The Unrepentant Cinephile

by Jason Coffman

  Whatever expectations you bring to the film, Deadgirl will likely confound them. That in itself is rare enough, but it’s only part of what makes Deadgirl one of the best and most important horror films of the year. We can only hope that filmmakers continue to be as inventive and thoughtful as Trent Haaga (screenwriter), Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel (co-directors) in taking the “Zombie movie” in new and darker directions.

  Deathgasm (2015)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 5 January 2016

  New Zealand has a proud history of horror comedies, and in 2014 Gerard Johnstone’s Housebound became a new entry into that country’s canon of fun, inventive genre cinema. In 2015, two more horror comedies made a big impression on the international film scene: Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows and Jason Lei Howden’s Deathgasm. While the former played with vampire film tropes and mixed them with quirky low-key humor to much critical acclaim, the latter was a hit at film festivals and got some midnight screenings at independent theaters but not a lot of attention otherwise. Now that Deathgasm has hit home video, hopefully it will find the cult following it deserves, because it’s a hell of a good time.

  Aspiring metal guitarist Brodie (Milo Cawthorne) has landed in the worst possible place for a young man of his talents and interests: the home of his strict Christian aunt and uncle, and his popular jock cousin David (Nick Hoskins-Smith). David makes Brodie’s life a living hell at his new school, both because he’s just an awful person and because his girlfriend Medina (Kimberley Crossman) seems to like Brodie. Fortunately Brodie meets a couple of friends to start a band with, and when he meets Zakk (James Blake) at a record store, the two become fast friends over their mutual interest in metal and antisocial behavior. Zakk joins the band, christens it “Deathgasm,” and persuades Brodie to break into an abandoned house that is rumored to be the home of a legendary metal musician who has been missing for decades. They stumble upon some ancient sheet music that when played summons an ancient demon called The Blind One, and soon a plague of demonic possession is underway. Can Brodie and his friends stop the demon apocalypse, or is it too late to prevent all those awesome metal album covers from coming to life?

  Unlike What We Do in the Shadows, Deathgasm is unapologetically a story about adolescent wish fulfillment, jettisoning careful character shadings and relationships between them for loud music and blunt humor. There is nothing subtle about this movie: It’s loud, fast, goofy, and gory. In other words, it’s pretty much exactly what you would imagine a heavy metal horror movie from New Zealand would be. The cast is great, the music is perfect, and there are fountains of gore. Regarding that last point, however, one major complaint that can be made about the film is its reliance on shoddy CGI effects. The practical effects throughout the film are fine, and they throw just how bad some of the CGI is into stark contrast. Ultimately this is not too much of a distraction, but it is worth noting. Overall, though, Deathgasm is a highly entertaining horror/comedy that is well worth a look for fans of horror, metal, and/or New Zealand.

  Dark Sky Films released Deathgasm on Blu-ray and DVD on 5 January 2016. Special features include a commentary track by writer/director Jason Lei Howden, three behind-the-scenes featurettes running about five minutes each, “Deathgasm” music video, and trailers. Bizarrely, the film has been released under the title Heavy Metal Apocalypse at Wal-Mart stores, although whether this is just a cosmetic change to the cover art is not clear as of this writing.

  Death Riders (1976)

  Originally published on Criticplanet.org

  Of all the films in the Crown International catalogue, only a small handful are documentaries. While Crown distributed a few non-fiction films made by other production companies (most notably Mondo Balordo (1964), narrated by Boris Karloff), they mostly specialized in traditional low-budget and drive-in exploitation fare. One of the few documentaries in the Crown catalog is Death Riders, a 1976 film that follows a group of small-time daredevils as they travel the Midwest. There were quite a few films about cars (and bikes, and vans, and 18-wheelers, etc.) in the 1970s, so Death Riders probably seemed like a safe commercial bet since it features cars, motorcycles, and beer. Looking back on it now, Death Riders is a fascinating time capsule of a very specific point in American history.

  The Death Riders are a traveling group of vehicular daredevils who roam the American Midwest. They live a nomadic life out of their vehicles, going from county fair to county fair and making enough money to move on to the next show. Death Riders depicts parts of their death-defying stunt shows with flat narration provided by members of the crew. The shows include such classics as driving a car through a burning pile of debris, jumping over stuff on a motorcycle, ramping a car off of another car, driving a motorcycle through a fire, and the “Human Bomb” trick. The latter is just what it sounds like: a guy gets in a wooden box circled with dynamite, which then explodes. Most of the time, the guy gets out of the trick just fine. Most of the time. The film opens with a note that every stunt shown in the film has killed someone at one time or another (followed by a list of people and the stunts that killed them), presumably to increase the audience’s morbid curiosity.

  When not entertaining fair-goers, The Death Riders unwind by doing pretty much the same stuff they do while they’re working. They go out bull riding, racing motorbikes on a mud track, jumping a bunch of prone nudists, etc. Sometimes they do slightly less dangerous things like ride in parades in semi-blackface and hang out with local girls at theme parks. “Salt Lake City girls are really neat,” one of the Riders explains, while footage of the Death Riders hanging out with very young teenage girls is displayed. When they’re not courting jailbait or flirting with danger for fun, the Riders play pranks on each other. In a lot of ways, Death Riders is sort of like Jackass ’76, only with a lot more cheap beer and big mustaches.

  The voiceover assures us that "Salt Lake City girls are really neat." Ahem.

  However, there’s an underlying sense of melancholy that pervades much of Death Riders that is only occasionally hinted at in Jackass. Pointedly dedicated (as the film’s poster reads) “to Those Who Don’t Make It,” the film presents the life of The Death Riders without any commentary from anyone other than the Riders themselves. There’s definitely a bit of the romance of the open road and the American dream of freedom from the regular grind in the lives of the Death Riders, but there’s also a strong sense that eventually something is going to go wrong and sooner or later, more guys won’t make it. The Death Riders are living hard and partying harder in an America that is rapidly changing, but they’re not concerned about anything beyond the next show.

  It’s impossible to watch Death Riders without wanting to spend a little time in the mythical American Midwest the film depicts, but it’s equally impossible to watch without wondering what became of The Death Riders and where they may be now. And that is a potentially very depressing line of thought. While it was no doubt originally made just to capitalize on the crazy stunts these guys pulled, Death Riders now stands as a fascinating snapshot of the mid-1970s.

  Death Spa (1989)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 27 May 2014

  Many horror fans who grew up in the 80s and 90s are understandably nostalgic for the days of the local video store, when great box art promised untold terrors. Although the films inside the boxes rarely delivered on those promises, small video companies went out of their way to make eye-catching designs stand out from the other films on the shelves. In the last few years, DVD imprints have been taking advantage of this nostalgia by re-releasing some of those films from the heyday of VHS horror, bringing long-lost horror to a modern audience. One of the more surprising returns has been that of Gorgon Video, perhaps best known for distributing the infamous “shockumentary” Faces of Death. MPI has resurrected the brand once again for a Blu-ray/DVD combo release of the 1990 video store horror hit Death Spa.

  Michael Evans (William Bumiller), a widower whose wife Catherine (Shar
i Shattuck) set herself on fire in a gruesome suicide, runs the Star Body Health Spa, a popular high-tech health club. One night after the club is closed, his girlfriend Laura (Brenda Bakke) is the victim of a bizarre accident when chlorine gas fills her steam room. When the police come to investigate, the number one suspect is Michael’s business partner and former brother-in-law David (Merritt Buttrick), Catherine’s twin brother. David designed and programmed the computer that runs the spa, so when the mechanical systems go wrong he seems the obvious culprit. Soon, though, more strange accidents occur in the club: a new high-diving board falls off when club employee Darla (Chelsea Field) tries to use it for the first time, and tiles fly off the wall in the women’s shower room, injuring some of the club members. Michael, convinced the ghost of Catherine is tormenting him, hires a paranormal investigator while police detectives Fletcher and Stone (Frank McCarthy & Rosalind Cash) follow Michael in hopes of catching whoever is sabotaging the spa. The truth turns out to be a lot more complicated–and much, much stranger–than they could have possibly guessed. Will the reign of terror end before the Star Body Mardi Gras party? How is all this going to impact membership numbers?

  Death Spa is probably best remembered by VHS horror fans for its outrageous cover art, featuring a man’s rib cage being ripped open by a weight machine and a busty skull-faced woman on an exercise bike. This sense of absurdity carries over into the film itself, even if the things on the cover are never quite in the film–they give the weight machine thing a try, but it was clearly out of their special effects budget. The film never takes itself too seriously, which would be all but impossible anyway given all the spandex, pastel colors and neon on display. What it does take seriously are the gory kills and makeup effects, and while some of them don’t really make much sense (either due to editing or clumsy staging), others are impressively over-the-top. There is one scene in particular involving a killer blender that goes on about a minute longer than it probably needs to, and the final confrontation with the film’s major villain is hilariously protracted and cartoonishly violent, leading directly into the end credits with a totally gratuitous shot that perfectly caps the movie. Horror fans will also be pleased to note that Dawn of the Dead‘s Ken Foree has a major supporting role in the film, among many other familiar faces, virtually all of them wearing something completely embarrassing at one point or another.

  Gorgon Video has given Death Spa a very nice treatment for this new release, a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack that includes two major special features that are exciting for fans of the film: a feature-length commentary track with director Michael Fischa, editor Michael Kewley, and producer Jamie Beardsley, and “An Exercise in Terror: The Making of Death Spa,” a 50-minute “behind the scenes” featurette detailing the production of the film that includes interviews with stars William Bumiller and Shari Shattuck as well as Kewley, Beardsley,, production designer Robert Schulenberg, Steadicam operator Elizabeth Ziegler and others. This featurette also includes home video footage shot on set during the shoot, giving a fascinating peek into the film’s production. The film itself has been scanned in 2K from the original camera negative, and its garish, Day-Glo color palette has never looked better. It may not be a lost classic of the genre, but Death Spa is a goofy, gory, unpretentious good time, and well worth checking out for any fan of 80s horror.

  The Demons (1973)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 6 May 2014

  Kino’s recent work with Redemption Films has been fantastic for genre and exploitation film fans, who finally have beautiful Blu-ray releases of films by Jean Rollin, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jesús Franco. While some of these films have been released in the States in various forms over the years, some of them are making their stateside debut on DVD. The latest discovery by Redemption is Jesús Franco’s nunsploitation epic The Demons. Made in the wake of Ken Russell’s The Devils, The Demons is a very Franco-esque take on a similar concept and less of an outright remake of Russell’s controversial film.

  The Demons opens with a witch being tortured by Inquisitor Jeffries (John Foster) while his cohorts Lady De Winter (Karin Field) and Thomas Renfield (Alberto Dables) look on. The witch curses everyone responsible for her execution to die by the hand of her daughters, but none of them are sure whether or not she means literal daughters or fellow witches. From this point, the action moves to a cloister of nuns where two orphan sisters live. Kathleen (Anne Libert) has been stirring up trouble, being caught sleeping in the nude and writhing in ecstasy by another nun. Her sister Margaret (Britt Nichols) is at first ashamed of her sister, but before long Margaret also embraces her sensual nature, driving the other nuns to distraction and at least one to suicide. The sisters flee the nunnery and happen to fall in with the cursed inquisitors, Margaret moving in with the De Winters masquerading as a foreign princess and Kathleen encountering the revolutionaries who want to overthrow the crown. After some lengthy detours, Margaret begins actively carrying out her mother’s mission of vengeance, while Kathleen is powerless to stop her sister.

  The random literary references and historical backdrop aren’t the only Franco standards that will tip off fans. There is plenty of bare flesh on display, including (of course) plenty of nude nuns and sexualized torture. Whereas other low-budget filmmakers asked to make a knock-off of Russell’s film would have been satisfied with putting a bunch of naked nuns on the screen with some demon possession hijinks, Franco takes the opportunity to make a surprisingly ambitious picture. The main storyline following Margaret is reminiscent of his earlier film Venus in Furs with an inquisition-era backdrop, and Franco. veteran Britt Nichols is excellent as Margaret, starting the film as a repressed, pious sister and ending it as a wild-eyed monster. Franco fans will be happy to see other familiar faces here, including Howard Vernon as Lord Malcolm De Winter. The film looks spectacular on Blu-ray, and Franco fans will find a lot to love here.

  Devil in the Dark (2016)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 6 March 2017

  Since the advent of cheap camera drone technology over the last few years, more and more films have succumbed to the temptation of far too many gratuitous drone shots. There’s no question that good drone footage can enhance a film’s production value, but it’s easy for a filmmaker excited for this new toy to overuse it. And this isn’t just a problem with low-budget independent productions. There are certain types of stories that do lend themselves to significant use of this technology, though. Devil in the Dark is one of these, a film that takes place mostly in beautiful but intimidating mountains and wilderness far away from civilization. It’s a great example of a film that uses technology in order to effectively tell its story instead of substituting technology for the story.

  Clint (Dan Payne) lives with his wife and two kids in the house where he and his brother Adam (Robin Dunne) grew up. Adam hasn’t been back to his hometown in over a decade, and in the intervening time Clint cared for their sick father until his death. When Adam returns to spend time with Clint, Clint decides they will do an “old school” hunting trip up to the plateau that Adam hasn’t seen since a mysterious incident on a hunting trip when he was four years old. Adam’s townie buddies warn him that there are stories of something dangerous out in the mountains, but Clint is convinced Adam’s skittishness is due to big city living having turned him soft. The brothers strike out deep into the wild, but when they reach the plateau they discover an ominous cave and soon find themselves hunted by something they can’t explain.

  Shot in British Columbia, Devil in the Dark takes full advantage of its location. Director Tim Brown and cinematographer Philip Lanyon use beautiful drone photography that effectively conveys the scope of the vast wilderness and the isolation of the two lead characters as they venture further and further into the unknown. There are some truly breathtaking shots, but rather than distract from the story that drives the film they enhance it. Most of the film takes place in the present as the adult brothers fight for their lives, but there are parallel flashbacks that
fill in the details of their shared childhood. The story is familiar but well-executed, with Payne and Dunne) giving a pair of solid lead performances.

  Once the film turns into a fairly straightforward stalk and chase in the woods, it loses some of its focus on the relationship between the two brothers. This is a little disappointing, but Brown stages a few tense set pieces that keep the momentum building through the final act. At under 80 minutes minus credits, Devil in the Dark is briskly paced throughout, and never wears out its welcome. It’s also appreciated that the nature of the thing in the woods is never directly spelled out, although some viewers may be more annoyed by this than enjoy the lingering mystery. It’s a tight, tense thriller that is beautifully shot, and well worth a look for horror fans.

  Devil in My Ride (2013)

  Originally published on Film Monthly 1 May 2014

  While a popular route for first-time feature filmmakers, the horror comedy is an extremely difficult balancing act. Many filmmakers lean too far in one direction or the other– too much comedy and not enough scares and you risk looking goofy. Too much gore and not enough laughs can easily look mean-spirited. Many independent filmmakers try to tackle the horror comedy to dire ends. Hell, even major studios drop the ball more often than not when it comes to merging these two genres. Given that, it’s always a pleasant surprise to find a genuinely great horror comedy, even more so from a completely independent production. Devil in My Ride is the perfect example of independent horror/comedy done right.

  Doreen (Erin Breen) and Hank (Joey Bicicchi) are getting married in a matter of days when Doreen gets a call from her brother Travis (Frank Zieger). Doreen hasn’t heard from Travis in a few years, so she’s happily surprised when he announces he will be attending the wedding. Hank isn’t quite as pleased given Travis’s exit from Doreen’s life and subsequent silence. As Travis speeds across the country in his custom van, Black Mama, he stops to help a beautiful woman with a truck piled high with weird junk. Travis asks the woman if he can take a locket he finds in the truck bed as payment for his assistance and as a wedding gift for Doreen, but she warns him that it is not for sale. He manages to make off with it anyway and gets into town in time to give Doreen the necklace and try to convince the wary Hank that he should be the best man in the wedding, despite knowing Hank for just a few minutes.