CTV ATLANTIC: RICHARD AND TODD BATTIS ON NEW MOVIES IN THEATRES!
I join CTV Atlantic’s Todd Battis to talk about a modernized “Hamlet,” an old-fashioned “You, Me & Tuscany,” a reflective “Outcome,” a monstrous “The Yeti”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
Posts Tagged ‘Eric Nelsen’
CKTB NIAGARA REGION: THE STEPH VIVIER SHOW WITH RICHARD CROUSE ON MOVIES!
I sit in with CKTB morning show host Steph Vivier to have a look at movies in theatres including a modernized “Hamlet,” an old-fashioned “You, Me & Tuscany,” a reflective “Outcome,” a monstrous “The Yeti” and a hypnotic “Exit 8.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
THE YETI: 2 ½ STARS. “old schoool scares delivered with b-movie exuberance.”
SYNOPSIS: In “The Yeti,” a new low budget monster movie now on VOD, a rescue team sets out to find an oil tycoon and a famous adventurer whovanished in Yeti territory.
CAST: Brittany Allen, Eric Nelsen, Jim Cummings, William Sadler, Corbin Bernsen. Directed and written by Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta.
REVIEW: A return to “a guy in a furry suit” monster movies, “The Yeti” is a lo fi survival flick with practical effects that harken back to the heyday of drive-in creature feature nights.
First-time directors Gene Gallerano and William Pisciotta clearly have a love for the direct-to-video/DVD genre. They were the movies you rented when you had either seen everything else at least twice, or you wanted something to watch with a few beers, or something stronger.
Populated with fading and/or emerging stars, they were generally formulaic, genre driven grindhouse style movies that generally made up in fun what they lacked in production value.
Such is the case with “The Yeti.”
The marquee comes decorated with names like “L.A. Law” star Corben Bernsen and genre favorite William Sadler, in addition to an eager cast of players, including the entertainingly named Elizabeth Cappuccino.
The story itself is pure b-movie hokum.
Set in 1947, it picks up after a famed adventurer (Sadler) and an oil tycoon (Bernsen) vanished without a trace in the wilds of Alaska. Curious to know their father’s fates, the missing men’s kids (Brittany Allen and Eric Nelsen) assemble a ragtag team, with nicknames like Watchdog—“Watchdog doesn’t fetch… he hunts.”—Doctor, Radio and Demolition, to bundle up and travel to snowy Alaska to retrace their father’s footsteps. The worst part of the adventure? It’s not the unforgiving weather or the isolation. It’s the ferocious Yeti, a giant, hairy beast, the result, we’re told, of “20,000 years of primal evolution.”
This trip to Yeti territory is actually a journey down memory lane to a time when movie monsters lurked in the shadows to create suspense and disguise any shortcomings in the creature’s makeup. In this case the Yeti, a kind of man-shaped polar bear, is more fun than terrifying, but Gallerano and Pisciotta take their time, working up to the Yeti’s bloody on-screen debut, building tension up to the reveal. That the practical effects bring more of an organic feel to “The Yeti” than actual scares is OK because they are delivered with old-school b-movie exuberance and buckets of blood.
RAVAGE: 1 ½ STARS. “no-frills thriller of the hunter and the hunted.”
The spirit of hillbilly grindhouse horror lives in the violent revenge flick “Ravage,” now on VOD.
Annabelle Dexter-Jones is Harper Sykes, a “GI Jane with a camera.” On a photographic assignment in the remote Virginia woods she witnesses and documents a group of men person to a pack of hungry dogs. Terrible things happen and she wakes up in a hospital bed, bandaged from head-to-toe, and being questioned by Detective Slayton (Michael Weaver). Convinced she is a “mountain tweaker who burned herself up in a meth lab,” he tries to coerce a story out of her.
In flashbacks the movie details, and I mean details with a capital D, the brutal story of Harper’s capture by the redneck ravagers, led by Ravener (Robert Longstreet), her revenge and what lies bandages.
If a movie with a title like “Ravage” appeals to you, then you likely know what’s in store. It’s a savage, uncompromising look at the cruelty humans are capable of. By definition the word means, “to devastate, waste, sack, pillage, despoil, to lay waste by plundering or destroying,” and that’s just the beginning in terms of how literally screenwriter and director Teddy Grennan takes the word’s meaning. It’s an unpleasant movie that doesn’t exactly celebrate the violence, there are no huge set pieces here, it more or less documents terrible things without lingering on the intricacies of the torture and killing, so I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies.
In a short cameo from Bruce Dern is suitably creepy, mouthing dialogue about how, “torture is the barometer of a nation’s creativity.” It’s the kind of role he could do in his sleep, but his presence adds a sense of gravitas which is blown in the film’s final moments.
You will not see the final twist coming, and I will not tell you what it is, but know this, if you thought “Ravage” would be a (SPOILER ALERT) an ode to female empowerment, you will be taken aback and disappointed. Harper’s resilience, despite some boneheaded moves along the way, display a resourcefulness that suggests she will emerge bloodied but unbowed. The film’s sick ‘n twisted final few moments lay waste to that assumption in no uncertain terms.
“Ravage” is a no-frills thriller of the hunter and the hunted that attempts to address moral questions about violence and revenge but instead gets caught glorifying the them.
