Home Video
Horror In Your House: The Blood Returns in Valentine Re-Release
Welcome to the January 13th edition of Horror In Your House, which features this week’s horror DVD releases. Besides the unrated version of Alex Aja’s MIRRORS, you’ll be able to pick up Lionsgate’s MY BLOODY VALENTINE, which features all of the deleted scenes that were cut from the film – integrated into the movie! This is a MUST for any horror fan. Read on to see what else hit stores.
Horror in Your House
January 13, 2008
By: Tex Massacre
AMATEUR PORN STAR KILLER 3: THE FINAL CHAPTER: Cinema Epoch
Brandon attacks one last time in this final installment of the AMATEUR PORN STAR KILLER Trilogy. Real-life Porn Star Regan Reese portrays an up-and-coming actress picked up off the streets by the young serial killer. What starts off as a Good Samaritan act quickly turns into a game of cat in mouse in the late night empty fields of a small town where the victim has nobody to turn to except the killer himself.
AMATEUR PORN STAR KILLER 3D: INSIDE THE HEAD: Cinema Epoch
An all-star indie cast heads AMATEUR PORN STAR KILLER 3D: Inside the Head; a satirical look at the APSK films, their success, and a mockery of the internet-frenzy-world today’s youth live in. Brandon has become a worldwide celebrity. Girls want him, guys want to be him, and filmmakers want to tell his story. Little do they know they’ve all made Brandon’s kill list. But Brandon may just be a victim himself when some of his past victims are resurrected from the dead.
BLACKOUT: Image
You’re trapped in the dark elevator of a deserted building with two strangers on a hot August afternoon, with a dire need to be somewhere else. Things couldn’t get any worse…unless one of you is a psychopathic serial killer.
THE BLOODY APE: Wild Eye
This film is the most outrageous, Grindhouse take on Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” ever committed to film. A carnival barker foolishly releases his 400 pound gorilla, who then literally goes bananas on a rampage of raw rape and boffo butchery – leaving the low rent population of Long Island New York either sexually violated, slaughtered – or both! From filmmaker Keith J. Crocker, The Bloody Ape is a gore-soaked love letter to the sex and violence of the drive-in movie era that pulls no punches and offers no apologies for wallowing in a skin-drenched stew of crudeness and camp!
HIT AND RUN: MGM/Fox
A night of Spring Break partying turns into a living nightmare for student Mary Murdock after she hits a bump on a dark road and returns home to find a man dangling from her car’s bumper. When he grabs her as she approaches to help, Mary frantically hits him until his bloody body stops moving. Panicked, she buries him in the secluded woods and returns home to cover her trail. But when it becomes clear that the crazed man is alive and has escaped his grave only for revenge, she stops worrying about evidence and starts worrying about surviving the night. With a vengeful madman following her every move, Mary learns that some accidents are deadly even after they’ve cleared the road.
MIRRORS: Fox
Kiefer Sutherland stars as a security guard who is exposed to unspeakable acts of evil from the past, present and future only visible to him in the reflection of mirrors. Suddenly, his life is exposed to the evil and he must stop it before everyone he knows is dead.
TEX SAYS: Director Alexandre Aja’s signature style is all over this film, but that doesn’t make it any less of a mess–a good looking mess, but still a mess.
MY BLOODY VALENTINE: Lionsgate (TEX’S PICK OF THE WEEK)
Twenty years after a Valentine’s Day tragedy, a small town prepares for its annual holiday dance. When a box of candy arrives containing an eerie warning and a blood-soaked heart, the townsfolk realize that this Valentine’s Day romance is as good as dead…and so are they!
TEX SAYS: So much better than the Paramount DVD that was released in 2002. Sell off your old one, grab this one, and I’ll see you at the theater on Friday for the remake!!!
TOKYO GORE POLICE: Tokyo Shock/Media Blasters
In the near future, the Tokyo Police Corporation is locked in a bloody war with the “engineers.” These genetically modified super-criminals can bio-fuse their open wounds with weapons, turning self-mutilation into a combat form. Ruka, the daughter of the police chief’s murdered right-hand man, is now the top engineer hunter. With cold-blooded efficiency she cuts through the psychotic engineers and tracks down their home base, a truly bizarre fetish club. Nothing keeps her from her sworn duty, even when she finds out the truth behind her father’s death.
TEX SAYS: It was tough not to make this the Pick of the Week! So, buy a copy anyway…just to make up for it.
YELLOW FANGS: Cinema Epoch
YELLOW FANGS tells the story of a young bear hunter living in the village of Hawk’s Hills, Japan. When Yuki, a young woman recently kicked out of her home, spends the night with him, a giant bear attacks her home, kills her father, her brothers and carries her mother off into the mountains. The bear hunters gather together and go after the beast but he forbids Yuki to follow. Undaunted, Yuki disguises herself as a boy and goes after “Red Spot” herself.
YETI: Genius
A college football team must find a way to survive after their plane crashes on a remote mountain during a blizzard. What starts as a battle against the elements becomes a desperate struggle to escape when they discover an ancient creature with a ravenous appetite for fresh meat. Will they survive the sub-zero temperatures, only to be eaten by the snow beast that hunts them down?
TEX SAYS: Its ALIVE meets the Abominable Snowman in this latest Maneater film! Come one…you know you want to see it just based on that idea alone.
Night School, director Ken Hughes and writer Ruth Avergon‘s tale of a headhunting slasher on the streets of Boston, arrived in the early Golden Age of the slasher film and never quite broke through the endurance test that other films in the subgenre, like Friday the 13th, managed to pass with flying colors. Blame it on a more cerebral tone, a crowded market, whatever you like, but saying it’s a shame that the film didn’t break through doesn’t begin to cover it.
Night School isn’t just an underrated slasher, or an underseen one. For my money, it’s one of the best films the subgenre has ever produced, full stop, and Vinegar Syndrome’s new 4K UHD restoration, arriving just in time for the film’s 45th anniversary, is must-have proof. Stacked with special features highlighting the craft of the film and its place in slasher history, and headlined by a gorgeous restoration showcasing the wonderfully textured production, this is Night School as it’s meant to be seen for slasher devotees everywhere.
So, what makes the film so effective? It starts very simply, with the revelation that a killer with a very cool knife and a motorcycle helmet as a mask is murdering young women in Boston, taking off their heads, and dropping those heads in the nearest body of water (no matter how small).
Solving the case falls on Judd Austin (Leonard Mann), a detective with an academic background who traces all of the victims in one way or another back to a local night school. There, suspicion falls on a womanizing professor (Drew Snyder) who sleeps around on his research assistant and romantic partner, Eleanor (Rachel Ward), whose own death could be right around the corner.
I’m doing my best to stay as spoiler-free as possible here, not just because I think plenty of slasher fans still need to see Night School, but because the film is quite determined to be a whodunit in the classic Italian giallo sense. The kills are brutal and elaborate, the killer deliberately covered head-to-toe in leather and a gleaming black helmet, the knife and the headhunting a disturbing signature. Avergon’s script is well-versed in the trappings of exactly this kind of story, complete with red herrings galore. And yet, by the time it’s all wrapping up, there’s also the sense that the answer was right there in front of you the entire time, something the very best films by legends like Mario Bava and Dario Argento could also achieve.
But on to the restoration: Like the best of the gialli, Night School is also a beautifully engineered film full of colors and delicate camera compositions and sound design. The opening kill, which takes place on a playground carousel outside of a daycare, is rich in exactly this kind of thing, from the cityscapes that lead into the scene to the sound of a motorcycle slowly rolling forward, its engine already dead. Cinematographer Mark Irwin, best known for his many collaborations with David Cronenberg, paints the film in rich reds, absinthe greens, and haunting, chilled blue-white light on wet Boston streets, all of which are preserved beautifully by the restoration team at work on this one.
It’s a movie that very deliberately evokes a specific place – the aging streets of Boston in the 1980s, and the halls of relatively low-level academia – and then takes that place into haunted territory, saturating every frame with color and shadow that suggests a killer lurking just out of view.
Night School is not a massively gore-heavy film, but it does deliver the slasher goods with a series of tense, often unpredictable kills and body discoveries that range from the darkly comic to the flat-out jaw-dropping. That’s thanks to the sound design, the score, the editing from Robert Reitano, and more, all of which add to the film’s giallo soul.
In every case, the scene’s geography is outstanding, and it’s easy to see where the simplest possible kill shot might land, but the film never goes for the obvious. Throw in a surprisingly (for 1981, anyway) feminist bent to the storytelling and some very progressive moments for an early slasher film, and this one fits right in with Black Christmas and The Slumber Party Massacre as a film with depth you can just keep unpacking.
That depth, helped along by a load of featurettes and two new commentary tracks featuring members of the crew, is what stands out the most in this new 4K set. Night School may be a niche film recognized mostly by horror addicts and the slasher faithful, but it deserves to be something more, a landmark on the roadmap of slasher cinema history. It’s one of the best in the genre, and this restoration highlights, underlines, and shouts that from the rooftops.
Night School is now available in 4K UHD from Vinegar Syndrome.
You must be logged in to post a comment.