 |
| Images courtesy of Visual Vengeance |
MVD and boutique sublabel Visual Vengeance have made their
presence known in the home video horror collecting community as a brand to
watch for when it comes to regional homegrown shot-on-video SOV horror. Akin to Olive Film’s Slasher Video sublabel
or Vinegar Syndrome’s Saturn’s Core focused on Super 8mm, tape or digital
productions released on home video rather than theatrical, their efforts
recently include everything from the inspired and kind of wonderful The
Abomination to the dreadful, near unwatchable Lycan Colony. Among their latest upcoming offerings is prolific
video horror purveyor writer-director Kevin J. Lindenmuth and his debut 1994 tape
film Vampires and Other Stereotypes, perhaps the best Visual Vengeance
release since The Abomination and certainly the most effects heavy.
Concerning two paranormal investigators roaming the
nighttime streets of New York when they cross paths with a group of party girls
seeking a warehouse dance rave, it turns out they also inadvertently opened a
portal to Hell itself. Soon the newly
formed oddball group consisting of occult detectives and partiers find
themselves trapped in the netherworld of evil desperately trying to find an
escape path while fending off fanged demons, oversized flesh-eating rats and an
insect-like Hellspawn that looks like a mosquito, a maggot and the newborn
concluding Alien Resurrection.
Worse still, our dynamic duo of paranormal investigators may know more
than their telling about their own intrinsic connection to the occult and
supernatural.
Though borrowing quite a bit from Sam Raimi’s The Evil
Dead or Lamberto Bava’s Demons in terms of the demonic makeup
including but not limited to a wall of disembodied heads constantly moaning and
groaning, a goblin-like green faced creature who keeps reappearing like an
unholy tour guide and grisly gore effects throughout, Vampires and Other
Stereotypes for being a no-budget do-it-yourself piece of regional horror
tape filmmaking is among the better examples of such you’re likely to see. Written, produced and edited by Lindenmuth
with startlingly good video photography and lighting by Tullio Tedeschi, this
little movie looks a lot better on its SD PAL tape source than it has any right
to. While openly stealing the arms
coming out of walls vista in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, the look and
feel of Vampires and Other Stereotypes feels like a souped-up haunted
house hayride.
Most of the cast members of the piece are other video film
actors though Laura Vale as one of the party girls would later turn up on both Desperate
Housewives and the hit sitcom Two and a Half Men. Also notable is actor Ed Hubbard as one of
the more serious minded elder paranormal detectives who looks like a cross
between Christopher Walken and Tobin Bell.
Our main hero played by Bill White, a young paranormal investigator with
a little secret, is rough around the edges but as our characters of college aged
partiers start losing life and limb to demons we don’t care as much about the
rusty acting.
A delightful counterpoint to The Evil Dead or Demons
with unique rules on the different circles and dimensions of Hell itself,
shown in a kind of Orpheus or Through the Looking Glass
framework, Vampires and Other Stereotypes despite not having much in the
way of bloodsuckers themselves is a splendid little beer and pizza film good
for a Halloween party. While clearly
done with next to no money and non-professional actors, this shot-on-video
demonic possession chiller as well as literal Hellscape does a surprising
amount of worldbuilding with vastness despite having few if any resources at
its disposal. As before, Visual
Vengeance have put together a wonderful deluxe package for the video film,
featuring several new interviews, several of the director’s early Super 8 short
films, limited slipcover and reversible sleeve art, rounding the release out
just in time for Halloween which it’s plainly tailor made for.
--Andrew Kotwicki
