Good Efficient Butchery

ESCOBAR: PARADISE LOST
(France/Spain/Belgium - 2014; US release 2015)

Giving audiences the rare opportunity to see Benicio Del Toro in a movie about drug trafficking, ESCOBAR: PARADISE LOST grants the Oscar-winning actor a role he was seemingly born to play: infamous Medellin Cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar (1949-1993). Unfortunately, ESCOBAR: PARADISE LOST is a tedious misfire hellbent on making Pablo Escobar a supporting character, and there are long stretches where Del Toro, who gained quite a bit of weight to play the cartel head in his indulgent years just before his 1991 incarceration, is offscreen. Rather, the focus is on Nick Brady (THE HUNGER GAMES' Josh Hutcherson), a Canadian who's somehow found his way into the Escobar inner circle on the eve of the boss turning himself over to Colombian authorities. Flashbacks show Nick was a surfer spending time doing Habitat for Humanity-type charity work in Colombia in the mid '80s with his older brother Dylan (Brady Corbet) and his wife Anne (Ana Girardot). Nick meets and quickly falls in love with nurse Maria (Claudia Traisac), who happens to be the beloved niece of her protective uncle (you guessed it) Pablo Escobar. Nick is welcomed into the family and affectionately dubbed "Nico," but tries to keep a distance from knowing too much about Uncle Pablo. Escobar is lauded as a benevolent hero by the people after his 80% stake in the world's cocaine traffic has made him a multi-billionaire with some interests in legitimate businesses, like opening a hospital for his nurse niece. But Escobar is a powerful and merciless boss who doesn't like loose ends, and he wants them all tied up before he goes to prison. Nick realizes far too late that he knows too much and the lives of everyone he loves are in danger and that Uncle Pablo intends to have him killed.

The directorial debut of Italian actor Andrea Di Stefano (Dario Argento's THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, and Hollywood fare like EAT PRAY LOVE and LIFE OF PI), ESCOBAR: PARADISE LOST is plodding and sluggishly-paced, perhaps because you aren't expecting a movie alleged to be about Pablo Escobar to instead focus on Peeta Mellark and his Colombian girlfriend. Del Toro pops in and out of the story with the majesty of a slovenly Don Vito Corleone, but the bulk of the film focuses on Nick, who's based on a person who was involved with Escobar's niece, but beyond that, his story as presented here is a work of fiction, which begs the question "Who cares?" Di Stefano has essentially dropped the character of Pablo Escobar into a Josh Hutcherson movie that could just as easily be titled THE MEDELLIN GAMES. Things pick up when Nick realizes he's a target and Escobar's men start pursuing him, but then the story just becomes an excuse for Hutcherson to play a suddenly gun-toting, blood-splattered badass blasting caps into some cartel flunkies. After a deadly dull opening hour and change, it at least belatedly comes alive when it turns into a conventional chase thriller, but it's too little, too late. There's one admittedly great scene that's very well-acted by Hutcherson, when he hears an inconceivably savage act on the other end of the line during a phone call, but almost everything else is ponderous, predictable, and boring. The Weinstein Company acquired this in early 2014 and sat on it for a year and a half before releasing it on just 105 screens in June of 2015. Its Blu-ray/DVD release has been expertly timed with the wide release of SICARIO, a far superior Del Toro drug trafficking saga. The actor makes a superb Escobar, but this isn't the Escobar movie he should've done. (R, 120 mins)

MANGLEHORN
(US/UK - 2015)

The third chapter in Al Pacino's back-to-basics, character-driven trifecta of low-key indie films following THE HUMBLING and DANNY COLLINS, David Gordon Green's MANGLEHORN lets the Oscar-winning screen legend be eccentric without resorting to his familiar post-SCENT OF A WOMAN histrionics. Pacino is very good here, but the film is a mixed bag, with Green too often engaging in self-indulgent asides and distracting detours into quirkiness that serve no real purpose other than establishing film festival bona fides. Pacino is A.J. Manglehorn, a sad-eyed locksmith in a smallish Texas suburb. Manglehorn works and spends most of his days alone with his beloved cat Fanny and occasionally takes his adorable granddaughter Kylie (Skyler Gasper) to the park. Divorced and mostly estranged from his high-rolling investment broker son Jacob (Chris Messina), Manglehorn laments a life wasted, spent without his lost love Clara. The proverbial "one that got away," Manglehorn pours his heart out in letters relayed in voiceover and mailed to Clara daily, and every day, there's an envelope in his mailbox stamped "Return to Sender." At first coming across like a tragic and lonely old soul, Manglehorn is soon revealed to be abrasive and a bit of an asshole who seems to sabotage his interactions, whether it's an unpleasant lunch with Jacob, where he complains about the food and how he never loved Jacob's mother because she was a poor substitute for Clara, or running into sleazy tanning salon owner/part-time pimp Gary (SPRING BREAKERS director Harmony Korine, in a role that seems like it was intended for Green pal Danny McBride), a socially inept, no-filter type prone to using words like "retard" and "mulatto" in public, but who still idolizes Manglehorn, his childhood Little League coach. Manglehorn has a friendly flirtation with bank teller Dawn (Holly Hunter) that leads to a disastrous date that goes south as soon as Manglehorn does what he always does: surely as THE BIG LEBOWSKI's Walter Sobchak made everything about Vietnam, Manglehorn steers every conversation into another rambling tale of woe monologue about how he let Clara slip away.

At its core, MANGLEHORN is a tale of redemption for a bitter, angry man who has some good in him, especially when it comes to his devotion to his granddaughter and his willingness to drain a good chunk of his savings on an expensive surgery for an ill Fanny. But Manglehorn wants Clara and is content to make everyone within earshot as miserable as he is about not being with her. It gets repetitive after a while (though his date with Dawn is a small masterpiece for connoisseurs of cringe), and Green's idiosyncratic digressions--a guy breaking into song in the bank and a teller responding in kind; Manglehorn encountering a multi-car pileup involving a truck full of smashed watermelons that looks like a pointless homage to Jean-Luc Godard's WEEKEND; one scene where he shows off some De Palma-style trickery that comes off like directorial wankery--just get in the way. Green also does some obvious telegraphing with the way he deliberately keeps the viewer out of a locked room that Manglehorn enters daily and emerges in a rage--of course, it's the decades-long shrine for the unattainable Clara, every returned letter filed away, every rejected bouquet of flowers wilted and rotting, which makes him look less like an unfortunate man burdened with a lifetime of sorrow and regret and more like an obsessed loon who needs a restraining order. Pacino's skills help him play a largely unplayable character, and by the time it's over, it's little more than a quirky indie version of AS GOOD AS IT GETS. Even with its many ups and downs, MANGLEHORN is still required viewing for Pacino completists, but be warned going in that it includes a feel-good ending that directly involves a mime. (PG-13, 97 mins)

COP CAR
(US - 2015)

Often coming off like a hastily-sketched idea that the Coen Bros. penciled into the margins of a script only to not include it, the acclaimed indie COP CAR has a solid premise that isn't quite enough to carry it to feature length. It gets a lot of mileage from a terrific, frantic performance by a Brimley-stached Kevin Bacon as Sheriff Mitch Kretzer, a suburban lawman whose day goes from bad to worse when his cruiser is stolen by a pair of grubby ten-year-old runaways who take it on a joyride. Travis (James Freedson-Jackson) and Harrison (Hays Wellford) are two of the dumbest, most obnoxious brats in cinema history, a pre-teen Beavis and Butt-Head who make one idiotic decision after another, usually involving playing with Kretzer's weapons they find in the backseat and staring down the barrel of the guns to figure out why they aren't firing. They also don't know there's a body in the trunk, the second of two that a coke-fueled, corrupt Kretzer was trying to bury in a field--he was off disposing of the first body when the idiot kids stumbled on the seemingly abandoned cop car. As the kids recklessly drive around the rural outskirts of town, plowing through fields and stopping to point automatic weapons at one another, Kretzer races around town, first on foot, then in a stolen car, then finally in his own pickup, to try and cover his tracks and locate the kids.

Directed and co-written by Jon Watts, who was rewarded (?) with the upcoming SPIDER-MAN reboot based on the festival buzz around COP CAR, the film mostly works as a thriller, but the implausibilities and the plot conveniences abound. It's never believable that Kretzer manages to misdirect all the other cops on the force and keeping them chasing their own tails all day, and it's tough to buy the way he goes about undetected all day long, even when he's pulled over by one of his own cops, calls in a fake emergency to the dispatcher on his cell phone, and manages to go unrecognized, with the now-distracted cop letting him off with the warning without really even taking a good look at him. Bacon is great as the wiry, frazzled, increasingly wigged-out Kretzer, and the child actors do a convincing job of playing--by design--a pair of stupid and truly appalling little shits, though Wellford's Harrison is slightly less loathsome than Freedson-Jackson's cocky, twerpy Travis. There's a couple of other characters--Camryn Manheim as a concerned citizen who spots the kids swerving in the cop car on a back road, and Shea Whigham ends up playing a prominent role, plus Bacon's wife Kyra Sedgwick provides the voice of the gullible dispatcher--but Bacon is the real show here. He's excellent, but the film seems ultimately too slight even for just under 90 minutes. (R, 88 mins)

KNOCK KNOCK

(US/Chile - 2015)

Directed by Eli Roth. Written by Eli Roth, Nicolas Lopez and Guillermo Amoedo. Cast: Keanu Reeves, Lorenza Izzo, Ana de Armas, Aaron Burns, Ignacia Allamand, Colleen Camp. (R, 99 mins)

Just two weeks after the long-delayed Italian gutmuncher homage THE GREEN INFERNO finally hit theaters, horror fanboy patron saint Eli Roth is back with the home invasion thriller KNOCK KNOCK. A remake of the sleazy, waka-jawaka-drenched drive-in favorite DEATH GAME, aka THE SEDUCERS (shot in 1974 but not released until 1977), KNOCK KNOCK essentially follows the same plot but with required modern updatings and more of a black comedy streak. In DEATH GAME, Seymour Cassel pays dearly when his wife and kids are away for the weekend and he allows himself to be seduced by two young women (Sondra Locke, Colleen Camp) who knock on the door claiming to be lost and waiting for a ride. KNOCK KNOCK--which lists Locke, Camp, and DEATH GAME director Peter Traynor among its committee of producers, with Camp returning for a cameo--has architect Evan Webber (Keanu Reeves) home alone at his luxurious Hollywood Hills residence with the dog over Father's Day weekend so he can finish an important work project while his artist wife Karen (Ignacia Allamand) and their two kids are away at the beach. After taking a break and smoking a little weed, Evan's work plans are put on hold when a torrential downpour brings two young women, Genesis (Roth's wife Lorenza Izzo) and Bel (Ana de Armas), to his front door. Claiming to be flight attendants looking for a party but then discovering they're in the wrong neighborhood, the girls persuade Evan to let them in to use the phone. He makes them tea, lends them bathrobes while their clothes are in the dryer, and calls an Uber as his sense of unease increases over small-talk that quickly escalates to flirtation and full-on seduction, as family man Evan can't resist an impromptu threesome in the shower--during which the Uber driver gets tired of waiting and leaves--followed by an all-night fuckfest straight out of Penthouse Letters.

The next morning, Evan finds the girls making a mess in the kitchen as they try to cook breakfast. As his temper flares and his patience runs out, the girls just giggle at him. When he threatens to call the police, they drop a bombshell, saying they're actually only 15, which makes him a pedophile ("And I've still got the evidence!" Bel taunts as she points below her waist). Evan eventually calls their bluff and dials 9-1-1 anyway, at which point Genesis backs off and the girls agree to let Evan drive them home. Later that evening, investigating a noise in the kitchen, Evan discovers the girls have broken back into the house and they knock him unconscious. He wakes up tied to the bed as Bel forces him to have sex with her while she wears his daughter's clothes and calls him "Daddy." Genesis and Bel have declared themselves judge, jury, and, if things go their way, executioner, subjecting Evan to a weekend of psychological torture and sexual sadism as punishment for betraying his wife, his children, and his life of one-percenter privilege, dismantling and destroying every piece of his life, whether it's his rare vinyl collection, Karen's art and sculptures, or scrawling "Whore" on a framed picture of his daughter and "My daddy now has AIDS" on one of his son.

The class struggle element seems almost arbitrarily tossed in and dropped as soon as it's mentioned, it's never really clear why Genesis and Bel have singled out Evan, even after it's revealed that they've been spying on him for some time prior to being invited inside, and some things are groan-inducingly predictable (has there ever been a movie where a character is introduced reaching for their asthma inhaler that didn't telegraph a later scene where that same person couldn't breathe and couldn't find their inhaler?) For a while, Roth and co-writers Nicolas Lopez and Guillermo Amoedo (the three have worked in various capacities with and for one another several other US/Chilean co-productions like AFTERSHOCK, THE STRANGER, and THE GREEN INFERNO) seem to be attempting a hot-button, FATAL ATTRACTION-type water cooler movie with the ethical and moral dilemma in which Evan finds himself. Initially, he does everything he can to resist the advances of Genesis and Bel, constantly moving from one seat to another in attempt to get them off of him, but when the Uber arrives and they refuse to leave the bathroom, only to have him enter and be rendered helpless when they go down on him simultaneously ("Have you ever had two women do this at once?" Genesis coos). Evan loves his family, but he's feeling a little unappreciated--the family left him alone on Father's Day and Karen hasn't had sex with him in several weeks, and here's two much-younger women stroking his ego about how buff he is and how lucky his wife must be. He gives in to temptation in a moment of weakness but the girls lord his transgression over his head for the rest of the movie ("You're all the same," Genesis scolds him), leading to an epic Keanu freakout that's on the level of Nic Cage's A-game. Tied to a chair, possibly going deaf from a piercing noises Genesis played through a set of headphones, and with a bleeding wound from being stabbed with a fork right over a recent shoulder surgery incision, Reeves dials it up to 11 with a long monologue, shouted at the top of his lungs about how "I'm a good guy! I'm a good father! I let you in! I called you an Uber! I made you tea! You came on to me! You were just free pizza that showed up at my door! What was I supposed to do?"

There's a darkly comedic mean streak throughout the film, but any pretense at seriousness is gone by the climax, where the comedy starts leaning broad and culminates in a great social media gag (between this and THE GREEN INFERNO, Roth has made his disdain for social media loud and clear) that's the funniest Facebook-related punchline I've yet seen in a movie (the melodrama in Reeves' punctuation of it is perfect as well). There's a lot of FATAL ATTRACTION, FUNNY GAMES, and HARD CANDY in KNOCK KNOCK, and if this was getting any kind of wide theatrical release (Lionsgate is dumping it on VOD and only releasing it in a few theaters), there'd likely be thinkpieces about the feminist and/or misogynist subtext (the girls are written off as "crazy bitches" but Roth leaves no doubt that Evan's in deep shit with his wife). Roth pays lip service to such things but doesn't explore it to any serious depth. It's very accomplished from a technical standpoint, especially in the way Roth has cinematographer Antonio Quercia snake and glide the camera through the house. Though it qualifies as a hard R, it's a virtually gore-free departure for Roth, who lets his sense of humor--sometimes clever, sometimes dudebro juvenile--run a little more free here even with the intensity and cringe-inducing discomfort of the whole thing. With solid performances by Reeves, Izzo (whose penetrating glare has some serious Eva Green potential), and de Armas, KNOCK KNOCK is quite enjoyable, guilty pleasure B-movie trash.

NIGHTMARE WEEKEND
(US/UK/France - 1986)

Directed by H. Sala (Henri Sala). Written by Georges Faget-Benard and Robert Seidman. Cast: Debbie Laster, Dale Midkiff, Debra Hunter, Robert Burke, Lori Lewis, Preston Maybank, Wellington Meffert, Kim Dossin, Andrea Thompson, Kimberley Stahl, Bruce Morton, Karen Mayo, Nick James, Dean Gates, Marc Gottlieb. (Unrated, 86 mins)

PIECES. TROLL 2. MIAMI CONNECTION. THE ROOM. GETEVEN. There are bad movies and then there are bad movies that take the art of bad movies to another level of cinematic nirvana. Films made with sincerity but so misguided and thoroughly bizarre that they simply must be seen to be disbelieved. You can add 1986's NIGHTMARE WEEKEND to that by-no-means comprehensive list. Just out on Blu-ray (Blu-ray!) from the folks at Vinegar Syndrome, the insane NIGHTMARE WEEKEND is poised to break out as the next great Bad Movie sensation. A US-British-French co-production starring American actors and shot in Ocala, FL in 1984 by a French crew headed by a director who didn't speak English, couldn't communicate with his cast, and was primarily known for his work in French hardcore porn (helming such classics as S COMME SPERME and CLUB PORNO POUR CHATTES ENRAGEES), NIGHTMARE WEEKEND is so deliriously bonkers that it feels like a lost Jess Franco film, only somehow less coherent.

In the '80s, many European exploitation directors (Lucio Fulci with THE NEW YORK RIPPER, Enzo G. Castellari with 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS, Umberto Lenzi with EATEN ALIVE and CANNIBAL FEROX, and Romano Scavolini with NIGHTMARE all come to mind) would shoot in America, particularly NYC and usually without permits, and would deftly capture its mood and aura in an almost verite way, in ways that sanitized and secured Hollywood productions couldn't. Not so with Henri Sala, barely hiding behind the name "H. Sala." Whether it's his living in a porn bubble or his lack of fluency in English, his "America" of NIGHTMARE WEEKEND seems to work from a list of vague caricatures of 1980s America: Big hair? Check. Computers? Check. Sony Walkman? Check. Aerobics? Check. It demonstrates the kind of cultural tone deafness that runs rampant throughout PIECES (Kung-fu professor? Retired tennis pro-turned-cop going undercover as a tennis pro? Lead detective letting Cosby-sweater-wearing, Horshack-looking campus babe magnet take over the murder investigation?) and it's almost as funny. The communication breakdown between all involved parties is apparent in nearly every frame. NIGHTMARE WEEKEND seems like the pieces of at least three movies stitched together at random. Though it was shot with live sound, the audio was tossed for some reason, leading to the American actors--including three young up-and-comers and one Brit who would go onto varying levels of success in years to come--all being dubbed over by other voice actors, giving it a distinctly foreign vibe that only adds to its ludicrous charms. According to cast member and American co-producer Marc Gottlieb, who gave up acting after this movie and became a Wall Street lawyer, the French script by Georges Faget-Benard was rewritten multiple times, both by a credited Robert Seidman (a co-writer on 1984's ALPHABET CITY) and by an uncredited Gottlieb. No one had any idea what was going on, and it's obvious when you see the finished product. When the action cuts three times between one set of characters and two others in a sex scene, and the two actors in the sex scene go from 1) naked and fucking to 2) clothed and talking to 3) naked and fucking again, it's almost offensive that someone in the closing credits is actually credited with "continuity." You had one job, Christine Rondwasser.

The plot--and I use the term loosely--focuses on three college girls on a weekend getaway at a mansion where they're the unwitting subjects of a scientific experiment. A behavior-based computer program called "APACHE" has been developed by the respected Edward Brake (Wellington Meffert) but has been hijacked for nefarious purposes by his bitch-on-wheels assistant Julie Clingstone (Debbie Laster). Clingstone has sad-sack hunk Ken (Dale Midkiff, a few years away from the NBC miniseries ELVIS & ME and the blockbuster hit PET SEMATARY)--who's still grieving over the death of his best buddy Bob (Preston Maybank) in another botched Clingstone experiment--under her thumb but she also has to contend with his attraction to Brake's daughter Jessica (Debra Hunter). Jessica spends a lot of time messing around with the APACHE program on a computer she calls "George" (played by a Coleco Adam), which has a sentient hand-puppet attachment that keeps demanding "More data please!" Meanwhile, there's constant cutaways to a local bar/arcade called Stag, where badass stud Dave (future ROBOCOP and DUST DEVIL Robert John Burke, currently guest starring on a network or cable TV show near you) has sex with a woman (Karen Mayo) on a pinball machine, an idiot named Tony (Bruce Morton) dances around to the music on his Walkman, and the alcoholic Brake limo driver is given "special sandwiches" by the bartender, a stealth way to disguise his drinking by putting a mini-bar bottle in between two slices of bread. Eventually, all of these parties end up at the Brake estate, where various hook-ups take place (even the Walkman guy gets laid!) and Clingstone unleashes the full power of APACHE, which materializes in the form of small silver balls that force themselves down the mouth of their victim and turn them into zombies.

"More data, please!"

A hodgepodge of nonsensical plot (watch Jessica and "George" control Clingstone's car via computer, and Clingstone's utterly blase non-reaction to her car driving itself!), endless filler (why is Sala so concerned with what's going on that bar? Why is the limo driver hiding tiny bottles of liquor between two slices of bread?), terrible dubbing, and even worse puppetry, NIGHTMARE WEEKEND is a film so fucked-up that cocaine should've gotten at least a co-producer credit. Sala made one more porno in France before calling it a career and hasn't been heard from since. Dead? Alive? Who knows? With the exception of four people, everyone else in the cast vanished into bad movie witness protection: Midkiff and Burke went on to busy careers; Mayo became better known as Karen Mayo-Chandler when she appeared in a few scattered B-movies like STRIPPED TO KILL II: LIVE GIRLS and 976-EVIL II and was a girlfriend of Jack Nicholson's in the late '80s (she died from breast cancer in 2006 at just 48); and one of the three college girls is played by Andrea Thompson, who would go on to stints on FALCON CREST, BABYLON 5, JAG, 24, and HEROES, but is best known for her role as Det. Jill Kirkendall for five seasons midway through NYPD BLUE's run. How could guys named "Wellington Meffert" and "Preston Maybank" not make it? It's safe to say that aside from the Ocala party scene and cast members hooking up after hours (Gottlieb even says the best thing to result for him from the film is that his daughter was conceived during the making of it), none of them have fond memories of NIGHTMARE WEEKEND as a movie--none take part in the Blu-ray special features, though Gottlieb does mention Midkiff having an on-set meltdown upon realizing he might not be finished with the film in time to move on to a more promising project that he had lined up immediately following (considering the time frame, it was probably the Roger Corman-released STREETWALKIN'). Watching the film, one can hardly blame Midkiff's hysterical reaction to such news. Yes, NIGHTMARE WEEKEND is...well, words can hardly do it justice. It's much more than the overwrought theme song's declaration of "You are a nightmare, a nightmare fantasy!" Simply put, if you haven't seen it, you must. And like me, you'll wonder where it's been all your life.

CRIMSON PEAK
(US - 2015)

Directed by Guillermo del Toro. Written by Guillermo del Toro and Matthew Robbins. Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston, Charlie Hunnam, Jim Beaver, Burn Gorman, Leslie Hope, Doug Jones, Bruce Grey, Jonathan Hyde, Sofia Wells, Emily Coutts. (R, 119 mins)

It seems as if all of Guillermo del Toro's films are long-gestating dream projects he's had toiling in the deepest recesses of his mind since he was a child. He announces more projects that he can possibly make (face it, kids--PACIFIC RIM 2 ain't happening) and there's seemingly no end to his boundless imagination and love for what he does. Del Toro's latest, CRIMSON PEAK, is an absolute triumph of style, set design, costuming, and an almost choking Gothic aura. Among the most ambitious of throwback homages, it plays like a never-made film where Alfred Hitchcock chose Mario Bava to be his cinematographer. It's the realization of what might've happened if Merchant-Ivory remade THE SHINING and moved it to Victorian-era England. Owing as much to Henry James, Daphne du Maurier, Charlotte Bronte, and Edith Wharton as it does to THE HAUNTING THE CHANGELING, and del Toro's own back catalog, CRIMSON PEAK is more of a supernatural Gothic tragedy than a non-stop frightfest, which isn't to imply that it skimps on the shocks and the gore. The jolting scares and the shocking violence are sporadic enough that del Toro makes them count. The found-footage and the digital splatter crowd will probably be bored senseless by CRIMSON PEAK--like the Wachowskis, del Toro is a visionary who still somehow manages to get studios to spend exorbitant amounts of money on his wildly inventive and very personal passion projects. CRIMSON PEAK is probably the best-looking film of the year, and it's a rare case where the surface beauty and visuals are stunning enough to give its writing and structural weaknesses a pass. The script, by del Toro and Matthew Robbins (his writing collaborator on MIMIC and the del Toro-produced DON'T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK), with uncredited contributions from British playwright Lucinda Coxon, hinges on too many predictable plot twists and familiar elements you've seen in a hundred other Gothic dramas and ghost stories. Had the plot been a little more inventive and up to del Toro's standards of production design, he would've had a legitimate classic instead of the year's best-looking retread. The layout, the decor, the architecture--del Toro's attention to even the most minute aesthetic detail is obviously obsessive on a Stanley Kubrick level. As exquisitely and hypnotically jaw-dropping as CRIMSON PEAKS looks, it's obvious where del Toro's priorities lied.

Just after the turn of the 20th century in Buffalo. Shy Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) has aspirations of being the next Mary Shelley. A headstrong, independent young woman forced to grow up early upon the death of her mother, Edith had an early supernatural experience as a child when she was visited by the ghost of her mother (played by del Toro's go-to guy Doug Jones) and warned to "Beware of Crimson Peak!" A bit of a loner with no interest in being a snobbish society matron, Edith lives with her loving, protective industrialist father Carter (Jim Beaver) and keeps ophthalmologist and potential suitor Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam) in the friend zone, but her comfortable upper-class life is upended with the arrival of Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and his sister Lady Lucille Sharpe (a delightfully scowling Jessica Chastain) from England. Sir Thomas is hoping to convince Carter to invest in a machine that mines clay from the earth, but Carter is unconvinced of the worth of the machine and dismisses Sir Thomas and his "soft hands" as indicative of a life of too much privilege. After Sir Thomas begins courting Edith in an attempt to prove his worth, Carter has a private investigator (Burn Gorman) look into the Sharpe's background and is so perturbed by what he finds that he pays Sir Thomas to break Edith's heart and leave Buffalo at once. When Carter is brutally murdered, Edith finds solace and comfort in the loving arms of Sir Thomas and the two are quickly married, much to Alan's suspicion and Lady Lucille's apparent seething jealousy.

When the newlyweds and Lady Lucille relocate to the Sharpe ancestral home at Allerdale Hall, a decrepit mansion so far out in rural England that it's four hours to the nearest town, the truth becomes clear: the Sharpes are penniless, and Allerdale Hall is in almost complete ruins, with a hole in the roof that allows leaves , rain, and snow to pour down directly into the main living room. It also rests on a large deposit of natural clay into which it's been very slowly sinking for decades. While it's clear the Sharpes are running a con game of sorts in an attempt to get Edith's money, it's also obvious that Allerdale Hall is haunted by the vengeful ghosts of those who have died within its walls. Edith encounters these ghosts but can't convince Sir Thomas or Lady Lucille that they're real, and Edith grows even more alarmed when she learns that, because of the red clay surrounding Allerdale Hall, the home is referred to by some as "Crimson Peak," the very place the ghostly spectre of her mother warned her about years earlier.

While reminiscent of Rebecca and The Turn of the Screw, CRIMSON PEAK has a long stretch of being a Victorian take on THE SHINING. From her childhood, Edith has had a "shining" of sorts that she blocked and let manifest in her writing of ghost stories. The Kubrickian design and layout of Allerdale Hall, with its endless corridors, a bathtub scene that's a blatant riff on Jack's encounter in room 237, a ball that enters the frame and rolls to Edith but there's no one there who could've rolled it to her, and warnings from Lady Lucille to stay out of certain areas, all owe a debt to at least Kubrick's (perhaps not Stephen King's) vision of the Overlook Hotel. There's even a Dick Hallorann surrogate in Alan, who journeys overseas from Buffalo to England and travels a great distance in a blinding blizzard to the snowed-in Allerdale Hall in an attempt to rescue Edith once he realizes the Sharpes' true intent. All of this looks incredible, but in terms of story and theme, del Toro's a bit on autopilot. His efforts were unquestionably concentrated in the visual aspects of the film, and to that respect, it works beautifully. If you want an impossibly gorgeous piece of Gothic eye candy, you can't beat CRIMSON PEAK, which demands to be seen on as big of a screen as possible. Del Toro has said, in envisioning Edith as his heroine, that CRIMSON PEAK is for his "inner 14-year-old bookish girl." That's a telling statement, because in terms of content, CRIMSON PEAK isn't really for 14-year-old bookish girls, but its character arcs and story progression could've very well been concocted by a 14-year-old del Toro. There's a lot to love here, especially if you're a fan of Gothic chillers, haunted mansions, and the garish lighting of Roger Corman's AIP Poe adaptations and when Mario Bava started making movies in color with 1964's BLACK SABBATH. But del Toro the screenwriter just isn't working at the same level as del Toro the director.

TERROR IN THE AISLES
(US - 1984)

Directed by Andrew J. Kuehn. Written by Margery Doppelt. Cast: Donald Pleasence, Nancy Allen. (R, 83 mins)

Can you imagine moviegoers lining up today to see what essentially amounts to a feature-length version of one of those Bravo 100 SCARIEST MOVIE MOMENTS-type TV specials? It's hard to believe there was a time that they would, but that's exactly what happened when Universal released TERROR IN THE AISLES in theaters on October 26, 1984, the same day as James Cameron's THE TERMINATOR and Brian De Palma's BODY DOUBLE. When the weekend was over, THE TERMINATOR landed in first place and BODY DOUBLE in third. That TERROR IN THE AISLES was the second most popular movie in America that pre-Halloween weekend only serves as a reminder of how huge horror was with moviegoers of the time. Horror's always been a popular genre, but it was exploding in the early '80s, with countless slasher films, splatter movies, and the innovative makeup effects work of guys like Rick Baker, Rob Bottin, and Tom Savini. The effects guys were often the superstars of the genre: Savini already had a prominent role as the head of the biker gang in DAWN OF THE DEAD, but was so well-known to fans and had such a gregarious personality that he parlayed his special effects fame into the popular VHS rental SCREAM GREATS, which looked at Savini and his techniques and his career highlights, and a second career as a character actor, starring in one of the earliest straight-to-video titles, 1985's THE RIPPER, and, years later, appearing as biker Sex Machine in Robert Rodriguez's FROM DUSK TILL DAWN (1996).

Compilations of this sort were nothing new: in the early 1960s, Robert Youngson assembled several compilations of silent film clips, like 1960's WHEN COMEDY WAS KING and 1961's DAYS OF THRILLS AND LAUGHTER), and 1974's THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT! and its 1976 sequel THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT, PART 2 celebrated the legacy of MGM musicals (and it's tag line "Boy, do we need it now!" seemed to assure aging moviegoers that there wouldn't be any of the violence, sex, or F-bombs that were becoming commonplace by the early '70s). Horror was a prime genre for the reverential clip-show treatment: every video store in America probably stocked Wizard Video's FILMGORE, Continental Video's TERROR ON TAPE, and Universal's John Landis-assembled COMING SOON. And Paramount tried releasing one of these genre clip comps in theaters exactly two years earlier, when IT CAME FROM HOLLYWOOD opened on Halloween weekend in 1982. A collection of scenes from vintage exploitation and campy sci-fi movies, with snarky commentary by hosts Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Cheech & Chong, and Gilda Radner, IT CAME FROM HOLLYWOOD flopped but in retrospect, served as somewhat of a dry run for MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000. TERROR IN THE AISLES approaches its highlights with a more reverent attitude, with hosts Donald Pleasence (HALLOWEEN) and Nancy Allen (DRESSED TO KILL) addressing the viewer while watching a horror movie with an enthusiastic, sell-out crowd. That Pleasence and Allen are never seen together is a strong indication that they weren't there at the same time and probably shot their segments in a single day, tops. Director Andrew J. Kuehn and writer Margery Doppelt have Pleasence and Allen wax rhapsodic on the nature and appeal of horror films, why they're so popular, and what the genre tropes (promiscuous woman = victim) are really saying, but there's nothing particularly deep in the analysis and it comes across as armchair psychology much of the time. The clips are mostly from the then-modern era, with popular hits like ALIEN, THE SHINING, SCANNERS, FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2, HALLOWEEN II, POLTERGEIST, John Carpenter's THE THING, and VIDEODROME, and "oldies" like PSYCHO, THE BIRDS, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE EXORCIST, THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, JAWS, and the 1978 remake of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, plus thrillers like MARATHON MAN, MS. 45 and VICE SQUAD among many, many others, mixed with archival footage of Alfred Hitchcock explaining the nature of suspense and terror.

Andrew J. Kuehn, the father of the modern movie trailer

Kuehn (1937-2004) was well-known in the movie industry as the head of Kaleidoscope Films, a marketing outfit that served as the big studios' go-to trailer supplier going back to 1968. While independents like Roger Corman would have their trailers assembled in-house, the studios went to Kuehn, whose team would write the narration and create the trailers. It was one of Kuehn's staffers who came up with JAWS 2's immortal and much-referenced "Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water," still regarded as one of the greatest tag lines of all time. Kuehn would also be commissioned to direct behind-the-scenes "making of" documentaries that would air on TV (like INSIDE "THE SWARM," LIGHTS, CAMERA, ANNIE! and JOURNEY TO KRULL) prior to a huge movie being released (many of these archival documentaries have been preserved as extras on eventual DVD and Blu-ray releases), and 15 years after TERROR IN THE AISLES, he directed the documentary GET BRUCE!, about famed comedy writer Bruce Vilanch. Kuehn's trailer-assembling expertise works in TERROR IN THE AISLES' favor in the often clever ways structurally similar shots from many different films are cut together (there's a door-slamming montage early on where he establishes a visual and sonic rhythm that's very well-done). Kuehn obviously put some thought into the way some of the clips should be shown, and for a while, TERROR IN THE AISLES is a pretty fun snapshot of where horror was in 1984 and what it was like to see a horror movie in that pre-pager, pre-cell phone, pre-texting era when devoted fans were so into the story that it would frequently become a communal experience the likes of which you very rarely see anymore. But Kuehn really starts to stumble and TERROR IN THE AISLES loses its way after about a hour. For starters, he and Doppelt have Pleasence and Allen referring to "terror films," which is a term nobody used. It almost seems as if they didn't want to limit themselves to horror movies, but even "terror films" is a stretch when trying to justify the inclusion of clips from TO CATCH A THIEF and KLUTE, and when Kuehn is editing Zoe Tamerlis from MS. 45 into a climactic scene from KLUTE with Jane Fonda and Charles Cioffi, you can't help but think he's wandered way off on a tangent that's probably just there to pad the running time. Kuehn had no way of knowing how beloved Italian horror of that time would become, but even then, it had enough interest to warrant stronger representation than a couple of one-to-two second shots from Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA very late in the proceedings. Lucio Fulci's ZOMBIE gained some notoriety when it was released in the US in the summer of 1980. Wouldn't the zombie vs. shark scene or the Olga Karlatos splinter-in-the-eye make more sense to show than a dialogue scene from KLUTE?

TERROR IN THE AISLES stayed in the top five at the box office for a couple of weeks and grossed over $10 million--small change today but keep in mind, it opened better than BODY DOUBLE and were it not for THE TERMINATOR, it would've been the most popular movie in America. It's one that's held in sentimental regard by children of the '80s, some of whom likely used it as a checklist of things they needed to see, and has become regular Halloween viewing for fans of a certain age. After its VHS release and some cable airings in the '80s, TERROR IN THE AISLES fell into obscurity and was a much sought-after title until 2011, when it was included as a bonus feature on Universal's 30th anniversary Blu-ray release of HALLOWEEN II. Just a year later, HALLOWEEN II was re-released on Blu-ray again, this time by Shout! Factory, but minus TERROR IN THE AISLES. AISLES then received its own DVD release through Universal's made-to-order "Vault Series," which was long thought impossible given the number of rights issues and clearances involving the clips, obstacles that caused Paramount to cancel IT CAME FROM HOLLYWOOD's planned DVD release in 2006. Clip shows like 100 SCARIEST MOVIE MOMENTS are always entertaining, but with TV specials of that sort and the ability of pretty much anyone to create their own horror scene compilation and put it on YouTube, the idea of something like TERROR IN THE AISLES not only being given a wide release in theaters but playing to packed houses seems quaintly absurd. Even though it veers way off point in its final third, it still stands as a decent, though by no means comprehensive, representation of early '80s horror.

MALONE
(US - 1987)

Directed by Harley Cokliss. Written by Christopher Frank. Cast: Burt Reynolds, Cliff Robertson, Lauren Hutton, Kenneth McMillan, Cynthia Gibb, Scott Wilson, Philip Anglim, Tracey Walter, Dennis Burkley, Alex Diakun, Brooks Gardner, Mike Kirton, Blu Mankuma, Don Davis. (R, 92 mins)

"Got a name?"
"Malone."
"Got a first name?"
"Yeah."

From the late '70s and into the early '80s, Burt Reynolds was the top box-office draw in America. The busy actor appeared in two to three movies a year, and there was rarely a time when a Burt movie wasn't in theaters. But after a while, his base grew fatigued with increasingly lazy efforts like 1983's STROKER ACE and 1984's CANNONBALL RUN II. 1984's CITY HEAT, a much-anticipated teaming with Clint Eastwood, the other biggest movie star in America, proved to be a disappointment for both actors, but it would be far more devastating to Reynolds than your average box-office underperformer. While filming a fight scene, Reynolds was supposed to be hit across the face with a lightweight, breakaway prop chair. Somehow, the prop chair was replaced with a real one and Reynolds was hit in the face with it at full force. His jaw broke on impact, requiring extensive surgery that kept his mouth wired shut for months, forcing him on a liquid diet and later resulting in an addiction to painkillers. It took over two years for him to recover, during which time Hollywood and many of his friends abandoned him and tabloids had a field day with the rumors about his health and his weight loss. Reports stated that he was dying of either cancer or AIDS. Reynolds had his long-delayed Elmore Leonard adaptation STICK in theaters in 1985, but it was actually shot in late 1983, prior to CITY HEAT and the jaw incident. Other than a cameo in his buddy Mel Tillis' 1986 comedy UPHILL ALL THE WAY, Reynolds was offscreen until the release of HEAT in March 1987. Savaged by critics and ignored by audiences, HEAT was a troubled production that cycled through three directors--Robert Altman quit after one day, his replacement Dick Richards made most of the film before quitting after an on-set physical altercation with Reynolds, and then TV vet Jerry Jameson finished it; director credit went to "R.M. Richards"--and opened in 11th place. In three years, Reynolds went from box office king to Hollywood pariah. Burt was back and he was in good shape, healthy, and fully recovered, but HEAT's paltry gross left little doubt: nobody cared.

HEAT was the first of three comeback vehicles Reynolds had lined up for 1987. The second was MALONE, opening less than two months after HEAT. The results were almost identical: MALONE opened in 11th place and grossed $3 million before quickly disappearing from theaters. HEAT grossed just under $3 million but both were stunning freefalls from the blockbuster revenue generated by Reynolds films over the preceding decade or so (even CANNONBALL RUN II grossed $28 million in theaters and that was considered weak by Reynolds standards in 1984). HEAT and MALONE bombed so badly that the third Burt comeback movie, RENT-A-COP, which paired him with Liza Minnelli, saw its wide release nixed and was unceremoniously bumped to January 1988, grossing $300,000 on just 200 screens. The idea of a megastar like Reynolds being downgraded to a limited release was almost unheard-of in 1988, but the message came through loud and clear: moviegoers no longer gave a shit about Burt Reynolds.

Of course, Reynolds has proven himself to be nothing if not resilient. There was an undeniable "pile-on" mindset in the way critics approached Reynolds films during his 1987-and-onward return to the big screen, and these films during his darkest period (at least to that time) aren't nearly as bad as their reputations would suggest. HEAT has aged well as a character piece, and 1988's THE FRONT PAGE/HIS GIRL FRIDAY remake SWITCHING CHANNELS is a perfectly enjoyable screwball comedy that shows Burt in fine form engaging in witty, rapid-fire repartee with Kathleen Turner and Christopher Reeve. Even a dull misfire like 1989's PHYSICAL EVIDENCE has a decent Reynolds performance for completists. Reynolds got some of his best reviews in years in the low-key 1989 indie BREAKING IN, which led to the short-lived ABC series B.L. STRYKER before Reynolds' career saw a major resurgence in 1990 with the CBS sitcom EVENING SHADE, and this was all prior to his Oscar-nominated career-best performance in 1997's BOOGIE NIGHTS.

MALONE's incredible
VHS cover art

Of the films from this period of Reynolds' career, it's MALONE that seems to have resonated the most, though certainly some of its appeal is ironic. It's not a particularly good movie, but it's an entertaining one. Its cult seems to be a sentimental one: as pointed out by Johnny Larue's Crane Shot's Marty McKee, it's got one of the most ridiculous cover boxes of the VHS era (much improved over the bland theatrical poster art), and Reynolds sporting a softball-sized shotgun blast in his gut and the most ludicrous wig of his career. It's McKee who posited the groundbreaking theory that the poofier Burt's wig, the dumber the movie, unlike, say, SHARKY'S MACHINE, where he's wearing his smaller, "serious toupee" (© Marty McKee). Also, the title MALONE just sounds like a cliched cop movie that might be on a double bill with Rainier Wolfcastle's latest MCBAIN joint. From a nostalgia standpoint, though it was made by Orion, MALONE is the closest Reynolds came to making a Cannon-type actioner. Everything about it, from the action and the style to the pace and the score, looks and feels like it should be a Golan-Globus production being directed by a pre-comeback John Frankenheimer. If you're unsure if you'll enjoy MALONE, just play the Cannon intro before watching it and it instantly improves. It's hardly Reynolds' best film, but like HEAT and SWITCHING CHANNELS, it didn't deserve the miserable response it got from critics and fickle audiences who were moving on to things like LETHAL WEAPON and other bigger and louder Joel Silver extravaganzas like DIE HARD. The action movie was in transition, and Reynolds, like Charles Bronson and even Clint Eastwood, would fall victim to the shift, forcing them to adapt or move on to other things.

Just out on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber, MALONE opens with burned-out covert ops CIA agent Malone (Reynolds) unable to pull the trigger on his latest target. He informs his handler/lover Jamie (Lauren Hutton, Reynolds' GATOR co-star) that he's leaving the agency. "You know too much! You can't just walk away!" she implores. "Watch me," Malone glumly replies. Driving with no particular place to go, Malone finds himself stranded in a small town in rural Oregon when his car breaks down. Malone befriends Vietnam vet mechanic Paul (Scott Wilson) and his spunky late teens daughter Jo (Cynthia Gibb). Paul is one of the last remaining holdouts, refusing to sell his business and his property to Charles Delaney (Cliff Robertson), a paranoid, far-right zealot who's taking over the town and turning it into his base of operations for his plot to "take America back." Delaney has assembled a cabal of one-percenters with the intent of getting himself a Senate seat and bringing down the US government. As Paul, Jo, and Malone are repeatedly hassled by Delaney's goons, Malone finds himself in a classic SHANE situation, helping them protect their property (and trying hard to not succumb to Jo's obvious crush on him) while being the only one tough enough to stand up to Delaney--who keeps a tight leash on useless Sheriff Hawkins (Kenneth McMillan) and thinks Malone was sent there to kill him--and amassing a blood-splattered body count in the process. Malone's troubles don't end there: once news that Malone has surfaced reaches the CIA, the powers that be dispatch Jamie to eliminate him.

An on-set photo from MALONE posted on actress
Cynthia Gibb's web site. Gibb on Burt:
"He made me feel like an equal on set
when I was still such a novice."

MALONE adheres to the SHANE template pretty closely, with some additional FIRST BLOOD in the way that the asshole sheriff keeps trying to run Malone out of town. It's also interesting to note how, even in the context of the jingoistic, "Born in the U.S.A." Reagan era of 1987, Delaney is clearly presented as a psychotic, delusional, and dangerous madman, and an ideological relative of John P. Ryan's similarly politically insane villain in the 1986 Cannon classic AVENGING FORCE. Forget the Senate--today, Charles Delaney's beliefs and statements would likely catapult him straight to 2016 GOP Presidential front-runner. Based on the novel Shotgun by William Wingate, MALONE's credited screenwriter is Christopher Frank, a British novelist who spent most of his career working in French cinema (he wrote the post-BREATHLESS Valerie Kaprisky film L'ANNEE DES MEDUSES). Reynolds said in an interview around the time of MALONE's release that the project originated in Europe and was intended for Gerard Depardieu and then Christopher Lambert before it exchanged hands and ended up in Hollywood with him. Frank's script was reworked for Reynolds by an uncredited Rudy Wurlitzer, best known for writing Monte Hellman's TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (1971) and Sam Peckinpah's PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID (1973). MALONE was directed by American journeyman Harley Cokliss, whose past credits included the post-nuke WARLORDS OF THE 21ST CENTURY (1982) and the John Carpenter-scripted BLACK MOON RISING (1986), in addition to serving as a second-unit director on THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980). Cokliss never really distinguished himself enough to rise above the level of C-lister, though his 1988 British horror film DREAM DEMON, which took several years to get a straight-to-video release in the US, was written by the venerable Christopher Wicking and was one of the more ambitious NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET ripoffs. He's worked very sporadically in TV and mostly unseen movies from 2000 on, but in the early '90s, Cokliss pulled a "Fronk-en-steen" and started calling himself "Harley Cokeliss," presumably to ensure the correct pronunciation and to prevent people from snickering at "Cokliss."

Reynolds at the Philadelphia Comic Con in May 2015

BRIDGE OF SPIES
(US/UK/Germany - 2015)

Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by Matt Charman, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. Cast: Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan, Alan Alda, Sebastian Koch, Scott Shepherd, Austin Stowell, Jesse Plemons, Eve Hewson, Domenick Lombardozzi, Will Rogers, Peter McRobbie, Dakin Matthews, Mikhail Gorevoy, Michael Gaston, Billy Magnusson, John Rue. (PG-13, 141 mins)

The Cold War drama BRIDGE OF SPIES is Steven Spielberg's first film in three years, and his third historical film in a row following the underrated WAR HORSE (2011) and the overrated LINCOLN (2012). It also marks his first collaboration with Joel & Ethan Coen, who revamped the original script by Matt Charman. Like WAR HORSE, his self-described "1940s John Ford film," BRIDGE OF SPIES is Spielberg crafting a deliberately old-fashioned work that, two F-bombs aside, seems to come straight out of 1965 and would probably be in regular rotation on Turner Classic Movies. From the climax on a bridge where west meets east to East German stasi at the Berlin Wall barking "Papers, please!" and, at its core, a very earnest, Jimmy Stewart/Henry Fonda-like performance by Tom Hanks (in his fourth Spielberg film), BRIDGE OF SPIES is very reminiscent of Hitchcock in Cold War mode, even though nobody really cares much for TORN CURTAIN (1966) and the perpetually unappreciated TOPAZ (1969) these days.

Based on the true events that led to the 1962 Glienicke Bridge prisoner swap of Soviet-captured American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers and American-imprisoned Russian spy Rudolf Ivanovich Abel, BRIDGE OF SPIES focuses on New York insurance attorney James J. Donovan (Hanks), chosen by the US government to defend accused Soviet spy Abel (Mark Rylance), when he's arrested by the FBI in Brooklyn on espionage charges. Donovan served in WWII and was an assistant to the prosecution team at Nuremberg, and though he's been strictly in insurance law for over a decade, the government believes he's got the skills and his glad-handing boss Thomas Watters Jr. (Alan Alda) thinks volunteering him would be great press for the firm. The judge (Dakin Matthews) makes it clear from the start that Donovan isn't supposed to do anything other than provide the most basic defense possible to fulfill the requirements of "due process," and when Donovan motions to have the search of Abel's apartment thrown out when he learns it was done without a warrant, everyone--from the judge to Watters to his own wife (Amy Ryan)--is outraged that he's actually putting forth effort in the defense of his client. Though he's a spy, Donovan respects the sense of duty shown by the soft-spoken Abel, who never once gives up a Soviet secret no matter how many times he's interrogated. Donovan is alarmed by how calm Abel remains through his ordeal (when he asks Abel how he's not panicking as he could be facing the electric chair, Abel replies "Would it help?" which becomes a recurring line). Abel is, of course, found guilty, though Donovan does manage to convince the judge to put in him prison rather than handing down a death sentence, explaining that if an American was ever in his position, going the humanitarian route and not executing Abel might save that American's life and provide leverage for a prisoner exchange.

Almost prophetically, that's exactly what happens the next year when Powers (Austin Stowell), on a secret CIA reconnaissance mission, is shot down over the Soviet Union and taken prisoner. Like Abel, he refuses to divulge what he knows, and when the US is desperate to get him back but wants to leave the government out of it, they once again call on Donovan to negotiate an exchange of Powers for Abel with the Russians. Once in East Berlin, much to the disapproval of his CIA handler Hoffman (Scott Shepherd), Donovan goes off script with his Soviet contact Schischken (Mikhail Gorevoy) and is forced to negotiate separately with East German Vogel (Sebastian Koch) for the release of a second American prisoner, Frederic Pryor (Will Rogers), a graduate student working preparing his dissertation on European economics.

BRIDGE OF SPIES won't go down as essential Spielberg, and it's infrequently prone to the same kind of preachy speechifying that bogged down LINCOLN (sure, Daniel Day-Lewis was an uncanny Honest Abe, but do you remember anything else about the movie?). Fortunately, it's kept in check here and there's quite a bit of snappy wit to prevent it from being a SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD or TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY-style downer, almost certainly a contribution of the Coen Bros. Whether it's Abel's refrained "Would it help?" or a running gag about Donovan's annoyance with how long the official names of the USSR and East Germany are (about the tenth time he hears Schischken say "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," Donovan snaps "Can you just say Russian? It'll save time"), or the CIA putting Donovan up at an unheated West Berlin safe house where he can see his breath as Hoffman informs him "I'm staying at the Hilton," or the way a sniffling head cold makes its way from Abel to Donovan to Hoffman over the course of the film, there's a lot of subtle, sly humor throughout the otherwise deadly serious proceedings. At 68, Spielberg isn't looking to blaze new trails and as such, BRIDGE OF SPIES is hardly SCHINDLER'S LIST or SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, and could even be termed "minor" if one were cynical enough (though it's not as minor as 2004's THE TERMINAL, his last teaming with Hanks and one of the director's weakest films), but second-tier Spielberg is better than most others' A-games. It trucks along quite nicely for a nearly two and a half hour film, Hanks again shows he's the durable master of the game as the American Everyman, and I like this throwback/historical side of Spielberg. Like WAR HORSE and probably LINCOLN, it's easy to label BRIDGE OF SPIES "an old people movie," but doing so is actually a compliment. More of today's directors could learn about shot composition, plot construction, and storytelling from old men like Spielberg and the Coens.

THE VATICAN TAPES
(US - 2015)

An absolutely atrocious EXORCIST ripoff, THE VATICAN TAPES was directed by Mark Neveldine, best known as half of Neveldine/Taylor, the duo behind the brilliant and insane CRANK (2006). Unfortunately, they've made nothing but unwatchable garbage since (CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE, GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE) and in stepping out for his debut solo joint, Neveldine just has nothing to say and only succeeds in further proving CRANK was a fluke. How many more of these generic, PG-13 possession movies do we need? It's been 42 years since THE EXORCIST--anyone making a demonic possession movie has to realize they have nothing new to bring to the table, right? With the pointless THE VATICAN TAPES, we just get more of the same, only dumber: attractive young woman (Olivia Taylor Dudley as Angela) gets possessed by a demon after accidentally cutting her finger. As her erratic behavior increases--vomiting; speaking an archaic language she couldn't possibly know; trying to drown a baby in the maternity ward; willing a detective to smash light bulbs into his eyes--she's discharged by the hospital shrink (Kathleen Robertson) into the care of a priest (Michael Pena) who appeals to the church higher-ups until a cardinal (Peter Andersson) who, natch, is some kind of legendary possession whisperer, is dispatched from Vatican City. In between all that, there's lots of mandatory found footage snippets (with a bunch of footage the Vatican couldn't possibly have on file), as the framing story of the film has a vicar (Djimon Hounsou) watching the already-occurred events on what must be the Vatican's top secret "Exorcism's Greatest Hits" YouTube channel.

THE VATICAN TAPES is shameful in the way it wastes overqualified actors: I expect to find Dougray Scott scowling as Angela's overprotective military dad and Michael Pare slouching as a detective, but why is two-time Oscar nominee Hounsou slumming through this, completely wasted in such a frivolous, nothing supporting role that anyone could've played? Why is Pena prominently billed but stepping aside while Andersson's Cardinal does all the exorcising? Swedish actor Andersson, with his unusual screen presence and strange performance (he looks like a shaven-headed David Gilmour and practically growls his dialogue like Christian Bale doing his Batman voice), is the only remotely interesting element of this otherwise miserable waste of time, unless you count an absurd scene where Angela vomits three whole eggs ("The Holy Trinity!" the Cardinal gravely declares) in a moment more reminiscent of AIRPLANE! than THE EXORCIST. It's insultingly bad, and might even be worse than THE DEVIL INSIDE and THE LAST EXORCISM PART II. Lionsgate knew they had a turd on their hands--they shuffled this off to their Pantelion division, specializing in films aimed at Latino audiences, and only released it on 420 screens. There's nothing here specifically geared toward Latino moviegoers (or any moviegoers, for that matter), unless you count the presence of Pena, and if that was their only justification for slapping the Pantelion logo on this, then the level of audience contempt is just off the charts. Fuck this movie. (PG-13, 91 mins)

Z FOR ZACHARIAH
(US/Switzerland/Iceland - 2015)

Z FOR ZACHARIAH is a confused adaptation of the 1974 sci-fi novel by Robert C. O'Brien, whose Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH was made into the 1982 animated film THE SECRET OF NIMH. Director Craig Zobel (COMPLIANCE) and screenwriter Nissar Modi take so many liberties with O'Brien's novel--for no real reason--that by the end, you'll wonder why they even bothered. The novel centered on two characters: Ann Burden and John Loomis, the apparent sole survivors of a nuclear disaster. The film starts out the same way, with Ann (Margot Robbie) encountering John (Chiwetel Ejiofor) exploring near her farm in a contamination suit. Ann's farm rests in a deep valley that somehow managed to avoid radioactive contamination. John is a chemist who was working in an underground science lab. Ann welcomes John into her home and for a while, the two live a life of platonic domesticity, fishing, farming, and surviving. Things get complicated when Ann makes romantic overtures and a hesitant John is afraid of ruining what they have, instead holding her and telling her they've got plenty of time to take that next step. Zobel and Modi have already dramatically strayed from the novel: Robbie's Ann is about a decade older than the 15-16-year-old girl O'Brien created, and in the book, it's John who makes mostly unwelcome advances on the underage girl, leading to tension for the duration of the story that escalates into violence by the end. At the point where John tells her they should wait, the filmmakers complicate things in the most cliched way imaginable with the mid-film introduction of Caleb (Chris Pine), a character completely invented by the filmmakers. The presence of Caleb immediately creates a standard-issue love triangle, made even more hackneyed by the racial element that didn't exist in the novel because John was white and is now being played by a black actor, with Ejiofor's John even making a snide comment to Ann about her now having a white guy in her life.

If this sounds familiar, that's because instead of an adaptation of O'Brien's novel, Zobel and Modi seem to have just gone ahead and made a rural farmland remake of the 1959 film THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL, where an abandoned NYC is inhabited by two survivors--black Harry Belafonte and white Inger Stevens--whose peaceful existence is complicated by the arrival of a third, an erudite and vaguely bigoted white guy played by Mel Ferrer. They don't even bother to explain the novel's meaning of the title Z FOR ZACHARIAH. The actors bring their A-games: Ejiofor and Robbie are very good and even with the earlier deviations from the book, things are working because they work so well together. Through it's not his fault, the film skids into a ditch when Pine's Caleb shows up and whatever is left of O'Brien's story basically gets tossed so he and John can glower at each other over who's going to get in Ann's pants first. Shot in New Zealand and West Virginia, Z FOR ZACHARIAH looks great, but nobody seemed to have any idea what direction to head in with this thing, rendering the entire project pointless. (PG-13, 98 mins)

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE III: VENGEANCE IS MINE
(US - 2015)

The 2010 remake of Meir Zarchi's 1977 grindhouse rape/revenge cult classic I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE was surprisingly not terrible, brutal as hell and one of the relatively better torture porn outings, with a committed, ferocious performance by Sarah Butler as a young woman who's gang-raped and, to put it mildly, goes medieval on the asses of the men responsible. One wouldn't think it would spawn a franchise but then, 2013's terrible I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE 2 was really just another remake, minus Butler, with the setting moved to Bulgaria and with Jemma Dallender as another victim of gang-rape who turns the tables on her attackers. Butler returns for this third installment, which ignores the second film and functions as a direct sequel to the first. Here, Jennifer (Butler) is now calling herself Angela and is in regular sessions with her therapist (Harley Jane Kozak sighting, and she's a long way away from PARENTHOOD and ARACHNOPHOBIA) and attending a weekly rape victims support group. She still encounters creeps everywhere she goes (even a homeless guy grunts "Nice tits" as she gives him some spare change) and is so stand-offish that her co-workers think she's a bitch. She finally befriends group member Marla (Jennifer Landon, Michael's daughter)--whose grating behavior has to be a nod to Helena Bonham Carter's Marla in FIGHT CLUB--only to lose her when she's killed by her crazy ex-boyfriend, who's set free due to lack of evidence. This sets off Jennifer/Angela's vigilante within, and she becomes an angel of vengeance, getting rid of all the male pigs that have caused so much pain and anguish in the group. Of course, hapless SVU detective McDylan (Gabriel Hogan) and hard-nosed homicide investigator Boyle (Michelle Hurd, a long way from the first season of LAW & ORDER: SVU) don't take long to figure out that Angela is a prime suspect, along with the bitter, frothing-at-the-mouth Oscar (Doug McKeon, a long way from ON GOLDEN POND), the lone male in the support group, there to find closure over the suicide of his teenage daughter, a victim who lost her will to live when her rapist got off on a technicality.

Though the reveal isn't handled very well, there's actually a fairly interesting third act plot twist that's telegraphed in distracting ways but probably looked great on paper. Even if director R.D. Braunstein and first-time screenwriter Daniel Gilboy didn't botch their admittedly ambitious whopper in the finale, I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE III would still be a pretty dumb movie. The deck is completely stacked, with every human being with a penis a leering, salivating threat. Every cop is an idiot, the legal system is useless, Jennifer/Angela's character arc is a tired cliche, and Butler, so strong playing it straight in the first film, just goes for a grinning, crazy-eyes approach here and comes off as cartoonish, especially when she starts busting out the Freddy Krueger one-liners, like quipping "Just the tip!" when she spits out the bitten-off head of a guy's cock after starting to suck him off, slicing it in the middle and opening it up like she's peeling a banana with both hands; or "You don't deserve the lubricant but it won't go in otherwise" as she's about to shove a long pipe with a daunting circumference up the ass of a man regularly molesting his stepdaughter. Looking at her performances in the first and third films, it's obvious Butler's a strong heroine when playing tough and pissed-off, but she doesn't do nearly as good a job going over-the-top crazy. It's completely skippable, especially since the two big splatter moments (the "just the tip" bit is so graphically over-the-top and so instant-NC-17-worthy that it's actually funny) are likely to become YouTube favorites rather quickly. (Unrated, 91 mins)

BONE TOMAHAWK
(US/UK/France - 2015)

Written and directed by S. Craig Zahler. Cast: Kurt Russell, Patrick Wilson, Matthew Fox, Richard Jenkins, Lili Simmons, David Arquette, Evan Jonigkeit, Kathryn Morris, Sid Haig, Fred Melamed, Michael Pare, Sean Young, James Tolkan, Jamison Newlander, Geno Segers, Zahn McLarnon. (Unrated, 132 mins)

An instant cult classic that actually earns the distinction, the horror-western hybrid BONE TOMAHAWK is the slow-burning directorial debut of novelist/musician/jack-of-all-trades S. Craig Zahler. Zahler's toiled on the fringes for much of his career, with his biggest brush with fame being when he was commissioned to script a ROBOTECH adaptation back in 2007 that ultimately never happened. He wrote the 2011 DTV horror film ASYLUM BLACKOUT, and in 2012, he had a martial arts series titled DOWNTOWN DRAGONS in the works for FX, but the network never moved it beyond the planning stage. Zahler found acclaim for his "western noir" novels like 2010's A Congregation of Jackals and 2013's Wraiths of the Broken Land, both books finding a huge fan in Kurt Russell, and the two became friends. Zahler wrote BONE TOMAHAWK for the legendary actor and the project was a labor of love--made for just $1.8 million, a shoestring budget by today's standards--that took several years to become a reality. It's a western like no other, one of the strangest and grisliest films of the year, and the kind of offbeat, original work that you just don't see much of these days. There's a reason it's getting a very limited theatrical release and being shuffled off to VOD. There's very little concern for commercial appeal here, though it will undoubtedly find an appreciative audience that will show it a lot more love than mainstream multiplexers ever would. Let there be no doubt: for better or worse, Zahler made exactly the film he wanted to make.

In the tiny town of Bright Hope, doctor Samantha O'Dwyer (Lili Simmons), Deputy Nick (Evan Jonigkeit), and injured outlaw Purvis (David Arquette) are abducted in the middle of the night from the sheriff's office by a tribe known as the "Troglodytes." Stone-age cannibals living undetected in caves in the vast terrain several days away from Bright Hope, the tribe came in search of Purvis who, with his late cohort Buddy (Sid Haig), disturbed a Troglodyte burial site and now everyone must pay the price. Sheriff Hunt (Russell), his loyal deputy Chicory (Richard Jenkins), sartorially dandy, lothario gunman John Brooder (Matthew Fox), and, against the wishes of everyone, Samantha's injured husband Arthur (Patrick Wilson), hobbling around and delicately nursing a broken tibia being held together by two splints, embark on the long journey to find Mrs. O'Dwyer and Deputy Nick.

Of course, they encounter every obstacle on the way--the elements, their horses get rustled away, Arthur's leg keeps needing reset--and for about 90 minutes, it's a harsh, brutal western. That's just an opening act for the harrowing last section of the film, when the heroes encounter the Troglodytes and are taken prisoner, at which point the film turns into what might happen if Ruggero Deodato remade THE SEARCHERS. For all the talk of Eli Roth's THE GREEN INFERNO being the big 2015 Italian cannibal homage, time will show that BONE TOMAHAWK was the better gutmuncher throwback, despite its old west setting (the Troglodytes are legitimately terrifying and far more effective than the cannibal tribe in Roth's film). But before all that, in character-driven sequences that many may find laboriously-paced, Zahler spends a lot of time establishing who these people are and what life is like in Bright Hope, engaging in world-building the likes of which you'd find in a novel. That kind of detail is uncommon in most movies today and yes, BONE TOMAHAWK takes a good 40 minutes to really get rolling, but viewer patience pays off by the end, when you realize just how well you know these people and how emotionally invested you are in the horrific, nightmarish predicament in which they've found themselves. Russell (his facial hair a work-in-progress for its epic state in Quentin Tarantino's upcoming THE HATEFUL EIGHT, which he worked on immediately following this) is so good here and has one particular line of dialogue late in the film that's so devastating and heartfelt that it brought tears to my eyes, and I don't get like that over movies, especially cannibal horror westerns. The performances are just terrific across the board. Every few minutes, Jenkins, basically playing the chatty, Gabby Hayes/Walter Brennan old coot sidekick, gets some goofy bit of dialogue or there's some sardonically funny and quotable line from somebody (Sheriff Hunt's deadpan reaction to seeing Chicory's geriatric horse: "That is a not handsome horse") that really makes you come to know and care about the characters.

BONE TOMAHAWK overcomes some early jitters over the possibility of gratuitous fanboy-pandering with the brief presence of cult horror scenesters and convention regulars like Haig, Michael Pare, Jamison Newlander (THE LOST BOYS' Alan Frog) as the mayor, and Sean Young as the mayor's abrasive, henpecking wife, but they're soon out of the picture when the rescue mission gets underway. In an age when horror filmmakers approach their movies with a sense of entitlement that it's a cult classic right out of the gate, it's nice to see a film take some chances and risk of alienating the audience, and to see the creative force behind it earn the trust of experienced lead actors who typically don't do this kind of "extreme" fare. Unfolding just like a really good book, BONE TOMAHAWK very slowly and deliberately pulls you in and its power sneaks up you. It's the kind of film where revisits will reveal something new and interesting that you didn't catch before. I can't wait to watch it again. Even the really gross parts.

TRUTH
(US/Australia - 2015)

Written and directed by James Vanderbilt. Cast: Cate Blanchett, Robert Redford, Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace, Elisabeth Moss, Bruce Greenwood, Stacy Keach, Dermot Mulroney, John Benjamin Hickey, David Lyons, Rachael Blake, Andrew McFarlane, Lewis Fitz-Gerald, Natalie Saleeba, Noni Hazelhurst, Nicholas Hope, Philip Quast. (R, 125 mins)

This chronicle of the 2004 events that led to the dismissal of 60 MINUTES II producer Mary Mapes and the end of Dan Rather's tenure at CBS suffers from being based on Mapes' own memoir. As a result, it constantly straddles the fine line between dramatization and Mapes hagiography. Writer/director James Vanderbilt's intent seems to be to make Mapes (played here by Cate Blanchett) a martyr for the dying profession of journalism, when it was primarily corner-cutting, sloppy fact-checking, and a rush to get on the air that undermined the explosiveness of the story itself. And whether it's her past accomplishments and her reputation as a tough ballbuster (she also broke the Abu Ghraib story), her upbringing at the hands of an abusive father, her need to challenge bullying power structures, or allowing herself to be duped for the sake of a big story, Vanderbilt seems to hold everyone but Mapes accountable for Mapes' questionable judgment.

Mapes was fired for the bungled report, whereas Rather (Robert Redford) was granted the dignity of resigning on his own terms. With the Swift Boat smear campaign of John Kerry in full force as he's in a dead heat with incumbent George W. Bush in the run up to the 2004 presidential election, Mapes gets word that retired Lt. Col. Bill Burkett (Stacy Keach) has documents that show Bush got special treatment to get into the National Guard and went AWOL and never reported for duty when stationed in Alabama in 1973. Burkett won't reveal his sources, and while Mapes and her team--freelance journalist Michael Smith (Topher Grace), researcher Lucy Scott (Elisabeth Moss), and retired Lt. Col. Roger Charles (Dennis Quaid)--follow the paper trail and assemble the story, they're unable to get complete confirmation that Burkett's photocopied documents are authentic. Two of four experts deem them authentic enough, and with Rather onboard, they run with it, putting the entire piece together in just five days in early October 2004 since 60 MINUTES II will be off the air until after the election to clear space for a Billy Graham crusade and a prime-time Dr. Phil special. Almost immediately after the report airs, discrepancies are brought to their attention and sources start recanting their original statements: Burkett lied about how he got the documents, the Times New Roman font in the documents is 100% consistent to how it looks when typed out on a computer, and the "th" superscript was very uncommon on typewriters of 1973. Additionally, one of the brass prominently mentioned in the documents wasn't even in a position of authority on the base in Alabama at the time the documents were supposedly written.

Eventually, Rather had to issue an on-air apology for what was referred to as "Memogate" and "Rathergate," and it brought his long and iconic run at CBS to an end. It was Mapes whose career took the biggest hit, and Vanderbilt makes sure we all realize it. Blanchett is one of our great actresses, but her Mapes is some pretty blatant Oscar-baiting. She's a little BLUE JASMINE and a little Faye Dunaway as she flips her hair and guzzles chardonnay and pops Xanax (the film also makes an effort to introduce her via a knitting pastime, which she's never seen doing again), and it's her against the world with the future of journalism at stake, but she's got father figure Rather to offer sage advice. Even the other characters marvel at her, as when Charles tells Smith that Mapes wanted to pursue Bush's alleged Guard misconduct in 2000, but her mother died and she dropped the story. "If her mother hadn't died...Al Gore would be the president," Quaid is forced to say with a straight face. The supporting characters, including Mapes' journalist husband Mark Wrolstad (John Benjamin Hickey), have precious little to do and exist only to prop up Mapes and repeatedly tell her some variation of "You're doing the right thing" or to break some bad news (you could make a drinking game out of how many times Quaid, Grace, or Moss enter a scene and say "It gets worse..."), or to passionately exclaim "This is what we do!" when she's feeling pangs of self-doubt. Journalism 101 turns to Cliche 101 throughout, right down to some truly terrible exposition when Grace's Smith is introduced to the rest of the team, and they all immediately do one of those LAW & ORDER: SVU info drops where everyone finishes everyone else's sentence as the camera zings from person to person, with Smith somehow completely up to speed on an investigation he's been a part of for about 30 seconds.

Dan Rather and Mary Mapes visiting the
set of TRUTH during filming.

The presence of Redford is both the film's strongest aspect and its biggest distraction. Like Christopher Plummer's interpretation of 60 MINUTES' Mike Wallace in Michael Mann's THE INSIDER (1999), Redford wisely makes no attempt to look or sound like Rather, instead opting to nail down his speech patterns and his general persona. A legend portraying a legend, Redford walks off with every scene he's in, but seeing him is a constant reminder of his Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman's Carl Bernstein in 1976's ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, the gold standard of the admittedly limited "investigative reporters bringing down a President" subgenre. TRUTH pales in comparison to that masterpiece, and it's indicative of just how much David Fincher had to do with the greatness of 2007's ZODIAC--scripted by Vanderbilt and with a major ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN influence in its structure and narrative. TRUTH marks Vanderbilt's debut as a director, but ZODIAC stands out as the anomaly among his screenwriting credits, which are littered with fun-but-lunkheaded fare like THE RUNDOWN (2003), THE LOSERS (2010) and WHITE HOUSE DOWN (2013). TRUTH has a powderkeg of a story at its core, but loses itself by constantly presenting Mapes as the crucified savior of real TV news reporting, the last bastion of integrity sacrificed at the altar of corporate business interests, with even Rather lamenting the death of the format once they're all forced out. Regardless of the truth--Bush's Guard record was quite dubious--Mapes, Rather, and their team dropped the ball and failed to get all their ducks in a row, which the film admits but stresses "that's not what it's about," a notion that only gave substance to the right-wing blogosphere's claim that the bombshell report was politically motivated. It is what it's about, and in making the presentation of the whole unfortunate saga so one-sided and myopic, Vanderbilt ends up making the same mistakes as his protagonists.

THE FINAL GIRLS
(US - 2015)

This meta slasher film sendup gets rolling with a surprisingly clever premise before bogging down and occasionally becoming a little too pleased with itself and displaying a sense of cult movie entitlement. As the film opens, Max Cartwright (Taissa Farmiga) and her mother Amanda (Malin Akerman) are in a car accident in which only Max survives. Amanda was a struggling actress still trying to catch a big break but can't with the albatross that is CAMP BLOODBATH, a classic summer camp slasher movie from 1986 in which she played a victim. Three years after the car crash, movie nerd Duncan (Thomas Middleditch) invites Max to be the guest speaker at a screening of CAMP BLOODBATH and its 1987 sequel CAMP BLOODBATH 2: CRUEL SUMMER. A fire breaks out in the theater and with the exits engulfed in flames, Duncan, Amanda, her best friend Gertie (Alia Shawkat), her former best friend Vicki (Nina Dobrev), and sensitive jock Chris (Alexander Ludwig) try to escape by cutting through the screen. Once they're on the other side, they find that they're in CAMP BLOODBATH, with the film's camp counselors passing them in a van every 92 minutes, the precise length of the film. It's here that Max encounters her mother, playing a counselor named Nancy, and they're all pursued by the film's hulking, Jason-like killer Billy (Daniel Norris). The presence of Amanda and the others sets off a new chain of events within the film, one that Billy and the camp counselor victims must adjust to, and in the course of altering the outcome of the film, inadvertently cause the death CAMP BLOODBATH's virginal "final girl" Paula (Chloe Bridges), the only one able to kill Billy within the definitions and tropes of the slasher genre. The visitors must work together with the actors in the film to take on Billy, while Max takes advantage of the opportunity to spend more time with her mother, even if she exists as a character named Nancy.

Funny without being too spoofy, THE FINAL GIRLS is like a slasher film take on THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO, with the meta aspects of everything from SCREAM to WES CRAVEN'S NEW NIGHTMARE to even the cult film POPCORN. After an inspired set-up, things slow down and grow repetitive as the filmmakers belabor the point, and isn't as consistently clever as it thinks it is. Still, there's a lot of affection in the script by M.A. Forton and Joshua John Miller (son of EXORCIST star Jason Miller, and best known for his days as a child actor in RIVER'S EDGE and as the vampire Homer in NEAR DARK), with nods to tons of slasher films (even a reference to the waterbed line from PIECES!), and any film that opens with an homage to the old-school Vestron Video logo obviously has its heart in the right place. Director Todd Strauss-Schulson (A VERY HAROLD & KUMAR 3D CHRISTMAS) does a nice job staging inventive kills, but the more the film goes on, the more forced the winking and nudging becomes. THE FINAL GIRLS opens and closes strong but doesn't quite have everything it needs to be crowned the next cult classic. (PG-13, 91 mins)

TIGER HOUSE
(South Africa/UK - 2015)

A forgettable and at times laughable home invasion thriller, TIGER HOUSE almost gets by on the strong screen presence of THE MAZE RUNNER's Kaya Scodelario, who capably carries the film despite being seemingly aware that it's a losing battle. Scodelario is Kelly, a dropout from the wrong side of the tracks who's in love with Mark (Daniel Boyd), whose domineering mother Lynn (Julie Summers) doesn't approve of her son's choice in girlfriends. Kelly sneaks into Mark's house via a second floor bedroom window so the two can fool around, but their plans are thwarted when a team of gunmen led by Shane (Dougray Scott) and Callum (THE TRANSPORTER: REFUELED's Ed Skrein) barge in to take the family hostage as part of a plot to rob the bank that Mark's stepdad Doug (Andrew Brent) manages. Shane is badly injured during the initial invasion and spends most of the film lying on Mark's bed bleeding out, with Kelly hiding directly underneath. She eventually gets out and proceeds to make her way in and out of the house, up and down the floors, and into and out of the attic as she tries to avoid the invaders and start taking them out HOME ALONE-style once she finds a crossbow in the attic. TIGER HOUSE is pretty by-the-numbers for this sort of thing, at least until the unintentionally hilarious climax with the second floor of the house engulfed in flames while Callum is downstairs in the kitchen making a sandwich with no smoke in sight. It's amazing that there's no smoke alarms in this high-tech fortress, which Doug has equipped with a dozen security and sound monitors that ultimately never come into play. Shane's crew have to be the least observant team of inept chucklefucks in the history of the home invasion genre. Two of them could be standing in a room talking and Kelly somehow manages to walk right out of that very room undetected. At one point, Callum goes up into the attic to find Kelly only to end up locked up there when she manages to sneak out while his back is turned. Of course, there's a twist ending that's completely predictable, plus a showdown that blatantly cribs from RESERVOIR DOGS. TIGER HOUSE is watchable thanks to the tough and committed performance of Scodelario, but that's absolutely all it has going for it. It's not enough. (R, 83 mins)

WE ARE STILL HERE
(US - 2015)

WE ARE STILL HERE is an anomaly in today's cult horror scene--a 1970s throwback that's completely lacking in irony, played totally straight, and cast with middle-aged actors. Writer-director Ted Geoghegan throws out a ton of references and shout-outs, cribbing elements of THE FOG, THE CHANGELING, THE WICKER MAN, and even STRAW DOGS, and displaying a particular affinity to the glory days of Lucio Fulci. The main characters share a surname with frequent Fulci screenwriting collaborator Dardano Sacchetti, other characters have the same names as those in Fulci's THE BEYOND and THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY (both 1981), and the film involves the vengeful spirit of man named "Lassander Dagmar," an inversion of cult actress and Fulci veteran Dagmar Lassander. Anne and Paul Sacchetti (Barbara Crampton of RE-ANIMATOR and Andrew Sensenig) are still grieving over the death of their college-age son Bobby in a car crash a few months earlier. Seeking a change of scenery and needing a new place to rebuild their lives, they purchase an old house in rural upstate New York. It isn't long before Anne senses Bobby's presence in the house, and despite Paul's skepticism, she reaches out to May and Jacob Lewis (Lisa Marie and cult filmmaker and Wendigo enthusiast Larry Fessenden, whose involvement in a low-budget B horror movie is apparently required by law), hippie mediums whose son Harry (Michael Patrick) was a friend of Bobby's. May immediately feels a malevolent force in the house, and things get even weirder when the townies cast suspicious eyes on them at a local restaurant. The house was formerly a funeral home run by the Dagmar family, who were victimized by the locals in 1949 amidst allegations that they were abusing corpses and not giving the dead proper burials. The house has a history that was deliberately kept from the Sacchettis, and neighbor Dave McCabe's (Monte Markham) constant reminders that "This house needs a family" prove to be more sinister than folksy.

Though it's never specified and Geoghegan's use of period detail is subtle, we can assume the film is taking place in 1979, but to his credit, he never gets kitschy or winking about it. It's a slow-burning and very character-driven film that could've been made in 1981 and takes its time getting into the routine of Anne and Paul, giving you time to know them and feel their loss. WE ARE STILL HERE doesn't go for loud jump scares and is one of those films that has you looking all over the frame, waiting for something to materialize. Geoghegan's demonstrations of genre affection never distract from the story, though unlike the Fulci films he obviously holds near and dear, he feels the need to explain everything. The film's one stumble is an initially scary sequence that turns silly when Dagmar possesses one of the characters and instantly turns him into a demonic Basil Exposition, grunting reams of backstory explaining why he still haunts the house and why the locals must pay. It regains its footing quickly, and the finale is quite unexpectedly emotional. All in all, WE ARE STILL HERE with its effective scares and chilly, dread-soaked atmosphere, is one of the rare horror films of recent years that deserves its fawning fanboy accolades, especially with its unusual decision to appeal to grownups by focusing on people in their 50s as well as providing 80-year-old veteran character actor Markham with his meatiest role in years. WE ARE STILL HERE is the kind of well-done retro-shocker that Ti West fans think Ti West makes. (Unrated, 83 mins)

SPECTRE
(US/UK - 2015)

Directed by Sam Mendes. Written by John Logan, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Jez Butterworth. Cast: Daniel Craig, Christoph Waltz, Ralph Fiennes, Monica Bellucci, Lea Seydoux, Ben Whishaw, Naomie Harris, Dave Bautista, Andrew Scott, Rory Kinnear, Jesper Christensen, Alessandro Cremona, Stephanie Sigman. (PG-13, 148 mins)

2012's SKYFALL was the best 007 adventure in decades--maybe since 1969's ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE--so SPECTRE, the 24th film in the 53-year-old franchise, wisely doesn't try to top it. Instead, it's a pastiche of the 23 that preceded it, with a wink and nod to just about every one of them, mixed with a continuation of what's become a four-film James Bond origin story since Daniel Craig took over the role with 2006's CASINO ROYALE. With Craig's quartet of films, the Bond series has demonstrated a strong influence by both the BOURNE franchise and Christoper Nolan's DARK KNIGHT trilogy, with Craig's Bond a brooding, damaged man driven by rage, revenge, and grief. With CASINO ROYALE and SKYFALL (and to an extent, QUANTUM OF SOLACE, generally regarded as the weakest of Craig's Bonds), the continuing storyline (other than some recurring characters and a couple of later references to Bond being a widower after his brief marriage at the end of MAJESTY'S, the Bond films are typically stand-alone entries rather than direct sequels) has been an attempt to add depth and maturation to the character and to play him more like the hard-edged killer in Ian Fleming's books. It's mostly worked, brilliantly so in SKYFALL (which played more stand-alone at the time but that changes here), but it grows a little stale in SPECTRE, primarily because the payoff isn't worth the elaborate buildup. Four writers are credited with the script--there were almost certainly more who remain uncredited--and the story was said to change course during production. It shows--the first half of SPECTRE is a big, globetrotting adventure of the classic 007 variety, but the second half stumbles, first with a complex backstory for its primary villain that doesn't really serve a purpose, and then with a shift to a secondary villain whose plans just aren't that interesting. Christoph Waltz was born to play a Bond villain, but his Franz Oberhauser is little more than an extended cameo: he has two brief bits in the opening hour--once seen from behind and then again in shadow--then doesn't turn up again until the hour-and-45-minute mark. Why bring this unique, versatile, two-time Oscar-winner onboard and use him so frugally? With the possible exception of Joseph Wiseman in DR. NO, I can't recall a lead Bond villain having this little screen time. I didn't stopwatch it, but there's no way Waltz is in this for more than 20 total minutes.

As the film opens with a lengthy and quite impressive tracking shot, Bond has gone rogue, tailing and killing a mystery man named Sciarra (Alessandro Cremona) to Mexico during the Day of the Dead festival. He's suspended by M (Ralph Fiennes) and injected with a tracking chip by Q (Ben Whishaw) so MI-6 has constant knowledge of his whereabouts. Undeterred, Bond informs Moneypenny (Naomie Harris) that the late, previous M send him a cryptic video message before her death (Judi Dench has an unbilled bit) to follow Sciarra, kill him, and attend his funeral. Bond seduces Sciarra's widow Lucia (Monica Bellucci), who informs him of her husband's involvement with a global criminal organization called Spectre. Bond infiltrates a Spectre meeting by wearing the outfit's distinctive ring (he took it from Sciarra before killing him) and is outed by its leader Oberhauser. Bond knows Oberhauser, who has been the secret puppet master behind the events of the three previous films, and after escaping from the Spectre headquarters, heads to Austria to protect Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux)--the daughter of Quantum operative Mr. White (Jesper Christensen), last seen in QUANTUM OF SOLACE--when he realizes Spectre agents, led by hulking henchman Hinx (Dave Bautista) are after her for what she knows about their global operation.

There's a secondary plot about a weaselly government operative known as C (Andrew Scott) and his attempt to banish M and the entire MI-6 division in order to rely on global surveillance and drones, deeming agents of 007's sort obsolete. Of course, British government officials have been deeming Bond obsolete since the Sean Connery era, and of course they're always proven wrong. SPECTRE wants to be a big, classic 007 adventure and for about an hour or so, it is. But what was initially an interesting exploration into the more serious side of Bond and his tortured psyche (it's interesting that Craig's grim and largely humorless portrayal of Bond has been praised for the same reasons Timothy Dalton was criticized during his underrated, two-film run back in the late '80s) just fizzles when it resurfaces in the film's second half. There's two twists involving Oberhauser and one serves no purpose whatsoever, at least in the sense of raising the stakes for Bond. It's a reveal for the sake of a big reveal, then it falls flat when the film does nothing with it. In other words, not a single thing about the outcome would've been different had that first big twist not been used. It doesn't help that Waltz's screen time is so paltry. Sure, Javier Bardem didn't appear until about 70 minutes into SKYFALL but he was at least given plenty of opportunities to strut his stuff and be an unforgettable villain. Waltz--and what the script does with Oberhauser--had the potential to be the ultimate Bond villain but instead, he's about as memorable as Michael Lonsdale's Hugo Drax in MOONRAKER and Toby Stephens' Gustav Graves in DIE ANOTHER DAY. Waltz isn't the only one ill-used in SPECTRE: the always gorgeous Bellucci, the oldest Bond girl at 51, has an even smaller role, and Bautista's silent (but for one word) hulk Hinx is gone well before the end and isn't around long enough to be more than a predictable retread of Robert Shaw's Red Grant in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, Harold Sakata's Oddjob in GOLDFINGER, and Richard Kiel's Jaws in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME.

The Craig era gives the recurring characters of M, Q, Moneypenny, and M's Chief of Staff Bill Tanner (a character who's appeared sporadically in the series going back to 1974's THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN and played in the Craig films by Rory Kinnear) a lot more to do than they did with the previous 007s (can you imagine Bernard Lee's M taking part in action sequences?), but it's at the expense of the some of the things that make the Bond movies what they are: the villains, the girls, and the gadgets. After the serious, DARK KNIGHT-ization of the character in the last three films, it's time to get over this JAMES BOND: ORIGINS mindset, and that's what SPECTRE thankfully does in its first half. It starts to have that welcome sense of fun, thrilling escapism that the Bond films had back in the day with the formulaic, workmanlike efficiency of a Guy Hamilton or a John Glen at the helm. SKYFALL director Sam Mendes returns here but can't resist the urge to go Serious with the second half, which really implodes in the home stretch (there's also no reason for this thing to be two-and-a-half hours). The action is great, the references are fun (the mountain-top health institute is a dead ringer for the Piz Gloria stronghold in ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE, and a really hardcore 007 nerd will smile at Q staying at a hotel called "the Pevsner," named after former series associate producer Tom Pevsner, who died in 2014), and Craig still makes a great Bond and even has a few more lighter moments than usual when he isn't still brooding about Vesper Lynd, but SPECTRE is a wildly inconsistent entry that eventually works at cross purposes. It's far from being in the basement with MOONRAKER and DIE ANOTHER DAY, but when the dust settles, it's got a home somewhere in the range of lesser 007s like YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, OCTOPUSSY, THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, and yes, QUANTUM OF SOLACE. Oh, and Sam Smith's "Writing's on the Wall" is now the worst Bond theme ever, which is great news for Lulu's "The Man with the Golden Gun."

THE EXECUTIONER PART II
(US - 1984)

Directed by James Bryan. Written by Renee Harmon. Cast: Chris Mitchum, Aldo Ray, Antoine John Mottet, Renee Harmon, Dan Bradley, Frank Albert, Bianca Phillipi, Frisco Estes, Ricco Mancini, Bruce Barrington. (R, 86 mins)

Not picking up where THE EXECUTIONER left off because there was no EXECUTIONER, THE EXECUTIONER PART II joined the T&A comedy SURF II in the very short-lived fake sequel craze of 1984. Oh, there was a movie called THE EXECUTIONER: a largely forgettable 1970 British spy thriller with George Peppard and Joan Collins. And THE EXECUTIONER was also an alternate title for Duke Mitchell's 1974 gangster opus MASSACRE MAFIA STYLE, and the US title for both the 1978 release of a 1974 Sonny Chiba martial arts movie and the British-made 1975 Dirk Bogarde spy thriller PERMISSION TO KILL. THE EXECUTIONER PART II has nothing to do with any of those films and its intent seems to be fooling less-savvy grindhouse denizens into thinking it's a sequel to 1980's THE EXTERMINATOR, beating the actual EXTERMINATOR 2 into release by three months in the summer of 1984. Directed by James Bryan, who also made the 1981 slasher film DON'T GO IN THE WOODS, THE EXECUTIONER PART II was made for $20,000 and it still looks like none of that money made it to the screen. Exhibiting a level of production values ranking somewhere between an industrial training short and a snuff film, it's only slightly more polished than, say, MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE. To his credit, a realistic Bryan, interviewed on Vinegar Syndrome's new DVD (where it's paired on a drive-in double feature with 1975's FROZEN SCREAM, as both films share producer/co-star Renee Harmon), openly admits it's terrible, and that he did what he could do with $20K and a crew basically consisting of himself (he's also the cinematographer). Shot in the summer of 1983 (JAWS 3-D is visible on a theater marquee) and almost certainly without permits throughout Los Angeles, the film doesn't use live sound and was dubbed in post with all the care and precision of the cheapest GODZILLA movie. The words don't match the lip movements on American (or at least English-speaking) actors speaking English, and a lot of the sound and foley effects are either way out of sync or simply not there (car doors are slammed and shotguns pumped with no accompanying sound). Shots are cut together but often don't match, or Bryan will cut away from a dialogue scene, show something completely unrelated, then cut back to the dialogue scene, apparently still in progress. Then there's the bellowing and profusely-sweating Aldo Ray, who couldn't have been on the set for more than an hour and maybe even left his car running in a fire lane while Bryan got the footage of him that he needed, and is always shot in extreme close-up on his own, sharing the frame with no one and inserted into scenes so awkwardly that it's laughably obvious he's not there with any other actors. This happens a lot in movies due to the availability of people and conflicting shooting schedules, but a good editor makes it smooth and seamless. Rarely has such a reality of the movie business been handled so badly. How badly? Ray isn't wearing glasses but his over-the-shoulder double is. In short, right on the heels of the stunning NIGHTMARE WEEKEND, Vinegar Syndrome has resurrected an '80s obscurity that deserves to be the next Bad Movie sensation. The classic MST3K line about MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE where "every frame of this movie looks like someone's last known photograph" certainly applies here.

He's your judge, your jury, and
your executioner. Part II!

Like the "best" of the likes of Jess Franco and Al Adamson, THE EXECUTIONER PART II is so random and disjointed that it often feels like the scraps of several abandoned movies carelessly stitched together: dogged, rumpled cop Lt. Roger O'Malley (Chris Mitchum) is a widower Vietnam vet on the trail of "The Executioner," a hooded vigilante who's taking it upon himself to take out the city's trash, finishing off scumbags by stuffing a grenade down their pants as Bryan always goes full Toonces and cuts to the same stock footage shot of the same generic explosion. The cops can't catch The Executioner but the public, cheered on by thickly German-accented celebrity TV news reporter Celia Amherst (Harmon), loves him. The local Mafiosi, represented by smug monster Casallas (Frisco Estes), aka "The Tattoo Man," even though he only has three small tattoos, wants The Executioner dead because he's disrupting business. O'Malley's teenage daughter Laura (Bianca Phillipi) is a drug addict who turns to hooking for Hawaiian-shirted pimp Pete Vance (Frank Albert) to support her habit. The police commissioner (Ray) is breathing down O'Malley's neck--never in the same shot, mind you--about catching The Executioner. And O'Malley's mechanic best buddy Mike (Antoine John Mottet) is suffering from Nam flashbacks, prompting O'Malley to think the man who saved his life in Vietnam might be The Executioner. SPOILER ALERT: he is.

Hardly a scene goes by without some hilarious gaffe or WTF? moment. Every scene with Harmon has to be seen to be believed. A German war bride who married an American soldier and came to the US after WWII, Harmon kept busy by forming a local theater group with some other officers' wives, and eventually found her way into the extreme fringe of the DIY exploitation industry. This is one of three films she made with director Bryan, including the same year's HELL RIDERS, which saw name stars Adam West (BATMAN) and Tina Louise (GILLIGAN'S ISLAND) getting the Aldo Ray treatment by being shot in extreme close-up and never actually interacting with their co-stars. Harmon (1927-2006) may have been a nice lady but she's a horrible actress and an even worse screenwriter. In her late 50s and playing half her age while wearing gaudy dresses and garish makeup and looking and acting nothing like a TV personality, she's also a love interest for O'Malley, but that goes nowhere. Chris Mitchum was Hollywood royalty thanks to his legendary father Robert, but he never came close to having the same success. He had some early co-starring gigs in late-period John Wayne movies like RIO LOBO (1970), CHISUM (1970), and BIG JAKE (1971) before he found steady work in Eurotrash fare like SUMMERTIME KILLER (1972) and RICCO THE MEAN MACHINE (1973). He bounced between the US, Europe, and the Far East, rarely distinguishing himself but occasionally turning up in something like Alejandro Jodorowsky's TUSK (1980) and the Emmy-nominated miniseries A RUMOR OF WAR (1980). But generally, he was confined to things like the Frank Stallone-starring DEATH FEUD (1987), Jess Franco's FACELESS (1988) and some schlocky but stunt-crazed Indonesian martial arts movies like LETHAL HUNTER (1989), where he'd get to display what can best be described as his unique "Lanky White Guy kung-foolery" (© me), which also gets an inevitable showcase in THE EXECUTIONER PART II. In recent years, the 72-year-old Mitchum--who's extremely likable and a great raconteur in interviews but has blamed his lack of Hollywood stardom not on his limited acting abilities but on being a staunch conservative associated with Vietnam War supporter Wayne--has had unsuccessful 2012 and 2014 Congressional bids as the Tea Party-backed House candidate from California's 24th district.

A typical extreme close-up of Aldo Ray
in THE EXECUTIONER PART II

In his prime, Aldo Ray (1926-1991) was a very popular tough guy in 1950s war movies like BATTLE CRY and MEN IN WAR (it's no coincidence that Brad Pitt's character in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is named "Aldo Raine"), but he also had a gift for comedy, as evidenced in the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn favorite PAT AND MIKE (1952), and with Humphrey Bogart and Peter Ustinov as a trio of dim-witted Devil's Island escapees in WE'RE NO ANGELS (1955), and as a romantic lead paired with Judy Holliday in THE MARRYING KIND (1952). Ray's stardom waned but he stayed busy in supporting roles in mostly reputable productions and guest spots on TV into the early 1970s, but his career completely derailed by the end of the decade when he was appearing in things like Al Adamson's DEATH DIMENSION (1978) and in a straight role in the 1979 hardcore porno SWEET SAVAGE with Carol Connors. In the 1980s, Ray managed a couple of roles in some major projects: he voiced a character in the animated film THE SECRET OF NIMH (1982) and had a small part in Michael Cimino's bomb THE SICILIAN (1987), but THE EXECUTIONER PART II was typical of the work Ray was getting at this point in his career, along with garbage like Mardi Rustam's EVILS OF THE NIGHT (1985), and Fred Olen Ray joints like BIOHAZARD (1985) and the outer space women-in-prison actioner STAR SLAMMER: THE ESCAPE (1986). He was diagnosed with throat cancer at some point in the 1980s and was so indiscriminate about the jobs he accepted that he would infamously have his SAG membership revoked for working in non-union productions. Ray would eventually succumb to cancer in 1991, his last film appearance coming in the Traci Lords horror movie SHOCK 'EM DEAD that same year. Largely forgotten these days except by hardcore Turner Classic Movies viewers, Ray's crashing and burning from the 1950s A-list to some of the worst of the worst in no-budget 1980s schlock remains one of the saddest downfalls in Hollywood history. Sure, the way he's half-assedly spliced into random scenes in THE EXECUTIONER PART II is funny, but it's incredibly depressing at the same time, considering the guy once very capably held his own with the likes of Tracy, Hepburn, and Bogart.

"OK, if you have to look directly into the camera,
try not to do it more than five or six times in the
ten seconds you're onscreen."

THE EXECUTIONER PART II is mind-bogglingly incompetent on every level. It's filled with clumsy action, terrible dubbing, and the most inept and choppy editing you'll ever see. The opening Vietnam flashback looks like it was filmed in a park. Characters frequent a bar where a woman in tight pants busts spastic, David Brent-like moves. Casallas makes a special trip to Mike's shop, his driver opening the door for him and Casallas getting out of the backseat of the car for the sole purpose of telling Mike he's not paying his $64 bill (he had to be driven all the way there just to say that?). In one scene, Laura is walking with a friend played by an actress who repeatedly looks directly into the camera while carrying schoolbooks and flowers that look like a clump of pulled weeds. When Mike is giving Casallas a beatdown in the climax, the mobster issues the least effective offer-you-can't-refuse ever: "We can make a deal! I can write you a check!" There's simply too many things hilariously wrong with THE EXECUTIONER PART II to pick up on a single viewing, but one bit of genius could be sufficient evidence to prove the whole thing is an intentional goof: witness the absurd brilliance of Celia stabbing a Casallas goon with a samurai sword (that happens to be chained to wall?) and impaling him on a couch as he then gets up and tries to chase her...with the couch still attached to him. Working micro-budget is one thing, but it hardly explains how nothing seems natural and everything is so stilted and awkward. One can excuse Ray seeming like he's in another movie because he's certainly not in this one, but Mitchum is the only cast member who looks like he's been in front of a camera before, and even he appears completely flummoxed. Whatever conditions he was forced to work under due to time and budget constraints, it a safe bet that "Take two" was decidedly not in James Bryan's vocabulary. In other words, THE EXECUTIONER PART II is a must-see, but if all 86 minutes of it seem too daunting, the folks at Everything is Terrible did a nice job of condensing the highlights.

HEIST
(US/UK - 2015)

Directed by Scott Mann. Written by Stephen Cyrus Sepher and Max S. Adams. Cast: Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Robert De Niro, Kate Bosworth, Dave Bautista, Morris Chestnut, Gina Carano, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, D.B. Sweeney, Lydia Hull, Tyler J. Olson, Summer Altice, Rosie Fellner, Lance E. Nichols, Stephen Cyrus Sepher, Tyson Sullivan, Han Soto. (R, 92 mins)

Let's be clear: HEIST is an absolutely idiotic thriller that hopes you'll fill in the blanks as it glosses over important details in between incongruous bouts of maudlin heartstring-tugging on its way to one of 2015's most asinine third-act plot twists. It's the rare violent, foul-mouthed, hard-R film with a schmaltzy sentimental streak. It's silly and dumb, but it has some good lines and a strange assembling of actors that range from an A-list Oscar-winner to the regulars at your local Redbox. Ten years ago, the $22 million HEIST would've opened nationwide in theaters and probably been the top movie for at least a couple of weeks (it also would've been confused for the 2001 David Mamet film with the same title), but today, it's being rolled out on VOD and a few scattered theaters. Director Scott Mann (whose 2009 film THE TOURNAMENT was a fun DTV actioner) and screenwriters Stephen Cyrus Sepher and Max S. Adams have created the unlikely offspring of OCEAN'S ELEVEN, DOG DAY AFTERNOON, SPEED, and THE GAUNTLET with this casino heist-turned-hostages-on-a-bus thriller that entertains in spite of its rampant stupidity. What can I say? Check your brain at the door and roll with it, and you'll probably like it. It's always dopey but it's never boring. Sometimes you just need a movie like this.

Vaughn (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is a blackjack dealer at the Swan Riverboat Casino, owned by a powerful crime figure known as The Pope (Robert De Niro, on the heels of his RED LIGHTS, FREELANCERS, KILLING SEASON and THE BAG MAN triumphs). Vaughn's daughter suffers from a rare illness and needs an expensive surgery that insurance won't cover, so he asks The Pope for a $300,000 loan. Vaughn and The Pope go back many years: Vaughn used to be the boss' strongarm until he met a good woman who steered him away from crime, prompting him to step back and just work as a table dealer instead (?!). Still hurting from the rejection, The Pope rejects Vaughn's request and has his replacement flunky, trigger-happy, raging psycho Derek (Morris Chestnut) throw him out. Casino security officer Cox (Dave Bautista) then lures Vaughn into a hastily-drawn plot to rob the Swan's vault of $3 million that gets laundered through the casino once a week by some of The Pope's Chinese Triad partners. Desperate to get the money for his daughter and pissed off at The Pope, Vaughn agrees but of course, the heist goes south when Derek and some goons pursue them through the casino as the fleeing thieves hijack a city bus that's surprisingly full for 4:00 am. With a busload of hostages and the police--headed by Bajos (Gina Carano) and corrupt Marconi (Mark-Paul Gosselaar)--in hot pursuit, it's a race against time for Vaughn to get the money to the hospital while dealing with the volatile Cox (who just wants to kill all the passengers), Derek (who just wants to impress his boss), and The Pope (who just wants to make sure $3 million of Triad money doesn't go missing).

Oh, the absurdity! Of course, the hostages recognize Vaughn as a weary, bad-luck guy with a heart of gold, so they're quickly on his side. And the filmmakers aren't the most subtle foreshadowers in the way they have The Pope announce his retirement from the casino business, immediately followed by the introduction of a nagging cough as he desperately tries to phone his estranged daughter (third-billed Kate Bosworth has one scene) to set things right. This draws an obvious parallel where The Pope, a rigid, ruthless hardass, identifies with Vaughn's desperation to do whatever he needs to do to save his daughter, even if it means stealing from the most powerful criminal he knows. The underrated Morgan is a constantly busy actor who turns up all over the place and it's surprising that he isn't a bigger star. He makes Vaughn an engaging enough hero that you root for him even though you know there's no way he won't win. Carano gets one fight scene with Bautista, but she basically exists to say "Copy that" to Marconi's orders and to be a sympathetic accomplice to Vaughn. The characters are mostly stock and predictable, like the requisite pregnant woman on the bus who's one pothole away from her water spontaneously breaking, but oddball elements like a runaway little kid, a hipster in a beaver costime, and an Asian guy who unsuccessfully pretends he doesn't understand English, all of whom, again, somehow find themselves on a packed bus at 4:00 am (prior to the hijacking of the bus, does no one--starting with the driver played by D.B. Sweeney--question why a five-year-old boy is on a bus alone at 4:00 am?), indicate that there's an even goofier film trying to break out.

De Niro, in what must be an homage to the VOD accomplishments of John Cusack, is introduced vaping and bitching about how e-cigarettes just lack the feeling of real smokes. He's not in HEIST a lot but he's in it enough to keep himself amused (try to picture how Bruce Willis would sleepwalk through the same role; De Niro at least leaves his desk), sort of like his gangster character from THE BAG MAN but minus the silly wig and a propensity for long-winded monologues about FULL HOUSE. Pulling out all the beloved De Niro moves in his arsenal, he could've played The Pope in his sleep but actually seems to be having fun with it when he isn't forced to shout banalities like "Get me my money back!" and "Where's the money?!" and using cliched gambling verbiage when he's on the phone with Vaughn ("You need to fold your hand and walk away from the table or I'm takin' your whole stack!"). When Derek tells The Pope that Vaughn got away with $3 million, De Niro's delivery of the line, "Hold on...now, maybe I had a stroke or something on my way over here, but..." while making a classic De Niro face is expertly-timed and laugh-out-loud funny. HEIST's big twist opens a gaping plot hole, but overall, the film is a fast-paced and diverting time-killer and will probably be a hugely popular Netflix stream in a couple of months. HEIST can't possibly be taken seriously, so if it embraced the sense of lunacy it occasionally hints at and gone a little more in that offbeat and potentially over-the-top direction, it might've made a bigger impression. Instead, it flirts with those ideas on its way to being something as predictable and generic as its title suggests. Still, there's a lot worse things in theaters right now.

ROAR
(US - 1981)

Directed by Noel Marshall. Written by Noel Marshall and Ted Cassidy. Cast: Tippi Hedren, Melanie Griffith, Noel Marshall, John Marshall, Jerry Marshall, Kyalo Mativo, Frank Tom, Steve Miller, Rick Glassey, Will Hutchins, Zakes Mokae. (Unrated, 94 mins)

Films with the most noble of intentions sometimes turn out to be misbegotten train wrecks, but even by the standards of misbegotten train wrecks, few movies went as far off the rails as 1981's ROAR. Several years in the making, ROAR was a $17 million home movie/vanity project from one-time Hitchcock muse Tippi Hedren (THE BIRDS, MARNIE) and her second husband, agent and producer Noel Marshall. After working on two films back-to-back in South Africa--1970's SATAN'S HARVEST and 1971's MISTER KINGSTREET'S WAR--Hedren become a passionate advocate for wildlife preservation, founding the Acton, CA-based Shambala Preserve animal sanctuary with Marshall in 1972. As the couple's fascination with wildlife grew, they came up with an idea they were convinced was a game-changer: make a movie showing these wondrous creatures--lions, tigers, and other big cats, plus elephants and other animals--interacting with humans in a peaceful co-existence. Studios balked at the idea, telling Hedren and Marshall that pulling it off with convincing special effects and camera trickery would be impossible and the notion of professionally training real wild animals to work with actors would be insane. Undeterred, they opted to take the insane route.

Hedren and Marshall and their children from previous marriages--Hedren's teenage daughter Melanie Griffith and Marshall's teenage sons John and Jerry; another Marshall son, Joel, worked on the crew but isn't in the movie--decided to welcome wild animals into their Sherman Oaks home to domesticate them (their unusual living situation was the subject of a 1971 Life pictorial), eventually moving to a desert ranch when the pack of big cats got to be too much to handle and probably didn't win them any points with their neighbors. Marshall's logic was that if the cats got used to living with them, they'd be able to function on camera, working with humans in a narrative feature that also doubled as a heartfelt public service announcement for wildlife preservation. With first-time writer/director Marshall at the helm, with additional script contributions by THE ADDAMS FAMILY's Lurch and Marshall family friend Ted Cassidy, who died in 1979, ROAR began shooting on the Shambala Preserve in 1974 and wasn't completed until 1980. Funded independently, with a good chunk of the proceeds coming from Marshall's huge payday as the executive producer of THE EXORCIST, ROAR would eventually require Marshall and Hedren pouring almost all of their personal finances and selling off a good chunk of their possessions (including a house in Beverly Hills) to see it through to completion. The end result was such a doomed disaster that no Hollywood studio would touch it and it only got a sporadic release in Europe and the rest of the world in 1981 and into 1982 before disappearing, becoming one of those lost films that you heard things about but concluded "That has to be bullshit." No, it's not bullshit. ROAR, resurrected in spring 2015 by Drafthouse Films, is real. And it has to be seen to be believed.

Noel Marshall: Filmmaker. Dreamer. Dumbass.

Marshall and Hedren thought they'd be able to take somewhere in the vicinity of 150 lions, tigers, cheetahs, cougars, jaguars and a few elephants and turn them into trained actors. Needless to say, the animals didn't really care what was in the script and more or less improvised in the most ferocious manner imaginable and establishing themselves as cinema's most violent and terrifying scene-stealers. ROAR's ostensible plot deals wildlife researcher Hank (Marshall, an unbearably bad actor who looks like Sammy Hagar, sounds like a screechy Mitch Hedberg and is prone to breaking out into pop standards in his more reflective moments) living with nearly 150 big cats on a Kenyan reservation to prove they can exist peacefully with man. Hank is waiting for his family--wife Madalaine (Hedren), daughter Melanie (Griffith) and sons John and Jerry (John and Jerry Marshall)--to arrive from the States when he's pulled into a neighboring region to argue with some local council members (among them '60s TV actor Will Hutchins--presumably another family friend--and future veteran character actor Zakes Mokae) about the danger of his decision to live with wild animals. This is all a ploy to keep Marshall offscreen for large chunks of time so he can devote his energies to "directing" the actors, where he must focus less on the story and more on trying to contain a massacre. When the family arrives to find Hank nowhere in sight, they're immediately beset by an onslaught of wild animals for pretty much the rest of the film, which Marshall is forced to make the main plot because he has no trainers on the set and no way to control his animal cast. The cats force their way through doors and walls and chase them through the house as Hedren, Griffith, and the Marshall sons run around screaming, obviously in fear for their lives and in complete denial that their experiment is backfiring. What's supposed to be a pleasant, family-friendly movie about humans and wildlife living in harmony almost instantly devolves into something that resembles a Disney home invasion horror film with animals run amok. Hedren and the kids start looking less like actors and more like prisoners being held against their will, with Griffith being mauled by a lion on camera at one point, crying real tears and screaming "Mom! Help!" as Hedren yanks on the lion's tail (!) in an attempt to get it off of her daughter. And yes, Marshall left it in the movie. One suspects Griffith and the Marshall sons used their real first names for their characters to make it easier for Hedren (who's just "Mom") during the many times she's freaking out and screaming for their assistance.

Tippi Hedren trying to intervene in
the mauling of her daughter Melanie Griffith

The mauling required 50 stitches and reconstructive surgery on young Griffith's face, and that was only one of 70 (!) cast and crew injuries over the six-year production. Marshall, who enthusiastically jumps into the middle of a multi-lion fight and seems blithely unaware that his and a film crew's presence in confined quarters might be what's agitating them, is bitten on his left hand and bleeds profusely after thinking he can reason with an enraged lion. He also had wounds so extensive near the end of shooting that he developed gangrene in his leg. Hedren was trampled by lions and broke her leg after being thrown by an elephant. The worst injury was reserved for cinematographer Jan De Bont, later the director of SPEED (1994) and TWISTER (1996), who was attacked by a lion and had the back of his scalp ripped off, requiring over 200 stitches. Although a snuff remake of BORN FREE seems ready to break out at any given moment, there were no fatalities on the set, unless you count Hedren and Marshall's marriage, which ended in divorce in 1984.

Future SPEED director Jan De Bont
after having his scalp
stitched back on.

Like any movie shot over a period of several years, the stitches--no pun intended--are bound to show. Griffith looks noticeably older at times, often in the same scene (such as the ending shots of her mauling once the lion is off of her, which were obviously shot much later than the rest of the sequence). Marshall's beard changes length and his hair is grayer from scene to scene. When someone is injured, the scene ends with a clumsy insert shot of them that's obviously months, if not years later. There's tone-deaf attempts at humor, clearly assembled in post, as when the terrified cast huddles in a corner of the house away from the lions, who bring in a carcass to tear apart and devour as an off-camera Hedren's voice quips "Look what the cat dragged in!" And it all culminates in a ridiculous happy ending, with the horrific, incessant animal attack brought to an abrupt end as everyone who spent the last 90 minutes (or six years) fearing for their lives now laughs and frolics with the cats in a feel-good montage, completely oblivious to the fact that 95% of the movie proves their thesis completely wrong. The American Humane Society may have been keeping an eye on the safety of the animals, but was anyone concerned about the actors? Made with the kind of myopic, self-delusional, and misguided tunnelvision that defies any sense of storytelling logic or basic regard for human safety, ROAR is one of the most irresponsible films this side of an Italian cannibal epic, with Marshall (who died of brain cancer in 2010) looking like a hapless buffoon early on and an unethical sadist by the end. Hedren and Griffith have distanced themselves from ROAR, whose dubious legacy is now being shepherded by John Marshall, perhaps more out of love for his late father than any fond remembrances of the years spent making it. The 85-year-old Hedren remains a passionate figure in the world of wildlife preservation and still runs the Shambala Preserve, her work there far more noble than the woefully ill-advised--albeit incredibly fascinating--grease fire that is ROAR.

MR. HOLMES
(US/UK - 2015)

An arthouse sleeper hit for grownups released in summer 2015, MR. HOLMES is a low-key affair that many may dismiss as an "old people movie," but it's an engrossing and quietly effective little film that unfolds like a good book. Based on Mitch Cullen's 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind, MR. HOLMES reunites star Ian McKellen and director Bill Condon, who last collaborated on 1998's GODS AND MONSTERS, which netted McKellen an Oscar nomination. The masterful actor is just as great here as a 93-year-old Sherlock Holmes, 30 years retired from detective work and retired to the English countryside in the years after WWII. Holmes lives in a 1947 where he's also a noted pop culture figure, as his late friend Dr. John Watson's chronicles of their adventures have led to bestselling novels and popular movies. Holmes is fighting to stave off the early signs of dementia, just returning from Japan to procure some jelly made from a "prickly ash" plant that's reputed to help with issues of memory loss. He lives in a cottage with widowed housekeeper Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney), who lost her husband in the war, and her young son Roger (Milo Parker), who spends a lot of time with the elderly Holmes and comes to view him as a father/grandfather figure. Holmes is haunted by regrets and the memories of dead friends and loved ones--Dr. Watson, his brother Mycroft, loyal housekeeper Mrs. Hudson--as well as an unresolved final case involving the search for a missing wife who never got over two miscarriages and a cold husband who didn't understand why she couldn't just move on with her life--a case that carried so much emotional weight with everyone involved that Holmes no longer had it in him to continue his work and retreated completely from public life, preferring to let the genius legend overshadow the flawed man.

McKellen is just perfect as the elderly Holmes, whether he's letting a wry sense of mischief show in his bonding with young Roger or when he illustrates the changing moods that so often come with the onset of dementia. He never overplays it for dramatic effect and he remains steady and genuine throughout. He's matched by the promising Parker and the always-excellent Linney, but this is really Sir Ian's show. As adapted by screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher, MR. HOLMES still allows Holmes to use his detective skills, but it's really a grounded, serious dramatic piece that bluntly and realistically approaches issues of aging, memories, mortality, and the acceptance that a long life is in its final act. It's a superb film that doesn't move along especially briskly, but slowly and surely draws you in, revealing layers of complexity in its story and themes and resonating with you ways you didn't expect. (PG, 104 mins)

THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT
(US - 2015)

Dr. Philip Zimbardo's infamous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment has inspired two films--the German DAS EXPERIMENT (2001) and its abysmal American remake THE EXPERIMENT (2010)--and returned to the spotlight after the revelations of the abuse taking place at Abu Ghraib in Iraq in 2003. But the harrowing indie THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT is the first narrative feature dealing specifically with it by name and place. Director Kyle Patrick Alvarez and screenwriter Tim Talbott (a former SOUTH PARK writer) stay faithful to the events as documented by Zimbardo (played here by Billy Crudup) and the participants, almost to a degree that some would consider a fault. During the summer when the campus is mostly empty, Zimbardo selects 24 out of 75 volunteers to be broken into groups of twelve guards and twelve prisoners (nine of each active, with three alternates on call if a replacement is needed). Zimbardo and his associates set up a mock prison in some empty offices in the basement of a campus building and let things play out as they happen for a planned duration of two weeks. By day two, the "guards" on the day shift were power-tripping and intimidating the "prisoners" to see how much abuse they would take. It starts with an agonizing roll call, with the prisoners being stripped of their names and known only by numbers and forced to repeat those numbers hundreds of times and in different ways ("I want you to sing it to me this time!"), escalating to forced push-ups, jumping jacks, denial of privileges (no cigarettes; the guards refuse to give one prisoner his glasses even though he can't see without them), and time in the hole. The day shift, led by an overzealous student (Michael Angarano) who fancies himself a John Wayne-type, even putting on an affected Southern accent, encourages the night shift to do the same, resulting in more forced exercise and some bonus sleep deprivation. When rebellious prisoner 8612 (Ezra Miller) snaps and grabs a guard by the throat, the guard clubs him across the face and it escalates from there. Prisoners are denied food and use of the toilets, instead given buckets that they aren't permitted to empty. Their beds are dismantled and they're forced to sleep on the floor. They're openly intimidated by the guards during visitation, and eventually emasculated and thoroughly dehumanized, with Angarano's guard even instigating some mock prison rape by forcing three prisoners to bend over while three others are ordered to grind against them from behind. All of this is observed by Zimbardo and his increasingly incredulous graduate assistants--some of whom abandon the experiment after a few days--but Zimbardo is so fascinated what's happened in so little time that he can't bring himself to terminate it, even as his colleague and girlfriend Dr. Christina Maslach (Olivia Thirlby) expresses her disgust at what he's allowing his subjects ("These aren't prisoners," she shouts. "These are boys!") to endure.

The Stanford Prison Experiment, like the 1961 Milgram Experiment, says a lot about people's blind obedience to authority and the kind of authoritative potential within otherwise normal, well-adjusted people if that level of power is allowed to be wielded without boundaries. The film doesn't shy away from making Zimbardo look bad, whether it's his refusal to let the troubled 8612 leave even though he's clearly approaching a psychotic break after just two days, or in the way he pretty much joins the guards in his psychological abuse of the prisoners, even donning the style of sunglasses he has the guards constantly wear to maximize intimidation and minimize any kind of emotional connection between guard and prisoner. Yes, he sees the error of his ways and went on to become a sympathetic authority in the study of the psychology of abuse, but he's shown to be an insensitive and unwavering prick for most of the film, even in the petty way he corrects the mother of prisoner 819 (Tye Sheridan), who refers to him as "Mr. Zimbardo" ("It's Doctor," he huffs). This is a grueling and intense film, with the clinical and almost relentless portrayal of the systematic breakdown of the prisoners' humanity making it a tough sit of almost SALO unpleasantness. Angarano creates one of the year's most despicable characters, though one weakness of the film is that it doesn't delve into the post-experiment analysis to a significant degree. Zimbardo pulled the plug on the experiment after just six days, and Alvarez shows recreated documentary footage of Miller as 8612 and Angarano's guard discussing the after-effects of the experiment. Here's where the actual footage would've been more interesting to see. Or perhaps the first meeting of these opponents after the termination of the experiment. Did they ever see one another on campus? Also with Nelsan Ellis (TRUE BLOOD) as one of Zimbardo's colleagues, Keir Gilchrist (IT FOLLOWS), Moises Arias (HANNAH MONTANA) and James Frecheville (ANIMAL KINGDOM) as guards, and Logan Miller, Thomas Mann, Johnny Simmons, and Jack Kilmer (Val's son) as prisoners. (R, 122 mins)

BOUND TO VENGEANCE
(US/Mexico - 2015)

Shot as REVERSAL but christened with the more exploitative BOUND TO VENGEANCE after it was completed, this is an occasionally suspenseful but ultimately empty revenge thriller that leaves too many dangling plot threads to be successful. It gets a lot from a strong performance by Tina Ivlev as Eve, and as the film opens, she's a kidnap victim bashing her captor over the head with a brick. The captor is Phil (Richard Tyson of THREE O'CLOCK HIGH and TWO MOON JUNCTION fame, looking and sounding like a stockier Tom Berenger as he's gotten older), and he's got her chained to a mattress in the basement of a house in the middle of nowhere off a California desert highway. Eve turns the tables on Phil, but she has no idea where she is, the phone doesn't work, and she can't find his car keys, so so fashions a dog catcher's pole out of some pipes and barbed wire and has him completely restrained, forcing him to drive to a series of destinations when he confesses he's got other girls hidden all over Los Angeles, and if she kills him, she'll share responsibility for killing them. It's an intriguing set-up, even though I'd still go for "driving to the nearest police station" as opposed to putting any kind of faith in whatever's up his sleeve. Things go badly when the first girl Eve finds and frees freaks out, trips, and impales herself on a fence post, and the next, a victim of Stockholm Syndrome, puts Eve in a position where she has to kill her in self defense.

Director Jose Manuel Cravioto, making his English language debut, and writers Keith Kjornes (who died in 2013) and Rock Shaink are obviously inspired by the horrific Ariel Castro case in Cleveland, but use it as a springboard to a bigger conspiracy story that never really makes sense. Phil is just a cog in an extensive human trafficking network, and the film blows its big plot twist early on when he keeps mentioning Eve's boyfriend Ronnie (Kris Kjornes). It also doesn't help that they try to humanize Phil by giving him a nice house in the suburbs and a wife and impossibly cute young daughter. Who is this guy? How does he get away with disappearing for long stretches to feed an untold number of kidnapped girls on a rotating basis around the greater Los Angeles area? Who are the people with whom he's complicit? How big is this operation? How long did Ronnie have to court Eve in order to establish a relationship with her just to arrange her abduction? These questions are never answered, though Ivlev, who might have a future as a second-string Jennifer Lawrence, gives it everything she's got and is thoroughly convincing in that rage-filled I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE/MS. 45 way. There's bits and pieces of a better movie infrequently revealing itself throughout BOUND TO VENGEANCE (and there's a very effective '80s-style score by genre vet Simon Boswell), but it never ends up coalescing into something noteworthy. Keep an eye on Ivlev, though. (Unrated, 79 mins, also available on Netflix Instant)

CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES
(US - 2015)

Directed by Jackie Earle Haley. Written by Robert Lowell. Cast: Michael Pitt, Dan Stevens, John Travolta, Jackie Earle Haley, Christopher Abbott, Rob Brown, Edi Gathegi, Travis Aaron Wade, Alan B. Jones, Tyrone Jenkins, Chris Haley, Morgan Wolk. (Unrated, 93 mins)

Or, GET SHORTY III: THINGS FOR SUICIDE KINGS TO DO IN DENVER WHEN YOU'RE KEYSER SOZE FOR 2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY. As generic as its title, the Cleveland-shot straight-to-VOD dumpjob CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES plays like any number of post-Tarantino/post-USUAL SUSPECTS-meets-Elmore Leonard knockoffs that cluttered the new release shelves of video stores in the latter half of the 1990s. Former Bad News Bear Kelly Leak-turned-LITTLE CHILDREN Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee Jackie Earle Haley, whose unexpected late '00s renaissance led to his being cast as Rorschach in WATCHMEN and as Freddy Krueger in the awful NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET reboot, makes his directorial debut here, and it's mostly by-the-numbers and undistinguished. The script is credited to Robert Lowell, who may or may not be the poet who died in 1977 (IMDb and several reviews seem to think it is, and that Haley extensively rewrote it) and has familiar situations and even more familiar dialogue from several noir thrillers of two decades ago. Less than five minutes in, and one of David Della Rocco's more memorable lines in THE BOONDOCK SAINTS is repeated almost word-for-word, and much later, a traumatized character proclaims "I'm pretty fuckin' far from OK," just like Ving Rhames' Marcellus Wallace did in PULP FICTION. But in CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES (shouldn't that be the title of a bad CBS police procedural?), it doesn't come off as a winking homage. It comes off as stale and lazy. Haley is a terrific character actor, but he doesn't come close to capturing the style and the flow of Tarantino. The script sounds like Haley cobbled it together after binge-watching a bunch of '90s Tarantino imitators and like most of those films (it really plays like a ripoff of a ripoff), CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES makes a lot of noise but it's all pretend and posturing, and seeming a little too pleased with itself.

Getting drinks after the funeral of their buddy Matthew (Chris Haley), who was run over by a bus, longtime friends Zach (Michael Pitt)--now a douchebag, coke-snorting investment broker with a trophy fiancee (Morgan Wolk) he suspects is cheating on him (foreshadowing alert!)--Bryce (Rob Brown), and recovering alcoholic Warren (Christopher Abbott) are joined by outcast and frequent bullying target Noah (Dan Stevens of THE GUEST). Noah is now a filthy rich real estate mogul, and in the course of their conversation, Bryce mentions he has a buddy who's got a hot tip on investing in a lucrative new pharmaceutical startup. After a month, the stock in the company is worthless following an SEC bust, and the four guys are out the $200,000 Noah borrowed from a benefactor who turns out to be Cleveland mob kingpin Eddie Lovato (John Travolta, wearing a shiny, helmet-like Big Boy wig). Lovato's got all of them on the hook for the investment plus interest, demanding $400,000 but offering them a clean slate if they kidnap Marques Flemmings (Edi Gathegi), whose brother is holding Lovato's niece for ransom and whose uncle is Demetrius Flemmings (Tyrone Jenkins), a top rival of Lovato's. Of course, putting four bickering incompetents in charge of an abduction never works out well, and of course the pragmatic Marques (Gathegi is the best thing in the movie) senses their weaknesses, manipulates them and attempts to turn them against one another, leading to twists, turns, buried secrets being revealed, and lots of dialogue that goes as follows:

Marques: "Shut the fuck up!"
Warren: "No, you shut the fuck up!"
Noah: "SHUT. THE FUCK. UP!"
Zach and Bryce: "SHUT THE FUCK UP!"

The major plot twists are telegraphed pretty hard throughout, to the point where it becomes painfully obvious who's not who he says is, though the big reveal of why this person has gone to the lengths he's gone has a surprising degree of chutzpah and an admirable "Whoa...what?" factor to it. The finale and Gathegi's performance give CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES a big boost, and Travolta and Haley (who plays Lovato's chief flunky) seem to be having a good time. Travolta coasts through in a supporting role, probably as a favor for his buddy Haley, and gets to resurrect some of his Vincent Vega and Chili Palmer schtick, holding court with long-winded speeches (everybody in this movie has multiple long-winded speeches) on everything from economics to Macbeth to how much he hates drinking kale shakes. It's all cut from the same cloth as "Royale with Cheese," and like most of its '90s influences, there's some unexpected, darkly-comedic accidental death (like Marvin getting shot in the face because of a bump in the road in PULP FICTION). CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES is shamelessly derivative at times, and you really don't care at all about the four main characters, especially Pitt's obnoxious Zach, who seems like nearly every other obnoxious Michael Pitt character (if you want to see Pitt in a better mob movie, check out the little-seen and much more entertaining ROB THE MOB) but Stevens' portrayal of nebbishy dweeb Noah seems to be channeling a young Woody Allen at times. Except for the finale where it tries far too late to find its own voice, CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES is a minor and mostly forgettable film for Travolta completists and people who can't get enough of dated Tarantino ripoffs that instantly play like relics found frozen in ice after 20 years and just now thawed for viewing.

SECRET IN THEIR EYES
(Spain/US - 2015)

Written and directed by Billy Ray. Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts, Dean Norris, Alfred Molina, Michael Kelly, Joe Cole, Zoe Graham, Don Harvey, Amir Malaklou, Niko Nicotera, Patrick Davis, Ross Partridge. (PG-13, 111 mins)

Juan Jose Campanella's 2009 Argentine thriller THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES dealt with the reopening of a 25-year-old murder case that was hindered in its initial stages by the tumultuous political upheaval of 1970s Argentina. It won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and is the source for the THE-less English-language remake SECRET IN THE EYES, written and directed by Billy Ray, who previously helmed SHATTERED GLASS and BREACH and whose CAPTAIN PHILLIPS screenplay earned him an Oscar nomination. SECRET '15 makes some major changes to the story (though Ray does restage the original's much-ballyhooed soccer stadium zoom at a Dodgers game) and works fine for a good chunk of the way. But then it starts collapsing under the weight of too many contrivances and coincidences, and a third-act twist that's just too ludicrous to accept, though it does give us a brief preview of how an Oscar-winning, A-list actress might handle a 1960s-inspired Bette Davis "horror hag" renaissance in another 25 or so years.

Alternating between 2015 and flashbacks to 2002, the film opens with former FBI agent Ray Kasten (Chiwetel Ejiofor), now the head of security for the New York Mets, arriving in Los Angeles to visit district attorney Claire Sloan (Nicole Kidman). Claire was an assistant D.A. in 2002 when Ray was on loan from the FBI in the months following 9/11, working a joint anti-terrorism task force with L.A. cops Jess Cobb (Julia Roberts), Bumpy Willis (Dean Norris), and bootlicking department company man Reg Siefert (Michael Kelly). They were part of a post-9/11 surveillance operation on a mosque believed to be housing a sleeper cell when a young woman's body was discovered in a dumpster adjacent to the building. The dead girl turned out to be single mom Jess' high-school senior daughter Carolyn (Zoe Graham). Devastated by Jess' inconsolable grief, Ray disregarded his own job and the orders of D.A. Morales (Alfred Molina) and conducted his own investigation after seeing a suspicious-looking young man (Joe Cole) staring at Carolyn in photos taken at a police department picnic. Nobody seemed to know who the kid was until Siefert confessed that his name was Marzin, and he was his snitch inside the mosque. With the department and Morales' office deciding that preventing another 9/11 trumps bringing Carolyn's killer to justice, the case against Marzin was buried and he was declared "untouchable" and set free, with Morales and Reg opting to instead railroad a mentally-incompetent Muslim (Amir Malaklou) for the murder.

But Marzin vanished shortly after, and Ray has spent 13 obsessive years tracking him down and he's finally found him, recently paroled, sporting a new nose and the name Beckwith. Claire is now the D.A. (Morales is now the governor) and is hesitant to reopen the investigation. Jess agrees, a broken shell of what she once was and having thrown herself into her job, concluding "I don't think I can stomach seeing him walk away again." Ray won't let it go and along with a hobbling Bumpy, now on desk duty and using a cane after suffering a serious knee injury in a 2002 pursuit of Marzin, and against the wishes of a sneering Reg ("Hey, Ray...the Mets just called and they need you...somebody stole second base!"), goes rogue in pursuit of "Beckwith."

When SECRET IN THEIR EYES focuses on the dual-timeline investigations in 2002 and 2015, with director Ray and editor Jim Page doing a fine job of handling the back-and-forth time element, it's a thoroughly engaging thriller with some potent observations about the post-9/11 War on Terror that ultimately get cast aside as the story progresses. It's got a sturdy foundation in the always-excellent Ejiofor's commanding performance as a man haunted by regrets--he was supposed to meet Carolyn at a bakery to pick out a cake for Jess' surprise birthday party, but he was swamped with work and blew her off, and two hours later, she was found dead in a dumpster. His obsessive pursuit of Marzin--spending several hours a night for 13 years in a needle-in-a-haystack search combing hundreds of thousands of mugshots in the parolee database hoping to find Marzin using an alias--is fueled more by guilt than a sense of legal justice. Ejiofor and Norris make a great team who deserve their own buddy-cop movie, but the romance angle between Ray and Claire is half-baked and eventually fizzles completely. It's not helped by Kidman's stilted, zombified performance--she's just not good here, aside from one terrific 2002-set scene where she just shreds Marzin, emasculating him in the most cutting ways imaginable. It's almost enough to redeem her otherwise weak performance, though it's a mystery why she does so well in that scene but almost seems under hypnosis in the rest of the film.

In what amounts to a supporting role, Roberts has a couple of Oscar-baiting breakdowns as the devastated Jess, but is solid throughout and keeps it real, looking like she hasn't slept in weeks and going without makeup and with unflattering bangs in her frumpiest and least-glamorous role this side of MARY REILLY ("You look a million years old," Ray tells her at one point). It's decidedly not a standard "Julia Roberts" role and those expecting a Roberts starring vehicle will likely be as disappointed as everyone else who sees an otherwise entertaining--if more than slightly unbelievable--procedural careening off the rails with a ridiculous climax that seems more fitting for a horror movie. The finale of SECRET IN THEIR EYES may seem ludicrous, but it's really just the entire film's Plot Convenience Playhouse nature crescendoing into a symphony of silliness, commencing right around the time three different stops on the way down puts all of the principal parties (Ray, Claire, Jess, and Marzin) on an elevator together. SECRET IN THEIR EYES abandons any illusions of subtext and commentary and despite the powerhouse headliners (a Roberts/Kidman teaming seems like it should've happened at least a decade ago, doesn't it?), it won't be getting any Oscar consideration, but if you're looking for a reasonably entertaining time-killer, it's worth a glance when it hits Redbox and Netflix in about three months.

SPOTLIGHT
(US - 2015)

Directed by Tom McCarthy. Written by Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy. Cast: Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schreiber, John Slattery, Stanley Tucci, Brian D'Arcy James, Billy Crudup, Len Cariou, Jamey Sheridan, Paul Guilfoyle, Gene Amoroso, Neal Huff, Elena Wohl. (R, 128 mins)

"We've got two stories here: a story about degenerate clergy, and a story about a bunch of lawyers turning child abuse into a cottage industry. Which story do you want us to write? Because we're writing one of them."

As much a chronicle of the Boston Globe's breaking of a cover-up of systemic sexual abuse in the Catholic church as it is a document of a dying profession, SPOTLIGHT is a film that dives deep into the nitty gritty of newspaper reporting. What's refreshing is that it does so without the sense of heroism, martyrdom, and apologia in TRUTH, another recent journalism drama, rather shamelessly wallowed. In TRUTH, 60 MINUTES II producer Mary Mapes is crucified for rushed and sloppy work on a story about George W. Bush's days in the National Guard, but the film wants to make her a saint anyway, and an uncharacteristically grating Cate Blanchett's overwrought performance has her barreling through it doing everything short of wearing a "For Your Consideration" sandwich board to get awards attention. SPOTLIGHT goes in the opposite direction, immersing the audience in the daily grind of hardworking reporters. A lot of the film has them talking on phones, jotting down notes, and fumbling for a pen when theirs runs dry. They leave messages, check sources, meet interview subjects in coffee shops, sit outside offices waiting for an appointment, dig through files and old newspapers, and thumb through dog-eared reference books and directories chasing every tip, lead, and theory they get. They go where the story takes them as each new development opens up another Pandora's Box of paperwork and legal hurdles. A smart film that makes the boring minutiae of the job riveting, SPOTLIGHT may just be a notch below the great modern-era journalism films like Alan J. Pakula's ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (1976) or, to an extent, David Fincher's ZODIAC (2007), but it's easily the best film about investigative reporting since Billy Ray's SHATTERED GLASS (2003).

After a prologue set in 1976, where a molesting priest is quietly ushered out of a police station by Boston Archdiocese officials, the story moves to the summer of 2001 with Globe's hiring of new chief editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), a man known for his bottom-line concerns during stints in New York and Miami. Baron thinks there might be a story in an alarming number of allegations against that 1976 priest, which got a brief mention in the Metro section some time back, but was never pursued with any vigor by the paper. Wanting to re-establish the Globe as the local paper of record with a focus on Boston concerns, Baron directs the Spotlight team--a four-person crew of reporters who work on months-long investigative pieces--to chronicle the paper trail of accusations against the priest. Led by editor Walter "Robby" Robinson (Michael Keaton), the Spotlight team--Mike Rezendes (a jumpy Mark Ruffalo), Sasha Pfeiffer (Rachel McAdams), and Matt Carroll (Brian D'Arcy James)--go to work, butting heads with lawyers, victims, church officials, rival papers, and concerned city big shots among others, not to mention the whole effort being jeopardized when Baron makes them put the story on the backburner for six weeks after September 11, 2001, during which time the Spotlight team is temporarily split up and assigned to other 9/11-related beats. Boston is a strongly Catholic community, and there's a concern that such talk may not rest well with the devout churchgoers. But when old Archdiocese guides show that many of the molesting priests--they eventually uncover 87 of them in Boston alone--were classified as "on sick leave" during times that coincide with the accusations, the Spotlight team correctly hypothesizes that it's a status given to priest reassigned to other parishes or sent away after an abuse incident that's settled privately and promptly buried by Cardinal Law (Len Cariou), the head of the Boston Archdiocese who's known of the plethora of incidents that have been going on for decades, with the cover-up trail leading all the way to the Vatican.

Directed and co-written by Tom McCarthy (THE STATION AGENT), who somehow made this and the career-worst Adam Sandler movie THE COBBLER in the same year, SPOTLIGHT boasts one of the year's strongest ensembles, headed by a resurgent Keaton on the heels of his triumphant BIRDMAN comeback. Keaton's been down this road before in Ron Howard's underrated THE PAPER (1994), and he's perfectly cast as the driven, quick-witted (when told by a lawyer friend that he read an article about Baron being the Globe's first Jewish editor, Robby replies "Really? Must've been a slow news day") Spotlight leader. McAdams and James are fine, but don't really stand out like Keaton or, for better or worse, Ruffalo, whose mannered performance takes some getting used to but is said to be an accurate portrayal of Rezendes. The actors also get sterling support from Billy Crudup and Jamey Sheridan as tight-lipped, big-shot attorneys behind a series of abuse case settlements, John Slattery as the Globe's managing editor Ben Bradlee, Jr. (whose father was executive editor of The Washington Post when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate story), and Stanley Tucci as victims' advocate Mitchell Garabedian, an eccentric, crusading lawyer who's been representing a number of abuse victims in their cases against the Archdiocese. SPOTLIGHT is as no-nonsense as its characters, a methodical and matter-of-fact grinder that tells its story as effectively as the Spotlight team pursued theirs. It doesn't make Baron, Robinson, and the writers into glory-seeking heroes--they're just people doing their job and doing it with commitment and tireless determination. TRUTH was about glory, but SPOTLIGHT is about the guts.

RICKI AND THE FLASH
(US - 2015)

Over her legendary career, Meryl Streep has demonstrated that she's capable of pretty much everything, so while it may seem like a stretch to imagine her as an aging rocker, it doesn't take long to accept her in the role. Streep is Ricki Rendazzo, who's more or less a D-list Bonnie Raitt in the grand scheme of things: her classic rock cover band Ricki and the Flash have a loyal following as the house band at a Tarzana bar that draws the same crowd every night of the week, but after one unsuccessful album over 20 years ago, she never came close to hitting the big time. Ricki's pursuit of fame and fortune came at a price: in the late '80s, she walked away from her life as Indianapolis housewife Linda Brummel, and though she's made sporadic appearances in the lives of ex-husband Pete (Kevin Kline) and their children, her job as a mother has been fulfilled by Pete's second wife Maureen (Audra McDonald). Now, Ricki has been summoned back to Indianapolis after her daughter Julie (Streep's daughter Mamie Gummer) attempts suicide when her husband leaves her for another woman. Had RICKI AND THE FLASH kept that dysfunctional family dynamic as its focus, it would've been a lot better than the film that screenwriter Diablo Cody (JUNO) and the great director Jonathan Demme (STOP MAKING SENSE, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS) ended up making. For a while, it goes along similar lines as the Cody-scripted YOUNG ADULT, even resorting to some well-done scenes of squirming discomfort, as when Ricki and Pete confront Julie's estranged, dickhead husband at a bar. I also like the approach Cody takes with Kline's Pete, who's happier with Maureen, has made peace with the past and, surprisingly by Hollywood standards, has moved on with his life and honestly harbors no resentment toward his ex-wife. Even more against convention, he may still have feelings for her but stops himself from acting on them. And Ricki's presence--and her tentative reconnection with her daughter and her sons, one sympathetic and forgiving (Sebastian Stan), the other bitter and resentful (Nick Westrate)--does manage to pull Julie off the ledge and get her taking steps toward rebuilding her life.

But then Demme abandons that, almost completely. Pete, Julie, and the rest disappear for a long stretch as Ricki returns to Tarzana and gets serious with her guitarist/boyfriend Greg (Rick Springfield) before heading back to Indianapolis for her son's wedding. It's here where Demme sees fit to turn the film into a less caustic version of his own RACHEL GETTING MARRIED before letting it careen into full-on feelgood bullshit with a cast sing-along as Ricki and the Flash boot the wedding band off stage as the uptight onlookers sneer their disapproval but are eventually won over, get up and start dancing. Yes, a blunt and honest film about fractured family dynamics and decades-old wounds turns into a movie that ends with everyone getting over hating Ricki (and her far-right politics, which are introduced and promptly forgotten) and joining her onstage for a big, triumphant jam session at her son's wedding reception. Streep, Springfield (who's quite good here) and the band playing the Flash (featuring guys like keyboardist Bernie Worrell and drummer Joe Vitale) are really playing the songs, and Demme seems more interested in letting Streep show off her rhythm guitar skills and her singing voice in full-length Tom Petty, U2, and Bruce Springsteen covers. RICKI AND THE FLASH just utterly collapses in its second half to the point where it's not out of the question to wonder if Ricki is imagining the whole thing. The first half is honest, smart, and occasionally scathingly funny (Julie to Ricki: "Do you have a gig or do you always dress like a hooker from NIGHT COURT?"), but it just skids to a halt in the second half with one endless song after another and that godawful finale. And why is the bartender from Tarzana dancing at the wedding in Indianapolis? The band making the trip is silly enough, but the fucking Ricki superfan bartender? Was Demme shooting the movie and realized Cody only had 50 minutes of script, so he decided to wing it the rest of the way? (PG-13, 101 mins)

AMERICAN ULTRA
(US/Switzerland - 2015)

A one-joke comedy that plays like a mash-up of screenwriter Max Landis' DVD collection, AMERICAN ULTRA initially seems like one of those movies that's trying too hard to be an instant cult classic until you realize it isn't trying to be much of anything at all. A splattery, stoner take on THE BOURNE IDENTITY, AMERICAN ULTRA takes place in the fictional West Virginia town of Liman, where pot-addled slacker Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg) works at a carryout and spends his free time getting baked with his live-in girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart). But it turns out Mike is a CIA sleeper agent in the top-secret Ultra program and only becomes aware of his abilities as an unstoppable killing machine when he's activated by Agent Lasseter (Connie Britton), who's trying to save him from the machinations of Yates (Topher Grace), an ass-kissing agency douchebag hellbent on eliminating all traces of the Ultra program. As CIA agents and covert assassins converge on Liman, with the media being fed a story about the town being quarantined, Mike and Phoebe try to stay alive, with Mike instinctively--though he's too perpetually high to figure out how--using anything at his disposal to kill the assets sent to make him vanish.

I'm not sure anyone was demanding a BOURNE movie filtered through HALF-BAKED, but the results are neither as goofy as you'd expect nor as funny as Landis (son of John and writer of the overrated CHRONICLE) thinks. The weed angle is eventually abandoned altogether as ULTRA becomes a lot like a conventional thriller with only the cartoonish, PUNISHER; WAR ZONE-level splatter and would-be CRANK-style gonzo attitude to indicate that it's supposed to be played for laughs. Eisenberg and Stewart fared much better together in ADVENTURELAND, and director Nima Nourizadeh (the found-footage teen comedy PROJECT X) has a great supporting cast at his disposal but doesn't do much with them: Grace, not the most plausible casting for the head of a secret division of the CIA, can play this kind of unctuous turd in his sleep, Bill Pullman has a few scenes as a CIA big shot, John Leguizamo pops up as a strip club owner who's also Mike's dealer, Tony Hale does his umpteenth variation on Buster Bluth as a needy, nervous Lasseter underling, and only Walton Goggins makes a memorable impression as a constantly-laughing assassin named (wait for it) Laugher, whose comedic demeanor masks a depressed cognizance of his autonomy and individuality being stripped from him by his CIA brainwashers. That's as close as AMERICAN ULTRA comes to making a statement about anything. In the end, it's a lot of noise, a lot of CGI (even the exhaled pot smoke is CGI'd!), and not much funny. THE BOURNE LEBOWSKI, it ain't. (R, 96 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: ESCOBAR: PARADISE LOST (2015); MANGLEHORN (2015); and COP CAR (2015)

In Theaters/On VOD: KNOCK KNOCK (2015)

Cult Classics Revisited: NIGHTMARE WEEKEND (1986)

In Theaters: CRIMSON PEAK (2015)

Cult Classics Revisited: TERROR IN THE AISLES (1984)

Cult Classics Revisited: MALONE (1987)

In Theaters: BRIDGE OF SPIES (2015)

On DVD/Blu-ray: THE VATICAN TAPES (2015); Z FOR ZACHARIAH (2015); and I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE III: VENGEANCE IS MINE (2015)

In Theaters/On VOD: BONE TOMAHAWK (2015)

In Theaters: TRUTH (2015)

On DVD/Blu-ray: THE FINAL GIRLS (2015); TIGER HOUSE (2015); and WE ARE STILL HERE (2015)

In Theaters: SPECTRE (2015)

Cult Classics Revisited: THE EXECUTIONER PART II (1984)

In Theaters/On VOD: HEIST (2015)

Cult Classics Revisited: ROAR (1981)

On DVD/Blu-ray: MR. HOLMES (2015); THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT (2015); and BOUND TO VENGEANCE (2015)

In Theaters/On VOD: CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES (2015)

In Theaters: SECRET IN THEIR EYES (2015)

In Theaters: SPOTLIGHT (2015)

On DVD/Blu-ray: RICKI AND THE FLASH (2015) and AMERICAN ULTRA (2015)