Good Efficient Butchery

THE GUEST
(US/UK - 2014)

The terrific YOU'RE NEXT (2013) earned some significant critical acclaim even outside the usual insulated and self-congratulatory horror circles and showed that indie filmmaker Adam Wingard and screenwriting partner Simon Barrett were ready to take things to the next level. The film didn't do very well commercially as mainstream audiences were perhaps a bit fatigued with home-invasion thrillers, but it's found a major cult following on DVD and Netflix streaming. Wingard and Barrett are part of the horror hipster collective that also includes their buddies and V/H/S franchise collaborators Joe Swanberg and Ti West (Wingard and Barrett starred in the horribly self-indulgent 24 EXPOSURES, a recent film by the prolific Swanberg. who also co-starred in YOU'RE NEXT), but as with YOU'RE NEXT, THE GUEST demonstrates that Wingard and Barrett are just as skillfully adept at making smart and entertaining thriller as they are the would-be auteurist circle-jerk home movies they get roped into by their friends. THE GUEST had an even tougher time in theaters than YOU'RE NEXT when distributor Picturehouse--a relaunch of the short-lived '00s indie distributor--cancelled their plans to roll it out nationwide (it was their only 2014 release) and instead halted THE GUEST's run on a mere 53 screens at its widest release for a gross of just $330,000. It deserved better and it's another one of those films that, had it been released ten years ago, would've easily become a huge word-of-mouth sleeper hit and likely launched the big-screen career of former DOWNTON ABBEY co-star Dan Stevens.

Sporting a flawless American accent, the British Stevens (also seen recently opposite Liam Neeson in the underrated A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES) is David, recently discharged from the military and paying a visit to the mourning family of his fallen friend Caleb. Caleb's family--mom Laura (Sheila Kelley), dad Spencer (Leland Orser), 20-year-old sister Anna (Maika Monroe), and teenage brother Luke (Brendan Meyer)--are dealing with his death in their own ways when David arrives to grant Caleb's final wish to tell each of them that he loved them very much. Touched by the extent of David's respect for their son by following through on his final wish, Laura and Spencer invite him to stay with them as long as he needs. David repays their kindness by helping out with some problems, whether it's handling some bullies making Luke's life hell, kicking some troublemakers out of a party thrown by Anna's friends, or just being a calming, comforting presence in a home fraught with tension. But something seems off about David, even with his story seemingly checking out and his being clearly visible in one of Laura's photos of Caleb's Special Forces unit in Iraq. To say any more about where the story heads would spoil the surprises THE GUEST has to offer (I haven't even mentioned the involvement of character actor Lance Reddick and an almost unrecognizable Ethan Embry), but with its twisty plot that expertly balances dark comedy and odd bits of humor (note the GENERAL HOSPITAL references in the family names) with grim and shocking dramatic turns, its unexpected character development (Brittany Murphy lookalike Monroe is quite good at playing Anna's very believable maturation from one who is disaffected and can't even to being the first to see through David's ruse and attempt to do something about it), and its killer John Carpenter-esque score by Steve Moore (one half of American synth-rock duo Zombi), it's one of the most giddily entertaining genre pieces in ages, and with the exception of THE IMMIGRANT, perhaps the best film of 2014 that nobody saw. Best of all is Stevens, whose brilliant performance brings to mind the smiling sincerity masking the tightly-coiled, ticking time-bomb menace that Terry O'Quinn brought to the 1987 classic THE STEPFATHER. Wingard admirably wastes absolutely no time in getting THE GUEST off and running, and it rapidly unfolds with all the appeal of a catchy song that's immediately got you hooked. This one should've been big, but like YOU'RE NEXT, it had to wait to be discovered. (R, 100 mins)

FALCON RISING
(US/Germany - 2014)

The busy Michael Jai White divides his time between DTV actioners and the Tyler Perry universe, starring in the Perry-produced WHY DID I GET MARRIED? TV spinoff FOR BETTER OR WORSE, a show that started on TBS but is now about to air its sixth season on OWN. For many years, White was best known for the title roles in the HBO movie TYSON (1995) and the big-screen SPAWN (1997), but his place in pop culture history would eventually be cemented by the 2009 cult classic BLACK DYNAMITE, a dead-on, labor-of-love spoof of blaxploitation films that White also wrote and shepherded every step of the way to its completion. BLACK DYNAMITE only received a limited theatrical release, but it's gone on to become one of the most revered and quotable comedies--at least with hardcore movie nerds--of the last several years, and in that sense, it's surprising that White, who's absolutely perfect as Black Dynamite, hasn't gone on to bigger things. White's no stranger to the world of DTV action, and his films have generally been a cut above the norm, whether he's working for Isaac Florentine in UNDISPUTED II: LAST MAN STANDING (2006), headlining the bone-crushing and bloody BLOOD AND BONE (2009), or directing himself in NEVER BACK DOWN 2: THE BEATDOWN (2011). Like Florentine--another DTV action figure who should theoretically be getting better mainstream offers--it may just be that White prefers the relative freedom that the world of low-budget action allows. Florentine is one of the producers of White's latest, FALCON RISING, which actually made it into a few theaters in September courtesy of Freestyle Releasing. It's the tentative beginning to what producers Shahar & Etchie Stroh of Moonstone Entertainment have christened the "Codename: Falcon" franchise, with White as former Marine-turned-government Black Ops agent John "Falcon" Chapman.

As FALCON RISING opens, a suicidal Chapman, haunted by his Iraq War memories, is playing Russian Roulette before heading to the liquor store, where he of course thwarts a robbery. When his humanitarian aid worker sister Cindy (Laila Ali, Muhammad's youngest daughter) is brutally beaten and left for dead in the "Favela" slums of Rio, Chapman heads to the Rio de Janeiro capital where his old war buddy Manny (Neal McDonough) conveniently runs the US Consulate. It seems Cindy was working to stop a human trafficking and child prostitution ring and got the attention of Rio's most corrupt cops and an evil crew of yakuza planning to ship underage girls to Japan. When an yakuza hit woman disguised as a nurse tries to kill a comatose Cindy, Chapman goes full One Man Wrecking Crew to take out the trash in the Favela. Director Ernie Barbarash is a DTV action veteran (CUBE ZERO, ASSASSINATION GAMES), not on the level of a Florentine or a John Hyams, but FALCON RISING (shot under the far less catchy title FAVELA) shows he's getting a little better. There's an enjoyable Cannon vibe to much of FALCON RISING, right down to its 101-minute run time, and it's really just one action movie cliche after another: PTSD-stricken Chapman's death wish, the Rio cop in charge of the case (Jimmy Navarro, looking and acting like his character should be named "Brazilem Dafoe") obviously being a villain, and the inevitable climactic shootout/MMA throwdown at a shipyard warehouse. There's nothing here you haven't seen before: the villains are complete cardboard cutouts; a sequence where Chapman issues a beatdown on a suspicious-looking guy who turns out to be a complete red herring who never bothers to introduce or explain himself until he and five of his buddies have been decked senseless is unbelievably dumb; a subplot about cleaning up the Favela owes a bit too much to THE RAID; and former boxer Ali has nothing to do but lie motionless in a hospital bed (and she gets an "introducing" credit despite IMDb showing 12 prior acting credits dating back to 2000), but FALCON RISING works as brainlessly diverting action fare. White is an engaging and stoical hero, there's some nice bantering with McDonough (shockingly not cast as a smug prick), who quips "I see you stopped working out" when he first sees the hulking Chapman at the Consulate, the fight choreography by Larnell Stovall is top-notch, and Barbarash and cinematographer Yaron Levy do a fine job of passing Puerto Rico off as Rio and making FALCON RISING look a bit bigger-budgeted than it really is (though you could make a drinking game out of how many times Barbarash cuts to swirling, second-unit aerial shots of the Christ the Redeemer statue). It's hard telling if FALCON RISING will actually lead to a franchise, but it's got plenty of action and no shortage of a perpetually scowling White beating the shit out of people, so what more do you need? (R, 101 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)

I ORIGINS
(US - 2014)

(Some SPOILERS ahead). The 2011 Sundance hit ANOTHER EARTH, directed by Mike Cahill and written by star Brit Marling, was one of the most intelligent and thought-provoking indie sci-fi films to come down the pike since PRIMER introduced the world to Shane Carruth. While Marling wrote and starred in the interesting SOUND OF MY VOICE and the disastrous THE EAST for their director pal Zal Batmanglij, Cahill was busy writing his follow-up film I ORIGINS. Marling is just an actress in this one, but it has that distinct feel that she usually brings to her projects. However, the film is ultimately a disappoint that never recovers from the glacially-paced mumblecore moping of its first half and it eventually succumbs to silliness despite an interesting premise once the narrative finally starts advancing. Opening in 2006, molecular biology Ph.D. candidate Ian Gray (Michael Pitt), his roommate Kenny (THE WALKING DEAD's Steven Yeun), and their frumpy research assistant Karen (Marling) are studying the evolution of the human eye in an effort to dismantle the notion of intelligent design and creationism. Ian meets Sofi (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) at a party and the two begin a whirlwind romance that comes to an abrupt end when Sofi is killed in an elevator accident. Cut to 2013, as the now-Dr. Gray and his research partner/wife Karen are told their infant son displays signs of autism. They're suspicious of the tests given to the baby and, through some plot advancement that the audience is just forced to roll with, discover that their son's iris pattern is identical to that of a man who died two years earlier, and the photos which provoked an emotional response from the baby during the test were images from that dead man's past. Making this their new mission--apparently with the plan of cutting the autism specialist (Cara Seymour) out entirely--Ian jets off to New Delhi when an eye-scan database indicates that a child with Sofi's iris pattern was there as recently as three months earlier.

Cahill tries to go for some heady ideas involving reincarnation, religion, and scientific theory, but too much of I ORIGINS is a laborious, pretentious bore. The courtship scenes between Ian and Sofi go on forever, with the two demonstrating the kind of odd, eccentric behavior that only goes over well at film festivals (their meet-cute is particularly absurd), and the performances of Pitt and Berges-Frisbey respectively channeling the most grating aspects of circa-2000 Jeremy Davies and circa-anytime Paz de la Huerta. The first 50 minutes are a slog, but if you can hang with it, it gets marginally better--for a while, at least--as Cahill gets a decent Shane Carruth forward momentum going and actually takes the concept somewhere. But it's ultimately a lot of talk on the way to nowhere special and not really worth the effort. There's still a lot of lingering questions, William Mapother's one-scene appearance as an American minister in Ian's New Delhi hotel seems to be what's left of a larger role that got hacked down in post, and a post-credits stinger tries to go for a big surprise but is just hokey and laughable. There's some nice cinematography, particularly in the New Delhi sequences, but Cahill's follow-up to the far-superior ANOTHER EARTH is, for the most part, a dull, draggy misfire, and though Marling is only in front of the camera, it's a good indication along with THE EAST that maybe the Marling/Cahill/Batmanglij team have said everything they've had to say. (R, 107 mins)

INHERENT VICE
(US - 2014)

Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, Katherine Waterston, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Jena Malone, Maya Rudolph, Martin Short, Joanna Newsom, Eric Roberts, Serena Scott Thomas, Michael Kenneth Williams, Martin Donovan, Sacha Pieterse, Sam Jaeger, Timothy Simons, Jordan Christian Hearn, Hong Chau, Jeannie Berlin, Michelle Sinclair, Peter McRobbie, Keith Jardine, Andrew Simpson, Jefferson Mays, Christopher Allen Nelson. (R, 149 mins)

INHERENT VICE, Paul Thomas Anderson's long-planned adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's most accessible, commercial novel, is a wildly careening, frequently meandering shaggy-dog/stoner noir set in the fictional SoCal haven Gordita Beach in 1970. As it plays out, it certainly brings to mind what might happen if someone remade CHINATOWN with Jack Nicholson's Jake Gittes replaced by Jeff Bridges' The Dude, or perhaps The Big Sleep if authored by Kurt Vonnegut. While INHERENT VICE has its share of laugh-out-loud scenes and quotable dialogue ("Molto panacaku!") and comparisons are perhaps inevitable, it's a much darker film than THE BIG LEBOWSKI, almost filled with as much somber sadness as absurdist humor. With its twisting, turning, labyrinthine plot at times akin to trying to watch THE TWO JAKES without ever seeing CHINATOWN, INHERENT VICE is likely to frustrate many moviegoers who think it's the wacky comedy the trailers and TV spots are selling. It is, for the most part, but it's also distinctly the work of Anderson, the guy who gave audiences a cast sing-along and a storm of frogs at the end of the three-hour MAGNOLIA, a film they expected to be a Tom Cruise vehicle, and whose PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE had Adam Sandler fans demanding refunds when they realized it wasn't an Adam Sandler movie. You can draw a straight line from the "Regret" deathbed speech by Jason Robards' Big Earl Partridge in MAGNOLIA to hippie private eye Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), whose days spent in a weed-induced haze are primarily his way of getting over the one that got away.

That would be Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston, Sam's daughter), who suddenly reappears, walking through Doc's front door a year after they split. She's gone semi-establishment, with a sugar daddy in wealthy real estate developer Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts). Wolfmann is missing, and Shasta tells Doc that she was offered a chance to take part in a haphazard plot by Wolfmann's wife Sloane (Serena Scott Thomas) and her boy-toy Riggs Warbling (Andrew Simpson) to orchestrate Wolfmann's disappearance and ship him off to a mental institution. Fearing for her own safety, Shasta leaves Doc's and promptly disappears herself as Doc soon becomes embroiled in a complex plot that inevitably leads back to Shasta. Drifting in and out of the story are Doc's chief nemesis, raging, flat-topped detective and part-time actor Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin); Sortilege (Joanna Newsom), Doc's imaginary Girl Friday who functions as his conscience and the voice that brings Pynchon's prose to life; ex-con Tariq Kallil (Michael Kenneth Williams), who points Doc in the direction of Wolfmann's neo-Nazi bodyguard Glen Charlock (Christopher Allen Nelson), who turns up dead; Charlock's sultry sister Clancy (Michelle Sinclair, aka porn star Belladonna), who's only into doing two men at once; Doc's current girlfriend and assistant D.A. Penny Kimball (Reese Witherspoon); session saxophonist and recovering drug addict Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), who's forced into being an informant by both the cops and the FBI; Doc's attorney Sauncho Smilax (Benicio Del Toro), whose specialty is maritime law; coke-snorting, sex-addicted dentist Rudy Blatnoyd (Martin Short); runaway rich girl Japonica Fenway (Sacha Pieterse); incompetent, nose-picking FBI agents Flatweed (Sam Jaeger) and Borderline (Timothy Simons); and various shady figures like Japonica's wealthy father Crocker Fenway (Martin Donovan), drug lord Adrian Prussia (Peter McRobbie), and Aryan Brotherhood strongarm Puck Beaverton (Keith Jardine); and a huge shipment of heroin swiped from Golden Fang, a corporation used as a front for the nefarious Indo-Chinese drug trade.

At the heart of INHERENT VICE is the relationship between Doc and Shasta, and one of the highlights of the film is a long and extraordinarily erotic sequence that should likely make a star out of Waterston (you'll know it when you see it). Phoenix is in every scene, and displays some comic chops and timing that really allow him to stretch and cut loose in ways you've never seen before. His banter with cartoonish supercop Bjornsen is often screamingly funny, and whether he's bellowing at diner cooks, kicking down doors, or delicately eating a frozen chocolate dipped banana in a way that bears an alarming resemblance to fellatio (with Phoenix's dismayed expressions looking like those of a disgusted Benny Hill) or tacitly dissing Smilax (working as Doc's criminal defense lawyer) with "Don't you practice marine law? Well, we've got kidnapping and murder, but we can throw some pirates in if it makes you more comfortable," Brolin has never been better than he is here. Amidst the drug humor and the increasingly ridiculous situations in which Doc finds himself, there's a downbeat streak of melancholy running throughout the film, from exterior elements like political upheaval and societal horrors (the Manson family is invoked on a couple of occasions) with characters lamenting the passage of time, opportunities squandered, and love lost.

That's not to suggest it goes as deep as a MAGNOLIA or a THERE WILL BE BLOOD, but INHERENT VICE, like THE MASTER, is an Anderson film that probably can't all be taken in on one viewing. Where THE MASTER was often impenetrable and cold, it markedly improved on a second and third viewing, once the plot was known and the more intricate details could be studied. With INHERENT VICE, it's due not to thematic complexity and deeper meaning, but simply because there's so many characters weaving their way through the impossibly complicated storyline, which mostly hangs together but occasionally feels like one of those BIG SLEEP situations where the plot is so tangled that the screenwriters adapting Raymond Chandler's novel weren't even sure who killed one of the victims, forcing them to seek the guidance of Chandler himself only to find out that he didn't know either. At two and a half hours, INHERENT VICE marks the first time that an Anderson film actually feels long. Perhaps because it's mostly an engagingly silly stoner comedy (this may have more blazing than the entire Cheech & Chong filmography), the epic length does make things drag at times...not enough to deem it a buzzkill, but for a guy whose past films never feel as long as they are (how many 189-minute films move as briskly as MAGNOLIA?), the bloat doesn't always feel justified here. Still, minor missteps aside, INHERENT VICE is a very good film by a director usually counted on to deliver great ones, one of the few filmmakers whose every new work is a legitimate event, and in the current American movie scene, Anderson's "very good" is still better than most filmmakers'"best."

TAKEN 3
(France/US - 2015)

Directed by Olivier Megaton. Written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen. Cast: Liam Neeson, Forest Whitaker, Maggie Grace, Famke Janssen, Dougray Scott, Leland Orser, Jon Gries, David Warshofsky, Don Harvey, Dylan Bruno, Sam Spruell, Andrew Howard, Jonny Weston, Al Sapienza, Wallace Langham, Steve Coulter. (PG-13, 109 mins)

With no one else in his family left to be abducted by evil Albanian human traffickers and their vengeful relatives, retired CIA special ops badass Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) channels his inner Richard Kimble when he returns to his apartment, picks up a knife on the floor and finds the dead body of his ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen) just as the cops barge in and he looks guilty as hell. A fleeing Mills takes advantage of his extensive knowledge of the layout of every home in the neighborhood, eventually evading his pursuers via a secret door in someone's garage that leads to the L.A. River. Mills goes on a city-wide rampage to prove his innocence--causing millions of dollars of damage in the process--while being doggedly pursued by Deputy Marshal Sam Gerard--er, I mean, Detective Frank Dotzler (Forest Whitaker), who demonstrates his eccentricity and intelligence by constantly twirling a knight chess piece between his fingers and marveling at the wily Mills' ability to evade capture.

NEESON!

TAKEN 3 is the least and hopefully last of this Luc Besson action franchise. Neeson stumbled into a second career as an aging action hero with the surprise success of the first TAKEN back in 2009. That film seems like gritty neo-realism when held up against the events that unfold in TAKEN 3, in which everyone involved is simply going through the motions, starting with Neeson. The actor's seemingly effortless gravitas just fizzles here, and for the first time in his action-star phase, Neeson looks bored and completely checked out. One can't blame him, considering the idiocy of Besson's and Robert Mark Kamen's script and the abysmal direction of Besson protege and returning TAKEN 2 helmer Olivier Megaton, who previously steered another solid action series to its nadir with 2008's TRANSPORTER 3. It's bad enough that the story is essentially a ripoff of THE FUGITIVE (with one of the guilty parties missing a pinky instead of an arm), but TAKEN 3 is dumb even by Besson standards. There's one sequence where Mills' daughter Kim (31-year-old Maggie Grace, still apparently playing 20 or 21), who jokes about inheriting her father's "OCD gene," is on her way to school and makes her morning stop at a carryout for a peach yogurt drink (always grabbing the fourth drink from the front) only this time, there's a note from her on-the-run dad on the fourth container back saying "Drink this now." It's been drugged with something to make her sick a bit later, but he did so in order to get her to leave her class and head to the restroom to vomit, where he's waiting with an antidote, so he can talk to her. Is there some reason he couldn't just put a note on the container telling her to meet him in the ladies' room near her class? Why spike the yogurt smoothie and deliberately cause gastrointestinal distress? What if she didn't make it to the restroom? It just seems like more work than necessary. I'd say Mills was overthinking it, but there's absolutely no way that "overthinking" and "TAKEN 3" should be mentioned in the same sentence.

NEESON!

The plot is as standard-issue and by-the-numbers as it gets and a better script would've provided some more back-and-forth phone banter, mind games, and grudging respect between Neeson's Mills and Whitaker's Dotzler. Both actors are capable of more than TAKEN 3 allows them to do or cares for them to attempt. Of course Mills is being framed. Of course some stock Russian mobsters--led by ruthless ex-Spetsnaz killing machine Oleg Malankov (Sam Spruell)--are behind it all. And of course it has something to do with Malankov seeking revenge for some shady and collapsed business deal with Lenore's asshole husband Stewart, now played by Janssen's HEMLOCK GROVE co-star Dougray Scott (replacing Xander Berkeley), bland and lifeless here and looking like he still hasn't recovered from losing the role of Wolverine in 2000's X-MEN to second-choice Hugh Jackman after being stuck working on reshoots for the behind-schedule MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE II. As dumb and uninspired as TAKEN 3 is (don't miss Mills driving a car down an elevator shaft), it's really Megaton's directing style that's the biggest deal-breaker. There is no scene that Megaton can't chop into nanosecond increments that would give Michael Bay a bout of vertigo. Action sequences are just a blurry smear of colors and quick cuts. Featuring three nausea-inducing car chases that make GETAWAY look like THE SEVEN-UPS, TAKEN 3's action is lost in a headachy haze of CGI vehicle flips and shaky-cam incoherence, much of which seems to be orchestrated around Neeson's stunt double. There are a few shots where you can tell Neeson is involved (the brawl in the carryout, for example), but most of the time, there's some alarmingly Seagal-esque chicanery going on where you see Mills fighting but not his face, as Megaton cuts to a close-up of a grimacing Neeson before cutting back to Mills fighting, as "Neeson" is either shot from behind or his head is out of the frame. On one hand, sure, at 62, Neeson's not a young man anymore, but in his other action movies, he's made a point of doing as much as he could. One can hardly blame him for not caring enough about the quality of TAKEN 3 or rightfully concluding that it wasn't worth risking injury on something so subpar. TAKEN was a surprise, lightning-in-a-bottle blockbuster that became a modern action classic. TAKEN 2 was an unnecessary but stupidly enjoyable victory lap. TAKEN 3 shows the franchise in a downward spiral worthy of the last two DIE HARD movies and is just no fun for anyone, from the actors to the audience. Liam Neeson is the man, and in films like THE GREY and A WALK AMONG THE TOMBSTONES, he brings a "thinking man's asskicker" complexity to his roles, and in something like NON-STOP, he manages to overcome the obstacles and still deliver a strong, convincing performance. But even Neeson can't conceal his TAKEN burnout with his half-hearted clock-punch of a performance here. Perhaps it's time for him to use the very particular set of skills that he's acquired over a long career and move on to something new.

PREDESTINATION
(Australia - 2014; US release 2015)

Written and directed by The Spierig Brothers. Cast: Ethan Hawke, Sarah Snook, Noah Taylor, Olivia Sprague, Monique Heath, Christopher Kirby, Christopher Summers, Christopher Bunworth, Freya Stafford. (R, 97 mins)

Robert A. Heinlein's classic 1959 short story "All You Zombies" gets the big-screen treatment by Australian twin siblings The Spierig Brothers, their third effort after the 2003 cult zombie movie UNDEAD (released in the US in 2005) and the underrated dystopian vampire film DAYBREAKERS (2010). The brothers--Micheal and Peter--reunite with DAYBREAKERS star Ethan Hawke for this time-travel saga that marks their most ambitious project yet. Taking place from 1945 to 1992 and jumping back and forth through the decades, PREDESTINATION belongs to that same mindbender genre that's home to the likes of Christopher Nolan's INCEPTION and Terry Gilliam's 12 MONKEYS. It does so with a much smaller budget, though the Spierigs work wonders with what they've got, maintaining a very DIY attitude throughout--they also handle the digital effects and matte work and Peter is credited with composing the score. It's a terrific-looking film, as was DAYBREAKERS (I wasn't as taken with UNDEAD as most genre fans were), but PREDESTINATION suffers from the brothers being far too antsy about getting to the story's big twist. They telegraph it in the most unsubtle ways possible, at times bordering on clumsy and comedic, and one character's singing of an old country ditty stops just short of him wearing a sandwich board announcing the surprise ending. I've never read "All You Zombies," but about a third of the way into the film, I jotted down what I predicted to be the twist. And I was right. Put it this way: if the Spierigs made THE USUAL SUSPECTS, they'd open it with Kevin Spacey limping into Chazz Palminteri's office and introducing himself as Keyser Soze. If the Spierigs made PSYCHO, they'd have Janet Leigh arriving at the Bates Motel and walking into the office to find Anthony Perkins sitting at the desk dressed as Mother.

As it is, PREDESTINATION has a nifty premise and is so well-made on a technical level that it's a shame the Spierigs couldn't keep their pants zipped a little longer and avoid blowing their wad with self-sabotaging spoilers. Even if I mention the clues--debates about the chicken or the egg; talk of Christine Jorgensen and the snake eating itself by the tail; characters having plastic surgery; characters' faces being deliberately obscured in certain time jumps; another singing a certain 1948 novelty hit--and, in defense of the Spierigs, that song does apparently does figure prominently in Heinlein's story--the outcome will be obvious to anyone who's seen a time-travel movie. While the twist is far too easy to call, it's still somewhat interesting to see how it plays out. Visually and stylistically, PREDESTINATION is top-notch, but if the Spierigs want to be in the big leagues, then they need to work on their poker faces. The film opens with a "Temporal Agent"--a government time traveler whose job is jumping through time to prevent crime before it happens--being horrifically burned in a bomb blast. After plastic surgery, the agent (Hawke), who has spent an untold number of years unsuccessfully tracking a terrorist known as "The Fizzle Bomber," lands in NYC in 1970, where he knows the Bomber will set off an explosive in March of 1975 that kills 11,000 New Yorkers. The agent is working as a bartender when into the dive walks an androgynous man with whom the agent/barkeep strikes up a conversation. Calling himself "The Unmarried Mother," the man (played by Sarah Snook) tells his story. He began life as an orphan girl in Cleveland named Jane. Shy and awkward, Jane excelled in classes, brawled with other girls, had no friends, and was never adopted. In her teens, she was contacted by Mr. Robinson (Noah Taylor), an operative for a secret NASA program that supplied female company for astronauts on long space missions. Around this time, she meets and falls in love with a man who leaves her without warning after a whirlwind romance. He also left her pregnant, and after delivering the baby via C-section, Jane is bounced from the NASA program when doctors discover partially-formed male genitalia in the makeup of her sex organs. Her female reproductive system is so damaged by the difficult birth that doctors perform a hysterectomy and put her through a transgender surgery that turns her into "John." Soon after, her baby, named Jane, is kidnapped from the hospital and John lives his life alone, rejected by NASA after applying to the space program, and instead making ends meet by writing a hack "confessionals" syndicated magazine column.

What does any of this have to do with the Agent/Barkeep's search for The Fizzle Bomber? Does the Fizzle Bomber have a connection to the Agent/Barkeep or The Unmarried Mother/John? And how exactly does the Agent/Barkeep really know The Unmarried Mother/John and why is he so eager to find the man who left Jane an unmarried mother? And who took Baby Jane from the hospital? And since the Spierigs invented the whole Fizzle Bomber element of the plot, why couldn't they come up with a more intimidating name than "The Fizzle Bomber"? If the Spierigs could've just contained themselves and held off on all the blatantly in-your-face clues that go way beyond the acceptable limits of foreshadowing (that probably worked better on the page), they really could've had an INCEPTION or a 12 MONKEYS here. Instead, the whole thing is practically spelled out in great detail even before the climactic montage that shows how it all fits together. PREDESTINATION is a wildly inventive and intelligent story presented in a way that dumbs it down as much as the filmmakers possibly can. Fortunately, they get a great performance in a very difficult role from Australian actress Snook. Even though she isn't initially the most convincing-looking man, Snook does her best to vanish into the role of "John," and in a matter of minutes, she's sold you on the idea (as John, Snook bears a striking resemblance to a young Simon Ward). The Unmarried Mother/John's story more or less dominates the first half of the film, and Snook is required to run the gamut of emotions as both a man and a woman, and you can almost see Hawke marveling at getting a front-row seat to what should be a star-making performance. There's so many intriguing and fascinating things in PREDESTINATION's story, its style, and in Snook's performance (Hawke is very good as well) that it just makes the Spierigs' inept handling of the key revelations all the more frustrating. It's surprising that Sony, via their B-movie wing Stage 6 Films, didn't roll PREDESTINATION out nationwide, given the thoroughly generic poster art with a nonsensical tagline that has almost nothing to do with the movie. It seems like the kind of January dump-job that has a huge opening weekend until word of mouth gets around. Instead, it's been given a very limited release and scuttled off to VOD in the US after its release in Australia last summer. Cold feet over the transgender story focus maybe not going over well with Joe Multiplex? There's still a lot to appreciate, but PREDESTINATION really could've been a legitimately great little B-movie.

MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN
(US - 2014)

Debuting to widespread dismay and derision at the 2014 Toronto Film Festival and opening to toxic reviews on 608 screens in October, MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN is currently ranked fifth on the list of all-time worst box office openings on 600 or more screens. Its total gross stalled at $705,000 but honestly, no film that allows you to hear Emma Thompson utter the words "titty-fucking cum queen" can possibly be completely worthless. Based on a novel by Chad Kultgen, MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN finds director Jason Reitman, once the toast of Hollywood and the Next Big Thing after THANK YOU FOR SMOKING (2005), JUNO (2007), UP IN THE AIR (2009), and the underappreciated YOUNG ADULT (2011), crashing and burning with this on the heels of the universally-lambasted apple pie fiasco LABOR DAY (2013). MW&C is an hysterically overwrought look at Our World Today and examines the ways technology and everything else in our environment makes us strangers to one another. People drift apart, communication is non-existent, and everyone lives in their own insulated bubbles. Written by Reitman and Erin Cressida Wilson, best known for scripting 2002's SECRETARY and Atom Egoyan's ridiculous 2010 erotic thriller CHLOE, MW&C is another of these "everything is connected," big ensemble movies along the lines of CRASH, but miraculously manages to out-Haggis Paul Haggis in hackneyed sanctimony. Reitman is only 37 years old, but he's somehow directed a film that seems to have been made by an embittered and out-of-touch 80-year-old with its "Old Man Yells At Cloud" attitude about the state of the world with all the texting and the internet and the oversexed kids with the selfies and the hooking up. Most of that stems from one character: Jennifer Garner's Patricia Beltmeyer, arguably the most smothering helicopter parent in the history of cinema, a killjoy of Nurse Ratched proportions, a drunk-with-power sadist who makes Piper Laurie's Margaret White in CARRIE seem lenient and easy-going. Patricia is a mom so fixated on controlling every aspect of her teenage daughter Brandy's (Kaitlyn Dever of SHORT TERM 12) life that she seems to spend all of her waking hours scrolling through her daughter's texts and Facebook profile, systematically unfriending anyone she deems a "threat," and even plugging in a keylogger that monitors every one of Brandy's keystrokes. There are no redeeming qualities about this character and no reason given for her behavior to be as extreme as it is. But that's MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN in a nutshell: everything is black or white, with no shades of gray. It exists in an ennui-drenched suburbia where everyone's neuroses, dysfunctions, and emotional voids are right there in their browser histories. Everyone is selfish, everyone is miserable, and if there's anything that disrupts that simplistic view--like Patricia's useless husband (Jason Douglas)--then they're just cast aside by the filmmakers. Ray's there, but only exists to shake his head as Patricia sifts through pages upon pages of Brandy's text message printouts, like a driven detective obsessively digging through cold case files. It's no fault of Garner, who does what Reitman requires her to do, but Patricia Beltmeyer is one of the most ludicrously conceived villains to pop up in a movie in ages, and it was that character who bore the brunt of the film's overwhelmingly negative reception.

Elsewhere, we get quite the parade of sad sacks, all accompanied by the soothing tones of Thompson serving as narrator, at least until Reitman seems to forget about her and we go an hour without hearing her, and when she breaks out the aforementioned "titty-fucking cum queen," you're kind of interested in what else she has to say. Instead, we get Don Truby (a schlubby Adam Sandler in drama mode) and his wife Helen (Rosemarie DeWitt), bored parents of two sons whose stagnant sex life is separately rejuvenated by Helen creating an account with Ashley Madison and Don hiring escorts. This provides him with a nice break from sneaking home from work in the middle of the day to rub one out at his son Chris' (Travis Tope) laptop since Don's computer is completely shut down due to malware and viruses from all the porn sites he's visited. Chris has spent so much time jerking off to bondage and creampie videos that he can't even function during "normal" sex with hot cheerleader and self-aggrandizing would-be model Hannah (Olivia Crocicchia), even after he practices by drilling a hole in a Nerf football and filling it with hand lotion. Hannah and her single mom Donna (Judy Greer) spend all their time working on making Hannah a star, taking photos of dubious merit--often with Hannah scantily-clad--and selling them online through Hannah's web site, where her "fans," unbeknownst to the impossibly naive Donna--who raised Hannah alone after being ditched by the father, a shitbag who promised to make her a star--are primarily pedophiles. Donna begins dating Kent (Dean Norris), whose wife abandoned him and star quarterback son Tim (Ansel Elgort) a year earlier. A disillusioned Tim has since quit the football team and spends all of his time playing a WORLD OF WARCRAFT-type game online, at least until he meets the similarly disconnected Brandy, who's looking for any way to escape her mother's psychosis. There's also the formerly overweight Allison (Elana Kampouris), who spent the last year starving herself and developing an eating disorder only to lose her virginity to an asshole jock (Will Peltz) who instantly ignores her. MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN is overbaked and hopelessly melodramatic, but it's hardly the grease fire that many reviews made it out to be. Despite the cartoonish characterizations, the cast acquits themselves well, especially Norris and Greer, at least until the script requires the characters to do something stupid. Norris' Kent is handled in a surprising fashion in the sense that he initially supports his son's decision to quit the football team, giving him his space to deal with an accept his mother walking out on them. In most situations like that, the dad would be an abusive bully pressuring his son to man up and get back out on the field. Even Sandler puts forth some effort, but eventually everyone is defeated by the ham-fisted, reactionary story that only provokes guffaws instead of serious thought. (R, 119 mins)

HONEYMOON
(US - 2014)

This North Carolina-lensed indie horror film looks at the disintegration of a relationship through an INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS filter. It's an alien invasion film with the intimate brutality of Andrzej Zulawski's POSSESSION and Lars von Trier's ANTICHRIST. While the derivative "pod people" angle sometimes feels like it's being forced into functioning as a metaphor by director/co-writer Leigh Janiak, HONEYMOON ultimately succeeds thanks to a pair of gutsy performances by its leads--the only actors onscreen for about 95% of the film--and a general queasy discomfort and one scene that recalls the kind of horrific set piece that fans cut their teeth on back in the '80s. Young newlyweds Paul (Harry Treadaway of PENNY DREADFUL) and Bea (Rose Leslie, best known as Ygritte on GAME OF THRONES) head to an isolated cottage in the middle of the woods for their honeymoon. After a couple days of wedded bliss, the party comes to an abrupt end when Paul finds Bea naked and confused in the woods in the middle of the night. She claims to have been sleepwalking but over the next day or so, she begins behaving oddly. She starts using familiar terms in a strange fashion (calling her suitcase a "clothes box") and forgets how to make coffee and French toast. She makes excuses for avoiding sex and has what look like deep bug bites on her inner thigh. She won't answer Paul's questions, leading him to believe she stepped out for a tryst with violent, hot-headed townie Will (Ben Huber) who owns the local diner and with whom Bea was obviously friendly as teenagers. Paul notes that Will's wife Annie (Hanna Brown) was also behaving in a disoriented manner. Strange lights shine into the cottage in the middle of the night and Paul catches Bea writing "My name is Bea, my husband's name is Paul" over and over in her journal, as Paul is convinced that something has happened to Bea and something has replaced her. "You look like her. You smell like her. You taste like her. But you're not her," he says.

One of the interesting things HONEYMOON does is flirt with the idea that maybe it's Paul who's cracking up and that his concern over Bea is really just his jealousy boiling over after he quickly concludes from their brief meeting that Will is a long-ago ex of Bea's. The BODY SNATCHERS motif is a tried-and-true formula for utter paranoia, and applying it to what's essentially a two-character piece mostly taking place in a cottage makes for an intriguing contrast with the usual widespread, large-scale scope of most films of this sort. If ever there was an alien invasion character study, HONEYMOON would be it. The concept seems a little forced when Janiak tries to use it to illustrate the idea that no matter how much you love someone and think you know them, you can never really know everything about them. Mostly low-key and character-driven, HONEYMOON makes great use of light and shadows, and Janiak is to be commended for avoiding cheap jump scares and setting HONEYMOON up as a narrative feature when it would've been very easy to turn it into yet another found-footage offering. Instead, she keeps it old-school by building the characters and getting to know them, then letting the tension escalate and deftly handling not just the innately horrific concept of being a stranger in your own body, but the horror of realizing the person you married is not that person at all. The "been there, done that" BODY SNATCHERS-esque plot elements aside, HONEYMOON is a creepy and effective horror movie that Magnet only released on three screens, grossing $9300. (R, 87 mins)

REVENGE OF THE GREEN DRAGONS
(US - 2014)

Martin Scorsese's 2006 Oscar-winner THE DEPARTED was a remake of Andrew Lau and Andy Mak's acclaimed 2002 Hong Kong thriller INFERNAL AFFAIRS, and Scorsese "presents" and serves as one of 20 credited producers on REVENGE OF THE GREEN DRAGONS, collaboratively co-directed by Lau and Andrew Loo. Lau hasn't had much luck trying to crack the American market--his 2008 Richard Gere/Claire Danes serial killer thriller THE FLOCK was taken away from him in post-production and partially reshot by an uncredited Niels Mueller (2004's THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON) before it was given an unceremonious straight-to-DVD release. He gives it another go after his 2010 Donnie Yen hit LEGEND OF THE FIST: THE RETURN OF CHEN ZHAN and the 2012 period epic THE GUILLOTINES, and the results are a mess. "Inspired by true events," GREEN DRAGONS desperately wants to be a Chinese GOODFELLAS or MEAN STREETS, but it's a cliche-laden disaster that only serves as a reminder that you should just watch those films one more time, along with Abel Ferrara's KING OF NEW YORK and Michael Cimino's YEAR OF THE DRAGON. Populated by stock characters and weak performances in a film whose story is typically advanced by montages, the confusing and often completely incoherent GREEN DRAGONS plays like an epic crime saga cut down to about half its length, but even at 95 minutes, it feels four hours long. It had potential, with its look at Chinese street gangs in Queens and Flushing in the 1980s, seen through the eyes of Sonny (THE TWILIGHT SAGA's Justin Chon), an orphan adopted into the Green Dragons gang after being brought to the US in the illegal immigration operation overseen by Snake Head Mama (Eugenia Yuan). Sonny and his adoptive brother Steven (played as an adult by Kevin Wu) serve as soldiers under the command of Green Dragons boss Paul Wong (GLEE's Harry Shum Jr) as Lau, Loo, and co-writer Michael Di Jiacomo essentially proceed with a watered-down remake of GOODFELLAS.

The chief problem is that Sonny registers a complete zero as a character, with Chon's bland performance doing nothing to make him sympathetic or even remotely compelling. So many other characters appear and disappear throughout that it's often impossible to tell how they relate to wherever the filmmakers are in the story. Of course, the hot-tempered Steven (the Tommy DeVito of the story) will be the major troublemaker in the Green Dragons. Of course Wong (the Jimmy Conway surrogate) is a ruthless leader who thinks nothing of throwing his own partners and subordinates under the bus if means saving his own ass by bringing down his chief competitor in smuggling heroin inside Hong Kong mooncakes. And of course, like the Henry Hill stand-in he's supposed to be, Sonny will turn against the Green Dragons when it becomes clear Wong intends to kill him. Also adding to the GOODFELLAS love-fest is a pointless supporting role for Ray Liotta as a hard-nosed FBI agent obsessed with busting up Wong's operation and getting no support from his do-nothing bosses at the Bureau. Liotta's character basically serves as a cipher for racist white America's ignorance of Chinese culture and customs, as Lau and Loo engage in laughably clumsy exposition drops like having Liotta ask an undercover Chinese-American NYPD detective (Jin Auyeung) "Do you speak Chinese?" to which the cop responds with a lecturing "Chinese is not a language. It's a family of languages...Cantonese, Fukienese..." Aimlessly meandering throughout its duration, GREEN DRAGONS only manages to be intriguing when it's focused on Shum's duplicitous, self-serving Paul Wong, constantly looking out for number one and a far more interesting character than either Sonny or Steven. Lau and Loo also sacrifice "true events" for a dramatic but phony twist ending, which is completely disingenuous considering the real Sonny is in witness protection and made contact with Loo to give him pointers on the film, which the co-director clearly disregarded. Elsewhere, it says nothing about the immigrant experience, opting instead to rely on every post-Scorsese, post-Tarantino gangster/crime movie cliche in the book, starting with Sonny's Henry Hill-style narration, right down to numerous instances of guys in a room shouting at each other until one yells "Fuck you!" and gets a "NO, FUCK YOU!" in response as everyone draws their guns for a standoff. REVENGE OF THE GREEN DRAGONS is a straight-to-DVD-level misfire completely at odds with the exemplary work Lau has done in his Asian films, and it's hard to believe Scorsese would even attach his name to it. (R, 95 mins)

AMERICAN SNIPER
(US - 2014)

Directed by Clint Eastwood. Written by Jason Hart. Cast: Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller, Luke Grimes, Sammy Sheik, Cory Hardrict, Sam Jaeger, Kyle Gallner, Keir O'Donnell, Jake McDorman, Mido Hamada, Reynaldo Gallegos, Kevin Lacz, Ayman Samman, Ben Reed, Marnette Patterson. (R, 132 mins)

Clint Eastwood stops just short of crafting AMERICAN SNIPER as a hagiography of Iraq War hero Chris Kyle, whose 160 confirmed kills have him credited as the most lethal sniper in US military history. Kyle was killed at the age of 38 at a shooting range in 2013 by a fellow vet suffering from PTSD, but since the publication of his memoir in 2012 up to the release of the film, questions have lingered. Questions that Eastwood and screenwriter Jason Hall (PARANOIA) sidestep completely: Kyle's penchant for boasting and braggadocio (he claims to have killed 255 in Iraq instead of 160); his alleged throwdown with someone he calls "Scruff-Face," claiming they were insulting Navy SEALs--Kyle later revealed this person to be Jesse Ventura, who eventually sued Kyle's estate and won, resulting in that chapter being removed from subsequent printings of the book; his claim that he and a buddy drove to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and killed 30 looters; or that he killed two men who were trying to steal his truck. There's no evidence to support these claims, and may just be shit-talk by a war-shattered man who, regardless of how tall his tales may have been, served his country and died trying to help a brother whose pain he knew all too well.

In tap-dancing around Kyle's life and avoiding the risk of offending his family in any way (Kyle's father claims to have looked Eastwood in the eye and told him he'd "unleash hell" on him if the movie disrespected his son), Eastwood and Hall simply present him as a humble, quietly mumbling, aw-shucks cowboy type, very well-played by a monstrously bulked-up Bradley Cooper. Cooper delivers a largely internalized performance, often looking like he'd rather crawl into a shell and doing his best to bury the horrors of war and the things he's seen and done--his first kill is a small child about to hurl a grenade at approaching Marines. Through four tours over a decade, he follows the standard character arc of a career soldier who's more at home in war than in the quiet and tranquil homefront. While the combat sequences have a raw, visceral intensity--particularly one scene involving an al-Zarqawi subordinate known as The Butcher (Mido Hamada), and his power-drill torture of a young boy that Eastwood and his usual editor Joel Cox handle with nail-biting, precise immediacy--the film too rigidly follows a template. It's great to see Eastwood, a notoriously fast director whose films have gotten downright sloppy in recent years, dig in and really make these sequences work. But what's here really isn't all that different from THE HURT LOCKER, swapping out an EOD bomb-disposal sergeant for a SEAL sniper, and other than a climactic firefight in a sandstorm, Eastwood often boils the Iraq War down to a cat-and-mouse game between Kyle, nicknamed "Legend" and with a $180,000 bounty on his head by terrorist insurgents, and feared al-Qaeda sniper Mustafa (Sammy Sheik), a character and subplot invented for the film.

Dramatic license is a given, and like the discrepancies between the real Captain Phillips and his portrayal in CAPTAIN PHILLIPS, it's possible to simply accept the film on its own terms. But while AMERICAN SNIPER works best in battle, its weakest sections are when Kyle is back home between tours. Sienna Miller is saddled with a stock "military wife" role as Taya Kyle, given little to do other than cry, whether she's calling Chris and listening in horror when he drops the phone in the middle of a firefight, or whether he's at home staring into space and she exclaims--wait for it--"Even when you're here...you're not here!" Miller does what she can with an underwritten role, and she's terrific in their early scenes prior to their marriage when she's feisty and independent. But once she becomes Mrs. Kyle, Taya is just worried, pregnant, or worried and pregnant. Taya Kyle is obviously a strong and intelligent woman, but AMERICAN SNIPER keeps her superficial and uncomplicated. There's a complex film to be made about the many sides of Chris Kyle and there are inconsistencies that need to be addressed, but nobody seemed up to it, almost as if even the appearance of criticizing or questioning him in any way would've diminished his accomplishments and his legacy.

Chris Kyle (1974-2013)

Eastwood once made challenging films weren't afraid to show that there were two sides to every man, whether it's the devoted father and good cop who spends his off-hours indulging in kinky, S&M sex with prostitutes the sleaziest areas of New Orleans in TIGHTROPE, or the bloodthirsty killer-turned-family man forced to once again unleash that inner beast in UNFORGIVEN. He's even explored this idea in a combat setting with LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA, which managed to effectively show the human, sympathetic side of Japanese soldiers in WWII. Historically, he's confronted serious moral issues in ways that are anything but black or white (think of the quandary presented to his fatherly trainer character in MILLION DOLLAR BABY or the choice made by his embittered retiree in GRAN TORINO), but with this and 2014's earlier JERSEY BOYS, he's made two consecutive biopics that seem too safe, too corner-cutting, and too eager to treat their subjects with kid gloves. At least AMERICAN SNIPER can get by on its combat intensity and a strong performance by Cooper--whereas JERSEY BOYS was indicative of Eastwood at his least-engaged--but the transparency of its Oscar-baiting couldn't be any more obvious if Harvey Weinstein was producing it. Eastwood didn't become the legend he is by being conventional, mainstream, and abiding by the rules, and regardless of how well-made it is on a technical level, AMERICAN SNIPER is something that requires a more substantive approach than its maker is interested in taking at this point in his career.

THE SKIN

aka LA PELLE
(Italy/France - 1981)

Directed by Liliana Cavani. Written by Robert Katz and Liliana Cavani. Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Burt Lancaster, Claudia Cardinale, Ken Marshall, Alexandra King, Jacques Sernas, Carlo Giuffre, Yann Babilee, Jeanne Valerie, Liliana Tari, Giuseppe Barra, Cristina Donadio, Maria Rosario Della Fammina. (Unrated, 134 mins)

Described as "distastefully bitter" and "a disaster" in the Maltin Movie Guide, Liliana Cavani's 1981 WWII drama THE SKIN, aka LA PELLE, is a film that's fallen through the cracks over the years, at least with American audiences. A Palme d'Or contender at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival (Andrzej Wajda's MAN OF IRON won), THE SKIN caused some controversy with its fervently anti-American sentiments, prompting Warner Bros. to back out of its US distribution deal. The Italian-French co-production's only US exposure at the time came at the 1982 Chicago International Film Festival, and even with the presence of Hollywood legend Burt Lancaster, in the midst of a brief late-career renaissance thanks to his ATLANTIC CITY Oscar nomination, it found no takers. It was never commercially released in American cinemas, and it would be another 33 years before anyone got around to releasing it on US home video.

Cohen Media Group recently issued THE SKIN in deluxe Blu-ray and DVD editions as part of their "Classics of Italian Cinema" line, with a new transfer culled from a 2014 restoration that screened at the Seattle International Film Festival last summer. It's garnered a reputation among Cavani's US-based fans as a lost film of sorts, difficult to see outside of going the region-free or bootleg route, though battered, truncated, and barely watchable prints have occasionally surfaced on YouTube, usually without subtitles. Cohen's transfer is pristine (don't be put off by the terrible cover art), framed at the old-school aspect ratio of 1.33:1 (Cavani shot it that way to maximize the crowding and the claustrophobia, according to the commentary track by film critics Wade Major and Andy Klein), but the only language option is Italian with English subtitles, and in a situation like this, where many scenes involve Americans and Italians trying to communicate with one another through interpreters, it doesn't really play well when everyone is speaking Italian. This of course, is the result of the then-standard practice in Italian cinema of not shooting with direct sound and dubbing everything after the fact. Judging from how lip movements often match the subtitles, a good number of cast members are speaking English, as would be their American characters, it nevertheless takes a while to get over the distraction of seeing and hearing Lancaster and others playing American military personnel speaking in awkwardly-dubbed Italian. It's possible that an English track was either lost or never recorded in the first place, so Cohen was forced to make do with what they had. It's not a matter of being subtitle-phobic, but THE SKIN is a case where a mix of English and Italian would actually be beneficial in making the film work a little better, or at least as its story intended.

Set during the 1943 American liberation of Naples just after the German occupation, THE SKIN is based on the 1949 novel (more a loose collection of short stories and reportage) by Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte (played here by Marcello Mastroianni), a former fascist-turned-outspoken enemy of Mussolini, who had Malaparte imprisoned on more than one occasion. Malaparte served as a liaison between the Italian military and the Allied Forces in Naples, led by Gen. Mark Clark, represented in the film in the most unflattering manner possible by the rechristened Gen. Mark Cork (Lancaster). Much of the film is seen through Malaparte's eyes, but also through the vantage point of Capt. Jimmy Wren (Ken Marshall), an American communications official who spends almost all of his downtime frequenting the Neapolitan brothels with what looks like the entire US military, which is essentially painted as a mass gathering of Ugly Americans. The Americans are verbally and physically abusive. They address the Neapolitans using slurs like "wop" and "greaseball." They gang-rape Neapolitan women. Cork is presented as a self-aggrandizing egomaniac prone to referring to himself in third person, demonstrating little regard for the people of Naples or even his own allies. When the Moroccan army is felled by a major syphilis epidemic, Cork denies them treatment, instead hoarding all the venereal disease medication for the Americans. Cork has instituted a ban on fishing due to mines in the water, but angrily demands fresh fish for a posh, swanky dinner where he's forced over the phone by Eisenhower and then FDR himself to entertain Col. Deborah Wyatt (Alexandra King), a high-profile pilot and the wife of an important US senator.

It's this dinner scene that's one of THE SKIN's most notorious. Earlier in the film, there's repeated mention of the desperation of the Neapolitan people. They've lost everything, they have no money, and they're starving. Some parents sell their children into prostitution, and when Wren expresses his outrage, Malaparte shrugs "It's better than eating them." Later, Malaparte is shown finishing a meal, assembling the leftover bones into the shape of a human hand and only half-joking when he mentions the concept of cannibalism as a viable option. At Cork's dinner reception welcoming Col. Wyatt, the General brags about the quality of the fish, a rare type known as Sirena, only to have the entree be a boiled child, an unforgettably horrific, disturbing image that puts THE SKIN squarely into the realm of SALO and SALON KITTY transgression. Cavani and co-writer Robert Katz (with some uncredited contributions by future ROMANCE and FAT GIRL provocateur Catherine Breillat) don't stop there, as the bullheaded Cork dismisses Col. Wyatt's cries of "It's a baby!" with "Someone needs to assume command," as he declares it's a fish, and orders it to be served (Major and Klein suggest this was done by the presumably Neapolitan kitchen staff as "a gesture of utter contempt for the Americans"). Cavani shows some restraint and spares the audience the sight of the Americans consuming the "fish," but it hardly lessens the impact of one of the most stomach-turning sights in all of Italian cinema.

Cavani goes to extremes throughout THE SKIN. Malaparte takes Col. Wyatt to a wild, decadent party where she's appalled to see the guests crowd around a bed to watch and cheer as a gay man penetrates himself with a massive dildo. The guts of an American soldier who steps on a mine spill out of his belly. The film ends with the trucks and tanks of Cork's Fifth Battalion triumphantly entering Rome after alienating the populace of Naples and leaving a trail of resentment and ill will behind. The citizens of Rome celebrate their arrival, and in the film's most infamous scene, it takes just long enough for one poor Roman bastard to cheer "Hooray for the Americans!" before a tank is carelessly driven over him, flattening him like a pancake under the tread as blood, brains, skin, and organs explode out of him. Cork and his battalion blithely drive on by the pile of mangled human flesh on the pavement, with more destruction, degradation, and tragedy sure to follow. It's intentionally over-the-top and Cavani repeatedly cuts back to the aftermath as THE SKIN is often more about using shock value to hammer home a point. A recent revisit to Cavani's most famous film, 1974's THE NIGHT PORTER, where former Nazi officer Dirk Bogarde unexpectedly encounters his former concentration camp sexual plaything (Charlotte Rampling) and the two rekindle their S&M dysfunction in 1957 Vienna, showed it to be far more tame than memory and legend served. THE NIGHT PORTER has a reputation among groundbreaking taboo-shatterers of the early 1970s that's rivaled only by Bernardo Bertolucci's LAST TANGO IN PARIS, but it's really quite reserved. The ideas in THE NIGHT PORTER are certainly transgressive but the sexual imagery is sparse and not particularly explicit or boundary-pushing when held up against the publicity that butter got from the Bertolucci masterpiece.

The spectacularly misanthropic THE SKIN is a far more transgressive and disturbing film, one that gets under your own skin and almost certainly would've needed some cuts to avoid an X rating if anyone was serious about distributing it in America. In the world of THE SKIN, flesh is a commodity to be bought, sold, eaten, and fucked, sometimes all together. To Cavani, the people of Naples do it out of necessity and survival, while the Americans just indulge out of their arrogance and entitlement. The now-82-year-old Cavani is interviewed on the Blu-ray, and she claims to not understand where critics see the anti-American sentiment. America takes a beating here and Cavani is delusional or having a senior moment if she thinks that isn't the case, but really, nobody comes out of THE SKIN looking very good--not the Americans, not the people of Naples, and especially not the Moroccans, with their entire army stricken with various untreated venereal diseases but still so desperate for "something to stick it into" that they go about procuring the services of underage Neapolitan boys and girls, whored out to them by their strapped, widowed mothers. Nothing is off limits in the efforts of desperate people to scrape by. It's the feel-good movie of 1981.

One really can't fault Cavani for her relentlessly grim approach to the story and her crafting it as a nightmarish freakshow, but around the midway point, when you can't unsee Burt Lancaster ordering a bunch of gluttonous Americans to eat what's obviously a boiled child, you can't help but wonder if her points might've hit harder with a more even tone, if the satirical elements weren't played against the vile ugliness of rape and the complete disregard for human life. Lancaster's Gen. Mark Cork's delusions of self-grandeur and his stubborn arrogance put him in the same wing of military madmen as Sterling Hayden's Gen. Jack D. Ripper in DR. STRANGELOVE. Cavani's stone-faced seriousness and her decision to wallow in misery and degradation for over two hours has its place, but she has an obvious ax to grind, and doing so in a sardonic and satirical way would've had more of a lasting sting than the easy shock bits involving rape, bodily functions, and the over-the-top cannibalism metaphor. THE SKIN has observations that remain pertinent today, namely the festering resentment of a "liberated" country that's freed from the control of one only to remain occupied by another, one that doesn't understand them and only seems interested in imposing their will and rule.

Cavani and Mastroianni on the set of THE SKIN

Cavani and Lina Wertmuller were the trailblazers when it came to a woman's perspective in Italian cinema of the '70s and '80s, but it was always Wertmuller who received the bigger accolades and box office success. Cavani has her place in the movement and a staunch fan base, but commercially, she never topped or even equaled the fame and notoriety brought to her by the international success of THE NIGHT PORTER. Following THE SKIN, she directed the tawdry BEYOND OBSESSION (1982), which reunited her with Mastroianni, playing a diplomat in a Moroccan prison for murdering his wife, passing the time with conjugal visits from his sultry stepdaughter (Eleonora Giorgi), who's also involved with an American oil company engineer played by a young Tom Berenger. Cavani's next two films flopped. She had her obligatory Cannon experience with Golan & Globus on 1985's THE BERLIN AFFAIR. 1989's FRANCESCO, a biopic of Francis of Assisi starring an unlikely Mickey Rourke, was cut by nearly an hour before its straight-to-video US release by Hemdale. Cavani's credits become very sporadic after this, with 1993's unreleased-in-the-US WHERE ARE YOU? I'M HERE being her only film of that decade. Cavani has spent her recent years doing movies for Italian television, including yet another take on FRANCESCO, this time as a mini-series in 2014, starring Polish actor Mateusz Kosciukiewicz as Francis and Rutger Hauer as his father (she also made FRANCIS OF ASSISI for Italian TV in 1966, with Lou Castel in the title role). Cavani's last feature film to date has been the unfortunately doomed RIPLEY'S GAME, which was shelved for over a year by New Line before debuting on cable in 2003. Based on Patricia Highsmith's novel, previously filmed by Wim Wenders as THE AMERICAN FRIEND (1977), RIPLEY'S GAME, a semi-sequel of sorts to 1999's THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, is easily Cavani's most accessible, commercial film, a solid thriller anchored by one of John Malkovich's best performances as the sociopathic Tom Ripley. Malkovich's Ripley is an older and more flamboyant interpretation of the character than Matt Damon's in THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, goading a terminally ill picture-framer (Dougray Scott) into becoming a hit man in order to leave money behind for his family. Considering the popularity of THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY just a few years earlier, it's surprising that RIPLEY'S GAME was given such an unceremonious dumping in the US.

Lancaster and Mastroianni would continue working throughout the '80s and into the '90s, with Lancaster settling into character roles and TV-movies and Mastroianni getting his third and final Oscar nomination for 1987's DARK EYES. Both were cinematic legends by the time of their passing (Lancaster died in 1994 at 80; Mastroianni in 1996 at 72), and remain beloved, iconic figures to cineastes the world over. That kind of big-screen fame eluded THE SKIN's young American stars. Marshall, who left medical school to pursue acting at Juilliard, made his film debut two years earlier, co-starring with Brooke Shields in the 1979 pinball comedy TILT. After THE SKIN, Marshall had the title role in the epic 1982 NBC mini-series MARCO POLO (also featuring Lancaster) and made his biggest splash the next year, starring in the big-budget 1983 sci-fi fantasy KRULL. Supported by numerous product tie-ins (arcade game, Atari 2600 game, Parker Brothers board game), but opening the same weekend as NATIONAL LAMPOON'S VACATION in a summer dominated by RETURN OF THE JEDI, KRULL was an expensive box-office dud, though it has a sizable cult following today. And with that, Marshall's career as a Hollywood leading man was over. It would be five years before he appeared in another film, with the instantly forgotten 1988 Rebecca DeMornay/Mary Gross buddy comedy FEDS (IMDb's page lists other credits, but they have him confused with a South African actor also named Ken Marshall). For the next decade and a half, Marshall's career was mostly limited to guest spots on TV shows like BAYWATCH, HUNTER, and QUANTUM LEAP, though he enjoyed a brief resurgence in the mid '90s, by that time balding and looking like his roles were going to Kurtwood Smith instead, with a stint as the treacherous Lt. Cmdr. Michael Eddington on STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE. One in a never-ending line of Next Big Things who just never happened (KRULL was a flop, but it was hardly career-killer caliber), the now-64-year-old Marshall has apparently retired from acting, with his last credit to date being a guest spot on a 2003 episode of the CBS series THE DISTRICT. THE SKIN was a one-and-done journey into acting for King, a model who would soon go on to marry 1970s tennis great Ilie Nastase. She devoted her time to raising their two children and her last time in the spotlight came when she was interviewed in People in 1996 when Nastase announced his intention to run for mayor of his native Bucharest, Romania (he lost). The couple divorced in the early 2000s and she's been out of the public eye in the years since. THE SKIN remains the sole entry on her IMDb page.

Cavani surrounded by producer Renzo Rossellini, and stars
Marcello Mastroianni, Ken Marshall, and Liliana Tari
at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival.

BLACKHAT
(US - 2015)

Directed by Michael Mann. Written by Morgan Davis Foehl. Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Wang Leehom, Tang Wei, Viola Davis, Ritchie Coster, Holt McCallany, Yorick Von Wageningen, John Ortiz, Andy On, William Mapother, Jason Butler Harner, Spencer Garrett, Christian Borle. (R, 133 mins)

Michael Mann is one of the dwindling number of American auteurs whose every new project is a legitimate event for serious film connoisseurs. BLACKHAT is his first film since 2009's PUBLIC ENEMIES, an uninspired John Dillinger biopic not helped in the least by dull performances from Johnny Depp and Christian Bale playing Prohibition-era dress-up. Prior to that, Mann's 2006 big-screen take on MIAMI VICE, the iconic TV series on which he served as producer and showrunner from 1984-1986, was another disappointment that never caught fire. Both MIAMI VICE and PUBLIC ENEMIES have been the subject of much debate, with die-hard Mann apologists insisting they're misunderstood masterpieces and worthy of mention in the same breath as Mann essentials like THIEF (1981), MANHUNTER (1986), and HEAT (1995). Mann's been focused on producing other projects over the last few years, such as the barely-released thriller TEXAS KILLING FIELDS (2011), directed by his daughter Ami Canaan Mann, and the ill-fated HBO racetrack-set series LUCK, canceled after one season due to multiple horse deaths on set. BLACKHAT finds the great filmmaker reclaiming his mojo for what's easily his best film since COLLATERAL (2004), though it's proven to be divisive with both critics and fans. In a controversial stance with the celluloid faithful, the 71-year-old Mann has openly and fully embraced digital filmmaking at a time when many younger directors like Paul Thomas Anderson, Christopher Nolan, and Quentin Tarantino are fighting tooth-and-nail to keep 35mm alive. With BLACKHAT, Mann uses digital technology not for clarity, but to enhance an almost primitive grittiness to the film's general look and feel. He uses handheld cameras in chase scenes and fight sequences in a way that, yes, probably constitutes the dreaded "shaky cam" aesthetic, but by not editing the hell out of them, he allows a coherent and natural flow to the action. He's content to let it happen, even if it doesn't look pretty. Some of the best action bits in BLACKHAT look like what might happen during real fights and chases. They look awkward and unrehearsed. The choreography has a clumsiness to it, like these are people who don't get in fights and chases very often. The sound design is sometimes intentionally disorienting, putting the audience in sync with the characters, working in tandem with the look of the film to jarring, powerful effect.

Some scenes in BLACKHAT look like Mann could've shot them using his phone, and in the context of this film, it works. The Mann hallmarks are all here: the captivating, neon-drenched skylines and city streets; a propulsive, hypnotic synth/loop score courtesy of Harry Gregson-Williams and regular David Fincher/Trent Reznor collaborator Atticus Ross; and a compelling hero in Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth). An ace computer hacker four years into a 13-year stretch at a federal prison in Pennsylvania, Hathaway's skills are called upon by both the FBI and the Chinese government when a hacker--dubbed "Blackhat"-- uses a RAT (Remote Access Tool) to cause an explosion and a near-meltdown at a Chinese nuclear power plant, followed by a catastrophic manipulation of soy futures on the stock market. Chinese cybercrimes specialist Chen Dawai (Wing Leehom) recognizes the first half of the code used in the attack: he co-wrote it with Hathaway when they were roommates at MIT. Working in conjunction with FBI agent Carol Barrett (Viola Davis), Dawai manages to get his old buddy furloughed to help track the elusive hacker, with the promise that if his assistance leads to a capture, Hathaway's sentence is commuted and he's a free man. Also along for the ride are Chen's tech-savvy sister Lien (Tang Wei), who also functions as a love interest for Hathaway, Hong Kong cop Trang (Andy On), and US Marshal Jessup (Holt McCallany), tagging along to keep an eye on Hathaway, who's been outfitted with an ankle bracelet if he decides to flee.

While some of the criticism of BLACKHAT has targeted its wild, labyrinthine plot (the script is credited to first-timer Morgan Davis Foehl but was significantly rewritten by Mann, who was ultimately denied a co-writing credit by the WGA), which really isn't that hard to follow, most of it has been aimed at Hemsworth's casting as a computer hacker with a six-pack. Sure, we probably have a stereotypical image of this sort of character being a pasty schlub chowing down on Funyuns and ramen and drinking Mountain Dew, but is the idea of a ripped hacker really a deal-breaker here? It's an especially petty criticism when we see Hathaway tossed into solitary early on (after hacking into the prison computer system and adding $900 to the spending account of every inmate) and immediately doing push-ups to pass the time. He's been in a tough prison for four years with nothing to do and plenty of time to shred and learn how to defend himself. Couldn't the possibility exist that Hathaway turned into Thor while incarcerated? Why is this such a bone of contention? Hathaway is a guy cut from the same cloth as James Caan's Frank in THIEF and Robert De Niro's Neil McCauley in HEAT: career criminals with a sense of honor. Hathaway's crimes targeted banks, not people. And when he's pulled into Dawai's and Barrett's investigation, he uses his criminal expertise for a good cause and becomes an equal team player. Hathaway has numerous chances to bolt and become a fugitive, but his friendship with Dawai, his feelings for Lien, and his grudging respect for the agents and the mutual trust that forms among them--after starting out firmly in "...if they don't kill each other first!" territory--is the foundation of an eclectic and appealing ensemble essayed by a top-notch group of familiar character actors. Hathaway isn't a criminal looking for a shot at redemption. He's looking to get out of prison by helping an old friend. But even that becomes secondary after a game-changing plot development completely alters the stakes going into the inevitable confrontation with the enigmatic Blackhat.

Mann and cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh (THE PIANO) create the almost otherworldly real-world look that Mann fans know and love, with the skyline of Hong Kong and other locales--an extensive, HEAT-like shootout in the slums of Shek O in Hong Kong; a dried river bed in Malaysia that looks like a post-nuke wasteland; or the camera circling some actors standing in the exposed upper levels of a half-completed skyscraper in Jakarta--looking especially arresting. BLACKHAT is pretty loopy, but it moves at such a breakneck pace that you really don't have time to question the specifics of the jargon-heavy plot. Mann manages to make suspenseful set pieces out of scenes that consist of people staring at screens reading a jumble of letters and numbers until Hathaway exclaims "There! There's the code!" as they hustle to another far-off location. The $70 million BLACKHAT grossed a pitiful $4 million over its opening weekend, providing more proof that people just don't give a shit about the Hemsworth brothers outside of established franchise branding, and they especially don't care about the Hemsworth brothers if they're starring in tech-heavy cyber-espionage thrillers (lest we forget Chris' HUNGER GAMES-starring brother Liam in 2013's terrible PARANOIA). Though 2015 is young, it's possible that we already have this year's KILLING THEM SOFTLY or THE COUNSELOR, two badly-received box office failures that had a quick turnaround into open-armed acceptance in cult movie circles. The resounding rejection of BLACKHAT after a very aggressive promotional blitz throughout the holiday season doesn't bode well for revered likes of Michael Mann. Look, BLACKHAT is no THIEF. It's no MANHUNTER, and it's no HEAT. But it's still the best thing Mann's done in a decade--a perfect balance between pursuing his digital dreams and giving the audience the Mann film they came to see. It's mystifying that, after coming up with every excuse imaginable to defend utter mediocrities like MIAMI VICE and PUBLIC ENEMIES, BLACKHAT is where the Mann faithful decide to bail. If Michael Mann fans can't get behind an exhilarating and visually stunning return to form like BLACKHAT, then I really don't know exactly what it is they want.

AMUCK!
aka MANIAC MANSION
aka LEATHER AND WHIPS
aka HOT BED OF SEX
(Italy - 1972; US release 1978)

Written and directed by Silvio Amadio. Cast: Farley Granger, Barbara Bouchet, Rosalba Neri, Nino Segurini, Umberto Raho, Patrizia Viotti, Dino Mele, Petar Martinovic. (R, 76 mins/85 mins/98 mins)

Following the huge success of the early gialli of Dario Argento after 1970's THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, the trailblazing Italian subgenre needed new ways to make the formula more appealing to audiences. Of course, the answer was to make them even more sensational by increasing the violence and sex at the expense of the craft and style that guys like Argento, Sergio Martino, and Mario Bava, whose 1964 classic BLOOD AND BLACK LACE was an early giallo prototype, brought to the more exemplary offerings. The giallo gets downright scuzzy by the time you get to 1975's STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER, but it was around 1971-72 that gialli began getting a little more daring with how much they were willing to show. Films like Martino's THE STRANGE VICE OF MRS. WARDH and THE CASE OF THE SCORPION'S TAIL (both 1972), and YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY (1972), Giuliano Carnimeo's THE CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS (1971), and Luciano Ercoli's FORBIDDEN PHOTOS OF A LADY ABOVE SUSPICION (1970) and DEATH WALKS ON HIGH HEELS (1971) invariably involve the rich and decadent artistic types (writers, photographers, models) basking in a world of privilege and luxury in gorgeous villas as a body count rises because of some past event obscured in a byzantine plot. Silvio Amadio's 1972 giallo ALLA RICERCA DEL PIACERE--translated: IN SEARCH OF PLEASURE--is one of the more flagrantly lewd contributions to the genre. It took six years to find a US distributor, when exploitation outfit Group 1 acquired it and released it under the catchy moniker AMUCK! in the summer of 1978. Group 1 was a prolific supplier of drive-in favorites throughout the mid-to-late 1970s like THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION (1975), NAZI LOVE CAMP 27 (1977), Lucio Fulci's THE PSYCHIC (1977), and PARTS: THE CLONUS HORROR (1979). The company's biggest successes were ALLIGATOR (1980) and THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER (1982), which was one of the major sleeper hits of its year. SWORD was so successful that Group 1 honcho Brandon Chase cashed out while he was ahead and closed down the company, taking the money he made from distributing grindhouse trash and forming the hugely-successful watch company Chase-Durer.

Because of its hyperbolic poster art promising such things as "An Explosion of Sexual Frenzy!" (which I'm guessing attracted more attention than "In Blazing Color") and its vaguely silly and exclamatory title, AMUCK! proved to be a durable drive-in and grindhouse hit for Group 1, who kept it in near-constant circulation into the early 1980s. Chase would frequently pair it up with other Group 1 titles like DR. TARR'S TORTURE DUNGEON (1973, acquired by Group 1 in 1976) and MEATCLEAVER MASSACRE (1977). As late as 1982, AMUCK! was still being shown at American drive-ins on the bottom half of a double bill with a re-released ALLIGATOR. And when Chase felt AMUCK! was getting too much exposure, he'd simply slap a new title on it and send it out again. The 98-minute AMUCK! was also released in an 85-minute version called MANIAC MANSION, and it played some areas in an even more-condensed 76-minute cut meaninglessly titled LEATHER AND WHIPS (meanwhile, AMUCK!'s UK distributor opted to christen it HOT BED OF SEX). It's doubtful that people were upset about seeing the film again and again, considering that Eurocult goddesses Barbara Bouchet (DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING) and Rosalba Neri (LADY FRANKENSTEIN) have an extended, slow-motion sex scene and spend a good chunk of the remainder of the film either completely nude or strutting around in skimpy lingerie or see-through gowns. Sure, there's a story and some people get killed and there's a mystery to solve, but with the rampant sleaze, the nudity, the Euro-lounge music (one song played to a striptease just has the singer repeatedly gasping "Sexually!"), the nudity, the dubbing, the nudity, the way the opening credits awkwardly cut from Bouchet on a gondola in scenic Venice to a plain AMUCK! title card, and the nudity, AMUCK! comes pretty close to perfectly encapsulating what this kind drive-in or Times Square grindhouse experience should be.

AMUCK! opens with Greta (Bouchet) arriving in Venice for her new job as an assistant to novelist Richard Stuart (Farley Granger, dubbing himself) after her predecessor Sally (Patrizia Viotti) has gone missing. But Greta has a secret: Sally was her lover and she's there to find out what happened to her. It doesn't take long for Eleanora to drug Greta and seduce her, a gateway for the young woman into the decadent life of debauchery, perversion, and homemade stag films enjoyed by the swinging Stuarts. In flashbacks, we see how Sally was drawn deeper into their hedonistic world. Even mentally-challenged handyman Rocco (Petar Martinovic) gets in on the action. While Eleanora carries on with Rocco and young boy-toy Sandro (Dino Mele), Greta allows herself to be seduced into a night of wild sex with Richard, even after she was convinced Richard and Eleanora were trying to kill her. Things get complicated when Sally's badly-decomposed body surfaces in a nearby lagoon, and while useless detective Antonelli (Nino Segurini) tries to get to the bottom of what happened, everyone else--except hapless butler Giovanni (Umberto Raho)--just keeps getting laid.

Amadio's script centers on a mystery that isn't particularly difficult to solve, and the big reveal isn't much of a reveal. But the notion of a homicidal writer using his own novel to strategize and secretly confess his murders is a clever one that would be utilized to a somewhat similar degree by Dario Argento a decade later in 1982's TENEBRE. AMUCK! also has a fumbling insertion of a potential supernatural subplot regarding Eleanora suddenly falling into a trance and Richard announcing she has ESP, but it's soon dropped and never mentioned again. And don't miss Greta pleading with dedicated man-of-action Detective Antonelli--who just rescued her from quicksand, which she fell into fleeing the shotgun-toting Stuarts--to believe her when she says Richard and Eleanora are trying to kill her, which he responds to by promptly excusing himself, hopping on a rowboat back to the heart of Venice, and leaving her at the isolated mansion for another night. Whatever interesting ideas Amadio (who had a largely undistinguished journeyman career, primarily as a screenwriter) brings to the table are quickly cast aside to get to the next nude scene, and that's precisely the reason why AMUCK! is undeniably fun, sleazy, trashy entertainment. You know a movie's going all in with the T&A when even a veteran of Hollywood's Golden Age like Farley Granger gets a sex scene where he gets to tilt his neck back in response to Richard receiving a just out-of-frame BJ from Bouchet's Greta.

Granger in a late 1940s publicity shot

When AMUCK! was shot in 1972, Granger was at the height of the busy Eurotrash phase of his career. Born in 1925, Granger was a Samuel Goldwyn prodigy who made a big splash with his film debut at 18 in THE NORTH STAR (1943) and he headlined two Alfred Hitchcock classics with 1948's ROPE and 1951's STRANGERS ON A TRAIN. He was among the first Hollywood stars to test the waters of the burgeoning Italian film industry with Luchino Visconti's SENSO (1954), cut down and released in the US in 1955 as THE WANTON CONTESSA. Granger's big-screen career began to fizzle in the late 1950s, and he found his services were much more in-demand on Broadway and in television. By the early 1970s, Granger was living in Rome and working almost exclusively as the American export value in Italian genre films like the popular Terence Hill/Bud Spencer spaghetti western THEY CALL ME TRINITY (1970), but mostly in sordid gialli like AMUCK!, SOMETHING CREEPING IN THE DARK (1971), THE RED-HEADED CORPSE (1972), KILL ME, MY LOVE (1973), DEATH WILL HAVE YOUR EYES (1974), and WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS? (1974). One such thriller, SO SWEET, SO DEAD (1972) was released in the US in 1974 by grindhouse outfit William Mishkin Motion Pictures as THE SLASHER IS THE SEX MANIAC. In 1976, Mishkin gutted and retro-fitted SLASHER with US-shot hardcore inserts featuring American porn stars Harry Reems and Tina Russell, and edited the new footage in a way that made it appear that Granger's character was voyeuristically watching them. Mishkin released this drastically altered version on the XXX circuit in 1976 as PENETRATION, with Granger's name prominently displayed in print ads and poster art, which boasted the charming tag line "Some women deserve it!" PENETRATION was quickly withdrawn from release after an outraged Granger threatened legal action. In his bluntly honest 2007 memoir Include Me Out, Granger more or less admits these films were mostly trash, but he was getting lead roles that Hollywood wasn't offering, they paid well, and they allowed him to live a very comfortable life of luxury in Rome. By the time Group 1 released AMUCK! in the US, Granger had moved back to the States and was keeping busy with guest spots on TV shows like THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN and THE LOVE BOAT, and in made-for-TV movies like THE LIVES OF JENNY DOLAN (1975). After starring in a pair of post-FRIDAY THE 13TH slasher films (1981's THE PROWLER and 1984's DEATH MASK), Granger worked sparingly in forgettable films like the Michael Nouri-headlined political thriller THE IMAGEMAKER (1986), had an obligatory MURDER, SHE WROTE guest spot, and from 1986-1988, had a recurring role on the daytime soap AS THE WORLD TURNS (more on that below). He left the business around 1990 but was talked out of retirement for a supporting role in the 2002 indie comedy THE NEXT BIG THING, starring then-Hal Hartley and Noah Baumbach regular Chris Eigeman. The film was barely seen outside of the festival circuit before getting dumped in video stores, and once more, Granger retired from acting.

Granger in his later years

Granger didn't go public until rather later in life, discussing it in the context of the movie industry as an interview subject in the 1995 documentary THE CELLULOID CLOSET, but in Hollywood circles, his bisexuality was an open secret throughout his career. The star was romantically linked to ROPE screenwriter Arthur Laurents, Shelley Winters, Leonard Bernstein, and French actor Jean Marais, and was engaged to Janice Rule at one point in the late 1950s. He met National Repertory Theater production manager and future AS THE WORLD TURNS producer Robert Calhoun in 1963 and they remained together until Calhoun's death in 2008. It was around the time of his memoir and after Calhoun's passing that Granger, still sharp and with a wry sense of humor, dove into the Raconteur Emeritus phase of his life, regularly giving interviews and doing Q&As at Hitchcock retrospectives, and screenings of other classic films in which he appeared going back to his Samuel Goldwyn days in the 1940s. While his career peaked early and his time as an A-list box-office draw ended by the late 1950s, Granger was happy to see that fans of Hollywood's classic era still remembered him and held him in high regard. Granger died in 2011 at 85.

Barbara Bouchet and Rosalba Neri in a pivotal scene
vital to the advancement of the plot of AMUCK!

With the possible exception of Edwige Fenech, Bouchet and Neri are probably the most stunning B-movie Euro starlets of this time period (they also appeared together in the Italian thriller THE FRENCH SEX MURDERS the same year). Born in 1943, Bouchet started in Hollywood fare like CASINO ROYALE (1967) and SWEET CHARITY (1969) before becoming a fixture in gialli and polizia films in the 1970s. She quit acting in the late 1980s but emerged from retirement for a small role in Martin Scorsese's GANGS OF NEW YORK (2002) and has since stayed very busy on Italian television. She's given many interviews over the years and pulls no punches, even attending a Quentin Tarantino-hosted screening of Antonio Margheriti's DEATH RAGE (1976), and giving the audience her unfiltered opinion about how much she hated working on the film with a rude and abusive Yul Brynner. Neri, sometimes credited as "Sara Bay," was born in 1939 and got an earlier start, appearing in some post-HERCULES peplum titles in the early 1960s but really hitting her stride around the time of AMUCK!, with 1971's LADY FRANKENSTEIN and 1973's THE DEVIL'S WEDDING NIGHT being particular favorites of her fans. Neri quit acting in the late 1970s before she even hit 40 but, like Bouchet, she's done numerous interviews in recent years, discussing her films that remain cult favorites today.

AMUCK! was released on VHS in a horribly cropped print by Catalina Video in the '80s but has been very difficult to see in the years since. Something Weird released it on VHS in its correct 2.35:1 aspect ratio, but it was the severely-cut, 76-minute LEATHER AND WHIPS print. The bootleg outfit Eurovista released it in the complete 98-minute version but it was just the visually compromised Catalina VHS master. Code Red recently unveiled what's--for now, at least--the best way to see AMUCK!, an occasionally and appropriately battered but still very watchable 2.35:1 anamorphic transfer of the 85-minute MANIAC MANSION cut (missing some exposition and dialogue, but the sexual content is intact), on the second half of a double feature "Spaghetti Cinema" DVD set with Alfonso Brescia's 1974 adventure comedy SUPER STOOGES VS. THE WONDER WOMEN, available exclusively through them. Since it's a crapshoot whether Code Red's web site--or company founder Bill Olsen, for that matter--will be functional on any given day, the fine folks at DiabolikDVD have purchased bulk quantities of Code Red product directly from Olsen to sell on their own site, subject to availability.

WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD
(France/US - 2014)

It's a sign of the times that WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD got publicity less for being the latest film by a genuine 1990s indie auteur who's never gone Hollywood and has happily remained on the fringes, and more for being the "Shailene Woodley gets naked" movie. Gregg Araki, who made his name during the '90s indie explosion with THE LIVING END (1992), TOTALLY F***ED UP (1993), THE DOOM GENERATION (1995), and NOWHERE (1997), isn't a young man anymore and at 55, he seems to have mellowed with age. Based on a novel by Laura Kasischke, WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD is a puzzling film from Araki--not in the sense of its content, but in its presentation. It's essentially a straightforward, commercial thriller filtered through the ethereally dreamy haze of Sofia Coppola's THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (2000). Taking place from 1988 to 1991, WHITE BIRD centers on Kat Connors (Woodley, of THE DESCENDANTS and the DIVERGENT series), a 17-year-old high school student with typical teenage ennui. School sucks, the town is a drag, and her parents--milquetoast father Brock (Christopher Meloni) and mentally unstable mother Eve (Eva Green)--are lame. The miserable Eve has steadily gone off the deep end as Kat has gotten older, become more independent, and likely to be out with her stoner boyfriend Phil (Shiloh Fernandez) instead of hanging out at home with Mom. Eve feels life has passed her by and she takes turns blaming Kat, who has learned to ignore her, and Brock, who crawls inside of his shell or, if he's in the mood, hides in the basement to jerk off to his Hustler stash. One day, Kat returns home from school to find her father waiting for her. Eve has vanished. Kat isn't alarmed, as this apparently isn't the first time it's happened, but this time, Eve doesn't come back. Brock files a missing persons report with hunky local cop Scieziesciez (Thomas Jane), with whom Kat starts a casual fling when things cool off with Phil. Three years go by and there's no sign of Eve, but life has gone on. Kat is in college and Brock is dating May (Sheryl Lee), a co-worker at his office. Everyone's grown accustomed to Life After Eve, at least until a troubled Kat finally addresses the glaring absence of her mother in her life and faces a nagging suspicion that there's something being overlooked in her disappearance.

I haven't read the novel, but I do know that Araki drastically--and I mean drastically--changed the ending for the film in a way that makes you question everything that came beforehand. In that way, it's the kind of crazy and unexpected twist ending that's all too commonplace in most standard thrillers today. It works in the context of the film--and in being a Gregg Araki film--even if it totally alters the intent of whatever points Kasischke wanted to make with her novel. I did like the mood and the aura Araki establishes throughout, brilliantly abetted by a mix of '80s goth and alternative (Cocteau Twins' "Sea Swallow Me" perfectly kicks off the opening credits, and there's also songs by The Cure, Talk Talk, Depeche Mode, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, among others), and a dream pop-ish score by avant-garde musician Harold Budd and Cocteau Twins' Robin Guthrie. It's a thriller that disguises a coming-of-age drama when Kat, haunted by dreams where her mother cries out for her, finds she's unable to move on with her life until she knows what happened. It's not even that she necessarily misses her mother. No one seemed all that broken up about her vanishing. Even the police investigation seemed to go through the motions. Eve is a profoundly troubled woman prone to irrational tantrums and uncomfortable competitions with Kat, especially when it comes to getting Phil's attention (connoisseurs of cringe will have to look away during a flashback when Eve puts on a tight miniskirt and struts around the basement rec room where Kat and Phil are trying to do their homework). Eve is brought to vivid life by Green's patented crazy-eyes, psycho-bitch routine, seen in its full glory throughout her flashback sequences but never more haunting than when she looks at herself in a mirror and turns a dead stare into a wild-eyed, maniacal grin to the tune of Love and Rockets'"A Private Future". With her terrifying glare, Green's ability to throw herself into these kinds of characters has a history of single-handedly elevating mediocre trifles like DARK SHADOWS and 300: RISE OF AN EMPIRE into must-see movies. Eva Greeniacs won't be disappointed with her work here, and she's in danger of typecasting even though this seems to be the niche she's chosen to carve for herself. The biggest surprise is Meloni, terrific in an unexpected role as a meek, slumped-shouldered doormat psychologically destroyed by his shrewish wife and quietly happy that she's decided to abandon them. There's some logic issues that pop up late in the game that beg the question of just how the cops did such a sloppy job with their investigation, but WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD is a low-key and very compelling film from a much less abrasive and in-your-face Araki, who doesn't work as frequently these days as he did in his '90s heyday--it's his first film since 2010's KABOOM, and the first I've seen since 2005's MYSTERIOUS SKIN--and gets fine performances from his cast, with a genuinely surprising finale, though serious fans of the book probably won't be as forgiving about the changes he's made. (R, 91 mins)

JESSABELLE
(US - 2014)

SAW VI and SAW 3-D director Kevin Greutert trades torture porn for jump scares in yet another JU-ON/THE GRUDGE-derived "vengeful ghost" saga that also serves as a Blumhouse Productions assembly-line revamp of the already-forgotten 2005 Kate Hudson chiller THE SKELETON KEY. A few weeks before JESSABELLE's release, distributor Lionsgate cancelled its nationwide rollout and instead went the limited release/VOD route, a good indication of how little faith they had in it. They've certainly made hits out of far worse films than JESSABELLE, but the story is dull despite an overstuffed plot courtesy of screenwriter Robert Ben Garant, whose past writing credits includes such horror classics as THE PACIFIER, HERBIE: FULLY LOADED, and BALLS OF FURY. Garant works in a wheelchair-bound woman in peril, voodoo, doom-filled tarot readings, messages from beyond the grave courtesy of some VHS tapes (points docked for blatant pandering to horror hipsters), and a couple of spectacular OMEN and FINAL DESTINATION-style deaths, but it does nothing to stand out from the crowd. Jessie (Sarah Snook) moves in with her estranged father (David Andrews) after a car crash claims the lives of her fiance and her unborn child and keeps her in a wheelchair while she undergoes physical therapy. She finds a box of VHS tapes left for her by her mother (JUSTIFIED's Joelle Carter), who died of cancer in 1988 when Jessie was a baby. In them, her mom gives her tarot readings that indicate a presence doesn't want her in the house. Soon, Jessie starts seeing apparitions of a screeching specter with long dark hair (Amber Stevens) and her father accidentally sets himself on fire in a tool shed that locks itself when he tries to burn the videotapes. Jessie reconnects with her now-married high-school boyfriend (Mark Webber) and they dig into the mystery of who this ghost is and why it's so adamantly against Jessie's presence in the house. Greutert goes for a bit of a slow-burn feel in JESSABELLE, and the bayou atmosphere is well-handled. It's a harmless and thoroughly average PG-13 fright flick that's by no means terrible, but you've seen it a hundred times before, you'll spot every jump scare several seconds before they happen, and it just evaporates from memory as soon as it's over. Australian actress Snook, so good in the recent PREDESTINATION, is a very appealing heroine and definitely a talent to watch. Hopefully she lands a breakout role soon and moves past these pay-your-dues gigs. (PG-13, 90 mins)

VIKTOR
(UK/France/Russia - 2014)

Since Liam Neeson struck gold with TAKEN five years ago, aging leading men have been attempting to score hits by hitching a ride on the 60-ish Action Guy bandwagon. In the wake of Neeson's unexpected second career, we've had 59-year-old Kevin Costner in 3 DAYS TO KILL, 61-year-old Pierce Brosnan in THE NOVEMBER MAN, and 59-year-old Denzel Washington in THE EQUALIZER in 2014 alone, along with 68-year-old Sylvester Stallone, 67-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger, and 72-year-old Harrison Ford in THE EXPENDABLES 3. Everyone's getting in the game. But VIKTOR might feature the Geriatric Asskicker subgenre's most unlikely addition yet with 66-year-old Gerard Depardieu as Viktor Lambert, just paroled after serving seven years in a French prison and heading to Russia to tear Moscow apart in search of those responsible for the recent murder of his son. It seems Viktor's son got involved with drugs while working as a diamond runner for ruthless crime lord Belinski (Denis Karasov). Viktor teams up with his retired, out-of-the-game partner Suleiman (Eli Danker) and rekindles a romance with his old flame, posh club owner Alexandra (Elizabeth Hurley) in his obsessive quest to destroy Belinski's criminal empire and make everyone in his organization pay with their lives. Sample dialogue from Viktor to Belinski on the phone: "I just wanted you to hear the voice of the man who's going to kill you." Then, Belinski to his goons: "Breeeng mee heeez hee-yed!"

Written and directed by DTV vet Philippe Martinez (WAKE OF DEATH), VIKTOR is surprisingly well-shot on location in Moscow and some outlying areas. But Martinez's script is as routine as it gets (Russian mobsters! Again!) and the pacing is absolutely laborious. Other than Hurley, it's difficult to understand most of the cast due to the garbled accents of actors for whom English is a second language. Ten minutes are likely added to the running time just by the camera lingering on Karasov--who quite obviously is not fluent in English--valiantly struggling to say his lines phonetically. Hurley, appearing in just her second feature film in the last decade, still looks stunning, though she has a hard time selling Alexandra's insatiable lust for Viktor. Martinez spares us the explosive erotica of a Depardieu-Hurley sex scene but does offer Alexandra giving Viktor a post-coital shoulder-rub while kissing his neck. Despite his size being in the the ballpark of late-career Brando, Depardieu still has enough gravitas to convincingly to sell this character if he wanted to, but he just doesn't look like he cares. The film doesn't even get any dramatic mileage from the tragically poignant real-life parallel of Depardieu being a grieving father offscreen, having lost his 37-year-old son Guillaume in 2008. In several scenes, the French acting legend mumbles like Steven Seagal, his wandering eyes give away that he's reading cue cards or a teleprompter, and he doesn't even take part in the obligatory climactic showdown at an abandoned warehouse, instead having some guys crash into the warehouse and bring Belinski to him. It's here where Martinez completely drops the ball, as the entire film could've been redeemed had it been Depardieu crashing an SUV engulfed in CGI flames through the warehouse doors while hanging out of the window shooting at everyone. The $10 million VIKTOR didn't quite do for Depardieu what TAKEN did for Neeson: it opened on ten screens in the US with no publicity whatsoever last October and grossed just $623 in its first and only week of release. (Unrated, 98 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)

BOARDING GATE
(France - 2007; US release 2008)

Written and directed by Olivier Assayas. Cast: Asia Argento, Michael Madsen, Kelly Lin, Carl Ng, Kim Gordon, Alex Descas, Joana Preiss, Raymond Tsang, Boss Mok. (R, 106 mins)

French filmmaker Olivier Assayas' sleek and glossy thriller BOARDING GATE was met with shrugs at best to outright hostility at worst when it opened in Europe in 2007 and then in the US in 2008. It shares certain similarities with Assayas' impenetrable corporate espionage thriller DEMONLOVER (2003), but is much more streamlined, straightforward work, even with all of its arthouse bells and whistles. Indeed, it wouldn't take much tweaking to turn BOARDING GATE into a commercial chase actioner, but that would be too easy for Assayas, the acclaimed auteur behind the deconstructionist filmmaking satire IRMA VEP (1996), the little seen addiction/recovery drama CLEAN (2004), the keenly insightful family saga SUMMER HOURS (2008), and the incredibly ambitious CARLOS (2010). BOARDING GATE was roundly criticized as Assayas feebly attempting to make a trashy erotic thriller, but such a labeling does it a huge disservice. Yes, it has tawdry and silly elements, but it's far too well-made and beautiful to look at to be so easily dismissed. It may be a tawdry and silly erotic thriller at its core, but BOARDING GATE does its damnedest to be the most hypnotic and compulsively watchable one you'll ever see.

Using the cutthroat financial sector wheeling-and-dealing as a backdrop, Assayas' focus on BOARDING GATE is Sandra (Asia Argento), a lone-wolf antihero with a mysterious past involving drug addiction and prostitution. She's currently working as a shipping and receiving supervisor at a Paris-based import/export shipyard run by Lester (Carl Ng) and Sue Wang (Kelly Lin). She's got a side business running off-the-manifest drug shipments, all part of a plan to ditch Paris and run off to Beijing to buy into a nightclub with Lester, with whom she's having a clandestine affair behind Sue's back. At the same time, Sandra is trying to find closure in her complicated, S&M-heavy relationship with American businessman Miles Rennberg (Michael Madsen), whose days as a power player in the world of global finance are behind him and now he's just looking to sell his stake in a French company to settle a debt with some shady Hong Kong investors. Years earlier, Rennberg was a major name in the business world, and Sandra was on his payroll as a corporate spy, seducing Rennberg's rich associates and investors and coaxing secrets out of them for her boss, who was less interested in the information than in what Sandra did to get the information. Rennberg's tendencies toward sexual sadism are at odds with his sensitive side, as he remains very much in love with Sandra even though he gets off on demeaning her ("I'm gonna handcuff you, and then I'm gonna fuck you"). Rennberg has his tender moments, but he's still the kind of guy who likes to play rough bondage games and have Sandra choke him with a belt while she straddles him and jerks him off. Out of nowhere, Sandra handcuffs Rennberg for what he thinks is a game but she instead shoots him in the back of the head, killing him. She flees his apartment and is picked up by Lester, who talked her into killing Rennberg and sends her and another employee, Lisa (Joana Preiss) to Hong Kong to lay low. Once there, Sandra has no idea who to trust, as she's faced with an embittered Sue--who's not all that oblivious about her husband's extramarital flings--as well as Kay (Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon), a shady American who oversees a sweatshop specializing in knockoff designer jeans and may have been part of the plot to eliminate Rennberg, which turns into a plot to eliminate Sandra.

A basic synopsis makes BOARDING GATE sound like a predictable suspense thriller, but Assayas isn't interesting in following that path. Much of the first hour is devoted to showing the layers of complexity in Sandra's relationship with Rennberg. It ended badly and both know they can't go back, but that pull is still there, and Assayas lets that play out in a long conversation between the two of them in Rennberg's office, and again in and even longer sequence that takes over 20 minutes of screen time, leading to Sandra's murder of Rennberg. Assayas probably could've got an entire film just out of the relationship between these two characters, and though Argento's reputation as a provocateur and enfant terrible seems to at least partially be a youthful attempt to establish herself beyond being Dario Argento's daughter (it's worth noting that she's fast-approaching 40 and has settled down quite a bit in recent years), it's also done her a disservice even this far into her nearly 30-year career by still eclipsing her acting talent. Away from the drawn-out and depressingly funereal decline of her father's films and his strange habit of putting his daughter in nude scenes that's always left a bit of an unpleasant aftertaste, not to mention her ill-advised attempts to break into Hollywood (Vin Diesel's XXX was a huge hit, but it did nothing for her in America), Argento probably has her career-best role in BOARDING GATE. Sure, the poster art plays on her hellraising, wild-child persona ("She's losing control again"), and Sandra at first seems like another variation on Argento's similar corporate seductress (named "Sandii") in Abel Ferrara's cyberpunk misfire NEW ROSE HOTEL (1999). But she has an alluring, edgy. and intense screen presence that Assayas uses for maximum effect, whether she's parading around in skimpy underwear, touching herself in Rennberg's office, glaring intensely while pulling a trigger, or letting emotion get the best of her in her final meeting with Rennberg. Judging from her work in BOARDING GATE, somebody really missed the boat by not casting Argento as a cold, ruthless, badass Bond femme fatale of the Luciana Paluzzi variety during the Pierce Brosnan era.

Even if you hate BOARDING GATE, if nothing else, Assayas deserves some credit for being the last filmmaker (as of this writing) to cast the perpetually slumming Madsen in a serious, significant role. Though he exits at the midway point, Madsen's presence is felt throughout BOARDING GATE, and watching this now is both gratifying and depressing. Gratifying in the sense that it's a rare glimpse of the electrifying, early '90s Madsen that showed up for THELMA & LOUISE and RESERVOIR DOGS, and depressing in that today, he's lumped in with fellow promising actors-turned-mercenaries Val Kilmer, Christian Slater, Eric Roberts, Tom Sizemore, and John Savage, guys who simply can't turn down a gig, no matter how dubious it is, especially if they're on and off the set in a day or less. Other than SIN CITY and an occasional CSI or BLUE BLOODS guest spot, the last decade of Madsen's IMDb page is infested with the likes of NOT ANOTHER NOT ANOTHER MOVIE, FOREST OF THE LIVING DEAD, PIRANHACONDA, and tons of other instantly obscure and unreleased YouTube-quality titles that barely qualify as films. Watching BOARDING GATE again now, it's almost as if Assayas created Miles Rennberg as a sort-of intervention for Madsen about where his career was heading. The parallels between Rennberg and Madsen are impossible to ignore: a buzzed-about shooting star years earlier, now looking for quick cash and clinging to the fringes of his industry thanks to name recognition and past accomplishments, and with, as Sandra points out, "a body gone to seed." A pasty, schlubby-looking Madsen sells it perfectly with his slumped shoulders, his middle-aged paunch, and a lurching gait that makes him look like he's babying a chronically nagging back injury. The actor does appear in Quentin Tarantino's currently in-production western THE HATEFUL EIGHT, but until that's released, BOARDING GATE stands as the last documented example of Michael Madsen giving a shit onscreen.

BOARDING GATE's second half is where it splits off into its more commercial direction, but even then, there's enough ambiguity in the ending to completely eliminate it from "crowd-pleaser" contention. Assayas and cinematographer Yorick La Saux (SWIMMING POOL, ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE) masterfully capture the dizzying, disorienting feel of overcrowded Hong Kong, whether in shopping centers, markets, or just in the busy streets. It's brilliantly abetted by the droning ambiance of selections from Brian Eno's back catalog, like "Lizard Point" and "Music for Airports 2/2," and "The Heavenly Music Corporation," by Eno and King Crimson's Robert Fripp. It all reaches a stunning crescendo in a finale that's heavy on the complicated camera moves and long tracking shots as Sandra follows Lester with the intent of exacting revenge for hanging her out to dry and cutting her out of their club deal. As Eno's music drones and throbs, Assayas comes up just a split-screen and a split-diopter shy of going into all-out Brian De Palma worship. Nevertheless, Sandra's tailing of Lester brings to mind fond memories of similar De Palma sequences like Angie Dickinson following her anonymous hook-up through the art museum in DRESSED TO KILL or Craig Wasson's lovestruck pursuit of his doomed neighbor through an L.A. shopping mall and to the beach in BODY DOUBLE.

Drenched in melancholy and yet alive with kinetic energy, BOARDING GATE seems to be held in higher regard now than it was seven years ago, and as a result, it's formed a minor cult following. By no means a secret masterpiece, it's still the kind of film that improves greatly on subsequent viewings, once you realize where the story is going and can further examine why Assayas has it play out the way it does. And in doing so, the viewer begins to unexpectedly empathize with Sandra and understand the devastation and resignation she feels in that deliberately open-ended final shot as a lifetime of self-destructive choices and terrible misdeeds hits her all at once. Most reviews of BOARDING GATE approach it from the viewpoint of Assayas offering a commentary on the state of global commerce and capitalism. That's all well and good, but it was also covered by the director in DEMONLOVER. Though it turns into a gripping thriller that's a tad esoteric and somehow manages to be convoluted and vague, BOARDING GATE is at its most intriguing in its first half, when it's a much more stripped-down and intimate film with devastating performances by Argento and Madsen...even if it does cleverly disguise itself as a tawdry and silly erotic thriller.

WHY DON'T YOU PLAY IN HELL?
(Japan - 2013; US release 2014)

Japanese auteur Sion Sono has several fascinating films in his back catalog--2001's SUICIDE CLUB, 2005's STRANGE CIRCUS, and 2010's COLD FISH to name three--but none on the level of his masterpiece, 2008's LOVE EXPOSURE, belatedly released in the US in 2012. A mammoth, four-hour epic about religion, forbidden love, and upskirt photos, LOVE EXPOSURE is a film like no other. Like the Takashi Miike of a decade and a half ago, the prolific Sono is always working on something, but WHY DON'T YOU PLAY IN HELL? is his first film to get a US release since LOVE EXPOSURE, and it's one where a little goes a long way. An absurdist satire that takes on the yakuza tradition and the state of Japanese filmmaking, HELL gets off to a funny start with the introduction of an enthusiastic but talentless filmmaking collective who call themselves "The Fuck Bombers." There's a long prologue set ten years ago before two parallel storylines kick off and finally converge around 80 minutes into the 130-minute film. Ten years ago, the wife (Tomochika) of yakuza boss Muto (Jun Kunimura) was sent to prison for going on a stabbing rampage that took out several flunkies of Muto's rival Ikegami (Shinichi Tsutsumi). This prompts a toothpaste company to take a popular series of commercials off the air that showcase a catchy jingle sung by Muto's young daughter Mitsuko (played as a child by Nanoka Hara), on whom Ikegami has an unusual and questionable fixation. Ten years later, Mrs. Muto is about to be released from prison and Mitsuko (Fumi Nikaido) is starring in a cheap yakuza thriller when she runs off the set with her hapless boyfriend Koji (Gen Hoshino). When Muto's men apprehend the couple, Mitsuko convinces her father that Koji is a filmmaker and was going to put her in a better movie to impress her mother. Forced to pretend he's a movie director, Koji recruits his childhood acquaintances in The Fuck Bombers, led by the delusional and oblivious Hirata (Hiroki Hasagawa), who sees this as his ticket to the big time and stages an epic, captured-on-film battle-to-the-death between Muto's and Ikegawa's perpetually-warring crews.

Sono is aiming all over the place throughout the often tedious HELL, but it improves quite a bit once Hirata starts shooting his magnum opus as blood, limbs, heads and appendages fly across the screen with wild abandon. Hirata insists on using 35mm and his resulting masterwork, also titled WHY DON'T YOU PLAY IN HELL? ultimately represents the death of film for Japanese cinema (I'm sure Sono is being facetious in his overuse of CGI splatter) as it goes out in a blaze of glory, where even the two-person camera crew starts firing assault rifles while making sure they get their shots. There's a bit of a STUNT MAN method to Hirata's Eli Cross-like madness, but ultimately, the film just starts getting too meta for its own good, with a late-in-the-game Buddy Bizarre wall-breaker that takes it into BLAZING SADDLES territory. There's some clever and funny bits scattered throughout, from offbeat humor (this is a guy, after all, whose EXTE: HAIR EXTENSIONS was a film about killer hair extensions) to simple sight gags (a bunch of yakuza goons bracing themselves and scrambling to avoid an approaching assassin that turns out to be a cat) and the message about the death of film being the end of an era is a poignant and elegiac one. But a dawdling Sono lets the pace drag and takes too long to say what he has to say, spending entirely too much time on standard-issue yakuza cliches straight out of any Beat Takeshi joint, and general goofball silliness with the Fuck Bombers (it's surely by design, but Hasagawa's performance is grating) that only serve to pad the running time. LOVE EXPOSURE was a four-hour work of art that I would've happily spent another four hours watching. With HELL, however, Sono could've trimmed it by at least 30 minutes and ended up with a stronger film as a result. (Unrated, 130 mins)

OPEN WINDOWS
(Spain/US - 2014)

In the years following the phenomenal success of the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, Elijah Wood has done voice work in the HAPPY FEET films but has generally laid low in indies and offbeat projects like the cult TV series WILFRED. He's also embarked on an unexpected side career in European-made thrillers like Alex de la Iglesia's THE OXFORD MURDERS and Franck Khalfoun's MANIAC, a remake of the 1980 horror classic. OPEN WINDOWS, the latest from TIMECRIMES director Nacho Vigalondo, puts Wood in a similar predicament his character encountered in another recent Spanish thriller, GRAND PIANO. In that film, Wood played a famous and reclusive concert pianist, returning from a very public nervous breakdown and being taunted and threatened via earpiece in mid-comeback performance by the voice of John Cusack as a sniper perched in the balcony, threatening to shoot him if he plays one wrong note. It was a high concept that didn't carry through to the end but had enough De Palma-esque visual flourishes to keep it giddily entertaining. Wood is harangued by an unseen voice yet again in OPEN WINDOWS, this time as Nick, a dweeby blogger and webmaster for a fan site devoted to B-movie actress Jill Goddard (Sasha Grey). Nick is in Austin, where Jill is premiering her latest cheesy horror film and he's won a contest to have dinner with her. He's contacted in his hotel room by Chord (Neil Maskell), who tells him that the dinner is off and that the bitchy Jill never had any intention of meeting up with him anyway. Chord has inside knowledge of Jill's activities and convinces Nick that he's part of her team and is just trying to let him down easy. He sends Nick some links that give him access to her phone and its contents, and even hacks into Nick's digital camera to provide an inside look into Jill's hotel room, where she's stepping out on her boyfriend with her agent. Nick's naivete has allowed Chord to completely take over his laptop and use it to remotely hack into every aspect of Jill's life, and only then does the slow-on-the-uptake Nick realize there never was any contest and that Chord is setting him up to take the fall for his plan to stalk and eventually kill Jill.

Around the time OPEN WINDOWS got a limited and VOD release in the US, celebrity cell phone hacks of Jennifer Lawrence, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and others were making headlines, followed sometime later by the Sony e-mail hacks over the controversial THE INTERVIEW. OPEN WINDOWS blows a chance to be a smart and unexpectedly prescient thriller by going off the deep end and not taking better advantage of its high concept--almost the entire film plays out as pop-up windows on Nick's laptop. Yes, we've gone from found-footage to feature-length Skyping, but the first 30 or so minutes are terrific and very well-orchestrated by the director. But then Vigalondo makes the fatal mistake that so many filmmakers do when dealing with something like this: he should've kept Nick in his hotel room, glued to his laptop. That's what cranks up the suspense--when he's helpless and has nowhere to go. Instead, Vigalondo can't wait to get Nick out of the hotel and into a car, where he ends up being chased by the cops, laptop open in his passenger seat as Chord continues to terrorize him. There's also a team of French hackers who dial in to help Nick, and then there's a whole subplot about them mistaking Nick for a criminal known as "Nevada," who might actually be Chord but maybe not. Vigalondo also introduces one nonsensical twist after another, involving identity theft, doubles, and masks and no one being who they say they are. While Nick is in his hotel room, OPEN WINDOWS is taut, plausible, and terrifying, but as soon as he's out, it collapses almost instantly as Vigalondo not only subscribes to the belief that computers can do what they do in CBS police procedurals, but he piles on one ludicrous twist after another, digging himself into such a hole that the resolution makes no sense whatsoever. It hardly matters, since you'll have stopped caring long before that. OPEN WINDOWS gets off to a killer start but implodes faster than any fright film this side of LEGION. (Unrated, 101 mins)

MAS NEGRO QUE LA NOCHE
(Mexico/Spain - 2014)

Pantelion Films, an offshoot of Lionsgate and Mexico's Grupo Televisa, is a specialty distributor of films targeted toward Spanish-speaking audiences in the US. Pantelion had a breakout hit with 2013's INSTRUCTIONS NOT INCLUDED and recently released the biopic CANTINFLAS, which wasn't quite as successful. Released on 178 screens last fall, where it had a respectable $3000 per screen average to land in 17th place its opening weekend, the 3-D horror film MAS NEGRO QUE LA NOCHE was so geared toward a particular audience that it went out under its original title instead of the translated "Darker Than Night." Other than its release pattern, there's absolutely nothing special about NOCHE, a remake of a 1975 film of the same title that's somewhat revered by Mexican moviegoers, though it didn't make much of a dent in the States. Presumably working from a checklist provided by Lionsgate, NOCHE '14 is yet another rote "vengeful ghost" saga that you've seen countless times before, loaded with jump scares and loud music cues. When Greta (Zuria Vega) was orphaned as a child, she was raised by her rich Aunt Ofelia (Lucia Guilmain), a spinster who lived with her beloved cat Becker and fiercely devoted housekeeper Evangelina (Margarita Sanz). Years later, Aunt Ofelia has died and Greta inherits everything, with the caveat that she must care for the seemingly ageless Becker. Greta moves into Ofelia's mansion with her cheating, dirtbag fiance (producer Josemaria Torre Hutt) and her three hard-partying besties, much to the chagrin of Evangelina as well as Aunt Ofelia, whose enraged ghost still prowls the grounds. When Greta's coke-whore friend Vicky (Ona Casamiquela) finds that her ferret's been killed by Becker, she drowns the cat in the pool, which sets Ofelia's ghost on a rampage of vengeance that eventually results in the possession of Greta, who starts offing everyone in a variety of gruesome ways. NOCHE '14 is an abysmally dull failure that takes forever to get going and when it finally does, it simply goes through every modern horror cliche in the book: predictable jump scares and fake-outs, a creepy music box, constantly flickering lights and creaking doors accompanying Ofelia sightings, and endless running and screaming down long corridors like some botched tribute to the slamming-door farce. NOCHE '14 clearly has some money up on the screen with some effectively dank and ominous production design (THE OTHERS and THE ORPHANAGE are major stylistic influences here), but when it's finally and mercifully over, writer/director Henry Bedwell's film is nothing more than a tired, D-list Guillermo del Toro ripoff, with loathsome characters, a dearth of scares, and the pointless bonus of ending with Marilyn Manson's cover of Carly Simon's "You're So Vain," for some reason. (R, 110 mins)

WILD CARD
(US - 2015)

Directed by Simon West. Written by William Goldman. Cast: Jason Statham, Michael Angarano, Milo Ventimiglia, Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Stanley Tucci, Hope Davis, Anne Heche, Sofia Vergara, Jason Alexander, Max Casella, Francois Vincentelli, Chris Browning, Matthew Willig, Davenia McFadden. (R, 92 mins)

Jason Statham's peak days as a solo box-office draw appear to be hitting a valley with recent under-performers like KILLER ELITE (2011), SAFE (2012), PARKER (2013), and HOMEFRONT (2013). Even the third EXPENDABLES entry did significantly less business than its predecessors, and all of that has combined to damn WILD CARD to a limited release/VOD burial from Lionsgate, who've apparently lost faith in Statham's ability to open a movie. None of this means the 47-year-old action hero is done: he's still got his Liam Neeson action icon rebirth to look forward to in a decade or so, and in the immediate future, he's playing the villain in the upcoming FURIOUS 7, and teams up with Melissa McCarthy in the slapstick comedy SPY, due out this summer. WILD CARD is a remake of the forgotten 1987 Burt Reynolds box-office bomb HEAT, based on a novel by Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman (BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, MARATHON MAN). If HEAT is remembered at all today, it's for being the movie where an irate Reynolds infamously punched director Dick Richards in the face after an on-set disagreement. Scripted by Goldman himself, HEAT was so plagued by production problems that Richards was actually the film's second director, a replacement for Robert Altman, who quit after one day of shooting. After the altercation with Reynolds, Richards quit and was then replaced by veteran journeyman Jerry Jameson (AIRPORT '77), who finished the movie without incident, with final credit going to a semi-pseudonymous "R.M. Richards."

HEAT was Reynolds' first film back from being sidelined for two years by a jaw injury sustained on the set of 1984's CITY HEAT, when he was shooting a fight scene and was hit in the face by a real chair instead of a breakaway prop chair. He had to have reconstructive jaw surgery and was on a liquid diet for months, leading to a drastic weight loss and rumors that he was dying of AIDS. Reynolds looked fit and healthy in HEAT, but by that point, audiences stopped caring. Just a few years earlier, he was the biggest movie star in the world, but by early 1987, HEAT was in and out of theaters in two weeks. The film itself is a noble failure, but it's better than its reputation, with a solid performance by Reynolds, and unlike most of his 1980s work, he's actually trying. HEAT was more a character study than an action thriller--probably why Altman was involved in the first place--and Reynolds took it seriously, but the few who saw it wanted an action movie.

Since so few people remember HEAT (and it's been slightly overshadowed by another, much more revered HEAT), it should be easy for audiences to take WILD CARD on its own terms. Goldman, now 83 and with his first screenplay credit in 12 years, essentially dusts off his HEAT script and adds a few modern touches, but it's largely the same film in terms of plot. However, its most unexpected element is that it only succeeds in making one appreciate HEAT. WILD CARD offers Statham in mostly serious mode (like the similarly dumped REDEMPTION) and while his acting chops are better than he's even given credit, he just looks bored here and can't enliven this bland, lifeless story. Statham is Nick Wild, a Las Vegas "security consultant" reduced to letting clients deck him to impress their girlfriends. He's trying to put together a $500K nest egg to pack up and move to Corsica, but even he knows he'll just be counting the days until he's back in Vegas. Like HEAT, WILD CARD gives Nick two stories that never really come together: his prostitute ex Holly (Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Andy Garcia's daughter) is brutally beaten and raped by sniveling brat mob scion Danny DeMarco (Milo Ventimiglia) and his two dudebro goons, prompting her to beg Nick to help her exact revenge; and Nick is also pestered by wealthy computer genius Cyrus Kinnick (Michael Angarano), a likable but spineless sort who wants lessons in standing up for himself and facing his fears.

And that's pretty much it. A number of familiar faces turn up in brief roles--Anne Heche as a waitress, Hope Davis as a blackjack dealer, Jason Alexander as Nick's lawyer/business partner Pynchus "Pinky" Zion (played by a scene-stealing Howard Hesseman in HEAT), Sofia Vergara as a woman impressed that her weakling beau handled Nick (she's gone before the opening credits), and Stanley Tucci as a flamboyant, god-like, mob-connected casino boss who tries to mediate the dispute between Nick and DeMarco while acting like a slightly toned-down version of Dean Stockwell's Ben in BLUE VELVET. Director Simon West (CON AIR, THE EXPENDABLES 2, and the Statham remake of THE MECHANIC) tries to keep things low-key, even attempting that sort of juxtaposed, jump-forward-then-backtracking with overlapping past/future dialogue editing style frequently (and much more successfully) used by Steven Soderbergh in films like THE LIMEY and OUT OF SIGHT, but coming from the School of Bruckheimer, he's utterly lacking in the nuance and the sense of fluidity required to make tricks like that work. Brian De Palma was signed on to direct this when it was announced but he quit the project during pre-production. One can only imagine how much differently WILD CARD might've turned out with the split-screens and the split-diopter shots and Statham really getting to show his range for one of cinema's all-time great filmmakers. The possibilities, even with De Palma not at the top of his game and in the self-parody phase of his career, are more exciting to ponder than anything that ended up in the finished product.

The worst part of WILD CARD is the distracting and clumsy insertion of elaborately-choreographed fight scenes overseen by veteran martial-arts coordinator Cory Yuen (director of THE TRANSPORTER). This is clearly intended to be a character-driven drama for Statham, but the occasional outbursts of quick-cut martial-arts mayhem as Nick breaks out the JOHN WICKstrionics are jarringly incongruous to the rest of the film and are obviously only there to prevent this from completely turning into the Statham equivalent of KILLING THEM SOFTLY, the kind of dialogue-heavy, misleadingly-advertised mood piece that would've sent die-hard action fans bolting for the exits. But WILD CARD's dramatic elements don't work either, the film ends with an almost anti-climactic shrug of surrender, and when it's all said and done, it's just a tonally confused DOA dud that can't reconcile giving its star a chance to stretch with the expectation that he be a one-man wrecking crew. It does nothing to correct the mistakes of HEAT--which were due more to its messy production than anything else--and instead just ends up making more of its own that are totally unique to this pointless remake of a film that absolutely no one was demanding. Statham's having a really off-day here, and while it's likely that the declining box office of his solo actioners in the last couple of years might've a hand in the stealth release of WILD CARD, there's also no way of getting around the fact that it's his worst film and that's the more likely reason why Lionsgate opted to sneak this into as few theaters as possible.

THE LOFT
(US/Belgium - 2015)

Directed by Erik Van Looy. Written by Wesley Strick. Cast: Karl Urban, James Marsden, Wentworth Miller, Eric Stonestreet, Matthias Schoenaerts, Rachael Taylor, Isabel Lucas, Rhona Mitra, Valerie Cruz, Kali Rocha, Elaine Cassidy, Margarita Levieva, Kristin Lehman, Robert Wisdom, Graham Beckel, Dora Madison Burge, Ric Reitz, Kathy Deitch, Laura Cayouette. (R, 103 mins)

It's rarely a good sign when a movie arrives in theaters in 2015 sporting a 2013 copyright after being shot in 2011. THE LOFT's nearly four years on the shelf have been attributed to distributor issues, with its release date shuffled numerous times as the film went from Warner Bros. to Universal, then finally to the smaller Open Road. It's not a terrible movie by any means, though it comes up far short of the USUAL SUSPECTS-type twistfest that it desperately tries to be. What's here is generally entertaining, diverting trash that could actually stand to be a little more trashy instead of just piling on the red herrings and dropped plot threads with reckless abandon. It's the kind of movie that offers unintended laughs when five people are in a room knowing that one among them is a killer, and we get close-ups of the five regarding each other with shifty, squinty eyes, accompanied by a ludicrously melodramatic Big Reveal/Cliffhanger/"Dun-Dun-DUUUUN!"-style music cue.

THE LOFT is an almost shot-for-shot remake of the 2008 Flemish-language thriller LOFT, which still stands as Belgium's highest-grossing homegrown film. LOFT was remade in similarly identical fashion as the Dutch LOFT in 2010. The 2008 LOFT was helmed by Erik Van Looy (THE MEMORY OF A KILLER), who makes his English-language directing debut with THE LOFT. Van Looy was also pressed into service on the Dutch LOFT when its director, Antoinette Beumer, and five others were injured by falling scaffolding on the set, stepping in as an uncredited backup director for a couple of weeks while Beumer recovered from her injuries. I'm not sure what else Van Looy can wring out of this story that he hasn't already, but THE LOFT (shot mostly in Brussels) follows the template of Bart De Pauw's original 2008 script, adapted by Wesley Strick, whose screenwriting credits include CAPE FEAR (1991), FINAL ANALYSIS (1992), and THE GLASS HOUSE (2001): five married guys have a secret apartment they agree to use as a getaway to hook up with mistresses and one-night stands. The whole thing is the brainchild of successful architect Vincent (Karl Urban), who gives keys to his four buddies: Chris (James Marsden), Luke (Wentworth Miller), Marty (Eric Stonestreet), and Philip (Matthias Schoenaerts, who played the same role in the Belgian LOFT). The film opens with Luke showing up at the loft and finding a dead, blood-covered blonde handcuffed to the bed. Van Looy cuts back and forth between the five men trying to work their way out of the situation and being interrogated by skeptical detectives (Kristin Lehman, Robert Wisdom), and the events of the previous year, starting with Vincent proposing the idea of the loft. All of the guys are bored with their perpetually sour-faced, ballbusting, complaining and/or needy wives. Shrink Chris fancies himself a family man but falls hard for icy blonde Anne (Rachael Taylor), who's not only the mistress of a city councilman (Ric Reitz), but also the sister of a patient who committed suicide. Vincent steps out on his wife (Valerie Cruz) with a younger woman (Isabel Lucas), with whom Luke is obsessed. Gregarious Marty, the loud fat guy of the group, sees his marriage ruined by his indiscretion on a business trip with Vincent and Luke. And Philip, the younger half-brother of Chris, is a violent cokehead who marries into a rich family and is irrationally overprotective of his 20-year-old sister (Dora Madison Burge).

Of course, as these five dipshits try to figure out which one of them is responsible for the dead body in their party pad, long-simmering resentments and grudges boil over, usually involving creepy Luke and his seething jealousy over Vincent's way with women or someone making a passive-aggressive accusatory comment and getting a "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" in response. Or, one guy telling another "You're a sick fuck!" and getting "No, YOU'RE a sick fuck!" and a shove as a retort. It's hinted that Luke is a closeted homosexual who secretly desires Vincent, but that's quickly tossed aside (it's an interesting side note that Miller himself came out of the closet in 2013) because THE LOFT isn't daring enough to take it in that direction. The contrivances and conveniences come at a furious clip and it's all moderately entertaining enough, if a bit lacking in the courage to be anything but standard and safe. The resolution isn't so much unpredictable as it is ridiculous, with characters making one dumb, nonsensical decision after another just so Van Looy can keep the movie going. Say what you will about 1998's similar VERY BAD THINGS, but at least it had a sick-humored, anything-goes sense of adventure to it. By the time everything is explained, THE LOFT has nothing left to do but end with a whimper, offering up one of the weakest denouements in recent memory. THE LOFT is perfectly OK as the kind of movie you stop on while channel-surfing, and it'll no doubt have a long life on Netflix Instant and cable. But while it's always nice to see a '90s-style thriller on the big screen these days, it would've been a lot better if it didn't take itself so seriously, inadvertently serving as the perfect example of why these kinds of movies faded from popularity in the first place.

THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN
(US - 2014)

Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. Written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. Cast: Addison Timlin, Veronica Cartwright, Gary Cole, Anthony Anderson, Edward Herrmann, Joshua Leonard, Denis O'Hare, Travis Tope, Ed Lauter, Andy Abele, Spencer Treat Clark, Wes Chatham, Lance E. Nichols. (R, 86 mins)

Charles B. Pierce's revered 1976 cult classic THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN provides the foundation for this reboot/meta-sequel of sorts that makes the creative decision of incorporating the existence of the original film into its story. A thriller dramatizing a series of murders in the small Texas/Arkansas border town of Texarkana in 1946 by a sack-hooded killer dubbed "The Phantom," SUNDOWN '76 has enjoyed a devoted following over the years despite its uneven structure and dismal comic relief, unwisely provided by Pierce himself as numb-skulled deputy Sparkplug. As a director, Pierce (THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK) is Pierce the actor's biggest fan, repeatedly killing the momentum with Sparkplug's wacky antics, blithely oblivious to how much damage his slapstick self-indulgence does to an otherwise well-made, chillingly effective film. A drive-in hit in its day, SUNDOWN '76 is still embraced by horror fans who are obviously more forgiving of Sparkplug than I am--I don't exaggerate when I say Pierce's endless clowning ruins his own movie. There's no doubting SUNDOWN '76's influence: its killer's "Sackhead" look was blatantly copied for the pre-hockey mask Jason in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 (1981).

Co-produced by GLEE and AMERICAN HORROR STORY mastermind Ryan Murphy and, like every current horror movie, "from the producer of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY and INSIDIOUS," SUNDOWN '14 takes place in present-day Texarkana, still a tiny town forever haunted by the events not just of 65 years earlier, but by the movie itself, now such a cult classic that its drive-in showings and TV airings have made it as much of the town's history as the murders that influenced it. In a way, orphaned teenager Jami (Addison Timlin) is herself a victim of the SUNDOWN mythology even though she was born decades after both the murders and the movie. Years earlier, frightened by the movie being shown and someone wearing a sackhead hood at a sleepover, young Jami called her parents to come and pick her up and they were killed in a car accident on the way home, leaving Jami to be raised by her grandmother Lillian (Veronica Cartwright). After leaving a showing of the movie because of her obvious discomfort, Jami and her boyfriend Corey (Spencer Treat Clark) are accosted in a nearby dirt-road Lovers' Lane by a sackheaded copycat who brutally kills Corey. Jami escapes, but the murders continue, prompting the sheriff (the late, great character actor Ed Lauter, who died in 2013, shortly after the film's completion) and his asshole deputy Tillman (Gary Cole) to bring in Texas Ranger Lone Wolf Morales (Anthony Anderson, very good in some unexpected casting) to help find the madman. Meanwhile, Jami and shy library archive staffer Nick (Travis Tope) conduct their own investigation, leading them to none other than Charles B. Pierce, Jr (Denis O'Hare), who insists he knows the copycat killer's true identity.

Anchored by a strong performance by the charming Timlin, who looks and sounds like the second coming of late '80s scream queen Jill Schoelen (THE STEPFATHER, POPCORN), SUNDOWN '14 is a surprisingly effective sleeper that deserved more exposure than it got from the relaunched Orion Pictures. Scripted by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (a writer on GLEE and AHS who also penned 2013's dreary CARRIE remake) and directed by Murphy's GLEE/AHS vet Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, who utilizes numerous visual tricks like some De Palma split-diopters, long tracking shots, and impressively swooping and well-choreographed crane shots. These days, it's expected that a reboot of this sort will be filled with self-conscious snark and shock value in place of actual horror (especially coming from so many AMERICAN HORROR STORY personnel), but SUNDOWN '14 is legitimately scary, with Sackhead's attacks--several of the '76 film's more iconic kills are restaged here--startling, brutal, and utterly relentless. But beyond it just being an unexpectedly solid fright film, SUNDOWN '14 is ambitious and very clever, with special attention given to showy filmmaking technique, giallo-inspired color schemes, and inspired mise-en-scene, from the jarring ways Gomez-Rejon has Sackhead enter the frame when you least expect it to the sardonic placement of a dead-end road sign.

There's also the scathing visual commentary of a billboard of finger-pointing, fear-mongering, Bible-thumping Reverend Cartwright (the late Edward Herrmann in one of his last roles) forming the backdrop of a shot that puts his judgmental visage right between two gay male high-school students about to have sex in a car before Sackhead attacks. Another scene set in a junkyard filled with signs of all the defunct Texarkana businesses that have gone under or left town over the years is essentially eulogizing the passing of small-town America. The empty streets and boarded-up storefronts of downtown Texarkana reveal a town decimated by past tragedies from which it can never recover and those ghosts are everywhere. Without the 1976 movie to keep it in the public consciousness, this dark part of the town's history could pass on like those who lived through it. But when it comes to cinema, everything is immortal. SUNDOWN '14 isn't flawless (the idea of Pierce Jr coincidentally living on the outskirts of Texarkana all these years is a little too convenient) but it subverts almost all expectations in an era where old-school horror fans usually approach these things, if at all, by preparing for the worst. There isn't a loud music cue or a pointless jump scare to be had and it makes a loud-and-clear statement regarding its stance on "Sparkplug" by completely Jar-Jar Binksing the character to a two-second, non-speaking walk-on. Like a serious SCREAM without the sense of smug self-awareness that its success spawned, and even at times recalling everything from the investigative obsessiveness of David Fincher's ZODIAC (2007), the meta-before-it-was-cool WES CRAVEN'S NEW NIGHTMARE (1994), and the movie vs. reality elements of Bigas Luna's cult oddity ANGUISH (1987), the 2014 revamp of THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN is a smart, unnerving, and ferociously uncompromising film that's far better than it has any right or reason to be. It's pretty much an anomaly in today's horror scene. If this was a found-footage remake, you know it would've opened on 3000 screens instead of getting dumped on VOD.

A MOST VIOLENT YEAR
(US/United Arab Emirates - 2014)

Written and directed by J.C. Chandor. Cast: Oscar Isaac, Jessica Chastain, David Oyelowo, Albert Brooks, Alessandro Nivola, Elyes Gabel, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Peter Gerety, Christopher Abbott, Ashley Williams, Jerry Adler, Elizabeth Marvel, David Margulies, Glenn Fleshler, John Procaccino, Robert Clohessy, Annie Funke. (R, 125 mins)

If you were to walk into J.C. Chandor's A MOST VIOLENT YEAR blind, knowing nothing about it, you might very well think it's a lost Sidney Lumet "gritty NYC" movie that's been on the shelf since 1981. In the course of just three films since 2011--he previously wrote and directed the mesmerizing financial meltdown chronicle MARGIN CALL and the Robert Redford lost-at-sea survivalist drama ALL IS LOST--Chandor has established himself as arguably the most versatile young talent in American filmmaking. With A MOST VIOLENT YEAR, Chandor wears his love of Lumet and a bygone era of NYC filmmaking on his sleeve. Set in the winter of 1981 during a record wave of violent crime, A MOST VIOLENT YEAR crackles with the kind of energy and intensity you just don't see much of these days. This is a movie for people who like big-city corruption dramas of the 1970s and early 1980s. Chandor's attention to detail is sharp and precise, and he lets the atmosphere, characterization, and performances convey the era rather than resorting to the easy, go-to tropes of garish clothing or the popular music of the period, which usually means a scene in a disco where Blondie's "Heart of Glass" is playing, or making the whole film play like the coked-up paranoia section of GOODFELLAS, which only works if you're AMERICAN HUSTLE. The problem with many of today's films that are set in the 1970s and 1980s is that they overdo the easy signifiers like hairstyles, clothing, and music. Chandor doesn't even break out those crutches, and instead approaches A MOST WANTED YEAR from a you-are-there 1981 perspective devoid of any sense of nostalgia. It's as if he's possessed by the spirit of the late, legendary Lumet.

In a performance that channels the best of the youthful Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, Oscar Isaac (INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS) is Abel Morales, the president of the relatively small-time Standard Heating Oil. Abel has several rivals throughout the Five Boroughs, and they're all jockeying for better positions in the local market. Abel and his business partner/wife Anna (Jessica Chastain) have dumped their life savings into a deposit on a riverfront land purchase from Hasidic businessman Josef (Jerry Adler), a fuel and oil storage facility that will give Abel leverage in the local competition. All he needs to do is come up with $1.5 million in 30 days and the land is his. Otherwise, Josef keeps the deposit and sells the property to a competitor. Abel is stressed but confident. He runs a clean business, prides himself on Standard's presentation and dedication to customer service, and has a great relationship with his bank. Of course, everything starts falling apart. For the last year, Abel's trucks have been occasionally hijacked on their routes, the drivers assaulted and the oil sold to the competition. These occurrences have been on an alarming increase, the latest one resulting in dedicated driver Julian (Elyes Gabel) getting his face smashed and his jaw broken. Abel and his lawyer Andrew Walsh (an almost unrecognizable Albert Brooks) go to District Attorney Lawrence (David Oyelowo) to address the problem, only to be told that the city's been riddled with crime for over a year and hijacked heating oil trucks aren't a priority. And on top of that, Lawrence is launching an investigation into corruption among the city's heating oil providers, with a particular emphasis on Standard. And when the hijackings continue, Walsh and Anna, behind Abel's back, make an agreement with Teamsters rep O'Leary (Peter Gerety) to supply the drivers with guns accompanied by permits that range from sketchy to completely forged.

As all of these issues crash in on the beleaguered Abel, he keeps telling himself that everything will be OK because he runs an honest business, but he's deluding himself. In the revisionist bio he's imagined for himself, he thinks he's built the business from the ground up, when in fact, he bought it cheap from his low-level mobster father-in-law, with Anna cooking the books in a subtle enough way that it's taken the D.A.'s office ten years to catch on to it. An immigrant, Abel believes in the American dream so much that he's willing to convince himself that he's above the corruption that infests his chosen industry. In a very intense, controlled, and pitch-perfect performance, Isaac vanishes into his character the way a young Pacino and De Niro would. His Abel Morales is, at his core, a fundamentally good man who thinks that as long as he doesn't see something illegal happening, everything's going to be OK. He's too smart to not know about Anna's machinations, whether she's falsifying tax records or skimming off the top. The one major flaw in Chandor's script is the sometimes one-dimensional presentation of Anna, though it's not the fault of Chastain. She's a loving wife and, in a rarity for this type of film, an equal partner, but she's still too often cartoonishly bitchy and ruthless, saddled with heavy-handed, melodramatic ways of showing that she's the decisive ballbuster while Abel needs to man up and get with the program, such as the scene where they're driving home from dinner and hit a deer. Opting to put the poor creature out of its misery, Abel hesitantly dithers with a tire iron, while Anna pulls out a gun and shoots it in the head.

Elsewhere, Chandor offers two marvelous, pulse-pounding chase sequences--one during a shootout on the 59th Street Bridge in heavy traffic, the other a long, stunning FRENCH CONNECTION homage when Abel hears a truck hijacking on the radio and realizes he's right in the area where it's taking place. At the end, after a bitingly cynical dialogue exchange between Abel and Lawrence that illustrates just how intertwined politics and business really are, A MOST VIOLENT YEAR is still just Lumet-worship first and foremost (with some bonus affection for guys like William Friedkin and Alan J. Pakula). But it's the closest thing to a new Sidney Lumet film that you're ever going to get, and I imagine that's the best praise one can bestow upon it. Dialogue-heavy and character-driven, set in a world that exists in a perpetual shade of moral and ethical gray, A MOST VIOLENT YEAR is the kind of film that should've been an Oscar darling, but still-not-ready-for-prime-time distributor A24 Films only gave it a minimal, NYC/L.A. release on December 31, 2014. While that wasn't a fatal mistake, A24 completely fell asleep on the job when they were too late getting screeners out to Academy members to qualify it for awards consideration. As a result, what was pegged as a surefire Oscar candidate ended up with exactly zero nominations, all but killing its awards-season momentum and any moviegoer interest with the film finally opening nationwide at the end of January. Nevertheless, its day will come, as it's the work of a strong, confident filmmaker who's only starting to hit the peak of his powers. There's going to be some great films from J.C. Chandor in the coming years.

JUPITER ASCENDING
(US - 2015)

Written and directed by The Wachowskis. Cast: Channing Tatum, Mila Kunis, Sean Bean, Eddie Redmayne, Douglas Booth, Tuppence Middleton, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Tim Piggot-Smith, Maria Doyle Kennedy, James D'Arcy, Doona Bae, Kick Gurry, Jeremy Swift, Edward Hogg, Terry Gilliam, Rupert Frazer, Christina Cole, Nicholas A. Newman, Frog Stone, Ramon Tikaram, Ariyon Bakare, David Ajala, Vanessa Kirby, Charlotte Beaumont. (PG-13, 127 mins)

It's already more or less expected that the $175 million JUPITER ASCENDING, the latest from MATRIX masterminds Andy and Lana Wachowski, will be yet another costly box-office dud to follow 2008's SPEED RACER and 2012's CLOUD ATLAS (co-directed with Tom Tykwer), not to mention 2009's NINJA ASSASSIN, which they produced. After the disappointing reception that followed the back-to-back MATRIX sequels, only V FOR VENDETTA (produced by the siblings and directed by their protege James McTeigue) seemed to get a positive reaction from mainstream audiences. But time can change perspective, and by now, SPEED RACER and especially CLOUD ATLAS already have strong cult followings with viewers who can simply appreciate the incredible visuals and wild ambition inherent in the Wachowskis' work (even the much-maligned MATRIX sequels have their defenders). Given the "What have you done for me lately?" attitude of Hollywood studios, it's amazing that they can still get someone to gamble nearly $200 million on greenlighting a massively-budgeted auteurist vision that still gives them more creative control than most filmmakers are granted in 2015. That MATRIX cache still carries a lot of cred, even though they haven't had anywhere near the same level of financial success, but when the sci-fi epic JUPITER ASCENDING was yanked from the summer 2014 schedule and bumped to February 2015 to "work on the visual effects," the online snark machine revved up. By the time the film was released, it was already anointed the next BATTLEFIELD EARTH before anybody even saw it. If anything, it's the 2015 SUCKER PUNCH, and much like Zack Snyder's one-of-a-kind vision was trashed by everyone only to enjoy a quick turnaround as a misunderstood cult film, so JUPITER ASCENDING will likely go. The elements are in place for a colossal flop of career-ending proportions, but just when nobody is expecting it, the Wachowskis turn in their loosest, craziest, and even more so than SPEED RACER, infectiously fun movie yet.

Every penny of that $175 million is up on the screen to create a cinematic canvas that resembles the covers of pulpy sci-fi paperbacks by the likes of Isaac Asimov or John Ringo, David Weber and the entire Baen Books back catalog. The Wachowskis have fashioned JUPITER ASCENDING as an insane mash-up of STAR WARS, DUNE, BUCK ROGERS, the 1980 FLASH GORDON, BLADE RUNNER, and even a brief segue into the satirical sci-fi nightmare bureaucracy of BRAZIL-era Terry Gilliam. There's a lot of story and some of the subplots and extraneous characters get shortchanged or abandoned outright. It's representative of the kind of world-building that, if this were the 1980s, probably could've resulted in an entire series of spinoff novels like the Star Wars and Star Trek novels that still fill the sci-fi sections of bookstores today. Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis), the daughter of a British father who was killed by home invaders before she was born, and a Russian mother (Maria Doyle Kennedy) who gave birth to her midway across the Atlantic while emigrating to America, lives in a cramped house with her mother's entire extended immigrant family. While her uncle and cousins engage in shady con games, Jupiter and her mother work as housecleaners for Chicago's wealthy. All of that changes when the three children of the late Seraphi Abrasax, the matriarch of the Abrasax family who recently died, her life tragically cut short by murder at just 91000, discover that her royal genomic code has "recurred" in Jupiter. The Abrasax offpsring--fey, hissing Balem (Eddie Redmayne), playboy Titus (Douglas Booth), and kind Kalique (Tuppence Middleton), looking smashing for 14004--are intergalactic one-percenters who collectively own most of the galaxy, left to them by their mother, whose genomic recurrence in Jupiter--a reincarnation of sorts--means that Queen Jupiter will control their assets through a complex DNA-related legal loophole of the laws of space royalty.

Enter disgraced ex-soldier Caine Wise (Channing Tatum), an albino half-man/half-wolf mercenary hired by Titus Abrasax to protect Jupiter from the forces of Balem. Earth is merely one tiny but very important piece of property to Balem, and like most planets, it's used to harvest life to provide eternal youth to the most wealthy and privileged among the galaxy's movers and shakers. Caine, expelled from the military after biting a member of the "Entitled" class ("I'm more dog than man," he explains to a lovestruck Jupiter), saves Jupiter from the clutches of Balem's minions and leaves Chicago for a country farm where his old commanding officer and bee DNA-carrier Stinger (Sean Bean) lives with his daughter and countless active beehives ("Bees are genetically designed to sense royalty," he tells Jupiter in one of the film's sillier deus ex machina lines). Caine delivers Jupiter to Titus, who of course, has ulterior motives, which leads to numerous power shifts between the siblings. Balem has Jupiter's family taken from Earth to be harvested, essentially holding them as ransom until Jupiter cedes control of Earth, while Caine and Stinger set aside their differences to team up with hard-nosed Cmdr. Diomika Tsing (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and her crew of half-human/half-animal officers, heading to Balem's planet stronghold to rescue Jupiter and bring an end to the Abrasax dynasty.

JUPITER ASCENDING is an utterly ludicrous space opera, and comparisons to GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY are inevitable (likely why it was bumped from last summer), but it works in spite of its silliness. The production design and visual effects are on par with the best the sci-fi genre has ever offered, and it takes less time than expected to get over the sight of a lupine, Spock-eared Tatum. A miscast Kunis never quite works as Jupiter, but top (over)acting honors must go to THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING Oscar-nominee Eddie Redmayne as the preening Balem, looking like a young Peter Cushing as an emo Grand Moff Tarkin, melodramatically gasping his lines while indulging in some intermittent Al Pacino shouting. It's exactly the kind of goofy, cartoonish performance the film needs and it only enhances the go-for-broke, bonkers nature of the entire project. There's a good chance people will laugh this off the screen, but it's earnest, entertaining, and offers some smart, subtle political and economic commentary on top of the space action and mayhem. I'm not sure how much longer the Wachowskis will get this kind of money to make movies this bizarre. Certainly, well-schooled cineastes can appreciate all the throwback sci-fi referencing, but how many casual, mainstream moviegoers, especially the younger ones to which studios and focus groups pander, are even aware of BUCK ROGERS and FLASH GORDON at this point? And who other than the most ardent sci-fi nerds or bookstore employees will even get the film's production design being an homage to garish, over-the-top sci-fi paperback artwork? It's a too-expensive film for a comparatively small pop culture niche, but that niche will find much to like if they don't approach it with an MST3K attitude. Check your sighing and eye-rolls at the door and go in with the right attitude and roll with it as big, dumb, visually stunning entertainment, and you'll be surprised at how much of blast JUPITER ASCENDING turns out to be.

STARRY EYES
(US/Belgium - 2014)

In horror circles, STARRY EYES was hailed as an instant cult classic almost immediately after it played the festival circuit and hit the VOD rounds last fall. I always get a little skeptical when today's horror fans latch on to something, because that's when you get conned by things like The Legend of Ti West and the absurd notion that THE INNKEEPERS is a good movie, or that Alexandre Aja's PIRANHA is "like, totally old-school exploitation!" Mind you, there's a great idea at the heart of STARRY EYES, and there's some cutting observations about the culture of Hollywood, the pretentiousness and the catty one-upmanship and those would-be stars working mundane day jobs when they aren't trying to catch a break at an audition. It also sports a supporting cast filled with minor cult figures like SOMEONE'S KNOCKING AT THE DOOR and DEADGIRL's Noah Segan, RED, WHITE & BLUE stars Amanda Fuller and Marc Senter, COMPLIANCE prank caller Pat Healy, and a KISS Kameo by professional wealthy offspring Nick Simmons. But in its execution, STARRY EYES is impossibly heavy-handed, making its points in the most suffocatingly ham-fisted and overly literal ways imaginable, and it just gets dumb and dumber as it goes along. In an undeniably strong and demanding performance that hints at deeper issues haunting the character, Alexandra Essoe is Sarah Walker, a Big Taters waitress struggling to make it as an actress. She gets an audition for a horror film called THE SILVER SCREAM, produced by Astraeus Pictures, a once-notable studio now sort-of on the skids. It's an unusual audition held by a pair of eccentrics, but she gets a callback that consists of a lot of flash photos in a dark room. She's then called to meet with the producer (Louis Dezseran), an aging Roger Corman-type who unsubtly tries to get her on the casting couch. Initially rejecting but having a change of heart after she quits her job and sees her roommates and friends going nowhere in their own acting and filmmaking pursuits, she caves to the producer's demands that she "show" how dedicated she is and that she make the appropriate "sacrifice."

Of course, there's something more sinister afoot, as the writing/directing team of Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer have shown the producer with a pentagram burned into his hand and his assistant (Maria Olsen, fast becoming the Michael Berryman of today's DIY hipster horror scene) wearing a pentagram necklace. Yes, they're all Satanists, and their cult is fame, the central conceit of STARRY EYES being a literal death and rebirth as your old self dies--the sacrifice--and a star is born. After fellating the producer, Sarah's body starts breaking down in Cronenbergian fashion, and also in ways very similar to the awful slut-shaming body-horror film CONTRACTED. There's a cynical message here that all Hollywood success stories are rooted in evil, soulless vanity, but that shouldn't surprise anyone after ALL ABOUT EVE. By the time Sarah vomits maggots and starts offing her friends in ways that will even have the most seen-it-all gorehounds flinching, the filmmakers have her literally stabbing one in the back in order to make sure you're getting the message that she's not the same old Sarah. It's all rather obvious and while Kolsch and Widmyer take the L.A. scenester-types to task early on, the notion of "breaking through the gate" and achieving fame and fortune by selling your soul to Satan isn't exactly a high concept if you've ever heard of Faust. This has its moments, augmented by a very John Carpenter-esque synth score by Jonathan Snipes, but I'm really at a loss as to what movie everyone saw when they got on the STARRY EYES love train and declared it a modern horror classic. (Unrated, 96 mins)

EXISTS
(US - 2014)

After co-directing the 1999 phenomenon THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, Eduardo Sanchez has stayed busy with DTV or limited theatrical release horror titles like ALTERED (2006), SEVENTH MOON (2009), and the critically-acclaimed LOVELY MOLLY (2012). Sanchez has never had the accolades nor the success that BLAIR WITCH brought him, so now, 15 years later, he's back sucking from the faux-doc/found footage teet with EXISTS, just as the subgenre he helped make mainstream is falling out of favor with fans. Obviously, Sanchez is an old pro at this kind of thing, and EXISTS has a handful of well-done set pieces, but you have to wade through an hour of dudebro dialogue, idiotic characters, several long sequences in night-vision or almost total darkness, and plenty of time to ponder the age-old question in this type of horror film: why are you still filming? Five dumbasses (two couples and the obligatory comic-relief fifth wheel who does all the filming) head to a remote cabin in the woods (owned by the uncle of two of the dudes, who actually are bros) for a weekend of beer, weed, and doing generally EXTREME! shit, all to be documented in its entirety on their GoPro cameras. Their SUV hits something, and only a blurred figure is seen on the playback, but once they're at the cabin, a howling in the woods convinces the goof of the group (Chris Osborn) that they're dealing with Bigfoot. Even if EXISTS wasn't rendered moot arriving so soon after Bobcat Goldthwait's Bigfoot-themed WILLOW CREEK, one of the better recent found-footage offerings, it can't overcome a deadly first half with some of the most irritating characters the subgenre has ever offered. Most of the dialogue is along the lines of "What the fuck was that, bro?" or "What the fuck's goin' on here, bro," and "You killed my friend, motherfucker!" as one fires a shotgun blindly in the dark, which of course attracts the creature and promptly gets the trigger-happy bro's head bashed in. To his credit, Sanchez does get some serious momentum going as the five get whittled down to three and they try to venture through the woods to find the highway. Naturally, one's surefire shortcut results in them getting lost, but Sanchez knows how to do this right. He gets that climactic BLAIR WITCH vibe going in the last 20 or so minutes with the sprinting creature's relentless pursuit (one sudden appearance through a cloud of fireworks smoke is a good example of a jump scare done right), but it's still not enough to counter the damage caused by such a shitty script, penned by Sanchez's usual post-BLAIR WITCH writing partner Jamie Nash. It's maybe worth a Netflix stream on a really slow night if you're still a found-footage completist, but in returning to the woods to recapture some of his dwindling mojo, Sanchez remains doomed to spend the rest of his career in BLAIR WITCH's shadow. (R, 81 mins)

HORNS
(US - 2014)

Anything would be a step up for French horror director Alexandre Aja after his smug and miserable fakesploitation 2010 remake of PIRANHA, and while it's not always successful, HORNS is certainly ambitious. Based on Joe Hill's novel, the very busy HORNS crams a lot of story into two hours and even though plot points are rushed through or not fully fleshed-out, it still feels overlong, like it either needed to lose 20 or so minutes or just be extended to a cable miniseries. Letting the story breathe might've done a lot to smooth over the rough tonal shifts as HORNS careens from love story to murder mystery to dark satire to CGI-heavy supernatural horror in ways that probably read a lot better on the page than they play on the screen. That doesn't mean there aren't pleasures to be had in HORNS, which has its moments before collapsing into contrivance, convenience, and stupidity in its third act. Radio station DJ Ig Perrish (Daniel Radcliffe) is besieged by media and outraged citizens of his small town when his longtime girlfriend Merrin (Juno Temple) is found brutally murdered in the woods. Nobody believes he's innocent except his older brother Terry (Joe Anderson) and his lawyer best friend Lee (Max Minghella). The town thinks Ig is the devil, and it doesn't help his case that he sprouts a pair of horns out of his forehead overnight--horns that not everyone can see, but when they do, they feel compelled to confess their deepest secrets and their most bluntly honest thoughts. It's this portion of HORNS that works best, as Aja wrings much dark humor out of a mom openly admitting she hates her screaming child, a bartender crowing about his dogfighting ring and how his dream is to torch his bar and collect the insurance money, or Ig being hassled by two bullying cops who casually admit they'd rather be sucking each other off. It also generates some well-handled drama as Ig's mom (Kathleen Quinlan) and dad (James Remar) admit they think he's guilty and would rather never see him again ("I don't want you to be my son anymore, sweetheart," his mother explains). People of genuinely good character--like Lee and Merrin's grieving father (David Morse)--can't see the horns, and over time, Ig learns to use their power to his advantage, with a highlight being one hilarious sequence where he's followed by a small army of reporters and uses the horns to convince them to beat the living shit out of one another, with the winner getting an exclusive, tell-all interview (there's a great callback to this scene much later, as reporters are all outside a courthouse with cuts, bruises, and bandages). Flashbacks to their childhood fill in the blanks of how Ig and Merrin got together, the effect it had on Ig's relationship with his buddies, and what exactly led to his being accused of her murder.

Admirably gory and going all-in with hard-R glee, HORNS works best in its periodic black comedy phases. No matter how silly a film's premise, it can always work if it follows its own rules, which HORNS doesn't always do. The more it goes on, the more uneven it becomes, as Aja and screenwriter Keith Bunin (the HBO series IN TREATMENT) juggle elements of DONNIE DARKO, TWIN PEAKS, HELLBOY, GHOST RIDER, early Peter Jackson splatter comedy and, in a possible shout-out to Joe Hill's dad Stephen King, STAND BY ME and THE DEAD ZONE until they just drop the balls and let them scatter. It's entirely too easy to figure out who the real killer is and once it's revealed, there's still over 40 minutes to go as Aja embarks on a Peter Jackson climax spree and can't seem to decide where the movie should end. Even with all the plot, it still loses track of several major characters (Kelli Garner as the no-self-esteem, self-described "town whore" who's carried a torch for Ig since childhood, seems especially shortchanged), and Merrin's dad's eventual sympathizing with Ig feels rushed and unconvincing. It's definitely worth seeing once, as Radcliffe is quite good and the film is really firing on all cylinders when it's being funny--Heather Graham has a great bit as a diner waitress giving false info about Ig to the police in the hopes that it makes her the star witness at the eventual trial ("I'm gonna release my own sex tape and have a reality show and be on the cover of Us Magazine!" she squeals with wild-eyed glee)--but the more it goes on, the more of a unwieldy, undisciplined mess it becomes. (R, 120 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)

SEVENTH SON
(US/China - 2015)

Directed by Sergei Bodrov. Written by Charles Leavitt and Steven Knight. Cast: Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, Ben Barnes, Djimon Hounsou, Alicia Vikander, Kit Harington, Olivia Williams, Antje Traue, Jason Scott Lee, John DeSantis, Gerard Plunkett, Kandyce McClure, Luc Roderique, Zahf Paroo. (PG-13, 102 mins)

Filmed way back in 2012 and bounced around the schedule since its first announced release date of February 2013, the $100 million SEVENTH SON has finally arrived with some of the lowest expectations this side of 47 RONIN. The original release date was postponed after one of the film's primary companies in charge of the visual effects went bankrupt. After that was sorted out, the first official trailer appeared in theaters in July 2013, followed by numerous release date shuffles pushing the movie into 2014. Some time later, Legendary Pictures ended their partnership with distributor Warner Bros., setting up a new deal with Universal, who bumped SEVENTH SON to February 2015, likely to afford it a reasonable opportunity to distance itself from the 47 RONIN debacle of Christmas 2013. The train-wreck potential on this one is pretty high, but its primary offenses are shoddy visuals, sloppy writing, and a strict adherence to a stale formula. Despite the buckets of money thrown on the screen, SEVENTH SON doesn't look any better than one of Uwe Boll's straight-to-DVD IN THE NAME OF THE KING sequels, with some alarmingly unimpressive greenscreen backdrops and the daytime exteriors given the same kind of blurry, smeary soft focus that ABC News uses on Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer.

Based on Joseph Delaney's 2004 novel The Spook's Apprentice (retitled The Last Apprentice: Revenge of the Witch in the US), the first part of the "Wardstone Chronicles" (UK)/"Last Apprentice" (US) medieval fantasy series (now up to 13 books, plus several spinoff novels), SEVENTH SON deals with Master Gregory (Jeff Bridges), a wise old warrior fighting the supernatural. Known as a "spook," he's the last of his kind, the sole survivor of a legion of warriors defeated by evil. Now a mercenary witch hunter, Gregory is called back into action when Mother Malkin (Julianne Moore), a nefarious spellcaster he imprisoned in a mountain dungeon decades earlier, escapes and kills his apprentice Bradley (Kit Harington). Mother Malkin, who frequently shapeshifts into a dragon, is set to reclaim her throne and unleash her evil over the world upon the rise of the Blood Moon, a once-per-century lunar event that happens to be a week away. Gregory needs a new apprentice, a seventh son of a seventh son, which leads him to earnest farm boy Tom Ward (Ben Barnes). Tom leaves his family to join Gregory in his quest, falling in love with Alice (Alicia Vikander), the half-witch niece of Mother Malkin. As Gregory trains Tom in the ways of being a spook--of course they initially butt heads but come to a mutual respect--they're joined by Gregory's faithful servant Tusk (John DeSantis) and prepare for battle against Mother Malkin, who's assembling her army of fellow shapeshifting witches and warlocks in order for evil to reign supreme at the coming of the Blood Moon.

No stranger to planned franchises that stall after one film, director Sergei Bodrov--well-respected in Russian and, since the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, Kazakh cinema--is best known to arthouse audiences for his Genghis Khan epic MONGOL (2008), the first installment of an announced trilogy whose second chapter has yet to materialize. It's hard to say what drew the 64-year-old Bodrov to a mega-budget Hollywood blockbuster-type project 40 years into his filmmaking career (he also directed PRISONER OF THE MOUNTAINS, a 1996 Oscar-nominee for Best Foreign Language Film), but the look and feel of SEVENTH SON is purely that of a B-grade LORD OF THE RINGS knockoff, from the inevitable swooping, circular aerial shots of the heroes walking along hills and mountaintops to the sage old mentor instructing a naive, impulsive pupil. The bland Barnes, who's seen whatever momentum he had going from being THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA's Prince Caspian derailed by films shelved for anywhere from two (THE BIG WEDDING) to three (this) to even five years (LOCKED IN), was 31 at the time of filming and looks a good decade too old for his role. Barnes, currently the British guy you go to after Andrew Garfield, Jim Sturgess, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Alex Pettyfer turn you down, is largely indistinguishable from his CGI surroundings, and in many scenes, he and the supporting cast appear to be looped in a way that's just ever-so-slightly off, giving a certain slapdash feel to the proceedings. It's especially noticeable with Swedish Vikander and German Antje Traue (as Mother Malkin's witch sister), who are clearly dubbed with different voices in some scenes, and speak with their own audible accents in others. This, along with some later scenes where Barnes' hairstyle and Bridges' hair color have changed, are obvious indicators of hasty reshoots.

Even Moore flubs it at times, using a comically regal tone most of the time and occasionally slipping into her normal way of speaking. She goes through rants and raves with a look on her face that indicates she's well aware of how dumb all of it sounds, but she trudges through like a pro, as does the great two-time Oscar nominee Djimon Hounsou, who deserves better than a stock henchman role as one of Mother Malkin's supernatural cohorts. It's hard telling what's up with Bridges, who really seems to have stopped trying after his CRAZY HEART Oscar. Bodrov obviously just let Bridges do whatever he wanted to do, which apparently involved playing Master Gregory as a some sort of bizarre mash-up between Gandalf and Karl Childers. Enunciating oddly through a jutted-out lower jaw, Bridges is mannered and hammy, much like he's been since his Oscar-nominated turn as Rooster Cogburn in TRUE GRIT. That was a fine and fun performance in 2010, but a coasting Bridges has just kept delivering it over and over again since. Jeff Bridges is one of the greats and while we all love The Dude, maybe it's time for him to start giving a shit again.

Earlier Warner poster art reflecting just
one of the film's many bumped release dates.

Bridges does get a couple of funny one-liners, but the script--credited to BLOOD DIAMOND screenwriter Charles Leavitt and LOCKE writer/director Steven Knight, who separately rewrote an earlier draft by Matt Greenberg (REIGN OF FIRE)--is all over the place, often feeling like we're watching the sequel to something that doesn't exist, arbitrarily pulling new rules and stipulations out of its ass when it gets backed into a corner, and not even following its own logic: why does Master Gregory even need an apprentice? He has Tusk, a more than formidable sidekick. And the only time Tom comes to Gregory's rescue is after the pupil's stupidity causes the mentor to be captured in the first place. If Gregory has a week to stop Mother Malkin's Blood Moon-abetted reign of terror, he and Tusk seem more than up to the task--why take all the time to train Tom, who's obviously dead weight until the script needs him to be the hero? Ultimately, all of this "seventh son of a seventh son" malarkey does nothing other than make you wish Iron Maiden was handling the soundtrack duties. On the plus side, SEVENTH SON moves quickly, Bodrov deserves some credit for getting Jason Scott Lee (DRAGON: THE BRUCE LEE STORY) back on the big screen again even if it's a brief role as a warlock who shapeshifts into a giant bear, and I'm sure Bridges and Moore had a great time between takes reminiscing about THE BIG LEBOWSKI. It's just too bad that SEVENTH SON doesn't end NEWHART-style with The Dude waking up from a hazy dream and trying to explain it to an incredulous Maude Lebowski.

FORCE MAJEURE
(Sweden/France/Norway/Germany/Denmark - 2014)

Remember that SEINFELD episode where George was attending a kid's birthday party and a small fire broke out in the kitchen? Remember how he yelled "FIRE!" and ran out screaming, pushing old ladies and little kids out of the way to get himself to safety? Change the fire to an avalanche and change the tone to a dour mix of uncomfortable Michael Haneke and serious Woody Allen in one of his Ingmar Bergman moods and stretch it out to two endless hours and you've got a good idea what FORCE MAJEURE is like. Critically-adored the world over (the film currently holds a 93% at Rotten Tomatoes), hyped as a guaranteed Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee (it didn't make the cut), and frequently described as a "comedy," for some reason (and the US trailer below sure makes it look like one), FORCE MAJEURE opens with a seemingly happy Swedish family--dad Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), mom Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), and kids Vera and Harry (real-life siblings Clara and Vincent Wettergren)--on vacation in the French Alps. All goes well until one of the ski resort's periodic "controlled avalanches"--a metaphor that will repeatedly slap the viewer upside the head--gets a little bigger than intended. A brief panic ensues among diners at a restaurant, and as Ebba grabs the kids and takes shelter under the table, Tomas impulsively grabs his phone and gloves and runs off. When he returns maybe 30 seconds later after calm is restored, the mood of the family and their vacation is never the same. Tomas won't admit what he did, and Ebba is soon taking any opportunity to humiliate him in front of others, even roping in his divorced, 40-ish friend Mats (Kristofer Hivju, best known as Tormund Giantsbane on GAME OF THRONES) and his 20-year-old girlfriend Fanni (Fanni Metelius). Of course, old marital grudges come into play as we learn more about Tomas and Ebba and why she's so high-strung and offended by one vacationer's comfort with having an open marriage and why Tomas' split-second cowardice might be a last straw for her. All the while, the constant invocation of "controlled avalanches" as a symbol of the give-and-take and the ups-and-downs of marriage is heavy-handed, obvious, and tiresome. The film wants to be raw and honest, but ends up with approximately the same entertainment value as observing the worst fight your parents ever had, with the two main characters becoming so overbearing and Kuhnke's performance so overwrought, that it's easy to stop caring and tune all of it out. Ultimately, writer/director Ruben Ostlund gets the strongest performances from the Wettergren siblings, who come off as total naturals and manage to create wholly believable characters with only a little dialogue, a lot of perceptive, knowing glances, and telling body language. They're the only great things about the stupefyingly overrated FORCE MAJEURE. (R, 120 mins)

THE DARK VALLEY
(Austria/Germany - 2014; US release 2015)

Downbeat, brutal, and vividly atmospheric, the Austrian-German co-production THE DARK VALLEY is an unusual western in that it takes place in Europe and is presented almost entirely in German with English subtitles. Even the film's British star, Sam Riley (CONTROL, ON THE ROAD, MALEFICENT) quite convincingly delivers his performance in the film's native language. Riley is Greider, an American stranger who arrives in an isolated town in the Alps. He claims to be a photographer and decides to stay for the winter, renting a room at the home of widowed Gaderin (Carmen Bratl) and her headstrong daughter Luzi (Paula Beer). It doesn't take long for Greider to learn the hard way that the town is under the strict control of the Brenner clan: the aged, sickly Old Brenner (Hans-Michael Rehberg) and his six loathsome, power-crazed sons (imagine GAME OF THRONES with six Joffreys and you'll get an idea of how despicable the Brenner boys are). As winter comes, two of the Brenner sons are found dead in ways that look like accidents until Old Brenner concludes that the American stranger--it never occurs to this family of psychos to ask how he's fluent in German--is somehow involved. Meanwhile, Luzi is engaged to be married to Lukas (Thomas Schubert) but the mood of the young couple is oddly lacking in celebration as their big day approaches. To say anything more would involve spoilers about the true depths of the depravity to which the Brenners have plummeted for too long. Needless to say, Greider is on a mission of personal vengeance, for reasons that will be explained only after he's forced to stage a daring rescue of Luzi when she's abducted by the Brenners. After that, he'll face the remaining brothers only to find out that the town has it share of Stockholm Syndromed citizens who defend welcome the ruthless rule--and all the perverse "laws" that accompany it--of Old Brenner.

Only when director/co-writer Andreas Prochaska, working from the 2010 novel Das finstere Tal by Thomas Willmann, resorts to some jumpy cutting and shaky-cam in Greider's showdown with the Brenner brothers--accompanied by a completely incongruous German alt-rock tune--does the film start a chain reaction of stumbling from which it never really recovers, resulting in a Big Reveal that you'll see coming a mile away. Until then, Prochaska's direction is deliberate, disciplined, and controlled, focusing on gritty little details that most westerns ignore, like dealing with the inclement weather and the constant cold. Breath is visible indoors at all times, and Greider is forced to shave cold, as a thin layer of ice forms over his water bowl overnight. The cold, barren and perpetually gray-skied look of the film recalls westerns as diverse as Clint Eastwood's PALE RIDER (1985) and Sergio Corbucci's THE GREAT SILENCE (1968), with Prochaska filming in some stunning locations in the mountainous Trentino-Alto Adige area of northern Italy, at the Austrian border. There's also nods to Andre De Toth's cult western DAY OF THE OUTLAW (1959), not just in its snow-blanketed setting but in the ugly and disturbing Luzi-Lukas wedding ceremony and reception, crashed by the Brenners, who take turns forcing Luzi to dance with them in front of the stone-faced attendees in way that owes a tremendous debt to a similar scene in the De Toth film. Riley is excellent as the revenge-obsessed Greider, and completely natural and comfortable acting in German (a cursory glance at the English-dubbed track reveals that it's not only terrible but that Riley doesn't dub himself--the film is meant to be seen in German, as Luzi point-blank asks him early "How do you know how to speak German?"). The filmmakers wisely choose to not make him some superhuman killing machine. Instead, he's flawed, often falling victim his own impulsiveness and even oversleeping the morning of his showdown with the Brenners, which almost allows them to get the edge on him. Given a straight-to-DVD release in the US, THE DARK VALLEY is so good for so much of its running time (it was Austria's Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film, but didn't make the final cut of nominees) that its third-act slip-ups are especially disappointing. Still, late stumbles and all, it's well worth seeing as a solid western and also one that takes full advantage of its unique setting. (Unrated, 115 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)

ANNABELLE
(US - 2014)

A prequel spinoff of THE CONJURING, ANNABELLE goes into the origin story of the creepy doll kept in a glass case in the home of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga in the 2013 hit. Wilson's voice makes an uncredited guest appearance in a prologue that would seem to be the first half of wraparound sequence that the film proceeds to completely forget about and never return to, but that's just the kind of slipshod carelessness that defines ANNABELLE. There's so little story here that writer Gary Dauberman (BLOOD MONKEY) and director John F. Leonetti (THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT 2) often appear to have forgotten which James Wan film they're prequelling, as a lot of it seems to owe more to INSIDIOUS than THE CONJURING (Wan remains onboard ANNABELLE as a producer). Set in 1969, as evidenced by a reference to Charles Manson being in the news, ANNABELLE opens with young marrieds and expectant parents Mia (Annabelle Wallis) and John (daytime soap vet Ward Horton, waiting patiently for the lead in THE JAMES MARSDEN STORY) being attacked in their home by the neighbors' crazed daughter Annabelle (Tree O'Toole), who ran off to join a hippie cult. Annabelle commits suicide while clutching the creepy new addition John bought for Mia's doll collection, and of course, the doll is now a vessel for whatever evil spirit took hold of Annabelle. Ghostly occurrences and apparitions keep happening, and neither parish priest Father Perez (Tony Amendola as F. Murray Abraham) nor neighbor/book shop proprietor/exposition dispenser Evelyn (past Oscar-nominee Alfre Woodard in the most egregious wasting of an overqualified African-American actress in a stupid horror movie since Cicely Tyson turned up in the amazingly-titled THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT 2: GHOSTS OF GEORGIA), are able to offer much assistance other than Father Lopez ominously intoning "Demons sometimes use objects as conduits" and Evelyn, who's an expert in all things pertaining to the spirit world because of course she is, informing them that the spirit inside the doll demands a sacrifice. That sacrifice is initially believed to be Mia's newborn daughter until Mia decides that she must sacrifice herself to save her child. And SPOILER ALERT--all of that is for naught because Evelyn, who lost her own daughter, apparently has nothing to live for except sacrificing herself for this wholesome, church-going, conservative white couple who long for an America where you should be able to leave your doors unlocked at night.

Setting aside the appalling way it has the de facto "Magical Negro" become the sacrificial lamb, ANNABELLE is just a terrible and inexcusably lazy film. Sure, Leonetti, a cinematographer going back to the '80s (he also shot DEAD SILENCE, DEATH SENTENCE, INSIDIOUS, and THE CONJURING for Wan), pulls off a few decent bits where he lets the camera snake around or in the way he offers some nicely-executed widescreen shot compositions, but they never lead anywhere. He's a solid technician with no idea how to deliver a scare. Scenes with a record player playing itself or the stove turning itself on and eventually engulfing the kitchen in flames (Mia, sewing in the next room, somehow fails to notice choking smoke throughout the house) are old-fashioned to a fault. In Leonetti's fumbling hands, these aren't classic-style chills as much as they're hoary cliches, and it doesn't get any better when the filmmakers start straight-up ripping off scenes wholesale from other, better movies. Remember in THE EXORCIST III when George C. Scott called his wife to warn her not to let a possessed killer nurse in the house, but only got a busy signal while evil forces at play caused the wife to hear him saying "There's a nurse delivering a package" on her end of the line? That's replayed here when John calls Mia to warn her not to let a possessed Father Perez in, but all Mia hears is static. They even rip off that classic "kid running down the hallway" jolt in Mario Bava's 1977 film SHOCK (aka BEYOND THE DOOR II), but it's restaged in bumbling fashion with shitty CGI assistance, almost as if they looked at that scene in SHOCK, which involved nothing but good timing and perfect camera placement that's so effective that it's hard to believe how simple it really is, and said "Wow, that's great...so, what do we have to do to render it completely amateurish and flat and make sure it lands with a dead thud?" A complete embarrassment, ANNABELLE somehow grossed $84 million in theaters despite being exactly the kind of quickie, D-grade, straight-to-DVD follow-up along the lines of the TREMORS, DARKMAN, FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, or the later HELLRAISER sequels, just to name a few examples of things you'd see during the video store heyday. While it's nice that they made an ostensibly old-school horror movie that's very light on trendy blood and gore, you kinda have to hold up your end of the bargain and remember to bring the atmosphere and the scares, preferably ones you didn't swipe from those who came before you and who put forth a lot more effort and innovation than you did. ANNABELLE is the worst kind of bad movie: one that actively makes you angry with its utter contempt for its audience. (R, 99 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: THE GUEST (2014); FALCON RISING (2014); and I ORIGINS (2014)

In Theaters: INHERENT VICE (2014)

In Theaters: TAKEN 3 (2015)

In Theaters/On VOD: PREDESTINATION (2015)

On DVD/Blu-ray: MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN (2014); HONEYMOON (2014); and REVENGE OF THE GREEN DRAGONS (2014)

In Theaters: AMERICAN SNIPER (2014)

Cult Classics Revisited: THE SKIN (1981)

In Theaters: BLACKHAT (2015)

Cult Classics Revisited: AMUCK! (1972)

On DVD/Blu-ray: WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD (2014); JESSABELLE (2014); and VIKTOR (2014)

Cult Classics Revisited: BOARDING GATE (2008)

On DVD/Blu-ray: WHY DON'T YOU PLAY IN HELL? (2014); OPEN WINDOWS (2014); and MAS NEGRO QUE LA NOCHE (2014)

In Theaters/On VOD: WILD CARD (2015)

In Theaters: THE LOFT (2015)

On VOD/Netflix Instant: THE TOWN THAT DREADED SUNDOWN (2014)

In Theaters: A MOST VIOLENT YEAR (2014)

In Theaters: JUPITER ASCENDING (2015)

On DVD/Blu-ray: STARRY EYES (2014); EXISTS (2014); and HORNS (2014)

In Theaters: SEVENTH SON (2015)

On DVD/Blu-ray: FORCE MAJEURE (2014); THE DARK VALLEY (2015); and ANNABELLE (2014)