Piotr (Itay Tiran) and Żaneta (Agnieszka Żulewska) met over the web and are about to be married. He barely speaks Polish, having lived in England for several years. As he comes back to the country for their wedding, he moves into an old home that was owned by her grandfather. However, as he works in the yard, he unearths a skeleton and starts to have visions of a dead bride, Hana, who slowly possesses him during the reception.

As Żaneta is from a rich family, they want to hide this from their friends, so they ply them with food and drink as a doctor and a priest examine Piotr. Only a teacher (Wlodzimierz Press), who is the last surviving Jewish person in the town, recognizes that the possessed man is speaking Yiddish and has the voice of Hana.

Directed by Marcin Wrona, who wrote the story with Pawel Maslona which was based on Piotr Rowicki’s play Adherence, Demon is a new way of looking at the Dybbuk myth but infused through marriage. In the act of being wed, we move past our previous selves and become someone new, someone united not only with a new person, but an entirely different family. Żaneta’s relatives may have profited from World War II and the extermination of the Jewish people, so their sins have come to infect the person who is joining them.

As the guests drunkenly become debauched and the winds and rain howl with fury outside, the groom is in the basement losing his sanity.

Sadly, Wrona committed suicide in his hotel room during the Gdynia Polish Film Festival where this movie was being shown. Beyond this tragic loss of life, this act ends the art that could have been created. What a loss.

Demon is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including an introduction by Slavic horror scholar Dr. Agnieszka Jeżyk, commentary with film historian Daniel Bird and film critic/actress Manuela Lazić, a video essay by Peter Bebergal, author Oo Strange Frequencies: The Extraordinary Story Of The Technological Quest For The Supernatural and filmmaker Stephen Broomer, a trailer and the short film Dibbuk.

You can order this set from Severin.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.

Look, if you can’t have a house in Amityville, have a theater. And if you can’t shoot in Amityville, shoot your movie in Canada and the UK. After evil monkeys, lamps, lumber and furniture, what else can become part of the dark side and get possessed, you know?

Spencer Banks, who plays Reverend Simon Randall, played a character named Simon Randall on the British 1970 children’s series Timeslip. His co-star on that show, Cheryl Burfield, is his wife in this movie and Lesley Scoble, who plays Karen, was Alpha 17 on that very same programme. Yes, I did spell it the British way.

Following the death of her parents, Fawn Harriman inherits a theatre in Amityville. She takes three victims — I mean friends — to spend the weekend there to check the place out. A homeless girl shows up, as does one of her high school teachers, who wants to warn her of the evil inside the playhouse. You know, every playhouse I’ve ever been in has been said to be haunted.

Director John R. Walker will show up in the upcoming Amityville: Evil Never Dies, which is pretty meta. Even more meta, he’ll be playing the Peter Sommers character he’s also played in Ghoul, Meathook Massacre 4 and another movie he’s directed that has a great title, Ouijageist.

This isn’t the worst Amityville movie I’ve seen. It’s pretty competently made, which is a major step above and beyond a lot of these films. I don’t know if that’s a good review or I have desert island syndrome, where everything looks better than some of these movies.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The I Hope You Suffer podcast said that “Since everybody is doing these movie challenges now, we made the only one worth doing.” Bring the pain.

Mark Polonia also made Empire of the Apes, so it stands to wonder why he waited so long to make a cash-in on the Amityville series. I mean, this is the man who also made Sharkenstein, Bigfoot vs. Zombies and multiple Camp Blood movies. Just so you know what you’re getting into — these are shot on video films intended for DVD distribution to maniacs like me in Walmart (or today, on Amazon Prime).

For the eleventh overall Amityville movie, a young woman and her friends — on their way back from helping with hurricane relief efforts in Florida, keeping it topical — stop in the town of Amityville to check in on a sick grandmother.

That’s when they run into an ancient witch and her spells, which turn one of them into a spider. This is more about a curse on the townsfolk than 112 Ocean Avenue. But hey — Eric Roberts turns up as The Dark Lord. What does Roberts do, show up in rural Pennsylvania and put out a beacon to tell directors that he’s available for work?

You can watch this on Tubi.

Director and co-writer Guillermo del Toro said that this was “a very set-oriented, classical but at the same time modern take on the ghost story. I think people are getting used to horror subjects done as found footage or B-value budgets. I wanted this to feel like a throwback.”

He succeeded as this feels so close to the gothic Italian films I love, as well as parts of Hammer along the way, as heiress and author Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) continually is visited by spirits who carry warnings of Crimson Peak, even in her childhood.

As she becomes an adult, she falls in love with English baronet Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), an inventor who is trying to revive the fortunes of his family’s clay mine. Her father thinks something is wrong with Thomas and his sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain), so he pays them to leave the country, but not before Mr. Cushing is murdered. Sharpe takes her to England and his home, located above the clay mines, a place where the red dirt and snow combine to make a bloody canvas for a foreboding home. Meanwhile, Edith leaves behind Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam), who follows her to England to save her from the Sharpes.

Working with writers Matthew Robbins and an uncredited Lucinda Coxon, del Toro aims for a big movie here and succeeds. I watch this at least twice a year and am always so pleased with its scope and substance. The story of doomed romance and a deranged family is one that I return to for comfort, marveling at the colors and tones of this, wishing that more filmmakers would find inspiration in films like The Haunting. Nothing compares to seeing this on a real movie screen, just sitting in the dark savoring each moment yet I try to recapture that feeling with each watch.

Crimson Peak is a movie that I have been waiting for a company to make a UHD release of and I’m so excited that Arrow Video did it. As always, you get an incredible package that goes beyond just a stunning looking version of the movie, but also a massive amount of extras. They include audio commentary by co-writer and director Guillermo del Toro; The House is Alive: Constructing Crimson Peak, a feature-length documentary with cast and crew interviews and extensive behind the scenes footage; a Spanish language interview with del Toro; four featurettes exploring different aspects of Allerdale Hall; A Primer on Gothic Romance, a featurette with the director and stars talk about the key traits of Gothic romance; The Light and Dark of Crimson Peak, featuring the cast and crew discussing the use of color in this movie; Hand Tailored Gothic, a featurette on the film’s striking costumes; A Living Thing, a look at the design, modeling and construction of the Allerdale Hall sets; Beware of Crimson Peak, which has Tom Hiddleston giving a walking tour around Allerdale Hall; Crimson Phantoms, a featurette on the film’s amazing ghosts; Kim Newman on Crimson Peak and the Tradition of Gothic Romance and Violence and Beauty in Guillermo del Toro’s Gothic Fairy Tale Films by Kat Ellinger. There are also deleted scenes, an image gallery, and original trailers and TV spots.

It all comes inside limited edition packaging designed by Crimson Peak concept artist Guy Davis, which includes a double-sided, fold-out poster, four double-sided postcards and a limited edition 80-page, hard-bound book featuring writing by David Jenkins and Simon Abrams, an archival interview with Guillermo del Toro and original conceptual design illustrations by artists Guy Davis and Oscar Chichoni.

Crimson Peak is one of the films that I can point to as being one of the best movies made this century. I’m beyond overjoyed to have this fabulous release in my collection to celebrate it.

You can get the limited 4K UHD on the Arrow site and the blu ray release from MVD.

Directed by Sean Baker, who wrote the movie with Chris Bergoch, this film was shot with three iPhone 5S smartphones. And from the beginning, I was sure I was going to hate it, as I was having issues with the look and feel and then, not just a few minutes in, I was swept into the world of Sin-Dee Rella (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, who did not act again after this movie) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), two trans sex workers out to find Sin-Dee’s pimp and lover Chester (James Ransone) for cheating on her with Dinah (Mickey O’Hagan).

Alexandra has a performance — one she paid for — in an empty bar while their lives also become mixed up with Armenian cab driver Razmik (Karren Karagulian) who has kept his love of prostitutes from his wife Yeva (Louisa Nersisyan) but not this night, Christmas night, when everything all falls apart inside a doughnut store.

Beyond the basic iPhones, the filmmakers used FiLMIC Pro, an app that fixes focus, aperture, and color temperature, as well as captures video clips at higher bit rates. They also had a Moondog Labs anamorphic adapter to shoot widescreen — Baked said, “It would let us shoot the way Sergio Leone would shoot westerns.” — and Tiffen’s Steadicam Smoothee that turns the iPhone into a fake StediCam.

The end of this film, when the two women are sitting inside a laundromat, one cleaning the other and finally gives her her wig to replace her ruined one is so raw. This whole movie is, an intimate exploration of lives lived a day at a time and a family about to be destroyed. The tree lights illuminate a man falling to pieces, which is one thing I wasn’t expecting in a Christmas movie.

Blackhat made $19.7 million at the box office against a budget of $70 million, which makes it a bomb, but does how many people came to see a movie on initial release mean it’s a bad movie? Nope.

When a nuclear plant in Hong Kong goes into meltdown and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange gets hacked, it turns out that Captain Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang) of the People’s Liberation Army cyberwarfare unit designed the code behind both systems. He asks that his college roommate, Nicholas Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth), be let out of prison to stop the hacker before they further destabilize several companies and governments. This includes a plan to sabotage a large dam and destroy several major tin mines in Malaysia, with the hacker buying into different futures that will profit from these attacks.

What emerges is a mix between art film and Hollywood action; what’s strange is that no person who spends hours typing on a computer — trust me, I know — looks as good as Hemsworth. But you know, only Michael Mann could direct a scene about hacking a PDF into obtaining a password and making it look that sexy and vibrant. That takes an artistic skill that so few directors lack.

Viola Davis, who plays FBI Special Agent Carol Barrett, and Holt McCallany, who is Deputy United States Marshal Jessup, are both really good in this, but they’re both always the best parts of any film they appear in.

I kind of like how by the end of this movie, it’s basically Hathaway and Dawai’s sister Chen Lien (Tang Wei) against the hackers and the world, having only each other to depend on.

The new release from Arrow also has a director’s cut. The changes were explained on the site Kevrania and they include:

Added scenes:

• A brief scene of a cargo ship being denied entry into Rotterdam
• An introduction to FBI Agent Carol Barrett and the Chicago exchange IT Director Jeff Robichaud.
• Nicholas Hathaway, Mark Jessup and Chen Lien are tailed upon arriving in Hong Kong and subsequently lose the tail.

Removed scenes:

• Hathaway is asked by the warden about hacking the prison accounting network. When he refuses to do that, he is put into solitary.
• Barrett and Chen realize they should be searching for soy sellers instead of soy buyers.
• A nuclear power plant worker explains what is happening to the plant.
• Hathaway changing the meet location.

It’s great that Arrow listened to fans and added the director’s cut, which is part of the Arrow Video 4K UHD release of Blackhat. It also has the US and international versions of the film, new audio commentary by critics Bryan Reesman and Max Evry, interviews with cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh and production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas, behind the scenes features, an image gallery, a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Doug John Miller and an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Andrew Graves. You can get it from MVD. There’s also a blu ray version.

Based on the novel by Carlo Bonini and Giancarlo De Cataldo, this movie is about the connections between organized crime and politics in Rome. A real estate project is going to turn the neighborhood in Rome into Las Vegas, but it creates a web connecting politicians like Filippo Malgradi (Pierfrancesco Favino) and criminals like neo-fascist terrorist turned crime boss Samurai (Claudio Amendola).

It also doesn’t make things any less dirty when Filippo parties with two sex workers. The underaged one, Jelena, overdoses and the politician has to bring in Alberto “Spadino” Anacleti (Giacomo Ferrara) to dispose of the body. Sapdino begins to blackmail him before he’s murdered by another criminal, Aureliano (Alessandro Borghi), which starts a war between him and Manfredi Anacleti (Adamo Dionisi).

Directed by Stefano Sollima, this has so many characters and so much happens in a little over two hours. It was expanded as two miniseries on Netflix, Suburra: Blood on Rome and Suburræterna, which start on Netflix on November 14, 2023.

It’s also pretty astounding how much of this was based on real life.

The Unearthed Films blu ray of this movie comes with a 2-hour making of feature and a trailer. You can get it from MVD.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Exploitation-film historian A.C. Nicholas, who has a sketchy background and hails from parts unknown in Western Pennsylvania, was once a drive-in theater projectionist and disk jockey. Currently, in addition to being a writer, editor, podcaster, and voice-over artist, he is a regular guest co-host on the streaming Drive-In Asylum Double Feature and contributes to the Drive-In Asylum fanzine. His upcoming essay “Emanuelle in Disney World and Other Weird Tales of a Trash Film Lover,” detailing bizarre and hilarious stories about midnight movies, grindhouses, and exploitation films, appears in Drive-In Asylum #25.

If ever they gave out awards to films with the most off-the-wall concepts, Director’s Commentary: Terror of Frankenstein would be at the top of the list. Taking a forgotten film version of the novel Frankenstein, co-writer/director Tim Kirk created something that can best be described as “meta layered upon meta.” But then again, Kirk has a history of being involved in bizarre projects. He was producer of Room 237, the nutty documentary purporting to unveil the hidden meaning in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, as well as producer/co-writer/director of pseudo-documentary Sex Madness Revealed with Patton Oswalt and Rob Zabrecky, and producer of the segment “Q is for Questionnaire” in ABCs of Death 2. Those projects don’t even hint at the lunacy of on display here. I had no clue what to expect.

The film opens on the static DVD menu screen purporting to be for the special edition of Terror of Frankenstein, a Swedish/Irish co-production from 1977, starring Per Oscarsson (The Girl Who Played with Fire), Nicholas Clay (Excalibur), and Leon Vitali (Eyes Wide Shut and Barry Lydon), adapted by Calvin and Yvonne Floyd, and directed by Calvin Floyd (In Search of Dracula). An unseen hand clicks on the menu to scroll through a gallery of a few nondescript photographs that appear to be from the movie’s premiere before turning on the director’s commentary and starting the film.

Up pops the blocky Independent-International logo (which would delight Sam Panico to no end) because Sam Sherman’s company released Terror of Frankenstein in the U.S. And then the commentary track begins. We hear legendary character actor Clu Gulagar (The Return of the Living Dead, Once Upon a Time In…Hollywood and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge) as “the director” and Zack Norman (Romancing the Stone, Cadillac Man and Chief Zabu) as “the writer.” They explain that Yvonne and Calvin Floyd listed in credits were their pseudonyms.

From the outset, it’s clear that there’s some tension between the two. Those expecting a Mystery Science Theater 3000 or Rifftrax version of the film will be surprised. It’s not. The film soon becomes its own original object. Although there is indeed droll humor sprinkled throughout the commentary—I laughed out loud a lot—there are tidbits dropped about “a trial,” “the execution,” and “those suitcases” to foreshadow that something sinister happened during filming. So what you get is a well-mounted, faithful, though somewhat sluggish, version of Frankenstein with a mysterious commentary track that sounds like an episode of the 1940’s radio show Inner Sanctum.

Getting to the revelation of the meta-plot is the fun here, as Gulager and Norman discuss the production, bicker, joke, weigh the virtues of method acting, and make inside-baseball remarks that are clues for the viewer. Eventually, Leon Vitali, one of the film’s actual stars (see the wonderful documentary, Filmworker, about Vitali’s life as Stanley Kubrick’s buddy and go-to guy), shows up in the last twenty minutes. All is then revealed in an existential ending that I can only describe as Ingmar Bergman meets the Drive-In Asylum Double Feature gang at the Monster-Mania Con. In other words, this is a film made by fans of exploitation films for a small group of select fans who would “get it.”

I enjoyed the experiment Director’s Commentary: Terror of Frankenstein. It’s the weirdest, most original thing that I’ve seen in a long time. It’s funny, intellectual, and completely bonkers in conception and execution. Gulagar, Norman, and Vitali understood the film’s universe perfectly, and the technical team did a fine job of mating their commentary to appropriate action in the film. Bless Tim Kirk and company’s twisted little black hearts. I felt like they made a movie just for me. Discerning cinephiles out there will love it.

The film is available with a subscription to Night Flight Plus. I hear you can also order a DVD by contacting the director from the film’s Facebook page.