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Let This Week’s Horror In Your House In
While this week’s Horror In Your House is a pretty small list, Magnet Releasing will be getting the Swedish vampire drama Let the Right One In into your households. The film snubbed by the Academy Awards arrives on both DVD (eh) and Blu-ray (holy-freaking-amazing) at a retailer near you tomorrow. Read on to see what else comes out and do not miss Let the Right On In!
Horror in Your House
March 10, 2009
CROWLEY: Anchor Bay
He was known as “The Wickedest Man in the World” or simply ‘The Beast’. More than 60 years after his death, the demonic life and works of British occultist Aleister Crowley has continued to capture our darkest imaginations. In this provocative supernatural thriller co -written by legendary Iron Maiden vocalist Bruce Dickinson, a virtual reality experiment gone wrong sends the soul of the infamous madman into the body of a shy university professor. But even as Crowley creates all – new orgies of depraved pleasures and black magic, is he now preparing to unleash the ultimate occult event upon the world?
TEX SAYS: Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson can certainly sing and pilot 747’s for Astraeus Airlines but, will he “three-peat” with this scary tale featuring one of heavy metal’s favorite occult icons or are his odds six hundred and sixty-six to one!
DARK REEL: North American
Adam Waltz, an avid movie fan, has won a walk-on role in a film produced by studio chief Connor Pritchett and featuring Cassie Blue and Tara Leslie. Thinking his luck has changed, Adam suddenly finds himself the star in a real-life struggle to survive a murderous, behind-the-scenes killing spree and Pritchett’s low-budget thriller suddenly buzzing with publicity. As Detective Shields searches for answers, will Adam live or will he end up as a final cut?
TEX SAYS: After Furlong’s reality show producer gone mad role in CRUEL WORLD, it’s a little disconcerting to see him skewering cinema again in this film. But with a supporting cast that includes Lance Henriksen, Tony Todd, Tiffany Shepis and Mercedes McNab, this might be worth checking out.
DEAD BY DAWN: New Blood
On the last day of school at Watertown High, USA, the beautiful Tanya Beach has been troubled by the mysterious disappearance of her twin sister. Against the wishes of her mother, Tanya decides to tag along with Jordan Schrieder and his motley crew up to his parent’s cottage for the first party of the summer. Little does Tanya know that months before, a gruesome death took place there. And as they start to settle in, little mysterious and frightening things begin to occur.
GROWING OUT: Cinema Epoch
Having no luck with his music, Tom finds work as a caretaker for an old mansion. He cleans the house, and in doing so discovers something rather odd: a human hand growing out of the basement floor. Over time, the hand develops into an arm and eventually a head sprouts. The Growth aka Archie quickly became friends with Tom. Tom also finds himself involved romantically with his neighbor’s mysterious girlfriend, Veronica. Tom continues his secret relationship with Veronica despite the danger of getting caught. But he never suspects it will be Archie who gives him away or how violent the consequences can be.
HALLETTSVILLE: Westlake
Something awaits Tyler Jensen and his friends in the Hallettsville house. When Tyler’s lifelong friends start dying, he must figure out a way to save himself, his girlfriend and the rest of the crew before the demons come.
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN: Magnolia (TEX’S PICK OF THE WEEK)
Oscar, a 12-year-old fragile and bullied boy, finds love and revenge through Eli, a beautiful but peculiar girl he befriends, who moves into his building. When Oscar discovers that Eli is a vampire it does not deter his increasing feelings and confused emotions of a young adolescent. When Eli loses the man who protects and provides for her, and as suspicions are mounting from her neighbors and police she must move on to stay alive. However when Oscar faces his darkest hour, Eli returns to defend him the only way she can.
TEX SAYS: One of the best horror films of 2008 also managed to be one of the best foreign language films of 2008–picking up some 40 festival and critic association awards including best film honors from Fantastic Fest, Fantasia, Tribecca, Toronto After Dark and Stiges and critics awards from Boston, Chicago, Austin and the OFCS. If you don’t know why, then you haven’t seen one of the best vampire films ever made! Remedy that situation and buy this film today.
PROMETHEUS TRIUMPHANT: Cinema Epoch
When his small hamlet of Birzirkenstadt is ravaged by a deadly plague, the young and rebellious Doctor Janick reveals a radical cure. But his revolutionary theories about life and death label him a heretic and he is rewarded with banishment. As Janick disappears into the wild with his secret love, Esmeralda succumbs to the deadly disease and the superstitious doctors are helpless to cure her. Enter a mysterious masked figure known only as the Creator who snatches Esmeralda’s body from its grave and begins to conduct weird experiments…their objective: to bring her back from death’s cold embrace.
STASH: Bloody Earth
Blood, crime, drugs and moonshine prove a lethal combination in this wicked back-roads nightmare called STASH. Bud’s a heavy-set, bearded, Marijuana grower from the hills of Eastern Kentucky. While Bud has a growing operation, this is not his only secret. Down in his damp, dark, blood-soaked basement is a darker and more sinister one. When two local crooks hear that Bud’s leaving town for a few days, they hatch a plan to relieve him of 20 pounds of homegrown. But before they make out with the stash, Bud catches them red-handed and forces them into a bloody game or life or death. A game where drugs, kidnapping, torture and rape are only the beginning.
Night School, director Ken Hughes and writer Ruth Avergon‘s tale of a headhunting slasher on the streets of Boston, arrived in the early Golden Age of the slasher film and never quite broke through the endurance test that other films in the subgenre, like Friday the 13th, managed to pass with flying colors. Blame it on a more cerebral tone, a crowded market, whatever you like, but saying it’s a shame that the film didn’t break through doesn’t begin to cover it.
Night School isn’t just an underrated slasher, or an underseen one. For my money, it’s one of the best films the subgenre has ever produced, full stop, and Vinegar Syndrome’s new 4K UHD restoration, arriving just in time for the film’s 45th anniversary, is must-have proof. Stacked with special features highlighting the craft of the film and its place in slasher history, and headlined by a gorgeous restoration showcasing the wonderfully textured production, this is Night School as it’s meant to be seen for slasher devotees everywhere.
So, what makes the film so effective? It starts very simply, with the revelation that a killer with a very cool knife and a motorcycle helmet as a mask is murdering young women in Boston, taking off their heads, and dropping those heads in the nearest body of water (no matter how small).
Solving the case falls on Judd Austin (Leonard Mann), a detective with an academic background who traces all of the victims in one way or another back to a local night school. There, suspicion falls on a womanizing professor (Drew Snyder) who sleeps around on his research assistant and romantic partner, Eleanor (Rachel Ward), whose own death could be right around the corner.
I’m doing my best to stay as spoiler-free as possible here, not just because I think plenty of slasher fans still need to see Night School, but because the film is quite determined to be a whodunit in the classic Italian giallo sense. The kills are brutal and elaborate, the killer deliberately covered head-to-toe in leather and a gleaming black helmet, the knife and the headhunting a disturbing signature. Avergon’s script is well-versed in the trappings of exactly this kind of story, complete with red herrings galore. And yet, by the time it’s all wrapping up, there’s also the sense that the answer was right there in front of you the entire time, something the very best films by legends like Mario Bava and Dario Argento could also achieve.
But on to the restoration: Like the best of the gialli, Night School is also a beautifully engineered film full of colors and delicate camera compositions and sound design. The opening kill, which takes place on a playground carousel outside of a daycare, is rich in exactly this kind of thing, from the cityscapes that lead into the scene to the sound of a motorcycle slowly rolling forward, its engine already dead. Cinematographer Mark Irwin, best known for his many collaborations with David Cronenberg, paints the film in rich reds, absinthe greens, and haunting, chilled blue-white light on wet Boston streets, all of which are preserved beautifully by the restoration team at work on this one.
It’s a movie that very deliberately evokes a specific place – the aging streets of Boston in the 1980s, and the halls of relatively low-level academia – and then takes that place into haunted territory, saturating every frame with color and shadow that suggests a killer lurking just out of view.
Night School is not a massively gore-heavy film, but it does deliver the slasher goods with a series of tense, often unpredictable kills and body discoveries that range from the darkly comic to the flat-out jaw-dropping. That’s thanks to the sound design, the score, the editing from Robert Reitano, and more, all of which add to the film’s giallo soul.
In every case, the scene’s geography is outstanding, and it’s easy to see where the simplest possible kill shot might land, but the film never goes for the obvious. Throw in a surprisingly (for 1981, anyway) feminist bent to the storytelling and some very progressive moments for an early slasher film, and this one fits right in with Black Christmas and The Slumber Party Massacre as a film with depth you can just keep unpacking.
That depth, helped along by a load of featurettes and two new commentary tracks featuring members of the crew, is what stands out the most in this new 4K set. Night School may be a niche film recognized mostly by horror addicts and the slasher faithful, but it deserves to be something more, a landmark on the roadmap of slasher cinema history. It’s one of the best in the genre, and this restoration highlights, underlines, and shouts that from the rooftops.
Night School is now available in 4K UHD from Vinegar Syndrome.
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