Good Efficient Butchery

AIR STRIKE
(China - 2018)

Directed by Xiao Feng. Written by Chen Ping, Yang Hsin-Yu, Zhang Hongyi, Yushi Wu, Xiaoqi Li and Qiao Wa. Cast: Bruce Willis, Ye Liu, Rumer Willis, Seung-Heon Song, William Chan, Wei Fan, Nicholas Tse, Bingbing Fan, Chen Daoming, Adrien Brody, Lei Jia, Gang Wu, Su Ma, Yongli Che, Yuanzheng Feng, Le Geng, Ning Chang, Simon Yam. (R, 96 mins)

Shot in 2015 and initially known as both the prophetically self-fulfilling THE BOMBING and later as the more inspirational UNBREAKABLE SPIRIT, with a price tag reported to be anywhere between $65-$90 million, this mega-budget Chinese government-funded epic has been hacked down by about 25 minutes for its straight-to-VOD US release under the generic, Redbox-ready title AIR STRIKE. Embarrassingly cheap-looking despite being the most expensive Chinese film ever made at the time it went into production (it was also shot in 3-D, but that was scrapped during post), with aerial dogfight sequences and visual effects that recall the kinds of computer animation that looked dated in the 1990s, AIR STRIKE looks like INCHON if remade by The Asylum. The making of the film seems far more interesting than anything that ended up onscreen, a jumbled hodgepodge of characters and events taking place in 1939 during the Second Sino-Japanese War, where Japan launched near-constant bombing raids that decimated Chongqing. There's three different storylines, with characters sometimes intersecting and ending up in places and you have no idea how they got there (the Chinese characters are badly dubbed in English, while the Japanese villains get subtitles). There's former pilot Xue Gangtou (Ye Liu), injured on a mission and reassigned to military intelligence, where he's to ensure that a truck with a secret McGuffin cargo must gets to Chongqing, complete with a half-assed WAGES OF FEAR crossing over a precarious bridge. There's a team of fighter pilots overseen by constipated-looking US military adviser Col. Jack Johnson (top-billed export value Bruce Willis), who barks orders and has to whip them into shape. And there's tons of gratuitous mahjong at a local bar.

The fact that Lionsgate is AIR STRIKE's US distributor might make it a backdoor installment in the studio's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series, but he's onscreen quite a bit here and actually takes part in some of the--albeit mostly greenscreen--action sequences. But he finds other ways to make his participation something special and display his utter contempt for what he does for a living, whether it's vacillating between several-day stubble and being clean-shaven in a single scene with no regard for continuity (this happens several times, and what kind of by-the-book US military honcho in 1939 sported trendy stubble?) or, in one scene that has to be seen to be believed, breaking out an anachronistic, open-mic-night-level Christopher Walken impression when the Chinese pilots throw him a surprise birthday party, going off on an obviously improvised monologue about a watch his father gave him. Did Chinese director Xiao Feng even realize his star was amusing himself by dropping a PULP FICTION reference into the middle of a scene? Willis is even visibly smirking while he's doing it. His daughter Rumer gets third billing for a 20-second bit part as a nurse, and she's been unconvincingly dubbed over with a British accent. Oscar-winner Adrien Brody turns up for two brief scenes in the not-even-remotely-pivotal role of "Steve," an American volunteering at a Chongqing orphanage and getting blown up before we even figure out who he is (an entire subplot with his character has been cut for the US release, perhaps as a bizarre tribute to the actor's mostly scrapped work in Terrence Malick's THE THIN RED LINE). Bingbing Fan, the hugely popular actress, model, and pop singer and China's highest-paid superstar, also puts in a few sporadic appearances. Her summer 2018 disappearance and subsequent re-emergence and tax evasion scandal (she's reportedly been fined the equivalent of $130 million by the Chinese government), combined with one-time producer Zhi Jianxiang being a fugitive on the country's most wanted list after fleeing China when he was hit with fraud and money laundering charges related to this project and 2015's IP MAN 3, resulted in the cancellation of the long-shelved film's belated Chinese release just a week before its American debut.

It's worth pointing out that the shots of Bruce Willis
above AND below come from the SAME scene.

Adrian Brody pleading with his
agent to get him in a better movie.

It's hard to imagine AIR STRIKE being good in any incarnation. The original Chinese version reportedly ran 120 minutes, but given its legal issues at home, the truncated, 96-minute American cut, supervised by veteran editor Robert A. Ferretti (TANGO & CASH, DIE HARD 2, UNDER SIEGE) might be the only one available for the foreseeable future. Prior to taking on this massive epic, director Xiao Feng only had one other film to his credit, the 2012 war drama HUSHED ROAR, which was unreleased outside of China. Helping out under the credited guise of "consultant" and creative adviser is the unlikely Mel Gibson, then in one of his periodic Hollywood pariah periods prior to his Oscar-nominated resurgence as a filmmaker with 2016's HACKSAW RIDGE. Ostensibly brought aboard because of his experience in hard-hitting battle scenes, it's possible Gibson had a hand in directing Willis and Brody, as almost all of the combat and action sequences are just a blurred blizzard of atrocious and aggressively unconvincing CGI. Other experienced Hollywood pros were hired by the Chinese producers in an advisory capacity, including cinematographer Conrad W. Hall (PANIC ROOM, OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN), credited as "special effects consultant," and the late, great Vilmos Zsigmond as a "cinematography consultant" to the film's own D.P. Shu Yang. An Academy Award-winner for his work on 1977's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and also the renowned cinematographer of MCCABE & MRS. MILLER, DELIVERANCE, and THE DEER HUNTER among many others, Zsigmond was a legend in his field when he died in 2016 at the age of 85. Sadly, AIR STRIKE will go down as his final work, though there's nothing here to indicate that he, Hall, or Gibson were able to help in any way. The kind of movie where six screenwriters are credited and the best any of them can come up with is the one man who knows the contents of the truck's secret cargo's last, dying words being "The truck...is carrying...aaaaggghh..." as he keels over, AIR STRIKE is one of the most bewilderingly awful films of the year. I mean, seriously. What the fuck happened here? What can you say about a movie that's such a garbage fire that 2018 Bruce Willis is one of its positives?

AIR STRIKE director Xiao Feng on the set with "consultant" Mel Gibson.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
(US - 1990)

Directed by Tom Savini. Written by George A. Romero. Cast: Tony Todd, Patricia Tallman, Tom Towles, McKee Anderson, William Butler, Kate Finneran, Bill Moseley, Heather Mazur, Bill "Chilly Billy" Cardille. (R, 88 mins)

Generally dismissed by horror fans in the fall of 1990, the remake of George A. Romero's landmark 1968 zombie masterpiece NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was in and out of theaters and pretty much forgotten in a couple of weeks. It was also another flop for 21st Century Film Corporation, Menahem Golan's short-lived, post-Cannon company. 21st Century was hemorrhaging money so quickly that Golan only managed to get a few of its films in theaters solely under its banner--the 1989 Robert Englund take on PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, the Golan-directed MACK THE KNIFE, and the women-in-prison grinder CAGED FURY--before Columbia had to assume distribution responsibilities. Along with THE FORBIDDEN DANCE, a film Golan rushed into production to duke it out with Cannon's LAMBADA because he sincerely believed the world needed two competing lambada movies, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD was one of the last to get a theatrical release before Columbia decided they'd seen enough and sent the rest of 21st Century's completed projects and other acquisitions straight to video or directly to cable. Made in part because Romero and his creative partners John A. Russo and Russell Streiner never properly secured a copyright for NOTLD '68 and weren't seeing any revenue or royalties from it thanks to its public domain status, NOTLD '90 was scripted by Romero himself, rewriting much of the original script he co-wrote with Russo. Directing duties were handed off to beloved makeup effects maestro Tom Savini, whose work was vital to the success of Romero films like MARTIN, DAWN OF THE DEAD, CREEPSHOW, and DAY OF THE DEAD, in addition to other '80s horror essentials like FRIDAY THE 13TH, MANIAC, and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2. To date, NOTLD '90 is Savini's only feature-length directing effort, and he's been open over the years about his creative disagreements with 21st Century, the under-the-gun shooting schedule (filming began in April 1990 and it was in theaters six months later), and how the end result was a compromised one that forced him to make numerous cuts to secure an R rating. He also didn't get much backup from Romero, whose involvement ended with the script and a courtesy producer credit, as he was instead off prepping the Stephen King adaptation THE DARK HALF, which would begin shooting in the fall of 1990 but wouldn't be released until the spring of 1993 due to Orion's financial woes.

Despite the rushed and troubled production, and faced with an initial fan reaction that ranged from ambivalent at best to hostile at worst, NOTLD '90 has built a sturdy fan base over the last three decades, enough that it's become a legitimate cult classic in its own right. Given a proper amount of time and space, it's been re-evaluated by many horror fans, and while no one's posited the absurd notion that it's better than Romero's film, it certainly stands as one of the better horror remakes of the modern era. It tells the same essential story, with a small group of people taking refuge in a rural farmhouse and fighting off an increasing horde of the living dead, but it isn't just a scene-for-scene carbon copy. The initial differences--beyond being in color--are slight: instead of just one, there's now three zombies in the cemetery where Barbara (Patricia Tallman) and her obnoxious brother Johnny (Bill Moseley) are attacked; it's their mother who's buried there instead of their father; Barbara seems to have some serious underlying psych issues stemming from a mother that Johnny clearly doesn't miss; and their initial bickering has a notably increased hostility ("When's the last time you had a date?" Johnny asks his prim, uptight sister). Like the original, Johnny is killed (in a much nastier fashion here), and Barbara escapes on foot, ending up at the farmhouse. There's already a few living dead dragging ass around the house before Ben (future CANDYMAN star Tony Todd in Duane Jones' iconic role) arrives and starts taking charge.

It's here where Savini's version starts differentiating itself from its source film. As played by Judith O'Dea in 1968, Barbara is so shell-shocked by the cemetery encounter that she's largely catatonic and helpless for the rest of the film. Tallman's Barbara starts out that way, but she quickly snaps out of it, becoming an equal with Ben when it comes to handling the situation, sometimes even more so once the other players emerge from hiding in the basement. There's the loudmouthed coward Harry Cooper (Tom Towles of HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER), his fed-up wife Helen (McKee Anderson), and their bitten daughter Sarah (Heather Mazur), along with young couple Tom (William Butler) and Judy Rose (Kate Finneran). Ben and Cooper spend so much time arguing in a back-and-forth alpha male pissing contest that it takes Barbara and Judy Rose to put a stop to it, with Judy Rose even threatening to kick everyone out since the house belongs to Tom's uncle, who they've already seen come back to life as a zombie.

Many of the plot elements remain the same, whether it's the disastrous attempt to unlock the gas tank out by the barn or the endless argument about whether they'll all be safer in the cellar. But while Savini and Romero know there's no need to reinvent the wheel, they tweak things enough that NOTLD '90 feels almost like an alternate universe take on Romero's original. Ben and Cooper are such hotheads here that they don't get much of a chance to get any news updates from the outside world, since they get into a scuffle that results in the TV taking a smashing tumble down the basement stairs. They also introduce a previously unexplored hiding space with one character ending up in the attic, which leads to a finale that's equal parts downbeat like NOTLD '68 while still giving the audience a crowd-pleasing payoff that's just one example of NOTLD '90's dark and morbid streak (watch out for that junkie zombie with a needle still sticking out of its arm). From start to finish, Savini's NOTLD is familiar yet so much about it is completely different, including the fates of key characters. It ends on a powerful note and is anchored by a strong performance by Tallman that's never really been given its due. Sony has very quietly re-released this on Blu-ray, six years after the justifiably-maligned limited edition Twilight Time release where cinematographer Frank Prinzi supervised a transfer that bathed the film in an unsightly dark blue that no one liked except for Prinzi and apparently Savini, who somehow gave it his approval. The new Sony Blu-ray corrects Prinzi's ill-advised makeover and the film now looks like it's supposed to, and if you're not one of the converted, it's a perfect opportunity to take another look at an unfairly neglected gem that a lot of us didn't give a fair shake back in 1990.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD opening
in Toledo, OH on 10/19/1990

SUSPIRIA
(US/Italy - 2018)

Directed by Luca Guadagnino. Written by David Kajganich. Cast: Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Mia Goth, Lutz Ebersdorf, Chloe Grace Moretz, Jessica Harper, Angela Winkler, Sylvie Testud, Renee Soutendijk, Ingrid Caven, Elena Fokina, Doris Hick, Malgosia Bela, Vanda Capriolo, Fabrizia Sacchi, Alek Wek, Clementine Houdart, Jessica Batut, Brigitte Cuvelier, Christine Leboutte, Mikael Olssen, Fred Kelemen. (R, 152 mins)

In the annals of Italian horror, few titles are as instantly recognized as Dario Argento's 1977 classic SUSPIRIA. The first of the "Three Mothers" trilogy--it was followed by 1980's INFERNO and 2007's belated and significantly lesser MOTHER OF TEARS--SUSPIRIA was a loud, bloody, garishly colorful, and ultra-stylish assault on the senses that still terrifies, as American ballet student Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper) arrives at the Tanz Academy in Freiburg to find all sorts of supernatural goings-on, all under the control of all-powerful witch Mater Suspiriorum, which is apparent even if Goblin's iconic score didn't include a proto-black metal hiss of "witch!" throughout. A remake has been in various stages of development for the last decade, with one-time indie wunderkind and HALLOWEEN 2018 director David Gordon Green attached for quite some time before he bailed and Italian producer/director Luca Guadagnino, an acclaimed filmmaker thanks to 2010's I AM LOVE and 2015's A BIGGER SPLASH, decided to make it himself. SUSPIRIA '18 was already in post-production when Guadagnino scored his commercial breakthough with 2017's Oscar-nominated CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, and whether you see it because of Guadagnino or because of your love for Argento and Italian horror, know up front that this is likely the most divisive film to hit multiplexes since Darron Aronofsky's MOTHER! pissed everyone off last year. And I'm not just talking about the response it's likely to get from the perpetually bitching gatekeepers (© Jason Coffman) of horror fandom. Guadagnino's SUSPIRIA uses Argento's film as a template before going off in multiple directions, and there's no argument that it bites off more than it can chew. The end result--all two and a half hours of it--is brilliant, frustrating, captivating, pretentious, ambitious, and self-indulgent in equal measures.

Guadagnino and his BIGGER SPLASH screenwriter David Kajganich (whose writing credits also include 2009's BLOOD CREEK, a little-seen horror film that deserved a bigger audience) fashion their SUSPIRIA with the very Lars von Trier-esque subtitle "Six Chapters and an Epilogue Set in a Divided Berlin." Specifically, 1977 West Berlin, with the omnipresent Berlin Wall and the city in turmoil with bombings and recurring invocations of Baader-Meinhof, the far-left militant Red Army Faction, and the October hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181 by the PFLP. In the midst of this is Markos Dance Academy student and Red Army supporter Patricia Hingle (Chloe Grace Moretz), who befriends elderly psychotherapist Dr. Josef Klemperer ("Lutz Ebersdorf"--more on him shortly) and frantically spells out the details of a wild story that the place is run by a coven of witches. When Patricia disappears--those close to her believe she went underground with a terrorist outfit--her spot at Markos becomes available and is given to Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson), who's also running away, fleeing a domineering, terminally ill mother and a repressive Mennonite upbringing in rural Ohio.

A rebellious outcast in both her congregation and her own family going back to her childhood--whether she was constantly daydreaming about dancing, obsessed with learning all she could about Berlin, or being caught masturbating in her closet--Susie feels destined for Markos, and more specifically, its renowned choreographer Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton), who soon takes the naive, sheltered American under her wing as her protegee for sinister reasons that have to do with more than dancing. Meanwhile, Dr. Klemperer (in the worst-kept secret of 2018, "Lutz Ebersdorf," initially described by the filmmakers as a practicing doctor and non-professional actor making his debut, is really Swinton under extensive prosthetics), haunted by the disappearance of his wife during the Holocaust 35 years earlier, is disturbed enough by Patricia's story and the notes scribbled in her left-behind journals that he begins his own investigation into her claims about the Markos Academy, one that dovetails with Markos dancer Sara (Mia Goth), who bonds with Susie but remains troubled by Patricia's vanishing.

That plot synopsis is really just scratching the surface of everything Guadagnino and Kajganich are up to here. SUSPIRIA '18 does a masterful job of capturing late '70s Berlin, with the gray, dreary atmosphere, the constant rain, the political tumult (bombs and commotion are frequently heard outside the walls of the Markos), the nods to Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the casting of Volker Schlondorff regular Angela Winkler (THE LOST HONOR OF KATHARINA BLUM, THE TIN DRUM) as Miss Tanner, the right-hand to Madame Blanc. The film takes place in a Berlin that's literally divided by a wall, but also by politics and history, particularly the still-open wounds of WWII, as represented by the mournful Klemperer. That extends to the scheming and machinations going on in the academy, with the staff divided over whether to give control to Madame Blanc or the aging and unseen founder Helena Markos. The score by Radiohead's Thom Yorke is moodily effective--a complete contrast to the progasmic bombast of Goblin--but doesn't really signify "Berlin" in a musical sense.

Rest assured, Guadagnino doesn't forget that he's making an Italian horror film, whether it's numerous instances of stomach-turning gore, a truly nightmarish climax that goes completely off the rails, a Yorke piano cue that sounds directly lifted from Fabio Frizzi's score for Lucio Fulci's THE BEYOND, or a late-film cameo by Jessica Harper. There's also Argento-specific callbacks, from the friendship between Patricia and Klemperer reminiscent of Jennifer Connelly and Donald Pleasance in PHENOMENA, and Swinton's disguised second performance recalling Adrien Brody's ridiculous "Byron Deidra" act in the dreadful latter-day Argento dud GIALLO. In a physically demanding performance, Johnson is an effective Susie, whose character arc goes in a vastly different direction than Harper's did in Argento's film, allowing Goth's Sara to resonate more for the audience in a way that wasn't required of Stefania Casini, her predecessor in the role. The dance instructors who make up the coven are well-cast, particularly Winkler, Paul Verhoeven vet Renee Soutendijk, and Sylvie Testud, who's made up in way that looks like a tribute to Jane March's "Richie" in COLOR OF NIGHT. Swinton is a terrific Madame Blanc, whose mentoring of Susie echoes Klemperer's belief that "love and manipulation...they share houses very often." Guadagnino perhaps overindulges his friend and frequent star Swinton, who actually has a third role by the end of the film, coming perilously close to making this her own personal DR. STRANGELOVE (her work as Klemperer is a triumph of old-age prosthetic makeup that the Oscars should recognize, but she doesn't do enough with her voice to totally sell the "Lutz Ebersdorf" illusion). While an over-the-top, arthouse deep dive into late 1970s West German politics, history, sociology, and culture seems like a strange approach to remaking a legendary and beloved Italian horror film, it's too lofty in its ambitions and too unpredictably gonzo to simply dismiss, regardless of how much of a daunting horse pill it can be at times.

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND
(France/Iran/US - 2018)

Directed by Orson Welles. Written by Orson Welles and Oja Kodar. Cast: John Huston, Oja Kodar, Peter Bogdanovich, Susan Strasberg, Lilli Palmer, Bob Random, Norman Foster, Edmond O'Brien, Mercedes McCambridge, Cameron Mitchell, Paul Stewart, Henry Jaglom, Paul Mazursky, Dennis Hopper, Curtis Harrington, Claude Chabrol, George Jessel, Gregory Sierra, Tonio Selwart, Dan Tobin, John Carroll, Stafford Repp, Geoffrey Land, Joseph McBride, Cathy Lucas, Pat McMahon, Peter Jason, Angelo Rossitto, Stephane Audran, Rich Little, Gary Graver, Frank Marshall, Cassie Yates, William Katt, Cameron Crowe, Les Moonves. (R, 122 mins)

Orson Welles died in 1985, but 33 years later, his "last" film has finally been completed and released as a Netflix Original. One of the most famous of "lost" movies, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND has spent decades mired in various legal, personal, and political quagmires among numerous involved parties. As was usually the case in Welles' European exile years in the 1950s and 1960s (the exception being his last Hollywood studio work as a director, 1958's TOUCH OF EVIL), funding came from his lucrative actor-for-hire jobs and when that ran out, he would constantly find himself hustling for cash from various wealthy investors from all over the world, who were always more than happy to partner with a revered filmmaker of Welles' stature until they realized they probably weren't getting their money back. Notorious for doing things his own way and clashing with Hollywood execs as far back as 1942's THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, Welles would rarely enjoy a hassle-free project other than 1962's THE TRIAL, and while he did have to cut corners when future SUPERMAN producer Alexander Salkind ran out of money by the end of production, he remained grateful that Salkind trusted him and left him alone to make the film he wanted to make.

Huston, Welles, and Bogdanovich apparently
coining the question "How 'bout a Fresca?"

As a result of his unconventional and often unreliable methods of finance, Welles probably had as many unfinished films as he did finished ones, none more talked about than THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. Filming began in 1970 and wasn't completed until 1976, as Welles would shoot what he could in bits and pieces when the money was there, scraping by with acting and TV commercial gigs (and shooting another movie, 1973's F FOR FAKE) in the interim. He managed to get a French production company to back the project and when that money ran out, he secured additional financing from the Shah of Iran's brother-in-law (the production dragged on for so long and so sporadically that star John Huston didn't even join the cast until 1974). Written by Welles and his girlfriend Oja Kodar, THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND would remain unfinished in Welles' lifetime, the film caught up in his tax issues with the IRS; the alleged embezzlement of funds by a Spanish business associate Welles met while starring as Long John Silver in the 1972 Harry Alan Towers production of TREASURE ISLAND; the Ayatollah Khomeini-ordered seizure of the assets and property of the Shah and his entire extended family following the 1979 Iranian Revolution; and a seemingly never-ending conflict between Kodar and Welles' daughter Beatrice following his death, a battle that also involved Welles' protege and friend Peter Bogdanovich. The young director was then riding high on THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and PAPER MOON, and put $500,000 of his own money into Welles' vision in addition to letting his mentor crash at his Beverly Hills mansion from 1974 to 1976.

There was always talk of finishing the film, with Kodar attempting and failing to broker a deal with Showtime in the late '90s, but it was Bogdanovich who seriously got the ball rolling on the completion of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND back in 2004 (other parties included cinematographer Gary Graver, who died in 2006, and producer Frank Marshall, who worked on part of the original shoot as a production assistant). Once all legal squabbles were resolved, Netflix agreed to fund the final restoration, with Oscar-winning editor Bob Murawski (THE HURT LOCKER) brought in to oversee the completion based on Welles' archived notes, multiple versions of WIND's scripts (including one that totaled 360 pages), and by studying his editing techniques on all of his previous films. Welles shot nearly 100 hours of footage, and it's an incredible achievement in itself that Murawski was able to put this together at all. The end result, running just over two hours, is seemingly free-form mash-up of various film stocks, image qualities, and aspect ratios, often switching from color to black & white in the same scene, almost like an art-house version of the kind of Z-grade drive-in patchwork you'd expect from Al Adamson or Jess Franco (an assistant to Welles on 1966's CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT). John Huston's actor son Danny was summoned to revoice some of his late father's dialogue in a few instances where the audio was too deteriorated to salvage or just missing altogether. Many scenes have the telltale signs of piecemeal shooting, with an absent Huston doubled from behind and conversations between two or more actors edited together even though the actors never share the frame and were shot years apart. Or even on a different continent in Lilli Palmer's case, with the actress in scenes with Huston and other cast members in California and Arizona shot anywhere from 1971 to 1976 even though she's always shown alone and all of her footage was shot in Spain in 1973.

Set up in an ahead-of-its-time mockumentary style by present-day voiceover from 1970s wunderkind Brooks Ottinger (Bogdanovich), THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND deals with the last day in the life of famed Hollywood movie director Jake Hannaford (Huston). A surrogate for Welles himself, Hannaford has invited his closest friends, colleagues, journalists, film students, and other assorted hangers-on and sycophants to his 70th birthday party being thrown by his long-ago lover and retired actress Zarah Valeska (Palmer), with everyone given 8mm and 16mm cameras to document the event. Hannaford's got other pressing issues: his latest film--titled THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND and a desperate attempt to attract the counterculture market--is in trouble. His star is John Dale (Bob Random), a Hannaford discovery who has no acting experience and is nowhere to be found after walking off the set midway through production; young studio boss Max David (Geoffrey Land) has seen the dailies and isn't happy, especially after loyal Hannaford flunky Billy Boyle (Norman Foster) confesses the director has tossed the script and is just making it up as he goes along; and Hannaford himself is growing increasingly jealous over the success of Ottinger, his protege who just scored a critically-acclaimed blockbuster hit with his third film and is now the toast of Hollywood. Hannaford needs Ottinger's help, but the young director won't use his newfound clout to help bail him out with David, who's been invited to the party and is a no-show.

Cameron Mitchell, Paul Stewart, Mercedes
McCambridge, and Welles on the set.

The party is a Who's Who of Hannaford's world, with tight-knit, ENTOURAGE-like acolytes like Boyle, retired actor friends Pat Mullins (an ill-looking Edmond O'Brien, who would retire from acting himself in 1974 after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's), Lou Martin (John Carroll), and Al Denny (Stafford Repp); former business partner "The Baron" (Tonio Selwart); loyal secretary Maggie Noonan (Mercedes McCambridge); his manager Matt Costello (Paul Stewart); and longtime makeup man Zimmie Zimmer (Cameron Mitchell), who attends the party even though he's fired en route. There's also macho screenwriter Jack Simon (Gregory Sierra), who's no fan of Hannaford's, and film critic Juliet Rich (Susan Strasberg), who's notoriously critical of the work of both Hannaford and Ottinger. As everyone mingles, drinks to excess, and wonders about everything from Dale's absence to Hannaford possibly being a closeted homosexual, the director screens an unfinished workprint of THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, an experimental, avant-garde, Euro-tinged, psychedelic art film starring Dale and a nameless actress (Kodar). The film-within-a-film (shot mostly in 1970) has some striking imagery, whether it's a sex scene in the passenger seat of a garishly lit car that looks like a Dario Argento cab ride (this sequence was shot in 1974), or Dale and "The Actress" spending most of the screened film wandering around nude on the MGM backlot with no dialogue. The power goes out, forcing the party to use generators that also fail, at which point the screening moves to a nearby drive-in. When The Baron informs the projectionist that he's showing the reels out of order as "The Actress" happens upon a giant, erect cock in the desert, the response is "Does it matter?"

Almost every character in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND is a stand-in for someone: Billy Boyle was reportedly based on Mickey Rooney, Max David on then-Paramount head Robert Evans, Zarah Valeska on Marlene Dietrich (Welles' original choice for the role, but she turned it down), Juliet Rich on famously combative film critic Pauline Kael, Jack Simon on John Milius, "The Baron" on John Houseman, and most importantly, Brooks Ottinger on Peter Bogdanovich himself, who skyrocketed to fame and fortune while Welles struggled to get any project off the ground (Ottinger's barely-legal girlfriend Mavis Henscher, played by Cathy Lucas, is based on Bogdanovich's then-girlfriend Cybill Shepherd). Bogdanovich's casting pretty much eliminates any mystery as to what Welles' feelings on their friendship were by that point, but it's interesting to note that Bogdanovich only ended up being cast after Welles' first choice--Rich Little, of all people--left the production just like John Dale left the film-within-a-film, partly because of other commitments but mostly because he had no idea what Welles was trying to accomplish. Little remains in the film as a party guest and has one dialogue scene with Lucas, and judging from his wardrobe and dialogue, it was clearly shot when Little was still playing Ottinger (and Ottinger's odd quirk of doing random celebrity impressions--not one of Bogdanovich's strengths--is something that was obviously conceived with Little in mind). Welles made no secret of his disdain for pretentious art cinema, with particular scorn reserved for Michelangelo Antonioni, whose ZABRISKIE POINT is being mocked in the film-within-a-film THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, and with Kodar's constant nudity and some scattered instances of explicit sex, it's very likely that this would've gotten an X rating if it was released in the 1970s. There's a dark-humored and misanthropic streak throughout the film, but the cheap shots--at European cinema (Billy on LAST TANGO IN PARIS director Bernardo Bertolucci: "He's-a-spicy-a-meatball!"), at new Hollywood, at film critics (how else do you explain a drunk Hannaford physically assaulting Juliet Rich near the end?), and at misfit, Hannaford-obsessed film students, especially with a pair of clingy dweebs in Marvin Pistor (Joseph McBride) and Marvin P. Fassbinder (Pat McMahon), who are invited to the party, ask inane questions, and follow him around like lost puppy dogs--start to feel like sour grapes after a while.

As the booze-swilling, cigar-sucking Hannaford, Huston is captivating every moment he's onscreen, channeling Welles through his own persona to create a fascinating hybrid characterization of two larger-than-life filmmakers. With the rapid-fire quick-cuts, constantly-changing film stocks, and the fact that some of their scenes may have been shot months or years apart, most of the cast doesn't get a chance to make that much of an impression, though Mitchell, by that point slumming in D-grade schlock, is an unexpectedly poignant standout as the melancholy Zimmie. Other then-contemporary filmmakers appear as themselves arguing about the state of cinema at Hannaford's party, including Dennis Hopper, Claude Chabrol, Curtis Harrington, Paul Mazursky, and Henry Jaglom, who directed Welles' final performance in SOMEONE TO LOVE, released in 1988, three years after his death. There's some scattered moments of Welles-ian mastery in THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, and at times, it's a remarkably candid confessional, like it's Welles' own personal version of Luchino Visconti's THE LEOPARD, where Burt Lancaster's aging prince wanders from room to room at a grand ball, saying goodbye to his aristocratic life, recognizing his irrelevance in a world that's moving on and leaving him behind. But after all these years, the knee-jerk reaction will be to label this Welles' lost masterpiece or his "ultimate statement," or something to that effect. Five decades of cineaste mystique surrounding an ambitious and unfinished project will do that, but at the end of the day, this is the kind of self-indulgent home movie that's an historical curio at best, and directly responsible for the career of Henry Jaglom at worst. I'm glad it's out, I'm glad we're able to see it, and it's required viewing for anyone with a serious interest in film history up to the 1970s, but am I ever gonna watch this again? There's a legend surrounding THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, and the backstory--covered at length in Morgan Neville's simultaneously-released Netflix Original documentary THEY'LL LOVE ME WHEN I'M DEAD--is ultimately more fascinating than the film itself.

THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB
(US/Germany - 2018)

Directed by Fede Alvarez. Written by Jay Basu, Fede Alvarez and Steven Knight. Cast: Claire Foy, Sverrir Gudnason, Lakeith Stanfield, Sylvia Hoeks, Stephen Merchant, Vicky Krieps, Claes Bang, Cameron Britton, Synnove Macody Lund, Mikael Persbrandt, Christopher Convery, Andreja Pejic, Hendrik Heutmann, Volker Bruch. (R, 115 mins)

It's been seven years since David Fincher's big-budget American version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, based on the first novel in Stieg Larsson's "Millennium Trilogy." It was generally faithful to the book, with Rooney Mara's Oscar-nominated interpretation of researcher/hacker/badass Lisbeth Salander more than holding its own against Noomi Rapace's career-making portrayal in a trilogy of Swedish adaptations. Larsson was only 50 when died of a heart attack in 2004, a year before the first of his three completed books in the series hit European bookstores en route to becoming a phenomenally popular bestseller in the US in 2008. Swedish writer David Lagercrantz was commissioned to continue the "Millennium" series, resurrecting Salander with 2015's The Girl in the Spider's Web and 2017's The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye. Opting to nix the second and third books in Larsson's trilogy and start fresh with a sequel to/reboot to the 2011 film, THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB doesn't bring back any of DRAGON TATTOO's participants other than producer credits for Fincher and Scott Rudin. Mara has been replaced by a game Claire Foy, but she's fighting a losing battle. Director/co-writer Fede Alvarez, best known for his work in the horror genre with the EVIL DEAD remake and the overrated DON'T BREATHE, completely drops the ball on re-establishing Salander as a heroic figure for the #MeToo era. The film jettisons almost everything that made her such a fascinating and iconic heroine in the past and instead drops her in the middle of what looks like a mash-up of SPECTRE, Jason Bourne, and a FAST & FURIOUS sequel. DON'T BREATHE was an excellent thriller to a very specific point where Alvarez jumped the shark: THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB's turkey baster moment comes rather early, when Salander leads some cops on a motorcycle chase and eludes them by driving off a dock and speeding across a frozen lake. It's only the first of several instances where you can hum the 007 "da-da-DA-DAAA!" cue and it wouldn't be at all out of place.

Opening with a flashback to Salander's childhood that doesn't really gel with her background in Larsson's books or in any of the movies, we're introduced to her sister Camilla, the favorite of their pedophile father (Mikael Persbrandt). Though Salander would grow up to be a righter of wrongs against women, she left her sister behind, escaping their abusive father by taking an improbably steep dive down a snowy hill off a balcony and never looking back. Cut to the present day as Salander--apparently known throughout Sweden as a hacker, vigilante, and media figure and somehow constantly out in public and living in what looks like a huge warehouse in a busy part of the city with its own closed-circuit security system and panic room--is hired for a job by Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant), who worked for the US government and designed a software program that would allow the US military to access and override the world's nuclear launch codes. Feeling he's created a monster with the serious potential for global destruction, Balder wants Salander to hack into the NSA's system in D.C. and steal it back so he can permanently delete its existence. This catches the attention of NSA analyst and former military and black-ops mercenary Edwin Needham (Lakeith Stanfield), who immediately flies to Stockholm with the intent of retrieving the program and eliminating Salander. With Swedish intelligence head Gabriella Grane (Synnove Macody Lund) putting Balder and his genius/autistic son August (Christopher Convery) in the least safe safe house imaginable, with a wide-open window you can see in from a great distance, it's only a matter of time before their lives are in danger. Of course, the danger arrives in the form of The Spiders, a collective of Russian bad guys in the employ of--who else?--Camilla Salander (Sylvia Hoeks), who took over their father's criminal empire and wants the launch codes as a global power play and, I presume, to get her sister's attention?

Does that even sound like something Stieg Larsson would've concocted? Foy could've made this role her own but not with that material she's been given, turning Salander into a rote, generic action hero. If this is indeed the start of a new action-driven franchise, then it already looks about two films away from putting Salander in space. Lisbeth Salander is an abuse survivor, troubled loner, and genius with incredible researching and computer skills. Why is she in car chases? Why is she in intricately-staged shootouts? Why is she dodging explosions? Why is her sister an albino-looking, Blofeld-like supervillain with a ridiculous wardrobe that makes her resemble the long-lost sister of Edgar and Johnny Winter? Why is Mikael Blomkvist (played here by BORG VS. MCENROE's Sverrir Gudnason) given virtually nothing to do? And why do Salander and Blomkvist seem to be the same age now? Wasn't his being quite a bit older a key component of their complicated relationship? Speaking of nothing to do, why is Vicky Krieps, who was so good opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in PHANTOM THREAD, squandered in a superfluous supporting role as Blomkvist's editor and sometime lover Erika Berger (played by Robin Wright in the 2011 film)? Salander's shut-in hacker pal Plague also returns in the form of MINDHUNTER co-star Cameron Britton, who more or less serves as a de facto Q to Salander's 007.

Only Stanfield (GET OUT, SORRY TO BOTHER YOU) manages to stand out, mainly because most of his scenes show him intensely glowering and walking through crowded places with steely purpose, almost as if he's trying to find the nearest way out of this movie. His character's shifting alliance seems more like plot convenience, and the long sequence where Salander assists him in escaping police custody in a Stockholm airport is thoroughly absurd (how can she coordinate that many things with such perfect precision timing?). THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB is filled with preposterous contrivances, eye-rolling coincidences, and lazy storytelling, glossing over plot details in a muddled fashion and leaving a capable cast stranded. Alvarez is obviously no Fincher, but while the film looks nice and has a couple of striking shots (one standout being Salander and Blomkvist facing each other from glass elevators in adjacent buildings), everything about it is a perfunctory clock-punch that feels like a Netflix Original that was accidentally released in theaters.

OUTLAW KING
(UK/US - 2018)

Directed by David Mackenzie. Written by Bash Doran, David Mackenzie, James MacInnes, David Harrower and Mark Bomback. Cast: Chris Pine, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Florence Pugh, Stephen Dillane, Billy Howle, Sam Spruell, Tony Curran, Callan Mulvey, James Cosmo, Steven Cree, Alastair Mackenzie, Chris Fulton, Lorne MacFadyen, Jack Greenlees, Josie O'Brien, Jonny Phillips, Tam Dean Burn. (R, 121 mins)

A longtime pet project of Scottish-born HELL OR HIGH WATER director David Mackenzie, OUTLAW KING tells the story of Robert the Bruce, King of Scots from 1306 until his death in 1329. The film takes place at the same time as the events depicted in Mel Gibson's BRAVEHEART (where Robert the Bruce was played by Angus MacFadyen). Sir William Wallace is invoked frequently, though his screen time is limited to a cameo by his severed arm following his execution. Like Wallace, Robert (played here by Chris Pine) took part in the rebellion against King Edward I of England (Stephen Dillane), who was asked to help choose a successor to Scotland's throne when the king had no heirs and promptly ended up claiming the land for himself. As the film opens in 1303, Robert is among the rebels begrudgingly pledging fealty to King Edward at the request of his acquiescing father (the great James Cosmo, also in BRAVEHEART and whose appearance in these sorts of medieval period pieces is apparently required by law), who sees it as the best option, as the alternative is execution.

The widower Robert, whose wife died several years earlier giving birth to their daughter Marjorie (Josie O'Brien), is also given King Edward's god-daughter Elizabeth Burgh (Florence Pugh) as part of the deal. The sense of peace and complacency doesn't last long: inheriting the title of the Earl of Carrack upon his father's death (their relationship is portrayed quite differently here than in BRAVEHEART), Robert is outraged to learn of the execution of Wallace and decides to reignite the rebellion against King Edward. Seeking an ally in rival John III Comyn (Callan Mulvey), Robert is denied and when Comyn threatens to turn him over to King Edward's forces, he impulsively murders him. He confesses his crime to the church, which agrees to give him absolution and pledge its fealty if he can defeat King Edward and reclaim Scotland. Crowned "King of Scots," Robert the Bruce and his loyal army are joined by displaced nobleman James Douglas (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) as King Edward's forces, led by his sniveling, power-crazed son Edward, Prince of Wales (Billy Howle) and the King's chief attack dog Aymer de Valance (Sam Spruell), proceed into Scotland, eventually capturing Elizabeth and Marjorie.

With its generous budget and epic battle scenes, OUTLAW KING probably would've benefited from a wide theatrical release instead of being relegated to the Netflix Original platform. While the script-- credited to five writers--is largely a spinoff of BRAVEHEART and doesn't really offer anything you haven't seen before (drink every time one of Robert's blood-soaked men yells), the film is technically ambitious and extremely well-made, with Mackenzie indulging in numerous long and complicated tracking shots (the opening sequence is almost nine uninterrupted minutes that establish numerous characters and conflicts in a rapid-fire fashion) and using natural lighting in some stunning and often breathtaking Scottish locations (he also cut it down from 137 minutes to 121 after a negative reception at the Toronto Film Fest). Anyone who's a fan of this sort of thing knows to expect a mud-caked bloodbath and on that end, especially with its climactic Battle of Loudoun Hill and its geysers of arterial spray, OUTLAW KING doesn't disappoint. Pine might initially seem miscast, but you get used to his mullet and he settles into the role nicely, especially in his scenes with LADY MACBETH star Pugh. She's terrific here as the supportive and fiercely outspoken Elizabeth and is quickly establishing herself as one of today's top young actresses from whom we'll be hearing a lot. Taylor-Johnson has a few standout moments as the almost-feral Douglas, while Dillane does a solid job of following in the footsteps of Patrick McGoohan, and gets off a couple of good jabs at his pathetic weasel of a son ("Well, you did manage to imprison a few women," he scoffs after the Prince's latest failed attempt to defeat Robert). Howle manages to create a villain you love to hate with his Prince of Wales, but it's a mostly cardboard display of bratty petulance that looks like he studied a highlight reel of Tim Roth in ROB ROY, Joffrey on GAME OF THRONES, and a few Donald Trump press conferences. There's apparently another Robert the Bruce film in the works for 2019, one that stars Angus MacFadyen in his most famous role, though it's hard telling if that's an actual film or just an IMDb page created by an "amacfadyenrulz69@hotmail.com." Rather formulaic in terms of its storytelling but entertaining and beautifully-made, OUTLAW KING is definitely above-average by the standards of Netflix Original films.

OVERLORD
(US - 2018)

Directed by Julius Avery. Written by Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith. Cast: Jovan Adepo, Wyatt Russell, Pilou Asbaek, Mathilde Ollivier, John Magaro, Bokeem Woodbine, Iain De Caestecker, Dominic Applewhite, Jacob Anderson, Gianny Taufer, Erich Redman, Meg Foster. (R, 110 mins)

Long-rumored to be another installment in executive producer J.J. Abrams' CLOVERFIELD universe, OVERLORD is not, perhaps thankfully so after the toxic reception given to the disastrous Netflix dumpjob THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX earlier this year. Set in 1944 in the hours leading up to "Operation Overlord," the D-Day invasion of Normandy, OVERLORD is a solid throwback to '80s-style horror that's equal parts BAND OF BROTHERS, THE DIRTY DOZEN, RE-ANIMATOR, THE KEEP, the WOLFENSTEIN video game series, and John Carpenter's THE THING. The Carpenter element is mainly in its third-act siege scenario, some periodic thumping synth beats, and the presence of Wyatt Russell, Kurt Russell's look-and-sound-alike son with Goldie Hawn. Young Russell's been plugging away for some years now, with showy supporting roles in COLD IN JULY, EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!!, and INGRID GOES WEST, but this is the first time his casting is a deliberate homage to his legendary dad. The day before the planned Normandy invasion, a squadron of Army paratroopers is shot down over France en route to destroy a German radio tower atop a church in an occupied France village in order to shut down enemy communication prior to the operation. The plane goes down with a few survivors, but their commander, Sgt. Eldson (Bokeem Woodbine) is killed by German officers, leaving the rest to carry out the mission: second-in-command Cpl. Ford (Russell), quiet Boyce (Jovan Adepo of FENCES), loudmouth Noo Yawk smartass Tibbet (John Magaro as Leo Gorcey), photographer Chase (Iain De Caestecker), and aspiring writer Dawson (Jacob Anderson), who doesn't last long thanks to a mine.

The remaining four end up taking refuge with Chloe (Mathilde Ollivier), who lives with her kid brother Paul (Gianny Taufer), and a gravely-ill aunt who's barely seen but whose guttural wheeze is heard throughout the house (the actress, very fleetingly seen and rendered unrecognizable under makeup, is credited as Meg Foster, but IMDb seems to think it's a different Meg Foster--one with only one other acting credit way back in 2009--than the veteran cult movie actress, though I'm inclined to think it's "the" Meg Foster until that's confirmed otherwise). Ford sends Tibbet and Chase to check their assigned rendezvous location and while he and Boyce are hiding in the attic, Chloe is visited by sadistic SS officer Wafner (Pilou Asbaek, best known as GAME OF THRONES' Euron Greyjoy), who routinely demands sexual favors. Boyce leaves to check on Tibbet and Chase and ends up discovering a secret lab under the church where Nazi scientists are conducting bizarre experiments on local villagers and captured POWs, including Rosenfeld (Dominic Applewhite), one of their squad who was presumed dead. He rescues Rosenfeld, but the labyrinthine lab is filled with disfigured creatures capable of superhuman strength, and Boyce realizes that Chloe's "sick" aunt is a botched casualty of the inhuman experimentation. Stealing a sample of a mysterious serum, Boyce makes it back to the house where they run afoul of Wafner, leading to a chain reaction of increasingly horrific events that necessitate overhauling the mission to destroy both the radio tower and the evil goings-on in the underground lab.

The plot hinges on Hitler's plan to create a Thousand Year Reich, which is only slightly more outlandish than, say, Quentin Tarantino's rewriting of history in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, and while it doesn't really break any new ground, OVERLORD is an enjoyably goofy and gore-soaked spiritual '80s-style throwback. To put it more simply, if I saw OVERLORD when I was 12, I'd probably still consider it a classic today. Director Julius Avery (SON OF A GUN), working from a script by Billy Ray (SHATTERED GLASS) and Mark L. Smith (THE REVENANT), keeps the pace fast and intense and allows everyone in the ensemble a chance to shine, whether it's Magaro acting like a drafted Bowery Boy, Ollivier getting a badass moment with a flamethrower, or Russell coming off like R.J. MacReady (I'd love to watch Kurt Russell watching OVERLORD). The CGI sometimes disrupts the mood, but there's enough practical splatter mixed in that it's not a dealbreaker. OVERLORD is obviously the end result of a variety of influences, but it does a nice job of keeping its homage factor in check so it's not just a lazy checklist of references. It could be that seeing Nazis get their asses handed to them is just something we need right now, and despite the pre-release hype and that not-very-promising first trailer inexplicably showcasing AC/DC's "Back in Black," it's really not about Nazi zombies, which would be pointless to even attempt, because you can't top 1977's SHOCK WAVES. Is OVERLORD a classic or a "game-changer?" No, but it's two hours of enjoyable, cut-the-bullshit popcorn thrills for genre fans.

FINAL SCORE
(UK/US - 2018)

As DIE HARD celebrates its 30th anniversary, it's only fitting that FINAL SCORE exists as a testament to its enduring influence. Entire scenes and situations are lifted completely, whether it's the hero listening in on the bad guys' walkies and jotting their names down or throwing a henchman off the top of a building with a message for the asshole police honcho who refuses to believe his story. The busy Dave Bautista gets a rare heroic lead as ex-Navy SEAL Michael Knox, who's in London to visit his dead combat buddy's widow Rachel (Lucy Gaskell, a second-string Sally Hawkins) and troubled 15-year-old daughter Danni (Lara Peake), who's always angry with her mum but appreciates "Uncle Mike" still being in their lives and looking out for them. Knox scores two tickets to the West Ham football semi-finals (he keeps calling it "soccer" like every American) at a nearby stadium, and--wouldn't ya know it--fanatical "Sokovian" terrorist Arkady Balov (Ray Stevenson) has packed the place with bombs and commandeered the power grid in an attempt to force the British government to turn over his brother Dimitri, who was presumed killed in a 1999 skirmish when Russia quashed a Sokovia rebellion led by the Balov brothers. Turns out Dimitri is very much alive, having turned himself over to the CIA after faking his death, getting plastic surgery, moving to London, becoming a huge football fan, and getting as much screen time as director Scott Mann (reteaming with Bautista after the better-than-average Lionsgate DTV thriller HEIST) could manage in Pierce Brosnan's two, perhaps three days on the set.

Like John McClane at the Nakatomi Plaza, Knox figures out what's going on and starts taking on Balov's goons one by one while the sellout crowd and the teams are oblivious to what's going on, which also gives FINAL SCORE a chance to rip off the 1995 Van Damme hockey actioner SUDDEN DEATH as an added bonus. After Danni gets separated from Knox, he finds an unlikely sidekick in lowly security usher Faisal (Amit Shah) while butting heads over the radio with both Balov and Steed (Ralph Brown), the bullheaded London police commissioner and this film's Dwayne T. Robinson. He also get in a couple of throwdowns with Tatiana (Alexandra Dinu as Alexander Godunov), Balov's most feral accomplice, who of course takes it personally when Knox dunks her lover Vlad's (Martyn Ford) head in a boiling concession stand fry vat, after which he bears an uncanny resemblance to The Toxic Avenger. As far as belated DIE HARD knockoffs go, you can do a lot worse than FINAL SCORE if it's a slow night and you're looking for a brainless action movie. Bautista (one of 25 credited producers) is an engagingly brutish hero who doesn't have much tolerance for bullshit ("Seriously? That guy's a dick," he scoffs when introduced to Danni's would-be boyfriend), and he's a better Bruce Willis than Bruce Willis is capable of being right now. There's nothing wrong with FINAL SCORE--it's better than a lot of DTV and Redbox-ready B action movies--but there's really nothing to make it all that memorable, either. (R, 105 mins)

BEL CANTO
(US - 2018)

One of the most inert hostage thrillers ever made, BEL CANTO is a lifeless and ultimately absurd adaptation of Ann Patchett's 2001 bestseller, itself inspired by a several-month hostage crisis at the Japanese embassy in Peru in 1996. Directed and co-written by an out-of-his-element Paul Weitz (AMERICAN PIE, LITTLE FOCKERS), the film also takes place in 1996, as wealthy Japanese industrialist and opera enthusiast Katsumi Hosokawa (Ken Watanabe) travels to an unnamed and politically unstable South American country with his interpreter Gen (Ryo Kase), where the president and assorted investors and diplomats plan to woo him into a building a factory by arranging a swanky dinner and intimate birthday performance by world-renowned American soprano Roxane Coss (Julianne Moore). The president bails, sending his VP (J. Eddie Martinez) instead, and Roxane is barely into her first piece when a group of armed rebels led by Comandante Benjamin (Tenoch Huerta, a last-minute replacement for Demian Bichir) storm the mansion and hold everyone hostage. They're demanding the release of a group of fellow guerrillas imprisoned by the president, as Red Cross negotiator Messner (Sebastian Koch) is called in to attempt to broker a peaceful resolution. Messner manages to convince Benjamin to release the women as well as Roxane's diabetic pianist (22 JULY's Thorbjorn Harr) but Roxane remains held due to her value as an American celebrity.

Weeks and months drag on as Benjamin refuses to budge and Messner comes and goes from the grounds as he pleases, and eventually Stockholm Syndrome-esque bonds form between the captors and their captives, especially with Gen falling in love with Carmen (Maria Mercedes Coroy), one of Benjamin's loyal soldiers. Romance blossoms between Hosokawa and Roxane as well, and as time goes on, the mansion becomes a sort-of idyllic paradise that no one really wants to leave ("This is where we live now," Carmen tells Gen). Call it DOG DAY AFTERNOON meets THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL as the outside world gradually ceases to exist. They play chess and soccer, they exercise together, they eat lavish meals, they teach Benjamin's soldiers English, Hosokawa learns Spanish, Roxane becomes a mentor to one of the rebels who's inspired to pursue his love of singing, and all the while, an incredulous Messner--perhaps a surrogate for the viewer--can't believe what he's seeing. There seems to be no urgency on the part of anyone--Messner, the president, various world governments (also among the hostages are Christopher Lambert as the French ambassador and Olek Krupa as a Russian trade delegate), and the hostages themselves--to bring this crisis to an end. When Messner finally loses it with Benjamin and shouts "You must release these people! Now!" it's hard to tell if he's talking about the hostages or the audience This sort of kumbaya utopia might've worked better in Patchett's novel where the medium allows the reader to get into the characters' heads, but it's absolutely ludicrous and deadening on the screen, and the abrupt shift in tone of the last ten minutes shows that Weitz had something in mind here, and I get it, but by that point, it's too little, too late. BEL CANTO is hobbled by wishy-washy politics and the bizarre intent of being a feel-good hostage thriller, leaving great actors like Moore (who doesn't even lip-sync Renee Fleming's vocals convincingly) and Watanabe completely defeated by the material, and even their presence couldn't get this barely-released dud on more than 30 screens for a paltry $80,000 gross. (Unrated, 101 mins)

THE PADRE
(Canada/Ireland - 2018)

Some good performances and gritty location work throughout Bogota elevate this minor chase thriller/character piece slightly above the norm among the plethora of VOD and Redbox options out there. Disguised as a priest, British con man Clive Lowry (Tim Roth) is on the run in Colombia, picking pockets and running scams and doing whatever he can to keep moving. In pursuit is Nemes (Nick Nolte), a retired and still-obsessed US marshal hunting the man known as "Padre" on his own time and dime, even hiring local cop Gaspar (Luis Guzman) to be his guide and translator. Padre crosses paths with Lena (Valeria Henriquez), a 16-year-old orphan desperately trying to get to the US to find her 12-year-old sister, who's been bought on a black-market adoption web site by a family in Minnesota. But with Nemes and Gaspar never far behind, Padre and Lena only keep moving south, with a plan to rob a church and fence some priceless goods to secure passage to the States. It's obvious Nemes' quest is personal, in ways that are both poignant and predictable, as is the way that Padre seems destined for redemption, but Gaspar is quick to remind Nemes of that old adage "Those who seek revenge should dig two graves." Nemes is hesitant to get into specifics in the quest for what's essentially his white whale, telling Gaspar--in a way that sounds awesome when grunt-croaked by a grizzled, 77-year-old Nick Nolte--"I'm bound to him...I lashed my fate to a spear and I aimed it at his heart!" a line fraught with such heavy-handed portent that he repeats it verbatim later on. Henriquez carries much of the dramatic weight, and Roth and Guzman play characters similar to those they've played before (Guzman seems to be the same guy he portrayed in THE LIMEY), but it's great seeing Nolte get such a showy role that keeps him onscreen from start to finish, even busting through doors with his gun drawn and constantly grumbling like a geriatric Jack Cates. With a cast headlined by Roth, Nolte, and Guzman, THE PADRE would need to take a time machine back to 1998 to have any chance at a wide theatrical release. It's easy to see why Sony relegated it to VOD--it's slight and forgettable, and it gets a little sluggish in the second half--but it's a decent enough time-killer that's worth seeing for some frequent flashes of vintage Nolte. (R, 95 mins)

DRACULA A.D. 1972
(UK - 1972)

Directed by Alan Gibson. Written by Don Houghton. Cast: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Stephanie Beacham, Christopher Neame, Michael Coles, Marsha Hunt, Caroline Munro, Janet Key, William Ellis, Philip Miller, Michael Kitchen, Stoneground. (PG, 96 mins)

By 1972, Christopher Lee wasn't even trying to hide his seething contempt for Hammer's ongoing DRACULA series. He portrayed the Count in five Hammer productions going back to 1958's HORROR OF DRACULA, and in between two entries in 1970 (TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA and SCARS OF DRACULA), he went to Spain to star in Jess Franco's COUNT DRACULA with the promise that it would be the faithful-to-Bram Stoker adaptation that he'd spent years pleading with Hammer to make. Hammer still wasn't listening, and in 1972, following their attempts to capture the youth market with the increased T&A of HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN and THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, they decided to move Dracula to mod, swinging London in all its Austin Powers glory with DRACULA A.D. 1972. It's not a bad idea, and the film's an entertaining time capsule that's proven to have significant longevity as a genre cult favorite, but it just doesn't have enough of Lee, who's in it so sporadically that there's no way he was on the set for more than a few days. That was likely by design, as Lee made it clear he didn't want to do the movie, even though it marked the return of Peter Cushing, as Dracula's arch-nemesis Van Helsing, to the franchise after 12 years away following 1960's Dracula-less THE BRIDES OF DRACULA.

A.D. 1972 gets off to a roaring start with a prologue set in 1872, with Dracula (Lee) and Lawrence Van Helsing (Cushing) fighting on a runaway coach as daybreak approaches. The coach crashes, with a broken wheel impaling Dracula in the heart as the rising sun turns him to dust, with Van Helsing soon succumbing to his injuries. A Dracula disciple (Christopher Neame, really busting his ass to be the next Malcolm McDowell) arrives on the scene, gathers some of Dracula's ashes in a vial and buries them at the perimeter of a churchyard cemetery that's Van Helsing's final resting place. 100 years later, that seemingly undead disciple is revealed to be Johnny Alucard (clever!), a black-mass enthusiast who hangs out with a group of Chelsea hippies that includes Jessica Van Helsing (Stephanie Beacham), who lives with her grandfather Lorrimer Van Helsing (Cushing), a descendant of the legendary vampire killer. Alucard needs Jessica for his master plan: the resurrection of Dracula for his master's ultimate revenge on the Van Helsing family. She proves difficult to pin down and get alone, thanks in part to her boyfriend Bob (Philip Miller) but more to her skeptical, overprotective grandfather, who's convinced something isn't right, especially when her friends start turning up dead. As Dracula takes refuge in the ruins of the church located at the cemetery where Lawrence Van Helsing is buried, Alucard tries to placate him with offerings like Jessica's friends Laura (Caroline Munro) and Gaynor (Mick Jagger's then-girlfriend Marsha Hunt, considered by many to be the inspiration for "Brown Sugar"), but the Count remains adamant that he must have Jessica. Alucard attempts to stage the dead bodies of the victims as cult-like sacrifices, but Lorrimer, working with Scotland Yard's Inspector Murray (Michael Coles) has studied his ancestor enough to recognize the work of Dracula when he sees it.

Christopher Lee can barely contain his enthusiasm in this
DRACULA A.D. 1972 publicity shot, accompanied by Caroline Munro,
Stephanie Beacham, Marsha Hunt, and Janet Key.

Given Lee's surly attitude toward the franchise and the character at this point, it's little wonder that most of the heavy lifting is left to the presumably less mercurial Cushing. Lee may have hated doing these movies, but the film has a noticeable spark whenever he's onscreen, particularly when he's with his good friend Cushing. There's a lot of time devoted to Jessica and her friends, including a ridiculously drawn-out sequence involving American rock group Stoneground, and the detective subplot with Van Helsing teaming with Murray serves to advance the plot, but A.D. 1972's best scenes involve Dracula, with Lee channeling his frustration into a portrayal of the Count that's arguably his meanest and cruelest yet. He doesn't even seem grateful for his disciple's 100 years of service to his memory, instantly dismissing him upon his Alucard-instigated resurrection and taking credit for it himself ("It was my will," he scoffs, waving Alucard aside). The problem is that Dracula has so little screen time (after the prologue, he has one appearance in the next hour) that, like many of Lee's performances during this period, is really little more than an extended cameo spread out enough to make it look like he's in the whole thing. It's difficult to tell if this is the result of his frustration or the root cause of it, considering that he actually had a lot of screen time in SCARS OF DRACULA. DRACULA A.D. 1972 was a box-office disappointment in both the UK and in America, where it was released by Warner Bros. Nevertheless, Hammer wasn't deterred, as Lee, Cushing, Coles, writer Don Houghton (DOCTOR WHO), director Alan Gibson (CRESCENDO, GOODBYE GEMINI), and the contemporary setting would all return for 1973's THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA.

DRACULA A.D. 1972 opening in Toledo, OH on 4/6/1973

THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA
aka COUNT DRACULA AND HIS VAMPIRE BRIDE
(UK - 1973; US release 1978)

Directed by Alan Gibson. Written by Don Houghton. Cast: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Michael Coles, William Franklyn, Freddie Jones, Joanna Lumley, Richard Vernon, Patrick Barr, Barbara Yu Ling, Lockwood West, Richard Mathews, Maurice O'Connell, Valerie Van Ost. (R, 88 mins)

If it was a stretch to imagine Dracula going after "London's hotpants," as the DRACULA A.D. 1972 poster promised, then who knows how they came up with the insane plot of THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA? It's crazy enough to admire, but it never quite pulls its various threads together, and like A.D. 1972, it still doesn't have enough Christopher Lee, who doesn't even enter the story until 30 minutes in and then isn't seen again for another half hour. Indeed, anyone watching SATANIC RITES' first 25 minutes might think they've accidentally stumbled on a Michael Coles police procedural, as his returning Inspector Murray catches a case involving a dead SIS agent's undercover investigation of a Satanic cult that's populated by a quartet of prominent Londoners, among them Nobel Prize-winning biochemist and germ warfare expert Prof. Keeley (Freddie Jones), real estate mogul Lord Carradine (Patrick Barr), government security analyst Dr. Porter (Richard Mathews), and military honcho Gen. Freeborn (Lockwood West). A stumped Murray and SIS official Torrence (William Franklyn) decide to consult occult expert Lorrimer Van Helsing (Peter Cushing), who happens to be an old college chum of Keeley's. Van Helsing discovers that Keeley has been secretly developing a new and ultra-lethal strain of bubonic plague that could wipe out mankind on the 23rd of the month--known in the occult world as "The Sabbat of the Undead," all under the auspices of a secret foundation bankrolled by enigmatic, reclusive Howard Hughes-like tycoon D.D. Denham, whose skyscraper headquarters is located at the location of the demolished church from A.D. 1972.

Once Van Helsing gets wind of "The Sabbat of the Undead," he immediately concludes that Dracula is somehow involved, which is confirmed when he's granted a personal meeting with Denham, who's revealed to be--you guessed it--Dracula. His latest plan--apparently concocted after seeing too many 007 movies in his downtime--is to unleash a bubonic apocalypse that will wipe out humanity and yet, he still needs to abduct Van Helsing's granddaughter Jessica (future ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS star Joanna Lumley replaces Stephanie Beacham) and take her as his bride, which will render the two of them immune from the apocalypse, carried out by his own personal "Four Horsemen." The bonkers SATANIC RITES fared even worse at the box office than A.D. 1972. After a disastrous reception in Europe, Warner Bros. shelved it in the US, eventually selling it to exploitation outfit Dynamite Entertainment, who belatedly released it on the American drive-in and grindhouse circuit in the fall of 1978 as COUNT DRACULA AND HIS VAMPIRE BRIDE. Once SATANIC RITES bombed, Lee, who's again terrifically snarling once he finally shows up (and his Bela Lugosi accent as D.D. Denham is...something), finally reached his breaking point and refused to appear in the next film, the 1974 Hammer/Shaw Brothers horror/kung-fu hybrid THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES. In it, Cushing's Van Helsing teams with a family of Bruce Lee-like karate experts to take on Dracula, now played in a bland and ineffective fashion by Lee's one-and-done replacement John Forbes-Robertson. The film was recut and retitled THE 7 BROTHERS MEET DRACULA for its 1979 US release, but by that time, the franchise and Hammer itself were over. With genre trendhops like SATANIC RITES' outlandish 007 plot and the ENTER THE DRAGON-inspired martial arts action of 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES, it would've been inevitable that Dracula and Van Helsing would've somehow ended up in space if the series was still going when STAR WARS came around in 1977.

THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA's biggest problem is that it's never as fun as its crazy story makes it sound. It's also pretty stupid: why would Dracula and his surrogate Renfield in the form of Chin Yang (Barbara Yu Ling) keep his vampire brides stashed away in a basement with a fully-functioning and easily-accessible sprinkler system when water is lethal to the undead? And for someone with the means to create the ultimate weapon in germ warfare, Dracula seems to be off his game here, especially when Van Helsing tricks him into walking directly into a giant prickly bush like a cloddish oaf and getting caught in its vines and branches in what could very well be Dracula's dumbest-ever movie demise. Under both of its titles, SATANIC RITES ended up falling into the public domain and was available in various versions on any number of cheap, bargain-bin DVD sets over the last 20 years. It's just out now on Blu-ray from Warner Archive, who also released a spiffed-up A.D. 1972 last month (a double feature set would've been perfect). To see the constant posts on Hammer's fan page on Facebook over the last year, you'd think SATANIC RITES was some lost classic or something akin to THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND of Hammer horror. Calm down, guys...it's not that good, but it's a must-have for completists, especially with it looking better that it ever has in this new edition. I like the Dracula-as-Blofeld idea of THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA more than what it ultimately turns out to be. But for all its faults, it's always a joy to see the two horror legends together (they also starred in HORROR EXPRESS, NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT, and THE CREEPING FLESH during this same period), and ever the stalwart, Cushing again seems more accommodating to the filmmakers than the disgruntled Lee, playing it totally straight and never once letting on how ridiculous he likely found the entire project to be.

THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA, under its US title
COUNT DRACULA AND HIS VAMPIRE BRIDE,
opening in Toledo, OH on 10/13/1978

THE FIFTH FLOOR
(US - 1980)

Directed by Howard Avedis. Written by Meyer Dolinsky. Cast: Bo Hopkins, Dianne Hull, Patti D'Arbanville, Sharon Farrell, John David Carson, Julie Adams, Robert Englund, Mel Ferrer, Anthony James, Pattie Brooks, Earl Boen, Betty Kean, Alice Nunn, Cathey Paine, Udana Power, Michael Berryman, Marie Marq, M.G. Kelly, Tracey Walter. (R, 90 mins)

A late-night cable fixture in the early '80s, THE FIFTH FLOOR has largely disappeared from view in the decades since. Just out on Blu-ray from Code Red (because physical media is dead) in a transfer that only acceptable but oddly appropriate given its exploitative nature, the film was just scuzzy enough for the perpetually shady Film Ventures International to release on the drive-in and grindhouse circuit over the spring and summer of 1980, but it's tamer than you might think, and it even aired on CBS in 1983. Its plot has several similarities with 1979's grungier HUMAN EXPERIMENTS and 1985's exponentially more tacky HELLHOLE, all three films combining staples of the women-in-prison potboiler with a quasi-SNAKE PIT tropes as a nice young woman thrown into a mental institution. After she suffers a seizure at a disco that's eventually determined to be caused by strychnine poisoning and considered by the ER doc to be a botched suicide attempt, college girl Kelly (Dianne Hull), who just broke up with her boyfriend Ronnie (PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW's John David Carson), is deemed a risk to herself and ordered to spend 72 hours in observation in the mental ward on the fifth floor, referred to as "Psycho City" by the other patients.

Distraught and unable to convince anyone that someone poisoned her and that she wasn't attempting suicide, Kelly is incredulously dismissed by everyone charged with her care, and no one--Ronnie, attending shrink Dr. Coleman (Mel Ferrer), head Nurse Hannaford (Julie Adams), and especially leering orderly Carl (an unhinged performance by Bo Hopkins)--seems very eager to hear her out, let alone release her. She makes friends with some of the other patients, like pregnant Cathy (Patti D'Arbanville), unstable Melanie (Sharon Farrell), who lost it after her husband's affair with a younger woman, and kooky Benny (Robert Englund), the fifth floor's resident class clown, but her defiant attitude keeps inevitably extending her stay. She also has to contend with the unwanted attention of Carl, who makes her shower while he watches and insists on soaping her back, and when she runs away, he tells Nurse Hannaford and Dr. Coleman that she grew violent and had paranoid breakdown, which forces Coleman to keep her confined for another 90 days.

THE FIFTH FLOOR was allegedly based on a true story, but that claim seems pretty suspect. Director Howard Avedis (THE TEACHER SCORCHY, MORTUARY, THEY'RE PLAYING WITH FIRE) was no stranger to trashy B-movies before or after THE FIFTH FLOOR, and the film marked one of the rare big-screen scripting efforts by veteran TV scribe Meyer Dolinsky, whose journeyman career included stops on shows like BONANZA, THE OUTER LIMITS, WAGON TRAIN, DAKTARI, STAR TREK, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, HAWAII FIVE-0, and MARCUS WELBY, M.D. Though it's generally lumped in with the horror genre, THE FIFTH FLOOR is more of a suspense drama, closer in spirit to ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST than anything inherently "scary." It was probably easy to sell it as a horror film ("Once the door closes here, it never opens!"), but if you remove some profanity, Hull's nudity and a surprisingly gory comeuppance for the villain, it could've easily been a made-for-TV movie. It's more uncomfortable than anything, especially with Hopkins' genuinely repellent performance, though even entertaining the notion that standards may have been lax 40 years ago compared to now, it's hard to believe any hospital would've kept this creep on the payroll. Avedis and Dolinsky also completely lose track of the whole "Who poisoned Kelly?" plot thread, addressing it in a throwaway line late in the film that should've gotten her released from the hospital weeks earlier but no one seems to be doing their job. It's possible that was the whole point (Adams' Nurse Hannaford clearly doesn't trust Carl, but Ferrer's Dr. Coleman is absolutely useless), but it's doubtful Avedis was crafting this as some kind of hard-hitting, SHOCK CORRIDOR-style statement.

Toledo, OH, 6/27/1980

The charms of THE FIFTH FLOOR lie mainly in nostalgia for its era and with its cast, which also includes such recognizable faces as Anthony James (the chauffeur in BURNT OFFERINGS), Earl Boen (the disbelieving police shrink in THE TERMINATOR), Michael Berryman (THE HILLS HAVE EYES), Tracey Walter ("Bob the Goon" in Tim Burton's BATMAN), and Alice Nunn (whose place in pop culture is cemented thanks to her work as Large Marge in PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE) as fifth floor patients. Film Ventures somehow managed to corral the services of Casablanca Record & Filmworks (known primarily as a disco label thanks to Donna Summer and the Village People, but also the home of rock bands like Kiss and Angel) to handle the soundtrack, though the only performer they could get to contribute anything was Pattie Brooks, who just had a huge hit in 1978 with THANK GOD IT'S FRIDAY's "After Dark" and is seen onscreen singing "Fly Away." THE FIFTH FLOOR has an appropriately grimy feel that's matched by Hopkins and the performance of Hull, if you can overlook her borderline Elaine Benes dance moves in the opening sequence. Born in 1949, she had a few prominent roles--as Kirk Douglas and Deborah Kerr's daughter in 1969's THE ARRANGEMENT, as Rose in 1975's ALOHA, BOBBY AND ROSE, and as John Savage's wife in 1979's THE ONION FIELD--but her career never took off. She has no IMDb credits after 1991 and her last big-screen role was as Mrs. Settigren in 1988's THE NEW ADVENTURES OF PIPPI LONGSTOCKING. THE FIFTH FLOOR was a minor hit at drive-ins and found a cult following on VHS and cable, but even the poster art did nothing to sell it as Hull's movie, since it's adorned with the image of distraught Sharon Farrell.

THE FIFTH FLOOR opening in Toledo, OH on 6/27/1980

WIDOWS
(US/UK - 2018)

Directed by Steve McQueen. Written by Gillian Flynn and Steve McQueen. Cast: Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Liam Neeson, Robert Duvall, Colin Farrell, Brian Tyree Henry, Daniel Kaluuya, Jacki Weaver, Carrie Coon, Garret Dillahunt, Lukas Haas, Jon Bernthal, Kevin J. O'Connor, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Molly Kunz, Matt Walsh, Coburn Goss, Michael J. Harney, Adepero Oduye, James Vincent Meredith, Josiah Sheffie, Tonray Ho. (R, 129 mins)

Following 2008's HUNGER, 2011's SHAME, and 2013's 12 YEARS A SLAVE, British filmmaker/video artist Steve McQueen's winning streak continues with the heist thriller WIDOWS. Though it's McQueen's most commercially accessible work yet, it's got more going on beneath the surface, mixing contemporary concerns into a story with a decidedly '70s aesthetic, one that manages to be a stylish, Michael Mann-inspired crime saga, an introspective, Robert Altman-esque character piece, as well as a chronicle of big-city political corruption that feels like vintage Sidney Lumet. Based on a British TV series created by Lydia LaPlante that ran in 1983 and 1985, WIDOWS has been both streamlined and expanded for its American incarnation by McQueen and co-writer Gillian Flynn, the latter quick to point out in interviews that the one whopper of a mid-film plot development is all LaPlante, despite it having Flynn's GONE GIRL style and execution written all over it.

McQueen opens WIDOWS with an initially jarring series of smash-cut snippets that quickly settle into a masterfully economic display of concise exposition. Chicago career criminal Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) lives a life of luxury in a penthouse apartment with his wife Veronica (Viola Davis), a former rep for the Chicago teacher's union. Veronica is as aware of Harry's "business" as she needs to be and seems to feign blissful ignorance while enjoying its many financial benefits. That comes to a screeching halt when Harry and his crew--Florek (Jon Bernthal), Carlos (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), and Jimmy (Coburn Goss)--are killed in an explosive shootout with police following a high-speed chase after their latest score. Immediately following the funeral, Veronica is visited at home by Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry), a well-known south-side crime kingpin who was robbed of $2 million by Harry's crew. That money burned up with Harry and the others and he gives Veronica a month to get it back, threatening to send his ruthless, attack-dog younger brother Jatemme (Daniel Kaluuya) after her if she fails to pay up.

It's a sign that Jamal isn't quite ready to let go of his past life, even as he's trying to go legit at the same time by running a high-profile campaign for alderman of the city's economically-depressed and predominantly African-American 18th Ward. It's a spot that's been held for three generations by the corrupt Mulligan political dynasty, currently being handed off by elderly and ailing Tom Mulligan (Robert Duvall) to his son Jack (Colin Farrell), the scion who's inheriting a storied legacy that he doesn't really want. With her back against the wall, Veronica reaches out to the widows of Harry's partners--Carlos' wife Linda (Michelle Rodriguez), violent meathead Florek's battered wife Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), and Harry's wife Amanda (Carrie Coon)--to carry out a haphazardly-sketched heist from a notebook of Harry's, one that will net them $5 million--$2 million to repay Jamal and $3 million to split among themselves. Amanda, preoccupied with a four-month-old infant, declines to take part, and when Jatemme kills Harry's loyal driver Bash (Garret Dillahunt) to send a message to Veronica that the clock is ticking, they need a driver. They find one in hairdresser Belle (Cynthia Erivo, so memorable in the recent BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE), a casual acquaintance of Linda's who's been babysitting her kids while Linda meets with Veronica and Alice to plan the heist.

All of these characters cross paths in unexpected ways, and WIDOWS manages to pack quite a bit into its brisk and relentlessly-paced 129 minutes. There are times where it feels like things are too simplified or convenient, most notably when Alice's gold-digging mom (Jacki Weaver) convinces her to become a de facto escort for some easy money, and her first "date" is David (Lukas Haas), who happens to be a big-time architect who spots a blueprint of the heist target on her bedside table and instantly recognizes it as a panic room and eventually helps identify its location. There's also Alice pretending to be a Russian mail-order bride at a gun show and effortlessly convincing a red-state mom to buy her three Glocks. And of course, Veronica's dog, an adorable little Westie that accompanies her everywhere, seemingly holding on to it in desperation as the last connection to a family that's been taken from her (she and Harry had a teenage son, whose death ten years earlier will prove to have a profound effect on the events that transpire), but is really there as a plot device that's instrumental in setting up that mid-film twist.

From the standpoint of commercial, mainstream storytelling, McQueen's handling of these sorts of things could use a little more polish, but WIDOWS makes up for its occasional narrative clumsiness with a stacked ensemble of award-worthy performances, the standouts being the always-galvanizing Davis, a terrifying Kaluuya, who makes Jatemme one of 2018's great bad guys, and Debicki, whose character gets the most surprising arc, revealing her unexpected smarts and ambition as the one who most transcends her lot in life as an abused doormat for her asshole husband and narcissistic mother. The political gamesmanship between Farrell's Mulligan and Henry's Jamal almost has enough going on that it could warrant its own movie, but it serves its purpose as part of a greater mosaic that McQueen is constructing, both thematically and artistically. There are several arresting visual touches ranging from the use of reflections in windows and mirrors (the final scene in the coffee shop!) to one long, uninterrupted take involving the younger Mulligan's limo that's a total knockout telling you all you need to know about his character. In the end, despite some occasional hiccups that might seem smoother on repeat viewings, WIDOWS is a terrific and compelling piece of grown-up filmmaking--the kind that can credibly and successfully coexist in the multiplex and the art-house--the likes of which we don't see enough of these days.

THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS
(US - 2018)

Written and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen. Cast: Tyne Daly, James Franco, Brendan Gleeson, Bill Heck, Grainger Hines, Zoe Kazan, Harry Melling, Liam Neeson, Tim Blake Nelson, Jonjo O'Neill, Chelcie Ross, Saul Rubinek, Tom Waits, Clancy Brown, Jefferson Mays, Stephen Root, Willie Watson, David Krumholtz, Ralph Ineson, Jesse Luken, Sam Dillon. (R, 133 mins)

There's a loose, shaggy dog vibe to THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS, a six-part western anthology from the Coen Bros. Erroneously reported to be a planned Netflix series retooled as a Netflix Original film, it still feels like a feature-length pilot for a potential series that could be hosted by Buster Scruggs, the protagonist of the first segment, "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs." Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson) is a singing cowboy of the Roy Rogers/Gene Autry sort, but with a ruthless streak that's incongruous with his affable, folksy demeanor. He rides into the town of Frenchman's Gulch and crosses paths with the fearsome Çurly Joe (Clancy Brown), which starts the first in a series of showdowns. It's an amusing piece that's short enough to not overstay its welcome, and is a fine display of the kind of absurdist humor that defines the Coen Bros' funniest work. That same tone is apparent in "Near Algodones," with James Franco as an outlaw who messes with the wrong teller (Stephen Root) in a bank in the middle-of-nowhere desert town of Tucumcari, sending his day on a quick journey from bad to worse.

The Coens have been sitting on some of these ideas for years, and indeed, first two stories are briskly-paced and funny, almost like short sketch concepts that wouldn't have had a place in any of their other projects. BALLAD takes a much darker and almost macabre, SANTA SANGRE-like turn with "Meal Ticket," with Liam Neeson as a grubby, hard-drinking impresario traveling from town to town with Harrison (Harry Melling), an armless, legless "artist" who recites pieces of Biblical verses, poetry, and the Gettysburg Address into a sort of still-life performance art that plays to decreasing attendance as they venture to more distant areas until the impresario finds a new act and has to make a decision about what to do with his old one. "All Gold Canyon," based on a Jack London story, stars Tom Waits as a grizzled old prospector who finds a gold deposit (which he names "Mr. Pocket"). It's mostly a one-man show to a certain point, but while Waits is entertaining, this is probably the least interesting of the stories.

The fifth segment, "The Gal Who Got Rattled," based on a story by Stewart Edward White, is the longest and most substantive, with a devastating gut-punch of a wrap-up. On the arduous Oregon Trail, Alice (Zoe Kazan) is left to fend for herself when her older brother Gilbert (Jefferson Mays) dies unexpectedly. Trail boss Mr. Arthur (Grainger Hines) and his right-hand man Billy Knapp (Bill Heck) offer their condolences and bury Gilbert but they're a day away before Alice realizes their money was on his person and is now buried with him. Potential Indian attacks make it too dangerous to go back, but as they continue on the trail, a bond forms between Alice, who has no money and no one else in the world, and Billy, who wants to settle down with a family and not grow old and alone like Mr. Walker. "Gal" meanders and takes its time and doesn't seem to be headed anywhere in particular, but it sneaks up on you, and it gets a lot from a trio of outstanding performances by Kazan, Heck, and especially Hines, a guy who's been around in bit parts (he's credited as "Emergency Room Aid" in ROCKY II) and minor supporting roles for decades but has never before gotten a chance to shine like he does here.

The final segment, "The Mortal Remains," could almost pass for an old-west version of DR. TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS, with five stagecoach passengers barely tolerating one another: Irishman Clarence (Brendan Gleeson), Englishman Thigpen (Jonjo O'Neill), Frenchman Rene (Saul Rubinek), society matron Mrs. Betjeman (Tyne Daly), and a scurvy, unkempt, and extremely talkative trapper (Chelcie Ross). Disagreements abound and barbs are traded, and Mrs. Betjeman is worked into a state of apoplexy, but as its pointed out, the driver never stops. Like "Gal,""The Mortal Remains" engages in some clever misdirection by seemingly going nowhere, especially in the hilariously rambling monologue delivered by the trapper, which gives veteran character actor Ross more dialogue than he's ever had in a movie. But then Clarence calms down Mrs. Betjeman by singing an Irish ballad and the story becomes something else entirely. Its final destination may not come as a surprise, especially once O'Neill starts acting like he's auditioning for a Vincent Price biopic, but in spite of that, it becomes oddly moving.

THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS feels too cobbled together and scattershot to be top-tier Coen Bros., and despite their claims that this was its intended format all along, it really does play like the two-hour premiere of a TV series. But even in a weaker segment like "All Gold Canyon," there's joys to be had. Shot digitally by Bruno Delbonnel, the film has some stunning shots of desert and canyon vistas along with some--perhaps intentionally--dubious CGI visuals. THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS has too many positives to say it's only for Coen completists, but when their bio is written, this will be one of the peculiar outliers in their filmography. It's by no means the place for newbies stumbling upon this on Netflix and impulsively deciding to begin their Coen studies, but having said that, it's a good sampler appetizer for their unique style and the themes that have run through their work over the last four decades.

CREED II
(US - 2018)

Directed by Steven Caple Jr. Written by Juel Taylor and Sylvester Stallone. Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Dolph Lundgren, Phylicia Rashad, Wood Harris, Russell Hornsby, Florian "Big Nasty" Munteanu, Andre Ward, Brigitte Nielsen, Milo Ventimiglia, Ivo Nandi, Jacob "Stitch" Duran. (PG-13, 130 mins)

2015's CREED surprised everyone. The idea of a ROCKY spinoff featuring Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan), the illegitimate son of Apollo Creed, being trained by his father's rival-turned-best friend Rocky Balboa seemed like a desperate attempt by Sylvester Stallone to keep the ROCKY saga going. But it was a project conceived by others, most notably director/co-writer Ryan Coogler, who brought an electrifying energy to the story and a deep-rooted empathy and understanding of its characters, particularly Rocky, portrayed in a gut-wrenching performance by Stallone that earned him a well-deserved Oscar nomination (he lost to Mark Rylance in BRIDGE OF SPIES). It also put FRUITVALE STATION director Coogler and its star Jordan on the map, leading to their reteaming for 2018's phenomenally successful BLACK PANTHER, where Jordan played the villainous N'Jadaka/Erik Killmonger. Coogler remains onboard as a producer on CREED II, but directing duties have been handed off to Steven Caple Jr., who helmed the acclaimed 2016 indie THE LAND. More importantly, the script is co-written by Stallone, given a more active behind-the-scenes role this time out. That proves to be both a blessing and a curse: yes, he's lived and breathed Rocky Balboa for over 40 years, but as evidenced by the increased absurdity of every franchise in which Stallone has been involved in a creative capacity, he doesn't know when enough is enough (the long-in-development fifth RAMBO film was rumored to have him battling a PREDATOR-type alien creature until cooler heads prevailed). There seems to be little need for a CREED II, which serves as not just a sequel to CREED but also 1985's ROCKY IV.

Depending on your tolerance for the jingoistic, flag-waving Cold War histrionics of the Reagan era, continuing the storyline of ROCKY IV may or may not seem like the right direction for CREED II to go. As the film opens, Adonis has just won the heavyweight title from aging Danny "Stuntman" Wheeler (Andre Ward). He's proposed to hearing-impaired musician girlfriend Bianca (Tessa Thompson), and he's on top of the world. That all comes crashing down with the reappearance of Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), the man who killed Apollo Creed in the ring in ROCKY IV and was defeated by Rocky in a revenge match in the Soviet Union, where even the most hardline communists--including a Mikhail Gorbachev lookalike president--stood up and cheered for Rocky as he was draped in the American flag. Drago's life in the ensuing 30 years has found him alienated and shamed in his homeland. He now lives in a gloomy Kiev, Ukraine apartment block with his hulking son Viktor (Florian "Big Nasty" Munteanu), both of them abandoned by Drago's wife Ludmilla (Stallone's ex-wife Brigitte Nielsen also returns). An embittered, seething Drago wants vengeance--on Rocky, on Russia, on his ex-wife, on the Creed legacy, and on everyone--and he's spent Viktor's entire life training him to reclaim the glory of the Drago name, an opportunity that arises when unscrupulous fight promoter Buddy Marcelle (Russell Hornsby) teams up with them to issue a challenge to the new world champ Adonis. Rocky wants nothing to do with it, leading to a falling out that results in Adonis recruiting Little Duke (Wood Harris), the son of his father's trainer. Bianca also has her reservations, considering she just found out she's expecting and fears that history will repeat itself and Adonis won't be around for her and the baby.

The fight is a disaster: Viktor beats the shit out of Adonis, the fight virtually over in the second round but resulting in a disqualification for an out-of-control Viktor when he lands a huge blow to Adonis' head while he was already down. You know what comes next: Adonis on a long road to recovery, doubting his ability, turning his back on Rocky, feeling sorry for himself, patching things up with Rocky, and answering the challenge for rematch in--where else?--Moscow, this time with Rocky in his corner. CREED II gets by almost entirely on emotional manipulation and audience familiarity with Rocky. There's some deep and thoughtful themes running through this film, with parallels to both other characters and previous ROCKY films. And time and again, whenever it seems poised to go further down that road, it hesitates and reverts to the familiar. Stallone is again great as an aged and weary but always positive Rocky, and he makes magic with little moments and asides, like the way he visits Adrian's grave and talks about how cold it is and after a pause, mumbles a barely audible "Miss you." It's a real and heartfelt moment, as is Adonis, hurt and furious over being told he's battling Viktor on his own, lashing out at Rocky about his estranged relationship with his own son (Rocky's feeling of not belonging is constantly conveyed in shots that show him standing alone outside a perimeter like John Wayne at the end of THE SEARCHERS, away from a group of people, whether it's the ring, the delivery room, or his son's house). Those words sting only because of the degree to which these two characters have come to love one another, and it's in those moments that CREED II manages to achieve the honesty and gut-punch emotion of its predecessor.

But as the film goes on, Stallone's influence becomes the driving force, and right around the time they're going back to Moscow, it essentially switches to autopilot, becoming pretty much a remake of ROCKY IV, minus the patriot porn and Paulie's robot, but with the addition of a singing and dancing Bianca as his hype man. The biggest missed opportunity of CREED II is the way it only scratches the surface of the Ivan Drago story. He's granted moments of genuine drama that almost generate sympathy for him and his son, but it takes the easy way out and turns them into stock Russian bad guys by the final act (perhaps Coogler would've explored the psychological complexity of Drago by having him show some remorse for killing Apollo, but Stallone definitely does not). There's a story to be told about Drago's humiliating downfall and the way he's obsessively molded his son into a single-minded vessel for revenge to restore honor to the family name. There's even some signs in his mannerisms--perhaps brought to the table by Lundgren, whose aged, craggy face speaks volumes that his minimal amount of dialogue cannot--that Drago regrets not letting his son be his own man. And there's some hints in Munteanu's performance that boxing isn't even what Viktor wants, but it's all he's been taught to do. It's always nice seeing Rocky back onscreen, and Stallone, Jordan, and all the returning CREED cast members (there's also Phylicia Rashad as Apollo's widow) are excellent across the board, but CREED II never gets by the fact that the Adonis Creed story didn't need to be continued, and what we've got is really just another generic ROCKY sequel that Coogler's CREED managed to successfully transcend. It's a testament to CREED II's adherence to a tried-and-true formula and cookie-cutter storytelling that the most interesting character arc belongs to Ivan Drago, and that Dolph Lundgren's performance had me wishing they'd made a hypothetical DRAGO spinoff instead.

THE LITTLE STRANGER
(UK/Ireland - 2018)

Buried at the end of summer and released with little publicity, the gothic ghost story THE LITTLE STRANGER was a huge flop, opening in 23rd place and grossing $713,000 on just under 500 screens. Based on the 2009 novel by Sarah Waters and adapted by Lucinda Coxon (THE DANISH GIRL), the film was a momentum-killer for Oscar-nominated ROOM director Lenny Abrahamson, and while it succeeds in atmosphere with impeccable production design and a memorably foreboding haunted house, it's ultimately a chiller too distant and stand-offish for its own good. The house in question is Hundreds Hall, the home of the once-prominent Ayres family. But it's the late 1940s and the mansion and the family have seen better days. Scion Roderick (Will Poulter) is severely burn-scarred, disabled, and shell-shocked following his WWII heroics in the RAF, his mother Mrs. Ayres (Charlotte Rampling) still mourns the childhood death of her first-born daughter Susan, nicknamed "Suki," and other daughter Caroline (Ruth Wilson) is a spinster trying to hold what's left of her family together. Much of Hundreds Hall is closed off and they're down to one servant in clumsy teenager Betty (Liv Hill). It's Betty's bout with a cold that brings mild-mannered Dr. Faraday (Domhnall Gleeson) into their lives and begins a series of events that Roderick believes is being caused by a malevolent spirit residing in the house. Caroline's docile dog suddenly mauls a little girl with no provocation, Mrs. Ayres finds scribbling on a closet wall that seems to spell out "Suki," and an increasingly agitated Roderick sets fire to his room in an attempted suicidal self-immolation and is promptly carted off to an insane asylum. All the while, the perpetually gloomy Faraday grows fond of Caroline and starts aggressively pushing the idea of marriage, and is also dealing with his own issues that stem from a traumatic childhood visit to Hundreds Hall with his mother, who was once part of the servant staff.

There's some intriguing elements to THE LITTLE STRANGER, but the pace is so oppressively glacial that even fans of slow-burn horror will find it to be a patience-tester (Wilson has experience with this style, having starred in I AM THE PRETTY THING THAT LIVES IN THE HOUSE, the absolute slowest of all horror slow-burners). Abrahamson captures a mood of sustained dread, but he's so focused on that aspect that with the exception of one well-done sequence where Mrs. Ayers encounters something in an empty room, the scares never come and all you're left with is a frustratingly ambiguous final shot that's more likely to provoke dismissal than discussion. Well-intentioned and well-acted (Rampling is, as always, a treasure who elevates everything she's in), but this is a meandering, ponderous bore. (R, 112 mins)

COLD SKIN
(Spain/France - 2018)

Based on a novel by Albert Sanchez Pinol, the somewhat Lovecraftian COLD SKIN feels a lot like a throwback to those circa 2000-2003 Spanish-made Filmax/Fantastic Factory/Brian Yuzna productions. There's a definite DAGON influence here with its aquatic creatures and even some Stuart Gordon-like sexual transgression, and though French filmmaker Xavier Gens conveys it through sounds and implication, that artistic decision doesn't make it any less unsettling. Gens hasn't really lived up the promise of his 2007 feature debut FRONTIER(S), his contribution to the "New French Extreme" explosion from a decade and change ago. He had a miserable experience going Hollywood with HITMAN and while 2011's ultra-grim THE DIVIDE has some defenders, it's little more than an exploitative, post-apocalyptic SALO, or THE LAST BOMB SHELTER ON THE LEFT. He did some hired gun TV work before returning to the horror genre with 2017's barely-released and instantly-forgotten THE CRUCIFIXION, arguably the most pointless modern-era EXORCIST knockoff this side of THE VATICAN TAPES. Though not without its flaws and budgetary shortcomings, the ambitious and often surprisingly thoughtful COLD SKIN is Gens' best film since FRONTIER(S) simply by virtue of it not being awful. That said, things get off to a shaky start with that oft-used Nietzsche quote about gazing into the abyss and it gazing back at you, which at this point is pretty much the screenwriting equivalent of walking into a Guitar Center and showing off by playing the intro to "Stairway to Heaven."

Set in late 1914 just as the world is heading toward war, a nameless meteorologist (David Oakes) is set to spend a year in voluntary "solitude-like exile" by manning the weather outpost on an isolated island near the Antarctic Circle. It's a job no one really wants unless they want to be alone (even the boat captain dropping him off asks "What are you running from?"), and the island's only other inhabitant is Gruner (Ray Stevenson, who stepped in when Stellan Skarsgard bailed during pre-production), the drunken and grizzled-bordering-on-feral lighthouse keeper, who informs him that his predecessor died not long after arriving a year earlier. Hunkered down for a year of cataloging wind and weather patterns, the meteorologist, dubbed "Friend" by Gruner, is in for a rude awakening when his cabin is attacked on the first night by a horde of amphibious creatures--resembling a cross-breeding of Voldemort with the Crawlers from THE DESCENT--who emerge from the water and only attack at night. The cabin catches fire and burns down, forcing Friend to find refuge at the lighthouse--somewhat fortified by spikes and makeshift barriers that merely slow the creatures down rather than keep them out--with Gruner. Friend also finds another surprise: Gruner has captured one of the female creatures, Aneris (Aura Garrido), and uses her as a sex slave. Friend and Gruner tentatively agree to share the lighthouse, forced to team up every night to fight off the persistent creatures as Gruner goes increasingly off the rails, especially once Friend starts treating the frightened Aneris with dignity and compassion. Given his past work, Gens is surprisingly restrained here, especially considering a key plot point being the sexual abuse of Aneris by Gruner. The creatures are an inconsistent mix of practical makeup and CGI, and the greenscreen work is occasionally shoddy, sometimes taking you out of the scene with a sense of artifice that doesn't appear to be by design. The attacking creatures storm the lighthouse in a very WORLD WAR Z fashion that's a little wonky and cartoonish, but there's some creepily effective moments throughout, particularly when Friend finds the dead meteorologist's notebook filled with sketches of a violent and sexual nature, with random scribblings like "Darwin was wrong." Stevenson is very good in a performance that grows unexpectedly complex as the film goes on, and Gens pulls off a few nice effects-aided technical shots, like a slow pan across the beach that takes the story from summer to winter. COLD SKIN needed a bigger budget to realize its full potential, but after a decade of floundering, this is Gens' most accomplished work since FRONTIER(S). (Unrated, 107 mins)

THE LAST MOVIE
(US - 1971)

Directed by Dennis Hopper. Written by Stewart Stern. Cast: Dennis Hopper, Julie Adams, Daniel Ades, Stella Garcia, Don Gordon, Tomas Milian, John Alderman, Michael Anderson, Jr., Donna Baccala, Toni Basil, Rod Cameron, Severn Darden, Roy Engel, Warren Finnerty, Peter Fonda, Fritz Ford, Samuel Fuller, Henry Jaglom, Clint Kimbrough, Kris Kristofferson, John Phillip Law, Ted Markland, Sylvia Miles, Jim Mitchum, Michelle Phillips, Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn, Chuck Bail, Tom Baker, Michael Greene, Toni Stern. (R, 108 mins)

The kind of film that can only result from everyone involved tripping balls, 1971's THE LAST MOVIE almost became a self-fulfilling prophecy for Dennis Hopper, completely quashing the momentum he had going from 1969's landmark EASY RIDER and effectively killing his career for the better part of the next decade and a half. Sure, there were high points during that time--Wim Wenders' THE AMERICAN FRIEND in 1977, Francis Ford Coppola's APOCALYPSE NOW in 1979, and OUT OF THE BLUE in 1980, a low-budget film Hopper was co-starring in and took over directing early in production--but THE LAST MOVIE began a downward personal and professional spiral for Hopper, who would continue to be mired in alcoholism and substance abuse and would soon be working almost exclusively in low-budget European productions after being deemed an unemployable pariah in Hollywood. Hopper would occasionally find work in a bonkers cult movie like the 1976 Australian adventure saga MAD DOG MORGAN, or he'd temporarily behave himself enough to get a respectable gig like Coppola's RUMBLE FISH or Sam Peckinpah's final film THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND (both 1983), but much of his work from these lost years (BLOODBATH, REBORN, LET IT ROCK) has fallen into obscurity or was never even released in the US. He hit bottom when he was fired from the trashy 1984 West German/Mexican-produced fashion models-in-prison potboiler JUNGLE WARRIORS when, coked out of his mind in Mexico, he wandered naked into a village 20 miles from the set, ranting about people trying to kill him, and was promptly put by the producers on a flight back to Los Angeles, where he had to be restrained after freaking out and trying to open the plane's emergency exit. It was his meltdown on JUNGLE WARRIORS that finally served as a wake-up call to Hopper to get his shit together and get clean and sober, and within a couple of years, he was the Comeback Kid with the likes of BLUE VELVET and HOOSIERS, finally exorcising his demons and shaking the career self-immolation that began 15 years earlier with THE LAST MOVIE.

EASY RIDER was part of the post-BONNIE AND CLYDE "New Hollywood" movement, and Hopper found himself in the bizarre position of being both a counterculture hero and an unlikely toast of the town. As a result of the film's success, studios began giving the green light to artistic, auteur-driven projects to capture the youth market. Paramount backed Haskell Wexler's politically-charged, X-rated MEDIUM COOL and MGM brought trailblazing Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni to America for ZABRISKIE POINT, but Universal went all-in, giving a handful of notable independent filmmakers carte blanche to make whatever they wanted to make with no studio interference, most notably Monte Hellman with TWO-LANE BLACKTOP and John Cassavetes with MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ. THE LAST MOVIE was part of this push by Universal, and the primary reason why the studio's enthusiasm for the avant-garde indie craze ended almost immediately after it began. Hopper spent almost all of 1970 on location in Peru going over budget on THE LAST MOVIE, a project he conceived with screenwriter Stewart Stern, best known for scripting 1955's REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, which was also Hopper's film debut. He brought an entourage of friends from the movie and music industry with him and shot over 40 hours of footage that he spent nearly a year in holed up in his New Mexico home trying to corral into a releasable, two-hour film. He even scrapped an initial, relatively mainstream-ish cut completely when he showed it to EL TOPO director Alejandro Jodorowsky, who derisively mocked it and advised Hopper to rearrange the story in a non-linear and more experimental fashion. THE LAST MOVIE found significant acclaim at the Venice Film Festival, where Hopper took home the Critics Prize, but Universal execs were much less impressed, especially since his final cut was several months overdue (they wanted it by the end of 1970 and he kept working until April 1971), and the end result was impenetrable and unsellable. It ended up opening in the fall of 1971 to largely blistering reviews from American critics, and it was soon yanked from distribution, never coming close to the zeitgeist-capturing success of EASY RIDER. Without Hopper's involvement, THE LAST MOVIE was re-released on the drive-in circuit a few years later in a shortened, recut version rechristened CHINCHERO (which was actually Hopper's original title), but beyond that, it was extremely difficult to see for many years, even with a 1989 VHS release from the exploitation outfit United American Video, likely to capitalize on Hopper's major career resurgence in the late '80s and into the 1990s.

Dennis Hopper (1936-2010)

Its relative obscurity did much to bolster its reputation as a "lost" classic, and Hopper would frequently do Q&As at screenings once he reacquired the rights to the film in 2006. But Hopper died in 2010, before he was ever able to oversee a DVD/Blu-ray release, though thanks to others, THE LAST MOVIE finally made the restoration rounds in 2017 and 2018. It's now out on Blu-ray and is widely accessible again after 47 years (because physical media is dead), but minus L.M. Kit Carson and Lawrence Schiller's THE AMERICAN DREAMER, a 1971 documentary chronicling the making and editing of THE LAST MOVIE and serving as its own BURDEN OF DREAMS and HEARTS OF DARKNESS. When something is out of circulation as long as THE LAST MOVIE has been, there's always a tendency among cineastes to mythologize it, as if its long absence is a sign of neglect or unacknowledged greatness. It's interesting that its Blu-ray debut has virtually coincided with the Netflix release of Orson Welles' THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (in which a LAST MOVIE-era Hopper has a small role), another much-ballyhooed film whose legend stems primarily from it being unfinished and unseen for over 40 years. Like WIND, THE LAST MOVIE is now a curio at best, a disjointed, largely improvised, self-indulgent misfire in which Hopper doesn't capitalize on EASY RIDER as much as he buys into the hype surrounding him.

The nominal plot has Hopper, looking a lot like he would as a pre-Matt Damon incarnation of Tom Ripley six years later in THE AMERICAN FRIEND, as Kansas, a disillusioned stuntman and horse wrangler working on a Hollywood western being shot in a small Peruvian village outside of Chinchero. It appears to be a formulaic bit of moviemaking, with an old-school, cigar-chomping director (Samuel Fuller), and starring an aging, John Wayne-esque cowboy actor (Rod Cameron) as Pat Garrett and a young up-and-comer (Dean Stockwell) as Billy the Kid. Once shooting wraps (other cast members in the film-within-a-film include familiar faces and Hopper buddies like Peter Fonda, John Phillip Law, Kris Kristofferson, Henry Jaglom, Severn Darden, and Russ Tamblyn), and the cast and crew head back to Hollywood, Kansas stays behind and shacks up with Chinchero local Maria (Stella Garcia) and is in no hurry to return home. His idyllic getaway, where he spends his days lounging about and having waterfall sex with Maria, is interrupted by the village priest (Tomas Milian), who informs him that the locals, led by "director" Thomas (Daniel Ades), are re-enacting the production of the movie and imitating what they witnessed--even constructing film "equipment" like cameras and cranes out of wood and sticks--and are so taken with their Hollywood experience that they can no longer differentiate fantasy from reality. Kansas also gets involved in role-playing sex games with Mrs. Anderson (Julie Adams), the horny socialite wife of an Peru-based American businessman (Roy Engel), and goes off on a hunt for gold with skeezy American expat Neville Robey (Don Gordon). That's before he's coerced back on the still-standing movie set by Thomas and the villagers and forced to re-enact his stunt work all over again in what seems to be shaping up as a proto-WICKER MAN but, like the rest of THE LAST MOVIE, goes nowhere.

There's some shallow statements about the artifice of cinema and the way Hollywood cynicism poisons a heretofore peaceful village populated by largely isolated people--note the way they production just packs up and leaves, leaving its large set of old-west building facades behind for the locals to deal with--but it's all much too muddled and meandering. It's beautifully shot by the great Laszlo Kovacs, Hopper gets a surprising performance out of Adams (THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON), and the themes he explores have some merit, but THE LAST MOVIE is awfully pretentious and full of itself, from the random intentional placement of "Scene Missing" cards, to the credit "A Film by Dennis Hopper" appearing 11 minutes in and followed a full 15 (!) minutes later by the title card, to Hopper paying homage to himself with a climactic restaging of the EASY RIDER campfire scene with Kansas and Neville. As the film grows increasingly abstract in its off-the-rails last half hour, Hopper simply loses the thread and gets lost up his own ass, as a long sequence with a drunk Kansas in a bar brawl is interrupted by cutaways to Hopper in a makeup chair stating "I never jerked off a horse before, ya know?" and another shot of Hopper lying down and a close-up of a lactating breast squirting milk into his face. Its chaos continues as Hopper breaks the fourth wall by smiling at the camera near the end as a LAST MOVIE clapboard is left in the shot. I suppose it's something do to about the blurring of film vs. life or illusion vs. reality, but the whole meta deconstruction/destruction of cinema thing was done much more succinctly with the unforgettable last shot of TWO-LANE BLACKTOP (also of note is that both films feature Kris Kristofferson's own version of his oft-recorded "Me and Bobby McGee"). THE LAST MOVIE is an insufferable mess, though it does have historical value as a document of its era and perhaps as "New Hollywood" taking a wrong turn prior to the age of the blockbuster ushered in by JAWS in 1975. It's certainly required viewing for fans of Dennis Hopper, but mileage may vary. It's either a hellraising artist's ultimate masterpiece and a defiant "Fuck you!" to the industry or a textbook example of the dangers of being handed too much money and too much freedom when your ego's running amok and you're high AF. In the years after he was in rehab, Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler often quipped that in their hedonistic heyday, the band "probably snorted up all of Peru." Well, yeah, perhaps...or at least whatever was left after Dennis Hopper and his cast and crew were finished with THE LAST MOVIE.

THE BLACK WINDMILL
(US - 1974)

Directed by Don Siegel. Written by Leigh Vance. Cast: Michael Caine, Donald Pleasence, Delphine Seyrig, Clive Revill, Janet Suzman, John Vernon, Joss Ackland, Catherine Schell, Joseph O'Conor, Denis Quilley, Derek Newark, Edward Hardwicke, Maureen Pryor, Molly Urquhart, Hermione Baddeley, Paul Moss, John Rhys-Davies. (PG, 106 mins)

"If there are things about me that you hate, Alex...be grateful for them now."

After setting up shop at Universal in the early 1970s, the producing team of Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown immediately knocked it out of the park by shepherding the Oscar-winning 1973 hit THE STING. The same year, they also produced the cult horror film SSSSSSS, and in 1974, gave the green light to Steven Spielberg's big-screen directing debut THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS. Impressed with the young director, they also produced his next film, JAWS, which set new standards for nationwide release strategies and defined the concept of the "summer blockbuster." In the midst of all this massive success for the Zanuck/Brown duo was 1974's THE BLACK WINDMILL, a kidnapping thriller that completely bombed with critics and audiences. Directed by the great Don Siegel (best known for the original 1956 version of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS and 1971's DIRTY HARRY), THE BLACK WINDMILL was based on Clive Egleton's 1973 novel Seven Days to a Killing, and was adapted by Leigh Vance, a veteran TV writer and producer whose credits included THE SAINT, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, MANNIX, CANNON, BARETTA, FANTASY ISLAND, and HART TO HART.

An American production shot in the UK and France, THE BLACK WINDMILL stars Michael Caine in GET CARTER mode as John Tarrant, a British intelligence agent working undercover to nail a crew of arms smugglers selling weapons to the IRA. Led by McKee (John Vernon) and Ceil (Delphine Seyrig), the smugglers seem to be on to Tarrant, since they kidnap his young son David (Paul Moss) and hold him for a specific ransom of $500,000 in uncut diamonds, which just happens to be the exact amount procured by Tarrant's boss Cedric Harper (Donald Pleasence) to fund a different covert mercenary operation. Suspicious about the timing and the ransom amount, Harper orders around-the-clock surveillance on Tarrant, who's having some financial problems in the wake of a pending divorce from his estranged wife Alex (Janet Suzman), even having Scotland Yard inspector Alf Chestermann (Clive Revill) bug his apartment at the request of MI-6 head Sir Edward Julyan (Joseph O'Conor). Harper, convinced Tarrant is secretly working with the arms smugglers and staged his son's kidnapping, refuses to authorize the ransom, while Tarrant can clearly see someone among his colleagues is setting him up to take a fall for their own purposes. Of course, this can only mean one thing: Tarrant disobeys his bosses and goes rogue, stealing Harper's stash of diamonds and chasing McKee and Ceil to France in an effort find his son.

Just out on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber (because physical media is dead), the fairly obscure THE BLACK WINDMILL sets up the pieces for a crackerjack thriller that would seem upon a cursory glance to be a 1970s TAKEN (there's also a really good action sequence with a foot chase through the London Underground), and while it moves fairly briskly and has a fine cast in support of a quietly enraged Caine, it never quite comes together like it should. Perhaps Siegel is just out of his element with an international thriller (though he did find with 1977's TELEFON), but he can't seem to settle on a tone. Indeed, not all of the actors appear to be on the same page when it comes to exactly what kind of movie they're in. Caine is all steely gravitas, as one might expect (except in one inspired bit where he does an amazing impression of Pleasence that has to be seen to be believed), and while he loves his son, Tarrant displays a detached, matter-of-fact coldness with Alex over the very real possibility that David is already dead, which serves as a reminder about why she hates his job and how it's driven them apart. Likewise, Vernon plays it straight as the chief villain, but Pleasence seems to be acting like he's in a spy spoof, breaking out every nervous tic in his repertoire to play a clueless oaf of a boss who has no business overseeing secret government operations and heading something called "The Department of Subversive Warfare," which itself sounds like something out of DR. STRANGELOVE. Pleasence is an undeniable hoot throughout--whether his Harper is getting mocked by his superiors for mistakenly referring to an agent named "Sean Kelly" as "Sean Connery," dismissing Tarrant's story about his kidnapped son when he's giddily distracted by a Q-like gadget man demonstrating an exploding duffel bag, refusing to put a phone all the way up to his ear, or constantly tugging on his mustache--but he seems to have wandered in from a completely different movie.

I suppose it's feasible that Siegel is using Pleasence's character to make some kind of commentary on inept and unqualified idiots falling upwards in life (a common refrain in DIRTY HARRY and its sequels, where Clint Eastwood is constantly disgusted with his incompetent superiors and bureaucratic pencil-pushers), but Pleasence is playing it far too broadly. Revill, too, seems to think he's in something more comedic with the way he works a simmering slow burn as events unfold. There's a terrific ensemble here and they're all good, but their clashing approaches and wildly divergent acting styles, and the erratic tone in the context of the film make THE BLACK WINDMILL seem like a quirky JANUARY MAN of its day, and "quirky" is not a word you'd imagine using to describe an ostensibly gritty early 1970s kidnapping thriller directed by Don Siegel and starring Michael Caine. It's not difficult to see why it tanked and is largely forgotten today, and while it's a minor footnote in the storied careers of Siegel, Caine, and Zanuck/Brown, it has its moments and is worth seeing for completists. And if you're a Donald Pleasence fan, well, you've definitely been deprived of something special with his work here.

NAKED VENGEANCE
(US/Philippines - 1985)

Directed by Cirio H. Santiago. Written by Reilly Askew. Cast: Deborah Tranelli, Kaz Garas, Bill McLaughlin, Ed Crick, Terence O'Hara, Carmen Argenziano, Steve Roderick, David Light, Don Gordon Bell, Nick Nicholson, Phil Morrell, Joseph Zucchero, Helen McNeely, Doc McCoy, Henry Strzalkowski, Bill Kipp. (Unrated, 97 mins)

Filipino exploitation auteur Cirio H. Santiago took a break the '80s cycle of Namsploitation and post-nuke ripoffs to helm 1985's NAKED VENGEANCE, an I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE-inspired contribution to the rape/revenge subgenre. An early release of Roger Corman's Concorde Pictures, NAKED VENGEANCE's Lightning Video VHS was in every video store in America back in the '80s, but it was available in two vastly different editions: a 77-minute R-rated version, and a 97-minute (!) unrated version, the latter represented on Scream Factory's new Blu-ray double feature set with the women-in-prison thriller VENDETTA, because physical media is dead. Much of those 20 additional minutes are related to character development, but in its uncut form, NAKED VENGEANCE is maybe the most ridiculously violent movie Santiago ever made. Flash-in-the-pan actress and SoCal trophy wife Carla Harris (Deborah Tranelli, then in the middle of a decade-long run as Phyllis Wapner, Bobby Ewing's secretary, on DALLAS) finds her world shattered when her husband Mark (Terence O'Hara) is shot and killed while heroically intervening in a sexual assault in the parking lot of a swanky restaurant where they were celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary. When the detective (Carmen Argenziano, whose two brief appearances are likely Hollywood-shot inserts by someone at Corman's lumberyard headquarters) tells her there's no leads and the rape victim isn't cooperating, Carla decides to get away and visit her parents in her childhood town of Silver Lake. Once there, she's ogled, leered at, harassed, and hit on by every guy in town, some of whom knew her in high school and resent that she ran off to Hollywood. When she resists the forceful advances of seemingly affable supermarket--or the closest approximation of a California supermarket that Santiago can throw together in a what looks like a vacant Manila gas station--butcher Fletch (Kaz Garas), tensions explode and when Carla's parents take an overnight trip to visit relatives, Fletch and his sub-literate buddies barge into the house and gang-rape Carla. Of course, her parents decide to return early, and they're shotgunned to death as Fletch also kills Timmy (Steve Roderick), the town's "slow" kid who tagged along, framing him for the massacre.

A catatonic Carla is hospitalized, but escapes nightly to exact revenge on the men in a variety of horrific ways, from setting one ablaze to crushing another under a car to the old rape/revenge standby of castration. As the body count rises, useless sheriff (Bill McLaughlin)--who shruggingly told Carla to "just keep your curtains closed" and "relax a little" when she reported Timmy peeping through her window--takes an inordinate amount of time to realize that all of the victims are Fletch's asshole bros, and he has to keep Fletch from forming a posse to go after Carla. Similar to what he'd do with FUTURE HUNTERS, Santiago rips off multiple films over the course of NAKED VENGEANCE: it goes from I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE to a DEATH WISH-style vigilante thriller, then it turns into FIRST BLOOD when they pursue Carla through town and into the surrounding woods, and finally STRAW DOGS when she barricades herself in her parents' house as Fletch and what's left of his crew lay siege. As evidenced by the grocery store and an equally unconvincing gym, NAKED VENGEANCE is laughably cheap. Even the sheriff's office has a laminated "Sheriff's Office" sign taped to a door in what's obviously not a police station.

While a few early scenes were actually shot in California, the bulk of the film has Manila passing itself off as suburban L.A. with occasional bits that almost look convincing (there's also the presence of Santiago's usual Philippines-based stock company members like Nick Nicholson, Henry Strzalkowski, and Ed Crick). An epilogue with Carla back in L.A. cluelessly makes use of stock footage of NYC before Tranelli is back in L.A., made apparent by a cameo appearance from Walter Hill's favorite bar, Torchy's. Tranelli isn't a great actress, and her TV career went nowhere after DALLAS (she left the business after a 1995 guest spot on LAW & ORDER). While she's good enough for NAKED VENGEANCE, it says a lot about the opportunities she was getting outside of DALLAS that she'd resort to something this grimy and nasty to land a lead role in a feature film (she's also a singer, and Santiago letting her belt out the overplayed but undeniably catchy Laura Branigan-esque power ballad theme song "Still Got a Love" might've sweetened the deal). It's repugnant and graphically violent, but make no mistake: for those genre fans so inclined, the absolutely insane NAKED VENGEANCE is a buried treasure of VHS glory days trashsploitation just waiting to be rediscovered.

VENDETTA
(US - 1986)

Directed by Bruce Logan. Written by L.J. Cavastani, Emil Farkas, Simon Maskell and John Adams. Cast: Karen Chase, Sandy Martin, Kin Shriner, Roberta Collins, Michelle Newkirk, Marshall Teague, Greg Bradford, Mark Von Zech, Hoke Howell, Eugene Robert Glazer, Marta Kober, Lisa Hullana, Durga McBroom, Will Hare, Jack Kosslyn, Bruce Logan. (R, 90 mins)

Paired with NAKED VENGEANCE on the new Scream Factory Blu-ray double feature set is VENDETTA, a Concorde pickup that made the regional rounds in the fall of 1986. Originally titled ANGELS BEHIND BARS, it joined Cannon's THE NAKED CAGE and New World's spoofy REFORM SCHOOL GIRLS as belated stragglers in the '80s women-in-prison revival that was highlighted by the likes of 1982's THE CONCRETE JUNGLE and 1983's CHAINED HEAT. VENDETTA was designed as a starring vehicle for stuntwoman Karen Chase, cast radically against type as Laurie Collins, a tough-as-nails Hollywood stuntwoman whose little sister Bonnie (Michelle Newkirk) is raped and gets tossed in prison on a manslaughter charge after shooting her attacker with his own gun. In the joint, Bonnie runs afoul of bitchy, ruthless cell block queen Kay (Sandy Martin), who has her crew beat the shit out of her, shoot her up with junk, and throw her over a railing in what corrupt prison officials and a shady coroner write off as a suicide. Laurie isn't convinced and devises a plan to get sent to the same prison--by stealing the judge's car and going on a drunken, reckless driving spree, and being sentenced by the same judge, which is in no way a conflict of interest--where she tries to figure out who killed her beloved baby sister.

VENDETTA is moderately entertaining trash that's pretty much par for the course as far as these kinds of movies go, except for a climax involving a Prince impersonator, which is admittedly not something you see every day. Chase's Laurie demonstrates some more fighting skills than the usual naive innocent protagonist you'd normally find, and it's of interest in retrospect to see Martin--later to find notoriety as Grandma in NAPOLEON DYNAMITE, as Mac's mom on IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA, and as disgraced deputy Sam Rockwell's mom in THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI--letting it all hang out and acting like an unhinged psychopath as Kay. Fans of the post-Roger Waters era of Pink Floyd will be surprised to see the band's soon-to-be fan-favorite backing vocalist Durga McBroom as an ass-kicking inmate named "Willow." There's also '70s drive-in starlet Roberta Collins (DEATH RACE 2000's Matilda the Hun) in her final film appearance as the one sympathetic prison official (she retired from acting and died in 2008); longtime daytime soap vet Kin Shriner, who's spent most of the last 41 years as Scott Baldwin on GENERAL HOSPITAL, as a horndog guard ("C'mon, I've already serviced three girls today and my wife's waitin' for me...it's our anniversary!"); Marshall Teague (best known as ROAD HOUSE dipshit Jimmy Reno) as Laurie's boyfriend; and a brawl outside Pacino's, then a well-known Covina, CA restaurant owned by Sal Pacino, who unsurprisingly couldn't talk his son Al into stopping by to say hello. VENDETTA was the directing debut of Bruce Logan, a cinematographer on '70s Roger Corman productions like BIG BAD MAMA, CRAZY MAMA, and JACKSON COUNTY JAIL who also worked on the special effects crew of STAR WARS, STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, and FIREFOX among others. He served as the cinematographer for the groundbreaking TRON before going into the world of music videos, where his biggest credit was producing the Mary Lambert-directed video for Madonna's hit "Borderline," from her self-titled 1983 debut.

VENDETTA opening in Toledo, OH on 12/12/1986 as a
"First Run Exclusive" at a nearly abandoned mall's
second-run two-screen that would be closed seven months later.
Note SONG OF THE SOUTH hitting another second-run
at the end of what would be its final--to date-- theatrical re-release.

THE CHILDREN
(US - 1980)

Directed by Max Kalmanowicz. Written by Carlton J. Albright and Edward Terry. Cast: Martin Shakar, Gil Rogers, Gale Garnett, Shannon Bolin, Tracy Griswold, Joy Glaccum, Edward Terry, Peter Maloney, Michelle LeMothe, Suzanne Barnes, Rita Montone, John Codiglia, Clara Evans, Jeptha Evans, Julie Carrier, Sarah Albright, Nathanael Albright, Jessie Abrams, June Berry, Martin Brennan. (R, 93 mins)

In heavy cable rotation in the early '80s and its Vestron Video VHS a fixture in every video store back in the day, 1980's THE CHILDREN remains enjoyably goofy and, in retrospect, looks reasonably professional relative to most regional horror offerings of its era. Shot in Massachusetts on a shoestring budget, the film managed to nab some personnel that had past associations with real movies and other legit gigs: top-billed Martin Shakar, in his only big-screen lead, had a key supporting role in the 1977 smash hit SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER as John Travolta's sympathetic older brother, who usurps his black sheep role by leaving the priesthood and encouraging him, against the wishes of their parents, to pursue dancing; Gil Rogers was a visible presence as a kindly grandfather in a series of Grape-Nuts TV commercials during this period; Gale Garnett was a singer best known for her Grammy-winning 1964 hit "We'll Sing in the Sunshine;" and while Shannon Bolin never had much of a big-screen career, she did recreate her acclaimed Broadway role as Meg in the popular 1958 big-screen version of DAMN YANKEES, co-starring with Tab Hunter and Gwen Verdon. THE CHILDREN also been inextricably linked to the same year's earlier hit FRIDAY THE 13TH, mainly as a lesser-known, distant relative, as it shared a few crew members, including cinematographer Barry Abrams but most notably composer Harry Manfredini, whose score here virtually recycles nearly every cue from the influential slasher hit with the exception of the iconic "ki ki ki, ma ma ma."

The brainchild of producer Carlton J. Albright and his writing partner Edward Terry, who would later team on the grungy 1989 cult classic LUTHER THE GEEK (with Terry in the title role), THE CHILDREN was set to be directed by Terry, who was battling alcoholism issues at the time, prompting Albright to go with Max Kalmanowicz, who logged time as a production assistant and sound guy on several projects (like Larry Cohen's THE PRIVATE FILES OF J. EDGAR HOOVER). Kalmanowicz got the job largely because he had enough industry contacts to put together a professional behind-the-scenes crew faster than Albright could. The story, inspired by the then-current near-meltdown at Three Mile Island, is set in the tiny New England town of Ravensback, where a school bus drives through a cloud of green, radioactive mist after a leak at a nearby nuclear power plant (Umberto Lenzi's NIGHTMARE CITY did something similar around the same time, but with a plane). Sheriff Billy Hart (Rogers) happens upon the abandoned bus while on patrol and can't find the driver or any of the kids. They soon start appearing, with pale faces, blackened fingernails, and arms outstretched, turned into radioactive zombies whose lethal hugs incinerate beyond recognition. After being met with general apathy by most parents-turned-victims (including bizarre and unexplored bits like one kid's dazed, codeine-popping lesbian mom and her bitchy doctor lover, the latter aggressively hostile to Hart for no discernible reason at all, and another who lounges by the pool smoking weed while her oiled-up boy toy pumps iron), and finding his deputy (Tracy Griswold) one of the victims of the children's scorching hugging spree, Hart teams up with local resident John Freemont (Shakar), whose daughter was on the bus and has the day free anyway since his car keeps breaking down, his wife Cathy (Garnett) is about to give birth, and their son Clarkie (Jessie Abrams) stayed home from school sick.

Just out on Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome (because physical media is dead), THE CHILDREN manages to conjure up a few decent creepy images, like a third-act John Carpenter-esque siege scenario accentuated by shots of the children roaming around the yard waiting them out and looking like a grade-school re-enactment of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (the children were played by the kids of Abrams, Albright, and other crew members, plus the son of one of Albright's neighbors, all helpful in circumventing union and child labor laws). But most of the film's enjoyment is of the unintentional yuks variety, whether it's the discovery that the only way to stop the children is by hacking off their hands, the numerous extraneous plot developments appear at random and are quickly abandoned, how thoroughly unlikable both Cathy (who smokes while pregnant) and John (who's always snapping at Cathy) are, and the amateur-night acting of most of the supporting cast, including Martin Brennan as an obnoxious asshole named "Sanford Butler-Jones," with Albright admitting in the Blu-ray bonus features that he's only in the movie because he was hanging around in an unofficial capacity as the production's coke dealer. Albright also says he and Terry took Kevin McCarthy to lunch at the Russian Tea Room in order to woo him into starring (presumably in what became Rogers' role), but were turned down, followed by a near-agreement from veteran character actor and Broadway Tony-winner John Cullum until he was talked out of it by his wife. As a result, Shakar, Garnett (who has a third-string Brooke Adams thing going on here), and Bolin (who plays the doomed owner of the local general store) were the closest THE CHILDREN got to having big names, but it gets the job done as terrific trash cinema without a Kevin McCarthy or a John Cullum having to come in and class it up.

THE CHILDREN opening in
Toledo, OH on 8/15/1980

Proof that a double feature of THE CHILDREN
and THE VISITOR played at a mall.

MAUSOLEUM
(US - 1983)

Directed by Michael Dugan. Written by Robert Barich and Robert Madero. Cast: Marjoe Gortner, Bobbie Bresee, Norman Burton, LaWanda Page, Maurice Sherbanee, Laura Hippe, Sheri Mann, Julie Christy Murray, Chu Chu Malave, Gene Edwards, Di Ann Monaco, Joel Kramer, Bill Vail. (R, 97 mins)

"There's some strange shit goin' on in this house!"

One of the great garbage horror movies of the 1980s now resurrected in an uncut, pristine Blu-ray restoration by Vinegar Syndrome (because physical media is dead), MAUSOLEUM is a ludicrously tacky demonic possession outing notable for a game performance by Bobbie Bresee as a woman transformed by a family curse into a nymphomaniacal succubus, with even her breasts turning into growling, chomping miniature Cuatos. Already in her mid 30s by this time with numerous TV guest spots to her credit, Bresee had a very short-lived run as a C-grade '80s scream queen, following her work here with roles in Empire's GHOULIES, Troma's SURF NAZIS MUST DIE, and a trio of Fred Olen Ray joints with ARMED RESPONSE, STAR SLAMMER, and EVIL SPAWN. But it's most definitely MAUSOLEUM that's cemented her place in exploitation history. Bresee stars as Susan Farrell, a 30-year-old woman who's been traumatized since childhood by the death of her mother. Raised by her aunt Cora Nomed (Laura Hippe) and under the care of fatherly psychiatrist Dr. Simon Andrews (Norman Burton), Susan lives a life of privilege as the wife of successful businessman Oliver (Marjoe Gortner!), but a family curse has come to stake its claim, taking possession of her as she succumbs to her carnal urges, her eyes glowing green as she kills Aunt Cora, and seduces and slaughters the lecherous gardener (Maurice Sherbanee) and a dopey delivery boy (future Andy Sidaris regular Chu Chu Malave). She also scares the shit out of Elsie (LaWanda "Aunt Esther from SANFORD AND SON" Page!), her put-upon, comic relief stereotype of a housekeeper, who flees the house in arm-flailing terror to the tune of her own wacky theme and stopping just short of exclaiming "Feets don't fail me now!"

Dr. Andrews is well aware of what's wrong with Susan: it's a curse on all first-born women in the Nomed family, which shouldn't surprise anyone who's ever seen a vampire movie with a character named "Alucard." The Nomed curse stems from a demonic spirit housed in a mausoleum at the cemetery where Susan's mother is buried. Susan's demonic histrionics are effectively conveyed John Carl Buechler--who would soon go on to be Empire's go-to mechanical FX guy on gems like THE DUNGEONMASTER, TRANCERS, TROLL, TERRORVISION, FROM BEYOND, and DOLLS among others--and once seen, Susan's possessed breasts cannot be unseen. Released by Motion Picture Marketing, a company known for picking up gory Euro imports like Lucio Fulci's CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (which they retitled THE GATES OF HELL) and Bruno Mattei's HELL OF THE LIVING DEAD (retitled NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES) and run by future convicted mobster-turned-Christian motivational speaker Michael Franzese, MAUSOLEUM was co-written and co-produced by one-and-done Robert Barich, and it even opens with the credit "A Robert Barich Film" even though Michael Dugan is the credited director (in a new interview on the Blu-ray, Buechler says that Dugan was on the set and "learning," but Barich was calling all the shots). The Blu-ray finally allows some impressive technical aspects to take center stage, as the film is revealed to demonstrate a nice use of garish color schemes that vaguely recall Mario Bava and Dario Argento, and there's a Euro batshit vibe to the whole thing, but don't think Barich is going for high art: it's all largely on the cheesy and often sexploitative side.

There is one legitimately creepy moment when Oliver wakes up in the middle of the night and sees Susan, in her demonic state, slowly rocking in a creaking chair in the corner of the room, but it's ruined by Gortner's underplaying the response in the way Oliver calmly walks out of the room and...calls Dr. Andrews? Wouldn't you just get the fuck out of the house? It makes even less sense when he's acting like nothing happened the next day and his wife wasn't sitting there looking like a creature spawned from the bowels of Hell. It's also amazing how nonchalant Oblivious Ollie is about the missing Aunt Cora, the missing gardener, and blood all over the kitchen from Susan killing the delivery boy. There's also a memorable sequence in a shopping mall and some spirited splatter throughout, capped off by a nonsensical, fourth-wall-breaking ending. In short, MAUSOLEUM is a bad movie, but it's an absolutely wonderful bad movie

MAUSOLEUM opening in Toledo, OH on 5/20/1983

BACKTRACE
(US/UK - 2018)

Directed by Brian A. Miller. Written by Mike Maples. Cast: Ryan Guzman, Sylvester Stallone, Matthew Modine, Meadow Williams, Christopher McDonald, Colin Egglesfield, Lydia Hull, Tyler Jon Olson, Sergio Rizzuto, Swen Temmel, Joe Gelchion, Jenna Willis, Baylee Curran, Yan Dron, Carl Nespoli, Geoff Reeves. (R, 87 mins)

Though it's not part of Lionsgate's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series, BACKTRACE certainly upholds the grand tradition: it's directed by frequent Willis VOD helmer Brian A. Miller (VICE, THE PRINCE, REPRISAL); it deals with a robbery gone south; has 50 credited producers; it's shot in Georgia, one of the big states (along with Louisiana and Ohio) known for generous film production tax breaks; and it boasts the star power of second-billed Sylvester Stallone, who hopefully wondered aloud at some point, "Who the fuck is Ryan Guzman and why is he billed over me?" Stallone is clearly pulling Willis duty here, probably working 4-5 days tops, with most of his scenes keeping him confined to his desk at a police precinct, glowering at a wall of maps and mug shots in what appears to be the only case he's been working on for seven years. It was seven years ago that Donovan MacDonald (Matthew Modine) and two accomplices made off with $20 million from a Savannah, GA bank and tried to keep more than the agreed 50% share from their silent partners, offering them a mere $5 million. A shootout ensued, killing MacDonald's two cohorts and leaving him comatose with a bullet in his head. Seven years later, he wakes up in a hospital with a debilitating case of retrograde amnesia, unable to remember anything and prone to migraines and nightmares. Robbery/homicide detective Sykes (Stallone) has been monitoring the case all this time, but is repeatedly told by MacDonald's doctor (Lydia Hull) that his mind is a blank slate and there's nothing there.

But buried somewhere in the nether regions of MacDonald's memories is the location of the stashed $15 million that he and his partners kept for themselves. Enter Lucas (Guzman, of two STEP UP sequels, HEROES REBORN, and currently on 9-1-1), who's in the psych unit for a voluntary 72-hour evaluation. He seems to know all about MacDonald, and is in cahoots with hot-tempered guard Farren (Tyler Jon Olson) and nurse Erin (Meadow Williams) to bust the amnesiac perp out and use an experimental medication on him to jog his memories and hopefully reveal the location of the money. Meanwhile, Sykes has to contend with FBI agent Franks (Christopher McDonald, cast radically against type as "Christopher McDonald") trying to take over the case (don't the Feds have jurisdiction on bank robberies anyway?), followed by the inevitable ridiculous third-act plot twist and assorted double crosses.

Would you be surprised to learn that BACKTRACE offers a climactic shootout at an abandoned factory? Or that at least one major character isn't who they claim to be? Or that at one point, a sneering Franks informs Sykes and his captain (Joe Gelchion) that "I'll expect your department's full cooperation?" The slightly sci-fi angle of the experimental serum injected into MacDonald's spine, allowing him to "see" his memories come to life, sounds like something that might exist on the bottom of Christopher Nolan's slush pile, but its almost-lofty ambitions end there. As far as Brian A. Miller movies go, this is better than expected, but that's not quite cause for celebration. The biggest surprise is that Modine is essentially the star. He has the most compelling character and the most screen time, and like a veteran pro, he invests much more effort into a forgettable VOD time-killer than was really necessary. Despite his inexplicable top billing, Guzman is strictly a supporting actor with no more to do than Williams and Olson (his image isn't even on the poster). And with CREED II still in theaters, Stallone finds himself back on the road to VOD/DTV oblivion a few months after headlining the execrable ESCAPE PLAN 2, with the simultaneously shot ESCAPE PLAN 3 due out next year. Sly at least handles his extended cameo with a reasonable degree of professionalism by actually showing up and sticking around for his scenes. That's more than Miller would've gotten from another cynical walk-through from Willis, who would've done his close-ups in a day and let an unconvincing double fill in the blanks. BACKTRACE has a slightly more ambitious approach to its formulaic, generic heist-gone-awry scenario, and its big-name action star is actually awake, but it's MVP Modine busting his ass and going above and beyond that almost single-handedly makes it maybe worth a look on a slow night.

In Theaters/On VOD: AIR STRIKE (2018)

Retro Review: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1990)

In Theaters: SUSPIRIA (2018)

On Netflix: THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (2018)

In Theaters: THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB (2018)

On Netflix: OUTLAW KING (2018)

In Theaters: OVERLORD (2018)

On Blu-ray/DVD: FINAL SCORE (2018), BEL CANTO (2018) and THE PADRE (2018)

Retro Review: DRACULA A.D. 1972 (1972) and THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA (1973)

Retro Review: THE FIFTH FLOOR (1980)

In Theaters: WIDOWS (2018)

On Netflix: THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS (2018)

In Theaters: CREED II (2018)

On Blu-ray/DVD: THE LITTLE STRANGER (2018) and COLD SKIN (2018)

Retro Review: THE LAST MOVIE (1971)

Retro Review: THE BLACK WINDMILL (1974)

Retro Review: NAKED VENGEANCE (1985) and VENDETTA (1986)

Retro Review: THE CHILDREN (1980)

Retro Review: MAUSOLEUM (1983)

In Theaters/On VOD: BACKTRACE (2018)