Monthly Archives: January 2019

Movie review: An Hour To Kill

27 Sunday Jan 2019

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You’d be forgiven for thinking than Aaron K. Carter’s sophomore outing behind the camera; An Hour To Kill is just another low budget, off-the-wall movie, with actors who appear to be running off their lines without any connection to the audience and cinematography that just about scraps the viewing experience over the line.

But if you look past the cracks and crevices that are blatant for a movie of its kind, something begins to happen that lures you in… namely the screenplay. Carter wisely breaks up the narrative of the film into various sections that are either flashbacks or stories told by our leads. This change allows the script to shift gears with each section and push the audience forward, whilst never feeling stagnant or spend too long on the sparseness of the captured footage. This is definitely a testament to Carter’s writing and direction to be able to transport the viewer into the world and not be too distracted by its obvious flaws.

Whilst the opening scene is obviously influenced by Tarantino, using a blend of peppered dialogue and crime, especially with rookie hit man, Frankie played remarkably convincingly by Frankie Pozos. It could be easy to dismiss Frankie’s performance at first, but as the story unfolds the audience finds themselves integrated into his character and his interaction with veteran hit man, Gio (Aaron Guerrero). Guerrero also teamed up with director Carter in his debut feature, Dead Kansas and also seems quite relaxed in his character on-screen.

The crux of the story is centred on an ongoing conflict between crime lord Mr. Kinski (Mel Novak – Game of Death) and Arash. When the former suspects Frankie as a mole, he charges Gio with the task of bumping him off. Gio asks that he be given the opportunity to do it his way. Kinski agrees but gives him the ultimatum to enact his deed within the hour. So with an Hour To Kill, Gio and Frankie exchange stories to pass the time.

Each story that is presented goes from the bizarre to the downright deranged and sucks you in deeper into the insanity. The first story, Valkyrie’s Bunker, a typical slasher style short story, presents a group of girls who drive to a Nazi bunker for a group project only to find out they are not alone.

The second story actually suits the style that the movie has been shot in, resulting in numerous pieces to camera monologues. Assacre focuses on an eating contest that has 5 entrees competing to eat a fairly substantial burrito. When the reigning champion is defeated, he teams up with fellow loser to seek revenge and produce a powerful pepper. The results are more than anticipated and one of the best and hilarious death scenes in recent times.

The last segment, Hog Hunters is the most crazed of all when a bowling team goes in search of some entertainment only to get more than they bargained for. Words cannot do this segment justice, just sit back and let the wild times unfold.

The Diagnosis:

Yes it’s low budget and it doesn’t hide the flaws, but Carter creates grindhouse-style deliverance in his direction that highlights his writing abilities and the acting credibility of the lead hit men. If you simply allow the story in An Hour To Kill to wash over you, you’ll be pleasantly entertained.

  • Saul Muerte

Retrospective: The Blair Witch Project

25 Friday Jan 2019

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Transport yourself back twenty years and cast yourself in an auditorium draped with red velvet curtains and matching carpet where the unwanted popcorn had stuck to the floor and would crunch beneath your feet.

This is where I found myself ahead of this massively hyped movie that had allegedly had audiences throwing up in the aisles.

Was this a reaction to the events in the movie or from the hand-held cinematography that the filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez were looking to achieve in order to capture the old documentary style filming you often saw in news reports etc.? What ever it was, Myrick and Sanchez had a lightning in the bottle moment that sent the Internet ablaze while it was still in its infancy, (no other film at this stage had created such a multimedia sensation) and in the process reawakened the found footage genre.

The twenty-year-old version of myself was determined not to buy into the insanity, but as I sat as the lights went down anticipating an awakening of my own. To be scared, thrilled, and gripped in fear at the events that would flow before me. This twenty-year-old was also incredibly stubborn. I beckoned, nay, willed the filmmakers to push my senses to the limit. Yes, I was disorientated, but not nearly to the degree that I had been led to believe, and I found my excitement transported to fury at these whining Americans that were lost in the woods.

To say that I was underwhelmed was a gross understatement.

And yet, something kept niggling away at me beneath the surface.

I was aware of the impact that this little movie had had on the horror industry, an industry that I loved so much. And numerous friends of mine would often talk about the impact that it had on them over the years. Was I wrong to have scoffed at the film so readily? Was there more to this movie than just your average run-of-the-mill found-footage horror?

Films of similar ilk like Paranormal Activity, or Cloverfield would come and go and not resonate as deeply, with the exception of Jaume Balagueró’s [Rec]. It was safe to say that I wasn’t a fan of this sub-genre.

It was only upon a few years back in preparation ahead of Adam Wingard’s sequel Blair Witch that I gathered the team together for a podcast on the franchise. It was during this time that I began to appreciate the making of this movie.

Listen to The Surgeons of Horror podcast:

The Blair Witch franchise


As The Blair Witch Project celebrates its 20th Anniversary, I’ve come to realize that it is a cracking example of experimental horror at its finest. The techniques that Myrick and Sanchez use in both production and marketing were exemplary, and should be applauded.

Whilst some could argue that it feels like a student film in places, (which let’s face it, it was) the direction would mark a new approach in film-making moving forward and open the door for similar stylized films.

With a 32-page screenplay and a trio of as-yet undiscovered actors (Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard) in their crew, (some having to double-up as camera crew) they ventured out into the wooded terrain in Maryland to carry out their vision.

The aim was to guide the actors through pre-decided marks throughout the woods, where they would improvise around the screenplay, whilst adapting to each action as it was given to them. The effect was a naturalistic piece of drama, which made the plight of our trio all the more gritty and realistic.

It essentially became a test of endurance on the three actors, as they were deprived of food and disorientated by lack of sleep.

Throw in the shock ending, which was initially asked to be reshot by Artisan Entertainment for its confusion, only to end up in the final cut. It’s a good job too, as the ending is both startling and unsettling leaving the viewer hollow inside. Any movie that can garner such a reaction from its audience will always be held highly in these writers’ eyes.

The final mark of brilliance though comes in the marketing. With so much back-story written, it became an online producer’s playing field to create and sell the ‘history’ and cement the believability further. In an age where the scope of the internets online marketing capability had yet to be explored, and the mythology behind the Blair Witch was catapulted into the mainstream, coupled with the mockumentary, Curse of the Blair Witch, and the book, The Blair Witch Project: A Dossier.

There’s plenty of good reason that The Blair Witch Project should and still be deemed a horror movie classic, and twenty years on, it is a testament to clever filmmaking, marketing, and that special lightning in bottle magic, that only comes around every so often.

Listen to The Surgeons of Horror podcast:

Director Eduardo Sanchez interview

  • Saul Muerte

Press Release: MidWest WeirdFest Announces First Programming Wave for 2019

20 Sunday Jan 2019

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Eau Claire, Wisconsin, January 16, 2019 – MidWest WeirdFest announces its first programming wave for 2019 today. The third annual festival – a cinematic celebration of all things fantastic, frightening, offbeat, and just plain weird – takes place March 8-10, 2019 at the Micon Downtown Cinema in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. 

“This year’s fest line-up is set to delight fans of cutting edge horror, sci-fi, underground, and documentary cinema”, says festival founder and programming director Dean Bertram. “We’ve put together a heady and eclectic mix of speculative genre offerings, underground strangeness, and paranormal revelations: From a psychedelic Manson Family reimagining and a post-apocalyptic dance-off epic, through tales about a reanimated electrokinetic teenager, haunted stoners, and inept buddy superheroes, to a bonkers lake monster adventure and the most in-depth Bigfoot documentary ever produced. And that’s just from MidWest WeirdFest’s first programming wave of 2019!” 

Discounted festival passes are now on sale at: www.midwestweirdfest.com. Individual tickets to each film will go on sale closer to the festival; both on the fest’s website, and directly from the Micon Downtown Cinema in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. 

Full program details and filmmaker guests will be revealed in February. 

The first seven feature films announced follow: 

FP 2: BEATS OF RAGE (director: Jason Trost)

Despite hanging up his boots following the events of the cult classic “THE FP”,  JTRO must return to the blood sport of Beat-Beat Revelation one last time.  JTRO and KCDC – his mystical hype man – will quest deep into The Wastes, a land decimated by the Beat Wars, to compete in the ancient Beat-Beat tournament, called “Beats of Rage”, face AK-47, and, hopefully, save the world.  Imagine a MAD MAX style future, where battles to the death are fought via the video game Dance Dance Revolution, and you might have an inkling of the crazy and hilarious post-apocalyptic world of THE FP.

THE INVISIBLE MOTHER (directors: Matthew Diebler and Jacob Gillman)

When lesbian stoner Marcy returns to her grandparents’ home to help care for her mentally declining grandmother, she discovers they are being terrorized by a malevolent force from a Victorian post-mortem photograph. THE INVISBLE MOTHER is a giallo-styled, terrifying descent into supernatural terror.

LAKE MICHIGAN MONSTER (director: Ryland Tews)

The eccentric Captain Seafield hires a crew of specialists to help him plot revenge against the creature that killed his father. After several failed attempts, Seafield is forced to take matters into his own drunken hands. What began as a simple case of man verses beast, soon turns into a rabbit hole of mysterious unknowns and Lovecraftian hijinks. LAKE MICHIGAN MONSTER — banned in four lakes! 

THE LAST OF THE MANSON GIRLS (director: Lonnie Martin)

Convinced there’s more to the Manson murders than meets the public eye, counterculture journalist Paul Krassner embarks on an LSD tinged investigation of the last of Manson’s disciples: Brenda McCann, Sandra Good, and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme. What he finds could change how the world sees the 60s… if he lives long enough to tell the story. A riveting, speculative, and psychedelic journey into one of the darkest byways of 1960s Americana.

ON THE TRAIL OF BIGFOOT (director: Seth Breedlove)

From Small Town Monsters, and MidWest WeirdFest alumni filmmaker Seth Breedlove (THE MOTHAN OF POINT PLEASANT, THE BRAY ROAD BEAST), comes this enthralling documentary examining the history of the Bigfoot phenomenon. ON THE TRAIL OF BIGFOOT was filmed coast to coast during 2018 and features witnesses and investigators of the elusive creature.  Prepare to go deeper into the Bigfoot subject than you’ve ever gone before.

REBORN (director: Julian Richards)

A stillborn baby girl is brought back to life by a morgue attendant using electrokinetic power. On her sixteenth birthday she escapes her captor and sets out to find her birth mother leaving a trail of destruction behind her. Don’t miss this stunning modern twist on 70s and 80s horror classics like CARRIE, FIRESTARTER, and THE FURY. Stars genre legends Barbara Crampton (RE-ANIMATOR, BEYOND THE GATES) and Michael Parle (STREETS OF FIRE, THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT).

ZEROES (director: Charles Smith)

After leaving a Halloween party dressed as ninjas, Kenneth and Ray – two drunken roommates – thwart a robbery and their heroics go viral. No litterer or public urinator is safe until an actual serial killer begins to ravage the city. Our inept crime-fighting duo, with the help of the enigmatic and insanely wealthy Gary, must catch the killer before Kenneth’s crush Kate becomes the next target. Hilarity abounds in this superhero spoof.

For more details visit the festival’s website: www.midwestweirdfest.com

The Unbreakable series

19 Saturday Jan 2019

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I remember it clearly, the end credits were rolling, the auditorium lights were fading up when a well-known media personality, that I won’t name, turned around in his seat in front and said to my friends and I;

“What the fuck was that?”

The year was 2000 and I’d just sat through a preview screening of M. Night Shyamalan’s much-anticipated follow-up to his previous blockbuster ‘The Sixth Sense’, ‘Unbreakable’. My friends and my reaction was the complete polar opposite of said famed personality. We saw the film for what it was, an utter genius take on a superhero origin movie.

‘Unbreakable’ was in fact a bold experiment by Disney, they’d entrusted their new wunderkind writer/director to follow up his previous success with another, and he’d gone and made a superhero movie way before anyone had.

Over the years that followed I re-watched and re-watched its Special Edition DVD. It was my go-to movie any time I was looking for something to watch. I devoured its rich story telling, it’s perverse humour, the subtle technique in reveal and what to not reveal. I loved the raw drama; of a normal couple toppling over a razors edge, two middle-aged men (Bruce Willis and Samuel L Jackson) searching for their place in the universe, a son desperately holding onto that time in your life when your parents are infallible. None of these were, or are, the standard ingredients of a comic book superhero movie. I savoured the Special Features on the DVD, particularly the ‘deleted scenes’, lamenting on their loss to ‘Unbreakable’ considering they were such strong scenes.

I loved the film from back to front…but the critics didn’t. Reading bad review upon bad review I wondered whether the critics had watched the same film.

Over the years I’d heard rumours that ‘Unbreakable ‘was to be the first film, the origin film, of a trilogy, but the more and more M Night spiralled into mediocrity with flop after flop, first came ‘The Lady In The Water’ and ‘Avatar The Last Airbender’, etc. etc., only slightly redeeming himself with ‘The Visit’.

So flash forward to 2018 and there I was ‘giving M Night another go’, I sat in my lounge room watching ‘Split’ because, well…James McAvoy is always bloody amazing and I’d just watched Anya Taylor-Joy in ‘The Witch’, so yeah….

And I was really enjoying it a lot. Though the more and more I watched, more and more something nagged at me – there was something really familiar at play here. The subtle reveals, the perverse humour, its dark fantastical reality.

Was McAvoy’s many characters crazy? Hell yeah, he did have some serious mental defects but the big question, as with David Dunn in ‘Unbreakable’…were his powers real or a figment of a wild imagination?

Would we see a supernatural being called The Beast or would it be some delusion fool with a furry fetish?

But it was as I was watching The Beast talk about the ‘broken’ being pure and the ‘unbroken’ were to be punished that things really started to click. By the time the ‘Unbreakable’ music began to swell as Crumb hid in his escape house and we cut to a non-descript diner with David Dunn I was literally off the sofa screaming at the TV.

“IT’S A MOTHER FUCKING UNBREAKABLE SEQUEL!!!”

And so now I have my finale.

‘Glass’ is really not a movie I can openly discuss with giving too much away, and frankly I’m still thinking about it several hours after I watched it. However again I sat in a cinema with an audience that I don’t think quite understood its wit. I think I was literally the only one laughing at its dark humour.

The cast were amazing, all returned from the previous two films (except Robin Wright) and why wouldn’t they, this was as much their story as it was the leading pro/antagonists. M Night (returning as his cameo from ‘Unbreakable’) even managed to include the deleted scenes from ‘Unbreakable’ as if they were made solely for that purpose.

This is not a conventional film though; ‘Glass’ is really is an act three of a three-film story. And while both ‘Unbreakable’ and ‘Split’ appear to be origin stories for the three lead characters Mr Glass, The Beast, and The Overseer, this transcends the ‘origin’ tale to make it an ‘origin of species’ story.

Already, like Unbreakable, critics do not like Glass but filmmakers don’t make films for critics.

The Diagnosis:

‘Glass’ is a fantastic final chapter to M Night Shyamalan’s daring superhero experiment. It’s exciting, it’s funny, it’s bloody entertaining and it’s a very well calculated story from a bold director who maintained the tenacity to play the long game here to create a three part opus for himself and us.

‘Unbreakable’, ‘Split’ and ‘Glass’… the little superhero films that could and did.

  • Myles Davies

Retrospective: Saw – 15 years on

19 Saturday Jan 2019

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Strip away all the torture devices and wash away all the blood-soaked, gore-infested mayhem that the franchise has become synonymous for and some of you maybe questioning what’s left? But with James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s original film that kick-started the whole Jigsaw frenzy the audience were treated to an exercise in constrained drama, flickered with tense, psychological elements that quite rightly projected the writer and director partnership into the Hollywood limelight as a result.

Part of Saw’s brilliance comes from the low-budget constraints that were placed on the making of the movie. Once the creative duo realised that the cheapest way to shoot a movie would be to have two actors in one room, this germ of an idea developed into the final product and the birth of Jigsaw and his twisted vision of justice.

Apparently the Jigsaw character began when Whannell feared that he had a brain tumour and pondered the notion of what he would do or need to do if he were only to have a year or two to live. This was the leaping point into the dark recesses of Jigsaws’ mind.

It’s this tightly shot, well structured movie that allowed Wan to develop his technique for manipulating lights and shadow to trick and deceive the audiences’ eye. He would harness this skill further with his sophomore film Dead Silence before working on his masterpiece, The Conjuring.

It wasn’t that easy getting budget for the movie though. With no luck gaining interest from their homeland in Australia, Wan and Whannell tried to taut their project in Los Angeles, but even then had to shoot a short feature to provide a proof of concept before getting any decent interest.
You have to applaud their bravado to. So intent were they in getting their vision made, they insisted on having both directing and acting duties respectively. In the end it took newly formed production outfit, Twisted Pictures to give them their desires and have been behind every Saw movie since.

So with one half of the acting team already cast in Whannell as the photographer with a complex past, the team needed a decent actor opposite him as Dr. Lawrence Gordon, a Doctor with an equally dubious past. In steps Cary Elwes, normally associated with his comical roles but proved worthwhile in this serious performance, more than holding his own and providing gravitas to the scenario.

The masterstroke comes with the casting of Tobin Bell as Jigsaw aka John Kramer, who simply owns his role and has propelled himself into horror movie history with his performance as the disturbed yet brilliant mind behind the various traps and tortuous devices throughout all the Saw movies.

So with the narrative played out with Adam and Dr. Lawrence wake up in a bathroom, chained to the floor with nothing but a corpse, a revolver, and a tape recorder to guide them on a journey that will test their metal and push them to the very limits of their intellect and perception.

Saw would be released in front of a Sundance audience for its initial premiere where Lionsgate picked up the distribution rights and the rest is history.

Since then, Wan has established a firm career in the director’s chair to the point hat he has been given the chance to give DC movies some decent crowd with Aquaman, and Whannell more recently carved his own success with Upgrade.

So for those who may have been apprehensive about checking out the origins of Jigsaw, before the bloodbath began, I’d recommend going back to the original source as you maybe pleasantly surprised by this outing with a clever, psychological thriller that is an example of how to shoot a low-budget movie with a lot of smarts and a decent narrative to keep the audience hooked.

It still stands strong 15 years on and my bet is that this will still be the case in another 15 years.

Movie review: Son of Frankenstein (1939)

13 Sunday Jan 2019

Posted by in Movie review, Universal Horror

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We’ve barely a decade of horror under their Universal belts, the powerhouse production company was struggling once more to pull in the numbers at the box office. So it’s with some sense of irony that the movies that started it all in Dracula and Frankenstein would be screened as a double feature and reignite the craze all over again. The stunt would be so successful that Universal Pictures would look to producing another instalment of their beloved monster franchise with Son of Frankenstein, in what would be the third of the series.

In Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, Universal had created two classic features, thanks to the direction of James Whale, where some have argued that the latter outweighed its predecessor. Whatever your views on the matter, it would be a touch act to follow and into the directors shoes steps Rowland V. Lee (The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers) to try and accomplish this task.

The result is one that is worthy of the Frankenstein name, despite it bordering on silliness and camp on occasion. (A sign of the direction that Universal would fall into down the track.)

With grand plans to shoot the film in colour using Technicolor only to be disbanded due to artistic and budgetary reasons, Son of Frankenstein would be presented to the audience in black and white and reunite the horror icons, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. In this instance, the latter donning the Monster mask for the last time in a feature film. The two would once again prove to be a winning formula with Lugosi playing the deformed Ygor and practically stealing the show with his performance. In an interesting turn of events, it is Ygor who is the dominant presence and has The Monster at his beckoning call, as he commands the creature to kill those that have proved him ill in the past.

Leading the cast as the son of Frankenstein is Basil Rathbone (The Adventures of Robin Hood) who cuts a fine figure of a man trying to right his fathers’ wrongs and changing the perceived conception of his family name. It would have been interesting had Peter Lorre had played the role as he had been cast, but had to withdraw due to illness. It’s a shame because I’m a huge fan of Lorre and would loved to see him cast against Lugosi and Karloff, but as I said, Rathbone more than proves his worth.

A worthy nod should also be assigned towards Lionel Atwill (Mark of the Vampire) as Inspector Krogh, a character whose past encounter saw his arm torn off his limb as a child when he came into contact with The Monster. It’s a stoic performance and Atwill shines in an already crowded cast of personalities.

The Diagnosis:

It’s a fitting end to this chapter in the Universal Horror history.
Son of Frankenstein manages to harness all the right ingredients to make it a worthy companion to its predecessors, whilst falling on the right side of drama and terror for its time.

Lugosi and Karloff are in their element and would ride out on a high. Around the corner a new king to the throne would lay in wait in Lon Chaney Jr… but that’s another tale.

  • Saul Muerte