Tag: Jesse Vint

Blu-ray, by Sean Axmaker, Contributors, DVD, Film Reviews, Horror

Blu-ray: ‘Basket Case,’ ‘Ichi the Killer,’ ‘Macon County’ justice, and ‘The Hidden’ with Kyle Maclachlan

Written by Sean Axmaker April 24, 2018

Basket Case (Arrow, Blu-ray)
Ichi the Killer (Well Go, Blu-ray)
Macon County Line (Shout! Factory, Blu-ray)
The Hidden (Warner Archive, Blu-ray)

Basket Case (1982), the debut feature of filmmaker Frank Henenlotter, is a gruesome little cult indie-horror drama of brotherly love and righteous vengeance shot on location in the seedier sections of New York City.

Henenlotter was reared on the cheap horror films of Herschell Gordon Lewis and other independent exploitation directors of the 1960s and 1970s and this is in many ways his tribute to the grindhouse horror films he loves, a low-budget monster movie with a creative twists and an embrace of the grotesque. The monster effects, a mix of puppets, models, and stop-motion animation, may look amateur today but there’s a loving B-movie attitude and a genuine sense of character and tragedy to the misshapen, fleshy, snaggle-toothed Belial, who sees Duane’s growing guilt and desire to connect to other people (notably a girl he’s fallen for) as a betrayal of their bond. A cult classic with an inspired twist on Cain and Abel.Kevin VanHentenryck shuffles through the low budget exercise in grotesquery and gore as Duane, the “normal” brother sent by his deformed, formerly-conjoined twin Belial to take revenge on the doctors who separated the two and left the blobby, grotesquely misshapen brother to die. Most of the effects are shrewdly just off screen, with spurts of blood and gnarly hand dragging the character out of view to feed our imaginations, and a few bloody corpses left in the aftermath (an exception is a pre-Freddy multiple impalement with scalpels).

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by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Macon County Line

Written by Richard T. Jameson December 22, 2015

[Originally published in Movietone News 35, August 1974]

Macon County Line has no special meaning in Macon County Line, but that’s the least of the film’s sins against form and sense, not to mention—and I shall mention—decency. A headnote assures us that this is a true story, one that happened in Louisiana in 1954. Louisiana is a lucky break; 1954 is a lucky break. 1954 means that the first few minutes of the film may be devoted to a sort of Lords of Underbrush tapping of the nostalgia vein. Louisiana means that it’s redneck-paranoia time on the open road, and all the Stars-and-Bars, gun-cult, male-chauvinist, white-supremacist hobgoblins are at the filmmakers’ beck and call whenever they feel the need. Stir in two fun-loving ripoff artists from Chicago, enjoying their last days of freedom before forced enlistment in the Army (it’s that or serve time in the pokey), and you’ve got the makings of a confrontation. Top with one slightly cynical but also fun-loving blonde hitching a ride between two meaningless stopovers, and flash kinescopes of Joe McCarthy on a handy TV screen, just for pseudo-intellectual seasoning. And I haven’t even got to the barrel-chested cop who doesn’t notice his wife would appreciate a midafternoon lay, so wrapped up is he with the shotgun he’s bought for his disturbingly liberalminded nine-year-old son in military school, or the … well, that’ll do for now.

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by Robert C. Cumbow, Contributors, Film Reviews, Horror

Review: ‘Bug’

Written by Editor September 28, 2014

[Originally published in Movietone News 43, September 1975]

Because it tries to become a new film every 15 or 20 minutes, Bug seems about three times as long as its hour-and-a-half. The effect is, I am sure, the unintended result of both cast’s and crew’s having no idea at all what they wanted to do with the film. It begins as an effort to fuse the horror picture with the disaster epic: in the first reel we have a heat wave, an earthquake, several horrible conflagrations, and the emergence into human affairs of a plague of subterranean beetles capable of starting fires by rubbing together their flinty appendages. The beasties subsist on carbon, which they lap from inside the exhaust systems of automobiles. Bradford Dillman plays Jim Parmiter, a neo–St. Francis of a biology teacher who bemoans humanity’s loss of the primordial power of communication with the animals. He finds his hobbyhorse in the firebugs and in a reversal of the usual invaders-from-beyond formula tries to find a way of keeping the bugs alive when they begin to die from reduced pressure on the earth’s surface. He preserves one female firebug in a diving helmet and mates her with a common cockroach, naming the hybrid species for himself and for the Greek god of fire: Parmitera hephaestus. First the bugs destroy their parent, the last of the firebugs; then they reveal themselves to be carnivores, eating only raw meat, and only as a group; then they show themselves capable of communication with Parmiter by arranging their bodies on the wall so as to spell out words; then they are once again no different in appearance or behavior from their mother, eating carbon and making fire; and finally they prove capable of tactical organization, flight, and divination, luring Parmiter to his Promethean doom in the fault through which their forebugs entered the world. Both they and the good doctor sink into the earth, and the fault seals up again.