Good Efficient Butchery

HARDCORE HENRY
(Russia/US/China - 2016)

Written and directed by Ilya Naishuller. Cast: Sharlto Copley, Danila Kozlovsky, Haley Bennett, Tim Roth, Andrei Dementiev, Sveta Ustinova, Darya Charusha, Ilya Naishuller. (R, 96 mins)

Genre films have flirted with sequences with first-person POV fleetingly in the past, from relatively recent video game adaptations like HOUSE OF THE DEAD (2003) and DOOM (2005) and any number of 1970s-and-onward slasher films where the killer stalks their next victim (most recently done in the remake of MANIAC with Elijah Wood). Robert Montgomery's ambitious Philip Marlowe noir LADY IN THE LAKE (1947) was the first film to extensively tell a story through the first-person POV of the main character, only seeing what they see ("Starring Robert Montgomery...and YOU!"). The mostly English-language, partially Indiegogo-funded Russian import HARDCORE HENRY takes that concept to its absolute extreme (or "X-treme," if you prefer), with the entire 96-minute film seen from the POV of the title character, a dead and partially dismembered man reanimated as a cyborg, outfitted with a durable new arm and leg and annihilating everyone in sight on a mission of vengeance. It's no surprise that, with its first-person shooter gimmick and frequent weed references (like "4:20" spray-painted on a wall) that it's a prefab cult movie geared toward gamers and stoners, which certainly has some union on a Venn diagram. And though it would defeat the whole purpose of the project, you can't help but question whether, given the impressive nature of the stunt work and the chase scenes, and that it was shot in some run-down and apocalyptically atmospheric sections of Moscow that can barely be discerned with the non-stop camera movement, HARDCORE HENRY would've played a lot better had it been shot in a conventional fashion.

Played by ten different stuntmen and cameramen (including writer/director Ilya Naishuller, who also has another acting role) with GoPro Hero 3 cameras attached to mask-like helmets on their heads, an amnesiac Henry awakens in a lab inside an airborne military plane over Moscow where his scientist wife Estelle (Jennifer Lawrence lookalike Haley Bennett) is working on him as some kind of top-secret project. The lab is overtaken by telekinetic albino supervillain Akan (Danila Kozlovsky), who's planning to create a race of biomechanically-engineered cyborg supersoldiers, but Henry and Estelle manage to get to an escape pod and crash land on an abandoned highway where Estelle is abducted by more of Akan's goons. Henry quickly meets up with Jimmy (DISTRICT 9's Sharlto Copley), a government agent and fast-talking exposition machine who helps in his quest for revenge against Akan, and, in one of the many nods to the video game influence, keeps getting killed and instantly reappearing in another, distinctly different guise (which also allows the increasingly grating and self-indulgent Copley--also one of a truckload of producers--to mercilessly ham it up).

Looking not unlike a co-production between the Russian mob and Red Bull, HARDCORE HENRY works surprisingly well for about 30 minutes, with some kinetic energy and chutzpah in its balls-to-the-wall, anything-goes mentality and it's buoyed by some truly hair-raising stunt work. But by half an hour in, it's played all of its cards and has no choice but to keep endlessly repeating itself. What was initially fun and gleefully over-the top--the violence and splatter here stretch the limits of the R rating about as far as it can go--turns deadening and headache-inducing as the gimmick runs its course in record time. Naishuller, a music video vet who shot several videos for the Russian punk band Biting Elbows in the same first-person-fashion (obviously, this is Naishuller's "thing"), is a protege of NIGHT WATCH director Timur Bekmambetov, who was the key producer here. The technique works in small doses, and this could've been an effective short film, but it doesn't take long for HARDCORE HENRY to turn into a toss-up between a Buzzfeed viral video designed to be watched on your phone, or DREDD re-imagined as a Russian dashcam video. Viewers with a low tolerance for shaky cam will bolt in record time, and Naishuller doesn't even try to rein in Copley, who seems to approach every role like he's Robin Williams on a talk show. There's some inspired moments scattered about--a bunch of Jimmy's various avatar incarnations doing a rendition of Cole Porter's "I've Got You Under My Skin," where Copley manages to pull off without being irritating; an argument yelled in Russian represented by overlapping, illegible subtitles; and a happy accident involving the actor playing Henry in a chase scene accidentally plowing over a stuntwoman on an escalator and Naishuller leaving the gaffe as is. He also acknowledges the the importance of LADY IN THE LAKE to the first-person POV motif by its poster being visible on one character's living room wall.

It's commendable that Naishuller sticks to the rules he establishes and fully commits to the first-person ethos, but does that automatically mean it's a worthwhile film? From the buzz at Toronto and SXSW this year, it seems that the glowing reviews were praising the technical accomplishment more than the film itself, which was an issue with another recent gimmick film, the 138-minute unbroken, single-take VICTORIA. HARDCORE HENRY has some ballsy ideas, but it simply blows its load too quickly, lacking the staying power for a 90-minute movie. Many of the jokes are cheap and lazy, like Jimmy listening to Leo Sayer's "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing" in his SUV, the punchline apparently being "There's a cheesy disco tune I recognize ironically," or Henry hopping on a horse, accompanied by the theme from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. Tim Roth has about 30 seconds of screen time as Henry's father in his one human memory remaining, and it would appear his shots were done in Los Angeles by a separate crew listed in the credits, with someone even getting a "Dialect coach for Mr. Roth" credit when he has three lines of dialogue and uses the same RESERVOIR DOGS American accent he's been using for the last 25 years. And in this era of trigger warnings and delicate snowflake sensibilities, when is someone going to stand up for the albinos of the world and how the pigmentally-challenged have been treated by the movie industry? Approaching his role as if Akan is a Bond villain's henchman working on his own nefarious, global domination plot in his downtime, Kozlovsky is appropriately cartoonish, but saddled with numerous groan-inducing quips that land with a thud. When's the last time you saw an albino in pop culture depicted as just a normal person? When Edgar Winter last had a hit single?

THE FOURTH WAR
(US - 1990)

An independently-made pickup for a post-Menahem Golan Cannon, John Frankenheimer's THE FOURTH WAR was a timely winding-down-of-the-Cold War thriller that failed to find an audience in the spring of 1990, bombing in 15th place its opening weekend as the much more high-profile HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER was still playing to packed houses. Though his days as an A-lister were done, Roy Scheider's steely star power and gravitas remained as strong as ever in an intense performance as Col. Jack Knowles, a career Army man and legendary Vietnam War hero with a history of bad behavior and losing his temper. He's been stationed at faraway bases like Manila and Guam and granted the respect he's earned from his service but essentially kept on a tight leash with easy assignments designed to keep him out of trouble. His buddy Gen. Hackworth (Harry Dean Stanton) gives him another shot in the limelight with a command post at an Army base at the West German/Czechoslovakia border. After witnessing Soviet officers kill a potential defector as he was running to cross into West Germany, Knowles starts a pissing contest with Soviet base commander Valachev (Jurgen Prochnow) that starts with snowballs, escalates to rocket launchers, and eventually, an international incident that takes them to the brink of WWIII.

Scheider and Prochnow are excellent as battle-hardened warriors--one shattered by Vietnam, the other by Afghanistan--who don't know what to do with themselves in peacetime. They served their country with honor, but war is all they know and when they have no war to fight, they're happy to create their own. Both actors do a terrific job of conveying the rage they can't articulate while the same time giving off subtle indications--a look, a half-hearted smile--indicating that underneath all the fighting, there's a grudging respect for what the other guy's been through and an acknowledgment that they speak the same language. Frankenheimer (THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, THE TRAIN) was a pro wise enough to spare us a hackneyed "We're a lot alike, you and I" discussion between Knowles and Valachev, and while it gets silly and implausible at times, Scheider and Prochnow keep it grounded and compelling, and there's fine support from Tim Reid as Knowles' by-the-book second-in-command. A solid little gem from Frankenheimer's lost years prior to his ANDERSONVILLE and RONIN resurgence in the late '90s, THE FOURTH WAR followed 52 PICK-UP (also with Scheider) and the Don Johnson actioner DEAD-BANG, all three Frankenheimer joints deserving better receptions than moviegoers gave them. He stumbled badly with his next project, 1991's dismal YEAR OF THE GUN, an ill-advised Andrew McCarthy/Sharon Stone thriller set in Italy during the Red Brigades domestic terror attacks and the kidnapping of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro, which was an even bigger box-office bomb than THE FOURTH WAR and one of the great director's worst films. (R, 91 mins)

PIGS
(US - 1973)

Re-released on the drive-in circuit incessantly throughout the 1970s and well into the 1980s under at least a dozen different titles and numerous re-edits, 1973's PIGS was the sole big-screen solo filmmaking effort of Marc Lawrence. Lawrence, who shared directing duties with John Derek on 1965's NIGHTMARE IN THE SUN and also helmed a few scattered TV shows in the early 1960s, was best known as a blacklisted character actor with communist and mob ties, whose career dated back to 1932, usually playing gangsters and killers (he had a memorably funny line as a Vegas gangster in the 1971 Bond outing DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER). PIGS finds Lawrence in total auteur mode--directing, producing, co-writing (with his wife Fanya Foss, though only an "F.A. Foss" is credited), and starring, along with his daughter Toni Lawrence, who would later be briefly married to a pre-fame Billy Bob Thornton in the late 1980s. After spending much of the 1950s and 1960s working in Europe after being blacklisted, Lawrence returned to the States and remained steadily employed into his 90s, with his final appearance coming in 2003's LOONEY TUNES: BACK IN ACTION. Lawrence sunk his own money into PIGS, even taking out another mortgage on his home to get it completed. He ended up with a strangely effective psychological horror film that on the surface, looks like a precursor to the over-the-top hillbilly/redneck horrors of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, EATEN ALIVE, MOTEL HELL, and nearly every Rob Zombie movie, but is really more in line with bizarre, low-budget, '70s indie oddities like MESSIAH OF EVIL, DEVIL TIMES FIVE, ALICE SWEET ALICE, HAUNTS, and to an extent, 1982's BUTCHER BAKER, NIGHTMARE MAKER.

A troubled woman on the run from a mysterious past, Lynn Hart (Toni Lawrence) stops in a small town off the beaten path and gets a job at a sparsely-patronized greasy spoon owned by Zambrini (Marc Lawrence), a retired circus clown who spends much of his free time feeding a dozen huge pigs he keeps in a pen on his property. The busybody townies insist Zambrini is behind a number of disappearances and he's been feeding his victims to the pigs, then engaging in second-hand cannibalism by eating them. That's actually the "B" story in PIGS, which really centers on the troubled Lynn, who's actually an escaped mental patient, locked up after killing her father, who molested her when she was a little girl. Finding a kindred spirit with the equally outcast Zambrini, Lynn begins seducing and killing the local yokels and providing more bodies for Zambrini to feed to the hogs, with the slow-on-the-uptake sheriff (Jesse Vint, a couple of years away from the 1974 sleeper smash MACON COUNTY LINE) gradually figuring out that something isn't right with the new girl in town and maybe Zambrini is feeding people to his human-flesh-craving pigs.

Marc Lawrence (1910-2005)

With an insanely catchy theme song that should've been a huge 1973 radio hit, PIGS would end up in the hands of numerous different and frequently shady distributors over the years. A couple of years later, Lawrence would add a ludicrous prologue that has Lynn a victim of some kind of demonic porcine possession in a re-release that went out under three titles: LOVE EXORCIST, THE STRANGE EXORCISM OF LYNN HART, and BLOOD PEN. It was also relaunched in the late '70s as DADDY'S GIRL, with a tone-deaf pedophile prologue that was more fitting for a T&A comedy. And in 1984, Aquarius' Terry Levene got a hold of it and sent it out on the grindhouse circuit for one more go-around as DADDY'S DEADLY DARLING, which is actually a rather appropriate title that's a bit more representative of the film's tone and mood than the bluntly exploitative-sounding PIGS. Each re-release and retitling would lead to more edits and newly-shot footage, but Vinegar Syndrome's recent extras-packed Blu-ray release of PIGS represents, with the input of Toni Lawrence, the original vision of PIGS intended by her late father. Well-acted by both Lawrences (Toni is especially good and has a kind-of Brooke Adams/Jennifer Salt/Adrienne Barbeau thing going on) and at times quite unsettling, PIGS often exhibits the kind of occasionally sloppy, one-take, DIY aesthetic you'd expect from an ultra low-budget drive-in horror movie shot on-the-fly in just ten days. But it makes an undeniable impression and has a disturbing and uneasy feel that it establishes and maintains throughout, keeping its WTF? elements in check and playing it totally straight and low-key. It's a grimly serious horror film despite some absurd elements that would've been played for sick, dark humor by other directors. It's an interesting approach and there's enough here to make you wonder about all of the offbeat ideas that Marc Lawrence might've had churning around in his head when he was paying the bills by appearing in big Hollywood movies. You might even find yourself so intrigued by PIGS that you'll wish it didn't turn out to be the end of his directing career (R, 81 mins)

THE LADY IN THE CAR WITH GLASSES AND A GUN
(France/Belgium - 2015)

Mystery novelist and screenwriter Sebastien Japrisot (1931-2003) was considered "the French Graham Greene" and is still held in high regard by fans in his home country. Though the 2004 film A VERY LONG ENGAGEMENT is probably the best known adaptation of his work to modern arthouse audiences, the late '60s/early '70s saw a string of French films that were either based on Japrisot's work or were original screenplays penned by the author himself, including two of Charles Bronson's biggest hits from his star-making European sojourn: 1968's FAREWELL, FRIEND aka HONOR AMONG THIEVES and 1970's RIDER ON THE RAIN. One such film was 1970's THE LADY IN THE CAR WITH GLASSES AND A GUN, the final work by veteran journeyman Anatole Litvak, scripted by Japrisot and based on his novel. LADY was remade in 1992 as the Estonian/Russian THE LADY IN THE CAR, which doesn't appear to have ever been released west of the Baltic Sea, and 2015 saw this remake that didn't really generate much interest in France or elsewhere. Director Joann Sfar sticks close to the novel and doesn't really do much to differentiate this version from Litvak's other than adding some more explicit sex and violence. In fact, he even makes a concerted effort to keep the story set in an early '70s setting and trots out some De Palma split-screen and other stylish and colorful tricks. The whole point of the project seems to be to emulate 1970 as much as possible while deliberately avoiding the self-conscious retro fetishism.

There isn't much reason for this remake to exist, but it's an enjoyable thriller with an appealing performance by Freya Mavor (Samantha Eggar in the 1970 version) as Dany Doremus, a frumpy wallflower in gaudy, oversized specs (of course, she's drop dead gorgeous when she takes them off). Dany is a secretary for wealthy Paris businessman Michel, played by Benjamin Biolay (Oliver Reed in the original). Michel has an important report Dany needs to type, so he has her come to his house and stay the night, since he and his wife Anita (NYMPHOMANIAC's Stacy Martin; Stephane Audran in the original) and their daughter are going out of town for a few days. Michel has Dany drive them to the airport in a vintage Thunderbird with instructions to take it back to their house and take a few days off work with an extra bonus for all of her trouble. Instead of taking the car back to Paris, she impulsively heads to the south of France because she always wanted to see the sea. On a road she's never taken to a place she's never been in a car she's never driven, everywhere she goes on the way, people insist they've seen her the previous day and she's even already signed in to a hotel where she tries to book a room. She's also attacked and has a wrist broken in a gas station restroom and can't trust a seemingly concerned mystery man (Elio Germano; John McEnery in the original) she meets in the hotel lobby. Things get even more bizarre when a body turns up in the trunk of the T-Bird. Is she suffering from amnesia or is there a conspiracy to drive her insane? The ludicrously contrived final explanation is so simple, quaintly old-fashioned, and beholden to coincidence and convenience that it's no wonder this didn't really get much play with today's twist-accustomed moviegoers. But right down to the score with some very Morricone-style 1970s cues, the 2015 version of THE LADY IN THE CAR WITH GLASSES AND A GUN is a slight but fun and entertaining throwback that wears its love of early '70s French thrillers on its sleeve and tries hard to please its audience. It's just too bad that its audience is still back in the 1970s. (Unrated, 95 mins)

STANDOFF
(Canada/US - 2016)

There's a lot of dumb things you need to overlook, but STANDOFF is the kind of compact B thriller that would've played the bottom half of a double bill back in the old days, and that's meant in a nice way. Visiting the graves of her parents who were killed in a car accident, 12-year-old Isabelle, nicknamed Bird (Ella Ballentine) witnesses several service attendees on the other side of the cemetery get gunned down by cold-blooded hit man Sade (Laurence Fishburne). Realizing he has a witness--and she was taking photos--he chases her to a ramshackle farmhouse where PTSD-plagued Iraq War vet Carter Greene (Thomas Jane) is drinking himself into a stupor with the intention of building up the courage to blow his brains out. Sade shoots Carter in the ankle, and a shotgun-toting Carter grazes Sade's side. Carter's got one shell left and heads to the top of the stairs with Bird, shatters some light bulbs and scatters them on the steps in case Sade decides to sneak up on them. Sade, meanwhile, waits in the living room for the perfect time to take them both out. Hence, STANDOFF.

Written and directed by Adam Alleca, who hasn't done anything since scripting the 2009 remake of THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, STANDOFF has a simple set-up that can't fail: stick the characters in a powderkeg of a situation in an enclosed space and just let it boil. Alleca's script sometimes falls victim to some overbaked tough-guy posturing and pissing contests as Sade and Carter repeatedly shout at each other and Sade constantly invokes how they're both soldiers following orders. Fishburne, whose and dialogue and his delivery of it seems to suggest that Alleca wrote the part for Samuel L. Jackson but Fishburne was probably more economically priced, has a blast playing a thoroughly despicable shitbag, while Jane does a nice job as a shattered man whose life has completely fallen apart after his combat experiences and his procrastinating about picking up a tire in the high grass, inadvertently leading to his young son's death when he tripped over it and cracked his head open on a rock. Sure, it's a hackneyed plot device that Carter, whose wife left him after their son died, sees saving Bird as his last shot at redemption, just like it's hopelessly maudlin to have the son's death symbolized by his red balloon floating away (also, why isn't anyone looking for the missing sheriff's deputy that Sade kills?), but STANDOFF overcomes its missteps by excelling where it matters, with the actors (young Ballentine is very impressive) and the intensity of the situation. Alleca also shows his horror influences with several striking shot compositions throughout, and some interesting and unexpected stylistic touches and some occasionally Argento-inspired colorgasms. These positives allow you to overlook things like Sade hectoring Carter with philosophical nuggets like "You don't look the devil in the face without takin' a ride to the bottom floor," which is probably the best bit of Satanically-based life coaching this side of mercenary-of-the-future Jack Palance incomprehensibly bellowing "If you're gonna dine with the devil, you're gonna need a looooong spoon!" in 1993's CYBORG 2. Fishburne and Jane were among the small army of producers, which also includes actor Hayden Christensen and, of all people, Rich Iott, a former Republican congressional candidate from Ohio and occasional Nazi fashion enthusiast. (R, 86 mins)

FLIGHT 7500
(US/Japan - 2016)

When a passenger has a violent seizure, vomits blood, and dies shortly into a Los Angeles-to-Tokyo flight, a supernatural presence makes itself known in this dismal and long-shelved English-language horror film from J-Horror auteur Takashi Shimizu, best known for 2002's JU-ON and its 2004 American remake THE GRUDGE. Filmed in 2011 with a trailer arriving online and in theaters early the next year for its planned August 2012 release under its original title 7500, FLIGHT 7500 was yanked from the release schedule by CBS Films and simply vanished until its premiere overseas in 2014. Lionsgate ended up acquiring the film for the US and sat on it for another two years before quietly dumping it as a DTV title with no publicity at all. The end result looks a lot like what might happen if M. Night Shyamalan remade one of the later, dumber AIRPORT sequels, filled with characters for the most part so loathsome that you hope the plane crashes five minutes after takeoff. With a running time of just 79 minutes, FLIGHT 7500 plays like something that's been truncated and mangled in the editing room, obviously the kind of film that was simply abandoned by everyone involved. The Shyamalanian plot twist at the end is a hoary cliche that negates everything that happened before, like the death of the seizing passenger or the douchey dudebro who tries to steal his Rolex. There's some talk of that passenger carrying a "death doll" that has something to do with Japanese folklore, but that's forgotten as soon as it's mentioned. Then a couple of dead passengers turn into zombies and the survivors are chased by what looks like the output of an '80s metal band's malfunctioning fog machine, but nothing comes of it and nothing is ever fully realized or even remotely explored for that matter, at least in this version.

In the midst of all the paranormal inactivity, Shimizu and screenwriter Craig Rosenberg (THE QUIET ONES) start focusing on the uninteresting characters' melodramatic, daytime soap-ready backstories--flight attendant Leslie Bibb coming to the realization that pilot Johnathon Schaech is never leaving his wife and kids for her; flight attendant Jamie Chung and her prolonged engagement; paramedic Ryan Kwantan and wife Amy Smart trying to get over their second miscarriage; ENTOURAGE's Jerry Ferrara and his germphobic bitch of a Bridezilla wife Nicky Whelan (who continued her unintentional "airline disaster-as-metaphor-for-her-career" motif by later co-starring in the Nic Cage remake of LEFT BEHIND) on their honeymoon; and sullen, tattooed goth chick Scout Taylor-Compton serving as this film's Basil Exposition when it comes to the spirit world and the whatever else thing this is trying to say. A film so bad that the post-production clusterfuckery has to be more interesting than anything in the finished product, FLIGHT 7500 might've had some good ideas at some point, but what's here is an incoherent disaster that's been chopped down as much as it can while still barely qualifying as feature-length. On top of that, after Capt. Schaech orders lights out for the duration of the flight, most of the film takes place in such murky darkness that you can hardly see half of what's going on. Some good films just have bad luck and get lost in the shuffle when it comes to finding a a place on the release schedule--this is not one of them. Still, I can't help but think that having George Kennedy turn up as a ghostbusting Joe Patroni would've salvaged the whole thing. (PG-13, 79 mins)

MIDNIGHT SPECIAL
(US - 2016)

Written and directed by Jeff Nichols. Cast: Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, Adam Driver, Sam Shepard, Jaeden Lieberher, Bill Camp, Scott Haze, Paul Sparks, David Jensen, Dana Gourrier, Sean Bridgers. (PG-13, 112 mins)

Since his brilliant 2008 debut SHOTGUN STORIES, Arkansas-based writer/director Jeff Nichols has explored family bonds and haunted legacies in distinct and vivid rural settings. His is a unique voice that has emerged over his follow-up efforts TAKE SHELTER (2011) and MUD (2013), a key film in the McConaissance of a few years back, in which Matthew McConaughey turned in an even better performance than he did in DALLAS BUYERS CLUB, even though it was the latter that got him an Oscar. MUD was enough of a sleeper hit to get Nichols his first major-studio production, the sci-fi drama MIDNIGHT SPECIAL, though it's hardly a commercial, multiplex endeavor. Warner Bros. opened it small after sitting on it for nearly two years and changing the release date a few times, and it's the kind of film that gains traction by word of mouth. Though he's working with a bigger budget and some reasonably conservative use of special effects, Nichols keeps MIDNIGHT SPECIAL very much in line with his own cinematic niche. In a way, it's his most personal film yet, inspired by a period where his then eight-month-old son was suffering seizures and was paralyzed for a month.

MIDNIGHT SPECIAL focuses on a family that's loving but shattered nonetheless. Nichols plays his cards close to the vest, offering small details here and there and leaving it to the audience to connect the dots, a brave decision in today's multiplexes. Roy Tomlin (Nichols regular Michael Shannon) and his friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton) are the subjects of a manhunt after an Amber Alert is issued for Alton Meyer (Jaeden Lieberher), the eight-year-old adopted son of Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard). Meyer is the charismatically shady leader of a religious cult known as "The Ranch," whose Texas compound has just been raided by the FBI after months of surveillance. Meyer tells the agents in charge that Roy is Alton's biological father and that Roy and his estranged wife Sarah (Kirsten Dunst) recently left The Ranch. Meyer preaches a series of numbers that the FBI and NSA investigator Paul Sevier (Adam Driver) believe are top-secret coordinates transmitted from government satellites. Both are incredulous when Meyer tells them the numbers came out of Alton's mouth and he believes he's a vessel for God's word. While Meyer dispatches his own hired guns (Bill Camp, Scott Haze) to find Alton, the boy is being taken to an unknown location in Florida by his father and Lucas, a childhood friend of Roy's who lost touch with him after Roy's family joined Meyer's cult. For reasons that become clear as the film goes on, Alton cannot be out in daylight and must wear dark goggles that keep in check powerful beams of light that emanate from his eyes when he gets his "messages" and noise-canceling headphones in an attempt to keep him from picking up radio signals. When he brings down a government satellite and it crashes in pieces on a gas station in the middle of the night, the FBI turns the case over to Sevier, the NSA, and the military, who want to get to the bottom of Alton's unique abilities, but even they aren't prepared for the reality of Alton or his origin.

A very allegorical, metaphorical story open to a number of interpretations--is Alton a symbol for Jesus? Is he possessed? Is he from another world? Is he a young superhero learning to control his powers? Is he terminally ill?--MIDNIGHT SPECIAL may be Nichols' most personal film yet. In dealing with the situation involving his own ill infant son and the recovery that inspired him to conceive this story, Nichols gained new perspectives on parenthood that resonate in the relationship between Roy and Alton. Shannon, rarely a sympathetic figure onscreen, is often heartbreaking as a loving father struggling to put his family back together and willing to do whatever it takes, even sacrificing innocent bystanders, to fulfill his role as protector and make sure his son is safe. Much has been made of the Spielbergian, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND nature of MIDNIGHT SPECIAL, though I'd argue that a good chunk of the film could almost pass for John Carpenter in STARMAN mode or Joe Dante in one of his darker moods. Regardless of what's the bigger stylistic influence, MIDNIGHT SPECIAL feels like an early 1980s film lost in time, and that's meant to be a compliment. Nichols demonstrates an ability to tell a bigger story that grows more reliant on special effects as it proceeds while still keeping it grounded in his own style and tone. Nichols loves setting films in rural places and makes great use of empty highways and back country roads, and it's telling that MIDNIGHT SPECIAL's weakest section is its effects-filled finale, where the payoff doesn't quite match the buildup (also, Shepard's Calvin Meyer just disappears from the film), with an open-to-interpretation ending that feels a little hoary and played-out. Still, for a film that's bigger than anything he's done ($20 million is probably still considered "low-budget," but that's double what MUD cost), MIDNIGHT SPECIAL succeeds in the way it very much remains the distinctive work of its maker. That's something that's unusual to see in today's movies, particularly ones with big-studio money that gradually roll out to nationwide release. This isn't Nichols' best film, but it's still a very good one that's better than a lot of what's out there now, and with a 4-for-4 record, it's pretty clear by this point that this is someone we can start calling an important American filmmaker.

CRIMINAL
(US - 2016)

Directed by Ariel Vroman. Written by Douglas Cook and David Weisberg. Cast: Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman, Tommy Lee Jones, Alice Eve, Gal Gadot, Ryan Reynolds, Michael Pitt, Jordi Molla, Antje Troue, Scott Adkins, Amaury Nolasco, Colin Salmon, Natalie Burn, Lara Decaro. (R, 113 mins)

Your tolerance for the high-concept sci-fi espionage actioner CRIMINAL is dependent upon a number of things: how much you can suspend your disbelief, how much you can stomach graphically brutal and gleefully over-the-top violence, and how perversely fascinating you find serious, award-caliber actors slumming it in a trashy genre offering from Cannon cover band Millennium (I'd recommend running the Cannon intro on your own as the movie starts to get the maximum effect). To Millennium's credit, they brought their A-game to this, opting to actually shoot a London-set story in London instead of their usual unconvincing Bulgarian backlot. Even their go-to CGI clown crew at Worldwide FX seems to have admirably stepped up to the challenge and produced possibly the best splatter and explosions they've ever done. At a cursory glance, CRIMINAL has "straight-to-VOD" written all over it, but with a wild script by the late Douglas Cook (he died in July 2015) and David Weisberg, the same duo who wrote THE ROCK (Michael Bay's one legitimately awesome movie), assured direction by the promising Ariel Vroman (the little-seen 2013 mob movie THE ICEMAN), and an absurdly overqualified cast, CRIMINAL ultimately transcends its dubious first impression and if you're approaching it in the right mood, ends up a hell of a lot more enjoyable than it has any business being.

When London-based CIA agent Bill Pope (Ryan Reynolds, who's all over the trailers but not in the print ads or the poster) is tortured and killed by international terrorist Xavier Heimdahl (Jordi Molla--was Rade Serbedzija busy?), his London CIA bureau chief Quaker Wells (a ranting Gary Oldman) needs vital info Pope had but has no way of obtaining it. Enter Dr. Micah Franks (Tommy Lee Jones), who's spent 18 years working on the transplanting of memories but is still five years away from human trials. Wells decides that time is now when the dead Pope's brain is kept alive and Franks--short for Frankenstein?--springs Jerico Stewart (Kevin Costner) from a maximum security hellhole to be their guinea pig. Stewart, a psychotic, sociopathic, zero-remorse killing machine who feels no emotion and no pain thanks to a broken home and a childhood abuse incident where he suffered a traumatic brain injury at the hands of his enraged dad that caused his frontal lobe to stop forming at the age of ten, is flown to London and has Pope's memories injected into his brain. The experiment doesn't initially take, and despite the sympathetic Franks insisting Stewart needs more recovery time, an impatient Wells orders him terminated. Of course, Stewart ends up escaping custody and heading on a rampage across London when Pope's memories start materializing in his head. Stewart is alarmed to find that he can suddenly speak French (though he thinks it's Spanish) and has tastes for the finer things in life like lattes, but he's still Jerico Stewart and can't stop himself from killing innocent people in cold blood or beating the shit out of a pompous asshole in a coffee shop ("Who punches someone in a patisserie?" the outraged victim yells, in one of the many intentionally funny bits). With Wells and the CIA as well as Heimdahl's ruthless hit woman Elsa Mueller (Antje Troue) in hot pursuit for the information that is becoming clearer by the minute, Stewart eventually hides out with Pope's widow Jill (Gal Gadot), and feels genuine emotion for the first time when Pope's perceptive and impossibly cute daughter Emma (Lara Decaro) is nice to him. Stewart finally grows a conscience and decides to act on Pope's memories, which involved negotiating a CIA deal with hacker Jan Strook, aka "The Dutchman" (Michael Pitt), who has the ability to override all US military launch codes and intends to sell that info to the megalomaniacal Heimdahl, a crazed anarchist hell-bent on bringing down all of the world's governments.

Costner, introduced in chains with long hair and a madman beard like Sean Connery in THE ROCK and speaking in a guttural, Nick Nolte grumble, has never cut this loose onscreen before, whether he's hamming it up as the insane Stewart or bopping his head Roxbury-style as he steals a van and cruises around London looking for trouble. But when Stewart grows more human thanks to the gradual clarification of Pope's memories that trigger actual feeling within him, Costner gives Liam Neeson some serious competition in the "60-and-over asskicker" club by demonstrating acting chops that a Van Damme or a Dolph Lundgren wouldn't had this been a typical Millennium/NuImage offering. Jones remains low-key and somber and doesn't have much to do after the initial surgical procedure, and the same goes for Alice Eve, prominently billed in a thankless supporting role that gives her nothing to do. Likewise for DTV action hero Scott Adkins, who's in the whole movie as one of Wells' flunkies but is tragically underused, only getting a few "Yes, sir, whatever you say!"s to Oldman and no action scenes of his own (speaking of Adkins--while Vroman does a fine job, here's another larger-scale Millennium/NuImage project that would've been perfect for Isaac Florentine). With his hair flopping all over the place and froth forming in the corners of his mouth, Oldman works at two speeds here: irritable and apoplectic. He paces around what looks like a vacant BOURNE crisis suite as everyone watches monitors, waiting for just the right time to bellow "Find Jerico Stewart!" and "It's him! Let's go!" or, in his more introspective moments, "FUCK!" like a bloviating jackass who seems blithely unaware that he's got a ridiculous name like "Quaker Wells" (Adkins' character is listed as "Pete Greensleeves" in the credits, but I don't recall any of the agents working under Wells ever being referred to by name). CRIMINAL is total empty calorie junk food, but it's junk food of the highest caliber. Like sweets and snacks that really do nothing good for you, you just need them once in a while, and CRIMINAL scratches that '80s/'90s throwback itch not just with its ridiculous premise and hooky electronic score by Brian Tyler and Keith Power (yes, like nearly everything else these days, it's "Carpenter-esque"), but with the casting of real actors--I wonder if Costner, Oldman, and Jones did any JFK reminiscing between takes--to seal the deal.

CONQUEST
(Italy/Spain/Mexico - 1983; US release 1984)

Every few years, I feel compelled to revisit Lucio Fulci's bizarre contribution to the 1980s sword & sorcery craze, thinking "I'll figure it out this time," and I never do. There's no making sense out of CONQUEST, an acid-trippy ripoff of CONAN THE BARBARIAN by way of EL TOPO, shot in the most gauzy, foggy, smeary lens filter this side of Robert Altman's QUINTET. About as coherent as fragments of a barely-remembered dream, CONQUEST has young Ilias (Andrea Occhipinti of BOLERO) sent by his people on a quest to defeat the nefarious Ocron (Italian CONAN ripoff fixture Sabrina Siani, billed here as the more American sounding "Sabrina Sellers"), an iron-masked, topless overlord who spends most of her time writhing with snakes, eating the brains of her victims, and ordering around her army of talking wolf/dog creatures who walk upright. Ilias gets some help from mercenary warrior Mace (Jorge Rivero, during his "George Rivero" phase). who becomes his mentor in their quest to defeat Ocron, who's later joined by her own masked co-conspirator Zora (Conrado San Martin). Mace and Ilias then spend a lot of time walking around and encountering various creatures of undetermined origin before their final, fateful laser arrow showdown with the evil Ocron and her minions.

Coming soon after the end of his unstoppable 1979-1982 run of iconic gorehound classics like ZOMBIE, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE BEYOND, and others, Fulci had grown into enough of a genuine auteur by this point--even if it hadn't yet been recognized--that you can see him attempting to imbue CONQUEST with his unique stamp. Claudio Simonetti's score is mostly then-trendy synth material, but there are some cues that are strikingly similar to Fabio Frizzi's work on CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, and it shares with it the same hazily nonsensical, anything-goes dream logic, plus Mace has a mark on his forehead that looks very similar to the "Eibon" symbol from THE BEYOND. From the laser arrows to the wolf/dog army to a drowned Mace being brought back to life by dolphins, there's no way to predict what will happen next in CONQUEST. Fulci also doesn't skimp on the trash and the gore: Siani is topless every moment she's onscreen, and there's plenty of gore, from cannibalism to scalping to one unfortunate female victim being ripped up the middle like a broken wishbone and disemboweled. His partnership with Fabrizio De Angelis over after the producer slashed the budget of 1982's MANHATTAN BABY by 75%, and his relationship with frequent screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti in tatters, Fulci is in hired gun mode on CONQUEST even with his attempts to personalize it, brought in by Italian producer Giovanni Di Clemente after the latter entered a co-production deal with Mexican producers/screenwriters Carlos Vasallo and J. Antonio de la Loma.

Mexican actor Rivero likely came as part of the Vasallo/de la Loma package deal, as he starred in several of their past and future de la Loma-directed films, like the 1982 espionage thriller TARGET: EAGLE, the 1984 DEATH WISH-meets-CONVOY trucker revenge actioner KILLING MACHINE, the 1988 DELTA FORCE ripoff COUNTERFORCE, and the 1989 bare-knuckle brawler FIST FIGHTER. Rivero attempted to break into Hollywood when he co-starred with John Wayne in 1970's RIO LOBO and with Charlton Heston and James Coburn in 1976's THE LAST HARD MEN, but he never happened in the US. Instead, Rivero built a career in Mexico and overseas in Spain, with occasional appearances in a few straight-to-US-video titles in the 1990s, like the Traci Lords thriller ICE and the 1995 MST3K staple WEREWOLF. Released in the US by United Film Distribution Company in the spring of 1984, CONQUEST has its devoted defenders but is generally considered second, if not third-tier Fulci. It's not a good movie, but there's something to it that keeps drawing me back, whether it's the splatter and surrealism inherent to Fulci or some of the humor that seems intentional, like Ocron screaming "Stop him, Zora!" as Zora just emits an exasperated sigh and vanishes into thin air as if he can't even with this bitch anymore, or the closing credits caveat "Any reference to persons or events is purely coincidental." Thanks for clearing that up. (R, 89 mins)

VENOM
(UK - 1982)

"Half the big-name cast appears to be drunk; the other half looks as though it wishes it were" - Leonard Maltin on VENOM.

One of the most stupidly entertaining guilty pleasure horror movies of the 1980s, VENOM finds a claustrophobic London hostage situation made worse when the party is crashed by the world's deadliest and most venomous snake. Philip (Lance Holcomb) is the animal-obsessed, dangerously asthmatic ten-year-old son of a wealthy American hotel CEO based in London. When Mom (Cornelia Sharpe, wife of the film's producer Martin Bregman, and the Lorraine Gary to his Sid Sheinberg) goes on a business trip with Dad, Philip is left in the care of his grizzled, retired safari guide grandfather (the always wonderful Sterling Hayden, in his last big-screen role) and maid Louise (Susan George). Unbeknownst to Philip and Grandpa, Louise and surly chauffeur Dave ("and Oliver Reed as Dave") are conspiring with Louise's beau, international terrorist Jacmel (Klaus Kinski, who turned down the role of Toht in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK because he felt the script was "moronically shitty" and VENOM paid more) to kidnap Philip and get a fat ransom from his dad. That plan goes south when Philip's package at the neighborhood pet store--a harmless African house snake--is mixed-up with an order for a black mamba placed by an area toxicology lab overseen by Dr. Stowe (Sarah Miles). The box containing the mamba is opened and it immediately bites and kills Louise, then proceeds to hide in the vents, occasionally slithering out to launch itself at someone or just play games by scaring the shit out of them. Meanwhile, irate hostage negotiator Bulloch (Nicol Williamson) tries to contain the escalating crisis from outside the house and meet Jacmel's demands. And, of course, Philip can't breathe.

Opening in theaters in January 1982, VENOM began production in the fall of 1980 with THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE director Tobe Hooper at the helm, fresh off of his success with the 1979 CBS miniseries SALEM'S LOT and the 1981 hit THE FUNHOUSE. Shortly into filming, creative differences manifested, leading to Hooper either quitting or being dismissed, depending on who's telling the story. While Hooper went on to direct (or "direct") POLTERGEIST, his hastily-chosen VENOM replacement was found in journeyman Piers Haggard. A respected and consistently busy director for British television, Haggard occasionally dabbled in features like 1970's THE BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW and Peter Sellers' horrendous 1980 swan song THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU, where he was fired by the star, who finished directing the film himself, though only Haggard--the third director cycled through the doomed project--remained the credited fall guy. Haggard arrived on VENOM with very little prep time and had to not only contend with an already troubled production falling behind schedule, but also with the numerous volatile personalities in his cast. The key focus of the damage control was on anger management poster boy Kinski, whose legendarily bad behavior and near-constant screaming fits prompted even the normally difficult Reed and Williamson to tone down their acts and just stay out of the path of Hurricane Klaus. Haggard contributed a very enjoyable commentary to Blue Underground's 2003 DVD release of VENOM (a Blu-ray upgrade is due out this summer) where he detailed all of the hassles and brouhahas that developed during the shoot (Haggard recounts Miles at one point telling Reed to just punch Kinski in the face to shut him up, to which the usually short-fused Reed quietly balked and said "I'm no fool").

As problematic as everything was, he seems like a good sport about it, and the film works in spite of its silliness. It's hard not to be entertained by Kinski's climactic spaz attack as he flails around wrapping a rubber snake around himself, Williamson's obviously grouchy disinterest in the whole endeavor, and a gun-shot Reed rendered immobile and forced to watch the mamba crawl up his pants leg and bite him on the dick. Also with brief appearances by Michael Gough as the London Zoo's leading snake expert, and John Forbes-Robertson--best known as Hammer's ineffective replacement Dracula when Christopher Lee refused to appear in 1974's horror/kung-fu hybrid THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES--as a doomed cop killed by an impulsive and panicked Dave. Reed apparently had such a great time doing a horror movie about a snake that he did another one a year later with 1983's Canadian-made SPASMS. (R, 92 mins)

HEARTS AND ARMOUR
(Italy - 1983; US release 1985)

Written and directed by Giacomo Battiato. Cast: Zeudi Araya, Barbara De Rossi, Rick Edwards, Leigh McCloskey, Ronn Moss, Maurizio Nichetti, Tanya Roberts, Giovanni Visentin, Tony Vogel, Lina Sastri, Lucien Bruchon, Al Cliver, Robert Spafford, Ottaviano Dell'Acqua, Bobby Rhodes, Hal Yamanouchi. (Unrated, 101 mins)

A virtually forgotten adventure saga set during the Crusades, 1983's HEARTS AND ARMOUR was a handsomely-produced, reasonably big-budget Italian film picked up for US distribution by Warner Bros. in 1984. A cursory glance puts it in the same class as any number of imported CONAN THE BARBARIAN ripoffs playing drive-ins and grindhouses at the time, but it's a comparatively highbrow affair, based on Ludovico Ariosto's 16th century, 38,000-line epic poem Orlando Furioso. Rather than muscular barbarians, it's closer in tone and chivalrous knighthood spirit to John Boorman's EXCALIBUR, which was a huge hit for Warner Bros. in 1981. But HEARTS AND ARMOUR never achieved that level of success or exposure. After a few test screenings that didn't go well, the studio shelved the film for a year before releasing it straight-to-video in 1985. It also had a few sporadic HBO airings not long after, but has largely languished in obscurity for 30 years, trudged up only by the curious obtaining import or bootleg copies or hoping somebody's put it on YouTube. Thanks to its review in the Maltin movie guide, a rumor has persisted among the film's tiny cult following (mainly confined to the daytime soap crowd, as two of the film's stars went on to make names for themselves in that field) that a longer version exists, and that the 101-minute US release was cut down from a four-hour miniseries for Italian TV. While that was the case with some films from that period (1983's YOR: THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE, being one major example), HEARTS AND ARMOUR was never a four-hour miniseries. It was shot in 2.35:1 widescreen, which would be unheard-of for a made-for-TV project in those 1.33:1 broadcast days, and nobody's ever found any evidence of air dates in Italy or anything whatsoever to corroborate a four-hour version, despite the persistence of that one inevitable dude in an IMDb comments thread who insists he's seen it.

Directed by Giacomo Battiato, a career journeyman who primarily worked in Italian television and is still active there today, HEARTS AND ARMOUR simplistically whittles the Crusades down to a tale of forbidden love and personal vengeance between warring Christian and Moor families. Bradamante (Barbara De Rossi) is a noblewoman who has rebelled against her Christian family, renouncing her wealth and comfort to go wherever the road takes her, coming into possession of an indestructible suit of armor that renders her most powerful in battle. She rescues Moor princess Angelica (Tanya Roberts, in between THE BEASTMASTER and SHEENA) from the first of many attacks (Angelica seems on the verge of being gang-raped every time we see her) and takes her prisoner, intending to turn her over to the Christians. Things are complicated when Bradamante meets Ruggero (future soap star Ronn Moss, then best known as the bassist in the late '70s soft rock juggernaut Player, of "Baby Come Back" fame), a Moor prince and heir to the throne of his king father (dubbing legend Robert Spafford). She falls in love with Ruggero, but is fearful of a witch's prophecy that he will die at the hands of Christian paladin Orlando (Rick Edwards, an American model and another future soap star). Orlando meanwhile, comes to love Angelica as various forces from the Moors--Ruggero's sister Marfisa (Zeudi Araya, who went on to marry the film's producer Franco Cristaldi) and an improbable Asian warrior (Hal Yamanouchi) who seems to have wandered in from SHOGUN ASSASSIN--and the Christians--evil mercenary Ganelon (Giovanni Visentin) and duplicitous knight Ferrau (a scenery-chewing Tony Vogel, who speaks every one of his lines through clenched teeth as if he's in physical pain trying to shit and it's stuck)--relentlessly pursue them, leading to numerous extensive scenes of swordplay, jousting, and one-on-one combat.

Battiato, who wrote the script with uncredited assistance from Italian genre stalwarts Sergio Donati and Luciano Vincenzoni, doesn't do a very good job of presenting the story in a remotely coherent fashion, nor does it help that he's asking you to accept Tanya Roberts and Ronn Moss as Moors alongside black actors like Araya and DEMONS'Bobby Rhodes. But it's this choppy editing and the random introduction of new characters with no information who they are or how they relate to other people that certainly lends much credibility to the "this was cut down from a four-hour miniseries" argument. Leigh McCloskey (INFERNO) appears quite a bit as Rinaldo, a paladin friend of Orlando's, but he doesn't really have much of a purpose. In the poem, Rinaldo is Bradamante's brother and they're both Orlando's cousins, but the muddled HEARTS AND ARMOUR doesn't establish that. Battiato instead opts to focus on the action sequences, which take up most of the running time and are brutal, gory, and well-choreographed. Blood splatters, limbs and heads fly, and armor and swords clang furiously, all set to a rousing score by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark members Martin Cooper and David Hughes. This ensures the film is never boring but it's awfully difficult to follow, especially for those who aren't already very familiar with Ariosto's poem.

De Rossi does a convincing job as Bradamante, but everyone else wanders in and out, making it difficult to leave an impression. Roberts, formerly of CHARLIE'S ANGELS and a big enough name in 1983 to provide credible American export value with then-DALLAS co-star McCloskey, has little to do with a character who's constantly in distress, with her wardrobe perpetually ready to fall off (it never does). A musician attempting to break into acting, Moss would go on to play Rowdy Abilene in Andy Sidaris'HARD TICKET TO HAWAII (1987) before spending 25 years as Ridge Forrester on the CBS soap THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL, while Edwards found much less job security, making a couple of little-seen Italian films before appearing for a few years on NBC's SANTA BARBARA, his career essentially over by the early '90s. Both do decent work in the battle scenes, though they don't fare as well dramatically, as both are dubbed by familiar-sounding Eurocult voice actors. There's also small roles for Eurotrash vets Yamanouchi, Rhodes, Ottaviano Dell'Acqua, and Lucio Fulci regular Al Cliver, who shows up long enough to get his throat sliced open by Angelica after yet another attempted gang rape, which these knights don't really grasp is hard to do with all the armor. Battiato went back to TV, directing the four-hour 1986 Italian TV miniseries BLOOD TIES, a mob drama with an impressive cast headlined by Brad Davis, Tony Lo Bianco, Vincent Spano, Maria Conchita Alonso, Michael V. Gazzo, Joe Spinell, and De Rossi. BLOOD TIES would be cut down to two hours for its American premiere as a Showtime original movie, later losing another 20 minutes for its eventual VHS release. HEARTS AND ARMOUR doesn't have much going for it aside from De Rossi's beauty and some impressive, spirited action, but a proper restoration to its 2.35:1 widescreen to show off the work of cinematographer Dante Spinotti, perhaps as a remastered Warner Archive release, would go a long way toward boosting its reputation. Or even reminding people that it exists.

CRY OF A PROSTITUTE

(Italy - 1974; US release 1976)

Directed by Andrea Bianchi. Written by Piero Regnoli. Cast: Henry Silva, Barbara Bouchet, Fausto Tozzi, Vittorio Sanipoli, Mario Landi, Patrizia Gori, Dada Gallotti, Alfredo Pea. (Unrated, 93 mins)

Titled QUELLI CHE CONTANO in Italy, which translates to the vague THE ONES WHO COUNT in English, this tawdry 1974 Eurocrime thriller was given a sleazy, drive-in-ready rechristening as CRY OF A PROSTITUTE for its 1976 US release by grindhouse outfit Joseph Brenner Associates, Inc. It's not exactly false advertising--there is an ex-prostitute who figures into the story and she indeed cries--but it probably disappointed those specifically looking for T&A trash, though audiences did end up getting a more-violent-than-usual Italian mob movie out of the deal. The great Henry Silva, who was getting a ton of work in poliziotteschi films throughout the 1970s, is Sicilian-born hit man Tony Ariante, who returns to his rural Sicily village birthplace after spending years with the American mob in Brooklyn. He's back at the behest of Don Cascemi (Vittorio Sanipoli), who wants to start a war between two other bosses, Don Cantimo (Fausto Tozzi) and Don Scannapieco (Mario Landi). The three warring dons have gotten involved in the drug trade, though Cascemi and Tony are appalled that the bodies of dead kids are being used to move junk back and forth between Europe and America. In classic YOJIMBO fashion, Tony plays both sides against the other ("Whose side are you on?" Scannapieco asks, to which Tony replies "The winner") and things escalate when he steps in and offs three goons who try to kill Don Scannapieco's handicapped son Zino (Alfredo Pea). If that's not enough, Tony's lured into a sadomasochistic fling with Don Cantimo's alcoholic, nympho wife Margie (Barbara Bouchet), the former prostitute of the title, who ropes Tony in by gently fellating the tip of a peeled banana at the dinner table. Fortunately for Tony, Don Cantimo gets off on being a cuckold, demanding dirty-talk confessionals about her extramarital flings while they have sex ("God, what a whore you are!" he ecstatically moans in the velvet tones of veteran voice dubber Michael Forest). Tony doesn't have time for romance, instead opting to anally rape Margie in the barn while beating her and forcing her face-first into the gutted, raw carcass of a hung-up pig in a scene so wrong in so many ways that it has to be seen to be believed.

The casually cruel nature of CRY OF A PROSTITUTE shouldn't be a surprise since it's directed by Italian trash auteur Andrea Bianchi, whose later films include the charming 1975 giallo STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER, the sleazy 1979 supernatural horror/porno crossover MALABIMBA: THE MALICIOUS WHORE, and the 1981 zombie incest masterpiece BURIAL GROUND. Silva plays one of the most vile sociopaths of his career, possibly even more despicable than the similarly nihilistic asshole he played in Fernando Di Leo's THE BOSS, aka WIPEOUT!, a year earlier, the difference being that Tony's the hero. Not only is there the extremely brutal sodomy scene in the barn, but he also later whips Margie with his belt, finishing her off with a few thwacks across her face with the buckle (the end result adorned Joseph Brenner's US poster art, which would not fly today). He also finds it's not enough to kill a couple of rival gangsters, but he also has to drive over and flatten them with a conveniently-available steamroller. The only thing that makes Tony even slightly human is the small amount of sympathy he feels for the helpless Zino, and a surprise reveal at the end tries to justify Tony's actions, but it's pretty hard to excuse his--or the film's--treatment of the pathetic Margie, played by the gorgeous Bouchet at her least glamorous. After opening with an instant classic decapitation, CRY OF A PROSTITUTE is a little slow-going and predictable for a while, but Bianchi clearly gets bored and starts going increasingly over-the-top in ways that make Silva's next Eurocrime gig--Umberto Lenzi's incredible ALMOST HUMAN--seem tame by comparison. Whether it's the misogynistic sexual violence, the pervy antics of Don Cantimo, or the insane killings (another guy gets his head split when it's pushed through a band saw), CRY OF A PROSTITUTE never resists a chance to go for shock value.

It also takes advantage of its rural, old-country setting by essentially making the story a spaghetti western in poliziotteschi disguise, from Tony's FISTFUL OF DOLLARS machinations to his climactic resurrection to take on Don Cantimo's men after he's presumed dead. Also noteworthy to the spaghetti western motif is Tony's ominous whistling before the kill, an obvious nod to Charles Bronson's Harmonica in Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. There's some good ideas in Piero Regnoli's script but Bianchi, by all accounts still with us at 90 though long-retired from the movies, is just too rude and crude to pull off any notion of stylistic, genre-melding subtleties. In the relatively controlled hands of a Di Leo, an Enzo G. Castellari (STREET LAW), or a more politically-minded genre figure like a Damiano Damiani (CONFESSIONS OF A POLICE CAPTAIN), CRY OF A PROSTITUTE could've been a much smarter film. But Andrea Bianchi never did subtle or smart, so it still scores as unabashed drive-in garbage, which is fine on its own. It also offers an essential Silva performance, with the actor getting in one of his signature, emphatic "MotherFUCKER!" bellowings ("Will you please clean my shoes?") that have retroactively made him the Samuel L. Jackson of Eurocrime.

Newspaper ad for CRY OF A PROSTITUTE, opening in Toledo, OH
on 6/2/1977, significantly toned down from the brutal one-sheet art.

PRECIOUS CARGO
(US/UK - 2016)

Directed by Max Adams. Written by Max Adams and Paul Seetachit. Cast: Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Bruce Willis, Claire Forlani, Daniel Bernhardt, Jenna Kelly, Nick Loeb, Lydia Hull, John Brotherton, Tyler John Olson, Sammi Barber, Christopher Rob Bowen. (R, 89 mins)

The latest in the landmark "Bruce Willis phones in his performance from his hotel room" series, PRECIOUS CARGO is marginally better than the likes of FIRE WITH FIRE, THE PRINCE, VICE, and EXTRACTION, but that's not saying much. Willis does even less than usual here, playing Gulfport crime boss Eddie Filosa, who's introduced in a hotel room berating and slapping a tailor and complaining that his tie looks "dipped in shit." He's doing this before sending his chief flunky Simon (Daniel Bernhardt) after disobedient cohort Karen (Claire Forlani), who tried to shaft him out of his 60% cut on her last job, so now he wants it all. Karen ends up involving her career-criminal ex Jack, referred to by Eddie as "the Michelangelo of thieves" and played with cocky wiseassery by SAVED BY THE BELL's Mark-Paul Gosselaar as if he's attempting to carve a niche as "the Ryan Reynolds of VOD," in a plot to rip off Eddie's diamond shipment. She's also got another surprise for him: she's pregnant with his child, which puts a damper on his blossoming relationship with nice veterinarian Jenna (Lydia Hull), who has no idea that he and his abrasive, little sis-like sidekick Logan (a legitimately enjoyable performance by the promising Jenna Kelly, who deserves her own movie) deal guns and kill people for a living. Double and triple crosses ensue, with Jack and Karen forming an uneasy alliance and putting together a crack team of hired criminals to take Eddie down in a way that is in no way reminiscent of a certain fast and/or furious franchise, with Simon in hot pursuit and Eddie right where you expect a modern-day Willis character to be: on his phone, either yelling "Find him!" or smirking as he sleepily recites tepid bon mots being fed to him just off-camera.

When Eddie derisively calls Jack "Cowboy," it's probably meant to be a winking homage to DIE HARD, but all it does is remind you of how great Willis once was and how little he cares now. If you stop-watched Willis' screen time in PRECIOUS CARGO, you probably wouldn't even get to five minutes. He has one brief scene away from Eddie's hotel room and the outside patio, and that's for the requisite visit to an abandoned shipyard for an incoherently-edited shootout. His most lifelike moment comes when he does an uncomfortably overlong half-assed chuckle that seems like less a character action and more like Willis' response to director/co-writer Max Adams requesting "Bruce, let's run through that last part again." Demonstrating a work ethic that makes you appreciate the comparatively tireless dedication of Steven Seagal, it's almost as if Willis' career has become a tribute to Henry Fonda's one morning of work on 1977's TENTACLES, where the legendary actor was cast as the scowling head of an oil company and was given vague lines like "Just fix it!" and "Why wasn't I notified of this?"--lines that could be about anything and it quickly becomes apparent that Fonda very likely has no idea that he's in a movie about a giant mutant octopus. Fonda didn't even leave his house to shoot his three or four brief scenes--the crew came to him. Willis is at least willing to go to expensive hotels to work on these low-budget movies for a couple of days, but we're maybe two or three of these things away from him texting in his performances while taking a dump.

There are a few things that work in PRECIOUS CARGO that make it a bit more endurable than most of its ilk: some of the stunt work is well-done, and there's a reasonably decent over-the-top jet skis-vs-speedboat chase that took some planning and looks like something out of a Bond movie. It also really relishes and sinks its teeth into its R rating. The blood splatters and Adams (who also co-wrote EXTRACTION) supplies Bernhardt and Kelly with some occasionally funny and at times unabashedly offensive one-liners (Bernhardt's Simon to a trio of dim, surgically-enhanced bimbos at Eddie's pool: "Hey! You. Dickbreath. Where's Eddie?"), but Gosselaar and Forlani have zero chemistry as the bickering ex-lovers forced to work together on One Last Job. The less said about the rest of Jack's crew, the better: Tyler Jon Olson fails to make "You owe me a vacation!" a new catchphrase despite tireless efforts to do so, and Sammi Barber, as the idiot wife of one of the guys, uses a forced and indescribably awful Southern-twanged vocal fry that brings every scene she's in to a screeching halt. Cashing another easy paycheck from his enablers at Grindstone Entertainment and Emmett/Furla Films, Willis coasts through his few scattered scenes with the expected disinterest and visible contempt (he's also the only main cast member absent during the closing credits blooper reel, a good indication that people weren't having as fun a time with him as they were with everyone else). This is an actor who looks like he hates what he does for a living. Over the last 30 years, Willis has done great work in some great movies. By most standards, he's had a stellar career and likely gets a lifetime pass just on the basis of DIE HARD. Why he takes on these frivolous cameos in B and C-list Redbox-destined clunkers when he still has star power is a mystery. Actors fall into periodic slumps, but Willis seems to have intentionally created this one. Why? Not since Klaus Kinski followed FITZCARRALDO with an endless string of C-list genre fare has a gifted actor been so openly brazen about not giving a shit. Willis' chief objective these days is "What's the most amount of money I can make for the least amount of work?" You've still got some good stuff in you, Bruno. Maybe start following your own advice.

STRANGE SHADOWS IN AN EMPTY ROOM
aka BLAZING MAGNUM
aka SHADOWS IN AN EMPTY ROOM
(Italy/Canada - 1977)

Directed by Martin Herbert (Alberto De Martino). Written by Vincent Mann (Vincenzo Mannino) and Frank Clark (Gianfranco Clerici). Cast: Stuart Whitman, John Saxon, Martin Landau, Gayle Hunnicutt, Tisa Farrow, Carole Laure, Jean Leclerc, Jean Marchand, Anthony Forest. (R, 99 mins)

Filmed as BLAZING MAGNUM, this Italian/Canadian co-production was sold in the US by AIP as STRANGE SHADOWS IN AN EMPTY ROOM, with chillingly effective poster art that unfortunately has little to do with the actual film. Coming from producer Edmondo Amati (THE LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE) and the same creative personnel behind the goat-tastic 1974 EXORCIST ripoff THE ANTICHRIST, which wouldn't even be released in the US until late 1978 as THE TEMPTER, STRANGE SHADOWS is a very American-looking police procedural that happens to be shot and set in Montreal. Almost everyone is hiding behind Americanized pseudonyms--director Alberto De Martino is "Martin Herbert," while screenwriters Vincenzo Mannino and Gianfranco Clerici (a pair who also collaborated on the scripts for HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE PARK and THE NEW YORK RIPPER) have been respectively rechristened "Vincent Mann" and "Frank Clark"--an exception being composer Armando Trovajoli, whose moody, jazzy score wouldn't be at all out of place in a then-contemporary cop show on TV. Only in a late-film flashback does STRANGE SHADOWS feel even remotely Italian, and even the end, with the camera pulling away from the obligatory pissed-off, plays-by-his-own-rules cop in an aerial shot as he walks away in disgust, looks like the final shot of any DIRTY HARRY movie. Poliziotteschi may have been big in Italy at this time, but STRANGE SHADOWS is only very vaguely indebted to them, playing more like a Canadian tax shelter actioner with some DIRTY HARRY/FRENCH CONNECTION overtures and some slight hints at giallo. The US poster is a selling a horror film that's really a mean-spirited little gem of a cop movie that's just been resurrected on Blu-ray by Kino (which drops the "STRANGE" and is now just called SHADOWS IN AN EMPTY ROOM) but it stands out as an Italian cop thriller that seemingly makes strenuous effort to be as North American as possible.

When his kid sister Louise (Carole Laure) is poisoned at college in Montreal and her doctor/possible lover George Tracer (Martin Landau) is the main suspect, perpetually aggravated Ottawa police captain Tony Saitta (Stuart Whitman) decides to go out of his jurisdiction and take over the investigation himself. Getting some help from agreeably sympathetic Sgt. Matthews (John Saxon), the tactless, bull-in-a-china-shop Saitta follows a convoluted trail of clues and dead ends that involve Louise's secret life about which overprotective Saitta knows nothing; Louise's blind friend Julie (Tisa Farrow); Tracer's creep son (Anthony Forest); a slutty prof (Gayle Hunnicutt), who may be sleeping with the married Tracer but is definitely screwing Tracer Jr; Louise's ex Fred (Jean Leclerc), who's still not happy about being dumped; the theft of a valuable necklace and someone wanting to keep potential witnesses from squawking; and a dismembered transvestite whose body parts are found in a scrapyard. Saitta cracks skulls all over Montreal and doesn't care who he pisses off or how much destruction he leaves in his wake, whether it's a ridiculously violent penthouse brawl with a trio of kung-fu cross-dressers that ends with him shoving a hot curling iron up exactly the worst place you can imagine, or one of the great unsung car chases of the '70s, coordinated by the venerable car stunt legend Remy Julienne and one that just keeps getting more ludicrous the longer it goes on. Even though he seems more like Laure's father than her brother, Whitman is very entertaining as the irate Saitta, who practically goes full McBain by the end with one of the most reckless acts of wanton destruction that a no-rules, one-man-force movie cop has ever pulled off. De Martino and producer Edmondo Amati reteamed later in 1977 for HOLOCAUST 2000 (aka THE CHOSEN and RAIN OF FIRE), an Italian OMEN ripoff with plenty of spectacularly gory deaths and a fully-committed and full-frontal Kirk Douglas giving it his all at the beginning of his exhibitionism phase.

EDGE OF SANITY
(UK/Hungary - 1989)

Directed by Gerard Kikoine. Written by J.P. Felix and Ron Raley. Cast: Anthony Perkins, Glynis Barber, Sarah Maur-Thorp, David Lodge, Ben Cole, Ray Jewers, Jill Medford, Lisa Davis, Briony McRoberts, Claudia Udy. (R, 91 mins)

Taking on the dual roles of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has always been an opportunity for a distinguished actor to deliver a tour-de-force performance. Legends like John Barrymore, Fredric March (who won on Oscar for 1931's DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE), Spencer Tracy, Christopher Lee, Jack Palance, and John Malkovich among many others have taken a turn (even Jerry Lewis if you count the Jekyll & Hyde-inspired THE NUTTY PROFESSOR), but it was 1989's EDGE OF SANITY that provided the great Anthony Perkins with his contribution to the Jekyll & Hyde canon. After nearly 30 years of PSYCHO-derived typecasting as nervous, twitchy weirdos, Perkins had long since given up trying get out of Norman Bates' shadow by the time EDGE OF SANITY came along, with multiple PSYCHO sequels under his belt, including one he directed himself (1986's PSYCHO III). There's a case to be made that Perkins wasn't being very choosy about the gigs he was accepting by 1989, and EDGE OF SANITY is Exhibit A. Produced by the always-suspect Harry Alan Towers, who shepherded many a Jess Franco project in the late '60s and early '70s, EDGE OF SANITY is probably the most jawdroppingly sordid take on Robert Louis Stevenson's source novel that you'll ever see, the possible exception being Walerian Borowczyk's 1981 masterpiece THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MISS OSBOURNE, which was least artistic and genuinely disturbing in its shocking transgressions. EDGE OF SANITY, on the other hand, is an unabashed raunchfest that seems poised to break out into a hardcore porno at any given moment. Perhaps that's not surprising given that French director Gerard Kikoine had previously dabbled in European porn prior to joining the Towers stock company, where he was assigned several of the producer's dubious, apartheid-era South Africa-lensed projects like DRAGONARD (1987) and its simultaneously-shot companion piece MASTER OF DRAGONARD HILL (1987) and the Poesploitation dud BURIED ALIVE (1990). So feverishly perverse is EDGE OF SANITY that rumors have persisted for years that Jess Franco secretly co-wrote it. Even though the credited J.P. Felix doesn't really sound like a real person and has no other IMDb credits, it's not Franco, despite the name sounding very much like his occasional pseudonym "J.P. Fenix."

Shot using more tilted Dutch angles than a Hal Hartley wet dream, EDGE OF SANITY presents Perkins' Jekyll as a milquetoast London surgeon whose experimentation with a cocaine-based anesthetic ends up inadvertently creating Victorian-era crack. With himself as the subject, Jekyll transforms into a gaunt, pale, compulsively-masturbating, crackhead Jack Hyde, sucking on a glass pipe and cruising for Whitechapel streetwalkers. They tend to turn up brutally slaughtered as Hyde's drug-fueled spree of sex murders earns him the name "Jack the Ripper." It's an interesting angle to fuse Mr. Hyde with the Ripper mythos, but EDGE OF SANITY is more concerned with letting Perkins fly his freak flag, using all the tics and mannerisms in his arsenal and borrowing a lot of his leftover Rev. Peter Shayne histrionics from Ken Russell's CRIMES OF PASSION (1984). Jekyll already has some sexual hangups in his psyche, stemming from a childhood voyeurism incident involving a servant girl (Sarah Maur-Thorp), a figure who repeatedly turns up in various guises in Hyde's nightly travels. It's another interesting touch to have Maur-Thorp play a series of prostitutes who all look the same to the out-of-control Hyde, the id of the more outwardly proper Jekyll. But again, whatever deeper themes Fenix, co-writer Ron Raley, and director Kikoine are going for are obliterated by the garish lighting, a demeaning role for Maur-Thorp (who only made a couple of other movies before quitting acting) and Perkins' insane performance, which manages to be simultaneously fearless and embarrassing. As a goth-looking Hyde, Perkins grimaces, twists and contorts his body, moans, groans, and grunts while aggressively rubbing bare asses, sucks on a crack pipe, head-butts Cockney pimps, initiates threesomes, masturbates a prostitute with his walking stick, and repeatedly gropes and fondles himself throughout.

In what's certainly his last memorable--for better or for worse--role before his death from AIDS in 1992, Perkins simply doesn't know where to stop, and considering some of the peccadilloes he demonstrated in his direction of PSYCHO III, one can't help but wonder how much of Hyde's antics stemmed from the actor being given some wide latitude by Kikoine. You'll need to shower after watching EDGE OF SANITY, though on Shout! Factory's new double feature Blu-ray, where it's paired with 1988's haunted prison dud DESTROYER simply because Perkins co-stars in it, it ends up looking far better than it has any business being. Filmed in Budapest using some of the same sets and locations as the same year's Robert Englund-headlined PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (also produced by Towers), EDGE OF SANITY is opulent and ornate, looking deceptively high-end for the in-your-face, late '80s T&A grinder that it is. The Blu-ray features the uncensored 91-minute version, five minutes longer than the R-rated 86-minute theatrical cut released in the spring of 1989 by the short-lived Millimeter Films, an offshoot of Miramax and sort-of a precursor to the Weinsteins' later Dimension Films genre brand. It's hard to believe Perkins hit all the major promotional destinations to plug this thing, showing up to talk EDGE OF SANITY on ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT and some morning shows, as well as the late-night circuit with Johnny Carson, David Letterman, and Arsenio Hall.

THE HOLCROFT COVENANT
(UK - 1985)

Directed by John Frankenheimer. Written by George Axelrod, Edward Anhalt and John Hopkins. Cast: Michael Caine, Anthony Andrews, Victoria Tennant, Lilli Palmer, Mario Adorf, Michael Lonsdale, Bernard Hepton, Richard Munch, Carl Rigg, Shane Rimmer, Michael Balfour, Andre Penvern, Andrew Bradford, Tharita Olivera De Sera. (R, 113 mins)

A misfire that reunites director John Frankenheimer with his MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE screenwriter George Axelrod (who shares script credit with two other respected scribes in Edward Anhalt and John Hopkins), THE HOLCROFT COVENANT is an intriguing conspiracy thriller that just never finds its footing. Adapted from Robert Ludlum's novel, the film has a fatally miscast Michael Caine as Noel Holcroft, an American architect who gets involved in a decades-old plot hatched by his biological father--a high-ranking Nazi and member of Hitler's inner circle--to pay reparations to surviving Holocaust victims and heirs to those killed using a secret Zurich bank account that's ballooned to $4.5 billion in the 40 years since the end of WWII. Certain parties have other plans for the money, like creating a Fourth Reich, which requires getting rid of Holcroft, who has completely disavowed his father and whose mother (Lilli Palmer, in her last big-screen role before her death in 1986) fled Germany when he was 18 months old and settled in America where she married the man who would adopt Noel (Holcroft's repeatedly proclaiming "I'm a foreign-born American citizen!" seems to be Caine trying to explain away his distinctly Michael Caine accent). Holcroft isn't alone in this inheritance. He must share the proceeds with the children of two other Nazis who entered this "covenant"--the Von Tiebolt siblings (Victoria Tennant and Anthony Andrews) and famed conductor Jurgen Mass (Mario Adorf), which of course leads to numerous double and triple crosses and assassins lurking in the background and foreground of scenes, constantly making attempts on Holcroft's life.

Made during a several-year stretch when he was turning absolutely nothing down (how can we forget his triumphant turn in 1987's JAWS: THE REVENGE?), Caine finished shooting the comedy WATER on a Friday when he got a call to begin work on HOLCROFT on the following Monday, a last-minute replacement after a disagreeable James Caan bailed the day before shooting was to begin. In his memoir, Caine wrote that he arrived for his first day of work on HOLCROFT without seeing even a page of the script, so he had no idea what he was doing, only that it was thriller and that he wanted to work with Frankenheimer (and, presumably, the pay was good). Nobody seemed to consider that Caine was completely wrong for the part and early scenes find him doing some weird thing with his voice where he's trying to sound American but quickly throws in the towel (Caine is one of the all-time greats, but his American accent, which sounds like someone doing a bad Michael Caine impression, wasn't any better when he tried it again on 2013's LAST LOVE). Frankenheimer spends too much time doing some distracting camera trickery and weird zooms and pointless Dutch angles instead of creating a suspenseful story. The script is a mess--it almost seems like none of the three credited screenwriters looked at what the others wrote--and Holcroft's transformation from a clueless dolt to a coldly lethal manipulator who becomes a crack shot when the movie needs him to never seems plausible. Coming soon after 1983's equally scattershot Sam Peckinpah swan song THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND, this would be the last big-screen Ludlum adaptation (other than a couple of TV-movies) until Hollywood finally got it right with THE BOURNE IDENTITY in 2002. For a globetrotting international thriller, it also looks surprisingly cheap and sloppy at times, with a London backlot doing a piss-awful job of portraying a Manhattan street, looking almost Bulgarian in its utter lack of conviction. And one laughable process screen shot shows Holcroft with some construction workers atop a skyscraper backed by a bush-league NYC skyline that looks edited in with all the cutting edge technology of your local TV weather forecast. Also, why does Noel Holcroft need a remote control for his answering machine? Is it that important that he put his bag on a chair ten feet away that he can't stand there and press "skip"?

THE HOLCROFT COVENANT is also the kind of film that gives away its surprises when you realize a prominently-billed actor has been given almost nothing to do and is barely in the first 3/4 of the movie, so of course, he has to end up being the chief villain (also, are we to believe that Caine, Tennant, Andrews, and Adorf are all roughly the same age?). There's some good work by Bernard Hepton as a British agent who helps Holcroft and the sluggish film finally comes to life with a climactic press conference that has a nice wink-and-a-nudge from Frankenheimer that's an obvious self-referential nod to a memorable scene in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE. But all in all, THE HOLCROFT COVENANT is one of the great director's most forgettable films--not terrible (we're not talking THE EXTRAORDINARY SEAMAN or YEAR OF THE GUN here), but by no means essential, unless you never miss a Mario Adorf vehicle. Universal picked up the British-made HOLCROFT for the US but pretty much buried it, releasing it on just 73 screens in the fall of 1985 before it quickly turned up on video store shelves.

JANE GOT A GUN
(US - 2016)

An infamously troubled production that changed directors and cinematographers and went through multiple rewrites and several cast switch-ups before filming began and then spent nearly three years on a Weinstein Company shelf before bombing in theaters, JANE GOT A GUN is rivaled only by EXPOSED and FLIGHT 7500 as the biggest catastrophe of the first quarter of 2016. A longtime pet project of Natalie Portman (one of 31 credited producers), JANE was set to go in early 2013 with director Lynne Ramsey (WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN) at the helm, and with SEVEN and frequent Woody Allen collaborator Darius Khondji as director of photography. Even before Ramsey quit over a dispute with one of the producers over final cut and Khondji left with her, co-star Michael Fassbender was forced to back out over a scheduling conflict with X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST. Joel Edgerton was already cast as the villain, but that role was given to Jude Law and Edgerton was shifted over to Fassbender's vacated role. Law signed on specifically to work with Ramsey, and when she left, he followed suit. Gavin O'Connor (WARRIOR) took over as director and Bradley Cooper signed on to replace Law, but quit over a scheduling conflict with AMERICAN HUSTLE and was replaced by Ewan McGregor (now the fourth actor to be cast in the villain role). In addition, Edgerton pulled double duty by rewriting Brian Duffield's original screenplay. Filming was completed in the fall of 2013, and after multiple canceled release dates that stretched back to summer 2014, the $25 million production was finally released in theaters in January 2016, grossing just $1.5 million.

JANE GOT A GUN has all the hallmarks of compromise, clashing ideas, and behind-the-scenes rancor: released with little fanfare after languishing in limbo, a truncated running time, choppy editing, slack pacing and stretches where important scenes seem to be missing, and a couple of prominently-billed actors who are barely in the movie. In the New Mexico territory in 1871, feisty rancher Jane Hammond (Portman) tends to bullet wounds on her husband Bill (Noah Emmerich), who informs her that the gang of outlaw John Baxter (McGregor) is headed their way. She enlists the help of ex-fiance and hired gun Dan Frost (Edgerton), while flashbacks fill in the complicated backstory of the quartet of characters. It's filled with darkness and tragedy, from Civil War prison camps to sex slavery to a dead child, with Jane forced into a hellish life servicing Baxter's gang until she's rescued and whisked away by one of his men, the kind-hearted Bill. For obvious reasons, Baxter remains enraged at the couple and when some of his men spot Bill and soon pay with their lives when Bill guns them down, he leads the rest of the gang after them for revenge (it does beg the question, if Bill ran into the gang and killed some of them, how does he manage to get several days ahead of the rest, back to his ranch with time to warn Jane that they're coming?). While Bill lies immobile in bed, Jane and Dan fortify the ranch and get their guns ready for the showdown. This should've been a RIO BRAVO situation, but it plays out in almost total darkness with intermittent breaks for flashbacks and long dialogue scenes that are incoherently mumbled by Portman and Edgerton. McGregor's appearances are so fleeting and brief that he has no chance to make any kind of impact as a threatening presence, and the best you can say for it is that it looks nice for a while, but even that ceases to help by the climax since you can't see a damn thing. Nothing works in JANE GOT A GUN, a doomed project plagued by pre-production turmoil from which it never recovered. Stick with HANNIE CAULDER instead. (R, 98 mins)

BACKTRACK
(Australia/UK/UAE - 2016)

A horror movie that feels like it should've gone straight to video in 2002, BACKTRACK is a shameless ripoff of THE SIXTH SENSE, with some STIR OF ECHOES, JU-ON/THE GRUDGE, and INSIDIOUS thrown in, perhaps to prevent M. Night Shyamalan from suing. Continuing his post-Oscar slide into irrelevance, Adrien Brody offers a fairly credible accent as Peter Bower, an Australian psychologist who's still reeling over the tragic death of his daughter Evie a year earlier when she was hit by a truck while riding her bike. While Peter is at least doing slightly better than his shattered wife Carol (Jenni Baird), who can't even get out of bed, he's haunted by visions of a dead girl named Elizabeth Valentine (Chloe Bayliss), and the realization that all of the patients referred him by his mentor Duncan (Sam Neill) seem to be people who died in an accident on July 12, 1987. This prompts him to return to his childhood home and visit his estranged father (George Shevtsov), triggering memories of a traumatic incident from his teen years (lemme guess...July 12, 1987?) that may have indirectly had a hand in his daughter's eventual death nearly 30 years later. Writer/director Michael Petroni (who scripted QUEEN OF THE DAMNED, THE RITE, and THE BOOK THIEF) thinks he's being clever by introducing incredibly hackneyed elements that would be painfully obvious twists to any seasoned viewer and revealing them almost immediately, like Elizabeth Valentine's initials E.V. sounding out "Evie" and that Duncan's really a ghost, which isn't a spoiler since it's revealed 20 minutes in. But he just keeps piling on one coincidence and absurd contrivance after another until you're too busy rolling your eyes and shaking your head to catch all the post-INSIDIOUS jump scares preceded by that distinctive JU-ON croak, which is something filmmakers in 2016 are still fucking doing. Some shoddy greenscreen work and a hilariously awful CGI train derailment provide some unintentional laughs, but BACKTRACK is stale, cliched, and dated, obviously a script Petroni's had stashed in a drawer for at least a decade. Though it does provide a brief role for THE ROAD WARRIOR's Bruce Spence as a ghost, there's not much to recommend with BACKTRACK, which continues Brody's fool's quest to become Nicolas Cage. I see dead careers. (R, 90 mins)

#HORROR
(US - 2015)

Actress and artist Tara Subkoff, best known as the kidnapping victim in 2000's THE CELL, makes her writing and directing debut with this ambitious horror indie that succeeds and stumbles in equal measure, amounting to 98 uneven minutes. It's a social media-savvy slasher film that admirably doesn't approach its subject with snarky irony, but too often overstates its message to the point of harping. It's set over one night at a sleepover at the isolated Connecticut mansion of bitchy Sofia (Bridget McGarry), the 12-year-old queen of a group of Mean Girls who tear one another down in vicious hashtags using a Bejeweled Blitz-type app (Subkoff really overuses this visual motif), tagged to their endless postings of selfies. Their targets change by the minute, whether it's Cat (Hayley Murphy), whose mother recently died; overweight Georgie (Emma Adler), who they've fat-shamed into bulimia; tomboyish Francesca (Mina Sundwall), who they've labeled a "dyke," or lesser-income Sam (Sadie Seelert), who's new to their school and has cut scars on her arm from past self-harming. And these girls are friends. When Cat tears into Georgie about her weight in a way that even Sofia thinks is over the line, Cat is expelled from the party. She leaves a hysterical message on the voice mail of her preoccupied cosmetic surgeon dad (a furious Timothy Hutton), while Sofia's alcoholic, ennui-drowning mom (Chloe Sevigny) leaves the girls alone to go through the motions at an AA meeting, completely unaware that her philandering husband (Balthazar Getty) has had his throat slashed by the same maniac who's now in the house and offing the girls one by one.

Let's address the elephant in the room that is the terrible title, which does the film no favors and makes it tempting to dismiss outright. And things get off to a dubious start with the gimmicky ENTER THE VOID-style opening credits that look like a bunch of rapid-fire Candy Crush images. But amidst the catty bitchery of the mostly overprivileged, underparented kids, Subkoff manages some small accomplishments that start to add up. The massive house is a great location that allows Subkoff to really take advantage of open space in the 2.35:1 image, especially when the creepy-masked killer starts materializing anywhere in the frame. The film takes place in the dead of winter and there's a vividly chilling, uniquely Canadian-inspired coldness that's conveyed in striking imagery both outside in the snowy setting and inside in the Cronenberg-like design and decor of the house (I'm willing to bet Subkoff is a big fan of the 1983 cult classic CURTAINS). There's also a pronounced giallo influence, particularly in one Argento-styled murder that takes place in a glass-enclosed tennis court, and it's all supplemented by an unsettling, driving score by EMA. Subkoff does such a solid job with the horror elements that you wish it didn't take her 70 minutes to get to them. With the exception of the opening murder (Getty's in the film for about seven seconds), the first hour and change focuses on the Mean Girl bullying, with the girls supporting and turning on one another with no notice, exploiting weaknesses and pushing to the breaking point, and it goes on long after Subkoff has made her point. The young actresses are convincingly unlikable, and Hutton is outstanding in his few scenes, one in particular when he barrels through the house in a frothing rage searching for Cat. Hutton plays it like a vein-popping homage to Alec Baldwin, screaming at the girls and shredding them for their shallow, nasty actions, and it's a scene that's destined to become a YouTube favorite. There's a lot to appreciate in #HORROR, especially a devastating reveal at the very end, but there's a lot of missteps as well. Call it a flawed but nonetheless interesting film that shows it's worth keeping an eye on what Subkoff does next. Incidentally, nothing's made me feel older lately than seeing Sevigny, Getty, and Natasha Lyonne now playing the parents in a horror movie. (R, 98 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

GREEN ROOM
(US - 2016)

Written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier. Cast: Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Patrick Stewart, Alia Shawkat, Joe Cole, Callum Turner, Macon Blair, Eric Edelstein, Mark Webber, Kai Lennox, Brent Werzner, David W. Thompson, Jake Love, Kyle Love, Samuel Summer. (R, 95 mins)

Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier established himself as filmmaker to watch after 2014's gritty revenge noir BLUE RUIN and his latest film, GREEN ROOM, finds him putting his characters in even more dangerous territory with grim and horrifying results. The Ain't Rights--bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin), guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat), frontman Tiger (Callum Turner) and drummer Reece (Joe Cole)--are a small-time, Richmond-based punk band touring the Pacific Northwest in a beat-up van and getting from gig to gig by siphoning gas. When their next show is abruptly cancelled and they're out of money, local zine writer and Ain't Rights superfan Tad (David W. Thompson) hooks them up with a show in the rural outskirts of Portland where his cousin Daniel (Mark Webber) is a bouncer. He warns them that there's a catch: the gig's at the clubhouse of a neo-Nazi stronghold owned by a group of white supremacists who don't take to The Ain't Rights kicking off their show with a cover of Dead Kennedys'"Nazi Punks Fuck Off." The band play their set and get paid and are packing up their gear to make way for the death metal house band Cowcatcher when Pat goes back to the dressing room to get Sam's phone and finds members of Cowcatcher and bouncer Werm (Brent Werzner) standing over a dead girl with a knife planted in her skull. Bouncer Gabe (Macon Blair, the star of BLUE RUIN) tries to contain the situation after Pat calls 911 to report a stabbing and has the phone taken from him as the rest of the bouncers refuse to let them go, with Gabe politely explaining "We're not keeping you...you're just staying." Gabe and club manager Clark (Kai Lennox) try to contain the situation by having two new recruits stage a stabbing outside in order to get rid of the cops, but when the band gets the edge on bouncer Big Justin (Eric Edelstein), grabbing his gun and barricading themselves in the room, Gabe has no choice but to call owner Darcy (Patrick Stewart), who takes charge and immediately decides the band will have to be eliminated and it has to look like an accident.

One of the more memorable things about BLUE RUIN was the way Blair's hapless, homeless hero tried to be a tough guy but had no idea how to handle any kind of weapon. That's a similar motif that pops up here as the dwindling number of Ain't Rights, accompanied by the dead girl's friend Amber (Imogen Poots), aren't really adept at handling guns and end up resorting to other means at their disposal, like box cutters, machetes, fire extinguishers, mic stands, etc, as Darcy keeps sending his guys into the club to deal with them. It's a survival/siege movie in the classic John Carpenter style (there is a synthy score, but it's very subtle, a surprise given the Carpenter score homages so prevalent in genre fare these days), and Saulnier does a great job of capturing that sense of bleak, claustrophobic hopelessness as the situation gets worse by the minute in one of the scariest clubs you'll see in any movie. Early attempts to run out of the club fail miserably as Darcy has guys waiting behind the door of every room they pass, and even breaking through the floor to Darcy's basement storage area for his cash and the neo-Nazis' heroin business fails to lead them to a way out. The Ain't Rights have no choice but to fight their way out and the results are gruesome and hard to watch. Even the most seasoned gorehound will have a tough time withstanding what happens to Pat's left hand, and when they're forced to work with what's available, a box cutter will certainly disembowel someone or slit a throat. But it's tough-going, and Saulnier assaults you with it so quickly that you don't have a chance to look away.

The Ain't Rights are generally OK, though other than Yelchin, they don't really have much to do but be frantic and try to survive. Outsider Amber is the toughest of the bunch--and she's not with the neo-Nazis but has a specific reason for being there--but even before she's injured, Poots' performance is overly affected and off-putting, almost like she's speaking at half-speed for no reason. She's the major misstep in GREEN ROOM, as Amber is a character who's a fierce, independent badass but Poots is playing her like a tranquilized Aubrey Plaza. The real revelation here is Patrick Stewart like you've never seen him before. Stewart is all calm, soft-spoken menace as the malevolent Darcy, doing whatever he can to keep the cops away from a situation that's spiraling out of control thanks to the resourceful nature of prey he's drastically underestimated ("They're smarter than you!" he shouts at Gabe in his one moment of losing his cool). Stewart is such a beloved, iconic figure that it's hard to get by him playing such a despicable character who says some things it's hard to imagine Patrick Stewart saying, but he makes it work by not overdoing it. Darcy isn't a raving maniac. In fact, he seems oddly detached at times, almost like he just assumes the situation will work itself out, even as more and more of his guys go inside to kill the Ain't Rights but don't come back out. Stewart underplays Darcy, a charismatic leader who can blend into society and be a nice guy on the surface, which makes his being a cold-blooded killer, heroin trafficker, and unapologetic racist and anti-Semite all the more chilling. Like many close-quartered, powderkeg nerve-shredders of this sort, GREEN ROOM works perfectly (Poots' terrible performance aside) until it goes outside, leaving the compound for a conclusion that seems abrupt and a bit unsatisfying given the buildup. Still, for 90% of its duration, it's a bold, brutal, stone cold piece of work, sickeningly violent in all its extreme, hard-R glory and unrelentingly intense in its execution.

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS
(US/Canada/UK - 2016)

Written and directed by Ricky Gervais. Cast: Ricky Gervais, Eric Bana, Vera Farmiga, Kelly Macdonald, Kevin Pollak, America Ferrera, Raul Castillo, Benjamin Bratt, Jim Norton, Kim Ramirez, Mimi Kuzyk. (Unrated, 101 mins)

The 2009 French comedy ENVOYES TRES SPECIAUX, where two Paris reporters file fake reports from the comforts of home while pretending to be covering an insurgency in Iraq, has been refashioned by writer/director/star Ricky Gervais into this toothless farce that's debuting as a Netflix original movie. Gervais has always been a master of cutting and often uncomfortable comedy, so the potential is there for some scathing digs at politics and the news media. It's all for naught, as Gervais just drops the ball and seems completely lost, relying on stale jokes (a "Go ahead, make my day" reference in 2016?) and painfully protracted set-ups for jokes that either land with a thud or never come at all. Making like Hope and Crosby on The Road to Nowhere, Gervais and Eric Bana star as, respectively, dweeby sound engineer Ian Finch and arrogant, smooth-talking news radio journalist Frank Bonneville. Handsome bullshit artist Frank is the superstar reporter at NYC-based news radio station Q365, and he and his de facto sidekick Finch are assigned by their blustery boss Mallard (Kevin Pollak) to cover a brewing insurgency in Ecuador. Just dumped by his shrewish, materialistic wife Eleanor (Vera Farmiga) and oblivious to the interest of nice, mousy Q365 reporter Claire Maddox (Kelly Macdonald), Finch decides to go along, tossing his suicide note to Eleanor in a garbage truck as they hail a cab to the airport. The problem is, Finch mistakenly threw out their passports, travel itinerary, and money instead of his epic suicide note. Rather than miss the story, Frank and Finch decide to fake it, hiding out in the apartment above a Mexican restaurant that's owned by Brigida (America Ferrera) and Domingo (Raul Castillo), and is directly across the street from the Q365 building.

Hilarity fails to ensue as Frank radios in fake updates and breaking news about a rebel leader named Alvarez and all the upheaval they're witnessing. It's never specified how long they plan to keep up the ruse, but when the US Secretary of State (Mimi Kuzyk) tells Mallard to order the pair to report to the US embassy in Quito, the only thing they can do is actually sneak away to Ecuador in order to show up at the embassy. And of course, once in Ecuador, they impulsively snort some coke and end up getting kidnapped anyway. All the while, aspiring singer Eleanor is raking in the money generated by a "rescue fund" benefit single and subsequent album deal, and she's not in any hurry to bring the pair back to the US safely, especially since she seduced an oblivious Frank--who never met Finch's wife before--shortly before the Ecuador assignment. Much is made of Frank's smooth charm and rogueish good looks--is there some reason he's not on TV? Oh, that's right. Because there'd be no movie if he wasn't a news radio superstar, which doesn't even seem like a thing.

Does any of this sound even remotely funny? It's a bad sign when you're only six minutes into the movie and Frank walks into the Q365 offices and is greeted by one employee standing up and slow clapping which, of course, escalates into office-wide applause. Gervais is a smart enough writer that he's probably making fun of the slow clap, but it's already an easy target that's been mocked endlessly. The same goes for dorky man-child Finch and his obsession with collecting comic books and action figures. Where's the joke here? And on what planet would he and Eleanor ever make it to a second date, let alone years of marriage? By the end, Gervais is resorting to mawkish sentimentality, antiquated stereotypes (why does Brigida shout "Julio Iglesias!" when she gets excited?) and an action movie finale that has Finch manning up and gunning down his captors to the accompaniment of Motorhead's "Ace of Spades." That's how he decided to wrap up the movie? How many of these contemporary "media/political" comedies have to fail before the plug is pulled on this subgenre? Remember NETWORK? It was brilliant, outrageous, bile-soaked satire in 1976 and remains so today but young people watching it for the first time now don't get it because the satire has become so depressingly close to reality in the ensuing 40 years. Look at more recent films like THE INTERVIEW, OUR BRAND IS CRISIS, WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT, and, to an extent, ROCK THE KASBAH. These films don't succeed because today's 24/7 news media-as-entertainment culture is already so inherently ludicrous that any attempts to satirize it only succeed in stating the obvious. Why take shots at something that's already ridiculous? The failure of these other films, and now SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS, is enough to make you appreciate the relative comedic genius of Richard Brooks' expensive 1982 bomb WRONG IS RIGHT, which still isn't very funny but might be worth studying, as its barbs have grown even more prescient with age, almost a thematic precursor to THEY LIVE in the way it predicted the future in many respects. A completely asleep-at-the-wheel Gervais can't even be bothered to try when it comes to SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS, a film nobody's going to remember next week, let alone look back on decades from now. It fails as satire, it fails as comedy, and it fails as anything even slightly resembling entertainment, and there's an almost Sandlerian laziness to the entire project. Is there even a target demographic for this thing? Who is it for? Why was it made? How is it possible that the creator of THE OFFICE and EXTRAS somehow managed to make an atrocious and incredibly dull WAG THE DOG knockoff with exactly zero laughs?

RUNAWAY TRAIN
(US - 1985)

Directed by Andrei Konchalovsky. Written by Djordje Milicevic, Paul Zindel and Edward Bunker. Cast: Jon Voight, Eric Roberts, Rebecca De Mornay, Kenneth McMillan, Kyle T. Heffner, John P. Ryan, T.K. Carter, Stacey Pickren, Walter Wyatt, Edward Bunker, Reid Cruickshanks, John Bloom, Hank Worden, Danny Trejo, Tommy "Tiny" Lister, William Tregoe. (R, 111 mins)

Though they were primarily known for Charles Bronson, Chuck Norris, and ninja movies, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus had serious aspirations as Cannon hit its stride in the mid '80s. Wanting artistic credibility, they began courting important, influential filmmakers like John Cassavetes (LOVE STREAMS), Robert Altman (FOOL FOR LOVE), Liliana Cavani (THE BERLIN AFFAIR), Lina Wertmuller (CAMORRA), Franco Zeffirelli (OTELLO), Roman Polanski (PIRATES), Jean-Luc Godard (KING LEAR), Barbet Schroeder (BARFLY), and Dusan Makavejev (MANIFESTO), among others. Released in late 1985 and expanding wide in early 1986, RUNAWAY TRAIN was the closest Golan and Globus came to working with legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, whose films like SEVEN SAMURAI and YOJIMBO are among the most iconic in all of cinema. Based on a never-filmed script that Kurosawa wrote and intended to shoot in 1966 following the release of RED BEARD, RUNAWAY TRAIN was re-written by the unlikely trio of Djordje Milicevic (VICTORY), YA novelist Paul Zindel (The Pigman), and crime writer and ex-con Edward Bunker, who scripted STRAIGHT TIME and would go on to play Mr. Blue in RESERVOIR DOGS. It was the second of four Cannon productions directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, a Russian filmmaker who more or less became Cannon's go-to, in-house art-house guy with 1984's MARIA'S LOVERS, 1986's DUET FOR ONE, and 1987's SHY PEOPLE. Konchalovsky broke away from Cannon for the 1989 Whoopi Goldberg/James Belushi bomb HOMER AND EDDIE and directed most of Warner Bros' mega-budget TANGO & CASH before he was fired and replaced by an uncredited Albert Magnoli (PURPLE RAIN).

Perhaps more than any other Cannon production, RUNAWAY TRAIN is representative of Golan and Globus straddling the line between mainstream and highbrow, with one foot in the grindhouse and the other in the art-house. At its core, it's a no-bullshit, edge-of-your-seat action movie with a very simple premise--right there in the title-- straight out of a B movie. At a maximum security prison in Alaska, lifer Manny Manheim (Jon Voight) is considered such a danger and an escape risk that he's spent the last three years in solitary with the door welded shut. When a court order forces vindictive, borderline psychotic warden Ranken (John P. Ryan) to let Manny back into general population, Ranken has another inmate attack Manny, which backfires and starts a prison riot. With none-too-bright and eager-to-please youngster Buck McGeehy (Eric Roberts) in tow, Manny manages to escape and the pair sprint miles through the snowy wilderness and hop aboard a four-car train. "Why this one?" Buck asks. "Because I want it," Manny replies, as if fate is drawing him to it.

As the train departs the railyard and Manny and Buck hide in the fourth car, the conductor suffers a fatal heart attack, falling off the train and leaving it in a way that overrides the automatic stop. The train accelerates at such a rate that it burns through the brakes and gains momentum, going at a high rate of speed with no one in control, barreling through the middle of desolate Alaskan nowhere. It takes the pair a while to figure this out, while railroad command center dispatcher Frank Barstow (Kyle T. Heffner) tries to manage the situation. Of course, arrogant hot shot Barstow designed the foolproof, fail-safe transportation communication system, which naturally, is neither foolproof nor fail-safe when the shit hits the fan. Ranken, meanwhile, correctly assumes that his two escaped cons are on the train, along with a third passenger, a rail line employee named Sara (Rebecca De Mornay), who eventually makes her way back from the second car to the fourth, where it's theoretically safer when the train inevitably crashes.

RUNAWAY TRAIN is one of the best films to come off the Cannon assembly line, but it's still basically a Cannon production, from a good chunk of Trevor Jones' score demonstrating that distinct '80s keyboard-and-drum-machine sound to the presence of perennial B-movie villain Ryan, best known for one of his rare good-guy roles in Larry Cohen's IT'S ALIVE and his other Cannon bad guy gigs in AVENGING FORCE and DEATH WISH 4: THE CRACKDOWN. Nevertheless, RUNAWAY TRAIN got a lot of love from critics: it won rave reviews, was a Palme d'Or contender at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival, and received three Oscar nominations: Voight for Best Actor (William Hurt won for KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN) Roberts for Best Supporting Actor (Don Ameche won for COCOON), and Henry Richardson for Film Editing (Thom Noble won for WITNESS). While it is a terrific genre film, it seems odd in retrospect that RUNAWAY TRAIN was such a critical favorite, especially given the dismissive treatment given to most Cannon fare. There's an argument to be made that the tenuous Kurosawa connection--1985 was also the year of RAN--made critics treat it with kid gloves or take it a little more seriously than they might have otherwise.

While seething with intensity, Voight and Roberts both use indecipherable accents and seem to be playing things far too broadly, with their performances--Voight's in particular--ranking among the hammiest to ever score Oscar nods. Roberts--back when he was supposed to be the Next Big Thing--really just offers a louder variation on his dumb, would-be gangster character in the previous year's THE POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE, even using the same affected voice ("Aw, Manny...take me wit ya!" and "I need some shooooooes!" providing some memorable moments). Voight, in his showiest role in years and one of only four films he made in the 1980s, chews the scenery in ways unseen until his incredible performance over a decade later in ANACONDA. There's really not much difference in Voight's acting here ("You gonna clean dat spot!") or when he winks at Jennifer Lopez after he's barfed-up in a partially digested state by a giant CGI snake. Voight dials it up to 11, which is extremely entertaining, but it sometimes seems like it's too much considering all the praise he and Roberts received. Watching RUNAWAY TRAIN again after many years, it's easy to picture a less frothing Manny providing a serious stretch for say, Cannon stalwart Charles Bronson if he felt like breaking away from vigilante movies. Voight and Ryan rage through clenched teeth and make perfect adversaries (though playing a maniacal villain, Ryan actually comes off as more restrained than Voight), and while many have questioned Ranken's thought process in dropping from a chopper on to the runaway train when it means certain death, it just goes to show that yes, at its core, RUNAWAY TRAIN is really just a dumb Cannon action movie with John P. Ryan as a very John P. Ryan bad guy--a great, textbook example of a Cannon action movie, sure, and maybe a bit more gritty than most, but had Kurosawa's name not been attached to it, it seems doubtful this would've received the accolades and the respect it got from critics.

SNIPER: SPECIAL OPS
(US - 2016)

Despite the title, this isn't a sixth installment of the long-running Tom Berenger action franchise. Instead, it's another "Steven Seagal" movie where the 64-year-old star and co-executive producer does as little as possible, is always shot solo and never directly interacting with his co-stars, and is obviously doubled in any shot where his face isn't visible. Indeed, there's several instances here of Seagal's double using props--and in one instance, actually holding up his hand--to obscure his face as he exits a room or walks away. Filmed on some still-standing sets from AMERICAN SNIPER at the Blue Cloud Movie Ranch facility in California, SNIPER: SPECIAL OPS is written and directed by exploitation vet Fred Olen Ray who, like his contemporary Jim Wynorski, almost could've had a big(ish) career in the 1980s but has instead dabbled in any number of DTV genres under a plethora of pseudonyms. On the commentary--yes, this actually has a commentary--Ray talks of this being a return to the style of his '80s action movies like ARMED RESPONSE and that it was a special project for him, but it's really just a blatant ripoff of ACT OF VALOR (Ray says his original draft of the script was titled HOUR OF VALOR). Seagal and pro wrestler Rob Van Dam have their last names above the title (I guess hoping to confuse Redbox rubes who don't follow wrestling and don't know how to spell "Van Damme"), but the real star is third-billed Tim Abell, a Ray regular who's been carving out a living on the fringes of D-list DTV since the early '90s when he headlined a number of erotic thrillers and the syndicated series SOLDIER OF FORTUNE INC. A gravelly-voiced and DUCK DYNASTY-bearded Abell is Sgt. Vic Mosby, the head of an Army special ops unit that rescues a US senator taken hostage by Taliban insurgents. Two of their unit--sniper Jake Taylor (Seagal) and his spotter Rich Cannon (Daniel Booko)--are left behind in the skirmish, with young Rich shot and unable to feel his legs. Back at the base, the commander (ex-Marine and go-to movie military advisor Dale Dye, who's had better assignments) assigns Mosby and his men, among them second-in-command Vasquez (Van Dam), to head into dangerous territory to retrieve a stranded military truck filled with explosives and fuel.

Of course, there's extensive firefights with terrorists, who aren't after the truck as much as they are the person in the truck, Jada (Rita Khori), the daughter-in-law of a major Taliban leader. Jada has renounced her terrorist ties and is trying to find safe passage with the Americans for herself and her infant son, which makes Mosby a bit more grumbly than usual, as does the presence of stowaway photojournalist Janet (Charlene Amoia). Mosby hatches a plan to use Jada as leverage to ensure the safe release of Taylor and Cannon, who are still holed up and under siege where Mosby was forced to leave them behind. In other words, what you have with SNIPER: SPECIAL OPS, is really a Tim Abell movie where he tries to rescue Steven Seagal. Seagal's laziness is rivaled only by Bruce Willis, and he's in SNIPER: SPECIAL OPS even less than he is his more recent "efforts." Seagal's amusing performance in 2014's GUTSHOT STRAIGHT was a good indication that he could have a credible career as a character actor if he gave a shit, but all the hallmarks of modern-day Seagal are on display in SNIPER: SPECIAL OPS: the barely-concealed double, the mumbling, fake N'awlins accent, the mid-film sabbatical where he's gone for somewhere around 20-25 minutes of screen time. I guess SNIPER: SPECIAL OPS isn't bad as much as it is by-the-numbers. Ray's handling of the action scenes is perfunctory at best, with a 15-minute opening sequence that should have you on the edge of your seat but never builds any momentum and just meanders on its way to nowhere. Abell does what's expected of him but none of these characters are interesting and we don't really get invested in anything they're doing. It's a standard, undemanding, streaming-ready, jingoistic military actioner with a lot of "Roger, sir!" and "Copy that!" and "Let's go!" and "You got it, Sergeant!" Seagal is practically a non-factor in what's being sold as a Seagal movie, and nothing sums that up more succinctly than Ray saying almost nothing about him on the commentary, probably because he has yet to actually meet him. (R, 86 mins)

REMEMBER
(Canada/Germany - 2015)

The wildly inconsistent Atom Egoyan is so far removed from his 1990s EXOTICA and THE SWEET HEREAFTER heyday that it's best to approach his new films with diminished expectations. He's been working at a fairly steady pace the last few years, with 2014's pointless West Memphis Three misfire DEVIL'S KNOT and the same year's missing child thriller THE CAPTIVE, which started good but got increasingly goofy as it went along. With REMEMBER, it's goofy pretty much from the start, its story so distant from any plausible reality that, given its subject matter, it's almost admirably tacky in its execution, In a nursing home in New York, 90-year-old Zev Guttman (Christopher Plummer) is a recent widower suffering from early-onset dementia. Zev is an Auschwitz survivor, like fellow facility resident Max Rosenbaum (Martin Landau). Max has to remind Zev of a plan they intended to carry out once Zev's cancer-stricken wife passed: to find and kill the Nazi blockfuhrer who ran their section of the concentration camp. The blockfuhrer goes by the name "Rudy Kurlander," and though Max, who has dedicated his life to tracking down former Nazis, has located four elderly men with that name living in the US, he's now confined to a wheelchair, hindered by emphysema, and too ill to do it himself. He gives Zev a detailed letter and a pile of cash and sends him to Cleveland, where that Rudy Kurlander (Bruno Ganz) turns out to be the wrong guy. Zev will venture through Michigan into Ontario, Canada and back into the US to Reno on his quest for the other three Rudy Kurlanders, the second being surprisingly poignant and heartfelt before Egoyan and first-time screenwriter Benjamin August (a former casting director on the reality show FEAR FACTOR) hop on the crazy train, turning REMEMBER into a bizarre and strangely compelling exercise in discomfort and disbelief, sort of what you'd get if you dropped Simon Wiesenthal into a DEATH WISH or HARRY BROWN scenario. There's a twist ending you'll probably see coming, a sweating Zev getting trapped in a place he shouldn't be and pissing himself while blowing an anti-Semite's brains out, and the great Jurgen Prochnow (as a Rudy Kurlander) sporting what might be the least convincing old-age makeup ever seen in a movie.

From the moment a visibly scattered Zev walks into a Cleveland gun shop and effortlessly walks out with a Glock, REMEMBER is pretty much full of shit but scores a few points for chutzpah. On top of that, the specific reminders in Max's letter and Zev writing "Read letter" on his arm seem too indebted to MEMENTO and it doesn't seem likely that a frail Alzheimer's patient can Leonard Shelby his way across the country on a mission of vengeance. Committed performances give this a lot more class than the story can possibly offer, with an excellent Plummer apparently under the impression that he's in an old-school Egoyan film, carrying this on his shoulders and reminding us what a great actor he's been all these years. Landau is fine in his few scenes, and Ganz and Prochnow have little more than cameos, much like the second Rudy Kurlander (Heinz Lieven), who's memorable even with very little dialogue. Henry Czerny plays Zev's concerned son who spends the entire movie trying to find him, and Dean Norris has a small role in the film's darkest and most over-the-top segment, at least until the surprise reveal in the finale. Egoyan bungles things by adding one more scene after where it should've ended, almost like he didn't trust the audience to figure out the machinations of a key character and had to explicitly spell it out for them. I'm not sure whether that's a sign of Egoyan's slipping as a filmmaker or him recognizing that he needed to dumb it down for audiences that might not be as sharp as they were circa EXOTICA. REMEMBER is better than Egoyan's most recent films, but that's a pretty low bar. He hasn't made a recognizably "Egoyan" film since 2008's ADORATION, and REMEMBER finds him in what's best described as his "trashy pulp paperback" mode, along with the sleazy, NC-17-rated WHERE THE TRUTH LIES or the laughably dated CHLOE, a decade-and-a-half-too-late contribution to the 1990s erotic thriller cycle. REMEMBER is better than those films, for what that's worth, and that's largely because of Plummer, who probably shook his head at some of the scenes as he read the script for the first time, but still gives it everything he's got. (R, 94 mins)

EMELIE
(US - 2016)

A '90s throwback, "Babysitter-from-Hell" thriller that's frequently quite unsettling in its early stages until it simply gives up, stops trying, and acquiesces to plot convenience and outright stupidity, EMELIE was nonetheless predictably hailed by fanboys as the Horror Insta-Classic (© William Wilson) of its week when it hit VOD in early March. In a strong performance, Irish actress Sarah Bolger (THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES, THE TUDORS) is Emelie, who's first seen with a male accomplice (Robert Bozek) abducting teenage Anna (Randi Langdon), who's on her way to a babysitting job for the Thompsons, Joyce (Susan Pourfar) and Joe (Frank Rossi). They're going out to dinner for their anniversary, and their regular sitter is unavailable and recommended her friend Anna. Emelie poses as Anna and initially lets the kids--sullen 11-year-old Jacob (Joshua Rush), 9-year-old Sally (Carly Adams), and 4-year-old Christopher (Thomas Bair)--do whatever they want, whether it's grounded Jacob playing with his PSP and scarfing down a box of cookies or Sally and Christopher guzzling all the sugary drinks they want and painting and drawing all over the living room wall. While the kids play, Emelie snoops around the house, and it's Jacob who first notices something isn't right when he walks into the bathroom to find Emelie on the toilet, telling him about her period, and asking for a tampon before changing it right in front of him. Things escalate from there, with Emelie finding a sex tape Joe and Joyce made long before any of the kids came along and showing it to Sally and Christopher ("Daddy's naked!" Christopher laughs as the camera stays on a traumatized Sally while we hear endless moaning and flesh slapping against flesh), and later letting Christopher feed Sally's hamster to Jacob's snake. Over the evening, Emelie develops a fixation on Christopher, calling him her "cubby," determined to keep him for herself and kill anyone who stands in her way.

Directed by veteran live concert DVD director Michael Thelin and written by J.J. Abrams protege Richard Raymond Harry Herbeck (is all that necessary?), EMELIE works best in its ballsy early stages, where it seems like it's willing to go into some pretty dark places (there's also a cringe-inducing scene of young Christopher playing with Joe's gun that Emelie found in a closet and left out). But it starts collapsing midway through, with Emelie's motivation being traumatic but handled in a much stronger fashion in the very disturbing PROXY from a couple of years ago. Once the pieces are in place, it's ultimately nothing more than HOME ALONE re-imagined as an R-rated psychological/home invasion thriller, with the smart Emelie suddenly required to do stupid things in order to keep the story moving. But all that's just a warm-up for the climax, which kicks off with her accomplice doing something so impulsive and recklessly idiotic that it undermines all of the careful planning they've done, all leading up to a dumb non-ending that lands with a resounding thud. Bolger is terrific as the psychotic Emelie, and young Rush does a solid job as a pre-teen just starting to rebel (and explore other things, as Joe expresses concern to Joyce about the boy's web browsing history) and stepping up to protect his younger siblings. Thelin and Richard Harris Raymond Burr Tom Dick Harry Dean Stanton Herbeck offer an intriguing set-up (even though we're not sure how Emelie knows Anna or that she'd be filling in for her friend at the Thompsons, but it's not really a necessary detail) that becomes increasingly ordinary and dumb as it fizzles to its conclusion. (Unrated, 82 mins)

THE ZERO BOYS
(US - 1986)

Directed by Nico Mastorakis. Written by Nico Mastorakis and Fred C. Perry. Cast: Daniel Hirsch, Kelli Maroney, Nicole Rio, Tom Shell, Jared Moses, Crystal Carson, Joe Phelan (Joe Estevez), Gary Jochimson, John Michaels, Elise Turner, T.K. Webb, Steve Shaw. (Unrated, 89 mins)

If his Wikipedia page is to be believed, the life of Greek exploitation filmmaker Nico Mastorakis has been filled with many strange twists and turns that would make a hell of a movie. A journalist, media personality, and pop music impresario who counted the likes of Aristotle and Jackie Onassis and John Lennon among his close friends and helped establish the career of CHARIOTS OF FIRE theme composer Vangelis. Mastorakis parlayed his notoriety into becoming a star on television, hitting it big in 1972 with Greece's version of CANDID CAMERA. Deciding to enter the world of trash movies and becoming a Greek precursor to Uwe Boll, Mastorakis made his filmmaking debut in 1976 with the notorious, crudely-made, and frequently banned ISLAND OF DEATH, which is probably his best known work in cult movie circles. He quickly followed that with the same year's giallo-sounding Greek thriller DEATH HAS BLUE EYES before scoring his most high-profile gig, scripting an early draft of director J. Lee Thompson's 1978 Onassis biopic THE GREEK TYCOON, with Anthony Quinn and Jacqueline Bisset. Mastorakis only ended up with a "Story by" credit by the time it was released, but it was his first and thus far last brush with an A-list, major studio project. He instead opted to go the independent route, writing and producing the 1982 Greek horror film BLOOD TIDE, starring vacationing celebrities James Earl Jones and Jose Ferrer. 1984 saw the beginning of a furiously productive run for Mastorakis, who took full advantage of the product demand in the burgeoning home video industry by becoming a B-movie, DIY mini-mogul of sorts with his Omega Entertainment, writing, producing, and directing over a dozen genre titles over the next eight years, first in his native Greece and eventually, by 1987, he moved his base of operation to Los Angeles. 1984's Athens-shot suspense thriller BLIND DATE offered an early starring role for Kirstie Alley, and Mastorakis had enough cash flow to hire recognizable names who weren't exactly at the peak of their careers, like Joseph Bottoms (BLIND DATE), Keir Dullea (BLIND DATE and 1984's THE NEXT ONE, aka THE TIME TRAVELLER), Adrienne Barbeau (THE NEXT ONE), and David McCallum, Robert Morley, and Steve Railsback, all of whom appeared in Mastorakis' 1987 horror film THE WIND with perennial B-listers Meg Foster and Wings Hauser.

In 1986, Mastorakis directed his first American film, the survivalist-slasher movie THE ZERO BOYS, featuring a little part SOUTHERN COMFORT and RITUALS and a lot of FRIDAY THE 13TH. The story centers on a trio of paintball-fixated L.A. dudebros--Steve (Daniel Hirsch), Larry (Tom Shell), and Rip (Jared Moses)--who call themselves "The Zero Boys," even sporting a personalized license plate reading "ZEROBOYS" on their pickup truck. Besting his chief rival Casey (John Michaels) in their latest combat match-up, Steve's prize is a weekend with Casey's feisty, sexually-liberated psych-major girlfriend Jamie (Kelli Maroney, who had FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH and NIGHT OF THE COMET to her credit and was the closest thing to a "name" present), and along with Larry's and Rip's respective girlfriends Sue (Nicole Rio) and Trish (Crystal Carson), head to the woods on a camping trip before crashing at an abandoned Cabin in the Woods for games of both the weekend warrior and between-the-sheets variety. Those plans are derailed with the appearance of a trio of machete and crossbow-wielding psychos (led by Martin Sheen's brother Joe Estevez, though he's credited as "Joe Phelan") who have already disposed of a handful of victims and are eager to pick off these new intruders. Of course, The Zero Boys put their paintball, war-game skills to use in an attempt to survive the night.

THE ZERO BOYS is a bit of a slow-burner, sometimes too slow for its own good, and considering Mastorakis' skeezy past with ISLAND OF DEATH, it's pretty tame for an unrated '80s horror movie. Where THE ZERO BOYS works best is with the sudden appearances of the trio of killers, often shown silhouetted and surrounded by light behind them or pouring rain, dark figures with weapons ready for the kill. These shots involving the killers are the highlights of the film, pulled off in a vividly eerie fashion by cinematographer Steve Shaw, who probably picked up some of those skills during his time as an assistant cameraman on E.T.: THE EXTRA TERRESTRIAL. Like a less-talented Roger Corman, Mastorakis surrounded himself with veteran talent he could afford and younger talent he could mentor: the synthy and exceedingly 1986-style score was co-written by Stanley Myers (THE DEER HUNTER) and a young Hans Zimmer, who would eventually nab ten Oscar nominations to date (for films like RAIN MAN, GLADIATOR, and INTERSTELLAR), winning one for his work on the 1994 Disney classic THE LION KING. Also buried in the closing credits are a pair of names who would go on to much bigger things in the '90s: production coordinator Marianne Maddalena would later become Wes Craven's producing partner from 1989 to the end of his career, and credited as one of three assistant art directors is future SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION and GREEN MILE director Frank Darabont, a year before his big break, landing a co-writing credit with Craven on 1987's A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS.

Mastorakis kept going throughout the rest of the '80s with films like 1987's TERMINAL EXPOSURE (with John Vernon, Andy Sidaris regular Hope Marie Carlton, and THE LOVE BOAT's Ted Lange), 1988's NIGHTMARE AT NOON (with George Kennedy, Bo Hopkins, and Wings Hauser), the 1989 spoof NINJA ACADEMY, 1990's HIRED TO KILL (with Kennedy, Jose Ferrer, and Oliver Reed), and 1991's NC-17-rated erotic thriller IN THE COLD OF THE NIGHT (an all-star affair with the likes of Shannon Tweed, Marc Singer, David Soul, John Beck, and Tippi Hedren). Mastorakis' Hollywood career came to a temporary close with the 1992 comedy THE NAKED TRUTH, where he somehow managed to corral a once-in-a-lifetime cast that reads like the IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD of early '90s straight-to-video: Tweed, Vernon, Lange, Erik Estrada, Lou Ferrigno, David Birney, Billy Barty, Alex Cord, Yvonne DeCarlo, Norman Fell, Bubba Smith, Herb Edelman, Camilla Sparv, M. Emmet Walsh, Dick Gautier, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Little Richard. Mastorakis returned to Greece for the rest of the '90s, relaunching the Greek incarnation of CANDID CAMERA and some other TV shows before returning to Hollywood in a one-off attempt to recapture his '80s magic in the world of straight-to-DVD with the 2003 cyber-horror thriller .COM FOR MURDER. Sporting the dubious tag line "In cyberspace, no one can year you scream," the film was a blatant attempt at fooling video store customers into thinking it was the previous year's thoroughly forgettable FEAR DOT COM, and featured another typically inexplicable cast that included Nastassja Kinski, Roger Daltrey, Nicollette Sheridan, Melinda Clarke, Julie Strain, and Huey Lewis. .COM FOR MURDER is the final film to date for the now 75-year-old Mastorakis, who appears in an interview on the bonus features for Arrow's new extras-packed Blu-ray/DVD release of THE ZERO BOYS. The two-disc set also has interviews with Rio as well as Maroney, who went on to appear in a few Roger Corman productions (CHOPPING MALL, BIG BAD MAMA II) and is now a regular on the convention circuit thanks primarily to the ongoing cult following of NIGHT OF THE COMET, and Maroney also joins former Fangoria editor Chris Alexander for an audio commentary.

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