Greece's most famous one-man exploitation machine, Nico Mastorakis, is a name most VHS junkies will recognize right away thanks to a slew of profitable films he made on his home turf with American stars like Blind Date, with a swift move to California keeping his formula intact with oddball programmers like The Zero Boys, Glitch!, and Nightmare at Noon. By the end of the '80s he was spreading his wings a bit by dabbling in different genres and doing producer duties on films geared for the video market helmed by young up-and-coming filmmakers starting off with Dwight H. Little's entertaining Bloodstone in 1988. That was immediately followed by Mastorakis' first full-fledged horror production in several years, Grandmother's House, which had originated as a story turned into a demo reel by college students Peter Rader (future co-writer of Waterworld) and Gayle Jensen. With Mastorakis aboard, Rader was good to go as director of the film and Hollywood steadicam operator Peter Jensen coming aboard to work on the final script. The story revolves around the sinister adventures of siblings David (Foster) and Lynn (Valentine), who have been recently orphaned and get packed off to live with their aggressively welcoming and upbeat grandparents, Sally (Lee) and Spike (Lesser). On their first night, David creeps downstairs and sees his grandparents in the kitchen disposing of what appears to be a body wrapped in a sheet. That turns out to be a nightmare-- or was it? While Lynn gets distracted by an aggressive wannabe boyfriend and former childhood acquaintance named Kenny (Robinson) she met at the public swimming pool, David becomes alarmed when he sees his grandparents what appears to be the attempted murder of a young woman they stash in a refrigerator. Meanwhile the kids are also being followed by a nameless woman (scream queen Stevens) whose motivations only become clear later during a frantic, chase-filled finale.

One of the stronger films to bear Mastorakis' name, Grandmother's House is a modest but mostly effective example of daylight horror with an off-kilter atmosphere that helps keep the potentially thin story bouncing along. (Viewers of M. Night Shyamalan's The Visit might feel a bit of deja vu at times, too.) The Mastorakis stamp can be felt here in the sometimes pokey pacing and droning electronic score, but the young stars do a good job of anchoring the story (the grandparents, not so much) and the film delivers some solid suspense sequences in the second half where it counts. The shock ending doesn't quite land but also gets points for sheer perversity as well, and anything with Stevens going way outside of her usual vamp zone has something going for it. This film first popped up on VHS from Academy Entertainment around the end of the decade without a formal theatrical release, with simultaneous laserdisc from Image Entertainment who later issued a DVD in 2003 via Mastorakis' Omega Entertainment, who did all the actual disc authoring. (A hideous budget DVD was also briefly released by Simitar and is best avoided.) In 2019, Vinegar Syndrome managed to revive the film with a drastically improved dual-format Blu-ray and DVD edition featuring a new 4k scan from the original camera negative, and it's impressive across the board with pin-sharp detail and superior color timing with much more consistent skin tones and legibility in the darker scenes in the basement. DTS-HD MA English 5.1 and 2.0 options are also included (with optional English SDH subtitles), both fine for what amounts to a limited sound mix mostly emphasizing the innocuous but very, very loud score. Extras here include the trailer, a still gallery, and (carried over from the DVD) that original promo reel (5m51s) augmented with Mastorakis narration and a comparison with the same scenes in the final film. The always enjoyable Stevens appears for a new interview, "The Mysterious Woman" (13m4s), discussing how she got the part through a string of auditions with increasingly gray hair and pulled off one of her favorite roles, while "Back to Grandmother's House" (16m11s) features Rader explaining how the project evolved with its three writers and became a reality when he was referred over to Mastorakis. Finally, Jensen (who also served as cinematographer and co-producer) turns up in "Slow N' Steady" (9m17s) to explain how he fell in love with the steadicam in its heyday and started wearing multiple hats on film productions like this. As usual, you get reversible cover options as well and the first pressing comes in a limited slipcase edition.

The Vinegar Syndrome roster also features a film actually directed by Mastorakis and one of his biggest titles back in the VHS days, In the Cold of the Night, a return to the upscale but still amusingly trashy erotic thriller format that had put him on the map. Republic Pictures got this one onto store shelves everywhere in NC-17 or R-rated incarnations (in keeping with the sexy thriller demands on the time), the latter cut featuring a lot less thrusting and bare breasts in the love scenes. The opening montage of bikini-clad models getting photographed in front of a foggy light display while "Fever" grooves on the soundtrack sets the tone for this tale of that photographer, Scott Bruin (Lester), who likes to make feminism cracks at the height of passion and keeps waking up with his hands around the throat of his latest model conquest, Lena (Tweed, of course). That's because he keeps having Blind Date-esque dreams about a young woman getting strangled in the shower at a strange house, something he decides to share with his iron-pumping buddy, Phil (Cobra's Thompson). A random T-shirt sighting of the dream girl leads him to Kimberly (Sachs), so he starts an affair with her while mingling with random guest stars like David Soul (as his shrink), Tippi Hedren, and Marc Singer (with a ridiculous haircut), all of whom happened to be available in L.A. around that time. Of course it turns out there's something more sinister going on here involving modern technology, with an explanation you won't believe (and it even involves snippets from Mastorakis's prior thriller, The Wind).

Complete with wailing sax music, billowing curtains, and absurd dialogue, this one is about as perfect a representation of pre-Basic Instinct mainstream erotic thrillers as you can get. Everything gets amped up here and sexualized right down to a simple dinner, a dish of marbles, and of course showering, with heavy blue lighting blasting the screen when things get especially heated. The extra NC-17 material is pretty brief but obvious when it hits, though you have to wonder why the far more capable and appealing Tweed wasn't given the lead here instead of Sachs. (Tweed of course went on to become the direct-to-video erotic thriller queen, so she had the last laugh.) This one made the same video rounds as those above, though the Image/Omega DVD was the R-rated version for no good reason. Thankfully the Vinegar Syndrome dual-format release (yep, also in a limited edition slipcase) is the full-strength cut in all its bumping and grinding glory, transfered from the original camera negative and looking way fresher than you would ever guess from the earlier editions. Again there are DTS-HD 5.1 and 2.0 English audio options with English SDH subtitles, with the music and those whooshing hi-tech nightmare sound effects getting most of the support here. In addition to the trailer and an image gallery, the release contains the making-of featurette (4m24s) from the DVD with Mastorakis briefly chatting about the production's most challenging scenes and his wrangling with the MPAA over material that seems quite tame now compared to what you see on prime time basic cable.

Reviewed on April 24, 2019