Blood Money, Vol. 26
By on Jul 3, 2012
Greetings, friends. Welcome to another installment of Blood Money, where we find you the best deals when you’re looking to buy a lot of blood. Or, according to my benevolent overlords, a weekly column in which we scour the best that the entertainment world has to offer and run down a checklist of the stuff you simply gotta have. Unfortunately, with the July 4 holiday bearing down on New Release day, pickings are slimmer than usual. Nevertheless, we’ll do our best to find some interesting entertainment to capture your imagination.
Theatrically, the only horror film opening this week is The Pact. Written and directed by newcomer Nicholas McCarthy, the film stars Agnes Bruckner, Casper Van Dien and Caity Lotz, and follows a young woman who begins to experience strange occurrences after she returns to her childhood home for her mother’s funeral. Although the trailer suggests that the film combines straightforward storytelling with found-footage technique, it certainly looks as effective as any of the other recent films that have essentially featured a variation on this same plot. That said, the make-up on the girl who can talk to spirits is more than a little overdone – or at the very least, she needs to get some sun.
On home video, check out the Dimension Extreme Horror Fest Triple Feature, which includes quite possibly the randomest collection of films I’ve yet seen in one of these multi-movie packages: Hellraiser: Revelations, Children of the Corn: Genesis and Zombie Diaries 2: World of the Dead. Perhaps our dutiful readers can find the common thread that connects these under-seen masterpieces, but the selling point here is, quite frankly, how bizarre a combination these three films make, and how much uninitiated audiences will understand of the worlds built within them. Then again, for $20, it doesn’t really matter – Dimension is going for quantity, not quality.
Next up is Some Guy Who Kills People, whose generic title was probably a riot to the first 12 people who saw it, but for everybody else it just speaks to the amount of effort that went into creating something unique or interesting. Or so it seems: the story revolves around a comic collector who is released from a mental hospital and decides to go on a killing spree targeting the tormentors who drove him to insanity. If there’s any obvious selling point it’s the cast, which includes Kevin Corrigan and Barry Bostwick. But not having seen the film, we can’t fully attest to how entertaining, original or otherwise appealing it might be, although as always we’d love to be surprised by something great.
Finally, the 1982 film The Entity is coming to Blu-ray for the first time, which should please horror fans to no end. Based on the true-life story of a woman who suffers a series of paranormal attacks – including rape – Barbara Hershey gives a terrific performance in the main role. Martin Scorsese called the film one of the eleven scariest movies of all time, and that’s not an altogether bad endorsement, but getting a film that’s been long unavailable in a new edition (in high-definition, no less) make this the pick of the week.
