Circle City Supernatural – review

Director: J.P. Leck

Release date: 2023

Contains spoilers

This portmanteau film had an interesting conceit in that the wraparound was a radio show with host Lindsay Mallyn (Lindsay Leck), engineered by Sylvia Flores (Patty Najera-Esparza) and they were taking calls from citizens of Circle City who were telling their true tales of the supernatural on Halloween.

The segments of the films were then the stories but the interesting twist to this was that the caller told the story all the way through and the scenes complemented the voice rather than became the whole narrative – there was, therefore, a bit of an old-time radio feel to this.

Lindsay Leck as Lindsay

The stories were very inventive, for the most part, but lacked some level of bite due to the fact that, as the protagonist of the tale was the caller, you knew that there was no ultimate peril within the story. They also suffered due to budget. Take the zombie tale, which was a mother (Laura Morrison Richcreek) relating the dream her son (J.J. Taylor) had in detention, which she claims was a vision of the future – we see a too decayed to move zombie, detail lost in a hazmat suit, and a moving body bag but no other one despite the caller saying the school was full of them. The first story, Do Not Disturb, was an example of the interesting ones where the caller, Melody (Julia Leslie), walks through a mysterious door standing alone in a field and ends up in an old hotel. She recognised that this was something that took the form of the building to trap her but ultimately wanted to devour her.

Hudson Leck as Johnny

The vampire story was Fertile Ground where John (Dennis Hanley) calls in and tells the story from his childhood, when he was still called Johnny (Hudson Leck), and he was dared to go trick or treating in an abandoned part of town – whilst there seems no logic to this, it worked in that ‘kids and dares’ sort of way. Apparently that part of town was deserted after ‘the blight’ forced everyone out, the source being a carnivorous plant called the Thicket that attacked for blood. The detail that sunlight killed the plant was also mentioned, causing Lindsay to exclaim about vampire plants from Transylvania.

fighting the Thicket

The name the Thicket came from a man who died with the last seed and it had grown from his decaying flesh. As we follow Johnny deeper into a house he thought still occupied (though he found no-one), we end up descending into the cellar with him and there is what is left of the Thicket. There is also an old-fashioned pump sprayer. The plant is dormant and Johnny realises this as it emerges from dormancy as he touches it and the plant attacks – he fights back with the sprayer and escapes, though he takes a scarlet ‘acorn’ with him. He later figures out that the Thicket had been feeding on rats and the sprayer was rat poison – Warfarin based – and the plant was already dying having drunk the blood thinner from the rats. John is now dying and he intends to put the acorn in his coffin…

mysterious door

The story was interesting and it is always good to get a vampire plant. The plant itself was a puppet with a red metal maw that looked a tad silly, unfortunately, and it is another sign of the ideas the filmmakers had being grander than their budget would allow (puppets appeared in several stories, working best in the actual haunted puppets story). So, there are some good ideas here, some really good ones, if I’m fair, but the conceit that feeds them also hamstrings them by taking away peril (as I mentioned). The film has its flaws certainly but I have to admire the inventive concepts and the effort to reach beyond the budget. 4 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK

Short Film: Blood & Roots

Directed by Wren Brewer, this 11 ½ minute short film was uploaded to YouTube in 2024 but does not have an IMDb page that I can find. Exploring the drifting of friends as puberty and boys enter the scene, it is also a neat little vampire tale.

girl talk

It starts with Care (Wren Brewer) and Jan (Evie Turley) hanging out. Jan suggests she is going to see *him* (he being Cyrus (Cannon Haney)) and let him do *it*. Care is unsure, suggesting it not being a good idea, expressing concern that he is older and that it will hurt. Jan is dismissive.

with Grandpa

At school, their teacher (Richard Douglas Jones) gives a biology lesson about metamorphosis. After school Care rides home on her bike and heads into the garage for a juice and a chat to her Grandpa (Bill Baker). He is making *another* birdhouse. When she asks why he says that he likes to protect small things and he also loves to work wood – suggesting that, with the things you can make from it, it is alive even after it is dead.

boyfriend at the window

In her room, getting ready for bed, Care hears a knock at the window. It is Jan asking to be let in. Shocked she does so, only registering the height from the ground later. Jan no longer has a reflection and her eyes shine and she has fangs… Cyrus is soon floating near the window and Jan has an ultimatum. Care must come to them the next day and let him bite her, to make her like Jan, or she will drain her friend to death. Luckily Care will confide in her grandpa, whose woodworking skills weren’t always focused on birdhouses…

fangs

This is such a well put together little short, examining coming of age and peer pressure, whilst crafting, as I mentioned, a neat little vampire tale. Whilst the main chops are not something particularly new, I liked the biology aspects (we see a second class ON the evolution of predator and prey) and it was particularly well photographed with sound acting. Worth your time.

Diva Satänica – review

Words and Art: BRÄO

First published: 2025

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: She’s an urban legend. A whispered name.
Some call her Medusa. Others, The Queen of Evil. The Lady in Black.
Vampire? Witch? Demon? No one knows for sure.
But one thing is certain. No one leaves her mansion alive.


And yet, people still go searching for her.
Why? Because she promises you the greatest night of pleasure you’ve ever known… in exchange for your life.


In this haunting tale, we follow Jonathan, a lonely, aimless man consumed by addiction. A string of strange, possibly supernatural encounters leads him to the legend of Diva Satänica, and what begins as curiosity soon becomes obsession.

Rendered entirely in stunning, hand-painted watercolour across 68 full-colour pages, Diva Satänica is a seductive, violent, and deeply atmospheric exploration of desire, death, and dark myth.

The review: This was a comic book I backed via a kickstarter, in its digital form, and it is a great piece of comic art. Pretty simple in its storytelling – a predator who hunts lonely men via a darkweb adult site, there perhaps is a simile with the film Succubus in the idea that she uses an electronic medium to hunt (and seems to have a supernatural control over that medium). She lures the men to her, though that may involve stepping between worlds also, with the promise of a sexual encounter.

This is absolutely beautiful and the creature, known as the Lady in Black, is described in comic both as a vampire and as a succubus. It is apparent that she needs blood in order to climax. The story itself has some adult themes (obviously, given the story as outlined) and some adult illustrations – so take that into account – but beyond the story, the joy of this has to be the wonderful, atmospheric artwork. 7 out of 10. The comic is available from Afterlight comics.

Stephen King’s the shining – review

Director: Mick Garris

Release date: 1997

Contains spoilers

Stephen King’s sequel to the Shining, Doctor Sleep, was a novel based around a group of energy vampires but, whilst Danny Torrence returned as an adult, the Overlook hotel was missing from the novel as it was destroyed in the climax of the original novel. Rather, the climax took place on the site that the hotel had stood upon. When the film Doctor Sleep was created this was changed as it followed the aesthetic and content of Stanley Kubrick’s film version of the Shining. Within Dr Sleep, as in the novel it is based on, the ghosts from the Overlook were shown as vampiric – trying to consume Danny’s Shining - but the hotel itself was also vampiric, the building was identified as consuming the shining also.

the Torrence family

Stephen King was famous for not liking Kubrick’s interpretation of the Shining, however. When a mini-series of the novel was proposed King, himself, wrote the teleplay. That makes the teleplay true to King’s concept, indeed the series was shot in the actual hotel that served as inspiration for the novel, but it still had to compete with the Kubrick film, which is (despite King’s feelings on the subject) a masterpiece.

the Overlook

I’m not going to blow by blow through the scenes. Suffice it to say that Jack Torrence (Steven Weber, Dracula: Dead and Loving It) is a recovering alcoholic who has lost his teaching job after beating a student and has previously injured his son, Danny (Courtland Mead), breaking his arm in a drunken rage. He gets the post of winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, which is snowed off over winter, and moves himself, wife Wendy (Rebecca De Mornay) and Danny to the hotel. He intends to write a play whilst there.

the hose

Danny is psychic, often seeing an (otherwise) invisible friend called Tony (Wil Horneff), a manifestation of his abilities. One difference between this and Kubrick’s is that Tony “appears” in Kubrick’s film as a voice spoken by Danny and represented by a crooked finger – in this Tony appears as a person. Danny is warned about the Overlook by Tony but, being seven, there isn’t much he can do about it. What we do get is an interesting view, in his visions, of something stalking the corridors but only the shadow is seen. This will turn out to be his father but the use of a shadow is, of course, a vampire genre trope. He also sees an animated fire hose with teeth, an unfortunate effect that we’ll get back to.

Melvin Van Peebles as Dick

Once at the hotel Danny meets chef Dick Hallorann (Melvin Van Peebles), a fellow psychic – though nowhere near as powerful – who recognises Danny for what he is. He calls the ability the shining and suggests that Danny shines brighter than anyone he has ever met. He warns Danny from the rooms, one in particular, and tells him that he has seen things occasionally in the hotel but they can’t hurt Danny. They are only pictures and if he looks away and counts to ten, they will go away. The hotel itself seems to have a shine of its own – hence it being a vampiric entity as we’ll explore.

reflected ghosts

Danny is seeing things from the beginning, and phenomena also occurs - poltergeist like falling of chairs, for instance. It is most certainly Danny that the hotel wants but, when it can’t get to him, it turns its attention to Jack. There is an implication that Jack shines also (in a minor way, and hence his susceptibility) but it is Danny’s ability that is fuelling the hotel and ghosts. This sees them ramping up their assaults and soon even Wendy can see/hear them. At one-point Danny realises that pretty soon they won’t be ghosts at all, meaning they are gaining a corporeal presence through their vampirism of Danny’s psychic gift.

the topiary

I mentioned effects and probably the worst is tied into an aspect missed in the Kubrick film altogether. In the movie Kubrick adds a hedge maze (rather effectively and it is reproduced within psychic sequences, at least, in the film Doctor Sleep) and uses it to replace topiary animals. They are here and, as in the book, there are moments when they come to life (an aspect of the vampiric hotel, rather than its associated ghosts). However, they look rubbish, bad cgi blobs with no weight to them as we see them move across the snows.

the ghost of 217

That’s not to say all the effects were bad. The drowned ghost of 217 (237 in Kubrick) looks fantastic in the bath, rotten and lying in a chemical soup. But the hose pipe, the topiaries and floating Tony all looked rubbish – and, given the key role of Tony plus the fact that the topiaries are essentially a set piece, that isn’t good. The dialogue can be a tad hokey also at times (have I committed a faux pas given King wrote it? Perhaps). The direction was, in fact, not as bad as it perhaps appeared as one cannot do anything but compare it to Kubrick’s auteur opus. That said, it didn’t capture the doom-laden atmosphere of the film. The mini-series format probably didn’t help with this dragging in its middle section.

Steven Weber as Jack

As for the key performances. Well, Courtland Mead works well as Danny – a tough role for any child actor, he manages to vacillate between childish reaction to knowing psychic. Rebecca De Mornay gives a strong performance as Wendy and a very different one to that offered by Shelley Duvall. Of course, Steven Weber was always going to be compared to Nicholson and his iconic performance – something that is probably really unfair. His Jack is more sympathetic, certainly, and he offers a strong performance but next to Nicholson it will always come out at second place. The adult actors were also hampered in places by that hokey dialogue I mentioned.

floating Tony

Retrospectively vampiric, like the Kubrick film, the consumption of the psychic energy isn’t mentioned (just that Danny enables it), and whilst it was always going to struggle next to the film, this wasn’t as good as it might have been anyway (in a universe where the Kubrick film didn’t exist). The film is dragged down by some of the effects, lack of atmosphere and some hokey Hallmark channel dialogue that surfaces through the film. Its TV mini-series origin means that some of the things we should have seen we didn’t. 6 feels a tad strong but 5.5 feels churlish and so 6 out of 10 it is.

The imdb page is here.

On DVD @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK

After Midnight – review

Directors: Various

Release date: 2005

Contains spoilers

Like its predecessor, Around Midnight, this was a shot on and straight to video effort and so, like that, it carries the caveat that If you are able to track down this anthology film it is going to look just that – with the fuzz one expects from such a film.

This is half an hour longer, however, and feels more ambitious (though it still isn’t great). They get rid of the host and have the wraparound as a woman (Nancy Feliciano) reading a book called After Midnight (thus the segments are the stories therein) – she does become a vampire. All the segments, bar one, are vampire, also. The one that isn’t is about a woman (Heidi Honeycutt) on her own when a virus has killed off the rest of the world it seems.

Sky and Art

The first segment is I Want to be a Vampire in which reporter Art (Johnny Monotone) pitches up at a woman’s house, she’s called Sky (Laura Giglio, Deep Undead), as there have been vampire related deaths reported and he wants to interview her with regards this due to her claims of being undead. He is sceptical, however, despite her insistence she is a vampire and her suggestion that she is 166 years old. He asks for the lights to be put on (vampires are scared of the sun, not lightbulbs) and she takes him to meet her feeder (Cruz Machine) who is strapped up in the closet. Eventually her façade breaks and it is revealed she is a wannabe – but perhaps Art is more than he seems…

bite

In the most complex of the stories (and the segment that struggles the most narratively because of this), entitled A Moment of Darkness, we see a woman in a disco. She is Dr. Janeane Melocarro (Cindy Osbourne). She meets a guy but this is superfluous to the main story. At home she gets a page and goes to the hospital in which there is a violent patient (Tiffany Warren) who manages to bite her and, of course, she turns. Where things become confused is with the vampire visiting her and, it appears, that they knew each other though no indication to that effect was given in the hospital scene.

photographing the dead

The last vampire segment is called the Perfect Subject and it involves a girl (Isabelle Stephen, Vampire Sisters) who has paid a photographer (Rick Trembles) to come and take some modelling shots – first clothed and then nude. He buggers off, much to her disappointment, so she gets dressed whilst another photographer (Michael Will) enters and strangles her because when she is dead she becomes his Perfect Subject. He is somewhat shocked, therefore, when she opens her eyes… guess what she is…

fangs

And that’s it, much more vampire facing but still a low-to-no budget effort, straight to video with a horrible print. There is a market for such films, of course, and this probably deserves the same 2.5 out of 10 that the other got, marred by simple narratives (and narrative confusion in the more complex story).

The imdb page is here.

Short Film: Canine

A nine-minute short film directed by Hunter Woelfle and released in 2023, this is one that certainly has acting (or more accurately dressing) as a vampire but you can read the creature within as vampire also – though this is through subtleties.

It starts with a girl (Isabel Oliver Marcus) flossing and cleaning her teeth before doing her goth style makeup and then putting in fangs. She walks down the street and is unnerved by a car that seems to slow but it eventually passes her. Then she notices bright eyes flashing in a dark pathway.

Isabel Oliver Marcus as the girl

One owner of the eyes comes forward and it is a cat, which she pets. The other set doesn’t come close and eventually she leaves. After she does, we see the eyes rise in the darkness, as though the owner was shapeshifting into something taller. She goes to a party but is sat by herself, at one point spotting shining eyes outside. She leaves and sees the earlier cat dead on the pavement, one if its fangs seems to be missing. She gets home and ready for bed but there are noises that are spooking her…

fang

As well as the eye shine and potential shapeshifting (and the fact that the film concentrates on fangs) there is also some shadow play during the denouement. This was an interesting, ambiguous little short, which relied on atmosphere rather than dialogue. The imdb page is here.

Blood Hunt: Marvel Universe: 1 – review

Writer: Various

Artist: Various

First published: 2024 (tpb)

Contains spoilers

The blurb: As the massive event BLOOD HUNT kicks into high gear, this collection of miniseries takes a deep dive into how its repercussions affect every corner of the Marvel Universe! The vampire onslaught of BLOOD HUNT reaches across the Marvel Universe - from Wakanda to New Orleans and beyond! Spinning directly out of events in the main series, the Black Panther finds himself transformed into a bloodsucker - and tasked with carrying out a key mission for the vampire overlord! But even a dark transformation won't keep T'Challa from his duties to Wakanda - for better or worse. At the school of magic known as Strange Academy, Doyle Dormammu, Shaylee, Toth, Zoe and German get embroiled in an adventure that will take them around the world - and right into the center of the BLOOD HUNT action! Plus: What happens when vampires face an enemy with gamma-irradiated blood? Find out, together with the Incredible Hulk! Collecting: Black Panther: Blood Hunt (2024) 1-3, Strange Academy: Blood Hunt (2024) 1-3, Hulk: Blood Hunt (2024) 1

The review: This is one of the primary Blood Hunt volumes. From the first Blood Hunt we knew that Blade had turned Black Panther. This contains the details of that story as Black Panther looks to protect Wakanda, whilst forced to do Blade’s bidding. The volume also includes how Varnae, the vampiric spirit possessing Blade, fell in the first place and how the actions of the Gods influenced that. It was interesting that Black Panther meets Adzi, the mother of pestilence as the adzi is an African vampire type.

The Blood Hunt also impacts the Strange Academy – especially Pia, whose own secret (she is a vampire with a mystically bestowed ability to withstand sunlight) becomes an issue when the kids from the Academy go off in search of the Darkhold.

The final story is a Hulk one, with Bruce Banner and the tale of a group of vampires (who have been feeding on immigrants for years) set free by sundeath and attacking Banner in a derelict movie set after he is distracted by their reluctant Renfield.

A solid volume – all vampire facing. 8 out of 10.

In Paperback @ Amazon US

In Paperback @ Amazon UK