Good Efficient Butchery

THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.
(US - 2015)

Directed by Guy Ritchie. Written by Guy Ritchie and Lionel Wigram. Cast: Henry Cavill, Armie Hammer, Hugh Grant, Alicia Vikander, Jared Harris, Elizabeth Debicki, Luca Calvani, Sylvester Groth, Christian Berkel, Misha Kuznetsov. (PG-13, 116 mins)

With rare exception, the list of 1960s TV shows turned into big-budget event movies in the mid '90s to the early '00s is a pretty dire roll call of failure. For every MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE or THE FUGITIVE, there's a slew of duds like WILD WILD WEST, THE SAINT, I SPY, BEWITCHED, THE MOD SQUAD, GET SMART, LOST IN SPACE, MCHALE'S NAVY, and THE AVENGERS, among others. In an age when every superhero is getting their own movie, 2015 seems a tad late to hop on the TV reboot bandwagon and bring THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. to the big screen as a $75 million summer movie. It's even more surprising that it retains the period 1960s setting during the Cold War. The film was a long-in-gestation project, languishing in development hell for at least a decade, with Steven Soderbergh, George Clooney, and Tom Cruise all attached at various times. On the heels of his career reinvention as a Hollywood franchise guy with Robert Downey Jr's SHERLOCK HOLMES films, the former LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS wunderkind Guy Ritchie fashions his U.N.C.L.E. as an extremely enjoyable retro '60s spy movie that's funny while successfully avoiding the camp and kitsch of a straight-up AUSTIN POWERS spoof. Other than some CGI work and some minor quick-cutting in some of the action sequences, Ritchie's U.N.C.L.E. looks and feels like it could've been made in 1965, with the same level of outstanding production design, atmosphere, and attention to detail he brought to his semi-steampunk interpretation of SHERLOCK HOLMES. The fact is, nobody needed a MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. reboot and the idea sounded less than promising, almost like the film was setting itself up to bomb and clean up at the Razzies next spring. There's no reason this thing should be as giddily entertaining as it is, but it turned out to be one of the most pleasant surprises of the summer.

The question is, will it matter? The target audience has to be older by default--how many in today's prime multiplex demographic even know what THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. was? The spy series, which starred Robert Vaughn and David McCallum as, respectively, U.N.C.L.E. (United Network Command for Law and Enforcement) agents Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin, and Leo G. Carroll as their boss Waverly, aired on NBC from 1964-1968. It was a response to the 007 phenomenon (then hitting its stride with the much-anticipated release of GOLDFINGER, followed by the Bondmania zenith THUNDERBALL in 1965) and even had Ian Fleming onboard as a creative consultant until his death a month before the series premiere. It was so popular that NBC even edited episodes together, padded them with new or unused footage, and released them as feature films that became hits. That's right--U.N.C.L.E. fans went to the theater and paid to see re-edited versions of things they already saw on TV. Ritchie's U.N.C.L.E. serves as an origin story for Solo (MAN OF STEEL's Henry Cavill) and Kuryakin (THE LONE RANGER's Armie Hammer), who begin the film as nemeses. It's 1963, and Solo is in East Berlin to smuggle mechanic Gaby Teller (EX MACHINA's Alicia Vikander) to the west. Gaby is the estranged daughter of Dr. Udo Teller (Christian Berkel), a scientist forced into being a Nazi collaborator during WWII. He's been in the secret employ of the US government but has gone missing and is now held prisoner by megalomaniacal shipping heiress Victoria Vinciguerra (Elizabeth Debicki), who's using him to develop a nuclear weapon. Solo and Kuryakin must become reluctant and constantly bickering allies to both protect Gaby and get her in contact with her uncle Rudi (Sylvester Groth), who may know of Udo's whereabouts. As they form a begrudging respect and friendship with one another as colleagues, Solo and Kuryakin are also operating under strict orders to obtain Vinciguerra's computer files--and take the other out if the need arises.

THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. is a lighthearted, globetrotting spy outing, filled with witty and occasionally smutty double entendres, great zingers ("For a special agent, you're not having a very special day, are you?") and some quirky action scenes, including one that plays out in the background while Solo relaxes with a quick bite and some wine while sitting in his getaway truck. Hammer does a great job with his thick Russian accent and actually demonstrates some character depth even though Kuryakin is primarily a ball of barely-contained rage. Cavill is having a blast as the cocky, womanizing Solo, not doing a direct impression of Vaughn but beautifully nailing the great character actor's distinct vocal inflections and cadences, uttering his dialogue with a perpetually-arched eyebrow but never taking it over the line into self-aware snark (Hugh Grant plays their eventual boss Waverly, though his role is relatively brief here).Ritchie's U.N.C.L.E. is a breezy, uncomplicated affair that's big on laughs but takes itself seriously when the situation warrants for a nice balance of serious action and intentional laughs. And that may ultimately be its commercial downfall: it's hard for 2015 audiences to accept a period piece like this at face value, without the kitsch and the parody element that an AUSTIN POWERS would bring to the table. It's one thing to wonder if the kids today know what THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. was, but do they even know what the Cold War was? Ritchie's film is terrific entertainment and the kind of movie you'll stop and watch until it's over every time you come across it while channel-surfing as it plays on HBO in perpetuity...but will anybody under 40 even care about this movie right now?

SINISTER 2
(US/UK - 2015)

Directed by Ciarin Foy. Written by Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill. Cast: James Ransone, Shannyn Sossamon, Robert Sloan, Dartanian Sloan, Lea Coco, Nick King, Tate Ellington, John Beasley, Lucas Jade Zumann, Jaden Klein, Laila Haley. (R, 97 mins)

Scott Derrickson's SINISTER (2012) was a dark, grim shocker with at least one instant-classic sequence and ranks as one of the better horror films to come off the Blumhouse assembly line. Derrickson co-wrote the first film with C. Robert Cargill, and both return to script the sequel, though Derrickson has delegated directing duties to Irish filmmaker Ciarin Foy. Foy wrote and directed the intermittently interesting 2012 high-rise horror indie CITADEL, a film with some effectively eerie sequences that just never quite gelled as a whole despite several terrifying moments. The intent of the script and the intent of the director often appear to be working at cross purposes throughout SINISTER 2: Derrickson and Cargill obviously want a modern horror movie filled with piercing jump scares and seem determined to turn boogeyman Bughuul (Nick King) into the next great horror icon, while Foy finds horror in the grounded reality of psychological trauma, much like his widower lead character in CITADEL, a timid man forced to protect himself and his infant child from a marauding gang of feral children prowling the building and seemingly singling him out to terrorize. Foy has said that CITADEL's story was born from a horrific mugging he endured where he violently beaten and stuck with a syringe, and while CITADEL had some undeniably frightening moments, Foy never quite pulled it all together, almost like his script needed one more draft before he got it right. There's a similar feeling throughout SINISTER 2: there's scary elements here, but they're the elements that don't involve the Bughuul silliness and the ghost children.

Taking place a few months after the events of the first film and the tragic fate of the family of celebrity true-crime writer Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke), SINISTER's unnamed "Deputy So & So" (James Ransone), the Barney Fife-ish sheriff's deputy and Ellison Oswalt superfan, is promoted to lead character for SINISTER 2. Fired from his job and working as a private eye to make ends meet, So & So is actually on a personal mission to locate and burn down the abandoned homes of families murdered by children in order to prevent future supernatural influence of Bughuul. The exact intent of Bughuul, the corpse-painted boogeyman who looks like the frontman for a Scandinavian black metal band, is a little hazy, but he basically, via ghosts of other dead children, cajoles impressionable kids to carefully plan the elaborately-staged murder of their entire family and film it on Super 8. A lot of this is just an excuse for some inherently creepy, grainy sequences of families being burned alive, electrocuted, or having rats gnaw through them all to the tune of some droning, nerve-jangling music by the duo of tomandandy. So & So ends up at a farmhouse in rural Illinois that he believes to be vacant but is actually occupied by Courtney Collins (Shannyn Sossamon), who is more or less squatting there with her twin sons Dylan (Robert Sloan) and Zach (Dartanian Sloan), the three of them hiding from her estranged, abusive husband Clint (Lea Coco). The house's previous occupants were killed in the barn behind the house and troubled Dylan is already being haunted by visions of Bughuul and dead children convincing him to murder his family.

Where the first film was primarily about Oswalt's investigation into the murders of his house's previous owners, Bughuul was seen only fleetingly, which made his infrequent appearances that much more jarring. Here, Derrickson (also a producer) and Cargill have Foy showing entirely too much of Bughuul, to the point where he ceases to be scary. Indeed, if there's a SINISTER 3, they'll likely have him start talking and dropping the kind of snarky bon mots that turned A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET's Freddy Krueger from a frightening and relatively quiet dream demon to a motor-mouthed stand-up comedian by the third and fourth entries in the series. No, the truly scary parts of SINISTER 2 lie beyond Bughuul, and it starts with the effective casting of the young Sloan boys (they're actually part of a set of triplets--they have a sister as well). They aren't completely identical and each is very good in challenging roles. As the introverted Dylan, the chief target of his father's abuse, the thinner, ganglier Robert Sloan perfectly conveys the slump-shouldered sadness of his character, a boy practically afraid of his own shadow and who reflexively wets himself at the sight of his bullying father. The stockier Dartanian plays the more outgoing and less book-smart Zach, the kind of pushy competitor that identifies him as his dad's favorite. The real sense of horror and suffocating tension in SINISTER 2 arrives with the appearance of Coco, who in just three or four short scenes is more terrifying than any of the times we see Bughuul. Sossamon and the Sloans also do their best acting in the scenes later in the film with Coco, whose control-freak Clint won't even allow anyone else at dinner to eat until he's taken his first bite, and is a man crude enough to announce "Now, if you don't mind, I'm gonna go fuck my wife" after he beats the shit out of So & So, who shows up unannounced to warn him that they're all in danger. Coco is the secret weapon of SINISTER 2, so much so that you'll actually feel your adrenaline pumping in the extreme discomfort his performance incites. It's he--not the grimacing Bughuul--who's the most frightening thing in the film.

There's a stronger, thematically deeper, and more disturbing film to be made with SINISTER 2 had the focus been entirely on the Collins family and its victimization by Clint--and to an extent Zach, who's clearly on his way to being just like his old man--and how that victimization and the cycle of abuse make it so easy for Bughuul and his supernatural acolytes to sway Dylan. Ransone is likable enough in a second-string Luke Wilson kind-of way as the affable So & So, but did his character even need to return? The filmmakers really drop the ball in the climax in a way that can't properly be described without massive spoilers, but let's just say it takes some leaps and is a tremendous letdown and feels like a scene or two seems to be missing. Foy's voice made itself heard in CITADEL but it was hampered by a script that wasn't quite ready for prime time. Here, that same voice is present but it's muffled by Derrickson's and Cargill's need to turn Bughuul into the face of a franchise. There's some real horror here grounded in everyday, ugly reality, but SINISTER 2 is more concerned with tired jump scares and CGI ghosts.

MIRACLE MILE
(US - 1989)

Written and directed by Steve De Jarnatt. Cast: Anthony Edwards, Mare Winningham, John Agar, Lou Hancock, Mykel T. Williamson, Denise Crosby, Kelly Minter, Kurt Fuller, O-Lan Jones, Robert DoQui, Earl Boen, Danny De La Paz, Claude Earl Jones, Alan Rosenberg, Diane Delano, Alan Berger, Brian Thompson, Jenette Goldstein, Edward Bunker, Howard Swain, voice of Raphael Sbarge. (R, 88 mins)

Despite rave reviews from critics, MIRACLE MILE wasted no time vacating theaters as quickly as possible. Opening on May 19, 1989, the last weekend before that year's big summer kickoff (back when Memorial Day weekend signified the beginning of the summer movie season) and the same day as the immortal ROAD HOUSE, the Richard Pryor-Gene Wilder comedy SEE NO EVIL, HEAR NO EVIL, the inferior horror sequel FRIGHT NIGHT PART II, and the teen comedy HOW I GOT INTO COLLEGE, it landed with a thud in 15th place. A box-office bomb, MIRACLE MILE has gone on to become one of the essential cult films of the 1980s and has just been released on an extras-packed Blu-ray by Kino Lorber. An apocalyptic AFTER HOURS or DR. STRANGELOVE remade as a meet-cute date movie that also prefigures Don McKellar's 1998 film LAST NIGHT, MIRACLE MILE has lovestruck trombone player Harry Washello (Anthony Edwards, also the star of HOW I GOT INTO COLLEGE) charming waitress Julie Peters (Mare Winningham) after spotting her at the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits. As Julie goes to her night shift at a coffee shop, Harry tells her he'll meet her outside when she's off at midnight, but a power outage causes him to oversleep and he doesn't get there until nearly 4:00 am. Julie's long gone and after leaving a desperate message for her, a romantic comedy enters the TWILIGHT ZONE as he picks up a ringing pay phone. On the other end of the line is Chip (voice of Raphael Sbarge), who's calling from a missile solo, frantically explaining that the nukes have been launched and they've got an hour before they hit. Chip thinks he's talking to his father, but dialed the wrong area code. Chip's ranting goes silent when Harry hears gunshots, followed by a voice warning "Forget everything you've heard and go back to sleep."

Still not sure if it's an elaborate prank, Harry describes the phone call to Julie's co-workers and overnight regulars at the diner. Disbelief escalates when a well-dressed coffee shop regular (Denise Crosby) makes some calls and finds out that many of America's politicians are mysteriously away in South America. Panic immediately ensues, with cook Fred (Robert DoQui) herding everyone into his food truck and heading to the airport, where the well-dressed woman has chartered several flights out of L.A. Fred refuses to go the opposite direction so Harry can pick up Julie, so Harry jumps out of the back of the truck and begins an hour-long odyssey into the night to get Julie--the woman he's waited his entire life to find--and get out of L.A., which is rapidly descending into a state of lawless chaos as the word of the world's end has quickly spread, making Harry wonder if he's needlessly incited a Chicken Little panic.

Steve De Jarnatt at a recent MIRACLE MILE screening

Written and directed by Steve De Jarnatt, MIRACLE MILE took nearly a decade to get made the way its creator intended. A hot property coming out of film school with his acclaimed 1978 short film TARZANA (with cult actors Timothy Carey and Eddie Constantine), De Jarnatt started shopping his MIRACLE MILE script shortly after, generating plenty of buzz but always getting the same reaction: the ending had to be changed. To De Jarnatt, the bleak ending was key to what made the film work, and the near-decade-long ordeal in making the MIRACLE MILE he wanted to make likely had a major hand in him shifting gears and abandoning feature films to focus on TV series work. While MIRACLE MILE languished in perpetual turnaround throughout the 1980s, De Jarnatt sought out journeyman gigs--he scored a co-writing credit on the 1983 SCTV cult comedy STRANGE BREW and directed the "Man from the South" episode of the rebooted ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS on NBC. He was offered films like THE PURSUIT OF D.B. COOPER (1981) and PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE (1985) and he was in talks to direct DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN (1985) before he left the project and was replaced by Susan Seidelman. De Jarnatt ultimately bought back the MIRACLE MILE script to ensure it would be made his way or not at all (on the MIRACLE MILE Blu-ray commentary with film critic Walter Chaw, De Jarnatt says "I was perceived as being arrogant, but I wasn't being arrogant...I just wanted to make my movie"). Still lacking the pull to get MIRACLE MILE made, De Jarnatt stashed it away and went to work on the post-apocalyptic action/romance hybrid CHERRY 2000 for Orion, who shelved it for three years before sending it straight to video in late 1988. By the time CHERRY 2000's belated and unceremonious release came about, De Jarnatt already had MIRACLE MILE in the can.

Support came from Hemdale Film Corporation, the indie that had just hit the respectable big time by backing Oliver Stone's Oscar-winning PLATOON (1986). Not only did Hemdale chief John Daly love De Jarnatt's script, he insisted that the downbeat ending remain intact. Figuring he'd have to make some concessions, De Jarnatt shot a somewhat less bleak--but still bleak--ending and Daly disapproved. "No," the supportive producer advised. "Let's rip their hearts out." Hemdale's credits included favorites like THE TERMINATOR (1984) and RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985), but they were hitting their artistic and commercial pinnacle around the time they gave the green light to MIRACLE MILE. Over 1986-87, the company produced the feel-good sleeper hit HOOSIERS, Oliver Stone's SALVADOR and PLATOON, Tim Hunter's grim RIVER'S EDGE, and Bernardo Bertolucci's epic THE LAST EMPEROR. Their fortunes would quickly wane over 1988-89 with box-office under-performers like CRIMINAL LAW, SHAG, and STAYING TOGETHER, and outright bombs like HOTEL COLONIAL, BUSTER, THE BOOST, COHEN AND TATE, THE TIME GUARDIAN, and the Nicolas Cage-eats-a-cockroach classic VAMPIRE'S KISS. They never had a moneymaker after THE LAST EMPEROR, and by the time MIRACLE MILE came out in 1989, nearly two years after it was shot, Hemdale was starting to run on fumes before sputtering to a quiet end in 1994 with the animated film THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN.

"It seems every year, more people find it," De Jarnatt explains on the commentary. Like most Hemdale releases in 1989, MIRACLE MILE played to empty theaters, but it's managed to find a place in the consciousness of the cult movie collective. Along with the NYC-set AFTER HOURS and John Landis' L.A.-set INTO THE NIGHT (1985), it's one of the great "night" movies of the 1980s, the kind of film that brilliantly captures the look and feel of a city in the wee hours of the morning and that distinct L.A. flavor with its desolate streets ("New York is the city that never sleeps," De Jarnatt says, "but L.A. goes to bed at ten o'clock"), oddball characters, absurdist humor ("Fuck Joyce Brothers!"), and its extremely effective score by Tangerine Dream (De Jarnatt only worked at night while writing the script, and did so while listening to the duo's soundtrack to William Friedkin's SORCERER). It's a distinct product of its era--with pay phones, TV stations that sign off after 2:00 am, and the all-consuming fear of nuclear war--but it's aged very well. Sure, some of the visual effects reveal just how little money with which De Jarnatt had to work, and the fashions unquestionably date the film in the late '80s, but the best things about it stand the test of time, particularly the vivid performances of the cast. Everyone from Edwards and Winningham down to the character player with the smallest bit all get their moments--from the ensemble at the diner (most of the surviving supporting actors all reunite for a group interview on the bonus features) to '50s western and sci-fi hero John Agar, who's just terrific as Julie's grandfather, setting aside his 15-year argument with his estranged wife (Lou Hancock) as the two reconcile on what Harry knows will be the last night of their lives. MIRACLE MILE is a film that has stuck with the few people who saw it in 1989, and it's obviously an important one to everyone involved (Edwards and Winningham also have an intervew on the Blu-ray), all of whom look back on it with nothing but fond memories and are clearly happy that its reputation has grown.

CHERRY 2000
(US - 1988)

Directed by Steve De Jarnatt. Written by Michael Almereyda. Cast: Melanie Griffith, David Andrews, Ben Johnson, Tim Thomerson, Pamela Gidley, Harry Carey Jr., Brion James, Michael C. Gwynne, Larry Fishburne, Marshall Bell, Jennifer Mayo, Cameron Milzer, Robert Z'Dar, Jack Thibeau, Howard Swain. (PG-13, 99 mins)

Prior to MIRACLE MILE, De Jarnatt made his feature directing debut with CHERRY 2000, a dystopian action sci-fi romance that at times seems to be going for some ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI-style eccentricity. Orion Pictures had no idea what to do with CHERRY 2000, which completed filming in 1985 and saw its release date shuffled multiple times throughout 1986 and 1987 before it was shelved indefinitely. Orion ultimately released it directly to video in November 1988, seven months before the already-completed MIRACLE MILE hit screens and just a month before star Melanie Griffith's breakout, Oscar-nominated performance in Mike Nichols' WORKING GIRL.

In the year 2017 with most of America a desert wasteland and unemployment at 40%, Sam Treadwell (David Andrews), a successful white-collar exec at a recycling business, is heartbroken when his cherished robot lover Cherry (Pamela Gidley) short-circuits and fries during a bout of vigorous lovemaking on a floor flooded by an overflowing dishwasher. Cherry was one of the last of the priceless 2000 line, and when Sam manages to salvage her data chip, he becomes obsessed with doing whatever it takes, whatever the cost, to find a pristine Cherry 2000 to replace his beloved unit. To do this requires the toughest tracker in the area to get him to Zone 7, the location of the last remaining Cherry warehouse, and he finds her in the desolate helltown of Glory Hole: renowned bounty hunter E. Johnson (Griffith). On their way to Zone, located in what was once Las Vegas, they bicker back and forth, with E. Johnson chiding Sam for loving a robot and Sam developing feelings for E. Johnson but unable to let go of his cherished Cherry. They eventually get some help from wily old tracker Six-Fingered Jake (Ben Johnson) and cross paths with treacherous Snappy Tom (Harry Carey Jr), the owner of the Last Chance Brothel & Gas before the introduction of chief villain Lester (Tim Thomerson), who rules what's left of a sand-covered Vegas.

Thomerson!

Written not by De Jarnatt but Michael Almereyda (best known for his modern update of HAMLET with Ethan Hawke) from a story by Lloyd Fonvielle (THE LORDS OF DISCIPLINE), CHERRY 2000 is a little silly at times, but it gets a lot of mileage out of a very likable performance by Griffith as the tough and charming E. Johnson, and it really picks up with the arrival of Thomerson, then fresh off TRANCERS, as the ruthless but hapless Lester. It's also enjoyable to see old-school western stalwarts like Johnson and Carey dropped into the middle of such a goofy setting, but CHERRY 2000 has a hard time getting by the black hole in the center that is human charisma vacuum David Andrews. Had the studio's original choice for Sam--a then-little-known Kevin Costner, who backed out after doing FANDANGO, SILVERADO, and AMERICAN FLYERS in quick succession--made himself available, the film likely would've had a more magnetic hero and more box office potential once THE UNTOUCHABLES and NO WAY OUT became big hits in 1987. Andrews has had a busy career in supporting roles and guest spots on TV--with his major series lead coming on NBC's short-lived MANN AND MACHINE in 1992--but there's a reason he never became a star. He plays Sam as whiny, needy, and even a little bit creepy, and while it still would've been silly, Costner would've at least been able to more convincingly sell Sam's devotion to Cherry without coming off in such an unappealing way. Still, CHERRY 2000 plays a bit better now than it did in 1988. It works it fits and starts, but it's a generally enjoyable and appealingly odd fusion of love story, western, and post-apocalypse, and shows what could've been a recurrent De Jarnatt theme of romance blossoming under the unlikeliest of circumstances. When the filmmaker seemingly removed himself from the game after the box-office failure of MIRACLE MILE, making ends meet with TV assignments on shows like THE X-FILES, ER, and LIZZIE MCGUIRE, cult cinema's had a potentially unique voice largely silenced for 25 years. With the Blu-ray releases of De Jarnatt's two forgotten late '80s gems, perhaps it's time for that voice to be heard again.

NO ESCAPE
(US - 2015)

Directed by John Erick Dowdle. Written by John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle. Cast: Owen Wilson, Lake Bell, Pierce Brosnan, Sterling Jerins, Claire Geare, Sahajak Boonthanakit. (R, 103 mins)

NO ESCAPE was originally titled THE COUP when it was scheduled for release in early 2015, but was sent back for some retooling and a title change when stupid test audiences didn't know the meaning of the word "coup." That damning example of real-world IDIOCRACY proves to be the most memorable thing about a largely generic action movie that constantly sabotages itself with bad editing, ill-advised slo-mo, and a complete leave from reality every time it gets some honest, serious momentum going. Filmed in Thailand and obviously set there even though all references to the country have been removed by the Weinstein Co. lest they risk offending a sizable portion of the always-lucrative Asian box office, NO ESCAPE takes place in a now-unidentified far east country where American engineer Jack Dwyer (Owen Wilson) is moving his family when his new employer, a corporate mega-conglomerate called Cardiff, ships him and two others to take charge of a clean-water project. Jack lost his last job in Austin, TX and while he and wife Annie (Lake Bell) and daughters Lucy (Sterling Jerins) and "The Beeze" (Claire Geare) aren't ecstatic about the move, it was the best offer he had. It's a bad omen when the Dwyers arrive and the TV and electricity are out, and no one from Cardiff has made any attempt to meet him at the airport or touch base with him after his arrival. While walking around the business district near the hotel, Jack finds himself in a middle of a riot when armed revolutionaries take on the police and the military. The Prime Minister, friendly to American business interests, has been assassinated and his regime toppled, and the revolutionaries are coming specifically for the Cardiff engineers to show the company that they aren't welcome. Jack sees one of the engineers shot in the head, and the revolutionaries pursue him through the streets and through the hotel, forcing the family to do everything they can to survive the siege, get out of the hotel, and somehow make it to the US Embassy.

There are quite a few solid, intense sequences throughout NO ESCAPE, but they're consistently undermined by the film's stretching of time to suit its own needs: when the Dwyers make their way to the roof of the hotel and decide they need to jump to the neighboring building, it provides some serious nailbiting suspense until you notice how absurdly long it's taking for the revolutionaries to get across the roof in an attempt to stop them. And when they finally do, the only person who gets shot is the nameless local schlub with no dialogue who dutifully helps the Americans only to get shot in the back for his selfless efforts, tumbling off the ledge and going splat on the ground ten stories down. The prologue showing the Prime Minister's assassination is a complete botch, with some incredibly slapdash editing that makes it appear the PM has somehow made it to the clear opposite end of the hotel in a matter of seconds (Kevin Smith associate Scott Mosier gets a prominent "Additional editing by" credit in the closing crawl, indicating that he was likely brought in to sort out a mess). When the revolutionaries are taking over the hotel, it's chaos wherever they are, but business as usual where they aren't, sometimes alternating from floor to floor--if they've already worked their to hacking people to pieces way up to the eighth floor, then how are things calm and normal on the fourth, where Lucy is swimming in the pool? The film's most ridiculous scene has all four family members covering their faces with scarves and hopping on a moped and slowly moving through a huge crowd of anti-American protesters undetected, all of them failing to notice Jack's blond hair dangling out of his hat. The Dwyers basically go from building to building in their trek to the American Embassy, and sometimes the streets are filled with rioters and sometimes they're empty--depends on what the filmmakers want to do in that particular scene.

NO ESCAPE is directed by John Erick Dowdle, who co-wrote with his brother Drew. The team, aka The Brothers Dowdle, are best known for their horror movies like the [REC] remake QUARANTINE (2008), the M. Night Shyamalan-produced DEVIL (2010), and the found-footage AS ABOVE, SO BELOW (2014). The Dowdles bring that horror sensibility to a number of sequences in which they let the suspense build, like letting Jack's ride up a slow elevator to the eighth floor play out in real time with the camera planted on Wilson's face, which does a very effective job of cranking up the tension since we have no idea what awaits him when those doors open. But there's just too much implausible silliness, like the way they're always hiding in plain sight underneath a table or something as the bad guys wander right on by. NO ESCAPE also drops the ball by squandering Pierce Brosnan in what amounts to little more than an extended cameo as a gregarious, hard-drinking mystery man named Hammond, who knows the country and offers some helpful tips to Jack. Brosnan is absent for a long stretch after his first early appearance, where he makes a memorable impression belting out a karaoke version of Huey Lewis'"Heart and Soul." It's obvious that he'll come into play later, but even when he does, he isn't well-utilized. Brosnan delivers a colorful, enjoyable turn as Hammond that sees him riffing on his wildly-praised-at-the-time but largely forgotten performance in THE MATADOR (2005), and his scenes with Thai actor Sahajik Boonthanakit, as Hammond's cab driving buddy Kenny Rogers (his cab business is named "Kenny Roger Taxi") are a lot of fun. The Dowdles should've made better use of both of them instead of scene after scene of Wilson saying "Now, come on girls, we've gotta stick together!" when the daughters complain that they're hungry or have to go potty, or repeatedly do things that put the family's lives in danger. NO ESCAPE doesn't really have enough depth to offer any sort of commentary (nor does it explore the sinister suggestion that the execs at Cardiff, who never do make contact with Jack, have left him there to die), so what you're left with is a rather run-of-the-mill, VOD-ready, end-of-summer action movie that doesn't seem to hang together all that well. On the plus side, it's never boring and there's enough to keep it briskly entertaining, but it just seems content to do the bare minimum it needs to do to get by, and sometimes not even that much.

THE RUNNER
(US - 2015)

The possibilities seem limitless when you think of the entertainment potential of Nicolas Cage playing a Louisiana politician embroiled in a sex scandal. But THE RUNNER, the Oscar-winning actor's latest straight-to-VOD trifle, demonstrates barely enough oomph to be classified as lukewarm. Playing like a really boring season of HOUSE OF CARDS whittled down to 90 minutes and missing all the good parts, THE RUNNER is set in 2010 just after the BP oil spill and offers Cage, with a wildly on-and-off N'awlins drawl, as Colin Bryce, a little-known New Orleans-based Congressman who makes headlines after delivering an impassioned speech shredding BP during a televised hearing. A rising star with Senate ambitions crashes quickly when hotel security footage shows him in an elevator dalliance with the wife of a local fisherman. Bryce's PR-savvy wife Deborah (Connie Nielsen) has overlooked his past infidelities in their 25-year business arrangement of a marriage and is willing to stick with him as long as he doesn't resign and start back at square one. He does resign, she leaves him, and he stops just short of going full TIGHTROPE with New Orleans prostitutes (the camera pans down to a wad of bills and a couple of Trojans just to let us know he's safe about it) before a whirlwind romance with his married-but-separated consultant Kate Haber (Sarah Paulson). Bryce then rebuilds his career as a pro-bono attorney working on lawsuits against BP until his attempt to get back in the politics forces him to realize that it's all about schmoozing lobbyists and greasing palms or corporate benefactors in the arena of political gamesmanship.

Who cares? Where's the story here? Where's the hook? As a drama, it's uninteresting, and as a character study, it doesn't even qualify as one-dimensional. You have to gladhand and sell part of your soul to be a politician? Thank you, writer/director Austin Stark for blowing the lid off that one. Cage plays it completely straight in a story that's begging for him to conjure some of his manic BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL - NEW ORLEANS craziness. I respect Cage wanting to play something straight, and it's probably not fair to criticize THE RUNNER for not being the film I wish it was, but if it offered anything substantive or even slightly intriguing, I wouldn't have to wish it was something else. What's most difficult in assessing THE RUNNER is that there's really nothing wrong with it in its presentation or its filmmaking: the performances are fine--there's also Wendell Pierce as Bryce's chief advisor and Peter Fonda as Bryce's alcoholic father, a beloved progressive 1970's New Orleans mayor whose legend casts a long shadow-- and there's nothing bad in Stark's direction, but there's just no meat to the story. THE RUNNER tries to be Cage's THE SEDUCTION OF JOE TYNAN, but there's two problems with that: nobody remembers THE SEDUCTION OF JOE TYNAN and the end result is about as exciting as watching Nicolas Cage watch C-SPAN. (R, 90 mins)

BIG GAME
(Finland/UK/Germany/US - 2015)

With some more convincing visual effects and better distribution, the high-concept, dumb-but-fun BIG GAME could've been a decent-sized hit. Written and directed by Jalmari Helander (the Finnish holiday horror cult hit RARE EXPORTS), BIG GAME is short (the closing credits start rolling at 77 minutes), and it's the kind of movie that dads and their preteen sons would really enjoy. Instead, Anchor Bay rolled it out on a whopping 11 screens and VOD, even with star Samuel L. Jackson riding high on KINGSMAN: THE SECRET SERVICE and AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON. Jackson is strictly in paycheck mode--yes, he does get one obscured-by-an-explosion "motherfucker"--as lame-duck US President William Alan Moore, dealing with declining approval ratings and a calculated effort by his opponents to smear him as "wimpy." He's already survived one assassination attempt, which left a bullet lodged near the heart of his top Secret Service agent Morris (Ray Stevenson). Moore is on his way back from a summit when Air Force One is shot down over the mountains of Finland. Morris, bitter about taking a bullet for a man he perceives to be a spineless coward, sabotaged the parachutes of the other agents and is revealed to be in cahoots with psychotic terrorist Hazar (Mehmet Kurtulus) in a plot to kill the President. Moore's escape pod is discovered by 13-year-old Oskari (RARE EXPORTS' Onni Tommila), who's hunting in the forest alone to prove his manhood to his father and the small village's close-knit hunter-gatherer types. Oskari steps up to help the President and get him through the forest to show his father he's a worthy outdoorsman and the President shakes off his wussiness to take on Morris, Hazar, and their associates who will stop at nothing to eliminate him.

Sort-of like a family-friendly OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN, BIG GAME is the very definition of a harmless diversion. Jackson isn't very convincing playing a doormat, and may have only signed on for the free trip to Helsinki, but he has a nice rapport with young Tommila. Stevenson and Kurtulus are pretty one-dimensional bad guys (Stevenson seems to be amusing himself by doing an Alec Baldwin impression), but you also get a character actor summit back home, with Victor Garber as the VP, Jim Broadbent as a CIA terrorism expert, Felicity Huffman as the CIA director, and Ted Levine as the Joint Chiefs chair. Helander pulls off a couple of imaginative action sequences--one involving Moore and Oskari huddled inside a runaway freezer--that succeed in spite of some greenscreen work that looks rushed. The kind of movie where no one can off a bad guy without a snarky quip of some kind, BIG GAME is brainless fun if you're in the right mood, and an earnest attempt at showing us what a low-budget Finnish Jerry Bruckheimer production might look like. (PG-13, 87 mins)

THE WATER DIVINER
(US/Australia - 2014; 2015 US release)

It doesn't seem like that long ago that an Oscar-winning actor like Russell Crowe making his narrative directing debut with an epic period piece would've been instant awards-season material. Indeed, THE WATER DIVINER was a big Christmas Day 2014 opening in Australia and other parts of the world, but Warner Bros. sat on it for several more months in the US before giving it a limited release on just 385 screens in April 2015, making it the Oscar-winning actor's least-seen film since 2009's instantly obscure (and deservedly so) TENDERNESS. It's that awards season presumptuousness that's the first step in hindering the film, which leisurely strolls out of the gate and unfolds at the speed of Merchant-Ivory, seemingly already assuming it's an Oscar front-runner. Set in 1919, the film also stars Crowe as Joshua Connor, a rugged Australian farmer and father of three sons who were killed on the same day in the Battle of Gallipoli four years earlier. Connor's still-grieving wife Eliza (Jacqueline McKenzie) has lost her grip on reality and still talks about their sons as if they were boys, fixing their shoes and darning their socks, and even insisting that Connor read a bedtime story to them in their empty room at night. After Eliza commits suicide, Connor heads to Turkey to recover the remains of his boys and bring them home to be buried next to their mother. The Gallipoli battle site is declared off limits by occupying British forces, but Connor finds an unlikely ally in Major Hasam (Yilmaz Erdogan of ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA), a leader for the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli but now working as a Turkish liaison with the Australia-New Zealand ANZAC forces on locating and identifying remains at the battle site's mass burial. At his hotel in Istanbul, Connor also bonds with proprietor Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko) and her young son Orhan (Dylan Georgiades). Ayshe, who also lost her husband at Gallipoli, initially resents the Australian "enemy" but comes to sympathize with him upon learning that he's lost his wife and his sons, and their growing friendship stirs resentment in Omer (Steve Bastoni), Ayshe's controlling brother-in-law to whom she has essentially been handed over as property and is arranged to be married when she decides her grieving period is over.

Crowe's film is sincere but inert and predictable, from the mutual, it's-nothing-personal-just-war understanding and respect that Connor and Hasam come to as they become friends, to the slowly blossoming romance between Connor and Ayshe. THE WATER DIVINER takes a turn for the silly when Connor's keen ability for locating ground water becomes a Spidey Sense of sorts when he uses it to ascertain the exact spot where his sons were killed. It's also hard to buy Connor's flashbacks to Gallipoli events that he couldn't possibly be remembering but rather, sees them as paranormal visions. Are screenwriters Andrew Knight and Andrew Anastasios trying to take the leap that Connor's talent for water divining leads to something more spiritually divine? If so, it doesn't work. The cramming in of the romantic subplot is soap-opera material at best, especially with a ludicrous dinner-by-500-candlelights scene that's unintentionally hilarious, as are some terrible CGI explosions that look like they were done using an app on Crowe's iPhone. The ending is weak, rushed, and unsatisfying, though there are moments throughout where the film almost pulls it together before bumbling and stumbling again. Crowe's performance is fine, and he has a good "buddy" chemistry with Erdogan, and when sequences aren't being thwarted by too-obvious greenscreen backgrounds, the location shooting in Australia and Turkey looks very good thanks to regular Peter Jackson cinematographer Andrew Lesnie, whose last film this was--the 59-year-old Oscar winner for FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING died of a heart attack just three days after the film's US opening. At the end of the day, THE WATER DIVINER is a well-intentioned but leadenly-paced and meandering misfire. (R, 111 mins)

SKIN TRADE
(Thailand/US - 2015)

The globetrotting actioner SKIN TRADE is a bloody, bone-crushingly entertaining throwback to the mismatched buddy/cop movies of the late '80s and early '90s. It occasionally suffers from budget limitations and has more plot and extraneous characters than it really needs, but it delivers the goods where it matters, and has its heart in the right place with an obviously sincere concern for human trafficking on the part of producer/co-writer/star Dolph Lundgren. Lundgren is Nick Cassidy, a plays-by-his-own-rules Newark cop obsessed with nailing Serbian crime lord Viktor Dragovic (Ron Perlman) who, with his four sons, oversees a global operation involving the trafficking of drugs, young women and teenage girls. Meanwhile, Bangkok detective Tony Vitayakul (ONG BAK's Tony Jaa) has lost contact with his girlfriend/informant Min (Celina Jade), who went undercover to be abducted by the Cambodia wing of Dragovic's operation. Back in Newark, Cassidy nabs Dragovic at a shipyard after a shootout results in the death of one of the criminal's sons, but Dragovic jumps bail to Cambodia after his goons blow up Cassidy's house with a rocket launcher, killing his wife and daughter. Clinging to life and without the knowledge of his boss Costello (Peter Weller) and FBI agent Reed (BLACK DYNAMITE's Michael Jai White), Cassidy flees both the hospital and the country, heading to Southeast Asia to exact revenge on Dragovic and bring down his operation. The Feds are in hot pursuit, and through a convoluted set of circumstances, Vitayakul spends a good chunk of time thinking Cassidy killed his partner, but eventually they team up to take out Dragovic...if they don't kill each other first!

A DTV-level film that somehow made it into some theaters, SKIN TRADE suffers from some dubious-looking greenscreen and digital work, though only Lundgren can convincingly pull off looking cool as he walks away from a CGI explosion. A weathered and craggy-looking Lundgren, augmented by some facial scarring makeup, is an engagingly gritty hero and convincingly sells Cassidy's obsessive rage (Lundgren is a better actor than people think). He works well with Jaa, especially in a pair of extensive fight scenes, but it's nearly an hour into the film before they even pair up, as the script works through a lot of backstory and characters. One wishes White had a little more to do--one pivotal plot point hinges on his character, but because he's such an engaging screen presence in action films (and a solid actor as well) that it does seem like he's getting table scraps here with an overall minor supporting role. Perlman chews the scenery with a thick Eastern European accent, and Weller gets a couple of dyspeptic outbursts as Cassidy's pissed-off lieutenant (disappointingly, the filmmakers deprive Weller of the chance to demand Cassidy's gun and shield to stash away in the top drawer of his desk). Director Ekachai Uekrongtham previously helmed the 2004 Muay Thai boxing drama BEAUTIFUL BOXER, but otherwise has little experience is this genre, with most of his work being straight drama aside from the 2008 horror film THE COFFIN. He does a good job with the actors, but one suspects Lundgren and Jaa--both experienced directors themselves--had significant input in the staging of the action. SKIN TRADE doesn't really offer anything new, but it does enthusiastically deliver exactly what it promises. (R, 96 mins)

EJECTA
(Canada - 2015)

Fans of the linguistic viral zombie outbreak cult classic PONTYPOOL (2008) will be interested in EJECTA, as both were scripted by Tony Burgess and feature Lisa Houle (PONTYPOOL's radio station manager Sydney Briar) in a key role. Much the way PONTYPOOL offered a rare lead for a familiar and constantly jobbing familiar face (Stephen McHattie), EJECTA does the same for veteran Canadian character actor Julian Richings. Richings is William Cassidy, a loner still haunted by an alien abduction he experienced 39 years earlier. Cassidy also blogs about UFO sightings, alien encounters, and government conspiracies under the name "Spider Nevi," and he reaches out to young documentary filmmaker and Spider Nevi superfan Joe Sullivan (Adam Seybold) about an upcoming Carrington Event or "mass ejection," a solar flare that may throw Earth off its orbit. Instead, they encounter an alien running rampant through the woods, and something--exactly what doesn't become clear until much later--happens that lands Cassidy in a Guantanamo-like bunker where he's interrogated and tortured by the sadistic Dr. Tobin (Houle, in a quite a menacing contrast to her PONTYPOOL character), an operative for a mysterious shadow wing of the government who doesn't hesitate to shoot military personnel in the head if she doesn't like the answers they give or if they fail to respond to her requests with appropriate speed.

Burgess and directors Matt Wiele and Chad Archibald juggle three overlapping stories: Cassidy and Sullivan encountering an alien in the woods; Tobin's soldiers looking for the missing Sullivan; and the psychological and physical torture of Cassidy by Tobin. It's the Cassidy-Tobin dynamic that's the most interesting element of EJECTA, so of course it takes a back seat until late in the game as the directors instead focus more on the other two storylines, which seem to exist simply to pander to the found-footage and hand-held crowd, whether it's Sullivan's documentary about "Spider Nevi" or the military search, which plays out entirely in green night-vision. There's some thought-provoking ideas in the Cassidy-Tobin sections of the film, particularly in the way Cassidy withstands every brutality Tobin has inflicted on him because after what he experienced 39 years ago, nothing can terrify or hurt him, and in fact, her abuse only makes him stronger. In the end, despite some unexpected elements in the home stretch--including some unabashed KEEP-worship in some of the music and visuals--and a pair of terrific performances by Richings and Houle, EJECTA isn't much more than yet another shaky-cam, faux-doc, found footage alien invasion movie with some pretty dodgy visual effects. Fans of PONTYPOOL--one of the best horror films of the last decade--will find it frustrating because, like that film, EJECTA could've brought something new to a played-out subgenre. It's still better than any SKYLINE or AREA 51 or most of its type. Despite its many problems, it's worth one watch for the work of Richings and Houle, and I have to admit that the shout-out to THE KEEP was a pleasant surprise that won some points in its favor. (Unrated, 82 mins)

BOULEVARD
(US - 2015)

The third of four films Robin Williams had in the can at the time of his death in August 2014 and the last to feature him onscreen (he voices a dog in Terry Jones' long-delayed sci-fi comedy ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING, tentatively due in the US in early 2016), BOULEVARD finds the actor on the controlled, dramatic side of things for one of the better projects from his mediocrity-plagued final couple of years. A character study of a lifetime of repression and walled-off emotions, BOULEVARD was directed by the wildly inconsistent Dito Montiel, who garnered some indie acclaim with 2006's A GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING YOUR SAINTS, but other than 2009's underrated FIGHTING, has fizzled in the years since. Montiel's specialty is shooting his films in the parts of NYC that still look like the NYC of the 1980s, but BOULEVARD finds him venturing outside his comfort zone. A low-budget indie shot in Nashville in the summer of 2013, the film didn't even secure a distributor until several months after Williams' death (Starz Media, who opened it on 11 screens in July 2015), which probably had to do with the subject matter as much as it's just a depressing downer without a lot of mass appeal. Williams stars as Nolan Mack, a milquetoast, 60-year-old loan officer who's worked at the same bank branch for 25 years. The comfort and familiarity of his job extends to his home life with wife Joy (Kathy Baker). While they enjoy one another's company, share an affinity for fine wine, the literary works of John Updike and Salman Rushdie, and movies like Godard's MASCULIN FEMININ, the childless couple are more like old friends than spouses. They sleep in separate rooms and there's no indication of any physical intimacy between them in quite some time. While returning from a visit to his father (Gary Gardner, who also died prior to the film's release) at a nursing home, Nolan impulsively detours through a sketchy part of town and picks up Leo (Roberto Aguire), a male prostitute who suggests they go to a motel. Asexual Nolan declines any offers of sex and just wants to talk or, at most, gently caress or hold Leo. Nolan becomes a sugar daddy of sorts, buying Leo a phone, clothes for a job interview, and giving him money. He grows possessive of Leo, who comes to like Nolan but is still drawn to the streets and hustling. Nolan's fixation on Leo becomes a major life distraction that eventually gets him a black eye after a physical altercation with Leo's pimp (Giles Matheny) that spills over into his workplace, and forces him to spin a web of lies that Joy constantly catches him in but says nothing.

It's always strange seeing an actor who's since passed on in a new project months or years after their death. Of course, the fact that Williams is no longer here and that his life ended the way it did casts a dark cloud over the already melancholy BOULEVARD. Nolan is a meek man who loves his wife, but whose life has passed him by and at 60, he's only now coming to terms with the fact that he's gay but too emotionally withdrawn to know how to act on it. After years (decades?) of a loving but platonic, convenient marriage, that part of Nolan has shut down but Leo stirs something inside of him and while he can't act on it in a sexual way, it's making him re-evaluate everything, much to the dismay of Joy, who loves her husband but knows their marriage is a security blanket of sorts. She even demonstrates just how well she knows her husband when he finally admits he's been lying and her first question is "What's his name?" Williams and Baker are very good here, and after some truly abysmal films in recent years (THE BIG WEDDING, THE ANGRIEST MAN IN BROOKLYN, A MERRY FRIGGIN' CHRISTMAS) and the failed TV series THE CRAZY ONES, it's nice to see one last excellent performance from him--he's always been at his best when a director can rein him in, and Montiel succeeds on that front, even as the story seems ready to clandestinely veer into ONE HOUR PHOTO territory at any moment. Williams also works well with Aguire and with Bob Odenkirk, as Nolan's best friend, a cynical English prof with a propensity for younger women. BOULEVARD manages to accomplish the rare feat of being a downbeat film that doesn't force its characters to wallow in misery, but at the same time, it offers no real surprises in its outcome and it's prone to clunky exposition drops. It's not a great film (unless you're grading on the Montiel curve), but it's an occasionally effective and heartfelt one, and fans of Williams and the always-excellent Baker (who gets a fine Beatrice Straight-from-NETWORK tirade near the end) will definitely want to seek it out. (R, 88 mins)

THE D TRAIN
(US/UK - 2015)

IFC opened THE D TRAIN on over 1000 screens in the second week of the summer movie season and watched it promptly tank, landing in 19th place with $450,000 and plummeting an apocalyptic 97% in its second weekend. It's a mixed bag, but commercially speaking, it's the kind of offbeat project--think of Adam Sandler fans going to see PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE--that produces vitriolic reactions from an audience that's not getting the movie they thought they'd be getting. Of course, THE D TRAIN didn't really get much of a push in the first place, starting with a vague trailer that sort-of looked like a wacky reunion comedy but seemed a little off. IFC was probably betting on Black's presence alone netting them a commercial hit, while Black was probably thinking this would be another BERNIE to beef up his indie cred. Black is Dan Landsman, a nice-guy sad sack with a nice family--wife Stacey (Kathryn Hahn), teenage son Zach (Russell Posner), and an infant daughter--and a dull job at an outdated Pittsburgh consulting firm whose technophobe owner Bill (Jeffrey Tambor) doesn't buy into the idea the computers are essential. Dan also chairs his 20th high school reunion committee, even though the other volunteers don't like him and don't invite him out for drinks after their meetings (Dan sees their bar pics on Facebook the next day). After spotting their high school god Oliver Lawless (James Marsden) in a sunblock commercial on TV, Dan has a plan to make the reunion epic and make himself the hero in the process: get Lawless, a star athlete and all-around stud who went to L.A. after high school to become an actor, to commit to the reunion. Dan grows a soul patch and fakes a business trip to L.A. in order to meet up with Oliver, and after a drug and alcohol-fueled weekend where something quite unexpected happens, Oliver agrees to come to the reunion, which up-ends Dan's life in ways that soon spiral out of control.

Given that the sexually adventurous Oliver talks openly of no preference for women or men, just "whatever feels right," what happens in L.A. between him and Dan probably won't come as a surprise to anyone who's seen 2000's CHUCK & BUCK, the indie hit whose star/writer Mike White--looking alarmingly like the late, great Norman Fell as he gets older--has a supporting role and co-produces here. THE D TRAIN explores this plot turn with little concern for commercial viability, but the biggest issue is that Dan never seems like a real person. He's a man who desperately wants to rewrite his high school experience, even inventing ridiculous nicknames for himself (like "The D Man,""D-Fresh," and "D-Money") that everyone calls out as complete bullshit. At first, Dan seems sad and a little pathetic, not unlike Ricky Gervais' David Brent on THE OFFICE, but the more the film goes on, especially after the L.A. section, the more unsympathetic you'll feel to the point of possible repulsion. Cringe comedy has to be funny while making you uncomfortable, but Dan becomes such a unlikable asshole that the cringe factor never gets to take hold and you start feeling sorry for Oliver, who's the far more interesting character and didn't ask for any of this. Marsden is terrific as Oliver, who also has his own insecurities ("I peaked in the 11th grade," he says regarding his failed pursuit of Hollywood fame, and he also haplessly tries to impress Dan by pretending to know Dermot Mulroney when they spot him in a bar) and vulnerabilities that he tries to mask by doing things like dispensing sage advice to Zach about how to maneuver his way through a three-way. But Black's performance becomes so over-the-top and off-putting that you keep rooting for Dan's life to completely collapse, and I'm not sure that was the intent of the writing/directing team of Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel. As Dan grows increasingly desperate and more hostile, I kept thinking of the nuances that an actor like, say, the late Philip Seymour Hoffman could've brought to the character (he would've been perfect for this). Black isn't able--at least not in his performance here--to explore the dark places that THE D TRAIN wants to go, and the film never finds the right tone, trying to go in one direction but being pulled in another by Black doing his "Jack Black" thing. It also doesn't seem to make much sense that 45-year-old Black and and 41-year-old Marsden would be high school seniors in 1994. Why not make it a 25-year reunion? And maybe this is being pedantic, but why is Quarterflash's 1981 hit "Harden My Heart" being played at a Class of 1994 reunion? What 18-year-old in 1994 was listening to Quarterflash? And the morning after the reunion, Stacey tells Dan that he needs to take Zach to school. What class reunion takes place on a weeknight or a Sunday? (R, 101 mins)

TRUE STORY
(US - 2015)

There's a fascinating film to be made of the facts behind TRUE STORY, but the result here is a lifeless and formulaic psychological thriller-turned-forgettable courtroom drama. In 2002, New York Times journalist Michael Finkel was fired after fudging some facts and creating composite characters for an investigative piece. At the same time, American fugitive Christian Longo was in Mexico, evading murder charges for the deaths of his wife and three children. When Longo was apprehended, he had been using the name "Mike Finkel," and passing himself off as a reporter. Finkel and Longo had no connection and had never met, and when word got back to Finkel that someone on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list was using his name as an alias, he reached out to a jailed Longo, who was in Oregon awaiting trial. So began a relationship that's somewhere between man-crush and co-dependency of sorts that carries on to this day (the film says the men still talk on the first Sunday of every month), one that saw Longo manipulating Finkel and the disgraced Finkel using the case to nab a book deal and revitalize his career. There's a lot of talk in the prison visitation scenes between Finkel (two-time Academy Award-nominee Jonah Hill) and Longo (Academy Award-nominee James Franco) but none of it really goes anywhere. Longo keeps insisting he's innocent, which secures Finkel's book deal, but then pleads guilty to two of the murders, and not guilty to the other two in what's perceived as a blatant attempt to confuse the jury and cause a mistrial. Longo has been diagnosed with a narcissistic personality disorder, but TRUE STORY doesn't really explore that. In fact, once director Rupert Goold keeps the focus on their one-on-one discussions, the film isn't really about much of anything. There's no suspense in the courtroom sequences, which are anchored by Franco giving a long and rambling Longo monologue, and Finkel comes off as too sloppy in his ambition and too gullible to be taken seriously. Because they have a nice natural rapport and have been friends for years, Hill and Franco--a dramatic pairing that, thanks to their extensive comedy history, still feels like stunt casting even though they have three (yes, three) Oscar nods between them (and a single wink from Franco as Longo smiles at Finkel after the verdict is read almost salvages things)--do good work with what they're given, but the Brad Pitt-produced TRUE STORY just never catches fire. (R, 99 mins)

DRAGON BLADE
(China - 2015)

Written and directed by Daniel Lee. Cast: Jackie Chan, John Cusack, Adrien Brody, Sharni Vinson, William Feng, Lin Peng, Mika Wang, Lorie Pester, Siwon Choi, Xiao Yang, Sammy Hung, Jozef Liu Waite. (R, 104 mins)

When the $65 million IMAX 3-D Chinese epic DRAGON BLADE became a blockbuster hit throughout Asia in February 2015, it didn't take long for a badly photo-shopped trade poster to explode on the internet thanks to the presence of John Cusack as a Roman centurion and Adrien Brody as a villainous nobleman in 50 B.C. Many even questioned if the poster was some kind of prank. No, it's a real movie, primarily a vehicle for star/producer Jackie Chan who, aside from his KUNG FU PANDA voice work, hasn't headlined an American film since the 2010 remake of THE KARATE KID. The 61-year-old action legend has instead settled into a series of generally serious Asian films like the period epic 1911 (2011) and typical--albeit with less death-defying stuntwork--Chan outings like CHINESE ZODIAC and the recently-released POLICE STORY: LOCKDOWN. DRAGON BLADE was a pet project for Chan, a story of disgraced warriors who team with an outcast faction of the Roman Army to defeat a power-crazed despot intent on taking control of the famed Silk Road.

The end result is a mess, at least in Lionsgate's re-edited, 104-minute American cut that's just arrived in a handful of theaters and on VOD (memo to Lionsgate's trailer team: you can't call something "a worldwide phenomenon" while dumping it on VOD). They cut nearly 25 minutes out of the film, among other things jettisoning an entire present-day prologue and epilogue involving archaeologists studying the Silk Road battle site. The Mandarin-language opening section is whiplash-inducing in its choppiness, making it impossible to figure out who's who except for the most familiar faces and a select few of the main supporting characters (YOU'RE NEXT's Sharni Vinson is prominently billed but has a role so small that it's literally blink-and-you'll-miss-her, so perhaps she was among the cuts made by Lionsgate). Chan is Huo An, a captain of the Silk Road Protection Squad, a close-knit group of warriors assigned by the government to keep peace among the many peoples who live in the Silk Road region. When the group is set up by one of their own and accused of gold smuggling, the entire squad is sentenced to the prison outpost Wild Geese Gate. It's here that they live in banishment until they're raided by a Roman army headed by General Lucius (Cusack). English-speaking Lucius instigates a one-on-one battle with English-speaking Huo An until a sandstorm approaches and the peace-seeking Huo An offers the soldiers food and shelter. Lucius is leading an army of rebel officers who have absconded with Publius (Jozef Liu Waite), a child prince chosen by his father to be the next heir, skipping over Publius' scheming, treacherous older brother Tiberius (Brody). Like most passed-over royals, Tiberius didn't take the news well and reacted by killing his father and poisoning his baby brother's eye medication, causing him to go blind. Tiberius is leading a 100,000-man army along the Silk Road in hot pursuit of Lucius, who is determined to keep Publius alive.

It's not a bad story, and at times, some of the visuals and battle scenes are pretty good, even if the CGI and greenscreen gets a little wonky-looking (boy, I get tired of writing that). But in the attempt to please the Chan faithful, the tone is all over the place. You get everything from slapstick comedy to blood-splattered battle with arterial spray and eye gougings. There's an absurd amount of over-emotional male bonding as Chan and writer/director Daniel Lee (BLACK MASK) try to turn this into a BRAVEHEART-level man-weepie (interestingly, Chan offered Cusack the gig after Mel Gibson turned it down). But nowhere is DRAGON BLADE sillier than in a long early sequence when Huo An is informed that Chinese officials will be arriving at Wild Geese Gate in 15 days to ensure that they've completed their assignment of rebuilding the fortress and the surrounding area. If it's not done, they'll all be executed and it's a job that would take six months of round-the-clock work. Fear not, Huo An's new bro Lucius says. With Roman ingenuity and good old-fashioned teamwork, the Romans and the Chinese can work together to rebuild this city with nothing less than an energetically plucky display of "Let's put on a show!" verve and moxie that would've made Mickey Rooney proud. They even have time to take a break where each army shows off its pageantry and formations in what amounts to a sort-of 50 B.C. Far East version of BRING IT ON. Then they sing war songs, drink, and bond and cry some more, as Publius declares Huo An an official Roman centurion. These kinds of radical tonal shifts play better with Asian moviegoers than they do with their western counterparts--the first half of DRAGON BLADE is so earnest and corny that it's honestly hard to dislike, but then it decides to get relatively serious when Tiberius takes center stage, and the shift just feels like too much after all the slapstick and shameless sentimentality that came before it. I say "relatively serious" since Brody, no doubt still basking in the glow of his INAPPROPRIATE COMEDY triumph, seems to be inspired by Nicolas Cage at his most Cagey. With a ridiculous wig, preening mannerisms and an inconsistent fey British accent that comes and goes without warning, Brody is obviously opting for the hammy route in his silliest performance since groping himself as the anagrammed "Byron Deidra" in Dario Argento's GIALLO. Cusack is ludicrously miscast but fares better than in most of his recent Cusackalypse Now trifles. Sure, the idea of him playing a Roman centurion is amusing--and he's more or less admitted he did it as a lark--but it's hardly any worse than most of his other recent jobs, with the exception of his acclaimed performance as Brian Wilson in LOVE & MERCY.

Asian audiences flocked to DRAGON BLADE and made it a huge hit, but they'll flock to anything and make it a huge hit. All the movies that go straight to VOD in the US are box office smashes in Asia. Make no mistake--this is strictly VOD material here, ready-made for Redbox. It might've had some potential as a word-of-mouth, sleeper crowdpleaser once it hit Netflix Instant, but well over half of the film is in Mandarin with English subtitles, so that's out, though I respect Lionsgate's decision to leave it Mandarin and not dub the Chinese cast members in English. At the end of the day, DRAGON BLADE's only notoriety is the unlikely sight of Cusack and Brody playing Ancient Roman dress-up on a Chinese vacation, but once the snickering dies down and the novelty wears off, you're left with a fairly middling, forgettable adventure.

THE TRANSPORTER: REFUELED
(France/China/Belgium - 2015)

Directed by Camille Delamarre. Written by Adam Cooper, Bill Collage and Luc Besson. Cast: Ed Skrein, Ray Stevenson, Loan Chabanol, Rasha Bukvic, Gabriella Wright, Tatiana Pajkovic, Wenxia Yu, Noemie Lenoir, Yuri Kolokolnikov, Lenn Kudrjawizki, Samir Guesmi. (PG-13, 96 mins)

Coming seven years after 2008's abysmal TRANSPORTER 3 and without Jason Statham or TRANSPORTER: THE SERIES star Chris Vance, THE TRANSPORTER: REFUELED seems like the kind of desperation reboot that should've held its world premiere at the Redbox in the vestibule of your nearest Walmart. It's as dumb as you might expect, but it's also surprisingly entertaining if you just sit back and roll with it, plus it's got a great set piece at an airport that's probably--even with some significant digital assistance--the most gonzo action sequence this side of MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. Replacing Statham is future trivia question response Ed Skrein, a part-time British rapper and one-time Daario Naharis on the third season of HBO's GAME OF THRONES (he was replaced in the fourth and on by Michiel Huisman). Skrein doesn't have the imposing screen presence or the bullish persona of Statham, but he grows on you as the movie goes on. Like Statham's interpretation of Transporter Frank Martin, Skrein's younger version prefers to work alone, but finds himself part of a ragtag team here, almost like Luc Besson and co-writers Adam Cooper and Bill Collage (EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS) are taking a page from the FAST & FURIOUS playbook, minus someone grunting "family" in every other line.

After the usual parking garage introduction where Martin is shown taking care of a gang of dipshits trying to steal his car, the Transporter is on to his latest no-questions-asked job: driving a mystery woman named Anna (Loan Chabanol). Anna says she has two packages, which turn out to be two additional passengers, Maria (Tatiana Pajkovic) and Qiao (Wenxia Yu). A fourth woman, Gina (Gabriella Wright) is at their destination, having tazed Frank Martin Sr. (Ray Stevenson), the Transporter's just-retired spy dad, holding him hostage to ensure Frank Jr's cooperation. Anna and the others are setting in motion an elaborate plan to drain the assets of numerous Monaco-based Russian crime lords and blame it on their pimp Arkady Kasanov (Rasha Bukvic), a human trafficker specializing in kidnapping teenage girls and forcing them into a lifetime of selling their bodies on the French Riviera. Double-crosses predictably ensue, but the Transporter and his dad come to sympathize with the long-abused women, and of course, it's personal between Frank Jr and Kasanov, who knew one another during their days as Special Forces mercenaries.

Other than being younger and lankier, Skrein mostly sticks to the Statham template, and there's a lot of good back-and-forth between Skrein and Stevenson, and the two actors work well enough together that Frank Sr would be a most welcome addition should there be future TRANSPORTERs. Though he takes part in a lot of the action, I doubt Stevenson's portrayal of Frank Sr. is meant to be an older version of the Statham character. There's enough here to suggest that it's both a reboot and a sequel, though the Transporter's detective pal Tarconi, played by Francois Berleand in the first three movies and on the TV series, is absent. The plot is busy enough that Frank Sr manages to find himself kidnapped twice and there's a very likable rapport between the Martins and the women, with the appealing Chabanol nicely channeling a young Monica Bellucci throughout. Director and Besson protege Camille Delamarre (BRICK MANSIONS) handles action sequences with much more clarity than TRANSPORTER 3's Olivier Megaton, a director who has yet to live up to his awesome name. There's still a lot of zooming and quick-cuts, but Delamarre keeps thing coherent, whether it's the car chases or a bank vault brawl, where the Transporter engages in what Joe Bob Briggs might term "safe deposit box-fu," or most notably, the bonkers airport sequence, which is almost worth the price of admission. It's not enough for the Transporter to drive his car 200 mph on a runway to get under an accelerating jet to catch his dad through the sunroof as he drops out of the cargo hold exit under the plane--no, then he has to speed back down the runway and up a ramp, going airborne into a jetway, then making a getaway by driving through the concourse like the Blues Brothers in a mall, crashing out through the airport's main entrance and blending in with the traffic undetected. Yeah, THE TRANSPORTER: REFUELED is that kind of movie and is fully self-aware. It's not on the same level as the franchise's standard-bearer, the Louis Leterrier-directed 2005 masterpiece TRANSPORTER 2 (Transporter, ambushing bad guy on a plane: "This flight's been cancelled." Bad guy: "Wrong. You've been cancelled!"), but it's a good sign that there's an unexpected reserve of fuel left in the tank.

THE VISIT
(US - 2015)

Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Cast: Olivia DeJonge, Ed Oxenbould, Deanna Dunagan, Peter McRobbie, Kathryn Hahn, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Patch Darragh. (PG-13, 94 mins)

M. Night Shyamalan's rocky road from once-adored wunderkind to piled-on pariah is nearing its second decade after a hubris-driven downward spiral that began with his spectacularly egocentric LADY IN THE WATER (2006) and last surfaced with the generally reviled sci-fi flop AFTER EARTH (2013). Shyamalan is back with THE VISIT and like seemingly every wide release horror movie these days, it's "from the producer of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY and INSIDIOUS." Judging from some of his recent career choices, it would appear Shyamalan is a glutton for punishment: anyone willing to take on a Will Smith family vanity project seems to be asking for it. AFTER EARTH wasn't very good, but it wasn't quite the apocalyptic bomb the reviews made it out to be, nor was Shyamalan's 2010 film THE LAST AIRBENDER, perhaps the apex of unrestrained and downright irrational critical and comments section Shyamahate. But for someone of Shyamalan's experience and reputation (he was, after all, once anointed "The Next Spielberg"), arriving beyond fashionably late at the Blumhouse dinner party to scrounge for found-footage table scraps six years after PARANORMAL ACTIVITY seems desperate and almost masochistic. Is he inviting hate from his detractors? Does he enjoy this?

Yes, THE VISIT is yet another Blumhouse-produced horror film of the faux-documentary/found-footage variety, and even as box office takes dwindle with each new one that comes along, they're so cheap to make with their usually unknown casts that you're getting more whether you want them or not. 15-year-old Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and 12-year-old Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) are Philadelphia siblings planning to visit their grandparents in rural Pennsylvania for a week while their divorced mom (Kathryn Hahn) goes on a cruise with her boyfriend. There's a troubled family history here: not only are Becca and Tyler still scarred by their father ditching them all to run off to California with a Starbucks barista five years earlier, but Mom hasn't spoken to her parents in over 15 years, after they had a huge falling out when she decided to run off and marry the kids' father against their wishes. The visit to the grandparents is not only to give Mom some time with the boyfriend (who the kids really like and would welcome as a stepdad). but also to reach out to the grandparents and try to put the family back together. All of this is documented by Becca, an aspiring filmmaker who uses terms like "blocking" and "mise-en-scene," and hopes to create a film chronicling the week with her mom's folks.

At first, Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop-Pop (Peter McRobbie) seem like a nice old couple--a little out of touch ("They don't know who One Direction is!" muses Tyler), and with odd bits of behavior like Pop-Pop frequently visiting the locked shed and a momentarily ferocious Nana pursuing them in a game of hide-and-seek under the porch. They live on a farm and turn in by 9:30 pm. Pop-Pop tells the kids to stay out of the basement because there's mold, and to stay in their room after 9:30. Outside their room, in the middle of the night, a nude Nana vomits, crawls around the house, and claws at the walls. Tyler sneaks into the shed to find a pile of feces-filled adult diapers. Pop-Pop explains that Nana has a condition known as "sundowning," when the night brings dementia-like symptoms, and Nana tells them that Pop-Pop is embarrassed by his incontinence issues and keeps the diapers in the shed until he has enough to burn the pile. The kids are weirded out, but accepting of the explanations because "well, they're old and they live on a farm, and..." Things get more intense as the week goes on, and when the grandparents are out for a walk, a couple of visitors stop by to check on Nana and Pop-Pop , who volunteer at an area mental hospital but didn't show up on their last scheduled day.

THE VISIT hinges on the kind of third-act plot twist that made Shyamalan famous, but it doesn't really work here. For starters, it requires the local police to be complete morons, and it can't be explained away by someone groaning about "hick-town cops." What does work are a lot of the little details the director throws in: the character elements between Becca and Tyler that show the way siblings both love and hurt one another and how they fight but instinctively stick together when the shit hits the fan. They're children traumatized by the breakup of their parents' marriage: Becca is filled with rage at her father that she can't articulate and instead morphs it into crippling self-esteem issues that she masks with an affected, beyond-her-age vocabulary, while Tyler cites his bad performance at a little league football game for the reason their dad left, and his coping mechanism is germphobia, which a fumbling Shyamalan only brings up when it's necessary for the plot (like an encounter with one of Pop-Pop's diapers that, once seen, can't be unseen). Both of the young actors are quite good, particularly DeJonge, but Shyamalan too often dwells on the more grating aspects of Tyler, like his freestyle rapping, which gets entirely too much screen time and does nothing to endear Oxenbould (who looks like a young Dax Shepard) to the audience.

The biggest problem with THE VISIT rests on the shoulders of the man himself, M. Night Shyamalan. As someone who has said things like "Well, AFTER EARTH has it strong points," and "THE LAST AIRBENDER was a little better than I thought it would be," I wouldn't say I'm a Shyamalan apologist, but there seemed to be a herd mentality in the way critics have piled on his films of the last decade. Shyamalan's decision to make THE VISIT in found-footage format is its complete undoing. Of course, he throws in some shots that couldn't possibly be filmed by Becca or Tyler or any of their cameras. Of course, their cameras never stop rolling 24/7. Of course, the middle-of-nowhere house owned by Luddites with no TV, computer, or cell reception somehow has wi-fi so the kids can Skype with Mom. And of course, the climax involves a shaky-cam, tilted-angle trip into the dark basement. There's enough positives in THE VISIT in its characterization and the concept itself that it quickly becomes obvious that it would've worked significantly better had it been shot as a straight narrative instead of the faux-doc/found-footage format, which adds nothing to the story but frustration and requires the actors constantly showing off and playing to the camera.

2002 seems like a lifetime ago

And in that realization, the truth becomes clear: M. Night Shyamalan is his own worst enemy. He had a good movie here, with a plethora of macabre and dark-humored ideas, but he can't resist shooting himself in the foot time and again by making the dumbest decisions possible, inviting scorn, negating the work of the two young stars and haplessly trying to cash in on a played-out fad that refuses to die. There's a reasonably decent little horror movie locked up in here, but Shyamalan has thrown away the key and with that, he's not so much the master filmmaker he was being touted as after THE SIXTH SENSE but rather, a troll masquerading as an auteur to the amusement of no one but himself. He's Uwe Boll with an Oscar nomination. The finale is disappointing, there's a typically cloying, sentimental coda, and then another rap from Tyler over the end credits because hey, let's make sure the audience leaves pissed-off and annoyed. Shyamalan could've saved a lot of time and just let those closing credits play over a static shot of himself flipping the bird. Even with all the positives that are there if you look for them, THE VISIT is his worst and most infuriating film yet. I have no more defenses of his work left in me. We're done here.

THE HARVEST
(US - 2015)

THE HARVEST is one of those intense thrillers that has you on the edge of your seat until you start thinking about it and it promptly falls flat on its face. Shown at festivals in 2013 but unreleased until its stealth VOD premiere two years later by IFC, it's also the first new film in over a decade by HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER and WILD THINGS director John McNaughton, whose last film, the obscure Bill Murray comedy SPEAKING OF SEX, sat on the shelf for seven years before going straight-to-DVD in 2007. In a rural, wooded area, a sickly 13-year-old boy named Andy (Charlie Tahan) is housebound and under the constant care of his overbearing, overmedicating doctor mother Katherine (Samantha Morton) and his passive, weak-willed father Richard (Michael Shannon). Andy is homeschooled, has never been outside of the house, and is surprised when his first friend comes knocking at his window. Maryann (Natasha Calis) is a feisty orphan who just moved in with her grandparents (Peter Fonda, Leslie Lyles) across the nearby creek. The two lonely kids enjoy playing video games, but the possessive Katherine is threatened by Maryann, and after a conversation with the grandparents, it's decided that Maryann is no longer welcome to visit Andy. That doesn't stop her, and as the observant Katherine sees evidence that Maryann is still visiting, she goes off the deep end, unable to give Andy any freedom despite protests from Richard to let the dying boy have as normal a life as possible in what little time he has left.

Something odd is going on in the house and what sounds like a fusion of coming-of-age and disease-of-the-week dramas makes an abrupt switch in direction with a doozy of a midway plot twist that unfortunately backs first-time screenwriter Stephen Lancelotti into a corner from which he can't claw his way out. The implausibilities abound--how is Maryann able to so easily sneak in and out of the house, and once she finds what she finds, she exclaims "Nobody believes me!" but we only see her tell her incredulous grandparents. Grandpa says "stay off the computer," then when she pleads with him later about what's really going on in the house, does he call the police? No, he tells her to "follow your heart." What? THE HARVEST has no idea what to do with Fonda's character, who starts out the film as a rock for his grieving granddaughter and quickly turns into a useless old fool, giving the actor literally nothing to do but parody himself and mutter "Far out!" a couple of times. Calis and Tahan are fine, even though it feels like they're 13-and-14-year-olds playing characters who should be eight or nine. Shannon is terrific in a rare restrained, sympathetic performance--watch him in one scene where he contorts his upper body and looks to be in agony trying to avoid hugging the bonkers Katherine. It's Morton who rules THE HARVEST, with a terrifying, mad performance as the off-her-rocker mother desperately clinging to her control over a child for reasons that only become clear later on. Fast-paced and gripping, THE HARVEST is nonetheless too dumb to be taken seriously, wrapping up with one of the more frustratingly inane closing shots in recent memory, one that looks like a hasty reshoot a year after the rest of the movie was finished. (Unrated, 104 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)

EXTINCTION
(Spain/Hungary - 2015)

This week's new zombie movie is the European-made EXTINCTION, which valiantly tries to bring an emphasis on characterization to the proceedings, but gets so bogged down in tedium and belaboring its points that it's a full 90 minutes before the creature mayhem even gets rolling. Directed and co-written by Miguel Angel Vivas (KIDNAPPED) and produced by frequent Liam Neeson director Jaume Collet-Serra (UNKNOWN, NON-STOP, RUN ALL NIGHT), EXTINCTION's prologue briefly goes into the initial zombie outbreak before cutting to "Nine Years Later." The world is now a frozen apocalypse with scant few human survivors, the plus side being that the extreme climate change wiped out the zombie population and killed the undead infection. The first hour and change primarily deals with a still-seething feud between a pair of neighbors in the middle of iced-over nowhere: bearded, long-haired Patrick (LOST's Matthew Fox) hunts for food with his loyal dog, while next door, overprotective Jack (BURN NOTICE's Jeffrey Donovan) helicopter parents his spunky, starting-to-rebel nine-year-old daughter Lu (Quinn McColgan). Patrick and Jack have a past--they were on a bus in the prologue, with a woman named Emma (Valeria Vereau) and a crying infant. When the bus was sieged by rampaging zombies, Emma was bitten and Patrick killed her before she turned. Jack has never been able to forgive him and forbids Lu to speak to him.

It seems hard to buy that this level of grudging tension and neighborly hatred could go on for nine years--almost as hard as it is to buy Lu eating a box of Froot Loops that looks like it was just brought home from the grocery store. When Patrick is out scavenging for food and encounters an evolved version of the zombies--able to withstand the cold but hobbled by blindness--the men set aside their differences to battle the approaching creatures and protect Lu, who's clearly the center of a pre-zombie outbreak babydaddy dispute. Even with its frequently shoddy greenscreen work, it's hard to dismiss EXTINCTION's efforts to do something different in an absurdly played-out genre, but it doesn't do itself any favors by pulling a Gareth Edwards and keeping the zombies offscreen as much as possible (for most of the film, there's one zombie and Patrick has him chained up outside). And when they do finally arrive, they seem to have sprinted in off the set of Neil Marshall's THE DESCENT. The film's sympathies clearly lie with the more proactive and heroic Patrick, who wins the respect of Lu, who seems to realize that Jack is a bit of an asshole and a coward, especially when his first reaction when the zombies attack is to try and pre-emptively shoot Lu in the head. Young McColgan is a scene-stealer, especially in a really nice bit where she traps a zombie in a downstairs freezer and allows herself a brief smile, marveling at her own ingenuity and badassery. More moments like that, and less of a pouting, butthurt Jack scowling at Patrick might've made some improvements. There's a solid 90-minute movie hiding somewhere in the bloated two-hour one that got released. (R, 113 mins)

UNFRIENDED
(US - 2015)

An ambitious stunt that sticks to its game plan but still really works only once, UNFRIENDED is a real-time social media fright flick that plays out on a multi-window Skype session. Nacho Vigalondo's OPEN WINDOWS attempted this with hapless results, and while UNFRIENDED is much more successful at adhering to and exploiting the gimmick, they payoff isn't quite worth the buildup. A year after the tragic death of high school student Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman), who committed suicide after a humiliating video of her was posted to YouTube, her group of friends are taunted during a group chat on Skype by a blank-icon user going by the name "Billie227." All attempts to ditch the intruder fail, and Billie seems to have insider knowledge about all of them. As Billie Facebook messages Blaire (Shelley Hennig), who at one time was Laura's best friend, the stakes are raised, secrets are revealed, and people start dying. Director Leo Gabriadze (a protege of producer Timur Bekmambetov) and screenwriter Nelson Greaves hint at things under the surface, whether it's lip service being paid to the issue of cyberbullying or some dark secret involving an incident with Laura's uncle when Laura and Blaire were younger, but they also do an admirable job cranking up the tension, making harmless sounds like text message and chat alerts come off as nerve-wracking and dread-inducing. As Billie starts to mercilessly expose the wrongdoings and hypocrisy of Blaire and her friends--both to Laura and to one another--it's clear that everyone has secrets and the bonds of friendship are tenuous at best, as evidenced by the nail-biting game of "Never Have I Ever." It's an often bleak and misanthropic film (kudos to the filmmakers for going for the R rating), but it's one that should've dug a little deeper instead of going the easy route of everyone shouting over one another, climactic jump scares, and tilted BLAIR WITCH camera angles. It's also another horror film where the "teenagers" are played by actors in their mid-to-late 20s and looking it. But for the most part, UNFRIENDED is better and more compelling than it has any right to be, and has enough good things going for it that its shortcomings are all the more frustrating. So many genre films of a reality-based style (faux-doc, found-footage, etc) start cutting corners and cheating as soon as they can, but UNFRIENDED establishes its rules and sticks to them. The real-time element is believably-handled and Gabriadze never once strays from the central position of having the camera planted on Blaire's laptop, from her POV (that was where Vigalondo dropped the ball with OPEN WINDOWS--he couldn't wait to get the action away from the laptop), and the whole film really does look like it was pulled off in one take in real time. Of course, a pretty good thing always has to be ruined: UNFRIENDED 2 is coming in 2016. (R, 83 mins)

CHINA 9 LIBERTY 37
(Italy/Spain - 1978)

Directed by Monte Hellman. Written by Jerry Harvey, Douglas Venturelli, Ennio de Concini and Don Vicente Escriva. Cast: Warren Oates, Fabio Testi, Jenny Agutter, Sam Peckinpah, Romano Puppo, Isabel Mestres, Gianrico Tondinelli, Franco Interlenghi, Carlos Bravo, Sydney Lassick, Natalia Kim, Helga Line, Luis Prendes, David Thompson, Tony Brandt, Luis Barboo. (R, 102 mins)

Born in 1929, Monte Hellman has always existed on the fringes of the movie industry, even on the rare occasions he found himself working for a Hollywood studio. Like many filmmakers of his generation and younger, he got his start working for Roger Corman. He made his debut with the 1959 horror cheapie BEAST FROM HAUNTED CAVE and, along with Francis Ford Coppola, Jack Hill, and others, was one of several Corman proteges involved in the assembly of Corman's 1963 patchwork THE TERROR. Hellman then directed a pair of 1964 Filipino action films, BACK DOOR TO HELL and FLIGHT TO FURY--both featuring a young Jack Nicholson, who co-wrote FLIGHT TO FURY with Hellman--and he made a name for himself in indie circles with a pair of enigmatic 1966 westerns co-starring Nicholson, RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND (which Nicholson also wrote) and THE SHOOTING. Both were backed by Roger Corman but ended up going straight to TV and not getting any theatrical exposure until after Nicholson's big breakthrough in 1969's EASY RIDER. Hellman also benefited from the post-EASY RIDER craze of big studios backing auteur projects with minimal commercial appeal when Universal gave the greenlight to his cult classic TWO-LANE BLACKTOP. A philosophical, existential road movie where The Driver (James Taylor), The Mechanic (Dennis Wilson), The Girl (Laurie Bird), and GTO-driving GTO (Warren Oates) are the players in a slow-moving road race to nowhere in particular, TWO-LANE BLACKTOP is a mesmerizing odyssey with arguably the ultimate Warren Oates performance (it's a close call between that and Sam Peckinpah's 1974 journey into madness BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA) and one of the all-time great final cinematic images. Hellman would re-team with Oates for 1974's COCKFIGHTER and, in a sign of odd jobs to come, began work on Hammer Films' kung-fu actioner SHATTER with Stuart Whitman and Peter Cushing before studio head Michael Carreras fired him and ended up directing the film himself. Hellman's career is filled with unrealized or partially completed projects. It would be another four years before his next film, the unlikely post-spaghetti western CHINA 9 LIBERTY 37.

Co-written by Jerry Harvey, the programming director of the influential 1970s/1980s L.A.-based pay-TV station Z Channel (the subject of the 2004 Xan Cassavetes documentary Z CHANNEL: A MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION) who would kill his wife and himself in a tragic 1988 murder-suicide, CHINA 9 LIBERTY 37--the title refers to a road sign showing the direction and distance to the two nearest towns--is offbeat, unpredictable, and very character-driven. Though it hasn't been the easiest film to see over the years, at least in Hellman's intended 102-minute form, it's become a legitimate cult classic since its extremely spotty release in 1978, the last film handled by a bankrupt and soon-to-be-defunct Allied Artists. So spotty was that initial release that CHINA 9 didn't even play in NYC until November 1984 when Lorimar, who acquired the Allied Artists library, gave it a brief relaunch that went nowhere. It's since fallen into the public domain and regularly turns up in battered, drastically edited, cropped prints on those bargain bin western collection DVD sets, almost always missing the film's explicit sex scenes and with running times ranging from 90 minutes all the way down to a pitiful 76. Hellman's director's cut has never received an official DVD or Blu-ray release but aired on the Z Channel decades ago. That changed recently, when an uncut, widescreen print was aired without fanfare on Turner Classic Movies, buried in the coveted 4:15 am time slot on a late Monday night/early Tuesday morning.

CHINA 9 LIBERTY 37 is a strange and somber mix of nihilistic spaghetti western, Hellman character piece, and loving Sam Peckinpah homage, right down to Bloody Sam getting an affectionate "Introducing Sam Peckinpah" credit for his brief appearance as a famous writer of western dime novels. Outlaw Clayton Drumm (Eurocult vet Fabio Testi, of WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? and THE BIG RACKET) is spared from the hangman when he's offered a cash reward and freedom if he kills Matthew Sebanek (Warren Oates, by this point a Hellman fixture), a proud rancher who refuses to sell his property--which rests directly in the path of a planned rail line--to the region's chief railroad baron. Drumm finds the Sebanek ranch and comes to befriend the gruff Matthew, who sees through his guest's "just passing through" act immediately and concludes that he's a hired killer. Drumm fesses up, admitting that he came there to kill him but changed his mind about going through with it because he didn't expect to like him. What Drumm likes even more is Matthew's younger, lonely, and sexually-frustrated wife Catherine (Jenny Agutter). The two have a clandestine morning fling in the river and when Matthew confronts her, things get violent and she hits him over the head with a rolling pin and stabs him in the back in self defense. Thinking he's dead, she runs off with Drumm, but once Matthew recovers, he and his loathsome brothers are hot on the lovebirds' trail, and both parties are pursued by the railroad's newest hired killer Zeb (Romano Puppo), who has orders to kill Matthew for refusing to sell the land and Drumm for not killing Matthew.

The elements are in place for a fairly standard-issue spaghetti oater, but Hellman doesn't give in to conventional story arcs. We don't expect Matthew to figure out Drumm's intent so quickly, just like we don't expect Drumm to confess and say that friendship made him change his mind about killing him. We don't expect Drumm and Catherine to feel terrible about how they've hurt Matthew. Even though the cuckolded Matthew is constantly mocked and having his manhood questioned by his vulgar younger brothers--one of whom even tries to have his own way with Catherine--he still seeks a reconciliation. He loves his wife, even though his patriarchal upbringing (often addressing her as simply "Woman...") frequently makes that difficult for her to see or for him to demonstrate. Realizing the error of his ways and understanding why she chose to run away, Matthew just wants to make things right, even if he feels compelled to kill Drumm anyway because that's what he "should" do. But there will be no showdown between Matthew and Drumm because there doesn't need to be. Like Ethan Edwards at the end of THE SEARCHERS, Drumm knows he doesn't belong here, and when Matthew insists on facing off, Drumm refuses. There's a big shootout, but it's not between the people you assume it will be. Instead, it's Matthew, Catherine, and Drumm inadvertently teaming up to take on Zeb and his posse. CHINA 9 has its stumbles--the overwrought Ronee Blakley love ballad that accompanies the ludicrous and overlong slo-mo hotel room sex scene with Drumm and Catherine is just awful, and Testi's thick Italian accent (though the supporting actors are dubbed by many familiar voices, Testi's own voice remains) sometimes makes his dialogue tough to decipher. The latter issue could just be the sound mix: Hellman stated on his Facebook page that the "restored" version," presumably what TCM aired, has some sound issues and still didn't meet with his approval. Other than Testi's sometimes garbled line readings, I didn't have any problems with the sound. Regardless, it's a fine film and probably Hellman's last good one, and it's long overdue for a proper Blu-ray edition. The beautiful-looking print shown on TCM is a huge step in the right direction, at last doing justice to Giuseppe Rotunno's cinematography.

Following CHINA 9's nearly non-existent American release, Hellman accepted a paycheck studio gig by taking over the espionage thriller AVALANCHE EXPRESS after director Mark Robson died during production in June 1978. In August 1978, shortly after Lorimar brought Hellman in to finish the film, it suffered another major setback when star Robert Shaw died unexpectedly from a heart attack while returning from a golf outing on a day off from shooting. Hellman and emergency producer Gene Corman (Roger's brother) were forced to restructure the rest of the film around Shaw's absence and subsequent rewrites caused some continuity issues that necessitated them having British voice performer Robert Rietty dub Shaw's entire performance. An uncredited Hellman and Corman (they got a "special thanks to" mention in the closing credits) did what they could to clean up the inevitable mess left behind when a movie loses its director and star in a short period of time, but the film (which also starred Lee Marvin) was a lost cause that should've been shelved, and instead opened to terrible reviews and flopped with audiences in October 1979.

Sam Peckinpah, cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, Sergio Leone,
and Hellman during a Leone visit to the set of CHINA 9 LIBERTY 37.

Hellman spent the bulk of the 1980s prepping projects that never came to fruition. In 1988, he returned after a ten-year absence with IGUANA, a $3 million Herzog-like period drama with Everett McGill, CHINA 9 star Testi, Jess Franco regular Jack Taylor, and a young Michael Madsen that played film festivals but didn't get much of a release anywhere in the world (it ultimately appeared on home video in the US in 2000). Hellman's next project was a money job that, at least in spirit, took him back to his early Corman days: the 1989 horror sequel SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 3: BETTER WATCH OUT. Helming a straight-to-video third entry in a controversial splatter franchise was about as far away from THE SHOOTING and TWO-LANE BLACKTOP as an auteur like Hellman could get. He became a mentor of sorts to young Quentin Tarantino, who gave Hellman his script for RESERVOIR DOGS with the intention of having him make it until Tarantino decided to direct it himself with Hellman onboard as a producer. Hellman's involvement in RESERVOIR DOGS--how different would cinema be today had he directed it instead of Tarantino?--remains his last significant contribution to cinema to date. It would be another 16 years before he resurfaced, directing a segment of the awful 2008 horror anthology TRAPPED ASHES. 2011 brought ROAD TO NOWHERE, a tedious, barely-released nightmare noir that plays like a bad David Lynch knockoff and wasn't exactly worthy of the cineaste hype of being Hellman's first feature film in 22 years and as of now, his last. Still active at 86, Hellman teaches and seemingly prefers the emeritus scene, regularly doing Q&A's at screenings of his older films and recording commentary tracks, most recently the Criterion double feature Blu-ray release of RIDE IN THE WHIRLWIND and THE SHOOTING.

BLACK MASS
(US/UK - 2015)

Directed by Scott Cooper. Written by Mark Mallouk and Jez Butterworth. Cast: Johnny Depp, Joel Edgerton, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kevin Bacon, Jesse Plemons, Peter Sarsgaard, Dakota Johnson, Corey Stoll, Rory Cochrane, David Harbour, Adam Scott, Julianne Nicholson, Juno Temple, W. Earl Brown, Bill Camp. (R, 122 mins)

If you listen closely in the theater, as the lights go down and BLACK MASS starts, you can almost hear CRAZY HEART and OUT OF THE FURNACE director Scott Cooper say "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to make a Scorsese movie." So it is with the much-anticipated BLACK MASS, touted as a return to form following a surplus of whimsical dress-up and endless self-indulgent eccentricities from former actor Johnny Depp. Even the most devoted Depp apologists turned on him after the loathsome MORTDECAI and to that end, BLACK MASS does showcase Depp's best performance in years, even if it's by default. Though he's not as "Depp"-y, it's still more of the same to some extent: as infamous South Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger, he's again buried under a ton of caked-on makeup, a combination bald cap/receded hairline, and a pair of ice-blue contact lenses that look not unlike those used on Bill Bixby at the beginning of a Hulk-out into Lou Ferrigno on THE INCREDIBLE HULK. Taking place from 1975 to 1991, BLACK MASS covers a lot of ground with a lot of characters, but it has all the depth and insight of Bulger's Wikipedia page. There was probably a longer, more epic film here at some point--even shortly before the film's release, it was still being tweaked, with Sienna Miller's entire role as a Bulger girlfriend ending up on the cutting room floor due to what Cooper termed "narrative choices."

Though Depp is front and center as Bulger, it almost feels as though the film should be about FBI agent John Connolly, played here by Joel Edgerton (THE GIFT). A childhood friend of Bulger and his state senator brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch), Connolly approaches Bulger in 1975 with an offer to become an FBI informant in an effort not to take down Southie crime operations, but rather, the Irish mob's Mafia competition. As the years go on, Bulger's Winter Hill Gang empire grows as he gives nothing to Connolly, who becomes complicit in Bulger's crimes by alerting him to FBI operations and falsifying reports under the guise of Bulger cooperation. Bulger is the devil on Connolly's shoulder, but their relationship really isn't explored, nor is there much in the way of escalating tension as Connolly gets in way over his head in his labyrinthine machinations to steer the FBI away from Bulger. We see him and co-conspirator agent John Morris (David Harbour) getting into shouting matches with incredulous colleagues played by Kevin Bacon and Adam Scott in superfluous extended cameos, and we see Connolly's new-found flashy sartorial choices not going over well with his wife (Julianne Nicholson), but nothing really happens with him until a new special agent (Corey Stoll) takes charge and starts holding him accountable as he still struts around the bureau office with a "What? Me Worry?" demeanor.

Connolly is a man obliviously drowning in his immoral and unethical choices and his pure hubris, but Cooper and screenwriters Jez Butterworth (EDGE OF TOMORROW) and Mark Mallouk are much more interested in Depp's feature-length Whitey Bulger impression. Depp is fine in the role, but at the end of the day, it's still not very far removed from what he's been doing for the last several years. He's using an intimidating monotone voice but letting the hairline and the contacts do almost all of the heavy lifting, and there's numerous scenes--the "family recipe" bit with Harbour's Morris, in particular--where he's just riffing on Joe Pesci and the "Funny how?" scene from GOODFELLAS. Cooper wants the entire film to be a Scorsese love letter, whether it's to GOODFELLAS or THE DEPARTED with its Baahston accents and Bulger being the prime inspiration for Jack Nicholson's Frank Costello in the latter film. Cooper doesn't have the style or the sense of energy to pull off Scorsese beyond a basic homage, and as a result, his film often keeps you at a distance.

BLACK MASS is a pretty good movie, but it's hard to shake the feeling that it could've been an exceptional one. There's a great cast and a fascinating story here and all we really get when it's over is a Whitey Bulger Greatest Hits package that gets into a comfortable and too-familiar groove and never tries to go further than scratching the surface. Everyone loves a good Scorsese-style crime saga, but why not just watch a real one instead of a pretend one? For all the presence Depp has as Bulger, his performance is still pretty one-dimensional in execution, with very little known about him other than his skills as a master manipulator and feared killer. Other than Edgerton, everyone else just drops by on occasion. Dakota Johnson has a brief role as the mother of Bulger's young son, but when the son dies from Reyes' Syndrome, she's never seen or mentioned again. We also see a lot of Bulger soldiers, but with the exception of hapless schlub Steve Flemmi (Rory Cochrane), we learn little about them, other than they all eventually turn on Bulger to save their own asses. BLACK MASS is compelling from start to finish, but you've seen it all before. Overt Scorsese worship is fine when you can master the style and give it your own spin (like David O. Russell with AMERICAN HUSTLE), but Cooper's direction is workmanlike at best. Without a Thelma Schoonmaker by his side to help him find those distinct patterns and rhythms, Cooper is only capable of delivering Scorsese-lite. And Scorsese-lite works if you're looking for a two-hour, empty calories crime story to watch when nothing else is on. Just don't expect anything substantive.

PAY THE GHOST

(US - 2015)

Directed by Uli Edel. Written by Dan Kay. Cast: Nicolas Cage, Sarah Wayne Callies, Veronica Ferres, Lyriq Bent, Stephen McHattie, Jack Fulton, Lauren Beatty, Kalie Hunter, Susannah Hoffmann. (Unrated, 94 mins)

The latest VOD offering in Nicolas Cage's slide into irrelevance is a tired and entirely too derivative supernatural horror film that tries to combine INSIDIOUS and SILENT HILL and ends up just a pale, predictable retread of both. Given the fanatastical elements of the film, Cage is surprisingly restrained as Mike Lawford, a tenured English professor in NYC (or, more accurately, a Toronto backlot with a CGI Manhattan Bridge), who loses his young son Charlie (Jack Fulton) at a Halloween carnival. Prior to his disappearance, Charlie made a couple of offhand comments about seeing a figure outside out his window and needing to "pay the ghost." A year goes by with no breaks in the case for detective Reynolds (Lyriq Bent), and Mike's marriage to Kristen (former WALKING DEAD star Sarah Wayne Callies) is on the rocks since she blames him for losing Charlie. In his obsessive search for his son, Mike uncovers more evidence of missing children taken around Halloween--children who also spoke of a dark figure or a "phantom" approaching them in the days before the abduction--and a medium (Susannah Hoffmann) is violently attacked and burned by a malevolent force when she enters the Lawford house to inquire about any spirits within. Mike seeks the help of Hannah (Veronica Ferres), a colleague in the history department, who tells him of a young Irish mother accused of paganism and witchcraft in 1679, whose punishment was witnessing her three children burned alive. This witch--Annie Sawquin (Lauren Beatty)--is back, gathering all the children she can and whisking them off to the spirit world, where Mike must venture in order to rescue his son.

There is nothing in PAY THE GHOST that you haven't seen a hundred times before. Based on a short story by British horror writer Tim Lebbon, the film looks drab and unspectacular, and Cage is just going through the motions. It's a bland venture into the horror genre for both Cage and German director Uli Edel, best known in his homeland for 1981's grim and groundbreaking CHRISTIANE F and for 1989's bleak-as-hell adaptation of Hubert Selby, Jr's LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN (he also made the 1993 Madonna bomb BODY OF EVIDENCE). Though he's made a couple of great films and still cranks out a good one every now and again (2008's THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX got a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar nod), Edel doesn't bring any sense of style to the proceedings other than the perfunctory efficiency of a veteran journeyman director getting a job done. There's some cheap jump scares that you'll see coming before they happen, and a lot of shadows and mist when Mike crosses over into the spirit world to rescue Charlie (it's here that the film just becomes a grayer and less garish ripoff of INSIDIOUS). Sometimes, PAY THE GHOST is downright silly, whether it's the medium arriving in a taxi and immediately and ominously looking up at the dark, overcast sky, or Mike and Kristen going to a pagan ritual re-enactment to seek some answers and being told by the first person they ask "I'm just here to dance...I'm just a schoolteacher." Without missing a beat, the schoolteacher who's just there to dance and knows nothing becomes Mrs. Basil Exposition, unleashing pages upon pages of backstory and complex details about paganism, witchcraft, portals, and spirit worlds, simply because Edel needs to get his actors to the next part of the story and has no other way to make it happen. The great character actor Stephen McHattie also appears as a creepy blind guy who looks like a homeless Tommy Wiseau and serves as a gatekeeper of sorts to the spirit realm.

Devoid of scares, indifferently directed by Edel, and blandly acted by Cage, PAY THE GHOST should be a new euphemism for coasting film figures with revered pasts who are capable of delivering more than the shrugging, phoned-in work they're doing. Example: "Did you see the remake of LEFT BEHIND? Nic Cage was just paying the ghost on that one."

LOVE & MERCY
(US - 2015)

A Brian Wilson biopic that doesn't follow the standard formula of music biopics, LOVE & MERCY is an original and often deeply moving look at two significant periods in the life of the Beach Boys mastermind. Director Bill Pohlad, a busy producer (BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, THE TREE OF LIFE, 12 YEARS A SLAVE) helming his first film since 1990's barely-released and long-forgotten OLD EXPLORERS, and screenwriters Oren Moverman (THE MESSENGER) and Michael Alan Lerner structure LOVE & MERCY as two parallel, GODFATHER PART II-type narratives as we see the beginning of the 1965 psychological breakdown of young Wilson, or "Brian Past" (Paul Dano) with the fragile shell of a man that is "Brian Future" (John Cusack) in 1988. The cracks are already starting to show with Brian hearing voices in his head before retiring from touring in 1965 to work exclusively in the studio on the Beach Boys' landmark Pet Sounds, which drives a wedge between him and bandmate/cousin Mike Love (Jake Abel). In 1988, an awkward and eccentric Brian stops into a car dealership to impulsively buy a Cadillac and meets salesperson Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), when a team of handlers headed by his therapist Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti) arrive to escort him out. As Brian and Melinda grow closer, she sees Landy's mistreatment of Brian--misdiagnosing him as a paranoid schizophrenic, overmedicating him, psychologically abusing him, and bringing along his own group of hangers-on to essentially live off of Brian's fortune, even taking over Brian's larger beach house and moving him into a smaller one nearby.

Telling two stories with two different actors playing the same role (shades of the multiple Bob Dylans in I'M NOT THERE) is an unusual choice that pays off. While Dano strongly resembles Brian Past, Cusack looks nothing like Brian Future, but it doesn't matter. Dano handles the breakdown while Cusack plays the result, with their performances brilliantly complementing one another. In his best role in years, Cusack inhabits Brian Future through halting and nervous body language that never crosses the line into becoming a mannered Brian Wilson impression. He approaches the role not unlike Chevy Chase playing Gerald Ford on SNL--he looks and sounds nothing like the person he's playing, but he uses his skills to bring the character alive in a way that's accurate and very believable. Many actors would've turned it into an Oscar-baiting tic-fest, but Cusack is effectively understated, reminding you what a terrific performer he can be when he's not slumming it and vaping his way through bad VOD thrillers. While Dano and Cusack are the dramatic focus, Banks also does career-best work as the emotional core of LOVE & MERCY, the woman who would become his second wife (one of the film's few missteps is the short shrift given to Brian's first wife Audree, played by a barely-there Joanna Going). Giamatti is fine, though he's largely playing "Paul Giamatti," with Landy prone to outbursts of blustery rage, which works as Landy was accurately the villain in the Wilson story, along with, to a lesser degree, the unsympathetic Love and the stern, impossible-to-please Wilson patriarch, played here by Bill Camp (COMPLIANCE). A minor word-of-mouth sleeper hit over the summer of 2015, LOVE & MERCY is, thus far, one of the standout films of the year, with performances from Cusack, Dano, and Banks that deserve to be remembered come awards season, and one that refreshingly avoids the pitfalls and cliches of the music biopic genre. (PG-13, 121 mins)

WELCOME TO NEW YORK
(France/US - 2014; US release 2015)

NYC auteur Abel Ferrara is no stranger to unflinching provocation and getting his actors to bare their souls and more--he is, after all, the mad genius who directed Harvey Keitel's legendary performance in 1992's BAD LIEUTENANT. A long way removed from his '80s and '90s flirtations with commercial film and television, Ferrara has spent most of the last decade and a half making documentaries and little-seen films that didn't even get any US exposure beyond a sporadic festival screening. 2012's bohemian end-of-the-world drama 4:44: LAST DAY ON EARTH was the first narrative Ferrara film to get US distribution in a decade. WELCOME TO NEW YORK finds Ferrara reaching back to his BAD LIEUTENANT side for a not-very-thinly-veiled account of the 2011 Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, when the French economist, politician, and IMF managing director known to his friends and the media as "DSK" was accused of sexually assaulting a hotel employee who arrived to clean his suite at the Sofitel New York Hotel. Charges were eventually dropped due supposed credibility issues of the accuser and that much of the evidence was inconclusive, but DSK soon faced other allegations in France in what seemed to be a behavioral pattern. Gerard Depardieu stars in WELCOME TO NEW YORK as the DSK figure, here named "Devereaux," a high-powered exec at a French financial behemoth who's in NYC for one day on business. Once that's done, he decompresses in his hotel suite with an all-night-long parade of prostitutes. The next morning, a maid (Pamela Afesi) enters the suite, announces she's from housekeeping, but a showering Devereaux doesn't hear her. Once he's out of the shower, he drops his towel and pushes her down to her knees, grunting "Do you know who I am?" He's on his way to JFK Airport when he realizes he's left his phone at the hotel, so the cops, already taking the maid's statement, intercept him at the airport under the guise of returning his phone and arrest him, forcing his long-suffering wife Simone (Jacqueline Bisset) to fly over from Paris to bail him out and set up a legal team while he's equipped with an ankle bracelet and confined to a $60K per month apartment she's rented.

All the while, Devereaux remains calm and relaxed, spending his house arrest watching movies under the assumption that something--his constant invocation of diplomatic immunity, his wealth and privilege, the ambitious Simone's political connections, his attorneys' manipulation of the media--will get him off the hook. Of course, he assumes correctly, but at the same time, Ferrara presents a portrait of a man both entitled and ill, who's convinced himself he's done nothing wrong while admitting he's powerless to combat what he is. Similar to the fearless work he got from Keitel in BAD LIEUTENANT, Ferrara convinced Depardieu to abandon all illusions of shame and modesty and literally let it all hang out. Whether he's being strip-searched or attempting to force himself into the maid's mouth--during which a shot from behind captures the legendary actor's dangling scrotum--Depardieu throws all of himself into WELCOME TO NEW YORK in ways he hasn't done for many years. Likewise for Bisset, who first appears around 40 minutes in and quickly becomes the focus of the film. Simone is a woman with social and political aspirations for her and her husband (cue obvious Clinton analogy) who comes from money but is fully aware of what kind of man she married. She accepts his excesses--the booze, his predilection for prostitutes, his sex addiction--because they need each other. Simone doesn't buy Devereaux's claim that the rape accusation is false, and his excuse of "I just jerked on her! I just jerked on her mouth! That's all!" doesn't win him any sympathy. Ferrara goes for ultra-realism in the early going, in terms of the profoundly uncomfortable sequence between Devereaux and the maid, and with the police pursuit of him, where Ferrara makes the decision to cast the roles of the Port Authority and NYPD cops with real Port Authority and NYPD cops, who do a very good job of lending a gritty immediacy and not coming across like amateur actors. The first half is a riveting tour de force for Depardieu and represents some of Ferrara's best filmmaking since his early '90s heyday. There's a bit of a shift once Bisset arrives and she gets a couple of astonishingly vicious tirades to remind us that she's a terrific actress who hasn't been used to the best of her ability over the years.

Things bog down a bit in the home stretch, with some ponderous voiceover by Devereaux and some arguments with Simone that start to get repetitive. The cranky Ferrara loudly complained about both US distributor IFC and French co-producer Vincent Maraval preparing a 108-minute, R-rated US cut and not releasing Ferrara's 125-minute cut that was slapped with an NC-17 rating. While some of the more salacious material may have been eliminated, mostly from an early orgy sequence (we still get Depardieu's nutbag, however), WELCOME TO NEW YORK could still use some trimming near the end, which seems a little draggy even in the cut version. The only other weakness in the film is Ferrara's odd choice of showing a prologue that has Depardieu as himself being interviewed by reporters about why he chose to take this role--it's not even a real interview, as one of the reporters is played by Ferrara's girlfriend and associate producer Shanyn Leigh, demoted to bit player after her terrible lead performance in 4:44. While what's here was released under vehement protest by its maker, WELCOME TO NEW YORK is still a welcome return to vintage form for Abel Ferrara and, if you're so inclined, an opportunity to see more of Gerard Depardieu than you ever thought possible. (R, 108 mins)

ELIMINATION GAME
(Australia - 2014; US release 2015)

ELIMINATION GAME was released in its native Australia as TURKEY SHOOT, much like the film it remakes, Brian Trenchard-Smith's 1982 cult classic TURKEY SHOOT, released in the US in 1983 as ESCAPE 2000. A future dystopian take on THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, ESCAPE 2000 was a mean and ultra-violent exploitation film that became a huge hit on cable throughout the '80s. The remake, which counts Trenchard-Smith among its producers, is an abomination: amateurishly-made and thoroughly shameless in the way it cribs from other, better movies. More of a satire on reality TV along the lines of THE RUNNING MAN and Paul W.S. Anderson's DEATH RACE, ELIMINATION GAME finds disgraced Navy SEAL Rick Tyler (a more lifeless-than-usual performance by former PRISON BREAK star and new Yoplait pitchman Dominic Purcell) rewarded for taking out a Libyan dictator (ESCAPE 2000's Roger Ward) at the behest of his commanding officer Gen. Thatcher (late 1970's TV Spider-Man Nicholas Hammond) and US President Sheila Farr (Carmen Duncan) by being thrown under the bus and sentenced to death for fabricated war crimes. Three years later, he's given a chance at freedom: being the target on "Turkey Shoot," the world's most popular TV show, which pits him in a fight for his life as expert assassins try to take him out, all for the entertainment of a global audience. Of course, Tyler manages to emerge victorious against his foes or there'd be no movie, and he's keeping top killer Ramrod (LONGMIRE's Robert Taylor, trying to make something out of nothing) alive for a reason.

ELIMINATION GAME wants to think it's perceptive satire, but its targets--vapid TV show hosts, bitch-on-wheels programming executive, corrupt government officials--are pitifully one-dimensional and obvious and its attempts to win over the audience with ESCAPE 2000 references--Ward's cameo, a scene from the 1982 film visible on someone's TV--just makes you want to watch ESCAPE 2000 instead (speaking of references to better movies, legendary Ozploitation producer Antony I. Ginnane has a cameo as Australasian president Charley Varrick). Purcell has never been worse, though putting yourself in his position, would you try? The lumbering lummox is defeated by any number of things, whether it's director/co-writer Jon Hewitt's tired use of shaky-cam, endless DOOM-like first-person shooter POV shots and crummy CGI, or letting whole sequences play out through CCTV footage and security cameras. The editing is very choppy and whole chunks of story seem to be missing. Also, for "Turkey Shoot" being as popular as it is, we never get enough of a sense of the outside world or how everyone would drop what they're doing to watch it. All of this would be petty nitpicking if ELIMINATION GAME was even reasonably clever or entertaining, or offered anything remotely worthwhile. There's no shortage of dark-humored avenues to travel if you're going to roast the concept of reality TV, but this is lazy and uninspired on an almost Friedberg/Seltzer level, and it easily supplants Mark Hartley's well-intentioned but botched PATRICK as the worst remake of an Ozploitation classic. When the best moment of your remake is a shot of the film it's remaking seen on a character's TV, then that's all the evidence you need to confirm that you really needn't have bothered. (Unrated, 90 mins)

THE GREEN INFERNO
(US/Chile - 2015)

Directed by Eli Roth. Written by Eli Roth and Guillermo Amoedo. Cast: Lorenza Izzo, Ariel Levy, Daryl Sabara, Kirby Bliss Blanton, Sky Ferreira, Richard Burgi, Aaron Burns, Magda Apanowicz, Ignacia Allamand, Nicolas Martinez, Matias Lopez, Ramon Llao, Antonieta Pari, Eusebio Arenas. (R, 100 mins)

For being as ubiquitous a cult horror figure as he is, Eli Roth's filmography has been surprisingly sparse. THE GREEN INFERNO is just his fourth feature film as a director, arriving eight years after his last, 2007's HOSTEL PART II, though he's produced and "presented" several others and co-starred as Sgt. Donny "The Bear Jew" Donowitz in buddy Quentin Tarantino's INGLORIOUS BASTERDS (2009). Part of the delay was beyond Roth's control: filmed back-to-back with AFTERSHOCK (co-written by and starring Roth, and utilizing most of the same cast and crew) in 2012 and shown at festivals in 2013, THE GREEN INFERNO saw its September 2014 release abruptly cancelled by Open Road Films. They sold it to High Top Films and Blumhouse offshoot BH Tilt, who have finally gotten it into theaters three years after it was completed, still sporting a 2013 copyright. A longtime pet project of Roth's, the film is homage to the most vile of Italian horror subgenres, the cannibal film, itself an offshoot of the 1960s mondo craze. The Italian cannibal film was born with Umberto Lenzi's 1972 adventure MAN FROM DEEP RIVER, a more violent ripoff of the 1970 Richard Harris hit A MAN CALLED HORSE. There were other cannibal films that followed--Ruggero Deodato's THE LAST CANNIBAL WORLD, aka JUNGLE HOLOCAUST (1977) and Sergio Martino's foul MOUNTAIN OF THE CANNIBAL GOD (1978), but it really exploded with Deodato's groundbreaking, found-footage-inspiring CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (1980), and consecutive Lenzi assaults, EATEN ALIVE (1980) and CANNIBAL FEROX, aka MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY (1981). The latter three, in particular, took the cannibal subgenre as far as it could go and even today, remain so extreme in their content that they still shock and repulse even the most jaded of uninitiated present-day gorehounds raised on post-SAW torture porn and hipster snark. I attended a midnight showing of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST about 11 or 12 years ago and the packed theater was ready for a good time. They wasted no time talking back to the screen, making fun of the dubbing, and mimicking one particularly cheesy synth cue in Riz Ortolani's score. Around 25 minutes in, something happened that quieted down the audience. The discomfort escalated over the next half hour. By the one hour mark, many were leaving. When the closing credits rolled, those who remained exited the theater in traumatized silence. 35 years after it was made, the snark-proof CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST still separates the players from the poseurs in horror fandom, and approaching it with a derisive MST3K attitude won't cushion the blow. You don't just watch CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. You survive it.

So in that respect, Roth is to be commended for daring to bring that kind of experience to the multiplexes of today. THE GREEN INFERNO (named after a documentary film-within-a-film in CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST) stretches its R rating about as far as it can go and more often that not, Roth and co-writer Guillermo Amoedo make a concerted effort to replicate the intensity of their influences. Alas, Roth is a director who has always straddled the line between fanboy and dudebro, and those conflicting identities trip him up throughout the film. His heart is in the right place: the jungle locations in Chile are stunning, he stays with practical effects as much as possible (though one CGI ant attack is just embarrassing to watch); in one shot, he frames his heroine (wife Lorenza Izzo) in a way that very purposefully recalls a memorable image of final girl Lorraine De Selle in CANNIBAL FEROX; and the closing credits feature a list of recommended Italian cannibal movies and end with a "Per Ruggero" dedication to the still very-much-alive Deodato, clearly a huge influence on the director (he also gave Deodato a cameo as "The Italian Cannibal" in HOSTEL PART II). But Roth also can't resist the temptation to play to the lowest common denominator, with comedic detours into a grossout humor involving vomit and diarrhea and a Scooby-Doo plan of stashing a bag of weed into the corpse of a soon-to-be-eaten character in order to make the natives high and allow the heroes to escape. That one character even derisively refers to it as "a Scooby-Doo plan" doesn't get Roth off the hook, nor does the resulting attack of the munchies that thwarts the escape when the buzzed tribesmen start chowing down on one guy like he's a bag of Funyuns.

Roth takes some shots at the college culture of hashtag activism and the political correctness of Generation Trigger Warning with mixed results. College freshman Justine (Izzo), the daughter of a big-shot U.N. attorney (Richard Burgi), falls in with a group of SJW campus activists led by the charismatic Alejandro (Ariel Levy). Alejandro and his buddy Carlos (Matias Lopez) are orchestrating a trip deep into the Peruvian rain forest to chain themselves to bulldozers to prevent an evil corporation from destroying the land and displacing the indigenous people to get to the natural gas supply deep underground. After successfully shaming the construction workers and their protecting militia via a live stream online, the group's plane crashes in an even more remote part of the jungle. While some die on impact, the survivors are soon abducted by a terrifying tribe, with one being eaten alive by the natives as an example of atrocities to come. The long sequence where the crash survivors watch in horror as one of their own is devoured limb-by-limb does a very credible job of replicating the brutal intensity of Deodato and Lenzi. Roth also makes the wise decision to avoid one troubling and indefensible element of Italian cannibal films that have always dogged them and rightly so: he doesn't even flirt with the idea of depicting on-camera animal killings, either for real or by special effects. The animals in THE GREEN INFERNO are treated with dignity (the tribe's pigs are pets who actually eat human flesh as well) and reverence, as shown by the respectful attitude displayed toward a majestic, beautiful jaguar resting near the river.

But then there's the juvenile, played-for-laughs diarrhea scene, where even the native kids are holding their noses and waving their hands in front of their faces. And there's the whole "stoned natives" sequence and the subsequent munchies. And a completely baffling scene where one character has committed suicide and Alejandro responds by vigorously masturbating in front of everyone in order to keep his mind focused. The standard-bearers of the Italian cannibal genre--CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST and CANNIBAL FEROX--depict generally docile tribes goaded by cruel white interlopers into committing the horrific atrocities they do. In CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, a documentary team needs to sensationalize their film, so they burn down a village and rape a native girl, who's punished by the tribal elders by being impaled on a pole that goes through her vagina and exits her mouth. In CANNIBAL FEROX, a doctoral student (De Selle) ventures to the Amazon to once and for all disprove cannibalism, but first she encounters a fugitive, small-time NYC coke dealer (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) who also rapes a native girl and tortures another tribesman to death, and the tribe rises up to attack the white invaders and give them what's coming to them. Alejandro fills that "white villain" role to a certain extent, at least in terms of his increasingly sociopathic behavior, but in an unexpected switch that's either Roth subverting genre expectations or keeping the door open for a sequel, Alejandro never gets what's coming to him.

Like Tarantino, Roth wears his love of grindhouse trash on his sleeve and his sincerity is never in doubt. But he's neither the stylist nor the writer that Tarantino is, though of course, QT's is a unique voice in contemporary movies. Roth wants to make THE GREEN INFERNO his CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST or CANNIBAL FEROX, and while he occasionally succeeds, he too often doesn't have the courage of his convictions, whether it's his handling of Alejandro or in the way the film repeatedly brings up the subject of female genital mutilation and seems poised to present it, much like those old Italian cannibal films always had some poor schmuck getting his dick hacked off and eaten by a cannibal. Not that I'm advocating female genital mutilation, but if Roth really wanted to push the envelope like his genre heroes did, he would've crossed that line. Deodato's and Lenzi's films aren't the infamous transgressions they are for holding back in the name of good taste and a desire to treat the audience with kid gloves. All in all, THE GREEN INFERNO is...alright. It's doubtful it's going to catch on with mainstream multiplexers, but the hardcore cult aficionados who form Roth's base will eat it up, pun intended. When Roth approaches the story seriously, the film works quite well, both as a tribute and as an intense experience in horror cinema that perfectly exemplifies what Roth is about. When he doesn't, then, well, you get some smirking dudebro jerking himself off for no reason, and to a certain degree, that also exemplifies what Roth is about.

Original 2014 poster art when the film was still being handled by Open Road

HOUSE OF THE LONG SHADOWS
(UK - 1983; US release 1984)

Directed by Pete Walker. Written by Michael Armstrong. Cast: Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Desi Arnaz Jr, John Carradine, Sheila Keith, Richard Todd, Julie Peasgood, Louise English, Richard Hunter, Norman Rossington. (PG, 102 mins)

When it came to ninjas, Namsploitation, and breakdancing, Menaham Golan had his fingers on the pulse of what audiences wanted to see. But just as often, he'd keep Cannon cranking out increasingly geriatric Charles Bronson actioners directed by an aging J. Lee Thompson, cheapjack franchise offerings like the one-and-done MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE (1987) and the ill-advised SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987), and misguided attempts at arthouse legitimacy that played to smaller and smaller audiences. When Golan decided to make an all-star horror movie with the screen's titans of terror in 1983, he didn't come up with the kind of horror movie that 1983 audiences had in mind. HOUSE OF THE LONG SHADOWS was born when screenwriter Michael Armstrong (director of the 1970 barf-bag classic MARK OF THE DEVIL) and cult British horror filmmaker Pete Walker (DIE SCREAMING MARIANNE, FRIGHTMARE, HOUSE OF WHIPCORD, THE CONFESSIONAL) came to Cannon with an idea for a gory horror movie called DELIVER US FROM EVIL. Golan rejected the idea and told them he wanted a vintage "old dark house" story with all the classic horror stars, so Armstrong and Walker concocted a script inspired by the 1932 James Whale classic THE OLD DARK HOUSE and based largely on the oft-filmed 1913 George M. Cohan play Seven Keys to Baldpate, itself based on a novel by Charlie Chan author Earl Derr Biggers. According to legend, Golan demanded Walker and Armstrong cast Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in this all-star horror summit, and was not deterred by minor inconveniences like Karloff's death in 1969 and Lugosi's a decade before that in 1956.

HOUSE OF THE LONG SHADOWS publicity shot

While Karloff and Lugosi were out of the question, Golan did manage to snag four living horror legends: 72-year-old Vincent Price, 61-year-old Christopher Lee, 70-year-old Peter Cushing, and 77-year-old John Carradine. The big selling point of HOUSE OF THE LONG SHADOWS--a playful nod to how beloved its stars were--was these iconic figures not just being in the same movie together, but finally having significant amounts of screen time interacting with one another. Of course, Lee and Cushing were paired up many times over the years (this would be their last movie together), and Cushing co-starred with Price in 1974's MADHOUSE and Price with Carradine in 1981's THE MONSTER CLUB, but usually, it would be a case of them being in the same movie but having no scenes together, like Price, Lee, and Cushing in 1970's SCREAM AND SCREAM AGAIN or Price and Cushing in 1972's DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN or Cushing and Carradine in 1977's SHOCK WAVES. There was also Price and Lee in 1969's THE OBLONG BOX , where they had one brief scene together very late in the film when Price finds Lee's dead body. In that respect, HOUSE OF THE LONG SHADOWS was sort-of the old-school horror EXPENDABLES of its day. And of course, upon its US release in the spring of 1984, it bombed with critics and audiences, who loved these old-timers on late-night TV and Saturday afternoon Creature Features, but didn't venture out to see a new movie with them in theaters. A gothic Hammer/Amicus throwback didn't really appeal to the slasher and special effects crowd. LONG SHADOWS was recently released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber and on one of the two commentary tracks, film historian David Del Valle and moderator Elijah Drenner also cite Cannon's poor marketing campaign: a tongue-in-cheek, old-fashioned horror mystery set on a dark and stormy night, the film has enough of a playful atmosphere that it never really takes itself too seriously, though it never quite takes the plunge into all-out comedy. Cannon didn't seem to know whether to sell this as a mystery, a horror movie, or a spoof.

Best-selling novelist Kenneth Magee (Desi Arnaz Jr) is good at cranking out books but really only cares about the money. His British publisher Sam Allyson (Richard Todd) wants Kenneth to challenge himself and after dissing the likes of Wuthering Heights, Kenneth bets Sam $20,000 that he can write an old-fashioned gothic novel in 24 hours. To get in the right frame of mind, Sam arranges to have Kenneth spend the night at a desolate Welsh estate called Baldpate Manor, which has been empty for 40 years. After he's interrupted by Sam's secretary Mary (Julie Peasgood), sent there to distract him, things get weird when Baldpate becomes the location of an impromptu family reunion of the Grisbanes: patriarch Lord Grisbane (Carradine), eldest son Lionel (Price), younger son Sebastian (Cushing) and daughter Victoria (Walker regular Sheila Keith). Baldpate Manor was home to the Grisbanes until a terrible scandal brought shame upon them in 1935: the youngest of the Grisbane sons, black sheep Roderick, raped and killed a 14-year-old village girl. The horrible crime was covered up by Grisbane and his other sons, who dispensed their own family justice by sentencing Roderick to live in chains in a hidden, locked room on one of the upper floors of the manor. For over 40 years, Roderick has resided in the dilapidated manor alone, surviving on food brought by Victoria or snacking on whatever rats he encounters, and tonight is the night the Grisbanes confront him and come to terms with their ugly past. Also complicating matters is the arrival of Corrigan (Lee), a sneering businessman who plans to buy Baldpate Manor to demolish it and develop the surrounding area. It doesn't take long before they're all being picked off one by one by an unseen Roderick, who's gotten out of his room, cut the phone line and slashed the tires on everyone's cars, and won't stop until he gets his revenge.

Critics savaged HOUSE OF THE LONG SHADOWS, with Arnaz's performance inexplicably singled out as the film's biggest problem (from the film's listing in the Leonard Maltin guide: "Arnaz Jr. singlehandedly sinks this adaptation..."). He's not the most magnetic lead actor, but he does what he's required to do and graciously steps aside at the right time and lets the masters do their thing. Del Valle, a longtime friend of Price's, even recalls the legendary actor defending Arnaz and his performance in the film. Both Del Valle and Drenner are incredulous over the amount of heat Arnaz took for his work here, and they're right: he didn't deserve the pummeling he got and isn't bad at all. You could almost compare him to Michael O'Keefe in CADDYSHACK: he plays the central character and he's the real star of the movie, but you're actually there to see everyone else around him. Walker and Armstrong do take too long to get all of the players together (it's nearly 50 minutes in and the film is half over when Lee first appears), but they all get some time to shine and seem to genuinely enjoy working off of one another. Cushing amuses himself by adding an Elmer Fudd-type speech impediment, Carradine is befuddled and cranky, Lee is huffy and pompous, and Price is gloriously florid and over-the-top as Lionel Grisbane, gravely intoning "I have returned" upon his arrival and admonishing Magee for asking a question during his eulogy for the Baldpate Manor of old with a hand wave and a firm "Please...don't interrupt me whilst I am soliloquizing."

Cannon could've easily put these guys in a gory, T&A-filled slasher movie, which probably would've been more in line with Pete Walker's comparatively trashy and sleazy B-horror films of the 1970s. HOUSE OF THE LONG SHADOWS was practically a departure for the director, whose cult status has grown in the subsequent decades. A true indie auteur accustomed to working on his own and outside the system, LONG SHADOWS was Walker's first and last gig as a hired gun director--he retired from filmmaking afterwards and in the decades since, has had success owning a chain of movie theaters in London. He remains active in the cult movie scene, recording DVD and Blu-ray commentaries for Redemption's "Pete Walker Collection," and he's on hand for a commentary track on the LONG SHADOWS release. LONG SHADOWS does demonstrate some infrequent concessions to the times in which it was made--there's a couple of mildly gory deaths and a few curse words (where else will you hear Vincent Price hiss "bitch" to Christopher Lee?), but it's a throwback before nostalgic throwbacks became a thing. It unfolds less like a Cannon production and more like a vintage Hammer or Amicus chiller and it does right by its cast, respecting them and the history they bring instead of derisively dismissing them, and when the actors are the butt of jokes, they're in on it.

Drenner points out on the commentary that it's easy to look back at the film now with a sense of nostalgia while seeing that it had to be very out-of-touch with where horror was in the early 1980s. Indeed, while it was enjoyable in 1983, it's a film that's improved over time and it's a rare instance where nostalgia is enough to carry it through. Of course, the story and the final twist are predictable, but watching these legends together is truly a joy that's helped the film out in the long run, especially now that a significant chapter of genre history has closed with the passing of Lee in June 2015 (Carradine died in 1988, Price in 1993, and Cushing in 1994). HOUSE OF THE LONG SHADOWS has aged like fine wine and sentimental feelings have won out over jaded cynicism, earning it a loyal cult following among classic horror fans enjoying the masters having one last hurrah without the baggage and expectations that came with its era. It may have been released in 1983 but it certainly wasn't made for 1983, and just about everyone back then--critics, audiences, and Cannon--was wrong about HOUSE OF THE LONG SHADOWS.

THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY
(UK - 2015)

When it opened in early 2015, the UK import THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY was the other BDSM film, the art-house counterpart to the more commercial and mega-hyped FIFTY SHADES OF GREY. Written and directed by Peter Strickland, whose BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO was a paranoia nightmare told in the vein of a 1970s Italian giallo, THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY follows numerous stylistic tropes seen in BERBERIAN, namely an unabashed adoration of the 1970s and an intricate and fascinating sound design. It's also a bit more substantive than the intriguing but empty BERBERIAN, which opened with a terrific set-up and then didn't really go any deeper than the surface. THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY's much-discussed opening credits sequence would appear to portend a softcore '70s sexploitation outing along the lines of a smutty British sex farce or an EMMANUELLE film, complete with a prominent credit for "Perfume by Je Suis Gizella." It's the story of a BDSM relationship between older, erudite lepidopterist Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen) and younger, demure protege Evelyn (Chiara D'Anna). Their role-playing takes on an almost JEANNE DIELMAN sense of precision repetition: Evelyn arrives at Cynthia's house, and Cynthia proceeds to make her clean the house, do the laundry, and be treated in all sorts of demeaning fashions, whether it's being interrupted or Cynthia making a mess where Evelyn just cleaned. Often, Cynthia will demand a foot massage. This repeats until we see that they're a loving couple and this is their intimate routine. But Strickland gradually reveals more: it's Cynthia who's the submissive, giving into Evelyn's domination and her demands to be humiliated. It's ultimately a story of the compromises, concessions, and the give-and-take involved in any committed relationship, whether it's one party acquiescing and allowing the use of an old trunk as a coffin for the other to be bound and held in as punishment, or whether one draws the line at treating the other as a "human toilet."

Considering its subject matter, BURGUNDY, whose creative spark was ignited, oddly enough, when Strickland turned down an offer to remake Jess Franco's 1974 film LORNA THE EXORCIST, is hardly the Skinemax softcore throwback you'd expect from the opening credits (which, as amusing and dead-on retro as they are, end up feeling like a stunt that has little to do with what transpires later) and the butterfly symbolism a tad too heavy-handed an obvious (and reminiscent of the 1995 art film ANGELS & INSECTS), but it manages to convey an overtly explicit feel without being very graphic at all. There's barely any nudity and only some fleeting onscreen sex. Yet Strickland's film is a hazy fever dream of erotica, with plenty of caressed skin, a couple of tastefully-executed sex scenes (he keeps the water sports heard but not seen), two excellent performances (Knudsen, in particular), and enough lingering shots of Knudsen's and D'Anna's feet to send it to the top of Quentin Tarantino's Best of 2015 list. (Unrated, 104 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)

THE CONNECTION
(France/Belgium - 2014; US release 2015)

This French crime saga directed and co-written by Cedric Jiminez purports to tell the French side of the drug trade depicted in THE FRENCH CONNECTION. Despite his love of handheld cameras for maximum immediacy, Jiminez never achieves the kind of wired, adrenalized intensity that William Friedkin established 44 years ago, and aside from the immediate art-house cred that comes with being a subtitled, foreign-language film, THE CONNECTION is utterly and frustratingly ordinary in every way. Jiminez borrows some Friedkin here, some Scorsese there, a good-sized portion of Ridley Scott's AMERICAN GANGSTER, and a heaping helping of Michael Mann's HEAT in its mirror-image motif of law enforcer vs. criminal and how they're flip sides of the same coin. Just to hammer it home, Jiminez even casts two actors who look very much alike, almost like you expect him to pull a Bunuel switch at the midpoint and have the stars switch roles. At least that would've been something unpredictable. THE ARTIST Oscar-winner Jean Dujardin busts his ass to enliven the uninspired material, often channeling the pent-up rage of a young De Niro as Pierre Michel, a Juvenile Court magistrate in 1975 Marseilles. He's transferred over to the Organized Crime unit and ordered to do everything at his disposal to bring down drug kingpin Gaetan Zampa (Gilles Lellouche), the key figure in the Marseilles-to-NYC heroin trade.

What follows is over two hours of Michel and his task force of interchangeable, nondescript supporting actors unable to make anything stick to teflon Zampa during an obsessive investigation that lasts from 1975 to 1981, and both men see their private lives suffer as a result of their respective professions: Zampa's wife (Melanie Doutey) is temporarily placated when her husband gives her a disco to run (cue Blondie's "Call Me," which must mean the producers couldn't secure the rights to "Heart of Glass," the mandatory song for every establishing shot of a disco in a movie set in the 1970s), but Mrs. Michel (Celine Sallette) grows weary (as will the viewer) of Michel being called away by work from literally every meal he's able to have at home with the family. You could almost make a drinking game out of it. And of course, just as in HEAT, Michel and Zampa have a mid-film confrontation where they acknowledge they're not much different from one another, but they best stay out of the other's way. Jiminez admirably doesn't get sidetracked by paying too much attention to period detail other than long sideburns, a detour to Manhattan that shows off a badly CGI'd shot of the half-built Twin Towers (which were completed by 1975 anyway), and one character name-dropping John Travolta and SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER. Dujardin and Lellouche are excellent, and Benoit Magimel and Cyril Lecomte have some standout moments as some Zampa criminal associates, but they all deserve more worthy material than this rote, paint-by-numbers non-epic that plays like lukewarm leftovers of too many better movies that inspired it. (R, 135 mins)

ALLELUIA
(Belgium/France - 2014; US release 2015)

With his 2004 feature debut, the rural, backwoods-set CALVAIRE, Belgian filmmaker Fabrice Du Welz became linked with the French "extreme horror" movement popularized by the likes of Alexandre Aja's HIGH TENSION (2003), Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's INSIDE (2007), Xavier Gens' FRONTIER(S) (2008) and Pascal Laugier's MARTYRS (2008). Du Welz followed CALVAIRE with the ambitious but unfocused VINYAN (2008), an English-language "ramshackle-boat-journey-upriver as metaphor for journey-into-madness" horror film that took too long to get to its genuinely unnerving, terrifying finale. VINYAN tanked worldwide before going straight-to-DVD in the US in 2009 and Du Welz vanished. He resurfaced in 2014 with a pair of thrillers, ALLELUIA and COLT 45, though only the former has received a US release (Du Welz's next project will bring him to Hollywood 12 years after he made a splash with CALVAIRE--the Chadwick Boseman action thriller MESSAGE FROM THE KING is due out in early 2016). ALLELUIA is a very loose and aggressively unhinged retelling of the 1940s "Lonely Hearts Murders," where spinster nurse Martha Beck and con-artist/gigolo Raymond Fernandez pursued victims through personal ads and proceeded to rob and murder the women whose ads Fernandez answered, with Beck posing as his sister. The story was previously depicted in the 1969 cult classic THE HONEYMOON KILLERS, with Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco, the 1996 Mexican film DEEP CRIMSON, and the barely-released 2006 thriller LONELY HEARTS, which focused on the detectives (John Travolta, James Gandolfini) pursuing the Lonely Hearts serial killers (Jared Leto, Salma Hayek). Du Welz's version updates the story to the present-day, with lonely morgue attendant and single mother Gloria (frequent Almodovar star Lola Duenas) meeting Michel (Laurent Lucas) after her friend Madeleine (Stephane Bissot) posts her profile on an online dating site. After falling hard for Michel even knowing he's a scheming con artist, Gloria impulsively leaves her young daughter with Madeleine and hits the road with Michel, finding women on dating sites and often going for the long con, with Michel marrying them and Gloria posting as his sister. The adventure stirs some kind of psychosis in Gloria, who grows insanely jealous when Michel has to sleep with their marks, which usually results in Gloria going off the deep end and brutally murdering the women. Michel becomes her unwitting accomplice, helping her dispose of the bodies--her job experience at the morgue comes in handy--but as their con games go on, Gloria grows increasingly deranged, with Michel unable to control her and her wild impulses.

Du Welz sometimes gets a little too goofy for his own good, such as Gloria getting a somber musical number before taking a saw to the corpse of the couple's latest victim, or a half-baked attempt at putting a vague supernatural spin on things with Raymond's prayer rituals and a bizarre sequence of a naked Michel and Gloria dancing by a raging fire, but ALLELUIA is a grim and disturbing sleeper that sneaks up on you. A lot of it has to do with the almost claustrophobic immediacy of the grainy, 16mm cinematography by Manuel Dacosse (AMER, THE STRANGE COLOUR OF YOUR BODY'S TEARS), but most of it is the thoroughly off-the-chain performance of Duenas. Du Welz and Duenas pull a cunning bait-and-switch with how plain and mousy she's introduced. You question the logic of her going to work the morning after meeting Michel and having him stay the night, then leaving her daughter with him. Once they're a couple and on the road, Michel soon realizes he has no idea what he's gotten himself into, and doesn't enter into his con games with murder in mind until Gloria puts him in that position. Michel is just a scheming heel who's trying to con lonely women out of their money--it's he who becomes an accomplice to murder and it's he who's forced into murder by Gloria, in whom he's awakened a sleeping giant prone to uncontrolled fits of rage and limb-flailing meltdowns. It's a slightly different take on the subject that seems to have been chosen simply because Du Welz wanted Duenas to let it rip with wild abandon, and she obliges. There are some instances where Du Welz is distracted by what he probably perceived to be transgressive shock value, like a scene where Gloria masturbates while Michel sucks on her toes and jerks off, or when he stages one of the most precariously-framed mainstream cinema blowjobs in recent memory, but ALLELUIA is a mostly effective bit of grim bleakness that stumbles here and there, didn't need the dumb musical number and could use a stronger ending, but Duenas' mad, almost possessed performance makes it a must-see. (Unrated, 93 mins)

THE MARTIAN
(US - 2015)

Directed by Ridley Scott. Written by Drew Goddard. Cast: Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Michael Pena, Kate Mara, Sean Bean, Sebastian Stan, Aksel Hennie, Benedict Wong, Mackenzie Davis, Donald Glover, Chen Shu, Eddy Ko, Nick Mohammed. (PG-13, 141 mins)

During a manned mission to Mars, a catastrophic storm suddenly appears and the crew of the Ares III is ordered to evacuate the landing site and abort the mission by Cmdr. Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain). Astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is blown away by a satellite antenna in a powerful gust of wind and when he doesn't respond and his vitals cease to register, he's presumed dead and Lewis and the crew--Martinez (Michael Pena), Johansson (Kate Mara), Beck (Sebastian Stan), and Vogel (Aksel Hennie)--begin the ten-month journey home. But Watney survived, though he's been impaled by an antenna and has no way to communicate to anyone at NASA that's he's been left behind. With enough pre-packaged meals for the entire crew to last 400 sols (a Martian sol being slightly longer than an Earth day) if he rations carefully, he must find a way to grow food to last four years until the next planned manned Mars expedition. Fortunately, Watney is a botanist and uses his wits and ingenuity ("I'm gonna have to science the shit out of this thing") to grow a small potato crop. Around the 54th sol after being left behind, Mars expedition director Dr. Vincent Kapoor (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and graveyard-shift NASA analyst Mindy Park (Mackenzie Davis) notice movement of structures on satellite imagery of the landing site, proof that Watney is alive. What follows is the thoroughly engrossing saga of Watney's struggle to survive when faced with one catastrophic obstacle after another, and the efforts of those at NASA to get him home.

Adapted by Drew Goddard (THE CABIN IN THE WOODS) from the novel by Andy Weir, THE MARTIAN is career highlight for director Ridley Scott (BLADE RUNNER, THELMA & LOUISE), an ageless workaholic who shows no signs of slowing down at 77 years of age (he just had EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS in theaters ten months ago). Unlike 79-year-old Woody Allen and 85-year-old Clint Eastwood, two legends who seem to crank out annual movies more out of obligation than anything, Scott still seems interested in challenging himself, whether it's venturing back to the ALIEN universe for PROMETHEUS or going way off on a tangent with the inspired and insane THE COUNSELOR. Scott's hardly been skidding, but THE MARTIAN is his best work in years, a masterful mix of drama, humor (there's a great running gag about Lewis' terrible taste in music), thrills, hard science, and escapist entertainment, operating at a level of quality you rarely see these days. It's rousing without being pandering, and filled with baited-breath intensity, and emotion and sentiment that's earned and not forced. It's a crowd-pleasing popcorn movie done right, with a terrific ensemble whose performances make a very human and universal story rather than simply "CAST AWAY in space." The world comes together in plausible ways to rally behind Watney and his safe return--the Chinese space program even sets its own ambitions aside to work with rival NASA by contributing a necessary booster that the Americans have yet to develop. There's a certain element of "Nobody gets left behind!" but it's not a jingoistic flag-waver. Watley's plight unites the planet.

Sure, that could've been some hokey, feel-good bullshit, and a man stranded alone on the red planet has been explored to some degree in the revered 1964 sci-fi classic ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS, but Damon's performance, filled with raw emotion, self-deprecating humor, and a spirit of dogged persistence, is nicely juxtaposed with a large cast of characters. They all get moments in the spotlight (with the possible exception of Kristen Wiig, who isn't given much to do as NASA's media relations coordinator), from each of Watney's fellow astronauts to the brilliant scientific minds on the ground (Ejiofor's Mars mission director, Sean Bean as the launch director, Benedict Wong as a rocket designer, and Donald "Childish Gambino" Glover as an astrodynamicist), to Jeff Daniels as the bottom-line, very Jeff Daniels-ish NASA chairman, a character that other films would've made into an obligatory earthbound adversary but here, his blunt demeanor that occasionally comes off as insensitive is just a realistic reaction to the situation. THE MARTIAN is a triumph across the board, from its story to its performances to its astonishing visual effects, particularly in the tense, nerve-wracking climax. Most of the film was shot on sets constructed at a Hungarian studio, but the Mars exteriors were shot in the Wadi Rum desert in Jordan, looking appropriately desolate and otherworldly through the lens of cinematographer Dariusz Wolski (working on his fourth straight Scott film), augmented by the appropriately otherworldly, Tangerine Dream-ish synth score by Harry Gregson-Williams, who also contributed to the soundscapes of Michael Mann's underrated BLACKHAT. THE MARTIAN is the most satisfying and thrilling time at the movies since MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, and like the mad genius George Miller, the great Ridley Scott is essentially conducting a seminar on how it's done.

SICARIO
(US - 2015)

Directed by Denis Villeneuve. Written by Taylor Sheridan. Cast: Emily Blunt, Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, Victor Garber, Jon Bernthal, Jeffrey Donovan, Daniel Kaluuya, Raoul Trujillo, Julio Cesar Cedillo, Maxiliano Hernandez, Hank Rogerson, Bernardo P. Saracino, Edgar Arreola, Boots Southerland, Adam Taylor, Eb Lottimer. (R, 121 mins)

A dark and harrowing drug trafficking thriller that's still rather simplistic at its core, SICARIO is nonetheless a gripping and hard-hitting experience. In a horrifying opening sequence, an FBI raid on a Glendale, AZ house near the US/Mexico border results in the discovery of no drugs but 42 dead bodies hidden in the walls. Idealistic agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is lauded for her work in the raid and offered a spot on a task force overseen by Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), the kind of character whose easy-going, smart-ass demeanor and dress casual look, complete with baggy khakis and flip-flops when everyone else is wearing suits, provides a nice-guy cover for a not-very-nice guy. A divorced loner with no children and nothing in her life other than her job, Macer is the perfect candidate, though it doesn't take her long to conclude that Graver is running some kind of off-the-books black-ops unit. That's confirmed once they're joined by Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro), a man of few words who comes from Colombia but "goes where he's needed." Alejandro's instincts and skills come into play at a traffic jam massacre at the border when the unit returns from an illegal run into Juarez to pick up Guillermo (Edgar Arreola), an associate of cartel boss Fausto Alarcon (Julio Cesar Cedillo). The more questions Macer asks, the more evasive Graver and Alejandro are, and she gets no answers from her own boss (Victor Garber). As Graver's operations put her at greater risk and the ruthless Alejandro seems to be addressing his own personal agenda, Macer is pulled into a moral and ethical quagmire that puts her career and her life at risk.

Directed by Denis Villeneuve, who's no stranger to moral and ethical quagmires with 2013's PRISONERS, and written by former SONS OF ANARCHY co-star Taylor Sheridan (he played Deputy Hale before being killed off in the third season premiere), SICARIO takes place in a world where everything is a gray area and the law is circumvented if it serves the greater good, which is why Macer's partner and seemingly only friend Reggie (Daniel Kaluuya), an Iraq War vet with a law degree, is purposefully kept at a distance by Graver. There's been some comparisons made between Macer and Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling from THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and it's a good analogy, especially in the way both films are seen through the POV of a strong, independent woman with something to prove in a male-dominated field that constantly underestimates her. It's also worth mentioning that both Foster and Blunt get their thunder stolen to a certain extent by the showier performance of a co-star with much less screen time, with Blunt's Anthony Hopkins being Del Toro as Alejandro, the mysterious angel of vengeance, a former cartel figure who lost his entire family and goes wherever his quest for revenge takes him. His allegiances are suspect and he won't hesitate to put a bullet in anyone who tries to stop him, but Graver is happy to have him along in an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" sort-of way. Del Toro keeps things pretty low-key throughout, never hamming but going for a less-is-more approach that makes Alejandro, the title character ("sicario" meaning "hitman"), utterly terrifying. While Macer is the central character, it's Alejandro who leaves the biggest impression, apparently on the filmmakers as well, as Blunt sits out most of the last 1/4 of the film as the focus shifts to Alejandro and his quest to find and execute Alarcon. It's a jarring move to make 90 minutes into a two-hour film, especially one that's been seen through Macer's eyes to that point, and it makes one wonder if that shift was in Sheridan's script or if it was a change that came about during the editing stage.

Boasting outstanding cinematography by the great Roger Deakins and with an effectively droning, tense score by Johann Johannsson, SICARIO works best in its crackling, edge-of-your-set set pieces like the opening sequence and the border shootout, and then later when a marvelously understated Del Toro takes center stage, his silent glare speaking volumes. Despite all the social, econimic, and legel issue lip service, SICARIO isn't as profound as some are making it out to be and is still largely a revenge saga, albeit a very well-made and intense one. It's a promising screenwriting debut for Sheridan, who directed a late-to-the-party SAW knockoff called VILE a few years back, right after he left SONS OF ANARCHY. VILE is one of the absolute worst horror movies you'll ever see and one couldn't blame Sheridan if he tried to distance himself from it now that SICARIO is earning worldwide accolades. Oh, wait...that's exactly what happened. In recent months, VILE has been removed from Sheridan's IMDb page by someone, and now is the lone credit on the page of a "Taylor Sheridan (IV)." Come on, Mr. Sheridan. You made a shitty movie before you were instrumental in the making of a very praised one. Just own it. Google "Taylor Sheridan Vile" and the ruse is exposed. You don't see James Cameron running away from PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING, do you? Do you see George Clooney sticking his fingers in his ears and yelling "La-la-la can't hear you!" at the mention of RETURN OF THE KILLER TOMATOES? You really think you're gonna just pretend VILE never happened?

Not on my watch.

In Theaters: THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. (2015)

In Theaters: SINISTER 2 (2015)

Cult Classics Revisited: MIRACLE MILE (1989) and CHERRY 2000 (1988)

In Theaters: NO ESCAPE (2015)

On DVD/Blu-ray: THE RUNNER (2015); BIG GAME (2015); and THE WATER DIVINER (2015)

On DVD/Blu-ray: SKIN TRADE (2015) and EJECTA (2015)

On DVD/Blu-ray: BOULEVARD (2015); THE D TRAIN (2015); and TRUE STORY (2015)

In Theaters/On VOD: DRAGON BLADE (2015)

In Theaters: THE TRANSPORTER: REFUELED (2015)

In Theaters: THE VISIT (2015)

On DVD/Blu-ray: THE HARVEST (2015); EXTINCTION (2015); and UNFRIENDED (2015)

Cult Classics Revisited: CHINA 9 LIBERTY 37 (1978)

In Theaters: BLACK MASS (2015)

In Theaters/On VOD: PAY THE GHOST (2015)

On DVD/Blu-ray: LOVE & MERCY (2015); WELCOME TO NEW YORK (2015); and ELIMINATION GAME (2015)

In Theaters: THE GREEN INFERNO (2015)

The Cannon Files: HOUSE OF THE LONG SHADOWS (1983)

On DVD/Blu-ray: THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY (2015); THE CONNECTION (2015); and ALLELUIA (2015)

In Theaters: THE MARTIAN (2015)

In Theaters: SICARIO (2015)