Greetings, all. Ambush Bug here with another AICN HORROR: ZOMBIES & SHARKS column. We’ve got another slew of new horror films sure to slay your senses and mindsets. But before we do that…there’s this!
I have a snippet from THE LOST COAST TAPES, a new Bigfoot film which I can’t wait to check out. Look for another Bigfoot-centric column here on AICN HORROR very soon, but in the meantime, check out this clip from THE LOST COAST TAPES (and find out more about this film here)!
LOVE IN THE TIME OF MONSTERS is another indie horror I can’t wait to see. It’s currently ramping up to production in May, but the folks behind the movie have passed on this cool behind the scenes production test footage that I thought I’d pass on to you guys. Find out more about LOVE IN THE TIME OF MONSTERS here!
Johnny Bigfoot from Alliecine on Vimeo.
In Manchester UK? Love zombie horror? Well, here’s the place to be. The Grimm Up North Zombie Night is April 27th. Below are the details, but the roster of films looks like an awesome zombie experience.Fancy dress (optional), Beer from £1.50 per bottle, late night bar, three great zombie flicks (Two premieres and one HD remastered classic)--WAR OF THE DEAD (reviewed here), JUAN OF THE DEAD (which I will be reviewing soon) and RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (reviewed here) on the big screen. What more could any self-respecting horror fan want?
Find out more about the Grimm Up North Zombie Night here and on Facebook here!
And now, on with the reviews!
(Click title to go directly to the feature)
Retro-Review: THE ASPHYX (1973)
HELL’S LABYRINTH (2008)
BREAK
7 BELOW (2012)
Advance Review: ZOMBIE DAWN (2012)
And finally…Peter Dukes’ THE BEAST
New this week on DVD/BluRay from Redemption Films!THE ASPHYX (1973)
aka THE SPIRIT OF THE DEAD, HORROR OF DEATHDirected by Peter Newbrook
Written by Christine Beers, Lawrence Beers, Brian Comport
Starring Robert Stephens, Robert Powell, Jane Lapotaire, Alex Scott
Retro-reviewed by Ambush Bug
Take hokey science and mix it with hokey effects, and somehow make it seem authentic (most likely because the actors speaking the lines speak the Queen’s English) and you’ve got THE ASPHYX, a bizarre mishmash of some of my favorite films of old. Newly released on BluRay, this oddball oldie is definitely something worth experiencing.The story begins with Sir Hugo Cunningham, a scientist (Robert Stephens,) and his adoptive son Giles (Robert Powell, possibly best known for his performance as Christ in 1977’s TV movie JESUS OF NAZARETH) noticing a black smudge in numerous photographs and when another one of the scientist’s sons dies on camera, the same smudge is present. Sir Hugo becomes obsessed with this smudge, dubbing it the Asphyx and then devising a mechanism which captures the creature before the time of a person’s death, thus making that person immortal.
The obsession with immortality makes this film a distant cousin of the Frankenstein mythos as Cunningham tries to thwart death and become immortal. When the operation succeeds, Sir Hugo pays dearly for playing god as his family begins to die around him.The film is also reminiscent of THE TINGLER, a personal favorite film of mine, as both scientists attempt to capture an elusive creature that only appears during dire consequences. Castle’s classic film and Vincent Price’s performance is much more entertaining, but in the 70’s THE ASPHYX could have been THE TINGLER’s modern counterpart.
As derivative as THE ASPHYX is, it also seems as if the film served as inspiration to some modern and very familiar fright fests. The photos taken just before the time of a person’s death are eerily reminiscent of the slideshow shown to the captive girl toward the end of MARTYRS depicting perfect martyrdom before death. Though the subject matter is slightly similar, I still couldn’t help but be reminded of those memorable images as our scientists attempted to prove the existence of the Asphyx at the beginning of the film to an audience of peers.
But the modern film most surprisingly like THE ASPHYX is GHOSTBUSTERS. The ghost-like creature dubbed the Asphyx in this film looks a lot like an anorexic Slimer. The obvious puppet effect doesn’t have legs, yet has a large mouth and flailing arms. Even more similar is the method by which the Asphyx is captured: trapping the spirit in a beam of light and then leading it into a containment unit which most would recognize as very, very similar to Ray, Egon, Peter, and Winston’s ghost capturing technique in the 80’s popular film. Though the method of capturing the Asphyx is much more clumsy and much less funny, the similarities between the two films are rather jarring.
This is not a great film by a long stretch. The musical score is completely inappropriately upbeat, more like an elegant ballroom waltz than a horror film score. The make-up is oddly effective, though rudimentary. The aforementioned puppet is simply projected onto a wall and the horrible old man make-up Sir Hugo wears at the end is so bad that it simply has to be seen to be believed (as seen on the DVD cover to the right). That classically and unintentionally hilarious end scene and lines like “This guinea pig is now immortal!” make this film so bad it’s fantastic.Film buffs should seek out THE ASPHYX for its connections with better films and those entertained by overly-melodramatic bad cinema are in for a real treat.
New on DVD & VOD this week!HELL’S LABYRINTH (2008)
aka CARNIVOROUSDirected by Drew Maxwell
Written by Drew Maxwell
Starring Leah Rose, Ryan Schaufler, Adrienne Rusk, Matt Ukena, Tom Lodewyck
Find out more about this film here!
Reviewed by Ambush Bug
A group of people find themselves lost in a seemingly endless labyrinth with a badly CGI-ed demon breathing bad CGI flames at their heels in HELL’S LABYRINTH. Though something should be said about a film shot almost entirely in front of a green screen, I can’t help but feel had some of it taken place in the real world, it would have been a slight bit better.
Some of the performances here aren’t half bad, especially the two leads, Leah Rose & Ryan Schaufler, who prove to be the toughest of the bunch when it comes to running away from cartoon images. I almost would have loved had they gone all COOL WORLD with this one instead of trying so hard to make things look real and failing miserably. Had there been just a shade more of an element of cartoon to the CGI, stylistically, it might have been better. As is, it looks like cheap CGI because it is cheap CGI. Still, of all of the actors trapped in this maze of computer generated terror, Rose and Schaufler react to the ping pong balls representing the monsters they are supposed to be running from the best.There are a few unexpected turns toward the end of this one, showing that writer/director Drew Maxwell has some potential moviemaking skill. He certainly knew how to cut corners with this film. Given a halfway decent budget and a sense of “less CGI is better” Maxwell might surprise us in future endeavors. Having just seen CABIN IN THE WOODS and thought about CUBE because of that screening, the survivors running around a dark labyrinth being manipulated by dark unseen forces rang as pretty familiar. Nevertheless, HELL’S LABYRINTH didn’t impress me much and it’s doubtful it will impress anyone but those looking for nothing but an hour-thirty to kill on the couch.
New this week on DVD/BluRay!BREAK (2009)
Directed by Matthias Olof EichWritten by Matthias Olof Eich
Starring Lili Schackert, Esther Maaß, Ralph Willmann, Marina Anna Eich, Thelma Buabeng, Sebastian Badenberg, Patrick Jahns, Meelah Adams
Find out more about this film here!
Reviewed by Ambush Bug
This particularly vile yet by the numbers killers in the woods flick is not going to impress many. BREAK is a German film made to look like it was made in America with much of the cast trying to hide their accents while speaking English. Going into this film I had high hopes, as it started out as reminiscent of THE DESCENT as four strong-willed women make their way through the Canadian mountains on a camping trip, but soon the film devolves into every brutal stalk and slash film you’ve ever seen.
Following formula, we get to know these girls in the first 30 minutes and there’s even a bit of depth to one or two of the characters. One of them is pregnant and just broke up with her boyfriend; one seems to be in love with another but scared to say it. There’s a token black girl along who is, of course, sassy. Soon they run into a pair of hunters in the woods who of course see women and immediately say to themselves “let’s rape and kill them”, like hunters in these types of films often do. By 40 minutes in, though, with all of that character out of the way, it’s time to kill half of the girls off immediately. Of course, per formula, the black girl bites it first. After an agonizingly long rape scene, the two hunters track down the remaining two women in the woods. I hate to overuse the word, of course, but things continue to proceed at a predictable manner as the hunted become the hunted. The advantage shifts back and forth until not many are left, resulting in an ending we’ve seen a million times before.
It’s not that BREAK is a bad film. It’s just that it’s been done so many times before and offers really nothing new to the genre. The effects are rather good. Writer/director Matthias Olof Eich directs capably and tells a clear story despite its familiarity. Eich should also be commended (or committed, depending on what stance you have on the violence) for his guts to go to base levels of gore and depravity, the final knifing scene being genuinely wince-inducing. The actresses do a good job of making us care a bit about them and the hunters do their best to be despicable, most of the time in a manner that works. But aside from being particularly brutal with the kills and the retribution the surviving girls give back to their tormentors, BREAK turned out to be utterly predictable.
New on DVD/BluRay!7 BELOW (2012)
Directed by Kevin CarrawayWritten by Kevin Carraway & Lawrence Sara
Starring Val Kilmer, Ving Rhames, Luke Goss, Bonnie Somerville, Christian Baha, Rebecca Da Costa, Matt Barr
Reviewed by Ambush Bug
Wow, just when you thought Val Kilmer couldn’t phone his roles in any further, he makes a film like this and his telephone bill just doubles.
Sneaking onto DVD and BluRay this week is 7 BELOW, a muddled ghost story about a group of travelers who get into a car crash and end up having to spend the night in an old mansion in a forest. Before the wreck, we get a fifteen minute intro to the characters, all of them flawed and somewhat unhappy with their existence. Wreck happens. Ving Rhames shows up to save the day, as Ving Rhames tends to do in these types of films. Soon, Ving and the survivors of the wreck find themselves in the middle of the worst storm in 100 years according to Ving and trapped in a cold, dark house.
Cell phones? Yeah, right. They don’t work in these types of films. No electricity or land lines either at this house. So all the survivors of the wreck can do is sit and wait out the storm. This being a ghost story, that wait is a little harder than they planned as folks start getting offed one by one.
Kevin Carraway does a decent job of making this film feel like a low budget version of THE WOMAN IN BLACK with creepy kids popping up here and there causing menace. Some of these ghosts are residual ghosts, reenacting past events of horror. Others are more violent and strike out at our guests. Carraway does his best in the cramped quarters and actually pulls off some decent shocks midway through this film. The film screeches to a complete halt, though, at the hour mark as Ving must explain to our final few survivors what is actually going on. By this time, the audience has figured things out, but just to make sure, Ving must reiterate the whole plot and dot all T’s and cross all I’s to be sure before the shockeroo ending that lacks in both shocker and oo.
Ving plays Ving as Ving always plays Ving, except the odd moment when he shrieks in a high voice at the survivors (a moment in the film which was truly and most likely unintentionally unsettling). He’s not bad. He’s just…Ving here. The other actors don’t really stand out other than Luke Goss (HELLBOY 2 and BLADE 2), who does a decent turn as a responsible older brother.
Oh yeah--I can’t forget Val Kilmer, who saunters though this film as if he’s still playing Jim Morrison 20 years and 100 pounds later. Sure, the film calls for Val to be drunk and somewhat dazed from the crash, though I’m not sure whether that was just the writer/director thinking quick and rewriting to match Kilmer’s condition while filming. It was kind of fascinating watching the man work as he clearly adopts the attitude of “No Fucks Given” with ease every second he’s on screen in this film.
Mild shocks permeate 7 BELOW, but the thing that will interest most are the odd performance by Ving and Kilmer’s sleepwalk through the narrative.
In limited release in theaters now!ZOMBIE DAWN (2012)
aka MUERTE CIEGADirected by Cristian Toledo & Lucio A. Rojas
Written by Cristian Toledo & Lucio A. Rojas
Starring Cristian Ramos, Guilermo Alfaro, Pablo Tournelle, Pamela Rojas, Felipe Lobos
Find out more about this film here!
Reviewed by Ambush Bug
ZOMBIE DAWN is low budget zombie horror done right. It has that gritty feel as if it were made right about the same time as DAWN OF THE DEAD while embracing films like Peckinpah and the old spaghetti westerns by focusing on a morally grey merc and his men. Colonel Rainoff (Cristian Ramos) leads a group of mercs into a quarantined war zone filled with zombies in order to find any who may have survived a zombie holocaust and possibly a cure to the outbreak. Though the zombies have been contained in a walled off area, a cure to the outbreak has not been found. With the promise of big money guiding them, the mercs lead two doctors through zombie hordes and abandoned buildings across a rugged South American landscape.
ZOMBIE DAWN shines when it embraces its South American landscape. Much like last year’s THE DEAD, which cast the zombie apocalypse against an African backdrop, ZOMBIE DAWN shows the viewer the sights and sounds of a desolate, cruel, and barren South America made worse by flesh-eating zombies. The locale is a huge factor in why this indie zeek is so effective, almost taking on a role itself in this story.Though the narrative is heavy at times, the words spoken by Rainoff provide a nice Man Without a Name vibe. Ramos plays Rainoff as not particularly a good man, but one driven by money, but wise enough to know that no good will come from his lifestyle. He’s a gritty 70’s action hero cast in this modern zombie movie, but somehow he fits extremely well as his performance is by far the best of the film.
Though I wish some of the rest of Rainoff’s mercs would have been developed more, they do provide as good fodder for the zombies. Though we know it from the start, these are bad men leading these scientists through this desolate wasteland, but that doesn’t stop the filmmakers from tossing in a rape scene to make sure we really know these guys are not altar boys.Heavy on CGI blood, though light on practical zombie effects, ZOMBIE DAWN is less about the zombies as it is about the bad men left to live in a zombie filled world. Some may be turned off by the high amount of CGI blood. I often find it distracting as for some reason no one seems to know how to make blood spurt with realism these days. Still, the scenes of zombie violence resonate as they overcome and overpower almost everyone. Though those scenes are horrifying enough, writers/directors Cristian Toledo & Lucio A. Rojas have done their homework in zombie lore casting the humans as the truly despicable ones. ZOMBIE DAWN is gorgeously shot and has a helluva ending to boot. There are a lot of zombie films out there these days, but few of them get it right as much as ZOMBIE DAWN does.
And finally…we have a special treat for you this week. A newly completed short called THE BEAST from writer/director Peter Dukes starring Bill Oberst Jr. (who will be seen in the upcoming ABRAHAM LINCOLN VS ZOMBIES) and produced by Dream Seeker Productions. I liked this simple yet effective little howl at the mooner that uses clever photography, patient pacing, and a brief but effective story to tell its tale. Enjoy THE BEAST!
See ya next week, folks!
Ambush Bug is Mark L. Miller, original @$$Hole/wordslinger/reviewer/co-editor of AICN Comics for over ten years. He has written comics such as MUSCLES & FIGHTS, MUSCLES & FRIGHTS, VINCENT PRICE PRESENTS TINGLERS & WITCHFINDER GENERAL, THE DEATHSPORT GAMES, WONDERLAND ANNUAL 2010 & NANNY & HANK (soon to be made into a feature film from Uptown 6 Films). He is also a regular writer for FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND & has co-written their first ever comic book LUNA: ORDER OF THE WEREWOLF (to be released in October 2012 as an 100-pg original graphic novel). Mark has just announced his new comic book miniseries GRIMM FAIRY TALES PRESENTS THE JUNGLE BOOK from Zenescope Entertainment to be released in March 2012.
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