Four women have rented the accommodation for what they hope will be a relaxing holiday; what they haven't counted on is that their destination is also a museum to the memory of Bathory, a tour around which they are obliged to suffer courtesy of the enthusiastic landlord/tour guide Martin (Michael Geary), under the watchful eye of a painting of the Countess herself. Also on the tour are a bunch of already pissed lads on a stag weekend who have, supposedly, double booked the rental. While the lads agree to stay in another local house, the girls elect to remain at the Bathory residence where, left to their own devices, they inadvertently - through the death of one of their number, Ambereen (Claudia Gregory) - trigger the resurrection of Elizabeth. Their troubles multiply when they find that they're unable to leave the house; any attempt to escape finds them right back in the room they left, where they team up with the lads and get picked off.
The concept of The Bloodline of Bathory is high; everything else remains pretty low, but by no means unenjoyable. Basically played for laughs (and there's no other way of executing so hokey a setup) within a location that's almost too cramped to contain all of the cast, the first half's overall silliness gives way to a slightly more fraught second, with some pretty good makeup and VFX from the ever resourceful Lumapix Creative Studios, who've brought some icky class to several low budget productions. Many of the cast, including star and producer Natasha Tosini, are regulars of the British Fantastic Film sausage factory, and bring the usual excitable performances you expect from this kind of thing. Overall this has a little more wit than many of its genre stablemates.
So what we have is the Demeter, a space vessel, departing its mission to intercept a distress signal emanating from a seemingly empty ship. Said ship contains a large coffin sized pod which, when brought aboard, disgorges the 'ruler of the damned' himself, Count Dracula (Marcus Massey). The space age crew know not of the infamous vampire, so the Count is free to feed and enslave according to tradition under cover of near darkness, until the captain of the ship, Harker (Charlotte Reidie) works out that it can be controlled by shining UV light at it.
Imagine, if you will, an ultra cheap sci fi horror movie so dark (lighting, not content) as to disguise the fact that it was filmed in an office corridor (possibly Champdog's premises?) with character names taken from Stoker's novel but with the cast having zero knowledge of the vampire myth. Imagine that movie including a 'synth' (android, not keyboard) among its crew (Felipe Chavez) whose chief skill seems to be speaking even slower and more deliberately than the rest of the cast. Imagine a cast that for over two thirds of the movie just sit around talking. Slowly. DiS is jolly hard work by anyone's standards. It's the second Champdog film this year directed by '3 time Emmy Award-winning writer, director, and producer' (it says here) Randolph Jr, although based on this bargain basement cut up of Alien and Dracula 3000 4's a while off.
P:U (say it quickly) may not earn plaudits from newcomers to the JE stable, but those familiar with Scott's back catalogue may conclude that this is his company's best work yet. A fast moving but rather odd mix of comedy, horror, sentimentality and genuinely repulsive makeup effects, Frake-Waterfield (whose previous projects include the first two Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey movies; a third is planned) has appropriated the popular wooden hero of the 19th century novel (and later Walt Disney) and taken it to places that...well, you wouldn't expect.
James (Cameron Bell) is a young boy in the care of his grandfather Geppetto (Richard Brake). James's short life has been an unhappy one, losing his parents and also a friend of his own age, Zach, to cancer. So lonely James is delighted when Geppetto introduces him to Pinocchio, a little boy made out of wood, fully animated and keen to hang out with his maker's grandson. Oh and who looks a bit like Zach.
James takes his wooden friend to school where, contrary to the instructions given by Geppetto, he introduces Pinocchio to his mates. But 'Pin's' own moral and spiritual guidance comes from a witchy soul hanging on the back of a door, the Woods Mother, and a small Cricket, voiced by the Robert Englund. Both remind Pinocchio that in order to be a fully functioning boy, he needs to harvest skin and organs, presumably to replace or upgrade his wooden form. Let the rebuild commence!
The most remarkable thing about the surprisingly confident (and bonkers) P:U is the care with which the effects are rendered. Pinocchio as a creation is a combination of animatronics, puppetry and, despite protestations to the contrary, what looks like a smattering of CGI; it's an effective combination and one that obviously stretched the resources of the team (end credit behind the scenes footage attests to this). Mood wise the film oscillates slightly uneasily between light comedy, YA hi jinx (although with liberal bouts of swearing) and, when Pin gets to do his stuff, some of the most startling and realistic (for the budget) practical gore effects I've seen in quite some time; not for this movie the worn out CGI blood splatter FX common to such low budget productions. Of course the movie doesn't make a lick of sense, and Pin seems able to move around school and hospital alike without being discovered, despite basically being a three foot high ambulatory tree trunk. The somewhat redemptive ending is as tonally weird as the rest of the film, but I didn't care, because I loved it. Like a Full Moon picture realised by Guillermo del Toro, this is hugely daft and very messy fun.
Strap yourselves in for this one. Dr Gerald Antrobus (Tony Stansfield, returning from Squeak) is the manager of a local insane asylum, whose inmates include 120 year old Professor Rex Shepherd (William Fitzgerald, also returning from Head's first feature), a killer of 10 who blames the murders on Spotus, a mouldy demon dog he unearthed while excavating in Little Barking, a small town in Cornwall, along with a farting creature called Miasma.
Antrobus is summoned to the reading of a will belonging to his estranged, now late father, the location being the same Little Barking. Once there, via a spell at a time shifting pub called 'The Loose Stool' (you may detect a certain scatological theme here, and you wouldn't be wrong), he arrives at the home of the executor, General Lord Gordon Waverley (Jonathan Hansler, Bogieville, Frankenstein: Legacy) and his grumpy housekeeper Ms Danvers (Katherine M. Ciani). But there's a snag; the will isn't there. It's hidden in the coffin of his father on Devil's Island, a place guarded by Miasma. And Gerald has to go and retrieve it.
If this sounds to you like a rip roarer, then reader I'm here to disabuse you of that notion; at a bum numbing near two hours, Miasma never roars. Rather, for the first half of the movie at any rate, it crawls. Things aren't helped by having most of the film's first act filmed with static actors against green screen, although things liven up slightly when Cornwall is reached. There is no attempt at pacing here, and Stansfield performs his lines as if he were paid for the gaps between them (actually I'm pretty sure no one got paid). The best thing in this is Ciani as the Yugoslavian housekeeper, whose cloud of depression and much welcome physical comedy seems to have strayed in from another film altogether. Chaps, I'm sure Miasma was a blast to make, but it certainly isn't to sit through; the odd bit of invention aside, it's not as big and clever as it thinks it is.
Six young men are separately invited to dinner at the impressively grand house wherein lives equally sprightly Islay (Silvia Presente); all six think that the invitation is personal, but when they arrive they're knocked out, branded, tied up and sat around a table.
This is clearly no ordinary dinner party. Islay, assisted by her father Edward (Tom Stocker) and mother Camilla (Pippa Winslow) is keen to pick out a suitor and father to her child, and only the fittest shall survive. A prologue suggests that this is not the first time this has been attempted.
Yes this is a setup which gives way to 75 minutes of Saw type games, starting fairly mildly with a quiz (the loser suffering a knife in the leg) and a game of cards. Things swiftly escalate into more cruel eye gouging stuff, as the suitors struggle to a) stay alive and b) outwit their captors.
Lure is pretty harsh; like its inspiration, there's little attempt at (or need for?) characteristation; the chaps are all fairly mercenary sorts, who clearly thought that an invitation to a pretty woman's house meant sex. They are of course swiftly disabused of this (indeed Islay discovers that two of the suitors came armed with condoms), and any hope that the group might escape seems dashed by the fact that an unseen control voice - again Saw like - is in charge of the game.
Cox's movie is well done but pretty inconsequential; I'm not a fan of the hard edit but it could have been useful here, as a largely static camera forces the overwrought score to do all the hard work. I didn't believe a word of it but then I don't think that Cox was aiming for realism here, perhaps more a warning to young men about the objectification of women.
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