PG: Psycho Goreman
4 star(s), 95 minutes, Shudder and Blu-Ray
If you’ve never seen a Steven Kostanski film, I hate to tell you just how much goofy, gory goodness you are missing out on, but that’s the reality.
Kostanski, a longtime member of the Canadian film group Astron-6, has been making killer genre films for 10 years now, but he’s yet to match or exceed his early output (“Manborg” and “Father’s Day”)—until now.
“PG: Psycho Goreman” is one of the goriest, funniest family-friendly films you’re likely to ever see, which is exactly what I believe Kostanski intended. To paraphrase a tired sports analogy, this is his bottom of the ninth, bases loaded grand slam and then some.
“Psycho Goreman” excels not only because of Kostanski’s script, which is razor sharp (more on that in a minute), or his exceptional practical creature effects, but because it’s fully-formed with a rich, detailed backstory for both for its titular alien marauder and his arch-rival Templar angels. Nothing feels forced—not the humor, not the ambitious world-building and not the redemptive arc that finds PG doing his best “T2: Judgment Day” about face in the third act.
“Psycho Goreman” wouldn’t work nearly as well if the two young protagonists, Luke (Owen Myre) and his overbearing sister Mimi (Nita-Josee Hanna), didn’t feel like very real, very unpredictable children who find themselves smack dab in the middle of an intergalactic war.
Mimi, in particular, is an abrasive riot. Imagine Newman from “Seinfeld” spliced with Ferris Bueller and slathered with a healthy smearing of James Spader’s Steff from “Pretty in Pink.” I know, I know. Just trust me, it somehow works. “Psycho Goreman” is essentially “ALF” on a cocaine and Adderall bender, packed with some of the juiciest quotes this side of the Milky Way.
It all starts when Mimi and Luke unearth a glowing orb that once activated frees PG from his prison box (similar to the Phantom Zone in “Superman II”) that was jettisoned to Earth in order to save the universe.
PG, it turns out, was a ruthless warrior who basically wanted to crush his enemies and hear the lamentation of their women. His Achilles heel, though, is the orb, which is called the Gem of Praxidice.
Whoever holds the orb controls PG, and now it’s fixed firmly in Mimi’s grasp. She basically turns PG into her show-and-tell alien puppet, which leads to some inspired back-and-forth dialogue, such as when Mimi and Luke introduce PG to their friend Alasdair (who later is turned into a pink blob).
“It was nice meeting you,” Alasdair says.
“It would be nicer if you were dead,” PG scoffs.
“All right, bye.”
Later on, Mimi chastises PG for taking so long to arrive after she summoned him.
“Time is a false construct that only exists for primitive beings unable to phase into the ninth dimension,” PG explains. “Also, I got lost.”
There’s just no shortage to the joy and glee that fans should feel upon watching “PG: Psycho Goreman.” And, if you don’t already subscribe to the streaming Shudder platform, this is a perfect reason to do just that.
Skull: The Mask
3.5 star(s), 90 minutes, Shudder
The latest exclusive to debut on Shudder’s streaming horror platform is a crazy cool import out of Brazil that plays like a vintage thriller from the 1970s packed with gore galore straight out of the 1980s.
Co-directors/writers Armando Fonseca and Kapel Furman craft a vivid backstory steeped in cultural lore, and then pile on the practical effects, which resemble a mash-up of the DIY wonders first discovered in “Dead Alive” and “The Evil Dead.”
The story pays homage to a host of genres, and includes scenes that feel inspired by everything from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to “Dirty Harry.” The titular skull mask, an ancient relic that allows the spirit of a nearly unstoppable demon to inhabit the body of anyone who gets too close, is wickedly awesome and masterfully realized.
Fonseca and Furman delight viewers with unexpected sequences, such as an incantation spell that transports the woman uttering it to another dimension, a hellscape formed in a different cosmos. “Skull: The Mask” is one of those surprise treats that Shudder excels at introducing subscribers to, and we can’t recommend it enough.
Morgue
3.5 star(s), 81 minutes, streaming, Blu-Ray and DVD
Not many first-time writer-directors would dare try and launch a franchise with their first film, but thankfully Hugo Cardozo failed to read that memo.
Cardozo’s debut, “Morgue,” which hails from Paraguay, is a seriously unnerving slice of paranormal fright that manages to find new and creative ways to bring ghosts to the screen while keeping viewers guessing as to whether the movie’s main character, Diego (Pablo Martinez), is a good guy in the wrong place at the worst time or a nasty SOB who deserves what’s coming.
The set-up is pretty simple: Diego gets called in to work as a security guard at a local hospital, by himself, patrolling the basement passageways, which includes the morgue. The hook is even more simple: The night before the assignment, Diego is driving home when he hits and kills a man. He flees the scene without calling the accident in.
Guess whose body is the only one on a slab in the morgue when he reports for work?
Cardozo does a bang-up job establishing a thick layer of dread that permeates every action that Diego takes while on patrol, whether it’s checking the morgue occasionally or taking a selfie in the breakroom after he’s been issued a handgun.
Even better, Cardozo makes sure to make full use of his entire frame, often allowing objects and shadowy figures to sneak past in the far corner of a shot, quick enough to almost be missed but your eye still catches enough to send a chill through your chest.
By the point “Morgue” hits its full-blown, haunted house apex, Diego is fighting off handfuls of angry meat sacks that moan and wail as they shamble toward him, trying to pin him down in a corner.
The ghosts are very well done and impressive, similar in style to other paranormal thrillers but still unique enough to deserve kudos.
As for the franchise launch, stick around through the early credits to see what I mean. If Cardozo has more stories to tell in the same vein, I would definitely be up for a return trip to the morgue.
The Djinn
3 star(s), 82 minutes, streaming
There have been a lot of movies to focus on the jinn, or Djinn, a supernatural creature found in both Arabian and Islamic mythology, but David Charbonier and Justin Powell’s “The Djinn” stands out both for its impressive visual style and its heartbreaking plot, which focuses on a young mute boy who longs to be able to speak. This one might surprise you.
Grizzly and Day of the Animals
3 star(s), Streaming, Blu-Ray and DVD
There’s nothing like a double blast of nostalgia, especially when it comes courtesy of acclaimed shock director William Girdler and his trusty leading man, Christopher George.
Severin Films has wisely dusted off two of their best man-versus-nature epics, 1976’s “Grizzly,” which unapologetically plagiarizes its entire narrative from “Jaws,” and 1977’s hokey but prescient environmental disaster thriller, “Day of the Animals.”
Neither movie is great, and they're both packed with all the political incorrectness that we now expect when revisiting a film from the 1970s, but each possesses a spirit of purpose that’s sorely lacking in many horror films today.
"Day of the Animals," in particular, also represents what many might consider the dizzying heights or crushing lows of what I call “Love Boat” or “Fantasy Island” cinema, a trend that I first noticed with the annual “Airport” movies, which were later lampooned by “Airplane!” and continued with disaster epics like “The Towering Inferno” and “The Poseidon Adventure.”
Basically, such movies delivered a star-studded cast of well-known and beloved character actors, often playing against type. In “Day of the Animals,” it’s Leslie Nielsen as a misogynistic advertising executive who decides that he is king of the jungle on the exact day that every wild animal decides its open season on human campers. He’s joined by Andrew Stevens, Richard Jaeckel, Christopher George and his wife, Linda Day George, as well as others I was too young then to recognize and now have long forgotten.
“Grizzly” is by far the better overall movie, but there’s something to be said for “Day of the Animals,” which basically pits the remaining cast against rabid stray dogs for its big finale.
Séance
2.5 star(s), 92 minutes, streaming
Simon Barrett has written some of the best genre films to be released in the past 20 years, penning fresh and original takes on ghosts (“Dead Birds”), survival thrillers (“A Horrible Way to Die”), secret military experiment/action mashups (“The Guest”) and gory home invasion thrillers (“You’re Next”).
With “Séance,” his first feature-length film as both writer and director, Barrett tries to combine two disparate genres—the revenge thriller and the paranormal conjuring—into one cohesive and entertaining story set inside an elite all-girls prep school.
The results are decidedly mixed, I’m afraid to say.
“Séance” isn’t bad, per se, but it also doesn’t have the same verve as Barrett’s best work with director Adam Wingard. For once, I found myself paying less attention to the words Barrett had written, if only because I was trying to keep up with his slippery narrative that fails to generate any real connection to the lead heroine, Camille (Suki Waterhouse), who is actually more of an anti-heroine, a la Walter White, than a full-blown social activist, a la Veronica Sawyer, taking out the privileged trash.
In the end, “Séance” fails to match the best of either genre that’s come before. The paranormal stuff isn’t very spooky, and the revenge angle falls short of that critical, satisfying release that accompanies a grand comeuppance.
Hellcats Revenge II: Deadman’s Hand
2.5 star(s), 82 minutes, streaming and DVD
Pssst, I’m going to let you all in on a little secret. We here at BVB have a special place in our pitch black hearts for a particularly salacious subgenre of exploitation cinema, and that would be women’s prison movies.
When I was much younger, this genre was exciting simply for the salacious nature of its existence. It felt taboo, like I was seeing and experiencing something that most "normal" folks wouldn't appreciate and might even gasp in shock and clutch their pearls if they caught a snippet of such a film on late-night after-hours cable. As I matured, and my knowledge of film expanded, I came to realize that much like blaxploitation and even lesser known and far more extreme genres, such cinema served a purpose by shining a light on characters, situations and controversial subject matter that rarely found a showcase in mainstream movies. Women's prison movies were over-the-top and often garnered attention for focusing too much on the puerile elements, but they still featured predominantly female casts and told female-centric stories in a way that other genres did not, especially during the 1970s and 1980s.
From “Caged Heat” to “The Lost Empire” to what I consider the all-time best, 1986’s “Bad Girls Dormitory,” women’s prison movies have existed for decades to titillate fans with unnecessary and gratuitous nudity, extreme catfights, ridiculously evil wardens and guards and even more evil female inmates.
It’s been forever since I’ve seen a truly awesome movie in this arena, and I had high hopes that “Hellcat’s Revenge II: Deadman’s Hand” would arrive to slake the void, even though I failed to catch Len Kabasinski’s original when it was released in 2017.
For the sequel, Kabasinski sticks with the same tough-as-nails, voluptuous femme fatale, Kat (Lisa Neeld), who finds herself blamed for a brutal murder and left to fend for herself in a lawless prison hellscape. Kat’s mission is to fight her way out from behind bars in order to seek and destroy the vicious girl-gang leader who framed her.
Kabasinski’s approach to filmmaking is to act like he’s directing a huge Hollywood action flick circa 1989 (think “Tango and Cash”), which is appreciated. You can tell how much thought went into certain scenes as far as framing and blocking.
All the ambition in the world can’t make up for average acting, though, or less-than-memorable antagonists, and sadly “Hellcat’s Revenge II” comes off more like an Andy Sidaris knock-off of a James Bond blockbuster than a fully-formed, wholly entertaining piece of stand-alone entertainment.
100 Candles
2 star(s), 100 minutes, streaming and DVD
As horror anthologies go, “100 Candles” delivers some effective short narratives. If only they weren’t trapped inside a less-than-engaging wrap-around story.
Each short film focuses on children in peril, which may be a trigger for some. The practical effects, for the most part, are surprisingly solid. There is at least one surprising cameo that had me reaching for my phone to confirm. And there’s one absolutely outstanding tale of terror involving a young boy raised by a serial killer to believe that he’s hiding from monsters that I immediately wished had been its own feature film.
The problem is that there are too many vignettes, too much focus on the wraparound story, which involves four annoying young adults playing a ritualistic game with candles, and not a quick enough pace to keep you enthralled instead of checking your watch.
Sound of Violence
2 star(s), 94 minutes, Streaming, Blu-Ray and DVD
For his debut feature, “Sound of Violence,” writer-director Alex Noyer takes a big swing for the fence, makes contact, but fails to lift the ball up high enough to clear the outfield wall.
I understand why he missed the mark; I just wish Noyer had taken a little more time to fully develop his main character, Alexis (Jasmin Savoy Brown), because his creative visual style and the thrust of his plot, which centers around synesthesia, a neurological condition that causes some to literally see certain sounds through a myriad of explosive colors, is wildly ambitious.
The big problem with “Sound of Violence” is that Noyer shows his hand way, way, way too early, and not just in his unsettling opening sequence where Alexis first experiences synesthesia as she watches and hears her father bludgeon her mother to death.
Before viewers can even wrap their minds around his concept, “Sound of Violence” time-jumps more than a decade ahead to a point when Alexis is trying to make a living as an avant-garde musician, and secretly trying to feed her need to hear people in extreme pain, which activates the brilliant burst of colors and drug-like euphoria that accompanies it.
Noyer essentially positions Alexis as some diabolical super-villain willing to sacrifice any human she chooses in order to quench her addiction, but he fails to make her very smart (she leaves clues everywhere) or sympathetic. Plus, he fails to help viewers understand how or why Alexis is able to suddenly come up with a series of elaborate torture devices that wouldn’t feel out in place in a “Saw” franchise film.
There’s just too many plot holes to overlook, especially when Noyer is positioning Alexis as the protagonist despite everything that she does on-screen to undermine that distinction. There’s a way to make this movie and make it work. If you haven’t seen Joe Begos’ “Bliss,” give it a view and you will understand what I mean.
“Sound of Violence” is a case study in great intentions versus practical execution, but at times it does make for a beautiful, messy canvas of what woulda, coulda, shoulda been.
Threshold
2.5 star(s), 78 minutes, streaming and Blu-Ray
I personally love a good slow-burn thriller, the kind of movie that takes its sweet time getting to the gut punch that leaves you gasping in surprise and shock on the floor.
I’m talking about movies like “The Invitation,” “The Witch” or “Entrance.”
“Threshold,” a new psychological, possibly supernatural thriller from co-directors Powell Robinson and Patrick Robert Young, has all the makings of a cult classic, including a great premise about a brother trying to corral his sister who has long had addiction issues who now is convinced that she has been cursed by a demonic cult and literally had her life bound to another man she’s never met who lives on the other side of the country.
The problem with “Threshold” is that Robinson and Young spend too much time, way too much time, especially for a movie that’s barely more than an hour long, documenting the brother and sister’s trek, which allows the brother time to fully buy into her story, but without giving viewers much to cling to.
The bigger problem with “Threshold” is that all the good stuff literally happens in the final five minutes.
That’s less of a slow burn and more like a damp wick that sputters and sputters until just before you give up trying to light it to finally catch a spark.
Goodbye Honey
2.5 star(s), 95 minutes, streaming
As abduction thrillers go, very few actually start with the abductee breaking free from her captor, but “Goodbye Honey” is not your ordinary thriller, for better and for worse.
The film opens with an escape, then introduces one of two main female protagonists, a weary long-haul truck driver, who is simply trying to stop for a nap before being roused by a young woman begging for help from an unseen assailant. The two women eventually end up locked inside the truck’s cargo trailer, where they wait and wait to see if the boogeyman will come knocking.
Max Strand’s debut feature takes what viewers normally expect to see happen, and gleefully goes the opposite direction. It’s an idea worthy of compliment, but that doesn’t mean that everything works just because it’s being done differently.
I personally struggled with “Goodbye Honey,” despite appreciating Strand’s unconventional approach. I didn’t find it to be very thrilling, I didn’t find the emotions on display to be always genuine and I honestly did not make it all the way to the end. But, for fans who crave something other than the typical paint-by-numbers approach, “Goodbye Honey” is likely a worthwhile investment.
In Action
1.5 star(s), 79 minutes, streaming
Another unique VOD arrival is “In Action,” a pseudo-action flick written by, directed by and starring Sean Kenealy and Eric Silvera, who play longtime friends and writing partners who finally hit upon a great idea for an insane action blockbuster, only to have the U.S. government suddenly suspect them of being terrorists trying to enact their plot for real.
The hook here is that almost the entire movie is told through bursts of exposition, or animation, or other clever DIY tricks like toys, allowing Kenealy and Silvera to become their own action heroes, so to speak, while being interrogated about their story.
Yes, it’s very original, but original doesn’t guarantee that it’s good, and while I always appreciate seeing filmmakers get creative to overcome a lack of resources and funding, “In Action” just didn’t catch my imagination enough to allow me to get onboard.
Evil Everywhere
1 star(s), 64 minutes, streaming and DVD
Video stores used to be stocked with movies like “Evil Everywhere.”
And like many of those long-forgotten titles, the nostalgia for a simpler time with simpler entertainment is far more inviting in theory than the reality of trying to make it through a very low budget attempt to pay homage to both slasher movies and the glory days of Italian schlock cinema.
To be honest, I can only recommend the first three minutes of “Evil Everywhere,” which launches off with a hysterical Joe Friday-esque voice-over describing the evil force that awakens in 1985 and begins killing off all the local high school students in alphabetical order.
There’s a wild montage of inspired DIY practical effects, including a wonderfully messy decapitation and an impressive hammer blow to a skull.
But the best part is the story being told, which includes a loner nerd named Zeke, the last in his class scheduled to die by virtue of his last name starting with “Z”; a mysterious girl with telekinetic abilities; and a climatic standoff with evil that ends with a massive homage to late-70s classics like “Scanners” and “The Fury.”
If only that had been the entirety of “Evil Everywhere,” and not the intro. By the six-minute mark, after unexplained time jumps to 1987 and back to 1985, I was confused. Within a few minutes more, I was skipping forward, hoping to land on some moment as equally cool as the opening.
Sad to say, that never happened.
Not to Be Overlooked:
For the Sake of Vicious For anyone who has seen Gabriel Carrer’s brutally effective “The Demolisher,” be prepared for another slice of homegrown carnage with this rousing home invasion thriller he co-directed with Reese Eveneshen.
The Columnist Katja Herbers slays (literally!) as Femke Boot, an outspoken newspaper columnist who decides to exact a bloody toll from the online trolls who hide behind a keyboard while spewing personal attacks because of her gender and her opinions.
Beverly Hills 90120: The Ultimate Collection For everyone who never wanted to graduate from Torrance High School, and even those who actually watched the very meta reboot “BH90210,” this 72-disc set packaged in very appropriate yearbook binders includes nearly 49 hours of Dylan, Brandon, Donna, Brenda and the rest of the gang doing what they did best (ie, getting in trouble, hanging at the Peach Pit and breaking our hearts on a weekly basis).
Also Available as of May 25, 2021:
Chaos Walking
Weird Wisconsin: The Bill Rebane Collection
The Final Countdown: Limited Edition 4K Ultra-HD
My Fair Lady 4K Ultra-HD
Django 4K Ultra-HD
Explorers: Collector’s Edition
The Marksman
Antidote
Shrek: 20th Anniversary Edition
Scavenger
Star Trek Lower Decks: Season 1
Santa Sangre: Limited Edition 4K Ultra-HD
CSI: NY – The Complete Series
No Reason
Land
Lapsis
Giants and Toys
Man with a Camera: The Complete Series
The Girl in the Basket
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at Blood Violence and Babes.com, on Facebook @BloodViolenceBabes or on Twitter @BVB_reviews.
Support local journalism in these crazy days. Our small but mighty team is working tirelessly to bring you up to the minute news on how Coronavirus is affecting Tampa and surrounding areas. Please consider making a one time or monthly donation to help support our staff. Every little bit helps.
Subscribe to our newsletter and follow @cl_tampabay on Twitter.
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2021.