GORE IN THE STORE - NEW DVD RELEASES FOR 4th JUNE 2007.

“Rest Stop”: In 1992 John Shiban spearheaded a pilot for a new supernatural detective series from Chris Carter and Fox Television, producing and directing what would become the inaugural outing of the decade’s televisual behemoth , “The X Files”. Now, 15 years later, Shiban is at the helm of another new studio venture, this time a cinematic one for Warner Brothers, with their latest horrific endeavour, low budget DVD label Raw Feed. Positioned by the company as a vital new outlet for otherwise marginalised stories and talent, in actual fact it’s plainly a canny marketing strategy to foist otherwise marginal DTV product on an impressionable DVD-buying public. Packaged efficiently, there’s no reason these Raw Feed productions shouldn’t stack up well against the latest teen-friendly big screen horror offering. The trouble is, when that fare is as qualitatively disparate as ‘The Fog’, ‘Boogeyman’ and 2007’s ‘The Hitcher’ it doesn’t make for the most auspicious of benchmarks.

Out of the gate first and released on 11th June, we have Shiban’s ‘Rest Stop’, as generic a title as the picture itself is a parade of tried and tested narrative strands and sketchy character types. Jess and Nicole, two teen (or is it twentysomething? -- it’s difficult to tell any more) lovers are on one of those familiar roads to nowhere. Familiar, that is, to anyone who’s encountered ‘The Vanishing’, ‘Hostel’ ‘Jeepers Creepers’, ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ or ‘Wrong Turn’ et al on their own personal road to cinematic enlightenment. The oblivious couple take a break at the titular roadside convenience only for Jess to vanish and all manner of unsettling intimidation to befall Nicol’s rapidly toughening damsel.

Into the mix are thrown a shady trucker, strangled voices which may be emanating from inside the building walls, a makeshift Sawyer-clan (though not from Texas and without a chainsaw in sight) cackling inanely in a campervan and a crazy, Polaroid-abusing dwarf. Add to that, untold sequences of credulity-stretching peril that render any sense of prolonged tension adrift in a sea of truly head-scratching narrative quirks and lead Jamie Alexander’s valiant portrayal of the heroically feisty Nicole ends up just another screaming cipher for a bemused audience. The botched attempt at some kind of ‘Shining’-esque circularity at the film’s fadeout is symptomatic of the picture’s unfocussed construction. Be thankful then that the picture’s actual climax isn’t one of the triumvirate of alternate “shocking” endings” that rounds out the modest special features package -- a nonsensical gaggle of logic-defying twist-for-the-sake-of-twists that can only hope to unnerve the most overly anxious or simply inattentive viewer.

It’s not an entirely regretful experience, however. Rendered like an episode particularly robust TV series, the picture certainly looks good, thanks to D.o.P. Mark Vargo, a seasoned second unit cameraman who’s worked with such luminaries as Caleb Deschanel, Michael Ballhaus and John Seale. Amid the pile-on of clichés there is also the odd moment of uncanny unease -- video footage of Jess’s predictably wince-inducing fate and the wild ramblings of the campervan clan, archly and bluntly played though it is, are certainly memorable.

But more often than not, it’s as if writer/director Shiban has been sitting on the script for more that 15 years, failing to update the more ripe elements of the yarn as shooting commenced. There’s not an original broken bone in this battered body. That the production is so naive as to not possess even the pretence of posing as something hip and new almost lets it off the hook. It’s a quaint throwback, but one without the smarts or dynamism to endear to any great depth.

Undemanding, inoffensive but ultimately disposable, it bodes well for the genre that a specialist label for such middling product has been given the green-light by a studio. The cynical, though, may see a further truth that cheap, disposable product with a pretty girl and some lopped off fingers will never fail to turn a buck or two and Raw Feed’s off-setting of any real quality filmmaking for an exercise in money-making exploitation might end up doing the genre more harm than good. Habitual DVD-buyers of even low budget genre pictures deserve a little better than a slickly put together showreel of the genre’s most time-worn story devices.

Let’s hope ‘The Believers’ & ‘Sublime’, two upcoming titles from the label, up the ante somewhat. It’s too good an opportunity to waste.

“Twisted Nerve”: a picture you may never have seen but one which you and any film fan you know will have certainly heard, courtesy of Quentin Tarantino and “Kill Bill”. This is the picture initiated a streak of stylish tension from the pursed lips of Darryl Hannah as she sashayed down a sterile, rain lashed hospital corridor, whistling Bernard Herrmann’s sweetly insidious title theme from this Boulting Brothers production. The prolific UK duo’s picture is a mild leap away from “Kill Bill”’s wonderfully lurid audacity, a psycho thriller in the vein of Hammer and Jimmy Sangster’s round of shockers like “Paranoiac” and “Taste Of Fear”.

Penned by Roy Boulting and Leo Marks, the man who performed similar duties on the seminal “Peeping Tom” three years previously, “Twisted Nerve” also features a host of familiar faces in front of the sinisterly invasive lens including Billie Whitelaw, Frank Finlay and an angelic Hayley Mills all becoming terrorised by a mentally unstable young man. Unseen for an age except in sporadic TV transmissions, this is a long overdue digital release from the annals of Optimum/Studio Canal’s back catalogue and surely a tantalising tease of joyous titles yet to come. This is one I can’t wait to finally experience.

“The Beguiled”: an odd one this. Not straight genre, this 1971 Don Siegel quasi-western/ melodrama is still worth noting here since it’s one of the uneasiest, gothically tinged non-supernatural films to be produced during an era so otherwise engorged with great horror cinema. Clint Eastwood’s wounded Union soldier seeks refuge from a bloody Civil War battle in a Louisiana bayou all-girl’s boarding school which practically reveals itself a coven-in-all-but-name as these Confederate harpies nurse, entice, faun and finally turn murderous over this unkempt offering with which the war has blessed them.

Surging with undercurrents of repressed sexuality, mental unrest and biblically forbidden covetousness, it’s a heady brew, packed with seething intensity and a gripping, genuinely unpredictable grimness. “The Beguiled” is a welcome respite from chainsaws, wielded knives and….lopped limbs (well, for the most part…I wont spoil it for you.) . It really is one of a kind from the great silver age partnership of Eastwood and Siegel. It’s clear also that the grizzled star was taking copious notes for his conspicuously strung-out directorial debut the same year, the fantastically paranoid “Play Misty For Me”.