Borderland / Crazy Eights Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.5

Borderland / Crazy Eights Blu-ray Movie Review

The horror. And also the horror.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 3, 2011

What’s wrong with these pictures? The After Dark Horrofest series, which is an annual event seeking to highlight newbie horror film makers, has a tradition to follow, one that seems to always start with a damsel in distress quickly meeting her untimely, and usually pretty gory, demise. And yet neither Borderland nor Crazy Eights starts with this horror film cliché. That’s the good news insofar as both of these films, which both feature occult elements while eschewing a lot of onscreen blood and guts. There’s little doubt that Borderland is the more completely realized of the two, with a really creepy performance by Sean Astin and a plot culled from a bizarre real life 1989 Mexican drug case which involved ritual sacrifice and the Santeria "religion". Crazy Eights flirts briefly with the occult when a group of childhood friends unites to carry out one of their cohort’s final wishes, and find his house full of pentagrams and other Satanic props. The group soon discover their past is considerably darker than any of them remembers, despite all of them being visited by all sorts of nightmares, visions and auditory hallucinations.

Please note: the scores above are averages of the two films together. See below for individual scores on each film.

What's happened to Samwise?

Borderland

Film: 4.0 stars
Video: 4.0 stars
Audio: 4.5 stars
Supplements: 3.5 stars

This disturbing film starts out with one of its few outright bloody segments, as two Mexican police officers stumble into a house harboring several wanted cult members. We see the cult members rather hideously dispatch one of the policeman, while leaving the other alive (if seriously wounded) to report back to his lawmaker buddies who’s really in charge in that part of Mexico. We then skip forward a year to a bunch of Texas college students deciding to travel south of the border for a graduation party before they all head off to their “real lives” of careers and untold riches. Care to guess what happens next?

Borderland does very well by not wallowing in excess blood and gore, at least most of the time. Most of this film’s patently unsettling ambience comes from a slow build up of terror, rather than outright shock and awe as depicted in more graphic enterprises. When one of the college crew is captured and kept in a barn by backwoods psychotic Randall (Astin in a very frightening performance), it’s obvious he’s about to be served up to the Mexican cult as part of their bizarre rituals which they believe make them invisible to cops on the prowl for drug runners. Meanwhile two others from the college crew, as well as a tagalong Mexican female with whom one of the guys has become romantically involved, try to find out what’s happened to their vanished friend, eventually enlisting the aid of the wounded policeman from the previous year.

There’s no denying that there are graphic elements in Borderland, but the real power of this creepy little film is in its increasing claustrophobia and the completely uneasy feeling which oozes from the film’s very pores, especially as it depicts the sick and twisted minds of the cult members. Borderland does give in to some baser tendencies toward the end of the film, when our surviving heroes finally wreak havoc on their tormentors, but that’s the kind of violence that somehow feels good, as odd as that may sound. Director Zev Berman brings a very visceral impact to most of this film, and it stands as one of the better After Dark Horrofest offerings to make it thus far to Blu-ray.

Crazy Eights

Film: 3.0 stars
Video: 3.0 stars
Audio: 4.5 stars
Supplements: .5 star

Crazy Eights has an intriguing premise and it deserves some passing kudos for not going the slash and gore route despite a plethora of deaths which fill its brief and frankly confounding running time. We get a brief textual prelude telling us that between 1954 and 1974 some 600 children were willingly given up by their parents in return for payment so that the kids could be part of some super secret research project. We get a very brief depiction of one of those kids being dropped off at a Gothic mansion. (Why is it research projects always are housed in Gothic mansions?) Cut forward 20 years and we meet a group of six childhood friends who are mourning the suicide death of one of their crowd. The dead man has appointed one of the six his executor, but his dying wish is that all six of them travel back to a remote barn to retrieve a lost time capsule. That sets the sextet out on a journey of repressed memory and a slowly emerging consciousness that their childhoods were fraught with a dark secret.

This is a low budget psychological horror film that is notable for the well known talent it attracted. Included in the cast are former porn vixen Traci Lords, Gabrielle Anwar, Frank Whaley, George Newbern and Dina Meyer. If some of those names don’t exactly jump off the page in A-list grandeur, rest assured you’ll recognize them once they show up on screen. But the problem with Crazy Eights is it is so completely illogical that even actors of this general caliber can’t do much to make sense of the proceedings. There are only so many times we can see Whaley react to the gruesome deaths which begin to pile up by screaming “I’m getting the f*** out of here” before we, too, want to follow him.

There are some definitely creepy bits in Crazy Eights, and director James K. Jones actually makes things a good deal creepier by keeping most of the death and maiming off screen, leaving it to the viewers’ imaginations. But once the supposed “reveal” comes along, it actually explains nothing and leaves the whole set up of this film wallowing in a murky pond of uncertainty. If these people were part of some vast experiment, the point of the experiment isn’t very well explained, and the supernatural aspect that enters the film is similarly anyone’s guess. The most illogical aspect of the film is the unexplained enigma of how these six can have completely repressed large swaths of their memory while continuing to know they knew each other as children despite having erased all vestiges of how exactly they knew each other.

Borderland / Crazy Eights Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Both of these films are delivered via an AVC encode, in 1080p, and 2.36:1. But Borderland is clearly the better looking of the two films, with a deep and darkly burnished palette which nevertheless does not lack for strong contrast, true looking black levels and a nicely sharp image despite the overall dank of a lot of the film. There is abundant grain, especially in the low lit shots, but this film, especially when compared to Crazy Eights, has abundant fine detail, a clear image and nicely saturated color. While there's nothing really horrible about Crazy Eights, it suffers from low contrast, a grainy, desaturated image and a tendency toward a yellow tint a lot of the time, which makes the image unpleasant. Blacks are outright milky in several key scenes. Close-ups do reveal some decent fine detail, but overall the image is decidedly inferior when stacked up against its horror housemate on this two-fer.

Borderland / Crazy Eights Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Both of these films sport excellently immersive lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mixes, and both tracks offer sterling fidelity and lots of things that go bump in the night, frequently filling the surrounds with near hallucinatory effects. Borderland likes to utilize a low rumbling LFE a lot of the time which plants an almost subliminal feeling of dread even when nothing overtly scary is happening on screen. Crazy Eights is a little more conservative in its sound design, but there are some great moments, including a couple of deaths that involve some very effective sound effects. Both of these films offer clear and nicely directional dialogue, and excellent effects and scores well balanced throughout.

Borderland / Crazy Eights Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Most of the supplements are on Borderland on this two-fer, and in fact the only "real" supplement (other than Lionsgate promos and bookmarks) on Crazy Eights is one of the supplements also included on Borderland:

• Borderland Feature Commentaries. Two above average commentaries are offered, one with apparently just slightly crazy director Zev Berman and actor Brian Presley, and the other with DP Scott Kevan and Producer Lauren Moews.
• Inside Zev's Head (SD; 20:41) interviews the director and goes into some detail about the actual 1989 case which inspired the film.
• Rituales de Sangre (SD; 28:47) gives even more information about the 1989 case, including interviews with some of the police involved. It's a really excellent, if disturbing, piece.
• Miss Horrorfest 2007 Contest Webisodes (SD; 19:20) contains some short audition videos which were uploaded to YouTube by would-be "Miss Horrofest" candidates. This is the supplement which is also accessible from the Crazy Eights Supplement menu.
• Trailers

Borderland / Crazy Eights Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

You're frequently playing a game of chance with two-fers, and that's the case here. The good news is Borderland is supremely creepy, made even more so by dint of the fact it's based on a real life case. Crazy Eights has a really intriguing premise but just can't deliver the horror goods, despite several effective sequences. For Borderland alone, though, this release is Recommended.