SPOILER WARNING: You can probably consider this review a bit unobjective seeing as how I love this movie so much and contributed to the commentary and liner notes for the blu ray release.

You should totally buy it from MVD because it comes with a limited edition slipcase New Hampshire Forest Scent air freshener, commentary with director Rob Roy, another commentary with Bill Van Ryn of Drive-In Asylum and me, an interview with Rob Roy, the Rifftrax version of the movie, a music video, bloopers, a trailer, liner notes, a mini-poster, a sticker set and a reversible blu ray sleeve.

Director and writer Rob Roy has had a strong connection to wolves his entire life. It started after he first saw Balto, which inspired him to create his own wolf film. The film you’re about to reach about. The film during which he attempted to contact Balto star Kevin Bacon for a cameo before being somewhat ironically chased off the actor’s property by dogs.

He told the Nashua Telegraph, “Let me say first of all that I am an animal lover. No werewolves were hurt during the making of Lycan Colony. I’ve always loved werewolf movies, but I’m tired of seeing the same storyline over and over again. The werewolf is always a sick tormented beast. He’s always the bad guy. In Lycan Colony, we filled a whole town with them. Some are good, some are bad. None of them are these simple monsters that show up for five minutes at the end of the movie. They’re the life and blood of a modern town, and much closer to us than we’re used to seeing in these movies.”

Roy is self-taught and learned every aspect of filmmaking – from make-up effects to building his own camera dollies, animatronic heads and blood sprayers as well as building his own blue-screen shooting area in his garage – while making this movie. 

Dr. Daniel Solomon (Bill Sykes), a disgraced alcoholic surgeon, and his family move to a small town in the wake of one of his surgeries under the influence costing a patient their life. He has an AA sponsor so bad that he takes him to a bar afterward, a bar where he meets a brother and sister who are ex-military and looking for their adventurer father. Seconds after they explain the inscription on their father’s watch, the bartender ends up dropping it on their table, which is like Chekov’s gun going off before you even see it. This leads to a werewolf attack within the bar, the military brother getting killed and Daniel falling through what can only be a warp zone to escape.

Meanwhile, Daniel’s son Stewart (Ryan O Roy) has fallen for Sarah (Libby Collins), who comes ot his room late at night and brings him to a graveyard where she bites his chest and makes him one of the cursed under the full moon.

Who can save the day? Maybe it’s Athena, the witch played by Kristi Lynn, who loaned all of her exotic animals to this movie which still doesn’t explain why a spider monkey randomly shows up at the end. She licks everything with sight and then explains the history of werewolves in animation that I am not even remotely sure can be referred to as animation. Speaking of animation, the military guy has a neck tattoo that was added in post and it flickers. It’s the most disconcerting take-you-out-of-the-movie thing I’ve ever seen and yes, it is awesome.

Made in Hudson, Bedford, Goffstown, Merrimack and Manchester, New Hampshire — which is why this had the tagline “Welcome to New Hampshire…Live free or die!” — you’ll perhaps struggle with some of the accents. These towns are the homes of stars like Seth Meyers, Sarah Silverman, Jane Balder from V, Grace Metalious who wrote Peyton Place and Adam Sandler. Perhaps most relevant to this film are the facts that GG Allin was born there as well as The Howling star Christopher Stone.

Keeping it local, the movie premiere at Chunky’s Cinema Pub in Pelham on Sunday, Oct. 23, 2005 with a concert/film screening/Halloween costume contest extravaganza. At Chunky’s you can order a Caesar Romero Salad, Wizard of Ozzarella Sticks, Reservoir Dogs (yes hot dogs), the Parmageddon Chicken Sandwich, a Kevin Bacon Burger, a Carrie Cosmo, the Catalina Wine Mixer Sangria, Jurassic Pork Tacos, Rum Forrest Rum or a Jabba the Hot Fudge Sundae.

If you ask Rob Roy, he says that this movie is about “The sensual underbelly of animalistic human beings and what happens when we surrender to that.” He’s expanded the universe of the film in Rage of the Theriomorphs, a book in which Dr. Dan, Dave, Russ, Stew, and Sarah are back and getting accustomed to their new lives and new rules. A new mysterious death has caused an uproar and a new threat to the entire town has arrived. This needs to be a movie, right?

Lycan Colony is the kind of movie that shuts off my brain and lets someone else drive. I never really recovered.

Michael Mann was an executive producer on the original Miami Vice, so it makes sense that he returned to direct, write and co=produce this reimagined movie.

Starring Colin Farrell as James “Sonny” Crockett and Jamie Foxx as Ricardo “Rico” Tubbs, this film was inspired by Foxx discussing the show with Mann at a party for the movie Ali. Mann would go a bit wild on this one, leading crew members to say that he made sudden script changes, filmed in unsafe weather conditions (the film was delayed by three hurricanes) and filming in places that “even the police avoid, drafting gang members to work as security.”

Since making the movie, Mann thinks of it as one of the ones that got away, because after guns were fired near the Paraguay location, Fox went home. The production than couldn’t afford to go back, so the compromised ending just doesn’t work for Mann. He said, “I don’t know how I feel about it. I know the ambition behind it, but it didn’t fulfill that ambition for me because we couldn’t shoot the real ending.”

It’s also a wild movie because where the series was fashion and pastel colors — and this still has fashion, of course — this film is just darkness. Drug informants’ wives get their heads blown off with C4 necklaces. Said informant walks in the way of a truck. And the movie moves past Florida to drug hot spots and involves Sonny in a doomed relationship with Isabella (Gong Li), the financial wizard and lover of Arcángel de Jesús Montoya (Luis Tosar).

I’ve had this conversation before, but if this was called something other than Miami Vice, people would have loved every moment of it. When that name came out, people immediately thought of the theme song and the past versus allowing this digitally shot piece of style to succeed on its own.

That said, we now live in a reality where you can watch it again and again without ever needing to associate it with anything else.

The Mill Creek steelbox of Miami Vice is exclusively available from WalMart. Extras include behind the scenes features and commentary by Michael Mann.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally on the site on July 20, 2022.

Based on The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy, which is in turn based on the unsolved 1947 murder of Elizabeth Short — one in which her black hair had been bleached and then dyed red before she was surgically sliced in half with a technique called a hemicorporectomy, her skin washed and her body was posed with her hands above her head, elbows bent at right angles and legs spread apart — this 2006 Brian DePalma movie was in development hell until L.A. Confidential was a success and Ellroy’s books got hot.

The director’s cut of the film ran over three hours but was cut down to a little over two hours for the producers. Ellroy was highly critical of the released film and claims that the original cut is a superior version of the film and more faithful to his book.

After a boxing match between them, LAPD detectives Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) and Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart) become partners and friends, bonding as a trio with Lee’s girlfriend Katherine “Kay” Lake (Scarlett Johansson). Beyond her trying to sleep with Dwight outside of her relationship, she’s also branded with the initials of the mobster whose arrest made Dwight’s career.

On January 15, 1947, their lives change when the Black Dahlia’s body is found.

Dwight soon learns from Madeleine Linscott (Hilary Swank) that Elizabeth was a lesbian and appeared in smoker films, a fact she doesn’t want to be connected with, so she sleeps with him in exchange for his silence and then introduces him to her rich parents. Meanwhile, the man whose initials are on Kay, Bobby DeWitt (Richard Brake) is out of jail, so Lee attempts to kill him and dies in the process. That grief causes Dwight and Kay to finally make love, but when she follows him later, she sees him with Madeleine, the woman who looks like the Black Dahlia who so obsessed her now dead husband.

The end of this goes beyond noir and pulp to madness, as incestual pornographic films, ruined rich families and femme fatales nearly wipe out most of the main players, which also includes Fiona Shaw as Madeleine’s mother, John Kavanagh as her father and Mia Kirschner as the ghostly Dahlia, seen only in flashbacks and death. Kirschner was originally on set simply to feed lines to other actors in their screen tests. potential actors in screen tests. De Palma and writer Josh Friedman cast her and expanded her role from the novel. As Kirschner resembled the real Dahlia, she knew a good deal about the case and had always been told if there was a movie about the murder, she should be in it.

Plus, the cast also has Rose McGowan, Rachel Miner, Angus MacInnes (Rosey from Strange Brew), Mike Starr (the hired killer from Dumb and Dumber) and DePalma regular — and Phantom of the Paradise — William Finley in his final film.

DePalma kept up his string of being seen as a woman hater by winning the Alliance of Women Film Journalists Hall of Shame for this. Other films inducted in 2006 were A Good Year, Basic Instinct 2, Beerfest, Little Man, My Super-Ex Girlfriend and You, Me and Dupree as well as Mel Gibson inducted for his languge about women when he was arrested for drunk driving.

David Fincher had originally planned to direct this movie as a multi-hour mini-series in black and white. He left the project when he saw that he wouldn’t be able to make it to his standards. While I like this movie, I would absolutely go wild seeing what Fincher would have done.

Lukas Moodysson said that this was “a black and white silent movie with sound” and used this sentence to set it up: “A woman in a man’s body. A man in a woman’s body. Jesus in Mary’s stomach. The water breaks. It floods into me. I can’t close the lid. My heart is full.”

As Jena Malone reads what sounds like an off the cuff soliloquy, we watch as Man (Peter Lorentzon), a man in women’s clothing, shares the screen with the ghost of Woman, an ideal he feels that he will never reach.

It’s been so incredible watching all of Moodyson’s films in sequence as he goes from the somewhat traditional feel — while still having a unique look — of Show Me Love and his films grow darker and less like ordinary narratives until by this point, it’s nearly just images against Malone’s monotone delivery, which is way more intriguing than that word choice may suggest.

I can see how some people would come to this movie and hate it. I was intrigued by how Moodysson uses a completely alien form to tell truths.

The limited edition The Lukas Moodysson Collection from Arrow includes high definition blu rays of seven films, as well as interviews with Moodysson and other cast and crew, moderated by film programmer Sarah Lutton. There’s also a two hundred page featuring new writing by Peter Walsh, excerpts from the original press kits for each film, interviews with and directors’ statements from Moodysson and essays on his films from a 2014 special issue of the Nordic culture journal Scandinavica by C. Claire Thomson, Helga H. Lúthersdóttir, Elina Nilsson, Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerståhl Stenport and Kjerstin Moody.

Extras include interviews with Moodysson, a feature on the themes of this movie, a trailer and an image gallery.

You can get this set from MVD.

It was thought that Jean Rollin’s 2007 film House of Clocks was his final film of his career, but then he made this one-hour short which was screened at the Cinémathèque de Toulouse. Then, he added twenty minutes of additional scenes and cut the film into two distinct parts just like The Rape of the Vampire.

Instead of vampires, this is the story of three sisters, Medusa, Stheno, and Eurydice. Rollin’s wife Simone plays Madusa as she stalks the stages of the Grand Guignol after her sister Euryale (Sabine Lenoël) and she have had a psychic battle that left one mindless and the other blind. A girl (Gabrielle Rollin, Jean’s granddaughter) plays for the reptiles and is turned to stone and then we hear a long conversation between a janitor (Jean-Pierre Bouyxou) and the figure of myth surrounded by posters advertising past bloody performances.

After a shocking battle between Stheno and Meduda, the second part really feels like the past films.  Stheno(Marlène Delcambre) wanders a cemetery holding the head of her sister, meets Cornelius (Delphine Montoban) and says things like “The two orphan vampires danced on the graves in Père Lachaise. We’ll dance under them,” before the two dance to a song from Fascination.

There are several moments near the end of his career where Rollin made movies that tried to unite his past works and say something about getting close to the curtain. This is one more and yes, as lovers of his films seem to always say, this may not be the best one to start with. But do start. Get obsessed.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is better than you would think. It was on the site on December 21, 2017.

Director Glen Morgan (Willard) did this movie with the intent of expanding on the ambiguous ideas of the original while giving it an identifiable villain. Once I read that, I instantly wanted to hate this movie. I’m of the John Carpenter school that believes that the more you explain the monster, the less interesting it is. But I was surprised how much I enjoyed this film.

Working along with producer James Wong (they also created the TV series Space: Above and Beyond, as well as the movies Final Destination (in Japan, this film is included as part of that film series and was called Final Deadcall) and the Jet Li vehicle The One), this film was made for Dimension Films and MGM. Wong and Morgan clashed with the Weinstein brothers over the script and the end of the movie, which led to numerous rewrites and reshoots. Oh that Harvey Weinstein — I feel that no one will really miss him in Hollywood until they figure out that he can make them money again.

A bright point that made me think twice about Black Christmas (or Black X-Mas) was that Morgan asked for input from Bob Clark, the original creator, as well as having him sign on as a co-producer. The film features Billy, the killer only hinted at in the original, and his daughter/sister (oh no, not another incest movie), Agnes. However, in Steffen Hantke’s book American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium, Morgan said that the inclusion of a second killer came from Dimension and that “a ten million dollar movie of Black Christmas didn’t need anyone’s help, and they should have left us alone. But they had to have the two killers, and then they were after kids from The O.C. We compromised a lot.” In another interview, he stated that he wasn’t happy with the film, claiming that it was schizophrenic “because Bob Weinstein came in and urinated on it. Really, there was a time where torture porn was the hot thing. You know I became friends with Bob Clark. You can throw that movie into one of your first questions. I loved that movie, and also A Christmas Story and I learned a lot from Bob, and had his blessing that we were trying to make a version that he didn’t get to deal with the background of the killers, and stuff like that. When Bob Weinstein came in and saw that, he was like, “We need to drag Michele Trachtenberg down the hall by her eyes.” And I was like, “Oh, Lord,” and I talked to my agent and lawyer, and Kristen about it. It was humiliating, it was horrible. I stayed to try and protect the cast and crew, friends of mine, and ended up taking it on the chin”.

Let’s get to the movie, hmm?

We meet Billy early — he was born with severe Sin City-esque jaundice and liver disease to a mother who never loved him. Beyond abusing him, she also kills his father and buries him in the crawlspace with the help of her boyfriend. It turns out that that guy is impotent, so she rapes her 12-year-old son (again, can we please stop getting incest movies by surprise) and gives birth to Agnes.

Eight years later, on Christmas Day 1991, Billy escapes from his attic prison and kills his mother, her lover and stabs Agnes in the eye. He then makes cookies out of his mother’s skin and is sent to a mental asylum that he escapes from fifteen years later.

Billy wants to go home, but his home now belongs to the Delta Alpha Kappa sorority. Within minutes, Clair (not Clare) is killed and when Megan goes to investigate, she is killed as well (including her eyes being ripped out and eaten while she is dragged by her eyesockets). Meanwhile, the rest of the sisters, Kelli  (Katie Cassidy, Taken, the 2010 revision of A Nightmare on Elm Street), Melissa (Michelle Trachtenberg, Dawn from TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Heather (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), Dana (TV’s Party of Five), Lauren and house mother Mrs. Mac (Andrea Martin, who was in the original film) are trying to have a Secret Santa party when an obscene phone caller threatens to kill all of them.

Clair’s half-sister Leigh (Kristen Cloke, Final Destination) comes looking for her, just as Eve, the weird sorority sister, gives Heather a glass unicorn for her present. Meanwhile, Kelli’s boyfriend Kyle (Goldie Hawn’s son Oliver Hudson) shows up. As they search for Megan, a video shows up on her laptop of her having sex with Kyle. Kelli kicks him out and then the lights suddenly go out.

Dana goes outside to fix the fusebox, but is murdered. The rest of the girls get a phone call of her screaming and another threat that they will all be killed. As they search for her, they only find blood. And oh yeah, Eve decapitated and frozen head inside her car.

Heather and Mrs. Mac try to get away despite the bad weather (the police said it would be up to 2 hours for them to arrive). Heather is killed inside the car as it warms up and an icicle impales Mrs. Mac right through the eye. Meanwhile, Melissa is killed with a pair of flying roller skates and Lauren, who was recovering from drinking too much, is found in bed with her eyes removed.

Whew! This film is a whirlwind of gore and eye destruction as if Fulci himself rose from the dead to do ocular harm. As Bill from Groovy Doom reminded me, Fulci once told an interviewer that the eyes “are the first thing you have to destroy, because they have seen too many bad things.”

Kyle comes back and swears that he is not the killer, which everyone tends to believe once he is pulled into the attic and killed. Turns out Agnes is the real killer and she’s brought Billy with her. A fight ensues, Agnes falls into the empty space between the walls and the house is set ablaze as Kelli and Leigh escape.

If you ever find yourself in a horror movie, always ask to see the killer’s body, then shoot that body in the head as many times as you can. Then set it on fire.

Of course, Billy and Agnes come back, with Leigh being killed and Kelli using a defibrillator to take out Agnes. Billy drops out of the ceiling and chases Kelli, but he falls off a railing and is impaled on a Christmas tree.

This movie is pretty much wall to wall gore, in marked contrast to the original. Yet I found myself really involved in its pacing, in the cinematography and even the lighting. It’s not a slapdash affair.

After the critical and financial failure of this film, Bob Clark began work on a sequel to the original with Olivia Hussey and John Saxon reprising their roles of Jess and Lt. Ken Fuller. Jess would have been the new house mother in this version, but Clark died before it could get made.

There’s a ton cut and changed in the final film. Like Lauren Hannon’s original death scene, which involved Agnes sneaking into her room and gouging her eyes out with the glass unicorn in an homage to the original film. And there were three alternate endings shot for the film. The first ending had Leigh and Kelli open Clair’s present when Kelli gets a phone call from either Billy or Agnes. The second ending, which was used in the UK, had Leigh coming to examine Agnes’ body and being killed by her, then Kelli electrocuting her Agnes. Finally, the third ending had a mortician find that Billy’s body is missing.

Despite the pain that it took to make the film, I really think it’s worth watching. It shouldn’t take over for the original, but it’s worth your time this holiday season.