DELIVER US FROM EVIL
(US - 2014)

Directed by Scott Derrickson. Written by Scott Derrickson and Paul Harris Boardman. Cast: Eric Bana, Edgar Ramirez, Olivia Munn, Joel McHale, Sean Harris, Chris Coy, Dorian Missick, Mike Houston, Lulu Wilson, Olivia Horton, Scott Johnsen. (R, 118 mins)

It's been 41 years since THE EXORCIST was released and filmmakers still crank out demonic possession movies as if they have something new to bring to the table. DVD bargain bins are cluttered with the forgettable likes of STIGMATA (1999), LOST SOULS (2000), THE UNBORN (2009), THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT (2009), THE RITE (2011), THE DEVIL INSIDE (2012), and THE POSSESSION (2012). THE LAST EXORCISM (2010) was a well-done found-footage variant, though it spawned an awful sequel. Writer-director Scott Derrickson and co-writer Paul Harris Boardman fashioned one of the more relatively interesting entries in the current possession parade with 2005's THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE which, while not a great movie by any means, was a surprisingly compelling mix of demonic horror and courtroom drama, a sort-of LAW & ORDER: EXORCISM based on the case of Annaliese Michel (also chronicled in the 2006 German film REQUIEM and the 2011 Asylum knockoff ANNALIESE: THE EXORCIST TAPES) that got a lot of mileage from the presence of respectable actors like Tom Wilkinson and Laura Linney, plus Jennifer Carpenter's impressive performance as the possessed Emily Rose. Derrickson later helmed 2012's grim and disturbing SINISTER without Boardman, but the duo are back together for another possession rehash with the "inspired by true events" DELIVER US FROM EVIL. Based on the experiences of Bronx cop-turned-demonologist Ralph Sarchie (played here by Eric Bana), chronicled in his 2001 book Beware the Night, the hopelessly generic DELIVER US FROM EVIL doles out just about every possession cliche you've been seeing since 1973, but seems especially devoted to recycling major plot points of 1990's THE EXORCIST III, minus William Peter Blatty's sharply unique writing and his direction of numerous unsettling sequences throughout. Derrickson's lazy jump scares can be seen coming a mile away (when Sarchie closely examines grainy surveillance footage, you know an evil face is going to flash on the screen and make him bolt back in his seat) and the possession bits get downright laughable as things go on, as the classic rock-savvy demon seems to have an odd affinity for The Doors, haunting Sarchie with greatest hits staples like "Break on Through (To the Other Side)" and "People are Strange," and even hurls some "Is everybody in?  The ceremony is about to begin!" as the exorcism commences.  Call me a possession genre purist, but I'll take "Your mother sucks cocks in Hell!" any day of the week.


Sarchie is a tough-as-nails cop working the night shift with wisecracking, hot-dogging partner Butler (a miscast Joel McHale, looking ridiculous in an Alice in Chains tee and the seven deadly sins tattooed on his neck).  The job is taking its toll on Sarchie, though perhaps it wouldn't if he didn't let his internal "radar" direct him to jump on every dangerous call that comes over the radio. He's got a loving, church-going wife in Jen (Olivia Munn) and an impossibly cute daughter (Lulu Harris), and Jen looks past his being a lapsed Catholic, lamenting that she--wait for it--feels like she doesn't know him anymore and "Even when ya heah, yanot heah." Over the course of a few shifts, Sarchie and Butler encounter a dead baby thrown in the trash, a woman (Olivia Horton) tossing her child in a ravine outside the lion's den at the Bronx Zoo, a dead handyman (Scott Johnsen) in a basement, and Jimmy (Chris Coy), an Iraq War vet who's beating his wife. They're all connected by another Iraq War vet named Santino (Sean Harris), who's caught on camera and seen by witnesses at all of the crime scenes.  Sarchie is hounded by Father Mendoza (Edgar Ramirez), a loose-cannon priest who dabbles in exorcism on the side. The Bronx zoo mom is a member of his parish, and he's convinced she's demonstrating signs of demonic possession. Soon, these evil forces invade Sarchie's life as he begins seeing and hearing things that aren't there on a conscious level, and his daughter falls victim to the out-of-tune strains of a beat-up jack-in-the-box and a stuffed toy owl that hoots on its own. Mendoza informs Sarchie that he has a gift, that his "radar" for cases is actually a sixth sense gift of a connection to the spirit world, and that the spirit may be targeting him for a past sin.


It's hard to imagine what past sins Bana and Ramirez committed to get stranded in a film as bad as this one. They're fine actors but they can't really bring much life to these characters. The spiritual conversations between Sarchie and Mendoza don't exactly have the same sense of insight, banter, and rich characterization that you've seen in similar scenes between Lee J. Cobb's Lt. Kinderman and Jason Miller's Father Karras in THE EXORCIST, or George C. Scott's Kinderman and Ed Flanders' Father Dyer in THE EXORCIST III. Derrickson is pretty shameless in his EXORCIST III worship throughout, from the cop angle to an irresponsible doctor in the psych ward to a possession victim going on a rampage in the hospital, acting under the control of the demonic spirit. Sarchie even races home once he realizes the possessed Santino is at his house, just like Viveca Lindfors' shears-wielding nurse in Blatty's film. Derrickson and Boardman (the duo also wrote Atom Egoyan's empty DEVIL'S KNOT) try to awkwardly shoehorn in some Iraq War commentary but they never really allow it to develop.  Santino, Jimmy, and the handyman were all vets who encountered a Latin verse carved into the wall of a cave as some evil latched on to them. Are the filmmakers trying to make some kind of heavy-handed analogy between PTSD and possession?  Who knows?  They can't even follow through on all of the plot threads, the constant Doors references are just silly, the SNL "Da War of Da Woilds" accents overbaked, the SE7EN-inspired set design too darkly-photographed, and the only thing that really keeps your attention is the recurring continuity flub with the bandaging on Sarchie's right arm that appears and disappears throughout. Drab and dull, overlong and underthought, the tired and vacant DELIVER US FROM EVIL wheezes its way to its weak conclusion, seemingly working from a checklist rather than an actual script.

REPENTANCE
(US - 2014)


When Forest Whitaker won his Oscar for 2006's THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND, it was just as much for his powerful performance as Idi Amin as it was an acknowledgment of his over 20 years of consistently exemplary work in lead and character roles. Whitaker was as reliable as they came, and his presence almost always meant a good film would be better or, worst-case scenario, a bad film would be bearable at least while he was onscreen.  Since the Oscar, he's been on a skid that easily rivals Cuba Gooding, Jr., Nicolas Cage, and Adrien Brody, but Whitaker's astonishing mutation into one of our current worst actors is somehow more alarming than the others, mainly because when you see him giving these terrible performances in terrible movies like THE EXPERIMENT, CATCH .44, and FREELANCERS, you can see he's giving it everything he's got, and then some.  Perhaps he knows the material is shit and he's overcompensating in his attempts to turn it into something. Twitching, gesticulating, and yelling are now his constant crutches. But even being in the presence of the likes of Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson, and Sam Shepard in OUT OF THE FURNACE didn't help matters: Whitaker's performance as an inexplicably grunting police chief was so bad that he stopped the movie cold every time he opened his mouth. Whitaker's past accomplishments will always be his and, by all accounts, he is a very nice and genuine guy, but seriously, what the hell is going on here? Why can't he act anymore? Watching Forest Whitaker in most of his recent films is almost always a painful, depressing sight.


He scrapes bottom with REPENTANCE, and since he also produced it, he has no one to blame but himself, though there's plenty of that to share with director Philippe Caland and screenwriter Shintaro Shimosawa, a former producer and writer on Whitaker's justifiably short-lived CBS series CRIMINAL MINDS: SUSPECT BEHAVIOR. Shimosawa has also logged time on Fox's hilariously awful THE FOLLOWING, which should be another huge red flag about what awaits the viewer in REPENTANCE (the film is a remake of a still-unreleased Caland film titled THE GURU & THE GYPSY, completed in 2012 and featuring Caland in the role played by Whitaker here). If you've ever wished for more socially-conscious torture porn with an uplifting, spiritual ending, then REPENTANCE is where it's at. In what's now a typically mannered, hyperventilating performance, Whitaker stars as Angel, a grieving and clearly troubled man unable to cope with the death of his mother. He still feels her and sees her following him around. He seeks the guidance of self-help author and life coach Tommy Carter (Anthony Mackie), who uses meditation and yoga to help Angel address the psychological blocks in his grieving process. But Tommy has his own secrets: he survived a near-death experience four years earlier, and the circumstances around it have led his older brother Ben (Mike Epps) to resent him, his success, and his marriage to Maggie (Sanaa Lathan).  When Tommy tries to break off the sessions with Angel, Angel knocks him out cold and goes full MISERY on his favorite writer, holding him captive in a bomb shelter under the house and inflicting all manner of torture and pain on him, starting with a spike through the leg. Obviously, there's a connection between Tommy and the death of Angel's mother that might have something to with the opening scene of Tommy and Ben driving drunk four years earlier and running over someone.  And there is the primary problem with REPENTANCE: Caland and Shimosawa never met a twist they couldn't telegraph ludicrously far in advance to the point where it's basically a self-spoiler. Obviously the person they hit is Angel's mother. Obviously, Angel knows this and has targeted Tommy. REPENTANCE also requires its characters to behave like idiots: after Tommy goes missing for several days and Maggie is informed by his manager (Peter Weller) that he's been a no-show at his book signings, Maggie never calls the police.  Instead, she just keeps texting him and leaving messages.  After Tommy's been missing a little while longer, Ben gets a text from him (actually sent by Angel) to meet him at a strange address. Is Ben suspicious of this strange address? Does he call the cops or even Maggie? Nope. He goes to the address, and it's Angel's mostly boarded-up house. Again, does Ben call the cops? Is he alarmed? Nope. He stands around until he gets conked over the head by Angel and dragged in the basement with his brother because Shimosawa is a shitty writer. The crammed-in feel-good ending is insultingly stupid, but considering what came before, what else do you expect?  I might suggest a life coach for Forest Whitaker if he continues squandering his talent in shit-shows like REPENTANCE. At least we'll always have GHOST DOG.  (R, 94 mins)


RAZE
(US/France - 2014)


New Zealand-born stuntwoman Zoe Bell is best known for doubling Uma Thurman in KILL BILL and playing herself in Quentin Tarantino's DEATH PROOF portion of GRINDHOUSE. Since then, she's turned up in small roles in mostly DTV actioners and is part of The Asylum's upcoming all-female EXPENDABLES knockoff MERCENARIES, with the likes of Vivica A. Fox, Cynthia Rothrock, Brigitte Nielson, and Kristanna Loken. Bell's latest film RAZE gives her the lead as well as a producing credit, and reunites her with DEATH PROOF co-stars Tracie Thoms and, in a brief cameo, Rosario Dawson, whose presence here proves that she's indeed a Bell friend, but not a good enough friend that she'd stick around any longer than absolutely necessary. RAZE is a numbingly violent, offensively idiotic waste of time from director Josh C. Waller, giving us back-to-back bed-shitters with this right on this heels of his awful MCCANICK. Bell is Sabrina, who wakes up in some kind of underground bunker with garishly red Dario Argento hallways. She's an unwilling participant in a twisted tournament hosted by cartoonishly psychotic high-society couple Joseph (Doug Jones) and Elizabeth (Sherilyn Fenn sighting!), who have narrowed it down to the final six in a fight to the death.  If you lose or refuse to fight, your dearest loved one will also be killed. They've got Sabrina's daughter and she's determined to emerge victorious.


What is the point of RAZE?  Imagine FIGHT CLUB with just the fights, and David Fincher botching the job. It's basically just one shaky-cam, quick-cut fight sequence after another, all ending with the loser getting their face beaten to hamburger. Joseph and Elizabeth appear to be the Tyler Durden organizers for the EYES WIDE SHUT one-percenter set, but to what end?  We get the what, but what about the why?  A lot of people seem to be in the know about the tournament. But who? Cops? Politicians? Other movers & shakers? Why is it taking place?  RAZE is indicative of the kind of "born on third base and thinks it hit a triple" mentality of today's cult cinema, the notion that all you need to do is show up and make the reference and you're "cult." RAZE can't even be bothered to make the reference. Many reviews have likened it to an old-school, 1970s women-in-prison movie. Anyone who thinks this has obviously never seen an old-school, 1970s women-in-prison movie. It's hard to care about anything when we learn almost nothing about the characters and there's no context in which the story exists. The women are abducted and taken to this place and they fight to the death. There's no suspense, no satire, no commentary on class struggle or social issues, no underlying themes, no message of empowerment for women, and ultimately, no answers and no payoff at the end. Where's the entertainment here? It's just women pummeling each other into ground chuck.  There's nothing here. Waller is so bad at his job that both Sabrina's fight with psychotic captive Phoebe (Rebecca Marshall) and her revenge on her captors are anti-climactic letdowns. RAZE is one of the most shallow, miserable film experiences I've had in quite some time. It's not overtly misogynistic because the movie would be equally worthless if it had just men in the tournament, but it sure does feel like girl-on-girl wife-batterer porn disguised as a BLOODSPORT knockoff. Is it supposed to be edgy or subversive because it involves women? If so, then Waller and screenwriter Robert Beaucage are even dumber than RAZE already makes them look. The worst film of 2014 so far. (R, 92 mins)

JODOROWSKY'S DUNE
(France/US - 2014)


Legendary Chilean cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky has been best-known for his surrealistic midnight movie classics EL TOPO (1970) and THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973), as well as his 1989 masterpiece SANTA SANGRE.  Now, however, at the age of 84, he's gotten the most attention of his career for a film he didn't make, an abandoned adaptation of Frank Herbert's classic 1965 sci-fi novel Dune. Jodorowsky and French producer Michel Seydoux began putting their DUNE together over 1974-75, with the director given carte blanche by the producer with a then-enormous $15 million budget. Jodorowsky's ambitions for the project almost went beyond what cinema of the time deemed capable--he wanted the film to resemble an acid trip without actually dropping acid--and he began to assemble a team of what he called "spiritual warriors" with the ability to pull it off. He commissioned artists like H.R. Giger, Jean Giraud (aka "Moebius"), and Chris Foss to design elaborate storyboards compiled in a tome thicker than a phone book, copies of which were eventually shipped to Hollywood studios.  Jodorowsky got Pink Floyd and French prog band Magma to compose the music, and DARK STAR's Dan O'Bannon to design the special effects after declaring 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY's Douglas Trumbull too "technical" and not spiritual enough. He secured what would've been a once-in-a-lifetime cast including Salvador Dali as the Emperor, Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen, David Carradine as Duke Leto, Jodorowsky's son Brontis as Duke's son Paul Atreides, Mick Jagger as Feyd Rautha, plus Udo Kier, Dali muse Amanda Lear, and Gloria Swanson. With the script, crew, and cast already locked down, Jodorowsky and Seydoux sought $5 million in additional financing from a Hollywood studio and the project--and Jodorowsky's dream--promptly collapsed. Studio execs balked at the extent of the filmmaker's vision and the lack of commercial appeal. The studios liked the storyboards but felt Jodorowsky, based on his sales pitch and his past films, was too "out there" and too unwilling to compromise. They wanted a 90-minute sci-fi movie, where Jodorowsky's script, if shot as it was, would've led to a film running at least 12 hours. With Jodorowsky and Seydoux unable to obtain further funding to construct the sets and begin filming, their DUNE was cancelled in pre-production, and the two men parted ways.


Documentary director Frank Pavich ultimately presents JODOROWSKY'S DUNE as a classic "art vs. commerce" scenario, with the gregarious but obsessive Jodorowsky committed to the DUNE he wanted to make and not really interested in how much money it would cost or lose. Only when the subject of money comes up does Jodorowsky demonstrate any bitterness and resentment, grabbing a wad of cash out of his pocket and bemoaning that "it's just paper...it has no soul." Of course, DUNE was eventually made by David Lynch for Dino De Laurenttis in 1984, and though Jodorowsky says he admires Lynch greatly, he was happy that he found the Lynch film "terrible." Jodorowsky's DUNE exists only as an epic storyboard book, and Pavich, via animation, plays out a number of the sequences in a film that never was. What's very intriguing is how much imagery and ideas in these storyboards ended up in other movies: O'Bannon, Giger, and Foss all worked on ALIEN (1979), and the influence in some of the designs, even in the much later ALIEN-related PROMETHEUS (2012) is obvious when you see the work they did for Jodorowsky. DRIVE director Nicolas Winding Refn states "His DUNE never got made, but its fingerprints are all over other movies that came after. If he made DUNE, history is changed. You wouldn't have ALIEN, and without that, you wouldn't have BLADE RUNNER or THE MATRIX," adding that the Hollywood studios were "afraid" of Jodorowsky and how his DUNE would've changed everything. Jodorowsky's storyboards circulated around Hollywood for years and Pavich shows that designs and artwork in them are apparent in numerous future films from that time, from STAR WARS (1977) to FLASH GORDON (1980) to THE TERMINATOR (1984), and the later CONTACT (1997). Pavich lets Jodorowsky speak at length and the film is just as much about his failed, would-be game-changer as it is his dedication to his art itself, which he conveys without ever coming off as pompous or pretentious, often telling great stories like one where he gets a firm commitment Welles by promising to hire his favorite chef to prepare his meals daily (some of the filmmaker's stories sound a little suspect, especially in the way he never seems to know how to contact the people he wants but instead keeps happening to bump into them somewhere in Paris). JODOROWSKY'S DUNE is a fascinating film that contemplates just how much film history might've been altered if Hollywood was willing to take a chance on one man's impossibly audacious and quite possibly lunatic vision. (PG-13, 90 mins)


STAGE FRIGHT
(Canada/US - 2014)


This blood-splattered horror musical gets off to a solid start with a very Dario Argento/OPERA-esque prologue and a legitimately inspired opening credits production number before rapidly exhausting every bit of its gimmick. Films like Brian De Palma's classic PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE (1974) and SAW II, III, and IV director Darren Lynn Bousman's more recent REPO: THE GENETIC OPERA (2008) have done the horror musical thing in a stronger fashion in the past, and regardless of how you felt about REPO, at least it was sincere and stuck to its convictions, right down to the casting of Sarah Brightman in a key role. STAGE FRIGHT can't decide if it wants to be a legitimate musical or one that's ironically bad-on-purpose, with a killer who uses a butcher knife as a capo before a shredding guitar solo as he shrieks like a laryngitic Rob Halford-by-way-of-Axl Rose while offing his victims. The novelty wears off quickly, though writer/director Jerome Sable does a nice job with some of the outrageously gory giallo-derived killings. Teenager Camilla (Allie MacDonald) and her twin brother Buddy (Douglas Smith) work in the kitchen at Center Stage, a summer performing arts camp for kids run by the manager (Meat Loaf) of their late mother Kylie Swanson (Minnie Driver), a beloved stage star brutally murdered ten years earlier by a masked killer in the opening sequence. This summer's Center Stage production is the musical The Haunting of the Opera, which, of course, was Kylie's last production. Camilla tries out for the lead role to honor the memory of her mom, and naturally gets the part, and before long, the same masked killer--looking like a refugee from the EYES WIDE SHUT orgy--starts murdering those behind the production one by one.  STAGE FRIGHT sometimes resembles an old-school '80s splatterfest and would probably function better as such, but after the opening credits (done in the John Carpenter font), the musical numbers do nothing but slow things down, making this fairly short film seem much longer than it is. Some of the killings are imaginative, and MacDonald is an appealing final girl, but the killer's identity and an accompanying twist are both obvious. A passable time-killer, but if you feel the need to watch a slasher film titled STAGE FRIGHT, where members of a theater troupe are dispatched one-by-one, you're better off checking out Argento protege Michele Soavi's identically-titled 1987 cult classic again instead. (R, 88 mins)

DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES
(US/UK - 2014)

Directed by Matt Reeves. Written by Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver. Cast: Andy Serkis, Jason Clarke, Gary Oldman, Keri Russell, Toby Kebbell, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Kirk Acevedo, Nick Thurston, Karin Konoval, Terry Notary, Judy Greer, Jon Eyez, Doc Shaw. (PG-13, 130 mins)

The 2011 reboot RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES was one of the biggest surprises in recent years: a smart summer blockbuster with convincing CGI, anchored by the superb motion capture performance of Andy Serkis as ape leader Caesar. Even in a mere three years, the technology has improved enough that Serkis, the face of cinematic motion capture between his work as Caesar, as Gollum in the LORD OF THE RINGS films, and in the title role of Peter Jackson's KING KONG, turns in his finest performance yet. Serkis and the other ape actors manage to create living, breathing performances that are visually enhanced by CGI, which is different from letting CGI do all of the work. On top of that, it's just a terrific film, the kind of grand, satisfying, action-packed entertainment that used to be what summer movies were all about. Of any recent summer franchise other than the DARK KNIGHT trilogy, the rebooted PLANET OF THE APES comes the closest to conveying the feeling that these might stand the test of time, certainly more than something along the lines of TRANSFORMERS.


Set a decade after the events of RISE, DAWN opens after a "simian flu" pandemic, generated by the Alzheimer's drug testing taking place in the first film, has wiped out most of humanity and turned the planet into a global wasteland. Caesar is the wise leader of a massive ape community in Muir Woods just outside of what was San Francisco. The apes sign, many speak functional English, and they've created a vibrant, self-sufficient society.  That is, until a small group of humans enters the woods and the trigger-happy Carver (Kirk Acevedo) shoots and kills an ape. The leader of the group is Malcolm (Jason Clarke), a kind-hearted former CDC official accompanied by his nurse wife Ellie (Keri Russell), and his son Alexander (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and a few others.  They're trying to get to a nearby dam with the ability to restore power to the San Francisco area and after some initially tense unease, Malcolm reaches an understanding with Caesar, who allows them to venture to the dam as long as they turn in all of their guns and let the apes accompany them  Of course, the idiotic Carver has managed to stash one away and of course he can't help himself and it ends up drawn on an ape, prompting Caesar to order all of them back to San Francisco. Malcolm pleads his case by keeping Carver confined to one of their trucks, earning the trust of Caesar, who wishes for peace and for the apes and humans to live their lives without intruding on one another. Caesar's tentative truce with the humans, which is helped by Ellie administering antiobiotics to Caesar's gravely-ill wife Cornelia (Judy Greer), annoys the militant Koba (Toby Kebbell), who holds a grudge against the humans who scarred him and experimented on him in a science lab. Koba repeatedly tries to push Caesar into fighting with the humans, even convincing Caesar's insecure, impressionable son Blue Eyes (Nick Thurston) to turn against his father. With no other options and determined to start a war against the humans, Koba commits an unthinkable act that pushes the situation its breaking point, quickly escalating into chaos and large-scale destruction.


RISE director Rupert Wyatt has been replaced by CLOVERFIELD and LET ME IN director Matt Reeves. Reeves and longtime Alan Parker cinematographer Michael Seresin (MIDNIGHT EXPRESS, ANGEL HEART) shot DAWN in 3-D, but it honestly doesn't add much to the experience and feels like the only superfluous element of the film.  Screenwriters Mark Bomback, Rick Jaffa, and Amanda Silver use the little-loved BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1973) as the template for the first portion of the film with the exploration of the ape community under the leadership of Caesar (played in more classically articulate fashion back then by Roddy McDowall) and his recurring philosophical disagreements with Koba, the new incarnation of BATTLE's warmongering Gen. Aldo (Claude Akins). Like Koba, Aldo commits an unspeakable act but against a different individual and at a different point in the film. DAWN isn't a straight up BATTLE redux, though as it proceeds, it becomes an homage to the second half of CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (1972), as McDowall's Caesar leads the ape revolt against the humans. Serkis' Caesar also leads a revolt--teaming with like-minded humans against Kobe's rebel faction of apes as well as a group of humans led by ex-military man Dreyfus (Gary Oldman), who isn't exactly a villain but is more than willing to wipe out the apes if it means the survival of his own community. Almost every character, be they human or ape, has a doppelganger--Malcolm and Caesar in their wish for peace, Dreyfus and Caesar in doing whatever is necessary to protect their kingdom, Carver and Koba in their need for conflict and thirst for blood, Alexander and Blue Eyes as impressionable youths trying to prove something to their fathers. It's these relationships that give DAWN a bit more emotional resonance than your standard summer explosion movie.  There's plenty of that, but the strong points of DAWN lie in the quiet moments with little or no dialogue, in a look of understanding and respect, or a touch of hands to signify trust and forgiveness.


The actors playing the humans are fine, but the key performances come from Serkis and Kebbell. Kebbell (ROCKNROLLA, THE VETERAN) is so good here that he might even steal some of Serkis' motion-capture thunder. He manages to make Koba more than a one-dimensional villain, as early on, he has no interest in supplanting Caesar as the leader and only acts in his king's best interest. Only later, when his hatred of humans and his long-suppressed anger over his physical and emotional scars pushes him into committing the most forbidden of acts in the ape culture, does he turn into a tyrannical, terrifying monster. Motion capture is such that the actors do the majority of their acting with their eyes and their facial muscles, and even more so than Serkis, Kebbell's eyes sell Koba's rage and hatred in a way that's spine-chilling.  It's a remarkable performance in an excellent film in a rebooted franchise that, two films in, has surpassed all expectations of quality and relevance.

SNOWPIERCER
(South Korea - 2013; US release 2014)

Directed by Bong Joon Ho. Written by Bong Joon Ho and Kelly Masterson. Cast: Chris Evans, Song Kang Ho, Tilda Swinton, Ed Harris, John Hurt, Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer, Ewen Bremner, Ko Asung, Alison Pill, Luke Pasqualino, Vlad Ivanov, Adnon Haskovic, Emma Levie, Clark Middleton, Tomas Lemarquis, Paul Lazar, Steve Park, Marcanthonee Jon Reis, Karel Vasely. (R, 126 mins)

The instant cult classic of the summer, the $40 million SNOWPIERCER was released in its native South Korea and the rest of Asia a year ago, where it became a blockbuster hit. It opened in Europe not long after, but its US release hit a roadblock. The Weinstein Company acquired the US distribution rights, but expressed concern over its commercial viability if it was to get a wide release. Harvey Weinstein wanted changes made, demanding the 126-minute running time be cut down to 100 minutes with voiceover exposition added at the beginning and end--in short, the same demands he made on Wong Kar Wai's THE GRANDMASTER. SNOWPIERCER director Bong Joon Ho (MEMORIES OF MURDER, THE HOST), making his (for the most part) English-language debut, refused to comply. Weinstein made the changes anyway and focus-grouped both cuts of the film to test audiences. When Bong's version got a better response, Weinstein agreed to release the director's cut, but demoted the film to Radius/TWC, the company's B-movie/genre outfit, presumably for VOD and a brief theatrical run. Word of the film's purported burial spread online and that, coupled with overwhelmingly positive critical reviews, the fact that it was a huge hit overseas, and a knockout US trailer, led to a groundswell of interest from North American audiences who wanted to see the film. It opened on eight screens two weeks ago, expanding to 250 last week, and now it's on VOD in what the Weinstein Company is spinning as a "bold new distribution platform," or some such industry jargon. Maybe it was planned all along, the same way Paramount released PARANORMAL ACTIVITY only because we "demanded" it, or maybe Weinstein's just being a bullying dick, but regardless, SNOWPIERCER is finally being made accessible stateside.


First off, let's not kid ourselves: there's no way this was going to play as a wide-release summer blockbuster, even if Bong relented and cut 26 minutes out of it. Length is not the issue in terms of commercial viability, especially when TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION runs nearly three hours. No, SNOWPIERCER is just a strange film. It exists in that place that precious few films can thrive, especially in today's cinematic culture: the tiny space between the multiplex and the arthouse. There's enough action to please the blockbuster crowd, and SNOWPIERCER has its own singularly unique vision and imagination. But it hammers its points so hard that its overtly aggressive lack of subtlety almost becomes comical at times.  Of course, it's intentionally heavy-handed in its mission and its points are valid, but this kind of metaphorical narrative can spill over into self-parody if it's not handled the right way. Bong never loses control of the story, but it goes in directions that will fly just fine in the art house but probably elicit eye-rolling and dismissive snickers in a packed multiplex. That's not a judgment on the intelligence of a movie audience--indeed, SNOWPIERCER, while enormously entertaining and a film I'll revisit frequently, isn't quite as smart or deep as it thinks it is--it's just an observation on a distributor understanding moviegoer expectations and knowing its target audience. Releasing this nationwide on 3000 screens would've resulted in a box-office flop. By letting word-of-mouth spread, SNOWPIERCER has the potential to gain momentum and become something we don't see much of anymore: a genuine sleeper hit.


In the year 2014, the governments of the world worked together to disperse a cooling agent called CW-7 into Earth's atmosphere as a way to combat escalating temperatures caused by global warming. It worked a little too well, freezing the planet and rendering humanity extinct. The relatively few survivors are corralled onto The Rattling Ark, an impossibly-long supertrain on an equally impossible track that circles the entire planet over the course of a year. Cut to 2031, and the Rattling Ark is a high-speed symbol of the world's economic and social structure: it churns in perpetuity, with its own ecosystem and food sources, gathering water from the snow it filters from the exterior of the train, and seemingly self-propelled so long as everyone and everything are in their right place.  Order must be kept. The privileged live in comfort toward the front of the train, the underclass "freeloaders" are herded in the rear in horrific living conditions  The front dine on sushi, they frequent salons, and their children attend school, the rear subsist on gelatinous "protein bars" made of ground-up insects and vermin and are routinely beaten and subjugated by ruthless, militarized security officials. The denizens of the tail, led by Curtis (Chris Evans), Edgar (Jamie Bell), and the wise Gilliam (John Hurt) are plotting a takeover of the train to make it to the front and gain control of "The Sacred Engine." Mason (Tilda Swinton) is the representative of the Rattling Ark's engineer, the revered Wilford the Benevolent (Ed Harris), the limitlessly wealthy magnate who designed the train and the global track and, as she often reminds those in the tail, was kind enough to allow them to live. Mason and her goonish guards try to quash the uprising but it backfires, and Curtis and company take Mason hostage and start moving up car by car with the help of Namgoong (Bong regular Song Kang Ho), who's been held in the prisoner car with his daughter Yona (Ko Asung, who also played Song's daughter in THE HOST).  Both are addicted to a drug called Kronole, which Curtis uses to bribe Nangoong into aiding their cause. Nangoong helped design the lock system on the train and knows how to get through each doors leading to each car, but has his own idea about what to do when they finally get to the front.


Essentially a REVOLT ON THE DYSTOPIAN EXPRESS or THE SACRED ENGINE THAT COULD, if you will, SNOWPIERCER is pretty blunt in its politics:  the one-percenters rule the world and will do what they have to do maintain order and keep everyone in their place (it's certainly no accident that there's no middle-class on the Rattling Ark). It's not subtle in its messaging, which is rather obvious and ham-fisted to the point that your enjoyment of the film is probably predicated on where you stand on the political spectrum. Needless to say, this is probably not a film that's going to play well with the Fox News crowd (SPOILER ALERT: Swinton's Mason is not the hero). SNOWPIERCER's strengths lie the sheer audacity of its story and its presentation, incorporating elements of class struggle, post-apocalyptic nightmare, and dark humor bordering on absurdism. It's equal parts Terry Gilliam (as in Hurt's character's surname), Jean-Pierre Jeunet & Marc Caro, Stanley Kubrick, Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and Luis Bunuel. It may not be the best film of the summer, but you won't find one that's more ambitious, visionary, and just plain odd.


Based on the 1982 French graphic novel Le Transperceneige, SNOWPIERCER was scripted by Bong and Kelly Masterson (BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD). The cast is excellent across the board, headed by a never-better Evans, who gets solid support from Hurt, Bell, Song, Ko, and Octavia Spencer as a mother whose son is taken to the front of the train for undisclosed reasons after Wilford the Benevolent's sinister attack dog Claude (Emma Levie) sizes him up with a measuring tape and has him taken away. As good as everyone is, they all take a backseat to an absolutely brilliant performance by Swinton, who's unforgettable as the ruthless Mason. Looking like a political cartoonist's mean-spirited caricature of Margaret Thatcher with a vocal impression to match and a case of the crazy eyes to rival Eva Green in 300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE, Swinton owns SNOWPIERCER whenever she's onscreen (though honorable mention must go to Alison Pill as a deranged teacher indoctrinating the children with the philosophy of Wilford). Whether she's coldly reciting the rules of the train ("Everyone in their place!") or gleefully awaiting the outcome of a clash between the rear dwellers and her officers ("Precisely 74% of you shall die...this is going to be good!") or hospitably offering sushi after she's been taken prisoner, Swinton delivers a master class in scene stealing, and in a just world, both she and Mason's dentures would be duking it out for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

THE PYJAMA GIRL CASE
(Italy/Spain - 1977)

Written and directed by Flavio Mogherini. Cast: Ray Milland, Dalila Di Lazzaro, Mel Ferrer, Michele Placido, Howard Ross, Ramiro Oliveros, Rod Mullinar, Eugene Walter, Fernando Fernan Gomez, Vanessa Vitale, Giacomo Assandri, Luis Barboo. (Unrated, 102 mins)

The Italian giallo craze, popularized in the early 1970s by, among many others, Dario Argento's THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE and DEEP RED and other films by Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, and Sergio Martino, was dying down by the latter part of the decade. Though gialli were still being produced (Antonio Bido's THE BLOODSTAINED SHADOW is a solid offering from 1978) and would still be made into the 1980s (Argento's TENEBRE in 1982, Lamberto Bava's A BLADE IN THE DARK in 1983), the filmmakers were moving into other areas, as evidenced by the supernatural element woven into Argento's DEEP RED as early as 1975. He would soon go into the realm of the overtly supernatural with SUSPIRIA (1977) and INFERNO (1980), while Fulci would find his niche with his 1979 classic ZOMBIE. During this giallo downturn, some films were being produced that were classified as giallo, but didn't strictly adhere to all of the genre tropes and expectations, like Pupi Avati's dark, bleak THE HOUSE WITH LAUGHING WINDOWS and Paolo Cavara's sordid giallo/polizia hybrid PLOT OF FEAR (both 1976). Flavio Mogherini's THE PYJAMA GIRL CASE (1977), despite sporting a title that sounds like a lost Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew mystery, is one of the most unconventional offerings in the giallo subgenre for a variety of reasons, starting with it being set and shot in Australia even though it's an Italian/Spanish co-production. Basing his film on a 1934 murder case in Australia, where the pajama-clad body of 28-year-old Linda Agostini was found mutilated and partially burned beyond recognition, Mogherini wasn't interested in making a typical giallo, and by subverting the expectations that came with that label, he created a haunting and very unusual film that was ahead of its time in some ways. It never scored a US theatrical release and was probably a hard sell considering its unorthodox construction that's admittedly confusing and seems choppy and disorienting for a first-time viewer. I didn't like THE PYJAMA GIRL CASE the first time I saw it, but it's a rare mystery that actually plays better a second and third time through, once you know its trickery and its final revelation and can admire the sleight of hand of Mogherini and editor Adriano Tagliavia (Pieter Jan Brugge's little-seen 2004 thriller THE CLEARING, with Robert Redford and Willem Dafoe, plays out in a similar fashion). Mogherini, occasionally to the film's detriment, is so concerned with the how of his gimmick that he often glosses over or outright neglects the what and the why, sometimes cramming key plot points into place to force the twist to work. It's a flawed film with its share of stumbles along the way, and its structure was probably a lot more innovative in 1977 before fractured timelines and the ubiquity of twist endings became more commonplace, but THE PYJAMA GIRL CASE is one of the most ambitious gialli of its time. Even though it doesn't quite knock it out of the park, it constantly aims for the fences and has deservedly--and quietly--become a cult item after being rescued from decades of obscurity by Blue Underground's 2006 DVD.



After a woman's body is found on a Sydney beach, wearing yellow pajamas and with her face burned beyond recognition, the police are baffled. This prompts crotchety, retired Inspector Timpson (Ray Milland in one of his best late-career roles), who misses the action and has grown bored spending his days tending to his flower garden, to offer his services on his own time ("Don't expect to get paid!" the chief yells). Timpson is an old-school sleuth who follows his gut instinct and has no time for the psychological analyses of college-educated cops like Inspectors Taylor (Ramiro Oliveros) and Morris (Rod Mullinar), who have been put in charge of the case. They initially have no leads since they don't even know the victim's identity, resulting in the film's most memorable scene, a desperation decision to publicly display the woman's mutilated corpse in the hopes that someone might recognize her (this actually happened in the 1934 source case). After Taylor and Morris beat a confession out of local pervert Quint (Giacomo Assandri), the case is closed despite Timpson's protestations otherwise. Meanwhile, Linda (Dalila Di Lazzaro, best known as the "female zombie" in FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN) has recently been seduced by a bisexual female friend who wore yellow pajamas very similar to the murder victim. With the woman gone on a trip and temporarily out of the picture, Linda goes back to juggling the three men in her life: her Italian immigrant husband Antonio (Michele Placido), his buddy Roy (Howard Ross), and Prof. Douglas (Mel Ferrer), her elite, upper-class sugar daddy. The parallel narratives intersect on occasion until fusing in a way that should've landed with more oomph than Mogherini gives it, but once you rewatch it knowing how it all plays out, it's fascinating to observe the way he obfuscates and intentionally misdirects the audience. It's easy for a first-time viewer to leave THE PYJAMA GIRL CASE feeling gypped and disgruntled, but there's a lot more going on it than just a simple murder mystery or a cookie-cutter giallo, and its rewards might only manifest on subsequent viewings. That's more work than most people might wish to devote to a movie, which is why this film has flown so under-the-radar for so many years, with its cult growing as those who are pulled back to it discover its intricacies and what Mogherini was really doing.


Though some interiors were shot in Rome, most of the film was done on location in Sydney, and the presence of future PATRICK and BREAKER MORANT co-star Mullinar gives it some legitimate Aussie/Ozploitation credentials. Mogherini uses the downtown, business district of Sydney in ways that make it seem as barren, desolate, and unwelcoming as the intimidating Outback of something like WAKE IN FRIGHT (1971). There's an unmistakable Antonioni chilliness to some of the location work as Mogherini frequently sets exterior shots in vast, empty spaces--often with the Sydney Opera House in the shot to establish scale--emphasizing the isolation and loneliness of the characters. Antonio's introduction is one of the film's most striking moments as Mogherini has Placido wandering through an empty downtown Sydney business district, surrounded by the concrete and steel of towering skyscrapers as he eats lunch alone on a bench without a soul in sight. It's a scene that, taken out of context, could easily be mistaken for a new version of THE LAST MAN ON EARTH or THE OMEGA MAN. That sense of isolation is a key theme for Mogherini:  Italian Antonio, German Roy, and Dutch Linda are all immigrants who have ended up in Sydney. They often complain that they're second-class citizens, intimating that Australians aren't particularly hospitable to outsiders. I don't see the film making this claim overtly as a knock on Australia specifically, as one could say that immigrants could feel that way anywhere.  Linda gets dealt even worse as she's constantly leered at and objectified by men, whether she's stopping at a bar or working her shift at a restaurant, where every male customer checks her out as she walks away and makes no effort to be subtle about it. Even the men who line up at the public viewing of the corpse seem to be doing it more for the chance to ogle another naked woman. With the exception of Timpson, the men in THE PYJAMA GIRL CASE are a sad and immature lot. Almost all of them have homes lined with nudie magazine pics on the walls, and Quint is introduced vigorously and openly masturbating to his neighbor as she hangs laundry in her yard, only to be rudely interrupted by Timpson and Taylor barging into his shack of a house (the sight of 70-year-old Oscar winner Milland making the "jerk off" motion in mockery of Quint is itself worth the price of admission). Roy claims Antonio is his friend but thinks nothing of sleeping with Linda. Even the seemingly mature Prof. Douglas is a self-centered bastard, wooing Linda with promises of a life together only to bail when she finally takes him up on his offer, almost as if he suddenly remembered they met while he was on a business trip to Amsterdam, where Linda was working as a prostitute before following him to Sydney (there's also another love triangle involving the professor, Linda, and her bisexual lover with the yellow pajamas). It's the rejection of Prof. Douglas that sends Linda on a self-loathing, self-destructive downward spiral that eventually starts bringing the dual narratives together.




Mogherini (1922-1994) didn't direct anything else of note other than the minor Marcello Mastroianni comedy LUNATICS AND LOVERS (1976).  He spent most of his career in art direction and production design on films like Mario Bava's DANGER: DIABOLIK (1968) and Federico Fellini's FELLINI SATYRICON (1969). With his unique depiction of Sydney as harsh and almost alien world (almost none of the Australian characters sound Australian, which effectively adds to the sense of detachment even if it's just a happy accident courtesy of a fast-working Nick Alexander-led dubbing crew), supplemented by a Riz Ortolani score that often sounds like a dry run for Giorgio Moroder disco (the songs croaked by Amanda Lear, however insidiously they burrow into your head, are an acquired taste regardless of how relevant their lyrics are), Mogherini created an uneven yet inventive and melancholy giallo like no other, offering a unique view of Australia through an Italian lens to tell a story of lost souls adrift, strangers in a strange land who left home out of a sense of not belonging only to arrive at a place that was even less welcoming. Perhaps THE PYJAMA GIRL CASE was ahead of its time in more ways than plot structure.

THE IMMIGRANT
(US/France - 2014)

Directed by James Gray. Written by James Gray and Richard Menello. Cast: Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix, Jeremy Renner, Dagmara Dominczyk, Yelena Solovey, Angela Sarafyan, Jicky Schnee, Antoni Corone, Maja Wampuszyk, Ilia Volok, Joseph Calleja. (R, 117 mins)

"You are not nothing."

Writer/director James Gray isn't the most prolific of American filmmakers with just five films over his 20-year career (plus co-writing this year's BLOOD TIES), but there's been a growing consensus that he's among the most under-appreciated. His latest film, THE IMMIGRANT, was poised to be his breakthrough that would get him the accolades and respect that's been a long time coming. Early buzz on THE IMMIGRANT prior to its May 2014 release was overwhelmingly positive, and then...nothing. US distributor The Weinstein Company began slowly rolling it out and abruptly pulled the plug. It trickled into some major cities and the people who saw it raved about it.  As recently as last week, it was still playing in a few art houses in the US, but at its widest release, it was only on 150 screens. Whatever momentum that was building for the film has long since stalled and while there's no DVD/Blu-ray street date as of yet, it unexpectedly turned up as a Netflix Instant streaming title this week. While such a move makes THE IMMIGRANT available to more audiences than ever, the treatment given to the film by its distributor borders on criminal, and once again, Gray is relegated to being the next big thing in American cinema, which he apparently always will be.


Gray's 1994 debut LITTLE ODESSA got some good reviews but landed him with the "Tarantino wannabe" tag and the film lumped in with the post-RESERVOIR DOGS crime genre. His follow-up, THE YARDS, the first of four collaborations with star Joaquin Phoenix and the first of two pairing Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg, sat on a Miramax shelf for two years before Harvey Weinstein barely released a recut version on just 146 screens in 2000 (Gray's improved director's cut was eventually issued on a special edition DVD).  It was another seven years before Gray resurfaced with the major-studio crime saga WE OWN THE NIGHT (2007), which reteamed Phoenix and Wahlberg and harkened back to the gritty cop dramas of Sidney Lumet, a major Gray influence. Despite generally positive reviews, audiences didn't respond. Gray's next film was 2009's TWO LOVERS, a departure with Phoenix as a sad sack recovering from a suicide attempt and torn between manipulative Gwyneth Paltrow and sweet Vinessa Shaw. It was a step away from cops & criminals films and demonstrated Gray's versatility, but any chance TWO LOVERS might've had was torpedoed when Phoenix used its publicity tour to go on talk shows in his madman-bearded, Andy Kaufman-esque meltdown stunt which was later revealed to be a hoax for his faux documentary I'M STILL HERE.  With a history of credible critical acclaim but minimal audience interest, Gray's day in the sun was finally supposed to happen with THE IMMIGRANT. At this point, one can hardly blame the man if he may start to feel that the entire film industry is conspiring against him.


THE IMMIGRANT finds Gray in familiar--and problematic--company: it reunites him with Phoenix, even after the TWO LOVERS debacle, and the film's distribution rights were picked up by The Weinstein Company. Considering how unpleasant Gray's last experience with Miramax-era Harvey Weinstein proved to be, it's not out of the realm of possibility that Weinstein's abandonment of THE IMMIGRANT and its unceremonious dumping on Netflix Instant less than two months after its miniscule theatrical release and before a DVD/Blu-ray street date has even been announced has the distinct stench of score-settling. Even if it isn't, the treatment that's been bestowed upon THE IMMIGRANT is a tragedy.  It's a great film--emotional, heartfelt, beautifully acted, masterfully filmed.  It's the kind of richly-detailed, exquisitely-crafted, prestigious period piece that was commonplace in the 1970s and 1980s--the time that a director like Gray really would've flourished--and the kind of majestic Oscar-sweeper that the Weinstein of 10-15 years ago would've been aggressively pushing come awards season. Times have changed, and if something like THE IMMIGRANT gets swept under the rug and banished to the world of Netflix streaming without ever being given much of a shot, then the movie industry is indeed broken beyond repair.


In a career-best performance, Marion Cotillard is Ewa Cybulska, a Polish woman arriving at Ellis Island in 1921 with her sickly sister Magda (Angela Sarafyan). Magda is quarantined for six months due to tuberculosis, while Ewa, thanks to dubious claims of "immoral" behavior on the trip to America, is immediately processed for deportation back to Europe. Ewa, a nurse in her homeland for a British diplomat's family, speaks perfect English and after a chance process-room encounter with one Bruno Weiss (Phoenix), ends up leaving with him and staying at his Lower East Side apartment. Weiss seems to manage a crew of "doves"--beautiful young immigrant women who perform at a burlesque venue and whom he pimps out to customers backstage after the shows. He has a connection at Ellis Island with processing officer McNally (Antoni Corone), who helps him procure new women. Bruno senses something special with Ewa, who only wants to free her sister from quarantine and get their piece of the American dream.

Nothing happens the way you expect it to with THE IMMIGRANT. You expect Bruno to be a heartless bastard.  You expect Ewa to be a naive innocent. Bruno talks a good game but isn't the smoothest operator, and Ewa has street smarts and a keen sense of self-preservation that you rarely see in immigration dramas of this sort. Ewa begins working as one of Bruno's prostitutes, and rather than gleefully count the money she makes for him, Bruno feels genuine remorse because he loves her. The story gets complicated with the introduction of Bruno's cousin Emil (Jeremy Renner), aka "Orlando the Magician," who arrives back home and is immediately drawn to Ewa. THE IMMIGRANT isn't so much a "dark side of the American dream" misery-fest as much as it's a somewhat cynical triumph of the human spirit saga, one that remains plausible in Ewa's many disappointments but also earns its few feel-good moments legitimately. Lives can change in an instant, and nothing in THE IMMIGRANT is black or white. Even when Bruno is at his worst, Phoenix manages to make you care about him, as when he eavesdrops on Ewa as she's in a confessional and only then understands the horrific life she and her sister have had and how much the promise of America means to them.  Also, Gray doesn't paint Ewa as a crucified martyr. She can be just as cold and cruel as the world around her, and even a shift in Emil/Orlando's behavior plays as completely natural and believable, where many less nuanced directors would've crammed it into place.

James Gray and cinematographer Darius Khondji

Gray, cinematographer Darius Khondji (THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN, SE7EN, MIDNIGHT IN PARIS) and the production design team have fashioned a visual triumph with THE IMMIGRANT. Shot in muted and sepia-tinged tones, the look of the film recalls the Young Vito Corleone sequences in THE GODFATHER PART II (1974) and the flashback scenes in Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA (1984), as well as Milos Forman's RAGTIME (1981) and Paul Thomas Anderson's THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007), and though it's not a western, you'll sense the visual influence of Michael Cimino's HEAVEN'S GATE (1980) as well. Movies just don't look like THE IMMIGRANT anymore:  the attention to detail is such that you feel transported to 1921 Manhattan. Gray's use of CGI is seamless, utterly non-intrusive, and highly effective. He tells the story efficiently and succinctly, always focused and making every moment and every shot count as the film just under two hours and feels complete, where nine out of ten filmmakers would've had this clocking in at a minimum of three hours. His framing of the actors and the action throughout frequently resemble old photographs, and the composition of the final shot is stunning in its presentation.  THE IMMIGRANT would obviously play best on a big screen, but most of us won't have that option. In the end, sure, it's just a movie, but when something this vital, ambitious, powerful, and just flat-out beautiful can't seem to find its place in the world, much like its beleaguered heroine, then there's something very wrong with the state of cinema and film distribution.  This is a film that should be celebrated. Instead, it's being streamed. In short, THE IMMIGRANT is a masterpiece in search of an audience and it's time for James Gray to get his props as one of today's great filmmakers. The "James Gray is the best filmmaker you've never heard of" pieces every time he makes a movie are getting tiresome. Give him a seat at the table. He's earned it.

UNDER THE SKIN
(UK/Switzerland/US - 2014)

A loose, stripped-down adaptation of Michel Faber's 2000 novel, UNDER THE SKIN spent nearly seven years in pre-production before director/co-writer Jonathan Glazer (SEXY BEAST, BIRTH) finally started shooting in 2011. On a very basic, narrative level, it's about an alien visitor (Scarlett Johansson) driving around Glasgow in a van, picking up men, seducing them, and draining their lifeforce. It sounds like the plot of cheesy B-movie, but UNDER THE SKIN is a hypnotic, abstract, and often surreal and experimental sci-fi art film that lulls you into a near trance with its visuals and Mica Levi's eerie, minimalist score. It owes a certain debt to Nicolas Roeg's THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH (1976) but bringing to mind a markedly less-abrasive stylistic take on Gaspar Noe's ENTER THE VOID (2011). Johanssen takes the men--played mostly by non-professional actors using improvised dialogue--to what looks like a typical Glasgow flat from the outside but the interior is an otherworldly realm with a black liquid floor into which they descend. As she collects more victims, she begins to experience emotional connection, especially with a painfully shy young man with a facial disfigurement (Adam Pearson, who suffers from neurofibromatosis), which marks the turning point in the story. She's also being pursued by a perpetually one-step-behind mystery cyclist (retired Grand Prix motorcycle racer Jeremy McWilliams) monitoring her activities. Dialogue is sparse throughout, and when it's used the Scottish accents of the non-actors are often so thick and garbled that the audience will feel--by design--as alienated as Johansson does. For the first hour, UNDER THE SKIN has an enigmatic, dream-like aura, complete with unnerving, droning music, soundscapes, and bizarre visuals as Glazer adamantly avoids clear-cut explanations. The latter part of the film finds Glazer taking things in a--relatively speaking--conventional direction as he begins telling something of an actual story.


UNDER THE SKIN is most effective when it's providing as few details as possible. If approached from a position of expecting a linear, cohesive story, the film is bound to disappoint, especially with its abrupt conclusion. Fortunately, the bulk of the film is not concerned with narrative issues as we see a disorienting Glasgow through Johansson's alien eyes, traveling through the streets and shopping malls, trying to comprehend the human existence. It doesn't make any philosophical or political points and it doesn't need to. It's Glazer using film as a visual and sound medium in a way that lives up to its title. A perfectly-cast Johansson is excellent, accomplishing very much by doing very little in a brilliantly nuanced and very subtle performance that should be studied side by side with David Bowie's in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH. UNDER THE SKIN is a film that washes over you, casts a spell, seduces and haunts you, much like the victims of its protagonist. The midnight movie crowds of decades passed would've embraced the hell out of this. (R, 108 mins)


A NIGHT IN OLD MEXICO
(Spain/US - 2014)

The great Robert Duvall is a national treasure showing no signs of slowing down, but A NIGHT IN OLD MEXICO, which could easily be titled NO COUNTRY FOR GRUMPY OLD MEN, again finds him in his now-standard "cantankerous old coot" mode. Duvall has nothing to prove to anyone at this point in his career, but he's played this role so many times that he can do it in his sleep. Perhaps that's why he opts to go through A NIGHT IN OLD MEXICO doing a feature-length impression of Uncle Pecos. We all love Duvall, but this film is just awful. Duvall co-produced it with his buddy Bill Wittliff, who also wrote the teleplay to LONESOME DOVE, one of the actor's most iconic works. Wittliff has also scripted films like THE BLACK STALLION (1979), BARBAROSA (1982), and LEGENDS OF THE FALL (1994), but OLD MEXICO won't go down as a career highlight. Duvall is Red Bovie, an irascible old Texas rancher being forced off his property to make room for a new housing community. Just as he's about to blow his brains out, he meets Gally (Jeremy Irvine), the grandson he never knew he had. Gally's father left home decades earlier, following the path forged by Red's wife, who got fed up with her husband's crotchety ways and split (this is a recurring motif with geriatric Duvall characters; see also JAYNE MANSFIELD'S CAR, or better yet, don't). Soon enough, Red and Gally are heading off in Red's classic Cadillac to "old Mexico" on a male-bonding road trip (thankfully we're spared a Tex-Mex cover of "Born to Be Wild") that gets a brief detour thanks to a pair of shitbag hitch-hikers who are carrying a bag of cash that belongs to Mexican drug cartel kingpin Panama (Luis Tosar). After getting a bad vibe, Red ditches the pair when they get out of the car to take a leak, and proceeds into Mexico unaware that a vast sum of cash in his car. Once in Mexico, Red stops at a whorehouse to get his "horn honked," and harangues Gally with taunts of "ol' Five-Finger Nelly" when he declines the old man's offer of a prostitute. Meanwhile, a very Anton Chigurh-like assassin named Cholo (Joaquin Cosio) relentlessly pursues Panama's cash as Red and Gally deal with long-dormant family issues.


Every development and character arc is either completely predictable or thoroughly unbelievable, starting with Red's unlikely romance with aspiring, several-decades-younger singer Patty Wafers (Angie Cepeda), which prompts an almost creepy competition between grandfather and grandson over who's going to sleep with her. Of course Red and Gally will butt heads, part ways, and of course big city tenderfoot Gally, with his red cowboy boots and ridiculous hat, will return to show his grandfather that he's a real man by facing down Panama. Wittliff and director Emilio Aragon can't decide if A NIGHT IN OLD MEXICO is a serious look at an aging hellraiser's last hurrah or a raunchy geezer comedy, or whether it's a leisurely, comfort-food road movie for Duvall's aging fans or a loud, bloody Sam Peckinpah shoot 'em up. There's a reason this only made it to a few theaters and VOD: too vulgar for elderly moviegoers, too dumb for the arthouse, and too boring for just about everyone else, it's a film with no target audience. It's an aimless, plodding mess that not even the presence of Duvall can salvage. At 83 years of age, it's nice to see that Duvall is still getting lead roles.  It would be a lot nicer if they were in projects that were worthy of him. (Unrated, 104 mins)

THE PURGE: ANARCHY
(US/France - 2014)

Written and directed by James DeMonaco. Cast: Frank Grillo, Carmen Ejogo, Zach Gilford, Kiele Sanchez, Zoe Soul, Michael K. Williams, Justina Machado, John Beasley, Jack Conley, Noel G, Edwin Hodge, Keith Stanfield. (R, 104 mins)

Last summer, the $3 million THE PURGE grossed $64 million to become one of season's surprise sleeper hits, despite no one really liking it that much. And yet, exactly one year later, here's THE PURGE: ANARCHY. When any film rakes in 21x its budget, a sequel is going to happen whether you want one or not. A year is a long time, and a lot of people have forgotten that over half of that $64 million came from the opening weekend before the negative word-of-mouth spread, sending the film on a precipitous 76% freefall in its second weekend. THE PURGE had a great concept, one that was ripe for social and political commentary: five years into the future, unemployment and crime are an all-time low, due to the revamped US government, overseen by a group of elected officials known as "The Founding Fathers" having legalized "The Purge," a one-night, 12-hour block of time where all crime, including murder, is legal, thereby allowing everyone to get a year's worth of rage out of their systems and allow society to flourish. It's the kind of dystopian high concept that could've led to an incendiary metaphor for the divisive state of the world today. But writer/director James DeMonaco blew it. After the intriguing set-up, THE PURGE quickly devolved into a rote, run-of-the-mill home invasion thriller, with a well-to-do family led by dad Ethan Hawke and mom Lena Headey under siege by a group of privileged thrill-killers trying to get in their locked-down house after they give shelter to young African-American man.

DeMonaco (who scripted 1998's THE NEGOTIATOR and the 2005 remake of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13) is back for THE PURGE: ANARCHY, and he's more or less admitted that he bungled the first film and is attempting to set things right. For the entire duration of THE PURGE, I kept wondering what an in-his-prime John Carpenter might've done with such an idea. That's a big shift in the direction that DeMonaco takes with the sequel, a sort-of PURGE 2.0, if you will, that jumps ahead to 2023, opening up the action and taking it to the streets as we follow a group of strangers thrown together to survive the night. There's low-income single mom Eva (Carmen Ejogo) and her teenage daughter Cali (Zoe Soul), nearly killed by riot-geared soldiers rounding people up in a high-tech truck; about-to-split married couple Shane (Zach Gilford) and Liz (Kiele Sanchez), stranded on the highway when their car breaks down on the way home; and a nameless mystery man (Frank Grillo) armed to the teeth on a mission of vengeance in a souped-up, steel-covered Italian-post-nuke-looking hot rod, who ends up rescuing them and reluctantly becoming their protector.


THE PURGE: ANARCHY doesn't really hold up under much scrutiny, but it's a vast improvement over the first film. While putting the heroes in a position to make their way across an urban hellscape may bring to mind everything from THE WARRIORS (1979) to the underrated JUDGMENT NIGHT (1993), DeMonaco keeps things moving at a fast clip and offers some striking imagery like ominous overhead shots or a school bus engulfed in flames speeding by in the background. He also has a lot of interesting if not fully-baked ideas while taking some crowd-pleasing shots at easy targets, like the bloody, mutilated remains of a stockbroker, chained up and hanging outside of a bank in the financial district, sporting a hand-written shame-sign stating that he stole the pensions of middle-class workers ("Maybe he deserved it," Shane muses as they stare up at the body), or a large gathering of Botoxed one-percenters holding an auction where the highest bidders get to go on a canned hunt of some captured underclass in an enclosed recreation area, fist-bumping as they don night-vision glasses to make the hunt easier. There's also Carmelo Jones (Michael K. Williams), leader of an online revolutionary organization determined to overthrow the Founding Fathers and expose their SNOWPIERCER-like plan for society. DeMonaco wears his politics on his sleeve, basically shooting fish in a barrel with the points he makes in ANARCHY (SPOILER ALERT: if you think the Botoxed one-percenters and the dead stockbroker are the victims, then you're probably not part of the target audience), but taken at face value, it's exactly the kind of subversive, cynical little B-movie--think CAGED HEAT or DEATH RACE 2000--that Roger Corman would've shepherded in the 1970s. Some action sequences get a little shaky-cammy and one is murkier than it should be, but the entire project gets a huge boost by a terrific lone-wolf performance from veteran character actor Grillo, playing a man who's lost everything and is using The Purge as a last-ditch way of setting things right. His character arc is predictable, but Grillo is perfect in the role, speaking volumes with a squint or a look of disgust, and it's easy to see why the terrified quartet latches on to him after he tries to extricate himself from them and continue on his mission. It's also nice that DeMonaco doesn't make the others into stock cowards and whiners--Liz turns out to be a crack shot, and Cali is a smart kid with wisdom beyond her years, and the protective father-daughter bond that develops between her and the mystery man is well-played by Soul and Grillo. THE PURGE: ANARCHY isn't a great film and it can be kind of dumb, but it's undeniably entertaining and works on a visceral, red-meat level.

TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS
(US/Spain - 1983)

Directed by Ferdinando Baldi. Written by Lloyd Battista, Jim Bryce, and Jerry Lazarus. Cast: Tony Anthony, Ana Obregon, Gene Quintano, Jerry Lazarus, Francisco Rabal, Emiliano Redondo, Francisco Villena, Lewis Gordon. (PG, 101 mins)

When 1983's TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS aired on The Movie Channel's JOE BOB'S DRIVE IN-THEATER back in the late '80s, host Joe Bob Briggs remarked that it was "the first hit in a series of one" for producer/star Tony Anthony. A funny line, yes, but not exactly true. Though he enjoyed some minor success and his COMIN' AT YA! was a surprise hit in 1981, he is, for the most part, an almost completely-forgotten C-lister as far as mainstream audiences are concerned. But the long, strange journey of Tony Anthony is the kind of oddball story that should be made into a movie. He wanted to run his career his own way, and like most independent-minded mavericks, his career achievements, such as they were, came about from ingenuity, perseverance, salesmanship, and having some good friends in unexpected places.




Anthony was born Roger Anthony Pettito in West Virginia in 1937. He broke into movies with his buddy Saul Swimmer (1936-2007) with their 1961 Miami-shot indie FORCE OF IMPULSE. Anthony and Swimmer wrote the script, Swimmer directed, and Anthony co-starred with a decidedly odd cast that featured Robert Alda, J. Carrol Naish, and jazz great Lionel Hampton. Anthony played a poor high-school student trying to woo a rich girl, so he robs his father's grocery store with tragic results. FORCE OF IMPULSE was barely released and probably hasn't been seen in decades, but Anthony and Swimmer kept at it with the 1962 circus drama WITHOUT EACH OTHER. Anthony and Swimmer briefly went their own ways, with Anthony going to Europe and finding work in some Italian films and Swimmer heading to London. As the spaghetti western genre exploded following 1964's A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, which wasn't released in the US until 1967, producers were scrambling to find the next Clint Eastwood, and Anthony would soon parlay what little notoriety he had into a series of "Man with No Name" knockoffs as "The Stranger."A STRANGER IN TOWN (1967), THE STRANGER RETURNS (1967), and THE SILENT STRANGER (1968) were all written and produced by Anthony and were moderately successful in America. Swimmer, meanwhile, directed the 1968 Herman's Hermits movie MRS. BROWN, YOU'VE GOT A LOVELY DAUGHTER and, through his friendship with Abkco Records chief and Rolling Stones manager Allen Klein, would eventually be part of the Beatles' inner circle once Klein took over managing the band after Brian Epstein's death in 1967. Swimmer co-produced the Beatles' 1970 documentary LET IT BE and would later direct George Harrison's THE CONCERT FOR BANGLADESH (1972). Anthony would eventually be pulled into the Beatles' orbit via his old friend Swimmer, and the pair wrote the post-EASY RIDER road movie COME TOGETHER (1971), starring Anthony, directed by Swimmer and produced by the pair with Ringo Starr. Starr and Anthony hit it off, and after COME TOGETHER, Starr co-starred in Anthony's next film, 1971's BLINDMAN, co-produced by Klein and directed by Italian journeyman Ferdinando Baldi. Due mostly to the novelty of seeing a former Beatle playing a bad guy in a spaghetti western, BLINDMAN was, to that point, Anthony's most significant success with American audiences. In 1974, he starred in the Italian GODFATHER knockoff 1931: ONCE UPON A TIME IN NEW YORK, unfortunately retitled PETE, PEARL AND THE POLE for its US release, one of the last titles handled by National General Pictures. In 1975, he and Baldi made GET MEAN, the fourth and final "Stranger" outing. Anthony appeared in just 12 films from 1961 to 1975, and other than BLINDMAN and whatever cult status his spaghetti obscurities have, his career appeared stalled and he didn't even pursue hired-gun acting gigs.



Anthony had other things in mind and it would be six years before the world heard from him again. Teaming with American producers Gene Quintano and Marshall Lupo, Anthony formed a new production company and found his true calling: he was bringing 3-D back in a big way.  The process had been used only sparingly since its flash-in-the-pan craze from 1953 to 1954. Anthony recruited his BLINDMAN and GET MEAN director Baldi for COMIN' AT YA!, a violent, R-rated, 3-D spaghetti western throwback that became a sleeper hit for Filmways in 1981. Anthony and his collaborators had one goal: throw everything at the screen. Audiences loved it, though obviously because of the novelty of 3-D rather than the inanities of Anthony's script. COMIN' AT YA! was enough of a success that the same creative personnel--Anthony, Quintano, Lupo, and Baldi--moved on to their next 3-D outing, TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS, a modernized but still quite blatant ripoff of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. Anthony and Quintano conceived the story, which was scripted by Lloyd Battista, Jim Bryce, and co-star Jerry Lazarus. Shot in Spain with American and Spanish actors and an Italian crew, with music by none other than Ennio Morricone, TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS was acquired by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus and released by Cannon in US theaters on January 21, 1983. By this time, the second big 3-D craze was underway with the previous year's FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3 and PARASITE, and, later in 1983, films like JAWS 3-D, AMITYVILLE 3-D, METALSTORM: THE DESTRUCTION OF JARED-SYN, and SPACEHUNTER: ADVENTURES IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE. Additionally, 3-D classics from the first wave like 1953's HOUSE OF WAX and 1954's DIAL M FOR MURDER were given nationwide re-releases to capitalize on the trend. To the surprise of no one, the fad fizzled as quickly as it did 30 years earlier, but the renewed enthusiasm, however brief, can largely be credited to Tony Anthony and COMIN' AT YA!


While today's digital 3-D primarily adds depth, texture, and detail, the old-school 3-D films were about having things pop out of the screen, and few understood this as well as Tony Anthony. After an opening crawl in no way inspired by STAR WARS, TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS commences with a 20-minute prologue as soldier-of-fortune J.T. Striker (Anthony, of course) searches for a hidden key inside a haunted castle. Over the course of those 20 minutes, Baldi and Anthony throw bats, buzzards, snakes, dogs, glass, spears, ropes, arrows, swords, cigarettes, and fireballs at the viewer. Anthony does everything short of unzipping his fly and showing the goods in his non-stop quest to just constantly dangle things in the audience's face. Virtually every scene--even boring exposition--features awkwardly-staged shots of people just sticking things in front of the camera.  Usually, you can clearly see the strings pulling the items. Audiences ate it up, and while FOUR CROWNS is a sentimental favorite to those of a certain age thanks to it seemingly being aired on a constant loop on cable in the '80s, it really doesn't play well flat. Time and again, things come to a dead halt when an actor has to stop the flow of a scene to hold something--a pen, a piece of paper, a key--in front of the camera for an absurd amount of time.  And the story is utter nonsense: Striker is hired by an aging professor (Francisco Villena) and money man Ed (Quintano, a terrible actor) to seek out the remaining two of four mystical, supernatural crowns with otherworldly powers. Striker assembles his team: Ed, "90 proof courage" alcoholic Rick (Lazarus), and father-daughter acrobatic pair Socrates (Francisco Rabal) and Liz (Ana Obregon) to infiltrate the impenetrable fortress of crazed cult leader Brother Jonas (Emiliano Redondo), who has the Crowns hidden in a booby-trapped lair inside.


While its set-up owes pretty much everything to RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, right down to Striker being chased by a boulder, TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS becomes more of a goofy heist movie. And it's never goofier than in the bonkers climax, which makes the whole tedious affair worthwhile. Striker finds the remaining two Crowns and the jewels inside cause him to be possessed by an otherworldly entitiy. His head spins around EXORCIST-style and his face mutates before he starts wiping out Jonas' army of followers by shooting fire from his hands. That's capped off by a nonsensical appearance by a disgusting lizard creature that seemingly there to set up a sequel that we're still waiting to see.



Sweating profusely throughout and looking like Christopher Hitchens with a bad case of heartburn, Anthony has absolutely no charisma and zero screen presence, making you appreciate Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones, David Warbeck in some of Antonio Margheriti's Italian RAIDERS knockoffs, and Richard Chamberlain's affable Allan Quatermain in Cannon's KING SOLOMON'S MINES (1985) even more. Anthony had his biggest box office hits with COMIN' AT YA and TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS, and that must've made him happy: after his triumphant turn as J.T. Striker, Anthony retired from acting and shows no signs of making a comeback. He continued producing movies with Quintano, like 1990's HONEYMOON ACADEMY and the popular 1998 TNT western DOLLAR FOR THE DEAD. Anthony also co-produced the Zalman King late-night cable favorite WILD ORCHID (1990), while Quintano went on to write the aforementioned KING SOLOMON'S MINES, as well as POLICE ACADEMY 3: BACK IN TRAINING (1985) and POLICE ACADEMY 4: CITIZENS ON PATROL (1987), and direct the instantly forgotten Christophers Lambert & Lloyd heist comedy WHY ME? (1990) and NATIONAL LAMPOON'S LOADED WEAPON 1 (1993).

Tony Anthony doing a Q&A at a 2012 screening of COMIN' AT YA!

Now 76, Anthony has been inactive in movies since his producing credit on DOLLAR FOR THE DEAD, but he occupied his time owning and operating a successful optical supply company that stemmed from his longstanding interest in camera and projection equipment (he designed a special lens around the time of COMIN' AT YA! that was used by studios and theater chains in the subsequent early '80s 3-D craze). He briefly returned from his self-imposed exile in 2011 when he converted COMIN' AT YA! to digital 3-D and it was re-released on an Alamo Drafthouse tour. TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS, meanwhile, has finally been released on DVD as part of a Shout! Factory "Action Adventure Movie Marathon" four-film set, with I ESCAPED FROM DEVIL'S ISLAND (1973), THE FINAL OPTION (1983), and SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL (1959).  I wish the news was better, but Shout!'s presentation of FOUR CROWNS is one of the worst DVD transfers in the history of the medium, barely sub-YouTube in quality, cropped from 2.35 to 1.33, and riddled with extensive scratches and debris, inconsistent color, and significant print damage, rendering it an almost-unwatchable travesty. Yes, the four-film set retails at $9.99, but the picture quality is shockingly bad for a company of Shout!'s reputation. I get that it's the only print they had access to, but you could find a 30-year-old VHS tape at a flea market and the picture quality would be better. It does offer a pleasant and enthusiastic commentary track by "pop culture historian" and TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS superfan Russell Dyball, but a sentimental cult favorite like this deserves something a little more than what Shout! has given it.

BLUE RUIN
(US/France - 2014)


A moody, highly effective slow-burner of a revenge thriller that works in large part due to its "hero" not really being cut out for what he's doing. Dwight Evans (Macon Blair) is a homeless man sneaking into houses for a bath, eating out of garbage cans, and living in his beat-up car on the beach. He's taken to the police station by a sympathetic cop (Sidne Anderson) who tells him he's not in trouble, but she wanted him to be in a safe place when he heard the news she has for him: Wade Cleland (Sandy Barrett) is being released from prison. Several years earlier, Wade killed Dwight's parents, a tragedy from which Dwight never recovered.  Dwight visits a pawn shop but can't afford a gun, then he steals one from someone's truck, but can't unlock the chamber. Armed with a steak knife, he sits in his car outside the prison and follows the Cleland family to Wade's coming-home party at a local bar. Hiding in the men's room, Dwight stabs Wade in the neck and head when he comes in to take a leak, then runs outside and slashes the tires of the Cleland's limo, slicing open his hand in the process. When he gets in his own car, he realizes he dropped the keys next to the body. Stealing the limo and driving it on a flat tire, he finds a teenage Cleland boy in the back and lets him go. Dwight visits his estranged sister Sam (Amy Hargreaves) and confesses what he's done. She's glad Wade is dead, though Dwight wonders why it hasn't been in the news. Believing the Cleland family hasn't called the cops because intend to respond to Dwight's act personally, Dwight tells Sam to leave town with her kids as he's suddenly in way over his head with a shady family who's more dangerous than he ever imagined.


Writer/director/cinematographer Jeremy Saulnier doesn't present Dwight as a tough badass, but rather, a sad incompetent whose plan for revenge is short-sighted, to say the least. He desperately wants to avenge the murder of his parents, but doesn't plan ahead and isn't equipped to handle the unexpected problems that arise, like getting his sister to safety or getting shot in the leg with an arrow. Dwight doesn't go after the Clelands with guns blazing--in fact, he's lucky if he can manage to get a shot off at all. Saulnier disperses the backstory very conservatively, and only near the end do all the details, and just how deeply the bad blood between the Evans and Cleland families runs become clear to the audience. Though the Clelands are a family of rednecks, Saulnier avoids the cliches that come with that label. BLUE RUIN drew a lot of comparisons to early Coen Bros., particularly BLOOD SIMPLE, in its depiction of unlikely people getting into deadly situations that quickly spiral beyond their control and capabilities, but with its early bits of dark humor, the film plays more like the Coens doing WINTER'S BONE. It's anchored by a powerfully internalized performance by Blair, and there's a brief, scene-stealing supporting turn by Devon "Buzz from HOME ALONE" Ratray as a high school friend who helps Dwight out (THE BRADY BUNCH's Eve Plumb also appears as one of the Cleland clan). True to its title, BLUE RUIN is a bleak and gritty noir of sorts that presents an atypical, low-key spin on the standard revenge saga. (R, 90 mins)




ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE
(US - 2014)


It's a little late to be making knockoffs of THE CRAFT, and if ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE seems a little tardy, part of the reason might be that the filmmakers already made it 15 years ago. The writing-directing team of Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson made an ultra low-budget, shot-on-video version immediately after graduating from college.  Since then, both have remained gainfully employed in the industry with varying degrees of success: McKee is best known for his 2003 cult classic MAY, with Sivertson's claim to infamy being Lindsay Lohan's 2007 dumpster fire I KNOW WHO KILLED ME. Both have made Jack Ketchum adaptations, with McKee co-directing 2008's RED (a terrific little gem that no one knows about) and handling 2011's inexplicably acclaimed THE WOMAN solo, while Sivertson directed 2006's THE LOST. Older, wiser, and having played and barely survived the Hollywood game, the two old friends reunited to give their debut a do-over. They made some incidental plot changes, but the general idea is the same: a group of cheerleaders are killed and one's goth, Wiccan ex-girlfriend casts a spell that brings them back to life, but they need the blood of the living to survive, all the while still being catty bitches about everything. Yes, it's essentially VAMPIRE ZOMBIE HEATHERS. McKee and Sivertson offer an intriguing set-up that finds student videographer Maddy (Caitlin Stasey) infiltrating a tight-knit clique of cheerleaders after one dies in a horrific cheering accident. Her whole plan is to rip apart the perfect world of the cheerleaders and their jock boyfriends. That storyline is working quite well until it's abandoned after an intense and well-acted confrontation that unfortunately leads to silliness once a car chase results in the girls dying when their car plummets into a river. The jocks chasing them split, but lesbian Maddy's witch ex Leena (Sianoa Smit-McPhee) happens to be in the area and brings them back to life. From then on, McKee and Sivertson can never settle on a tone, careening wildly between sick, black humor (virginal, sensitive dudebro has sex in a bathroom stall with one undead cheerleader, then brags to his buddy "I was all up in that sweet freezer!  It's supposed to be cold, right?") and grueling, Rob Zombie-esque unpleasantness. There's some worthwhile moments, and the directors get a pair of strong performances from Stasey and Smit-McPhee, but it's all rather uneven and quite dumb, some of the visual effects are pretty bush-league, and the film feels like it's visiting from the distant netherworld of 1998.  (R, 90 mins, also streaming on Netflix)




OPEN GRAVE
(US/Hong Kong - 2014)


A promising premise is quickly squandered in this ponderous Hungary-shot horror film from Spanish director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego, who's somehow still able to find employment after the universally-loathed APOLLO 18. Sharlto Copley (DISTRICT 9) wakes up in the titular location, surrounded by rotting corpses.  He's rescued by a mute woman (Josie Ho) who takes him to a house where several others (among them Thomas Kretschmann) are suffering from group amnesia. Hazy details slowly come into view over what's happened to them and why as they try to escape and are met by strange, almost feral people and keep running into corpses used as scarecrows. The twists and turns in the story aren't really that interesting or suspenseful and the film ultimately turns into yet another stale variant of an already played-out subgenre. Copley is a bit more tolerable here than he was in Spike Lee's OLDBOY, but Ho, whose character doesn't understand English and can only write Chinese, has absolutely nothing to do but stand around and look at her histrionic co-stars and may as well be wearing a T-shirt that says "I'm only here to satisfy a Hong Kong co-production deal." Scenes of tense bickering are supposed the sense of mistrust and paranoia among the protagonists, especially when a foggy Copley starts to think he might be the one responsible for all the mayhem. But after the 19th or 20th shouting match between frazzled people who can't remember who or where they are in a film that feels way longer than it is, there's a good chance you'll stop caring. Even Leonard Shelby would run out of patience with these assholes. (R, 102 mins)

LUCY
(France - 2014)

Written and directed by Luc Besson. Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Morgan Freeman, Choi Min-Sik, Amr Waked, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Pilou Asbaek, Analeigh Tipton. (R, 89 mins)

Where most auteurs start with genre efforts to get their feet wet and mature into serious filmmaking, Luc Besson's career has largely been the exact opposite. Early films like LE DERNIER COMBAT (1983) and THE BIG BLUE (1988) exhibited art-house aspirations that culiminated in his 1990 classic LA FEMME NIKITA, which perfectly combined his artistic and commercial sensibilities.  You could say the same for 1994's THE PROFESSIONAL, aka LEON, initially dismissed by most critics but now considered one of the best films of its decade.  1997's THE FIFTH ELEMENT has amassed a large cult following, though 1999's THE MESSENGER: THE STORY OF JOAN OF ARC was badly received and prompted Besson to take a lengthy sabbatical from directing. These days, Besson is best known for his EuropaCorp action assembly line that gave us Jason Statham's TRANSPORTER and Liam Neeson's TAKEN franchises, films directed by Besson proteges yet exhibiting all the signature stylings of their boss. After last year's disappointing gangster comedy THE FAMILY, Besson is making a quick return to American multiplexes with LUCY, which has enough scientific theorizing in it to make it seem like Besson's most ambitious film yet. Instead, it's his dumbest.


Equal parts Besson action movie and "Luc Besson's COSMOS" if the confused director was mistakenly getting scientific and philosophical consultation from Mike Tyson rather than Neil DeGrasse Tyson, LUCY is an absurd sci-fi outing that has occasional flashes of fun but just gets arduously tiresome the longer it goes on. Scarlett Johansson is Lucy, an American college student in Taipei who's forced by her dirtbag boyfriend (Pilou Asbaek) to deliver a briefcase with unknown contents to psychotic Korean gangster Mr. Jang (Choi Min-Sik, the original OLDBOY). Inside the briefcase are bags of a synthetic drug called CPH4, and Jang's men sew it into her stomach, forcing her to work as a mule. Before she can get to the airport, an altercation with some of Jang's goons causes the bag to break and the drug to leak into her bloodstream, giving Lucy an increasingly heightened sense of awareness. She soon has the ability to control everything around her, starting with people and moving on to electronic signals and matter itself. Making her way to Paris and teaming up with cop Del Rio (Amr Waked), Lucy tries to make contact with renowned scientist Prof. Samuel Norman (Morgan Freeman), one of the world's leading experts on brain function, with Jang and his underlings in hot pursuit.

"I'm in, Luc.  No, don't send the script. Not gonna read it anyway. Here's the account number."

It's Norman's assertioin--and Besson's as well, I suppose--that human beings use only 10% of their brain capacity. As the CPH4 is absorbed by Lucy's body and completely overhauls her chemical structure, her brain rapidly begins increasing in power.  At 20%, she can control electronic signals and communicate with Norman through the TV in his hotel room. At 30%, she can diagnose undetected health issues just by touching someone. By the time she reaches 50-60%, she's able to control the thoughts and actions of those around her, manipulating matter and even time itself. As Del Rio and the French cops battle Jang's army in a huge shootout, Lucy goes on her own version of the Stargate sequence in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, transforming into a black, sinewy human computer as she travels back through the dawn of time, starting with Native Americans and going back to cavemen, dinosaurs, and eventually, the Big Bang.


Its in the last third that Besson totally goes off his rocker and LUCY becomes a self-indulgent action version of THE TREE OF LIFE. But honestly, LUCY just never works. Besson fails to get any momentum going early on by running two parallel stories--Lucy being cornered and trapped in her situation with Jang is frequently intercut with a heavy-handed display of stock nature footage and Norman lecturing to a large auditorium of students and fellow scientists at a Paris conference. The science is mostly made up by Besson, but the real problem is that the cutting to Norman grinds the film to a halt in a way that recalls Steven Seagal's mumbling environmental speech at the end of ON DEADLY GROUND, only spread apart to constantly interrupt any suspense or action that might be developing. A barely-awake Freeman, in his second terrible sci-fi movie in the last three months (anyone remember TRANSCENDENCE?), has obviously stopped giving a shit and will apparently read whatever is handed to him. It's nice to see Choi doing some vintage OLDBOY screaming, but he has little else to do. LUCY might make an interesting companion piece to Johansson's recent UNDER THE SKIN as both films require her to rely on an otherworldly stare and an innate seductiveness (and both films have her utilizing a mysterious, undetermined black matter), but LUCY goes in an opposite direction as her character becomes more unemotional and alien as the story proceeds. And the comparisons end there. There's some amusing moments as Lucy experiments with her newfound powers, but such bits are few and far between, and even a big action sequence like a car chase is ruined by crummy, carelessly-executed CGI and gratuitous shaky-cam. Besson tries to make some grand, life-affirming points about humans living to their potential, which he probably intended as something profound and powerful, but instead comes across as an utterly tone-deaf lack of self-awareness.

THE FINAL OPTION
aka WHO DARES WINS
(UK/Switzerland - 1982; US release 1983)

Directed by Ian Sharp. Written by Reginald Rose. Cast: Lewis Collins, Judy Davis, Richard Widmark, Edward Woodward, Robert Webber, Ingrid Pitt, Tony Doyle, John Duttine, Kenneth Griffith, Rosalind Lloyd, Norman Rodway, Paul Freeman, Aharon Ipale, Patrick Allen, Maurice Roeves, Bob Sherman, Albert Fortell, Mark Ryan, Nick Brimble. (R, 125 mins)

Created in 1941 for the duration of WWII and reactivated in 1947, the Special Air Service (SAS) is a Special Forces division of the British Army that enjoyed its height of fame after the six-day Iranian Embassy siege in London from April 30 to May 5, 1980. Globally, the event was overshadowed by the 444-day hostage crisis at the US Embassy in Tehran that began in November 1979 and ended moments after President Ronald Reagan's inauguration in January 1981. But in England, the SAS' swift and precise action after being deployed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the London incident, where Arab terrorists took over the Iranian embassy to demand the release of Arab prisoners from jails in Khuzestan, brought the SAS into the mainstream, making them Thatcher-era national heroes not unlike the 9/11 first responders in America three decades later. Now involved primarily in counter-terrorism efforts, the SAS' motto has always been "Who Dares Wins," and WHO DARES WINS was the name of the 1982 film inspired by their actions at the Iranian Embassy.  Retitled THE FINAL OPTION for its fall 1983 US release from MGM/UA, WHO DARES WINS was the brainchild of producer Euan Lloyd, best known for shepherding the 1978 mercenary classic THE WILD GEESE, a film that was a huge hit everywhere in the world except America, where it was acquired by Allied Artists during their final days on life support. Consequently, the film was a flop in the States, despite being headlined by Richard Burton, Roger Moore, and Richard Harris. Nevertheless, it went on to find an audience on TV, and later, on video and is now regarded as a top action film as well as an influence on such all-star action extravaganzas as THE EXPENDABLES.




THE FINAL OPTION opens with a nuclear disarmament protest march in London, with a member of the militant domestic terror outfit The People's Lobby brutally murdered from a distance with a crossbow arrow through the mouth. The dead man was an undercover government operative who infiltrated the organization and was obviously discovered. SAS administrators Cmdr. Powell (Edward Woodward) and Col. Hadley (Tony Doyle) opt to send in Capt. Peter Skellen (Lewis Collins), going so far as to stage an elaborate, airtight cover that involves him purposely getting booted out of the SAS and, with the help of his handler Ryan (Norman Rodway), posing as someone who's disillusioned and bitter and has an axe to grind with the British government. The cover works for People's Lobby leader Frankie Leith (Judy Davis), who's powerless against Skellen's seductive charms and almost immediately offers to let him move into her place, much to the disapproval of her cohorts Helga (Ingrid Pitt) and Rod (John Duttine). Helga and Rod aren't sold on Skellen or the expertise that he brings as one who knows their enemy, and they follow him to see him having clandestine meetings not just with Ryan but also with his wife Jenny (Lloyd's daughter Rosalind) and their baby daughter. Exposed as a plant, and left on his own once go-between Ryan is offed by Helga, Skellen is forced to tag along with Frankie's half-assed plot to commandeer the home of the US Ambassador to England, where a formal dinner is taking place with US Secretary of State Currie (Richard Widmark) and top-ranking American military official Gen. Potter (Robert Webber) in attendance. Frankie and the People's Lobby have one demand:  for the US to detonate a nuclear weapon at the Holy Loch Naval Base in Scotland, a move that she somehow believes will bring about "peace."


Frankie's plan isn't the most logical, but then, neither is most of this film. Davis, in between her breakout debut performance in 1979's MY BRILLIANT CAREER and her Oscar-nominated turn in 1984's A PASSAGE TO INDIA, turns in a committed performance even though she would later denounce the film over its political messaging.  When it was released in the UK as a slobbering, shoot 'em up love letter to the SAS, the glorification caused a fair amount of controversy for those opposed to the actions of the SAS and the general culture of Thatcher's England. THE FINAL OPTION was labeled "right-wing propaganda," and there's no denying where its politics lie: the nuclear disarmament crowd is portrayed across-the-board as broad-stroked, frothing-at-the-mouth lunatics; the SAS are largely "shoot first and ask questions later"; Frankie, calm and collected in the early part of the siege, quickly turns emotional and frazzled when she's grilled by Currie, Potter, and a bunch of angry, old American men (Widmark gets the film's best line when he barks "Why don't you hijack a plane?  It's more fun. Hell, kids can hijack a dinner!"), and, in its most hysterical and over-the-top plot development, after Skellen and the SAS save the day and blow everyone in The People's Lobby away, a left-wing politico (Paul Freeman) is seen complaining about the level of violence in the raid and questioning why the SAS instigate such an extreme level of national pride just before he meets Malik (Aharon Ipale) for lunch.  Malik is seen very early and is established as the key source of funding for The People's Lobby. So here's the end of the film, with the left-wing member of Parliament literally walking arm-in-arm with the primary money man who's bankrolling domestic terror, not just sympathizing with his cause but clearly conspiring with him as both men chuckle over future terrorist plots against England. There's no mistaking the message there: you're either onboard with the actions and the philosophy of the SAS, or you hate England and want to see it burn.

SAS!  FUCK YEAH!


WHO DARES WINS was released in the UK in the summer of 1982, and it would be over a year later before MGM/UA released it in the US in September 1983 as THE FINAL OPTION. Perhaps MGM felt that the action and the notoriety of the two Iran-related hostage situations would trump the sections of British politics that many potential American moviegoers likely didn't follow too closely. While the film certainly delivers on the action in the climax--with the SAS raiding the US Ambassador's house in a relentless, ferocious barrage of explosions, grenades, splattery squibs, shoulder-rolls, Skellen going on a Rambo-esque rampage against the People's Lobby stooges shortly before anyone knew who Rambo was; and even several shots from the through-the-helmet POV of an SAS officer that presciently foresees later first-person shooter video games, all propelled by Roy Budd's catchy, waka-jawaka-tinged score--it nevertheless bombed in US theaters, opening in 12th place with $750,000.  To put that in perspective, FLASHDANCE landed in seventh place that same weekend, grossing $1.4 million in its 23rd week of release. THE FINAL OPTION made a quick turnaround to VHS and cable, where it developed a cult following through seemingly constant airings on HBO throughout the '80s. While the film didn't catch on in America during its brief theatrical run, it did manage to find one unexpected fan who got a special screening at his residence arranged by producer Lloyd and cited it as the most realistic depiction of a terrorist situation and a counter-terrorism response that he'd ever seen on the big screen. Who was this FINAL OPTION superfan? President Reagan.


Regardless of your political leanings (if this were released today, it would be a Fox News wet dream), THE FINAL OPTION is a solid action thriller, especially in its nail-biting climactic rescue sequence, which even the film's detractors will usually reluctantly admit is brilliantly-handled by director Ian Sharp, a TV vet who worked on THE PROFESSIONALS and was brought in by Lloyd because he already had a solid working relationship with Collins. Sharp never distinguished himself beyond this film other than with the acclaimed 1988 Showtime espionage miniseries CODENAME: KYRIL, which reunited him with Woodward, who's sadly underused here. THE FINAL OPTION was originally conceived as a story by journalist and espionage writer George Markstein, best known for writing some early episodes of the 1960s series THE PRISONER. Markstein's outline was commissioned by Lloyd and simultaneously turned into the novel The Tiptoe Boys by James Follett and a script by Oscar-nominated screenwriter Reginald Rose, who honed his skills in the early days of TV drama before writing Sidney Lumet's classic 12 ANGRY MEN (1957). Rose also scripted THE WILD GEESE, and when that became a hit everywhere in the world but America, the same creative team--Lloyd, Rose, star Moore, and director Andrew V. McLaglen (MITCHELL)--reunited in 1980 for the WWII actioner THE SEA WOLVES, another "old guys kicking ass" EXPENDABLES prototype, where the still relatively youthful Moore (then 53) joined forces with 64-year-old Gregory Peck, 70-year-old David Niven, 67-year-old Trevor Howard, and 58-year-old Patrick Macnee. Rose had entered the hired-gun phase of his career by this point, but found a late-career niche with Lloyd, and after WHO DARES WINS/THE FINAL OPTION, they planned a sequel for Collins that would've involved his Capt. Skellen character in the ten-week Falklands War between the UK and Argentina in 1982, but it never materialized.  Instead, Lloyd and Rose went to work on WILD GEESE II (1985), directed by Peter Hunt (ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE), and starring Scott Glenn, Barbara Carrera, Laurence Olivier, and Edward Fox, a last-minute replacement for Richard Burton, who died shortly before filming began.  The film flopped in the UK and was barely released in the US, and Lloyd retired from the movie industry. Now 91, Lloyd was most recently heard on a WILD GEESE DVD commentary track with Moore in 2004. Rose scripted the 1987 CBS TV-movie ESCAPE FROM SOBIBOR and took a few freelance gigs before his death in 2002 at 82.


With THE FINAL OPTION, Lloyd didn't go for the geezer adventure approach of THE WILD GEESE and THE SEA WOLVES and instead tried to make a movie star of British TV actor Collins (1946-2013), who was nearing the end of a six-year run on the popular adventure series THE PROFESSIONALS, from AVENGERS creator Brian Clemens. THE FINAL OPTION marked Collins' first starring role in a feature film and for a brief period in 1982, Lewis Colllins almost happened when he auditioned to take over the role of James Bond. After 1981's FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, Roger Moore informed 007 producer Albert R. Broccoli that felt he was getting too old to play Bond and wanted to quit, and the search was on for a replacement.  Collins and Ian Ogilvy (who already had experience replacing Moore--he was best known at the time for playing Simon Templar on TV's RETURN OF THE SAINT) were on the short list, and Collins would later say that Broccoli found his presence "too aggressive." Broccoli went with the wild-card pick of none other than American James Brolin, who was cast as 007 and set to star in 1983's OCTOPUSSY until an eleventh-hour deal was struck with Moore, who begrudgingly returned for OCTOPUSSY and 1985's A VIEW TO A KILL before leaving the franchise for good at age 58. Despite WHO DARES WINS' success in the UK and his TV popularity, Collins' career never really picked up after losing out on the 007 role. Having played an SAS officer on THE PROFESSIONALS and in THE FINAL OPTION, Collins was essentially the UK's celebrity face of the Special Air Service, even passing the physical endurance test required to join. For a while, Collins parlayed his SAS persona into steady work in a trilogy of West German/Italian WILD GEESE knockoffs from director Antonio Margheriti and producer Erwin C. Dietrich: CODENAME: WILDGEESE (1984), COMMANDO LEOPARD (1985), and THE COMMANDER (1988). CODENAME was released in the US in 1986 by New World, but the other two never found American distribution.  After displaying some convincing action chops in THE FINAL OPTION and still stinging from losing the Bond gig (he frequently called it his biggest career missed opportunity), a wooden Collins doesn't even camouflage his boredom in the Margheriti films and his deflated disappointment over the direction of his career. THE COMMANDER proved to be Collins' final feature film role, and other than co-starring with Michael Caine and Armand Assante in the 1988 CBS TV-movie JACK THE RIPPER, he drifted into increasingly sporadic TV guest spots. He eventually retired from acting in 2002, when he moved his family to Los Angeles and became a 56-year-old college student, enrolling in UCLA to study screenwriting, eventually moving on to create an L.A.-based computer sales and equipment company. He survived a 2008 bout with cancer and was attempting an acting comeback in 2012 when his illness made an aggressive return.  He died in November 2013 at the age of 67.



THE FINAL OPTION was recently released on DVD as part of Shout! Factory's latest four-film "Action Adventure Marathon" set, along with I ESCAPED FROM DEVIL'S ISLAND (1973), SHAKE HANDS WITH THE DEVIL (1959), and TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS (1983).  They also released it as a double feature Blu-ray with I ESCAPED FROM DEVIL'S ISLAND.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY
(US - 2014)

Directed by James Gunn. Written by James Gunn and Nicole Perlman. Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper, Lee Pace, Glenn Close, Benicio Del Toro, Michael Rooker, Djimon Hounsou, Karen Gillan, John C. Reilly, Gregg Henry, Peter Serafinowicz, Christopher Fairbank, Sean Gunn, Tomas Arana, Krystian Godlewski, Laura Haddock, Wyatt Oleff, Alexis Denisof, Ralph Ineson. (PG-13, 121 mins)

In keeping with the recent tradition of Marvel installments being tailored to the stylings of their directors--Shane Black's IRON MAN 3 and Anthony & Joe Russo's CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER--James Gunn fashions GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY as very much his own film in the guise of a Marvel production and the results are fantastic. Starting his career by scripting Troma's TROMEO & JULIET (1996), Gunn moved on to Hollywood and penned the two SCOOBY-DOO movies before making a name for himself by writing Zack Snyder's surprisingly good 2004 remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD. That got Gunn his first feature directing gig, 2006's tragically underappreciated and wonderfully oozy and slimy SLITHER. Never the most prolific of writers or directors, Gunn resurfaced five years later with the dark-humored indie SUPER and again with a segment in last year's awful MOVIE 43. Gunn seems an unlikely choice for Marvel, but really, it's that kind of outside-the-box thinking--turning IRON MAN 3 into a smartass Shane Black movie or CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER into the superhero version of a '70s paranoia thriller--that's made much of their recent run of films so successful. As someone who's not a comic book guy, I take these kinds of films at face value for what they are in and of themselves, not where they fit in the Marvel universe or how faithful they are or whatever. That said, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY is the best Marvel movie I've seen.  It's the best movie of the summer.  And it may very well be the STAR WARS of its generation, a film that helps shape a childhood with its spectacle and imagination. Yeah...it's that good.


Moviegoers of a certain age--I'm 41--look back fondly on the films of their youth, sometimes inducing sentimentality that's not really warranted. Let's face it, folks: not every '80s movie is a "classic." But to be someone who saw the STAR WARS movies, and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, and E.T., and a lot of those timeless blockbusters in theaters, on their first runs when they were kids--it shaped you. You don't forget the first time you experience those movies. Seen-it-all-cineastes who have a sort of multiplex misanthropia--I include myself in that category--often sound like bitter old men lamenting how today's special effects-heavy blockbusters just aren't like they used to be. People still talk about those older movies today. Who's going to be talking about the fourth TRANSFORMERS movie or the second AMAZING SPIDER-MAN three decades from now? My point is this: watching GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY took me back to that time in a way that no film in recent memory has. It's a genuinely great crowd-pleaser of the classic sort: it's clever, it's funny, it's filled with action, and it's made with affection. This wasn't a job for Gunn--it was a labor of love. You can feel it in every scene. You can see a committed cast rallying behind their director, believing in his vision. Today's blockbusters have lost touch with that sense of commitment, and people have grown accustomed to the clock-punching soullessness and predictability of most of them and continue to see them out of...obligation? I'm not aware of a single person who was enthused about THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 a few months back, and yet it still grossed $200 million in the US. Enough people flocked to TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION for it to gross nearly $1 billion worldwide so far, but has anyone really enjoyed it?  With any luck, GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY will remind moviegoers of how things used to be and how they still should be, but you can't help but wonder if today's audiences have become so conditioned to accept mediocrity that they'll fail to appreciate what Gunn has accomplished here.


In a sequence that's an obvious nod to the opening of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, mercenary Ravager Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), who's given himself the name "Star Lord," acquires a mysterious orb for blue-skinned Ravager leader Yondu (Michael Rooker).  Said orb is also desired by Kree supervillain Ronan (Lee Pace), working in the employ of the feared Thanos (voiced by an uncredited Josh Brolin). Ronan dispatches Thanos' daughter Gamora (Zoe Saldana) to intercept the orb. Quill and Gamora have an epic scuffle that ends up involving bounty hunter Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper), a cynical, genetically-altered raccoon with anger management issues, and his plant/muscle Groot (voiced and motion-captured by Vin Diesel), a tree whose vocabulary is limited to "I am Groot." All four are rounded up and sentenced to The Kyln, a space prison, where they meet vengeance-obsessed and metaphor-impaired Drax (Dave Bautista), whose family was killed by Ronan. The quintet of outcasts and misfits form a classic unholy alliance as they very slowly learn to trust one another, taking on Ronan's forces and working to keep the orb--which has the power to destroy worlds--out of the hands of both Ronan and the greedy but good-natured Yondu, and returned to the galactic leader Nova Prime (Glenn Close), where it belongs.


Filled with nods to Lucas and Spielberg, and some blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameos (in addition to the requisite Stan Lee appearance, you'll also spot Troma chief Lloyd Kaufman and Gunn pal Nathan Fillion, and stick around through the end credits for the best one), GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY is the summer movie to finally remind everyone what a summer movie should be. Funny without being snarky, using hit '70s singles without being ironic, and demonstrating some sincerely heartfelt affection for its characters, the film sends up the superhero/comic book genre while recalling the spirit of wonder and adventure that captivated moviegoers when STAR WARS became the phenomenon that not even 20th Century Fox was expecting. Laugh-out-loud funny but never slapsticky, GUARDIANS succeeds in working for both children and grown-up audiences (listen to all the adults in the theater laugh when Gamora tells Quill his ship his filthy and he says under his breath, "She has no idea...if I had a blacklight, this place would look like a Jackson Pollock painting"). Even the referential bits--so many films today think that just making the reference is good enough--are thoughtful and legitimately creative and funny: it's one thing to have the requisite "ragtag group of badasses walking in slo-mo" shot set to a classic rock tune (in this case, The Runaways'"Cherry Bomb"), but Gunn's take on it has Gamora yawning and Rocket adjusting his nutsack.  The leads are perfectly cast, Pratt is a smartass without being grating, and Cooper's vocal delivery of the hard-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside Rocket is spot-on (Gunn's brother Sean filled in as Rocket during filming to provide sight-lines and a model for the actors to look at; similarly, Krystian Godlewski was the surrogate Groot on-set until the effects were completed and Diesel's motion capture work was CGI'd in). Everyone else, from the supporting actors on down--even Gunn regular Gregg Henry--gets a moment to shine, and the film is so good that you don't even mind that the great Djimon Hounsou is saddled with a stock henchman role when he could've made a terrific Ronan himself.


Hollywood needs to take note. The summer blockbuster has lost its way. The budgets are too big and the results are too bland. Too much blurry CGI and too much shaky-cam. A movie needs to gross $200 million before it's not considered a "flop." And regardless of how popular it is, it's still out of theaters in three weeks. Remember when movies played at first-run theaters for months? GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY and James Gunn are like curious visitors from another time and another place, arriving just in time to save the summer blockbuster from itself. You won't see a more infectiously fun, witty, and smart "big" movie this summer, and it's the best time I've had at the multiplex all year.

LEGENDARY
(UK/China - 2013; US release 2014)


A change of pace for B action stars Scott Adkins and Dolph Lundgren, LEGENDARY is an adventure/monster movie of the JURASSIC PARK sort that has loftier ambitions than its visual effects team can match. Adkins is Travis Preston, a renowned cryptozoologist drawn into the search for a giant lizard on an uncharted island off the coast of China. Bringing along his research team, he's met by big-game hunter and arch-nemesis Harker (Lundgren), who doesn't share Preston's scientific curiosity and only wants to bag the creature as a trophy. The two clashed once before when Preston hired Harker as security on a search for a prehistoric bear that resulted in the tragic death of one member of their party when the arrogant Harker's itchy trigger finger sent the bear on a ferocious rampage, for which Preston shouldered the blame and saw it derail his career. Naturally, Preston and Harker butt heads once more as they close in on the fabled creature, who is expectedly unhappy about having its home invaded by uninvited guests. Cue the ALIENS-inspired scenes of characters watching and listening to radar and sonar equipment as one nervous guy yells "300 yards...200...it's coming right for us!" and finally...wait for it..."it's right underneath us!"


Released in 3-D overseas last year, the $12 million LEGENDARY goes straight-to-DVD in the US and suffers from some really wonky-looking creature effects, both in the prologue with the rampaging bear and later with the giant lizard. It's not quite on the level of SyFy or The Asylum, but it's still not ready for prime time as far as a nationwide theatrical release is concerned.  Fans of Adkins and Lundgren looking for some NINJA or UNIVERSAL SOLDIER-style action will be disappointed:  Adkins was recovering from a knee injury sustained on a previous project and chose LEGENDARY largely because it was light on demanding stunt work and fight scenes as he and Lundgren only have one very brief throwdown. LEGENDARY isn't all that different from a bottom-half-of-a-double-bill B programmer you might've seen in the 1950s, but its draggy pace doesn't do it many favors. Adkins is OK, but doesn't seem at home in these surroundings, while Lundgren, who pops in and out of the movie in a way that suggests the filmmakers probably only had him for a very limited amount of time, seems to relish playing the bad guy by turning in a performance that's somewhat Jack Palance-esque at times. LEGENDARY was directed by the unlikely Eric Styles, who helmed the acclaimed minor 1999 arthouse hit DREAMING OF JOSEPH LEES before completely falling off the radar--his 2000 follow-up RELATIVE VALUES, starring Julie Andrews and Colin Firth, and based on a Noel Coward play, skipped theaters and debuted on Starz, while his 2003 thriller TEMPO (with Melanie Griffith and Rachael Leigh Cook) went straight to DVD. LEGENDARY is Styles' first film since the barely-released 2008 Heather Graham rom-com MISS CONCEPTION, and while it's not terrible, it's pretty slight and forgettable, and really only required viewing for Adkins completists or those with insatiable Lundgren man-crushes. (PG-13, 93 mins)


CUBAN FURY
(France/UK - 2014) 


Despite the success they've achieved together over the years, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost haven't fared as well when they work apart. Pegg has been part of the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE and STAR TREK franchises, but a rundown of his headlining films reads like a Do Not Buy list handed to employees of a used movies/music joint when the manager decides they've got far too many copies on hand just taking up shelf space: RUN FATBOY RUN, BIG NOTHING, THE GOOD NIGHT, HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS & ALIENATE PEOPLE, BURKE AND HARE, and the miserable A FANTASTIC FEAR OF EVERYTHING range from tolerable to godawful, and none of them will ever be mistaken for Pegg's finest hour. Frost had a supporting role in the very entertaining Edgar Wright-produced alien invasion flick ATTACK THE BLOCK, but CUBAN FURY marks his first solo starring vehicle. Sadly, it can be filed on that same list along with all of Pegg's headlining duds, serving as proof that these two are best taken as a package deal (SPACED, SHAUN OF THE DEAD, HOT FUZZ, PAUL, THE WORLD'S END).  Based on an idea by Frost, the makers of CUBAN FURY apparently figured "Nick Frost" and "salsa dancing" would be enough to induce guffawing and the rest would just work itself out. It's a dull, ploddingly-paced and thoroughly formulaic and lazy film that, save for one scene, forgets one ingredient that's key to any comedy: comedy.


25 years ago, Bruce Garrett was a teenage salsa phenom who gave it up after he was beaten up by some hooligans on his way to a championship contest. Cut to the present day, and schlubby Bruce (Frost) is a lathe-designer working for a London engineering company that's just brought in new American manager Julia (Rashida Jones). Bruce and asshole co-worker Drew (Chris O'Dowd) start vying for their impossibly nice boss' affections, and Bruce gets the edge when he finds out she's taking salsa classes. Finally inspired to pick up where he left off 25 years earlier, Bruce summons the eye of the tiger so he can go the distance, fulfill his long-abandoned dreams and win over Julia in the process. CUBAN FURY is a film that appears to be working from a checklist rather than a script, right down to the cock-blocking tactics of the bullying Drew, ludicrous meet-cutes (Bruce and Julia bump into one another in the hallway and get their name placards tangled in their lanyards!), and Bruce seeking the guidance of his grizzled old salsa trainer Ron Parfitt (Ian McShane). There is one funny scene where Bruce and Drew have a dance showdown in a parking garage that gets an easy laugh out of a quick cameo, but other than that, CUBAN FURY is a total snooze, laboriously going through the motions of romantic comedy and spoofy redemption saga. Frost is pretty bland, which is disappointing after his marvelous work against type in last year's THE WORLD'S END, and not even Jones' innately charming screen presence or McShane basically coasting through as a salsa-dancing Al Swearengen are enough to make things interesting. Sure, I guess it's better than SALSA, but CUBAN FURY just never heats up, neither comedically nor in the choreography of its dance sequences. (R, 98 mins)



THE ANGRIEST MAN IN BROOKLYN
(US/France - 2014)


Henry Altmann (Robin Williams) is a Brooklyn lawyer with anger management issues.  He hates everyone and everything and he isn't in the mood to wait two hours at the doctor's office only to be told that he has a bleeding brain aneurysm. The news comes from Dr. Gill (co-producer Mila Kunis), who's filling in for Aaron's regular doctor, and when a belligerent Henry demands to know how much time he has left to live, she impulsively blurts out "90 minutes." Henry then decides to spend the next hour and a half making amends with his family--his wife Bette (Melissa Leo) and his estranged son Tommy (Hamish Linklater), who enraged his dad when he decided to pursue a career in dance instead of joining the family law practice with Henry and his younger brother Aaron (Peter Dinklage). There was a time, shown in some 1989-set flashbacks, when Henry was happy, but that time has long passed. When his other, favored son was killed in a hunting accident two years earlier, Henry imploded and became the raging asshole he is as he faces death. Even on his quest to set things right, he can't resist going off on everyone, with a xenophobic tirade against an Uzbek cabbie, yelling at homeless people, or mocking a stuttering electronics store owner (James Earl Jones). Dr. Gill has her own issues: bad choices in men, burned out with her job, and secretly nursing a prescription pill addiction, she regrets her frazzled "90 minutes" prognosis and embarks on a late-afternoon journey across the borough to find Henry and get him to a hospital, following the trail of pissed-off New Yorkers he leaves in his wake.


Where to begin?  Let there be no mystery as to why Lionsgate buried this remake of Assi Dayan's 1997 Israeli film THE 92 MINUTES OF MR. BAUM: it's staggeringly bad. Williams is the kind of actor who turns in his best work when he has a strong director to rein him in, and the usually reliable Phil Alden Robinson (FIELD OF DREAMS, SNEAKERS), helming his first film since 2002's THE SUM OF ALL FEARS, isn't up to the task. ANGRIEST MAN indulges nearly every move from the Williams playbook, but mostly his shamelessly sentimental side from PATCH ADAMS and his motor-mouthed talk-show guest persona with bonus F-bombs. In short, this film permits a completely untethered Williams to run rampant in every possible way and none of them good. Henry Altmann is the kind of character that you could almost see Larry David or maybe even Woody Allen, in one of his mean-streaked DECONSTRUCTING HARRY moods, playing with successful results. Either of them would be capable of writing a better script than the one penned by Daniel Taplitz. Not only are the character arcs predictable, but the dialogue is so stilted, awkward, and unreal that Henry's rants and bile-soaked screeds never work. Henry's anger sounds so forced and unnecessarily verbose that it never once feels natural. When Dr. Gill tries to stop him from jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, Henry yells "What are you? I ask you, what are you? Are you my thorn?  My nemesis? Have you no humanity?" Who talks like that? Even 1970s Charlton Heston would've dismissed that speech as pompously melodramatic bullshit. Williams is forced to stumble over dialogue like that throughout. There's also trite and endless third-person narration by Williams and Kunis that accomplishes nothing, and even appearances by the likes of Louis C.K., Richard Kind, Isiah "Sheeeeeeeeeiiiit!" Whitlock, Jr., Jerry Adler, and the great Bob Dishy manage to yield zero laughs. There isn't a single honest moment--either comedic or dramatic--in THE ANGRIEST MAN IN BROOKLYN, and I challenge you to find a worse final scene in a 2014 release than the one presented in this film.  Shrill, screechy, shrieking, bombastic, maudlin, contrived, and most damning of all, unfunny, it's a complete misfire from start to finish, easily Robinson's worst film, and probably Williams' as well, though in all fairness, I haven't seen LICENSE TO WED. (R, 84 mins)

KING SOLOMON'S MINES
(US - 1985)

Directed by J. Lee Thompson. Written by Gene Quintano and James R. Silke. Cast: Richard Chamberlain, Sharon Stone, Herbert Lom, John Rhys Davies, Ken Gampu, Shai K. Ophir, June Bethulezi, Sam Williams, Bernard Archard. (PG-13, 100 mins)

Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus wanted Cannon to have its own Indiana Jones, and the answer came in the form of Allan Quartermain, the heroic adventurer and protagonist of H. Rider Haggard's 1885 novel King Solomon's Mines and a subsequent series of adventures. Cannon's KING SOLOMON'S MINES was released on November 22, 1985, in time to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the novel. It opened at #1 at the box office and stayed in the top ten for several weeks, proof that the public was still jonesing for some RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM-style adventure. It proved to be one of Cannon's bigger successes, despite almost across-the-board negative reviews that dismissed it as a RAIDERS knockoff.  Well, of course it was. That was the whole point.



What gave KING SOLOMON'S MINES a little more appeal to moviegoers was the presence of Richard Chamberlain as Quatermain. The 51-year-old actor had appeared in many critically-heralded and/or financially successful films over his career, ranging from PETULIA (1968), THE MUSIC LOVERS (1970), THE THREE MUSKETEERS (1973), THE FOUR MUSKETEERS (1974), THE TOWERING INFERNO (1974), THE LAST WAVE (1977), as well as the bad-movie classic THE SWARM (1978). However, with rare exception (THE MUSIC LOVERS, THE LAST WAVE), Chamberlain was usually part of an ensemble and not the lead in feature films and ended up enjoying his biggest successes on the small screen. He starred in the popular NBC series DR. KILDARE from 1961 to 1966, getting his breakout role after two other up-and-comers--William Shatner and James Franciscus--turned it down. After appearing in several big-screen movies, the success of the two MUSKETEERS films got Chamberlain two expensive TV adaptations of other Alexandre Dumas works for NBC:  THE COUNT OF MONTE-CRISTO (1975) and THE MAN IN THE IRON MASK (1977). In 1980, Chamberlain hit his career pinnacle with the gargantuan NBC mini-series SHOGUN, based on James Clavell's best-selling novel. SHOGUN captivated America and established Chamberlain as the king of the mini-series, the extended, multi-part format made popular by ROOTS (1977), JESUS OF NAZARETH (1977), and CENTENNIAL (1978), the latter featuring Chamberlain as part of its large cast. While it's difficult for those accustomed to today's technological conveniences and the internet and the ease of binge-watching to fathom a time when homes didn't have DVRs or even the ancient relic known as the VCR, America did indeed drop what it was doing and, for five consecutive nights in September 1980, orchestrated their lives around Richard Chamberlain and SHOGUN. Chamberlain was bigger than ever, and it led to ABC mini-series THE THORN BIRDS, another phenomenal success that had audiences glued to their TVs for four nights in March 1983.

Chamberlain would go on to other mini-series and prestige TV projects--1985's WALLENBERG: A HERO'S STORY for NBC, 1986's DREAM WEST for CBS, and 1987's CASANOVA for ABC--and in 1988, nearly a decade and a half before Matt Damon popularized the character, he would become the first Jason Bourne in the ABC mini-series adaptation of THE BOURNE IDENTITY but, while people tuned in, these later projects didn't pull in the ratings of SHOGUN and THE THORN BIRDS. Chamberlain starred in the one-season CBS series ISLAND SON in 1989 and his output slowed after that. He starred in CBS' TV-movie THE THORN BIRDS: THE MISSING YEARS in 1996, but for most of that decade, he focused on stage work. He occasionally popped up in a made-for-TV movie like ABC's remake of NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1991) or a late-comer mini-series like CBS' TOO RICH: THE SECRET LIFE OF DORIS DUKE (1999), where he played the faithful butler and companion of the billionaire tobacco heiress, played by Lauren Bacall, but he generally stayed out of the limelight and gravitated to stage work, possibly due to offers dissipating with age as he entered his 60s, but probably more likely because of persistent rumors that the very private actor was gay. A 1989 People article more or less outed him, but Chamberlain never publicly confirmed it until his 2003 memoir Shattered Love. In the years since, the now-80-year-old Chamberlain has had small roles in a few indie films that didn't expand much beyond the festival circuit, guest spots on TV shows like WILL & GRACE, NIP/TUCK, and DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES, as well as recurring roles on CHUCK, BROTHERS & SISTERS, and LEVERAGE.

Chamberlain and director J. Lee Thompson

More than capable of holding his own in a Ken Russell film like THE MUSIC LOVERS or among the impressive cast of 1970's JULIUS CAESAR, Chamberlain was often dismissed by film snobs in his heyday as "a TV actor," but he's always been underrated, and his enthusiastic, affable interpretation of Allan Quatermain in KING SOLOMON'S MINES is quite enjoyable. Chamberlain hoped to take his SHOGUN and THORN BIRDS triumphs and jump-start his stagnant big-screen career and, even it was for one week, a Richard Chamberlain movie topped the box office as late as 1985. Chamberlain's days--all seven of them--as the nation's leading box office draw were brought to a swift end the next weekend when ROCKY IV opened, but KING SOLOMON'S MINES holds up nicely nearly 30 years later. Much of that is due to the directorial skills of veteran journeyman J. Lee Thompson (1914-2002), a guy who knew how to get in the can quickly and on budget, and though he was often slumming in his later years, he had experience with big, epic movies. Sure, he ended his career with the 1989 Charles Bronson sleazefest KINJITE: FORBIDDEN SUBJECTS, a film that opens with an enraged Bronson rescuing an underage hooker and jamming a dildo up a guy's ass, but Thompson also directed 1961's THE GUNS OF NAVARONE (earning him his lone Oscar nomination), 1962's TARAS BULBA, and 1963's KINGS OF THE SUN. While no one mistook Thompson for the second coming of David Lean, these big films were grand, majestic adventures with big budgets, big crews, and big spectacle (he also managed to fit the original CAPE FEAR into 1962). Though his Cannon contributions consisted mostly of working with his buddy Bronson in the '80s (10 TO MIDNIGHT, MURPHY'S LAW, DEATH WISH 4: THE CRACKDOWN, MESSENGER OF DEATH, and KINJITE), Thompson became an in-house Cannon guy, also directing the THE AMBASSADOR (1985), the studio's first adaptation of Elmore Leonard's 52 Pick-Up before John Frankenheimer's more faithful second version a year later, as well as the Chuck Norris actioner FIREWALKER (1986). Thompson was already over 70 when he was given KING SOLOMON'S MINES, and though he was obviously working with some budget limitations and the film doesn't look quite as good as an INDIANA JONES movie, it is one of Cannon's more handsomely-mounted and well-shot productions. The aging workhorse cranked out at least a movie per year for Cannon until he retired after KINJITE, which was also Bronson's last Golan-Globus production. Thompson died in 2002 at the age of 88.

The other key player in KING SOLOMON'S MINES is Sharon Stone, several years before 1992's BASIC INSTINCT made her a worldwide phenomenon. Stone's success didn't happen overnight, and she was already in her 30s by the time BASIC INSTINCT happened. KING SOLOMON'S MINES marked her first major starring role in a feature after years of supporting roles in films like Wes Craven's DEADLY BLESSING (1981) and the "Drew Barrymore divorces her parents" comedy-drama IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES (1984) as well as TV work like the short-lived Michael Nouri sports series BAY CITY BLUES, cancelled by NBC after four episodes in 1983, and the Rock Hudson TV-movie THE VEGAS STRIP WAR (1984). Stone paid her dues for years before her breakout role in TOTAL RECALL (1990) got her the BASIC INSTINCT gig, even logging time as Steve Guttenberg's love interest in 1987's POLICE ACADEMY 4: CITIZENS ON PATROL and as Steven Seagal's wife in his 1988 debut ABOVE THE LAW. Stone is OK but doesn't do much more in KING SOLOMON'S MINES than play the damsel in distress and incredulously proclaim or frantically scream "Quatermain!" whether she's reacting to his antics or in need of rescue, and there's little indication of the fame (and, I suppose, infamy) that would come a few years later. In documentary filmmaker Mark Hartley's upcoming ELECTRIC BOOGALOO, a look at the history of The Cannon Group, Chamberlain reportedly shares a story about Stone's casting in KING SOLOMON'S MINES being accidental: Golan wanted "that Stone woman," and his casting associates signed Sharon Stone. According to Chamberlain, Golan meant Kathleen Turner, whose ROMANCING THE STONE had just been a big hit and, with its lighthearted tone, an influence on KING SOLOMON'S MINES.


The plot of KING SOLOMON'S MINES is updated to WWI as soldier of fortune Quatermain is hired by Jessie Huston (Stone) to locate her missing professor father (Bernard Archard). The professor has been kidnapped by evil German Col. Bockner (Herbert Lom) and nefarious Turkish slave trader Dogati (John Rhys Davies) and forced to interpret what's reputed to be a map to the legendary King Solomon's Mines, allegedly housing wealth and treasure beyond imagination. Accompanied by Quatermain's faithful native companion Umbopo (Ken Gampu), Quatermain and Jessie encounter all manner of adventure that retains some elements of Haggard's novel but takes its share of wild liberties, including an encounter with a giant spider.  While Thompson succeeds in making a relatively inexpensive film look bigger than it is, Chamberlain's and Stone's stunt doubles are often distractingly obvious, but he keeps things moving at a frenetic pace in what's basically a series of chase scenes, all propelled along by Jerry Goldsmith's rousing score. The script by Gene Quintano (TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS) and James R. Silke (NINJA III: THE DOMINATION) has some amusing elements, like Bockner using the dead bodies of his officers as a bridge to cross quicksand or yelling at a drowning officer to "Stop sinking!  That's an order!" Lom and especially Rhys Davies are terrific as the villains, both chewing the scenery with comical gusto and seemingly having fun with the project, despite what was a sometimes arduous shoot on location in Zimbabwe. There's some pretty blatant racism in the script that comes across as rather cringe-inducing today, and it's not just the comic relief of the perpetually frightened Umbopo, who's too scared to ride in a car and stops just short of exclaiming "Feets don't fail me now!" Nor is it just the tribe of savage cannibals putting Quatermain and Jessie in a giant pot to boil.  It's Jessie calling untrustworthy merchant Kassam (Shai K. Ophir) a "cheap-suited camel jockey" and a "towel-headed freak." It's an unfortunate misstep in an otherwise immensely likable and highly entertaining film.



ALLAN QUATERMAIN AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD
(US - 1987)

Directed by Gary Nelson and Newt Arnold. Written by Gene Quintano. Cast: Richard Chamberlain, Sharon Stone, James Earl Jones, Henry Silva, Robert Donner, Doghmi Larbi, Aileen Marson, Cassandra Peterson, Martin Rabbett, Alex Heyns. (PG, 100 mins)

KING SOLOMON'S MINES was successful enough to warrant a sequel, though that sequel was planned all along. Shot concurrently with the first film in 1985 by a different director and crew, ALLAN QUATERMAIN AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD almost gets by on the easygoing charm of Chamberlain but is a vastly inferior film. It looks cheaper, moves slower, and lacks the playful revisionist goofiness of KING SOLOMON'S MINES. It was a troubled production that could've used J. Lee Thompson at the helm. The director was Gary Nelson, another journeyman who made some good films but lacked the expertise of a seen-and-done-it-all pro like Thompson. Nelson directed the Disney films FREAKY FRIDAY (1976) and THE BLACK HOLE (1979), as well as the Gary Coleman comedy JIMMY THE KID (1982).  He started directing NIGHTHAWKS (1981) before disagreements with star Sylvester Stallone resulted in Nelson getting fired and Bruce Malmuth stepping in, though many sources claim Stallone directed most of the film and Malmuth was merely present on the set and collecting a paycheck by being the guy yelling "Action!" to skirt around the DGA's "Eastwood Rule" that a fired director can't be replaced by the film's star, a rule created in 1976 when Philip Kaufman filed a grievance after Clint Eastwood fired him from THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES and took over as director himself.



Inactive since 2000, the now-80-year-old Nelson was primarily known in the industry as a TV director, working on everything from HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL, THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW, GILLIGAN'S ISLAND and GOMER PYLE, USMC in the 1960s, KOJAK, MCMILLAN AND WIFE, and POLICE STORY in the 1970s, TV-movies like THE PRIDE OF JESSE HALLAM and NOBLE HOUSE in the 1980s to EARLY EDITION in the late 1990s. Nelson knew how to work on a tight schedule and his plethora of TV credits indicates that the networks saw him as a go-to guy for the small screen, but he seems in over his head on ALLAN QUATERMAIN.  That may not speak to his abilities or lack thereof as the guy calling the shots--after all, FREAKY FRIDAY and THE BLACK HOLE were successful--but more likely, the corner-cutting circumstances under which Golan & Globus had him working. Though shot simultaneously, it's obvious that the producers considered KING SOLOMON'S MINES the more important of the two films, as ALLAN QUATERMAIN looks like a disgruntled younger sibling forced to wear hand-me-downs. KING SOLOMON'S MINES needed to be successful to justify a sequel...which they were already shooting at the same time. It's obvious that it didn't matter to Golan & Globus if ALLAN QUATERMAIN was a piece of shit. At least some attempt was made to make it presentable:  after principal photography was finished, veteran second-unit director Newt Arnold (who would go on to direct BLOODSPORT) was given a crew for extensive reshoots in Los Angeles. It's never been said whether Nelson was fired or if he was just busy with another assignment or simply didn't want any further involvement in the film, but there is an "Additional scenes directed by Newt Arnold" credit. Some of these scenes stick out like a sore thumb: Chamberlain's beard and Stone's hairstyle change throughout, Chamberlain's hair has some clearly visible gray streaks in some scenes, and Henry Silva, who turns up an hour into the film as the villainous high priest Agon, has two noticeably different wigs that sometimes switch back and forth in various shots within the same scene. The theatrical trailer also has numerous shots--including Quatermain tangling with some Agon's warriors over a pit of melted gold--that don't appear in the released film.

This cheery publicity shot of the stars constitutes the most convincing acting associated with ALLAN QUATERMAIN AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD

But even before the obvious Arnold-directed reshoots, confined mostly to the film's second half, ALLAN QUATERMAIN is sloppy and carelessly executed. The visual effects and process screens are laughably crummy, no effort is made to hide the wires attached to the actors--one character is lifted by another and the "lifting" actor barely has his hands on the person as black wires yank him out of the shot, and though Goldsmith is uncredited, the score is almost completely recycled from the first film. Chamberlain gives it his best shot as Quatermain puts off his wedding to Jessie as the two search for his missing brother Robeson (played by Chamberlain's longtime partner Martin Rabbett), who's involved with a cult led by the loony Agon.  Silva doesn't appear until an hour into the film, but he hams it up mercilessly, as does Robert Donner (MORK & MINDY's Exidor), mugging shamelessly as the cowardly, comic relief mystic Swarma. One of ALLAN QUATERMAIN's biggest offenses is having James Earl Jones in the cast and giving him nothing to do with the role of warrior Umslopogaas, an old friend of Quatermain's who, with Donner's Swarma already fulfilling the comedy obligation, basically functions as a badass version of KING SOLOMON'S MINES' clownish Umbopo. A surprisingly lean Jones looks appropriately intimidating but he's far too vital a screen presence to be saddled with the noble savage sidekick role. In his memoir Voices and Silences, Jones completely dismissed the film as "a failure" and said he only did it because he'd never been to Zimbabwe and the production was paying for everything.


As far as the general public was concerned, once was enough for Chamberlain's pseudo-Indiana Jones act. ALLAN QUATERMAIN AND THE LOST CITY OF GOLD tanked badly, landing in seventh place with less than $2 million. It opened on January 30, 1987, the same day as the Bette Midler/Shelley Long comedy OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE, which took the #2 spot as everything fell victim to Orion's wide release expansion of Oliver Stone's landmark, headline-making PLATOON, the talk of the industry at the end of 1986 and the beginning of 1987. QUATERMAIN took a serious beating, grossing less in its opening weekend than STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME in its tenth week of release and even being beaten out by THE GOLDEN CHILD, Eddie Murphy's attempt at being Indiana Jones, in its eighth week out. In short, regardless of how much they may have enjoyed KING SOLOMON'S MINES 14 months earlier, moviegoers didn't give the slightest semblance of a shit about a second Allan Quatermain adventure, and it fell out of the top ten in its second weekend and was in second-run discount theaters in its third.

A MOST WANTED MAN
(UK/US/Germany - 2014)

Directed by Anton Corbijn. Written by Andrew Bovell and Stephen Cornwell. Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rachel McAdams, Willem Dafoe, Robin Wright, Grigoriy Dobrygin, Daniel Bruhl, Nina Hoss, Homayoun Ershadi, Mehdi Debhi, Rainer Bock, Herbert Gronemeyer, Vicky Krieps, Martin Wuttke, Max Volkert Martens. (R, 122 mins)

The late Philip Seymour Hoffman had two films in the can and he was nearly finished with his scenes on the next two HUNGER GAMES installments when he died of a heroin overdose on February 2, 2014. To say that modern cinema has lost one of its greatest actors isn't an exaggeration: a look at Hoffman's credits over the last 15-20 years brings back memories of so many unforgettable characters: the obnoxious, "shaka-laka-doobie-do" craps player in HARD EIGHT; the awkward, closeted production assistant pining for Dirk Diggler in BOOGIE NIGHTS; the obscene phone caller in HAPPINESS; dispensing sage-like wisdom as Lester Bangs in ALMOST FAMOUS; the gas-huffing widower in LOVE LIZA; the gambling-addicted bank manager in OWNING MAHOWNY; his Oscar-winning turn as CAPOTE; the scheming son orchestrating a robbery gone horribly awry in BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD; the theater director given an unlimited budget to create his life's work in SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK; the priest who may or may not be abusing altar boys in DOUBT; the L. Ron Hubbard figure in THE MASTER. Just 46 when he died, Hoffman already amassed a body of work that gave significant credibility to the notion that he was the best of his generation, but it's depressing to think of all the great performances he still had left in him.

Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967-2014)

Shot two years ago, A MOST WANTED MAN, based on the 2008 novel by the seemingly ageless John le Carre, grants Hoffman another memorable character into which he vanishes completely: Gunther Bachmann, a German counterterrorism agent based in Hamburg. Like most of the protagonists in le Carre's perpetually gray and dreary, Spy Who Came in From the Cold settings, Bachmann is weary, rumpled, jaded, and cynical. He has no apparent life outside of his job, he chain smokes, lives on black coffee, whiskey, and fast food, probably sleeps in his office most nights, and wears the same clothes several days in a row. He feels the Hamburg assignment is punishment for a job that went south on his watch in Beirut, resulting in the deaths of most of his team. Bachmann is the beaten-down-by-life doppelganger of Hoffman's bellicose Gust Avrakatos in CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR. But Hamburg is actually an important post, being the residence of 9/11 hijacker/ringleader Mohammed Atta prior to the terrorist attacks in 2001, and Bachmann believes he's on to something with respected philanthropist, Islam expert, and anti-terrorism lecturer Dr. Faisal Abdullah (Homayoun Ershadi).  Records of Abdullah's many charitable donations always show a discrepancy involving a mysterious shipping company based in Cyprus, through which Bachmann believes the doctor is funneling money to terrorist organizations. Meanwhile, Issa Karpov (Grigoriy Dobrygin), a Russian/Chechen fugitive, has escaped captivity and made his way to Hamburg. Believed to have terrorist ties that may involve Abdullah, Bachmann and his team keep surveillance on both men. Karpov is led to left-wing, civil-rights activist lawyer (or, as Bachmann calls her, "a terrorist social worker") Annabel Richter (Rachel McAdams), who agrees to oversee his collecting an inheritance from his late father that's being kept in a bank owned by Tommy Brue (Willem Dafoe). Having been tortured in Russian and Chechen prisons and renouncing all terrorist beliefs, Karpov wishes to take his inheritance and donate it to the worthy causes of the outwardly altruistic Abdullah. With the German government breathing down his neck for results and believing Karpov innocent, Bachmann instead wants to use Karpov to nail Abdullah, teaming with opportunistic CIA operative Martha Sullivan (Robin Wright) to set Karpov and Annabel up at a safe house while they put the complex plan in motion.


Like Tomas Alfredson's masterful TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY (2011), A MOST WANTED MAN is a melancholy slow-burner for grown-up audiences. There's a lot of espionage machinations and what little there is in the way of action doesn't play at all like a typical spy-movie crowd-pleaser, with Bachmann gasping and wheezing after being on the losing end of a foot chase. The film is directed by Anton Corbijn, whose last effort was the glacially-paced, Euro-styled George Clooney mood piece THE AMERICAN (2010), a very good film sold as a commercial shoot 'em up actioner when it fact it was a somber, morose Jean-Pierre Melville homage that should've played the art-house circuit (still one of the funniest things I've ever witnessed in a movie theater: an older woman at a matinee of THE AMERICAN standing up and shouting "Hang the director!" as the closing credits rolled). A MOST WANTED MAN isn't quite as austere as THE AMERICAN, and it's forcefully driven by one of Hoffman's greatest performances. Again disappearing into a role, Hoffman's German accent is flawless from the start and you immediately forget you're watching Philip Seymour Hoffman. Hoffman was always an actor who committed regardless of how undignified he had to be, and his out-of-shape, overweight Bachmann, his belly hanging over his belt and his breathing labored with audible congestion between every drag on the cigarette constantly between his lips, is a vividly real characterization. Given his unexpected passing, most of the focus of A MOST WANTED MAN will be on him, but the rest of the cast does excellent work as well, particularly McAdams and Dafoe, both offering German accents just as convincing as Hoffman's. Scripted by Andrew Bovell, with an "additional writing" credit for le Carre's son and co-producer Stephen Cornwell, A MOST WANTED MAN is the kind of summer movie specifically engineered as counterprogramming for adult audiences, but at the same time, it's a bittersweet reminder that we've lost a gifted, one-of-a-kind actor whose absence will be felt for years to come.

IRONCLAD: BATTLE FOR BLOOD
(UK/Serbia - 2014)

2011's IRONCLAD was a $25 million medieval epic set during the 13th century First Barons' War that had a SEVEN SAMURAI-type band of Knights Templar fighting to defend Rochester Castle from the forces of England's tyrannical King John, exacting revenge on the noblemen who forced him to sign the Magna Carta. It had a cast of solid pros--James Purefoy, Brian Cox, Kate Mara, Derek Jacobi, Charles Dance, and a scenery-chewing Paul Giamatti as the despicable King John--but nevertheless went straight to DVD in the US, where it developed a small cult following once it started streaming on Netflix. It's a nicely-done, blood-splattered adventure saga that suffers from too many scenes of Purefoy and Mara gazing longingly at one another, but as far as battle sequences and sword-induced carnage were concerned, IRONCLAD delivered. Proving that no film is too unknown to warrant a sequel, director/co-writer Jonathan English returns with IRONCLAD: BATTLE FOR BLOOD, which, unlike its predecessor, actually made it into a few US theaters. That seems odd, since it has almost no recognizable faces except for Michelle Fairley--best known as GAME OF THRONES' Catelyn Stark--and a few of her third-and-fourth-string THRONES co-stars looking for work since they've been killed off of the HBO series. More of a spinoff than a direct sequel, IRONCLAD: BATTLE FOR BLOOD takes place five years after the events of the first film and only has one minor character reappearing--Guy the Squire--and he's not even played by the same actor (Tom Austen replaces Aneurin Barnard). Guy the Squire is paid a visit by his cousin Hubert De Vesci (Tom Rhys Harries) when the De Vesci castle is attacked by a rogue band of Scottish rebels led by the ferocious Maddog (Predrag Bjelac). Maddog's son (Ljubomir Bulajic) is killed in the initial battle and Hubert's father, Lord Gilbert De Vesci (David Rintoul) loses an arm. Knowing Maddog's revenge attack is a matter of When and not If, Gilbert sends Hubert to secure the services of mercenary Guy who, as expected, is able to assemble the requisite ragtag group of mismatched warriors who band together before the climactic battle at an abandoned warehouse.  Wait. Hold on. No. No, there's no abandoned warehouse. My apologies. I was confusing my cliches. Please excuse me.


English seems to have regressed since the first IRONCLAD.  This new film looks cheap and clumsy, and it might not had English elected to shoot it in a competent or even remotely watchable fashion. Every scene is a dizzying, headache-inducing blur of the worst kind of shaky-cam. He goes so overboard with it--even in scenes where people are just talking or standing around--that you could be forgiven for assuming the DVD or Blu-ray was defective. There are very few moments in the film where the camera is held steady, and after a while, it starts to resemble medieval found footage. It's a stunningly numb-skulled decision by a director to fix what wasn't broken. Sure, IRONCLAD had some shaky-cam but it wasn't so much that it was a deal-breaker. Here, it's just overwhelming and does nothing to justify a project that already doesn't have much reason to exist. IRONCLAD has found a small cult following and while it's not an unsung classic or anything, it's certainly worth seeing once, if only for Cox's spirited performance and Giamatti's vein-popping histrionics. All you'll get from IRONCLAD: BATTLE FOR BLOOD is a migraine. (Unrated, 108 mins)



ANNA
(Spain/US - 2014)


Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra (ORPHAN, UNKNOWN, NON-STOP) produced this lackluster mystery that melds psychic phenomena with the usual--and completely predictable--twists and turns. The premise sounds like the set-up for a high-concept CBS procedural: "memory detective" John Washington (Mark Strong) works for an organization called Mindscape (the film's original title), whose investigators are able to infiltrate the memories of their subjects and witness the things they've seen.  Of course, Washington, like most rumpled cops with bleary eyes, perpetual three-day stubble, and a utility bill with a huge "Past Due" stamp visible on his cluttered coffee table in front of the couch where he passes out every night, has some baggage that's placed him on an extended leave of absence--in this case, a dead child and a wife who committed suicide--but he needs the money and tells his boss Sebastian (Brian Cox) that he wants back in the game. Sebastian gives him the easy gig of investigating Anna (AMERICAN HORROR STORY's Taissa Farmiga), a rich teenager with psychological issues and vague psychic abilities, who's gone on a hunger strike and is kept locked in a room under surveillance by her boozing mom (Saskia Reeves) and her sneering stepfather (Richard Dillane), who has a habit of sleeping with the help. Arriving at Anna's family home, the kind of sprawling, gothic, spiral-staircased mansion specifically designed to contain generations of secrets and lies, Washington's job is simply too find Anna's reasons for her self-harm and get her to eat. But as he spends more time with her and they get to know each other, he starts finding bits and pieces of a complex puzzle that he becomes obsessed with putting together.  And someone should, because director Jorge Dorado and screenwriter Guy Holmes sure don't seem up to the task.


ANNA gets off to an intriguing start as a sort of supernatural MANHUNTER, and it's nice to see veteran character actor Strong, whose one-season-and-done AMC series LOW WINTER SUN failed to become the network's next BREAKING BAD, in a leading role, but this film is a disjointed, incoherent, badly-paced mess. It feels like vital scenes are missing, especially near the end, which is completely rushed and makes little sense.  Further evidence to suggest haphazard editing: prominently-billed Noah Taylor doesn't appear until the very end, seated at a table talking with Strong, but is listed quite high in the "Cast in order of appearance" roll at the end.  There's also a guy credited as "Mr. Taylor's body double," but there's nothing about their scene that would require a body double, indicating that an entire plot thread involving his character was left on the cutting room floor. It's hard to believe someone with the sharp skills of Washington, regardless of how burned-out he is, would be gullible enough to get tripped up in the situation that develops, and never seeing how he's been duped until it's too late. There's signs of a decent thriller lurking somewhere in here, but that's not what got dumped on just ten screens in the US. (R, 99 mins)



THE DAY OF THE SIEGE: SEPTEMBER ELEVEN 1683
(Italy/Poland - 2012; US release 2014)


This chronicle of the Battle of Vienna is so concerned with scoring cheap political points that even its title is flagrantly misleading:  the final battle took place on September 12, 1683, but why let well-documented historical facts get in the way of being able to crassly draw false parallels to a world-changing tragedy?  Italian director Renzo Martinelli has been making films for several years now with the backing of the Northern League, the far-right political party that in many--but not all--ways is Italy's version of the Tea Party. THE DAY OF THE SIEGE: SEPTEMBER ELEVEN 1683 was co-produced by the Polish Film Institute and was originally conceived as a tribute to King Jan III Sobieski, whose army was largely credited with defeating the Ottoman Empire forces in their quest to establish Islam in the west. That premise was enough get famous but not-exactly-A-list Hollywood actors like F. Murray Abraham, Harvey Keitel, and Jim Caviezel onboard. Abraham and Keitel both starred in Martinelli's fervently anti-Islam (and completely terrible) THE STONE MERCHANT (2007) and Abraham starred with Rutger Hauer in the director's SWORD OF WAR (2009), which co-star Cecile Cassel publicly denounced once she realized that Martinelli was making a Northern League propaganda film disguised as a historical epic (the fact that then-Northern League leader Umberto Bossi was hanging around the set and had a cameo might've been the first tip-off). Apparently, the involvement of the Northern League and the politics inherent in the SIEGE script were enough to prompt Keitel to bail, and you know your agitprop might be skewing a little too far to the right when even outspoken Hollywood conservative Caviezel feels the need to distance himself and drops out of the project. Abraham stuck around, either out of a sense of professional obligation or, considering this is his third appearance in a Martinelli project, he either likes the guy, agrees with his views, both, or neither. Maybe a job's a job for Abraham, who seems to be working now more than ever on TV and in supporting roles in Hollywood movies, but he's had a rather lucrative and busy side career in Italy for nearly 30 years. Many of Abraham's Italian TV and film projects have never received US distribution, but his Italian credits very likely outnumber his Hollywood ones at this point. For years, prior to the post-JERRY MAGUIRE career self-immolation of Cuba Gooding, Jr., Abraham was the poster boy for the so-called "Oscar jinx" after his Best Actor win for 1984's AMADEUS failed to make him a movie star and instead made him a punchline, and that's not fair. Abraham is a great character actor, but he was never going to be a Hollywood A-lister. AMADEUS was that once-in-a-career, lightning-in-a-bottle gift that very few jobbing actors like Abraham get. Balancing Hollywood gigs with a secret Italian career was more common for aging actors of the 1960s and 1970s than it is today. Still, for a guy like Abraham (and Keitel, and the late Tony Musante and Ben Gazzara--both of whom made their final appearances in a 2013 miniseries for Italian TV--character actors who also have extensive European careers that American audiences know nothing about), the idea of a lead role in an Italian epic, even if it's mostly bankrolled by a party of the country's most vehement xenophobes, was probably hard to turn down.


In Turkey, Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa (Enrico Lo Verso, in what I assume was supposed to be Caviezel's role) is entrusted with expanding the Ottoman Empire and its practice of Islam into Europe. Revered monk Marco D'Aviano (Abraham) can't convince his flock that he's just a man, even though he's seen performing miracles on more than one occasion. D'Aviano tries to spread the word of God and Christianity as armies assemble to thwart Kara Mustafa after the monk sees a comet and insists it's a threat from Islam (a good second guess would be a shitty special effect worthy of an Al Bradley joint).  D'Aviano barely secures the reluctant commitment of fey, cowardly King Leopold of Austria (Piotr Adamczyk), and even get a feisty duchess (Alicja Bachleda-Curus of ONDINE) to join the battle. They're eventually joined by the mighty forces of Jan III Sobieski (renowned filmmaker and occasional actor Jerzy Skolimowski, in what was likely Keitel's part), for the completely incoherent and ineptly-assembled final battle, filled with amateur-night CGI and greenscreen and cannonballs causing more explosions than all of Antonio Margheriti's films combined. It's all rather numbing and dull by the end, and quite distasteful not just in its dishonest invocation of 9/11 but also in the way that all of the Turkish characters are portrayed as swarthy and untrustworthy, especially the opportunistic Abu'l (Yorgo Voyagis), who allows his Christian girlfriend to be violated by animalistic "Allahu Akbar!"-chanting troops in order to appease his Islamic cohorts. And for a film that's ostensibly about Jan III Sobieski and his army's triumph, the Polish end of the story gets completely relegated to the sideline, with Skolimowski not even appearing until 80 minutes in to give the script enough space for Martinelli's Christian proselytizing and Islam-bashing. Abraham gets to sink his teeth into a few spiritual monologues (make a drinking game out of how many times he cries "I am but a simple monk!") and Bachleda-Curus gives her scenes enough of a spark that you wish she was in it more, but most of the actors are badly dubbed with inappropriate voices, especially Skolimowski, whose dubber's final declaration of "Damn you, Kara Mustafa!" doesn't even match his lip movements and is obviously not what he said on-set.  Most disheartening of all is seeing the ageless Claire Bloom (Chaplin's LIMELIGHT, THE HAUNTING--yes, that Claire Bloom) squandered in a one-scene cameo as D'Aviano's mother. That's right:  Claire Bloom as F. Murray Abraham's mom.  Martinelli may fancy himself the Northern League's Ridley Scott, but with that kind of ridiculous casting, slipshod filmmaking, and bush-league visual effects, he's really just Italy's Uwe Boll. (R, 120 mins, also available on Netflix Instant)

CURTAINS
(Canada - 1983)

Directed by Jonathan Stryker (Richard Ciupka and Peter R. Simpson). Written by Robert Guza Jr. Cast: John Vernon, Samantha Eggar, Linda Thorson, Anne Ditchburn, Lynne Griffin, Sandra Warren, Lesleh Donaldson, Deborah Burgess, Michael Wincott, Maury Chaykin, Kate Lynch, Calvin Butler. (R, 89 mins)

"Fans have made this movie a lot more intricate than it is.  Because there's nothing to understand" - Paul Zaza, CURTAINS score composer


"It's such a mishmash and such a mess that it's endearing somehow? They love it for the idea of what it could've been"- CURTAINS co-star Lesleh Donaldson

"I started getting e-mails from people wanting to interview me about CURTAINS, telling me it's a big cult movie now, and I'm like, 'This is a cult movie?  Really? CURTAINS?'" - Richard Ciupka, uncredited co-director of CURTAINS


Those are just some of the sentiments of the participants in "The Ultimate Nightmare: The Making of CURTAINS" on Synapse Films' just-released Blu-ray and DVD edition of the 1983 Canadian cult classic CURTAINS. It's a bluntness usually not heard in such supplements, which typically resemble pleasant puff pieces about how great everyone was and what a great time they had. But there's a bit of an incredulous streak running through some of the cast/crew comments on CURTAINS that borders on the legendary SNL sketch where host William Shatner yells "Get a life, will you people?" to a room filled with Trekkies at a STAR TREK convention. CURTAINS is a perfect example of a completely forgotten film that bombed upon its initial release inexplicably taking on a life of its own long after the people involved in its creation have put the experience behind them and gotten on with their lives and careers.




Synapse's Blu-ray goes a long way toward making the case that CURTAINS is a film worthy of study, but it's mostly surface and cosmetic.  Zaza's right--there's nothing to understand, and it's probably the ultimate in revisionist nostalgia among children of the '80s who now label every 1980s movie a classic. I don't throw this stone with a dismissive tone from a glass house, either--hell, I bought the CURTAINS Blu-ray. Nostalgia's fun, and it's nice to look back at a time when movies like this were opening in theaters every Friday, but the notion of CURTAINS being a "classic" is absurd. I first took note of just how big this particular facet of '80s nostalgia was becoming back in 2009 when fans were outraged over Lionsgate's DVD release of the 1986 slasher film SLAUGHTER HIGH just being a port of the old VHS transfer, right down to the Vestron Video logo at the end of the movie. First of all, it is outrageous that they'd release a VHS transfer on DVD as late as 2009, but secondly, I thought "People give a shit about SLAUGHTER HIGH?" The story of a persecuted nerd named Marty Rantzen getting revenge on his tormentors at their ten-year reunion was barely a blip on the radar and was in and out of theaters in a week in 1986, and whatever attention it got from Fangoria at the time was due to actor Simon Scuddamore, who played Marty, committing suicide shortly after filming ended in late 1984. SLAUGHTER HIGH was the actor's only film and there was an air of mystery surrounding him and his short life and to this day, very little is known about him.  So there's the Scuddamore factor but beyond that, SLAUGHTER HIGH is not particularly interesting and certainly not an exemplary film in its genre. It's good for some laughs and it's got some gore, but it's really nothing special at all.


CURTAINS falls under that same category:  it's not a great movie or even a good one, though admittedly, its infamously troubled ordeal of a production and its lengthy journey into theaters make it an interesting curio. Synapse's Blu-ray is a case where the supplemental features are actually more interesting than the film itself, though in this beautiful, newy-restored 1.78 transfer, it does play a lot better than it did on the murky old Vestron VHS at 1.33:1, which was the source for CURTAINS' appearance on a 2010 Echo Bridge four-film bargain bin DVD set and on free cable VOD services like Verizon's ViewNow. Donaldson has a good point in that fans love CURTAINS for what it could've been, but it's probably more of a love for the time that it was released. It takes us back to our formative years as horror movie fans, when everything was new and every trip to the video store in that golden age was an adventure. It didn't even matter if the movies were good. It was the thrill of discovery...of directors, actors, subgenres, styles, etc. Home video was a revolution whose impact is easy to forget now and it just isn't understood by younger people who've only known a world where everything is a click away. You can't explain to them the hours spent browsing the shelves of video stores.  That's why there's the whole VHS nostalgia craze.  It's certainly not for the picture quality, although that's what the hipsters might try to tell you.  The nostalgia is for the boxes themselves. Cable exposed us to a lot of new things, but video stores offered a seemingly bottomless treasure trove of choices when we were used to whatever was on late-night TV or Saturday afternoon Creature Features. For example, my favorite Lucio Fulci film is CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980), which was released in the US in 1983 as THE GATES OF HELL. CITY is one of his essential films, but it's probably not his best. I suspect the reason CITY (which I still find myself calling THE GATES OF HELL, even though no one refers to it as that anymore) still resonates so strongly with me is that when my dad got a video store membership, the first movie I picked was THE GATES OF HELL, in that old Paragon big box. I was ten years old and it was the most gloriously disgusting movie I'd ever seen. From that moment on, I was hooked. I knew the old Universal horrors of the 1930s and the Hammer and Amicus titles of the 1960s and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and JAWS and HALLOWEEN and ALIEN and FRIDAY THE 13TH, but this was something else entirely. To an impressionable ten-year-old, those other films were merely gateway drugs and now there was no turning back. For me, it was THE GATES OF HELL, but someone else's cult movie epiphany might very well have been SLAUGHTER HIGH or CURTAINS.  The point is, this kind of nostalgia is like comfort food. The key is avoiding the hyperbole and the tendency to anoint everything "classic." I love the era of CURTAINS as much as anyone, but that doesn't make CURTAINS good. Let's not pretend this is a brilliant film awaiting critical reassessment. It's not without its effective moments, which seem like happy accidents considering how chaotic the shoot was--including one legitimately terrifying scene that's usually the only thing anyone remembers from it--but let's not kid ourselves about this being a good movie. The people involved in it don't even have your back on that claim.


As CURTAINS opens, famous actress Samantha Sherwood (Samantha Eggar) feigns a breakdown in order to get admitted to a mental hospital to research the title role in AUDRA, the next film by famous director Jonathan Stryker (John Vernon). She ends up escaping when she reads in Variety--which is apparently delivered to the asylum--that Stryker is casting for AUDRA and has no intention of having her released from the institution. Samantha shows up at Stryker's mansion, where he's auditioning five actresses for AUDRA: aspiring stand-up comedian Patti (Lynne Griffin), ice skater Christie (Donaldson), dancer Laurian (Anne Ditchburn), party girl Tara (Sandra Warren), and embittered Brooke Parsons (Linda Thorson, best known for replacing Diana Rigg on THE AVENGERS), a veteran actress on the outs in the industry and desperate for a comeback. A sixth actress, Amanda (Deborah Burgess) is killed before she even gets to Stryker's house, and that same killer, wearing a horrific hag mask, starts offing the actresses one by one. Is it one of the actresses eliminating the competition?  Is it Stryker? Is it red herring caretaker and Tara's hot-tub buddy Michael (Michael Wincott)?  It's doubtful even the filmmakers knew until the footage was assembled.


CURTAINS began shooting in Toronto in October 1980. Producer Peter R. Simpson just had a big hit with the HALLOWEEN knockoff PROM NIGHT and was finishing production on the child-custody drama MELANIE, which was eventually released in 1982. Simpson fired MELANIE director Rex Bromfield and assigned the film's cinematographer Richard Ciupka to handle some post-production reshoots involving a character played by Guess Who frontman Burton Cummings. The Belgian-born Ciupka was making a name for himself in the Canadian film industry with numerous Canadian/French co-productions: he was the chief camera operator on two Claude Chabrol films (BLOOD RELATIVES and VIOLETTE, both 1978) and was promoted to director of photography on Nicolas Gessner's IT RAINED ALL NIGHT THE DAY I LEFT (1980) and, most importantly, Louis Malle's ATLANTIC CITY (1980). After agreeing to finish MELANIE for Simpson, Ciupka was rewarded with what was to be his official directorial debut with the $4 million CURTAINS. Working from a script by Robert Guza Jr, who would go on to be the head writer on GENERAL HOSPITAL from 1984 to 2011, Ciupka shot CURTAINS, with Simpson frequently checking in but more or less leaving him alone to work, as he was a businessman who had other projects going on at the same time and Ciupka knew what was expected of him. When shooting was finished and Simpson asked to see Ciupka's rough cut, their relationship quickly soured. According to editor Michael MacLaverty in the "Ultimate Nightmare" supplemental feature, Ciupka made an art film when Simpson wanted a slasher thriller, and on top of that, "it was only 45 minutes long and it was boring."


Simpson immediately shelved the film and it was over a year before he reassembled the necessary cast members for reshoots--without Ciupka--in March 1982, taking over the direction of CURTAINS himself. He completely overhauled and restructured the story, adding the slasher/gore elements that Ciupka didn't include, and it was Simpson who directed the film's most famous sequence: Christie's ice-skating encounter with the killer. Donaldson says that Simpson shot an entire subplot about her character that was ultimately not used, but all told, in its final cut that was finally released in US theaters on March 4, 1983, Ciupka and Simpson each directed about half of the 89-minute film, which was credited to one "Jonathan Stryker," after Vernon's character, when a disgruntled Ciupka refused to sign off on the paperwork required by the Director's Guild. Simpson basically took the 45 minutes that Ciupka assembled and created a beginning and ending around it, plus the ice-skating sequence, which happens around the 40-minute mark. Ciupka is interviewed for the Blu-ray, and states that his work is mostly confined to the middle of the film (he doesn't claim to have directed the ice-skating sequence here, but he has in the past; Donaldson says it was part of the 1982 reshoots, when Ciupka was no longer around), and that nothing in it is his until roughly 21 minutes in, when Amanda finds the doll in the middle of the road during a storm, a sequence that Simpson re-edited to appear as a dream. Though he added a beginning and an ending, Simpson's final cut of CURTAINS has haphazard seams and stitching showing all over the place, not just in terms of hairstyle changes from 1980 to 1982 and other continuity mishaps, but with Simpson completely forgetting about the Michael character, who has no dialogue and disappears until he turns up dead (on the commentary track with Griffin and Donaldson, Griffin has a vague recollection of Michael being Samantha's son in the script, but it's never mentioned in the film). Elsewhere, most of Ditchburn's scenes were cut as she has no dialogue in the released version, but she does get a memorable death scene as Ciupka slowly, almost hypnotically, moves in on her wonderfully expressive face, accompanied by Zaza's haunting piano theme, before the killer's black-gloved hand enters the frame and covers her mouth--it's another example of a powerful moment indicating what could've been. There's another scene where Samantha is burning photographs of the other actresses and talking to a woman who helped her escape.  We only see this other woman's legs and hear her voice.  This mystery woman is neither seen nor mentioned again (Griffin on the commentary: "Who is this woman supposed to be?").  Simpson's closing scene is an effective reveal that works well, but still feels like a last-minute decision on who the killer should be.



Synapse's Blu-ray presents CURTAINS in a way you've never seen it before, finally making it watchable and proving that, yes, it is at least a visually competent film. The muddy-looking VHS that everyone's been watching for 30 years was so dark at times that it was hard to tell what was going on and which characters were alive or dead. In this HD remastering, the film plays a lot like a Canadian giallo, particularly in some of Ciupka's very atmospheric framings and willingness to let things play out slowly. Simpson mimics that to a degree in his initial set-up of the ice-skating scene, which lasts about eight minutes, though the finishes of his kill scenes have an aggression to them that Ciupka's do not.  It works both ways, as demonstrated by Laurian's murder as she rehearses, dancing for several minutes as Ciupka very deliberately moves the camera in. Some of Ciupka's decisions have an understandably European feel to them in a way that was at odds with the in-your-face slasher movies of the sort Simpson was expecting. The end result is a confused mix of styles, but at least as far Ciupka's work is concerned, there's an argument that CURTAINS attempts the now in-vogue "slow burn" horror a few decades before Ti West made it hip, and maybe Ciupka's contributions influenced that to some degree. Again...the film that could've been... And that's not even taking into account all of the footage--Christie's subplot, a completely different ending, and more--that Simpson shot and never used.  All of that material--various rough cuts, alternate takes, scenes shot with Quebec actress Celine Lomez before she was fired and replaced by Thorson early into shooting, any unused footage--was destroyed by the rights holders during a vault-cleaning in 2009. As Synapse head Don May posted online at the time: "All gone...destroyed by someone who had no idea what they were getting rid of."


In addition to "The Ultimate Nightmare," there's also two commentary tracks, though one consists of a 45-minute phone interview with Simpson from 2004 (he died in 2007), and a ten-minute audio interview with Samantha Eggar by CURTAINS superfan Todd Garbarini, where she talks mostly about her past career and doesn't recall much about CURTAINS. The actual 2014 commentary features Griffin and Donaldson and is moderated by Edwin Samuelson, a regular fixture in the world of Blu-ray/DVD supplements. Samuelson was a last-minute replacement for planned moderator Garbarini who, for unspecified reasons, couldn't make it to the recording. Samuelson uses some of Garbarini's prepared notes and obviously knows the movie, and he does a decent job considering he probably woke up that morning with no idea he'd be recording a CURTAINS commentary before the day's end.  He asks the expected questions of the actresses, and sometimes it goes nowhere--Samuelson brings up future makeup effects guru Greg Cannom, who worked on the movie, and Griffin and Donaldson have no clue who he is--but the actresses are entertaining to listen to and come off like two old friends shooting the breeze.  Samuelson tries to keep them on subject, but he doesn't really have to--the two have a natural chemistry together and sometimes their asides and wanderings have an emotional, real-world resonance to them, as when Griffin, having not seen the film in many years, is surprised to see her late mother in a background bit part ("That's my mom!  Hi, Mom!"), and Donaldson being able to pinpoint exactly when a particular scene was shot because "we were working on this when we heard that John Lennon was killed."


Exclusive to the Synapse Blu-ray edition is a 1980 short film about Ciupka, then a hot commodity after his ATLANTIC CITY cinematography accolades, and his debut effort with CURTAINS. There's some great behind the scenes footage of Ciupka directing Vernon and some of the cast during the dinner scene.  What's most fascinating is that even during production, Ciupka is already openly questioning and pretty much regretting his decision to become a director, saying he was much happier as a D.P. and misses working with his crew and that sense of collaboration, feeling more like a manager now that he has to oversee everything on the set as director. He's clearly not happy (one shot catches him sitting alone, thumbing through a copy of the script and looking almost longingly at the camera crew as they adjust some lighting) even though, at least according to Donaldson, the cast was behind him and they were disappointed when shooting reconvened in 1982 and Ciupka was no longer their director. It's no surprise that he went back to being a D.P. after CURTAINS, waiting another decade to direct again and even then, only very sporadically and, aside from one episode of the late '90s Showtime erotic horror anthology series THE HUNGER, all French-language, Quebec-shot productions that never got US exposure. CURTAINS rarely works or makes any sense, but Synapse's stunning presentation of it and its informative extras come dangerously close to making a believer out of even the most ardent detractor.

RAGE
(US - 2014)


Almost as if his potentially career-reviving turn in JOE never happened--which it feels like anyway considering how Lionsgate seemingly went out of their way to ensure nobody knew about it--Nicolas Cage is back with another phoned-in actioner ready-made for one of those random eight-movie "Action Marathon" sets you find in the $5 bin at Wal-Mart.  By now, Cage has racked up almost enough of these DTV-quality programmers to make an entire set of his own--anyone remember TRESPASS, SEEKING JUSTICE or STOLEN?  Of his recent work, only JOE and the surprisingly engaging and similarly distributor-abandoned THE FROZEN GROUND have given Cage the quality projects he's still clearly capable of doing. RAGE is every bit as generic as its title suggests, at least until a legitimately unpredictable twist ending that's undermined by a pointless coda that plays along with the closing credits. Cage is Paul Maguire, a successful building developer who's managed to bury his criminal past with the Irish mob. He went legit years earlier when his wife died of cancer and someone needed to be around for their daughter Caitlin (Aubrey Peeples). Now married to the much younger Vanessa (Rachel Nichols), Paul is a loving but stern father who wants the best for his little girl. While Paul and Vanessa are out at a business dinner, Vanessa has some friends over but the party comes to an abrupt end during a home invasion by three gunmen who abduct her. When the cops find Caitlin dead, Paul knows his past has come back to haunt him: years earlier (Cage's son Weston plays Paul in flashbacks), he and his buddies Danny (Michael McGrady) and Kane (Max Ryan) robbed and killed the younger brother of Russian mob chief Chernov (Pasha D. Lychnikoff) and got away with it. Believing Chernov knows their secret and is finally exacting his vengeance, Paul and his still-connected pals embark on a citywide rampage taking out Chernov's crew, despite the warnings of weary, dogged detective St. John (a weary, dogged-looking Danny Glover, who finally does look too old for this shit) and aging, wheelchair-bound old mob boss Francis O'Connell, played by Swedish Peter Stormare using a vague and inexplicable Eastern European accent as if the filmmakers neglected to inform him that he was supposed to be Irish.


Director Paco Cabezas stages a couple of interesting action sequences, like Paul taking out a bunch of Russian mob flunkies while armed only with a hunting knife, but then blows it with a tiresome shaky-cam foot chase that ends in--where else?--an abandoned warehouse. Other than the intriguing twist that unfortunately doesn't deliver for those expecting an explosive finish, the script by Jim Agnew and Sean Keller (the writers of Dario Argento's Adrien Brody/Byron Deidra buddy movie GIALLO) is just a cut-and-paste job from hundreds of other such revenge thrillers.  Not even 20 minutes in, and we've already heard Cage declare "I'm out of the game...you know that!", McGrady bellow "Knock knock, asshole!" while barging through a door, and someone asking Cage "How deep to you wanna take this?" to which he growls "How deep is Hell?" Of course, Nichols, who has nothing to do, pleads "Talk to me!  Please don't shut me out!" and Glover warns "You can't go around tearin' up the city!" Sporting what looks like a vintage 1970 Christopher Lee hairpiece, Cage mostly goes through the motions here but indulges in a couple of classic Nic Cage meltdowns, presumably to keep himself awake ("You're a rat!  RAT! RAT! RAAAAT!"), and in one ridiculous scene, smashes a guy's head into the ground ten times, empties an entire clip into him, then kicks his head again, all while screaming at the top of his lungs. Such histrionics indicate not only that Cage knows this is garbage, but also that he's fully aware of what his fans want and is just giving them more material for future "Nic Cage Freaks Out!" clips on YouTube. It's passably entertaining and never boring, but if you've seen JOE, it's depressing all the same, and the future doesn't look promising with the upcoming LEFT BEHIND reboot.  RAGE isn't good and it isn't bad.  It just is. Watch JOE or THE FROZEN GROUND instead. (R, 98 mins)



LOCKE
(US/UK - 2014)

Steven Knight is best known for his Oscar-nominated script for 2002's DIRTY PRETTY THINGS as well as writing David Cronenberg's 2007 drama EASTERN PROMISES. These were the first two films in a loose trilogy of London's exploited and downtrodden that also includes Jason Statham's 2013 departure vehicle REDEMPTION, which marked Knight's directing debut. Knight, also the creator of the original British version of WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE, took six years off between EASTERN PROMISES and REDEMPTION, and has been a veritable workaholic since. He wrote last year's flop legal thriller CLOSED CIRCUIT and the current THE HUNDRED-YEAR JOURNEY, and was recently hired to script the sequel to WORLD WAR Z. He's also written and directed LOCKE, his most ambitious project yet. It's difficult to put a guy in a car taking phone calls during a real-time 80-minute road trip and not just adhering to the premise, but also making it compelling, and Knight and star Tom Hardy pull it off. Obviously dealing with a badly-timed cold that was worked into the story as the film was shot over eight consecutive nights, Hardy is Ivan Locke, a prominent and successful Birmingham builder who's got the biggest, most expensive concrete pour of his career taking place bright and early the next morning, a 55-story, $100 million skyscraper commissioned by a corporation based in Chicago. But he's delegating it to an underling and making a late-night drive to London to be with Bethan (voiced by Olivia Colman on speakerphone), who's about to give birth to his child. The problem is, Locke has been married to Katrina (Ruth Wilson) for 15 years and they have two sons. Locke had a drunken one-nighter with the older Olivia, a lonely, socially awkward woman who'd given up on happiness. He has no interest in being with her, but he feels that being there for the birth and being a presence in the child's life is the right thing to do, much like overseeing the final details of the concrete pour as he speeds down the highway, fielding a constant barrage of phone calls from Bethan, Katrina, his oblivious sons giving him football updates, his frazzled second-in-command who's picked the wrong time to get drunk, an irate boss, and overseers in Chicago who want him fired.


In the rare moments he isn't taking or making calls, Locke, symbolically enough, looks to the rearview mirror to address his unseen and long-dead father, a deadbeat dad who walked out on him and was never there. That's the past Locke's speeding away from as he careens to his future, however bleak it might be considering how he's jeopardized his marriage and his career. Sniffling his way through the film in the best real-cold-written-into-the-film bit since John Malkovich's one day on the set in JENNIFER 8 (1992), Hardy is dynamic as the beleaguered Locke, trying to keep his cool as he faces the consequences of one mistake that's causing his entire life to collapse. Knight's a little heavy-handed with the metaphors (yes, Locke constructs sturdy buildings but his own is a shambles with crumbling foundation!), and some of the actors on speakerphone, particularly Wilson as Katrina, sound a little too rehearsed (Locke: "This only happened once." Katrina: "The difference between once and never is everything!"), but he does a marvelous job of wringing suspense and tension from something as simple as an incoming call notification. In the end, it's still a gimmick, but unlike stunts of this sort, it sticks to its established rules and doesn't cut any corners, and the real time element indeed feels real. The problem most filmmakers run into when they have a premise like "He's in the car for the whole movie!" is that they can't wait to get him out of the car, and Knight admirably avoids that trap. (R, 85 mins)



PROXY
(US - 2014)


The obfuscation and misdirection start immediately in PROXY with the introduction of the very pregnant Esther Woodhouse (Alexia Rasmussen), whose surname would seem to indicate that she's in store for a ROSEMARY'S BABY predicament, but that would be too easy. Director/co-writer Zack Parker has other things in mind when Esther is violently assaulted two weeks before her due date. The baby dies and Esther, a loner who used an anonymous sperm donor, has no family or friends and finds herself hanging around in hospital waiting rooms to find some sense of security. Things look up for her when she starts attending a support group for grieving mothers and meets Melanie (Alexa Havins), and PROXY is the kind of film where revealing any further plot details would be a disservice to a potential viewer. What I've described here is approximately the opening 15 minutes, and this is a film best seen knowing as little as possible other than the essentials: it's not for everyone, it's often extraordinarily uncomfortable, it's absolutely riveting, and you won't soon forget it. It's an audacious and chilling psychological thriller that begins as a painful examination of grief before a focused and assured Parker sends it into increasingly unpredictable and, for the most part, plausible directions. Every time you think you know where PROXY is going, Parker has something wholly unexpected in store for you. It only stumbles with a couple of contrivances that reek of plot convenience, but it recovers nicely for its terrific finish. PROXY is populated by complex and extremely damaged characters with equally complex motivations whose lives of secrets, deception, and neuroses intersect in tragic and shocking ways. Parker even manages to pull off a Hitchcock trick at one point and not have it blow up in his face, but he also throws in little bits of Kubrick (fans of THE SHINING will spot one obvious homage), and one long sequence in a department store that's total De Palma, right down to the Newton Brothers' blatantly Pino Donaggio-esque score. Some scenes of domestic discord have a Cassavetes-level of emotional rawness to them. One stunning sequence resorts to a jaw-dropping, over-the-top fusion of Argento splatter and Peckinpah bloodletting. Rasmussen and Havins are remarkable in very difficult roles (Rasmussen's in particular), and they get solid support from Kristina Klebe as someone who figures into the story in a major way (again, anything is a spoiler here).  Of the four leads, only DIY indie auteur Joe Swanberg doesn't really work, and it's largely because he just doesn't have the dramatic chops (he's fine as the comically arrogant blowhard in YOU'RE NEXT) to pull off the arc his character endures. You've never seen anything quite like PROXY, one of the boldest and most unusual films of the year, and perhaps the most impressive breakout genre offering since Nicholas McCarthy's THE PACT. This is going to become a major cult movie. (Unrated, 122 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)