After Dark Horrorfest – 8 Films To Die For (Borderland/Crazy Eights/The Deaths Of Ian Stone/Lake Dead/Mulberry St./Nightmare Man/Unearthed/Tooth & Nail; Lionsgate)

 

Picture: C     Sound: C+     Extras: D     Features: D

 

 

Lionsgate has been trying to establish a name brand of hip Horror titles that are more like Torture Porn and Slasher fare than anything else and the After Dark series has been moving along for a while.  It is cheap, silly, has not produced anything memorable and by default must be profitable just by distributing enough so out of curiosity buyers will snag them.  To further this end, they are doing a blitz of eight titles to see if they can make the brand stick.  I was not too impressed.

 

Borderland has Texas college students going down to Mexico for a good time, but finding a couple of psycho-killers who love to mutilate bodies instead.  Guess they should have read the travel brochures… or the script.  Guess none of these college kids ever watch movies either.

 

Crazy Eights is one of the poorest of the bunch, with its dated bit about former mental patients becoming killers to be feared.  Besides the insulting nature of the idea, the final product with a cast including Traci Lords (who has appeared in better XXX material than this wreck,) Dina Meyer, Gabrielle Anwar and Frank Whalley, is a mess and yes, there is a dirty white gal with a long white t-shirt and long hair hiding her face connected to death.  Yawn!

 

The Deaths Of Ian Stone has Stan Winston creature effects and no sense of narrative as a man investigates a figure on the road, prods it, then when getting back in his vehicle, is attacked and stalked by it for the whole rest of the 87 long minutes with no point.  Try Mike Nichols’ Wolf instead.

 

Lake Dead is dead on arrival in this lame tale of sisters inheriting their lost uncle’s wealth and home, only to discover it being squatted by yet more tired psychotics.  Maybe if they had just brought some friends, lawyer and taken some precautions, but it is so dumb, you root for the house to explode from bad gas lines so this all ends quickly.

 

Mulberry St. is one of the few titles here that could have worked as tenants and others around the famous New York street too-slowly for their own good discover rodents are on the way to attacking, but it looks like they first chewed a few holes in the plot.

 

Nightmare Man is another “woman is crazy or the world is crazy” tale where she keeps seeing herself stalked by the title nemesis, but this is so badly done, you might just fall asleep and rename it “nighttime man”.

 

Unearthed 900 year old creature is brought to life all of the sudden and when this gets tired, you too will feel like you watched the creature hibernate for 9 millennia.  Really silly, this is part of a bad subcycle of these tales where the payoff of seeing the creature is a howler if it weren’t so bad to wear you out before the none-too-impressive make-up/costume work is revealed.

 

Tooth & Nail is set in a post-apocalyptic world and features cannibals, but is so far from anything smart or Science Fiction that you be fighting ‘tooth & nail’ to pop the disc out of your DVD player.  Rachel Miner and cameos by Robert Carradine, Vinnie Jones and Michael Madsen cannot save this mess.

 

No kidding.  They are all that bad!

 

 

All are anamorphically enhanced.  The ones that feign a scope frame are pretentious and the ones that don’t (Lake, Mulberry, Nightmare, Tooth) are phony.  All are soft and have motion blur, while the Dolby Digital 5.1 mix on all 8 are spreading around the low-budget audio that in all cases are not possibly conceived for 5.1 in the first place.  Some do not have extras, but the ones that do (Mulberry, Nightmare, Borderland) are trite offerings that make up for nothing you’ll have already suffered through.

 

We’ll see how much longer Lionsgate can prop this up.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo