IN THE COLD OF THE NIGHT
(US - 1991)

Directed by Nico Mastorakis. Written by Nico Mastorakis and Fred C. Perry. Cast: Jeff Lester, Adrianne Sachs, Marc Singer, David Soul, Tippi Hedren, Brian Thompson, Shannon Tweed, John Beck, Jack Kehler, Shelley Michelle. (NC-17, 112 mins)

If there's a genre of exploitation trash that's been woefully under-represented on DVD and Blu-ray, it has to be the straight-to-video, unrated erotic thrillers that were constantly gushing all over the new release walls of America's video stores throughout the first half of the 1990s. A couple of years ago, some of us hoped that Synapse's Blu-ray release of the 1995 Jim Wynorski-directed, Julie Strain-starring SORCERESS would herald the much-anticipated resurrection of these things, but it's been largely crickets and tumbleweed since. Shout! Factory recently released a POISON IVY box set, which is a start (even though the fourth one is a Lifetime movie, for fuck's sake), and Mill Creek has some Andy Sidaris joints on the way for the T&A action crowd, but where's the BODY CHEMISTRY, NIGHT EYES, INDECENT BEHAVIOR, SECRET GAMES, ANIMAL INSTINCTS, or MIRROR IMAGES collections? Where's the Shannon Tweed triple features? Where's the IN THE HEAT OF PASSION or SCORNED double feature Blu-rays? Fortunately, Vinegar Syndrome does their part to satiate the burning desires of those who were powerless to avoid the seductive early '90s temptations of any VHS box displaying the magic word--"UNRATED!"--with their Blu-ray release (because physical media is dead) of 1991's IN THE COLD OF THE NIGHT, directed and co-written by Greek exploitation auteur Nico Mastorakis (more on him here).





Playing like a weird and utterly nonsensical fusion of a late '80s Italian fashion giallo and a prototype of the in-its-infancy DTV/Skinemax erotic thriller while somewhat prefiguring the "virtual reality" craze that would kick off with the next year's THE LAWNMOWER MAN, IN THE COLD OF THE NIGHT centers on Scott Bruin (Jeff Lester), an in-demand Malibu fashion photographer with a glowing, fluorescent waterbed, who's suddenly plagued by horrific nightmares that look like garbled video transmissions, where he believes he's killing a beautiful woman he's never met. He even wakes up in the act of strangling his current friend-with-benefits, sultry model Lena (Shannon Tweed), who's shocked but still turned on ("Your hand was around my throat, I couldn't breathe! But I almost came..."). He gets nowhere with a shrink (David Soul), who simply advises "You need a good night's sleep," which is kinda hard with a bed that serves as a source of bright, blinding light. He also gets some jokey support from his fridge-raiding, bodybuilder best buddy Phil (Brian Thompson), and for some reason, clears his head by hanging out at the beach and having pizza with a homeless guy (Jack Kehler, best known as The Dude's dance quintet landlord in THE BIG LEBOWSKI). It's here that he sees a panicked, pony-tailed guy on a bike wearing a T-shirt adorned with the airbrushed image of the mystery woman's face. Scott does some digging and gets nowhere with Rudy (John Beck), the shop owner who made the shirt, but immediately after, the mystery woman arrives at his front door. She's Kimberly Shawn (Adrianne Sachs), who rides her motorcycle right into his living room and explains that Rudy knows her ex-husband, though she's very vague on the matter. Of course, Scott and Kimberly begin a passionate fling, but he's still haunted by visions of himself--or someone--killing her again and again.


Released straight-to-video in February 1991, IN THE COLD OF THE NIGHT was among the first films to be slapped with an NC-17 rating, created the previous fall as a replacement to the stigmatized X and first given to Philip Kaufman's controversial HENRY & JUNE. There's plenty of skin, grinding, and high-in-the-sound-mix slurping in the film's sex scenes--not to mention a peculiar use for a dish of marbles--but what's here really didn't seem NC-17-worthy then and it definitely doesn't now (Mastorakis said the MPAA had a problem with the shots of Sachs' vigorous thrusting on top of Lester). The cuts had to be minimal since Republic Pictures Home Video released it in both NC-17 and R versions (the latter presumably for Blockbuster), and both clocked in at 112 minutes. Filled with plenty of neon set decor, acid-washed jeans, big hair, and wailing saxes--the tell-tale sign in these things that people are about to get busy--IN THE COLD OF THE NIGHT is very much a product of the DTV erotic thriller in its early stages, but it has a more ambitious storyline than its fellow genre standard-bearers like NIGHT EYES, LAST CALL, and the later flood of post-BASIC INSTINCT knockoffs that were down the road.


Ambitious though it may be, that storyline doesn't really make much sense, especially when a sinister, smirking Marc Singer shows up in the third act for the dual function as the film's villain--the kind of guy who has an ominous wall of TV monitors in his living room--and dutiful Basil Exposition, giving a long, lecturing speech about Scott being the unwitting guinea pig in a government-contracted experiment using TV signals sent through an implant in a tooth as a means of mind control. You'd think with all the money invested in this project, they'd use this technology in a financial or even a MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE or PARALLAX VIEW way rather than just voyeuristically watching some douchebag fashion photographer bang models on his ridiculous glowing waterbed. Mastorakis specifically namechecks Brian De Palma and one could see this as sort of sci-fi-tinged BODY DOUBLE, and the stylishly foggy, blue backlit climax serves to demonstrate Mastorakis' affection for the work of Michael Mann, and to his credit, he does seem to recognize the campy elements, with some outrageously suggestive use of finger food during Scott and Kimberly's dinner, along with an overflowing bottle of uncorked champagne, stopping ust short of cutting to a shot of a speeding train entering a tunnel. Mastorakis would also have us believe that Kimberly's laserdisc movie library consists of two Nico Mastorakis films (THE WIND and GLITCH) and he also has a brief role for one-time Hitchcock muse Tippi Hedren as Kimberly's mother, complete with a shoehorned-in reference to THE BIRDS. The film gets points for its terrific B-movie supporting cast (Tweed is very charming here and you'll wish she had more screen time), but is severely deficient when it comes to the leads. Sachs (best known as the brunette hooker in the "Bitches leave!" scene in ROBOCOP) is gorgeously seductive, but she can't act, and Lester (whose most high-profile role prior to this was as one of Bo Svenson's deputies on the short-lived 1981 TV spinoff of WALKING TALL) is like a bland, blank Michael Dudikoff. Both would be out of the acting business within the next two years, though Lester embarked on a second career directing TV commercials and music videos, and has been married to Susan Anton since 1992. IN THE COLD OF THE NIGHT isn't a great movie, but it's at least unusual for its type, and it was fun experiencing its rampant silliness again after all these years. Let's get some more of these things out on Blu-ray!

THE HIGHWAYMEN
(US - 2019)

Directed by John Lee Hancock. Written by John Fusco. Cast: Kevin Costner, Woody Harrelson, Kathy Bates, John Carroll Lynch, Thomas Mann, Kim Dickens, W. Earl Brown, William Sadler, David Furr, Joshua Caras, Dean Denton, Jason Davis, David Born, Brian F. Durkin, Jake Ethan Dashnaw, Emily Brobst, Edward Bossert. (R, 132 mins)

Chronicling the notorious Depression-era Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow killing spree from the law enforcement side, the Netflix Original film THE HIGHWAYMEN centers on legendary retired Texas Ranger Frank Hamer (1884-1955), played by Denver Pyle in Arthur Penn's trailblazing 1967 classic BONNIE AND CLYDE. As great as that film is, it played a little fast and loose with the facts, most egregiously when it came to its depiction of Hamer, so much so that his widow filed a defamation of character lawsuit and won an out-of-court settlement in 1971. Hamer is presented as a bit of a buffoonish, walrus-mustached punchline in BONNIE AND CLYDE, particularly when he's captured and humiliated by the title duo. In truth, Hamer never saw Bonnie and Clyde in person until the moment he and his posse ambushed them on the side of a rural Louisiana country road and took them down in a hail of bullets. That's the Hamer portrayed here by Kevin Costner, who's introduced in 1934 barely tolerating a mostly forced retirement after the Texas Rangers were disbanded years earlier for their often lawless tactics. When Texas'"lady governor" Miriam "Ma" Ferguson (Kathy Bates) exhausts all other options for bringing Bonnie and Clyde down, she reluctantly agrees, at the suggestion of Marshal Lee Simmons (John Carroll Lynch), to make Hamer a special "highway agent" assigned to essentially hunt down and exterminate the pair.




Joining Hamer is his old partner Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson), now an unemployed drunk living in a foreclosed home with his daughter and grandson. Both men are haunted by the violence of their past and dealing with it in their own ways, and Hamer is hobbled by chronic pain from an estimated 16 bullets still remaining in his body from various skirmishes over the years. Their biggest obstacle in the pursuit is dealing with the movie star-like following that Bonnie and Clyde have with the general public, excited by their Robin Hood tactics of robbing banks at a time when everyone is in dire financial straits, but they seem to turn a blind eye to their brutality and the dead bodies left in their wake. It's even strongly suggested that one naive young deputy helping them (Thomas Mann), a childhood friend of the pair, may have even tipped them off about a plot to nab them at the home of Clyde's father (William Sadler).


Right down to its slightly overlong 132-minute length, THE HIGHWAYMEN has the leisurely feel and pace of a post-UNFORGIVEN Clint Eastwood film, which isn't surprising considering that director John Lee Hancock (THE BLIND SIDE) scripted two Eastwood works from that era (1993's A PERFECT WORLD, which starred Costner, and 1997's MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL). As written by John Fusco (YOUNG GUNS, YOUNG GUNS II, THUNDERHEART), THE HIGHWAYMEN has the comfortable, familiar feel of the kind of uncomplicated procedural that your dad would enjoy, and I mean that in a good way. Aside from setting the record straight on the distinguished career of Hamer and paying lip service to the idea of fawning over dubious celebrities (America's women make Bonnie an inadvertent fashionista by copying her clothing and hairstyle, while 20,000 people attended the pair's funerals, mourning them like heroes), THE HIGHWAYMEN is content with familiarity of well-worn cliches and character arcs, like Hamer's devoted wife (Kim Dickens) just wishing he'd stay home and paint the kitchen but acknowledging "I knew what you were when I married you," Hamer flagrantly disregarding Ma's "stay in Texas" orders and heading out of his jurisdiction, a haggard Gault seeing the pursuit of Bonnie and Clyde as the standard-issue One Last Shot at Redemption, and the usual banjos-and-fiddle soundtrack that's required by law for any crime drama set during the Great Depression or in Dust Bowl migrant towns. The most unexpected decision that Hancock and Fusco make is keeping the faces of the villains largely offscreen, with Clyde (Edward Bossert) seen fleetingly during speeding getaways and Bonnie (Emily Brobst) represented mostly by her dragging, injured left leg.


In some ways, Hamer and Gault almost feel like castoffs from THE WILD BUNCH, stuck in a modern era they don't quite understand and don't want to. Hamer has adapted better than Gault, who has no idea that the FBI can wiretap party lines, which becomes an amusing running gag throughout the film. Obviously, THE HIGHWAYMEN isn't on the level of BONNIE AND CLYDE, but it's reasonably entertaining and the stars are terrific together. It's easy to see Costner's Hamer as a morose, older version of his earnest, "Let's do some good!" Eliot Ness way back in 1987's THE UNTOUCHABLES, and looking past the actor's ill-fated hubris years that gave us WATERWORLD and THE POSTMAN, it's been a pleasure to watch him age into a top-notch character actor in his 60s, where he's carved himself a niche as the Robert Duvall of his generation.

THE BEACH BUM
(US/UK/Switzerland/France - 2019)

Written and directed by Harmony Korine. Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Snoop Dogg, Isla Fisher, Martin Lawrence, Zac Efron, Stefania LaVie Owen, Jimmy Buffett, Jonah Hill, Donovan St. V. Williams, Clinton Archambault, Joshua Ritter, Chela Arias, Bertie Higgins. (R, 95 mins)

The stoner comedy THE BEACH BUM is a pretty blatant attempt by Matthew McConaughey to give himself his own BIG LEBOWSKI. Like Jeff Bridges, he's practically iconic just by being "Matthew McConaughey," right down to his signature "alright, alright, alright," which will likely be carved into his tombstone. McConaughey tried one of these projects before with 2008's barely-released and largely-forgotten SURFER, DUDE, an ill-advised, self-produced vanity project that came a few years before the vaunted "McConnaissance" that culminated in his Oscar for DALLAS BUYERS CLUB. With THE BEACH BUM, McConaughey puts himself in the hands of writer/director Harmony Korine, who made an enfant terrible splash a generation ago as the 22-year-old wunderkind screenwriter of Larry Clark's controversial 1995 provocation KIDS. Korine went on to direct his own films of varying degrees of unwatchability, like 1997's GUMMO and 1999's JULIEN DONKEY-BOY. He remained on the fringes of the indie scene over the next decade, with 2008's MISTER LONELY getting some acclaim before 2009's TRASH HUMPERS had him back in GUMMO mode. With 2013's instant cult classic SPRING BREAKERS, with perhaps the ultimate James Franco performance, Korine demonstrated an unexpected maturity in his ability to make something relatively multiplex-accessible. THE BEACH BUM again finds Korine in the vicinity of mainstream, albeit with some expected indie and arthouse flourishes, mainly in the form of the same kind of striking cinematography that Benoit Debie provided for SPRING BREAKERS. There's just something hauntingly beautiful about a shot of McConaughey's stoned character dancing in a torrential downpour lit with some SUSPIRIA-esque purple filters with accompaniment by Gordon Lightfoot's "Sundown."





While THE BIG LEBOWSKI had a shaggy dog mystery plot to guide The Dude along in his ambling antics, THE BEACH BUM feels mostly improvised and pretty much a goof on the part of all involved that's equal parts arthouse indie, DAZED AND CONFUSED, Cheech & Chong, and '80s slob comedy propelled by a ton of yacht rock needle drops. In a role he was born to play, McConaughey is Moondog, an affable stoner and Key West folk hero who spends his days smoking weed, drinking PBR, doing lines, getting laid, cruising on his boat christened Well Hung, and hanging with celebrity bros like Jimmy Buffett and Bertie Higgins, even joining the latter onstage at a beachfront bar for a rendition of his 1982 hit "Key Largo." Ostensibly a once-revered poet (think Charles Bukowski crossed with Captain Ron), though his watching an old VHS tape of a nearly vacant reading says otherwise, Moondog gets by on the family wealth passed down to his wife Minnie (Isla Fisher), with whom he's in an open marriage. She's in Miami, hooked up with Moondog's soul-singing best friend Lingerie (Snoop Dogg), and Moondog has just arrived for the wedding of the daughter Heather (Stefania LaVie Owen) to the square Frank (Joshua Ritter), referred to by everyone as "Limpdick." Moondog and Minnie go bar-hopping after the wedding, and a drunk and stoned Minnie crosses left of center and is killed in a head-on collision. Moondog survives and is told by her lawyer (Clinton Archambault) that half of the $100 million inheritance goes to Heather, while his half is held in escrow until he publishes his next long-delayed book of poetry, Minnie's final inspiration to get him off his ass and do something. Instead, he rounds up a bunch of homeless guys and destroys one of his houses, which leads to his arrest and a choice: jail or rehab. Moondog opts for rehab, which lasts almost an entire day before he busts out with Flicker (Zac Efron), a JNCO-wearing, panini-bearded, paint-huffing pyromaniac who once fronted a Creed cover band.





Efron doesn't even appear until around the 50-minute mark, and in about ten minutes of screen time, with the help of some hypnotically captivating facial hair that should be an early front-runner for next year's Best Supporting Actor Oscar, almost manages to steal the movie from McConaughey, bringing a surprisingly dark edge to what's been pretty aimless and easy-going for the most part. Even the grieving over Minnie's death is played for laughs, with Moondog reminiscing to Heather about how "Your mom had an amazing ass...and she could fellate like a python!" McConaughey is clearly enjoying himself playing one of the most irresponsible characters you'll ever see, though there's never any doubt he's a loving father. Heather's forgiving affection for him is genuine, though she recognizes his flaws and can hardly conceal the fact that marrying a guy like Frank is an act of rebellion (when Frank criticizes Moondog, Heather says "He's a great man...he's brilliant. You'll never be great or brilliant...but you're dependable"). Once Moondog breaks out of rehab, THE BEACH BUM becomes a series of increasingly silly vignettes, with a visit to his dolphin tour guide buddy Captain Wack (Martin Lawrence) and his coke-addicted parrot, and a trip to a party yacht with Lingerie and Buffett, who write an ode to Moondog called "Moonfog" before the cops arrive and Lingerie whisks him to a small charter plane captained by his personal pilot, an elderly rasta (Donovan St.V. Williams) with severe glaucoma. THE BEACH BUM has some genuine heart to it and there's no shortage of outrageous scenes (Minnie ripping a bong as Moondog goes down on her...while she's getting a pedicure) and quotable dialogue (Lingerie, officiating the wedding, asks Heather why she's settling down with a guy like "Limpdick" when "your pink tweeter ain't even squirted yet," which, trust me, is hilarious when said by Snoop Dogg). Sure, there isn't a whole lot to THE BEACH BUM's ramshackle structure beyond McConaughey trying to turn Moondog into his version of The Dude. It could've used more Snoop and Efron, and even at 95 minutes, it starts to wear a little thin by the end, but truthfully, I laughed quite a bit, which is more than I can say for a lot of present-day comedies. And while it's not exactly the best Matthew McConaughey performance, it's certainly the most Matthew McConaughey performance.

THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT
(US/Belgium - 2019)


Is there anyone who doesn't love Sam Elliott? He's a goddamn national treasure who's been a reliable presence in movies and on TV for 50 years, and he's one of those actors who's so consistently good that maybe we take him for granted. At any rate, the 74-year-old badass is enjoying a late-career renaissance that began with 2017's THE HERO, which didn't get great reviews but generated praise for Elliott as an ailing western star making amends with his family. He then received his first Oscar nomination for his work in Bradley Cooper's remake of A STAR IS BORN, but shot just before that (and released after) was THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT--the eclectic likes of John Sayles, Douglas Trumbull, and Lucky McKee are among its producers--which sounds like the kind of bizarre, bonkers movie that would venture into a revisionist history scenario akin to BUBBA HO-TEP and INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. And it's...not. It's certainly sincere on the part of writer/director Robert D. Krzykowski, and he's to be commended for providing Elliott with a role that's tailor-made for him. And, in all fairness, the title delivers what it promises, but there seems to be a fundamental disconnect with the tone implied by a title like THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT and what's presented in the film.



For an hour or so, it's a serious, somber character study set in the 1980s, with elderly WWII vet Calvin Barr (Elliott) living a quiet life of small-town anonymity among family and neighbors who have no idea of the secret that's haunted him for 40 years: he was the trigger man (played in flashbacks by Aidan Turner) in a successful covert plot to take out Hitler (Joe Lucas), and the Allied forces and the German government subsequently covered it up. He also never got over Maxine (Caitlin FitzGerald), the schoolteacher and sweetheart he planned to marry but never contacted once he returned home from the war. He now spends his days with his dog, eating TV dinners, and going to the corner bar (and he's still able to handle three punks who try to steal his car), seemingly waiting to die. But his government calls on him again when an agent (Ron Livingston) informs him that a blood sample still on file at a military lab reveals him to be immune to a lethal virus spreading across Canada that's been traced the mythical Bigfoot (Mark Steger). The film abruptly switches gears to become a throwback '70s Bigfoot movie with Barr venturing alone into the Canadian wilderness to track and kill the creature. To get a feel of how much of an oddity this thing is, imagine Clint Eastwood spending the second half of GRAN TORINO hunting down the Loch Ness Monster. Elliott is terrific here as the melancholy Barr, but Krzykowski can only get away with subverting expectations to a point. Sure, the confrontation with Bigfoot has some action and grossout gore, but the Hitler section of the film is a bit of an anticlimactic dud, and the trite, facile symbolism (the pebble in Barr's shoe!) would generate dismissive eyerolls in a high school creative writing class. In the end, Elliott is the whole show here, and he's given the perfect intro, sitting alone at an empty bar looking down at his glass while Billy Squier's "Lonely is the Night" blares from the jukebox. If you took all the humor out of BUBBA HO-TEP, you'd still be left with the heartfelt and oddly convincing performances of Bruce Campbell as Elvis and Ossie Davis as JFK, so it wouldn't be a total loss. Similarly, THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT has the great Sam Elliott as its sturdy foundation, but no movie with that title should be this dour and downbeat. (Unrated, 98 mins)



KING OF THIEVES
(France/Germany/UK - 2018; US release 2019)


A chronicle of the 2015 Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary in London headlined by a cast of living legends is a film that almost seems impossible to screw up. Hell, it's even got guys from two of the most iconic heist thrillers with THE ITALIAN JOB's Michael Caine and SEXY BEAST's Ray Winstone. But KING OF THIEVES is an almost total misfire--the heist is glossed over, the characterizations thinly drawn, the police investigation a muddled, incoherent mess. It never generates any tension or suspense, the actions of the characters seem completely random, and when all else fails, it relies on the tired standby of old people doing old people things, like griping about technology ("What's an eBay?"), or in the case of Tom Courtenay's befuddled character, giggling after unexpectedly ripping a loud, bubbling fart in a pool. Despondent and bored after the sudden death of his wife (Francesca Annis), former criminal Brian Reader (Caine) is approached about taking part in a safe deposit break-in at Hatton Garden by safecracking young acquaintance Basil (Charlie Cox), who's got the keys and the alarm code. In what seems like the next scene, Brian's got his old associates rounded up and they're inside, posing as repairmen working on a gas line. There's Terry Perkins (Jim Broadbent), Kenny Collins (Courtenay), Carl Wood (Paul Whitehouse), and brutish Danny Boy Jones (Winstone), and tensions flare afterward when Kenny takes it upon himself to bring in a fence in the form of doddering, incontinent drunkard Billy "The Fish" Lincoln (Michael Gambon), who can hardly be trusted to keep his mouth shut. Brian announces he's out, and Terry and Danny proceed to systematically cut everyone else out of the take, with none of them realizing that they've been under police surveillance pretty much the entire time thanks to their careless actions during and after the burglary.



It's hard to believe any of these guys had careers as professional criminals considering the stupid decisions they make, from not even obscuring their license plates outside the building (and the youngster Basil is the only one who thinks ahead and wears a disguise) to Kenny being assigned lookout and immediately removing his hearing aid and dozing off to all of them talking loudly in public places about what they did. Director James Marsh (MAN ON WIRE, RED RIDING: 1980, THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING) and screenwriter Joe Penhall (THE ROAD and the creator of the Netflix series MINDHUNTER) could've approached this from the angle of inevitable, fatalistic doom, but they don't do much of anything. It's part GRUMPY OLD MEN and THE BANK JOB until its abrupt shift in tone when Terry and Danny start going full post-Lufthansa Jimmy Conway with their rapidly escalating paranoia and incessant talk of getting rid of everyone. It's obvious that the filmmakers assumed they had the kind of cast where this thing could basically just make itself, but it's total letdown for everyone. The elder statesman of the ensemble at 85, Caine is effortlessly Caine, and has some poignant moments in Brian's initial grieving, shrugging in disbelief that he'll never see his wife walk into the room again and observing "When somebody dies, nothing prepares you for the silence of an empty house." But in no time at all, KING OF THIEVES becomes such a plodding, lifeless bore that unless you're a completist who has to see everything Caine does, there's little reason to bother with it. That is, unless you've been waiting to cross "seeing Jim Broadbent's ass" off your bucket list. (R, 108 mins)

PET SEMATARY
(US - 2019)

Directed by Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer. Written by Jeff Buhler. Cast: Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, John Lithgow, Jete Laurence, Hugo Lavoie, Lucas Lavoie, Obssa Ahmed, Alyssa Levine, Frank Schorpion, Sonia Maria Chirila, Suzi Stingl. (R, 101 mins)

Stephen King has long considered his 1983 novel Pet Sematary his scariest work. It was certainly his darkest to that point, so much so that he sat on it for a few years, feeling he'd "gone too far this time." A hit movie version arrived in 1989 after several years in development, including a period where George A. Romero was attached to direct. It was ultimately helmed by music video vet Mary Lambert (best known for several of Madonna's most popular videos of the era), with King writing the screenplay himself and being an on-set presence to ensure that it was being done properly. Of course, King took liberties in streamlining the transition from page to screen, and while it had some flaws and it's certainly no CARRIE, THE SHINING, MISERY, or THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, it remains on the side of the better King adaptations, especially when held up against the likes of, say, 1990's GRAVEYARD SHIFT, 1995's THE MANGLER, 2016's CELL, or 2017's THE DARK TOWER. King adaptations never really stopped being a thing, but the blockbuster success of 2017's IT seems to have kickstarted a resurgence in their major studio viability, which has led to another go at PET SEMATARY. King didn't have anything to do with this new version, which was scripted by Jeff Buhler (THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN, THE PRODIGY), who rewrote an initial treatment by Matt Greenberg, who had some experience adapting King in the past, having written 2008's 1408 and 2014's straight-to-DVD MERCY, based on King's short story "Gramma." It's directed by Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer, the team behind 2014's STARRY EYES, one of many wildly overpraised indie horror films deemed "an instant classic" until something else came out the next week.




Having revisited it in preparation for this remake, PET SEMATARY '89 has aged better than expected, and it still has some chillingly effective moments throughout, though there was undoubtedly room for improvement. To its credit, PET SEMATARY '19 does address a few of those issues, starting with Jason Clarke and Amy Seimetz being better actors than Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby, and the long-brewing discord between the main character and his disapproving father-in-law is conveyed by a few seething, silent glares rather than the hysterically overwrought, corpse-tumbling-out-the casket funeral brawl in the 1989 film, which is straight from the book but didn't really work on the screen. PET SEMATARY '19 maintains the same core premise as the novel and the original film, with Dr. Louis Creed (Clarke) and his family--wife Rachel (Seimetz), eight-year-old daughter Ellie (Jete Laurence), toddler Gage (played by twins Hugo and Lucas Lavoie), and cat Church--moving to the rural Maine town of Ludlow when Louis gets a position in the ER at the University of Maine. Behind their property is, as the misspelled sign states, a "Pet Sematary," where generations of Ludlow children have laid their beloved cats and dogs to rest. Their elderly neighbor Jud Crandall (John Lithgow) tells them all about it and forms a grandfatherly bond with Ellie. It's Jud who finds Church dead on the side of the road, struck by one of the many speeding semis that barrel past the house. Despite insisting to a hesitant Rachel that they need to be truthful with Ellie about the nature of death, Louis opts to tell Ellie that the cat simply ran away. Jud accompanies Louis to bury Church in the Pet Sematary but insists they go further, to the blocked-off land beyond it. The next day, Church is back, but he's not the same. He's disheveled, smelly, covered in caked blood, and is violent toward the family. Jud informs Louis that the area beyond the Pet Sematary is a tribal Wendigo burial ground of the native Indians who once inhabited the area, and there's something about the land that brings back the dead.





If you've seen PET SEMATARY, you know what happens next (the ghostly Victor Pascow character, played by Obssa Ahmed, is pretty much an afterthought that the movie seems to forget about), but this new version switches it up quite a bit in ways that the trailer completely spoiled. It's Ellie--not Gage--who gets mowed down by a truck. When a grieving Rachel, whose traumatic memories and suppressed guilt over her spinal meningitis-afflicted older sister Zelda (Alyssa Levine) come back to haunt her in the new house in Ludlow, takes Gage to visit her parents in Boston, Louis is left alone at the house with plenty of time to exhume Ellie's body and bury it beyond the Pet Sematary. And of course, she returns, and she's...different. Earlier on, Lithgow's Jud invokes the signature line "Sometimes dead is better," and sometimes leaving well enough alone is as well. I was with PET SEMATARY '19 to a point, and the idea of Ellie getting killed instead of Gage isn't a dealbreaker, but there needs to be a good reason for it. And the best reason I can surmise is that the idea of a murderous, scalpel-wielding undead toddler is a bridge too far in these more sensitive and easily-triggered times. Young Laurence is fine as the living and dead Ellie, and it's not her fault that Ellie returning from the dead with a droopy eye and having long conversations with her dad comes off as ludicrous when, even when brought to "life" by an animatronic puppet that didn't look quite real in 1989, the undead, killer Gage is far more unsettling than a loquacious near-tween with a "#whatever" sneer.

Poster for the 1989 version

The chain of events that unfold once Ellie returns from the Pet Sematary ultimately takes PET SEMATARY '19 from loose adaptation to straight-up Stephen King fan fiction, so much so that it starts to resemble a modern reimagining of the "Wurdalak" segment from Mario Bava's 1964 classic BLACK SABBATH more than anything else. While Clarke and Seimetz are a step up in thespian ability over Midkiff and Crosby, this version is sorely missing the sense of folksy camaraderie that the great Fred Gwynne brought to the 1989 film. His Jud was just as readers pictured (ayuh), even though both the 1989 and 2019 films dump Jud's wife Norma from the narrative aside from establishing that Jud is a widower (she's in the book, where Louis even saves her from a heart attack at one point). Lithgow brings a certain level of wisdom and gravitas to Jud, but that's due more to his being a seasoned pro who can make something out of nothing, as Jud is just on hand for reams of exposition and nothing else. There's no real friendship with Louis, which was key to both King's book and the 1989 film, and his decision to even bring up burying Church beyond the Pet Sematary seems both unnecessarily sinister and completely boneheaded (and a throwaway line even implies that Jud had something to do with Norma's death). Lithgow is one of our finest actors, but he's just collecting a paycheck here. PET SEMATARY '19 is a film that cuts corners on the assumption that you're already familiar with the material and it's working from a checklist of things it knows test audiences and genre fans enjoy. You got kids in creepy masks, Blumhouse-inspired jump scares, shout-outs to other movies (including the 1989 PET SEMATARY), a shitty new cover of the Ramones' closing credits song "Pet Sematary," and why the hell is Jud invoking the Wendigo other than to pander for cult horror nerd cred and to make Larry Fessenden hard? Again, it's not like PET SEMATARY '89 was an untouchable classic, but while PET SEMATARY '19 offers a precious few improvements, they aren't nearly enough to justify its existence.

THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE
(Spain/Belgium/France/Portugal - 2018; US release 2019)

Directed by Terry Gilliam. Written by Terry Gilliam and Tony Grisoni. Cast: Adam Driver, Jonathan Pryce, Stellan Skarsgard, Olga Kurylenko, Joana Ribeiro, Jordi Molla, Sergi Lopez, Rossy de Palma, Jason Watkins, Oscar Jaenada, Hovik Keuchkerian, William Miller, Paloma Bloyd, Will Keen, Jorge Calvo, Antonio Gil, Rodrigo Poison. (Unrated, 133 mins)

Terry Gilliam is no stranger to overcoming obstacles and adversity in bringing his vision to life, whether it's running wildly over budget on 1989's THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN, bitterly clashing with Universal studio head Sid Sheinberg on 1985's BRAZIL and Miramax's Harvey Weinstein on 2005's THE BROTHERS GRIMM, or being forced to completely overhaul 2009's THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS after Heath Ledger's sudden death midway through production. But those were walks in the park compared to Gilliam's Sisyphean ordeal in getting THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE made. A dream project he began mulling over around the time of BARON MUNCHAUSEN, THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE was conceived by Gilliam and frequent collaborator Tony Grisoni (the pair also worked together on 1998's FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS and 2006's TIDELAND) as a revisionist take on the classic Miguel de Cervantes novel Don Quixote, and began shooting in September 2000 with beloved French actor Jean Rochefort as Don Quixote and Johnny Depp as Toby, a present-day marketing executive who gets sucked back in time to the 16th century and is mistaken for loyal sidekick Sancho Panza by the aging and insane knight-errant.

Jean Rochefort in Gilliam's unfinished 2000 version

On the first day of filming, the problems started: while completing some early location work in Spain, Gilliam discovered that the constant flights from a nearby NATO training base would render the sound unusable, necessitating post-production dubbing and sound effects. On the second day, a hailstorm and some intense flash floods destroyed some equipment and altered the appearance of the surrounding cliffs, forcing Gilliam to scrap all of the first day's work since the shots wouldn't match. On the third day, Gilliam was told that the production's insurance company wouldn't cover the cost of the damaged or lost equipment. Then some actors started bailing. On the fifth day, the 70-year-old Rochefort was in obvious pain, wincing during takes and unable to ride a horse. He flew to Paris to visit his doctor and was diagnosed with a double herniated disc that required immediate surgery. With no timetable set for the return of Rochefort--who never acted in an English-language film to that point and spent several months learning the language just for the role--Gilliam and Depp soldiered on, shooting whatever they could to work around his absence, but production was soon suspended. By November, the ailing Rochefort was still sidelined under doctor's orders and the French producers and their insurers--citing the flood damage and Rochefort's medical issues as "acts of God"--shut down the production for good two months into filming. This was chronicled in the 2002 documentary LOST IN LA MANCHA, directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe and intended to be a making-of for the eventual DVD release, but the production grew so chaotic and cursed so quickly that they were gifted with an opportunity to create their own feature film instead.


While working on other projects in the ensuing years, Gilliam always had DON QUIXOTE on the backburner. From 2003 to 2016, he made it to various stages of pre-production, with Robert Duvall, Michael Palin, and John Hurt attached as Quixote at certain points (production was nearly set to begin in mid-2015 but was halted once more when Hurt was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer), along with Depp, Ewan McGregor, Colin Farrell, and Jack O'Connell as the time-traveling Sancho Panza stand-in. A falling out and protracted legal battle with Portuguese producer Paulo Branco (who later tried--unsuccessfully--to halt the film's release, the stress of which contributed to Gilliam suffering a minor stroke in May 2018), and the implosion of a distribution deal with Amazon almost derailed the film again in 2016, but shooting finally began--finally, for real--in March 2017 with Gilliam's BRAZIL star Jonathan Pryce, who was originally cast in another role back in 2000, as Quixote, and Adam Driver as Toby. Gilliam and Grisoni had plenty of time to revise and restructure the story, and much like AVATAR had been brewing in James Cameron's head for so long that he used bits and pieces of it in other films over his career, longtime Gilliam fans will recognize familiar ideas and characterizations that may have surfaced in a similar form in his work over the last 30 years (there's more than a little of John Neville's Baron Munchausen and Robin Williams' Parry from THE FISHER KING in Pryce's portrayal of Don Quixote). But unlike Gilliam's 2014 film THE ZERO THEOREM, it doesn't play like a stopgap Gilliam's Greatest Hits package. THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE is the best thing Gilliam's done since 1995's 12 MONKEYS, and it's so near and dear to its maker's heart that you can sense his passion in every scene, almost like he can't believe it's finally being made. Or that after nearly 30 years of this being his white whale (the opening credits have a self-congratulatory "25 years in the making...and unmaking"), he'd have absolutely no excuse for not getting it right.


In Spain shooting a TV commercial, Driver's Toby is a former film school wunderkind who long ago succumbed to jaded cynicism, selling out to work in advertising. He's inspired when his obnoxious boss (Stellan Skarsgard) picks up a bootleg DVD from a gypsy peddler (Oscar Jaenada). It's Toby's award-winning student film from a decade earlier, a micro-budget, black-and-white version of Don Quixote that he shot in a nearby village, starring a cast of locals headed by simple, elderly shoemaker Javier (Pryce). Unable to focus on the TV commercial, Toby impulsively leaves the set and visits the village, which is still feeling the effects of the movie shoot from ten years ago: local innkeeper Raul (Hovik Keuchkerian) remains bitter over Toby telling his teenage daughter Angelica (Joana Ribeiro) that she could be a movie star, prompting her to run away in search of stardom that has only led a life as an escort for wealthy men; and Javier still remains in costume as a sideshow attraction, convinced he's Don Quixote. "Quixote" sees Toby and thinks he's Sancho Panza returning to serve as his faithful squire for more marvelous adventures in "chivalry."

Johnny Depp in the abandoned 2000 version

To say anything more would deprive you of the rambunctious and inspired mayhem that transpires, running the gamut from slapstick comedy to heartfelt drama (most notably, the time-travel element has been mostly jettisoned, with Gilliam having used it extensively in 12 MONKEYS and with the idea of alternate realities in THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS, which really seems to have been a landing point for a lot of his initial QUIXOTE ideas). In a performance that would be generating awards buzz if this got any kind of release (it was given a one-night Fathom Events screening in theaters before heading to VOD on April 19, courtesy of Screen Media Films), Pryce is an absolute joy to behold. Watching him here, it's easy to imagine an alternate universe when Gilliam made this 25 or 30 years ago with a still-living Peter Sellers as Quixote. Pryce is matched by Driver, who spends much of the film in a state of sustained rage and confusion over the often absurdist plot turns that make this the funniest film Gilliam's done since his days in Monty Python.


Following the multi-decade nightmare of getting THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE out of his head and on the screen (Fulton and Pepe have also made their own sequel, HE DREAMED OF GIANTS, detailing the events following LOST IN LA MANCHA), Gilliam turns Quixote's saga into a very personal one that deals with the effects of the creative process and the sacrifices made in the name of art and integrity, whether it's an obsessive, ambitious filmmaker like young Toby blithely unaware of his impact on Javier and Angelica, or the cynicism and bitterness that can take hold when nothing goes right (Skarsgard's "The Boss" even casually tosses out "Act of God" as an excuse at one point, echoing the producers who shut the production down in 2000). It's a film that marches to the beat of its own drum, unafraid to go off on unexpected tangents and not really concerned with tying everything together, but always entertaining and never feeling self-indulgent. Considering the number of times he's faced insurmountable odds over his storied career, and let's be honest, some of it he brings on himself (re: THE BROTHERS GRIMM, why even get involved with a control-freak studio head known industry-wide as "Harvey Scissorhands" unless you're looking for a fight?), it's just nice to see this work as beautifully as it does and to see that ultimately, the struggle was worth it. THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE (Gilliam dedicates it to Rochefort and Hurt, both of whom died in 2017) is just exuberant filmmaking on an grand scale, and the best buddy movie of 2019 so far.

HELLBOY
(US - 2019)

Directed by Neil Marshall. Written by Andrew Cosby. Cast: David Harbour, Milla Jovovich, Ian McShane, Daniel Dae Kim, Sasha Lane, Thomas Haden Church, Sophie Okonedo, Stephen Graham, Penelope Mitchell, Brian Gleeson, Alistair Petrie, Rick Warden, Nitin Ganatra, Mark Stanley, Laila Morse, Kristina Klebe, Mario de la Rosa, Markos Rounthwaite, Troy James. (R, 121 mins)

Following 2004's HELLBOY and 2008's HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY, both very well-received big-screen takes on Mike Mignola's Dark Horse Comics character, director Guillermo del Toro and star Ron Perlman never got around to making a much-discussed third installment. As del Toro grew busy announcing more projects than he'll ever be able to make in one lifetime, the third film has ended up being a reboot with a new team of filmmakers headed by Neil Marshall, helming his first feature film since 2010's CENTURION. Hailed as the next big thing in horror after his 2006's acclaimed THE DESCENT, Marshall (who established his bona fides with the 2002's word-of-mouth video store hit DOG SOLDIERS) was subsequently given the cold shoulder by genre fans with his gonzo 2008 post-nuke throwback DOOMSDAY, an absolute blast that just didn't click with its intended audience. Following CENTURION, Marshall turned to television, finding acclaim with hired gun gigs on shows like BLACK SAILS, HANNIBAL, WESTWORLD, and most notably, the instant classic 2012 "Blackwater" episode of GAME OF THRONES. With Marshall working from a script by Andrew Cosby, the creator of the cult sci-fi series EUREKA, the new HELLBOY had some potential. STRANGER THINGS' David Harbour certainly looks the part as the title character, but after a good start, it peters out, looking every bit like what you'd expect from Cannon cover band Millennium Media as things eventually devolve into a blur of corner-cutting Bulgarian CGI, lunkheaded needle drops (a Spanish-language cover of the Scorpions'"Rock You Like a Hurricane" in a scene set in Tijuana, and later on, a video-gamey shootout to Motley Crue's "Kickstart My Heart," for some reason), and all-too-obvious signs of some post-production mangling, apparent even without recent revelations that tensions mounted when the producers fired Marshall's cinematographer against his wishes, then took the film away from him in post (Marshall has done no press for the film's release and was a no-show at the premiere), and that Marshall and Harbour apparently didn't get along during the shoot.




An agent for the US government's Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, Hellboy is dispatched by his boss and adoptive father Prof. Broom (Ian McShane) to their London counterparts at Osiris Club, where he's informed of his origins as a Nazi hellspawn by the group's blind seer Lady Hatton (Sophie Okonedo, a past Oscar-nominee for HOTEL RWANDA). He's tagging along in their quest to kill three giants when he's ambushed by turncoat Osiris agents and rescued by psychic Alice Monaghan (AMERICAN HONEY's Sasha Lane), who was saved as an infant by Hellboy when she was abducted and replaced by a hell-born hog-like creature called Gruagach (voiced by Stephen Graham). Gruagach still holds a grudge against Hellboy, and is caught under the spell of Nimue, the Blood Queen (Milla Jovovich), a fifth-century sorceress who was captured and dismembered by King Arthur (Mark Stanley) and Merlin (Brian Gleeson), who buried the pieces of her body in scattered locations all over England. Gruagach is gathering the parts to reassemble a vengeful Nimue in the present day so she can complete what she didn't finish 1500 years ago: unleashing a deadly plague upon the world and convincing Hellboy to join her on the dark side where she feels monsters belong.


For a while, HELLBOY is agreeably dumb fun, throwing in everything from vampirized Mexican wrestlers, the legend of King Arthur and Excalibur, Rasputin, witchcraft, Nazis, Leni Riefenstahl, Baba Yaga, and various gothic horror tropes. Harbour brings a more downbeat, rumpled sensibility to Hellboy that's not nearly as enjoyable as Perlman's classic interpretation, though some of the supporting actors fare better, particularly Jovovich, who sees this for the junk that it is and has fun with it, hamming it up and playing to the back row throughout (there's also an amusing scene where she grows annoyed with endless reality TV shows while waiting for Gruagach to return with one of her legs). Lane and Daniel Dae Kim (as shapeshifting agent Ben Daiamo; Kim stepped in after Ed Skrein dropped out upon learning that the character as Asian in origin) are fine as Hellboy's sidekicks, and the always-excellent McShane offers some effortless paternal gravitas in a role previously essayed by his old friend, the late, great John Hurt, even if he's undermined by some truly embarrassing CGI near the end. Thomas Haden Church plays Dark Horse fan favorite Lobster Johnson in an appearance so fleeting that calling it a walk-on would be charitable. He does turn up again midway through the interminable 13-minute (!) closing credits crawl, presumably to set up a sequel--along with yet another end credits stinger--that ain't gonna happen.


Turning HELLBOY into a hard-R gorefest with copious F-bombs isn't a dealbreaker, but once it plays out, there's no real reason for it, unless it's to pull in the gamers who like their movies to look more like Playstation and Xbox. It's also rough-going at times, especially with the introduction of Alice, where the scene unfolds as if we're supposed to know who she is, looking suspiciously like an earlier scene with her was cut. It also loses all sense of internal logic after Nimue arrives in London and embarks on a rampage like General Zod in Metropolis, destroying everything and unleashing her deadly plague, with breaking news reports warning everyone to stay inside and that the plague is set to overtake all of England in a matter of hours and the rest of Europe by the end of the day. Why then, a few scenes later, are London streets just teeming with calm pedestrians, cafes and stores operating business as usual? I mean, if you're gonna take the movie out of the hands of its director, at least pay attention to what you're throwing together in the editing room. In fairness, HELLBOY isn't terrible (though it does get perilously close to loitering at 121 minutes), but in a world where we already have two terrific HELLBOY movies that haven't aged a bit, its biggest crime is that it's just pointless and ultimately forgettable, as a reboot to both an established brand and to Neil Marshall's filmmaking career.

THE SILENCE
(Germany/US - 2019)

Directed by John R. Leonetti. Written by Carey Van Dyke and Shane Van Dyke. Cast: Stanley Tucci, Kiernan Shipka, Miranda Otto, John Corbett, Kate Trotter, Kyle Breitkopf, Dempsey Bryk, Billy MacLellan, Chris Whitby, Barbara Gordon, Sarah Abbott, Kate Corbett. (Unrated, 90 mins)

THE SILENCE is based on a 2015 novel by British horror/fantasy author Tim Lebbon, but that still won't stop the comparisons to last year's hit A QUIET PLACE. Filmed in 2017 and originally set to be released by the financially-strapped Golden Road before they sold it to Netflix, THE SILENCE was in production around the same time as A QUIET PLACE, and it's also interesting to note that SILENCE star Stanley Tucci is married to the older sister of A QUIET PLACE star Emily Blunt, so they had to know they had a family competition going with oddly similar horror movies about creatures who hunt by sound, with the action centering on a family that learns to exist in silence and can communicate by sign language since one of the children is deaf. Lebbon's novel is adapted by the writing team of Carey and Shane Van Dyke, the grandsons of Dick Van Dyke and best known for scripting various Asylum "mockbusters" like TRANSMORPHERS, STREET RACER, and THE DAY THE EARTH STOPPED. The director is certified hack John R. Leonetti, a veteran cinematographer whose filmmaking credits include such classics as MORTAL KOMBAT: ANNIHILATION, THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT 2, ANNABELLE, and WISH UPON.




With that pedigree, THE SILENCE lives down to its expectations despite an intriguing set-up. Researchers are exploring an uncharted cave system 1000 feet below the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania when they're attacked by a horde of prehistoric, bat-like creatures that have been living and evolving in those sealed-off caverns for millions of years. The creatures are named "Vesps" by the scientific community. They're blind and hunt by sound, which means the hustling and bustling major cities are the first to be attacked and wiped out, followed quickly by the suburban and rural communities. The Andrews family--dad Hugh (Tucci), mom Kelly (Miranda Otto), teenage daughter Ally (Kiernan Shipka), younger son Jude (Kyle Breitkopf), Kelly's mother Lynn (Kate Trotter), and the family dog, along with Hugh's best friend Glenn (John Corbett), decide to get out of suburban New Jersey and head to the country where it's quiet. They're in two vehicles--Glenn and Jude in one and everyone else in the other--and they have an inherent advantage when it comes to keeping quiet: three years earlier, Ally lost her hearing in a car accident that killed Hugh's parents, prompting the whole family and Glenn to learn sign language. It isn't long before survivalist-type Glenn's impromptu shortcut leads to disaster when his SUV rolls off the road avoiding some deer. Jude already switched vehicles during a stop, and Hugh is unable to get a pinned and injured Glenn out of the wreckage. With the Vesps approaching, Glenn decides to fire his gun to attract them, sacrificing himself while the family takes refuge in their minivan. Any chance the dog will start barking uncontrollably?


Trapped in the minivan might've been a good way to sustain the tension, but it isn't long before they take their chances and hoof it in total silence, happening on a farmhouse whose owner instantly runs outside, firing her gun and screaming "Get off my property!" which of course, instantly gets her attacked and devoured by a flock of Vesps. That's the kind of insultingly lazy writing that just shows utter contempt for the audience, with the filmmakers taking the easiest possible route to get the family in the safe confines of an isolated rural home. That's followed by an immediate burst of genius as Hugh turns on a loud wood chipper, causing a ton of blind Vesps to fly into it and get instantly shredded. Why doesn't he just leave the wood chipper running and kill them all? Because there'd be no movie and more importantly, no inane third act home invasion curve ball, where a creepy reverend (Billy MacLellan) and his flock show up at the house, all of them with their tongues cut out to ensure silence and the reverend demanding Hugh hand over Ally, holding a handwritten sign that says "The girl is fertile." I can't speak for Lebbon's novel, but the Vesps have been out of their cave for seriously like, two days by the film's timeline. 48 hours into a national emergency and this clearance bin Immortan Joe and his crazed cult have already severed their own tongues and are out there stalking families and trying to abduct fertile underage girls? The milk in their fridge hasn't even expired yet.


There are a couple of intriguing elements that aren't really explored, like just how quickly everyone turns on one another when the shit hits the fan (watch a bunch of New Yorkers trapped in the subway kick a woman and her crying baby off the train to get eaten by the Vesps), and the Vesps using the carcasses of their victims--human and animal--as incubators for their eggs. More of that ickiness would've given this some appropriately apocalyptic and generally unsettling cred. Or just give me a whole movie of Stanley Tucci shredding blind prehistoric dinosaur bats in a wood chipper and I--and no doubt The Tucci Gang--would be totally onboard with it. But this is seriously just cheap-looking, SyFy-level junk. The Tooch is one of our most reliable character actors (and an Oscar nominee for THE LOVELY BONES), and he's an accomplished screenwriter as well (BIG NIGHT). Surely, he read the script for THE SILENCE and could see that it was hot garbage. Did he need to make a down payment on a new house? A kid starting college the next fall?  He classes it up as best he can, and THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER's Shipka (currently starring with Otto on Netflix's CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA) turns in an appealing and very credible performance, even taking the time to learn ASL in preparation, which is really going above and beyond for something this dumb.

THE MUSTANG
(France/Belgium - 2019)

Directed by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre. Written by Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, Mona Fastvold, Brock Norman Brock and Benjamin Charbit. Cast: Matthias Schoenaerts, Jason Mitchell, Bruce Dern, Connie Britton, Gideon Adlon, Josh Stewart, Noel Gugliemi, Thomas Smittle, Keith Johnson. (R, 96 mins)

Initially developed at the Sundance Institute (Robert Redford is among the truckload of credited producers), THE MUSTANG is the debut of French actress-turned-filmmaker Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre (THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF ADELE BLANC-SEC), and if you're a guy who like a good UMBERTO D, BRIAN'S SONG or FIELD OF DREAMS man-weepie, then you're gonna want to see this one right away. Incarcerated at Nevada State Prison for the last 12 years, Roman Coleman (Matthias Schoenaerts) is a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. Only able to express himself through rage and violence, he's spent most of his prison time in solitary confinement, preferring to be alone and resorting to behaviors and actions that he knows will keep him isolated from the other inmates. "I'm not good with people," he mumbles the prison psychologist (Connie Britton), who's prepping him for his latest return to general population from solitary. She assigns him to work on the outdoor maintenance crew, shoveling piles of shit from the prison's horse-training program, funded by the state as a rehabilitation technique and to fill a demand for captured wild mustangs to be properly trained and groomed to sell at auction. The program is run by elderly rancher Myles (Bruce Dern), who's earned the respect of the inmates under his charge and repays it in kind, with inmate Henry (Jason Mitchell) designated the head trainer.




Roman is drawn to one horse in particular, who's kept in a locked stable and spends all day, every day kicking on the door in rage over his confinement. Myles gives Roman a shot at working with him, and it goes well for a while until Roman, furious over a disastrous visit from his estranged, pregnant daughter Martha (Gideon Adlon), takes his anger out on the disobedient horse, violently pummeling him with a series of punches. Myles has him thrown back in solitary as punishment, but he gets a second chance when he's called to help move some horses inside the prison kitchen when a dangerous storm approaches the area. Slowly but surely, Roman and the horse, who he names "Marquis," begin to bond, with Myles and Henry remarking that no one was able to break him until Roman came along. De Clermont-Tonnerre and her co-writers (including Nicolas Winding Refn's BRONSON collaborator Brock Norman Brock) aren't really dealing with complex metaphors or deep symbolism here, as it's quite obvious that Roman and Marquis are two sides of the same coin, kindred spirits who feel constantly trapped and violently lash out at anyone who tries to get close to them.


THE MUSTANG's strengths come not from its formulaic story arc but from its performances. Belgian actor Schoenaerts first began getting attention in art-house and foreign film circles with 2011's BULLHEAD and 2012's RUST AND BONE, and while he's made some impression with American audiences with roles in 2014's THE DROP and as Jennifer Lawrence's duplicitous uncle in 2018's RED SPARROW, THE MUSTANG might prove to be his English-language breakthrough. It's a very internalized performance, and as Roman, he's tightly-wound and seething, but with his eyes conveying the pain of regret and a complete inability to communicate. While he has frightening outbursts, it's in the quiet moments that Schoenaerts speaks volumes about this character, and you might be dead inside if you can keep it together at the pivotal moment when Roman and Marquis reach a mutual respect and understanding of one another. Schoenaerts gets solid support from Mitchell (STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON) and Dern, who's just perfect in a role that has him getting a little piece of Robert Duvall's "grizzled old coot" action. De Clermont-Tonnerre's messaging gets a little ham-fisted at times, and there's an underdeveloped subplot with Roman's shitbag cellmate (Josh Stewart from the COLLECTOR movies) forcing Roman and Henry to procure ketamine from the horse vet's office, but at its core, THE MUSTANG is an empathetic and compassionate character study of rehabilitation and redemption.

RIDER ON THE RAIN
(France/Italy - 1970)

Directed by Rene Clement. Written by Sebastien Japrisot. Cast: Charles Bronson, Marlene Jobert, Annie Cordy, Corinne Marchand, Gabriele Tinti, Jill Ireland, Jean Gaven, Jean Piat, Marc Mazza, Ellen Bahl, Steve Eckhardt, Jean-Daniel Ehrman, Yves Massart. (PG, 114/118 mins)

When you think of Charles Bronson, the things that usually come to mind are the DEATH WISH films, his many sleazy Cannon actioners of the 1980s, the vengeful Harmonica in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, or his being a member of THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, THE GREAT ESCAPE, and THE DIRTY DOZEN in the 1960s. But it's his European phase--lasting from roughly 1968 to 1973--that firmly established him as a global superstar, and it's that era that isn't referenced much today, though two new Blu-ray releases from Kino Lorber (because physical media is dead) are finally doing justice to this vital period of Bronson's career. Steadily employed in supporting roles on the big screen and in TV guest spots on shows like THE VIRGINIAN and THE FUGITIVE in the mid-to-late '60s but frustrated with the state of his career as he was approaching 50, Bronson decided to test the waters of the European film industry when he was offered a chance to team with French superstar Alain Delon in 1968's sweaty heist thriller FAREWELL, FRIEND (aka HONOR AMONG THIEVES). The film was a huge hit in Europe but wouldn't be released in the US until 1973. Following ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, Bronson starred in a series of French and Italian-made thrillers while maintaining a Hollywood profile in occasional American films like CHATO'S LAND, THE MECHANIC, and THE STONE KILLER. Nevertheless, it was his European films that were cementing his status as a pop culture icon everywhere in the world but the US. The major outlier here would be 1972's gangster biopic THE VALACHI PAPERS, an Italian-French co-production that became a major box-office hit in America in the wake of THE GODFATHER.




While Bronson's Euro sojourn began with FAREWELL, FRIEND, it was 1970's RIDER ON THE RAIN that was the key film in making him Europe's most popular movie star. Reteaming Bronson with his FAREWELL, FRIEND producer Serge Silberman and screenwriter and French mystery novelist Sebastien Japrisot, RIDER ON THE RAIN, directed by Rene Clement (PURPLE NOON), is a dreamily melancholy Hitchcockian psychological thriller with an appropriately-named heroine in Melancolie "Mellie" Mau (Marlene Jobert), who lives in a resort town in the south of France with her possessive flight navigator husband Tony (Gabriele Tinti), who's frequently away at work for several days at a time. Mellie spends most of her time at a bowling alley managed by her sardonic mother (Annie Cordy) and it's here on a gray and torrentially rainy afternoon that she spots a stranger (Marc Mazza) standing across the street after exiting from a bus, remarking "He must've ridden in on the rain." Stopping at a clothing shop run by her friend Nicole (Jill Ireland, Bronson's wife) to pick up a dress for a wedding she's attending the next day, she spots the stranger staring at her through the shop's window. Arriving home and discovering a delayed Tony won't be home until the next morning, Mellie is soon accosted by the stranger, who has somehow followed her home. He rapes her until she loses consciousness, and she awakens in the middle of the night to find he's still in the house. She blows him away with Tony's shotgun and proceeds to dispose of the body by throwing it over a cliff. Trying to hold it together and behave like nothing's happened, which eventually leads to insanely jealous Tony thinking she's having an affair, Mellie is confronted at the wedding by Harry Dobbs (Bronson), a smiling and vaguely sinister American mystery man who already seems to be completely up to speed on everything that's happened and keeps turning up wherever Mellie goes.





It's nearly 30 minutes into the film before Bronson even makes his first appearance, but once he does, he completely steals the film with a performance that's among his most loose and eccentric, at least until things take an even darker turn and he realizes the head games he's been playing to get a confession out of Mellie (who he glibly calls "Love-love") have sent her down a dangerous path with a different set of bad guys. Who was the stranger? Why is Dobbs after him? Do the stranger and/or Dobbs have business with Tony? More of a character study than an outright mystery/thriller, RIDER ON THE RAIN shows a much wider range for Bronson as an actor than those accustomed to his vigilante thrillers might expect. He's matched by the lovely Jobert, whose Mellie is a little flighty and odd (particularly in the way she doesn't like to swear and replaces expletives with "saxophone" when she's inclined to curse), but proves more resilient and determined than Dobbs anticipated, and you can see some of that intensity in Jobert's eyes was passed down to her actress daughter Eva Green, born in 1980. RIDER ON THE RAIN's denouement may frustrate first-time viewers (there's a reason there's a character named "Mac Guffin"), but it's an offbeat and unpredictable film (and you get to see Charles Bronson bowl!) that sticks with you long after it's over. It's very European in its style and structure, though it did OK business in the US when it was picked up by Avco Embassy. Kino's Blu-ray has both the English-language version at 114 minutes and the French-language version at 118 minutes. Beyond a simple dub or re-edit, Clement actually shot the film twice, once with the cast speaking English and the other with them speaking French, with Bronson saying his French dialogue phonetically and having it revoiced later on (the French-language version earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Foreign Language Film). RIDER ON THE RAIN was one of five films Bronson made in a busy 1970--only one being American--closing out the year with another French thriller, COLD SWEAT.







COLD SWEAT
(France/Italy - 1970; US release 1974)

Directed by Terence Young. Written by Shimon Wincelberg, Albert Simonin, Jo Eisinger and Dorothea Bennett. Cast: Charles Bronson, Liv Ullmann, James Mason, Jill Ireland, Michel Constantin, Jean Topart, Luigi Pistilli, Yannick de Lulle, Paul Bonifas, Sabine Sun, Roger Maille, Nathalie Varallo, Remo Moscani, Dominique Crosland. (PG, 93 mins)

Released in France in December 1970, COLD SWEAT had mostly spotty distribution in Europe over the next couple of years. It didn't turn up in America until the fall of 1974, courtesy of grindhouse bottom-feeders Emerson Film Enterprises, a company that spent most of the '60s distributing dubious drive-in fare like CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS and MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE, and assorted pre-porn-era Times Square "nudies" like PUSSYCAT PUSSYCAT and WIFE SWAPPERS. After Bronson hit it big in the summer of 1974 with MR. MAJESTYK and the water-cooler, zeitgeist sensation DEATH WISH, Emerson saw some potentially easy money and vultured in on one of the actor's long-forgotten European efforts that fell through the cracks and still hadn't made it stateside. They managed to get COLD SWEAT into some theaters (it opened at a mall in my hometown of Toledo, OH on Christmas Day 1974), but it wasn't enough to keep the lights on, as Emerson finally folded after releasing the more typical FUGITIVE LOVERS in 1975. No one will ever mistake COLD SWEAT for Bronson's best movie, but it's a decent-enough thriller that deserved better than Emerson Film Enterprises who, from the looks of it, spent about five minutes working on that US poster art.




COLD SWEAT didn't generate much business in theaters, but it enjoyed a long life on television, airing on CBS in 1975 before going into regular rotation on late-night TV and on VHS in the early '80s. It became a public domain staple and was available on any number of low-quality DVD sets (usually with artwork showing shots of Bronson from other movies), but Kino's new Blu-ray release, taken from a restored French print (but in English) is easily the best it's ever looked. Bronson stars as Joe Martin, an American expat residing in the French Riviera, earning a living as a tour and fishing boat captain for wealthy tourists. He's married to Fabienne (the great Ingmar Bergman muse Liv Ullmann, who got some shit from highbrow critics for "slumming" in a Bronson movie) and is stepfather to her daughter Michele (Yannick de Lulle). Their quiet, happy life abruptly crashes and burns when Joe's past comes back to haunt him in the form of a team of criminals with whom he associated some 20 years earlier. Ross (James Mason, taking his Southern MANDINGO drawl for a test spin) was Joe's commanding officer during the Korean War, and they got reacquainted after being thrown in the stockade on a military base in Germany after the war, Joe for drunkenly punching a colonel and Ross for hijacking US Army trucks as the head of black market gunrunning operation. They escaped from the stockade, along with three other Ross cohorts--Katanga (Jean Topart), Fausto (Luigi Pistilli), and Vermont (Michel Constantin, dubbed by LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT star David Hess)--with Joe agreeing to be the getaway driver. But when Katanga impulsively killed a German cop who stumbled on the scene, Joe sped off, leaving Ross and his men behind and taking all of their money with him to start a new life in France. Ross and the others have just busted out of another German prison and tracked Joe down to "balance the books." They want their money and they want Joe to take them out on his boat to pick up a shipment of drugs from a Turkish cargo vessel.


What begins as a DESPERATE HOURS home invasion scenario (and it foreshadows A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, as they find Joe via a two-year-old newspaper article where he rescued a drowning tourist) soon changes locations to a cottage in the mountains, where they're eventually joined by Ross' much-younger hippie girlfriend Moira (Jill Ireland, by this point a standard part of the Bronson package deal). There's unexpected character development, as Ross just wants the money and isn't interested in killing Joe, even after Joe breaks Vermont's neck in self-defense. The real problem is the psychotic, trigger-happy dumbass Katanga, who constantly makes the situation worse. Paranoid that Joe will double-cross them, he just starts firing his gun and accidentally kills Fausto and shoots Ross in the stomach. With Ross in desperate need of medical attention, Joe agrees to take Moira to get a doctor while Katanga holds Fabienne and Michele at the house as COLD SWEAT becomes a race against the clock--complete with a nicely-done Remy Julienne car chase--to get Ross a transfusion before he bleeds out.


COLD SWEAT was based on Richard Matheson's 1959 novel Ride the Nightmare, which was also the basis of a 1962 episode of THE ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR with Hugh O'Brian, Gena Rowlands, and John Anderson in the respective Bronson, Ullmann, and Mason roles. The novel was adapted by a team of writers--exactly who depends on whether you see the French print, where German-born American TV writer Shimon Wincelberg (whose long career included credits on HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL, NAKED CITY, GUNSMOKE, LOST IN SPACE, STAR TREK, MANNIX, DYNASTY, and LAW & ORDER among countless others) and Albert Simonin are credited, or the US version, which credits Wincelberg, veteran Hollywood scribe Jo Eisinger (GILDA), and Dorothea Bennett, the wife of director Terence Young. Best known for directing three of the first four James Bond films (DR. NO, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, and THUNDERBALL) and the classic Audrey Hepburn nail-biter WAIT UNTIL DARK, Young was strictly in hired gun mode from the late '60s on. COLD SWEAT was the first of three European collaborations between Young and Bronson, followed in quick succession by the 1971 east-meets-western RED SUN and 1972's THE VALACHI PAPERS, though it would be the last to make it to US screens.

COLD SWEAT opening in Toledo, OH on 12/25/1974

THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES
aka THE 7 BROTHERS MEET DRACULA
(UK/Hong Kong - 1974; US release 1979)

Directed by Roy Ward Baker. Written by Don Houghton. Cast: Peter Cushing, David Chiang, Julie Ege, Robin Stewart, Shih Szu, John Forbes-Robertson, Robert Hanna, Chan Shen, James Ma, Liu Hui Ling, Liu Chia Yung, Wong Han Chan, Chen Tien Loong, Fong Kah Ann. (Unrated, 89 mins/R, 75 mins)

With 1970's THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, Hammer Films started spicing up their horror offerings with generous doses of skin and sex in an attempt to inject new life into their product. They made a play for the youth market by benching Peter Cushing in favor of Ralph Bates as a much-younger Dr. Frankenstein in 1970's little-loved HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN, and while they didn't replace Christopher Lee as Dracula, they did transport him with Cushing's Van Helsing to mod, swinging London in all its Austin Powers glory for 1972's DRACULA A.D. 1972 and 1973's THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA. Neither film was a hit, and while Cushing soldiered through them, Lee made sure to voice his displeasure with Hammer and the DRACULA series to anyone who would listen. Warner Bros. shelved SATANIC RITES in the US, where it wouldn't be released for another five years, and when pandering to the counterculture demographic failed, Hammer took an even more unpredictable approach by partnering on two 1974 projects with Hong Kong's Run Run Shaw, whose Shaw Brothers outfit was for responsible much of the burgeoning martial-arts craze: the horror/kung-fu hybrid THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES and the Stuart Whitman-starring Hong Kong-set actioner SHATTER.




Hammer was in a strange place by 1974. THE EXORCIST was enough of a game-changer that "classic"-style horror was falling out of fashion. Cushing returned to his Dr. Frankenstein role for one last time with 1974's FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL, by far the goriest entry in the series and the same year saw the release of their most inspired film in years with Brian Clemens' horror/swashbuckler cult classic CAPTAIN KRONOS: VAMPIRE HUNTER, which was actually completed in 1972 but Hammer didn't have any confidence in it and shelved it for two years. Bad decisions, diminishing returns, and a changing genre landscape would eventually cause the company's classic incarnation to fold after 1976's TO THE DEVIL...A DAUGHTER, but THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES, like CAPTAIN KRONOS, was a film tragically unappreciated in its time and one that has aged remarkably well over the decades.


It would've been even better had Lee returned as Dracula, but he was so fed up with whole thing after SATANIC RITES that he walked away and refused to have anything more to do with the series, and it's doubtful that he would've been wooed back by the prospect of Dracula in a kung-fu setting. While Cushing returned as Van Helsing, Dracula was now played by jobbing British character actor and one-and-done trivia question response John Forbes-Robertson, the George Lazenby of the Hammer DRACULA series. Since Dracula's screen time is limited to the beginning and the end, the actor doesn't have much of a chance to make an impression beyond his excessive rouge and pasty makeup. And on top of that, he's dubbed over by veteran voice actor David de Keyser, whose familiar tones can be heard revoicing John Richardson in THE VENGEANCE OF SHE and Gabriele Ferzetti in ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE. Forbes-Robertson has very little to do here, but it's likely Dracula would've received more face time had Lee agreed to be in it, but with the end result, it hardly matters. Directed by the venerable Roy Ward Baker (ASYLUM, THE VAULT OF HORROR, AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS), with uncredited assistance from top Shaw Brothers director Chang Cheh, who handled the action sequences, THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES is a dark horse underdog in the Hammer canon that's long overdue for respect and appreciation. As recently as 2018's comprehensive, 992-page chronicle Hammer Complete: The Films, The Personnel, The Company, author Howard Maxford calls the film "a letdown on almost every level." Quite the contrary...it's clever, wildly entertaining, paced like a freight train, and better than at least the last four of Lee's DRACULAs.


Disregarding the A.D. 1972 and SATANIC RITES continuity even though, like those two, it was written by Don Houghton, 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES opens in 1804 Transylvania, where Chinese priest Kah (Chan Shen) awakens Dracula (Forbes-Robertson) to beg for his help in resurrecting the legendary "seven golden vampires." A weakened Dracula decides to use Kah as a vessel to strengthen his own evil spirit and to use the seven golden vampires to wreak his vengeance on mankind (having Dracula possess Kah is also a convenient way around Forbes-Robertson being cast late in production). 100 years later, Van Helsing (Cushing) is in Chung King as a guest lecturer on the subject of vampirism, telling his students of the legend of the seven golden vampires who have terrorized the remote village of Ping Kwei for the last century. Most scoff and walk out, but one, Hsi Ching (David Chiang) knows he speaks the truth: his family comes from that village and his grandfather lost his life battling the seven golden vampires, but not before killing one of them. Van Helsing, with his son Leyland (Robin Stewart) and wealthy, widowed Scandinavian socialite Vanessa Buren (Julie Ege), who thinks "a vampire hunt sounds exciting," agrees to accompany and advise Hsi Ching, his six brothers, and their ass-kicking little sister Mei Kwei (Shih Szu) on a treacherous journey to Ping Kwei to find and destroy the six surviving golden vampires while frequently fighting off a growing army of their undead victims, now resurrected as kung-fu zombies.




I'm not sure how "Peter Cushing leading a band of sibling martial-arts warriors against vampires and kung-fu zombies" wasn't the most slam-dunk cinematic sales pitch of 1974. It's handsomely-produced and stylishly shot in garish greens, blues, and reds, with spirited performances (this is one of Cushing's best turns as Van Helsing, even taking part in some of the kung-fu fighting) and a sharp use of the region and its iconography (Van Helsing warns that crosses are useless against these vampires, who can only be warded off by Buddha imagery), but THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES was met with general apathy by UK audiences. Like THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA, it was shelved in the US by Warner Bros, who eventually sold both films to the short-lived grindhouse outfit Dynamite Entertainment. They eventually released SATANIC RITES in 1978 as COUNT DRACULA AND HIS VAMPIRE BRIDE, while 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES underwent a drastic restructuring into the cheesily-titled THE 7 BROTHERS MEET DRACULA, which hit theaters in the summer and into the fall of 1979. It's one of the worst botched re-edits of all time, gutting the film from 89 to 75 minutes, losing tons of exposition and shifting scenes around to the point where the story makes no sense at all. This had to be part of the reason the film was dismissed as gutter schlock and was maligned for so long by American audiences until Anchor Bay's original DVD release in 1999 finally made the original 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES cut widely available (the butchered 7 BROTHERS MEET DRACULA was included as an extra, and both cuts are present on Scream Factory's new Blu-ray, because physical media is dead). Considering how well-crafted the original version was, and that kung-fu films were all the rage in 1974--especially with Warner Bros., who had huge hits with  5 FINGERS OF DEATH and the landmark ENTER THE DRAGON--shelving the film in the first place was an astonishingly bone-headed decision, let alone Dynamite's later catastrophic mangling of it, basically reducing it to fight scenes and T&A, with one topless shot of a woman repeated three times. Forget the 7 BROTHERS cut unless you need to analyze just how badly a good movie can be fucked up beyond recognition. THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES is an absolute blast and a worthy conclusion to Hammer's DRACULA series, and it's time for it to be given its rightful place among the studio's crowning achievements.

The butchered 7 BROTHERS MEET DRACULA version opening in Toledo, OH on 10/5/1979

THE IGUANA WITH THE TONGUE OF FIRE
(Italy/France/West Germany - 1971)

Directed by Willy Pareto (Riccardo Freda). Written by Willy Pareto (Riccardo Freda), Alessandro Continenza and Gunther Ebert. Cast: Luigi Pistilli, Dagmar Lassander, Anton Diffring, Valentina Cortese, Arthur O'Sullivan, Werner Pochat, Dominique Boschero, Renato Romano, Sergio Doria, Ruth Durley, Niall Toibin. (Unrated, 96 mins)

Journeyman director Riccardo Freda (1909-1999) remains a key figure in Italian horror, having mentored Mario Bava and encouraged his transition from cinematographer to director by letting him handle large chunks of 1957's I VAMPIRI and 1959's CALTIKI, THE IMMORTAL MONSTER. Bava soon made the groundbreaking 1960 Italian horror classic BLACK SUNDAY while Freda, who often used the Anglicized pseudonym "Robert Hampton" on his films, never seemed particularly beholden to the genre beyond 1962's THE HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK and its 1963 semi-sequel THE GHOST, with both in very high regard by connoisseurs of Italian horror. But Freda spent most of the decade making a string of HERCULES-inspired peplum epics like 1960's THE GIANTS OF THESSALY and 1961's MACISTE AT THE COURT OF GRAND KHAN and assorted spaghetti westerns and 007 Eurospy knockoffs. Following Dario Argento's trailblazing 1970 giallo THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE and its followups, 1971's THE CAT O'NINE TAILS and 1972's FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, Italian journeymen directors essentially formed a conga line to crank out a series of knockoff gialli with animals in the title, among them Lucio Fulci's A LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN (1971) and DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING (1972), Sergio Martino's THE CASE OF THE SCORPION'S TAIL (1971), Paolo Cavara's THE BLACK BELLY OF THE TARANTULA (1971), Duccio Tessari's THE BLOODSTAINED BUTTERFLY (1971), Sergio Pastore's THE CRIMES OF THE BLACK CAT (1972), and Antonio Margheriti's SEVEN DEATHS IN THE CAT'S EYE (1973) just to name a few. Following his 1969 krimi-inspired DOUBLE FACE, Freda hopped on the animal giallo bandwagon with one of the genre's most nonsensically random titles, 1971's THE IGUANA WITH THE TONGUE OF FIRE.




The meaning of that title is shoehorned in almost as an aside and doesn't really make sense even in context, but it's probably the most memorable thing about the film, which suffers from erratic pacing, hilariously awful special effects, and Freda and his co-writers fighting a losing battle to keep track of all of their red herrings, at least two of whom completely disappear from the film. It does benefit from an unusual setting, a great cast of familiar Eurocult faces, an expectedly catchy lounge score by Stelvio Cipriani with the participation of Edda dell'Orso, whose wordless vocals were essentially legally mandated by this point, and an admirably off-the-rails climax that prefigures both Brian De Palma's DRESSED TO KILL and Dario Argento's TENEBRAE to a certain extent. In Dublin, a woman has acid thrown in her face and her throat slashed before being stuffed in the boot of a Rolls Royce belonging to Sobiesky (Anton Diffring), the Swiss ambassador to Ireland. Police inspector Lawrence (Arthur O'Sullivan) gets nowhere with the investigation since Sobiesky immediately plays the privileged asshole card by flaunting his diplomatic immunity and refusing to cooperate. It turns out the dead woman was his mistress, and when another Sobiesky mistress, a sultry nightclub chanteuse (Dominique Boschero), also turns up dead after trying to blackmail him over their affair, Lawrence sends rogue, plays-by-his-own-rules detective John Norton (Luigi Pistilli) undercover. Norton, who's persona non grata with the Dublin police after a suspect grabbed his gun and committed suicide during a brutal interrogation, and who's still plagued by the unsolved murder of his wife (a plot point that's mentioned and never revisited), lets himself get picked up at a bar by Sobiesky's promiscuous stepdaughter Helen (Dagmar Lassander), much to the chagrin of her arrogant boy-toy Walter (Sergio Doria), and manages to ingratiate himself into the Sobiesky household, also questioning the ambassador's alcoholic wife (Valentina Cortese, who would earn a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination three years later for Francois Truffaut's DAY FOR NIGHT) and generally not giving much of a shit about the ambassador's diplomatic immunity privileges. There's also suspicious, conjunctivitis-afflicted limo driver Mandel (Renato Romano), who's also blackmailing Sobiesky's weirdo stepson Marc (Werner Pochat) for his own indiscretions back home in Switzerland, a doctor (Niall Toibin) who's creepy for no reason whatsoever, and comic relief in the form of Norton's teenage daughter as well as his doddering, Agatha Christie superfan mother (Ruth Durley), an amateur sleuth whose annoying habit of misplacing her glasses with attached hearing aids leads to one of the dumbest contrivances in the entire giallo genre.





Never released theatrically in the US, THE IGUANA WITH THE TONGUE OF FIRE has been available only in bootleg format stateside, never even hitting home video and remaining one of the most obscure giallo offerings that, thanks to that title, was certainly read about more than it was actually seen. That is until now, thanks to Arrow's new extras-packed Blu-ray that gives it its first official US release, 48 years after it was made, because physical media is dead. That doesn't mean it's a classic waiting to be discovered. Structurally, THE IGUANA WITH THE TONGUE OF FIRE is a mess that's needlessly convoluted--is there anyone in it not involved in a clandestine blackmail scheme?--and goes to absurd lengths to make sure every character is a suspect at one point, usually in the form of an aggressive zoom into their faces, sporting expressions that land somewhere between suspicious and constipated. The best thing about the film is the unique Dublin setting, especially with some extensive location work done by Freda and his crew, particularly some breathtaking shots at the Cliffs of Moher. There's also a cringe-worthy shout-out to an iconic Dublin business--the Swastika Laundry and yes, that was its logo--which was in existence since 1912, well before the swastika was co-opted by Nazi Germany (it ultimately closed in 1987). And speaking of cringe-worthy, don't miss the scene where O'Sullivan's spectacularly unappealing Lawrence sneeringly hypothesizes that the first murder shows signs of "a woman's hand, or that of a colored person...they're experts at such things," which is the worst hunch by a cop this side of Jack Hedley's Lt. Williams in 1982's THE NEW YORK RIPPER expressing with certainty that "we know the killer has lived in New York his whole life."


Freda wasn't happy with much of anything about THE IGUANA WITH THE TONGUE OF FIRE, starting with Pistilli (best known as the priest brother of Eli Wallach's Tuco in THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY and in a rare lead here), who he felt was forced on him by the producers after they failed to secure his first choice--Roger Moore, of all people (Ivan Rassimov was also considered at some point). Displeased with the end result after post-production, Freda decided to take his name off the finished film, where he's credited as "Willy Pareto." It's not a top-shelf giallo, but it's hardly the worst ever made and it's definitely worth seeing for completists. And it's a masterpiece compared to Freda's next film, his 1972 career nadir TRAGIC CEREMONY, which was so bad that it would be nine years before he made another, 1981's MURDER OBSESSION, aka FEAR. MURDER OBSESSION is no great shakes, but it's a decent enough second-tier giallo that's marginally better than THE IGUANA WITH THE TONGUE OF FIRE, if for no other reason than it co-stars Laura Gemser. Freda's comeback was short-lived, however, as he opted for retirement with MURDER OBSESSION proving to be his final film.

BLACKOUT
(Canada/France - 1978)

Directed by Eddy Matalon. Written by John C.W. Saxton. Cast: Jim Mitchum, Robert Carradine, Belinda J. Montgomery, June Allyson, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Ray Milland, Don Granbery, Terry Haig, Victor Tyler, Camille Ange, Fred Doederlein, Judy London, Norman Taviss, Gwen Tolbart, Vlasta Vrana. (R, 92 mins)

A then-topical, "ripped from the headlines" Canadian tax shelter quickie cranked out in response to the infamous NYC blackout and the resulting looting and crime spree over July 13-14, 1977, BLACKOUT never gets as nasty or exploitative as its R rating would lead you to believe, and other than some minor cursing and a bloody stabbing, it could easily pass for a TV-movie. It's surprising in retrospect that the '77 blackout didn't lead to competing Movies of the Week on all three major networks, but the bland BLACKOUT never takes advantage of being the only contemporary semi-dramatization of the event, instead resorting to recycled tropes of the decade's disaster movie craze (the poster even has the standard "faces in boxes" design showcasing the sort-of all-star cast). Released by New World Pictures in the fall of 1978, BLACKOUT was relegated to grindhouses and drive-ins and other than a 1986 VHS release and some scattered TV airings, has languished in obscurity in the decades since. It's just been released on Blu-ray in a flawed but as-good-as-it-can-be edition by Code Red (because physical media is dead), and while it's not really very good, I'm glad it's available. And it's got some curio value, like one of the producers being future MEATBALLS, STRIPES, and GHOSTBUSTERS director Ivan Reitman, and a cast headlined by the sons of two Hollywood legends sharing scenes with revered old-timers looking to cash in on the declining disaster cycle by slumming in a cheap B-movie from the director of 1977's schlocky CATHY'S CURSE.




As a storm rages over NYC (played mostly by Montreal mixed with mismatched stock footage of Manhattan), a series of lightning strikes takes out the power grid, sending the entire city into darkness and total chaos. At the same time, a prisoner transport van crashes and the cops running it are killed by crazed Christie (Robert Carradine, youngest son of John), who dons one's uniform and leads three other psycho escapees (including Don Granbery, who played a similar role in the previous year's Canuxploitation home invasion thriller THE HOUSE BY THE LAKE) into a nearby high-rise where they make their way through the building on an overnight spree of rape, robbery, and murder. Meanwhile, cop Dan Evans (Jim Mitchum, eldest son of Robert), apparently the only police officer in the area, happens upon the transport crash and heads into the building after hearing the screams of a tenant (Belinda J. Montgomery), who's just been raped by one of the psychos. Among those terrorized by Christie and the fugitives are French magician Henri the Magnificent (Jean-Pierre Aumont), who gets lectured by Christie about the dangers of living on credit cards before being stabbed in the stomach; Mrs. Grant (June Allyson), whose ailing husband (Fred Doederlein) is on a ventilator; and wealthy, asshole art collector Stafford (Ray Milland, cast radically against type at this point in his career as a pompous, sneering prick), who initially refuses to give the psychos the combination to his safe, even as they beat his helpless wife, but finally caves when Christie threatens to burn a priceless Picasso (and, in a brief moment where you actually side with the bad guys, Christie gets in the safe but proceeds to burn all of Stafford's paintings anyway). In accordance with disaster movie convention, there's also two people trapped in the elevator, a pregnant woman (Gwen Tolbart) about to go into labor, as well as a big, fat Greek wedding packed with drunk, obnoxious guests on the top floor that will no doubt be crashed by Christie and his creeps.

Director Eddy Matalon and screenwriter John C.W. Saxton (ILSA: SHE WOLF OF THE S.S., HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, CLASS OF 1984) don't really convey the chaos of the NYC blackout aside from a handful of cutaways to the power company command center and a few random shots of black people looting. Instead, they stay confined to the high-rise in what amounts to a proto-ENEMY TERRITORY/DIE HARD situation, the latter especially once Christie pulls a "Bill Clay" on Evans by passing himself off as a resident. But the comparisons end there, as Matalon generates little suspense and really no one to root for since the lumbering, sleepy Mitchum--at the end of a very short-lived stint as a drive-in headliner, following MOONRUNNERS, TRACKDOWN, and MANIAC!, aka RANSOM--can only get so far by looking exactly like his father, not even possessing the screen presence of his younger brother Chris, let alone the magnetic star power of his legendary dad. Carradine, several years before cementing his place in pop culture history with 1984's REVENGE OF THE NERDS, fares better as the ruthless Christie, even if the crimes for which he was incarcerated (he's an activist who has a chip on his shoulder about...corporations and credit cards?) don't really gel with his homicidal actions. The older actors seem like they're getting sub-Irwin Allen table scraps, particularly Allyson, who's far too classy to be in something like this, even if it's relatively restrained for its type. Neither she, Aumont, nor Milland (a Best Actor Oscar-winner for 1945's THE LOST WEEKEND) have much screen time, and Allyson's character just disappears from the film after Christie ties her up, gags her, and shuts off her husband's ventilator just because.





There's some obvious audio damage inherent to the print used for Code Red's Blu-ray, a sort-of audible, rhythmic hiss that's apparent whenever there's no dialogue. It tapers off as the film goes on and is hardly a dealbreaker and might actually accentuate the grindhouse experience. No, the only real issue with the BLACKOUT Blu-ray is (deep breath) yet another steaming shit sandwich of a commentary track from the two-man wrecking crew of Code Red head Bill Olsen and L.A.-based DIY filmmaker Damon Packard--the duo last heard knowing fuck-all about anything to do with Lamberto Bava's DEVILFISH--who welcome co-star Belinda J. Montgomery for her first and probably last Blu-ray bonus feature. Perhaps best known to genre fans for co-starring with Patrick Duffy on his pre-DALLAS '70s cult TV series MAN FROM ATLANTIS and later as the title character's mom on DOOGIE HOWSER, M.D., the now-68-year-old Montgomery acts sparingly today but had a very busy career on TV from the early '70s through the '90s. But it's this commentary that might actually constitute her finest acting thus far, as she somehow doesn't just get up and leave after a barrage of idiotic comments from Olsen and Packard, who have clearly done zero prep work and, judging from how often they throw her a question that's already been asked and answered, don't even appear to be listening to what Montgomery is saying. Honestly, I got 25 minutes into this commentary and couldn't take it anymore, but among the lowlights in that short period of time:

• Olsen taking all of 52 seconds into the film before uttering something stupid, over a stock footage shot of NYC: "This isn't Quebec," to which Montgomery replies "Yep, it's supposed to be New York but we shot in Montreal." OK, sure, maybe he was making a joke and it just didn't land, but I've heard enough Bill Olsen commentaries to conclude that's probably not the case.
• Olsen doing his usual schtick of mispronouncing people's names as they come up in the credits, and saying "Gene" Pierre Aumont, with Montgomery immediately correcting him with "Yes, Jean-Pierre Aumont." 
• Olsen and Packard deciding, apropos of nothing, to shit all over score composer Didier Vasseur when his credit appears. Olsen, chuckling: "There's a great musician." Packard: "Never heard of him." Well, Vasseur also composed two other films by Matalon, including CATHY'S CURSE, which might be worth mentioning as opposed to a flippant "Never heard of him." If only there was some sort of, oh I don't know, some easily-accessible database on the internet that had movie information where one could quickly find out this sort of stuff beforehand. 
• Packard asking "What else has Eddy Matalon done?" Again, if there was only a way to find this information online ahead of time.
• Montgomery mentioning that MAN FROM ATLANTIS was canceled after one season, followed five minutes later by Packard asking "Why were you replaced on the second season of MAN FROM ATLANTIS?" Montgomery clears her throat and replies "There was no second season of MAN FROM ATLANTIS." 
• The Canadian-born Montgomery mentions early on that she got her start when she came to Hollywood in 1969, so of course, Packard later asks "When did you get your start?" 
• Olsen keeps talking about Don Granbery being in THE HOUSE BY THE LAKE, aka DEATH WEEKEND. Packard: "Was that a Canadian film?" Yes, it's pretty well-known among Canadian tax-shelter films of the period.
• Montgomery mentions she didn't see BLACKOUT when it was released, but she and her husband saw it somewhere several years later (I would assume on TV). Olsen, less than ten minutes later: "Now, when this came out, did you see it in a theater?" 
• Montgomery reminisces about doing an episode of MARCUS WELBY, M.D., and says "Robert Young was just adorable." Packard: "Robert Young the director?" Montgomery, after a pause: "No. Robert Young. The star of the show." Packard: "Oh." Yes, there is a director named Robert M. Young (SHORT EYES, ONE-TRICK PONY, EXTREMITIES, DOMINICK AND EUGENE), but how do you not think of the actor Robert Young when someone is talking about MARCUS WELBY, M.D.?

BLACKOUT opening in Toledo, OH on 11/17/1978

EMMANUELLE
(France - 1974)

Directed by Just Jaeckin. Written by Jean-Louis Richard. Cast: Alain Cuny, Sylvia Kristel, Marika Green, Daniel Sarky, Jeanne Colletin, Christine Boisson, Samantha, Gaby Brian, Gregory. (X, 94 mins)

Based on the scandalous 1959 novel by Emmanuelle Arsan that was long-rumored to be at least semi-autobiographical, 1974's controversial EMMANUELLE was a groundbreaking, X-rated deep-dive into post-LAST TANGO IN PARIS softcore erotica and it's likely that there never would've been a Skinemax without it. Focused on the intense sexual awakening of a beautiful and sexually-gifted but naive young woman, Emmanuelle was the first in a series of erotic novels by "Arsan," initially thought to be the pseudonym of French-Thai novelist Marayat Rollet-Andriane, an occasional actress who had a prominent supporting role as Richard Attenborough's love interest in the 1966 epic THE SAND PEBBLES, but the actual writer was later revealed to be her UNESCO diplomat husband Louis-Jacques Rollet-Andriane. The directing debut of French photographer Just Jaeckin, EMMANUELLE was a much-discussed sensation worldwide and made an international sex symbol of 22-year-old Dutch actress Sylvia Kristel, who would, for better or worse, be inextricably linked with the character for the rest of her career. As the film opens, Kristel's Emmanuelle is flying to Bangkok to visit her diplomat husband Jean (Daniel Sarky). They have an open marriage, though only Jean seems to take advantage of it and wishes his wife would indulge in similar exploits to share with him. Jean considers this the one negative aspect of his marriage to Emmanuelle, boasting to a colleague "I married her because no woman enjoys making love more, or does it better." Once in Bangkok, she's encouraged by other women, most of whom have slept with Jean, to explore her wild side, with young Marie-Ange (Christine Boisson) admonishing "He's only your husband...you have to take a lover if you want to be a real woman!" before masturbating in front of her to a magazine photo of a smiling Paul Newman.




Emmanuelle confesses that she had sex with two strangers on the flight from Paris to Bangkok, joining the mile-high club in the first-class cabin with a man across the aisle while others watched, then she was whisked away to the restroom by another man emboldened by her fearlessness. Jean has aggressive sex with Arianne (Jeanne Colletin), who also desires Emmanuelle, confronting her with "You're nude under your dress, aren't you...have you made love since I last saw you?" Emmanuelle is coveted by everyone, and she finds unexpected passion with archaeologist Bee (Marika Green, who has a noticeable resemblance to her actress niece Eva Green). Emmanuelle confesses her love for Bee, who likes her very much but politely rejects her. A heartbroken Emmanuelle is chastised by Ariane ("What I live for is pure enjoyment. Your violins, your hearts and flowers, your promises of eternal love make me sick"), who boasts of her fling with Jean in a country club locker room dialogue exchange that pretty much sums up Euro softcore porn in a nutshell:

Ariane: "You know, I made love with your husband."

Emmanuelle: "Yes, he mentioned it. How'd it go?"

Ariane: "I thought you knew, it was practically rape."

Emmanuelle: "Help me unhook my brassiere." 

As Jean grows jealous over Emmanuelle's sudden interest in taking advantage of the open marriage that was all his idea, it's Ariane who suggests that she visit Mario (Alain Cuny), an aging playboy and an expert in the ways of mature lovemaking. Mario is infatuated with Emmanuelle at first sight but refuses to make love to her, instead promising to take her to "the land of eroticism." This essentially involves a series of degrading activities that include being pawed by a vagrant, drugged in an opium den and gang-raped to pilfered King Crimson riffs, and then taken to an underground fight club where Mario promises Emmanuelle to the winner. He's really just a perv--and presumably impotent--who likes to watch, and it's the last third of EMMANUELLE that really becomes unpleasant to watch, and not just through the lens of 2019. I don't wish to sound like a representative of Woke Twitter, and I'm not advocating canceling EMMANUELLE 45 years after its release, but it's hard to imagine the Mario section of the film, with Emmanuelle experiencing her ultimate sexual awakening through one humiliation and degradation after another, being a turn-on to audiences or even a symbol of female empowerment, since it's all for Mario's pleasure. Even after this, Mario still doesn't sleep with Emmanuelle and moves on to his next subject, offering the kind of explanation where the only suitable response would be a kick in the balls: "I collect situations. I want to find the next Emmanuelle...through the looking glass!"


It's putting it mildly to say that EMMANUELLE hasn't aged well, but it obviously set the template for the countless European-made "sexual awakening of a young woman" films that came in its wake, such as Corinne Clery in THE STORY OF O (1975) and Dayle Haddon in THE FRENCH WOMAN (1977), both directed by Jaeckin; Patti D'Arbanville in BILITIS (1977); Olivia Pascal in VANESSA (1977); and Annie Belle in both ANNIE (1976) and LAURE (1976), the latter written and co-directed by the Rollet-Andrianes, and featured "Arsan" herself as the title character's sexual mentor (the film was released in the US in 1982 as FOREVER EMMANUELLE). EMMANUELLE itself spawned two sequels (all three films have just been released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber) and was so popular that it was spoofed in the 1978 British comedy CARRY ON EMMANUELLE. But it's the BLACK EMANUELLE series (note the missing "M") with Laura Gemser that was the most successful of the knockoffs, and in many ways, surpasses the inspiration (and Gemser most closely resembles the real Arsan). Released in the US by Columbia with the attention-getting tag line "X was never like this," EMMANUELLE is insufferably pretentious, with the constant hot air blather of "making love" growing unintentionally funny very quickly. It really fancies itself as something chic, artistic, and profound, and the presence of top-billed Cuny (memorable in Federico Fellini's LA DOLCE VITA and FELLINI SATYRICON) certainly gives it an air of importance, though the respected actor was said to be difficult and later commented that he only took the role to show his contempt for modern cinema. It also exploits the exoticism of Thailand and the Far East, with a particularly memorable shot of a dancer using a certain orifice to smoke a cigarette that's exactly the kind of thing you think of when you hear "bar in Bangkok." But it's Kristel's film from beginning to end. She's lovely and has haunting eyes that hypnotize when she stares into the camera, and it's easy to see why EMMANUELLE catapulted her to fame, while at the same time leaving her hopelessly typecast.

EMMANUELLE opening in Toledo, OH on 2/27/1976

EMMANUELLE 2
aka EMMANUELLE: THE JOYS OF A WOMAN
(France - 1975; US release 1976)

Directed by Francis Giacobetti. Written by Bob Elia. Cast: Sylvia Kristel, Umberto Orsini, Frederic Lagache, Catherine Rivet, Venantino Venantini, Caroline Laurence, Henry Czarniak, Tom Clark, Marion Womble, Florence Lafuma, Claire Richard, Laura Gemser, Eva Hamel, Christiane Gibelin, Sterling St. Jacques. (X, 91 mins)

With no shortage of "Emmanuelle Arsan" stories, and with EMMANUELLE being such a worldwide box-office smash (it opened in the US in December 1974 and moved across the country slowly, letting the notoriety continue to build, and it was still hitting first-run theaters in America well into 1976), a sequel was inevitable. Just Jaeckin passed on directing, not wishing to be associated strictly with EMMANUELLE, and instead made the similarly X-rated, S&M-themed THE STORY OF O and the brothel-set THE FRENCH WOMAN. Kristel returned for EMMANUELLE 2, better known by its eventual US title EMMANUELLE: THE JOYS OF A WOMAN, directed by a debuting Francis Giacobetti. It's a loose sequel, with a markedly more confident and assured Kristel playing what appears to be an Emmanuelle, if not the same Emmanuelle from the previous film, with Jean now either an engineer or an architect and played by Italian actor Umberto Orsini (THE DAMNED, VIOLENT CITY). The film opens with Emmanuelle boarding a ship to Hong Kong, where Jean is working, but a booking snafu forces her into a dormitory sleeping arrangement with some commoner women, which instantly leads to some girl-on-girl action between a now sexually-emboldened Emmanuelle and young traveler Ingrid (Caroline Laurence), who seduces Emmanuelle by confessing a violent gang-rape fantasy. Emmanuelle and Jean continue to have the most open marriage imaginable, with Jean practically salivating over her exploits. Jean is also providing room and board to a pilot named Christopher (Frederic Lagache), who sleeps with his propellor (?) and, of course, becomes a fantasy object for Emmanuelle, especially after he takes her to an acupuncturist and she masturbates to him with needles sticking out of her face. In Emmanuelle's absence, Jean has been sleeping with (or, in the parlance of EMMANUELLE, "making love to") Laura (Florenca Lafuma), the younger wife of aging diplomat Peter (Tom Clark). When she isn't fantasizing about Christopher or masquerading as a prostitute in a Hong Kong brothel and having sex with three men in a consensual re-enactment of Ingrid's rape fantasy, Emmanuelle becomes obsessed with Laura's virginal stepdaughter Anna Marie (Catherine Rivet). She eventually convinces the naive young girl (oooh...could she remind Emmanuelle of her younger self?) to partake in a threesome where Jean is only all too happy to deflower the young woman. You know, if that's what Emmanuelle wants and all...




Of course, that's after the film's most famous scene, a long massage sequence where Emmanuelle, Jean, and Anna Marie are given soapy, oily rubdowns and happy endings by a trio of masseuses, including one played by Indonesian actress Laura Gemser, who made such an impression in this one scene that she would immediately be cast in the Italian knockoff BLACK EMANUELLE, which led to her own series of films that lasted well into the 1980s. EMMANUELLE: THE JOYS OF A WOMAN understands first and foremost what drew audiences to EMMANUELLE and as such, it doesn't waste time with endless philosophizing about "making love" and instead just gets down to it. It's much closer in spirit to the Italian-made Gemser series, perhaps in part since it features Italian actors like Orsini and Eurocult regular Venantino Venantini (who would also appear in three of Gemser's BLACK EMANUELLEs), seen here as a tattooed polo player who gets fellated by Emmanuelle in a locker room before fisting her. EMMANUELLE: THE JOYS OF A WOMAN is often jawdropping in its brazen explicitness, rivaling the carnal content of any of Gemser's outings, so much so that even after being cut down to 84 minutes for its 1976 US release by Paramount (yes, Paramount), it still got handed an X rating. It wasn't quite as big of a hit as its predecessor, but it enjoyed a reasonably successful run as a midnight movie into the early 1980s. EMMANUELLE: THE JOYS OF A WOMAN is the best of the Kristel EMMANUELLEs by far (strangely, Giacobetti never made another movie), and Kino Lorber's Blu-ray offers the uncut 91-minute version, so plan accordingly..

Further evidence that things just used to be different: here's EMMANUELLE: THE JOYS OF A WOMAN playing at a goddamn mall in Toledo, OH on 6/16/1978

GOODBYE EMMANUELLE
(France - 1977; US release 1981)

Directed by Francois Leterrier. Written by Monique Lange and Francois Leterrier. Cast: Sylvia Kristel, Umberto Orsini, Jean-Pierre Bouvier, Alexandra Stewart, Olga Georges-Picot, Charlotte Alexandra, Caroline Laurence, Sylvie Fennec, Radiah Frye, Jacques Doniol-Valcroize, Erik Colin, Jack Allen, Bob Asklof, Greg Germain, Patrick Victor. (R, 98 mins)

The EMMANUELLE series made Kristel an international star, though it limited her to largely similar roles in various Euro erotica outings ranging from artsy to commercial, including Alain Robbe-Grillet's PLAYING WITH FIRE (1975), Roger Vadim's GAME OF SEDUCTION (1976), and Walerian Borowczyk's THE STREETWALKER (1976). Kristel returned to her signature role for the final film in the original trilogy, 1977's GOODBYE EMMANUELLE, which reteamed her with Umberto Orsini as Jean but under the direction of a third helmer, this time Francois Leterrier, who had a minor hit in France with 1973's PRIVATE SCREENING, with Francoise Fabian, Jane Birkin, and Bulle Ogier. GOODBYE EMMANUELLE drastically tones down the "anything goes" titillation of its predecessor and desperately wants to be taken seriously like Jaeckin's original. It's got a very catchy theme song by Birkin and her husband, renowned French singer and composer Serge Gainsbourg, and its cast has more prestigious actors than usual, like Olga Georges-Picot (Alain Resnais' JE T'AIME, JE T'AIME, Fred Zinnemann's THE DAY OF THE JACKAL, Woody Allen's LOVE AND DEATH) and Canadian-born Alexandra Stewart (Francois Truffaut's THE BRIDE WORE BLACK and DAY FOR NIGHT, Louis Malle's BLACK MOON). But it gets everything about EMMANUELLE fundamentally wrong. The central premise has Emmanuelle, now traveling to the Seychelles, where Jean is (allegedly) working, but this time, she's growing tired of the sexual histrionics of their open marriage--of course, not before an opening threesome with Jean and local dressmaker Angelique (Radiah Frye). She even begins sympathizing with frigid Clara (Sylvie Fennac, a dead ringer for Dayle Haddon), who tried to play that game with her husband, Jean's friend Guillaume (Erik Colin), but just wasn't into it. Clara also blames Emmanuelle and Jean for Guillaume's sudden interest in pursuing an open marriage and his obsession with perfecting the art of "lovemaking," which is understandable since it's all anyone in these movies ever fucking talks about. Emmanuelle develops feelings for Gregory (Jean-Pierre Bouvier), a filmmaker scouting locations in the area, who doesn't believe in Jean's lifestyle philosophy and happens to catch Emmanuelle at the very moment she's been thinking the same thing, especially her growing disgust with how Jean and all of the expat swinger couples in their social circle pass eager, nubile young Chloe (Charlotte Alexandra) amongst themselves for their endless sexual pleasure. Though Jean loves nothing more than being turned on by Emmanuelle's stories of making love to other men, he soon grows jealous of Gregory and starts deliberately sabotaging her relationship with him, driving Emmanuelle to make the decision to abandon her sexually adventurous world and consider settling down with Gregory.




The less said about GOODBYE EMMANUELLE, the better. "Emmanuelle Goes Monogamous" might've seemed like a thought-provoking and even subversive idea on paper, but it's deadening in execution, unless you're a big fan of the endless "making love" philosophizing and highbrow poseurdom that constitute everything you fast-forwarded through in your teenage years in an impatient dash to get to "the good parts." The good parts are few and far between in the impossibly dull GOODBYE EMMANUELLE, and it must've been apparent to any potential US distributors. While EMMANUELLE was released by Columbia and EMMANUELLE: THE JOYS OF A WOMAN by Paramount, GOODBYE EMMANUELLE went unseen in America until it was picked up in 1981 by ambitious young concert promoter Harvey Weinstein, who was looking to get into the movie distribution game, thus earning the film its only claim to future notoriety by being the first release of the fledgling Miramax Films. It was so tame that it didn't even need any trimming for an R rating. And it was only given a spotty release, with Weinstein's acquisition likely due less to the fading brand recognition of the EMMANUELLE films (even Gemser's EMANUELLEs were being retooled as women-in-prison grinders like CAGED WOMAN and WOMEN'S PRISON MASSACRE) and more because Kristel, then in the midst of a short-lived run in Hollywood after 1979's THE CONCORDE: AIRPORT '79 and 1980's THE NUDE BOMB, was having a pretty good year in 1981, and here was one of her EMMANUELLE movies, sitting there unclaimed. 1981 saw Kristel reunite with Jaeckin for the future cable favorite LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER and she also enjoyed her biggest US success that same year with PRIVATE LESSONS. Like EMMANUELLE, PRIVATE LESSONS was another influential first centered on Kristel, in this case kickstarting a string of "horny, virginal teenage dweeb inexplicably gets seduced by his hot teacher" comedies (followed by the likes of HOMEWORK, MY TUTOR, and THEY'RE PLAYING WITH FIRE) that wouldn't have a chance in hell of being made today, much less being huge moneymakers at the box office, and, it bears mentioning, inspiring Van Halen's hit "Hot for Teacher."


But it's the success of PRIVATE LESSONS that was a blessing and a curse for Kristel. It finally gave her a non-EMMANUELLE hit, but a scheming agent talked her into signing her percentage profits over to him, so while the film was a smash hit, she barely made anything from it. Coupled with the collapse of her often volatile relationship with Ian McShane, who she met while making 1979's THE FIFTH MUSKETEER, and a worsening drug and alcohol problem (she was very open in later years about having a serious cocaine addiction in the late '70s and into the '80s), Kristel was quickly bottoming out personally and professionally. Out of desperation, she was lured back to the world of Emmanuelle for the 1984 Cannon reboot EMMANUELLE IV, which played like an erotic take on SECONDS, almost insulting then-32-year-old Kristel by having her Emmanuelle go through plastic surgery to emerge in a younger incarnation played by Mia Nygren. After that, Kristel was simply taking jobs for the money, from 1985's MATA HARI to the same year's German-made women-in-prison potboiler RED HEAT to a disastrous attempt to once again crack the American market with 1988's DRACULA'S WIDOW, which was caught up in the bankruptcy of DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group and ended up going straight to video. The increasingly dubious and decreasingly-budgeted  EMMANUELLE series continued without her, but Kristel was eventually reduced to starring in 1993's EMMANUELLE 7, which has the title character now running a virtual reality lab where people can fulfill their sexual fantasies. The same year, she appeared as "Old Emmanuelle" (Kristel was 41 at the time) in a series of French made-for-cable movies where she's featured in wraparound segments recounting her youthful sexploits to a new Mario (George Lazenby, of all people), with young Emmanuelle played by Venezuelan actress Marcella Walerstein. Kristel remained in Europe, working primarily in France, Italy, and her native Netherlands in obscure films and on TV, but her career never bounced back. While she successfully conquered her substance abuse issues, she spent the bulk of the '00s battling cancer, first in her throat, then spreading to her lungs, and she suffered a stroke shortly before her death in 2012 at just 60.

Sylvia Kristel (1952-2012)

UNDER THE SILVER LAKE
(US - 2019)

Written and directed by David Robert Mitchell. Cast: Andrew Garfield, Riley Keough, Topher Grace, Callie Hernandez, Don McManus, Jeremy Bobb, Riki Lindhome, Zosia Mamet, Patrick Fischler, Jimmi Simpson, Grace Van Patten, India Menuez, Wendy Vanden Heuvel, Chris Gann, Stephanie Moore, Sibongile Mlambo, Rex Linn, Annabelle Dexter-Jones, Laura-Leigh, Luke Baines, Sydney Sweeney, David Yow, Summer Bishil, Deborah Geffner. (R, 139 mins)

It says something about just how strange and impenetrable UNDER THE SILVER LAKE is that distributor A24--the folks who specialize in giving nationwide rollouts to divisive audience-alienators like THE WITCH, IT COMES AT NIGHT, GOOD TIME, and HEREDITARY--were at a complete loss as to what to do with it. The much-anticipated follow-up to writer/director David Robert Mitchell's acclaimed 2015 horror hit IT FOLLOWS, UNDER THE SILVER LAKE was filmed in late 2016 and released overseas last summer after a mixed reception at Cannes. Skittish about its commercial prospects at home, A24 moved the film to December 2018, then pulled it from the release schedule entirely, ultimately unveiling it with little fanfare on just two screens on April 19, 2019, with a VOD dumping four days later. In more ways than one, UNDER THE SILVER LAKE is to Mitchell what SOUTHLAND TALES was to Richard Kelly, the acclaimed writer/director who was given wide latitude after 2001's DONNIE DARKO got zero attention in theaters before becoming a bona fide cult sensation once it hit video stores. Following the success of IT FOLLOWS, Mitchell was more or less permitted to make the film he wanted to make with UNDER THE SILVER LAKE. It's not IT FOLLOWS, just like SOUTHLAND TALES wasn't DONNIE DARKO, and it's an odd time for visionary auteurs when Kelly hasn't made a movie in ten years and unfortunately seems to have fallen off the face of the earth, and here's Mitchell, another wunderkind granted almost complete freedom on a project and creating something that's left its producers and distributors (and some audiences) completely dumbfounded. History has a way of repeating itself.




That said, UNDER THE SILVER LAKE is a better and, relatively speaking, more disciplined film than SOUTHLAND TALES, and it's not just Kelly to whom Mitchell owes a debt. He's also wearing his love of David Lynch and Brian De Palma on his sleeve and fashioning the whole thing as a sort-of INHERENT VICE-esque shaggy dog story that's incredibly ambitious and compulsively intriguing for much of its lengthy duration. That is until Mitchell starts trying to explain too many things, which is something Lynch would've never done. In probably his best performance to date, HACKSAW RIDGE Oscar-nominee Andrew Garfield stars as Sam, an aimless, unemployed L.A. slacker who's five days away from being evicted. He loves comic books and movies, his apartment is filled with old movie posters and his mom calls him to talk about Janet Gaynor and remind him that the silent classic SEVENTH HEAVEN is airing on Turner Classic Movies later that night. Sam fills his days hooking up with an aspiring actress and friend-with-benefits (Riki Lindhome) and watching his bikini-clad neighbor Sarah (Riley Keough) through binoculars. That night, she invites him over. Her bedroom walls are adorned with movie posters and they watch HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE on TCM. After some flirting and a kiss, her two roommates return home with an eye-patched, pirate-looking guy and a suddenly nervous Sarah abruptly ends the evening, telling him to come over and hang out tomorrow. The next day, Sarah's apartment is empty, she and the roommates are gone, and the building manager (Rex Linn) says they just up and left. Sam sneaks into the vacant apartment and is almost seen by a mystery woman (Zosia Mamet), who grabs a shoebox full of Sarah's personal items from a closet and gets in a car with two other women. Sam follows them and witnesses them hand off the shoebox to the pirate guy, who urgently sprints away with it.






To go any deeper into a straight synopsis is pointless, as it'll likely make me sounds as insane as Sam, who embarks on a dangerous journey throughout and underneath L.A. and Hollywood in search of Sarah. Her disappearance was really all he needed to fully embrace his inner crackpot conspiracy theorist, especially once the actress friend is scared away after finding pages upon pages of papers on Sam's bedside table revealed to be his scribbled notes documenting old episodes of WHEEL OF FORTUNE, as he's convinced that Vanna White is sending coded messages with her eye movements. Sarah may or may not be dead, and Sam's investigation involves, in no particular order: a rash of serial dog killings plaguing the neighborhood; strange, shadowy figures following him; the July 1970 issue of Playboy; the death of prominent billionaire Jefferson Sevence (Chris Gann) and three women in a car fire; a freeze-frame of a TV news update on the Sevence death showing the burned remnants of what looks like Sarah's hat and the charred remains of a dog found in the purse of one of the women; Sam's drinking buddy (Topher Grace) using a drone to spy on women; self-published graphic novel writer Comic Guy (Patrick Fischler), who has an intense interest in subliminal messages and the "programming" inherent in advertising; a symbol painted on the wall of Sarah's apartment that Comic Guy reveals to be known among the homeless to mean "Keep quiet;" Sam finding hidden codes and messages in the lyrics of an up-and-coming L.A. indie rock band called Jesus and the Brides of Dracula; one such code sending him to the James Dean bust at the Griffith Park Observatory, where The Homeless King (Jesus Lizard frontman David Yow) introduces him to a series of hidden tunnels under the park; the sudden appearance of Owl's Kiss, a murderous figure from Comic Guy's zine Under the Silver Lake; a map found in an old cereal box that mirrors the tunnels underneath Griffith Park; and an elderly songwriter (Jeremy Bobb), whose influence on popular culture is more than Sam can fathom.


What does all of this mean? It means there's certain to be years of thinkpieces and essays written about UNDER THE SILVER LAKE. Even Mitchell says there's too much here to unpack on one viewing, but from the start, you're paying attention to every number and detail that appears, as everything on the screen is likely there for a reason (Comic Guy's address is 1492, the drinking buddy's is 1016, and there's a flashing "751" on a scoreboard). But it's just as likely that some of these details are just there for Mitchell to fuck with the audience. There's a prescient subtext that definitely addresses the issue of toxic masculinity, invoked with background chatter of "the male gaze" at a Jesus and the Brides of Dracula secret show that Sam attends, his eventually meeting a trio of actresses who work for an escort service called "Shooting Star" and are also seen in the company of the pirate guy (Sam will see one of them in a club as they dance to R.E.M.'s "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" a further nod to conspiracy kooks); and in the drinking buddy's use of a drone to secretly record women. But it's also a blistering rebuke of a kind of male, namely the adult stuck in a state of perpetual adolescence. Sam has no apparent job or means of supporting himself, yet he drives a nice car (that eventually gets repossessed) and hangs out at pricey coffee shops (one assumption might be that his mom is sending him money and he's pissing it away). But Sam's humiliating dressing-down by the songwriter is a key moment as the man claims that he's responsible for everything formative in everyone's lives, from classic songs to memorable jingles, even playing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on a piano and cackling that people think that song changed their lives ("That song wasn't written for distorted guitar...it was written by me between a blowjob and an omelette!  I'm the voice of your generation!").





With the brutal takedown of pop culture by the songwriter (a great scene, by the way, and destined get 30 million views on YouTube), and Sam's ultimate discovery of what's really going on and the reasoning behind it all, UNDER THE SILVER LAKE's third act veers into FIGHT CLUB territory, which is maybe one influence more than the narrative of this labyrinthine saga can handle. The "waking nightmare" feel of the story begins collapsing when Mitchell feels the need to start explaining, and his decision to force it all to make sense (and a lot of it still doesn't) grinds things to a tedious halt when it matters most. But in fairness, this is the kind of film that you can watch ten times and have ten different reactions, depending on which element you choose to focus. On one viewing, it feels like it's biting off way more than it can chew, though the endless in-jokes (there's a funny sight gag involving an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, a pointed reference to nobody liking Garfield's turn as Spidey, a planned trilogy halted after two films) and movie references (there's a slew of David Lynch shout-outs, like the tunnels invoking the horror underneath the Norman Rockwell-esque surface of BLUE VELVET; Sam beating the shit out of two teenage vandals in a moment that's every bit as gratifying as mobster Robert Loggia's revenge on an obnoxious tailgater in LOST HIGHWAY; and the very presence of Fischler, unforgettable in the traumatizing Winkie's scene in MULHOLLAND DR) are undeniably entertaining. Is UNDER THE SILVER LAKE a brilliantly-conceived, unsolvable puzzle that cineastes will be deciphering for years to come or is Mitchell is sending the gullible on a wild goose chase? It's impossible to tell, but one recurring theme throughout is masturbation, which becomes a metaphor for Sam's obsessive pursuit, never more blatantly than when he takes a break to jerk off while a Jesus and the Brides of Dracula vinyl plays in reverse as he scours their album for hidden messages. Maybe all we're doing with all this overanalyzing is jerking ourselves off. Maybe that's kinda what Mitchell's doing with UNDER THE SILVER LAKE.

DESTROYER
(US/UK - 2018)

Last fall, DESTROYER had some awards-season buzz going for Nicole Kidman, but financially-strapped distributor Annapurna decided to focus their attention on the Oscar-baiting VICE instead, leaving DESTROYER to flounder on just 235 screens at its widest release. Looking what can be charitably described as several degrees south of haggard, Kidman did get a Golden Globe nomination for her performance as hard-drinking LAPD detective Erin Bell, a disgraced ex-FBI agent who's pretty much regarded as a total shitshow among her colleagues and always looks like she hasn't slept in days. Though two other cops have already caught the case, she shows up at a homicide where the John Doe murder victim was shot dead and has dye-stained $100 bills scattered around his body. Back at the precinct, someone mails her an envelope with an identically dye-stained $100 bill. She's convinced it's a message and she knows who's sending it: Silas (Toby Kebbell), the leader of a ring of bank robbers she and her former FBI partner Chris (Sebastian Stan) infiltrated as part of an extensive undercover operation nearly 17 years ago. Going rogue and blowing off her partner Antonio (Shamier Anderson), Erin starts tracking down all of Silas' known associates, none of whom are happy to see her since her cover was ultimately blown. She eventually works her way to Silas' sleazy, money-laundering lawyer DiFranco (Bradley Whitford), who's been holding the take and doling it out as requested in clandestine park handoffs to Silas' drug-addled girlfriend Petra (Tatiana Maslany). As Erin predicted, Silas' money is running out and he's resurfaced to plan another robbery and settle old scores.



At its core, DESTROYER is another saga of a morally-conflicted cop, with Kidman fearlessly diving  into her own TRAINING DAY crossed with a bit of BAD LIEUTENANT, with one shock value scene where she goes to absurd lengths to get info on Silas' whereabouts from one of his terminally-ill former accomplices. But director Karyn Kusama and writers Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (the trio also worked on 2005's AEON FLUX and 2016's terrifying THE INVITATION), have a few unexpected tricks up their sleeves beyond a cleverly-constructed ending and one incredibly intense robbery sequence. These are doled out slowly in a series of flashbacks to the undercover operation that play as a parallel timeline to the current events. Erin's job, boozing, and pill-popping are at the expense of fractured relationships with her ex Ethan (Scoot McNairy) and her teenage daughter Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn), and as the backstory gradually fills in, you finally get a sense of the extent to which she's gone to numb the pain. Everyone in her life has written her off, with the possible exception of her sympathetic former FBI boss Gil (Toby Huss), who invites her to a Bible study, insisting "It's low-key...nobody's handling snakes," prompting one of the very few times present-day Erin cracks a sort-of smile. In the end, DESTROYER doesn't absolve Erin of her sins and doesn't ask the audience for sympathy, but Kidman succeeds in conveying the humanity underneath an irreparably damaged person who can't stop making terrible decisions. (R, 121 mins)




WE DIE YOUNG
(US/Bulgaria/UK - 2019)

Following the French drama THE BOUNCER, Jean-Claude Van Damme gets another chance to go serious with the earnest but cliched WE DIE YOUNG. Hampered by obvious budget constraints, the film gets off to a clunky start with too many shots of a Bulgarian backlot unsuccessfully portraying the mean streets of Washington, D.C. (no streets have as many mailboxes and pay phones as these do), but it gets better and more compelling as it goes on. Set in a barrio war zone controlled by MS-13 kingpin Rincon (David Castaneda of the Netflix series THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY), who's already reaching "heavy is the crown" levels of paranoia, so much so that he really only trusts teenage drug delivery boy and collector Lucas (Elijah Rodriguez), who lost his older brother in Afghanistan and is doing everything he can to shield his younger brother Miguel (Nicholas Sean Johnny) from gang life. Rincon is preoccupied with the wedding of his baby sister Gabriella (Robyn Cara) and entrusts Lucas to deliver two bricks of heroin to a contact just outside his territory. But Lucas is distracted when he learns that Rincon's guys are planning to initiate Miguel into MS-13, so he never makes the drop and is instead pursued by Rincon's hot-headed cousin and ambitious second-in-command Jester (Charlie MacGechan). Fleeing for safety, they end up in the car of Daniel (Van Damme), an Oxycontin-addicted neighborhood mechanic and ex-Marine who lost his ability to speak when he took some shrapnel in a bomb blast in Afghanistan.



Set over the course of Gabriella's wedding day, WE DIE YOUNG turns into a standard-issue, urban "survive the night" scenario with Rincon's guys eventually catching Lucas and Miguel, forcing Daniel to channel the long-dormant warrior within to mount a daring one-man rescue. Making his narrative feature debut, Israeli-American documentary filmmaker Lior Geller has obviously spent time worshiping at the altar of Alfonso Cuaron, with a couple of reasonably well-executed handheld, long-take chase sequences, both in a car (complete with blood splattering against the lens, as required by law) and on foot. The problem is that you've seen them all before, along with the heavy-handed digital insertion of the Capitol Building and the Washington Monument into the background to remind you that This Is America, and all the hackneyed literary allusions with Daniel trying to get Lucas to read A Tale of Two Cities and Rincon serving as an ersatz Shakespearean figure who even quotes The Merchant of Venice at one point. To his credit, Castaneda tries to bring some complexity to a potentially cartoonish character, and Van Damme (one of 37 credited producers) does a fine job letting his aged face, pinched into an almost constant contorted grimace due to Daniel's chronic pain, speak volumes. But for the most part, there's nothing new here--the kid who's been sucked into the gang life trying to keep his little brother from the same fate, the SCARFACE trope of the powerful gangster being possessive of his little sister, the quiet loner silently suffering in a shell of his former self until he has a reason to take action. In the end, it's a decent enough Redbox rental, as Geller gussies it up with some occasionally effective documentary immediacy, and its three solid lead performances (Castaneda and Rodriguez were both in SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO as well) give it a little more credibility than those early Bulgarian backlot scenes would initially indicate. (R, 93 mins)

ARCTIC
(US/Iceland - 2019)


A showcase for the always-reliable Danish character actor Mads Mikkelsen, ARCTIC is a cold and punishingly harsh survivalist saga from Brazilian musician-turned-debuting filmmaker Joe Penna. Shot in some desolate locations in Iceland with nothing to see but vast, snow-covered nothingness, the film gets a committed and physically demanding performance from Mikkelsen, and opens in medias res with almost no backstory as his character, Overgard, goes about his daily routine after being stranded somewhere in the Arctic. He sleeps in a crashed plane, but spends his days mapping coordinates, checking various fishing lines, and hand-cranking a small distress beacon. The only sign of life in the area is an occasional sighting of a lone polar bear who invades his camp and steals some fish while he's away. He spots a rescue helicopter that gets caught in a snowy wind gust during a whiteout and crashes. The pilot is killed and the lone passenger, a woman (Maria Thelma), is severely injured and barely conscious. Overgard raids the chopper for food and equipment--including a sled--and takes the woman back to his plane. With no sign of a further rescue attempt and the woman's situation growing more dire by the hour, he makes the decision to embark on a several-day hike, pulling her on a sled over the snowy terrain to where he believes a remote seasonal rescue station might be.



That's really it as far as the story goes. Almost all of ARCTIC's effectiveness comes from Mikkelsen, who has minimal dialogue and lets his weary, exhausted, exposed face say everything. Penna put Mikkelsen and Thelma out in the brutal elements (except for a couple of composited moments that look like post-production reshoots and do somewhat stick out like a sore thumb), and in addition to fighting off a polar bear with a flare (another scene that's dampened by some obvious CGI), there's a long, arduous sequence where Overgard encounters a mountain that wasn't on the map, and tries to haul the woman and the sled over it FITZCARRALDO-style, eventually giving up and opting to go around it, which will add another five days to the trip at a time when every moment counts. Speaking of FITZCARRALDO, one is reminded of Werner Herzog while watching ARCTIC, as Penna isn't afraid to let things unfold in a way that captures the monotony and the hopelessness while never being dull. He tells you next-to-nothing about Overgard or the woman (we briefly see his pilot's license, and we're led to assume the dead chopper pilot was her husband), and we only learn who they are over the course of this journey, as Overgard is a man who's willing to risk his life to save a stranger. We've seen these triumph of the human spirit stories countless times before, and they live or die based on the star. Mikkelsen's work here isn't as showy as James Franco in 127 HOURS nor does he carry the iconic weight of the legendary Robert Redford in ALL IS LOST, but it's a study in low-key persistence and quiet determination. That, and the pervasive sense of isolation are the standouts in ARCTIC, a tough sell that Bleecker Street only got on 268 screens at its widest release, but it's a must see for fans of Mikkelsen and survivalist cinema. (PG-13, 98 mins)



THE HOLE IN THE GROUND
(Ireland/Belgium/Finland - 2019)


Released a week before Nicholas McCarthy's THE PRODIGY, this past spring's other "evil kid" movie, albeit on a much smaller scale (A24 put it on just 24 screens and VOD), THE HOLE IN THE GROUND has a handful of effective moments, but can't stop tripping over its own feet and more importantly, can't settle on what it wants to be. Right from the start, with a high aerial shot of a yellow vehicle driving down a road through a forest, director/co-writer Lee Cronin is letting us know that he's seen THE SHINING, and the entire film ends up feeling like warmed-up leftovers from other horror films, namely THE BABADOOK and HEREDITARY. Living in the outskirts of a rural Irish town, Sarah (Seana Kerslake) works in an antique shop and is a single mom to young Chris (James Quinn Markey). She's evasive about her past and has to style her hair to hide a large scar on her forehead that presumably came from an abusive, estranged husband. One gets the sense that she's fled rather than moved and doesn't want to be found ("I know Dad makes you sad," Chris tells her), and she's on edge enough that the town doc prescribes a mild anxiety medication. Sarah and Chris live in an old, dark house bordered by an expansive forest with a massive sinkhole. Chris wanders off near the sinkhole and from that point on, Sarah feels something is different about him. Her increasing paranoia isn't helped by two near-misses in the middle of a road with local crazy woman Noreen Brady (Kati Outinen), who gets right in Sarah's face and declares "It's not your boy." Noreen's husband Des (the great James Cosmo) apologizes for his wife, but the townies know all about Noreen: years earlier, she became convinced that her own son was replaced by an impostor and she "accidentally" ran him down with her car and has been in a virtually catatonic state since.



Shortly after, Sarah happens upon Noreen's dead body near the side of the road her head buried in the dirt. Chris' behavior grows more erratic, with Sarah finding all the proof she needs when he has no idea what to do during an affectionate game the two have played for years, where they each make a funny face to see who laughs first. There's some intriguing ideas here about motherhood, which is where the BABADOOK parallels are most prevalent (though Markey's Chris isn't grating like the BABADOOK kid), and the panic and dread Sarah feels in looking at Chris and wondering if he's just like his father. That psychological horror gives way to something more, with Chris eating spiders and crawling on the floor like one, and demonstrating enough strength to throw Sarah around the kitchen. Cronin wants to deal in both metaphor and reality, and the story begins working at cross purposes. The atmospheric look turns to murkiness as it goes on, with Cronin indulging in pointless directorial flourishes like a perpetually flickering light in a dark basement and an inevitable journey into the sinkhole, where something even more horrific awaits. A debuting Markey is fine, and the promising Kerslake delivers a strong performance--both stars could've benefited from more focused script instead of what feels like a greatest hits compilation of the last several years of acclaimed indie horrors. Though, to its credit, it does have one late-breaking development that kinda sorta prefigures Jordan Peele's US, which opened a month and a half later. (R, 90 mins)



AMERICAN HANGMAN
(Canada/UK - 2019)


It's not every day that you get a heavy-handed, SAW-inspired courtroom drama, but here's AMERICAN HANGMAN. A hectoring, finger-pointing lecture disguised as a suspense thriller, the film was written and directed by Wilson Coneybeare, a veteran of numerous Canadian kids TV shows in what appears to be a serious step away from his comfort zone in addition to being his first IMDb credit in a decade (back in the mid- '80s, he also wrote for the Don Adams-starring syndicated Canadian import CHECK IT OUT!). AMERICAN HANGMAN opens with two kidnapped men being carried into a concrete bunker of some kind. One is a guy named Ron (Paul Braunstein), who was sitting in his car in a fast-food parking lot, and the other is an elderly man (Donald Sutherland) who was unloading groceries in his driveway. Their captor (Vincent Kartheiser) snips off one of Ron's fingers and gives the two men five minutes to figure out their connection. When they can't come up with one, he shoots Ron in the head. All of this is captured by a dozen cameras in a complex tech set-up, with the captor broadcasting the events live across social media. It's soon picked up by cable news, the cops, and the public. The captor explains his actions: the old man is retired Judge Oliver Straight, who years ago sentenced a convicted child murderer to death. The convicted killer was executed that morning, but the captor, who says he's the victim's uncle, appoints himself "prosecutor," accusing the Judge of murder in sentencing the wrong man to die. Also on trial are the police and the media, who also joined in the mad rush to condemn the wrong man, and the millions of viewers who tune in as the stream goes viral are the judge and jury--"the voice of the people"--voting to sustain or overrule every objection and ultimately decide Judge Straight's fate.



AMERICAN HANGMAN plays like one of those CBS crime procedurals when they try to break from the formula and do something "deeper." It's pompously full of itself, taking rudimentary, fish-in-a-barrel shots at the "breaking news" culture of today's media, represented by ambitious USCN (United States Cable News) reporter Harper Grant (Lucia Walter), while at the same time utilizing every tired, generic trope in the book. The captor's motivation is supposed to be a third-act twist that's obvious from the start, and the wild goose chase he sends the cops on won't fool anyone who's seen THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. And Lt. Roy (Oliver Dennis), the cop put in charge of this as it unfolds over the course of the day, is also busy overseeing a shuttering precinct AND it's his last day before retirement (no word on whether he's "too old for this shit"). Judge Straight is apparently a man of renowned standing in his field, and the murder case in question was national news, but no one watching the stream in its early stages--the cops, the media, the public--recognizes him, and nobody seems to know that this is the day the girl's killer was set to be executed. And when Roy and his cops finally start getting an idea of who the captor is, one announces "He has a record for some sort of endangerment but he got off on a technicality, and get this...he's an IT guy!" like a bad LAW & ORDER: SVU episode, as Coneybeare is so preoccupied with pummeling the audience with messages that he loses any semblance of basic logic and common sense. Kartheiser, sporting dorky glasses and kind of unflattering bowl haircut that no normal, innocent non-creep would willingly have, isn't asked to do much other than yell Coneybeare's talking points, while Sutherland brings some effortless professionalism to a role that has him seated at a makeshift witness stand the entire time and was probably shot in a few days. He's obviously the best thing about AMERICAN HANGMAN, the kind of movie where a supporting character is named "Josh Harkridge" and we're still supposed to take it seriously. (Unrated, 99 mins)

EXTREMELY WICKED, 
SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE
(US - 2019)

Directed by Joe Berlinger. Written by Michael Werwie. Cast: Zac Efron, Lily Collins, Kaya Scodelario, John Malkovich, Jim Parsons, Jeffrey Donovan, Angela Sarafyan, Dylan Baker, Brian Geraghty, Terry Kinney, Haley Joel Osment, James Hetfield, Grace Victoria Cox, Morgan Pyle, Ken Strunk, Justin McCombs, Ryan Wesley Gilreath, Tess Talbot, Forba Shepherd (R, 110 mins)

Infamous serial killer Ted Bundy has been the subject of numerous true crime books, nearly a dozen movies, and even more TV documentaries. The 1986 NBC TV-movie THE DELIBERATE STRANGER capped off of a banner year for Mark Harmon, who received critical acclaim and a Golden Globe nomination for his performance as Bundy on top of being named that year's Sexiest Man Alive by People. Until then, the former college football star was known as a competent TV actor who was gaining some momentum on ST. ELSEWHERE as lothario Dr. Bobby Caldwell, but playing Ted Bundy unquestionably opened some doors for him and turned him into a big-screen headliner for a couple of years before returning to journeyman duty on TV, eventually finding his career role on the still-running CBS series NCIS. With his charm and good looks, Harmon was perfect casting for a truly reprehensible serial killer who didn't fit the stereotype, one of the main reasons Bundy remains such a popular topic today. The same degree of perfect casting applies to Zac Efron, who made his name as a teen superstar with Disney's incredibly popular HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL franchise. As the years have gone on, Efron has found steady work in comedies both good (NEIGHBORS) and godawful (DIRTY GRANDPA), and his attempts to branch out and be taken seriously have yielded results both interesting (ME AND ORSON WELLES) and woefully misbegotten (THE PAPERBOY). With an absurd panini beard and about ten mintues of screen time, Efron managed to steal this year's earlier THE BEACH BUM from both Matthew McConaughey and Snoop Dogg, and in playing Ted Bundy in the Netflix original film EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE (a verbatim description of Bundy used by the judge who sentenced him to die in the Florida electric chair), Efron uses his persona to chilling effectiveness in a performance that matches Harmon's, but through no fault of his, the film only works in fits and starts.





That's largely due to the approach taken by director Joe Berlinger, helming his first narrative feature since 2000's little-loved BOOK OF SHADOWS: BLAIR WITCH 2. Best known for his documentaries like the PARADISE LOST trilogy detailing the saga of the West Memphis Three, and Metallica's SOME KIND OF MONSTER, Berlinger also directed this year's earlier Netflix documentary series  CONVERSATIONS WITH A KILLER: THE TED BUNDY TAPES. A companion piece of sorts, EXTREMELY WICKED is based on the memoir The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy by Elizabeth Kendall, who was romantically involved with Bundy for several years until his initial incarceration in the mid-1970s. Played here by Lily Collins, Liz Kloepfer (her maiden name) is a college student and single mom when she meets Bundy in a Seattle bar in 1969. They instantly hit it off and the film cuts to 1974, with both of them pursuing law degrees and Ted a loving father figure to Liz's daughter Molly. They maintain a long-distance relationship while Bundy is in law school in Utah, where he's picked up as a suspect in a kidnapping and eventually accused of the crime. He keeps giving Liz flimsy excuses about being set up, but when an Aspen, CO detective (Terry Kinney) starts asking questions and contacting Liz, it sets off a chain reaction of investigators in several states gradually realizing that they're all pursuing the same suspect. Despite endlessly proclaiming his innocence, it looks so dire for Bundy that even his own lawyer (Jeffrey Donovan) bails on him with an insincere "Good luck."


EXTREMELY WICKED ostensibly looks at the Bundy story from Liz Kloepfer's point-of-view, but Berlinger sort-of drops the ball on that angle, starting with a rapid jump from 1969 to 1974. We don't see much of the foundation of her relationship with Bundy, or why she sticks with him despite all the evidence against him, and the film ultimately resorts delaying a reveal in the story until it can make a dramatic impact, except that it doesn't really land. Berlinger obviously knows Efron-as-Bundy is the selling point here, so it doesn't take long to shift to that focus, whether it's his two escapes from custody (one from a courthouse and the other from an Aspen jail) and his circus of a trial in Florida (where he fled after Aspen), when he fires his public defender (Brian Geraghty) and represents himself, with prison groupies forming a Bundy fan club in the courtroom, cheering him on and often describing him as "dreamy" and admitting to reporters that they fantasize about him. Exploring that bizarre phenomenon (known as hybristophilia, with Bundy arguably the most prominent example) might've been a more interesting subject for Berlinger to explore, especially when it comes to the pathetic Carole Ann Boone (Kaya Scodelario), a former co-worker of Bundy's in Seattle who follows him to Utah and eventually to Florida, all in the hopes of getting him to fall in love with her.


We never see any of Bundy's killings, but with his tangles with the law and his antics in the courtroom where he often spars with the sardonically folksy judge (John Malkovich) and the incredulous prosecutor (Jim Parsons), all we're left with concerning Liz is her increasing dependence on booze and a hesitant relationship with her nice-guy co-worker Jerry (Haley Joel Osment), who keeps unsuccessfully trying to get her to forget Bundy and move on. This only leads to cliches, like the inevitable scene of Liz gathering all of her empty liquor bottles and throwing them in a trash can, and Berlinger resorting to Scorsese needle-drops like Bundy being hauled out of court to Emerson, Lake & Palmer's "Lucky Man," and escaping from the Aspen courthouse from a second-story window to The Box Tops' "The Letter." EXTREMELY WICKED is a serial killer thriller that wants to be different, realizes there's not enough there for what it wants to do, then tries to have it both ways, which only results in an uneven structure and a lack of focus. In other words, it's flawed but not without interest, thanks mostly to a revelatory performance by Efron and some solid supporting work from the cast, particularly Scodelario, who's good enough here that you wish the story was being told from her POV.

THE CORRUPTION OF CHRIS MILLER 
aka BEHIND THE SHUTTERS
(Spain - 1973; US release 1975)

Directed by J.A. Bardem. Written by Santiago Moncada. Cast: Jean Seberg, Marisol, Barry Stokes, Perla Cristal, Rudy Gaebel, Gerard Tichy, Alicia Altabella, Vidal Molina, Maria Bardem, Juan Bardem, Miguel Bardem, Gustavo Re. (R, 113 mins)

A Holy Grail of sorts for Eurocult aficionados, the 1973 Spanish thriller THE CORRUPTION OF CHRIS MILLER has long been a staple of the bootleg circuit in editions that have been cropped and chopped and, at best, semi-watchable. Vinegar Syndrome has just released a fully-restored, uncut version on Blu-ray, in its original 2.35:1 widescreen (because physical media is dead), and in an era where obscurities tend to be revered and hailed as lost classics simply because they've been virtually impossible to see for so long, this is an insidious and quietly unsettling little gem that's been waiting patiently to be rediscovered and is thus far the top Blu-ray resurrection of 2019. What makes its chilling effectiveness all the more surprising is that director Juan Antonio Bardem (Javier's uncle) was a filmmaker known more for exploring social and political concerns in Spanish neo-realist works like 1955's DEATH OF A CYCLIST and 1956's MAIN STREET, films that earned him a spot on the shit list of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. An avowed communist whose early films offered blistering critiques of Spain's politics and bourgeois hypocrisy, Bardem had no ties to or demonstrable affinity for the horror genre aside from stepping in to complete the final shots and post-production of 1973's A BELL FROM HELL when the director, his friend Claudio Guerin, died tragically in an on-set accident when he fell from the film's bell tower on the last day of shooting. But make no mistake, Bardem has a horror master's touch with THE CORRUPTION OF CHRIS MILLER, showing off an palpable verve and panache with at least two terrifying and unforgettable sequences that are so audaciously well-crafted that it's a regretful missed opportunity that he never hopped on the '70s giallo bandwagon or teamed with someone like Paul Naschy, the face of Spanish horror during that period.





In a rural Spanish town, an actress named Perla (Perla Cristal) wakes up in the morning and is brutally stabbed to death by a one-night stand who emerges from the bathroom dressed in Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp costume. The killer raids her belongings for whatever cash he can find, leaves the Chaplin mask and wardrobe behind, and disappears down a lonely country road. Cut to an isolated house in the vicinity, where things are tense between Ruth Miller (Jean Seberg) and her stepdaughter Chris (25-year-old Marisol, whose career began as a popular Spanish child star and then a singer in her teen years) after they were abandoned by Chris' father a year earlier. While Ruth hides mail and rants that "Men don't love...they possess, they injure, they invade," Chris is bitter and resentful and blames Ruth for driving her father away. The increasingly fragile, unstable Chris also has a paralyzing fear of rain and running water after being raped in a locker room shower shortly after her father left. Ruth's comforting of Chris involves leering looks and lingering kisses that aren't in any way maternal, and that's only the beginning of the perverse dysfunction that's going on. Following a violent storm, Ruth finds drifter Barney Webster (British actor Barry Stokes, later to play a similar role but as a disguised alien in Norman J. Warren's PREY), with only a backpack and a guitar, sleeping nude in the barn. While Chris is out horseback-riding with local trainer Lewis (Rudy Gaebel), sex-starved Ruth makes breakfast for Barney and the pair end up in bed under the stipulation that he leaves before Chris returns home. That only encourages Barney to stick around (Ruth: "You've had your breakfast, now get out!" Barney: "How could I leave after something as tasty as that?"), and before long, he's a guest in the house and in Ruth's bed, much to Chris' disgust. That is, until Barney makes a play for her as well, which turns an already precarious situation into a powderkeg of jealousy and sexual intrigue, with Chris sneering "He's never been in my room...yet."





Bardem and screenwriter Santiago Moncada (HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON) engage in some clever misdirection by letting this slow-burn situation reach a boil for over an hour, with little mention of the opening murder until an enraged Ruth kicks Barney out in the middle of the night during a torrential downpour. Shortly after, an entire family is murdered in their farmhouse by a sickle-wielding killer in a hooded black raincoat. This brings in a detective (Gerard Tichy) on the trail of a serial killer who's murdered seven people in the region over the last two years, with one witness describing a young man with a backpack and a guitar. And with that, the film just floors it, turning into a relentless, terrifying nail-biter when Ruth and Chris, convinced they would've been the killer's next victims, are stirred awake in the middle of the night after Barney breaks into the house, seemingly to take care of some unfinished business.





THE CORRUPTION OF CHRIS MILLER was a moderate success with Spanish moviegoers, but Spanish critics beholden to important films like DEATH OF A CYCLIST generally dismissed it with the consensus being that Bardem was slumming with a paycheck genre gig that was beneath him. But viewed today, from its jawdropping prologue to its hypnotic, stylish finale, it stands with the top Italian gialli of the time, with the jarring suddenness and sheer ferocity of the farmhouse massacre rivaling anything in the unforgettable, stomach-knotting last half hour of Sergio Martino's 1974 classic TORSO and standing up to any jump-from-your-seat kill in the '80s slasher pantheon (even Waldo de los Rios' score seems to prefigure FRIDAY THE 13TH's Harry Manfredini at times). The killer decked out in a long, hooded black raincoat and wiping out the family with a sickle should've been an iconic horror image long before I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER co-opted it for the post-SCREAM craze over two decades later. THE CORRUPTION OF CHRIS MILLER was relegated to US drive-ins and grindhouses by the one-and-done "Chris Releasing" (likely a dubious tax scam) in 1975, and they tried launching it again a year later with the more lurid title BEHIND THE SHUTTERS. The SHUTTERS title was used again when the short-lived Analysis re-released it in November 1979 to capitalize on the death of star Seberg, the Iowa-born Otto Preminger ingenue who starred in 1957's SAINT JOAN before heading to Europe, where she became an iconic figure in the French New Wave with Jean-Luc Godard's BREATHLESS (1960).

Jean Seberg (1938-1979)

Seberg divided her time between America and Europe throughout the 1960s until her left-wing political activism and support of the Black Panthers essentially got her blackballed from Hollywood after a pair of major 1970 releases (AIRPORT and MACHO CALLAHAN), and made her a target of J. Edgar Hoover, who regularly briefed President Richard Nixon and/or White House counsel John Ehrlichman on his findings. Through the bureau's infamous COINTELPRO program, Seberg was the subject of round-the-clock government surveillance, her home was bugged, her phones tapped, and she was the victim of a ruthless Hoover-orchestrated smear campaign in the media that didn't stop when she left America for good following the premature birth of her daughter, who died at just two days old on August 25, 1970 (at the behest of Hoover, FBI agents planted a story with a Los Angeles Times gossip columnist that was picked up by Newsweek, alleging that the baby's father was prominent Black Panther Raymond Hewitt). She lived and worked exclusively in Europe for the rest of her career, and was still under surveillance and wiretapping through the FBI working in conjunction with the CIA and the US military as late as 1972, the year of Hoover's death. Professionally, Seberg wasn't happy about starring in movies like THE CORRUPTION OF CHRIS MILLER, but you wouldn't know it by watching her performance (perhaps in their mutual outspoken political activism, she saw in Bardem a kindred spirit who also had bills to pay). Haunted by the death of her infant daughter (and according to her second husband Romain Gary, attempting suicide on more than one occasion in the ensuing years around the August 25 anniversary of her passing), Seberg's psychological state continued to deteriorate and she disappeared on August 30, 1979. Her body was found eight days later, wrapped in a blanket in the backseat of her car, with a bottle of sleeping pills and a note addressed to her 17-year-old son. Paris police ruled it a "probable suicide," but there was enough alcohol in her system to lead investigators to believe that someone had to be with her when she died for the body to be blanketed the way it was, though who that is remains a mystery to this day. Seberg was 40 years old. Following her death, Time ran an extensive piece titled "The FBI vs. Jean Seberg," where top-ranking FBI officials attempted to distance themselves from the actions of J. Edgar Hoover, admitting that there was a coordinated defamation of the actress, which is the subject of the film AGAINST ALL ENEMIES, due out later this year and starring Kristen Stewart as Seberg.

IRON WARRIOR
(Italy - 1987)

Directed by Al Bradley (Alfonso Brescia). Written by Steven Luotto and Al Bradley (Alfonso Brescia). Cast: Miles O'Keeffe, Savina Gersak, Elisabeth Kaza, Iris Peynado, Tim Lane, Tiziana Altieri, Frank Daddi, Josie Coppini, Malcolm Borg, Conrad Borg, Jon Rosser. (R, 87 mins)

One of the countless Italian ripoffs of CONAN THE BARBARIAN, 1983's ATOR THE FIGHTING EAGLE helped keep Miles O'Keeffe employed following his career-killing Hollywood debut opposite Bo Derek in her husband John's 1981 fiasco TARZAN THE APE MAN. Directed by the venerable Italo sleaze king Aristide Massaccesi (aka "Joe D'Amato") under his "David Hills" pseudonym, ATOR led to the 1984 sequel THE BLADE MASTER, better known today by its MST3K incarnation CAVE DWELLERS. The third in the franchise, IRON WARRIOR, is an odd in-series reboot of sorts that almost feels like it wasn't intended to be part of the ATOR universe. Made not by Massaccesi and his Filmirage outfit but by producer Ovidio G. Assonitis (BEYOND THE DOOR, THE VISITOR, PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING), IRON WARRIOR gives Ator a completely different origin story and puts him in decidedly different, R-rated surroundings with gore and T&A that doesn't gel with its two PG-rated predecessors. Assonitis farmed out directing duties to Alfonso Brescia as a consolation prize after removing him from 1986's CHOKE CANYON during pre-production when he decided the action-and-stunt-heavy film was too much for Brescia to handle. Better-known by his Americanized pseudonym "Al Bradley," and a perennial Italian D-lister, Brescia (1930-2001) cut his teeth on low-grade peplum (1964's THE MAGNIFICENT GLADIATOR), spaghetti westerns (1968's CRY OF DEATH) and men-on-a-mission WWII movies (1969's KILL ROMMEL!), never distinguishing himself in any conceivable way as his filmography ranked several notches below mediocre. As his career went on, he made the 1974 action comedy SUPER STOOGES VS. THE WONDER WOMEN and even managed to get Jack Palance to star in the 1976 GODFATHER knockoff BLOOD AND BULLETS, but it wasn't until his quartet of oppressively dull post-STAR WARS space operas (and the sexually explicit 1980 offshoot THE BEAST IN SPACE, which featured hardcore footage) that Brescia cemented his place in Eurocult history, even if it was for all the wrong reasons.




Shot on the same sets with most of the same supporting cast and looking like inept community theater versions of Antonio Margheriti's GAMMA 1 quartet over a decade earlier, 1977's COSMOS: WAR OF THE PLANETS, 1978's BATTLE OF THE STARS, 1978's WAR OF THE ROBOTS, and 1979's STAR ODYSSEY are virtually interchangeable and are differentiated only by their leading men (John Richardson in the first two, followed by Antonio Sabato in ROBOTS and Gianni Garko in ODYSSEY) and rank among the ultimate feats of cine-masochistic endurance. COSMOS: WAR OF THE PLANETS actually made it into some US theaters in 1979 but the other three went straight to syndicated TV and later surfaced on any number of public domain DVD sets, though I wouldn't be surprised if someone put them out on Blu-ray box set if the elements are able to be tracked down (nor would I be surprised when I clicked on "pre-order" when that hypothetical listing turns up on Amazon). With Scorpion's release of IRON WARRIOR, we're forced to confront what was once unthinkable: the stunning realization that an "Al Bradley" joint is on Blu-ray which, depending on your tolerance for bad movies, is either cause for celebration or the cracking of one of the seven seals that will open the gates of Hell.


IRON WARRIOR isn't exactly an expensive epic, but it's obviously got the biggest budget that the perpetually hapless Brescia was ever granted. It's his most polished and professional-looking film, shot on some stunning locales on Malta, where the production also took full advantage of some still-standing sets left over from Robert Altman's POPEYE seven years earlier. Brescia also had the added bonus of having veteran optical effects technician Wally Gentleman as a cinematographer. A real person despite his name sounding like a hastily-blurted alias, Gentleman worked on the effects crew of Assonitis' BEYOND THE DOOR and scored a visual effects gig with Francis Ford Coppola on 1982's ONE FROM THE HEART. Gentleman also worked on Douglas Trumbull's effects team for Stanley Kubrick's 1968 landmark 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, and how he went from that to serving as Alfonso Brescia's cinematographer on the third movie in the ATOR series is a story that demands to be told. Watching IRON WARRIOR in a pristine HD transfer is quite a different experience than seeing it on VHS back in the late '80s. It's less of an ATOR movie and more like a companion piece to Lucio Fulci's hallucinatory 1983 sword-and-sorcery saga CONQUEST. It's trippy and surreal, like if an Italian CONAN ripoff was directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky.


The script, credited to "Al Bradley" and veteran voice actor Steven Luotto (who can be heard dubbing Mark Gregory in 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS), is a hot mess of curses, hexes, and mysticism, with Brescia shamelessly stealing iconic imagery from SUPERMAN, STAR WARS, and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. Believing in a prophecy that she would be destroyed by twin brothers, evil old witch Phoedra (Elisabeth Kaza) spies on eight-year-old siblings Ator and Trogar and kidnaps Trogar as part of a revenge plot against Deeva (Iris Peynado), who freed Phoedra's enslaved people. 18 years later, Phoedra summons the Iron Warrior (Frank Daddi) to kill the King (Tim Lane), who sends his princess daughter Janna (Assonitis' girlfriend Savina Gersak) away for her own safety. Deeva puts Janna in the care of lone warrior Ator (O'Keeffe), but not before he's seduced by Phoedra in the form of a nude young temptress (Tiziana Altieri). Prophesied to protect the King's daughter ("She for who you are fated needs you now!" Deeva gravely intones), Ator leads Janna on a treacherous journey where they're constantly thwarted by the supernatural shenanigans of Phoedra, who pits brother against brother as the deadly Iron Warrior is--you guessed it--the grown Trogar, whose body and soul have been taken over by the spell of Phoedra.


Or something like that. IRON WARRIOR makes absolutely no sense and there's no chemistry between O'Keeffe and Gersak, reunited from Ruggero Deodato's 1986 Indiana Jones ripoff THE LONE RUNNER (released in the US in 1988 by Trans World Entertainment, who also got IRON WARRIOR on a whopping 17 screens in January 1987), but it's so hypnotic and strange from beginning to end that it ultimately doesn't matter. It's disorienting by design, especially a scene where Ator and Janna cross a precarious suspension bridge that's genuinely dizzying to watch. It's an ATOR movie on shrooms, something that Red and Mandy would watch while eating TV dinners, and the only reason it hasn't been embraced by the stoner crowd is because they just aren't aware of it. There's enough craziness here that I'm willing to bet Assonitis--known for firing directors and finishing movies himself--had more to do with the creative direction of this than Brescia, especially when you consider the bizarre imagery in something like THE VISITOR. But for all its visual flair, it's still tough to take it seriously when Deeva's trial of Phoedra employs the same type of "Council of Elders" faces on a giant screen behind the accused, who stands there shackled by rotating hula hoops on loan from Jor-El. Or the Iron Warrior's resemblance to Darth Vader. Or a long action sequence where Ator and Janna are in a cavern being chased by giant RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK rolling boulders. O'Keeffe's catatonic performance actually enhances the hazy, stoned vibe, though he wouldn't be back for the fourth and final ATOR installment, 1990's QUEST FOR THE MIGHTY SWORD. That marked the return of Massaccesi and the introduction of a new Ator in the form of Grand Rapids, MI native Eric Allan Kramer, who presumably got the job after playing Thor in the 1988 TV-movie THE INCREDIBLE HULK RETURNS (Kramer is probably best known as Little John in Mel Brooks' ROBIN HOOD: MEN IN TIGHTS, and he's currently co-starring on the critically-acclaimed AMC series LODGE 49). As far as IRON WARRIOR is concerned, Scorpion's Blu-ray certainly makes the case that there's some artistic merit to it, even if the method to its madness gets lost along the way. Nevertheless, it takes a lesser-ranked place among other threequels--HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH or THE EXORCIST III, for example--that either break from established formula or serve as outliers or stealth secret weapons in their respective franchises, an ATOR: TOKYO DRIFT, if you will.