BLOOD THEATRE (1984)/THE VISITANTS (1986) Blu-ray/DVD combo
Director: Rick Sloane
Vinegar Syndrome

Before he foisted HOBGOBLINS on us, Rick Sloane tested and tortured viewers with the oddball slasher BLOOD THEATRE and the sci-fi comedy THE VISITANTS, on Blu-ray/DVD combo from Vinegar Syndrome.

Forty years ago, the artistically-compromised and romantically-spurned owner (David Millbern, SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE) of a theatre set fire to the building, killing his love Ellen (Jenny Cunningham, RECORD CITY), her lover, the actors on stage, the ticket girl, and the entire audience. With the city offering a $25,000 reward for anyone who will open the theatre, Dean Murdock (Rob-Roy Fletcher), cost-cutting owner of the Spotlight Theaters multiplex chain, acquires the building and assigns projectionist Adrian (Andrew Cofrin, MONSTER IN THE CLOSET), his usherette girlfriend Jennifer (Cunningham again), and Malcolm (Daniel Schafer) to renovate the theatre with the promise of a one thousand dollar bonus if they have a successful opening night. Of course, he and his secretary Miss Blackwell (Mary Waranov, SUGAR COOKIES) have neglected to mention that people have died every time someone has attempted to reopen the theatre. Strange sights and sounds, not to mention the disappearances of some of friends and coworkers, have Jennifer suspecting something supernatural afoot while Malcolm contends with pranks played by bitchy usherette Selena (Joanna Foxx) and her lackey Darcy (Stephanie Dillard) who have a grudge against Jennifer, while Adrian's ambition becomes an obsession as opening night nears.

With listless pacing, inappropriate sound effects, a grating Casio keyboard score, not-so-special effects, and performances that range from competent to downright feeble – a scene-stealing Ms. Waranov excepted – BLOOD THEATRE has little to recommend to it beyond the novel setting of the gorgeous Art Deco theater. STAGEFRIGHT or POPCORN this is not, as atmosphere is undercut constantly but the score, the sound design, and blank line readings (along with the full revoicing of Foxx, the recording of which jars with the live sound every time she opens her mouth). While the camera occasionally creates atmosphere with pans or dollies around the theatre, dialogue scenes are as awkwardly staged as they are edited and there are far too many static shots in which the main trio are instructed to walk into the frame together and look around and deliver lines of dialogue without an actual senses of "exchange" in the conversations. Student director Rick Sloane (T&A ACADEMY) – who also wrote, produced, photographed, scored, and edited (in addition to creating some animation sequences) – seemingly could not decide whether he wanted to the film to be a straight horror film or a horror-comedy, so both the kill scenes and the intentional humor falls flat. Viewers who may have felt that SCREAM/THE OUTING or SAVAGE WATER were bottom-of-the-barrel slashers may have had yet to see this one. LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE's Alison Arngrim has a cameo in Sloane's trailer-within-a-film "The Clown Whores of Hollywood."

Released to home video in a wonderfully-designed big box from Active Home Video – reissued for sell-through by Star Classics – under the title MOVIE HOUSE MASSACRE followed by brief availability from Retromedia in the early 2000s. Transferred from a 2K scan of the original 35mm camera negative, BLOOD THEATRE looks far better than the film could ever deserve on Vinegar Syndrome's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray with the saturated colors of the costumes and the décor of the titular theatre popping off the screen in contrast to the film's few bland sets. The Blu-ray format has revealed that any low budget film with a modicum of technical competence in the lighting and focus can look great when just recording the environment, and the predominance of static camera setups serves the film well. The DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono mix is as good as the original mix allows with its mix of live sound compromised by camera noise, post-dubbed MOS scenes, half-live/half-dubbed scenes, and scenes dominated entirely by Sloane's scoring. Optional English SDH subtitles are provided.

The film is accompanied by an audio commentary by Sloane who reveals that he was still a twenty-one year old Los Angeles City College student while making the film and wrote a fake ten-page script in order to secure the location – a now demolished Art Deco theatre designed by the same architect responsible for Los Angeles' Pantages – and that a number of the camera setups were dictated by the renovation that was going on during the shoot. More interesting than his comments on the film and actors – apart from referring to Foxx as the first "true slut" he ever met due to her willingness to do nudity unpaid – is his discussion of the crash course in sound editing and scoring necessitated by the noisy Arri camera – the loose sync of which require him to drop frames to match the audio recording – adding effects and scoring to cover up the noise, shooting scenes without audio, and redubbing Foxx's performance entirely. He also recalls how the departure of the original actress playing Jennifer (who believed she was going onto fame) required reshooting a few days of material while keeping in shots of the actress in which her face was visible (the unavailability of the three main actors on some days required other stand-ins). The disc also includes an additional commentary by podcasters The Hysteria Continues who reveal that the MOVIE HOUSE MASSACRE prints credited direction to assistant direction Alice Raley and their mixed reactions to seeing the film for the first time. The track gets off to a rough start with some forced humor before some genuine enjoyment in the Selena character and Foxx who told all in an interview the podcasters had up on The Hysteria Lives site before she requested it be taken down. They also draw from an interview with Sloane, although they really are no more convincing than Sloane in insisting that the film was meant to be in the vein of John Waters.

The disc also includes Sloane's second feature THE VISITANTS, a sci-fi comedy that is anything but. Teenage Eric (Marcus Vaughter, SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE) is having trouble sleeping due to the sounds emanating from the satellite dish belonging to his next door neighbors Exeter (Jordana Capra, HIRED TO KILL) and Lubbock (Joel Hile, SURF NAZIS MUST DIE!) who are actually space aliens who have spent the past thirty years studying the Earth and its suitability for invasion. When Lubbock's laser gun neatly slices Eric's clock radio in half, he takes it to science teacher Professor Levelland (Jeffrey Culver, HOBGOBLINS) who asks him to get the gun. In spite of Exeter and Lubbock revealing their true selves to Eric when they catch him in their home and threatening him with death or taking him back to their home planet as a specimen, he takes the gun. His best friends Ellen (Nicole Rio, THE ZERO BOYS) and Sherwin (William Thomas Dristas) are bewildered as Eric alternately dodges Exeter and Lubbock while also keeping Levelland in the dark about what kind of "illegal aliens" his neighbors actually are in the days leading up to the aliens' planned invasion on a day when they are least likely to be noticed: October 31st.

Made two years after BLOOD THEATRE, THE VISITANTS is a more visually assured effort from Sloane who managed to pull the entire project together for roughly $8,500 thanks to the sort of economic planning he would employ in his subsequent works that would allow him to own most of them outright. The story idea had potential and probably could have been turned into something more memorable and mainstream in studio hands or even with the backing of the likes of Charles Band, but the final product is let down not so much by the budget or the "special effects" so much as the sense of shooting challenges being worked around and the generally poor acting apart from Capra and Hile who both deserved a better film. THE VISITANTS is ultimately more interesting in demonstrating how Sloane learned from his mistakes on BLOOD THEATRE and honed his craft. The audio commentary finds him recalling how the hoarder mentality of his family and himself provided him with a lot of "vintage" props, the allocation of the low budget, and learning to work with a single Lowell lighting kit.

Released to home video by Trans World Entertainment and not available since, THE VISITANTS looks virtually spotless in terms of the archiving of the elements, but the exaggerated grain that looks like noisiness in the highly saturated colors of the 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen encode seems to be an effect of the director's decision to shoot the film on bulk slide film and develop it in a still photography lab combined with the underexposure of the night scenes. The more brightly lit interior scenes look quite good apart while the sunny exteriors look a bit oversaturated. The DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 mono track is clean and reveals that Sloane's mastery of sound design and editing had improved since his debut (along with cleaner sound recording). Optional English SDH subtitles are also provided.

Other extras include an ensemble introduction at the New Beverly Cinema by Sloane, Mary Waranov, Vaughter, and Captra (8:54) at a screening of both films, with Waranov revealing that her reason for taking the part being a scene in the script in which a phone receiver made of soap melts in her hand and how Sloane described how he was going to achieve the effect. She, Sloane, and the other two actors seem to acknowledge how bad the films are but are as in on the joke as the audience. A post-screening Q&A (14:04) features only Sloane and Waranov as it took place in between the screenings of BLOOD THEATRE and THE VISITANTS. The combo comes with a reversible cover while the first 1,500 copies ordered directly from Vinegar Syndrome come with a special limited edition embossed slipcover designed by Earl Kessler Jr. (Eric Cotenas)

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