October 26, 2024
2021's The AGFA Horror Trailer Show, but the waiting paid off three years 
later with The Cult of AGFA Trailer Show, a 76m47s cinematic mixtape compiling trailers, bumpers, and commercials (all from new 35mm scans) into a brain-melting collage. All the complete trailers are presented separately as well, so prepare for repeated mental whiplash as you enjoy titles like Slapstick of Another Kind, The Mysterious Monsters, The Peanut Butter Solution, Brain Damage, The Birds II: Land's End, Strangers with Candy, Meet the Feebles, The Doom Generation, Sex Beyond the Grave, The Best of the New York Erotic Film Festival, Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer, Cocaine Wars, The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years, C.H.O.M.P.S., Robotrix, Forbidden Zone, Starchaser: The Legend of Orin, Angel Terminators, Pinocchio's Birthday Party, Psycho Beach Party, Meatballs 4, Suture, Tough Beauty and the Sloppy Slop, Body Rock, 
Eraserhead, Rad, Foxes, Death Race 2000, Times Square, Versus, Escape from New York, Tuff Turf, Black Magic, Another Son of Sam, Munchies, Blood Diner, 
Bewitched, and more surprises including a notorious anti-drug PSA, soft drink plugs, gift certificate pitches, and much more. As usual, there are some hilarious editing flourishes here including a stinger at the end that definitely won't be spoiled here. The scans all look very good, with creators Bret Berg and Joseph A. Ziemba providing a rapid-fire audio commentary about how everything was unearthed, sliced, and diced into the creature you now see before you. Plus you get an insane "Rated R" 8m35s TV spot title countdown, a psychedelic "The Day the Earth Got Free Richard Pryor's Photos" (3m26s), and the indescribable "Just When You Thought It Was Safe" (3m30s). Buy here. 
entertainment news at the moment thanks to his unabashed starring role in 
Ryan Murphy's Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, Cooper Koch (grandson of The Keep and Wayne's World producer Hawk Koch and great-grandson of Ghost and The Odd Couple producer Howard Koch) was already pushed his boundaries big time in the 2022 horror film Swallowed, now out on Blu-ray from Yellow Veil Pictures. Basically an extended riff on an idea from the debut short film "Bugcrush" by director Carter Smith (The Ruins), the film follows the last night together between friends Benjamin (Cooper), who's about to leave Maine to go into adult films in L.A., and Dom (Jose Colon), who surprises him with an impromptu drug run over the Canadian border to help fund the trip. However, things take a turn when their contact, Alice (Jena Malone), makes them swallow condoms filled with an illicit substance. Only after a violent encounter at a truck stop that leaves Dom punched in the 
stomach do they find out the contraband is larvae whose bites induce a 
paralyzing high, with Alice stepping in to help. The intervention of her creepy boss, Rich (A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge's Mark Patton), complicates the situation even further as Dom's health deteriorates and Benjamin in pushed further than he could have predicted. Though it leaves the more repugnant ideas implied rather than shown, Swallowed is definitely a body horror film from a queer perspective that pays off in an audacious final ten minutes bound to divide some audiences. It's essentially a grim coming-of-age story hinged on the four solid performances at its center; the addictive critters only get a brief amount of screen time and obviously serve as a metaphor for the drug epidemic that's been plaguing the gay community for years. After doing the festival and streaming circuit, the film fares well here in its special edition that looks and sound excellent and comes with copious extras from Smith including a quick video intro, a video interview (38m14s), and a solo commentary, two joint commentaries (one with cinematographer Alexander W. Lewis and editor Eric Nagy, the other with Colon and journalist and filmmaker Mary Beth McAndrews). There's a lot to cover here including Smith's desire to make a down-and-dirty indie after starting off with a studio project, the commentary on the way men are presented and objectified over the course of their lives, the use of body horror ideas, and lots more. There's also a fourth commentary with journalists Terry Mesnard and Joe Lipsett who dig more into the themes of the film, plus video interviews with Colon (8m42s) and Koch (10m13s) about their approach to their characters and working with Smith. Also included here is the "Bugcrush" short (35m38s), an extremely disturbing tale about a young man in high school whose infatuation with a sketchy new kid leads to a date that goes very, very badly... as you can probably figure out from the title. Smith and Lew also provide a commentary for this one (and leave the ambiguous ending mostly unexplored except noting how it compares to the source short story). An amusingly raunchy insert booklet features an essay by Elizabeth Purchell about the idea of bug chasing in gay parlance and its connection to the themes in Smith's work.
of golden era Roger Corman films who went to appear in numerous big budget genre classics 
like Gremlins and The Terminator. He rarely got leading man roles (the most notable being the ill-fated coffee house server turned murderous sculptor Walter Paisley in A Bucket of Blood), but his mark on cult movie history was more than secured by the time he became the subject of Elijah Drenner's 2014 documentary, That Guy Dick Miller. With way over 100 films to his credit, Miller (who later passed away in 2019) takes center stage here with tons of collaborators on board including Joe Dante, Belinda Balaski, Fred Olen Ray, Roger and Julie Corman, Mary Woronov, Robert Forster, Allan Arkush, Fred Dekker, William Sadler, Ernest Dickerson, and Steve Carver. Uncork'd gave this an MOD BD-R and DVD release back in 2016 that left a lot to be desired, so it's nice to finally have a worthy deluxe edition of this endearing, highly engaging doc on Blu-ray as a two-disc set from Dekanalog, here featuring 5.1 and 2.0 DTS-HD MA English audio options, English SDH subs, and a commentary with Drenner, producer Lainie Miller, and cinematographer Elle Schneider. Also included are Dick's 8mm home movies (11m46s), L.A. premiere footage (48m36s) from 2014 at the Egyptian during a Miller retrospective including a Q&A with Corman and 
Miller, a 4m49s outtake reel, and the trailer. One big selling point of this 
set is the second disc, a Blu-ray of the 1978 comedy Starhops directed by Barbara Peeters (Humanoids from the Deep) who co-wrote with Stephanie Rothman. This one's been out of circulation since its fairly obscure '80s VHS releases in the U.S. and U.K., now presented here uncut in a gorgeous 2K scan from the original camera negative. The film got an R rating at the time but is actually pretty wholesome as it chronicles the antics at a drive-in fast food joint where cook Dick Miller takes care of the problem customers for the carhops including Angel (Firecracker's Jillian Kesner), Danielle (Dorothy Buhrman), and Cupcake (Sterling Frazier). There's some semblance of a plot involving a jerk businessman trying to sabotage the business so he can swipe the land for a gas station after Dick lets the ladies take over, but mostly this is a breezy location hangout movie in vogue with others of the time like Drive-In, Record City, Thank God It's Friday, and so on. It's a lot of fun and great to have looking and sounding so good; the set also comes with an insert booklet featuring an essay by Caelum Vatnsdal, author of You Don’t Know Me, But You Love Me: The Lives of Dick Miller.
horror phenomenon that's been going strong for the entire 21st century, found footage has roots going 
far further but really kicked into high gear with 1999's The Blair Witch Project and countless subsequent features using variations on the same template. The whole cycle gets its due thanks to the extensive documentary The Found Footage Phenomenon, with numerous filmmakers and critics assembled to explain the format's appeal and ability to morph depending on the needs to stories and scare tactics around the world. The 2021 doc by Sarah Appleton and Phillip Escott takes a more or less linear approach laying out how it all started (including the most famous ancestors, Cannibal Holocaust and Ghostwatch) through the big ones like The Last Broadcast, [REC], Paranormal Activity, Troll Hunter, Cloverfield, Noroi: The Curse, The Borderlands, Afflicted, and many more. The talking heads here are plentiful including Jaume Balagueró, Patrick Brice, Derek Lee, André Øvredal, Eduardo 
Sánchez, Sean Hogan, Kôji Shiraishi, and Michael 
Goi over the 101m16s running time, which is actually surpassed by the voluminous deleted interview footage collected as a bonus feature (101m55s) on the 2024 Blu-ray release from Shudder. The Region A disc looks excellent as you'd expect for a recent digital production, with the DTS-HD MA 5.1 English track making fun use of directional sound for some good cheap scares. Optional English SDH subtitles are provided as well. Also among the extras is a 28m15s interview with Appleton and Escott who have a number of great insights and memories of the found footage wave and why it appeals so much for international audiences. A trailer is also included, and the disc comes with an insert booklet featuring an essay by Sam Cohen outlining the essentials of found footage and its importance on the genre scene.
found footage, one that virtually no one's ever heard of until now is the 
2005 indie In Memorium [sic on the spelling], making its home video debut as a Blu-ray release from Bleeding Skull. The packaging makes a case for this as a forerunner to the Paranormal Activity series, which is a fair claim as this also hinges on the idea of video cameras set up in a home and capturing very unnatural incidents by accident. In this case, young Dennis (Erik McDowell) has been diagnosed with aggressive bone cancer and given virtually no chance of surviving a year. His partner Lily (Johanna Watts) agrees the best course of action is to feed him Vicodin and let him spend the rest of his days in peace at a spacious rental house, with video cameras documenting their remaining happy days together for posterity. Soon they're being disturbed by strange things at night, and when Dennis' brother Frank (Levi Powell) starts hanging around for longer periods of time, it becomes evident that something else is inhabiting the house with them. The idea of a caregiver having trouble differentiating a declining medical condition from 
a supernatural assault is an intriguing one that 
anticipates some of the later grief and trauma-driven horror films to come much later (especially Relic), and it's odd that this one has languished in obscurity for so long outside of on and off streaming options and an indie promotional edition. The two leads do well in their roles, and while this doesn't reinvent the found footage wheel in any way, it has some really effective sound design choices and at least one terrific, legitimate jump scare. The Blu-ray features both the original VHS screener version and the much better quality current assembly from the master tapes, which both run slightly over 73 minutes and vary only by a matter of seconds. Director Amanda Gusack is present here in an audio commentary and a 10m9s video interview in which she talks about shooting inside her own house, some of the spookier incidents on the set, the influences of films like Blair Witch and The Ring, the origins of the terminal illness angle for the story, and the distribution woes that kept it out of general circulation. A trailer and photo gallery are also included. 
obscurity kept out of reach on home video until now is the 1996 shot-on-VHS 
chiller Night, given a belated liberation on Blu-ray from VHSHitfest. Things start off like a Manhattan camcorder version of a vampire giallo as a panicked woman in cornered in her apartment late at night by a bloodsucker in sunglasses, which serves an intro to a world where vampires and their hunters -- especially the very dogged Margot (Jillanne Smith)-- are engaged in ongoing rounds of oneupmanship around the city. The vampires including Terrance (James Aronsen), Alana (Annemarie Marino), and Monica (Inga Zupancic) cover up their bloodsucking by physically demolishing their victims when they aren't busy running a drug operation, headed by the, ahem, highly unorthodox onetime Prohibition bootlegger Anthony Garring (Richard Cutler). Lots of boroughs accents of all stripes, 
ambitious plotting, stage blood, sassy cops, moody lighting, and even a Hulk-style bodybuilder vampire in a great basement fight scene. This is extremely 
'90s SOV in terms of aesthetics, so you should already have an idea if this one will be up your alley. If it is, get ready for tons of grue, iffy sound recording, and weird indie charm over the course of 79 minutes. The Blu-ray adheres to the scruffy VHS look you'd expect and comes with an audio commentary by Cutler and director Glenn Andreiev, who also appear in separate interviews (10m46s and 22m7s respectively), covering the casting call process, the fun had on the set, the reasons for the film's anonymity after it was completed apart from a few VHS copies handed around, and the logistics of grabbing shots wherever they could. A trailer and teaser round out the disc. 
the outermost fringe of the SOV market, W.A.V.E. Productions has been shockingly 
well represented on Blu-ray in recent years -- which seems incredibly perverse given their technical credentials and production values. For a taste of what the custom order kink and terror label has in store for the holiday season, look no further than the Saturn's Core Blu-ray double feature of Hayride Slaughter and Halloween Horrors, both directed by company head Gary Whitson. The first film was shot in 2001 on location at Delaware's Frightland Halloween, a spooky seasonal attraction, and its soundtrack (co-composed by SOV filmmaker Ron Atkins) is peppered with tunes like "Werewaltz" and "There's Always Room for Giallo." Someone wearing a black robe and leather gloves is slicing up folks around the Frightland area, with pentagrams carved in their abdomens during the nocturnal slayings. Enter psychic Desiree Vargas (W.A.V.E. star Tina Krause), who practices her craft in front of a ginormous pentagram which actually isn't a clue, and her partner Cliff (Jim O'Rear) who get brought in to suss out the killer by... performing magic acts on stage. Which we see... in real time. There's also the 
obligatory nudity and bondage shenanigans, some sacrificial cult rituals, and 
some weirdly upbeat romantic interludes to boot.
to the two films above, calling 1998's Gut Pile a feature film is stretching things since the Sub Rosa SOV production barely comes in at 52 minutes and looks like someone drizzled candle wax all over your screen. There's a lot of passion here though in Jerry O'Sullivan's Syracuse-shot scarecrow slasher film about wildly irresponsible young hunter Dan (Jeff Forsyth), who brings some pals out to the woods for a weekend in the same area where he accidentally killed and concealed a guy one year earlier. The only thing around besides the trees is a seemingly harmless scarecrow, but soon the guys are getting strung up and dismembered after night falls. Obviously this is one you need to grade on a curve, but the piles of practical gore effects and caffeinated camera movements make this an amusing love letter to '80s splatter films. As the Blu-ray from Saturn's Core demonstrates, 
this was the result of combining ideas from two of O'Sullivan's 
Super 8 shorts, 1979's "The Axe" (8m46s) and 1980's "The Scarecrow" (9m11s), both included here in their entirety. O'Sullivan also delivers a new audio commentary with actors Ron Bonk (head of Sub Rosa, now SRS), Ed Mastin, and Forsyth, while the video interview extras include "Spilling Guts" (9m44s) with O’Sullivan, "Analog Diva" (27m38s) with actress Sasha Graham, "Hunting Season" (12m18s) with Forsyth, "Make it Gross" (5m23s) with FX artist Jeff Meyer, and a "Within the Family" (12m25s) round table chat with O’Sullivan, Bonk, Mastin, and Forsyth. An archival "Gut Pile: Behind the Scenes" (15m53s) featurette is also included.
better known to VHS junkies as Delusion, 1981's The House Where Death Lives is part of a 
fascinating strain of horror films trying to reconcile the new craze for slashers with the comfort of old dark house chillers. (See also: The Unseen, Silent Scream, Hell Night, etc.) Here nurse Meredith Stone (Patricia Pearcy) is writing an account of her mother's death which is linked to her first assignment, which we see in flashback. She's sent to take care of the ailing, elderly Ivar Lancrock (Joseph Cotten), who still has family members and staff at his sprawling estate. When his grandson Gabriel (John Dukakis, son of Michael) shows up following the death of his parents, the house dynamic is torn asunder and a body count begins. Could it all have something to do with the creepy locked room on the second floor housing a mentally incapacitated young man, or is something else sinister at play? An entertaining and clever little psycho thriller, this feels a lot like a descendant of the 
'60s shockers turned out by Hammer in the wake of Psycho with 
a fairly deliberate pace to builds to a substantial body count in the final half hour. Promoting this film to a gore-hungry audience was always a challenge on VHS and cable TV, and it's been given a second shot now in a radically improved presentation on Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome with a stunning 4K scan from the original camera negative. This is exactly the kind of title they're great at digging up, and it also comes with a typically lively and appreciative commentary from the gang at The Hysteria Continues who point out its finer slasher and gothic elements, its video history, and backgrounds on the cast and crew. Also included are three new interview featurettes: "Dear John (18m42s) with Dukakis covering his early acting career and path to this film after Jaws 2, "Stuck in That House" (15m33s) with actor David Hayward discussing his role here as the family attorney and sharing memories of his fellow cast members including getting tips from Cotten, and "Mad House (25m12s) with author Stephen Thrower doing a deep dive in the film's history including its shooting in 1979 (as Trauma) and the long path to getting a spotty theatrical release. Buy from Diabolik.
name, Blood Feast has been popping up every now and then well after the 
release of the original 1963 splatter trailblazer by H.G. Lewis. A triumph of hallucinatory wooden acting, squishy practical gore, and delightful Florida kitsch, it was followed by the wonderfully deranged unofficial sequel Blood Diner by Jackie Kong in 1987 and an official but so-so sequel by Lewis himself, Blood Fest 2: All U Can Eat, in 2002. (That doesn't even include uncredited imitations like Mardi Gras Massacre, but that's another story.) Then we have the 2016 Blood Feast, which has now gotten a 4K UHD release from Synapse Films because... well, I don't know, but you're getting it anyway. Lewis himself even cameos here as an exposition-spouting professor so this apparently got his seal of approval, with microbudget German slasher director Marcel Walz making his international debut here. With its extremely dark, desaturated, and soft 
digital veneer, this couldn't be further 
from the feel of the original, though at least there's still a sense of humor in some of the dialogue. As for the story, this time restauranteur Fuad Ramses (Robert Rusler, another Elm Street 2 alumnus) has a wife, Louise (Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2's Caroline Williams) and a daughter. They end up relocating to Paris where he becomes fixated on the mythology of the bloodthirsty goddess Ishtar, who appears to him in visions and compels him to commit grisly murders for a blood feast tribute to end them all. This was part of a tiny run of Lewis updatings in the '00s kicked off by 2005's 2001 Maniacs, 2010's 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams, and the worthiest of the whole bunch, 2007's The Wizard of Gore. Walz's film seems to have all the necessary ingredients to work, but the listless pacing and truly hideous aesthetic are major issues right out of the gate. There is a lot of gore though, and if you're a fan, the UHD is as good as it's going to get. Somehow this ended up as a censored Best Buy exclusive on Blu-ray in the U.S. but got a wide commercial release on Blu-ray and DVD in Germany; that means the Synapse UHD is the first time it's been complete stateside with the HDR10-compatible Dolby Vision doing what it can with the murky photography. The DTS-HD MA English 5.1 track sounds fine and features English SDH subtitles, with extras including an Indiegogo promo teaser, a trailer, a making-of featurette, red carpet premiere footage, a "scare cam," and a "Tonite" music video by Chilli Con Curtis. Buy from Diabolik.
films know they can make horror movies that don't really feel like 
anyone else's, which extends to their creepy comedies as well. Made late in the game in 2000, Dial D for Demons might fall into the latter category depending how you feel about people acting completely freaked out and traumatized by pagers, in what feels like a peculiar and very restrained attempt to ride the Japanese horror fad that was just kicking in. It's definitely a change of pace for director Billy Tang, who had pulled out all the stops before in Category III outrages like Run and Kill, Dr. Lamb, and Red to Kill-- but then again this is the guy who gave us Haunted Karaoke, so all bets are off. Here we get six young upwardly mobile friends who decide to get away to Lantau Island for a vacation at rental property. At first they're all having fun in the sun, but the trip turns sour when one of them who 
seems to be psychic feels like they've got a very bad feeling about all this-- and 
then drops dead in his bedroom. Soon they're all getting creepy messages on their pagers saying the time of their imminent deaths, which have something to do with a demon and a bunch of deaths in the area involving burning charcoal. It all looks pretty stylish once the scares begin, but anyone expecting a high-voltage Hong Kong scream fest won't get it here as this mostly involves goofy yuppies running around screaming for most of the running time. At least you can't fault the Vinegar Syndrome Archives Blu-ray, which looks very impressive and comes with Cantonese 5.1 and 2.0 stereo DTS tracks with optional English subtitles plus a fun commentary by Podcast on Fire Network's Kenneth Brorsson and Phil Gillon who explain the already obsolete tech in the film, the state of HK filmmaking at the time, and the backgrounds of the few actors in the film. You also get the trailer and two new featurettes: "Not One of Those Movies" (13m1s) with actor Terence Yin talking about his still fresh acting career at that point and his lessons learned on the set, and "The Bloody Legacy of Billy Tang" (9m58s) with Samm Deighan surveying Tang's genre contributions, his path to becoming a director, and the trajectory he took to largely working in TV. PREVIOUS SICK PICKS:
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