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Mum and Dad Visit Horror In Your House
Welcome to another edition of Horror In Your House featuring our home video releases for Tuesday, May 5th. While the lot of films hitting retailers are indie films, some titles you definitely want to pick up are Revolver’s UK torture film Mum & Dad, along with the long, long, long delayed End of the Line from Critical Mass.
Horror in Your House
May 5, 2009
ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES: Brett Kelly Entertainment
In a small town, the silence is shattered by a rash of disappearances at the swamp near the old deserted factories. Bodies are being discovered with no blood left in their bodies. It s up to a park ranger and the town sheriff to discover what ungodly creature is responsible for these deaths. It s only a matter of time before they discover that what they seek are Leeches that have grown to unbelievable size. We bleed- they feed!
THE BONE SNATCHER: First Look
When Dr. Zack Straker, a field research scientist, unearths the skinned bodies of three missing prospectors, Zack discovers that he and his team are being hunted by millions of creatures that have united into one unstoppable killing machine. As darkness descends, the ground they stand on becomes a living carpet capable of devouring their flesh with every step. Hell has been unleashed. With no clues to investigate the massacre, Alex must find a way to stop them before it’s too late.
ECOUTE LE TEMPS (aka FISSURES): Koch Lorber
Charlotte, a sound engineer and loner, travels to her mother’s house in the countryside to help with arrangements after her mother is murdered. Once there, she realizes that she knows very little about her mother’s life in this strange village. Frustrated by a lack of progress by the police investigation, Charlotte begins to use her sound equipment to carry out her own investigation. While listening to a fresh recording she made in her mother’s house, Charlotte discovers a strange phenomenon; sounds from the past blend in with sounds from the present. Soon she is piecing together the last days and hours of her mother’s life, drawing every closer to discovering who killed her, even as the murderer returns to try and kill Charlotte before they are discovered.
THE 8TH PLAGUE: Celebrity
Launa is obsessed with investigating the disappearance of her sister who has not returned from a recent camping trip in the mountain town of Halcyon Springs. The search leads to an abandoned prison where Launa and her friends are exposed to an ancient evil that the stone walls of Halcyon Ridge can no longer hold back. Relentless terror, gore, and bone-chilling thrills are unleashed on anyone whose soul is exposed to this demonic curse.
END OF THE LINE: Critical Mass (TEX’S PICK OF THE WEEK)
Karen, a young psychiatric nurse, boards the last subway train of the night only to have it stop in the middle of the tunnel. Suddenly, her nightmare begins: a mysterious cult has decided that it’s the end of the world and the only way to save the souls of the living is to kill them in cold blood. As those around her are brutally murdered, Karen and a handful of survivors must face the homicidal cult, supernatural forces and their own fears of Armageddon in order to survive.
FRANKENHOOD: Lionsgate
Motown and Darius work in a morgue, trading put-downs and toiling among the most undemanding of customers. But outside of their decidedly dreary jobs, the two dream of bigger and better things. If only they could win the $25,000 prize that will go to the winners of the upcoming 3-on-3 Streetball Tournament. One night, having been demoted to graveyard shift, they run into their semi-sane colleague Franklin in a dark alley outside the morgue. They find Franklin using the auto battery of Motown’s precious Gremlin to bring to life a monstrous dead man whose heart Franklin has just replaced. That 3-on-3 basketball tournament isn’t looking so bad…if they can just get their new mutant friend to play basketball!
FROM A PLACE OF DARKNESS: Celebrity
There can be a fine line between good and evil. Documentary filmmaker, Miles Cody, ends up crossing that line when he becomes obsessed with his subject: the King of Snuff Films and delves into a world of nudity, forbidden sex and…VIOLENT CLIMAXES. Miles soon discovers the ghosts of those films have returned to warn him…or lure him into…a place of darkness.
HELLBRIDE: Jinx Media
Everything is working out for Nicole Meadows. She has a great job. She has an adoring boyfriend who has just proposed. She has a doting father who is preparing the wedding. She also has a dark secret. And a cursed engagement ring. Come the wedding day, there will be bloodshed. But at least there will be cake, too.
THE HOUSE OF THE DEMON: Celebrity
It’s Halloween, the biggest party night of the year. A group of college friends won’t let the university’s new ban on parties spoil their plans. Charlie has just inherited his recently deceased uncle’s abandoned house on the outskirts of town. What is supposed to be a night of good, clean, Halloween fun becomes an outrageous nightmare of demonic possession, as each of the hapless teens discover what is inside The House of the Demon!
MUM & DAD: Revolver/Image
One of the most disturbing shockers to emerge in recent years, “Mum & Dad” will leave the toughest horror fan gasping in shock. When Lena, a young Polish immigrant working as an airport office cleaner, misses her last bus home, she accepts an offer of help from friendly co-worker Birdie, who lives nearby with her “adoptive” parents. Knocked unconscious after arriving at the house, Lena soon finds herself imprisoned in a suburban house of horrors, a living nightmare of torment and terror. Designated a “Mommy’s Girl,” Lena’s only options appear to be becoming part of the insane family — or dying.
RISE OF THE SCARECROWS: X Posse/Tempe
Big city cop Officer Brown has moved to Adams, a small town in the middle of nowhere. With less crime and less stress, Brown plans to live a quiet life, but all is not what it seems. Adams is the sort of town that you can visit but never leave. Bodies are piling up, people begin to disappear, and only Officer Brown can uncover the horrible truth that is THE RISE OF THE SCARECROWS!
SCARCE: Critical Mass
Returning from a snowboarding weekend, three friends take shelter from a sudden winter storm in an isolated cabin. But while waiting out the weather, they are stalked, one by one, by the cabin’s demented owners. These locals specialize in curing of meat but this time, there is more than venison on the menu. The weekenders find themselves fighting more that the cold; soon they are fighting for their very lives.
SLAUGHTER: Celebrity
Slaughter is the feature film debut of writer and director Dan Martin and takes horror back to its nasty, gritty and often tongue in cheek rootsd of the 1970’s and 80’s. The film follows escaped mental patient David Ward as he hides in his derelict caravan spending his days hiding from the police and doctors and filming himself raping and murdering while police slowly discover his crimes and get closer to him.
There’s something really insidious, in a great way, about setting a horror story in a movie theater. It’s something filmmakers have known for decades, going back to The Blob and beyond, but it never fails to strike a chord because, in a way, it hits us exactly where we feel safest. Seeing a horror movie on the big screen, surrounded by like-minded moviegoers, is a communal experience, one in which everyone screams and laughs together. We are together, and therefore we are much less vulnerable, so when someone punctures that bubble of safety, it’s all the more frightening.
Matinee (also released as Midnight Matinee in some territories) is a movie that understands this from the jump, setting up a stunning opening kill that predates a similar sequence in Scream 2 by almost a full decade. A smart, layered, very stylish Canadian slasher released at the tail end of the 1980s, it’s one of those films that’s spent a lot of time in the dark even among the horror faithful (I’m willing to admit that I hadn’t seen it until recently). Now, a new Kino Cult Blu-ray release is out to change that, and it reveals a slasher essential that, while not perfect, has charm and style to spare.
Two years ago, the Paramount Theater in the small town of Halston closed its doors when, during the theater’s annual horror festival, a young moviegoer was murdered in his seat, mid-movie. Leads in the murder quickly dried up, and the case is cold enough now that the town barely talks about it anymore. Fortunately for local horror fans, that means the Paramount can open again in time for its Halloween horror festival, and they’ve got a hotshot producer (William B. Davis) in town for just such an occasion.
As the festival draws closer, the film introduces us to a variety of characters, including rebellious teenager Sherri (Beatrice Boepple), her boyfriend Lawrence (Jeff Schultz), her overbearing mother Marilyn (Gillian Barber), and the theater’s kindly owner, Earle (Don S. Davis), who’s just hoping he can run a business without more bloodshed. But someone clearly remembers what happened two years ago, and their violent streak is on a collision course with opening night.
Matinee has quite a few things going for it, but what stands out right away, and maintains a consistent grip right up through a wonderful crescendo in the third act, is the film’s visual style. Writer/Director Richard Martin, cinematographer Cyrus Block, and special effects wizard Bob Comer make great use of the film’s limited locations, giving the movie a charming small-town feel reminiscent of Halloween or The Blob while building a self-contained little world inside the theater itself that’ll remind you of films like Popcorn and Demons.
The colors are striking, the framing is clever, and the film clearly has a ball making references to all kinds of other horror cinema moments ranging from The Phantom of the Opera to Friday the 13th. The kills, while relatively sparing with gore, are delivered with style and appropriate tension, creating that sense of unease right in the middle of a place where we as movie fans should be comfortable: The movie theater. Along the way, the Paramount itself becomes a character, and this release definitely dials up its retro splendor.
The Blu-ray upgrade preserves the film’s attention to detail and ambitious cinematography, helping the colors to pop while never letting go of the texture and feel of a relatively low-budget horror film made in Canada in the 1980s. There’s a certain gauziness to many exploitation films of this era, that haloed light you get when the scene is perhaps overexposed just a little too much. It makes the film dreamlike even when it reaches for realism, and Kino Cult’s upgrade preserves that feeling. Throw in a smart script and a whodunit plot that leans heavily into the psychological details of each character, and you’ve got a winner.
There are a couple of things that stick out as slight issues here, including the lack of special features beyond an excellent commentary from film historians and Kino regulars Jason Pichonsky and Paul Corupe. The disc is quite reasonably priced, so it’s not a letdown economically speaking, but I’d love a deeper dive into the film and the Canadian slasher boom in general, particularly for a movie like this that seems to have faded from so many memories, including mine. The sound mix also has some issues, probably left over from previous releases, that might have you playing with your volume settings a little more than you’d like over the course of a 90-minute film, particularly when lines of ADR dialogue crop up.
These are minor concerns, though, and they do nothing to diminish the impact of Matinee, or the joy that’ll come from watching this film for the first time if you’re a slasher devotee in search of something new, or even someone who saw this movie way back when hoping to relive its glories. This is one of those slashers I’ll be talking about with fellow horrorphiles for a long time, and it’s because of this disc.
Matinee is now available on Blu-ray from Kino Cult.
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