TYTD Reviews

Im going to keep this one brief because, honestly? I dont have that much to say. ‘Creepshow’ is a 1982 Anthology horror film written by Stephen King and directed by George Romero, both were basically riding high at this point in their relative fields, with Romero fresh off of ‘Knightriders’ with ‘Dawn of the dead’ and ‘Martin’ not that far behind it. and King somewhere between ‘Cujo’, ‘The Running Man’ and ‘Christine’. The pair struck up on the idea of making a movie literally in the style of the old horror comics of the 50s and 60s. and so King wrote a few original ideas and re-adapted a couple of his short stories into ‘comic style’ takes of his works. With a star studded cast to help really lift this thing up and above where it could have ended up.

We go through the film like flipping pages in a comic book, with stories of ressurected vengeful fathers, killer weeds from space, 150 year old killer yetis, a bug infestation and a tale of betrayal and bloody vengence.

I didnt really get around to ‘Creepshow’ till about 3-5 years ago when I chanced upon a VHS copy in amongst a haul of tapes I picked up. Creepshow infamously hasnt really had a release past VHS in the UK. and even then, the VHS copy is kind of hard to come by. But for spooky season this year? I decided to upgrade, picking up the 4k release from Scream factory, and it looks absolutely astounding.

The film itself is really good honestly, The stories are all consistently decent quality, with the best stories being incredibly solid and totally engrossing, and even the worst ones are still pretty watchable…if not a little slow paced. While I do take some issue with the 2 hour runtime (an unfortunate fact that means I may not watch this one again for a while…) Its a rock solid production, that isnt as good as the sum of its parts…PURELY for how MANY good parts there are in this. When you have Romero and King on writing and direction, and a cast that includes Ted Dansen, Leslie Nielsen Adrienne Barbaue, Tom Atkins, Tom Savini, Hal Holbrook and E.G Marshall, its kind of inevitable that their combined performances dont really match expectations…But thats okay! because they DO get BLOODY close!

Direction is rock solid, hyperstylised ‘comic book’ aesthetics give this film a real flare that helps it stand out against its contemporaries, It could have been easy for this to look cheap, but it has a kind of endearing ‘cardboard’ feel to it for the most part that I really quite enjoyed.

Shots are heavily considered to match the ‘comic’ aesthetic, and transitions that include fades in and out of the comic book frame, page turns and other novelties, really help give this a feelgood ‘Halloween’ spooky vibe. In many ways, I think this is probably a perfect movie for this time of year, just for how it balances actual true horror with that hokey spooky vibe that Halloween gives off.

The scorings superb. Honestly? barring the length of the movie and a couple of slower paced moments dribbed and drabbed across the runtime. I think this is a fantastic little film. Not one that I think i’d choose to watch regularly, but definitely one i’ll keep coming back to over the years. Highly recommended, especially around Halloween time. If you havent seen ‘Creepshow’ you really gotta change that!

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/creepshow/1/

Nudist Coloney of the Dead may be one of Mark Piros most infamous films, covered multiple times over the last 2 decades by the youtube Commentariat, Its a…BIZARRE work or comedy horror, taking a total dedication to unrelenting silliness and marrying it up to a scathing swipe at religious zealotry. And…I kind of love it for that? At a time when a LOT of the media were taking ‘concerned christian parents’ VERY seriously, this film quite happily mocks them in a way that, on the surface is blunt, idiotic and irritating…But below the surface knows EXACTLY what its trying to do and say.

The premise is simple enough, the film, as mentioned is a Comedy Horror, and a musical to boot! as we open with a judge reckoning on a case where some puritan Christians are arguing that the owners of a local nudist colony are taking up precious land that could be used for pure wholesome activities with there…NAKED SIN!…The Nudists protest and provide meaningful evidence to the contrary, but the Judge rules in favour of the Christians and the camp is forced to close.

But the Nudists have one final plan up their sleeve, they plan a kool aid style cult suicide, and with their final breaths swear unholy vengence on ANY religious zealots that happen to wander onto their land. After which they all die and are promptly buried at the former Nudist site.

Some time passes and a local pastor is preaching to his congregation, promising revelation and spiritual purification to the parents of sex mad, drug addled, EVIL teenagers, by sending them on a Christian retreat in the woods. Several members of the congregation jump at the chance and send their kids off on the retreat, led by two dyed in the wool, unwavering Christian evangelists. The retreat is on the land that was formerlly the nudist colony.

Cue mad running around, THE most catchy earworm musical numbers, DOZENS of fake blood soaked limbs and VERY anti PC language. As religion and personal freedom clash in the most bizarre and over the top ways, likely ever put to screen.

My score for this film would be higher if not for one, frankly tragic and fatal issue with this film. Up front, the script is absolutely delightful, Im a fan of dumb humour when its done right, and the way its done right is to get smart people to write it. See…when a dumb person writes dumb humour, its insufferable. Because Dumb people just write what they THINK dumb humour should be…meaning its often garish, over the top…but most importantly, not funny, its annoying. Smart people see dumb people every day, and learn what makes dumb people funny…they also see dumb ideas and points being taken seriously every day by people often regarded as smart, which gives them the perfect balance of being able to write from the perspective of being able to see why ideas dumb people think are great…are in fact dumb. meaning they can lampoon dumb people, while also stealthily working in complex satirical commentary on present day dumb issues, without feeling like they’re preaching to the audience.

The writers for the early seasons of ‘The Simpsons’ are probably the best example of this, but Piro here has essentially done this with his script, but gone a bit more farcical as a result. At its core the film is an anti zealot, anti ‘moral panic’ film, and for about 75% of the runtime, that intention is soft baked in across the runtime. The folks who’d actually be offended by what this film had to say, would likely have stuck their nose up within the first 5 minutes when an old woman with comedically saggy breasts knocks out half the nudists. They likely would have swanned off before the titles even played.

Which is unfortunate, becuase the films a laugh riot, hitting the audience with dumb humour, smart humour, ultra catchy musical numbers and some decent subtext to chew over…especially in the year that is 2025. By the final 20 minutes of the film, we’ve shifted from a subtle but continuous jabbing, to just a flat out admission of the films intentions…with 5 minutes of that runtime being filled with a muscial number called ‘Kill All the Zealots’ Which…is kind of wonderful really.

The pacings absolutely breakneck, we career through 90(ish) minutes of a movie right here being unrelentingly bashed over the head with every type of comedy going, I dont think theres a 2 minute window in this whole movie where it isnt trying to do SOMETHING to make you laugh, and much like Piros previous films, there really is something for everyone.

The act structuring is a little bit on the sloppy side, this is, at the end of the day, still just ‘some folks running around in the woods’ for the most part. The first act is probably the most stable of the 3, it at least sets the premise up and gets things rolling. But the other 2 acts are kind of melted into each other and theres no clear shift up, or down, between the middle and final acts…mainly because its SO high energy, it would be stupid to ramp down…but they cant really ramp UP any higher than they are.

The characters are all farcical pastiches of horror archtypes, the ‘villains’ of the piece are equally bizarre and over the top. it can be a tad overwhelming at times. But in the right headspace all these characters are a hoot!

But! the praise does kind of have to end there, because of the aforementioned ‘tragic’ faults that this film has.

The first, simply put, is unfortunately the film dabbles inconsistently in racist language and stereotypes. Theres literally a character in this film called ‘Juan Tu’ who is supposed to be a half mexican, half japanese immigrant. he spends the entire runtime of the movie speaking in a racist asian accent, he’s portrayed doing stereotypical racist things like eating a hotdog with Chopsticks and just…knowing kung fu. and more aggregiously, he’s the butt of multiple hard slurs across the runtime, which were frankly winceworthy. I believe theres also some gay and other racial slurs used in the film too…which is a real shame and did pull the joy out of it a bit.

But the other tragic thing, that really hits this film hard is the technical issues with the production. According to the DVD release, large chunks (i’d say as much as 55-75% of the movie) were hit with technical issues that made the footage largely unwatchable, this ranges from shots being underlit to the point of darkness, crew members appearing in shots, the wrong frame rates being used…basically anything and everything you could think COULD go wrong while filming a movie DID seem to go wrong here. For the original release, it couldnt really be corrected. So folks just had to…accept that over half their movie was basically unwatchable.

But for the DVD release. Mark Piro decided to try and fix it. and the way he’s tried to do that is by splicing out the problematic film scenes and recreating them with behind the scenes footage shot on video tape when the ACTUAL takes were being done. In any other movie, this would have made the film as unwatchable, if not MORE unwatchable than just leaving in the problematic footage. Here, its a bit more accepted/understandable…But it still renders the film a bizarre viewing experience.

The VHS footage doesnt look anything like the film footage, its in a different aspect ratio to the film footage, Piro here has decided to crop the film footage into widescreen, despite it being pretty close to 4:3 orignally…but NOT to crop ALL the VHS footage into widescreen, meaning the film bounces around in different aspect ratios for the full runtime. sometimes on a cut by cut basis within a sequence.

The film footage appears to have been sourced from an original VHS copy of ‘Nudist colony of the dead’ and Piro appears to have had a go at re-grading it, leading to huge sections of crushed blacks, weird artifacting and heavy overcontrasting. and the behind the scenes replacement footage varies wildly in quality, from some replacements looking and feeling totally at home, with no sense of anything being amiss. To moments where its clear the camera was set up next to the crew, and Piro has had to heavily crop and zoom into the footage to remove people out of the frame.

This presentation is a real dogs dinner of a production, but Piro considers this the ‘Directors cut’ and in a message to the viewer at the start of the film, it notes that he considers this ‘the way the film should be seen.’ …So I dont know, I reckon with the revelations in modern digital editing, if the original film elements of this movie still exist, a proper restoration could probably be feasable with much less interference…As it stands, its incredibly distracting in my opinion as it is, and…while the films style lends itself to this weird bouncing around in the edit. I think i’d much prefer to see this get a 2k scan, some decent colour correction and an attempt to save the damaged footage if im honest.

Other than that the performances are goofy, over the top, cheesy, corny, the works. its a manic production and not one person fails the assingment. Couple that with a HELL of a cheap tinny synth soundtrack, with musical numbers that WILL get stuck in your head TILL YOU DIE. And I have to say I have a real soft spot for ‘Nudist Colony of the dead’ My hope is that at some point a proper restoration of this can be done. Because I think restoring it back to its original aspect ratio, in HD, and with the tools to attempt a proper grade on it. I could easily see this become my favourite Mark Piro film.

Definitely recommended, ESPECIALLY if you like Smart/dumb humour. Its been too long since I last watched this one…and I wont make that mistake again.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/nudist-colony-of-the-dead/1/

After recently watching ‘Insidious’ My partner decided for tonights movie night to check out the other jumpscare ‘hot property’ of the 2010s. ‘Sinister’ a film that, i’d heard some pretty good things about myself over the years, but hadnt really got around to checking out…and, for the most part, I was pretty pleasently surprised!

The plot follows true crime novellist Ellison Oswald, Ellison last had a hit 10 years ago, and after a string of failed releases has chanced one last roll of the dice, moving his family to Pennsylvania to explore the story of a missing child and her murdered family, hoping that he’ll be able to uncover some new information, or better yet; solve the crime, so that he can make it big, and spend the rest of his life financially secure with his family…the only hangup? Ellison didnt tell his family that the house they were moving into was in fact, the house that the murdered family lived in…and that the murder was fairly recently.

The only people who do know what Ellisons done, are the local law enforcement who think its a bit of a sick joke, and tell Ellison up front to watch himself because they dont want any trouble…and the locals who slowly tease information out to Ellisons family, and give them the evil eye on multiple occasions.

But Ellison presses on, setting up his office ready to start working on figuring out exactly what happened. But on taking some boxes up to the attic, he discovers theres already a box up there labelled ‘Home Movies’ on bringing them down, he finds an old 8mm home movie projector and a selection of 8mm films with names like ‘Pool Party’ and ‘Mowing the lawn’…He decides to play one to see whats on the reels, and after a few moments of family home movie type fodder, the film harshley cuts to a brutal act of murder. Ellison slowly begins to realise, that whatever he’s watching here may be tied to the murders he’s looking into, and so he decides to dig deeper into the footage to try and figure out exactly what he’s looking at.

Pairing up with the deputy of the local sheriffs office, he begins to piece together the murders, finding demonic links embedded into the film itself, and a cultish undercurrent that may (or may not) link all the murders to a single killer. But with his family life beginning to spiral as the town begin to open up more about exactly WHAT Ellisons gotten them into. Ellison begins to come under increasing stress and pressure. and when a mysterious presence begins to make itself known in the house, things go from bad to downright horrifying.

Going into this one, I’d heard good things, but I wasnt exactly excited. at an hour and 51 minutes long, I thought this one may have me ‘clock watching’ before too long, and the fact that this is often lumped in with ‘Insidious’ as a bit of a ‘jumpscare’ centric production had me internally groaning a bit, as I figured the long runtime and jumpscare obsession basically translated to a bum numbing experience punctuated by cheap scares.

But theres actually a bit more going on with ‘Sinister’ than I expected. It still didnt quite astound me or anything, but I came away from it actually kind of glad I checked it out. The scripts VERY slow burn, but unlike a lot of films from this era, the slow burn nature in combination with the direction really helped create a slow mounting sense of tension and dread. its an incredibly atmospheric film in places and the plotting, while slow, didnt feel painful to me…I fully believe this film would have been higher rated had it been 90 minutes rather than 112, but whats here, for the most part, is pretty good!

The tone is a wonderful malevolence all the way through, steeping the audience in claustrophobic and analogue horror scenery, that I really found quite engaging. The characters are all pretty nicely multi layered (something that I think is missing from a lot of films from this era) its as much a psycho-thriller about an author slowly losing his mind to the stresses of potential failure, as it is a straight paranormal horror film. and the mixture of psychological horror, paranormal horror, thriller elements and the aforementioned jumpscares, actually mixes together into a rather solid work all things considered.

The act structuring is pretty solid, establishing all the tools the audience needs in the first act to crack on, it revs up in the second act, leading to a 3rd act thats maybe a little too high on tension/low on scares. But (and this is the crucial thing) for me, it ended actually pretty solidly. So many films from the late 2000s and early 2010s could do temporary horror or tension and then bomb on the landing…So this one just about managing to hold it together and deliver something (mostly) satisfying? I think is a really good job.

Direction wise. Im going to keep it simple here, its a studio picture, so it already meets the absolute base standards needed to be an acceptable viewing experience. My problem with this is that the directional style falls into two silos. Its a 33% mesh of shots that look very aesthetically pleasing, are well coloured and…while maybe not the most adventurous direction in the world, is still enagaging and pretty well handled…to 66% DEEPLY underlit to almost pitch black footage. Seriously, I dont know how anyone could watch the DVD version of this film, as for the vast majority of it you’ll either be watching a black screen, or at most about 20% of the screen will be dimly lit with the cast feintly framed…We watched a HD copy and even then we were struggling with the murkey darkness. I think a 4k copy may ACTUALLY be the only way to SEE this damn movie.

On the cine front, Again, its good! shots are fairly well compsed (when you can see whats going on) they dont shy away from experimentation with composition and scene layout, as I mention, they arnt exactly pushing any boundaries here. But it was a comfy watch to just sit and get immersed into. Lighting was a bit of an issue, and Im still not a champion of that terrible mid 2000’s onwards trend of desaturating the whole film to give it a washed out ‘murky water’ colour grade. I like my horror vibrant and visually pleasing!

Sequences are well cut together, theres some nice effects work that I think is handled really well, the edit is razor tight. Im honestly surprised this film doesnt get held up more often from that perspective, as there were genuinely some fun horror moments through this film, that I feel get a bit overlooked honestly.

Performance wise, Ethan Hawke gives a great turn as Ellison, he comes across as genuine, sincere and for the most part I thought he played it quite naturalistically…Though I do think he struggled a bit with more anger driven moments. he went big during those scenes, when I think a quieter approach may have served him better. But otherwise? I thought he was a solid lead.

The rest of the supporting cast are all pretty solid as well…No notes really, I just kind of sort of enjoyed hanging around with the people in this story, I dont think any of them performed particualrly badly, and on the whole I think the cast got the assignment and nailed more or less all of it.

And the soundtrack? A little unremarkable if im honest, its the era of drone and sampling older corny tunes, twisting them into horror pieces. What I really liked about Sinister is the fact they utilise silence so well, its rare to see a mainstream film do it so often, but here. They really do use silence and drone well to help keep things feeling extra spooky!

All in all, I liked Sinister. But thats not to say it doesnt have its problems. its a long LONG movie that I feel DESPERATELY needed a shorter cut to fully win me over, throw in a couple of plot beats that I felt didnt quite play true to how real people would behave and the questionable lighting choices, and you have a film that I think i’d absolutely watch again…But maybe not with my full attention. I’d say its definitely worth checking out at least once. But temper your expectations, and I think you’ll enjoy it more for it.

All I can say is, its got me curious to check out the sequel…So it must have done something right!

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/sinister/

So…we’re now at the point where we’re asking the question ‘What if Hellraiser, But ACTUALLY ‘Carnival of Souls’ by way of ‘Fight Club’…And about halfway into this film I lamented to my partner that only a week or so ago we were enjoying ‘Hellbound: Hellraiser 2’ and all the wonderful mysterious etherialness that came with it.

And now here we are, crashing through the world of DTV, where originality is beyond the attention of the morgue and the absolute BEST we can hope for is a couple of half decent performances and the feint FEINT hope that the tribute act this film is trying to make will at least stick the landing…and by the barest of threads, I think this film manages it.

‘Hellraiser: Hellseeker’ is the 6th entry in the Hellraiser series, and we’ve now pretty much settled into the ‘Freddys Nightmares’ approach to the cenobites…I.E, that 90% of the story is a standalone tale of a persons excesses leading them down a dark and dangerous path, ultimately leading to the final 10% of the story, which is a handful of shots of pinhead scattered across the runtime, leading to a final confrontation where the great spikey git appears through the mists of a creaking set in the style of a reveal from ‘Stars in their Eyes’, to essentially tell the victim EXCATLY why they’ve ended up in front of Pinhead, in such a way that reveals that there was in fact VERY little way anyone could have really guessed what was going on.

‘Hellseeker’ specifically has a fundamental flaw that i’ll get to shortly…But the plot is the first film Since ‘Hellbound’ to try and tie things back to our first ‘Final Girl’ of the series, Kirsty Cotton. As we open with Kirsty fooling around with her husband of 5 years ‘Trevor’ when…after getting a little TOO hot and heavy on the highway, their car careers off a bridge into the fridgid lake below, killing Kirsty and putting Trevor in the hospital with severe amneisa and memory loss.

Released from the hospital, the detectives want to know EXACTLY whats gone on, but Trevor has no idea…Kirsty’s body hasnt been recovered from the wreckage and the best Trevor can muster up is some vague flashbacks to their 5th anniversairy celebrations, and an encounter with a mysterious man offering him a mysterious box that could lead to both his AND Kirstys life vastly improving…

As Trevor tries to work his way back to normality, he quickly finds that his intepretation of reality may not be entirely accurate, he keeps bouncing around multiple different scenarios and moments. One minute he’s riding the night bus home, next he’s being grinded on by his boss in lengerie, next the girl from down the hall is trying to have sex with him…then his accupuntural therapist…and mixed in all amongst this, we have scenes of cenobites tormenting and torturing both Trevor and some of his close friends, feint memories of him and Kirsty together that dont always quite align. and a constant feeling like he’s forgotten something critical…Something that would make all of this make sense…something ominous…that may in fact be better left in the darkest recesses of his mind…something terrible thats about to turn Trevors world completely upside down and give him revelations he could have never conceived.

I’ll get my biggest gripe out of the way here, and its the script. It. drags. ASS. it is SO slow, painfully slow, glacially slow. its slow, and because they’re trying to play with the ‘Fight Club’ mechanism of showing the audience scenes which may be real, may only be happening in Trevors head, or may be the Cenobites screwing with Trevor. it means that everything we see happen MAY be real…or may be totally false…which, on paper may read like an intreaguing process…Until you realise that if you dont ground your unreliable narrator into at least SOME basic world lore…you end up with a film where I as the viewer dont feel like ANY of it matters…because it could ALL be a false narrative, just as much as it could all be true.

They dont clarify anything until about 10 minutes off the end of the film when they put all their cards on the table finally, and just…flat out tell the audience what was real, and what wasnt. And thats a problem for me, because…This isnt a film trying to get the audience to figure out whats going on. It isnt trying to tease the narrative, it isnt even really breadcrumbing. Its just showing us a load of random scenes and then at the end going ‘Ah! THESE scenes were REAL!!!’ before cutting to black. and thats awful storytelling, because why would I want to invest 89 minutes of my time into a film where realistically, the only stuff that ACTUALLY matters is the opening 10 minutes or so, and the final 10 minutes or so.

It creates a film thats pretty much ‘Burn after reading’ because once you’ve seen it once from start to finish and understand what they’re ACTUALLY trying to do, I can say confidently that you might get ONE more watch out of this thing, just to see if you can notice the things you missed the first time…and then its basically unwatchable for how much of the audiences time it wastes.

The films INCREDIBLY horny. But not in a ‘Hellraiser’ 1 or 2 way…a classy way…No. this is ‘Skinimax’ terratory, with fully clothed dry humping and blink and you’ll miss it boob shots…and thats about it. Their must be at least 4 or 5 sex scenes in this film. and again, it just reminded me of the sex scenes in the first couple of movies, where they were delicately peppered in to give the audience an idea of the intensity of the relationship between Frank and Julia…here, it feels cheap and seedy. Basically just here because otherwise the film quite literally WOULD be sedentary and incoherent.

The characters are all fairly one note for most of the runtime. Trevor probably gets the meatiest character development…But he essentially has 3 moods, bewildered, sad…and later in the film, when he finds out whats ACTUALLY going on…angry. and thats about it. the rest of the cast are horny inserts…or corporate inserts…and thats all their is. Even the dialogues just awkward and stilted. Reading like what a teenager would imagine ‘angsty’ and ‘edgey’ would ACTUALLY be like.

The act structurings a mess, again, the first and last 10 minutes of the movie. No notes, they’re pretty solid…but the remaining 69 minutes? incoherent ramblings that ride pretty much the same level across the runtime. In fact, this almost feels like a beat for beat reworking of ‘Hellraiser: Inferno’ to some extent…Only, instead of the lead character being an out and out ass. Instead we here have a character whos sad, confused and looking for meaning…while the implications lead to a darker past.

Direction wise, it again feels like ‘Hellraiser: Inferno’ we have David Fincher inspired moody lighting and tribute style framing and directional choices within the edit and performance choices. Nothing offensively bad, but nothing particularly groundbreaking. Again, it hurts me to see this series nosedive so hard, so quickly.

The cine again…is fine. I dont feel they quite manage to do the cenobites justice here, they cut around them quite frequently and the lighting doenst really compliment their presence…I assume they just…Didnt think the costumes were very good and decided to hide them by keeping them in low lighting and showing as little of them as possible.

Sequences are built fine enough for DTV, but theres a definite whiff of phoning it in across the board, it doesnt have heart, it doesnt have that creative flow…It feels like someone went to the movies over a long weekend, saw a load of cop dramas and psychothrillers and just…decided to borrow some of the best bits for this movie…with mixed to poor results.

Performance wise, We’re pretty much with Dean Winters as Trevor for the full runtime…and he’s fine. Not outstanding, not remarkable…he does a fine enough job as the lead in a cop infused horror thriller DTV, he gets through his lines fine enough, his physical presence is fine enough. He’s watchable.

To be completely honest, I was happier to see Ashley Laurence back as Kirsty, and although she only appears in the movie via flashbacks. She did end up having a meatier role than I expected, and again, she’s pretty decent. Honestly, the best parts of the movie are scenes with her and scenes with her and Winters. Its such a shame this is only really a cameo for the most part…

Doug Bradley is in this movie in a duel role for approximately 10-15 minutes of screentime. He’s clearly bored by this point, they arnt really giving him any good material to work with, he doesnt really do much…I know he’s capable of great things, but…to excuse my language. He’s dealing with a case of ‘Shit in, Shit out’, and this kind of marks the beginning of him really firmly trying to leave the franchise, but then being dragged back in for one reason or another.

The musics ‘MiDi-fied’ orchestral gumpf, with a little bit of rock and drone thrown in for good measure. its nowhere near as good as the first two films score…But its SO much better than ‘Hellraiser III’ or ‘Inferno’…

All in all, Hellraiser: Hellseeker is a frustrating watch, because it opens strong and the ending is probably the strongest the series has been since ‘Hellbound’, but you have to wade through over 60 minutes of absolute drivel and garbage to get there. This could have been an incredibly good short film, something for the fans to get a bite of. But instead, its an overly bloated, underfunded and badly managed waste of time for the most part. Not the worst that the series has spit up yet…I COULD actually see myself rewatching this one. But we are NOT in Kansas anymore Toto…

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/hellraiser-hellseeker/

An interesting experiment, ‘Phantasmatapes’ is a special effort from Bleeding Skull to recreate the vibe and feel of the old 80s ‘late night horror’ slots on TV, presented in ‘Warm Fuzzy Glow’ VHS vision. The idea is simple enough, take two public domain movies (In this case; ‘The Revenge of Dr. X’ and ‘The Brain that wouldnt Die’) and recut, remix, rescore and represent these films using mixed media and experimental feedback techniques. and, I think the end result is both charming, interesting…But also not quite what i’d hoped for.

Based on the pitch for this film, I went in expecting a bumper length feature totalling around 90-110 minutes that tried to recreate the late night horror show vibe, with maybe a few modern twists and turns thrown into the mix to keep me on my toes…Instead, the entire feature runs to 72 minutes long (shorter than the shortest film featured on this set by 10 minutes) and realistically, probably isnt the best way to experience these movies.

I had seen ‘The Brain that wouldnt Die’ multiple times before watching this, but I hadnt seen ‘Dr. X’ before. and the way this film handles the features is to heavily HEAVILY truncate them down to about a third of their original feature running length, and using feedback experimentation and the scoring, they attempt to bridge large gaps in the narrative.

As a result, I found myself really struggling to follow ‘Dr. X’ as I feel they chopped WAY too much out to really make it make much sense, and the experimentation at times overrides all the visuals onscreen. meaning by the end of it, I felt like I had a vague idea of what the plot was, but really; it felt like I hadnt been shown enough to know what was going on. Luckily with ‘Brain’, because I HAD seen it plenty of times before, I was able to fill in the gaps, and as a result I had a much more pleasent time with that one.

4 or 5 times across the runtime, we also get treated to some commercial breaks, which again is nice…but does yield some mixed results. their were ads I really liked, that felt bizarre and hit the right tone of what I was looking for, there were some ones that felt a bit dull. on the whole I think it was okay, but that kind of leads me to my biggest problem with this release.

Having the entire feature run to 72 minutes (including commercials) results in it feeling more like a ‘vibe’ watch than anything I could actually see myself sitting down to watch again…It felt like the kind of movie that runs quietly in the background of a party to help create a sense of atmosphere…While not actually being something I think i’d conciously choose to sit and watch again.

I feel like the films really should have been 45 minutes a piece, with maybe 10-15 minutes of commercials/bumpers/station IDs and other goodies intercut. I feel like the films were cut down too threadbare and needed just a bit more narrative tipping back in to steady the ship, and I feel like the commercial sections needed more consistency in their utilisation, and maybe even a bit more variety. I enjoyed the goofy ads, but what makes the ads feel distinct and weird is when they’re contrasted with just fairly normal commercials. It kind of broke the illusion that this was supposed to be a ‘late night off air recording’ because everything was way too lean and concentrated.

I didnt hate ‘Phantasmatapes’ But I dont think it’ll be one that I put in regular rotation, I could in fact see myself being more likely to pull this off my shelf for the extras (including clean full length VHS versions of ‘Brain’ and ‘Dr.X’ alongside upscaled VHS oddities like ‘The Max Headroom Incident’) than for the main feature itself.

That being said, I believe they are planning a volume 2 in this set, and I feel if they let this thing breath just a little more and paced out the commercials a little better. This could become a firm favourite series for me. So…this one’ll probably go on the shelf for now…but i’ll be keeping an eye on it.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/phantasmatapes/

Over a somewhat divided room, we made the decision tonight to check out the sequel to ‘Insidious’, quite decently titled ‘Insidious: Chapter 2’ I wasnt a huge fan of the first one, I didnt hate it, but I felt like it basically did the legwork so that ‘The Conjuring’ could pretty much perfect the format ‘Insidious’ was trying to work up. My partner on the other hand had a real soft spot for the first one, and today was her day to pick a movie, so; we carried on.

This entry picks up maybe a couple of days to a week after the events of the first film. Elise is dead, Josh is a prime suspect in a murder case and Renai, who has every faith in her husband, is starting to have some doubts. Josh hasnt been quite right since the events of the last film, and its pretty much confirmed more or less straight away that the being inhabiting Josh’s body ISNT Josh…

Meanwhile, the Lambert family move AGAIN into ANOTHER new house, Joshes mothers place, and ghosts and demons once again begin to plague the place. Josh tries his best to convince Renai that its all in her head, but soon it becomes to much to ignore.

Meanwhile Elises assistants from the first film visit her former home and stumble on an archive of VHS tapes covering most of her time as a paranormalist medium. and by a chance accident they stumble on a tape from the mid 80s featuring one Josh Lambert. THIS is footage of the visit Elise had to the Lambert house back in the 80s that Josh is told he had his memories wiped of in the first film…the pair start taking a closer look and find something shocking.

Enter ‘Carl’, Elises former paranormal partner in crime, who holds ‘dice seance’ basically he has a load of dice with letter on them, he asks a question, rolls the dice and the answer will be spelled out if theres a presence there. Carl gets summoned to Elises place urgently with dire news. On Carls arrival the assistants sit him down and play the tape of Josh, only its been slightly enhanced…Why is the tape a concern? Because standing in the background of the shot, too dim to see on the original footage, but visible when enhanced, is the future version of Josh watching his past self.

Carl consults the dice that give him a clue, which is transcribed by Joshes mother Lorraine to mean an abandoned hospital that Lorrain used to work at, and a terrifying mystery surrounding the story of a man named ‘Parker Crane’ comes to light…that could have dire consiquences for all involved, both living…and dead.

Quick caption review of this one; I liked it marginally more than the last one. Its literally more of the same across the board, my original reviews points pretty much stand once again for the entirity of this film, so rather than rehash them, i’ll just point you to my original review, but my thoughts there, were more or less the same here; and if your up for ‘more or less more of the same’ then your quids in here pal!

The reason I actually like this one a tiny bit more is 3 specific reasons:

1 – The pacings a little bit quicker, it still has a lot of moments of glacial pacing, but its quicker to get going with the monster show, it really revs up a lot sooner than the first film, and I found most of the resolutions to be fairly satisfying.

2 – Theres a significantly lower reliance on Jumpscares. The first film I felt really ONLY had jumpscares to work with, this film draws a bit closer to a supernatural slasher film, which gave it a lot more to work with in terms of styles and types of horror. Which endeared me to it quite a bit more. Its still a LOT of jumpscares for one movie, which is a bit of a shame, but at least we have some variety here…

and 3 – Despite the plot of this film going off to crazy and strange places, I actually felt that it was a bit more coherent than the first film. It actually wants to tell a more in depth story than just ‘people being kind of haunted sort of…or are they?’ Here its essentially a paranormal slasher for the vast majority of the runtime with a hint of science fiction thrown into boot. I find aesthetically its much more pleasing. and the tone is more consistant.

Once again, I cant say I out and out loved this film, but I appreciated the fact it tried to do something a bit more interesting in this entry. and I almost certainly think it’s better than the first film for it. Unfortunately you would likely have to watch the first film to fully understand and appreciated everything that happens int his entry. But! If they continue on this path, then i’ll be REALLY excited for ‘Chapter 15!’

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/insidious-chapter-2/

The first ‘Hellraiser’ film to not involve Clive Barker (the studio actually BANNED him from having any input on this film), the first ‘Hellraiser’ film NOT to be released in theaters, and from here on in, im on ‘first time viewings’ till the end of this franchise. All I knew about ‘Hellraiser: Inferno’ was that it featured cops trailing some ‘bizzare murders’ I figured; ‘Well; that cant be all bad!’…By the way, have you seen any of David Finchers movies between 1995 and 2000?…just checking…

‘Hellraiser: Inferno’ is the first (but certainly NOT the last) entry into this franchise to be heavily rumoured to be a retroactive ‘refit’ of a script stuck in development hell. The rumour goes that the Weinsteins hired a writer, who took an old rejected supernatural cop script HEAVILY inspired by ‘Se7en’, but changed…whatever supernatural element was supposed to be in THAT script to Cenobites and the lament configuration, and…they threw in a good dose of ‘Fight Club’ to the mix as well because…hey why not? its the year 2000 baybeeeeee

The result is a film that comes across like a poor mans attempt at Fincher with an uncanny vally degree of ‘Freddys Nightmares’ thrown into the mix. and I absolutely did NOT gel with it one bit.

The plot centers around Joseph, a dirty DIRTY cop. Josephs charming, charismatic, good at magic tricks and one of the forces best and brightest. But Joseph is also both a coke user and a dealer, he’s totally open to framing people to make himself look good and get himself out of trouble, and he’s addicted to cheating on his Wife (whome he has a daughter with) with sex workers…largely for the buzz, playing it off as him working late at the station and paying them in cash and crack stolen from crime scenes. Joseph thinks he’s too smart to get caught, as he balances the line between excess and debauchery, while not going SO far as to go full on overt and get caught.

But things are about to change for Joseph, as; when attending a gory and gruesome crime scene, he stumbles across two things, a mysterious puzzlebox, and a candle with a childs finger encased in it.

The case stays with him through the night…But doesnt bother him so much that he wont head out to spend the night getting coked up with a sex worker. After ‘finishing’, he hits the bathroom and starts messing around with the puzzle box, which opens, and briefly transports him to a world of nightmarish visions. After which he awakens on the bathroom floor, heads to bed, and the next day heads into the station.

But while warming up for the day, Joseph recieves a call from the motel he stayed at last night, its the sex worker pleading for him to come and save her because someones after her. At which point she gives a blood curdling scream and the phone goes dead. Both Joseph and his partner Tony head to the motel, where they find the woman carved up and bolted onto the bathroom wall. Joseph begs Tony to cover with him, and confesses that he was there that night.

Tony reluctantly agrees. But this sends Joseph down a deep and dark path. As a suspect known only as ‘The Engineer’ makes his presence known. At first, Joseph is warned off pusuing this, with a warning that, if he ‘hunts for The Engineer, The Engineer will hunt for you’ But Joseph is the best cop in town! he’ll crack the case lickety split surely!…surley not…as the bodycount rises and Joseph ends up way in over his head. he’s led into a realm of demons, torture and debauchery as he tries to get to the bottom of the killers motive, without finding himself on the hit list.

Its heavily refuted that this is a recycled rejected script retrofitted to be a Hellraiser vehical…But in many ways, i’d be more forgiving of it if it was. Because, this quite literally does just feel like a direct to video knock off of ‘Se7en’ with a dash of ‘Fight Club’ and ‘Freddys Nightmares’ thrown in for good measure.

Probably one of the biggest complaints I see regularly is that ‘Pinhead’ is barely even in this movie. And I think thats a fair critique, but thats the least of this films worries really, honestly; I thought it was kind of refreshing and interesting to reframe the series in this way, having a cop stumble onto the site of one of the Cenobites victims and then slowly, they piece together whats happening from various crime scenes, before being compelled into hunting the box down for themselves. That sounds like it could have been fun!

This movie though…is NOT fun. its very VERY cheap for the most part and I feel largely focusses on the wrong things. Rather than a horror cop drama with subtext and coded messaging. We instead get a character piece, where we’re stuck with a deeply unlikable character getting more and more unlikable as the runtime goes on, barely even really dealing with the cenobites or the nature of the crime scenes, until the final 10 or so minutes (with notable exception) when the Cenobites just randomly turn up, explain the whole movie, and then leave again.

Theres way too much focus on Josephs personal life, on the world he’s built for himself and his own ostracization. To the point that, when the Cenobites DO turn up in dribs and drabs, it feels like i’ve accidentally swapped movies for a couple of minutes. They feel SO out of place in this movie, i’d have rather it just been ghosts or non descript demons than trying to ‘square peg in a round hole’ it as they’ve tried here.

The pacings glacial, it moves at a crawl, with the plot largely just being Joseph plus 1-2 other people standing or sitting in a room lore dropping till we can get to a Cenobite scene or a change of location…But you better no be interested in HEARING any of this script, because other than Doug Bradley, who actually DOES ennunciate his lines here, the rest of the cast are TERRIBLE mumblers…and as my bluray for this one didnt contain a subtitle track…I pretty much have NO idea what was said for about 70% of the runtime.

Tonally, it wants to be a dark and gritty cop drama, but the budget wont stretch to decent effects and heavy gore, which means all the gore shots have to either be heavily distorted or obscured. They also seemingly couldnt find an actress with a ‘nudity’ exception in her contract, because the one sex scene in the film is fully clothed and heavily filtered. Basically, it feels like someone commissioned a ‘Hellraiser’ film, and then ACTUALLY WATCHED a ‘Hellraiser’ film and realised that they ABSOLUTELY DID NOT want to make a new Hellraiser film, because it was a sin. So they then moved heaven and earth to SOMEHOW create a ‘sanitized’ take on ‘Hellraiser’…and its bizarre. I’ve never seen a film so desperate to fight against what its supposed to be.

The characters are poorly structured, they dont feel naturalistic at all, and some of their decisions in this script are just downright stupid; probably the most glaring example is Joseph reciving the call from the sex worker being murdered, visiting the motel and THEN realising that it looks like he killed her…despite the fact that…even in the year 2000, most police stations recorded incoming calls, and that CCTV was INCREDIBLY prominant even then, so he would have had MORE than an alibi to prove he didnt kill her…but he acts in this film like he’d be getting the death penalty for all this…and thats just one glaring example out of dozens I spotted across the runtime that just…made me think the movie was kind of stupid and rushed script wise.

The directions fine enough, Scott Derrikson was clearly a Fincher fan as this film reeks of ‘Se7en’ on a directoral standpoint. It looks nice enough, even if the CGI is creaky as hell in the year of our lord 2025…I’ll take a poor mans take on Fincher over uncoordinated any day. But its still kind of poor show that the best the director can do with a picture is just ape a VERY popular film makers style and hope enough people get on board with it.

Cast directions taken a page from Fincher too, but here I think its very well handled…arguably the best aspect of this production…if only they’d got the cast to read their lines at a volume that I could actually HEAR what was being said, i’d probably have an even greater appreciation for it.

The cine is fine, it looks cheap. it looks REALLY cheap…but its fine. I think my only big hangup with this one is the design of the Cenobites. we have 4 new Cenobites in this film, and all of them have pretty much the same facial design…basically a tweak on ‘Chatterers’ design, but with different body shapes. It also looks like they managed to find the old ‘Chatterer’ makeup prosthetics, becuase his head is back on a legless body for a few scenes, and its all kind of iffy. Now, I will say they mercifully only use CG sparingly to enhance the practical effects. My rating would have been even lower had they gone for purely CG cenobites. But the lack of diversity in design is just really kind of a bummer…

Other than that though, its shot to look like a TV movie/direct to video feature. You can clearly see the inspriations behind the compositional choices, but the fact remains that the budget is REALLY struggling to match the vision here, and there are several moments that really made me just feel like this film was coasting on fumes.

The edit is a bit of a mixed bag too, It was the age where horror films relied on ‘flash cuts’ to create a sense of horror and jumpscares. and when they do that, the film curdles like sour milk. the 2000s style horror editing here is rancid. it looks and feels terrible…but when its not trying to do that. I think its pretty passable for the most part. Plenty of B-roll, good enough pacing, and sequences breath…maybe a little too much for their own good, but I’d rather something have stretch room than feel like its been chopped to within and inch of its life.

The performances are…not the best, Craig Sheffer as Joseph is probably the strongest character here, but he’s essentially jsut playing a charicature of the charismatic, wise cracking cop trope thats now commonplace in series like ‘CSI’ and ‘Law and order’. He gives it a good crack and his ‘fear’ moments are genuinely impressive…Its just a shame that he gets so little in the way of range, and that I cant tell a bloody word he’s saying.

Doug Bradly is probably second best here, returning as ‘Pinhead’ for all of 5 minutes, his makeup once again takes a hit, after they just about ‘nailed’ it in ‘Bloodline’…they dont really modify his voice either. But they do give him an intimidating presence, and the time he’s on screen is arguably some of the best.

But good lord, the soundtrack. is. HORRENDOUS. at times it feels like Sterling entertainment and full moon offcuts…the kind of music they wouldnt use in THEIR movies. GONE is the orchestral ‘real’ instrument pieces and instead its midi samples and stock music…and it utterly throws the vibe of the movie entirely, I hated it. With a more impactful score, this probably could have been somewhat salvagable…but as it is? it sucks SO bad…

‘Hellraiser: Inferno’ had promise…as mentioned, I could see the core premise of this movie ACTUALLY being kind of fun. But it feels like they really lost their way on this one at some point in pre-production and what should have been a ‘Hellraiser’ film from a Cops perspective, became a ‘Cop’ film that just so happened to have demons in it…I really didnt care for this one, it’ll likely be a while before I revisit it. Cant recommend it, its cheap, boring and lacking all the bite, vibe and aesthetic that made the series great in the first place. ‘Hellbound’ is now but a distant memory…

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/hellraiser-inferno/

A first time spin, I picked up ‘Insidious’ during a sale a few months ago, pretty much as a blind buy, with the only knowledge I had for the movie being that it was a ‘paranormal’ film, and that several of my ‘non filmie’ friends said it was a solid horror film that they would recommend. Im always trying to broaden my horror horizons, as I am a bit patchy on 2010’s/2020’s horror. So, I took a punt. Having seen it now; I didnt really *love* it, but I will admit it has its moments.

The plot follows the ‘Lambert’ family as they’ve just moved into a new house, Father, Josh; is a school teacher and Renai is a muscian and they have two young boys and a baby. With Josh working away from the home, Renai picks up most of the housework and parenting side of things, its tough, but the pair are hoping for a fresh start after the last place they lived in had an ‘incident’ occur that the family are hoping to move on from.

However, it doesnt take long for Renai to start feeling a bit uncomfortable in the new place, and after one of their sons, Dalton falls off a ladder, he appears to drift into a coma. Obviously the family are horrified, and after 3 months of observations, to which the doctors have no answers, the Lamberts bring their son home and set him up for long term care at the house.

But in doing so, something…’Insidious’ (Eh…Ehhhhhh?!?) starts to stalk the Lambert family, Renai begins to see beings in the corner of her eye, and as time goes on they become more and more prominent, eventually trashing up their house, and eerily stalking their other kids and Dalton…this bothers Renai so much that she manages to convince Josh to pack up and move to a new house…Which is probably THE most sensible thing i’ve EVER seen in a horror film.

But its no good! as on arriving in the new house the beings continue, and a TERRIFYING encounter with a red faced demon looking fellow, has Renai contact Joshes mother, who in turn contacts a paramormalist ‘Elise’ and her team. Who reveal to her the terrifying REAL reason Daltons in a coma…

One thing that I absolutely cannot abide about more contemporary horror is the normalisation of the ‘Jump Scare’ as the primary horror tactic. Back in the good old days of horror, Jumpscares were a fleeting tool in the horror filmakers arsenal. a quick, cheap and dirty way to get a couple extra scares in while working with subtext, metaphores and deeply uncomfortable imagery to create a well balanced horror feature. But as we entered the mid 90s, jumpscares became more and more overused…to the point that today, entire film FRANCHISES, are almost entirely reliant around the Jumpscare as the SOLE meathod for scaring people in a horror film. Insidious; is ONE of those movies.

Its film that solely relies on jumpscares to be the horror, theres almost no unsettling imagery, no real subtext or meat on the bones, nothing to really grip onto to make me sit up and take notice about this feature. Its just jumpscares intercut with lore dropping, and I could not have been more bored. Jumpscares dont really do anything for me, they just make me a bit stressed while I wait for them to happen, and I rarely if ever want to go watch a movie to be mildly stressed out. So right off the bat the film really didnt win any favours for me.

Compounding the issue further, it takes an absolute AGE to get going, I lost track of time unfortunately, but I reckon it must have been at LEAST 30 minutes of the hour and 40 runtime before we really saw anything even remotely CLOSE to horror. everything up to that point was just a mum doing chores, a dad going to work and kids hanging out and doing kids stuff, and while admittedly, I will say that by the hour mark the film was finally in full swing and doing its thing, and the pace almost certainly did pick up quite a bit from there, it really did try my patience to the point I nearly lost all interest in the film.

The scripts plot is fine enough, for a film that predates ‘The Conjuring’ by 3 years it seems to pretty much establish the template that that series would work off of for the next 10 years. I thought the ending was predictable, but about as satisfying as could be expected, once it did get going around the halfway point, I had a fine enough time, and as mentioned there are a few moments here that, as a long time horror watcher, did pleasently surprise me, because it made me feel like the characters were a bit more realistic than most.

Unfortunately; the act structuring does struggle a bit. with a glacial first act giving way to a half and half ‘interesting’ to ‘filler’ mixture…and the 3rd act pulling out all the stops, ultimately delivering a fine enough time…but your milage may vary if you can put up with the wait to get there.

Tonally; it felt a bit murky, like the comic relief parnomal assistants to Elise felt a bit forced, which I didnt enjoy, and it doesnt really seem to know how hard it really wants to go as a horror, or what kind of contrast it wants to play against those darker moments…While I appreciate the attempt at making things creepy by playing ‘tiptoe thru the tulips’ intermittently to try and create a sense of unease. As someone who grew up with that song being a mid to late 60s novelty record, I wasnt so much creeped out, more cracking out into laughter whenever it was played because…Is this what kids think is ‘super old and creepy’? I just thought it was more bizarre than anything else.

The characters are all pretty well written, I thought there was a nice complexity with the core cast, and the dialogue was quite naturalistic for the most part. It was probably the thing that kept me hanging on the most for the production.

The direction and cine are both above board, this is a studio picture, so certain standards had to be adhered to…So nothing too nefarious is present here. The film plays with a strong aesthetic, very angular and interested in the grading, with some shots looking almost black and white, but in fact are just very carefully curated set spaces with experimental lighting applied. the use of CG here is sparingly paced out. But its a 15 year old movie at this point, and even on bluray its starting to creak a little bit when it does happen.

I kind of felt what CG they did use was a bit unecissary honestly. This film suffers a bit from what I dub ‘Hellraiser’ syndrome, a cinematic condition where; The more you learn about the big scary baddies, the less big and scary and mysterious they seem and the more silly and rubbish they become. The oversharing of the ‘baddies’ in this film combined with the less than steller CG ultimately totally defanged these antagonists…by the end I was giggling more than I was paying attention.

Sequences are incredibly well composed however, the edit is rock solid, theres some really nice cine experimentation present in this film, that I thought was quite impressive honestly; its a pretty good looking film for the most part, that I think still largely holds up visually.

Performance wise, well, I wont go into the kid actors, but the trio of Patrick Wilson, Rose Byrne and Lin Shaye are fabulous here, giving largely believable performances with great physical presence and pretty solid natural delivery. Yes they do have some stupid moments that feel stiff and awkward. But mercifully they are few and far between and dont totally ruin the films ‘vibe’.

And finally, the soundtrack! Which is deafening. This is another problem a lot of films from the mid 2000’s to the present day suffer with, the mixing is frankly painful. The score here is string,synth and other sharp noises, mixed up to 11. and those stings when the jumpscares happen are frankly deafening, especially when there are prolonged periods of absolute silence. Its the kind of loudness that, if you saw it in a theatre environment, would likely make you go temporarily visually impared (A feat i’ve experience only once before when I went to see ‘Evil Dead Rise’…THAT…was an experience…) But this? this is a bit annoying, and meant I basically had to rock the volume button my TV because every 5 minutes it would hit a sting that would make my cat explode.

Insidious has some pretty great ideas peppered into its 104 minute runtime. Its a visually impressive film for the most part with some solid performances and clear directoral vision. Unfortunately; it takes WAY too long to get to the good stuff, the digital effects havent aged all that well and it’s only using one tool to try and get the job done…and its using it badly.

If I was at a friends house, or if my partner wanted to watch this film again, I wouldnt put up any protest, but would I choose of my own volition to watch this thing again? Probably not…it was a nice idea, and I dont regret watching it. But I wouldnt choose to watch it again. I think if your into 2010’s horror, you’ll get on with this…but if your not…be prepared for a trek.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/insidious/

When a franchise hits the ‘In Space!’ part of its existence, I tend to run to the hills, or at the very least make some notes for my next youtube review. Its usually a sign that a franchise has exhausted its creative outputs and hit the ’emergency panic’ button because…well…who DOESNT wanna see a predominantly earth based hero or villain get thrust THEMSELVES into the unknowing dark void of space! Who KNOWS what crazy hi-jynx they could get up to?! Its usually the death rattle.

‘Hellraiser: Bloodline’ is essentially this franchises death rattle. After ‘Hellraiser III’ took the high concept, complex world of the cenobites and their interdimensional quest for pleasure through ultimate pain. and reduced it to a low budget, pinhead-centric ‘Nightmare on Elm Steet’ knock off. I didnt have high hopes for ‘Chapter 4’. In fact, I didnt like ‘Hellraiser III’ so much that I actually put off watching ‘Bloodline’ for the better part of a decade, figuring that, if that was the direction the series was going in, it was probably better to cut my losses and just stick with the first two, than venture any further.

But sometimes, fortune favours the brave. and while ‘Hellraiser: Bloodline’ is FAR from a return to form for the series, I have to admit that I really quite enjoy it.

The premise is simple enough, we open the the far off future of 2150, on a space station as a member of the ‘Merchant’ family is controlling a robot to open the Lament configuration. He successfully opens the puzzlebox. Pinhead and a new set of cenobites appear, but before any kind of showdown can occur, space marines barge into the space station and Arrest ‘Merchant the younger’.

While in custody, the marines question Merchant about why ‘the man who built this space station would cut all communication and access to it and threaten to destroy it?’ At which point it’s revealed that the Merchant family have a long and entangled history with the puzzle box and the cenobites, dating back to 18th century France, and a distant relative of Merchant, who was in fact the creator of the first puzzlebox.

From here, the film essentially takes on an anthology pathway, showing three tales from the Merchant bloodline, starting with ‘Philip Merchant’ the creator of the box, as he battles with a demon from hell called Angelique who may or may not have manifested the box for demonic purposes. Before flashing forward to 6 years after the events of ‘Hellraiser III’ and 1996 where ‘John Merchant’ is the architect who helped construct the ‘Lament tower’ featured as the big twist ending in ‘Hellraiser III’ with Angelique back on the hunt to reclaim the puzzle box. and finally finishing the present day of 2150 with ‘Paul Merchant’ finally trying to put an end to this stain on the bloodline, once and for all.

Im going to be honest up front here, this is a stupid, silly and daft little movie. It is FAR removed from the deadly serious tones of the first 2 Hellraiser movies. But I feel like it does a lot right, that the last film got VERY wrong.

For a starters, this film shifts the tone back away from just, gore for the sake of gore and a slasher mentality, back to a more ‘otherworldly’ quality. there are moments in this film that arnt really fully explained or clarified that reintroduce a little bit of mystery back into the series which is nice. Angelique as a character is a bit of a mixed bag concept. On the one hand, its interesting to learn that their are beings in the Leviathan realm heald in higher regard than the Cenobites…However, at the same time introducing a monarch-esq framework into the series grounds the Cenobites as beings even further and kind of takes a bit more magic away from the series.

They show significantly less of Pinhead, and when he does appear he isnt doing much of the heavy lifting on the gore front. He gets some really nice dialogue here and its nice to see them shift him back to being a more mysterious being (with significantly better make up this time to boot!) without just…not featuring him at all in the movie.

Calling this film what it is, it feels like a ‘closer’ to the series. Clive Barker was back on board as an executive producer (I believe for the final time), and the tone and vibe the film gives off throughout is basically ‘we’re done, this is tying things off.’ indeed, the anthology nature of this basically burns any bridges of future sequels as (mild spoilers here) the film implies that after 1996’s encounter, the puzzle box drifts from place to place, but that no Cenobites are lost and no new victims are collected until 2150. The Puzzlebox basically just waited till 2150, at which point (again, mild spoilers) its destoryed. Which means one of two things, either the series ends with this film (as I assume many people would prefer) or this film…the one Clive Barker worked on…DOESNT count as canon and instead all the films that come after this one DO count.

in either case, for me? this is a perfect jumping off point. With this film, we learn everything we didnt already know about the Cenobites, they get to do some fun last film killings, we get a thorough history of the puzzle box that helps begin and end the timelines for events, and the ending of the film is about as strong a closure as you can get.

I enjoyed the short stories within this film, all of them feel pretty strong, though not quite as strong as the original elements, theres a nice consistency tonally amongst all the stories. The Merchants as characters are all a little bit on the flat side, it maybe would have been nice to see a little bit more character varience rather than them just increasingly modernising the same personality type. But Angelique as a character nicely counter balances it as a seductive and sadistic demon/cenobite…thingie…I dont think the film really clarifies what shes supposed to be.

Technically the film looks sound, with some solid effects work for 1996, I enjoyed the direction for the most part, though I think the middle story does take a bit of a hit, just in the sense of I dont think the set work is as good as the set spaces for the other two films. That being said, the Cenobites look fantastic, they bring back that wonderful cool blue lighting and some decent experimental chiascuro to help really bring things to life, the candle lit sequences in the first story are delightfully handled and there does seem to be an attempt to reignight some experimental cine, with decent compositional choices that genuinely gave Pinhead as a character a bit of menace.

Performances are, for the most part as sharp as always, there are a few wobbly deliveries here and there, but nothing too gratuitous, and we see a VERY welcome return to orchestral and grand soundtracking, after the last films dalliance with rock music.

‘Hellraiser: Bloodline’ is a fantastic jumping off point for the series, if you want to recoup your losses after ‘Hellraiser III’ I feel like this one leaves the franchise in an ‘iffy’ but positive place. Its far from perfect, and very VERY dumb. particularly with the ending. But its not dumb in an annoying way, its dumb in a kind of endearing way. It feels like the people involved really understood the core concepts of the series. They just maybe didnt have the budget or comprehension to fully get it over the line, and the result is a film thats a bit silly, wearing the skin of a higher concept movie.

I enjoy this one because it is what it is, it isnt trying to convince you its better than it is. and I think if you didnt enjoy Hellraiser III, you should probably give this one a go. I’d definitely say its worth catching, and this one will definitely be going into rotation more often. Underrated.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/hellraiser-bloodline/

Working through the ’31 horror films in 31 days’ Halloween challenge this year, we arrive at another selection from the Missus, and a film that I previously hadnt seen. ‘The Little Vampire’ was particularly prominant in the UK, with heavy advertisement on the terrestrial channels and a LOT of kids VHS releases from around this time running teasers and full trailers for it ahead of the main feature. It passed me by, but at the time It did pique my curiosity. Mainly for being able to see Richard E. Grant simultaineously playing a lead vampire, the ‘Shalka’ Doctor AND Withnail, all in the space of one movie!

The plot follows a young boy named Tony who’s family have moved from the US to Scotland as Tonys Dad has got a gig refurbishing a Scottish Lords land into a commerical golf course. But since landing at their new home, Tony has become obsessed with Vampires. At night he dreams of a hoard of vampires weilding a mysterious amulet drawing power from a comet thats been granted mysterious powers by the moonlight.

Tony isnt entirely sure what any of this means, but he has bigger fish to fry, his parents are constantly busy with his Lordship, and the Lords kids bully Tony at school mercilessly. But one night, while playing dress up as a vampire…an ACTUAL vampire who’s being hunted by a modern day ‘Slayer’ crashes into Tonys room, thinking he’s found a fellow kin member…only to realise he’s revealed himself to a human.

But Tony is thrilled! he’s wanted to meet a vampire ever since the visions started, and after the pair introduce themselves, our Vampire reveals his name is ‘Rudolph’ and that he’s in desperate need of some cows blood to recover from the incident.

Tony obliges, and explains that he is one of the final members of a regional hoard of Vampires. He says that Vampirism has changed a lot in the 300+ years since his coven was in its prime. They largely hide from humans now, and only consume Animal blood to sustain themselves as it helps to fight the stereotype that vampires are human killers. Despite most of them not having drunk human blood in over 3 centuries…the myth still persists to this day.

Tony and Rudolph form a strong friendship, eventually leading Rudolph to take Tony to his families crypt, where an unexpected meeting happens. Rudolphs family are terrified of Tony and quite firmly ask him to leave. But when Rudolphs father touches Tony, the pair share a flashback, bringing about a preivously unseen vision of one of their ancestors holding the mysterious amulet, which has been missing now for 300 years. This vision strongly implies that the amulet is still out there and fairly local. And so Tony, Rudolph and the rest of the family must work together to try and figure out just what exactly happened to the family amulet, While also avoiding the ‘Slayer’ who’s been given full clearence by the Lordship to take the vampires out by any means necessary, and who is ALSO looking for the amulet, as he has a device which, when the amulet is placed into it, will allow him to permanently eradicate all vampires from existence!

And im going to be honest here, I had a fine enough time with this movie, is it a lifechanging work that warrents an annual revisit? No. I think, unless you have a bedded in nostalgia for this film, it’ll probably be one sparsly revisited. But I would watch this one again happily and found it a pretty passively entertaining time.

The scripts a little slow to get going, with it being a film aimed at younger children they spend a MASSIVE amount of time explaining and re-explaining basic plot points to try and make sure everyones on board with the story, the plot itself is very simplified. It isnt trying to overcomplicate things. but the film really doesnt hit its stride or start using the momentum its building up until just after the half way point…and thats kind of a fundamental problem if you happen to be a kids film. Because, I dont know a kid that would willing sit through 45 minutes of passive plot and world building, peppered with some (at the time) kind of alright visual effects pieces. to be rewarded with an actually kind of solid 45 minute second half. Most would have waddled off to go and play with an electrical socket or to play under the cupboard mixing ammonia and bleach before the 20 minute mark…and im being generous there.

Luckily, I am not a child and I do have patience, and I found the back half of this film to be a gentle but fun little romp, the pacing really picks up, it finally finds its feet as a horror adventure film with some light comedy elements. and it ends about as strongly as these films can. It struggles for a bit to find its feet tonally, but when it does it locks in and really delivers on that.

I think structurally the film does sag a bit in the middle, a common problem with kids movies like this, the first and third acts run a little shorter to accomodate additional lore and info dumping in the middle, but its pretty clear they padded the runtime in multiple places to hit that 90 minute sweet spot for TV and home video releases. The padding here isnt bad, its just kind of unremarkable. Not something I can rib, but not anything to praise really.

The characters are all VERY oversimplified. which, for the most part works in the films favour, by not giving the supporting characters more of a backstory, it enables the film to bring more backstory to the vampires, which is really why any kid is actually watching this, it means characters like the Slayer and the Lord are SUPER one dimensional. But again, that works in the films favour, because they can milk that for humour.

I do wish Tony had maybe had a bit more of a complex character if im honest. It starts off somewhat strong making Tony a victim of bullying, but they push that a little far with a scene in his school where he’s being mocked by his teacher for wanting to talk about vampires…to the point he gets sent out of class, which I felt was quite unbelievable…and then as soon as Tony meets his vampire friends, he largely seems to exist to just…do the bits the vampires cant do for plot reasons, while also bullying the kids who bullied him initially…which isnt the best message to be teaching kids…but hey, whatever. Oh! and the dialogues also a but ropey in places…some lines are a bit awkward and some feel like they were trying to push the overexplanation a bit too far.

Other than that though, we have a pretty solid film technically. The direction and cine are both incredibly fresh feeling, they relish the opportunity to film on location with green lush rolling hills and gorgeous colour and framing work, the lighting is open to experimentation and looks complex and engaging. the cine is well composed, with some nice experimentaiton and what made me laugh was some shots were ‘half inched’ from some of the 80s horror classics. I spotted at least a couple of shots ‘liberated’ from ‘The People under the stairs’ which I thought was a fun touch.

The sequences are very well composed, if I had to gripe, some of the set work, particularly the graveyard scenes that were set built, look cheap…VERY cheap…like, late night horror host on a shoestring budget cheap. and that pulled me out of the action because, while again, they were at least kind of well lit, they overdid it with the smoke machine and some of the graves are visually vaccume form and styrafoam.

I would usually discuss performances, but as a courtesty to an largely all kid cast. I’ll skip my usual analytics, other than to say some of the kid actors are really pretty solid, and give great turns…others?…VERY much not the case. prepare for a long ride with some cast members who just CANNOT get a line out convincingly…I’ll say no more.

It makes it all the more unfortunate given how good the visusals are for this film, that it appears they skimped on the soundtrack as well…we have a cheap and cheerful farty midi synth score for the most part, its actually quite distracting because it sounds so cheap and unpleasent when compared to how rich the camera work and direction is…the only way I could compare it really is; imagine if ‘Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back’ had been scored by Richard Band. Its THAT disorienting…

All in all, do I think ‘The Little Vampire’ would still win over kids of today? No. I think this could be modernised into something kids would love. But this adaptation? is very much a product of its time. As someone who lived through that time however, I can appreciate what it was trying to do, and i’d say I enjoyed more than I disliked. It wont be in regular rotation, but I could see myself revisiting this one again sometime when I want a quick and easy watch. Not one I could recommend, but if your big on 00’s nostalgia, you may wanna hit this one up.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/the-little-vampire/