Feeling nostalgic for the VHS days of old? Look into THE BASEMENT!!!

How many of you big time fans out there still have love for the analogue goodness that is VHS? I know a lot of you do. Lots of you still scour the flea markets and bargain thrift shops looking for discount tapes of those wonderful shot on tape atrocities from the 80's that were labors of love for those creators. Well those crazies are ALTERNATIVE CINEMA heard your cries and are putting out a box set JUST FOR YOUR CRAZY LUNATICS! Check this out a VHS/DVD combo from THE BASEMENT....

THEY’RE WAITING FOR YOU…

THE BASEMENT

Camp Retro ‘80s

“Big Box” VHS / DVD 5-Film Collection

Available Sept. 13, 2011

New York, NY – Camp Motion Pictures, the home entertainment company specializing in 80’s and 80’s-style DIY cinema, unleashes a terrifyingly cool micro-budget cinema collection of five feature films in an exclusive VHS Collector’s Package that Joe Ziemba of BleedingSkull.com calls “A brain-baking vortex of D.I.Y. gore, suburban angst, and trash-gore exuberance!”   

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Eye-catching authentically ‘80s VHS poster illustration by noted graphic artist Vince Evans and “Big Box” design contains the never-before-released 1989 feature, The Basement, on VHS and DVD along with SOV cult cinema favorites Video Violence 1&2, Captives, and Cannibal Campout on DVD .    

About The Basement

The Basement is the lost 1989 Super 8 anthology feature film directed by Timothy O’Rawe (Ghoul School ). Restored by director of photography Michael Raso in 2010,The Basement is a shining example of 80’s DIY cinema inspired by Amicus Films’ Tales from the Crypt and features elaborate special make-up and creature effects by Scott Hart.   

The Basement Synopsis.

Four strangers are summoned to the basement of an abandoned house by a mysterious entity known only as The Sentinel.  One after another, they are forced to witness heinous deeds they have yet to commit – and which will damn them for all eternity.

Swimming Pool – An unfaithful woman disposes of the evidence with a little help from a demonic water spirit.

Trick or Treat – Classic monsters exact revenge on a bitter man who refuses to honor Halloween.

Zombie Movie – Cocaine, hookers and reanimated corpses wreak havoc on the set of an independent film.

Home Sweet Home – A young man questions his sanity after purchasing a house where torture and mass murder were committed 6 years before. 

About Captives

Referred to as “the most accomplished SOV horror film from this era”*, Captives, the sophomore effort of director Gary Cohen (Video Violence 1&2), is now available for the first time in this director-approved version.    *Bleedingskull.com

Captives Synopsis  

Taken hostage by three violently deranged criminals, a woman fights back to save her baby and mother-in-law’s lives in this gritty and suspenseful crime drama from Gary Cohen (Video Violence 1&2)

Video Violence Synopsis

In this gore-soaked cult classic, a young couple opens a video store in a small town populated by violence-addicted amateur filmmakers, lead by the demented Howard and Eli.   

Video Violence 2 Synopsis

The sequel to Video Violence finds Howard and Eli pirating a cable TV channel for the purpose of furthering their brand of homegrown depravity, madness and murder.

Cannibal Campout Synopsis

Deranged orphans torture, mutilate and murder innocent campers in this DIY classic from Jon McBride. 

Plus you get all these insane SPECIAL FEATURES!

Frighteningly Enjoyable Bonus Features

The Basement Camp Retro ‘80s “Big Box” VHS / DVD Collection is loaded with new commentaries and spine-chilling extras including:

• The Basement Commentary
• Captives Commentary
• Video Violence Commentary
• Video Violence 2 Commentary
• Cannibal Campout Commentary
• The Basement Outtakes
• The Basement New Segment
• Short film: Vengeance
• Short film: Say No To Drugs
• Meadowlands Showcase Segment: Halloween Take Over
• Meadowlands Showcase Segment:  The Long Road to Karaoke
• Meadowlands Showcase Segment: Long is the Night
• Interview with director Gary Cohen

Technical Information The Basement 5-Film VHS and DVD Collection  

·        New, functional VHS and DVD copy The Basement

·        DVD The Basement

·        DVD Captives and Cannibal Campout

·        DVD Video Violence and Video Violence 2

·        Street Date: August 16, 2011

·        Copyright: 2011 Camp Motion Pictures , all rights reserved

·        Price:  $34.98

·        UPC: 612385007996

·        Total Run Time Collection:

·        Format:  VHS and Dual Layer DVD

·        Aspect Ratio:

·        Rating: Not Rated

·        English language, Stereo 2.0

Get your copy at Alternative Cinema

Keep on Walking...

I've only Walked out of Five movies in my life...

Everyone who knows me knows I am an insane movie goer. There was a time in my life when I would see several movies a week theatrically. When I worked several theaters and had the keys to one in particular I had a habit of staying after and running the films for myself or friends and saw plenty that way too (man I miss that place, or what it used to be I should say). But over the years and thousands of movies I have seen theatrically I have only ever walked out of five movies in my life. Some kinda weird circumstances I guess, some just anger inducing. It is late and I thought I would share.

#1 CRITTERS - I was fairly young when this came out, can't remember exactly how old. Early teens, maybe 12 or so. I was dying to see it because of the write ups in fangoria and almost had my Mom convinced to let me see it at the Kon-Tiki theater on a double bill with Lamberto Bava's Demons! I was too young to understand things like Grindhouse theaters and what went on in them. But my Mom wisely understood that the Kon-Tiki was not a good place to drop off a young teen for a three and a half hour stretch. So when it finally landed at the Loews Ames we went and saw it together. Now the Lowes Ames was a second run theater for the most poor in Dayton, Ohio. It was a two screen affair on Main st. in an area that wasn't too hot. But in 1985 it wasn't the ghetto it is now either. The theater charged 80 cents for a ticket. We had been seeing movies there for years. Raiders of the Lost Ark, Escape From New York (my first R rated movie btw) Hardly Working with Jerry Lewis. But it had been a couple of years since we had been there preferring drive ins as the mode of seeing flicks. A lot had changed. It was now the flea pit of Dayton. We made it maybe a half hour into the movie before the Hobos and drug addicts freaked us out too much. The guy across the aisle from us was smoking dope and kept dropping matches and his joint and temporarily setting the seat in front of him on fire. Vagrants kept wandering up and down the aisles. I was the only kid there, and my mom the only woman. we did not feel safe. So we left. Didn't ask for our money back but gave a bitching out to the manager on the way out, but I'm sure they didn't care. No one got killed so it wasn't a big deal. My first time ever walking out of a movie. I was crushingly disappointed too because I wanted to see Critters so damn bad. 

2# THE FIRST POWER - Years later when I was 18 or 19 I went to see this occult horror flick with a huge group of friends at the new multiplex in town. Once again I made it about 20 minutes to a half hour before outside forces made me leave. When I was younger I had a hell of a temper. Really bad. I would go off like a motherfucker about shit and not care about who saw it. I didn't give a fuck who I scared the shit out of. I've gotten much better as I've grown older and am pretty mellow now. But then, watch out! So my friends and I are chilling before the movie when a group of teenagers, probably 16 years old or so all crowd in behind us. Now I have this power in a movie theater to attract the biggest douschbags in the place just by my presence. I can be in an empty theater and the biggest, loudest dumbfuck will come in and sit behind me. Happens all the time, to this day. It was in full force that night. These kids were obnoxious, rude, loud, spoiled little fuckwits and wanted the world to know it. We all prayed they would shut the fuck up when the movie started. They didn't. About ten minutes into the movie I hear them behind me discussing the ACID they have brought with them and distributing it amongst them. Clearly they were about to get fucked up and make more noise. Now earlier before the movie started, we had moved once previously because another group of idiots were being loud and we didn't want to be around them during the movie. So this was the SECOND group of fucktards we had encountered. They continued to talk and get louder and louder. I finally lost my cool, spun around in my seat and got about two inches away from the face of the kid directly behind me, who was also the loudest, stupidest of the bunch. I screamed at the top of my lungs "SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU FUCKING RETARD OR I'M COMING BACK THERE AND RIPPING YOUR FUCKING HEART OUT!!!" I stared at him for about thirty seconds and then just sat back in my seat. My friends were mortified. The theater was staring at me in silence and fear. I was far scarier than the piece of shit movie we were all watching. Some people were glad the kids were now shut up. But I think most were just terrified. There was a consensus amongst my friends it was a good idea that we leave just in case someone tried to shoot us later. We went and got our money back. The funniest thing is that the movie was shitty anyway and to this day I've never seen the rest of it.

#3 ARMY OF DARKNESS -I'm gonna commit horror fan heresy here. I detest this movie. I think it is a big load of shit. let me start by saying I LOVE the first EVIL DEAD. it is one of the movies that made me want to become a filmmaker. I love EVIL DEAD 2 a lot as well for different reasons. I didn't mind it was a comedy because it was still a horror movie too. I was stoked to see ARMY OF DARKNESS. really, really excited. My friend saw it earlier in the day and told me it sucked shit but I had to see it myself anyway. he even came with us to see it again just to see if a second viewing would change his mind. I was working a theater at the time so i got in free. Within five minutes I felt totally cheated as the whole mythos of the other films was replayed for laughs (though I appreciated seeing my then current crush Bridget Fonda) by the crucial half hour mark I literally felt like Sam Raimi was standing at the front of the theater cackling that horrific laugh of his and flipping me off. I felt like that movie was one long fuck you to me because I loved the original so much. I wasn't just disappointed. I was offended. My girlfriend thought it was stupid and my friend was just convinced his first prognosis was right. So we left and saw a different movie. Unfortunately that was the American remake of The Vanishing which wasn't much better.

#4 SLITHER - This story is not as interesting or exciting. I used to go see movies with my mom every Sunday. We haven't lately because her health is not so good and the cold weather makes it harder for her to get around. But anyway, we would normally go to the Danbarry Cinemas which are our local second run houses which only charge $2.75 a ticket. Basically they are current grindhouses with crappy seats, rowdy customers and spotty projection and sound, but they are a deal. We went and saw SLITHER and immediately I noticed the sound was fucked up. It sounded like the soundtrack was running through sand. I hoped it would get better but after about fifteen minutes it never did, so we left and went into the movie 16 BLOCKS instead, which was alright. Weird thing is that no one else in the theater left at all. Another Danbarry story was when we went to see the Lindsey Lohan movie I KNOW WHO KILLED ME.

We didn't technically walk out because we never got to see any of the movie at all. We walked in and sat down and the only other people in the theater were the worst, most intensely frightening white trash family I had ever seen. And I grew up in a white trash ghetto. What made it so bad was that there were like five kids with them varying in ages, none of them being monitored or watched. It was in the smallest theater the place has which is about as big as a large living room anyway. And these kids were spread out over the entire theater. Some in the front, some in the back, some to the side of us etc. The family was right across the aisle from us and were hardcore. The "dad" looked like he just got out of prison that day and had spent all his time pumping iron and getting tattoos. He was clearly making up for lost time drinking. "Mom" was fairly nice looking... from behind. She looked good in fact. But then she turned around and had on a tank top shirt that allowed her sagging muffin stomach to hang out. Which looked like a popped weather balloon of sagging disease ridden skin. There was another fairly normal woman with them. I suspect it was a parole officer. They ALL were talking at the top of their lungs and clearly didn't care they were in public. So we hightailed it the fuck out of there. No way were we gonna watch a white trash thriller with a white trash family cheering it on. We saw SHRECK 3 instead.

#5 THE HILLS HAVE EYES REMAKE - I actually saw this at the drive in with SILENT HILL. I was fucking stoked to be seeing a horror double bill at the drive in. Something I had not done since the 80's. Drive ins only play family friendly fare now so this was a rare, rare occasion, I was pumped. I didn't care if both movies sucked ass. I was watching horror movies the place they were meant to be seen. I was there with my girlfriend at the time and she had gotten babysitting for her son overnight so we could go. It was all good. She wasn't a horror fan, but would watch them occasionally with me. SILENT HILL went over fine. We both liked it manly because it was artistically done. I was biased against THE HILLS HAVE EYES going in because it was a remake of a movie I considered to be pretty damn close to perfect as it stood. The movie started off REALLY strong with the montage of mutated babies and children during the opening credits. Real mutated babies and children. I think that set the tone for my girlfriend right there. 

I wasn't giving the movie much of a chance really and was kinda picking it apart, not noticing the profoundly disturbing effect it was having on my girlfriend. By the time the camper attack happens. She was toast. She was shaken and crying. Not hysterically, but still enough that it upset me. Here was this movie I wasn't taking seriously at all, but it freaked her out completely. She didn't ask for us to leave, but she made it clear she was not liking the movie and it was upsetting her greatly. So I offered for us to go and we left. The ride home was awkward at best, I'm not sure what was said and that night was uncomfortable as well. I felt like an asshole. It wasn't my fault, but I felt like it was. Like I had subjected her to something horrible on purpose and then didn't have the decency to even notice. Our relationship got weird after that. She started taking much more notice of what I was into and how I reacted to it. How much I let it infiltrate into her world and especially the world of her kid. We didn't make it very much longer. Six months maybe. We tried again later down the road, but it was a dead end. I did see the movie a few weeks later, shockingly enough, at the Danbarry with a friend that I hadn't seen in many, many years. We both really, really liked it. The second viewing I found it to be a well made, powerful horror film with a lot of balls. The script is bad, but it has a lot of verve and menace and totally plays it straight. It never fucks with the audience and is mean as hell. The very thing that upset my girlfriend. Funny thing is when we first started dating she rented Last House on the Left just to get a feel of these kinds of movies and was gonna watch it on her own. I dunno if she ever did. I kinda warned her not to.

So that's some stuff out of my brain pan. Just some memories to fondle for a while. It's almost 5:00 am so if there are misspellings and shit, forgive me. I'm tired, sore and going to bed.

(Post script: I wrote this article in 2009 for Facebook. What you are seeing here is a slightly edited and cleaned up version. Also my Mom who appears several times here passed away in 2010. She was the person who often was my movie going partner in crime from a very early age. She was often willing to go to movies most parents would never go to and I owe most of who I am to her.)

© Andrew Copp 2009

How would you reshape your body?

MODIFY (2005)

d. Jason Gary, Greg Jacobson
Comitted Films
Full Frame

Modify seeks to explore the lives of those who modify their bodies, from the simple to the extreme. But what it really does is bring the mondo film into the 21^st century. With the various montages extreme plastic surgery, slicing flesh, insane piercings, suspensions and implants of every sort, this is a gore show of the highest order masquerading as a serious look at a lifestyle documentary. 

The movie starts off with a small thesis that modification can be anything from tattoos, to extreme implants and piercings to body building and plastic surgery. We then spend some really unpleasant time with some surgeons who seem like nice people, but their comments are made moot because theyare played over a long montage of outrageously gory surgery footage. Scenes of breast implants, eyelids being cut off, liposuction, labia being construction, huge stomachs being removed and just flesh being cut, torn, sucked and rendered endlessly.

 "Here Kitty Kitty. It's time for my next procedure..."

The next big section deals with extreme piercing and body suspension. A theme that seemed to have really took hold in the era this documentary was made around 2005. I remember seeing the troop covered in this movie first on the extras of the movie HELLRAISER in 1999, but from then until this doc it seemed to exploded. With hundreds of suspension performers the lifestyle seems to have a permanent foothold these days. Though certainly not to the extent the gentleman in the movie claim where he says there are hundreds of thousands of people in American doing it. 

We meet a young man who has started modifying using his artistic vision as a sculptor and his biology background by doing implant work using Teflon and silicone. He also shows off his surgical tools he has sculpted himself. Seems that he is a real life version of a character from a Cronenberg movie.

Once the movie moves into the mid-section of the discussion of modification mutilation a lot of the interviews take a nosedive with man of the participants dropping in I.Q level. Up to the point 95% OF the interviewees have been very intelligent folks. But suddenly we get some people who claim to work the sideshows who say things like “I am a cynical nihilist, but I really don’t know what that means. I heard Flea explain it once though”. The opinions on what equals mutilation against modification seems to vary wildly from each person, but all of them seem to agree the line is drawn where people can’t really decide for themselves of it the modification will impair the lives of the person in some way.

"They may have not fully understood what she meant by a lace up the back dress"

We spend another uncomfortable amount of time with a fully tattooed dude as he pushes beads into the flesh of his cock in a bloody mess of a scene and then meet several other people who have sliced up their wieners into strange positions. Interestingly enough most of the modified people admit that their lifestyle is an addiction and openly discuss that thy feel that want it more and more. A doctor has a cockimamee explanation saying it is some defeating fear bullshit. But most of them seem to understand it is a endorphins rush combined with a need for something more extreme. A natural high. The extreme plastic surgery cases obviously have something bigger going on though. 

There is a short interview with groundbreaking modifying Fakir Moustafir who was the original person at the ground floor of the movement. He discusses a lot of the so called spiritual sides of things involved in this. He also goes into a rant about how if people are willing to modify themselves they are radical enough to take to the streets and effect change I the world and that is why society thinks they are dangerous. Which is why they try to legislate these sort of things. I think he is overstating things more than a little bit.

In the last third of the movie we get to see a tongue split into two halves, a cock split in two halves a a full sexual reassignment surgery all in the discussion of how modification is being legislated in weird ways. But this is more of the big time Mondo footage and some of it REALLY hard to get through. The tough split it especially hard to watch and actually doesn’t go a long way towards the discussion that the procedure shouldn’t be regulated. 

The discussion of religion comes down tot pretty much only Jim Ward of The Gauntlet only comes off not sounding like a prentious dufuss. Everyone else sounds like a typical artshool airhead with too lofty self-importance on the subject. Which is why it probably shouldn’t have even been asked in the first place.

Naturally it all ends with another music video montage of the best and the nastiest moments, with a song called “Unforgettable” playing. The sound bytes try to convince us that the bottom line is about having an open mind and not judge people. Which is all nice and good. But the bottom line is REALLY we just saw a major gore filled freakshow of modern day epic proportions that something like FOX wish they could get away with showing if the censors would allow all the bleeding sliced open breasts and split cocks on TV. 

Review © Andrew Copp

Blood, Boobs, Sand, and Orgasm Nero

SEX AND BLACK MAGIC aka ORGASM NERO (1982)
D. Joe D’Amato
ONE 7
Full Frame

Richard Harrison stars as a writer in a far off island who becomes estranged from his lopsided breast implanted wife (Nieves Navarro). She begins to bang the nubile island hottie (Lucia Ramirez) to fulfill her sexual needs. Lots of picturesque lounging on the beach. Well photographed white sands and sixty nine positions while splayed out with waves crashing into them. Soon The wife is doing more than plowing the public fields, she is teaching the house guest the English language and generally taking her into her lie and heart. When Hubby gets home he is at first oblivious to their transgressions, but it wont take long for him to smell the musky scent of lady lust and put his own manly spin on the situation.

Richard Harrison speaks about shooting this movie in the book GODS IN SPANDEX and what he says is not exactly kind. He claims the script he was given to shoot was a thriller without sex and the movie he was actively shooting was quickly becoming the quasi-porn film we have today. Little did he know that some versions had hardcore spliced in as well (scenes which are extras on this DVD). He also tells stories of crew members teenaged daughters that continuously tried to have sex with him and how he had to fend off their advances... But if he was so in the dark about the content of the film then what about the shots of him almost balls out naked?

"Wading in the waters of island love. Joe D'Amato style."

The movie is typical of D’Amato in that is is generally boring sex fodder bookended by wacky almost horror. Opening with a cannibal tribal ritual in which a man has been killed by a shark and the tribe shares eating his heart for some reason that is not entirely clear. This makes not much sense until the last few minutes when it rears its head again to bring the movie back together. Naturally being the era it is from it also contains the typical lesbian gets raped by the lead of the movie scene. But here done one better when the female lead who has just been bitch slapped away so he can rape her lover decides this is just too good a chance for some hot three way action and joins in. Naturally this repairs their broken marriage and the poor Island girl is just going to have to go back to her savage ways!

Still with all the sleazy sex and offensive non-pc goings on, the movie has one nearly constant thing going for it. It is unrepentantly boring. It looks nice, D’Amato was always a talented cinematographer. But his movies were always paced like doughnuts packed into a colon. they often just refuse to move.  This is no different.

This new dvd has some cut scenes, those mentioned hardcore shots and a different end credit sequence. The transfer is nothing to write home about but it is at least in Italian.

Review by Andy Copp

Pure Brazilian Evil

EMBODIMENT OF EVIL aka EMBODIMENT OF THE DEVIL (2008) 
D. Jose Mojica Marins aka Coffin Joe
Synapse Ent.
Blu-Ray/DVD Combo
1.85

After nearly three decades in hibernation from the director's chair, Coffin Joe returns to the horror scene with the blood-drenched horror tale that is sure to raise hackles if it ever gets a real release stateside. It is also the third movie in the trilogy that began with the films AT MIDNIGHT I WILL TAKE YOUR SOULand AT MIDNIGHT I WILL POSSESS YOUR CORPSE featuring Marins as the penultimate character of Coffin Joe, an evil gravedigger who doesn't believe in god, morals, or good and evil. Just in the flesh and what he can prove in the here and now. Humans are of no value to him unless he gets immediate pleasure or usefulness out of them. In all three films he is in search of the ultimate woman of superior intellect and breeding to bear him a son and continue his bloodline. Naturally he failed in the first two films.

Here, the film opens forty years later with him being released from prison after serving for all the murders he committed in the previous films. He is being released much to the consternation of the prison officials and police in San Paulo. His hunch back assistant Bruno and several nearly sub-human worshipers await him on the outside and waste no time getting back down to business. He may be in his seventies but he has not slowed down with the need to get laid and to kill! Meanwhile the corrupt cops in the small town are killing the poor locals, the criminals are running extortion schemes, and the priests are closet masochists who hook up electrodes to their nipples for self-abuse purposes. Seems only the town witches and whores are close being honest. Joe finds a beautiful atheist writer who openly gives herself to him for his purposes, and he puts through one of his horrific and painful tests to make sure she is worthy of his offspring: making her eat the flesh of her own buttock. Which she does greedily to prove her prowess. Still, he has his servants kidnap about a half dozen other women from the town to torture and impregnate for good measure. He also catches the local cops beating on his crippled assistant Bruno at one point, leading them to horrors and suffering they could have never dreamed of.


The narrative of EMBODIMENT OF EVIL should be rather simple, but somehow it gets really messy rather quickly. Several plot threads get raised, then forgotten, then pop back up almost at the end of the film. There is this business of Joe being tormented by the ghosts of those he has killed in the past films. It sort of plays into the movie, but awkwardly at best. And when the climax hits, that plot strand pays off in a way that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Really, it is kind of a mess in a lot of ways because what you are left with is a movie of images and nightmares. Thankfully those are the things that Jose Mojica Marins has always done best and he's still in top form here. There is a long trippy sequence where he ends up in purgatory, guided by an old man who shows him the pits of hell below him (not represented by lakes of fire, but instead by landscapes of sand and desert, filled with tortured souls and lakes of blood) which is simply stunning. Preceding that is a moment where he fucks one of the women while corpses above them rain blood upon them until the room becomes an ocean of blood and literally buries them both. Another great scene has Joe cutting open a dead pig and a nude Asian woman emerges that he embraces and kisses. Then there are the vile torture scenes. Scenes that do not owe their power to the SAW/HOSTEL school of film-making since Marins has been doing stuff like this since the sixties. The usual spiders, bugs and other creepy crawlies make appearances, but this time he dowses a woman in molten cheese and has a hungry rat chew into her exposed vagina! People are dunked in vats of blood and guts, crucified, whipped and pierced and hung from the ceiling. A lot of the piercing in the film appears to be for real as well, using actual body modifiers, a practice that once again, Marins started using back in his old B/W films in the sixties. Except back then they were circus performers and geeks.

Which brings me to the question; How and why did 20th Century Fox pick this film up for release? There is no way in hell it can ever get an R rating! Even though it was passed uncut in the U.K. (which mystifies me because almost all of the violence is sexually tinged. Not rape, mind you, but with a healthy does of S+M involved which used to be a BIG no no in the UK). This is about as far from studio safe horror fair as you can possibly get. It's gory, brutal, ugly, anti-religion, anti-government, anti-establishment, and last but not least, NOT in English. You cannot convince me that Fox has any real interest in releasing this, at least not theatrically. Boy, I'd love to be a fly on the wall at the MPAA screening though.

This was co-written by Dennison Ramalho, who directed the short film LOVE FOR MOTHER ONLY (which is on the Synapse DVD SMALL GAUGE TRAUMA) which is excellent. He also directed the second unit. Problem is, often the film feels more like his work that Jose Mojica Marins. The themes of Marins work are all present, but stylistically this is more like Ramalho's shorts, especially in the approach to violence, and in the editing. even the casting of the actresses feels more like Ramalho's shorts and less like the voluptuous sirens of Coffin Joe's previous films. But then, he was also a driving force in getting the project made at all, so I can't complain. I should be grateful that Coffin Joe got another real movie made, on 35mm no less, before he passed out of this mortal coil. Of course, he is still kicking around pretty well, so he may still shoot out another before long. I'd be game for that.

The new Blu Ray/ DVD combo from Synapse is an amazing package. The preceding review was originally done for the British DVD Release. But I have since rewatched the movie from the Synapse release with an audience no less and it has resonated much more with me. Synapse remastered the film from original elements to a 4K Hi Def master with an all new re mastered sound track. So experiencing the film from the Synapse discs is like seeing it for the first time. I still stand by my opinion that the script and story get mighty muddled in the mid section, but a second viewing go a long way to clearing it up. All the elements are there, they just get introduced quickly and several characters look astonishingly alike which makes it hard to follow on first go around. 


Watching this with an audience was a blast. We held a FREE screening here in Dayton and only maybe three people knew Coffin Joe's work. The rest were Virgin's as it were. I figured people would be turned off by the Subtitles but in fact everyone got into it vibe quickly and were way into it. Everyone came out saying they loved it and claiming they saw "things they had never seen before!"


This Blu/DVD package has some fun extras including behind the scenes, a video of the premier at Fantasia and some trailers. It would have been nice to have some more interviews or something, especially considering Coffin Joe's age. But it is still an amazing package. And Seriously, who would have thought we would have a Coffin Joe movie on BLU RAY? Certainly not me!!! 


Review © Andy Copp