Some Like It Rare aka Barbaque (2022)

"Everything Tastes Better With Vegans"

Following its UK premiere at this year's Glasgow Frightfest, Signature Entertainment are releasing Fabrice Eboué's French cannibal comedy horror picture on digital platforms.

Sophie (Marina Fois) and Vincent (co-writer and director Eboué) run a small butcher's shop. Business isn't good and their marriage is in a state of collapse. In fact the last thing they need is a raid by vegan activists, especially when Vincent accidentally kills one of them. The disposal of the body results in a new taste sensation they dub 'Iranian pork' and which quickly becomes the talk of the town. But when the stock runs out they are faced with a new problem: should they refill and where are they going to get the vegans from?

Visitors to this site may well be familiar with Paul Bartel's 1982 EATING RAOUL, a rather wonderful little black comedy in which Bartel and Mary Woronov play a married couple who want to open a restaurant and fund it by advertising kinky sex services and then killing their customers. Well SOME LIKE IT RARE is basically the same idea but with vegans instead of swingers. It also happens to be almost as funny, with our couple going to increasingly bizarre lengths to obtain their special meat.  

Blood-splattered, guaranteed to offend certain groups, and often very funny, SOME LIKE IT RARE gets maximum Michelin stars (or their horror equivalent) and is likely to be one of the top horror comedies of the year. Here's the trailer:

SOME LIKE IT RARE is out on Digital from Signature Entertainment on Digital Platforms on Monday 21st March 2022

The Ledge (2022)

"A Real Cliffhanger"

Following its UK premiere at this year's Glasgow Frightfest, Signature are releasing Howard J Ford's THE LEDGE on Digital and DVD.

We're in Italy in the Dolomite mountains. Two American girls are on holiday with the intention of doing some serious climbing. Four American men just happen to arrive and move into the chalet next to them. There only appear to be two chalets, or if there are more we certainly don't see any evidence of any other tourists.

That night the girls are invited to a fireside party and things go horribly wrong, with one of them being brutally murdered and the other capturing it all on tape. But she's spotted and the chase is on, the difference here being that the chase is up a cliff.

And that's the raison d'être behind THE LEDGE, a film that shines during these beautifully-shot, frequently tense sequences. Unfortunately the rest of the film doesn't live up to these highlights. Characterisation is minimal, dialogue is frequently clunky (and at points laughable) and the acting can't save it because it's pretty much of the same calibre as the writing. 

It's a shame because if you can get through the rather awkward and contrived first act, once the chase is on THE LEDGE has some really decent suspense sequences, and the film only slows down when we have to go back to characters talking. But if you can put up with that and fancy a bit of tension and some amazing landscape photography then THE LEDGE isn't such a bad way of spending 80 minutes. Here's the trailer:

Howard J Ford's THE LEDGE is out from Signature Entertainment on Digital on Monday 14th March 2022 and DVD on Monday 21st March 2022

Sweetie You Won't Believe It (2021)

After its rollicking Frightfest premiere last year, where it was the favourite of quite a few who attended, Kazakhstan comedy horror SWEETIE YOU WON'T BELIEVE IT gets a Blu-ray and digital release from 101 Films. 

Dastan (Daniar Alshinov) wants to spend one last weekend of fun before the birth of his first child. So he and his two hapless idiot friends go on a fishing trip where they end up having to use defective inflatable sex dolls bundled together as a raft. On the way they inadvertently throw a bottleful of urine at some villains and, a short while later and after a trouser-losing incident, they witness the same villains execute a killing. Soon they're on the run, the body count is starting to rise, and who is that mysterious one-eyed man and what does he want?

Billed as CARRY ON DELIVERANCE this is more like the comedy version of those ultra-bleak Australian or French films set in the back of beyond, with accompanying gruesome characters and situations to match, except they are played for (extremely effective) laughs - a bit like if THE LOVED ONES or a Pascal Laugier movie had been done as a comedy. 

One lengthy suspenseful sequence works really well as both comedy and horror as you keep your fingers crossed a certain character doesn't break wind again. SWEETIE YOU WON'T BELIEVE IT is a real surprise - an unexpected delight that manages the difficult thing of creating scenes and situations that are as funny as they are horrific. Let's hope we get more of this sort of thing from the same team. 101's Blu-ray has the trailer you can watch below now, but no other extras.

SWEETIE YOU WON'T BELIEVE IT is out from 101 Films on Blu-ray and Digital on Monday 21st February 2022

Black Friday (2021)

"Gore in the Store"

There's splatter, prosthetics and mayhem aplenty in BLACK FRIDAY, getting a digital release from Signature.

The staff of kids' superstore We Love Toys are getting ready for the annual Black Friday sale, not knowing that the night before, a blob of peculiar ooze has appeared and infected the night security man.

The doors open, the shoppers stampede in, and pretty soon everyone's turning into Robert Kurtzman-created monsters. Soon the few normal humans left find they have to resort to measures both extreme and extremely silly in an attempt to destroy the alien menace.

BLACK FRIDAY isn't a classic. There's nothing here that hasn't been done or seen before and for a film that purports to be a horror comedy the laugh factor could have done with being upped considerably, although recalled toy Dour Dennis the Depressed Teddy Bear is very funny - more of this sort of thing would have been most welcome. It's also lacking the frenetic sense of mounting jeopardy that better examples of this kind of subgenre (eg 2015's BLOODSUCKING BASTARDS / BLOODSUCKING BOSSES) achieve.

That said BLACK FRIDAY is a reasonable timewaster with a cast of genre favourites including, Devon Sawa (FINAL DESTINATION), Michael Jai White (BLACK DYNAMITE), Ivana Baquero (PAN'S LABYRINTH) and Bruce Campbell (so much stuff but I'll just put EVIL DEAD) plus Seth Green as the voice of Dour Dennis. It's the kind of movie that used to go down a storm at horror film festivals in the late 1980s, usually in the 1am slot when it was just the thing you needed so you didn't have to keep propping your eyelids open with cocktail sticks. Recommended for a bit of undemanding Friday night fun.

BLACK FRIDAY is out on digital from Signature on Friday 11 February 2022. Here's the trailer:

Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021)

Of course it had to happen. When I reviewed RESIDENT EVIL 6: THE FINAL CHAPTER back in 2017 there was indeed very much a sense that this series, based on 'the highest-grossing video game franchise of all time', had come to a definite end. These days, however, old franchises aren't allowed to die gracefully. Instead they get rebooted, and if HALLOWEEN and SCREAM can do it, to name but two, then why not RESIDENT EVIL?

So for this seventh film we're back in 1998, and in case you miss that date caption there's lots of music and plenty of technological devices from the period shoehorned in so that teenaged future archaeologists can gasp at the sight of Palm Pilots and pagers actually being used by living people. 

Racoon City, home of the Umbrella Corporation, is now slowly dying, with most company employees and townsfolk already gone. Then a mysterious leak at the local plant turns most of those left into flesh hungry zombies and it's up to the few non-zombified survivors to fight for their lives. 

There are some familiar faces in RESIDENT EVIL: WELCOME TO RACOON CITY including Kaya Scodelario (best known to readers here for playing the lead in Alexandre Aja's alligators on the rampage picture CRAWL) and TV's Tom Hopper (Umbrella Academy and Black Sails). There's a familiar director behind the camera as well. Johannes Roberts is best known for mediocre child back from the grave movie THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR, mediocre shark movies 47 METERS DOWN and its sequel, and mediocre home invasion picture THE STRANGERS: PREY AT NIGHT. 

For someone with a bit of a track record with directing modern-day exploitation movies Mr Roberts still hasn't got the hang of how to make this kind of stuff worthwhile and entertaining viewing. Elements from the Resident Evil games are present and correct but it's all unforgivably at the expense of plot and pacing. A scene where a petrol tanker crashes is wasted and ends up being laughable, and there are numerous scenes where tweaks to the dialogue would have added immensely to the virtually non-existent characterisations. Sad to say, but RESIDENT EVIL: WELCOME TO RACOON CITY, is a bit of a comedown from the highly entertaining RESIDENT EVIL 6: THE FINAL CHAPTER.

Sony's Blu-ray contains three short featurettes that last just over ten minutes in total but that's it for extras.

RESIDENT EVIL: WELCOME TO RACOON CITY is out on Digital Rental, 4K UHD, Blu-ray , and DVD on Monday 7th February 2022. It's already out to download and keep.

Censor (2021)

"Top Quality Art House BritHorror"

One of HMC's Top Ten films of 2021, Prano Bailey-Bond's CENSOR gets the kind of luxury treatment that's become de rigeur from Second Sight Films, with two Blu-ray discs, a book and art cards, all housed in a rigid slipcase.

We're in Britain in the 1980s at the height of Video Nasty mania. Enid (Niamh Algar) works as a film censor where her job is to watch and assess gruesome and violent material, or at least those are the only kinds of films we ever see her watching. She, along with a co-assessor, then recommends if the film should be banned ('rejected') or released with cuts. She frequently finds the material difficult to watch, as do some (but not all) of her colleagues.

As well as a job she often finds hard to stomach, Enid has other problems. There's the suggestion she's responsible for the disappearance of her sister Nina in the woods many years ago. Enid's parents are convinced Nina is dead and have a death certificate drawn up to help everyone move on. But Enid isn't convinced and her job, her desire to find her sister, and her faltering grip on reality all combine to cause her to spiral into madness.

At least that's what I took away from CENSOR, that and the idea that sometimes those who want to take on the job of film censor job may well be the least suited to it. Director and co-writer Prano Bailey-Bond has fun with coloured lighting and altering aspect ratios to emphasise Enid's disorientation and Niamh Algar does a fine job in the lead role, ably assisted by a cast that includes a number of familiar faces from British television. 

Extras on Second Sight's two disc set kick off with three commentary tracks - Bailey-Bond and Kim Newman (one of the executive producers of CENSOR) on the first, Bailey-Bond and other members of the crew on the second, and finally Kat Ellinger, Lindsay Hallam and Miranda Corcoran on the third. Needless to say the first two are more concerned with the nuts and bolts of the films genesis and shooting while the third offers an academic analysis of the film. 

Disc one also includes a 20 minute making of as well as Bailey-Bond's 15 minute short film 'Nasty' which features some familiar footage and a familiar forest location. My Nasty Memories is 28 minutes with the always cheerful David Gregory of Severin Films who gives an accurate, entertaining and nostalgic (for those of us who were there) account of Britain in the 1980s and the video nasty phenomenon. Finally, you get both parts of Blue Underground's 'Ban the Sadist Videos!' documentary which runs to about 100 minutes in total.

Disc two offers a stack of interviews, including Prano Bailey Bond (30 minutes), Niamh Algar (22 minutes), co-writer Anthony Fletcher (12 minutes), DP Annika Summerson (18 minutes), editor Mark Towns (13 minutes) and composer Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch (11 minutes). Alexandra Heller-Nicholas offers a 21 minute critical appraisal and there's a 14 minute post-screening Q&A. You also get a fascinating 40 minute conversation between Bailey-Bond and David Hyman who is one of the BBFC's 'Compliance Officers' - the modern term for what in the old days would have been 'censor' and the whole package is rounded off with a couple of minutes of deleted scenes. 

Prano Bailey-Bond's CENSOR is out from Second Sight Films in a limited edition two disc set with book, art cards and slipcase on Monday 31st January 2022

Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)

The Sony/Marvel franchise continues on its own semi-independent path with the sequel to 2018's VENOM, getting a 4K UHD, Blu-ray and DVD release from Sony after its digital download and keep release last Christmas Eve.

Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is now living in knockabout symbiotic sort-of harmony with the organism known as Venom when he gets the chance to interview Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) on death row. Unfortunately for all concerned, Cletus manages to ingest some of Eddie's (and therefore Venom's) DNA and becomes host to a similar creature, this one named Carnage. Cletus / Carnage escapes and sets off to find Cletus' lover Shriek (Naomie Harris) who can manipulate sound, and it's up to Eddie / Venom to stop both of them.

Like its predecessor, VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE comes to our screens feeling oddly...lacking, as if either a chunk of the script wasn't filmed or too much of what was filmed ended up being cut. This may simply be indicative of the complexity (and length) of other modern super hero movies, and if you're looking for a straightforward goodies vs baddies plot then this will do the job for you. Anyone looking for more will have to satisfy themselves with wondering which bits were shot in the film's setting of San Francisco and which were filmed at London South Bank University and Leavesdon Studios in Hertfordshire. Needless to say the preponderance of British cast members will help in that regard.

Extras on Sony's 4KUHD and Blu-ray discs include a seven minute making of featurette (the only extra on the DVD), three minutes of out-takes and bloopers, nine minutes of deleted scenes, behind the scenes featurettes on Eddie & Venom (ten minutes), Marvel Easter Eggs found in the film (four minutes), Cletus Kasady and Cletus and Shriek (five minutes each), Concept to Carnage (four minutes), eight minutes of scenes before visual effects were added, and a one minute trailer for the extras. There is no commentary track. 

VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE is out on 4KUHD, Blu-ray and DVD from Sony on Monday 3rd January 2022