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A Cadaver Christmas Review

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Title: A Cadaver Christmas

Year: 2011

Distributor: Level 33 Entertainment

Director: Joe Zerull

Stars: Daniel Rairdin-Hale, Hanlon Smith-Dorsey, Yosh Hayashi

Language: English

Length: 86 minutes

Sub-Genre: Zombie, Comedy

 

 

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Plot: After a janitor (Rairdin-Hale) shows up at a local bar covered in blood, a rag-tag team of heroes is thrust into battle with a horde of “cadavers”. Can the janitor, the drunk (Smith-Dorsey), the bartender, the cop (Hayashi) and his perp work together to survive this Christmas Eve and save humanity?

Review: I love Christmas. Soon after Thanksgiving I’ll be the first to start breaking out the Christmas CDs and I won’t be tired of it until New Year’s. Freakish, huh? Because of this, I have a hard time getting into Horror films which are set on or around Christmas, put simply: it’s just too macabre for me. Tim Burton’s animated, A Nightmare Before Christmas, truly disturbs me. I’m also not huge on Horror Comedy. My point in all of this is that this film should be a perfect film for me to whole-heartedly despise. It starts off leaning that way. We open with a bartender and a single patron in a bar and the first exchange (albeit small) leaves me wondering what I had gotten myself into. Then something strange happens; a janitor covered in blood walks in and heads to the bathroom to wash the blood off, he does so, and then comes back out still dripping in blood and for whatever reason, I was hooked from that point on. This janitor looks like one of the pencil-necked and single brain-celled teachers on Disney and Nick shows which my daughter likes so much. However this janitor becomes the action hero of the film and is almost believable. In terms of acting Rairdin-Hale, who plays our kickass janitor, is clearly the standout, but nearly everyone plays their part to perfection.  Soon we meet our bumbling cop type Sam Sheriff, that’s right -his last name is Sheriff- and he has to save the day by dragging the bar patrons back to the building in which the zombie (or cadaver) outbreak began. A female security guard joins the fray after a hilarious and useful side gag and then we’re ready for some serious mayhem. At times the film is nearly too silly to bear but it always works in its favor; it is reminiscent of a Monty Python film in ways. Touting a reported budget of only $7,000, A Cadaver Christmas looks damn good and I’ve seen films which cost over a hundred times more that look no better. For that budget the effects are more than adequate and the cinematography is solid. Let me say this about the writing; the stupider you can make a film and have it still work, the more intelligent the creators must be. That might be hard to grasp, but I believe it’s true nonetheless. The writers are very intelligent and aren’t just good at bringing laughter, they present some truly unique ideas. I don’t want to give anything away but I truly hope this creative team makes enough money on Cadaver to make a high-concept horror film one day, I think they have it in them. Kudos to everyone involved and to director Joe Zerulla, I may have found my first go to holiday horror film. Well done.

A Cadaver Christmas released on VOD and DVD October 4th. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwWQYWLb3MI

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Tiny’s Halloween Series Airing For The Holiday

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Everyone knows that Halloween is the greatest holiday of the year especially for the horror fans amongst us all over the globe. It is our pleasure of airing a trifecta of shorts written, produced and directed by Douglas A. Plomitallo, a diehard Halloween filmmaker.

Mr. Plomitallo runs Scared Stiff TV and is dedicated at providing the audience creepy, scary and quirky films. His blockbuster Tiny’s Halloween has been sequalized in 3 parts with the latest in the chain included on Horror Palace.

We are proud to have in our archive this chiller of a series. Get in the mood before Halloween and enjoy a back-to-back-to-back run of all 3 horror shorts right here! Listed below are direct links to each of the shorts.

Tiny’s Halloween:

After watching the series, check out the YouTube Channel of Doug’s for even more horror shorts covering sub-genres of Monsters, Aliens, Thrillers, Slashers, Zombies and many more for you to enjoy free!

Red: Werewolf Hunter Review

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Plot: The real-life descendants of Little Red Riding Hood are dedicated werewolf hunters, but Virginia “Red” Sullivan, her generation’s head tracker, faces a horrible conflict when her fiancé, Nathan, is bitten by a werewolf and she must protect him.

Review: I’ve had this movie for quite some time and always skipped over it as I knew this was a SyFy original picture, so I was expecting cheesiness, jokiness and ludacris CGI as with many that come out of the popular cable channel. Let me tell you, it’s not all bad, still not a glowing praise but read on.

The story is run of the mill; a special agent falls in love and hides her true background from her beau. When she takes her new found lover to her hometown all hell breaks loose and her true life style is exposed. She is the leader of her family’s werewolf hunting escapades and when her boyfriend gets bit by a new breed of werewolves that can turn during the daylight, she struggles to maintain her bloodline and her new found loyalty to her soon to be husband.

There are a few things that always come to my mind when I think of this movie. Her family calls her “Red” and you guessed it, she has bright red hair, but that is not the reason for the name, you also guessed it; they had to take 5 minutes out of the movie to explain it. How predictable and pretty lame writing. The other point that stands out, this is a positive note; several of the man-to-wolf transformations were pretty good. It’s all CGI but many of them were very credible, except and this is a big except, when they get to total hairy werewolves, its garbage. Video games have better effects than this movie.

The score and sound effects were satisfactory, nothing startling with jump appeal, but then again were talking about fake-looking werewolves so a movie like this couldn’t scare a teenager who never seen a horror movie. The action scenes were passable as was the acting. Good ole Stephen McHattie from Summer’s Blood and Pontypool plays the leader of the werewolves, and is by far the star of this movie, way over the lead Felicia Day who has been in umpteen TV shows.

I will say that Red: Werewolf Hunter kept me watching. There was an entertaining appeal to it, and even though I was lying in bed tired, I couldn’t doze off because there was things about it that you wanted to find out how the movie was going to conclude. Maybe it was McHattie, maybe it was some of the initial transformation scenes, whatever it was I don’t feel like I wasted any time by watching this.

Closing out the Red: Werewolf Hunter review, I will say that if you are a fan of werewolf-style movies I think you should take a watch on this. There were some twists to the story that I thought were credible. But for all other horror fans, skip this one by. If you are in need of a good werewolf movie, four always come to mind; Underworld, Ginger Snaps, The Howling and Wolfen. You may wonder why I excluded An American Werewolf In London; while it does have the best man-to-werewolf transformation ever filmed, I loathe the comic undertones that were inbred in that film.

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Working Stiffs (Book Review)

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Working Stiffs Book CoverBook: Working Stiffs
Year: 2012
Publisher: Necro Publications
Author: Lucy Leitner
Language: English
Chapters: N/A
Pages: 248
Type: Novel

 

Lucy Leitner Author PicturePublisher’s Summary: Working Stiffs is a hilarious, action-packed tale of survival in the fast-paced world of pharmaceuticals. Something has gone horribly wrong in the Pro-Well Pharmaceuticals factory and ex-meth dealer Marshall Owens, the company’s owner and drug genius, must keep the surrounding Pittsburgh area from finding out. Unfortunately, the undead assembly line workers have other plans. The infection spreads and chaos reigns supreme as the surviving Pro-Well employees battle their way through offices with whatever weapons they can scrounge from the supply closet. They must get outside. But they don’t know that The General is out there amassing a shambling, rotting army of Pittsburgh’s finest. Will the employees make it? Will two repulsive workers find love in a janitor’s closet? How many office workers can one man take down with the blade of a paper cutter and some staplers? Will Marshall Owens go back to selling meth? And most important of all, will Pro-Well’s stock value plummet? Find out all the answers in this brilliant new horror/comedy novel reminiscent of style of Christopher Moore.

Review: I am going to start this review with my perception of the plot for Working Stiffs; a previous drug-lord named Marshall Owens is the CEO of a Pittsburgh Pharmaceutical company. He creates chemicals that zombiefies or sickens lowlifes in society like the homeless, whores and addicts so he can put them to work at the drug company on the assembly line so he can get out of paying the employees.

These drugs turn the unsuspecting lower rung of society into grotesque gray-looking creatures with rotting teeth and scabbed skin desiring flesh. These working zombies so to speak get chained up and must perform daily duties in the factory in return for human meat that they desperately want. But there is a twist when “The General” doesn’t get turned into a walking dead, somehow escaping the drugs power…and he bands the affected together for a little payback on the money-hungry Mr. Owens.

Working Stiffs has tons of action and very descriptive brutality which I admired. There is blood, guts, gore and body parts all over this book. The author painted an extremely vivid picture in my mind that worked flawlessly. On the downside, it was tough to comprehend on certain occasions; there were many characters to follow while trying to picture in my mind the time allotments that were given instead of chapter breakdowns. Additionally, there were some comedic elements that frankly didn’t work. I never felt a chuckle coming on, moreover I think it was unneeded and took me a touch out of it.

An extra tidbit is that Working Stiffs is a part of a 5 horror book collection of new authors, and if you desire more scary books to read late at night take a peek at; Revelations, Red Town Lost, Last Stand On Zombie Island, Crogian and of course this zombie-comedy novel, Working Stiffs which will be a moderate recommendation by me. I am not particularly a huge fan of zombies but it did have plenty of moments to keep my mind wandering.

The book is available to buy at Amazon on Paperback for $15.95 or you can get the E-Book or Kindle Edition for a mere $4.99. On a side note; there was a limited supply of autographed, hard-bound books available for Working Stiffs, but it’s sold out already, I can see why because zombie lovers will be titillated with this one.  My ratings, suggestions and links are below.

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Reviewer: Dark Goddess
Date: 10/05/2012
Rating: 5.5/10
Suggestion: Paperback: Avoid
Suggestion: E-Book: Buy