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Good morning film fiends! Feast your eyeballs on the triple whammy of trashy cinematic greatness I’ve served up below and  wile away those Monday morning blues on the grey drudgery of the morning commute. Rejoice I say and remember it’s just another five days till the weekend…

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This October, you’re not even safe on the Sofa!
From filmmaker Bernardo Rao, comes the most ridiculously entertaining horror jaunt of the year, KILLER SOFA on DVD and Digital from High Octane Pictures.
ELECTRIC DREAMS meets CHRISTINE in the heart-warmingly horrific chronicle of a killer Lazy Boy that falls in love with a girl – and the bloody carnage that follows as a result!
Francesca always attracted weirdos. When one of her stalkers is found dead, she looks for comfort from her best friend, Maxi. Meanwhile, Maxi’s grandfather, Jack, a disgraced Rabbi, comes across a reclining chair containing a Dybbuk inside. Jack and his voodoo sorceress partner try to find out where the recliner has been delivered while exploring Jack’s newfound gift for communicating with the other world. Meanwhile the reclining chair becomes enchanted by Francesca and starts committing crimes of passion.
Jed Brophy (THE HOBBIT), Sarah Munn, Stacy King, and Harley Neville star in a horror treat straight out of New Zealand, available October

 

The book opens on Krisstian de Lara’s spine-tingling Investigation 13 with Uncork’d Entertainment announcing a digital and DVD release for September 10.
Screen icon Meg Foster (LORDS OF SALEM, THE STEPFATHER 2, THEY LIVE) stars in director Krisstian de Lara’s mesmerizingly unnerving INVESTIGATION 13, premiering on digital and DVD this September from Uncork’d Entertainment.

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Incorporating traditional narrative story-telling, as well as numerous forms of pioneering technology, including found footage, hand-held cameras, surveillance cameras, and smart glasses, INVESTIGATION 13 is a new-age fright-fest chronicling the tale of a group of college science students investigating the urban legend of The Mole Man, an ex-patient said to still be residing within the walls of the Black Grove Asylum. When members of the group start missing, they soon learn that this myth is more real than they thought, making this 13th investigation one they will come to regret.
From Gorilla Studios, INVESTIGATION 13 also stars Stephanie Hernandez, Patrick Flanagan, Robert Paget, William Alexander, Giordan Diaz, Jesse Ramos and Peter Aratari as ‘The Mole Man’.
Clay Smith wrote the original screenplay, Rolando Vinas and de Lara wrote the most recent version.
INVESTIGATION 13 On VOD and DVD September 10 from Uncork’d Entertainment.

 

New artwork and a trailer have been released for ONCE UPON A TIME IN DEADWOOD, the new revenge western feature starring Robert Bronzi (recent hit DEATH KISS) and Michael Pare (STREETS OF FIRE) that comes out October 1st in the U.S.
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ONCE UPON A TIME IN DEADWOOD concerns a notorious gunslinger who is slipped a slow-acting poison by an heiress and told he has three days to track down and rescue her sister, who has been kidnapped by a band of hoodlums and holds the antidote.  Rene Perez directs from his screenplay, with Jeff Miller (THE TOYBOX) also contributing.
Bronzi plays the gunslinger.  Pare plays the main villain.  The cast is rounded out with Karin Brauns (PLAYING WITH DOLLS series), Lauren Compton (CLOWNTOWN), actor-model Chris Matteis, J.D. Angstadt, Jose Varela Garcia, Justin Hawkins, Tony Jackson, and Sierra Sherbundy.
The movie was filmed in California as well as in Western Leone, near Almeria, Spain, site of much of the filming of the famous Sergio Leone/Charles Bronson western ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST.
Miller (who produced the recent DEATH KISS, which Perez directed, as well as the recent thriller  THE RUSSIAN BRIDE) is producing with Ronnie D. Lee (THE TOYBOX, OUIJA HOUSE) through their companies Millman Productions and Ron Lee Productions, respectively.
“If you liked DEATH KISS, you’ll love Bronzi again delivering his brand of justice,” says Miller.   “We filmed at recognizable locations where Bronson stood 50 years ago on the classic ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, and I can’t wait for fans to check out this latest chapter in our series of films with Bronzi.”
ONCE UPON A TIME IN DEADWOOD comes out in the U.S. on October 1st on digital and on November 19th on dvd.  Uncork’d Entertainment is handling distribution in North America and international sales.
For more information and updates, please visit the film’s Facebook page at www.facebook.com/onceuponatimeindeadwood

Festival News

With this year’s FrightFest now passed, there are two more annual UK film festivals for horror hounds and cult movie mavens to make a beeline for – Grimmfest 2019 in Manchester, and Mayhem in sunny old Nottingham town.

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Grimmfest 2020 has already announced it’s line up for this year’s event with one of the highlights been the announcement that the Soska Sisters will be attending showcasing their reimagining of the 70’s lo-fi Cronenberg classic RABID. Other flicks lined up include SHE NEVER DIED, director Audrey Cummings female centric follow up to the 2015 Henry Rollins vehicle HE NEVER DIED, Australian WWII set creature feature BLOOD VESSEL and outrageous splatter-satire, SATANIC PANIC, from first-time director, Chelsea Stardust and Fangoria Films and loads more. Horror icon and all round great lady Barbara Crampton heads the jury with 14 awards including BEST FEATURE FILM, BEST SHORT FILM, BEST DIRECTOR, BEST SFX and BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY, up for grabs with prizes that include over £120,000 worth of post – production support.
For more information on this great festival visit http://grimmfest.com/grimmupnorth/2019/09/grimmfest-2019-schedule/

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As well as continuing to make much hay out of its association with medieval armed robbery, Nottingham is also home to The Broadway cinema which hosts the annual Mayhem Film Festival every October. Billed as a showcase for the best features and short films in horror, sci-fi and cult cinema, through premieres, previews, and special events, this year sees HARDWARE director Richard Stanley’s HP Lovecraft adaptation COLOR OUT OF SPACE, nightmarish sci-fi VIVARIUM starring Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots (CENTURION), haunted house thriller  GIRL ON THE THIRD FLOOR and twisted suspense thrillers DOOR LOCK and COME TO DADDY.
Two classocs dusted down and brought out of the archive are Nicolas Cage’s VAMPIRE’S KISS and the crinminally underrated late VHS era classic THE HIDDEN.
For more information on this joyful celebration of everything cinematically weird and horrific visit
http://www.mayhemfilmfestival.com/news/2019/09/mayhem-film-festival-reveals-full-line-up-for-2019-edition

On a final note –  to any aspiring independent filmmakers, podcasters or film related writers out there out there reading this, let me know if you’d like me to publicize and/or review your projects, The Stricken Land is always happy to promote new talent and ideas! And as ever, please feel free to share this post and any others on here that you like, far and wide.

Spread the Word!
Ian

 

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The Hatred (2017) US Dir: John Law
Zelda Adams, John Law, Lulu Adams

In civil war era Blackfoot territory, a band of confederate soldiers massacre the family of a young girl (Zelda Adams) and lynch one of their own number (Law) to conserve their meagre supply of food.
Swearing vengeance, the girl conjures the dead soldier back to life and begins to exact a grisly revenge against his former comrades.

Told mainly in flashbacks, this uncompromisingly bleak gothic revenge western is a micro budget indie that looks like a big studio picture. Filmed using only natural light in the snowbound Catskill mountains of New York State, writer director and star John Law conjures a strange dream like atmosphere for his movie, and has delivered a bloody and brutal work of art. Utilising the simple well worn revenge plot of countless westerns the efficient deftly written screenplay lays bare the fallen nature of the human condition, and how easy it is for men to revert to savagery when freed of the constraints of civilised society.

Fans of Corbucci’s similarly snowbound masterpiece THE GREAT SILENCE will find much to enjoy here as will fans of revenge horror and the gothic western sub genre. And it has one of the most superbly terrifying climaxes I’ve seen in any recent fun. Highly recommended.

THE HATRED is currently available to buy and stream from Amazon Prime.

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Kurt Russell? Check. Old West setting? Check. Cannibal troglodyte mountain men? Check.

Well, you had me at hello. A Sunday afternoon trip to favoured cinephile haunt the Broadway with my old partner in crime Alan saw pair of us spend an enjoyable couple of hours viewing this under the radar mash up of two of our favourite genres, namely the western and horror. As you might have guessed from my opener, I’m a bit of a sucker for anything with Kurt in (Overboard and Captain Ron are great films, and I’ll take issue with any man who says otherwise.) Apart from that other little Tarantino flick he’s just knocked out, the last film where The Russell has sported such impressive facial hair was the stone cold 90’s classic Tombstone. Clearly I was in for a treat.

I wasn’t disappointed. Okay, the film does have some flaws (a bit more tension in places wouldn’t have gone amiss, along with a ramping up of the grand guignol splatter element), but these are minor quibbles in what turns out to be a solid and respectable, if not quite a classic effort from director S. Craig Zyler.

The opening prologue sees a welcome cameo by genre stalwart Sid Haig, playing drifter Buddy, cutting throats and stealing from a bunch of napping cowhands along with his ne’er do well partner Purvis (a seedy David Arquette). Sure enough they soon stumble into a weird burial ground where natural justice is inevitably soon dispensed, with Buddy quickly dispatched with an arrow to the throat followed by disembowelling by a shadowy assailant, and the terrified Purvis making a desperate run for it.

Cut to the frontier town of Bright Hope where a drunken and nervy Purvis is confronted by Sherriff Hunt (Russell) and town troubleshooter and ladies man Brooder (Lost’s Matthew Fox). Shot in the leg trying to escape, Purvis is quickly thrown into jail where Hunt calls on the services of town doctor Samantha O’Dwyer (True Detective’s Lili Simmons) to patch up the miscreant.

Sure enough Buddy’s mysterious killers have followed Purvis to Bright Hope where they wreak some bloody mayhem before abducting Samantha, Purvis and Deputy Sheriff Nick (Evan Jonigkeit). Examining an arrow left behind by the attackers, token Native American Chief Ominous Exposition informs Hunt and Samantha’s distraught husband Arthur O’Dwyer (the excellent Patrick Wilson) that it belongs to a band of ‘trogodytes’, a tribe of devolved cannibal savages, who dwell in the ‘Valley of the Starving Men’ (how did the US Cavalry miss this lot?). Sheriff Hunt and O’Dwyer decide to form a posse with Brooder and back up deputy and comic relief Chicory (Richard Jenkins) to rescue the captives.

From this point the film enters into The Searchers meets The Hills Have Eyes territory where the macho men of the old west most definitely meet their match in the troglodytes (interestingly, their look evokes that of the cannibals in Ruggero Deodato’s infamous 1980 splatter Cannibal Holocaust and its many imitators) and the wilderness itself begins to take on an ever more threatening mileau.

As with a lot of horror flicks, the theme of masculinity in crisis looms large. Arthur O’Dwyer has been rendered lame, his leg broken in the course of a roof repair, and both Hunt and Brooder mine the classic western trope of violent men outliving their time (The Wild Bunch, The Shootist, Unforgiven.) While this serves to give their characters a certain mythic air, this is splendidly punctured later on when the captive Samantha berates Hunt and Chicory on the ‘stupidity of frontier life’ in them allowing her lame husband to accompany them on the rescue mission against a tribe of bloodthirsty cannibals. There’s just no helping some people. One scene of (literally) gut wrenching violence later, and it seems as if the posse’s emasculation is complete (where is Snake Plissken when you need him?).

I won’t give anything more away though, suffice to say it’s not for the squeamish (but then why ever would you come to this blog? Stumbled upon by accident you say? You’ll never leave…), but an interesting and solid attempt to marry together two iconic film genres.

by on

bone-tomahawk-600x888

Kurt Russell? Check. Old West setting? Check. Cannibal troglodyte mountain men? Check.

Well, you had me at hello. A Sunday afternoon trip to favoured cinephile haunt the Broadway with my old partner in crime Alan saw pair of us spend an enjoyable couple of hours viewing this under the radar mash up of two of our favourite genres, namely the western and horror. As you might have guessed from my opener, I’m a bit of a sucker for anything with Kurt in (Overboard and Captain Ron are great films, and I’ll take issue with any man who says otherwise.) Apart from that other little Tarantino flick he’s just knocked out, the last film where The Russell has sported such impressive facial hair was the stone cold 90’s classic Tombstone. Clearly I was in for a treat.

I wasn’t disappointed. Okay, the film does have some flaws (a bit more tension in places wouldn’t have gone amiss, along with a ramping up of the grand guignol splatter element), but these are minor quibbles in what turns out to be a solid and respectable, if not quite a classic effort from director S. Craig Zyler.

The opening prologue sees a welcome cameo by genre stalwart Sid Haig, playing drifter Buddy, cutting throats and stealing from a bunch of napping cowhands along with his ne’er do well partner Purvis (a seedy David Arquette). Sure enough they soon stumble into a weird burial ground where natural justice is inevitably soon dispensed, with Buddy quickly dispatched with an arrow to the throat followed by disembowelling by a shadowy assailant, and the terrified Purvis making a desperate run for it.

Cut to the frontier town of Bright Hope where a drunken and nervy Purvis is confronted by Sherriff Hunt (Russell) and town troubleshooter and ladies man Brooder (Lost’s Matthew Fox). Shot in the leg trying to escape, Purvis is quickly thrown into jail where Hunt calls on the services of town doctor Samantha O’Dwyer (True Detective’s Lili Simmons) to patch up the miscreant.

Sure enough Buddy’s mysterious killers have followed Purvis to Bright Hope where they wreak some bloody mayhem before abducting Samantha, Purvis and Deputy Sheriff Nick (Evan Jonigkeit). Examining an arrow left behind by the attackers, token Native American Chief Ominous Exposition informs Hunt and Samantha’s distraught husband Arthur O’Dwyer (the excellent Patrick Wilson) that it belongs to a band of ‘trogodytes’, a tribe of devolved cannibal savages, who dwell in the ‘Valley of the Starving Men’ (how did the US Cavalry miss this lot?). Sheriff Hunt and O’Dwyer decide to form a posse with Brooder and back up deputy and comic relief Chicory (Richard Jenkins) to rescue the captives.

From this point the film enters into The Searchers meets The Hills Have Eyes territory where the macho men of the old west most definitely meet their match in the troglodytes (interestingly, their look evokes that of the cannibals in Ruggero Deodato’s infamous 1980 splatter Cannibal Holocaust and its many imitators) and the wilderness itself begins to take on an ever more threatening mileau.

As with a lot of horror flicks, the theme of masculinity in crisis looms large. Arthur O’Dwyer has been rendered lame, his leg broken in the course of a roof repair, and both Hunt and Brooder mine the classic western trope of violent men outliving their time (The Wild Bunch, The Shootist, Unforgiven.) While this serves to give their characters a certain mythic air, this is splendidly punctured later on when the captive Samantha berates Hunt and Chicory on the ‘stupidity of frontier life’ in them allowing her lame husband to accompany them on the rescue mission against a tribe of bloodthirsty cannibals. There’s just no helping some people. One scene of (literally) gut wrenching violence later, and it seems as if the posse’s emasculation is complete (where is Snake Plissken when you need him?).

I won’t give anything more away though, suffice to say it’s not for the squeamish (but then why ever would you come to this blog? Stumbled upon by accident you say? You’ll never leave…), but an interesting and solid attempt to marry together two iconic film genres.