Beware of Satanic goats and other oddities in the gory Canadian message horror film DEADLINE, on Blu-ray/DVD combo from Vinegar Syndrome.

Having struck overnight success with his horror novel "The Executioners" which was subsequently made into a blockbuster film, writer Steven Lessey (Stephen Young, SOYLENT GREEN) has been on a roll with novel after novel turned into movies thanks to his lucrative partnership with producer Burt Horowitz (Marvin Goldhar, HOT MONEY) that has netted him an expensive house and cars to distract his bored wife Elizabeth (Sharon Masters, BONNIE'S KIDS) and squabbling, foul-mouthed three children (THE BROOD's Cindy Hinds, DEADLY EYES' Tod Woodcroft, and Phillip Leonard) who are so eager to spend time with him and help him finish his story. Lately, however, as Steven searches for new inspiration and new directions, he realizes that the various horrific dreams and ideas he bangs out on his typewriter involving murderous children, cannibal nuns, and naked girls who drown in showers of blood are the same old shit. His ego takes a beating when he shows up at his old university class to accept a plaque and speak about the sociological implications of his work to an audience who attack him as a sellout and a contributor to society's moral decay (it does not help that he has screened a clip from his recent film "Anatomy of a Horror" in which a man is run over by a threshing machine telekinetically piloted by a black goat). Things do not get much better at the studio when actress Darlene (Jeannie Elias, NOMADS) attacks his script, which he defends by insulting her intelligence even though he concedes to Burt that it is all garbage. Things turn tragic when his children discover playing on TV the film version of "The Executioners" which is about a series of hangings committed by children.

A Canadian tax shelter film with wall-to-wall gore and a good smattering of nudity, DEADLINE purports to be about the negative influences of horror movies the just before Britain was in hysteria over Video Nasties – and seven years before British media claims that watching CHILD'S PLAY 3 lead two children to murder another – but the film itself seems reluctant to actually engage with the argument on any level beyond a television PSA, reveling in gore and some overwrought domestic drama. The filmmakers seem to have been going through Lessey's own crisis, having to pitch a horror movie as one of the easiest genres to fund and pondering various exploitative scenarios, unable to expand them meaningfully beyond vignettes and ruling them out as garbage. Young, a seasoned Canadian actor who wound up in Italy during the sixties and did bit parts in CLEOPATRA and Visconti's THE LEOPARD before a Hollywood career in film and television in the late sixties and through the seventies, tries to give a bluntly written character nuance but becomes as shrill as any of the others at moments of high drama. The gore vignettes – including a scene in which Nazi scientists convince the band Rough Trade to perform one of their numbers through a special amplifier to show their new method of "crowd control" – may have been exactly the sort of thing that would stir the moral majority, but the film drags well beyond its climax and the final vignette in which drunk Lessey's real and imaginary worlds merge on film is more predictable than surprising. The film is ultimately more interesting as a Canadian tax shelter movie than as a horror film. Director Mario Azzopardi directed a handful of other features but has been extremely prolific directing Canadian episodic television from the various STARGATE franchises, HIGHLANDER: THE SERIES, THE OUTER LIMITS, and so forth.

Released direct to video in the United States by Paragon, DEADLINE developed a following from that edition but no subsequent edition was forthcoming until Vinegar Syndrome's Blu-ray which was derived from a 2K scan of the producer's personal 35mm print (the negative is now lost). There is some jitter during the credits but the print must not have been run through the projector many times as it is very clean without any distracting wear or damage and stable colors with popping reds and some saturated gels. The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track has clear dialogue but mainly demonstrates its range with the music, including the bassy Rough Trade number and the scoring of Sam Bari which riffs on the theme song "Everlasting Love" which tries to eke out some emotional resonance during the end credits in its full version. Optional English SDH subtitles are included.