Movies
[SCREAMBOX] Dark Star Classics Added to Service: ‘Dementia: Part II’, ‘Antrum’, ‘Attack of the Demons’ and More!
March is coming to an end and while SCREAMBOX‘s April line-up is absolutely jam-packed – stay tuned! – we’re first ending this month with a bang.
Now streaming on SCREAMBOX are several Dark Star Pictures classics, including the completely gonzo Bloody Disgusting collaboration Dementia: Part II, which delivers absurd gross-out humor and nonstop mayhem.
Here are some of the titles in addition to new SCREAMBOX arrivals Evil Little Things, Crispy’s Curse, Clownface, Clownado, and the previously released Killer Sofa and FeardotCom.
Achoura
Also called “Children’s Night,” Achoura is a religious celebration. In Morocco, children splash water on each other and gather around a bonfire.
In the film, four friends reconnect when one of them, who disappeared 25 years ago, suddenly comes back into their lives. Together, they will have to confront the terrifying events of their youth and fight a monstrous creature born of a horrible legend.
Patrick Bromley reviewed the film out of the Cinepocalypse premiere, calling Achoura “a bleak, somber meditation on the death of innocence.”
Ankle Biters
In Ankle Biters, “Sean, a pro hockey enforcer, has fallen in love with Laura, a widowed mother of four young daughters. When Laura’s children mistake an act of lovemaking as an attack, they plot to protect their mother at all costs and with horrific results.”
Antrum
Written and directed by Michael Laicini and David Amito, Antrum presents itself as a cursed film from the 1970s. Through several layers of lost and uncovered footage, it explores how audiences allow horror films to frighten them long past their viewing experience.
Attack of the Demons
Attack of the Demons is a wild and crazy animated horror film written, directed and animated by Eric Power (Path of Blood).
In the film, “For centuries, a demonic cult has been plotting world destruction. When a small Colorado town is overrun by a legion of mutating demons, three non-demon hunter friends must use every skill their minds can fathom to stave off the demon apocalypse.”
Meagan reviewed the film, writing, “Power manages to throw every possible manner of gore, viscera, bile, and blood on screen, creating delightful body horror and carnage… It’s pure chaos!”
Breeder
The Danish Breeder sees women being abducted for bio-hacking experiments.
One of the women, Mia, begins to work out the truth – can she escape from this nightmare?
Climate of the Hunter
Things get weird in Mickey Reece‘s award-winning festival hit Climate of the Hunter, about two sisters who vie for the affections of a man who may or may not be a vampire.
“Two sisters, Alma and Elizabeth, along with a dog who’s described as a ‘philosopher’, have come to Alma’s remote house to reconnect with Wesley after twenty years. Alma is recently divorced, Elizabeth is a workaholic in Washington, D.C., while Wesley lives in Paris dealing with a wife recently struck with a fatal disease. When the three come together for dinner it has all the makings of a lovely adult melodrama about loneliness, and the desire to connect and share our lives with someone… but we must add to the mix one otherworldly piece of information: Wesley could be a vampire.”
Dementia Part II
In Dementia Part II, “Suzanne wasn’t always this confused. She wasn’t always dead either – when an ex-con takes a job as a handyman for an unstable elderly woman to avoid a parole violation, it becomes a choice he may regret.”
The film stars genre favorites Matt Mercer (Contracted, Bliss, Beyond the Gates), Graham Skipper (Almost Human, Sequence Break, VFW) and Najarra Townsend (Contracted, The Stylist), with Suzanne Voss (The Lords of Salem).
It was produced from conception to its world premiere screening by the writer/director team Matt Mercer and Mike Testin (The Salesman, Dementia) in just 30 days!
Empathy, Inc
In the black & white thriller, “Hotshot venture capitalist Joel (Zack Robidas) has a multimillion-dollar deal go up in smoke, and he and his actress wife Jessica (Kathy Searle) are forced to move in with her parents and start from scratch. At the lowest and most desperate moment in his life, Joel meets old friend Nicolaus (Eric Berryman) and his business partner Lester (Jay Klaitz), who are seeking investors in a new technology known as XVR—Xtreme Virtual Reality—from their company Empathy, Inc., which is said to offer the most realistic and moving experiences for users by placing them in the lives of the less fortunate. Joel gets the startup its funds but soon discovers that the tech’s creators have far more sinister uses in store for their creation and that the reality it provides its customers isn’t virtual.”
St. Agatha
In the film now streaming, “Set in the 1950s in small-town Georgia, the film centers on a pregnant con woman named Agatha who is on the run and seeks refuge in a convent. What first starts out as the perfect place to have a child turns into a dark layer where silence is forced, ghastly secrets are masked, and every bit of willpower Agatha has is tested as she learns the sick and twisted truth of the convent and the odd people that lurk inside its halls.”
Our own Meagan Navarro loved Darren Lynn Bousman’s (Spiral, Saw II-IV, Repo! The Genetic Opera, Mother’s Day, Abattoir) St. Agatha, explaining in her review that it “revives nunsploitation with nerve-fraying results.”
Movies
’28 Years Later’ – Ralph Fiennes, Jodie Comer, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson Join Long Awaited Sequel
Danny Boyle and Alex Garland (Annihilation, Men), the director and writer behind 2002’s hit horror film 28 Days Later, are reteaming for the long-awaited sequel, 28 Years Later. THR reports that the sequel has cast Jodie Comer (Alone in the Dark, “Killing Eve”), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Kraven the Hunter), and Ralph Fiennes (The Menu).
The plan is for Garland to write 28 Years Later and Boyle to direct, with Garland also planning on writing at least one more sequel to the franchise – director Nia DaCosta is currently in talks to helm the second installment.
No word on plot details as of this time, or who Comer, Taylor-Johnson, and Fiennes may play.
28 Days Later received a follow up in 2007 with 28 Weeks Later, which was executive produced by Boyle and Garland but directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. Now, the pair hope to launch a new trilogy with 28 Years Later. The plan is for Garland to write all three entries, with Boyle helming the first installment.
Boyle and Garland will also produce alongside original producer Andrew Macdonald and Peter Rice, the former head of Fox Searchlight Pictures, the division of one-time studio Twentieth Century Fox that originally backed the British-made movie and its sequel.
The original film starred Cillian Murphy “as a man who wakes up from a coma after a bicycle accident to find England now a desolate, post-apocalyptic collapse, thanks to a virus that turned its victims into raging killers. The man then navigates the landscape, meeting a survivor played by Naomie Harris and a maniacal army major, played by Christopher Eccleston.”
Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer) is on board as executive producer, though the actor isn’t set to appear in the film…yet.
Talks of a third installment in the franchise have been coming and going for the last several years now – at one point, it was going to be titled 28 Months Later – but it looks like this one is finally getting off the ground here in 2024 thanks to this casting news. Stay tuned for more updates soon!
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