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DanXIII

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Movie Review: The Crippled Masters (1979) – Film Masters Blu-ray

This is going to be a Grade-A fuckin’ nuts… Just by looking at that title up there you can tell if this is for you… and if you will be offended by it, which admittedly I’m sure there’s something here to displease most… also this is (probably) the first review where I have to emphatically state that I am not a doctor, so I’ll have to describe… oh fuck this, here we go! So 1979’s The Crippled Masters begins the way it should, with our main men strutting their bizarre, yet impressive stuff under the opening credits. Here we see Lee Ho (Frankie Shum), a man with but one arm… but it’s incredibly small and contains only a few fingers… and let me tell you, this fella is dynamite with a bow staff. We also meet Tang (Jackie Conn), a dude with emaciated legs that, and I shit you not, launches himself from a skateboard to land backwards on Lee’s

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DanXIII

Jul 4, 2024

IndieMoviesReviewsSci-Fi

Movie Review: Sting (2024) – Well Go USA Blu-ray

A diminutive comet hurtles through the steel-gray New York City winter sky before crash landing in an apartment building (where it comes to rest in a dollhouse) where it promptly cracks open revealing it was an egg containing a small spider… a spider that is found by a young girl named Charlotte (Alyla Browne). Charlotte takes her new pet home… to the apartment she shares with her mother, Heather (Penelope Mitchell), infant sibling, Liam, and building superintendent/comic book artist step-father Ethan (Ryan Corr)… and names her new friend Sting. So, space-spider Sting is actually super smart as well, which would be fine and dandy if she didn’t apply that insidious intelligence to facilitate feeding on the dwelling’s residents (as well as any exterminator stupid enough to get in her way)… oh and she’s growing… and growing… So much so, that things look rather dire for those that call the building home! Coming from Writer/Director Kiah Roache-Turner (who brought us the

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DanXIII

Jul 3, 2024

AdaptationBooksForeignIndieMoviesReviewsStreaming TVThriller

Movie/Show Reviews: Severin’s New Sherlock Holmes Releases (1962/1968) – Blu-ray

Coming your way from our fiendish friends at Severin are a duo of Blu-ray releases featuring legendary literary Detective, Sherlock Holmes!First up comes 1962’s Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace: Who do you call when Cleopatra’s priceless necklace turns up missing? Well, the Egyptian authorities should be number one I guess, but freakin’ Sherlock Holmes is definitely probably on that list somewhere… As fate would have it, Holmes (Sir Christopher Lee… I’m sure everyone knows this legend, but just in case think Hammer Films’ Dracula flicks) is indeed called in, along with Dr. Watson (Thorley Walters) and the two quickly begin their famous sleuthin’ bag. Before long the trail leads to the infamous Dr. Moriarty (Hans Söhnker), who has set-up sinister shop under the guise of being a respectable archaeologist, which will definitely screw up Holmes’ investigation six ways to Sunday! Directed by Hammer mainstay Terence Fisher (who just so happened to direct a few of those aforementioned Dracula pictures

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DanXIII

Jul 3, 2024

MoviesReviews

Movie Review: Child’s Play (2019) – Scream Factory 4K/Blu-ray combo

Young mother Karen (Aubrey Plaza) has it tough all over. She’s moved to the city with her son Andy (Gabriel Bateman) who is having a shit of a time adjusting to his new environs, she has a rather shitty boyfriend, and her department store job is a real drag… so a bummer convention through and through. What is the hottest selling item at the store ol’ K-dawg toils away at I don’t hear you ask? Why the Buddi doll of course, a robotic best friend for children that our heroine manages to snag for free after blackmailing a member of the returns department. Of course, Karen has no idea that this particular Buddi doll, Chucky by name, has had each and every safety protocol removed from it’s circuits by a disgruntled worker before he splats himself into the street pizza Hall of Fame. After a bit of disinterest, Andy grows to really enjoy Chucky’s company, and even manages to befriend

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DanXIII

Jul 1, 2024

IndieMoviesReviewsSci-Fi

Movie Review: Arena Wars (2024)

In the very near future, everyone is absolutely balls deep into Arena Wars; the game show where convicts can earn their freedom if they survive the onslaught of a ghoulish gaggle of murderous madmen (and women)… well at least they used to be into it, but the contest has been one sided… what with those sinister stalkers being armed to the nines and all… for so long that things are getting a bit long in the tooth. Enter: Luke Bender (John Wells), an ex-marine serving a totally rational 200 year sentence for a crime he had nothing to do with after all, which gives him plenty of motivation to win this particular contest of champions, so before you can say Bachman Books we’re off and runnin’, man! Now of course comparisons between this film’s narrative, and Arnie’s 1987 masterpiece (and by association Stephen King’s 1982 novel of the same name written under his Richard Bachman pen-name) are going to be

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DanXIII

Jun 30, 2024

IndieMoviesParanormalReviews

Movie Review: Realm of Shadows (2024)

Who got their relationship hoo-ha all mixed-up with supernatural shenanigans? Well the new anthology from filmmaker Jimmy Drain, Realm of Shadows for one… and lucky for you cats n’ creeps that’s the feature I’ll be slappin’ my putrid peepers on and given the ol’ standard substandard revoltin’ review treatment! After we are introduced to the Sisters of the Moon; a gaggle of gals, lead by the devilish Nalum (Erika Monet), hell bent on relating their visions of the battle for men’s souls as they struggle to obtain the mystical… and apparently pretty damn powerful Dagger of Destiny… from some priest-types. These visions form the basis of the stories presented for our vicious viewing pleasure! We are soon introduced to Malick (Drain), a dude with the hots for multiple ladies, which of course leads to raucous results once he makes his preternatural pick, followed by a journey into a relationship influenced by those witches mmentioned up yonder… so again, expect decidedly

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DanXIII

Jun 6, 2024

AdaptationBooksForeignMovies

Movie Review: Cemetery Man (1994) – Severin 4k/Blu-ray Combo

Michele Soavi’s (1987’s StageFright, 1989’s The Church) 1994 adaptation of Tiziano Sclavi’s Gothic novel Dellamorte Dellamore concerns the misadventures of one Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett, My Best Friend’s Wedding) the caretaker of the local cemetery of the small, largely unpopulated town of Buffalora. While you would surmise that this would be a quiet, perhaps even boring job, there’s one catch… anyone buried within it’s confines comes back to life after seven days and must be put back down and made double dead before they can enjoy eternal rest. Helping Francesco with his daily routine is the child-like, mentally disabled Gnaghi (François Hadji-Lazaro), an incredibly sweet and helpful gentle giant who speaks only one word, “Gna” which can mean a multitude of things which only our hero can decipher. Things go from bizarre to surreal when Francesco falls for She (Anna Falchi), the widow of a rich ol’ coot who is obsessed with the dead. Eventually she is bitten by her

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DanXIII

Jun 1, 2024

MoviesReviewsThriller

Movie Review: Orphan (2009) – Scream Factory Blu-ray

Kate and John Coleman (played by The Conjuring series’ Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard respectively) are down in the dumps and sorta on the rocks after the stillborn death of their third child, so they decide to adopt the freakishly gifted Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) from ye olde local orphanage. While their son, Daniel (Jimmy Bennett) is lukewarm to his new sister at best, his sister, the deaf mute Max (Aryana Engineer), couldn’t be more thrilled with Esther’s presence. Of course this being a fright flick and all, Esther has a few issues, and before long Kate is mega-suspicious that her brand-new terror tyke is much more than she seems, in the worst possible ways… a fact that the orphanage’s head honcho, Sister Abigail (CCH Pounder) confirms when she reveals the shaky past our girl had back home in Russia. Will Kate be able to convince the family that her feelings are correct, or will that home sweet home turn into

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DanXIII

Jun 1, 2024

DocumentariesForeignIndieMoviesReviews

Il Tempo del Sogna – Dream Time (2023) – Rustblade Blu-ray

There’s nothing that hits quite like Italian horror cinema of the ’80s to mid-’90s. It is often outrageous, spectacularly gore-drenched, surreal and completely one-of-a-kind (even when it lifts elements from Hollywood fright flick blockbusters)… and just as it was rockin’ and rollin’, the wheels came off the cart shortly after the release of Michele Soavi’s kinda-sorta Dylan Dog adaptation, Cemetery Man in 1994. How did this occur? Well, that is precisely what Nocturno magazine’s Davide Pulici aims to decipher in Claudio Lattanzi’s (1988’s Zombi 5: The Killing Birds) documentary Il Tempo del Sogna. Following the journey from Lamberto Bava’s 1985 monsterpiece Demons, with a special focus given to the troubled production of it’s second sequel (which would eventually be retooled into Soavi’s The Church in 1989), on through late-era Fulci, and to late in the game stragglers such as 1997’s The Wax Mask (directed by effects maestro Sergio Stivaletti) we hear first-hand accounts of both the production of beloved fright

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DanXIII

May 19, 2024

AdaptationMoviesReviewsThriller

Movie Review: The Cat and The Canary (1927) – Eureka Blu-ray

As per his dying wish, twenty years after rich eccentric geezer Cyrus West kicks the bucket, his relatives gather on a dark and stormy night for the reading of his will at his former arcane abode; a mansion that looks like German Expressionism mixed with Edgar Allan Poe aesthetics. Anyhow, this groovy gaggle of weirdos eventually discovers that Cyrus’ fortune is to be left to his niece Annabelle (prolific silent film actress Laura La Plante)… on the condition she be judged sane (something Cyrus himself would never be able to achieve) by the macabre medicine-man Doctor Ira Lazar (Lucien Littlefield). If she fails the exam, the riches will be given to the second choice family member who will be revealed in a separate sealed will… I mean for fuck’s sake dude, couldn’t you have just split that shit six ways among everyone and call it a day?! As if Annabelle isn’t under enough pressure from the threat of her remaining

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DanXIII

May 18, 2024

DanXIII

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