Good Efficient Butchery

THE SQUEEZE
aka THE RIP-OFF
(Italy/West Germany - 1978; US release 1981)

Directed by Anthony M. Dawson (Antonio Margheriti). Written by Simon O'Neill (Giovanni Simonelli), Marc Princi, and Paul Costello. Cast: Lee Van Cleef, Karen Black, Edward Albert, Lionel Stander, Robert Alda, Angelo Infanti, Peter Carsten, Antonella Murgia, Dan Van Husen, Roy Brocksmith, Ron Van Clief, Steve Burche. (R, 99 mins)

Italian cult director Antonio Margheriti (1930-2002) was the consummate journeyman over the course of his career, dabbling in everything from muscleman epics, gothic horror, and 007 ripoffs in the '60s, spaghetti westerns and gialli in the '70s, and Namsploitation, commando, and INDIANA JONES-derived action films in the '80s. He's perhaps best known today for his "Gamma 1" quadrilogy of goofy and practically interchangeable far-out space operas THE WILD, WILD PLANET (1965), WAR OF THE PLANETS (1966), WAR BETWEEN THE PLANETS (1966) and SNOW DEVILS (1967) as well as the immortal YOR: THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE (1983) and his many actioners of the '80s, like THE LAST HUNTER (1980), HUNTERS OF THE GOLDEN COBRA (1982), CODENAME: WILDGEESE (1984), and INDIO (1989). Margheriti, aka "Anthony M. Dawson," dabbled in a little bit of everything and could stage an explosion with the panache of any Hollywood blockbuster.

With his 1975 spaghetti western/kung-fu hybrid THE STRANGER AND THE GUNFIGHTER, Margheriti worked with legendary badass Lee Van Cleef for the first time and the pair became good friends who would team up for five more projects before Van Cleef's death in 1989. After STRANGER, Margheriti cast Van Cleef as the bad guy squaring off against Jim Brown in the 20th Century Fox blaxploitation western TAKE A HARD RIDE, which would be Margheriti's only Hollywood studio gig. Van Cleef also turned up in Margheriti's RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK knockoff JUNGLE RAIDERS (1985) and two of his WILD GEESE ripoffs with CODENAME: WILDGEESE (released in the US by New World in 1986), and the unreleased-in-the-US THE COMMANDER (1988). But the pinnacle of the Margheriti/Van Cleef alliance is 1978's THE SQUEEZE, a wonderfully grungy little heist flick that began production in December 1977, with extensive location work in the NYC metropolitan area in January and February 1978. According to Edoardo Margheriti, the director's son and regular production assistant, some of THE SQUEEZE's NYC shoot coincided with a major late January snowstorm that, given the time frame, would've been the tapered-off remnants of the Blizzard of '78 that hit Ohio during the last week of January. By the time it hit the east coast, it wasn't quite the monster that incapacitated Ohio, but it managed to dump heavily on the city, which also got hit with its own separate blizzard during the first week of February and you can see some of both storms in THE SQUEEZE. The brutal cold, the unplowed streets, the wet slush, the visible breath on the actors, and cars getting stuck in the snow all add to the harshly gritty ambience that makes it an essential NYC movie of the era, playing more like a street-tough American crime thriller rather than the generously budgeted, Carlo Ponti-backed Italian/German co-production that it was. Margheriti made a lot of films over his long career, but none boasted the bitterly cold and uniquely scuzzy verite atmosphere that he and cinematographer Sergio D'Offizi captured with THE SQUEEZE. They secured an American production office and permits to shoot in certain areas, but there's an unmistakable handheld immediacy to scenes set in fleabag hotels, bars, tenements, a police precinct, filthy cabs, and a ride on the Roosevelt Island tram, and enough gawking onlookers throughout to suggest that Margheriti caught a lot of footage on the fly in the guerrilla-style of many Italian filmmakers shooting in the city without permits in the 1970s and 1980s. The only mistake Margheriti makes in his depiction of the city's sublime grime of the time is not finding a reason to send any of the characters to Times Square.

THE SQUEEZE was written by veteran Italian screenwriter and frequent Margheriti collaborator Giovanni Simonelli (SEVEN DEATHS IN THE CAT'S EYE), Marc Princi (GREAT WHITE), and voice/dubbing actor Paul Costello, who was probably in charge of the English translation. The script is essentially another in the One Last Job heist subgenre, with legendary safecracker Chris Gretchko (Van Cleef) in self-imposed exile on a Mexican ranch under the name "Ray Sloan." He's tracked down by Jeff Olafson (Edward Albert), the son of an old criminal associate who told his son to find Chris if he ever got into a jam. Jeff is involved with some German mobsters led by Van Stratten (Peter Carsten), and he needs Chris to open a safe filled with diamonds or Van Stratten's goons will whack him. Chris is reluctant ("The last door I opened cost me eight years!"), but out of loyalty to Jeff's late father, agrees to help the kid out and heads back to NYC and secures the assistance of his old fence, grumpy pawn shop owner Sam (Lionel Stander). When Van Stratten tries to cut Jeff out of the deal, Jeff tells Chris that Van Stratten's going to kill him as soon as he opens the safe, prompting Chris to hatch a scheme to keep the diamonds for themselves and split the take. To do so requires Jeff being out of the picture so nobody knows about his involvement, so he gets himself arrested on a minor charge so he can spend a month in jail while Chris plans to wait it out at a safe house rented by Jeff. Chris gets the stones, but takes a bullet in the leg in the process, and is tended to at the safe house by ditzy, new age neighbor Clarisse (Karen Black), while Van Stratten's guys and the muscle for the safe owner (Roy Brocksmith) try to track down Jeff, figuring there's some kind of con game going on. All the while, irate police captain Donati (Robert Alda) is perpetually one step behind but closing in.

As the double and triple crosses ensue, Chris takes too long to realize that he's being played, and the script could do a better job of exploring that storyline. Once he knows Chris has the diamonds, Jeff is already figuring out a way to get rid of him. Chris is a smart enough guy that he should see this, but time and again, he lets his loyalty to Jeff's father blind him to what should be right in front of his face. These are interesting ideas that are never fully fleshed out, as Margheriti gets sidetracked with an extended action sequence and a series of explosions that were impressive enough for Ponti to have him recycle the footage for his 1979 PIRANHA ripoff KILLER FISH. THE SQUEEZE is one of the rare Margheriti films where dialogue scenes really come alive, and it's likely due in part to the abundance of American actors working together instead of European actors being post-synched later on. For instance, here's a very loose and improvisational feel to some of Van Cleef's and Stander's scenes together, with Stander even making fun of Van Cleef's earring at one point.

There's that same familiar feel in the conversations between Chris and Jeff. Albert was a promising actor in the early '70s, winning a Golden Globe for his breakout performance as a young blind man who falls in love with Goldie Hawn in BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE (1972), but while he remained busy until his death in 2006 at just 55, stardom eluded the son of GREEN ACRES star Eddie Albert. He turns in one of his best performances in THE SQUEEZE, but not long after, he was mainly doing TV guest spots and B-movies like GALAXY OF TERROR (1981) and THE HOUSE WHERE EVIL DWELLS (1982). His most high-profile gig after that was a recurring role as Linda Hamilton's love interest on the CBS series BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. But Albert was still getting major Hollywood work when he made THE SQUEEZE, which features an unusually strong cast for a Margheriti film--probably because Ponti could afford them--the most notable being the participation of Black. Black was nominated for an Oscar for 1970's FIVE EASY PIECES and was only a couple of years removed from films like THE GREAT GATSBY (1974), NASHVILLE, THE DAY OF THE LOCUST, the legendary TV-movie TRILOGY OF TERROR (all 1975), BURNT OFFERINGS, and Alfred Hitchcock's swan song FAMILY PLOT (both 1976). Black's fall from the A-list was alarmingly rapid--she worked for Margheriti again on KILLER FISH--though she remained a beloved B-movie figure until her death in 2013, her late-career cult status due in large part to shock rockers The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, and for her role as Mother Firefly in Rob Zombie's HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES (2003), which she apparently disliked so much that she refused to do the 2005 sequel THE DEVIL'S REJECTS and was replaced by Leslie Easterbrook.

Many American actors did these sort of Eurotrash movies for quick paychecks and free vacations, but the ensemble of THE SQUEEZE brings their A-game. At the heart is a top-notch Van Cleef, who does everything he can to add deeper dimensions to the character. Chris is a guy who made his money and enjoyed the life, but he knew when to get out, especially now that the game is run by greedy bastards like Van Stratten and amoral shitbags like Jeff. It's only through his loyalty to Jeff's father that he inadvertantly allows himself to be manipulated by the young man. It almost takes too long for Chris to realize that Jeff isn't like his father (or Chris or Sam, for that matter), and Van Cleef's weary yet stone-cold Angel Eyes demeanor in the climax is some terrific acting. When he's forced to shoot Jeff and tells Sam with a resigned sadness "I had to kill the kid," both old men lament not just the loss of someone they trusted and that Chris came to regard like his own son, but the loss of another era when a man's word and his honor meant something. Chris doesn't even care about the diamonds at that point. He's already lost too much for the stones to even matter. As Sam's car drives down the unplowed, snowy, slushy streets with the NYC skyline in the background, there's an overwhelming sense of melancholy artistry that Margheriti rarely attempted. Throughout its duration, THE SQUEEZE, while containing some weak writing, some typically dubious Margheriti miniatures in the explosion sequence and boasting a cheesy yet oddly effective and infectiously catchy score by Paolo Vasile (Italian pop group I Nuovi Angeli performs the opening credits tune "Now"), comes dangerously close to being a genuine auteur statement by the guy who would go on to make YOR: THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE. It's almost a legitimately great movie.

On-set wardrobe malfunction or Lee Van Cleef
making unreasonable demands of Antonio
Margheriti? (photo from antoniomargheriti.com)

Even with its NYC shooting and the cast of American headliners, THE SQUEEZE wasn't released in the US until 1981, when it was acquired by the short-lived exploitation outfit Maverick Pictures International, whose distribution slate consisted of a whopping five films over 1980-81 before they threw in the towel. THE SQUEEZE was also released as THE RIP-OFF, and that was the title used when it aired on CBS in 1986 and on cable and in late-night syndication after that. The film fell into the public domain and is available on any number of budget DVD labels under those titles as well as the less common DIAMOND THIEVES. You could probably walk into any Wal-Mart and find it on one of those VHS-transfer multi-film DVD sets in the $5 bin. It's a film long overdue for a proper widescreen presentation and critical re-evaluation. THE SQUEEZE is a buried treasure of sorts--a solid thriller, a cinematic snapshot of a harsh 1978 winter in NYC, and an essential film for Lee Van Cleef fans--and it may be Margheriti's masterpiece.

MCCANICK
(US - 2014)

David Morse has long been one of those respected character actors whose presence always gives a boost to whatever he's in, whether he's making good projects better or bad projects bearable. He'll go down as one of the greats of his kind, but MCCANICK, which gives the actor a rare big-screen lead, offers the unthinkable: a bad David Morse performance. MCCANICK didn't get much of a release--eight screens for a gross of $2000--but it did get some notoriety as the final work of GLEE star Cory Monteith before his overdose death in July 2013. It's a departure for Monteith and his performance is enough to show that he had ambitions beyond GLEE, but aside from him, the cliched MCCANICK is an almost complete disaster, and it pains me to say that star/producer Morse is a big reason why. Morse stars as Philadelphia narcotics detective Eugene "Mack" McCanick, the kind of cop who has a punching bag hanging in his kitchen. It's his 59th birthday and he just found out that Simon Weeks (Monteith) has been paroled. Seven years earlier, McCanick busted a 17-year-old Weeks, then a small-time hustler and male prostitute, for the murder of a closeted Congressman who regularly cruised for young men. McCanick is enraged about the early release, but is warned by boss Quinn (Ciarin Hinds) to stay away from Weeks. Of course, McCanick ignores him and misleads his partner Floyd (Mike Vogel) into pursuing Weeks, which only results in McCanick accidentally shooting Floyd. Ordered to go home, McCanick instead gets drunk and goes on a city-wide rampage trying to find Weeks.

Director Josh C. Waller and writer Daniel Noah are intentionally vague about the truth behind McCanick's motivations: does he have a score to settle with Weeks? Does it have something to do with McCanick's estranged cop son? Does he feel a paternal instinct to help Weeks? Did he frame Weeks? Does Weeks, as Quinn suggests, have some information on dirty cops that might bring them all down? Once revealed, the ultimate answer is ludicrous at best and offensive at worst once you consider the absurd lengths McCanick goes to in order to "just talk" to Weeks. MCCANICK starts out as a tough, gritty cop thriller, and for a while, it works in spite of the cliches. But then the silliness kicks in and it starts to drag badly--why would Floyd call McCanick in a dingy apartment building where he knows McCanick is trying to stealthily corner a suspect? And watch the filmmakers awkwardly cram in a bunch of exposition in the middle of a pursuit, as if McCanick would really choose that time to go into why his marriage fell apart and why his son hates him. Most laughable of all is McCanick demolishing someone's apartment then pausing to pensively regard his distorted reflection in a mangled toaster. Oh, the symbolism! As McCanick's actions become increasingly illogical and cement-headed, Morse's performance goes off the rails. His strengths as an actor have always been in his quiet, controlled intensity, not in sub-Nicolas Cage meltdowns. By the end, it starts to look a lot like a David Morse vanity project that was understandably hijacked after the fact by Monteith's death. How else do you explain the closing credits starting not with an "In loving memory of Cory Monteith" (which is saved for the very end), but instead with with a lone "David Morse as Eugene 'Mack' McCanick," then a fade, then the rest of the cast scrolling by in the typical fashion. Morse is a great actor, but MCCANICK shows that even the best in the business can have a really off day. (R, 96 mins)

SQUATTERS
(US - 2014)

Or, "OMG I'M, LIKE, SO HOMELESS! :(" Debuting on DVD two years after it was completed, the useless SQUATTERS has vague cover art and a trailer that suggests it's a home invasion suspense thriller of sorts, but it's really a sappy, simplistic drama that comes off like a homeless version of TRUE ROMANCE with all the insight of a spoiled 13-year-old who hasn't heard the word "no" nearly enough. Riddled with one plot convenience and hackneyed contrivance after another, SQUATTERS tells the not-very-compelling story of Kelly (Gabriella Wilde, from the already forgotten ENDLESS LOVE remake) and Jonas (Thomas Dekker), two homeless Pacific Palisades teenagers who spend their days dumpster diving, shoplifting, and scoring drugs. While rooting around inside a parked car in a lot, Jonas overhears wealthy Evelyn Silverman (Lolita Davidovich), who's standing a few cars down, telling her Mexican cleaning lady "We'll be going on vacation to Greece, and remember, the alarm code is the address backwards," as Evelyn and the cleaning lady get in separate cars. Now, let's pause here for a moment. Evelyn appears to be picking up her dry-cleaning. Why is the cleaning lady meeting her there in her own car? If Evelyn is picking up the dry-cleaning herself, why does the cleaning lady even have to be there? Couldn't Evelyn have given her that information over the phone? Did they really have to drive in two cars to a parking lot just to talk about an alarm code so Jonas could happen to overhear it? Anyway, Jonas steals a bike, follows Evelyn and gets a look at the house, and then with Evelyn and her wealthy businessman husband David (a slumming Richard Dreyfuss, whose presence is either a nod to DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS or a sad realization that DOWN AND OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS was a long time ago) away, Jonas and a reluctant Kelly crash there, where Jonas spends two, perhaps three seconds rifling through a few random scattered papers on David's desk and, based on that thorough research, manages to crack David's safe combo after three attempts, because yeah, that's how it works. Jonas tries to broker a deal with obnoxious, fey British crime lord Ronald (Andrew Howard as Jason Statham as Vinnie Jones) to fence all of the Silvermans' belongings, including cars, jewels, and a gun, while the more sensitive Kelly spends time watching the Silverman's home movies and getting the sense of family she never had. Of course, the Silvermans return from Greece early and find they've been burglarized, and after a chance meet-cute with the Silvermans' son Michael (Luke Grimes) at a screening of Chaplin's THE KID, Kelly ends up back at the house as Michael's love interest as Jonas tries to contend with the "Fookin''ell, mate!" histrionics of Ronald, a character who seems to have gotten lost on his way back to a bad late 1990s Guy Ritchie knockoff.

Written by Justin Shilton (grandson of F TROOP's Larry Storch and a co-writer on Chris Messina's upcoming directorial debut ALEX OF VENICE) and directed by Martin Weisz (the repulsive GRIMM LOVE and the 2007 THE HILLS HAVE EYES II), SQUATTERS is about as dumb as it gets. It's hard to tell exactly what audience the filmmakers are pursuing, considering it has all the depth of a bad YA novel but has enough violence and F-bombs to warrant an R rating. There's an interesting film to be made about situations where homeowners find themselves forced to contend with squatters, and it certainly would've been more interesting than the cookie-cutter blandness that develops in this one. Shilton's writing is just lazy and amateurish, whether he's piling on the improbable coincidences, magically pulling contrivances out of his ass or clumsily trying to work in Chaplin references to establish critical cred. He's matched by Weisz's bumbling direction, which includes perhaps the worst sex scene of 2014, composed entirely in pretentious, zooming still-life freeze frames, much like the climactic shootout at Ronald's, a CGI splatter-filled fiasco that inexplicably looks like the Slo-Mo tripping scenes in DREDD. And it all ends not with "The End" but with the cutesy "And THIS is where our STORY ends," followed by on-set photos during the closing credits showing how much fun everyone had. Everyone, that is, except the audience. Come on, Mr. Dreyfuss...you've gotta have better things to do than this. (R, 106 mins)

THE RAILWAY MAN
(Australia/UK - 2013; US release 2014)

Directed by Jonathan Teplitzky. Written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and Andy Paterson. Cast: Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman, Hiroyuki Sanada, Stellan Skarsgard, Jeremy Irvine, Sam Reid, Tanroh Ishida. (R, 107 mins)

Based on Eric Lomax's acclaimed memoir of his time spent in a Japanese prison camp after the fall of Singapore during WWII and his later efforts to track down the officer who tortured him, THE RAILWAY MAN offers fine performances and harrowing depictions of war crimes, but sometimes suffers from hokey dialogue and too often emits a "Weinstein Company awards bait" vibe. The script by frequent Michael Winterbottom collaborator Frank Cottrell Boyce and Andy Paterson takes some occasionally questionable liberties with Lomax's story, but overall, it's a solid film that succeeds more often than it stumbles, and gets an immense boost from a quietly powerful performance by Colin Firth as Lomax.

Set in 1980, the film presents Lomax as a milquetoast railway enthusiast with an almost savant-like knowledge of trains and rail schedules. He meets Patti (Nicole Kidman) during a train ride home and, in a bit of rushed storytelling, they hit it off and soon marry. Only then does Patti become aware of Lomax's PTSD in the form of nightmares, mood swings, periods of aloof silence, and attacking a bill collector with a box cutter. He refuses to discuss his war experiences, prompting Patti to turn to Lomax's war buddy Finlay (Stellan Skarsgard), who also believes in the stiff upper lip, keep-calm-and-carry-on mentality but can see how much Patti wants to help his friend. Flashing back to 1942, young Lomax (Jeremy Irvine) and Finlay (Sam Reid) were engineers taken prisoner by the Japanese and forced to help build the Burma Railway (part of this railroad was the centerpiece of the 1957 classic THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI). All the men were tortured and treated with barbaric cruelty by the captors, none more than Lomax, who was caught with a secretly-built radio used for listening to British broadcasts. His captors insist it was an instrument for secret communication, and though he endures extensive beatings and all manner of torture overseen by Kempeitai officer Nagase (Tanroh Ishida), Lomax never gives in. Back in 1980, Lomax's psychological torment threatens his marriage and his sanity until Finlay alerts him to a Kempetai historical museum located at the very camp where they were prisoners, and the museum is run by none other than Nagase (Hiroyuki Sanada).

THE RAILWAY MAN then sends Lomax off on a mission of vengeance against Nagase that becomes a journey of healing for both men. The remorseful Nagase is just as haunted by his actions during the war, and runs the museum as a way of setting things right and dealing with the past. It takes Nagase a few minutes to realize he's talking to Lomax. In reality, Lomax never considered revenge, their reunion took place in 1993, and Nagase knew he was coming. From the outset, the meeting was an effort to turn the page on that chapter of their lives. Of course, film is a different medium and THE RAILWAY MAN is not a documentary. Dramatic developments must be expressed in their own way, but initially portraying Lomax as a nebbishy vigilante seems a bit disingenuous, no matter how good Firth is in the role. The inaccurate 1980 setting seems to have been chosen perhaps because it's the latest year that the filmmakers could possibly ask the audience to buy Firth in the role of a WWII vet, considering the two men, both born in 1919, were 74 when they reunited. The film also does some pre-emptive damage control to maximize audience sympathy, completely eliminating the fact that Lomax was married for 37 years and had two adult children who wanted nothing more to do with him when he left his wife for the younger Patti in the early '80s, and he wasn't quite the stammering, socially-awkward Rain Man he is in the early scenes. Nevertheless, taken in its own context and on its own terms, THE RAILWAY MAN is compelling, with outstanding performances by Firth and Sanada, even if both look too young for their roles at 52, when Lomax and Nagase would've been 61 even if they met in 1980. As for the rest of the cast, Kidman has little to do after the midway point, but Irvine (WAR HORSE) does a remarkable job of channeling a young Firth and bears an uncanny resemblance to the young Lomax. As far as a "true story" is concerned, to say THE RAILWAY MAN plays fast and loose with the facts is an understatement, but the essential message of forgiveness and healing is key and in that respect, the film gets the job done. This story was also adapted into the 1995 British TV movie PRISONERS IN TIME, with John Hurt as Lomax.

THE SIEGE OF FIREBASE GLORIA
(Philippines/Australia - 1989)

Directed by Brian Trenchard-Smith. Written by William Nagle, Tony Johnston, Brian Trenchard-Smith and R. Lee Ermey. Cast: Wings Hauser, R. Lee Ermey, Albert Popwell, Robert Arevalo, Mark Neely, Gary Hershberger, Clyde R. Jones, Margi Gerard, Richard Kuhlman, John Calvin, Nick Nicholson, Michael Cruz, Henry Strzalkowski. (R, 99 mins)

Before it came back into circulation on MGM's HD cable channel, streaming services, and as an "MGM Limited Edition Collection" manufactured-on-demand DVD in recent years, Brian Trenchard-Smith's THE SIEGE OF FIREBASE GLORIA was a hard-to-find VHS obscurity going for exorbitant rates on eBay. It was a sought-after title not just for B-movie aficionados and cine-hipsters who embraced it after learning Quentin Tarantino was a huge fan, but also for Vietnam War veterans. Released in January 1989 by the short-lived Fries Entertainment, THE SIEGE OF FIREBASE GLORIA was one of many post-PLATOON Vietnam War dramas that saw a marked reduction in the "The war's not over till the last man comes home" side of Namsploitation, where the heroes of UNCOMMON VALOR (1983), MISSING IN ACTION (1984), and RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II (1985) went back to 'Nam to settle scores and take care of unfinished business. Instead, there was a shift to grittier fare like HAMBURGER HILL (1987), PLATOON LEADER (1988), and EYE OF THE EAGLE 3 (1989), throwbacks to the types of straightforward, formulaic, B-grade WWII and Korean War battle pictures that Sam Fuller made in the 1950s. FIREBASE GLORIA's trump card was the presence of R. Lee Ermey, a Vietnam vet and former Marine drill sergeant who found work as a Vietnam genre Hollywood technical advisor on films like THE BOYS IN COMPANY C (1978) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), where he can be seen as a helicopter pilot during the famous "Ride of the Valkyries" sequence. Ermey was hired by Stanley Kubrick to mentor actor Tim Colceri, who was cast as the brutal drill instructor Gunny Sgt. Hartman in FULL METAL JACKET (1987). Kubrick's instructions to Ermey were simple: "Lee, I want it real." What Kubrick realized in witnessing Ermey's training of Colceri was that he cast the wrong guy in the part and that Ermey should be playing Hartman. Kubrick, never known as the most sympathetic director to actors, felt bad enough about replacing Colceri that he gave the young actor the consolation prize of a small but memorable one-scene role as a trigger-happy doorgunner ("Get some!"). Ermey, meanwhile, was given wide latitude by Kubrick to improvise and actually wrote much of his own dialogue, creating one of the most memorable characters and some of the most quotable lines in cinema history in the film's harrowing opening 45-minute basic training segment (it's worth noting that Hartman's insults about "steers & queers" and "I will gouge out your eyes and skullfuck you!" were bellowed five years earlier by an Oscar-winning Louis Gossett, Jr. in AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN).

Ermey's FULL METAL JACKET success led to him being given the lead in THE SIEGE OF FIREBASE GLORIA, even though '80s B-movie icon Wings Hauser (VICE SQUAD) gets top billing. Like Kubrick, Trenchard-Smith gave Ermey a lot of wiggle room, allowing him to rewrite much of the script, which is credited to William Nagle and Tony Johnston (Trenchard-Smith and Ermey are credited with "additional dialogue"). Nagle wrote the novel The Odd Angry Shot, about Australian soldiers in Vietnam, and it was turned into the acclaimed 1979 film that may very well have the worst trailer ever. He also scripted the WWII courtroom drama DEATH OF A SOLDIER (1986) before working as an assistant director on 1990s straight-to-video fare like INDECENT BEHAVIOR II. It's hard telling how much of Nagle and Johnston's work made it into the finished film, but the result resonated with many Vietnam veterans who feel that THE SIEGE OF FIREBASE GLORIA is the most accurate cinematic depiction of the war. You can find that sentiment on message boards and IMDb user reviews, and I can even attest from my days at Blockbuster Video that this film was regularly cited as the most brutally realistic look at Vietnam that many of these vets had ever seen.

Now, as someone who's never served in the military, I can only approach THE SIEGE OF FIREBASE GLORIA from the perspective of a fan or a film critic. You can see it trying to be a little more than the typical Namsploitation offering. Its depictions of the savagery of war are unflinchingly grim and bloody, and the battle scenes have a relentless intensity to them. I suspect these are the bits of realism that the vets are talking about, along with paying briefly futile lip service to the idea that "The VC are soldiers, too," in the way it spends time with Viet Cong commander Cao Van (Robert Arevalo), who believes in respecting the courage of one's enemies. Other than that, the story and the characterizations roll straight off of the war movie assembly line. At the start of the Tet Offensive in 1968, Sgt. Maj. Hafner (Ermey) and his right-hand man DiNardo (Hauser) and their squad commandeer and fortify a ramshackle firebase populated by stoned, disillusioned burnouts and led by a C.O. (John Calvin), who sits at his desk nude while jerking off to nudie mags and getting high. Of course, the no-nonsense Hafner is outraged over such things as weed and long hair, as Ermey himself probably is, and proceeds to whip the men into shape using the same kind of speeches he gave in FULL METAL JACKET. Sure, it's entertaining hearing Ermey fire off quips like "We're gonna fortify this shithole and protect it like it's your daughter's cherry," or "It's time to sprinkle some shit in Charlie's rice," and another about how "there is no such thing as an atheist in a combat situation!" but when Ermey's not doing his Ermey schtick, FIREBASE GLORIA becomes so awash in cliches that it defeats itself. There's a little Vietnamese boy named "Pee Wee" (Michael Cruz), who becomes a surrogate son to battle-hardened DiNardo, who's still mourning the death of his own young son; there's Hafner having no time for emotional silliness like a female captain (Margi Gerard) who's in charge of the infirmary; there's wide-eyed, naive innocent Murphy (Mark Neely), who immediately goes off the deep end and starts thousand-yard-staring like he invented it as soon as the shit hits the fan when Cao Van's forces attack; there's the crazed, stoned photojournalist (Nick Nicholson as Dennis Hopper); and with several reminders that he only has 17 days left in his tour, is there any chance radio communications guy Shortwave (Clyde R. Jones) is making it out alive?

One of the few instances of Namsploitation doubling as Ozploitation, THE SIEGE OF FIREBASE GLORIA was a Filipino/Australian co-production that displayed the kind of grandiose action sequences that Trenchard-Smith was known for in his prior Australian exploitation films, which often showcased the death-defying stuntwork of perpetual Trenchard-Smith man-crush Grant Page (STUNT ROCK). Once it gets going, FIREBASE GLORIA is almost non-stop battle sequences, with some explosions that would make Antonio Margheriti envious. And that's really what this film is all about. It may have some scattered moments of lofty ambition, but it's really just a higher-end, Philippines-shot Namsploitation entry that's just made with more precision and care than, say, the Cirio H. Santiago joints of the same period, like BEHIND ENEMY LINES or EYE OF THE EAGLE (both 1987). Ermey is onboard to be R. Lee Ermey, but perhaps FIREBASE GLORIA's dramatic element would work better if Hauser's performance wasn't so terrible. Hauser is a legend in B-movie histrionics, but that approach doesn't adapt well to serious drama. His big emotional scene near the end, where he talks to Hafner about his dead son and how a drunken, post-funeral, three-week AWOL bender got him busted down to corporal should be DiNardo's big moment, but Hauser's bug-eyed over-emoting is just embarrassing and cartoonish, as is every line of dialogue spoken by Gary Hershberger, who turns up late in the film as Moran, an Army chopper pilot who lends the men some assistance. When Hafner gives Moran a list of necessary supplies, Moran quips "You want french fries with that?" Hershberger seems to have been told to act as much like Bill Paxton's Chet-from-WEIRD SCIENCE as possible, and he's so grating that you almost expect him to smirk "Cleanup, aisle 3!" after mowing down some VC. Speaking of ridiculous, don't miss the scene where an enraged Hafner yells at his men while carrying the severed heads of two slaughtered Marines. It's possibly the most batshit moment of R. Lee Ermey's career.

If one approaches THE SIEGE OF FIREBASE GLORIA as a B-grade actioner in the Namsploitation subgenre, it doesn't disappoint. It may occasionally try to go the extra klick quality-wise, but when it's all said and done, it's still the kind of movie that expects you to cheer and chant "U-S-A!" when DiNardo tortures an enemy soldier. That, coupled with Hafner/Ermey's almost John Wayne concepts of social conservatism (Hafner has bigger fish to fry than Moran getting a haircut and a shave), probably puts FIREBASE GLORIA more on the right-wing HANOI HILTON end of the political spectrum as far as these films are concerned. But it's all in the eye of the beholder: THE SIEGE OF FIREBASE GLORIA wasn't seen by many people in theaters, but became a word-of-mouth hit with both military vets and exploitation fans on video, and it's a film many of them have held near and dear in the 25 years since. In other words, it's the very definition of a cult classic.

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST
(US/UK - 2014)

Directed by Bryan Singer. Written by Simon Kinberg. Cast: Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Halle Berry, Ellen Page, Anna Paquin, Peter Dinklage, Nicholas Hoult, Shawn Ashmore, Fan Bingbing, Omar Sy, Evan Peters, Josh Helman, Daniel Cudmore, Famke Janssen, James Marsden, Michael Lerner, Mark Camacho. (PG-13, 131 mins)

Director Bryan Singer's return to the X-MEN universe for the first time since 2003's X2 is a loose adaptation of a 1981 storyline in The Uncanny X-Men and brings together both the original cast and their X-MEN: FIRST CLASS counterparts in a gathering the likes of which we haven't seen since Yes' 1991 album Union. Singer and screenwriter Simon Kinberg somehow manage to keep the multiple plot threads coherent for the most part, though if you aren't up to speed on your X-MEN lore, there's a good chance you'll be a bit lost here and there, as DAYS OF FUTURE PAST serves as a sequel to both 2006's X-MEN: THE LAST STAND and 2011's X-MEN: FIRST CLASS.

Opening in a dystopian future where robots known as Sentinels are waging war on mutants, DOFP has Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) sending the consciousness of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back to 1973 so he can stop the assassination of Sentinel creator and Nixon cabinet member Dr. Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) at the hands of Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence). As it plays out in their current timeline, Trask dies a hero, and Mystique is captured, with her DNA being used to help create the mutant-hunting Sentinels killing them in the future. Wolverine is advised by Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) to track down their younger selves in 1973 for assistance. Young Xavier (James McAvoy) is a despondent recluse being cared for by Hank/Beast (Nicholas Hoult) in the decrepit Xavier School, while young Magneto (Michael Fassbender) is being held in a enclosed prison deep beneath the Pentagon. Wolverine, Xavier, and Beast enlist the aid of Quicksilver (Evan Peters) to infiltrate the Pentagon and extract Magneto in what's probably the film's most inspired sequence, boasting an unforgettable use of Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle." Once freed, it doesn't take Magneto long for his evil ways to take control, often working at cross purposes with Mystique, who has her reasons for killing Trask, who isn't the noble altruist that history has purported him to be.

The wild plot also works in the JFK assassination, the Watergate tapes (Mark Camacho is a peculiar-looking Nixon), SANFORD AND SON, and some time-travel comic relief as Wolverine adjusts to life in 1973. Other than Jackman's Wolverine, who acts as a bridge between the two casts, the focus is more on the FIRST CLASS end of things, with the original cast not having a whole lot to do after the opening sequence other than pop up periodically to remind the audience that they're still there as they bide their time until a climactic showdown with some Sentinels. McKellen and Stewart look dour and concerned, Page's Kitty Pryde (it's Kitty, not Wolverine, who goes back in time in the comic book source story) does little more than rub her hands on future Wolverine's temples as she guides his soul into the past, Halle Berry's Storm has maybe three lines of dialogue, and a prominently-billed Anna Paquin returns--if you can call it that--as Rogue, a central character in the first film but now reduced to a two-second walk-on without even a clear view of her face (Singer decided to cut all of her scenes, but they'll be included on the Blu-ray release). Other than Wolverine and a brief face-to-face with young and old Professor Xavier, there's no interaction between the originals and the First Class. Jackman, McAvoy, and Hoult make a great team, and Peters almost manages to steal the film with his Quicksilver antics (after the brilliant Pentagon escape sequence, you'll wish Peters was in the movie more). The X-Men vs. Magneto vs. Mystique vs. the Sentinels showdown on the White House lawn is a superbly crafted set piece, even if one element makes it bit too reminiscent of the stadium destruction from Bane in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES. It's not perfect, and CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER is looking even better as the year goes on, but X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST is an ambitious return to the franchise for Singer, and it gets the job done as enjoyably huge big-screen summer entertainment.

24 EXPOSURES
(US - 2014)

Indie filmmakers Joe Swanberg, Adam Wingard, Simon Barrett, and Ti West form the core of a relentlessly busy crew of DIY mumblecore filmmakers who took part in the V/H/S anthology and have received acclaim mostly in indie hipster circles but seemed poised to break into the mainstream with the terrific 2013 slasher film YOU'RE NEXT, directed by Wingard, written by Barrett, and co-starring Swanberg and West. West, who had some acclaim away from this posse with THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL and the overrated THE INNKEEPERS, also directed Swanberg in the current THE SACRAMENT. Swanberg wrote and directed 24 EXPOSURES, which stars Wingard and looks like what might happen if West teamed up with Henry Jaglom to make a slow-burn re-imagining of the 1983 cult slasher film DOUBLE EXPOSURE. 24 EXPOSURES is obviously a film shot cheaply and quickly. It's as minimalist as can be, with some really bad acting and a score that vacillates between "1980s John Carpenter" and "Skinemax fuck scene." Wingard is "fetish photographer" Billy Wingard, who specializes in graphic still death shots of staged murders. Helping him is assistant/girlfriend Alex (Caroline White), who's open enough to allow model Callie (Sophia Takal) to join them in bed. Billy is also preoccupied with Callie's friend Rebecca (Helen Rogers), whose possessive boyfriend (Mike Brune) doesn't want her taking part in his photo sessions. Meanwhile, down-in-the-dumps and improbably-named detective Michael Bamfeaux (Barrett) is given the boot by his wife but still has to do his job, which involves investigating the murder of a model who never showed up for a scheduled shoot with Billy and Alex.

Starting with Wingard's character having the same surname, 24 EXPOSURES is meta almost to the point of self-parody. This is especially the case by the end when, after a whole lot of very little has happened, Bamfeaux, moonlighting as an aspiring writer, turns his search for the murderer and his friendship with Billy into a memoir as a literary agent (played by Swanberg) goes through a laundry list of his manuscript's flaws, go-nowhere plot details, and general construction weaknesses and rattles off ways to improve it, almost like Swanberg is stopping to critique his own film, still in progress. It's that kind of nonsense that shows he's more interested in being "clever" than constructing a real story. Some parts of 24 EXPOSURES look almost Tommy Wiseau-like in their sub-softcore-porn production value. You'd think for as long as Wingard and Barrett have been friends, they could at least convincingly play friends in a movie (Barrett, in particular, is awful). But this is the kind of film where the sense of amateurish artifice is intended and the bad performances are by design, but to what end? Other than Swanberg drawing facile parallels between Billy and Bamfeaux by showing them both eating dry cereal as a snack, there's no real attempt at character or thematic depth. 24 EXPOSURES is a tediously self-indulgent home movie made by guys who should know and have done better. It's either an inside joke among their clique or, more likely, an excuse for Swanberg and Wingard to hang out with some naked chicks on set. (Unrated, 77 mins)

ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW
(US - 2013)

When it debuted at 2013's Sundance Film Festival, it seemed highly unlikely that ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW would ever been seen again afterwards. With an inheritance from his grandparents providing the budget, writer/director Randy Moore and his cast and crew pulled off one of the most audacious and ambitious guerrilla filmmaking stunts in the annals of cinema: with season passes to both Walt Disney World and Disneyland, they shot the bulk of the black & white film inside the parks, using scripts stored on their phones and armed with handheld (or concealed) cameras and sporting wardrobes that made them look like average tourists. Moore said in interviews that as many times as they went back to the parks and as many times as the actors got on the rides (he reportedly had the four main actors ride It's a Small World 12 times in a row until he got the shots he needed), none of the Disney cast members got wise to what they were doing. Much to the surprise of Moore and everyone else, Disney, fiercely protective of its image and its intellectual property, never attempted to block the film's release and never publicly addressed it, though it has been added to the online supplement to Disney A to Z: The Official Encyclopedia.

On the last day of a family vacation to Walt Disney World in Florida, Jim (Roy Abramsohn) gets a call from his boss telling him that he's been fired. Jim keeps this devastating news to himself and focuses on giving wife Emily (Elena Schuber) and kids Elliott (Jack Dalton) and Sara (Katelynn Rodriguez) one last fun day before going home. It's a day that becomes increasingly surreal as every song, every attraction, and every animatronic character becomes more sinister and nightmarish by the minute. And that's on top of the everyday horrors of a nagging wife, screaming kids, rude or constantly coughing patrons, lines that won't move, and Elliott getting sick on Space Mountain. Jim is also bewitched by two seductive, giggling French teenage girls (Danielle Safady, Annet Mehendru) who turn up everywhere before he starts deliberately following them. It's clear early on that Jim's current level of reality might not actually be, and the completely off-the-rails second half becomes a horrifically dystopian version of the Disney experience, fusing elements of TOTAL RECALL and VIDEODROME, with a cat-flu epidemic, turkey legs made of emu, rollercoaster decapitations, a secret crew of cleaners, and Disney princesses who double as high-priced courtesans for wealthy Asian businessmen. By the end, it's basically an elaborate TWILIGHT ZONE episode and would probably work better as such, but Moore's daring filmmaking process and his ability to make do with what he had--a lot of the shots are composed as such to avoid copyright infringements and being discovered--are very impressive. Regardless of how the film even turned out, it's a major accomplishment that he was able to get it done. As a story, it loses its way a bit and seems to drag even at 90 minutes, but as an exercise in DIY filmmaking, it's not to be missed. (Unrated, 90 mins)

GAMBIT
(US - 2014)

Veteran Andrew Bergman producer Mike Lobell (THE FRESHMAN, HONEYMOON IN VEGAS) began attempting to assemble a remake of the 1966 Shirley MacLaine/Michael Caine caper comedy GAMBIT as far back as 1997. Countless creative personnel were officially and unofficially attached to the new GAMBIT at various times over the next decade plus--directors Robert Altman, Mike Nichols, Alexander Payne, Anand Tucker, Bo Welch, Richard LaGravenese, and Doug Liman, writers Aaron Sorkin, Frank Cottrell Boyce, and Joel & Ethan Coen--and time and again, the project would stall and collapse. When LaGravenese was onboard around 2009, he rewrote much of the script, and again, it didn't make it out of pre-production. By the time filming finally started in 2011, Lobell had Michael Hoffman (ONE FINE DAY) directing, and LaGravenese's revisions were tossed in favor of the Coen Bros.' draft, which they penned during some down time between films a decade earlier. The Coens would probably prefer to forget they were ever involved in this doomed production, which bombed everywhere else in the world in 2012, prompting CBS Films to abruptly cancel the US release and shelve it for a couple of years in the hopes that everyone would forget about it. In a move of stealth deception that almost rivaled the Baltimore Colts sneaking away to Indianapolis in the middle of the night when no one was looking, CBS swiftly and silently released GAMBIT on VOD and on just nine screens in the US in late April 2014 with virtually zero publicity--probably not the desired end result of 15 years of work on Lobell's part.

It's often said that no one sets out to make a bad movie, that they sometimes just happen. Almost nothing goes right in the stunningly DOA GAMBIT, which tries to evoke the classic '60s caper aesthetic in a modern setting, but joke after joke after joke lands with such a dead thud that it actually feels uncomfortable watching a cast of pros flailing so helplessly. Considering the talent involved, there's no reason GAMBIT shouldn't be an enjoyable farce, but it's just a miserably dull misfire. Art appraiser Harry Deane (Colin Firth) is fed up with his venal boss, media baron Lionel Shabandar (Alan Rickman), and concocts a scheme with an art forger known as The Major (Tom Courtenay) to bilk him out of a fortune with a fake Monet. Helping them in the scam is hard-partying, trailer-park Texas rodeo gal P.J. Puznowski (Cameron Diaz), who lives with her senile grandmother (Cloris Leachman). Diaz plays it as broadly as possible (as does Stanley Tucci as Harry's German appraising rival), while Firth tries to be Michael Caine by way of Peter Sellers, whether he's losing his trousers or stuck on a ledge or repeatedly getting punched in the face or all manner of slapstick. This is the kind of stuff that should be funny, but everything is just off--the performances, the timing--everyone just seems lost and confused, with a "let's just get this over with" look on their faces. Everyone, that is, except for Rickman, who plays smug pricks as well as anybody and relishes the opportunity to do it again here. When Rickman is dismissively sneering at pretty much everything around him--it's possible he wasn't acting--GAMBIT has some spark. But Rickman's pomposity and the chance to hear Courtenay say "shitbag" aren't nearly enough to carry this all the way through. By the time GAMBIT resorts to fart jokes, it's a safe bet that everyone involved has officially given up. (PG-13, 89 mins)

PATRICK
(Australia/UK - 2013; US release 2014)

Hitchcock disciple and future PSYCHO II director Richard Franklin's PATRICK (1978) is one of the cornerstones of the Ozploitation scene. Written by the venerable Everett De Roche (LONG WEEKEND, ROAD GAMES, RAZORBACK), PATRICK dealt with a comatose young man wreaking telekinetic havoc in a hospital in a twisted display of obsessive love for a new nurse. It's rather slow and dry by today's standards, but the sight of Patrick lying in bed, eyes wide open, is one of the iconic horror images of the 1970s. The film did only modest business in Australia, but became a surprise hit in Italy, where its original score was wiped in favor of one by Goblin and was successful enough to generate its own Italian ripoff/fake sequel with Mario Landi's PATRICK STILL LIVES (1980), which turned Franklin's comparatively restrained little horror film a sleazy gorefest best known for its infamous "fireplace poker in the vagina" scene. PATRICK was acquired by Vanguard/Monarch for its 1979 US release, where it lost nearly 20 minutes of material to neuter it down to a PG rating and, as AIP did with MAD MAX a year later, the Australian cast was dubbed over by American voice actors. PATRICK remains a cult classic to this day, and exploitation superfan Mark Hartley, a native Australian behind such hugely enjoyable and infectiously fun documentaries as the Ozploitation love letter NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD (2008) and the Filipino exploitation tribute MACHETE MAIDENS UNLEASHED (2010), as well as the upcoming ELECTRIC BOOGALOO: THE WILD, UNTOLD STORY OF CANNON FILMS, makes his narrative feature debut with this remake. NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD jump-started the recent resurgence of interest in Australian cult cinema and it's very probable that a PATRICK remake wouldn't have happened were it not for NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD. Hartley's love of '70s and '80s B-movies rivals that of Quentin Tarantino, but unfortunately, the comparisons end there: no matter how much his heart is in the right place by affectionately remaking one of his favorite films, Hartley's PATRICK is just not good, and it does no favors for vintage Ozploitation, PATRICK fans, or Hartley himself.

The plot is essentially the same: nurse Kathy Jacquard (Sharni Vinson of YOU'RE NEXT) gets a job at a hospital run by the stern Dr. Roget (Charles Dance) and his uptight head nurse daughter Matron Cassidy (Rachel Griffiths). Kathy is intrigued by comatose Patrick (Jackson Gallagher), who's been lying still and unresponsive since killing his mother and her boyfriend years earlier. Patrick seems to respond to Kathy in the form of reflexive spitting and transferring his thoughts to a computer monitor or via text to her phone (the lack of such technology forced him to communicate via typewriter in the original version). Of course, in true "One Froggy Evening" fashion, only Kathy sees this. Patrick is also able to control the minds and bodies of others, particularly those close to Kathy, whether it's her estranged boyfriend Ed (Damon Gameau) or doctor/potential suitor Brian (Martin Crewes). Kathy can't convince anyone of Patrick's brain activity, and as Dr. Roget's unethical, electro-shock treatments on Patrick increase, so do Patrick's violent tendencies and his drive to control Kathy and the people around her. Hartley is sure to pay homage to Franklin's film by giving the new Patrick the surname of the actor who played him in 1978 (Robert Thompson), giving Ed the surname Penhaligon, after the 1978 film's Kathy (British actress Susan Penhaligon), naming a hospital "The Royal Helpmann" after the 1978 Dr. Roget (Robert Helpmann), and in casting Ozploitation fixture Rod Mullinar (the 1978 Ed) in a small role as an asshole hospital administrator. He even pays brief tribute to PATRICK STILL LIVES (Italian title: PATRICK VIVE ANCORA) in the form of an end credits stinger. Hartley frames a lot of shots in the fashion of Hitchcock and De Palma, and has a score by regular De Palma collaborator Pino Donaggio, but it's so grating and over-the-top that it annoys more than enhances. Hartley also relies too much on cheap jump scares and some really bush-league, cheap-looking CGI that makes the whole project look like an Asylum ripoff of PATRICK. PATRICK '13 is a plodding, slowly-paced bore, with only Dance's acid-tongued villainy providing any entertainment (the way he spits "And you are prissy, meddling little bitch who's wasting my precious time, and I would dearly love for you to fuck off!" at Vinson is the highlight). He gave it a shot, but Hartley's first foray outside of the documentary realm is a resounding failure, though I have no doubt that ELECTRIC BOOGALOO will be his magnum opus. He's doing great things to preserve the memory of the B-movies that many of us hold so dear. But if PATRICK '13 is any indication, he just doesn't need to be making his own. (Unrated, 96 mins)

A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST

(US - 2014)

Directed by Seth MacFarlane. Written by Seth MacFarlane, Alec Sulkin, and Wellesley Wild. Cast: Seth MacFarlane, Charlize Theron, Liam Neeson, Amanda Seyfried, Giovanni Ribisi, Neil Patrick Harris, Sarah Silverman, Wes Studi, Evan Jones, Matt Clark, Christopher Hagen, Rex Linn, Alex Borstein, John Aylward. (R, 116 mins)

One of FAMILY GUY and AMERICAN DAD creator Seth MacFarlane's strong suits is his voice acting ability, bringing life to most of the characters on his animated shows as well as to a talking teddy bear in his 2012 feature directing debut TED. What makes his latest film, A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST, different is that director/producer/co-writer MacFarlane also puts himself front and center as a leading man. His presence as an actor doesn't offer him the versatility and spontaneity that he demonstrates as various animated characters, and he just doesn't have the chops to carry a movie as "Seth MacFarlane." And make no mistake, that's essentially who he's playing in this western spoof that offers a decidedly 2014-ish MacFarlane as Albert Stark, a sensitive, cowardly sheep farmer with a snark-laden view of the Old West in the kill-or-be-killed 1882 Arizona frontier town of Old Stump. The Monument Valley location shooting and the sweeping, reverent score by Joel McNeely do a nice surface job of paying homage to John Ford westerns, but with his bland, one-note performance, his propensity for dragging jokes past their breaking point and continuing to beat it to death after that, and his general sense of self-indulgence, MacFarlane gets some scattered laughs but falls far short of hitting the mark. Forget any absurd comparisons to BLAZING SADDLES--this doesn't even measure up to RUSTLER'S RHAPSODY.

After negotiating his way out of a duel in front of all of the Old Stump townfolk, Albert is dumped by his embarrassed girlfriend Louise (Amanda Seyfried), who runs to the open arms of sneering, pompous mustachery boutique owner Foy (Neil Patrick Harris), who's rich and successful and everything Albert is not. When he's not drowning his sorrows at the saloon with his devoutly religious, repressed best friend Edward (Giovanni Ribisi) and his prostitute wife Ruth (Sarah Silverman), Albert is hanging out with Anna (Charize Theron), the tomboyish crack shot who just arrived in town with her brother Lewis (Evan Jones), who's already in jail for starting a bar brawl. What Albert doesn't know is that Anna is the wife of dastardly outlaw Clinch Leatherwood (Liam Neeson), who sent Anna and Lewis to Old Stump to pose as siblings and wait for the arrival of the rest of his gang as they hunt for gold in the region. With Lewis locked up, Anna realizes this is the perfect chance to escape Clinch's clutches and comes to genuinely like Albert, who's funny and kindly and everything Clinch isn't. Albert, meanwhile, is obsessing over Louise and asks for Anna's help in winning her back from the insufferably smug Foy. She helps train him in firing a pistol after he gets so jealous and enraged that he challenges Foy to a gunfight. Of course, all of their plans go awry when Clinch and the gang arrive in Old Stump earlier than expected, and word gets back to Clinch that his wife's been spending a lot of time with the hapless Albert.

MacFarlane can be a smart satirist and the script (co-written with regular collaborators Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild) gets in a handful of legitimately good laughs about various western cliches, the joylessness of old-timey photos, the sheer misery of what life must've been like back then, and occasional digs at religion, antiquated norms of that time ("Why are the Indians so mad all the time? We share this land with them, it's pretty much 50/50" and a carnival shooting gallery game called "Runaway Slave" are particularly stinging), and the present-day culture wars ("Oh, Parkinson's is one of those things that God gives you that somehow shows how much He loves you"). Anachronistic humor is inherent in this kind of thing, but MacFarlane just doesn't have the screen presence to make it work. Neither his character nor his performance are very funny. Too much of A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST is focused on Albert's whining about Louise and on his slowly-blossoming romance with Anna. MacFarlane may be a gifted voice actor, but on the screen himself, he never seems comfortable and a lot of the script seems to be geared toward stroking his own ego, whether Theron's Anna is laughing at everything he says or constantly affirming what a nice guy he is and how he deserves someone better than the shallow Louise. Theron does a good job of playing the always-appealing, no-bullshit, "just one of the guys" types, but she can't really sell the idea of finding the self-pitying, constantly-complaining Albert that interesting. The supporting cast is mostly wasted, but Harris steals the film with his inspired turn as the loathsome Foy, especially when he makes Louise suck the end of his perfectly waxed mustache while he fondles himself. But even Harris is forced to succumb to the frequent bouts of MacFarlane's toilet humor--quite literally, at one point. After being introduced early on, Neeson is absent until the third act, so he doesn't really have time to make Clinch Leatherwood (a great name, by the way) anything more than a two-dimensional caricature of a western heavy.

One criticism that's rightfully been leveled at MacFarlane over the years is the way he finds humor in beating a joke to within an inch of its life (think FAMILY GUY's infamous Conway Twitty cutaways or Peter Griffin's epic brawls with Ernie the Giant Chicken). Here, MacFarlane isn't content with a couple of mustache jokes when 15 will do, and even then he'll tack on two musical numbers about mustaches just to be sure. Even the funny observation about stone-faced people in photos of the era is rehashed multiple times. The most labored jokes center on the relationship between Edward and Ruth. Ruth is Old Stump's busiest prostitute, but she refuses to have sex with Edward before marriage. Edward goes to the whorehouse to wait until she's done working, and even uses his finest handkerchief to wipe "dirty cowboy cum" off of her face. The joke of Edward waiting downstairs while she loudly screws Old Stump's skeeziest is funny once, so of course MacFarlane repeats it five more times. His set-ups are also getting predictable. As Edward and Ruth leave for lunch, the madam (Alex Borstein) tells Ruth she's got someone planning to see her around 5:30 that day. "What does he want?" Ruth asks. Now, if you've seen enough of MacFarlane's work, you know the answer will be "Anal," and it is. But it's not enough. Edward and Ruth have to somehow be confused about how soon they should be back, and need clarification on what time the guy will be there. "Whenever he feels like putting his penis in your asshole," the madam tells her. "Anal" was predictable but amusing. But MacFarlane just lets the scene go on and on. And then Ruth can't sit down because, yes, her asshole hurts. This happens time and again throughout the film, and with its nearly two-hour running, it goes on entirely too long. Just when things should be heating up for the confrontation between Albert and angry Clinch, MacFarlane sends the story an unfunny, running-time-padding detour which finds Albert hanging out with Cochise (Wes Studi) and drinking a hallucinogenic potion that has him tripping and the film looking like the old west version of a Storm Thorgerson-designed album cover. Why? Because nobody's going to stop him, that's why.

A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST isn't a terrible movie, but it's not a very good one. It probably could've been a little better with someone other than MacFarlane in the lead. He tries to go for a sort-of Jason Bateman-type demeanor with his snide detachment and wry observations pointing out the absurdity of his surroundings, but instead, he's loud, aggressive, and annoying. There's simply too much Seth MacFarlane in this movie. He also tries to milk some easy laughs out of several cameos, but only one approaches the sheer insanity of James Woods voicing himself as "James Woods" on FAMILY GUY, and making Peter watch VIDEODROME (Peter: "Does anyone get naked in this?" Woods: "Yeah. I do") or FLASH GORDON's Sam J. Jones turning up as himself in TED. What MacFarlane doesn't understand about parody is that it has to be done from a place of genuine affection. That's why the one really inspired cameo here works as well as it does. That's also what shines through in the best work of Mel Brooks and the ZAZ team in their AIRPLANE/TOP SECRET heyday, and that's why those parodies are timeless. While very disappointing, A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST is nowhere near the depths of say, a typical Friedberg/Seltzer abomination like DATE MOVIE or MEET THE SPARTANS. But it does share with those films a certain fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to parody something. Most of the dud jokes here--and there's a lot of them--would probably work as single brief cutaways in a FAMILY GUY episode, but MacFarlane's script isn't nearly as funny as he thinks it is and he doesn't seem to realize that parodying something at feature length requires a bit more than being a flippant smartass.

FILTH
(Germany/US/UK/Sweden/Belgium - 2013; US release 2014)

Written and directed by Jon S. Baird. Cast: James McAvoy, Jamie Bell, Eddie Marsan, Imogen Poots, Jim Broadbent, Joanne Froggatt, Shauna Macdonald, Shirley Henderson, John Sessions, Gary Lewis, Brian McCardie, Emun Elliott, Martin Compston, Kate Dickie, Iain De Caestecker, Joy McAvoy, Pollyanna McIntosh, Bobby Rainsbury. (R, 98 mins)

This grotesque adaptation of Irvine Welsh's 1998 novel suffers from the same problem that plagued the last movie based on a Welsh work, the little-seen Canadian film ECSTASY (2012). While FILTH doesn't have Canadian actors attempting to tackle Scottish accents and losing spectacularly, it does share with ECSTASY a sense that it's been kept in storage for 15 years and is only now being released. It seems inevitable that every film version of Welsh's work will look and feel like Danny Boyle's landmark TRAINSPOTTING (1996), but in the hands of a director with vision like, say, a David Cronenberg or a Terry Gilliam, FILTH's parade of filth could've had some unique gonzo artistry that would've made its own mark outside of the dated world of TRAINSPOTTING knockoffs. Instead, it's the work of writer/director Jon S. Baird, who has one other feature under his belt (the obscure 2008 crime drama CASS), with his only other credit of note being an associate producer on the 2005 cult film GREEN STREET HOOLIGANS. Baird is obviously a fan of Boyle and probably saw FILTH as a way to pay homage to both him and Welsh, but it's all so familiar and formulaic at this point. Baird's FILTH only makes fleeting mention of a key element of Welsh's novel: the tapeworm that's inside the protagonist's body and, as it grows and spawns, it starts narrating its own chapters. The elimination of that "character"--something with which a hypothetical Cronenberg or Gilliam would've had a blast--leaves Baird with little to do other than fashion FILTH as BAD LIEUTENANT with a Scottish burr.

Det. Sgt. Bruce Robertson (James McAvoy), is an Edinburgh cop obsessed with discrediting the colleagues in line for the promotion he wants for himself. Robertson is a sociopath, a misanthrope, an alcoholic, a junkie, a thief, and a sex addict. He's corrupt and amoral, and his sickness has spread to his impressionable young partner Lennox (Jamie Bell), as the two routinely go on coke-and-hooker binges. While Lennox is questioning an 18-year-old man for engaging in unlawful sexual conduct with his under-the-age-of-consent 15-year-old girlfriend, Robertson is in the next room getting a blowjob from said underage girl in exchange for not telling her dad what she's been doing. Robertson is supposed to be investigating the murder of a Japanese tourist with Lennox and the ambitious Dunning (Imogen Poots), but they end up doing the leg work as Robertson instead spreads rumors about other cops, steals balloons from little kids, engages in mutual erotic asphyxiation with the wife (Kate Dickie) of an irate cop (Brian McCardie), makes obscene phone calls to the wife (Shirley Henderson) of his nebbishy, dweeby lodge brother Bladesey (Eddie Marsan), from whom he steals money to buy drugs, and then drags away on an ostensible bicycling trip to Hamburg, where he visits brothels on his own after slipping Bladesey some roofies, leaving him stranded at a gay bar, and forcing him to squint his way through the rest of the trip after stealing his incredibly thick-lensed eyeglasses, and throwing them in a river between periodic hallucinations with a mocking shrink (Jim Broadbent). Robertson is a bad guy---he's also bipolar and off his meds--and in his more introspective moments, pines for the wife (Shauna Macdonald) who left him, but some semblance of good exists deep within him when he tries to save a dying man on a busy street while everyone else stands around helplessly. The man's widow (Joanne Froggatt) sees he's a troubled soul but instead of letting her in, resorts to his maniacally excessive ways.

There's no denying McAvoy throws himself into the role much like Harvey Keitel and Nicolas Cage did in each of their interpretations of BAD LIEUTENANT. But FILTH the movie is a dumbed-down version of Filth the book and plays like stale retread of BAD LIEUTENANT filtered through TRAINSPOTTING. It doesn't even keep Welsh's very INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION-esque ending. It's shot in very much the same style, and you can almost see Ewan McGregor as Robertson if this was made a decade and a half ago. Many of Welsh's novels take place in the same universe with recurring characters popping up throughout (for example: Begbie, played by Robert Carlyle in TRAINSPOTTING, is mentioned several times throughout Filth), and on the page, it's part of an ever-expanding, self-referential universe. On the screen, it just comes across as repetitive and uninspired. Welsh is one of the film's 34 (!) credited producers and obviously signed off on it (which, much like most authors selling book rights, probably involved getting paid and then had nothing else to do with it), but the alterations made to the story are to its detriment. Yes, film is a different medium, but Baird just seems interested in the most transgressive elements of Welsh's story with little concern for other things that were going on. An ambitious adaptation of Filth would've explored more than Robertson's over-the-top histrionics. I'm probably making FILTH sound like a bad movie. It's an OK film, moderately entertaining and never dull (and there is one admittedly brilliant use of David Soul's "Silver Lady"), but it never really tries, either. If shock value is all Baird was after, why didn't he just remake BAD LIEUTENANT? Why bother adapting Welsh's book if you're just going to toss its most unique elements?

DEVIL'S KNOT
(US - 2014)

The story of the West Memphis Three, accused of the ritualistic murder of three little boys in West Memphis, AR, has been told in many ways since the horrific events of the summer of 1993. Books, countless investigative pieces, TV news profiles, and most notably, four documentaries--Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger's PARADISE LOST trilogy and the Peter Jackson-produced WEST OF MEMPHIS--seem to have covered the story from every possible angle. With that in mind, it seems odd to make a dramatization of the events now and odder still that it's directed by the great Egyptian-born Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan (EXOTICA). Egoyan's been in a slump for going on a decade now, with only 2008's ADORATION showing signs of the Egoyan of old: 2005's WHERE THE TRUTH LIES and 2009's CHLOE are easily his weakest films, with CHLOE in particular looking like a laughably dated erotic thriller that was found sealed in a film canister marked "1995." Egoyan's been spending a lot of his time in recent years making short films and documentaries, so it's likely that TRUTH and CHLOE were just mercenary director-for-hire gigs that provided a financial cushion. Unfortunately, DEVIL'S KNOT, based on Mara Leveritt's 2002 true-crime account of the same name, falls into the same category. Other than some familiar Egoyan actors like Bruce Greenwood and Elias Koteas, and some shots early on that recall the remorseful sense of melancholy of Egoyan's 1997 masterpiece THE SWEET HEREAFTER, DEVIL'S KNOT takes the story of the West Memphis Three and turns it into a perfunctory, workmanlike courtroom drama that offers no new perspective on the case other than to belatedly suggest that the father of one victim and the stepfather of another may have been involved in the murders. Despite some early signs that Egoyan might take a David Fincher/ZODIAC approach to examining the story, it doesn't take long to devolve into rote storytelling that anyone familiar with the case already knows, laid out in thoroughly by-the-numbers fashion by the screenwriting team of Paul Harris Boardman and SINISTER director Scott Derrickson, whose previous credits together include HELLRAISER: INFERNO, URBAN LEGENDS: FINAL CUT and THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE. With that pedigree, it's pretty obvious Egoyan's just punching a clock on this one.

All the expected story elements are here: the parents demanding revenge, the town, the lazy police, and a stone-walling judge going into full-on, witch-hunt, "Satanic panic" mode. They're all in a frothing-at-the-mouth quest to pin the murders on a trio of social outcasts who had an interest in the heavy metal and the occult and a ringleader in Damien Echols (played here by James Hamrick) who was a loner from a broken home who dressed in black and was simply deemed "weird." The police work in this case was horribly shoddy, with one suspect, Jessie Misskelley, Jr (Kristopher Higgins), obviously mentally incompetent and thought to be "mildly retarded," coerced into confessing to the murders with wrong timelines and details completely inconsistent with the crime scene, but the cops ran with it anyway. Since these details, and the eventual Alford Plea release of the three convicted murderers in 2011 are old news, a lot of DEVIL'S KNOT focuses on the grieving Pam Hobbs (Reese Witherspoon), the mother of victim Stevie Branch, and her late discovery of Stevie's pocket knife in a box kept by her husband Terry (Alessandro Nivola). This, along with another knife that was given to Sinofsky and Berlinger (who briefly appear as themselves) by John Mark Byers (a hammy Kevin Durand), the father of victim Christopher Byers, and the police department's botched handling of a bloodied African-American man who was found in the ladies' room of a fast-food restaurant the night of the murders, would appear to indicate DEVIL'S KNOT's agenda in probing deeper into the case. If Egoyan was really interested in that, why not pursue Terry Hobbs and John Mark Byers for a documentary? Why devote time to defense team investigator Ron Lax (a miscast Colin Firth, struggling with a Southern accent) moping around after his wife (a one-scene drop-in by Amy Ryan) serves him with divorce papers? Who gives a shit about Ron Lax's failed marriage? This is the kind of film where the judge decrees to a packed courtroom that Misskelley will be tried separately from the others, but Lax still has to immediately lean over to his assistant and whisper "Separate trials...Jessie's gonna be tried on his own" just in case the audience is having trouble keeping up. With Oscar-winners Firth and Witherspoon onboard, and with justice for the West Memphis Three a longtime cause for many in the entertainment industry, DEVIL'S KNOT looks suspiciously like transparent Weinstein Company awards bait, but this time it backfired. The film got such a unanimously negative response at the 2013 Toronto Film Festival that Harvey Weinstein unloaded it on RLJ Entertainment, who rolled it out on VOD and a handful of screens a month before its DVD/Blu-ray debut. It's a strangely appropriate burial for such a shallow endeavor that barely scratches the surface as it treads down a path that's already been explored in much more insightful detail by others. (Unrated, 114 mins)

IN THE BLOOD
(US/UK - 2014)

Steven Soderbergh's HAYWIRE arrived with much publicity and positive reviews in early 2012 as the starring debut of former MMA sensation Gina Carano. It had a unusually highbrow supporting cast for such action fare and promised old-school fight scenes and delivered, but mainstream audiences weren't especially taken with Carano or with Soderbergh's directing style, which turned HAYWIRE into more or less an MMA arthouse film. Nevertheless, while it's a fixture in DVD bargain bins at a retailer near you and already little more than a footnote in Soderbergh's filmography, it has a minor cult following and Carano's future as a B-level DTV action star seemed inevitable. After a supporting role in last year's FAST & FURIOUS 6, she's back with the rather pedestrian IN THE BLOOD. For all the complaints action fans had about Soderbergh's artsy-fartsy pretensions with HAYWIRE, at least he made the action sequences count. Here, sometime hack actor-turned-fulltime hack director John Stockwell weighs things down with too many characters with too many subplots and not enough Carano ass-kicking. Shot in Puerto Rico, the first half-hour of IN THE BLOOD looks like a typical Stockwell effort, demonstrating his endless fascination with exotic, scenic tourist destinations (since 2002, he's also made BLUE CRUSH, INTO THE BLUE, TURISTAS, and DARK TIDE) as recovering heroin addicts and newlyweds Ava (Carano) and Derek Grant (Cam Gigandet) honeymoon in the Caribbean. They met in rehab--she came from the wrong side of the tracks and saw her father (Stephen Lang in flashbacks) murdered by drug dealers, he's the scion of a wealthy family whose asshole father (Treat Willliams) disapproves of Ava and tries to bully Derek into signing a pre-nup. While at a restaurant, Ava and Derek meet affable local Manny (Ismael Cruz Cordova) who talks them into a zip-lining excursion. While careening down the aptly-named "Widowmaker," Derek's line snaps and he plummets into the forest below. The medics won't let Ava ride in the ambulance and no hospital in town has any record of Derek being brought in. The local cops, led by the predictably useless chief (Luis Guzman), and her sneering father-in-law think she staged a kidnapping, or even killed him to gain access to the family's wealth. So, of course, under the tutelage of her father, she's been schooled in the ways of MMA (much to the surprise of Derek during an early nightclub skirmish), and she becomes an inevitable one-woman wrecking crew in the quest to find her missing husband.

Once Stockwell finally gets to the action, IN THE BLOOD has its moments, but they're few and far between. This should be a tight, fast B-movie, but at 108 minutes, it's at least 20 minutes too long and the pacing is laborious. Did we really need clunky subplots about Guzman's police chief or the feud between island crime lords Lugo (Amaury Nolasco) and Big Biz (Danny Trejo)? At least Nolasco's character eventually figures into the increasingly ludicrous plot, but Trejo has almost nothing to do until the script (written by Farrelly Brothers collaborator Bennett Yellin and THE HOWLING: REBORN screenwriter James Robert Johnston) clumsily has him turn up at the end and somehow be the hero, which seems completely counterproductive considering that this is supposed to be a Gina Carano vehicle. Carano would do better to work with an Isaac Florentine or a John Hyams, both the kind of low-budget action auteur who can really bring out the best in action stars like Jean-Claude Van Damme, Scott Adkins, and Dolph Lundgren. Carano's niche is practically pre-carved, but ponderous duds like IN THE BLOOD aren't going to do much to help her make her case. You're better off watching HAYWIRE again. (R, 108 mins)

SMALL TIME
(US - 2014)

Since his acrimonious departure from LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT in 2011 over a salary dispute, Christopher Meloni has been jobbing around from gig to gig, with an acclaimed but short-lived recurring role on TRUE BLOOD, supporting roles in 42 and MAN OF STEEL, and, more recently, the Fox sitcom SURVIVING JACK, which survived four episodes before being cancelled, and a hilarious arc as Julia Louis-Dreyfus' personal trainer/secret paramour on VEEP. In 2012, Meloni shot the low-budget SMALL TIME, written, directed, and self-financed by 24 creator Joel Surnow. It gives the veteran TV actor a rare big-screen lead, but it's also the kind of small, personal film that just doesn't generate much interest outside of film festivals. It opens strongly and succumbs to cliche and formula in its second half, but a decade ago, a film like SMALL TIME probably would've become a minor, word-of-mouth sleeper hit instead of getting the VOD dump-job from distributor Anchor Bay Films. Meloni is Al Klein, a master used-car salesman and co-owner of Diamond Motors, along with his best friend Ash Martini (Dean Norris). Al is going through a midlife crisis and can't commit to girlfriend Linda (Garcelle Beauvais), and as his son Freddy (Devon Bostick) is graduating from high school, Al fears the years have slipped away. Despite the protestations of his ex-wife Barbara (Bridget Moynahan) and her wealthy investment broker husband Chick (Xander Berkeley, the go-to actor for "asshole second husbands"), Freddy wants to skip college and work as a salesman with his dad. Wanting some father-son bonding time, Al welcomes Freddy onboard as he and Ash school him in the ways of wheeling and dealing.

Despite some funny scenes of car-lot hustling, SMALL TIME isn't another USED CARS-type comedy. The focus remains on Al and the realization that maybe this isn't the life he wants for his son, especially since his gift for closing deals almost immediately gives the impressionable Freddy a swelled head, which isn't helped by the encouragement of Ash, a well-meaning guy who loves Freddy but often comes off as a bad-influence uncle, and some cynical salesman friends who teach Freddy that "people are shit and they'll believe anything." Al and Ash may be fast-talking salesmen, but they're generally honest, and Al worries about the side of Freddy that the job is bringing out. SMALL TIME is a small labor of love for all involved, but once Freddy starts getting a shitty attitude, Surnow's script devolves into too many standard-issue tropes and conventions, culminating in a really bad moment when Bostick gets in Meloni's face and yells--what else?--"You're so...small-time!" There's also too many whimsical elements that film fest folks love: set in an undetermined period that would appear to be the early '80s, the film opens with an older Freddy narrating "It was the summer that changed my life"; montages set to soul and/or Latin music; gregarious ethnic supporting characters; and a kooky and improbably Scottish secretary (EXTRAS' Ashley Jensen) who has no idea how to make coffee. There's a lot in SMALL TIME that should completely derail it, but the consistently-underrated Meloni is the glue that holds it together. He's terrific here and his rapport with both Bostick and Norris (as well as in the seemingly improvised scenes with their lunch group of crass, old-school salesmen buddies played by Kevin Nealon, Ken Davitian, and Barry Primus) really manages to redeem the film's many inherently self-destructive elements. SMALL TIME is slight and predictable, but it's enjoyable enough, moves very briskly, and is a must-see if you're a Meloni fan. (R, 94 mins)

EDGE OF TOMORROW
(US - 2014)

Directed by Doug Liman. Written by Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth. Cast: Tom Cruise, Emily Blunt, Bill Paxton, Brendan Gleeson, Noah Taylor, Kick Gurry, Charlotte Riley, Jonas Armstrong, Tony Way, Franz Drameh, Dragomir Mrsic, Masayoshi Haneda, Terence Maynard. (PG-13, 114 mins)

Admittedly, the trailers for EDGE OF TOMORROW didn't look promising. Based on the 2004 novel All You Need is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, EDGE appeared to be another chance to show Tom Cruise running around and saving the world, this time in a GROUNDHOG DAY-meets-STARSHIP TROOPERS scenario. Yes, that's part of the plot, and the film makes no secret that it's a mash-up potpourri of other military sci-fi films. But even before it establishes its central conceit, EDGE is subverting your expectations in creative and unpredictable ways. Yes, it fuses GROUNDHOG DAY and STARSHIP TROOPERS, and also ALIENS and WWII movies and video games and Tom Cruise running and feels like the kind of movie James Cameron might've made in the late '80s and early '90s before he publicly unleashed his inner Insufferable Asshole for all the world to see. But it takes those elements and sends them in an unpredictable direction, and when Cruise runs, he doesn't run like a hero saving the world. He stumbles and bumbles like a guy who's skated by on his personality and just likes wearing a uniform and whose grinning visage is all a show for the cameras. Cruise has some fun toying with his screen persona here, and that's just the beginning of the unexpected highlights that this furiously-paced, surprisingly inventive, and often quite witty sci-fi actioner has to offer.

Set five years into a Europe-based war with an alien race known as Mimics, EDGE opens with military media liaison Major William Cage (Cruise) being ordered by United Defense Forces commander Gen. Brigham (Brendan Gleeson) to act as an embedded correspondent with forces launching a massive invasion of France to hold off and defeat Mimic forces. Known as a ubiquitous presence on cable news as the chief UDF spokesperson and PR/propaganda flack, the arrogant Cage objects to being sent into combat, and ultimately tries to blackmail Brigham by threatening to publicly blame him for any casualties in the next day's attack. An enraged Brigham has him arrested and branded a deserter, and the next day, Cage wakes to find himself on a military base, stripped of his rank, busted down to Private, and being read the riot act by gung-ho Sgt. Farrel (Bill Paxton, whose presence is an obvious nod to ALIENS). Cage, despite almost no training and with the extent of his service being a smiling face on TV encouraging young people to join the fight, accompanies the troops on the invasion, which immediately ends in disaster: the Mimics knew they were coming and wipe out the UDF in five minutes, including Cage and legendary warrior and the heroic face of the UDF, Sgt. Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), aka "Full Metal Bitch" and "The Angel of Verdun" after leading the first UDF victory against the Mimics at Verdun. But then something funny happens: Cage wakes up, back on the base, at the same starting point as the previous day. He goes through the same botched attack again, and each time he's killed, he wakes up at the previous original point. His ability to finish everyone's sentences and predict the outcome of the UDF invasion are summarily dismissed as parlor tricks and the ravings of a coward trying to get out of military action, but during one time loop, Vrataski tells him "Find me when you wake up." Only she knows what he's talking about and how he's reliving every day once he's "killed," and together, they try to devise a plan of attack, based on their previous failures, of defeating the Mimics in France and finding the truth behind what they are, what they're capable of doing, and why only they have experienced the time loops.

Like Sakurazaka's novel, EDGE is essentially intended to be one long video game, and it's one of the very few instances where that's meant as praise. Witness the constant "resets" from the same starting point each time Cage is "killed" and the way he and Vrataski strategize and memorize every Mimic movement during the failed invasion in order to survive and "get to the next level." Director Doug Liman (SWINGERS, GO, THE BOURNE IDENTITY) and editor James Herbert handle the potentially unwieldy time element in expert fashion. Most impressive is the way time loops come to shockingly abrupt ends when Cage is unexpectedly killed and how, when the time loops seem to stop, we only gradually realize that Liman is only letting us see certain developments for the first time. In other words, we discover that Cage has been living these time loops for an undetermined amount of time, and there's a subsequent implication that even the precise starting point is something that's questionable in the context of the narrative. Liman holds it together in masterful fashion, but EDGE OF TOMORROW could've easily been an incoherent mess considering the committee of writers involved and the fact that it didn't even have a finished script until shooting was about to start. The screenplay is credited to Christopher McQuarrie (who won an Oscar for his USUAL SUSPECTS script) and Jez & John-Henry Butterworth (FAIR GAME), but the initial work was done by Dante Harper, whose original script was reworked by Joby Harold (AWAKE). Liman tossed out most of the work done by Harper and Harold and brought in the Butterworths, whose work was then revised by Simon Kinberg (SHERLOCK HOLMES, ELYSIUM). Kinberg departed the project and Cruise pal McQuarrie (who worked with the star on VALKYRIE and JACK REACHER, two of Cruise's most underrated films, and is set to direct the next MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE entry) was brought in to write an ending and give the script one final polish.

EDGE OF TOMORROW's seemingly frozen-in-time Europe looks terrific (I skipped the 3D version) and the CGI creatures are very well-done. It never pretends it isn't constructed on a foundation of great films that came before it, but it wastes little time in becoming its own beast. Going in expecting a by-the-numbers CGI blur, you may come away pleasantly surprised at the relatively old-school feeling of the whole thing. But that may just be part of the Cruise experience at this point. Yes, he's a crazy Scientologist, but he's one of the few genuine movie stars left who can still draw huge audiences just on the basis of his name. For all their accolades and media ubiquity, how many blockbuster mega-hits have guys like George Clooney or Brad Pitt had? Not many. People don't go see "Brad Pitt movies." They go to "movies with Brad Pitt," and often, mainstream audiences don't like them (THE TREE OF LIFE, KILLING THEM SOFTLY, THE COUNSELOR). People still go see "Tom Cruise movies" regardless of what they're about. Sure, one could argue that the 51-year-old Cruise is entering the self-deprecation phase of his career with the way he slyly mocks his image here (the patented "Cruise running" shot comes very early, and it's clumsy, awkward, and hilarious), but the guy's still got it. Sure, EDGE OF TOMORROW has a couple of plot holes (at the point in the time loop where Cage and Vrataski's Jeep runs out of gas, why doesn't Cage ever consider taking some gasoline cans along with them on the next loop?) and it may suffer from coming so closely on the heels of another Cruise sci-fi epic with last year's visually stunning but somewhat empty (and seemingly already-forgotten) OBLIVION. That was another film that stood on the shoulders of giants, but unlike EDGE, didn't take things to the next level. Contrary to the ho-hum trailer and TV spots we've been seeing, EDGE OF TOMORROW is incredibly entertaining and far better than it has any right to be, and it may very well be the summer's biggest surprise.

ALAN PARTRIDGE
(France/UK - 2013; US release 2014)

British actor/writer/comedian Steve Coogan's (PHILOMENA) best known character is clueless and insufferably self-aggrandizing radio and TV personality Alan Partridge. Coogan's been playing Partridge off-and-on on numerous British TV shows since 1991, and it's proven so popular that he had a change of heart on his plan to retire Partridge some years back. Coogan's first stab at bringing Alan Partridge to the big screen resulted in a blockbuster hit in British theaters, where it was called ALAN PARTRIDGE: ALPHA PAPA. The second half of the title was dropped by US distributor Magnolia, but it makes no matter. If you like snappy, misanthropic, foul-mouthed British humor in the vein of THE THICK OF IT and its big-screen spinoff IN THE LOOP (2009), you'll dig ALAN PARTRIDGE since it also features the contributions of co-writer Armando Iannucci, whose unique brand of biting humor has translated beautifully to American TV with HBO's blisteringly funny VEEP. Here, Partridge is the afternoon DJ at North Norfolk Digital, a small-time radio station that's just been bought out by a big-time media company run by the loathsome Jason Tresswell (Nigel Lindsay). Fearing for his job security, Partridge trash-talks veteran night DJ Pat Farrell (Colm Meaney) enough that Farrell is canned. Later that night, at a party thrown at the station by Tresswell, a disgruntled Farrell shows up and takes everyone hostage. Acting as a liaison between the police and Farrell, Partridge sees the siege and the inevitable media circus as his ticket back to the big time.

Even if you haven't seen much of Coogan's past work as Partridge, ALAN PARTRIDGE works just fine as a stand-alone film. You'll be able to fill in the blanks, like Partridge's insensitive interaction with doting assistant Lynn Benfield (Felicity Montagu) or the antics of his Geordie friend Michael (Simon Greenall). Coogan and Iannucci assembled a summit of ALAN PARTRIDGE writers older and newer to put this together, including Peter Baynham, who worked on the early Partridge material and went on to write BORAT with Sacha Baron Cohen, plus twin brothers Neil & Rob Gibbons, who worked on more recent PARTRIDGE incarnations with Coogan. Along with the writers, director Declan Lowney (a veteran of numerous British TV favorites like FATHER TED and LITTLE BRITAIN) approaches this in a fan-friendly fashion and doesn't fix what isn't broken, while at the same time making it accessible for the first-time viewer. Of course, if you know Coogan's style or have seen any of his work with Rob Brydon, you know what to expect. Whether he's being politically incorrect, extraordinarily self-centered, pretending to be on the phone to avoid talking to someone only to have it ring, or just being an outright coward (as someone's about to enter a room with guns blazing, Partridge tells one woman "I'll protect you" while sheepishly crouching behind her), Coogan is hilariously obnoxious throughout, and has a good foil in Meaney's ill-tempered Farrell. Sure, the whole concept is more than a little reminiscent of the 1994 radio station hostage comedy AIRHEADS, but Coogan and Iannucci bring enough of their distinctive style to the table to make it very worthwhile. (R, 90 mins)

CAPITAL
(France - 2012; US release 2013)

Though he's dabbled in various genres, the great Greek-French filmmaker Costa-Gavras is best known for his politically-charged films like the Oscar-winning Z (1969), THE CONFESSION (1970), STATE OF SIEGE (1972), MISSING (1982), BETRAYED (1988), and MUSIC BOX (1989). He's never shied away from controversy, especially with 1983's HANNA K, a film whose perceived Palestinian sympathies got it yanked from theaters and probably had a hand in effectively ending Jill Clayburgh's run as a Hollywood A-lister. Costa-Gavras hasn't made an American film since 1997's ham-fisted MAD CITY, but he's been working fairly steadily in France over the last decade. His latest--and first to get US distribution since 2002's AMEN--is CAPITAL, which finds the 80-year-old director taking aim at the global financial meltdown in sometimes heavy-handed ways, and while it's not essential Costa-Gavras, it's still worth seeing. It's hard to make financial thrillers thrilling (the recent MOBIUS is a great example of how not to do it), and while the characters and the subplots are fairly standard-issue, CAPITAL gets some genuine momentum going once all the pieces are in place.

When the old-school CEO (Daniel Mesguich) of France-based Phenix Bank has a heart attack and gets an overly symbolic testicular cancer diagnosis (that's right--he doesn't have the balls for this business anymore), he nominates his protege Marc Tourneuil (Gad Elmaleh) to replace him. The board isn't happy, but figure Tourneuil is enough of a yes-man that they can bully him around and get what they want anyway. Tourneuil proves to be a hard negotiator and a driven businessman and immediately makes a number of bottom-line decisions that are so unpopular that even his mentor wants him fired. Phenix is in dire shape and in order to turn things around, Tourneuil forms an uneasy alliance with an aggressive Miami-based hedge fund overseen by ruthless financial titan Dittmar Rigule (Gabriel Byrne, who had one of his earliest major roles in HANNA K). Rigule plots an insider trading scam to drain Phenix's assets through a secret corporation, then overtake it with his own hedge fund, essentially using Phenix's money to buy themselves out. Tourneuil is promised a fat payday out of it and the first step is firing 10,000 Phenix employees worldwide to aid in shareholder (and Rigule) profit. Of course, Tourneuil's mind isn't always focused on Rigule's junkyard-dog act or the deceptive machinations of his own underlings, since his newfound power predictably turns him into a total asshole, ignoring his devoted wife (Natacha Regnier) and growing obsessed with a manipulative supermodel (Laura Gemser lookalike Liya Kebede), even blowing off meetings so he can fly to Tokyo to go down on her in an airport restroom. The relationship between Tourneuil and the supermodel is the most problematic element in CAPITAL, taking up too much time and going nowhere, and their final scene together is just unpleasant and bizarre. Costa-Gavras pulls no punches in his depiction of the high-rolling sociopaths that inhabit the financial world: even from the beginning, when the old CEO collapses on a golf course, Tourneuil is already grinning at the prospect of being put in charge. He's not a nice guy corrupted by power. He's an asshole who was patiently waiting for his turn. In the end, CAPITAL's points are simplistic and obvious, but the financial cat-and-mouse game between Tourneuil and Rigule (it's great fun watching Byrne turn from a smooth operator into a bloviating prick as the film goes on) provides some well-handled dramatic tension. It's no Z, but Costa-Gavras, still looking spry, energetic, and a good decade younger than his age in the DVD's making-of doc, still has a little gas left in the tank. (R, 114 mins)

HAUNT
(US - 2014)

It's probably easier to just list the movies HAUNT rips off rather than attempt a review. Another in an ever-increasing (and ever-annoying) line of slow-burner horror films that mistakes "long stretches of lethargically-paced nothing" for "building tension" (thanks, Ti West!), HAUNT offers yet another dull and oblivious family moving into a cursed house because it's impossibly cheap thanks to all of the murders that have taken place under its roof. The Ashers--dad (Brian Wimmer), mom (Ione Skye), oldest daughter (Danielle Chuchran), son (Harrison Gilbertson), and younger daughter (Ella Harris)--relocate to a spacious Iowa home where the the previous family all met horrific ends except for the matriarch (SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK'S Jacki Weaver), who ran a pediatrics practice from a home office. The ghostly activity starts with an EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) machine that's been left behind in a secret room next to Gilbertson's. Gilbertson meets a troubled teen (Liana Liberato) who lives down the road with her abusive father, and soon she's sleeping over with him, which is totally cool since his folks are the hippest and most easygoing parents around. Gilbertson and Liberato mess around with the machine and a voice tells him to "Get out of my room!" Soon enough, they're haunted by the usual apparitions out of nowhere, shadows lurk in hallways, wet footprints lead nowhere, and the youngest Asher is having long conversations with her dolls, standing in doorways in a catatonic stupor, and scratching the eyes and faces out of family photos. Might it all have something to do with a clumsily-placed flashback with Weaver helping out a young mother with a screaming baby girl? Gilbertson is so preoccupied playing savior with Liberato that he doesn't even notice the weird stuff going on with his little sister, which is fine since director Mac Carter and writer Andrew Barrer completely forget about her anyway. Instead, they just restage elements of INSIDIOUS, WHITE NOISE, THE AMITYVILLE HORROR, SINISTER, and of course, once they unleash the angry spirit of Weaver's teenage son, Gilbertson briefly becomes possessed and starts doing the herky-jerky JU-ON/GRUDGE shuffle. With no scares, thoroughly cardboard characters, and an egregious wasting of two-time Oscar-nominee Weaver, HAUNT (not to be confused with the recent and much better HAUNTER) is an instantly forgettable trifle that almost wears its half-assed laziness like a badge of honor, its only concern being how many movies it can crib from on its way to the $5 DVD bin at Wal-Mart. I guess the only good thing you can say about it is that no one in the family seems to own a video camera. (R, 86 mins, also available on Netflix Instant)

MACHINE GUN MCCAIN
(Italy - 1969; US release 1970)

Directed by Giuliano Montaldo. Written by Mino Roli and Israel Horovitz. Cast: John Cassavetes, Britt Ekland, Peter Falk, Gabriele Ferzetti, Gena Rowlands, Florinda Bolkan, Tony Kendall, Salvo Randone, Luigi Pistilli, Pierluigi Apra, Steffen Zacharias, James Morrison, Claudio Biave, Margherita Guzzinati, Val Avery, Carol Doda. (Unrated, 96 mins)

Actor/writer/director John Cassavetes (1929-1989) was one of the key figures in the birth of the American independent film. He was already a jobbing character actor throughout the 1950s in films like THE NIGHT HOLDS TERROR (1955), CRIME IN THE STREETS (1956) and EDGE OF THE CITY (1957), and on television, where he earned a shot at headlining his own series with the short-lived NBC private eye drama JOHNNY STACCATO in 1959. Though he was building a solid reputation as an actor, Cassavetes' true passion was directing (NBC let him direct several JOHNNY STACCATO episodes) and that same year, he released his self-financed writing/directing debut SHADOWS, which he actually shot twice, once in 1957 and again in 1959, preferring the reshot '59 version. SHADOWS received high praise, particularly from European critics, and it led to Cassavetes getting a couple of Hollywood studio directing gigs with the 1961 Bobby Darin vehicle TOO LATE BLUES and 1963's A CHILD IS WAITING, with Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland. Cassavetes took the latter film as an assignment after original director Jack Clayton (ROOM AT THE TOP, THE INNOCENTS) left over a scheduling conflict, and didn't get along with either of his legendary stars or producer Stanley Kramer, all of whom were old school Hollywood and very set in their ways and had no use for Cassavetes' love of improvisation and gritty sensibilities. Kramer took the film away from Cassavetes and fired him during the editing stage. Cassavetes ultimately disowned A CHILD IS WAITING while reiterating his respect for Kramer and conceding that it wasn't the kind of film he should've been directing in the first place. If Cassavetes took anything away from his unsuccessful stint as a Hollywood studio director, it was the mindset of the character played by Darin in TOO LATE BLUES, a talented jazz musician torn between selling out for easy money or sticking to his ideals and making the art he wished to make, regardless of commercial appeal or financial reward.

After his miserable experience on A CHILD IS WAITING, Cassavetes decided that he would no longer compromise himself as a filmmaker, and the easiest way to do this would be to compromise himself as an actor. Cassavetes wanted to make the films he wanted to make and didn't give a shit that some found them talky and self-indulgent. Like their maker, Cassavetes' films are raw, intense, and unpleasant, sometimes to the point of belligerence. He didn't want to fall into the same trap that continually managed to snag another maverick, Orson Welles, who perpetually found himself beholden to producers and investors who romanced him with seductive promises of total autonomy only to take the films away from him anyway once the realization set in that they most likely wouldn't be getting their money back. Cassavetes started taking acting gigs to both support his growing family with actress wife Gena Rowlands (they married in 1954) and their three children, but also to bankroll his own directing efforts so he'd have to answer to no one. He spent the next several years on television with guest spots on shows like THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR, BURKE'S LAW, VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, and COMBAT! plus 1964's THE KILLERS, which was shot as the first made-for-TV-movie but released to theaters when it was deemed too violent, including a notorious scene where Angie Dickinson is slapped around by a vicious gangster played by Ronald Reagan in his final acting role before entering politics. Cassavetes returned to the big screen in 1967 with the biker movie DEVIL'S ANGELS and as one of THE DIRTY DOZEN. His performance in THE DIRTY DOZEN earned him an unexpected Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination (he lost to George Kennedy in COOL HAND LUKE), and much to his surprise, his acting career was taking off. 1968 was a banner year for Cassavetes, as he co-starred in ROSEMARY'S BABY and re-established his dormant filmmaking career with his breakthrough FACES, which received Oscar nominations for Cassavetes' script as well as the supporting performances of Seymour Cassel and Lynn Carlin. As his career behind the camera gained significant momentum, Cassavetes' interest in acting diminished, but he soldiered on since it provided him with the budgets he needed for his personal projects, and as that interest waned, his reputation as "difficult" grew, which certainly wasn't helped by his heavy drinking. He didn't get along with Roman Polanski on ROSEMARY'S BABY, and this would be a recurring theme throughout the rest of Cassavetes' acting career. Shortly after THE DIRTY DOZEN and ROSEMARY'S BABY, Cassavetes acted in a pair of Italian gangster films: Alberto De Martino's ROME LIKE CHICAGO (1968), which wasn't even seen in the US until it aired on CBS in 1974, and Giuliano Montaldo's MACHINE GUN MCCAIN (1969), released in the US in the summer of 1970.

MACHINE GUN MCCAIN is an interesting film on Cassavetes' acting resume. While it's obviously a money gig for him first and foremost, producers Bino Cicogna and Marco Vicario allowed him to bring along members of his stock company, including Rowlands, and two of his best friends, Peter Falk and Val Avery. MCCAIN is an occasionally uneven film that tries to juggle more characters than it can handle in its 96 minutes (though the European version is reportedly 20 minutes longer), but it contains one of Cassavetes' best performances as ex-con Hank McCain. Hardened criminal McCain is unexpectedly pardoned 12 years into a life sentence at San Quentin. He's met by his 20-year-old son Jack (Pierluigi Apra), a two-bit hood who claims to have paid $25,000 to have his him set free. Jack and two buddies, Cuda (James Morrison, in a role IMDb erroneously credited to Jim Morrison for years--yes, the Doors singer) and Barclay (Claudio Biave), woo him with a $2 million heist of The Royal, a new casino in Las Vegas. McCain doesn't buy that these three losers came up with this plan--or the $25,000--on their own (he gives Jack some tough-love with "You're gonna be small change your whole life"), and he's right: the job has been orchestrated by powerful mobster Charlie Adamo (Falk) and his consigliere Duke Mazzanga (Luigi Pistilli), who run the west coast operation for New York-based Don Salvatore (Salvo Randone) and his second-in-command, nephew Don Francesco DeMarco (Gabriele Ferzetti). Based in San Francisco, Adamo was given the west coast with specific instructions to stay out of Vegas, but believing Don Salvatore lacks confidence in him, Adamo thinks asserting his power in Vegas will prove that he's a player. What he doesn't know is that Salvatore and DeMarco secretly own The Royal, and when he finds out, he backs down, telling Jack that the heist is off and that he'll no longer need McCain. McCain doesn't care and moves ahead with the job on his own, along with Irene (Britt Ekland), a young woman he met at the Royal and impulsively married. Once McCain pulls off the heist and with Adamo and Mazzanga dead men walking, Don Salvatore dispatches top hit man Peter Zacari (Tony Kendall) to track down an on-the-run McCain and Irene, who are offered sanctuary by McCain's bitter ex Rosemary (Rowlands).

MACHINE GUN MCCAIN is almost three films in one: McCain doesn't figure much in the first third, which focuses more on the scheming of Adamo and Mazzanga, their ill-conceived plan to rob the casino, and the mob bosses deciding what to do with them. Then things shift to McCain and Irene and things bog down a bit, since Ekland isn't given much of a character to play and we never really care about Irene or see why McCain so immediately falls for her (another missed opportunity: Cassavetes and Falk have no scenes together). Once the heist, pulled off with a complicated set of small explosions inside the casino, is over, MCCAIN becomes almost like a Cassavetes film, especially when Rowlands turns up about 80 minutes in. What makes MCCAIN an interesting and offbeat film for its type is not just its eclectic mix of American and European actors and settings (location work was done in California and Nevada, with most of the interiors shot in Rome), its fusing of the gangster genre with the then in-vogue international heist film (Montaldo had just directed 1967's GRAND SLAM, an essential entry in the subgenre), and its in-depth depiction of the legitimate business side of the Mafia, but most notably in what Cassavetes took from the project. The role almost seems written for him: Hank McCain is a gangster version of Cassavetes himself, doing things his own way, refusing to back down, and taking on the Mafia (read: "the system") all on his own, consequences be damned. This is a motif that would turn up again in later Cassavetes films like 1976's THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE, with connected strip club owner Ben Gazzara roped into killing the head of the Chinese Mafia on the west coast in order to settle a debt to a mob boss; in 1980's GLORIA, his biggest commercial success as a director, with Rowlands in an Oscar-nominated performance as a hit woman on the run, protecting an orphaned boy after his parents are murdered by her bosses; and again with Cassavetes as an actor, co-starring with Falk in Elaine May's largely improvised and very Cassavetes-ish MIKEY AND NICKY (1976). Considering his increasingly surly reputation as an actor (it's no accident that he's name-checked by Denis Leary in the song "Asshole"), Cassavetes found some common ground with Montaldo, who speaks highly of his star on Blue Underground's 2010 DVD/Blu-ray release of the film. They clashed early in the filming, but once Montaldo asserted that he was the director and earned Cassavetes' trust, the pair got along fine, and Cassavetes even assisted his director with some indie/underground, guerrilla location filming tactics during the American portion of the shoot, securing a couple of rented cars and helping Montaldo catch some scenes on the fly in San Francisco, bypassing permits. It's probable that Cassavetes wrote much of his own dialogue, though the script is credited to GRAND SLAM co-writer Mino Roli, who would work again with Montaldo on 1971's SACCO & VANZETTI and go on to write Enzo G. Castellari's 1976 spaghetti western KEOMA. English dialogue is credited to Israel Horovitz, whose most noteworthy credit otherwise is for writing the 1982 Al Pacino comedy AUTHOR! AUTHOR!, though undoubtedly his biggest contribution to popular culture is fathering Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys. MACHINE GUN MCCAIN also featured a catchy score by Ennio Morricone, as well as the over-the-top "Ballad of Hank McCain," a Jackie Lynton-sung ditty more appropriate for a spaghetti western of the era, and one that was covered in 2000 by John Zorn and Faith No More frontman Mike Patton.

Using the money from his lucrative Hollywood and Italian acting gigs, Cassavetes funded 1970's HUSBANDS, a mid-life crisis drama starring himself, Falk, and their other best buddy Ben Gazzara (the trio going on THE DICK CAVETT SHOW completely drunk to plug the film is some priceless TV history, where they give Cavett so much grief that the host quips "This is why I didn't join a fraternity"). Occasionally, Cassavetes would be promised total freedom, as was the case with 1971's MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ, made by Universal during their short-lived courting of indie filmmakers in post-EASY RIDER Hollywood that resulted in Monte Hellman's TWO-LANE BLACKTOP and Dennis Hopper's infamous THE LAST MOVIE. Universal still cut an early scene out of MINNIE despite Cassavetes' objections--the scene was later restored but he was once again disillusioned with Hollywood and went back to his usual routine. Only now, the acting roles temporarily slowed down and Cassavetes mortgaged his house to finance 1974's A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE with Rowlands and Falk. He followed that with 1977's OPENING NIGHT while finding work in front of the camera in big-budget movies like TWO-MINUTE WARNING (1976), BRASS TARGET (1978), and Brian De Palma's THE FURY (1978), which ends with Cassavetes getting one of cinema's all-time greatest death scenes.

Cassavetes made GLORIA with Columbia, originally planning to simply sell the studio his screenplay but Rowlands talked him into directing it and it became a surprise sleeper hit. Still, Cassavetes wasn't interested in going Hollywood. He continued acting in films for others, starring opposite Richard Dreyfuss in John Badham's WHOSE LIFE IS IT ANYWAY? (1981), with Rowlands in Paul Mazursky's acclaimed TEMPEST (1982), and reteaming with BRASS TARGET director John Hough on the grimy horror film THE INCUBUS (also 1982). In 1984, the drinking and the chain-smoking caught up with Cassevetes as he was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and given months to live. He decided to spend the time making one more film, this time teaming up with none other then Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus for LOVE STREAMS. Though known for schlocky action movies, the Cannon duo of Golan & Globus also tried to cultivate a serious reputation with directors like Cassavetes, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, and Franco Zeffirelli just to name a few. Time went on, and though Cassavetes was slowed down by his liver problems, he was still around. In 1986, he directed his last film, the doomed BIG TROUBLE. Conceived as a follow-up to 1979's THE IN-LAWS and reuniting stars Falk and Alan Arkin with writer (and now director) Andrew Bergman, the film was a disaster from the start. Bergman quit 1/3 of the way into filming and had his writing credit removed (the script is credited to "Warren Bogle"). Knowing his friend's days were numbered, he could use the money, and would probably like to direct again, Falk talked Columbia into letting Cassavetes step in and finish the film, which he did without incident. He viewed it as a job and wasn't really bothered when the studio recut the film and barely released it. BIG TROUBLE is so bad then even producer Mike Lobell took his name off the movie. A few more years went by and Cassavetes was still beating the odds and planning to direct a project titled SHE'S DE-LOVELY, but he finally succumbed to his illness and died in February 1989 at 59, five years after he was told he had just a few months to live. Cassavetes and Rowlands' three children have all become filmmakers: son Nick (born in 1959), a sometime actor (FACE/OFF), would direct the retitled SHE'S SO LOVELY in 1997 as a tribute to his dad and go on to direct his mom in the tearjerker THE NOTEBOOK (not quite the Hollywood iconoclast his old man was, Nick's most recent film is the Cameron Diaz comedy THE OTHER WOMAN), daughter Xan (born in 1965) directed the acclaimed 2004 documentary Z CHANNEL: A MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION and the 2012 horror indie KISS OF THE DAMNED, and daughter Zoe (born in 1970) directed their mom in 2007's BROKEN ENGLISH.

Cassavetes and Rowlands in a photo
taken near the end of John's life.

THE MACHINE
(UK - 2014)

An ambitious film that works wonders with a small budget, THE MACHINE, written and directed by Caradog James, successfully manages to balance the precarious divide between thinking person's sci-fi and winking, reference-heavy '80s homage. In a not-too-distant future, "the West" is at war with China, and the British government is in the business of building and selling mechanized warriors. Widower scientist Vincent McCarthy (Toby Stephens, one-time Bond villain in DIE ANOTHER DAY) works for the corporation contracted to create the unstoppable "Machines," the foundation of which are the remains of dead soldiers, rewired and programmed to kill. It hasn't been a total success, but McCarthy's heart isn't in his job anyway: unbeknownst to his unscrupulous boss Thomsen (Denis Lawson), he's using government funds to find a cure for his brain-damaged daughter who's suffering from a rare neurological disorder. He's also recently brought Ava (Caity Lotz of THE PACT), an American colleague, onboard to help with the creation of a new Machine, for which she volunteers to be the physical model. But Ava starts asking too many questions about Thomsen's business, prompting Thomsen to have her killed. In what Thomsen calls "a monument to his dead assistants," McCarthy creates a Machine version of Ava, one capable of cognitive reasoning and emotion. The Ava Machine declares herself "the future," while Thomsen demands McCarthy remove the chip that allows reasoning and feelings.

Of course, the message of the increased dehumanization of society and how computer-programmed cyborgs are now capable of more emotion and genuine feeling than actual humans is a bit obvious and heavy-handed (McCarthy doesn't call the new Ava by her name, instead opting for the much colder "Machine"), but THE MACHINE is the kind of film that becomes an instant cult classic. Looking like the kind of moody, atmospheric, dystopian sci-fi film you might've blindly rented at the video store in 1991 if their one copy of it was in stock, THE MACHINE throws a lot of influences into the mix: you'll spot elements of BLADE RUNNER, HARDWARE, and THE LAWNMOWER MAN, along with VHS staples like CIRCUITRY MAN and especially CYBORG 2. The throwback vibe is enhanced magnificently by Tom Raybould's score, a giddy mash-up of John Carpenter synth and 1980s Italian post-nuke that showcases some of the best genre compositions since Tomandandy's work on RESIDENT EVIL: AFTERLIFE and Sinoia Caves' hypnotic soundtrack for BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW. When that score drones on and on as Ava rampages through the complex, mowing down Thomsen's army as bullets ricochet off of her, it's pretty damn hard not to have a stupid grin on your face (and Lotz is absolutely terrific here). To his credit, James keeps that sense of nostalgia in check, and despite the myriad of influences of past works classic and not-so classic, THE MACHINE manages to be its own creation. It's tough to make films like THE MACHINE and not fall into a trap of your own making, but James pulls it off. If my references and points of comparison made any sense to you at all and had you nodding in recognition, then this one's not to be missed. (R, 91 mins)

ALMOST HUMAN
(US - 2014)

Like THE MACHINE, the micro-budgeted indie ALMOST HUMAN wears its love of the 1980s on its sleeve, but writer/producer/director/cinematographer Joe Begos ultimately doesn't have much to offer beyond paying homage to his DVD and Blu-ray collection. ALMOST HUMAN isn't very good...in fact, it's mostly pretty terrible, but Begos' enthusiasm isn't in question, and he's probably a lot of fun hosting movie nights at his place. He seems well on his way to winning you over right away by having his production company named Channel 83, a direct nod to VIDEODROME's Civic TV graphic, by breaking out some John Carpenter-esque synth music and having the opening credits in the Carpenter font and dragged out over several minutes a la PRINCE OF DARKNESS, but then ALMOST HUMAN almost sets a land speed record for wearing out a welcome. PRINCE is definitely an influence on ALMOST HUMAN, but it draws even more from the likes of THE THING, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, THE HIDDEN, and XTRO. Set in the late '80s for no particular reason and with little attention to period detail other than the background decor of VCRs, cassettes, and land lines (characters sport present-day hipster beards and there's not a mullet in sight), the film opens with Seth (Graham Skipper) claiming his buddy was abducted into the sky by a powerful blue light. His skeptical pal Mark (Josh Ethier) is soon taken by the same light, seemingly never to return. Two years later, Mark's girlfriend Jen (Vanessa Leigh) has moved on, but Seth is still suffering from nightmares and nosebleeds, and has a premonition that Mark is returning. Sure enough, a pair of hunters find Mark's nude body in the woods, covered in an extraterrestrial ooze and possessed by an alien force. "Mark" goes on a killing spree, collecting bodies for cocoons on his way back to town to impregnate Jen with his alien seed, while Seth fails to convince anyone that something bad is about to happen. ALMOST HUMAN might work if any of the actors were good, but they're strictly amateur-night across-the-board. The material is spread so thin that Begos has to run a ludicrously slow-moving eight-minute closing credits crawl just to get this to 79 minutes. Things pick up a bit in the splatter-and-slime-drenched climax, and the film displays some genuine chutzpah with one of the more icky alien impregnation scenes you're likely to see, but it's too little, too late, and ALMOST HUMAN is a mostly empty experience. Sure, it pays tribute to a lot of great movies and Begos is obviously a die-hard horror nerd, but unlike THE MACHINE, ALMOST HUMAN lacks its own voice. It gives you plenty of reference points, but that's all it gives you, and by its NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD-inspired finish, you have to question why you're watching what looks a home-movie remake of THE THING or BODY SNATCHERS when you could just be watching the real thing. The poster art is pretty cool, though. (Unrated, 79 mins)

JERSEY BOYS
(US - 2014)

Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice. Cast: John Lloyd Young, Erich Bergen, Michael Lomenda, Vincent Piazza, Christopher Walken, Mike Doyle, Kathrine Narducci, Renee Marino, Freya Tingley, Steven J. Schirripa, Erica Piccininni, Joseph Russo, Donnie Kehr, Lou Volpe, Elizabeth Hunter. (R, 134 mins)

JERSEY BOYS, the story of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, became a Broadway phenomenon in 2005, going on to win the Tony for Best Musical and Best Lead Actor for John Lloyd Young as Valli. Young recreates the role for Clint Eastwood's big-screen version, which is not quite the adaptation that fans of the original musical or its many touring permutations might be expecting. The Broadway production, with a book by 1970s Woody Allen collaborator Marshall Brickman (ANNIE HALL, MANHATTAN) and Rick Elice, was anchored by a "Rashomon structure," which told the group's story from the vastly different POV of the four members, each under the guise of spring, summer, winter, and fall to make up the Four Seasons, supported and propelled by the group's songs. It all tied in together nicely, but Eastwood, working from a script by Brickman and Elice, almost completely abandons that concept other than occasional fourth-wall-breaking comments, but mainly, the focus is whittled down to just Frankie Valli. Eastwood also jettisons the whole "musical" element. On the stage, JERSEY BOYS uses the music of the Four Seasons to tell the story, but on the screen, it's a standard-issue backstage biopic where the live performances and studio recording sessions essentially function in the place of where a montage might go. A lavish musical with big production numbers might've been a challenge for Eastwood, but his vision of JERSEY BOYS is pretty much a Scorsese-lite gangster saga peppered with some timeless Four Seasons songs, glossing--sometimes quite sloppily--over details, cutting corners, and taking dramatic license when it's convenient or when something might make co-executive producer Frankie Valli look bad. On the surface, it's a reasonably entertaining film and the musical performances are fine, and, unlike of a lot of Eastwood's directing efforts, it moves rather briskly, but by the end, it's all surface: if you want a BEHIND THE MUSIC breakdown of the Four Seasons, you'll learn more from their Wikipedia page than you will here.

Opening in 1951 Newark, Valli is introduced as 16-year-old Francis Castelluccio, a neighborhood kid with a killer falsetto and plans to attend barber school. He has strict parents (there's an inspired running gag where random people keep asking him "Hey, aren't you supposed to be home by 11:00?"), but runs with a rough crowd led by would-be gangster Tommy DeVito (Vincent Piazza), who plays guitar in a group called the Varietones when he isn't planning half-assed burglaries and trying to get in with local mob kingpin Gyp DeCarlo (Christopher Walken). Tommy recognizes Frankie's talent and gets him to join the band, along with another trouble-prone buddy, bassist Nick Massi (Michael Lomenda). They change their name to The Four Lovers and get some local recognition, but that changes when their buddy Joe Pesci (Joseph Russo)--yes, that Joe Pesci, Tommy clarifies, with young Pesci even asking "Funny how?" at one point--introduces them to former Royal Teens keyboardist Bob Gaudio (Erich Bergen), who wrote the hit song "Short Shorts." Gaudio has the songwriting chops they need, and coupled with Frankie's voice and the production expertise of Bob Crewe (Mike Doyle), the Four Seasons are born, despite the objections of Tommy, who sees himself as the leader of the group and constantly resorts to the bullying tactics of the Newark streets in order to maintain that authority. What follows is a strictly connect-the-dots chronicle of the band's rise, fall, and eventual rise again at their 1990 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction: they get screwed by a record contract, life on the road takes its toll, marriages get ruined, Gaudio and Tommy butt heads over the direction of the band, Tommy's excesses cause the whole thing to implode, etc, etc.

After the "1951" title card, the time element in JERSEY BOYS is handled atrociously. It's completely abandoned by Eastwood, so there's often no way of telling if days or years have gone by. A character in 1951 is talking about wanting to see THE BLOB, which was made in 1958. Frankie marries tough-talking Mary (Renee Marino) and has a daughter. Then he gets back from a tour and has three teenage girls at home. Sometimes you can only tell that a long period of time has passed because the sideburns get longer, the lapels get wider, and Gaudio's goatee gets more unkempt. Mary says she's sick of Frankie's serial adultery, but we never see it. After the marriage ends, Frankie has a fling with a Detroit reporter (Erica Piccininni), who vanishes only to reappear much later talking about "all the things we've been working for" as she dumps him. What things? Where have you been? And do we even know your name? Characters appear and disappear throughout with no explanation, and not in a way that feels like their scenes were just cut, but more in a way that these scenes just never existed in the first place. There's little sense of context: we're told Gaudio wrote "Short Shorts," but we're not told that he was 15 when he wrote it. As played by the 28-year-old Bergen, Gaudio is introduced like he's some older, experienced musician who can offer them guidance and who knows his way around the music industry, when in fact, he was only 17 when he hooked up with the decade-older Frankie and the even-older Tommy, who was already past 30 when they hit it big. With that in mind, it's easy to see Tommy's resentment of this Gaudio kid taking creative control, but that noteworthy age difference never comes up. Also, Tommy, Frankie, Nick Massi, and Tommy's brother Nick DeVito had some minor success as The Four Lovers, releasing two albums and several singles on a major label. JERSEY BOYS presents them as music industry novices who had no idea how the business worked prior to Gaudio replacing Nick DeVito and turning them into The Four Seasons. In reality, Valli and Crewe worked together during the Four Lovers era, but the film has Gaudio introducing the band to Crewe. Crewe would become the band's lyricist and de facto fifth member, but the movie shows Gaudio as the guy who wrote everything and Crewe as their producer, except much later when Gaudio says something about "Bob needing to write some lyrics." Then there's the issue of Frankie's oldest daughter Francine. At 17, Francine (Freya Tingley) runs away from home and Frankie has to fly from Vegas to Jersey to find her. He does, and tells her that Gaudio will write some songs for her and they'll get a voice coach to help her be the singer she always wanted to be. It's supposed to be a powerful moment of emotional bonding between an estranged father and daughter, but because we've seen Francine for maybe 30 seconds prior to this and know nothing about her, the whole incident comes out of thin air and falls completely flat.

Perhaps most egregiously, JERSEY BOYS implies that the Four Seasons broke up after some Tommy-instigated money problems at some point in the 1960s (I'm guessing--the timeline isn't really clear). It's a huge blow-up that prompts a frustrated Massi to quit the band and stay home with his family, which would put it in 1965 if we go by actual history, which Eastwood, Brickman, and Elice apparently don't have the time or the inclination to do. Tommy exits the story at this point, and Frankie becomes a solo artist to pay off Tommy's debts, but in reality, Tommy was in the band for another five years, and while Tommy and Gaudio would eventually quit (though he retired from recording and touring, Gaudio continued to work behind the scenes as the group's songwriter), Valli never disbanded the Four Seasons and has remained the sole constant member. The film doesn't even mention the successful late '70s incarnation of the group, with future drummer Gerry Polci handling lead vocals on the 1976 hit single "December 1963 (Oh, What a Night)," a song that JERSEY BOYS portrays, along with Valli's 1975 solo hit "My Eyes Adored You," as belonging to the original Four Seasons lineup. Perhaps this is how co-executive producers Valli and Gaudio see things in their own Rashomon structure, but there's a fine line between dramatic license and rewriting history.

Young has this role down, so it's no surprise that he's fine as Valli, even if it's asking a bit much to buy the now-38-year-old performer playing 16 in the early parts of the film. Bergen and Lomenda are both vets of the touring versions of the musical, and handle their roles reasonably well, considering their relative newness to the medium. Bergen has an odd Jeff Goldblum-meets-Michael Shannon demeanor that indicates he'd do well in character parts if he chooses to pursue a career in movies, while Lomenda, who plays Massi as a bit of a lunkheaded lug, more or less gets relegated to the background but does get a couple of instances where he does an effective job of playing not-very-articulate guy struggling to get his feelings across. Piazza, the only non-musical performer of the quartet, goes for the standard "tough mook" act that he does as Lucky Luciano on HBO's BOARDWALK EMPIRE, but isn't asked to do much other than be the self-centered asshole of the group. Walken has a few scenes where he gets to be Walken, which is always fun, and at least a couple of his lines feel improvised (especially "Don't use my bathroom!" which, in context, sounds like a hilarious ad-lib). The cliched scenes of Frankie's home life do nothing but slow the film to a halt, especially since we have no idea who the women in his life really are, whether it's his wife or, after the divorce, the reporter. Like Bergen and Lomenda, Marino is a veteran of the touring version of JERSEY BOYS and played various female roles on different tours, but her performance here as Mary Valli is embarrassingly bad. Perhaps she's too accustomed to theatrically over-projecting for the live-on-stage factor and didn't adjust to the different medium like Bergen and Lomenda, but her shrewish, booze-swilling, bitch-on-wheels act is unbearable and more fitting for a WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? production staged by Tommy Wiseau. She's overwrought and completely over-the-top, snarling and shrieking her way through her scenes, but given the liberties that the story takes with other elements, perhaps Marino should be given the benefit of the doubt. Is it possible that her performance is the way it is because that's how Valli wanted his ex-wife portrayed? JERSEY BOYS has some good performances, from both acting and musical perspectives, but it suffers from the same issues that plague several recent Eastwood films: known as the most efficient director in Hollywood, one who always comes in under budget and ahead of schedule, perhaps he's getting a little sloppy. He throws in some nice touches--I liked his attempts at sticking to filming techniques of the era, like a blatantly fake process screen background in a car scene, the kind you'd see in a 1960s movie, and the obvious backlot used for the early Newark neighborhood scenes--but he doesn't really seem fully committed here. The Eastwood of 40 or even 20 years ago wouldn't have allowed a performance as mind-bogglingly awful as Marino's to happen, regardless of her inexperience or (hypothetically) Valli's wishes. An engaged Eastwood would've seen during production that it wasn't working. It's one thing to think it's a good idea to cast Raul Julia and Sonia Braga as Germans in a dumb action movie like 1990's THE ROOKIE, but this is something else entirely. Around the time of INVICTUS--his worst film as a director--I had a discussion with some friends and we concluded that perhaps Eastwood was cranking his films out a little too quickly. Eastwood need not prove anything to anyone, and at 84 and in his seventh decade in the movies, it's great that he can work so frequently, but if he's going to rush through them and not give a shit, then what's the point?

A FIGHTING MAN
(Canada - 2014)

Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and once in a while, a combination of forces that, under any normal circumstances, would portend certain doom actually turns out to have unexpected merit. Consider the case of A FIGHTING MAN, a low-budget, straight-to-DVD Canadian-made drama that would appear to be the epitome of every melodramatic boxing cliche you've ever seen going back to the 1930s Warner Bros. programmers. Consider that it stars Dominic Purcell, the once-promising PRISON BREAK star-turned-lumbering charisma-vacuum whose constant employment is one of the great mysteries of the modern DTV era. Consider that it's written and directed by veteran Canadian hack Damian Lee, who's somehow managed to be in the business of making movies for 30 years without ever making a good one (yes, Purcell and Lee also teamed on last year's abysmal BREAKOUT). There's absolutely no reason for A FIGHTING MAN to be anything but a steaming shit sandwich, but...this is actually...pretty good? Lee's script piles on a checklist of tropes and contrivances. Purcell is Sailor O'Connor, an aging ex-boxer with a record somewhat south of mediocre. He's not even worthy of being called a has-been. He's a never-was. If Sailor O'Connor was an actor, his stage name would be "Dominic Purcell." Sailor's only claim to fame is that, while he's lost almost all of his fights, he's never been knocked down. He hasn't been in the ring in four years, but wants to fight the proverbial One Last Fight. And it's not for the obligatory One Last Shot at Redemption: it's because he needs the money to give his fiery, cancer-stricken Irish mom Rose (Sheila McCarthy, thickly laying on the feisty Maureen O'Hara sass) one last trip to the old country since she's got six months to live. He's too proud to accept a handout from his trainers Brother Albright (James Caan) and Max (Michael Ironside), and he won't be talked out of fighting by his mom or by concerned Father Brennan (co-producer Kim Coates), who seems to spend more time fretting over Sailor than he spends in church. Sailor's opponent is King Solomon (Izaak Smith), a cocky and ambitious young fighter who's trying to escape his hellish life in the projects with his crack-addict mother (Emma Campbell). King needs a fight because he's been reduced to appearing in porn flicks to make ends meet and all he wants is to marry his pregnant girlfriend Peg (Jenessa Grant).

There's also Louis Gossett, Jr. hamming it up with a ridiculous Jamaican accent as King's irascible trainer Cubby, Adam Beach as reptilian promoter Fast Eddie, who's as big a conniving, untrustworthy piece of shit as his name would imply, famed trainer Freddie Roach as himself, and Famke Janssen as Diane, a recovering alcoholic linked to Sailor through a past tragedy that haunts both of them to this day. Lee also manages to cram in some mid-fight contractions for Peg, a visit to a bar for Diane where she almost falls off the wagon, and a traumatic backstory from Sailor's childhood about his abusive, drunken father that explains why he's the bullheaded fighter he is and how nothing can knock him down. Lee's structure of the film is interesting in the way that the fight is already underway at the very beginning, and between rounds, we're given the fragmented flashbacks detailing the events that led up to the fight we're seeing, and the timelines converge by the end. I never would've guessed a straight-to-DVD Damian Lee joint starring Dominic Purcell would have an ambitious Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu structure combined with the profound sense of melancholy and grief you'd find in the EXOTICA/THE SWEET HEREAFTER heyday of Atom Egoyan, where all the pieces of the puzzle are slowly put in place and you see how everything fits together in the end. Yes, it's hokey and manipulative, but its straight-faced sincerity sucks you in. And for all the cheap shots I've taken at Purcell, he may have found his perfect role with Sailor O'Connor, whose terrible boxing record, dead-eyed stare, monotone mumble, and the shuffling, tired gait of a defeated man with nothing left to lose and who's had nothing but shitty cards dealt to him for his whole life allow the actor to use his lackluster screen presence to his utmost advantage. To quote the poet laureate Harry Callahan, "A man's got to know his limitations," and while Purcell looks comatose when he has to do action movies, here, he's perfect. Look, I'm not saying this is some undiscovered classic or anything. We're not talking ROCKY or THE SET-UP or THE HARDER THEY FALL here--it's a maudlin and overly earnest B-movie for sure, but it somehow works, even as it plows head-first into shameless man-weepie territory by the end. Maybe it's Purcell finally finding a role that suits his somber persona, maybe it's the better-than-expected supporting cast (Caan is very good, and really, you had me at "Caan and Ironside as his trainers"), but against all odds, A FIGHTING MAN is an unexpectedly not terrible surprise. Purcell and Lee...who knew? Eye of the tiger, guys. Eye of the tiger. (R, 88 mins)

THE OUTSIDER
(US - 2014)

Caan also turns up as the villain in THE OUTSIDER, which marks veteran British actor Craig Fairbrass' first attempt at becoming a headlining action star in America. Fairbrass starred in a couple of British horror films that became mid '90s video store staples (NIGHTSCARE and PROTEUS), and frequently turns up in various D-grade fare like Uwe Boll's FAR CRY, the Randy Couture actioner HIJACKED, and the Dominic Purcell dud VIKINGDOM, but he's best-known for TV's EASTENDERS and for his voice work in various CALL OF DUTY video games. He's got an imposing, square-jawed presence with a Vinnie Jones "fookin''ell, mate!" demeanor that could make him an acceptable fourth-string Liam Neeson with the right vehicle, but THE OUTSIDER, which surrounds Fairbrass with the best supporting cast that 2002 had to offer, isn't it. Utterly generic in every way, THE OUTSIDER, conceived by Fairbrass and writer/director Brian A. Miller (a repeat purveyor of completely forgettable Wal-Mart bargain-bin clutter like the 50 Cent-produced CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE and the Stephen Dorff cop thriller OFFICER DOWN), is patched together from elements of THE LIMEY and TAKEN (Fairbrass is even referred to as "the Limey" at one point). Fairbrass is tough-as-nails British mercenary Lex Walker, called away from a contract gig in the Middle East when his daughter Samantha turns up dead from an apparent drug overdose in Los Angeles. When he arrives at the morgue to identify the body, it's not his daughter, who went missing from her job at tech giant Most Industries a week earlier. Walker doesn't get anywhere with evasive Most CEO Karl Schuuster (Caan, who couldn't have put in more than two, maybe three days on the set), who obviously knows something he's not telling. Walker teams up with Samantha's waitress friend Margo (Shannon Elizabeth), and her sometime boyfriend Ricky (Johnny Messner), who leads him right to Samantha (Melissa Ordway). She had to fake her death because Schuuster's goons were coming for her after she uncovered a massive identity theft scam he was masterminding from the Most headquarters. Meanwhile, Walker forms an uneasy alliance with cynical detective Klein (Jason Patric) to bring down Schuuster and expose his shady dealings.

Lethargically paced and drably shot, THE OUTSIDER offers no surprises or suspense, with Patric and Caan sleepwalking through their performances, everyone else unconvincingly spouting vague techno-jargon, and Fairbrass proving to be a dull action hero. Sequence after sequence follows the same formula: Walker blusters and bulldogs his way into somewhere, wants ta ask someone some queestions 'bout 'is daw 'er, gets some guff, and promptly smashes the person's head into a wall or through a door until they staaht tawkin'! The kind of movie that provides an adequate level of white noise while you peruse your Netflix queue for something else to watch, THE OUTSIDER is as bland and paint-by-numbers as it gets. Nothing overtly terrible about it, but there's really nothing to see here. (R, 94 mins)

THE ROVER
(Australia/US - 2014)

Written and directed by David Michod. Cast: Guy Pearce, Robert Pattinson, Scoot McNairy, David Field, Tawanda Manyimo, Gillian Jones, Susan Prior, Anthony Hayes, Gerald Coulthard, Nash Edgerton, Jan Palo. (R, 103 mins)

"You should never stop thinking about a life you've taken. That's the price you pay for taking it."

The Outback has been the setting of countless Australian films, and in the best of them, regardless of the genre, the vast, desolate region practically functions as a character. It gets one of its most unsettlingly sinister incarnations in THE ROVER, the latest film from ANIMAL KINGDOM director David Michod. Set "ten years after the collapse," THE ROVER opens with a stunning 15-minute sequence with the grizzled Eric (Guy Pearce) sitting alone in his car outside a shitty shack of a bar. He goes in for a drink as a pickup truck filled with three quarreling fugitives--Henry (Scoot McNairy), Archie (David Field), and Caleb (Tawanda Manyimo) flips over, careening past the bar and coming to an upright stop on the side of the road. Eric realizes too late that they're ditching the truck and taking his car. Glaring down the road, Eric decides to get in their truck and gets it unstuck by what seems like sheer will and determination, and takes off after them. After some high-speed road games, both cars come to a stop. Words are exchanged. Eric: "I want my car back." Archie: "I can see that." Eric: "Give me my car back." Henry: "That's not gonna happen." Even with guns pointed at him, Eric fearlessly charges at the men and gets knocked out for his trouble. He comes to and the men and his car are gone. He eventually crosses paths with Rey (Robert Pattinson), a slow-witted young man who happens to be Henry's younger brother. Shot in the stomach and assumed dead, Rey was left behind during whatever job his cohorts were pulling off. Eric, who proves time and again that he'll stop at nothing to get his car, takes Rey prisoner and orders him to take him to where his brother and the others are hiding out.

Part vigilante revenge saga, road movie, Ozploitation throwback, and dystopian nightmare punctuated by sudden bursts of shocking violence, THE ROVER has some surface similarities with John Hillcoat's THE PROPOSITION (2006), the great blood-splattered Outback western that also starred Pearce, but somehow, exists in a world that's even more bleak and nihilistic. Anyone can be killed at any moment in THE ROVER, and at any moment, the sins of your past can come back to haunt you. In his quest for revenge against the men who stole his car, Eric, the ostensible "hero," manages to leave a trail of bodies behind and brings death and tragedy to several people pulled into his destructive orbit. Michod asks a lot for the audience to get behind someone who's as much of an anti-hero as Eric, but as more layers of the character are revealed, there's glimpses of the man that may still lurk, however faintly, deep down. At its core, THE ROVER is a film about relationships, particularly the shaky bond that forms between and Eric and Rey. When Rey grows angry upon the realization that he's been left to die by his brother, it's debatable whether he comes to that conclusion on his own or if he's been manipulated into it by the misanthropic Eric, who's quite the killjoy with lines like "Who cares if he's your brother? Just because you both came out of the same woman's hole?" These are two men who, by different circumstances, are alone and find some tenuous common ground in a dangerous world where a wrong look gets you killed, seemingly kindly grandmothers offer young boys for sex, and the scenic route through the Outback offers the tourist-friendly sight of roadside crucifixions.

Pearce has rarely been better than he is here. With his constant snarl and his slumped right shoulder, he looks and moves like a wounded animal, and though Pattinson is sometimes a little too mannered, he generally handles his role well. I didn't care for David Cronenberg's COSMOPOLIS, but Pattinson, who reunited with Cronenberg for the upcoming MAPS TO THE STARS, continues to prove himself a sharper actor than you'd think as he seems to be taking on the most non-commercial projects he can to establish his post-TWILIGHT cred. To say much more would spoil the plot turns that THE ROVER takes, but it does offer a study in duality, not just with its two main characters, but also when the title and even the caption "ten years after the collapse" ultimately take on more than one meaning. Michod, cinematographer Natasha Breier, and the chillingly minimalist score by Antony Partos work together to create an atmosphere of suffocating hopelessness. You can smell the sweat and the despair. Real flies constantly swarm around the actors' faces. The stench of death and decay are everywhere under the perpetually baking sun. In many ways, THE ROVER is an Outback-set Sam Peckinpah homage, not in a way that Eric and Rey are men out of their own time with nothing left to do but go out with their guns blazing (as with THE WILD BUNCH), but in the quiet ways of loyalty and family and when someone's word meant something. It's not a crowd-pleasing summer movie for everyone, and you'll find the ultimate reveal either profoundly moving or dismiss it as completely hokey (one guy, a few rows back: "Are you kidding me?"). Eric is a total bastard and he's fully aware of it, but in a world where laws and a basic moral code have disintegrated and are never coming back, a man will do what he has to do to hold on to the slightest shred of humanity and dignity left in him. A love letter of understanding to the bitter misanthrope in all of us, THE ROVER is one of 2014's best films.

ENEMY
(Canada/Spain - 2014)

Loosely based on Jose Saramago's novel The Double, but not to be confused with the recent Jesse Eisenberg film THE DOUBLE, Denis Villeneuve's ENEMY is one of those frustrating cinematic puzzles where the set up and the placement of the initial pieces prove much more challenging and engaging than the actual solution. ENEMY excels in its early stages in its depiction of the ennui-drenched L'AVVENTURA, RED DESERT, and THE PASSENGER alienation of vintage Antonioni fused with the cold Cronenbergian chill of Toronto high-rises that recalls everything from SHIVERS to CRASH and even Fernando Mereilles' underappreciated BLINDNESS, itself an adaptation of another Saramago novel. There's also an overt DEAD RINGERS vibe that begins with quiet, withdrawn history professor Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal) suffering through small talk with a colleague, who recommends a movie called WHERE THERE'S A WILL, THERE'S A WAY. Adam rents the movie and it's a run-of-the-mill romantic comedy, but something catches his attention: cast as "Bellhop #3" is one Daniel Saint Claire, who happens to look exactly like Adam. Adam researches the doppelganger's other roles, which are limited similar bit parts in two other forgettable films from a decade earlier, and eventually goes to the office of the agency representing Saint Claire and is mistaken for him, which gets him Saint Claire's phone number and address. Adam calls the actor, whose real name is Anthony Claire, and though Anthony is initially hesitant, they meet. Their features are identical and they even have the same scar. Adam freaks out and regrets meeting, but Anthony, who has a history of cheating on his now-pregnant wife Helen (Sarah Gadon), forces Adam to go along with a swap so he can spend some time with Adam's girlfriend Mary (Melanie Laurent).

There's such an eerie, unsettling, Hitchcockian, De Palma-esque by way of Antonioni and Cronenberg feel to the first hour of ENEMY (at times, you might think it's a horror film) that it's almost enraging when you realize it's gone to such intriguing and fascinating lengths to tell such an ultimately banal story. And I haven't even gotten into the ham-fisted symbolism of spiders and webs, which wasn't part of Saramago's novel. ENEMY is borderline brilliant for 2/3 of its running time, but the back end of the script by Javier Gullon (who also co-wrote the intriguing 2007 thriller KING OF THE HILL) has all the depth and insight of someone's first and quickly-discarded draft in an Intro to Creative Writing course. The film is very well-directed by Villeneuve, who also teamed with Gyllenhaal on last year's more commercial PRISONERS (ENEMY was shot first, but released after). Villeneuve is a director who brings out the best in the actor, who was riveting in PRISONERS in a performance that deserved more attention than it got. Gyllenhaal delivers two strong performances here, even as the film starts collapsing around him in the closing sequences as--you guessed it--the lines between real and fantasy become impossibly blurred, not to mention hopelessly hackneyed. Still worth seeing for that opening hour and the powerfully dread-filled slow build...at least until it starts sabotaging itself. (R, 91 mins)

ROB THE MOB
(US - 2014)

There's a slight sense of TRUE ROMANCE redux in this somewhat fictionalized account of Tommy and Rosemarie Uva, a Queens couple trying to stay on the right path after jail stints for armed robbery. Struggling in their 9-5 jobs, they started robbing mob-owned bars and social clubs. In one of their jobs, they managed to obtain a list that thoroughly detailed the Gambino and Bonnano family hierarchy, and as they got increasingly cocky and overconfident, they used it to guarantee their safety which, of course, backfired and the couple were whacked on Christmas Eve 1992. In ROB THE MOB, directed by Raymond De Felitta and written by Jonathan Fernandez, Tommy (Michael Pitt) and Rosie (Nina Arianda) aren't married, for some reason (they're planning to get married on Christmas Day, so perhaps it was a dramatic decision), and some of the names are changed, but otherwise, it mostly sticks to the story. The none-too-bright Tommy has a lifelong grudge against the local gangsters, who strong-armed, shook down, and eventually killed his florist father, so once they get desperate and he starts toying with the idea of ripping them off, Rosie can't talk him out of it, and when the money starts rolling in, she's OK with it as well. During one robbery, they get "the list" from inside the wallet of aged and slightly feeble mobster Joey D (Burt Young), and all hell breaks loose in the family, run by the reclusive Big Al Fiorello (Andy Garcia), a composite of Bonnano boss Joseph Massino and underboss Sal Vitale.

ROB THE MOB does a good job of mixing lighthearted and serious moments, as Tommy's early, haplessly clumsy attempts at pulling a social club stick-up get a reaction from the mobsters that's not unlike Richard Pryor's famous "Mafia Club" bit. But as things get serious and the stakes get higher, the shift to drama is smooth and organic. De Felitta (who previously worked with Garcia on 2009's enjoyable CITY ISLAND) does a superb job with period detail and other than some CGI effects in the closing scene, the whole film has a vivid sense of time and place and feels like it could've been made 20 years ago. The film takes place during the trial of John Gotti, whose 1992 conviction was essentially the beginning of the end for the old-school glory days of the American Mafia, and it deftly ties in an elegiac feeling for that era, though only Big Al seems aware that things are about to change. Most of the goodfellas in ROB THE MOB have seen better days but there's a comfortable complacency that's set in for them. It's a period of Mafia history that isn't glorious and hasn't been covered much in popular culture and ROB THE MOB offers a unique perspective in the "working-stiff gangster" subgenre with films like DONNIE BRASCO (1997) and KILLING THEM SOFTLY (2012). Fine performances all around from Pitt, Garcia, and Ray Romano as NYC crime reporter "Jerry Cardozo," presumably based on Gotti biographer and Mafia historian Jerry Capeci, in addition to colorful supporting turns by familiar faces like Michael Rispoli, Griffin Dunne, Cathy Moriarty, Yul Vazquez, John Tormey, Joseph R. Gannascoli, and Frank Whaley (Aida Turturro is prominently-billed but her role was cut from the film). The standout however, is Tony-winning Broadway actress Arianda in what would be a star-making big-screen breakout had Millennium released ROB THE MOB on more than 30 screens. Arianda is a ball of fire throughout, in her interaction with Tommy ("You bought me flowers!"), chewing people out on the phone at her collection agency job, or overcome with visions of fame and talking way too much when Cardozo wants to interview her. She handles the "tough moll" role in classic fashion and has a very natural, streetwise 1970s presence (these small-time Queens would-be gangsters always seem a little behind the times) that sets her apart from a lot of young actresses today, who probably would've appeared mannered and playing dress-up. It's the kind of showy role that could've easily been turned into a caricature, but Arianda keeps it under control and nails it, and if this movie had gotten any exposure at all, there's a good chance she'd be getting some legitimate Oscar buzz. On the whole, ROB THE MOB wanders a bit and isn't as ambitious or as focused as it should be, but it's a solid little film, and Arianda's performance is a big reason why. (R, 104 mins)

WOLF CREEK 2
(Australia - 2014)

In the horror genre, nine years is an unusually lengthy wait for a sequel, and after that amount of time, you might wonder why writer/director Greg McLean took so long to get to the follow-up to 2005's WOLF CREEK. And after you watch the absurdly tardy WOLF CREEK 2, you'll wonder why he even bothered. When it was released, WOLF CREEK got the attention of hardcore horror fans with its mercilessly bleak vision and its instantly iconic performance by veteran Australian character actor John Jarratt as gregarious Outback serial killer Mick Taylor. As Mick, Jarratt came across as the terrifying doppelganger of Crocodile Dundee, and the grueling film wasn't for horror amateurs. Indeed, it didn't go over with mainstream audiences (earning a rare F from the ludicrous CinemaScore), and was lumped in with the then in-vogue torture porn craze (which, to be fair, it shared some aspects), but horror scenesters embraced it and McLean was hailed as a major new talent in the genre. He returned with 2008's surprisingly good killer crocodile flick ROGUE, buried by Dimension Films after the similar and inferior PRIMEVAL beat it to theaters and bombed. McLean's been off the radar since ROGUE, and the pointless WOLF CREEK 2 isn't likely to re-establish his career momentum.

Jarratt is back, and rather than play Mick in the sinister, unsettling way he did nearly a decade ago, McLean instead has him crank it up to 11 and beyond, turning the character into a relentless killing machine with his endlessly-quipping Freddy Krueger zingers and asides ("Welcome to Australia, cocksucker!"). WOLF CREEK 2 eschews the nightmarish qualities of WOLF CREEK to go for broad horror comedy augmented by over-the-top splatter effects. Shifts in tone in a sequel are nothing new: Sam Raimi did it with 1987's EVIL DEAD 2 and it's the same approach Tobe Hooper took for 1986's THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2. It doesn't work here, nor does McLean's decision to attempt a "shifting of the protagonists" move from the PSYCHO playbook. The first hour is essentially one long chase as we spend a bunch of time with two likable German backpackers, Rutger (Philippe Klaus) and Katarina (Shannyn Ashlyn), only to have them exit as Mick's focus turns to British tourist Paul (Ryan Corr). Mick plays road and head games with Paul, eventually getting him back to his vast HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES torture dungeon. It's hard to pinpoint exactly where WOLF CREEK 2 implodes beyond repair, but Mick plowing over kangaroos to the tune of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" is as good a location as any. It doesn't really matter in the end, because this only exists to be THE JOHN JARRATT SHOW, with the actor's overbearing histrionics turning his second interpretation of Mick into an extended tribute to the career of Bill Moseley, whether he's screaming at the top of lungs, shouting Aussie jingles and limericks, or mowing down a friendly old couple to "The Blue Danube Waltz." Some nice cinematography and a tense opening sequence aside, the ill-advised and badly-executed WOLF CREEK 2 is just uninspired, stupid, and lazy. Here's to hoping McLean gets his mojo back before he has to shit out a WOLF CREEK 3 in desperation seven or eight years from now. (Unrated, 106 mins, also available on Netflix Instant)

SCREAMERS
aka SOMETHING WAITS IN THE DARK
(Italy/US - 1981)

Directed by Sergio Martino and Miller Drake. Written by Sergio Donati, Cesare Frugoni, Sergio Martino, Miller Drake. Cast: Barbara Bach, Claudio Cassinelli, Richard Johnson, Beryl Cunningham, Joseph Cotten, Mel Ferrer, Cameron Mitchell, Franco Javarone, Roberto Posse, Giuseppe Castellano, Francesco Mazzieri, Eunice Bolt, Tom J. Delaney, James Alquist, Bobby Rhodes. (R, 90 mins)

The story of how the 1979 Italian fantasy adventure ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN became the 1981 Roger Corman drive-in splatter movie SCREAMERS is one of the more entertaining examples of hucksterism in the annals of exploitation cinema. Just out on Blu-ray and DVD in its SCREAMERS incarnation courtesy of Scorpion Releasing, the circumstances surrounding the metamorphosis of ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN into SCREAMERS are covered in great detail in the set's bonus features. Contrary to popular belief, Roger Corman didn't have anything to do with the changes despite SCREAMERS being released by his New World Pictures. It came to him with the changes already in place. Richard Kay and Harry Rybnick were two veteran B-movie producers of such titles as 1956's CURUCU, BEAST OF THE AMAZON, and both had a hand in bringing Ishiro Honda's GOJIRA (1954) to the US and its restructuring into GODZILLA in 1956. By 1980, Kay and Rybnick were still eking out a living on the fringes of Hollywood, with their company United Producers picking up foreign exploitation fare and frequently retitling them for their second and third runs through American drive-ins and grindhouses (for instance, Pete Walker's 1974 imprisoned-fashion-models thriller HOUSE OF WHIPCORD was twice relaunched via United Producers, first as PHOTOGRAPHER'S MODELS and then as the even more lurid STAG MODEL SLAUGHTER). Kay and Rybnick acquired Sergio Martino's ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN, a bizarre aquatic Italian ripoff of THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU that blended elements of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft, and approached PIRANHA director Joe Dante about beefing it up with some American actors and gory killings. Dante was busy with THE HOWLING at the time and sent the guys to his buddy Miller Drake, a trailer editor at New World who had been wanting to branch out into directing. Drake took the job, recruited cinematographer Gary Graver, a longtime exploitation fixture whose main claim to fame among his friends was working on Orson Welles' shelved and never-released THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND in 1972, and assembled a crew comprised mainly of moonlighting New World staffers looking for some quick cash and some additional experience (future TERMINATOR producer and eventual James Cameron ex-wife Gale Anne Hurd is credited on SCREAMERS as "Maui location manager," even though no scenes were shot on Maui). Drake wrote and directed a prologue to be added to the beginning of FISHMEN with Mel Ferrer and Cameron Mitchell, aging warhorses who had been in the business long enough to remember the glory days of Hollywood but were now taking any job that came along if it paid enough, being stalked and killed by slimy creatures that didn't really look like the ones in FISHMEN. Drake was supplied with a $50,000 budget for the prologue and the additional footage was shot in four nights at the caves at Bronson Canyon in Los Angeles' Griffith Park, a favorite location of Corman's going back to the 1950s.

Though Dante, who paid his dues at New World and clearly had bigger fish to fry by this time as he was about to break into the big leagues after THE HOWLING, declined the offer to shoot the new footage and wanted to keep his involvement under the radar, he did help Drake out by editing the footage and overseeing the overhaul of FISHMEN into SCREAMERS. Using the pseudonym "Giuseppe Dantini," Dante worked with Drake to streamline the 99-minute FISHMEN down to its basics, cutting it down to about 75 minutes to work in approximately 12-13 minutes of Drake's footage and a couple of other changes sprinkled throughout, like the addition of one character (James Alquist) who appears briefly only to get killed by one of the fishmen, and a later shot in a laboratory where Drake and soon-to-be-revered makeup effects maestro Chris Walas (THE FLY) replaced a shot of one of Martino's fishmen in a tank with their own, more CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON-ish monster--shot in a makeshift tank in Dante's garage--and the seams barely show until they're pointed out to you by Drake in his interview segment. The film, now running 90 minutes (75 minutes from FISHMEN, 13 minutes of Drake's material, plus new credits) was retitled SOMETHING WAITS IN THE DARK, given a new English dub (star Claudio Cassinelli dubs himself in FISHMEN, Italian accent intact, but has been revoiced by someone else for SCREAMERS) and even though it wasn't a slasher film, that's how Kay and Rybnick wanted it marketed, and they began shopping it around to distributors. Because of their knowing Dante and Drake having used a number of off-the-clock New World guys, Corman was happy to take it off their hands. And that's where things got really interesting.

Original 1979 Italian ISLAND OF
THE FISHMEN poster art.

Using United Producers' artwork and assorted promo material, Corman sent SOMETHING WAITS IN THE DARK out to ten drive-ins in Virginia for a test run and it bombed. Refusing to lose money on an investment, he pulled the film from distribution for a marketing overhaul that was assigned to New World advertising honcho and future filmmaker Jim Wynorski. With SCANNERS being an early 1981 hit, Wynorski proposed the title SCREAMERS and it stuck. He devised an ad campaign that made it look completely American, with Cassinelli renamed "Charles Cass," FISHMEN producer Luciano Martino changed to "Lawrence Martin," and a non-existent "Dan T. Miller" credited as director (the original Italian names remained intact in the film itself). Most importantly, the new one-sheet boasted "Be warned: You will actually see a man turned inside out!" and on a Sunday afternoon, Wynorski quickly shot a TV spot that featured just one quick opening shot of actress Eunice Bolt screaming from the new SOMETHING WAITS IN THE DARK scenes and no footage whatsoever from ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN. Instead, it featured Wynorski's then-girlfriend running around the still-standing sets from the same year's GALAXY OF TERROR and a quick shot of a monster thrown together by his pal Rob Bottin (soon to make his mark with his makeup work on THE HOWLING and John Carpenter's THE THING) for free as a favor to Wynorski. A few weeks later, Corman picked Georgia for the new test run, and blitzed Atlanta and the surrounding areas with Wynorski's TV spot and sent out ten prints of the newly-christened SCREAMERS and its second test run was a smash hit. But there was a problem: exhibitors and customers were furious that there was no scene of a man being turned inside out. Word got back to Corman, who told Wynorski that the scene needed to be there. The prints were recalled, and the shot of the Bottin monster from the TV spot and a couple of additional test footage shots were spliced into the fourth reel when Cassinelli is peeking in some various doors in a hallway. More prints were struck, and SCREAMERS became a decent drive-in and grindhouse hit in the summer of 1981. Unless you saw SCREAMERS on the big screen in 1981, you've never seen the complete "man turned inside out" footage. When Corman had the Bottin monster from the TV spot spliced into the existing prints, no one bothered splicing it into the negative. The prints are long gone. The footage isn't in the negative, and it was the negative that was used for the Embassy Home Entertainment VHS release in the '80s and the subsequent interpositive utilized for the new Scorpion release (Dante, in his interview segment, is under the mistaken impression that the footage has been restored).

"Look, do you understand that I was
in CITIZEN KANE?"

SCREAMERS is definitely an improvement over the lethargic ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN. Opening in 1891 with the prologue as broke fortune hunter Radcliffe (Ferrer) charters a boat to a Caribbean island captained by wily old sea salt Decker (Mitchell) only to have the entire party offed by rampaging fishmen in an orgy of throat-slashing, disemboweling, and decapitations, the action quickly shifts to Martino's original film, also set in the Caribbean in 1891, after the sinking of a prison ship, with a small band of survivors led by the doc in charge, Lt. Claude de Ross (Cassinelli). They end up on the titular island of the fishmen, which is home to the fortress-like compound of the dastardly Edmund Rackham (a hammy Richard Johnson). Rackham believes the island lies over the ruins of Atlantis, and tells de Ross that the Fishmen are the amphibious descendants of the original inhabitants of Atlantis. Of course, he's lying. The fishmen are actually mutants created from the remains of dead men by doddering, senile mad scientist Professor Marvin (Joseph Cotten), who believes he's doing altruistic work in abetting humanity's adaptation to the world's future (perhaps the insane doc was an early proponent of climate change?). In reality, Marvin and his daughter Amanda (Barbara Bach) are being held prisoner as Marvin's gill-man creations are being used to raid Atlantis--depicted in miniatures that would make Antonio Margheriti turn away in shame--for the endless buried treasures desired by the despicable Rackham.

This is the original fishman-in-progress creature discovered
in a tank in Prof. Martin's laboratory in ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN, but
Richard Kay and Harry Rybnick didn't like the design, so
it was replaced with...

...this creature, designed by Chris Walas, for an insert shot
done by Miller Drake in a makeshift tank in Joe Dante's garage

In its original form, ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN was a harmlessly goofy adventure with a little violence but minimal gore. It would've easily gotten a PG rating in America, but Kay and Rybnick told Drake they wanted R-rated gore and splatter but, being the old-schoolers that they were, weren't interested in nudity (Drake says he could've easily gotten Bolt, as Radcliffe's female companion, to go topless, but the old-timers shot it down). The SCREAMERS prologue delivers splatter and then some, with Mitchell getting his gut sliced open, Ferrer's throat being ripped out, and another guy getting his head torn off in graphic detail. The biggest cuts Dante and Drake made to FISHMEN in their streamlining it into SCREAMERS was cutting out a good chunk of Beryl Cunningham's screen time as Shakira, a priestess who spends most of FISHMEN blathering on about voodoo and accomplishing little more than slowing the movie down until Martino and co-writers Sergio Donati and Cesare Frugoni finally find a use for her in the climax.

Bach may have been a minor factor in whatever success was enjoyed by SCREAMERS. It's surprising New World didn't play up her involvement a little more, considering that in the summer after John Lennon's murder, anything involving the Beatles was big news, and right around the time of SCREAMERS' release, Bach was a ubiquitous media presence thanks to her marriage to Ringo Starr after the two became an item while shooting the surprise hit comedy CAVEMAN, which hit theaters a couple months before SCREAMERS. Bach's potential breakout role as a Bond girl in 1977's THE SPY WHO LOVED ME got her the global notoriety that came with being a Bond girl, but like many of her predecessors, it evaporated quickly, and by 1979, she was back doing the same European B-movies she was prior to her time with 007, starting with back-to-back aquatic horrors with Martino, first FISHMEN and then THE BIG ALLIGATOR RIVER, which debuted in America on CBS in 1982 as THE GREAT ALLIGATOR. At the ripe old age of 37, Bach retired from acting after she and Starr appeared in Paul McCartney's 1984 vanity project GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROAD STREET. In the early 1990s, she enrolled in UCLA to get a Master's in Psychology, and in the years since, the now 66-year-old Bach has been involved in humanitarian work for numerous charities, generally staying out of the public eye but almost always seen accompanying Starr at red carpet events. Most of FISHMEN's main cast returned in ALLIGATOR, including Bach, Cassinelli (whose tragic 1985 death on the set of another Martino film is discussed here), Johnson, and Bobby Rhodes, who appeared in FISHMEN as a servant and would later go on to cult movie glory for his roles in Lamberto Bava's DEMONS and DEMONS 2. ALLIGATOR also featured Mel Ferrer, who had no idea he'd inadvertently be part of the FISHMEN reunion in a roundabout way thanks to the SCREAMERS additions. Johnson and Cotten were both busy hamming it up in Eurotrash at the time, with Johnson also starring in Lucio Fulci's ZOMBIE the same year as the Martino films. Cotten, who appears to have been granted the privilege of live-on-set sound, really dives into his mad scientist role with the utmost enthusiasm--he only has two or three scenes, but judging from his work here, you'd think he was as invested in this as he was CITIZEN KANE, SHADOW OF A DOUBT, and THE THIRD MAN decades earlier. That's a pro.

Mel Ferrer collecting an easy
$10,000 for his work on SCREAMERS

ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN was never officially seen in its original form in the US until Eurocult outfit Mya Communication released it on DVD in 2009. The Mya transfer is acceptable for the most part, with some very murky bits and various rough spots. Scorpion's SCREAMERS presentation essentially makes the FISHMEN DVD obsolete--not only is the quality better (except for one exterior scene with Bach offering some blue potion to the fishmen that's still quite murky, which must just be the way it was shot), but SCREAMERS, even with its patched-together nature, is the far more entertaining and fast-paced film. The Blu-ray also offers reversible artwork if you prefer the SOMETHING WAITS IN THE DARK poster design (both one-sheets can be spotted adorning the walls of the Civic TV offices in David Cronenberg's VIDEODROME). Corman knew how to make a movie play, and he obviously taught guys like Dante and Drake well, not to mention Wynorski, whose carnival barker act of an ad campaign upped the hyperbole factor past a point where even Corman was left bewildered. In the bonus features, Wynorski talks of getting the call from Corman on Saturday morning after he received word of the Friday night debacle of drive-in owners and audiences furiously voicing their outrage at not seeing a man turned inside out. "Jim, is there a man turned inside out in the picture?" the always soft-spoken Corman asked. "No, Roger. There isn't," Wynorski sheepishly replied, expecting to hear the words "You're fired." Instead, Corman told him to get down to the office so they could figure out what they were going to do to fix it. "You mean I'm not fired?" Wynorski asked. "No, Jim. You put people in seats. I'll never fire anyone for putting people in seats. But we need the inside out man." Roger Corman: a man who always knows what his audience wants.

THE MISSOURI BREAKS
(US - 1976)

Directed by Arthur Penn. Written by Thomas McGuane. Cast: Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Randy Quaid, Kathleen Lloyd, Frederic Forrest, Harry Dean Stanton, John McLiam, John P. Ryan, Sam Gilman, Steve Franken, Richard Bradford, Luana Anders, Hunter von Leer, Virgil Frye, Dan Ades. (PG, 126 mins)

When it was released in theaters in the summer of 1976, the western THE MISSOURI BREAKS was arguably the anticipated event film of the season. It was the first and ultimately only pairing of Marlon Brando, offscreen since his GODFATHER/LAST TANGO IN PARIS triumphs of 1972 and 1973, and Jack Nicholson, who had just won the Best Actor Oscar for the previous year's ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST. The script was written by acclaimed novelist and screenwriter Thomas McGuane (92 IN THE SHADE, RANCHO DELUXE) right in the midst of a particularly chaotic, excess-fueled phase of his life where those close to him were dubbing him "Captain Berserko." Like seemingly every major 1970s studio film, it also featured additional script contributions by an uncredited Robert Towne (THE LAST DETAIL, CHINATOWN). The director was Arthur Penn, no stranger to westerns (1958's THE LEFT HANDED GUN, 1970's LITTLE BIG MAN), but best known for his iconic BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967). In short, THE MISSOURI BREAKS' pedigree was without doubt. This was the very definition of a sure thing.

Then, much to the detriment of everyone involved, it was released. Critics hated it. Audiences hated it. The word-of-mouth was toxic. The movie bombed.

There's no shortage of notable, worthwhile, and even classic films that tanked on their initial release only to find appreciation some time--weeks, months, years, decades--later. THE MISSOURI BREAKS existed in that odd time between the auteurist, maverick mindset that became the Hollywood norm post-EASY RIDER, and the new summer blockbuster ethos ushered in the previous year by JAWS and made industry standard the next summer with STAR WARS. While most of 1976's biggest moneymakers (ROCKY, A STAR IS BORN, KING KONG, SILVER STREAK) were released in the fall, the two most successful films of the summer represented both ends of the spectrum: the topical ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN was released in April and continued to be a huge hit throughout the summer, and THE OMEN was released in June. THE MISSOURI BREAKS was flat-out rejected by everyone. There's a good chance that if it came out a few years earlier, it might've gotten a more hospitable reception. If it came out a few years later, it would've been focus-grouped into losing its personality and engineered into a commercial crowd-pleaser. On one hand, it's a film that refuses to stick to convention, but on the other, a western that promised a face-off between what many considered film's greatest living actor and his heir apparent and instead turned their confrontation into an anticlimactic afterthought that practically takes place offscreen does feel like a bit of a dick move.

THE MISSOURI BREAKS opens with wealthy northern Montana ranch owner Braxton (John McLiam) and his strongarm Pete (Richard Bradford) overseeing the execution-by-hanging of Sandy (Hunter von Leer), who was caught trying to rustle horses off of Braxton's property. Sandy was part of a group of horse thieves led by Tom Logan (Nicholson). Logan and the rest of the gang--Calvin (Harry Dean Stanton), Little Tod (Randy Quaid), Cary (Frederic Forrest), and Si (John P. Ryan)--hatch a plan that involves using money from a nearly-botched train robbery to buy a ranch near Braxton's land. While the other four men are off on a separate horse-rustling job near the Canadian border, Logan is planting crops and creating the illusion of being an upstanding citizen while plotting his revenge on Braxton, even being cordial with Braxton and secretly courting his fiercely independent daughter Jane (Kathleen Lloyd). After Logan secretly kills Pete and leaves him hanging from the same tree where Sandy was executed, Braxton hires legendary "regulator" Robert E. Lee Clayton (Brando), an eccentric, lilac-perfurmed Irish bounty hunter, to track down and bring to justice (meaning, kill) the men responsible. Clayton sees right through Logan's "average farmer" act, which sets the stage for the regulator obsessively pursuing the other men and offing them one by one before coming back for Logan, who goes soft when he grows accustomed to working an honest living and finding true love with Jane. "You're pretty far gone, ain't ya?" Calvin asks in disgust as Logan beams with pride over the progress of his ranch work. "That's how it happens, isn't it?" Logan shrugs. The deranged Clayton manages to take over Braxton's ranch, usurping his power and instilling his own brand of HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER terror to the townsfolk, getting under Braxton's skin enough that the rancher can't call him off the job and Clayton, who's now just in it for the kill, doesn't even want to be paid. "It's about the job," he says with wild eyes. "I always finish the job."

The revisionist nature of THE MISSOURI BREAKS makes it easy to see what drew Penn to the project. With BONNIE AND CLYDE and LITTLE BIG MAN and even his 1975 box-office flop NIGHT MOVES, a film dismissed in its day and now regarded as one of the essential films of its decade, he was a filmmaker who thrived on the offbeat, the unexpected, and the groundbreaking. For a while in the early-going, THE MISSOURI BREAKS is very similar to the quieter moments in some of Sam Peckinpah's westerns--it's beautifully-photographed (by Michael Butler), with very deliberate pacing and a focus on character development, like Logan initially vowing revenge but finding he might just want to live a quiet farming life. Nicholson turns in a surprisingly restrained, understated performance, rarely raising his voice and only very sporadically resorting to some quintessential "Jack" late in the game when Clayton forces his hand by killing all of his friends. His performance is more in line with the work he had recently done for Michelangelo Antonioni in 1975's THE PASSENGER rather than the McMurphy schtick of CUCKOO'S NEST. He seems happy to be part of the ensemble of great character actors that make up his gang, and he's very charismatic in his scenes with Lloyd, a charming actress who should've been bigger and is largely forgotten today (she went on to co-star in THE CAR, reunite with Forrest and Ryan and Larry Cohen's IT LIVES AGAIN, and have a recurring role on MAGNUM, P.I. before spending the next three decades doing TV guest spots). Penn's handling of the Nicholson end of the plot is indicative of a filmmaker in control of his vision. Where THE MISSOURI BREAKS loses its balance--and not necessarily in a bad way--is with Brando.

This was Brando's first film appearance in three years, and it's essentially the beginning of the final phase of his career: the "I'm just going to riff and do what I want because I'm Marlon Brando and I'm getting paid more than everybody else here" phase. This is the Brando who showed up on the APOCALYPSE NOW set without having read the script and opting to intentionally stall filming because his contract stipulated that he stood to make more money if he was still needed after a certain date. This is the Brando who wore an ice bucket on his head for no reason in THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU. This is the Brando who was now almost openly contemptuous of his craft and the whole concept of Hollywood. Brando had a history of being difficult and, at least with 1969's THE NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY, purposefully attempting to sabotage a film with his antics, but while he may be undisciplined, unfocused, and impossibly hammy in THE MISSOURI BREAKS, he's doing what he needs to do keep things interesting, and from the looks of it, he's having a blast. Penn directed Brando in 1966's underrated THE CHASE, which contains one of the actor's best performances from his mid-to-late 1960s downward spiral. Only a decade had passed, but it wasn't the same controlled, serious Brando who showed up to work on THE MISSOURI BREAKS. Brando first appears around the 35-minute mark, hanging off a horse and sporting an over-the-top Irish brogue that sounds like a tribute to his MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY co-star Richard Harris. His performance is a parade of eccentricities that starts off quirky and rapidly escalates to gonzo. He walks into Pete's funeral, roughs up the body, lying in ice in a casket, and proceeds to grab some ice cubes and rub them all over his face. Elsewhere, Brando's Clayton dons a variety of costumes in his pursuit of Logan's gang, disguising himself as a mandolin-strumming preacher mumbling through mouthful of tobacco and later, maniacally cackling in drag in a frontier granny dress as he hurls a spike through someone's head. He sets another on fire while screaming "Smoked meat!" He plays with bubbles in the bathtub. He taunts Braxton while wearing a dorky derby and munching on a plate of raw carrots like a distinguished Bugs Bunny. When Braxton tells Clayton "You're out of control!" it's hard to tell if McLiam is in character or talking to Brando personally. Brando treats the entire project as a self-indulgent, absurdist playground, opting to goof off to his heart's content on United Artists' dime (interestingly, the studio would go bankrupt in four years with another revisionist western, Michael Cimino's much more costly and similarly-reviled-and-now-reconsidered HEAVEN'S GATE), but unlike some of his later films (CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS: THE DISCOVERY, anyone?), no one can accuse him of phoning this one in. 1976 audiences might've been pissed off, but Brando was having the time of his life.

Brando grows more unhinged with each passing scene, and while his material is at odds with the relative seriousness of the rest of the film (there's bits of dark humor here and there, like a blubbering Ryan crying "It ain't even legal!" when some Canadian Mounties have the audacity to cross the border to take back their stolen horses), they give THE MISSOURI BREAKS much of its unique personality. Over the years, it's Brando's insane performance that's drawn people to the film, not the horse-rustling plot or the romance between Nicholson and Lloyd. THE MISSOURI BREAKS has a level of weirdness that's probably very off-putting for a first-time viewer or those 1976 audiences who expected a more traditional western. Audiences who loathed THE MISSOURI BREAKS responded much more positively to Clint Eastwood's THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES, released a month later, but westerns were generally moving away from the John Wayne tradition (though the Duke went out strong in 1976 with THE SHOOTIST), with offbeat films like THE MISSOURI BREAKS, Robert Altman's BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS OR SITTING BULL'S HISTORY LESSON, and Andrew V. McLaglen's THE LAST HARD MEN. In THE MISSOURI BREAKS, Brando and Nicholson have a few scenes together, but they spend the bulk of the film apart, and the only really lunkheaded artistic decision Penn and McGuane make is in the final confrontation between Clayton and Logan, which is virtually over before it even begins. It's not quite the resolution that the teaming of titans like Brando and Nicholson would seemingly promise.

Though it has yet to enjoy a NIGHT MOVES-style renaissance, THE MISSOURI BREAKS' reputation has improved significantly over the years, at least as far as fans of bizarre cult movies are concerned. In addition to critics hating it, the film also got some bad press after it was condemned by the American Humane Association when one horse drowned and several others were injured at various points in the shoot. It was also revealed that the crew was using tripwires on the horses, a practice that the AHA and the major studios previously agreed to cease, and the responsibility for that rightfully fell on Penn and the producers. It's a slow, strange film, almost revisionist to the point of being an anti-western, and it's hard to argue with anyone who finds it a bit of a misfire (it still rates a "BOMB" in Leonard Maltin's movie guide, which calls it "a great director's worst film and one of the worst 'big' movies ever made"). It's a film frequently at odds with itself, almost like Penn realized that trying to corral Brando was a lost cause so he instead focused on what he could control. Perhaps Nicholson's restraint was a sympathetic concession to his director, like the actor realized the film (and Penn, for the matter) didn't need two outrageous, mischievous scamps trying to out-ham one another. After THE MISSOURI BREAKS, Penn never again tackled a huge, highly-publicized project of this sort. He laid low, spending five years licking his wounds and waiting for the smoke to clear before returning with 1981's character-driven drama FOUR FRIENDS, a film filled with a cast of relative newcomers like Craig Wasson, who wouldn't give him any headaches or force him to measure up to impossible expectations. He made a few more films, the most notable being 1987's underrated suspense thriller DEAD OF WINTER, before retiring after directing an episode of the Sidney Lumet-produced TV series 100 CENTRE STREET in 2001. Penn died in 2010 at the age of 88, hopefully aware that THE MISSOURI BREAKS, while a flawed mess, is a much more worthwhile, intriguing, and entertaining film than the moviegoers of 1976 realized.

Cult Classics Revisited: THE SQUEEZE (1978)

On DVD/Blu-ray: MCCANICK (2014) and SQUATTERS (2014)

In Theaters: THE RAILWAY MAN (2014)

Cult Classics Revisited: THE SIEGE OF FIREBASE GLORIA (1989)

In Theaters: X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST (2014)

On DVD/Blu-ray/Netflix Streaming, Special "DIY Indie" Edition: 24 EXPOSURES (2014) and ESCAPE FROM TOMORROW (2013)

On DVD/Blu-ray, Special "Terrible, Barely Released Remakes" Edition: GAMBIT (2014) and PATRICK (2014)

In Theaters: A MILLION WAYS TO DIE IN THE WEST (2014)

In Theaters/On VOD: FILTH (2014)

On DVD/Blu-ray: DEVIL'S KNOT (2014); IN THE BLOOD (2014); and SMALL TIME (2014)

In Theaters: EDGE OF TOMORROW (2014)

On DVD/Blu-ray: ALAN PARTRIDGE (2014); CAPITAL (2013); and HAUNT (2014)

Cult Classics Revisited: MACHINE GUN MCCAIN (1970)

On DVD/Blu-ray: THE MACHINE (2014) and ALMOST HUMAN (2014)

In Theaters: JERSEY BOYS (2014)

On DVD/Blu-ray, Special "James Caan Co-Starring With Lumbering Lummoxes" Edition: A FIGHTING MAN (2014) and THE OUTSIDER (2014)

In Theaters: THE ROVER (2014)

On DVD/Blu-ray: ENEMY (2014); ROB THE MOB (2014); and WOLF CREEK 2 (2014)

Cult Classics Revisited: SCREAMERS (1981)

Cult Classics Revisited: THE MISSOURI BREAKS (1976)