We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
Full Moon, AI, Christopher Lee, and an '80s possession.
DEATH STREAMER (2024)
Earlier this year, Full Moon founder Charles Band announced that his company was launching a new production label called Pulp Noir, with the focus being on “edgier, weirder, darker horror and dark fantasy films.” They also set up a Patreon account where fans can subscribe and show their support for the company while getting a behind-the-scenes look at the making of these films. The first movie in the Pulp Noir line, a female serial killer story called Quadrant, was released in August, with a black & white release following in September – and now that October is upon us, so is the second movie in the Pulp Noir line-up, the vampire story Death Streamer. Quadrant seemed to get a bit more attention than the average Full Moon movie, with some reviews even calling it artistic and mature… but while Band, who produced and directed both movies, has described Death Streamer as one of the best movies he has made “in a lot of years,” this one isn’t likely to receive those sort of accolades. It’s a fun watch, but comes off as being more low-key and less eventful than its predecessor.
The film begins with the vampire Arturo Valenor (Sean Ohlman) donning a pair of “technologically advanced glasses” that allow him to live stream his point of view onto the internet, making his way through a party and picking a young woman from the crowd. With the help of two assistants, he’s able to spike her drink with some of his blood, putting her in a hypnotic state, and takes her to a bedroom, where he kills her and feeds on her blood while thousands of viewers watch online.
The footage of Arturo’s blood feast catches the attention of Alexander Jarvis (Aaron McDaniel), who hosts a webcast called Church of Chills, which digs into stories of monster sightings and hauntings, among other things, alongside his own two assistants, Emma Massalone as Edwina and Kaitlin Moore as Juniper. Their show is called Church of Chills because they broadcast out of an old, abandoned and decommissioned church that also seems to be their home, as they sleep in tents inside the place. A few years ago, Full Moon purchased a house in Cleveland, Ohio to film several of their productions in (they named the place Full Moon Manor), and recently they also purchased this old church that stands in Cleveland. The plan is to use this place as a studio and warehouse, but here it’s presented as what it really is, an old church – and they got their money’s worth on this production, because once Death Streamer cuts to the Church of Chills folks, it rarely leaves the confines of this church. The majority of the movie involves Alexander, Emma, and Kaitlin investigating and discussing the case of the live streaming vampire, and the movie rarely follows any of them outside of the church.
Occasionally, scenes will drop in on the tech-savvy vampire, and when it’s time for him to feed, he does some more live streaming. As we witness the final moments of Arturo’s victims (one of whom is played by porn star Maddy May) through his live streaming glasses, we also see the constantly changing numbers of his subscribers and viewers at the bottom of the screen, and I would advise trying not to focus on those numbers too much, because they go up and down from shot to shot in a way that doesn’t always make sense. The streaming specs aren’t the only impressive thing about this bloodsucker, as he also has a special way of watching and communicating with people at a long distance that I won’t spoil here because it demands to be seen in the movie. It’s one of the most unique vampire tricks ever shown on screen.
If you sit down for a viewing of Death Streamer, you should be prepared to be looking at the interior of the church location for a good portion of the movie’s 72 minute running time. The small number of locations and the extensive dialogue sequences may be an issue for some viewers, but the script by Full Moon regular Roger Barron (also known as Benjamin Carr, also known as Neal Marshall Stevens) does give Band plenty of time to focus on the characters, and he was able to assemble a strong cast to bring them to life. Sean Ohlman is effectively sleazy and threatening in his scenes, and Aaron McDaniel, Emma Massalone, and Kaitlin Moore do great work as our trio of heroes. None of them have many feature credits to their names at this time, but their performances here indicate they could have great careers ahead of them.
So, as a Pulp Noir release, is Death Streamer edgier, weirder, and/or darker than other movies we’ve seen from Full Moon recently? Not extremely. I think it would fit right in with last year’s Full Moon releases Bring Her to Me and AIMEE: The Visitor, which came before the Pulp Noir launch. But while it doesn’t stand out in that way, it is an entertaining and quick-moving vampire-meets-modern-tech story that features good acting and the necessary bloodshed, finds ways to expose the breasts of nearly every actress in the movie, and even builds its villain up to be an apocalyptic threat (allowing for the awesome line, “This motherf*cker isn’t just looking for blood and tits, he’s trying to destroy the whole f*cking world!”). It’s all in good fun and makes for an entertaining way to spend an hour and change. Having a live streaming vampire as the villain was a cool idea, and Band and Barron put him up against some interesting heroes.
The Death Streamer review originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
AFRAID (2024)
A Blumhouse production written and directed by Chris Weitz, Afraid is a totally watchable sci-fi thriller – which may not sound like a very positive thing to say, but it’s better than the word-of-mouth I had heard before watching the movie. I had heard that this movie was atrocious. Critics tore it apart, and it was a box office disappointment, earning only $12 million worldwide (but at least $12 million also happened to be its budget). So when I gave it a chance, I was surprised to find that I didn’t have any problem watching it at all. I thought it was fine.
John Cho and Katherine Waterston star as Curtis and Meredith, a married couple with three kids: Lukita Maxwell as Iris, Wyatt Lindner as Preston, and Isaac Bae as Cal. Curtis’s job at a computer engineering company brings him into contact with the representatives (David Dastmalchian, Havana Rose Liu, and Ashley Romans) of a company that has come up with a “super AI” device called AIA, which they allow Curtis to install in his home so he can try it out. Things go well with AIA at first. The AI helps Meredith in her attempts to further her education, it gives Iris a way to deal with her sleazeball boyfriend, it helps Preston with his anxiety, and it diagnoses Cal with a health condition... but, as is always the case in this sort of movie, AIA starts overstepping boundaries and soon becomes way too attached to her owners.
Having the helpful AIA in their lives soon turns into a nightmare – and I was actually impressed by some of the ways in which Weitz was able to present this AI being as a threat. You get the typical stuff like the AI taking control of someone’s smart car, but the most disturbing element is when you realize just how much access AIA has to every aspect of people’s lives. She doesn’t have to physically harm them to destroy them.
Overall, Afraid is your typical Blumhouse movie. There are some standouts in their catalogue, but you usually know what to expect from this company, and that’s pretty much what you get here. It’s not great, but it wasn’t as terrible as I was led to believe. It’s not even the worst Blumhouse movie I’ve seen this year.
THE CITY OF THE DEAD (1960)
While watching director John Moxey’s horror film The City of the Dead, I had the feeling that the screenplay crafted by Milton Subotsky and George Baxt must have been a direct reaction to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It has a similar structure – just replace the psycho Norman Bates with a devil-worshipping witch who has been tormenting a small town in Massachusetts for a couple hundred years. Psycho starts off by following a blonde woman, Marion Crane, who steals some money and hits the road. She makes the mistake of checking in to the Bates Motel, where she gets killed by the proprietor, Norman Bates. The City of the Dead starts off with a prologue set in 1692, when a witch named Elizabeth Selwyn (Patricia Jessel) cursed the town of Whitewood while being burned at the stake. But when it jumps ahead to the then-modern day, it follows a blonde woman, Nan Barlow (Venetia Stevenson), who is writing a paper on witchcraft and is encouraged by college professor Alan Driscoll (Christopher Lee) to visit the town of Whitewood.
Nan hits the road, and when she reaches Whitewood, she checks in to a place called the Raven's Inn... where viewers will recognize that the owner, Mrs. Newless, is actually Elizabeth Selwyn. For over 150 years, Selwyn has remained in Whitewood, regularly conducting human sacrifices. And just like Marion Crane is killed roughly halfway into Psycho, the same happens to Nan. And just like it was up to the people who cared about Marion to come to the Bates Motel and find out what happened, people who cared about Nan come to Whitewood to get to the bottom of her disappearance.
I thought for sure this was a witchy copy of Psycho... but since the movies were first released around the same time, that could only have been the case if someone involved with the production of The City of the Dead somehow got an early look at the Psycho script. More likely, it was coincidence.
But even when I thought this movie was copying the structure of Psycho, I was enjoying it. A bit of copycat action never turned me away from a movie... and this is a well-crafted horror movie regardless of inspirations. The set-up is creepy, and Moxey and cinematographer Desmond Dickinson were able to capture a wonderful atmosphere for this movie that makes it perfect for October “spooky season” viewing. There are sequences that can put the viewer on edge, and great visuals like fiery apparitions and fog-shrouded graveyards.
The City of the Dead (which is also known as Horror Hotel) is very impressive, and just found its way into my annual October viewing rotation.
RETRIBUTION (1987)
After working his way up to it with several years of directing episodes of TV shows (and three years spent raising money), Guy Magar made his feature directorial debut with Retribution, a supernatural horror film that also has a gangster movie element to it. That’s an unusual mix to begin with, and the movie comes off even odder than it would have seemed otherwise due to the fact that character actor Dennis Lipscomb takes the lead role here – and not only does he not have “leading man” looks, but he also delivers a really unappealing performance, making his character come off as an annoyingly whiny sap throughout.
That character is George Miller – who is not the filmmaker behind the Mad Max franchise, but rather an unsuccessful painter who starts the movie by jumping off a building. He survives this attempt to end his own life, but he comes out of this near death experience with a little something extra: he’s now possessed by the spirit of a murdered gangster who proceeds to use George’s body to get ghostly revenge on the people responsible for his death. It’s a fine set-up for a movie, but the script Magar wrote with Lee Wasserman doesn’t have enough substance to sustain the movie’s overly long 109 minute running time. There are some interesting and entertaining sequences, but the movie should have been a good 20 minutes shorter than it ended up being.
I didn’t enjoy watching Lipscomb in the lead role, but as a fan of Return of the Living Dead Part II, Night of the Creeps, and Killer Klowns from Outer Space, I was very glad to see Suzanne Snyder in the supporting role of Angel, a prostitute that George romances and gets stoned with. It was good to have Snyder around to liven things up in the moments between the scenes of possessed George terrorizing and killing people with his supernatural powers. Unfortunately, those moments between the horror sequences are also when George is at his blubbering whiniest, because he’s scared of what’s going on. But at least Snyder is there to keep the movie from getting too irritating.
Retribution isn’t great and it goes on too long, but it has its moments, it has Suzanne Snyder, and it’s from the ‘80s, so I don’t regret checking it out.
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