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Horror In Your House: August 9th, 2011
Dream Home (pictured below; yum!) is being released by IFC films this Tuesday. That’s great news for slasher and Asian horror fans alike. It’s got plenty of startling kills and fun for the whole family (if your family consists of people who take pleasure in watching pregos get murked).
Check out the rest of this week’s releases below and let me know what you’re planning on taking home. Happy shopping.
Horror In Your House
August 9th, 2011
BIKINI GIRLS ON ICE (DVD / Blu-Ray) – Well Go USA
Stranded on their way to a bikini car-wash fundraiser, a group of hot college girls find refuge in an abandoned gas station on the outskirts of town. Soon their broken down bus is the least of their worries as a maniac axe-man mechanic starts picking them off one by one. Scared, alone and miles from help, the girls are faced with a psycho killer who wants to put these hot girls on ice. Instead of struggling to raise small change, the honeys are now in the biggest fight of their lives.
CAMP HELL – LionsGate
Camp Hope is a place where Christian children come together to share and study their faith. Deep in the woods and far from distraction, they learn how to better serve their maker and the perils of tangling with the Devil. Unfortunately their charismatic leader unknowingly leads them into a world of evil, and the nightmare begins, as each child’s body soon becomes possessed by something.
CHOOSE – MPI Home Video
The slasher genre gets an iconic new killer with Nathan Jones, the monster at the center of Marcus Graves’ CHOOSE. His methods are simple. He selects a victim and forces them to choose between horrific options, his blood-filled hour glass counting down the seconds they’re allowed to decide. And if his victim fails to choose, then Nathan forces both horrible options upon them. Katheryn Winnick (Love And Other Drugs) and Kevin Pollak (The Usual Suspects) star in this nail-biting thriller that unleashes a terrifying new face onto the horror scene.
THE CLINIC – Image Entertainment
A road trip turns into a battle for survival when Cameron (Andy Whitfield, Spartacus: Blood and Sand) and his pregnant wife, Beth (Tabrett Bethell, Legend of the Seeker), stop for the night at a desolate motel. That night Beth is suddenly abducted from their room and wakes up in an ice-filled bathtub…with her baby now gone! She finds herself captive at a sinister clinic with other women whose newborns are being taken for an unknown purpose, and as Cameron desperately searches for his missing wife, time is rapidly running out. Inspired by true events, this nail-biting thriller, in the tradition of Wolf Creek, explores the most unspeakable, forbidden terror a new mother could possibly face.
DREAM HOME – IFC Films
Cheng Lai-sheung, a young, upwardly mobile professional finally ready to invest in her first home. But when the deal falls through, she is forced to keep her dream alive — even if it means keeping her would-be neighbors dead. Pang Ho-Cheung’s disturbingly imaginative violence unfolds against a backdrop of lifestyle fetishization and the housing market crisis in this metropolitan spin on Guignol horror.
MICAH SAYS: Pick of the week. This Asian horror flick is, in a word, Slashtastic. In a subgenre that centers on creative and disconcerting kills, “Dream Home” deserves to be mentioned with some of the best of the bunch. Just don’t get this one confused with the Daniel Craig / Rachel Weisz flick with a very similar name. The American film is NOT a remake of this gem.
EVIL THINGS – Inception Media Group
In the middle of nowhere, five young friends are trapped in an unrelenting nightmare when a sinister stranger armed with a video camera turns a birthday weekend into a terrifying fame of cat and mouse. Packed with heart-stopping twists and turns, this riveting thriller in the style of Paranormal Activity delivers one chill after the next!
FRAT HOUSE MASSACRE – Synapse Films
From the creators of CAMP SLAUGHTER comes FRAT HOUSE MASSACRE, a true homage to the best of the late 70’s grindhouse and early 80’s slasher films! Sean (Chris Prangley) and his little brother Bobby (Rane Jameson) thought joining the Delta Iota Epsilon fraternity would be the best time of their lives with parties, freedom, girls and sex. The fraternity president Mark (Jon Fleming of TVs WILL & GRACE and DANTE’S COVE), however, is a little strange. His twisted hazing rituals include extreme physical and mental torture that lead the boys down a horrific path of destruction and death. But death may be just the beginning, as this gritty twisted film unfolds. Inspired by actual events and set in the year 1979, FRAT HOUSE MASSACRE is a disturbing journey through the twisted world of fraternity boys, pledges and the not-so-innocent sorority sisters swept up in their madness. Loaded with violence, gore, nudity and a fantastic music score by Claudio Simonetti, this DVD is the director’s cut containing over twenty minutes of additional footage. Director’s Commentary, Crew Commentary, Deleted Scenes, Making Of Featurette.
MICAH SAYS: The reviews out there for this are not great, but I’m a sucker for horror flicks made now, but set in the past – like “House of the Devil” for example. More of homages to the past please!
RAGING BOLL – Take 2 Releasing
Widely recognized as the planet s worst film director, Uwe Boll embarks on a quest to conquer Hollywood and take vengeance upon the film fanatics striving to destroy him. Filmed over three years on and off the set, Raging Boll is a walk in the shoes of a man people love to hate. Filmmaker Uwe Boll challenges his harshest critics to boxing matches! Known for Blood Rayne, House of the Dead, and Alone in the Dark.
MICAH SAYS: Obviously not a horror film, but I thought there might be some interest in this documentary about the infamous Uwe Boll vs. Critics boxing matches. His recent movies have been a little better, but his next flick titled, “Auschwitz” seems like a disaster in wait. I mean c’mon. A crazy, angry and mostly terrible German director making a movie regarding the atrocities of the Holocaust. What could possibly go wrong with that idea?
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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