THE KILLER 4 PACK

Well, you have to hand it to our friends at MVD Visual - here, they offer four films for the price of one, and even grace the back of their packaging with this wonderfully salacious warning: "These movies contain gratuitous nudity! Torture! And violence!".

First up is the cheekily titled THE DAY OF THE DEAD.

In actual fact, this is no relation - or rip-off - of George A Romero's classic zombie fest. Rather, it's a fairly grim 2007 effort from Ricardo Islas which is better known in its native territory of Mexico as EL DIA DE LOS MUERTOS.

Purporting to be based on true events, it follows the plight of Ana Lucia (Rosa Isela Frausto), a young Mexican girl who's relocated to Chicago in the hope of making her fortune. However, things haven't turned out quite how she'd hoped: she misses her family dreadfully and is struggling to make ends meet in America. Still, at least she has the good sense to enrol in a rape defence class - that may come in useful later...

Indeed, it transpires that a gang are terrorising the city, claiming homeless women as victims to rape and then murder. One woman, for example, has her breasts chopped off and a baseball rammed into her mouth while the mob shag around her and pull faces for the video they're recording. The cops are as worried as they are baffled by these horrendous crimes, especially by the fact that the gang are clearly enjoying what they're doing to a great extent.

When an agency gives Ana Lucia a few addresses to call by in the hope of gaining housekeeping work, she inadvertently captures the attention of the gang's wrestling-loving leader and becomes their next intended victim. One of the gang's female members imposes herself upon Ana Lucia in the local launderette, as their dastardly plan begins to unfold.

Inevitably, as Ana Lucia's luck keeps getting shittier, she eventually falls foul of the gang. But that's when the film throws a serious curveball in the viewer's direction...

Much more engaging than its lo-fi aesthetics would initially suggest, Islas' dual language film (in many scenes characters swap and change between Spanish and English dialogue several times in the space of a single conversation, which is bizarre) is often attractive to look at, and feels like a much bigger production than it evidently was ($100,000 is the rumoured budget).

All the performances are reliable; the gore scenes employ clever editing and camerawork to get round the low budget shortcomings. The tone of the film, despite moments of offbeat humour throughout, is nicely dour; the sense of impending doom is deftly handled by the director.

The shift from culturally aware crime thriller with gory set-pieces to full-on Japanese-style mayhem during the final act is an odd one, and one that some viewers may have trouble digesting. The melodramatic soundtrack does the film few favours too. But, overall, THE DAY OF THE DEAD came as a most pleasant surprise.

Next up is JEZEBETH, a 2011 film by writer-director Damien Dante.

It starts with a flashback to 1873, in the Blandy family home where the mother has given birth to an unholy beast that she christens Jezebeth. She calls for a priest to help, but all he does is condemn the mother to "an eternity in Hell".

Flash forward to the present day, and a group of bitchy young women share the Blandy house. One of them just so happens to be called Jezebeth (Bree Michaels) - and she's a self-professed devil worshipper. Unbeknownst to housemates Justina (Katie Auerbach) and Lenora (Madeline Maser), Jezebeth has discovered a Satanic bible in the house's attic and starts to stir shit up by reciting incantations from it.

Cue more bickering, lots of creepy piano music, skewered camera angles and unnecessary dips into grainy monochrome. In contrast to the skilled storytelling presented by THE DAY OF THE DEAD, JEZEBETH is an incomprehensible mess.

Sepia-tinted graveyard scenes and bad heavy rock music ("she's calling out your naaaame!") give a lousy impression from the off here. More than six minutes of opening titles serve essentially as a terrible music promo video. When the film finally starts proper, however, it does improve a little - but not much. At 83 minutes in length, it was a chore to sit through.

A sequel - JEZEBETH 2: HOUR OF THE GUN - is forthcoming.

Readers may remember the next film, CARNAGE: THE LEGEND OF QUILTFACE, when it was released on UK DVD by Quantum Leap back in 2003, as CARNAGE ROAD (which is also the onscreen title here).

It's a terrible film from Massimiliano Cerchi (HELLINGER; HOLY TERROR etc) which nevertheless achieves that which JEZEBETH cannot: it's highly entertaining.

Yes, it's badly acted, has an ugly ultra-cheap shot-on-video look and relies on a single gore effect - by Lizard Studios - repeated over and over (a machete with a portion cut out of its blade to give the impression that it's embedded in flesh) for its kicks. Yes, the entertainment value is pure kitsch - but at least it has some.

It opens with a couple stopping in their car on a lonely desert road, where the guy suggests he take some photographs of his blonde filly. She has a better idea: she removes her top and mounts him. All is good until their lovemaking is curtailed by the arrival of some tinker in a boiler suit, poor man's psycho mask and a machete in hand.

This machete-wielding threat established, it's then time to introduce four dim-witted students on a road trip as more fodder for the desert-dwelling killer known only as Quiltface (and billed as being portrayed by "Quiltface" in the opening titles!).

Cerchi, I love your films in some immoral way. They offer regular gore, nudity, cheap aesthetics, terrible acting, overly loud sound effects - and they're almost always the right length (CARNAGE clocks in at an agreeable 69 minutes long).

Finally, we get to HELLWEEK, Eddie Lengyel's 2010 endurance test.

In it, a group of wisecracking jocks decide to put the willies up their female college pals by holding a party in a disused warehouse. Within 10 minutes, mayhem as erupted as a 'guest' turns up in a spooky mask and proceeds to start hacking people apart.

Although frequently inventive on a visual front, and certainly gory, HELLWEEK has no characters worth attaching yourself to, no tension and no real plot to speak of. Moments of Richard Kern-style rawness are welcomed by me, but the lack of focus ultimately turned this 103-minute film into a real slog.

This being the "grindhouse edition" of the film, it's given a soft, grainy and distressed look to resemble some poorly-looked-after 16mm print from the 1970s. But, of course, the language, fashions, gore and even music (awful emo in the first five minutes!) are all incongruous with this conceit.

The disc on this region 1 DVD opens to a static main menu page. There are no extras or scene selection menus, which is understandable seeing as though we're getting over six hours of films here on a single disc.

Each film is uncut. DAY has a windowboxed presentation; CARNAGE is 1.33:1 pillarboxed; the other two films are presented in 16x9 widescreen.

Although none of the films look great, they're all perfectly watchable in terms of colour, detail and cleanliness. The fact they often look soft, or dark, or rough around the edges is down to the lo-fi origins of their individual shoots as opposed to any transfer defects.

English (and Spanish with forced English subtitles in the case of THE DAY OF THE DEAD) 2.0 audio is solid throughout.

So, there are no hidden classics on here unfortunately. But THE DAY OF THE DEAD is pretty decent, worth a look certainly, and CARNAGE remains a fun way of admiring rubbishness over the course of 70 minutes.

Not a bad proposition, considering MVD Visual's nice retail price.

Review by Stuart Willis