Good Efficient Butchery

CREED
(US - 2015)

Directed by Ryan Coogler. Written by Ryan Coogler and Aaron Covington. Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad, Andre Ward, Anthony Bellew, Graham McTavish, Ritchie Coster, Wood Harris, Jacob "Stitch" Duran, Ricardo McGill, Malik Bazille, Gabriel Rosado, Frank Pesce. (PG-13, 133 mins)

"Time takes everybody out. It's undefeated."

When CREED was first announced a couple of years ago, with a plot focusing on the son of Apollo Creed being trained by Rocky Balboa, the immediate reaction of most was eye-rolling dismissal. It sounded like a desperate ploy by Sylvester Stallone to keep the ROCKY franchise going by remaking it with himself in Burgess Meredith's Mickey role. It sounded like the kind of cheap, cynical DTV spinoff along the lines of a CARLITO'S WAY: RISE TO POWER, an EASY RIDER: THE RIDE BACK, and the still-unreleased THE BRONX BULL, which was shot as RAGING BULL II prior to succumbing to various legal issues that have kept it on the self since 2012. Even if it's approached with lowered expectations, CREED is one of the biggest surprises of the year. In the hands of director/co-writer Ryan Coogler (2013's acclaimed FRUITVALE STATION), CREED is so much more than a Stallone nostalgia trip. It's a thoughtful and perceptive film about families, legacies, loss, and new beginnings. Ghosts of the past haunt nearly every scene. The legacy of the late Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), killed in the ring in ROCKY IV (1985), unites two men: his best friend and former foe Rocky (Stallone) and Adonis (Michael B. Jordan), the son whose birth Apollo didn't live to see.

The result of an extramarital affair between his mother and Apollo Creed, Adonis Johnson was orphaned at a young age, had severe anger management issues, and seemed doomed to a life in juvenile detention when he wasn't bouncing around foster care and group homes until he was 13, when Apollo's widow Mary Anne (Phylicia Rashad) found him, took him in, and adopted him. Keeping his mother's last name to both honor her and avoid getting a free ride on his father's legend, Adonis establishes himself as a capable fighter in illegal Tijuana boxing matches while maintaining a day job at a prestigious investment firm in Los Angeles, where he's just gotten a promotion before promptly quitting to pursue boxing full-time. This angers Mary Anne, who remembers what it was like taking care of Apollo after his fights ("Do you know how many times I had to help the Heavyweight Champion of the World up these stairs because he couldn't walk? Do you know how many times I had to wipe his ass because he couldn't use his hands?"), but she's powerless to stop him. Adonis heads to Philadelphia to track down Rocky. He finds him, still running Adrian's, the small neighborhood Italian restaurant named in honor of his late wife, who died prior to the events of 2006's ROCKY BALBOA. Rocky is happy to tell Adonis stories about his dad but firmly states he has no interest in becoming his trainer, instead sending him to Mighty Mick's Gym, now being run by Pete Sporino (Ritchie Coster), who keeps trying to get Rocky's celebrity name attached to his own son Leo "The Lion" Sporino (Gabriel Rosado). Of course, it doesn't take long for lonely Rocky, who's once again estranged from Rocky, Jr and who also lost his brother-in-law Paulie (Burt Young) and Apollo's trainer Duke (Tony Burton) in the years since ROCKY BALBOA, to see Apollo's spirit in Adonis and take him up on the training offer, not having much in the way of book smarts to give the educated Adonis but dispensing the sage advice he's learned from experience over his lifetime ("See that guy in the mirror? That's your biggest opponent. I believe that in the ring and I believe that in life"). Adonis, meanwhile, falls for his neighbor Bianca (Tessa Thompson), an aspiring singer who's suffering from progressive hearing loss.

The story structure of CREED--the first ROCKY film not written by Stallone--is largely formulaic in its point A-to-point B plot mechanics: Adonis establishes a name for himself, eventually accepting his lineage and going by Adonis Creed when Pete leaks his true identity to the media, and becomes a recognized fighter over the course of the film, eventually taking on the champion "Pretty Ricky" Conlan (Anthony Bellew) in a Liverpool bout hastily arranged by Conlan's manager (Graham McTavish) to pay the bills while Conlan serves a seven-year prison sentence on gun charges. Stallone directed four of the six previous ROCKY movies, with John G. Avildsen helming 1976's ROCKY and 1990's ROCKY V, and both men are the sort-of capable journeyman types whose skills can best be described as "workmanlike." Coogler, on the other hand, displays more confidence and skill at just 29 than Stallone and Avildsen could've brought to the table, the innovative Steadicam contributions of Garrett Brown in the 1976 film notwithstanding. Coogler and veteran cinematographer Maryse Alberti (WHEN WE WERE KINGS) have fashioned some of the best fight sequences you'll see in the boxing genre, especially in Adonis' bout with The Lion, where the entire first round is shot in real time without a cut, the camera snaking around the ring, between and above the fighters, with a dizzying array of sounds from each of their corners drifiting in and out as they move around the ring. It's a stunning sequence, and along with the film's many long, uninterrupted tracking shots that follow Adonis or Rocky, indicative of a gifted director at work. Stallone must have had absolute faith in Coogler's vision to allow his most personal, iconic character to be placed entirely in someone else's hands. Coogler responds by making Rocky even more multi-layered and complex than ever, a man who knows he's a legend but remains humble, preferring his quiet, low-profile life and lamenting that all of his loved ones are gone and he's alone. Even in the midst of the formula elements (why does every aspiring boxer live in a shithole apartment?), CREED remains unpredictable: we expect Rocky Jr, now living in Vancouver and calling himself "Robert Balboa," to show up at a certain point in the film when Rocky needs him most. He doesn't. He's referenced once and never mentioned again. In some films, this could be an oversight, but here it's by design. Adonis is the son Rocky's lost through estrangement, and Rocky is the father Adonis never had (Adonis immediately endears himself to Rocky by repeatedly referring to him as "Unc"). We also expect Bianca's hearing loss to factor in, but it's introduced and matter-of-factly accepted. She puts her hearing aids in like someone putting on their reading glasses. There's nothing Adonis can do in the ring to restore her fading hearing, so like every other setback these characters face--and a big obstacle surfaces in the second half--they adjust to it and keep on fighting.

It would've been easy to cave to hokey sentimentality and maudlin manipulation, but when the waterworks start (this immediately joins the pantheon of Hall of Fame man-weepies--you can actually feel a wave of emotion in the audience late in the film when Bill Conti's "Rocky Theme" fires up), it's earned. Jordan is absolutely magnetic as Adonis, who's simultaneously running away from and directly toward the long shadow cast by his father ("I just want to know I'm not a mistake!" he yells when Rocky asks what he's trying to prove), but it's Stallone's Rocky who's the emotional core of CREED. This is a beloved character we've known for nearly 40 years, so much so that it practically transcends an actor playing a role. Stallone's had so many ups and downs throughout his career that he perfectly embodies that underdog spirit. It's enough to make you forget the cartoonish depths of the Reagan-era flag-waving of ROCKY IV (nobody likes the much-maligned ROCKY V, but at least it's better than ROCKY IV), even though CREED's springboard is Apollo's death at the hands of Soviet superfighter killing machine Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), a tragedy for which Rocky still feels tremendous guilt over not throwing in the towel to stop. Now that he knows Adonis, Rocky feels a responsibility for him. Stallone, who at 69 is the same age Burgess Meredith was in ROCKY, is so lived-in and naturally comfortable as Rocky that you almost forget he's acting. He's presented with a challenge by Coogler and co-writer Aaron Covington's script and he rises to the occasion by delivering his most accomplished and invested performance in many years, probably going back to FIRST BLOOD in 1982. He's great in his big moments, but brilliant even in little ones, whether he's looking on with pride at Adonis or visiting the cemetery and talking to Adrian and Paulie ("It's gettin' harder to walk up that hill!" the arthritic Rocky says, catching his breath and pulling up a chair at Adrian's grave to tell her about his day). Filled with exhilarating boxing sequences, dazzling filmmaking (watch the way Coogler darkens the arena midway through the final fight as a way of illustrating the fighters' singular focus), gut-wrenching emotion, and honest, heartfelt performances, CREED is like nothing you'd expect a seventh film in the ROCKY series to be. More than a generic sequel-turned-reboot, CREED very much stands on it own as a terrific film and one of 2015's very best.

GOODNIGHT MOMMY
(Austria - 2015)

This wildly-acclaimed Austrian import ("The rebirth of Austrian horror," one blog emphatically declared ) was hailed as a new genre classic by the horror scenester echo chamber when it opened in limited release and on VOD in September of this year. Sure, there's an occasional BABADOOK or IT FOLLOWS where the hype is justified, but accolades of this sort might carry more weight if those same scenesters didn't say that about every new indie horror movie that comes out (remember every Ti West movie? Or when everyone said STARRY EYES was the next classic? Remember how everyone was pumped about THE GALLOWS and then it was actually released?). GOODNIGHT MOMMY gets an extra love tap with the kid gloves since it's a subtitled foreign film, as if that lends it a classy sheen to help deflect the rote predictability of the entire endeavor. There's some baiting-and-switching and a big twist of a reveal at the end, but anyone not declared legally brain-dead will be able to call it by the ten-minute mark, so all that's left to do is sit and wait. Then the twist comes--and it plays out just as you predicted--and the movie's over. Giving off the stench of bargain-basement Michael Haneke, GOODNIGHT MOMMY has an interesting and disturbing set-up, but the writing/directing team of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala switch gears almost immediately, turning the film into another tired "evil children" piece that just spins its wheels and turns into a stultifyingly tedious waste of time. When their mother (Susanne Wuest) returns home from having some kind of vague cosmetic surgery, nine-year-old twin brothers Elias and Lukas (Elias and Lukas Schwarz) are alarmed by her increasingly erratic behavior--she's prone to mood swings, demands total silence, and won't even acknowledge Lukas--and come to believe the woman whose face is covered in gauze and bandages (an admittedly unsettling image) isn't their mother. So far, so good, but then the sinister element of "Who is this woman?" is up-ended as the bandages come off and the boys go to extreme measures to get this person who looks exactly like their mother to confess her true identity, morphing into a rote "creepy kids" movie, even if it's the sensitive Elias acting under the direction of the persuasive and domineering Lukas. The twist is so embarrassingly easy to see that you figure there has to be something more, but there isn't. That is, unless you count the boys super-glueing their mother's mouth and eyes shut and blood gushing all over the place when they try to cut her lips open. A film that almost sets a land-speed record for going from intriguing to actively pissing me off, GOODNIGHT MOMMY can't even get much out of its ominous, middle-of-nowhere setting in a huge house straight out of a classic giallo. Come on, bloggers and horror fanboys. Your hype and fawning praise are meaningless if you don't start being a little more discerning and a little less concerned with keeping the free shit coming. (R, 100 mins)

MISSISSIPPI GRIND
(US - 2015)

For a while, the gambling drama MISSISSIPPI GRIND, the latest from the writing/directing team of Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck (HALF NELSON), seems like a shaggy dog road movie that doesn't appear to be ambling to anywhere in particular. But it carries itself like a '70s character study along the lines of its two primary 1974 influences: you could argue that it's a loose remake of Robert Altman's CALIFORNIA SPLIT, but it also owes a lot to Karel Reisz's THE GAMBLER, right down to the brief presence of veteran filmmaker and GAMBLER screenwriter James Toback in a rare acting role. With his slumped shoulders and dark cloud perpetually hovering over his head, Ben Mendelsohn straddles the line between good-natured but unlucky sad sack and sketchy, self-serving shitbag as Gerry, a down-on-his-luck real estate agent who owes money all over Dubuque. With his soft-spoken but serious loan shark (Alfre Woodard in some unexpected casting) tells him the clock's ticking, Gerry hits the road with new acquaintance Curtis (Ryan Reynolds), a confident and gregariously likable guy he recently met at a seedy dive of a casino, the kind of effortlessly smooth talker who loves to tell stories and has everybody at the poker table laughing. Once he meets Curtis, Gerry coincidentally starts winning and is convinced Curtis is his good-luck charm ("You're my leprechaun!"). Gerry splits town, helping himself to $200 in his employer's petty cash fund, dragging the goes-where-life-takes-him Curtis (Curtis to Gerry: "What? You have a job?") on a road trip to Memphis and through Little Rock to New Orleans, by which time Gerry presumes to have earned enough money to invite himself to a secret poker game with a $25K buy-in hosted by Tony Roundtree (Toback), a big-time gambler he only knows of through Curtis' second-hand stories.

Things obviously don't pan out, as Gerry is a character played by Ben Mendelsohn, who's sort-of cornering the market on dodgy, untrustworthy skeezes and small-time scam artists (ANIMAL KINGDOM, KILLING THEM SOFTLY, THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES, LOST RIVER, and the Netflix series BLOODLINE). Like the Altman film it models itself on, MISSISSIPPI GRIND is about the interaction between the two main characters and how their bond brings out the best and worst in one another. Gerry is a hopeless, reckless gambler who loves the thrill of the bet but is terrible at it. So is Curtis, but his confidence carries him and compared to Gerry, he knows when to walk away. Curtis, whose financial solvency is never really explored, mainly just likes talking to people and finds poker tables are the best place to people-watch. He goes along with Gerry initially because he's got nothing else going on but eventually because he just likes him, and if Gerry believes Curtis is the source of his luck, then so be it. It's hard to get a read on Curtis, and that's by design. Reynolds again proves himself to be a much better actor than his detractors would ever be willing to admit (he was a last-minute replacement for Jake Gyllenhaal, who was delayed on another project), and he's a good match with Mendelsohn, who gets to show different shades of his character as the film progresses. He's funny and likable one moment, desperate and pathetic the next--nowhere is this more apparent than in a very uncomfortable reunion with his embittered ex-wife (Robin Weigert). Sienna Miller and Analeigh Tipton are saddled with underwritten and rather superfluous supporting roles as hookers-with-hearts-of-gold who capture the attention of Curtis and Gerry respectively, but other than that and an ending that's sufficient but does wrap things up a little too neat and tidy, MISSISSIPPI GRIND is an engaging, slow-burner throwback character piece that would've been right at home if it had opened 40 years ago instead of today, on just 46 screens for a total gross of $130,000. (R, 109 mins)

MOMENTUM
(US/South Africa/Spain - 2015)

The kind of movie where an establishing aerial shot features the Capitol Building in the foreground and the Washington Monument in the background and still feels the need to include the caption "Washington, D.C.," MOMENTUM is cliched almost to the point of parody. It has a hissing, snarky villain who, just before he's about to off the hero, opts to give an endless, condescending speech instead. You'd be correct in assuming a bad guy like that is also prone to hackneyed chess analogies that come back to bite him in the ass, as he of course gets the upper hand on the hero and sneers "Check!" which is pretty much an open invitation to that hero to declare "Checkmate!" just before killing him. And that's exactly how it plays out. Nevertheless, once it gets settled in after a clunky and confusing opening, MOMENTUM is stupid but reasonably entertaining action movie junk food. It's complete garbage, but it's energetic and has a pair of fun performances at its core, plus one seriously slumming surprise guest star who's not featured in the trailer, the poster art, or in any of the promotional material, and who couldn't possibly have been on the set for more than half a day, literally phoning in his performance from behind a desk.

After a botched Cape Town bank robbery where one of the criminals, Alexis (QUANTUM OF SOLACE's Olga Kurylenko) loses her mask in front of a lobby full of witnesses, a cleanup crew of hired killers led by the gleefully snide and sardonic Mr. Washington (James Purefoy) is dispatched to eliminate the entire team. Alexis had plans to disappear after this One Last Job, but now she's fighting for her life with Washington and his goons in hot pursuit. The killers are in the employ of a corrupt US senator (Morgan Freeman...yes, that Morgan Freeman), who's secretly planning a terrorist attack in Chicago in order to start a new war and secure a huge defense contract, with his entire nefarious plan laid out on a flash drive that Alexis acquired in the bank job (why a US senator would save that on a flash drive and then go through the trouble of storing it in a safety deposit box in South Africa remains a mystery). Co-written by Adam Marcus (JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY, TEXAS CHAINSAW 3D) and directed by a debuting Stephen Campanelli, a veteran camera operator who's been part of Clint Eastwood's crew since 1995's THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY (MILLION DOLLAR BABY and INVICTUS star and nice guy Freeman obviously doing a solid for Campanelli, who likely wasn't going to risk getting booted off the Malpaso payroll by asking Clint to play the senator), MOMENTUM knows exactly what kind of movie it is, and it's almost nonstop action after the clumsy first act. Kurylenko displays steely gravitas as a kickass heroine who walks away from CGI explosions like a pro (team her up with Milla Jovovich!), and a constantly smirking Purefoy is having a blast as Mr. Washington ("Oh, you magnificent bitch!" he yells at Alexis when she outsmarts him yet again), There's some brutal action sequences, some winking Eastwood homages (cue the "Do you feel lucky?" speech) and self-referential auto-critiques ("I've seen this in too many movies," Washington glowers as Alexis is doing exactly what he thinks she's doing) and an inspired bit where one bad guy's head is smashed apart with a kid's Tonka Truck. A late-breaking plot development involving Alexis' background as a rogue CIA superagent recruited from the Mossad would appear to set up a BOURNE-like franchise that likely isn't happening, considering the $20 million film went straight to VOD in the US and is currently making headlines for grossing the equivalent of $69 during its ten-screen theatrical release in the UK. It's enjoyable for what it is--wait for it to turn up on Netflix Instant and queue it up on a slow night expecting nothing and you'll be entertained. (Unrated, 96 mins)

KRAMPUS
(US - 2015)

Directed by Michael Dougherty. Written by Todd Casey, Michael Dougherty and Zach Shields. Cast: Adam Scott, Toni Collette, David Koechner, Allison Tolman, Conchata Ferrell, Krista Stadler, Emjay Anthony, Stefania LaVie Owen, Lolo Owen, Queenie Samuel, Maverick Flack, Luke Hawker. (PG-13, 98 mins)

Inspired by a nightmarish holiday figure in Germanic folklore, KRAMPUS is at times quaintly old-fashioned in the way that, with a few tweaks, it could've been pretty much the same movie 30 years ago. It's got some dark elements in line with today's more snarky and cynical audiences, but in terms of style, score, and visual effects (yes, there's CGI, but there's a lot of practical-based work as well), it's the kind of GREMLINS-era mix of horror and dark comedy that recalls both the best of Joe Dante and a high-end, big-budget Full Moon title. It's a film out of its own time, much like its young protagonist Max (Emjay Anthony), a ten-year-old who's already nostalgic for a few years ago, desperately clinging to the notion of Santa Claus as his childhood slips away. His older sister Beth (Stefania LaVie Owen) is always off with her boyfriend, and his parents Tom (Adam Scott) and Sarah (Toni Collette) love each other but are very slowly growing complacent and drifting, with Tom spending so much time at work and Sarah's realization that time keeps ticking. The mood isn't helped by the holidays, which are supposed to bring cheer but instead bring relatives: Sarah's sister Linda (Allison Tolman), her right-wing, gun-nut husband Howard (David Koechner), and their abrasively unpleasant children, bullying tomboys Stevie (Lolo Owen) and Jordan (Queenie Samuel) and silent-except-for-belching, Mountain Dew-guzzing Howie Jr (Maverick Flack, easily the most awesomely-named horror movie child actor since 28 WEEKS LATER's Mackintosh Muggleton), plus the bonus surprise of booze-guzzling, constantly-complaining Aunt Dorothy (Conchata Ferrell).

In its earliest scenes, KRAMPUS does a great job of nailing all the terrible things about the holiday season, starting with an opening credits sequence that shows a mob of frothing-at-the-mouth shoppers stampeding into a big-box retailer in a symphony of destruction and mindless consumerism. Likewise, anyone will be able to relate to the dread and unease of family--people you might not necessarily be close to but they're family so you spend the holidays together--visiting, whether it's the way a judgmental aunt criticizes your cooking or your decor or the way you have to listen to your conservative blowhard brother-in-law bitch about Democrats and parroting what he heard on talk radio. When Stevie and Jordan make fun of Max's letter to Santa, Max tears it up and tosses it out the window. This fateful act awakens Krampus, a hooved, horned demon described by Tom's German-speaking mother Omi (Krista Stadler) in a beautifully-executed animated detour as "the shadow of St. Nicholas," the vengeful spirit who brings death and destruction on those who've lost sight of the true meaning of Christmas. When a blizzard hits the next morning, knocks out the power and makes travel impossible, the family is holed up inside the house, forced to deal with each other and the evil elves of Krampus, who's trying to get into the house to teach them all a lesson.

KRAMPUS is directed and co-written by Michael Dougherty, a Bryan Singer associate who co-wrote X2 and SUPERMAN RETURNS but is best known for writing and directing the cult horror anthology TRICK 'R TREAT, which was bounced around the release schedule for two years before going straight-to-DVD in 2009. I found it merely OK, but TRICK 'R TREAT has become a beloved Halloween favorite for today's horror fans, and with KRAMPUS, Dougherty establishes himself as the go-to guy for holiday fright. Both films have Dougherty demonstrating a fondness for (relatively) old-school horror, particularly the crowd-pleasing types of the '80s. KRAMPUS isn't necessarily scary, but it has a nicely creepy feel throughout, whether it's the snowbound desolation or the way ominous-looking snowmen keep popping up in the front yard and moving closer to the house. There's also a loving homage to the video-store favorites from Charles Band's Full Moon, with some evil toys and gingerbread men coming to life and attacking the family in vintage DEMONIC TOYS fashion, with an incredulous Howard, after shotgun-blasting gingerbread men who were attacking him with a nail gun, shouting "I just got my ass kicked by a bunch of Christmas cookies...I'll believe anything!" Of course, the family bands together and casts aside their differences to survive the holiday onslaught, and KRAMPUS is probably accessible enough that kids would enjoy it, but it does get darker than you'd expect, especially in the way it pulls no punches in terms of who it's willing to kill off and in its deceptively happy ending that's really anything but. I don't think Dougherty has quite made his knock-it-out-of-the-park horror classic yet (despite horror scenester hype that KRAMPUS is "the next great horror classic!"), but his is a welcome voice that still has a lot of promise if he doesn't keep taking eight years between movies.

WAR PIGS
(US/UK - 2015)

This dull and pointless WWII actioner rips off THE DIRTY DOZEN, THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS, and just about every other men-on-a-mission outing and even borrows two stars of THE EXPENDABLES but can't even muster the energy to function as a remotely entertaining dumb movie. Funded in part by Panzerfabrik, a Colorado-based company that manufactures reproductions of WWII German tanks and other war equipment and offers its services for WWII re-enactments, WAR PIGS is basically a bunch of coasting C-listers playing dress-up while wandering around Utah's Uinta National Forest and pretending it's 1944 France while dodging an occasional CGI explosion. Luke Goss, who's devolved from passable second-string Jason Statham into arguably the most boring actor alive, is Capt. Jack Wosick, a disgraced soldier ordered by Maj. A.J. Redding (Mickey Rourke, whose kamikaze squandering of his SIN CITY resurgence and Oscar-nominated WRESTLER triumph is now complete) to team up with Capt. Hans Picault (Dolph Lundgren) of the French Foreign Legion. Their assignment: whip a team of military malcontents, ne'er-do-wells, and all-around fuck-ups into shape to take out a secret weapon being developed by Hitler. Cliches abound, usually with Wosick butting heads with smartass, pretty-boy soldier August (Noah Segan), before they all grow up and emerge heroes. There's no humor and barely any action, Lundgren doesn't even pretend to give a shit, with his French accent coming and going throughout, and third-billed UFC icon Chuck Liddell is killed off five minutes into the movie in a role that's not so much a cameo as it is "POLICE SQUAD! special guest star." Most depressing of all is Rourke, always seen behind a desk and clearly arriving to work in his own clothes, sporting a cowboy hat with his long hair dangling down the side of his head and shirt unbuttoned halfway down in regulation, by-the-book 1944 military style. Looking less like a high-ranking officer and more like he got the part after some Panzerfabrik re-enactors found him dumpster diving on the Uinta campgrounds, Rourke is just a sad sight here, and since Lundgren is in a coma, Liddell has the good sense to get offed 300 seconds into the movie, and there's absolutely no such thing as a fan of Luke Goss movies, there isn't a single reason for anyone to watch this. (R, 87 mins)

RE-KILL
(US - 2015)

After a five-year hiatus, the "8 Films to Die For" After Dark Horrorfest package returns with more indie horror from around the world. Most of the titles released from 2006 to 2010 ranged from completely forgettable to thoroughly awful, but there were a few notable standouts, like Nacho Cerda's THE ABANDONED, Xavier Gens' FRONTIER(S), Sean Ellis' THE BROKEN, and Joel Anderson's disturbing LAKE MUNGO. Lionsgate is no longer involved, and the 2015 relaunch came and went with little fanfare on VOD and has now arrived on DVD courtesy of Fox. One of the new offerings is RE-KILL, a bottom-of-the-barrel zombie shoot 'em up shot so long ago that it was originally announced as part of the 2010 lineup before it was abruptly yanked from the list and shelved for five years. Shot in Bulgaria and Baton Rouge, RE-KILL is a borderline unwatchable 90 minutes of handheld shaky-cam that would've seemed stale even in 2010, set after yet another apocalyptic zombie outbreak, this time generated by some botched government experiment called "The Judas Project." As cities are overrun with the sprinting dead (called "Re-Ans," short for "Re-Animateds"), military officers are followed by a camera crew for a reality TV show called RE-KILL, which documents their pursuit and extermination of Re-Ans. And that's pretty much it, other than frequent breaks for some Paul Verhoeven-esque would-be satirical commercials that lack the bite of similar bits in ROBOCOP and STARSHIP TROOPERS (and furthermore, with 80% of the population dead and hordes of undead in the streets, who's really in the mood or even has time to keep up on reality TV?). The cast is headed by Bruce Payne (PASSENGER 57), doing a Russell Crowe impression as a fanatically religious, thousand-yard-staring hardass soldier, and a badly-utilized Scott Adkins (NINJA: SHADOW OF A TEAR) as a fist-pumping, chest-thumping war hero ("You got questions about soldierin', you come to me!"). Both actors are better than the material (Payne actually appears to be taking it seriously), but both are killed off well before it's over. You can never tell what's going on or who's who or where--it's just a lot of posturing ("This is what we do!"), stating the obvious ("You gotta destroy the brain stem"), yelling ("Get down!"), gunfire, and CGI splatter. There's little nuance or subtlety in the script by Mike Hurst, but that's about what you should expect from the guy who gave us such renowned gems as HOUSE OF THE DEAD II and PUMPKINHEAD 4: BLOOD FEUD. Hurst co-directed with Valeri Milev, who parlayed this success into getting the coveted WRONG TURN 6: LAST RESORT gig in 2014. Payne's effort is the only thing keeping RE-KILL from stumbling off the ledge into utter uselessness, and when it wraps up at the end, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more fitting metaphor than the RE-KILL TV show closing credits rolling on a TV in an empty house with no one watching. (R, 87 mins)

WHITE OF THE EYE
(US - 1988)

Directed by Donald Cammell. Written by China and Donald Cammell. Cast: David Keith, Cathy Moriarty, Art Evans, Alan Rosenberg, Michael Greene, Alberta Watson, William G. Schilling, David Chow, Danielle Smith, Mimi Lieber, Pamela Seamon. (R, 111 mins)

Scottish-born Donald Cammell (1934-1996) made only four features over his career, beginning with the 1970 cult classic PERFORMANCE, co-directed with cinematographer Nicolas Roeg. A wild, surreal mindfuck about a vicious London gangster (James Fox) on the run and going down the road to madness while hiding out with a retired, reclusive rock star (Mick Jagger) and two bisexual groupies (Anita Pallenberg, Michele Breton), the X-rated PERFORMANCE was shot in 1968 and shelved for two years by Warner Bros., who hated the movie and had no idea what to do with it. They finally released it after some re-editing against Cammell's wishes, and supported it with a promotional campaign that centered almost completely on Jagger, even though Fox is the star and Jagger doesn't even appear until 45 minutes in. This would become a recurrent theme throughout the director's career, with tragic results: his final film, the 1995 thriller WILD SIDE, which features one of Christopher Walken's most insane performances, was taken away from him in post-production and recut by the producers, who emphasized the explicit lesbian sex scenes between Joan Chen and then-newcomer Anne Heche, whose last name was mispronounced "Heck" in the trailer. It went straight to video and into regular rotation on late-night cable after Cammell had his name taken off of it, with directing credit going to the non-existent "Franklin Brauner." The filmmaker was so despondent over his serious work being retooled into a tawdry Skinemax flick that he fell into a deep depression and made the ultimate protest for final cut, shooting himself in the head in his Hollywood home on April 24, 1996. His widow and frequent collaborator China Kong claimed that it took him nearly 45 minutes to die, and he requested a mirror in order to observe his own final moments of life.

Donald Cammell (1934-1996)

Between his first and last films, Cammell made two others--1977's DEMON SEED and 1988's WHITE OF THE EYE--and occasionally directed music videos, most notably U2's "Pride (In the Name of Love)." DEMON SEED was Cammell's most commercial effort, relatively speaking, an adaptation of a Dean Koontz novel in which Julie Christie is held captive and impregnated by a sentient computer system (voiced by Robert Vaughn) created by her scientist husband (Fritz Weaver). Weaver was cast against Cammell's wishes, as the director wanted his friend Marlon Brando, who was vetoed by the studio for being too difficult and too expensive. Cammell and Brando attempted numerous projects over the years, none of which came to fruition in their lifetimes. In 2005, a year after Brando's death, their novel Fan Tan, assembled from a manuscript that the actor had stashed away since 1978, was published. DEMON SEED was a journeyman big-studio gig for Cammell, who needed the money but wasn't happy with the film's lurid marketing and the lack of control over the project (it's the only one of his four films that he didn't script). Cammell is also credited with co-writing the 1979 Brooke Shields pinball movie TILT, which he was originally scheduled to direct but quit over creative differences, namely the casting of Brooke Shields (he wanted Jodie Foster). Keeping busy with music videos in the early '80s, Cammell didn't make another film until WHITE OF THE EYE, shot in early 1986 and given a very limited release by Palisades Entertainment in the spring of 1988, a year after it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. It was the last release of the short-lived Palisades, which was founded in 1987 and released films like ZOMBIE HIGH, Frank Henenlotter's BRAIN DAMAGE, and future ROAD HOUSE director Rowdy Herrington's acclaimed thriller JACK'S BACK. The company was already facing bankruptcy by the time WHITE OF THE EYE was smuggled into a handful of theaters and grossed just $225,000, its cause not helped by a terrible trailer (see below). Palisades' final productions, the Mickey Rourke boxing drama HOMEBOY among them, were eventually released by other distributors and the doomed indie company closed up shop less than two years after it started. Recently resurrected on Blu-ray in the US courtesy of Shout! Factory's "Scream Factory" horror division, WHITE OF THE EYE is represented by the British print licensed from Arrow Video, opening with the Cannon logo, as they secured the UK distribution rights.

Themes of duality, transformation, flip sides of the same coin, and an irreversible descent into all-out madness turn up in PERFORMANCE and WILD SIDE, and WHITE OF THE EYE is no exception. Adapting the 1984 "Margaret Tracy" (a pen name for Andrew Klavan) novel Mrs. White, but very much tailoring it to suit his own style and obsessions, WHITE is a sun-baked, suburban desert-set giallo, with AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN's David Keith as Paul White, a likable stereo/sound system/VCR (yeah, it's the '80s) installer and repairman in Globe, a small town in the outskirts of Tuscon, AZ. Paul makes a good living maintaining and repairing the luxury toys of Globe's upper-class residents, and he and his wife Joan (RAGING BULL Oscar-nominee Cathy Moriarty, who had been offscreen since the 1981 John Belushi/Dan Aykroyd bomb NEIGHBORS) and ten-year-old daughter Danielle (Danielle Smith) are a close and loving family. Flashbacks to ten years earlier--done in a strange, high-contrast "bleaching" look--show that New Yorker Joan was cross-country road-tripping with then-boyfriend Mike (Alan Rosenberg), when she angrily poured a can of soda in his van's 8-track player. Stopping off in Globe to see if it can be repaired, they encounter and befriend Paul, who begins a clandestine fling with Joan prior to Paul and Mike going on a hunting trip where a bizarre episode involving Paul's erratic behavior and over-the-top glee in killing a deer greatly disturbed Mike. Eventually, Mike found out about Paul and Joan and splits town, leaving her behind. In the present, nothing is what it seems as a serial killer has been offing Globe's wealthy and adulterous wives. The local cops are in over their head and call in Tuscon detectives Mendoza (Art Evans) and Ross (Michael Greene), who find some tire tracks at a murder scene are a match for the tires on Paul's truck. Mendoza and Ross, who keeps calling Paul a "non-conformist," are convinced he's the killer, but these educated investigators don't get any cooperation from Globe's useless and not-much-for-fancy-book learnin' sheriff (William G. Schilling), who grouses to his buddy Paul that "They got a 'psychological profile,' whatever the hell that means!" After Mendoza hauls both Paul and Joan in for questioning, philandering Paul's dalliances with recent victim Ann Mason (Alberta Watson) are brought into the open, prompting Joan to question whether her husband is the killer.

Donald Cammell's descents into madness:
James Fox as Chas in PERFORMANCE (above)
and David Keith as Paul White in WHITE OF THE EYE (below)

It's not a spoiler to say that Paul is the killer--it's revealed for certain at roughly the midpoint, in a horrifying scene where Joan discovers Ziploc freezer bags filled with human organs neatly stored in a hidden compartment built into their bathroom vanity. Paul admits he's the killer, driven by the notion that he's "chosen." Joan tries to reconcile the fact that the man she loves is a deranged killer and when she can't, he arms himself to the teeth and straps himself in dynamite (Danielle: "Dad's wearing a bunch of hot dogs!"), pulls his hair back in a samurai bun, applies war paint, and tries to kill his family. There's more to the story, especially with the late-film return of a brain-damaged Mike, who suffered a serious head injury during a jail stint and still has some resentment about Joan leaving him for Paul. Mike's surface function in the story is as a red herring--Cammell briefly flirts with the possibility that Mike is the killer and he's setting Paul up to take the fall--but he's the flip side of Paul. Paul internalizes his sickness and maintains a normal exterior, while the doofy but fundamentally decent Mike is "damaged" on the outside (an early cut of the film included a third man in Joan's life: her boss at her part-time thrift shop job played by John Diehl, who primarily existed to be another red herring, but was cut out of the film entirely by Cannon for the UK, and his scenes were left out for the US release as well; they're included as a bonus feature on the Blu-ray, minus lost audio but with commentary by Cammell biographer and film historian Sam Umland).

Both Paul and Mike love Joan--Mike showed it by walking away and Paul shows it by trying to kill her if it means being together forever. Keith and Moriarty have never been better in roles that require the gamut of emotions and put them in situations that grow increasingly unpleasant as the film goes on. There's some shades of THE SHINING as a deranged Paul stalks his wife and daughter through the house, but in nearly every other way, WHITE OF THE EYE is a film like no other. It's not the most cohesively-assembled work (allusions to Native American folklore are mostly cosmetic never really go anywhere) and not everything wraps up neat and tidy, but like life, marriage, and relationships, it's messy by design. It's a terrifying thriller, but it plays out like anything but a commercial one, with the off-kilter feeling throughout augmented by hypnotic Steadicam work by cinematographer Larry McConkey and a trippy score composed by Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason and 10cc guitarist Rick Fenn. Cammell also shows some love to Italian horror in the stunning opening sequence that has the (unknown at that point) killer following a woman into her house and killing her, the mix of blood, broken wine bottles, and thawed meat creating a disturbing and virtuoso display of all manner of splattering red that recalls Dario Argento firing on all cylinders.

The kind of film that stays with you days after seeing it, WHITE OF THE EYE is moody, bleak, and profoundly unsettling, especially one straight-out-of-an-Italian giallo murder, the punchline of which eerily foreshadows Cammell's own final request in his last moments of life. Its almost non-existent release and the fact that nobody saw it did nothing to further his career, and the next several years would find him mired in the expected stalled productions that would never be, including a collaboration with Brando called JERICHO, which would have found the actor cast (improbably at that point in his life) as a retired contract killer who emerges from hiding to wipe out a Colombian drug lord's operation. JERICHO made it as far as pre-production but fell apart in 1988 when the erratic and unpredictable Brando bailed. Looking for some studio gigs to make some quick cash, Cammell was in the running to direct ROBOCOP 2 (eventually directed by Irvin Kirshner) and the Rob Lowe thriller BAD INFLUENCE (ultimately made by Curtis Hanson), as well as 3000, a drama about a wealthy business executive who hires a street-tough prostitute for a week. The script for 3000 had been floating around Hollywood for several years before it was completely overhauled and turned into the beloved romantic comedy blockbuster PRETTY WOMAN. It would be another five years before the ill-fated WILD SIDE would get the greenlight from Cannon cover band NuImage, the Avi Lerner-owned outfit best known up to that time as a straight-to-video assembly line specializing in Frank Zagarino action vehicles. Cammell wrongly assumed that a small company like NuImage would leave him alone and let him make the film he wanted to make, but they weren't interested in art-house auteur pieces and recut it into the kind of sleazy, unrated erotic thriller that cluttered video store shelves at the time. Several years after his death, Cammell's director's cut of WILD SIDE would get a festival screening in the UK, but it thus far hasn't seen the light of day in the US outside of the bootleg and torrent circuit. A 2006 biography titled Donald Cammell: A Life on the Wild Side, written by Umland and his wife Rebecca, wasn't widely read but the cineastes who did applauded its cementing of Cammell as a genuine auteur, and it's a tragedy that he only directed four films in 25 years. Cammell's name is synonymous with PERFORMANCE, but the Blu-ray release of WHITE OF THE EYE marks the perfect occasion to rediscover this haunting, forgotten masterpiece.

EXTRACTION
(US/UK - 2015)

Directed by Steven C. Miller. Written by Ulair Aleem and Max Adams. Cast: Kellan Lutz, Bruce Willis, Gina Carano, D.B. Sweeney, Dan Bilzerian, Joshua Mikel, Steve Coulter, Olga Valentina, Lydia Hull, Tyler J. Olsen, Summer Altice, Rob Steinberg, Simon Rhee, Hwan Tran. (R, 82 mins)

It's not unusual for an A-list actor to hit a rough patch and go slumming in second-tier work for a brief or extended period of time (Nicolas Cage and John Cusack immediately come to mind). It happens to almost any big star whose career has any kind of multi-decade longevity. However, it is unusual for an A-lister to tackle these kinds of B-movie projects by choice, in the midst of an otherwise solid period. Four years ago, on the heels of his 2010 hit RED, Bruce Willis turned up in a couple of low-grade, straight-to-DVD 50 Cent productions (SET-UP and CATCH .44) and it seemed like an odd move at the time, almost like he was doing a favor for someone. Then, when he wasn't in something acclaimed like Wes Anderson's MOONRISE KINGDOM and Rian Johnson's LOOPER or in the big-budget A GOOD DAY TO DIE HARD, G.I. JOE: RETALIATION, and RED 2, he was popping up in another 50 Cent production, FIRE WITH FIRE. In the last couple of years, Willis has appeared in such forgettable Redbox-ready trifles as THE PRINCE and the WESTWORLD ripoff VICE, and his roles in both of them (as well as FIRE WITH FIRE), mainly confine him to a desk where he barks orders at underlings in person or on the phone, in shots that require minimal set-up and probably keep him on the set for two days tops. In VICE, Willis plays the CEO of an adult amusement park where sex robots revolt by going offline and becoming sentient. Thomas Jane is the star, but there's periodic cutaways to Willis, looking like he's battling a case of indigestion as he observes a row of monitors in a control room and mutters things like "Whaddaya got?" and "Bring up the temperature in Sector Five," until the androids rebel and he gets to yell "Initiate the kill switch!" Willis' descent into VOD/DTV irrelevance is odd in that it seems to be by choice. He was still getting major, starring Hollywood gigs when he started dabbling in this shady netherworld and now, aside from his iffy turn in the current stage production of MISERY, it's these slapdash paycheck jobs that seem to constitute the overwhelming majority of his cinematic work these days.

Few actors do a worse job of masking their complete indifference to a project than Willis, and as set by the standards of FIRE WITH FIRE, THE PRINCE, and VICE, he's sleepwalking through EXTRACTION, a film that shares a screenwriter and at least five supporting actors with the recent VOD release HEIST, which featured Robert De Niro, himself no stranger to inexplicably slumming in B-movies between high-profile studio titles. Rather than sitting behind a desk, Willis spends most of his limited screen time in EXTRACTION zip-tied to a chair in a dimly-lit warehouse office. He plays Leonard Turner, a former CIA legend forced into retirement a decade earlier after a terrorist outfit he was pursuing attacked his home and murdered his wife. His teenage son Harry survived the tragedy, and in the present day, played by the almost-lifelike Kellan Lutz (the TWILIGHT series), is in the CIA training program in Prague, against his father's wishes. Disregarding the orders of his superiors and his mentor and dad's old partner Robertson (D.B. Sweeney), Harry takes matters into his own hands when Leonard is kidnapped in Newark by a group of domestic terrorists who have stolen "The Condor," described as "the ultimate hack" (not to be confused with 2015 Bruce Willis), a device that, once activated, can control any government's electronic communication--internet, e-mail, GPS, etc. It can only be deactivated by "The Patriarch Key," which must be uploaded directly into The Condor. Teaming with CIA agent and ex-girlfriend Victoria Fair (Gina Carano), Harry heads to Newark to rescue his estranged father, resulting in two fight scenes at bars, a few explosions, some attempts at witty repartee (the ass-kicking Carano doesn't seem like someone who would start a sentence with "You know, this totes reminds me of..."), and a shootout at an abandoned warehouse, just in case you were concerned that EXTRACTION would do something completely insane and even slightly stray from the path of utterly formulaic convention.

Blandly directed by Steven C. Miller, who's got the atrocious SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT remake SILENT NIGHT on his resume, EXTRACTION feels overlong and padded even at a brief 82 minutes--and that includes over a minute devoted to five or six production company logos at the start, a long opening credits sequence where 23 producers have to see their names listed, and a slow closing credit crawl that combine to make the actual movie itself a little under 75 minutes. It's the kind of movie where Jersey-based characters can't just say "Newark," but instead have to say "Newark, New Jersey" to give the target audience--pay-per-viewers at hotels in Asia and the United Arab Emirates--some sense of geography. It's the kind of movie where an establishing shot of the most instantly recognizable cemetery in America is accompanied by the caption "Arlington National Cemetery - Washington, D.C."

"Hey, pal...there should be
another zero on this!"

EXTRACTION gets its biggest boost from an occasionally funny, Bob Balaban-like performance by Steve Coulter as the sarcastic, condescending CIA honcho watching the proceedings on a bank of monitors in the mandatory Jason Bourne Crisis Suite (when told about the specifics of The Condor, he calmly and matter-of-factly queries "Can someone who didn't spend their childhood jerking off to science magazines explain this to me?"). Still waiting for a worthy starring vehicle post-HAYWIRE, Carano isn't given much to work with, starting with Lutz, who's so charisma-impaired and so lacking in screen presence that he practically evaporates before your eyes. Lutz has got several failed actioners under his belt (JAVA HEAT, the unwatchable THE LEGEND OF HERCULES, and the disappointing THE EXPENDABLES 3) in numerous attempts to make him a thing after TWILIGHT, and it's not hard to fathom why Willis is so bored playing support to him, though a late-film plot twist does get Bruno out of his chair and a little more invested in the proceedings than in his other VOD credits. I still doubt Willis spent more than a few days working on EXTRACTION before ensuring the money was wired to his bank account and moving on to his next projects: an action thriller called MARAUDERS directed by--you guessed it--Steven C. Miller, and a heist thriller called PRECIOUS CARGO, directed by EXTRACTION co-writer Max Adams. Can someone sit Bruce Willis down and show him DIE HARD or maybe PULP FICTION? Hell, even COLOR OF NIGHT would be worth another look at this point. Does Willis have some personal financial issues that necessitate his taking on these mercenary assignments or is he still pissed that nobody went to see HUDSON HAWK and he's just now exacting his vengeance?

STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS
(US - 2015)

Directed by J.J. Abrams. Written by Lawrence Kasdan, J.J. Abrams and Michael Arndt. Cast: Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Max von Sydow, Lupita Nyong'o, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, Gwendoline Christie, Joonas Suotamo, Simon Pegg, Pip Torrens, Kiran Shah, Greg Grunberg, Kenny Baker, Warwick Davis, Ken Leung, Iko Uwais, Harriet Walter, Thomas Brodie-Sangster. (PG-13, 135 mins)

Picking up the STAR WARS saga a decade after the mixed-bag prequel trilogy, fan expectations were high with franchise overlord George Lucas removing himself from the equation and Episode VII being handed to polarizing director and lens flare enthusiast J.J. Abrams. Abrams himself is coming off a career nadir with the abysmal STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS, a film that everyone loved until they actually saw it. Taking place 30 or so years after the events of RETURN OF THE JEDI, STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS brings together two protagonists--lone warrior/scavenger Rey (Daisy Ridley), from the desert planet Jakku, and morally-conflicted Stormtrooper FN-2187, or "Finn" (ATTACK THE BLOCK's John Boyega)--and a rolling droid called BB-8, who has an important piece of a map in his possession, placed there by Resistance pilot Poe Dameron (EX MACHINA's Oscar Isaac). The Empire may have fallen after the destruction of the second Death Star, but The First Order has risen in its place, overseen by the nefarious, masked Kylo Ren (GIRLS' Adam Driver) and ambitious General Hux (Isaac's EX MACHINA co-star Domnhall Gleeson, channeling Peter Cushing's Grand Moff Tarkin), who work at the behest of Supreme Leader Snoke (motion-captured Andy Serkis). The map contains the key to the whereabouts of the long-missing Luke Skywalker, and with Kylo Ren's Stormtroopers in pursuit, Rey, Finn, and BB-8 commandeer a junked Millennium Falcon and cross paths with none other than Han Solo (Harrison Ford) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew in some closeups, but played mostly by stuntman Joonas Suotamo due to 71-year-old Mayhew's disabling knee issues), who are surprised to find their old ship. As the hunt for BB-8 intensifies, the heroes end up joining the Resistance, led by General Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), who's desperately searching for the whereabouts of her lost brother, Luke.

It's simply impossible to replicate the groundbreaking, game-changing phenomenon that was the original STAR WARS trilogy, which still stand among the most influential films ever made. It's clear that Abrams and co-scripters Michael Arndt (LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE) and EMPIRE STRIKES BACK/RETURN OF THE JEDI co-writer Lawrence Kasdan (THE BIG CHILL) have molded THE FORCE AWAKENS as the "give the fans what they want" nostalgia trip. There's nothing wrong with that, but one must keep their expectations in check. It's filled with exciting action, fun performances, and lots of trips down Memory Lane to get a good sentimental streak going, but that's really all it does. It works for the most part, and you'd almost have to be a total dick to not get a big, stupid grin on your face over Han's and Chewbacca's first appearance 40 minutes in when they discover the Millennium Falcon ("Chewie...we're home!"). The same goes for the eventual appearances of Fisher's Leia (she and Han still harboring feelings for one another, and both feeling a sense of responsibility for the rise of The First Order), Anthony Daniels' C-3PO, and an offline R2-D2 (81-year-old Kenny Baker now credited as "R2-D2 Consultant"), who comes back to life late in the film to provide an important piece of the puzzle involving Luke's location. Mark Hamill returns as Luke--obviously to help set up what must be a larger role in Episode VIII--but don't be fooled by his second billing: there are Hitchcock cameos that last longer than Hamill's appearance in THE FORCE AWAKENS.

There's also a trip to a bar run by 1000-year-old pirate Maz Kanata (motion-captured by 12 YEARS A SLAVE's Lupita Nyong'o) that looks very similar to the legendary Mos Eisley Cantina, and there's numerous callbacks and parallels to previous saga plotlines, from Rey living in the hollowed remnants of an AT-AT Walker to a father-son confrontation that looks very similar to the Cloud City showdown between Luke and Darth Vader in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. The set-up itself is very similar to STAR WARS, with BB-8 carrying a crucial piece of information and teaming up with Rey, much like the circumstances that brought R2-D2 and Luke together. Franchise newcomers Boyega and Ridley acquit themselves well, particularly Ridley, whose fierce energy makes her an inspiring heroine worthy of becoming a next-gen Luke Skywalker. Once he removes the helmet, Driver is seriously miscast as the sulking, pouting Kylo Ren, and regardless of that being the intent with the character, it turns Kylo Ren into little more than a millennial Darth Vader with daddy issues. For those who saw the original trilogy when it was new, the real fun of STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS is seeing the old-school icons back in action. Even though only Han and Chewbacca get any significant screen time, it's great fun seeing them still doing what they do and bickering like an old married couple. Ford gets by on his legend alone, often delivering his dialogue with a "Look, Abrams...how much longer do I have to be here?" tone that sort-of works considering he's playing an older and even more cynical Han that gels rather well with the actor's grouchy persona. He gets a huge laugh out of fans when Rey says "You're the Han Solo?! You made the Kessel Run in 14 parsecs!" to which Han angrily snaps "12 parsecs!" then, shaking his head and harumphing in incredulous disgust under his breath, "14..." Abrams and the writers lean heavily on that sense of established goodwill and unlike the prequel trilogy, it moves quickly, gets pretty much all of the exposition out of the way in the traditional opening crawl, and doesn't dawdle around with political machinations and trade federation debates or get bogged down with George Lucas' complete post-JEDI inability to grasp human interaction. There have been some analogies made comparing this to a long-floundering classic rock band getting a few original members back together for a new album and going on a tour to play one song from it while the rest of the set is all the beloved hits from the past. That perfectly describes STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS: it's the real thing, it's got enough of the key components, it's fun while you're watching it and maybe you love it now because you really don't like the prequels and this gives you everything you want. But when the dust on Jakku settles, is it really going to hold up against the original trilogy?

TIME OUT OF MIND
(US - 2015)

A long-planned pet project for Richard Gere, TIME OUT OF MIND is anchored by one of the veteran actor's most committed performances. Gere is the focal point and is in every scene as George Hammond, a homeless man on the streets of NYC. Introduced squatting in a vacant tenement and kicked out by the landlord (Steve Buscemi), George makes his way around the city, asking for spare change and trying to find a place to sleep. He has his rituals, like sitting in the park and selling his coat for beer money only to stop by a donation center at a church to grab a new one. He wants to reconnect with his estranged bartender daughter Maggie (Jena Malone), who wants nothing to do with him. The film is largely plotless and seems to go where George's day takes him, though we learn bits and pieces as it goes on: George's life started to collapse over a decade earlier when he lost his job and his insurance, then his wife got sick and he was unable to get her proper medical care. After she died, he handed Maggie over to be raised by his mother-in-law, and he's been surviving on the streets since, unable to pull his life together and admittedly living in a ten-year-long blur. Gere and writer/director Oren Moverman (THE MESSENGER, RAMPART) aren't really interested in telling a linear story as much as they are getting inside George's head. Moverman often plants the camera on Gere as we hear all the sounds that surround him, going in one ear and out the other: fragments of chatter and phone conversations, passing cars, horns, sirens, construction, and the general sounds of NYC. Moverman often goes for old-school guerrilla filmmaking, keeping the camera stationary and from a distance--perhaps from inside a business establishment--to observe Gere-as-George asking passersby for change, rummaging through trash cans, or sleeping on the sidewalk as actual NYC pedestrians are unaware that the homeless man they're passing is a famous Hollywood actor. It feels a little gimmicky at times, and at 121 minutes, it's an extremely slow-moving exercise in verite minimalism that's a good 30 minutes longer than it really needs to be (there were walkouts when it was shown at the Toronto Film Festival in 2014), but it's an ambitious experiment on Gere's part, and he gets some solid support from friends who appear in cameos, like Kyra Sedgwick as a homeless woman, Michael Kenneth Williams as a guard at the shelter, and, in his best role in years, Ben Vereen as a homeless former jazz pianist (or so he claims) and nonstop chatterbox befriended by George at the shelter. With no concern for mainstream appeal (IFC had this on 18 screens at its widest release) and no real drive to the story, it's most certainly not for everyone. It's absolutely the kind of film you need to be in the mood for, but it's a must-see for Gere fans and if you brew a pot of strong coffee ahead of time, it has its rewards, particularly in its powerful final shot. (R, 121 mins)

NASTY BABY
(Chile/France - 2015)

Chilean filmmaker Sebastian Silva (the 2012 Michael Cera stoner oddity CRYSTAL FAIRY & THE MAGICAL CACTUS) wrote, directed, and stars in this largely improvised--at least for its first 2/3--comedy-drama that remains effective despite never really settling on what it wants to accomplish. In a gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood, gay couple Freddy (Silva) and Mo (RACHEL GETTING MARRIED's Tunde Adebimpe, also the frontman for the band TV on the Radio) are trying to become parents with the help of Freddy's friend Polly (Kristen Wiig), who desperately wants to be a mom, with the trio planning to raise the child in an unconventional but loving home. Freddy's low sperm count prompts Polly to plead with Mo to be the donor, which he initially declines but eventually agrees to do. As they go about their daily lives, with performance artist Freddy planning an absurdly awful multimedia exhibition called "Nasty Baby," where he sucks on a pacifier and rolls around on the floor like a helpless infant while video of Mo, Polly, and Freddy's assistant Wendy (Alia Shawkat) doing the same plays on video monitors around him, Silva establishes an occasionally rambling improvisational feel in the relationship and interaction between Freddy, Mo, and Polly and how their lifestyle choice affects those in their lives. They get support from fatherly neighbor Richard (a rare nice-guy performance by veteran character actor Mark Margolis), who's also gay, and there's some static from Mo's opinionated sister about their "disregard" of tradition.

But their biggest obstacle is "The Bishop" (Reg E. Cathey), a homophobic and mentally unstable neighborhood nutjob who fires up his leaf blower at 7:00 am, hurls anti-gay slurs at the couple whenever they pass him on the sidewalk, and also repeatedly gets in Polly's personal space and physically grabs her from behind, but the cops won't arrest him because his mother is a prominent judge. Throughout the film, the Bishop's increasingly aggressive and antagonizing presence provokes a discomforting sense of unease to what otherwise feels like any number of self-indulgent mumblecore indie rom-coms, Indeed, the final third offers one of the most abrupt, jarring, and audacious plot shifts in recent memory, sort-of like how Robert Rodriguez's FROM DUSK TILL DAWN went from a kidnapping thriller to a vampire movie at its midpoint. Even with the Bishop's irrational behavior, you still won't be prepared for what Silva does--for better or for worse--with the character in the late stages. There's certainly an argument that NASTY BABY is an uneven, unfocused mess (and despite what some thinkpiece-type reviews might say, I don't see it saying one thing or another about gentrification), but after getting to know these characters for an hour and change, and suffering through Freddy's cringe-worthy demonstrations of his idiotic presentation (surely, Silva is satirizing pretentious, hipster performance artists with the ludicrous "Nasty Baby" project), the shocking development that dominates the last third and sends it into blood-splattered, SHALLOW GRAVE territory prompts you to question what you really think of them and what they think of themselves (you can see the self-doubt on Freddy's face in the final shot). Silva and Adebimpe make a likable couple, a wild-eyed Cathey is intimidating and terrifying, and Wiig continues to surprise in her post-SNL/BRIDESMAIDS career choices that include the blockbuster THE MARTIAN and the upcoming GHOSTBUSTERS remake, but also have her spending a lot of time in small, under-the-radar indies like this, HATESHIP LOVESHIP, and WELCOME TO ME. NASTY BABY is a weird and ultimately unsettling little movie that sneaks up on you and veers wildly down roads you never see coming. It's hard to tell if it's some kind of slyly brilliant head game or a last-ditch, desperation Hail Mary to keep the story going, but regardless, it sticks with you. (R, 101 mins)

GUNS FOR HIRE
(US - 2015)

You really have to sit back and admire the astonishing straight-to-DVD hosejob that is GUNS FOR HIRE. It's practically a throwback to the days of old when people were duped into seeing movies that were nothing like the misleading posters. One can't entirely blame the writing/directing team of Donna Robinson and Katherine Brooks. After all, GUNS FOR HIRE was a last-minute title change for a film shot as the more docile-sounding THE ADVENTURES OF BEATLE. It's a quirky character piece that was obviously never meant to be thought of as the gun-toting action thriller that the GUNS FOR HIRE artwork is selling, with the recognizable faces of Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Ben Mendelsohn, Tony Shalhoub, and Orlando Jones on display (all have supporting roles that range from minor to, in Shalhoub's case, a brief cameo). It almost looks like some kind of SMOKIN' ACES knockoff or something along those lines. But as you watch the movie, it doesn't take long to figure out that something doesn't seem right and something is very off, particularly with the appearance of Mendelsohn, whose craggy, sad-sack visage has been in seen several noteworthy films of late and the Netflix series BLOODLINE, but he looks distractingly young here. Then Morgan turns up, and he looks both younger and a little heavier in the face than he's been in recent films. Though it completed post-production in 2013 and has some 2013 and 2014 copyrighted songs by unknown bands in the credits, principal photography on what was called THE ADVENTURES OF BEATLE was done all the way back in 2006. In other words, the film now being released as GUNS FOR HIRE has spent nearly a decade on the shelf before being a justifiably silent DVD burial.

Well, I've got news for Robinson and Brooks: this thing still doesn't seem to be ready for public consumption. The credits are video-burned; the opening credit roll lists Robinson and Brooks as co-directors but the closing credits only give Robinson director credit; prominently-billed Brooke Adams (the 1978 version of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, THE DEAD ZONE) has a nanosecond of screen time as a secretary, another character whizzing by her as she gets up from her desk and has a door slammed in her face with her back to the camera, only allowing you to ascertain that it's Adams if you hit the pause button; and even better than that, Ivana Milicevic (RUNNING SCARED, CASINO ROYALE) is credited with playing someone named "Friday Green" and isn't even in it. GUNS FOR HIRE follows lesbian tow-truck driver and part-time assassin Beatle (Michele Hicks, who was on THE SHIELD at the time), and the story is told in flashbacks as she's being interrogated by angry cop Holt (Raffaello Degruttola) over her association with sleazy crime kingpin Kyle Sullivan (Mendelsohn). Athena (Ever Carradine) is a suicide case being pursued by Sullivan's psychotic hitman Bruce (Morgan), but instead hires Beatle to kill her first. Of course, they fall in love but not before endless psychoanalyzing and Cassavetesian discussions that turn the film into a talky remake of BOUND that plays like it's being staged by the world's worst acting workshop. That's bad enough, but then Robinson and Brooks pull two laughable whoppers of plot twists out of their asses that take a merely boring, pointless film and turn it into an inexcusable, infuriating one. Even factoring out the retitling and the marketing and looking at it as simply THE ADVENTURES OF BEATLE, this is an amateurishly-made, badly-acted, and thoroughly unwatchable collection of scenes that might make a lot of noise, but goes nowhere and says nothing. GUNS FOR HIRE wasn't so much completed as it was abandoned. It obviously ran into some huge problems on the long--but not long enough--road to release to be kept on the shelf for so many years (a 2014 BEATLE trailer got a polite but vague response from Morgan on Twitter), but this is such a hopelessly lost cause that not even a vigorous and sweaty Hicks/Sarah Shahi sex scene in the early-going can keep it from being the worst 2015 film I've seen so far. You're off the hook, HOT TUB TIME MACHINE 2, MONSTERS: DARK CONTINENT, and THE VATICAN TAPES. (Unrated, 82 mins)

THE BIG SHORT
(US - 2015)

Directed by Adam McKay. Written by Charles Randolph and Adam McKay. Cast: Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Marisa Tomei, Melissa Leo, Hamish Linklater, Rafe Spall, Jeremy Strong, John Magaro, Finn Wittrock, Adepero Oduye, Karen Gillan, Jeffry Griffin, Byron Mann, Billy Magnusson, Max Greenfield, Stanley Wong, Tracy Letts, Wayne Pere, Al Sapienza. (R, 130 mins)

Based on the book of the same name by Moneyball author Michael Lewis and a good companion piece with J.C. Chandor's 2011 film MARGIN CALL, THE BIG SHORT chronicles the disparate group of hedge fund oddballs and outsiders who predicted the bursting of the mortgage bubble and bet against the American economy when it became apparent that the crash was inevitable. Directed and co-written by frequent Will Ferrell collaborator Adam McKay, THE BIG SHORT treats a serious, devastating subject with cynical and often scathing humor, with an offbeat and occasionally anarchic sensibility that's used conservatively enough that it doesn't wear out its welcome. For instance, when the Wall Street verbiage gets a little too technical for the layman, narrator Jared Vennett (a smooth, sarcastic Ryan Gosling) will break the fourth wall to introduce a celebrity and say something like "And now, to explain this in everyday terms, here's Margot Robbie drinking champagne in a bubble bath," or "Here's world-famous chef Anthony Bourdain..." though at times it opts for the easy route and has an incredulous character say "OK, wait a minute...let me get this straight...are you saying....?"

The film, which changes the names of the major players from Lewis' book except for Dr. Michael Burry, centers on a small number of individuals who took the time to separately analyze data to conclude that the global economy was a Jenga tower with a foundation of dubiously unstable subprime loans. In 2005, Scion Capital head Burry (Christian Bale), a socially-awkward former neurologist-turned-hedge fund wunderkind with a glass eye and Asperger's and a penchant for ultra-casual dress and air-drumming to Master of Puppets-era Metallica and Pantera in his office, is the first to notice the initial signs of trouble and of course, no one listens to him. He risks becoming a Wall Street pariah when he invests his firm's money into betting against subprime mortgages (known as a "credit default swap") that he anticipates collapsing beginning in 2007 ("Everybody pays their mortgage!" overconfident bank execs say repeatedly). Vennett is another hedge fund cowboy who overhears news of Burry's maverick actions and finds his own analysis comes to the same conclusion. A wrong number by Vennett ends up bringing him into contact with the abrasive Mark Baum (Steve Carell), an outspoken trader with an axe to grind against big banks, and the head of FrontPoint, a small outfit within Morgan Stanley that's referred to as "the world's angriest hedge fund." Vennett and Baum discover that clumps of bad loans are being repackaged as CDOs (collateralized debt obligation) with inaccurate AAA ratings or just flat-out fraudulent "synthetic CDOs" and it's not only being condoned but encouraged. At the same time, a pair of idealistic young hedge funders from Colorado, Charlie Geller (John Magaro) and Jamie Shipley (Finn Wittrock), also get word of what Vennett and Baum are up to and want a piece of the action. They secure the assistance of legendary trader Ben Rickert (co-producer Brad Pitt, who had a big success with the movie version of MONEYBALL)--a paranoid semi-recluse who grew so disgusted with Wall Street's dishonesty that he quit the business and retired with his millions to Colorado to live off the land. Rickert informs them that the mortgage collapse will make them millions, but it also means millions of middle-class Americans will lose everything in the process.

That's the message at the heart of THE BIG SHORT. Wall Street's illegal antics and unending greed created a housing bubble that everyone got a piece of until reality set in and the bill came due. It takes a year longer for the bubble to burst than Burry predicted, mainly because the banks were withholding vital information and not being honest about what was really happening as they continued to turn no one down for a home loan ("Immigrants are the best," one broker brags, adding "They don't even know what you're saying!"). To its credit, the film doesn't make its characters into heroes, at the most painting them in shades of gray: they profit from the collapse of the evil financial institutions, but it's still the public that pays the price, especially with the inevitable taxpayer bailout ("They knew this was coming and they did nothing to stop it because they knew the taxpayers would bail them out," Vennett seethes). The ensemble cast is terrific, though only Carell and Gosling have any scenes together (with the exception of a shot where he walks by Carell and Gosling at a convention, all of Pitt's scenes are solo or with Magaro and Wittrock; and Bale never crosses paths with any of them), and the script by McKay and Charles Randolph (who also wrote the absurd THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE) is filled with zingers and quotable dialogue (Vennett to one of Baum's partners played by Jeremy Strong: "That's a nice shirt...do they make it for men?") that almost function as a protective shield from all the devastation on display. There's a good amount of humor ranging from dark to laugh-out-loud, but also gut-wrenching poignancy, as when Baum's partners find entire subdivisions of homes left abandoned when the owners simply walked away from the house, sometimes leaving almost everything behind ("This looks like Chernobyl...all they took was the TV"), and in some cases leaving unlucky renters in the lurch ("He hasn't been paying the mortgage? But I've been paying my rent!" says one tenant whose family is living in a van by the end of the movie). Easily McKay's most mature work to date, THE BIG SHORT is a bleakly funny, laugh-so-you-don't-cry autopsy of an economic clusterfuck that reinforced the cynicism of today's world: as Vennett says "Only one banker went to prison, all the executives got fat bonuses, and everything was blamed on immigrants and the poor." The end credits tell what the principals have been up to since the events depicted here. The most telling is that Burry's repeated requests to interview Wall Street investment honchos, bank CEOs and government officials about the crash have all been declined and since 2008, the IRS has audited him four times.

JOY
(US - 2015)

Written and directed by David O. Russell. Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper, Edgar Ramirez, Diane Ladd, Virginia Madsen, Isabella Rossellini, Dascha Polanco, Elisabeth Rohm, Ken Howard, Susan Lucci, Donna Mills, Laura Wright, Maurice Benard, John Enos, Alexander Cook, Jimmy Jean-Louis, Melissa Rivers. (PG-13, 124 mins)

With JOY, a loose biopic of inventor, entrepreneur, and HSN personality Joy Mangano, writer/director David O. Russell has started to coast on formulaic tropes that stretch back to 2010's THE FIGHTER and 2012's SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK. Like those two justifiably acclaimed films, JOY has a down-and-out protagonist trying to scrape by while being helped but more often hindered by an ostensibly well-meaning but absurdly dysfunctional family. We had Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) in THE FIGHTER, struggling to succeed in the ring while dealing with a crackhead brother (Christian Bale), a pushy mother (Melissa Leo), and a small army of almost comically unpleasant sisters, and Pat Solitano, Jr.(Bradley Cooper) in SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK, struggling to come out on top with his bipolar disorder while falling for a bitter young widow (Jennifer Lawrence) and dealing with his wacky friends and family, headed by his superstitious, Philadelphia Eagles-obsessed dad (Robert De Niro). Lawrence, De Niro and Cooper all star in JOY (all also appeared in Russell's 2013 Scorsese homage AMERICAN HUSTLE), and Lawrence's title character is largely cut from the same cloth as Micky Ward and Pat Solitano.

Once-promising high-school valedictorian Joy is an airport ticket clerk and divorced mother of two struggling to support everyone in her family: kindly, encouraging grandmother MiMi (Diane Ladd), her soap opera-addicted, shut-in mother Terry (Virginia Madsen), and even her ex-husband Anthony (Edgar Ramirez), who still lives in the basement. She also has to periodically take in her dad Rudy (De Niro), when he's in between girlfriends, and puts up with older, bitter half-sister Peggy (Elisabeth Rohm)--Rudy's daughter by his first wife--who constantly bad-mouths Joy to her own children. Fed up with none of her dreams coming to fruition and everyone's dependence on her, Joy long ago abandoned her gift of creativity when real life set in. After mopping up a spill and cutting herself on broken glass while hand-wringing the mop, Joy is inspired to create a single-looped thread, self-wringing mop and gets investment backing from Rudy's newest lady friend, wealthy widow Trudy (Isabella Rossellini). Eventually, Joy gets a meeting with QVC exec Neil Walker (Cooper) and after a couple of stumbles that lead to Joy going on the air herself to sell it, the "Miracle Mop" becomes a huge hit, but Joy is unprepared for the cutthroat, dog-eat-dog world of commerce. 95% of the film is Joy's struggle with little regard to the time frame, then it ends with a five-minute wrap-up where years have gone by and she's suddenly a huge business mogul with inventors coming to make product deals with her as if she's Vito Corleone doling out favors on his daughter's wedding day.

At face value, JOY can be seen as an uplifting tale of determination and can-do spirit as the underdog achieves the American Dream and overcomes the obstacles to become a self-made success. But the story is so predictable and the characters surrounding Joy such unlikable and quirky cartoons that it never rings true. Russell seems to vacillate between lighthearted Coen Bros. and less-precious Wes Anderson throughout. Russell isn't as interested in production design as Anderson, but character-wise, it fits that mold. It's often like THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS restaged as a blue-collar HUDSUCKER PROXY. JOY is almost defeated by a bungled opening half-hour that jumps all over the place and never gets the groundwork and exposition effectively conveyed (it's telling that there's four credited editors). We're shown Joy's family as the train wreck they are and get little sense of what brought them to this place of almost outrageous self-delusion. Anthony is constantly regarded as a lazy, deadbeat fuck-up by the family, but he ends up being Joy's rock while everyone else except the loving MiMi--even the allegedly business-savvy Trudy, who insists they don't need a patent attorney--gives Joy terrible advice and almost actively thwarts her progress. Scenes sometimes end in the middle of sentences--possibly an ill-advised stylistic choice--and there's huge gaps in the story that are simply left hanging: does Joy ever quit her airport job? We see her being told she's getting moved to the night shift, then her job is never mentioned again. Why is Peggy such a bitch to Joy? Why do we see so much of Joy's daughter but never even get a clear look at her son's face? Joy Mangano (her last name is never mentioned onscreen) has patented over 100 inventions but we only hear of two: the Miracle Mop and the Huggable Hanger.

Russell has directed Lawrence, Christian Bale, and Melissa Leo to Oscars (along with nominations for Cooper, De Niro, Jacki Weaver, and Amy Adams), with second nominations after the win for Lawrence and Bale. He's certainly an actor's director and JOY intermittently works in fits and starts thanks to its cast: 25-year-old Lawrence is miscast and a decade too young to play someone who quit college 17 years earlier to take charge of the family after her parents' divorce (Mangano was already in her mid-30s when she invented the Miracle Mop), but manages to get by on her energy and screen presence. De Niro has a couple of good De Niro moments (he's really funny in the flashback to Joy and Anthony's wedding, and when he unloads on Terry with "You're like a gas leak--we can't see you, we can't smell you, but you're silently killing all of us!"), Cooper only has a few scenes, but his tour of the QVC operation with Joy is probably Russell's most inspired sequence in the film, and Ladd provides some much-needed warmth and humanity as the loving MiMi. Ramirez is alright but isn't given much to do but stand around, but almost everyone else--Madsen with her gaudy, unsightly eyewear, Rohm constantly glowering and seething, Rossellini's inconsistent shifting from kindly widow to ruthless shark--is stuck playing unplayable characters. Madsen comes off the worst by far, with her pathetic helplessness and her addiction to a terrible daytime soap--featuring characters played by soap vets Susan Lucci, Donna Mills, and John Enos, among others--getting entirely too much screen time (it seems like it'll function as a Greek chorus of sorts, but with Lucci, Mills, and the others giving intentionally terrible line readings, it ultimately plays as a cheap, lazy recurring gag that doesn't really belong in this movie). Madsen's Terry also gets a love interest in Haitian plumber Toussaint (Jimmy Jean-Louis) in a quickly abandoned subplot that never seems plausible and goes nowhere fast. There's probably a very good movie hiding somewhere in the middling misfire JOY ends up being. It feels like Russell is half-assing it, banking on the track record of the proven Lawrence/Cooper/De Niro magic to carry the weight and compensate for the cut corners and shortcomings of a script that maybe needed another polish or two before it was ready to roll.

THE HATEFUL EIGHT
(US - 2015)

Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Walton Goggins, Demian Bichir, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, Bruce Dern, Channing Tatum, James Parks, Zoe Bell, Lee Horsley, Gene Jones, Dana Gourrier, Keith Jefferson, Craig Stark, Belinda Owino. (R, 168 mins)

Quentin Tarantino's second consecutive western (after 2012's spaghetti tribute DJANGO UNCHAINED) is a three-hour epic that's equal parts classic western, Agatha Christie mystery, Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, bitterly misanthropic screed, and a horrific, splatter-filled gorefest. It has everything you'd want in a Tarantino film--quotable dialogue, vividly-detailed characters, a spirited love of all cinematic genres, and some truly inspired creative violence. But it's also Tarantino at his most self-indulgent. THE HATEFUL EIGHT is a very good movie that could've been a great one if there was less of it. For the first time since the 107-minute European cut of DEATH PROOF, the shorter version of which was his contribution to GRINDHOUSE, a Tarantino film has moments of rambling, florid overwriting. Tarantino characters have a lot to say, but in THE HATEFUL EIGHT, they simply talk too much. And then they talk some more. It's the stagiest Tarantino film--even more so than his 1992 debut RESERVOIR DOGS, which had a lot more cutaways and flashbacks and was an hour shorter--but that's by design. For about 90 minutes, THE HATEFUL EIGHT is top-tier Tarantino, with a deliberate buildup that brings a group of wildly disparate characters together during a blizzard and the audience can just lean back and watch a great filmmaker get great performances out of his cast, letting the story gradually build into a stomach-knotting powderkeg of suspense and tension. But then Tarantino loses focus, a couple of major characters are Janet Leigh'd out of the film far earlier than you'd expect, and then it becomes a bit of an unwieldy mess, complete with the requisite Tarantino flashbacking, fractured timelines that bring both plot threads together. To call Tarantino self-indulgent is like calling water wet, but as a director, he's growing too enamored of the words of his favorite writer--Quentin Tarantino--to remain objective. DJANGO UNCHAINED ran a little long, but THE HATEFUL EIGHT starts to feel oppressive after a while, its story not nearly substantive enough to justify its bloated run time. It may sound like I didn't care for it, but I liked it quite a bit. I just would've preferred less of it.

Set several years after the end of the Civil War, THE HATEFUL EIGHT opens during a Wyoming blizzard as a stagecoach heads toward the mountain town of Red Rock. Bounty hunter and former Union Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), with the corpses of three outlaws in tow, hitches a ride on the coach transporting legendary bounty hunter John Ruth, aka "The Hangman" (Kurt Russell), who's taking his latest capture, outlaw Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to hang in Red Rock (she's wanted dead or alive, but as Ruth says, "I don't like to cheat the hangman"). As the blizzard gets closer and travel becomes more treacherous, they decide they'll have to wait it out at a lodge called Minnie's Haberdashery. Warren and Ruth form a Leone-esque unholy alliance to have one another's backs with their respective bounties, and on the way to Minnie's, they're joined by another traveler, new Red Rock sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), on his way to being sworn in and whose horse broke a leg in the storm and had to be killed. Mannix is the son of a legendary Confederate officer and tensions flare with Warren over old North and South grudges. Coach driver O.B. (James Parks) gets them to Minnie's to find others stranded: former Confederate General Sanford Smithers (Bruce Dern); cowboy Joe Gage (Michael Madsen), who's penning his memoirs; the very British Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), Red Rock's hangman; and Bob (Demian Bichir), a Mexican employee of Minnie's. Owners Minnie and Sweet Dave are nowhere to be found and Bob claims they went to visit Minnie's mother on the other side of the mountain and left him in charge. Warren is suspicious of their absence (Bob: "Are you calling me a liar?" Warren: "Not yet") and Ruth doesn't trust anyone in the group, remaining shackled to Daisy in the event anyone plans on collecting the $10,000 reward for her capture. Words are exchanged, war-era grievances exhumed, and alliances shift as it becomes clear that at least one person in the room isn't who they claim to be.

Though it doesn't involve an alien creature, the scenario should sound familiar to any Kurt Russell fan who's seen John Carpenter's 1982 version of THE THING. That's one of the most obvious homages in THE HATEFUL EIGHT, right down to the film's use of unused cues from the legendary Ennio Morricone's THING soundtrack (one of the very few times a Carpenter film was scored by someone other than Carpenter). Though Tarantino uses his usual mix-tape approach to scoring the film, throwing in some Roy Orbison and The White Stripes as well as a memorable borrowing of Morricone's "Regan's Theme" from EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC, the film also contains some original Morricone music written specifically for it. Tarantino's grandiose vision for THE HATEFUL EIGHT borders on hubris at times--who else would stage an overlong drawing-room mystery taking place mostly on one set while shooting in Ultra Panavision 70, a 65mm format that hasn't been used since 1966 (in keeping with that, a roadshow edition running 175 minutes (plus an intermission and an overture with some new Morricone music, debuted on 100 screens a week earlier than this general release version)? The snowy exteriors look incredible on a big screen, and Tarantino's the kind of gifted filmmaker who can make such lofty ambitions work in such a claustrophobic setting, also tossing in a few unmistakably De Palma split diopter shots to make the really hardcore movie nerds trickle a little with giddy excitement (guilty as charged).

From Tarantino's ego (the opening credits declare "The 8th Film by Quentin Tarantino," and midway through, he can't resist giving himself the role of narrator) to the inflated length to the use of Ultra Panavision for what's mostly a single-set production, everything about THE HATEFUL EIGHT is grandiosely overblown, including--intentionally so--the performances. Russell fans will be delighted to see him resurrecting the John Wayne swagger he used as Jack Burton in 1986's BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, though his better--and more restrained--2015 western performance can be seen in BONE TOMAHAWK. Jackson does his furious indignation schtick that no one does better, and no one drops an enraged "motherfucker" quite like him (and he gets to spit out his most vile Tarantino monologue yet with a story he tells Dern's Smithers about crossing paths with his son), and Leigh is positively feral at times, especially once she's missing some teeth and covered in blood and brain matter, looking like a possession victim in a '70s EXORCIST ripoff by the end. THE HATEFUL EIGHT is a film that's unmistakably the work of its mad scientist auteur creator, showcasing both his strengths and weaknesses, and operating at an estimated rate of 75% riveting to 25% tedious. Tarantino is one of the very few major directors whose new films constitute a legitimate event, but he could really stand to start taking a "less is more" approach.

CLOSE RANGE
(US - 2015)

The latest teaming of B-movie action icons Scott Adkins and director Isaac Florentine has about as straightforward an action movie set-up as you can get. Adkins is Colton MacReady, an on-the-run Iraq War deserter who turns up in Mexico and takes out a good chunk of the soldiers working for drug lord Fernando Garcia (Tony Perez). Among the dead are Garcia's nephew (Ray Diaz), who kidnapped MacReady's teenage niece Hailey (Madison Lawlor), after her lowlife stepfather Walt (Jake La Botz), the go-between for Garcia's operation north of the border in Arizona, stole a hefty sum of money belonging to the cartel. MacReady brings Hailey home to her mother, his sister Angela (Caitlin Keats), with what's left of Garcia's army in hot pursuit. The bad guys have some help from corrupt sheriff Calloway (Nick Chinlund), who's morally conflicted over his duty to the law and the money that being on the Garcia payroll brings him. In addition to periodic attempts to show Calloway's decent side, there's also some brief overtures at characterization in the way MacReady scolds his widowed sister for settling on a shitbag like Walt for a second husband, but Florentine wisely keeps the focus on action, with MacReady, Angela, and Hailey holed up inside the family farmhouse while Garcia keeps sending his guys in only to get roundhouse-kicked, stabbed repeatedly, or just shot in the head point-blank by MacReady.

If you've ever seen a Florentine/Adkins collaboration, you know that over-the-top action is the main focus, and CLOSE RANGE delivers to almost absurd levels. Florentine fluidly moves the camera around to keep as much of the expertly-choreographed confrontations going with as few cuts as possible. Things get a little sped up at times, as is the norm, but he makes an effort to avoid going for the quick-cut, shaky-cam approach, which showcases exactly how much work went into these sequences by the actors and the stunt crew. Story-wise, CLOSE RANGE is pretty standard and predictable--of course, MacReady deserted for the right reasons, as he was defying incompetent orders that would've disgraced his unit and led to certain death--and Florentine gets a little too winking at times with the fun but repetitive spaghetti western homages. But it steps up where it matters, and again, you're forced to wonder why Adkins isn't headlining bigger movies (Florentine likely prefers the autonomy of low-budget cinema). It's not quite on the level of their UNDISPUTED sequels or the outstanding NINJA: SHADOW OF A TEAR. but it's more entertaining and satisfying than a lot of what passes for major action movies these days. Short, simple, and to the point (except for a drawn-out title card intro for each minor villain, which only seems to be there in order to pad the brief run time), CLOSE RANGE's only goal is to have Scott Adkins glower and kick ass for an hour and a half, and on that end, it achieves everything it sets out to do. (R, 85 mins)

SHANGHAI
(US/China - 2015)

Filmed in Bangkok in the summer of 2008 and released in Asia and other parts of the world over 2010-2011, this lavishly-mounted, $50 million US/Chinese co-production was shelved stateside for seven years by Harvey Weinstein before getting a stealth release on 100 screens in the fall of 2015. SHANGHAI fancies itself a Far East, historical noir CASABLANCA, set in the title city that's doing its best to stave off the encroaching Japanese occupation in October 1941, but the lugubrious pacing, lackluster direction by Mikael Hafstrom (who made the Anthony Hopkins demonic possession film THE RITE and the Stallone/Schwarzenegger pairing ESCAPE PLAN in ensuing years before this finally came out) shoddy CGI, and a hopelessly muddled script by Hossein Amini (DRIVE) prove to be flaws too fatal to overcome. US Naval Intelligence spy Paul Soames (John Cusack) arrives in Shanghai, posing as a Nazi-sympathizing journalist but drawn into a murder investigation when his Navy buddy and fellow agent Conner (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is found dead with his throat slashed. Soames is at the center of an incredibly convoluted story that involves Triad crime lord Anthony Lan-Ting (Chow Yun-Fat) and his mysterious wife Anna (Gong Li), with whom Soames will of course have a clandestine fling. There's also Japanese Intelligence officer Capt. Tanaka (Ken Watanabe), who's suspicious of Soames' true intentions, plus Soames also seduces Leni (an underused Franka Potente), in order to get intel on her husband, a German engineer (Christopher Buchholz), who may have Nazi business to conduct with the Japanese.

A couple of months go by in what feels like real time, and all of these parties converge for a boring climax that takes place on a certain date which will live in infamy--by which I mean the bombing of Pearl Harbor and not the date that Harvey Weinstein greenlit SHANGHAI--with the exception of Leni and her husband, who are completely forgotten by the filmmakers. Rinko Kikuchi (then a recent Oscar nominee for BABEL) turns up as Conner's opium-addicted Japanese girlfriend, and David Morse has a few inconsequential scenes as Soames' contact at the US consulate in Shanghai, warning Soames to not get involved and forced to utter trite dialogue like "This isn't black or white...we're caught in the middle!" SHANGHAI is a tedious, plodding mess that never gets going and never gels together. There's no consistency to the characterizations and everyone wanders in and out of the story with the kind of clunky randomness that suggests this was a much a longer film at some point. Made when Cusack was still getting A-list work but fitting in perfectly with his current string of unseen, Cusackalypse Now paycheck gigs, SHANGHAI reunites the star with Hafstrom, who directed him in the decent 2007 Stephen King adaptation 1408. Cusack is completely unengaging as the hero here and has no chemistry with either Gong or Potente. Beyond that, a fine cast is completely stranded in this incredibly dull misfire that bombed everywhere, grossing just $46,000 in the US. (R, 104 mins)

ASHBY
(US/UK/UAE - 2015)

Mickey Rourke has squandered so many opportunities and burned so many bridges over the last 30 years that it's hard to feel sorry for the present state of his career. But Rourke isn't the problem with the indie comedy-drama ASHBY, an appallingly tone-deaf and wildly inconsistent quirkfest that won raves on the festival circuit because of course it did. The film gives the veteran actor his best role since his Oscar-nominated turn in THE WRESTLER, but ASHBY is an otherwise total failure that's simplistic, insulting, and absolutely insufferable whenever he's not onscreen. In one of the most loathsome performances in recent memory, Nat Wolff, the former NAKED BROTHERS BAND star and current third-string Michael Cera, plays Ed, a 17-year-old who's probably supposed to be a snarky wiseass but comes off as a smug, smirking prick. Ed lives with his divorced mom June (Sarah Silverman) and is put on the backburner by his always-too-busy dad, who traded his old family in for a new one. Ed hates jocks but inexplicably wants to be one anyway, making the football team while befriending quiet neighbor Ashby Holt (Rourke), a withdrawn man who claims to be a retired napkin salesman. Ashby has two secrets he's keeping from Ed: he was recently diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and has three months to live, and he's really a decommissioned CIA assassin, Ed discovering the latter while snooping in Ashby's basement and promising to keep it a secret. Ashby takes Ed under his wing, teaching him how to be a better man than his self-absorbed father (though after spending 100 minutes with Ed, you'll probably at least somewhat see the deadbeat dad's side of things), and Ed improbably becomes the star of the football team while pretending he isn't falling for bespectacled, quirky, and all-around adorkable Eloise (Emma Roberts), the kind of Manic Pixie Dream Girl (© Nathan Rabin) who only exists in movies like ASHBY, and whose neurologist dad has an MRI machine in their house, just in case Ashby will need to use it to prove to Ed that he's indeed terminally ill.

Writer/director Tony McNamara can't seem to decide what he wanted ASHBY to be. It's like the worst parts of Cameron Crowe and Wes Anderson got jumbled in with a RUDY ripoff, a little GRAN TORINO, and a discarded draft of the Kevin Costner-as-a-terminally-ill-assassin movie 3 DAYS TO KILL. When Ashby finds out that one of his assigned contracts was not a threat to the country, but an innocent guy who got in the way of some old associates making a profit on a business deal, he starts taking those associates out--and having an oblivious Ed chauffeur him around--in order to right a wrong while he's still able. Ashby is an anguished man plagued by guilt and regret--he's already lost his wife and daughter and wants nothing more than to be absolved of his countless sins (he estimates he killed 93 people over his career) in order to be permitted into Heaven to be with them. It's a great role for Rourke, but McNamara would rather focus on Wolff's Ed, who's presented as the only smart kid in his class, and the only one with a vague notion of history but who has somehow never seen a cassette tape and, in his clueless fascination, unspools the tape on one of Ashby's Peter Frampton cassettes and smirks "I don't think I can get this back in there." Mind you, it's the entire tape. All of it. How much of the tape do you unspool before you ascertain that it's probably not a good thing? And why would he unspool it in the first place? Is that how he found it? How can a jaded millennial douchebag like Ed not know what a goddamn cassette looks like? Can he possibly be that stupid? And if the scene is played for laughs, then it's even worse, because now Ed is a complete dick for fucking with Ashby's Frampton tape. Wolff goes through the film with a cocky "Aren't I just a stinker?" look that renders his the most punchable face this side of Justin Bieber or the Affluenza kid. It's a wonder why Ashby would even dispense life lessons to this little turd. McNamara's characters are unreal, from Roberts' stock quirky girl who serves as whatever the story needs her to be at any given moment, to Kevin Dunn's bombastic football coach who still uses terms like "the Japs" when referencing WWII, to Zachary Knighton's improbably hipster cool-guy priest with alt-rocker hair who says "fuck" and eats hot wings. The situations are inane, like Ed commandeering the coach's pregame speech--what coach would allow a player to rally the team with "Fuck the coaches!"? ASHBY doesn't exist on any level of reality, and speaking of which, do you know anyone Sarah Silverman's age named June? I don't. Does she have younger sisters named Edith and Myrtle? And there's even stabs at raunch humor with Ed walking in his mom blowing a guy. Rourke brought his A-game to ASHBY, but his efforts were wasted. Rarely has such an excellent performance been stuck in a movie this bad. Paramount picked this up for distribution but the buyer's remorse must've hit quickly: they only released it on 15 screens and VOD for a total gross of $4600. (R, 103 mins)

THE REVENANT
(US/Hong Kong/Taiwan - 2015)

Directed by Alejandro G. Inarritu. Written by Mark L. Smith and Alejandro G. Inarritu. Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter, Forrest Goodluck, Paul Anderson, Lukas Haas, Kristoffer Joner, Joshua Burge, Arthur Redcloud, Duane Edward, Brendan Fletcher, Melaw Nakehk'o, Fabrice Adde, Grace Dove. (R, 156 mins)

Following his Oscar-winning BIRDMAN, Mexican filmmaker Alejandro G. Inarritu (AMORES PERROS) goes full Werner Herzog-meets-Terrence Malick with the unflinchingly brutal and extremely visceral revenge saga THE REVENANT. Based in part on a 2002 novel by Michael Punke, a fictionalized chronicle of famed 19th century trapper/explorer Hugh Glass, THE REVENANT is a semi-remake of the 1971 film MAN IN THE WILDERNESS, where "Zach Bass" was portrayed by Richard Harris during his post-MAN CALLED HORSE period of rugged, violent outdoor adventures. Inarritu constructs THE REVENANT as an homage chiefly to Herzog--with its location shooting in distant and difficult terrains of Canada and Argentina, relying on natural lighting and benefiting from the director's refusal to use greenscreen--but also to Malick, with its long takes of vast wilderness and nature shots with voiceover as Glass, played here by Leonardo DiCaprio, reflects and drifts in and out of consciousness. Exposed to the elements and turning in the most physically demanding performance of his career, DiCaprio is up to the challenges of what's essentially Inarritu's period-setting take on a muddy, bloody, snowy, and slushy survivalist thriller, and while there's a lot of contemplative, dreamlike artistry to establish cineaste cred and to draw comparisons to Malick's THE NEW WORLD, it's also get plenty of harrowing action and a strong narrative to make it accessible to mainstream audiences.

According to legend, Glass was hired as a guide for a group of trappers and frontiersman exploring the vast Louisiana Purchase area in 1823, and after being mauled by a bear, two men in the expedition were left behind to bury Glass when he died. The two men left him to die, taking his guns and equipment with them. Glass survived and traveled 200 miles with serious injuries and on a broken leg, crawling almost the entire way, to find the men and retrieve his belongings. Inarritu and co-writer Mark L. Smith (who's scripted mostly horror movies like VACANCY, Joe Dante's THE HOLE, and the upcoming American remake of MARTYRS) stick to that same basic story, but add a human element to Glass' quest for vengeance in the form of Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), his half-Indian teenage son with his late Pawnee wife. Glass is hired as a guide by a military exploration outfit headed by Capt. Henry (Domhnall Gleeson), who's brought along various mercenary frontiersman and fur trappers who make their living selling pelts. Over 30 of the 40 men in the expedition are killed in a battle with a ferocious Ree tribe, which forces the survivors to send their boat downriver as a decoy and travel the long journey back to the camp on foot if they have any chance of survival. Henry places his trust in Glass, who brought Hawk along, the two knowing the area better than anyone else. That doesn't settle well with Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), an unscrupulous trapper and scalping survivor more concerned with his take on the pelt sales than with everyone's safety. The bigoted Fitzgerald also doesn't like having "half-breed" Hawk along and openly taunts Glass about his dead wife and questions his loyalty to white men. After Glass is viciously mauled by a bear and clings to life, Henry takes all but two of the men back to camp, leaving Fitzgerald and young, inexperienced Bridger (Will Poulter) behind with Hawk to bury Glass when he eventually dies, with orders to bring Hawk back with them to the camp. While Bridger is getting water from the river and Hawk is elsewhere, Fitzgerald convinces Glass to allow him to put him out of his misery, and as he's suffocating him, Hawk returns and attacks Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald barely tries to explain the circumstances, instead quickly opting to stab the boy to death as an immobile Glass watches helplessly. Disposing of the body and lying to the returning Bridger about the Ree tribe being nearby, Fitzgerald half-buries Glass alive and intimidates Bridger into going along with it.

Of course, Glass survives, a revenant returning from the "dead," so to speak. With open, festering wounds covering his body, he slowly regains his strength on his arduous journey back to Henry's camp to make Fitzgerald pay, facing the incredibly harsh elements, a group of French trappers who have abducted a young Ree woman (Melaw Nakahk'o), and the enraged Ree tribe led by Hikuc (Arthur Redcloud), the young woman's Chief father who will stop at nothing to find her. Inarritu channels Herzog's AGUIRRE: THE WRATH OF GOD and FITZCARRALDO in his depiction of Glass' single-minded pursuit (also, to an extent, Nicolas Winding Refn's brilliant 2011 minimalist Viking saga VALHALLA RISING). Glass' obsessive quest for revenge gives him strength and is as blood-soaked as any splatter film, with hacked off limbs, bleeding wounds, bitten-off appendages, scalpings, castration, and Glass using gun powder to cauterize a neck wound. The stunning cinematography by frequent Malick collaborator Emmanuel Lubezki (often utilizing the kind of long takes reminiscent of his work on Alfonso Cuaron's CHILDREN OF MEN), Ryuichi Sakamoto's score, and the intricately detailed production design by the great Jack Fisk (an Oscar-nominee for Paul Thomas Anderson's THERE WILL BE BLOOD and another go-to guy for Malick) combine with Inarritu's vision to create an incredibly rough and unforgiving landscape that vividly captures the merciless nature and the arduous toil of frontier life. Glass' contemplations of his late wife and his thoughts as he traverses the land of the living and the dead in fittingly mythic death-and-rebirth fashion often play as voiceover (and sometimes subtitled, as he speaks Pawnee) and are pretty blatant in their Malick worship, but THE REVENANT is a perfectly-balanced fusion of the arthouse and the commercial. A constantly grunting, wheezing DiCaprio, aided by some gruesomely realistic wound makeup, throws himself into the role with such a committed fervor that it's easy to overlook how great Hardy is here as well, playing one of the most despicably self-serving bastards to come down the pike in some time. In the end, it's little more than a high-end revenge story, but done with artistry and ambition by a genuine auteur at the top of his game.

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE?
(Italy/West Germany - 1972)

Directed by Massimo Dallamano. Written by Bruno Di Geronimo and Massimo Dallamano. Cast: Fabio Testi, Karin Baal, Joachim Fuchsberger, Christine Galbo, Camille Keaton, Gunther W. Stoll, Claudia Botenuth, Maria Monti, Pilar Castel, Giovanna Di Bernardo, Rainer Penkert, Marco Mariani, Antonio Casale, Giancarlo Badessi, Aristide Massaccesi. (Unrated, 107 mins)

After the international success of Dario Argento's THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE (1970), the Italian horror/mystery subgenre known as giallo was a legitimate phenomenon. Argento is generally credited with starting the craze, but the style can be seen in its early stages as far back as Mario Bava's THE EVIL EYE (1963) and BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (1964) and other giallo prototypes like Antonio Margheriti's THE YOUNG, THE EVIL AND THE SAVAGE (1968), Romolo Guerrieri's THE SWEET BODY OF DEBORAH (1968) and Massimo Dallamano's A BLACK VEIL FOR LISA (1968). Following the breakout success of BIRD, Argento quickly followed with THE CAT O'NINE TAILS (1971) and FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET (1972), and the giallo floodgates were opened. Strange, poetic, verbose titles that often incorporated colors, numbers, letters, animals, a woman's name, or questions were hallmarks of the giallo movement, and Argento's films paved the way for Luciano Ercoli's THE FORBIDDEN PHOTOS OF A LADY ABOVE SUSPICION (1970) and DEATH WALKS ON HIGH HEELS (1971), Paolo Cavara's THE BLACK BELLY OF THE TARANTULA (1971), Lucio Fulci's A LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN (1971) and DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING (1972), Riccardo Freda's THE IGUANA WITH THE TONGUE OF FIRE (1971), Duccio Tessari's THE BLOODSTAINED BUTTERFLY (1971), Emilio P. Miraglia's THE RED QUEEN KILLS 7 TIMES (1972), Giuliano Carnimeo's THE CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS (1972), aka WHAT ARE THOSE STRANGE DROPS OF BLOOD DOING ON JENNIFER'S BODY?, Aldo Lado's SHORT NIGHT OF GLASS DOLLS (1971) and WHO SAW HER DIE? (1972), Carlos Aured's Spanish-made BLUE EYES OF THE BROKEN DOLL (1974), and several from Sergio Martino: THE CASE OF THE SCORPION'S TAIL (1971), YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY (1972), and ALL THE COLORS OF THE DARK (1972), aka THEY'RE COMING TO GET YOU, among countless others.

The gialli were also inspired by the work of prolific British mystery novelist, playwright, short-story writer, and screenwriter Edgar Wallace (1875-1932), who died while in the early stages of scripting the 1933 classic KING KONG. Wallace's works had been adapted to the big screen as far back as 1915, but the late 1950s saw a massive resurgence in Wallace's popularity in West Germany roughly 25 years after his death. In 1959, the German production company Rialto Film acquired the rights to a good chunk of the Wallace catalog and produced dozens of films based on his writings throughout the 1960s. Known as krimi, most of these were directed by Harald Reinl or Alfred Vohrer and made their way to the US as part of syndication packages aired on late-night TV and afternoon Creature Features, and like their future gialli brethren, boasted memorable titles like THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE FROG (1959), THE DEVIL'S DAFFODIL (1961), SECRETS OF THE RED ORCHID (1962), THE CURSE OF THE HIDDEN VAULT (1964), THE COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS (1967), and CREATURE WITH THE BLUE HAND (1967). The Rialto Wallace programmers featured a stock company of West Germany-based actors like Klaus Kinski, Karin Dor, Joachim Fuchsberger, Harald Leipnitz, Eddi Arent, Heinz Drache, Werner Peters, and Aidy Berber, but would occasionally import an international star like Christopher Lee. The films were so popular in West Germany that Rialto's rival studio CCC Film bought the rights to several books by Wallace's son Bryan Edgar Wallace, which were turned into a competing series of "B. Edgar Wallace" adaptations like THE STRANGLER OF BLACKMOOR CASTLE (1962), THE PHANTOM OF SOHO (1964), and THE MONSTER OF LONDON CITY (1964).

In 1972, for their final Wallace-inspired production and more or less a passing of the torch to Italian thrillers, Rialto teamed up with Clodio Cinematografica and Italian International Film to produce the Italian/West German giallo/krimi hybrid WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE?, a film that attempted to balance the sleaze and the graphic violence of the gialli with the old-school, Edgar Wallace-inspired mystery of the krimi. For the most part, it succeeded, though it certainly leans more toward the giallo side of things, with the primary influence of the krimi coming from the presence of genre vets Karen Baal and Joachim Fuchsberger. If there's a poster boy for all things krimi, it's Fuchsberger (1927-2014), a busy character actor who became a beloved celebrity (nicknamed "Blacky" by friends and fans) and TV talk and game show fixture in his homeland, even serving as the stadium announcer at the opening and closing ceremonies at the ill-fated 1972 Olympics in Munich. Fuchsberger made a career playing detectives and inspectors in seemingly every krimi ever made, and of course, he's the lead detective in SOLANGE, which centers on philandering Enrico Rossini (Fabio Testi), a married gym teacher at a British girls' school who's having an affair with one of his students, Elizabeth (Christine Galbo). While the two are carrying on in a rowboat by the riverside, Elizabeth catches a flash of a blade coming from a nearby wooded area and the next day, a body is found near their canoodling spot, the woman stabbed and the knife still sticking out of her vagina. Initially dismissing Elizabeth's claims that she saw a knife, a concerned Rossini goes to the murder scene to find it swarming with police, arrives late for work and lies about having car trouble to wife and fellow teacher Herta (Baal), which blows up in his face when he's visible among the onlookers in a newspaper photograph of the murder scene on the front page of the next day's paper. This brings him into the sights of Inspector Barth (Fuchsberger), who thinks he has his prime suspect, which puts more strain on Rossini's already-fracturing relationship with the cold and brittle Herta. Elizabeth is plagued by nightmares about the murder, and more victims are found, all girls at the school and stabbed in the vagina, and though Rossini is eventually cleared as a suspect, he follows the rules of the giallo by conducting his own investigation. This ultimately leads him to the mysterious Solange (Camille Keaton, later to cement her place in exploitation history in the infamous 1978 grindhouse rape/revenge cult classic I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE), a traumatized, mentally-disturbed young woman with a dark tragedy in her past that has a direct correlation to the horrific serial killings that also claim the life of Elizabeth.

Directed by Italian journeyman Massimo Dallamano, of the aforementioned A BLACK VEIL FOR LISA and the cinematographer on Sergio Leone's A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964) and FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE (1965), SOLANGE is very much a giallo, right down to its sordid story, and the haunting score by Ennio Morricone, with dreamy, wordless vocals by the ubiquitous Edda Dell'Orso. It's one of the great "schoolgirls in peril" slasher thrillers, a tangent of the giallo movement that began with Margheriti's THE YOUNG, THE EVIL AND THE SAVAGE, aka NAKED YOU DIE, and popularized by the likes of Narciso Ibanez Serrador's THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED (1969), Sergio Martino's masterpiece TORSO (1973), and even Bob Clark's Canadian-made classic BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974), and Juan Piquer Simon's insane chainsaw massacre epic PIECES (1983). Even the schoolgirls-in-peril films had their own supernatural spinoffs, like Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA (1977) and PHENOMENA (1985). SOLANGE adheres to many tropes of its giallo contemporaries beyond its disturbing violence and its dark, bleak twist. Elizabeth is a murder witness haunted by a barely-glimpsed clue that's just one piece of a complicated puzzle. Rossini's wife Herta is introduced in somewhat of a misogynistic fashion as a shrewish and vaguely androgynous tight-ass, not unlike Mimsy Farmer's similarly blonde, angry, and cheated-on wife in Argento's FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, with Herta only letting her tightly-bunned hair down after it's revealed that Elizabeth was a virgin and Rossini's escapades stopped at going down on her, which apparently is enough to forgive him and go full-on "Stand by Your Man." Additionally, a potential murder suspect in the school's priest Father Webber (Marco Mariani) and the possibility of the killer posing as a priest are two plot strands very much in line with the giallo's inherent distrust of religious and church figures, also a key element of DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING, WHO SAW HER DIE? and Antonio Bido's THE BLOODSTAINED SHADOW (1978), to name a few.

Photographed by Aristide Massaccesi, the Italian exploitation legend later known as "Joe D'Amato," WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? was released in the US by Newport in 1975 as the more lurid, drive-in-ready THE SCHOOL THAT COULDN'T SCREAM. SOLANGE was the first of a very loose trilogy of Dallamano schoolgirl outings that was followed in 1974 by the giallo/polizia hybrid WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS?, with Claudio Cassinelli and Giovanna Ralli (released in the US in 1977 under its original title and later reissued as THE COED MURDERS), and in 1978 by ENIGMA ROSSO (released on US home video in 1985 as TRAUMA), starring Testi in a different role than he played in SOLANGE. Dallamano was set to direct ROSSO but only has a co-writing credit--it was ultimately helmed by Alberto Negrin after Dallamano's tragic death in a car accident in Rome in November 1976. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE?'s cult has endured over the years for a variety of reasons--giallo superfans, hardcore krimi buffs, and the devoted horror-con fan base of the iconic Keaton, who doesn't appear until very late in the film but makes a powerful impression, starting with her memorable introduction--and was just released in a Criterion-level special edition from Arrow Video, complete with a booklet of essays, various interviews (including Baal, who really hates this movie), and a commentary track with film critics Kim Newman and Alan Jones. Firmly planted in the giallo but exhibiting a noticeable outside krimi influence, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? is a bit of a slow-burner but is stylishly made, more emotionally-driven than most of its type, and with the devastating reveal of its still-controversial subject matter, it remains one of the most downbeat and heartbreaking of the entire Italian giallo movement.

IRRATIONAL MAN
(US - 2015)

On the heels of 2014's pleasant but decidedly minor MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT, Woody Allen turns in another inconsequential trifle with IRRATIONAL MAN, where he essentially recycles the Martin Landau half of 1989's infinitely superior CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS and parts of 2005's MATCH POINT. The 80-year-old Allen cranks out so many movies that it's getting harder to keep track of the less significant ones, and while no one's expecting him to blaze new trails at this point in his career, it's not unreasonable to expect something a little more than the lukewarm leftovers served up with IRRATIONAL MAN. You know when a legendary rock band starts getting a little long in the tooth and instead of new albums, they just start releasing collections of unreleased tracks and outtakes that weren't good enough to make it on previous records? That's where Allen's at now. It looks and sounds like a Woody Allen movie, but he doesn't even seem engaged with the material. It's a serious Allen film, one that involves murder and deception, but he makes no effort to generate any suspense or tension, and for perhaps the first time in his career, the only humor is unintentional in the absurd way he keeps repeatedly playing The Ramsey Lewis Trio's "The 'In' Crowd." It's almost like he used it as a temp track and forgot to put the intended music in the finished film. Regardless of the situation, the only music you'll hear is "The 'In' Crowd," and its inappropriateness becomes amusing until it grows so utterly grating that you'll never want to hear it again.

Woody's protagonist is Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix), a depressed, alcoholic philosophy prof doing a guest lecturer stint over the summer semester at the fictional Braylin College in Rhode Island. Burned out and creatively blocked, Abe ambles through his job in a drunken blur and shows little interest in the advances of married colleague Rita (Parker Posey). He strikes up a friendship with Jill (Emma Stone in her second straight Allen film), an intelligent student whose paper he legitimately admired, and her constant talk of Abe eventually drives a wedge between her and boyfriend Roy (Jamie Blackley), especially when it's obvious she has feelings for the troubled Abe. While at a diner, Abe and Jill eavesdrop on a conversation in the next booth, where a woman is in tears over an unsympathetic judge who she says is deliberately hassling her in court, siding with her husband and likely awarding him custody of their children after their divorce. It's at that moment that Abe feels the spark he needs to get his life back on track: with no motive and no connection to the woman or the judge or any of his cases, he's going to kill the judge, committing the perfect crime and completely getting away with it. There's lots of talk of moral quandaries and references to Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky and Crime and Punishment, but IRRATIONAL MAN never gets going and never seems like it's heading anywhere. Allen's dialogue is trite and repetitive. He used to really have a knack for human interaction and astute observation but he's reached that Stanley Kubrick/Terrence Malick/George Romero point where it's obvious he doesn't get out much anymore, demonstrating no feel or understanding for how universities in 2015 operate or how college students even talk (not even a charming actress like Stone can sell a line like "I enjoyed making love with you"--what young person says "making love"?), and one scene where Abe attends a college party is just embarrassing in its utter disconnect from reality. Phoenix is uncharacteristically dull here and Allen is just going through the motions in a way that recalls 2012's TO ROME WITH LOVE, one of his worst films. Though it's definitely bottom-five Allen, IRRATIONAL MAN isn't quite as bad as that or 2003's ANYTHING ELSE?, but even in those duds, his personality periodically made its presence known. IRRATIONAL MAN has none of that: it's a Woody Allen film that feels like someone else trying to make a Woody Allen film and not getting the job done. It's bland and listless and Allen doesn't imbue it with any of his signature wit or insight. He doesn't let his funny side show and he keeps his misanthropic side under wraps. There's just nothing here and no reason for him to make this film other than he thinks he has to make a new one annually. The last year without a new Woody Allen offering was 1981. Maybe taking a year or two off to regroup and recharge would do him some good. (R, 95 mins)

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE GHOST DIMENSION
(US - 2015)

The latest, least, and hopefully last of the trendsetting found-footage franchise is the worst yet, the sixth film (seven if you count 2010's Japan spinoff PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: TOKYO NIGHT) in a series that ran out of gas halfway through the first sequel. In the hands of writer and eventual director Christopher Landon, the son of iconic TV star Michael Landon and a once-promising screenwriter (Larry Clark's ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE), the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY movies proceeded to create an increasingly convoluted mythology surrounding Katie, the heroine in the first film played by Katie Featherston. With the exception of the TOKYO NIGHT offshoot, which still hasn't been released in the US, Featherston has turned up in all of the sequels at some point, including the allegedly unrelated Latino-aimed spinoff PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES, which may as well have been titled PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 5. While Oren Peli started things off, he left after the first movie and the franchise pretty much became Landon's baby once he was hired to write PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2, then wrote and produced 3 and 4 (both directed by the CATFISH guys) before directing THE MARKED ONES himself. Landon did nothing but drag this series out past the point of anything resembling relevance (even though everyone's quick to point out that oscillating fan bit from 3 is pretty cool), and even he had the sense to jump ship for the latest, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE GHOST DIMENSION, which is directed by series editor and short-straw-drawing Gregory Plotkin. The series has seen diminishing box office with each successive entry, so as a last-ditch attempt to lure people back and make the franchise a thing again, they did the obvious: made it in 3-D. After a slow start, the almost-nonstop plethora of 3-D effects might've made this work a little bit better in theaters, but Paramount shot themselves in the foot by announcing a drastically-shortened 53-day VOD window (compared to the typical 90), infuriating the major cinema chains, who responded by refusing to show the movie. As a result, GHOST DIMENSION only made it to about 1600 screens compared to 3000-3500 it would've been on under normal circumstances. It still managed to gross $18 million, but the word of mouth was toxic, and this vacated indie-owned theaters pretty quickly.

Unless you have the capability of viewing this in 3-D at home, the standard DVD version is a complete fiasco, a blurry, globby mess as the spirit that's haunted everyone for the last five movies now manifests itself and hovers around the frame as "Tobi," an ectoplasm that looks like a shapeless version of the jungle camouflaging by the title creature in PREDATOR. Video-game designer Ryan (Chris J. Murray), his wife Emily (Brit Shaw), and young daugher Leila (Ivy George) move into the house once owned by Katie and sister Kristi's spirit-conjuring grandma (respected stage actress Hallie Foote). Ryan's comedy-relief hipster brother Mike (Dan Gill) and Emily's friend Skyler (Olivia Taylor Dudley, in her second terrible horror movie of 2015 after THE VATICAN TAPES) come to visit, and they find a box in the basement with an oversized 1980s camcorder and some VHS tapes. The camcorder still works, and when looking through its viewfinder, Ryan sees the gloopy, formless ghost surrounded by cosmic dust and debris, and after watching Katie and Kristi's childhood paranormal encounters on the VHS tapes, he concludes that this camcorder is rigged to record spectral matter (and even more incredibly, was somehow able to record in 16x9 HD in 1988). Of course, "Tobi" makes contact with Leila, and eventually she becomes possessed, which brings in a priest (Michael Krawic), who proclaims "This isn't an exorcism...it's an extermination!" Resorting to 3-D is bad enough, but trying to scrounge a few nibbles at the empty EXORCIST ripoff trough is just pathetic. And all the while, Ryan and Mike never stop filming. Even the easy jump scares come up weak this time around, and since Plotkin and the visual effects team "show" a lot of Tobi so they can maximize the 3-D, what's really here is a dull, found-footage version of POLTERGEIST, which we need about as much as that POLTERGEIST remake that came out earlier in 2015. Abysmal in every way save for one inspired moment when it becomes clear to Ryan that Katie and Kristi on the 1988 VHS tape are watching Mike and him watch them, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE GHOST DIMENSION should be the wheezing death rattle of this moribund franchise. The fact that it took four screenwriters (including two writers of the found-footage EXORCIST knockoff THE TAKING OF DEBORAH LOGAN) to come up with this should be an embarrassment to the entire Writer's Guild. (R, 88 mins)

SCOUTS GUIDE TO THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE
(US - 2015)

Another Paramount release that fell victim to their ill-advised shortened VOD-window botch and was banished from major cinema chains, SCOUTS GUIDE TO THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE was directed and co-written by Christopher Landon, and while it isn't anything spectacular, it's at least an improvement on anything Landon accomplished while running the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY franchise into the ground. There isn't a whole lot left to be done with anything related to zombies at this point, and SCOUTS isn't giving SHAUN OF THE DEAD any competition as the world's best comedic zombie homage. It's about on the level of the intermittently amusing but forgettable ZOMBIELAND, only with grosser and raunchier hard-R gags that usually involve genitalia. Three high-school sophomores--sensitive nice guy Ben (Tye Sheridan), horndog Carter (Logan Miller), and overweight dweeb Augie (Joey Morgan)--are the only three childhood holdovers still actively involved in their Boy Scouts program. Carter insists it's time to grow up since, as he puts it, "all girls turn into sluts junior year." Carter talks Ben into ditching Augie and going to a senior rave instead of their final Scout campout, and when their badly-toupeed, Dolly Parton-obsessed scoutmaster Rogers (an underused David Koechner) is turned into a zombie, they find the entire city infected as they make their way to the rave so Ben can rescue his lifelong crush, Carter's older sister Kendall (Halston Sage), who's dating total douchebag Jeff (Patrick Schwarzenegger--yes, his son). Along the way, they meet tough strip-club waitress Denise (Sarah Dumont), who teaches them how to man up. SCOUTS is harmless enough and it moves fast and has a few funny moments amidst the expectedly juvenile toilet humor. But it almost always goes for easy gags like having the three scouts, armed to the teeth with makeshift weapons they assembled after raiding a hardware store, taking out a rave full of zombies to the tune of Scorpions'"Rock You Like a Hurricane." Where's the joke there, other than teen audiences recognizing a familiar '80s hair metal staple? At least BORDELLO OF BLOOD's use of Sweet's "Ballroom Blitz" as former comedian Dennis Miller took out a bunch of vampires with a holy water-filled Super Soaker was set in something that looked like a ballroom. Instead, SCOUTS is a film that gives you the spectacle of 89-year-old Academy Award-winner Cloris Leachman as a zombified crazy cat lady neighbor, pulling Miller's pants down and trying to take a bite out of his bare ass. Is this really the best Hollywood has to offer Ms. Leachman in her eighth decade in show business? (R, 93 mins)

THE VEIL
(US - 2016)

Blumhouse, the Jason Blum-led production company behind the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, INSIDIOUS, and PURGE films, has a serious backlog of delayed and shelved titles through various distributors. One such distributor is Universal, who released several Blumhouse titles directly to Netflix with no fanfare in late 2014. This week, the studio quietly released to Netflix another batch of Blumhouse product that's been sitting around for anywhere from one to three years. The best of the bunch is THE VEIL, written by Robert Ben Garant (JESSABELLE) and directed by the long-absent Phil Joanou (THREE O'CLOCK HIGH, STATE OF GRACE), helming his first feature film since 2006's GRIDIRON GANG. THE VEIL takes its cue from Ti West's relatively recent THE SACRAMENT in that it obviously references the 1978 Jonestown tragedy in Guyana, but goes in a different and more supernatural direction. In 1985, 47 members of the Heaven's Veil religious cult committed mass suicide by poisoning, including the cult's crazed leader, the shaggy-haired and shades-wearing Jim Jacobs (Thomas Jane). 30 years later, lone survivor Sarah Hope (Lily Rabe), who was only five years old at the time of the mass suicide, is contacted by a team of documentary filmmakers headed by Maggie Price (Jessica Alba). Maggie and her cameraman brother Chris (Jack De Sena) have also had their lives affected by the Heaven's Veil incident--their father was the lead FBI agent investigating Jacobs and the man who led the raid on the compound. It had a profound effect on him and he committed suicide three years later, his body found by young Maggie. Maggie has scoured her father's personal files on Heaven's Veil and in some photos never released to the public, there are visible movie cameras, though any film that was shot was never recovered. As desperate to confront her past as Maggie is to see what truths are to be uncovered on any lost films, Sarah accompanies the group to the ruins of the Heaven's Veil compound where they indeed discover reels of film that show Jacobs experimenting with a brain-death-inducing drug and an antidote that pulls one back from the edge of death with what he claims are newfound, otherworldly, spiritual abilities. It doesn't take long before some unlucky members of the group discover the hard way that Jacobs' spirit haunts the Heaven's Veil grounds, with the intent of procuring new vessels for his and his followers' spirits to carry on their work in the present day.

Admittedly, the early going isn't promising, starting with Jane's character being named "Jim Jacobs" (not a far leap from the real Rev. Jim Jones or Stuart Whitman's "Rev. Jim Johnson" in 1980's GUYANA: CULT OF THE DAMNED) and wearing the signature dark sunglasses (do all suicide cult leaders go to the same Sunglass Hut kiosk at the mall?). But rather than go through the pointless, found-footage Jonestown re-enactment that West did with THE SACRAMENT, Joanou and Garant at least try to do something different with the idea, even if it seems a little reminiscent of EXORCIST III or PRINCE OF DARKNESS at times. Joanou also admirably avoids going full found-footage and instead shows Maggie and the others start watching the grainy, damaged films that seamlessly become flashback sequences. It's a rudimentary technique but it at least avoids the stale, shaky-cam, tilted-angle nonsense that permeates the found-footage subgenre. There's a tremendous sense of atmosphere and chilling imagery throughout, using old-school standbys like shadows, fog, and trees with ominous branches. Dead characters revived and inhabited by the spirits of long-gone Heaven's Veil members walk together and approach their next victims in scenes where Joanou invokes Mario Bava films like the "Wurdalak" segment of BLACK SABBATH and PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES. THE VEIL doesn't break any new ground, but it's a good mix of predictable Blumhouse jump scares and a welcome throwback to horror tropes of old, with a legitimately dramatic climactic twist that leads to a downer ending that pulls no punches. The experienced Joanou (other credits include U2: RATTLE AND HUM and FINAL ANALYSIS) may seem like he's slumming in low-budget horror, but he's done his homework and knows what works, and in the end, it's really just a catchily repetitious synth score away from being a mid-level John Carpenter film. We're not talking about a new cult classic or anyone's new favorite horror flick by any stretch of the imagination, but for a movie buried by its studio and dumped straight to Netflix, THE VEIL is better than anyone would expect it to be. (R, 94 mins)

VISIONS
(US - 2016)

Completed in 2014 and hopefully the world's first and last oenosploitation horror film, VISIONS is a relentlessly dumb paranormal activity potboiler whose sole saving grace is that it isn't found-footage. A year after surviving a freak car accident that killed a baby in the other vehicle, Eveleigh Maddox (Isla Fisher) and her husband David (Anson Mount) have purchased a vineyard in Paso Robles where they plan to rebuild their lives now that Eveleigh is expecting. It's not long before she's plagued by (spoiler alert) visions, such as a bloody hand print on the wall, exploding wine bottles, an attack by a mannequin, and being stalked by a robed figure with an unseen face. A preoccupied David doesn't take Eveleigh's claims seriously and pushes hard to get her back on antidepressants with the help of her doctor (Jim Parsons--yes, that Jim Parsons), but against the advice of her new prenatal yoga pal Sadie (Gillian Jacobs). Eveleigh does some investigating and discovers that the house's previous owners abandoned it due to ghostly occurrences, and that the paranormal poppycock dates back to the late 1800s, when the home was owned by the great-grandparents of local vintner Napoli (John De Lancie), who conveniently said nothing about this early in the film when he hosted a housewarming party for the Maddoxes.

Written by Lucas Sussman, whose last screenplay credit was collaborating with Darren Aronofsky on David Twohy's impressive 2002 WWII submarine horror film BELOW with , and directed by SAW series vet Kevin Greutert, VISIONS can't decide what it wants to be and is ultimately all red herrings and no payoff. There's an entire subplot about Eveleigh thinking the neighbors are running a meth lab and it serves no purpose whatsoever. The supernatural silliness makes no sense once the twists and turns are abruptly laid out in the climax, which seems headed in a ROSEMARY'S BABY direction before it suddenly shifts gears and turns into a ripoff of the French "extreme horror" outing INSIDE, which may have been a better idea all along. It's never made clear why the paranormal activity is confined to the house or why it's doing what its doing (is it the ghost of Paul Masson, avenging the sale of a wine before its time?) and its ultimately all smoke and mirrors to cover up a really weak script that wastes an overqualified cast of TV vets and others who should have better things to do. Joanna Cassidy turns up as a wine distributor who also--gosh, wouldn't ya know it?--happens to be a medium when the plot requires one, and in easily the most frivolous role of her career, Eva Longoria in a pointless, two-scene bit part as Eveleigh's unattached and on-the-prowl friend. Being stuck on NBC's TELENOVELA is one thing, but what did the former DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES star do to get busted down to minor supporting roles in crummy horror movies where she plays the second best friend to the lead actress? Did she lose a bet with Jason Blum? (R, 83 mins)

CURVE
(US - 2016)

Shot back in 2013, CURVE is essentially a two-character piece that starts out as a HITCHER ripoff that morphs into a survivalist thriller version of 127 HOURS before wrapping up as a grisly revenge outing. It gives singer and DANCING WITH THE STARS vet Julianne Hough a chance to get gritty as Mallory, a bride-to-be taking the deserted highway route from San Francisco to Denver, where her fiance is currently working. Of course she has engine trouble but that's remedied by a convenient hiker named Christian (Teddy Sears) who happens to stroll by. She offers him a ride to the next town and things go pleasantly enough until he openly ponders if she'd be able to "deep throat his cock," which Mallory correctly interprets as a major red flag that Christian is a depraved psycho. Unable to get him out of the vehicle, Mallory instead crashes through a guard rail on a road, sending them sailing into the woods below. Christian is thrown from the passenger seat but Mallory's leg is trapped and she's unable to move, so after taunting her a little, Christian leaves. Days go by, with Christian periodically returning to the scene of the accident to hector her some more, because if he killed her, then there'd be no third act where she manages to free herself and track him down at a lodge where he's killed several other people and has a girl (Madalyn Horcher) strapped face-down on a bed.

It doesn't really score any points for intelligence or originality, but CURVE is never dull and Hough is surprisingly credible in the lead. Her fans might be surprised to hear her dropping vulgarities, eating a rat, and drinking her own urine as she's trapped in her car for days on end, but director Iain Softley (HACKERS, THE SKELETON KEY) and first-time screenwriters Kimberly Lofstrom Johnson and Lee Patterson don't offer much in the way of logic or consistency. Why would Christian leave Mallory alive in the car? And why is the highway completely deserted early on, but when Mallory gets in a position to expose Christian, you can suddenly see several cars whizzing by, including a cop (Drew Rausch) who, right on cue, becomes Christian's next victim? Sears doesn't do much as the dull antagonist besides widen his eyes and smirk. It's nice that he doesn't overplay it, but since we know nothing about the character, and what little we do know is unreliable info, it's hard for both Sears and the audience to get a handle on the hows and whys of Christian. Has he left a trail of dead bodies in his wake? Is he from the area? Is anyone after him? Who knows? For the most part, CURVE is a forgettable retread of other, better movies, but Hough does a surprisingly convincing job of stretching outside her comfort zone and really gives it everything she's got. (R, 85 mins)

DIRTY GRANDPA
(US - 2016)

Directed by Dan Mazer. Written by John Phillips. Cast: Robert De Niro, Zac Efron, Dermot Mulroney, Aubrey Plaza, Zoey Deutch, Julianne Hough, Jason Mantzoukas, Danny Glover, Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman, Adam Pally, Brandon Mychal Smith, Jake Picking, Michael Hudson, Mo Collins, Henry Zebrowski. (R, 102 mins)

The worst thing to happen to Robert De Niro since prostate cancer, DIRTY GRANDPA is about as unwatchable as modern comedy can get, existing almost on the same plane of laziness, incompetence, and flat-out contempt as any atrocious Friedberg/Seltzer spoof. The film imagines itself some kind of edgy, "did they just go there?" envelope-pusher, but there's nothing here beyond the shock value of a living legend like De Niro working blue and saying some of the filthiest things ever heard in a mainstream movie. But "shock" doesn't mean "funny." Raunch humor can kill--in-their-prime Farrelly Brothers and Judd Apatow and AMERICAN PIE have shown that. And the great BAD SANTA (2003) expertly mixed raunchy shock with smart writing and funny performances. DIRTY GRANDPA skips the humor component, demonstrating absolutely no restraint as it guns it straight for the raunch and nothing but. As decreed in the Burgess Meredith Amendment set forth upon the release of 1993's GRUMPY OLD MEN, Hollywood seems to think there's nothing funnier than old people saying really nasty shit. After 102 minutes of watching De Niro--arguably the greatest actor of all time--jerk off; talk about donkey-punches, creampies, chugging horsecock, and Queen Latifah taking a shit in his mouth; call his grandson "Jack Dicklaus" and "Michelle Wies-in-my-mouth" while golfing; call his grandson's fiancee's pink car "a giant labia" and "a giant tampon"; stick his cock and balls in his grandson's face; make racist and homophobic cracks to a gay black man; harangue the same grandson for cockblocking him and calling him "Cocky McBlockerson"; and bellow ad nauseum that he wants to "fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck till my dick falls off!" while dropping more F-bombs than in all of his Scorsese films combined, you'll long for the tact and grace of Meredith cackling about "taking the skin boat to Tuna Town!" in GRUMPY OLD MEN. De Niro isn't so much a dirty grandpa as he is a geriatric 2 Live Crew.

Dick (De Niro) convinces his grandson to take him
to Daytona Beach by making him an offer he can't
refuse in DIRTY GRANDPA

It has a plot that's similar to the not-quite-as-godawful-but-close Robert Duvall vehicle A NIGHT IN OLD MEXICO. The day after the funeral of his wife of 40 years, who succumbed to a long battle with cancer, grieving Dick Kelly (De Niro) convinces his uptight, straight-arrow lawyer grandson Jason (Zak Efron) to take him from Atlanta to his vacation home in Boca Raton where he and his wife spent their summers. When Jason picks Dick up and catches him jerking off to porn ("You caught me takin' a #3!"), it's a harbinger of things to come. After 40 years of being a faithful husband and 15 years of celibacy due to his wife's lengthy illness, Dick needs to blow off some steam. Jason really wants no part of it, as he's got a big case at his dad's (Dermot Mulroney) law firm and he's getting married to Jewish bridezilla Meredith (Julianne Hough) in a week, but Dick nevertheless cajoles his square grandson into taking him to Daytona for spring break. Dick keeps getting on Jason about why he abandoned his passion for photography to join his dad's law firm, and why he's marrying a control-freak shrew like Meredith, but his real focus is getting laid, and after they run into a trio of spring breakers, Dick sees the perfect opportunity to achieve his dream of unprotected sex with a college girl. Pretending to be a professor, Dick catches the attention of hard-partying Lenore (Aubrey Plaza), who has a fantasy about screwing an elderly prof, wooing Dick with come-ons like "How about you knock your balls in my vagina?" and "I want you to tsunami all over my face!" and "I want you to eat me out and blow your last breath in my pussy." Simply by default of nothing else in the film being even remotely amusing, Plaza is the sole source of anything resembling actual comedy in DIRTY GRANDPA, but her only funny lines (like "I want you to tell me you watch Fox News!") are probably ad-libbed and, perhaps most tellingly, are the ones that aren't X-rated.

Dick (De Niro) asks "You talkin' to me?"
after Lenore tells him to tsunami on her face and
blow his last breath in her pussy in DIRTY GRANDPA

Elsewhere, DIRTY GRANDPA is absolute misery. In the right hands, Jason accidentally smoking crack and being busted for pedophilia and threatened with prison rape and putting on semen-encrusted pants and Facetiming his Jewish fiancee and her Rabbi while unknowingly sporting a swastika of penises drawn on his forehead and having De Niro's stunt junk resting on his face might've been funny. The same goes for De Niro doing rap poses doing a karaoke version of Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day." But in the hands of first-time screenwriter John Phillips (his next project is BAD SANTA 2, so scratch any hope for that one) and director Dan Mazer, a past Sacha Baron Cohen collaborator who helped write DA ALI G SHOW, BORAT, and BRUNO (after DIRTY GRANDPA, it's obvious who was carrying who in that partnership), nothing works and the entire purpose of the project seems to be how far down to the bottom De Niro will let them take him. Mazer's direction is an amateur-night abomination, lacking even a basic understanding of blocking and cutting, starting early on when Dick and Jason leave for their road trip and Dick cracks "Let's get in the giant labia you pulled up in." Mind you, Dick hasn't seen the car because he was too busy "taking a #3" in his man-cave when Jason walked in on him. And how does it make any sense that Jason, several years out of law school, would've been a photo lab partner of Lenore's friend Shadia (Zoey Deutch, daughter of Lea Thompson and a potentially charming actress if she can find the right movie) in college? And Shadia, Lenore, and their gay black friend Bradley (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman) are graduating from college in a week, but they're on spring break now? Does Phillips know the concept of semesters? His script tries to get all maudlin and sappy at various points, with a completely out-of-nowhere about-face by Dick, who spends the first half of the film derisively mocking the stereotypically flamboyant Bradley only to turn into a beacon of progressive acceptance later on. The filmmakers also awkwardly mix the sentimental and the tasteless, as in a heartfelt speech Dick has about how much his wife meant to him, while tossing in as an aside "We tried anal once every five years." There's no consistency and a lot of points are sloppily thrown in--Jason dreamed of being a photographer for Time, which isn't really known for its photos (was Phillips thinking of Life, perhaps? Did De Niro care enough to clarify? Does Efron know what a magazine is?), and Dick was secretly a Special Forces badass who spent his career fighting terrorism, which explains how he's able to take on a quintet of guys 50 years younger than him in a fight. Attempts to humanize Dick amidst his scatological and gynecological insults and one-liners that would make old-school Andrew Dice Clay blush come off as forced and phony. BAD SANTA turned its misanthropic anti-hero around, but that film provided Billy Bob Thornton with a real character to play, with a real progression and arc, and surrounded him with ringers like late greats Bernie Mac and John Ritter. De Niro gets Efron, who's frankly in over his head in pretty much anything, and even gets to mimic his co-star's familiar facial expressions at one point, which might've been funny had he not already done it for the De Niro party in NEIGHBORS.

Dick (De Niro) isn't afraid to take on
some younger troublemakers in DIRTY GRANDPA

De Niro's career took an unexpected turn into comedy the late '90s and into the '00s with ANALYZE THIS and MEET THE PARENTS and both of their sequels. But in those, he was essentially parodying his own serious image. It's not that De Niro can't do comedy--after all, 1988's buddy action comedy MIDNIGHT RUN is a classic--but he needs well-written comedy, or at least a comedically-gifted co-star to bounce off of, like he had with Charles Grodin in MIDNIGHT RUN. It goes without saying that Efron is no Grodin, and while De Niro has nothing to work with here, it still no excuse for the revolting mess in which he's gotten himself. The two-time Oscar-winner has taken a lot of shit over the last decade and a half or so for taking easy gigs that were beneath him (FREELANCERS, THE BIG WEDDING, THE BAG MAN), with constant cries from fans that he's tarnishing his legacy. But there have been some excellent performances from this much-maligned period--the barely-seen STONE and BEING FLYNN and his Oscar-nominated turn in SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK come to mind. I get that working actors have to work, and De Niro likes to stay busy. While I'm sure he enjoys the big paychecks as well, it's easy to see where he's coming from--how many 72-year-old actors are still getting leads in major movies these days? We bag on De Niro but forget someone like Harrison Ford, who's been coasting and phoning it for years but that's all forgotten now that he's Han Solo again. Ford doesn't even mask his cynical disdain for what he does for a living, but you have to give De Niro some credit--he actually seems to be enjoying himself with DIRTY GRANDPA. He approaches the role with an enthusiastic gusto that gets increasingly desperate as the movie flop-sweats its way through one depressingly unfunny set piece after another. After some dubious career choices in recent years, De Niro has hit bottom and there's nowhere to go now but up, as DIRTY GRANDPA is an unequivocally soul-crushing endurance test of a comedy, easily the worst film he's done in a career now in its sixth decade. It's really hard to sufficiently convey just how incredibly devoid of laughs DIRTY GRANDPA is, but in the De Niro comedy canon, it's gotta rank dead last, with nothing in it nearly as hilarious as Travis Bickle's rescue of Iris in TAXI DRIVER or the Russian Roulette scenes in THE DEER HUNTER.

ROOM
(Ireland/Canada - 2015)

Directed by Lenny Abrahamson. Written by Emma Donoghue. Cast: Brie Larson, Jacob Tremblay, Joan Allen, William H. Macy, Sean Bridgers, Tom McCamus, Wendy Crewson, Amanda Brugel, Joe Pingue, Cas Anvar, Randal Edwards. (R, 118 mins)

Adapted by Emma Donoghue from her best-selling 2010 novel, ROOM is a harrowing, grueling, yet ultimately uplifting drama that's one of 2015's finest films. Cementing her place as one of the top actresses of today, Oscar-nominated Bree Larson is Joy, a 24-year-old woman who was abducted seven years earlier from her suburban Ohio neighborhood by a man she dubs "Old Nick" (Sean Bridgers, who had a somewhat similar abductor role in the Lucky McKee horror film THE WOMAN). Locked in a fortified backyard shed with only a skylight to show any trace of the outside world, Joy has a five-year-old son, Jack (Jacob Tremblay), fathered by Old Nick, who still regularly forces her to submit to his sexual demands while Jack hides in a closet. "Room," as Joy and Jack call it, is their only world, as Jack has never been past the door and has no concept of people or society. Joy and Jack have a loving relationship, spending every waking moment together, and she's fiercely protective of him, standing her ground and refusing to let Old Nick near him. Joy learns Old Nick has been unemployed for six months, which explains why he's been increasingly frugal with the supplies he provides, and coupled with Jack's fifth birthday, she realizes it's time to start planning an escape.

That's only part of the film, which splits its story into roughly equal halves of one hour each. Once a series of circumstances results in Jack getting out and Old Nick being arrested, Joy must not only reintegrate herself into society after being locked in a shed for seven years, but Jack must quickly adjust to the existence of world he never had the ability to contemplate. Shell-shocked and terrified to leave his mother's side, Jack very slowly warms to life with Joy's mother Nancy (Joan Allen, terrific as always). Nancy and Joy's father Robert (William H. Macy) have divorced in the seven years since her abduction, with Nancy's significant other now Leo (Tom McCamus), who Joy remembers as being an old family friend. It takes time for Joy and Jack to adjust to the freedom, with Jack periodically missing the security he felt in "Room," the only place he's ever known.

Director Lenny Abrahamson (FRANK) takes a methodical and unflinching approach to both the day-to-day confinement and the ultimate liberation of Joy and Jack. He conveys the sense of claustrophobic dread and terror but admirably never goes for the exploitative in his depiction of Old Nick's repeated violations of Joy, only showing a cowering Jack in the closet and trusting the audience to understand what's happening. He also pulls no punches in the natural, human flaws of the characters, unafraid to show Joy as impatient and angry or Jack as occasionally unappreciative and bratty. Even once they're safe with Nancy and Leo, tensions flare but there's always a sense of love and perserverance. It's ultimately a feel-good story, but it earns it by never feeling forced or manipulative. No one is really sure how to react to anything, particularly Robert, whose cold reaction and refusal to even look at Jack doesn't necessarily make him a bad person, but certainly one who has no place in their lives now. The focus is the love between Joy and Jack but the bond that Jack separately develops with Nancy and especially with Leo, who steps up to be the father and grandfather Robert can't and won't be, is very touching (McCamus' warm and sympathetic performance may be ROOM's stealthiest secret weapon). Larson, a gifted young actress who should've been nominated for an Oscar a few years ago for her indie breakthrough turn in SHORT TERM 12, is unforgettable as Joy, and she's matched in every way by nine-year-old Tremblay, who turns in one of cinema's most remarkable performances by a child actor. With maybe the most perfect closing scene in any film of 2015, ROOM is a gut-wrenching, devastating ordeal about tragedies overcome and lives moving on. Don't miss it.

THE BOY
(US/China - 2016)

Directed by William Brent Bell. Written by Stacey Menear. Cast: Lauren Cohan, Rupert Evans, Jim Norton, Diana Hardcastle, James Russell, Ben Robson, Matthew Walker. (PG-13, 97 mins)

I'm a sucker for a good creepy doll movie, and after the unwatchable ANNABELLE, THE BOY appeared to be a welcome throwback that relied more on atmosphere and mood than jump scares and subpar CGI. Hope was deflated significantly upon learning THE BOY was directed by William Brent Bell, whose previous films include the idiotic gamers-killed-by-video-game dud STAY ALIVE (2006), featuring a legitimate contender for the most annoying snarky movie line ever ("Sweet Sebastian Bach, I wanna play!"), and the rock-bottom, found-footage EXORCIST knockoff THE DEVIL INSIDE (2012). STAY ALIVE was merely stupid, but THE DEVIL INSIDE was the cinematic equivalent of a Nigerian prince e-mail, a loathsome scam of a film whose boundless contempt for its audience was so off-the-charts that it just stopped abruptly with no ending, with a middle finger of an end crawl sending moviegoers to a web site "for more on the ongoing investigation." Despite toxic word-of-mouth, THE DEVIL INSIDE somehow managed to sucker audiences out of $53 million despite a 76% freefall in its second weekend. Still, both STAY ALIVE and THE DEVIL INSIDE probably scored well enough on the horror fanboy's overly generous "Everything is Awesome!" curve that Bell likely got himself a lifetime "Master of Horror" pass. Against all odds and any rational logic, William Brent Bell is still considered employable, and though I love a creepy doll movie as much as anyone, the biggest concern going in was "How badly is Bell going to fuck this up?"

To his credit, he does an alright job, as THE BOY is a pretty good horror movie until it turns into a pretty dumb horror movie. It's his most accomplished film yet as a director, though it would be hard to make something worse then THE DEVIL INSIDE. It's worth noting that Bell also wrote that film and STAY ALIVE but had nothing to do with THE BOY's script, which is a career path I advise him to keep following. Set in the kind of stately British manor that would've fit perfectly in a 1970s Hammer or Amicus film, THE BOY (actually shot in Canada) stars THE WALKING DEAD's Lauren Cohan as Greta, an American running from a requisite dark past, all the way to rural England, where she takes a job as a nanny at a large estate in the middle of nowhere. She's hired by the elderly Mr. and Mrs. Heelshire (Jim Norton, Diana Hardcastle) to watch over their eight-year-old son, Brahms. Brahms is revealed to be toddler-sized porcelain doll. The Heelshires are going on holiday and Greta has specific instructions to follow Brahms' itinerary to the letter, including poetry and music lessons, a bedtime story, a kiss goodnight, and to be with him at all times. Of course, Greta blows off her duties, but is essentially housebound with nothing much to do, no internet and no cell reception. Local bloke Malcolm (Rupert Evans) drops off groceries and dispenses the Heelshires' generous pay to Greta each week, and rightly senses that Greta is running away from something that she reveals to be a violent ex who's trying to track her down, and she fled overseas from Montana to get as far away from him as she could. Malcolm informs Greta that Brahms was the Heelshires' eight-year-old son, and he died 20 years earlier in a fire. They've never been able to cope with the loss, so they treat the doll as if it's the child Brahms. Greta starts taking her duties seriously when she begins witnessing strange occurrences that indicate "Brahms" is alive, or at the very least a spirit of some kind exists inside the doll.

THE BOY works fine for about 2/3 of the way, with Cohan an engaging, believable heroine, and she has a good rapport with Evans, who's very likable as Malcolm. Brahms, with the ever-so-slight changes in his facial expressions, is an eerie figure and the premise is bizarre enough that it keeps you intrigued over where it's going. Then it gets to where it's going and it stumbles to its unsatisfying conclusion. From the moment Greta's ex improbably shows up, the film never regains its footing before abandoning the "creepy doll" angle and turning into...well, it's hard to say what it turns into without spoiling it, but it's a 2014 import that got a lot of buzz in cult horror circles. THE BOY isn't a bad movie, but it's another example of the need for a bait-and-switch plot twist negating much of what took place before, with the focus going from telling the story to laying the foundation for a sequel. I wouldn't be surprised if what turns out to be "Brahms" becomes a DTV franchise, which I guess some producers find more important than making one good, strong, solid-from-front-to-back horror film.

BOLERO
(US - 1984)

Written and directed by John Derek. Cast: Bo Derek, George Kennedy, Andrea Occhipinti, Ana Obregon, Olivia d'Abo, Greg Bensen, Ian Cochrane, Mirta Miller, Mickey Knox. (Unrated, 105 mins)

One of Cannon's most controversial releases, BOLERO opened on Labor Day weekend 1984 riding a wave of publicity due to its troubled production and explicit sexual content involving iconic star Bo Derek. The actress had been offscreen since 1981's TARZAN THE APE MAN, a film that began a decade-long stretch where she was starring exclusively in films directed by her husband John Derek. John, born in 1926 and 30 years his wife's senior, was a former actor who once held his own with Humphrey Bogart in KNOCK ON ANY DOOR (1949) and an Oscar-winning Broderick Crawford in ALL THE KING'S MEN (also 1949) and had prominent roles in epic blockbusters like THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956) and EXODUS (1960). John was married to original Bond girl Ursula Andress when he quit acting in 1966 to focus on filmmaking and photography. After he and Andress divorced, John was married to Linda Evans until their divorce in 1974. The divorce came after John met 16-year-old Kathleen Collins a year earlier and whisked her away to Europe. Upon returning to the US after Kathleen turned 18, the pair married and he rechristened her "Bo Derek," managing every aspect of her career and even handling the photography for her numerous Playboy pictorials. She landed a supporting role in the 1977 JAWS ripoff ORCA and in 1979, skyrocketed to international stardom as the object of a midlife crisis-stricken Dudley Moore's obsession in Blake Edwards' zeitgeist-capturing megahit 10.

Bo followed 10 with a very similar role in 1980's A CHANGE OF SEASONS, which had Anthony Hopkins in the Dudley Moore midlife crisis part. By this point, the Dereks, with their age difference and John's Svengali-like management of her career--he resented the "Svengali" implications but trolled his detractors by naming his company "Svengali Productions"-- became a lightning rod for tabloid controversy. They had such a ubiquitous media presence and Bo-mania was such a pop culture phenomenon that Fleer even released a set of "Here's Bo" trading cards. 1981 saw the release of the incestuous love story FANTASIES, a film the Dereks shot in Greece in 1973 during their sojourn to Europe where John wouldn't be inconvenienced by California's 18-as-the-age-of-consent statutory rape laws (when they returned to the States and while Bo was shooting 10, John also found time to direct the 1979 hardcore porno LOVE YOU! with Annette Haven). But the Dereks made their biggest splash of 1981 with their sexed-up remake of TARZAN THE APE MAN, a film that veered so far from the source story that the estate of Edgar Rice Burroughs tried to sue. Highly publicized thanks to Bo's barely-there Jane outfit and her numerous nude scenes, TARZAN saw Bo not using her 10 fame to further her own acting career but rather, the couple using her fame to get big-studio budgets for John's crummy movies. A director with an eye for beauty but no idea how to tell a story, John Derek's films during his marriage to Bo accomplish little aside from John Derek showing the world how hot his young wife is. TARZAN THE APE MAN generated enough interest--and enough people still wanted to see Bo naked--that it became a hit, but nobody liked it and it was immediately and rightly ridiculed by critics and audiences, earning multiple Razzie nominations and making John a major-studio pariah.

A set photo from early in BOLERO's shoot, as
evidenced by the presence of the soon-to-be-fired
Fabio Testi on the far left (thanks to
William Wilson for supplying this pic)

Undaunted--and still winning since, as he was quick to point out, his wife was incredibly hot--John set up a deal with Menaham Golan and Yoram Globus at Cannon for the couple's next film, BOLERO, its title a reference to the Ravel piece that was prominently featured in 10. Golan and Globus were in the middle of a lucrative distribution deal with MGM/UA, and that allowed them to supply John with an even bigger budget than he had with TARZAN, and to further stroke his ego as if that was even necessary, they also gave him final cut. Shooting began in the summer of 1983 and almost immediately ran into problems when Bo became alarmed over a cold sore on the lip of the male lead, Italian actor Fabio Testi. The two stars already weren't getting along, and there was a lot of chatter in the press that Testi had herpes and was forced to exit the movie. The official diagnosis was "atypical facial dermatitis," and an already-under-contract Testi was yanked off of BOLERO and sent by Golan to another Cannon production, J. Lee Thompson's THE AMBASSADOR. Testi was replaced by another Italian actor, the much-younger Andrea Occhipinti (Lamberto Bava's A BLADE IN THE DARK, Lucio Fulci's THE NEW YORK RIPPER), but John wasn't satisfied with his physical appearance and, according to a February 1984 article in People, tried to talk him into bulking up with steroids. Following the advice of his doctor, Occhipinti refused, but agreed to physically train with Scottish co-star Ian Cochrane, who had some bodybuilding experience. Shooting mostly in Spain, John's directing style alienated much of the local crew, but the real clashes came later when Golan screened the finished film for MGM/UA personnel, including studio head Frank Yablans, who was put in charge of the company in early 1983.

Yablans was already pissed off about the quality of product Cannon was bringing him with low-budget films like TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS and HERCULES and big-budget money-losers like the expensive Brooke Shields adventure SAHARA and the raunchy Faye Dunaway period piece THE WICKED LADY, both of which bombed. REVENGE OF THE NINJA and BREAKIN' were two of the very few hits under the MGM/UA-Cannon deal, and when Yablans attended the disastrous private screening of BOLERO, during which numerous MGM/UA brass started laughing out loud in all the wrong places, he'd reached his breaking point. Golan was just as upset about John Derek's finished cut as Yablans, but he got an even bigger surprise when an irate Yablans drew the line and flat-out refused to distribute BOLERO. The topic was brought up in Mark Hartley's 2015 Cannon documentary ELECTRIC BOOGALOO and Yablans, who was out at MGM/UA by 1985 and who died in 2014, appears on camera still stewing about Cannon, and over BOLERO in particular. After the teen comedy MAKING THE GRADE flopped later in the summer of 1984, Yablans had seen enough and pulled the plug on MGM/UA's relationship with Cannon. As a result of the falling out with Yablans, Golan and Globus were on their own and began self-distributing most of their films, starting with BOLERO (1985's LIFEFORCE, produced by Cannon and released by Tri-Star, was an exception, and several 1986-87 Cannon productions would be released by Warner Bros). While BOLERO barely made back its budget thanks to, once again, people wanting to see Bo Derek nude (it opened in third place that Labor Day holiday weekend, behind TIGHTROPE in its third week and GHOSTBUSTERS in its 13th, then plummeted to 8th place in its second weekend), the resulting film was so terrible that it did irreparable damage to what remained of the Dereks' credibility in Hollywood.

Make no mistake--BOLERO is an awful film. The only positive thing one can say about it is that the budget is up there on the screen. With lavish sets and location shooting in Spain, Morocco, and the UK, the only thing John gets right--other than Bo's gratuitous nude scenes--is a certain sense of spectacle. Set in the 1920s, the threadbare plot has 28-year-old Bo as Ayre "Mac" MacGillvary, a wealthy orphan just out of boarding school, armed with her inheritance and ready to search the world for the perfect man to whom she can gift her virginity. Accompanied by her best friend Catalina (Ana Obregon) and her chauffeur/guardian Cotton (a bewildered-looking George Kennedy), Mac travels to Morocco where she meets a London-educated, narcoleptic sheik (Greg Bensen, in his simultaneous acting debut and swan song) who seduces her and covers her in milk and honey but falls asleep before he can deflower her. Then it's on to Spain where she meets bullfighter Angel (Occhipinti). The two fall in love and Mac loses her virginity in an over-the-top sex scene that has John employing a wind machine as Mac reaches orgasm, in addition to zooming in as close to the actors' grinding and thrusting as he can to vividly show the friction of their pubic hair (in a later climactic sex scene, Derek gives us a clear shot of Occhipinti's nutbag). The couple's passion is threatened when Angel is gored by a bull (in a scene where John shows shocked onlookers, including a reaction shot from a barking dog) and is unable to perform sexually. Never fear, though--Mac gives him a thumbs up and promises "That thing is going to work! I guarantee you this!"

"Yep...the picture was called COOL HAND LUKE," sighs
George Kennedy, adding "They gave me an Oscar for it!"

From then on, Mac focuses on helping Angel heal in order for them to continue breaking barriers in sexual ecstasy (or "extasy," as she spells it). All the while, Mac is given strong support and encouragement by Cotton, Catalina, and 13-year-old local gypsy girl Paloma (debuting future WONDER YEARS co-star Olivia d'Abo who, in a move that would only happen in a John Derek film, was 14 at the time of filming and somehow does full frontal nudity), as well as Angel's housemaid, who has a brief fling with Cotton (yes, even George Kennedy gets laid in this movie). Never have so many people had to devote so much time and energy to an impossibly gorgeous woman getting some dick. While the numerous sex scenes are vigorous and explicit (give John Derek some credit--he knew how to shoot a fuck scene), and, in the case of Angel's triumphant return to potency, hilarious thanks to John breaking out some lightning effects and an '80s metal fog machine, they're spaced out enough that the rest of the film is a dead-on-arrival bore. John manages to create the illusion of class with the majestic locations (he also served as his own cinematographer), brief and quickly abandoned attempts at paying homage to silent cinema (the film opens with a photo of Rudolph Valentino and the sheik's seduction of Mac plays out with silent movie intertitles in place of dialogue) and the sex scenes scored in overwrought fashion by the legendary Elmer Bernstein, but BOLERO is just bad. Bo's performance is terrible (she won a Razzie for it), and you can barely understand anything Obregon and Occhipinti are saying (around 48 minutes in, Occhipinti audibly flubs a line and John just left it in). The sex scenes were graphic enough that the Dereks knew BOLERO would get an X rating, and since the couple was promised complete artistic control and final cut, the film went out unrated, though stories differ over whether Golan wanted it to be even more explicit. The Dereks said at the time that Golan was pushing for more graphic content, while Golan claimed he asked John to make some cuts. Over 30 years later, it's hard to ascertain the truth, and at this point, no one cares.

A willing participant in the implosion of her once-promising career, Bo Derek was offscreen for six years after BOLERO. When she made another film, it was of course directed by her husband. 1990's GHOSTS CAN'T DO IT, produced by former Trans-World Entertainment partners Eduard Sarlui and Moshe Diamant, is John Derek's worst film by a wide margin, a self-indulgent travelogue/home movie that found Bo as a widowed wife trying to find a younger body to host the spirit of her robust, much-older, and recently deceased husband (Anthony Quinn). Also featuring veteran actors Don Murray and Julie Newmar, the alleged comedy GHOSTS CAN'T DO IT is obviously about an aging John Derek facing his own mortality but is so vapid and empty that it's somehow worse than either TARZAN THE APE MAN or BOLERO, with its only notoriety these days stemming from the presence of none other than Donald Trump in a small role as an asshole corporate raider (in other words, "Donald Trump") trying to take control of Quinn's business. BOLERO and GHOSTS CAN'T DO IT were recently released as a double feature Blu-ray by the fine folks at Shout! Factory, and the very fact that this product exists in the year 2016 should completely debunk once and for all the myth that physical media is dead.

John and Bo Derek at the height
of the early 1980s Bo-mania.

Not long after GHOSTS CAN'T DO IT predictably bombed in theaters, John's health began to decline and Bo had to branch out and act in other movies. She found herself in several straight-to-video titles like 1992's HOT CHOCOLATE and a pair of 1994 post-BASIC INSTINCT erotic thrillers, SHATTERED IMAGE and WOMAN OF DESIRE. GHOSTS CAN'T DO IT proved to be John's final feature but he directed a pair of music videos for Shania Twain in 1995, the same year Bo had her most significant role in years as Chris Farley's scheming stepmother in TOMMY BOY. This led to some steady work on TV for Bo, which continued after John's death following emergency heart surgery in 1998 at the age of 71. In a relationship with SEX AND THE CITY and MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING co-star John Corbett since 2002, Bo hasn't appeared in a major theatrical feature since 2003's MALIBU'S MOST WANTED, though she's remained busy with a couple of Lifetime movies and guest spots on TV shows like CHUCK and CSI: MIAMI, as well as playing Tara Reid's mother in 2015's SHARKNADO 3: OH HELL NO! Bo Derek will turn 60 this year, and though she hasn't headlined a box office hit in over 30 years, she remains one of the world's most recognizable sex symbols, due mostly to one film: 10. No matter how peculiar or creepy the public perceived their relationship to be, there's no doubt she and John loved one another dearly, but after 10, she probably could've accomplished more than becoming a four-time Razzie winner in every movie she made with her husband--one for each film and then a special award for Worst Actress of the 1980s.

In Theaters: CREED (2015)

On DVD/Blu-ray: GOODNIGHT MOMMY (2015); MISSISSIPPI GRIND (2015); and MOMENTUM (2015)

In Theaters: KRAMPUS (2015)

On DVD/Blu-ray: WAR PIGS (2015) and RE-KILL (2015)

Cult Classics Revisited: WHITE OF THE EYE (1988)

In Theaters/On VOD: EXTRACTION (2015)

In Theaters: STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS (2015)

On DVD/Blu-ray: TIME OUT OF MIND (2015); NASTY BABY (2015); and GUNS FOR HIRE (2015)

In Theaters: THE BIG SHORT (2015)

In Theaters: JOY (2015)

In Theaters: THE HATEFUL EIGHT (2015)

On DVD/Blu-ray: CLOSE RANGE (2015); SHANGHAI (2015); and ASHBY (2015)

In Theaters: THE REVENANT (2015)

Cult Classics Revisited: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? (1972)

On DVD/Blu-ray: IRRATIONAL MAN (2015); PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE GHOST DIMENSION (2015); and SCOUTS GUIDE TO THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE (2015)

On Netflix, Special "Universal/Blumhouse Dumpjob" Edition: THE VEIL (2016); VISIONS (2016); and CURVE (2016)

In Theaters: DIRTY GRANDPA (2016)

In Theaters: ROOM (2015)

In Theaters: THE BOY (2016)

The Cannon Files: BOLERO (1984)