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!

 

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