Lycan Colony / Vampires and Other Stereotypes

Rescuing the most tantalizingly obscure SOV oddities, Visual Vengeance is back with a, well, vengeance in the form of Lycan Colony, a 2006 horror epic which made the rounds on RiffTrax a few years back.  Loaded with unintentional humor and overly ambitious special effects, you don’t need extra jokes to have a great time with this movie…but it helps.


Caught up in a werewolf civil war, two trackers team up with a disgraced doctor to rescue his son from the curse hidden in plain sight in a small East Coast town.  Like an unrehearsed bit of Howling fan fiction, Lycan Colony is completely unapologetic about its technical flaws, including bad green screen effects, jump cuts, sloppy video composites and hilarious regional accents.  Which makes it a perfect party movie in nearly every respect.  

 

Writer-director Rob Roy, who turned the film into a series of self-published novels, is so earnest in his efforts to create a sprawling supernatural universe you can’t help but root for his film to succeed.  It doesn’t.  But it’s endearing amateurishness results in something better than what he set out to achieve anyway. You can’t set out to create a cult classic, it has to be blissfully unaware. And Lycan Colony is a film where every flubbed line, corny effect and visible cue card is something to celebrate.  

 


At the other end of the SOV spectrum is writer-director Kevin J. Lidenmuth’s Vampires and Other Stereotypes (1994), an admirable semi-pro effort that is about as slick as they come.  Shot on BetaSP with a cast and crew who actually knew what they were doing, the story involves some innocent partygoers lured into a gateway to hell which, of course, it located in a warehouse in New Jersey!

 

Featuring some creative practical effects work, set design and a clever script that doesn’t overreach, Lidenmuth’s film is a nice little calling card that probably should have lifted him out of the low-budget arena.  Lead actress Wendy Bednarz had also appeared in fan favorite There’s Nothing Out There and makes a cute horror heroine.  As the group faces off against the demons of hell and half a giant rat, there are callbacks to Raimi’s Evil Dead films and a bit of The Prophecy franchise.  It’s all way above the usual SOV curve and a solid creative effort across the board.

 

Lycan Colony comes to Blu looking terrific in both its full length cut and the abbreviated RiffTrax version, which is also included as an extra.  Other bonus features include two commentary tracks, a blooper reel, music video, interviews, liner notes, poster and official Lycan Colony air freshener!  Vampires and Other Stereotypesis pulled from a 1-inch master tape and includes three commentary tracks, interviews with cast and crew, early Super 8 films, trailers, liner notes and a mini-poster.  Each film is available separately…but would make a super sweet double feature!

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tormented

Image
The west coast always struggled to create a creepy atmosphere on screen.  All that southern California sunshine just doesn’t lend itself to ghostly apparitions or gothic castles.  But  Tormented  (1960) gives it a good try, staging its opening scene in an abandoned lighthouse where blackmail turns into murder - and one cover up leads to another.  Director Bert I. Gordon, better known for his giant-sized - but low-budget - monster movies, works well at this level, turning in a film that delivers small scares but perhaps his most  professional finished product. Tom Stewart (played by genre regular Richard Carlson) is a fairly successful jazz pianist whose impending marriage to Meg Hubbard (Susan Gordon) will put him in an entirely new tax bracket.  Trouble is his old flame, Vi (Juli Reding), isn’t taking this lying down.  After  allowing  her to fall to her death in the opening scene, Tom is haunted by disembo...
Read more

All Ladies Do It / Frivolous Lola

Image
Every semi-professional review of erotica probably starts off with the same question:  what’s the difference between porn and art?  The internet age has essentially done away with foreplay; sex is merely the act of completion itself, minus the threat of any malware or suspicious browser activity.  But the work of Italian director Tinto Brass, for all its leering upskirt shots of derrieres and pubic hair, still communicates something that websites like Pornhub never will:  the art of seduction.  All Ladies Do It  (1992), a breezy sexual adventure, follows Diana (Claudia Koll) whose marriage is threatened by her fantasies of dalliances with other men, stories her husband believes are nothing more than exciting role play.  But her loose definition of adultery inspires plenty of promiscuous hook-ups, taking advantage of any (ahem)  loophole  that provides a quick thrill.   Flirting with some hardcore sequences (there...
Read more

The Cat and the Canary

Image
My favorite directors have always been showoffs:  Hitchcock, DePalma, Spielberg (when he’s feeling frisky) and gonzo auteurs like Sam Raimi.  There’s just something about their cinematic ambition, constantly reminding the audience that, yes, there actually  is  someone behind the camera calling the shots.  And that directorial discontent shines through even in the early days of the medium, such as Paul Leni’s 1927 adaptation of  The Cat and the Canary .  While the rest of the industry was still learning the basics of visual language, Leni fills his frame with tracking shots, POVs and dramatic lighting that set the standard for every spook show to come!  Gathered for the reading of the last will and testament of eccentric recluse Cyrus West,  the potential heirs meet up in his decrepit mansion to discover who will inherit the estate and family jewels.  Predictably there is some petty jealousy when young Annab...
Read more