Good Efficient Butchery

EXTINCTION
(US - 2018)

Directed by Ben Young. Written by Spenser Cohen and Brad Caleb Kane. Cast: Michael Pena, Lizzy Caplan, Israel Broussard, Mike Colter, Emma Booth, Lex Shrapnel, Amelia Crouch, Erica Tremblay, Lilly Aspell. (Unrated, 95 mins)

Originally set to be given a nationwide rollout in theaters by Universal in January 2018, the apocalyptic sci-fi saga EXTINCTION was pulled from the schedule two months prior to its release without explanation. In the tradition of other A-list sci-fi offspring rejected by their mothers--Universal's SPECTRAL, Paramount's THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX--the film was sold to Netflix and is finally debuting as a Netflix Original. 2016's ambitious and unexpectedly imaginative SPECTRAL was better than Universal's treatment of it would lead you to expect, but EXTINCTION is a muddled mess from the start. In a vaguely defined near-future, factory maintenance worker Peter (a bland Michael Pena) is plagued by recurring nightmares of an alien invasion, so troubled by them that he's growing preoccupied and distant from his concerned wife Alice (Lizzy Caplan) and frustrated daughters Hanna (Amelia Crouch) and Lucy (Erica Tremblay, younger sister of ROOM's Jacob Tremblay). He falls asleep at work and starts seeing mysterious light formations in the sky, but no one believes him and his seemingly skeptical but sympathetic boss (Mike Colter) suggests he see a doctor. While entertaining some friends (Emma Booth and Lex Shrapnel, who may have the greatest name ever) the next evening, the alien invasion begins, with buildings brought down and black-helmeted soldiers marching through their high-rise mowing down everyone. After their friends are killed in the mayhem, Peter, Alice, and the girls manage to escape to safety in a secret tunnel beneath the industrial complex where he's employed, a place he only knows exists because he saw it in one of his nightmares.

It's shortly after this point, with the introduction of an alien soldier calling itself "Miles" (Israel Broussard), that EXTINCTION shifts gears and heads into a different direction. This twist is intriguing enough--and puts the film firmly in the formulaic Netflix wheelhouse of "feature-length BLACK MIRROR episode"--that it makes you wonder why the first hour was basically pissed away with what could've easily been titled SKYLINE: EXTINCTION. The credited screenwriters are Spenser Cohen and Brad Caleb Kane, with an earlier Cohen draft circulating around Hollywood as far back as 2013. The extent of which Cohen's and/or Kane's work made it into the finished movie isn't clear, but it's an open secret that the script was almost completely reworked by an uncredited Eric Heisserer, who was nominated for an Oscar for his ARRIVAL screenplay. There's certainly a "too many cooks in the kitchen" feel to what EXTINCTION is trying to accomplish as it juggles too many Philip K. Dick concepts (you'll spot the BLADE RUNNER and TOTAL RECALL elements) while mostly serving as yet another rote CGI destructiongasm. The visual effects aren't really up to par for a major-studio production, and director Ben Young (2016's acclaimed HOUNDS OF LOVE) does the film no favors by opting to shoot much of the first hour in murky darkness with the action conveyed mostly in incoherent quick cuts. The twist around the hour mark is actually is pretty good, and for about a 20-minute stretch, EXTINCTION seems dangerously close to getting its shit together. Unfortunately, it fizzles out with a huge, clumsy exposition dump in the closing minutes that's completely unsatisfying, and like Netflix's recent dud HOW IT ENDS, makes the entire project feel like a tanked series pilot. There's little mystery as to why Universal kicked this one to the curb and why Netflix figured it would fit right in with their unofficial mission statement of offering as many thoroughly disposable and instantly forgotten sci-fi mediocrities as possible. Do give SPECTRAL a whirl, though. That one's worth a look.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT
(US/China - 2018)

Written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Cast: Tom Cruise, Henry Cavill, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Alec Baldwin, Michelle Monaghan, Sean Harris, Angela Bassett, Wes Bentley, Vanessa Kirby, Frederick Schmidt, Liang Yang, Kristoffer Joner, Caspar Phillipson, Alix Benezech. (PG-13, 147 mins)

Big-budget summer blockbusters don't get much more entertaining than MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT, the sixth film in the durable, 22-year-old franchise. An incredible jolt of adrenaline in cinematic form, FALLOUT is easily the best in the M:I series so far, and it might even be the best movie Tom Cruise has ever made. Setting aside his batshit religion, Cruise may very well be The Last Movie Star and only a fool would count him out after a trio of forgettable underperformers--JACK REACHER: NEVER GO BACK, THE MUMMY, and AMERICAN MADE--that had all of the entertainment industry prognosticators concluding that the now-56-year-old (!) actor was washed-up and his time had passed. While we justifiably question the necessity of a TOP GUN sequel that's due out next year, FALLOUT is Cruise here and now in a series that's been on a roll, reteaming him once more with writer/director Christopher McQuarrie, the Oscar-winning USUAL SUSPECTS screenwriter who emerged from an eight-year sabbatical to become Cruise's most trusted aide-de-camp in either writing (VALKYRIE, EDGE OF TOMORROW, THE MUMMY) or directing (JACK REACHER, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION) capacities in the ensuing decade. What everyone was saying about MAD MAX: FURY ROAD three years ago holds true here: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT is an instant classic in the action genre.

A direct sequel to ROGUE NATION, FALLOUT is as convoluted as you'd expect, with IMF agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his team, Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg), botching a mission to intercept three weapons-grade plutonium orbs that end up in the hands of The Apostles, a splinter cell offshoot of The Syndicate, the organization run by international terrorist Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), who was apprehended in the previous film. Assigned to retrieve the plutonium by IMF boss Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin), the team is overruled by CIA chief Erica Sloane (Angela Bassett), who orders her own operative and attack dog Walker (Henry Cavill) to tag along. The story moves all over the globe, as Hunt ends up posing as a mystery man named John Lark, set to buy the plutonium from the Apostles with a wealthy socialite and arms dealer known as The White Widow (Vanessa Kirby) acting as a go-between. Things get even more complicated when The Apostles refuse to pay for the plutonium, instead insisting that if "Lark"/Hunt wants the plutonium, he has to help Lane escape from a military-fortified prison transport. Throw in MI-6 agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) and her own assignment to kill Lane, Hunt being framed as a rogue agent once more, and a scheming Walker clearly up to games of his own, and the stage is set for one double-cross and jaw-dropping action set piece after another for a two-and-a-half hour stretch that's over before know it.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT is a movie that just doesn't quit. It's a preposterous delight and a rare instance of an action film that actually merits the comparison to the proverbial standby blurb of a non-stop rollercoaster ride. Though there's some conservatively-deployed CGI and visual effects, the abundance of practical stunt work and action choreography solidifies Cruise's standing as Hollywood's most death-defying madman. McQuarrie's puzzle-like story construction and recurring motif of "Who's really who?" recalls THE USUAL SUSPECTS, but there's also generous helpings of humor and warmth among the IMF characters who, to borrow a term from the FAST AND THE FURIOUS series, have really become family by this point (it's Hunt's unwillingness to sacrifice Luther that causes him to lose the plutonium in the prologue, something that Sloane and Walker never stop reminding him). FAST AND THE FURIOUS fans may want to argue the point, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a big-budget franchise still creatively firing on all cylinders and running better than ever six installments deep. It's impossible to pick a best scene--the HALO jump, the bone-smashing men's room throwdown, the epic boat/car/motorcycle chase through Paris, the greatest "Tom Cruise running" sequence ever, or the nerve-wracking, INCEPTION-like cross-cutting race against time in the climax, when the team tracks Lane to a medical camp in Kashmir where a smallpox outbreak caused by The Apostles has just been contained, which involves a helicopter chase, a brawl that spills over to the side of a mountain, and the defusing of two nuclear devices. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT is crowd-pleasing, edge-of-your-seat, popcorn movie perfection, the kind of relentlessly heart-pounding, balls-to-the-wall barnburner that restores your faith in the summer blockbuster.

DAGON
(Spain - 2001; US release 2002)

Directed by Stuart Gordon. Written by Dennis Paoli. Cast: Ezra Godden, Francisco Rabal, Raquel Merono, Macarena Gomez, Uxia Blanco, Brendan Price, Birgit Bofarull, Ferran Lahoz, Joan Minguell, Alfredo Villa, Jose Lifante, Javier Sandoval, Victor Barreira. (R, 98 mins)

Going back to his days as the founder of the Organic Theater Company in Chicago in the late 1960s, Stuart Gordon has always been a versatile director of stage and screen. But it's his association with the works of H.P. Lovecraft that have cemented his place in horror film history. Beginning in 1985 with the Empire Pictures cult classic RE-ANIMATOR, Gordon, along with screenwriter Dennis Paoli, and (with one exception) producer Brian Yuzna, created a quartet of Lovecraft adaptations that, while not completely faithful to the source, nevertheless generated a renewed interest in the influential horror writer whose work was never really discovered until after his death in 1937. Gordon's Lovecraft projects updated the settings and were very much the works of their maker, but RE-ANIMATOR and 1986's FROM BEYOND managed to brilliantly convey the essence of Lovecraft in spite of the liberties taken. Gordon moved away from Lovecraft for a number of years, directing 1987's DOLLS and a pair of sci-fi films with 1990's ROBOT JOX and 1993's FORTRESS, in addition to scripting Abel Ferrara's 1993 sci-fi/horror outing BODY SNATCHERS. He probably got his biggest commercial payday by creating, with Yuzna and their DOLLS screenwriter Ed Naha, the storyline behind the 1989 Disney hit HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS. Their script (originally titled TEENY WEENIES) was ultimately rewritten by Naha and Tom Schulman (DEAD POETS SOCIETY), and Gordon was replaced as director by Joe Johnston, but his "story by" credit remained and the film spawned two sequels, a TV spinoff, and a Disney theme park attraction.

Empire eventually folded by the end of the 1980s and was more or less reborn as Charles Band's Full Moon Productions, whose signature franchise remains the PUPPET MASTER series. Gordon and Paoli collaborated on Full Moon's 1991 Poesploitation entry THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM and would eventually revisit the Lovecraft universe for Full Moon with 1995's CASTLE FREAK (based on the short story "The Outsider"), which also reunited RE-ANIMATOR and FROM BEYOND stars Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton. Yuzna, meanwhile, directed the 1989 cult classic SOCIETY and kept the RE-ANIMATOR series going on his own by directing 1990's BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR and, much later, 2003's BEYOND RE-ANIMATOR. He also helmed 1991's SILENT NIGHT DEADLY NIGHT 4: INITIATION and 1993's RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3, along with a pair of Corbin Bernsen video store staples with 1996's THE DENTIST, co-written by Gordon, and its 1998 sequel THE DENTIST 2. By 2000, Yuzna set up shop in Barcelona, working with Spanish producer Julio Fernandez's company Filmax, creating a horror-focused subsidiary division called Fantastic Factory. Yuzna reconnected with Gordon and Paoli and Fernandez agreed to produce DAGON, the last (so far) of Gordon's Lovecraft feature film adaptations.

Based only partly on "Dagon" and more on "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," DAGON opens with young stock market wunderkind and Miskatonic University grad Paul Marsh (Ezra Godden) and his girlfriend Barbara (Raquel Merono) on a yacht with his business partner Howard (Brendan Price) and his wife Vicki (Birgit Bofarull). A powerful storm brews and the boat crashes into some rocks, sinking off off the coast of the nearly abandoned fishing village Imboca. Paul and Barbara make it to the shore and get help from a strange priest (Ferran Lahoz) with webbed fingers, who has two hooded men take Paul to what's left of the yacht. Howard and Vicki have disappeared, and when he returns to the village, Barbara is missing as well. The priest puts him up in a decrepit, filthy hotel where the desk clerk (Jose Lifante) has visible gills. The Imbocan villagers begin pursuing Paul through the hotel and the town, and he finds an unlikely ally in elderly vagrant Ezequiel (veteran character actor Francisco Rabal in one of his final films; he died before it was released). Ezequiel tells Paul of the dark secret of Imboca: it was once a poor Christian village ("Imboca" meaning "town of God") during his childhood until evil Capt. Camborra (Alfredo Villa) brought a curse on the residents, swaying them to worship "the great god Dagon," convincing them to turn their backs on Christianity and in exchange, Imboca prospered with an endless supply of fish and the discovery of gold in the surrounding sea. But the riches have a price, and Imbocans must pay in the form of blood sacrifices to Dagon, a hideous monster whose forced couplings with Imbocan women propagates a species that's half-human and half-sea creature.

Francisco Rabal (1926-2001)

There's a twist in the tale that comes much later, and it's not exactly stealthily foreshadowed by Paul's recurring dreams--even before the yacht sinks--of being underwater and seduced by a mermaid (Macarena Gomez) who turns into a monster or a strange formation of birthmarks visible around his ribcage ("Your dreams brought you here...every dream is a wish," he's told). After a slow build, DAGON has moments that are quite terrifying, especially in the way the relentless Imbocans never stop pursuing Paul no matter how fast he runs or how desperately he tries to hide. They're deformed but look mostly human, and move like aquatic beasts on land, shambling and slithering about in the background. Paul's tentative friendship with Ezequiel, who will eventually sacrifice himself in an attempt to save Paul, provides some legitimate emotion, especially in an unexpectedly moving scene where the Dagon-worshipping Imbocans are torturing the frail Ezequiel by skinning him alive as he defiantly shouts Psalm 23 ("The Lord is my shepherd...") in Spanish and is soon joined in English by Paul. Setting aside some CGI that's primitive in that distinctly "early 2000s" sort-of-way, Rabal is simultaneously the best and most problematic aspect of DAGON. Gordon gives reams of vital exposition to the actor, but a combination of the character being barely literate and Rabal's English being largely garbled and unintelligible is frustrating if you don't turn on the subtitles. At the same time, Rabal makes Ezequiel such a terrific character that, for a while, he becomes the heart and soul of DAGON, which helps make the Psalm 23 scene so powerful. The film closes with a heartfelt dedication to Rabal, "a wonderful actor and an even better human being."

DAGON went straight-to-video in the US in 2002, shortly before Gordon briefly reinvented himself as a bit of an indie auteur with 2004's bizarre oddity KING OF THE ANTS and 2006's EDMOND, a collaboration with David Mamet. Now 70, Gordon's last film to date is 2008's excellent black comedy STUCK, with white trash nurse Mena Suvari plowing into homeless Stephen Rea and promptly driving home and parking in her garage...with Rea still stuck in the windshield and bleeding out. Gordon did revisit Lovecraft once more, with DAGON star Godden, a British actor who briefly became the director's go-to Jeffrey Combs-alike, for "Dreams in the Witch-House" a 2005 episode of the Showtime series MASTERS OF HORROR. Just out on Blu-ray from Lionsgate's "Vestron Collector's Series," even though Vestron Video was long gone by 2002 (I guess it's "Vestron" in spirit), DAGON isn't the best of Gordon's Lovecraft works (that would be RE-ANIMATOR), but it's perhaps the most effective at capturing the vividly unique, nightmarish quality of Lovecraft's writing.

INCIDENT IN A GHOSTLAND
(Canada/France - 2018)

Pascal Laugier's 2008 film MARTYRS was pretty much the last word in France's "extreme horror" craze that gave us Alexandre Aja's HIGH TENSION, Xavier Gens' FRONTIER(S), and Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury's INSIDE, among others. It was an impossible film to top, so Laugier didn't even try, instead following it up with the creepy and comparatively restrained 2012 Jessica Biel thriller THE TALL MAN. For his first film in six years, Laugier revisits some less extreme but still quite disturbing MARTYRS-esque themes with INCIDENT IN A GHOSTLAND. Upon a cursory glance, it's easy to dismiss GHOSTLAND as a torture porn throwback, but it's got more on its mind, and weaves its story in such an intricately constructed way that you'll never see how it's planning to pull the rug out from under you. In an extended flashback, single mom Pauline (legendary French singer Mylene Farmer) is traveling with her two teenage daughters--elder and bratty Vera (Taylor Hickson) and younger and bookish Beth (Emilia Jones)--to the rural Canadian home of a late aunt who left her middle-of-nowhere home to them. They're passed on a deserted country road by an ominous, barreling ice cream truck en route, which means it won't surprise any seasoned horror fan to learn that the two people in the truck are the ones behind a home invasion later that night. Despite being brutally terrorized and beaten, Pauline manages to get the upper hand and kills both of the attackers. Cut to 16 years later, and Beth (now played by Crystal Reed) has followed her dream of becoming a writer and is now a bestselling horror novelist with a husband and young son. Her latest book Incident in a Ghostland is earning rave reviews with its semi-autobiographical depiction of what happened to her family that night. After an hysterical phone call from Vera (Anastasia Phillips), Beth returns to her mother's home to find a volatile situation: Pauline drinks too much and she's forced to keep the dangerously unstable Vera in the basement with padded walls, still haunted by the events of the past, prone to meltdowns and lunatic rants about how "they're still here."

Indeed, the nightmare is not over, and to say any more would involve significant spoilers, but rest assured, INCIDENT IN A GHOSTLAND isn't going where that synopsis would lead you to believe. What transpires is alternately intense, terrifying, and often upsetting, not on the "next level of existence" where MARTYRS went, but certainly just as bleak and harrowing in its own way. Laugier's depictions of the horrors his characters endure is unflinching and fearlessly acted by his stars, and as a result, like MARTYRS, GHOSTLAND isn't going to be for everyone. It's an unsettling examination of abuse, trauma, and coping mechanisms that isn't afraid to go to some very dark places. This is Laugier's fourth feature film, and all have been excellent, and even though INCIDENT IN A GHOSTLAND will inevitably acquire a cult following, it'll likely be overshadowed by an on-set accident involving Hickson. Laugier was directing her to pound her fists on a glass door and he kept telling her to pound harder when the glass shattered and she fell forward. A piece of glass caught her cheek as she fell and opened a huge gash on the left side of her face that required 70 stitches, leaving her permanently scarred. She subsequently sued the producers for negligence and failure to provide a safe working environment, and the case is still pending at this time. That aside--and no movie is worth what Hickson has gone through--INCIDENT IN A GHOSTLAND is an excellent horror film that's worth a look. (Unrated, 91 mins)

KINGS
(China/US/France/Belgium - 2018)

Shot in Los Angeles, KINGS is the first English-language work from Turkish-born, France-based filmmaker Deniz Gamze Erguven, and it's the kind of misguided, laughably contrived, embarrassingly tone-deaf disaster that almost always sends an acclaimed foreign auteur on the first flight back home, never to try their luck with the US market again. Erguven won a significant amount of acclaim with her debut, 2015's MUSTANG, which earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. With KINGS, Erguven takes a look at the 1992 L.A. riots in the wake of the Rodney King verdict, trying to go for a hard-hitting immediacy by mixing in archival footage from the time but also never settling on a tone. The film is an impossibly awkward mishmash of social commentary, arthouse pretension, and slapstick comedy, culminating in a climax that cuts back and forth between the tragedy of a supporting character bleeding to death in the backseat of a car while two others engage in Three Stooges-style antics to free themselves from the parking lot light post to which they've been handcuffed. Who is this film's intended audience?

KINGS got a toxic response at last year's Toronto Film Festival and only made it to 215 screens in the US, despite having a pair of A-listers heading its cast. Oscar-winner Halle Berry pulls her wig from THE CALL out of storage to play Millie, a single South Central woman with eight foster kids, while Daniel Craig has arguably the most ill-advised role of his career as Obie, her cranky and improbably British neighbor who seems to have wandered in from the set of an early Guy Ritchie movie. Frankly, I'd like to know how Obie ended up living in this neighborhood. I'd also appreciate an explanation for his behavior. He hangs out by his window naked, goes to the liquor store in his bathrobe, drives a nice SUV, listens to opera at full blast, throws his furniture off his balcony, and randomly fires a shotgun out of his bathroom window when he's feeling really irritable. He yells at Millie's younger kids one moment, then he's got them in his apartment, ordering pizza and dancing with them to his Motown records the next. Craig is saddled with an absolutely unplayable, incomprehensible character, while Berry valiantly tries to give it her best and most sincere shot. Both are offscreen for long stretches as Erguven focuses on Jesse (Lamar Johnson), one of Millie's older foster kids. As an impressionable and level-headed young man entering adulthood, it would make sense for the events that unfold to be seen through Jesse's eyes. Instead, Erguven has him distracted by and smitten with Nicole (Rachel Hilson), because apparently she thought KINGS needed its own Manic Pixie Dream Girl (© Nathan Rabin) to mouth off to cops and gang members and sleep with William (Kalaan "KR" Walker), another Millie foster kid. Indeed, Jesse's indignation that sets him on a third act path to violence isn't because he's caught up in the outrage over the cops being acquitted in the beating of King but rather, walking on in Nicole and William having sex. Because yeah, that's what the L.A. riots need to be boiled down to. With its art film flourishes and character arcs that range from simplistic to nonsensical, KINGS feels like a bizarro interpretation of 1992 South Central. The minimalist score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is out of place, the ludicrous dream scene where Millie erotically fantasizes about being seduced by Obie looks like a dated Fellini parody, and one scene where a Burger King manager desperately tries to negotiate with some rioters and talk them out of burning down the restaurant has a darkly comedic, sketch comedy absurdism to it. It's funny, but why is it in this movie? (R, 87 mins)

THE CON IS ON
(US/Canada - 2018)

A legitimate contender for the worst film of 2018, THE CON IS ON is a would-be screwball comedy put through a '90s post-Tarantino filter complete with QT vets Uma Thurman and Tim Roth heading the cast. Dumped on VOD by Lionsgate after three years on the shelf, THE CON IS ON (shot as THE BRITS ARE COMING) manages to go its entire miserable 95 minute duration without anything even resembling humor, leaving an overqualified cast mugging shamelessly as they feebly try to make something out of nothing. Married British con artists Harriet (Thurman) and Peter Fox (Roth) have made off with a fortune belonging to lethal international assassin Irina (Maggie Q). They make their way to L.A. and stage an accident to get a free room at the Chateau Marmont, where they get the idea to swipe a priceless ring from Peter's ex-wife Jackie (Alice Eve), whose pretentious film director husband Gabriel (Crispin Glover) is having affairs with both his clingy personal assistant Gina (Parker Posey) and terrible actress Vivien (Sofia Vergara), the sultry star of his latest film LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR. Throw in a subplot with Harriet posing as a "dog whisperer" and Stephen Fry as a pedophile priest and opium smuggler and you get...well, nothing.

Directed and co-written by James Haslam, whose previous film THE DEVIL YOU KNOW was shelved for eight (!) years before its 2013 release and only resurfaced because it featured an unknown-in-2005 Jennifer Lawrence in a supporting role (also, should it have been a premonition that he's the stepson of Jimmy Haslam, the owner of the perpetually hapless Cleveland Browns?), THE CON IS ON abandons its stars in one unfunny situation after another, leaving them little to do but fall back on various vulgarities or, in Posey's case, flail around and generally embarrass herself. It's apparently supposed to be funny that Harriet and Peter are such unrepentant misanthropes, but isn't it key to any kind of screwball comedy that the central characters have some element of charm? Thurman is glamorous enough but Roth looks genuinely defeated by the futility of the whole endeavor, and it's the kind of film that thinks an establishing shot of an Asian dry cleaning establishment should be accompanied by the sound of a gong, a punchline that was past its sell-by date roughly around the time of THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU. Considering the quality of its cast, THE CON IS ON is shockingly bad. The only reason this is going to get any attention at all once it hits streaming services is for a brief and largely-implied but admittedly surprising sex scene that features a topless Thurman and a salad-tossing Maggie Q, but it's hardly worth enduring the entire film. There's also a brief Melissa Sue Anderson sighting, if any LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE or HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME superfans give a shit. (R, 95 mins)

PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING
(Italy/US - 1982)

Directed by James Cameron. Written by H.A. Milton (James Cameron, Charles H. Eglee and Ovidio G. Assonitis). Cast: Tricia O'Neil, Steve Marachuk, Lance Henriksen, Ted Richert, Ricky G. Paull (Ricky Paull Goldin), Leslie Graves, Carole Davis, Connie Lynn Hadden, Arnie Ross, Tracy Berg, Albert Sanders, Ward White, Aston S. Young. (R, 95 mins)

A tangentially-related sequel to Joe Dante's 1978 hit for Roger Corman's New World Pictures, PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING was instead produced by Egyptian-born Italian schlock king Ovidio G. Assonitis, best known for his 1974 EXORCIST ripoff BEYOND THE DOOR and his 1977 JAWS knockoff TENTACLES. Assonitis has a bizarre history of hiring rookie directors just to fire them during production so he can take over himself, and the most infamous example of this tactic is indeed PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING, which would likely be a forgotten footnote in drive-in exploitation history lost somewhere in your 1980s video store memories were it not the directing debut of one James Cameron. Though he logged time on the visual effects team of John Carpenter's 1981 classic ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, the 27-year-old Cameron was hired for PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING because of his association with Corman productions in various capacities as art director (1980's BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS) and production designer (1981's GALAXY OF TERROR), as well as his oft-expressed eagerness to start directing his own movies. He got his chance when Assonitis fired Miller Drake--a New World trailer editor who shot the US inserts for SCREAMERS, the 1981 re-edit of Sergio Martino's 1979 H.G. Wells-inspired ISLAND OF THE FISHMEN--during pre-production after a disagreement over the direction in which Drake wanted to take the story.

With his friend Drake's blessing, Cameron jumped at the opportunity, but clashed with Assonitis from the start. Working on location in Jamaica, with underwater sequences shot off Grand Cayman, and interiors done in Rome, and forced to use an Italian crew with whom he couldn't communicate, a miserable Cameron had to run every decision by Assonitis first and was almost always overruled. Cameron was fired at some point--exactly when depends on who's telling the story--but was at least around for some of post-production in Italy, as he was eventually locked out of the editing room and reportedly kept breaking in after hours to undo all of the changes Assonitis was making to the film. Cameron has frequently told this story over the years, sometimes standing by it, sometimes saying he was only kidding, but one thing is certain: his mercurial nature and uncompromising defiance in sticking to his vision was apparent even on a junky B-movie like PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING. Once Assonitis kicked him off the movie for good and finished it himself--hopefully after shouting "You're through! Finished! You hear me? I'll see that you never work in this town again!" while furiously chomping on a cigar--Cameron used his sudden downtime to begin outlining and fleshing out a script idea he had brewing in his head for a while, which of course became his 1984 breakthrough THE TERMINATOR. You were right, Ovidio--this kid's going nowhere. Well-played, sir. Well-played.

It shouldn't be a surprise that PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING (shot as PIRANHA II: FLYING KILLERS and shown in some parts of the US as simply THE SPAWNING) isn't a good movie. It's professionally made, with some nice cinematography by Assonitis regular Roberto D'Ettorre Piazzoli and an effective score by Stelvio Cipriani, hiding behind the Americanized alias "Steve Powder." The script--the combined efforts of Assonitis, Cameron, and Cameron's buddy and fellow Corman gofer Charles H. Eglee, who would go on to a prolific career in TV--is credited to the pseudonymous "H.A. Milton," and while it references its predecessor in one throwaway line, it's largely a standalone work. At a Club Med-type resort called Club Elysium, two divers are devoured by a school of piranha while engaged in the act of deep-sea fucking. More divers are killed, and a nurse at the morgue is attacked by a flying piranha that burrows out of the remains of one of the victims. Local police chief Steve (Lance Henriksen) is irate about the body count, but he's more pissed off about the time his estranged wife and Club Elysium diving tour guide Anne (Tricia O'Neil) is spending with new hire Tyler (Steve Marachuk). Anne turns out to be a former marine biologist who gave up her career when she married Steve and gave birth to their now-16-year-old son Chris (future daytime soap regular Ricky Paull Goldin), so she knows something is in the water, and so does Tyler. He's a biochemist who worked on a secret government gene-splicing project that resulted in the creation of a piranha/grunion crossbreed that has the ability to fly and survive out of water. Tyler believes a container of flying piranha eggs was on a boat that sank off the coast of the Elysium resort. Of course, he's right, and they've hatched and bred and with nothing left to eat in the water, it's only a matter of time before they attack the resort at its busiest time of the year.

It's your classic JAWS scenario, with Anne in the Roy Scheider role once she can't convince anyone there's piranha in the water and decides to cancel her diving tours, only to promptly get fired by asshole resort manager Raoul (Ted Richert as Murray Hamilton). The first hour of PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING is spent with annoying, "wacky" characters at Club Elysium and player Tyler's tireless attempts to get in Anne's pants. The film has some unintended laughs and WTF? moments that are seemingly inherent with Italian trash movies (like the strange physical interaction when we're introduced to Anne and Chris, where it takes an unusually long time to finally conclude that they're mother and son and not, as it would initially seem, in a PRIVATE LESSONS scenario where a hot teacher has seduced a horny student), and the eventual flying piranha attack on Club Elysium is pretty entertainingly bonkers. It also certainly indulges in gratuitous gore (courtesy of the great Giannetto De Rossi) and plenty of T&A, knowing exactly what kind of movie it is. But whether it's the material or his lack of control over the whole project, there's absolutely nothing here to indicate that Cameron would go on to be the visionary trailblazer we know him as today, other than Goldin, in an interview on Shout! Factory's new Blu-ray (because physical media is dead), reminiscing about how "methodical" he was on set. It may not have established him in the way he'd hoped, but had he not been fired, he might not have been inspired to finally sit down and write THE TERMINATOR when he did. And it did establish his working relationship with Henriksen, who brings his usual intensity and gravitas to the film and puts forth far more effort than was really required. Henriksen previously worked with Assonitis on 1979's THE VISITOR, but became fast friends with Cameron, eventually appearing in both THE TERMINATOR and ALIENS. O'Neil never broke out despite a lot of TV guest spots in the '70s and '80s, but Cameron never forgot the star of his first movie and gave her a small role in TITANIC. Cameron also worked with Eglee further down the road, with the pair co-creating the Jessica Alba series DARK ANGEL for Fox, while Eglee carved himself a niche as a busy TV writer and producer on shows like ST. ELSEWHERE, MOONLIGHTING, NYPD BLUE, MURDER ONE, THE SHIELD, DEXTER, THE WALKING DEAD, and most recently, Netflix's HEMLOCK GROVE. Everyone has to start somewhere, and to his credit, Cameron has never tried to pretend PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING doesn't exist and has always had a good sense of humor about it, even referring to it as "the very best flying piranha movie ever made" in a 2009 60 MINUTES interview with Morley Safer.

REVENGE
(France/Belgium - 2018)

A throwback to both the French "extreme" horror movement of the mid-2000s as well as the vintage exploitation standby of the rape/revenge thriller, REVENGE hit international screens at just the moment that #MeToo and #TimesUp exploded in the global culture in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal. As a result, many critics and bloggers seemed especially intent on making it a zeitgeist-capturing "issues" film when it really isn't. It's easy to see why molding it to fit a post-Weinstein narrative was easy: it's written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, working in a genre that's typically male-dominated from a behind-the-scenes standpoint. There's that, along with the fact one of the main male villains spends the entire climax running around completely nude as he's being pursued by the vengeance-seeking Jen (a star-making performance by Matilda Lutz). Jen is the party-girl mistress of wealthy, married Richard (Kevin Janssens). He's got a weekend hunting trip planned at his posh desert getaway with two of his buddies, but he and Jen head out a day early to have the place to themselves. The buddies--Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimi (Guillaume Bouchede)--show up early and the quartet spend the evening drinking and having a good time. Jen and Stan do some playful slow dancing, and the next morning, while Richard is getting supplies for the hunt, Dimi is nursing a hangover, and Jen's packing so Richard's private chopper pilot can fly her home, Stan confronts her about "leading him on" and when she gets uncomfortable and tries to politely reject his advances, he rapes her as Dimi walks in, sees what's happening, closes the door, and turns up the volume on the living room TV to drown out the noise before blithely going for a swim. Richard returns and tries to calm Jen down, promising her a job with his company and wiring some money into her bank account to buy her silence. Furious that Richard's more concerned with protecting himself and his buddy than with her safety and well-being, she threatens to go to his wife, he belts her across the face, and she runs out of the house. The men chase her down, cornering her at a cliff as Richard pushes her off, impaling her on a tree branch and leaving her to die.

Of course, she survives, escaping with the branch still sticking out of her abdomen, and when Richard and the others return from their hunt assuming they'll dispose of her body, she's gone. After one of the more gruesome cauterization scenes in recent memory, Jen spends the rest of the film evading and eventually hunting down the trio, with results so violent and blood-soaked that it's really hard to believe this somehow managed to get an R rating. Even for the seasoned genre enthusiast, this is some pretty strong stuff, with one agonizing and painful scene with Stan rooting around inside his foot to remove a glass shard that goes on so absurdly long that a splatter newbie might very well throw up or pass out. Fargaet does a great job mining edge-of-your-seat suspense from Jen's pursuit of the men, often letting these scenes play out in long, real time takes. The final showdown between Jen and Richard is a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling bloodbath. This is the kind of movie where a character has to Saran Wrap himself to keep his guts from spilling out. Lutz, previously seen in RINGS, which was hated by pretty much everyone, instantly establishes her genre bona fides in a ferocious performance that rivals Cristina Lindberg in Bo Arne Vibenius' THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE (1973) and Camille Keaton in Meir Zarchi's I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (1978). And with its gruesome revenge tropes and Richard's reprehensible victim-blaming ("You're so damn beautiful, it's hard to resist you," he says in an attempt to justify Stan's actions), those are the real antecedents here, albeit with a much diminished focus on the rape aspect (in another example of defying expectations, the rape mostly takes place offscreen, with Jen's cries for help drowned out by the TV), and some admittedly clunky, high school creative writing-level symbolic religious imagery, from a rotten apple to Jen's impalement on the tree being a sort-of crucifixion. Other than the novelty of being directed by a woman and boasting more male nudity than female, REVENGE isn't making any statement about empowerment that Vibenius and Zarchi didn't make over 40-plus years ago. But even as a present-day homage to those cult classics, REVENGE is a riveting, visceral experience, and a breakout not just for Lutz, who throws herself into this fearless abandon, but also Fargeat, who's obviously a filmmaker to watch. (R, 108 mins)

MARROWBONE
(Spain - 2017; US release 2018)

The Spanish-made, English-language thriller MARROWBONE is the feature directing debut of Sergio G. Sanchez, best known as the writing partner of Guillermo del Toro protege and JURASSIC PARK: FALLEN KINGDOM director J.A. Bayona on 2007's THE ORPHANAGE and 2012's THE IMPOSSIBLE. Bayona is onboard as an executive producer here, and THE ORPHANAGE's influence is felt throughout, along with shades of the 1977 cult classic THE LITTLE GIRL WHO LIVES DOWN THE LANE, at least until the twists and turns start becoming apparent. The story is structured as such that said twists and turns are calculated too far in advance to be as effective as they should be, and MARROWBONE is a film that feels like it should've been made a decade ago. Set in 1969, it begins with American expat Rose Fairbairn (Nicola Harrison) fleeing England with her four children--adult Jack (George Mackay), late teens Jane (Mia Goth) and Billy (Charlie Heaton), and young Sam (Matthew Stagg)--across the Atlantic all the way to Marrowbone, her family's namesake ancestral home in a remote area of Maine. The reasons are initially vague--something about an abusive father--and the journey prompts a precipitous decline in Rose's health. She dies not long after they settle in and shortly after that, their father (Tom Fisher) finds them, appearing out of the nearby forest and taking a shot at Jane through her bedroom window.

Sanchez then immediately jumps ahead six months, and that incident isn't mentioned again until much later, the first clear sign that vital info is being withheld from the audience and that there's an obvious twist with more to come after that. The longer Sanchez draws it out and throws in other subplots--the reveal of the real reason they left England and a scandal involving their father being dubbed "The Beast of Bampton" by the British press; Jack courting local librarian Allie (Anya Taylor-Joy) and vying for her affections with Porter, the smarmy lawyer (Kyle Soller) in charge of the Marrowbone estate; Jack's efforts to keep his mother's death a secret and deal with an attempted blackmailing by Porter; and Jack's insistence that only he go to town for errands while his siblings stay at the house--the more likely you are to figure out most of the third act developments that start flying fast and furious after an extremely slow buildup. There's some effective atmosphere throughout and some creepy moments here and there (little Sam's encounter with "the ghost" in their mother's room and the gradual realization that something is in the attic), but by the end, the twists and reveals are just deployed at an almost absurd rate, to the point where once everything is explained and rationally tied together, it becomes harder to swallow than what might've transpired otherwise. The performances are good, particularly Mackay, and Sanchez does a nice job at building some tension, but by the end, it just feels like the end result of recycling some leftover ORPHANAGE ideas after binge-watching some earlier M. Night Shyamalan. (R, 110 mins)

2036: ORIGIN UNKNOWN
(UK - 2018)

A sci-fi thriller so bad that its only surprise is that Netflix failed to acquire it, 2036: ORIGIN UNKNOWN wastes a committed performance by BATTLESTAR GALACTICA's Katee Sackhoff in what's largely a one-woman show. After a failed mission to Mars in 2030 resulted in the deaths of the entire crew, all space missions became manned with an artificial intelligence working in conjunction with a human "supervisor" there to ensure AI functionality. In 2036, Mackenzie "Mack" Wilson (Sackhoff) is a supervisor on a return mission to Mars, but she's informed at launch--by her bureaucratic older sister Lena (Julie Cox), who runs mission control--that she's been demoted to second in command behind ARTi (voiced by Steven Cree), the sentient, British-accented AI system that was also part of the 2030 mission, whose victims included Mack's and Lena's father. The assignment is to investigate a mysterious cube-like structure that has suddenly appeared on Mars and is demonstrating an ability to teleport. Mack is hesitant to put all of her trust in ARTi, arguing that "We created AI to help us, not to lead us." If this sounds familiar, you're right: 2036: ORIGIN UNKNOWN is basically celebrating the 50th anniversary of a Stanley Kubrick masterpiece by offering up 95 minutes of shamelessly derivative, nutsack-riding 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY fan fiction, at least until an infuriating finale where it sees fit to reference EX MACHINA Turing tests before wrapping things up as a blatant ripoff of MOON. The mission is eventually joined by Sterling (Ray Fearon), one of Mack's colleagues, and director Hasraf "Haz" Dulull even has the chutzpah to stage a scene where Mack and Sterling sneak away to have a private conversation and are spied on by HAL 9--...er, I mean, ARTi. Dulull has a lot of experience on the visual effects and pre-viz teams of numerous big-budget Hollywood movies like HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY, THE DARK KNIGHT, and PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME, in addition to the TV documentary series NOVA. The interior ship design is handsomely mounted and Dulull admirably makes 2036: ORIGIN UNKNOWN look much more expensive than it is, but even that falls on its face for a few scattered action bits that are badly rendered with laughably cheap effects more fitting for a 20-year-old sci-fi TV show. Devotees of Sackhoff will no doubt have to watch this, but know going in that she's better than the material and this is the maybe the dullest and dreariest sci-fi flick to come down the pike since 1987's NIGHTFLYERS. (Unrated, 95 mins)

BLACKkKLANSMAN
(US - 2018)

Directed by Spike Lee. Written by Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott and Spike Lee. Cast: John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace, Corey Hawkins, Robert John Burke, Michael Buscemi, Frederick Weller, Ken Garito, Harry Belafonte, Alec Baldwin, Ryan Eggold, Jasper Paakkonen, Paul Walter Hauser, Ashlie Atkinson, Nicholas Turturro, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Danny Hoch, Arthur Nascarella, Brian Tarantina, Ryan Preimesberger. (R, 135 mins)

As difficult as it may be to believe, Spike Lee's BLACKkKLANSMAN is based on the true story of Ron Stallworth, the first black police officer hired by the Colorado Springs P.D. back in the 1970s, and the man who was instrumental in busting up a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. As a rookie hired mainly for show, Stallworth (BALLERS' John David Washington, son of frequent Lee star and close friend Denzel Washington) is immediately sent to the records department and generally dismissed and disrespected by his fellow officers. Looking for some meaningful police work, he jumps at the chance to go undercover at a rally hosted by Colorado College's black student union, welcoming civil rights leader Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins), formerly known as the Black Panthers' Stokely Carmichael. Backed up by detectives Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) and Jimmy Creek (Michael Buscemi, Steve's look/soundalike younger brother), Ron doesn't see much more than rhetoric in Ture's call to arms, but he does make the acquaintance of Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier), the "pig"-hating president of the black student union, though he keeps his job a secret.

Shortly after, spotting an ad for the local chapter of the KKK in the newspaper on a slow day in the squad room, Ron calls the number and pretends to be a white racist, inquiring for information about joining and, in a bad rookie mistake, giving his real name. Police chief Bridges (Robert John Burke) and Sgt. Trapp (Ken Garito) assign Ron to lead an undercover infiltration of the KKK, with Jewish Flip posing as "Ron Stallworth" while the real Ron coaches him and backs him up from a nearby location. As "Ron," Flip gathers intel by ingratiating himself with local chapter president Walter Breachway (Ryan Eggold) and his two chief underlings, hot-headed Felix Kendrickson (Jasper Paakkonen) and mouth-breathing moron Ivanhoe (Paul Walter Hauser, who seems to be cornering the market on such characters between this and his role as the hapless Shawn Eckhardt in I, TONYA). The ruse can't last forever, especially with Felix's overwhelming suspicion that "Ron"/Flip looks "too Jewish" and when he looks up "Ron Stallworth" in the phone book and sees that a black man lives at the address. Ron and Flip always manage to cover themselves and explain away inconsistencies, whether it's Flip avoiding a Felix-administered lie detector test or the real Ron getting in the good graces of KKK Grand Wizard David Duke (Topher Grace) over the phone. Tension soon escalates with Duke planning a visit to Colorado Springs for "Ron"'s initiation and Felix, Ivanhoe, and Felix's wife Connie (Ashlie Atkinson), who's desperate to be accepted as one of the guys, planning to bomb a civil rights demonstration organized by Patrice.

Co-produced by the GET OUT team of Blumhouse and Jordan Peele, BLACKkKLANSMAN is Lee's best narrative film in at least a decade, maybe since 2006's INSIDE MAN. Alternately edge-of-your-seat suspenseful, funny (the great Isiah Whitlock Jr. stops by long enough to drop his signature catchphrase), satirical, and biliously enraged, the film balances its moods perfectly and satisfies on all fronts, serving as a 1970s-set police procedural and as a bitter polemic about the current state of Donald Trump's America. It's no coincidence that the film was released on the one-year anniversary of the Charlottesville tragedy, and Trump is invoked both in archival news footage and in the platitudes of Grace's sinister yet folksy ("You're darn tootin'!") David Duke, both in his political aspirations and his use of "America first" and the KKK"s background chatter of "making America great again." Lee even opens the film with a faux-editorial by fictional white supremacy advocate Dr. Kennebrew Beauregard (Alec Baldwin), whose disturbingly prophetic inflammatory hate speech sounds exactly like the Laura Ingraham diatribe that aired on Fox News just a couple of nights before the film's release. The riveting, kinetic third act balances the thwarting of an act of domestic terrorism along with a cross-cutting of "Ron"'s induction into the Klan and a celebratory viewing of D.W. Griffith's THE BIRTH OF A NATION and Patrice and her fellow black students listening to a lecture by elderly activist Mr. Turner (Harry Belafonte) as he recounts the horrifying 1916 lynching, mutilation, and burning of Jesse Washington, itself inspired by the renewed interest in the Klan following the box-office success of Griffith's film, which was praised by none other then President Woodrow Wilson.

Lee's output has been wildly inconsistent in recent years. Small, crowdfunded indies like 2012's RED HOOK SUMMER and his 2015 horror film DA SWEET BLOOD OF JESUS, a remake of the 1973 cult film GANJA AND HESS, were intermittently interesting curios at best, while his ill-advised 2013 remake of OLDBOY was a disaster that he disowned after the producers took it away from him in post-production (I haven't seen 2015's CHI-RAQ, which many praised as a return to form, or his barely-released, 2018 filmed play PASS OVER). But BLACKkKLANSMAN finds the 61-year-old auteur at a full fury on a level we haven't seen since DO THE RIGHT THING (or possibly BAMBOOZLED), a perfect mix of his commercial capabilities and his sociopolitical concerns. The cast is outstanding across the board, and over the course of its 135 minutes, a star is born with Washington, who turned to acting after his pro football career failed to pan out. His transformation into a leading man occurs with his character's growth over the film, and by the end, you'll absolutely see his dad in his performance. Dazzling from start to finish, and funny and frightening in equal measures, and with an utterly devastating final montage, BLACKkKLANSMAN immediately establishes itself as one of Lee's essential works and one of the best films of the year.

THE MEG
(US/China - 2018)

Directed by Jon Turtletaub. Written by Dean Georgaris, Jon Hoeber and Erich Hoeber. Cast: Jason Statham, Li Bingbing, Cliff Curtis, Rainn Wilson, Ruby Rose, Winston Chao, Robert Taylor, Page Kennedy, Jessica McNamee, Sophia Cai, Olafur Darri Olafsson, Masi Oka, Vathaya Pansringarm. (PG-13, 113 mins)

Based on Steve Alten's 1997 novel Meg and in development hell since about that time, THE MEG is enjoyably stupid summer junk food that may as well be titled DEEP BLUE SEA: JURASSIC SHARK. A $140 million US/China co-production, THE MEG offers a nice working vacation in New Zealand for its international cast, brought on board mainly to play paper-thin characters but really serving as chum for a giant CGI shark. The film opens with deep sea rescue hotshot Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) losing three members of his team in a split-second decision that meant losing three or losing everyone. He swears the vessel was attacked by a giant shark but no one sees it and he's written off as a coward who cracked under pressure. Cut to five years later, and the billion dollar underwater research facility Mana One, located 200 miles off the coast of China and run by Dr. Zhang (Winston Chao), has a small submersible disabled after breaking through the frozen thermocline and finding a second level of the ocean beyond the Mariana Trench, never before explored by man. Zhang and crew member Mac (Cliff Curtis) know there's only one man in the world capable of saving them: The Transporter. Er, I mean, Jonas, now a hopeless drunk idling his days away, living in a shithole apartment above a bar in Thailand, presumably next door to John Rambo.

Jonas agrees to help, especially since one of the stranded personnel is his ex-wife Lori (Jessica McNamee), and after a rescue that involves researcher Toshi (Masi Oka) sacrificing himself to save the others, they have visual proof of what Jonas saw five years earlier: the Megalodon, a giant, 70 ft. long shark thought to have gone extinct in prehistoric times. Trapped for centuries under the frozen thermocline breached by Zhang's research submersible, "The Meg" breaks free and begins attacking the research facility, also staffed by Zhang's daughter and colleague Suyin (Li Bingbing); her precocious, 8-year-old moppet daughter Meiying (Sophia Cai); engineer and computer hacker Jaxx (Ruby Rose as Pauley Perrette from NCIS); sneering Dr. Heller (Robert Taylor), with whom Jonas has some bad blood after Heller dismissed his claims about a giant shark years earlier; burly ox with a heart of gold "The Wall" (Olafur Darri Olafsson); comic relief black guy DJ (Page Kennedy), on hand to frequently yell "Aw, hell no!" and "This is not in my job description!"; and Morris (Rainn Wilson), the money behind Mana One, and an obnoxious billionaire man-child for whom the world is a playground.

Clearly, there are few surprises to be had in THE MEG, unless you consider the title creature's ability to somehow sneak up on people, lure them into traps, or the way people continue to venture out in vessels that can easily be devoured whole (also, the inevitable "It's right under us!" moment). It's nice to see the always-engaging Statham headlining his own action movie again after a series of middling underperformers threatened to relegate him to VOD until his addition to the FAST AND FURIOUS franchise gave his career a much-needed boost. He has a nice chemistry with both Li (though maybe not to the degree of John Barrowman and Jenny McShane in 2002's SHARK ATTACK 3: MEGALODON) and Cai and gets to work a good slow burn with his reactions to both Wilson's Morris and Taylor's Heller. As far as CGI sharks go, "The Meg" isn't bad until you start to see too much of it, though both Statham and director Jon Turtletaub (WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING, NATIONAL TREASURE) expressed dissatisfaction with the studio's decision to cut down the gore to secure a PG-13. While an unrated Blu-ray is inevitable, THE MEG as it stands is reasonably entertaining, never boring and often amusing brain-dead summer multiplex fare, and it even throws in a yapping dog named "Pippin" as a shout-out to the doomed black lab Pippet from the shark movie that will never be surpassed.

THE CHANGELING
(Canada - 1980)

Directed by Peter Medak. Written by William Gray and Diana Maddox. Cast: George C. Scott, Trish Van Devere, Melvyn Douglas, Jean Marsh, John Colicos, Barry Morse, Madeleine Thornton-Sherwood, Helen Burns, Frances Hyland, Ruth Springford, Eric Christmas, Roberta Maxwell, Bernard Behrens, J. Kenneth Campbell, Michelle Martin. (R, 107 mins)

Though a huge success in its native Canada, the tax shelter-era haunted house chiller THE CHANGELING was released to middling box office in the US in the spring of 1980, sandwiched between the previous year's megahit THE AMITYVILLE HORROR and the soon-to-be-released THE SHINING. While it didn't really find an audience in American theaters, it gained a strong cult following on cable and in video stores throughout the decade. Time has been kind to THE CHANGELING, and it's held in high regard today and belongs near the top of any short list of great haunted house horror movies, often mentioned in the same breath as 1963's THE HAUNTING and 1973's THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE. In a year where the horror genre was dominated by the controversy and game-changing impact of FRIDAY THE 13TH and the explosion of the slasher film, THE CHANGELING, directed by versatile career journeyman Peter Medak (THE RULING CLASS), brought a level of class and respectability thanks to the presence of revered, award-winning actors like George C. Scott and Melvyn Douglas and a notable lack of gore, exploitation, or even gratuitous post-EXORCIST/OMEN demonic histrionics (though one minor supporting character dies an OMEN-esque death late in the film). Even in 1980, THE CHANGELING felt like a bit of a throwback that didn't quite go in the direction that horror was trending, which may have diminished its commercial appeal then but almost certainly helped contribute to its ability to stand the test of time and remain as chillingly effective nearly 30 years later. The film has never been ideally represented on home video until now, thanks to Severin's recent Blu-ray release, which finally gives this classic the loving presentation it so richly deserves.

After his wife Joanna (Jean Marsh) and daughter Kathy (Michelle Martin) are tragically killed in a horrific road accident, music professor and composer John Russell (Scott) leaves NYC and moves to Seattle for a teaching position at his alma mater. Still grieving and looking for privacy and place to compose music, Russell rents the long-abandoned Chessman House, a massive, isolated Victorian mansion that's owned by the local historical society. It's more space than he needs, but there's a large music room with a grand piano, and he appears to be settling in until he's awakened every morning at 6:00 am by a loud banging that the caretaker writes off to the house having an "old furnace." Soon, there's strange sounds, doors slamming, faucets turning themselves on, and a brief apparition of a boy drowned in a bathtub. One historical society matron informs him "That house doesn't want people," criticizing society rep Claire Norman's (Trish Van Devere, Scott's wife) decision to lease the house to Russell. After other inexplicable instances--the discovery of a secret, hidden room, Russell finding a music box in the attic with a melody identical to the one he's been composing, and Kathy's ball bouncing down the steps, prompting him to throw it in a nearby river only to be greeted by the same, dripping wet ball bouncing down the steps to welcome him when he returns home--Russell and Claire make arrangements for a seance where the medium (Helen Burns) establishes contact with a restless spirit residing in the house and unable to find peace. At first, Russell assumes it's his daughter trying to make contact with him, but the spirit soon reveals itself to be a boy named Joseph who was killed in the house in 1906. What follows is a labyrinthine conspiracy mixing the paranormal and the political, especially once the events are brought to the attention of wealthy and powerful Senator Carmichael (Douglas), who seems to hold the key to the secret of what happened at the Chessman House over 70 years earlier and desperately wants to keep that truth buried.

THE CHANGELING is an absolutely terrifying film that's not easily shaken, with numerous spine-tingling scenes that stay with you and more than a few passing references to staple of the Italian horror and gialli (the central character being a composer, an old house with a horrible secret, the existence of a walled-up room where something unspeakable occurred). The believable performance of Scott keeps the film grounded and gives it an indisputable degree of seriousness and gravitas that a younger actor and character would've lacked. Scott's casting also links it to the then-trendy genre trope of aging Hollywood leading men doing horror (Gregory Peck in THE OMEN, William Holden in DAMIEN: OMEN II, Kirk Douglas in THE FURY, Charlton Heston in THE AWAKENING, etc), but the PATTON Oscar-winner plays it totally straight and never once conveys the feeling that the material is beneath him (for example, as great as it was, Peck wasn't that enthused about being in THE OMEN, and Holden only did the sequel after turning down the role that went to Peck and seeing what a blockbuster it became). The venerable Melvyn Douglas is also marvelous as the ailing politico with a dark secret. With a distinguished acting career that dated back to 1928, Douglas was coming off of his second Best Supporting Actor Oscar for 1979's BEING THERE (he also won for 1963's HUD) but certainly didn't phone it in for THE CHANGELING. The frail, 79-year-old actor can be seen late in the film slowly ascending a staircase that's engulfed in flames in a truly startling shot that wouldn't even be attempted today without the extensive deployment of unconvincing CGI ("Fucking Melvyn...he did it," Medak gushes on the Blu-ray's commentary track). A tireless workhorse to the end, Douglas died in August 1981, with his final two films released posthumously: the Peter Straub adaptation GHOST STORY (which teamed him with fellow legends Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, and John Houseman) hit theaters in December 1981, while the little-seen Roger Vadim caper comedy THE HOT TOUCH received a very spotty release much later in December 1982.

Like THE SHINING, which would be in theaters two months later, or any great ghost story for that matter, THE CHANGELING gets a ton of atmosphere out its haunted central location, in this case the expansive Chessman House, represented by an exterior facade and built on three-story soundstage at a Vancouver production facility at the cost of $500,000. While lacking the hypnotic Steadicam effect of what Stanley Kubrick accomplished with THE SHINING, Medak still uses the house's endless corridors and maze-like structure to maximize tension and terror, even featuring one of the best horror movie staircases this side of PSYCHO. 1972's THE RULING CLASS hailed the Hungarian-born Medak as a major new talent, but the disastrous, long-shelved 1973 Peter Sellers comedy GHOST IN THE NOONDAY SUN immediately derailed him. He's alternated between TV and film for his entire career, job-hopping on a diverse list of TV staples like SPACE: 1999, HART TO HART, REMINGTON STEELE, MAGNUM P.I., FAERIE TALE THEATER, HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREET, LAW & ORDER: SVU, THE WIRE, HOUSE, BREAKING BAD, and HANNIBAL. After THE CHANGELING, Medak floundered on the big screen in the '80s with misfires like ZORRO, THE GAY BLADE and THE MEN'S CLUB, but he enjoyed a bit of a resurgence in the early 1990s with a trio of acclaimed crime thrillers with THE KRAYS, LET HIM HAVE IT, and ROMEO IS BLEEDING before settling back into hired-gun mode with the likes of SPECIES II. The now-80-year-old Medak also directed the upcoming documentary THE GHOST OF PETER SELLERS, chronicling the chaotic shooting and colossal failure of GHOST IN THE NOONDAY SUN, which has clearly haunted him over the years like the spirit of Joseph in the Chessman House.

THE CHANGELING opening in
Toledo, OH on April 25, 1980.

SHOCK AND AWE
(US/UK - 2018)

There's a strong and critical indictment of a film to be made of the journalistic lapses and outright cheerleading in the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq based on the false claim of Saddam Hussein having WMDs, but SHOCK AND AWE isn't it. It wants to be another ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN or, to use a more recent example, SPOTLIGHT, but it loses its way when it constantly has to stop to hammer home the political leanings of director Rob Reiner and use its characters to spout ham-fisted talking points and gratuitous, clunky info dumps. Too frequently, SHOCK AND AWE feels less like a film utilizing a screenplay and one that instead just has its actors reading old transcripts of COUNTDOWN WITH KEITH OLBERMANN. Shot back-to-back with Reiner's 2017 film LBJ, SHOCK AND AWE reteams the veteran director with that film's screenwriter Joey Hartstone and star Woody Harrelson, the latter cast as Knight Ridder reporter Jonathan Landay who, along with Warren Strobel (James Marsden), became the unintended Woodward & Bernstein of the WMD story. Unlike Woodward & Bernstein, their work wasn't fully recognized until after the fact, when the media--particularly The New York Times, who infamously issued an apology for their kid gloves coverage--took a lot of criticism for essentially being derelict in their duty and, as Knight Ridder Washington Bureau chief John Walcott (played here by Reiner) puts it, "working as stenographers for the Bush Administration." Landay, Strobel, and Walcott, along with weary, cynical Vietnam War correspondent and We Were Soldiers author Joe Galloway (Tommy Lee Jones), dug deep into the Bush White House's false claims of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction, leading to the invasion of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.

SHOCK AND AWE has the potential to be a fine movie about investigative journalism, but Reiner succumbs to polemics and seems content to coast on everything he remembers from ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN. There's numerous scenes of Landay and Strobel on the phone with sources who give them bombshell information, prompting them to incredulously ask, wide-eyed and jaw agape, "OK, wait a minute...so you're telling me...?" The film even has its own Deep Throat, with Galloway having clandestine meetings over pad thai at a hole-in-the-wall Asian restaurant where he gets classified intel from a high-ranking intelligence official known as "The Usual Suspect" (Richard Schiff). Jessica Biel has a few fleeting appearances as Strobel's girlfriend (their first date, where she wows him by going into the history of the Shia-Sunni conflict, makes her sound like a Manic Pixie MSNBC Host), and Milla Jovovich is badly-utilized as Landay's Yugoslav-born wife, who has nothing to do but drop heavy-handed talking points with clumsy dialogue about The New York Times being "propaganda." There's also an inept attempt to put a human face to the WMD lies, with periodic cutaways to a young black man (Luke Tennie) compelled to enlist after 9/11 only to end up a paraplegic in a roadside IED explosion. But Reiner can't even do that without having the kid's dad intently watching HANNITY & COLMES (which he calls "the news") and nodding along in agreement with what Sean Hannity says as his wife yells "Stop calling that the news!" That's the problem with SHOCK AND AWE: even if you're in agreement with Reiner's political stance, it grows cumbersome and tiresome when the story is put on pause every few minutes so someone can get on a soapbox and deliver speechifying talking points. The barely-released SHOCK AND AWE dropped on VOD and just 100 screens a month ago for a box office gross of $77,000. I missed LBJ and in fact, though he's stayed very busy, I haven't seen anything Reiner's done since 2007's THE BUCKET LIST until this. Anyone see FLIPPED? THE MAGIC OF BELLE ISLE? BEING CHARLIE? Remember when Rob Reiner movies were a big deal? (R, 91 mins)

THE YELLOW BIRDS
(US/UK/China - 2018)

An intermittently intriguing Iraq War drama, THE YELLOW BIRDS is based on a 2012 novel by Kevin Powers but still feels like it should've been made a decade ago around the time of THE HURT LOCKER or STOP-LOSS. There's some powerful moments and strong performances, but it never seems to be building to anything even as its mystery is revealed at the end. Completed in early 2016, the film was released straight to DirecTV with a cursory VOD and very limited theatrical dumping to follow, and in the home stretch, it exhibits the ragged feel of something that's been recut or cut down from something bigger (it ran 15 minutes longer when it screened at Sundance in early 2017), with the arc of a key character feeling rushed and incomplete in a way that diminishes the impact. Told in a non-linear fashion, THE YELLOW BIRDS focuses on two soldiers who become friends in boot camp: 20-year-old Brandon Bartle (Alden Ehrenreich) and 18-year-old Daniel Murphy (Tye Sheridan). Bartle seems to have a troubled background, doesn't respond to his single mother's (Toni Collette) attempts to reach out, and he joined the Army out of bored aimlessness, while "Murph" is shy, quiet, and comes from a stable home, is doted on by his loving mother (Jennifer Aniston) and ex-Marine father (Lee Tergesen), and has plans to follow his military service with college. Taken under the wing of tough-as-nails Sgt. Sterling (Jack Huston), Bartle and Murph see extensive combat, but as the film jumps around, we see that only Bartle returns home, suffering from debilitating PTSD--even attacking his mother at one point in a fit of rage--and taking off when an Army CID investigator (Jason Patric) comes snooping around to ask him some questions about Murph, who never returned home and disappeared without a trace.

A replacement brought in when screenwriter and intended director David Lowery (AIN'T THEM BODIES SAINTS) bailed to do Disney's PETE'S DRAGON remake, French-born filmmaker Alexandre Moors, best known for directing music videos for Kendrick Lamar and Nicki Minaj and helming his first feature since the 2013 Beltway sniper chronicle BLUE CAPRICE, brings the expected visceral intensity to the combat sequences. These sequences recall Iraq War standard-bearers like THE HURT LOCKER and AMERICAN SNIPER, but having come along in such a tardy fashion, they can't help but suffer from an overall familiarity. The non-linear arrangement keeps things generally compelling, but the film only starts to stumble when all of the pieces begin to coalesce. Murph starts thousand-yard-staring out of nowhere, and what happens to him is confusingly conveyed and the decision made by Bartle and Sterling doesn't seem plausible. It feels like both Patric and Huston had their roles significantly hacked down in the editing room, but Collette and especially Aniston--one of 41 (!) credited producers--are excellent in their limited screen time. Ehrenreich and Sheridan are also good, and it's obvious that this grim drama was a tough sell that Lionsgate probably sat on since early 2016, waiting patiently to time its belated release with Ehrenreich's turn in SOLO (Sheridan also had READY PLAYER ONE in theaters a couple months earlier). Some strong moments and solid performances, but in the end, THE YELLOW BIRDS just comes up a little short. (R, 95 mins)

WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS?
aka THE COED MURDERS
(Italy - 1974; US release 1977)

Directed by Massimo Dallamano. Written by Ettore Sanza and Massimo Dallamano. Cast: Giovanna Ralli, Claudio Cassinelli, Mario Adorf, Franco Fabrizi, Farley Granger, Marina Berti, Paolo Turco, Corrado Gaipa, Micaela Pignatelli, Ferdinando Murolo, Eleonora Morano, Sherry Buchanan, Roberta Paladini, Renata Moar, Adriana Falco, Lorenzo Piani, Giancarlo Badessi, Steffen Zacharias, Attilio Dottesio. (Unrated, 91 mins)

The second film in a loosely-connected trilogy of "schoolgirl in peril" thrillers, WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS? is a semi-sequel of sorts to 1972's giallo/krimi hybrid WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE?, jettisoning the German "krimi" element to instead function as a giallo/poliziotteschi mash-up. Both films were directed and co-written by Massimo Dallamano, who earlier established himself as a top cinematographer for Sergio Leone on A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE before becoming a filmmaker in his own right. Dallamano was set to direct the third film in the series, 1978's ENIGMA ROSSO, aka RED RINGS OF FEAR, but was killed in a car accident in late 1976 before finishing the script, which was completed by others with directing duties assigned to Alberto Negrin. All three films share the "schoolgirls in peril" motif, but where SOLANGE dealt with a string of brutal murders--where a group of teenage girls are stabbed in the vagina--committed in the wake of an unspeakable, heartbreaking tragedy, DAUGHTERS takes sociopolitical aim at the powers that be in the upper echelon of Italian society, with its darkly misanthropic tone abetted by one of Stelvio Cipriani's top scores, with a chipper-sounding, wordless vocal refrain that, given the subject matter, comes across as incongruously unsettling.

The film opens with the discovery of a nude 15-year-old girl found hanged in a small apartment that appears to be a secret love nest. Insp. Valentini (Mario Adorf) catches the case, but is soon replaced by the more bullish Silvestri (Claudio Cassinelli) and his partner Sgt. Giardana (Ferdinando Murolo), who team with deputy D.A. Vittoria Stori (Giovanna Ralli) in their investigation. For much of its first half, DAUGHTERS is more of a polizia-tinged procedural than a giallo, with Silvestri and Stori looking into the background of the dead girl, Silvia (Sherry Buchanan), who they soon discover was murdered at a different location, then taken to the apartment, with her body staged to look like a suicide. They also learn that Silvia was part of a secret teenage prostitution ring, much to the dismay of her wealthy parents, with her mother (Marina Berti) expressing outrage at finding her stash of birth control pills, and her father (Hollywood expat Farley Granger, in one of several gialli he made around this time) remorseful that he loved his daughter but never really tried to get close to her. Before long, the giallo end of the story kicks in as a meat cleaver-wielding hired killer decked out in leather and a black motorcycle helmet starts going after the other girls in the ring as well as any clients who pose a threat at exposing the powerful forces in charge of running it and profiting off the forced sexual servitude of underage girls.

From the beginning, Dallamano pulls no punches with WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS? Valentini's reading of the coroner's report on Silvia's murder is graphic, mentioning the semen of multiple men found in her vagina, anus, and stomach, and later on, one scene where Silvestri and Stori listen in shock and disgust to secretly-recorded tapes of teenage girls being subjected to abhorrent sexual violence--including an impotent john who resorts to penetrating the girls with a bottle--is excruciating. With 1970s Italy in constant political upheaval and with crime rampant, there was also an epidemic of teenagers running away from home, disappearing, falling into drug abuse, etc. Secret prostitution rings were a recurring theme in Italian genre fare around this time, as seen in ENIGMA ROSSO as well as Sergio Martino's THE SUSPICIOUS DEATH OF A MINOR (1975), which also starred Cassinelli, Paolo Cavara's PLOT OF FEAR (1976), and Carlo Lizzani's bluntly-titled THE TEENAGE PROSTITUTION RACKET (1975), arguably the CHRISTIANE F of Red Brigade-era Italy. DAUGHTERS does an excellent job of balancing its dual polizia and giallo nature, with some dizzying camera work in a couple of chase scenes as well as a terrific suspense set piece with the killer pursuing Stori through a dark parking garage. There's also a few jarring moments of over-the-top splatter (one that prefigures a famous bit in Argento's TENEBRAE) along the way to its appropriately bleak, cynical, and pissed-off ending.

WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS? wasn't released in the US until 1977, when short-lived exploitation outfit Peppercorn-Wormser sent it out on the grindhouse and drive-in circuit. It was re-released in 1980 as THE COED MURDERS, but never made it to video stores in VHS' 1980s glory days. It's been difficult to see in America outside of the bootleg circuit until Arrow's recent Blu-ray release with numerous extras, including a commentary by film historian Troy Howarth that takes time to give props to the unsung dubbing heroes revoicing the actors on the English version. Arrow's restoration really does the film justice in its 2.35:1 aspect ratio, of which former cinematographer Dallamano takes full advantage. It also benefits from a strong cast, though one wishes the great Adorf wasn't sidelined for much of the film, even though Cassinelli and Ralli make a fine LAW & ORDER: SVU team. Veteran actress Ralli was back in Italy after a brief attempt to break into Hollywood with James Coburn in the 1966 Blake Edwards farce WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE WAR, DADDY?, the 1967 Stephen Boyd/Yvette Mimieux heist comedy THE CAPER OF THE GOLDEN BULLS, and the 1970 George Peppard actioner CANNON FOR CORDOBA. She's given an especially substantive role, and her casting is practically progressive--perhaps even approaching woke--on the part of Dallamano, considering the unusual notion of a strong, independent female lead in a 1970s Italian polizia, a genre where women usually existed as victims, complaining girlfriends, or abused junkies. Ralli's Stori takes no shit from anyone, is respected by her male colleagues, lives alone, and she and Cassinelli's Silvestri never hook up. Fans of Aldo Lado's NIGHT TRAIN MURDERS will recognize Marina Berti and Franco Fabrizi in familiar roles, with Berti as the distraught mother of a victim and Fabrizi as a voyeuristic Peeping Tom. Also worth noting are some of the young actresses cast as the girls in the prostitution ring, with Mississippi-born Buchanan going on to a reasonably busy Eurotrash career over the next decade (TENTACLES, THE HEROIN BUSTERS, ESCAPE FROM GALAXY 3, DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D.), Micaela Pignatelli co-starring as James Franciscus' wife in Enzo G. Castellari's infamous JAWS ripoff GREAT WHITE, and Renata Moar, whose place in film history would be secured the next year as the girl forced to eat a handful of human excrement in Pier Paolo Pasolini's SALO, a moment preserved on the cover of the film's Criterion release.

MILE 22
(US/China - 2018)

Directed by Peter Berg. Written by Lea Carpenter. Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Lauren Cohan, Iko Uwais, John Malkovich, Ronda Rousey, Terry Kinney, Carlo Alban, Sam Medina, Natasha Goubskaya, Chae Rin Lee, Emily Skeggs, Keith Arthur Bolden, Poorna Jagannathan, Peter Berg, Nikolai Nikolaeff, Sean Avery, David Garelik. (R, 93 mins)

A fictional offshoot of actor-turned-director Peter Berg's "Mark Wahlberg: American Hero" trilogy, MILE 22 sees the duo hitting rock bottom and serves as irrefutable proof that whatever potential Berg might've had is gone and he's totally regressing as a filmmaker. LONE SURVIVOR was prone to military cliches but was a solid, well-acted film overall, and the underappreciated DEEPWATER HORIZON was even better, probably because it didn't paint Wahlberg as the sole hero and gave a lot of screen time to Kurt Russell and other actors, making it more of an ensemble piece. PATRIOTS DAY, Wahlberg/Berg's laughably simplistic take on the Boston Marathon bombing, which placed Wahlberg's completely fictional everyman cop as a tough-talking Johnny On-the-Spot who's magically at the center of all the action, even barking orders at FBI guys and government officials who hold off on making their next move until they consult with him, was a huge stumble, and MILE 22 finds the pair suffocating on the toxic fumes of their alpha male bullshit. This film is atrocious on nearly every level, from its confused plot to its quick-cut action sequences, which are over-edited to the point of sheer incoherence, to Berg functioning as less of a director and more of an enabler who's derelict in his duties, doing nothing to rein in his star, who turns in one of the most embarrassingly self-indulgent performances in recent memory. It's Mark Wahlberg imploding into bad self-parody by doing a ludicrously amped-up impression of "Mark Wahlberg," and that's long before another character actually says "Say hi to your mother for me." Imagine Jason Bourne as a loud, loathsome, motor-mouthed asshole and you'll get an idea of how insufferably grating an over-the-top Wahlberg is here. When John Malkovich yells "Stop monologuing, you bipolar fuck," one gets the impression that the line was unscripted.

Wahlberg is James Silva, the leader of an elite CIA black ops/counterterrorism unit called Ground Branch. He's supposed to be the best of the best, but as the opening sequence at a suburban American safe house of a rogue Russian terror cell and the subsequent 90 minutes demonstrate, a lot of colleagues seem to die on his watch. This isn't surprising seeing that he's almost like the perfect hero for the Trump era: a vein-popping anger management case and bellicose know-it-all prone to blowhard lectures that include long quotes from Wikipedia, frothing-at-the-mouth tantrums, dismissive insults to his colleagues, and endlessly yapping displays of bloated arrogance that make it hard to believe anyone would work under this prick, let alone lay down their lives for him. In an unnamed Asian country, nine containers of cesium have gone missing and Silva's team is activated by remote Overwatch commander Bishop (Malkovich) to deal with Li Noor (THE RAID star Iko Uwais), a cop and former Indonesian government agent who knows the worldwide locations of the missing cesium and wants asylum to the US in exchange for the information. This leads to a sort-of DIPSHIT GAUNTLET as Silva and his team, which includes Alice (Lauren Cohan as Milla Jovovich) and Sam (Ronda Rousey), have to safeguard and escort Li on a 22-mile trip across the city to the airport, all the while evading corrupt local cops charged with taking them out.

It speaks to Berg's clueless approach to MILE 22 that he has Uwais onboard and utterly squanders the opportunity by feeling the need to edit his action sequences into a scrambled, eye-glazing blur. THE RAID and its even better sequel THE RAID 2 were perfect showcases for the Indonesian action star, and Berg must be a fan since the last half hour of MILE 22 makes a sudden switch from DIPSHIT GAUNTLET to DIPSHIT RAID, with Silva, Alice, and Li trapped in a high-rise apartment complex as corrupt local cop Axel's (Sam Medina) goons try to corner and kill them. Working from a script by Lea Carpenter that should've been redacted in pre-production, Berg has made this film a loud, headache-inducing mess, with constant shaky-cam, bizarre camera angles, an over-reliance on close-ups, characters screaming at each other for no reason, and Wahlberg allowed to run rampant, unleashed, unchecked, and completely out of control, shouting at everyone and, in his more introspective moments, constantly snapping his wristband as a way of controlling his fury (it never seems to work). There's half-assed attempts at topicality with passing mentions of "collusion" and "Russian election hacking," and at character development with Alice in a custody battle with her ex-husband, an almost instantly-abandoned subplot that seems to exist only to give Berg some brief screen time as the asshole ex. Rousey's character has nothing to do but sit and watch Silva hurl her birthday cupcake across the room in a fit of rage like a toddler who can't find his binky, and Malkovich, sporting a distracting buzzcut wig and sneakers with a suit, tries out a mannered, halting, staccato delivery that suggests Christopher Walken having a stroke. The abrupt ending leaves the door wide open for a sequel, a presumptuous way to end things that's right in line with its abrasive hero's stratospherically-inflated sense of confidence even though almost everyone bites it under his command and he never sees the big plot twist coming. Cohan shows some action potential and Uwais gives it his best shot even though his work is repeatedly sabotaged by his director, but MILE 22 is just torpedoed from the start by Wahlberg in one of the most aggressively off-putting "hero" star turns you'll ever see in a major movie.

BLACK WATER
(US - 2018)

A more apt title for this nautical non-actioner might be ESCAPE PLAN: RUN STAGNANT, RUN DULL, as cult action heroes Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren reunite once again, though this is really a JCVD vehicle with a glorified cameo from Dolph. Van Damme is Scott Wheeler, an off-the-grid CIA agent who wakes up on a sub that doubles as a secret black-ops detention facility, located in deep waters off the southern coast of the US. He has no memory of how he got there, but he stands accused of traitorous actions against the US, specifically trying to sell classified intel on a drive that's gone missing. He repeatedly professes his innocence, even under the threat of gruesome eyeball injection torture by rogue agent Ferris (JCVD's old DEATH WARRANT nemesis Patrick Kilpatrick). Of course, Wheeler's being set up by former boss Rhodes (Al Sapienza), whose goons (the inevitable Kris Van Damme among them) take over the sub in search of Wheeler after he escapes from his holding cell and finds an unlikely ally in rookie agent Taylor (Jasmine Waltz), who doesn't buy what her bosses are selling her. Lundgren appears briefly in the beginning, as a German detainee named Marco, offering sage advice to Wheeler from an adjacent cell, but he then vanishes for most of the next hour and change before Wheeler springs him and then he finds a way to completely sit out the climax, ample evidence that Lundgren didn't spend more than a day working on this. If you're expecting an enjoyably old-school, throwback Van Damme/Lundgren actioner from the glory days of 1992, then you're better off rewatching UNIVERSAL SOLDIER. Murky and slow-moving, BLACK WATER is an inauspicious directing debut for cinematographer Pasha Patriki (GRIDLOCKED), not helped in the slightest by the fact that passing this tedious submarine thriller off as a JCVD/Dolph teaming is some straight-up Das Bullshit. (R, 105 mins)

BLEEDING STEEL
(China - 2017; US release 2018)

When his Liam Neeson-esque revenge thriller THE FOREIGNER hit US theaters last year, many moviegoers probably assumed it was a comeback of sorts for Jackie Chan, who, other than voice work in the KUNG-FU PANDA movies, hadn't been seen onscreen in American multiplexes since the 2010 remake of THE KARATE KID. Quite the contrary, as the 64-year-old action icon remains as busy as ever, averaging three to four movies a year for the Asian market, most of which get no publicity whatsoever on their way to domestic VOD and Redbox kiosks. Chan's most recent Chinese film to stealthily drop in the US is BLEEDING STEEL, and it's one of his worst, an incoherent hodgepodge of ideas and styles that tries to be everything and succeeds at nothing. It's mostly dour and serious but has slapstick moments that come out of nowhere, and it might make a good kids or at least YA movie, but it's R-rated and far too bloody and violent for younger audiences. Even worse, it's no fun at all, and Chan is uncharacteristically boring as Lin Dong, a Hong Kong special agent whose young daughter XiXi (Elena Cai) is dying of leukemia in a hospital. He's unable to make it to her deathbed when he's called upon by his government superiors to deal with securing Dr. James (veteran Australian character actor Kim Gyngell), a recently defected geneticist whose witness protection has been compromised. Lin and his fellow officers protecting Jones are attacked by a "bioroid" creation of James' called Andrew (Callan Mulvey) and his group of pale, leather-trenchcoated bald dudes who look like they wandered in from a DARK CITY cosplay convention.

Jump ahead 13 years, and Lin ends up in Sydney, Australia when sci-fi author Rick Rogers (Damien Garvey) is killed by the Woman in Black (Tess Haubrich), a ruthless, bloodthirsty underling of a now-ailing Andrew. Rogers' latest book Bleeding Steel shares an alarming number of details that go into specifics on James' experimental work on Andrew, and it turns out the writer was buying the session notes of a witch (Gillian Jones) who's been serving as a quack therapist to confused orphaned teenager Nancy (Nanan Ou-Yang), who feels like her memories aren't her own and she isn't who she thinks she is. That's because she's really XiXi, who didn't die, and was instead treated with a regenerative drug by Dr. Jones. Lin figures this out and teams with younger sidekick Leeson (Show Lo) to protect his daughter from a sickly Andrew, who wants to transfuse her blood to give himself unlimited biomechanical powers. Or something. Chan (one of 50 credited producers) and director/co-writer Leo Zhang take this nonsense a lot more seriously than they should, so much so that it doesn't really gel when the star takes a few lengthy sabbaticals so the film can focus on Show's puerile antics, which include some asinine kung-fu moves while his pants fall down, accompanied by what sounds like someone trying to do the SEINFELD bass line. There's also a wacky food court brawl where an undercover Lin is working at a fast-food joint and wearing a nametag that reads "Jackie Chan." Only Haubrich seems to find the right tone in playing her role, and BLEEDING STEEL comes alive whenever she's onscreen, especially in the one standout sequence, a fight with Chan atop one of the shells of the Sydney Opera House. The film does earn some points for pulling arguably the most shameless deus ex machina in recent memory out of its ass in the climactic battle on Andrew's spacecraft (!) hovering over Sydney (!!), but this is far and away the dumbest movie Jackie Chan has ever made, and not in a good way. (R, 109 mins)

DAMASCUS COVER
(Singapore/UK - 2018)

Based on a 1977 novel by Howard Kaplan but with its setting updated to 1989 just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, DAMASCUS COVER is a spy thriller that wants to be both a BOURNE actioner and a methodical TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY-style espionage saga from the John Le Carre school, and definitely landing more in the latter camp with its low-key presentation and slow pacing that's frequently too plodding for its own good. The notion of showing the evolution of the spy game from the Cold War to the eventual War on Terror shows that director/co-writer Daniel Zelik Berk (a veteran producer whose most high-profile directing credit is the 1998 TV-movie SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK...FOR MORE) has put some thought into the project, but DAMASCUS COVER never really catches fire. Jonathan Rhys Meyers is Ari Ben-Sion, an undercover Mossad agent based in Berlin and posing as a German businessman named "Hans Hoffman." After he botches an extraction of an asset who blew his cover, he tries to redeem himself with his cantankerous boss Miki (the late John Hurt in his final role before his death in January 2017) by volunteering for a dangerous assignment that involves smuggling a chemical weapons scientist and his family out of Syria. He also crosses paths with an intrepid USA Today photojournalist (Olivia Thirlby) while trying to keep her at a distance, and ingratiates himself into the Damascus business world by glad-handing with a wealthy ex-Nazi (Jurgen Prochnow) in a time-consuming subplot that doesn't really go anywhere.

Sir John Hurt (1940-2017)

As expected, the story does some globetrotting, jumping between Berlin, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Damascus, with some attractive areas of Morocco portraying Israel and Syria, and there's the usual double-crosses and people not being who they claim to be, but DAMASCUS COVER just sort of putters along with no real sense of urgency and very little suspense. Igal Naor has a few good moments as a Syrian general, but Rhys Meyers is a bland hero and Prochnow has nothing to do (and I'm pretty sure that's a publicity shot of Prochnow from 1983's THE KEEP serving as the file photo in his character's Mossad dossier). It's competently made and looks nice, but DAMASCUS COVER is a footnote to the careers of everyone involved and it's notable only as Hurt's last film (he was cast as Neville Chamberlain in DARKEST HOUR but his battle with cancer forced him to back out just before shooting began, and he was replaced by Ronald Pickup). He's the old pro he always was in his sporadic appearances as Miki (who isn't too far removed from his Control in TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY) and by the end, one gets the feeling that a more intriguing film could've been made about his and Naor's characters. Hurt's final shot near the end, hanging up a pay phone after somberly sighing "Goodbye, my friend," serves as a perfect farewell to a wonderful actor. (R, 94 mins)

PAPILLON
(US - 2018)

Directed by Michael Noer. Written by Aaron Guzikowski. Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Rami Malek, Eve Hewson, Yorick van Wageningen, Roland Moller, Tommy Flanagan, Michael Socha, Joel Basman, Christopher Fairbank, Slavko Sobin, Antonio de la Cruz. (R, 133 mins)

Based on the 1969 memoir of Devil's Island escapee Henri Charriere, the 1973 hit PAPILLON provided the legendary Steve McQueen with one of his most indelible characters, even if the film wasn't exactly faithful to Charriere, nicknamed "Papillon" because of the butterfly tattoo on his chest. A remake was completely unnecessary but we've got one anyway, and while it's based more on the 1973 film's script by Dalton Trumbo and Lorenzo Semple Jr., it still takes its own, different liberties. The results are better than expected, due in large part to its straightforward approach to its action sequences (who would've thought camera stability and visual coherence would be considered "old school?"), and guys throwing punches that actually sound like real punches hitting flesh. It's also R-rated versus the 1973's PG (it was originally R, but got a PG on appeal, and it does get away with a lot for a PG), allowing acclaimed Danish filmmaker Michael Noer (R, NORTHWEST), making his American debut, much more room for graphic violence and brutality, including a knife fight in a shower that clearly shows Noer is a fan of EASTERN PROMISES. The central story remains the same, opening in 1931 Paris with safecracker Papillon (Charlie Hunnam) keeping a few diamonds from a recent job for himself and being framed by his employer (Christopher Fairbank) for the murder of a pimp and sentenced to a brutal penal colony in French Guiana. Once there, he forms an alliance with wealthy counterfeiter Louis Dega (Rami Malek in Dustin Hoffman's 1973 role), offering protection in exchange for bankrolling an attempted escape. Time and again, Papillon runs afoul of Warden Barrot (Yorick van Wageningen), earning two-year and five-year stints in solitary. Eventually, Papillon plans his most ambitious escape attempt yet, using the last of Dega's money--usually stored in his rectum--to secure a boat from a local trader (Hunnam's SONS OF ANARCHY co-star Tommy Flanagan) as he and Dega form an unholy alliance with brutish Celier (Roland Moller) and young Maturette (Joel Basman).

Shot two years ago and tied up in part due to the apparently-defunct production company Red Granite's legal problems tied to racketeering and an ongoing Malaysian government scandal (Red Granite had to pay a $60 million settlement to the US Justice Department and the company's name is no longer in the credits or the advertising), PAPILLON '18 hits all the same bullet points as PAPILLON '73 with some changes of varying significance--a changed name here, a different circumstance there. But Noer and screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski (PRISONERS) include enough unique touches to allow their version to stand on its own. It's also an unexpected development that, unlike almost all prison wardens in popular culture, von Wageningen's Barrot is stern and unsympathetic without crossing the line into sadism, even almost begrudgingly respecting Papillon's resolve for emerging from years in silent solitary confinement with his mind intact. Hunnam and Malik are very good, but they're obviously not McQueen and Hoffman, and they'd probably be the first to agree with that point. No one in this film sounds French but then, neither did the stars of PAPILLON '73.

One minor stumble of PAPILLON '18 is that some of the vernacular in its early scenes doesn't really sound very "1931 Paris," especially when characters start dropping tough guy GOODFELLASisms like "Fuck that piece of shit!" and "Cut his fuckin' balls off!" (there's even another variant later as Flanagan's character yells "Pay me or fuck you!"). There's a nightmare sequence as Papillon comes close to breaking in solitary that looks like an outtake from Alejandro Jodorowky's SANTA SANGRE, and when he's eventually condemned for life to Devil's Island, his arrival has surreal, otherworldly feel of AGUIRRE and HEART OF GLASS-era Werner Herzog (or, possibly, the "Village of the Crazies" sequence in GYMKATA). Such arthouse flourishes aren't something usually seen in a generally mainstream summer release, and the location work in Serbia and Malta, the very physically committed performances of Hunnam and the other actors, and the reliance on as much practical shooting as possible on painstakingly constructed recreations of the penal colony give the film a real-world tangibility that's lost a lot these days as more films utilize CGI and greenscreen for even the simplest shots (Hunnam seems drawn to this sort of thing, between this and James Gray's THE LOST CITY OF Z). Regardless of its superfluous nature, PAPILLON '18's work ethic is admirable. It obviously doesn't supplant it predecessor, but it's fine film in its own right, and better and more compelling than it has any business being.

GIALLO IN VENICE
aka GIALLO A VENEZIA
(Italy - 1979)

Directed by Mario Landi. Written by Aldo Serio. Cast: Leonora Fani, Jeff Blynn, Gianni Dei, Maria Angela Giordano, Michele Renzullo, Eolo Capritti, Vassili Karis, Giancarlo Del Duca, Maurizio Streccioni. (Unrated, 99 mins)

After the genre reached its pinnacle with Dario Argento's 1975 classic DEEP RED, the Italian giallo didn't really have anywhere else to go. DEEP RED tangentially involved the supernatural with its story kicking off with a medium sensing the presence of a murderer who will kill again only to find that she's the next victim. Inspired to explore this new direction, Argento abandoned the giallo for several years to go into the full-on supernatural madness of SUSPIRIA and INFERNO. Gialli were still being made by others, but they were getting increasingly sleazy with the likes of Andrea Bianchi's STRIP NUDE FOR YOUR KILLER (1975) and Alberto Negrin's RED RINGS OF FEAR (1978). Some gialli--most notably Roberto Montero's 1972 offering THE SLASHER...IS THE SEX MANIAC!--were retrofitted with newly-shot porno inserts and released on the XXX circuit. When the Montero film was rechristened PENETRATION in 1976, it featured new hardcore footage of Harry Reems and Tina Russell, much to the chagrin of SLASHER star Farley Granger, who sued to have to it yanked--no pun intended--from porno houses. The introduction of such material foreshadowed the direction the giallo would take by the end of the 1970s before getting a second wind with Argento's 1982 masterpiece TENEBRAE. With interest in the genre waning, directors like Argento, Sergio Martino, and Lucio Fulci (whose 1977 film THE PSYCHIC is a solid giallo from the period) moved on to other things, which cleared the way for the D-list journeymen of Italian exploitation to scrounge for table scraps and make their mark in the mercifully short-lived giallo/porno crossover craze of 1979.

The attempted mainstreaming of pornography reached its apex (or nadir, depending on your POV) with 1980's epic CALIGULA, but as far as the giallo is concerned, it sounds a lot more fun in theory than in practice, because the two signature examples of the movement are both grungy, grimy, ugly, bottom-of-the-barrel affairs. For Eurotrash fans and Italian horror connoisseurs, PLAY MOTEL and GIALLO IN VENICE (neither film received a US theatrical release) had a certain mystique about them when they languished in obscurity in the olden, 1990s days of mail order catalogs and barely-watchable transfers on bootleg VHS often so dodgy and difficult to come by that they'd be in Italian without English subtitles, all the proof you need that the plots in these things didn't even matter. Directed by Mario Gariazzo (THE EERIE MIDNIGHT HORROR SHOW), PLAY MOTEL was released on Blu-ray and DVD by Raro a couple of years ago, and it was decidedly not worth the wait. Star Ray Lovelock (THE LIVING DEAD AT MANCHESTER MORGUE) called it the worst movie he ever made and he's probably right. PLAY MOTEL exists in both hardcore and softcore variants, the softcore basically featuring everything but the money shots, and the hardcore footage not involving established, "name" actors like Lovelock and Anthony Steffen. It's a giallo in the sense that people are killed, but the story of blackmail at a no-tell motel is completely DOA, and the sex scenes aren't even remotely erotic. Likewise with the even more notorious GIALLO IN VENICE, directed by Mario Landi, who would also helm 1980's similarly scuzzy fake PATRICK sequel PATRICK STILL LIVES, the most famous scene of which involves C-list Eurocult sex goddess Maria Angela Giordano getting impaled by a fireplace poker rammed into her vagina.

That's pretty much the level you're at with GIALLO IN VENICE, a problematic 99-minute Vulture/AV Club/Vice doomsday scenario that also features an almost identical vaginal violation involving a large pair of scissors that's somehow less distasteful for what it depicts and more offensive for the cheap and shoddy way in which the gore effect is accomplished. Unlike PLAY MOTEL, GIALLO IN VENICE actually makes a few half-assed overtures at pretending to be a giallo, and in better hands, a couple of its plot twists and a few genuinely striking shots, even if achieved accidentally, might've made it at least a serviceable justification for the giallo/porno mash-up. But it's saddled with some terrible actors, a hilariously inappropriate score, which has graphic scenes of sexual sadism accompanied by what sounds like the kind of brassy, big-band orchestration more suited for an old MGM musical, and endless, extremely unerotic and unpleasant sexual interludes. It never quite goes full-on porno, but there's explicit female masturbation, a cunnilingus scene that leaves almost nothing to the imagination, and an onscreen erection with a guy jerking off in a movie theater, all showcasing the finest in 1979 pubic grooming standards, plus one of the least subtle uses of an oyster you'll ever see. The gore is also over-the-top, but done so amateurishly that you can't help but laugh at it if the film doesn't put you to sleep. It's really hard to believe that an X-worthy grinder filled with wall-to-wall sex and violence could be as boring as GIALLO AS VENICE.

The film utilizes a flashback-heavy structure, opening with the murders of Venice architect Fabio (Gianni Dei) and his wife Flavia (Leonora Fani). Enter shaggy-haired, hard-boiled egg-fixated Insp. De Pol (Jeff Blynn, a Maurizio Merli clone who looks more like Jefferson Starship frontman Mickey Thomas here) going through their sordid life to find out what happened. He questions her friend Marzia (Giordano), who has a drug rap with dealer Marco (Maurizio Streccioni). Marzia tells De Pol of the couple's dirty secrets, with Fabio a sadistic exhibitionist with a strong desire for public sex with Flavia, often hoping that strangers joined in (including a movie theater perv who's silently encouraged by Fabio to jerk off on his wife). Flavia tried to go along, especially since Fabio couldn't achieve arousal unless he was humiliating her, even agreeing to take part in an orgy, which was documented in a series of photos De Pol's slovenly, Kojak-looking sidekick (Eolo Capritti) snags from Marzia's apartment. Soon, a sunglassed killer (Michele Renzullo, who resembles a balding Klaus Kinski) kills a hooker (the vaginal scissor stabbing) and then sets his sights on Marzia, who dumped him after the pair briefly dated.

Jeff Blynn as Maurizio Merli as Mickey Thomas

It should become clear to De Pol who the killer is, but he's unquestionably the worst detective in the entire giallo canon. He's there when the killer leaves an obscene message for Marzia, who claims that it's an ex but he doesn't bother asking her the guy's name, and he has an eyewitness but doesn't ask any follow-up questions, probably because he can't think of anything other than hard-boiled eggs. The killer soon takes out Marco and Marzia in ways that are simultaneously (intentionally) gross and (unintentionally) hilarious, but the story takes an unexpected twist that lands with a thud but could've been a knockout if handled by a better filmmaker than the clock-punching Landi, who had a lengthy career in TV going back to the 1950s but did little to make a name for himself. There's essentially two storylines going on in GIALLO IN VENICE, which may make it sound like Flavio Mogherini's ambitious 1977 gem THE PYJAMA GIRL CASE, but the comparisons end there. It's ultimately all pointless smoke and mirrors, especially since De Pol never does get to the bottom of what happened. It's obvious with the introduction of Flavia's ex-boyfriend, comic book artist Bruno (Vassili Karis), that he's there for a reason, but while it's not the one you expect, the resolution is still ultimately unsatisfying. Of course, it hardly matters by that point anyway, as the film's sole reason for being is to wallow in as much tawdry lewdness that Landi can cram into its seemingly interminable running time.

About as titillating as watching your mother get bukkaked, GIALLO IN VENICE--just out on Blu-ray from Scorpion, because physical media is dead--is pretty miserable, unless you count one vigorously enthusiastic Giordano sex scene that's still nevertheless tainted by the fact that it starts out as a brutal rape that she comes around to enjoying. This was one of several trashfests that she starred in for sleaze merchant producer Gabriele Crisanti, with whom she was romantically involved from the late '70s to the early '80s. This included her best-known role as the object of her zombified son's breast-biting lust in 1980's legendary BURIAL GROUND, and in addition to PATRICK STILL LIVES (which also featured Dei as the comatose title character), other films in the Giordano/Crisanti tribute to tackiness included 1979's MALABIMBA (where she played a horny nun who decides the best way to cure her possessed niece is to seduce her), and 1982's SATAN'S BABY DOLL. Fani starred in various Italian exploitation films in the late '70s into the '80s, including 1976's bestiality-themed DOG LAY AFTERNOON, which is exactly what you think it is. Los Angeles-born Blynn had a modeling career in Europe before finding some movie work as a bargain-basement Maurizio Merli in some late-period poliziotteschi like the forgettable Henry Silva vehicle WEAPONS OF DEATH. He never found stardom on any level, and he's absolutely terrible here as one of the least charismatic and most ineffectual protagonists in any giallo. Other than a novel twist that it botches, a few admittedly cool shots of victims reflected in the killer's mirrored shades, and Giordano's spirited reverse cowgirl histrionics, GIALLO IN VENICE is a depressing drag, though I suppose it's necessary viewing for Eurocult completists. Just plan on feeling really disgusted with yourself and needing a Silkwood Shower (© Marty McKee) when it's finally over.

OPERATION FINALE
(US - 2018)

Directed by Chris Weitz. Written by Matthew Orton. Cast: Oscar Isaac, Ben Kingsley, Melanie Laurent, Lior Raz, Nick Kroll, Haley Lu Richardson, Joe Alwyn, Greta Scacchi, Peter Strauss, Michael Aronov, Ohad Knoller, Greg Hill, Torben Liebrecht, Michael Benjamin Hernandez, Simon Russell Beale, Allan Corduner, Rainer Reiners, Rucio Munoz, Rita Pauls. (PG-13, 123 mins)

In its best moments, OPERATION FINALE recalls the kinds of international espionage, manhunt, and WWII or post-war men-on-a-mission productions that were commonplace in the 1960s, and might star a Sophia Loren or a Julie Christie with a Peter O'Toole or a Christopher Plummer and feature some combination of Jeremy Kemp, Anton Diffring, or Donald Pleasence as monocle-wearing Nazis, along with the inevitable Karl-Otto Alberty as a sinister aide-de-camp to whoever was playing the primary villain. FINALE is set in 1960 and details the plot to extract SS Obergruppenfuhrer and key Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann from Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he was hiding since 1950, working in a Mercedes-Benz factory under the alias "Ricardo Klement." Eichmann is played by Ben Kingsley, in his second "war criminal in hiding" role this year after the forgettable AN ORDINARY MAN and depicted as a captive that recalls, albeit in a much less psychosexual fashion, his role in Roman Polanski's 1994 film DEATH AND THE MAIDEN (famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal was also indirectly involved with supplying intel the early days of the search for Eichmann; he's not seen or mentioned in OPERATION FINALE, but of course, he was played by Kingsley in the 1989 HBO movie MURDERERS AMONG US). Things start to unravel for Eichmann/"Klement" when his son Klaus (Joe Alwyn), who he, as Klement, publicly refers to as his nephew through marriage (Greta Scacchi plays Mrs. Eichmann), begins dating young Sophie (Haley Lu Richardson), the daughter of Lothar Hermann (Peter Strauss sighting!), a blind, half-Jewish German businessman who's lived in Buenos Aires for 25 years. Sophie doesn't get around to mentioning that she's Jewish and flees in horror and disgust when Klaus, who has kept his last name and claims Adolf was just a relative he never knew, takes her to a de facto Nazi rally at a banquet hall, where prominent members of the city's German population still gather to privately goose-step and Sieg Heil like the good old days. Sophie gets suspicious of Klaus and his family when she hears him address his "uncle" Ricardo as "Father," prompting Lothar to notify German prosecutor Fritz Bauer (Rainer Reiners) that Adolf Eichmann might be hiding in Buenos Aires.

Bauer alerts Israel's Mossad intelligence, which launches an investigation as agency head Isser Harel (Lior Raz) assembles a team headed by Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac), who's looking for redemption after being disgraced in a 1954 incident in Austria that saw his team thinking they found Eichmann and killing the wrong man in a case of mistaken identity (this plot point seems to be a creation of the filmmakers for dramatic purposes). Getting Eichmann turns out to be the easy part. Once the authorities and powerful Germans in Buenos Aires realize Eichmann is missing, the Israelis will only have a limited time to get him out of the country. It's too long by boat, and no Israeli airline flies direct to Buenos Aires. Harel manages to secure a plane under the guise of some diplomats from Tel Aviv visiting for the anniversary of Argentina's independence, but when the plane is delayed for a week, they're forced to sit on Eichmann at a safe house much longer than anticipated. As Argentine officials and Eichmann's German benefactors--along with an enraged, vengeful Klaus Eichmann--Malkin and chief interrogator Zvi Aharoni (Michael Aronov) attempt to break their captor and get him to sign a statement confessing to his roles in the atrocities.

Directed by Chris Weitz (AMERICAN PIE, ABOUT A BOY), helming his first film since 2011's A BETTER LIFE, OPERATION FINALE takes some dramatic license (especially in the occasionally talky middle) but remains generally faithful to the story. It's a terrific scene for a Hollywood movie in the way Aharoni coerces a confession, but it's doubtful that a stone cold master manipulator like Eichmann caved as quickly as it's depicted here. The film drags a bit in the middle when Malkin decides to play "good cop" and bond with Eichmann in order to get him to sign a statement, and it comes as no surprise when he learns that he's being played. But the scenes detailing the early procedural work involved in the mission and the nail-biting suspense of Eichmann's extraction, where agent/doctor Hanna Elian (Melanie Laurent, revisiting some more historically accurate INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS stomping grounds) keeps Eichmann in a state of dazed, barely-conscious sedation that requires the team to essentially WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S him out of Buenos Aires, all propelled by a terrific Alexandre Desplat score, provide edge-of-your-seat entertainment. Other than some flashbacks where Kingsley is saddled with some truly horrific-looking de-aging makeup that looks like it's ready to melt off his face at any moment, the actor is superb as Eichmann, even nailing the facial expressions and twitching that we see on the real Eichmann in some archival footage of his trial at the end. Despite the grim topic at hand, OPERATION FINALE is not overly self-serious and gunning for awards. Rather, it's a respectful genre piece that takes the time to treat its subject matter with appropriate respect and sensitivity while still remembering to be a solid, mainstream thriller and actually having some humorous one-liners, mostly provided by Nick Kroll as one of Malkin's wisecracking Mossad colleagues. We're not talking MUNICH here, but OPERATION FINALE is a welcome, old(ish)-school throwback of sorts, and better than the end-of-summer, Labor Day weekend dumping it's getting from MGM would indicate.

SEARCHING
(US - 2018)

Directed by Aneesh Chaganty. Written by Aneesh Chaganty and Sev Ohanion. Cast: John Cho, Debra Messing, Michelle La, Joseph Lee, Sara Sohn, Stephen Michael Eich, Briana McLean, Ric Sarabia, Dominic Hoffman. (PG-13, 102 mins)

Setting an entire film on a laptop screen isn't a new gimmick. UNFRIENDED did a better-than-expected job of pulling it off, while others, like Nacho Vigalondo's OPEN WINDOWS, start strong but fall apart by trying to ditch the hook as quickly as possible. UNFRIENDED, produced by Russian NIGHT WATCH auteur Timur Bekmambetov, wasn't perfect, but it understood that it needed to stay on the computer screen to work, so to that end, it's not surprising that Bekmambetov is a producer on SEARCHING, a tense nail-biter that takes UNFRIENDED's hook and runs with it, making something smart, substantive, immersive, and wholly engrossing. It's a one-of-a-kind film both in its execution and the way it will actually hold up on repeat viewings even after you know how it ends. It'll be just as riveting to study how the filmmakers and the editors assembled the puzzle and hooked you along the way.

Sure, SEARCHING could be told in a straightforward, narrative fashion. It is, after all, a missing persons mystery first and foremost, with widower David Kim (John Cho) not terribly concerned about his 16-year-old daughter Margot's (Michelle La) whereabouts after a Thursday night. They communicated only by text and Facetime when she was at a study group at a friend's house and said she'd be home late. They had a brief, insignificant disagreement about her forgetting to take out the trash. He falls asleep, misses three calls from her, wakes up Friday morning and assumes she's already left for school, the trash still overflowing in the kitchen. He goes to work and he grows increasingly worried over the course of the day that she isn't answering his texts. He remembers that she has piano lessons after school on Fridays and calls the instructor, who informs him that Margot cancelled her lessons six months ago--lessons for which he's been shelling out $100 a week. He gets home and notices that she never took her laptop and backpack to school. Because she never made it home Thursday night. He calls the school and is told she never showed up that morning.. After being told of an overnight Friday camping trip in which a bunch of students were cutting class to attend and that Margot was invited, his mind is at ease until he gets a hold a student who says Margot was invited to go but didn't show. He finally calls the police, where decorated Detective Rosemary Vick (Debra Messing) catches the case (David Googles her while he's on the phone with her), instructing David to let her do the groundwork and instead turn his focus to piecing together Margot's Thursday by seeing what her friends can tell him.

From a straight synopsis perspective, SEARCHING is a functional mystery. But director/co-writer Aneesh Chaganty, a veteran of Google's commercial department, and his writing partner and fellow USC grad Sev Ohanion keep the action entirely on a computer screen, with the actors seen in Facetime chats, webcams, YouTube videos, some dialogue conveyed in text form, and online news services providing updates in the soon-to-be-nationwide hunt for Margot. Everything we as the audience observe and learn is on the screen and in David's relentless Google searches and hacking into Margot's social media--Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr--to see that she's leading a secret life and that he doesn't know her at all (and he's not really tech-savvy with "the kids"--at one point, he's Facetiming one of Margot's friends and asks "What's a tumbler?"). There's names he's never heard, weekly $100 deposits in her bank account, and $2500 being transferred to herself via a now-closed Venmo account. Contacting her Facebook friends reveals she was an outcast who didn't have many friends at all, that she was only in the study group because the others knew she was smart. He's also told that she was only invited to the camping trip because one kid's mom felt sorry for the two of them over their loss of her mom and his wife Pam (Sara Sohn in old videos saved on David's computer), who succumbed to a long battle with lymphoma a year earlier.

From the moment SEARCHING begins, it's clear that Chaganty's film is a remarkably confident and assured debut: with no dialogue, we get a six-minute journey through the last 16 years in the life of the Kim family, all via videos, photos, messages, e-mails, changing social media platforms (they sign up on Facebook in 2007) and calendar appointments on the family computer. It's all there--happy memories, Margot's birth, her birthdays, Mother's Days, Father's Days, family outings, Margot's first days of school with each passing year, Pam's cancer diagnosis, treatment, remission, the cancer returning, a "Mom comes home!" date that keeps get bumped ahead in the onscreen planner until it's finally dragged into the trash and we see the next First Day of School photo with just Margot and David. We learn everything we need to know about this family--their dynamic, their interaction, their affection--through their lives on the computer. The filmmakers also admirably don't succumb to preachy "messages" and statement-making about the ubiquity of computers and social media, although they do skewer the online culture in the way they cleverly weave it into the fabric of the story. As news of Margot's disappearance spreads and "#FindMargot" goes viral, the case starts being tried in the court of public opinion. Soon enough, David is being harangued by trolls and mean-spirited "Father of the Year" memes for losing his daughter. Internet comments sections on news stories and Reddit are flooded with internet bullies saying cruel and horrible things about the Kim family ("The dad did it,""She's a whore," etc), and even the study group friend who says she barely knew Margot posts a teary video where she's devastated about the disappearance of her "best friend."

Never has a film of this sort used the online medium in such a smart and vividly-detailed fashion. David's frantic, dread-inducing Google searches often go by so quickly that you barely get a subliminal flash of a clue that may or may not be important. Chaganty and Oharian have you guessing from the get-go. What is Margot doing? Is she acting out as a coping mechanism over her mother's death? Is she mad that David kept harping about the trash? Did she run away from home? Why did she recently buy a fake ID? Is she into drugs? Is she laundering money? Why did she try to call David three times? One Reddit commenter claims to be her "pimp." Why doesn't David's pothead brother Peter (Joseph Lee) seem very concerned? Does Vick know more than she's letting on? Is she keeping pertinent details from David? The red herrings and misdirection come at you from all angles and from anywhere in the frame, with at least two potential game-changing plot developments that actually produced audible gasps from the audience. There's a couple of minor quibbles that nit-pickers might not be able to get around (one that doesn't involve spoilers--don't schools call parents when kids no-show?), but SEARCHING is a marvel of intricate story construction and almost flawless execution. It doesn't back itself into corners that require a half-assed deus ex machina to get out of, and it doesn't cut corners to get where it needs to go. Anchored by a quietly powerful performance from Cho with strong support from Messing as the by-the-book cop who's methodical and clinical but still sympathetic and sharing humorous parenting stories about her own teenage son with David to keep him grounded and calm, SEARCHING got some hushed acclaim at Sundance early in 2018, where Sony acquired it for $5 million and critics who saw it wisely kept its many rewards under wraps. Don't be fooled by its Labor Day weekend dumping: this is a near-perfect thriller and one of the best films of the year. Go see this movie.

REPRISAL
(US/UK - 2018)

Directed by Brian A. Miller. Written by Bryce Hammons. Cast: Frank Grillo, Bruce Willis, Olivia Culpo, Johnathon Schaech, Natali Yura, Wass Stevens, Colin Egglesfield, Uncle Murda, Christopher Rob Bowen, Natalia Sophie Butler, Tyler Olson, Geoff Reeves, Shea Buckner, Ken Strunk. (R, 89 mins)

On Comedy Central's recent roast of former actor Bruce Willis, Edward Norton was on the dais and wondered if he could get away with the stuff Willis does: "Could I just leave the set of a movie after my close-ups are done and have my co-stars act opposite a C-stand with a red 'X' taped to it while a script girl reads my dialogue to them?" Perhaps Norton has seen at least a few entries in Lionsgate's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series, the latest installment being REPRISAL. Reuniting Willis--at least for a day, maybe two--with his THE PRINCE and VICE director Brian A. Miller, REPRISAL also makes frequent use of the big-eared Willis double who pretty much handled his work for him in the climactic shootout of FIRST KILL. In a performance that sets new standards for doing the bare minimum, Willis again demonstrates the kind of coasting entitlement that comes when you no longer feel the need to hide your utter contempt for your co-stars, your craft, and your audience. Upon a cursory glance, he seems to be in a good amount of REPRISAL, but not when you look closer. His first appearance comes five minutes in and perfectly encapsulates this bizarre phase of Willis' career: his character is seen working out in his driveway and his neighbor jokingly calls him "old man." But it's not Willis. We see Willis' Fake Shemp with the big ears and his back to the camera, then Miller cuts to a close-up where Willis looks frazzled and confused, but the shots don't really match. He's standing in front of windows that aren't there in the long shot. It looks like Miller has been forced to sub in outtakes from another scene. Then there's a cut to the big-eared double, his back to the camera, saying "I'll take you anytime, punk!" in what is clearly the voice of someone trying--and failing--to sound like Bruce Willis. This double shows up at a few more times throughout the movie, usually when Willis' character is required to be outdoors. Were it not for this man's heroic actions in the line of duty, doing whatever was needed to make the DIE HARD icon's performance complete, the makers of REPRISAL might've been forced to resort to drastic measures, like seeing if John Cusack was available.

Once in a while, Willis appears in one of these things and it's not terrible. 2016's HEAT ripoff MARAUDERS was actually OK, but that was due mostly to a borderline-gonzo performance by Christopher Meloni as a pissed-off FBI agent and certainly not due to Willis putting in a few sporadic, sleepy appearances as a financial CEO organizing robberies of his own banks. REPRISAL is maybe the worst of the bunch, and it doesn't even get a good performance out of the usually reliable PURGE and WHEELMAN tough guy Frank Grillo, who just looks lethargic and bored from the start. Grillo makes a lot of movies. He knows this is a piece of shit, but he doesn't have the luxury of being Bruce Willis, so he's forced to trudge through it. Grillo stars as Jacob Tasker, the manager of a downtown Cincinnati bank that's robbed by Gabriel (Johnathon Schaech), a methodical master criminal who's called in a series of bomb threats around the city as a distraction. Put on administrative leave for a week after the robbery, Jacob has time to sit at home and stew about things--not just what he could've done differently, but also his diabetic daughter Sophia (young Natalia Sophie Butler, given a warm welcome to the biz by having her name misspelled "Natlia" in the credits) and some mounting bills that are causing some tension with wife Christina (Olivia Culpo, whose primary function here is to say things like "Any updates?" and "Talk to me!"). Jacob spends a lot of his downtime drinking Heinekens with his neighbor James (Willis), a retired cop who helps him break down the robbery as the two try to pinpoint where the next one will occur. Jacob somehow figures this out and starts tailing Gabriel himself, even following him to an armored car heist and intervening as the cops arrive. Gabriel drops the bag of money during the shootout with the cops, prompting Jacob to impulsively pull a SILENT PARTNER and take the money for himself. This doesn't quite work out, as Gabriel figures out Jacob has the money and--wait for it--kidnaps Christina and Sophia, who goes into diabetic shock right on schedule while Jacob is forced to tell James he took the money as the two face two challenges: figuring out how to rescue Christina and Sophia and doing so with as little participation from Willis as possible.

REPRISAL is neither smart nor ambitious enough to devise something as clever as the 1979 cult classic THE SILENT PARTNER, where bank teller Elliott Gould figures out that deranged mall Santa Christopher Plummer is plotting to rob his bank, giving him time to concoct a clandestine plan to skim some money off the eventual take, starting a lethal game of cat and mouse between a mild-mannered teller who got a little greedy and a lunatic psycho who wants his money. No, REPRISAL just has no energy or momentum at all, starting with an unusually dull Grillo, who's saddled with a character that just as unbelievable as he is idiotic. Schaech isn't bad as far as stock, teeth-gritting bad guys go, even if it seems like the prep for his role consisted of watching Val Kilmer's and Tom Sizemore's scenes in HEAT, which is probably more than anyone else did. And Bruce? Well, he's Bruce. He spends a good chunk of his scenes--almost all in close-up because that's pretty much all he was there for--doing this weird, slurring thing with his voice. What is he doing? Is he ad-libbing his retiree character recovering from a stroke? It's a pointless affect that goes nowhere and serves no purpose other than Willis pretending he's "acting," but he can't even be bothered to keep up the ruse, as he starts speaking normally midway through. He does get to jog around with a shotgun near the end and blow somebody away, but it's obvious from the editing (lots of Bruce close-ups) and from the presence of the Fake Shemp that Willis and the actor he kills weren't there at the same time. There's one scene between Willis and Grillo where they have a beer in Jacob's backyard, and it seriously looks like neither actor has ever been in front of a camera before. But honestly, nothing sums up the futility of chronicling all of these Redbox-ready Lionsgate VOD dumpjobs like that first scene with Willis' double less than five minutes into the movie. I mean, seriously, look at this. This is laziness and apathy on a Steven Seagal level. Look how this scene had to be cobbled together just because Willis couldn't be bothered to stand there and stretch in a driveway. Edward Norton wasn't joking.

A MINUTE TO PRAY, A SECOND TO DIE
(Italy - 1968)

Directed by Franco Giraldi. Written by Louis Garfinkle, Ugo Liberatore and Albert Band. Cast: Alex Cord, Arthur Kennedy, Robert Ryan, Nicoletta Machiavelli, Mario Brega, Enzo Fiermonte, Renato Romano, Franco Lantieri, Giampiero Albertini, Spartaco Conversi, Rosita Palomar, Ottaviano Dell'Acqua, Aldo Sambrell, Daniel Martin, Antonio Molino Rojo, Lorenzo Robledo. (R, 99 mins)

A minor spaghetti western that used to be a fixture on late-night TV back in the '70s and '80s, the memorably-titled A MINUTE TO PRAY, A SECOND TO DIE has yet to be seen in the US in its intended form, and that's still the case with Kino Lorber's new Blu-ray release. Shorn by 19 minutes for America, the film has an understandably choppy feel, especially early on, but the biggest change can now be seen in the Blu-ray's bonus features, which include a blurry but watchable snippet of the extended international ending from an overseas TV broadcast. It completely changes the movie and strongly suggests something much more substantive and cynical than the happy ending that the film's American fans have always seen. Produced with the input of Selmur Pictures, a short-lived feature film division of ABC, A MINUTE TO PRAY was possibly intended to go straight to network TV in the US, which would explain trimming the 118-minute European version down to just about 100 minutes, the perfect run time for a two-hour time slot with commercials.

But it ended up playing in theaters and drive-ins over the summer and fall of 1968, which is right around the time Hollywood was really trying to make Alex Cord happen. Best known these days as the eye-patched Archangel on the hit 1980s CBS series AIRWOLF, Cord but was being groomed for stardom in the late 1960s. Born in 1933, the actor had numerous TV guest spots going back to 1961, and was tapped to play John Wayne's "The Ringo Kid" character opposite Ann-Margret in the 1966 remake of STAGECOACH, but the movie bombed with critics and audiences. After A MINUTE TO PRAY, Cord starred in three high-profile flops--as Mafioso Kirk Douglas' kid brother in Paramount's pre-GODFATHER mob drama THE BROTHERHOOD (1968); the steamy Harold Robbins adaptation STILETTO (1969); and the British mercenary actioner THE LAST GRENADE (1970), with Richard Attenborough and ZULU's Stanley Baker--that more or less ended his big-screen aspirations. He starred in the 1972 Italian horror film THE DEAD ARE ALIVE and was part of the ensemble of the 1974 bats-in-a-bomb shelter cult favorite CHOSEN SURVIVORS among a scattered few theatrical films, but he concentrated on guest spots on pretty much every TV show in the 1970s and 1980s, including obligatory stops on POLICE STORY, THE LOVE BOAT, FANTASY ISLAND, and MURDER, SHE WROTE before co-starring with Jan-Michael Vincent and Ernest Borgnine as eye-patched covert ops chief "Archangel" on AIRWOLF gave his career a bit of a small screen resurgence in the mid '80s. Now 85 and an occasional guest on the convention circuit, Cord seems to be retired from acting, with his last credit being the 2009 DTV Kevin Sorbo actioner FIRE FROM BELOW.

A serviceable journeyman ideal for one-off TV guest spots (how was he never on a LAW & ORDER?), Cord wasn't the most magnetic big screen leading man, which is apparent throughout A MINUTE TO PRAY, A SECOND TO DIE. Cord stars as Clay McCord, an epileptic outlaw with a $10,000 bounty on his head. He's on the run with his significantly less-wanted partner Fred Duskin (Giampiero Albertini) when they get word that the small New Mexico town of Tuscosa is offering amnesty to any wanted criminal wishing to renounce their evil ways and start a new life and make an honest living in an expanding territory. The edict is handed down from New Mexico governor Lem Carter (Robert Ryan), but is pretty much ignored by Tuscosa marshal Roy Colby (Arthur Kennedy), who has his deputies setting traps outside of town to keep any undesirables out and stop bottom-feeding bounty hunters also waiting to ambush any amnesty-seeking criminals in the vicinity for some easy reward money that Colby doesn't feel like paying. Increasingly frail and with his seizures increasing, McCord hopes to get medical help in Tuscosa but first has to get through Escondido, a haven for outlaws ruled by the ruthless Kraut (spaghetti stalwart Mario Brega). McCord snaps and kills one of Kraut's men after seeing him gun down a grieving widow in cold blood after she blames Kraut for the death of her husband and son (they were seeking amnesty and were killed by bounty hunters), which sends McCord fleeing from Escondido and trying to get past the bounty hunters and Colby's deputies to find safe passage into Tuscosa, where Carter himself has arrived to kick ass when word gets to him that Colby is being derelict in his duty.

A MINUTE TO PRAY, A SECOND TO DIE was directed by Franco Giraldi, a veteran assistant and second unit director on films like Sergio Corbucci's 1962 SPARTACUS knockoff THE SLAVE and, more importantly, Sergio Leone's 1964 game-changer A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS. Giraldi soon graduated to directing second-tier spaghetti oaters like SEVEN GUNS FOR THE MACGREGORS and its sequel UP THE MACGREGORS, though they were released in the US in reverse order. Like his star, Giraldi brings a workmanlike efficiency to the table and gets the job done, but there's very little in the way of the style and artistry that guys like Leone and Corbucci displayed in their landmark contributions to the genre. Likewise, Carlo Rustichelli's score is largely by the numbers and lacks the rousing and instantly iconic feel of Ennio Morricone's compositions for Leone. If the additional sequence in the Blu-ray bonus features are any indication, it would be interesting to see if Giraldi's extended European version perhaps has more going on than the US cut would indicate. In its 99-minute incarnation, A MINUTE TO PRAY feels more like a Hollywood western, with only the supporting cast (including stalwarts like Aldo Sambrell and the perpetually doomed Lorenzo Robledo who, predictably, shows up long enough to get immediately killed), some familiar dubbing voices (Ed Mannix and Tony La Penna can be heard) and McCord being haunted by a past trauma (think Col. Mortimer's raped and murdered sister in FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE or Harmonica's older brother in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST) to really contribute to the expected Italian aura. That's likely due to the involvement of ABC as well as the script contributions of Americans Albert Band (father of Empire Pictures and Full Moon honcho Charles Band), who was doing a lot of work in Italy at the time, like writing Sergio Corbucci's underrated THE HELLBENDERS , and Louis Garfinkle, whose writing credits include Band's 1959 cult film FACE OF FIRE, 1972's THE DOBERMAN GANG, the 1973 little person gangster oddity LITTLE CIGARS, and, of all things, 1978's Oscar-winning THE DEER HUNTER.

Of course, the film gets a huge boost from the presence of Kennedy and especially the great Ryan (the same year that both also appeared in the big-budget Italian WWII epic ANZIO), the latter appearing about an hour in, immediately kicking ass, and more or less taking over the film over the film once Cord's McCord is sidelined with an emergency surgery. This leads to a strangely maudlin plot twist that feels more like a spaghetti western AFTERSCHOOL SPECIAL. It's in no way as overtly political as the "Zapata" spaghettis of Corbucci and Damiano Damiani that were just around the corner, but A MINUTE TO PRAY has a very bleeding heart figure in Ryan's Carter, whose plan to forgive almost all outlaws is never really explained. It could be what drew Ryan, one of Hollywood's most outspoken liberal activists of his day, to the role or it could've been a paid vacation to Almeria. Still, the film really comes alive when Carter, Colby, McCord, and Tuscosa town doc Chase (Enzo Fiermonte) are holed up in a small ranch RIO BRAVO-style as Kraut and his Escondido bad guys close in on them. There's even a visibly dangerous bit where the ranch is set ablaze and Kennedy is on the roof surrounded by flames. A MINUTE TO PRAY, A SECOND TO DIE is far from an essential spaghetti western, but it's worth seeing for fans of the genre and Ryan, who takes what could be a check-cashing walk-through in a B-movie and busts his ass like he's on a big-budget Hollywood epic. The Blu-ray looks terrific (there's also a commentary by REPO MAN director and spaghetti western junkie Alex Cox) and the inclusion of that extended ending as a bonus--even in a less than pristine form--is enough to at least consider that Europe has gotten a much more complex and interesting film than America's been able to see. Hopefully we'll get a restored version of it someday.

STRAIGHT TO HELL
(US/UK - 1987)

Directed by Alex Cox. Written by Dick Rude and Alex Cox. Cast: Sy Richardson, Joe Strummer, Dick Rude, Courtney Love, The Pogues, Elvis Costello, Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones, Edward Tudor-Pole, Jim Jarmusch, Juan Torres, Biff Yeager, Zander Schloss, Sara Sugarman, Miguel Sandoval, Jennifer Balgobin, Xander Berkeley, Kathy Burke, Michele Winstanley, Sue Kiel, Ed Pansullo, Graham Fletcher-Cook, Luis Contreras, Del Zamora, Fox Harris, Cait O'Riordan, Martin Turner, Jem Finer. (R, 91 mins)

Born in 1954, Alex Cox established himself as a major new talent with 1984's cult hit REPO MAN and 1986's critically-acclaimed SID AND NANCY, and as a result, the British wunderkind immediately found himself being courted by the major studios for a variety of commercial, big-budget projects. He turned down offers to direct THREE AMIGOS (eventually made by John Landis), ROBOCOP (Paul Verhoeven), and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Stephen King adaptation THE RUNNING MAN (Paul Michael Glaser), and instead chose to make the low-budget, spaghetti western-inspired STRAIGHT TO HELL for the prestige indie Island Pictures. A critical and commercial bomb in the summer of 1987, STRAIGHT TO HELL only made it into a handful of theaters on the same day as DRAGNET and SPACEBALLS, and topped out with a final box office tally of $210,000. The script was written over the course of three days by Cox and co-star Dick Rude, and only came about because the far-left Cox had organized a benefit concert in Nicaragua to be headlined by Elvis Costello, The Clash (shortly before they disbanded), and The Pogues with the intention of filming a documentary before the political tumult in the country led to everyone involved concluding that it wasn't a good idea. Still wishing to work with the musicians in some capacity, Cox came up with STRAIGHT TO HELL, which ultimately plays less like a real film and more like a self-indulgent home movie with Cox and a bunch of cult rocker buddies dicking off in Almeria, Spain.

A textbook example of a film where it's obvious everyone had a blast during filming but the end result leaves the audience feeling like they're deliberately being excluded from the joke, STRAIGHT TO HELL opens with a quartet of incompetent bank robbers barely getting away with a suitcase full of cash in Spain: irate leader Norwood (Sy Richardson), cynical Simms (Clash frontman Joe Strummer), hyper Willy (Rude), and Norwood's abrasive, screeching girlfriend Velma (22-year-old Courtney Love, during her brief early acting career prior to fronting Hole and meeting Kurt Cobain). Their car dies after Simms stupidly fills the gas tank with diesel, stranding them in a middle of nowhere desert. They bury the money and happen upon a small town straight out of an old western, run by the large, coffee-addicted McMahon family, led by Frank (Biff Yeager), with most of the others, excluding Preacher McMahon (Xander Berkeley) and Stupid McMahon (Martin Turner, who's also credited as "sex and cruelty consultant," which is maybe the film's only funny joke), played by members of The Pogues. After intervening in a conflict between two McMahons and deranged rival Rusty Zimmerman (Edward Tudor-Pole) that sees Norwood, Simms, and Willy blowing away Rusty, the outsiders earn the trust of Frank McMahon. All that goes straight to hell when Frank's doddering old father (Jem Finer) is killed by his niece (Kathy Burke), a murder that's pinned on Whitey (Graham Fletcher-Cook), a flunky sent to search for Norwood and his cohorts by their employer, feared crime boss Amos Dade (Jim Jarmusch). This sets in motion a chain of double crosses and unholy alliances, complicated by the arrival of obscenely wealthy American gas station/convenience store magnate I.G. Farben (Dennis Hopper) and his wife Sonya (Grace Jones), who supply Norwood, Simms, and Willy with a Gatling gun and other weapons to start a war with the McMahons, the clan standing in Farben's way of redeveloping the desert town into an expensive housing development.

Cox having Hopper's Farben supply the fugitive bank robbers with weapons draws obvious parallels to the soon-to-explode Iran-Contra scandal, which the director would explore with more muddled results in 1987's WALKER, released six months after STRAIGHT TO HELL. An intentionally anachronistic, revisionist "biography" of William Walker (played in the film by Ed Harris), an American mercenary who declared himself president of Nicaragua in 1856 (Marlon Brando played Walker in Gillo Pontecorvo's BURN! in 1969), WALKER was Cox's most ambitious film to date, a bonkers left-wing polemic with helicopters and cars in 1856 Nicaragua and featuring a good chunk of STRAIGHT TO HELL's cast along with Marlee Matlin in her first role after winning an Oscar for CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD. Barely released at the height of the holiday awards season as if it had a chance of winning anything, WALKER was somehow bankrolled by Universal, who had no idea what to do with it, and it grossed only slightly more than STRAIGHT TO HELL, effectively ending Cox's career in Hollywood. Like any terrible bomb that loses a lot of money, it's developed a cult following over the years, most notably from the Criterion Collection, who have taken it upon themselves to serve as WALKER's chief apologists.

Despite Criterion's insistence that it's a misunderstood masterpiece of gonzo cinema, WALKER is all kinds of terrible, as is STRAIGHT TO HELL, which is in some ways a more freewheeling, improvisatory test run for WALKER, both in terms of Hopper's weapons-selling Farben as well as the borderline slapstick antics of the three stars. The underrated Richardson, who provided REPO MAN with some of its funniest moments, displays some comedic chops both physically and in his facial expressions and tough guy act, but almost nothing in STRAIGHT TO HELL is even remotely amusing. It's laborious, slowly-paced, filled with obnoxious characters and a diverse cast that's just goofing off while Cox gets enough footage to piece a movie together. Why do the rough-and-tumble McMahons have a perpetually befuddled, properly-attired butler named Hives, and why is he played by Elvis Costello? Costello seems to be patterning his performance on both Rowan Atkinson and Donald Sutherland's "clumsy waiter" in THE KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE, but like everything else, there's no rhyme or reason to it. Cox and Rude made this up as they went along and got Costello, Strummer, the Pogues, and pals like Richardson, Del Zamora, Fox Harris, and Miguel Sandoval, and called in some favors from Hopper (then in the midst of a major career resurgence following BLUE VELVET and HOOSIERS) and Jarmusch and just hoped the eclectic ensemble could somehow make something happen. It doesn't really work as a spaghetti western satire or spoof because Cox has nothing to say about the genre and only creates some sense of purpose once he introduces the heavy-handed Iran-Contra parallels. Even then, with the potential of some topical political commentary along the lines of the late '60s "Zapata" westerns, Cox can't get his shit together because he's too busy buying his own hype. It's an aimless mess where no one's in charge and there's no endgame. The Nicaragua concert got cancelled but everyone still wanted to hang out. That's the only reason STRAIGHT TO HELL exists.

Cox revisited STRAIGHT TO HELL in 2010, adding a five minutes of cut scenes and sprucing other shots up with visual effects and CGI splatter (including the obligatory "blood hitting the camera lens" schtick) and it got a brief release on the arthouse circuit as STRAIGHT TO HELL RETURNS. That's the version on Kino's new Blu-ray, now rechristened STRAIGHT TO HELL: THE DIRECTOR'S CUT. In any incarnation, it represents the beginning of the end for Cox, who has almost completely regressed like a directorial Benjamin Button in the decades since, helming a series of increasingly amateurish projects with decreasing budgets and very little exposure. His last behind-the-scenes association with anything resembling a real movie was when he scored a co-writing credit on Terry Gilliam's FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS. He's also acted in several films, most notably Alex de la Iglesia's PERDITA DURANGO (aka DANCE WITH THE DEVIL). Cox has long believed that WALKER got him blackballed in Hollywood, but as his standing as a filmmaker has cratered in the last 30 years, he has become a reputable spaghetti western historian, appearing on several DVD commentaries and writing a book about the subject titled 10,000 Ways to Die. He's also written other non-fiction books on a variety of topics--including a memoir, a book about JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald, and an analysis of the cult TV series THE PRISONER--and he's directed TV documentaries on Akira Kurosawa and the 1970s EMMANUELLE films. As a narrative filmmaker, Cox's place in movie history is secure thanks to REPO MAN and SID AND NANCY, but the combined, quick-succession tanking of STRAIGHT TO HELL and WALKER proved too toxic to overcome, with Cox imploding hard and hitting his nadir with 2011's ill-advised, desperate, and all-greenscreen semi-sequel REPO CHICK. Cox's most recent film is a crowd-funded time travel western with unknown actors called TOMBSTONE RASHOMON, which was screened as a work in progress at some film festivals in 2017 but has yet to be officially released. You'll likely never see it, and that's probably for the best.

On Netflix: EXTINCTION (2018)

In Theaters: MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT (2018)

Retro Review: DAGON (2002)

On Blu-ray/DVD: INCIDENT IN A GHOSTLAND (2018); KINGS (2018); and THE CON IS ON (2018)

Retro Review: PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING (1982)

On Blu-ray/DVD: REVENGE (2018), MARROWBONE (2018), and 2036: ORIGIN UNKNOWN (2018)

In Theaters: BLACKkKLANSMAN (2018)

In Theaters: THE MEG (2018)

Retro Review: THE CHANGELING (1980)

On Blu-ray/DVD: SHOCK AND AWE (2018) and THE YELLOW BIRDS (2018)

Retro Review: WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS? (1974)

In Theaters: MILE 22 (2018)

On Blu-ray/DVD: BLACK WATER (2018), BLEEDING STEEL (2018) and DAMASCUS COVER (2018)

In Theaters: PAPILLON (2018)

Retro Review: GIALLO IN VENICE (1979)

In Theaters: OPERATION FINALE (2018)

In Theaters: SEARCHING (2018)

In Theaters/On VOD: REPRISAL (2018)

Retro Review: A MINUTE TO PRAY, A SECOND TO DIE (1968)

Retro Review: STRAIGHT TO HELL (1987)