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Released by: AGFA
Released on: December 22nd, 2022.
Director: Mike Conway
Cast: Lilly Brown, Kerry Wallum, Mark Lang, Mike Conway
Year: 1991
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The Black Crystal – Movie Review:
Also known as The Black Triangle, 1991’s The Black Crystal, written, directed, edited and scored by Mike Conway, who also plays a prominent role in the movie, was shot on location in and around Tucson, Arizona on 8mm film with a mostly amateur cast. This would be Conway’s feature film debut as a director.
The story revolves around a man named Will (played by Conway) who drives a super-sweet yellow Pontiac Trans-Am. He’s cruising around a backroad looking cool when stops to pick up a hitchhiker named Justin (David Lamb). Will quickly realizes that Justin is pretty worked up about something and before long, he understands exactly why when he runs into a gang of Satanic cult members who answer to a boss-man named Daniel (Mark Lang of Hey Dude!) and appear to be unusually skilled in the deadly art of kickboxing. Poor Justin gets killed, his eyes gouged out of their sockets, while Will manages to split and make a run for it in his bad ass car.
A short time later, unsure what to do about all of this, Will decides to squirrel himself away at a remote cabin belonging to his brother Peter (Russell Fowler). Here, he decides to track down a woman named Daphne (Lilly Brown) who Justin mentioned before he was killed. Daphne is none too keen on Will when he shows up at her place unannounced but eventually he finds a small, black pyramid in the back of his car which Justin must have dropped. He brings this to her and she warms up enough to him that they decide to have a picnic. After this, they’re able to talk about what happened and it turns out that she’s actually a witch and that the pyramid is a crystal power channeler that may allow a person who knows what they’re doing with it to travel to the underworld itself.
This, of course, leads to Will and Daphne teaming up to try and save the world from Daniel and his cult, but not before they have a seriously heavy make-out session.
A quickly paced seventy minute barrage of cheap effects, questionable acting and loads of appreciable DIY spirit, The Black Crystal is a pretty entertaining mix of horror, action and drama. The remote Arizona locations give the film a lot more production value than you might expect it to have, and while the effects work is a little on the crude side, you’ve got to appreciate the homemade gore and the absolutely awesome synthesizer score that Conway himself managed to conjure up for his feature.
The cast do a pretty fun job of bringing their characters to life. Conway is okay in the lead, he’s just charismatic enough for us to like him even if he doesn’t really have any depth. He and Lilly Brown aren’t exactly going to set the world on fire with their chemistry but they manage to get into the French kissing scene enough that we buy them as a couple. David Lamb is dead before we can care much about him but Mark Lang manages to steal pretty much every scene that he’s in as the leader of a very atypical cult made up of chubby middle-aged guys in flannel shirts driving pick’em up trucks.
This disc also includes the original VHS version of the movie, which uses the The Black Crystal title card and has the Raedon Entertainment logo preceding it. It runs approximately twenty-four seconds longer than the feature version.
The Black Crystal – Blu-ray Review:
The Black Crystal arrives on region free Blu-ray, making its debut on disc in its proper 1.33.1 aspect ratio in an AVC encoded 1080p high definition transfer with the feature taking up just over of 20GBs of space on the 50GB disc. "Preserved from the original 1” tape master" this won’t blow you away with superb fine detail but for something sourced from a tape, it looks pretty decent, given that it was shot on Super 8mm and edited on tape. Colors are a bit flat and this never pops the way a newly shot HD program or film sourced transfer would but it’s perfectly watchable and free or any real compression problems.
Audio chores are handled by a 24-bit DTS-HD 2.0 mix in the film’s native English, with optional subtitles provided in English only. The synth score sounds pretty solid here but there’s some background noise and hiss noticeable throughout pretty much the entire duration of the movie. Again, this is a case of doing the best you can with the elements available. It certainly isn’t perfect, but it gets the job done.
A new commentary with director Mike Conway kicks off the extra features where he talks about how the film was originally titled The Black Triangle but changed by its distributor before release. He talks about shooting the movie on Super 8mm and the gear used to do it, casting the film and details on most of the players involved in the production, how he got the movie distributed only to have his distributor go under shortly after, how different locations were chosen and secured, the guerilla filmmaking style that was used to get the movie made, having to change things on the fly when different actors didn't show up, why he wound up playing a role in the movie himself, creating the music for the film and lots more. It's a good talk, no real dead air here, and loaded with details about the production’s history.
An eight minute interview with Mike Conway and then Mark Lang goes over how he wrote, directed, edited, scored and starred in the movie. He talks about the two week shoot in Tuscon, paying the actors fifty dollars a day and feeding them cheap sandwiches and chips, the film's VHS distribution history via Raedon Entertainment, how Conway cast the film, locations, Lang's character and what it was like playing a villain, his work on Hey Dude, other work that he's done in his career including some work on Sonic The Hedgehog.
The disc also includes four short films that Conway has directed in more recent times (these aren’t older camcorder or film projects but clearly shot on digital HD video), the first of which is a seven minute movie called Bug Complex where a poor woman deals with one of the worst cockroach infestations you’re ever likely to see. The four minute Contingency Plan, starring Mike and Sheila Conway, ties into the feature as it’s playing on a television in the background as a couple solves an argument in a very unorthodox manner. Roadkill, which runs thirteen minutes, is a quick crime story in which three characters try and sort out some very specific problems. The last of the shorts is the seven minute Tequila, where a drinking game quickly spirals out of control. Conway stars in this one as well. Each of these is pretty entertaining and worth checking out.
Finishing up the disc is the original home video trailer, menus and chapter selection options.
The Black Crystal - The Final Word:
The Black Crystal… somehow it all works. This movie is nicely paced, the soundtrack is fantastic and it features some pretty fun performances and neat no-budget gore to compliment a wonky plot that’s actually pretty good at holding our attention. The Blu-ray release from AGFA looks as good as it probably can, which is fine if not amazing, but the extras are plentiful and interesting. Recommended.