Movie Review: "Farm/Ominous/Evidence of a Haunting/Meadowoods/Deadrise" (2015: Echo Bridge/Green Apple/Midnight Releasing/Brain Damage/Monterey/Brauer)

...OK!! OK!! I admit it. I am an absolute sucker for those Echo Bridge multi-movie bundles. Yes, those bargain-bin, mish-mash cult film collections, often butting the most familiar, up against the most obscure. A treasure-trove of long-time movie favorites, with preferred-to-be-forgotten cinematic fumbles. Big-budgeted matter-of-facts, mated with low-budget, independents oddities. Cheezy, no name direct-to-video fodder...and big starring, director-notable okie-dokes. The 'dumping grounds' for lesser studio efforts and public domain classics. The campy, crazy and nutty stuff, originally released singularly, from distributors like Midnight Releasing, Full Moon Pictures, The Asylum, Brain Damage Films, Alliance Releasing, York, and countless others...

...a buck or two'll typically get ya' four or five of these films, laid out on one disc...four or five bucks'll get ya' ten of 'em, and so on. Most of the film titles on the smaller bundles will usually all be found on the 'step up to eight-or-ten' film' collections, along side one or two rarities. And most of those will be found on the 15-to-20-film collections, along side even more obscurities. And often, it genuinely becomes worth the slight extra cost to double dip on a bunch of others, which might be sitting on one's video shelf, in one previously purchased collection, to get that singularly unique and obscure rarity, which might be only available on that attention drawing second collection (...heck, I remember collectors going all ga-ga over the unceremoniously released, under-the-radar editions of the bloody, 1980 'Bigfoot' horror obscurity, "Night of the Demon", as well as the under-appreciated 1983 slasher entry, "Curtains" in this venue, before a couple of the major cult film distributors picked them up, 'legitimately' and the allure of collectible 'special features' editions)...

Movie Review: Death and Cremation (2010)

Directed by Justin Steele

Starring Brad Dourif, Jeremy Sumpter and Scott Elrod

Death and Cremation is an odd but interesting movie about murder, sweet revenge against the bullies and douchebags of modern society, and the unusual friendship that develops between a high school outcast and a serial-killer mortician.

The story revolves around Jarod (Jeremy Sumpter), a kid who is picked on relentlessly at school. A pot-smoking slacker, his mother is fed up with him laying around the house and tells him its time to get a job. Not interested in getting a regular job, he runs across the local crematorium run by Stanley (Brad Dourif), a quite, strange little man who has absolutely no tolerance for bullies or assholes. And in fact relishes in the opportunity to run them over in his station wagon or smash their skulls in with a sledgehammer. Stan makes it clear that he is not interested in hiring a helper but when Jarod offers to work for free the first week, Stanley relents and decides to give the kid a chance. A friendship soon develops between these two kindred outcast spirits and it doesnt take long before Jarod starts to figure out that Stanley may be behind the disappearance of a local teenage girl. After being severely beaten by the missing girls boyfriend, Jarod shows up at Stanleys soon after, and they trade opinions on how bullies should be dealt with. Once Stanley realizes that Jarod shares his views on the subject, he asks him the name of the kid who beat him up. The following day, Stanley evens the score by kidnapping, killing and then of coarse cremating the bully, with the help of his eager new apprentice.