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DanXIII

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Horror Fuel

Short Film Review: Nova (2020)

Dr. Nova Thorpe (Kelly Kula) is racing against the clock to get a warning out about impending doom related to a top secret experiment she’s involved in… but is said threat already in the room with her? Running a scant eight minutes, Nova, the latest short film from writer/director David McAbee makes a lot of very little; to wit: we have one actress (the aforementioned Kula who does a fantastic job of selling the dire straits she has been tossed into), one room, and some rock solid cinematography (courtesy of David C. Smith). Adding to the overall top-shelf quality of this short is the fact our heroine’s degeneration is captured in nearly one continuous shot (which rumor has it was achieved with the help of a remotely operated robotic arm) and features some great make-up effects created by Chanel Panagiotopoulos. There’s not much more to say really; if you love a tense sci-fi tale told right (and right quick) then

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Dec 6, 2020
Horror Fuel

Movie Review: Paintball Massacre (2020)

A gaggle of ol’ school chums get together for a bit of the reunion n’ paintball combo that sits so well with telephone operators from Biloxi between the ages of 22 and 22. Long story short, these folks get balls deep into feudin’ and fussin’, but that shit is small potatoes compared to the fact that a masked maniac has joined the (soon to be) ghoulish game, and he’s brought the tools to guarantee that there will be a higher than normal body count (which for paintball usually hovers somewhere between zero and zip) in this contest of champions! If Paintball Massacre is anything, it’s a damn good joltin’ jaunt into our beloved stalk n’ slay genre! What makes this one such a great time you may (or admittedly may not) ask? For starters, it has a great cast that manage to convey both horror at the murder biz befalling them, and a solid sense of comedic timing (yup, this

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Dec 5, 2020
Horror Fuel

Movie Review: Backwoods (2020)

Molly (Isabella Alberti) wakes up in a trunk, with no memory of how her ass got in there, and wanders into a trap laden cemetery. Sounds like a typical Tuesday to me boils n’ ghouls… So how in the hell did Molly end up in the sinister soup anyway? Could it be because of the large debt her cheap skate boyfriend Hunter (Matthew McCoy) owes ye olde local drug dealer (Jeremy Sande)… or maybe it was jealous AF Hunter himself… he did quite peeved she was jawin’ with ol’ Noah (Michael Anthony Bagozzi). Regardless of how she got to the charmingly named Hangman’s Hollow, Molly is drfinitely going to have to keep her shit together to avoid the local slasher; namely the Hangman (Scott Alan Warner) his own damn self… a deformed sick-ticket religious nut, who hangs his male victims and keeps the ladies as his brides! Told in part via flashbacks, Backwoods manages to throw some fun twists and

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Dec 2, 2020
Horror Fuel

Blu-ray Review: Silent Running (1972)

Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) spends most of his time aboard the spacecraft Valley Forge caring for the ship’s verdant greenhouses while the rest of the skeleton crew tears ass through the corridors of the vessel on dune buggies… when they aren’t shooting pool, playing poker, or generally acting like complete assholes. Speaking of the Forge; the ship is part of a space fleet that contains all of the Earth’s remaining flora after the planet has succumbed to a catastrophic environmental event, and they’ve been cultivating those plants for eight long years, and to say Lowell is attached to his job is an understatement. Imagine his outrage then when the orders come down from above to jettison the greenhouse pods from the fleet and nuke them… and imagine how he’s not going to sit still and let that happen… at least not to his greenhouse. After eliminating the crew, Lowell makes a desperate gambit to pilot the ship through Saturn’s rings

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Dec 1, 2020
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Horror Fuel

Blu-ray Review: Burst City (1982)

The plot, as very, very loose as it is to Gakuryû Ishii’s (aka Sogo Ishii) Burst City goes kinda/sorta as follows: In a dystopian Japan, gangs of punk rockers put on large concerts (conveyed via music video style vignettes), fight each other for stage time, and form their own dominant, completely out-of-control culture. This of course goes over like a fart in church to the local gangsters who plan on making the city, or more properly the land it sits on, their own. Rioting, rock, racing, and hard fucking (it’s not an “R” word, but it’s in there) ensue! Oh, and before I forget there are also a draconian police force (the Battle Police), a work force comprised of violent heavily armored Road Warrior-style bastards (some mutated, all insane), and plenty of piss n’ puke! Unconcerned with traditional narrative structure, Ishii throws as much light, sound, movement and pure adrenaline on screen as humanly possible… and when the film does

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Dec 1, 2020
Horror Fuel

Blu-ray Review: The Black Cat (1989)

Being an adaptation of horror maestro Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 short story The Black Cat, this film begins the only way it could; with a baby in the womb super-imposed with images of the cosmos. A visit to a movie set, some hair metal, and a baby having apocalyptic dreams later, and we know well and truly that Luigi Cozzi (Starcrash, Contamination) is following the original story to the absolute letter in such a slavish fashion that would make literary scholars the world over to rise up and shout “Skeet, skeet skeet!” Anyway, there’s also a freaky ass witch, and Caroline Munro involved in these goings-on as well. Not a lot of cats here so far, but I’m sure they’ll chuck one in at some point. (Edit: they do) So what exactly is going on in this picture? The long and the short of it all is; some folks want to make a horror movie about the aforementioned legendary evil

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Nov 30, 2020
Horror Fuel

Blu-ray Review: The Other Side of Madness (1971)

After a moody, dialog-free opening (a trend that will continue for much of the film’s runtime) that shows the Manson family planning the Tate-LaBianca Murders as ol’ Charlie observes, we shift our focus to some wild-ass hippie hootenanny taking place on the outskirts of the Spahn Ranch interspersed with scenes of the Family in court on trial for their murder biz! As the story unfolds we are introduced to the doomed starlet Sharon Tate (Debbie Duff), and before long we are balls-deep into the events of the night of August 9th and10th in all of their disturbing detail… all of which is presented in a fashion akin to a documentary, which makes the horror all the more impactful. Does this all sound a bit disjointed? Well it certainly is… but The Other Side of Madness has a shit-ton of energy and some truly arty-farty touches that makes the entire affair as hallucinogenic and fever-dream addled as the times would dictate!

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Nov 29, 2020
Horror Fuel

Blu-ray Review: The Rental (2020)

Friends/couples Mina (Sheila Vand, A Woman Walks Home Alone At Night), Josh (Jeremy Allen White), Charlie (Dan Stevens) and Michelle (Alison Brie, she of the late, great Netflix series GLOW) head out to a loverly rental house situated along a scenic coastline for a lil’ r&r. The one in charge of said dwelling, Taylor (Toby Huss) by name, is a creepy-ass racist… but the house is so damn groovy our heroes shelve their feelings about the caretaker and they settle in for some of that good ol’ drinkin’, druggin’ and fuckin’ that is so popular with telephone operators between the ages of 22 and 45. As fate, and the screenplay, would have it, the friends begin to learn each other’s deepest secrets which causes relationships to fray… but what really causes static is the camera they find installed in the home’s shower. Now normally one would call the cops right quick after making a discovery such as this, but these

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Nov 29, 2020
Horror Fuel

The Weird World of Wild Eye Releasing: Part 5

As you have seen in the first four parts of this series ((located here, here, here, and here) posted a few months back, Wild Eye Releasing love to set all manner of monsters and madness loose upon your arcane asses… and here are a few more examples to prove it! First up comes Amityville Toybox (2016) After a groovy flashback to ol’ murderous maniac Ronnie DeFeo offin’ his family back in 1974 we zoom ahead 40 years to attend a 50th birthday party for Mark (Mark Popejoy), with all of his family present. Speaking of the word present; one of the gifts our man M-dawg receives is one of those creepy-ass cymbal slappin’ monkeys with the perma shit-eatin’ grin… and guess where that terror toy came from? That’s right; the infamous addy our pre-credit killer called home! Before long mild-mannered Mark is actin’ the tyrant and guess who, or should my ass say “what” is to blame? It’s that fuckin’

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Nov 28, 2020
Horror Fuel

Movie Review: Flay (2019)

Patricia (Peggy Schott) is one of those long sufferin’ artist types, but her problems are going to expand 666-fold as she acquires a cursed chain (which has been around since those days of covered wagons and rampant dysentery) which ends up resulting in a serious case of the deaths for anyone unlucky enough to come in possession of those loathsome links! Can Pat get her shit together and end the curse? Special effects wizard turned director Eric Pham and screenwriter Matthew Daley, aren’t exactly re-inventing the wicked wheel with Flay; this is your typical ancient curse causes mayhem in the modern day yarn at it’s heart… but goddamn do they manage to keep things fresh! To wit: the way the curse spreads here is rather inventive, as the links of the chain (which were given that ol’ wild whammy by an imprisoned Native American shaman) give anyone that touches them a permanent bad day, and since our heroine has utilized

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Nov 23, 2020

More from DanXIII

Horror Fuel

Short Film Review: Nova (2020)

Dr. Nova Thorpe (Kelly Kula) is racing against the clock to get a warning out about impending doom related to a top secret experiment she’s involved in… but is said threat already in the room with her? Running a scant eight minutes, Nova, the latest short film from writer/director David McAbee makes a lot of very little; to wit: we have one actress (the aforementioned Kula who does a fantastic job of selling the dire straits she has been tossed into), one room, and some rock solid cinematography (courtesy of David C. Smith). Adding to the overall top-shelf quality of this short is the fact our heroine’s degeneration is captured in nearly one continuous shot (which rumor has it was achieved with the help of a remotely operated robotic arm) and features some great make-up effects created by Chanel Panagiotopoulos. There’s not much more to say really; if you love a tense sci-fi tale told right (and right quick) then

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Dec 6, 2020
Horror Fuel

Movie Review: Paintball Massacre (2020)

A gaggle of ol’ school chums get together for a bit of the reunion n’ paintball combo that sits so well with telephone operators from Biloxi between the ages of 22 and 22. Long story short, these folks get balls deep into feudin’ and fussin’, but that shit is small potatoes compared to the fact that a masked maniac has joined the (soon to be) ghoulish game, and he’s brought the tools to guarantee that there will be a higher than normal body count (which for paintball usually hovers somewhere between zero and zip) in this contest of champions! If Paintball Massacre is anything, it’s a damn good joltin’ jaunt into our beloved stalk n’ slay genre! What makes this one such a great time you may (or admittedly may not) ask? For starters, it has a great cast that manage to convey both horror at the murder biz befalling them, and a solid sense of comedic timing (yup, this

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Dec 5, 2020
Horror Fuel

Movie Review: Backwoods (2020)

Molly (Isabella Alberti) wakes up in a trunk, with no memory of how her ass got in there, and wanders into a trap laden cemetery. Sounds like a typical Tuesday to me boils n’ ghouls… So how in the hell did Molly end up in the sinister soup anyway? Could it be because of the large debt her cheap skate boyfriend Hunter (Matthew McCoy) owes ye olde local drug dealer (Jeremy Sande)… or maybe it was jealous AF Hunter himself… he did quite peeved she was jawin’ with ol’ Noah (Michael Anthony Bagozzi). Regardless of how she got to the charmingly named Hangman’s Hollow, Molly is drfinitely going to have to keep her shit together to avoid the local slasher; namely the Hangman (Scott Alan Warner) his own damn self… a deformed sick-ticket religious nut, who hangs his male victims and keeps the ladies as his brides! Told in part via flashbacks, Backwoods manages to throw some fun twists and

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Dec 2, 2020
Horror Fuel

Blu-ray Review: Silent Running (1972)

Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) spends most of his time aboard the spacecraft Valley Forge caring for the ship’s verdant greenhouses while the rest of the skeleton crew tears ass through the corridors of the vessel on dune buggies… when they aren’t shooting pool, playing poker, or generally acting like complete assholes. Speaking of the Forge; the ship is part of a space fleet that contains all of the Earth’s remaining flora after the planet has succumbed to a catastrophic environmental event, and they’ve been cultivating those plants for eight long years, and to say Lowell is attached to his job is an understatement. Imagine his outrage then when the orders come down from above to jettison the greenhouse pods from the fleet and nuke them… and imagine how he’s not going to sit still and let that happen… at least not to his greenhouse. After eliminating the crew, Lowell makes a desperate gambit to pilot the ship through Saturn’s rings

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Dec 1, 2020
Horror Fuel

Blu-ray Review: Burst City (1982)

The plot, as very, very loose as it is to Gakuryû Ishii’s (aka Sogo Ishii) Burst City goes kinda/sorta as follows: In a dystopian Japan, gangs of punk rockers put on large concerts (conveyed via music video style vignettes), fight each other for stage time, and form their own dominant, completely out-of-control culture. This of course goes over like a fart in church to the local gangsters who plan on making the city, or more properly the land it sits on, their own. Rioting, rock, racing, and hard fucking (it’s not an “R” word, but it’s in there) ensue! Oh, and before I forget there are also a draconian police force (the Battle Police), a work force comprised of violent heavily armored Road Warrior-style bastards (some mutated, all insane), and plenty of piss n’ puke! Unconcerned with traditional narrative structure, Ishii throws as much light, sound, movement and pure adrenaline on screen as humanly possible… and when the film does

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Dec 1, 2020
Horror Fuel

Blu-ray Review: The Black Cat (1989)

Being an adaptation of horror maestro Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 short story The Black Cat, this film begins the only way it could; with a baby in the womb super-imposed with images of the cosmos. A visit to a movie set, some hair metal, and a baby having apocalyptic dreams later, and we know well and truly that Luigi Cozzi (Starcrash, Contamination) is following the original story to the absolute letter in such a slavish fashion that would make literary scholars the world over to rise up and shout “Skeet, skeet skeet!” Anyway, there’s also a freaky ass witch, and Caroline Munro involved in these goings-on as well. Not a lot of cats here so far, but I’m sure they’ll chuck one in at some point. (Edit: they do) So what exactly is going on in this picture? The long and the short of it all is; some folks want to make a horror movie about the aforementioned legendary evil

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Nov 30, 2020
Horror Fuel

Blu-ray Review: The Other Side of Madness (1971)

After a moody, dialog-free opening (a trend that will continue for much of the film’s runtime) that shows the Manson family planning the Tate-LaBianca Murders as ol’ Charlie observes, we shift our focus to some wild-ass hippie hootenanny taking place on the outskirts of the Spahn Ranch interspersed with scenes of the Family in court on trial for their murder biz! As the story unfolds we are introduced to the doomed starlet Sharon Tate (Debbie Duff), and before long we are balls-deep into the events of the night of August 9th and10th in all of their disturbing detail… all of which is presented in a fashion akin to a documentary, which makes the horror all the more impactful. Does this all sound a bit disjointed? Well it certainly is… but The Other Side of Madness has a shit-ton of energy and some truly arty-farty touches that makes the entire affair as hallucinogenic and fever-dream addled as the times would dictate!

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Nov 29, 2020
Horror Fuel

Blu-ray Review: The Rental (2020)

Friends/couples Mina (Sheila Vand, A Woman Walks Home Alone At Night), Josh (Jeremy Allen White), Charlie (Dan Stevens) and Michelle (Alison Brie, she of the late, great Netflix series GLOW) head out to a loverly rental house situated along a scenic coastline for a lil’ r&r. The one in charge of said dwelling, Taylor (Toby Huss) by name, is a creepy-ass racist… but the house is so damn groovy our heroes shelve their feelings about the caretaker and they settle in for some of that good ol’ drinkin’, druggin’ and fuckin’ that is so popular with telephone operators between the ages of 22 and 45. As fate, and the screenplay, would have it, the friends begin to learn each other’s deepest secrets which causes relationships to fray… but what really causes static is the camera they find installed in the home’s shower. Now normally one would call the cops right quick after making a discovery such as this, but these

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Nov 29, 2020
Horror Fuel

The Weird World of Wild Eye Releasing: Part 5

As you have seen in the first four parts of this series ((located here, here, here, and here) posted a few months back, Wild Eye Releasing love to set all manner of monsters and madness loose upon your arcane asses… and here are a few more examples to prove it! First up comes Amityville Toybox (2016) After a groovy flashback to ol’ murderous maniac Ronnie DeFeo offin’ his family back in 1974 we zoom ahead 40 years to attend a 50th birthday party for Mark (Mark Popejoy), with all of his family present. Speaking of the word present; one of the gifts our man M-dawg receives is one of those creepy-ass cymbal slappin’ monkeys with the perma shit-eatin’ grin… and guess where that terror toy came from? That’s right; the infamous addy our pre-credit killer called home! Before long mild-mannered Mark is actin’ the tyrant and guess who, or should my ass say “what” is to blame? It’s that fuckin’

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Nov 28, 2020
Horror Fuel

Movie Review: Flay (2019)

Patricia (Peggy Schott) is one of those long sufferin’ artist types, but her problems are going to expand 666-fold as she acquires a cursed chain (which has been around since those days of covered wagons and rampant dysentery) which ends up resulting in a serious case of the deaths for anyone unlucky enough to come in possession of those loathsome links! Can Pat get her shit together and end the curse? Special effects wizard turned director Eric Pham and screenwriter Matthew Daley, aren’t exactly re-inventing the wicked wheel with Flay; this is your typical ancient curse causes mayhem in the modern day yarn at it’s heart… but goddamn do they manage to keep things fresh! To wit: the way the curse spreads here is rather inventive, as the links of the chain (which were given that ol’ wild whammy by an imprisoned Native American shaman) give anyone that touches them a permanent bad day, and since our heroine has utilized

Continue reading →
DanXIII
Nov 23, 2020
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