Good Efficient Butchery

WHAT?
aka DIARY OF FORBIDDEN DREAMS
aka FORBIDDEN DREAMS
(Italy/France/West Germany - 1972; US releases 1973, 1976, 1979)

Directed by Roman Polanski. Written by Gerard Brach and Roman Polanski. Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Sydne Rome, Hugh Griffith, Romolo Valli, Roman Polanski, Guido Alberti, Roger Middleton, Cicely Browne, John Karlsen, Richard McNamara, Henning Schlueter, Gianfranco Piacentini, Elisabeth Witte. (Unrated, 114 mins)

Roman Polanski's most obscure film as a director was made between a pair of masterpieces: his brilliant 1971 adaptation of MACBETH, probably the best screen version of that particular Shakespeare play, and his 1974 classic CHINATOWN, one of the essential films of its decade. To say that Polanski lost his way in between those triumphs is an understatement. WHAT? is a semi-improvised and self-indulgent fiasco, trying to be an exercise in comedic erotica with bawdy and absurdist humor, but testing the patience of even the most devoted Polanskiphile. 21-year-old Sydne Rome, an Akron, OH native who's still active on Italian and German television and whose entire career has been spent in Europe, stars as Nancy, an American hitchhiking through Italy, narrowly escaping a gang rape (played for laughs, as one of the rapists, waiting his turn on Nancy, tries to have his way with one of the other guys) and hiding out at a posh, seaside villa inhabited by all manner of wealthy, high society perverts. After one night in the villa, Nancy's shirt disappears, thereby allowing Rome to spend much of the film topless, wearing only bellbottoms and a dinner napkin tied around her neck. Most of Nancy's time is spent with Alex (the legendary Marcello Mastroianni, in possibly the worst performance of his career), also known as "Coco the Mashed Potato," a syphilitic and possibly gay ex-pimp and sadomasochist prone to dressing in a tiger costume and asking Nancy to whip him before she finally gives into his open-sored charms. Nothing much happens other than Nancy walking around the villa in various states of undress and interacting with other guests, including Polanski as a creep named "Mosquito" talking about his "big stinger," and Romolo Valli as the lecherous Giovanni, who introduces himself to Nancy by going down on her while she's asleep. Eventually, Nancy meets their host, the villa's gravely-ill owner Noblart (Oscar-winner Hugh Griffith, who had just done another Eurosmut film with Pier Paolo Pasolini's THE CANTERBURY TALES), who begs her to bare her body to him before he dies.

Shot mostly at an Amalfi villa owned by producer Carlo Ponti, WHAT? must rank as the second worst thing Polanski's ever done in a celebrity friend's house. It's one of those films where it's obvious that the actors are having a much better time than the audience, who can't help but get the feeling that the entire film is a long private joke that they're just not being let in on. Polanski and frequent screenwriting partner Gerard Brach seem to be going for a naughty, Bunuel-meets-Pasolini-like spin on Alice in Wonderland, sans Bunuel's mastery of the absurd and Pasolini's predilection for scatological loaf-pinching. After a set piece that finds Alex dressing as Napoleon, slapping Nancy around, and talking to a tree, the film finally, mercifully ends, with a half-assed, Buddy Bizarre breaking of the fourth wall as Nancy escapes from the would-be EXTERMINATING ANGEL bullshit at Noblart's villa and revealing to Alex that "We're in a movie!" as if the inhabitants of the house are trapped in a movie and only she can break free.

Viewers of WHAT? will know how they feel. WHAT? was greeted with respectful reactions from European audiences in 1972 but it took a year to get released by Embassy in the US, where it got an X rating. It also got such a toxic response from critics and audiences that it was quickly withdrawn and shelved after playing in NYC and Chicago. While Polanski went on to accolades with CHINATOWN, WHAT? languished, completely forgotten until it was picked up by the small United National Films in 1976, re-edited without Polanski's involvement from 114 minutes to 94, re-rated R, and retitled DIARY OF FORBIDDEN DREAMS, with a misleading ad campaign that called it "the kinkiest caper of the year" and of course, name-dropping ROSEMARY'S BABY and CHINATOWN. The DIARY version was later acquired by grindhouse outfit Motion Picture Marketing (a company co-owned by mobster Michael Franzese that found a niche in the '80s with vigilante scuzz like SAVAGE STREETS and Italian horror films like Lucio Fulci's THE GATES OF HELL and Bruno Mattei's NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES) and relaunched once more on the drive-in circuit in 1979 as the shortened FORBIDDEN DREAMS. MPM's poster art sported the tag line "The erotic fantasies of the world's most notorious director," taking queasy advantage of Polanski by then being a fugitive from US authorities for unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl. The 1976 re-edit would later be released on VHS in 1986 by Trans-World Entertainment under its DIARY OF FORBIDDEN DREAMS title, but until now, Polanski's original, 114-minute WHAT? has been almost impossible to see in the US since that aborted rollout in 1973. Severin Films released it on Blu-ray in the UK in 2008 and eight long--but not long enough--years later, they've just recently restored and released it for the US market. Other than the lovely Rome's many nude scenes, WHAT? is an unwatchable home movie, a justifiably buried footnote to a great filmmaker's career that will only appeal to the most fanatical Polanski completist, with only the most delusional apologist finding anything of value in it. That is, unless you've got "seeing Marcello Mastroianni's sagging ballsack" on your bucket list.

1976 re-edited version

1979 re-release of the 1976 version

1986 VHS release

STEELE JUSTICE
(US - 1987)

Written and directed by Robert Boris. Cast: Martin Kove, Sela Ward, Ronny Cox, Bernie Casey, Joseph Campanella, Jan Gan Boyd, Soon-Teck Oh, Sarah Douglas, Shannon Tweed, Robert Kim, Peter Kwong, Al Leong, Phil Fondacaro, Asher Brauner, Dean Ferrandini, Big Bull Bates, Kevin Gage, The Desert Rose Band, Astrid Plane. (R, 97 mins)

In the annals of ridiculous '80s cop movies, STEELE JUSTICE fell through the cracks and still flies under the radar today. An action hero straight out of the McBain playbook, disgraced L.A. cop John Steele is perfectly played in Rainier Wolfcastle-style by a teeth-gritting Martin Kove, then best-known for both his role as Isbecki on the popular CBS series CAGNEY & LACEY and as Kreese, the asshole sensai of the Cobra Kai dojo in the KARATE KID movies. A Vietnam vet-turned-renegade cop who refused to play by the rules, Steele was thrown off the force for insubordination by perpetually irate Chief Bennett (Ronny Cox, basically playing a sniveling "protect the shield" version of his BEVERLY HILLS COP character). Steele, the kind of badass who wears a live coral snake (named Three Steps "because three steps, and you're dead") around his neck, is pulled back into action when his Asian-American ex-partner and Vietnam buddy Minh (Robert Kim) and his family are massacred by the goons of drug kingpin Pham Van Kwan (Peter Kwong), a prominent figure in the "Black Tiger" Vietnamese Mafia. Of course, it goes deeper than that, as Pham is the son of Gen. Bon Soong Kwan (Soon-Teck Oh), a corrupt South Vietnamese military official who was smuggling CIA gold and tried to have Steele killed in the final days of the war. Understandably still holding a grudge, Steele is recruited Shriker-from-DEATH WISH 3-style by Bennett, who wants him take out the trash while keeping the department's image squeaky clean. Or, as Bennett explains to Steele's reluctant new partner Reese (Bernie Casey), "He isn't being recruited...he's being unleashed!" In addition to avenging the death of his best friend, Steele has to contend with clueless, desk-jockey cops and his corrupt former commanding officer Harry (Joseph Campanella) being in cahoots with Kwan, who's now a respected L.A. businessman who's also hooked up with the ambitious, spoiled daughter (Shannon Tweed) of a powerful mafia boss. Any chance all concerned parties will converge at an abandoned factory at a waterfront shipyard? And that a crane will somehow be involved?

There isn't a single cop/action movie cliche that goes unused by writer/director Robert Boris, who also wrote 1973's ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE and 1983's DOCTOR DETROIT. The film is filled with stunts and brutal violance but it's silly enough that you have to wonder if Boris was making a comedy. You know there's no way anyone in the cast is taking it seriously. Certainly the actors saw the absurdity of Minh's daughter Cami, the only survivor of the massacre of Minh's family, being played by Jan Gan Boyd. That same year, Boyd played a Secret Service agent who sleeps with Charles Bronson in ASSASSINATION, but here she is in pigtails and dressed like a little girl, skipping around and calling Steele "Uncle John," an actress in her mid 20s playing a role that seems like it was written for a six-year-old. Steele's ex-wife Tracy (Sela Ward) is on hand to humanize him while trying to tell herself she doesn't still love him, admonishing him with "The war isn't over for you...it just changed locations." Of course, there's a "working out/preparing for battle" montage set to a driving, AOR hard rock tune, in this case Hot Pursuit's "Fire with Fire." And it doesn't get any more '80s than the L.A. hotel lobby shootout where Tracy is directing a music video for Animotion ("Obsession") singer Astrid Plane (as herself), when Pham's guys (including perennial '80s henchman Al Leong) show up to kill Cami. Steele and Reese, a budget-conscious Riggs and Murtaugh, arrive only to have Reese barely survive a bullet to the gut and Steele shot with a poisoned dart. That's no problem for Steele, who dives head-first through a window into a banquet room, slices his arm open, sucks out the poison, and cauterizes the wound with a conveniently unattended sizzling pan in one of the greatest scenes ever.

It gets really good around the 4:00 mark

Released by Atlantic, STEELE JUSTICE opened on a handful of screens May 8, 1987, the same day as Francis Ford Coppola's GARDENS OF STONE and the John Cusack comedy HOT PURSUIT. It expanded across the country over the next few weeks but never even cracked the top ten, petering out in late May with a box office take of just over $1 million, more than double the take of Cannon's NUMBER ONE WITH A BULLET, another neglected cop flick from earlier that year. For a movie that was equal parts RAMBO, DIRTY HARRY, and LETHAL WEAPON, STEELE JUSTICE surprisingly never found an audience (it opened in my hometown of Toledo, OH on May 29 and didn't even play for a full week, gone five days later to make room for the Wednesday opening of THE UNTOUCHABLES). It didn't even really break out on video, which is a shame. Was STEELE JUSTICE a spoof and none of us realized it? Is this the STARSHIP TROOPERS of '80 cop actioners? Sure, it's a stupid movie but it seems to recognize that fact. There's something ludicrous happening at any given moment (Steele driving a truck through a Black Tiger billiards hall and beating the shit out of everyone is great, but why is he wearing too-tight burgundy slacks?), and Kove is a blast as Steele. Needless to say, the failure of STEELE JUSTICE didn't open any doors for Kove as a big-screen action star. After the end of CAGNEY & LACEY in 1988 and THE KARATE KID PART III in 1989, he found a lot of work in the world of straight-to-video throughout the '90s and into the '00s for directors like Cirio H. Santiago, Joseph Merhi, and J. Christian Ingvordsen. He remains busy on TV and low-budget schlock to this day (he's in Syfy's upcoming LAVALANTULA sequel 2 LAVA 2 LANTULA!, one of 24 IMDb credits he's got for 2016 alone), and is a regular fixture at fan conventions thanks to his KARATE KID notoriety. One of the most entertaining action movies Cannon never made, STEELE JUSTICE is junk, but it's junk that deserved a better reception than it got. It's just been unleashed on Blu-ray--unfortunately, with no extras other than a trailer--by Kino Lorber. Nearly 30 years after it bowed to instant oblivion, let's hope STEELE JUSTICE's day has finally arrived.

REGRESSION
(Spain/Canada - 2015; 2016 US release)

There's a good movie to be made of the so-called "Satanic Panic" of the mid-to-late 1980s. It was a time when horror movies and heavy metal were blamed when impressionable kids did horrible things and a Satanic cult was believed to be emerging after dark throughout small-town America, practicing all manner of Satanic ritual abuse. Written and directed by the once-promising Alejandro Amenabar, who made his name with 1997's OPEN YOUR EYES and the revered 2001 ghost story THE OTHERS, REGRESSION could almost describe the filmmaker's career momentum over the last decade. This is just Amenabar's second feature since helming 2004's Best Foreign Language Film Oscar-winner THE SEA INSIDE: nobody saw his 2009 historical epic AGORA and REGRESSION received only a scant US release two years after it was shot. By tackling the subject of Satanic ritual abuse, Amenabar is working at cross purposes: he spends 90 minutes trying to fashion a creepy, supernatural horror film but anyone old enough to remember the Satanic Panic knows how it became a big nothing, and those who weren't around for it are bound to be disappointed by the historically accurate but cinematically empty resolution.

"Inspired by true events," REGRESSION takes place in a small Minnesota town in 1990, even though the height of Satanic Panic was more 1985-86). Hard-nosed, obsessive detective Kenner (Ethan Hawke) catches what seems to be a open-and-shut child molestation case involving mechanic John Gray (David Dencik). Gray confesses to molesting his teenage daughter Angela (Emma Watson), even though he has no memory of doing so. With Angela seeking refuge at the local church under the protection of the parish priest (Lothaire Bluteau), Gray undergoes regressive hypnotherapy with psychologist Dr. Raines (David Thewlis), during which he recalls another person present while the molestation took place: local cop Nesbitt (Aaron Ashmore). Kenner impulsively throws Nesbitt in jail and Angela reveals that her father, grandmother (Dale Dickey, once again cast as the second-string Melissa Leo), and numerous other town residents are part of a Satanic cult that engaged in everything from sex rituals to murdering and eating newborn babies. It isn't long before Kenner's paranoia takes over and he believes himself the next target of the cult. Considering that the Satanic Panic was little more than irrational hype from worried parents, reactionary law enforcement, and an overzealous media latching on to an alleged phenomenon guaranteed to get attention and scare the public into a frenzy, fashioning REGRESSION as a straight-up horror movie for most of its duration probably wasn't the way to approach this if Amenabar was making a serious examination of the topic. By the end, especially after a really dumb revelation that undermines everything about the Satanic Panic for the sake of a stupid twist, Amenabar has backed himself into a corner and debunked his own movie. This really should've been something more, but I can't really say what. And neither can Amenabar. (R, 106 mins)

SYNCHRONICITY
(US - 2016)

A frustratingly empty time travel sci-fi saga, SYNCHRONICITY goes for the trendy retro '80s look and feel, but doesn't accomplish much else. If it had a story worth telling, all of the fetishizing with the synths and the cold, blue cityscapes would provide effective accompaniment, but in the end, that's all SYNCHRONICITY has and it just comes off as PRIMER remade as BLADE RUNNER fan fiction. Scientist Jim Beale (Chad McKnight) is working on a top-secret project to open a traversable wormhole in the space-time continuum. His benefactor, the sinister and obscenely wealthy Klaus Meisner (a nicely-cast Michael Ironside), a guy we instantly know is sinister because he's named "Klaus Meisner," naturally wants to use it for power and financial gain, but after admitting that the ramifications of the project could have globally apocalyptic ramifications, Beale uses it for something far more altruistic: chasing a girl. The girl is Abby, who may or may not have come from a time jump and is played by Brianne Davis, who looks like Jennifer Lawrence and sounds like Joey Lauren Adams, but plays the part as if she's Aubrey Plaza playing Sean Young's Rachael in BLADE RUNNER. SYNCHRONICITY is very beholden to the 1982 Ridley Scott classic, almost annoyingly so, from its blatantly Vangelis-like score to the Syd Mead-inspired visual futurism on a budget. Writer-director Jacob Gentry, who was also one of three directors of 2008's inexplicably acclaimed THE SIGNAL, fills SYNCHRONICITY with unsubtle references to other movies, whether it's Beale's colleague (AJ Bowen) shouting "We are messing with the primal forces of nature here!" or the constant film noir shout-outs, with lighting through Venetian blinds or constantly spinning window fans. The exposition and dialogue are cloddish as well, like Beale proclaiming "We are precious moments from a topological anomaly!" or dropping some clumsy exposition like "Then I will have proof of the findings to show our venture capitalist, Klaus Meisner." From the get-go, SYNCHRONICITY just rubbed me the wrong way, and the glacially slow pace, the shameless BLADE RUNNER worship, the bland performance by McKnight, who's not unlike a sedated Casey Affleck, and Gentry giving the great Ironside almost nothing to do but sneer (which he does beautifully) did little to win me over. These retro homages really only work if there's a engaging story to tell, like in THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW, or TURBO KID (which also co-starred Ironside). All Gentry does here is pilfer from other, infinitely better movies while bringing nothing of his own to the table. He should've just saved time and money and filmed himself watching a double feature of BLADE RUNNER and PRIMER. You'd be better off doing exactly that. Cool poster, though. (R, 100 mins)

SUBMERGED

(US - 2015)

A limo careens into a river and sinks, the people inside unable to get out, the water rising and the air in short supply. Seems like a can't-miss premise for an intense nail-biter of a thriller, but writer Scott Milam (the 2012 remake of MOTHER'S DAY) and director Steven C. Miller (SILENT NIGHT, the 2012 remake of SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT) do everything they can to screw it up. Insisting on telling the story in a fractured timeline is the biggest mistake, as it completely eliminates any sense of escalating tension to cut away to flashbacks every few minutes. The key to pulling something like this off is staying in the limo, but by the eight-minute mark, Miller, fresh off his EXTRACTION triumph with former actor Bruce Willis, is already out of the limo, filling us on in the backstories of the characters and how they arrived at their current predicament. Who gives a shit? Limo driver Matt (Jonathan Bennett, who played Bo Duke in the DTV DUKES OF HAZZARD sequel and replaced Ryan Reynolds in a DTV VAN WILDER sequel) is a bodyguard for Jessie (Talulah Riley), the spoiled daughter of billionaire business CEO Hank Searles (a slumming Tim Daly), who recently laid off a ton of workers. Turns out the party limo filled with several of Jessie's friends was targeted by disgruntled ex-employees looking to abduct Jessie for a fat ransom from Searles (or Sayles--in an apparent homage to OVER THE TOP's Lincoln Hawk/Hawks, the movie can't seem to decide).

Instead of letting the suspense build in the limo--where everybody starts arguing ("Every time you kiss her, you're tasting my dick!")--Miller and Milam spend entirely too much screen time on flashbacks involving Matt's troubled, drug-dealing younger brother Dylan (Cody Christian), which ultimately does nothing other than pad the running time. You'll be able to spot the puppet masters behind all the mayhem long before Matt does, mainly because of one character who acts weird for no reason (and later talks in the kind of condescending, sing-songy tone that only one-dimensional villains in bad movies and TV shows use), and another who's played by a prominently-billed, well-known, veteran actor who's barely in the first 90% of the movie. Also featuring Mario Van Peebles, SUBMERGED sinks in almost record time, with Miller demonstrating absolutely no ability to stage any kind of suspense or action sequence (the climax has one of the most ineptly-shot fight scenes in recent memory), with only a couple of surprisingly gory splatter scenes and a competent, if slightly bland performance by Bennett (who looks like the guy you get when Karl Urban doesn't return your calls and Brandon Routh lies and says he's busy) to save it from total uselessness. Even by the standards of the VOD scrapyard SUBMERGED, is at the bottom of the heap. (Unrated, 98 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

THE TRUST
(US/UK - 2016)

Directed by Alex Brewer & Benjamin Brewer. Written by Adam Hirsch and Benjamin Brewer. Cast: Nicolas Cage, Elijah Wood, Sky Ferreira, Jerry Lewis, Ethan Suplee, Steven Willliams, Eric Heister, Alexandria Lee, Keston John. (R, 92 mins)

At this point in his career, Nicolas Cage has almost become synonymous with "VOD," spending the last several years cranking out a series of largely interchangeable and mostly forgettable action movies that played in as few theaters as contractually mandated. For every worthwhile film he makes, like JOE or THE FROZEN GROUND, there's three RAGE's or THE RUNNER's. And when he does manage to headline a nationwide release, it's LEFT BEHIND, easily the most embarrassing film of his career. Cage coasts through so many garbage movies that it's a major event for his fans when he makes a good one, and the quirky heist thriller THE TRUST, while no classic, qualifies as high-end Cage these days and definitely belongs in the JOE and FROZEN GROUND club. Directed by Alex & Benjamin Brewer and written by Benjamin Brewer and Adam Hirsch, THE TRUST provides the Oscar-winning actor with one of his trademark eccentric characters, essayed by a Cage who's sort-of mellowed with age but still shows flashes of bug-eyed hysteria when he's pushed to the edge. Cage is Jim Stone, a bored cop and supervisor of the Las Vegas P.D.'s evidence department. Stone happens upon a bail receipt for $200,000 cash and is curious about the potential criminal activities and "deep pockets" of someone who has $200,000 in cash so easily available. Buddying up with one of his staffers, disgruntled David Waters (Elijah Wood), Stone uses department funds to set up a phony undercover/surveillance operation, even posing as a clumsy waiter to tail the guy who got bailed out to see if it leads to the source of the big money. Eventually, they uncover the existence of a secret vault hidden in a freezer inside a carryout, where numerous drops are made but no money ever leaves. Convinced it's a cash drop for a Vegas drug operation, Stone aggressively cajoles Waters into robbing the vault, even convincing him to drop $10K of his own money on an industrial-sized drill so they can work into the vault from the supposedly vacant apartment above the carryout. And of course, like any heist movie, complications ensue.

It's great to see Cage in a role that effectively utilizes his talents and inspires him to turn in one of his periodic "He's still got it!" performances. JOE proved that Cage is capable of great things if his heart's in it, and while THE TRUST is by and large a relatively minor, "small" movie, it's the kind of low-key, indie departure that he should've made more of back in his '90s and early '00s heyday and his career probably wouldn't be in the rut it is today. In his best role since JOE, Cage is wired, jumpy, and unpredictable in ways unseen since Werner Herzog's BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS back in 2009, with some laugh-out-loud funny line deliveries (the odd way Stone says "cocaine," or when meeting a dangerous criminal named Bobo, Stone can't stop marveling at how "fun" the name Bobo sounds, carrying on until Bobo inevitably barks "Shut the fuck up!") and having fun with character quirks like Stone's taste for lemons slathered in tabasco. Though he makes the character his own, there are a few instances--the breath spray bit, for instance-- where Cage seems to be channeling vintage Chevy Chase (and then Stone struck me as the kind of offbeat role that could've revitalized Chase's career back when it mattered). Starting with the unholy lemons & tabasco mix, Stone can pretty much talk the unambitious Waters into anything, and the humor, which almost feels like the Coen Bros. adapting an Elmore Leonard novel, gradually disappears as the stakes get more serious.

THE TRUST is a lot more fun in its early stages when it focuses on the planning of the heist and the amusing camaraderie between Stone and Waters, and Wood proves to be a solid, slow-burning foil for his boss' impulsive and often irresponsible antics ("You're mortgaging your house to pay for a heist?!"). But when the heist starts to involve murder and an unintended hostage (Sky Ferreira), and Waters gets an increasingly paranoid feeling that Stone is setting him up, THE TRUST gets dead serious and very downbeat, and it doesn't really gel with the more easy-going, working-stiff OCEAN'S ELEVEN riff with nine less guys pulling off a job on the seedier side of town. It's almost too methodical in its depiction of the heist, actually slowing down the momentum at times. But despite the jarring shift in tone and the uneven nature of the story, THE TRUST is still an engaging comedy-turned-thriller. Cage (wearing one of his more plausible Christopher Lee hairpieces) and Wood could make a good comedy team, and the film even offers a rare-these-days screen appearance for the legendary Jerry Lewis in a small role as Stone's retired cop dad. It's a role anyone could've played and 90-year-old Lewis doesn't have much to do in two brief scenes. While it's not a KING OF COMEDY-style stretch and he likely wasn't on the set for more than a day, it's nice to see him in a movie again, and in a generally atypical dramatic role.

MONEY MONSTER
(US - 2016)

Directed by Jodie Foster. Written by Jamie Linden, Alan DiFiore and Jim Kouf. Cast: George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Jack O'Connell, Dominic West, Caitriona Balfe, Giancarlo Esposito, Lenny Venito, Christopher Denham, Chris Bauer, Emily Meade, Dennis Boutsikaris, John Ventimiglia, Condola Rashad, Aaron Yoo, Carsey Walker Jr, Grant Rosenmeyer, Olivia Luccardi. (R, 98 mins)

The kind of slick, hot-button star vehicle that was a weekly thing back in the 1990s, the George Clooney-Julia Roberts-headlined MONEY MONSTER probably could've been released 20 years ago with, say, Michael Douglas and uh, I guess Julia Roberts, and not been much different. While obviously not in the same league, it's a throwback "New York City" movie in the vein of DOG DAY AFTERNOON, but probably owes more to (and comes off better than) Costa-Gavras' forgotten 1997 flop MAD CITY, where an improbably cast Dustin Hoffman was an ambitious TV news reporter in a hostage situation instigated by an unemployed security guard played by a set of sideburns attached to John Travolta. MONEY MONSTER opens with disgruntled package service delivery driver Kyle Budwell (Jack O'Connell) crashing the live broadcast of the cable financial news show MONEY MONSTER, hosted by the smugly arrogant and almost buffoonish Lee Gates (Clooney). Suggesting a more roguishly handsome MAD MONEY host Jim Cramer combined with the grating, "look at me!" showmanship of Jimmy Fallon, Gates is the kind of "news-as-entertainment" jagoff who has softball interviews with money experts, mockingly dons gold chains and has choreographed routines with backing dancers, and has his snarky one-liners punctuated with cheesy horror movie clips and zany sound effects straight out of the "wacky radio morning zoo" playbook. There's a lot to suggest that the cocky, strutting Gates is regarded as a clown by Wall Street: as the film opens, a financial guru and "friend of the show" cancels their dinner plans for the seventh time and blows him off on the phone, and Gates' long-suffering director Patty Fenn (Roberts), who tells one guest "We don't do gotcha journalism here...hell, we don't even do journalism here," has accepted a job with another show and has yet to tell her boss she's leaving.

All of that gets put on the backburner when Budwell manages to get through lax security under the auspices of a package delivery. Pulling a gun on Gates on live TV and forcing him to strap on a vest bomb, Budwell wants to know why IBIS Global Capital's stock lost $800 million the day before. IBIS communications director Diane Lester (Caitriona Balfe) is making the talk show rounds saying it was a "computer glitch" but that's only because CEO Walt Camby (Dominic West) is gallivanting around the world on his private jet and has been MIA for several days. He was scheduled to be on MONEY MONSTER that day, which is why Budwell brought two vests. Budwell invested his entire savings--$60,000 in insurance money he received when his mother died--in an investment that Gates and frequent guest Camby endlessly crowed was a sure thing, and he wants answers, not just for himself but for all the other investors who were victimized by a rigged system (or dumb enough to throw everything into one basket). Budwell doesn't believe that $800 million can just vanish because of a computer glitch. Of course, he's right, and Patty, whose long-dormant inner journalist is reawakened as she tries to keep Gates focused by talking to him through his hidden earpiece, directs MONEY MONSTER staffers to do some actual investigative work and look into the coincidental timing of nearly $1 billion vanishing while Camby's been off the grid and impossible to find for nearly a week.

Directed by Jodie Foster and co-written by veteran journeyman Jim Kouf (STAKEOUT, RUSH HOUR, NATIONAL TREASURE, and back in his younger, dues-paying days, THE BOOGENS and UP THE CREEK), MONEY MONSTER is more concerned with being a commercial hostage thriller than taking a serious look at stock market fraud and income inequality issues. That's not to say it doesn't make some bitter, satirical points here and there, whether it's taking aim at the vacuous nature of most cable news shows (of course, real-life news personalities like the increasingly hapless Wolf Blitzer and the increasingly loud Cenk Uygar have cameos as themselves), and the fickle, short attention span of the viewing public. One of the big mistakes MONEY MONSTER makes is in its closing minutes, tacking on a coda to give the audience one more scene with Clooney and Roberts when a perfect, hard-hitting indictment of an ending would've been the shot of the foosball game resuming in the coffee shop (no spoilers, but you'll know it when you see it).

MONEY MONSTER has some tricks up its sleeve in that nearly every time you start rolling your eyes at some hackneyed plot device or think the movie is careening off the rails with an improbable, Hollywood plot convenience, it pulls the rug out from under the audience--and its characters--and essentially confirms your feelings. Just when you think Budwell is an impossibly dumb, useless lug (British O'Connell is really chewing on that "working-class Queens schlub" accent) who's gathering the sympathy of captivated TV viewers, the movie introduces his pregnant girlfriend--played by Emily Meade in the kind of incredible, one-scene turn that got Beatrice Straight a Supporting Actress Oscar for NETWORK--to mercilessly lay into him about just how impossibly dumb and useless he is. Meade's is the best scene in the movie, with the actress practically stealing the whole show in about two minutes of screen time. It's destined to be a YouTube favorite, along with Clooney's ridiculous dancing. O'Connell (UNBROKEN) overdoes it a little too much at times, with his Budwell weighed down by a massive blue-collar chip on his shoulder about how "you tink I'm fukkin' stoopid?" and "you's rich fucks wit ya fancy edgee-cayshuns!" Clooney and Roberts are, as usual, a solid, almost comfort-food team even though they don't share the screen very much (one question: is Clooney wearing eyeliner in the climax at Freedom Hall? His eyes are all puffy and he looks completely different, like that sequence was a reshoot or maybe he was sick that day), and the supporting cast is filled out with numerous familiar, reliable character actors (Giancarlo Esposito, Lenny Venito, Christopher Denham, Chris Bauer, John Ventimiglia, and Dennis Boutsikaris, cast radically against type as the kind of sneering prick who would've been played by the late Ron Silver two decades ago). MONEY MONSTER isn't high art and it isn't very deep or analytical about Wall Street aside from obvious points that too much of the money is controlled by too few people, but it's an entertaining, straightforward movie for grown-up audiences, so enjoy this kind of thing in a theater while you still can.

HIGH-RISE
(UK/Ireland/Belgium - 2016)

Directed by Ben Wheatley. Written by Amy Jump. Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans, Elisabeth Moss, James Purefoy, Keeley Hawes, Bill Paterson, Peter Ferdinando, Sienna Guillory, Reece Shearsmith, Stacy Martin, Augustus Prew, Tony Way, Enzo Cilenti, Dan Skinner, Louis Suc, Neil Maskell. (R, 119 mins)

Producer Jeremy Thomas has tried to put together an adaptation of J.G. Ballard's novel High-Rise since it was first published in 1975. Though regarded as unfilmable, it nearly came to be in the late '70s with director Nicolas Roeg and screenwriter Paul Mayersberg intending it to be their next film after 1976's THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH. That never happened, nor did any other attempt, and the closest anyone got prior to now was when CUBE director Vincenzo Natali nearly got the greenlight in the early 2000s. It took 40 years, but Thomas finally got HIGH-RISE made, with acclaimed British cult filmmaker Ben Wheatley at the helm, working from a script by his wife and writing partner Amy Jump. Wheatley has acquired a cult following with the overrated WICKER MAN knockoff KILL LIST, the dark comedy SIGHTSEERS, and the unnerving A FIELD IN ENGLAND, but HIGH-RISE is his most ambitious project yet, working with his biggest budget and largest, most prestigious ensemble cast yet.

Combining the coldness of David Cronenberg (whose controversial 1996 film CRASH was based on the Ballard novel of the same name) with the absurdist black comedy of Terry Gilliam, HIGH-RISE is ultimately done in by a too-lengthy delay between the publication of its source novel and its eventual big-screen adaptation. Had Roeg and Mayersberg made this in 1977, it likely would've been prophetically visionary and as highly regarded as THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH But now, in 2016, it's exhaustingly heavy-handed, hammering its points over the audience's head again and again, and even ending with a Margaret Thatcher soundbite just in case the themes of class struggle and the haves ruling the have-nots wasn't quite hammered home for the preceding two hours trip into the hellhole of dystopia and capitalism run amok. Med school instructor Robert Laine (Tom Hiddleston, in a role that would've been perfect for David Bowie had Roeg had his shot at this way back when) moves into the 25th floor of a Jenga-esque 40-story high-rise tower block. The swingin' 70s are here in all their glory, as Laine quickly hops into bed with sexually liberated single mom Charlotte (Sienna Miller), and the residents of the high-rise form a very insulated community with every convenience--a gym, pool, 15th floor grocery store--readily available. The not-very-subtly-named Royal (Jeremy Irons), the building's architect, lives in the top floor penthouse, and when problems start arising--priorities for supply deliveries going to the wealthy one-percenters on the top floors and the lower class near the bottom being plagued by frequent power outages--he dismisses it as "teething" and "the building settling in." Disgruntled, philandering TV documentarian Wilder (Luke Evans) lives on one of the lower floors with his very pregnant wife Helen (Elisabeth Moss) and several kids, and eventually leads a revolt against the rich and powerful in the high-rise. Soon, all sense of order disintegrates as the high-rise becomes both the entire world of its occupants and a microcosm (SYMBOLISM!) of societal inequality and injustice: garbage piles up, food molds, and it's kill or be killed as life metamorphoses into a visceral orgy of rage, violence, hate-fucking, and all manner of degradation, debauchery, and destruction.

This feels a lot like SNOWPIERCER in a skyscraper, from the class struggle motif to Wilder's making his way to the top of the building, all the way to one character admonishing Laine to "know your place." Sure, in retrospect, it looks like SNOWPIERCER--and other movies--co-opted a lot of Ballard's ideas, and that's not the fault of the filmmakers here, but it doesn't do this belated adaptation any favors. It's also reminiscent of a somewhat less abrasive BLINDNESS, though Wheatley and Jump do keep the unpleasantness to a minimum, mostly implying it except for a few examples of shock value shots and dialogue (Royal to Laine, during a game of squash: "By the way, I hear you're fucking 374...she has a tight cunt as I recall"). Laine is the relative "everyman" audience surrogate, a successful career man who lives in the middle of the building and is comfortable screwing third-floor Charlotte and hobnobbing with penthouse Royal and other near-the-top residents, like sneering, asshole gynecologist Pangbourne (James Purefoy). Royal, the Trump of the high-rise if you want a present-day analogy, speaks of the building as both a living, breathing entity and as a symbol of society. It's all rather facile and obvious, though again, it could've been the angry FIGHT CLUB of its day had it been made 40 years ago. Whatever ham-fisted conclusions there are to draw from the events in HIGH-RISE have already been made decades ago. Wheatley scores some points for the film's retro-future look that ties in perfectly with Laine's observation that it "looks like a future that had already happened," and trippy, early '70s prog tunes by Amon Duul and Can, and a Portishead cover of ABBA's "S.O.S." provide a lot of atmosphere, but HIGH-RISE is repetitive, dated, and eventually oppressive. The filmmakers swing for the fences and get a few hits, but it goes on forever and you'll be ready for it to end long before it finally does.

THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND
(US - 1983)

Directed by Sam Peckinpah. Written by Alan Sharp and Ian Masters. Cast: Rutger Hauer, John Hurt, Craig T. Nelson, Dennis Hopper, Burt Lancaster, Chris Sarandon, Meg Foster, Helen Shaver, Cassie Yates, Sandy McPeak, Christopher Starr, Jan Triska, Merete Van Kamp, Tim Thomerson, Buddy Joe Hooker. (R, 103 mins)

The legendary Sam Peckinpah's final film was a typically troubled production that saw him clashing with producers and having the film recut without his involvement. A very loose adaptation of Robert Ludlum's 1972 novel, THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND stars John Hurt as Lawrence Fassett, an embittered CIA agent whose obsessive investigation into his wife's murder leads him to uncover evidence that three men--TV writer Bernard Osterman (Craig T. Nelson), plastic surgeon Richard Tremayne (Dennis Hopper), and hotheaded stockbroker Joseph Cardone (Chris Sarandon)--are really Soviet agents who have been operating in the US since their college days. Fassett convinces their old college buddy John Tanner (Rutger Hauer), now a successful liberal pundit in the political talk show arena, to host a weekend reunion with the guys and their wives. With Tanner's home filled with hidden surveillance cameras and Fassett in regular communication, it's the perfect set-up to expose the alleged KGB agents and in exchange for helping out the US government, Tanner gets an exclusive, one-on-one interview with controversial CIA chief Maxwell Danforth (Burt Lancaster), infamous for his extensive authorization of all manner of high-tech surveillance.

Given its prescient subject matter--cable news pundits, high-tech spy games, government overreach, etc--THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND was a bit ahead of its time and seems ripe for an updated remake today. This version is entertaining, often for the wrong reasons. It's incredibly convoluted, crossing over into the incoherent on occasion, and it's often very sloppily edited, with a few repeated shots and no one watching the continuity when it comes to Nelson's epic fake mustache, which almost never looks the same in two consecutive shots. Peckinpah reportedly tried to make this into an espionage satire, similar to his initial cut of 1975's THE KILLER ELITE which, by the time the producers finished recutting it, was left with only a visibly drunk and unsteady Gig Young slurring his words and struggling to stand and James Caan and Burt Young battling ninjas to keep it interesting. As with that film, the producers removed all the comedy, so maybe OSTERMAN's inconsistent editing and the varying mustache lengths were all part of unsung satirist Peckinpah's master plan. There's some effective bits, especially once Peckinpah lets the film fly off the rails in the last third. Peckinpah uses a peculiar technique in his action scenes here, with a lot of slow-motion and drawn-out, quick-cut editing that, in context, works well, especially in the late-going with the exploding RV, plus he gets a genuinely terrific performance out of Hurt. There's a lot to like here--irate Lancaster at his most assholish (is there any way a guy named "Maxwell Danforth" won't be a complete prick?); gratuitous nudity; Meg Foster decking Helen Shaver; and a hilarious bit involving a dog's head in the fridge--but at the same time, it feels like a missed opportunity. There's a pronounced lack of focus and the disconnect between the director and his producers is apparent. It's a mess, but a consistently intriguing one.

Speaking of messes, Anchor Bay's Blu-ray, released last year, is a splotchy, ugly disaster. And unlike their special edition DVD from 2004, it doesn't include the 116-minute Peckinpah rough cut that led to his dismissal from the project. THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND was Peckinpah's first film since 1978's CONVOY, much of which was directed without credit by his friend James Coburn. Coburn was interested in stepping behind the camera for some future projects and was serving as second unit director to get his DGA card. The veteran actor ended up directing significant portions of the movie while Peckinpah was holed up in his trailer on an extended coke binge. After doing uncredited second unit work without incident for old friend Don Siegel on the 1982 Bette Midler bomb JINXED!, Peckinpah was given THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND as a comeback project and while things initially ran smoothly, disagreements took over and by the end of shooting, there was no communication between him and the producers. When Peckinpah refused to make the changes demanded after a disastrous test screening in May 1983, he was handed his walking papers and the producers re-edited the film themselves. After directing a pair of Julian Lennon music videos, including one for his breakout hit "Too Late for Goodbyes." Peckinpah died of heart failure at just 59 in December 1984, a little over a year after THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND's November 1983 release.

CLAY PIGEON
(US - 1971)

Directed by Tom Stern and Lane Slate. Written by Ronald Buck, Buddy Ruskin and Jack Gross Jr. Cast: Telly Savalas, Robert Vaughn, John Marley, Burgess Meredith, Ivan Dixon, Tom Stern, Jeff Corey, Peter Lawford, Marilyn Akin, Marlene Clark, Belinda Palmer, Mario Alcalde. (R, 92 mins)

A laughable hippie revenge saga that had to look like a dated relic the day it was released, 1971's CLAY PIGEON was co-written by MOD SQUAD creator Buddy Ruskin but is otherwise an amateurish, heavy-handed vanity project for producer/co-director/star Tom Stern. Born in 1940, Stern was an up-and-coming young actor who had small roles in major films like THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD (1965), THE HALLELUJAH TRAIL (1965), and THE DEVIL'S BRIGADE (1968) before briefly finding a niche in biker movies. ANGELS FROM HELL (1968) and HELL'S ANGELS '69 (1969) did good business on the drive-in circuit, but CLAY PIGEON was a DOA flop that would pretty much kill any momentum the actor and budding auteur had going. Financed independently but distributed by MGM, who no doubt regretted the acquisition and relegated the film to the bottom half of drive-in double bills well into 1972, CLAY PIGEON's only accomplishment was convincing the rest of Hollywood that there was nothing to gain by getting into the Tom Stern game, which had to be a hard lesson learned by the lineup of big-name actors Stern somehow cajoled into appearing in it.

Filmed and edited with all the competence and precision of a classic Al Adamson joint, CLAY PIGEON is embarrassingly bad, and not even in a "so bad, it's entertaining" way. The demand for hippie/biker movies was so heavy at the time that MGM probably didn't care that the film was largely unwatchable. Looking like a cross between painter Bob Ross and MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE's Torgo, Stern is Joe Ryan, an ex-cop and Vietnam vet who's now a homeless, cart-pushing hippie living on the streets of Hollywood. In one of his many random acts of sticking it to The Man, Joe steals a cop's motorcycle and takes it on a joyride before getting tossed in jail, where he's made an offer by rogue FBI agent Redford (Telly Savalas): go undercover and infiltrate the heroin smuggling operation of L.A. drug lord Neilson (Robert Vaughn). When Joe refuses, Redford sets him up to be mistaken for Neilson in some nonsensical attempt to draw Neilson out of hiding. All parties converge for an impressively bloody shootout at the Hollywood Bowl, filled with all that great '70s blood that looks like bright red paint. Stern (who has never directed another movie) and co-director Lane Slate (who would go on to write numerous TV movies, but also a few theatrical releases like 1972's THEY ONLY KILL THEIR MASTERS and 1977's THE CAR) even throw in an over-the-top, gory axe murder in the wild climax, but it's too little, way too late, especially with a hackneyed groaner of a surprise ending.

Other than the splattery finale, nothing works in CLAY PIGEON. If Uwe Boll time traveled back to 1971 to make a counterculture revenge thriller, it would turn out a lot like CLAY PIGEON. Redford's plan makes no sense (and why is Savalas, for no reason, shown in one scene shirtless and staggering around a fleabag hotel room with his hands in restraints? In the next scene, he's wearing a suit and whatever was going on in the hotel room is never referenced again). There's entirely too many meandering asides that provide some nice time-capsule location shooting around the skeezier parts of Hollywood, but it's mainly just Stern walking around or going to strip joints, or hanging out with some free-lovin' lady friends who can't help but throw themselves at a smelly homeless guy. Stern gives himself a couple of nude scenes, including one where he and two full-frontal hotties in all their '70s bush glory are frolicking in a swimming pool threesome, a scene that producer Tom Stern, in conjunction with co-director Tom Stern, no doubt felt was a necessary component to the development of the character played by star Tom Stern. Action scenes (including a slow motion shot of a highway patrol truck repeatedly flipping over that takes up two minutes of screen time) are jarringly accompanied by mellow and laid-back country, folk, and/or protest tunes by the likes of Kris Kristofferson and Arlo Guthrie. John Marley has a few scenes as a grumbly police captain constantly arguing with Redford, while Peter Lawford appears briefly as Redford's boss. But where else will you see Burgess Meredith as a geriatric hippie scrap metal junkyard owner named Freedom Lovelace?

Looking hippie but often sounding like a square, Stern tries to make some big social statements throughout, usually in the most ham-fisted, AFTERSCHOOL SPECIAL way imaginable. He stops to give a finger-pointing lecture to Redford--calling him "Supercop"-- about hard drugs, complaining that the dealers get off because they can afford to bribe judges, but kids "get five-to-ten years for possession of a roach, which in case you don't know it, is a marijuana cannabis joint!" Even Savalas is weighed down by attempts to make his character sound hip to the lingo ("I wanna arise the conscience of this freakout," Redford says of Joe), though there is one good exchange where he tells Joe "Your slang is a little dated," to which Joe replies "Is 'fuck off' dated?" Vaughn's bizarre performance is the only reason to watch CLAY PIGEON. Apparently given carte blanche to improvise and do whatever was necessary to keep himself amused, Vaughn is obviously making it up as he goes along, appearing in a series of increasingly ridiculous hats that Judge Smails wouldn't even try on. In one scene, he gives a rambling, spiritual monologue while wearing a Gilligan hat and a gold chain with a Volkswagen hood ornament attached to it, along with a scene-stealing parrot resting on his shoulder. No matter how insane Vaughn's scenes become or how silly of a hat he's wearing (it's surprising he isn't wearing a propeller beanie for the big shootout), he somehow manages to keep a straight face. The same can't be said for Ivan Dixon, who plays Neilson's chief enforcer, and in several scenes with Vaughn (the bumper pool scene, in particular), Dixon is visibly breaking like they're in an off-the-rails SNL skit. Of course, the home-movie-quality CLAY PIGEON is so badly-made that Stern just left the mistakes as they were. There's a reason this obscurity was never released on VHS or DVD and didn't even get much play on late-night TV back in the day. It's been hard to see for several decades, though Turner Classic Movies recently aired a 1.33 print on their "TCM Underground" series. After this film's failure, Stern sporadically appeared in TV guest spots and occasional B-movies, his last credit being Zalman King's 1998 drama IN GOD'S HANDS. A film more suited to the likes of Independent-International than MGM, CLAY PIGEON, despite how crazy it sounds, has little entertainment value for anyone other than Robert Vaughn completists. If someone put all of his scenes in a YouTube video, you'd have all you need to see of it.

KINDERGARTEN COP 2
(US - 2016)

Here to present its case as the most unnecessary sequel of 2016, KINDERGARTEN COP 2 would more accurately be termed a remake, and not a very funny one at that. No returning cast or characters from the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy are on hand here, with the star replaced by perennial DTV legend Dolph Lundgren. Lundgren is a better actor than he's usually required to be, but comedy isn't really his specialty, and KINDERGARTEN COP 2 does little to establish any genre bona fides for him.The tired plot has Seattle-based FBI agent Reed (Lundgren) going undercover as the new kindergarten teacher at the posh, expensive, and ultra-politically correct Hunt's Bay Academy. He's looking for a flash drive hidden somewhere in the school by his dead predecessor, whose loser brother worked for Albanian gangster Zogu (Aleks Paunovic), who's about to go on trial and the flash drive is needed to lock him away for life. Reed isn't prepared for what he has to deal with, namely oversensitive kids with names like Cowboy, Jett, and Patience who, along with their classmates, need constant reassurance of emotional safe spaces and boundaries, and the structure of a rigid schedule. Reed also finds he has to negotiate with the kids, who need their hands held through everything, eat tofu for lunch and lecture him about the dangers of gluten. Worst of all, Reed can't even have a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich in the classroom because of Cowboy's peanut allergy.

KINDERGARTEN COP 2 really could've taken some shots at helicopter parenting and the delicate-snowflake coddling of today's kids, but the kids barely factor into the story. Instead, Reed and his partner Sanders (Bill Bellamy) bust each others' chops in cliched buddy comedy fashion when they aren't being chewed out by their shouty, Frank McRae-like boss Giardello (Danny Wattley), and Reed dates pretty kindergarten teacher Olivia (Darla Taylor). She seems to be the only other educator in the school (and Reed's class the only students) other than uptight principal Miss Sinclaire (Sarah Strange) and oafish computer teacher Hal (Michael P. Northey), who's never shown teaching a computer class and gets angry when Reed and Olivia become an item in a subplot that goes nowhere. There's not really anything funny in KINDERGARTEN COP 2, with an early reference to Grey Poupon more or less setting the tone. There's a running gag about the Asian kid in the class having his perfectly understandable dialogue accompanied by English subtitles, but it's not funny the first time they do it, let alone the 20th. Screenwriter David H. Steinberg (AMERICAN PIE PRESENTS THE BOOK OF LOVE) shares script credit with Herschel Weingrod, Timothy Simon, and Murray Salem, the trio who wrote the 1990 original, but their inclusion here seems to be for legal, WGA reasons, especially considering Salem died in 1998. KINDERGARTEN COP 2 was directed by Don Michael Paul (HALF PAST DEAD, WHO'S YOUR CADDY?), apparently the go-to guy for forgettable DTV sequels to movies that you had no idea spawned a franchise that was somehow still a thing, with LAKE PLACID: THE FINAL CHAPTER, JARHEAD 2: FIELD OF FIRE, SNIPER: LEGACY, TREMORS 5: BLOODLINE, and the upcoming SNIPER: GHOST SHOOTER to his credit. Sure, there's worse things out there than KINDERGARTEN COP 2, but who wants an uninspired carbon copy of the first movie, and one that seems more focused on constant Twix product placements and doesn't even bother to supply a game Lundgren with his own "It's not a toooo-maaah!" quotable? (PG-13, 100 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

SOUTHBOUND
(US - 2016)

Much of the creative personnel behind the wildly overrated V/H/S franchise reconvenes for another hipster-approved Horror Insta-Classic (© William Wilson) of its week. As far as this generation of horror anthologies go, SOUTHBOUND is no CREEPSHOW--hell, it's not even NIGHTMARES--and while it's marginally better than most of its ilk, it still isn't worthy of all the slobbering knobshines it got from the scenesters. With an overarching Purgatory metaphor running through all of the stories--all in some way are connected, and the ending of one blends with the beginning of the next--the themes are rather obvious and there's little narrative drive, even once everything starts to clumsily coalesce. Revelations land not with a "Whoa!" but with a "Huh? Uh, that's it?" On an endless desert highway that seems to go in circles with all road signs indicating South (METAPHOR!), two men (Chad Villella and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin) covered in splattered blood try to flee strange, hovering, insect-like creatures in "The Way Out," directed by the collective Radio Silence, of which Villella and Bettinelli-Olpin are two of the four members. That leads to "Siren," from debuting director Roxanne Benjamin (a V/H/S producer), where a female punk trio--a quartet until one band member was recently killed--are stranded on that same endless highway and picked up by a strange couple who are part of a cult (led by comedian Dana Gould, of all people) planning their next sacrifice. Next is "The Accident," from THE SIGNAL co-director David Bruckner, where a distracted driver (Mather Zickel) on that same endless highway plows over someone from "Siren" and is given a series of increasingly strange directions by EMT personnel who are too far away to assist. The segues into "Jailbreak," by ENTRANCE and THE PACT II director Patrick Horvath, in which a vengeance-crazed man (Jesus Lizard frontman David Yow) takes on some dangerous dudes at a middle-of-nowhere bar in an attempt to rescue his kidnapped sister. Finally, Radio Silence return with the closer, "The Way In," a rote home-invasion story where a bunch of guys in creepy masks--two of which will obviously be the guys in "The Way Out"--converge on a seemingly nice family (mom Kate Beahan and dad Gerald Downey) spending a final weekend together before their daughter (Hassie Harrison) goes off to college.

If general weirdness is your thing, then you might get more out of SOUTHBOUND than I did. We're eventually shown the source of the hovering creatures from the first segment who also periodically appear in other segments, but that still doesn't mean their eventually-explained presence makes any sense. Because the filmmakers have the stories flow together in a not very smooth fashion, they tend to end in abrupt and confusing ways. Nothing makes sense in "The Way Out," and by the time you get to the big reveal of "The Way In," you'll still have more questions than answers. "The Accident" and "Jailbreak" have some committed performances by Zickel and Yow respectively, and both go above and beyond the gore quota. The standout story is easily "Siren," which is the only one to make concerted efforts to develop its characters and establish a legitimately unsettling vibe. It almost feels like a tribute to those really unnerving occult movies of the '70s and has a real MESSIAH OF EVIL thing going on. Elsewhere, there's synth cues and John Carpenter homages all over the place, which was affectionate fun for a while but has become so prevalent and obligatory in today's horror movies that it's really time for the genre's current standard-bearers to find a new crutch. Also, I'm sure they're nice people and it's nothing personal, but when Larry Fessenden and Maria Olsen--an unusual-looking actress who's found an indie horror niche as essentially the female Michael Berryman--turn up in the opening credits, I'm already annoyed. I don't know--I'm pretty much a curmudgeon when it comes to most new horror offerings these days, especially these fawned-over indies where the film's most vocal supporters are all Facebook friends of the directors. The accessibility of fans to the artists has undoubtedly clouded the judgment of critics and bloggers when an unwatchable piece of shit like V/H/S: VIRAL gets good reviews. SOUTHBOUND isn't bad for this new breed of horror in the social media age, but there's still very little about it that's noteworthy. (R, 89 mins)

DEMENTIA
(US - 2015)

A thriller that would fit right into the late 1990s with its "caregiver-from-Hell" plot, DEMENTIA is a reasonably suspenseful and well-acted film with a twist that's perhaps a little too easy to see coming, but the script by Meredith Berg does some alliance-shifting bait-and-switches that keep you on your toes. After a mild stroke, elderly retiree George Lockhart (Gene Jones from Ti West's THE SACRAMENT and best-known as the gas station clerk on the receiving end of the "Call it, Friendo" coin-flip in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN) is tended to by his estranged son Jerry (Peter Cilella) and 18-year-old granddaughter Shelby (Jennifer Lawrence lookalike Hassie Harrison, also seen in SOUTHBOUND), neither of whom he's seen for many years. The recovery goes slow when moody George has difficulty focusing and periodically forgets who Shelby is ("This bitch broke into my house!"), so Jerry and Shelby decide to hire a temporary live-in caregiver to assist him until he's well again. The caregiver is Michelle (Kristina Klebe), who says her specialty is post-stroke therapy and insists Jerry and Shelby check into a hotel in order for her to focus on George's recovery, but it doesn't take long before George gets a bad vibe from her. When he begins showing signs of improvement, she pumps him full of unnecessary medication that makes him worse, then starts playing tricks on him, which escalates to Michelle beheading George's beloved cat and covering him with its blood while he's sedated to convince him he did it. George insists he's a victim of elder abuse, but a preoccupied Jerry doesn't buy it, choosing to go back home to his job while a summer vacationing Shelby decides to stay behind at the hotel and keep visiting with her grandfather, an idea constantly thwarted by an increasingly irrational Michelle.

While Michelle is the clear antagonist of the story and obviously isn't what she claims to be, George isn't exactly an innocent victim. A man deeply traumatized by his experiences in Vietnam (Eric Senter plays George in flashbacks), George returned home and became a violent, alcoholic wife-beater and child-abuser, the source of Jerry's alienation from his father. George has made efforts to change: he's been sober for over 20 years and tells Jerry he's proud of how he raised Shelby since he had such a terrible role model. His sorrow is sincere, and while an understanding but apprehensive Jerry warns her not to get to close to him, Shelby can't help but feel sympathy for her ailing grandpa, even if she steals jewelry out of a drawer and helps herself to some of his more powerful meds when nobody's looking. But George is a man with secrets, and he's been specifically targeted by Michelle, whose rage grows so strong the she forces whiskey down his throat and starts torturing him in ways he endured during his days as a POW. Berg and director Mike Testin do a good job of making the audience reconsider its loyalties throughout: is Michelle batshit crazy? Does she have her reasons for putting George through hell? And sure, George is contrite and has sincerely attempted to right his wrongs as a husband and father, but is he a monster beyond redemption? DEMENTIA provides no easy answers, and it's the kind of movie that would be a talked-about, hot-button, big-studio thriller if it was made 20 years ago. Jones, Klebe, and young Harrison turn in convincing performances, and 90% of DEMENTIA is a nicely-done sleeper that's sure to find a cult following on Netflix Instant. But then something inexplicable happens in the climax that has nothing to do with the script or story but still manages to very nearly drive the movie off a cliff. Just as the big reveal comes along of what George did and why Michelle has gone to such extreme lengths to make his life hell, the sound mix gets all bungled and wonky, with the score cranked up really loud and the dialogue drowned-out and almost completely unintelligible. I had to turn the subtitles on to find out what was being said. There's a whole thread about this on the movie's IMDb page, and several reviews from the film's December 2015 VOD release also mention the dialogue being muffled and barely audible when it matters most. Was this an artistic decision on Testin's or the producers' part? If so, it's one of the dumbest I've ever seen. It must be by design, or else it would've been remixed between December and now. I don't get it. It's baffling why the filmmakers drown out the dialogue just in time for the big reveal. I mean, seriously. What the fuck? (Unrated, 90 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

THE NICE GUYS
(US - 2016)

Directed by Shane Black. Written by Shane Black and Anthony Bagorazzi. Cast: Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Angourie Rice, Kim Basinger, Matt Bomer, Margaret Qualley, Yaya DaCosta, Keith David, Beau Knapp, Lois Smith, Gil Gerard, Jack Kilmer, Ty Simpkins, Murielle Telio, Daisy Tahan, Lance Valentine Butler, Hannibal Buress. (R, 115 mins)

It's one of the most egregious crimes of recent movie distribution that Shane Black's 2005 meta noir/private eye black comedy KISS KISS BANG BANG didn't get the exposure it deserved. Perhaps the most quotable movie of the last couple of decades after THE BIG LEBOWSKI, KISS KISS BANG BANG was the directorial debut of Shane Black, the screenwriter behind such wiseass, mismatched, "...if they don't kill each other first!" action/buddy classics as LETHAL WEAPON, THE LAST BOY SCOUT, and THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT. KISS KISS BANG BANG was nothing if not a mission statement for Black, encompassing all of his ideas and influences in one smart, razor-sharp, brilliantly executed package that Warner Bros. had no idea how to market. Showcasing a mystery with the labyrinthine complexity of CHINATOWN fused with the big action set pieces of producer Joel Silver and one of the all-time classic bickering, forced-together partnerships with small-time criminal Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.), gay private eye Gay Perry (Val Kilmer), and still-aspiring starlet-in-her-mid-30s Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan), KISS KISS BANG BANG got rave reviews across the board but the studio still only gave it a limited release, topping out at just 226 screens. It became a bigger hit in Europe and eventually found a cult following on DVD/Blu-ray and cable, and it led to Downey getting Black a major directing gig with IRON MAN 3.

In a lot of ways, THE NICE GUYS is Black's chance at do-over of KISS KISS BANG BANG. It's another Warner Bros. release of a Silver production, though the studio is giving this one a significantly bigger push, opening it nationwide in the summer movie season. It's a similarly busy, intricate, self-aware Hollywood mystery filled with lightning-fast, hard-boiled, profane dialogue and a story awash in sleaze and corruption, only this time in the period setting of 1977. Opportunistic and hapless (he cuts himself with an electric razor) private eye Holland March (Ryan Gosling) is a widower raising his wise-beyond-her-years 13-year-old daughter Holly (a terrific performance by Angourie Rice). He's also the kind of guy who takes money from a deranged old woman to find her missing husband whose urn is on the mantelpiece ("I haven't seen him since the funeral!" the woman tells him). Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe) is a fixer-for-hire, a guy who doesn't care to get an investigator's license and makes a better living getting paid under the table by clients who want the shit beat out of someone. He's been paid by a young woman named Amelia (Margaret Qualley) to do just that to March, who's been working for her aunt (Lois Smith), who thinks she's gone missing. Amelia's situation dovetails into a car-crash suicide involving porn star Misty Mountains (Murielle Telio), prompting Healy and March to set aside their differences and work together (with a lot of help from Holly, who in many ways is the smartest of the trio) when the case balloons into a conspiracy involving Detroit's Big Three auto companies, a Justice Department honcho (Kim Basinger), a psychotic hit man known as "John-Boy" (Matt Bomer), a corrupt auto industry CEO (Gil Gerard sighting!), and a missing film canister containing the lone print of Misty Mountains' final work, a porno film titled HOW DO YOU LIKE MY CAR, BIG BOY?

A lot of this will sound very familiar to any fan of KISS KISS BANG BANG: the way the trio of protagonists essentially serve the same plot functions; the Hollywood setting; the mystery kicking off with a car crash suicide; a scene where a hero happens to look over his left shoulder to find a dead body right behind him; the way Black has his heroes--and a little kid ogling a nudie mag in the opening scene--respectfully cover exposed areas when they find a dead woman's body. Anyone accusing Black of repeating himself wouldn't be wrong. But it's a formula that once again works beautifully, with the work of Crowe and Gosling perhaps even more surprising than Downey and Kilmer since neither are particularly known for their comedic skills (Downey, as good as he was, was essentially playing a very "Robert Downey Jr" character, and Kilmer had some comedies under his belt). With his gut the biggest it's ever been, Crowe is a burly attack dog as Healy, and while he's basically Gosling's straight man, he's still never cut this loose onscreen before. That's a surprise given his dismal performance during his recent SNL hosting gig, where he appeared in only four sketches for what would be the season's worst show were it not for the Donald Trump episode. Gosling, on the other hand, demonstrates a versatile flair for the comedic throughout, whether it's fast-talking bullshit, slow-burn reactions, his tumbling, Clouseau-like pratfalls, and an incredible impression of Lou Costello from ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN. A serious actor who's done some grim films in the past, Gosling is a revelation here, though it may not be a surprise if you saw his own SNL stint a few months ago, which was so infectiously fun that he couldn't stop completely breaking in nearly every sketch. While they're both funny as hell, there's a melancholy--and in March's case, tragic-- undercurrent to their characters and the ways they use their cynicism as a protective shield (if anything, the character development might be stronger here than it is in KISS KISS BANG BANG) as they make their living navigating the cesspool of Tinseltown depravity (one aspiring starlet to another as Healy walks by them at a party: "I told him if you want me to do that, fine...just don't eat asparagus first"). The leads are matched by a breakout performance from young Australian actress Rice, whose Holly is rebellious and fearless, getting herself into dangerous situations and using her wits to extricate herself. At the same time, she really grounds the mismatched detective team and keeps them on their toes. It's a huge accomplishment that she holds her own with guys like Crowe and Gosling and manages to steal scenes from dramatic actors of their caliber.

Though Paul Thomas Anderson handled it with a bit more obsessive attention to details with INHERENT VICE, Black gets the late '70s period look as right as he needs to, not overwhelming the audience with it but always cognizant of it, whether it's the cars; the chain-smoking in public places (around kids, even!); billboards for SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT, AIRPORT '77, and JAWS 2; and songs like Earth Wind & Fire's "September," America's "A Horse with No Name," and Rupert Holmes "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)." It's easy to overrate THE NICE GUYS, simply because movies like it are such a rare commodity these days. It's noteworthy that eleven years after not knowing how to sell KISS KISS BANG BANG, a decade in which the power of word-of-mouth has diminished and everything is about breaking $150 million on the opening weekend, Warner Bros gives a nationwide release to something that could just as easily have been called KISS KISS BANG BANG II: THE NICE GUYS. A lot of this will be familiar if you've seen KISS KISS BANG BANG, but it's pulled off so well by Black and his actors that if you're a fan of that film, you won't mind seeing an equally enjoyable and just-as-quotable '70s pseudo-reimagining of it. Consistently laugh-out-loud funny, THE NICE GUYS is the best time I've had at a movie so far this year. If only Black had found a way to work in the name "Chook Chutney."

CANDY
(Italy/France - 1968)

Directed by Christian Marquand. Written by Buck Henry. Cast: Charles Aznavour, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, James Coburn, John Huston, Walter Matthau, Ringo Starr, Ewa Aulin, John Astin, Enrico Maria Salerno, Elsa Martinelli, Sugar Ray Robinson, Anita Pallenberg, Florinda Bolkan, Marilu Tolo, Nicoletta Machiavelli, Umberto Orsini, Joey Forman, Fabian Dean, Lea Padovani, Peter Dane, Enzo Fiermonte, Buck Henry. (R, 124 mins)

Based on the controversial 1958 "dirty book" of the same name by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, CANDY is the kind of movie that could only have been made in the late 1960s. Unevenly mixing slapstick sex farce with trippy psychedelia and counterculture satire in one bloated, overly indulgent, and almost instantly dated package, CANDY is a chaotic all-star mess of the 1967 CASINO ROYALE variety, but like that film, it's an endlessly fascinating one. Contrary to the myth that's stuck over the nearly 50 years since its release, it was not a box office disaster. Indeed, opening in December 1968, it made $16 million and was the 18th highest grossing film of the year in the US, sandwiched between THE BOSTON STRANGLER and THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR. Adjusted for inflation, that's $111 million in 2016 dollars. Can you imagine something as balls-out insane as CANDY making $111 million in theaters today?

Adapted by Buck Henry, who had just been nominated for an Oscar for co-writing THE GRADUATE, and directed by Christian Marquand, the French actor who co-starred with Brigitte Bardot in the iconic AND GOD CREATED WOMAN (1956), CANDY's biggest draw was the spectacle of a huge cast of big names and a couple of Oscar winners starring in a smutty comedy based on a book that was widely considered pornography. Much less explicit than the book, the film nevertheless has a high raunch factor and a decent amount of nudity that still warrants the R rating it got 46 years ago. Opening with what looks like her arrival on Earth (2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY special effects mastermind Douglas Trumbull designed some of the surreal visuals in the opening and closing sequences), CANDY centers on naive high-school student Candy Christian (18-year-old Ewa Aulin) and her wild sexual escapades with a increasingly deranged parade of pervy older men. What was played as comedy in 1968 would undoubtedly be labeled rape by today's trigger warning-obsessed thinkpiece writers, but the oblivious Candy just rolls with it, starting with drunken poet MacPhisto (Richard Burton), who has his way with her in the back of his glass-bottom limo, slurping spilled champagne off the floor while ranting and grunting about his "overpowering need!" Arriving at her house while her social sciences teacher father T.M. (John Astin) is still at school, Candy is attacked by Mexican gardener Emmanuel (Ringo Starr) who shouts "Viva Zapata!" as he ejaculates and MacPhisto dry-humps a Candy-lookalike doll on the floor. Enraged by her dalliance with Emmanuel, her uptight, conservative father tries to take her to NYC with his lecherous brother Jack (also Astin), and Jack's swinging wife Livia (Elsa Martinelli), but they're accosted on the airport runway by Emmanuel's domineering, revolutionary biker sisters (Florinda Bolkan, Marilu Tolo and Nicoletta Machiavelli). Hopping aboard a refueled military plane that's been transporting the squadron of Gen. Smight (Walter Matthau) around the globe for six years, T.M. suffers a head injury while sexually frustrated Smight tries to force Candy to bear his child. Landing in NYC, they rush T.M. to the hospital where he's the next production in the gala theater of superstar brain surgeon A.B. Krankheit (James Coburn), who hosts a wild post-surgery after-party/orgy where Uncle Jack has sex with Candy in her father's hospital bed, pushing his brother onto the floor when he gets in the way. Krankheit seduces Candy in another room while a partially lobotomized T.M. wanders the halls, and even enraged hospital head Dr. Dunlap (John Huston) tries to spread unconscious Candy's legs and look up her skirt. From there, Candy is separated from Uncle Jack and Livia, and crashes the set of sex-crazed filmmaker Jonathan J. John (Enrico Maria Salerno) and is soon pursued by a pair of horny cops (Joey Forman, Fabian Dean). Then she meets a hunchback (Charles Aznavour) in Central Park, who asks her for "rub dub dub" before taking her back to his mansion, where he can fly and climb walls. Candy's next escapade finds her in an Indian temple housed in the back of a big rig, where she's mentored in the ways of bullshit philosophy and tantric sex by fake guru Grindl (Marlon Brando).

Unless you're in the mood for it, CANDY can be downright unwatchable, but the once-in-a-lifetime cast makes it mandatory viewing at least once (there's also model and longtime Keith Richards girlfriend Anita Pallenberg as Krankheit's chief nurse and boxing legend Sugar Ray Robinson as MacPhisto's chauffeur Zero). It gets more bewildering as it goes along, all the way to a fourth-wall breaking finale where a wandering Candy actually sees Marquand himself directing the movie that's imploding on itself. The good slightly outweighs the bad, and while some segments are tedious duds (the sequences with Matthau, Salerno, and Aznavour just land with a thud, and Starr's Mexican caricature is embarrassing even by 1968 standards), others are legitimately funny. Burton gets the best entrance of his career as MacPhisto, his hair and scarf constantly blown back by a seemingly supernatural wind that surrounds only him. Coburn is great as the demented Krankheit, with the notion of the rock star-like surgeon, years before Buckaroo Banzai, the height of the film's absurdist Southern influence (Southern also co-wrote DR. STRANGELOVE and would write 1969's star-studded and equally anarchic THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN, which also starred Starr). Brando is also quite amusing as the phony mystic, sheepishly trying to hide a footlong sub and a bottle of beer as Candy awakens after a marathon of Twister-like sex.

Of all the star power in the cast, the biggest surprise is Astin, who's a riot as the shameless horndog Uncle Jack, constantly leering and making suggestive, over-the-line comments as he tirelessly tries to get in his niece's pants. According to legend, Marquand's original choice for the T.M./Uncle Jack dual roles was Peter Sellers, and there's a lot of Sellers' style in Astin's performances, particularly the Clare Quilty skeeziness he brings to Uncle Jack's LOLITA-like designs on Candy. Probably because he was known as a TV actor, his spot in television history forever cemented by his Gomez Addams on THE ADDAMS FAMILY (he also briefly replaced Frank Gorshin as the Riddler in the second season of BATMAN), Astin isn't even granted the dignity of having his name above the title with the others--where, alphabetically, he would've been top-billed before legendary French singer Aznavour--even though between both of his roles, he's got the most screen time other than Aulin. Sellers would've been incredible but Astin's work in CANDY is rarely cited as one of its strong points and that's a shame. He manages to upstage his significantly higher-profile co-stars and gets some of the biggest laughs in the movie. Given an "introducing" credit even though it was her fourth film, Swedish actress Aulin's voice is dubbed but she certainly looks the part, and seems like a good sport considering she spends a good chunk of the film in various states of undress while being pawed by a bunch of overpaid and presumably highly intoxicated A-listers (quoted in the 2004 book The Candy Men by Terry Southern's son Nile, about the controversy surrounding the novel, Coburn claimed that inexperienced Aulin had a breakdown and needed several days off to decompress after dealing with Brando). CANDY's notoriety didn't really open any doors for Aulin, despite a Golden Globe nomination for Most Promising Female Newcomer (she lost to Olivia Hussey in ROMEO AND JULIET). She remained busy in Italian films, most notably the gialli DEATH LAID AN EGG (1968) and DEATH SMILES ON A MURDERER (1971), with her most high-profile post-CANDY role being in the Gene Wilder-Donald Sutherland comedy START THE REVOLUTION WITHOUT ME (1970). Tired of being offered the same kinds of sexpot roles, the now-66-year-old Aulin quit acting in 1974, enrolled in college, became a schoolteacher, and focused on raising her kids. She made a one-off comeback in a supporting role in the little-seen 1996 Italian comedy STELLA'S FAVOR and quickly returned to a life completely off the celebrity grid.

An unmistakable product of its time (featuring music by The Byrds and Steppenwolf), CANDY was hard to see after its theatrical run in 1968 (where it was in cinemas the same time as the similarly time-capsule-worthy SKIDOO), Outside of some occasional and highly-edited late-night TV airings, the film built a cult mystique as it essentially disappeared for a number of years. It was never released on home video until Anchor Bay's DVD and VHS editions in 2001. It recently debuted on Blu-ray courtesy of Kino Lorber, with a very good Buck Henry interview, where the 85-year-old comedy writing legend is pretty blunt about what works and what doesn't and shares a number of stories about the production.

LOLLY-MADONNA XXX
aka THE LOLLY-MADONNA WAR
(US - 1973)

Directed by Richard C. Sarafian. Written by Rodney Carr-Smith and Sue Grafton. Cast: Rod Steiger, Robert Ryan, Jeff Bridges, Scott Wilson, Season Hubley, Gary Busey, Joan Goodfellow, Tresa Hughes, Paul Koslo, Ed Lauter, Kiel Martin, Randy Quaid, Timothy Scott, Katherine Squire. (PG, 106 mins)

In the years before her career took off in 1982 with A is for Alibi, the first of her ongoing "alphabet mysteries" (the 24th, titled simply X, was released last year), novelist Sue Grafton worked primarily in television, writing numerous made-for-TV movies in addition to being a creative force behind Michael Learned's post-WALTONS CBS series NURSE. She made the move to TV in an effort to polish her plotting and character-building skills after her first two books tanked. Her second novel, The Lolly-Madonna War, was published overseas in 1969 with little fanfare, not even attracting interest from a US publisher. British writer/producer Rodney Carr-Smith (BARTLEBY) bought the movie rights and brought it to MGM in an attempt to establish himself in America (still unpublished in the US, The Lolly-Madonna War remains Grafton's most obscure novel, and used mass market paperback import copies currently range from $423 to $880 on Amazon). Carr-Smith collaborated with Grafton on the screenplay adaptation and the film version was rechristened as the ill-advised LOLLY-MADONNA XXX, which didn't do it any favors as many confused moviegoers and theater owners may have understandably mistaken it for a porno. The title refers to a signature on a postcard, with the "xxx" being "kisses," but it proved problematic enough that MGM pulled the film and relaunched it under its original book title as the more straightforward THE LOLLY-MADONNA WAR (and judging from the trailer, it was also titled FIRE IN THE MEADOW at some point prior to its release), though the LOLLY-MADONNA XXX title is what it's most commonly known as today. Under either title, the movie bombed and Carr-Smith's adventures in Hollywood, as well as his career in cinema, came to an abrupt end.

A then-contemporary take on the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys, updated to rural backwoods Tennessee, LOLLY-MADONNA XXX opens with young Roonie Gill (Season Hubley) switching buses in a podunk town on her way to Nashville and being mistaken for Lolly-Madonna, the supposed fiancee of Ludie Gutshall (Kiel Martin). Roonie is abducted from the bus stop by Thrush (Scott Wilson) and Hawk Feather (a never-better Ed Lauter), two sons of Laban Feather (Rod Steiger), who's in a property dispute with former best friend and rival moonshiner Pap Gutshall (Robert Ryan, in one of his last films; he died less than five months after it was released). Correctly assuming Feather's dumb sons would take the bait and head to the bus stop, Ludie put a forged postcard from a non-existent "Lolly-Madonna" in the Feather mailbox (right next to the Gutshalls on the roadside), asking to be picked up, giving Ludie and two other Gutshall sons, Zeb (Gary Busey) and Villum (Paul Koslo), time to run up to the Feather still and vandalize it. This is just one in a series of escalating back-and-forth pranks that the Feather and Gutshall sons have been playing for the last couple of years, as the bond between the families has deteriorated to the point where star-crossed lovers Skyler Feather (Timothy Scott) and Sister E. Gutshall (Joan Goodfellow) are forced to carry on their relationship in secret. Things headed south after Gutshall's other daughter married Zack Feather (Jeff Bridges) and was killed in a horse-riding accident that Laban blamed on black sheep Thrush. Following Gutshall's purchase of a disputed piece of land that went up for auction when Feather owed back taxes on it, tensions have done nothing but flare and it's only made worse by the presence of Roonie, who is held captive by the Feathers and can't convince Laban or any of his sons--even Zack, with whom she falls in love in what may be a case of Stockholm Syndrome--that she's not Lolly-Madonna and has no idea who the Gutshalls are.

LOLLY-MADONNA XXX is a strange and often twisted film that somehow got a PG rating in 1973 despite some grim and disturbing developments as things take a decidedly dark turn. Ludie confronts Thrush and cracks his skull open with a rock, requiring stitches. Heading to the hills for a clandestine dalliance with Skyler, Sister E. is spotted by Thrush and Hawk (the latter with his face smeared in Roonie's makeup and wearing her bra and granny panties), who attack her and take turns raping her. Pap demands justice for his daughter's rape and wants Thrush and Hawk whipped, which only enrages Laban as the violence and lunacy intensifies and the Feather patriarch sets the disputed piece of land ablaze while leading his clan in a sing-along of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow." Eventually, Pap and his sons--with the exception of pacifist Zeb, who goes behind his father's back and attempts to broker a truce with an unconvinced Zack, pack an arsenal of weapons to launch an assault on the Feather homestead.

Directed by journeyman Richard C. Sarafian (VANISHING POINT), LOLLY-MADONNA XXX is surprisingly strong stuff that would probably get an R rating even today with the mostly-implied but still unsettling rape scene (it's actually more effective that Sarafian cuts away just as it's about to get really unpleasant), the bloody violence, and fleeting nudity by both Hubley and Goodfellow. Though it prefigured oncoming hillbilly-centered films like GATOR BAIT by a couple of years and the great SOUTHERN COMFORT by eight, it feels a lot like a big-studio version of a really grimy drive-in hicksploitation flick, almost like THE WALTONS-meets-DELIVERANCE, definitely revealing an unexpected side to Sue Grafton's writing if you're only familiar with her very mainstream mystery novels. The climax--a long, protracted, Sam Peckinpah-meets-Walter Hill-style shootout where all hell breaks loose while a catatonic and insane Laban can do nothing other than silently stew at the kitchen table and angrily make himself a mayonnaise-and-ketchup sandwich--is the kind of batshit craziness that did little to win LOLLY-MADONNA XXX any fans then but makes it a terrific and bizarre curio item today (one of Hollywood's great overactors, Steiger is one of the very few people who can overdo the act of pouring ketchup). It's hard to believe there was once a time when a character played by a young and still-serious Gary Busey (in just his fourth film) would function as the most stable and level-headed voice of reason in a movie (speaking of crazy, a young Randy Quaid is also on hand as a mentally-challenged Feather son). Despite its more exploitative elements, there's certainly an anti-war Vietnam era metaphor to LOLLY-MADONNA XXX in the way Laban and Pap express concern over what's going on but do absolutely nothing to stop it, instead being complicit in its escalation and content to let their sons do the fighting and the dying. Vietnam is also directly invoked by Pap Gutshall having lost a son in combat and Zack Feather being established as a draft dodger. Even by the standards of the more adventurous, chance-taking cinema of the post-EASY RIDER, pre-summer blockbuster 1970s, LOLLY-MADONNA XXX is one of the weirder movies to come from a major studio in that era and is worth seeing on that basis alone, and even more so when you look at that fascinating mix of old-school Hollywood and up-and-coming youngsters. Shortly after completing this film, Ryan and Bridges would work together again on John Frankenheimer's THE ICEMAN COMETH, released several months after Ryan's death from lung cancer.

ZOOLANDER 2
(US - 2016)

You could probably count the number of good comedy sequels on one hand and it should come as no surprise that ZOOLANDER 2 wouldn't be one of them. Arriving 15 long years after the original was a minor hit on its way to becoming a cult movie on DVD and cable, ZOOLANDER 2 has nothing new to offer except more noise and more cameos, feeling the need to repeat or reference nearly every gag from the first film before its threadbare plot kicks into gear. In the years since the first film, the world's top male supermodel and total idiot Derek Zoolander (director and co-writer Ben Stiller) is a hermit (or, as he calls it, "a hermit crab") in isolation following the accidental death of his wife (Stiller's wife Christine Taylor) in an accident involving the giant, book-shaped Center for Kids Who Can't Read Good falling on her because Zoolander had the building made from the same materials as books (that joke lands even worse in the movie than it does in synopsis form). After having his son Derek Jr taken away from him when a viral video leaks of Zoolander melting down as he tries to cook spaghetti in a toaster ("How did Mom make make the noodles soft?" he screams), Zoolander retreated from the world much like LITTLE FOCKERS' Ben Stiller has retreated from comedy. Unfortunately for everyone, Zoolander and sidekick Hansel (Owen Wilson) are pulled back onto the runway by hipster designer Don Atari (Kyle Mooney), who needs them for the "Old and Lame" (Zoolander pronounces it "Laa-may") part of his Rome show. Zoolander and Hansel are soon drawn into an investigation by Interpol agent Valentina Valencia (Penelope Cruz, who followed this triumph with THE BROTHERS GRIMSBY), which leads to the return of evil fashion megalomaniac Mugatu (Will Ferrell, who doesn't even appear until an hour in) and his plot to find and kidnap Derek Jr (Cyrus Arnold), who carries the Fountain of Youth bloodline of "Steve," humanity's first fashion model, booted out of the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, and subject him to a "ritual fattening" to make him an embarrassment to the Zoolander name.

It's really difficult to describe how astonishingly unfunny ZOOLANDER 2 is. The only reasonably big laugh comes from one line Mugatu has as he holds a black mass over a lava pit to sacrifice Derek Jr (dubbed "the fat little Chosen One") so the world's top fashion names--Anna Wintour, Tommy Hilfiger, Valentino, Mark Jacobs, and Alexander Wang appear as themselves--can bathe in his blood Bathory-style: "Check out Tommy Hilfiger's spring line, brought to you by white privilege!" Elsewhere, nothing works. Stiller and his co-writers (including co-star Justin Theroux) really overestimated the level of sentiment we feel for these characters. Was anyone demanding a ZOOLANDER sequel? With nothing new to add, Stiller's Hail Mary is to pile on endless cameos, where the recognition of a famous person is, in and of itself, supposed to be funny. It's like a long SNL skit or Jimmy Fallon bit where someone just unexpectedly pops up and we're supposed to be entertained by the mere sight of a celebrity. Some of them play characters (Kristen Wiig and Fred Armisen have minor roles and Benedict Cumberbatch is an androgynously hermaphroditic supermodel named "All") or appear as distorted versions of themselves (Kiefer Sutherland plays himself as part of Hansel's dozen-person orgy collective; Sting plays Sting as an Obi-Wan Kenobi of the fashion world, who only speaks in Police or solo Sting-related song lyrics), but most just appear and that's supposed to be the joke: Justin Bieber, Billy Zane, Susan Boyle, Willie Nelson, Joe Jonas, Olivia Munn, Skrillex, Naomi Campbell, Ariana Grande, Katy Perry, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Susan Sarandon, Christina Hendricks, M.C. Hammer, John Malkovich, Kate Moss, A$AP Rocky, and others. It also might set the record for cameos by TV news figures, including but not limited to Katie Couric, Jane Pauley, Joe Scarborough, Soledad O'Brien, Don Lemon, Matt Lauer, Dan Abrams, and, my God...et tu, Jim Lehrer? You get to see Tommy Hilfiger quipping "Tommy likey" as he watches Valentina and Mugatu henchwoman Katinka (Milla Jovovich) wrestling in a 69 position, and there's rimshot-worthy groaners like Derek going undercover and saying "Every bathhouse I've ever worked at had a rear entrance." ZOOLANDER 2 is appallingly bad. It's ANCHORMAN 2 bad and it's Adam Sandler lazy. It's Stiller and a bunch of his friends fucking around on Paramount's dime. Movies like this are a special kind of bad. It would be one thing if ZOOLANDER 2 tried and failed, but all it does is show up because it doesn't come from a place of inspiration. ZOOLANDER did. ANCHORMAN did. But their sequels came from a far more cynical place. No effort was put forth because none was necessary. And because the movie was shot at the legendary Cinecitta Studios in Rome, it seems that the primary motivation was paid vacations all around. No one involved in this thing gives the slightest shit about it. You shouldn't either. (Unrated, 102 mins)

RISEN
(US - 2016)

One of the few offerings from the faithsploitation scene to stifle the preaching and attempt to reach out to secular audiences, RISEN treats the days following Christ's crucifixion as though it's LAW & ORDER: RESURRECTION. This isn't an original approach--Damiano Damiani's 1987 film THE INQUIRY starred Keith Carradine as a Roman soldier sent by Pontius Pilate (Harvey Keitel) to investigate a missing persons case where the missing person happens to be Jesus. THE INQUIRY was remade in 2006 as THE FINAL INQUIRY, an Italian film picked up for the US by Fox Faith and starring F. Murray Abraham, Max Von Sydow, and Dolph Lundgren. RISEN is more or less another de facto remake of THE INQUIRY, with cynical, agnostic tribune and war hero Clavius (Joseph Fiennes) assigned by Pilate (Peter Firth) to find the missing body of the prophet Yeshua (Cliff Curtis), who vanished from his sealed tomb three days after being crucified. Clavius and Lucius (HARRY POTTER's Tom Felton), the rookie tribune assigned to accompany him, tear Jerusalem apart searching for Yeshua's missing apostles and other accomplices (including Mary Magdelene, played by Maria Botto), until Clavius goes rogue and accompanies the remaining eleven apostles on a journey to meet the resurrected Yeshua. Of course, the film is ultimately all about making Clavius a believer, but director/co-writer Kevin Reynolds has plenty of real movies on his resume (ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES, WATERWORLD, 187, and the acclaimed History Channel miniseries HATFIELDS & MCCOYS) to not let the sermonizing take precedence over the story. Shot on Spanish and Maltese locations, RISEN looks great, though some discount-rate CGI is an occasional distraction, most notably a boat ride that seems tragically reminiscent of the greenscreen work in IN THE HEART OF THE SEA. The biggest problem is the film's ponderous pacing and a one-note performance by Fiennes, whose voice barely rises above a mumble until he finally meets Yeshua, who's very charismatically played by veteran character actor Cliff Curtis. Fiennes (when's the last time you went to see a Joseph Fiennes movie?) just doesn't have the screen presence to carry this, and it really seems like he got the job because his asking price was the most Sony was willing to spend for their faith-based Affirm Films division. The sincere RISEN deserves some credit for being the one of the least sanctimonious examples of faithsploitation and it gets quite good once Curtis' Yeshua finally shows up, but it just misses the mark. (PG-13, 108 mins)

THE PROGRAM
(France/UK - 2016)

Not to be confused with the 1993 James Caan college football drama that inspired dumb teenagers to lie in the middle of the road and get killed, THE PROGRAM is a well-acted but choppy chronicle of the Lance Armstrong doping scandal. Based on the book Seven Deadly Sins by Sunday Times sports reporter David Walsh (played here by Chris O'Dowd) and scripted by frequent Danny Boyle collaborator John Hodge (SHALLOW GRAVE, TRAINSPOTTING), THE PROGRAM too frequently feels like an adaptation of a Wikipedia page, glossing over details and assuming you know enough to fill in the blanks (shot of Armstrong getting married, wife never seen again). It also can't decide whether to focus on Walsh, Armstrong (a terrific performance by Ben Foster), or Floyd Landis (Jesse Plemons). Landis, a cyclist on Armstrong's team, enters the story midway through and quickly grows embittered over the way Armstrong gets all the glory, especially when trainer and chief Armstrong enabler Johan Bruyneel (Denis Menochet) has to sell a number of the team's bikes to pay for everyone's performance-enhancing drugs. They're all part of the "program" designed by dubiously sketchy Italian doctor Michele Ferrari (Guillaume Canet), and the film details all the ways Ferrari and Bruyneel pump the cyclists full of drugs and the elaborate methods employed to cheat mandatory drug testing. THE PROGRAM opens like a standard Armstrong biopic, then shifts to Walsh as he grows incredulous of Armstrong's seemingly superhuman abilities after a grueling battle with cancer. But it's the Landis subplot that more or less dominates the last third, with the perennially-sidelined cyclist busted in a random urine test while Armstrong smugly beats the system and uses his celebrity and his "cancer shield" to render himself untouchable.

For a while, it seems like Hodge and director Stephen Frears (once a great filmmaker, now a comfortably jobbing journeyman) might go in an ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN/SHATTERED GLASS/SPOTLIGHT direction as Walsh tries to expose the culture of doping, fighting his editors at the paper and everyone else seeking to protect Armstrong's heroic image, getting doors slammed in his face and getting the cold shoulder from his colleagues when Bruyneel bullies them and threatens to cut their access if they continue to associate with Walsh. But Hodge and Frears introduce him as basically a co-lead character, then almost instantly sideline him for much of the film. There's too much ground to cover, and it probably would've worked better as an HBO or FX miniseries, where characters and conflicts would've had time to build and be fleshed-out in a more organic way. The film's flaws don't negate the excellent work of Foster, who doesn't really look a lot like Armstrong (though he gets some help from minimal makeup and trimmed eyebrows), but disappears into the character to such an extent that he becomes Armstrong by the end, uncannily nailing his body language and speech patterns. THE PROGRAM doesn't shy away from presenting Armstrong as little else than an egomaniacal, narcissistic sociopath, but it also seems too rushed and lets the committed actors down (Dustin Hoffman also turns up for a couple of scenes as bridge champion and investor Bob Hamann, though he seems to have wandered in from another movie). Shot in 2013 and unreleased until early 2016, THE PROGRAM would seem like a talked-about, awards-season gimme but debuted on DirecTV before hitting VOD and a small handful of theaters, ensuring that Foster's award-worthy performance will be lost in an utterly average movie nobody's going to see. (R, 104 mins)

JUNGLE WARRIORS
(West Germany/Mexico - 1984)

Directed by Ernst R. von Theumer. Written by Robert Collector and Ernst R. von Theumer. Cast: Nina Van Pallandt, Paul L. Smith, John Vernon, Alex Cord, Sybil Danning, Marjoe Gortner, Woody Strode, Dana Elcar, Kai Wulff, Louisa Moritz, Suzi Horne, Mindy Iden, Kari Lloyd, Ava Cadell, Myra Chason, Angela Robinson, Isabel "Chichimeca" Vazquez. (R, 95 mins)

From the producers of 1983's legendary women-in-prison masterpiece CHAINED HEAT comes this similarly sleazy actioner packed with slumming big names, including returning co-stars John Vernon, Sybil Danning, and Louisa Moritz. The ludicrous plot involves a group of fashion models managed by coke-snorting asshole Larry (Marjoe Gortner) heading to a shoot in the Amazon and getting caught in the middle of a war between South American drug lord Cesar Santiago (Paul L. Smith) and gregarious mob kingpin Vittorio Mastranga (Vernon). Mastranga and a few of his goons, including his nephew/lawyer Nick Spilotro (Alex Cord), are trying to muscle in on Santiago's turf, but things get complicated when Santiago shoots down the models' plane and takes them prisoner. Of course, this leads to an extended and distasteful sequence where Santiago's slobbering underlings take turns raping all of the women before they revolt--one of them (Mindi Iden) is actually an undercover FBI agent, which begs the question "What would the point of her going undercover as a model be if the plane didn't get shot down?"--and become the titular ass-kickers. JUNGLE WARRIORS also provides ample space for Vernon to overact and for Smith to do his patented glowering stink-eye routine, but there's also some additional trashy enjoyment to be had from Cesar's obviously incestuous relationship with his sultry, psycho-bitch sister Angel (Danning), who instigates the models' gang rape and gets a nude oil rubdown from her brother, though the lighting of the scene suggests neither Danning nor Smith were directly involved with it.

Greatest grindhouse group shot ever?

You also get Woody Strode as Luther, Santiago's top henchman, top-billed Nina Van Pallandt (a former model and one-time Robert Altman muse) as Joanna, the producer of the photo shoot, German actor Kai Wulff as a pilot and brief love interest for Joanna, and Dana Elcar (MACGYVER) as irate FBI agent D'Antoni, who seems to exist in another movie altogether (Elcar shares no scenes with any other main cast members and is always shown stewing and yelling in an office). The primary reason anyone remembers JUNGLE WARRIORS today is because of who wasn't in it: Dennis Hopper was originally set to co-star when the film went into production in early 1983, and he arrived at the remote Mexican location with his legendary drug and alcohol problems at their apex, working for a couple of days before fleeing the set when he was convinced people were trying to kill him. He was discovered in a small village 20 miles away, where he was picked up by local police after stripping nude and wandering around in a daze shouting "Kill me naked!" He was fired and put on the first flight to Los Angeles, where he had to be restrained when he tried to open the plane's emergency exit. Hopper would tell this story many times over the years, and the details only came from those who witnessed it--he had no memories of being in Mexico or even working on the movie before his dismissal. After years of escalating and ultimately out-of-control alcoholism (he was drinking over a case of beer and a nearly a gallon of rum a day) and substance abuse ("I'd do a few grams of coke to sober up"), Hopper hit bottom with his JUNGLE WARRIORS meltdown, and it proved to be the wake-up call that got him into rehab upon his return home, after which he remained clean and sober and within a few years, rebuilt his career with his triumphant comeback that began in 1986 with BLUE VELVET and an Oscar-nominated supporting turn in HOOSIERS. The common belief is that Hopper was cast as Larry and replaced by Gortner, which makes sense given some of Larry's behavior and Gortner's very Hopper-like performance. But an early trade ad in Variety that ran when the film started production (thanks to Video Junkie's William Wilson for that bit of history seen below) shows that both Hopper and Gortner were in the cast. That same trade ad makes no mention of Kai Wulff, so it's possible--and this is pure hypothesis on my part--that Hopper was cast as Larry and Gortner as the pilot/Joanna love interest, and when Hopper was canned, Gortner was shifted over to the more showy Larry role. It doesn't seem likely that Hopper would've played the heroic love interest to the main heroine, and since both Larry and the pilot are killed off before the midpoint (Larry by booby-trap impalement, the pilot by one of the least-convincing decapitations ever), Gortner wouldn't have had to stick around any longer in order to play Larry instead.

"and Marjoe Gortner as Larry"

Distributed in the US by 42nd Street mainstay Terry Levene's Aquarius Releasing in November 1984, JUNGLE WARRIORS is a mostly crummy grindhouse affair that's prime guilty pleasure material thanks to the bewildered-looking cast and some splattery shootouts, not to mention one killing involving the rotor blades of a chopper that probably sounded better in concept that it plays in execution. And you really haven't lived until you've experienced Marina Arcangeli's incredible JUNGLE WARRIORS theme, quite possibly the worst song ever recorded. In addition to the headaches involving Hopper, the film also switched directors early in the shoot, with veteran German producer Ernst R. von Theumer giving Billy Fine the axe and taking over direction himself. Fine was also a producer on CHAINED HEAT and 1982's THE CONCRETE JUNGLE, and JUNGLE WARRIORS was set to be his debut behind the camera. Von Theumer had been a journeyman in German B-movies going back to the late 1950s (he also directed the 1972 Roger Corman pick-up THE BIG BUST-OUT under the pseudonym "Richard Jackson") and carved a brief niche for himself in the 1980s women-in-prison/jungle action explosion: he would later produce and co-write (and do some uncredited directing) on 1985's RED HEAT, a CHAINED HEAT semi-sequel that reunited Danning and Linda Blair, and he'd direct 1986's HELL HUNTERS, a typically sleazy jungle exploitationer that brought together the seen-better-days likes of Maud Adams, George Lazenby, William Berger, and Stewart Granger as a former Nazi hiding in Paraguay and working on a spider venom-based mind control drug.

CUT AND RUN
(Italy - 1985; US release 1986)

Directed by Ruggero Deodato. Written by Cesare Frugoni and Dardano Sacchetti. Cast: Lisa Blount, Leonard Mann, Willie Aames, Richard Lynch, Richard Bright, Michael Berryman, Karen Black, John Steiner, Valentina Forte, Eriq La Salle, Gabriele Tinti, Barbara Magnolfi, Luca Barbareschi, Penny Brown, Carlos De Carvalho, Edward Farrelly, Ottaviano Dell'Acqua. (Unrated, 91 mins)

Often erroneously lumped in with his controversial cannibal films, CUT AND RUN is a fairly straightforward and infrequently tacky '80s Italian jungle actioner from the infamous Ruggero Deodato. Unlike his JUNGLE HOLOCAUST (1977) and the legendary CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (1980), CUT AND RUN has absolutely no cannibal gut-munching, so it's surprising that so many people consider it the final chapter of a non-existent Deodato "cannibal trilogy" or some such nonsense. Sure, it takes place in the Amazon and has some savage tribes who engage in shooting poisoned blowdarts, decapitations, and rape, but even it in its uncensored, hard-edged European form that features one poor bastard being split in half up the middle--softer kill scenes and alternate takes were used for the export version handled by New World, which hit US theaters in May 1986--there's nothing here that equals the disturbing savagery seen in any Italian cannibal outing. No flesh-eating. No on-camera animal deaths. It's not a cannibal movie. It's a distant cousin at best.

Deodato nevertheless finds other ways to be tactless, like using actual footage of Jonestown cult leader and Kool-Aid aficionado Jim Jones being interviewed by NBC reporter Don Harris, who would be one of the people ambushed and killed on a Guyana airstrip by Jones'"People's Temple" disciples when he and other members of Congressman Leo Ryan's entourage tried to help people escape from Jonestown in 1978. CUT AND RUN's chief villain is the fictional Col. Brian Horne (Richard Lynch), a disgraced and dishonorably discharged ex-Green Beret purported to be Jones' right-hand man and the mastermind behind the Jonestown massacre. Horne escaped from Jonestown and has secretly built a powerful drug operation in South America with a few Jonestown latecomers and some Amazon tribesmen he uses to eliminate the competition. He's more or less what might happen if APOCALYPSE NOW's Col. Kurtz ran a drug cartel. Horne has been believed dead, but when intrepid Cable Video News reporter Fran Hudson (Lisa Blount) and her cameraman Mark Ludman (Leonard Mann) beat the police to a bloody crime scene and find a recent picture of Horne with runaway Tommy Allo (Willie Aames), the son of their boss Bob (Richard Bright), they head down to the Amazon to find Tommy and get an exclusive interview with Horne. Obviously, mayhem and over-the-top violence ensue.

Shot in Florida and Venezuela, CUT AND RUN began life, oddly enough, as an unmade Wes Craven script titled MARIMBA. Written around 1980, MARIMBA got as far as pre-production when Craven made the acquaintance of Alessandro Fracassi, a wealthy Italian Formula One racing enthusiast looking to break into film production. Craven had scouted locations in South America and went so far as casting Dirk Benedict, Chris Mitchum, and Tim McIntire in starring roles before the project fell apart. Fracassi hung on to Craven's script and it was eventually completely reworked for Deodato by veteran Italian genre screenwriters Cesare Frugoni (MOUNTAIN OF THE CANNIBAL GOD, THE GREAT ALLIGATOR), frequent Lucio Fulci collaborator Dardano Sacchetti (CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE NEW YORK RIPPER), and an uncredited Luciano Vincenzoni (THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY). None of Craven's MARIMBA script was used, and he remains uncredited even in a courtesy "Story by" capacity on CUT AND RUN. The closest one gets to any sense of Craven's at-most peripheral involvement in what was eventually made is the presence of THE HILLS HAVE EYES' Michael Berryman as a machete-wielding madman working for Horne. He disembowels a few people and chops off a few heads, but other than that, his primary job is to be Michael Berryman.

1980 Variety ad announcing Wes Craven's never-made MARIMBA

Fracassi managed to corral an impressive cast for Deodato, certainly one with more recognizable names and faces than most junky Italian exploitation movies of the time. The appealing Blount was one of the few stars of AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN who didn't get a career bump from it, possibly because her shallow, scheming Lynette was so unlikable, duping David Keith's Sid, faking a pregnancy, and ultimately driving him to suicide. On Anchor Bay's 2001 DVD release, Deodato praised Blount as "completely professional," but he got the sense that she "didn't really want to be there." The cast also included small roles for a shrieking Karen Black as a Cable Video News exec; John Steiner as a rival cartel boss and recipient of the truly disgusting "split up the middle" death, which was cut from the US release (he just gets put out of his misery by being shot instead); Gabriele Tinti as a drug-running pilot who gets a particularly gushing decapitation courtesy of Steve (David Warbeck lookalike Edward Farrelly), another Horne henchman; and future ER star Eriq La Salle, of all people, turns up as Vargas, a Huggy Bear-like Miami pimp and informant who keeps Fran in the loop about what's going on in the cartel. Of his stars, Deodato had the most trouble with two American actors. Bright (best known as Michael Corleone's chief enforcer Al Neri in the GODFATHER trilogy) was drinking heavily but, according to the director, got his act together after being kicked off the set for a day and set straight by an intervening Karen Black. EIGHT IS ENOUGH's Aames had just started both CHARLES IN CHARGE and a serious cocaine addiction around the time CUT AND RUN was made. By his own admission in his later memoir, Aames was on a massive coke binge during the entire shoot and, as required in such circumstances, destroyed a hotel room. He would eventually get clean and become a born-again Christian, producing and starring in the inspirational kids video series BIBLEMAN. Aames now works as a celebrity cruise ship director for Oceania Cruises, and other than a pair of EIGHT IS ENOUGH reunion movies in the late '80s, has acted very sparingly, most recently appearing in a couple of Hallmark Channel original movies.

Anchor Bay's uncut and uncensored DVD release was a welcome offering at the time, but it's in serious need of an upgrade. It's a composite assembling of the New World US cut (opening with the company's logo) with a few scattered scenes in Italian with English subtitles, usually whenever there's violent imagery exclusive to the European version. In the first issue of Video Watchdog, Stephen R. Bissette's article "Uncut and Run" details the differences between the European and American versions, with several scenes completely reshot for the softer US version or, in the case of Steiner's death scene, drastically edited to make it appear that he dies a different way (the same with Tinti's decapitation after getting shot with a poisoned dart; the US cut just shows him getting shot with the dart). The decline in quality of some of the footage is noticeable, with Steiner's big scene looking like a subpar bootleg.

There's enough of a minor cult following around CUT AND RUN and a major one around Deodato himself to warrant a Blu-ray upgrade to the acceptable but problematic 15-year-old DVD. CUT AND RUN suffers from some dumb plotting that relies too much on convenience and contrivance (no way the lady with the fake baby is making it through customs), but it's extremely fast-paced, loaded with action and splatter, has a killer score by Goblin's Claudio Simonetti, and has the kind of bizarre cast (Lisa Blount, Willie Aames, and Eriq La Salle in a Ruggero Deodato movie?) that makes it a must-see for followers of strange cinema. Deodato and Fracassi reteamed for the 1986 slasher BODY COUNT, which was never officially released in the US, and Fracassi continued to sporadically work in the Italian and Romanian film industry. Fracassi now makes his living in the financial industry, his last major credit being a co-producer of the 2006 Donald Sutherland-Sissy Spacek horror film AN AMERICAN HAUNTING.

CUT AND RUN and the Dario Argento-produced DEMONS
opening in Toledo, OH on May 30, 1986

Visual proof of a Ruggero Deodato movie opening
at three Toledo malls in the summer of 1986.

OPERATION TITIAN
(Yugoslavia - 1963)

Directed by Rados Novakovic. Written by Vlasta Radavanovic. Cast: William Campbell, Rade Markovic, Patrick Magee, Miha Baloh, Vjekoslav Afric, Irena Prosen, Manja Golec. (Unrated, 95 mins)

PORTRAIT IN TERROR
(US - 1965)

Directed by Michael Roy (Rados Novakovic and Stephanie Rothman). Written by Vic Webber (Vlasta Radavanovic and Stephanie Rothman). Cast: William Campbell, Anna Pavane (Irina Prosen), Patrick Magee, Kerry Anderson (Manja Golec), Dante Gerino (Rade Markovic), Mike Astin (Miha Baloh), Al Astar (Vjekoslav Afric). (Unrated, 81 mins)

BLOOD BATH
(US - 1966)

Written and directed by Jack Hill and Stephanie Rothman. Cast: William Campbell, Marissa Mathes, Linda Saunders, Sandra Knight, Carl Schanzer, Sid Haig, Jonathan Haze, Biff Elliot, Patrick Magee. (Unrated, 62 mins)

TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE
(US - 1966)

Written and directed by Jack Hill and Stephanie Rothman. Cast: William Campbell, Marissa Mathes, Linda Saunders, Sandra Knight, Patrick Magee, Carl Schanzer, Sid Haig, Jonathan Haze, Biff Elliot, Manja Golec. (Unrated, 79 mins)

Out now in what's likely a contender for the Blu-ray restoration/box set of the year, the low-budget 1966 cult horror movie BLOOD BATH is part of a quartet of films with one of the most complex and labyrinthine backstories in all of cinema. At the center is the legendary Roger Corman, who was attending a film festival in Adriatic coastal city of Dubrovnik when he was approached by representatives from Avala Film, one of Yugoslavia's state-run film organizations, about the possibility of co-productions and distribution deals. Looking to test the waters of the Eastern European film industry, Corman agreed to be a silent partner on the Yugoslav crime thriller OPERATION TITIAN, under two conditions: the movie would be in English and some of his people had to be involved to make it an easier sell in the US. Corman sent American actor William Campbell and Irish actor Patrick Magee--both of whom had just been in the Corman-produced DEMENTIA 13 and the Corman-directed THE YOUNG RACERS--to Dubrovnik to star in OPERATION TITIAN, with young protege and DEMENTIA 13 director Francis Ford Coppola tagging along as a production supervisor to observe director Rados Novakovic's crew and make sure Corman's money wasn't being wasted.

OPERATION TITIAN is a lethargic and draggy thriller about the heist of a priceless Titian painting and the murder of its owner, Ugo Bonacic (Vjekoslav Afric), by duplicitous Italian doctor Maurizio (Magee). Maurizio is working in cahoots with Bonacic's nephew Toni (Campbell), who believes the Bonacics are connected to the legendary Sordi family of artists. Toni is also pining for Vera (Irina Prosen), who's engaged to reporter Dzoni (Miha Baloh), who's working the Bonacic murder case with detective Miha (Rade Markovic). Novakovic stages several stylish sequences that owe more than a passing debt to both the German krimis of the era as well as Carol Reed's THE THIRD MAN and the directorial work of Orson Welles. OPERATION TITIAN is an intriguing-looking and visually interesting film that too often gets bogged down by its confusing storyline and lugubrious pacing (its 95 minutes feel like three hours), with Novakovic far too willing to let too many sequences play like he's making a Dubrovnik travelogue. Corman wasn't happy with the resulting film and saw no potential for it whatsoever on the drive-in circuit, so he shelved it until early 1964, when he found two uses for it. One involved having in-house production and editing assistant Stephanie Rothman rework TITIAN into PORTRAIT IN TERROR, an overhauled version of the film that trimmed a lot of the fat from the clunky early scenes that go nowhere, streamlined some of the meandering story, rearranged some scenes, and replaced the TITIAN score with AIP library cues. Other than Campbell and Magee (his name misspelled "Patrick McGee" in the new credits), everyone else was hidden by Americanized pseudonyms and revoiced. Miha is now "Miho" and Dzoni "Donny," and one key character's offscreen murder is now seen in almost real-time detail in a new L.A.-shot sequence clumsily edited into the Yugoslav footage, with doubles who look nothing like the people they're supposed to be (the victim has a completely different hairstyle to obscure her face in the new footage). This murder takes place in broad daylight with the killer carrying the body for what seems like a mile and leaving a trail of blood behind before rowing it out to sea and dumping it in the Adriatic. Rothman's work was enough for Corman to declare OPERATION TITIAN salvaged, and with director credit going to the non-existent "Michael Roy," PORTRAIT IN TERROR went straight to US television in 1965 as part of an AIP syndication package deal.

While Rothman was working on PORTRAIT, Corman was determined to get his money's worth out of his botched Dubrovnik investment. Having taken bits and pieces of Soviet sci-fi films and working in new American footage in the past (like 1962's BATTLE BEYOND THE SUN being a reworking of a 1959 Russian film; Corman would also use Soviet sci-fi footage in 1965's VOYAGE TO THE PREHISTORIC PLANET and 1966's QUEEN OF BLOOD, both featuring Basil Rathbone in the new scenes, wearing the same wardrobe on the same sets in scenes shot in a day), the thrifty auteur decided to use the same approach with OPERATION TITIAN. In early 1964, he commissioned Jack Hill, who was called in for cleanup duty to shoot some gory axe murders when Corman wasn't happy with Coppola's cut of DEMENTIA 13, to take 30 minutes of footage from OPERATION TITIAN and create a horror movie around it. A production assistant looking to get into directing, Hill enthusiastically saw this bizarre assignment as a challenge, and TITIAN had enough stark Eastern European location work and imposing old-world architecture that it just might work. Hill came up with BLOOD BATH, and he would need Campbell to shoot additional scenes in Venice, CA. Campbell thought turning TITIAN into a horror movie was a terrible idea, so he made exorbitant salary demands on Corman than the producer reluctantly agreed to since he needed Campbell to match the TITIAN footage. In Hill's BLOOD BATH (handling sound on the BLOOD BATH crew was a young Gary Kurtz, who would go on to be George Lucas' Lucasfilm partner and producer of STAR WARS), Campbell was now playing Antonio Sordi, a crazed Venice Beach artist driven to kill his models and preserve their bodies in wax (an idea Hill got from the fate of Magee's Maurizio in TITIAN). None of the primary Yugoslav TITIAN cast--Markovic, Baloh, Afric, and Prosen--appear in BLOOD BATH. Hill pulls off one legitimately stunning, Antonioni-esque shot in the California desert and has some surprisingly bloody murders throughout (more proof that it was Hill, and not Coppola, who was behind some of DEMENTIA 13's more memorable moments). There's also some Cormanian callbacks to A BUCKET OF BLOOD with some beatniks played by LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS' Jonathan Haze and a young Sid Haig, but for whatever reason--Corman off shooting THE SECRET INVASION is usually the cited one--Hill's BLOOD BATH got lost in the shuffle and was shelved by Corman...for the time being.

In 1966, Corman took another look at BLOOD BATH and while he still didn't like it, he wasn't done tinkering with it or squeezing every last nickel he could out of OPERATION TITIAN. Hill moved on to other projects (like the cult classic SPIDER BABY), so Corman assigned the BLOOD BATH revamp to Stephanie Rothman, who wrote and directed new scenes that now have Campbell's Antonio Sordi not only being a homicidal maniac artist, but also---wait for it---a vampire. An uncredited actor plays Sordi in the scenes where he metamorphoses into a bloodsucker, not for artistic reasons but because Campbell refused to do any more reshoots related to the now-two-year-old BLOOD BATH and even filed a grievance with the Screen Actors Guild against Corman for repeatedly reusing old footage of him in new movies and not compensating him for it (he lost, due to a loophole involving the source film--OPERATION TITIAN--being a foreign production outside of SAG jurisdiction). Combining footage from TITIAN and Hill's aborted BLOOD BATH with new footage of actors from Hill's shoot--Haze, Haig, Carl Schanzer as a Sordi rival, and Linda Saunders as a Sordi victim--plus scenes involving a new character, created by Rothman and played by THE TERROR's Sandra Knight, and a silhouetted double filling in for Sordi in a non-vampire scene, the revamped BLOOD BATH has Hill and Rothman sharing writing and directing credit, though they never collaborated and Hill has had nothing positive to say about Rothman's contributions. Considering it's a mash-up of three different productions dating back to 1963, it's amazing that it holds together at all, though it's sure to delight fans of rampant continuity errors.

BLOOD BATH was released by American International in 1966 on a double bill with Curtis Harrington's QUEEN OF BLOOD, where new and quickly-shot footage of John Saxon, Dennis Hopper, and Basil Rathbone was mixed in with scenes from the 1962 Soviet sci-fi epic A DREAM COME TRUE. Unusual for 1966, BLOOD BATH was in black & white since it still had to match OPERATION TITIAN, and it ran barely over an hour at just 62 minutes. When it came time to package the film in a syndication deal, AIP realized the film too short. As a result, it was tweaked yet again, this time as TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE, with some scenes dropped and new footage added by Rothman, including two of the most blatant examples of pointless filler you'll ever see: a long and profoundly unsuspenseful foot chase, and an almost comically belabored five-minute interpretive dance sequence on a beach, with Saunders unconvincingly doubled by someone else. When that didn't add enough time, an entire subplot involving Magee's and Manja Golec's TITIAN characters is introduced in the final act, only with Magee badly redubbed to make it appear that he's a jealous husband convinced his wife (Golec) is having an affair with Sordi. These additional scenes got the film to 79 minutes, making TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE long enough to fit in a 90-minute time slot with commercials. Unlike Campbell, Magee was never called back for reshoots on any incarnation of BLOOD BATH (the future CLOCKWORK ORANGE co-star is uncredited in BLOOD BATH and TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE, and though he has a sizable role with the introduction of more TITIAN footage in TRACK, his appearance in BLOOD BATH is limited to one brief shot as a wax figure in Sordi's workshop), so it's not known how he felt about not being paid for three additional movies (four if you count Hill's never-released first cut of BLOOD BATH) or if he was even aware of it. TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE has enough deviations from BLOOD BATH that it should be regarded as its own stand-alone work as opposed to simply "the TV version of BLOOD BATH." Some of the shocking-for-the-time violence is toned down for TRACK, especially in the early murder of the character played by June 1962 Playmate of the Month Marissa Mathes. It's not really any better or worse than BLOOD BATH, though the interpretive dance scene, which rivals any extended MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE driving scenes, has to be seen to be believed.

Though BLOOD BATH has a bit of a cult following and one of the more colorfully lurid one-sheet designs of the 1960s, neither it nor its three distantly-related cousins OPERATION TITIAN, PORTRAIT IN MURDER, and TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE are very good. Nevertheless, for any true cult horror fanatic, Arrow's Blu-ray box set is absolutely essential as the most thorough archiving of the complicated history of this particular Roger Corman project. The bonus features include interviews with Hill and Haig, but the big selling point is film historian and Video Watchdog big dog Tim Lucas' video essay "The Trouble with Titian," an 81-minute look at Corman in the early '60s and everything that went into the making of OPERATION TITIAN and its variant offshoots. BLOOD BATH is a Blu-ray package that's not really designed for the casual horror fan but rather, the hardcore obsessive who likely won't mind that the tangled and fascinating behind-the-scenes chronicle of the four films proves to be more interesting than the four films themselves.

THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE
(US - 1976/1978)

Written and directed by John Cassavetes. Cast: Ben Gazzara, Timothy Carey, Seymour Cassel, Robert Phillips, Morgan Woodward, John Red Kullers, Al Ruban, Azizi Johari, Virginia Carrington, Meade Roberts, Alice Friedland, Donna Marie Gordon, Val Avery, Soto Joe Hugh. (R, 134 mins/109 mins)

There's a cohesive story in this impenetrable John Cassavetes character study that becomes more apparent in his 1978 re-edit, which moves faster, has some scenes in a different order, uses alternate or unique-to-that-version takes, runs 25 minutes shorter, and is certainly the more commercially viable and entertaining cut of the film. But it's his original 1976 version, running a frequently grueling 134 minutes, that's quintessential Cassavetes. It's also got one of the great Ben Gazzara performances: as Cosmo Vitelli, the owner of the Crazy Horse West, the most oppressive burlesque show/strip club you'll ever see, Gazzara is all hubris and swagger, a perpetual small-timer hoping to run with the big dogs. Shooting his mouth off and trying to look like a player at a mob-run poker game gets him $23,000 in the hole to some L.A. gangsters--intimidating Flo (Timothy Carey), and manipulative, glad-handing Mort (Seymour Cassel) among them--who laugh at Cosmo and his club when his back is turned and force him to pay off his debt by whacking a bookie (Soto Joe Hugh) who turns out to be the head of the Chinese underworld in L.A.

In Cassavetes' 1976 cut, the plot is secondary to the feel, and boy, does this feel like no other film. Its improv nature is loose but admittedly off-putting for a first-time viewer, almost like Cassavetes couldn't part with anything he shot. This is especially true in the burlesque show production numbers introduced by depressing emcee Mr. Sophistication (Meade Roberts)--looooong sequences that Cassavetes lets play out in real time. Most of the Mr. Sophistication stuff got cut for the 1978 re-edit, but it's these scenes inside Cosmo's club and his interactions with the staff ("I'm a club owner...I deal in girls") that give CHINESE BOOKIE its distinctive flavor. The red and blue filters lend a grubby seediness that almost makes this feel like a west coast, Sunset Strip MEAN STREETS or TAXI DRIVER. Of course, Cosmo is a stand-in for Cassavetes himself: he doesn't care about the profits of the Crazy Horse West, only the presentation of the show itself, even when he checks in on his way to kill the Chinese bookie. Cosmo is an artist and an impresario, fashioning his show for seemingly no one but himself (there's always a big crowd, but part of me tends to think it's in his mind), and selling himself to money men when he needs to get out of debt, though Flo and Mort, plus "The Boss" (Morgan Woodward) don't give him much of a choice.

THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE, in its original 134-minute format, is one of the all-time "movies you have to be in the mood for." It's almost deliberately alienating (it took me about four sittings to get through the whole thing the first time I tried to watch it) and incredibly self-indulgent even by Cassavetes standards, at times seeming like he's daring the audience to give up and walk out. But if you approach it for its mood and its vibe and its time and place as opposed to its point A-to-point B story, you may find it hypnotic in its sense of cynical, dead-end hopelessness a portrait of an overconfident schmuck with big dreams and an even bigger mouth, forever condemned to be small-time.

POPSTAR: NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING
(US - 2016)

Directed by Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone. Written by Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone. Cast: Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, Akiva Schaffer, Sarah Silverman, Tim Meadows, Maya Rudolph, Imogen Poots, Joan Cusack, Chris Redd, Edgar Blackmon, James Buckley, Justin Timberlake, Emma Stone, Will Arnett, Chelsea Peretti, Mike Birbiglia, Eric Andre, Bill Hader, Kevin Nealon, Paul Scheer, Derek Mears, Will Forte, Weird Al Yankovic. (R, 87 mins)

The music mockumentary is best represented by the 1984 classic THIS IS SPINAL TAP, though even Christopher Guest and Rob Reiner have cited the 1978 TV special THE RUTLES: ALL YOU NEED IS CASH as its primary influence. The tradition continued in later Guest projects like A MIGHTY WIND and in the early '90s rap mockumentaries CB4 and FEAR OF A BLACK HAT. The latest project from the Lonely Island comedy team of former SNL star Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer, the brains behind numerous viral SNL Digital Shorts like "Jizz in My Pants" and "Dick in a Box," takes aim at the current pop music scene and does a mostly nice job of completely roasting it. Inspired mostly by Justin Bieber but with a generous helping of Kanye West included, Connor Friel, aka Connor4Real (Samberg) is a global pop culture phenomenon, a pop star and ubiquitous social media and tabloid presenc, about to drop his second album, Connquest, the long-awaited follow-up to his record-shattering solo debut Thriller, Also. It's the most anticipated album of the decade from the one-time member of the chart-topping rap trio The Style Boyz, whose biggest hit "The Donkey Roll" made them superstars before disbanding at the end of the boy band heyday when Connor's increased popularity started to keep bandmates Owen, aka Kid Contact (Taccone), and Lawrence, aka Kid Brain (Schaffer) relegated to the background. When a guest verse on "Turn up the Beef," a hit single from a Katy Perry-like diva (Emma Stone) helped launch Connor4Real's solo career, Kid Contact stayed with him as his DJ while Kid Brain released a flop solo single and moved to Colorado to live a quiet, anonymous life as a farmer and woodcarver.

Connquest tanks upon its release, which sends Connor4Real's manager Harry (Tim Meadows) and publicist Paula (Sarah Silverman) into panic mode, securing a promotional partnership with appliance behemoth Aquaspin to have Connor4Real's music constantly blaring from all of their wi-fi-compatible products (remember that U2 debacle?). The backlash is so strong that concert attendance dwindles (thanks in no part to insensitive songs like "Ethpania," the inspiration for which came from Connor noticing that "in Spain, people's S's sound like T.H.'s," and "Equal Rights," a pro-LGBT duet with Pink where all of Connor4Real's lyrics aggressively stress that he's not gay), forcing Harry to bring up-and-coming Hunter the Hungry (Chris Redd) onboard as an opening act. Hunter's presence increases the ticket sales, but Connor4Real is on a downward spiral: his televised-live-on-E! engagement to movie star Ashley Wednesday (Imogen Poots) is marred by wolves mauling guest singer Seal; there's a huge fallout over leaked video from the European tour where he takes a dump in the toilet in the Anne Frank house; a wardrobe malfunction during a concert goes viral when it appears he has no penis; someone's cell phone captures him drunk, starting a fight and getting his ass kicked by Martin Sheen in a sports bar; and he's constantly being overshadowed by the increasing popularity of Hunter the Hungry, whose sets start running long and Connor4Real has to face the realization that even though he's the headliner, nobody's there to see him. All the while, Kid Contact starts feeling more and more marginalized and resorts to PARENT TRAP machinations to encourage a Style Boyz reunion.

A balanced combination of spoof, satire, oddball humor (Bill Hader as a roadie who's a FLATLINERS superfan) and grossout raunch (Connor4Real signing one frantic male fan's dick from the back of his limo after the guy drapes his balls over the half-rolled-down window), POPSTAR: NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING does an admirable job of shredding vacuous pop culture figures, annoying trends (Connor4Real goes on tour with an Adam Levine hologram), blasting the fickleness of a fan base (Connor4Real's "Connfidants"), torching industry greed (Paula: "I don't personally like Connor's music, but it makes so many people so much money!"), and taking some merciless shots at the sycophantic media. The periodic cutaways to the TMZ-like bull sessions of the cackling staff at CMZ, who gleefully revel in every Connor4Real misfortune, are absolutely blistering, with Will Arnett doing an absurd and vicious takedown of Harvey Levin, complete with large straws sticking out of an increasingly ridiculous number of cups, mugs, and pitchers as he asks for the most mundane items of "news" ("Does anyone have a pic of James Franco leaving a Denny's?"). As it becomes obvious that the Style Boyz will set aside their differences and triumphantly reunite, POPSTAR loses its caustic edge and gets a lot nicer. But in the first half, where Samberg boldly plays all of Connor4Real's clueless arrogance and megastar entitlement to the hilt--whether he's enjoying the constant reassurance of his entourage of paid enablers and yes-men or callously ignoring the Kubrick-like levels of care that go into the meticulous meal preparations of his devoted and long-suffering personal chef Tyrus Quash (Justin Timberlake)--it has a scathing mean streak and isn't afraid to take some hard-hitting jabs at the artists, the fans, the vapidity of Twitter, and the ubiquity of idiotic catchphrases ("Doink-de-doink!"). Like the protagonists of THIS IS SPINAL TAP, the Style Boyz might be clueless dolts but they're good guys deep down and it's a big-studio summer comedy, so one can't expect something too subversive. It's not about wanting to have bad things happen to Connor4Real, though a further exploration of the public's love of schadenfreude could've provided some more substance. This is bombing hard in theaters, as did the team's HOT ROD (directed by Schaffer and starring Samberg and Taccone, but written by Pam Brady) and Taccone-directed MACGRUBER, but both of those found cult followings later on Netflix. The same seems likely for the often very funny POPSTAR: NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING.

GODS OF EGYPT
(US/China - 2016)

A mega-budget franchise non-starter that arrived on a wave of bad publicity due to casting controversies--a ridiculous grievance, really, considering that it's not a remotely serious film--GODS OF EGYPT seemed doomed the moment the trailer hit the internet. By the time it was released, the pile-on had already begun, and director Alex Proyas (THE CROW, DARK CITY, I ROBOT) didn't handle it well, taking to Twitter and social media to excoriate critics and detractors. Regardless of how legitimate his complaints were, he couldn't help but come off as, in the parlance of our times, a little butthurt. Is the movie good? Sometimes. "Kinda, almost" might be a good answer. Despite its lofty ambitions, it seems by the end that its sole purpose was to be played continuously on rows of display TVs in the electronics department of a big box retailer. Working with the screenwriting team of Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless (whose previous triumphs include DRACULA UNTOLD and THE LAST WITCH HUNTER), the visionary Proyas establishes a pretty clearly campy tone, with the early scenes featuring intentionally anachronistic dialogue for its ancient Egypt setting ("This old thing?" one female character sasses when asked about her dress) and a very deliberate sense of humor. But the tone changes from scene to scene, along with the quality of the visual effects. The film is wall-to-wall CGI and looks almost completely animated at times. There are moments where the visuals are jawdroppingly beautiful and others where it looks like it's not even Asylum-worthy. The schizophrenic tone coupled with the repetitive set pieces eventually turn the film into a slog by the midway point.

That doesn't mean it's the catastrophic washout that everyone says it is. Oh, it's an unwieldy mess, but Proyas has stretches where he seems possessed by an in-his-prime Terry Gilliam, and for that reason alone, one shouldn't just blithely dismiss GODS OF EGYPT as soulless schlock. This just looks like a film that got away from its maker and had too much riding on it in terms of becoming a studio's next tentpole franchise. In Egypt, where gods are ten feet tall, bleed gold, and coexist with men, beloved and benevolent King Osiris (Bryan Brown sighting!) intends to pass the throne on to his son Horus (GAME OF THRONES' Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). That plan is thwarted by Osiris' scheming brother Set (a scenery-chewing Gerard Butler), who kills the king and gouges out the eyes of Horus, who goes into hiding as a power-crazed, despotic Set takes his nephew's intended, the Goddess of Love Hathor (Elodie Yung) for himself, enslaves the population, and destroys all the good Osiris has done like some ancient Egyptian Donald Trump. Bek (Brenton Thwaites), a wily young thief, also loses his love Zaya (Courtney Eaton) when she's killed by her owner, Set's architect Urshu (Rufus Sewell). Bek manages to steal one of Horus' eyes--the source of his godly powers--from Set's vault, promising him the other if he helps him find and restore Zaya to earthly life. Horus agrees, as he and Bek form an unholy god-and-man alliance to save Zaya and exact vengeance on Set...if they don't slay each other first! There's some fun in the early going, and it's hard not to get a kick out of Geoffrey Rush engulfed in CGI flames and hurling balls of fire as Horus' grandfather Ra, but GODS OF EGYPT is all over the place, and nearly every stop on their quest involves them being attacked by giant CGI creatures and fleeing an interior or exterior structure, outrunning the destruction as it crumbles around them. It loses its sense of fun and starts to seem more like a GODS OF EGYPT video game. The actors, especially Rush and Butler, came prepared to ham it up, but after a promising start, GODS OF EGYPT just switches to autopilot and becomes one eye-glazingly dull CGI action sequence after another. (PG-13, 127 mins)

THE ASIAN CONNECTION
(US - 2016)

A pretty generic Far East shoot 'em up that features one of Steven Seagal's more lifelike performances in recent years, THE ASIAN CONNECTION would probably be a forgettable but diverting enough actioner if it had better leads. As the nominal villain, a Cambodia-based crime lord named Gan Sirankiri, Seagal is as mumbly as ever but actually logs some significant screen time and even takes part in a few big action sequences without being doubled (surprisingly, he's also a participant in the making-of featurette, a good indication that, for whatever reason, he gave a shit about this one). While Seagal has an "and Steven Seagal" credit and a puffy-eyed Michael Jai White gets top billing for a one-scene cameo as a gun dealer named Greedy Greg, the real star is the thoroughly unappealing John Edward Lee--who resembles some kind of Frankenstein fusion of Stephen Dorff and Josh Duhamel, but somehow with exponentially less charisma--as Jack, an expat American living in Bangkok with his Thai girlfriend Avalon (Kempo black belt Pim Bubear). Desperate for cash, Jack and his buddy Sam (Bryan Gibson) decide to rob a bank in Cambodia and take the cash back over the border into Bangkok. The bank they rob is holding the money of Sirankiri, who understandably wants it back and dispatches his chief goon Niran (Sahajak Boonthanakit, memorable as the gregarious taxi driver "Kenny Rogers" in the otherwise pedestrian NO ESCAPE) to recover it. Niran has other plans, like blackmailing Jack by having him and Sam rob a bunch of banks that hold various amounts of Sirankiri cash and giving him the bulk of the proceeds behind his boss' back, lest something nasty happen to Avalon.

Boasting a story credit for none other than former actor Tom Sizemore, THE ASIAN CONNECTION suffers from a smirking Lee as a hero you never care about, plus an inept performance by Bubear, who may be a karate champ but she can't act. On top of that, director Daniel Zirilli takes zero advantage of her Kempo skills. The script is predictable from start to finish, with Sam turning into a humorless, trigger happy loose cannon with each successive job, a character arc that was obvious upon the first of many times he admonishes Jack with "Don't call me stupid!" when he does something stupid (which is a lot). And yes, it all ends up with a shootout at an abandoned factory. Seagal is in character actor mode here, not nearly as loose as he was in GUTSHOT STRAIGHT, but definitely not sleepwalking through it, either, perhaps a major sign that he's ready to hand over his long-held Laziest Actor in the World crown to Bruce Willis. Not good at all but hardly the worst VOD/DTV title out there, the biggest problem with THE ASIAN CONNECTION is that you've seen it all before, and most likely with better actors than Lee and Bubear. Some more White really could've helped, even though he looks like he got stung by a bee right before his scene was shot. Wasn't BLACK DYNAMITE supposed to take him to better places than this? (R, 91 mins)

JARHEAD 3: THE SIEGE
(US - 2016)

The third entry in one of the most unlikely DTV franchises, JARHEAD 3: THE SIEGE has nothing to do with 2014's JARHEAD 2: FIELD OF FIRE and almost nothing to do with Sam Mendes' original 2005 film version of Anthony Swofford's Gulf War memoir. Unlike JARHEAD 2, JARHEAD 3 at least brings back one character from JARHEAD with a brief appearance by Major Lincoln, played by Allstate insurance salesman Dennis Haysbert. Lincoln was a minor character in the 2005 film and is even less significant here, usually observing the action from a chopper and shaking his head when something bad happens. Now an action franchise whose main connecting thread is that it involves Marines, JARHEAD 3: THE SIEGE is budget-conscious 13 HOURS, as ambitious Corporal Evan Albright (HOW TO GET AWAY WITH MURDER's Charlie Weber) arrives at the US Embassy in an unnamed-but-obviously-Benghazi-like location, where everyone gets along with the locals and the US Ambassador (Stephen Hogan) has it pretty easy. Albright quickly establishes himself as an impulsive cowboy during a botched training exercise, and he doesn't win himself any friends by reporting a suspicious cameraman lurking outside the compound to the Ambassador, going over the head of his commanding Gunny Raines (top-billed Scott Adkins). Of course, Albright is right: the cameraman is notorious terrorist Khaled (Hadrian Howard), who leads an assault on the Embassy in which Albright and the other Marines get to engage in some Benghazi fan fiction where tragedy is averted and America triumphs, all while referring to the locals as "Ali Baba" and bellowing things like "This is OUR house! Let's show these motherfuckers how we do it!" and "Locked & loaded!" and, of course, "Let's roll!"

It's mostly jingoistic right-wing military porn in the grand tradition of "America! Fuck Yeah!" but veteran DTV director William Kaufman (now going by the hipper "Will Kaufman") pulls off a few decent shootouts amidst the shaky cam and the iPhone app-level explosions. Weber is a pretty bland hero, and the film doesn't give Adkins much to do other than glower and lecture Albright before being killed off in an explosion about an hour into the movie. The characters are largely cliches, like loudmouth racist Stamper (Joe Corrigall), who goes full Hudson-from-ALIENS as soon as the shit hits the fan, but the worst by far is Blake, a grating comedy relief blogger/documentarian played by 41-year-old Dante Basco, who's a good 15-20 years too old for the role. Blake is constantly filming (cue found-footage scenes) and saying inane things like "When the ambassador is burning shit, you know like, heavy shit is going down" (Blake also has a gluten allergy, making him even more insufferable). As far as in-name-only sequels go, JARHEAD 3: THE SIEGE is passably entertaining and never dull, but that still doesn't seem to be reason enough to justify its existence. (R, 89 mins)

EVERY THING WILL BE FINE
(Germany/Canada/France/Sweden/Norway - 2015)

One of the major voices of the 1970s New German Cinema who reached his pinnacle in the next decade with the classics PARIS, TEXAS (1984) and WINGS OF DESIRE (1987), Wim Wenders has enjoyed his biggest success in the latter half of his career with documentaries like THE BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB (1999), PINA (2011), and his contributions to the PBS series THE BLUES. His first narrative feature since 2008's surreal PALERMO SHOOTING (one of Dennis Hopper's last films, and still unreleased in the US), EVERY THING WILL BE FINE plays more like an homage to SWEET HEREAFTER-era Atom Egoyan, from the crux of its story being a tragedy uniting several people, to its cold, wintry Canadian setting. Judging from the end result, Wenders can't do vintage Egoyan any better than Egoyan can these days. Making superfluous use of 3-D, which is limited mostly to some falling snowflakes for the six people who managed to see this in a theater, EVERY THING WILL BE FINE offers the most somnambulant cast this side of Werner Herzog's HEART OF GLASS, headed by James Franco as Tomas Eldan, a struggling Quebecois novelist whose marriage to Sara (Rachel McAdams, with a distracting and stilted Swedish--I think--accent) is in a rough patch. It gets worse when Tomas is involved in a freak accident on a snowy rural road where he thinks he narrowly averted hitting a young boy in a sled but realizes too late that there were two boys on the sled and the other died, pinned under his SUV. This scene, where Tomas thinks he and the surviving kid had a close call but slowly realizes, when the boys' shell-shocked single mother Kate (Charlotte Gainsbourg) asks where the other boy is, that he's accidentally killed the unseen second child, is by far the best in the film and it's all downhill from there.

Of course, even though it was a tragic accident, Tomas is plagued by guilt and half-heartedly attempts suicide, demonstrated in a trite montage where Wenders shows him crashing in a cheap motel, empty booze and pill bottles and torn up papers strewn about the room. The film repeatedly jumps through a few years at a time. Tomas and Sara have split up and he feels compelled to help the devoutly-religious Kate in some way. She's forgiven him and doesn't blame him and though they seem drawn to one another through their mutual grieving, Wenders and screenwriter Bjorn Olaf Johannessen don't indulge anything further, since that would mean something happening. The film takes place over an 11-year period, and every time Wenders seems to be building to something, he calls a time-out and jumps ahead four years. It's especially frustrating in the last section, when Tomas gets a letter from troubled, 16-year-old Christopher (Robert Naylor), who was five when he survived the accident that killed his little brother. Tomas has become a bestselling author, channeling his pain into prose and becoming rich and famous, and while Christopher is a fan of his work, he feels his brother's death has somehow worked in Tomas' favor while his mother has never really recovered. While Tomas and his second wife Ann (Marie-Josee Croze) are away on a brief book tour, someone--obviously Christopher--breaks into their house and urinates all over their bed. Just as EVERY THING WILL BE FINE seems poised to turn into a thriller of some kind, the film abruptly ends in the most enraging way possible, with Franco--who's about as believable a Quebecois novelist named Tomas as you'd expect--turning to the camera and smiling. Did Wenders just feel "Hey, it's been eight years, I should probably make a drama again"? There's some beautiful cinematography by the venerable Benoit Debie, but EVERY THING WILL BE FINE is a film that keeps stopping itself dead in its tracks. Scenes crescendo into nothing and collapse, actors appear and disappear (Peter Stomare has one scene as Tomas' publisher; frequent Wenders actor Patrick Bauchau plays Tomas' dementia-addled father). It seems to be actively avoiding being about anything. The actors seem to be partially sedated, even more so as the film goes on. When a remarried Sara has a chance meeting with Tomas at a Patrick Watson concert (yes, time-killing concert footage) and slaps him, it seems less out of anger than to simply revive Franco. A comatose Wenders misfire like 2001's THE MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL moved at the pace of plate tectonics but at least had an insane performance by a neck-braced Mel Gibson to occasionally liven things up--there's nothing of the sort in EVERY THING WILL BE FINE. Life is filled with disappointments, regrets, and unresolved issues--which can make for compelling cinema but not when it's done the way Wenders does it here. It seems like a sincere enough film, but what's the point? (Unrated, 119 mins)

THE CONFIRMATION
(UK/US/Canada - 2016)

The kind of slight, low-key character piece that goes over like gangbusters at film festivals but plays to crickets and tumbleweed in general release, THE CONFIRMATION is the directing debut of Oscar-nominated NEBRASKA screenwriter Bob Nelson. As in that film, we have a story set in a blue collar town where most of the residents have seen better days. Anthony (MIDNIGHT SPECIAL's Jaeden Lieberher) has it pretty good other than his ambivalence about being prodded into confession and confirmation by his church-going mom Bonnie (Maria Bello) and stepdad Kyle (Matthew Modine). Bonnie and Kyle are going away to a church-sponsored couples retreat for the weekend, leaving Anthony in the care of his alcoholic, sporadically-employed carpenter dad Walt (Clive Owen). Slumped-shouldered Walt has been dealt some shitty hands and is beaten down by life, but he's trying to make things work. He's on his latest attempt to quit drinking and isn't sure what to do with Anthony over the weekend, but that soon becomes a moot point as the pair encounter one obstacle after another. Walt gets a lucrative job lined up for Monday morning, but his expensive and sentimental (they were his dad's) specialty tools get stolen from his truck, his truck breaks down, a trip to drop a huge jar of change into a Coinstar machine at the grocery store to get some quick cash is all for naught when Anthony accidentally hits the "Donate" button, and they get locked out of the house when Walt gets an eviction notice. Borrowing Bonnie's SUV--Anthony neglects to tell Walt the brakes need replaced--the pair spend the weekend tracking down Walt's tools BICYCLE THIEF-style, getting help from a variety of odd folks both helpful and dubious, ranging from Walt's fatherly friend Otto (Robert Forster), drunken gun nut Vaughn (Tim Blake Nelson), and eccentric drywaller Drake (Patton Oswalt) whose claim to have the inside info on Walt's tools is negated by the fact that everyone knows he's back on meth.

THE CONFIRMATION is basically a standard redemption saga, with Walt and Anthony bonding and everyone realizing Walt's not such a loser after all. Nelson gives the story time to breathe and find its way, even with the trite symbolism of carpenter Walt "building" a relationship with his son. Walt tries to keep his temper in check as the deck is constantly stacked against him and and does everything he can to not cave to temptation and disappoint his son (after a bad withdrawal episode the first night, the first thing out of Walt's mouth in the morning is "Are you OK? Did I hurt you?"). Though he's hardly a textbook role model, Walt tries to dispense life lessons to the boy, and of course, he learns just as much from the wise-beyond-his-years Anthony. There's some legitimate surprises in the development of some of the characters: Anthony forms a friendship with Vaughn's sensitive son Allen (Spencer Drever); when Walt finds out who stole his tools, he feels sympathy rather than anger; and after constantly hearing from Walt what a useless tool he is, we're surprised to find that Kyle is actually a genuinely nice and sincere guy once we meet him. There's no big scenes or huge plot reveals in THE CONFIRMATION. It's a quiet, working-class indie film where the actors probably wore there own clothes and packed their own lunches for Nelson's heartfelt labor of love. It's not much to get excited about, but Owen and Lieberher make a good team, and fans of the actors will definitely want to check it out. (PG-13, 101 mins)

Retro Review: WHAT? (1972)

Retro Review: STEELE JUSTICE (1987)

On DVD/Blu-ray: REGRESSION (2016); SYNCHRONICITY (2016); and SUBMERGED (2015)

In Theaters/On VOD: THE TRUST (2016)

In Theaters: MONEY MONSTER (2016)

In Theaters/On VOD: HIGH-RISE (2016)

Retro Review: THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND (1983)

Retro Review: CLAY PIGEON (1971)

On DVD/Blu-ray: KINDERGARTEN COP 2 (2016); SOUTHBOUND (2016); and DEMENTIA (2016)

In Theaters: THE NICE GUYS (2016)

Retro Review: CANDY (1968)

Retro Review: LOLLY-MADONNA XXX (1973)

On DVD/Blu-ray: ZOOLANDER 2 (2016); RISEN (2016); and THE PROGRAM (2016)

Retro Review: JUNGLE WARRIORS (1984)

Retro Review: CUT AND RUN (1985)

Retro Review: BLOOD BATH (1966)

Retro Review: THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE (1976)

In Theaters: POPSTAR: NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING (2016)

On DVD/Blu-ray: GODS OF EGYPT (2016); THE ASIAN CONNECTION (2016); and JARHEAD 3: THE SIEGE (2016)

On DVD/Blu-ray: EVERY THING WILL BE FINE (2015) and THE CONFIRMATION (2016)