Ghost House Underground Collection

In truth, Ghost House impresarios Sam
Raimi and Rob Tapert did little more than select these
already-completed items, although any karmic connection can only help
sales—just ask the innocents who believe Quentin Tarantino’s new
feature is Hell Ride, when he merely served as an executive
producer for the biker epic. Judging from half of the Underground
output, however, there are highs and lows aplenty, with more
horror-flick homages than you can shake a dismembered limb at.

Dance of the Dead. (87 minutes; R; 2008).
The local high school is abuzz over tonight’s Hawaiian-themed prom, so
it’s unfortunate that the town’s cemetery is adjacent to the nuclear
power plant, as mysterious lime-green fumes awaken the dead—and they’d
like nothing better than to carnivorously chow down on the senior
class. To the rescue is wiseass pizza-delivery guy Jimmy (Jared
Kusnitz), whose redhaired prom date Lindsey (Greyson Chadwick) dumped
him at the last minute for Mitch (Jeff Adelman), the slick president of
the student council. Also lending a hand: nerdy members of the school’s
Sci-Fi Club (played by Chandler Darby, Randy McDowell, Mark Lynch and
Michael Mammoliti); surly punker Nash Rambler (Blair Redford, copping a
Johnny Depp circa 21 Jump Street vibe), who soon discovers the
real power of rock’n’roll; badass greaser Kyle (scene-stealer Justin
Welborn); and the gung-ho gym teacher, Coach Keel (Mark Oliver). 

The most audience-pleasing work in the Underground
collection, director Gregg Bishop and writer Joe Ballarini offer a
snappy rejiggering of zombie-flick conventions, while betraying some
tongue-in-cheek truthiness for the teen-angst formula. Sure, there’s
obvious fun at hand when Lindsey offers a prayer before her adolescent
comrades go into combat mode: “Dear God, we don’t know why you brought
the dead back to life. {Two-beat pause} But you have.” 

Yet the Bishop-Ballarini team navigates
a skillful path between parody and pathos, because viewers will
ultimately care about these kids. As with all zombie movies, friends
will die (after being bitten by the ghouls, naturally) and there will
be some brief grieving—because you gotta kill ’em again when they get
instantly reanimated. There’s inspired touches, too, like the
formaldehyde frog that exacts some payback, the exciting visuals of
corpses who launch themselves from their burial plots and dweeby
ripostes along the lines of “It’s chicks like you that make me glad I
don’t have a girlfriend.”

Dance of the Dead is presented in
a 1.78:1 ratio, with a commentary track by Bishop and Bellardini that
points out the influences of 1980s horror epics like The Monster Squad, Return of the Living Dead and The Evil Dead.
The 23-minute behind-the-scenes vignette and a five-minute glimpse on
the special effects tackle everything from the location work in Rome,
Ga., the choreographed stunts, the composite shots and the triumphant
screening at last spring’s SXSW Festival. Nine minutes of deleted and
extended scenes are accompanied by optional commentary from Bishop, who
explains that most of the cuts occur in the early reels so he could
quickly “get to the zombies.” 

Also on the DVD is Bishop’s comic short Voodoo,
filmed for $1,000 in black and white as a student project while he was
at the University of Southern California. Bishop explains in the
commentary that a USC edict demanded that the movie could run no longer
than five minutes and 33 seconds; Voodoo is now used to impress new students entering USC’s film program. 

The Last House in the Woods (Il Bosco Fuori). (86 minutes; unrated; 2006).
This Italian slaughterhouse from writer-director Gabriele Albanesi
opens with a very disturbing prologue that is not resolved until the
closing minutes. Yet those events from the prologue become entwined
with the grisly fate that awaits poor Aurora (Daniela Virgilio), who
thought she had seismic emotional difficulties with her ex-boyfriend
Rino (Daniele Grasetti)—but those relationship woes soon turn out to be
the least of her problems. 

First, the couple get viciously attacked
on the roadside, with Aurora nearly raped, by a trio of drunken
miscreants (David Pietroni, Geremia Longobardo and Cristiano
Callegaro). Interceding on the duo’s behalf is a seemingly normal
family unit, Antonio (Gennaro Diana) and Clara (Santa De Santis) plus a
sleeping child named Giulio (Fabiano Malantrucco), as they bring the
upset lovebirds back to the clan’s residence buried deep in woodland
territory. Of course, things grow more impossibly bizarre, with
sinister actions from mom and dad as they care for their very strange
son. The movie’s various titles provide not-so-subtle tip-offs of where
Albanesi’s gruesome package is heading: It’s called Italian Chainsaw in the Japanese market, while the stateside moniker deliberately recalls Wes Craven’s infamous Last House on the Left.

Albanesi seems to be spearheading a
revival of 1970s-era, blood-soaked Italian horror cinema, especially
the works of Dario Argento (VCR alert: Argento’s 1977 gore classic Suspiria
screens early Saturday, Nov. 14, 2 a.m., on cable’s Turner Classic
Movies), yet Albanesi seems more concerned with the degrees of human
depravity. When the hooligans invade the home of Clara and Antonio to
commit more mischief, even these lowlifes are taken aback by the
madness that is taking place; in an unexpected display of character
reversal, the drunken slimeballs become slightly heroic. 

Meanwhile, the yecch factor is sometimes
neutralized by weirdly poignant dialogue, especially when one
chainsawed thug holds his exposed entrails and says in his dying
breath, “The priest always told me I should behave.” And there’s one
shocking visual revelation at the climax that, trust me, you will not
see coming. At once stylish, ferocious and sick, sick, sick, discerning
gorehounds (now there’s an oxymoron!) should make a beeline for this
one.

The Last House in the Woods is
presented in a 1.78:1 ratio. If you’re averse to dubbing, head for the
Italian-language option with English subtitles. More subtitles turn up
for the 40-minute “making of” extra, a comprehensive overview of
low-budget moviemaking in Italy. It’s amusing to watch Albanesi, an
intense, gaunt young man, in action, whether he’s shooting a room of
corpses (“Stay still, you dead people!”), taking the mystery out of
gory scenes for child actor Malantrucco’s benefit (a dismembered leg is
constructed with jelly candy and black cherry syrup, as crew members
gnaw on it) or instructing his offscreen cohorts on the benefits of
“More, more. More blood!” 

Albanesi’s commentary track, also
subtitled, demonstrates his movie-mad qualities; in the first three
minutes he name-drops Argento, Stanley Kubrick, Sergio Leone, Roman
Polanski and the Coen Brothers as inspirations for certain shots and
themes. And hold onto your popcorn for Albanesi’s subtitled
seven-minute short L’Armadio (The Closet), ostensibly about a
sleeping boy who hears strange noises from his bedroom armoire—until a
well-timed plot twist also reveals Albanesi’s twisted storytelling
skills. 

Trackman. (80 minutes; widescreen; unrated; 2007).
In director Igor Shavlak’s Russian-language thriller, a trio of bank
thieves (Dmitri Orlov, Tomas Motskus and Oleg Kamenshikov) spirit away
the loot during a violent holdup, and they’re also holding hostage a
pair of female tellers (Svetlana Metkina and Yuliya Mikhailova) and a
policeman (Alexsandr Vysokovsky). They all go on the lam underneath
Moscow’s abandoned subway tunnels, so it’s a pity that a hulking
psycho, known in urban legend as the Chernobyl-damaged Trackman
(Alexsei Dmitriyev), turns out to be the real deal—and this creep has a
penchant for plucking the peepers out of his victims’ noggins. Eye
carumba!

The making of Trackman was one component in a sweeping 2006 New York Times
article on the new Russian cinema and the financial involvement of
American film studios. That helps explain why Sony Pictures’ Monumental
Films shingle and 20th Century Fox have their logos preceding this
effort. Still, Trackman proves the universality of cinema genres; it’s an atmospheric knockoff of our own slasher-flick achievements, with My Bloody Valentine
instantly coming to mind, although the killer’s appearance, with
sunglasses perched atop a cloth-covered kisser, recalls Claude Rains’
1933 getup for The Invisible Man. 

A box-office success in Russia (although there’s no confirmation that Putin gave it a thumbs-up), Trackman’s
derivative outing has been letterboxed at a 2.35:1 ratio for its
stateside DVD debut, preserving Shavlok’s widescreen compositions.
Instead of the bland American dubbing, the movie plays better with the
DVD options of the original Russian soundtrack with English subtitles.

Brotherhood of Blood. (88 minutes; R; 2007). Genre veterans Sid Haig (the killer clown Captain Spaulding in Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects) and Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead, Zombie’s Halloween
remake) try to pump some new blood into this low-budget terror tale
from Germany’s co-writer/co-director tag team of Michael Roesch and
Peter Scheerer. Carrie the comely vampire hunter (Victoria Pratt) and
her band of stake-wielders attempt to protect architect Thomas (William
Snow) from harm, since his photographer-brother could be a bloodsucker
following a recent brouhaha in Brasov, Romania. But 800-year-old
vampire king Pashek (Haig) has other ideas, and so does the fanged
Stanis (Foree). 

Shot in 12 days on a Los Angeles
soundstage, in which the film’s high-definition video transfer has been
colored in dull, pasty blotches of yellow and white, Brotherhood
isn’t very good. Roesch and Scheerer’s slapdash direction makes a
mishmash of their own script, a time-hopping, nonlinear chronicle that
doesn’t help an already confusing story. Cliches abound, like the
moment when a flashlight goes dead in the darkness or a character
ominously intones, “It’s been quiet. Too quiet,” with Ralph
Rieckermann’s annoying music score detracting from any suspense. 

Poor Foree, who also co-produced, has
one scene where his vampire must deliver so much plot exposition that
this cheapo production simply collapses under its own pretensions. By
the way, Eurotrash hack director Uwe Boll gets a thank you in the final
credits, never a good sign, while the dental overbites employed by the
movie’s sawtooths make the cast slobber and lisp like Yosemite Sam. 

Brotherhood of Blood is presented
in a 1.78:1 ratio. Extras include five minutes of behind-the-scenes
jabber and three minutes of on-camera interviews with Pratt, Haig and
Foree. The commentary track features Haig riffing with the heavily
accented directors, who sound almost like a throwback to those
Hans-and-Franz routines from Saturday Night Live, while those who really, really like this movie can sit through 20 minutes’ worth of storyboard-to-screen comparisons. 

Other titles in the series, which can be purchased separately or in a box set, include Dark Floors, Room 205, The Substitute and No Man’s Land: The Rise of the Reeker.
In addition to whatever extras are found on each DVD, all feature
plastic shell packaging with black-and-white skulls for artwork, plus
12 minutes of coming attractions (most of them red-banded for R-rated
consumption) for the other Underground features, as well as trailers
for Lions Gate’s theatrical releases of Saw 5 and Punisher: War Zone.

—Bill DeLapp