Bloodlust (1961/Film Chest DVD)/419 (2013/MVD DVD)/Haunter (2013/MPI/IFC Midnight Blu-ray)/How I Live Now (2013/Magnolia Blu-ray)/The Invoking (2013/Image DVD)/Memory Of The Dead (2011/Artsploitation DVD)

Picture: C+/C/B-/B/C/C+ Sound: C/C/B-/B/C+/C Extras: D/D/C/C+/C/C- Films: C/D/C/C/C/C-

This latest group of thrillers often had potential, but none really worked well, even when some had their moments.

Ralph Brooke's Bloodlust (1961) is one of the endless imitators of The Most Dangerous Game (the 1924 book best known as a 1932 classic RKO film with Fay Wray) but this one has a young Robert Reed before he beat out an also then-unknown Gene Hackman for the role as Mike Brady on The Brady Bunch. Here in a nice new HD transfer from a pretty decent film print, he is one of four people in two couples who land up being abducted on an island that is not as empty as it looks by a crazed, egotistical hunter.

This lasts 63 minutes and has plenty of unintentionally funny moments, but Reed being in it just makes it all the funnier. If you have never seen this version, this is the DVD edition and print to catch.

There are sadly no extras.

Ned Thorne's 419 (2013) is yet another tale of people who disappear looking for other people who... disappeared! This time, an actor in New York is dumb enough to send money from an Internet scheme that then has him flying to South Africa to get his money. His friends then decide they'll look for him. Of course, it is obvious this is going to go badly and the majority of the sloppy 84 minutes is simply actors playing friends and associates being interviewed about what went wrong.

Duh! Everything here starting with the script did just that in this mess that is cynical, never convincing, becomes torture porn and even has a bit of racism in it. The big dud here, the title is as wrong a number as you'll encounter on home video all year.

There are no extras.

The next two films have young female leads trying to survive crisis. Vincenzo Natali's Haunter (2013) offers a good performance by Abigail Breslin as a young women who starts to realize she keeps waking up to the same events everyday as if it were Satan's answer to Groundhog Day. Turns out her house is haunted and unbeknownst to her parents and younger brother, they are trapped. At what could have been a tight 82 minutes, Steven McHattie shows up as a dream villain out to torment her, but it is too derivative of the more serious side of Freddie Kruger.

Still, it has some ambition and a few good moments, but never offers much new. At least it takes itself seriously and never gets stilly, but too bad it did not offer more. I also did not buy the ending.

Extras include a feature length audio commentary track by Director Natali, plus a second such track with writer Brian King, a Behind The Scenes featurette, Original Theatrical Trailer and Natali's complete storyboards for the project.

Kevin MacDonald's How I Live Now (2013) has Saoirse Ronan as a young woman from the U.S. visiting relatives in the U.K. in what first seems like it will be simply a coming of age story where she is very cynical and needs to let go of her personal pain, in this case she has mental health issues and is on medication. After a good chunk of the story, there is suddenly an explosion and the country is suddenly in some kind of war!

This twist might have worked (including having some of the British men attacking women and killing indiscriminately) if the script did not try to juggle so much. Her mental health issues are not addressed enough, the fact that she starts falling for her older cousin is oddly glossed over, the politics of the twist are barely explored and the actual events barely explained. The result is a hodgepodge of ideas that look like they are trying to be an intellectual Hunger Games (try Punishment Park, a far better British film (reviewed elsewhere on this site) for that one) and then we have another phony ending. Too bad, because it too takes itself seriously enough.

Extras include BD Live interactive functions, an on-camera Interviews section with various cast & crew, Behind The Scenes Comparisons, Making Of featurette, Original Theatrical Trailer and AXS-TV look at the film.

Jeremy Berg's The Invoking (2013) has a group of young adults going out in the middle of nowhere to a house, but in this case, it is also done with maturity, with the characters we actually get to know and with a better-than-usual reason that one of the females on the trip is investigating the house she now owns to see if she will sell it or not. Unfortunately, she is also having to deal with mental illness and starts having delusions connected with an abusive past, but could it also be hat the house is haunted?

The cast is decent and we get a few twists that help, but the script runs out of ideas and eventually backs itself into a corner it cannot get out of. With some slight changes, this could have worked even better. Worth a look like the last three films, but don't expect much.

Extras include two feature length audio commentary tracks (one with the actors, the other with Berg and his crew) and a Behind The Scenes documentary.

Finally we have Valentin Javier Diment's Memory Of The Dead (2011) which can congratulate itself for not being another zombie film or Romero tribute, but it is a Spanish supernatural dark comic thriller that finds itself in Guillermo del Toro territory in its supernatural and haunted history aspects, but lacks the knowledge or finesse he can bring to such storylines, so it becomes too jokey and then too bloody and graphic without a story to hold it together including an unfortunately inevitable delving into torture porn.

Some of the visuals work early on and the cast is interesting, but once the makers give up on a storyline, this never recovers and was more disappointing after actually having promise early on. I also was not impressed with the sexual angle, but genre fans might want to see it if this review does not put them off just to see what they think.

An Original Theatrical Trailer for this film and four recent Artsploitation releases are the only extras.

The the 1080p 1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on the Blu-rays perform the best on the list as expected, but Now edges out the sometimes strained and styled Haunter for detail, depth and consistency throughout. Coming in third are a tie between the nice new HD transfer for the 1.33 X 1 black & white image on Bloodlust (the print can still show its age and a little wear) and stylized, color, anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on Dead (many shots are purposely distorted) with some images that are soft. The performers that land up being too soft are the anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image playback on Invoking (just softer to often despite some good shots) and 419 (rough digital video throughout).

On the sonic side, Haunted and Now offer DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mixes that are not bad, but Now is more consistent while some moments of Haunted have dialogue that is flat to the point of being monophonic. In third place is the lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 on Invoking, which switches between quiet and active moments, but the same mix on Dead is rougher and less consistent, placing it in last place with the lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on Bloodlust and lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo on 419, which is rough accidentally and on purpose, plus is just badly edited and mixed in general.

- Nicholas Sheffo