism to begin with.  It was about filling that drive-in screen with as much goopy, flowing red as could be managed and entertaining an audience in the process.  Sure it’s silly and stupid and about as scary as a pair of wool socks, but it’s also a blast to watch – grand guignol has rarely been such good clean fun.


Who couldn’t trust a face like that?

Something Weird, through distributor Image Entertainment, present Blood Feast for the first time on Blu-ray by way of The Blood Trilogy collection (along with Two Thousand Maniacs and Color Me Blood Red, all housed on a single dual layer BD50).  Though the end results aren’t perfect they are overall positive.  Blood Feast is transferred from a well worn but serviceable positive 35mm source, as evidenced by the considerable print damage on display (including reel change markers and the repaired film tear shown below).  While it’s clear that little to no restorative work was put into the transfer after the telecine process the transfer certainly stays true to the source, and I’m hard pressed to argue with the end results.

Presented in 1080p, the chosen aspect ratio of 1.78:1 may court controversy with fans expecting another open matte 1.33:1 edition a la earlier videos and DVDs.  I can’t say that the choice bothered me in the least.  Lewis obviously photographed Blood Feast with the possibility of widescreen matting in mind, with plenty of headroom all around.  Only a brief shot of a letter stood out for me as being improperly framed (see the 9th capture below), and I suspect it’s appeared much the same way to the film’s theatrical audiences over the past 48 years.  The new transfer also adds a bit to the left and right of the frame, at times substantially.  Another potential sticking point is the fact that Something Weird have packaged Blood Feast with its two HD co-features and a host of extras on a single dual layer disc, limiting the available bitrate and wreaking all manner of theoretical havoc in the process.  The simple fact of the matter, as should be supported by the captures below, is that the technically meager AVC video encode (just 17.6 Mbps on average) appears to support the visuals just fine.  After checking the technical specs I was expecting something akin to The Big Doll House‘s presentation in the recent Women in Cages Blu-ray collection, or worse the unbridled mess of The Beyond, but such disasters thankfully failed to materialize and Blood Feast maintains a respectable film-like appearance throughout.

Depending on the original photography, which varies quite a lot in terms of focus, Blood Feast‘s visual detail can range from the lowly and modest to reasonably impressive (there’s some excellent skin texture to be found in the final close-up below), but always appears accurate to the source print.  Color saturation is at healthy levels, with reds (from the multitude of stage blood to the monotone lighting of Fuad Ramses’ secret shrine) that really pop, and skin tones looked natural to these eyes.  Black levels are the only sore spot, appearing flat and gray, but are hardly a deal breaker.  Overall I’m very pleased with Blood Feast‘s appearance on Blu-ray, and imperfect as it is it more than gets the job done.

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 first image below is a sample of some of the worst print damage this transfer has to offer, and is followed by ten more typical samples.

Whatever you think of the image, I think it’s safe to say that there’s nothing controversial about Blood Feast‘s audio presentation.  Something Weird grant the film an uncompressed 16-bit Linear PCM monophonic track in the original English, and it sounds just as everyone should expect – rough.  Like the photography, Blood Feast‘s audio recording can vary quite a bit from scene to scene.  Dialogue is largely intelligible, even if the final mixing of some segments is suspect, but there’s nothing wrong with the track that can’t be blamed squarely on the original recording and Lewis’ original score is even more delightfully rotten than ever.  My only complaint is that there are no accompanying subtitles whatsoever.

Blood Feast comes packaged with a healthy array of film-specific supplements, all of which appear sourced from earlier releases.  The best of the bunch is an excellent feature commentary track with director Herschell Gordon Lewis and the late producer David Friedman, with Something Weird’s Mike Vraney serving as moderator.  Lewis and Friedman are under absolutely no illusions about the quality of their product, but clearly had a blast creating it and are obviously proud of the influence it has since had on exploitation filmmaking as a whole.  Next up is a lengthy run of unedited silent alternate and outtake footage in 4:3 SD, totaling 50 minutes in all!  The only other film-specific supplements are a gallery of ad art (including images from other Friedman / Lewis productions) and the theatrical trailer presented in 1080p.  (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)

And that’s it, I think.  Something Weird have done better by Blood Feast than I really ever expected of them, and the presentation’s few imperfections do nothing to thwart my overall enthusiasm for it.  I can’t imagine most fans being disappointed (though online chatter has proven that some of you are anyway), and with The Blood Trilogy collection available for less than $12 as of this writing the disc gets an easy recommendation from me.

in conclusion
Film: Excellent (Yes, I mean it!)  Video: Very Good  Audio: Very Good   Supplements: Very Good
Harrumphs: Limited video bitrate, with all three films plus extras cohabiting one dual layer BD50, and no subtitles.
Packaging: Standard Blu-ray case.

The Dead Don’t Die

September 30th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1975   Runtime: 74′  Director: Curtis Harrington
Writers: Robert Bloch  Cinematography: James Crabe   Music: Robert Prince
Cast: George Hamilton, Linda Cristal, Ray Milland, James McEachin,
Joan Blondell, Ralph Meeker, Reggie Nalder, Yvette Vickers

1934. In the night of Ralph Drake’s (Jerry Douglas) execution on the electric chair for the murder of his wife during a break in a dance marathon, the supposed killer, who has no memory of what took place between him and his the murdered but is sure he would never have killed laid a hand on her, makes his brother Don (George Hamilton) promise to find out who is the true killer.

Initially, Don – who is in the Navy and not a detective anyhow – has nothing to go on in his investigation. A visit with Moss (Ray Milland), the dancehall promoter responsible for the dance marathon Ralph and his wife took part in, does not bring to light anything the sailor doesn’t already know.

And that could be that already, making for a very short film, but strange things begin to happen all around Don. It begins when a mysterious woman (Linda Cristal) – later to be named Vera LaValle – tries to warn Don off the case completely, for a certain “he” knows what the sailor’s up to and will do something terrible to him if he persists. Before he can question Vera further, Don sees his dead brother walking around outside the restaurant the scene’s taking place in, and follows the dead man into a shop whose owner Perdido (Reggie Nalder) is not a fan of people just barging in at him. In the following scuffle, Don accidentally kills Perdido, or at least thinks he does, before the shop owner’s assistant (Yvette Vickers) does her best to bash his head in.

When Don awakes, he finds himself in the tender care of Vera. The woman spouts more cryptic warnings, but at least she now gives the mysterious “him” a proper name – Varrick – and very reluctantly puts Don on his trace. That trace, not completely surprisingly, leads directly into a funeral parlour. Alas, there seems to be no Varrick at hand there. However, there’s the body of a certain Mister Perdido laid out. Our hero is confused enough to take a look at the dead man. Little does Don expect the corpse to speak to him with someone else’s voice and try to strangle him.

After escaping the zombie, Don decides to go to the police with his rather wild story, because that’s what you do when dead people attack. The patient cop on duty even agrees to accompany Don to Perdido’s shop to clear things up. It’s just that Perdido seems to be pretty much alive, and makes Don’s story out to be an alcohol fueled fantasy.

Obviously, Don can’t count on the help of the police anymore, yet he can’t bring himself to give up until he has found out what the hell is going on around him.

  
  

The excellently titled The Dead Don’t Die belongs to the last interesting phase of director Curtis Harrington’s career, before he became just another guy churning out episodes for any old TV show people paid him for, and that film about the possessed dog.

The Dead is a TV production too, it can, however, count itself among the small yet potent group of US TV horror movies from the 70s that are just as individual and peculiar as anything made for the big screen. Unexpectedly for a TV movie in general, yet not all that surprising if you’ve seen some of the other TV movies directed by Harrington, the film has the feel of something more personal and individual than what you’ll usually see produced for the small screen, and fits nicely into the cinematic body of work of its director.

As is typical of his films, Harrington fuses diametrically opposite elements into a film that’s dream-like and artificial. On the one hand, the The Dead Don’t Die is pervaded by a sense for and an interest in period detail that just screams – at least as much as the film’s budget and short production time allow – “realism”, its visual style, on the other hand, is clearly influenced by the conscious artificiality of the film noir (and what, after all, is more noir than the story of a guy looking for the man who framed his brother for murder, a mysterious woman with a heavy accent, and series of strange encounters?), the lush melodrama of Douglas Sirk (though with other social interests than Sirk had), and the hidden complexity of Val Lewton’s RKO productions. In a sense, Harrington is about as retro a director as I could imagine (see also the near obsessive casting of old guard Hollywood actors in minor roles here and everywhere else in his career), but he’s not interested in merely reproducing the past. Rather, Harrington is taking (his favourite) elements of the past to shape something new and very much his own. Which, again, isn’t something you’d expect to find in a TV movie, where routine usually comes before individual artistic expression.

As a whole, The Dead feels like a film noir’s themes had stumbled into an RKO horror movie that for its part has found itself inexplicably entwined with the visual and emotional world of the melodrama.

Robert Bloch’s (who you might know as the author of the novel Hitchcock’s Psycho is based on, but who began his career as a pulp writer in the Lovecraft circle, wrote large amounts of SF, horror and mystery, and also worked a bit for TV too) script is an appropriately strange one, too, full of small but interesting diversions and peculiar little flourishes that just might let the members of The Dead Don’t Die‘s audience put on the same utterly confused facial expression George Hamilton wears for much of the film’s running time.

I’m not a great admirer of Hamilton, but his sleepwalker-ish body language here and his wide-eyed looks of surprise are just what the film and his role need of him. His character is, after all, walking through scenes and encounters as unreal and surreal as anything a man might dream up, never sure what’s real and what’s not, finding himself completely out of his depth.

It all adds up to one of the best voodoo zombie movies of the 70s.

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.

The Evil Dead

September 14th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1981  Company: Rennaisance Pictures   Runtime: 85′
Director: Sam Raimi   Writers: Sam Raimi   Cinematography: Tim Philo   Music: Joseph LoDuca
Cast: Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Richard DeManincor, Betsy Baker, Theresa Tilly, Bob Dorian, Sam Raimi
Disc company: Starz / Anchor Bay   Video: 1080p 1.85:1 / 1.33:1   Audio: Dolby TrueHD 5.1 English,
Dolby Digital 2.0 French   Subtitles: English SDH,  Spanish   Disc: BD50 (Region A) / DVD-9
Release Date: 08/21/2010   Limited Edition 2-disc is OOP, but available through third party sellers.  The current single-disc standard edition is 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.  And with Halloween nary a month and a half away it seemed appropriate to cover an oddball horror classic in this, the inaugural edition of the column.  Mmmm… manufactured timeliness.  Can you dig it?

It’s difficult to know just what to say about The Evil Dead, a bona fide cult phenomenon that’s spawned two successful sequels, sent its writer and director to the top of the Hollywood food chain, and converted thousands of seemingly well-adjusted individuals into foaming-at-the-mouth genre fanatics over the course of the past three decades.  Perhaps the greatest compliment I can level at it is that even after thirty long years it has lost none of its spectacularly deranged funhouse appeal.  Current generations can have their sleek and soulless remakes and mindless torture porn, but my heart will always belong to The Evil Dead.

Low budget horror of the highest possible order, The Evil Dead begins in more or less familiar territory and ends anywhere but.  An air devilish playfulness is obvious from the start.  The film introduces itself with a roaring Steadicam-style point-of-view motif, thrusting the audience into the perspective of its eponymous malignance before a human cast is ever produced!  Once the cast does arrive it is almost immediately threatened, and narrowly avoids the certain doom of a disastrous head-on collision.  It’s a moment indicative of the a-thrill-a-minute mentality of The Evil Dead‘s production, and the first notice to the audience that they’re in for a bumpy ride.

Somewhere between its genre flourishes – a creepy cabin, a dark cellar, fog-bound woods full of unnatural noises – the film’s meager plot unwinds.  Five young friends are off to the wilds of Tennessee for a touch of low-rent rest and relaxation.  In rummaging about their creaky vacation spot they discover some strange memorabilia – a skeletal knife, an ancient book bound in human flesh, and the tape-recorded ramblings of a mysterious archaeologist – which they immediately set about messing with.  Before long the likable if dim-witted cast has run afoul of obscure demonic forces, and a delirious nightmare of possession begins…

The setup for The Evil Dead is as sparse as it is brief, a fact that works well in the film’s favor.  Contemporary horrors were often burdened by their dependency on cheap titillation at best or drab dramatic fill at worst, but writer and director Sam Raimi foregoes all of that and instead focuses on assaulting both his characters and his audience with a precisely timed assortment of false alarms, sight gags and legitimate frights.  That’s not to say that the story isn’t important.  Quite the contrary.  That the premise is so grounded in familiar genre tropes only enhances the insanity of what follows, providing a stable foundation from which The Evil Dead‘s house of hysterical horrors can emerge.  There’s a sort of sideshow appeal to the terrors on display here that’s hard to quantify, something that keeps us looking no matter how outlandish or cringe-worthy the film becomes.  What’s more is that on some subversive, primal level it’s fun, a factor that keeps the film from feeling cruel or mean-spirited even at its most grueling.


Who’s that guy?

And grueling The Evil Dead can certainly be, though never to such an extent that its playful spirit is entirely obfuscated.  Though clearly inspired by the dreadfully serious horror blockbuster The Exorcist, Raimi and his co-conspirators were just as clearly not concerned with the existential or spiritual concerns of demonic possession.  The focus here is squarely on entertaining the audience through the physical and psychological torments so judiciously ladeled upon the cast, a focus that brings The Evil Dead closer to the realm of slapstick comedy and Looney Tunes than to the nastily viceral horrors of The Exorcist.  While overt comedy wouldn’t enter into the series until Evil Dead II, the over-the-top comedy of gore that serves as both a retread of and a sequel to the first film, the same sensibilities are certainly in evidence.  This is the sort of film that proves just how paper-thin the line between comedy and horror really is, and much of its success lies in the fact that it frequently takes the latter to such extremes that it flirts with becoming the former.

Produced for less than half a million dollars and filmed on grainy 16mm film stock, I never cease to be amazed at just how well made The Evil Dead really is.  Sure, the extensive gore effects are so fiscally constrained as to be silly at times (a silliness that would become more and more intentional as the series wore on), but the film maintains a cinematic vitality that’s simply not seen in most of its kind.  Much of the crew of The Evil Dead had worked together to produce short 8mm subjects in the past, including the legendary Within the Woods (the short horror film concocted to drum up support for this feature production), and that experience definitely paid off here.

The Evil Dead is positively gut-loaded with old-school atmosphere and inventive design (including my favorite visual, a collapsed bridge whose steel supports have been curled so as to look like a menacing hand), with an uncharacteristically professional sound mix to match.  Save for some inherent grittiness of the 16mm photography rarely gives itself away, bolstered by thoughtful key lighting and often bizarre compositions.  Raimi’s camera follows the cast from a variety of strange and often hand-held angles, in one case beginning upside down and behind the subject, then sweeping over to end in an extreme close-up of their face.  Then there is the editing (by Edna Ruth Paul and Joel Coen, who would coordinate again for the Coen brothers’ debut feature Blood Simple), the bane of so many low-budget low-talent productions, and an element that’s in stronger form here than in most films, period.  Taken as a whole The Evil Dead can be a disarming experience, a drive-in shocker that defies expectations, transcending the limitations of genre and budget to become something deliciously unique and totally its own.

There’s plenty more to be said of The Evil Dead, its horrors, and its star (what’s his name again?), but I’ll leave it to others to say it.  This is a film best experienced first hand rather than talked about, and I’ll not spoil further details of it here.  Just rest assured that its reputation is well-earned and that yes, you need to see it.  Enough said.

I’m sure I’ve been guilty of saying the same thing in the past, but the more marginal Blu-ray releases I see the more I hate the same tired assumption that such and such subpar product is “perhaps the best this low-budget cult picture is ever going to look“.  I realize that expectations are low for genre efforts, largely because of decades worth of sub-par theatrical presentations and even worse video editions, but when generally trustworthy reviewers begin excusing crap like the recent Blu-ray of The Hills Have Eyes with idiotic assumptions about filmic limitations (“You can’t improve beyond the source” my ass) I get angry.  I count myself lucky that there are at least a few genuinely fantastic genre releases on my side, and couldn’t be happier to add Anchor Bay’s Blu-ray edition of The Evil Dead to the list.

Anchor Bay has had more than its fair share of HD troubles, mostly to do with a spate of overly-processed DNR-heavy affairs (Dawn of the Dead anyone?) from early in the format’s history, but there’s nothing to fault them for here.  The Evil Dead makes its high definition debut in a new director-supervised 1080p transfer minted from the original negative, and I find it genuinely difficult to believe that the film could ever look much better.  Presented in both theatrical 1.85:1 and the originally-intended 1.33:1, this new edition excels beyond past DVD editions to an extent I hardly thought possible.  Detail shows a marked improvement across the board, with the backgrounds of exterior shots finally appearing as more than just amorphous blobs, while color saturation and contrast take a turn for the natural.  Film grain is present throughout, and is predictably more pronounced in the matted 1.85:1 edition, and aside from some questionable moments during the opening title the strong AVC encode (26.3 Mbps average video bitrate for the 1.33:1 version, minutely higher for 1.85:1) never falters.  Framing differs between the two aspect ratios but not always as one might expect.  The 1.85:1 edition almost always appears to have more information at the sides, though the amount is not consistent across the board.  The intended 1.33:1 feels more comfortably framed, but even the 1.85:1 edition isn’t so ridiculously constrained as in past editions (see the 8th comparison set below).  This wipes the floor with what came before, and I’d say it looks damned good.

For the sake of full disclosure, HD screenshots were captured as .png at full resolution in MPlayer and compressed to .jpg using Image Magick.  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 2002 Anchor Bay edition, upconverted to 1920×1080 in GIMP and compressed to .jpg format at a quality setting of 95%.  DVD screen shots appear first, followed by the 1.85:1 and finally 1.33:1 HD variants.  Frame matches are exact in all cases.

Comparison Set #1

Comparison Set #2

Comparison Set #3

Comparison Set #4

Comparison Set #5

Comparison Set #6

Comparison Set #7

Comparison Set #8

Comparison Set #9

Comparison Set #10

Comparison Set #11

Comparison Set #12

No original monophonic mix is included, but this is no surprise (the 2002 DVD was lacking in that department as well), and the 5.1 surround track gets a decent technical bump in Dolby TrueHD.  The Evil Dead‘s outlandish sound design, with clocks ticking like guillotines and voices sneaking up from beyond, lends itself well to the surround format, and the more bombastic moments come across very nicely.  A lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 French dub track is also included, and the feature is supported by optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles.

The sole new supplement in this package is a brand new audio commentary that gathers director Sam Raimi, producer Robert Tapert and the star of the show (who has sadly gone on to dwell in obscurity, with no hit television series or successful film productions to his credit at all), and it’s a blast.  Detailed production information goes hand in hand with anecdotes, and The Evil Dead may be one of the most fascinating film production to hear about, ever.  It’s abundantly clear that this was a labor of (mad) love for all involved, and that they genuinely cherish the experience regardless of how awful it was at times.

If you have the standard single-disc Blu-ray version of The Evil Dead then the above commentary is the only extra on board.  The now-OOP and needlessly limited edition two-disc version collects most of the supplements from Anchor Bay’s Ultimate Edition DVD from 2006 and piles them onto a dual layer DVD that accompanies the feature Blu-ray.  This is the only sore spot of this release, in my mind.  The dual layered Blu-ray, even after carrying 2 separate encodes of the film, still has more than enough space to cover the 6.9 GB of standard definition material presented on the DVD.  So why not put it there?  I have no idea, but those who already own the Ultimate Edition can at least rest assured that the additional disc in the LE Blu-ray doesn’t have anything on it that they haven’t already seen.

The disc 2 standard definition supplements are as follows: One By One We Will Take You: The Untold Saga of The Evil Dead (54 minutes), The Evil Dead: Treasures From the Cutting Room Floor (60 minutes), The Ladies of The Evil Dead Meet B…. C…… (29 minutes), Discovering Evil Dead (13 minutes), Unconventional (19 minutes), At the Drive-In (12 minutes), Reunion Panel (31 minutes), Book of the Dead: The Other Pages (2 minutes), Make-Up Test (1 minute), a theatrical trailer (2 minutes), four television spots (2 minutes), and a brief photo gallery.  It amounts to just under four hours of material, all told, and is well worth the time it takes to view it all.

I could lament again how disappointing it is that Starz / Anchor Bay needlessly released a limited edition and have now saddled potential buyers with a Blu-ray with very little supplemental heft, but I won’t.  With The Evil Dead looking as it does here I’d have settled for nothing and less in the way of supplements.  Yes, I think it looks that good.  There’s no question here as to whether to recommend or not recommend.  Just buy it.  It’s good for you.

in conclusion
Film: Excellent  Video: Excellent  Audio: Very Good   Supplements: Excellent -
Harrumphs: Missing some past supplements, and needlessly a limited edition.
Packaging: Standard 2-disc Blu-ray case.

MST3K: “Manos” The Hands of Fate Special Edition

September 1st, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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includes: ep 424 “Manos” The Hands of Fate  Year: 1993  Company: Best Brains   Runtime: 97′
Cast: Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu, Kevin Murphy, Frank Conniff, Jim Mallon, Michael J. Nelson, Mary Jo Phel
Disc company: Shout! Factory   Video: 480i 4:3    Audio: Dolby Digital 2.0 English
Subtitles: None   Disc: DVD9 (2)   Release Date: 09/13/2011   Product link: Amazon.com
Reviewed from a screener provided by Shout! Factory LLC. Thanks guys!

Here it is, folks – the most legendary episode of the cult television hit Mystery Science Theater 3000 is back, and the experiment is every bit as stupid as ever.  I suspect that I need not espouse the comedic virtues of series episode 424 “Manos” The Hands of Fate to anyone reading this article, and I won’t.  Frankly, I wouldn’t even know where to start, but those not in the know should rest assured that this episode has certainly earned its reputation for being the defining moment of the series.  Previously available in decade-old VHS and DVD editions from Rhino Video, cult video wunderkinds Shout! Factory have now seen fit to give “Manos” The Hands of Fate the duluxe DVD treatment.  God help us all.

Evidently sourced from the original broadcast master, episode 424 “Manos” The Hands of Fate is presented interlaced in its original 4:3 aspect ratio on disc one of this 2-disc set.  As has been the case with past Shout! Factory MST3K offerings, I suspect this presentation looks just about as good as it ever will.  Colors are vibrant and well saturated, and contrast and detail are at as high a level as one could ever expect from a television show produced on video in the early ’90s.  The audio, presented in the standard Dolby Digital 2.0 format, sounds just fine, and my only complaint with the presentation is the lack of subtitles.

  
  

Disc one continues with a slight but appreciated smattering of supplemental material.  First up is Group Therapy (18 minutes), in which the several of those involved in episode 424 (Joel Hodgson, Frank Conniff, Trace Beaulieu and Mary Jo Phel)  gather for a friendly backyard chat about the episode’s production and the film itself.  The conversation is very laid back and informal compared to the standard interview format for such things, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.  A collection of Mystery Science Theater Hour wraps for the episode (5 minutes) round out disc one, which just nudges into dual layer territory at 4.8 GB.  The disc menus are, as ever, hilarious, with an animated Crow and Tom Servo wisecracking as characters from the film make appearances.  Good stuff.

Disc two of the MST3K: “Manos” The Hands of Fate Special Edition plunges viewers into the deepest depths of cinematic awfulness, presenting the unvarnished original “Manos” The Hands of Fate for all to suffer.  A brief word of caution – “Manos” The Hands of Fate is every bit as dreadful as you could possibly imagine, and quite probably worse.  Produced, written, directed by and starring ego-centric insurance and fertilizer salesman Harold P. Warren, who purportedly began the project as reaction to a bet with acclaimed screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, this is undeniably some of the worst of worst that American cinema has to offer.  Thanks to Shout! Factory you can now witness the shock, the horror, and one of film’s greatest abuses of leitmotif on your own – if you dare.

I had relatively high hopes for the untouched “Manos” The Hands of Fate on this disc, having seen over and over what kind of transfers Shout! are capable of through their tremendous line of Roger Corman titles, but no dice.  “Manos” looks positively horrid here, sourced from an aged tape master of what looks to have itself been sourced from an already terrible 16mm television print.  Interlaced, soft, dark and muddy, “Manos” appears worse for wear here than it does in the complementing episode, a monumental feat in and of itself.  If looking for something abysmal with which to torment your friends, this may well be the best thing out there.  Audio, presented in grubby Dolby Digital 2.0 English, sounds every bit as painful as it has in the past, and possibly a little worse.  There are no subtitles.

  

Where disc two really takes off is in its own supplemental department.  First up is the excellent documentary and interview piece Hotel Torgo (27 minutes), in which a handful of documentarians descend upon El Paso, TX to try and piece together just what transpired there and why some 40 years before.  Interviewed are “Manos” historian Richard Brandt and Bernie Rosenblum, photographer, co-star and stunt coordinator for the film.  The brief documentary also revisits various shooting locations, most notably the rundown remains of the hotel that serves as the setting, and a revival screening of the film.  I thought this was an exceptional piece, and while I’m unsure of whether it has ever been released before I am happy to see it here.

The remainder of the supplements pertain to those frequent secondary targets of MST3K - bizarre educational shorts.  First up is Hired! (Parts 1 and 2 together again) (18 minutes), which combines the MST3K treatment of the Jam Handy Organization short that was originally spread across two episodes.  The short follows the troubles of a Chevy salesman whose under-staff just aren’t performing as well as they should.  Humorous montages, strange conversation and head towels ensue.  Not included is the original un-mocked version of the short, which can be found quite readily at Archive.org.  Next up is My (Educational) Short Life (8 minutes), in which Joel Hodgson is interviewed with regards to the shorts that frequently appeared on MST3K, and the Jam Handy Organization films in particular.

 

The strangest supplement of the bunch is Jam Handy to the Rescue! (23 minutes), a co-production between Shout! Factory and featurette producer Ballyhoo Pictures that brings alleged writer, comedian and actor Larry Blamire together with ephemeral film history.  Half parody, half documentary, Jam Handy to the Rescue mixes archival footage and newly produced faux-educational short trappings to present details of the life and times of former Olympic athlete and commercial film pioneer Henry Jamison “Jam” Handy in a manner that, while awkward, seems rather appropriate.  I’m still not a Blamire convert, but I found this far more watchable than any of his own films and informative to boot.  Bloopers from the production (2 minutes) as well as a fake television spot for the film-within-a-film Look Over round out disc two.

Shout! Factory’s MST3K: “Manos” The Hands of Fate Special Edition packs nearly three hours of supplemental material in addition to one of the series’ very best episodes, making it one of the company’s most attractive television releases to date.  Though I suspect that no true MSTie is without “Manos” in their collection already, the wealth of material here coupled with a decent price tag ($24.97, but far less through most retailers) may render an upgrade irresistible.  Recommended!

in conclusion
Show: Excellent  Video: Very Good   Audio: Very Good   Supplements: Excellent
Harrumphs: No subtitles
Packaging: Clear 2-disc DVD case, with mini-poster recreation of cover art.
Final Words: The irresistible force of MST3K met the immovable awfulness of “Manos” The Hands of Fate nearly 20 years ago, but the end result is still a blast.  This Shout! Factory special edition packs a considerable supplemental wallop, and comes highly recommended to fans.

Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell

August 18th, 2011 | article by | No Comments »
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Year: 1978  Company: Zeitman-Landers-Roberts Productions / CBS   Runtime: 95′
Director: Curtis Harrington   Writers: Steven Karpf, Elinor Karpf   Cinematography: Gerald P. Finnerman
Music: Artie Kane  Cast: Richard Crenna, Yvette Mimeux, Kim Richards, Ike Eisenmann, Victor Jory,
Lou Frizzeli, Ken Kercheval, R. G. Armstrong, Martine Beswick, Bob Navarro, Lois Ursone, Jerry Fogel
Disc company: Media Blasters / Shriek Show   Video: 1080p 1.33:1    Audio: DTS-HD MA 2.0 English,
DTS-HD MA 2.0 Italian   Subtitles: None   Disc: BD50 (Region A)   Release Date: 06/28/2011
Order this disc now from Amazon.com

Produced for CBS television by Zeitman-Landers-Roberts Productions in 1978, Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell may well be one of the silliest of the multitude of demon-fueled horrors to follow in the wake of Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist and The Omen.  For my money it’s also one of the more amusing.  For the sake of full disclosure the devil of the title is not in fact the devil, but a barghest – a monstrous black dog from English folklore that here possesses a cute German Shepherd named Lucky.  I’d argue that it’s a distinction without a difference, however, as Devil Dog follows plenty of the familiar tropes of its successful theatrical predecessors.

The story, credited to Steven and Elinor Karpf (Gargoyles), is pretty ridiculous even by the rather low standards set by past devil-on-the-loose pictures.  Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell begins with some shady cultists (led by the lovely Martine Beswick, Prehistoric Women) raising a hell-beast from beyond to breed with a prize-worthy German Shepherd as part of an unbelievable scheme to spread their cult-y ways to middle America one demonic puppy at a time.  I suppose if this film teaches us anything it’s that you shouldn’t buy puppies from out the back of some creepy bastard’s (R. G. Armstrong!) rolling produce stand, but that’s precisely what little Bonnie and Charlie (Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann, of Escape to and Return from Witch Mountain fame) do after they find that their old dog has been unceremoniously run over.

Parents Mike and Betty Barry (Richard Crenna and a still-gorgeous Yvette Mimeux) are happy to see the new puppy arrive, but stereotypical Latina-maid-with-supernatural-intuition Maria (Tina Menard, who made an impressive career out minor ethnic roles) knows that there’s more to the critter than meets the eye.  Unfortunately Maria is not long for this world, and before she can get anyone to take her concerns seriously she finds herself spontaneously combusting – a victim of the demon-puppy’s nefarious powers.  Believing the death to be just a horrible accident Mike and the family move on, but as the puppy grows ever stranger things begin to happen.  Neighbors die, the kids take a turn for the weird, and Betty becomes promiscuous, while Mike struggles to deal with the consequences.  Before long he realizes that it’s his lovable dog Lucky who’s to blame, leaving him no recourse but to travel to Ecuador (?!) in search of a solution to his other-worldly problem.

  
  
  

Director Curtis Harrington (Queen of Blood, Night Tide) was none too fond of Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell, a film he felt was too poorly written and under-financed to be a successful horror picture.  He approached the material with cool professionalism all the same, generating some genuine spookiness and suspense along the way.  Through montage alone he renders the possessed Lucky’s movement through a living room uncharacteristically unnerving, while a sequence in which Mike is willed by the dog to stick his hand into a whirring lawnmower blade maintains suspense in spite of its guaranteed-bloodless made-for-TV pedigree.

Otherwise, this small-screen spook fest is held together by the talent of its cast alone.  Richard Crenna is solid as an everyman out of his element, keeping his cool even as the Karpf’s teleplay takes a nose-dive into the absurd.   Crenna had some experience in battling goofy demonic forces by this point, of course, having rid a rural mansion of a pudgy and be-suited devil from a bright and foggy alternate dimension in The Evil earlier the same year.  Yvette Mimeux (Dark of the Sun, The Time Machine) gives another charming and sympathetic performance, even as the writing fails her.  So convincing is her loving housewife that it’s difficult to believe her turn for the wicked later in the film.  The supporting cast is as strong as the rest, from cultists Martine Beswick and R. G. Armstrong (Race With the Devil) to doomed neighbor Lou Frizzell (The Other) and Ecuadorian shaman Victor Jory (Cat-Women of the Moon).

It’s a pity, then, that a little more money wasn’t thrown Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell‘s way, as the crux of the story – the spectacular appearance of the eponymous creature in all its horrifying glory – is a failure of hilarious proportions.  Rather than pay for traditional composite effects work, the producers instead turned to the video technology of 1978 for a cheaper solution.  The results must be seen to believed, with Lucky transforming into a floating fluffy and glowing-eyed triceratops-looking thing that is, to be kind, less frightening than was perhaps intended.  At times it appears as though an especially awful ’80s metal video is invading a perfectly normal film.  As such the final confrontation between Crenna and the beast at a chemical works is rightly one of the most memorable moments of the film, even if it’s remembered for all the wrong reasons.

It’s easy to see why director Curtis Harrington never looked kindly upon his involvement in this production, but it’s really not so bad as all that.  The ridiculousness of the monster reveal lends the production plenty of schlock appeal, and the dramatics are all the more enjoyable for their silliness.  All in all this is a fun little diversion that’s more family friendly than the title would ever suggest, and those keen on creature features should find plenty to love.

  
  
  

I have no great confidence in video distributor Media Blasters after their handling of Zombi Holocaust, which may well be the worst-produced disc I’ve seen all year even without getting into the issues of the transfer, but I was still interested in seeing how well they might handle a domestic title for which dubious transfer practices abroad would not be an issue.  To that end I found their Blu-ray issue of Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell to be unexpectedly strong, leaving me to wonder why the rest of their high definition titles haven’t been handled in kind.

Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell looks surprisingly good here, transferred in 1080p at its native 1.33:1 aspect ratio.  The low-budget television production only rarely looks so, with the 35mm photography scaling nicely to HD.  Colors can appear a bit muted at times, but other than that there’s precious little to complain about.  Detail is at healthy levels throughout, with some close-ups looking quite exceptional, and contrast is consistently strong.  Film grain is always in evidence but isn’t overpowering, and the AVC encode at an average bitrate of 29.2 Mbps dutifully supports it.  Damage is visible in the form of speckling and debris, much of which appears to have been printed right into the film, but isn’t as heavy as I expected for a film of this budget and vintage.  The brief video-mastered effects scenes are a particularly ugly exception to the rest, with the 35mm source footage having been mastered on video, overlayed with the desired effects, and fianlly printed back to 35mm.  These scenes (there are two) present with more damage than the rest of the film, both the soft and fuzzy blips captured during the first film-to-video conversion and the tack-sharp dust and specks that emerged when the resulting video footage was transferred back to 35mm stock.  The interlacing artifacts and degraded detail and color in these sequences are built right into the source and, as awful as it may seem, look precisely as they should.

Compare and contrast: Facial detail of the excellent (1) and adorable (2) kind versus the absolute worst in vintage 1978 video mastering technology (3). That ungainly black crescent to the right in the final shot is in fact print damage captured in the video mastering process, while to the left of it is a razor-sharp speck produced when the footage was re-printed to film.  Weird stuff, but neat!

The primary audio option is an honest DTS-HD MA 2.0 English track that easily handles the original frills-free recording.  Dialogue and effects are clear, and aside from some hiss inherent to the original mix there’s nothing to complain about here.  I’d say it sounded better than I expected, and is likely as good as its going to get.  Accompanying the English track is a secondary DTS-HD MA 2.0 Italian dub which, aside from the hilarity that can be had from switching between the original English and the looped Italian, seems rather pointless.  There are no subtitles.

Supplements are duplicated from the earlier 2-disc DVD, but have been reformatted (rd: windowboxed) to fit a 16:9 frame.  The biggest draw is a so-called featurette on the making of the film, To the Devil a Dog (SD), that runs a whopping 73 minutes, and features input from producer Jerry Zeitman and stars Kim Richards and Ike Eisenmann.  Next up is a 15 minute audio interview with the late Curtis Harrington, to whom this disc is dedicated.  Next is a brief photo gallery of supporting player Martine Beswick, followed by an essay / interview with the actress that plays as a text scroll.  A promotional trailer for the feature and a handful of previews for other Media Blasters properties rounds out the on-disc material.

Well color me surprised.  With the inevitable disappointment of Media Blasters’ Burial Ground blu-ray looming (my copy arrives tomorrow) I was expecting nothing good from this, a disc I picked up simply because it was too cheap not to review it.  Needless to say Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell surpassed my non-existent expectations with room to spare, all the more so because MB actually managed to meet their street date for the title.  Soak in the success while it lasts – if only all of their releases were this good.

in conclusion
Film: Fun!  Video: Excellent –  Audio: Very Good   Supplements: Very Good
Harrumphs: No subtitles
Packaging: Standard Blu-ray case.
Final Words: Sure, it’s silly, but sincere performances coupled with a ridiculous script and some of the worst video-mastered effects in US television history make it more than worth your while.  I dig it!

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