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Review by Ben Bussey

You know what they say – location, location, location. There is a lot to be said for picking the right place to shoot your film, especially when money is in short supply. Find somewhere suitably picturesque, unspoiled, and – if possible – relatively unfamiliar, and that’s half your job done for you. It would seem this was what Dark Nature’s producer/director Marc de Launay was counting on. His story (from screenwriter Eddie Harrison) revolves around an unhappy family’s venture into the highlands of Scotland, which turns from a domestic nightmare to a fight for survival. Naturally this necissitates filming in some very pretty places, and de Launay’s camera is keen to let the viewer soak up that natural beauty, and the sense of isolation and exposure that invariably accompanies this. Potential for an atmospheric and evocative bit of horror, then.

Just a thought, though… it wouldn’t hurt to have a bit of a story to tell. And/or interesting characters. And/or charismatic actors. And/or just a smidgen of energy.

Let’s not beat about the proverbial and in this instance aesthetically pleasing bush… Dark Nature is totally, utterly, mind-numbingly boring. 75 minutes of pure tedium with absolutely no sense of reward, even for such a comparatively small investment of time. Heard the recent controversy about The Hobbit in 48FPS HFR; how it often makes character movements seem unnaturally fast? Well, Dark Nature seems to suffer from precisely the opposite affliction. Even at only an hour and a quarter of screentime, it’s such uneventful, painfully slow viewing with so little of interest to offer the viewer that you’ll be begging for it to end within fifteen minutes at least.

Now that I’ve said that, it’s hard to find a great deal else to say. In fairness, there’s nothing inherently wrong with de Launay’s atmosphere over narrative approach, but that kind of minimalism is only going to work if there’s sufficient chemistry between the cast, but there’s simply none here: Imogen Turner and Vanya Eadie utterly fail to convince as the squabbling mother and daughter at the centre of the action, nor does any other player come off as anything but forced and unnatural. The vague hints of ecological theme were done better by Long Weekend, the blend of horror and domestic drama in a picturesque setting was done better by The Children, and everything else was done better by innumerable backwoods horror films.

Yeah… I don’t usually like to be this brief but this film really isn’t worth dwelling on. Dark Nature is an absolute waste of time, so don’t waste yours with it.

Dark Nature is out on Region 2 DVD from 31st December 2012, from Matchbox Films.

Review by Kit Rathenar

Ah, the magic of Christmas. Trees, lights, cake, presents, carols, peace, goodwill, man dressed as Father Christmas going around killing people…

Wait, run that last one by me again? Oh, okay – that would be the premise of one-off director Lewis Jackson’s indie cult classic Christmas Evil, originally released in 1980 as “You Better Watch Out”. Harry Stradling is a toymaker, a disillusioned man working in a depressing factory, surrounded by bullying colleagues, greedy bosses, and an entirely more successful younger brother who sees him as a failure. He’s also never recovered from the childhood trauma of finding out that Father Christmas doesn’t exist, and in response to this has dedicated his life to understudying Saint Nick. He makes toys at home for the local kids – and even spends his time spying on them to see who’s being naughty or nice, just to make sure he gets it right. I’m sure in a modern movie the image of a man peering through a bunch of kids’ windows with a pair of binoculars would send the viewer off expecting a different kind of horror entirely, but since this was 1980, it’s not what you might think. Harry may not be entirely in touch with reality, but he really does seem to care about the children he watches over, and would never do anything worse than leaving a sack of coal on someone’s doorstep.

At least, not until one Christmas, under the pressure of a promotion at work that he didn’t want and a new executive who’s put together a “charity” drive to give toys to a local children’s hospital as a purely PR exercise, Harry snaps. Finally going all-out, he robs his own workplace of enough toys to sink a battleship, dons his home-made Santa costume and heads out across town to spread cheer and goodwill. Harry is going to make Christmas special this year if it kills him… or indeed, everyone else.

This film has its faults. It’s slow and somewhat incoherent at times, certainly in the first half; the acting is very much eighties B-movie standard for the most part; and it handwaves a lot of awkward practical issues (if you like nitpicking for plot holes and “wait, how did that happen?” moments you’ll have a field day with this one). But once it picks up its pace and finds its feet, it… well, begins to look a lot like Christmas, actually. Christmas Evil draws a lot of its imagery and feel from the mainstream tradition of Christmas movies, and once you realise that it’s deliberately meant to be a skewed reflection of that genre, it’s a lot easier to enjoy. I loved that there are scenes in here which are genuinely heartwarming, such as when Harry manages to pull off his mission and ends up delivering an entire van of presents to the children’s hospital, or gets to dance at a party when he’s watching through the window and is dragged inside to join the fun. These could have come straight out of any Christmas classic you care to name.

But of course, not everyone appreciates the spirit of Christmas, and these Scrooges are the ones who end up dying. The actual body count in this film isn’t all that high however, certainly not by modern standards, and the killings are surreal but not especially gory. What’s going to stay with me about Christmas Evil is the more subtle vein of the genuinely macabre that runs through it; the implications it manages to make about kids, grownups, innocence, right and wrong, and how people are capable of committing terrible acts without even thinking about what they’re doing. Sure, intellectually I may wonder how a group of citizens in New Jersey managed to find flaming torches, let alone why they actually needed them given the electric lights, but the image of Father Christmas being chased down an alley by a torch-wielding mob is one that’s going to stick with me nonetheless. You don’t realise how strongly certain ideas are entrenched in your subconscious until someone starts subverting them, and that’s where Christmas Evil comes into its own.

Well, that and the humour, which ranges from the pitch-black to the possibly purely accidental and even struck the odd chord right the way back to my childhood. Ever been one of those precocious (and probably naughty) children who used to wonder HOW Father Christmas gets down the chimney, and what would happen if he got stuck? Lewis Jackson obviously was too, and I can only thank him for finally clearing that one up for me. Add to all this an ending that’s simultaneously utterly nonsensical and absolutely perfect, and you’ve got Christmas Evil – a strange, flawed, yet oddly inspired little film. I’d pitch this strictly to those of you who – like me – still secretly love Christmas, but like the idea of seeing it played something other than straight for a change.

Arrow Video’s Region 0 DVD of Christmas Evil is available now. You might also like to read Marc’s interview with Lewis Jackson from last December.

Review by Ben Bussey

Yes, Roger Corman’s still alive. No, he has not yet tired of lending his name to half-brained SyFy Channel films with a concept surely concieved over beers in a titty bar, scribbled down on a napkin, accidentally slipped into a stripper’s thong, then hastily retrieved before being rushed to American World Pictures HQ. So what this time, eh? We’ve had Sharktopus, Dinoshark, Dinocroc vs. Supergator; so now what silly title can we come up with that provides an excuse for a poorly rendered CG beastie to wreak havoc in an off-season holiday destination? What’s that you say? Half snake half killer fish? Well alright, greenlit. I’m sorry, what? It’s not really half-fish, more just a big bastard snake with big teeth? Ah, who gives a shit, still greenlit.

But believe it or not, there might be a tiny, tiny bit more to Piranhaconda than you might initially think. You see, this isn’t just a people versus giant killer snake movie; it’s a B-movie crew versus gun-toting kidnappers versus giant killer snake. All the difference, wouldn’t you say?

So here’s how it breaks down. A typically ragtag, mismatched bunch of low budget filmmakers – including would-be scream queen Kimmy (Shandi Finnessey), charming heroic stunt guy Jack (Ribb Hillis) and script supervisor/’tattoo final girl on my forehead’ Rose (Terri Ivens) – are shooting a shitty sequel to a shitty slasher movie which, for some unexplained reason, is being shot in Hawaii. Yeah, because the first thing any underpriced hack-’em-up flick does is up sticks for exotic faraway locations. Girls will accept money to take their tops off and let you spray fake blood on them in any arse-end of nowhere town, you know. Anyway, they think they’ve got problems when their funding gets cut and they’re forced to abandon the shoot – but of course, they’re wrong. First off, they have to deal with the aforementioned gang of kidnappers – who, again for no apparent reason, count among their number the Artist formerly known as Mrs Rod Stewart/Stacey’s Mom, AKA Rachel Hunter – who hope to get a hefty ransom from the studio. And then, of course, there’s the big fuck-off man-eating snake. And who should be on the trail of the fucker but Michael bastard Madsen. If you can’t quite believe he’s in this film, he’s right there with you. Ours is not to question.

These AWP/SyFy productions are always infuriating for the simple reason that they’re made specifically for SyFy, which means minimal gore, little to no swearing, and absolutely no nudity. This really does not compute when the guy behind the camera is Jim Wynorski, a director who got his start with Corman a good three decades ago on the near-legendary Chopping Mall, yet – unlike Coppolla, Scorcese, Demme et al – is still one of Corman’s go-to guys in 2012. The thing is, up to this point Wynorski’s monumental filmography (90+ under various aliases – the American Franco, anyone?) has been pretty much defined by two things, and lots of them. Yes, I’m talking about bazoomas, melons, jugs, sweater puppies, fun bags, love muffins, tig ol’ bitties, Danny DeVitos (that one has haunted me since Eli Roth used it in Piranha 3D). So we see the problem. By all rights Piranhaconda should be as resplendent with bountiful boobage as, say, Dinosaur Island or his Bare Wench Project series (okay, I haven’t actually seen the latter but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume it’s got a lot of tits in it), but those pesky TV guidelines forbid it. Ever hear the classic Bill Hicks routine about hotel porno movies with the pornography cut out of it…?

Well, it may be somewhat neutered, but Wynorski’s grubby fingerprints are still much in evidence. By comparison with plenty of the more recent SyFy monster flicks, we have a great more top-heavy actresses here clad either in bikini tops or low cut and invariably wet vests, all filmed in a typically voyeuristic fashion. Presumably it’s the only reason Rachel Hunter’s there, as she sure as shit doesn’t serve much narrative function or bring much else to the table as an actress. And the director knows exactly what he’s doing when Terri Ivens stumbles into the giant snake’s nest, and finds her torso coated in some thick, transluscent sticky stuff. Brings to mind that moment in Eight Legged Freaks, when a giant spider pounces on a towel clad Scarlet Johannson and sprays her down with distinctly white and sticky webbing. Now what might that be supposed to resemble, I wonder?

Doubtless there’s also more to be said on how the monstrous antagonist obviously looks like a gargantuan penis, but I think we get the general idea. Anyway, we might be in slight danger of reading too much into a really, really silly film with spectacularly sub-par CGI, extraordinarily lazy cinematography and editing, and locations which are clearly nowhere near as warm and sunny as the filmmakers would have us believe. Also high on the list of SyFy crimes against monster movies are the death scenes; they obviously can’t be especially graphic, but do they really have to be so fucking repetitive? Seriously, every single death is practically identical: Piranhaconda pounces forward, human disappears in cloud of red mist, and their shoes go tumbling. Whilst the film has yet to go by the BBFC, a 15 certificate is predicted; in no way is this warranted, particularly in a country where Jaws is rated 12.

But at this point, pretty much all of this goes without saying. No one expects intelligence, depth and interesting characterisation in movies like this. It’s 85 minutes of unchallenging silliness, and really, for what it is it’s perfectly good fun. The cast are likeable, the dialogue is agreeably dumb, the psychobilly theme tune is reasonably toe-tapping, and you’ll forget about most of it within minutes of the end. Yeah, it’s crap, but it’s not crap crap. And anyway you look at it, it’s still better than Piranha 3DD.

Piranhaconda is released to Region 2 DVD on 7th January, from Chelsea Films.

Review by Annie Riordan

There wasn’t no innernet way back when I was a stupid teenage girl in the long ago 1980s. Back then, if you wanted to meet one o’ them seckshul predators, you had to get on a bus and go all the way to the mall! Why I can’t even tell you how many times I went out walking with my friends – uphill, both ways, barefoot, in ten feet of snow – and not one single serial killer tried to lure us into his windowless van with the offer of illicit candy. Goddamned kids have it so easy nowadays with their chat rooms and their Wifi’s and their 4chans and stuff.

For the first hour of its runtime, “Megan Is Missing” is a spectacularly stupid chronicle of the lives of two Hollywood teenagers. Megan – she of the ominous title – is the popular slut whose mother hates her and whose dark past of molestations committed by stepfathers and camp counselors alike drives her to be ever more promiscuous, attending parties where she drinks too much, smokes too much (without actually inhaling) and blows any popped-collared douchecanoe who snaps his fingers. Her best friend Amy is her utter antithesis; sweet, virginal, plain, unpopular, still called “Princess” by her doting daddy. The inexplicable bond between these two seems to stem from their bottomless low self esteems, a thick glue of worthlessness that holds them together more powerfully than 3M Scotch Weld.

Megan’s life is at an all-time low when, lo and behold, a new guy pops up just in time to make her feel pretty and special. His name is Josh. He hangs out online a lot but, goshdarnit, his webcam is conveniently broken so Megan can’t see what he looks like. He sounds super cool though and he’s really nice, so Megan agrees to meet him behind a slummy diner in about 20 minutes. Sounds totally legit, right? When Megan fails to show up for school the next day, Amy knows that something is terribly wrong. No one else seems too concerned, until the one day turns into several, and then the days turn into weeks. The MISSING fliers go up. The local news is all over the story like flies on shit. Security cam footage turns up, showing Megan being led away from the diner by a strange man. But Megan herself has disappeared without a trace.

Amy has an idea about what may have happened and stupidly logs online looking for Josh, and finds him…or has he found her? The cool, sweet veneer is gone: Josh is a sick fuck, and while he doesn’t admit to having taken Megan, he assures Amy that the same thing – or worse – can happen to her if she doesn’t keep her big fucking mouth shut. Wisely, Amy reports this to the police. Not so wisely, she wanders around the lonely hills and wooded areas of LA by herself. Apparently, the scene in which Amy’s short term memory is surgically removed from her brain was cut from the film’s final reels. It’s the only thing I can think of that would explain Amy’s fucking idiocy in wandering off alone after having been told by a faceless psychopath that he is constantly watching her.

Amy disappears, but unlike Megan, we know who has her and exactly what’s happening to her, because the final 20+ minutes of film is an excruciating video diary which reveals – in sickening detail – Amy’s harrowing ordeal. What started out as a slightly racy (and, quite often, badly acted) After School Special about the tragic results of Stranger Danger, veers right the fuck off the road and slams headfirst into torture porn land. If Audition and Hostel had a baby, and aborted it, and then sewed its corpse onto the ass end of an episode of 90210, it might look a lot like this movie. It’s a filthy, grimy, ugly surprise at the bottom of a moldy box of cereal. I’ve seen worse – Jin Won Kim’s “The Butcher” and “The Poughkeepsie Tapes” come to mind – but this is pretty fucking unpleasant. Rolled in sugar and spice, then deep fried in diarrhea. Okay, I think I’ve exhausted the gross metaphors for now – you get the idea.

This film claims to be based on a true story, although I have yet to learn what that true story is. Sadly, there’s too many true stories to which this movie can be compared: Polly Klaas, Amber Hagerman, Adam Walsh, etc. Maybe I’m better off not knowing. As a cautionary tale, “Megan Is Missing” is both stereotypically shallow and graphically extreme, giving us the Grimm Fairy Tale version of online predator danger: completely devoid of common logic and parental supervision, then wallowing in the unsanitized, unDisneyfied world of the real Grimm’s tales, where nothing ends happily and no one – no matter their intentions – escapes the monster.

Bleak and depressing. Let your teenage daughter watch it at her next slumber party if you can’t be bothered to supervise her online habits. The bills for her psychotherapy will be astronomical, but I can guarantee you: she will never leave the house again.

Megan is Missing is available now on Region 1 DVD and VOD from Anchor Bay.

Review by Annie Riordan

So, on Saturday morning, having nothing better to do, I stripped completely naked except for a pink tutu, popped a handful of NoDoz and washed it down with a bottle of Nyquil, lowered the disco ball, tuned into the All Calliope All the Time radio station, ran a YouTube recording of a Russian exorcism on a loop, filled my bath tub with circus peanuts, razor blades and glitter and then rolled around in it for an hour whilst simultaneously butt-chugging peyote steeped in Kool-Aid, poking a rabid baboon with a stick and screaming: “I am the Lizard Queen!” much to my neighbors’ consternation.

Uh, I mean, I watched The Devils Carnival, the latest offering from the weirdos who brought us Repo: The Genetic Opera back in 2008.

Set in the candy colored world of a 1950s that never existed, The Devil’s Carnival begins with the deaths of three young people: John, a grief stricken young father, commits suicide in his dingy bathroom. Miss Merrywood, a petty thief, is gunned down by police in her trailer home following a botched robbery. Tamara, a naive bobbysoxer, has her head blown off by her abusive boyfriend. Before the fact of their deaths can sink in, they find themselves wandering around a seemingly deserted carnival, each with a personally addressed envelope containing a single ticket.

But the carnival is far from deserted. In fact, it’s teeming with the damned souls of Satan’s sideshow, all of them eager for the show to begin. One by one, the players are handpicked for the night’s performances. The Painted Doll (goth chanteuse Emilie Autumn) is chosen to assist John (Sean Patrick Flanery, one half of the Boondock Saints). The handsome juvenile delinquent Scorpion (Marc Senter, the new Crispin Glover) is assigned to Tamara (Jessica Lowndes, MOH: Dance of the Dead). Miss Merrywood (Briana Evigan of S. Darko and Burning Bright) is set upon by the Hobo Clown and the Twin, who tempt her with a diamond the size of a rhino’s hemorrhoid. One by one, they newly dead fall to temptation as they play out three fables by Aesop, unaware of the fact that they are the stars of the show and that this is their last chance to redeem themselves and find eternal peace, or be condemned to an eternity as a bit player in the Devil’s Carnival.

The Devil Himself is the axis around which everything revolves, and he is played convincingly by Terence Zdunich, who – when last we saw him – was singing about little glass vials as Repo’s narrator Graverobber. He is entirely unrecognizable here, buried under prosthetics, horns and face paint that puts Gorgoroth to shame. He turns much of the show over to his supporting cast, but rises up in the film’s final moments to claim what is his with a power ballad entitled “Grace For Sale.”

For yes, this is another musical. A warped, perverted, sinister autopsy of a musical. Everyone gets a turn and everyone does a damn fine job with their assigned songs. Two pieces definitely stand out, however: “Prick! Goes the Scorpion’s Tale” is performed by Emilie Autumn and her amazing voice which moves smoothly up and down like a sultry genie performing a blowjob on its own bejeweled bottle. It’s hard to believe that anything could outshine Autumn’s amazing performance, but “A Penny For A Tale” is an absolute showstopper, performed by the Hobo Clown before an audience of carnies who have gathered to witness Miss Merrywood, now stripped down to a pair of lacy lambchop panties, being whipped repeatedly as she writhes and screams in the sexy red spotlight with a malformed carnie gyrating between her legs. I have been condemned to be a total hetero in this lifetime, but even I can admit that watching pretty Briana Evigan arching her back, sticking her ass in the camera and jiggling her naked-nude-with-no-clothes-on boobs was hot. If you’re NOT inclined to masturbate whilst watching this scene, there’s something wrong with you.

The Devil’s Carnival runs for a mere hour, but it’s a filled-to-bursting hour, like a water balloon filled with whipped cream and blood, stretched beyond the breaking point and about to viciously orgasm all over your lily-white virgin face. It’s relentlessly fun, totally insane and as catchy as an airborne virus. This isn’t a film, it’s a gothic steampunk orgy, batter dipped and deep fried. It’s Tod Browning’s Freaks on acid. And thankfully, this time around, Paris Hilton is nowhere to be seen.

Review by Oliver Longden

Southern Comfort is a re-release of a 1981 survival thriller by Walter Hill, best known for the cult classic The Warriors in which a street gang must fight their way home across a surreal gang-haunted vision of New York. Southern Comfort tells a similar story of violence and struggle. A group of National Guardsmen training in the Louisiana bayou end up in a violent confrontation with the Cajun inhabitants of the swamps. With limited supplies, scarce ammunition and a collection of amateur soldiers with very little skill, the Guardsmen are trapped in a guerilla war with an enemy that knows the terrain, and the business of hunting and killing, better than they ever will.

Southern Comfort works on a number of levels. Firstly it works as a pretty typical ensemble survival thriller. We are presented with a middling sized cast who are violently whittled down over the course of the narrative. The characters are broadly drawn but well acted, with a cast that includes Keith Carradine and Powers Boothe, both of whom would later pop up in HBO’s Deadwood (on which Walter Hill also worked). Southern Comfort has a typical range of characters for the survival genre: the nutter, the coward, the bad guy and the guy who is clearly out of his depth. There are the guys who drive the plot forward through their mistakes and the guys who drive it through their ability to survive, to rise to the occasion. The Cajun bad guys are a mysterious other culture who, despite living in America, are not fully part of it, a species of indigenous alien. There are obvious points of comparison here with the hillbillies of Deliverance, the gang bangers of Assault on Precinct 13 and even the monstrous cannibal family of The Hills Have Eyes. The bayou location provides a plausibly alien environment; the claustrophobia of the sodden trees, the men constantly up to their knees in water, the endless panorama of greys and browns. It’s well shot and Hill expertly ratchets up the tension throughout the film, often exploiting familiarity with the shooting techniques of anticipation to raise the stakes in long, knuckle-biting sequences filled with the growing expectation of sudden violence. The music is excellent too: legendary slide guitarist Ry Cooder provides a fantastic score, and the final scenes make heavy use of Louisiana folk music to embody the unique Cajun culture of the bayou. Taken on a superficial level though, Southern Comfort is still a standard, if expertly put-together genre piece mostly notable for having an unusual and soggy setting that must have been an absolute nightmare for both cast and crew.

The film is about more than simple horror though. It can also be seen as a powerful commentary on war; the Vietnam war at the time, but equally applicable to the Iraq war and other conflicts. The actions of the National Guard patrol in microcosm reflect the actions and attitudes of the whole US military in macrocosm. The Guardsmen are arrogant, careless of the feelings of the Cajun residents, stealing their supplies and generally strolling round like they own the place. As the conflict escalates the soldiers find themselves increasingly out of their depth in the strange, surreal world of the swamps. The point is that they simply don’t understand what is going on, they don’t understand the swamps and they don’t understand the people who live there. Crucially they don’t understand how underskilled they are in this strange environment, and they never fully grasp that their arrogance is completely unjustified. There are links here with films like Black Hawk Down that chronicle some of the more abject failures of the American military abroad, but the parallels might be equally applicable to great British military failures like the Boer War and the disastrous Cadiz Expedition of 1625. Unwarranted military self-confidence has always been a widespread failing. This rich seam of historical commentary elevates Southern Comfort above its genre trappings and turns it into something rather more intriguing.

This re-release adds a 45 minute interview with Hill in which he talks about the making of Southern Comfort, the cast, crew and the social context in which it was made. He fills in some information on the National Guard that helps establish the organisation for non-US viewers. Interestingly Hill rejects the notion that Southern Comfort was designed to be seen exclusively as a metaphor for the Vietnam war and suggests that this is merely one interpretation. He goes on to suggest that the film can also be seen as a Western transposed to a new setting. The interview illuminates the filmmaking process and provides a fascinating insight into the way Hill sees the world. It’s well worth watching and is definitely one of the better DVD extras I’ve seen as Hill goes out of his way to be meticulous in his reminiscences and provide wider contexts for all aspects of the film.

Southern Comfort comes highly recommended, particularly to fans of survival horror and action thrillers who are sick of zombies and mutants and like their murder to come seasoned with a healthy dash of social comment.

Southern Comfort is out on Region 2 DVD and Blu-Ray on 26th November, from Second Sight Films.