Evilution Review

I recently raved about a film called “Basement Jack”, and I’ve since been lucky enough to see its prequel “Evilution”. This gruesome epic follows award-winning actor Eric Peter-Kaiser (performing with the charm and skill of a young Ted Raimi) as military doctor Darren Hall (Dan Cain and Herbest West all in one). Darren was last seen working with some mysterious samples to create a cure for death but following a botched experiment was forced to abandon his zombified Iraqi outpost and flee back to America. Now at home in The Necropolitan, Darren attempts to perfect this cure while dodging military assassins.



Inevitably things go from bad to pleasant (there’s a bodacious love interest), to bad to worse, and then finally: Boom! Welcome to zombie town. We climax with a swarm of infected tenants ripping through everything that stands in their way including comical body builders, street gangs, junkies, improperly dressed young ladies and dotty old women gone bad. Only Darren has the know-how to try and reverse the effects of his experiments on the community and save the day. There’s a twist too!



“Evilution” is every bit as entertaining as its slasher counterpart “Basement Jack”, but it remains its own monster. There’s been a recent surge in this style of doomsday film with re-makes, spins-offs, sequels, adaptations (28 Days/Weeks Later, Day of the Dead, Doomsday, Diary of the Dead, I Am Legend, Resident Evil, Dead Set…) racking up DVD sales, but I’m pleased to say that “Evilution” owes nothing to this trend. Writer Brian O’Toole has named “Dawn of the Dead” as his favourite film, and that influence can (arguably) be seen within “Evilution” in that there’s something decidedly “old-school” and classic about its structure and content. “Evilution” is not a flavour of the week - rather it is a witty and intelligent horror movie with well-placed gore around the edges. This is one for true fans of horror.



I don’t like to press the “Hype Button” with a couple more features like this and Black Gate Entertainment could really prove themselves to be the future of horror. You have been warned.



P.S Nathan Bexton is a horror-icon in the making. You heard it here first!

Awesome Film Review: BASEMENT JACK

Though easily marked as a '70s/'80s throwback, "Basement Jack" is about as good a slasher film as you could hope to find in any decade. Tipping its hat to John Carpenter's classic while still relishing in its modernity; "Basement Jack" is a hugely entertaining horror film that acknowledges its influences without being a thing like "Scream".

The story follows Jack Riley (the spectacularly creepy Eric Peter-Kaiser) AKA Basement Jack: a silent slasher who takes up residence in the basements of "apple-pie" American families, silently observing their happy lives before putting his favourite blade to use on mother, father, sister, brother, and Spot the dog.
His motivation? In true delusional mass-murderer fashion, he has mummy issues. Driven mad by seventeen years of home-cooked electro therapy courtesy of his endlessly charming mother (Lynn Lowry of "The Crazies" and "Shivers" fame) Jack seeks revenge on any family that represents the love and kindness he was denied.

Jack tours the country, slaughtering families in every town he visits - but no matter how well you slice-and-dice, there's always one that gets away. Enter Karen (Michele Morrow): the sole-survivor of Jack's murder spree. Each hunting the other, Karen wants retribution for the death of her family, while Jack hopes to improve his bowling average by finishing the job.
With the help of a likeable rookie cop (Sam Skoryna) Karen tracks Jack for one final showdown. She must stop him once and for all - or die trying.

True, you may have already seen a number of films with a similar story, but the slasher has always been very formulaic, and "Basement Jack"'s plot certainly has enough demented quirks to help it stand out from the regular Myers/Krueger/Voorhees clone. There is tribute, but there's originality too. 

The film plays well at a perfect 90 minute running-time with gross-out gore scenes, scares, laughs and plot revelations all liberally distributed at the right moments.

There's no shortage of highlights, but certainly a newly masked Jack Riley's assault on police headquarters will go down as one of the all time great stalk-and-slash moments, recalling "Halloween 4", "Maniac Cop" and "The Terminator" all at once. It's beautifully choreographed, frantically shot, outrageously gory and sickeningly amusing – not to mention it features the simultaneous deaths of three prominent characters. This is horror back to its old unpredictable self.

While producer/screenwriter Brian Patrick O'Toole has a good a track record for horror ("Dog Soldiers", "Cemetery Gates" and personal favourite; "Sleepstalker") – you have to believe that the cast and crew believed in this picture 110%. For what is truly a shoe-string budget, "Basement Jack" looks great, possessing almost a Hollywood standard of gloss. This is something a first-time director (prolific FX artist Michael Shelton) simply cannot achieve without the benefit of a crew's love and dedication to a project.
Shelton himself is a bit of a revelation, having obviously paid attention during his fifteen year career, his first time behind a camera and he's already showing the spark of a young Sam Raimi ("Evil Dead" trilogy). Keep an eye on this man.

Although there's been a few noble attempts to revive the slasher sub-genre (or indeed the horror genre) recently ("Hatchet", "Wrestlemaniac" and "The Tripper" come to mind), none have brushed the cobwebs off the 1980s formula quite as well as "Basement Jack" and certainly none have been so accessible that they might actually pose a threat to the slew of sequels and avalanche of remakes (which I'm not actually all that fussed about) that are dominating the genre – but "Basement Jack" does. Basement Jack Riley is an icon in the making.

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Trailer

IMDB

This Month's Awesome Film: Brotherhood of Blood

This month's awesome film isn't awesome at all...it's more like FLAWESOME.

Despite some hard work and good performances (genre veteran Ken Foree is especially entertaining) the film really struggled to keep me interested. Much of the actual horror happened off-screen or in cutaways and the majority of dialogue sequences were under dramatised, over-long and a little daft.

Certainly it picks up a little towards the end with a nice twist or two, but ultimately its complete lack of style and urgency keep a good premise bogged down by mediocrity.

It may act as a decent demo-reel for its rookie directors but I can only really recommend this to Ken Foree fans or vampire completists.