Blood Money, Vol. 33
By on Aug 29, 2012
Greetings, partners in crime! It’s time for another installment of Blood Money, our weekly roundup of the newest and most noteworthy horror releases to arrive in stores. Before we get to films and home entertainment, however, we want to make special mention of the burgeoning UK record label Death Waltz Recordings, who attracted our attention when they announced they would be releasing Jeff Grace’s amazing score for Ti West’s The House of the Devil on vinyl – complete with Mike Armstrong’s incredible theme music!
That record hasn’t yet been released, but they’ve released LPs for Fabio Frizzi’s amazing score for Zombi 2, John Carpenter’s music for Escape From New York, and Michael Andrew’s phenomenal score for Donnie Darko. Plans for other releases include vinyl versions of Halloween II and III as well as Prince of Darkness and They Live, which means that DJs amateur and otherwise will soon have these bad boys to mix with during their sets. In any case, check out their official web site for more information as they’re putting out some of the most exciting horror-themed content anywhere these days.
Theatrically, there are two semi-high-profile films being released: The Possession and The Tall Man. The Possession stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Kyra Sedgwick as a pair of divorced parents who are forced to deal with the possession of their preteen daughter. While the action is decidedly more animated than in the Exorcist days (lots of flying bodies, the odd fingers down their daughter’s throat), this feels like a fairly classic sort of possession thriller, punctuated by the sort of bombastic style that dominate most contemporary horror movies.
The Tall Man, meanwhile, offers a similar, but different tale of parental anxiety as a nurse in a provincial town who pooh poohs the idea of a spectral figure who preys on children until she awakens one night to see her own kid being kidnapped by it. Biel’s been doing some great work lately so this might be at best an acting showcase for her, but from the director of Martyrs, this is at least worth investigating. That said, if you’re not interested in heading to theaters to see it, you won’t have to wait long for home video – it premieres September 25th on Blu-ray and DVD.
Two television series premiere new seasons on Blu-ray this week. The Vampire Diaries: The Complete Third Season and The Walking Dead: The Complete Second Season are both being released in new sets featuring abundant extras and in the case of The Walking Dead, even a limited-edition version that comes packaged inside a zombie head that’s been impaled with a screwdriver. (Leave that out for an unlucky burglar to find and they’ll think twice about breaking and entering next time.)
Redemption Home Video has been doing a great job lately bringing horror fans high-quality transfers to movie that, quite frankly, you probably haven’t even heard of, and this week’s they are releasing The Living Dead Girl and Two Orphan Vampires. Admittedly they’re two creepshows that I’m not intimately familiar with, by Jean Rollin was a particularly unique genre filmmaker, and as with the previous releases these titles look terrific – better than they probably have any right to, to be honest.
Also on Blu-ray is Lovely Molly, which kind of came and went in theaters but which should find a comfortable home on Blu-ray thanks to this new release. The disc features featurettes “Path to Madness,” “Haunted Past,” “Demonic Forces,” “Is It Real” and the theatrical trailer, which supplements the scares in the actual film, but as a modest but engaging little thriller, this is a solid choice for the week.
Meanwhile on DVD, there’s Apocalypse of the Dead, which stars original Dawn of the Dead leading man Ken Foree in, appropriately, a thriller about a new zombie holocaust. Area 407 enjoyed some attention earlier this year as a found-footage (albeit direct-to-DVD) horror film about a group of plane crash survivors who find themselves in the territory of a government experiment and hunted down by mutated creatures with an appetite for human flesh. And then Jersey Shore Shark Attack isn’t that Discovery Channel-MTV crossover reality series you’ve been waiting for, unfortunately, but it’s nonetheless a magical tale of mouth breathers from a certain part of the country being dispatched by nature’s deadliest predator.
Finally, there are two films released this week on DVD which carry a certain pedigree, but only one of them is worth watching. Penumbra is not the better of the two films: after making the rounds on the festival circuit, Cold Sweat director Adrian Garcia Bogliano helmed this story about a woman with an impossibly awesome bosom who is held against her will in an apartment as a small group of zealots prepares for a violent and monstrous ritual. Sadly, the comely actress who stars in the film is never nude, but the filmmakers do their best to pointlessly grease up her assets and otherwise exploit the talents of her and everyone else involved – to little effect.
On the other hand, there’s The Moth Diaries, from director Mary Harron, who previously made the cult classic American Psycho. An indie lesbian-friendly alternative to Twilight-style fare, the film follows a group of schoolgirls who become involved with one another even as one suspects the other of being a vampire. A murder-mystery and supernatural thriller, Harron’s body of work makes this absolutely worth checking out, even if you’re only superficially as interested in this film as you would be in the higher-profile fare that it’s being compared to.
