Good Efficient Butchery

BEWARE THE SLENDERMAN
(US - 2017)

Directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky. (Unrated, 115 mins)

Hobbled by leaden pacing and an unfocused narrative, BEWARE THE SLENDERMAN isn't exactly the second coming of PARADISE LOST as far as documentaries about arrested teens and moral panics go. Irene Taylor Brodsky's film looks at the circumstances surrounding the attempted murder of 12-year-old Payton "Bella" Leutner, a Waukesha, WI girl who was lured into the woods on May 31, 2014 by two friends--Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, also 12 at the time--and stabbed 19 times. The reason? Morgan and Anissa wanted to impress the Slenderman, a fictional supernatural figure in a suit, with long arms and no face. The character was created in 2009 for a paranormal Photoshop contest on the Something Awful forum, which led to a viral explosion of Slenderman photos, YouTube videos, and fan fiction. Morgan and Anissa discovered Slenderman on the Creepypasta Wiki and became obsessed with the idea of becoming "proxies," or servants, to him. Morgan eventually convinced Anissa that killing Bella would sufficiently appease the Slenderman, enabling them to live in his so-called "Slender Mansion," which they believed to be located in the middle of Nicolet National Park in northern Wisconsin.

The fact that the girls attempted to walk from Waukesha to Nicolet National Park after leaving the crime scene--it's a 320-mile trip--is as good a tip-off as any to show how disconnected they were from reality. Through interviews with parents, police, psychologists, teachers, and footage from the girls' interrogations (Morgan and Anissa were not interviewed for the film, nor was Bella, who miraculously survived the attack), we're given background information on the accused. Anissa was a loner who had a hard time making friends, and bonded with Morgan over their mutual interest in Slenderman. Lonely Anissa tells her fourth grade teacher "You're like a second father to me," and the teacher wonders if any of this would've happened if the girls had more friends ("In a group of eight girls, this wouldn't have happened--they wouldn't be talking with just each other and spending all of their time on the Internet"). Both girls come from stable homes with loving parents who can't help but wonder how or why any of this happened or what they should've done differently (Anissa's father says Bella's parents would be completely justified if they hated him). Brodsky withholds a vital piece of information about Morgan, who never showed much in the way of empathy even as a little girl (her mother recalls watching BAMBI with young Morgan years earlier and being shocked that she wasn't even fazed by the death of Bambi's mother, a scene that's traumatized children for over 70 years), until very late in the film and while her reasons for doing so make sense in the context of the audience needing to remain objective, it still plays like a fumbled attempt at a plot twist and something that should've been divulged earlier.

At nearly two hours, BEWARE THE SLENDERMAN eventually becomes a laborious slog. The girls haven't even gone on trial yet (that's happening sometime in 2017) and the courtroom footage seen here is simply to determine if they should be tried as adults or as juveniles. Brodsky and her crew went to Waukesha to chase the story almost immediately after it happened--the first round of parent interviews in the film take place just two months after the stabbing--so there's a lot of repetitive interrogation footage that's sometimes chilling in the girls' shrugging ambivalence (when told Bella is fighting for her life, a presumably shell-shocked Anissa's only concern is "How far did I walk before I got picked up?") but eventually grows tiresome. There's some eerie recreations of Slenderman imagery and a history lesson in folklore (talking heads label Slenderman a mythical figure along the lines of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Pied Piper) and how Slenderman varies from person to person to be whatever the person telling the tale needs it to be, whether it's a malevolent evil or a guardian angel of sorts for troubled children. Brodsky also examines the power of the viral meme, with mentions of planking and the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, and Richard Dawkins briefly drops by to helpfully define the word "meme." All of this is very informative, but the story jumps all over the place, and by the time Brodsky spends several minutes of screen time with the camera planted on a monitor as we go through Morgan's and Anissa's browser history, it really just feels like she's belaboring the point. The tedious BEWARE THE SLENDERMAN has its moments, but it might've made a better DATELINE or 20/20 segment than a two-hour movie.

SCAVENGER HUNT
(US - 1979)

Directed by Michael Schultz. Written by Steven A. Vail and Henry Harper. Cast: Richard Benjamin, James Coco, Scatman Crothers, Ruth Gordon, Cloris Leachman, Cleavon Little, Roddy McDowall, Robert Morley, Richard Mulligan, Tony Randall, Dirk Benedict, Willie Aames, Stephanie Faracy, Richard Masur, Meat Loaf, Vincent Price, Pat McCormick, Avery Schreiber, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Liz Torres, Maureen Teefy, Carol Wayne, Stephen Furst, Stuart Pankin, Henry Polic II, Hal Landon Jr, Marji Martin, Jerado Decordovier. (PG, 116 mins)

When you go a couple of decades or longer without seeing a favorite film from your younger, formative years, you always run the risk of childhood nostalgia blowing up in your face, forcing you to confront the harsh realization that this thing you loved so much just might be a steaming pile of dog shit. Such is the case with SCAVENGER HUNT, a comedy that did only middling business in theaters when it was released the week of Christmas 1979. It found an audience on cable, where it was in constant rotation on Showtime and The Movie Channel in the early '80s, watched over and over again by latch-key kids like me who got home from school and had a couple of hours to kill before Mom and Dad got home from work. It was a movie I watched many times and always guffawed at the wacky, slapstick antics of the all-star cast of comedy stars and familiar character actor ringers I recognized from TV. I hadn't seen SCAVENGER HUNT in over 30 years and I still vividly recalled specific scenes. The film was just released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber and in watching it again, many of those scenes played out exactly as I remembered, but something was different this time. It's the same movie, but I wasn't laughing. So is it me? Have maturity, life experience and age combined to make SCAVENGER HUNT a miserable slog now compared to the uproarious classic it was when I was eight or nine? Other comedies from that era that I watched a million times hold up beautifully. SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT. THE BLUES BROTHERS. CADDYSHACK. AIRPLANE! PORKY'S. I still love the Three Stooges and Looney Tunes shorts I watched repeatedly at that age. But SCAVENGER HUNT? Was it always this awful and I was just too young and dumb to know any better? Because let me be clear: what was comedy gold at nine was excruciatingly painful to watch through 44-year-old eyes.

The film opens with the death of wealthy board game creator Milton Parker (Vincent Price). His attorney Charles Bernstein (Robert Morley) reveals that Parker left a unique will for the "scavengers" looking to inherit his $200 million fortune: they're to form five groups and work from a checklist with objects to acquire for point value and bring back to the Parker estate by 5:00 pm that day. The teams: Parker's greedy sister Mildred Carruthers (Cloris Leachman), her oafish man-child of a son Georgie (Richard Masur), and her sleazy lawyer Stuart Selsome (Richard Benjamin); the servant staff consisting of butler Jenkins (Roddy McDowall), limo driver Jackson (Cleavon Little), chef Henri (James Coco), and sexy French maid Babette (Stephanie Faracy); Parker's hunky, nice-guy nephews Jeff (Dirk Benedict) and Kenny (Willie Aames), who welcome Mildred's outcast stepdaughter Lisa (Maureen Teefy) along; Parker's widower son-in-law Henry Motley (Tony Randall), who sees it as a way to bond with his four kids after his wife's death; and lunkhead cabbie Marvin Dummitz (Richard Mulligan), who failed to get Parker's business partner to a meeting in a timely fashion many years earlier, therefore enabling him to take over their company and include Dummitz in the scavenger hunt as a form of gratitude. That Mad-inspired name--obviously a riff on Melvin Dummar, the guy who claimed to have given a ride to a disheveled Howard Hughes and was later named in a disputed will after Hughes' death--is the closest SCAVENGER HUNT comes to a clever joke, and it's a reference I never would've gotten at nine years of age.

With the ground rules set, the rest of the movie basically consists of acts of wanton slapstick destruction as a bunch of actors run and flail around, shouting, screaming, and mugging shamelessly as they do whatever it takes to get the items on their list. This leads to scenes where the servants have to steal a toilet, Selsome has to move a huge safe from the top floor of a building with an out-of-service elevator, Kenny has to tear the clown head off the drive-thru order speaker at a Jack-in-the-Box, and Dummitz has to disguise himself as a mummy, for some reason. Other objects on the list include tennis rackets, laughing gas (yes, it leads to a scene with everyone hysterically laughing), a fat person (yes), false teeth, a bulletproof vest, a globe, five ostriches, a stuffed fish, an oar, a stroller, a medicine ball, a table, assorted kitchenware, a football helmet, an old cylinder phonograph, etc. By the time of the climactic car chase with everyone heading to the Parker mansion with the random junk spilling out of their vehicles, SCAVENGER HUNT starts to look like an unfunny hybrid of IT'S A MAD MAD MAD MAD WORLD and SANFORD AND SON. As in IAMMMMW and other similar, star-studded comedies that send their large casts on a madcap pursuit (THE GREAT RACE, THOSE MAGNIFICENT MEN IN THEIR FLYING MACHINES, THE GUMBALL RALLY, MIDNIGHT MADNESS, THE CANNONBALL RUN, GREEDY, THE RAT RACE, etc), other parties end up joining the ensuing fracas, including a bridal shop security guard (Scatman Crothers), three obese people (Stuart Pankin, Stephen Furst, and Marji Martin) who are among the "items" and exist only to be the butt of endless "fatty eats and/or falls down" jokes, an old Native American (Jerado Decordovier) whose dentures were stolen by Selsome, and a lisping, Sylvester the Cat-sounding zookeeper (Avery Schreiber), looking for his stolen ostriches. Various parties also cross paths with a batty old weapons nut (Ruth Gordon), fearsome motorcycle gang leader Scum (Meat Loaf), and pumped-up gym trainer Lars (Arnold Schwarzenegger).

Over 116 laborious minutes, nothing funny happens. It's a pretty amazing grouping of actors and they seem to be having a good time (Benjamin, especially), but SCAVENGER HUNT is the kind of comedy where everyone equates being loud with being funny. Everyone plays everything too broadly and most of the one-liners are totally rimshot-ready ("I loved him like a brother," Mildred says of Parker, to which Bernstein replies "He was your brother"). Bankrolled by shopping mall magnate turned movie producer Melvin Simon, SCAVENGER HUNT was co-written and produced by Steven A. Vail, whose only prior credit was the smutty 1978 late night cable favorite and KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE ripoff JOKES MY FOLKS NEVER TOLD ME, and directed by Michael Schultz, which leads to the bizarre opening credit "A Steven A. Vail film by Michael Schultz." Schultz already had a reputation as a top African-American filmmaker of the decade with hit films like 1975's COOLEY HIGH and 1976's CAR WASH, and was a frequent Richard Pryor collaborator (WHICH WAY IS UP? and GREASED LIGHTNING, both from 1977, and he directed some of 1981's BUSTIN' LOOSE, though only Oz Scott received credit). Schultz's career hit a major speed bump with the expensive 1978 flop SGT. PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND, which gathered a huge cast of non-singers in a musical starring Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees. After SCAVENGER HUNT, Schultz stayed busy but he never lived up to the potential of his early hits. He enjoyed moderate box office successes with THE LAST DRAGON and KRUSH GROOVE in 1985, and directed the 1987 comedy DISORDERLIES, notable for its much-anticipated teaming of The Fat Boys and Ralph Bellamy. Other than 1991's LIVIN' LARGE and 2004's WOMAN THOU ART LOOSED, the now-78-year-old Schultz has worked exclusively in TV since the late 1980s, directing episodes of a myriad of shows, among them PICKET FENCES, ALLY MCBEAL, FELICITY, THE PRACTICE, BOSTON PUBLIC, EVERWOOD, TOUCHED BY AN ANGEL, JAG, BROTHERS & SISTERS, and most recently, BLACK-ISH and ARROW. Schultz contributes a commentary track to the SCAVENGER HUNT Blu-ray, and cites it as his most successful film in terms of people mentioning it to him. It's remained a minor cult classic beloved by those who saw it at an impressionable age, and part of that ongoing affection might be because it was out of circulation for so long unless, as Schultz points out, "you taped it off of TV years ago or found an old VHS tape at a garage sale or on eBay." If you want to keep having fond memories of SCAVENGER HUNT, then you'd be wise to just leave it alone, because revisiting this one was a soul-crushing disappointment.

USS INDIANAPOLIS: MEN OF COURAGE
(US - 2016)

The story of the USS Indianapolis is familiar to anyone who's seen JAWS, where Robert Shaw delivers arguably the greatest monologue in film history as salty shark hunter Quint recounts his experiences on the doomed ship near the end of WWII. After completing orders to deliver the materials for the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima, the Indianapolis, without sonar and with no customary escort due to the top-secret, classified nature of the mission, was torpedoed by the Japanese submarine I-58 between Tinian and Okinawa. It sank within 12 minutes, as Captain Charles Butler McVay ordered the crew to abandon ship, leaving them stranded for five days in shark-infested waters. Of the 1196 on board, nearly 300 died in the initial attack. Of the remaining 900 left in the water, only 317 survived, the rest dying from dehydration, saltwater poisoning, drowning, and, as JAWS fans know, shark attacks. It's a horrific tragedy that deserves a more dignified presentation than USS INDIANAPOLIS: MEN OF COURAGE. The 1991 CBS TV-movie MISSION OF THE SHARK, with Stacy Keach as McVay, did a better job with the limited expectations of being a made-for-TV movie. This film, starring Nicolas Cage as McVay, is undoubtedly sincere in its intentions but can't overcome a trite, cliched script and rock-bottom visual effects that makes it look like an Asylum production debuting on Syfy. The explosions are laughable and the CGI sharks jump out of the water looking like deleted SHARKNADO files e-mailed to director Mario Van Peebles.

The film is divided into three sections, with the interminable opening act devoted to the camaraderie and ballbusting among an interchangeable and impossibly dull group of sailors, focusing on two--wholesome, all-American Bama (Matt Lanter) and gregarious D'Antonio (Adam Scott Miller), who does everything short of yell "Hey, you's boys wanna play some stickball?" to let you know he's from Brooklyn--who fall in love with the same woman (Emily Tennant). The second is the sinking of the ship and the five days stranded in the water, where Van Peebles turns the film into a cheap jump-scare shark attack horror movie, and third is a courtroom drama when the Navy, looking for someone to scapegoat for their failure to answer multiple distress calls (they thought it was the Japanese trying to deceive them), decides to court-martial McVay, saying he could've "zig-zagged" the ship to avoid the torpedoes. McVay's story is a sad one--he committed suicide in 1968 after over two decades of harassment and death threats by the families of the dead sailors even though he was fully supported by the survivors as well as by I-58 commander Mochitsura Hashimoto (Yutaka Takeuchi), who testified that there was no way McVay could've avoided the torpedoes. McVay and the men aboard the USS Indianapolis deserved something a little more polished and professional-looking than a WWII movie that looks like it was directed by Anthony C. Ferrante. The writing isn't much better--try not to laugh at the torpedoes hitting the ship a nanosecond after a guy playing dice in the mess hall rolls snake eyes. Or at decisions being made in darkened and ominous film noir-lit rooms filled with cigar-sucking fat cats ("War's good for business, and business is good for America!"). Or at McWhorter, the Chief Petty Officer played by Tom Sizemore in what's apparently an extended tribute to William Bendix (and of course, McWhorter's wife just had a baby that he describes as "nine pounds of rompin' stompin' dynamite!" which is code for "McWhorter's never going to meet his kid"). There are scattered moments where USS INDIANAPOLIS rises above its schlocky, Redbox-ready nature: Thomas Jane does some nice work in a small role as Lt. Adrian Marks, the pilot who disobeyed orders and made a daring water landing to rescue as many survivors as he could, and Cage, who's subdued and surprisingly restrained throughout, shares a scene with Takeuchi very late in the film where both actors are demonstrating such raw emotion that they almost convince you that they're in a better movie. With more money, a better script, a supporting cast of actors that you could actually tell apart, more directorial flair (Van Peebles' heart may be in the right place, but his bland direction is pure clock-punching and irrefutable proof that his NEW JACK CITY and POSSE days of being a filmmaker of note are long gone), and a time machine to go back to around 2000 when Nicolas Cage movies were still major events, the well-meaning USS INDIANAPOLIS could've been a strong WWII movie instead of what has to be the cheapest-looking $40 million movie ever, looking like total amateur hour despite having 30 credited producers and the participation of RESERVOIR DOGS and PULP FICTION cinematographer Andrzej Sekula. (R, 130 mins)

THE HOLLOW POINT
(US - 2016)

There's absolutely no reason why this shouldn't be a nifty little desert noir B-movie in the vein of '90s video store mainstays like RED ROCK WEST and BLACK DAY BLUE NIGHT, but the barely-released THE HOLLOW POINT just never gets its shit together. Content to churn out a nearly decade-too-late ripoff of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego (APOLLO 18, OPEN GRAVE) and first-time screenwriter Nils Lyew waste an inspired and entertaining performance by the great Ian McShane in total Al Swearengen mode as Leland Kilbaught, a gruff, grubby, hard-drinking, burned-out sheriff of Los Reyes County, right along the Arizona-Mexico border. Kilbaught's got a reputation among the locals for not really caring much about the rules, and after he shoots Clive Mercy (Nathan Stevens) in the head during a traffic stop, he's relieved of his duties and new sheriff Wallace (Patrick Wilson) is sent in to replace him. Kilbaught knows what Clive was up to--running armor-piercing ammo into Mexico as a flunky for a cartel operation. Clive's equally hapless loser brother Ken (David Stevens) ends up killing a mid-level cartel figure after a botched ammunition run before skating back to Los Reyes County and hiding out. Complicating matters is that Wallace, who's from the area and couldn't wait to get away, knows his ex-wife Marla (Lynn Collins) is hooked up with Ken, which puts her at serious risk when the cartel sends unstoppable killing machine assassin Atticus (John Leguizamo as Javier Bardem) to find Ken and kill anyone who knows him, including Marla and sleazy used car dealer Shep Diaz (Jim Belushi), who also has connections to the cartel.

Other than a truly startling moment when Atticus hacks off Wallace's right hand with a machete, the only thing THE HOLLOW POINT has going for it is McShane, who single-handedly saves it from total oblivion. Lyew's script is an incoherent mess, Lopez-Gallego, who also serves as his own editor, couldn't generate any dramatic momentum if his career depended on it, occasionally resorting to stupid POV shots like the one from inside a spinning washing machine at a laundromat. The entire film is so sloppily-constructed that we never get a full grasp of who's who or why they're even in danger. Leguizamo is just Anton Chigurh with a better haircut and Belushi, sporting a cheap suit and a hideous combover, can play this kind of obnoxious shitbag in his sleep. But McShane valiantly tries to save the day, with his gravelly line readings and snide deliveries of mellifluously poetic bon mots like "You are not an unfortunate man...you're an auspicious parasite!" and "Buenos Diaz!" He seems to be having a blast playing this character, making it almost criminal that his efforts are squandered on such an uninspired and otherwise completely forgettable project. (R, 97 mins)

THE UNHOLY FOUR
(Italy - 1970)

Directed by E.B. Clucher (Enzo Barboni). Written by Mario di Nardo and Franco Rossetti. Cast: Leonard Mann, Woody Strode, Peter Martell (Pietro Martellanza), Luigi Montefiori, Evelyn Stewart (Ida Galli), Helmuth Schneider, Lucio Rosato, Alain Naya, Giuseppe Lauricella, Dino Strano, Andrew Ray (Andrea Aureli), Enzo Fiermonte, Luciano Rossi, Salvatore Billa, Romano Puppo. (Unrated, 94 mins)

A spaghetti western mostly by virtue of being Italian, THE UNHOLY FOUR is a throwback of sorts and more in line with the psychological, character-driven 1950s westerns of Anthony Mann than with the more distinct 1960s spaghettis of the Sergios Leone and Corbucci. Even Riz Ortolani's score sounds like it came from an older Hollywood western, unlike the groundbreaking, iconic cues of Ennio Morricone. The film opens with a Dodge City asylum being set on fire as a distraction for an overnight bank robbery by a gang of miscreants led by Tom Udo (Lucio Rosato), the son of a wealthy landowner (Giuseppe Lauricella). Four inmates escape the burning jail: slow-witted, God-fearing strongman Woody (Woody Strode), intimidating card cheat Hondo (Luigi Montefiori, better known as "George Eastman"), loony Silver (Peter Martell), and Chuck Mool (Leonard Mann), an amnesiac with no idea who he is or why he's in the asylum until one of Udo's dying cohorts sees him and exclaims "Chuck Mool!" With his three unlikely compadres in tow, Chuck Mool (a name concocted by the English dub team--the Italian version was titled CIUKMULL, so everyone constantly refers to him as "Chuck Mool" on the English dub track) embarks on a quest to uncover the chain of events that led him to being locked up in Dodge City

But there's more to the story than the plight of Chuck Mool: the Udo family is fighting off an attempt to take over their land by John Caldwell (Helmuth Schneider), another rich asshole who's buying up everyone's property and wants the Udos out of the way. Caldwell believes Chuck Mool is his son, presumed dead in a fire three years earlier. Learning that Chuck Mool is alive and heading their way with three presumed-dangerous madmen, Old Man Udo devises a scheme to convince Chuck Mool that he's his father and that he's supposed to kill the Caldwells. Udo's daughter Sheila (Evelyn Stewart) isn't happy about the scam and tries to warn Chuck Mool after he arrives. Tensions escalate as Chuck Mool, Woody, Hondo, and Silver are forced to take on the duplicitous Udo family and a bunch of their hired killers (among them ubiquitous Eurocult stalwart Romano Puppo) and shoot their way out of town.

THE UNHOLY FOUR was the directing debut of veteran cinematographer Enzo Barboni, who shot Sergio Corbucci's influential 1966 classic DJANGO, as well as Corbucci's THE HELLBENDERS (1967) and American director Don Taylor's spaghetti western THE FIVE MAN ARMY (1970). Adopting the pseudonym "E.B. Clucher," Barboni (1922-2002) would go on to direct the enormously popular spaghetti western comedies THEY CALL ME TRINITY (1971) and TRINITY IS STILL MY NAME (1972), which led to international fame for stars Terence Hill and Bud Spencer. Barboni's experience as a cinematographer is put to excellent use in THE UNHOLY FOUR, with some expertly choreographed gunfight sequences and some--for the time--unusually fluid, almost Steadicam-like camera movements throughout the action scenes. For the most part, it doesn't really play like the more stylish and violent Leone westerns or the politically charged genre offerings from Corbucci, but rather like something out of the 1950s or early 1960s and more beholden to the Hollywood western. There's one wacky, comedic bar brawl that hints where Barboni's career would soon head with the TRINITY movies, but THE UNHOLY FOUR gets darker and more downbeat as it goes on, making Ortolani's incongruously upbeat music cues sound somewhat inappropriate. There's occasional flashes of genuine unpleasantness scattered throughout, none more shocking than the jaw-dropping moment when a leering, lip-smacking Tom Udo tells Sheila "You got a hell of a lot to offer...too bad we're brother and sister...I could show you what it's all about."

In just his second film, Mann, an American actor who spent the bulk of his career in Italy before retiring from movies in 1989 at the age of 42 (his few American gigs included 1981's NIGHT SCHOOL, 1987's FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC, and his final film to date, 1989's SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 3: BETTER WATCH OUT) to become a teacher and playwright under his real name Leonard Manzella, is good as the lost hero in an existential crisis. Things slow down a little too much in the sluggish midsection, which seems to just be killing time for the undeniably ass-kicking last 20 or so minutes, where Barboni really starts firing on all cylinders and the titular quartet bands together to take on Udo's army. Though it was dubbed in English by the usual suspects (Ed Mannix, Robert Spafford, and others can be heard), THE UNHOLY FOUR was never released theatrically in the US and pretty much fell into obscurity, a curio known only to the most devoted spaghetti western completists. Wild East released a gray market double feature DVD that paired it with Ferdinando Baldi's 1969 western THE FORGOTTEN PISTOLERO, which also starred Mann and Martell, but it was was recently issued on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber in another textbook example of the death of physical media being greatly exaggerated.

iBOY
(US/UK - 2017)

Directed by Adam Randall. Written by Joe Barton, Mark Denton and Jonny Stockwood. Cast: Bill Milner, Maisie Williams, Miranda Richardson, Rory Kinnear, Jordan Bolger, Charlie Palmer Rothwell, Aymen Habdouchi, Armin Karima, McKell David, Shaquille Ali-Yebbuah, Christopher Colcuhoun. (Unrated, 90 mins)

Once you get past the hokey title, the Netflix Original iBOY is a decent-enough time-killer blending sci-fi elements with the vigilante genre, set in familiar-looking HARRY BROWN, FISH TANK, and ATTACK THE BLOCK London housing projects and bathed in that Michael Mann-ish blue sheen that makers of British crime thrillers love so much. Based on a novel by Kevin Brooks, iBOY focuses on Tom (Bill Milner, grown up since the 2007 cult movie SON OF RAMBOW), a shy, quiet teenager who lives in a public housing block with his grandma (Miranda Richardson). He has a crush on classmate Lucy (GAME OF THRONES' Maisie Williams) and when he goes to visit her nearby flat, he walks in on a burglary in progress with Lucy in her bedroom screaming for help. Tom impulsively flees and tries to call for help, but he gets shot in the head and is comatose for ten days. Once he's awake, he's informed that pieces of his iPhone are lodged into his brain from when he was shot, and attempting to remove the fragments is too risky a procedure. All things considered, he's generally fine other than a large scar on the side of his head but complications arise when Tom begins picking up wi-fi connections and phone signals that allow him to instantly hack anyone around him, cataloging images and data of whatever everyone he passes is saying or texting into their phone, iPad, laptop, etc.

Of course, this overloads his brain but he eventually learns how to control it, and when he realizes that the guy who shot him is troublemaking classmate Eugene (Charlie Palmer Rothwell), Tom decides to use his newfound powers for revenge on Eugene and his crew of small-time criminals who work for drug dealer Cutz (Aymen Habdouchi). He starts by playing simple pranks, but it quickly escalates to dangerous games like draining bank accounts and sending them on wild goose chases so he has time to break into Cutz's pad, steal his entire inventory, plant it in the homes of Eugene and all the underlings, then anonymously tip off the cops. This leads paranoid Cutz frantic about losing his merch and the trust of his gang, and unable to explain what's happening to his boss, big-time London gangster Ellman (Rory Kinnear). All the while, Tom, hiding behind the moniker "iBOY," becomes a folk hero of sorts, a high-tech surveillance vigilante cleaning up all the crime and corruption permeating the housing block.

It's not the most plausible premise, but it's engaging enough to make you wish director Adam Randall and the screenwriters kept the momentum going through a sluggish midsection. The notion of Tom turning into a one-man Big Brother is intriguing, and there's a lot of humor in the games he plays with Eugene and the others, whether it's on their phones or controlling the computer system in their vehicles. It doesn't make much sense that with all of these new powers that permit him to see and hear all and even emit a high-pitched sound to incapacitate his enemies, he still doesn't pick up that Cutz and his gang are right behind him when they ambush him. And sometimes, his capabilities seem to go beyond the possibilities of simple hacking, turning him from a cloud-connected avenger to a Lawnmower Man-inspired CHRONICLE reject whenever it's convenient for the plot. I suppose the idea is that his powers are growing stronger, but we sort-of miss that realization taking place. And why can he suddenly do that trick with the high-pitched whistle?

After a meandering second act, things really pick up with the first appearance of Ellman a bit after the one-hour mark. As played by Kinnear, perhaps best known to Netflix viewers for his starring role as the British Prime Minister having the worst day of his life in the unforgettable BLACK MIRROR series premiere "The National Anthem," Ellman is a fascinating and complex character who you'll wish had more screen time. Ellman grew up in these projects and has a chip on his shoulder about it, not denying his roots but instead infiltrating high society to take it down from within. When he realizes his operation has been put in jeopardy by "iBOY," he doesn't want revenge--he wants to recruit him. Ellman has a sense of honor--when Tom's only other friend Danny (Jordan Bolger) rats him out, Ellman scolds "If you're gonna betray your friend, at least look him in the eye when you do it!" He's prone to wry observations like "Cutz is a man with a hammer in a world of china, know what I mean?" and seething sarcasm, as when Eugene and his stooges kidnap Lucy and she ends up outsmarting them: "You got everything under control here? I mean the hostage does have the gun." Kinnear sinks his teeth into the role and in the course of just a few minutes, creates the most detailed and multi-layered character in the movie, stone-cold serious but making you laugh at the same time ("Really, Cutz? The granny?" after Cutz impulsively knocks Tom's grandma unconscious). iBOY isn't a kids movie at all--it's dark, bleak, profane (even Arya Stark drops a bunch of F-bombs), and violent, played completely straight and would easily get an R rating if it was in theaters instead of bowing on Netflix. iBOY shows enough flashes of brains and inspiration that it's worth a watch, but it drops the ball with a certain degree of frequency. It's entertaining, but ultimately, it's still the kind of movie that gathers all of its characters for a climactic showdown at an abandoned warehouse.

RESIDENT EVIL: THE FINAL CHAPTER
(US/Germany - 2017)

Written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. Cast: Milla Jovovich, Ali Larter, Iain Glen, Shawn Roberts, Ruby Rose, Eoin Macken, Fraser James, William Levy, Rola, Lee Goon Ji, Ever Anderson, Mark Simpson. (R, 106 mins)

The Paul W.S. Anderson-shepherded RESIDENT EVIL franchise has been a mostly reliable source of empty calorie junk food over the last 15 years, with the only real stumble being the second film in the series, 2004's RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE. Directed not by Anderson (who was busy with the execrable ALIEN VS. PREDATOR) but by veteran second-unit guy Alexander Witt--who hasn't directed a film since--APOCALYPSE remains the nadir of a series that sprang back to life when Anderson returned to the director's chair for the fourth entry, 2010's 3D RESIDENT EVIL: AFTERLIFE (HIGHLANDER director Russell Mulcahy helmed 2007's so-so RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION). Unfortunately, with RESIDENT EVIL: THE FINAL CHAPTER, the purported conclusion to the series (not likely), things take a turn toward the APOCALYPSE end of things. Fatigue was starting to set in with the most recent entry, 2012's RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION, but with THE FINAL CHAPTER, everyone involved, starting with star Milla Jovovich, just seems to be over it. The worst decision Anderson makes here--and perhaps he did so under the false assumption that it would liven up a stale formula--is to utilize the services of editor Doobie White. White's credits include CRANK 2: HIGH VOLTAGE, RECLAIM, and MOMENTUM, action films that rely on lighting-fast cutting so that no shot seems to last longer than a second. It's RESIDENT EVIL done quick-cut/shaky-cam style, rendering most of the action sequences an unwatchable, headache-inducing blur. Not only does that aesthetic not gel with Anderson's usual style, but it's nearly a decade past its sell-by date. Anderson takes a lot of shit from fanboy types, but he's always been a stylist first and foremost, and his films do have a distinctive look and feel to them, all the way back to his 1994 debut SHOPPING. Why he would decide, nearly a quarter century into his filmmaking career, to start ripping off the worst tendencies of Michael Bay and the Neveldine/Taylor CRANK guys is a mystery. To say that THE FINAL CHAPTER is marginally better than APOCALYPSE is damning with faint praise, but it's still an incoherent, hideous mess to look at and tantamount to a digital migraine.

Quickly wrapping up the cliffhanger ending of RETRIBUTION with a de facto "Previously on..." recap, THE FINAL CHAPTER begins with Jovovich's Alice wandering the ruins of Washington D.C., and encountering the hologram of the Red Queen (Ever Anderson, Jovovich's Mini-Me daughter with husband Anderson). The Red Queen directs Alice to venture back to the wasteland that is Raccoon City to break into The Hive, the Umbrella Corporation's underground compound, where there's an airborne antivirus to cure the pandemic T-Virus that turned the whole world into zombies with only 4000 humans remaining. The Red Queen was created in Alice's image, her father a humanitarian scientist with the Umbrella Corporation who was murdered by his business partner Dr. Isaacs (Iain Glen, returning from APOCALYPSE and EXTINCTION) and Umbrella flunky Wesker (Shawn Roberts, returning from AFTERLIFE and RETRIBUTION and continuing his "I'm almost Hugo Weaving from THE MATRIX" act) when he foolishly decided to put people before profits. Alice gets away from Isaacs, now a ranting prophet wanting to bring about the end of the world, and makes her way to Raccoon City where she encounters the obligatory ragtag band of survivors, including Claire Redfield (Ali Larter, returning from EXTINCTION and AFTERLIFE) and must make their way into The Hive with 12 hours left to save what's left of humanity and start over. They've got Isaacs in a tank leading a zombie horde straight to them as well as Wesker pacing around his underground lair arguing with the Red Queen hologram, who has promised to tell amnesiac Alice the truth about herself.

That truth is obvious since Anderson reveals his cards too early, enabling any viewer with the capacity to fog a mirror to figure out the secret long before Alice does. Gathering cast members from past entries gives THE FINAL CHAPTER that comfort food, high-school reunion, victory lap feel that RETRIBUTION had, but none of the supporting cast are put to good use--Roberts' Wesker and Larter's Claire have nothing to do--except for Glen, who seems to having a good time hamming it up as the evil Isaacs. As the ho-hum story moves from one loud jump-scare, verbose exposition drop, and eye-glazingly incomprehensible set piece to another, you can practically feel the burnout along with Jovovich after six of these. The accelerated pace of the action scenes comes off not so much as a jolt of inspiration on the part of Anderson but rather, an eagerness to just get through this as quickly as possible. Anderson doesn't even take advantage of the easy political subtext of Isaacs and his transformation from scheming CEO to end-of-days Bible thumper. Once upon a time, George Romero was attached to direct a RESIDENT EVIL adaptation prior to Anderson's involvement all those years ago--can you imagine what he could've brought to this in his prime? Even middling installments like EXTINCTION and RETRIBUTION have solid zombie action and some striking dystopian imagery. Here, you can't see any of that because Anderson has instructed White to keep it cut at such a frenetic pace that your eyes can't even process what you're seeing (watch that turbine scene and imagine how much more effective it would've been if sensibly edited). It'll probably be a big enough hit in Asia, where it opened huge in December 2016, a month before it was released in the rest of the world (that also explains the very brief presence--at least in the US version--of South Korean TV star/singer/model Lee Goon Ji) that it'll likely be rebooted with or without Jovovich and Anderson, but it'll be awfully difficult to get excited about it.

IRONMASTER
(France/Italy - 1983)

Directed by Umberto Lenzi. Written by Alberto Cavallone, Dardano Sacchetti, Lea Martino and Gabriel Rossini. Cast: Sam Pasco, Elvire Audray, George Eastman (Luigi Montefiori), William Berger, Pamela Field (Pamela Prati), Jacques Herlin, Brian Redford (Danilo Mattei), Benito Stefanelli, Areno D'Adderio, Giovanni Cianfriglia, Walter Lucchini, Nello Pazzafini, Nico La Macchia. (Unrated, 93 mins)

"When warriors stop showing their power, it's the beginning of the end. We're only happy in battle! War is our reason for living! What's the use in having invincible weapons if you can't use them?"

"But everyone hates us, Vuud."

This isn't to suggest that the makers of the 1983 Italian QUEST FOR FIRE-meets-CONAN THE BARBARIAN-with-a-bit-of-EXCALIBUR ripoff IRONMASTER saw a certain world leader's ascendance happening 34 years ahead of time, but the eagerness of Vuud (George Eastman), the film's villain, to use all the weapons at his disposal does draw comparison. Vuud's father Iksay (Benito Stefanelli), the aging leader of their caveman tribe, is eager to step down after the next hunt but is stalling because he doesn't think his son is capable. Vuud is next in line by right, but Iksay expresses concern to his council Rag (Jacques Herlin) over the bad-tempered, impulsive, Sonny Corleone-esque Vuud: "He's unable to control himself," Iksay says, adding "What would become of this tribe if it were led by someone so restless?" Rag assures him Vuud will mature into the job but Iksay is unconvinced: "I don't know. I just don't believe in him."

Sam Pasco as Ela

Iksay would rather hand control of his tribe off to the more well-liked and even-tempered Ela (Sam Pasco), but he never gets the chance since an impatient Vuud bashes in his father's skull, a vicious act witnessed by Ela. Ela outs Vuud as a murderer, to which Vuud naturally responds by attacking Ela in a violent rage, accidentally killing Rag when he tries to break up the scuffle. Vuud is banished to the surrounding desert, where he encounters the duplicitous Lith (Pamela Prati) and discovers iron in the shape of a sword in the aftermath of a stock footage volcanic eruption. Believing he has found a new form of weapon beyond their customary rocks and sticks, Vuud returns to the tribe and is hailed as a god, his first act to banish Ela to six days and nights crucified in the desert as he and Lith take charge, roaming the land, dominating and enslaving every peaceful tribe they encounter. The cave people are ordered to accept this as their new normal and anyone who objects is killed. Ela befriends Isa (Elvire Audray), the daughter of kindly tribe leader Mogo (William Berger), who assembles his people to help Ela take back his tribe and overthrow the despotic Vuud and the scheming, self-serving Lith, his chief source of encouragement and prodding.

George Eastman as Vuud

There was no shortage of CONAN THE BARBARIAN ripoffs flooding theaters and drive-ins throughout the early-to-mid '80s, and the Stone Age-set IRONMASTER, co-written by Alberto Cavalline (the 1978 coprophagia ode BLUE MOVIE) and frequent Lucio Fulci collaborator Dardano Sacchetti, and directed by Italian genre stalwart Umberto Lenzi (ALMOST HUMAN, CANNIBAL FEROX), is probably one of the weakest (hey, they can't all be YOR: THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE). It has some undeniable entertainment value for Eurotrash devotees and fans of Italian knockoffs, whether it's the presence of perennial Eurocult fixture Eastman, the familiar dubbing voices (almost all of them are here) or an amazing shot where Lith is jogging away and actress Prati is the victim of a gratuitous nip slip that Lenzi just left in the movie. One of its chief points of interest is that most of the exteriors were shot at some striking locations in Custer State Park in South Dakota, which gives the film a look and feel that's unique to this subgenre (and Lenzi and the producers were really fixated by a nearby herd of grazing buffalo, as nearly every cast member gets a scene running by them at one point). The other noteworthy aspect of IRONMASTER is that it's the sole mainstream film appearance of Pasco, an American bodybuilder better known as "Big Max," who appeared in numerous gay porn films at the time and was also a popular model for COLT, a leading producer of gay pornography and sex toys since 1967. Pasco is dubbed in IRONMASTER, and in an interview on Code Red's new Blu-ray, Lenzi dismisses him as "worthless" and "pathetic" as an actor as well as in action scenes, saying he didn't move in a "masculine" way. Pasco and his porn world monikers "Big Max" and "Mike Spanner" vanished and were never seen or heard from again after 1985, so it's generally assumed he died around that time, with several corroborating comments on a couple of different message boards mentioning he spent his final days doing private modeling gigs and hustling in NYC before succumbing to steroid-related liver failure in 1985. Lenzi is also similarly unkind to Audray (THE SCORPION WITH TWO TAILS), who committed suicide in 2000 at the age of 40, saying she came along in a package deal with the French co-producer that she was dating at the time. The dull and slow-moving IRONMASTER is really only for the most die-hard Italian ripoff completist, but such people are out there (guilty as charged), and it's a small victory for children of the '80s to see these VHS staples getting such nice HD treatment decades down the line.

Sam Pasco, aka "Big Max," on the cover of a 1979 issue of COLT Men

BLASTFIGHTER
(Italy - 1984; US release 1985)

Directed by John Old Jr (Lamberto Bava). Written by Max von Ryt (Massimo De Rita) and Luca von Ryt (Luca De Rita). Cast: Michael Sopkiw, Valerie Blake (Valentina Forte), George Eastman (Luigi Montefiori), Mike Miller (Stefano Mingardo), Richard Raymond (Ottaviano Dell'Acqua), Patrick O'Neil Jr (Massimo Vanni), Elizabeth Forbes, Carl Savage, Michael Saroyan (Michele Soavi), George Williams, Giancarlo Prati, Billy Redden. (Unrated, 90 mins)

An Italian FIRST BLOOD knockoff that also works in elements of DELIVERANCE and SOUTHERN COMFORT, BLASTFIGHTER was originally conceived as a yet another post-nuke ROAD WARRIOR ripoff until a new script was commissioned and the filmmakers just kept the same title. BLASTFIGHTER probably refers to a state-of-the-art experimental combat shotgun that's used by the hero, but it can just as easily describe the hero himself. Jake "Tiger" Sharp (2019: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK's Michael Sopkiw) is a disgraced Atlanta ex-cop just paroled after serving eight years for blowing away the creep (Giancarlo Prati) who murdered his partner (Massimo Vanni, billed as "Patrick O'Neil Jr") and then killed his wife. Tiger's cop buddy gives him an off-the-books SPAS shotgun to off the corrupt D.A. who repeatedly shielded the creep and sent Tiger to prison, but he can't bring himself to pull the trigger. Instead, he heads to Clayton, the small town where he grew up, intent on living a quiet, solitary life in the Sharp family cabin.

Of course, the rowdy, redneck townies won't allow that to happen. Tiger repeatedly clashes with bullying Wally Hanson (RAIDERS OF ATLANTIS' Stefano Mingardo, billed as "Mike Miller") and his buddies (including Eurocult regular Ottaviano Dell'Acqua, billed as "Richard Raymond"), who hassle him at the market and kill a helpless fawn he's adopted. Tiger runs into his childhood buddy and local sawmill owner Tom (George Eastman)--who's also Wally's older brother--and learns that Wally and his doofus pals are poaching wildlife and selling the carcasses to a black market herbal medicinist from Hong Kong who's set up shop in the area. Tiger busts up that operation, sending the Hong Kong guy and that entire subplot packing, but now he's pissed off Wally. Arriving just in time for the backwoods mayhem is Tiger's estranged daughter Connie (Valentina Forte, billed as "Valerie Blake"), who's nearly gang-raped by Wally and his goons after they kill Tiger's visiting cop buddy as well as Connie's boyfriend Pete (Michele Soavi, billed as "Michael Saroyan"). Despite Tom intervening to keep his stupid brother from letting things escalate (the Clayton depicted here has possibly the most absent sheriff in film history), that's exactly what happens, with Wally gathering up all the yahoos from town to hunt down Tiger in the woods before a final confrontation that will pit two lifelong friends against one another.

Most Italian exploitation fare from this period was made with the intent of passing itself off in the most American way possible. This often involved a certain amount of location work being done in the States, mixed with interiors being shot in Rome. In the mid '80s, however, the US location work became significantly more extensive, with states like Georgia, Nevada, Florida, and especially Arizona welcoming Italian crews for numerous films. With almost everyone in the cast and crew hiding behind Americanized pseudonyms, BLASTFIGHTER, directed by Lamberto Bava (credited as "John Old Jr" as a tribute to his legendary father Mario Bava, who went by "John M. Old" on a couple of movies), puts forth a lot of effort to look as American as possible, shot almost entirely on location in Atlanta and Clayton, GA, the latter being the same general vicinity where much of DELIVERANCE was shot. Also contributing to the "See, this isn't Italian...it's American!" ruse is the recurring use of the Bee Gees-penned "The Evening Star," a big hit for Kenny Rogers the same year of BLASTFIGHTER's release, but represented instead by a cover version by someone named Tommie Baby. The production even found Clayton resident Billy Redden, best known as the "Dueling Banjos" kid in DELIVERANCE, handed him another banjo, and had him stand with it in the downtown Clayton market with some other confused locals watching the Italian crew hard at work (which begs the question, why is everyone just standing in the tiny market watching Billy Redden play a single half-assed banjo lick before Tiger walks in?). There's some interior work obviously done in Rome, but most of BLASTFIGHTER takes place out in the elements of Clayton and the surrounding rural area, which lends much grittiness and authenticity to the action, as well as the surreal appeal of things just being slightly off because no matter how much effort they put into the illusion, these Italian knockoffs never quite fully succeeded at passing themselves off as totally American. Even in the hick environs of rural Clayon, the local boys don't yell "Yee-haah!" as much as Wally and his buddies do.

Of course, for fans of such things, that's all part of the charm and why movies like BLASTFIGHTER--a movie whose battered Vestron Video VHS tape was guaranteed to be found in every video store you walked into well into the 1990s--have remained such nostalgic cult items decades later. It helps that BLASTFIGHTER is a legitimately entertaining action movie, with American Sopkiw a credible genre star considering he only made four movies over a three-year period before quitting acting (and he's dubbed here by Larry Dolgin). Fresh off Sergio Martino's 2019: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK--the pinnacle of the Italian post-nukes--Sopkiw, 29 at the time of filming, is miscast in BLASTFIGHTER as the father of a character played by Forte, who was around 17 or 18 at the time (and dating CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST director Ruggero Deodato, who cast her in the next year's CUT AND RUN). Some effort is made to make Sopkiw look a little older--with his stache, he actually resembles both Franco Nero and Maurizio Merli, which makes one wonder how badass one them would've been as Tiger--but he and Forte just don't really gel as father and daughter. Still, it's easy to look past it, as he's a solid action hero who handles a lot of his own stunts along with Forte.

Released in the US in late 1985 by Almi Pictures, BLASTFIGHTER has just resurfaced in a terrific-looking limited edition Blu-ray restoration by Code Red in another defiant example of the death of physical media being significantly exaggerated. There's interviews with Bava, Sopkiw, cinematographer Gianlorenzo Battaglia (credited on the film as "Lawrence Bannon"), and Eastman, who was clearly caught on a bad day, going full Howard Beale in one of the more scorched earth special features interviews of late, declaring "I never liked Lamberto Bava," going on to call him a "half-man" and "an idiot," and emphatically stating "Let's be honest, most of the movies I did are atrocious." Sopkiw is on hand for a commentary track with Mondo Digital's Nathaniel Thompson that has some interesting observations here and there, but despite Thompson's efforts to prod for more info, Sopkiw just isn't the best interview subject. He's foggy on a lot of details--understandable after 33 years--and won't talk about his other Bava film DEVIL-FISH (aka MONSTER SHARK) because "that's another contract," and "my contract said the interview was for this and AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK," (which Code Red is releasing later this year) and, worst of all, he comes off as dismissive of the film, his short-lived movie career, and the very idea that his movies have a cult following.

Sopkiw with Code Red's Bill Olsen,
still trying to make "Banana Man" a thing.

Sopkiw says doing conventions isn't worth his time and that "only a half dozen people are interested in these movies anyway." He doesn't seem to like movies much at all (he's never seen THE GODFATHER, didn't realize BLASTFIGHTER was a FIRST BLOOD knockoff because he wasn't aware of FIRST BLOOD, didn't care for MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, and doesn't like watching movies in HD), he seems to go through several mood swings over the course of the commentary, and his reluctance or inability to go into any significant detail and his repeated shout-outs to Quentin Tarantino to give him a call get old after some time (Bava also mentions Tarantino in his interview--must Tarantino be invoked on every one of these?). It's a sharp contrast to how good-natured Sopkiw was on the disastrous commentary on Media Blasters' old DVD release of AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK, where he seemed enthused to be there until "post-nuke historian" Dolph Chiarino infamously hijacked the track to shit-talk and settle scores with message board scenesters, bloggers, and writers (the DVD was eventually recalled and reissued without the commentary). There was probably a better commentary to be had with Thompson and some other genre historian just discussing the movie and the creative personnel, but nevertheless, BLASTFIGHTER looks great on Blu-ray (once you get past an intro with Sopkiw and Code Red's Bill Olsen in his inane "Banana Man" costume that you can't bypass) and holds up quite well as one of the more entertaining Italian ripoffs of its day.

THE COMEDIAN
(US/UK/China - 2016)

Directed by Taylor Hackford. Written by Art Linson, Jeff Ross, Richard LaGravenese and Lewis Friedman. Cast: Robert De Niro, Leslie Mann, Danny DeVito, Harvey Keitel, Edie Falco, Charles Grodin, Cloris Leachman, Patti Lupone, Lucy DeVito, Veronica Ferres, Lois Smith. (R, 120 mins)

It's pretty ballsy of Robert De Niro to attempt comedy in the same year he gave us the unspeakable DIRTY GRANDPA, but THE COMEDIAN (given a very limited Oscar-eligibility run in December 2016 but only now rolling out nationwide) is a project he and producer/co-writer Art Linson have had in various stages of development for nearly a decade. If there's a sense of familiarity to the end result, it's coming from a couple of different directions: De Niro already tackled stand-up comedy decades ago in Martin Scorsese's 1983 cult classic THE KING OF COMEDY, and the whole idea of following a working, schlepping stand-up has been seen over several seasons of Louis C.K.'s revered FX series LOUIE. Hell, there's even a scene of De Niro walking down the street and shaking hands with the door guy as he walks down into the entrance of the Comedy Cellar, almost straight out of LOUIE's opening credits. All that's missing is a revamped theme song that goes "Bobby, Bobby, Bobby, Bobbbbyyyyyy!"

De Niro is Jackie Burke, a 67-year-old shock comic best known for a MARRIED WITH CHILDREN-style sitcom he did in the 1980s called EDDIE'S HOME, where he played a working-class blowhard cop named Eddie, as crass as Al Bundy and with his own catchphrase he always shouted to his wife: "Arleeeeeeene!" Now scraping by doing nostalgia gigs in rinky-dink clubs where he shares the bill with Brett Butler and Jimmie Walker (a ton of stand-up luminaries young and old appear in cameos as themselves). Jackie is confronted in mid-act by heckling fan demanding he shout his catchphrase. A scuffle ensues resulting in Jackie decking the guy and the whole thing is caught on cell phone video and goes viral. After refusing to apologize to the guy in court, he's sentenced to 30 days in jail and 100 hours of community service. Once he's out, he spends his community service hours at a NYC soup kitchen where he befriends Harmony (Leslie Mann), who's also spending court-appointed time after assaulting her philandering boyfriend and his other girlfriend. Harmony is desperately trying to find a place for herself after spending most of her adult life screwing up and blowing opportunities, and wants to get out from under the thumb of her wealthy, mob-connected father Mac Schiltz (Harvey Keitel), refusing his offer to buy her out of her sentence with a judge friend and move down to his Florida home. Instead, she bonds with Jackie and a tentative romance blossoms as Jackie tries to rebuild his career, which is stuck in an endless rut: even though his fellow stand-ups revere him for his stage act, all any TV execs and fans on the street want from him is "Eddie" and his stupid catchphrase.

Considering he probably can't go a day without someone quipping "You talkin' to me?" to him, there's a lot of De Niro in Jackie as everyone he encounters demands he give them an "Arleeeeeene!" But THE COMEDIAN stumbles where it matters most: De Niro's stand-up bits as Jackie just aren't funny. Often, they're cringe-inducing in a bad way and too reliant not just on playing blue but going for that same kind of pointless raunch and childishly scatalogical way that torpedoed DIRTY GRANDPA. Is this a De Niro thing? Is this his sense of humor? Is Jackie playing to a crowd of seniors in a retirement home and changing the words of "Makin' Whoopee!" to "Makin' Poopie!" supposed to be funny? Considering Jackie's status as a legend among his peers (Jim Norton, after another Jackie video blows up online: "You're more viral than Charlie Sheen!"), his routine is pretty hacky, whether he's entertaining the homeless at the shelter or cracking gay and Jewish jokes at his niece's (Lucy DeVito) wedding to her same-sex partner, an act that includes one-liners about collecting the semen of homeless guys and doesn't go over well with Jackie's long-suffering brother Jimmy (Danny DeVito) and his shrewish wife Flo (Patti Lupone). While the stage bits tank, there's other pleasures to be had with THE COMEDIAN: it's great to see De Niro and DeVito busting each others' balls in their scenes together, and it's always a welcome sight to see De Niro and Keitel onscreen together, especially when Jackie talks about wanting to "bang the shit out of" Harmony and calls Mac "Pops."

Director Taylor Hackford and the screenwriters (among them Linson, journeyman Richard LaGravenese, and "Roastmaster General" Jeff Ross) take the story down an admirably dark detour when Jackie's long-suffering manager (Edie Falco) gets him a spot on the dais at a Friars Club roast of the beloved, 95-year-old Betty White-like screen and TV legend May Miller (Cloris Leachman) and she drops dead in the middle of his turn at the mic ("I didn't even get to my best lines!" Jackie grumbles). Terence Blanchard's melancholy jazz score combined with the location work in a Manhattan where it's constantly raining and gray does a wonderful job of conveying the sense of gloom and desperation Jackie feels over his career, with Hackford really succeeding in creating a very authentic "New York City" feel that makes the city an actual character in the story, and that's something you don't see much of these days. Likewise with the setting, there's also occasions where it has somewhat of a Woody Allen mix of comedy and drama going on, especially with the romantic pairing of 73-year-old De Niro and 44-year-old Mann. THE COMEDIAN has genuine affection for the world of the working comedian, and the roster of cameos is impressive--Norton (who served as a technical adviser), Butler, Walker, Hannibal Buress, Nick DiPaolo, Billy Crystal, Richard Belzer, Gilbert Gottfried, Stewie Stone, and Freddie Roman among others can be spotted--but Jackie's routines just don't cut it, even though the audience and everyone else within earshot are always doubled over with laughter. De Niro nails the body language, the stage presence, and the mannerisms of a veteran stand-up, but his act sounds like stuff that didn't make the cut of DIRTY GRANDPA (jokes about jerking off, pulling out, making the cunnilingus gesture at May, etc), and the improbably feel-good ending is just lazy. There's a charming, insightful film that manages to make its presence known throughout THE COMEDIAN, but the comedy doesn't hold up its end of the bargain

THE TAKE
(France/US/UK - 2016)

A relentlessly fast-paced actioner that should please fans of the BOURNE series and the post-TAKEN Eurothriller, THE TAKE was originally titled BASTILLE DAY in France, where its release was delayed once by a November 2015 terrorist attack. It then opened in French cinemas on July 13, 2016 but was pulled three days later out of respect for the victims of the next day's Bastille Day bombing in Nice. Universal genre offshoot High Top Releasing acquired it for the US and retitled it THE TAKE, but didn't give it much of a rollout, topping out at 100 screens in November 2016. It should find an audience on Blu-ray and eventual streaming services, as it's as commercial a thriller as can be, directed in a very welcome coherent fashion by James Watkins, whose credits include the horror films EDEN LAKE (2008) and THE WOMAN IN BLACK (2012) as well as the recent BLACK MIRROR episode "Shut Up and Dance," and he scripted the forgettable sequel THE DESCENT PART 2 (2009). THE TAKE is anchored by a steely, badass Idris Elba as Sean Briar, a lone-wolf, plays-by-his-own-rules CIA agent based in Paris, where he's the loose cannon on a counter-terrorism team investigating a recent bombing that killed four people. The bomb, stuffed into a teddy bear inside a shopping bag, was supposed to be planted at the Nationalist Party headquarters by Zoe (Charlotte Le Bon), a willing accomplice of Jean (Arieh Worthalter), who promised her no one would be in the building. Zoe aborted the mission when she saw members of the janitorial staff on the premises, and before she had a chance to throw the bag into the river, it's swiped by Michael Mason (Richard Madden, best known as Robb Stark on GAME OF THRONES), an American con man and master pickpocket who's been hard at work in Paris fencing wallets, watches, and phones for shady pawnbroker Baba (FEMME FATALE's Eriq Ebouaney). Seeing nothing of value, Mason tosses the bag with some trash outside an apartment building and it blows up seconds later. Security camera footage and surveillance photos pinpoint him as the bomber, which sends Briar, Interpol, and French intelligence in hot pursuit. A cat and mouse game ensues, with Briar and Mason eventually joining forces...if they don't kill each other first!...along with the duped Zoe when it becomes apparent that the bombing was instigated by a group of rogue Paris cops with the intent of blaming the attack on a nearby mosque, creating a protest and a riot as a distraction for a Bastille Day heist of the French National Reserve Bank.

THE TAKE doesn't deviate very far from the formulaic as these things go, but Watkins does a very solid job of handling the double and triple crosses and the crackerjack action and chase sequences. It's not too difficult to figure out the real bad guy who's orchestrating all the mayhem and you'll be able to spot which character may as well be wearing a sign reading "Dead Meat" the moment they go to inform that person of the information they've discovered. But formula works when everyone's on point, and THE TAKE, despite its original French release being affected by horrific, real-life tragedies on two occasions, is terrific entertainment when taken its own escapist terms. And, at 92 minutes, it's smart enough to not overstay its welcome. A lot of its success is due to an absolutely riveting Elba, an actor whose name is constantly mentioned as a potential James Bond, and THE TAKE proves he'd be up to the task. Despite the lack of support from High Top, who opted to spend more money marketing the flop horror film INCARNATE instead, THE TAKE would've easily been a modest, mid-level hit in US multiplexes. (R, 92 mins)

ANTIBIRTH
(US/Canada - 2016)

If you can picture BREAKING BAD reimagined as a David Cronenberg-inspired body horror film by GUMMO-era Harmony Korine, then you sort-of have an idea of what to expect with the aggressively unpleasant and off-putting-by-design ANTIBIRTH, but even that description doesn't cover everything. Writer/director Danny Perez has a lot of ideas and inspiration, but he's unable to streamline them into a coherent, consistent vision. As a result, ANTIBIRTH is all over the place, with plot tangents dealing in urban and rural blight, substance abuse, human trafficking, a kidnapped child, secret military experiments, alien beings, and space colonization, culminating in a spirited gross-out finale that's part XTRO and part SOCIETY. In a desolate and depressing small town that's home to a small military base in nowhere Michigan, hard-partying Lou (Natasha Lyonne) blacks out and starts showing signs of pregnancy, even though she swears to her best friend Sadie (Chloe Sevigny) that she hasn't had sex in months. As her belly swells from the accelerated pregnancy, she doesn't give up her ways, still partying, drinking and drugging to excess, living off her dad's military pension and picking up shifts cleaning rooms at a shitty local motel when she needs spending money. Meanwhile, sinister dealer Gabriel (Mark Webber) has obtained an experimental drug and had his flunky Warren (Maxwell McCabe-Lokos) give it to Lou without her knowledge, the end result being the accelerated pregnancy. The drug was given to Gabriel by Isaac (Neville Edwards), a shadowy black-ops figure who occasionally pops into view. As Lou refuses to take her predicament seriously, she makes the acquaintance of the seemingly spacy Lorna (Meg Tilly, in her first theatrical feature since 1994's SLEEP WITH ME), a retired Army vet who babbles incessantly but starts to make sense when she talks of experimental drugs being used on unwitting women, space exploration, and contact with alien life forms.

Well, "makes sense" is a relative term as far as Perez's script goes. There's at least six potential movies that could've been made of any one of ANTIBIRTH's wildly disparate plot lines, but Perez opts to mash them all together and let the goopy body parts splat where they may. For much of its first hour, it seems like Perez is trying to go for some kind of metaphor about urban decay and the epidemic of rampant drug abuse in economically depressed areas. A lot of the scenes between offscreen friends Lyonne and Sevigny have an aimless, improvisational feel that recalls Korine or Gus Van Sant in one of his periodic experimental projects like ELEPHANT or LAST DAYS. It's not a very smooth shift when the horror starts, whether it's the oozing, grossout mess of Lou slicing open a huge blister on her foot or being shocked by an electric jolt from a TV in an effect that would've looked dated in an '80s Empire production like TERRORVISION. It's obvious Perez came up with the climax first and struggled to construct a movie to attach to it, and there's so many dangling plot threads that he completely loses track of Sadie and her kid, who we never heard about until he's referenced in a throwaway line by Gabriel ("You want your kid back, don't you? Is he even gonna recognize you?") and then never mentioned again. Sadie just vanishes from the movie, and Lorna unceremoniously exits offscreen. Lyonne gives it her all in a fearless performance, and it's nice to see Tilly again, and while she's done some sporadic TV work in recent years after taking the latter half of the '90s and the entire '00s off (she resurfaced in 2010 on two episodes of CAPRICA, and on the two-season Canadian TV series BOMB GIRLS), it's hard to see what it was about ANTIBIRTH that prompted her to end a 22-year big-screen sabbatical. (Unrated, 94 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

FUTURE HUNTERS
(US/Philippines - 1986; US release 1989)

Directed by Cirio H. Santiago. Written by J.L. Thompson. Cast: Robert Patrick, Linda Carol, Richard Norton, Ed Crick, Bob Schott, David Light, Paul Holmes, Peter Silton, Ursula Marquez, Elizabeth Oropesa, Bruce Le, Wang Chang Lee. (Unrated, 100 mins)

While Filipino exploitation auteur Cirio H. Santiago is best known for his association with Roger Corman from the 1970s until his death in 2008, he frequently branched out and worked on his own. Some of the better-known non-Corman Santiago films include THE MUTHERS (1976), VAMPIRE HOOKERS (1978), DEATH FORCE, aka FIGHTING MAD (1978), and FINAL MISSION (1984). Perhaps the craziest Santiago joint away from Corman is 1986's FUTURE HUNTERS, where the filmmaker basically goes for broke, throwing every big Hollywood action/adventure genre from the period into one ambitious mash-up before anyone knew what a genre mash-up was. Perhaps more than anything, FUTURE HUNTERS is Santiago trying to make his own version of a Cannon/Golan-Globus production. Its dumb plot and nearly nonstop action could've worked for any Chuck Norris or Michael Dudikoff adventure outing; its rousing score by Ron Jones (who went on to write music for FAMILY GUY), divides its time between mimicking cues from Jerry Goldsmith's KING SOLOMON'S MINES score and something more synth and drum machine-based that does its best to invoke Gary Chang or Jay Chattaway; and its 100-minute running time matches the typical Cannon genre production to the minute. Alas, without a bottom-line guy like Corman to oversee things, Santiago indulges himself a bit too much. Even with a jam-packed plot and a shitload of action, FUTURE HUNTERS somehow manages to drag a bit. A lot of this is due to Santiago letting shots run longer than necessary and not trimming the fat elsewhere. In his quest to showcase every action subgenre he could in a single movie, Santiago somehow lets the pace slack. Had this been done under the Concorde banner instead of Vestron offshoot Lightning Pictures, Corman would've had this thing down to 80 minutes and it would've been perfect. As it is, it's stupidly entertaining in all the right ways, but it really could stand to lose 15 or 20 minutes.

Opening in the year 2025, 40 years after "The Holocaust" turned the world into a post-nuke wasteland, marauding, Mad Max-like hero Matthew (Richard Norton) is the last survivor of a group of renegade warriors who have ventured into the Forbidden Zone to find the head of the Spear of Longinus. The Holy Lance, which pierced the body of Christ on the cross, holds within it the power of creation, and with that the ability to turn back time. Matthew hopes to retrieve it and go back 40 years to prevent the Holocaust, with Wez-esque despotic madman Zaar (David Light) in pursuit. Matthew is transported back to 1986 but is badly wounded right beforehand. Before he dies, he hands off the spearhead to vacationing couple Michelle (Linda Carol) and Slade (a debuting Robert Patrick). So begins an adventure through every genre that pops into the heads of Santiago and screenwriter J.L. Thompson (probably a pseudonym for someone, and erroneously listed as veteran director J. Lee Thompson on IMDb). FUTURE HUNTERS is primarily a RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK ripoff with the globe-trotting search for an ancient artifact, as Michelle and an incredulous Slade attempt to find the actual Spear of Longinus in order to reattach the spearhead and thus, prevent the approaching nuclear holocaust. But it dabbles in Santiago's familiar post-nuke wheelhouse before Norton's Matthew is killed off shortly after the prologue. Then the RAIDERS plot kicks in, then they're off to Asia where Slade meets an old buddy Liu (kung-fu second-stringer Bruce Le) and it becomes a Shaolin martial arts movie for ten minutes as Liu has an extended fight scene with powerful Silverfox (Wang Chang Lee, aka Jang Lee Hwang). Then it's back to RAIDERS as Slade and Michelle are confronted by Bauer (Bob Schott of GYMKATA), the chief henchman of modern-day Nazi Fielding (Ed Crick) who wants the spear in his quest to bring about a new Nazi uprising. Before long, they're a lost in the jungle for a brief segue into ROMANCING THE STONE before they encounter a dwarf tribe played by the same group of little people who play similar roles in all of Santiago's post-nukes, only this time it's a blatant riff on the RETURN OF THE JEDI Ewoks, That detour sends them to a group of Amazon warrior women, one of whom Michelle must battle over a crocodile pit in order to obtain the spear, attach the head, and save the world.

For such a wild plot, FUTURE HUNTERS could have some more spring in its step. Santiago pads a lot of the running time with overlong establishing shots and hanging on to some shots much longer than needed. Still, watching him rip off every '80s blockbuster in sight (you can even say there's some BACK TO THE FUTURE in Matthew's story) is ambitious and pretty ballsy on such a fairly low budget. Though the film was released in the Philippines in 1986, it didn't turn up in the US until its straight-to-video debut in 1989. Though he appeared in several films after, FUTURE HUNTERS marked Patrick's debut and he's a pretty engaging smartass hero, and he's clearly doing a lot of his own strenuous stunt work. Prior to making his impact in pop culture history with his role as the T-1000 in 1991's TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY, Patrick got his start in Santiago's Filipino B-movies after he auditioned in L.A. for the Roger Corman production WARLORDS FROM HELL and, according to WARLORDS director Clark Henderson on the Blu-ray special features for Santiago's WHEELS OF FIRE, "it was obvious to all of us that he was a better actor than everyone else in the room." Corman farmed Patrick out to Santiago, who took an instant liking to the young actor and gave him the lead role in FUTURE HUNTERS, as well as his Vietnam actioner BEHIND ENEMY LINES (1988), along with supporting roles in other Philippines-shot, Santiago-directed Corman productions like EQUALIZER 2000 and EYE OF THE EAGLE (both 1987). Though he realizes the movies were junk, Patrick, who has never stopped working since FUTURE HUNTERS, has always looked back on his time with Corman and Santiago with appreciation, grateful for his first big break and for the experience, as well as for meeting his BEHIND ENEMY LINES co-star Barbara Hooper, another Corman ingenue loaned out to Santiago in the late '80s. They hit it off during during production of BEHIND ENEMY LINES and have been married since 1990.

LIFE ON THE LINE
(US - 2016)

A look at the life of linemen that has all the depth and insight of a Budweiser commercial, LIFE ON THE LINE is content to rely on every cliche and tired signifier imaginable. There's twangy guitars, overripe Southern accents, shitty country ballads, empty platitudes about "walking the line" and a drinking game-worthy number of times someone emphatically declares "We're linemen...this is what we do!" Inspired by a true story, LIFE ON THE LINE, which went straight to VOD after two years on the shelf, focuses on Beau Ginner, played by a fake beard precariously glued to the face of John Travolta. Beau is a tough-as-nails Texas lineman raising his niece Bailey (Kate Bosworth) after her dad (Beau's brother) was electrocuted on the job years earlier--partially due to Beau's negligence--and her mother was killed in a car crash on her way to see him at the hospital. Tragedy seems to follow the Ginners, but they persevere because...it's what they do. Beau, as we're constantly reminded, "is the best at what he does," and just wants to run his crew of hard-working good ol' boys (including Gil Bellows as someone named "Poke Chop") and get busy replacing every inch of a 30-year-old grid before storm season comes, but he's forever dealing with tie-wearing, bottom-line pencil pushers in management telling him to speed it up. He's also dealing with Bailey's relationship with Duncan (Devon Sawa), a new recruit on the line whose father died on the job, and whose mother (Sharon Stone) is now a weepy, boozy wreck who's so insignificant to the story that the screenwriters don't even give her a name (Stone, in a nothing, two-scene role that just has her cry and sit slumped in a chair passed out, is credited with playing "Duncan's mother"). Other dilemmas: Bailey's psycho ex (Matt Bellefleur), who isn't taking the breakup well; lineman transfer Eugene (Ryan Robbins), who's still suffering from military PTSD, which drives his wife (Julie Benz) to infidelity; and Beau getting plenty pissed off when Bailey tells him she's pregnant with Duncan's child.

Oh yeah, there's also a storm coming. Any dramatic tension is completely deflated by an opening caption that reads "10 days before the storm." But when that storm comes, along with a derailed train that takes out the entire grid, the film whittles the whole disaster down Beau and Duncan setting aside their differences to get the line fixed, because pregnant Bailey is in the hospital and there's no power, and, as Beau puts it, "We gotta save our girl!" LIFE ON THE LINE obviously holds its subjects in high regard, and rightly so--the film points out that it's the fourth-most dangerous job in the US--but it doesn't really tell you anything about the lineman's world. We don't learn about the job other than it's dangerous and...it's what they do. Instead, the screenwriters and director David Hackl (SAW V, INTO THE GRIZZLY MAZE) deliver what looks like a lazy, made-for-TV soaper with occasional swear words where the big storm is almost an afterthought. It's cheap-looking and sloppy (two people are credited as "Co-exexutive producers"), yet there was enough money in the budget for Travolta to have two executive assistants, a personal assistant, and a production assistant. The brave people who do this work deserve better representation than the cardboard cutout characters on display here. Save yourself an hour and a half and just listen to Glen Campbell's "Wichita Lineman" a few times instead. For all the reverence and hero worship on display in LIFE ON THE LINE, you'd think the filmmakers would commit to creating slightly complex characters and portraying an accurate representation of this work, but unlike the linemen, they fall down on the job. I guess that's...what they do. (R, 98 mins)

BLACKWAY
(US - 2016)

Released on 11 screens and VOD with no publicity at all, BLACKWAY is a gray and gloomy non-thriller whose only surprise is the low level of urgency with which it plods to its conclusion. It plays as if Swedish director Daniel Alfredson--who directed THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE and THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST, the two markedly inferior sequels to the original Swedish version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO--left out significant chunks of the script, written by Joe Gangemi and Gregory Jacobs. Gangemi and Jacobs are the guys behind the 2007 cult horror film WIND CHILL and the acclaimed Amazon series RED OAKS, and Jacobs is also a Steven Soderbergh protege who served as an assistant director on several of his films before graduating to 2015's MAGIC MIKE XXL. Whether Alfredson's streak of mediocrity continued or it just caught Gangemi and Jacobs on a bad day, BLACKWAY ends up being one of the dullest thrillers of 2016. Moving from Seattle back to the Pacific Northwest logging town of her childhood following the death of her mother, Lillian (Julia Stiles) goes to the sheriff (Dale Wilson) for help after her cat is brutally murdered. She knows the culprit is Richard Blackway (Ray Liotta), an ex-deputy turned white trash crime lord and all-around bad guy. Blackway's been stalking Lillian and the sheriff isn't in any hurry to do anything about it, instead recommending she go talk to Whizzer (Hal Holbrook), the cantankerous old mill owner who may know a guy brave enough to confront Blackway. When that guy chickens out, one of Whizzer's employees, elderly Lester (Anthony Hopkins) volunteers himself and slow-witted, stuttering new hire Nate (Alexander Ludwig) to help Lillian find Blackway. This essentially involves going all around town and having Lester repeatedly ask "Where's Blackway?" with everyone denying they've seen him or know his whereabouts. Blackway rules the town, and things escalate when Lester and Nate start a fire at a motel on the outskirts of town that's been commandeered by Blackway as the base for his gunrunning, meth-dealing, prostitution, and human trafficking operation. Simply put, Blackway is a real asshole.

It's obvious Lester has personal reasons for going after Blackway (all he says is "It needs to be done"), though even after they're explained, the reasoning still seems muddled. Nate just goes along for the ride while Lillian's character makes no sense at all. If she grew up in this town (on numerous occasions, she states "I grew up here!") where everyone knows everybody, why doesn't anyone know her? If she grew up in this town, why doesn't she know who Blackway is before he starts stalking her? Who is Blackway? What's his story? Was he kicked out of the sheriff's department? Did he run his crime operation while on duty? How did he take over the town? Do Gangemi and Jacobs know? Does Alfredson care? There's really not much to say about BLACKWAY. The kind of inconsequential time-killer that you may very well forget about while it's in progress, it drags ass and the story goes nowhere, failing as both a thriller and a character piece. Hopkins, who also starred in Alfredson's equally forgettable KIDNAPPING MR. HEINEKEN and is becoming a regular in crummy VOD thrillers like this, MISCONDUCT (also with Stiles) and SOLACE, is visibly bored and looks half-asleep, while a short-fused Liotta is basically doing the same act he does on NBC's SHADES OF BLUE. (R, 90 mins)

THE BRONX BULL
(US - 2017)

Exhibiting the kind of shameless chutzpah that gave us EASY RIDER: THE RIDE BACK, THE BRONX BULL began life as RAGING BULL II when it was initially announced way back in 2006. It was still called RAGING BULL II when cameras began rolling in 2012, which prompted a lawsuit from MGM that kept it in embroiled in legal hassles until the producers agreed to change the title. Shelved for five years and now known as THE BRONX BULL, the film was finally given a VOD dumping in January 2017 before its Blu-ray release a month later. Other than it being a story about Jake LaMotta made with the legendary boxer's blessing, the comparisons to Martin Scorsese's 1980 classic end there. Perhaps attempting to create a GODFATHER PART II-style bookend to Scorsese's film, THE BRONX BULL focuses on LaMotta's teen years in the 1930s (where he's played by Mojean Aria) and the years after what's covered in Scorsese's film, from 1967 to the present day (95-year-old LaMotta is still with us). William Forsythe plays the older LaMotta, and he's fine actor (THE DEVIL'S REJECTS) who's spent too much of his career paying the bills with B-movies, so it's easy to see why he jumped at the chance for a lead role, even if he probably rolled his eyes when he saw the script was called RAGING BULL II, a title only slightly more credible than The Asylum's TITANIC 2. After we see young Jake's tumultuous relationship with his demanding and often abusive father (Paul Sorvino, doing a bad Rod Steiger impression), he ends up in juvenile detention where he's mentored in boxing by a kindly priest (Ray Wise). Cut to years later, after he's retired (hey, nothing like a boxing biopic that skips over the boxing!), his latest wife (Natasha Henstridge) leaves him, and he's being threatened into working as a strongarm for low-level mobsters Tony (Tom Sizemore) and Jerry (Mike Starr). He's also involved in the schemes of his fast-talking filmmaker pal Rick Rosselli (Joe Mantegna), a character probably based on RAGING BULL co-producer Peter Savage. Rosselli is directing amateur porn films but wants to go legit, and ends up making a low-budget drive-in movie called CAULIFLOWER CUPIDS, in which LaMotta stars with Jane Russell (played here by a far-too-young Dahlia Waingort) and Rocky Graziano (James Russo).

Released in 1970, CAULIFLOWER CUPIDS was a real movie, and with LaMotta's involvement in the production, a lot of what transpires in THE BRONX BULL is probably legit (like RAGING BULL, it's not afraid to present its hero in a negative fashion). But NATIONAL LAMPOON'S CATTLE CALL and BENEATH THE DARKNESS director Martin Guigui's first name is about all he has in common with Scorsese. The finished film, almost Uwe Boll-esque in its amateurish execution and squandering of its overqualified cast, is so haphazardly assembled and so lacking in any momentum that it really just ends up being a collection of random vignettes from Jake LaMotta's post-boxing life. His grown daughter Lisa shows up for a couple of scenes, but other than giving Forsythe a chance to share the screen with his own daughter Rebecca, she has no purpose. Most of the slumming names in the large cast drop by for just a scene or two: there's also Penelope Ann Miller as another Mrs. LaMotta, with Cloris Leachman as her mother; Harry Hamlin as an earlier wife's boss who gets threatened by LaMotta ("You tappin' my wife?!") after he sees them having a business lunch; Bruce Davison as a politician overseeing a committee on the mob's involvement in boxing (that storyline vanishes); Dom Irrera as comedian Joe E. Lewis; Alicia Witt as the most recent LaMotta wife; Joe Cortese as a NYC talk show host; and Robert Davi as a mystery figure who appears to a drunk LaMotta, and may or may not be real. No one here is at the top of their career (though, given his starring role in the popular, long-running CBS procedural CRIMINAL MINDS, it's surprising that Mantegna didn't have better things to do), and while nobody is overtly awful--Forsythe basically acts like Forsythe with a putty nose--it's hard to feel sorry for any of them when they knowingly signed on to an obviously suspect litigation-magnet called RAGING BULL II. Did they really think that title was gonna fly? Looking like a corner-cutting TV show (all of the exteriors appear to be shot on the same street on the NBC Studios backlot), the low-budget THE BRONX BULL started out as a cheap and dubious Scorsese knockoff and that's exactly how it finishes. (R, 94 mins)

JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2
(US/China - 2017)

Directed by Chad Stahelski. Written by Derek Kolstad. Cast: Keanu Reeves, Common, Laurence Fishburne, Ian McShane, John Leguizamo, Franco Nero, Riccardo Scamarcio, Ruby Rose, Lance Reddick, Bridget Moynahan, Peter Stormare, Claudia Gerini, Peter Serafinowicz, Thomas Sadoski, Tobias Segal, Wass Stevens, Luca Mosca, Chukwudi Iwuji, Simone Spinazze. (R, 122 mins)

A sleeper hit in 2014, JOHN WICK was held in such ambivalent regard by Lionsgate subsidiary Summit that it almost went straight to VOD until someone decided to arrange some test screenings and the audience response was through the roof. An electrifying, non-stop action thriller about a retired assassin--an unstoppable killing machine known to those in his profession as "The Boogeyman" and "Baba Yaga"-- on a mission of vengeance when the son of a Russian crime boss steals his car and kills his dog, JOHN WICK was filled with memorable shootouts, quotable dialogue ("Oh..."), a sly sense of humor, and an almost graphic novel-like sense of imaginative world building. In this world, the assassins have accoutrements like their own gold coin currency and they stay at the Continental, a safe sanctuary where business is conducted and violence forbidden. Friends become foes and back again, and it's understood that it's "just business." But things turned personal for John Wick (Keanu Reeves): on the day after the funeral of his cancer-stricken wife (Bridget Moynahan), his car is stolen and his dog killed by Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen), the sniveling brat son of Wick's former boss, Russian crime lord Viggo Tarasov (Michael Nyqvist). Wick declares war on Tarasov and single-handedly wipes out his entire organization over the course of the film, all while dodging an endless parade of fellow assassins after the bounty placed on his head by Viggo. JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2 picks up shortly after where the first film left off, with Viggo's vengeful brother Abram (Peter Stormare) waiting in his secured office as his men try--and fail--to stop Wick, who's arrived at the Tarasov warehouse to reclaim his stolen car. Wick confronts Abram and spares his life, offering him a drink as a mutually agreed peace offering.

Wick's return to retirement is short-lived however, as Italian mobster Santino D'Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio) presents a marker--a blood oath among assassins--demanding Wick pay a debt. D'Antonio helped Wick with the final task for Viggo Tarasov that got him his freedom, and it was under the condition that he stay retired. Since he emerged from civilian life to wipe out Viggo's organization, D'Antonio declares the marker reactivated. His demand is that Wick whack his Rome-based sister Gianna (Claudia Gerini), who represents the Camorra on the international council of assassins, a seat D'Antonio believes he should've inherited from his late father. Wick refuses to acknowledge the marker, prompting D'Antonio to blow up his house. Under advice from Continental manager Winston (Ian McShane), Wick concedes he has no choice but to fulfill the marker if he wants any chance of returning to retirement. He travels to Italy, where he's greeted by Julius (Franco Nero), the manager of the Continental's Rome branch. Once Gianna is eliminated, Wick is double-crossed by D'Antonio, who puts out a $7 million contract on his life to create the appearance that he must avenge his sister's murder (really, Wick should've seen that coming). Once he's back in NYC, the chase is on as Wick spends the entire second half of the movie evading every covert assassin in the city--which is everyone from homeless guys to food truck vendors to street musicians--looking to grab $7 million to take out their most lethal colleague on the planet.

With a body count somewhere between "astronomical" and "fucking ridiculous," JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2 exists in a patently unreal world where no cops of any kind are visible. Returning director Chad Stahelski (going solo this time, without the original's uncredited co-director David Leitch, his name left off the film by a DGA snafu) and screenwriter Derek Kolstad go for the same approach as THE RAID 2: it's the same story, just on a significantly larger and much more grandiosely ambitious scale. The set pieces are done with even more intricate, ballet-like precision, whether it's a high-tech hall of mirrors or Gianna's top security detail Cassian (Common) and Wick having a silencer shootout in the middle of a crowded subway station where no one even hears the guns going off around them. Stahelski goes for a much more stylized look this time out, with some tracking shots that serve as some of the best Kubrick homages this side of Nicolas Winding Refn's ONLY GOD FORGIVES. And some garish neon color schemes coupled with the staging of the action end up concocting an unholy visual fusion of Dario Argento, Brian De Palma, and John Woo. There's amusingly bizarre touches like the call center where assassins order contracts being filled with typewriters and analog equipment and looking a lot like a 1940s switchboard exchange straight out of HIS GIRL FRIDAY. This is absolutely exhilarating and gloriously bonkers filmmaking that rewards fans of the first film with numerous callbacks (there's another ominous "Oh..." from someone and we finally get to see Wick kill multiple guys with a pencil, a story that everyone who hears the name "John Wick" seems to reference), but takes everything to a higher level of inspiration and execution. Almost everyone in the cast gets a moment to shine, whether it's Nero's Julius breaking up a THEY LIVE-level brawl between Wick and Cassian, an unusually gregarious Laurence Fishburne (MATRIX reunion!) as the Bowery King, solid turns by returning JOHN WICK vets McShane and Lance Reddick as the Continental concierge, and a silent, scene-stealing performance by Ruby Rose as Ares, a mute, androgynous D'Antonio assassin who gives an almost Oscar-caliber flutter of an eye-wink to reassure her boss that she can handle Wick (spoiler: she can't). An improvement upon an already exemplary predecessor, JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2 takes its place beside the elite likes of THE RAID 2 and MAD MAX: FURY ROAD among the decade's greatest achievements in action cinema. It's that good.

DAVID BRENT: LIFE ON THE ROAD
(UK - 2016; US release 2017)

Written and directed by Ricky Gervais. Cast: Ricky Gervais, Ben Bailey Smith, Dan Basden, Jo Hartley, Tom Bennett, Andrew Brooke, Andy Burrows, Stuart Wilkinson, Steve Clarke, Michael Clarke, Mandeep Dhillon, Miles Chapman, Abbie Murphy, Rebecca Gethings, Nina Sosanya, Diane Morgan. (Unrated, 96 mins)

With only 12 episodes over its two series and a two-part Christmas special to wrap things up, the original UK version of THE OFFICE ran from 2001 to 2003 and didn't have a chance to wear out its welcome. Ricky Gervais doesn't seem to realize that, so now we have the feature film spinoff DAVID BRENT: LIFE ON THE ROAD, making its US debut as a Netflix Original after opening to lukewarm reviews in the UK last summer. Gervais and Stephen Merchant created the show, but Gervais is flying solo here, resurrecting his OFFICE character David Brent, the well-meaning but socially inept and endlessly delusional and self-aggrandizing office manager of the Slough branch of the Wernham Hogg paper company, perpetually playing to the cameras documenting the office's day-to-day activities for a BBC documentary series. It's been 13 years since the Christmas special, which found the hapless Brent trying to parlay his dubious TV documentary fame into a pop music career by blowing his severance pay on a music video for his cover of "If You Don't Know Me By Now." In the present day, Brent's still chasing that dream, taking time off from his sales rep job peddling tampons and toilet brushes for the bathroom supply company Lavichem and bringing along another documentary crew as he assembles a new version of his extremely short-lived '80s band Foregone Conclusion to go on a three week tour.

Latching himself to rapper and acquaintance Dom Johnson (Ben Bailey Smith, also known as British rapper and comedian Doc Brown) and sound engineer Dan (Tom Basden), Brent hires a band of mercenary session guys as the original lineup of Foregone Conclusion either has family priorities, isn't interested, or in the case of the guitarist, is in jail for sexual assault. The new Foregone Conclusion wants nothing to do with Brent, who's paying them a ridiculous amount of money and has even rented a top-of-the-line tour bus even though, as Dan informs him, the gigs are all in such close proximity that would actually be easier to drive home every night rather than waste money on hotel rooms and meals. But being a clueless poseur with an ever-present white man's overbite, Brent only knows how to overdo everything. He's also completely oblivious when the band wants nothing to do with him, even banishing him from the tour bus when he boards it invoking the ancient "Whazzzzzzuppppp?" catchphrase and is told to follow the bus in his own car. The gigs are a disaster, as Foregone Conclusion repeatedly plays to almost completely empty clubs and Brent predictably manages to alienate the few people who do show up by delivering a de facto monologue about what every song means rather than just simply playing it (Coldplay frontman Chris Martin helped Gervais write most of Foregone Conclusion's songs). Other cringe-worthy moments involve him shooting an audience member in the face with a Foregone Conclusion shirt fired in close proximity from a T-shirt gun, or a culturally tone-deaf reggae tune that Dom Johnson is embarrassed to rap over, or performing a heartfelt ballad called "Please Don't Make Fun of the Disableds," The "tour" keeps Brent cashing in his pensions and maxing out his credit card, and the band holds him in such disdain that they won't even have a drink with him after the show unless they're paid for their time and he buys the drinks.

During its original run, THE OFFICE was brilliantly funny and a standard-bearer in the comedy of grueling discomfort, but all these years later, Gervais can't really do anything new with the Brent character. He's still behaving in the same fashion, and still alienating almost everyone with whom he comes into contact (though shy Pauline, a Lavichem co-worker played by Jo Hartley, obviously and inexplicably has a crush on him), usually with insensitive jokes, as when he's called into Lavichem's HR office after back-to-back cracks involving violence against women and his doing a buck-toothed "Chinaman" impression that would've been offensive in the 1940s. Other than a few bits--getting kicked off his own tour bus, falling down on stage after trying to do a "back-to-back" stage pose with the lead guitarist--David Brent simply isn't that funny anymore and Gervais is just going through the motions. We know that, despite his idiotic behavior, everyone from the band to his Lavichem co-workers will come around to appreciating him on his own terms, giving Brent a redemptive and wholly unearned feel-good ending. Gervais seems to struggle with this sort of thing when Merchant isn't around, and while his HBO series HELLO LADIES lost its way near the end of its lone season, there was enough there in its best episodes to indicate that it was perhaps Merchant who was the secret weapon behind the signature cringe success of THE OFFICE and EXTRAS. With more than a passing resemblance to THIS IS SPINAL TAP and the underrated STILL CRAZY, there's a handful of legitimate laughs to be had with DAVID BRENT: LIFE ON THE ROAD and to its credit, it's better than Gervais's last Netflix Original effort (the dismal SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS). But there's an undeniable "beating a dead horse" vibe to the whole thing as the writer/director/star coasts by on past glory, falling far short of recapturing that magic from a decade and a half ago.

AMERICAN PASTORAL
(US/China - 2016)

Philip Roth has been a lion of American literature since the 1950s, though that success hasn't always translated to the screen, with a common description of Roth's writing being "unfilmable." 1969's GOODBYE, COLUMBUS, adapted from Roth's 1959 National Book Award winner, was a critical and commercial hit that put Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw on the map. But when Benjamin was tapped to star in another Roth adaptation with 1972's PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, lightning didn't strike twice and the results were so disastrous that it would be over 30 years before anyone attempted another big-screen take on Roth. Robert Benton's THE HUMAN STAIN opened to middling reviews in 2003, and Barry Levinson's THE HUMBLING (based on one of Roth's most critically panned works) only made it to a handful of theaters in 2015. Other than GOODBYE, COLUMBUS, the only Roth adaptations to receive any notable degree of acclaim were 2008's ELEGY, based on his 2001 novel The Dying Animal, and 2016's INDIGNATION. 2016 also saw the release of the long-planned AMERICAN PASTORAL, based on Roth's 1997 Pulitzer Prize winner about a well-to-do family falling into turmoil in the late 1960s. In various stages of development since 2003, filming actually began on a version in 2012 with Fisher Stevens at the helm and husband and wife Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly starring, but the project fell apart and was scrapped almost immediately. It got rolling again in 2015 with some help from Chinese co-producers TIK Films, with Connelly still attached and now heading the cast with Ewan McGregor in place of Bettany, but when director Philip Noyce quit during pre-production, McGregor himself stepped in to make his directorial debut. AMERICAN PASTORAL was touted as a major 2016 awards contender but that never panned out, as the initial reviews were so overwhelmingly negative that Lionsgate bailed on the film, pulling the plug on its nationwide rollout and stalling its release at just 70 screens for a gross of $550,000.

Considering its internationally revered source novel, AMERICAN PASTORAL the film is a complete disaster, the kind of transparently phony awards bait that wears its bloated sense of self-importance on its sleeve. You can actually see the film completely collapse around the 23-minute mark, when we get our first look at stuttering 16-year-old Merry Levov (Dakota Fanning) as she's cooking burgers in the kitchen. She's having a pleasant conversation with her father Seymour "Swede" Levov (McGregor) when the sight of LBJ on TV provokes a profane, hysterical meltdown. She excoriates Swede and her mother Dawn (Connelly) over their upper-middle class complacence, with Swede running his dad's (Peter Riegert in cartoonish Oy, vey! mode) Newark glove factory and Dawn having her own cow pasture on their expansive property in rural Old Rimrock. When Dawn tells Merry "You're not anti-war...you're anti-everything!," Merry concludes this bug-eyed, out-of-nowhere tirade by shouting "And you're pro-cow!," spitting her burger on the floor and storming out of the house, prompting Swede to go into her bedroom to find the walls plastered with anti-war, Weather Underground-like pamphlets and flyers calling for revolution as Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" cues up on the soundtrack, modern cinema's universal sign that the times they-are-a-changin' and it's...the Sixties, man! AMERICAN PASTORAL never recovers from this jaw-droppingly awful scene, as the Levovs' cushy existence is upended when Merry becomes a fugitive after blowing up the Old Rimrock post office and killing the local mailman. This leads to endless malaise and ennui in the lives of the Jewish Swede, a high-school football legend, and the Catholic Dawn, a shiksa who was Miss New Jersey in the 1947 Miss America pageant.

McGregor and journeyman screenwriter John Romano (who's had a long career in writing for TV on everything from HILL STREET BLUES to the recent HELL ON WHEELS) cut out huge chunks of Roth's novel willy-nilly to focus on how the general sense of the Sixties, man! takes its toll on the Levovs, though they do leave in a 2002-set framing device with recurring Roth character Nathan Zuckerman (David Strathairn) that really doesn't add anything to the story. AMERICAN PASTORAL relies on trite cliches and overwrought hysteria, with McGregor demonstrating no clue how to direct himself or his actors: Fanning's vein-popping overacting through clenched teech and flared nostrils is actually embarrassing to watch, especially since that palpable rage comes out of nowhere and wasn't present in the 12-year-old Merry we see played by a younger actress in earlier scenes. The first time we see Fanning, she's boiling with uncontrollable, shrieking fury and we don't know why. Even Connelly is terrible here, saddled with an unplayable character whose big scene has her showing up at Swede's factory, off her meds and babbling incoherently, dancing around totally nude except for her Miss New Jersey sash. At one point, a cop tells Swede "You've done everything wrong you possibly could've." I think that actor was breaking character and speaking directly to McGregor. AMERICAN PASTORAL is a botched misfire, but hey, congrats to PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT: you're no longer the worst big-screen Philip Roth adaptation. (R, 108 mins)

KING COBRA
(US - 2016)

Though it frequently succumbs to the cliches that come with almost any post-BOOGIE NIGHTS look at the seedy underbelly of the porn world, KING COBRA shifts gears into a grim and bleak thriller that benefits from the twists and turns of the real-life events on which it's based. Based on Andrew E. Stoner and Peter A. Conway's true crime chronicle Cobra Killer: Gay Porn Murder, the film follows wide-eyed innocent Sean Paul Lockhart (Garrett Clayton) as he arrives in the relatively non-descript northeastern Pennsylvania from San Diego, intent on becoming a star for Cobra Video, a web-based gay porn production company owned by Stephen (Christian Slater). Middle-aged Stephen (a character based on Cobra Video head Bryan Kocis) is drawn to young, late-teens "twinks," and he has a particular affinity for Sean, growing extremely jealous when he shows interest in other men. Stephen directs a series of videos with Sean starring under the name "Brent Corrigan," and after a falling out when Sean begins aggressively demanding more money and objecting to Stephen's controlling attitude, the pair part ways in an acrimonious split that jeopardizes both of their careers when Sean reveals he lied about his age and was only 17 when Stephen directed his first videos. Meanwhile, Joe Kerekes (James Franco, one of 29 credited producers) and Harlow Cuadra (Keegan Allen), a pair of sketchy escorts and amateur gay porn entrepreneurs running a low-rent company called Viper Boyz, are trying to break into the big time, living way beyond their means convincing themselves that they're on the level of Cobra Video. $500,000 in debt and increasingly desperate, the unstable and manipulative Joe reaches out to "Brent" to forge a business partnership based on the "Brent Corrigan" name, but Sean isn't legally allowed to use it since Stephen had the name copyrighted as a property of Cobra Video. While Sean tries to broker a peaceful agreement with Stephen, Joe and Harlow decide to deal with it in a manner that befits their thoughtless, volatile nature: they kill Stephen and set his house on fire in a half-assed attempt to cover it up.

All of this occurred from 2004 to 2007, and other than changing the name of Slater's character, it gets all the pertinent details down, albeit a bit glossed over and rushed considering the film only runs 90 minutes. It's a rare instance of a movie that could've been improved if it ran a little longer, with some more time allotted to explore the smaller details. Writer-director Justin Kelly keeps things moving briskly and copies from the best, with much of the film having that same tense vibe as the section of BOOGIE NIGHTS where everyone's hitting bottom (Dirk hustling, Rollergirl in the limo, etc). He gets mostly strong performances from his cast, with a really skeezy Franco doing his best to channel Willem Dafoe in AUTO-FOCUS mode but sometimes going overboard, and Clayton and Allen doing solid work as the naive and, in the case of Allen's Harlow, dumb young twinks being manipulated by the older men projecting their neuroses on to them. Molly Ringwald has a small role as Stephen's wholesome, oblivious sister and if you want to feel really old, Alicia Silverstone plays Sean's mom (yes, Alicia Silverstone is 40 now). But the real standout is Slater who, between Lars von Trier's NYMPHOMANIAC and his Golden Globe-winning work on the acclaimed TV series MR. ROBOT, has very quietly been taking his career seriously again in between his frequent gig as a guest co-host on LIVE WITH KELLY. Slater sells every facet of Stephen's mercurial personality. He puts up a front for his sister and his neighbors, pretending he makes a living as a photographer at kids' birthday parties, but when it comes to Cobra Video, he stops at nothing to get what he wants. He's soft-spoken and sensitive, insanely jealous, a creepy manipulator of barely-legal boys far away from their homes, and a ruthless businessman who never hesitates to remind Sean/"Brent" that he owns him. It's a complex and fearless performance by Slater, who manages to make you feel some degree of sympathy for Stephen--he fears growing old alone and Sean did lie about his age with a very well-crafted and believable fake ID. KING COBRA has to get to the circumstances surrounding Stephen's murder, but it loses something once Slater exits the movie with about 30 minutes to go. He's so good here that you almost wonder if a more interesting film could've been made by just focusing on his Bryan Kocis-inspired character. As it is, KING COBRA is a decent film, and one of the more relatively accessible James Franco indie productions of late (more than, say, INTERIOR. LEATHER BAR., for example), and the story is so intriguing that it may leave you wanting more substantive details into the world of Cobra Video. (Unrated, 92 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

THE CRASH
(US - 2017)

A financial thriller set in the near future that plays like the 1981 flop ROLLOVER if remade by the most annoying Ron Paul supporter in your Facebook newsfeed, THE CRASH is a lecture disguised as a movie. Written and directed by Aram Rappaport, last seen watering down 2013's SYRUP, a pointless adaptation of Max Barry's scathing 1999 novel satirizing corporate marketing and branding, THE CRASH renders itself dated immediately as it assumes Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, with "Madame President" a fleetingly-seen character (played by Laurie Larson) late in the film. After cyber-terrorists hack the NYSE and threaten to bring down the global economy in 48 hours, Treasury Secretary Sarah Schwab (Mary McCormack) only sees one option: hiring master hacker and market manipulator Guy Clifton (Frank Grillo, also one of 29 credited producers) to thwart the attack. Clifton's currently facing SEC charges of hacking the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to benefit his own companies and previously hacked into the NYSE. He's somehow not in prison but he'll be granted immunity on the latest charges if he and his crack team of computer wizards and financial experts can stop the cyber attack and keep the economy stable. This mostly involves Clifton and his cohorts--sultry market analyst Amelia Rhondart (Dianna Agron), ALS-afflicted hacker George Diebold (John Leguizamo), and genius programmer Ben Collins (Ed Westwick)--spouting endless financial jargon while staring at monitors in the makeshift command center set up in Clifton's mansion. Clifton's got other things on his plate: his wife Shannon (Minnie Driver) isn't convinced this will keep him out of prison, and his 18-year-old daughter Creason (AnnaSophia Robb) is suffering from cancer and isn't responding to chemo. And she just got dumped by her secret boyfriend Ben.

THE CRASH runs just 84 minutes--and even then it's padded with super-slow-moving end credits kicking in around the 78-minute mark--yet it feels roughly three hours long. There's a way to make financial thrillers intriguing and suspenseful--BLACKHAT and the little-seen AUGUST come to mind--but Rappaport still feels the need throw in some disease-of-the-week TV-movie melodrama with Creason, and relies on too much in-your-face shaky cam, perhaps with the intention of making the viewer feel as backed-against-the-wall as Clifton, but it doesn't work. The more the film goes on, the more preachy and obvious it gets, especially with a corrupt, sneering Federal Reserve chairman named Richard Del Banco, who any seasoned moviegoer will correctly deduce is a scheming Dick from the Bank the moment they see he's being played by Christopher McDonald. By the end, with a mole inside Clifton's team planting a virus that creates a domino effect of collapsing world economies (of course, there's still time for Clifton and Ben to have a heart-to-heart and reach an understanding about dumping Creason) as "Madame President" stands around helplessly while her aides scramble and freak out, Clifton has a change of heart and just lets it fail, followed by an end crawl passive-aggressively advocating the abolishing of the Federal Reserve. Considering what I've seen of his work with SYRUP and now THE CRASH, I think the bigger priority is abolishing Aram Rappaport's DGA membership. (Unrated, 84 mins)

A CURE FOR WELLNESS
(US/Germany - 2017)

Directed by Gore Verbinski. Written by Justin Haythe. Cast: Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth, Harry Groener, Celia Imrie, Ivo Nandi, Carl Lumbly, David Bishins, Lisa Banes, Adrian Schiller, Tomas Norstrom, Ashok Mandanna, Magnus Krepper, Johannes Krisch, Susanne Wuest, Rebecca Street, Craig Wroe. (R, 146 mins)

It's a safe bet there won't be a more ambitious, audacious, and flat-out weird major-studio horror movie to hit multiplexes this year than A CURE FOR WELLNESS. That title probably isn't going to do it any favors, but in an era where horror films are typified by Blumhouse jump scares, found-footage fatigue, and the unbridled sycophancy of horror hipster scenesters, A CURE FOR WELLNESS seems like it's borne of another time and place. A modern-day gothic throwback, it seems to have been made with little concern for mainstream appeal by Gore Verbinski, who established his genre bona fides with the 2002 RINGU remake THE RING but soon became synonymous with bloated, mega-budget summer fare like the first three PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN films. Perhaps seeking a fresh start after the costly flop that was 2013's THE LONE RANGER, Verbinski was obviously allowed to make the film he wanted to make with A CURE FOR WELLNESS, even if 20th Century Fox was only willing to put up half of the $40 million budget, necessitating the involvement of German co-producers Studio Babelsberg. Headlined by recognizable actors but no expensive big names, it's a film so exquisitely crafted and meticulously detailed that it looks like it could've easily cost $200 million. Working from a script by REVOLUTIONARY ROAD and LONE RANGER screenwriter Justin Haythe, Verbinski wears his love of high-class horror on his sleeve throughout: themes and imagery conjure memories of everything from Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING, the dreamlike scenarios of Andrei Tarkovsky, the claustrophobic anxiety of Roman Polanski classics like REPULSION, ROSEMARY'S BABY (especially that lullaby-like theme), and THE TENANT, and the gothic Italian chillers of the 1960s by genre legends like Mario Bava and Antonio Margheriti, with the climax especially feeling like a gushing love letter to a certain early 1970s Bava film. Verbinski's playing the long game with A CURE FOR WELLNESS, a film likely to alienate casual moviegoers but one that's intended more for the more hardcore horror devotee to appreciate and dissect for many years to come.

At a major NYC financial investment firm, young hotshot broker Lockhart (Dane DeHaan) is given a promotion and a corner office after his predecessor in the job drops dead of a heart attack. It's not long before he's called into the office by acting boss Green (David Bishins): a merger is imminent and Lockhart's been cooking the books. He's threatened with prison ("Have you ever had a 12-inch black dick up your ass?" one of the other honchos spits at him) unless he can retrieve the real boss, Roland Pembroke (Harry Groener). Pembroke's been MIA since having a breakdown and checking into the Volmer Institute, a luxurious "wellness spa" housed in a castle in the remote mountains of the Swiss Alps. Green instructs Lockhart to travel to Switzerland and bring Pembroke back to NYC so he can sign off on the merger and pin all the malfeasance--Lockhart's and their own--on him. Once at the spa, Lockhart is stone-walled and given the run-around by everyone, including the spa's head doctor Heinrich Volmer (Jason Isaacs). Volmer insists Pembroke is not well enough to leave and when Lockhart finally encounters his colleague, Pembroke agrees to get his things together but is quickly admitted to another section of the hospital, with Volmer explaining his "condition" has taken a turn for the worse. Lockhart ends up being admitted to the institute following a horrific car crash when Volmer's driver (Ivo Nandi) hits a deer while taking him to a hotel, and even from inside as a patient, he isn't given any access to Pembroke. While most of the patients are elderly, Lockhart is intrigued by the young and enigmatic Hannah (NYMPHOMANIAC's Mia Goth), a special patient whose parents died years earlier and who has been in Volmer's care since. Lockhart is subjected to bizarre treatments, including time spent in a sensory deprivation tank and an iron lung, and is haunted by recurring visions of large eels, with himself and all the patients constantly instructed to drink plenty of the purifying water and take regular eye-dropper oral doses of the liquid vitamin that Volmer insists is vital to their wellness.

You can count all the great two-and-half-hour horror movies on one hand, and while it's easy for an excitable and enthused genre fan to overrate something like A CURE FOR WELLNESS (some of the plot doesn't hold up under intense scrutiny, especially when it comes to Lockhart's bosses' slow response to his extended absence), it's also a near-certainty that you've never seen a genre mash-up quite like this one. Refreshingly, it's played completely straight and dead serious, never going for winking irony, cheap quips, or lazy references. Verbinski and Haythe set the ominous mood from the get-go, and it just gets more freakishly bizarre with each new plot turn as it crescendos into a symphony of absolute madness by the final act. Lockhart spends much of the film convinced Volmer and the staff are trying to drive him insane, but with the help of another patient, puzzle enthusiast Victoria (Celia Imrie), he discovers that the compound is a 200-year-old castle built over the partial ruins of another, the ancestral home of the demented Baron von Reichmerl, a 19th century nobleman killed by the villagers over his obsession with creating a pure and incestuous bloodline with his sister. A CURE FOR WELLNESS is set in the present day but seems to come from the 1970s. It's a triumph of chilling atmosphere, with ornate sets and carefully composed shots that give it a vivid feeling of cold, classic Kubrick. The three leads are fantastic, from the waif-like Goth conveying the naive innocence of Hannah to the historically annoying DeHaan, who's matured as an actor since the overrated CHRONICLE, which established him as a sort of excruciatingly whiny Emo DiCaprio. Isaacs has a blast in a vintage mad doctor role, relishing the sinister machinations of Volmer (what a classic-sounding mad doctor name) but never going overboard into hammy scenery-chewing. Indeed, in his controlled performance and the way Volmer plays his cards close to the vest, Isaacs is very reminiscent of a mid-career Christopher Plummer (I wouldn't be surprised if a studio suit at some point in the planning stages suggested Verbinski get Johnny Depp to play Volmer). A CURE FOR WELLNESS isn't for everyone, and if it's not your thing, then its 146 minutes will be an endurance test. But for the schooled and well-traveled horror scholar, it's probably the giddiest time you'll have with a genre offering this year. I don't care if this tanks in theaters--the fact that it even exists and I could see it in a theater in the year 2017 is a small miracle worth celebrating.

THE GREAT WALL
(US/China - 2016; US release 2017)

Directed by Zhang Yimou. Written by Carlo Bernard, Doug Miro and Tony Gilroy. Cast: Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, Jing Tian, Andy Lau, Willem Dafoe, Zhang Hanyu, Lu Han, Eddie Peng, Lin Gengxin, Junkai Wang, Zheng Kai, Xuan Huang, Pilou Asbaek, Yiu Xintian, Liu Qiong. (PG-13, 103 mins)

The prolific Zhang Yimou is arguably the most famous figure in the Chinese film industry, his filmography a mix of serious human drama (his numerous collaborations with Gong Li, the Meryl Streep of China, include 1987's RED SORGHUM, 1990's JU DOU, 1991's RAISE THE RED LANTERN, 1994's TO LIVE, and 1995's SHANGHAI TRIAD) and some of the best post-CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON wuxia epics like 2002's HERO, 2004's HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS, and 2007's CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER. He was also commissioned to direct the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, and that experience was a major influence on his latest film THE GREAT WALL, which already became a blockbuster in Asia over the 2016 holiday season and is just now being released stateside. An epic $150 million co-production with Universal and Legendary that currently ranks as the most expensive Chinese film ever made, it doesn't represent the serious and "important" side of Zhang, but offers briskly-paced entertainment and stunning eye candy. It's filled with bright colors, large-scale and often jawdropping action sequences, and it allows Zhang to have a lot of fun with 3-D as arrows, swords, axes, flaming cannonballs and CGI monsters fly off the screen and into your face, just as 3-D should.

It also offers the jarring sight of Matt Damon in a medieval Asian period epic set in the 11th century, and his involvement in the film has generated some controversy over potential "whitewashing." Considering the film is pure fantasy inspired by a legend of the Great Wall of China, the "white savior" notion seems absurd to bring up in this context and only seems to be a thorn in the side of those looking for something to find offensive. Damon is William, a soldier of fortune who, along with his cohort Tovar (Pedro Pascal, memorable as Oberyn Martell on GAME OF THRONES), are in search of black powder when they're attacked by a creature in the night that takes a tumble down a cliff after William hacks off its reptilian, claw-like appendage. They're captured by soldiers of The Nameless Order, a fortress along the Great Wall overseen by General Shao (Zhang Hanyu). One of Shao's underlings, Commander Lin Mae (Jing Tian), and top adviser Strategist Wang (Andy Lau) speak English, and after some initial misgivings, Wang concludes they're telling the truth about the attack. Shao's forces know of the creatures: the Nameless Order is a secret sect devoted to preparing and training to repel the onslaught of the Tao Tei--reptilian, lizard-like alien monsters that rise every 60 years. Shao has no intention of ever letting them leave, but when William and Tovar prove themselves adept with weaponry, they join in the fight against the Tao Tei, who attack in a horde as far as the eye can see, all under the radar-like control of their "queen."

The CGI has its dodgy moments, but the visual effects are mostly top-notch, with an appropriate level of gross-out digital splatter involving the green-blooded Tao Tei. Zhang seems more concerned with the spectacular presentation of the military pageantry, from the five color-coordinated factions of the Nameless Order and their various inspired weapons to some innovative battle sequences with female bungee jumpers diving off bows perched off the fortress to man-powered, oscillating rotor blades that emerge from the Great Wall to slice and dice Tao Tei as they ascend the wall. Damon's William is an active participant later on, but mostly he spends his time marveling at the Nameless Order's brilliant display of battle might and making goo-goo eyes at Lin Mae while never really nailing down whatever accent he's trying to use. It's a wildly inconsistent Irish brogue that vacillates between the more plausible Pierce Brosnan/Brendan Gleeson side of things but occasionally veers off into full-on, "Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral" QUIET MAN territory.

It doesn't help the stalled romance subplot that Damon has more chemistry with Pascal than with Jing. The script--credited to Damon's BOURNE buddy Tony Gilroy and NARCOS creators Carlo Bernard and Doug Miro, with Edward Zwick, Marshall Herskovitz, and World War Z author Max Brooks sharing story credit based on a earlier draft that wasn't used--seems to be bringing William and Lin Mae together but it never happens, while there's some funny banter and ballbusting between William and Tovar (Tovar: "You think they'll hang us now?" William: "I could use the rest"). Lau (who starred in the 2002 Hong Kong cop thriller INFERNAL AFFAIRS, which was remade in the US in 2006 as THE DEPARTED with Damon essaying his role) brings appropriate gravitas to his role as the practical and wise Strategist Wang and Asian pop star Lu Han has some heartfelt moments as a quiet soldier whose bravery is constantly being called into question by people who never see his heroic actions. There's also American guest star Willem Dafoe, underused in a minor supporting role as Ballard, a scheming westerner who was captured 25 years earlier by the Nameless Order during his search for black powder and has been held prisoner to ensure the purpose of the sect is kept secret. He accepts his fate to teach English to the warriors, but sees William and Tovar as a possible means of escape. In the end, THE GREAT WALL is a triumph of style over substance, brainless B-movie material that's heavy on stylized CGI, elevated considerably by inventive action choreography and entertaining usage of 3-D, and brilliant cinematography by Stuart Dryburgh (BLACKHAT) and frequent Zhang collaborator Zhao Xiaoding.

WILD BEASTS
(Italy - 1984; US release 1985)

Written and directed by Franco E. Prosperi. Cast: Lorraine De Selle, John Aldrich (Tony DeLeo), Ugo Bologna, Louisa Lloyd, John Stacy, Enzo Pizzu, Monica Nickel, Stefania Pinna, Frederico Volocia, Leslie Thomas. (Unrated, 92 mins)

Back in the day, Italian exploitation filmmakers were always quick to pounce on a Hollywood trend and milk it for all it was worth. Whether it was the torrent of exorcism movies that spewed forth following THE EXORCIST, the endless zombie gutmunchers that came after DAWN OF THE DEAD, the truckload of post-nukes after MAD MAX and THE ROAD WARRIOR, and the countless barbarian adventures that resulted from CONAN THE BARBARIAN, the Italians were the undisputed kings of the shameless ripoff. Though you could go back as far as FROGS and NIGHT OF THE LEPUS from 1972, the late 1970s saw a brief ecological, "nature-run-amok" craze with films like 1976's THE FOOD OF THE GODS, 1977's DAY OF THE ANIMALS, 1977's KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS, 1978's THE SWARM, and 1979's PROPHECY, among many others.There were a few stragglers over the years, like three different rat movies coming out from 1982-83 with DEADLY EYES, OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN, and the final segment of the anthology film NIGHTMARES, but generally the fad, arguably popularized by JAWS in 1975, quickly passed. The Italians were fashionably late to the party when it came to the nature-run-amok subgenre. 1982 saw the release of Enzo G. Castellari's JAWS ripoff GREAT WHITE and the Ovidio G. Assonitis-produced PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING, which debuting director and future King of the World James Cameron still insists is "the greatest flying piranha movie ever made," and in 1984, Bruno Mattei directed the incredible RATS: NIGHT OF TERROR, a bizarre fusion of post-nuke and nature-runs-amok made unforgettable by one of the most ridiculous closing shots in all of Italian exploitation. 1984 also gave us WILD BEASTS, directed by Franco E. Prosperi, one of two Franco Prosperis known to Italian exploitation enthusiasts. One was a journeyman genre-hopper (MEET HIM AND DIE, THE LAST HOUSE ON THE BEACH), while the WILD BEASTS Prosperi, along with Gualtiero Jacopetti, was one of the leading figures in the "Mondo" documentary scene that began with 1963's MONDO CANE. Prosperi and Jacopetti made several Mondo films over the next decade, ending with 1971's revolting ADDIO ZIO TOM, released in the US as FAREWELL, UNCLE TOM, an exploitative, shock value re-enactment of the slave trade in which the pair essentially function as the early 1970s drive-in equivalent of trolls in a comments section.

Other than 1975's MONDO CANDIDO, a Mondo spoof inspired by Voltaire's Candide that he co-directed with Jacopetti, WILD BEASTS remains this Franco Prosperi's only foray into both the horror genre and non-Mondo-related narrative. It's also the final work to date for the 88-year-old filmmaker, who's still with us and present for an interview on Severin's new Blu-ray release of the film. Though a narrative work of fiction, Prosperi uses his experience as a documentary filmmaker throughout WILD BEASTS, a ludicrous story of PCP-contaminated industrial waste polluting the water supply of "a northern European city" that's obviously Frankfurt judging from all the Frankfurt signs visible throughout. The contamination results in rapidly escalating aggression in animals, from a seeing-eye dog attacking a blind man to rats overtaking a parked car and devouring the canoodling couple inside to the animals in the zoo breaking out of their cages and pens and going on a city-wide rampage. The zoo's leading veterinarian Dr. Rupert Berner (Tony DeLeo, billed as "John Aldrich," and a discomforting mix of Christopher McDonald and Yanni) teams with constantly-snacking detective Braun (Ugo Bologna), following the trail of carnage as enraged animals run rampant throughout the city. There's a cheetah chasing down a driver (after she almost drives into them, Berner exclaims "She's not crazy! She's being chased by a cheetah!"), cows stampeding through an arcade, and elephants running through the streets, causing cars to pile up or go airborne, crashing into a places like a lamp and chandelier store in scenes of almost Blake Edwardsian destruction before they overtake an airport runway and cause a plane to crash (don't ask). Meanwhile, Berner's journalist girlfriend Laura Schwarz (CANNIBAL FEROX's Lorraine De Selle) is desperately trying to get to her daughter Suzy (Louisa Lloyd), who's trapped at dance class with other kids as a hungry polar bear wanders the halls.

Prosperi fumbles a bit in the middle with some pacing issues that a more experienced genre figure could've alleviated, but WILD BEASTS is an overall entertaining bit of batshit exploitation that doesn't skimp on the gore or other WTF? factors. The relationship between workaholic, absent mother Laura and sarcastic, self-reliant daughter Suzy has some passive-aggressive dysfunction that could use more exploration, and Lloyd is up there with Paige Conner in THE VISITOR, Veronica Zinny in MACABRE, the children in BEYOND THE DOOR, and Nicoletta Elmi in anything as one of the strangest and most off-putting kids in any Italian horror movie. And I haven't even mentioned the bizarre shift in the climax when things take a decidedly WHO CAN KILL A CHILD?-esque turn. Even with some staged sequences in the Mondo films, Prosperi is still a documentarian at heart and that's evident throughout WILD BEASTS in his sometimes distracting interest in extended shots of a newspaper going to press, firefighters and emergency responders on the job, animals attacking one another, and other mayhem presented in stock footage. He also captures some shots of the Frankfurt underbelly, from a trash-strewn street with a prominent Burger King bag to some CHRISTIANE F-inspired images of used needles along the steps exiting the Frankfurt U-Bahn.

Prosperi also careens into the arguably irresponsible, insisting on putting his actors in the same shots as dangerous animals (the reason non-acting circus performer DeLeo got the lead role--he had experience working with these animals and this remains his only film) or having streets closed off to accommodate elephants and bears running around (the cheetah vs. car sequence was actually shot in Johannesburg, South Africa). This commitment to realism is especially alarming late in the film when two child actors are clearly in the same shot as the polar bear chasing them down a school hallway. Prosperi kept a team of animal wranglers with tranquilizer guns and darts just out of camera view throughout shooting to prevent WILD BEASTS from becoming the second coming of ROAR, and it would seem that some of the animals might be slightly sedated at times (that polar bear in the school is moving, but he doesn't look like he's at 100%), but it's still representative of the kind of jaw-dropping risk-taking that no producer would sign off on today. Severin's new Blu-ray is packed with extras, including interviews with a still-vibrant Prosperi (who retired from directing after this film), an affable DeLeo, and editor Mario Morra. It's a nice package for such a relatively obscure film that was on the shelf of every video store in America back in the '80s (with a Lightning Video box that erroneously credited score composer Daniele Patucchi as the director), but has fallen off the radar in the decades since. It's a little clunky at times and the story calls for a Ruggero Deodato or an Umberto Lenzi to keep it focused, but flaws and all, it's Prosperi's, for better or worse, devotion to realism and his willingness to put his actors in harm's way that gives WILD BEASTS its cult appeal.

I DON'T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE
(US - 2017)

Written and directed by Macon Blair. Cast: Melanie Lynskey, Elijah Wood, David Yow, Jane Levy, Devon Graye, Christine Woods, Robert Longstreet, Gary Anthony Williams, Jason Manuel Olazabal, Derek Mears, Myron Natwick, Lee Eddy, Matt Orduna, Macon Blair. (Unrated, 97 mins)

"Everyone is an asshole" - Ruth Kimke

The winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, the Netflix pickup I DON'T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE (not to be confused with I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER or Netflix's I AM THE PRETTY THING THAT LIVES IN THE HOUSE) is the directing debut of actor Macon Blair, who should be familiar to fans of the acclaimed Jeremy Saulnier films BLUE RUIN (2014) and GREEN ROOM (2016). Blair (the driven but hapless "hero" of BLUE RUIN and the incompetent manager of the skinhead venue in GREEN ROOM) doesn't deviate too far from the formula of his buddy Saulnier, and ANYMORE certainly belongs in that burgeoning indie subgenre depicting the seedy underbelly of rural and back roads America with Saulnier's films and Zeke & Simon Hawkins' flawed but interesting BAD TURN WORSE (2014). Blair's film takes more of a Coen Bros. approach, especially in the early-going, which is filled with dark humor and occasional bits of cringe comedy to around the midpoint, at which time things get more serious and the humor takes on a decidedly macabre bent that wouldn't be out of place in BLOOD SIMPLE and FARGO. Blair wears his love of the Coen Bros. on his sleeve (even the set-up has a shaggy dog-like BIG LEBOWSKI feel to it), so while it doesn't win many points for originality, it has something to say about these troubling times and Blair pulls it off with enough panache that it works beautifully.

Depressed, lonely nurse's assistant Ruth Kimke (a perfectly cast Melanie Lynskey) spends her time moping around the house and reading fantasy novels. She's growing increasingly agitated by the boorish behavior of others, whether it's a huge pickup truck obnoxiously "rolling coal" at a red light, the same neighborhood dog shitting in her yard, people being inconsiderate to others in stores, guys who say "Deez Nuts," and a total stranger (Blair in a cameo) sidling up to her at a bar and spoiling a huge plot twist that's much further into the book she's sitting there reading. Things just get worse when she gets home from work and finds her house has been burglarized, with her laptop, her prescriptions, and her late grandmother's silver dinnerware missing, And with that, Ruth reaches her breaking point, telling her friend Angie (Lee Eddy) that she's tired of "the way people treat each other...they're disgusting and it's all 'mine mine and fuck you,'" adding "Everyone is an asshole." Fed up with lack of interest by the cop assigned to her case, one Det. William Bendix (Gary Anthony Williams), she manages to track down her laptop and cajoles her eccentric neighbor Tony (Elijah Wood)--a would-be martial arts doofus with a rat-tail and a Saxon shirt who's introduced jamming to Pentagram's "Forever My Queen"--into coming along as backup on a mission to retrieve it. But the perps bought it from a flea market, where the skeezy owner Killer Sills (Myron Natwick) has been buying stolen merchandise from Christian Rumack (Devon Graye), a bratty fuck-up from a rich family who's one of a trio of small-time, lowlife criminals that includes ex-con Marshall (Jesus Lizard frontman David Yow) and Dez (Jane Levy of DON'T BREATHE).

Online sleuthing and some good guesswork lead them to the home of Christian's wealthy, obnoxious father Chris Sr. (Robert Longstreet), who's more or less written off his son and refuses to take any responsibility for the shitbag he's become. Marshall has noticed Ruth and Tony following them around and after one major character makes an abrupt and shocking exit, all parties converge at the elder Rumack's house for one of the most inspired and audaciously over-the-top showdowns that the Coen Bros. never concocted, mixing it up with guns, knives, ninja stars, and projectile vomiting. Once it becomes apparent that Ruth and Tony are storming into a world with which they're not prepared to deal, there's some initial trepidation on the part of the viewer over the abrupt shift in tone, but Blair quickly regains control and smooths over the rough spots in the transition. He finds a perfect balance between the more dark-humored elements of Ruth's situation--such as her growing misanthropy and a quest for her belongings not unlike the Dude's pursuit of his peed-on rug in THE BIG LEBOWSKI--and the genuine sense of fear and danger that surrounds Ruth and Tony as they keep tangling with Marshall, whether intentionally or unintentionally. As good as it is, I DON'T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE wouldn't work nearly as well as it does were it not for the pitch-perfect performance by Lynskey, who impressed over 20 years ago with her debut in Peter Jackson's 1994 film HEAVENLY CREATURES and here creates a character that's every bit as memorable as her Pauline Parker from that film. Lynskey conveys the frustration, the anger, and the sadness in her character while never overdoing it, and while we never get Ruth's backstory, it's not really needed. She's getting by and she finds fleeting enjoyment in little things, but she's a loner who leads a solitary life and feels isolated from a world that she no longer understands. She gets able support from Wood, who gets to play the more goofy sidekick character but, like his co-star, underplays it for the most part. Where Ruth is a mordant, sad sack Dude, Tony is a more stoical but just as furious Walter Sobchak, again drawing comparisons to THE BIG LEBOWSKI and the Coens, albeit in a more low-key fashion (also worth mentioning is HELLO LADIES' Christine Woods, who steals all of her scenes as Chris Sr's booze-swilling second wife). A funny, twisted, and suspenseful film that goes in some genuinely unpredictable directions, I DON'T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE is an impressive debut for Blair, and a perfect showcase for the underrated Lynskey.

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS
(UK - 2016; US release 2017)

Directed by Colm McCarthy. Written by Mike Carey. Cast: Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine, Glenn Close, Sennia Nanua, Anamaria Marinca, Fisayo Akinade, Anthony Welsh, Dominique Tipper. (R, 111 mins)

Based on the 2014 novel and scripted by its author M.R. Carey, THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS is one of the more thoughtful and intelligent offerings in the overcrowded zombie genre, approaching its subject from a unique perspective and benefiting from refreshingly unpredictable and very human character arcs. Set in an apocalyptic, near-future England, the film opens in a bunker at a military installation where restrained children are kept in maximum security cells before being taken to their lessons restrained in wheelchairs. The soldiers point guns at them at all times and don't engage in conversation, even though young Melanie (Sennia Nanua) is polite, articulate, and eager to please. Outside the gates of the base, hordes of zombies, or "hungries," linger about, ferociously seeking any kind of food and turned into mindless flesh-eaters by a deadly fungal virus that spread across the globe. The children being kept at the base are second generation "hungries" who transformed in utero and burrowed out of their mothers' wombs after devouring their insides. The virus is transmitted through bites and body fluids, but the second generation hungries--the children--still display the capacity for humanity. They're able to talk and learn and their feral side only comes out when they're hungry (they're fed live worms) and catch the scent of a human. The soldiers and the others running the base cover themselves in a blocker gel that stifles their scent, but that still doesn't provide enough security for Sgt. Parks (Paddy Considine) who simply regards them as inhuman hungries and doesn't care about their more human side seen by their teacher Helen Justineau (Gemma Arterton). Helen is in the minority with her views on attempting to treat the second generation hungries like children, especially when it comes to Dr. Caldwell (Glenn Close), the research scientist working on a vaccine for the virus, which often involves killing and dissecting the young hungries. "They're children!" Helen argues, with Caldwell countering "They present as children!"

Caldwell is about to vivisect Melanie when Helen intervenes and the marauding hungries outside tear down the barrier and overtake the base. Almost everyone is slaughtered, with Caldwell, Parks, Helen, Private Kieran (Fisayo Akinade), and Melanie getting away, Melanie kept on top of the transport vehicle, restrained and wearing a clear Hannibal Lecter-type muzzle shield. It's here that THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS settles into a more comparatively routine, sprinting undead 28 DAYS/WEEKS LATER situation, with the small band of survivors making their way across the apocalyptic landscape that was once England (aerial views were shot by drones flown over the abandoned Chernobyl town of Pripyat), though Carey and veteran British TV director Colm McCarthy (RIPPER STREET, PEAKY BLINDERS) offer enough unique elements to keep things from feeling too rote and stale. The relationship that develops between Melanie and the others is unexpected, with even the hard-bitten Parks begrudgingly seeing the girl's human side after she does numerous things to help them, such as scouting paths to safe places since the hungries will leave her alone. THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS gets a lot from an often-remarkable debut performance from young Nanua. She's terrifying when her feral instincts take over and quite touching in fleeting instances where she's allowed to be a kid (Melanie's utter joy in putting on a pair of sneakers and communicating with Parks over a walkie-talkie is very nicely played by Nanua). Even Close's ostensible antagonist displays signs of empathy as their journey goes on, no matter how heartlessly matter-of-fact she is at times (Close spitting out "Was that cathartic?" when Caldwell is cracked across the face by Helen is a highlight). It's hard to do anything original with the zombie genre at this point, and indeed, a lot of the scenes play like any random episode of THE WALKING DEAD. But with a quartet of strong performances at its core (not to mention the sight of Glenn Close killing zombies) and some original ideas in its foundation as well its ultimate revelation, THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS manages to separate itself from the rest of the horde.

On HBO: BEWARE THE SLENDERMAN (2017)

Retro Review: SCAVENGER HUNT (1979)

On DVD/Blu-ray: USS INDIANAPOLIS: MEN OF COURAGE (2016) and THE HOLLOW POINT (2016)

Retro Review: THE UNHOLY FOUR (1970)

On Netflix: iBOY (2017)

In Theaters: RESIDENT EVIL: THE FINAL CHAPTER (2017)

Retro Review: IRONMASTER (1983)

Retro Review: BLASTFIGHTER (1984)

In Theaters: THE COMEDIAN (2016)

On DVD/Blu-ray: THE TAKE (2016) and ANTIBIRTH (2016)

Retro Review: FUTURE HUNTERS (1986)

On DVD/Blu-ray: LIFE ON THE LINE (2016); BLACKWAY (2016); and THE BRONX BULL (2017)

In Theaters: JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2 (2017)

On Netflix: DAVID BRENT: LIFE ON THE ROAD (2016)

On DVD/Blu-ray: AMERICAN PASTORAL (2016); KING COBRA (2016); and THE CRASH (2017)

In Theaters: A CURE FOR WELLNESS (2017)

In Theaters: THE GREAT WALL (2017)

Retro Review: WILD BEASTS (1984)

On Netflix: I DON'T FEEL AT HOME IN THIS WORLD ANYMORE (2017)

In Theaters/On VOD: THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS (2016)