Good Efficient Butchery

ALIEN: COVENANT
(US - 2017)

Directed by Ridley Scott. Written by John Logan and Dante Harper. Cast: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demian Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Guy Pearce, James Franco, Jussie Smollett, Callie Hernandez, Amy Seimetz, Nathaniel Dean, Alexander England, Benjamin Rigby, Goran D. Kleut. (R, 120 mins)

Despite the pre-release tap-dancing around the issue, it was obvious that 2012's PROMETHEUS was Ridley Scott's return to the universe he created with the 1979 classic ALIEN. After PROMETHEUS' ultimate reveal as a prequel, Scott has returned with no illusions about what's going on with ALIEN: COVENANT. Picking up ten years after the events of PROMETHEUS, COVENANT centers on a colonization mission on the space vessel Covenant, with a crew of 15 carrying 2000 colonists and 1000 embryos on a seven-year, hypersleep mission to an oxygenated planet known as Origae-6. They're under the watchful eye of "Mother," the ship's computer, as well as Walter (Michael Fassbender), a synthetic in charge of maintaining the ship. A "neutrino burst" causes significant damage to the ship, killing some sleeping colonists and forcing Walter to bring the crew out of stasis. Second-in-charge Oram (Billy Crudup) is forced to assume command when mission leader Branson (a barely-seen and uncredited James Franco) is killed in a freak explosion when his pod won't open. They're still seven years from Origae-6, and Branson's wife Daniels (Katherine Waterston, Sam's lookalike daughter), who's also on the crew, voices her objection when Oram decides to investigate a signal (someone singing John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads," in a garbled audio transmission that's effectively creepy in an EVENT HORIZON way) from a previously unseen planet just a few weeks away that's showing even better habitability figures than their intended destination.

I guess Daniels is the only one who's ever seen an ALIEN movie or an ALIEN ripoff, since this is obviously a decision worthy of a Bad Idea Jeans commercial. While the Covenant and pilot Tennessee (Danny McBride) stay in orbit with two other crew members, a smaller vessel piloted by Tennessee's wife Faris (Amy Seimetz) takes Oram and the rest of the crew to the surface. They split up, with Oram's biologist wife Karine (Carmen Ejogo) collecting samples with soldier Ledward (Benjamin Rigby), who unknowingly stirs some alien spores that enter his ear and go undetected, taking root in his brain. Meanwhile, Oram and the others discover the wreckage of the spacecraft in which Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and synthetic David (also Fassbender) escaped at the end of PROMETHEUS. When a soldier in that group, Hallett (Nathaniel Dean), also gets infected by spores, they head back to the docked vessel where a creature has already burst out of Ledward's back and killed Karine, eventually leading to an explosion that kills Faris. A creature erupts out of Hallett's mouth and soon, others similar to the franchise's signature xenomorphs start attacking until the whole group is rescued by David (also Fassbender), who's been living alone in what appears to be the ruins of a Pompeii-like civilization. Dr. Shaw was killed in a crash landing ten years earlier, and when David isn't weeping at a shrine he's set up in her memory, he's been surviving on his own. He clearly has other intentions, as evidenced by his barely-contained enthusiasm upon being told that there's 2000 hibernating colonists and 1000 embryos aboard the still-orbiting Covenant.

ALIEN: COVENANT is consistently interesting, but it's still a hot mess. The biggest obstacle that it can't overcome--and it didn't seem apparent to me until I considered it and PROMETHEUS as a whole piece--is that knowing the backstory to the events of ALIEN and the whole Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) saga is completely unnecessary. When the actual H.R. Giger-designed xenomorphs finally appear in the last half hour or so, we see entirely too much of them, and in their sleek new CGI incarnation, pinballing all over the screen like sprinting zombies in 28 DAYS LATER, they lack the sense of tangible menace like the aliens in ALIEN and its equally great 1986 sequel ALIENS. This whole saga of PROMETHEUS and COVENANT ultimately feels like little more than ALIEN fan fiction that does nothing to enhance the movies we've been watching for going on 40 years now. Scott throws in enough bizarre and unexpected elements that COVENANT has always got your attention even when it's stumbling--the whole midsection of the film, showing David's routine around the ruins of the society he's adopted as his home, is another example of the director's occasionally insane side making its presence known. But in the end, it doesn't go far enough, like a lobotomized Ray Liotta eating his own sauteed brain in HANNIBAL or Cameron Diaz fucking a car in THE COUNSELOR. Before long, we once again start getting that PROMETHEUS feeling that Scott realizes he needs to appease the studio and abandons the project's unique ideas in favor of rushing through the last 30 or so minutes because he seems to suddenly remember he's making an ALIEN movie. In other words, almost right down to the minute, the same flaws in PROMETHEUS are repeated in COVENANT, with the added detriment of a laughably predictable twist ending and an attempt to turn David into a quipping, synthetic android Freddy Krueger.

Fassbender is fine in both roles, especially as David, with his gentlemanly sinister demeanor and erudite line delivery recalling Peter Cushing not just in his performance, but also in the echoes of Cushing's Nazi mad scientist living on a deserted island among his aquatic zombie creations in 1977's SHOCK WAVES (instead of CGI-ing Grand Moff Tarken in ROGUE ONE, they should've just hired Fassbender to do his Cushing impression). ALIEN: COVENANT feels like three movies in one, all of them tonally different (a late shower kill with gratuitous T&A as an apparently pervy xenomorph peeps in on a cavorting couple feels like it belongs in an '80s slasher movie or, at best, a Roger Corman ALIEN ripoff like GALAXY OF TERROR). Waterston makes a tough, gritty heroine, but elsewhere, there's too much distracting stunt casting, whether it's McBride coming off as "Kenny Powers in space" and not selling lines like "That's one hell of an ionosphere!" or Franco turning in his finest performance in years as a burnt corpse (Guy Pearce also appears as evil CEO Peter Weyland in a prologue). It's intriguing that the crew is almost entirely made up of married couples, with some sociopolitical commentary in Oram being established as conservative and bitching that his faith has held him back in his career, or that Hallett and badass security head Lope (Demian Bichir) are a gay couple, but it's never really explored other than as transparent thinkpiece-bait. Ridley Scott owes no explanations to anyone, and it's great that the 79-year-old legend is still full of piss and vinegar and able to work so much in his emeritus years, but like others in his age bracket such as Clint Eastwood and Woody Allen, his average of a new film every year or year-and-a-half is an indication that maybe a break and a recharging wouldn't be a bad thing. Scott is just spinning his wheels here, and so is the ALIEN franchise.

THE WIZARD OF LIES
(US - 2017)

Directed by Barry Levinson. Written by Sam Levinson, John Burnham Schwartz and Samuel Baum. Cast: Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, Alessandro Nivola, Hank Azaria, Nathan Darrow, Kristen Connolly, Lily Rabe, Kelly AuCoin, Geoffrey Cantor, Steve Coulter, Neil Brooks Cunningham, Michael Goorjian, Diana B. Henriques, Michael Kostroff, Kathrine Narducci, Amanda Warren, Gary Wilmes, David Lipman, Sophie Von Haselberg, Clem Cheung. (Unrated, 132 mins)

As far as HBO prestige biopics go, THE WIZARD OF LIES is on the lesser end--not as good as YOU DON'T KNOW JACK but nowhere near the depths of the slobbering apologia of David Mamet's loathsome PHIL SPECTOR. A chronicle of disgraced financier, stockbroker, and former NASDAQ chairman Bernie Madoff, who was arrested in late 2008 for perpetrating the biggest Ponzi scheme in US history, a massive fraud to the tune of $65 billion. The fortunes of famous people (Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick, John Malkovich, and, as if he hadn't endured enough in his life, Elie Wiesel), the life savings of Madoff's millionaire friends and some ordinary average people, as well as the funds of numerous Jewish-based charity organizations were lost in what ended up being a 16-year scam where all the stocks, trades, reports, statements, paper trails, everything was made up by Madoff, who was eventually crushed under the weight of it and couldn't find a way out, especially after the housing market crash of 2008. It was after that event that nervous investors began withdrawing their money, prompting him to lure in others to cover the cash that wasn't there, seduced by Madoff's bogus financial reports that showed his investments were still making money despite the severe downturn in the market.

Anyone familiar with the Madoff scandal knows what happened and that most of the money was never recovered, but THE WIZARD OF LIES doesn't really have anything to add. It does offer Robert De Niro as Madoff, in a slouchy and slightly nasally performance that's accurate as far as the Madoff we've seen in news footage, but director Barry Levinson (DINER, RAIN MAN) and the three credited screenwriters, among them Levinson's son Sam, never really let the viewer into Madoff's head to know what makes him tick or what drove him to do what he did. They're working from book by New York Times financial writer Diana B. Henriques (who appears throughout as herself in a hokey framing device that has her interviewing De Niro as Madoff), but from what's presented here, we don't see the charismatic guy that roped so many people into his scheme and somehow convinced them to put their entire fortunes in his hands. Just because he's got De Niro in the lead, Levinson (who previously directed the actor in SLEEPERS, WAG THE DOG, and WHAT JUST HAPPENED) instead tries to make a low-energy Martin Scorsese movie, complete what what sounds like a Scorsese mix cd (The Platters'"The Great Pretender" and the Animals "House of the Rising Sun"--how did the Rolling Stones "Gimme Shelter" not make the cut during a "Madoff scrambling for investors" paranoia montage?) playing at a swanky anniversary party for Madoff and his wife Ruth (Michelle Pfeiffer). At this same party, an obsessive-compulsive Madoff goes around inspecting each and every plate to make sure they're spotless while shattering the ones that aren't in a scene that lets De Niro riff on his Ace Rothstein hissy fit over blueberry muffins in Scorsese's CASINO (this bit was also referenced in EQUITY, another recent financial dud). THE WIZARD OF LIES plays like a listless Scorsese knockoff, bullet-pointing its way through the story to such a degree that Wikipedia should've been credited as a fourth screenwriter.

De Niro certainly looks the part as Madoff, and while he's not exactly busting his ass, he seems to be coasting somewhat simply because he isn't really given a character to play. It's as if Levinson and HBO figured "Well, De Niro's gonna look just like Madoff, so everything should just fall into place." Pfeiffer is a great American actress who works too infrequently to re-emerge for inconsequential movies like this (she's been offscreen since co-starring with De Niro in Luc Besson's 2013 mob comedy THE FAMILY). Though she spent time with Ruth Madoff to help prepare her performance and looks a lot like her, Pfeiffer comes off less like Ruth Madoff and more like a tribute to Edie Falco's work as Carmela Soprano. On top of that, she's miscast, as the 58-year-old actress looks several years younger, making it a pretty tough sell to buy that she's playing a 70-year-old who's been married for 50 years. Alessandro Nivola and Nathan Darrow are fine as Madoff's sons Mark and Andrew, who worked for their father and claimed, along with Ruth, to be unaware of the scheme. Some of the film's high points come from the effect of the scandal on their lives, afraid to leave their homes for fear of being accosted by friends, former co-workers, and random strangers, and their arcs are all the more tragic considering Mark would hang himself in 2010 and Andrew, after distancing himself from his father and trying to salvage his own reputation, would succumb to cancer in 2014 at just 48. Despite working in fits and starts (Ruth's hurtful reaction to her favorite hairdresser firing her as a customer is well-played by Pfeiffer is well-done), THE WIZARD OF LIES' chief priority is making sure De Niro looked like a dead ringer for Madoff. It doesn't have much else to say and actually seems so bored with itself that it completely forgets about Hank Azaria, cast as Frank DiPascali, the top Madoff associate who ran the inaccessible 17th floor where all of the books were being cooked--a vital figure in the Ponzi scheme, he disappears from the film around 75 minutes in and is never seen or mentioned again. The more THE WIZARD OF LIES goes on, the more you realize that erhaps the better approach, especially since ABC just aired the Richard Dreyfuss/Blythe Danner miniseries MADOFF a year ago, would've been to examine this story from the perspective of anyone involved with it other than Bernie Madoff.

WILLARD
(US - 1971)

Directed by Daniel Mann. Written by Gilbert A. Ralston. Cast: Bruce Davison, Ernest Borgnine, Sondra Locke, Elsa Lanchester, Michael Dante, Jody Gilbert, William Hansen, John Myhers, J. Pat O'Malley, Joan Shawlee, Alan Baxter, Sherry Presnell. (PG, 95 mins)

A surprise sleeper smash for Cinerama Releasing in the summer of 1971, WILLARD, from the masters of horror at Bing Crosby Productions, has been out of circulation for a number of years but has resurfaced, along with its sequel BEN, on Blu-ray courtesy of Shout! Factory. To those under 30, WILLARD has probably been supplanted by the minor cult following of its over-the-top 2003 remake, but for Gen Xers and older--those fortunate enough to have seen it theatrically or on one of its many TV airings as kids throughout the '70s and '80s--the original WILLARD remains one of the most beloved horror films of its day. It's creepy enough to make you squirm and give everyone the willies, but carries a PG (or GP at the time) rating that allowed it to have a huge impact on kids who were actually allowed to see it. It also helped that everyone at some point in their lives probably felt like Willard Stiles, the slumped-shouldered sad sack played by Bruce Davison in the role for which the veteran character actor is best known, even with a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for 1990's LONGTIME COMPANION. Endlessly picked on at work by his cruel, bullying boss Al Martin (an essential Ernest Borgnine performance) and never given a moment of peace at home by his needy, domineering mother Henrietta (Elsa Lanchester), Willard is a ticking time bomb looking for a way out. He has no friends and his birthday party is attended only by his mother's elderly friends who start in on him about how he needs to stand up to Martin, a conniving asshole who co-owned a foundry with Willard's late father only to muscle him out of the partnership and stress him into an early grave. Martin kept Willard on the payroll as a consolation prize for being screwed out of co-ownership, putting him in sales accounting, dumping everyone else's work on him and forcing him to come in on weekends in the hopes that he'll quit. Willard's only joy in life comes from a family of rats he finds in the backyard. He spends all of his free time with them, playing with them and teaching them tricks, eventually getting them to understand voice commands and perhaps even developing a kind of psychological connection with them. He bonds with two in particular: good-natured and playful white rat Socrates and clingy and vaguely sinister black rat Ben.

Willard soon devotes all of his time to the rats, especially after his mother dies. He moves the fertile rat pack, which has grown exponentially, into the basement, where he has a hard time corralling and controlling them. He ignores the attention given to him by shy, pretty co-worker Joan (Sondra Locke, several years before hooking up with Clint Eastwood) and begins using the rats to plot vengeance against his tormentors. Director Daniel Mann (THE ROSE TATTOO, BUTTERFIELD 8, OUR MAN FLINT) and veteran TV writer Gilbert A. Ralston (BEN CASEY), working from Stephen Gilbert's 1969 novel Ratman's Notebooks, play a little coy with the horror element for a good chunk of the film's running time, whether it's the lighthearted, cute antics of the rats or the completely, almost sarcastically inappropriate score, which sounds like it belongs in a cheerful, uplifting kids movie. Willard just seems shy, lonely, and unable to stand up for himself until his dark side takes over. First it's relatively harmless pranks like setting some rats loose at a swanky work party hosted by Martin that everyone was invited to except Willard, who was nevertheless put in charge of mailing the invitations. But before long, he's using the rats as a decoy to stage a theft of some cash at the home of Martin's sleazy new business partner (Alan Baxter) and eventually, after bringing Socrates and Ben to work with him only to have Martin kill Socrates after he's spotted in the supply closet, training them to attack under the newly-assumed leadership of Ben. It's about 2/3 of the way through WILLARD before its shift to outright horror, and the much talked-about scene where Willard finally exacts his revenge on Martin by bringing along a few thousand of his friends ("Tear him up!" a wild-eyed Willard commands) was the kind of cathartic, crowd-pleasing entertainment that helped make WILLARD such a huge word-of-mouth hit.

WILLARD's inspired willingness to go off the rails in the home stretch makes it especially endearing all these years later. With his mother gone and Martin no longer around to make his life miserable, Willard is finally free and doesn't need his rodent friends anymore. But Ben, feeling rejected on an almost-FATAL ATTRACTION level, won't be ignored, and the scene where Willard's romantic dinner with Joan is interrupted when he spots Ben on the mantle stink-eye squinting at him in a jealous, silent rage is absolute genius. WILLARD inspired one direct ripoff with 1972's STANLEY, about a PTSD-stricken Vietnam vet (Chris Robinson) who trains his pet rattlesnake to take out his enemies, but can be seen in retrospect as a loose precursor to two later 1970s trends: the "nature run amok" (JAWS, GRIZZLY, THE FOOD OF THE GODS, etc) and the "social outcast exacting telepathic revenge" subgenres (CARRIE and JENNIFER--the latter about a teenage girl with both CARRIE-like powers and an ability to control snakes, starring Lisa Pelikan, who was married to Davison for many years--as well as popular made-for-TV-movies like THE SPELL and THE INITIATION OF SARAH). What helps WILLARD a lot is the genuinely terrific performance by Davison, who sells the character much the way Anthony Perkins did with Norman Bates in PSYCHO. Sure, there's the similarities in that they're both sheltered mama's boys, but like Norman Bates, you sympathize with Willard until he starts crossing lines. Norman Bates got off easy by getting to spend two decades in an institution for his crimes. Willard Stiles wasn't so lucky: he made the mistake of fucking with Ben.

WILLARD opening in Toledo, OH on July 2, 1971

BEN
(US - 1972)

Directed by Phil Karlson. Written by Gilbert A. Ralston. Cast: Joseph Campanella, Arthur O'Connell, Meredith Baxter, Lee Harcourt Montgomery, Rosemary Murphy, Kaz Garas, Kenneth Tobey, Paul Carr, Richard Van Fleet, James Luisi, Norman Alden. (PG, 94 mins)

In theaters less than 12 months after WILLARD, the quickie sequel BEN looks and feels even more like a made-for-TV movie than its predecessor, a vibe enhanced by the presence of TV stalwarts like Joseph Campanella and a young Meredith Baxter in leading roles, both of whom accumulating only a small handful of big-screen credits over their long careers (unless I'm mistaken, BEN is the only time Campanella headlined a theatrical release). Stepping in for Daniel Mann was veteran journeyman Phil Karlson, whose directing career dated back to Charlie Chan and Bowery Boys programmers in the 1940s and included some westerns and film noir in the 1950s and Dean Martin's Matt Helm movies in the 1960s. Karlson's biggest success would come 30 years into his career with his next-to-last film when, right after BEN, he directed the surprise 1973 blockbuster WALKING TALL, with Joe Don Baker in his signature role as ass-kicking, hickory-clubbing Sheriff Buford Pusser. Karlson came from the "Let's just get it in the can and move on" school of no-nonsense efficiency, but things get off to a shaky start with an awkward and stilted opening with a bunch of people standing as silent and still as a freeze frame outside the home of Willard Stiles, with BEN picking up immediately after the events of WILLARD. Willard's body has been found in the attic following the Ben-orchestrated revenge attack on him. Dogged detectives Kirtland (Campanella) and Greer (Kaz Garas) find Willard's diary, where he details his training of an army of rats, but the incredulous cops are quick to dismiss it as the rantings of a kook since the rats are nowhere to be found. That's because Ben has directed them to hide in the walls undetected, and while the detectives bicker with cigar-chomping newshound Hatfield (Arthur O'Connell), Ben waits patiently to lead them to a safe place. The safe place turns out to be the sewer, from which Ben and a few other scouts emerge to befriend lonely Danny (Lee Harcourt Montgomery), a frail eight-year-old with a weak heart who lives in Willard's neighborhood. Like Willard, Danny has no friends and spends his time putting on marionette shows in the garage, converted into a workshop/playroom by his single mom Beth (Rosemary Murphy) and big sister Eve (Baxter). Danny and Ben bond immediately, with Ben doing for Danny exactly what he did for Willard when he leads a rat attack on a neighborhood bully who's picking on Danny. Meanwhile, Kirtland and Hatfield are scouring the city for the rat army, though who knows what they intend to do when they find it?

BEN wasn't as big of a hit was WILLARD, though it was just as ubiquitous on late-night TV in the '70s and '80s. With the killer rat angle already established, BEN is able to get right to the horror element and as such, it follows a template not unlike later slasher films like HALLOWEEN, with Ben and the rats terrorizing a small suburban town and going back into hiding, pursued by cops and the media, both of whom have little success in catching them as the body count escalates. Again scripted by Gilbert A. Ralston, BEN manages to be simultaneously more nasty and grisly and more maudlin and silly than WILLARD. There's some amusing scenes like rats invading a health spa and walking on treadmills and an absolutely ludicrous shot of Ben and a few other rats peeking out of the sewer with their eyes fixated on the display window of a nearby cheese shop, not to mention the fact that while Danny speaks and Ben squeaks, they're both able to understand each other perfectly ("Which way, Ben? Left or right?" Danny asks, to which Ben replies with a series of short squeaks. "OK, left!" Danny somehow concludes). But elsewhere, it goes bigger and grosser. There's several times the number of rats here than in WILLARD and Karlson really likes going for lingering shots of them swarming over a victim, putting several cast members in visibly unpleasant situations (Eve ends up looking for Danny in the sewer, and Baxter proves herself a real sport by crawling through all sorts of wet gunk and piles of live rats in the glory days of pre-CGI), or taking over a grocery store to the point where literally the entire floor is covered in large rats climbing all over one another. Young Montgomery, who would go on to be a regular presence in '70s horror cult classics like BURNT OFFERINGS (1976) and in the terrifying "Bobby" segment of the TV-movie DEAD OF NIGHT (1977), is pretty hard to take as the whiny Danny, but he's boldly fearless when it comes to working and physically interacting with his rodent co-stars. BEN could use more smartass banter between seasoned pros Campanella and O'Connell and less of Montgomery's Danny and his marionette song and dance productions, but kids ended up digging WILLARD, so they had to make BEN appeal to that audience. That appeal went so far as getting 13-year-old Michael Jackson to record the title song, a heartwarming ballad about a young boy and his best friend who happens to be a super intelligent, insanely possessive, serial-killing rodent. Titled "Ben" but generally known as "Ben's Song," Jackson's theme song ultimately ended up being more popular than the movie it was from, becoming his first chart-topping solo hit and scoring a Best Original Song Oscar nomination, losing to Maureen McGovern's "The Morning After" from THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE. Yes, BEN is an Oscar-nominated film.

HIGHPOINT
(Canada - 1984)

Directed by Peter Carter. Written by Richard Guttman and Ian Sutherland. Cast: Richard Harris, Christopher Plummer, Beverly D'Angelo, Kate Reid, Peter Donat, Robin Gammell, Saul Rubinek, Maury Chaykin, George Buza, David Calderisi, Ken James. (PG, 87 mins)

Aside from one good car chase and stunt legend Dar Robinson taking a dive off of Toronto's CN Tower, which at the time was the tallest free-standing structure in the world, the justifiably obscure Canadian tax shelter comedy-thriller HIGHPOINT is an absolute shit show. Filmed in 1979, subjected to reshoots in 1981, given a brief European release in 1982, and unseen in the US until 1984 in a drastically restructured version that was assembled following even more reshoots and post-production tweaking, HIGHPOINT was deemed a lost cause by anyone who came into contact with it. Director Peter Carter and co-writer Ian Sutherland had just made the Canadian survivalist horror film RITUALS, and intended HIGHPOINT to be a spoofy homage to NORTH BY NORTHWEST and other Hitchcockian "innocent man caught in a web of intrigue" tropes, even though Mel Brooks'HIGH ANXIETY did the job quite well in 1977. By the time HIGHPOINT was finally dumped in a handful of theaters on Labor Day weekend in 1984 (opening the same day as BOLERO and C.H.U.D.), the new regime at New World Pictures, which had just changed hands after being sold by Roger Corman, jettisoned the lighthearted score by Oscar-winner John Addison (TOM JONES) and replaced it with more bombastic, Jerry Goldsmith-style cues by Christopher Young, who would become an in-house New World composer on films like FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC and HELLRAISER before going on to a busy career with the major studios (he received a Golden Globe nomination for his work on Lasse Hallstrom's 2001 film THE SHIPPING NEWS). New World also excised as much of the comedy as they could, opting to retool it in the editing room as a relatively straight-faced, serious action-heavy thriller, with what appears to be half of the jobs in the credits being prefaced by the word "additional," and all without the involvement of Carter, who died of a heart attack at just 48 in June of 1982. As anyone who's seen Sam Peckinpah's THE KILLER ELITE can attest, taking a comedy and turning it into a serious movie in post-production is a terrible idea, and HIGHPOINT, which would be more accurately titled NORTH BY NORTHWORST, is such an ineptly-assembled dumpster fire of a movie that it's surprising it was ever released at all. And even after all the time, effort, and money (approximately $2 million) spent revamping HIGHPOINT as a thriller, New World's poster art sold it as a comedy anyway, further proof that no one at any point could reach an agreement on what they wanted from this project and that no one involved was on the same page. A new exposition-filled opening sequence was shot with co-stars Peter Donat and Robin Gammell after test audiences had no clue what was happening, and veteran Roger Corman associates Clark Henderson and Barry Zetlin are among the heavily-staffed behind-the-scenes triage unit credited with "additional editing," which is enough to seriously question whether HIGHPOINT was acquired by the Corman-owned New World prior to his selling the company in late 1983 and perhaps thrown in as a freebie for the new owners. Speaking purely hypothetically, if there was ever a wreckage so beyond salvaging that not even Roger Corman could get it in profitable shape, it's HIGHPOINT.

Unemployed accountant Lewis Kinney (Richard Harris, trying desperately to be Cary Grant) rescues a young woman from an attempted suicide by drowning and ends up getting involved in all manner of complex and incoherent machinations. The woman is Lise Hatcher (Beverly D'Angelo, who replaced a bailing Katharine Ross shortly before filming began), the adopted younger sister of noted playboy and con artist James Hatcher (Christopher Plummer), whose funeral she just left. But Hatcher is very much alive, faking his own death after absconding with $10 million of CIA cash that was loaned to the Mafia for a top secret money laundering scam code-named "Highpoint." When Hatcher's ailing mother (Kate Reid) hires Kinney to help locate her son, the nebbishy accountant finds himself targeted by government goons working at the behest of corrupt CIA agent Banner (Gammell), as well as incompetent, slapstick hit men Centino (Saul Rubinek) and Falco (Maury Chaykin), dim-witted flunkies working for mob boss Maronzella (Donat). The plot begins in Los Angeles before moving to NYC and eventually Quebec and Toronto, probably per the rules of the tax shelter incentive, but it's anyone's guess why anything happens in HIGHPOINT. One admittedly well-done car chase early on is still plagued by obvious post-production stitching, awkward cutting, and continuity issues that run rampant throughout, like two repeats of the same reaction shot of D'Angelo laughing. And while Robinson's jaw-dropping 700 ft free fall off the CN Tower in the climax (he's doubling Plummer in the scene) is the sole reason HIGHPOINT got any attention at all back in the day and probably why New World worked so hard to make this presentable, even it's handled in a way that ruins the moment, looking as if Carter and the crew didn't get enough coverage for the shot and had no way of cutting it together without asking Robinson to do it again. And to give you some perspective on just how incredible this HIGHPOINT stunt was, Robinson's famous free fall from the Peachtree Plaza at the end of SHARKY'S MACHINE, where he's doubling Henry Silva, was only 220 ft.

As this miserable film slogged on, the most interesting thought I had was wondering if, years later on the set of Clint Eastwood's 1992 classic UNFORGIVEN, Harris (as English Bob) and Rubinek (as bespectacled, tenderfoot biographer W.W. Beauchamp) reminisced about the trainwreck they appeared in together over a decade earlier. Harris and Plummer, both in the midst of a string of Canadian tax shelter gigs, walk through HIGHPOINT looking smug and punchable, delivering their lines with an annoyingly glib tone that might've been appropriate for a comedy but makes no sense now that these performances are in a thriller. The "comedy" cut is included in a 112-minute workprint version on Code Red's new Blu-ray, though I can't imagine anyone caring enough to do a comparison with New World's 87-minute US cut, which only came about because no one, from test audiences to the suits at New World, could follow the original version, even though executive producer William J. Immerman (TAKE THIS JOB AND SHOVE IT, SOUTHERN COMFORT) is on hand for an interview to defend the 112-minute cut as superior. Even in its restructured and streamlined incarnation, too much unfunny comedy remains, whether it's Harris breaking the fourth wall and winking at what I presume is a vacant theater where an audience was expected to be, or a long mid-film chase involving horse-drawn carriages, cars, and a portly guy chasing them all, with everything sped up Benny Hill-style complete with high-pitched voices, wacky music and zany sound effects. It sticks out like a sore thumb in what's supposed to be a thriller (imagine the Keystone Kops pulling up alongside Cary Grant while he's being chased by the crop dusting plane in NORTH BY NORTHWEST), but if that was an indication of what constituted "funny" in the original cut, then New World probably had the right idea, but just no way to make it better regardless of the tone. With today's constant crowing about the so-called death of physical media, I'm glad to see any obscure movie resurrected on Blu-ray, but does this film have any fans? Thanks--I guess--but special edition restorations don't get much more pointless than HIGHPOINT, currently the front-runner for my Buyer's Remorse Blu-ray of 2017.

WAR MACHINE
(US - 2017)

Written and directed by David Michod. Cast: Brad Pitt, Ben Kingsley, Tilda Swinton, Topher Grace, Anthony Michael Hall, John Magaro, Scoot McNairy, Will Poulter, Alan Ruck, Lakeith Stanfield, Meg Tilly, Emory Cohen, RJ Cyler, Anthony Hayes, Josh Stewart, Pico Alexander, Daniel Betts, Griffin Dunne, Aymen Hamdouchi, Nicholas Jones, Hopper Penn, Sian Thomas, Georgina Rylance. (Unrated, 122 mins)

Built around the most cartoonish and self-indulgent performance of Brad Pitt's career, the muddled WAR MACHINE, the most high-profile Netflix Original film yet, is another in a long line of absurdist political satires that try to poke fun at government and military institutions and end up coming off as irritatingly smug and self-satisfied. With rare exceptions like Stanley Kubrick's DR. STRANGELOVE (1964) and Barry Levinson's WAG THE DOG (1997)--films that found the right tone, stuck with it, and didn't get sidetracked by ham-fisted messaging--this subgenre is filled with the misbegotten likes of WRONG IS RIGHT (1982), WAR, INC (2008), and THE INTERVIEW (2014) to name a few, though in all fairness, WRONG IS RIGHT might actually be worth another look as some of its ludicrous plot has become reality much like entertainment-driven TV news has in the decades since NETWORK (1976). "Inspired" by the book The Operators, Michael Hastings' expansion of his 2010 Rolling Stone article "The Runaway General," WAR MACHINE stars Pitt as four-star Army Gen. Glen McMahon, a fictional stand-in for Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was appointed head of Coalition Forces in Afghanistan in 2009. McMahon doesn't feel the war is being won because "it's not being led," and despite orders from President Obama, along with reminders from the US ambassador to Afghanistan (Alan Ruck), and advisers who never actually served, McMahon ignores the plan to "assess" the situation and Obama's wish to wrap it up and "bring it on home," and instead plans to ask for 40,000 more troops and take control of Helmand Province and Qandahar, two areas that the coalition has already written off. McMahon's chief duty is counter-insurgency or, as narrator Sean Cullen (Scoot McNairy), a fictionalized Hastings, puts it, "Try to convince the country you've invaded that you're actually here to help."

McMahon is accompanied by his close-knit team of generals and soldiers who all come across as fawning sycophants to this military legend--nicknamed "The Glenimal"--none more disturbingly devoted than anger management case Gen. Greg Pulver (Anthony Michael Hall), a character based on future disgraced Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn. Flynn/Pulver is portrayed here as a raging asshole with a dedication to McMahon that borders on a stalking man-crush. There's also de facto PR guys Staggart (John Magaro) and Little (Topher Grace, cast radically against type as "Topher Grace"), but all of them take a backseat to Pitt's scenery chewing. Pitt's McMahon is so far removed from the real McChrystal that changing his name was a no-brainer: he barks and grunts like the actor's Aldo Raine in INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, gesticulates with his right hand balled up in a claw, walks around in a bow-legged strut, makes pained faces, and generally acts and moves like a combination of Popeye and Sterling Hayden's Gen. Jack D. Ripper from DR. STRANGELOVE if Ripper just had a stroke. It's an overly broad performance more fitting for an SNL guest-hosting gig, and it might've worked if writer/director David Michod could've settled on a tone.

The satirical elements work best in the early-going, with McMahon introduced taking a shit before chest-out strutting through the airport to the tune of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's "Confused," or McMahon meeting Afghan president Hamid Karzai (Ben Kingsley) and giving him a moment to finish praying until it's revealed that the president is not kneeling toward Mecca, but actually trying to set up his new Blu-ray player (Karzai is later seen sick in bed laughing hysterically at DUMB AND DUMBER). McMahon also gets off a few good zingers like walking into a command center and scoffing at what's on TV, saying "Let's lose the Fox News...we don't need a bunch of angry perverts yelling at us all day." But it doesn't take long for Michod to lose focus, as the satire is largely abandoned in favor of making a serious look at McMahon's ambitions blowing up in his face. His wife (Meg Tilly) spends their 30th anniversary lamenting that, by her calculations, they've spent an average of 30 days a year together for the previous eight years, and Cullen tags along on a trip to Europe to visit other coalition government officials, during which time McMahon and everyone else have a few too many drinks at a Paris bar and start openly trash-talking President Obama and VP Joe Biden (Hillary Clinton is also a character, played by Sian Thomas, though she's largely left alone and depicted as an image-conscious company woman). The resulting article ended McChrystal's military career, but even as the same fate befalls McMahon, the biggest question you might have is why is the story being told this way? As things get more serious and events start becoming less absurd and more centered on actual incidents, Pitt's mannered, over-the-top performance starts to resemble talk-show Robin Williams, a sure sign that Michod, the Australian auteur behind 2010's ANIMAL KINGDOM and 2014's underrated THE ROVER, simply deferred to the wishes of producer Brad Pitt regarding how star Brad Pitt should treat the material. Considering his degree of fame and tabloid notoriety, Pitt is an actor who relishes offbeat and decidedly non-mainstream projects (THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD, KILLING THEM SOFTLY, THE COUNSELOR, BY THE SEA). In the end, WAR MACHINE is less a cutting, cynical, satirical look at the military and war and more a Brad Pitt vanity project where the actor is clearly off on his own in some other movie instead of the one his director and co-stars are working on.

The many faces of Brad Pitt in WAR MACHINE:

THE TERROR WITHIN
(US - 1989)

Directed by Thierry Notz. Written by Thomas M. Cleaver. Cast: George Kennedy, Andrew Stevens, Starr Andreeff, Terri Treas, John Lafayette, Tommy Hinckley, Yvonne Saa, Joseph Hardin, Al Guarino, Butch Stevens. (R, 88 mins)

It doesn't scale the glorious cult movie heights of New World classics like 1980's HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP or 1981's GALAXY OF TERROR, but by the lesser standards of late '80s, Concorde-era Roger Corman, THE TERROR WITHIN isn't bad. Owing a lot to both ALIEN and HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP, the film is set in a post-apocalyptic America of an unspecified future--not too far in the future, if the presence of mullets are any indication--after a plague has wiped out a good chunk of mankind. A small group of military scientists have taken refuge in an underground lab in the Mojave Desert, occasionally scouting the land above for food and dodging "Gargoyles," hideous mutant creatures that run rampant. During one excursion to find the remains of two of their team killed by a Gargoyle, David (Andrew Stevens) and Sue (Starr Andreeff), along with David's dog Butch (played by Stevens' own dog, who gets onscreen credit), find a shell-shocked young woman named Karen (Yvonne Saa) and bring her back to the lab, much to the concern of the group's leader Hal (George Kennedy), after a Gargoyle discovers their secret entrance through a dilapidated shed and knocks out their main security camera to the outside. Head doc Linda (Terri Treas) runs some tests and finds that Karen is expecting, but the pregnancy is accelerating. During an attempted C-section, the baby claws its way out of Karen, the mutant result of a rape by a Gargoyle. The mutant spawn escapes into an air vent and grows at a rapid rate, occasionally emerging from a hiding place to pick off the survivors one by one in sequences that will in no way remind you of ALIEN.

The HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP-derived idea of the Gargoyles hunting women in order to propagate their species brings some exploitative tackiness to the proceedings, which elsewhere mimic ALIEN right down to the top-billed actor and biggest name in the cast being killed off halfway through, just like Tom Skerritt in Ridley Scott's 1979 classic. Both happen offscreen and are implied, but Skerritt's is handled in a much better fashion compared to the way TERROR WITHIN director Thierry Notz has a bellowing Kennedy foolishly charge the gargoyle and yell "Die, you miserable ugly fuck!" Elsewhere, John Lafayette as Andre and Tommy Hinckley as Neil are carbon copies of Yaphet Kotto's Parker and Harry Dean Stanton's Brett, respectively, with Brett's repeating of "Right!" echoed here with Neil's "Maybe," and David asking "Do you just repeat everything he says?" just like Sigourney Weaver's Ripley (elsewhere, STAR TREK gets invoked as a frustrated Linda barks "I'm a doctor, not an engineer!"). THE TERROR WITHIN suffers from chintzy makeup work, with the body of the Gargoyle an obvious rubber suit that looks like Corman borrowed it from a HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP cosplayer, and some serious lapses in logic, as a limited-power laser is tested on a fire extinguisher, not only draining the laser by 25% but also emptying out the fire extinguisher, almost certainly foreshadowing a raging inferno to come later (SPOILER: it does). But THE TERROR WITHIN is a fairly solid little B-movie, with Notz enthusiastically letting the blood splatter everywhere as well as establishing a convincing claustrophobic atmosphere in the underground lab. He even pulls off a couple of stylish, De Palma-esque split diopter shots. A native of France, Notz didn't spend much time working for Corman--his other directing assignment around this time was 1990's WATCHERS II and he served as second unit director on the same year's FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND, Corman's one-off return to directing after a 20-year hiatus--before moving on. He directed a pair of obscure war dramas with 1994's FORTUNES OF WAR and 1997's GOODBYE AMERICA, and the latter remains his last credit on IMDb.

THE TERROR WITHIN opening in Toledo, OH on Feb 24, 1989

THE TERROR WITHIN II
(US - 1991)

Written and directed by Andrew Stevens. Cast: Andrew Stevens, Stella Stevens, Chick Vennera, R. Lee Ermey, Burton Gilliam, Clare Hoak, Larry Gilman, Barbara A. Woods, Rene Jones, Lou Beatty Jr, Gordon Currie, Brad Blaisdell, Cindi Gossett, Brewster Gould, Pete Koch, Butch Stevens. (R, 85 mins)

Two years after THE TERROR WITHIN, Andrew Stevens and a noticeably older Butch returned to reprise their roles, wandering the post-apocalyptic wasteland for THE TERROR WITHIN II. The sequel provides some backstory that the first film didn't really address, namely that a nuclear disarmament treaty led to covert experiments in biological warfare, resulting in a plague that wiped out most of mankind, creating the creatures that were called "Gargoyles" in the first film, but are now referred to as "Lusus." David is eventually joined in his nomadic existence by a young woman named Ariel (Clare Hoak, from Concorde's MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH remake). The sole survivor of the first film (apparently, Terri Treas' Dr. Linda died in the desert after they got away), David is en route from the Mojave stronghold to a similar underground lab in the Rocky Mountains run by Von Demming (R. Lee Ermey, on the heels of a similar role in Juan Piquer Simon's ENDLESS DESCENT), with the intent of bringing along a Lusus vaccine derived from a cactus extract. David and Ariel fall in love and after one night of passionate desert lovemaking, she's convinced she's pregnant. They eventually run afoul of Aunty Entity-type despot Elaba (Cindi Gossett), which leads to Ariel being kidnapped and strapped to a rape stand as a Lusus has its way with her. David and Ariel eventually make their way to Von Demming's compound, where it's discovered that Ariel is indeed pregnant with David's child, though a mutant sperm from the Lusus has infiltrated the egg and caused yet another human/creature hybrid. Meanwhile, a finger severed from an earlier Lusus attack on the Rocky Mountain lab is regenerating an all-new Lusus as David, Von Demming and the rest--including Kyle (Chick Vennera), treacherous scientist Sharon (Barbara A. Woods), who's created just enough vaccine to hoard it for herself, and head doc Kara (Stella Stevens, Andrew's mom)--are hunted down one by one by Ariel's rapidly growing offspring, a half-human/half-Lusus monstrosity that looks a lot like Dr. Pretorious in Stuart Gordon's FROM BEYOND (1986).

Stevens was being groomed for stardom back in the late '70s with co-starring roles in a pair of 1978 films, THE BOYS IN COMPANY C and as Kirk Douglas' brainwashed psychic son unable to control his powers in Brian De Palma's THE FURY. He then headlined a pair of high-profile NBC miniseries with 1978's THE BASTARD and its 1979 sequel THE REBELS, as well as a 1979 made-for-TV remake of the 1938 classic TOPPER that paired him with then-wife Kate Jackson. He co-starred in two Charles Bronson movies (1981's DEATH HUNT and 1983's 10 TO MIDNIGHT) and played a psycho stalker obsessed with TV news anchor Morgan Fairchild in 1982's THE SEDUCTION, but big-screen stardom never panned out and Stevens spent most of the '80s on short-lived TV shows like CODE RED and EMERALD POINT N.A.S. He also had numerous guest spots on shows like THE LOVE BOAT and MURDER, SHE WROTE, as well as a recurring role as J.R. Ewing underling Casey Denault on DALLAS. It was during his time on DALLAS from 1987 to 1989 that Stevens first began dabbling in the world of low-budget B-movies, with 1987's SCARED STIFF and a pair of Spanish actioners with director Jose Antonio de la Loma, 1988's COUNTERFORCE and 1989's FINE GOLD. Stevens would ultimately find his niche as a leading man with the advent of the straight-to-video erotic thriller thanks to 1990's video store mainstay NIGHT EYES. Thus began a series of what could best be described as "Stevensploitation," leading to three sequels, with 1992's NIGHT EYES 2 and 1993's NIGHT EYES 3 pairing him frequent co-star Shannon Tweed, as the duo would also star in 1994's SCORNED, 1994's ILLICIT DREAMS, and 1995's BODY CHEMISTRY 4: FULL EXPOSURE, the Concorde franchise that Stevens inherited with 1993's BODY CHEMISTRY 3: POINT OF SEDUCTION. Stevens also starred in the Tweed-less 1997 sequel SCORNED 2, making him the DTV erotic thriller equivalent of compulsive franchise-joiner Jeremy Renner (THE AVENGERS, THE BOURNE LEGACY, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE).

Clare Hoak between takes of the human/Lusus-hybrid birth scene

While he paid the bills enduring endless unrated sex scenes with the likes of Tweed, Shari Shattuck, Tanya Roberts, and others, Stevens was also pursuing his interest in directing. THE TERROR WITHIN II marked his debut as a filmmaker, and it's only fitting that the opportunity came courtesy of Roger Corman. Corman was known for shepherding many young, aspiring filmmakers of the '60s and '70s, like Francis Ford Coppola (DEMENTIA 13), Peter Bogdanovich (VOYAGE TO THE PLANET OF PREHISTORIC WOMEN), Martin Scorsese (BOXCAR BERTHA), Jonathan Demme (CAGED HEAT), Joe Dante (PIRANHA), John Sayles (writer of PIRANHA and BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS), James Cameron (an art director and production designer on BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS and GALAXY OF TERROR), and Ron Howard (GRAND THEFT AUTO) just to name a few. Corman didn't establish much in the way of bench strength during his '80s Concorde years, with only two directors having any notable degree of mainstream Hollywood success (Luis Llosa with SNIPER and THE SPECIALIST and Carl Franklin with ONE FALSE MOVE and the Denzel Washington thrillers DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, and OUT OF TIME). Corman letting Stevens earn his stripes with THE TERROR WITHIN II was an old-school move out of the 1970s New World playbook, and that extended to the involvement of Polish-born cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, who shot THE TERROR WITHIN II and THE RAIN KILLER for Concorde before quickly graduating to the big leagues as Steven Spielberg's go-to cinematographer, winning Oscars for his work on 1993's SCHINDLER'S LIST and 1998's SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (it's doubtful Kaminski mentioned THE TERROR WITHIN II in either acceptance speech), while also earning nominations for 1997's AMISTAD, 2011's WAR HORSE, and 2012's LINCOLN. The end result is somewhat less than its predecessor, though Stevens does what he can with the pocket change given to him by Corman (in an interview on Code Red's new TERROR WITHIN II Blu-ray, Ermey claims the budget was only $500,000, and judging from the finished film, that's probably accurate). Incredibly cheap-looking and raggedly-assembled, THE TERROR WITHIN II makes THE TERROR WITHIN look like a lavish sci-fi epic, with no money spent on even the most basic props, as evidenced by a great shot of Vennera--a Stevens BFF who appeared in several of his films, and this one just three years after starring in Robert Redford's acclaimed THE MILAGRO BEANFIELD WAR--angrily firing an assault rifle but he's really just holding it and shaking it as sounds of firing ammo are put over it in post. The first hour of THE TERROR WITHIN II plays more like a Cirio Santiago post-nuke than a sequel to an ALIEN knockoff, and once David and Ariel arrive at the Rocky Mountain compound with 25 minutes to go, it morphs into a rushed, condensed version of the first film, with David apparently remembering absolutely nothing of what he endured since he faces the same situations and makes the same mistakes once again.

Complaining about plot holes and contrivances in something called THE TERROR WITHIN II is a waste of time. It's an enjoyable enough time killer, though Stevens' direction lacks even the most basic sense of style that Notz brought to the table two years earlier, and considering that he was just a couple of years away from becoming one of the most respected and sought-after D.P.'s in the movie industry, Kaminski's work here is functional at best. Stevens would continue directing throughout the '90s (NIGHT EYES 3, SCORNED, ILLICIT DREAMS) before launching a second career as a producer, forming Franchise Pictures with business partner Elie Samaha. Franchise had a hand in everything from low-budget action movies (STORM CATCHER, AGENT RED) to future cult classics (THE BOONDOCK SAINTS), and major studio fare with big name actors (THE WHOLE NINE YARDS, BATTLEFIELD EARTH, 3000 MILES TO GRACELAND, DRIVEN). Franchise would eventually crash and burn in a controversial court case involving allegations of scamming investors with inflated and fraudulent budget reports, leading to the company declaring bankruptcy in 2007. It was during this period that Stevens was accused of hiring private investigator and "wiretapper to the stars" Anthony Pellicano to tap the phones of one of the plaintiffs in the case. Pellicano became the subject of an extensive, years-long FBI investigation involving everything from racketeering to illegal possession of explosives and firearms, and Stevens was granted immunity for testifying against him in the same investigation that eventually led to the imprisonment of DIE HARD and HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER director John McTiernan after he allegedly lied to an FBI agent about hiring Pellicano. Now 61, Stevens has laid relatively low in recent years. He hasn't directed or appeared in a film since 2010, and his last credit as a producer was on Fred Olen Ray's 2013 DTV kids movie ABNER THE INVISIBLE DOG. In 2014, he published the book Foolproof Filmmaking: Make a Movie that Makes a Profit, and embarked on another career giving seminars and online tutorials covering the ins and outs of movie production.

THE BEGUILED
(US - 1971)

Directed by Donald Siegel. Written by John B. Sherry (Albert Maltz) and Grimes Grice (Irene Kamp). Cast: Clint Eastwood, Geraldine Page, Elizabeth Hartman, Jo Ann Harris, Darleen Carr, Mae Mercer, Pamelyn Ferdin, Melody Thomas, Peggy Drier, Pattye Mattick, Matt Clark, Buddy Van Horn. (R, 105 mins)

With Sofia Coppola's upcoming Colin Farrell/Nicole Kidman remake of THE BEGUILED getting a ton of positive buzz at Cannes, there's likely to be some renewed interest in this original 1971 version. An against-type departure and a box office flop for Clint Eastwood 46 years ago, THE BEGUILED isn't referenced much in discussions about Eastwood, but it's further proof that he was up for stretching as an actor two decades before critics finally took him seriously with UNFORGIVEN. Set during the Civil War, Eastwood is John McBurney, an injured Union soldier given refuge and medical treatment at a Confederate boarding school for girls run by Martha (Geraldine Page). It isn't long before the charming McBurney, to varying degrees, seduces and manipulates the sexually repressed older girls and basks in the obvious crush the younger ones have on him. His carousing around the house eventually costs him dearly, as THE BEGUILED turns into a sweat-soaked Southern Gothic and sits right alongside the supernatural-tinged HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER as the closest Eastwood got to starring in a horror movie.

Director Don Siegel (who already directed Eastwood in COOGAN'S BLUFF and TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA) lets the tension simmer throughout until it completely boils over in the third act, with a horrific amputation sequence and one confrontation after another allowing Eastwood to flex his acting muscles more than he ever had up to that point in his career. He's matched by a subtly powerful Page, whose Martha has all sorts of perverse emotions brought to the surface when she realizes how much McBurney reminds her of her dear brother, with whom she was a little too close. Universal had no idea how to sell THE BEGUILED, and Eastwood fans expecting another western or another COOGAN'S BLUFF or KELLY'S HEROES were left bewildered and bored. Scripted by the long-blacklisted Albert Maltz under the pseudonym "John B. Sherry" and Irene Kamp under the alias "Grimes Grice," and based on the 1966 novel A Painted Devil by Thomas Cullinan, THE BEGUILED gets pretty daring in spots, with some questionable comments McBurney throws at one of the younger girls ("13? Old enough to be kissed!") and a tawdry dream sequence where Martha fantasizes about a threesome with McBurney and Edwina (Elizabeth Hartman). An interesting precursor to Eastwood's later TIGHTROPE in that it shares the motif of the star having a large female supporting cast pretty much throwing themselves at him, THE BEGUILED was an unusual and offbeat project for Eastwood to tackle and deserved a better reception than it got in the spring of 1971. He rebounded quickly, as PLAY MISTY FOR ME (his directorial debut) and DIRTY HARRY (his fourth of five films directed by mentor Siegel) were both in theaters later the same year, but time has been kind to the dark and disturbing THE BEGUILED, and it'll be fascinating to see what Coppola has done with it.

THE BEGUILED opening in Toledo, OH on June 30, 1971

RUPTURE
(Italy/US - 2017)

RUPTURE is the first directing effort in a decade from Steven Shainberg, who had some significant critical acclaim with 2002's SECRETARY. But after the mixed reception of his 2006 Diane Arbus biopic FUR, he concentrated on producing until ending his filmmaking sabbatical with this strange horror film that tries to straddle the line between arthouse and grindhouse and comes up short in both. Renee Morgan (Noomi Rapace) is a divorced Kansas City mom who drops off her son Evan (Percy Hynes White) for the weekend with his bitter, angry father. Heading to meet a guy she's been dating for a skydiving excursion, her plans are derailed when a device attached to her rear tire causes it to blow out and she's abducted on the side of a deserted road by several people in a hauling truck. Shackled and with black tape wrapped around her head with only her eyes, nostrils, and mouth exposed, she's taken several days away to a grimy, dimly-lit, generic horror movie warehouse at an undisclosed location and strapped to a table in an observation room. Various mysterious personnel--Dianne (Kerry Bishe), Dr. Nyman (Lesley Manville), and a well-dressed Bald Man (Michael Chiklis)--interrogate her with personal questions that seem to focus primarily on her fears. Exploiting her fear of spiders--which they already know because of hidden surveillance cameras throughout her home--their goal is to get her to break, to "rupture," to reach the point where she "destroys" her fear. These mystery people--are they part of a secret government operation?--are researching a genetic code known as "G10/12x," which they believe is the key to fear, and to lose that sense of being afraid causes an inner mutation that makes carriers of that gene the next phase of human evolution.

The script by Brian Nelson (HARD CANDY, 30 DAYS OF NIGHT) is filled with heady concepts, but once RUPTURE takes a hard turn towards sci-fi in its third act, its half-baked ideas don't hold up under much scrutiny. For the most part, it's a claustrophobic and unpleasant mix of MARTYRS, HOSTEL, and William Friedkin's BUG, but its disparate elements never really gel. RUPTURE might've made for a solid TWILIGHT ZONE episode, but by the end, there's more questions than answers (such as why, if these mystery people are capable of what they are, do they still have to rely on old-school security cameras to learn more about Renee prior to abducting her?). It's hardly the triumphant return of a briefly-lauded filmmaker, and it's hard telling what it was that made Shainberg decide RUPTURE was the project to lure him back behind the camera. RUPTURE stumbles with some embarrassingly bush-league CGI spiders and shape-shifting that appear to be on loan from a 1997 NuImage production, and other than Rapace, the cast--which also includes Peter Stormare, cast radically against type as "Peter Stormare," as the leader of this mysterious outfit--seems lost. Just as odd as Shainberg directing, it's hard telling what inspired Mike Leigh regular Manville (HIGH HOPES, TOPSY-TURVY, ANOTHER YEAR) to go slumming in something like this, unless it just seemed a lot smarter on the page. Similarly, someone forgot to tell Rapace that she's starring in a garbage B-movie, because she admirably gives this thing everything she's got. She's so committed--mentally and physically--to this character and her situation that she single-handedly makes RUPTURE worth seeing for fans of the original Lisbeth Salander. (Unrated, 101 mins)

XX
(US - 2017)

XX got a lot of buzz in horror circles for its unique standing as an anthology project created by and centered on women. In its initial stages, the filmmakers involved were set to be Jennifer Lynch (BOXING HELENA), Jen & Sylva Soska (AMERICAN MARY), Mary Harron (AMERICAN PSYCHO), Karyn Kusama (THE INVITATION), and former Rue Morgue editor Jovanka Vuckovic. By the time the XX was officially underway, Lynch, Harron, and the Soskas dropped out, with Kusama and Vuckovic joined by Roxanne Benjamin (SOUTHBOUND) and Annie Clark, better known as musician St. Vincent, with Mexican stop-motion animator Sofia Carrillo handling the wraparound and the "interstitial" segments between the stories. Oddly enough, it's the least-experienced filmmakers of the bunch who fare best, with Vuckovic's opener "The Box," based on a Jack Ketchum short story about a child's curiosity about the contents of a gift box held by a stranger on a train ultimately sending a family into emotional and physical turmoil as everyone who finds out what's in the box begins starving themselves. Clark's "The Birthday Party," which she co-wrote with Benjamin, is a deadpan farce with Melanie Lynskey as a wife and mom desperately trying to carry on with her seven-year-old daughter's birthday party even though her husband drops dead right before the guests arrive. It's a one-joke story that gets an admittedly huge laugh at the end, but perhaps not big enough to justify the elaborate buildup.

At that point, XX fails to heed its own advice with "Don't Fall," a useless ten-minute trifle from Benjamin with a group of obnoxious campers being pursued by a shape-shifting desert creature. The closer is "Her Only Living Son," and it's quite a disappointment from Kusama, who doesn't keep her INVITATION momentum going. Waitress and single mom Cora (Christina Kirk) is having a hard time dealing with her rebellious son Andy (Kyle Allen) on the eve of his 18th birthday. He's in trouble at school and he's prone to nasty mood swings, but his increasingly violent behavior is justified or outright ignored by those seemingly under his spell, including the overly friendly mailman (Mike Doyle) whose job it's been to "watch over him" all these years. It's bad enough that Kusama's script doesn't even follow its own internal logic, since much is made of Andy's resentment that they've had to move around every few years to avoid "Andy's father," which immediately calls into question how the mailman has watched over them "all these years." But what really makes "Her Only Living Son" collapse in on itself is that it's ultimately nothing more than fan fiction derived from a certain late 1960s supernatural horror classic that's obvious the moment "Andy's father" is mentioned. It's interesting that three of the four stories--and Carrillo's animation, to an extent--deal directly with the lengths a mother will go to protect her family, but Benjamin's story is not only the odd woman out, but it's also a complete waste of time. XX is a good idea, but two of the filmmakers fall asleep on the job: Benjamin torpedoes any momentum this thing had going, and anyone who watches enough horror anthologies knows you have to finish big, but Kusama completely drops the ball and regardless of XX's intent, the result is an underwhelming disappointment. (R, 81 mins)

BEYOND THE GATES
(US - 2016)

Another in a long line of fetishistic '80s VHS horror throwbacks, BEYOND THE GATES has good intentions but stumbles by not knowing the difference between "slow burn" and "lollygagging," taking a promising premise and turning it into yet another fanboy-anointed "insta-horror classic" (© William Wilson) that's just not. Vincenzo Salvia's killer synth tune "Outrun with the Dead" gets things going in the right direction as two estranged brothers--elder, uptight Gordon (Graham Skipper) and younger, aimless slacker John (Chase Williamson of JOHN DIES AT THE END)--arrive in town to clean out and close up an old-school video store (played by the legendary L.A. memorabilia mecca Eddie Brandt's Saturday Matinee) owned by their father, who's been missing for seven months. The brothers clearly don't get along and there's hints of childhood trauma and their dad's heavy drinking, and Gordon's surly unease doesn't let up even with his loving and supportive girlfriend Margot (Brea Grant) in tow. Back in their dad's office, Gordon and John find a VCR/board game called "Beyond the Gates," which includes seizure-inducing strobe lighting as well as a sultry hostess (RE-ANIMATOR's Barbara Crampton) who seems to know of their father's whereabouts. She challenges the brothers and Margot to play the game and find four keys in various unlikely locations in order to save the soul of their dad, who's trapped in some kind of tortured purgatory within the game.

The concept of a haunted VCR board game sounds like something Charles Band would've commissioned at Empire in 1985 around the time of THE DUNGEONMASTER or TERRORVISION, and while that's ultimately the direction BEYOND THE GATES heads with the world inside the game being shrouded in thick fog and purple/pink neon lighting and some probably intentionally janky-looking practical splatter effects, director/co-writer Jackson Stewart takes entirely too long to get there. The script makes an effort to create strong characters, and Skipper and Williamson are believable as distant siblings forced to rebuild their long-lost bond, but BEYOND THE GATES loses its way. There's a sense of lingering resentment toward recovering alcoholic Gordon, both from John and his bullying, asshole friend Hank (Justin Welborn), while Margot is saddled with unsubtle exposition drops about having a hard time sleeping after injuring her wrist in a vague "fall," a obvious red flag that the cycle of alcoholism and abuse has been passed on to Gordon and it's the very reason he split when he was 18 and never looked back. These are interesting ideas and characterizations that are left flailing as BEYOND THE GATES devotes entirely too much time to Gordon and John sitting around twiddling their thumbs while they decide to enter the game and rescue what's left of their dad. This could've been a smart film with a deeper subtext--like, say, THE BABADOOK or IT FOLLOWS--but it never finds the right balance between its character-driven, mumblecore components and its mandatory indulgence in heavy retro '80s worship. That opening synth jam is a keeper, though. (Unrated, 82 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

THE GREATEST BATTLE
aka THE BIGGEST BATTLE
aka THE GREAT BATTLE
aka BATTLE FORCE
(Italy - 1978)

Directed by Umberto Lenzi. Written by Umberto Lenzi and Cesare Frugoni. Cast: Helmut Berger, Samantha Eggar, Giuliano Gemma, John Huston, Stacy Keach, Ray Lovelock, Henry Fonda, Edwige Fenech, Evelyn Stewart (Ida Galli), Aldo Massasso, Venantino Venantini, Guy Doleman, Patrick Reynolds, Rik Battaglia, Andrea Bosic, Giuseppe Castellano, Luciano Catenacci, Giovanni Cianfriglia, Geoffrey Copleston, Tom Felleghy, Manfred Freyberger, Marco Guglielmi, Fulvio Mingozzi, Giacomo Rossi Stuart, Bill Vanders, Robert Spafford, Olga Pehar Lenzi. (PG, 102 mins)

WWII movies were extremely popular all over the world from the mid-1960s through the 1970s, and journeyman Italian director Umberto Lenzi was no stranger to the genre. He'd already made "macaroni combat" movies like 1967's DESERT COMMANDOS and 1969's BATTLE OF THE COMMANDOS in response to the 1967 blockbuster THE DIRTY DOZEN, but then he moved into gialli like 1972's SEVEN BLOODSTAINED ORCHIDS and really hit his stride with a string of ridiculously entertaining and extraordinarily violent poliziotteschi like 1974's ALMOST HUMAN and 1976's ROME ARMED TO THE TEETH among many others. But between his crime movies and his jumping on the post-CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST gut-muncher bandwagon with 1980's EATEN ALIVE and 1981's CANNIBAL FEROX, Lenzi cranked out two more "macaroni combat" films. Differing from the DIRTY DOZEN-inspired "men on a mission" formula of his late '60s genre contributions, 1978's THE GREATEST BATTLE and 1979's FROM HELL TO VICTORY (which starred George Peppard and George Hamilton, the same year he had a huge hit with LOVE AT FIRST BITE) seemed like responses to the more large-scale, all-star ensemble epics that were being produced at that time, like 1976's MIDWAY, 1976's THE EAGLE HAS LANDED, and 1977's A BRIDGE TOO FAR. Both films had casts of big-name actors who carried significantly more prestige than you'd expect in a run-of-the-mill Italian knockoff, but from the looks of THE GREATEST BATTLE, the entire budget went to paying those actors because for the most part, it looks like how a WWII epic might turn out if it was directed by Jess Franco or Al Adamson.

THE GREATEST BATTLE was shown under a plethora of different titles: it was shot in Rome, Almeria, and Los Angeles in 1977 as IL GRANDE ATTACCO, and then alternately known as THE BIGGEST BATTLE (the title it carries on Amazon Prime), THE GREAT BATTLE, and BATTLE FORCE, but THE GREATEST BATTLE is what it initially went by when drive-in outfit Dimension Pictures released it in the US, cut down to 90 minutes, with Lenzi pseudonym "Humphrey Longan" credited as director, and with added narration by Orson Welles, who's not heard on the complete 102-minute, English-dubbed BIGGEST BATTLE version streaming on Amazon (dubbing fixture Anthony La Penna handles some incidental narration in a few spots). Stacy Keach is among the stars, and in his very enjoyable 2013 memoir All in All, he refers to the film under yet another title, THE MARETH LINE, and calls it "flat-out awful." A fair assessment, though as Keach points out, "It gave me a chance to work with Henry Fonda and John Huston," and they're only a few of the reputable actors called upon to star in a film by the future director of CITY OF THE WALKING DEAD, MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY, and FATTY GIRL GOES TO NEW YORK. THE GREATEST BATTLE opens in Berlin in 1936 just after the Olympics, as a small group of friendly acquaintances meet for a formal dinner: German Major Manfred Roland (Keach), British war correspondent Sean O'Hara (Huston, not even attempting a British accent) and his wife (Lenzi's wife Olga Pehar Lenzi), West Point legend General Foster (Fonda), and renowned German actress Annelise Ackermann (Samantha Eggar). They discuss the rise of Hitler and his disdain of Jews and "American negroes" in the wake of Jesse Owens' Olympic triumph, but all parties foolishly conclude that everything is fine, that war is unlikely and they'll all be friends for many years to come.

Cut to 1942, and the entire world is at war. From then on, THE GREATEST BATTLE is an episodic and seemingly random series of vignettes that eventually form some semblance of a story but it still feels choppy and haphazardly-assembled. There's copious amounts of stock footage from newsreels and other movies, and sometimes the various film stocks don't even match. Foster's son John (Ray Lovelock) has enlisted after flunking out of college, unable to win over his old man like his older, war hero brother Ted (never seen, but played by a framed photo of future CEMETERY MAN director Michele Soavi); Roland and Annelise are now married, but he's conflicted about pledging his allegiance to Der Fuhrer and the Nazi party and determined to keep Annelise's being half-Jewish a secret from his superiors. We also meet other characters who have nothing to do with the initial expository set-up of the Berlin dinner, such as British Capt. Martin Scott (Giuliano Gemma), his ex-wife (Ida Galli) and her new husband (Venantino Venantini), and German Lt. Kurt Zimmer (Helmut Berger), who's fallen in love with French prostitute Danielle (Edwige Fenech) who may or may not be a member of the Resistance. Some of these people cross paths, and some of them don't. Huston's O'Hara is the most confusing character of them all, a grouchy old cynic who seems far too old to be playing a roving war correspondent chasing a story at the center of the action, and who knows why some characters occasionally refer to him as "Professor O'Hara" or why he's shown strutting around and barking orders at some officers in one scene. Huston--just four years removed from co-starring in CHINATOWN--doesn't even seem to know or care what he's doing, as he has one of the most jaw-dropping exits you'll ever see, a barely-concealed breaking of the fourth wall, almost as if he said "Alright, Lenzi, I'm done here...I'll show myself out of this movie." In between the Ovidio G. Assonitis classics TENTACLES and THE VISITOR, Huston isn't even hiding his disinterest in THE GREATEST BATTLE, further evidenced by an anecdote Keach shares in his memoir. Concerned about not overdoing his German accent and having difficulty communicating with Lenzi, who didn't speak English, Keach asked Huston, his director on 1972's FAT CITY and THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JUDGE ROY BEAN, for some advice. Huston replied "I'm only an actor here. I didn't ask you about my accent. Talk to the director," adding "Learn Italian or find an interpreter."

Speaking of TENTACLES, both Huston and Fonda appeared in that 1977 Italian JAWS ripoff about a giant mutant octopus, though they shared no scenes. Fonda has a few fleeting appearances scattered throughout TENTACLES, always on the phone yelling at someone. His entire role was shot in one morning at his house, and his dialogue is vague enough ("Well, take care of it!") that I remain convinced he had no idea he was in a movie about a giant mutant octopus. While Fonda gets out a bit in THE GREATEST BATTLE in both the opening dinner sequence and the closing scene at a cemetery, the rest of his appearances are, once again, by himself and on the phone in what looks suspiciously like a very 1970s Beverly Hills home in which a famous movie star might reside. Was this Fonda's thing prior to capping his stellar career with ON GOLDEN POND? Forcing journeyman Italian directors to make house calls if they wanted him in their movie? THE GREATEST BATTLE makes a lot of noise but very little sense, jumping from place to place with an ensemble that whose members vanish for long stretches or right after they're introduced. The supporting cast is an impressive who's who of jobbing Italian supporting actors who always turn up in this sort of genre fare (I'm pretty sure Tom Felleghy owned that general's uniform, and having gravelly-voiced dubber Robert Spafford appear on camera as Gen. George S. Patton was an inspired choice), but the performances of the main cast are all over the map, with Huston looking visibly inconvenienced and demonstrably irritable in a way that borders on acting out, and Fonda mostly phoning it in TENTACLES-style (oddly, in Tony Thomas' 1983 Citadel Press-published The Complete Films of Henry Fonda, THE GREATEST BATTLE was absent even though his role is considerably more than a cameo). Berger is relatively restrained, considering his reputation and that he'd recently been in the 1976 Nazisploitation epic SALON KITTY, though if anyone can figure out why he and Fenech are even in this, let me know. The usually reliable Eggar is absolutely awful, but for whatever reason, Keach, the same year he co-starred in Sergio Martino's vile MOUNTAIN OF THE CANNIBAL GOD, is trying a lot harder than his other big-name co-stars and is the only one who seems interested in creating a three-dimensional character, even if the sloppiness of Lenzi's direction and the scattered script by Lenzi and Cesare Frugoni give him little with which to work. Franco Micalizzi's by-the-numbers "rousing" score lacks the maestro's usual catchy pizazz, and some of the miniatures in the battle sequences would make Antonio Margheriti cringe and look away in embarrassment. But for fans of "macaroni combat" movies, there's plenty of action sequences and a lot of big and loud explosions. Just don't expect it to make much sense. Maybe that's why Huston looks like he's breaking character and literally walking out of the movie.

THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS
(Spain/France/West Germany/Italy - 1968)

Directed by Antonio Isasi. Written by Antonio Isasi, Lluis Josep Comeron, Jorge Illa and Jo Eisinger. Cast: Gary Lockwood, Elke Sommer, Lee J. Cobb, Jack Palance, Roger Hanin, Jean Servais, Georges Genet, Gustavo Re, Daniel Martin, Gerard Tichy, Maurizio Arena, Armand Mestral, Fabrizio Capucci, Enrique Avala, Ruben Rojo, George Rigaud, Fernando Hilbeck, Luis Barboo, Lorenzo Robledo. (R, 129 mins)

"America's free-living and free-wheeling pleasure capital and the men who came to strip it raw!"

One of the great hyperbolic tag lines of its era, and it's only fitting for one of the most memorable movie titles of its day. Even if you've never seen it, that tag line tells you almost all you need to know about THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS. A late-night TV staple well into the 1980s, the film fell into obscurity for a couple of decade before Warner Archive resurrected it for a widescreen DVD release in 2010, THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS is one of many international Europe-set capers of the 1960s (along with SEVEN THIEVES, TOPKAPI, GAMBIT, KALEIDOSCOPE, GRAND SLAM, THE BIGGEST BUNDLE OF THEM ALL, and THE ITALIAN JOB to name a few) but unique in that the Spanish-French-West German-Italian co-production is required to fool the audience into thinking it's taking place in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Some great second unit Vegas location work helps, but all of the interiors and any scenes involving the actors were shot in Spain and other than the four English-speaking leads, the supporting cast is made up of a bewildering mix of actors from four different countries playing Americans but all speaking their own language and letting the dubbing team figure it out later. The effect is jarring at times, especially since the dubbing isn't all that great (if you watch enough Eurotrash movies, you'll recognize the familiar voices of dubbing fixtures like Ed Mannix and Nick Alexander), and the Euro-lounge score by Georges Garvarentz and the haunting, wordless, giallo-like vocals of the ubiquitous Edda dell'Orso almost immediately blow the movie's cover, eliminating any illusion that this is an American film, but Spanish director/co-writer Antonio Isasi (SUMMERTIME KILLER) busts his ass assembling it all together in the most seamless way possible.

Fresh off of his turn as doomed astronaut Frank Poole in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, Gary Lockwood stars as Tony Ferris, a San Francisco hippie who shaves his sideburns and gets a haircut to become a Vegas blackjack dealer after turning down an offer to go in on an armored car heist with his older brother Gino (RIFIFI's Jean Servais), a mobster who's just escaped from prison. It was a smart move, since Gino and all of his cohorts end up being gunned down by the cops. At the casino, Tony has a table scam going with girlfriend Ann Bennett (Elke Sommer), who's also the mistress of her married boss Steve Skorsky (Lee J. Cobb), the owner of the security company whose armored car Gino tried to jack. It isn't long before Ann is an accomplice in Tony's labyrinthine plot to avenge Gino's death by staging an elaborate heist of a Skorsky truck ostensibly filled with casino cash that's en route from Vegas to L.A. Complicating matters is Douglas (Jack Palance), a pissed-off Treasury agent who's working undercover as an insurance investigator in a sting on Skorsky, who's been using his trucks to transport gold for the west coast branch of the Cosa Nostra. Douglas knows what Skorsky's up to, but hasn't been able to prove it, and when a surveillance team follows a decoy truck employed by Tony, Skorsky is convinced his own employees are ripping him off. The distraction allows Tony and his crew to stash the real truck--which they don't know is filled with Mafia gold--in an underground bunker they've dug in the desert, with Skorsky's employees and one of Douglas' undercover agents (Ruben Rojo), barricading themselves inside, refusing to open the door as Tony and his increasingly mutinous crew try to find a way in.

Isasi juggles multiple storylines where all parties eventually converge for a shootout in the scorching desert, with additional conflicts stemming from two of Tony's men--Merino (Daniel Martin) and Cooper (Fabrizio Capucci)--actively revolting and trying to cut him out of his own plan, and an increasingly irritable Skorsky getting it from all sides, with his scheming mistress, an incredulous Douglas and an unhappy mob boss (Roger Hanin) all breathing down his neck. Cobb and Palance have some amusing back-and-forth ballbusting throughout, and while he never became a big star, Lockwood is more than capable of holding his own as a lead here. The film has some interesting subtext with its juxtapositioning of Tony's hippie, free love lifestyle clashing with the more old-school Gino, almost like Isasi has one foot in the counterculture and another in the more refined elegance of the classic caper film. The casting of Servais is no accident, with his starring in Jules Dassin's highly-revered 1954 heist classic RIFIFI, but the "young generation" point may be a little too oversold, as Servais, 27 years older than Lockwood and looking it, seems more like his disapproving father than his protective older brother. Tony warns Gino that he's out of touch and out of his element, and that he and his aging gangster pals aren't equipped to deal with today's computers and the technological know-how required to rob a high-tech armored truck (high-tech by 1968 standards--it even has a Skype-like video feed to stay in constant contact with Skorsky's headquarters, but looks like Isasi rented a huge RV and put some steel siding on it), and sure enough, they're immediately killed for their efforts.

Despite its counterculture elements in the early scenes, THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS didn't exactly become the EASY RIDER of Euroheist movies, but it was a moderate success for Warner Bros. in US theaters in 1969 and was cycled through the regional drive-in circuit for a number of years. It made its TV debut in prime-time on NBC on Saturday, July 16, 1977, going against THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE on ABC and the Bob Barker-hosted Miss Universe pageant on CBS, with the R-rated, 129-minute film hacked down by at least 30 minutes to fit in a two-hour time slot with commercials, which likely made an occasionally confusing film completely incoherent. Since its very welcome DVD release seven years ago, uncut and with Juan Gelpi's outstanding cinematography in the desert sequences restored to its widescreen glory (Isasi shot these scenes in the same stretch of desert in Almeria, Spain where Tuco sends Blondie on his agonizing march in THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY), THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS has been in semi-regular rotation on Turner Classic Movies and remains an instantly recognized cult item even by movie buffs who haven't seen it, and one of the best examples of the 1960s Euroheist caper thriller.

THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS opening in Toledo, OH on April 16, 1969

TV listing for THEY CAME TO ROB LAS VEGAS,

airing in prime time on NBC on Saturday, July 16, 1977

KILL 'EM ALL
(US - 2017)

Jean-Claude Van Damme's DTV action films have historically been a cut above most of their ilk, but he stumbles badly with the arguably career-worst KILL 'EM ALL, a dull and uninspired Biloxi, MS-shot waste of time that sees fit to shamelessly rip off THE USUAL SUSPECTS two decades after the fact. KILL 'EM ALL jumps back and forth in time over the course of one day, opening with the aftermath of a massacre at a soon-to-be-closed hospital that's abandoned except for the emergency room. Nurse Suzanne (Autumn Reeser) is being questioned by FBI agents Holman (a ludicrously miscast Peter Stormare, looking like an aging rock band's tour manager) and Sanders (Maria Conchita Alonso) about Philip (JCVD), the mysterious stranger who took on a crew of hired killers and kept her safe during the hospital siege before vanishing. The agents, especially Holman, are skeptical about Suzanne's story and seem convinced that she's withholding details. In a brief detour that borrows a lot from EASTERN PROMISES, it turns out Philip infiltrated the Serbian "Black Hand," a crime outfit that rose from the ashes of the former Yugoslavia, and led by war criminal Dmitri Petrovic (Eddie Matthews), the man who assassinated Philip's activist father in front of young Philip 35 years ago (among other implausibilities, we're asked to believe that craggy-faced, 56-year-old JCVD is playing someone who was a little kid in the 1980s). A shootout starts at a nearby hotel and ends up at the hospital, where each of Petrovic's goons, including Radovan (Daniel Bernhardt, looking like a DTV Jon Hamm), Dusan (the mandatory bone thrown to JCVD's son Kristopher Van Varenberg, who's finally cut the shit and just decided to go by "Kris Van Damme"), and Almira (Mila Kali) not only get introductory captions but also momentum-and-time-killling flashbacks showing how lethal they are. Battling a knife wound and a concussion, Philip takes on each of them in the abandoned hospital as he fights to keep himself and Suzanne alive.

JCVD has maybe the fewest lines he's ever had in a movie, and while he has several fight scenes here, he looks tired and seems like he's going through the motions. First-time director Peter Malota, a veteran stuntman and fight coordinator who's regularly worked with JCVD going back to 1991's DOUBLE IMPACT, relies on dizzying quick edits that render every brawl a tiresome blur. A lot of is certainly used to cover the understandable fact that the aging JCVD isn't as agile as he once was, but he's at least showing up for work, unlike his contemporary Steven Seagal. But KILL 'EM ALL is cheap-looking and slapdash enough that it's too close for comfort with Seagal-level quality, and it's probably not a coincidence that co-writer Jesse Cilio wrote the recent Seagal dud THE PERFECT WEAPON. By the time the final twists start coming, each one more ridiculous than the last, KILL 'EM ALL just gives up and doesn't even attempt to be subtle about how much it's ripping off THE USUAL SUSPECTS. Even a dipshit like Fenster could've made a better movie than this. (R, 95 mins)

ENTER THE WARRIORS GATE
(France/China - 2016; US release 2017)

If the gamer/wuxia fantasy ENTER THE WARRIORS GATE seems like it should've been made ten years ago, that's because it pretty much was--when it starred Jackie Chan and Jet Li and was called THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM. Produced and co-written by Luc Besson, the $48 million ENTER THE WARRIORS GATE was given a huge 3-D release in China in November 2016, but was banished to VOD when it debuted in the US in May 2017, a couple of months after Zhang Yimou's expensive THE GREAT WALL underperformed in US theaters. It's not without its moments of KARATE KID-like retro charm, but at the same time, it feels awfully late to be jumping on the CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON bandwagon, making you wonder just how long Besson and regular writing partner Robert Mark Kamen (TAKEN, THE TRANSPORTER) had this one stashed away before Besson got around to assigning it to someone (in this case, COCKNEYS VS. ZOMBIES director Matthias Hoene). Jack Bronson (Uriah Shelton, most recently seen on Netflix's 13 REASONS WHY) is a bullied gamer who lives with his busy-single-mom-too-distracted-to-notice-all-the-shenanigans-going-on-in-her-house Annie (Sienna Guillory). He blows off his homework for video games and works part-time at antique shop, where his Chinese boss Mr. Chang (Francis Ng) gives him an ancient crock that turns out to be a portal to another time. He's visited through the crock by Zhao (Mark Chao), the chief guard to Princess Sulin (Ni Ni), who he leaves in the care of Jack, believing him to be the fabled "Black Knight," confusing him with his gaming avatar. Zhao has brought Sulin to the present day in order to escape Arun the Cruel (Dave Bautista), a despot who has murdered Sulin's emperor father and intends to claim her as his bride as he takes over the land. After Jack takes Sulin to the mall for some ice cream and some tired culture clash/fish-out-of-water comedy, some of Arun's men get through the time portal and end up trashing Jack's mom's house. This sends Jack and Sulin fleeing through the portal back to her time, where she's abducted by Arun, forcing Zhao and Jack, who's definitely not the Black Knight that Zhao was expecting, to set aside their differences and work together to rescue Sulin...if they don't kill each other first!

There's a nice '80s vibe to some of the early scenes, with Jack trying to avoid a bullying asshole named Travis (Dakota Daulby, really oozing that loathsome William Zabka prickitude) and a resulting reckless mountain bike chase through the streets (cue reaction shots with befuddled old people looking confused and scared). Jack even has the required overweight, obnoxious, comic relief best buddy in Hector (Luke Mac Davis as Jonah Hill as Josh Gad as Dan Fogler as Zack Pearlman), who tries to fistbump Sulin and rightly gets his ass kicked in the process. There's also some laughs to be had from a running gag involving Arun's incredibly stupid henchman Brutus (Zha Ka), but while it occasionally amuses, ENTER THE WARRIORS GATE never reaches beyond the level of merely OK. The action sequences are nothing special, and Shelton is as irritating here as Michael Angarano was in THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM. There's too many easy, predictable jokes about Jack trying to get Zhao to loosen up, like when he provides human beatbox and club sound accompaniment to teach Zhao to dance (do they have time for this?), or sheltered, demanding Sulin learning contemporary slang ("You're the shit!" is her favorite). A Robert Zemeckis or a Richard Donner probably could've made this a lot of fun 30 years ago, but it isn't retro enough to be completely funny and it isn't imaginative enough to be anything other than a run-of-the-mill knockoff of all the Zhang Yimou epics of the early-to-mid 2000s, like HERO, HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS, and CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER. (PG-13, 105 mins)

SHIMMER LAKE
(US - 2017)

Written and directed by Oren Uziel. Cast: Benjamin Walker, Rainn Wilson, Stephanie Sigman, John Michael Higgins, Ron Livingston, Rob Corddry, Wyatt Russell, Adam Pally, Mark Rendall, Matt Landry, Isabel Dove, Angela Vint, Neil Whitely, Julie Khaner. (Unrated, 86 mins)

With screenwriting credits on 22 JUMP STREET and the awful horror spoof FREAKS OF NATURE, one wouldn't think Oren Uziel would make his directing debut by branching out with a Coen Bros. knockoff, but the Netflix Original SHIMMER LAKE isn't bad despite hinging on a gimmicky set-up. Set in the days following a botched bank robbery in a small rural town, SHIMMER LAKE plays in reverse, starting on Friday when everything has fallen apart and ending on Tuesday, the day of the robbery. It's like an arc of the FX series FARGO if showrunner Noah Hawley gave it the MEMENTO treatment (this reverse set-up was also done quite well earlier this year in the little-seen western BRIMSTONE). By the end, it's little more than smoke and mirrors to cover up a story that wouldn't be all that interesting or even remotely clever if told in a straight chronological fashion. Indeed, it often requires clumsy exposition to get the viewer up to speed, as in an early scene taking place on Friday where the sheriff is talking to FBI agents and drops this cumbersome chestnut: "We'll see if it matters when we find Andy's--my brother's--dead body!" If they're looking for Andy and have obviously already been working together, wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that the FBI guys already know that Andy is his brother? Nobody would say that sentence like that unless they were characters in a story being told in reverse.

SHIMMER LAKE opens on Friday, and the first time we meet Andy Sikes (Rainn Wilson), he's hiding in his basement with a duffel bag full of money, pleading with his young daughter Sally (Isabel Dove) not to tell anyone he's there. Up in the kitchen, Andy's clueless wife Martha (Angela Vint) is talking to Sheriff Zeke Sikes (Benjamin Walker of ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER), who's torn between upholding the law and looking out for his brother. As the story plays out, starting on Friday and working back to Tuesday, all of the details are gradually doled out until everything comes together at the beginning. Zeke and devoted, puppy-dog-like deputy Reed (Adam Pally) are forced to work with snide, condescending FBI agents Walker (Ron Livington) and Biltmore (Rob Corddry) to investigate a bank robbery that took place on Tuesday and resulted in Zeke taking a bullet in the shoulder. Andy is a disgraced former county prosecutor who lost his job in a corruption scandal after taking a payoff in a case involving Ed Burton (Wyatt Russell, Kurt's lookalike son with Goldie Hawn), the former star QB and local superstar who became a drug-dealing shitbag after high school. Ed was charged with murder and drug possession in a meth lab explosion at nearby Shimmer Lake that killed his five-year-old son Ed Jr., but Andy happily accepted a bribe to knock it down to manslaughter. Ed was ultimately released from prison after serving just eight months. With both men desperate for cash, Ed and Andy decide to rob the town bank, owned by local businessman Brad Dawkins (John Michael Higgins), who also happens to be the judge in Ed's trial and agreed to go with the absurd reduction in charges only because he's planning a Senate campaign and Ed and his stupid, drug-added buddy Chris (Mark Rendall) have blackmailed the married, family man judge with a videotape showing him in a compromising position with his secret side piece--a young boytoy known around town as "Meth Billy" (Matt Landry).

As Uziel moves the story back one day at a time, pieces will fall into place and some running gags will be established (on Friday, Reed is introduced freaking out over the perceived insult of being forced to sit in the backseat of Zeke's cruiser because he's giving the mailman a ride to work, and the events of Thursday reveal why he's so pissed off about it), and many sides to Ed's long-suffering, still-grieving wife Steph (Stephanie Sigman of MISS BALA and Netflix's NARCOS) will be revealed, along with several twists that make you see previous (future?) events in a different light. Despite the presence of many people known for their comedic skills, SHIMMER LAKE rarely goes for big laughs and instead exhibits the kind of morbid, pitch-black humor seen in the the great Coen Bros. classics like BLOOD SIMPLE and FARGO. In the end, it's pretty minor and slight, but the performances are good, with Wilson doing a good job conveying that distinct sense of Jerry Lundegaard nervous panic, and it has some surprises up its sleeve, even when you concede that the film wouldn't be much were it not for its backtracking Leonard Shelby structure.

IT COMES AT NIGHT
(US - 2017)

Written and directed by Trey Edward Shults. Cast: Joel Edgerton, Christopher Abbott, Carmen Ejogo, Riley Keough, Kelvin Harrison Jr., David Pendleton, Griffin Robert Faulkner. (R, 91 mins)

It's not surprising that A24 picked up the distribution rights for IT COMES AT NIGHT, an intense and extremely claustrophobic psychological horror film that falls in line with two other divisive genre titles they're released: THE WITCH and THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER--well-crafted, minimalist exercises in escalating tension and paranoia that attract significant critical acclaim while alienating mainstream moviegoers. It's the second feature film by 28-year-old Trey Edward Shults, a Terrence Malick protege whose 2015 indie family dysfunction drama KRISHA got some significant critical acclaim. He then worked as a production assistant on Jeff Nichols' 2016 film MIDNIGHT SPECIAL, where he met co-star Joel Edgerton, who produces and stars in IT COMES AT NIGHT, a film that will likely frustrate those looking for standard, straighforward horror with clear-cut explanations for the things that occur. Shults is more interested in symbolism, atmosphere, and creating a sense of disorientation (certain scenes have a different aspect ratio, and that's by design) and mounting unease that explodes into paranoia that ultimately leads to tragedy. It's grim and uncompromising, and as far as multiplex counter-programming goes, make no mistake--this is the Feel Bad Hit of the Summer.

Shults opens the film with the camera planted on an elderly, dying man covered in sores in what are obviously the last minutes of his life. Muffled voices try to comfort him as the camera pulls back to show the room covered in plastic sheeting and his family members wearing gloves and oxygen masks. The dying man, Bud (David Pendleton) is taken outside in a wheelbarrow as another man tells him he's sorry and that they love him before shooting him in the head, pouring gasoline over his corpse, and setting him ablaze. Bud was killed by his son-in-law Paul (Edgerton), who's moved his family--wife Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) and 17-year-old son Travis (Kevin Harrison Jr.)--into an isolated, boarded-up cabin in the woods following some kind of plague that has wiped out an undetermined number of people. As they grieve over the loss of Grandpa Bud, who became infected only a day earlier, they cope with the day-to-day monotony of life in this post-apocalyptic dystopia. Food is rationed, they have their own water filtration system, and they never stray far from the house, and never, under any circumstances, do they go out at night. One night in the wee hours, Paul hears someone trying to break into the house through its only entrance, a red door at the end of a hallway that remains locked at all times. The intruder is Will (Christopher Abbott), and Paul ties him to a tree for a couple of days to ensure that he isn't infected. Will pleads with Paul for help, insisting he can be trusted, that he has his own family to protect and he was only looking for water, and broke into the house because he saw it boarded up and assumed it was abandoned. A hesitant Paul determines that Will can be trusted to an extent, and the two drive off to get Will's wife Kim (Riley Keough), their young son Andrew (Griffin Robert Faulkner), and their water and food supply, which includes six chickens and a goat played by Black Phillip from THE WITCH.

The two clans quickly bond and an extended family is on the verge of forming, with Paul and Sarah agreeing with the notion of strength in numbers, especially since, if Will found them (likely after he saw the smoke from the cremation of Bud), others might find them as well, and they might not be as friendly. It isn't long before unease and mistrust sets in, from barely-perceived slights to statements that conflict with previously provided information. Paul is visibly distressed when Will mentions that he's an only child, but in his early story of how he ended up breaking into the house, he specifically stated that he had a brother (when Paul questions him about it, Will says "Well, brother-in-law...he's Kim's brother...he's like my brother"). The seeds of mistrust and simmering resentment are planted (did Will deliberately mislead Paul or was it just a wrong choice of words after being tied to a tree for two days without food or water?), and it's all downhill from there, coming to a head when Travis hears some noises in the night and finds young Andrew asleep on the floor in what was Bud's room after an apparent bout of sleepwalking. Travis notices that the red door is unlocked and ajar and his lost dog Stanley is infected and dying right outside. Who opened the door? Was it a sleepwalking Andrew? Was someone trying to break in? Is someone hiding in the house? Will and Kim deny that Andrew's a sleepwalker and they insist he's too short to reach the lock and the handle, instead suggesting that maybe Travis was half-asleep and imagined the door being unlocked. With little Andrew unable to remember if he touched Stanley and Travis possibly being infected after holding Andrew's hand and walking him back to bed, the families distance themselves on opposite sides of the cabin, and it's quite clear at this point that none of this is going to end well.

The terrors of IT COMES AT NIGHT exist almost entirely in the mind, as the constant state of vigilance gives way to paranoia, distrust, and hostility, bringing out the worst in everyone. Shults, who wrote the story as part of the grieving process just after his father died, tells the story mostly through the eyes of impressionable and sensitive Travis, who's loved by his parents but nonetheless feels isolated and lonely, especially when he overhears both of the couples having sex at various points. He's also fantasizing and having dreams about Kim, and even those are invaded by nightmarish visions of death and disease, offering no escape from his depressing existence. Paul notices his curious son eyeing Kim and tells him to stay focused, stern but sympathetic in his understanding that despite everything that's happened, Travis is still a 17-year-old kid with raging hormones who's had everything--his beloved grandfather, his dog, and his adolescence--taken from him by a world that's become a plague-ravaged hellhole. It's a terrific and subtly understated performance by Harrison (THE BIRTH OF A NATION and the Fox series SHOTS FIRED), who does a lot of acting with his eyes and his body language. It's refreshing how Shults exhibits some serious discipline in his handling of the story and the direction in which it heads. He demonstrates his knowledge of the masters, at times channeling Stanley Kubrick in the use of natural or very limited lighting from flashlights or lanterns, and the way the Steadicam prowls the dark and ominous hallways, making the sizable cabin feel like a smaller Overlook Hotel, or in the very John Carpenter way he has his characters barricaded inside to keep an existential evil outside. Everything that happens within the context of IT COMES AT NIGHT's world is thoroughly plausible and believably handled by the actors, who never resort to chewing the scenery and overselling the situation. Even the little kid, who only has a few lines, is really good. IT COMES AT NIGHT is a film that probably shouldn't have been given a wide release in the summer. It's a cerebral, methodical downer that people looking for another Blumhouse jump-scare rollercoaster ride will leave disgruntled and grumbling (cue audible mutterings of "That was stupid" and "Fuckin' bullshit" as the credits rolled and the audience shuffled out of a Saturday matinee showing). But, like THE WITCH and THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER, IT COMES AT NIGHT is an intelligent, challenging genre offering that gets under your skin and will stay with you long after it's over.

THE MUMMY
(US - 2017)

Directed by Alex Kurtzman. Written by David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie and Dylan Kussman. Cast: Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe, Annabelle Wallis, Sofia Boutella, Jake Johnson, Courtney B. Vance, Marwan Kenzari, Neil Maskell, Simon Atherton, Javier Botet. (PG-13, 107 mins)

A simultaneous reboot of the Brendan Fraser franchise and at least the fourth attempt to kick off a new and updated 1940s-style monster cycle, it's obvious with the 2017 incarnation of THE MUMMY that Universal needs to get its shit together or give it up. 2004's VAN HELSING, 2010's THE WOLFMAN, and 2014's DRACULA UNTOLD all tried to reignite the legendary Universal monsters and failed, and now, in response to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Extended Universe, they're trying it again with the so-called "Dark Universe," an attempt to meld the classic Universal monsters with the comic book/superhero genre. There's already other films in various presumptuous stages of development, including an INVISIBLE MAN with Johnny Depp, DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE with Russell Crowe, and yet another WOLFMAN with Dwayne Johnson, plus a BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, with a yet-to-commit Angelina Jolie's name being constantly mentioned. Universal's philosophy with the Dark Universe seems to be "If at first you don't succeed, throw another $200 million at it and cross your fingers."

THE MUMMY has a major A-lister at its foundation in Tom Cruise, and the 54-year-old actor is a good two decades too old to be playing Nick Morton, a smartass, devil-may-care Army recon officer and part-time fortune hunter who finds plenty of spare time to seek priceless treasure in dangerous areas of Iraq. With his wisecracking sidekick Chris (Jake Johnson), they're caught in a skirmish with Iraqi rebels, calling in an air strike that inadvertently opens a long-buried tomb housing the mummified Egyptian Princess Ahmamet (Sofia Boutella), deemed such a danger that she was entombed 1000 miles away in then-Mesopotamia. Centuries earlier, Ahmamet, after offering her soul to Set, the Egyptian god of death, slaughtered her entire immediate royal family to hasten her ascent to the throne. Forming an unholy alliance with archaeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), with whom he recently had a one-nighter in Baghdad after which he snuck out of her hotel room and stole the map that led him to Ahmamet's burial ground, Nick boards a military plane to London, where subway construction crews have accidentally unearthed a tomb containing Egyptian artifacts that date back to Ahmamet's time. The plane is struck by a swarm of birds and Jenny ends up with the only parachute, while everyone else onboard perishes in the resulting crash.

That is, except Nick, who wakes up in a body bag in a London morgue with a tag on his toe, supernaturally kept alive after being cursed by the spirit of Ahmamet. The mummy has been taken to the London headquarters of Prodigium, a secret government organization devoted to collecting and containing the world's monsters, and led by Dr. Henry Jekyll (Crowe), who must take frequent injections of an antidote when he feels his evil alter ego Mr. Edward Hyde taking control. Ahmamet has come back to life, draining the life of those around her LIFEFORCE-style, but is now kept in chains in an underground Prodigium bunker, intent on breaking free and collecting the artifacts necessary for her to reassemble the "Dagger of Set," the weapon required to make her an all-powerful god. She eventually possesses a Prodigium tech and escapes, materializing outside as a giant sandstorm that destroys London (cue obligatory "Tom Cruise running" shot as he's being chased by sand and dust). Ahmamet reanimates the long-entombed skeletons of crusader warriors unearthed in the London excavation, as a still-possessed Nick, plagued by visions put in his head by Ahmamet, is determined to stop the mummy's reign of terror and somehow save his own spirit.

THE MUMMY is a chaotic mess that somehow took at least six writers to put together, and it doesn't seem like any of them looked over anyone else's work. Three are credited with the screenplay, including veteran journeyman David Koepp (JURASSIC PARK), USUAL SUSPECTS writer and Cruise BFF Christopher McQuarrie (who's no doubt responsible for the ludicrous climactic plot twist), and Dylan Kussman, an actor best known as Cameron, the student who turns against Robin Williams' John Keating in 1989's DEAD POETS SOCIETY. Others had a crack at it, including Jon Spaights (PROMETHEUS, PASSENGERS), Jenny Lumet (at what point did a Universal exec say "Maybe we should see what the writer of RACHEL GETTING MARRIED can do with this?"), and Alex Kurtzman (TRANSFORMERS, STAR TREK, STAR TREK: INTO DARKNESS), who ended up directing. The end result is disjointed and unfocused, like a product that was cynically assembled by market research, trend analysis, and focus groups. Why is Universal so hellbent on shoehorning these characters into a superhero scenario in a "Dark Universe?" Crowe could probably make a plausibly frightening Jekyll & Hyde in a straight, serious adaptation, but here, growling and hulking out with significant CGI enhancement, he just looks silly in what amounts to the Dark Universe's Nick Fury surrogate (and why is Dr. Jekyll even here anyway? Other than 1953's ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE, Jekyll & Hyde wasn't part of the classic Universal Monsters roster). The film also pays winking homage to the Universal-released AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, when Chris is killed off by a poisonous spider bite and his rotting corpse keeps returning to bust Nick's balls, much like Griffin Dunne's mauled Jack did to David Naughton's lycanthropic David in the 1981 classic. As the mummy, Boutella probably fares best, though the CGI does a lot of the acting for her. And despite the claims of some historically-challenged entertainment journalists who must be unaware of 1944's THE MUMMY'S CURSE, 1971's BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY'S TOMB, and 1980's THE AWAKENING, Ahmamet is not the first female mummy in a movie.

Cruise looks out of his comfort zone in a horror film that can't settle on a tone (it works best as a straight adventure in its early scenes, before quickly imploding), and this just seems like a superfluous project for him to be tackling at this point in his career. Cruise has the Barry Seal biopic AMERICAN MADE due out later this year, but other than his commitment to doing his own stunts in the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE and JACK REACHER franchises and in a zero-gravity scene here, can you name the last time he really challenged himself as an actor playing a three-dimensional character? The serious actor side of Cruise has become harder to locate than the whereabouts of David Miscavige's wife. Where did BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY's Ron Kovic go? What happened to MAGNOLIA's Frank T.J. Mackey? Where's that Tom Cruise? He'll be 55 this year and his next two projects after AMERICAN MADE are MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 6 and the sequel TOP GUN: MAVERICK. Dude, what are you doing? At his point, is a future sequel to RISKY BUSINESS out of the question? Are we gonna get a 60-year-old Tom Cruise reliving his glory days and dancing around in his underwear to Bob Seger? In total coast mode with declining box office results but still big enough to avoid going the Nic Cage VOD route (for now), Cruise's career is in serious danger of becoming the Hollywood version of a classic rock band hitting the summer concert circuit and still selling a sufficient amount of tickets at big venues but playing nothing but the old hits for maximum nostalgia. He's the Def Leppard of A-list movie stars. The MISSION: IMPOSSIBLEs and the first JACK REACHER and EDGE OF TOMORROW were fine, but the last time he really stretched as an actor was when he put on a bald cap and bunch of makeup and busted a move to Flo Rida in TROPIC THUNDER. It's almost like he left the committed, serious Cruise behind on that couch during his much-analyzed OPRAH freakout.

OPERATION NAM
aka COBRA MISSION
(Italy/West Germany - 1986; US release 1987)

Directed by Larry Ludman (Fabrizio De Angelis). Written by Gianfranco Clerici, Vincenzo Mannino, Larry Ludman (Fabrizio De Angelis) and Erwin C. Dietrich. Cast: Oliver Tobias, Christopher Connelly, Manfred Lehman, John Steiner, Donald Pleasence, Ethan Wayne, Gordon Mitchell, Enzo G. Castellari, Enio Girolami, Alan Collins (Luciano Pigozzi), Aldo Massasso, David Light. (Unrated, 87 mins)

"Forget about it, man. It's Vietnam."

This Italian-German Namsploitation actioner was shot in 1985 as COBRA MISSION but unreleased in the US until 1987, when it went straight to video courtesy of Imperial Entertainment, who retitled it OPERATION NAM, as Vietnam movies were in vogue in months after PLATOON. In West Germany, COBRA MISSION was known as THE RETURN OF THE WILD GEESE in an effort to tie it in with Antonio Margheriti's WILD GEESE ripoff CODENAME: WILDGEESE (1984), as both films shared German co-producer Erwin C. Dietrich. An unusually downbeat and cynical example of the '80s P.O.W. rescue movie, COBRA MISSION/OPERATION NAM avoids the flag-waving, "Born in the USA,""America! Fuck yeah!" jingoism of the Reagan era, when blockbusters like RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II went back to Vietnam to refight the war with a guaranteed American victory. OPERATION NAM shares the distrust of the powers that be exemplified by Charles Napier's duplicitous Murdock in RAMBO, but it goes further by letting the corrupt US government and military win and having the good guys lose the war a second time. The heroes of OPERATION NAM aren't killing machines like Sylvester Stallone's John Rambo or Chuck Norris' James Braddock in the MISSING IN ACTION movies. They're normal, everyday guys like the Vietnam vets in Ted Kotcheff's UNCOMMON VALOR. OPERATION NAM has some valid points to make and its finale is an unexpectedly subversive gut-punch, but it's still a Namsploitation B-movie directed by Fabrizio De Angelis, under his usual pseudonym "Larry Ludman." Much better known as a producer (ZOMBIE, THE BEYOND, 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS) than a director--something he didn't start doing until 1983's FIRST BLOOD ripoff THUNDER WARRIOR-- De Angelis blows things up impressively, but the film is ragged and filled with amateurish continuity gaffes (like one character going back and forth from light stubble to a two-week beard, often in the same scene) and sloppy corner-cutting, often glossing over important details just to get to the next explosion.

Unable to adjust to civilian life in the decade-plus since they returned home from Vietnam, three Arizona men impulsively decide to mount a hastily-planned P.O.W. rescue mission: henpecked Roger (Christopher Connelly) plays video games all day and hates his wife, his daughter, and his life in general; drifter Mark (Manfred Lehman) just walked out on a shitty job at a desert bar; and unemployed James (John Steiner) has just pawned his service medals so he can afford a suit to wear to Roger's daughter's wedding. The vets share crass, vulgar war stories and offend the other guests--all rich friends of Roger's nagging wife--who drop unsubtle lines that scream "MESSAGE!" like one pompous asshole declaring "Those Marines are trained for combat, but they're only happy when they're fighting in war." The three men ditch the wedding and pay a visit to their old commander, Major Morris (cult director Enzo G. Castellari), who was railroaded out of the Marines for his persistence in pushing the issue of rescuing P.O.W.s still left behind in Vietnam, a topic that those high up the military chain of command, like stern Col. Mortimer (Gordon Mitchell), refuse to discuss or even acknowledge. The guys visit another vet buddy, Richard (top-billed Oliver Tobias of THE STUD), who's crashing in a mental institution for free meals and easy sex with the nurses, improbably break him out of the facility and head to Bangkok. "There's only one problem...how do I get outta here?" Richard asks, as De Angelis immediately cuts to the four men driving around Bangkok, never bothering to show how they managed to get Richard out of the hospital.

Taking $30,000 from a corrupt, Bangkok-based contractor (Enio Girolami) who cons grieving families of their hard-earned money by promising to find their MIA sons, the quartet head to Vietnam meet up with Father Lenoir (Donald Pleasence), a French priest who's been in the region since the 1950s and supplies them with weapons, ammo, and maps to still-operational P.O.W. camps. Typical Namsploitation antics ensue, with the guys mowing down numerous Viet Cong soldiers and eventually finding a camp with several Americans still being held captive. In a plot development that echoes RAMBO and the untrustworthy Murdock, Roger and the others find out that the US government and military are fully aware of the remaining P.O.W.s, and that they were left behind and labeled "war criminals" as part of the agreement to end the war. US inspectors visit the camps every year or so to check up on everyone, always promising that "We're gonna bring you home soon," and they never do, and Roger and the others who went on this unauthorized rescue mission find themselves in over their heads with a government that needs them to keep their mouths shut.

Perhaps because European producers didn't have an American flag to fly behind tough guy stars like Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, and David Carradine (who's literally draped in an American flag at the end of the 1986 Cannon production P.O.W.: THE ESCAPE), bleak endings were nothing new with Italian Namsploitation movies. Two films by Antonio Margheriti--1980's THE LAST HUNTER and 1983's TORNADO--have bum-out final shots that send the audience out sulking. Even taking those into consideration, OPERATION NAM is a little more subversive than you might expect, going full PARALLAX VIEW in the home stretch and boasting one of the more ballsy downer endings you'll see in the Namsploitation genre, one that not only paints the government as not giving a shit about those who risk their lives fighting for their country, but actively silencing those who pose a risk of shattering the illusion of America. Until then, it's fairly typical of mid '80s Italian action, complete with some of the same Arizona locations seen in films like THUNDER WARRIOR and HANDS OF STEEL, location work in the Philippines filling in for Vietnam, questionable dubbing choices (Tobias, Lehman, and Steiner are all dubbed, with British Steiner given a ridiculously overripe Southern good ol' boy accent), a slumming guest star cameo (in this case, Pleasence, who's in the movie for five minutes, tops), and Connelly ad-libbing the same bizarre insults he used in almost all of his many Italian trash movies of the period (yes, his old standbys "flyface" and the ubiquitous "suckfish" make appearances here).

Ethan Wayne hanging with his dad on the
set of 1973's THE TRAIN ROBBERS

When Imperial Entertainment's VHS release of OPERATION NAM video stores, the pre-release promo and the cover art hyped the presence of Ethan Wayne. The sixth of John Wayne's seven children and named after his father's character in THE SEARCHERS, Ethan Wayne (who's also gone by "John Ethan Wayne") has a supporting role as one of the P.O.W.s and figures prominently in the depressing finale, but Imperial's tag line screamed "In the John Wayne action-packed tradition comes his son Ethan Wayne," plastered over a pic of Oliver Tobias blowing someone away. Born in 1962 to John Wayne and his third wife Pilar, Ethan Wayne started out with bit parts in some of his dad's late-period westerns like 1970's RIO LOBO and 1971's BIG JAKE, and eventually moved into stunt work. He made a brief detour to Italy in an attempt to restart his acting career, but all he got were roles in two Fabrizio De Angelis films, starring in 1984's Arizona-shot THE MANHUNT, plus his supporting role in OPERATION NAM. Wayne got a few TV guest spots over the years and had a lengthy run on the daytime soap THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL, but his things never took off for him and he never even got as big as Patrick Wayne, let alone their old man. These days, Ethan is in charge of overseeing his father's estate and all of its business concerns, and he runs the John Wayne Cancer Foundation charity. Tobias, meanwhile, would reunite with De Angelis for 1990's insane THE LAST MATCH, without question the greatest football commando movie ever made, with Tobias as a superstar QB whose daughter is abducted in a South American country, prompting him to take his team--played by off-season members of the Miami Dolphins and the Buffalo Bills, including then-Bills QB Jim Kelly--on a rescue mission as they attack the villain's compound in full game-day attire, complete with their coach (Ernest Borgnine) calling coordinated plays ("Hut! Hut!") and their kicker punting footballs stuffed with grenades.

Under its original COBRA MISSION title, the film was enough of a success in Europe and Asia that De Angelis produced the 1988 sequel COBRA MISSION 2, directed by Camilo Teti (a production manager for Sergio Leone on ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST and DUCK, YOU SUCKER and for Dario Argento on THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE) under the pseudonym "Mark Davis," with the younger and more Stallone-esque Brett Clark (BACHELOR PARTY, EYE OF THE EAGLE, DELTA FORCE COMMANDO) as someone named Roger--though it doesn't seem as if he's playing the same Roger as Connelly, who died of cancer in 1988--who's off the grid and working black ops for the US government, sent to help freedom fighters depose a Latin American dictator. COBRA MISSION 2 can be found on the bootleg circuit, but was never released in the US and has fallen into total obscurity.

SPOILER ALERT

Note: the version of OPERATION NAM that's streaming on Amazon Prime, under the original title COBRA MISSION, has a bizarre edit in the final scene that eliminates crucial information and inadvertently gives the film an anticlimactic and confusing wrap-up that significantly cushions the blow. After the men leave Vietnam and head home, forced by the military to leave the P.O.W.s behind, Mortimer is shown arriving at a hospital and saluting an apparently shell-shocked, motionless, wheelchair-bound Richard. The Amazon version eliminates a POV shot of Moritmer walking down the hallway to Richard's room as captions reveal that Roger and James both died mysterious deaths immediately after their attempted rescue mission, the implications being that they were murdered and Richard has been given a ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST lobotomy and dumped back in the V.A. hospital to keep quiet about what he knows. This scene is actually shown in full in the COBRA MISSION trailer above, so it's odd that it's incomplete in the Amazon Prime version, which actually runs two minutes longer and has more violence and gore than Imperial Entertainment's 85-minute VHS release of OPERATION NAM.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN VENICE
(US - 2017)

Directed by Mark Cullen. Written by Mark Cullen and Robb Cullen. Cast: Bruce Willis, John Goodman, Jason Momoa, Thomas Middleditch, Famke Janssen, Adam Goldberg, Kal Penn, Wood Harris, Stephanie Sigman, Christopher McDonald, David Arquette, Elisabeth Rohm, Jessica Gomes, Maurice Compte, Ken Davitian, Billy Gardell, Tyga, Victor Ortiz, Sol Rodriguez, Sammi Rotibi, Adrian Martinez, Ron Funches. (Unrated, 94 mins)

While it seems like a good idea for former actor Bruce Willis to take a break from his landmark "Phoning in his performance from his hotel room" series of Lionsgate/Grindstone VOD titles by actually legitimately headlining a movie again, ONCE UPON A TIME IN VENICE shows he needn't have bothered. Unceremoniously dumped on VOD by RLJ Entertainment after two years on the shelf, VENICE is an episodic shaggy dog story with Willis as Steve Ford, the only licensed private eye in Venice Beach. He's a disgraced LAPD detective (as shown in a framed newspaper headline on a wall in his house, which seems like an odd memento to display) who ambles about from case to case and spends his plentiful downtime beach-bumming and skateboarding. He's got a protege in young John (Thomas Middleditch), who also serves as the narrator (he gets the first lines of the film over an establishing shot: "Ah...Venice Beach...") and gets involved in various ongoing cases that Steve is barely working: a missing young Samoan woman named Nola (Jessica Gomes), who's found and promptly hops into bed with Steve, which leads to her angry brothers chasing Steve, who makes a getaway by skateboarding around Venice Beach nude; an artist known as "the Banksy of Venice" who keeps spray-painting sexually explicit graffiti on an apartment building owned by scheming businessman Lou the Jew (Adam Goldberg); and an auto repossession involving powerful drug lord Spyder (Jason Momoa) that ends up propelling the central story. Seeking revenge on Steve, Spyder's guys burglarize his sister's (Famke Janssen) house and steal Steve's beloved Parson Russell terrier Buddy. When Spyder's girlfriend Lupe (Stephanie Sigman) runs off with Buddy and a shipment of Spyder's cocaine, Steve reluctantly agrees to recover the coke for him if it means finding Buddy.

Bruce Willis at the exact moment he was told
he'd have to leave his hotel room to work on this film

Some of the plot threads come together, but most don't. VENICE feels like a semi-improvised series pilot that got rejected by Seeso and Crackle. It's a mix of KEANU (which was in production at the same time) and a quirky detective story with shades of THE BIG LEBOWSKI, THE BIG BOUNCE, and INHERENT VICE, but with no chemistry between the actors and 99% of the jokes landing with a thud. The LEBOWSKI aspirations are apparent in the casting of John Goodman as Steve's best friend Dave Jones ("No, not the legend from the Monkees," explains SILICON VALLEY's ever-punchable Middleditch), a surf shop owner who's being taken to the cleaners by his ex-wife (Elisabeth Rohm) and comes across like a morose, self-pitying, sad-sack version of Walter Sobchak. It's a character that plays to exactly none of Goodman's strengths, and you know you're in a bad movie when John Goodman can't make it better. There's also Wood Harris as a money-laundering crime boss, David Arquette getting prominent billing for one shot of skating past Steve and shouting "We're putting the band back together!," Kal Penn as a convenience store clerk, BORAT's Ken Davitian as a ruthless loan shark who promises a "Belarus Bowtie" to anyone who doesn't pay him back within a day ("You cut off balls, stuff them down throat, you slit throat, and...""They pop out like a bowtie," Steve says, echoing a line you'll already hear coming), and Christopher McDonald, cast radically against type as "Christopher McDonald," in this case an asshole real estate mogul trying to sabotage a lucrative deal for Lou the Jew.

Though he's in nearly every scene, Willis, whose level of commitment to his craft can be ranked somewhere between "senioritis" and "Seagal," coasts through this with a half-assed smirk and a visible ambivalence. He's always been good with wisecracks but rarely adept at comedy past the days of MOONLIGHTING and Blake Edwards' BLIND DATE, back in 1987 when he was young and still gave a shit. At 62, Willis is at the age when he should be tackling serious work and thinking about his legacy rather than slumming through D-grade VOD thrillers and unfunny comedies for a paycheck he doesn't even need. It's hard to believe he'd want to reunite with the sibling writing team of Mark & Robb Cullen, best known for their TV work (LAS VEGAS) but also the writers of the awful 2010 comedy COP OUT, Kevin Smith's buddy-cop movie homage that stood as the director's worst film until YOGA HOSERS. Willis hated making COP OUT and infamously clashed with Smith, so his beef must not have been with the Cullens, but VENICE is ample proof that they aren't exactly on their way finding sponsors for a membership at the Friars Club. While there is one legitimately funny line (a throwaway from a bartender when a nude Steve skateboards across the bar: "Steve, you can't have a gun in here!"), the pacing is laborious (it takes 40 minutes for Buddy to go missing), the credits riddled with careless gaffes (Elisabeth Rohm's name is spelled correctly in the closing credits but misspelled "Elizabeth" in the opening, and the closing credits show Goldberg's character as "Low the Jew"), and it goes without saying that the best performance comes from the dog. Buddy deserves better than ONCE UPON A TIME IN VENICE.

47 METERS DOWN
(UK/Dominican Republic - 2017)

Directed by Johannes Roberts. Written by Johannes Roberts and Ernest Riera. Cast: Claire Holt, Mandy Moore, Matthew Modine, Santiago Segura, Chris J. Johnson, Yani Gellman. (PG-13, 89 mins)

Opening almost exactly one year after last summer's better-than-expected THE SHALLOWS, the Blake Lively shark attack thriller 47 METERS DOWN had an unusual journey to the big screen. Shot in 2015 as 47 METERS DOWN, the British/Dominican Republic co-production was acquired by Dimension Films, who retitled it IN THE DEEP and planned on releasing it straight-to-DVD/Blu-ray in August 2016, probably figuring it could fool less-savvy Redbox customers and Walmart and Best Buy impulse buyers into thinking it was THE SHALLOWS. A week before the planned street date, Dimension abruptly cancelled the release after closing a deal to sell the film to the upstart Entertainment Studios, a TV production company looking to branch out into movie distribution and owned by none other than veteran comedian and syndicated talk show host Byron Allen, last seen hosting COMICS UNLEASHED when you woke up at 3:30 am and realized you left the TV on. Allen reinstated the 47 METERS DOWN title, gave himself an executive producer credit (he's one of 38 credited producers), and sat on the film for nearly a year before making it Entertainment Studios' inaugural multiplex offering. Review copies of IN THE DEEP had already been sent to media outlets and DVD/Blu-ray shipments had already arrived at stores the week before the August 2016 release date. Dimension recalled the shipments, but certain retailers--Target, in particular--broke the street date, so a handful of physical copies, under its interim IN THE DEEP title, were inevitably sold and have since turned up on eBay as collector's items, even though the film hasn't officially been released until now. It's good timing on the part of Entertainment Studios: shark movies are perfect summer fare, and while co-star Mandy Moore's movie career wasn't exactly on fire two years ago when this was made (she's not even top-billed), she's enjoyed a significant resurgence thanks to the huge success of the NBC series THIS IS US.

Lisa (Moore) and her younger sister Kate (Australian actress Claire Holt of THE VAMPIRE DIARIES and its spinoff THE ORIGINALS) are vacationing in Mexico, with Kate going along as a last-minute substitute after Lisa got dumped by her longtime boyfriend for being "too boring." The sisters couldn't be more different--outgoing Kate is the life of the party while the more conservative Lisa is overly cautious and hesitant about everything. Kate convinces her big sister to live it up and take a chance after they meet Benjamin (Santiago Segura--not to be confused with the popular Spanish actor of the same name) and Louis (Yani Gellman), a couple of nice local guys who talk them into an off-the-books cage-diving excursion, chartering a boat captained by the Dude-like Taylor (Matthew Modine getting a paid vacation to the Caribbean), who lets tourists go five meters down in a shark cage to get up close and personal with the plentiful number of great whites inhabiting the waters. Benjamin and Louis go in without incident but while Lisa and Kate are in the cage, the cable frays and the boat winch breaks off, sending them to the floor 47 meters down. At a depth too far down to communicate with Taylor on the radio, with limited oxygen, sharks swimming all around the cage, and certain death from the bends even if they get out and try to ascend to the surface too quickly, there's no way out in the amount of time it will take the Coast Guard to mount a deep sea rescue.

Had director/co-writer Johannes Roberts stuck to this simple, intense premise, 47 METERS DOWN would be a front-to-back winner. The score by tomandandy is terrifically effective, the CGI sharks look surprisingly convincing, and Roberts takes a page out of the Spielberg playbook by not showing too much of them. Smart move. It's an exemplary nail-biter with convincing performances from Holt and Moore and for about 2/3 of its running time, it's looking like we might have a new gem in the shark attack subgenre. But that's before Roberts decides things are going just a little too well, forcing him to call a time-out so he can promptly shit the bed. Since the mid-to-late 1990s, when the shocking finales of films like THE USUAL SUSPECTS and THE SIXTH SENSE dazzled audiences (and you could maybe even go back to 1991's SHATTERED to see where the trend really began), third-act twists, no matter how absurd, have been become so commonplace that more often than not, they aren't even surprising anymore. That's not to say good ones don't still happen, but Roberts (STORAGE 24, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE DOOR) isn't a skilled enough filmmaker to pull it off. It's telegraphed in a line so verbosely clunky that the only way you could miss it is if you were in the restroom. Why does a shark movie need a twist ending? They're sharks, not Keyser Soze. A good filmmaker executes a twist and leaves the audience buzzing and going back and replaying the events to see how cleverly the plot was constructed and realize just how you were manipulated and played. The twist of 47 METERS DOWN leaves you feeling like you just got your chain yanked for the last 80 minutes and you leave the theater only to find Roberts keying your car. I guess there's a fine line between executing a masterful plot twist and just being a dick, and 47 METERS DOWN has one of those twists where the wave of audience resentment upon its revelation is palpable. And speaking of being a dick, there's no need for the onscreen title of this film to be JOHANNES ROBERTS' 47 METERS DOWN. How much sack does it take for the director of STORAGE 24 to pull that move? Pump your brakes, JoJo. You think you're John Fuckin' Carpenter?

DVD packaging for the cancelled 2016 release of 47 METERS DOWN

THE VALACHI PAPERS
(Italy/France - 1972)

Directed by Terence Young. Written by Stephen Geller. Cast: Charles Bronson, Lino Ventura, Joseph Wiseman, Jill Ireland, Walter Chiari, Gerald S. O'Loughlin, Amedeo Nazzari, Fausto Tozzi, Pupella Maggio, Angelo Infanti, Guido Leontini, Maria Baxa, Mario Pilar, Alessandro Sperli, Anthony Dawson. (R, later PG, 125 mins)

The other big Mafia hit at movie theaters in 1972, THE VALACHI PAPERS was in production at the same time as THE GODFATHER, beating it to European theaters by a month in February 1972, but its US release was held up until November, eight months after the trailblazing Francis Ford Coppola blockbuster. Produced by Dino De Laurentiis, THE VALACHI PAPERS benefited from the GODFATHER phenomenon and was itself a huge box office success, and along with the following year's SERPICO, was a key film in helping the legendary Italian producer establish himself as Hollywood mogul. THE VALACHI PAPERS and SERPICO were both fact-based crime based based on books by journalist Peter Maas (De Laurentiis would later produce 1978's KING OF THE GYPSIES, a fictionalized adaptation of another Maas non-fiction work). VALACHI gets a lot of mileage out of a terrific performance by Charles Bronson as Joseph Valachi, the infamous informant whose Senate testimony in 1963 blew the lid off the inner workings of the Cosa Nostra and organized crime in America. As the film opens in 1962, an aging Valachi arrives in prison and is given the "kiss of death" by incarcerated mob boss Vito Genovese (Lino Ventura), who believes Valachi was the rat who tipped off the Feds on a drug shipment that got a good chunk of the Genovese crime family pinched. Valachi emphatically professes his innocence, but after an attempt on his life in the showers, having his 15-year-sentence bumped to life after mistaking a fellow inmate for a Genovese hit man and beating him to death with a lead pipe in the yard, and receiving word that Genovese has offered $20,000 to anyone who whacks him, he demands to be put in solitary confinement and decides to cooperate with FBI Agent Ryan (Gerald S. O'Loughlin), spilling the beans on the inner workings of the Cosa Nostra and "this thing of ours."

Charles Bronson sending a message to his critics

The film then cuts to a flashback structure, going back to Valachi's early days as a two-bit hood in the 1920s. In 1931, after a stretch in Sing Sing where he meets low-level mob flunky Gap (Walter Chiari), he eventually gets a job as a driver for "Boss of Bosses" Salvatore Maranzano (Joseph Wiseman). He's placed under the tutelage of underboss Gaetano Reina (Amedeo Nazzari) and assigned to the crew of the ambitious, scheming Tony Bender (Guido Leontini). After whacking Maranzano's chief rival Joe Masseria (Alessandro Sperli), Lucky Luciano (Angelo Infanti, the only VALACHI cast member who was also in THE GODFATHER) and Genovese stage a coup with the help of Bender, killing Reina and distracting Valachi and Gap with a pair of prostitutes as they send a crew of hit men to kill Maranzano. The power play is a success, as Luciano takes over Maranzano's family, but is himself set up by the duplicitous Genovese and arrested on prostitution charges, leaving Genovese the Boss of Bosses of the Cosa Nostra. Valachi eventually marries Reina's daughter Maria (Bronson's wife Jill Ireland) and runs a successful Italian restaurant, and while he was a simple man with a seventh-grade education who never advanced beyond being a driver in the Maranzano/Luciano/Genovese family, he heard and saw everything, making him an easy target for an FBI sting where he's viewed as the small fish who can lead them to a much bigger one. Even before Genovese orders a hit on him from prison (upped to $100,000 after he learns that Valachi is talking to the FBI), Valachi already gets a spot on his shit list for his association with lunkheaded Gap, who was carrying on a clandestine affair with Genovese's bisexual moll Donna (Maria Baxa) and was brutally castrated by Bender for his transgressions in the film's most notorious scene. R-rated at the time of its release in 1972, THE VALACHI PAPERS was eventually and inexplicably re-rated PG at some point prior to its 2006 DVD release, and with some Baxa nudity, a level of squib splatter throughout that rivals Sonny Corleone's causeway death in THE GODFATHER, and Gap getting his dick chopped off in an agonizingly long scene (ripped off the next year in a cartoonishly over-the-top fashion when cuckolded mob boss Arthur Kennedy orders an underling's junk hacked off and stuffed into his own mouth in Tulio Demicheli's RICCO THE MEAN MACHINE), VALACHI might now rank as one of the most violent PG-rated movies in existence.

Controversial in its day and rumored to have moved production from NYC to Rome after threats from the mob, THE VALACHI PAPERS was scripted by Stephen Geller (who also wrote the big-screen version of Kurt Vonnegut's SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE the same year), with uncredited contributions by Italian writers Massimo De Rita and Dino Maiuri, who co-wrote the excellent 1970 Bronson crime thriller VIOLENT CITY. The film was directed by Terence Young, whose place in film history is secured by his helming the likes of DR. NO (1962), FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963), THUNDERBALL (1965), and WAIT UNTIL DARK (1967). VALACHI was the last of three European Bronson films he directed (following 1970's COLD SWEAT and 1971's RED SUN), and by this period, Young was mostly on autopilot, slumming on mercenary gigs like the Italian T&A female gladiator movie WAR GODDESS (1973) and the outrageously offensive THE KLANSMAN (1974), and more focused on maintaining his jet-set lifestyle and being a sugar daddy to a much-younger girlfriend than he was on filmmaking. In the VALACHI PAPERS entry in the Leonard Maltin video guide, the film is described as "sloppy but engrossing," and that's just about dead-on accurate. Young got the film in the can, but from the looks of things, he was in Zero Fucks mode throughout the shoot: the film gets some key dates wrong (it says Valachi died in 1969, but he died in 1971); scenes of Valachi as a driver set in 1930 have late 1960s/early 1970s cars driving alongside him and parked on NYC streets, obviously catching footage on the fly without permits; Bronson slips at one point and refers to Masseria as "Maserati" and Young just left it in; Gerald S. O'Loughlin's name is misspelled "Gerard" in the credits; late in the film, Valachi attempts to hang himself with the power cord yanked off of the TV in his cell, and when he's rescued by Ryan, the red makeup around Bronson's neck to simulate the cord burn is smudged all over his white collar--again, no "Take 2" from Young; and most hilarious of all, a 1930 car chase that ends with Valachi driving into the East River, the camera panning up to show the 2/3 completed World Trade Center towers, still under construction with cranes visible on top of each building.

Joseph Valachi testifying before a Senate committee in 1963

THE VALACHI PAPERS is good but with a more engaged director at the helm, it could've been great. Bronson was always an engaging badass onscreen, but he rarely got a chance to really show off his acting chops, and his vivid portrayal of Joe Valachi is one of his career highlights, with the 50-year-old actor convincingly playing the character from his 20s to his late 60s. Ventura is appropriately menacing as the ruthless Genovese, while Ireland, likely included in the package deal to keep Bronson happy, has little to do in the historically thankless "Mafia wife" role, though her reactions to Valachi's lack of culture and table manners during their courting are cute, and allow Bronson a rare opportunity to show some comedic skills. Even though they're dubbed, Italian character actors Chiari, Leontini, and Fausto Tozzi (as hot-headed, Joe Pesci-like anger management case Albert Anastasia) make memorable impressions with their distinctive features. The scene-stealing honors, however, must go to Wiseman, best known for being the first Bond villain with the title role in DR. NO. Playing a Maranzano far more sympathetic than existed in real life, Wiseman conveys a grandfatherly charm and affable befuddlement, and while he may not offer the best acting in THE VALACHI PAPERS, he certainly offers the most acting. He sports a huge mustache and uses goofy facial expressions and a garbled, completely invented accent, rolling his Rs and sounding like a Transylvanian mafioso and giving the audience a bizarre, alternate universe look at what might've happened if Bela Lugosi lived long enough to audition for the role of Vito Corleone. Wiseman's shining moment comes at Reina's funeral, when the dead underboss' grieving widow demands justice and Maranzano embraces her and declares "I-uh-can-uh-not-uh-bring-uh-back-uh-the-dead-uh...I-uh-can-uh-only-uh-kill-uh-the-living-uh!" Maranzano's execution-style murder is integral to the Valachi story as it begins Genovese's ascent to capo di tutti capi, but Wiseman's performance is so unpredictably strange that THE VALACHI PAPERS definitely loses a little something when he exits midway through. Twilight Time has just released a limited edition Blu-ray of THE VALACHI PAPERS, and it's easily the best it's ever looked. Bonus features are sadly lacking, though there is an isolated audio track for Riz Ortolani's score, which has some lovely and memorable cues, but comes in a distant second to Nino Rota's work on THE GODFATHER.

THE VALACHI PAPERS opening in Toledo, OH on November 8, 1972

MINE
(Spain/Italy/US - 2017)

Even though he showed himself to be a credible actor as the Winklevoss twins in 2010's THE SOCIAL NETWORK and other serious films like J. EDGAR and THE BIRTH OF A NATION, it's easy to see what drew Armie Hammer to a project like MINE. It's the kind of Acting-with-a-capital-A exercise toward which an actor generally known for undemanding commercial fare like THE LONE RANGER and THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. gravitates when they want to demonstrate some real chops. But after establishing its nail-biting premise that echoes a variety of other films (127 HOURS, BURIED, PHONE BOOTH, OPEN WATER, THE SHALLOWS, LIBERTY STANDS STILL), MINE blows up in Hammer's face thanks to the hackneyed choices made by the Italian filmmaking team "Fabio & Fabio"--writers/directors Fabio Guaglione and Fabio Resinaro. In North Africa, Marine sniper Mike Stevens (Hammer) and his buddy Tommy (Tom Cullen) are perched atop a cliff overlooking a desert wedding, with orders to take out a man (Agustin Rodriguez) believed to be the leader of a major Middle East terror cell. Mike botches the operation when he gets a clear shot and hesitates. A skirmish results and Mike and Tommy are left to walk through a long stretch of desert to get to the nearest safe haven--a stretch that a discarded sign in the sand warns of being filled with mines. Sure enough, a cocky Tommy steps on one and it blows off his legs. Taking a step to help him, Mike feels a click under his left foot and realizes he's stepped on one as well. With Tommy soon out of the picture and sandstorms plus, it would seem, retaliatory petulance over the bungled mission preventing an attempted extraction for 52 hours, Mike must keep his left foot planted on the mine, standing as still as possible until help arrives.

That's the first 20 minutes of MINE, and it's around the 21st minute that it falls apart. There's significant suspense to be generated by Mike's predicament, but Fabio & Fabio instead have him reflect--on his fiancee (Annabelle Wallis), his cancer-victim mother (Juliet Aubrey), his drunkard father (Geoff Bell), whose physical and psychological abuse sent Mike running off to escape to the military in the first place, and all the things he should've done differently, like Dewey Cox having to think about his entire life before he goes on stage. MINE works just fine when it deals directly with Mike battling thirst, the elements, exhaustion, and unseen threats in the darkness at night, but that momentum is constantly interrupted either by hallucinations or the periodic appearances of a good-natured berber (Clint Dyer), who gives him the equivalent of pep talks with a bunch of inspiring platitudes straight of a self-help book. The shifts are jarring, to say the least, and the attempts to expand the story with cutaways and people real and imagined only lead to tedium, with Fabio & Fabio seemingly unaware that MINE is working just fine when the camera's planted on the star. Hammer gives this everything he's got, but his above-and-beyond efforts are sabotaged by his indecisive and unfocused filmmakers. (Unrated, 106 mins)

BITTER HARVEST
(Canada - 2017)

After a long career spent in exploitation movies and television, one gets the feeling that journeyman Canadian director George Mendeluk saw BITTER HARVEST as a magnum opus of sorts, a serious, sweeping historical epic that showed the world that a hired gun pushing 70 was perhaps a secret auteur who just never got his chance. To that end, BITTER HARVEST is about the best you can expect a serious, sweeping historical epic from the director of 1987's MEATBALLS III to be. It deals with a subject that's only been tackled by a couple of Russian films to this point: the Holodomor, the forced, man-made famine inflicted on the Ukrainian people from 1932-33 by Joseph Stalin (played here by GAME OF THRONES' Gary Oliver, looking suspiciously like a heftier Soup Nazi), after he declared that the farmers of the region must supply grain for all of the Soviet people while leaving themselves hungry and dying. Historians have debated the cause of the genocide and a majority agree that it was Stalin's way of quashing a Ukrainian independence movement, ultimately claiming the lives of anywhere between seven and ten million Ukrainians. Those people deserve something better than BITTER HARVEST, a heavy-handed and insipid melodrama that uses the Holodomor as a backdrop for the old standby of one man trying to get home to the woman he loves. Yuri (Max Irons, Jeremy's son) is a sensitive artist who's uninterested in fighting the Stalin regime like his father Yaroslav (Barry Pepper, not the first actor who comes to mind when you're looking for a Ukrainian guy named Yaroslav) and tough-as-nails grandfather Ivan (a slumming Terence Stamp), who has no use for his soft grandson's fancy book learning. After his father is killed in a skirmish (Pepper exits the film at the 18-minute mark), Yuri marries his childhood sweetheart Natalka (Samantha Barks) and is forced to leave her behind as he goes off to a factory job in Kiev in order to feed his family. Jailed in a gulag and narrowly avoiding a firing squad, Yuri joins the resistance and fights to return home to fight for his wife, family, and community, who are all suffering at the hands of sadistic Stalin strongarm Sergei (Tamer Hassan).

Striving to be DOCTOR ZHIVAGO but saddled with a basic cable budget and left on the shelf since 2013, BITTER HARVEST is cliched and simplistic throughout, as evidenced in a scene where a random stranger sees Yuri sketching and emphatically declares "You are an artist! You have a duty to tell the world the truth!" The film feels like one of those mid '80s Cannon productions where Golan and Globus would indulge in some blatant historical awards-bait but it would still end up looking unmistakably Cannon (THE BERLIN AFFAIR, THE ASSISI UNDERGROUND, HANNA'S WAR). For all its high-minded aspirations of being the definitive chronicle of the Holodomor, BITTER HARVEST is still the kind of movie that has a stock, brutish, '80s-style commie bad guy in Sergei, ends with the hero mowing down scores of Soviet officers with his back to a huge explosion, and credits occasional Steven Seagal director Lauro Chartrand (BORN TO RAISE HELL) with second-unit duties (it's also produced by Oscar-nominated editor Stuart Baird, for some reason). There's nothing wrong with being a career journeyman, and while Mendeluk may have gone into BITTER HARVEST with noble intentions, his best films are still the 1980 Canadian tax-shelter two-fer of STONE COLD DEAD and THE KIDNAPPING OF THE PRESIDENT. (R, 103 mins)

ALTITUDE
(US - 2017)

We last heard from Alex Merkin back in 2013 when he directed two movies--the horror film HOUSE OF BODIES and the Master P-style rapsploitation throwback PERCENTAGE--that quietly debuted on Netflix streaming within two weeks of one another with a level of stealth secrecy usually reserved for likes of the Baltimore Colts packing up and moving to Indianapolis in the middle of the night. Both films appeared to be micro-budgeted home movies with production values that ranked somewhere between "sex tape" and "snuff film." Neither looked to be in a releasable or even finished condition, both featured real actors (Peter Fonda and Terrence Howard in HOUSE OF BODIES, Ving Rhames and Macy Gray in PERCENTAGE), and both were inexplicably produced by Queen Latifah, who also Skyped in a cameo in HOUSE OF BODIES. The only conclusion I could draw at the time--and for a long time, mine was the only external HOUSE OF BODIES review on IMDb, making me seriously wonder if I imagined the whole thing--was that Merkin did such a consistently terrific job cleaning Queen Latifah's pool that she agreed to repay the favor by financing his two movies. PERCENTAGE is merely amateurishly awful, but HOUSE OF BODIES is so bad that it deserves to mentioned in the same breath as THE CREEPING TERROR and MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE. and regardless of Queen Latifah's career accomplishments, the only question I have for her in the event I ever meet her is "HOUSE OF BODIES and PERCENTAGE. Seriously, what the fuck?"

Needless to say, ALTITUDE ("From Director Alex Merkin," the artwork brags, with zero justification at all) is by default a better film, only because it couldn't possibly be worse. Merkin still has no business being on a movie set unless he's manning the craft services table, but ALTITUDE is, at best, barely watchable. Other than scenes involving visual effects, it at least looks like a real movie, albeit a very familiar one. If you've ever wanted to see DIE HARD ON A PLANE with Denise Richards as a hardass FBI agent, here's your chance. A plays-by-her-own-rules hostage negotiator who plays by her own rules once too often, Gretchen Blair (Richards) is busted down to desk duty and sent back to Washington. Her plane is hijacked by a crack team of jewel thieves after one of their own, Terry (Kirk Barker), who made off with their recent take and is of course, seated right next to Blair. Among the baddies are the psychotic ringleader Sadie (Greer Grammer, Kelsey's daughter), who's disguised as a flight attendant, plus burly Rawbones (Chuck Liddell, doing nothing and getting killed off early as usual), and no-nonsense Sharpe (Dolph Lundgren), who takes over as the pilot when Sadie kills the entire crew, including endlessly chipper flight attendant Rick, played by a grown-up Jonathan Lipnicki--yes, the kid from JERRY MAGUIRE--who gets fourth billing for getting his neck snapped 20 minutes in. Blair spends most of the movie hiding in the cargo hold, eliminating Sadie's bad guys one by one and getting little help from a useless air marshal (daytime soap vet Jordi Vilasuso). Somehow opening with seven (!) production company logos and boasting 40 (!!) credited producers, including Lipnicki (!!!), the impossibly cheap-looking ALTITUDE is dire even by the low standards of Redbox-ready DTV/VOD actioners. Lundgren and Liddell are just cashing checks here, but one good thing to say about the whole project is that Grammer is a surprisingly engaging villain and would've held her own in better circumstances. A more ambitious film would've done something with the possibilities of a DIE HARD/PASSENGER 57/NON-STOP scenario with female adversaries. And while Richards isn't particularly well-cast or believable, she doesn't embarrass herself, at least not until she delivers the death blow to Sadie, tossing her out of the plane while quipping "You need to check your altitude, bitch!"(R, 88 mins)

TEN LITTLE INDIANS
(Italy/West Germany/France/Spain - 1974)

Directed by Peter Collinson. Written by Peter Welbeck (Harry Alan Towers). Cast: Oliver Reed, Elke Sommer, Richard Attenborough, Charles Aznavour, Stephane Audran, Gert Frobe, Herbert Lom, Maria Rohm, Adolfo Celi, Alberto de Mendoza, voice of Orson Welles. (PG, 98 mins)

The second of three Harry Alan Towers adaptations of both Agatha Christie's 1939 novel And Then There Were None and her subsequent 1943 stage version, 1974's TEN LITTLE INDIANS has just resurfaced after decades of obscurity courtesy of Scorpion Releasing, and it's one of the more pleasantly surprising Blu-ray resurrections of the year. Like the 1965 and 1989 versions also produced by Towers, TLI '74 jettisons the bleak ending of Christie's novel in favor of the more relatively crowd-pleasing finale, and features an all-star cast of familiar faces being picked off one by one at an isolated location after a mysterious, unseen figure calling himself "U.N. Owen" (voiced here by Orson Welles) gathers them together and accuses each of a past crime they've successfully buried until now. The 1965 version, written by Towers under his screenwriting pseudonym "Peter Welbeck," was a box office success and Towers decided to remake it using the same script in 1974 after Paramount announced Sidney Lumet's glossy, star-powered MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, which gathered an amazing group of stars in support of Albert Finney as legendary detective Hercule Poirot. In response, Towers, one of the masters of the international co-production (TLI '74 was a deal brokered with Italian, German, French, and Spanish production companies), assembled a roster of the biggest names he could buy (and his wife Maria Rohm) in a cast headed by Oliver Reed and Elke Sommer that also boasted two iconic former Bond villains (GOLDFINGER's Gert Frobe and THUNDERBALL's Adolfo Celi), and beat ORIENT EXPRESS to European screens by two months in September 1974. As was the case with productions involving so many different countries, variant versions with were prepared for each market, with the Spanish version adding a prologue showing the characters at the airport as well as a subplot featuring Spanish actress Teresa Gimpera and Italian actor Rik Battaglia. The prologue as well as the subplot were cut from Avco Embassy's belated US release in April 1975 (the version on the Scorpion Blu-ray), though Gimpera and Battaglia inexplicably remain listed in the opening credits.

Towers (1920-2009) was known as an exploitation huckster and there's certainly no disputing that reputation, especially in the late '80 when he partnered with Cannon and produced a slew of films in apartheid-era South Africa for Golan-Globus and others (including the 1989 TEN LITTLE INDIANS as well as several late '80s B-movies with Reed, including SKELETON COAST, DRAGONARD, GOR, CAPTIVE RAGE, and THE HOUSE OF USHER). He later allied himself with some shady investors from the Russian mob on a pair of dire, simultaneously-shot Harry Palmer throwback thrillers (1995's BULLET TO BEIJING and 1996's MIDNIGHT IN ST. PETERSBURG) that left star Michael Caine in such a depressed state that he was seriously ready to give up acting altogether. In an amusing Towers anecdote recounted in his second memoir One Lucky Bastard, Roger Moore tells of frequent Towers star Herbert Lom (who's in both the 1974 and 1989 versions of TEN LITTLE INDIANS) declining an offer to appear in the two Russia-lensed Harry Palmer movies with Caine. According to Moore, Lom said Towers tried to woo him with the promise of an "exciting" chance to film in areas where no film crews had gone before. Towers was evasive about the exact location and Lom, probably knowing Towers all too well, kept pressing him and had to repeatedly ask "Well, where is it?" before Towers finally, hesitantly replied "Um...Chernobyl." In the early 2000s, in the profitable world of DTV, Towers was one of the first producers to set up shop in Eastern Europe and exploit the cost-cutting advantages of shooting in Romania and Bulgaria, practices that are still used to this day and provide homes-away-from-home for the likes of Jean-Claude Van Damme, Scott Adkins, and former movie star Steven Seagal.

Despite his well-documented penchant for ruses and chicanery, Tower$ had a knack for drawing big names to dubious projects and his 1967-1970 partnership with Jess Franco yielded some of the cult Spanish director's most ambitious and professional-looking work (1969's JUSTINE and VENUS IN FURS and 1970's COUNT DRACULA and THE BLOODY JUDGE being the standouts). Towers was capable of backing some fairly lavish, respectable productions like 1965's THE FACE OF FU MANCHU and its first two sequels and the 1965 version of TEN LITTLE INDIANS, directed by longtime David Lean assistant George Pollock, has an air of class to it, with a fine cast headed by Hugh O'Brian and doomed GOLDFINGER Bond girl Shirley Eaton, and Christopher Lee providing the voice of U.N. Owen. There's also a classier-than-usual--for Towers--aura surrounding the 1974 TEN LITTLE INDIANS as well. Directed by British filmmaker Peter Collinson (THE ITALIAN JOB, OPEN SEASON), TLI '74 benefits greatly from Towers' securing one of the most unusual and striking locations he could find: the Shah Abbas Hotel in Isfahan, Iran, just a few years prior to the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution against the Shah. An isolated location is key to any adaptation of And Then There Were None, but the Shah Abbas (now known as the Abbasi Hotel, and not exactly located in the middle of nowhere; the desolate exteriors around the hotel were actually shot in the desert of Almeria, Spain, showcased prominently in many a spaghetti western), a luxury hotel built over 300 years ago, becomes a character itself as Collinson has the camera prowl the ornate and seemingly endless hallways and expansive lobbies and lounge areas and one of the most memorable movie staircases you'll ever see. It's almost like a Middle East Overlook Hotel (the cast and crew actually stayed at the Shah Abbas as the production more or less took over the hotel for the shoot), and while it frequently comes close to achieving that same feeling of tension and isolation in THE SHINING, it could've been even better had Garrett Brown's Steadicam been available in 1974.

A shot of the staircase from the film

A recent photo of the staircase from the Abbasi Hotel web site

Stylistically, TLI '74 is very much a product of its time, with Collinson staging the murders in a very giallo-style fashion, often taking full advantage of every bit of the widescreen frame. Two murders in particular--Elsa (Rohm) and General Salve (Celi)--are staged with an almost Dario Argento-like, logic-be-damned panache, with Salve's even foreshadowing the brutal stabbing death presented by Argento as a shadow on the wall in the opening scene of the following year's DEEP RED. Indeed, if Argento or Sergio Martino ever made a 1970s Agatha Christie adaptation, it would probably look a lot like what Collinson accomplished with TEN LITTLE INDIANS. The story yields little surprises if you've seen any other of Towers' takes on the project or Rene Clair's 1945 classic AND THEN THERE WERE NONE, but TLI '74 stands out with its stylish murders, a persistent, throbbing score by longtime Ennio Morricone associate Bruno Nicolai, and the visually stunning Shah Abbas Hotel, an expansive location that gives its ten victims nowhere to hide, yet still feels claustrophobic amidst its vastness. Even if you're familiar with the story, this well-crafted take on TEN LITTLE INDIANS is beautifully shot by cinematographer Fernando Arribas (DEATH WALKS AT MIDNIGHT, DEATH WALKS ON HIGH HEELS, COMIN' AT YA) and is a neglected and forgotten gem that's worthy of rediscovery. If you're intrigued by the idea of Agatha Christie gone giallo, you'll find this to be the best and most interesting version of Towers' three takes on the story.

A recent photo of the Abbasi Hotel lobby

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Retro Review: TEN LITTLE INDIANS (1974)