A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET's John Saxon and DAWN OF THE DEAD's David Emge lend dignity to the flawed regional oddity HELLMASTER, on Blu-ray/DVD combo from Vinegar Syndrome.

Twenty years ago, Professor Jones (Saxon) conducted government-funded experiments on chemically-induced telepathy on select students of the Kant Instituted for the Gifted. When the experiments resulted in madness and death, Jones was forced out and went underground while the deaths were covered up with a fire that destroyed the campus' chapel. Years later, reporter Robert (Emge) is doing a story on the homeless and connects a series of murders to Jones' experiments, a discovery which costs his wife her life and sends him on the run from Jones's zombified minions. With nothing left to lose, he hides out in the university's chapel to seek out what is left of the experiments and await Jones' return. Meanwhile, a select group of new students – among them sociology major Drake (Edward Stevens), religious studies major Shelley (Amy Raasch), crippled and lovelorn nerd Joel (Sean Sweeney), ditzy Barb (Lisa Sheldon), and bully Jesse (Jeff Rector, DINOSAUR VALLEY GIRL) – are taking a special seminar with Professor Damon (Robert Dole) who is ready to take drastic measures to keep Robert from further investigating an experiment on which he worked years before. Jones, however, has returned along with a family of mutated psychopaths who have hijacked a bible camp bus and are slashing away at the student body to be rewarded by Jones with a synthetic drug he has developed that has enslaved them into helping him achieve his goal of bringing about Hell on Earth.

A Michigan-lensed independent horror film from Detroit-area filmmaker Doug Schultze, who went a decade before making his next film DARK HEAVEN and has been more prolific in the last decade or so, HELLMASTER (or THEM as it was originally titled) has some excellent atmospheric locations and proficient gore effects but the plotting is hopelessly muddled, the acting is almost uniformly awful, murderously so in some cases. Any thematic significance to the characters' various preoccupations with religion, promiscuity, social welfare, or their own personal weaknesses might have had some resonance had the script been tighter and the actors more professional. On set for only a few days and shot separately from much of the action in which he is supposed to be participating, Saxon's disembodied performance ranges from entertaining scenery chewing to non-committal. On the other hand, it is not a bad role for Emge who, like two of his other DAWN OF THE DEAD co-stars, really should have gotten more work in the genre and elsewhere. The original cut of the film is increasingly sluggish in its pacing, enough so that it is striking how amateurish parts of the film are compared to how otherwise slick it is in other respects.

Unreleased in its original cut titled THEM, the film appeared on VHS from Action International Pictures and Image Entertainment laserdisc under the title HELLMASTER in a recut on video director's cut titled HELLMASTER which was subsequently released on DVD in 2006 with an audio commentary track. Transferred from a 4K scan of the original camera negative, THEM's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen transfer looks spectacular, with the film's saturated lighting and SUSPIRIA-inspired color scheme looking tack sharp compared to the video version. The only flaw DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo rendering of the Ultra Stereo mix is the vocal aspect of film's horrendous performances while the stereo field is well-utilized for the synth score and directional effects and the rear channel used less so. Optional English SDH subtitles are provided. The major extra is the inclusion in its entirety of the HELLMASTER cut in standard definition fullscreen with Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo audio. Although five minutes shorter than THEM, the differences are much more complex with a new opening scenes from unused footage – some bits seem to have production audio with roomtone evident – the inclusion of previously unused bits as added scenes or shots within finished scenes, additional onscreen and offscreen dialogue, the re-ordering of scenes, and an improved pace. While the image quality is inferior, it is a significantly better film than THEM although it is still hampered by bad acting and the script.

Both cuts are accompanied by audio commentary track. Schultze appears on the THEM track newly-recorded for Vinegar Syndrome, in which he admits that he "overworked" the script during the protracted period of searching for funding, incorporating elements into what was originally "Carnage on Campus" that he now would have developed into separate scripts. He also admits to being preoccupied with the art direction of the film at the expense of directing the actors, and also expressed dissatisfaction with the editing of this cut. HELLMASTER is accompanied by the 2006 DVD commentary by Schultze and co-producer Kurt Eli Mayry who reveal that the recut version was created with the video transfer struck from the answer print of THEM in 1991 and going back to the original negatives for the footage that was added to this cut.