MERIDIAN (1990) (Full Moon Blu-ray Review)

MERIDIAN (1990) 

Label: Full Moon Features
Region Code: Region-FREE
Duration: 85 Minutes
Video: 1080p HD Widescreen 
Audio: English Dolby Digital 2.0, Dolby Digital 5.1 
Director: Charles Band
Cast: Sherilyn Fenn, Malcolm Jamieson, Hilary Mason, Alex Daniels, Phil Fondacaro

In Meridian (1990) Sherilyn Fenn (Twin Peaks) stars as Catherine Bomarzini who returns to her family's ancestral castle in Italy after the death of her father. There she reunites with her former childhood nanny, the kindly Martha (Hilary Mason, Dolls) who watches after the castle and has cared for her family for generations. What Catherine does not know is that her inherited birthright includes a secret family curse, one that promises Gothic romance and tragedy, haunting visions and some troubling date-rape by a hairy-beast! 

After arriving at the castle Catherine is joined by her art school classmate Gina (Charlie Spradling)who is employed in Italy doing art restoration for a local church, together they go out for a night on the town and wind up at the Fauvrey's World of Wonders carnival. The women are so impressed by the wonderment of magician  Lawrence Fauvrey (Malcolm Jamieson) that they invites him and his troupe of carnie performers back to the castle for some late-night dinner and wine. The magician seems charming and well-mannered, but his evil dwarf (Phil Fondacaro, Ghoulies 2) drugs the women's wine and the night devolves to a hallucinatory rape and orgy scene, featuring a hairy-backed beast who fornicates with the drugged Catherine. 

Afterward, despite the date-rape, Catherine maintains a weird relationship with the rape-y magician, who it turns out has a twin brother. One is good, one is evil, both are cursed, and are somehow entwined into Bomarzini family history. Soon after Catherine begins having visions of a murdered woman in white around the castle, when she tells Martha of her visions the old woman brushes it off as an old family superstition, but as the visions become stronger she reluctantly reveals that the woman she is seeing is Catherine's own aunt, who was murdered years ago by someone from the Fauvrey's World of Wonders. Ah, the date-rapey plot thickens. 

The movie promised Gothic romance along the lines of Dracula by way of Beauty and the Beast, it also promises plenty of nude Sherilyn Fenn, which it delivers to varying degrees, but the movie is a hot mess with a half-hearted script written by regular Full Moon scribe Dennis Paoli, whom in the past has done some great work with Stuart Gordon (Pit and the Pendulum, From Beyond, Re-Animator), but this cursed Gothic romance doesn't flow so well, and throwing rape into a romance is just troubling. What it does have going for it aside from an amply nude Fenn, who is stunning, is that it was lensed by cinematographer Mac Ahlberg (Hell Night, From Beyond) who gives the movie a nice sumptuous look on what was surely a shoestring budget> We also get a decent score from the talented Pino Donaggio (Carrie, Dressed to Kill), and some competent direction from Full Moon impresario Charles Band. It's not the most engaging movie you will watch this week, or maybe even today, but it has some keen Gothic elements and that peculiar Full Moon visual style that makes me nostalgic for the 90s, but like I said, the overall movie is a drawn-out romance yawner, not helping matters is the fact that the romance is triggered by a drug-induced date-rape! 

The real draw here is Sherilyn Fenn who would this same year go onto TV fame with David Lynch's Twin Peaks as the sweater-rockin' Audrey Horne, she is kind enough to bare her voluptuous top-shelf assets multiple times throughout, most notably in an extended rape-seduction scene, which was nice but the sexual politics of this things are twisted indeed, if you can get beyond that there are some cheap Gothic-tinged thrills to be had and plenty of Sherilyn Fenn in 1080p HD

The movie arrives on single-disc Blu-ray from Full Moon and is advertised as being restored from the original 35mm camera negatives. The end result is a mixed bag, it looks very nice framed in widescreen, it is a step-up in all the expected areas, however the image is a bit dark and thick at times, but this is the best the movie has looked on home video to date, it's just not the most crisp and wonderful HD image you could hope for. While advertised as being sourced from the OCN there are numerous instances of dirt, debris and slight print damage that I would typically associate as coming from a theatrical print, but I don't have any info on that other than what is advertised on the disc. That being said, I was pleased with what we have, it's not reference quality, but it beats the snot out of the previous fullframe DVD releases. Like all of Full Moon's Blu-rays up to this point they have forgone a lossless audio option and go with choice of Dolby Digital 2.0 and 5.1 mixes, the stereo is they way to go here, the surround mix is forced and front-centric.
Extras on the disc are limited to a vintage 5-min behind-the-scenes featurette and a selection of Full Moon trailers, including one for Meridian under the alternate title of The Ravaging. 

ZOMBIE HIGH (1987) (Blu-ray Review)

ZOMBIE HIGH (1987) 

Label: Scream Factory 

Region Code: A

Rating: R

Duration: 91 Minutes

Audio: DTS-HD Mono 2.0 with Optional English Subtitles

Video: 1080p HD Widescreen (1.85:1)

Director: Ron Link

Cast: Clare Carey, James Wilder, Richard Cox, Kay E. Kuter, Paul Feig, Scott Coffey, Sherilyn Fenn, Virginia Madsen

Synopsis: Virginia Madsen (Candyman, Sideways) and Richard Cox (Cruising) star in this humorous thriller about the bizarre happenings that occur in a prestigious boarding school. It seems to Andrea Miller (Madsen) that the upperclassmen act like robots. They're the perfect students – dedicated, involved and loyal. Their clothes are perfectly pressed and their hair is perfectly styled. It seems that the teachers have something to do with this ingratiating behavior. And when Andrea, the new kid at school, sees her friends turning into clones, she starts to suspect the worst.

Zombie High (1987) had a few things going for it from the start, for one it features the very attractive Sherilyn Fenn from Twin Peaks and Boxing Helena, plus it also stars Virginia Madsen (Candyman). The movie is a variation on The Stepford Wives taking place at the prestigious Ettinger Academy where Andrea Miller (Madsen) has won a paid scholarship. Adrea's excited about the opportunity but her clingy jock-boyfriend doesn't want her to attend the school, fearing she will fall for one of the silver-spooned preppies, but he's so wrong, she actually falls for the moody biology professor Dr. Louis Philo (Richard Cox).

Anyway, it turns out that the school is a strange place all the way around once you get past the ivy league exterior. Any students who shows a lack of proper study habits or counter-culture influence winds up transformed overnight into straight-A study nerds in blue blazers. At the heart of the transformative weirdness is the elderly Dr. Beauregard Eisner (Kay E. Kuter) and his quest for immortality, a byproduct of which leaves the students mindless study-drones, with the faculty and staff harvesting brain-serum which prolong their own lives.

Honestly, by the end of the movie I felt as if I was becoming a mindless drone myself, this is the worst kind of low-budget b-movie, a boring one. Madsen is decent in the role, she's a capable actress but she cannot save the movie alone, the script is awful and there is zero atmosphere to be found, the movie might have gotten by on a weird sense of creepiness if it had any.  The precious few interesting aspects of the story are never fleshed out decently and the whole affair screams amateur hour from start to finish. If you can imagine a hybrid of the superior The Stepford Wives (1975) by way of the Australian movie Strange Behavior (1980) and you might have an idea of what maybe this could have been with a little inspiration, but this movie has none to offer. 

The Blu-ray from Scream Factory prents the movie in 1080p HD widescreen and is sourced from a clean print, the image lacks depth or fine detail but looks acceptable, looking soft and anemic at times. The English DTS-H MA Mono 2.0 comes through clean, optional subtitles are provided. The only extras is a trailer for the movie, leaving me to surmise that no one involved wants to discuss this blemish on their filmography. On one hand I applaud Scream Factory for rescuing this one from the vault obscurity, on the other hand I will never watch this movie again, there are too many other better movies out there to discover, this is not one of them, I love bad movies, just not the boring ones. 2/5