Good Efficient Butchery

MILES AHEAD
(US - 2016)

For years, Don Cheadle has been talking about his wish to make a film about jazz legend Miles Davis. He finally got the chance with this partially crowd-funded indie that also marks his debut as a writer and director. For something that he had bouncing around in his head all these years, MILES AHEAD is an almost total missed opportunity. Cheadle wanted to avoid the pratfalls of a standard-issue biopic, which is commendable, but he more or less just drops a character named "Miles Davis" into a rote buddy movie with occasional car chases and action sequences. Set primarily during Davis' reclusive late 1970s period of self-imposed exile in his Upper West Side NYC apartment, MILES AHEAD pairs him with a fictional Rolling Stone journalist named Dave Braden (Ewan McGregor), who's desperate to grab an exclusive with him. Davis is currently butting heads with Columbia Records execs who have been waiting several years for his latest record. Columbia A&R douchebag Harper Hamilton (a reptilian Michael Stuhlbarg) and his Davis-like, Next Big Thing signing Junior (LaKeith Lee Stanfield) steal the sole copy of Davis' latest recording, prompting the embittered, burned-out, drug-addled trumpeter and his befuddled sidekick Braden to turn NYC (actually, Cincinnati, where this was shot) upside-down in pursuit of it. All the while, Davis periodically reflects on his career triumphs (and, of course, sees himself in the young ingenue Junior) and his failed marriage to dancer Frances (Emayatzy Coridealdi), pondering Where It All Went Wrong.

The flashbacks to the 1950s to the mid 1960s seem like Cheadle giving himself some opportunity to portray Davis in a straightforward fashion rather than the showy, coke-snorting jazz version of Howard Hughes he's playing in the late 1970s sections of the film. Cheadle is a dead ringer for Davis and it's a terrific performance that's completely let down by Cheadle the filmmaker. Cheadle is a gifted actor who could've brought much substance and complexity to a serious chronicle of the ups and downs of Davis' life. Why he--and Davis' family, who gave him their blessing--opted for a completely fictional scenario is a mystery. McGregor doesn't have much to do other than to look perplexed over Davis' wildly unpredictable behavior (like firing a gun in the Columbia offices), while Coridealdi does some good work in the more serious side of the film, even though she's tasked with little other than raging at a selfish, serially philandering Davis when he repeatedly treats her like a doormat. If Davis' family was OK with showing him in a negative light in these scenes, then why not make an honest film about him instead of this dumb movie that tries to have one foot in the arthouse and the other in the multiplex? Cheadle makes a great Miles Davis...it's just lost in a mediocre misfire of his own making. (R, 101 mins)

ELVIS & NIXON
(US - 2016)

Elvis Presley and President Richard Nixon had a meeting in the Oval Office on December 21, 1970, with the resulting photo of the two cited as the most requested in the National Archives. ELVIS & NIXON purports to tell "the true story" of what went down at that secret meeting. Troubled by the direction of Vietnam-era youth--their malaise, their drug use, their music--Elvis is obsessed with the idea of working undercover for the Federal Narcotics Bureau as a "Federal Agent-at-Large," and requests a meeting with Nixon to make it happen. This story was covered before in Allan Arkush's little-seen 1997 cable movie ELVIS MEETS NIXON, with Rick Peters as Elvis and Bob Gunton as Nixon, but ELVIS & NIXON, co-written by actor Cary Elwes and directed by Liza Johnson (HATESHIP LOVESHIP), has two bigger names onboard, with Michael Shannon as Elvis and Kevin Spacey as Nixon. These are brilliant actors, and while neither does an SNL caricature, Spacey does a good job of nailing Nixon's mannerisms in the face of Elvis' increasingly absurd behavior, like an impromptu karate demonstration near the end of their afternoon together. Nixon sees being an Elvis pal as a way of appealing to America's youth, and while he's initially dismissive of the idea, the meeting puts a spring in Nixon's step--watch the way he enthusiastically asks aides Egil Krogh (Colin Hanks) and Dwight Chapin (Evan Peters) "Am I Mr. Cool?"--and Spacey does a very nice job with it. Shannon is a versatile actor but he just can't pull off Elvis. It makes sense that he wants to play Elvis as a person rather than the "Elvis" of his public image, but he never comes off as anything but Michael Shannon in an Elvis costume. He meets two impersonators early on and they demonstrate more life than he does. Shannon's Elvis is among the most quiet and soft-spoken in pop culture. It would've helped a little to maybe sound or act like him--Shannon is about as plausible an Elvis as Chevy Chase was a Gerald Ford. While Spacey doesn't cartoonishly mimic Nixon, he at least conveys a Nixonian presence. Shannon seems like an Elvis impersonator who's off the clock but still hasn't changed into his own clothes. And who cares about his buddy Jerry Schilling (Alex Pettyfer) who's preoccupied with getting back to Hollywood to propose to his girlfriend (Sky Ferreira)? The closing credits roll at 80 minutes and they still have to pad the running time with a subplot about Jerry and his girlfriend? Also featuring Johnny Knoxville for some reason, ELVIS & NIXON finds some genuine laughs in the very late-going, but for the most part, it's low-key to the point of catatonia, never recovering from a miscast Shannon's inert (though some critics really liked it) interpretation of the King. If you want an Elvis performance that's funny and heartfelt and relatively real, stick with Bruce Campbell in BUBBA HO-TEP. (R, 86 mins)

ANDRON
(Italy/UK - 2016)

From the 1960s through the 1980s, it was common to find Hollywood actors who were aging or in a career slump slumming in B-grade European knockoffs of popular American movies. To that end, there's a brief sense of nostalgia to be enjoyed with ANDRON, an incoherent Italian ripoff of THE HUNGER GAMES and THE MAZE RUNNER that somehow prominently features a visibly inconvenienced Alec Baldwin as Adam, the nefarious master of--wait for it--"The Redemption Games." It's some survival game being broadcast to a post-apocalyptic, dystopian society in the year 2154, years after "The Big Catastrophe" nuked the planet, killing billions of people and leading to The Nine Corporations assuming control of the world. Ten strangers wake up to find themselves forced contestants in The Redemption Games, which is being beamed to members of an enslaved society who have placed bets where the winners earn their freedom. You expect to see Danny Glover in something like this--he plays "The Chancellor," some Nine Corporations leader--but isn't this a little beneath Alec Baldwin? Sure, hosting a rebooted MATCH GAME is probably a fun lark, but how exactly did this script get to him? Did he see an easy payday and assumed the resulting mess would never be released? ANDRON was filmed in 2014, around the same time Baldwin had a supporting role in the fifth entry in Santiago Segura's popular Spanish-made TORRENTE action/comedy franchise, TORRENTE 5: OPERACION EUROVEGAS (the first was made in 1998 and they've turned up streaming on Amazon), so he likely did the Malta-shot ANDRON on the same trip to Europe. But why? His appearances throughout are almost Bruce Willisian in their laziness and disconnect from the rest of the movie (the DVD's making-of shows a VFX shot of Baldwin's head being CGI'd onto a stand-in's body for a scene where his character appears with Glover). He probably didn't spend any more than a day or two on the set, probably coming off like a mercurial prick at least once and maybe trying to lighten the mood by entertaining the crew by dropping some GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS bon mots or the MALICE "I am God" speech. His role primarily consists of sitting at a desk, watching The Redemption Games on a hologram and occasionally engaging in some MINORITY REPORT pantomiming as he manipulates and moves things around on a holographic screen. When the first contestant is killed, a smirking Baldwin purrs "Ten little Indians standing in a line, one toddled home and then there were nine." Other observational witticisms from behind his desk include:

"Now things get interesting."

"Let's liven things up a little."

"Let's give them something else to think about."

"That's my girl."

"Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends!"

"Let's shuffle this deck."

"What the hell is that?"

"Get them back on the grid!"

"Shit!"

Written and directed by Francesco Cinquemani, ANDRON is so muddled and incomprehensible that it feels like you're watching the fourth or fifth installment in a franchise where the previous installments were never made. Opening in medias res is one thing, but not knowing who anyone is or what's going on or why we should even care makes for a frustrating experience. Never mind the atrocious CGI and greenscreen work--it seems entirely possible that Baldwin is completely unaware of this film and his appearance in it is actually a CGI hologram--the story isn't even remotely engaging and what little you can figure out is blatantly and shamelessly cribbed from THE HUNGER GAMES, THE MAZE RUNNER, and even the cult classic CUBE. The nominal lead is Leo Howard, the star of the Disney Channel's KICKIN' IT, and Skunk Anansie vocalist Skin plays a Milla Jovovich-like badass who's been implanted with someone's memories or some such nonsense. ANDRON is a complete botch that has the audacity to leave the door open for a sequel, and if Z-grade '70s hack Alfonso Brescia/"Al Bradley" was still alive and making Italian ripoffs, he probably would've made this. As it is, it's hopefully as close to an Uwe Boll joint as Baldwin will ever get. Did he owe Stephen a favor and do this movie for him? Did Mitch & Murray send him to Malta on a mission of mercy? (R, 96 mins)

LIGHTS OUT
(US - 2016)

Directed by David F. Sandberg. Written by Eric Heisserer. Cast: Teresa Palmer, Maria Bello, Gabriel Bateman, Alexander DiPersia, Billy Burke, Alicia Vela-Bailey, Andi Osho, Emily Alyn Lind, Lotta Losten. (PG-13, 81 mins)

Produced by INSIDIOUS and THE CONJURING director James Wan, LIGHTS OUT is a feature-length expansion of David F. Sandberg's two-and-a-half minute short film with the same title that went viral in 2013. It was a marvelous little self-contained fright sequence that built up more ominous dread in 150 seconds than most 100-minute features. Sandberg also directs the new LIGHTS OUT, from a script by Eric Heisserer, whose writing credits include the 2010 remake of A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, the 2011 prequel THE THING, and the same year's FINAL DESTINATION 5. Sandberg and Heisserer keep things focused and on-point with LIGHTS OUT which, upon a cursory glance, has some big things working against it: it relies on the obligatory jump scares and its supernatural antagonist could just as easily be called THE GRUDGADOOK, a psychological manifestation that only attacks in the dark as a creepy-eyed, blinking silhouette, looking not unlike UNCLE BOONMEE doing the herky-jerky JU-ON shuffle. But Sandberg knows how to stage a scare, going for the usual loud jolts, but displaying a genuine understanding of atmosphere and buildup. There's some legitimately creative ways the heroes combat the spectral figure pursuing them, holding it back and keeping it away with any available light source, resulting in clever scenes like a guy holding out his illuminated smart phone like Van Helsing wielding a cross to ward off Dracula.

Sophie (Maria Bello) suffers from serious depression and is unable to deal with the death of her second husband Paul (Billy Burke), who was killed in the opening scene by a silhouetted spectre in his mannequin factory (an inherently creepy setting even without a shadowy presence darting around the warehouse). She's prone to long discussions with her unseen "friend" Diana, who hides in her closet and occasionally shows hints of her presence to Sophie's ten-year-old son Martin (Gabriel Bateman), like long, talon-like black fingers emerging from behind a barely-cracked door, subtly pulling Sophie away as she tries to talk to him. Unable to sleep and having trouble at school, Martin begs to stay with his older half-sister Rebecca (Teresa Palmer), Sophie's daughter with her first husband, who split when Rebecca was about Martin's age and hasn't been seen or heard from since. Rebecca has her own issues--living in a dumpy apartment above a tattoo parlor, she wants nothing to do with her mother, she's fiercely independent and doesn't allow Bret (Alexander DiPersia), the nice guy she's seeing, to get too close. Rebecca doesn't want to get involved but when Martin mentions Mom's friend Diana, traumatic memories return and she realizes her little brother is dealing with the same problems she had. It isn't long before an angry Diana is attacking the siblings at Rebecca's apartment (Sandberg makes great use of a flashing red neon "Tattoo" sign outside Rebecca's window), and when Sophie goes off her meds, Diana's power only grows in strength, putting everyone in danger.

"Diana" is a pretty obvious metaphor for Sophie's depression, and if the film has any problem, it's that it lays on too much exposition and over-explains the symbolism like it doesn't trust the audience to reach that conclusion. LIGHTS OUT explores territory very similar to THE BABADOOK and in that respect, doesn't bring much innovation to the table. It does, however, succeed as a fairly non-stop scare machine, running a brief 81 minutes and never having a chance to wear out its welcome. There's some chilling and intense set pieces throughout, and it's a great example of the kind of horror movie designed for maximum crowd response. It uses the standard jump-scares of today, but doles them out just right so they aren't overused. Too many of today's horror films just pile on jump scare after jump scare until you see them coming and you're pretty much numb to them. LIGHTS OUT spreads them out enough and lulls you into a comfort zone before delivering its scares, making them much more powerful. Some terrific performances add credibility as well. Bello and Palmer are perfectly cast as mother and daughter, DiPersia's Bret is a refreshingly real guy and not a pop culture-quipping dudebro, and young Bateman is very believable as a little kid who's been forced to grow up too soon, and he also has a great stare when scary shit is happening right in front of him. Not a classic but much better than it has any business being, LIGHTS OUT has an undeniable familiarity to it, especially coming so soon after THE BABADOOK, but Sandberg gets enough of the little details right that it impresses as one of the better big-studio horror offerings of late.

STAR TREK: BEYOND
(US/China - 2016)

Directed by Justin Lin. Written by Simon Pegg and Doug Jung. Cast: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, John Cho, Anton Yelchin, Idris Elba, Sofia Boutelle, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Lydia Wilson, Joe Taslim, Greg Grunberg, Deep Roy, Doug Jung, Melissa Roxburgh, Shea Whigham. (PG-13, 122 mins)

It didn't take long for opinion to turn on 2013's STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS. Opening to glowing reviews and an 86% score on Rotten Tomatoes, anticipation was high considering that it was the worst-kept secret of that summer that Benedict Cumberbatch's character was going to be revealed as Khan, the most iconic villain in the TREK canon. Once the opening weekend passed, fans were discovering that they didn't really like the movie all that much. Yeah, there was the screenwriting involvement of the much-maligned Damon Lindelof and director J.J. Abrams' distractingly gratuitous use of Dutch angles and lens flare, but INTO DARKNESS focused on Michael Bay-type action with no feel at all for the characters, demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes the beloved STAR TREK work so well. To his credit, Abrams listened to the fans. He stayed onboard as a producer and hired Justin Lin, the veteran of the third-through-the-sixth installments of the FAST & FURIOUS franchise, to direct. Lindelof was out, and INTO DARKNESS co-writer Roberto Orci's script, co-written with Patrick McKay and John D. Payne, was extensively reworked by co-star Simon Pegg (who plays Scotty) and Doug Jung. Whatever remains of the original script is minimal, as only Pegg and Jung are credited, and the end result at least extends an olive branch to those unhappy with INTO DARKNESS, now generally regarded as the worst film in the TREK franchise, toppling the longtime title holder, the William Shatner-directed STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER (1989). It's still got plenty of the blurry, shaky-cam CGI action mandatory for today's mega-budget franchise blockbusters, but this is the closest the rebooted TREK has come to "getting" these characters, now that they're in the familiar places from which we've known them since the 1960s. Cult star and proud nerd Pegg is guilty of giving Scotty some of the showier elements of the story, but he and Jung exert an effort to make this a throwback TREK, at least as far as the characters are concerned, particularly Zachary Quinto's Spock ("Horse shit?") and Karl Urban's perpetually grumpy "Bones" McCoy, who gets a huge expletive cut off in mid-beam with "Dammit, Spock! I'm a doctor not a fu--."

STAR TREK: BEYOND opens with the Enterprise just past the midway hump in a five-year mission in deep space, stopping off for supplies and R&R at Yorktown, a high-tech base and utopian community. Kirk (Chris Pine) is offered a Vice Admiral position in the Federation, but another matter is more pressing: a mission to rescue a stranded ship on Altamid after an escape pod with one survivor, Kalara (Lydia Wilson), arrives at Yorktown. The rescue turns into an ambush, with Kalara forced to steer them right into a trap set by alien despot Krall (an unrecognizable Idris Elba), who's holding her crew hostage on Altamid. Krall wants an artifact acquired by Kirk on a recent mission and stored in the Enterprise's archives, and launches a full-on assault on the Starship, destroying the Enterprise and leaving Uhuru (Zoe Saldana) and Sulu (John Cho) and the rest of the crew as hostages while other parties--Kirk and Chekov (the late Anton Yelchin, who died in a freak car accident a month before the film's release), Spock and Bones, and Scotty--get out in escape pods and are temporarily split up. Scotty teams up with Jaylah (Sofia Boutelle), a lone alien warrior, who takes him to the wreckage of the Franklin, a long-abandoned, century-old, pre-Federation Starfleet vessel. Eventually, the other parties meet up and get the Franklin back in semi-working condition, overcoming various obstacles (Spock is severely injured at one point, and Kirk and Chekov are briefly suspended in ice), before hatching a plan to beam the hostages on to the Franklin and get it back to Yorktown.

Of course, this leads to an inevitable battle with Krall and there's more to his story and his reasons for needing the artifact and having an axe to grind with the Federation, though the heaviest lifting Elba seems to do is trying to talk with all the old-school rubber and latex on his face. STAR TREK: BEYOND is an entertaining entry in the series, rather predictable and offering very little in the way of surprises, but a definite improvement over the botched INTO DARKNESS. It manages to find a happy medium for those who need CGI histrionics and those who want the STAR TREK of old. Elba's Krall is a villain on about the same relatively generic level as Christopher Lloyd's Klingon commander Kruge in STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK, but he's having a good time. The cast clicks a lot better here than in the last film, especially the banter between Spock and Bones. Sulu and Chekov don't have a whole lot to do, with Yelchin primarily required to occasionally urgently yell "Kypteen!" at Kirk, followed by something about shields and "wessels." Pegg throws Scotty the biggest bones, with more dialogue than he had in the last two movies combined, and an obvious girlfriend in the badass Jaylah (Boutelle steals the movie). It's pretty middling as a STAR TREK movie, but it's enjoyable, and Pegg at least seems to understand its universe better than Orci, Lindelof, and probably even Abrams ever did, considering the dip in quality between the 2009 reboot and the 2013 INTO DARKNESS. There's also a touching tribute to original Spock Leonard Nimoy, who died in early 2015 when the film was in pre-production, and a late shout-out to the original cast that's sure to tug on some heartstrings (the film is dedicated to both Nimoy and Yelchin). Pegg even has some references to other sci-fi/horror movies, the biggest one being the very LIFEFORCE way that Krull feeds off his victims, who are left looking not unlike the dead left behind by Mathilda May's nude space vampire in that 1985 Tobe Hooper classic. Lin certainly brings a "2 TREK 2 FURIOUS" (© Marty McKee) vibe to STAR TREK: BEYOND, and seems to be following Abrams' instructions to keep the tilted Dutch angles, but that's just the way things have to be now (the same goes for the reasons that the final attack on Krall requires the crew blasting the Beastie Boys'"Sabotage," which is actually worked into the plot). Speaking not as a Trekkie but as a curmudgeon, it's pretty good fun while it lasts, forgotten immediately after, but I'll still take that absolutely perfect and timeless triptych of STAR TREK II-IV any day of the week.

Anton Yelchin (1989-2016)

DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D.
(Italy - 1982)

Directed by Frank Martin (Marino Girolami). Written by Frank Martin (Romano Scandariato). Cast: Ian McCulloch, Alexandra Cole (Alexandra Delli Colli), Donald O'Brien, Sherry Buchanan, Peter O'Neal, Dakar, Walter Patriarca, Franco Ukmar, Angelo Ragusa, Romano Scandariato, Roy Frumkes. (R, 82 mins)

One of the most notorious Italian gorefests of the 42nd Street grindhouse glory days, DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D. benefitted from an attention-getting ad campaign courtesy of its US distributor, Terry Levene's Aquarius Releasing. The Australian Levene became a successful B-movie distributor and theatrical exhibitor in NYC, with his office located just above the marquee of the Selwyn Theater on 42nd Street. He acquired the US rights to the 1980 Italian horror film ZOMBI HOLOCAUST, a low-rent gut-muncher that hopped on two trends at once with its inclusion of both cannibals (Ruggero Deodato's CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST) and zombies (Lucio Fulci's ZOMBIE). It even utilized some still-standing sets seen in ZOMBIE, courtesy of producer Fabrizio De Angelis, who also brought along co-stars Ian McCulloch and Dakar. Directed by veteran comedy filmmaker Marino Girolami (father of Eurocult icon Enzo G. Castellari) under the pseudonym "Frank Martin," ZOMBI HOLOCAUST was a serviceable entry in the gore galore cycle that followed the template of many Italian horror films at the time (opening 20 minutes set in NYC with some vintage location shooting before the action shifts to a jungle and/or tropical island) but suffered from a low budget, unconvincing latex and rubber effects, and some sloppy filmmaking, as evidenced by what is hands-down the greatest dummy death in film history.

When Levene got hold of ZOMBI HOLOCAUST, he wanted to make it look and sound more American. He bought a few minutes of footage from TALES THAT WILL TEAR YOUR HEART OUT, an unfinished and abandoned anthology film that began shooting in 1976. The mastermind behind TALES was Roy Frumkes, later to gain horror notoriety for his DAWN OF THE DEAD documentary DOCUMENT OF THE DEAD (1985), along with the Tenafly Viper-swilling cult classic STREET TRASH (1987), and his most high-profile mainstream gig, a co-writing credit on the 1996 Tom Berenger hit THE SUBSTITUTE. Levene and his editor Jim Markovic took a couple of minutes of Frumkes' footage--featuring Frumkes himself as a shambling zombie--and turned it into the opening credits sequence of BUTCHER, intercut with a couple of shots of ZOMBI HOLOCAUST's zombies, but having nothing whatsoever to do with Girolami's film (Frumkes is credited with "Title Sequence" on BUTCHER). Levene also whittled down some ZOMBI scenes for pacing reasons (Alexandra Delli Colli's character walking into her apartment and burning some incense, a long dialogue scene during the ride to the jungle compound of the villain), and replaced most of Nico Fidenco's far more appropriate score with one by NYC-based musician/inventor/producer Walter Sear, the owner of Sear Sound Studio and a pioneer in the use of synthesizers. Sear's work on DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D. will not go down as his finest hour, as his endless and amazingly tuneless assault of random bleeps, blips, and bloops sounds like an unsupervised kid fucking around on a Casio keyboard in Radio Shack circa 1982, undermining any kind of suspense that might've been building. At the same time, it's a key ingredient in what makes DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D. so endearing to fans of trashy movies. It's not like ZOMBI HOLOCAUST was a serious film--it was already a crummy movie with idiotic dialogue ("I could easily kill you now...but I'm determined to have your brain!") and laughable gore effects before Levene got his paws on it--but its Americanization into DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D. gives it much of its Bad Movie charm and takes it very close to the level of Eurotrash grindhouse Nirvana rarely rarely experienced with movies not titled PIECES. And when it was ready to go, Levene wanted the denizens of 42nd Street to line up, so he promoted the hell out of it in a very memorable way: with a trailer narrated by Adolph Caesar (two years away from an Oscar nomination for A SOLDIER'S STORY) that promised "DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D...Medical Deviate!," poster art that misled people into expecting a slasher film ("...and he makes house calls!"), and most effectively, by renting a flatbed truck and adorning it with DOCTOR BUTCHER artwork and driving it around Manhattan in the days prior to the film's release on May 7, 1982. The "Butchermobile," as it was soon dubbed, was seen by everyone and word spread like wildfire. DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D. was an instant 42nd Street legend thanks to Levene's canny marketing.

The plot, such as it is, deals with a Manhattan hospital morgue beset by a serial mutilator who's helping himself to the limbs and organs of cadavers. The culprit turns out to be an orderly with ties to a Caribbean cult that worships a cannibal god called Kito. This is deduced by nurse Lori Ridgeway (Delli Colli, credited as "Alexandra Cole" in the BUTCHER version, and best known for her performance as the doomed, high society nympho in Fulci's THE NEW YORK RIPPER), who also dabbles in anthropology on the side and even has a priceless Kito dagger in her apartment. That dagger is stolen and her apartment is ransacked, which sends her and NYC health department chief Peter Chandler (McCulloch), along with his associate George (Peter O'Neal) and pushy reporter Susan (Sherry Buchanan), to the Moluccas, a group of islands off the coast of New Guinea. They're welcomed by Dr. Obrero (Donald O'Brien), a famed researcher who's secretly been conducting brain transplant experiments on unwilling victims. Those victims have become his slave-like zombies, which eventually leads to a clash of zombies and cannibal natives, with the NYC interlopers caught in the middle, and with rare exception, becoming either a zombie or dinner. One could argue that ZOMBI/BUTCHER was imaginative in the way it combined two Italian horror trends in zombies and cannibalism, and it's interesting to see the initially threatening cannibals get scared off by the walking dead and eventually coming to the aid of the remaining New Yorkers when they're under attack by Obrero's zombies. But that's about all the credit one can give DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D. on any creative level. It's a rudimentary splatter movie that's entertaining for all the wrong reasons, and its attitude toward indigenous people is barbaric at best, as evidenced by George's stunning lack of sympathy toward their native tour guides. When one is brutally killed, the remaining two--dubbed by voices that make them sound developmentally disabled--are understandably frightened, to which George barks "Bury your friend here...and be quick about it!" When the last of the hapless guides is impaled, clinging to life and gasping his last final breaths, the Big Apple intruders gather around and basically shrug while impatiently waiting for him to die, looking more inconvenienced than afraid. O'Neal's George is a complete asshole, so it's actually a crowd-pleasing moment when he's attacked about halfway through and endures what's probably the film's grossest death scene, if you don't count Peter shredding a zombie's head with a small outboard motor.

I love DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D., and it's been hard to see in that form for quite some time. While a Paragon VHS could be found in any video store in the 1980s, since the advent of DVD, the only version readily available in the US was the original ZOMBI HOLOCAUST cut, released by Media Blasters in 2002. It featured the Frumkes footage as an extra, but did not include the drastically altered and rescored BUTCHER cut that caused such a sensation in Times Square in 1982. That's no longer the case, thanks to Severin's new two-disc Blu-ray set, which features both DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D. and ZOMBI HOLOCAUST, with each disc accompanied by a ton of extras--the best being an interview with the now 86-year-old Levene and a tour through 42nd Street history with Frumkes and Temple of Schlock guru and exploitation historian Chris Poggiali--plus a limited edition barf bag! It's as close to a definitive, Criterion-level last-word on all things DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D. as you're going to get, though Severin did make the curious decision to add a strange scene that was unique to the BUTCHER cut--McCulloch and Delli Colli encountering a couple of cannibals as she falls into a pit trap--back into the ZOMBI HOLOCAUST version. This scene isn't discussed on any of the bonus features, but sticks out like a sore thumb. McCulloch's clothes are darker than in the scenes before and after and his prominent bald spot, seen throughout Fulci's ZOMBIE, is clearly visible (it's covered with either a combover or a small hairpiece in the rest of the film), and Delli Colli's straight hairstyle is suddenly crimped. This scene was clearly shot after ZOMBI HOLOCAUST was made--did Levene commission it? Though this scene wasn't in ZOMBI HOLOCAUST, Severin put it there for this edition, and that's the only questionable decision of what's otherwise one of 2016's most essential Blu-ray purchases for cult horror fans.

The Butchermobile cruising the streets of NYC in 1982.

JASON BOURNE
(US - 2016)

Directed by Paul Greengrass. Written by Paul Greengrass and Christopher Rouse. Cast: Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Jones, Alicia Vikander, Vincent Cassel, Julia Stiles, Riz Ahmed, Bill Camp, Ato Essandoh, Gregg Henry, Scott Shepherd, Vincenz Kiefer, Stephen Kunken. (PG-13, 123 mins)

After sitting out 2012's disappointing THE BOURNE LEGACY--the TOKYO DRIFT of the BOURNE franchise--star Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass return for the fifth entry, JASON BOURNE (they really should've called it BOURNE AGAIN). It's been nine years since THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, and the Damon-Greengrass duo basically stick to the formula, opting to not fix what isn't broken and, naturally, including a new closing credits remix of Moby's "Extreme Ways." Not participating is screenwriter Tony Gilroy, a key component to the success of the first three films who failed to find a spark when he was promoted to director in Greengrass' stead for LEGACY. Greengrass' hyper-kinetic, shaky-cam style is, for better or worse, so inextricably linked with the BOURNE franchise that it's easy to forget he wasn't involved with 2002's THE BOURNE IDENTITY and only came onboard when Doug Liman (SWINGERS, GO) wasn't invited back for 2004's THE BOURNE SUPREMACY after clashing with Universal on the first film. Gilroy's focus on exposition and dialogue turned LEGACY into a bit of a bore, and without his presence here, Greengrass has taken over scripting duties for the first time on a BOURNE film. It's telling that he shares credit with his usual editor and first-time screenwriter Christopher Rouse, who won an Oscar for his editing work on ULTIMATUM. With that in mind, the focus is on action, with many of the more intricate details of plot, characterization and motivation left fuzzy, probably because that just isn't their chief concern. Trotting all over the globe at a breakneck pace, JASON BOURNE keeps your attention and is a definite improvement over THE BOURNE LEGACY, whose existence it completely ignores, but there's no denying that the freshness is waning and that neither Damon nor Greengrass seem as inspired this time out.

CIA operative Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles) hacks into the agency's database from Iceland, stealing damning files on the Treadstone and Blackbriar programs that turned all-American David Webb into superagent Jason Bourne (Damon). Bourne is living off the grid in Greece, picking up pocket money in brutal street fights and still coming to terms with his past. Parsons' hack is traced by ambitious cybersecurity official Heather Lee (Alicia Vikander), who talks new CIA director Robert Dewey (a craggier-than-ever Tommy Lee Jones) into making her point in the trackdown of Parsons, who they're sure will lead them to Bourne. Of course she does, though Parsons is killed by Dewey's covert agent "The Asset" (Vincent Cassel), which sends Bourne all through Europe trying to get to the bottom of Parsons' claim that the death of his State Dept honcho father Richard Webb (Gregg Henry in newly-shot flashbacks) in a Libya car bombing in 1999 was actually a CIA hit disguised as a terrorist attack. He forms an unholy alliance with Lee, who works closely with Dewey but seems to have her own agenda. Dewey, meanwhile, wants to keep a lid on anything related to Bourne and is preoccupied with his own secret dealings with billionaire social media tech mogul Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed), who's been paid a huge amount of money for his work in a new agency project called Ironhand, an advanced surveillance program that will track the whereabouts and actions of all users of Kalloor's Facebook-like app Deep Dream.

There's some fleeting attempts at topicality with Kalloor's parallels to Mark Zuckerberg, and one of Dewey's flunkies (Ato Essandoh) gravely intoning that Parsons' hack is "worse than Snowden," but Greengrass isn't really concerned with the confusing plot, instead keeping a relentless forward momentum as Bourne goes from one action set piece to the next. This culminates in a ridiculous but nonetheless entertaining car vs. SWAT truck chase in Las Vegas that's more CANNONBALL RUN than BOURNE. Mainly, the bulk of the action is a more propulsive-than-most travelogue of Damon briskly walking through scenic European cities and train stations while looking over his shoulder, intercut with the obligatory scenes in a CIA crisis suite filled with rows of surveillance monitors on the walls, with a steely-eyed Lee demonstrating an almost Spidey Sense of where to spot Bourne in a crowd ("Stop...back up two seconds...pause...enhance the image...it's HIM!"). In the most apparent sign of the shift in writing focus, Damon has very little dialogue here, and Vikander doesn't have much to other than look really grim and serious, her Heather Lee coming across like the least fun person on the planet (she's essentially a young version of Joan Allen's Pamela Landy). Jones relies on a lot of his stoical Sam Gerard routine, periodically barking "Find him!" and stopping just short of ordering Cassel's "The Asset" on a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse, and doghouse in the area. Damon's three previous BOURNE films were smartly-plotted thrillers with intense action sequences, while JASON BOURNE just dispenses with the notion of a story making much sense, but works as an over-the-top action movie, albeit one you've seen several times before. It's not so much a dumbing down as it is giving people what they want. To that extent, it's a good time, but certainly a step below the first three films, particularly the two Damon-Greengrass collaborations.

CAFE SOCIETY
(US - 2016)

Written and directed by Woody Allen. Cast: Steve Carell, Jesse Eisenberg, Blake Lively, Kristen Stewart, Jeannie Berlin, Parker Posey, Corey Stoll, Ken Stott, Sari Lennick, Stephen Kunken, Sheryl Lee, Paul Schneider, Anna Camp, Douglas McGrath, Tony Sirico, Richard Portnow, voice of Woody Allen. (PG-13, 96 mins)

CAFE SOCIETY is the annual Woody Allen obligation, 2016 edition, and it's his strongest work since he directed Cate Blanchett to an Oscar in 2013's BLUE JASMINE. Latter-day Allen, particularly in this decade, is wildly inconsistent, ranging from his biggest commercial success in decades with 2011's MIDNIGHT IN PARIS to two of his career worsts with 2012's completely phoned-in TO ROME WITH LOVE and 2015's embarrassing IRRATIONAL MAN. Mainly, late-period Woody consists of mildly enjoyable trifles that are forgotten soon after watching. His 47th film as a director in 47 years (1981 was the last year he took off), CAFE SOCIETY isn't top-tier Allen by any means, but it's better than a lot of what he's done in the last ten or so years, exhibiting a bit more ambition and depth to go along with the requisite Windsor font-opening credits set to a scratchy jazz standard (most of the compositions are new recordings by Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks). Working for the first time with the great Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (LAST TANGO IN PARIS, APOCALYPSE NOW, THE LAST EMPEROR), Allen achieves one of his best-looking films with the digitally-shot CAFE SOCIETY, which has a lot of laughs but is never played too broadly, with a melancholy streak that grows more apparent as it goes on.

In late 1930s Hollywood, idealistic young Woody surrogate (Allen himself narrates the film, and the 80-year-old legend's voice is starting to sound a little frail) Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg) arrives from the Bronx, hoping to land a job with his uncle Phil Stern (Steve Carell), a high-powered agent-to-the-stars. A relentless name-dropper ("I'm expecting a call from Ginger Rogers," he says to anyone who will listen at a posh party), Stern wheels and deals and can barely make the time for his nephew, but he does get him some gofer work delivering messages and driving people around. Bobby eventually works his way up to script reader for a big studio and falls head over heels for Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), one of Phil's secretaries. Vonnie is flattered by Bobby's attention, but she's already in a relationship. Unbeknownst to all parties--initially--Vonnie's boyfriend is the much-older Phil, who's ready to leave Karen (Sheryl Lee), his wife of 25 years. When Phil decides he can't break his wife's heart, Vonnie and Bobby become a couple and it isn't long before they all realize their connection, and Phil finally walks out on his wife, insisting he'll kill himself if he can't be with Vonnie.

This plotline takes up most of the first hour of CAFE SOCIETY before Allen does a bit of a time jump in which Bobby has left Hollywood and has moved back to NYC, working as a manager at a swanky club owned by his older brother Ben (Corey Stoll), a mobster gaining notoriety in the city. We see a vastly different Bobby from the shy, nebbishy, Woody-type we saw in Hollywood. He's cool, confidant, and a player. Allen does some clever misdirection here with the presentation of this "new" Bobby, almost as if a chunk of the movie was missing. And just when you're thinking this change in Eisenberg's performance seems forced and lacking in credibility, that's because it is. When the Hollywood past comes blithely strolling into his brother's Manhattan nightclub, that facade immediately vanishes and Bobby is Bobby again: awkward, hesitant, unable to look someone in the eye. The only difference is that it's now accompanied by a palpable anger. Eisenberg has done some great work (THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, THE SOCIAL NETWORK), but when he gets too "Eisenberg"-ish, he can be an acquired taste (his dreadful performance in BATMAN V SUPERMAN is a perfect example). His Allen impression in the first half is among the better ones Woody's commissioned for his films (remember Kenneth Branagh's cringe-inducing Woody in CELEBRITY?), but the actor is able to build the Bobby character using the Allen persona as a starting point, and the abrupt switch from man-about-town Bobby to the real Bobby is some of the most convincing work Eisenberg's ever done. This is his third pairing with Stewart, after ADVENTURELAND and AMERICAN ULTRA, and they really click here, as do Eisenberg and Blake Lively, who turns up in the second half of the film as a new object of Bobby's affections. Jeannie Berlin steals every scene she's in as Bobby's mother, taking the "harping Jewish matriarch" stereotype and running with it, along with Ken Stott as Bobby's grumbling father, who's always complaining about his brother-in-law Phil ("You don't just walk out on your wife because a newer one comes along" he tells his wife, adding "You're not winning any beauty contests, but I stuck with you!"). CAFE SOCIETY is as thematically and stylistically formulaic as almost every other Allen film, but there's a little more substance to this one than he's demonstrated in his more recent offerings. Judging from the pattern, Woody's 2017 film should be a disappointment, but in the meantime, CAFE SOCIETY shows the legendary filmmaker in pretty solid form.

THE LOBSTER
(Ireland/UK/Greece/France/Netherlands - 2015; US release 2016)

The English-language debut of Greek DOGTOOTH auteur Yorgos Lanthimos, THE LOBSTER is an absurdist, dystopian satire that's equal parts Stanley Kubrick, Lars von Trier, and Franz Kafka. Set in a near future where being romantically unattached is forbidden, college professor David (a schlubby Colin Farrell) is dumped by his wife for another guy. The authorities cuff him and escort him to The Hotel, a government-sanctioned facility where people have 45 days to find their perfect partner or they'll be turned into an animal of their choice. Accompanying David to The Hotel is his dog, who used to be his older brother until he failed to find a partner by the end of his last 45 days. The rules at The Hotel are ironclad and strictly enforced: you must have some similar physical trait with a potential mate, prompting a limping widower (Ben Whishaw)--even those whose spouses have died must report to The Hotel immediately following the funeral--to cause injuries that make his nose bleed when he's attracted to a chronic nosebleeder (Jessica Barden); sexual stimulation can only be provided by dry-humping the maid/sex therapist (Ariane Labed), and masturbation is forbidden, as a lisping man (John C. Reilly) learns when the punishment is having his hand burned in a toaster in front of everyone. The unattached can buy more days by going on daily "Hunts," where they find illegal loners in the surrounding woods and shoot them with tranquilizer guns and bring them back to The Hotel. Down to his seven days, David desperately attempts to bond with The Heartless Woman (Angeliki Papoulia), so named because she's the record holder at capturing loners and extending her stay. When that fails, he stages a daring escape and is welcomed into the woods by the Loner leader (Lea Seydoux), where he finds love with a similarly near-sighted woman (Rachel Weisz), only to find that the Loner philosophy is the exact opposite: love is forbidden.

Even that synopsis is just scratching the surface with everything going on in THE LOBSTER. Once out of The Hotel, the story takes some unexpected twists and turns, but Lanthimos also slows it down, and it isn't quite as effective as the absolutely brilliant first hour, which has some of the most bizarre and wildly inventive ideas in any movie this year. Lanthimos and co-writer Efthymus Filippou don't clearly lay out the rules of this unnamed society, though the characters themselves are aware and never seem shocked by the insanity of what's their "normal." Instead, they just drop one baffling revelation and rule after another on the audience, making David's predicament both nightmarish and darkly hilarious. It's laugh out loud funny when David turns into a total prick to convince The Heartless Woman that he's her guy, like kicking a little girl in the shin or not lifting a finger to help her when she pretends to be choking as a way to test just how much of a heartless asshole--like her--that he is. The same goes for The Heartless Woman's utterly robotic display of dirty talk ("Do you mind if we fuck in the position where I can see your face?" she asks David as she's bent over, face down on the bed). THE LOBSTER--so named because that's David's choice of animal to be turned into should he not find a partner in 45 days--loses some momentum in the "loner" half of the story, though there's interesting parallels in the way the Loner leader is just as totalitarian and barbaric as the people who run The Hotel (her ultimate revenge on the hotel manager, played by Olivia Colman, is quite good). A love it-or-hate it proposition, THE LOBSTER is a dark, disturbing, and often hysterically funny one-of-a-kind work from a consistently bold and provocative filmmaker (if you haven't seen DOGTOOTH, you need to), and an instant cult classic. I wish the second half was as strong as the first, but this is still one of the year's best films, and one that sticks with you long after it's over. (R, 119 mins)

I AM WRATH
(US - 2016)

Continuing his slide into the netherworld of VOD, John Travolta dons his CRIMINAL ACTIVITIES Big Boy helmet wig for this C-grade JOHN WICK ripoff, playing a seemingly ordinary guy avenging the murder of his wife. Shot and set in Columbus, OH, I AM WRATH has Travolta as Stanley Hall, a former auto plant manager who's jumped by three assailants, one of whom, Charley (Luis Da Silva, Jr) stabs his wife Vivian (Rebecca De Mornay) to death. Vivian was part of an independent team hired by Governor Meserve (Patrick St. Esprit) to verify the state's clean water percentages. Stanley isn't convinced it was a random attack when Charley is apprehended and useless Det. Gibson (Sam Trammell as Not Quite Colin Farrell) shrugs and lets him go with the explanation "Eh, people like him don't last long. He'll O.D. soon enough." Of course, Stanley happens to have been a lethal black-ops mercenary prior to giving that all up for Vivian, so he calls his old buddy Dennis (Christopher Meloni) to track down Charley for him so he can get to the reason Vivian was killed. Gee, is there any chance the corrupt cops are in cahoots with the governor, who didn't like the numbers Vivian turned in, therefore needing her to be silenced? Maybe, considering it's riddled with cliched lines like "This goes all the way to the top."

Written by Paul Sloan (who plays one of the villains), I AM WRATH is the kind of movie that has zero trust in its audience, overexplaining everything and flashing back to past comments as if its simple plot is too complex to follow. It's heavy-handed to the point of self-parody, such as the shot where an enraged Stanley throws a Bible across the room and it lands with the page opened to the Jeremiah passage about "the wrath of the Lord." Gibson is one of the most absurdly and obviously corrupt cops you'll ever see in this kind of movie. There's no subtlety to the direction of Chuck Russell (THE MASK, ERASER), helming his first film since 2002's THE SCORPION KING. Travolta and Russell came onboard late, as the film was originally pitched to Nicolas Cage with William Friedkin (!) set to direct. That would've turned out better than the thoroughly generic film I AM WRATH ended up being. It's so sloppy that it can't even keep the name of its villain straight--in some scenes, he's "Meserve" and in others "Merserve." Travolta has a few scenes where he puts forth some acting effort, though it's pretty obvious that the 62-year-old icon is doubled almost Seagal-style in the the action scenes. The one bright spot in I AM WRATH, which skipped theaters entirely and debuted on VOD, is Meloni, once again busting his hump to salvage a middling, forgettable actioner (though MARAUDERS was a bit better than this). Travolta's just at the "Who gives a shit?" stage of his career, but Meloni throws in enough wiseass asides and bizarre quirks that he's always interesting to watch even when he's just standing there wondering why he ever left LAW & ORDER: SVU. (R, 91 mins)

SNIPER: GHOST SHOOTER
(US - 2016)

The sixth entry in the SNIPER franchise--not counting the misleadingly-titled recent Steven Seagal vehicle SNIPER: SPECIAL OPS--SNIPER: GHOST SHOOTER is the third to star the almost-lifelike Chad Michael Collins as Brandon Beckett, son of original SNIPER Thomas Beckett, played by Tom Berenger in the first, second, third, and fifth films. Berenger, who wasn't in the 2011 reboot SNIPER: RELOADED, but returned for 2014's SNIPER: LEGACY, sits this one out, though Billy Zane, who co-starred in the first and fourth films, is back as Sniper Jr's commander Richard Miller. This time, they're on a mission in Eastern Europe, surveilling the Trans-Georgian Pipeline, a terrorist-targeted gas line stretching from Georgia into Europe. All the while, every move they make, coordinated by their commander (when Dennis Haysbert announces "I'll be quarterbacking this from the JSOC office in Turkey," that's straight-to-DVD code for "I'm barely going to be in the rest of this movie") and a civilian contractor/Sniper Jr. love interest (Stephanie Vogt), is anticipated by the nefarious Gazakov (Velislav Pavlov). Gazakov is the "ghost shooter" of the title, a lethal sniper who's able to pinpoint the exact location of the American military team, indicating the operation has a mole or he's been able to hack into their network. It's never really explained how he tracks them, but it hardly makes a difference, as veteran DTV sequel director Don Michael Paul (LAKE PLACID: THE FINAL CHAPTER, JARHEAD 2, TREMORS 5, KINDERGARTEN COP 2) is more focused on firefights, digital blood, and CGI explosions. Collins is as bland as ever, and Zane has little to do other than bark orders and tough-guy jargon ("There is no next time...there's only ONE time!"), while other characters talk like people who've seen too many action movies ("Say hello to my Russian friend!" cackles a Russian liaison as he blows some bad guys away, before telling Sniper Jr "Welcome to the wild, wild east!"). SNIPER: GHOST SHOOTER is pretty standard-issue, jingoistic, DTV, shot-in-Bulgaria military porn--with Paul repeatedly letting the camera linger on fetishized shots of empty shells as they spill out of weapons--and offers little that's new or interesting beyond killing 100 minutes. You could do a lot worse, but that doesn't mean you should expect much. (R, 99 mins)

HELLHOLE
(US - 1985)

Directed by Pierre De Moro. Written by Vincent Mongol (Aaron Butler), Lance Dickson and Mark Evan Schwartz. Cast: Ray Sharkey, Judy Landers, Marjoe Gortner, Mary Woronov, Richard Cox, Terry Moore, Edy Williams, Robert Darcy (Robert Z'Dar), Marneen Fields, Martin Beck, Cliff Emmich, Martin West, Dyanne Thorne, Lynn Borden, Lamya Derval, Natalie Main, Ann-Elizabeth Chatterton, Carole Ita White. (R, 95 mins)

A women-in-prison take on THE SNAKE PIT and ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, the wonderfully sleazy and boundlessly stupid HELLHOLE was the first and last film distributed by the short-lived Arkoff International Pictures. Formed by Samuel Z. Arkoff (1918-2001) after his American International Pictures was acquired by Filmways in 1979, Arkoff International Pictures allowed the B-movie legend to keep the AIP abbreviation, but lightning didn't strike twice. Arkoff's new AIP produced a handful of genre titles that were acquired by others--UFDC released 1982's Q, Comworld released 1983's THE FINAL TERROR, and Orion released 1984's UP THE CREEK. But HELLHOLE, which played in theaters over the spring and summer of 1985, was also distributed by Arkoff and his son Louis, and it promptly brought the curtain down on Arkoff International Pictures, quickly and quietly closing a largely forgotten chapter of the famed drive-in and exploitation icon's storied career.

HELLHOLE was written by Aaron Butler, using the pseudonym "Vincent Mongol," with separate "additional dialogue" credits going to both Lance Dickson and Mark Evan Schwartz, an almost certain sign of script revisions during a troubled shoot. As "Mongol," Butler also wrote the incredible 1983 trash classic CHAINED HEAT, so that should give you some idea of what to expect with HELLHOLE. Aerobics instructor Susan (Judy Landers) witnesses her mother (Lynn Borden) being strangled by psychotic Silk (Ray Sharkey), who's after the location of some papers Mom had stashed away. Said papers go into all the details of the evil experiments taking place at Ashland, a sanitarium for women. Silk has been hired by Monroe (Martin Beck) and Rollins (Martin West), two corrupt members of the state board of examiners trying to cover up what's going on at Ashland. Suffering from amnesia after surviving a head injury escaping from Silk, Susan is transferred to--wait for it--Ashland, where kinky lesbian Dr. Fletcher (Mary Woronov) is using the scantily-clad patients as guinea pigs in an abandoned building on the grounds--referred to as the "Hellhole" by those in the know--for some brain serum/chemical lobotomy nonsense that apparently has a 0% survival rate. It's not a well-kept secret that Fletcher's up to some shady shit--crusading medical board chief Sydnee Hammond (Terry Moore, a long way from MIGHTY JOE YOUNG, her COME BACK LITTLE SHEBA Oscar nomination, and being Howard Hughes' alleged secret wife) already has an inside man, Ron (CRUISING's Richard Cox) conducting an investigation while working as an orderly. Also improbably brought on as an orderly is Silk, who's there to kill Susan after finding out what she knows about the location of her mother's papers. To pass the time, Silk manages to seamlessly blend in by acting like a complete psycho, sexually abusing some of the women, and using an empty room to create his own workplace S&M fuck pad (what do you expect from the same writer who gave us a warden with a jacuzzi in his office in CHAINED HEAT?) while somehow avoiding any kind of disciplinary action whatsoever from either Fletcher or the more altruistic, level-headed Dr. Dane (Marjoe Gortner). Just to give you an idea of how sordid HELLHOLE is, Marjoe Gortner plays one of the relatively nice characters.

Director Pierre De Moro (SAVANNAH SMILES) does a workmanlike job getting the film in the can, but HELLHOLE is definitely worth seeing for fans of the 1980s women-in-prison revival that gifted us such B-movie favorites as THE CONCRETE JUNGLE, CHAINED HEAT, CAGED WOMEN, WOMEN'S PRISON MASSACRE, THE NAKED CAGE, and REFORM SCHOOL GIRLS. The unusual cast gives it some cult movie cache, from the likes of Gortner, Landers (then a TV favorite with her older sister Audrey), buxom Russ Meyer muse/ex-wife Edy Williams, future MANIAC COP star Robert Z'Dar (billed as "Robert Darcy") as a hulking orderly, ILSA, SHE WOLF OF THE SS' Dyanne Thorne in a small role as a crazed patient, and Moore, a fading '50s actress who, a year earlier at 55, became the oldest Playboy centerfold in their August 1984 issue. However, HELLHOLE is dominated by two competing batshit performances from Woronov and Sharkey. Woronov, who's interviewed on Shout! Factory's new Blu-ray release, clearly knows this is campy silliness and just has fun with it, as evidenced by the long, slow, wet kiss she gives her latest failed experiment (Marneen Fields) after torturing her to death.

But it's Sharkey who wins the overacting honors for HELLHOLE. Whether he's singing nursery rhymes or perpetually smirking or just standing there looking like a brainless dipshit, you can't take your eyes off of him, usually for all the wrong reasons. How many bridges did Sharkey burn to go from winning a Golden Globe for his breakout performance in 1980's THE IDOLMAKER to rolling around in a mudbath threesome with Edy Williams in a sleazy women-in-prison potboiler from the makers of CHAINED HEAT a mere five years later? Sharkey had a career year in 1980, with starring roles in THE IDOLMAKER, HEART BEAT, and Paul Mazursky's JULES & JIM remake WILLIE & PHIL, followed by a 1981 hosting gig on the ill-fated Jean Doumanian-led sixth season of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE, but his momentum stalled and things quickly derailed when he opted to become a cautionary tale. Sharkey began using heroin not long after his Golden Globe win, and the downward spiral was depressingly apparent in the rapidly declining quality of work he was getting. By 1984, his career completely crashed and burned, and he was reduced to a supporting role in the Lorenzo Lamas breakdancing bomb BODY ROCK. And did anyone see the same year's patchwork clusterfuck DU-BEAT-E-O, a barely-released look at the L.A. punk scene from WELCOME BACK KOTTER co-creator Alan Sacks that starred Sharkey and Fear bassist Derf Scratch, along with a prominently-billed Joan Jett in six-year-old footage from an unfinished 1978 documentary on The Runaways? Relative to the projects he was being offered at the time, Sharkey probably saw a top-billed starring role in HELLHOLE as a step up.

Ray Sharkey (1952-1993)

He managed occasional guest spots on TV shows like MIAMI VICE, THE EQUALIZER, and CRIME STORY, and was lucky to score small roles in Brian De Palma's little-loved gangster comedy WISE GUYS and the Richard Gere-Kim Basinger thriller NO MERCY (both 1986), but it took several stints in rehab before he finally kicked his heroin addiction. His marriage ending in divorce over his drug use and multiple overdoses, Sharkey enjoyed a brief comeback with an acclaimed recurring role from 1987-1989 as mobster Sonny Steelgrave on the CBS series WISEGUY, and was such a prominent face at the network that he even did a drunk driving PSA for them after being involved in four drug-related car accidents a few years earlier. But offscreen, he replaced his heroin addiction with even more reckless and grossly irresponsible behavior. Though he managed to keep it secret for several years, he was diagnosed as HIV-positive in the late '80s after years of heroin use and shared needles. In complete denial of his medical condition, Sharkey continued having unprotected sex with scores of women--well over 100, according to his manager. By 1992, with his WISEGUY gig long gone and his career in the toilet, Sharkey was back on drugs and was busted by Canadian customs when a routine cargo inspection uncovered a package of cocaine and heroin being shipped to him from Los Angeles to Vancouver, where he was working on the CBS series THE HAT SQUAD. Vancouver police searched his hotel room and uncovered more heroin and he was arrested and fired from the show. The same year, his second marriage ended because of his drug abuse and his condition progressed to full-blown AIDS. When it became known that he was aware of his HIV-positive status and didn't tell his partners, he was sued by three different women who accused him of knowingly exposing them to infection. One of the women was model Elena Monica, daughter of Borscht Belt comedian and third-string Rat Pack member Corbett Monica. Elena Monica won a $52 million settlement against Sharkey's estate after he died in June of 1993. The ruling was essentially worthless, as the actor was broke by the time of his death, not living long enough to face judgment in any of the lawsuits filed against him. The 40-year-old Sharkey was reportedly down to 90 lbs when he died, and he looked gaunt and tired in his final film appearance as the bad guy in the Burt Reynolds kiddie comedy COP AND A HALF, released two months before his death. A gifted actor--even in junk like HELLHOLE--unable to control and conquer the demons that destroyed his life and forever changed the lives of at least three women, Sharkey's legacy is a tragic one: in 2015, his only child, Cecelia Sharkey, born in 1988 to Sharkey and his second wife, was charged with murder, accused of bludgeoning her boyfriend's mother to death with a baseball bat.

HELLHOLE opening in Toledo, OH on 6/14/1985

HELLHOLE playing at two local malls

James Spader sandwiched between DEF-CON 4
and NIGHT PATROL. This kid's goin' nowhere.

A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING
(US/Germany/France/Switzerland/Mexico - 2016)

There isn't much of a sense of urgency in this occasionally obvious and heavy-handed midlife crisis/culture clash drama based on the 2012 novel by Dave Eggers. It's a rare instance of a Tom Hanks movie not getting much of a push, with Lionsgate getting it on just 520 screens at its widest release. Hanks' durable, everyman persona makes him perfectly cast in this fish-out-of-water story centering on a skidding sales rep who's seen better days, being offered One Last Chance to Close the Sale of His Life. Alan Clay (Hanks) hasn't really liked himself much since selling out an American Schwin plant to China, a deal that put several hundred people--including his dad (Tom Skerritt)--out of work. His marriage fell apart and though he feels like a failure, his relationship with 21-year-old daughter Kit (Tracey Fairaway) remains strong thanks to her dislike of her mother. Now working for a tech company, Alan's been handed the plum contract of setting up IT service for Saudi Arabia's royal family. Once on site, he's constantly given the runaround, the wi-fi doesn't work, and he's so bogged down by jet lag that he repeatedly oversleeps and misses his shuttle to the work site. He forms a tentative friendship with Yousef (Alexander Black), a buddy of the hotel concierge, who drives him to the palace grounds every day in his beat-up clunker. A rapidly growing cyst sends Alan to a local doctor, Zahra (Sarita Choudhury), for whom an attraction is mutual, but societal customs initially prevent any moves from being made.

And that's about it. There's a health scare and Alan starts drinking to excess in an attempt to counter his malaise, and in his interactions with both Yousef and Zahra, he learns to appreciate life and pull himself together, while doing what he can to help his new friends in their assorted plights (Yousef's involvement with a married woman and Zahra's pending divorce and a life lived as a second class citizen, even though she's a brilliant doctor). A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING is an unusual project for director Tom Tykwer, normally a more rambunctious filmmaker best known for the innovative 1999 cult classic RUN LOLA RUN. Tykwer directed Hanks in 2012's underappreciated CLOUD ATLAS, and Hanks, a huge fan of the Eggers novel, was likely instrumental in ensuring Tykwer could make this film at all. But even Hanks' involvement didn't generate any Hollywood interest, as the film was an independently-financed, five-country co-production, with extensive location work done in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Morocco. It's easily Tykwer's most low-key film to date, and somewhat European in its pacing and style, probably why Lionsgate didn't see much potential for it at US multiplexes, instead relegating it to its Roadside Attractions arthouse division. It really only starts gaining momentum very late, when Alan and Zahra start to admit their feelings for one another, after the symbolic removal of the cyst on Alan's back is the literal weight lifted off of his back. Tykwer more or less abandons Yousef, who's such a prominent character that you expect him to be there by the end, and a potential love interest for Alan in Danish contractor Hanne (THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY's Sidse Babett Knudsen) is a subplot that goes absolutely nowhere. Skerritt's brief performance looks phoned-in from his living room, and Ben Whishaw, a Tykwer semi-regular since 2006's underrated and insane PERFUME: THE STORY OF A MURDERER, has even less screen time as the titular hologram, designed as a long-distance meeting facilitator for the Saudi king. It's got some expectedly rock-solid work by Hanks, who gets strong support from Choudhury and a very likable performance by Black, but A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING is a harmless trifle that just never really catches fire. (R, 98 mins)

FATHERS & DAUGHTERS
(US/Italy - 2016)

The warning signs are all there if you look closely: a movie you've heard nothing about, featuring a star-studded cast with several Oscar wins and nominations between them, debuting on VOD in 2016 courtesy of the Redbox-ready B-movie genre outfit Vertical Entertainment with no fanfare, still sporting its 2014 copyright. Yes, FATHERS & DAUGHTERS has spent some time gathering dust on a shelf, a bad movie that's so earnest and self-serious that is occasionally feels like an act of cruelty to be bagging on it. A maudlin, overwrought tearjerker that will have even the most easy weepers rolling their eyes, shaking their heads, and calling bullshit, FATHERS & DAUGHTERS is directed by Italian filmmaker Gabriele Muccino, who had some success in Hollywood several years back with a pair of Will Smith dramas, THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS (2006) and SEVEN POUNDS (2008), before tanking with the instantly forgotten Gerard Butler flop PLAYING FOR KEEPS (2012). Muccino fashions FATHERS & DAUGHTERS as a shameless weepie, telling two intercutting, parallel stories taking place in 1989 and 2014. In 1989, blocked Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jake Davis (Russell Crowe, also one of the producers) is behind the wheel when a tragic car accident takes the life of his wife, leaving him to raise their seven-year-old daughter Katie (Kylie Rogers) alone. Jake's grief is overwhelming and, coupled with a head injury he sustained in the accident that causes random seizures that threaten a psychotic break, he's institutionalized for several months while Katie stays with his late wife's wealthy sister Elizabeth (Diane Kruger) and her high-powered lawyer husband William (Bruce Greenwood). Once Jake is out, Elizabeth, still bitter over her sister's death, wants custody of Katie. Jake's latest book becomes a critical laughingstock and commercial bomb, and he's running out of money to fight the impending court battle. In 2014, adult Katie (Amanda Seyfried) is a grad student and social worker attempting to break through to a troubled girl (BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD Oscar-nominee Quvenzhane Wallis) when she isn't trying to LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR her way through her daddy and abandonment issues, frequently picking up random men at bars for public quickies (Jake isn't around in 2014, so it's obvious he's died at some point in the 25-year interim). She meets an aspiring writer, Jake Davis superfan, and all-around good guy in Cameron (Aaron Paul), and their tender lovemaking is a stark contrast to numerous scenes of Katie getting drilled from behind in the backseat of a car or in a men's room shitter at a bar. Of course, nice-guy Cameron is exactly like her father and therefore, the film posits, exactly what she needs, so she repeatedly tries to sabotage a potentially good thing with her inability to commit and face all the trauma in her past with her mother's death and her father's breakdown.

Never mind the cliche of a woman resorting to promiscuity over unresolved parental issues--Muccino and debuting screenwriter Brad Desch have no notion of the concept of storytelling subtlety. They floridly hammer everything home in an overbaked fashion both in dialogue and filmmaking techniques, with one Katie/Cameron argument pointlessly played out in a long, dizzying single take down a NYC street, into a cab, and back out on the street again for no reason other than Muccino trying to make something out of nothing. Or there's clumsy exposition drops like our first look at adult Katie, when one of her fellow grad students runs up to her and exclaims "I can't believe you're about to get a graduate degree in Psychology!" It just grows more laughable as it goes on, in the 1989 scenes with an increasingly distracted Jake repeatedly trying to make amends with young Katie by referring to her nickname "Potato Chip," the two of them singing along to a Michael Bolton cover of Burt Bacharach's "(They Long to Be) Close to You," and Jake being hit by seizures at all the predictable times, like a major book signing (he has pills for this condition--why doesn't he take them?). In the 2014 scenes, FATHERS & DAUGHTERS turns into an all-out howler by the end, with Katie about to leave a bar to partake in an orgy with some strangers when the Bolton cover of the Bacharach song comes on the jukebox, prompting a total meltdown. This is a non-descript little dive bar in NYC that's playing alternative music at the beginning of the scene. Not even the most insufferable Williamsburg hipster douchebag would play a Michael Bolton song. And why is that song even a choice on a jukebox in this bar? And when a night out is ruined by the drunken appearance of one of Katie's one-nighters from a year ago ("I fucked you on your kitchen floor!" he yells), she tries to explain her past to Cameron, a guy so nice and sensitive that a never-played acoustic guitar is visible on a rocking chair in his apartment, with "You thought you were getting Potato Chip, and you ended up with some cheap piece of ass." What else? Oh, during an argument between Jake and William over the looming custody fight, a sneering Greenwood is actually required to bark the line "I've got more money than God!" The film completely strands its capable actors with unplayable roles, whether it's Crowe slipping in and out of a broad Noo Yawk accent or Kruger delivering a shrill, wine-swilling performance as the boozy, bitchy control freak Elizabeth. Younger actors Wallis and Rogers manage to escape unharmed, but there's also nothing supporting roles for Octavia Spencer (an Oscar winner for THE HELP) as Katie's boss, two-time Oscar-nominee Janet McTeer, wasted in one brief scene as Katie's therapist, and Jane Fonda in a small role as Jake's caring agent who can't bring herself to tell him he's washed up. Ludicrous, manipulative, and completely over-the-top, FATHERS & DAUGHTERS definitely has some potential to be an audience participation camp classic down the road. (R, 116 mins)

ANTHROPOID
(Czech Republic/UK/France - 2016)

Directed by Sean Ellis. Written by Sean Ellis and Anthony Frewin. Cast: Cillian Murphy, Jamie Dornan, Toby Jones, Charlotte Le Bon, Anna Geislerova, Harry Lloyd, Sam Keeley, Jiri Simek, Marcin Dorocinski, Jan Hajek, Alena Mihulova, Bill Milner, Pavel Reznicik, Vaclav Neuzil, Mish Boyko, Andrej Polak, Jan Budar, Roman Zach, Detlef Bothe. (R, 120 mins)

It's probably difficult to bring anything new to the WWII genre after 70+ years worth of movies, and ANTHROPOID doesn't really try. Despite a title that sounds like some kind of ALIEN spinoff. the film tells the story of Operation Anthropoid, the 1942 plot to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich--#3 in the Nazi chain of command after Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, and who chaired the Wannsee Conference that laid the groundwork for the "Final Solution"--in Czechoslovakia. It's an event that's been depicted in movies going back to when it was still breaking news in 1943, as Fritz Lang's HANGMEN ALSO DIE! and a pre-tearjerker Douglas Sirk's HITLER'S MADMAN were loose chronicles of Operation Anthropoid filtered through the lens of patriotic, crowd-pleasing Hollywood war effort propaganda. The 1964 Czech film ATENTAT and 1975's OPERATION DAYBREAK (from three-time 007 director Lewis Gilbert) also told the Anthropoid story. Director/co-writer/cinematographer Sean Ellis (CASHBACK, THE BROKEN, METRO MANILA) is able to bring more bleak brutality to this than films from the 1940s could and, contrasted with the glossy feel of big WWII epics, his use of handheld shaky-cam brings a gritty, in-your-face immediacy to the proceedings despite frequent overuse. While ANTHROPOID doesn't reinvent the wheel as far as WWII programmers go, and there's a couple of hoary cliches and obvious symbolism in the finale (a candle extinguishing just as someone's life ends? Really?), it's well-acted, the period detail is excellent, and Ellis nails several intense and nerve-shredding set pieces throughout.

Parachuting into German-occupied Czechoslovakia as part of the Anglo-Czech Allied operation, Josef Gabcik (Cillian Murphy) and Jan Kubis (Jamie Dornan) meet with Czech Resistance leaders Uncle Hajsky (Toby Jones) and Ladislav Vanek (Marcin Dorocinski), who arrange for them to be sheltered by the Moravecs (Alena Mihulova, Pavel Reznicik) and their 15-year-old violin prodigy son Ata (Bill Milner). Their orders are to assassinate Heydrich (Detlef Bothe), the head of Nazi forces in Czechoslovakia, and while the plan is in the works, they manage to blend into their surroundings by being seen with two local women, Marie (Charlotte Le Bon) and Lenka (Anna Geislerova), who are also part of the Resistance. When word comes down in the final days of May 1942 that Heydrich is being reassigned to France, Gabcik and Kubis immediately go forward with the plan on May 27, with the help of other officers and Resistance members. It almost immediately flies off the rails when Gabcik steps in front of Heydrich's car to open fire and his machine gun jams, leading to an explosive battle erupting on a busy Prague street. Kubis blows up Heydrich's car with a bomb and the Nazi takes a few rounds in the ongoing crossfire. Heydrich would die from his injuries a week later, but in the immediate afterward of the execution of Operation Anthropoid, Gabcik, Kubis, and the others are under the impression that they failed. Upon Heydrich's death, an enraged Hitler sends more troops into Czechoslovakia. The hunt for Heydrich's killers begins at Lidice, where any male over the age of 16 is executed and the women and children are rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Gabcik, Kubis, and five other Czech officers take refuge in a crypt underneath the Cyril and Methodius Cathedral in Prague, where they remain undetected for two weeks until Czech Resistance member Karel Curda (Jiri Simek), fearing for the safety of his family, rats out the Moravecs, which leads to the Nazi siege of the cathedral on June 18, 1942, where the seven Czech soldiers--three in the church and four down below in the cavernous crypt--manage to hold off the Germans for six hours.

Ellis' handling of the attempt on Heydrich's life on a crowded street and the final siege at the cathedral are masterfully done. It's edge-of-your-seat suspense, even when you know the outcome. Prior to that, Ellis and co-writer Anthony Frewin, a trusted member of Stanley Kubrick's inner circle from 1968's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY to 1999's EYES WIDE SHUT, and the writer of 2007's COLOR ME KUBRICK, don't really delve too much into the characters other than what we need to know. The filmmakers make a concerted and unflinching effort to stay close to the facts, even if it paints the heroes in negative light. Murphy's Gabcik is driven and obsessed, while Dornan's Kubis is more emotional and prone to choking at clutch moments, such as an early anxiety attack that prevents him from shooting a fleeing traitor and his allowing himself to fall in love with Marie (cue a disdainful Gabcik inevitably calling him out with a "Why are we here?" lecture). They also don't shy away from depicting the kinds of psychological and physical torture the Resistance members endured, particularly in the horror inflicted on young Ata Moravec. There isn't much here you haven't seen in any number of WWII movies, but it's a riveting story and the pace is relentless. Considering the season and the depressing glut of franchises, brands, and regurgitated remakes out there right now, ANTHROPOID is a welcome bit of grown-up counterprogramming that probably won't get much attention in theaters, but will undoubtedly find a larger audience on streaming and cable down the road.

EMANUELLE IN AMERICA
(Italy - 1977)

Directed by Joe D'Amato (Aristide Massaccesi). Written by Maria Pia Fusco. Cast: Laura Gemser, Gabriele Tinti, Paola Senatore, Roger Browne, Riccardo Salvino, Lars Bloch, Maria Piera Regoli, Matilde Dell'Aglio, Stefania Nocilli, Giulio Bianchi, Efrem Appel, Lorraine De Selle, Salvatore Baccaro, Renate Kasche, Pedro the Horse. (Unrated, 100 mins)

The most notorious of the tenuously-connected BLACK EMANUELLE series--at least in its uncut version--EMANUELLE IN AMERICA is, for the most part, another globe-trotting travelogue with freelance photojournalist Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) engaging in the usual spontaneous sexcapades. Made as a direct response to Just Jaeckin's X-rated, 1974 global phenomenon EMMANUELLE with Sylvia Kristel, 1975's BLACK EMANUELLE (note one less "m"), directed by Bitto Albertini, showcased 25-year-old, Indonesian-born Gemser in the title role (around the same time, she had a small part in the 1975 Kristel sequel EMMANUELLE: THE JOYS OF A WOMAN). Combining the erotic elements of EMMANUELLE with a nod to blaxploitation, BLACK EMANUELLE was successful enough that Gemser was soon starring in all sorts of softcore erotica that were often exported as EMANUELLE movies even though she sat out the first official sequel. 1976's BLACK EMANUELLE 2, also directed by Albertini, saw Gemser replaced by the George Lazenby of the series, one-and-done Israeli actress Shulamith Lasri, credited as "Sharon Lesley." Gemser, meanwhile, was headlining a slew of unofficial follow-ups that were often shot under one title but released as EMANUELLE movies, like Brunello Rondi's BLACK EMMANUELLE, WHITE EMMANUELLE (1976), which paired her with French actress Annie Belle and reinstated the extra "m" to the title; Enzo D'Ambrosio's boring EMANUELLE ON TABOO ISLAND (1976), which featured five-time Oscar nominee Arthur Kennedy at an all-time career low; Giuseppe Vari's nunsploitation outing SISTER EMANUELLE (1977); Mario Bianchi's sex comedy EMANUELLE IN THE COUNTRY (1978); and the Greek-made drama EMANUELLE'S DAUGHTER (1980). In 1978, perennial D-list producer and later serial Bruno Mattei enabler Franco Gaudenzi (STRIKE COMMANDO, ROBOWAR) tried to get a piece of the action, taking an unreleased mondo documentary and having Gemser host introductions to its segments, releasing it under the title EMANUELLE AND THE EROTIC NIGHTS, which received a US release in 1983 as an early acquisition of Bob and Harvey Weinstein's fledgling Miramax Films. So popular were these EMANUELLE films that Albertini would even be hired to direct Chai Lee as an Asian Emanuelle in the 1977 offshoot YELLOW EMANUELLE.

1976 saw a BLACK EMANUELLE reboot of sorts, with a returning Gemser and veteran cinematographer and journeyman director Aristide Massaccesi (better known as "Joe D'Amato") starting a long partnership that extended beyond just the BLACK EMANUELLEs. 1976's EMANUELLE IN BANGKOK was released around the same time as BLACK EMANUELLE 2 and more or less ignores it, with Emanuelle once again an independent, respected, and sexually-liberated journalist (Lasri's Black Emanuelle was a famous model) sent off to investigate something in some semblance of a plot that's just an excuse for a plethora of sex scenes. Gemser and D'Amato would make five of their own EMANUELLEs, with BANGKOK followed by three in a busy 1977: EMANUELLE IN AMERICA, EMANUELLE AROUND THE WORLD (released in the US in 1980), and the cannibal horror hybrid EMANUELLE AND THE LAST CANNIBALS (released in the US in 1984, after the craze had passed, as TRAP THEM AND KILL THEM, presumably to draw in the MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY crowd). The final installment, 1978's EMANUELLE AND THE WHITE SLAVE TRADE, was a quickie padded with significant amounts of recycled and redubbed footage from previous Gemser EMANUELLEs. Another Gemser/D'Amato collaboration, BLACK COBRA WOMAN (1976), co-starring a slumming and probably shitfaced Jack Palance, was sold in Japan as an EMANUELLE film, and several years later, Gemser would resurrect the Emanuelle-as-crusading-reporter act without D'Amato for a pair of Bruno Mattei women-in-prison movies, 1982's VIOLENCE IN A WOMEN'S PRISON (released in the US in 1984 as CAGED WOMEN), and 1983's immortal WOMEN'S PRISON MASSACRE (released in the US in 1985).

Gemser and offscreen husband and frequent co-star Gabriele
Tinti. They were married from 1976 until his death in 1991.

Fans generally cite EMANUELLE IN AMERICA as the high point of Gemser's EMANUELLE run, but that seems most likely due to its shock value. It's rough going for the uninitiated, especially on Blue Underground's 2003 DVD release, which presents the film in its uncut, 100-minute version (VidAmerica's VHS ran somewhere in the vicinity of 82 minutes). It's a typical Gemser/D'Amato EMANUELLE set-up: moonlighting as a fashion photographer in NYC--with ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN and THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT PART 2 visible on theater marquees, Gemser riding the Roosevelt Island tram, and Big Apple pedestrians predictably gawking at the camera--Emanuelle is almost killed by a model's crazed boyfriend before calming him down the best way she knows how: with a blowjob. She then gets a hot tip about a sex trafficking ring involving wealthy asshole Eric Van Darren (Lars Bloch). Armed with her sneaky pendant camera with a seemingly endless supply of film, Emanuelle infiltrates his group of Zodiac-named women and going by "Virgo," she's privy to all sorts of high society, EYES WIDE SHUT transgressions, including one of the women (SALON KITTY's Paola Senatore), jerking off Van Darren's prized horse Pedro in a scene of explicit bestiality that was obviously cut from most releases. From there, Emanuelle follows Van Darren's duke friend (Gabriele Tinti, Gemser's husband and frequent co-star--they met on BLACK EMANUELLE and married in NYC around the time of EMANUELLE IN AMERICA's shoot, becoming the Bogie & Bacall of Italian trash cinema) to his villa in Venice, where she witnesses an orgy that includes some onscreen fellatio in shots that never involve Gemser. From there, she goes to an island where D'Amato stops the film cold for a solid ten minutes of hardcore sex scenes and money shots involving previously unseen actors (one of whom is Nazisploitation regular Salvatore Baccaro, best known for his credit "and Boris Lugosi as Ook the Neanderthal Man" in 1973's FRANKENSTEIN'S CASTLE OF FREAKS). While on the island, Emanuelle witnesses a copulating couple carrying on as a brutal snuff film plays in the background. An investigation of the snuff film leads her to the nation's capital (why didn't they call this EMANUELLE GOES TO WASHINGTON?), where she's seduced by a corrupt senator (Roger Browne, a Cincinnati, OH native who spent his entire career in Europe) with a penchant for LSD and getting off on the kind of filmed torture tactics that would make him the ideal target for Videodrome. Then it all ends with a wacky, fourth-wall breaking finale involving Emanuelle and her boyfriend (Riccardo Salvino)--yes, she has a boyfriend--and some comical stereotypes of island natives.

Narratively speaking, EMANUELLE IN AMERICA is a mind-boggling mess with little flow and even less logic. But nobody's watching this for storytelling. The more conventional sex scenes are well-handled--a sweaty steamroom hook-up between Emanuelle and Gemini (Lorraine De Selle) is nicely done--and while it's not quite "Run Cheetah Run" from EMANUELLE AND THE WHITE SLAVE TRADE, it's got a great catchy, "English-as-second-language" Nico Fidenco-penned theme song in "Celebrate Myself." But D'Amato just goes too far for the audience that watched these softcore Euro imports on late night Showtime back in the early '80s. Of course, the hardcore elements would've been trimmed (and were only shot by D'Amato as alternate takes for different territories in the first place), but while I see the demand for cum shots if there was potential for this on the XXX circuit, who other than Pedro really wants to see Paola Senatore (who, big surprise, was doing porn a decade later) give a horse a two-handed tugjob? Between that and the disgustingly graphic and very convincing snuff film snippets that D'Amato shot, I question EMANUELLE IN AMERICA's definition of "entertainment." Gemser is as lovely as ever here, but the enjoyment is significantly hampered by all the extraneous shit going on. I'll take the drag queen bowling alley brawl in EMANUELLE AND THE WHITE SLAVE TRADE any day. D'Amato would continue dabbling in all sorts of genres (zombies, cannibals, CONAN and ROAD WARRIOR ripoffs) before his death in 1999, spending the final years of his career in hardcore porn. Gemser would be an exploitation staple well into the '80s, with appearances in 1976's VOYAGE OF THE DAMNED, the 1981 Rankin/Bass period epic THE BUSHIDO BLADE, and an unlikely co-starring role with Michael Landon in the 1983 NBC TV-movie LOVE IS FOREVER (where she was credited as "Moira Chen" when producers didn't want her sexploitation notoriety to be a distraction) representing her only attempts at mainstream crossover. A devastated Gemser would retire from acting when 59-year-old Tinti died of cancer in 1991, though she worked behind the scenes as a costume designer on a few more D'Amato productions (including the legendary TROLL 2) before withdrawing from movies altogether in 1993. Now 65, Gemser lives completely out of the public eye. She gave an audio interview for EMANUELLE IN AMERICA's 2003 DVD release, but her last on-camera appearance to date was in an interview for EMMANUELLE: A HARD LOOK, a 2001 British TV documentary about Sylvia Kristel's EMMANUELLE films by REPO MAN director Alex Cox.

IMPERIUM
(US - 2016)

Written and directed by Daniel Ragussis. Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Toni Collette, Tracy Letts, Sam Trammell, Nestor Carbonell, Burn Gorman, Chris Sullivan, Seth Numrich, Pawel Szajda, Devin Druid, Linc Hand, Adam Maier, Roger Yawson. (R, 108 mins)

It's hard not to be reminded of 1998's AMERICAN HISTORY X or 2002's THE BELIEVER while watching IMPERIUM. It's another chronicle of white supremacy, but while it provides insightful commentary on the nature of fascism, its primary concern is being a straightforward thriller. It's also yet another example of the changing nature of film distribution. Headlined by an actor known the world over, it's a sad commentary that a solid, crackerjack nail-biter like this is relegated to a few screens and a VOD dumping. It didn't cost much to make and it's not an offbeat art film. It's a smart movie that would've been a hit 10-15 years ago, and it's depressing that there's no place for IMPERIUM in today's blockbuster-obsessed, franchise-driven distribution model. It's also a very topical film considering the rhetoric of a major American political party's Presidential nominee, a man whose words and opinions have frequently been termed "fascist." IMPERIUM looks at the motivation behind fascism and what really drives it ("it's about looking for someone to blame"), and does so without being overtly political. There's no liberal vs. conservative soapboxing here, but it does provide a sometimes terrifying look inside the white supremacy culture, much like AMERICAN HISTORY X did. The stereotypes are there, but they don't always apply. White power meetings take place at suburban homes in IMPERIUM. The ugly rhetoric is discussed at backyard barbecues while children play, and where housewives bake cookies decorated with swastikas. These are people you know, and you don't know them at all.

Young FBI agent Nate Foster (Daniel Radcliffe) is a quiet outsider among his colleagues, riding along on raids but spending most of his time at his desk combing through surveillance material. It's his introverted and analytical nature that attracts the attention of Agent Angela Zamparo (Toni Collette). When six sealed barrels of radioactive cesium go missing from an overturned chemical transport vehicle outside of Washington, D.C., Zamparo is convinced it's part of a plot by Richmond-area white power radio host Dallas Wolf (Tracy Letts) to detonate a dirty bomb in the nation's capital. She wants Nate to go undercover as a skinhead and infiltrate Wolf's inner circle. Passing himself off as an embittered vet just back from Iraq, Nate gets his foot in the door by getting chummy with low-level dirtbags like Vince (Pawel Szajda) and Roy (Seth Numrich), guys who talk loud and are always looking for a fight. This introduces him to the more connected Ohio-based religious militia figure Andrew Blackwell (Chris Sullivan) and engineer Gerry Conway (Sam Trammell). While Blackwell is the standard-issue, swastika-sporting skinhead, albeit with more drive, focus, and a seemingly intelligent demeanor than clowns like Vince and Roy, Conway is an upper-middle class suburban husband and father with a successful career. Of course, he's taught his kids that their playhouse needs to be fortified in case "the mud people" attack, but Nate is caught off-guard by how far from the stereotype Conway and his associates present themselves. Conway even tells Nate "You seem a little mature for a skinhead," as they observe the drinking, fighting, and carrying on of Vince and Roy. Nate is eventually introduced to Wolf, by spinning a story about being backed by an investor who wants to take Wolf's show nationwide but needs assurance that his plans are coming to fruition. When a small Geiger counter indicates high levels of radiation in Wolf's house, Nate and Zamparo are convinced that the cesium is on the premises and set in motion a plan to take down Wolf and his followers.

Things don't go according to plan, but little does in IMPERIUM. It's a film that never plays out how you expect it to and adds unpredictable little asides that sometimes border on black comedy: witness the cringeworthy moment when a humiliated Vince, who talks a big game about "going way back with Dallas," isn't even recognized by the radio host when he introduces Nate to him. Or, even funnier, when Nate visits Wolf at his nondescript house in an average neighborhood and finds that this white power hero is a middle-aged man who still lives with his mother. It's her house and the much ballyhooed radio show is broadcast from a tiny den in the basement ("This is just temporary!" Wolf keeps adamantly insisting). Wolf spouts a lot of ideas online and in his speeches ("Diversity is a code word for 'white genocide!'"), but the early signs that he's little more than a shit-stirring troll who regards his followers as little more than useful idiots are telling. It's a very subtle performance by Letts, a veteran playwright and screenwriter (BUG, KILLER JOE, AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY), who's only recently been gaining ground as an actor in films like THE BIG SHORT, ELVIS & NIXON, and an acclaimed turn in INDIGNATION. Radcliffe is credible and believable throughout, though director Daniel Ragussis' script, inspired by a true story involving now-retired FBI agent Michael German, sometimes abandons key figures and plot points. It's stated that "a lot of these white supremacist guys are all talk," but as the true threat presents itself, we never see what happens to some of the others, and this is after Blackwell makes it quite clear something about Nate doesn't gel. But then we never see him again. The audience might also like to know more about the African-American protester at a white power rally who recognizes Nate and asks him what he's doing there (staying in character, Nate has to respond by shouting "Shut the fuck up, n----r!"), but we never see him again.

It's around this time that IMPERIUM pivots from AMERICAN HISTORY X-type statement to a domestic terrorism thriller along the likes of ARLINGTON ROAD or the little-seen UNTHINKABLE. The shift is smooth enough that it isn't awkward or a major disruption, but it's noticeable. And it still works. Though its antagonists differ, IMPERIUM actually has a lot in common with UNTHINKABLE, a terrific film that should've received more exposure than it got, but maybe that's the issue right there. It would be one thing if Radcliffe were paired up with, say, Bruce Willis in a quipping, mismatched buddy actioner about two FBI agents out to stop a white supremacist outfit...if they don't kill each other first! That's a film that would get a wide release. But think back to ARLINGTON ROAD's release being delayed for several months in 1999 because of the Columbine tragedy. 2010's UNTHINKABLE and now IMPERIUM are two smart yet multiplex-ready, commercial thrillers that take a completely serious and uncompromising approach to their subject. Maybe the potential for controversy is too much of a headache. Maybe movies like this just make studios uncomfortable. They wouldn't have 20 or 30 years ago. This is not to imply that IMPERIUM is some kind of classic or anything, but it is a good film that deserves a much better rollout than it's getting.

FEAR CITY
(US - 1985)

Directed by Abel Ferrara. Written by Nicholas St. John. Cast: Tom Berenger, Billy Dee Williams, Jack Scalia, Melanie Griffith, Rossano Brazzi, Jan Murray, Rae Dawn Chong, Joe Santos, Michael V. Gazzo, Janet Julian, Maria Conchita Alonso, Daniel Faraldo, Ola Ray, Frank Ronzio, Juan Fernandez, Tracy Griffith, Robert Miano, Frank Sivero, Neil Clifford. (R, 95 mins)

Though he established himself as a critically-acclaimed filmmaker during his '90s heyday with KING OF NEW YORK (1990), BAD LIEUTENANT (1992), and THE FUNERAL (1996) among others, the always controversial Abel Ferrara got his start in the NYC exploitation gutter. His first feature film was the 1976 porno 9 LIVES OF A WET PUSSY and he followed that with 1979's scuzzy THE DRILLER KILLER, a self-explanatory splatter film where he also starred in the title role under the name "Jimmy Laine." 1981's low-budget vigilante thriller MS .45, in which a mute garment district seamstress (Zoe Tamerlis) goes full DEATH WISH on NYC scumbags after she's raped twice in the same day, was a hit on the grindhouse and drive-in circuit and even got some accolades from critics. Bronx-born Ferrara's contemporary NYC-set films of that era are among the grimiest presentations of the city in all of cinema. Like a cinematic Travis Bickle, he's from the streets, he knows them, he's lived them, and he's seen the worst they have to offer. Ferrara's always had a keen ability to bring that sleazy world to vivid life on the big screen like few others.

MS .45 got Ferrara some attention from the big studios, and it makes one wonder exactly what 20th Century Fox expected when they greenlit FEAR CITY, Ferrara's first sizably-budgeted film with actual Hollywood actors. Filmed in the spring and summer of 1983--with BLUE THUNDER, FLASHDANCE, OCTOPUSSY, and LONE WOLF MCQUADE visible on Times Square theater marquees--FEAR CITY was produced by Zupnik-Curtis Enterprises, with a good chunk of the budget and a distribution deal provided by Fox. A combination cop/mob/slasher movie, FEAR CITY deals with the hunt for a serial attacker dubbed "The New York Knifer." He's slashing strippers, most of whom work for the Starlite Talent Agency, run by childhood buddies Nicky Parzeno (Jack Scalia in his first big screen role, fresh off two short-lived TV series with THE DEVLIN CONNECTION and BERRENGER'S) and Matt Rossi (Tom Berenger, who had just been in THE BIG CHILL and EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS). Both are connected to powerful mob boss Carmine (Rossano Brazzi, quite a ways away from THREE COINS IN THE FOUNTAIN and SOUTH PACIFIC), who's the cash behind their business. Matt is a former boxer who walked away from the sport after killing an opponent in the ring. He's also nursing a broken heart after a relationship with ex-junkie dancer Loretta (Melanie Griffith, around the same time she played a porn star in Brian De Palma's BODY DOUBLE) went south. Matt and Nicky's business starts collapsing after the wave of stripper murders, and when the body count starts rising, they're forced to team up with top competitor Goldstein (Borscht Belt legend Jan Murray, dropping F-bombs in what would be his last film appearance) as rival talent agents, club owners, and mobsters all set aside their ongoing beefs to organize their own hunt for the martial-arts madman (played by an uncredited Neil Clifford) who's killing their girls and costing them money. Matt also has to deal with perpetually irritable detective Wheeler (Billy Dee Williams), who doesn't seem to get much work done but has a big chip on his shoulder about Italian-Americans, never missing a chance to hurl slurs like "dago,""guinea,""greaseball,""goombah," and "wop" at Matt, Nicky, and anyone in the immediate vicinity who looks or sounds even remotely Italian.

Shot entirely on location and setting the mood with the theme song "New York Doll" by New York Dolls frontman David Johansen, FEAR CITY effectively captures the grimy filth and the neon sleaze of early 1980s NYC. The story structure in regular Ferrara collaborator Nicholas St. John's script is rather formulaic--of course Matt and Loretta will rekindle their love, and of course the horror of her friends being murdered will send her back to the needle--but the fascinating cast (also featuring Joe Santos, Michael V. Gazzo, Rae Dawn Chong, Maria Conchita Alonso, Ola Ray from Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video, and, as Loretta's dealer, a typically reptilian Juan Fernandez, best known to trash movie fans as "that shitbag Duke" in KINJITE: FORBIDDEN SUBJECTS) and various quirks keep things interesting. Ferrara goes off on a bit of a tangent near the end, invoking the kind of recurring Catholic imagery that was so prominent in MS .45 and would be again in later films like BAD LIEUTENANT. The momentum is sidetracked a bit in the late going as Ferrara and St. John explore Matt's tortured soul as everything haunting his conscience comes to a head: the murders he's witnessed as a mob flunky since being a neighborhood shoeshine boy in his youth, killing a man in the ring, Loretta using again, Nicky ending up in a coma after a near-fatal encounter with the Knifer. It all leads to not just a confessional with a sympathetic priest but also a Tom Berenger shadow-boxing/workout montage as he prepares to take out the Knifer himself. There's another interesting character element in that African-American Wheeler and his Hispanic partner Sanchez (Daniel Faraldo) are far and away the biggest racists in the movie. Its killer (dubbed "The Karate Killer" by FEAR CITY fans even though he's only referred to as "The New York Knifer" in the movie), who attacks with ninja-like precision and often practices his martial arts moves in the nude, could be a close relative of Gene Davis' legendary in-the-buff serial killer in the Charles Bronson classic 10 TO MIDNIGHT.

With its gratuitous nudity and graphic violence, FEAR CITY didn't endear itself to the top brass at Fox. Even after Ferrara trimmed some of the violence and nixed a kissing scene between bisexual Loretta and soon-to-be-victim Leila (Chong), the studio still wasn't happy and refused to release the film. After sitting on it for over a year, Fox finally sold it back to Zupnik-Curtis, who decided to release it independently through their own Maryland-based Chevy Chase Distribution (which may have led some moviegoers to believe Chevy Chase was involved in it) while selling the New York rights to Terry Levine's Aquarius Releasing, an outfit best known for driving a Butchermobile around Manhattan to promote DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D. (the uncut version of FEAR CITY was eventually released on Blu-ray in 2012 by Shout! Factory, but the reinstated shots were lesser-quality standard def), Though it was released in Europe in 1984, FEAR CITY didn't start hitting US theaters until February 1985. Berenger would get an Oscar nomination for the next year's PLATOON and Ferrara went on to direct a couple of MIAMI VICE episodes and the pilot for the acclaimed NBC series CRIME STORY in 1986. He moved on to two mishandled Vestron releases with the warring street gang ROMEO AND JULIET redux CHINA GIRL (1987) and the Elmore Leonard thriller CAT CHASER (1989) before the now-classic KING OF NEW YORK and BAD LIEUTENANT cemented his status as a key figure in the '90s indie explosion.

FEAR CITY opening with little fanfare or print support in Toledo, OH on 4/19/1985

Actual layout of the above shot, demonstrating how much
advertising support FEAR CITY was getting.

CLOWN
(US - 2016)

When 2015's COP CAR got some festival buzz going and became a minor hit on the arthouse circuit, it was enough to bump director/co-writer Jon Watts and his writing partner Christopher Ford into megabudget circles with the upcoming reboot SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING. But long before COP CAR, Watts and Ford made their debut, the horror film CLOWN. Shot in late 2012 but kept on a shelf by the Weinstein Co. until 2016, CLOWN is a feature-length expansion of a fake trailer Watts and Ford made and posted to YouTube in 2010. The "trailer," about a demonic clown, jokingly proclaimed "From master of horror Eli Roth," which prompted a flattered Roth to meet with the pair and offer to produce an actual CLOWN movie. While Robert Rodriguez's MACHETE may have worked once--before the novelty wore off with MACHETE KILLS--CLOWN is more on the HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN end of fake trailers-turned-real movies. Leadenly-paced and feeling much longer than 99 minutes, CLOWN has dad Kent (Andy Powers) forced by a cancellation to don an old clown costume for his son Jack's (Christian Distefano) birthday party. The suit and makeup soon adhere to and fuse with his body, making it impossible to take off. After several failed and increasingly gruesome attempts to get out of the costume, a desperate Kent shoots himself in the head only to find he can't die. This drives him to madness and murder, as his wife Meg (Laura Allen) learns from Karlsson (Peter Stormare), the suit's previous owner, that it's an instrument of a demon who subsists on the sacrificing of five children a year. This leads to a repetitive series of sequences with Kent pursuing children and slowly morphing into a full-on clown demon as Meg tries to keep him from killing Jack. There's some intriguing and occasionally ballsy ideas in CLOWN--Karlsson's brother was a pediatric cancer specialist, so the pair conquered the clown curse by offering the demon terminally ill children, and when the demon offers to give Kent back for one more child, Meg isn't above leading an innocent kid to the slaughter if it means saving her family--but CLOWN just doesn't come together. It's sluggish and dull, and it needs a better actor than Powers to really feel for Kent's plight. It doesn't skimp on the gore and some occasional shock value antics, but this story is, at best, a 20-minute segment in an anthology film. (R, 99 mins)

BASKIN
(Turkey/US/UK - 2016)

This Turkish import got some significant acclaim at film festivals and from the horror scenester echo chamber, which only serves as further evidence that fanboys will bestow accolades on pretty much everything. BASKIN is a tired, slow-moving splatterfest that's a veritable grab-bag of cribbed material. The crux of the plot is essentially a Turkish HELLRAISER, with a quintet of cops answering a call for backup and ending up at a long-abandoned police station off a dark country road on the middle of nowhere. There's some backstory about the father-son relationship between the in-charge Boss Remzi (Ergun Kuyucu) and young rookie Arda (Gorkem Kasal), who was more or less raised by Remzi after a traumatic childhood incident that, of course, comes into play late in the film. The dark, empty police outpost is filled with bloodied, contorted souls in a mad orgy of sex and torture, overseen by "The Father," played in a bit of FREAKS and THE SENTINEL-style stunt casting by non-actor Mehmet Cerrahoglu. The Father puts the cops through all the torture porn tropes, whether it's slowly tearing out one's intestinal tract or carving out another's eyes and tongue-kissing the socket before making him fuck a goat-masked woman from behind.

It was the eye socket moment where I finally lost my patience with BASKIN. Not because of the gore or the perverse French kissing of the eye socket--that wasn't the problem at all. Even from the start, little things started rubbing me the wrong way and I was getting grouchy without really realizing it, whether it was a restaurant scene where the cops are swapping stories and one goes into a Joe Pesci "Funny how?" routine from GOODFELLAS; or the long exploration of the dark, cavernous underbelly of the abandoned police station that just seemed a little too much like SESSION 9; or the fleeting glimpse of an obviously non-human figure darting across the frame like he was trying to find his way back to THE DESCENT. Director/co-writer Can Evrenol, expanding his 2013 short film of the same name, was wearing his love of horror movies on his sleeve, but it was just getting to be too much. Too forced. By the time The Father turns up about an hour in, talking about being "one with the cosmos" and "you always carry Hell with you," he started to sound a lot like HELLRAISER's Pinhead in the days when he was simply known as "Lead Cenobite." But then the eye socket scene happened and Evrenol lost me. He accompanies it with a prominent cue from Riz Ortolani's CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST score--including that synthy beeeeeew!--and the transparency was just too much to ignore. That's what I concluded to be the exact moment where those lauding the film tilted their heads back, closed their eyes, exhaled slowly and purred "Oh, right there. That's the spot. I'm yours, BASKIN." There's nothing here but Evrenol name-checking bits and pieces of his favorite horror movies, bringing nothing new to the table but fooling enough people into proclaiming BASKIN some triumphant new vision of horror. It's lazy, it's uninspired, and worst of all, it's not scary. At all. It's all smoke and mirrors, and once again, horror fans prove themselves to be the biggest genre pushovers in moviegoing. BASKIN is the most overrated horror film since GOODNIGHT MOMMY. One more time, gang: start being a little more discerning, and a little less concerned with making sure your free screeners and your convention credentials keep coming. (Unrated, 97 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

THE INVITATION
(US - 2016)

While everyone was busy fellating BASKIN, another horror film was stealthily released around the same time that actually deserved the accolades but more or less fell off the radar even with the scenesters. A slow-burner that starts ratcheting the tension in the first scene and never lets up, THE INVITATION is a film where it's best to go in knowing as little as possible. It's also one of the best films of the year that you've probably heard nothing about. En route to a dinner party in the Hollywood Hills, Will (Logan Marshall-Green) and his girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) accidentally hit a coyote that Will is forced to put out of its misery via tire iron. That will turn out to be the least upsetting thing about the evening. The dinner party is at Will's old house, hosted by his ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and her new husband, record producer/recovering addict David (Michiel Huisman). Several of their closest friends are there and it's been two years since they've all been together, the group more or less splintering when Will and Kira's young son died and their marriage didn't survive the aftermath. Right off the bat, Will gets a strange vibe from Eden and David, the two endlessly talking about a trip to Mexico where they embraced a self-help philosophy of grief coping known as "The Invitation." Also at the party is a friend they met in Mexico, a clingy and needy young woman named Sadie (Lindsay Burdge), who almost instantly offers to sleep with Will. There's also the ominous presence of stranger named Pruitt (John Carroll Lynch), a friend of Eden's and David's who breaks the ice by showing the group a DVD of an assisted suicide they observed in Mexico. Wounds that never completely healed are torn open as Will vehemently disagrees with the way Eden has addressed her grief. He's also bothered by Pruitt and the fact that the windows have bars on them, that Dave has locked all the doors from the inside, and the fact that one of the guests they're still waiting on left David a voice mail two hours earlier saying he was the first one there, yet no one has seen him and he's nowhere to be found.

Things only get more claustrophobic and uncomfortable from there, with things boiling over into sheer terror by the end. So many films do the slow-burn approach that ends being a lot of buildup to nothing, but THE INVITATION hooks you in from the start. No matter how slow or meandering it may seem in the early going, every line, every incredulous glance, and every reaction from Will is important. Screenwriters Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi must've been sitting on this one for a while and saving it for the right occasion, because nothing else they've written--AEON FLUX, the CLASH OF THE TITANS remake, R.I.P.D., and both RIDE ALONGs--would indicate a capacity for the complexity and near anxiety-attack levels of suspense that transpire here. Nothing it as it seems and you'll never see where the story is heading with THE INVITATION. It's directed by Karyn Kusama, who established her indie cred with 2000's GIRLFIGHT but then washed out with high-profile studio projects AEON FLUX (2005) and JENNIFER'S BODY (2009). She's mainly been keeping busy directing TV (THE L WORD, CHICAGO FIRE, HALT AND CATCH FIRE), and THE INVITATION is her first feature film in seven years. It's a small masterpiece as far as modern day horror goes, a film that got some glowing reviews but very little attention from horror fans seemingly ready to call anything that gets made a classic. That's not to say THE INVITATION is an Insta-Horror Classic (© William Wilson), but it's one of the very few films of recent years, along with THE BABADOOK, IT FOLLOWS, THE WITCH, and HUSH, that deserves the kind of fawning hype that comes with today's horror offerings. (Unrated, 100 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

DON'T BREATHE
(US/Hungary - 2016)

Directed by Fede Alvarez. Written by Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues. Cast: Stephen Lang, Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette, Daniel Zovatto, Emma Bercovici, Franciska Torocsik, Christian Zagia, Katia Bokor, Sergej Onopko. (R, 88 mins)

Director Fede Alvarez made his mark on the horror scene with his surprisingly well-received and better-than-expected 2013 remake of EVIL DEAD. Once again teaming with co-writer Rodo Sayagues and producer/original EVIL DEAD mastermind Sam Raimi, Alvarez is back with the home invasion-thriller-with-a-twist DON'T BREATHE. In an almost apocalyptic Detroit (some exteriors were done in the Motor City, but the bulk of the film was shot in Hungary), Rocky (Jane Levy, outstanding in EVIL DEAD '13) is fed up with her abusive, white trash mom (Katia Bokor) and wants nothing more than to take her little sister (Emma Bercovici) and run off to California. Rocky's been stashing money away by breaking into houses with her dirtbag boyfriend Money (Daniel Zovatto, from IT FOLLOWS) and their nice-guy friend Alex (Dylan Minnette). Alex's dad manages a home security company, so that gives them easy (a little too easy--why wouldn't his dad have all the keys and alarm codes to his clients' homes at the office instead of at his own home?). Money gets word of an inner-city neighborhood completely abandoned except for one house. In that house is a recluse who's supposedly sitting on six figures he got in a settlement from a rich family whose teenage daughter accidentally ran over his own daughter. Casing the house and observing the owner (Stephen Lang) outside, the trio of nitwits are surprised to see that he's blind, the result of a bomb blast during his military days in Iraq. They manage to get in the house in the dead of night but they're no match for the fighting and weaponry skills of The Blind Man, who can take easily take them on despite his lack of sight. He starts by killing Money and isn't aware of Rocky and Alex until his enhanced sense of smell leads him to their shoes, which they took off and left in the kitchen. Fleeing the Blind Man and his vicious watchdog, Rocky and Alex end up in the basement, where they stumble on an entirely unexpected house of horrors.

The premise of a home invasion where the invaders become the hunted isn't exactly new, as Wes Craven's THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS did it 25 years ago. But Alvarez does a great job in the early going--despite beating you over the head with some bush-league foreshadowing--establishing some serious tension in every whisper, sign, and creaking floorboard potentially giving the trio away. Alvarez and Sayagues also take a big risk in not making the trio particularly likable, even if Rocky's doing what she's doing for herself and her sister, and friend-zoned Alex is doing it because he's carrying a torch for Rocky. Killing Money off first is gratifying to the audience since he's by far the most loathsome of the three and at that point, you're sort-of expected to be on the side of The Blind Man. Other than the business involving Alex's access to the keys and alarm codes, the first half of DON'T BREATHE will have you wound pretty tight and holding your breath in suspenseful anticipation of what happens next. But what happens next is the story moves to the basement, where there's a moderately clever scene shot with a low-lit camera after the Blind Man shuts off the power and Rocky and Alex are forced to wander around in total darkness, as blind as their pursuer but without his homefield advantage.

DON'T BREATHE's utter collapse begins with the reveal of what's in the basement and why it's there. And also, how it's there, because that doesn't seem too plausible, either. There's a really demented element that's brought to the forefront involving this discovery in the basement, and it all seems to be a long, drawn-out buildup to a gross-out gag that seems more in line with something that the Farrelly Brothers would've concocted in the late '90s. From then on, DON'T BREATHE becomes an endless series of plot holes and contrivances, with one major thread left dangling at the end that, upon any scrutiny whatsoever, makes the Detroit police look completely incompetent. Yes, it may seem silly and nit-picky to gripe about implausible story mechanics in some movies (I haven't even mentioned the dog chasing Rocky through the heating ducts), but it smacks of Alvarez and Sayagues recognizing that they've backed themselves into a corner, and instead of even bothering with a ridiculous deus ex machina, they choose to simply not address it at all. And sure, maybe some moviegoers won't even think about it, but it seems so glaring that it seems impossible to not think of it. Lang and Levy do some very good work here, with Levy in particular staking her claim as one of the great Final Girls of today's horror, but other than an extremely impressive sequence involving Rocky barricading herself in Money's car to avoid The Blind Man's dog that's a small masterpiece of blocking and editing, DON'T BREATHE's second half just completely flies off the rails into total stupidity when it had a really good thing going.

HELL OR HIGH WATER
(US - 2016)

Directed by David Mackenzie. Written by Taylor Sheridan. Cast: Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gil Birmingham, Marin Ireland, Katy Mixon, Dale Dickey, Kevin Rankin, John-Paul Howard, Margaret Bowman, Taylor Sheridan. (R, 102 mins)

A strong, character-driven thriller that emerged as a summer sleeper after being rolled out the old-fashioned way--limited release over a few weeks and expanding nationally with strong word-of-mouth--HELL OR HIGH WATER is a timely drama about family, duty, poverty, and getting revenge on the system. It does get a little ham-fisted on occasion, with characters required to give a florid speech every now and again as they look at a bank and vent their anger at everything it represents, but director David Mackenzie (YOUNG ADAM, MISTER FOE) and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan (SICARIO) excel at creating very real people that the audience comes to know thoroughly over the course of the film. Unemployed gas driller Toby Howard (Chris Pine) and his bank-robbing, ex-con older brother Tanner (Ben Foster) are hitting the small-town branches of the regional Texas Midlands Bank, usually before open as an employee arrives and never taking packs of money, only the loose bills in the tills. They get away, bury the car, and move on to the next town. Meanwhile, wily old Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) is looking at forced retirement but wants to nail the robbers first ("I may have one hunt left in me"), following their criminal path with his Mexican/Native American partner Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham). As they make their way across the state toward Oklahoma, the Howard brothers are almost undone by Tanner's impulsive behavior that includes a reckless, spur-of-the-moment robbery while Toby is picking up the check at a diner across the street. Hamilton is stymied in his pursuit by behind-the-times Texas Midlands, with two of the targeted branches not having an electronic surveillance system, instead relying on a VHS recorder that's not even working. The robberies are masterminded by Toby, with Tanner tagging along because he's experienced. Their mother recently passed away and Texas Midlands was threatening foreclosure even as she quickly withered away from terminal cancer. Toby's ultimate plan for the stolen cash is an inventive one, and he does it with the best intentions--to provide his two sons with his bitter ex-wife Debbie (Marin Ireland) the kind of life he and Tanner never had. He's breaking the law to break the cycle of poverty that, as is the case with so many others in these desolate nether regions of rural America, has been passed on from generation to generation.

HELL OR HIGH WATER recognizes the noble reasoning behind Toby's actions but never makes him or Tanner heroes, even though the locals questioned by Hamilton and Parker are all too happy to see Texas Midlands get screwed. The only clear villains of the piece are those in the financial sector, who are treated with scorn and condescension by everyone, even Hamilton, who arrives at one crime scene, sees a well-dressed manager and gruffly intones "Well, let's talk to this guy here, he looks like someone who can foreclose on a home." Pine and Foster are excellent as the sibling bank robbers, and even a trigger-happy loose cannon like Tanner is humanized to some degree and not played as a stock psycho by Foster. But HELL OR HIGH WATER's biggest joys are provided by the national treasure that is Jeff Bridges. It's another Oscar-caliber performance, on the same level of burned-out melancholy as Tommy Lee Jones' Ed Tom Bell in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN but given a more gregarious manner in his rapport with Parker. Indeed, the testy ballbusting between Hamilton and Parker is hands-down the bromance of the year, so much so that you could easily watch an entire movie of Bridges and Birmingham in character, just sitting around dogging on each other. Whether it's Parker getting on Hamilton about his age ("You gonna do somethin' or just relax and let Alzheimer's run its course?") or Hamilton's constant razzing about Parker's dual ethnicities ("I haven't even gotten to my Mexican insults yet. I'm still on the Indian ones."), these two have an unspoken respect and dedication to one another ("You're gonna miss me pickin' on you," Hamilton tells Parker), an ironclad bond that makes events that transpire utterly heartbreaking.

Like other recent indie films that have addressed foreclosure and those doomed to struggle in a vicious cycle of being screwed and marginalized by the system (SUNLIGHT JR and 99 HOMES come to mind), HELL OR HIGH WATER is filmed in areas that have been hit hard, augmented by a downbeat score courtesy of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Abandoned houses and boarded-up businesses line the streets. Old-timers are embittered, beaten-down, and done giving a shit (the "What don't ya want?" T-Bone waitress played by Margaret Bowman is a real crowd-pleaser) and young people just cruise around looking for fights (watch Toby handle the two meatheads blasting aggro-metal and waving a gun at Tanner at a gas station). Sheridan was best known as the ill-fated Deputy Hale on SONS OF ANARCHY before he switched careers to screenwriting with SICARIO. In between, he directed VILE, one of the worst horror films ever made, and one that was mentioned a lot on his Facebook page but mysteriously vanished from his IMDb profile and reappeared as the sole credit on another as soon as SICARIO started getting some positive buzz (c'mon, man--if James Cameron can own up to PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING, you can admit to VILE). His hapless attempts at scrubbing his past aside, Sheridan has proven himself adept at creating believable, fully-rounded characters but it sometimes comes off as a little too scripted and "messagey." It's not enough to be a huge issue, but some more subtlety would've been a good thing in these fleeting moments. In the end, HELL OR HIGH WATER is one of 2016's best, a film that doesn't let anyone off the hook, one filled with nail-biting tension when it counts most and genuine, devastating emotion when you least expect it.

BLOOD FATHER
(France - 2016)

Directed by Jean-Francois Richet. Written by Peter Craig and Andrea Berloff. Cast: Mel Gibson, Erin Moriarty, William H. Macy, Diego Luna, Michael Parks, Miguel Sandoval, Thomas Mann, Raoul Trujillo, Dale Dickey, Richard Cabral, Daniel Moncada, Ryan Dorsey. (R, 88 mins)

Is it possible to cover a new Mel Gibson movie without rehashing the very public meltdowns over the past decade? Is it OK to like Mel Gibson onscreen again? To praise his acting without sounding like you're defending the man himself? After 2011's badly-received THE BEAVER, Gibson didn't seem to have much of a future as anything other than a Hollywood pariah. Aside from an occasional friend like Jodie Foster standing by him, nobody wanted anything to do with him. 2012's slight but enjoyable actioner GET THE GRINGO premiered on DirecTV before Gibson managed to score two nearly identical over-the-top, self-parodying villain roles in MACHETE KILLS (2013) and THE EXPENDABLES 3 (2014), but that appeared to be the extent to which anyone was willing to cast him. This fall brings the WWII epic HACKSAW RIDGE, Gibson's first directing effort since 2006's APOCALYPTO (the trailer just says "From the Academy Award-winning director of BRAVEHEART," never mentioning Gibson by name), but before working on that, he starred in the French-financed BLOOD FATHER, which is finally getting a limited theatrical and VOD release two years after it was completed. If you have any doubts about whether the now-60-year-old Gibson's still got it, BLOOD FATHER should put any of those concerns to rest. Lean, mean, crude, and scuzzy, the hard-R BLOOD FATHER is an unabashed old-school exploitationer.. Films of this sort are usually of the pre-fab cult movie variety, imbued with a smug sense of hipster snark and winking, entitled self-awareness. Not BLOOD FATHER. Propelled by what may very well be Gibson's most ferocious performance in a long career with no shortage of them, BLOOD FATHER is the sort of throwback B-action grinder that puts the pretenders to shame.

Based on a novel by THE TOWN screenwriter Peter Craig, who co-wrote the script with Andrea Berloff (STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON), and directed by Jean-Francois Richet (the surprisingly engaging ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 remake, and the two-part French gangster saga MESRINE), BLOOD FATHER has Gibson as John Link, a grizzled recovering alcoholic and ex-con who now lives a solitary life in a California desert trailer park. He does tattoos to make ends meet, but otherwise spends most of his time in AA meetings with his neighbor and sponsor Kirby (William H. Macy), staying focused on his sobriety, and wondering if he'll ever see his missing daughter Lydia (Erin Moriarty) again. He hasn't been a part of her life since she was a kid, but she calls him out of the blue. She's on the run after accidentally shooting and presumably killing her shitbag boyfriend Jonah (Diego Luna), the nephew of a powerful, south-of-the-border Juarez cartel boss. Link is enraged to see that scheming, unreliable junkie Lydia is indeed her father's daughter, but he's sympathetic to the fact that she was born into shit and never had any role models growing up, so he wants to help. It isn't long before Jonah's crew traces her to Link's trailer, sending Link and Lydia on the run, with cartel flunkies, cops, as well as a psychotic Sicario assassin called The Cleaner (Raoul Trujillo) always close behind.

Its plot doesn't win any points for originality, but the execution makes for one of the most gleefully and entertainingly nasty movies of the year. An explosive Gibson is a junkyard dog in this, getting angrier by the scene in ways that are alternately terrifying and funny (when Jonah's crew starts shooting his trailer, Link fires back, raging about all the parole violations he's committing), eventually going completely off the chain when he seeks the help of his old biker gang leader Preacher (Michael Parks) and his old lady Cherise (Dale Dickey, the second-string Melissa Leo), only to have them attempt to sell out father and daughter for the reward money. There's also some humorous touches throughout, like broke-ass Preacher reduced to selling his neo-Nazi swag online. Gibson's performance almost functions as a de facto confessional at times. When he's recounting the sins of his past, Link confronts those transgressions head-on and it's sometimes hard to tell where Link ends and the craggy, weathered-looking Gibson begins, whether he's talking about all the people he's disappointed and alienated, or observing Preacher's white supremacist merch and quipping "Still backing the losers, I see." The role is tailor-made for the fallen star at this point in his life and career, and it's his best work in years. Sure, there's some dumb plot points, like Lydia taking forever to figure out that she's being tracked by the GPS on her phone or being required to do stupid things to advance the story, but it doesn't matter. This is the Mel Gibson Show from start to finish. You don't have to like him and it's a certainty that he'll always remain persona non grata with a good number of moviegoers and industry insiders, but there's no way you can watch BLOOD FATHER and deny that he's still a movie star who knows how to command a screen.

MECHANIC: RESURRECTION
(US - 2016)

Directed by Dennis Gansel. Written by Philip Shelby and Tony Mosher. Cast: Jason Statham, Jessica Alba, Tommy Lee Jones, Michelle Yeoh, Sam Hazeldine, John Cenatiempo, Toby Eddington, Femi Elufowoju Jr, Anteo Quintavalle, Yayaying Rhatha Phongam. (R, 98 mins)

The 2011 Jason Statham remake of THE MECHANIC was close enough to the 1972 Charles Bronson original that the older film's screenwriter Lewis John Carlino still retained a WGA-mandated co-writing credit despite retiring from movies in the late '80s. Five years later, Statham is back with MECHANIC: RESURRECTION, a film so ludicrous that it makes his own MECHANIC look like a PBS documentary on professional assassins. Right from the opening "Summit Premiere" logo, it's pretty clear that VOD was the original destination for this woefully cheap-looking sequel that's probably only getting a shot in wide release because of Statham's resurgence as a supporting actor in hits like the Melissa McCarthy comedy SPY and as the villain in last year's FURIOUS 7. MECHANIC: RESURRECTION has a lot of location footage shot around the world, but closeups of the actors are against an obvious greenscreen at Avi Lerner's Nu Boyana Studios in Bulgaria, with blurry and hazy CGI carelessly added in post. Background shots of bodies of water seem curiously still and there's always a halo-like outline around the actors, who sometimes look composited into the shot. Explosions look like pre-2000 CGI and the carelessness extends to typos throughout, whether an official document describes a sex offender as "extremly" dangerous or a character named Max Adams is mentioned in a newspaper headline reading "Max Adam's Financial Records..." All that silliness aside, MECHANIC: RESURRECTION is harmless fun and the kind of entertaining junk food that's hard for Statham fans to resist. As far as Statham sequels go, it's better than the anything-goes obnoxiousness of the unwatchable CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE, recognizing its own silliness and more or less approaching it with a DEATH WISH 3 mentality that's right in line with Cannon-like ethos of Avi Lerner's Golan-Globus cover band Millennium Films.

Picking up a few years after faking his death at the end of the first film, professional killer-for-hire Arthur Bishop (Statham) is in hiding in Rio (cue establishing aerial shot of Christ the Redeemer statue accompanied by the caption "Rio de Janeiro, Brazil") when he has to dispose of a team of goons in the employ of former associate-turned-international criminal Crain (Sam Hazeldine as Almost Hugo Weaving). Fleeing to a Thai beach resort owned by his friend Mei (Michelle Yeoh), Bishop accidentally kills a guy attacking Gina (Jessica Alba). Of course, it was all a set-up: Gina is an American humanitarian aid worker based in Cambodia, and Crain threatened to kill all of the kids at an orphanage if she didn't lure Bishop into his trap. Crain wants Bishop to kill three men and he's holding Gina hostage to ensure his cooperation. The targets are Sudanese warlord Krill (Femi Elufowoji Jr), currently residing in an impenetrable island prison 70 miles off the coast of Malaysia; Adrian Cook (Toby Eddington), a billionaire Australian businessman (cue establishing aerial shot of the Sydney Opera House with a caption reading "Sydney, Australia") running a lucrative human trafficking operation; and Max Adams (a slumming Tommy Lee Jones), an eccentric American arms dealer based in Bulgaria. All of the hits have to look like accidents, and when Bishop loses all faith in Crain keeping his word, he decides to take matters into his own hands and turn the tables on his employer, who wants the three targets gone because they're his competition.

Co-written by Philip Shelby, who scripted the absurd SURVIVOR, with Milla Jovovich vs. Pierce Brosnan, the latter a deadly assassin known as "The Watchmaker," MECHANIC: RESURRECTION marks the English-language debut of German director Dennis Gansel, who made the 2010 female vampire import WE ARE THE NIGHT. Gansel relies on standard quick-cut/shaky-cam action scenes that do little to distinguish himself as anything other than a hired gun who saw the project as a foot in the door to the American movie industry. It doesn't help that it looks as chintzy and corner-cutting as any late-period, circa 1990 Cannon production. The only thing really distinctive about MECHANIC: RESURRECTION is Arthur Bishop's newfound superhuman abilities. He can hold his breath underwater for incredible amounts of time. He can apparently delete himself from recorded footage, as when he orchestrates a killing involving a man falling out of a glass-bottom swimming pool at the top of skyscraper, and it's caught by onlookers with the footage going viral, and yet Bishop rappelling out of the way mere seconds earlier somehow doesn't appear. He can tally up an astronomical body count with nary a scratch on himself. He's also incredibly prepared: he can arrive anywhere in the world in a middle-of-nowhere location and already have a case filled with cash, phones, and passports under a floorboard of a shack or buried in the sand, waiting for him. He can arrive in these places with nothing on him and spontaneously set up an impromptu laboratory with chemicals, beakers, protractors, and other engineering accoutrements to create the gadgets he needs to pull off his jobs.

It also helps that the bad guys in the film employ the world's least-attentive henchmen, all of whom make it easy by conveniently looking the other way when Bishop approaches them for the kill. That is, when they aren't doing things like standing next to two awkwardly-placed red gas cans on a landing pad that are just waiting to be shot at for another CGI explosion courtesy of the Bulgarian clown crew at Worldwide FX. Visual effects have always been the Achilles' heel of Millennium/Nu Image, who can corral enough money to lure big name talent but never could get special effects to advance beyond the level of a straight-to-VHS Frank Zagarino vehicle from 1996. Worldwide FX seemed to be stepping up their game with their convincing work in recent Millennium fare like STONEHEARST ASYLUM and CRIMINAL, but they apparently farmed the work on this one out to the unpaid interns. The effects here are embarrassingly bad, even if the film cost a relatively low-budget--by today's standards--$40 million, most of which probably went to Statham, Alba, a barely-utilized Yeoh, and a visibly inconvenienced Jones, who doesn't even appear until 70 minutes in and lets a couple of clip-on earrings do most of his acting for him. Turning Arthur Bishop into a hybrid of James Bond and MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE's Ethan Hunt isn't a bad idea, and after a clunky and needlessly convoluted opening 20 minutes, MECHANIC: RESURRECTION--obviously a comedy--finds its footing and becomes stupidly likable thanks to an engaged Statham doing what he does best.

KICKBOXER: VENGEANCE
(US/UK - 2016)

Directed by John Stockwell. Written by Dimitri Logothetis and James McGrath. Cast: David Bautista, Alain Moussi, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Georges St-Pierre, Gina Carano, Sara Malakul Lane, Darren Shahlavi, Cain Velasquez, Fabricio Werdum, T.J. Storm, Matthew Ziff, Sam Medina, Hawn Tran, Daneya Mayid, Steven Swadling. (Unrated, 88 mins)

A remake/reboot of KICKBOXER the 1989 Jean-Claude Van Damme favorite, KICKBOXER: VENGEANCE is passable action fare that's tailor-made for a long life on cable and streaming, even if it doesn't quite match up to its inspiration. Taking part in the illegal underground fight scene in Thailand, Eric Sloane (the late Darren Shahlavi) is mercilessly killed via neck-snap in the ring by unstoppable Muay Thai master Tong Po (Dave Bautista). Of course, as the title of the film already indicates, vengeance is nigh as Eric's little brother Kurt (veteran stuntman Alain Moussi) vows revenge on the ruthless Tong Po. After infiltrating Tong Po's training stronghold and getting his ass handed to him, Kurt seeks the guidance of legendary, fedora-sporting trainer Master Durand (Van Damme). Endless training sequences ensue as Kurt grows stronger and more agile under the tutelage of the wise and outwardly laid-back Durand. As has been the case in every other kickboxing and martial arts fight movie ever made, the sworn enemies meet for the final, fatal showdown in the ring.

It doesn't get much more formulaic than KICKBOXER: VENGEANCE, a film that may set some kind of record with 43 credited producers. The story offers zilch in the way of surprises and character development is kept to the most shallow minimum. A romance between Kurt and local cop Liu (Sara Malakul Lane) comes out of nowhere. She's obsessed with nailing Tong Po's balls to the wall over his illegal fight operation, but she's thwarted at every turn by her own corrupt police force. She ultimately arrests Kurt and Durand for their own safety, and after they improbably escape from jail and go to the fight, she shows up and is right there to cheer Kurt on as he and Tong Po beat one another into a pulp. The fight scenes are mostly well-done and effectively brutal, if a bit too reliant on the shaky shots and quick-cut editing (one sequence involving Kurt and some bad guys parkouring and fighting atop two elephants in a parade had some bizarre potential, but is ruined by some far-from-seamless editing between fake elephants and cuts to close-ups of real ones). Moussi has some credible action star potential, though he's about as expressive as Van Damme was at that age, and Bautista, despite not being the first person who comes to mind when one hears the term "Muay Thai," makes a formidable, imposing villain. Thai model Lane is stunningly beautiful, UFC champ Georges St-Pierre doesn't have much to do as a hapless, drunken Tong Po stooge who joins Kurt and Durand, and MMA legend Gina Carano (HAYWIRE, DEADPOOL) is wasted in a nothing supporting role as Eric's unscrupulous manager and scheming fight promoter. Why hire Carano for a movie called KICKBOXER: VENGEANCE and not have her fight? She's not about to advance her movie career based on her acting skills.

The real selling point here is the presence of Van Damme. He didn't appear in any of KICKBOXER's four forgotten sequels, where Sasha Mitchell played another kickboxing Sloane brother. It's always nice to see the iconic Muscles from Brussels in action and his turnaround into a beloved pop culture figure who has a sense of humor about himself is a look he wears well. As he was quietly putting together a strong DTV resume over the last decade and a half when no one was looking, I've often said he would make a terrific Bond villain if anyone gave him the chance. He seems to be opting for the self-deprecating, self-aware William Shatner career approach, which is fine, too. When the closing credits play over a split-screen comparison of JCVD's goofy bar dance from the original KICKBOXER and Moussi recreating it in the present day, you know it's done out of genuine affection. But KICKBOXER: VENGEANCE doesn't take full advantage of having JCVD around. It's a great idea to have him graduate to the wise mentor role a la Stallone in CREED, but wouldn't having him play an older Kurt Sloane, instead of an all-new character, make more sense? There's also some hiccups throughout the film involving JCVD, like some scattered shots where he's clearly doubled (back turned, face not seen in shots with Moussi) and the second half of the film has some extensive relooping of his dialogue by a bad impersonator as Jean-Claude Van Dubbed comes perilously close to Steven Seagal territory. Much of this is indicative of a troubled shoot that saw the New Orleans crew revolting during production in December 2014 when they weren't paid, followed closely in January 2015 by the unexpected death of 42-year-old Shahlavi from an undiagnosed heart condition (preliminary tabloid reports indicated a prescription drug overdose). These incidents cast a dark cloud over the proceedings and may have led to the departure of director John Stockwell (a specialist in lush travelogues in the guise of action thrillers like BLUE CRUSH, INTO THE BLUE, and TURISTAS) after the US portion of the shoot. According to Impact's Mike Leeder, Stockwell bailed before the production headed to Thailand, where directing duties were assumed by co-writer/co-producer Dimitri Logothetis (SLAUGHTERHOUSE ROCK). Only Stockwell receives credit, but perhaps the whole thing would've turned out better with a guy like Isaac Florentine at the helm (and while we're at it, why isn't Scott Adkins starring in this?). There's nothing here you haven't seen before, but KICKBOXER: VENGEANCE is a case study of "It is what it is." It's diverting and entertaining, even if its flaws and Band-Aids are plainly visible. Moussi, Van Damme, and Logothetis already have the sequel KICKBOXER: RETALIATION in the can for 2017, with new cast additions Christopher Lambert and Mike Tyson.

MORGAN
(US - 2016)

Directed by Luke Scott. Written by Seth Owen. Cast: Kate Mara, Anya Taylor-Joy, Rose Leslie, Toby Jones, Paul Giamatti, Michelle Yeoh, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Brian Cox, Michael Yare, Boyd Holbrook, Chris Sullivan, Vinette Robinson. (R, 92 mins)

Luke Scott has served as an assistant and a second-unit director on several films by his legendary and seemingly ageless father Ridley Scott, but MORGAN marks the 48-year-old scion's feature directing debut (Ridley's other filmmaker son, Jake Scott, debuted with 1999's PLUNKETT & MACLEANE). Pops Scott produced the film, and if Luke had any hopes of emerging from the long shadow cast by his visionary father, he's gonna have to try a lot harder than MORGAN. In all fairness, MORGAN looks fine, with some effective set design and a few breathtaking exterior visuals in a surrounding forest and on a lake (this was shot in Ireland), but the script by Seth Owen (rumored to be overhauled and rewritten by the director) is so derivative and obvious that any seasoned moviegoer will figure out where this thing is headed by the ten-minute mark. At a secret research facility in remote upstate New York, scientists have succeeded in creating, after two failed attempts, a flesh-and-blood, A.I. humanoid named Morgan (THE WITCH's Anya Taylor-Joy), who's five years old but whose accelerated growth rate gives it the appearance of a girl in her late teens. Cold and standoffish Lee Weathers (Kate Mara) is a risk assessment agent sent in by the project's corporate benefactors to determine Morgan's viability after it attacks one of the scientists, Dr. Kathy Grieff (Jennifer Jason Leigh), gouging out her eye in a fit of rage when it's informed it disobeyed the rules and can't go outside anymore. Lee is naturally met with apprehension and scorn by the rest of the research team--Dr. Simon Ziegler (Toby Jones), Dr. Amy Menser (Rose Leslie), Dr. Ted Brenner (Michael Yare), married Drs. Darren and Brenda Finch (Chris Sullivan, Vinette Robinson), and the head of the project, Dr. Liu Cheng (Michelle Yeoh)--with her only real ally coming from the facility's nutritionist/cook/potential love interest Skip (Boyd Holbrook).

Why these people can't prepare their own meals and require Skip to be on the payroll in a sworn-to-secrecy, middle-of-nowhere location for a minimum of five years is the least of the questions you'll have after watching MORGAN. As Morgan demonstrates more human qualities and has tangible feelings of joy and sorrow (it loves the outdoors and opera, and is set off when it's punished for wandering off the property while out on a walk with Amy), they've grown attached to it and refer to it as "she" and "her," which doesn't fly with the no-nonsense Lee. With her aloof, bottom-line attitude, Lee's character arc is pretty easy to pick up on thanks to Scott's inability to grasp the concept of subtlety. There's a big EX MACHINA influence on MORGAN, but it also works in a significant plot point of Dad Scott's first or second-most famous film in such a ham-fisted way that the biggest mystery isn't what the twist is, but how long it's going to take the rest of the dim characters to figure out what you already know. With her saucer-like eyes and the large pupil contacts she wears in some scenes, Taylor-Joy evokes memories of Delphine Chaneac's more monstrous Dren in Vincenzo Natali's 2010 film SPLICE, which took things in a decidedly more Cronenberg-ian slant, but whose transgressive perversions are hinted at here and dropped almost instantly. Indeed, there's something strongly suggested in outsider Amy's feelings for Morgan--feelings that don't seem to be maternal or sisterly. There's a throwaway line by Skip about how he briefly hooked up with Amy years ago before realizing "I'm not her type." There's enough in Leslie's performance here to suggest that Amy has other designs on Morgan but nothing comes of it (those who've seen SPLICE will recall that, yes, it went there).

There's good performances in MORGAN in the early-going, before it turns into a rote body count movie when Morgan escapes from the lab and starts killing everyone off one by one. Taylor-Joy does a solid job of balancing childlike innocence with palpable rage, but Alicia Vikander did it much better and with more complexity and ambiguity in EX MACHINA. Still, Morgan shows more emotion than Mara's Lee, whose brittle chilliness is oversold with a stick-up-her-ass demeanor and an "I'd like to speak to a manager"hairstyle that exemplifies MORGAN's rush to show its cards too soon. The veteran actors in the cast are underutilized: Leigh pretty much lies in a bed with gauze over her eye, catatonic with painkillers in one of the most inactive-by-design performances this side of Eric Stoltz in ANACONDA; Yeoh's Dr. Cheng drifts in and out of the story in ways that suggest Scott only had the actress for a very limited time (why is she not there for the big assessment of Morgan?); Brian Cox almost literally phones in his entire performance as the CEO of the company bankrolling the Morgan project; and Paul Giamatti has one ten-minute scene, breaking out every move in his "Paul Giamatti" arsenal as Dr. Shapiro, the psychologist brought in to interview Morgan. Giamatti's character is a man so bellicose and arrogant that the actor has barely finished emitting his first dismissive sneer before you conclude that he's not making out of the room alive. The fact that Shapiro's there because Morgan has attacked Kathy and his plan is to sit with it at the same table and agitate it to evaluate its temper--essentially poking Morgan with a stick until it attacks--tells you how smart this film and its characters are. MORGAN looks like what might've happened if EX MACHINA was made at a major studio and the suits let the test audiences and the focus groups dictate the outcome. It's never dull but it's doomed to be a forgotten afterthought as soon as its over, its primary influences thuddingly apparent to any knowledgeable cineaste with even a passing interest in genre fare. They've seen things the makers of MORGAN wouldn't believe. All those ripoffs will be lost online, like streams on demand.

On DVD/Blu-ray: MILES AHEAD (2016); ELVIS & NIXON (2016); and ANDRON (2016)

In Theaters: LIGHTS OUT (2016)

In Theaters: STAR TREK: BEYOND (2016)

Retro Review: DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D. (1982)

In Theaters: JASON BOURNE (2016)

In Theaters: CAFE SOCIETY (2016)

On DVD/Blu-ray: THE LOBSTER (2016); I AM WRATH (2016) and SNIPER: GHOST SHOOTER (2016)

Retro Review: HELLHOLE (1985)

On DVD/Blu-ray: A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING (2016) and FATHERS & DAUGHTERS (2016)

In Theaters: ANTHROPOID (2016)

Retro Review: EMANUELLE IN AMERICA (1977)

In Theaters/On VOD: IMPERIUM (2016)

Retro Review: FEAR CITY (1985)

On DVD/Blu-ray: CLOWN (2016); BASKIN (2016); and THE INVITATION (2016)

In Theaters: DON'T BREATHE (2016)

In Theaters: HELL OR HIGH WATER (2016)

In Theaters/On VOD: BLOOD FATHER (2016)

In Theaters: MECHANIC: RESURRECTION (2016)

In Theaters/On VOD: KICKBOXER: VENGEANCE (2016)

In Theaters: MORGAN (2016)