A Gang of tough London Hoods get more than they bargained for when a Group of Eastern European Businessmen make an offer to buy their Club, the Paradise. Refusing to take no for an answer mayhem ensues as the ‘Businessmen’ turn out to be nothing less than a group of Vampires hell-bent on reclaiming what they consider to be ‘their’ property. Gangsters and Vampires battle it out for the ultimate prize…
We heard good things about Tower Block out of last year’s Fantastic Fest and we;re pleased to report that the film will be released on DVD and Blu-ray via Shout! Factory on July 2nd.
Written by James Moran (Torchwood, Severance, Cockneys Vs. Zombies) and directed by Ronnie Thompson (Screwed) and James Nunn (Cockneys Vs. Zombies), the high concept suspense thriller stars Sheridan Smith(Quartet), Russell Tovey (Being Human, History Boys), Jack O’Connell (Skin, Harry Brown), Ralph Brown (Alien 3, Nearly Famous) and Kane Robinson (AKA rapper Kano).
“The residents of Tower Block 31 are terrified after witnessing the brutal murder of a young man. The case is left unsolved, due in large part to their collective silence. A year later, with their building marked for demolition, the witnesses begin to find themselves picked off one by one by a mysterious sniper out for justice. Pitted against not only the sniper’s deadly traps, but also each other, the residents must figure out a way to escape their own building…or die trying.
Featuring critically hailed performances by Jack O’Connell (300: Rise Of An Empire) and Sheridan Smith (Quartet) and co-starring Ralph Brown (Stoker), and Russell Tovey (BBC’s Being Human), Tower Block is a pulse-pounding thriller that delivers gritty action and relentless suspense.”
Specs and bonus features are still being determined.
Speaking of Scream Factory, their Blu-ray release of The Fog will be the first time that film has landed on the high-def format in the US. And they’ve just unveiled the cover for their product! As always, you can just flip the insert around if you want the original poster.
“Look what just rolled in…our newly retro-styled designed artwork for John Carpenter’s THE FOG! This new “remix” of the ghostly classic comes to us from artist Justin Osbourn. As always with our Collector’s Editions, the reverse wrap will have the original theatrical key art (the iconic one with Jamie Lee Curtis bolted up against the door).”
The DVD & Blu-ray go on sale July 30th. An announcement of the bonus features is forthcoming. Head inside for the art! READ MORE
Fans of The Amityville Horror and its’ two immediate successorsAmityville II: The Possession and Amityville 3D will no doubt be thrilled to hear that they are going to be reissued on Blu-ray by Shout Factory’s horror division, Scream Factory, as The Amityville Trilogy.
“We teased the following weeks ago but now we will confirm it: THE AMITYVILLE HORROR TRILOGY (consisting of the ’79 original, the ’82 prequel and the ’83 3D entry) will be making its way from us in a Blu-ray collection set before Halloween. That’s a lot of bleeding walls, flies, demons, possessed family members in HD! More specifics (extras, street date, etc.) to emerge in the Summer.”
Get your wallets ready! More details as the come in! READ MORE
When I think about the career of Wes Craven, Swamp Thing never really even comes to mind. Just not my cup of tea (and I almost – gaps – prefer the sequel). But still, fans of the film should be excited that it will finally be getting a Scream Factory Blu-ray release! The film. starring Adrienne Barbeau, will be arriving this summer on Blu-ray for the first time.
It might not be your preferred cut though. “As always, we are planning to provide as many bells and whistles as we can on this release, but we felt it was important to tell you early on that we will only be able to present the 91 minute U.S. cut of the film (the same version MGM has released on DVD since ’05) and not the 93 minute “unrated” international version as we had originally hoped for. This is due to legal issues that are out of our control and we hope you understand. ”
Specs and release date will be revealed in the coming months. READ MORE
Reviewed by Patrick Cooper
Bruce D. Clark’s Corman-produced Naked Angels was released two months after Easy Rider and I have a strong hunch they rushed through shooting and editing to cash in on the seminal hippy-biker film. Corman had set the outlaw biker bar high three years earlier with The Wild Angels and then Easy Rider successfully infused the genre with the hippy sensibilities of the time. Naked Angels takes this artsy-hippy approach and combines it with the best and worst aspects of the outlaw biker genre.
Michael Green (To Live and Die in LA) plays Mother, the anti-hero leader of the California biker gang Naked Angels. The gang’s name is misleading – none of them are all that naked and they’re certainly not angelic. They should be called the Denim Dickheads. The movie begins with Mother returning after an extended hospital stay. Their rivals the Las Vegas Hotdoggers beat Mother senseless and now that he’s out, he wants revenge. Revenge against the Hotdoggers, which has got to be the lousiest biker gang moniker ever.
The Angels mount up and head out to Vegas to skin some Hotdogs, but they can’t find them. They do manage to weed out one of their members at a bar, and he squawks about some hidden mine in the Nevada desert where the Hotdoggers are holed up. Mother and the gang head out into the desert without a clue of the mine’s whereabouts. Jealousies and concerns about Mother’s sanity begin to tear the gang up. When the gang refuses to run a train on Mother’s woman, their leader takes to the desert alone.
Like most drive-in biker movies, there’s not much plot. Long scenes of hauling ass through the desert are interspersed with sex and heaps of debauchery. There is some interesting things going on though. Still shot montages and trippy camera work (ala Easy Rider’s cemetery scene) abound and some of it is pretty damn good. There’s even an old west dream sequence. The scenes of hell-raising in Las Vegas are particularly great and capture the raunchy vibe of Sin City in the late-60s. The neon lights of the strip are contrasted nicely with the scorched earth of the endless desert.
Michael Green is one mean bastard. Some of the close-ups of his face make his eyes look the headlights of a truck, barreling right for your face. I wasn’t even sure what the hell was going on in one trippy scene, but a close-up of his face is superimposed with go-go dancing as he peels some skin off from under his eye. It’s disturbing and wonderful. The music is fantastic too, even if it seems out of place at times. It was composed and performed by Jeff Simmons, who would later join the Mothers of Invention.
Bruce D. Clark (best known for 1981’s Galaxy of Terror) only made a handful of movies and that’s a shame. He was one of the more talented hacks in Corman’s stable of filmmakers and Naked Angels has enough interesting things about it to make it stand-off in a saturated genre. The film is sure to satisfy outlaw biker fans and devotees to subversive ‘60s cinema.
A/V
Shout! Factory presents Naked Angels in full-frame, in a washed-out, muddy transfer. There are plenty of scratches and dirt. Shout! Factory doesn’t really seem to apply any restoration technology to these Corman releases, but in the case of Naked Angels, it enhances the film’s authentic, dusty biker vibe.
The mono audio is absent of hisses and the soundtrack sounds pretty good.
Special Features
NONE.
Reviewed by Patrick Cooper
Eddie Collins is one handsome-ass gym teacher. The ladies find him irresistible and his male students come to him for relationship advice. But Eddie is harboring some deep mommy issues – ones that cripple his dick and force his rage to boil over. When a woman comes onto him too strong, he flips out and runs away. The only way he can get his rocks off is by hiring a prostitute to dress up like his mother. During one sexual excursion with a woman, Eddie accidentally kills her. This act gets Eddie a little stiff in the trousers and low and behold, he’s discovered another way to get off.
And that’s about it. Written and directed by future Oscar-winner Curtis Hanson (LA Confidential), Sweet Kill is a lesser release in Shout! Factory’s “Roger Corman’s Cult Classics” DVD series. Besides the novelty of it being Hanson’s first film, I have no idea why they even bothered to release it. It’s not a very good movie and doesn’t display any of the craft Hanson later developed. It clunks from one scene to the next with no heightened suspense or even a hint of drama. 1950′s hunk Tab Hunter is appropriately creepy as Eddie, but his bursts of sexual frustration comes off as unintentional comedy most of the time. The rest of the cast is altogether unremarkable.
There are some fun scenes in the beginning with Eddie creeping around women’s apartments, sniffing panties and hiding behind curtains (his sneakers poke out the bottom – classic!). These scenes suggest he’s a full-blown prowling pervert, but this early deviant activity is ignored later in favor of his mommy issues. We never really get a good grasp on what the hell is wrong with this guy.
Sex scenes are drawn out and boring. After it was poorly received in theaters, Corman asked Hanson to go back and shoot some more sex scenes and edit them in. Then Corman re-released the film under the names A Kiss from Eddie and The Arousers, tricking suckers into seeing it again. In Hanson’s original script, the killer was a woman, but Corman made him change that too. The man is a groundbreaking producer, no doubt, but sometimes questionable as an artist.
The transfer is absolute garbage. It’s presented in fullscreen, but is a widescreen movie. Some scenes are so dark they’re nearly completely black. There are scratches and marks consistently throughout the entire film and overall it just looks shitty. This is really sub-par for a Shout! Factory release. They usually crap out these Corman releases with no supplements, so no surprise there, but this one looks particularly crappy.
This one is definitely for Corman completists only. I think even fans of ‘70s sleaze flicks will be disappointed with Sweet Kill.
Update: Final special features revealed.
They Live might not be John Carpenter’s best movie, but it’s still a total blast. We reported a month or so back that Scream Factory is releasing it on Blu-ray and DVD (complete with a great illustrated cover) on November 16th (hurry up and order). If you were waiting for special features to make the leap – then today’s they day!
“Horror master John Carpenter (Halloween, The Thing) directs this heart-pounding thriller in which aliens are systematically gaining control of the Earth by masquerading as humans and lulling the public into submission. Humanity’s last chance lies with a lone drifter who stumbles upon a harrowing discovery — a unique pair of sunglasses that reveals the terrifying and deadly truth.”
Head inside for the special features and box art! READ MORE
On September 18, 2012, fans will rejoice as Shout! Factory’s Scream Factory branch unleashes Halloween II Collector’s Edition and Halloween III: Season of the Witch 30th Anniversary Special Collector’s Edition on Blu-ray and DVD. These two formidable titles inaugurate the Scream Factory home entertainment series and are now available to preorder! Something you can do here and here.
But in case you weren’t already sold, we’ve got trailers for those releases inside! Along with full specs of course! READ MORE
The 3-D creature feature is about a mutated creature runs amok in an oil prospecting ship.
The film actually even dates back to 1985 where a worker goes missing at an underwater oil base. It flashes to present day where the protagonist is the daughter of the missing worker, and now working as a marine equipment manager on an old oil prospecting ship called Eclipse. After 3 weeks of preparation the new recruit sinks to the bottom of the sea when the equipment fails. Evidence suggests that it was not an accident and points at one of the crew as a saboteur. Crew members begin to turn up dead – one by one – their bodies viciously mutilated. To make matters worse, the ship is isolated in a typhoon. It is soon revealed that they’re all about to become food for a transparent underwater creature.
In The Velvet Vampire, a couple accepts an invitation from the mysterious Diane LeFanu (Celeste Yarnall, The Mechanic) to visit her in her secluded desert estate. Unaware that Diane is actually a centuries-old vampire, the couple soon realize that they are both the objects of her seduction and cravings…
When Baron Frankenstein is killed by his creation, his daughter Tania (Rosalba Neri, a/k/a Sarah Bay) creates her own creature using the brilliant mind of her assistant and the body of her dimwitted servant in Lady Frankenstein. She not only ends up with the perfect lover, but one that can destroy her father’s killer. Also starring Joseph Cotten (The Third Man) as Baron Frankenstein.
Lisa (Linda Blair, The Exorcist) was looking forward to a nice, relaxing vacation at the family cabin, but instead she bears witness to the brutal death of her friends and family at the hands of a group of mindless punks in Grotesque. As the thugs close in on Lisa, they don’t realize they are about to come face to face with something far more horrifying than themselves
From deep within the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun, Professor Douglas McCadden ships the coffin of Ankh-Vanharis to the California Institute of Sciences, where X-rays reveal five diamondlike crystals hidden within the coffin. Technician Peter Sharpe steals the crystals, but he doesn’t notice that the powerful X-ray has revived a green fungus. When the coffin is opened at a university press conference, the reporters uncover more than they bargained for. The mummy has disappeared . . . the Time Walker is alive again!
Own it on DVD September 27 from Shout Factory.
READ MORE
Elvira continues her late-night horror tradition with the MOVIE MACABRE series, which finds the buxom Mistress of the Dark hosting a selection of campy horror classics. This volume presents a double feature of flicks: in COUNT DRACULA’S GREAT LOVE (1972), a group of comely young women seek refuge in a castle on a rainy night, only to find themselves in the lair of a vampire king with a lust for female blood; and in FRANKENSTEIN’S CASTLE OF FREAKS (1974), libidinous dwarves and scantily clad lovelies figure into a story about a mad scientist who resurrects a Neanderthal caveman.
A reporter who has had an affair with the daughter of the U.S. President is sent to Hungary. There he is bitten by a werewolf, and then gets transferred back to Washington, where he gets a job as press assistant to the President. Then bodies start turning up in D.C. . . .
When their father dies, three greedy sisters and their husbands reunite to hear the reading of the will. His fortune is theirs…assuming, of course, they’re able to survive a weekend at the family mansion. One by one, the unsavory characters find themselves the targets of an unknown killer who has plans of their own for the family fortune.
A quest for the mythical Ring of Vermougglian leads the Schiller brothers to Transylvania and Castle Dracula, where they find more than they bargained for in the castle’s current resident and her undead servant. What follows is a ghastly nightmare of blood and sex, as the countess needs one brother for feeding and the other to house the spirit of her long-lost lover—Count Dracula!
Five travelers are forced to take refuge in the legendary Castle Dracula. Unfortunately, the infamous Count Dracula (Paul Naschy) is alive and well and he’s more than eager to take in his new guests. But when one of the travelers falls in love with Dracula, she must choose between her mortal soul and an eternity as Count Dracula’s Great Love.
In an effort to further explore the galaxy, the United States is hours away from launching a manned mission to Venus. But when a Chinese plot to destroy the Earth is uncovered, the U.S. teams up with the Soviet Union to replace members of its all-male crew with women. Now, it’s up to the crew of Project Astra to keep the human race alive and thriving.
Get ready for another outbreak of outrageous shorts from Spike & Mike’s Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation – the touring film festival that began as a prelude to rock concerts 25 years ago. Always wild & audacious, these groundbreaking films raise the bar for animated shorts and offer a million laughs on the way. This set includes Happy Tree Friends: Milkin’ It and Here Comes Dr. Tran, which requires the use of 3-D glasses included in set)
Horror and suspense in the story of a psychotic maniac who literally “loves” women to death.
Mother has just got out of prison and wants to get revenge on the biker gang that put him there. He teams up with his old gang “The Angels” and they head to the desert to get even. Soon, Mother’s obsession begins to take it’s toll on his relationship with his girlfriend, Marlene, and the respect his gang has for him quickly dwindles until he is left alone in the desert to fend for himself.
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