Good Efficient Butchery

THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS 2
(US - 2015)

The RZA's ragged and likely compromised (his original cut was rumored to run a self-indulgent four hours) kung-fu homage THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS wasn't really a hit when it was released in theaters in the fall of 2012. Grossing close to $16 million, it made just enough to recoup its $15 million budget, thus justifying a DTV sequel. Minus the cosmetic "Quentin Tarantino Presents" banner, RZA returns in the title role and co-wrote the script with ROMEO MUST DIE screenwriter John Jarrell (whose last writing credit was the 2002 Bruce Campbell vehicle TERMINAL INVASION), but hands directing chores off to straight-to-DVD action sequel specialist Roel Reine (THE MARINE 2, DEATH RACE 2, DEATH RACE 3: INFERNO, THE SCORPION KING 3, 12 ROUNDS 2: RELOADED). As far as these things go, IRON FISTS 2 is dumb but reasonably entertaining, has some better-than-expected CGI, humor in the form of some intentionally anachronistic verbiage and delivery and, like many of Reine's movies, looks a lot more expensive than it really is. The film opens with RZA's Blacksmith leaving Jungle Village on a journey of peace to find his chi, but instead being attacked by the brother of the dead Silver Lion, his chief adversary in the first entry. The Blacksmith, named Thaddeus, is injured in the melee and is eventually nursed back to health by the family of Li Kung (21 JUMP STREET's Dustin Nguyen), the leader of a village of oppressed, slave-laboring miners ruled by tyrannical warlord Master Ho (Carl Ng), whose ruthless quest for power and "The Golden Nectar" has rendered the paraplegic, wheelchair-bound Mayor Zhang (the great Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) a helpless figurehead.

Of course, Thaddeus the Blacksmith will aid Li Kung and the miners in their fight to take back their village from Master Ho in what essentially amounts to a martial-arts redux of SHANE and PALE RIDER. Where RZA paid homage to '70s kung fu in the first film, here he sets his sights on things like Sam Peckinpah's THE WILD BUNCH and Sergio Leone's THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY, right down the final showdown between the miners and Master Ho's feared Beetle Clan being set to a sampled remix of Ennio Morricone's "The Ecstasy of Gold." Rivers of blood flow, and there's one very well done and exceptionally splattery and chunky full-body explosion, plus a visual shout-out to CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST with Master Ho having some miners impaled on wooden poles going in one end and exiting through the mouth. While it's lacking the first film's flamboyant performance by RZA buddy Russell Crowe playing vulgar mercenary Jack Knife as a fusion of Richard Burton and Oliver Reed, THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS 2 isn't bad for what it is. While RZA's heart was in the right place when he took on directing duties in the previous film, Reine is much more solid and polished with action sequences and ensuring that its Thailand location-shooting has a near-epic scope that you wouldn't expect considering its low budget and straight-to-DVD/Blu-ray/Netflix Instant release (it actually looks better than its much bigger-budgeted predecessor). You could almost see this turning into a franchise or a cable series with RZA's Blacksmith functioning as some sort of wandering, 19th century David Banner, drifting from village to village helping those in need. And I don't know about you, but Ng's Master Ho declaring "You just walked into a windstorm of flying elephant shit!" is pure poetry. (Unrated, 90 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)

[REC] 4
(Spain - 2014; US release 2015)

The fourth and allegedly final installment in a franchise that was already superfluously padding an 85-minute running time as early as [REC] 2, [REC] 4 marks the return of Manuela Velasco as reporter Angela Vidal, the central character of the first two films, as well as director Jaume Balaguero, who co-directed the first two entries with Paco Plaza before Plaza flew solo on the third while Balaguero went off to direct SLEEP TIGHT. Balaguero is back and Plaza is out, but it hardly matters. After a very well-done first film. the [REC] series has been running on fumes since about 40 minutes into [REC] 2. [REC] 3: GENESIS was the odd-man-out, HALLOWEEN III/THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT of the franchise, instead focusing on a different cast at a wedding reception where the demonic virus outbreak spreads at the same time as the events of the first two films, a concept that allowed Plaza to rip off Lamberto Bava's DEMONS and Michele Soavi's THE CHURCH. One survivor of that reception (Maria Alfonsa Rosso) turns up here, but Velasco's Vidal is again front and center, rescued from the apartment building from the first two films and quarantined with others on a ship in the middle of the ocean. The ship's been commandeered by secretive medical researcher Dr. Ricarte (Hector Colome), who's working on a retrovirus to counter the outbreak and is convinced that Angela is the key to finding a breakthrough. That is, until all hell breaks loose when the ship's infected cook contaminates all of the food, and everyone's trapped onboard since Ricarte cut off communication and disabled the lifeboats to eliminate the chance of any infected making it back to the mainland. If nothing else, [REC] 4 deserves some credit for completely jettisoning the exhaustingly overplayed found-footage element, even if that's what gives the [REC] title its meaning. It's also telling that the [REC] movies have overstayed their welcome to the point that they've outlasted the very craze the original had a hand in popularizing ([REC] was remade in America as QUARANTINE). There's nothing really exciting here: those infected by the virus crave human flesh and sprint and banshee-howl through the ship when attacking. It's pretty much a fast-zombie apocalypse on a boat, though there is a nice nod to the great DOCTOR BUTCHER, M.D. with one of the infected being on the receiving end of an outboard motor head-shredding. There's nothing more than can be done with this story, and while Balaguero has insisted that this is the final film in the series, the door is of course left open for a fifth (or even worse, a reboot), even if he may be the only one who still cares: Magnolia released this on VOD and five screens in the US for a total theatrical gross of $837. (R, 95 mins)

KIDNAPPING MR. HEINEKEN
(US/UK/Netherlands/Belgium/Canada - 2015)

At the time it took place in 1983, the kidnapping of Amsterdam-based Heineken Brewery CEO Freddy Heineken led to the biggest ransom ever paid for an individual, the equivalent of roughly $17 million. Heineken and his driver Ab Doderer were abducted outside of Heineken's office on November 9, 1983 and held for three weeks before an anonymous tip led police to suspect a small group of friends and failed businessmen led by Cor van Heut and Willem Holleeder, who split the money five ways and fled. All were eventually apprehended and served prison time. It's a fascinating story, and it was just made into the 2011 Dutch-language film THE HEINEKEN KIDNAPPING, with Rutger Hauer as Heineken. In this English-language telling--made with the input of famed Dutch true crime journalist Peter R. de Vries, author of the 1987 chronicle The Kidnapping of Alfred Heineken--Anthony Hopkins pulls out all of his Hannibal Lecter tics and mannerisms (in other words, "Anthony Hopkins") for a perfunctory performance as Heineken, making schmoozing small-talk and attempting to manipulate his kidnappers. Even going through the motions, Hopkins effortlessly walks away with the film, which isn't hard since it's also a gathering of the hottest new talent that 2008 had to offer, with Jim Sturgess as van Hout and Sam Worthington as Holleeder. Other than Hopkins and a couple of well-acted bits by David Dencik as Doderer--knowing he's expendable and that if the kidnappers want to show how serious they are, he'll be the example--nobody makes much of an impression. There's a reason Sturgess never became a big star after ACROSS THE UNIVERSE and 21 and Worthington's career never took off after AVATAR, the highest-grossing film of all time: they just aren't very interesting actors. Competent, yes, but guys like Sturgess and Worthington (and, I guess, Ryan Kwanten, who plays kidnapper Cat Boellard but, like the other two actors who make up the quintet, more or less just blends in with the background) are a dime a dozen and never stand out when given headlining roles. And judging from this film's almost non-existent theatrical release, the Sturgess star vehicle ELECTRIC SLIDE getting dumped on VOD two weeks ago after celebrating its fourth anniversary on the shelf, and that Worthington's most recent major gig being a supporting role in SABOTAGE--one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's worst movies--Hollywood has apparently finally given up trying to make them happen.

It doesn't help that KIDNAPPING MR. HEINEKEN rushes through the set-up and never establishes a clear time element (van Hout and the others spent two years planning their abduction of Heineken), but it's also packed with every kidnapping thriller trope and cliche imaginable. You can predict with almost clockwork accuracy at what point the Amsterdumbasses will turn on one another and question their loyalty, or how fugitive, homesick van Hout's insistence on calling his girlfriend back home in Amsterdam will eventually lead the cops right to their door. It almost takes a special effort to make a story this inherently interesting so utterly bland and instantly forgettable. Lifelessly directed by Daniel Alfredson, who helmed the second and third inferior entries in the original Swedish GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO trilogy, KIDNAPPING MR. HEINEKEN doesn't even work hard enough to earn the participation medal of being deemed a harmless time-killer, or to justify its existence just four years after another film told the exact same story. (R, 95 mins)

2020: TEXAS GLADIATORS
(Italy - 1983; US release 1984)

Directed by Kevin Mancuso (Aristide Massaccesi and Luigi Montefiori). Written by Alex Carver (Luigi Montefiori). Cast: Harrison Muller, Al Cliver, Daniel Stephen, Peter Hooten, Al Yamanouchi, Sabrina Siani, Donald O'Brien, Geretta Geretta. (Unrated, 86 mins)

The credits of the Italian post-nuke ROAD WARRIOR ripoff 2020: TEXAS GLADIATORS take great pains to make the movie look American. All of the technical credits are pseudonymous, starting with score composer Carlo Maria Cordio going by "Francis Taylor" and production manager Donatella Donati as "Helen Handris," all the way to the end with assistant director and future Italian horror auteur Michele Soavi (CEMETERY MAN) hiding incognito as "Mike Soft." But all of that effort is for naught early on with the repeated sightings of signs reading "DANGER: EXSPLOSIVE," the tell-tale, "Do Not Entry" sign from THE BEYOND that, despite the Herculean efforts of everyone involved, the ruse collapses thanks to the Italian prop guy. And if you watch enough of these, you'll start recognizing not only the same actors being dubbed by the same voices, but also the same Italian locations, as 2020's action mostly has the actors running around the same abandoned factory and the stunt drivers careening around the same gravel pit and dirt mounds that can be spotted in most entries in the subgenre.

Set in the ruins of Texas several years after "the Atomic Wars," 2020 focuses on the Rangers, a group of mercenaries led by Nisus (Al Cliver). The Rangers battle the jack-booted forces of The Black One (Donald O'Brien), a nefarious dictator-type who's trying to conquer the community so he can have access to a refurbished refinery that now produces clean drinking water. After an early Rangers expedition results in Nisus banishing Catch Dog (Daniel Stephen) after he tries to rape single mother Maida (Sabrina Siani, in one of her few appearances outside of an Italian CONAN ripoff), Catch Dog immediately switches sides and joins the Black One, using his knowledge of the Rangers to get back at his former cohorts. When Nisus (the character is listed as "Nisus" in the credits, but it sounds like the dubbing team is saying "Nexus," which sounds cooler) is killed in a raid by the Black One's goons and Maida is sold into prostitution, the rest of the Rangers--Halakron (Peter Hooten), Jab (Harrison Muller), and Red Wolfe (Al Yamanouchi)--rescue her and avenge Nisus by taking on The Black One and Catch Dog. Filled with the usual goofy-looking cars, mutant goons, wild stunt work, gun battles, "exsplosions," completely inconsistent beard continuity for Hooten and Muller, over-the-top violence, and a pretty impressive body count, 2020 is total guilty pleasure stupidity, right from the start with the Rangers killing about 50 bad guys before the opening credits are even finished. There's no shortage of bloodshed and the near-constant action keeps things moving briskly, but 2020: TEXAS GLADIATORS doesn't really try to take advantage of its setting. Other than a hand-painted "Texas" sign, and Halakron challenging Maida's cowboy pimp to some DEER HUNTER-inspired Russian Roulette in an old west saloon, no effort is made to create the illusion of "Texas," unlike the many post-nukes set in NYC, like 2019: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK, where even a half-melted model of the Statue of Liberty went a little way toward creating some NYC atmosphere. 2020 does an OK job of being a post-nuke western of sorts--an idea more successfully explored in Giuliano Carnimeo's EXTERMINATORS OF THE YEAR 3000--but it mainly resorts to cliches and cringe-worthy stereotypes that would've been antiquated in the 1940s, like the late-film introduction of some constantly war-whooping "Indians" who stop just short of saying "How!" and "We smokum peace pipe" when they reach a tentative truce with Halakron and the Rangers and join their fight against The Black One.

Aristide Massaccesi (1936-1999),
aka "Joe D'Amato,""David Hills,"
and at least 50 other pseudonyms

Released in the US in 1984 by short-lived grindhouse outfit Megastar Films and shown on TNT's MONSTERVISION with Joe Bob Briggs in 1999, 2020 was directed mostly by Aristide Massaccesi, who used countless pseudonyms over the course of his career, the most frequent and familiar being "Joe D'Amato." Massaccesi dabbled in everything, starting as a camera operator on Mario Bava's HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD (1961) before graduating to cinematographer by the late '60s and moving on to directing in the '70s, with everything from Laura Gemser's BLACK EMANUELLE films to the gore classics BEYOND THE DARKNESS, aka BURIED ALIVE (1979), and ANTROPOPHAGUS, aka THE GRIM REAPER (1981). As "David Hills," he directed several ATOR films during the post-CONAN craze, and under the name "Steven Benson," he would gather most of the cast and crew of 2020 for the same year's Italian post-nuke favorite ENDGAME. The workaholic Massaccesi also used the D'Amato name on several old-school Skinemax favorites like ELEVEN DAYS, ELEVEN NIGHTS (1986) and TOP MODEL (1988). By the early 1990s, Massaccesi was working exclusively in hardcore porn, where he would finish his career prior to his death in 1999. 2020: TEXAS GLADIATORS' direction is credited to "Kevin Mancuso," which is actually a shared pseudonym for Massaccesi and familiar Italian cult actor Luigi Montefiori, better known as "George Eastman."

Luigi Montefiori, aka "George Eastman"

Montefiori first gained notice as The Minotaur in 1969's FELLINI SATYRICON, and, as "Eastman," would later co-star in the Charlton Heston version of THE CALL OF THE WILD (1972) and with Kirk Douglas in SCALAWAG (1973), as well as one of the kidnappers in Mario Bava's RABID DOGS (1974), but that's about as classy as his resume got. As "George Eastman," he was a regular fixture in Eurotrash cinema, usually appearing in "Joe D'Amato" films. He starred as the cannibalistic killer in THE GRIM REAPER and in the D'Amato horror/porno crossovers EROTIC NIGHTS OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980) and PORNO HOLOCAUST (1981), the latter known more for its close-ups of porn actor Mark Shanon's genital warts than anything else. "Eastman" is perhaps best known by post-nuke fans for his performance as Big Ape in 2019: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK (1983). In addition to acting under his "Eastman" moniker, Montefiori scripted numerous films, either under his own name (1976's KEOMA) or under a variety of pseudonyms (as "Lew Cooper," he co-wrote Michele Soavi's 1987 breakthrough STAGEFRIGHT). Montefiori scripted 2020 under the name "Alex Carver," and wanted to try his hand at directing some of it as well. It's been rumored that Massaccesi handled the action scenes, which would mean he directed most of the movie. Considering they remained friends and worked together several more times over the years, it's doubtful that this was a situation where Massaccesi stepped in and took over for Montefiori. More likely, Montefiori wanted to get his feet wet behind the camera and Massaccesi delegated some scenes to the neophyte director. Cult actress Geretta Geretta--aka Rosemary in Lamberto Bava's DEMONS--had a small role in 2020 and when asked who directed what, she responded "All I remember is that the director was tall and handsome," which would probably indicate that the few scenes she was in were handled by the the 6' 9" Montefiori. If Montefiori wanted to branch out into filmmaking, it didn't really pan out after partnering with Massaccesi on 2020: to date, he's only stepped behind the camera on one other occasion, the Norfolk, VA-shot horror film METAMORPHOSIS (1990)--memorable to back-in-the-day video store denizens for having one of those great, gimmicky Imperial Entertainment VHS boxes--where he's credited as "G.L. Eastman." Now 72, Montefiori hasn't acted since 2004 and has spent recent years writing for Italian TV.

Despite being fourth billed in the credits, Hooten is the real star of 2020: TEXAS GLADIATORS, at least after second-billed Lucio Fulci regular Cliver gets Janet Leigh'd out of the film by the 30-minute mark. A native of Florida, Hooten worked steadily on TV in the early '70s with guest appearances on shows like THE MOD SQUAD, MANNIX, and THE WALTONS. Over 1977 and 1978, with a co-starring role in ORCA and the title role in the CBS/Marvel pilot movie DR. STRANGE, it appeared as if he was about to break out, but DR. STRANGE wasn't picked up for series and Hooten quickly became a Next Big Thing instantly forgotten. By the end of 1978, he made his way to Europe where he would work almost exclusively starting with Enzo G. Castellari's THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS. Already showing signs of disinterest in the projects he was being offered--his only Hollywood gig during this time came in a supporting role as one of Ken Wahl's commando unit in James Glickenhaus' 1982 actioner THE SOLDIER, and he didn't even stick around to dub himself for 2020, leaving it to voice actor Frank von Kuegelgen--Hooten only worked sporadically as the '80s went on. He eventually retired from acting in 1990 after starring in TROLL 2 director Claudio Fragasso's completely obscure NIGHT KILLER. It was shortly after shooting 2020 that the openly gay Hooten met Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Merrill, and the two were together until Merrill's 1995 death from AIDS. Now 64, Hooten currently lives in Florida and came out of retirement in 2013 to appear in a pair of extremely low-budget Sarasota-shot regional horror movies, HOUSE OF BLOOD and SOULEATER.

2020: TEXAS GLADIATORS is a fun film, but between young Montefiori working with Fellini and Hooten almost becoming a Marvel superhero, it's also a film that those with once-promising careers settled for when they just needed the work. French-born Irish actor O'Brien was no exception. He got his start with supporting roles in big-budget films like John Frankenheimer's THE TRAIN (1964) and GRAND PRIX (1966) before finding his niche as villains and miscreants in a slew of Italian spaghetti westerns throughout the 1970s, going back to Sergio Sollima's RUN MAN RUN (1967), all the way up to era-enders such as Lucio Fulci's FOUR OF THE APOCALYPSE (1975), Enzo G. Castellari's KEOMA (1976), and Sergio Martino's MANNAJA (1977). He also played a Nazi general in THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS and an exorcist in Massaccesi's sleazy nunsploitation classic IMAGES IN A CONVENT (1979). O'Brien is best known to Eurotrash audiences for Marino Girolami's ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST (1980), where his zombie-creating mad doctor was granted the title role when the film was rechristened DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D. for its 1982 American release. Vacationing in Paris in 1980, shortly after completing his work on ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST, O'Brien suffered a serious head injury when he slipped and fell in the bathroom of his hotel room. After spending several days in a coma, he awoke to find he was partially paralyzed. 2020: TEXAS GLADIATORS was his first film after the accident and its effects are obvious: he has a halting limp and is often dragging his left leg, and the right side of his face demonstrates frequent, involuntary twitching very similar to that of Japanese actor Takeshi Kitano/Beat Takeshi in the aftermath of his 1994 motorcycle accident. Still, the veteran actor, while dubbed, manages to create a vivid impression with his shaved head, hammy overacting (check out his overdone Dr. Evil cackle at a not-very-funny joke that Catch Dog makes), and memorable death scene. O'Brien continued to act in films, but his paralysis took its toll. He required a cane and as the years went on, in later films like HANDS OF STEEL (1986) and THE NAME OF THE ROSE (1986), he's usually seated or leaning against something. O'Brien would go on to appear in Massaccesi's final ATOR film QUEST FOR THE MIGHTY SWORD (1990) and Michele Soavi's THE SECT, aka THE DEVIL'S DAUGHTER (1991), before retiring from acting in 1994 after severely injuring his hip in another fall. He died in 2003 at the age of 73.

ACCIDENTAL LOVE
(US - 2015)

Writer/director David O. Russell has been on a hot streak with THE FIGHTER (2010), SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK (2012), and AMERICAN HUSTLE (2013), and that's probably what finally got his long-shelved NAILED released as ACCIDENTAL LOVE. NAILED was shot in South Carolina during the summer of 2008 and co-written by, among others, Russell and former Vice Presidential daughter Kristin Gore, based on Gore's 2004 novel Sammy's Hill. The film's primary backer was the financially-strapped Capitol Films, who ran out of money on this and several other films shot at the same time, including Taylor Hackford's LOVE RANCH (ultimately released in 2010) and AMERICAN HISTORY X director Tony Kaye's BLACK WATER TRANSIT (still unreleased). NAILED shut down production on at least eight occasions over that tumultuous summer, despite an initial budget alleged to be in the area of $25 million. One shutdown was caused when the crew revolted over not being paid, and another occurred when stars Jessica Biel and Jake Gyllenhaal followed suit and walked off the set over similar money issues. Production was halted permanently by the end of 2008 with all of the post-work still needing to be done and at least one major scene--one that all parties agreed was completely essential--still unfilmed. By early 2010, Russell ran out of patience and washed his hands of it. He publicly distanced himself from NAILED, moved on to THE FIGHTER, and never looked back. In 2013, co-producer Kia Jam corralled enough funds to cobble as much of the missing scene together as possible and complete post-production, but Russell wanted no part of it. Now carrying the generic title ACCIDENTAL LOVE, the film was acquired by Millennium and given a VOD dumping in February 2015, with the non-existent "Stephen Greene" shouldering the blame after Russell successfully petitioned to have his name removed as both director and co-writer.

It's hardly praise, but as far as abandoned clusterfucks go, ACCIDENTAL LOVE isn't as bad as Alec Baldwin's doomed directorial debut THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER, shot in 2001 and ultimately aired on Starz in 2007 as SHORTCUT TO HAPPINESS, with director credit going to one "Harry Kirkpatrick." Biel stars as Alice, a small-town Indiana roller-skating carhop who gets shot in the head with a nail gun at a restaurant just after her cop boyfriend Scott (James Marsden) proposes. Uninsured Alice can't afford the brain surgery required to extract the nail, and it's deemed a pre-existing condition when she tries to get on Scott's insurance. Concerned about future medical issues, Scott bails and Alice goes to Washington to meet with her district representative, freshman Congressional newbie Howard Birdwell (a mannered, bug-eyed Gyllenhaal), to bring attention to her plight and plead the case for health care reform. Birdwell is a nebbishy type with great political ambition but he's kept under the thumb of lobbyists and powerful Rep. Pam Hendrickson (Catherine Keener, cast radically against type as a cold, brittle bitch-on-wheels), a former astronaut whose primary goal is getting the government to fund a military base on the moon. ACCIDENTAL LOVE vacillates between screwball comedy, with Alice's condition frequently causing spontaneous outbursts, speaking in a foreign language, or demonstrating insatiable lust, and political satire, which comes across as forced and rather toothless. It shouldn't come as a surprise or edgy insight to see that politicians are frequently corrupt, self-serving, and beholden to special interest groups.

"Stephen Greene"'s ACCIDENTAL LOVE obviously isn't as polished as David O. Russell's NAILED would've been, but what's here is almost all Russell's work, and it wouldn't have been his finest hour any way you cut it. There's some amusing bits here and there, and Kurt Fuller does a nice job as a priest with Viagra issues, but the more it goes on, the more shrill and heavy-handed it becomes. It's the kind of movie that ends with the whole cast gathered for a feelgood dance number, with the added bonus of closing credits bloopers, as if anyone had a good time making this thing (given the chaotic production, wouldn't footage of the Capitol money men telling a pissed-off crew they aren't being paid make for a much more entertaining blooper reel?). Other familiar faces lost in the quagmire include James Brolin as the Speaker of the House (a last-minute replacement when James Caan quit over "script disagreements," probably the film's liberal bent being at odds with the far-right Caan's politics); Tracy Morgan as Alice's friend Keyshawn, but he's essentially playing himself; Paul Reubens as Hendrickson's aide; Bill Hader as the snide ER doc who shuts down the surgery and grabs a burger when he's told Alice is uninsured; Beverly D'Angelo as Alice's mom (D'Angelo, in what must've been a frustrating summer in 2008, was also in BLACK WATER TRANSIT); and Kirstie Alley (her name misspelled "Kirstey" in the closing credits) as Alice's aunt. Perhaps NAILED could've been a sharp and prescient satire on pre-Obamacare politics, but ACCIDENTAL LOVE is a dated misfire best forgotten by all concerned. (PG-13, 101 mins)

EVERLY
(US - 2015)

The idea of Salma Hayek spending an entire movie slicing, dicing, and blowing away a crew of yakuza goons in an apartment building sounds a lot more fun than EVERLY turns out to be. A reverse RAID of sorts, EVERLY has Hayek as the title heroine, a prostitute holed up on the sixth floor of a yakuza-owned slum where other women are pimped out to wealthy Japanese clients and other assorted perverts and sadists. Everly has secretly been working with the cops to bring down crime boss Taiko (Hiroyuki Watanabe), who owns the building and the women who live in it. Taiko knows what she's been up to and has a price on Everly's head as other prostitutes, Taiko flunkies, and her neighbors try to get into Everly's apartment and take her out while she frantically tries to reunite with her estranged mother (Laura Cepeda) and young daughter (Aisha Ayamah). Director Joe Lynch (CHILLERAMA, KNIGHTS OF BADASSDOM) manages to pull off a couple of fairly well-executed sequences involving long tracking shots and uninterrupted takes, but for the most part, EVERLY just never finds its groove and feels significantly longer than 90 minutes. When it was screened at the 2014 Fantastic Fest in Austin, it got an overwhelmingly positive reaction from participation medal-awarding scenesters who no doubt have Lynch among their Facebook friends, but what's here is in many ways reminiscent of Alexandre Aja's atrocious PIRANHA remake, another lazy grindhouse poseur of an exploitation flick that thinks showing up and making the references are good enough. There's a lot of Takashi Miike in the over-the-top bloodshed and a bit of Tarantino, not just in the adoring shots of Hayek's feet as Everly constantly goes from high heels to barefoot, but also in one Japanese john (Akie Kotabe) spending his entire screen time bleeding out from a gunshot wound on Everly's couch, just like Tim Roth in RESERVOIR DOGS right down to his wardrobe. As she demonstrated 20 years ago in DESPERADO (has it been that long?), Hayek, still stunning at 48, is more than game as a kick-ass action heroine, but EVERLY just isn't up to her level. It's an endless fanboy circle jerk that exists in an insulated, prefab cult movie echo chamber. Hayek could use a hit, and in better hands, EVERLY could've easily been her JOHN WICK. Instead, it's her HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN and nobody needs that. (R, 92 mins)

A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT
(US - 2014)

There's a strong early-Jim Jarmusch vibe to this hypnotic vampire film from writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour, perhaps the most inventive of its kind since LET THE RIGHT ONE IN. Co-produced by Elijah Wood and shot in black & white in and around Bakersfield, CA, GIRL is set in the fictional Bad City, Iran and is in Persian with English subtitles. Amirpour and cinematographer Lyle Vincent do a tremendously effective job with the widescreen framing and using things like smokestacks and pumpjacks to present Bad City as a depressing industrial wasteland where drugs and crime rule above all. Nice-guy Arash (Arash Marandi) is forced into settling the debts of his junkie father Hossein (Marshall Manesh) to ruthless drug lord Saeed (Dominic Rains) when Saeed decides to take the only thing that matters to Arash--his pristine '57 T-Bird--as repayment. Saeed is soon slaughtered by a strange, silent woman (Sheila Vand) who turns out to be a vampire. The remarkably expressive, sad-eyed Vand is one of the most memorable vampires to hit the screens in some time. Portraying The Girl as one those melancholy sorts doomed to a life of loneliness, Vand doesn't even utter a word until nearly 40 minutes in, and almost like a holdover from the silent era, lets her face do much of her acting. When she tells prostitute Atti (Mozhan Marno) "You're sad, you don't remember wanting, and nothing ever changes," she's really talking about herself. GIRL is largely a triumph of style over substance, but there are numerous parallels and dualities at work throughout, like flip sides of a coin--between The Girl and Atti, Arash and Saeed, and The Girl and Hossein, perhaps the biggest monster of all when he shoots Atti full of heroin and prompts The Girl to take on the role of avenger. The Girl longs for love and humanity--watch the small, subtle smile she allows herself in really great scene the first time she's alone with Arash and plays White Lies'"Death"--in a world where empathy and feeling simply have no place with the likes of Saeed and Hossein around. A fascinating thematic companion piece to Jarmusch's recent ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE, A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT has its tedious bits that scream "art house pretension," especially with a long scene of Reza Sixo Safai's Rockabilly dancing with a balloon, but overall, it's a unique and visually arresting addition to vampire cinema. (Unrated, 101 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)

While Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns were game-changers in Europe and made Clint Eastwood a star, the US releases of A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964), FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (1965), and THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (1966) were delayed for a few years (the first two hit US theaters in 1967 and UGLY was released in 1968). By that time, the spaghetti western explosion in Italy was completely out of control, with literally hundreds being made in the years following, with every handsome Italian and ambitious young (or coasting old) American actor heading to Europe to achieve the kind of fame that Eastwood was enjoying. By 1967, Eastwood was the biggest star in Europe but back home, he was still best known for his stint on TV's RAWHIDE as few were even aware of the massive popularity of the films he'd been making in Europe. That all changed when FISTFUL finally opened in America, marking the belated arrival of a phenomenon that had already been raging in Italy and the rest of Europe for three years. American westerns were now trying to emulate the Italian ones--even Eastwood's debut as a Hollywood headliner, 1968's HANG 'EM HIGH, is heavily indebted to the spaghetti westerns--in a rare reversal of the trend pattern that usually saw Italian genre offerings blatantly copycatting what was big in America (like the later Italian EXORCIST ripoffs and post-DAWN OF THE DEAD zombie movies). The spaghetti craze reached its artistic apex with Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1969), an elegiac examination of the American west that drew the iconic Henry Fonda into Italian westerns, completely shattering his Tom Joad image by playing one of the most evil figures in all of cinema, one who's introduced shooting a small child point blank in the face.

The list of American actors hopping on the spaghetti western bandwagon is endless--even a young Burt Reynolds got into the act with Sergio Corbucci's 1966 film NAVAJO JOE, and William Shatner starred in the Spanish WHITE COMANCHE (1968) during a break between the first and second seasons of STAR TREK. One such actor was Tony Anthony, a New Jersey native whose background was covered at length on this blog in a piece on his 1983 film TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS. Born in 1937, Anthony had made a few independent productions and by 1967, through his producing partner Saul Swimmer, he had fallen in with Abkco Records head Allen Klein, the Rolling Stones manager who would also end up overseeing the Beatles after the death of their manager, Brian Epstein. It could be argued that Anthony's career is a classic case of smart networking, knowing the right people, and plain old dumb luck, as over the next few years, he and Swimmer would become tangential members of the Beatles' inner circle, with Swimmer directing George Harrison's CONCERT FOR BANGLADESH and Anthony working on a couple of projects with Ringo Starr. With Klein's help and a distribution deal with MGM, Anthony starred in three STRANGER films, the first two of which became surprise hits in the US in 1968. There were four STRANGER entries altogether, but MGM only released the first three, and as a result, Warner Archive's just-released STRANGER COLLECTION only includes those initial three, all directed by Luigi Vanzi under the Americanized pseudonym "Vance Lewis." Generally well-regarded by fans in their day, the films have fallen into obscurity over time, with Anthony better known today for his hand in the early '80s 3-D revival, but they're available once again, in decent if not spectacular widescreen transfers. And one of the films in particular, is a cult classic that's waited decades for rediscovery.

A STRANGER IN TOWN
(Italy - 1967; US release 1968)

Anthony's Stranger arrives in a Mexican ghost town and watches psychotic bandit Aguilar (Frank Wolff) mow down a group of military officers. The Stranger concocts a gold heist with Aguilar with the full intention of ripping him off and turning him and his gang in for the reward money, but numerous double crosses ensue, with both the Stranger and Aguilar alternately getting the upper hand. This first entry in the series looks and sounds like any other spaghetti western of the era, but like most, it lacks artistic majesty of Leone and isn't quite up to the level of Corbucci, the other standard-bearer of the genre. A STRANGER IN TOWN is very laboriously-paced, with long stretches where not much happens, and the bland story lacks the kind of imagination and character of Leone's films and doesn't attempt any of the political subtext that was creeping into spaghetti westerns around this time, in films like Damiano Damiani's A BULLET FOR THE GENERAL (1968). In its defense though, it finally gets cooking in the last 15 minutes when the Stranger starts killing Aguilar's gang one by one, usually by sneaking up on them and blasting a shotgun into their face at point-blank range. The climax is so good that it almost makes you forgive the middling mediocrity of the first 70 minutes. Anthony is much more appealing here than he was in his comparitively bland '80s action star incarnation, and American expat actor Wolff, a fixture in Italian cinema and best known for his role as the doomed Brett McBain in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, is appropriately dastardly as the ruthless Aguilar. Between Anthony's looks, Wolff's curly hair, and Benedetto Ghiglia's very Morricone-esque score, if 1968 moviegoers left their glasses at home, they might be tricked into believing that it was Clint Eastwood and Gian Maria Volonte up on the screen. The killer finale gives it a nice boost, but A STRANGER IN TOWN is really only for spaghetti western completists and Tony Anthony stalkers. (R, 86 mins)

THE STRANGER RETURNS
(Italy - 1968)

Released in Italy in January 1967, A STRANGER IN TOWN proved to be a surprise hit for MGM when they released it in the US in April 1968 to appreciative American audiences for whom the spaghetti western was still relatively new. By that time, Anthony and Vanzi had already made the sequel THE STRANGER RETURNS, which appeared in US theaters just four months after A STRANGER IN TOWN. The sequel is an improvement over the first film, though it also suffers from a flabby midsection that could use some serious tightening. But it opens and closes strong, and Anthony imbues the Stranger with even more quirky characterization, including a Roy Rogers & Trigger-type relationship with his faithful horse Pussy (yes, Pussy), and a sometimes whimsical attitude that almost looks like a prototype for the slapstick antics of Terence Hill in the TRINITY films and MY NAME IS NOBODY. Without ever crossing the line into outright comedy, Anthony plays the Stranger here in a decidedly offbeat way--he's not quite as sharp as the Man with No Name, and often gets himself into situations where he's unquestionably the intellectually inferior party. But there's a very amusing sequence early on that Vanzi lets play out to a comically absurd length, where two bad guys force the Stranger to dig his own grave at gunpoint, and he keeps digging and digging until the grave is twice the size it should be. One of the guys asks if the hole is too big, to which the Stranger smiles and says "No," as the two villains remain blissfully and cluelessly unaware that they're going to be sharing the double-wide grave in matter of moments. Here, the Stranger runs afoul of a gang led by El Plein (Dan Vadis), who kills a postal inspector who was their inside man on the heist of a gold shipment being transported by stagecoach. The Stranger ends up impersonating the postal inspector, again with a half-assed plan to keep the gold for himself while turning El Plein and his men in for the reward money.

It's almost the same plot as A STRANGER IN TOWN, and like that film, there's a lot of walking around and noisy mayhem that never leads anywhere until late in the film when, once again, the Stranger is pursued by an outlaw gang and does the "sneak up on them and blow them away with a shotgun" act, which is just as illogically silly and crowd-pleasing here as it was in the first film. The occasionally light tone doesn't always gel with the film's hard-hitting violence, still worth an R rating today, with Vadis' El Plein being as nihilistic a bad guy that's been in any spaghetti western. In addition to Pussy the Horse, the Stranger gets another sidekick in the form of a drunken, crazed old street preacher (Marco Guglielmi) looking for one last shot at redemption. There's also one returning character, Army Lt. George Stafford, played here by an uncredited Ettore Manni (Lars Bloch played Stafford in the first film), though he and the Stranger don't seem to know each other like they did in A STRANGER IN TOWN. THE STRANGER RETURNS suffers from a meandering middle that drags badly, but Anthony conceived the story and he was clearly attempting to take things in a different direction and make the Stranger not so much the Man with No Name/Django clone that we saw in the first film. (R, 95 mins)

THE SILENT STRANGER
(US - 1975)

After the success of A STRANGER IN TOWN and THE STRANGER RETURNS, MGM decided they wanted a STRANGER trilogy and went all in on THE SILENT STRANGER. This third film in the series took Anthony's Stranger (and Pussy the Horse) to Japan to deliver an ancient scroll to its rightful owner. Of course, being that this is a western, the Stranger ends up in the middle of a longstanding battle between two rival samurai clans--exacerbated by the meddling of an Ugly American (Lloyd Battista, a Cleveland native who would become an integral part of Anthony's stock company starting with this film), who introduces modern gatling gun technology to the samurai--in what's essentially the earliest example of an "east-meets-western" offshoot that finds the way of the samurai clashing with the American west (and naturally, the Stranger sneaks up on various samurai to blow them away with a bizarre front-loading sawed-off cannon). This would be popularized by the likes of Terence Young's RED SUN (1971), which paired outlaw Charles Bronson with samurai Toshiro Mifune, and later, during the post ENTER THE DRAGON craze, when gunslinger Lee Van Cleef teamed up with kung-fu warrior Lo Lieh in Antonio Margheriti's THE STRANGER AND THE GUNFIGHTER (1976). In addition, samurai and elements of Japanese culture made it into other pre-RED SUN spaghetti westerns like Tonino Cervi's TODAY IT'S ME...TOMORROW YOU! (1968), co-written by Dario Argento, which had Brett Halsey and Bud Spencer assembling a posse to avenge the rape and murder of Halsey's wife by a sadistic Japanese outlaw chillingly played by Akira Kurosawa regular Tatsuya Nakadai, and Don Taylor's THE FIVE MAN ARMY (1970), which counted samurai Tetsuro Tamba among its titular band of heroes.

However, THE SILENT STRANGER is the forgotten film of the east-meets-western fad, though it was the earliest to actually take its hero east as opposed to bringing the east to the west. MGM was so pleased with the success of the first two films that they fully backed THE SILENT STRANGER with a big Hollywood budget and even let Anthony, who was taking a more creative role in the series and took over as producer with Klein, keep his same core group of partners, including director Vanzi (from Vanzi and Battista here to Ferdinando Baldi and Gene Quintano later, Anthony preferred to work with a close-knit circle of collaborators). Filmed on location in Japan, THE SILENT STRANGER boasts production values that are leaps and bounds ahead of the same old Almeria, Spain sets seen in the first two films and every other spaghetti western. The battle scenes between the samurai clans are staged with the enthusiastic fervor of any Kurosawa throwdown. THE SILENT STRANGER was a troubled production that used its problems to its advantage: filmed in the fall of 1968, the shoot was hit by no less than 13 typhoons in a horrifically awful weather season, but they worked it into the story and whole sequences play out in a jawdroppingly torrential downpour very reminiscent of the final battle in Kurosawa's SEVEN SAMURAI (1954). And when it's not raining in sheets, the whole area is muddy from the rain that just fell, which adds significant atmosphere and gritty, harsh realism to the proceedings. The cast and crew are battling the elements and as a result, THE SILENT STRANGER almost comes off like it's Tony Anthony's FITZCARRALDO.

So why then, was the film not released until 1975? A management shake-up at MGM ended with the ousting of studio president Robert O'Brien--a strong supporter of Anthony and a big fan of the STRANGER films--and Klein aggressively taking his side, which didn't endear him or Anthony to the new people in charge. They responded to Klein's support of O'Brien by abandoning THE SILENT STRANGER and shelving it for seven years. It's a tragedy of sorts, because THE SILENT STRANGER is so good, and coupled with the momentum generated by the first two films--which aren't nearly as good-- it likely could've led to Anthony being a much bigger mainstream star than he ever would be, and the film might be cited as a great example of a Hollywood spaghetti western. Instead, by the time it opened in the summer of 1975, with new, MGM-ordered voiceover narration recorded under duress by Anthony that makes Harrison Ford's in BLADE RUNNER sound enthusiastic, the Stranger's time had passed. The buzz around Anthony had already died and the film was greeted with shrugs and dismissed as a RED SUN ripoff, when in fact, it was shot three years before that film.

After the shelving of THE SILENT STRANGER, Anthony moved on to BLINDMAN (1971), his first film with Italian director Ferdinando Baldi, who would eventually become his go-to director for his brief early '80 renaissance with COMIN' AT YA! and TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS. BLINDMAN, thanks largely to the presence of Ringo Starr as one of the villains (Battista was the other), would become Anthony's biggest hit in America up to that time, but again, he marched to the beat of his own drum and made a seemingly deliberate effort to avoid the mainstream machine. His next film was the departure gangster drama 1931: ONCE UPON A TIME IN NEW YORK (1972), which reteamed him with Vanzi. In 1975, he decided to revisit The Stranger, this time with Baldi directing, as Anthony and his co-writer, co-star, and buddy Battista took the offbeat and increasingly surreal touches of the Stranger films and steered them straight into all-out insanity with GET MEAN, which pitted the Stranger against Vikings, barbarians, and the supernatural in what might be a dry run for TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS. After the big Hollywood-backed SILENT STRANGER, GET MEAN was released in the US on the grindhouse circuit in 1976 by the small-time Cee Note Films. Never a prolific actor and not one to take hired gun jobs, Anthony stayed offscreen for five years until he returned with sleeper hit COMIN' AT YA!, and it's the early '80s return of 3-D for which Anthony is best known. But with these STRANGER films returning from obscurity courtesy of Warner Archive, and Blue Underground set to release GET MEAN on Blu-ray later this year, 2015 seems to be the year of the Tony Anthony renaissance, a time to re-examine a genuinely uncompromising and strangely endearing maverick who never seemed very interested in playing Hollywood games. If nothing else, it's time to discover the minor masterpiece that is THE SILENT STRANGER. (PG, 90 mins)

EX MACHINA
(US/UK - 2015)

Written and directed by Alex Garland. Cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander, Sonoya Mizuno, Corey Johnson. (R, 107 mins)

It's easy to make surface comparisons to Caradog James' 2014 sci-fi film THE MACHINE, but Alex Garland's EX MACHINA, while sharing some similar ideas and, unfortunately, a focus on female android protagonists named Ava, goes in an otherwise completely different direction. A twisty, often philosophical mindbender, EX MACHINA marks the directing debut of novelist Garland, who's been a frequent Danny Boyle collaborator (he scripted 28 DAYS LATER and SUNSHINE, and his novel The Beach was adapted into a 2000 Boyle film by TRAINSPOTTING screenwriter John Hodge), and also wrote Pete Travis' instant cult classic DREDD (2012). Garland lays on the Kubrick worship a little thick, especially in the back end of the film, but he does it right, and the film's cold, clinical look, its long hallways, its recurring use of mirrors, and its limited number of protagonists in an isolated, claustrophobic location make it particularly indebted to THE SHINING. In conjunction with a throbbing electronic score co-written by Portishead's Geoff Barrow and the cinematography of Rob Hardy, EX MACHINA is one of those hypnotic films whose visual intoxication works on you quickly, but unlike many such instances, it's got the story to back up the style.

Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is a code writer for Bluebook, a Google-meets-Facebook-like behemoth and the internet's most utilized search engine. He wins a company-wide contest to spend a week with reclusive CEO Nathan (Oscar Isaac), a billionaire several times over who lives in a distant, subterranean fortress that doubles as his secret research facility. Nervous Caleb wonders why he's there and why he has to sign a confidentiality agreement, but Nathan soon reveals that he wants Nathan to administer the Turing Test--whether an artificial intelligence can engage in human behavior and make human decisions on its own--on an android named Ava (Alicia Vikander). After several interview and observational sessions with Ava, an odd mutual attraction forms, and during periodic power blackouts that Nathan claims were caused by faulty installation but now has too much top-secret research to allow the electricians back in--during which time Nathan loses security camera access to what Ava and Caleb are talking about--Ava secretly warns Caleb "Do not trust Nathan. You can't believe anything he tells you."

Roles eventually shift in unpredictable ways, but as heavy-drinking Nathan becomes more erratic, Caleb grows more paranoid about his host's intentions, and Ava begins to exhibit more signs of intelligence and independent thought, the film definitely starts to resemble THE SHINING, with evil Nathan subbing in for Jack Torrance and Caleb and Ava functioning as Wendy and Danny. There's a fourth major character in Nathan's mute Japanese servant and sexual outlet Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), who doesn't understand English but clearly has secrets of her own and knows much more than she lets on. But little is at it seems in EX MACHINA, which doles out its plot twists in a restrained, organic fashion rather than ridiculous reveals that negate what's happened prior. Garland engages in some clever misdirection designed to make you think you've got things figured out in a "maybe Caleb isn't the one conducting the Turing Test" sort-of way, but ultimately, he isn't interested in going down that road. It's a near-flawless fusion of intelligent, hard sci-fi and rich, vivid atmosphere that just gets better and more intense as it goes along, though if it ended one scene before it did, it would've been flirting with perfection. All four stars are superb, with Isaac turning in another dynamic performance right on the heels of A MOST VIOLENT YEAR. Shot at the Juvet Landscape Hotel in Valldalen, Norway, with the long hallway shots done at Pinewood Studios in London, EX MACHINA is a remarkable film, intelligently written, visually stunning, and with top-notch android CGI on Vikander, proving that CGI can look good, and doing so on just a $16 million budget. It belongs on that short list of almost trance-inducing modern sci-fi cult classics like BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW, UNDER THE SKIN, and the little-seen THE MACHINE, which also deals with AI and a female android named Ava but in an entirely different, post-apocalyptic setting and, it should be noted, lacking an amazing Isaac-Mizuno dance scene.

STRYKER
(Philippines - 1983)

Directed by Cirio H. Santiago. Written by Howard Cohen. Cast: Steve Sandor, Andria Savio, William Ostrander, Mike Lane, Ken Metcalfe, Julie Gray, Monique St. Pierre, Joe Zucchero, Jon Harris III. (R, 82 mins)

Though Italy was largely ground zero for the 1980s post-nuke ROAD WARRIOR ripoff, it should come as no surprise that Cirio H. Santiago, the undisputed king of Filipino exploitation, wasted no time in getting his own post-apocalyptic saga in theaters when he saw the craze gaining momentum. Santiago (1936-2008) schlepped his way around the Filipino movie industry from the mid-1950s on before finding his niche in drive-in trash after forming a partnership with Roger Corman in the early 1970s. Corman would co-produce and distribute Santiago's Manila-shot T&A actioners like FLY ME (1973) and COVER GIRL MODELS (1975) as well as 1974's immortal T.N.T. JACKSON ("She'll put you in traction!"). Santiago and Corman would part ways by the late '70s as Santiago had some other successes with EBONY, IVORY & JADE (1976), THE MUTHERS (1976), VAMPIRE HOOKERS (1978) and DEATH FORCE (1978). Santiago and Corman reunited for 1981's FIRECRACKER, a remake of T.N.T. JACKSON. By the mid-to-late 1980s, the prolific Santiago was on a roll, with Corman's Concorde Pictures releasing a slew of his post-nukes (1987's EQUALIZER 2000, 1988's THE SISTERHOOD, 1992's DUNE WARRIORS), horror (1987's DEMON OF PARADISE), vigilante exploitation (1985's NAKED VENGEANCE), cop movies (1986's SILK), RAMBO ripoffs (1986's THE DEVASTATOR), post-PLATOON Vietnam sagas (1987's EYE OF THE EAGLE, 1988's NAM ANGELS, 1989's better-than-expected EYE OF THE EAGLE III), and one that was a fusion of everything (1986's insane FUTURE HUNTERS). Santiago slowed down a little in the 1990s, but still had time to crank out several BLOODSPORT knockoffs like the 1993 duo of ANGELFIST (with Vidal Sassoon's karate champ daughter Cat) and LIVE BY THE FIST, and a few more 'Nam offerings that provided jobs for fading American tough guys, such as 1992's BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY with Jan Michael Vincent, and 1993's KILL ZONE with David Carradine and Dallas Cowboys great Tony Dorsett. By the early 2000s, he was making jingoistic military actioners like 2003's WHEN EAGLES STRIKE, and producing a pair of 2006 films with Mark Dacascos: THE HUNT FOR EAGLE ONE (2006) and its sequel THE HUNT FOR EAGLE ONE: CRASH POINT (2006), which transplanted his Vietnam formula to the post-9/11 era.

Cirio H. Santiago (1936-2008)

Released in September 1983, STRYKER was Santiago's first post-nuke, and one of the last films distributed by New World Pictures after Corman sold the company that same year. Santiago's style typically didn't concern much beyond getting the film in the can and shipped off to Corman, but with STRYKER, he seems to have taken some care as it demonstrates some of his most accomplished filmmaking. It's not just in the stunt work or the action sequences (Filipino writer/actor Joe Mari Avellana is credited as "associate director"), but Santiago also seems to have gotten access to a Steadicam for a few shots that really show off the barren, desolate look of the mines on the Filipino island of Marinduque (the site of terrible mining tragedy in 1996), which does a very effective job of standing in for a vast, post-nuke wasteland. As much of a shameless and aimless ROAD WARRIOR ripoff as it is, STRYKER stands as one of Santiago's best films, even though it could really use some Vic Diaz.

Even by the standards of the post-nuke ripoff, STRYKER's story is threadbare: years after the nuclear (or, as the opening narrator puts it, "nucular") holocaust, water is the scarcest commodity, and marauding bands of relatively good guys team up to take on the sadistic overlord Kardis (1950s pro wrestler turned B-movie actor/producer Mike Lane), who's bent on hoarding it for himself. A band of scantily-clad female badasses led by Delha (Andria Savio) are part of The Colony, where a natural spring has supplied them with water for years. They reach out to a compound run by Trun (Ken Metcalfe as Tom Atkins), figuring that an alliance between The Colony and Trun will force Kardis to realize he's outnumbered and negotiate a deal that finds them all sharing the spring. Of course, since Kardis is the villain in a post-nuke ripoff, there's no way he'll go along with this pie-in-the-sky bullshit, especially after he's revealed to be a thoroughly tone-deaf post-apocalyptic one-percenter who announces his plan to strictly ration the precious water "for those who contribute" while splashing his face after a refreshing, hot shave. Wandering in and out of the convoluted but somehow still empty story is Stryker (Steve Sandor), the requisite nomadic warrior in a souped-up muscle car. Stryker is Trun's younger brother but branched out on his own because that's just how he rolls. Stryker has a sidekick in Bandit (William Ostrander), who gets a love interest with one of the Colony ladies, but considering the movie is called STRYKER, Stryker doesn't figure much in the action until the climax, when he gets to face Kardis one-on-one and avenge his late wife, who was tortured and beheaded by Kardis years earlier.

Steve Sandor IS Stryker!

Santiago comes storming out of the gate with an opening scene that includes a disemboweling and several shotgun blasts to faces and heads. There's quite a bit of action, constant explosions, and dangerous stunts throughout (there's one impressive chase sequence where Ostrander clearly does his own stunt, falling from the top of a moving rig onto the truck passing by it, and it looks dangerous as hell), but the script by Howard Cohen (SATURDAY THE 14TH, DEATHSTALKER) has too many characters (there's also a group of robed, jabbering dwarves who get a lot of screen time) and almost treats its title hero as an afterthought. That's a shame, because Sandor is well-cast and plays the part with just the right tongue-in-cheek attitude. STRYKER was, for that time anyway, a rare big-screen lead for Sandor, who headlined a couple of late '60s biker movies but was mainly a jobbing journeyman making his living on TV guest spots. Santiago's film came in the midst of a brief renaissance for Sandor, who provided the voice for Darkwolf in Ralph Bakshi's FIRE AND ICE, which opened a week before STRYKER, and a month later, he had a co-starring role on the short-lived Cybill Shepherd/David Soul NBC series THE YELLOW ROSE. Sandor is perhaps best known to cult movie audiences of more refined taste than STRYKER for his role as the leader of a gang of sadistic bikers whose beating and humiliation of a fragile ex-astronaut (Scott Wilson) and his even more unstable shrink (Stacy Keach) kick off what's probably cinema's most harrowing bar fight in William Peter Blatty's THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980).

William Ostrander in his best-known role as bullying
Buddy Repperton in John Carpenter's CHRISTINE

A native of Euclid, OH outside of Cleveland, Ostrander also had a voice role in Bakshi's FIRE AND ICE and is best known to genre fans as Buddy Repperton in John Carpenter's CHRISTINE, released three months after STRYKER. As played by Ostrander, Repperton is one of the most memorable movie bullies of the 1980s, but even though the film was a hit and his performance is remembered by fans to this day, Ostrander never capitalized on it and it wasn't long before all of those roles started going to William Zabka (THE KARATE KID, BACK TO SCHOOL) instead. Ostrander plugged away for the rest of the '80s, but fame never materialized. He co-starred in the grim 1985 German-made women-in-prison drama RED HEAT, with Linda Blair and Sylvia Kristel and had a recurring role on KNOTS LANDING in 1986, but he only worked sporadically in the '90s and onward. He had a small role in David Lynch's MULHOLLAND DR. (2001), but he hasn't acted since an episode of ANGEL that same year.

Thai DVD art for WATER WARS

At the time of his death in 2008, Santiago was working on a sequel of sorts to STRYKER, which would be his first time behind the camera since 2005's futuristic kickboxing opus BLOODFIST 2050, an unusually long break for the director. An ill Santiago was battling lung cancer when he died five days into production on ROAD RAIDERS, which would eventually become WATER WARS. The film, starring Michael Madsen because of course it did, was shelved until 2011 when producer Corman brought in his veteran utility man Jim Wynorski to finish Santiago's final project. Wynorski shot new scenes and assembled what he could out of what Santiago managed to get done, and relied on copious amounts of stock footage from STRYKER and other Santiago post-nukes to fill in the gaps. All told, about 20-25 minutes of WATER WARS' 78-minute running time is stock footage from movies that were nearly 30 years old, featuring characters who have nothing to do with WATER WARS. The resulting patchwork, which has been charitably described as ranging from "amateurish" to "unwatchable," seems to have been shelved permanently by Corman as far as actual release is concerned, and has only been seen by a small number of masochists relying on the bootleg and torrent circuit. Its only official release thus far has been as a straight-to-DVD title in Thailand in 2014, the kind of under-the-radar rollout usually reserved for snuff films on the sex traveler and human trafficking circuit.

THE COBBLER
(US - 2015)

The 2014 Toronto Film Festival didn't go very well for Adam Sandler. Seemingly in response to criticism about his juvenile and increasingly lazy star vehicles that just give him an excuse to hang out with his buddies, Sandler tried to get serious with two smaller films, both of which were unveiled at Toronto: JUNO director Jason Reitman's dysfunction drama MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN and Tom McCarthy's THE COBBLER. McCarthy's made some respected and acclaimed indie films, such as THE STATION AGENT (2003), THE VISITOR (2008), and WIN WIN (2011), and Sandler would seem to be in good hands with either director if he was seeking an indie-cred reinvention. But whatever mojo Reitman had circa UP IN THE AIR is gone, as MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN was a ridiculous CRASH knockoff that got laughed off the screen with its "Old Man Yells at Cloud" attitude about social media and modern technology and eventually opened in theaters to the tune of a $700,000 total gross while asking the tough questions like "What's with all the selfies and the texting and the porn and the jerking off?" THE COBBLER got an even more toxic response. Earnest and schmaltzy to a fault, it plays like an excessively sappy take on the kind of middling, klezmer-scored, high-concept trifle that Woody Allen might churn out to lighten the mood between dramas. Acquired by Image Entertainment and relegated to a few theaters and VOD, THE COBBLER grossed just $24,000 and is somehow worse than any of Sandler's phoned-in Happy Madison joints.

The dumb concept might've provided passable entertainment had McCarthy been able to settle on the right tone. Instead, he veers wildly from comedy to fantasy to drama, with Sandler doing his best to keep up as schlubby Max Simkin, a fourth-generation cobbler in a Lower East Side neighborhood that's struggling to hold off gentrification. Weighed down by Allen-esque Jewish neuroses, deserted by his father (Dustin Hoffman), and living with his dementia-addled mom (Lynn Cohen), Max wishes he'd made different choices in life but just plugs away in his mundane existence. That is, until he discovers an old stitching machine in the basement that enables him to literally walk in someone else's shoes: when he slips on shoes that have been repaired using the antique stitcher, he turns into the person who owns the shoes. At first, he uses his new trick to mess with Jimmy (Steve Buscemi), who owns the barber shop next door, but then he's dining-and-dashing by switching into another pair of shoes in the restaurant's men's room and trying to get in the shower with the hot girlfriend of local DJ Emiliano (THE GUEST's Dan Stevens), and while wearing the shoes of neighborhood gangster Leon (Method Man), he threateningly steals the shoes of another (Joey Slotnick) because he wants to get that guy's sports car out of the parking garage and speed throuogh the streets. There's probably a ton of ways that shoe-stealing scene, relying on Leon being a stereotypical thug, could've been subversive and funny, but McCarthy treats the joke the same way a regular Sandler director would and it lands with the expectedly uncomfortable thud. THE COBBLER gets hopelessly maudlin as Max slips on his dad's shoes to stage a reconciliation with his mom, but he soon decides to use it to stop gentrification in his neighborhood, with Leon in cahoots with a corrupt property developer (Ellen Barkin, who can play this kind of bitch-on-wheels character in her sleep) to run elderly holdout Mr. Solomon (Fritz Weaver) out of his building so they can tear it down. This all leads to a twist ending that, among other things, somehow turns THE COBBLER into a superhero origin story ("You are the Guardian of Soles. You are the Cobbler" is probably the single worst line of dialogue Hoffman's been forced to utter in his 50-year career). In his defense, Sandler really isn't the problem here, nor was he the issue with the overwrought MEN, WOMEN & CHILDREN. It's almost like he's acting out by defiantly choosing the most terrible serious scripts he can find so people stop giving him so much shit about paid vacations like GROWN-UPS 2. (PG-13, 98 mins)

THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST
(Germany/Austria - 2013; US release 2015)

Though he'll always be the director of 1988's PAPERHOUSE and 1992's CANDYMAN, Bernard Rose's freefall into Roland Joffe depths of irrelevance continues with the laughable Niccolo Paganini biopic THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST. Rose directed 1994's well-regarded IMMORTAL BELOVED, anchored by a great Gary Oldman performance as Beethoven but here, he's saddled with violinist/PBS crossover sensation David Garrett as the maverick 19th century classical great Paganini. Garrett can obviously play but he can't act and as a result, there's a massive void in the center of the film that's impossible to fill. But really, Garrett is just one of many insurmountable problems with THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST: Rose wisely offers his inexperienced lead some support with veteran professionals, almost of whom decided to bring their D-game. In the worst performance of his career, Jared Harris is Urbani, a vaguely demonic figure in a ludicrous top hat who has Paganini sign a contract in exchange for fame and fortune. Rose seemingly treats the metaphorical "deal with the devil" as historical fact, and it leads to all manner of self-destructive behavior on Paganini's part. Rose has no interest in exploring Paganini as a character and simply bulldozes through the exposition--in rapid-fire succession, Paganini goes from unknown violinist to superstar to father of a five-year-old boy to hopeless opium addict. That's all in the first 12 minutes. Then the kid disappears, and we see him again 100 or so minutes later, then five minutes after that, he's a decade older. Then Paganini is on opium again after no signs of drug abuse for 90% of the movie. At times, it seems like a long "Previously on..." recap for a TV series that doesn't exist.

Goaded by Urbani, Paganini treats everyone like dog shit, callously bankrupting the London benefactor (Christian McKay gives the only thing resembling a performance) who tries to help him expand his audience, breaks the heart of Charlotte, the benefactor's daughter (Andrea Deck), and demands financial compensation to play for the King of England. He takes the stage hours late like some 19th century Axl Rose, and is targeted by an ever-present group of religious protesters--led by the prudish and perpetually haranguing Primrose Blackstone (Olivia d'Abo)--that also functions as a Greek chorus for the plot. Everything about THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST is wrong-headed: casting a violinist with no acting experience and a complete inability to correctly pronounce the name "Charlotte" instead of a real actor who could maybe learn to mimic the violin performance scenes; Harris playing Urbani with a Mephistophelian scowl more befitting a silent movie villain, and with a bizarre vocal affect that can best be described as "SLING BLADE starring Peter Lorre"; Joely Richardson as a rough, cigarillo-smoking journalist with Carrot Top's hair, getting catty with Charlotte over Paganini's attention; giving the great Helmut Berger prominent billing but nothing to do...I could go on. Boasting some nicely ornate interior production design, THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST is otherwise appallingly bad and just more proof, along with the little-seen 2014 found-footage horror film SX_TAPE, that Rose just has no idea what he's doing anymore. He's made some accomplished films and a couple of his early ones could arguably be called great, but while he keeps busy, he's done nothing noteworthy since his 1997 version of ANNA KARENINA with Sophie Marceau. Rose is prolific but his consistently barely-released or completely unseen films fly so far under the radar that it's easy to forget he's even still around, let alone cranking out six movies in the last five years. In the end, THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST, released on just ten screens in the US by Freestyle two years after flopping in Europe, seems like as much of vanity project for Garrett as Klaus Kinski's humbly-titled 1989 Paganini chronicle KINSKI PAGANINI. Garrett, also one of 26 credited producers, gets to show off his chops numerous times, his Paganini beds a slew of comely women, and his female fans are always shown fanning themselves as they mob him like he's One Direction, accompanied by sounds of Elvis and Beatlemania crowd shrieking. And in a bizarre onscreen credit worthy of infamously self-aggrandizing neoclassical metal Paganini disciple Yngwie Malmsteen, there's even a special acknowledgment from the producers thanking Garrett for his work on the film. Does that mean he's thanking himself for starring in a movie that he co-produced? Isn't that like a Malpaso production thanking Clint Eastwood for showing up? (R, 123 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)

MR. TURNER
(UK/France/Germany - 2014)

Since his 1988 breakthrough HIGH HOPES, Mike Leigh has become one of the most distinctive voices in British cinema. In the years since, his credits read like a list of essential British films of the last quarter century: LIFE IS SWEET (1990), the shockingly misanthropic NAKED (1993), SECRETS & LIES (1996), TOPSY-TURVY (1999), VERA DRAKE (2004), HAPPY-GO-LUCKY (2008), and ANOTHER YEAR (2010) are generally considered great films to varying degrees, and even comparatively minor Leigh works like CAREER GIRLS (1997) and ALL OR NOTHING (2002) are very much worthwhile. I guess every great filmmaker has to have an off day, and with MR. TURNER, Leigh has delivered his first genuine misfire, though considering its current 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, I'm clearly in the minority with that sentiment. A lethargic, coma-inducing biopic that focuses on the last 25 years in the life of famed British painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) and feels like it's being told in real time, MR. TURNER offers the great character actor and Leigh regular Timothy Spall the opportunity for the role of a lifetime, but after 30 or so minutes, his endless grunting, snorting, and harumphing in lieu of actual sentences--and when he does talk, you can barely understand him--gets old and there's still two tedious hours to go. Leigh has a method to his filmmaking that works for his small, intimate character studies: he brings his cast together for weeks or even months of improvisation and workshopping, collaborating as a team to develop the characters, their backstories, and their arcs, and from that, Leigh constructs a script and then the film is made. It's a system that has always worked but utterly fails him here. All Spall has is the tics and the mannerisms and they become a crutch because there's no narrative drive to MR. TURNER whatsoever.

It opens in the middle of the action and it's a good 45 minutes before you've worked out who's who and where they fit in Turner's world. It's all for naught because all Leigh presents is a series of vignettes and snapshots, jumping around the last two decades of Turner's life as characters drift in and out of view. It should be a perfect showcase for Spall, but it always ends up with Turner finding some inspiration for a landscape painting, then treating people like garbage--he has two children he doesn't acknowledge with a former mistress (Ruth Sheen) he ignores, and that mistress' psoriasis-stricken niece (Dorothy Atkinson) works as Turner's housekeeper and is routinely mounted from behind by her grunting, slobbering boss when he feels the urge. Turner has fleeting moments where he's a sensitive, caring individual in his own peculiar, grunty way, whether in his close relationship with his father (Paul Jesson is very good) or later, when he falls in love with his widowed landlady (Marion Bailey), but generally, he's a bastard, and maybe Leigh wants to make a point about the divide between the beauty of his art and the darkness of his soul. Unfortunately, it's lost amidst a guttural cacophony of snorts and gurgles that turn Spall's performance into a hammy and constipated embarrassment, regardless of how accurate the portrayal may be, and once Turner's father dies around an hour in, the film loses Jesson and its biggest source of warmth and humanity. Turner may be a great artist, but there's little here to suggest--at least in Leigh's unbearably monotonous presentation--that he's an interesting subject for a two-and-a-half hour film. By contrast, Turner's clashes with rival painter Benjamin Robert Haydon--and Martin Savage's performance in the role--bring a too-infrequent spark to the proceedings and definitely lead one to conclude that perhaps Haydon would've been a more interesting and cinematic subject for Leigh to pursue. Despite the beautiful, Oscar-nominated cinematography by Dick Pope--Academy Awards president Cheryl Boone Isaacs mispronouncing his name "Dick Poop" at the announcing of the nominees is more memorable than anything in the actual film--MR. TURNER is a shockingly empty and unfocused work from a great filmmaker, a tortuously slow-moving 150-minute endurance test whose maddeningly molasses pacing is slower than any Merchant-Ivory film. (R, running time: endless)

WINTER SLEEP
(Turkey/France/Germany - 2014)

WINTER SLEEP is 45 minutes longer than MR. TURNER, and while it actually feels shorter than Leigh's film, it's still too much by at least an hour. The Palme d'Or winner at last year's Cannes Film Festival--a decision that suggests the Jane Campion-led jury was possibly suffering from Stockholm Syndrome--WINTER SLEEP, loosely based on the Chekhov short story "The Wife," is the latest from Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan and demonstrates very much the same visual aesthetic of his 2011 masterpiece ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA. It's also more self-indulgently bloated than it has any reason to be, with significant stretches of time devoted to escalating arguments between characters that make their point and keep circling back and restating those points for no other reason than to pad the film's absurd length, coming in at just under 200 minutes. In a performance with a demeanor and mannerisms that frequently recall Robert De Niro, Haluk Bilginer is Aydin, a one-time actor and now de facto town leader, landlord, and owner of the Hotel Othello, an unusual hotel carved into the side of a mountain. He fancies himself a benevolent and important figure but his arrogance is alienating everyone, including his much younger wife Nihal (Melisa Sozen). He owns all the property and writes a newspaper column that nobody reads, and tries to horn his way into Nihal's charity work for a local school, which she resents, accusing him of ignoring her requests to help improve the school for the last year and then swooping in to take all the credit at the end. He also claims to be busy working on a book about the history of Turkish theater, even though there's no demand and his blunt sister Necla (Demet Akbag) says he's only writing because he pontificates and loves the sound of his own voice. It's essentially a three-plus-hour horse pill that follows a not very likable person with an inflated sense of self-importance, both subtly and overtly denigrating everyone, and while there are some undeniably strong moments, both visually and with the work of the actors, it's just an exhausting experience. Riding high on the acclaim bestowed upon ANATOLIA, Ceylan just lets WINTER SLEEP go on and on and on to the point where he's like Michael Douglas' Grady Tripp in WONDER BOYS--he just doesn't know where to stop.You can probably zone out for several stretches of the film and still not miss anything in the way of plot development. By the interminable last hour, where Aydin leaves and Nihal tries to make amends with a local drunkard (Nejat Isler) who clashed with Aydin and his employee Hidayet (Ayberk Pekcan) early on, I have to admit that I was pretty much over it. WINTER SLEEP is well-made, beautifully shot, powerfully acted, and Ceylan is obviously a major international talent, but maybe he shouldn't read so much of his own press next time. (Unrated, 197 mins)

MAGGIE
(US/Switzerland - 2015)

Directed by Henry Hobson. Written by John Scott 3. Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Abigail Breslin, Joely Richardson, J.D. Evermore, Douglas M. Griffin, Jodie Moore, Bryce Romero, Raeden Greer. (PG-13, 95 mins)

Once upon a time, the idea of Arnold Schwarzenegger starring in a zombie movie would mean plenty of action, horror, and the expected shouting of "Aim fah da head!" In his bumpy transition back to full-time acting since a decade in politics, Schwarzenegger hasn't enjoyed the box office blockbusters he had in his heyday, with only THE EXPENDABLES 2 and THE EXPENDABLES 3 being big moneymakers, though ESCAPE PLAN was a modest hit, but those were group efforts done with Sylvester Stallone and others. Elsewhere, the enjoyable THE LAST STAND and the dismal SABOTAGE were met with utter disinterest and absolutely tanked, and served as further proof that the geriatric action guys don't do well solo anymore (witness Stallone's fun BULLET TO THE HEAD bombing as well). Perhaps that's why Schwarzenegger chose now, at the age of 67, to take on the most unusual role of his career in MAGGIE, a moving, character-driven drama that happens to take place during a zombie apocalypse.

Shot in Louisiana two years ago, from a script by first-time screenwriter John Scott 3 that's been bouncing around Hollywood for several years, the low-budget MAGGIE opens in the midst of a viral outbreak that's rendered the major cities deserted wastelands. The government has turned the inner cities into quarantine zones for the infected, who have an average of eight weeks from the point of infection before they fully "turn" into flesh-eating zombies. Maggie Vogel (Abigail Breslin) left her home for the city after becoming infected from a bite on the arm, but as the film opens, her father Wade (Schwarzenegger) has spent two weeks trying to find her before locating her in a barely-staffed hospital. Wade's intent is to take her home but the doctor advises him to return her to the quarantine zone when she enters the final stages before her turn. A proud, self-reliant farmer and Christian family man, Wade will not hear of letting Maggie die alone, surrounded by strangers and other infected, instead insisting on having her live out her final weeks at home with him and her stepmother Caroline (Joely Richardson), who sends the couple's two younger children off to stay with her sister while Maggie undergoes her turning.

The grieving process already underway, Maggie is relatively normal for the first few weeks, but as her body slowly decomposes and rots, and her increased sense of smell draws her to human and animal flesh, she has moments where she can still be a normal teenager. She laughs and reminisces with her dad, usually about her late mother. She hangs out with friends, some of whom are infected and in the early stages of turning. Through it all, Wade does his best to keep a stiff upper lip and be the rock that he's always been for his little girl, but it often proves too much to bear. He's already lost his wife (her death predates the outbreak, so while it's never specified and doesn't need to be, she likely died of cancer) and since he refuses to turn Maggie over to the medical teams in quarantine--which gets him into hot water with the local sheriff--he's burdened with the task of killing what was once his daughter when her transformation is complete.

MAGGIE is an extremely dour, downbeat film, shot in dark, muted tones with a grim, funereal mood throughout. The "turning" is a powerful metaphor that will resonate with anyone who's seen a family member or friend face the last stages of a terminal illness. They'll recognize the overwhelming helplessness felt by Wade, who's always been there to protect his family but seems lost facing the realization that there is absolutely nothing he can do to make Maggie better. With his craggy face and his shoulders slumped with age (which didn't work to his advantage in SABOTAGE), the stunt casting of Schwarzenegger is inspired and spot-on. We've always taken leaps and allowed a generous amount of wiggle room when it comes to his acting. Even when he's playing US military guys or Texas sheriffs, his appeal and his screen presence have helped audiences overlook the often cumbersome Austrian accent and his occasionally awkward line deliveries that fans often endearingly quote (think "Get to da choppah!" or "It's not a too-mah!"). Schwarzenegger delivers a low-key performance that's unlike anything he's done before, and the fact that he's playing an Austrian-accented rural farmer never once becomes a distraction. His scenes with an excellent Breslin are often very touching, especially when he tells her how much of her mother's spirit she has in her, or when, on the ride back after an unpleasant checkup with the doctor midway through her turning, he makes her smile by playing a tape of Oscar Brown, Jr's "Maggie," and the shared look between the two conveys the kind of warmth and fond memories that words don't need to express.

Scott 3 and debuting director Henry Hobson (who designed the opening credits for THE WALKING DEAD) never let things get maudlin or sappy. Maggie's decline is treated matter-of-factly and comes as no surprise to anyone, as the outbreak's been ongoing and they've seen it all before (recognizing Wade's staunch refusal to quarantine Maggie, her doctor's last bit of advice to him is "Make it quick"). We see a couple of shambling zombies but the apocalypse has already taken place, with big city highways deserted and fields in the outlying areas seemingly constantly ablaze. MAGGIE turns the focus on an element of zombie lore that's been largely unexplored outside of the slow turning of Scott H. Reiniger's hot-dogging Roger in George Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD (1979): the time between infection and transformation. But even then, Roger didn't have time to get sentimental ("You got a hell of a lot more to do before you can afford to lose me") and despite the same certain inevitability that Maggie faces, promised "I'm gonna try not to come back." Wade and Maggie face her fate with bravery and her final act demonstrates a level of compassion not usually found in the genre, proof that no matter how sick you become and how much your body degrades and turns against itself before it finally dies, you're still you and that sense of who you are can never be completely taken away. MAGGIE isn't a typical summer horror movie, and it's surprising that everyone involved on the business end didn't force Hobson to turn it into one (Schwarzenegger was one of 21 credited producers, so he obviously believed in the project). It's a small film that Lionsgate recognized wouldn't be a commercial hit, which is likely why they relegated it to their arthouse Roadside Attractions division and released it on VOD. And that's fine, because a thoughtful, offbeat film like MAGGIE will cultivate an audience over time and remain relevant and effective much longer than a by-the-numbers zombie shoot 'em up with a quipping Ah-nuld and shitty Bulgarian CGI ever would.

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
(US/Australia - 2015)

Directed by George Miller. Written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris. Cast: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne, Nathan Jones, Zoe Kravitz, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Riley Keough, Abbey Lee, Courtney Eaton, Josh Helman, John Howard, Richard Carter, Megan Gale, Melissa Jaffer, Angus Sampson, Richard Norton, iOTA. (R, 120 mins)

Australian auteur George Miller has worked only sporadically in the 30 years since 1985's MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME, but when he does reappear, he makes it count. He produced the beloved BABE in 1995 and directed 1998's BABE: PIG IN THE CITY, a dark and bizarre curveball of a sequel that baffled everyone but has become a major cult film. In the years since, he's become synonymous with the hugely popular HAPPY FEET films, but MAD MAX: FURY ROAD marks his triumphant return to the franchise he started in 1979 with MAD MAX, one that made Mel Gibson a star and spawned an entire subgenre of post-nuke action films after its sequel THE ROAD WARRIOR opened in the US in the legendary summer of 1982. THE ROAD WARRIOR (released a year earlier in its native Australia as MAD MAX 2) remains one of the most influential action films ever made and one that BEYOND THUNDERDOME probably couldn't have topped even if Miller's mind wasn't elsewhere following the 1983 death of his friend and producing partner Byron Kennedy in a helicopter crash while location-scouting (his name remains on their production company Kennedy Miller Mitchell to this day), prompting a grieving Miller to delegate enough of the film to Australian TV vet George Ogilvie that both Georges shared directing credit. For 30 years, the disappointing-but-OK-on-its-own-terms BEYOND THUNDERDOME, despite such memorable characters as Master Blaster and Tina Turner's Aunty Entity, has remained a lesser conclusion to an otherwise exemplary trilogy.

Miller's had the basic concept of FURY ROAD churning in his head since the late '90s, and tried to get it off the ground in the early 2000s with Gibson returning to his iconic role. But it never materialized into anything more than the idea stage until Miller finally got all the pieces in place with Tom Hardy taking over the Mad Max role from Gibson, who by then was either too old or too much of a tabloid distraction or both. FURY ROAD isn't a reboot, it's not a prequel, and it's not an origin story. It's not even necessarily a sequel as much as it's another Mad Max adventure. It functions as a stand-alone, self-contained piece, much like the old James Bond movies used to do. There's references to things from the earlier films, mainly winking nods to longtime fans (the music box given to The Feral Kid in THE ROAD WARRIOR; a near-subliminal shot of bulging eyeballs from MAD MAX), and 67-year-old Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played MAD MAX's chief villain Toecutter 36 years ago, is onboard as a different villain this time. Much the way THE ROAD WARRIOR blazed trails in the action genre, so does FURY ROAD, with the now-70-year-old Miller unveiling what's likely the best action movie in a generation, effectively showing an entire demographic weaned on CGI and video games and hyper, incoherent, shaky-cam editing how it should be done. Much was made of FURY ROAD's reliance on practical effects and old-school stunt work, though it obviously utilizes CGI to a certain degree. Yes, a couple of shots look a little on the cartoony side, but the other 98% of the time, Miller uses CGI how it should be used: as an enhancement as opposed to a crutch. Even by the standards he set 34 years ago with THE ROAD WARRIOR, the veteran filmmaker outdoes himself with MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, proof positive that underneath his soft-spoken, milquetoast exterior, George Miller is a fucking madman perpetually straddling the fine line between genius and insanity.

Hardy's Max Rockatansky is introduced being abducted by the War Boys, the albino-like minions of wasteland despot Immortan Joe (Keays-Byrne), who sports a plastic casing over his boil-ravaged body and a breathing apparatus permanently attached to his face. Max is kept prisoner as the human blood bag of Nux (Nicholas Hoult), a sickly War Boy who needs frequent transfusions. Immortan Joe is viewed as a deity by his followers, who are kept in line by a very conservatively doled-out water supply and promises of being carried into Valhalla. Not everyone is happy under his rule, particularly one-armed War Rig driver Imperator Furiosa (a terrific Charlize Theron), a buzz-cut, battle-scarred warrior in charge of getting a supply of "guzzoline" from nearby Gastown. Instead, she's stowed away Immortan Joe's five young wives--the very pregnant Splendid Angharad (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley), Toast the Knowing (Zoe Kravitz), Capable (Riley Keough), The Dag (Abbey Lee), and Cheedo the Fragile (Courtney Eaton), all enslaved and kept under lock and key for breeding and sexual purposes--with the intent of taking them to their freedom to a mythical promised land known as "The Green Place." Once Immortan Joe realizes they've gone off the road to Gastown, he and his hulking son Rictus Erectus (Nathan Jones) unleash an army of warriors and War Boys for what's essentially a feature-length, extended chase sequence with a couple of breaks for character development. Max begins the pursuit chained to the front of Nux's car, intravenously connected to him until an epic dust storm separates them from the rest of Immortan Joe's forces and Max forms an unholy alliance with Furiosa. Dialogue is relatively minimal, often with nods or facial expressions often speaking volumes (note Max's only smile--a half-hearted one at that--and the exhausted thumbs-up he gives The Splendid Angharad when she steps up and disposes of a War Boy), and there's little in the way of subtlety: when Max asks Furiosa what she's after, the answer is "Redemption." Well, duh.

But that's not the main concern with FURY ROAD. Miller has fashioned this as a jawdropping epic, with himself the conductor of a batshit symphony of destruction. With a $150 million budget, Warner Bros. has given Miller an astounding amount of leeway in the creation of his latest masterpiece. Filmed in the summer and fall of 2012 in the Namib Desert and Namibia, with other shooting in South Africa and Australia, with some additional reshoots and second-unit work in November 2013, Miller took a Kubrickian amount of time getting FURY ROAD just right, from the action choreography to the vehicles and the costumes to the locations and the production design. I've never seen a film with so many credited assistant directors, assistant editors, and stunt personnel. From the car wrecks to the stunt professionals being hurled through the air or pole-vaulting onto big rigs barreling through the Namib Desert at high speeds, or the flashy Doof Warrior (iOTA), who heads into battle perched atop a War Rig with a flamethrowing double-necked guitar backed by a wall of amps and eight drummers on the trailer behind, MAD MAX: FURY ROAD presents bombastic, skullcrushing action as a work of lunatic art. Describing it not only risks spoiling it, but it in no way does it justice. You've seen films like this before--you just haven't seen them done this way before. Miller, his co-writers Brendan McCarthy and Nico Lathouris, Oscar-winning cinematographer John Seale, and all the technical personnel have achieved a new benchmark in action cinema, and a blistering example of just how placated we've become with what passes for such in most of today's big movies. Miller has bestowed MAD MAX: FURY ROAD on the moviegoing public to remind us of the possibilities and to save the Big Summer Movie from itself. It can be done, because Miller and his cast and crew did it. People still remember the formative experience of seeing THE ROAD WARRIOR for the first time. That's how you'll feel leaving the theater after MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. Can you remember the last time you felt that way? The term "game-changer" gets tossed around a little too liberally these days, but believe the hype. This is the new standard-bearer.

Note: standard, 2D version reviewed

TWO MEN IN TOWN
(US/France/Algeria/Belgium - 2014; US release 2015)

A low-key, deliberately-paced character piece, TWO MEN IN TOWN is a remake of a 1973 French film by Jose Giovanni, with Alain Delon as an ex-con trying to stay straight with the help of an elderly social worker (the legendary Jean Gabin in one of his last films) and a new girlfriend (Mimsy Farmer). He finds this difficult thanks to a variety of obstacles, chief among them an angry cop (Michel Bouquet) with a serious grudge against him, and a former criminal associate (a young Gerard Depardieu) who keeps trying to pull him back into his old life. This new version, directed and co-written by French filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb (DAYS OF GLORY, OUTSIDE THE LAW), moves the story from France to the sparsely-populated southern-most area of New Mexico, right along the US/Mexico border. Paroled after serving 18 years of a 21-year sentence for killing a deputy sheriff, William Garnett (Forest Whitaker) has a dark past as a vicious criminal and a drug dealer, but has found peace while incarcerated. He's converted to Islam, is devoutly religious, he's taught himself to read and earned his GED, and worked as a tutor and counselor to his fellow inmates. A model prisoner who has fought his demons and wants nothing more than to start his life over and get it right, Garnett gets some support from his sympathetic parole officer Emily Smith (Brenda Blethyn), gets a minimum wage job at a cattle farm, and starts dating nice bank teller Teresa (Dolores Heredia). But flashes of the old Garnett occasionally pop up, whether he arrives home from work to find Emily inspecting his room at a local halfway house, or smashing his neighbor's TV when he won't turn the volume down. His temper is egged on by big-shot, five-term sheriff Bill Agati (Harvey Keitel), who shows legitimate concern over a local vigilante group's unlawful treatment of illegals crossing the border, but extends no such goodwill toward Garnett. It was Agati's deputy that Garnett murdered, and he has no intention of letting him off the hook. Agati follows Garnett, harasses him while he's having dinner at a restaurant, shows up at Teresa's house to embarrass him, has him held overnight for a speeding violation, and even goes so far as to bully Garnett's boss into firing him. On top of that, Garnett's old criminal cohort Terrance (Luis Guzman) keeps turning up, endlessly hounding and threatening him about picking up where they left off and, like Ben Kingsley in SEXY BEAST, refuses to take no for an answer. With no one but Teresa and his parole officer allowing him to lead the quiet life he wants to lead, it's only a matter of time before Garnett explodes.

Anchored by a Ry Cooder-esque score by Eric Neveux, TWO MEN IN TOWN often has a PARIS, TEXAS-era Wim Wenders feel to it. Like Wenders, Bouchareb is a European filmmaker who manages to convey a unique view of the American Southwest. The cinematography by Yves Cape (HOLY MOTORS) effectively captures the sun-drenched surroundings and the desert highways that Europeans seem to have a special knack for achieving, because as outsiders, Bouchareb and Cape see the unique things that Americans in their positions might miss. This environment is nothing new to Bouchareb, who has an affinity for the region, having shot 2012's JUST LIKE A WOMAN in New Mexico as well, plus he produced Bruno Dumont's 2003 cult film TWENTYNINE PALMS, a desert road trip slow-burner shot in the title city and in Joshua Tree. A lean and intense Whitaker, who's been dismayingly terrible in pretty much everything he's done for the last several years, turns in his best performance in a long while as the tightly-wound Garnett. Keitel does some fine work as Agati, who, despite his early concern for some illegals before turning them over to the border patrol, is every bit the asshole that you expect an apparent sheriff-for-life in a small town in the middle of nowhere to be. Ellen Burstyn turns up for one very well-played scene as Garnett's adoptive mother, who couldn't bring herself to visit him even once while he was in prison. Blethyn seems miscast, and her performance is uneven, as the folksy tone of her line delivery seems more to mask her British accent than to convey the down-home, tell-it-like-is sass of her character. The conclusion leaves a little to be desired, and Bouchareb has no idea what to do with Keitel's character, instead turning the primary antagonist role over to Guzman while Keitel basically disappears from the film. Still, it's an interesting drama that flopped in Europe and only managed a VOD and scant US theatrical release here over a year after it played the Berlin Film Festival. It's flawed, but worth seeing for fans of Keitel and Whitaker, who hasn't been this good since his Oscar-winning turn in 2006's THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND. (R, 117 mins)

EXTRATERRESTRIAL
(Canada - 2014)

Though the generically-titled EXTRATERRESTRIAL is not intended to be a remake of the 2011 Spanish film by Nacho Vigalondo, they do share the idea of a couple's relationship issues being put on the backburner by a sudden alien invasion. That wouldn't be the only derivative element of the latest film from the GRAVE ENCOUNTERS team of Colin Minihan and Stuart Ortiz, who work under the name The Vicious Brothers. Their EXTRATERRESTRIAL is more concerned with being a blatant ripoff of THE CABIN IN THE WOODS, with five archetypes--brain, nice guy, dude-bro, stoner, and blonde ditz--only here, they encounter UFOs and not-very-friendly aliens. April (Brittany Allen) is planning on a weekend at her parents' cabin with boyfriend Kyle (Freddie Stroma), but it turns into a blowout party when he invites their friends Seth (Jesse Moss as the dude-bro), Melanie (Melanie Papalia as the stoner), and Lex (Anja Savcic as the blonde ditz). April's rejection of Kyle's sudden proposal sours the weekend, but things go from bad to worse when a UFO crash-lands in the woods. Grabbing her dad's shotgun, April blasts one of the E.T.s, which doesn't bode well with its alien friends.

Diverting but not nearly as clever as it thinks it is, EXTRATERRESTRIAL doesn't really get the whole "meta" thing down like CABIN IN THE WOODS did. Like CABIN, it also has unseen puppet masters secretly calling the shots, in this case it's exposition supplied by Travis (Michael Ironside), a pot-growing, conspiracy-theorist Vietnam vet who lives in a nearby cabin. He knows what's the alien visitors have been up to in the woods and tells April and the others of a secret treaty between the US government and the aliens that dates back to Roswell: the government agrees to leave the aliens to go about their business of abducting yokels if they do so quietly and in limited numbers so as not to draw attention. In exchange, as Travis puts it, "We get to keep acting like we're running things down here." It's an interesting concept that gets a lot of mileage out of a terrific performance by Ironside, but the Vicious Brothers err in taking him out of the film far too early. Gil Bellows is also very well cast in a haggard, beaten-down-by-life way as the beer-gutted sheriff who hasn't been able to get past his wife's disappearance a decade earlier, and when these kids start talking about UFOs and aliens, coupled with a shell-shocked local mom (GINGER SNAPS' Emily Perkins) telling the same story where her husband and son were taken away, he starts seeing an explanation for what happened to her. EXTRATERRESTRIAL opens strong and for a while, it has the feel of an old-school '80s crowd-pleaser, but with its two major assets--Ironside and Bellows--not getting enough screen time, we're left with mostly uninteresting leads (Allen is a strong, appealing heroine, but the rest range from forgettable to, in Moss' case, excruciating). Connoisseurs of alien invasion films may enjoy what's easily cinema's nastiest anal probe scene, but there's little consistency: if the aliens can establish a psychic link strong enough to force one character to blow his own head off, then why can't they find Perkins' character, who's hiding in plain sight? And if the aliens are supposed to be keeping things on the down-low, why are they spending so much time and abducting so many people in this neck of the woods? The film really stumbles with an overdone, maudlin finale that leads to a downbeat NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD ending that it doesn't earn, instead coming off as unnecessarily mean-spirited. Though it's rather unrestrained in its CABIN IN THE WOODS worship, there's a good film desperately trying to break out of the merely average EXTRATERRESTRIAL. As far as recent alien invasion pics go, it's at least preferable to the Milla Jovovich con job THE FOURTH KIND and the unwatchable SKYLINE, one of the worst major-studio releases in years. (Unrated, 101 mins)

MORTDECAI
(US - 2015)

After a string of misfires that saw former actor Johnny Depp's stock plummet with fans (THE RUM DIARY, DARK SHADOWS, THE LONE RANGER, TRANSCENDENCE, and his incognito supporting role in Kevin Smith's pathetic TUSK), it seems as if the world put its foot down with MORTDECAI. After at least two months of the most relentlessly pushy ad campaign in recent memory, moviegoers actively revolted and let it bomb hard in theaters. On its own terms, it could've been an amusing throwback to double entendre-filled '60s comedies, like something Peter Sellers might've made around the time of THE PINK PANTHER, WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT? or AFTER THE FOX. But the world made it known that it's clearly sick of Depp's constant crutches of pancake makeup and whimsical vocal affectations, and seeing him in the MORTDECAI trailers with a waxed mustache and a forced British accent trading randy and sassy quips with Goop publisher and vagina-steaming advocate Gwyneth Paltrow was where everyone drew the line, took a stand, and emphatically declared "No more!" The $60 million MORTDECAI, based on a series of 1970s comic adventure novels by Kyril Bonfiglioli, grossed just $8 million in the US and took a beating from critics, making it a safe bet that this won't become another PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN franchise for Depp. The wasteful budgets of today's movies often border on criminal, but it seems especially offensive here. Other than paying a bunch of big names to jerk themselves off (Depp got paid $10 million), nothing here warrants pissing away $60 million. Think what $60 million could've done for people in need. Who the fuck needed MORTDECAI?

An appalling, obnoxious vanity project for star/producer Depp, MORTDECAI is every bit as awful as you've heard, which is tragic because there's a surplus of squandered talent. This is a film with an alarming contempt for its audience. It's obvious the actors are having a much better time than the viewer and you soon realize you're paying to attend a party where you're deliberately being excluded from the fun. Eccentric, jet-setting--and broke--British art dealer Lord Charlie Mortdecai (Depp) gets roped into a plot by his friend and M.I.5 agent Martland (Ewan McGregor) to recover a rare stolen Goya painting. So begins a globetrotting adventure that finds Mortdecai and his faithful, hulking manservant Jock (Paul Bettany) tangling with Russian mobsters, vacuous Californians, and the nympho daughter (Olivia Munn) of a shady L.A. art figure (Jeff Goldblum, cast radically against type as "Jeff Goldblum"). Meanwhile, Mortdecai's wife Johanna (Paltrow) also gets pulled into the pursuit of the Goya, providing Martland with an opportunity to steal her away from Mortdecai, which he's been trying to do since their college days. There's very little in the way of comedy in the script by Eric Aronson, whose lone previous writing credit is the 2001 Lance Bass/Joey Fatone vehicle ON THE LINE. It's too bad director David Koepp, a veteran screenwriter whose credits include JURASSIC PARK, CARLITO'S WAY, and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, didn't write it as well--perhaps he could've brought something to the table other than Aronson, whose approach seems to have been scribbling "Johnny Depp, British accent, mustache" on a piece of scrap paper, crossing his fingers, and hoping everything would work itself out. As it is, MORTDECAI's idea of comedy is Depp's overdone accent and the fact that he has a mustache and his character is a pompous dolt who still calls America "The Colonies." That's it. Every joke is based on one or a combination of those things. There's one legitimate AUSTIN POWERS-style laugh--Mortdecai at a men's room urinal as a Russian gangster grabs him from behind, injecting a sedative into his neck as Mortdecai quips "Oh! I've read about this!"--and that's it. There's nothing here. One of the emptiest films of the year, MORTDECAI is what happens when a movie star is too rich and out of touch for anyone to tell him no. Depp hasn't tried in years because he doesn't have to, so he enjoys another fat payday, amusing himself by mugging shamelessly with a wacky accent and a fake mustache. Well, I guess that means at least one person found MORTDECAI amusing. (R, 107 mins)

THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MISS OSBOURNE
aka DR. JEKYLL AND HIS WOMEN
(France/West Germany - 1981)

Written and directed by Walerian Borowczyk. Cast: Udo Kier, Marina Pierro, Patrick Magee, Gerard Zalcberg, Howard Vernon, Clement Harari, Giselle Preville, Jean Mylonas, Eugene Braun Munk, Louis Michel Colla, Catherine Coste. (Unrated, 91 mins)

Walerian Borowczyk (1923-2006) was a Polish filmmaker who worked primarily in France after settling there in 1959. Though generally lumped in with mavericks like Jess Franco and Jean Rollin, directors who constantly straddled the line between art and smut, Borowczyk was more of a renaissance man, an artist and filmmaker who dabbled in everything from lithograph art to short animated works to the avant garde as a young man, tallying up many film festival awards throughout the 1960s. He collaborated with famed LA JETEE director Chris Marker and, like Marker, was an influence on Terry Gilliam. Borowczyk moved into feature films in the 1970s, earning a Palme d'Or nomination at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival for THE STORY OF SIN, but for decades, he was best known for IMMORAL TALES (1974), with its famous Elizabeth Bathory segment, and THE BEAST (1975), films that mixed horror with softcore porn that became so popular in the wake of Just Jaeckin's EMMANUELLE (1974). Subsequent films like THE STREETWALKER (1976), with EMMANUELLE star Sylvia Kristel and the nunsploitation BEHIND CONVENT WALLS (1978) pretty much cemented his reputation as a purveyor of high-end Eurotrash. Like Rollin and Franco, Borowczyk was capable of making films of serious artistic value, but often let his love of naked women take precedence. Lured by producer Alain Siritzky to the ill-fated EMMANUELLE 5 in 1987, with American actress Monique Gabrielle stepping in for the absent Kristel. Borowczyk's cut was released in France, but he would see the film completely gutted for the US market when it was acquired years later by Roger Corman, who dumped a good chunk of Borowczyk's footage and had HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD II director and regular Concorde/New Horizons post-production supervisor Steve Barnett shoot new sex scenes and decidedly un-EMMANUELLE action sequences with Gabrielle. Barnett's Corman-mandated changes essentially turned Borowczyk's erotic European art film into an Andy Sidaris knockoff that went straight to VHS in 1992. True to form for these guys in the late '80s, Borowczyk contemporary Rollin ended up directing some of the equally doomed EMMANUELLE 6 in 1988 (also released by Corman in the US in 1992), with the franchise becoming so hopelessly lost that by the time Kristel returned in 1993, the next in the series was redundantly titled EMMANUELLE VI. Borowczyk finished his big screen career with 1987's LOVE RITES and from 1986 to 1991, helmed several episodes of the erotic French TV series SOFTLY FROM PARIS before retiring from directing.

Though he's best known for IMMORAL TALES and THE BEAST, one Borowczyk film that's gained significant traction over the years is his perversely transgressive 1981 masterpiece DR JEKYLL ET LES FEMMES, better known as DR. JEKYLL AND HIS WOMEN (and also BLOOD OF DR. JEKYLL and BLOODLUST). The FEMMES title was imposed on Borowczyk by the producers, but the film is just out on Blu-ray from Arrow under the director's preferred title THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MISS OSBOURNE. Borowczyk's take on Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is one of the most unusual horror films of the 1980s and certainly one of cinema's most misanthropic screeds, with an aggressive electronic score by Bernard Parmegiani that's genuinely unsettling. The set-up owes as much to Agatha Christie as it does to Stevenson, and after a slow and tense build, Borowczyk steers it into some incredibly dark places, offering sights that, once seen, can never be unseen. Set over the course of one doomed night, the film takes place at the mansion of Dr. Henry Jekyll (Udo Kier) during his engagement party to Miss Fanny Osbourne (Marina Pierro). While guests--among them renowned Dr. Lanyard (Franco regular Howard Vernon), the Reverend Donald Regan Guest (Clement Harari), and the eccentric military legend General William Danvers Carew (the great Patrick Magee in his last film before his death in 1982)--pretentiously pontificate and bloviate on proper Victorian matters of high society and self-aggrandizement, they're picked off one by one by a ranting, sexually voracious madman calling himself Mr. Hyde (Gerard Zalcberg).

Hyde usually violates his victims--both female and male--with his incredibly large organ ("The sex of the criminal was extremely long and pointed, wasn't it?" a guest asks after finding a victim penetrated so deeply that the abdomen was ripped apart), with Zalcberg's stunt cock given several close-ups by Borowczyk in a couple of scenes that dangerously flirt with crossing over into hardcore porn, and no one really pieces together that Hyde only appears after Jekyll excuses himself and goes into his laboratory. In the lab, he has a bath filled with a secret potion called Solicor, which allows him to shed his proper Victorian image and become the raging id that lurks beneath. Once transformed into Hyde, he obliterates the facade of Victorian societal decorum, dismantling it one horrifying assault at a time as he annihilates cherished institutions like the military, the clergy, medicine, and family. He ties up the tough-talking Carew (one of Magee's most insane performances in a career filled with them) and forces him to watch as he has his way with the General's rebellious, willing, and sexually adventurous daughter as she's bent over a table, fondling and stroking the world's most phallic sewing machine. He rapes one of the male guests after pursuing him through the darkened house. Eventually, he even rapes his own mother (Giselle Preville, the 1935 Miss France runner-up who inherited the crown when the winner gave it up after just two hours), shouting "I'm going to break you in two, decrepit hag!" Fanny finds out his secret, and rather than being terrified, she's intrigued and even turned on, jumping into the Solicor bath with him, transforming into her own Hyde as the two commandeer a coach and ride off in the night, their dead guests' bodies strewn about the mansion as Parmegiani's score drones and on and on and on.

The second-best profoundly unnerving 1981 French/West German horror film by a Polish emigre (after Andrzej Zulawski's POSSESSION), THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MISS OSBOURNE was released in France and other parts of Europe in 1981 and had an unsuccessful one-week run in the UK in 1984. Critics had mixed reactions, and few moviegoers saw it, but those who did never forgot it. It never received a theatrical or video release in the US (it did appear in Canadian video stores under the BLOODLUST title), though it was a mainstay on the bootleg circuit and eventually, crummy (and usually edited) prints could easily be found on YouTube. Arrow's new Blu-ray/DVD combo set marks the first official, authorized release of the film on home video in the US, and it's a package that practically outdoes Criterion in terms of the superior digital restoration and the copious extras. After years of watching blurry, cropped versions of the film, fans will be surprised at what they see and hear on Arrow's set, which will undoubtedly stand as the definitive version of what's become Borowczyk's signature work. It's a film that encompasses all of the filmmaker's sexual, political, and social obsessions, and it's shot on ornate sets with an at-times BARRY LYNDON-like use of natural or very dim lighting that emphasizes the disorientation and terror of the proceedings. Borowczyk makes excellent use of shadows and mirrors, the latter being the perfect metaphor for the duality of Jekyll and Hyde, Fanny and her murderous alter ego, and the perfect Victorian exterior masking the ugly hypocrisy underneath.

Luis Bunuel was a major influence on Borowczyk when he turned to feature filmmaking, and it's been pointed out by others and bears mentioning here how much of a debt STRANGE CASE owes to the Bunuel classics THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962), with its guests physically unable to leave a dinner party, and THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (1977), with the female lead alternately played by two different actresses (Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina), sometimes in the same scene. Taking on the role of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has always been regarded as a tour-de-force for any actor who's essayed the role, like John Barrymore in 1920, Spencer Tracy in 1941, Christopher Lee as "Dr. Marlowe and Mr. Blake" in 1971's I, MONSTER, and even Anthony Perkins in 1989's tawdry EDGE OF SANITY, which worked in the Jack the Ripper mythos as a freebasing Jekyll became a serial-killing, compulsively-masturbating Mr. Hyde. Fredric March even won the Best Actor Oscar for MGM's 1932 take on the famous story. It wasn't often that you'd see guys like Barrymore, March and Tracy in a horror movie, and the whole point of a serious actor taking on the role was to show their range. Borowczyk goes in the opposite direction in an obvious nod to Bunuel, casting one actor to play Jekyll and another to play Hyde. This had been done before--out of necessity with Ralph Bates and Martine Beswicke in 1971's DR. JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE--but in the context of Borowczyk's take on the story, the dual casting works perfectly, even if it deprives us of just how interesting Kier as Mr. Hyde might've been. With his shaved eyebrows and dead glare, Zalcberg, best known to Eurotrash fans as Helmut Berger's hulking, drill-killing henchman in Jess Franco's FACELESS, is terrifying as Hyde, even if he's saddled with some of Borowczyk's prose that's often more purple than Hyde's engorged penis. If Borowczyk makes one mistake with STRANGE CASE, it's overstating the message and not trusting the audience to put it together. Jekyll/Hyde's appalling offenses, his shredding of societal convention, his exposing of upper-class hypocrisy, and his unleashing the beast within are apparent enough without him haughtily sneering "Like a schoolboy shedding the tawdry rags of his dreary institution, I throw off pretense, and leap, wallowing in an ocean of freedom and pleasure!" in a dubbed voice that sounds like Bill Corbett's later version of Crow T. Robot on MST3K, undermining Hyde's horrific actions by making him sound like a verbose brat in desperate need of a time-out.

Going with the French audio probably gives the film a touch of class that's lacking in the rather clumsy English dub (which only has Magee voicing his own performance; Kier's actual voice isn't heard on either track), and like its themes, it only further illustrates the sense of duality that permeates THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MISS OSBOURNE: it's an art film with one foot in the grindhouse, simultaneously serious and trashy, classy and graphic, legitimately erotic and then straight-up uncomfortable. Like Jekyll and Hyde, STRANGE CASE is constantly two things at once, with incredibly effective and often stunning visuals juxtaposed with vile sexual violence. It shares a kinship with the best of Jean Rollin and maybe, on his best day, Jess Franco, though Franco wouldn't have been able to resist the urge for constant crotch zooms and would've have paid attention to the particulars, like having the camera pointed in the right direction. It's a strange, bewildering, beautiful, and shocking piece of work with haunting images that stay with you long after it's over.

CYMBELINE
(US - 2015)

Outside of Ralph Fiennes' powerful and little-seen 2011 directorial debut CORIOLANUS, I've never been a big fan of putting Shakespeare in a modern setting while keeping the actual text of the play. It almost always comes off as a gimmick whose novelty wears off by the 15-minute mark. Michael Almereyda's NYC-set HAMLET (2000) is usually cited as the best of its type, but other than Ethan Hawke doing the "To be or not to be..."soliloquy while browsing the aisles of a Blockbuster Video, do you remember anything about it? Almereyda and Hawke are back with a modern take on Cymbeline, a late Shakespeare romance first performed five years before Shakespeare's death. It's one of his least-known works, sporadically dragged out of storage but rarely studied and enjoyed by few other than the most ardent completists. There was a BBC television production of it in 1982, with Richard Johnson, Claire Bloom, and Helen Mirren, but CYMBELINE marks the first big-screen take on the play, with Almereyda centering the action on the New York-based Briton Motorcycle Club, led by King Cymbeline (Ed Harris). Cymbeline has a lot on his plate with the Queen (Milla Jovovich), his power-crazed, status-obsessed second wife, who plans on shifting the balance of power in her favor by arranging the marriage of Cloten (Anton Yelchin), her son by her late first husband, to Imogen (FIFTY SHADES OF GREY's Dakota Johnson), Cymbeline's daughter. But Imogen is in love with another, the lower-class skateboarder Posthumus (Penn Badgley). After Posthumus is run out of the city by Cymbeline, he stays with his friend Philario (James Ransone), where he makes the acquaintance of the duplicitous Iachimo (Hawke). After listening to Posthumus talk of his love for the virginal Imogen and how she'll remain true to him until they can be together, Iachimo wagers that he can seduce her. When she rejects his advances, Iachimo hides in her room until she's asleep and falsifies evidence of a conquest that never took place. This sets off a chain reaction of misunderstandings and chaos involving the central players, along with Cymbeline's right-hand man Pisanio (John Leguizamo), banished nobleman Belarius (Delroy Lindo), the ghost of Posthumus' father Sicilius Leonatus (Bill Pullman), the Rome police force, led by the corrupt Caius Lucius (Vondie Curtis-Hall), plus a magical potion that makes its sleeping user appear dead, and Imogen disguising herself as a young man named "Fidele."

Even in its original form, with its scheming Queen, sleeping potion, Imogen disguised as a boy, and the appearance of a patriarchal poltergeist, Cymbeline probably felt like a stale, self-parodying retread from a coasting Bard in its day, and at no point does CYMBELINE work. Despite a detailed opening crawl that tries to explain what's going on, the film is almost impossible to follow and that isn't helped by the lugubrious pacing (this is one of the longest 98-minute movies you'll ever see). The Shakespeare-speech-in-a-modern-setting gets old in record time, especially with Johnson's absolutely dreadful performance as Imogen. She's terrible here, giving Shakespeare a Millennial, vocal-fry spin with a generous helping of can't even that was always sorely lacking in the cinematic takes of Laurence Olivier and Orson Welles. Johnson and Badgley get the most screen time, with top-billed Hawke turning up in a handful of scenes that amount to little more than an extended cameo. Jovovich's role is even smaller and Harris, in an ostensibly nice nod to his early breakthrough in George Romero's 1981 classic KNIGHTRIDERS, never looks or sounds comfortable. The direct-from-Shakespeare dialogue aside, another reason CYMBELINE doesn't work as a Shakespearean biker movie is because it feels like too much of a retread of the TV series SONS OF ANARCHY. During its run on FX, SONS creator Kurt Sutter made no secret of the Shakespearean themes running through the show and its characters, particularly Charlie Hunnam's Hamlet-like Jax and Katey Sagal's very Gertrude-inspired Gemma. So, for Almereyda to take a Shakespeare play, regardless of how obscure it might be, and work in a criminal motorcycle gang has to make you wonder what he was thinking. Had he heard of the show? Does he have basic cable, Hulu, or Netflix? What was Lionsgate thinking when they retitled the film ANARCHY and unveiled a trailer for it before yanking it and changing it back to CYMBELINE? The problem here is that Almereyda updates the setting but that's all he does. Fiennes made CORIOLANUS work by making its themes relevant to today's global political climate. By contrast, Almereyda has nothing to say about anything with CYMBELINE, so we're left with hacky plot bits like Iachimo taking a selfie with a sleeping, scantily-clad Imogen or Cloten getting on his laptop to do a Google search. (R, 98 mins)

HOT TUB TIME MACHINE 2
(US - 2015)

Capitulating to the demands of no one, the painful HOT TUB TIME MACHINE 2 somehow arrived in the nation's multiplexes only to promptly tank, likely due to nobody even remembering the first one from way back in 2010. How did this even get in theaters in the first place? Five years on, it seems like one of those belated sequels that would've gone straight-to-DVD, like all those later AMERICAN PIE spinoffs with only Eugene Levy still showing up to get paid and the spotlight given to a Seann William Scott lookalike as Stifler's cousin. Maybe it got into theaters because 3/4 of the original HOT TUB TIME MACHINE lineup is back, though it's not an understatement to say that John Cusack skipping out on this is the best career decision he's made in years (he apparently shot a cameo that didn't make the theatrical cut but turns up at the end of the unrated Blu-ray version). This time out, Lou (Rob Corddry), who's used the powers of time travel to become a rock god who invented the search engine "Lougle," gets shot in the balls by an unseen and vengeful assailant, prompting him, son Jacob (Clark Duke) and buddy Nick (Craig Robinson) to travel to an alternate timeline to find out who tries to kill him. In the future, they're also joined by Adam (Adam Scott), the son of Cusack's character. From the start, it's dick jokes, lazy '90s nostalgia, bodily functions, dick jokes, a grating Corddry mugging shamelessly, dick jokes, puking, gay sex jokes, dick jokes, a game show where Nick has to fuck Adam in the ass, dick jokes, a tired-looking Chevy Chase, dick jokes, Christian Slater as the game-show host, dick jokes, and dick jokes. None of the gags here are funny and maybe two even flirt with being semi-remotely amusing. HOT TUB TIME MACHINE wasn't exactly on its way to the Criterion Collection, but it fell into the "dumb but fun" category. This, on the other hand, is as obnoxious and unfunny a comedy as you're likely to see. HOT TUB TIME MACHINE 2--"Un Film de Steve Pink," according to the credits--mistakes being loud and yelling "fuck" a lot for comedy and gives its flop-sweating stars--who have been funny in other things, like the original HOT TUB TIME MACHINE, for example--nothing to work with, and it's somehow even less entertaining than MORTDECAI, presumed to be the standard-bearer for terrible comedy in 2015. At least MORTDECAI had one legitimate laugh. That's one more than HOT TUB TIME MACHINE 2 offers. (R, 93 mins)

THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE 3 (FINAL SEQUENCE)
(Netherlands - 2015)

Written and directed by Tom Six. Cast: Dieter Laser, Laurence R. Harvey, Eric Roberts, Robert LaSardo, Tommy "Tiny" Lister, Clayton Rohner, Bree Olson, Tom Six, Jay Tavare, Akihiro Kitamura, Bill Hutchens, Carlos Ramirez, Peter Blankenstein. (Unrated, 103 mins)

When it was released in 2010, Tom Six's "100% Medically Accurate" THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE became a legitimate pop culture phenomenon. The saga of a mad doctor (Dieter Laser, still one of the greatest names ever) surgically connecting three unfortunate victims mouth-to-anus to form a "human centipede" with a one shared digestive tract was original, to say the least. Late night talk show hosts cracked jokes about it and it didn't even take long for it to be brilliantly parodied on SOUTH PARK. Taken on its own terms, it's a ridiculous yet reasonably effective film that's significantly less graphic than you think, with a genuinely creepy performance by Laser, who does go over the top on occasion, but deservedly enjoyed a very brief run as a horror icon. Six quickly followed it up with 2011's dismal THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE 2 (FULL SEQUENCE), a grimy, ugly sequel, shot in black and white, where a socially inept, British HUMAN CENTIPEDE superfan (Laurence R. Harvey) kidnaps a dozen people to form a crude, surgically unskilled 12-person human centipede which includes one of the first film's stars, Ashlyn Yennie, playing herself, coerced into showing up in London after Harvey pretends to be Quentin Tarantino calling her to set up an audition. The sequel was Six's response to the first film's naysayers, many of whom condemned the film without even seeing it, based just on its concept and what they figured it depicted. With the sequel, Six went completely overboard, wallowing in the scatological and showing all of the shit, piss, puke, phlegm, and other bodily functions (plus the squashing of a baby's head) that were missing from the comparatively tactful first entry. Whatever sense of class Six brought to THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE was thoroughly obliterated by FULL SEQUENCE, which was essentially a feature-length tantrum. It's so bad that it retroactively worsens its predecessor.

So what then, does one make of THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE 3 (FINAL SEQUENCE), the conclusion of Six's coprophilic trilogy? By the time the repugnant FULL SEQUENCE ended, the only thing that seemed to be left for Six to do was go door-to-door to shit in your mouth. There's nowhere for him to go except to crank up the shock and outrage factor, so now he's the equivalent of an online troll, throwing one offense after another at the audience to get a reaction from a film that boasts "100% Politically Incorrect." Set at the George H.W. Bush State Prison in Texas, FINAL SEQUENCE has sadistic warden Bill Boss (a chrome-domed Laser) and his hapless sidekick Dwight (Harvey with a Hitler mustache) under fire by the Governor (Academy Award nominee Eric Roberts) over the out-of-control prison population, the rampant violence, and the exorbitant costs as they run way over the state budget. Dwight, a fan of both HUMAN CENTIPEDE films, repeatedly fails to convince Boss that a "human-prison centipede" made out of the 500 inmates is the answer. Instead, Boss prefers going medieval, whether it's force-feeding raw pork to Jewish and Muslim inmates, waterboarding one with boiling water, breaking the limbs of another (Tommy "Tiny" Lister) or castrating yet another (Robert LaSardo) in loving close-up before having the testicles prepared medium-rare and brought to his office for lunch. Boss, who snacks on imported deep-fried African clitorises ("Thank God for Africa! Thank God for female circumcision!" he exclaims), forces his secretary/"cock socket" Daisy (former porn star Bree Olson) to sexually service him ("Tits, I need my ballsack emptied before lunch!"), and never holds back when it comes to the racism, finally agrees to the human-prison centipede after Dwight arranges a meeting with Six, appearing as himself. In this massive undertaking, with the forced help of the prison's unlicensed, unemployable doctor (Clayton Rohner), Boss sees his new grand design of inmate suffering via forced shit-eating: "A Jew behind a Muslim, a Muslim behind a Jew, a Crip behind a Blood, a Republican behind a Mexican..."

There are a couple of genuinely funny moments here, and they're at the expense of Six: he seems to know it's patently absurd that he'd be given the fawning celebrity treatment that he gets here, and prior to his arrival, much is made of his "poop fetish." In the film's only really legitimately good joke, Six vomits and flees the prison in horror when he sees the human-prison centipede surgical procedure in progress ("What a pussy," Boss says). But everywhere else is just one missed opportunity after another. Six seems to have the right idea when it comes satirizing himself, but otherwise, he drops the ball. Why have Roberts (who was just in INHERENT VICE a few months ago and looks embarrassed to be in this) play the Governor as basically "Eric Roberts"? Why not have him (or someone else who will do anything for money) play it as a riff on George W. Bush or Rick Perry or someone topical? Six could've made some political jokes here but all the casting of Roberts says is "Eric Roberts said yes, and we could afford him." But without question, the biggest mistake Six makes is doing nothing to reign in Laser, who's been gifted with zero boundaries, engaging in a level of eye-popping, vein-bursting overacting that, with his thick German accent, brings to mind what might've happened if Robin Williams ever went on a talk show and decided to act like Klaus Kinski. Some of Laser's outrageously offensive dialogue might've even played a bit better if he wasn't screaming himself purple in every scene. As a result, his schtick gets old quickly, and the constant racial slurs, degradation of Daisy ("Swallow it, office slut!" he shouts after ejaculating in her mouth), and his endless screaming (often into a megaphone, as if he wasn't already loud enough) have absolutely no entertainment value. Among the many Bill Boss zingers, we have:

"Circumcised Jewish goat-fuckers!"
"Mother-fisting, baby-raping Mexican lowlifes!"
"Pubic-hair-bearded Islamic halal pigs!"
"Beaten-up women make me so horny!" (after Daisy is beaten during a prison riot)
"Even in a coma, I'll make you squirt!" (said as he has sex with a comatose, post-riot Daisy)

And that's not counting the copious N-words (or "monkey" in Boss' more reflective moments) or other puerile shock tactics, whether it's Boss ripping off one inmate's colostomy bag and shooting him in the colon only to cause an eruption of blood and liquid shit, or a nightmare sequence where LaSardo's furious inmate gets revenge for his castration by slicing open Boss' side and raping him in the kidney. Scenes like this go on and on, with Laser's acting abandoning all illusions of characterization and instead coming off as an all-consuming seizure. It's obvious Six fancies himself some provocateur, but he's really just a grosser, ass-to-mouth-fixated Uwe Boll, offering nothing satirical, with his attempts at going meta very sporadically amusing but mostly failing to live up to their potential. So what we're left with is a thoroughly pointless endeavor anchored by one of the most unbearable, headache-inducing lead performances in the history of cinema.

DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS
(US - 2015)

Though his influence is still felt in new films like Justin Simien's DEAR WHITE PEOPLE, in recent years, Spike Lee has done his best work on low-profile documentaries and really only makes mainstream news when he's pissed-off at a geriatric white director. After his remake of OLDBOY was taken away from him and recut by producers only to end up being one of the biggest bombs of 2013, Lee wanted to make a small film with total creative control and turned to Kickstarter to crowdfund his unlikely next narrative effort: a remake of Bill Gunn's 1973 cult horror oddity GANJA & HESS. DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS follows the 1973 film very closely--so closely, in fact, that Gunn, who died in 1989, shares a screenwriting credit with Lee. Like Lee, Gunn was a maverick with experience playing the Hollywood game--he was a veteran TV actor and wrote Hal Ashby's 1970 film THE LANDLORD. GANJA & HESS was supposed to be a low-budget blaxploitation vampire film but Gunn fashioned it as a gritty and challenging art film. It also existed in a more blaxploitative cut called BLOOD COUPLE that Gunn hated, but GANJA & HESS' cult following remains strong over 40 years later, and has even aired on Turner Classic Movies. Lee obviously loves the film, since DA SWEET BLOOD is an almost scene-for-scene tribute, shot in just 16 days and doing its damnedest to emulate the look and feel of Gunn's seminal contribution to African-American cinema. Wealthy anthropologist Dr. Hess Greene (Stephen Tyrone Williams, in a role played by NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD's Duane Jones in the 1973 film) is studying the Ashanti Empire, an ancient African culture for whom the consumption of blood became an addiction. He's stabbed to death with a cursed Ashanti dagger by his suicidal research assistant Lafayette Hightower (Elvis Nolasco). Lafayette succeeds in killing himself and when Hess awakens from the dead the next morning, he not only hides the body but has an insatiable thirst for blood, first stealing packets from a blood donation center and eventually picking up a prostitute, slashing her throat, and consuming her blood (there's a brief AIDS scare for Hess in one of Lee's few attempts at updating the story). Eventually, Lafayette's British ex-wife Ganja (Zaraah Abrahams) arrives at Hess' Martha's Vineyard summer home from Amsterdam, and the two quickly begin a passionate fling as Hess initially tries to keep his need for human blood a secret known only by his devoted, Renfield-like manservant Seneschal (Rami Malek). When Hess and Ganja marry, Hess "turns" her as the couple seek out victims--who always "return" much like they did--starting with Hess' bisexual ex-girlfriend Tangier (Nate Bova).

Like Gunn, Lee uses the need for blood as a metaphor for addiction and the way it destroys the lives of the user and those close to them. But it's not enough for Lee to present vampirism (a word never used in either Gunn's or Lee's film) in a metaphorical sense--he actually has to have Hess say "This is like an addiction!" Lee does everything short of stop the film and break the fourth wall himself to say as much. Lee gets really heavy-handed when Hess reaches an existential breaking point late in the film and goes to a black church (where Thomas Jefferson Byrd and Stephen Henderson reprise their respective Bishop and Deacon roles from the endlessly self-referential Lee's 2012 film RED HOOK SUMMER), where a gospel group is singing a hymn with the not-very subtle lyrics "You've got to learn/To let it go/You've got to know/When it's all over." Lee throws in some lines that pay clumsy lip service to inner-city race and poverty issues, but they exist as ham-fisted bullet points and are quickly dropped. DA SWEET BLOOD is overlong and self-indulgent, but it offers a terrifically moody score by Bruce Hornsby (his opening credits piece is among the best things he's ever done), some impressive original songs by unsigned artists from numerous genres, and has its strong moments as Lee mixes the Brooklyn-based, indie-film aesthetic of his youth (it's hard to believe he's pushing 60) with a bizarre fusion of art film and grindhouse trash. Clearly trying to wash away the bitter aftertaste of OLDBOY, Lee made DA SWEET BLOOD for no one but himself. It's the strangest film of his career and one with absolutely zero commercial potential, but there's an overwhelming feeling of dread throughout and some legitimate poignancy amidst the arthouse posturing as Hess barrels down the road to ruin, dragging everyone along with him. For all its flaws, I still prefer DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS over RED HOOK SUMMER, Lee's last attempt at re-establishing his indie cred, a film that offered a great Clarke Peters performance but little else, starting with Lee himself as a graying, paunchy Mookie from DO THE RIGHT THING, still delivering pizzas for Sal's. (Unrated, 124 mins)

CUT BANK
(US/Canada - 2015)

The Coen Bros. worship is laid on so thick with CUT BANK that it almost qualifies as fan fiction. Veteran TV director Matt Shakman makes his feature filmmaking debut here and among his many credits over the last decade or so were a few episodes from the first season of the FX series FARGO. CUT BANK features Oliver Platt from the FARGO series, plus other actors from past Coen Bros. films, like John Malkovich (BURN AFTER READING) and Michael Stuhlbarg (A SERIOUS MAN), and Billy Bob Thornton has both the FARGO series and a Coen film (THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE) to further cement the connection. CUT BANK centers on a Coen Bros. staple: the kind of stupidly pie-in-the-sky, ostensibly foolproof scheme that's half-assedly planned in maximum Jerry Lundegaard fashion and almost immediately collapses in on itself. In folksy Cut Bank, MT, former high school football star and current townie Dwayne McLaren (Liam Hemsworth) is sick of his dead-end mechanic job and just wants out. He's tired of being the caregiver to his distant and now-bedridden father, and he wants to run off to California with high-school sweetheart Cassandra (Teresa Palmer) and open a body shop. He's talked mute co-worker Match (David Burke) and disgruntled mailman Georgie Witts (Bruce Dern) into going in on a scam with him: while Dwayne is standing in a field filming Cassandra's Miss Cut Bank audition video, a disguised Match will shoot Georgie in the distant background, be captured on video by Dwayne, and the reporting of the murder of a federal employee will net them a $100,000 reward (it should tell you how doomed the plan is when Dwayne thinks $100,000 is "a lifetime sum" and none of them seem to know how to keep up the ruse of Georgie being dead). While Dwayne keeps Georgie in hiding and waits for his reward money from a postal inspector (Platt), soft-spoken Sheriff Vogel (Malkovich) investigates, and Cassandra's father/Dwayne's asshole boss Big Stan (Thornton) quickly figures out that Dwayne is up to something, local stuttering recluse and--red flag!--taxidermy enthusiast Derby Milton (an unrecognizable Stuhlbarg) eagerly awaits a priority mail package that Georgie was supposed to deliver the day of the murder. With the mail truck gone missing, Derby decides to launch his own obsessive investigation and pursuit of his parcel, and that's when the body count starts climbing.

As far as Coen Bros. ripoffs go, CUT BANK is one of the better examples, thanks largely to a great supporting cast comprised of some of the most solid pros in the business. There's quirky dialogue, shocking violence, dark comedy, and vicious twists of fate, but sometimes Shakman and screenwriter Roberto Patino (SONS OF ANARCHY) are a little shameless, not just in the plot but with some of the quirks. Any fan of the FARGO TV series will recognize Burke's Match as a slight resketching of Russell Harvard's deaf assassin Mr. Wrench. And as great as he is with his screen presence and quotable dialogue ("I just want my p-p-parcel" is this film's "Friendo"), Stuhlbarg's Derby is basically what would happen if NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN's Anton Chigurh was played by Milton from OFFICE SPACE. Make no mistake, Stuhlbarg owns CUT BANK and you almost wish he was the central character, even if Hemsworth is marginally less bland than usual. The wrap-up is a little too neat and clean, with Malkovich getting a speech somewhat similar to Tommy Lee Jones' at the end of NO COUNTRY, but as derivative as it is, it moves quickly and entertains. You're still better off watching BLOOD SIMPLE, FARGO, or NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN again, but you can do a lot worse than CUT BANK, and it's a must-see if you're a fan of Stuhlbarg. (R, 93 mins)

SURVIVOR
(US/Italy/UK - 2015)

Directed by James McTeigue. Written by Philip Shelby. Cast: Milla Jovovich, Pierce Brosnan, Dylan McDermott, Angela Bassett, Robert Forster, James D'Arcy, Roger Rees, Benno Furmann, Frances de la Tour, Genevieve O'Reilly, Sonya Cassidy, Alex Beckett. (PG-13, 96 mins)

Ten years ago, SURVIVOR would've opened nationwide--probably in January, April, or early September--and likely been the #1 movie in America, at least for a week. Now, it's in "select theaters" (meaning, maybe ten) and on VOD, with US distributor Alchemy not even bothering to prepare a domestic trailer. Even with the relatively low budget of $20 million, SURVIVOR should look better than it does (obviously, the money went to the cast and little else). It's a brainless but fast-moving B-movie that Cannon cover band Millennium/NuImage didn't feel had the potential to be their next OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN, despite corralling three of its cast members--Dylan McDermott, Angela Bassett, and Robert Forster--in supporting roles, which also begs the question "How is Morgan Freeman not in this?" Set mostly in London but primarily filmed in Bulgaria, SURVIVOR stars Milla Jovovich as Kate Abbott, a top-level security expert at the US Embassy (this is the kind of film that feels the need to accompany a shot of the Thames and the London Eye ferris wheel with the caption "London"). Driven in her job and haunted by memories of being in one of the WTC towers on 9/11, Kate has an almost Spidey Sense when it comes to terror threats and something seems off with Dr. Emil Balan (Roger Rees), who's trying to get a visa to visit the US to attend a pediatrics convention. Balan is really in the employ of wealthy and generically Eastern European terrorist Zafer Pavlou (Benno Furmann), who has a half-assed plot to launch an attack in Times Square on New Year's Eve in order to manipulate the global economy in his favor. Pavlou's found the perfect patsy in Balan, a grieving, vengeful man who blames his death of his ill wife on US customs' hemming and hawing about allowing her a visa to travel to the US for treatment. When Kate's persistent questioning of Balan threatens to derail the operation, Pavlou dispatches The Watchmaker (Pierce Brosnan), one of the world's deadliest and most elusive assassins ("He's had so much reconstructive surgery, nobody knows what he looks like anymore!" says one US Embassy official) to take her out.

The Watchmaker is introduced completing a complicated repair on an expensive watch to show how methodical and precise he is, but of course, he repeatedly fails at killing Kate or there wouldn't be a movie. His initial actions--which include pointlessly blowing up an entire city block where Kate and some co-workers are having dinner, when all he really had to do was sneak up on her and put a bullet in her head--end up inadvertently making Kate the prime suspect in the eyes of the US Ambassador (Bassett) and the angry M.I.5 official on the case (James D'Arcy), but her boss and vague love interest Sam Parker (McDermott) is the only person who believes that she's being set up. Directed by Wachowski protege James McTeigue (V FOR VENDETTA, NINJA ASSASSIN), SURVIVOR is a watchable if unspectacular actioner that seems ready-made for Netflix Instant. It wants to have that sort-of globetrotting BOURNE momentum to its cat-and-mouse, race-against-time plot, but it doesn't have the cash flow to pull it off. Or, perhaps more accurately, it doesn't have the cash flowing to the right departments. Working with a significantly lower budget than he did in his days on the Wachowski payroll, McTeigue can't do much when he's saddled with the likes of the Bulgarian clown crew at Worldwide FX, whose cartoonish CGI histrionics here continue to make one appreciate the relative care and craft of the folks at The Asylum. On top of that, McTeigue and screenwriter Philip Shelby really dumb it down, not trusting their audience with anything. Needless captions are one thing ("Times Square," shown over a stock footage shot of the iconic Coca-Cola sign), but when Kate reflects on losing her friends in the World Trade Center on 9/11, was it necessary for McTeigue to cut to cable news stock footage of the second plane hitting the tower just in case anyone in the audience was unaware of what "9/11" means?

A classic case of "It is what it is," SURVIVOR is chintzy and aggressively dumb, but at least it's never boring. Jovovich is fine, but Brosnan doesn't really do much with the opportunity to dig in and play a ruthless, unstoppable killer. The Watchmaker almost seems like a distant relative to his KGB assassin in John Mackenzie's underrated and little-remembered 1987 espionage thriller THE FOURTH PROTOCOL. Granted an opportunity to play a bad guy right on the heels of his Liam Neeson "aging action guy" bid with last year's minor hit THE NOVEMBER MAN, a slumming Brosnan just looks annoyed. It doesn't help that Shelby's script introduces him as one of the most lethal assassins on the planet but has him continually presented as an incompetent fuck-up. There's some attempt at topical ISIS metaphors--almost certainly accidental--in the way that the US, in their efforts at thwarting terror, only succeeded in creating a terrorist, however hapless, in Dr. Balan. By the climax, which has The Watchmaker and Balan in Times Square trying to detonate a bomb set to go off in the ball as it drops at the stroke of midnight, all that's really left to do is marvel at SURVIVOR's almost adorable attempt to recreate New Year's Eve in Times Square on a Bulgarian backlot, with some stock footage shots inserted into the mix with maximum obviousness. And it gets better, as Kate encounters The Watchmaker on the roof of a nearby building, against a backdrop of what's supposed to be the NYC skyline. Instead, it looks like Jovovich and Brosnan fighting it out on a set against a large screen with the Troma intro on pause. Originally set to star Katharine Heigl and Clive Owen, SURVIVOR doesn't make the best use of its stars, all of whom seem above the Redbox-ready material that feels like a dusted-off and slightly updated script that executive producer Avi Lerner had sitting around from the days when Frank Zagarino was the biggest name he could afford. Even VOD seems too gala a premiere for something like this, and I recommend waiting until the right time and watching it the way it was really meant to be seen: when nothing else is on and you remember you grabbed it months earlier as an impulse buy in the $5 dump bin while waiting in a slow checkout line at Wal-Mart.

BLACK SEA
(US/UK - 2015)

If you're a sucker for claustrophobic submarine white-knucklers, you're gonna love BLACK SEA, a riveting thriller more or less abandoned by Focus, who only rolled it out on 350 screens nationwide in the January dead zone. Directed by Kevin Macdonald (TOUCHING THE VOID, THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND), BLACK SEA is anchored by an arguably career-best performance by a Scottish-brogued Jude Law as Robinson, an embittered ex-Naval sub commander just handed a paltry severance check after 11 years with a salvage company that's decided it no longer requires his services. Tired of soft guys in suits getting rich off the labor of hard men like himself, Robinson gets drawn into a shady plot where he's promised total autonomy by wealthy benefactor Lewis (Tobias Menzies). The job: venture--undetected and off-radar--deep into the Black Sea in Russian waters to extract millions in gold bars from a Nazi sub that sank in 1941--a sub that Robinson's former employers know about but were unable to salvage because of maritime laws and established boundaries. Seeing the secret operation as the perfect way to get back at his old bosses, Robinson assembles a ragtag crew consisting of Brits and Russians who take an immediate dislike to each other, especially with the increasing paranoia about each screwing the other out its share. There's also Tobin (Bobby Schofield), an 18-year-old who Robinson takes under his wing, and Daniels (Scoot McNairy), a sniveling American pencil-pusher and Lewis flunky who seems overly concerned that Robinson has promised every man onboard an equal share of the take. The operation itself is as ramshackle and rickety as the ancient, rustbucket sub that Lewis supplies, and when tensions rise to the point where hotheaded Brit Fraser (Ben Mendelsohn) stabs and kills Blackie (NIGHT WATCH's Konstantin Khabenskiy)--the only Russian who speaks English--which leads to a brawl that causes an explosion, knocking multiple crew members unconscious and costing them the vessel's drive shaft. Tempers reach a boil and rampant mistrust takes over, leaving them stranded in Russian waters, no one knowing they're down there, and Robinson having knocked out the radio in a earlier fit of rage.

Macdonald's handling of the intense sense of claustrophobia is terrific, and one extended sequence where three of the crew obtain the preserved drive shaft of the Nazi sub and try to take it on a precarious ridge back to their own sub while maneuvering the heavy gold with a tow-line that's about to snap--because they only have enough oxygen for one trip to the Nazi sub and back--could almost be a stand-alone short film and a master class in sustaining suspense in a set piece. Macdonald and screenwriter Dennis Kelly owe a tremendous debt to Clouzot's THE WAGES OF FEAR in this sequence and DAS BOOT--the reference point for submarine thrillers--in many others. You could perhaps term BLACK SEA as a DAS SORCERER of sorts. In a gritty performance that channels Sean Connery or Robert Shaw at their surliest, Law has never been better, creating a well-rounded character who's an honest man and a hard worker, driven to support his estranged young son who he regrets throwing on the backburner for his job. He sees his good qualities reflected in Tobin, who's got a baby on the way with a hook-up he barely knows but is on the job because supporting his kid is the right thing to do. But Robinson is also so blinded by rage about losing his job and his sense of self-worth and he's so overcome by his need to stick it to the rich that he's willing to risk the lives of everyone onboard if it means getting the gold. BLACK SEA is the kind of dark, brooding, edge-of-your-seat, manly-man adventure thriller that they just don't make much of anymore. This never would've been a blockbuster, but it definitely could've been a word-of-mouth sleeper hit. (R, 114 mins)

SPRING
(US/Italy - 2015)

The directing team of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (Benson also scripts and Moorhead serves as cinematographer) earned some accolades in cult circles for their 2013 meth withdrawal horror film RESOLUTION, which got them a spot with the helmet-cam "Bonestorm" segment of 2014's unwatchable V/H/S: VIRAL. SPRING finds the duo capturing some lovely imagery throughout Italy in a film that looks much more grand and magnificent than its budget would indicate, and Moorhead engineers some impressive aerial tracking shots going from the city to the sea and back again. While SPRING is a huge technical step forward, Benson's script is on the half-baked side, though they admirably demonstrate some patience in holding back the big reveal that this isn't the kind of movie you think it's going to be. Lou Taylor Pucci, a Next Big Thing in indie circles about a decade ago with THUMBSUCKER, THE CHUMSCRUBBER, FAST FOOD NATION, and SOUTHLAND TALES, stars as Evan Russell, a sullen 20-something who dropped out of college to care for his cancer-stricken mother just a few months after losing his father to a sudden heart attack. Needing to get away after his mom's death to clear his head and because the cops are looking to press assault charges on him after a post-funeral bar fight that costs him his bartending job, Evan impulsively takes off to Italy to decompress. He parties with some British tourists and helps out on a farm run by wise old widower Angelo (Francesco Carnelluti), but soon falls head over heels for Louise (Nadia Hilker) who, putting it mildly, has a secret and is not entirely what she seems to be.

I guess if there had to be a reworking of BEFORE SUNRISE with a heaping helping of the supernatural, evolutionary anomalies, Roman mythology, a splash of Lovecraft and a dash of Andrzej Zulawski's POSSESSION, then SPRING is probably as good as it gets. Benson and Moorhead's decision to use mostly practical effects is a welcome one, and the film works best when it's being enigmatic. Once the big shock reveal happens--and it's a great effects moment--SPRING has nowhere else to go and becomes a gabfest with facile metaphors about fear of commitment and loving someone despite their flaws. It wouldn't take much tweaking to turn it into a ridiculous, SPLASH-inspired mumblecore romantic comedy (just imagine "He's looking for the perfect girl. She's half-octopus and needs human DNA. Sometimes you have to catch love before it slithers away!" on the poster art, with their backs against one another with "Get a load of this one here!" expressions on their faces, his thumb aimed at her and her tentacle aimed at him). SPRING isn't nearly as profound and observational as it thinks it is, but there's no denying that it has a pair of excellent performances from Hilker and Pucci, who's matured into a promising second-string Ryan Gosling. SPRING looks great and serves as a wonderful travelogue of Rome and the surrounding area, but the angst mixed with the horror and the fantasy elements and the banality of the central conceit just never really gel. An interesting idea, but not enough to sustain a nearly two-hour film. (Unrated, 110 mins)

CANNIBAL FEROX
aka MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY
(Italy - 1981; US release 1983)

Written and directed by Umberto Lenzi. Cast: John Morghen (Giovanni Lombardo Radice), Lorraine De Selle, Bryan Redford (Danilo Mattei), Zora Kerova, Robert Kerman, Venantino Venantini, John Bartha, Walter Lloyd (Walter Lucchini), Meg Fleming (Fiamma Maglione), "El Indio" Rincon, Perry Pirkanen, Dominic Raacke, Jake Teague. (Unrated, 93 mins)

The Italian cannibal genre is always a touchy subject. Its origins are in 1962's MONDO CANE and the subsequent mondo documentaries of the 1960s and into the 1970s by Gualtiero Jacopetti & Franco Prosperi and others. There's also the influence of the 1970 Richard Harris hit A MAN CALLED HORSE, which spawned Umberto Lenzi's 1972 Italian ripoff THE MAN FROM DEEP RIVER. In HORSE, Harris is an English aristocrat abducted and treated like an animal by a Sioux tribe until he eventually comes to earn their respect, abandons his privileged upbringing and ultimately becomes the tribe's leader. THE MAN FROM DEEP RIVER took a very similar concept--with Ivan Rassimov as a British wildlife photographer in the jungles of Thailand--but steered it in a Mondo direction that a Hollywood film wouldn't dare venture. THE MAN FROM DEEP RIVER, a fixture in American drive-ins throughout the 1970s under various alternate re-release titles (DEEP RIVER SAVAGES, SACRIFICE!), offered sparse but still graphic depictions of cannibalism, sex and rape involving subgenre mainstay Me Me Lai, and brutal animal killings, and though it's rather tame compared to what would come later, it's almost universally considered the first Italian cannibal film.

While Lenzi is generally credited with creating the Italian cannibal genre, it was Ruggero Deodato who established it as a legitimate craze with 1977's THE LAST CANNIBAL WORLD, released in the US in a cut version in 1978 as THE LAST SURVIVOR, but best known today as JUNGLE HOLOCAUST. A far more graphic riff on THE MAN FROM DEEP RIVER and featuring Rassimov in a supporting role, THE LAST CANNIBAL WORLD stars Massimo Foschi as an oil prospector stranded in Mindanao after a plane crash. He's abducted and humiliated by a cannibal tribe and eventually resorts to cannibalism to earn their respect. Allegedly based on a true story, THE LAST CANNIBAL WORLD raised the bar for what the Italian cannibal genre was willing to depict. Here was the more aggressive barrage of flesh-eating, graphic rape, Foschi and Lai (again as a tribe girl/sex object) completely nude for a good chunk of the film, and on-camera animal slaughter, hands-down the most troubling element of the genre. Sergio Martino hopped on the cannibal bandwagon with 1978's MOUNTAIN OF THE CANNIBAL GOD (released in the US in cut form as SLAVE OF THE CANNIBAL GOD), which got a minor boost in class thanks to the presence of Ursula Andress as a socialite venturing into the jungles of New Guinea to find her missing husband, and Stacy Keach as the experienced guide she hires, traumatized by his own experiences being abducted by a cannibal tribe years earlier. MOUNTAIN's really foul elements, including a monkey obviously being thrown into a snake's mouth, a borderline pornographic cannibal orgy that showcases gratuitous masturbation involving a female cannibal, and one really unpleasant depiction of simulated bestiality with a cannibal and a water buffalo, are mostly confined to the climax, don't directly involve Andress or co-star Claudio Cassinelli, and happen long after Keach's character is killed off, a certain indication that Martino pulled a CALIGULA on his cast and shot the really vile stuff when they weren't around.

If THE LAST CANNIBAL WORLD got the ball rolling on the cannibal craze, it was Deodato's infamous CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (1980) that really caused the movement to explode. One of the key films in the genesis of found-footage that was used so effectively nearly 20 years later with 1999's THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and became practically standard after 2009's PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is a horrifying and intensely disturbing experience--go to a midnight showing of it with a snarky audience that's ready to mock it MST3K-style and you'll see them grow silent about 25 minutes in as the shell-shocked crowd starts really thinning out by the one-hour mark. It remains one of the very few irony-proof films that separates the players from the pretenders when it comes to cult hipster fandom. You don't simply watch CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST--you survive it. Deodato's handling of the found-footage element--the second half of the film consists of a professor (Robert Kerman, better known at the time as porn actor R. Bolla) watching increasingly damning footage left behind by a documentary crew who vanished while investigating the existence of cannibals in the Amazon--has yet to be equaled by any of its countless faux-doc/found-footage offspring. Deodato's film was so believable that Italian authorities actually thought he made a snuff film and he had to prove he didn't kill off his unknown actors. CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST has legitimate statements to make about the comparisons between the stone-age jungle and modern civilization, evidenced in the way that the tribes are generally peaceful but only end up turning on the documentary crew when the raw--no pun intended--footage shows the crew (civilization) acting like sociopathic assholes and goading them into acts of increasing savagery and abhorrence. One of the film's most telling moments involve two of the crew raping a tribe girl, who's later punished in one of the film's iconic images: impaled on pole that enters her vagina and exits her mouth. Lead filmmaker Alan Yates (Gabriel Yorke) is smirking and visibly amused at the horrific punishment until one of the other guys says "Watch it, Alan...I'm shooting," at which point he turns serious and melodramatically declares "Oh, good Lord! This is horrible!" CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST is an intelligent film with moments that remain prescient today in an era when there is no depth to which the media won't plummet to sensationalize or outright manufacture a story. But any indicting aspirations it has to being the NETWORK of Italian cannibal movies is negated somewhat by Deodato also wallowing in the same exploitation and sensationalism that he's criticizing, whether it's turning his camera on the gruesome slaughter of a helpless animal (the turtle scene is arguably the most revolting thing ever filmed for a commercial movie, and co-star Francesca Ciardi's vomiting is real) or playing up the graphic exploitation elements.

Giovanni Lombardo Radice and Umberto Lenzi
on the set of CANNIBAL FEROX

Even with its ultimately heavy-handed message ("I wonder who the real cannibals are," muses Kerman's pipe-smoking professor), CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST was as smart as the genre ever got. After that, there was nowhere to go but down, and Umberto Lenzi was happy to oblige. A veteran journeyman who went wherever genre trends took him (he really found his niche with 1970s polizia), Lenzi returned to the cannibal genre he helped create with EATEN ALIVE (1980), which fused the cannibal craze with the then-topical Jonestown massacre, with yet another wealthy young woman (Janet Agren) hiring a guide (Kerman, again) to find her missing sister (Paola Senatore), who's run off to Sri Lanka and fallen in with a religious cult led by the insane Jonas (Rassimov, again). EATEN ALIVE is grimy, trashy, and cheap, with animal slaughter scenes pilfered from MOUNTAIN OF THE CANNIBAL GOD, ears and breasts being sliced off, perpetual subgenre abuse object Me Me Lai being gang-raped, Senatore being sodomized by a cannibal, Rassimov inducting Agren into his cult by penetrating her with a venom-dipped dildo, and a seriously slumming Mel Ferrer, no doubt questioning the state of his career while appearing in his second movie in three years titled EATEN ALIVE, as a professor dropping exposition to a NYC detective (gay porn star Gerald Grant) about how cannibal tribes still exist.

Lenzi quickly followed EATEN ALIVE with CANNIBAL FEROX, the most infamous Italian cannibal film after CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, and one of the most notorious films ever made. HOLOCAUST at least had something to say and broke new ground, but EATEN ALIVE and CANNIBAL FEROX are pure exploitation all the way. Abandoning any illusions of restraint and not about to be told "Don't go there!" Lenzi goes all-in with CANNIBAL FEROX as NYU anthropology grad student Gloria Davis (Lorraine De Selle), her brother/research assistant Rudy (Danilo Mattei, billed as "Bryan Redford"), and her friend Pat (Zora Kerova) venture deep into the Amazon to prove cannibalism has never existed. Of course, they're wrong, but cannibals aren't their only problem: they soon fall in with Mike Logan (Giovanni Lombardo Radice, using his "John Morghen" pseudonym) and Joe Costolani (Walter Lucchini), a pair of on-the-run, small-time NYC lowlifes who ripped off $100,000 from a mafioso (John Bartha) and fled to South America to make their bones in the cocaine business. It doesn't take long for Mike to expose himself as a dangerous psychopath whose actions only stir up the natives who, in true CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST style, turn on the white interlopers. Whether it's animal killings or cannibal mayhem, Lenzi holds nothing back in CANNIBAL FEROX, with the most horrific punishment reserved for the much-deserving Mike, who's paid back in kind after he ties up a tribesman, gouges out his eye, and chops off his penis. Since Lenzi goes for maximum tactlessness, Mike is given the further indignity of having his dick not only chopped off but devoured by a cannibal in loving close-up. Mike's terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day continues when he gets his hand hacked off before being restrained under a table with his head poking through and locked in place has the top of his skull is macheted off and his brains picked at like hors d'oeuvres at a dinner party. And then there's one of FEROX's iconic images: Pat's punishment for her part in Mike's murder of a native girl by being strung up with hooks through her breasts.

Where Deodato tried to make a statement with CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, Lenzi just unabashedly goes over the line time and again in ways not telegraphed by the film's opening theme that's so "'70s cop show" that you almost expect to hear an announcer intone "Previously on CANNIBAL FEROX..." (Lenzi opened EATEN ALIVE with a similarly incongruous Budy-Maglione number). CANNIBAL FEROX was acquired by Terry Levene's Aquarius Releasing--the company behind the cannibal/zombie crossover ZOMBI HOLOCAUST's transformation into DOCTOR BUTCHER, M.D.--and released in 1983. under the instantly legendary title MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY, advertised with Levene's typically hyperbolic hucksterism ("Bizarre Human Sacrifices! The Most Violent Film Ever! Banned in 31 Countries!"). A grindhouse and drive-in staple well into the fall of 1984, MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY became a fixture in video stores and scarred many budding gorehounds in those mid-1980s glory days of PMRC outrage and Satanic Panic. We knew slasher movies and zombie movies, but the Italian cannibal films were another beast entirely. To those who cut their teeth on horror in that era, MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY and its ilk were as far as grossout cinema could possibly go, which of course, was part of its charm (plus, grindhouse gorehounds in America saw it before most of the others: CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST and EATEN ALIVE, the latter as both DOOMED TO DIE and later on VHS as THE EMERALD JUNGLE, didn't turn up in the US until 1985). Of course, CANNIBAL FEROX is garbage. Of course it's indefensible and utterly reprehensible. But it has its charms and it left its mark. In many ways, it's the ultimate exploitation movie: it's trashy, sleazy, sloppily-dubbed; has some incredible late 1980 time capsule NYC location shooting (DIVINE MADNESS, HOPSCOTCH, FAME, and THE EXTERMINATOR all playing at one NYC theater!); a pointless Manhattan mob subplot that Lenzi simply abandons; gratuitous nudity; delirious overacting by Radice; supporting roles for NYC-based porn actors (Kerman is present once again, this time as rumpled cop Lt. Rizzo in scenes shot at the same precinct Lenzi used for Ferrer and Grant's scenes in EATEN ALIVE), over-the-top violence, ridiculous dialogue ("Hey bitch, where's your stud?" and one of the greatest lines of all time as a starved Pat is tempted by a piece of meat: "No! Stop! It might be Rudy!"), and one of the most unforgettable and effective retitlings ever, even utilized by Rob Zombie for an early, pre-fame White Zombie album. You remember a movie called MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY, even if it has a trailer as unappealingly narrated as this one:

After CANNIBAL FEROX, there was really nowhere else for the cannibal subgenre to go. By this point, they were all following the same template and audiences quickly grew fatigued with the repetitive mayhem. Joe D'Amato tried to get into the act with the softcore/cannibal fusion jams EMANUELLE AND THE LAST CANNIBALS (1977), released in the US in 1984 as TRAP THEM AND KILL THEM, and PAPAYA, LOVE GODDESS OF THE CANNIBALS (1978), and Jess Franco inevitably chimed in with DEVIL HUNTER (1980) and CANNIBALS (1980), both borrowing Lucio Fulci regular Al Cliver and Sabrina Siani for Italian legitimacy purposes but nevertheless exhibiting Franco's tendency toward amateur hour and his expected lack of attention to detail, whether it's a cannibal sporting a visible wristwatch or another with a disco perm, porn 'stache, and sideburns. There were a few later stragglers, like Michele Massimo Tarantini's MASSACRE IN DINOSAUR VALLEY (1985), Mario Gariazzo's AMAZONIA (1985) and Antonio Climati's dubiously titled CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST II (1988). Italian hack Bruno Mattei tried to restart the cycle with a pair of 2004 shot-on-video atrocities, MONDO CANNIBAL and IN THE LAND OF THE CANNIBALS, both of which shamelessly rip off CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, and Jonathan Hensleigh (THE PUNISHER, KILL THE IRISHMAN) directed the justifiably little-seen 2007 American found-footage dud WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE, with two dipshit couples encountering cannibals while on a get-rich-quick plan to retrace the journey of Michael Rockefeller before his disappearance in New Guinea in 1961. Eli Roth's long-delayed THE GREEN INFERNO, shot in 2012 and finally due in theaters in fall 2015 after some distribution snafus, is purported to be an overt homage to the entire Italian cannibal subgenre.

MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY, opening in my hometown of Toledo, OH on 9/14/1984

MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY playing at
the Liberty in Times Square

The legend of CANNIBAL FEROX has grown over the years, and is cemented by Grindhouse's recent Blu-ray release, which is without question the definitive edition. Packed with extras, including Calum Waddell's feature-length documentary EATEN ALIVE: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE ITALIAN CANNIBAL FILM, and the instant-classic commentary with Lenzi and Radice--recorded separately--ported over from the 1997 laserdisc and later DVD edition. The commentary is one for the ages, with Lenzi's repeated defending of the film alternating with scorn and derision from Radice. The actor is known for his early '80s horror film work and being on the receiving end of the legendary drill scene in Lucio Fulci's CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980), but whose first love has always been the stage, more or less admitting that he took these roles for the money. He doesn't hold back on the commentary, whether he's dissing Lenzi or repeatedly declaring that he's ashamed of CANNIBAL FEROX, citing it as the only film he regrets making. Radice also appears in a new interview segment, as do Zora Kerova and Danilo Mattei (Lorraine De Selle, retired from acting since 1988 and now a successful producer for Italian TV, is MIA). Grindhouse's two-disc Blu-ray set gives this landmark bit of drive-in scuzz the veritable Criterion treatment. CANNIBAL FEROX obviously isn't for everybody, but as Eli Roth points out in the Blu-ray's accompanying booklet of essays, "Lenzi's film was reviled for many years but for many of us, the film is a treasure." It's also a snapshot of a bygone era when something as vile as MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY could play in American movie theaters and drive-ins, a time when impressionable young fans were devouring everything they could find at the holy sanctuary that was the video store. It's an era that's passed and the likes of which we'll never see again. It's more about sentiment than quality, especially since it's not even the best of the cannibal subgenre, but Grindhouse's CANNIBAL FEROX brings those memories and images and that sense of discovery back in all its sleazy, offensive, gut-munching HD glory. You'll probably need to shower after watching CANNIBAL FEROX, but that's not a criticism--that means it did its job.

SERENA
(US/France/Czech Republic - 2015)

Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier (2004's BROTHERS) cracked the US market with the 2007 Halle Berry vehicle THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE, but is best known for the 2010 Best Foreign Film Oscar-winner IN A BETTER WORLD. SERENA, however, will not go down as one of her career highlights, despite the notoriety of being another Bradley Cooper-Jennifer Lawrence teaming that didn't exactly generate the buzz of SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK and AMERICAN HUSTLE. SERENA was shot in the Czech Republic in the spring and summer of 2012, several months prior to SILVER LININGS' release and before the stars moved on to AMERICAN HUSTLE, which hit theaters in December 2013. Bier displayed what must've seemed like an alarming lack of urgency to her backers, spending a year and a half tinkering with the footage while her stars went on to awards and accolades as SERENA languished in a state of perpetual incompletion. Even on the heels of Lawrence's blockbuster HUNGER GAMES success and Cooper's megahit AMERICAN SNIPER, the $30 million SERENA went straight-to-VOD in the spring of 2015 with just a 59-screen rollout following, for a gross of $176,000. You'd be correct in assuming SERENA is terrible--for all the time she spent assembling various cuts, Bier seems to have no idea what she wanted to accomplish with this film. Character behavior and motivation seem to change from scene to scene, and considering how well they worked together in SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK, Cooper and Lawrence just appear lost throughout. They're certainly capable actors, but neither get a handle on how they're supposed to play their characters, and both looking hopelessly out of their element in a rural period setting.

In the Smoky Mountains in North Carolina in 1929, timber magnate George Pemberton (Cooper) marries the unpredictable Serena (Lawrence) after a whirlwind courtship, or at least Bier's depiction of a whirlwind courtship: they meet, introduce themselves, screw, step off a train as man and wife, and she's immediately running his business, all in about 75 seconds of screen time. George's business is in trouble, he's been cooking the books, and the stock market crash has rendered his holdings worthless. On top of all that, he has an illegitimate son with dirt-poor Rachel (Ana Ularu), secretly supporting the boy behind Serena's back. Their marriage deteriorates after Serena miscarries and begins manipulating the clearly insane Galloway (Rhys Ifans), a glowering employee who gets his hand hacked off and believes Serena has been prophesied to him as he swears to do her bidding, whether it's killing a disgruntled employee (Sean Harris) who provided the irate sheriff (Toby Jones) with evidence of George's corruption, or killing Rachel and her son as George slowly comes to realize that his wife is a sociopathic shrew. Of course, George is no angel either, whether he's callously breaking Rachel's heart or killing his business partner (David Dencik) when his plans don't gel with what Serena wants to do with the company. It's hard to get behind George as a hero when he's not, and we never know enough about him or Serena to get a handle on either of them. There's stretches of the film where Bier seems to be assembling scenes at random, with no consistent time element whatsoever. Screenwriter Christopher Kyle took significant liberies with Ron Rash's 2008 novel, but that doesn't explain the poorly-defined characters and their vague and often nonsensical motivations. Bier just seems actively disengaged from the story and her actors, and instead demonstrates an almost Cimino-like fixation on the look and the atmospheric background details. Indeed, the only real positive of SERENA is the marvelously picturesque production design and period detail, which bring the era to vivid life in the same way that HEAVEN'S GATE did with its late 19th century Wyoming setting for the Johnson County War. If nothing else, SERENA looks like it costs a lot more than $30 million, but that's all it has going for it. It's under-the-radar enough that it'll likely be a minor footnote in the careers of its stars, but I'm still willing to bet that their publicists will be erring on the side of caution and instructing media types and TV talk show hosts to avoid bringing it up for the foreseeable future. (R, 110 mins)

MONSTERS: DARK CONTINENT
(UK - 2015)

2010's MONSTERS, a monster movie that seemed to go out of its way to spend as little time as possible dealing with the titular tentacled creatures, nevertheless received much acclaim and vaulted writer/director Gareth Edwards to the big-time, winning him the job of last year's GODZILLA reboot. Edwards' GODZILLA utilized his MONSTERS ethos by sidelining Godzilla to a point where he was virtually a minor supporting character in his own movie. Edwards is onboard as an executive producer for MONSTERS: DARK CONTINENT, which is more of a spinoff than a sequel, taking place ten years after the events of the first film, with clusters of the giant creatures now scattered all over the globe. Director/co-writer Tom Green (not the FREDDY GOT FINGERED Tom Green, though that undoubtedly would've been more interesting) is even less concerned with making a giant monster flick than Edwards was, and both strike me as the kind of guys whose favorite Frankenstein movies are the mid-1940s Universal monster rallies where Glenn Strange's Frankenstein monster doesn't even get off the table until the last two minutes of the movie, when he stands up, stumbles over some electrical equipment, and blows up the lab. The End. If these guys remade JAWS, the opening hour would be devoted to Sheriff Brody dealing with the karate school kids who keep "karate-ing" that old islander's fence down. If they remade THE EXORCIST, they'd spend the first 90 minutes of the film focusing on the trials and tribulations of Chris MacNeil and Burke Dennings ironing out the script details for the movie they're shooting in Georgetown. If they made a ROCKY reboot, it would focus on Adrian working at the pet store, with Rocky occasionally mentioned and maybe dropping in once or twice to say hello. These guys are so actively against giving the audience what they came for that they wouldn't even have Rocky say "Yo, Adrian."

MONSTERS: DARK CONTINENT focuses on a trio of Detroit guys who are part of a military unit deployed to the Middle East, where they're taken under the wing of battle-hardended Sgt. Frater (Johnny Harris, in an intense performance) and captured by insurgents after numerous combat sequences. The monsters are offscreen for long stretches, and when they're seen, they're just sort of doing their thing in the background, now an accepted part of the scenery after a decade of migrating over the world. With a few CGI touch-ups to remove shots of the monsters, this could just as easily be called THE HURT LOCKER II: DARK CONTINENT. Green's insistence on keeping the monsters--you know, the title of the movie--offscreen and out of the action is initially baffling and ultimately infuriating. Edwards' minimalist approach to the monster element with the overrated first film was annoying, but at least he got to them eventually. Green doesn't even give us that, instead letting the whole film build up to a showdown between a crazed, shell-shocked Frater and young soldier Parkes (Sam Keeley), while a couple of skyscraper-high creatures dick around in the background, seemingly as confused as the viewer as to exactly what they're doing here. Green is clearly more interested in making a war drama than a sci-fi/horror film, and while the dramatic elements aren't bad (and Harris is very good), it still begs the question: what is the point of this movie? Is there some allegorical, "I wonder who the real monsters are" statement about the American military presence in the Middle East? Green neither knows nor cares. If he's not interested in making a giant monster movie, then why is he wasting his time and ours? Green made an ostensible sequel to MONSTERS, with the word "monsters" in the title, but what he's got is a Middle East-set combat movie with very sporadic shots of creatures lingering the background, having no effect on the story whatsoever. I'm sure there's apologists out there prepping bullshit MONSTERS: DARK CONTINENT think pieces about "subverting genre expectations" in a hapless attempt to defend this pathetic sham of a movie, but here's the deal: rarely in modern cinema has a film so stubbornly refused to live up to its end of the bargain. (R, 119 mins)

ASMODEXIA
(Spain - 2014)

On the surface, the Spanish horror film ASMODEXIA is yet another in a seemingly endless parade of possession potboilers, with aging exorcist Eloy (Lluis Marco) traveling around Spain with his 15-year-old granddaughter and partner-in-exorcism Alba (Claudia Pons). They're drawn to possession victims and perform exorcisms on their way to an unspoken destination in the days leading up to 12-21-12, the Mayan calendar end of the world. There are parallel storylines involving an institutionalized woman (Irene Montala), and that woman's sister (Marta Belmonte), a Barcelona detective who's frantically searching for Eloy and Alba, as well as a hooded figure and a black van that also make sporadic appearances. Screenwriters Marc Carrete (who also directed) and Mike Hostench (who scripted a couple of Brian Yuzna's Spanish horror films a decade ago) take a pretty much in medias res approach to the story and it's a good 45 of the film's 81 minutes before all of the pieces are in place and things start making sense. The demonic possession angle is a bait-and-switch as Carrete and Hostench just start throwing everything against the wall to see what sticks. There's some Fulci, there's some of THE SENTINEL, there's a little of THE KEEP, and there's a great twist late in the film that up-ends everything, but Carrete has some serious pacing issues, the script is entirely too convoluted, and the filmmakers try to take it in more directions than 81 minutes will allow. There's some good ideas in ASMODEXIA but the execution is lacking. The script needed another draft and the film could actually use maybe five or ten more minutes to give it some breathing room to flow and maybe clarify some plot points to eliminate some of the confusion that dominates the sometimes frustrating opening half. As it is, ASMODEXIA is constantly taking one step forward and two steps back. There's something here, but it really could've been a lot better. (Unrated, 81 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)

JURASSIC WORLD
(US - 2015)

Directed by Colin Trevorrow. Written by Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly. Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D'Onofrio, Irrfan Khan, Jake Johnson, Omar Sy, BD Wong, Ty Simpkins, Nick Robinson, Judy Greer, Lauren Lapkus, Brian Tee, Andy Buckley, Katie McGrath. (PG-13, 124 mins)

JURASSIC WORLD, the long-in-gestation reboot/continuation of the JURASSIC PARK franchise, opts to ignore 1997's THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK and 2001's underappreciated JURASSIC PARK III and instead function as a direct sequel to Steven Spielberg's 1993 classic. Much has changed in the ensuing 22 years and JURASSIC WORLD exists in a CGI-driven cinematic environment. There's very sporadic animatronics used for a close-up here and there, but overall, the dinosaur effects are CGI creations, utilized sparingly by Spielberg (who has an executive producer credit here) in 1993 but relied upon heavily here by director Colin Trevorrow. With only one feature film to his credit, 2012's low-budget Aubrey Plaza rom-com SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED, Trevorrow is an odd choice to helm a mega-budget summer tentpole, but honestly, any anonymous indie filmmaker or idealistic, wide-eyed kid fresh out of film school could've supervised the actors in JURASSIC WORLD. There's really nothing for Trevorrow to do but direct his actors and let the plethora of CGI and visual effects teams do the heavy lifting. There's no Spielbergian sense of wonder this time around--Trevorrow really just needs to make sure the camera's pointed in the right direction and the actors are looking exactly where the dino threats will be added during post. JURASSIC PARK was the JAWS of its day and by the time you get to the fourth film in the franchise, there's not much magic left to mine. That doesn't mean JURASSIC WORLD is another JAWS: THE REVENGE. It's big-budget summer junk food of the highest order: dumb, derivative, but undeniably entertaining since all Trevorrow really has to do is not screw it up. The film almost owes as much to James Cameron's ALIENS as it does to JURASSIC PARK, with one sequence directly harking back to when soldiers encountering the aliens are killed and their monitors start flatlining one-by-one back at the control station. Trevorrow does a nice job handling these scenes, but we've seen them before. There's some early digs at marketing tie-ins, commercialization, and that bored, "can't even" teens aren't even excited about seeing live dinosaurs anymore, but the satire is a gentle nibble rather than a bite, and it's quickly dropped to get on with the action. About the only "Trevorrowian" touch the director brings comes in the form of two minor characters in the control room: ironic hipster Lowery (Jake Johnson, who co-starred in SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED), who wears a vintage Jurassic Park tee he found on eBay, and his snarky quipping with co-worker Vivian, played by comedian Lauren Lapkus, who looks and acts like a somewhat less deadpan Aubrey Plaza.

Going back to Isla Nublar off the coast of Costa Rica, Jurassic Park has been reinvented as Jurassic World, a massive theme park that allows visitor interaction with the more docile dinosaurs, who have been genetically engineered to be safe for such activities. Except, of course, for the carniverous ones like the T-Rex, kept in glass compounds safe for guest viewing. Jurassic World's billionaire owner Simon Masrani (Irrfan Khan), the eighth-richest person in the world, vows to follow in the footsteps of John Hammond (the late Sir Richard Attenborough in the original films), to allow the public to experience these wondrous creatures, "no expense spared." Masrani's workaholic marketing chief Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) is constantly monitoring the bottom line and ways to enhance profits, so much so that she dumps her visiting nephews, Zach (Nick Robinson) and Gray (Ty Simpkins) off on her harried, distracted assistant Zara (Katie McGrath). Most of her attention is devoted to a Jurassic World-created hybrid dinosaur, the Indominus Rex, engineered in absolute secrecy by the scientific team of Dr. Henry Wu (BD Wong, the only holdover from the 1993 film). The Indominus Rex has lived its entire life in its compound, has no social interaction skills other than with a backup Indominus that it opted to have for dinner instead of companionship, and has a DNA makeup so secret that even Masrani doesn't know what really went into its creation. Of course, the Indominus will escape its inescapable paddock, and of course Zach and Gray will get separated from the inattentive Zara, and of course, icy, brittle Claire will fall for Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), the ex-Navy hero velociraptor expert--a Raptor Whisperer, of sorts--who understands the dinosaur mind and is constantly at odds with Hoskins (Vincent D'Onofrio), the security contracting chief who wants to train raptors for use in military situations as a replacement for boots on the ground.

Trevorrow, one of four credited screenwriters (William Monahan and even John Sayles had a crack at the script as far back as 2007), pulls off a good number of exciting sequences and for the most part, keeps JURASSIC WORLD moving at a furious clip, whether the Indominus is rampaging or the pterosaurs are escaping from the massive aviary and attacking the 20,000 park visitors. Sometimes, the action is diminished somewhat by the disconnect that comes with too much CGI. Aerial shots of a helicopter going down look embarrassingly bush league and there's no denying that some shots have an almost SyFy look to them. There's also some glaring inconsistencies in logic and character portrayals: Masrani is a benevolent humanitarian with no concern for profits and margins in one scene, and in the next, he's refusing to authorize the killing of the Indominus, a clear threat to the visitors and a certain PR nightmare, because "We've got $26 million tied up in this thing!" The whole military contracting subplot with Hoskins and Wu is only barely touched upon and completely forgotten about, with Wu, made into a snarling Dr. Frankenstein villain for some inexplicable reason and even getting a hissing "This is what we do!" speech when Masrani asks him what he's been up to, boarding a chopper with lab-created dino DNA samples and promptly disappearing from the movie. And how does it make any sense whatsoever--other than plot convenience--that Masrani isn't authorized to know what DNA strands make up the Indominus? Isn't he the owner of Jurassic World? Isn't he signing Wu's checks? How does he not have clearance? If not Masrani, then who? Does Dr. Wu answer to no one? Wu's character shift from the first film to this one couldn't be any more ludicrous if he was Fiendish Dr. Wu from BLACK DYNAMITE. And who put Hoskins in charge of security? I guess it wouldn't be a Jurassic Park without an incompetent and dangerous Dennis Nedry somehow slipping through the vetting process and the background check and ending up on the payroll, but D'Onofrio plays him a lumbering loose cannon who's just salivating over the opportunity to mutiny and take control of the park.

But the brontosaurus in the room and the plot element set to launch a thousand inane thinkpieces thanks to the internet's perpetually churning outrage machine is Howard's Claire. Complaints of sexism dogged the film prior to its release, starting with a Joss Whedon tweet, and while it's easy to dismiss the complaints of SJWs who need to invent things to be offended by, there might actually be some merit to the charges. Claire is portrayed as an incomplete woman because she chooses to focus on her career instead of having a family, unlike her sister (Judy Greer), Zach and Gray's mom. There's tension between Claire and Owen, who went out on one disastrous date at some point, over which he chides her for having such a stick up her ass that she brought an itinerary with them ("I'm an organized person!" she whines). Much was made of Claire being in high heels the entire film--at times, Trevorrow goes to almost Tarantino lengths to get a shot of Howard's heels, and Owen even mocks her about them at one point, as he does when she rolls up her sleeves to get down to business when they find themselves in the middle of the forest, needing to get back to the main part of the park, asking "What was that supposed to be?" to which she replies "That was me getting ready for this!" All of Claire's attempts to be heroic are dismissed, even by her own nephews, who cling to Owen because he's a "badass." What finally loosens Claire up is a big kiss from Owen after she finally gets it together and saves his life, after which she largely stands aside and lets him be the hero. The film doesn't go so far as to directly send the message that what she really needs is some Owen dick, and the treatment of Claire by the filmmakers isn't necessarily awful (she does step up when she has to) as much as it is out of step with the franchise's past portrayals of women. Laura Dern's paleobotanist in JURASSIC PARK and Julianne Moore's paleontologist in THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK were independent career women who weren't made into an object of smirking derision for it. Maybe Claire was a throwback, Fay Wray, "damsel in distress" idea that played better on paper than it does on the screen...who knows? Regardless of how sexist the film's treatment of Claire is and how Owen is lauded as a hero for being the same kind of career-driven loner more comfortable with raptors than people, anyone going to a big-budget dinosaur rampage movie and fixating on the heroine wearing heels and needing to be rescued by a big, strong man probably lost the ability to have fun years ago anyway.

JURASSIC WORLD is an easy film to pick apart, but in the end, plot holes, logic lapses, and missed satirical jabs aside, it gets the job done. It doesn't do it with the same intelligence and sense of freshness that Spielberg brought over 20 years ago, but it accomplishes what it sets out to do. Those who will get the most out of this are those too young to have seen JURASSIC PARK on the big screen 22 years ago or those moviegoers who don't really care to learn much any pop culture that existed before they were born. To them, sure, JURASSIC WORLD probably kicks ass and JURASSIC PARK may as well be a relic from the Cretaceous. But where Spielberg forged his own path, Trevorrow is merely following in the footsteps, more or less admitting as much during the press junket when he said that Spielberg would provide feedback on what needed to be fixed and it was he who ultimately had final cut. So really, like any good soldier, Trevorrow was just following his boss' orders, but that's really all one can do four films and 22 years into a franchise in an era when any kind of deviation from formula or challenge to the audience are simply not realistic options. It's Trevorrow's second movie and being hand-picked by Spielberg would be a big deal for anyone in his position. With that in mind, it really didn't matter who directed this, but it's doubtful an experienced and long-established filmmaker would want to enter such an arrangement. Just ask Tobe Hooper.

On DVD/Blu-ray: THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS 2 (2015); [REC] 4 (2015); and KIDNAPPING MR. HEINEKEN (2015)

Ripoffs of the Wasteland: 2020: TEXAS GLADIATORS (1983)

On DVD/Blu-ray: ACCIDENTAL LOVE (2015); EVERLY (2015); and A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT (2014)

Cult Classics Revisited: The Stranger Collection: A STRANGER IN TOWN (1967); THE STRANGER RETURNS (1968); and THE SILENT STRANGER (1975)

In Theaters: EX MACHINA (2015)

Ripoffs of the Wasteland: STRYKER (1983)

On DVD/Blu-ray: THE COBBLER (2015) and THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST (2015)

On DVD/Blu-ray: MR. TURNER (2014) and WINTER SLEEP (2014)

In Theaters/On VOD: MAGGIE (2015)

In Theaters: MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015)

On DVD/Blu-ray: TWO MEN IN TOWN (2015); EXTRATERRESTRIAL (2014); and MORTDECAI (2015)

Cult Classics Revisited: THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MISS OSBOURNE (1981)

On DVD/Blu-ray: CYMBELINE (2015) and HOT TUB TIME MACHINE 2 (2015)

In Theaters/On VOD: THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE 3 (FINAL SEQUENCE) (2015)

On DVD/Blu-ray: DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS (2015) and CUT BANK (2015)

In Theaters/On VOD: SURVIVOR (2015)

On DVD/Blu-ray: BLACK SEA (2015) and SPRING (2015)

Cult Classics Revisited: CANNIBAL FEROX (1981)

On DVD/Blu-ray: SERENA (2015); MONSTERS: DARK CONTINENT (2015); and ASMODEXIA (2014)

In Theaters: JURASSIC WORLD (2015)