Author Archives: Vanessa Berben

About Vanessa Berben

Vanessa Berben’s obsession with horror and cult cinema began at the tender age of eight when a film about cute little bunnies ended up being "Night of the Lepus". When she’s not writing for such esteemed publications as Cinesploitation and Stiff Magazine, she manages the humor site The Donnybrook Writing Academy and dreams of teaching Freddy Krueger how to love.

Bite Marks (2011, Screener Review)

Posted on by
Reply

Director: Mark Bessenger

Cast: Benjamin Lutz, Windham Beacham, David Alanson, Stephen Geoffreys

Breaking Glass Pictures / Region 1 / Unrated / 1.85:1 widescreen / Dolby Digital Stereo / 84 minutes / BUY FROM TLA

Disk Extras: Director and Cast Audio Commentaries / Interview With Actor Windham Beacham / Interview Wtih Actor David Alanson / Interview With Actor Benjamin Lutz / Production Photo Gallery / Behind The Scenes / Gag Reel

—————–

Mark Bessenger’s horror-comedy Bite Marks might be one of the funniest vampire films I’ve ever seen. It’s inexplicably rated a 3.7/10 on IMDB and I honestly can’t figure out why. I’ll admit there are a few actors with bit parts that deliver slightly sub par performances but that’s really the only thing I can think of that would make people dislike it. Is it the gay protagonists? Why does that even matter? I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around what could make viewers score this little treasure so lowly.

Admittedly, Benjamin Lutz (The Love Patient, The Man Next Door) gets the movie off to a shaky start as “Brewster,” a truck driver forced to take over the route of his missing brother, Walsh (an awesome cameo by Fright Night and 976-Evil’s Stephen Geoffreys). But he quickly fleshes out his role as soon as Windham Beachem (Back Soon, Long-Term Relationship) and David Alanson (making his feature debut in Bite Marks and going on to also star in 2012’s The Man Next Door) show up as two hitchhikers he picks up to help him stay awake. Brewster believes he’s just transporting a few coffins, but after his GPS mistakenly leads them all to a near-vacant junkyard, his vampire cargo’s unleashed and goes after them to hilarious ends.

“Is this the Zombie Strippers auditions?”

Bessenger pulls double duty as both writer and director, and he shines in both roles. With clever asides, horror references that surprised even me by their level of “in the know-ness” and dialogue gold throughout (one character telling another that going to the bathroom in a junkyard is like “getting to piss in an art museum” had me cracking up and thinking this had to be something Bessenger thought of himself during some kind of drunken shenanigans), Bite Marks had me laughing the entire time, in large part due to the great performances by Alanson (a stand-out), Beachem and Lutz.

The three leads in Bite Marks take this film from well-done indie labor of love to fantastic vampire romp. Beachem and Alanson’s “Cary” and “Vogel,” respectively, shine as a couple on the rocks (plagued by the age-old dilemma of one partner being a bit of a slut—we’ve all been there) making a last-ditch effort to save their relationship by backpacking together across the country. The two of them have pitch perfect chemistry, masterfully bringing Brewster into the fold and taking Lutz’s performance to the next level it needed in order to keep up with the sharp, incredibly smart banter and fantastic comedic timing of his co-stars.

With a downright adorable (my possession of girl parts allows me the right to use words like that and still retain a semblance a horror-dignity) opening sequence by Jovani Olivar and a great original soundtrack by Rossano Galente, coupled with two outstanding performances delivered by Alanson and Beachem that shatters the stereotype of the “hapless couple” reduced to screaming through the movie desperately trying to save each other, Bite Marks is one of the funniest and best written horror movies I’ve seen in ages.

Symphony in Blood Red (2010, Screener Review)

Posted on by

aka Come una crisalide

Director: Luigi Pastore

Cast: Riccardo Serventi Longhi, Federica Carpico, Anna Morosetti

EuroObscura

—————–

Symphony in Blood Red is an Italian thriller, or “giallo,” inspired by legendary filmmaker and Dawn of the Dead producer Dario Argento. Borrowing from Argento’s 2009 film, appropriately named Giallo, (which centered on a psychotic cab driver who would take photos of his mutilated victims) Symphony tells the story of an unnamed (and never fully revealed) killer with a penchant for videotaping himself and his murders. Unfortunately for Symphony’s director and co-writer, Luigi Pastore, he may have backed the wrong horse as Giallo’s regarded by many critics to be one of Argento’s worst since 2004’s equally panned The Card Player.

Symphony failed to really catch my interest and make me want to stay to the end, but that could be due to my own hang-ups about storyline. Pastore seems to vacillate between a faceless slasher flick in the vein of Friday the 13th and a more intricate love letter to a psychopath, a la Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Movies like Friday succeed in making you root for the silent killer by keeping him ruthless and keeping his victims horny, unsympathetic teens. Not with the horny part, I’m always sympathetic of the lustful. I’m talking about stupid teenagers. No one likes stupid teens, not even other stupid teens. Conversely, films like Henry put you so deeply into the killer’s mind that you can’t help but want him to keep going. In trying to be both, Symphony is neither.

Open up and say “AAAAAAAAH”!

There are a lot of fun little quirks to the film that only made me more frustrated by the lack of fully fleshed out characters. There’s interesting cut scenes of two hand puppets that serve as narrators (I’m a little weird for puppets, there may be a slight obsession with Jim Henson… just saying) who offer the only comprehensible explanation of the killer’s motives. Another glaring mistake I perceived is Pastore’s failure to utilize what could’ve been an intriguing twist: while the killer’s obsessed with filming himself walking around stalking his victims and cutting them into pieces, he’s briefly the focus of a TV reporter’s attention. The juxtaposition of the killer’s need to record himself and the TV host’s interest in recording him too briefly serve as an examination of sensationalized media before being completely wasted.

It should be noted however, that this choice to forego the development of characters and story is what the giallo genre is all about. Giallo films purposefully put plot on the back burner to focus more on artistic and visual aspects of a film. So my own American influenced complaints about what I perceive to be a failure of characterization may not be your own.

In the true, classic giallo style made famous by Argento hits like The Cat o’ Nine Tails, or the giallo/supernatural hybrid Phenomena (starring a young Jennifer Connelly and released in the states as Creepers) Symphony looks fantastic. The colors are vibrant and expertly contrast with clever usage of shadows and lighting. The handmade gore (always a fan) is well done and the kill scenes are given just the right creative flourishes. If you care less about a solid narrative and just want to see a succession of beautiful shots and people getting sliced up to a great selection of classical music, Symphony in Blood Red is the picture for you.

Bloodline (2011, Screener Review) [Revised]

Posted on by
Reply

Director: Edo Tagliavini

Cast: Francesca Faiella, Virgilio Olivari, Marco Benevento

Distribution: EuroObscura

Official Film Website

——————–

I wanted to like Edo Tagliavini’s Bloodline, I really did – the beginning is fun to watch and jumps right into the action, the actors perform well, the two leads are attractive – always a plus in my book, and the idea of a slasher/zombie movie intrigued me. Unfortunately there’s limited positives I can muster up for this frustrating entry to the Italian horror genre.

Francesca Faiella (Into the Gloom) stars as Sandra, a woman still wrestling with the childhood memories of seeing her sister brutally murdered by sadistic serial killer, “The Surgeon” (who looks like an odd hybrid between a cop in riot gear and a butcher or fisherman), who shoots his victims with some kind of immobilizing serum so he can take them back to his hideout and slowly remove their organs one by one.

When Sandra and her partner/potential love interest Marco (Marco Benevento, an accomplished sound technician and editor making his first feature-length appearance) accept a job to shoot porn at an Italian villa it’s with some trepidation as the woods surrounding the house are the same ones that Sandra’s family was attacked in years ago. Sandra and Marco’s hopes that she can find some closure hit a bit of a snag when the actors and crew end up falling victim to an apparent “Surgeon” copycat, except this time the serum the copycat’s using to take down his victims has the unfortunate side effect of turning them into zombies.

Bloodline’s touting itself as the first feature-length film to be shot entirely using Canon 7D cameras, but if I were Tagliavini I don’t know that I’d be so proud of that fact. There are several fundamental problems with the camerawork in this film that make it somewhat difficult to watch. Originally the screener copy I was given had an error, showing only every few frames of film which created jarring sequences that were hard on the eyes. However after viewing the film in its correct resolution that jumpiness wasn’t present, so I’ve revised this review to omit my critique of that effect, as it was completely unintentional.

What still remains as a sticking point for me is the absence of any sort of tripod or stabilizers for the cameras during the second half of the film, creating shaky shots that put The Blair Witch Project to shame. Tagliavini himself reached out to us and explained that this was a conscious decision on his part to better show Sandra’s structured world breaking down into chaos. While I get that more artistic moments necessitate this effect (Bloodline is full of neat dream sequences and violent deaths that make the use of the handheld camera easier to understand) but damn, girl’s just going to the fridge to get a sandwich, does she need to waver around like I’m on acid? Am I on acid? That’s not the point. There was even a moment near the end when the Surgeon and Sandra finally have their showdown where it actually looks like the camera got knocked over and bounced around on the ground a few times before being picked up. Yeah. They kept that in there.

The saving graces of this movie were the sound quality (thanks for pulling double duty, Marco!) and the creature effects (why the Surgeon’s victims are turning into zombies is never really explained, I’m just assuming the chemicals he shoots them with play a part in it but I’m a huge fan of handmade effects and these were done very well), but most especially by a fantastic performance by Faiella as “Sandra”. She’s too good for this cheaply made film. She’s gorgeous, which definitely helps, but the woman is a natural onscreen. Surrounded by actors hamming it up to SciFi Channel proportions (I absolutely refuse to spell it the new way), she remains honest, raw, and believable right up to the very end, despite having to work with somewhat clichéd dialogue and a cameraman with perpetual butterfingers.

Bloodline could’ve been an interesting addition to the horror genre: the concept of using small cameras to film a feature-length picture is admirable, but it’s ruined by not utilizing something as simple as even a monopod. The shakiness was so distracting that not even a stellar lead performance could save it. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone with a sensitive stomach, and that has nothing to do with the gore.

In honor of her birthday: We remember Tura Satana

Posted on by
Reply

“The only thing I can say to my fans is a very humble THANK YOU. If it were not for my fans I would have faded away a long time ago, but their love and devotion have kept me, not only alive, but KICKING ASS.” – Tura Satana

When I was 18 my parents were lucky if I got out of bed and could get through class without sneaking into the parking lot for a toke. By the time Tura Satana was 18 she’d overcome bullying, a stint with her family in a World War II internment camp, become an aikido and karate master, posed nude for film-legend-turned-photog Harold Lloyd, and toured the country as one of the most famous burlesque dancers in the exotic dance circuit. If all of those accomplishments weren’t enough, she also went on to date Elvis Presley, turned down his marriage proposal and kept the ring, of course.

If it weren’t for a tragic car accident that left her with a broken back and a debilitating gunshot delivered by a jilted lover, Tura’s star could’ve gone meteoric. Luckily for all of us there’s the screen-gold that is Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! to serve as the perfect encapsulation of everything I love about her. We lost not only a cult-goddess but a cultural treasure when Tura passed away at the age of 72 on February 4, 2011. While we can see her in classics like Our Man Flint and Irma La Douce (her cameos in both films aren’t nearly big enough but worth it just to see how gorgeous she looks on-screen) it was her iconic turn as tough as nails Varla in Meyer’s Faster Pussycat that made her every cult-fan’s wet dream come true.

Tura in Ted V. Mikels’ “Astro Zombies”

With unforgettable lines like “I never try anything, I just do it… Wanna try me?” Tura karate chopped her way into my heart and I’ve had a ridiculously huge girl-crush on her ever since. It isn’t her beautiful face or amazing figure, though they help, there’s something primal about her badassery that hits you in the gut when you see her on-screen. It’s like anyone who starred alongside her might as well have used her screen time to grab a smoke break, she was that magnetic.

Working in the 100+ degree heat of the California desert, she and Meyer worked together to painstakingly craft what is arguably both of their best works. Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill! may not be the best cult film ever made (I’ll fight you on that point though), it’s definitely one of the most legendary and quoted, without many people even realizing it. Just sit through it once or for the millionth time if you’re me, and you’ll be surprised at how much dialogue has worked its way into mainstream movie vernacular with most of the people who quote it probably not even realizing that’s the film they’re quoting from.

While her work with Meyers remains her most notable (Meyers would later lament that he regretted not working with Tura on his future projects), it was her friendship with another cult-film legend that helped cement her place in film history. Director Ted V. Mikels featured her in the first three installments of his Astro-Zombies series and in the legendary The Doll Squad, which would inspire a little series called Charlie’s Angels and serve as Quentin Tarantino’s inspiration for the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad in Kill Bill. She remained closely tied to Mikels right up until her passing: her last screen appearance was as herself in the 2010 documentary The Wild World of Ted V. Mikels. Tura would’ve been 73 on Tuesday July 10th, but she could never be anything but timeless.