Vinegar Syndrome - New Genre Label

i always wonder if these people are as vigilant in their own workspace as they expect others to be

 

10K Bullets reviews Savage Harbor: http://10kbullets.com/reviews/s/savage-harbor-vinegar-syndrome-archive-bluray/

 

LOVED Nightbeast! So much fun! I was kind of expecting something like Bloodsuckers From Outer Space or Invasion Of The Blood Farmers, but this was so much better. It actually reminded me more of The Children in the quaint small town vibe where you have all these quirky locals and the everyman cop who knows them all personally. Also, the pace is way faster. This movie opens with stuff that is usually saved for the third-act of most movies, and it never stops from there. Not to mention the hilarious sex scene that makes Madman and Night Screams look erotic.

Good extras too! I was surprised to see J.J. Abrams interviewed (it was an older interview, probably from mid-'00s). Don Dohler's interview must have been right before his death. He died in 2006, but mentions Alias, Lost, and Mission: Impossible 3.

 

Invasion of the Blood Farmers is a movie I will NEVER see.

The cover art is so lurid and graphic and horrifying, there's no way the movie could actually live up to it. So I'd rather keep the much nastier movie in my imagination rather than watch it and be utterly disappointed. Sort of like the Stephen Wright joke: "I watched a football game with my grandfather. They scored a touchdown, and when they showed the instant replay, he thought they scored again. I was gonna correct him, but I decided the game he was watching was better than the real one"

 

^ You're not wrong

 

Loved it as well. Feels “home movie” like Dohler’s others but super entertaining.

 

10K Bullets reviews Nightbeast: http://10kbullets.com/reviews/n/nightbeast-vinegar-syndrome-bluray-dvd-combo/

 

Quick question. The VS is still closed correct?

 

I believe so. It looks like it's taking a little longer than normal to get their Halfway to Black Friday sale stuff shipped (just visit the Blu Ray.com Forum for proof), and they don't put the site back up till they're finished shipping and doing an inventory.

I got my order a couple of days ago. Haven't watched any yet, but I popped 'em all in for a preview. I really love the work they do on the films they release. It can be tough sometimes, as often the films are really bad, and no amount of restoration can make a bad film good. But you have to respect the effort and appreciation they give all movies, regardless of filmmaking quality. I wish I could afford to get every movie they release, but it's just not in my budget, especially when so many of their releases are of movies that are just so unwatchable. Still, I'd love to see them anyway, at least once.

 

Oh ok. Just wondering. I thought maybe my browser was stuck on some page/cookies. Then that admin password section upper right.

 

June bundle is here (along with today's release of New York Ripper):

 

Apparently, there's a discount code hidden as an Easter Egg on The Corruption of Chris Miller.

 

There's a screen that will allow you to enter a 6 digit code and once you enter it you’ll be told that the code is the discount code and that it can be used through 2019, one time per customer, for $5 off. No idea how to get to it from the menu or how to figure out the code, I just know the code because I cheated to find it. :]

 

Play Dead was, uh, interesting?

It feels like a made-for-TV movie with some brief nudity spliced in (it's a body double according to the actress, not sure about her male counterpart). It's very slow and very tame. Super quaint and melodramatic with a few sparse silly horror moments throughout. This was supposedly made in 1981, but feels like it could have been made a decade earlier. Add a few scenes of Yvonne DeCarlo practicing satantism and you have Play Dead.

Extras are pretty brief. The director interview is maybe 5 minutes and he basically just says "that was 35 years ago and I don't remember". There's an audio interview with the lead actress that is much better, runs maybe 20 minutes? Also includes a trailer.

The reverse cover is pretty wild. This is the artwork they used:

 

Finished up this month's lite offerings with Them aka Hellmaster last night.

This was another, uh, interesting one. It's incredibly '90s. Think a mash-up of Mindripper and Happy Hell Night. Another way to describe it might be Wishmaster 3 directed by Dante Tomaselli. I went for the HD Director's Cut titled Them, but I'd be curious to know what the differences are in the SD straight-to-video cut titled Hellmaster. I'm not ambitious enough to watch it again so soon (and in SD).

The short version of the plot is this. You have a group of college students on a campus (in reality an old insane asylum in Pontiac, MI, it's a great location!). John Saxon rolls onto campus in an old school bus full of his mutated cult followers. John Saxon and his mutant cult attempt to take over the campus, killing off the college students one-by-one. There's much more if you really want to get into it, but it's weird and confusing and somewhat irrelevant.

For the most part, this hit me in the perfect mood because I had a lot of fun with it. It does get a bit repetitive and monotonous towards the end. They probably could have shaved ten minutes off the final act. It's really just a silly "kill the attractive college students" teen horror film, but the villains are genuinely kind of creepy and the movie as a whole is extremely stylish. The score is pretty great too, it plays over the menu. The 2.7 IMDB rating is incredibly harsh, but I imagine they watched the Hellmaster cut I didn't see.

Both versions of the movie include a director's commentary, which I didn't listen to. The best extra here is the 25-ish minute interview with DP Michael Goi. He also shot Moonstalker (his first movie) and has since gone on to work frequently with Ryan Murphy (he's worked on American Horror Story, Glee, Scream Queens, Town That Dreaded Sundown remake, etc). He is also the director of Megan Is Missing. Coolest of all, he's a Vinegar Syndrome annual subscriber (one of us! one of us!). Two photo galleries are also included, as well as some nondescript footage of the location where they shot the movie.

Most horror fans hate '90s horror on principle, so YMMV, but I think the decade was fun and this fits right in with those direct-to-video fright flicks of the early '90s.

 

Anyone else having playback issues with their Mountaintop Motel Massacre Blu? Mine skips around the 57 and 59 minute marks. I tried cleaning the disc to no avail.

 

This has been reported on other forums as well. I haven't gotten around to watching mine yet, but there was a replacement disc included in my July monthly shipping with Play Dead and Hellmaster.

If you contact VS I'm sure they'll send you one.

 

And it's driving me nuts. I cannot find the code! The screen where you would enter it, yes, but not the code.

 

It's a "game" you have to play on the screen. Choose numbers until you get the right ones, and keep track of the correct ones you find...since they'll disappear if you choose an incorrect number on one of the slots.

 

I received my replacement already and can report that it works fine now except one of the trailers doesn't have sound now, So hold on to your old one if you care about such things