Ahhh, Death Spa. . .
I felt like I was eight years old all over again when my copy of Death Spa arrived last week. I distinctly remember renting it at the video store one summer while I was visiting my grandmother in Ohio. It was a night I would never forget. Death Spa is the perfect example of a fun, cheesy, straight from the ’80s horror flick that maintains both goofiness and bloodshed until the bitter end.
Suspense is vital to the horror genre. Blood and guts can be effective, true, but without suspense, they’re just gore. Filmmaker Ti West has proven that he can build tension in a film until we’re begging for release. The House of the Devil was a master class in how to freak the hell out of audiences starved for actual scares. Plus, it’s just a great movie. The Innkeepers was less terrifying, but still worthwhile, and West’s contribution to the first V/H/S found footage anthology, “Second Honeymoon” is one of the few films in the last five years to make me sleep with the lights on. What’s most impressive about that is the way absolutely nothing happens in the film for the longest time, so the payoff is inexplicably frightening.
All of this made me extremely excited for The Sacrament, especially since West was once again tackling found footage (a style which I quite like), but this time using the real-life events at Jonestown as the basis for his film. It makes me sad to report that The Sacrament did not live up to my expectations.
The term “Hammer Horror” evokes a certain feeling. For more than two decades, Hammer Film Productions produced some of the most iconic horror films of all time, movies which implied a distinctive cachet: lush, artful, Gothic. There were also buxom beauties and a lot of vivid red blood.
Countess Dracula was released in 1971 when the studio was starting to lose its grasp on the market and trying different approaches to the Dracula/Frankenstein/Mummy trilogy of terrors. Ingrid Pitt, fresh from Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers (loosely based on J. Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla), stars as the Hungarian countess Elisabeth Nádasdy, herself loosely based on the infamous Countess Elisabeth Bathory, who allegedly bathed in the blood of virgins to maintain a hold on her youth.
Whenever I get mail from Vinegar Syndrome I hold my breath while I open it because I have no idea what I’m getting myself into. Recently I acquired Jungle Blue and holywhatthefuckohmygodwhatthefuck! I still don’t have a clue what I watched. I’ve seen a number of vintage hardcore pornos in the past couple months and I have never seen anything like this.
Back in the day I bought just about every VHS I could find and still own a great deal of the ones I’ve purchased through the years. I would stumble across some great films and some not so great ones, but either way I was educating myself thought I didn’t realize it. Honestly, a lot of the films that I didn’t care for back in the day are the ones I fell in love with later on in life. The House Of The Yellow Carpet is one of those films.
Evilspeak was a film that I’d always heard about but never saw a physical copy of in the video or retail stores. It always seemed to hide from me so I never got to see it until now . . .
Scream Factory isn’t just about the popular horror films, they love the lower budget underrated flicks as well and that’s what I love about them. I do wish Scream Factory would focus a little more on VHS-only films and less on stuff that has already received a DVD release but I can’t complain. I love my HD. I’m stoked that a film like Evilspeak has seen the light of day on Blu-Ray because this film is batshit insane and all the blood looks glorious in HD.
An all-girl fighting movie with Zoe Bell? Hell yes! Is it good? Meh . . . There are many great qualities that Raze does have so let’s start with those.
There are quite a few slashers out there and among them are some underrated ones. Last month I focused on Hide and Go Shriek for VHS Visions and now I bring you another hidden gem called Iced.
One of my goals in life is to watch every single film in existence. That isn’t a realistic goal but I would love to think I could achieve it someday. There are many films out there that I’ve never heard of and that is why I love companies like Olive Films. They release things that are popular amongst a certain fan base but that fan base is usually an older audience. The films they release please their existing audience as well as people like me because I get to see films I would probably never seek out because they are hard to find or just not in existence anymore.
A question I often ask myself is: what happened to Christian Slater? I honestly don’t know the answer but ever since 2004 he has had a weird career. I’ve always thought he was a fun actor and decent in the movies he was in. I know people tend to laugh at that but I honestly don’t know what people have against him. It’s true that he doesn’t act in the best films these days but still, where did it all go wrong and how did we end up disliking Christian Slater?