He soon has bigger problems on his hand when he narrowly avoids a wreck in the middle of nowhere and the three men find themselves stranded in a junkyard waiting for a mechanic. While they wait, they learn about an even more pressing issue: Brewster is transporting five coffins, each one apparently packing a ravenous vampire. Soon Brewster, Cary and Vogel find themselves barricaded in the cab of Brewster’s truck with pages of a Bible pasted over every inch of the windows to hopefully keep the vampires out. When the mechanic arrives, they learn they’re dealing with a very different breed of vampires than they’re used to seeing in the movies, and that the familiar rules don’t exactly apply.
Bite Marks is competent enough, and the cast is mostly pretty good, but it certainly has some problems. Cary and Vogel suddenly start spouting horror nerd dialogue when the vampire attack starts, although there’s nothing to suggest that they have any interest in horror movies up until that point. The meta humor feels somewhat out of place in a film that has played its story relatively straight up until that point. Still, there’s definitely some funny stuff here, including Vogel’s fistfight with a vampire using some interesting improvised boxing gloves, and most of the gore and makeup effects are effective. Bite Marks has some intriguing ideas about its vampire villains, but unfortunately not enough of that inventiveness carried over into the plot, which is just a little too familiar. Bite Marks is certainly fun, and it’s always good to see Stephen Geoffreys, but horror fans will probably be left wanting a bit more than the film delivers.
Bitter Feast (2010)
Originally published on Film Monthly 2 February 2011
While critics continue to bemoan the “torture porn” category of mainstream horror films and audiences seem to have grown just as tired of them, the Saw/Hostel model of horror shows little sign of going away any time soon. A few films have taken the concept and dressed it up in new clothes to varying degrees of success, but in the end they’re still basically the same thing. Bitter Feast is a recent example of a film that fulfills all the apparent requirements for “torture porn,” but adds a unique spin to distract audiences from all that beating and abuse.
Peter Gray (James LeGros) is a chef and co-host of The Feast with Peter Gray, a cooking show. As Gray becomes more and more obsessed with using local and organic ingredients, he becomes irritable and difficult to work with. His ratings are slipping, and the opening of his new restaurant is sabotaged by a savage review by influential food blogger J.T. Franks (Joshua Leonard). When the review results in Gray being fired from his own restaurant, he snaps and kidnaps Franks. Franks’s wife Katherine (Amy Seimetz) hires a private detective (Larry Fessenden) to find J.T. while Gray commutes between shooting the last episodes of his show and torturing J.T. by reading him back his own bitter reviews and forcing him to participate in a series of games. The result of these games is typically Franks being beaten severely.
Bitter Feast, in some ways, feels like an update of the Vincent Price classic Theatre of Blood. LeGros seems to be enjoying hamming it up as the pompous Gray, dealing justice to the critic who has no concept of how his writing actually impacts other people. Franks, however, is given much more of a story and character than the critics in Theatre of Blood. The audience is tipped off early that much of his anger is rooted in frustrated literary ambitions and the loss of his child. This serves to make Franks at least a little human, although he is still a very unpleasant character.
And, of course, once Franks has been kidnapped, the film becomes a series of protracted scenes of abuse and torture. If it weren’t for the unique setup (and LeGros’s performance), there would be little to separate these scenes from those in any other “torture porn” film. This fact, in addition to the groan-inducingly obvious finale, leaves somewhat of a bad aftertaste (pun not entirely intended). Fans of LeGros and Fessenden will definitely want to give Bitter Feast a look, but for most other filmgoers, it might be less appetizing (pun, unfortunately, intended).
Black Dynamite (2009)
Originally published on Film Monthly 19 October 2009
There seems to be a trend building of films that try to mimic the look and style of films from previous eras. Naturally, the success rate is all over the place– Anna Biller’s Viva and Ti West’s The House of the Devil are indistinguishable from the early-70s sex films and early-80s horror films which they replicate, while Alien Trespass basically only correctly copies the clumsy writing and rubber suits of 1950s sci-fi. This wave of replication may have at least partially been kicked off by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, the first half of which painstakingly attempted to reproduce the look of a cheap action/horror film that had been through the projector a few too many times. Grindhouse may have bombed at the box office, but it’s found more than its fair share of fans on DVD and proven to be just as influential as Tarantino and Rodriguez’s other films.
One of the latest films to jump on the Xerox wagon, Black Dynamite is an attempt to both parody and offer meticulously-detailed tribute to the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s. It’s absolutely hilarious, and except for one very minor quibble (an obvious cheap CG effect late in the film), you could put Black Dynamite on a double bill with Foxy Brown and no one would be able to tell they were made over 30 years apart– at least not if anyone was paying close enough attention. Black Dynamite nails the look and sounds of Blaxploitation cinema, down to the dirty fuzz guitar on the soundtrack, the amazing costume design, and the grainy film quality of a grindhouse print.
Michael Jai White stars as Black Dynamite, basically every badass Blaxploitation hero rolled up into one character. The film opens with a drug deal gone bad, and Dynamite’s brother Jimmy is killed. Vowing revenge, Black Dynamite gets his License to Kill back from the CIA and starts scouring the streets for information on who killed his brother, as well as wiping out anyone who sells drugs to his community. All while taking some time out to romance Gloria (Salli Richardson), an activist who helps run an orphanage and a community center. The film crams in a dizzying array of references to Blaxploitation films, covering all the bases from ridiculously-outfitted pimps to a climactic confrontation that takes place on Kung Fu Island before moving on in a suspiciously quick helicopter ride to a very well-known U.S. government building.
Perhaps the best part of Black Dynamite is the fact that despite the obvious jokes, much of the film is played relatively straight and adheres to the standards of Blaxploitation action movies. It doesn’t hurt that Michael Jai White is a legitimate badass, holding black belts in several martial arts. The fight scenes manage to be both hilarious and seriously awesome at the same time– Black Dynamite looks like he could utterly humiliate Black Belt Jones at a moment’s notice.
Black Dynamite is an hilarious homage to Blaxploitation cinema and easily one of the funniest films of the year. I can’t recommend it highly enough to Blaxploitation fans, and if it doesn’t blow up at the box office it’s a sure bet to become a huge cult hit on DVD, introducing many new fans to the genre. Maybe enough that we’ll get a 30th anniversary special edition of One Down, Two to Go in a few years!
Blair Witch (2016)
Originally published on Daily Grindhouse 15 September 2016
If for nothing else, The Blair Witch Project will go down as a classic in horror cinema for its genius marketing campaign. Taking advantage of the internet in ways that hadn’t been done before, the filmmakers and marketers of the film were able to create a mystique that could never be duplicated. Over fifteen years later, the world is a much different place than it was when The Blair Witch Project first hit screens across the world. It’s not quite the same thing, but the producers of the new Blair Witch managed to keep its existence a secret up until fairly recently. In a world where fans know everything about movies years before they hit the big screen, that’s an impressive feat. It doesn’t quite match convincing people your movie is legitimate footage of an ancient evil killing people in the woods, but it’s impressive nonetheless.
It also makes s
ense from the standpoint of managing expectations. Even the most die-hard “Blair Witch” fans had probably given up on another sequel. Announcing much further than a couple of months in advance would have given audiences time to get the hype machine running overtime. Any sequel to such a hugely popular and influential film is doomed by expectations regardless; giving audiences a little less time to get their expectations up was a smart move. That’s not to say that Blair Witch is not worth watching, but director Adam Wingard and his regular screenwriter Simon Barrett had what amounted to an impossible task before them in taking on a sequel to a horror film that has become a major cultural touchstone. The result is a very good “haunted house”-style “found footage” horror movie packed with loud noises, jump scares, and some genuine unease. Whether it’s a very good “Blair Witch” movie is another question.
The film opens with a title card explaining that the movie was assembled from footage found on DV tapes and memory cards discovered in the woods near Burkittsville. James (James Allen McCune), the younger brother of Heather (Heather Donahue) from the first film, thinks he has found a video online recently recovered from the woods that shows Heather alive. His friend Lisa (Callie Hernandez) wants to make a documentary on James’s search for the truth about his sister, and so joins him along with Peter (Brandon Scott) and Ashley (Corbin Reid). When they get to Burkittsville, they meet Lane (Wes Robinson) and Talia (Valorie Curry), the young couple who found the tape, and the six of them strike off into the woods.
From this point, things start to seem familiar. Loud noises wake them up in the night, and creepy stick figures start to appear around their campsite. This time out, though, Wingard and Barrett have opted to go much bigger. Where the original film was all about the relationship between the three leads and their increasing despair, this one is all about big, loud scares. It’s the Blair Witch as invisible kaiju, knocking over trees and sending tents soaring into the air. When the survivors finally reach the house where the first film ended things start to get creepier on a more personal level, but the charm and personality of Wingard and Barrett’s previous collaborations all but disappears by the end of the first act when the characters stop relating to each other and start screaming each other’s names repeatedly.
The result is a “found footage” film that is exceptionally well made, particularly in its unnerving and disorienting sound design, but is otherwise not a whole lot different from any number of other “lost in the woods” films of this type that followed in the wake of the original film. It’s perfect for Halloween viewing on the big screen with a packed theater of people looking for thrills and reasons to grab their dates and hold on tight. But The Blair Witch Project wasn’t about jump scares, and even the sequel barely had a sense of humor. Blair Witch shifts the property into more obvious franchise territory as a shrieking, banging funhouse that shares the same basic ingredients of the original film but takes a totally different approach to scares.
It’s great for some popcorn-tossing fun, but it’s kind of a shame it had to come out around the same time Stephen DeGennaro’s Found Footage 3D is hitting horror festivals. That film does some really new and inventive things with what has become a tired style of horror. In contrast, Blair Witch basically does the same things we’ve come to expect from seeing countless times before, even if it does do them very well. Whether that’s enough to make Blair Witch the new Paranormal Activity remains to be seen.
Blood Bath (1966)
Originally published on Film Monthly 3 June 2016
Arrow Video has been building their reputation as the “Criterion of cult” for years now, giving lavish home video editions to films that have languished in a limbo of bare-bones releases (and some that never had releases at all). Their latest set, however, is in a class of its own. Exploitation cinema legend Roger Corman’s Blood Bath has been released before on home video in the States under that title as well as Track of the Vampire and Portrait in Terror, in wildly varying quality. Its release history is second only to its actual production in instilling mind-bending confusion for cult film historians. Now Arrow has given the film–or is it films?–an absolutely definitive release in a new 2-disc set that ranks as one of their most impressive achievements. Included in this set are all four different versions of the film: Operation Titian, Portrait in Terror, Blood Bath, and Track of the Vampire. The saga of this film and its varying releases is a testament to Corman’s imagination and ingenuity, and what has previously been a curious footnote in the careers of Corman and directors Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now), Jack Hill (Spider Baby, Foxy Brown) and Stephanie Rothman (Terminal Island, The Velvet Vampire) has finally received the treatment its strange history deserves.
First up is the original material: Rados Novakovic’s Operation Titian. Arrow has reconstructed the original film from original film materials and standard-definition inserts, resulting in the first chance most viewers have ever had in seeing it more or less as originally produced. This version of the film runs about 95 minutes. Corman came on to the project as a producer and had Francis Ford Coppola work on the production as an uncredited story editor, but was unsatisfied that the final product was something that could play the drive-in circuit. This makes sense, given that Operation Titian is not strictly a “horror” genre film, but is instead more of a dark crime thriller. Corman recut and re-scored the film to produce the second iteration, Portrait in Terror, which runs 81 minutes and which Corman felt was more marketable. Stephanie Rothman probably worked on assembling this cut of the film, and that work likely led to her subsequent involvement in the project.
Here’s where things get really interesting. Corman had directors Jack Hill and Rothman shoot new material which he would use to cut several minutes of Portrait in Terror into for a third film. Each director brought something different to the table: Hill gave it a weird beatnik bent reminiscent of Corman’s A Bucket of Blood, while Rothman introduced the vampiric element. The result is perhaps the best-known version, Blood Bath (62 minutes). Finally, the film was recut yet again to create Track of the Vampire, a version of the film meant for screening on television that runs a little under 80 minutes and includes scenes not in Blood Bath. This set presents Portrait in Terror, Blood Bath, and Track of the Vampire in new 2K restorations, which is exciting since many previous releases of the films have been muddy and dark. As expected, though, these new transfers don’t exactly smooth over the seams where the different versions of the films were stitched together. Track of the Vampire in particular is a mess, albeit a fascinating one.
And that sort of tells the whole story of this set, really. Anyone interested in Corman ’s career or drawn to stories of strange productions is going to find more than enough here to justify the set’s space in their library. As always, Arrow has given the set a collection of impressive special features. The big draw here is Tim Lucas of Video Watchdog‘s “The Trouble with Titian Revisited,” a visual essay updating his look at the history of Blood Bath. Running a full 81 minutes, Lucas’s essay is longer than two of the cuts of the feature, and is packed with well-researched history on Corman, Rothman, Coppola, and the various versions of Blood Bath. Rounding out the set are archival interviews with Sid Haig and Jack Hill, and a brief photo gallery.
Arrow has given Blood Bath a typically lavish package with a gorgeous sleeve, reversible artwork, a double-sided fold-out poster and booklet with new writing on the film and its cast by Anthony Nield, Vic Pratt, Cullen Gallagher and Peter Beckman. In what has already been a stellar year for Arrow, this is easily one of their best releases yet. No student of cult film history should be without it.
Blood Rites (2012)
Originally published on Film Monthly 14 June 2012
Lincoln, Nebraska may not be on the map for most horror fans, but Dorothy Booraem is out to change that. Her debut feature, Wake the Witch, was an interesting indie horror film memorable for a number of reasons, most prominent of which was its overabundance of ideas and the fact that it was shot
in and around Lincoln. That film felt like three different movies got in a nasty pile-up with each other, and sprawled too much in its 114 minutes. For her second feature, Blood Rites, Booraem keeps the horror and the unique setting, but narrows the focus considerably. The result is a much slicker product than Wake the Witch, but in losing some of the ambition of that film, Blood Rites also trades in some of Wake the Witch‘s weirdo personality for more familiar shocks. However, that’s not necessarily a bad trade, as Blood Rites is also a more immediately (if conventionally) satisfying film than Wake the Witch.
Nikki (Karis Yanike) is waiting at a hideout for her partners to return from a big drug deal. When they arrive, it is immediately apparent that things did not go well. Darrin (Shaun Vetick) shows up in one car with the wounded Diz (Christina Marie Leonard), who took a gunshot in the crossfire. Just before they lock up the hideout, Diz’s high-strung boyfriend Axel (Mark Dews) shows up with three hostages who appear to be Amish or Mennonite: Brother Abram (Christopher Michael O’Neill), Sister Adna (Allison Scott) and Sister Anani (Jeanne Kern). The group then heads to the top floor of the building to hide out and figure out what to do next since their ringleader Jason was apparently killed in the exchange. Diz is bleeding out, Axel can’t stop pointing his gun at everybody, and those chanting hostages are looking less and less like innocent bystanders as the day drags on.
Meanwhile, three young women led by the mysterious Donna (Katrina Adams) perform a strange ritual and end up dead. Now the cops have a drug-related shootout and a ritual murder to deal with all at the same time, not the way Detectives Frey (Eric Moyer) and Green (Robert-Kingston Green) wanted to start their weekend at all. As the situation in the hideout worsens, it seems as though supernatural forces may be trying to keep the criminals in the building while the police follow the trail of blood around the city. Whether they know it or not, Nikki and her cohorts may be in danger of being captured by the cops if they can’t escape the building, or by something much worse if the cops don’t get there first.
The Unrepentant Cinephile Page 8
