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| Courtesy: Vinegar Syndrome |
Vinegar Syndrome has built a stellar reputation on giving first-class restorations and feature-packed special editions to the most obscure, overlooked, otherwise-forgotten types of indie genre films. Some of their titles have enjoyed cult followings in the past but have struggled to find decent distribution; others are largely-unknown oddities that VinSyn resurrects and makes the case for their cult-classic status. With both types of releases, the small company has carved out a well-deserved reputation as one of the best niche labels out there. Their dedication to giving the best possible editions to the most overlooked films has seldom been so succinctly stated and effectively symbolized as on their new Homegrown Horrors box set, which gives 2k restorations and exhaustive extras to three micro-budget, regionally-produced indie horror films – from Missouri, Ohio, and Massachusetts – two of which already had respectable though modest cult followings, and the last of which was pretty much entirely forgotten and had barely even seen a VHS release. All three of these were first-time viewings for me, and two of them I had never even heard of before this set came out. Is Vinegar Syndrome correct that these previously-neglected films have bright futures as rediscovered cult classics, or are any of them obscure for good reason? Let's find out...
FATAL EXAM (1985/1990)
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| Courtesy: Vinegar Syndrome |
Homegrown Horrors gets off to – there's no nice way to say this – a pretty rough start with Fatal Exam, a largely amateur-produced haunted-house/Satanic-cult/slasher hybrid shot in St. Louis in 1985, and released on VHS in 1990 after a long and financially-troubled post-production process. The passion and dedication of the first-time filmmakers is very clear – especially after watching Vinegar Syndrome's very thorough 45-minute documentary about the making of the film – and the movie certainly has an ambitious story that blends various genre elements in a way that gives it real potential, so it kind of pains me to say this, but.... this movie is bad. It has elements that are cool, and sequences that are quite fun, so it isn't a total waste of time, and I can see why VinSyn thought it was worthy of a fresh look. But the problem stems from one of the biggest issues that inexperienced filmmakers tend to bring to a first-time production: a lack of awareness of good pacing and structure. This movie moves with a glacially slow pace exacerbated by poor decisions at every stage of the production. The writing is far too wordy and exposition-heavy – it is the very antithesis of “show, don't tell,” the first rule of good screenwriting – the dialogue scenes are directed at way too slow a pace, and the editing is waaaaay too loose. The editing is really what kills the film: so many shots feel like like they have too much padding on either side, giving unnatural pauses between every line of dialogue when cutting back and forth between close-ups, and it feels like every line of dialogue that was on the page was left in the final cut, with no thought to pacing. This feels like an assembly cut of all the footage strung together, and not a final edit. The movie clocks in at 115 minutes (a red flag in itself, on a film like this), but it feels like if it had been cut by a more experienced and disciplined editor, it would be about 85 minutes long, tops. My feeling was vindicated when, in the documentary, director Jack Snyder says as much: that upon rewatching it for this restoration, he felt like he could turn it into probably an 80-minute movie that would work better. I honestly wonder why Vinegar Syndrome didn't give him the chance to do this – create his Snyder Cut, dare I say it – as an alternate version on the disc. Because despite the strong points throughout the film that give it potential to be a lot of fun, that endlessly slow pacing is lethal.
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| Courtesy: Vinegar Syndrome |
And let me be clear – there definitely are strong points that could make it a lot of fun if it lost about half an hour of padding. The premise is pretty solid, if not exactly unique: a group of parapsychology students spend the weekend in a haunted house for a research project, but find themselves confronted not only by ghosts, but by a robed slasher with a scythe. It has some legitimately strong sequences, starting with a pretty cool opening nightmare sequence that gets the movie off to a promising start, and including some very fun and effective, if clearly DIY, stop-motion animation. As one might expect, the acting and filmmaking both feel a bit amateurish, but that's only natural for a grassroots indie from St. Louis, and hardly a dealbreaker for the kinds of horror fans who would be interested in a film like this. The blend of genre elements – how it has ghosts, but also a slasher, but also a lot of Satanic-panic wackiness – makes for a movie where anything could happen (when anything actually is happening). The variety is fun, as we get ghostly manifestations in one horror sequence, and a slasher chase in the next, before building to some Manos: The Hands of Fate-ish occult shenanigans. It's just a shame that those fun sequences are separated by so. much. dull. exposition. But most importantly, the last half-hour of the film is honestly quite fun, once it finally stops talking and gets moving. It does what it should have done all along: gives the overlong dialogue a rest and plays to those strengths, with those various genre elements coming together in a way that's really pretty cool, in a scrappy, DIY sense. It is here that the movie gives us its most impressive technical achievement: some stop-motion animation that is unmistakably very homemade, but looks really cool. It's downright impressive that these guys were able to pull off what they do at the end of this movie, considering that the whole film has the feel of a bunch of big-dreaming amateurs learning filmmaking as they go along.
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| Courtesy: Vinegar Syndrome |
Those strong points make me want to be nice to this movie. It's an underdog of a movie made by people who clearly love films, and clearly wanted to make a good one, and I can appreciate that. But the best I can say is that it has some positive qualities that make it worth maybe a one-time viewing, and maybe just barely make it worth including in this set. But... it's a long, dull, patience-testing slog to get to those stronger points, and you really have to have a taste for no-budget regional horror to enjoy this one. It's hard to recommend, and it probably shouldn't be the first film you watch in this set. I am pretty sure that there's a more fun movie lost in this footage somewhere, but this isn't it.
Score:
BEYOND DREAM'S DOOR (1989)
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| Courtesy: Vinegar Syndrome |
Ok, now THIS is more like it! Beyond Dream's Door is a perfect Vinegar Syndrome movie: a low-budget, very obscure, off-the-beaten-path indie which swings for the fences with tremendous ambition, and pulls off something seriously impressive, and the best kind of weird, despite its limited resources. It is frankly pretty shocking what this film is able to accomplish and how good it is, by force of sheer creativity and passion for weird, surreal horror; especially considering that its origins were as a grad student project in Ohio State University's film program. This is everything that Fatal Exam is not: it is very well-shot, with ambitious steadicam, crane, and dolly work, it is well-edited and tightly-paced in a way that maintains a consistently strong momentum, and while its script unquestionably has flaws, clunky dialogue, and moments that don't work, the writing is pretty good, and the concept is great. As the title makes clear, this is a dream horror movie, drawing very heavily from H.P. Lovecraft, with influences from Thomas Ligotti, Clive Barker, and Stephen King mixed in for good measure. It's a wildly ambitious idea for a bunch of college students in Ohio, and while the youthful indie nature of the production is occasionally obvious in stilted performances, questionable bits of dialogue, and occasional dodgy cutaway shots, first-time-feature-director Jay Woelfel and company really pull it off.
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| Courtesy: Vinegar Syndrome |
Psychology major Ben Dobbs is having nightmares; increasingly alarming recurring nightmares, which every night pick up where the last one left off, in which he is being chased by a hideous, shadowy monster which won't stop until it gets him. As the nightmares start to affect his sanity, he turns to his psych professor and two grad students for help, but they make a grim discovery: anyone he tells about his nightmares then starts having the same nightmares, and sometimes the dreams can be fatal. They are being hunted by a dream-demon which feeds off fear, and kills people in their dreams while using them as a vehicle to spread to the dreams of others. What makes the film so effective is that it executes that very cool, classically-Lovecraftian premise in a way that genuinely captures the slippery, unreal, ethereal quality of dreams. Much of the script is written with the fragmented logic of dreams, so that the viewer can never really be sure when we are in a dream, or when dreams are bleeding over into reality, as they increasingly do as the film progresses. And I do not mean that the script is just sloppy or incoherent and uses “dream-like” as a cop-out (we've all seen films that try that); it's a very deliberate choice, taking cues from its obvious literary reference-points like Lovecraft and Ligotti (some of the nightmare apparitions Ben encounters are named in the credits as “Dead Dreamers,” in reference to Thomas Ligotti's cult-classic short story anthology Songs of a Dead Dreamer from a few years earlier, and at a couple points Ben reads from a spooky poem about nightmares that feels inspired by both authors). The script may have weaknesses elsewhere, in the form of occasional clumsy dialogue, but it nails the nightmare logic of the story, in a way that feels very compelling.
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| Courtesy: Vinegar Syndrome |
The same goes for the filmmaking and cinematography. The film is shot
with a very dreamy aesthetic, using a lot of Fulci and
Argento-inspired colored lighting, strong use of shadows and
darkness, and very effectively-used camera movement. Especially given
the film's origins as a student production, how kinetic the
cinematography is, and how well its movement is orchestrated, is
particularly impressive. The film uses a lot of practical locations
which are very well-chosen for being conducive to its nightmarish
feeling, but a lot of the nightmare sequences appear to have been
shot in a studio, making very strong use of a black void, minimally
lit. The nightmare sequences are greatly enhanced by a whole lot of
abstract cutaways that feel very genuinely like details of a dream:
images shot using distorted mirrors, glass, hands without bodies, and
things like that, which demonstrate Woelfel and company's desire to
make something more artsy than just a typical horror film. The
nightmare sequences also have some rather gratuitous, shoehorned-in
moments of nudity which were shot last and spliced in at
the behest of the film's eventual distributor, and they feel more than a
bit out of place, but those are really the only questionable moments
in some pretty outstandingly assembled sequences.
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| Courtesy: Vinegar Syndrome |
For a low-budget indie, Beyond Dream's Door also has some excellent effects work. The dream-demon hunting our heroes is very cool. The film learns well from Lovecraft, and never directly shows us the full creature in its entirety: it is always seen half-masked in deep shadows, as a silhouette on walls, or in fast close-ups of specific details during attacks, so we don't get a clear picture of what it actually looks like, and instead our imagination takes over to piece the fragments and shapes together into the creepiest possible version of what it could be. But we do see a lot of it in fragments like that, and mostly see a whole lot of its long, spindly arms, giant claws, and giant mouth full of teeth, and it all looks great. The film also packs some great, surprisingly nasty gore effects. The production team used their resources very well, to make the film look very good, both for its budget, and in general.
It may still be a little rough around the edges and show its low-budget, young-filmmaker indie nature in aspects of its production (particularly with regards to acting), but Beyond Dream's Door is a very good, very well-made film that stands FAR above the others in this set in terms of its filmmaking skill. I was seriously impressed, and wound up really loving it. This is a very strong work of Lovecraftian horror, and anyone who likes that kind of thing will definitely enjoy it. This movie absolutely deserves a lavish special edition like this – once again featuring a very enlightening new documentary, a cast and crew commentary, and much more – and I really hope that its reputation as a cult classic only grows as a result. The set was worth picking up just for this one alone. Highly recommended.
Score:
WINTERBEAST (1986/1989/1992)
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| Courtesy: Vinegar Syndrome |
So far, Homegrown Horrors Volume 1 has been one bad movie with a few fun moments, and one genuinely really good one. And now... there's a movie so jaw-droppingly bizarre and so singularly peculiar that it really defies description, and transcends good and bad. The best way to describe it is just that... it's Winterbeast; beyond that it's hard to find the words to capture quite what it is. Winterbeast is... something else. A movie whose years-long, on-the-weekends-and-when-people-have-free-time production saw it veer off-script in ways that are just bizarre, and which started as an ultra-low-budget DIY project and got seriously spiced up along the way when one of its producers developed into an incredibly talented stop-motion animation artist working with the likes of Nickelodeon and Will Vinton, and decided to use the film to showcase his abilities. It is one of those movies which is simultaneously very bad in some ways, and pretty amazing in other, weirder ways, but captivating throughout due to the really strange combination of both. It's the kind of movie that would be best enjoyed with cheesy-movie-loving friends and plenty of drinks; a party movie. Take some of the so-bad-it's-kind-of-amazing quality of a good Mystery Science Theater flick, mix in the eclectic, off-the-wall creature insanity of Spookies, and the ambitious and artistically-impressive stop-motion-animation-showcase aspects of Equinox, and you have a decent idea of what to expect from Winterbeast, but.. it's probably also weirder than you expect. This movie is just bananas.
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| Courtesy: Vinegar Syndrome |
What is Winterbeast even about? So... some people have been going missing on the trails above a small mountain-side town during tourist season, and the head forest ranger starts an investigation into the disappearances, despite the reckless protests of the mayor-from-Jaws-esque greedy owner of the local hotel and bar. But the forest rangers get more than they bargained for when it turns out that the forest is home to a gateway to Hell from Native American mythology, and the gate is flooding the local area with various strange, bizarre creatures. It's the loosest possible plot, told in the loosest, most borderline-incoherent way; basically, it's a movie where a bunch of outlandish creatures show up every few minutes without rhyme or reason and cause chaos, and our ragtag, comic-relief-heavy band of rangers try to deal with them, while bargain-basement Ben Horne pops up regularly to be a dick. It's a movie where things just happen, without much overarching logic, but it doesn't matter that it doesn't make much sense because it's all so enchantingly weird and unhinged. The movie is so freewheeling, thanks largely to the chaotic nature of how it was made, that the title doesn't even really fit anymore: it seems to be set in the fall (we see a Halloween festival at one point), and there isn't really a primary beast that the movie focuses on, but a whole plethora of them. Much like Fatal Exam, it feels like a movie where anything can happen because the plot makes room for literally any kind of supernatural nonsense. But totally unlike Fatal Exam, this is a movie where everything actually DOES happen: the first monster shows up within seconds of the film starting, and the craziness keeps coming at a pretty fast pace, with very few dull stretches. Winterbeast is many things, but aside from a few scenes that are a bit too long and way too static, boring is not one of them.
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| Courtesy: Vinegar Syndrome |
Something else Winterbeast mostly is not, if we're being honest, is a well-made movie. In terms of filmmaking technique, this thing is an absolute mess, which can only partly be blamed on how it was shot and re-shot very gradually over a period of three years, and then not finished for three more. At least when they started the production, the filmmaking skills of director Christopher Thies and company really weren't there. The cinematography is largely pretty bad, with a lot of too-dark shots and sloppy shot compositions, not to mention a very odd mix of 16mm master shots and 8mm close-ups which can be rather distracting. It's a no-budget indie production made mostly by a bunch of first-time filmmakers, so that's forgivable, but less forgivable is that there are several lengthy dialogue scenes which are basically just an unbroken master wide shot with no closeups or cutaways, because they didn't shoot any. On the commentary (the archival commentary recorded for the film's previous DVD, before Thies passed away at just 50 in 2015) the late director says that this was due to budget concerns, that they were afraid they only had enough money and film stock to shoot scenes once, from one angle, but... come on. Thies and the crew did get better as they went along, with later scenes at least having close-ups, and some even being decently shot, but their skill level maxes out at “ok,” and the film remains technically rough. The mostly single-shot dialogue scenes aren't exactly helped by the obviously amateur nature of most of the actors either. The script, however, is where the lack of polish and conventional quality transcends the bounds of good and bad, and just becomes fascinating; where the strange quality of it all becomes a feature rather than a bug. The dialogue and scenarios are bizarre to say the least, filled with non-sequiturs and really strange exchanges which feel surreal and almost dadaist at times. There are also some priceless moments with cutaways that were obviously shot months or years after the wide shots and dialogue, which insert some really weird humor, like one involving close-ups of a dildo cut into an otherwise unrelated conversation which never acknowledges that it's there. Is Winterbeast supposed to be a comedy? I'm really not sure. It is genuinely unclear what is intentional humor and what is the byproduct of a disjointed production creating a possibly-accidental work of quasi-surrealism. But the result is a fascinating, jaw-droppingly weird and unpredictable oddity.
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| Courtesy: Vinegar Syndrome |
The film's creature effects, however, are an unironic success, and the one place where the movie really creates something genuinely good. In stark contrast to the disjointed, shambling, tonally insane DIY feature surrounding them, Winterbeast's menagerie of mostly-stop-motion monsters is legitimately pretty great, thanks to the handiwork of producer, stop-motion-artist, and Nickelodeon and Will Vinton Studios alum Mark Frizzell. Nearly every creature attack features a different, unique monster, and all of them are really cool in their design, and mostly quite effective in their execution. In the (once again, very extensive) extras, we learn that the initial plan for the film was to feature just one monster – the Winterbeast of the title – but as the production dragged on and Frizzell got more and more accomplished with his stop-motion work, they decided instead to run with the gateway-to-Hell concept, and make every creature a unique, one-off monster that showcased his stop-motion abilities. It was by far the best decision they made in the whole production. Some of the creatures were clearly executed with little time and little money, and have a certain DIY feel to them, but they all look really cool, and the unpredictability of never knowing what type of creature will show up next makes the film all the more fun to watch.
The creature aspect is what makes Winterbeast most worth recommending, and the charmingly insane, off-the-wall quality of the rest of the film is just the icing on the cake. While it may be an odd combination of really cool effects work wrapped up in an objectively pretty badly-made film, the whole weird journey is kind of a blast, if you enjoy this particular variety of lo-fi strangeness. It's a movie that is almost impossible to give an actual rating to, so I'll give it two: one for its overall quality as a film, and one for how much fun it is, in ways both intentional and probably not. Regardless, this is a film that I wholeheartedly recommend, to the kind of B-movie aficionado who thinks they will enjoy it.
Score:
For overall filmmaking quality:
For creature effects and overall fun:
As a package, Homegrown Horrors Volume 1 is an absolutely stunning box set – quite possibly one of the best that Vinegar Syndrome has ever done, and they are a company that sets an extremely high bar. These are three films that easily could have fallen through the cracks forever, stuck on VHS-era SD masters with the original negatives lost to time, and yet here they are on gorgeous 2k restorations. All three of the films have some mild intrinsic picture quality issues that are unavoidable – Fatal Exam has a pretty beat-up negative, not to mention a ton of out-of-focus shots, Beyond Dream's Door had a reel of the negative missing, so about five minutes of the film are sourced from an upscaled tape submaster (which actually still looks quite good and matches very effectively, thanks to VinSyn's meticulous color-correction and restoration), and Winterbeast features a very noticeable mix of decent 16mm footage and pretty atrocious 8mm footage – but considering what they had to work with, these 2k restorations are stunningly good, and it's pretty miraculous that almost all of the negatives survived to be remastered at all. Beyond Dream's Door especially looks great, even with five minutes of upscaled SD footage sprinkled throughout – I really can't say enough about what a great-looking film it is for a micro-budget production, and VinSyn truly did it justice.
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| Courtesy: Vinegar Syndrome |
The extras on the set are also unbelievable. All three of the films have very detailed documentaries about their production – in the case of Fatal Exam and Beyond Dream's Door, VinSyn produced brand-new docs, while in the case of Winterbeast, a very good doc already existed that was thankfully made when the director was still alive, and VinSyn supplements it with some other new interviews – plus multiple commentaries, more interviews and behind-the-scenes footage, and a wealth of other extras new and archival. The extras are well-worth checking out, as they give fascinating looks into these ambitious DIY productions, and will really make you appreciate the films all the more. The packaging for the set is stunning as well, with the three films in separate cases housed in a larger hardbox, with beautiful new artwork. This is basically a perfect box set; in fact, the only fault I can find with it is that I really didn't care for Fatal Exam and I wish they had included another film instead (if you want a better Homegrown Horror-type regional DIY indie to round out a more fun triple-feature with Beyond Dream's Door and Winterbeast, I would recommend the Michigan-produced Hellmaster, which has its own outstanding Vinegar Syndrome edition). But aside from that matter of personal taste, this set is unbelievable. I highly, highly recommend it.
