TYTD Reviews

Camp Blood 2 is the long awaited horror sequel to 1999’s Camp Blood. And by “Awaited” I mean 3 people were vaguely interested in seeing more of the “CBU” (camp blood universe) AND BY “Long” I mean about 6-8 months. Thats because Camp Blood 2 was *technically* being ironed out before the original Camp Blood had even finished filming. With Camp blood getting a release in early mid 2000, They LITERALLY were working on franchising the series before an assembly cut of the original even existed. And that STILL is just…blowing my mind. It does kind of make you think what kind of people were working on this film when they already had a “Multi film” roadmap on the cards before the first was even finished…

Anyway! Given my original thoughts on “Camp Blood” were that I thought it was (in my opinion) a reletively boring watch with poor technical ability, WAY too much padding and a chronic case of the “In References” I didnt exactly have the highest hopes for “Camp Blood 2”. Frankly given how low the bar was set with the original “Camp Blood” One did find ones self wondering how it could POSSIBLY get any worse. Well; What we have here with “Camp Blood 2” is a film that, in some regards is actually a bit better than the original, but in some regards is actually quite a bit worse.

The plot of the film is Astoundingly simplistic and about as generic as they come for a post 90’s horror film. Taking a page out of the Scream franchise the film picks up about 12 months after the events of the original Camp Blood, Trisha is still in an insane asylum after the events of the first movie where her and her friends went on a camping trip and ended up on the receiving end of a killer clown from folk legend. Trisha was able to reveal the killer to be non other than their woodland guide “Harris” however, when the cops turned up they could only find a ton of dead bodies and Trisha covered in blood holding a clown mask and the murder weapon.

The original film left it a little bit open ended as to whether Trisha was the only survivor of Harris or whether she was actually the killer and had had some kind of mental breakdown. But the sequel opens making it EXTREMELY clear that Trisha was not the killer in the first movie. Which actually kind of undercuts one of the only okayish things I thought about the first film…

Anyway; a year after the event Trisha is still struggling and has recurring dreams that shes being chased through the woods by the killer clown. Things are about to change pace however when she receives a visitor in the form of Worth Milligan a film maker who’s been researching the events of “Camp Blood” and wants to make a movie of the events with Trisha on board as an executive producer…basically she’ll get to work on the scripts, casting, how events played out. The whole thing. Milligan is FAR from sincere though trying to sell her on the idea of getting involved by citing the success of “The Blair Witch Project” as a reason he wants to make the movie.

Trisha is rightfully concerned that this might just end up being a cheap exploitation style cash in on her friends deaths, so she initially walks away saying she’ll consider it, but after arriving back at her “Cell” she has a flashback to the events of the first movie and decides that working with Millington might actually help her get over her trauma, and…well…anythings got to be better than being trapped for life in someones 1980s livingroom.

So! With that, Trisha requests an meeting with Milligan and heads out to L.A. to meet him while he’s in the process of casting for the movie. And it’s hear that we get the first feelings that things arnt quite as “Professional” as Milligan had promised. For a starters the casting is being held by Milligan and his assistant, whos a chronic alcoholic and is drinking during the casting and doesnt seem to know how to operate the camera used for the casting call.

All female applicants are ogled and when Trisha arrives at the office shes almost immediately jumped on by our alcoholic assistant in a clown mask while holding a machete. Which…given her PTSD for this, was DEFINITELY the worst way they could have opened discussions on her helping with the shoot. In either case these discussions are fairly short, in fact. Thinking about it, I don’t think Trisha ever actually agrees to take part. She just turns up, gets jumped by one of the crew and then is somehow suddenly involved in the movie.

After the ‘Incident’ Trisha asks to step outside to get some air and it’s here she meets Adrian, a young woman here to apply for a role in the movie who has a nice chat with Trisha, gives her her last cigarette before heading inside. Unfortunately; just as shes going in for the casting call, Worth tells her that the films been fully cast and that the last actress in just got the last available role leaving Adrian devastated.

That night however after a full frontal nudity shower (not for this movie…please…) the actress worth hired is mysteriously murdered. So! The next day when the cast get together for introductions and to run through their roles, when that cast member is a no show Worth tells Trisha to go through some mugshots and cast a replacement…well; of course she goes for Adrian. While heading out to go call her though, Trisha is AGAIN attacked by a clown killer. Who chases her all around the casting building until she gets back to the casting room. At which point it’s revealed to be the SAME alcoholic crew member AGAIN. Clearly illustrating that this is a film for people with the memory span of a goldfish.

So with the cast and crew all arranged Worth piles everyone into a mini van and they all head out to the woods to start filming. In a move that…well, it’s pretty baffling. Worth failed to tell the cast or crew that they were actually heading out to film at the ACTUAL site of the camp blood murders. Trisha is naturally quiter triggered at the thought that they’re about to recreate her fiance and friends murders at the site where it actually happened. But Worth says he’s doing this for convenience and authenticity. Why settle for a site thats *like* the place where the murders happened when the ACTUAL place the murders happened is right on their doorstep!

So! They head into the woods, set up. And it doesnt take long for mysterious happenings to…happen. People start disappearing, the actors begin to feel uncomfortable around Trisha who may or may not be responsible for the disappearances and tensions begin to rise after Milligan threatens to send Trisha back to the asylum if she doesnt cooperate with his vision of the film. Which; in turn leads to some very exploitative and nasty tensions between him and the cast and crew. As the bodies pile high in the last 15 minutes, Will Trisha get closure for the camp blood murders? Will Worth get to make his movie? And will this movie break the world record for the number of times the previous film will be shown, referenced or basically played back in full!? All this and more will be answered if you watch; Camp blood 2.
And to be honest; the quick caption review for this thing should really start and stop at “This is a great “Value” movie, it’s a terrible sequel.” and what I mean by that is, it’s great value in the sense that if you buy ‘Camp Blood 2’ you don’t need to buy or watch ‘Camp Blood’ because they tell you, beat for beat the FULL plot from beginning to end about 5 or 6 times over and over again across the runtime of this movie. Complete with about 20-30 minutes of flashback clips from the original Camp Blood as well! And the original Camp Blood was only about an hour and 10 long to begin with!

It suffers from similar problems to Silent Night Deadly Night 2 where a not insignificant chunk of the runtime is dedicated to talking about or showing footage from the original film. And while that kind of worked with Silent Night 2 because…”GARBAGE DAY” here? There is NO such eccentricities. Strip away the scenes of people recounting the original movie and the flashback sequences and your left with about 40 minutes of border mind numbing running around and fluffy dialogue designed to pad the film out till its LITERALLY just about long enough to dump on DVD without anyone demanding their money back.

Its just such a generic idea for a script. It genuinely feels like the writer/director saw the opening of Scream 2 where its revealed the events of the first film got made into a movie and went “Hey!…imagine if an ACTUAL killer got onto the set and killed the cast for real!” Like they had an idea for a decent enough 20-30 minute short film that was tied to the original Camp blood. But then realised they couldnt really bolt it onto the original film without it feeling a bit wonky, nor could they release it as a 20-30 minute mini movie without losing the ability to distribute it or make money off it. So they just Crammed a load of footage from the first movie into it and added a few more runaround scenes till it got *just* over the line to sell it as its own movie.

Theres so little here to talk about regarding the script, mainly because so much of this is either people arguing or recycled footage. To the point that there isnt really anything fresh to latch onto in a positive way. There isnt really a solid 3 act structure. Just a series of scenes that feel a bit like “Well…if we have the budget we could maybe try to do this?” happening one after another right up to the end credits…I could split this film into “Before they go to the woods” and “When they get to the woods” but to be honest all that changes in the characters between those two locations is they get more angry when they get to the woods as they realise the movies been missold to them and people start disappearing.

The pacing is all out of whack because we have to keep stopping and starting to talk about points from the first movie, there are TONS of weird plot point moments that don’t really get picked up properly like, how could someone like Worth afford to get Trisha out of an insane asylum to have her advise on the film, while at the same time only being able to afford 2 crew members, one of which is a stoner who threatens to kill everyone and the other being an alcoholic who, on any other plaine of reality would have been off the set for “Inappropriate behaviour” before they’d even left the casting room.

It just feels like someone trying to write what they *think* an audience would accept as a bad movie set…when in reality REAL bad sets involve a LOT more people and get particularly emotionally malicious. Its incredibly annoying to sit through as someone who has been on many bad sets, when you see things like Worth saying and doing stuff that would have resulted in full blown walkouts happening before they’d even loaded tape into the camera.

Theres just, so many little things that are problematic, the fact that theres very little character development. I mean, This was a chance to give Trisha the strong female lead comeback arc that probably would have made this movie ten times more interesting, but instead shes still a mentally collpased individual when the film starts, and shes if anything even worse by the time the film finishes. That wouldnt be so much of a problem if that wasnt EXACTLY how she was in the last movie. It would have at least been interesting to let her change her tone on how she deals with this grief. Im not saying she has to have a “Strong badass female” retribution arc like Laurie Strode of Barbara in the Night of the living dead remake. But just…ANY kind of development beyond “Shes exactly the same as she was in the last movie, but now WAY more jumpy!” would have been nice.

And this is a problem that not only effects Trisha, the rest of the cast don’t grow or develop really either. They’re all quite narcissistic actors who, if anything only get more narcissistic as the film goes on until they’re inevitably bumped off.

Add in an underwhelming ending that tries SO hard to tie itself into the first movie with a reveal that…was SO obvious it hurt, and you’ve just got a terrifically underwhelming script that has a nugget or two of a good idea buried DEEP inside it but is ultimately NOT what this needed to be as a sequel. It needed to take the first film a build on it. It needed to be definitively better, to have shown growth and improvement. As it stands its happy to settle with “More of the same” with a generous helping of self referencing. And in doing that it has rather sealed its fate.

Returning on writing and directing duties for this one is Brad Sykes, I already took a deep dive into his work as part of my review for Camp Blood. But what I will say at this point is that I hadnt realised when I started covering this series that theres actually TWO camp blood 3’s…In 2005 Brad Sykes once again picked up a camera to shoot “Camp Blood 3: Within the Woods” a proposed closing part to a camp blood trilogy that bizarrely…even though its written AND directed by Brad Sykes ISNT considered as an official entry in the “Official” series line. The other is included in my Camp Blood collectors Set and is known as “Camp Blood 3: First Slaughter” released in 2014 written and directed by two people not really associated with ANYTHING to do with the previous movies…I don’t know which one i’ll cover next…first person to tell me in the comments will get their wish granted… See you there.

On the direction front, I will give Brad credit, I feel theres some improvement. It’s only minor, but there is a noticeable “Tightening up” on structure and vision here, we have clear establishing shots of the locations used in places, some sequences appear to have had more thought put to them such as using different filters to differentiate when we’re dealing with the cameras used to shoot this movie and the cameras used to shoot the movie within the movie. Sequences seem a little bit more thought through, not necessarily on shot type but on what Sykes wants to put across in his movie vs what the characters could just…flat out tell us.

That isnt to say though that this is now a “Good” film from a direction standpoint. We still have problems with sequences containing shots that don’t really need to be there, the amount of padding is something a good director would be able to turn into something vaguely meaningful, but here its just lacking that solid hand on steerage, and the cast, while *slightly* better directed than the first film still seem fairly lost. They don’t give confident performances and, while I will give them credit for using their surroundings a bit more here than the last lot, they still don’t really feel all that confident about HOW to go about utilising the set space.

It also doesnt help that this film kind of gets a bit leery in places, now I know a lot of people come to horror for T&A, Im not going to fight that, but there are ways to shoot said T&A to make it look sexy or interesting. To pull your audience in with an allure of titilation. Here it feels less alluring and more “Exhibit A”. I cant show any examples here (for obvious reasons), but theres a shower scene in this movie that goes on WAY longer than i’d have liked and the way Brads decided to shoot the thing REALY made me look around to make sure noone could see me watching this thing. It didnt feel sexy, it felt like I was committing a felony.

The whole thing honestly is a bit of a mixed bag and given that Brad was the writer AND director here I would have thought he would have been able to make a rational and clean cut decision as to whether to leave out scenes from the script that struggled to translate well to the screen. Unfortunately it looks like he shot pretty much beat for beat and even if some things DIDNT work out too great he just powered on regardless and as a result it ends in an uneven film thats, probably a bit better than the first to me in terms of direction…but only just.

As for the cine? Don’t you worry! It’s just as bad as ever. Im not kidding this thing looks EXACTLY like the previous movie only with a slightly higher budget. And when I say “Slightly higher budget” I mean they’ve been able to afford a slightly higher quality clown mask, they’ve replaced poorly made signs with slightly better quality poorly made signs, the titles and credits are bigger and cleaner than the original, and while I will say that the sequences here are a little bit more sturdy when compared to the cine of the original, its also a lot LOT safer than the original.

The original had chases down dirt roads, a couple of fights in a river, and aftershots of people being roasted alive. This movie has NOTHING like that. Its all just sequences of people wandering around the woods or backrooms and thats it. Sequences are acceptable, with basic cuts and transitions covering things off without being too offensive. And while in some regards safer sequences reduce the risk of things not quite working or worse going horribly wrong, the downside of playing it safe is that safe sequences…are REALLY bloody boring.

Now I will give them credit here where credits due, there are at least a couple of sequences where they use coloured lighting which…I mean, its here for no particular reason, but i’ll give it to them. Thats a step up from the low/no lighting they had in the first film. And the effects shots here got a REAL big boost you actually get some pretty nice gore shots here that are handled within the cine and sequences rather well! In fact I’d go as far as to say the gore scenes in Camp Blood 2 ARE the best thing about camp blood 2!

That is however somewhat deminished by the same recurring issues that plagued the first film, shots arnt levelled off and are regularly wonky, the edits either cut too soon or too late which can pull you out of the moment, there a weird ghosting effect that plagues a lot of the footage and no consideration was given to sun placement meaning some shots have a great big bright fucker in the background that doesnt half make the shot look ugly. And as if matters couldnt get any worse…remember in my original Camp blood review when I said some shots had this weird trim running around the edge of the frame? Like it looked like the camera was in a camera bag looking through a translucent window or something? well..THE BAGS FUCKING BACK! I thought it was an error that was missed when they made the first film! But NOPE! Apparently it was intentional as they sure as shit don’t bother to fix that issue in part 2! I just…Im at a loss with this thing.

Performance wise…Jennifer Ritchkoff as Trisha is the best performer here. If im being honest…she isnt great. But she has a more than decent bash at playing a scream queen. A bash I think she does acceptably. Given she now has a history thanks to the first film I feel it gives her the scope here to at least work with whats established rather than clinging to existing horror stereotypes like she did in the last film. That being said though Im still trying to decide if I think her performance has gotten better since the last movie or whether all the other cast being slightly WORSE than the last bunch has just kind of…made her more presentable.

Because my GOD the rest of the cast in this thing are insufferable. My main criticism from the last batch of cast members were they were a little too reliant on the horror character archetypes and their performances were just above porn acting…how I long for for those days. As we now have characters who are playing to “typical actor” stereotypes and we’re just…full on into porn level acting. Lines are delivered completely unbelievably, quite often with almost no feeling and even the more interesting sequences or scenes where revelations happen are played down SO much as to be almost muted. Its a bad lot. And the only good thing I can really say is, at least the padding and clips from the first film offer as a distraction from the shoddy acting on display here…in my opinion at least.

And finally; the soundtrack. And if my ears don’t decieve me. I am…99.9% sure that this is just the original camp blood score re-run over this movie. There may be 1 or 2 new tracks in the mix to help give a sense of distinction. But, im pretty convinced they literally just recycled the previous films score and shoved it onto this thing. So given that I wasnt impressed with it when it was used for the first time in the original “Camp Blood” I sure as hell don’t like it now that they’re being so cheap that they’re just reusing the old score over again.

Equally; as an aside too, they didnt bother to get any atmos recordings for the locations they shot at, meaning the set audio veers WILDELY all over the place. Generally when you shoot a movie you get “Room tone” (basically 5 minutes or so of the rooms natural silence) so that you have better control over actor dialogue and other sounds in post…they didnt bother. So this film jumps all over the place going from loud to almost muted with no balancing on background OR foreground noise. Its just a total mess.

Camp Blood 2 was released on VHS and DVD by Spectrum films in the US in the year 2000, it would also later recieve a DVD release in the UK in 2002 by Film 2000, it would have a couple of releases over the 2000’s in various “Multi film” packs typically alongside the original Camp Blood. It was released as a drive in double feature Bluray alongside “Camp Blood” with a 3d conversion of all things from Sterling Entertainment in 2011.this same disc would ultimately end up in the “Complete camp blood” collection which is the version I own as of 2021. And you’ll be totally unsurprised to hear that the version included on this set is basically the DVD version dumped onto a bluray disc complete with tape faults and sound drop outs present in the original DVD release.

Im not even sure if this has been upscaled. It looks pixellated and murky and just..not particularly great at all, theres no extras barring a load of trailers for other movies that the distribution company have shot in 3d…some boutique labels release their movies with a certain reverence. Y’know. They’ll treat these physical releases as a kind of shrine to the films existence. There’ll be commentaries, documentaries, trailers, making of’s all kinds of things that make you think “Oh wow! This film has a living breathing history behind it!” this release has more adverts for 3d conversion technology on it than it does extras about the movies included on this release…I just…I have NO idea what they were thinking with this set. Its a poor presentation…

Ultimately; if you liked camp blood and wanted more of the same. Here it is! It’s barely a movie honestly and stops just short of basically being a clip show. The only capacity with which I can recommend Camp Blood 2 is that it’ll save you time on watching the original Camp Blood. AND theres some slightly decent effects shots in this, which the first one didnt really have. Other than that it’s a tired. BORING movie that wasted 75 minutes of my time, and one I wholeheartedly recommend you avoid alongside the original. It did almost nothing but jerk itself off over how great it thought the first movie was and that seldom makes for an enjoyable time… Don’t get me wrong! If I want to watch a camp blood movie, this will be the one I watch. But in many ways…thats the problem.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/camp-blood-2/

I’d heard about Nukie over 10 years ago when Brad “The Cinema Snob” Jones bluntly and forthrightly declared “Nukie” to be THE worst movie he’d ever seen…not one of the worst, THE. worst…and that guys seen some shit in his time. So I took his word for it. A few years later Red Letter Media began hoarding copies of it and being incredibly coy around exactly what their stance on the film was. I took this as a decent sign that this film was something special. Something that would REALLY test my metal. And…as GOD is my witness…I sat through this entire movie. And all I could really think as the credits rolled was “Welp…That was 95 minutes.”

Y’see; what we have here with Nukie can only be described as a time sink, it’s about 95 minutes of barely incoherent and repetitive nothingness just sort of…oozing out of the screen one happenstance after another. I don’t know if I’m blowing some big cottage industry secret here when I say that no. Nukie isnt that bad, “Lets Ruin Dads Day” is bad, “Nutbag” is bad, “Camp Blood” is bad. Nukie is not bad. It’s fucking boring!…but it’s not bad. Because of this, explaining the plot is going to be a bit more condensed than usual, mainly because theres SO much repetition that I might as well just write one scene and then copy paste it a few times if I wanna go down the “Full breakdown” route. So heres the basic gist.

Nukie opens in possibly the most underwhelming way imaginable…with this obviously being an E.T knock off, generally the idea is you warm your cast up to the aliens, maybe set the scene first then slowly reveal and introduce them. NOT HERE! Instead we just flat out introduce Nukie and Miko, two brothers who’re just palling around and having a ball in the one place that hasnt been corrupted by capitalism…SPACE!. The pair get a little too wild and free and accidentally fly too close to the planet earth, getting pulled in by the planets gravity and losing track of each other in the process, Miko ends up crash landing in America and Nukie ends up wiping out in central africa.

Due to the amount of radiation the pair give off while in “flying mode” their presence sets off every aviation and federal agency alarm going and almost immediately Miko is captured by the authorities and taken to a laboratory who want to experiment on him to find out more about extraterrestrial life. Nukie meanwhile wakes up in a savannah and spends a frankly obscene amount of time wandering around the plaines shouting Mikos name and trying to talk to Giraffes and Zebras. While this is going on the scientists tranquillise Miko and begin their experimentation, Nukie tries to telepathically connect with Miko, but Miko is drugged up and incredibly weak and doesn’t know where he is.

After a time Miko is well enough to tell Nukie that he’s in America…But Nukie doesnt know where or what an America is!, so he cant really do anything, instead he complains that he doesnt like the dark, tries to sleep and then complains that he doesnt like the sun. meanwhile the scientists have locked on to Nukies radiation signal and they decide to put one of their best scientists on the case, Dr. Eric Harvey with the mission of seeing if any alien tech crashed to earth and to try and capture Nukie and bring him back.

We then cut back to Nukie who is STILL wandering around this fucking Savannah, and he briefly meets two young twin boys called Tucki and Tiko. Things don’t quite go to plan however as they’re instantly terrified of the sentient little woeful looking bollock (and understandably so!) While Nukie is mid introduction, the pair flee and make each other promise to never speak of the encounter again. So! Nuki pillocks about in the savannah for a bit more, Miko gets tortured by the malicious and border sociopathic Dr. Glynn, Nukie falls asleep again, we BRIEFLY get introduced to a nun by the name of Sister Anne who tells us that Dr. Eric is on his way (we havent actually seen him up to this point) Nukie wakes up and immediately starts bumbling about AGAIN. And we have at least 1 solid minute where Miko just shouts “NUKIIIEEEEEEEEE” over and over again. And I need to make it clear right here, that this is what the writer and director THOUGHT would be an acceptable first act for a childrens movie…Im not kidding, that’s the first 30ish minutes of this movie.

Mercifully a BIT more happens in the 2nd act…but only a little bit more mind…As, for some reason that the film doesn’t entirely explain, Nukie ends up buried alive and his rising out of the dirt (and possibly him hearing Mikos pained screams) triggers a freak storm to blow through a nearby missionary station and a small African village. And if youuuuuuuuuuuuu can believe it, this is going to pretty much be the main thrust of the film from here on in. So in relatively quick succession, it’s revealed that Sister Anne and her security partner have a pet Chimpanzee that can telepathically communicate and is a bit of an annoying arsehole THEN it’s revealed that despite not being able to talk to Rhinos, Giraffes and Zebras, Nukie CAN telepathically communicate with Monkeys. He meets a troupe of monkeys just…doing their thing. And after speaking to them for a bit about trying to find “America” the Monkeys suggest that Nukie visit “Charlie” Sister Annes Chimp in the nearby village.

Shortly after this, two hunters from the village try to kill Nukie, and he responds by paralyzing one of them. The other hunter drags his friend back to the village but noone can help. Meanwhile, after a frankly obscene amount of time Dr. Eric FINALLY touches down at the village and is almost immediately told to head home by Sister Anne, it’s later revealed that the village has got a bit of a crisis of faith going on at the minute, the sister arrived and managed to convert the village from their old traditions of sacrifice to christianity and with some recent plights hitting the village, along with the recent freak storms and paralyzed hunters, she REALLY doesnt want some American flyboy dropping in to tell the village potentially lethal aliens are wandering about the plains.

While this is going on, Nukie makes it to the village and links in with Charlie…who doesnt tell him anything new and is an annoying arsehole. The pair destroy a storeroom and Nukie flees the scene, eventually meeting back up with the twins again, who are being attacked by a Lioness. Nukie knocks the Lioness out cold and the boys once again try to run away. But this time, they kind of accept that Nukie’s probably actually kind of alright. And…as an aside because I need to fit this bit in somewhere, after the lioness attack, we then cut back to Miko who just flat out walks out of his testing chamber, goes up to the scientists super advanced computer and just starts screwing around with it, The computer plays a hypnosis programme that knocks Miko out as apparently…its an evil supercomputer for some reason?

Anyway; there then follows a BEYOND long winded sequence in which Nukie uses a radio to call back to the village where Charlie picks up and fills him in on the situation, the pair swap information and…well…long story short Nukie steals Dr. Erics Helicopter, nearly destroys the village with it, before crashing it just outside and fleeing the scene. Miko meanwhile wakes up from his hypnosis and just. Rewires the evil computer to instead make it his best friend. And it works. The pair trade some information and the next day when the scientists come in to check on things, they find Miko asleep at the computer and the machine talking about the joys of friendship and love.

After a time, Nukie heads back to the village to try to apologise for destroying the expensive helicopter and almost immediately gets jumped by the village, an elongated comedy chase scene ensues in which Nukie and the twins are captured. At this point too theres a brief scene where one of the scientists called Pamela begs Dr Glynn to stop the experiments which gets met with a rather blunt “hmm…no.” and then! It’s sacrifice time! As Nukie is sent to be “Wicker manned” and the twins, who are being tried for having hung around with a supposed “Demon” are cast out of the village for what they’ve done. Leading to a confrontation between the leader of the village and Sister Anne who’s appalled with the situation and debates the leader over moral choices.

After only a short time of being kicked out of the village, the twins see a bright light in the sky which turns out to be Nukie! Yes somehow he escaped being roasted alive and to celebrate he gives the boys a toasty fire and they all swap stories about their lives before bed. Nukie also reveals that he’s got to find Miko soon as, if he doesnt, he’ll become too weak to leave the planet. It’s at this point Nukie decides to give us an inexplicable extended dance break. He then drugs the children and falls asleep himself.

While Nukie heads back to the village AGAIN to cause carnage, Miko continues to develop the super computer, who renames itself “Eddie” and confesses his feelings for Pamela and after a HELL of a lot of seizure inducing footage, the lead scientist and possible boss of the company comes in and asks what on EARTH is going on. And Miko and Eddie basically lobotomise the lead scientist, turning him from a moody miser into a fun time happy clown of a man…oh, and that’s permanent by the way!

It’s here that we find ourselves on to the 3rd act, as one of the twins gets bitten by a poisonous king cobra and Eric and the Corporal head out to rescue the twins on the orders of Sister Anne, a race against time ensues to get the them back to the village for treatment. And when the Corporal manages to find and tranq Nukie and the sister begins to suspect foul play, the twins are left to find each other, free Nukie, defeat the corporal, clear their names, get Nukie to America, find Miko, shut down the evil scientists and get the pair off this hell hole of a rock. I’m not kidding, it’s almost like they forgot their movie had to have a point right up until around 20 minutes off the end. In a frankly fractious finale where they, rather than trying to resolve the narrative thread at a reasonable rate instead go for the “cramming shrapnel pieces of plot right into a tightest closing point of this thing and hoping they can cram enough to pass with the audience”. Will Nukie and Miko be reunited?, will Dr Eric actually have a point? And will the twins get their names cleared? If you enjoy watching paint dry, then you‘ll love finding out when watching…Nukie.

And my god this script is like a tapeworm. It just goes ON and ON and ON with very little pleasure to be had for anyone involved with it. I can quite honestly say that this is one of the most broken scripts I’ve sat through…quite possibly ever. Right off the bat, the scene ordering is a total mess, key examples being the ENTIRE of Dr. Erics plotline, which is totally bewildering. They mention he’s involved near the opening of the film, there’s a glimpse of his helicopter about 20-30 minutes in, and then seemingly he arrives, looks around a bit, speaks to sister Anne, gets his Helicopter destroyed, fixes his Helicopter, leaves, comes back, leaves again, comes back again and then leaves again. That’s it. That’s his whole plot, he’s supposed to be our alien napper for the movie and he spends more time fixing his Helicopter than he does looking for Nukie!

Situations will regularly be spoken about out loud by the cast and then replayed beat for beat in literally the next scene, but the way the scenes play out make it look like the latter scene is fresh information to the audience. Like; There’s TONS of examples of characters physically saying “Well I sure hope this thing doesnt happen!” followed immediately in the next scene with the same characters saying “Oh no! That thing we don’t want to happen is happening! We didnt want this to happen!” as if it’s the first time they’ve said it.

The amount of repetition is a joke, when I say that the first 30 minutes of this film is Miko getting tortured in a lab and Nukie pissing about in a field with accompanying dialogue which is AT LEAST 60% Just Nukie and Miko shouting each others names over and over again. I’m not exaggerating…that’s the movie, and even in the 2nd and 3rd act when more elements get introduced…that’s STILL fundamentally the movie in a nutshell, pissing about in a field or a lab shouting each other’s names. And because it’s so repetitive and structurally unstable, even the weird and interesting bits like the talking chimpanzee, the helicopter crash, the weird Nukie Dance sequence, the bit where he teaches one of the twins to fly. All that nonsense just gets drained of it’s bizarreness almost entirely, because you cant focus on the weirdness because your too busy trying to figure out which way is “up” with this thing.

What I will say is they have at least managed to stick to a rigid 3 act structure. Those gear changes clunk rather tonedeafly, but there is an unmistakable shift in tone when this thing transitions between its acts. But…honestly; even with the act structure, this is still a movie that’s pretty much entirely made up of padding with about 12 minutes of movie sprinkled in throughout…it’s almost completely aimless. You could honestly take the first 5 minutes and the last 5 minutes, slam them together and you wouldn’t lose a single bit of the main story as a result. Its incoherent to the point that I had to rewind, pause, and even read up externally on exactly what was *supposed* to be happening in this thing, it’s that messy. And this noxious combination of incoherence and boredom left me with a film that struggled to hold my interest and when it did pull me in, struggled even harder to keep it.

On a closing note, the dialogue too is just ATROCIOUS. As mentioned at LEAST 60% of the dialogue is just Nukie and Miko either shouting each others names or chatting absolute bollocks to each other. And the rest of the script reads like someone threw a slice of emmental cheese at a dictionary and then wrote down the words that showed up in the holes. It’s inconsistent,stilted and filled with lines that shouldnt have made it out of the draft edit. In many cases entire conversations happen in this that add NOTHING to the thrust of the main plot and are just…BEYOND confusing.

This is in my opinion, without hyperbole,one of the worst scripts I’ve ever covered on the channel, if not THE worst script I’ve covered on the channel. Not because it’s enjoyably bad, not because it’s insufferably bad. It won’t test your metal, it won’t make you laugh, it’s just a clear example of someone out of the depth, doing something they’re clearly not comfortable doing. And as a result its beneath amateurish,It’s convoluted, long winded, boring, drab and dull and genuinely not worth the 95(ish) minutes you need to sit through it to find that out.

The script was written by Ben Taylor and co written and co directed by Sias Odendaal. Sias came up with the initial plot beats and Ben then took that pitch and expanded it into the full screenplay. Ben has 17 writing credits with his last being in 2006 and unsurprisingly you’ll be stunned to learn this was Ben’s first feature writing credit. Which, does explain a lot…(he had a single writing credit for 1 episode of a kids TV show prior to this) I’d say this is probably his most infamous credit, but he also seems quite well known for a movie called “In the Flesh”.

As for Sias? He has 6 directing credits, mostly for films that, other than a title, have ZERO information attached to them…like, literally; the title and the year is all we have. Nukie was his final directing credit and he hasn’t been seen in the industry since 1996. The film was also co-directed by Michael Pakleppa, he has 8 directing credits and, to be honest, Nukie is probably his best known work from what I can see…

On the direction front, im going to approach this from three different criteria, It’s ability to standout as a work that has these directors unique marks, their ability to take all of the technical elements of this film and tie them together effectively, AND the ability to help guide the cast through the film and deliver a great performance that works with the technical elements in a wonderful form of synergy.

In terms of it being a standout work that’s defined by its creators. I don’t even have to pause to think about it, this film is about as distinct as it can possibly be, it’s completely and totally unhinged, and I am by NO means saying that this is a creatively astute work, honestly it’s an absolute mess. But, there would be NO mistaking this as anything other than “Nukie” (a genre unto itself). So in that regard, I’d give it a somewhat sarcastic soft pass. In terms of their ability to tie all the technical elements together effectively, it’s a BIG fail in my opinion. NOTHING holds together on this movie, they had 7 editors working on this thing at any one time in order to try and get it finished and it STILL ended up being an incoherent wreck. The soundtrack doesnt compliment the visuals, the audio quality is inaudible at times and the editing doesn’t work with the cine or cast direction resulting in a totally knotted production that’s just ludicrous honestly.

I suppose a broad way to answer this is “Does it work as a kids film?” given that thats literally it’s reason to exist. It must surely at least maintain a spirit and flow that this is supposed to be a gentle, and maybe even amusing film for children to enjoy?…well no, it starts off with strong intentions, but at some point along the way while shooting this movie, the idea that it was a kids film just kind of…got lost and instead it seemingly just became about shooting the script verbatim, for better or worse. With mostly catastrophic results.

Finally; is the direction able to at least enthuse the best out of the performers? Well..given the main cast members here include a rubber bollock who’s mouth cant move, a group of scientists who seem to have basically been all given one characters dialogue to fight over and a dr who’s supposed to be a main character but ends up being talked about more than he’s actually IN the film. I’m going to lean towards them not quite grasping how to direct their cast members. Now that’s not to say it’s all bad, I actually, genuinely think the twins they got for this film do a more than decent job and work a good range, which must have had some director involvement. But outside of them…well…yeah…its another swing and a miss I feel. So overall? Not a good look for the direction honestly…

From a cine perspective. This film could realistically be used as an act of terrorism, literally; it’s so full of unexpected strobe lights, rapid cuts and flashing imagery that, to anyone not expecting it, this could cause some VERY serious harm. Shots have reasonable enough composition, it’s not a pretty film by any stretch, but there’s some depth of field here and there and they do seem to at least understand basic framing rules (for the most part…when it suits them) The biggest issue with the cine really is how its been assembled in the edit. Because what they’ve done to this film can only really be described as “they’ve minced it” they’ve done to it what is done to a steak to make hamburgers.

Almost every single sequence has at least one example of undercutting the scene, cutting the scene too late, putting WAY too many shots into a sequence creating something disorienting, or assembling the scenes in what clearly must be the wrong order in places due to continuity issues. We may never know if a recut version of this healmed by someone who understood basic editing rules would have treated the cine more fairly. As it stands all I can say really is the shots I saw were okay, but the presentation, to me?, was abysmal. Like seeing a battered flower propped up in a spent soda bottle filled with piss.

There are no good performances in this movie barring the twins who do a decent job, I don’t talk about child actors, but with Nukie we’re well into bizarro world so fuck it, they’re the best part of this thing. Everyone else is shite.

And finally! The soundtrack! Its not half bad! It sounds a smidge on the cheap side but it’s better than a lot of scores we’ve covered this season, it’s just such a shame it’s absolutely not designed with a family movie in mind. At times this sounds like an art house piece, at times it sounds like a straight sci-fi horror movie score. Its not bad, but it’s totally not fit for purpose and the editing on it is SUPER weird. With the score just, crashing in and out of the film everytime they remember that having your film play out in silence when their ISNT dramatic tension, is a bad thing. Couple that with the aforementioned poor on set audio recording, with muffled voices, unclear dialogue and on set noise scattered throughout and it really is just a totally poor show…in my opinion I hasten to add.

Nukie was released as a big box ex-rental VHS tape in the UK in 1988 by 20.20 Vision, why they bothered to licence this thing when their books contained hits such as “Bill and Teds Bogus Journey” and “Bram Stokers Dracula” I have NO idea. That being said, they also distributed “Robot in the Family” over here…so…I don’t know who they had working in their Licensing department back in the day, but I want to buy them a good curry and a bad pint. And…other than that and a laserdisc release in 1989, thats it! It never got a retail home video release, and no company has been brave enough to test a DVD or Bluray release of this thing on the open market, and with good reason! I have seen a number of bootleg copies of this film floating around on DVD and their *MAY* possibly be a european DVD release that was official. But theres so many bootlegs of this film for sale, it’s honestly quite hard to say…it’ll happen inevitably at some point…may GOD have mercy on us all…

I waited well over a decade to check out Nukie, after having it labelled as one of the worst movies ever by SO many of my esteemed colleagues, I feel now, having actually seen it somewhat underwhelmed. I wanted to hate this thing, I REALLY wanted to be able to come to this review impassioned! Hell; even if I couldnt be mad at it, it would have at least been nice to be able to come here with a bit of a jaw dropped “What the FUCK!?” style breakdown…but the reality is, this probably isnt even in the top 5 worst movies i’ve reviewed on this channel. Let Alone the worst movie of all time. What this is, is just a fairly repetitious, fairly boring, border irritating watch written by two people who had almost no experience writing. The direction and cine are questionable, but probably could be somewhat fixable had they not hired 7 different editors to try and salvage the thing. Even then though, that still wouldn’t fix the fact there’s only 12 minutes worth of actual plot development here…but it’d almost certainly make it a lot more tolerable.

This isnt a terse warning not to watch Nukie, if your curious, go watch it. This is a tired warning not to watch Nukie. Its a truly hollow experience that I’ll probably end up using more as reference materials from now on than anything else…that and the novelty value of owning a slightly soiled Nukie is inherently amusing to me…Its just a quite boring, heavily padded, badly put together film that doesnt deserve anger…it deserves abandonment.

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

I dont think I was entirely prepared for what I was getting into when I decided to take a look at 1993’s “Champagne and Bullets”, A.K.A “Road to Revenge”, A.K.A “Get Even” (though…that last ones all as one word so…I guess it should really be “Geteven”. My first exposure to the movie was from an early episode of Red Letter Medias “Best of the Worst” where they covered the…highlights? of this thing? and what I saw was frankly so absurd in terms of presentation that I knew it was a movie that I had to get round to watching at some point. And; with Vinegar Syndrome releasing a rather lovely (and might I add comprehensive) set in 2021, I made sure to nab myself one because…lets be honest; this is my kind of rodeo.

The film was the brainchild of John De Hart. a (now retired) lawyer who decided almost completely on a whim that he wanted to write, direct, score, produce and star in his own gritty action cop drama thriller. And…he did just that. Self funding the production and carrying it to a limited release in 1993 under the title “Champagne and Bullets”…it didnt gather much momentum. So! A short time later he recut the film to remove most of the nudity and sex scenes and also to cut down quite a few of the longer scenes bringing the runtime down from 98(ish) minutes to 75(ish) minutes and retitling the picture “Road to Revenge”. This fared a little bit better and managed to get distribution, but it wasnt until the early 2000’s that Dehart would have one final crack of re-releasing the movie, reinsterting some of the nudity and sex scenes and shooting 4 miniutes of new footage (that was shot on standard video tape and not film like the rest of the movie) this cut clocks in at roughly 89 minutes and was retitled “Get Even” and this version, for a time, was the best known cut of this movie out there.

So this film is a bit like “The Wicker Man” of shite action cop thrillers. But I suppose the next question is. What makes this film so special that it deserves 3 separate cuts and a limited edition Bluray release? Well…the plot is more or less the same across the 3 cuts, but for clarity, i’m going to be *mainly* talking about the “Champagne and Bullets” cut for the purposes of this review.

The plot follows best buddies Rick and Huck. two cops just palling around and trying to get things done by the book. When the film opens they’re partnered up with a tom carvel sounding motherfucker called Normad and the film wastes NO time in making it clear Normad is the villain of the movie. As he leads Rick and Huck to stage a drugs bust, without a warrant. Things dont quite go to plan, and the pair end up in court trying to defend their decision. Normad testifies AGAINST the pair, claiming that Rick and Huck are in fact drug takers AND dealers and that the “Bust” that went down was in fact a drug deal that went bad. The judge sides with Normad and Rick and Huck are kicked out of the force with immediate effect.

Some time passes and Rick and Huck move in together and start doing some freelance security work to help make ends meet. This includes having to deal with obnoxious and pompous frat boys as chaufers for prom night. It’s not pretty. But its good honest work. After getting off a particularly manic shift Huck suggests the pair hit a bar for “Cowboy night” and it’s here that the main thrust of the film really begins.

Because, when Rick and Huck enter the bar they’re greeted by Cindy, Cherry and Cindy’s mum. And this is a blast from the past for Rick because Cindy and him were in a pretty serious relationship when Cindy mysteriously vanished without a trace. The pair reconnect briefly and Cindy rather cryptically explains that she’s been in a bit of a bad place for a time and that shes come back to town to try and get her head back in the game and is currently stopping with Cherry. It’s clear almost immediately that the pair intend to rekindle things, but before it can go any further, Huck breaks the pair up because it’s time for one of the greatest moments in cinematic history.

For a solid. 3-4 minutes. We as the audience are effectively treated to a music video for the song “The Shimmy Slide” and…while im not going to risk angering the copyright claim gods here by playing a clip. I absolutely would not begrudge you if you paused the video here. Searched “The Shimmy Slide” and just…basked in the most awkward and absurd piece of work i’ve seen on film in a LONG time. It’s pretty much THE sequence that anyone who watches this movie remembers. AND WITH GOOD REASON!

Anyway; While Ricks up there giving it his all a rather sinister looking group enter the bar and almost immediately surround Cindy, they recognise her from somewhere. Cindy makes a break for Rick as soon as he gets off stage and at the exact same time 2 things occur. A woman gets up on stage and starts stripping and an outraged “Karen” calls the police to report indecent exposure. And while THATS going on, Rick and Huck team up to protect Cindy and a small bar brawl breaks out…the stripper doesnt stop at any point during the brawl by the way, it’s a bizarre few minutes of bad punch sound effects and the gentlest toss’s and tumbles you’ll ever see. Anyway, the police turn up and Rick manages to avoid arrest, Hucks not so lucky however and ends up behind bars for aggravated assault.

Rick and Cindys mum go to bail Huck out of jail but the cost of bail pretty much bankrupts an already struggling Huck. This is put on the backburner however as we then spend an almost coma inducing amount of time with Rick and Cindy. Watching the pair have a romantic meal and make small talk, before we catch up with them the next day hanging in someones back yard on a swing. It’s here that Cindy opens up a bit more about what happened to cause her to leave town mysteriously.

Cindy says that she basically fell in with a bad crowd, started doing drugs, the drugs got harder, the friends got fewer and eventually she was sucked into the world of satanism and devil worship. All was, actually going pretty alright for Cindy, until she attended a black mass where they announced they were going to sacrifice a live baby. This was apparently the stick that broke the camels back for her and she basically got up and started wailing and screaming during the sacrifice, ultimately ruining the event. The guys from the bar earlier removed her from the mass and bound and gagged her. The next day she got her things together and fled back to her home town to try and get away from it all.

Unfortunately for her; the leader of the cult is non other than Normad as it’s revealed that he’s actually a drug dealing cult leader running operations while being backed by the law. Rick doesnt know that Normad is the cult leader, but comforts Cindy all the same. The pair embrace and by this point they’re pretty much back on as a couple.

Back with Huck though, things arnt going so rosey after being cleared out by the bail money Hucks got nothing left to pay the bills…as illustrated by him standing in the bathroom LITERALLY shooting his bills and flushing them down the toilet. Things go from bad to worse when later that night Hucks Ex-wife turns up demanding an alimony payment as apparently Hucks quite a bit behind on paying. When he tells her he cant pay, she does the perfectly reasonable thing and rips her dress open, calls the police screaming that Hucks trying to kill her, before cursing Huck out and running out of the house.

The police end up taking Huck in for something between aggravated assault and attempted murder and GUESS who the judge is who’ll be hearing Hucks case? Normad. Who’s now been promoted to the role of a judge for some reason (im pretty sure it’s lawyers who become judges…not cops) Anyway; as you can imagine it’s a kangaroo court and Huck gets hurled into jail with no bail. As soon as he gets in he manages to trick a janitor into leaving his post before grabbing a bottle of bleach from his wheely cart and treating it like water in the desert. A short time later and Hucks in the hospital where a chance encounter with a nun sets in motion a new path for Huck and…from here about a third of the film devloves into a weird mixture of padding and literal blink and you’ll miss it plot points. So to save us both a lengthy breakdown, I’ll just hit the key beats.

Rick and Cindy go to see Huck only to almost immediately leave him to go and grab the last of Cindys things from her parents house, they have a montage of lovey dovey romance stuff, theres a BLOODY long sex scene that goes on for about 2.5 million years between Rick and Cindy *Urghhh* Huck becomes a full blown religious wacko, Rick and Cindy get Married, on there honeymoon night Cindy does a ULTRA long striptease to “The Shimmy Slide” that lasts about 2.2 million years, And the bad gang update Normad about Cindy, Rick and everything thats going on and Normad demands Cindy be killed because she knows too much.

Which takes us up to the final act! Where Cindy finds a picture of Normad and immediately recognises him as the cult leader, she tells Rick and the pair head out to inform the police! But the bad guys spot the pair leaving and decide to give chase! In a barnstorming finale that actually IS probably some of the best parts of this movie, will Rick and Cindy bust Normad, Will Huck achieve enlightenment and has Cindys mum REALLY got it going on? All these things and more WILL probably be answered. If you check out “Champagne and Bullets”

And I think the biggest problem this film has is that it’s script is border incoherent. I’d stop short of saying I personally found it to be the inane ramblings of a mad man. But only by a hairs breadth. A good tip for any budding scriptwriter out there is, if you going to write a script…and its a novel idea but hear me out…if your going to write a script. Have a point. It makes it so much more interesting an experience for the viewer. This film could, in my opinion, best be described as “Asleep at the wheel” scenes just; “exist” bereft really of any purpose or requirement. The film maker has NO issue with a 10 minute long dining scene where nothing happens apart from Rick and Cindy sitting at a table while a stream of characters who arnt really involved in the plot come in, talk to them for a couple of minutes and then leave never to be seen or heard from again.

Its not even so much that some of the scenes are absolutely pointless, the thing that annoys me more is that some of the scenes DO have a point that gets lost because the scene was only required to be 5 minutes long, if that. And instead has turned into a 15 minute long, seemingly improvised character piece that again, adds nothing and just goes on and on and on. A good example being when Cindy goes to her parents house to get the last of her things and a SUPER long cyclical conversation happens where Cindys dad accuses Rick of being a drug taking devil worshipper and Rick just repeatedly keeps saying “Im not” in a roundabout way…it’s just ridiculous.

I mean;This is the kind of film that thinks that referencing “Hamlet” constitutes “High art” status. The kind of film that will spend 15 minutes running a sex scene, and 2 minutes explaining whats ACTUALLY going on. And it can at times be BEYOND insufferable.

The pacings pretty damn awful to. The first act is actually not half bad in terms of setting up our hero’s and villains, putting our heroes in a tight spot and then introducing the love interest while keeping things *fairly* light on tone but busy on development. But around the time Rick and Cindy start reconnecting after Cowboy night at the bar. The film pretty much loses its thread and goes completely round the reakin to just put across VERY simple plot mechanics. The films an hour and 38 minutes long and I’d say the first act is about 25 minutes and the final act is about 20. Everything that happens between those two points is utter freewheeling of both the best and worst kind.

I’d hoped, with this film having multiple cuts, that John would have gone back and tried to salvage the film. Rework it to make it leaner, more sensical and focussed on the plot points and not 15 minute montages of Rick and Cindy playing with Ice cubes in front of a fireplace. But here’s the biggest disappointment. NON of the cuts achieve anything close to making this film more coherent. If anything the film makes less sense the more it’s been worked on.

For example; you’d think with my main complaint being that the film is “Too long and incoherent” that the ultra short “Road to Revenge” cut would be my preferred viewing choice. But no! Because in that cut they’ve ALSO cut out some key plot points that help define the characters and make the film make sense! So while it’s shorter and less focussed on showing us that John De harts had sex, it’s also almost TOTALLY incomprehensible. In part because they’ve chopped key points out, but more bafflingly because they’ve left in some of the padding for some unknown reason!

“Okay Dan” I hear you say “Well, if thats the case; the “Geteven” cut must surely be the one for you?” NO! Because in that one they’re STILL missing some key plot points and all they’ve really put back in is some of the super long boring nudity and sex scenes and new footage of Rick working out outside and shots of the L.A Strip. Its not quite as incoherent as “Road to Revenge” but now it’s got WAY more of the boring bits back in it!

There is no “Good” cut of this to me. It’s either too long and rambly or too short and incoherent. Though; I suppose if im looking at positives there are points in this movie that are frankly so absurd, weird or just downright daft that I had to openly laugh at just how unashamed this film is to just be itself.

And on that subject. The dialogue for this film, while equally as incoherent, has some absolutely ASTOUNDING lines in there. Stuff you couldnt make up. I firmly believe John De Hart must talk like this in real life. Lines like “Adyosi Bela Lugosi!” and “Listen here you Polyester Puppet!” I was absolutely delighted! With a personal favourite exchange being when Rick goes to visit Huck in hospital after his suicide attempt and the pair greet each other by saying “I heard you did that bleach thing!” to which Huck responds “Yeh!”…just…I have no words for this thing. In places its drawn out, protracted and aimless. But when it hits that sweet spot of sounding like an alien wrote it. Oh man does it scratch my bad movie itch.

The Script was Written and directed by John De Hart, with additional direction credited to James Paradise. De Hart has one writing and one directing credit. This film. Thats it. This was his only experience of film making and apart from an acting credit in 2006, he’s effectively retired at this point. As for Paradise. This is his only directing credit too, but! He’s more of an actor with 33 acting credits including “Sleepaway Camp”, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Doogy Hauser M.D”

And surprisingly; all things considered, the direction isnt too bad. In fact, for a first attempt at film making i’d say it was pretty damn good! Theres a clear vision here and John’s clearly trying his best to really give the visuals his seal of approval. Admittedly if this had been churned out by a studio i’d have probably not even blinked in saying this film was pretty meh. But for a one man band with no previous experience? Its pretty impressive honestly. Scenes have a clear structuring to them, shots in places seem pretty considered and the final act is actually rather decently handled. The cast direction iiiis a little bit wobbly. In fact in some scenes its pretty much fallen over. But I think here, its a case of taking the rough with the smooth. Again; this was a first time director with no prior experience of working in film. It’s hard to get what you need out of an actor even as a veteran film maker. So while it was probably a bit of a looser production in that regard, it’s not the worst it COULD have been.

What IS fucked in this thing though is the continuity. Which is just AWFUL. Characters will go from not having drinks, to having drinks, to not having drinks again. People will randomly go from standing NEXT to objects to holding them, theres no real concept of time passage. It goes from day to night completely willy nilly and sometimes MONTHS can go by in film without ANY kind of acknowledgement. In some ways I like the inconsistencies because it helps make the weirder moments of this film even more unusual, but at the same time its an editors nightmare because the analytical part of my brain wont shut up in pointing out all these weird inconsistencies.

On the cine front. Its passable. It, for the most part looks like a feature film, scenes have a decent selection of shots that follow a pretty standard formula, there are a couple of bug bares, moments where the camera is clearly being hand held and has to move quickly often result in jerky, VERY unprofessional shots that instantly pull you out of the action and while there is a decent variety of shots, i’d have personally been happier with a bit more variety in terms of pans, tracking shots and other bits. It experiments! Which is good. Though whether those more experimental moments were intentional or just because the film maker didnt know that the shots he was using WERNT considered standard takes for a production is up for debate. But! There was nothing too egregious in here, it’s just a not too awful time.

And as a quick aside I do need to mention the lighting here, which, for the most part is pretty decent. There are a couple of shots here and there that stray into “Floodlit” territory, but for the most part he handles Day for night lighting pretty decently, theres some attempts at Chiascuro dotted throughout and in the last 10 minutes things go positively J.R Bookwalter in terms of shadowy sequences lit by multicolour lighting gels and hyper experimentation on shot composition. It looks great!

On the performance side of things. Its pretty poor. John De Hart appears to come from the Neil Breen school of acting. Giving a performance that quite often feels like he’s reading his lines for the first time on set…AND HE WROTE THE BLOODY THING. He’s dry, overly quiet and has NO physical presence on camera. I’ve seen taxidermy look more animated on screen than this man. Im sure he was trying his best, but his strange acting style and choices while endearing were not suitable for the grizzled action cop the role required.

Wings Hauser appears to be pissed as a fart through about 90% of this movie, his performance is memorable in the sense that he appears to absolutely have given NO craps throughout. I can only assume this was a clean paycheck gig for him because he slurs through his lines from start to finish with all the enthusiasm of an ambien dosed sloth. Pamela Jean Bryant gives a largely unimpressed performance as Cindy…and its hard not to see why. She was a playboy playmate who’d been in shows like “The Incredible Hulk” and films like “Dont Answer the phone” and here she is…having to spend AT LEAST 30 minutes making out with John De Hart. I mean…whatever she was being paid…probably needed a few more zeros on the end is all im saying.

In fact the only actor here who seems to be somewhere in the realms of decent is William Smiths turn as Normad. He’s gravelly, stern and actually plays a half decent baddy for this movie…it’s just a shame he doesnt really get to sink his teeth into the role as the films WAY too busy watching a drunk Wings Hauser piss about in a pool with two models for 10 minutes or following Rick as he tells rubbish jokes to a waiter for an hour and a day. I mean; he’s not astounding. But hes the best of a bad bunch and i’d have really loved to see him be a bit more malicious in this rather than the odd snippets we ended up with.

Finally; the soundtrack. It’s almost all John de hart. He has a guitar and hes threatening to use it and boy, DOES he use it. 70% of the soundtrack is just John and an acoustic singing in what sounds like a monologue its a MORE than bizarre choice with VERY mixed results. Almost all of which are hilarious. Theres a couple of synthy numbers in this, but nothing memorable and when it isnt John or forgettable synth. It’s royalty free recordings of classical music. It’s probably the most mismatched and incoherent score I’ve covered this season. And while I didnt hate it, I have more questions about it than answers.

Champagne and bullets release history is…difficult to track down in all honesty. As far as I can tell the actual original cut “Champagne and Bullets” had a limited screening in 1993 but ultimately never found distribution. When it was recut into “Road to Revenge” it DID manage to make it to VHS, but im reading conflicting reports that it came out in either Late 1993 or 1994. I equally cant find a distributor for this VHS release so In the absence of knowledge im going to fall back on logic and presume that it was self distributed by the films production company “Monarch Productions”. In 2006 the film was released AGAIN on DVD courtesy of Amadeus Pictures with some footage put back in alongside additional scenes shot in 2006 as “GETEVEN”. And finally in 2021, all three cuts were released by Vinegar syndrome in a deluxe bluray package which includes a full length commentary by John De Hart, an interview with the man himself, “Road to Revenge” and “GETEVEN” presented in VHS quality alongside a lovely new HD scan of “Champagne and Bullets” all wrapped up in a wonderful Hardbox numbered set that comes complete with a double sided poster. This is literally the most comprehensive set this film is EVER going to get. Savour it.

Is Champagne and bullets a piece of “Trashterpiece theater”…mmmmaybe. While it absolutely has its moments and is VERY weird in places, with some fabulous dialogue, bizarre performances and a script that has ADHD almost as bad as myself. It really struggles to maintain its momentum and frequently gets sidetracked into frankly PAINFUL sequences that are just…so inane and go on and on and on. It’s absolutely a good/bad movie. With direction and cine thats actually not half bad and a soundtrack thats positively ear splitting.

It has all the elements of a winner really if your into bad movies. But that poor script structuring is a HELL of a ding against this thing. At the time of writing this films out of print. And I bought my copy for £30 which wasnt that far off Vinegar syndromes asking price. Is it worth that? No. absolutely not. I cant fault the work thats gone into this release. Its superb. But the film itself just…isnt entertaining enough (to me at least) to warrant that kind of cash exchanging hands. Im not going to get rid of it because I own it now. But if you were to come to me now and say “Dan! I wanna buy this movie! It’s £30” i’d be telling you to save your money honestly. There are much greater laughs to be had for much less cash. If you do see it in the wild going cheap though; i’d say absolutely snap it up!

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

2006’s “Halloween Night” While clearly tying itself via marketing to the “Halloween” franchise, is arguably probably the closest we’ve seen in this run to a movie that actually kind of sort of has some reference points to the Halloween franchise. And! Its a mega early release from “The Asylum” AND it’s the first Asylum film we’ve ever covered on the channel!

Honestly; I’ve never been too “into” asylum films…Im a firm believer that “truely” entertainingly awful films have to come from the (somewhat deluded) belief that your film is going to be a masterpiece, even if the filmmaker is totally devoid of talent. Self awareness kills these kinds of films. So a studio thats entire operation is PURPOSELY to shovel out half arsed low budget films where the aim is not to make something good, but rather something that’ll shift copies through sensationalism while strangling TRUELY weird and wonderful experimentation in the crib…yeah. Thats not really my happening. Not to slam anyone who digs those movies, They’re just generally not for me. It would appear that Asylum *gradually* shifted to that sensationalist model though, as a brief look at their early work from 1999 to 2005 shows that to begin with, they were actually pretty grounded.

The plot of “Halloween Night” is *allegedly* based on real life events, in the DVD extras they clarify that the plot for this film was based on an event that happened to one of the crew. Now…unfortunately this film right out of the gate has one massive problem and thats that they bring in approximately 2 million characters in the opening and then don’t introduce them properly, meaning that their names are all scattered across the whole films run time and due to audio issues on my DVD release of this combined with some characters only getting name checked once it’s been difficult to keep track of things. So, rather than have to rewatch the film multiple times and then PAINSTAKINGLY link actors based on headshots alone on IMDB to their character names. Im running with pseudonyms on this one because…why the hell not? If the film didnt care that much about naming the characters up front I don’t think anyone should care if I give them made up names for this.

The only name I DO know is the killer in this movie, Christopher Vale. The movie opens with a flashback to Christopher as a child witnessing his mother getting sexually assaulted and murdered, followed immediatley by his fathers suicide. Chris witnesses the whole thing and then emerges from his hiding place to release some kind of chemical into the air which kills the intruders but horribly burns him in the process. The film then jumps forward ten years and it’s revealed that Christopher’s been in an asylum ever since. While doing their rounds he manages to viciously murder an orderly before escaping the asylum. Its here that we’re introduced to a WAVE of teenagers who’ve rented a house in the woods. Each year a chap I’m choosing to call “King Rollo” puts on a lavish halloween party and this year, they’ve rented a space to do a mediaeval themed gathering. Along for the ride is “King Rollos” missus “Roselina”, “Shaggy”, “Shaggys top babe”, “Lewis from Revenge of the nerds”, and a secret lesbian couple.

They’ve turned up to help set things up, but unbeknownst to them, King Rollo has ulterior motives. He’s invited a character im going to call “Arsehole” to the party without telling anyone else with the plan being to have him break into the party, threaten everyone with a gun before abducting “Shaggy”. With the big gag being that while the party goers “THINK” the halloween theme is “Ren fair” it’s actually “Psychological Horror”. Things start to go wrong quite quickly however, as a police blockade is set up just down the road from the house meaning getting in and out of the party is awkward due to mandatory police searches and helicopters buzzing all over the place. Shaggy and his missus get stopped by the police and they panic because Shaggy is going to the party as an “Executioner” and because he obsessed with getting a VERY accurate costume, he went so far as to illegally import ACTUAL weapons from out of state that are in the back of his car. Luckily the police just want to know if the pair have seen Christopher and after showing them a picture they head on their way, but not before pulling up just after the blockade as a petrol station to fill up.

The pair find the petrol stations abandoned and Shaggy decides to use the opportunity to change into his costume. Unbeknownst to him though, Christopher’s hiding in the petrol station toilets and using some kind of weird ritualistic carving knife he takes shaggy out and steals his costume. Now vaguely disguised, he heads back to the car…fails to drive because…y’know…he’s never done it before, and butchers Shaggys missus. Before barely spluttering off in their car and heading up to the teens party house. After some rather dramatic introductions, the party gets formally opened and drunken revellers pile in. After a while, King Rollo and the arsehole put their plan in motion. The arsehole enters the party, awkwardly mingles with some of the partygoers including a very awkward sequence where he tries to aggressively hit on one half of the lesbian couple, both of whome tell him, quite rightly to fuck off and keep fucking off until his not fucking there anymore.

At which point, Christopher enters the party and King Rollo and Arsehole have a “play fight”, Arsehole pulls out the gun and eventually takes Christopher who he THINKS is Shaggy hostage before fleeing the house just as a fake police officer whos in with King Rollo turns up to try and “assess” the situation. With people in literal tears, King Rollo decides that this “prank” probably wasnt his best move and comes clean with the best line in the entire film “The REAL theme was Psychological horror! NAAAT mediaeval Decadence!”. EVERYONE kicks off at King Rollo and the whole party falls apart, the real police turn up, find out they’ve had their time wasted and threaten to arrest everyone there if they don’t all clear out asap.

While this is going on however, we then cut back to Arsehole, who pulls up and chats with Christopher about how cool the prank went, Christopher kills Arseole AND the fake cop before heading back to the house to start murdering again leading into our 3rd act, an explosive finale where, yes, they do that scene where one of the last survivors wanders around the house and finds all their dead friends one by one to kill time. In a film that just about tries, Will we ever get to the bottom of Christophers past? Will the cops find him in time and will the teens make it through to the end…of “Halloween Night”.

From a script perspective. What we have here…is; well actually not too bad. Don’t get me wrong, this thing isnt defining the slasher genre for the mid 2000’s by any stretch of the imagination. But what we have here at its core is just a quite reasonably executed if not fairly generic slasher flick. it’s professionally paced. Theres a clean 3 act structure here with nice clean transition shifts between the acts to get you from plot point to plot point. the first act is particularly nice and nippy, moving at a more than reasonable pace and keeping things nice and interesting from the opening roll right through to when the party is set to start. It’s not perfect mind, as mentioned earlier, they have a real problem with overstuffing on characters. There’s WAY too many, which makes it hard to really get a read on them, and because they don’t really bother to name the characters consistently and up front (preferring instead to name drop across the first and second acts) it makes it SUPER difficult to really get invested in these people when you don’t really even know who they are for the first 45-65 minutes.

Because theres so many characters, it does mean that some disappear for a decent chunk of the opening act, or are relegated to doing very minor menial tasks in the background because, the film just doesn’t really have a lot for them to do and it’s WAY too preoccupied trying to set up the main thrust of the story to deal with characters who really don’t need to be in the film until the end of the 2nd act. I feel like they were kind of caught between a rock and a hard place honestly; if they’d had less characters, it’d make the script tighter, but the party itself would be SUPER unattended which would have had a knock on effect in the 2nd and 3rd acts making it look sparse and quite cheap due to the lack of extras. It’d also make the final act “Slasher ramp up” a bit of a non event. But including the additional cast has led to a whole lot of not really knowing what to do with them…So, While I’m not entirely happy with the situation, I can at least appreciate that it was something of a lose lose situation.

While the first act is pretty solid and REALLY gets the job done, the 2nd act unfortunately bloats to a BEYOND uncomfortable level as we spend WAY too much time just kind of mooching about at the party, and I know its supposed to be scene and tone setting. But here it gets painful. The key events of the second act realistically could have been handled in 10-15 minutes here. But instead its nearly double that…meaning we have to spend an ungodly amount of time just watching people dance about, weird small talk between the guy playing the stair troll and people wanting to get into the party and shots of Christopher mooching about the party, but not really doing anything. I genuinely started to think that the film was a lost cause at one point BECAUSE it had slowed down so much, I cant exactly say it’s padded because it IS busy trying to tie all it’s elements together, but I just feel like it could have done this much quicker and more concisely.

When the film finally made it to the third act, I had low expectations, but! While it didnt manage to get back to the speedy highs achieved in the opening act, it DID manage to pick up the pace and end things pretty concisely. Again; it wasn’t PERFECT, but given that some of the movies i’ve covered this month barely bothered with act changes and tonal shifts. It’s surprisingly nice to deal with a film thats pretty much just a decent stab at making an okay and somewhat solid slasher film.

What I will say is this film borrows a LOT from other horror movies. For a starters you have elements of the original “Halloween”, “Halloween 2”, “Halloween 4” and “Halloween Resurrection” (no…seriously) alongside nods to “Black Christmas”, “Friday the 13th” and “I know what you did last summer”. In a frankly BIZARRE turn of events, they also appear to have paid a scene forward back into the Halloween franchise, with the scene where Christopher kills Shaggy in the gas station and then suits up eerily mirroring a scene in Halloween (2018) where literally the exact same thing happens. (I appreciate that it could be argued that the gas station scene here is most likely an homage to the gas station scene from Halloween 4…but I think it’s SO much more entertaining to think that the producers of Halloween (2018) just watched a load of Halloween knock offs and cherry picked the best bits into their movie.) While these “Liberations” are expected, they do somewhat lower my opinions on this thing a bit because, it’s not great to just steal random good scenes from other movies and put them in your movie. Even if, quite often, they’re some of the best bits of the film altogether.

Outside of it’s theiving, the film pretty much hits every slasher trope going, you get the “I’ll be right back” the scene where one of the guests mistakes the killer for someone else, the scene where the cops turn up and don’t take the kids seriously, its a free for all honestly. Some horror fans like the tropes, I can take or leave them personally but the fact that this film tries to cram SO MANY of them into the hour and 25 runtime does get a little tiresome by the 3rd act. The dialogues probably the weakest element of the scripting here, they’ve gone for that, slightly snarky Gen X style fast paced chatter type dialogue that was probably best utilised in scream, just long, almost monologuey lines that have to be read really fast and sharp because if they don’t get read that way they make literally no sense and don’t sound anywhere near as charismatic. The dialogue feels like an imitation of an imitation of the scream style of writing. Throw in some VERY dated language (early/mid 2000’s homophobia and mild racism ahoy!) and the result is a movie that swings wildly from being just about tolerable to pretty insufferable and almost inaudible in places.

The script was written by Michael Gingold and David Michael Latt. David has 15 writing credits, his last in 2020 and I’d say this was probably his best known writing credit. But really; he’s more of a producer and in a move that may well make Roger Corman shit his pants, David has nearly 290 production credits at the time of writing. Which is just…wild. I mean to put it into perspective as of 2022 Latt is 56 years old and has 287 production credits. By the time Roger Corman was 56 years old he’d only managed 195. Which is just…wild. And he’s still going! With several projects still in active development and no signs of slowing down, I fully expect him to potentially catch up to, if not blow clean past Cormans production credits fairly soon!

The film was also written by Michael Gingold, he has 5 writing credits and he’s more of a director than a writer, with 30 credits under his belt. This was his last writing credit, and i’d be inclined to say I think this is probably his most recognised work. On directing duties with have Mark Atkins, Mark has 24 directing credits and this was only his 3rd ever directing gig. His works include “Six headed Shark attack” and “Android Cop”. While his last directing credit was in 2019, he’s a keen cinematographer with 56 credits under his belt.

On the direction front, we have a good solid attempt here. Atkins has delivered a film that, while probably not the most original piece visually, does have a level of distinction about it that, for the time would have just about set it above its low budget slasher peers. This is one of those Halloween movies that utilises warm colours throughout to help almost subconsciously remind the audience that this movie IS taking place at halloween, with plenty of oranges and reds on display throughout and a grade that eases slightly towards the warmer end of the spectrum. These choices contrast nicely against the flashback sequences which are instead manipulated to have a cooler look and feel (presumably to emphasise the passage of time) which I thought looked quite nice.

While there are key moments that have strong visual definition in the opening act, around the time we get into that bloated 2nd act, the direction also kind of settles into things a bit, as we end up with more traditional sequences that frequently feel like a “Gun for hire” going through the motions. Which is a shame after so much effort went into the first half an hour. I’d say with Atkins at the helm, this does have some potential, even if it does skirt mediocrity from time to time. Direction of the cast is perfectly serviceable too. No complaints from me. I feel like Mark was able to work with the cast to deliver something reasonable. Though I think he maybe struggled a bit in places to pull the right kind of emotion and feelings from the cast. Their physical presence was good! And it’s clear to see a lot of time went into the choreography of some of the scenes, but while the physicality is nicely handled, emotionally? I’d say it was a swing and a miss.

From a cine perspective, we do alright as well, there’s a not unreasonable amount of experimentation on display, which I always like to see in my Horror movies, But I do rather feel that in places they’ve over egged things a bit. Composition of shots (for the most part) is pretty solid and helps convey the plot of the film in a more than decent manner and, for the most part, sequences are passably constructed. My big isuse with these sequences is that, they’ve tried to cram WAY too much into these sequences shot wise and at times it can be a bit disorienting and distracting rather than the what the actual aim of fast cine should be, which is panic inducing and claustrophobic.

For years now i’ve said that good horror sequences work on a slow boil principle, you start with longer slower cuts in your early sequences establishing the set up to your audience. Then; as things start to get a bit uneasy and spooky, you cut more frequently and begin to ramp up, introducing more experimentation, before finally, when the horror of whatever is the big spooky is on screen, your cuts need to go into overdrive while keeping consistent and purposful. It’s NO good just throwing everything and the kitchen sink at a sequence and hoping the disorientation will carry the horror. The best sequences craft what the audience see and choose their cuts carefully. Halloween night unfortunately goes for the “Everything and the kitchen sink” approach resulting in break neck sequences that really don’t give the audience time to breath or even process what they’re seeing. It can make some scenes confusing and I actually kind of began to dislike just how scattershot it was. Even in the bloated sections the cine is just, all over the place and it really pulls you out of the story. Given that the editing of this was also done by David Michael Latt, I think either editing isnt his strongest suit, or he just didnt care and wanted it out the door. From the looks of things.

Performance wise…we have our weakest overall element, the cast arnt *objectively* bad. There physical performances are great in places here! But theres just something going on with their actual line delivery thats just awkward and weird. Most of the cast mumble their way through their lines, some to the point of incoherence, and they all really just feel like they wernt confident in their delivery. for low budget horror this is positively passable in context. But I didnt get on with it personally; I just found it way too stilted and, in a move that actually surprised me, The film does dally a little bit into comedy horror. there was more than decent scope for them to lean into that with the performances to deliver something maybe a little next level. But they totally miss the ball and just blast through those scenes completely flat. Which, to my broken brain, almost makes it funnier. But to a broader audience would most likely come across as a cast just not giving a crap about the gig they’ve signed up to.

While a lot of these performances do feel a bit like they’re only their for the paycheck. I will give a notable mention to Scott Nery as the killer Christopher Vale. while he gives an almost entirely mute performance, his physical acting in this is above and beyond the rest of the cast. Giving a genuinely animated performance that works a more than decent range, he gives the character an intimidating edge, but is aware enough in his performance to give the character a decent emotional undercurrent and even the odd bit of physical comedy. I think he does a really solid job and I have to commend him for bringing the character (no matter how generic) to life quite effectively.

And finally; the soundtrack. Its not too bad! Again we’re not talking award winning, it borders on the stock side of things in places. But they use effective sound cues throughout the film to really emphasise the horror elements while also giving life to the party scenes and the more thriller driven moments. It’s a decent enough score that takes a step above the standard cheap midi fodder that a lot of these movies seemed to pool from. What I will flag up is the on set audio, which was far from ideal. The cast are already giving mumbly performances and there were at least half a dozen scenes I saw where they either didnt quite get the mic placement right, or had to do some off site ADR work, but when the audio is bad, it’s almost inaudible. Which was quite the disappointment.

Halloween Night was released on DVD in 2006 by Lighthouse DVD Distribution, which surprised me as, given this is an ‘Asylum’ film, I had figured they’d maybe handle their own distribution on this one as they’ve done in the states. Rather oxymoronically; the version released in the UK is touted as the “Unrated Directors cut” while also having a great big ‘18’ certificate in multiple places across the box. Good lot of extras on this release too! Not only do you get an audio commentary and a handful of trailers for other movies Lighthouse distribute, but you also get deleted scenes, bloopers, a brief interview with David Michael Latt AND the option to watch the movie in both a 2.0 and 5.1 surround mix. Which blows most of the movies I’ve covered this month clean out of the water.

Other than that this movie hasnt had a bluray release and is currently out of print, but it’s dirt cheap to pick up online. And; honestly? I think giving this film a bluray release and a proper making of documentary might just give it enough of a facelift to make it actually worth picking up. The DVD version is watchable, but it’s got heavy compression on it that doesnt let you see the detail that the picture really has. If they could present it in widescreen, re-encode it and clean up the extras, even better. So here’s hoping for an upgrade in the near future!

Halloween Night is probably the only example i’ve found during this run of “knock off” movies where the film was created from the ground up to be a cash in BEFORE the release of a movie tied to the franchise, a short time after this film was released the Rob Zombie remake of Halloween would hit the screens, and it cant be ignored that it feels like the Asylum wanted to get in early to try and nab a piece of that pie. While I cant say i’m absolutely in love with this film, I did come away from it feeling better about it than when I went in. With a script that left mixed to positive feelings combined with reasonable enough direction and a passable score I think theres almost certainly something for slasher fans to enjoy with this one. More broad horror fans may be put off by the unfocused cine and editing, the WAY less than stellar performances and the fact this thing is starting to show its age. But i’d say if you want a hit of that sweet sweet low budget mid 2000’s horror and you’ve seen the main hitters, Give this a shot, it’s not perfect…but then, thats the asylum all over…

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/halloween-night/

2001’s Final Scream (Also known as “Final Stab”) presented me with an actually quite nice moment as It’s, in effect; a little bit of a J.R Bookwalter reunion. Reuniting the SOV Six packs producer David Decoteau with Matthew Jason Walsh of “Zombie Cop” and “Legend of the Mummy 2” fame. From what I can see, I don’t believe I’ve covered a Decoteau written or directed film on this channel yet…well…barring the L.A portions of chickboxer…but I hardly think they count. The main reason I’ve tended to avoid Decoteau’s work stems largely from the same place as to why I don’t cover more Jess Franco movies honestly; Davids work is…uneven. I think thats the kindest way I can put it. While he has had some modest hits with things like “Puppet Master 3” and “Witchhouse”, a lot of his other works, I would argue, barely constitute films.

Stuff like his “1313” series of movies which are LITERALLY 70-90 minute features where 2-3 veteran horror actors or actresses will kind of wander around a set and say slightly mysterious stuff while a load of hunka-dunk guys ALSO wander around a set or location taking there tops off and saying things that are moody or also mysterious (theres 14 of those)… and If he isnt doing stuff like that he works in the lower end of MOST of the major genres. Producing films where the quality is SO uneven in SUCH large volumes that if I stopped reviewing anyone else and JUST focussed on his movies from now, i’d have a stable run of reviews to see me through to the end of the 2030’s. Whether it’s seasonal fodder, family flicks or his traditional ground of horror. Decoteau’s a machine just…pumping out 6-10 films a year. And with a staggering 176 directing credits and NO sign of slowing down, It was all but inevitable that i’d end up covering one of his movies at some point.

So what is “Final Scream”? Well…if the box art and the fact it was made in 2001 didnt give it away, “Final Scream” was an attempt by Decoteau to cash in on the “Scream” franchise. Scream 3 came out in the year 2000 and, in an attempt to try and trick people into thinking “Scream 4” was a thing, Decoteau rushed through a movie with ZERO connection to the Scream franchise apart from the fact 2 of the characters like horror movies, shot it in 4 days and kicked it up the arse and out the door as “Final Scream”. After a while Dimensions films, the owner of the scream franchise, clocked this and threats of legal action were sent Decoteau’s way. Forcing him to change its name to “Final Stab” which, in itself, is a reference to the “Scream” universe.

The film’s main characters of Angela and Charlie. And the film opens with Charlie watching a horror movie when he gets a call from Angela who’s vying for some “Bouncy Bouncy” Charlie goes to freshen up, but while he’s in the shower theres a powercut. After some moody wandering around a dark house where someone appears to have left a strobe light on. Charlie eventually bumps into Angela the pair start preparing for the night. Charlie hears another noise and after exploring a bit more a scary killer jumps out and stabs him! But Oopsy doops! It’s just a dream! (ugh.)

It turns out that this is a reoccuring dream that Charlies has every night for years, and after trying medications, therapy and more nothing has shifted it, Angela is supportive of Charlie but just wishes she knew the best way to try and help him. anyway; this is basically a precusor to the next days events as we’re then introduced to Doug and Kristin. Kristin is Angela’s estranged sister and Doug has a history with Charlie and the pair are about to lay down some serious havok.

See; Kristin wants to reconnect with her sister, so she’s decided to throw a party and invite the pair over. The location of the party? Is the infamous ‘Palero Estate” so called because according to local legend, in 1995 the Palero family were all living their best lives when someone broke in and butchered all of them, with no witnesses and next to no evidence. At this point in the film the plan for the party itself is a bit vague, but Doug alludes to the fact that he’s not happy with what Kristins got planned. Kristin however has dirt on doug and basically says she’ll go public with it if he doesn’t help, She then tells him she wants him to go see Angela to invite her to the party acting as a kind of ‘middle man’ between Angela and Kristin because Kristin doesnt think that Angela will give her the time of day. Doug reluctantly heads off and Kristin starts work on preparing the house for the party.

Meanwhile; in the woods just behind the house, some dudebros are shooting the shit and one of them reveals that he’s found a flyer asking for actors to appear in a project that Kristin is working on. They think it’s some kind of play or art project, and because Kristin comes from a rich family and has always been a bit of a prep, the dudebros decide that nows the perfect time to dish out some sweet sweet bullying and they all agree to go stake out the house with the aim of sabotaging shit. Y’know, cutting the power, slashing peoples tyres, destroying any props needed…all that bollocks.

Its here that we’re introduced to some of our other characters for the film. Theres Steve and Brett our Jocks for this picture…AND NOTHING ELSE. and then theres Julie and Patrick, a couple who’ve agreed to help set things up and while setting things up Julie gets chatting to Patrick about Charlie and reveals that when she slept with her mums therapist (ugh.) she found out that Charlie had a lot of issues growing up. When he was a kid he witnessed his mum and dad get butchered by a random killer, noone was ever caught, no evidence was ever found and Charlie spent a not insignificant amount of time in asylums, therapy and on heavy medication…somehow the way Julie explains this makes it sound like Charlie is somehow a lesser being for having had that happen to him, and almost makes out that Angela could do better because of it…which is a bit odd.

As an aside, because it doesnt really fit in anywhere but I feel like I cant omit it. While this is all going on the dudebros start scoping out the house using cellphones and one by one each of these dudebros is picked off by the killer barring one. Who also gets killed but just…a little bit later into the movie. They don’t add ANYTHING to this picture. They eat up a not unreasonable amount of time given the films only about 74 minutes long. Honestly? I have no idea why they even made it into the final cut given they don’t actually interact with our main cast in any way apart from, I think, angela finds one of them dead in the final act.

Anyway! It’s the night of the party and Charlie and Angela have both been coerced into going and…I’ll try to keep this as brief as possible because I don’t want to overegg EXACTLY whats going on here. The pair enter the house and it’s revealed it’s a surprise party, but when everyone jumps out it triggers Charlie who has to go get some air. When things get a bit calmer Angela and Kristin bury the hatchet and the night finally gets underway. Only it doesnt, because almost immediately a “Killer” pops up behind Steve and “Murders” him! This traumatises Charlie who immediately bolts from the house again, Angela gives Doug her keys and tells him to go get help before she runs out of the house to try and find Charlie and it’s here the whole point of the film is revealed. And boy howdy is it convoluted.

So; it transpires that EVERYONE at the party with the exception of Doug hates Charlie. Like…they don’t just dislike him, they ACTIVELY hate him. Kristin thinks Angela can do better and doesnt want Charlie to join their family, so…shes told her friends that they’re doing a dry run of a murder mystery party and she wants Angela and Charlie to be the unknowing participants in this murder mystery party to see if it works out and to make sure all the clues are correct. That’s the OVERT interpretation of the plans though, what the friends are doing COVERTLY though is basically an attempt to break Angela and Charlie up. They’re pretty much ALL aware of Charlie’s background and they hope that if they can ramp up the scares enough it’ll make Charlie flip out leading to either Angela realising she’s let herself in for more than she bargained for, or Charlie being sent back to an asylum. Either way resulting in them splitting up.

They’ve all got fake blood pouches, they’ve hired an actor to play the killer and the plan is to have them all get “Fake” murdered one by one, then whoever is left will meet up at a gazebo outside the house where it’ll all be revealed as a funny joke and apart from Charlie being sectioned everything will be fine. Unfortunately; they didnt factor on their being an ACTUAL killer also on the premesis who begins to ACTUALLY murder the friends one by one. And…thats pretty much the rest of the movie. The friends slowly get actually murdered, and every single time they play the “Oh no! It’s the killer *PLEASE* don’t murder me!…oh wait he’s real! AGHHHH!” card. Angela and Charlie have a few heart to hearts, and all this builds to an final act finale that is BEYOND convoluted and was INCREDIBLY underwhelming…in a film where, I swear to god they TELL you the ending in the first 15 minutes and then act SUPER proud of themselves in the last 10 minutes as they retell you the ending again. Will Charlie and Angelas relationship survive!?, Who is the mysterious masked killer?! And did David Decoteau ACTUALLY watch any of the ‘Scream’ movies before writing this thing? All this and more will be answered if you check out “Final Scream”.

And what I find ridiculous about this film is it’s structure is INSANE. For the vast VAST majority of the 2nd act, this is one of THE most generic 90’s slasher movies i’ve ever seen. It’s not particularly badly written and they do handle some of what they’re trying to do with a modicum of respectability, but theres literally NOTHING here thats standout from any other slasher movie from the time. ALL the tropes are present in this thing from having multiple killers, to EVERYONES A SUSPECT! To the aforementioned final act where the final girl runs around the murder house one by one finding her dead friends and being all like “Oh no! My friends are dead!” it really doesnt miss a beat. But then bookending this generic middle bulge is some of THE most convoluted writing for a slasher i’ve ever seen. I’ve got to spoil the ending really to prove my point so a warning from here on in, but at the end of the film Kristin basically reveals herself to be the killer, and her plan was to basically kill off all her friends, who she didnt like anyway AND Angela and then pin it all on Charlie. Resulting in Kristin being able to claim her family’s FULL inheritance rather than having to share it with Angela. Charlie then reveals that him and Angela *THOUGHT* that was what Kristin was up to and so they COUNTER planned for it by making sure Angela’s “real” knife that kristin stole was swapped for a prop one. Angela then murders Kristin with a real knife.

But just before the credits roll they pull back a FURTHER layer by ending on an open ending that implies Charlie IS in a fact a killer and that he murdered Doug (and possibly others) for his own modus operandi (which…I mean, killing Doug would make sense because appatrently him and Doug had a sordid history…but the rest? I have no idea). Honestly the ending of this film reminds me of the ending of “Bill and Teds Bogus Journey” where everytime the bad guy has a “AHA! I’ve got you moment” Bill and Ted retort with their own “AHA! We knew you’d do that! So we did this!” it’s just…Such an odd contrast because that middle part of the narrative is SO predictable that when all this 4d chess bollocks turns up at the end, I had to kind of. Pause to take stock as it genuinely caught me off guard.

Thats not to say I think the ending is clever or particularly interesting. I think if your average stoner watched this thing they’d probably be like “WOAH! MATE! This is…WOAH!!!!” but for anyone NOT high as balls, it comes out of left field, feels tonally out of step with the rest of the narrative and doesn’t really hold up to much scrutiny. If Kristin knew that Charlie had a traumatised past, why even BOTHER setting the party up. Why not just kill Angela at Charlie’s place and then make it look like a domestic incident? I just…don’t get why it needed to be this elaborate grand set piece for any other reason than; “It makes a movie!”

Barring the beginning and the end of the film which are predominantly info dump sessions or dreams, the pacing of this thing is fairly fast, im not going to lie there is padding here, but it’s not intrusive padding…for the most part. Whats been done here is a “Pinch an inch” technique where they take an underrunning script and just make some scenes run on for a *few* seconds longer than planned. We’re not talking 5 minute sequences where nothing advances the plot, we’re talking, making driving sequences or establishing shots, juuuuuuuuuust a bit longer than they should be to just try and grab back 10 seconds here, maybe a minute or two there. The Dudebro subplot takes about 8-10 minutes and even though it adds NOTHING to things ultimately, the fact they spread those scenes out into 1-3 minute long bursts across the opening 30 minute runtime, makes it feel less like padding. Its nuanced padding, unintrusive padding, it’s there to just get it over the line, but not to the detriment of the rather generic main plot.

There isnt really much of a solid act structure either honestly; everything up to the party starting is really just kind of happenstance, theres no script structure that ties all these threads together, we’re just having characters thrown at us and being asked to weigh up how we feel about them. Theres almost no interaction between cast members outside of the pairings they’re introduced to us as. Basically up to the point where Charlie and Angela attend the party, the footage in front of that? Might as well be flashcards for all the coherence it offers in terms of a structured opening act. The 2nd act then BULGES out for i’d say about 40-50 minutes of the run time being slightly better structured but not by much, which ends up with a crushed 10-15 minute long third act that tries to come across as hyper intelligent but just, totally fails to read the room. In that regard, it is really kind of a mess.

The dialogue’s not too great either honestly, with some really rather flat lines that just about put the point across and progress the narrative, but they arnt inspiring or particularly interesting, nothing quotable or even really memorable on show here as we just kind of…grind through the plot from dawn to dusk. I was going to say that this film feels like someone “Half watched” Scream and then decided that writing snarky was ALL you had to do to win over Gen X’ers and Elder Millennials. But to be fair to Scream, at least it stuck to it’s premise of “Horror nerds get stalked by a killer who knows about horror movies” I mean; I don’t particularly like Scream, but at least it is what it is.

Final Scream is Non committal to it’s source material. Charlie and Kristin both mention they like horror movies two…maybe three times in this film altogether at the very beginning and very end. And apart from literally two mentions of both Friday the 13th and Halloween, this film doesn’t reference, mention or raise ANYTHING to do with horror movies. No references, no nerdy film maker talk, no mention of directors, NOTHING. And; in a way, i’m relieved, because one of my pet peeves with horror movies is when they get all self indulgent and fan wanky about existing horror IP’s to the point that they start dropping references or flat out naming horror movies to try and endeare themselves to the “Horror community”. But theres no worries of that happening here! Other than the mentions above, this film doesnt do ANYTHING like that…which totally defeats the point of it being a “Scream” knockoff…but I kind of don’t care.

As mentioned the script was written by Matthew Jason Walsh, we’ve already covered him off as part of our adventures into the SOV six pack, but I will say that this film falls just under halfway through his writing career and seemingly in a period where he was writing predominantly sequels and films based on other films, in fact, the film he wrote before this one is called “I’ve been watching you” and seems to be trying to do the same thing “Final Scream” is doing here, but with “I know what you did last summer” instead. As for the other writer AND director of this? David Decotau has 176 directing credits and 45 writing credits as of the time of writing, with notable entries including “Puppet Master 3”, “Sorority Babes in the Slime ball Bowl-a-rama” and “Creepazoids”. The mans a machine, a roger corman, Godfrey ho, jess franco type who fires films out faster than they’re loaded in. that is NO sign of quality…but in terms of volume…yeh…im pretty impressed.

On the direction front. *Sigh* its passable. This looks like a late 90’s/early 2000’s horror movie. And while they maybe overegg a few tropes here and there, the biggest issue I personally had was the fact they had a STRONG overreliance on strobe lighting to imitate lightning. But they had the ‘strobe’ set too fast and the intervals arnt random enough, so it just looks like someones left a strobe light on accidentally in the other room. For the most part I’d say the direction was perfectly serviceable for a film of this time and budget. In fact, i’d say given that it was shot in 4 days, i’m actually kind of impressed at how solid this has actually turned out. I mean; I want to be careful not to overestimate it’s quality here, in the grand scheme of 90’s and 2000’s slashers this is NO trendsetter. But it looks the part for the most part. I think if you’re looking for that, this might actually be up your ally.

Direction of the cast…isnt quite so sharp mind, while the in studio stuff is more than serviceable barring a couple of slightly jerky moments, the location work is a little disappointing honestly, cast members seem a bit lost, don’t really confidently deliver their lines and it feels (to me at least) almost like something was going on during the location shoots that made it difficult for the cast to focus on what was at hand. Whether it was time limitations, external distractions or just a case of the director or cast not being in their A-game headspace during these scenes. I cant say, it’s purely speculation. But I just feel like the cast really weren’t as solid outdoors as they were under studio conditions.

The cine, i’d say is probably this films strongest element. It still doesnt quite match the creative highs of mid budget horror cine. But it does feel like effort has been put into making this thing look as nice as it can be given the budget and time limitations. Shots mostly have decent composition of frame, theres a nice variety of shot types used and even some decent lighting implemented in places to help create a low light, but moody atmosphere without getting SO dark you cant see what’s actually going on.

Is it perfect? No. I personally feel that while the sequences are solid, they have a bit too much room to breath. I’d have preferred a much tighter cut edit with more experimentation in the shot types implemented. Dutch angles, dutch pans, All that good stuff. The energy in this edit is rather lacking, and I feel with a few more shot types and quicker cutting it could have created something that was a bit more engaging to the audience. As it stands, its more than functional and even looks great at some points. I appreciate given the budget and scope they probably didnt have time to be ultra out there or creative on construction. But it still would have been nice to see something beyond “Solid”.

Performance wise, ehhhhh…it’s TV acting. And not good TV acting…I dunno. Everyone here is trying, i’ll give them that…but ALL the performances are just…SO thin on the ground and so fake. An example being Michael Lutz and Forrest Cochran as Steve and Brett. 2 characters in this who…pretty much have NO point being here. What does Brett do in this film? Like; whats his actual function. As far as I can see, it’s to be a foil to steve for about 5 minutes and to help pad the runtime with an extra death scene. Steve doesnt fair much better getting about 10 minutes to actually have purpose in the film as the first “Fake victim” before getting 5 minutes to be the first “real victim” barring the dudebros and then he’s dead for the rest of the film. Neither of them, in my opinion at least, bring ANY presence to the role or the film even. I’d say they give a bad performance, but when the script gives them so little to work with in the first place, it’s no wonder they underperformed.

Probably the best performer in this is Erinn Hayes as Kristin, and even then thats a case of “The best of a bad bunch” shes playing it melodramatic…or at least…I HOPE she’s playing it melodramatic. And she really gets into that Bitchy badness with a zeal and relish that I felt quite passionately about, she made me dislike the character, which was absolutely the scripts intention. So I have to take my hat off to her. While I wouldnt say her performance was great, she got the job done without making me question her existence.

As for the rest of the cast. They’re the beigist performances i’ve ever seen. Part of that again is down to the script. Part of it may have been down to a lack of directional steer or direction that didn’t really give the actors much motivation as to the nature of their roles, but part of it HAS to be down to the actors just…not really giving these parts their all. I didnt feel passionate about any of these characters, non of them made me care about them or what happened to them. Ultimately; when a film leaves you thinking “Does it matter if these people are in the movie or not?” and they’re the some of the main characters…you know something hasn’t gone quite to plan here.

And finally; the soundtrack. If you’ve ever seen a full moon production, you’ve heard the score for this movie. Decotau has close ties to Charles Band and Full Moon Films. So it’s unsurprsiing that the scoring for this movie would pool from the same people who are seemingly on licence scoring for Full Moon. but yeh. It’s a somewhat generic midi generated border orchestral slush. It’ll make you feel something. But exactly what is hard to define. It’s not quite boredom, but it’s a feeling of muggy familiarity that’ll creep up on you and then leave you largely feeling unremarkable. Definitely not one I’d seek out. It helps to set the mood. But it’s just WAY too generic for my blood.

Final Scream was released in the UK on DVD by Third Millenium Films in early 2002. I’m having a bit of trouble pinning down an exact month of release in the UK but I can narrow it down to between January and June of 2002. After a brief circulation as a standalone release it would later end up being one of the STAPLE films for release as part of the various Prism Leisure multi film DVD packs that were often bundled up with DVD players to help make it look like you were getting a better deal. And when I say a staple, I am speaking anecdotally here. But from memory this thing was EVERYWHERE. I struggle to think of a time I didnt see one of those DVD bundle sets where that film wasnt included SOMEWHERE on it. As a result amazon is PLAGUED with DVD copies of this movie going for next to nothing. The DVD copy was also quite sophisticated for a low budget pressing. Theres a trailer, scene select a photo gallery. And an interactive DVD menu. Which genuinely surprised me as I was concerned this film wouldnt even have a play button quite honestly.

After its DVD release it pretty much disappeared into the ethos until 2022! When Massacre Video announced a VERY nice looking Bluray reissue under it’s alternate title of “Final Stab” and I feel that through a mixture of mixed reviews about selling the film as something it isnt, the misleading promotional material and the lawsuits. Massacre have learnt a valuable lesson here and have VERY wisely chosen to release the film with alternate artwork on the packaging. It now bears ZERO resemblance to the “Scream” franchise…and honestly; I feel that that’s the best way to package this as I feel people may get on with it better without the pre-established subconscious bias. Features include a 2k Scan from the original 35mm print…THIS THING WAS SHOT ON 35MM!?…GOOD LORD…. … anyway. Theres a new audio commentary with Decoteau and some trailers..so extras ARE a bit thin on the ground…not that it matters because this was a limited edition release thats now out of print. But i’d put money on their being a standard edition reissue in future…so..if you want one. Maybe give it a year or two…

Final Scream isnt as bad as it could have been. But thats faint praise when you consider that it could have also been SO much better. This is just a fairly run of the mill slasher that doesnt rock the boat much…which really is part of the problem. It’s a solid enough production with a script that doesnt exactly wow, but it just about does enough to keep a feint interest held to it… some of the cine and direction gives the impression it’s probably on a bigger budget than it actually was. But with a mixture of bizarre script choices in places, mixed to poor performances and a total unwillingness to really do ANYTHING interesting with the pitch beyond “Stick to the formula” this movie left me somewhat tepid. A middling slasher thats notable really more for it’s blatant attempt at trying to rip off a then popular franchise more than anything else. I’d say this might be worth watching as a bit of an oddity. But otherwise, there are PLENTY of better slashers out there to explore.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/final-stab/

2004’s Dawn of the Living Dead (Also known as Curse of the Maya, also known as “Evil Grave”) is…an experience. I think thats fair to say and puts me in a bit of an unusual position really because I honestly cant figure out if this is one of the WORST movies i’ve ever sat through, or some kind of weird work of counter culture genius in the same vein as Neil Breen or Barry J. Gillis. While the film itself is a TOTAL mixed bag of weirdness and monotony, it’s the director David Heavener who’s really caught my interest in this whole thing because. Well…he’s a character.

Not only does he have his own self styled paywalled broadcast network that charges $6 a month to discuss fundamendalist evangelical christian news and the upcoming end of days. But this is unusual (well…unusual to some of you, anyone who’s hung around the church long enough will NOT be surprised) because Heaveners kind of duel wielding at this point, marketing himself as a crusader and preacher, while also maintaining a strong anti PC stance. Before moving into evangelical christian broadcasting he previously ran shows like “David Heavener Live” where he did serialised specials talking about how the Deep state is coming to take your land, or whether radicalised christians are a threat to the Hollywood system.

He currently has a series called Xposed. I mean, David Heavaner Investigates, where he looks at bizarre claims of acts of god and investigates if they really ARE acts of god. The item that caught my eye was this image featured on his IMDB listing for his live shows basically trying to appeal to a christian alt-right audience. Now; in my opinion, a grift is a grift, if someone wants to send this guy $6 a month so he can tell them that illegal immigrants and the deep state are stealing their pens, thats between them and Jesus. I personally think it only adds to the echo chamber of bilge thats bought most of the major high performing economic countries to their knees over the last 10 years+ But thats just my opinion. What Im trying to get at here is that Heavener gives the impression of wanting to be an auteur.

And I mention these things because a third pillar of Heaveners career is that he makes exploitation films…which…is a bit of a contrast to his other projects…Dawn of the living dead wasn’t an outlier, the vast majority of his film career has been spent making Horror movies, Sci fi films and action thrillers, some of which have had a Christian edge. Now if anyone can explain to me how someone can simultaneously be an exploitation film maker and a latter day evangelical preacher AND a member of the anti PC brigade who believes the deep state is trying to kill us all, I’d be fascinated to chat. But im getting off track here.

I do need to make it clear at this point before we get to business, this film has a LOT of racist language used towards mexicans. And I personally don’t believe it’s being used solely for the purpose of character development here. I just wanted to flag that up right off the bat because, while some people would say that was ME being politically correct. I’d prefer to frame it as, me not being an arsehole and needlessly upsetting people for no good reason. So if you are bothered by that kind of thing, don’t bother with this movie it really isnt worth your time, and im going to try and keep any rhetoric to a minimum.

The film opens near the mexican border as we’re introduced to Jeffrey and Renee. A couple that have recently purchased a property on ebay with the aim of escaping the rush of the city to start a new life out in the desert. When they arrive at the house, its in serious disrepair, in fact it looks like whoever lived their previously left in a hurry. Renee isnt phased by the awfulness mind, in fact, the idea of a fixer upper delights her and we’re then treated to an extended montage of Jeffrey doing light repair (largely painting and replacing rotted wood) while Renee wanders around the house to get a better grasp on her surroundings.

While exploring the grounds Renee finds an old bust of a persons head in the grass and decides to bring it into the house, this seems to start something as it becomes apparent that something appears to be watching them from the scrubland. That night when the pair go to bed, Renee has a strange nightmare that a girl she saw in a photograph in one of the rooms is calling to her. She wakes up in a cold sweat and gets Jeffrey to scout the house out, but he finds nothing. The next day Renee finds a hidden room in the house with some toys and playthings, which in turn starts her off hearing even more childrens voices calling out to her, but she cant pinpoint from exactly where.

After getting a bit overwhelmed by the voices Renee heads out into the desert to explore the scrubland and its here that shes set upon by guy in overalls who has learning difficulties. He’s fended off however by non other than David Heavener himself who plays a strong, quiet loner type who speaks with a vague heir of pseudo wisdom Michael. Michael helps maintain wind turbines in the area and the guy he fended off is his co-worker. Renee almost immediately swoons for the great galoop. But shes in a committed relationship and engaged to Jeffrey, so while finding Michael UTTERLY irresistible (it’s worth reiterating here that David Heavener wrote, directed, produced and is now starring as the hunk a dunk of this picture) She has to break away to get home. But she does invite Michael back to the house for dinner.

And it’s over dinner that the tone of the film kind of fundamentally changes. It’s revealed that the reason Jeff and Renee left the city to go and live on the border was because Renee had only just gotten out of a psychiatric hospital. A few years prior her daughter was killed by a hit and run driver while in the care of a foster family because Renee is an addict. Her daughters death triggered a full psychological breakdown that led to 2 years of recovery under Jeffrey, the pair started having a relationship and when she was discharged from the service and released from the hospital the pair thought retreating to a quite house away from all the hussle and bustle might be a good way to work on Renees recovery.

Shes a manic depressive with paranoid tendencies that has to be constantly medicated or she goes psychotic. And wouldnt you know it shes recently stopped taking her meds, and WOULDNT YOU KNOW IT shes also started drinking a lot more booze than before AND WOULDNT YOU KNOW IT! Jeffreys also a bit controlling!…Seriously this dinner just drops all that on the audience within a 3-6 minute window…basically he reminds renee that she loses control of reality if she doesnt stay medicated and gets quite upset when she starts being assertive about not being arsed about taking her medication leading to clear signs that theres trouble in paradise.

Anyway; after that Renee asks Michael about the house, he informs her that it was basically a stopgap for illegal immigrants crossing the border, they’d stay at the house for a few days rest up, eat, drink and get well enough to make it to the nearest city to set up (which…apparently is established as being 400 miles away sooo…I dunno about that.) he also repeatedly refers to mexicans here under a couple of different racial slurs which NOONE pulls him up on. So I just have to assume all the characters in this film are big racists on top of all being quite unlikable people. Anyway, post dinner Jeff heads out and Renee and Michael stay up flirting outrageously with each other (again David wrote this for himself) before the pair go their separate ways.

The next day things get even more interesting as Renee starts to see phantoms all over the ranch, and she also nearly gets drown while tending a pond near the house where a hand comes out of the water and tries to drag her in. Renee is adamant that something DEFINITELY grabbed her, but when Jeffrey gets to her, the first thing he asks is if shes back on her medication, Renee says she isnt which leads Jeffrey to question if she really was attacked by lake zombies or if her DIAGNOSED psychosis (which she IS supposed to medicated for) might have potentially caused her to manifest accidentally slipping into a pond and getting tangled in some weeds as something trying to pull her into the pond. Renee is furious that Joe doesnt believe her and stomps off.

A short time passes and in a scene I cant show you due to nudity, Renee decides to have a bath to try and calm down, only for a hand to pull her under the water. At which point, she is dragged into a vivid flashback in which, the phantoms shes seen wandering around the ranch are all gunned down, drown or just straight up murdered. Including a little girl who ran to hide in the secret toy room that Renee found near the beginning of the film.

When Renee wakes up, she’s on a sofa in the hidden toy room and after moving some of the toys she finds a dried blood splatter on the floor in the exact spot the girl in the flashback was shot to death. Renee goes to tell Jeffrey who simply reiterates that he cant take anything she says seriously until she’s back on her medications. Oh. did I mention that for some reason its also now 5am?. The editing of the film implied the bath scene took place maybe an hour or two after the pond sequence so I was guessing it was mid to late afternoon when the flashback sequence took place. But no, apparently 12-15 hours has passed since the previous scene…also; what was Jeffrey doing awake and fully dressed at 5am!? Ugh…

Anyway in an attempt to prove that she isnt crazy, Renee begs Jeffrey to go check a cornfield thats at the bottom of the ranch’s fields as that’ll prove that these people who got murdered actually existed. Jeffrey humours her and when Renee gets to the spot where the cornfield was, it’s all gone. Jeffrey reiterates that the best thing they can do right now is abandon the renovation work and get Renee back to the city to re-evaluate her mental state and review her medications (which again; given whats going on and that non of the other characters know of an incoming mexican ghost zombie invasion…seems reasonable.)

Later that night Jeffrey comes home drunk and attempts to sexually assault Renee. This causes some strange editing where it gives the impression that Renee dissassociates from the attack and goes into her own mind where a fantasy plays out of her making passionate love to michael. When the deed is done, Renee realises that it WASNT in fact a dissassociated dream and that she really has had sex with Michael who plays things very cooler than thou. And it’s here really that the main drive of the film FINALLY kicks in (WELL over 45 minutes into this hour and 25 minute movie)

Renee begins to research Mayan culture, given that Michael has repeatedly mentioned something about mexicans bringing Vood doo stuff over the border *sigh* and its while researching the Mayan culture that she realises whats going on. Apparently when someone dies a very specific set of rituals need to take place in order to purify the body ready for it’s journey to whatever the mayan version of Heaven is. Because this family were executed without being given the proper burial rituals after 3 days of being dead, they have been resurrected as flesh eating zombies. They then have 5 days of restless hungry zombie mode with which to get someone to perform the official burial rituals otherwise they go to the Mayan version of Hell.

Armed with this information Renee is then set on performing the rituals and releasing these spirits from their pain. Unfortunately; the zombies don’t realise this is what Renee is up to and instead begin to attack the house and people in the surrounding area. In a final 20 minutes that honestly just left me with more questions than answers. Will Renee be able to complete the ritual?, Is Michael all he appears? And will Jeffrey make it to the end credits? All this and a HELL of a lot more will be answered if you take a chance on “Dawn of the living dead”.

So; right off the bat it needs to be said that this script is SO PADDED. Its honestly more stuffing than movie. A lot of the film is dedicated to Renee roaming around the scrubland surrounding the house, long sequences exploring the house itself or cyclical discussions about if the zombie ghost thingies are real, Renee’s medication issue and Mayan culture. There are entire subplots I missed out of my synopsis just because they literally add NOTHING to the film apart from an excuse to get the first gore scene into the film at 38 MINUTES into the run time and to possibly drop more mexican slurs into the mix.

The pacing is all over the place and I think the script was trying to play clever with all the “Is it all in Renee’s head or are there REALLY zombies” angle, but because that plotline isn’t developed much beyond Jeffrey telling her to take her meds and Michael telling her she doesn’t need to take her meds, there’s never any sense that her medication is the reason why all this weird supernatural stuff is happening. It’s like the film WANTS you to think thats an option, while doing everything in its power to make that CLEARLY not what’s going on. We’ll spend 4-6 minutes info dumping our two main characters’ entire backstory over lasagna, then waste 10 minutes with Renee just opening boxes and doors around the house. It’s so uneven. It could have maybe gotten away with it had they played up the psychological elements a bit more, made it a bit more suspenseful or tried to create more of a sense of unease. But theres just…non of that.

The continuity is boned too, characters are introduced and then vanish until they’re convenient, time is constantly being played around with (it goes from night to day almost instantly in places,It can be broad daylight at 5am in this thing) the whole plot about mayan burials way too convoluted honestly, Theres a subplot about weirdo racist bounty hunters that’s just randomly inserted throughout the 2nd act and ultimately adds nothing to the main plot. Michael establishes that the house is near a wind farm which is never utilised bought up, or mentioned again outside of michael giving two passing references to it being his job to maintain them…a job he MUST be doing pretty poorly as he spends most of the film hanging around with Renee…hell; even the end plot twist is SUPER predictable (I guessed it 20 minutes in) and is riddled with continuity issues, it’s just a bit of a mess honestly.

The film this most reminded me of from a Script perspective was “The Day Time Ended” because both films DO have interesting and weird moments that happen within them and I could see someone really enjoying this thing. But the gulfs of total inactivity between those weird moments really tested my patience. This is one of those movies where you’ll sit through 15 minutes of total nothingness to be rewarded with 3 minutes of just…utter oddness. And the worst part here is I cant really describe the oddness to you because A: out of context it wont seem *That* odd and B: a lot of the oddness is tied to spoiler heavy scenes that would take way too long to explain and would ruin the surprise. But trust me when I say that there are moments in this thing that left me full on snort laughing at just how absurd things got so quickly. Whether this was intentional or not is very much up for debate. I personally think David Sincerely wrote this script believing it to be a genuine horror movie. I certainly don’t believe this is satire.

Add in totally underwhelming dialogue that borders and occasionally steps over the line into melodrama campy goodness, a total lack of consistency for our core characters, seriously the intelligence of these people fluctuates wildly. The biggest oddity being that throughout the film the sun is shown to turn purple and split into 5 miniature suns and NOONE says ANYTHING until the very end of the movie and everyone just kind of goes, “Ohhhh thats what that was..” theres barely 1 act, letalone 3 when it comes to act structuring, scenes just kind of melt into each other and because of the experimental editing sometimes cuts will be used mid scene to show hours or even days worth of time passage. Which again, would be great if they were playing this up as a psychological horror…but they arnt.

The script for this is FAR from great. With long dragging sections, no narrative cohesion, poorly written and defined characters, an over reliance on racist language, frankly bizarre scenes that I think were supposed to illicit horror, but instead only made me burst out laughing, and dialogue thats bordering on the inept. I honestly don’t know if I love or hate this thing. It’s left me with SO much confliction and I feel a revisit in the near future is almost a certainty.

As mentioned this film was produced, written, directed and stars David Heavener. He has 29 directing credits and 28 writing credits. He initially started his career working in Action, horror and the occasional scifi movie, before branching out into Christian action and christian drama movies and nowadays he predominantly works on his own streaming platform doing investigative journalism on faith, but he does still churn out the occasional horror or christian action film on the side. With credits including “Prime Target” and “Twisted Justice”.

On the direction front. Im actually not too down on it truthfully, Davids style of direction seems to predominantly be grounded in wide angle shots, fish eye shots and handheld work. Which…well it isnt my cup of tea, but it does leave an ultimately distinct mark, with this being shot on film as well it just gives the picture a little bit more of a boost, just a tiny push that takes it over the line from being something that could have looked cheap being shot on digital video tape to something that, I’d say in the macrocosm of low budget horror actually looks quite respectable. The horror scenes themselves are quite well handled and while it would have been nice to see more gore in these shots (they’re not nearly bloody enough for me) I think they’re handled about as well as they could be. I just wish there was more of them and more blood honestly.
There are nitpicks I’d can pull up, his Day for night work is frankly atrocious, some of the worst i’ve seen in a good while. Some of the choices on how shots are framed aren’t exactly the most professional in the world and the directional choice to shoot some of the scenes handheld to me felt a bit overly unnecessary. Its almost nausea inducing in places, particularly in the day for night sequences where, at points, it can quite literally look like someones just shaking a camera pointed at the colour blue.

I wasnt entirely thrilled with his direction of the cast either. I felt real awkwardness with them. A lot of the pacing beats between line deliveries are off, meaning sometimes there are strong pauses between actors while they’re having a very basic conversation, it all just has an heir of uncertainty about it with only Davids performance itself being relatively rock solid. Which, I assume is down to the fact he actually took the time to not make himself look too much like a doofus in the edit. Set spaces are utilised quite well which is commendable, but I feel like he’s tried to make up for a lack of directorial vision on the location footage by just using funky lenses and colours to try and distract from the fact he just didnt really know what to do to make miles of scrubland look all that interesting.

From a cine perspective. Its…inconsistent. Shots quite often lack focus within the composition barring shots that are only focussing on one person. As mentioned, the choice to shoot a lot of the film handheld is problematic resulting in shaky and often (in my opinion) unprofessional looking shots. The sequences are pretty poorly constructed, they in some cases use smash cuts to try and show passage of time and play with what’s real and whats not. But its so half hearted in committing to that type of play it results in disorienting cuts that,rather than making me wonder what’s real and what isn’t, it ultimately left me wondering if there’d been a mistake in the edit resulting in a jump anywhere between a few minutes to a couple of days within the narrative. Theres a limited range of actual shot types on display and a lot of the heavy lifting is seemingly being done with limited CG effects, strange colour grading or odd lens choices.

To me? It feels like a film where the director got the rushes into the edit and realised that the film looked quite flat and dull. So he shot some materials with weird lenses and then played around in post till it looked more interesting at the cost of its coherency. It also has to be stressed that theres a near total lack of lighting in this film, you say chiaroscuro. I say lack of budget. I counted at least half a dozen scenes in this thing that were underlit and underexposed to the point where I thought it was maybe part of the narrative, like maybe the underlighting was the phantom zombies doing something…but no. this film just doesn’t have very good (if any) lighting direction and minimal lighting in general.

Performance wise; Jesus christ. So right off the bat I feel like Joe Estevez was a miscast. I like Joe, I think he’s a fine enough actor and he seems like a super cool guy in real life. But at the time this film was being made, and at that point in his career. Of ALL the roles you could present him with, “Toxic partner whos an alcoholic and into sexual assault” would be the FURTHEST thing away from what i’d cast Joe as. He’s just too cuddly for that role. Its just all kinds of wrong and works against what that characters supposed to be. I don’t believe his performance as a doctor, I don’t believe his performance as a toxic partner. It’s just…wrong! So wrong!

David’s turn as Michael Richards in this is hilarious, I feel like when he was writing the script for this, his thought process decided he wanted the character he played to be wise, charismatic, charming he wanted the character to be the love of every woman and the envy of every man basically your typical mary sue. But then he realised that it probably wasn’t going to go down well to have this amazing and loved character who gets to snog and act bang Amanda Bauman also be completely faultless to the point he ends up saving the day and also by sheer chance be the same guy who wrote and directed it. So in order to play down what feels like a guys attempt to just have a shot at kissing attractive women and playing the hero for 90 minutes they rush out a 15 minute plot twist ending to give him a MASSIVE fault that’s completely out of line with anything that’s happened in the film up to that point. His character in this is ridiculous and whenever he was on screen I literally couldn’t help but stifle a laugh at his performance.

Amanda Bauman by contrast kind of ends up stuck between these two guys and I’d say she is VERY representative of the middle ground for this film. I feel her casting was appropriate, and I think Davids written her to be a flawed but understandable character, I think Amanda plays it well. Is it a perfect performance? Absolutely not, there’s a few moments where she falters and…in honesty the material (to me at least) is pretty bad so she’s working with a bad hand. But, she does amicably. Shes decent enough. So i’d say thats an absolute win. The rest of the cast are awful. Most of them have no lines and the ones that do feel like they fell out of an early 2000’s Troma movie. And not a good early 2000’s Troma movie. Lines are delivered stiffly with little to no animation, It’s a bit of a shit show honestly, which was a dissapoitnment.

And finally; the soundtrack. And it’s…Alright. And I feel bad for saying that because I personally don’t think it’s alright; I think it’s generic. But objectively I cant really find any flaw in it within the context of it being a low budget horror movie. It’s pan pipey string and acoustic midi fodder. Not the worst i’ve ever heard. Not enthralling or interesting but it DOES work to help punctuate the horror elements of this quite well. What I will say is the sound recording for the cast is atrocious, if anymore than 1 person is in the scene the audio goes WAY off balance. Wind is in most outdoor recordings and the diegetic sound has been dubbed on from stock effects that don’t match what’s happening on screen and havent been balanced against the soundtrack of the actors meaning frequently doors gently being shut are louder than actor dialogue and waters overwhelmingly loud. its a poor audio experience in all honesty.

Dawn of the living dead was released on DVD in 2005 by Lighthouse DVD distribution, the same Lighthouse DVD that released “Stranger – A soulmate of chucky ” only a year prior. My guess is, much like stranger Lighthouse took a look “Curse of the Maya” as a title and went “We’ll lose money if we put it out as that!” Then they noticed that Zack Snyder had a “Dawn of the Dead remake recently out and they thought “Hey! Lets just do that!” before slapping a new title over the film and kicking it out the door. At least this one DOES technically have zombies in…Anyway, no extra features, just a scene select and my assumption is it went out of print at the same time Lighthouse DVD was dissolved in 2016 because since then it hasn’t been reissued and there’s no bluray release. While there were a lot of mixed to bad things to say about this one. I dunno, I kind of would like to see it cleaned up for a bluray release, just purely for the MST3K factor of it clearly being PERFECT for a good riff!

I still havent fully decided whether I like Dawn of the living dead or not, and I think it’ll take a LOT of time and rewatches to finally let my feelings settle. The only thing I know for sure is that this is NOT a good movie by any stretch of the imagination in my opinion. But deciding whether its an enjoyably bad movie or just a bad film is, to me, very much up for debate. I cant say I hated it, though there is a lot to dislike. Nor can I say I loved it despite it having the weird quirky charms it does have. The scripts all over the place, the direction and cine are a mess, the cast are miscast and the soundtracks paper thin. But there just something oddy endearing about it… With it being cheap I’d say grab it; its definitely something different. I wont endorse it but I think by a hairs BREADTH. I’d recommend it…ugh. I feel so dirty Im going to go wash my mouth out…see you next week.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/curse-of-the-maya/

1975’s Footprints on the moon (Also known as “Le Orme”, also known as “Primal Impulse” also known simply as “Footprints”) is an experimental mystery Thriller with a hint of Giallo and a dash of sci-fi thrown in for good measure. I’ve been meaning to get around to this one for a while, having picked it up about 4 years ago thinking it was just going to be a sci-fi arthouse movie. I realise now on the back of the box it does make a passing reference to Giallo in the synopsis of this release, but I was sold on sci-fi crazy sexy times and as such what I ACTUALLY witnessed kind of caught me off guard.

Y’see; while the film is heavily grounded in a narrative, it is fairly open ended in terms of interpretation and doesnt give you answers to everything. Which can be a bit frustrating honestly because some of the plot points that are left unanswered are kind of important plot points. With this being a bit on the experimental side, scenes and sequences sometimes happen in such a way that leads the audience to question whats really important and whats a misdirect. So rather than go through a beat by beat plot summary, because doing that will honestly just lead to a lot of “And then she went here and did this, and then she went here and did that” repetition. Im just gonna hit you with a broad overview.

The film follows Alice…I think…It gets convoluted. A woman from Portugal working as a translator in Italy. As the film opens Alice is woken by a bad dream. In the dream an astronaut is abandoned on the moon and slowly dies, it’s later clarified that this is a dream that Alice has had for almost a decade, ever since she went to the cinema as a little girl to watch a scary sci-fi movie called “footprints on the moon”. Anyway; she gets up, wanders around her house for a bit, takes some medication and then finds a torn up postcard in her kitchen, she assembles it and it shows a picture of a Hotel with a caption at the bottom that reads “The Garma Hotel” She doesn’t know how the postcard got there, but she put it to the back of her mind and heads back to sleep.

The next day; she heads out to work only to find that when she arrives at the office, her boss’s supervisor has called her into a meeting because she hasnt turned up for work in a few days. The reason why is unclear but her boss is adamant Alice DEFINITELY hasn’t attended for 3 days, But Alice VERY clearly remembers having attended a function on one of the days she was absent. Alice explains that she was asked to attend a conference as a translator for global speakers, around half way through the conference though she suddenly began to feel very overwhelmed and ended up fleeing the conference via a side door, though exactly what happened after that…noone seems to know.

Her supervisor has a different story, saying that Alice never turned up at all and that her translation tools were all left at the office with no way to contact her to see what was going on. As a result of her not handing her translations over to her boss, shes had to head to a conference unprepared and as a result of this AND Alice’s unexplained absences, its VERY likely that Alice is soon to be an ex-employee. Things get stranger for Alice, as she realises one of her earrings has gone missing and a dress has turned up in her wardrobe that shes never seen before. After talking with a friend about her dreams and the missing three days, Alice is drawn again to the postcard and Garma, she keeps having unexplainable flashbacks of an asian inspired hotel room, a stained glass window portraying a peacock and a balcony overlooking the sea that for some reason, she’s sure is linked to the postcard.

Deciding that whatever is currently going on HAS to be tied to that postcard, Alice travels by plane and ferry to arrive on the island of Garma with the aim of getting to the bottom of what exactly is going on. When she arrives at the port harbour she meets a lovely gent who agrees to give her a lift to the hotel. They make small talk and the man suggests they may well meet again. Alice arrives at the hotel and requests the room with the peacock stained glass, but the hotel receptionist doesn’t really know what shes talking about, he is able to get her a room with a balcony overlooking the sea though, With that, Alice sets up and starts trying to piece things together. Eventually meeting a young girl called Paula who insists on calling Alice “Nicole”. It transpires that this “Nicole” person visited the island on the same day that Alice vanished from the conference, she looked EXACTLY like Alice, but with long red hair and she spent some time with paula… though; what she exactly did, Paula wont say.

As Alice explores the island more and starts trying to make sense of exactly whats gone on, it starts to become apparent that either Nicole has been doing something in Alice’s name, or that Alice and Nicole are one in the same and the key to exactly what happened during Alice’s 3 day memory wipe lies on Garma. With more and more of the puzzle slowly beginning to fall into place and Alice’s scary Astronaut nightmares slowly starting to creep more and more to the front of her mind. Will Alice manage to find Nicole? Does the man who gave her a lift to the hotel know more than he’s letting on? And…why is Klaus Kinsky in this? Guys got like 5 minutes of screen time total and adds almost NOTHING to the main plot…all this and more will be answered if you take a trek with Footprints on the moon.

The trouble with covering Giallo and mystery cinema is that the mystery in many ways IS the movie. A poor payoff can make what was otherwise a great movie, awful. And vice versa. The problem I have here is how much exactly to spoil because I cant really offer you proper analysis of this film without spoiling some of the twists and turns. So from here on in, im not going to spoil EVERYTHING. But i’d say watch at your peril. I will be talking a little bit about the ending and some of the elements the film plays with.

What I will say is I do recommend you check this film out if your into Giallo cinema and haven’t seen this one before. Its a fun watch, even if it isnt necessarily the most satisfying one in the world. It was considered “Lost” for years as all that existed was a ropey VHS copy, but as of 2009 the vast majority of the film turned up as a film print allowing for a *partial* restoration. It also has a bit of a wobbly copyright standing meaning that companies like Mill Creek have included it multiple times on their public domain sets under the title “Primal Impulse” so odds are you may have a copy of this movie (unremastered) and not even know it! So as a quick caption, i’d say go check it out.

From a script perspective I think it handles its source material rather well, this film is based on a novel by Mario Fanelli and while they do play up the artier side of things visually, from what I can gather (based on italians discussing this LONG out of print book online) it’s largely faithful. One of the things that’s almost annoyingly endearing about this movie is the fact that it uses its central plot point around the loss of time to really play around with what we’re perceiving as an audience. Events will happen, but we’re not sure if they’re in Alices head, or if they’re flashbacks, if they’re relevant to the main plot or totally negligible. I love it in the sense that the film is REALLY open to playing with the audience. But it’s also annoying in some regards because some important points they raise never ACTUALLY get resolved.
The two biggest points that end up mostly unanswered are HOW Alice ended up losing the 3 days; they explain a rough breakdown of what exactly happened DURING that time, Basically; she left the conference centre after having a breakdown, convinced the astronauts from her nightmares were coming to take her away. So she put on a disguise, adopted a pseudonym and fled to Garma looking for her childhood friend Harry for protection against her abduction. Then she began to believe Harry was in on the abduction attempts, attacked him and fled the house, ditching her disguise, burning any trace of her whereabouts and fleeing back home. (little of this is shown by the way).

But they don’t explain a single JOT of what triggered a bout of 3 day amnesia, nor do they explain how NOONE between Italy and Garma saw her in clear mental distress fleeing the country..Even basic things like her bank statements aren’t bought up…like; I don’t know how rich Alice is, but if I had a blank on my memory for 3 days and checked my bank balance to find that a return flight and multiple ferry trips + expenses had been charged on my account. I wouldn’t be booking another flight out there, I’d be calling my bank to see where ALL my money had gone. The fact we never exactly find out how she lost her memory in the first place bugs me, because it’s kind of the driving force of the film. Just saying “Funny things happen when you have a breakdown” isn’t really a justifiable way to resolve what is really a key plot point.

The other problem, lies with timings…the film doesn’t overtly state the date these events take place, it gives the day and month (the film takes place between the 7th of September and the 11th of September) but the year is left out. That wouldn’t generally matter. But the final shot of the film is a shot of the moon with a caption stating “Since 15th October 1971 Alice has been interned at the neuropsychiatric institute in switzerland” This is a problem for multiple reasons. The original novel was published in 1971. The film adaptation happened in 1975. The only dates shown in the movie are at the very end, and the very beginning of the film. In the beginning of the film Alice sets the date to tuesday the 7th of September before she goes to work and finds out that it’s actually a thursday. Looking online, that would mean the film took place in 1971.

But because it’s such a blink and you’ll miss it scene, and bearing in mind that unless you’re a bit of a weirdo who keeps an eye on calendars across multiple years. Audience members wouldnt be thinking that this film was taking place in ‘71. Audience members would naturally assume that this was happening in ’75. Which makes the caption at the end saying that she was sent to a hospital in ‘71 VERY confusing. Even more so for modern audiences watching it back now who would glance the release date and then hit play. I got SO confused by this end caption because I was thinking “Soooo…does the film take place in September 1971? Has she been in the hospital the entire time and we’re just seeing some kind of weird deluded internal visualisation? Is this a flashback? What is ACTUALLY going on?

Part of me kind of liked the end caption because I took that to mean that the entire film was just someone reliving bits of a past life from within a secure facility. But part of me was BEYOND annoyed that they effectively did the “It was all a dream” line. Now having looked into things a little more I know that the whole thing takes place in 1971. But I feel its a bit much to expect the audience to research the film, find that it’s based on a novel written in 1971 and that the filmmakers decided not to draw the dates in line with the film adaptations release.
There’s a man referenced throughout the film called “Matthew” that we never really meet or find out anything about despite him being referenced as being involved with Nicole. Towards the end of the film, Alice tries to flee the island when she becomes convinced that the astronauts from her nightmares are real. They then ACTUALLY appear and try to take her, but the film isnt clear as to whether they’re actual astronauts or if they’re even really there. They don’t clarify if Alice was actually AT the conference or not, they don’t clarify if Nicole is the dominant personality or Alice and they don’t really explain how the personality swap is triggered, I mean; I’m not precious, I don’t want to be spoon fed. But it would have been nice to not have such glaring key plot points left unanswered or left in a state where you need to spend half an hour on google looking at calendars, maps and reference guides from 1971 to figure out what’s ACTUALLY going on.

Grumbles aside though, I did enjoy this script, Im hesitant to call this Giallo because it kind of lacks the blood, guts and nastiness that Giallo tends to invoke, a stabbing scene with a pair of scissors with no blood at the very end of the film is about as nasty as it gets…But given that everyone else has already labelled it a Giallo movie, I realise im probably in the minority. As a mystery movie, it’s structured solidly enough. but because of the messing around with time and what is or isn’t real, it kind of free’s itself to tit about without invoking too much wrath. I think the characters all have a decent level of development and growth, Alice in particular really gets a broad range to work with in this script. I’d say that range lends itself to a well paced character development arc from wallflower-esq cubical girl to forward and border aggressive woman on the edge.

There’s a clean 3 act structure and the pacing (barring a little bit of 2nd act flab) is slowburner but satisfying. This isn’t something racing to get you to the end line. It’s happy to let its audience stew in Garma, its people and the world built into the island to really let you savour the clues in order to make the audience savour the reveal as to what exactly’s been going on. And barring my own hang ups around some aspects needing closure…Im kind of okay with this.

The film was directed and written by Mario Farelli and Luigi Bazzoni, as mentioned the film itself was based off a novel Mario wrote in 1971 called “Las Huellas” but he came on board here to help adapt the novel to screen and he also had some uncredited work on here in a directing capacity. He has 73 directing credits almost ENTIRELY for italian TV movies. Non of the titles jumped out at me honestly, BUT! If I had to pick another work he was probably famous for it would probably be “The Fifth Chord” which was also based on a novel he wrote. He has 12 writing credits and He sadly passed away in 1991. As for Luigi, he has 14 directing credits and 8 writing credits. His best known work is probably either this, “The Possessed” or his work with Mario on “Fifth chord”. He too sadly passed away in 2012.

On the direction front, we have a pretty decent looking movie! Its a stylized production that uses block colours, particularly dark blues, blacks and browns in a thoughtful and powerful way throughout to help create a moody piece that I think really gives the film it’s own sense of identity. The scenes involving the astronauts are shot in greyscale and stylised to look like old 50’s B movies which is a really nice touch that helps contrast against the sleeker more nuanced work 70s sequences. Visually i’m actually kind of disappointed that the film isnt *Entirely* immaculate, it looks like the grade is slightly off in places,it almost has an olive tinge to it. Which did rather take me out of what was otherwise a fairly immersive experience.
Luigi’s style of film making is seemingly to focus on BIG scenes, complex and gorgeous looking sets and locations are shot as wide as possible to get from floor to ceiling in the shot and that distinctive look used throughout the film when coupled with the colour choices really helped sell me on this. I think a less kind critic would say that this doesn’t really bring anything new to the table. Admittedly this isn’t really anything we haven’t seen before in “Blood and Black Lace” or “Cat O Nine Tails”. But I feel that for an early to mid 70’s mystery movie at a time where Giallo as a genre was just coming down from its first peak and heading into their gorier, nastier second wind in the 80’s. It does the job in keeping you on board right up to the big end reveal. It’s no “Bird with the Crystal Plumage”…but it’ll do.

Direction of the cast is solid enough. With this being a moodier piece, cast reaction is critical here and I feel that Mario and Luigi have both worked particularly well to get the absolute best they can out of the cast. The language barriers that are present in most of italian cinema are present here, but that makes it all the more impressive that the pair were able to pull the range out of the cast that they did. While they could have utilised set space just a tiny bit more, they aren’t afraid of those spaces either. Their guidance ultimately could have been better. But its far far from awful.

From a cine standpoint what we have here is a wonderful piece that seemingly isnt afraid to experiment. The camera is CONSTANTLY moving throughout with silk smooth pans and tracking shots that carry us through the film effortlessly. It’s SO nice to see camera work be so thoughtful and creative in terms of trying to hold audience interest, sequences blend seamlessly into one another using the sense of “timelessness” in its favour, we’ll smoothly glide from Alice in her bluelit bedroom pondering what exactly is going on in her life, to the nightmares that plagues her sleeping moments. This is a definite step above most of the fodder I cover on this channel with a curated and thoughtful shot list being used to really drive the emotion and thoughts within the scene to the forefront.
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When coupled with some decent editing that really takes its time to let the scenes breathe without overstaying their welcome. The end result is some wonderfully composed shots, excellently arranged into sequences that have been given the loving care they clearly needed in order to be presented as best they could. And here, i’d say they absolutely achieved that. Is it the most original work in the world? That might be a reach, though theres definitely a debate to be had here and and my GOD it’s pretty in places.

Performance wise. It’s pretty much the Florinda Bolkan show, the vast majority of the film is pretty much solely hers, and she REALLY gets to stretch out, giving a performance that manages, successfully I might add, to REALLY invest you in the character and her situation. You genuinely feel the wooziness she feels along the way as she tries desperately to make sense of the situation she’s found herself in and honestly; shes just a delight for most of the run time.

Given this movie has Klaus Kinski in it, I actually found his *VERY* brief appearance in this to be largely unremarkable. He does a good job of playing that kind of 50’s B-movie archetype…but honestly, there isn’t much more to say other than that. Equally; the rest of the cast all do fairly reasonably but ultimately feel unremarkable too. I wont say they’re bad because they’re not. But they do rather remind me of NPCs in video games. They don’t really go above and beyond saying their lines with conviction and then sort of…wandering off. Nicoletta Elmi is probably the only standout additional cast member as Paula, who REALLY gets put through the ringer by Alice and Nicole and gives a believable reaction to this weird situation of split personalities. Shes a natural performer that I feel for a child actor, was actually quite impressive.

And finally; The Soundtrack. Its decent! Its got a classical edge to it, but there are some electronic elements that do break through occasionally. It isn’t TOO intrusive on the film, it’s just a relatively solid piece that helps to keep the flow of the film going during key points and while, it is possibly a touch on the generic side for movies of this genre, i’ll take stable and a bit generic over no music or irritating scoring any day.

Footprints on the moon was largely considered a “Lost” film until a print resurfaced in the 2000’s. Before that it did the rounds on bootleg circuits as a ropey and incomplete VHS dub under the title “Primal Instinct”, I cant find any evidence of an official VHS release having ever happened for this film, but I can trace an “Unauthrosied” DVD bootleg back to as early as 2006. So its to be presumed that bootleg VHS copies were floating around for a few years before then. As mentioned, Mill creek has released this multiple times on their public domain 50 movie film packs. But it wasn’t until 2009 that the film would be “Restored” and OFFICIALLY released on DVD by shameless films under the name “Footprints on the moon”.

The film print located was missing some scenes which have been restored using a good quality VHS rip. And…well…the restoration work isn’t amazing. Shameless pride themselves on a more “rough and ready” aesthetic. That’s not to say they don’t bother restoring their releases. It’s just that they believe that films like this SHOULD have a bit of grit and grime thrown back in…for character. Given their remit is generally for gory and overly violent movies like Cannibal Holocaust and The New York Ripper. I do feel somewhat inclined to agree that these movies do feel “right” with a little bit of grit thrown back in. But at the same time with movies like this one, it maybe would have been nice to see it fully “ground up” restoration…really giving it a proper polish, and then offering this release with the option of either seeing the fully cleaned version or a cut with a rougher around the edges look. Extras on here are a bit thin on the ground, but there’s trailers, multiple subtitle tracks and a scene select soo….its something!

I don’t think ardent Giallo followers will rush out to catch “Footprints on the moon” while it is a quite well made production in my opinion, I don’t feel it offers anything unique enough that hasn’t been seen or done before better in other films. What this film IS good for though, is as an entry level picture for people new to the genre who’ve maybe seen a couple of staple entries and want to see something that’ll make them sound a bit more confident about their Giallo knowledge. It has a good, solid and unusual script, Gorgeous cine, decent direction and a good range of performances. To some; it may be retreading old ground. But if you’re new to the genre or maybe a casual viewer who isn’t 100% invested in every work of giallo ever released. I think you might get a kick out of it so I’d say, check it out.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/footprints-on-the-moon-1975/

1993’s The American Ninja 5 is NOT “The American Ninja 5”. It feels a bit weird saying that, but it is what it is. This action film with VERY light comedy elements was originally called “American Dragons” and on some TV broadcasts of this film it’s STILL called “American Dragons”. In fact it was only towards the very end of production that Cannon pictures decided to tweak the script slightly on some reshoot footage, inserting the words “American Ninja” a few times to try and tie it into the American Ninja franchise and changing the name from “American Dragons” to “American Ninja 5” on the promo materials to try and sucker in people who were invested in the “American Ninja” series.

And y’know what? Given the absolute YAWN a thon that “The American Ninja 4” was, given that this film currently sits at around a 2.5 to 3.0 rating on IMDB and given that it LITERALLY has nothing to do with the “American Ninja” movies barring David Bradely appearing in the lead role. I think this is probably one of my favourite “American Ninja” movies.

The film follows David Bradley playing a completely different ninja expert called Joe. Joe owns a gym in town and lives on a boat. He’s a master of Ninjitsu and has an ability to use a form of meditation to cause things to explode, teleport or die. So he’s basically a Scanner. Anyway! After a hard days training Joe finishes up at the gym and heads back to the marina to chill out at home. But when he gets back he finds someone varnishing his boat. This is Lisa, a woman who owns a boat a couple of slots down from him who offered to Varnish his boat for him, Unfortunately; Joe misheard, he didn’t want Lisa to VARNISH the boat. He wanted her to TARNISH the boat! *Laugh track* Because of this blunder, Joes boat is uninhabitable for at least 48 hours. So Lisa offers to let Joe sleep on her boat till its dry and even suggests cooking dinner for him. He’s not happy with the arrangement, but agrees.

Shortly after this; we’re introduced to the main thrust of the movie. As we meet Simon Glock, owner of Glock Chemicals. A bio company that works in pesticides and poisons. Their chief scientist Dr. Strobel has mastered a pesticide called ZB-12 that kills insects and leaves no residue on the plant itself. Making it essentially safe to eat without having to chemically wash the produce. Unfortunately; a side effect of ZB-12 is that, when used in a high enough concentration, it can more or less instantly kill any animal or human. When news hits the lab that Glock wants Strobel to start studying its effects on animals, He storms into a meeting Glock is holding to call the request barbaric. Glock tells Strobel that the reason for testing is with “Honourable Intentions” and when Strobel refuses to comply, Glock restricts the Dr’s movement to his lab.

It turns out that Glock is working with the Venuzualan military to develop a bomb full of ZB-12 that can be concealed in a suitcase. The plan being to sell these bombs on the black market to reap a massive profit. With Strobel not interested in supporting that, Glock makes the decision that he’s going to have to intimidate him into compliance. So! He tells one of his bodyguard,henchmen…people, who goes by the name “Viper”. To go and kidnap Strobel’s daughter to act as a hostage.

Meanwhile; back at the gym Joes really going at it when an old friend and mentor Master Tetsu drops by, Joe had completely forgotten he agreed to housesit for Tetsu while he was vacationing. while running through the list of things to keep an eye on, he casually drops that he also needs Joe to keep an eye on his Grandnephew Hiro. Hiro is an orphan, his mother died during childbirth and his father was killed under mysterious circumstances. Hes an introvert loner gamer weirdo but Tetsu trusts that Joe can take care of him and asks him to maybe even work with him a bit on learning the art of Ninjitsu.

Joe flat out refuses to babysit, but ultiamtely isnt left with much of a choice when Tetsu uses a smoke bomb to just…vanish. So! Joe takes Hiro to go and cancel plans with Lisa, and on the way over to the marina Hiro opens up a bit more…turns out, hes a bit annoying. We’re talking TOTAL Scrappy Doo energy. When the pair arrive at the boat they find that dinners already ready and that Lisa had kinda sorta planned the whole thing because she was REALLY interested in getting to know Joe better. Hiro, being a bit of a twerp helps initiate things further and what WAS supposed to be a cancelled dinner date, ends up being a late night dining and schmoozing session where they all get to know each other quite a bit better.

Lisa heads below deck to sort a few things out, and almost immediately she’s attacked by Viper who knocks her out, gets her off the boat and into the back of a van that speeds off to the airport. Joe goes to look for Lisa and Hiro spots her being taken off the ship. A crazy car chase ensues with Hiro driving and when the pair arrive at the airport they see Lisa get smuggled onto an aircraft and they immediately try to smuggle themselves on board too…well Joe does, he tells Hiro to head home, but Hiro just sneaks into a crate and gets loaded onto the plane anyway. It turns out the planes heading to south America and when the plane lands, it doesn’t take long for Lisa to get offloaded into another van and for Joe to end up being captured by the Venuzualan police and put in jail. Hiro manages to evade capture, at which point Joe gives him the job of trying to get to the US embassy to tell them about whats gone on.

Back at Glock Chemicals, Lisa and her father are reunited and Strobel tells Lisa that he’s built a prototype of the bomb. His plan is to get Glock and the general all together in the same room and detonate it. Killing himself in the process, but stopping the bomb from making its way to the black market. Lisa is strongly against the plan, but knows there isnt really a lot she can do to stop it. Shes then taken to a hotel where she’s kept in a guarded suite.

Hiro eventually manages to find/steal a bike and after a short while finds out Joe is being moved, after a lenghty chase sequence, he manages to get the transfer truck to crash and when the drivers get out to try and find Him, he steals the transfer truck. What they don’t realise though is that following the transfer truck was a jeep with two of Glocks henchmen in, a guy named “Flathead” and “Generic baddie A”. Anyway!; eventually the transfer van gets rammed off the road. Flathead pumps the truck full of bullets, but when they open the back of the truck to see the mess, Joe swings out (having clung to the roof) and promptly beats the crap out of both of them. But before he’s able to claim a win, Viper turns up and summons a load of ninjas. Some fight Joe, while others kidnap Hiro. Joe quickly dispatches his opponents and chases after the ninjas who took Hiro. a few fights here and there and a stint through, what looks like an obstical course and Hiro is free again and the pair quickly dust themselves off and start heading out to look for clues again.

But the baddies haven’t given up just yet! as another chase ensues that results in Joe jumping off a dock into the sea where Flathead machine guns him. When Joe doesn’t resurface, Flathead declares “I got him!” something Hiro overhears and assumes that Joe is dead. Things look pretty bleak, as Hiro heads back into the nearest town to beg people for directions to the US Embassy. BUT! It turns out Joe ISN’T dead! I have no idea how…the film doesn’t bother to explain. BUT! He’s alive! And using his Ninjitsu skills he’s able to bust his handcuffs off and starts to plan his next moves.

Meanwhile Hiro stumbles on a local street gang who, as soon as they see him basically hold him down and threaten to cut his fingers off. But by SHEER DUMB LUCK, Joe turns up, beats up the gang, rescues Hiro *again* and the pair manage to get away, they have a bit of a heart to heart, when Viper appears AGAIN and sets another army of ninjas on the pair, Joe manages to take the ninjas out, but while fighting Viper manages to hit Hiro in the head, knocking him unconscious. While out cold, he has a flashback where he sees Viper kill his father and take an amulet from him. When Hiro wakes up, Joe continues the heart to heart and, as if by magic, Master Tetsu appears as a force ghost and praises Joe for his work at protecting Hiro. He reveals that Hiro’s dad intensely trained him in the art of Ninjitsu and that, with some minor training and meditation, his abilities and powers will return. He tells Joe that the trauma in Joes past around failing to protect HIS little brother will be absolved if he helps Hiro unlock his full potential.

And so! Cue training montages, a foiled attempt at assassinating the head of a global chemicals company and rainbow ninja outfits galore! As Hiro and Joe head out to rescue Lisa and her father, put a stop to illegal arms dealings and teach Glock and Viper the lesson that, whether young or old, master or student NOONE messes. With the American Ninja…Dragons? American Dragon Ninjas? JUST DON’T MESS WITH DAVID BRADLEY!

My bar for this movie was pretty much on the floor, im not going to lie. While the American Ninja 4 had a sense of grandness, it frankly wasted SO much time doing the weird split plot line thing and the fights were SO poorly choreographed that frankly, I was done with the franchise by the time the credits rolled. I enjoyed the first two, the third was fine and the forth was a slog that had a couple of good moments sprinkled in throughout. The American Ninja 5 doesnt exactly bring the franchise back to fertile ground. But if we ARE going to treat this movie as an American Ninja sequel (official or otherwise) then what I will say is, it’s not as grand as the previous American Ninja movies. But it does a lot more with a lot less producing something thats arguably the most enjoyable American Ninja movie since part 2.

The script for this is fairly minimalist, gone are the large scale Ninja training compounds, gone are the baddies looking to create super ninjas or aiming to raise a dictatorship. Here it’s as simple as two not unreasonably written characters ending up pulled into rescuing a love interest and inadvertently stumbling on a nefarious arms deal which they try to stop. There were elements of this in “The American Ninja 4” but it was just that, Elements. Parts of a BIGGER picture that ultimately got watered down as a result.

Here, because the script only really has Lisa’s kidnapping and the bomb threat to work with, it’s able to build a greater sense of peril into those elements because thats ALL thats at stake. Its not trying to spin a lot of plates, so it can take its time in making sure that it gets the elements it IS working with just about right. There’s a LOT less characters to worry about when compared to the other films. Which again; only really helps to keep things focussed because, unlike Ninja 4, your spending the whole movie with only 2 or 3 of *roughly* 5 characters which makes it much more coherent when compared to Ninja 4 where you’d spend an UNGODLY amount of time with one character, then an UNGODLY amount of time with another.

Equally; with this entry, the series embraced a light dash of comedy which has really gone a long way to help freshen things up a little bit. It doesn’t HAVE to be all pouty serious moody action. Its ALLOWED to have a little bit of fun with it’s characters and I think this helps MASSIVELY as it takes the pressure OFF trying to deliver something as grand and serious as previous instalments, instead allowing the audience to just relax and be entertained for a spell. When the previous American Ninja movies did comedy it was VERY few and far between and played with a “Cooler than thou” mentality. Here. it feels like the cast are actually having fun, which in turn makes me, the audience member ALSO feel like i’m having fun. And really; that’s all you can ask of a sequel, quality and entertainment.

Now thats not to say this movies amazing, the fact its smaller scale does mean it somewhat fails to really define itself against the other movies in the series or even the genre really. There are MUCH better Ninja action movies out there than this, and just being “okay” can and will work against it with some people. It suffers from padding in places and at times, it feels like some scenes have had their order rearranged post shoot, which has created a bit of instability in the script structure. The best example I can think of is Joe agreeing to help train Hiro after Viper knocks Hiro out, only for Tetsu to turn up and tell Joe he needs to help train Hiro and for Joe to AGAIN agree to help train Hiro. there are a couple of examples of that in this film, where it feels like scenes have been split in half and spread out across the run time to help give the impression that the characters are in the movie more than they actually are, when in reality all it really does is make it look like the characters are a bit forgetful and keep repeating points they made 10-15 minutes prior.

In fact, if we’re talking about the script structure, While it does have a problem in terms of deciding what order to run things in, it does cover the basics pretty decently. It has it’s 3 act structure firmly in place, the pacings all relatively decent, it maybe slows down a little bit in the middle, but only a smidge and I’d put that largely down to padding (examples being Hiro spending a TON of time wandering around looking for the US embassy and scenes throughout where Joe fights some ninjas and kicks their arses, only to IMMEDIATELY walk into the next scene where a load of ninjas appear and Joe has to kick their arses) its by no means the worst i’ve seen for padding and repetition, but it cant go unnoticed.

Throw in some cheesy dialogue that really does sound like its coming from a kids tv show (this movie was PG-13 in the US so you know exactly the tone they’re going for) and depending on your preference for movies that don’t take themselves MASSIVELY seriously, your milage may vary. I could easily see someone who liked the tone and vibe of the American Ninja movies coming to this film and being VERY disappointed that it’s chosen to go down a lighter, less life or death route. But I for one really rather welcomed it, Its a change of pace after 2 movies that felt VERY samey and had similar issues that made them…well…a bit boring in all honesty. This isn’t bogged down with continuity, and, to me? It’s a fun, sturdy enough work that i’m not ashamed to say I got on with.

The script was written by Gregg Latter, George Saunders and John Bryant, Gregg has 25 writing credits to his name with credits including “Cold Harvest”, “Cyborg Cop” and “Delta Force 3: The Killing Game” His last credit was in 2017. George and John have 5 and 4 writing credits respectively, and both have pretty much worked together on everything they’ve written with the exception of 1 extra credit for George in 1995 and Johns last credit being in 1994. Highlights include: “Scanner Cop” and “Martial Outlaw”. On directing duties we have Bob Bralver, he has 17 directing credits, mainly for TV including “Knight Rider”, “The A-Team” and “Dragnet” he’s really more of a Stuntman in honesty, in that field he has 178 credits with highlights including “Roadhouse” and “Darkman”.

On the direction front…I mean, it tries. It’s hardly the most breathtaking watch i’ve ever sat through, I’ll be completely honest. I suppose the best way I could describe it is, it’s above acceptable, Not exactly showstopping, but it does have the odd flourish in their that makes me think the director was trying to turn out something good with whatever resources he had. While the general scene by scene direction is rather by the numbers, it does have the odd nice moment where it goes above and beyond. The various car chases that happen throughout the film are usually ones that standout in terms of doing things that made me go “Ooh. this is a bit more interesting!” shots set in the hotel near the end when Hiro and Joe go to rescue Lisa also impressed. It’s not groundbreaking stuff. But reasonable with the occasional moment of “great” is, for me at least, always going to trump good but underwhelming. There was nothing here that blew my socks off, but there was enough to keep me on board.

The fight Choreography iiiiis a little underwhelming, BUT! It IS a lot better than how it was handled in American Ninja 4. They go for masked contact and the occasional soft contact blow, and while the choreography itself is a little underwhelming…they’ve made the probably wise decision to go for fast martial artistry rather than anything more intricate which is safe, but ultimately a bit disappointing, they DO at least handle the technicals around masking those contact shots quite well. Ninja 4 was awful at that with shots of actors not even touching each other making it into the final cut. Here at least it looks like the punches and kicks are landing AT LEAST 90% of the time and it feels like theres weight behind the attacks as well. It may not be pushing boundaries. But I always admire solid attempts.

The cine is in a bit of a similar place to the direction, it lacks scale, but its ambitious and I respect that. Sequences are fairly basic, but the cine team behind this do have a nice eye for composition and there’s some decent shots making up these sequences. While there isnt really a lot of experimentation here, I’m more than happy with acceptable cine structured into competent sequences that do occasionally strive to go a bit above and beyond. The cine around the fight scenes is tight and focussed on the action. The chase scenes are edited swiftly with a variety of shots driving emphasis on the fast paced nature of the chase and theres even just the odd nice addition in play too, like establishing shots of the aeroplane Joe and Hiro hop aboard mid flight and shots of the villages surroundings to help really sell us on the locations. I don’t think it’ll exactly blow anyone away. But I cant knock it really all that much because it’s not doing what it does badly…its just trying it’s best to do what it can with what it has…

Performance wise, David Bradley as Joe is pretty solid, with this being an action/comedy he’s playing things with a slightly lighter edge here than when compared to Sean in the other American ninja movies. It’s not his greatest performance, but for this genre of film, I think he does the job just about. I think he comes across as warm when he needs to be and serious when its time to throw hands. So I wont fault him here! I also have to REALLY give some credit to Lee Reyes on this one. I don’t like to comment particularly on child actors. I make it a bit of a rule, but I will say here that Reyes takes a character that COULD have been, in the wrong hands quite insufferable and by the end of the movie has really made him into something I actually thought was pretty decent. Given this was his first full feature credit I find that all the more impressive. I thought he did a good job on this one, and im glad to see he’s still fairly active, with a credit as recent as 2012.

I think where this film falls down really is with it’s handling of the villains. With James Lew and Clement von Frankenstein (seriously…thats his ACTUAL name.) as Viper and Glock respectively just being…a little too generic for my taste. I dunno. I just…didnt really get anything distinct off them, they didnt really set themselves up as unique or interesting characters…they were pretty much just generic martial arts and business men style “baddies”. It would have maybe been nice to have a bit more depth, complexity or points of interest with our antagonists beyond, one killed Hiros dad and the other wants to sell bioweapons to south american arms dealers…they work with what they have well enough. I just wanted a bit more from them honestly…

The rest of the cast are alright. They do a decent turn in this, but, as has been the story throughout this thing I feel like they do good enough to give them some praise, but not good enough to really take things to the next level where i’m enthusiastically endorsing what they’ve done here. They all work with the dialogue as best they can, they all use the set space as best they can and I think, with the director working as a stuntman, he’s had enough experience working with directors to be able to help steer the cast towards giving a decent turn. I cant say fairer than “They did the job and just about hit the spot.”

And finally; the soundtrack and it’s Pan pipe fever! Seriously this whole thing is rocky and poppy numbers just DRENCHED in pan pipes. Its wall to wall pan pipes, SO MANY PAN PIPES. It’s fine. I’d have liked a little bit more range personally as after a while it all does start to sound a bit samey…but it’s just about fine. It does have that early 90s cheap and cheerful edge to it, which does help set the mood. But doesnt really help to kick this thing into high gear. Especially when it really needed something distinct and actioney to help tie the cine, direction and performances all together. It’s passable.

American Ninja 5 was released in the UK on VHS in 1993 by Cannons own distribution and…In a move thats STILL got my jaw on the floor *sigh* I have to bring the BBFC into this. Y’see; this movie came out at a point in time where the BBFC were still all in on banning anything to do with ninjas or ninja weaponry because they were scared that kids would see it and immediately all go out and become ninjas. Seriously. Stop laughing. ANYWAY. American Ninja 5 was initially refused certification in the UK uncut and the BBFC requested 1 MINUTE and 11 SECONDS of cuts IN ORDER TO SECURE AN 18 RATING IN THE UK. Bearing in mind ladies and gents that this got released in the US UNCUT as a PG-13.

Do you know whats even more wild? A year earlier in 1992 Zombie flesh eaters was resubmitted for classification after being banned for 8 years from being shown in the UK and they passed it with an 18 certificate with 1 minute and 46 seconds of cuts. Meaning that; in one of the most bizarre turns i’ve seen. The BBFC thought a PG-13 action comedy about 2 people beating up ninjas with no blood or gore. Was only SLIGHTLY better than a full on GRAPHIC ZOMBIE MOVIE THAT WAS BANNED FOR 8 YEARS AND REGISTERED AS A VIDEO NASTY WITH BLOOD, GORE, MUTILATION, EYE GOUGING AND FULL FRONTAL NUDITY. Jesus christ… As far as I can see it didn’t receive a DVD release in the UK, but it did get multiple releases across Europe between 2002 and 2004 (some cut, some uncut) but…outside of that, that’s it. No bluray release that I can find and It’s not on any streaming services I can see either…so if you live in the UK it’s a cut VHS or bust im afraid…

Had the American Ninja 5 been an *official* entry in the series. I’d have actually been pretty comfortable with things ending here. While previous entries were grand, bombastic and full on. This entry kind of pulls things back to what I want from a series like this, a decent amount of fighting, a basic but engaging and somewhat charismatic plot and a lively cast who bring the script alive. While I absolutely HAVE to say it could have done MILES better in almost every regard, with it at times really bordering on becoming a generic action movie with a hint of comedy gaffa taped to it. Given where we’ve come from. I was happy to just have a stable end product that didn’t put me to sleep, made me smile a couple of times and gave the cast a decent opportunity to work on some good character development. American Ninja 5 probably wont win many peoples hearts. But i’d say, if you’ve enjoyed previous American Ninja movies, but felt 4 kind of left things a bit flat. This might just be the do over you needed.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/american-ninja-5/

1989’s ‘Dr. Caligari’ has me *almost* lost for words. Its a fascinating film from the minds of Stephen Sayadian and Jerry Stahl. And…if you’ve never heard of Stephen or Jerry. Well…they’re responsible for some of the strangest and most fascinating pieces of cinema that i’ve ever personally come across, ‘Nightdreams’ and ‘Cafe Flesh’. Both of which are considered ‘Hardcore’ erotic films, but both of which are also distinctly experimental in style and VERY new wave in execution. I can sincerely say i’ve NEVER seen anything quite like ‘Nightdreams’ before or since and im almost certain if you check it out, you’ll say much the same.

Their style is very fragmented, purposefully erratic and supremely campy with an emphasis on *high key* not taking themselves too seriously, while *low key* kind of taking themselves a bit seriously.‘Dr. Caligari’ initially started life as a sequel to ‘Nightdreams’ until the pair realised that the 1920 german expressionist film ‘The Cabinate of Dr. Caligari’ had, at this point, fallen into the public domain. As such, they changed tact. Adapting their ‘Nightdreams 2’ script into a direct sequel to ‘Cabinate’ instead. They softened the hardcore elements right down into something a little more commercially acceptable (theres still a lot of nudity, but no actual visual on screen penetration or anything like that) and after a bit of a refit, they arrived at ‘Dr. Caligari’

Jerry Stahl puts it best, when interviewed about ‘Caligari’ he quipped that the critics absolutely loved the film and thought it was something truely next level in the medium of cinema. He managed to get a date and thought the ultimate street cred would be taking her to go and see his own critically acclaimed movie. Only to get to the theatre to find it COMPLETELY empty barring those two…The date didnt really go anywhere after that.

Explaining the plot of ‘Caligari’ is hard…well…actually thats a bit misleading because its surprisingly easy. But this is a film which has a LOT of symbolism and on screen double meanings, so to explain the plot does the film a disservice because it wont really give you the full understanding of quite WHY this magnificent work of art IS in fact a magnificent work of art. Its a bit like ‘Eraserhead’ or ‘Liquid Sky’ or ‘Split’ in the sense that, a LOT is being inferred, a lot more than a basic synopsis would really allow. So what i’ll say up front is, if you’ve seen the promotional materials for this film, or you’ve liked what you’ve heard so far. Go and watch the movie. It’s one of those films that works 100 times better as a blind watch anyway and I wholeheartedly recommend it, what you see here is pretty much what you get, so I think it’ll be a pretty clean cut case as to whether you get on with this one or not.

The film is set in what can only be described a surrealist nightmare void. In which not even sets really exist…everything is kind of just presented as is and the sets just seem to roll on forever into the void. So for example our cast will be happily lounging in an armchair watching TV on a lino floored space that just suddenly disintigrates into marshland, which in and of itself rolls on well out of shot of the cameras. Its a trip to be sure.

Anyway; in the film we follow the case of the Van Houtens. Eleanor Van Houten is the wife to an important businessman Les, and she’s currently struggling with a mental disorder which makes her excessively rampantly insatiably horny. In the opening of the film we see Elenor in some king of nightmare sequence in which she’s watching TV and a scene comes on in which a woman has a puss ridden sore on her ankle, on touching the screen Eleanor develops a similar sore and she flees to her bathroom to grab some medication. She sits by the bath and a strange gentleman wearing a cherub mask erupts from under the water and slashes her wrists. She manages to escape but finds herself slow motion crawling through a warped asylum before suddenly realising that the masked man is having sex with a version of herself. Horrified, shes suddenly jolted back into her armchair. Where a mysterious woman breaks in on the static of the TV thats broadcasting and begins pleasuring Eleanor via ‘static licks’

Its here that her husband finally enters the scene and decides to intervene. In a panic, he contacts ‘Dr.Caligari’ to explain that Eleanor has had a relapse and needs to be sedated and taken into her care again. Caligari is reluctant as Eleanor by all accounts has been ‘cured’ by her. But Les is insistent and after some backing and forthing in which Les mentions the sheer scandal and embarrassment he had to endure the last time Eleanors illness caused her to act out in public, Caligari agrees to take her back and asks Les to swing by the asylum the next day to sign some release papers.

He arrives at Caligaris asylum, but before signing anything, he asks if he can see Eleanors file to get a better idea about what *exactly* Caligari did to her last time. Caligari refuses saying she destroyed her files shortly after declaring her ‘cured’. Before going on to state that Eleanor suffers from ‘Erotic Trauma’ a difficult to cure ‘disease of the labido’. As such, she suggests 2 weeks in the asylum under her care to try and get to the bottom of the trauma and resolve it. Les Reluctantly agrees to sign the documents, at which point we then cut to what appears to be some kind of Barroom setting.

In here we’re introduced to Dr. Avol. Who…seemingly doesnt really have a function in this film other than being a colleague to Dr. Caligari who may or may not work in the same asylum. He has a daughter called Ramona who also works in the Asylum alongside her partner Dr. Lodger. Ramona and her partner are currently doing a spot of espionage on Caligari, as they’re convinced that she’s repurposed her asylum into basically a huge guinea pig farm for her devious and sadistic mental experiments referring to her as a ‘Sex Nazi’.

Dr. Avol doesnt quite believe it, but the pair have seen and heard enough anecdotal evidence to feel convinced that Caligari is up to something. They just don’t know what. Avol tells them to drop it because theres nothing to worry about, but the pair decide to keep it up for now at least. As they head out, it’s revealed that Caligari was hidden as a statue in the room they were in and heard the entire exchange first hand.

Its here that it’s revealed that Caligari IS in fact experimenting on patients, as we’re introduced to a ‘Mr. Pratt’ a cannibalistic mass murderer with needles in his ass who’s OBSESSED with being electrocuted,hinting that it’s something of an orgasmic expeirence for him. Caligari gives him a brief jolt, before showing him some severed heads and Pratt recounts one of the first murders he ever did, killing a woman who worked at a ‘Home for wayward tots’ by bashing her head in with a family sized bottle of ketchup and disposing of the body in a giant stew. He said he understood because ‘he was a wayward tot too’.

Les visits Caligari again to explain that the situations now worse than ever, and Caligari tells Les that, now Eleanors in her care, she’d like to take her in for observation. Eleanor meanwhile is having ‘sexy wall visions’ *shudder* She’s immediately committed and what follows is a VERY cold exchange between the two in which Eleanor expresses her horniness while Caligari mildly chastises her, but also asks her if she’s interested in having sex with a scarecrow thats in the room. She agrees. But after rustling around in the scarecrows trousers trying to find his corncob, she turns up empty handed and instead somehow seriously burns her hand and arm.

Another meeting is set up between Caligari and Les to update him on Eleanors condition and, I cant really go much further into this film at this point without seriously spoiling the ending (I honestly feel i’ve said too much with whats here) what I will say is Les ends up getting WAY more than he bargained for here, Caligaris plans are revealed and things quickly take a tumble into the nightmarish and absurd as her self styled and titled work in the field of ‘Hyperthalmic Interfacing’ causes our main characters to slowly lose their minds and give into their base urges. In an ASTOUNDINGLY fun 78 minutes, Will Eleanor be cured? Will Caligari’s research get accalaim? and…Just why IS Les in the asylum!? Non of this will be answered…or it might be…I don’t even know anymore, if you check out ‘Dr. Caligari’.

This reviews pretty much gonna be a love in by the way, I wish I had more to complain about honestly, but so far at least, this is easily the best, the most entertaining, the most interesting film that i’ve seen this year. I have a LOT of love for this thing because it pretty much ticks every box as both a film viewer AND maker that I want ticking in my film going experiences.

For a starters, the script is erratic, incoherent in places and TOTALLY unpredictable. Which I absolutley love. And when I say ‘unpredictable’, I don’t mean that in the neurotypical sense. I mean that this film has well and truely gone off the rails and is wiping its shit on the walls and wailing about the trouser goblins. I had NO idea what was going to happen on a minute by minute basis, letalone an act by act one. I actually spoke to a friend shortly after the credits rolled on this, and I referred to it affectionately as ‘Concussion cinema’ because it feels like you’ve received a concussion and then been made to watch it.

Scenes seemingly don’t always have a beginning OR an end. Theres no clear distinction between whats a fantasy, whats reality and whats a dream. The dialogue will be sensical for a time before veering off into lines that, for lack of a better descriptive, feel like we’ve suddenly just changed the channel. The pacing is absolutely breakneck as we lunge from scene to scene with NO foreshadowing as to exactly what we’re getting ourselves into. I can honestly say that I havent been this enthralled by a work in a VERY long time. And the total unhinged randomness of it all, I personally found very engaging and endearing.

And I need to make it clear here. This isnt ‘Lolrandum’ style humour. This isnt some film maker shitting out a feature with their mates on next to no budget, with no plan, little to no script and no outset vision. This is a VERY carefully crafted and orchestrated vision of chaos. This is meticulously planned, it had to be because of just how heavily stylized this thing is. They couldnt afford to pillock about on set. So the script had to be razor.

It’s tone is acidic, it’s wonderfully devious mix of jet black dark comedy, gratuitous ‘Yuzna’ esq squishy flesh horror and border cartoonish inhibition absolutely won me over. This film is what happens when you take ‘Society’, ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’, ‘Female Trouble’ and ‘Forbidden zone’ shove them in a blender and pour it over the rocks. And the fact it does ALL that mania, creative flowing and intrigue AND delivers it in under 80 minutes…well, dear viewer. I honestly thought I was in love.

It’s by no means a PERFECT script. The thematic choices throughout are a little vague. Jerry Stahl says the films a comment on the pharmaceutical industry at the time and how, in the late 80’s and early 90’s all these companies were transitioning into a more advertiser heavy, business friendly model, the idea was that mental illnesses were now just something you took pills for and got on with your life, without anyone questioning if that was the right thing to do. It was overprescribing but with a glossy coating to it.

History has learned from those mistakes, but other than the first act, I honestly didnt really see much of Stahls comments present in the film. I instead interpreted it as having more to say around mental health as a subject, its detriments on its victims and the conditions with which we hold our mentally unwell than anything else. With several references to things like leprosy throughout. To me, the film was quite literally saying that these people may have excesses and flaws, but treating them like plague victims to be either hidden away or drugged to the point that they arnt even themselves anymore very much ISNT the answer.

But on the whole? This is a razor sharp, wickedly dark, ultra campy and lively work that gets in, wrecks up the place, and gets the hell out. And I love, love LOVED it for that.

As mentioned, the script was written by Jerry Stahl and cowritten and directed by Stephen Sayadian. Jerry has 21 writing credits for film and television with a large number of credits for shows like ‘ALF’, ‘Moonlighting’ and the various ‘CSI’ shows. He also of course has previous for writing ‘Nightdreams’ and ‘Cafe Flesh’ and he’s currently in preproduction on a new film called ‘Happy Mutant Baby Pills’ which I VERY much wish him luck on!

Stephen meanwhile has 6 writing credits Including ‘Nightdreams’ and ‘Cafe Flesh’ alongside a two part video series called ‘Party Doll A Go-Go!’ which sounds…fascinating. He also has 9 directing credits, including the official Nightdreams sequels, with his last credits being in 1993 for another 2 part video series called ‘Untamed Cowgirls of the wild west’…make of that what you will.

And on the direction front, again. I have VERY little to complain about. The stylistic choice to realise this script as some kind of bizarre combination of 1920’s german expressionist cinema by way of the pop art/new wave movement is an honestly inspired choice, some would say garish, I say unique, distinct and quite wonderful. For the most part all facets of the crew are working in near perfect harmony. Theres a couple of wobbles here and there (which I put more down to the time the film was made in than anything else) just moments where the occasional effect shot doesnt *quite* land as intended, the odd lighting choice that seems a little flat profile, the very rare moment or two where the choice to shoot things in a black void makes things feel a bit cheap rather than mysterious.

But quite honestly, these incidents are VERY few and far between and, for the most part, this is a hyperstylish, distinct vision that Sayandian has brought to the table. In many ways I wish i’d seen this film sooner, as when I used to make films way back in the mists of time. While totally unaware, this film was perfectly capturing the style I aspired to achieve myself (I was a weird filmmaker). I feel like I have to make up for lost time at this point quite honestly.

Direction of the cast, in my opinion at least, is absolutely spot on as well. The performances here are all playing to Massively over the top and melodramatic styles. Its done intentionally and it’s clear that Stephen had a very distinct vision of what he wanted and, according to the cast at least, he communicated that very effectively and spent a lot of time with the cast putting in rehearsal time to make sure they knew the EXACT tone of what he wanted and how he could get them to play that way. They’re lively, animate and utilise the fabulously designed set spaces with absolute relish. You can almost always tell when a cast had fun on a shoot, and thats DEFINITELY the vibe present here.

Same goes for the cine, with a hyper distinctive set design and very little in the way of background sets to worry about, this thing hyperfocusses on it’s use of colour and composition delivering a mighty punch that absolutely floored me honestly. pastel Yellows, Pinks, greens and blues seem to be the main flavours of the day here and they’re incorporated into everything from door frames to clothing to floor tiles. It’s what gives the film that ‘New wave’ edge that really helps push it above and beyond a more muted colour profile.

Composition is outrageous and explorative, this film absolutely isnt afraid to experiment and across the runtime we have TONS of interesting uses of composition, coloured chiascuro lighting and other strange and interesting attempts. When combined with the set spaces the results are absolutely a cut above the rest for the era in my opinion. With modernised twists on older cinematography from the expressionist era. This things frankly gorgeous and could quite easily play in a gallery with no qualms or questioning. I sincerely enjoyed the visual tone and vibe and I really think it’s probably one of the nicest looking ‘art’ movies i’ve seen in at least 4 or 5 years.

Performance wise, this is astounding. We have a hyper manic energy from our cast, who are FULLY committed to the various deranged acts they get up to across the runtime. Theres in some ways a very feint ‘John Waters’ quality to the performances here and I had SO much time for this hammy, overly dramatic and at times border aggressive setup. Madeleine Reynal ASTOUNDS as Caligari, giving a very cold and calculated performance with an almost pantomime edge. Considering this was her breakthrough role after a chance audition she wasnt even 100% set on attending, AND that initially the team didnt think she’d be a good fit. I think she absolutely blew the competition out of the water here, she’s brilliant.

Equal praise has to go to Laura Albert as Eleanor. Who gets to play SO many different styles within her character, from traumatised to hypersexual to a vicious killer. Her dedication to the performance is absolutely top notch, her delivery is astounding, her physicality excellent and shes easily one of the most memorable performances i’ve seen in as long time. As is John Durbin as Gus Pratt the cannibal serial killer. He really has that ‘John Waters’ edge with his performance and brings a fantastic extra layer of campy goodness to the show that only further cemented this films excellence to me.

The rest of the cast do a fine enough job of setting tone and atmosphere, they’re animate enough, if I was being constructive, it maybe would have been nice to see more of Caligaris other inmates. As beyond Eleanour and Gus, the only other inmates we see are given really basic issues. Like one woman who’s been conditioned to only say the word ‘Chinchilla’ or, theres a scene where Ramona talks to another inmate who’s conditioning seems to be that she wears a straight jacket and talks about beans and thats about it. A little more diversity and thought into the inmates conditions probably could have produced more lively results, as it stands they came across as a little bit fillery.

And finally, the soundtrack! And good golly miss molly this things awesome, its a jazzy, synthy, bluesy type arrangement. It sounds awesome. Suits the tone of the film perfectly and I really want it on vinyl. They don’t overuse the scoring, it comes in whenever it needs to and the sound design on this thing is equal measures disgusting as it is brilliant. I had a LOT of time for this thing on the sound front quite honestly.

Dr. Caligari to this day hasnt had a UK release in any format from what I can see (happy to be corrected if you VHS collectors out there know of a UK release!) But in the US it was released on Video in 1990 by Shapiro Glickenhause Entertainment Corporation. It also apparently had a laserdisc release in December of that same year on the same label. But I cant find much in the way of information on that release. It seemingly skipped DVD (though many a bootleg release is floating around on Ebay) until finally in 2022 Mondo Macarbro announced that it was releasing Caligari uncut and in both its original and cropped aspect ratio for 4k and Bluray.

And I’ve got to say this package is BRILLIANT. It comes with a slip cover, with the case itself containing the original theatrical poster art, the 4k presentation looks really solid, colourful and sharp. But then, equally so does the bluray release, though i’d say this was more, a testimony to fantastic Bluray restoration compression advancement than a lower quality 4k mastering. The DVD menus are stylised in line with the films poster and opening titles, which was a nice touch and extras (while a little bit thin on the ground) were VERY informative. You have a half hour interview with Stephen Sayadian alongside interviews with Jerry Stahl, Madeline reynal, Laura albert and John Durbin alongside a remastered version of the films original theatrical trailer. Theres commentaries too and a nice chunky booklet to boot including essays on the film. The only thing missing from this release that really would have made it faultless for me is a solid making of. But otherwise? This is a damn fine release in all honesty.

I think i’ve driven my point home hard enough by this point, I REALLY loved this film. It’s not *quite* an all time favourite at this point. But give it time and I could certainly see it heading that way. With a ridiculous and manic script, bizarre direction and hyper styalized, ultra creative cine. Performances that could give you a contact high and a DAMN fine soundtrack. I can only wholeheartedly recommend ‘Dr. Caligari’ to ANYONE with a passing interest in new wave art house cinema. Its an absolute two man cinematic revolution and I really hope it’s recent 4k re-release helps inspire people to take more creative risks with their own film making endeavours.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/dr-caligari/1/

1989’s “The Phantom of the Mall: Erics Revenge” is a bit of a tepid oddity of the late 80s slasher genre. It’s what i’d affectionately refer to as a “Grayzone” film due to the fact that it’s kind of stuck in the middle of the slasher genre quality wise, too good to really be considered a bad or poor offering, not good ENOUGH to really be memorable or to have cut through to the social consciousness. It’s one of those movies that, up until recently had fallen through the cracks in terms of memorability. But; with it’s recent resurfacing by Arrow Video in 2022 I figured now would be a decent enough time to take a look at this thing to see exactly WHY it kind of ‘failed to launch’.

The film follows Melody, a young bright and hopeful woman looking to enter the working world for the first time. And in the opening moments of the film we get the good news that she’s been offered a job as a waitress in the food court of a brand new mall thats been built in the town of Midwood. A short time after being introduced to Melody, we see the owner of the mall and the towns mayor holding a ‘grand opening’ event for the press in which a local photographer called Peter spots Melody in the crowd and almost immediately becomes smitten by her.

Peter catches up to Melody shortly after the opening ceremony has been completed and it’s revealed the pair actually kind of know each other, as Melody is the survivor of a brutal and mysterious house fire in which her partner Eric and Eric’s parents were supposedly burnt to death. The plot twist? Erics house used to stand on the foundations that the mall now stands on and Erics family refused to sell up to the mall owner in order to allow the malls construction…so their mysterious case of arson was a little TOO convenient to go unnoticed…But! The case was hushed up, wasnt investigated properly and instead the house was torn down and the mall was put up in it’s place.

But theres one more thing I forgot to mention, Y’see Eric isnt dead. Eric is alive and well and living in the walls and basement of the mall, hideously burnt and seeking revenge on assholes and anyone who may have wronged him. At first it starts with a repair guy who Eric feeds into a fan he’s repairing. But this quickly expands, as a security guard is sent down to the basement to try and identify a disturbance, only to be taken out by a forklift truck and a large amount of electricity.

Around this time we’re also introduced to minor characters Buzz and Suzie, Buzz runs the ice cream parlour in the mall and is friends with both Melody and Peter and Suzie is Melodies friend and basically seems to only be present here to have someone Melody can do the whole “Boys are CUTE!” schtick with intercut with occasionally she throws narrative points at Peter and Melody in order to progress the narrative.

Anyway, after her first day on the job Melody starts to head home, but a series of bizarre circumstances occur, Firstly; in her work locker someones left a bouquet of orchids…which were flowers that only Eric would ever buy for her, and later that night when she heads out to her car, she finds a gift wrapped package on the passenger seat which turns out to be a blue dress that Melody had REALLY liked and wanted to buy in the mall that day, but it was too expensive. While confused, she tries to shrug it off and leave, but her car wont start. She steps out to see if she can find out what the problem is, and almost immediately gets attacked by a mugger. This is short lived however as, off in the distance a mysterious masked man shoots our mugger with a crossbow before disappearing.

The Mayor, who was just passing by, offers to take Melody home after hearing her story and after a erotically charged nightmare, its the next day and Melody heads back in for her next shift. Its here that it’s revealed that a large amount of stock from the mall has mysteriously gone missing, AND that the mall owner has a son whos a little shit who keeps harassing the female employees, doing skateboards and robbing the place. Despite his Dad banning him, he cares not one fuck and continues acting the dickhead.

And really, its here that we end up getting the main thrust of the movie underway, as the owner of the mall hires in a guy he knows called “Christopher” to fill in for the security guard who got fork’d. And within minutes of his hiring, Peter spots him, realises somethings off about him, takes his picture to show Melody and inadvertently ends up in a mad pursuit across the mall trying to get away from the guard who wants his camera. Non of this particularly matters mind, because it’s pretty much made perfectly clear from the off that Christopher is the guy who burned down Erics house, a fact that Melody and Peter almost immediately figure out and Eric (who’s now using the malls CCTV to spy on Melody) is also slowly figuring out.

And what follows is a…well a fairly middle of the road slasher thriller. As Melody, Peter and Christopher butt heads on multiple occasions and Eric continues to pick off the assholish inhabitants of the mall, Will Melody realise who the “Phantom of the mall” really is!? Will Christopher take Peter and Melody out of the picture! And How did Eric get a full couch and punching bag down to his evil sewer layer, but he didnt find the time to at least get a few decent lights and some nice wallpaper down there? Hell even a touch up with some paint probably wouldnt have hurt…Oh well, all this and more will be answered if you take a chance on “Phantom of the Mall: Erics Revenge”

And the problems with this movie pretty much start at the top and work all the way down through this thing, and I need to make it clear from the off that I didnt hate this thing, I thought it had a few decent moments and more than held up as a watchable picture. It just didnt do anything more than that and as such its really a bit underwhelming as a standalone feature.

Almost immediatley theres confusion in this thing because of the title of the film. “Phantom of the Mall: Erics Revenge” sounds like a sequel. And I wouldnt begrudge an audience for thinking this was a sequel because subtitles within movie titles generally denote that this isnt the first entry in a series, with only a handful of exceptions. So audiences looking to check this out in 1989 may have well been within their rights to pass this thing by because, to someone who HASNT seen it, the first thought they may well have had is “Well…I havent seen ‘Phantom of the Mall’ so, why would I check out a sequel where eric (whoever he is) gets his revenge?”

This is before we even GET to the movie itself. Of which, the script is SO slow going. The biggest problem that it has is simply that there isnt enough plot beats or complications to sustain the movie across its full runtime. We have 2 VERY simple plots (Melody, Peter and Chris as one and the mystery of Eric as the other) and thats all there is for 90 minutes…sometimes LONGER depending on what cut you choose to watch. Everything happens very bluntly with no scope for overlapping subplots, more complex narratives or character progression. The film has the ILLUSION of a lot of stuff going on, but in reality almost everything outside of the two plots going on that I mentioned earlier, is filler. The Mall owner and his son are filler, suzie and Buzz are filler, the mayor is filler, the security guards are VERY briefly important to the plot (for literally 5 minutes) and then they become filler for the rest of the runtime.

And that wouldnt be such a bad thing if it wasnt all so one note for the entire runtime! Honestly while there is 3 acts in this thing, theres no sense of growth, ramping up or ramping down. It’s like a low drone that runs the whole films length, never changing pitch or volume, just humming away at the exact same level, and thats beyond frustrating given theres SO much scope to work with.

They could have introduced Eric a bit slower rather than just dumping him in right at the beginning as a way to help build tension as to whether it really WAS him hiding out in the mall, they could have made Melody and the mall owners relationship a bit more fractured to create a sense of tension at the fact Melody is almost certain the mall owner was involved in Erics house burning down, they could have more heavily played up the will they/wont they relationship of Melody and Peter, they could have given Buzz something more to do than just be a prat for most of the runtime. Security could have had more dealings with Eric rather than one getting bumped off and another one briefly highlighting a large number of thefts from the store and thats it.

They could have made Eric and Peter have a bit more of a ding dong over Melody to help drive that love triangle angle. They could have involved the mayor a little bit more, rather than just making her this weird sub character who only seems to turn up to rescue the characters from immediate death inadvertently, then refuse to acknowledge that there was ever a problem to begin with.

I mean, those are just examples off the top of my head without really even that much thought put into it. But the fact that SO LITTLE of the script actually ties together in a meaningful way, is a beyond dissapointing situation and that lack of detail gives way to SO much padding and over explanation of really basic plot points, that honestly? I found it astonishing that I could go on my phone and look up information about the film, WHILE WATCHING THE FILM and then jump back in to find that NOTHING had happened. It feels like they mustered up 30 minutes of story and stretched that out with overly long dialogue and Paulie Shore by an additional 60 minutes. Which made for a sluggish watch and very little else.

Topping it all off, the dialogue was fairly uninteresting too, we have an unintentional, almost woozy/dreamlike quality to the writing which feels quite unusual. Our characters basically warble through ultra basic and overly wordy dialogue thats absolutely NOT written with the audience in mind. Its elongated, frustrating and most importantly…dull. It tells the story, it gets the job done. But you have here the perfect opportunity to modernise the phantom of the opera plotline and maybe even have some fun with it, and the film makers just…dont really,barring a few black comedy moments…though I think I may know the reason as to exactly why this wound up the way it did.

The script was written by Scott Schneid, Frederick R. Ulrich, Robert King and Tony Michaelman. Two pitched out the story and 2 wrote the screenplay, and to say it was a bit of a mixed ability writers room on this one would be a bit of an understatement. Robert probably has the most experience in scriptwriting here with 23 writing credits to his name including “Bloodfist”, “The Nest” and “Dragonfire” but after this things quickly go downhill, with Tony and Scott having 7 and 4 writing credits between them, with there best known works probably being some contributions to the TV series version of “Friday the 13th” and “The Rugrats”. And this is Fredericks only writing credit…so, to me? Its no surprise that 4 mixed ability writers produced a script thats slow, uneven and inconsistent tonally.

The film was directed by Richard Friedman, who has 31 directing credits spanning a 40 year career and some pretty decent hitters within the 80s horror genre including “Scared Stiff”, “Doom Asylum” and TV credits including “Tales from the Darkside” and “Lois & Clarke the new adventures of superman”

Which means it should come as no surprise to find out that the direction for this movie is probably it’s strongest overall asset, given this was a lower budgeted feature, it more than cuts the mustard as a studio grade production, I should stress that for 1989, it isnt pushing any envelopes. But its doing what it needs to competently, and in places it does go above and beyond. Friedman has been able to successfully coral the crew into working fairly harmoniously on this and honestly, there isnt much more to say on that front, other than “they did a good job, and it looks fine”.

It’s stylish and largely competent due in no small part to the fact that the mall they used for filming is honestly just a really unique and interesting location AND it has had previous exposure in the horror genre being the same location they shot “Chopping Mall” at. I gues what im getting at ultimately is, while I don’t think i’d necessarily be able to IMMEDIATELY identify this as Friedmans work, I’ll settle for competent to good over incompetent anyday.

As for the cine? Well thats a bit more of a mixed bag in my opinion. About 50% of it is fairly passable, Studio grade standard once again, nothing that’ll set my socks on fire, but not bad by any stretch. 25% of it is poor by my reckoning with badly blocked shots, weird framing or attempts at experimentation that just didnt quite land properly, which is a shame. But as always; I’ll admire a film that tries, than one thats purely mediocre. And I’d say the remaining 25% was actually a pretty above board job, with the fiery reenactment of Erics parents house catching fire, Melodys nightmare sequences and the grand finale with Eric in the mall being definite highlights that more than created a spectacle and looked great doing so!

Theres a good range of colour use throughout whether its going for a warmer tone in the nightmare/fire sequences to really drive home the heat of the scene, or even small things like underlighting in the arcade sequence to give everything a greenish tint, its small touches like that that can really take a production to the next level and I appreciated that. They even do a decent job with the chiascuro throughout, giving Eric a wonderfully mysterious and malevolent presence that this kind of film absolutely needed!

Unfortunately; there is ONE thing that lets this film down and thats the editing. It doesnt feel finished. Or rather, it feels like an editor got the film so far and then that editor got fired and they got an amateur in to finish the film. Cuts sometimes are razor and really help to keep this thing chuntering along, even when it’s desperately trying to work against a fast paced edit. But then, there are sequences where the cuts are either WAY too slow or WAY to early which really effects the pacing, with probably the most egregious instance being a moment at the very beginning of the film where for a good couple of seconds you can see an instance where the film originally had an alternative opening shot which hasnt been completely removed from the theatrical cut.

Now in fairness there are multiple edits of this film floating around, a shorter version that had alternate sequences, new scenes and more formed the “TV edit”, theres the theatrical cut, and in recent times a version that merged the TV and theatrical edits together to create and extended cut have also done the rounds. But thats no excuse for why, when they were cutting the MAIN THEATRICAL RELEASE. That they’d use a print with technical issues like that inherent on it. It’s…weird to say the least.

Performance wise, its mixed to poor, up front I now know why the world hates Paulie Shore. Buzz is largely pointless here, he’s bad comic relief and Shore absolutely does not help matters by somehow making an irritating character so much worse. Kari Whitman as Melody is fine enough for a leading lady, I think she has a decent range here and even though she does come across as a bit spaced from time to time. I think overall she nails the character with enough sincerity that I was more than happy to spend the runtime with her, Rob Estes as Peter is innoffensive, he has a bit of a flicker behind the eyes to his character which just puts him above “Balloon with a smiley face drawn on it” in terms of performance, I liked him. I thought he did a good turn in this and he seems to have been enjoying himself throughout.

My most enjoyed character in this has got to be Gregory Scott Cummins as the psycho mall cop goon “Chirstopher” it genuinely caught me off guard when I first saw him on screen because he’s INSTANTLY recognisable as Macs Dad from “Its always sunny in Philadelphia” which made his character here TEN TIMES BETTER. I think he plays slightly unhinged really well, i’ve seen him do this type of role a few times, but I think here, he’s clearly having fun and it reflects in a genuinely decent performance that really won me over.

Ironically; the performance I was least impressed with was Derek Rydall as Eric. Very mild spoilers here, but given how much build up there was to Eric as a character, his backstory, and how he seems to be a bit nuanced. I was genuinely expecting his big reunion with Melody at the end to be something a bit more complicated than what ultimately happened. I was expecting Melody to maybe have to battle with her feelings for the man she loved or the man she is in love with. I was expecting a complex and deep performance from Derek as he himself deals with the reality that he’s been left behind, that Melody has moved on and how he finds his place in things.

But no. Instead we get a flat, dead behind the eyes (literally due to the prosthetics) performance thats 2d and amounts to little more than a dullened monotone delivery for half of his screen time, and Incel fodder for the second half. It was a disappointing reveal that in many ways would have been a lot better had they just kept him mute and had done with it.

The supporting cast are also underwhelming, best described as set dressing, they don’t really do much, theres the inkling of a character for some of them, but most of them are either TOO two dimensional and are just playing to stereotypes (the asshole punk kid, the evil mall owner, the untrusting mayor) OR they’re bland…SO bland like Suzies character, who gets one chance and one chance only to stand up for herself, but otherwise is just a sounding board for Melody. It was underwhelming to say the least.

Oh…and Ken Foree is in this…he doesnt do much…err…something something “Dawn of the dead” somethign something “Back to the mall”

AND FINALLY THE SOUNDTRACK! And this is probably the 2nd best thing to come from this movie outside of the direction. Its a fast paced, new wave punky score that absolutely packs a punch and doesnt disappoint, it reminded me a little bit of the “Return of the living dead” score. Not for how it sounds, but just for it being a movie that has almost its entire vibe established purely through the tone of the music they’ve chosen to play with. It’s a magnificent piece and I hope it gets a re-release sometime as i’d love to get my hands on it.

“Phantom of the Mall: Erics Revenge” was released on VHS as a rental tape in 1990 by Prism Distribution (later Prism Leisure). In the UK they chose the, probably wise decision to just release it as “Phantom of the Mall” though no doubt that has probably created temporary confusion with british film aficionados who SWEAR that “Phantom of the Mall” and “Phantom of the Mall: Erics Revenge” are TOTALLY different movies. Not helping matters at all the DVD release put out by Quantum Leap studios in 2001 flipped the titling on their release making the “Phantom of the mall” part REALLY small on the box and making “Erics Revenge” HUGE…ugh…still! Im delighted to say that everything pretty much got resolved in the end when, in 2022 Arrow Video released “Phantom of the Mall: Erics Revenge” as both a deluxe hard box and standard edition bluray.

I personally picked up the limited edition release, and with it, you get a lovely hard box display, a booklet with essays about the films history, a mini poster, some lobby cards and a 2 disc set with the first disc containing the theatrical cut and raft of extra features, and the second disc containing the TV and extended cuts of the film. I’ve seen all three cuts now and I think I like the theatrical and TV edits equally.

I paid something in the region of £25-£35 when this was available on preorder for the deluxe edition. And while it does look really nice, If I could go back, cancel the order, wait 6 months and grab the standard edition for a tenner. I absolutely would have preferred to do that. Its a gorgeous set with a keen eye to attention to detail…but I didnt enjoy the film enough to really benefit from the luxury version.

Ultimately; I came away from Phantom of the mall just a bit non plussed. While it had moments that I absolutely loved, there was a LOT of stuffing here and because the pacing wasnt great alongside other issues i’ve mentioned. I genuinely came away from the thing feeling like I was glad that I had seen it, but that it absolutely wasn’t essential viewing. If your big on your slasher movies with a slight comedic tinge, i’d absolutely recommend this one, I think you’ll really get into it.

Equally if you’ve seen pretty much every slasher the 80s has to offer 10 times each and want a change of pace, again. This could be for you its dropped in price quite significantly at this point, and for what it currently goes for, i’d say it was worth the punt. But if your just getting into the slasher genre, or your picky with your horrors. I’d maybe give this one a wide birth. It’s not bad…but theres a LOT better out there.

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/phantom-of-the-mall-erics-revenge/1/