Good Efficient Butchery

NYMPHOMANIAC
(Denmark/Germany/France/Belgium - 2013; US release 2014)

Written and directed by Lars von Trier.

VOL I:
Cast: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgard, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBeouf, Christian Slater, Uma Thurman, Sophie Kennedy Clark, Connie Nielsen, Jens Albinus, Hugo Speer, Cyron Melville, Felicity Gilbert, Anders Hove, Jesper Christensen, Saskia Reeves, Ananya Berg, Nicolas Bro. (Unrated, 117 mins)

VOL II:
Cast: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Stellan Skarsgard, Stacy Martin, Shia LaBeouf, Christian Slater, Jamie Bell, Willem Dafoe, Mia Goth, Jean-Marc Barr, Udo Kier, Michael Pas, Caroline Goodall, Kate Ashfield, Ananya Berg, Shanti Roney, Kookie Ryan, Papou. (Unrated, 124 mins)

Arthouse provocateur Lars von Trier prides himself on walking the fine line between visionary auteur and misanthropic asshole, a firm believer that any publicity is good publicity, whether he's putting his lead actresses through hell to get the performance he needs from them, or prompting John C. Reilly to walk off of 2005's MANDERLAY over filming the actual slaughter of a donkey, or getting kicked out of the Cannes Film Festival for saying he sympathizes with Hitler. Like a bratty kid, von Trier revels in attention but with rare exception, backs it up with great films. When he announced NYMPHOMANIAC would run over five hours and include professional actors in unsimulated, hardcore sex scenes, the buzz was on. While the director's complete five-and-a-half hour cut was released in Europe, the US release was split into two films running around two hours each, released a few weeks apart (the director's cut will likely surface on Blu-ray). Von Trier supervised the US cuts, and while much explicit material was removed, quite a bit remains, including some penetrative shots that involve body doubles and CGI trickery melding the below-the-belt region with the name actors' bodies from the waist up. In other words, Shia LaBeouf may have auditioned for the film by sending von Trier a homemade sex tape, and while he's doing frontal nudity, the erection and beyond are the work of his body double. The same goes for actress Stacy Martin fellating a man (Jens Albinus) on a train. It's a very real-looking prosthetic penis, and while we see semen drooling out of Martin's mouth, the director's cut apparently shows the spurting ejaculation, for those so inclined.

A lot of this is von Trier just being von Trier, but contrary to initial reports and the director's own incessant hype, NYMPHOMANIAC, at least in its US incarnation, isn't quite the wall-to-wall porno fuckfest that it's been made out to be. In many ways, it's a von Trier greatest hits package, with cues from and callbacks to his past films like DOGVILLE (2003), ANTICHRIST (2009) and especially BREAKING THE WAVES (1996). It's von Trier's third straight film with Charlotte Gainsbourg, who's become his muse in misery after the harrowing ANTICHRIST and MELANCHOLIA (2011), where she initially has a supporting role but becomes the focus as the film progresses. Von Trier has a history of pushing his actresses to their limit and getting incredible work from them: Emily Watson's Oscar-nominated performance in BREAKING THE WAVES remains one of the greatest in all of cinema, while Bjork surpassed all expectations in DANCER IN THE DARK (2000). DOGVILLE's Nicole Kidman and MANDERLAY's Bryce Dallas Howard also survived von Trier and lived to tell the tale. In Gainsbourg, von Trier has found a kindred spirit who's willing and eager to go to the dark places others won't. She's the Klaus Kinski to his Werner Herzog, minus the mutual death threats.

As the first half of NYMPHOMANIAC opens, bookish academic Seligman (Stellan Skarsgard) happens upon the unconscious Joe (Gainsbourg) lying in an alley, beaten and bloodied. He helps her back to his apartment, lets her shower and makes her some tea. They begin talking, first about little things, and then she agrees to tell her story. Von Trier plays with the time element a bit, but in the first volume, much of the dramatic weight is carried by 22-year-old newcomer Stacy Martin as young Joe. As older Joe explains, "I discovered my cunt as a two-year-old," and before her age is in double digits (Ananya Berg plays Joe at this age in some discreetly-shot sequences that imply more they show), Joe and her best friend B are exploring themselves in ways that are already threatening to go beyond sliding down the bannister and grinding themselves against the bathroom floor. At the age of 15 (and now played by Martin), Joe asks local stud mechanic Jerome (LaBeouf) to take her virginity, which he does in the most perfunctory fashion imaginable. Nevertheless, the beast has been unleashed as Joe and B (Sophie Kennedy Clark) have contests like sneaking on to a train and screwing as many men as possible during the trip. They even form a club at school devoted to the pursuit of sex without love, though B eventually comes to her own realization that "the secret ingredient to sex is love." Joe believes that love complicates things, and continues sleeping with as many men as possible, eventually reconnecting with Jerome when she applies for a secretarial job at a printing company owned by his uncle (Jesper Christensen), even though she has no secretarial skills. She resists Jerome's advances, spending her evenings maintaining a busy schedule of hourly appointments with men who drop in to have sex with her, often passing one another as one arrives and the other leaves. By her own estimate, she's sleeping with up to eight men on a typical evening, and even devises an elaborate system for deciding which men she'll call back among the many messages on her answering machine. At the end of Vol. 1, Joe decides to settle down for domesticity with the now-successful Jerome, when she finds she can no longer reach orgasm.

In a brilliant debut, Martin is the focal point of the first half of NYMPHOMANIAC, and like Watson in BREAKING THE WAVES, she's up to the challenge even though von Trier saves the worst for Joe for when Gainsbourg assumes the role. For the first half, Gainsbourg is limited to sitting in bed as Joe tells Seligman her story, and the kind-hearted intellectual listens intently, often going off on thematic tangents involving fly fishing, cake forks, Bach, Poe, and mathematical theories that sort-of tie into the psychology of what Joe is telling him. Von Trier also gives Christian Slater his best role in years as Joe's doctor father in flashbacks. Joe loves her father deeply, and the two bond over their shared love of trees and flowers, neither feeling a connection to Joe's "cold bitch" mother (Connie Nielsen). As good as Martin and Slater are, the show-stealer for the first half is Uma Thurman in a one-scene stunner as the enraged wife of Mr. H (Hugo Speer), one of Joe's regular hookups. When Mr. H leaves his wife and shocks Joe by showing up at her place with his suitcases in tow, he's followed closely by Mrs H, who's dragged their three young sons along with her. If that wasn't awkward enough, Joe's next guy (Cyron Melville) shows up and everyone watches Mrs. H maniacally melt down, introducing the boys to Joe so they can "put a face to the all the therapy they'll need down the road," and saying "Would it be alright if I show the children the whoring bed? They need to see it! Let's go see Daddy's favorite place!" Thurman is onscreen for less than ten minutes but she makes every second count, and it's an instant classic of laughing while cringing in pained discomfort, one of those rare instances where a cameo is actually Oscar-worthy.

Vol. 2 picks up with Joe and Jerome married and having a baby. A few years pass as Martin exits and Gainsbourg takes over. The child, Marcel, is now three and though they love each other, Joe and Jerome's sex life has stalled. Jerome encourages her to see other men if it will help her psychologically ("If you buy a tiger, you have to keep it fed," he says). This goes on for some time and eventually leads Joe to the mysterious K (Jamie Bell). K seems to be some sort of Craigslist-type sex therapist/sadist who lives in what appears to be an abandoned office building where women show up for appointments to be beaten. K does not offer sex, and he doesn't allow safe words. You do what he says, period. Joe's sessions with K involve him renaming her "Fido," tying her to a couch, bent over, while he whips her bare ass with a riding crop, then inserting his fingers into her vagina to gauge her arousal. Things just get worse for Joe as her sex addiction, self-loathing and degradation cause her to lose her family. She can barely hold down her office job, routinely fucking male co-workers in the restroom or a closet space. She's ordered into therapy, where she lashes out against a society that judges her and tries to shame her. Now in her mid-40s, she eventually loses any feeling of pleasure, as her vagina is so scarred and worn from the thousands of men over three decades of hook-ups that it spontaneously bleeds, and causes numerous bouts of unbearable, debilitating pain. Joe eventually gets a job as a debt collector/extortionist for the shady L (Willem Dafoe), which leads to her shot at redemption by becoming a mentor to troubled teen P (Mia Goth).

While the first half of NYMPHOMANIAC has its share of dark moments, it's also surprisingly amusing in spots, such as Joe comparing her vagina to the automatic doors at a supermarket ("only with a stronger sensor") or when Seligman echoes the audience's call of bullshit with every one of Jerome's improbably hackneyed returns to the narrative. There's also the standard von Trier button-pushing bits like Joe getting wet standing by her father's death bed, and later in Vol 2, unsubtle Christ metaphors and Joe admitting that she feels a sympathetic kinship with a pedophile (Jean-Marc Barr) because of their "outcast" status (drawing thematic parallels to past von Trier outcasts ike the tragic Bess in BREAKING THE WAVES, Selma in DANCER IN THE DARK, and Grace in DOGVILLE and MANDERLAY). But it's the second half where things take a grim turn, largely with the intensely disturbing sequences involving Bell's K (the much-ballyhooed "Silent Duck" moment when K fists Joe is mostly implied, at least in the US cut), and the effect Joe's behavior has on Jerome and Marcel. I'm still not convinced that his recent public implosion isn't some extended von Trier-coordinated publicity stunt, but credit where it's due--funny accent and all, LaBeouf is actually quite good, especially in the second half. Given the extreme length and the myriad of directions the story takes, von Trier generally keeps things on point even when it threatens to derail at any moment. It only starts to feel choppy as things wind down, especially in the debt collection tangent, which comes out of nowhere and doesn't really feel like it belongs. As shown in her scenes at her jobs, Joe really has no skills other than sexual, which wouldn't seem a prerequisite for tough-talking collecting for a loan shark (perhaps the manipulation aspect?). Also, Joe's relationship with P is never fleshed out, at least not to the point where some of P's actions near the end make complete sense. I see the way the tables get turned and Joe is looking at things from another perspective, but it just feels like something's missing or got lost in the editing.

Like Seligman, the viewer is likely to be skeptical of some of Joe's story. There are many times over the course of the four hours when both Joe and to a lesser extent, Seligman seem like the classic "unreliable narrator." In many ways, NYMPHOMANIAC is film loaded with sex and not really specifically about sex. One popular theory is that Joe is a stand-in for von Trier and that Seligman is every stuffy, erudite, out-of-touch film critic who's judged and vilified him, though this involves a revelation by Seligman that I won't spoil. But Seligman doesn't judge Joe (other than being incredulous over some too convenient developments), which makes him different from every other man she's ever known other than her beloved father. There's a lot to take in--no pun intended--with NYMPHOMANIAC, so much so that sometimes the filmmaking itself is easy to overlook. There are some stunning shots and a strong Andrei Tarkovsky vibe throughout--one shot of older Joe finding "her" tree is breathtaking, and clothed or otherwise, the camera simply adores Martin, who has the most hauntingly seductive gaze you've seen in ages. Even seeing it split into two films--if you see it in its American incarnation, it's best to set four hours aside and just binge it--it probably still needs to be seen again in von Trier's original director's cut. Judging from viewing it in this format, it's not von Trier's best film--it seems to start stumbling with the introduction of L, though that's no fault of Dafoe's-- but it may be his most personal one, and one that reveals more of itself on repeat viewings, however soul-crushing and exhausting that may be. But that's vintage Lars von Trier. Love him or hate him, his films get you talking.

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER
(US - 2014)

Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo. Written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. Cast: Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Redford, Sebastian Stan, Anthony Mackie, Cobie Smulders, Frank Grillo, Emily VanCamp, Jenny Agutter, Toby Jones, Hayley Atwell, Maximiliano Hernandez, Callan Mulvey, Garry Shandling, Chin Han, Georges St-Pierre, Salvator Xuereb. (PG-13, 136 mins)

Around the time Joss Whedon got the AVENGERS gig, there seemed to be a conscious effort by Marvel to bring some outside-the-box personality to the proceedings while still meeting the demand for intense action and grandiose visual effects. Shane Black brought his patented LETHAL WEAPON smartassery to IRON MAN 3 while semi-regular GAME OF THRONES director Alan Taylor fashioned an appropriately darker THOR: THE DARK WORLD. One could argue that the trend started before Whedon, as CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER director Joe Johnston utilized some of the same WWII-set atmosphere way back in 1990's THE ROCKETEER. For the sequel, CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER, the sibling directing team of Anthony and Joe Russo seem as unlikely a choice as you can conceive. Best known for directing episodes of ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT and COMMUNITY, the pair hadn't made a film since the 2006 comedy YOU, ME AND DUPREE but here reveal themselves to be secret '70s post-Watergate political paranoia/conspiracy fans. The spirit of Alan J. Pakula seems to permeate THE WINTER SOLDIER, and it's an interesting approach that keeps things fresh and exciting. Does the world need another run-of-the-mill superhero movie? Most of these films are entertaining on their own, but I've found that even the ones I really like--SPIDER-MAN 2, IRON MAN and THE AVENGERS, for instance--I never feel compelled to own or even revisit (Christopher Nolan's DARK KNIGHT trilogy being an exception). Letting the filmmakers bring their own style or ambitions to these films gives them something more tangible than just wall-to-wall CGI. I mean, be honest--it made a ton of money, but how many people really like IRON MAN 2?

The Russo brothers and returning screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely open the film in the present day, two years after the events of THE AVENGERS. Steve Rogers/Cap (Chris Evans) is still adjusting to the modern world, regularly updating his list of things to check out ("See ROCKY (ROCKY II?)" S.H.I.E.L.D. head agent Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) informs Rogers of Project Insight, a secret operation involving three helicarriers routed to various spy satellites around the globe for the purpose of pre-emptively halting terror threats. After he receives a flash drive from Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Fury is unable to access the encrypted data and is soon ambushed by mysterious agents posing as cops. Meanwhile, Rogers incurs the wrath of top-ranking S.H.I.E.L.D. official Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford), who believes he's up to something with Fury. Soon, Rogers, Romanoff, and Sam Wilson/The Falcon (Anthony Mackie) find themselves on the run after uncovering information about HYDRA, a rogue unit operating within and against S.H.I.E.L.D., and their top assassin is the unstoppable Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), whose true identity--not a surprise to Marvel fans--makes him closer to Cap than the hero realizes.

I enjoyed Johnston's THE FIRST AVENGER but found it generally forgettable despite the wonderful WWII-era production design. But this is a different story. One of the best films in the Marvel canon, THE WINTER SOLDIER is a much darker work, jettisoning the 1940s idealism for a strong sense of modern cynicism. There's a rampant mistrust of government and its abuses of power throughout, and while Cap decries the measures S.H.I.E.L.D. is taking in the name of protecting the people, Fury reminds him that the Greatest Generation has its own issues and shouldn't be pointing fingers. Also note how Pierce informs Cap that "building a better world sometimes means tearing the old one down." There's much humor throughout, with Rogers and Romanoff frequently coming off like a pair of ballbusting partners in a cop buddy movie, and Cap looking at another night in by explaining "All the guys in my barbershop quartet are dead," and nods and inside jokes (including a quick reference to Jackson's Jules Winnfield from PULP FICTION). But where THE WINTER SOLDIER really succeeds is not with its title-sharing villain (Stan is fine, but he's really a secondary bad guy), but with its vividly 1970s atmosphere--not in terms of the look, obviously, but in the style. It plays a lot like a Marvel superhero version of THE PARALLAX VIEW, THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, or ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN (watch the tense scene where Rogers boards an increasingly crowded elevator and realizes he's a target), and one of the key elements is the inspired and almost subversive casting of Redford as the primary villain. Redford acts infrequently these days, and never in huge films of this sort, but seeing him play the kind of callous, duplicitious, well-connected string-puller that his characters used to face decades ago is a treat for fans of the screen legend. Redford's casting isn't mandatory for the film to work, but it adds a clever layer to the proceedings (had he turned it down, I can picture Warren Beatty serving the same function), and fortunately, the Russos don't let him down.

While the conspiracy elements inevitably take a back seat to non-stop CGI action in the latter half, it's generally convincing and well-handled. Some of the up-close fight scenes have a too-dizzying shaky-cam element to them, but it's not too overwhelming and it makes up a small percentage of the film. In keeping with the '70s aesthetic, many of the action scenes and a couple of car chases are handled, for the most part, practically, thanks to second-unit director and veteran stunt coordinator Spiro Razatos, who cut his teeth working on B-movies by the likes of William Lustig (MANIAC) back in the '80s. Razatos has done second-unit work for a number of CGI-heavy action films in recent years, like THE EXPENDABLES and last two FAST & FURIOUS entries, but the Russos use him for his old-school skills here, and he does some exemplary work. Given my lukewarm response to THE FIRST AVENGER and my general one-and-done sentiments when it comes to watching most of these things, I found THE WINTER SOLDIER to be a cut above the norm. It's a superhero film with a dark, gritty streak, and its unusual fusion of comic book action and cynical conspiracy thriller makes it an unpredictable spring surprise at the multiplex.

IN THE NAME OF THE KING: THE LAST MISSION
(Canada/Germany/Pakistan - 2014)

When the hit series PRISON BREAK ended its run in 2009, co-star Dominic Purcell dove straight into movies and seemed to have what it takes to become a tough, chiseled big screen action guy. The problem is that all of his starring vehicles are terrible. He can be alright in supporting roles (the not-as-bad-as-everyone-says STRAW DOGS remake, KILLER ELITE, and the recent THE BAG MAN), but when he's left to carry a film, he seems to be going for the "man of few words" thing, but something in his line delivery and his body language makes him come off like a lumbering oaf. Regardless, the guy's phone apparently never stops ringing and he hasn't stopped working since PRISON BREAK wrapped up. He starred in five films--almost all DTV--in 2013 and has already been in four this year, with another on the way. I suppose it was inevitable that Purcell would get sucked into the orbit of Uwe Boll. The director's latest, the in-name-only DTV sequel IN THE NAME OF THE KING: THE LAST MISSION ("Too intense for theaters!" the packaging boasts), the third entry in this improbable franchise (Purcell follows the first film's Jason Statham, and the second's Dolph Lundgren, neither of whom got along with Boll at all), is also the third pairing of Boll with his current favorite actor, after the deck-stacking histrionics of ASSAULT ON WALL STREET and the pointless remake of the Presidential assassination thriller SUDDENLY. It's a partnership that's yielded nothing worthwhile, and while they may get along just fine, it likely exists simply because Purcell works cheap, and cheap is where Boll's at as he still adjusts to his post-German tax loophole world.

Purcell, knowing he's in another Boll joint and not trying any harder than he needs to, grunts his way through this ARMY OF DARKNESS/GAME OF THRONES ripoff as Hazen Kaine, a present-day American hitman working in Sofia for Bulgarian crime boss Avaylo (Marian Valev, who looks like Bulgarian Sean Bean). Avaylo orders Kaine to kidnap the two daughters of the heir to the Bulgarian throne, and Kaine finds one of them possesses a strange medallion. The medallion matches one of Kaine's tats. Yep...he's The Chosen One. Cue the wormhole portal sucking Kaine back to medieval times as he aids two sisters, Arabella (Ralitsa Paskaleva) and Emeline (Daria Simeonova), and their uncle Tybalt (Nikolai Sotirov) in their battle against the tyrant Tervin (Valev, again) and his giant, flying, fire-breathing dragon. Boredom ensues (watch Boll pad the running time by having Purcell make an espresso and drink it in real time!), both in terms of story and Purcell's performance, but the batshit Boll of old shines through in the last 15 minutes, when Kaine and the dragon get sucked back into the wormhole and dropped in present-day Sofia. The dragon is chasing Kaine through the streets of Sofia as Kaine carjacks some Bulgarian guy, as if the dragon can't follow a car by flying over it ("Take a right!" Kaine tells the hapless driver. "Lose it!" IT'S A FLYING DRAGON! IT CAN STILL SEE YOU!). Realizing the error of his ways, Kaine, who's somehow eluded the dragon, releases the two kidnapped girls he's kept in a shipping container, while the dragon, now apparently a good guy, shows up and carries away one of Avaylo's flunkies. Kaine kills Avaylo and takes the girls back to their father, who's OK with the fact that, even though Kaine returned them unharmed, they wouldn't have been missing in the first place had Kaine not abducted them, and lets him go ("Thanks...appreciate it," Purcell mumbles). As Kaine ambles away, the dragon can be seen taking a leisurely flight through the skies over Sofia. Nope, no worries. Everything's fine. Nobody's taking cover. There's no police or emergency personnel anywhere. Everyone's just back to their business, disregarding that a fire-breathing dragon just appeared out of nowhere and destroyed half the city and is now apparently a permanent resident of Sofia, but hey, just let it fly around and do its thing, it won't bother anyone. (R, 86 mins)

VIKINGDOM: THE BLOOD ECLIPSE
(Malaysia/US - 2013)

Purcell also stars in this "300 Meets THOR in Middle-Earth" would-be epic that was shot in 3D by Malaysia's KRU Studios, founded by three Halim brothers who, since 1992, also comprise that country's leading chart-topping pop group KRU when they aren't being movie moguls. Boasting embarrassingly primitive CGI and the same quality of greenscreen backdrops usually favored by local TV meteorologists, VIKINGDOM: THE BLOOD ECLIPSE was supposed to be KRU's big splash in the US (CLASH OF EMPIRES went straight to DVD in 2011), but it only made it to a few screens and VOD, and even that's a stretch considering how shoddy it looks. The visual effects, including some tame CGI splatter, aren't even on the level of a typical Asylum title, though in a few scenes, the sets have that cheap-but-charming quality that brings to mind early '80s Roger Corman productions like THE WARRIOR AND THE SORCERESS or DEATHSTALKER. But still, that's probably not what director/set designer/visual effects supervisor Yusry A. Halim (or, "Yusry KRU" in his teen idol years) was going for with a budget equaling $15 million US. Sure, that's not big bucks by today's standards, but for that amount, one should be able to say something more positive than "some of the sets come close to looking like a 30-year-old Roger Corman production." The incoherent plot has Viking leader Eirick (Purcell) killed in battle and resurrected by the ghost of his dead betrothed Freya (Tegan Moss) in order to take on an evil Thor (Conan Stevens), who's plotting some scheme to gather ancient relics for the apocalyptic "Blood Eclipse." Eirick assembles a crew of warriors, including Sven (Craig Fairbrass) and Brynna (Natassia Linn Malthe), as well as martial arts expert Yang (Jon Foo, from the ill-fated TEKKEN movie) to battle the forces of Thor, which includes a papier-mache dragon that looks like a rejected prop from a high school drama club production of THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG.

The action scenes try to copy both the speed-ramping of 300 and the choreography of wuxia, but Halim doesn't quite pull it off, and while he might be going for that graphic novel artifice in the visuals, it ends up looking like a laughably cheap, dated ripoff. If this film and IN THE NAME OF THE KING: THE LAST MISSION show us anything, it's that Dominic Purcell doesn't get your movie into theaters--he gets it a spot on a Wal-Mart DVD department planogram. Halim should've known he wasn't going to find success in the US market when his lead is Uwe Boll's go-to guy (Malthe and Fairbrass have also logged time with Dr. Boll), but even Boll's movies look better than this. VIKINGDOM's cheapness--the wigs look like mop heads, and Thor's hammer appears to be a block of silver-spray-painted packing styrofoam stuck on a broom handle-- might've had some B-movie charm if Purcell wasn't once again sleepwalking his way through the whole thing. This is easily the narcoleptic thespian's worst performance yet. He speaks in a monotone that doesn't even mask his utter boredom with the project, and with his often halting and hesitant moves in the battle scenes, he looks like someone who's nursing a recent back injury. He frequently looks confused and irritable, not even hiding that he's just in this for the free Kuala Lumpur vacation. VIKINGDOM does little other than establish Halim as the Uwe Boll of Southeast Asia, getting stilted performances from his cast of C-listers, and his staging of the action scenes is awful: it's obvious he's got about 25 extras that he unsuccessfully tries to make look like an army. Old-school directors back in the day knew how to pull that off. (Unrated, 115 mins)

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES
(US - 2014)

Imagine what the characters in found-footage horror movies could accomplish if they just had both hands free. Late in PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES, a guy is frantically running around a house, trying to find an exit, and he comes across a boarded-up window. He half-heartedly tries to pull the board down with his left hand and it budges just a very little bit. Here's a thought: put the camera down and use both hands. Pitched as a Latino-targeted "cousin" to the PA franchise, THE MARKED ONES actually ties in pretty directly to the increasingly ludicrous spirit-world shenanigans. Oren Peli's effective, out-of-nowhere 2009 original has become a distant memory as the franchise has morphed into the brainchild of DISTURBIA screenwriter Christopher Landon (son of legendary TV icon Michael), despite the guys from CATFISH getting all the attention when they were hired to directed PA3 and PA4. Landon has scripted every entry since the first sequel (except for the 2010 Japan-only spinoff PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: TOKYO NIGHT, still unreleased in the US) and gets promoted to director here. PA3 grossed $104 million, while PA4 had a massive drop-off, bringing in only $53 million. Still not bad considering how cheap these are to produce, but the fact that THE MARKED ONES topped out at $32 million, didn't open at #1 like its predecessors, and that other found footage horror films are suffering from diminished grosses are major red flags that fans are experiencing some found-footage fatigue. A 70% domestic drop between two installments seems like cause for alarm, but since THE MARKED ONES only cost $5 million, it still made a big enough profit that these things will just continue until they stop breaking even. Perhaps audiences are growing tired with the way the PA films are progressing as there appears be no plot twist too ridiculous for Landon to pull out of his ass in a desperate attempt to keep this franchise gasping for one more run. PA4 revealed that a witches' coven has been orchestrating all the paranormal mayhem, and now THE MARKED ONES introduces wormholes and time-travel. No, really.

Set in Oxnard in 2012, the film follows Jesse (Andrew Jacobs), after he buys a video camera with his high school graduation money. He and goofball buddy Hector (Jorge Diaz) start off by filming JACKASS-style pranks but soon get involved in a mystery when Jesse's neighbor is killed by valedictorian Oscar (Carlos Pratts), who then vanishes. After breaking into the victim's apartment, Jesse awakens the next day with a strange mark and begins acting possessed and displaying bizarre powers (for a good chunk of its running time, this seems more like a knockoff of the overrated CHRONICLE) and is eventually abducted by some mysterious women as Hector and their friend Marisol (Gabrielle Walsh) recruit Oscar's gang-leader brother (Richard Cabral, memorable as the drug mule "The Green Hornet" in THE COUNSELOR) to track down Jesse. Of course, other characters from the franchise make token appearances (Molly Ephraim from PA2, and series mainstays Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat), but the direction in which THE MARKED ONES steers things is a pretty clear sign that Landon is just trying to belatedly explain away the inconsistencies and contradictions that have been popping up in all of the sequels. There's no "master plan" here: he's making it up as he goes along. The only interesting element Landon brings to the table--think the camera on the oscilatting fan in PA3--is having Jesse communicate with the spirit via an old Simon. But time travel portals? Enough. (R, 84 mins)

NURSE
(US - 2014)

Another pre-fab cult film lovingly embraced by horror hipsters before it was even released, the long-delayed (shot in 2011) NURSE thinks it's being edgy and outrageous, but it's just tired and boring. Loaded with numbing CGI splatter, NURSE centers on Abby Russell (Paz de la Huerta), the titular psycho, who spends her off-hours picking up and slaughtering adulterous men with their "cheating cocks." She's fixated on bright-eyed new nurse Danni (Katrina Bowden of 30 ROCK), who she quickly roofies and seduces in a series of selfies that she presumably plans to send to Danni's paramedic boyfriend Steve (Corbin Bleu of HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL). When the bodies--including Danni's lecherous, asshole stepdad (Martin Donovan)--start piling up, Danni can't convince irate detective Rogan (Boris Kodjoe) that she's being framed and that Abby's a serial killer. With it being shot in 3D with copious amounts of digital gore and de la Huerta nudity, and no shortage of ironic stunt casting (there's Bleu, Judd Nelson as a sexually-harrassing doc, Niecy Nash as a sassy nurse, and Kathleen Turner as the head nurse), NURSE is one of those fakesploitation films that flaunts the Alexandre Aja/PIRANHA-remake mentality of assuming that it's already a cult movie, blithely and smugly unaware that such status is earned. Director/co-writer Doug Aarniokoski (HIGHLANDER: ENDGAME) tries to go for some John Waters outrageousness (why else would he trot SERIAL MOM's Turner out for one scene?) with some occasional giallo lighting and music cues that echo those of Ennio Morricone in his minimalist percussive phase, but it's not amusing, and it's not scary, and how exploitative can it be when you have a star in Bowden who obviously refused to do nudity? Arms always strategically covering her breasts and two scenes where she's showering in her underwear? No offense, Ms. Bowden, but you know what kind of movie you're in. If you're not gonna play, then don't take the gig. I'm no Corbin Bleu fan, but at least he had the sack to lay his Disney rep on the line and show his thrusting ass in a sex scene with you.

The script (co-written by David Loughery, a regular Joseph Ruben collaborator) requires its characters to be complete idiots. Witness the scene where a bloodied Abby gets away when someone turns their back for two seconds. The guy turns around to see she's gone but has left a trail of bloody footprints down a long hallway. How far could she get in two seconds? And does he go after her? Of course not. More sloppy craftsmanship: it's revealed that Abby's real name is Sarah and that the reasoning behind her actions is that, as a child, she walked in on her doctor father having sex with a nurse and killed him; she ultimately changed her name from "Sarah" and moves from hospital to hospital, changing identities and splitting town when things get out of control, and her current alias is "Abby." OK, fine. Then why, in the flashback to her childhood, is her mother calling her "Abby"? The grating de la Huerta plays Abby in her typical talking-too-slow fashion with a look on her face that's perpetually stuck somewhere between "I'm confused" and "Who farted?" and her voiceover narration is obviously the work of another actress, always a sign of post-production Band-Aiding (as terrible as de la Huerta is, she's at least game for Aarniokoski's hard-R intentions, unlike Bowden). The only real high point of NURSE is provided by Melanie Scrofano as an impossibly, annoyingly chipper HR exec. In just a few scenes, Scrofano nails the out-of-touch idiocy of corporate higher-ups who have no idea what it's like in the trenches. Imagine what she could've done with the Abby role instead of the dazed and dull de la Huerta. Other than Scrofano's performance, NURSE is a complete waste of time. (R, 84 mins)

THE RAID 2
(US/Indonesia - 2014)

Written and directed by Gareth Evans. Cast: Iko Uwais, Arifin Putra, Oka Antara, Tio Pakusadewo, Alex Abbad, Kenichi Endo, Ryuhei Matsuda, Julie Estelle, Very Tri Yulisman, Yayan Ruhian, Cecip Arif Rahman, Cok Simbara, Kazuki Kitamura, Roy Marten, Fikha Effendi. (R, 150 mins)

Welsh-born, Indonesia-based writer/director Gareth Evans caught the attention of martial arts fans with his 2009 cult film MERENTAU, his first teaming with Pencak Silat champion Iko Uwais. The duo paired again for their global breakthrough, 2011's THE RAID, a riveting actioner and an instant classic in the "high-rise mayhem" genre, with Uwais as a rookie cop forced to fight his way floor-by-floor through a Jakarta drug lord's apartment-building stronghold. THE RAID earned acclaim worldwide and was released in the US in 2012 as THE RAID: REDEMPTION (even though no one calls it that), becoming a rare subtitled foreign film to break out of the art-house shackles and open wide, and while it didn't exactly tear it up at the box office, it grossed a relatively respectable $4 million for Sony Pictures Classics on its way to becoming a big hit on DVD and Blu-ray. Evans and Uwais are back with THE RAID 2, and let it be said here and now: they are not fucking around.

THE RAID was a perfect, self-contained B-movie but THE RAID 2 is just...bigger. Not only is the action more expansive, but Evans has grown as a filmmaker. THE RAID was a B-movie, but THE RAID 2 is a film. Evans has already proven that he's an expert action choreographer, but THE RAID 2 is on an altogether higher and more advanced level. A few months after the events of the first film (some reviews say it begins a few hours after, but that can't be, since the hero's wife was pregnant in THE RAID and in THE RAID 2, the kid is a few months old), Jakarta cop Rama (Uwais) is talked into going undercover by his anti-corruption task force boss Bunawar (Cok Simbara), who knows police commissioner Reza (Roy Marten) is in cahoots with various crime organizations, but needs proof. Rama's assignment: get arrested, get convicted, and get sentenced to a few months in prison so he can get close Uco (Arifin Putra), the incarcerated son of mob boss Bangun (Tio Pakusadewo), and work his way into the organization to see just how many cops are involved in Jakarta's criminal underworld. Fearing for the safety of his wife and infant son after bringing down the drug lord in the first film, Rama agrees and goes undercover as Yuda, but "a few months" turns into a two-year prison sentence, during which time he earns Uco's trust by saving his life in an attempted rubout in the yard. Bangun pulls some strings with the police to get Rama/Yuda released and Yuda becomes an enforcer in the Bangun family. Meanwhile, ambitious, duplicitous would-be gangster Bejo (Alex Abbad) wants a bigger piece of the action and decides to shake things up by manipulating Uco and playing the Bangun family against the Goto (Kenichi Endo) organization, a Japanese outfit with whom Bangun has has ten years of peaceful co-existence.

Where THE RAID's action was limited to the claustrophobic confines of an apartment building, THE RAID 2, its inital premise owing more than a slight debt to DONNIE BRASCO, INFERNAL AFFAIRS and THE DEPARTED, allows Evans to make all of Jakarta his bonecrushing playground. The fight scenes are longer, more intricate, and more violent (Evans had to make some cuts to avoid an NC-17), and by opening things up and resisting the ease of making an identical sequel, Evans and Uwais now get to expand their repertoire to include an epic car chase (watch Uwais stuck in a car with four other people, fighting them in the car, while it's being chased), a blood-drenched fight sequence on a subway with a Bejo hired gun called Hammer Girl (Julie Estelle), whose weapons of choice should be self-explantory, and a long brawl in a muddy prison yard during a torrential downpour. And those are just some of the exhilarating sights on display: Evans pays obvious tribute to Scorsese throughout, especially in the way he makes two and a half hours fly by, but also to Stanley Kubrick in some of the ornate, expansive interiors. One vast cocktail lounge bears a striking resemblance to the Gold Ballroom in THE SHINING, and the tracking shots and production design in the restaurants and offices have that distinctly cold, antiseptic Kubrick aura. In these scenes, THE RAID 2 is often as stunningly beautiful as Nicolas Winding Refn's divisive Kubrick lovefest ONLY GOD FORGIVES.

But all that aside, fans of THE RAID are seeing THE RAID 2 for the action, and on that front, Evans and Uwais deliver, and then some. Rama/Yuda's late-film, restaurant-kitchen battle with a Bejo assassin (Cecip Arif Rahman) is one of the most jaw-dropping fight sequences ever shot in a film full of unforgettable, innovative set pieces. Except for some sparingly-utilized CGI gore (and not the distracting, over-digitized kind), Evans goes practical and avoids the modern propensity for shaky-cam action and leaning on the crutch of CGI. Of course, it's there, but it's used to subtly, conservatively enhance rather than do all of the heavy lifting. The action is clear and coherent, and the characters and the viewer feel the pain of every blow. Limbs are snapped, faces are shot off, throats are ripped out, people are disemboweled, one poor bastard gets hibachied, and heads scrape along the road as they're held out of a door that flies open during a car chase. THE RAID 2 is gloriously, breathtakingly brutal, an action film for action fans who think they've seen it all, with an insane 40-minute climax that should be required viewing for any director working in the genre. While the set-up and the police corruption angle are nothing new, THE RAID 2 is the kind of balls-out action ass-kicking that fans have been awaiting for a long time. I don't want Evans to come to Hollywood unless it's on his own terms. He's doing just fine on his own in Indonesia. THE RAID established him as a new voice in cinematic action. THE RAID 2 is a masterpiece.

JOE
(US - 2014)

Directed by David Gordon Green. Written by Gary Hawkins. Cast: Nicolas Cage, Tye Sheridan, Gary Poulter, Ronnie Gene Blevins, Adriene Mishler, Brian Mays, Brenda Isaacs Booth, Anna Niemtschk, Milton Fountain. (R, 118 mins)

At first glance, the rural drama JOE--not a reimagining of John G. Avildsen's controversial 1970 film--would appear to be a lot like last year's MUD, starting with Tye Sheridan again cast as a troubled kid who finds an unlikely role model played by an actor with something to prove. Where MUD saw Sheridan bearing witness to the McConnaisance, JOE finds the gifted young actor--who also co-starred in Terrence Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE--paired with Nicolas Cage in his best role in years, turning in the kind of performance that made him such a captivating presence in his younger days up to his Oscar-winning turn in LEAVING LAS VEGAS (1995). Cage seemed to stop exerting himself once "Academy Award winner" was guaranteed to preface his name for the rest of his life. Sure, there were entertaining popcorn movies--it's hard to argue with the likes of THE ROCK (1996), FACE/OFF (1997), and CON AIR (1997), and the NATIONAL TREASURE films were dumb fun. But in recent years, Cage has become a case study in talent-squandering starting with the ill-advised remake of THE WICKER MAN (2006), which has become a modern-day bad-movie classic, and continuing with a string of increasingly phoned-in and decreasingly distributed paycheck gigs brought on mostly by the actor's serious financial issues in the late '00s. But even amidst the drek, there were some good performances in films like THE WEATHER MAN (2005) and LORD OF WAR (2005), Werner Herzog's insane THE BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS (2009) and KICK-ASS (2010). Looking over his credits from the last decade, there's numerous examples of Cage either not giving a shit (BANGKOK DANGEROUS, GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE, SEASON OF THE WITCH, STOLEN) or hamming it up to provide material for future YouTube videos of his overacting, but are his list of duds and misfires worse than any other coasting A-lister in a career lull? One could certainly argue that we've been a little too hard on Cage, but it's only because he, like the frequently-criticized Robert De Niro, is capable of so much more than what he's been doing. If you miss the Cage of old, the Cage that made LEAVING LAS VEGAS so devastating, the Cage that existed prior to the line "Killing me won't bring back your goddamn honey!" then JOE will be a most welcome surprise.

It's interesting that Cage's comeback effort is helmed by indie darling-turned-pariah David Gordon Green, the GEORGE WASHINGTON (2000) and ALL THE REAL GIRLS (2003) auteur who's spent the last several years in the stoner-comedy orbit of James Franco and Danny McBride with PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (2008) and the universally-loathed YOUR HIGHNESS (2011), in addition to producing and directing HBO's EASTBOUND AND DOWN. Green's been derided as everything from a hack to a sellout for his commercial endeavors, but it only lasted three films (he also made the instantly forgotten Jonah Hill vehicle THE SITTER) before he got back to business with last year's acclaimed but little-seen PRINCE AVALANCHE. Green's shift to commercial comedy was surprising, but perhaps hewas just setting himself up with enough of a financial cushion so he'd be free to make the films he wanted to make. If he should be criticized for anything, it's refusing to abandon his doomed plan to remake Dario Argento's 1977 classic SUSPIRIA.

Green shot JOE in the outskirts of Austin, TX, and like his earliest efforts, it captures a genuine grittiness and displays a strong sense of local color. With the exception of Cage, Sheridan, Ronnie Gene Blevins, and Adriene Mishler, the cast is made up of non-professionals from Austin and surrounding towns who contribute a very palpable feeling of reality to the characters they play. Green understands these folks and he's taken the time to get to know them and get them acclimated to being on a movie set. These are not sophisticated, big-city types with cinematic aspirations. JOE takes place in what looks like a destitute area that in many ways is as isolated as the Cahulawassee River region of DELIVERANCE. Even the bit players are three-dimensional characters and not caricatures where most Hollywood films would play the white trash, hillbilly cliches--barely literate, bad teeth, ramshackle homes--for easy laughs. A Hollywood film would've worked in a subplot where Cage busted up a meth lab. JOE takes place in a part of Texas that's decidedly off the beaten path, where misfits blend in among misfits and other societal cast-offs, the kind of place where Harry Dean Stanton's Travis from Wim Wenders' PARIS, TEXAS probably could've disappeared unnoticed.

Sheridan is 15-year-old Gary, looking for a job to support his mom and mute sister while his abusive dad "G-Daawg" (Gary Poulter) beats him, drinks, and is generally useless around their dilapidated backwoods shack of a home. He gets a job working for Joe (Cage), who runs a crew of under-the-table guys who poison trees so lumber companies can come through and cut them down. Pacing the film like a good book, Green only reveals Joe's character in a very gradual fashion. We learn that he has anger management issues, spent some time in prison, drinks too much, and is the kind of guy who uses black electrical tape to secure a bandage over a bullet wound, but he treats his employees well, has a reputation as a stand-up guy and a straight-shooter, and sees in Gary someone very much like himself, a good person who's been dealt the same shitty cards and seems doomed to have his ass beaten by life. There's unspoken darkness in Joe's past: you can see him mustering all of his strength to control his temper (being that it's Cage, you constantly wait for him to erupt--which he does, but not in the fashion you expect from "Nicolas Cage"), he has very specific demands when he visits prostitute Merle (Sue Rock) at the skeeziest brothel to hit the screens in a long time, and there's a reason the local cops always seem to be on his case. It's no surprise that Joe and Gary will bond and that Joe will intervene in problems that eventually intersect to affect both of them (Blevins plays a local idiot who has an axe to grind with Joe, but he also has a run-in Gary that will prove fateful), giving Joe the obligatory One Last Shot at Redemption, but what makes JOE special is the unique way Green, the actors, and screenwriter Gary Hawkins (working from a novel by Larry Brown) tell the story.

Given Sheridan's presence and the surface similarities, comparisons to MUD are inevitable and not unwarranted. But JOE, despite lighthearted moments in the scenes with Joe and his workers busting each others' chops (the locals who make up his crew have a very improvisational rapport with Cage that's a joy to watch), is much more grim and dark. A lot of this is due to the stunning work done by Poulter, in what sadly turned out to be his only film. Poulter was a homeless man discovered by casting associates whose only experience was once being a background extra on THIRTYSOMETHING 25 years earlier. He was diagnosed with lung cancer shortly after filming wrapped, and was found lying dead in shallow water a month after that. For someone who had no acting experience, Poulter commands the screen like a veteran pro. Knowing Poulter's own unfortunate story, it's impossible to watch his terrifying performance and not imagine the dark shit he'd experienced in his life. He was only 54 when he died, but looks about two decades older. There's a simmering rage behind Poulter's eyes that's disturbingly real in his scenes with Sheridan, as G-Daawg verbally and physically abuses Gary before stealing his hard-earned money. You'll hate G-Daawg like you've hated few movie villains in recent memory (Blevins' pathetic Willie-Russell is just as awful a human being), and Poulter is so good here that he manages to steal the film from the two stars.

Lionsgate isn't giving JOE much of a rollout, relegating it to its "Roadside Attractions" arthouse division and sending it on the VOD route. There's no reason that this couldn't be the same kind of sleeper hit that MUD was a year ago. It's a more difficult film and its slow-burn nature may make it inaccessible to some, but it's one of the year's best films, and as much as I'd love to think it's the first step of a Cageaissance, he does have some typically dubious-looking films coming down the pike, including a remake of the Kirk Cameron Rapture cheesefest LEFT BEHIND, which can't possibly be good. Hey, whatever pays the bills, but it would be an unfortunate missed opportunity if the 50-year-old Cage doesn't build on the artistic momentum of JOE for a middle-aged revitalization that shows the world why he was so special when he was a young man. JOE is as essential a Cage performance as RAISING ARIZONA or LEAVING LAS VEGAS, Sheridan is a remarkable actor who's going on to a great career, and Poulter will give you chills. JOE is one of those low-key sleepers that sneak up on you as you find yourself thinking about it days after seeing it.

DRAFT DAY
(US - 2014)

Directed by Ivan Reitman. Written by Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman. Cast: Kevin Costner, Jennifer Garner, Denis Leary, Frank Langella, Chadwick Boseman, Ellen Burstyn, Sam Elliott, Tom Welling, Sean Combs, Terry Crews, Arian Foster, Josh Pence, Timothy Simons, David Ramsey, Wade Williams, Chi McBride, Patrick St. Esprit, Rosanna Arquette, Brad William Henke, Kevin Dunn, Griffin Newman, W. Earl Brown, Pat Healy. (PG-13, 108 mins)

It's only April and DRAFT DAY is already the third major release this year to star the busy Kevin Costner, after taking the aging mentor role in JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT and trying a Liam Neeson-styled Luc Besson actioner with 3 DAYS TO KILL. DRAFT DAY is more in line with vintage Costner, a sort-of "give the fans what they want" move that finds him back in the realm of the sports dramedy, where he's had some of his biggest successes. DRAFT DAY's beleaguered Cleveland Browns GM Sonny Weaver Jr. is cut from the same cloth as BULL DURHAM's Crash Davis, TIN CUP's Ray McAvoy, and FOR LOVE OF THE GAME's unsubtly-named Billy Chapel: the no-bullshit straight-shooter who got where he is by going against the grain, following his gut, being his own man, and doing what's right. Sonny also has something to prove: it's 2014 draft day, he's in his third year with the team and he's still in rebuilding mode. He's also living in the shadow of his legendary father Sonny Sr., a former Browns coach who just died a week earlier, just a year after retiring from football--a retirement that he got after he was fired by his own son. He's got an irate new head coach in Penn (Denis Leary), who got a Super Bowl ring coaching the Cowboys and wants more say in the direction of the team. He's got a flashy billionaire owner in Anthony Molina (Frank Langella) who doesn't care about the team's strategic needs and just wants a superstar draft pick and the media circus guaranteed to follow. He'd rather make linebacker Vontae Mack (Chadwick Boseman) their top draft pick but he already had to make a deal with the Seahawks to trade draft picks so he can please Molina and secure Heisman Trophy winning QB Bo Callahan (Josh Pence), even though he senses some red flags and they already have a top-notch QB in Brian Drew (Tom Welling). And finally, he's got a secret relationship with Browns front-office financial exec Ali (Jennifer Garner) and she just told him she's pregnant.

DRAFT DAY juggles a lot of story for a film that takes place over just a 12-hour period, but it effectively portrays the hectic nature of the business world that exists behind the scenes of the NFL. Sure, the script by Rajiv Joseph and Scott Rothman is completely formulaic in its structure, but director Ivan Reitman keeps the pace fast and the story compelling, even when the film has to stop and overexplain things for non-football fans, like the opening shot of the Space Needle accompanied by the caption "Seattle," a whoosh, and "home of the Seahawks." Though he's got a large supporting cast working under him (perhaps too large as Ellen Burstyn just seems to drop in for her few scenes as Sonny's mom, and a prominently-billed Sam Elliott has just one scene as a grumbly college coach), this is completely Costner's show, and enough time has gone by that we can forget about all the rumbling, bumbling, and stumbling he did in the mid '90s when, post-DANCES WITH WOLVES and THE BODYGUARD, hubris and bloated films like WATERWORLD and THE POSTMAN turned him into a punchline bordering on pariah. Starting with 2003's OPEN RANGE, he very slowly started to rebuild his career and while there were a few missteps along the way (I'm still not convinced anyone in the world has actually seen SWING VOTE, including myself) and even a dumped-on-DVD horror movie (THE NEW DAUGHTER), he's turned in some excellent performances in underappreciated films like THE UPSIDE OF ANGER (2006) and MR. BROOKS (2007). More recently, he did terrific work on the History Channel's HATFIELDS & MCCOYS miniseries and his performance as Pa Kent was one of the better things in the otherwise disappointing MAN OF STEEL. He's got a likably laconic, almost Gary Cooper-like screen persona that, in the right movie, always gets you on his side. DRAFT DAY isn't anywhere near the level of a BULL DURHAM or a FIELD OF DREAMS, but Costner, pushing 60, still has that screen presence that a genuine movie star never loses, and that's not something you see enough of these days. The DRAFT DAY Costner is the kind of actor who's smart enough to not worry about capturing a demographic, choosing instead to play mostly to an adult audience that's aged and matured with him, and some of his best years might actually still lie ahead if he chooses the right projects. Yeah, it's comfort food to a certain extent, but it's entertaining, and when Costner's in his wheelhouse like this, he's awfully hard to dislike.

While it secured the cooperation and involvement of the NFL for maximum realism--including appearances by commissioner Roger Goodell and numerous on-air personalities like Chris Berman, Jon Gruden, and Mel Kiper, and even a brief bit by Browns legend Jim Brown--it's important to note, from the perspective of a die-hard NFL fan, just how deeply entrenched in the realm of wish-fulfillment fantasy DRAFT DAY can be. While it gets the business and boardroom elements down, it's also a pipe dream of a movie that Cleveland-area sons and daughters will be giving their perpetually-disappointed Browns superfan dads on Father's Day for decades to come. It's a love letter to the perpetually hapless, "This is our year!" Browns while acknowledging that the team's pursuit of a championship is largely futile. As they are, the Browns are incapable of having anyone in their organization with as much draft day savvy as Sonny Weaver Jr. Also, no promising college star entering the draft wants to play for Cleveland. But perhaps most hilariously, in a plot point so utterly absured that it threatens to take the film into the realm of science fiction, DRAFT DAY insists on playing along with the myth that the Dallas Cowboys are a feared team that consistently wins championships.

OCULUS
(US - 2014)

Directed by Mike Flanagan. Written by Mike Flanagan and Jeff Howard. Cast: Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites, Katee Sackhoff, Rory Cochrane, Annalise Basso, Garrett Ryan Ewald, Miguel Sandoval, James Lafferty, Kate Siegel. (R, 104 mins)

The concept of a haunted mirror is about as hoary a horror cliche as one can fathom, so the biggest surprise about OCULUS is what an effective little gem it is. It's light on in-your-face scares and pretty conservative with the bloodshed, but where director/co-writer Mike Flanagan (ABSENTIA) really scores is the way he establishes such an ominous, foreboding mood throughout and confidently juggles multiple timelines in a story that could quickly grow unwieldy and fly off the rails. OCULUS isn't a film that sets out to reinvent the wheel, but it does succeed in showing that it's possible to make a good, solid, old-fashioned horror film that, were it to lose some of its more modern conveniences, could easily have been an Amicus offering from the early '70s, or perhaps a restrained late '70s/early '80s Italian horror film. Flanagan wears his influences on his sleeve--there's some AMITYVILLE HORROR, THE SHINING and PRINCE OF DARKNESS in there as well--but to make something like that and get some distributor support in 2014 is a massive accomplishment in and of itself. You know at some point in the production, some or perhaps a few of the individuals among the boatload of credited producers called Flanagan in for a meeting and tried to sell him on going the found-footage route, probably showing him some cost analysis reports and some preview screening feedback cards of other recent films of that sort already forgotten. OCULUS is a film that mostly takes place in the present day and yet feels out of its own time. The characters and the performances are straight-faced and deadly serious. There's no hit songs on the soundtracks, there's no CGI gore, and there's no ironic snark. I don't want to come off like an old man telling the few remaining fans of the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY franchise to get off my lawn, but it's a sad state of affairs when something as traditional and straightforward as OCULUS manages to stick out from the crowd simply for being old-school and not fitted with any bullshit, trend-hopping bells & whistles to accommodate "the kids."

Tim Russell (Brenton Thwaites) is released from a mental institution on his 21st birthday, 11 years after shooting and killing his father Alan (Rory Cochrane). Having psychologically sorted out the incidents that led up to that horrific event, Tim is ready to start his new life but is reminded by his 23-year-old sister Kaylie (DOCTOR WHO's Karen Gillan) of a promise they made to one another when they were kids. Karen works for an auction house and has gone to great lengths to secure a 300-year-old antique known as the Lasser Glass, a large mirror that's left a seemingly endless string of madness and murder in its wake. As it changes hands through the centuries, it claims more victims, drawing power from the lifeforce of humans, pets, and plants in its vicinity, and using that power to psychologically manipulate and torment its owners. Alan bought the Lasser Glass to adorn his office in the family's new home in 2002, and almost immediately, strange phenomena began to occur: the kids (Annalise Basso plays young Kaylie, Garrett Ryan Ewald plays young Tim) see Alan talking to a strange woman named Marisol (Kate Siegel), Alan starts behaving irrationally, the family dog gets sick, plants start dying, and mom Marie (Katie Sackhoff) stands transfixed in front of the Lasser Glass. Marie, believing Alan is having an affair, confronts him, prompting Alan to go berserk, beat her, and keep her chained in their bedroom. Then he goes after the kids.

Flanagan deftly handles the mixing of past and present, with some very precise editing that allows the adult Kaylie and Tim to be in the same place as the actors playing their younger selves, never directly interacting, but as a clever way for them to revisit the trauma of their childhood. One of the underlying themes of OCULUS is how, through the haze of time and the flexibility of memory, events can be recalled differently by various people who jointly experience them (Kaylie remembers the dog disappearing into the Lasser Glass while Tim recalls it getting sick and being put down by the vet). The Lasser Glass has a way of playing tricks, distorting the perception and subsequent memories, and altering the reality of the people around it. It's a gateway to another world and it goes in both directions, and no matter how many Rube Goldberg-esque precautions the obsessed Kaylie takes, one can never be sure what's real and what isn't once the Lasser Glass is no longer dormant.

It's a tricky plot that Flanagan and co-writer Jeff Howard, expanding Flanagan's 2006 short film OCULUS: THE MAN WITH THE PLAN, do an overall excellent job of mapping out. Late in the film, when all hell breaks loose, it almost spins out of control but they pull it back in for a gut-wrenching finale. While there are a few jump-scares, none of them are cheap and the sequences of the children being pursued through the house by both their haunted father and the monstrous Marie are terrifying. The sudden appearances of the spectral figures from inside the Lasser Glass are a lot more frightening when you just happen to see them standing there rather than having a jarring music cue announcing their presence. It also helps that the filmmakers let the story build and the characters grow, and they take a genuine risk in making Kaylie largely unsympathetic even though, of course, she's right. Gillan's fiery performance anchors the first third of the film--she's as no-nonsense a horror heroine as you've seen in years when she goes through her rundown of how to combat the Lasser Glass and methodically lays out its backstory--though the whole ensemble does fine work. There's enough going on in OCULUS to warrant repeat viewings, and while it's not groundbreaking in any way, it transcends the played-out trends of its era and strikes me as a film that will enjoy a long shelf life with fright fans who like their horror on the moody and atmospheric side.

And please. No sequels. No prequels. No OCULUS: ORIGINS or some such nonsense. It's a nice, nifty little film on its own. Can't we just leave it at that?

THE ANTICHRIST
aka THE TEMPTER
(Italy - 1974; US release 1978)

Directed by Alberto De Martino. Written by Gianfranco Clerici, Vincenzo Mannino, and Alberto De Martino. Cast: Carla Gravina, Mel Ferrer, Arthur Kennedy, George Coulouris, Alida Valli, Umberto Orsini, Mario Scaccia, Anita Strindberg, Remo Girone, Ernesto Colli, Lea Lander. (Unrated, 112 mins; R-rated US theatrical cut, 96 mins)

When THE EXORCIST opened in December 1973 and became a worldwide phenomenon well into the next year, it gave birth to a seemingly endless parade of imitations and blatant ripoffs, some from the US, but mostly from Europe, and Italy in particular. As they would later demonstrate with zombies, CONAN, and RAMBO ripoffs, the Italians latched on to the EXORCIST formula and beat it to death with films like 1974's BEYOND THE DOOR, 1974's THE TORMENTED (also released as THE SEXORCIST but best known under its 1978 ROCKY HORROR-inspired US release title THE EERIE MIDNIGHT HORROR SHOW), and the subgenre's absolute nadir, 1975's pathetic NAKED EXORCISM, aka THE RETURN OF THE EXORCIST (it was later shamelessly retitled THE EXORCIST III: CRIES AND SHADOWS for its UK video release), which showcased a possessed teenage boy howling "I've had it up to here with your mumbo-jumbo!" to an exorcist played by visibly embarrassed GODFATHER co-star Richard Conte, looking very frail in his final screen appearance (he was dead for two years when the film was released in the US in 1977 as THE POSSESSOR). Even the legendary Mario Bava's then-shelved 1973 pet project LISA AND THE DEVIL was infamously retooled with new footage featuring Robert Alda as an exorcist for its 1976 release as THE HOUSE OF EXORCISM. BEYOND THE DOOR was a surprise box office hit when it was released in the US in 1975, and even prompted an unsuccessful lawsuit from Warner Bros., though they did manage to get AIP's 1974 blaxorcist take ABBY (with BLACULA's great William Marshall as the exorcist) yanked from screens. The ripoffs weren't limited to Italy: Spain got into the game with the Paul Naschy-starring EXORCISM (1975) and BLIND DEAD mastermind Amando de Ossorio's DEMON WITCH CHILD (1975), released in the US in 1976 as THE POSSESSED. And Walter Boos took a break from SCHOOLGIRL REPORT installments to direct the West German MAGDALENA: POSSESSED BY THE DEVIL (1974), released in the US in 1976 as BEYOND THE DARKNESS and featuring THE EXORCIST's Rudolf Schundler (who played the servant Karl) as--go figure--the exorcist.

By the time many of these post-EXORCIST copycats made it to the US, the craze had passed. Along with BEYOND THE DOOR, Alberto De Martino's THE ANTICHRIST was among the first Italian EXORCIST ripoffs produced (they opened in Italy within days of one another), though it was one of the last to hit the US when it arrived in American grindhouses and drive-ins courtesy of Avco Embassy in the fall of 1978 as THE TEMPTER, shorn of 16 minutes of mostly exposition but of some other salacious material that almost certainly would've earned it an X rating. As these films went on, they seemed to be attempting to outdo one another with the sleaze and shock value, but none of Italy's EXORCIST knockoffs were quite as unabashedly blasphemous as THE ANTICHRIST. If you can get by the frequently rudimentary visual effects, there's actually a legitimate, beautifully-shot, and provocative film lurking within the THE ANTICHRIST's stunning and gleefully exploitative displays of sexual frustration, inventive profanity ("You stinking pots of shiiiiiit!"), slut-shaming ("You had so many cocks you can't remember, and you liked it!"), orgies, incest, headless toads, an image of a grinning Jesus sporting a raging erection, and the possession victim ranting as gobs of demon semen hang from her chin. All of that is just a warm-up for the film's most infamous sequence, an act of bestiality as the possessed woman performs something that could best be described as "goatilingus" (© Stacie Ponder). Not everything in THE ANTICHRIST works, but time and again in its bold and often obscene depiction of demonic possession, De Martino is willing to take it places that even something as groundbreaking as THE EXORCIST didn't dare tread. The film is loaded with many "Did that shit just happen?!" moments and, in its uncensored European form, goes about as far as a demonic possession film can go.

Where THE EXORCIST dealt with evil reaffirming the faith of troubled Father Damien Karras, THE ANTICHRIST is much more fervently Catholic in its presentation and its faith never in doubt, which makes its many transgressions all the more shocking. Wheelchair-bound Ippolita Oderisi (Carla Gravina) has been unable to walk since a childhood car accident that claimed the life of her mother. Around 30 years of age, Ippolita still lives in the family home with her father, Prince Massimo (Mel Ferrer), and seems well on her way to spinsterdom, telling her high-ranking Bishop uncle Ascanio (Arthur Kennedy) that no man has ever taken an interest in her and that a part of her would sell her soul to the devil just for the experience of intimacy. She's furiously possessive of her father and insanely jealous over his relationship with his secretary Gretel (Anita Strindberg). Offering to say a mass for her, Bishop Ascanio tells Ippolita that her jealousy is "absurd" and that she needs to realize that her widower father needs to move on with his life as well. He also hyperbolically expresses his concern to his brother Massimo that Ippolita may have fallen in with a sect of devil worshippers. Oh, it's way worse than that: thanks to some hypnosis sessions with parapsychologist Dr. Sinibaldi (Umberto Orsini), who believes her disability to be psychosomatic, horny Ippolita has been possessed by a spirit that has been lying dormant in her subconscious, an Inquisition-era Oderisi ancestor, also named Ippolita, who ran off with a Satanic cult the night before she was to be sent to a convent. She was branded a witch and burned, though she renounced Satan and pledged herself to God at the last moment. The demon that possessed the past Ippolita has taken over the present-day Ippolita, taking advantage of her secret feelings for her father (she writhes around on her bed, rubbing a photo of her father over her crotch) and her intense sexual frustration. Ippolita has an out-of-body experience where she goes through the same ritual as her ancestor, which involves a black mass/orgy where, among countless copulating Satanists, she eats the severed head of a toad, drinks toad's blood, and performs analingus on a goat before being sexually violated by the devil himself.

Things go from bad to worse as the demonic Ippolita now takes over as De Martino (HOLOCAUST 2000, THE PUMAMAN) and the screenwriters bring things more in line with the usual EXORCIST shenanigans: there's the requisite projectile green vomit, both in the face of family caregiver Irene (Alida Valli) and a handful that she force-feeds a bogus faith healer (Mario Scaccia). Ippolita goes an astonishingly profane tirade at dinner, seduces her playboy brother Filippo (Remo Girone), and tries to strangle her father. She taunts Ascanio, croaking "She's a big whore, your Ippolita...she'd lay you as well! She'd pluck gladly from under your tunic that innocent little nestling that never has flown," before exposing herself and bellowing "Dip your limp bird in holy water and bless me!" After all that, authorization is finally given for a formal exorcism, and, arriving out of the shadows Father Merrin-style is Austrian monk Father Mittner (George Coulouris), who has popped up on the fringes throughout, usually shaking a can for change, and is also seen in the Inquisition flashbacks and may be the reincarnation of the priest who saved the older Ippolita's soul.

THE ANTICHRIST is much more devout in its religious aspects than THE EXORCIST. There's much debate over theology vs. science, and though he considers Sinibaldi a fine doctor, Ascanio dismisses him as a "skeptic and a non-believer." Eventually, Prince Massimo relieves Sinibaldi of his duties, more or less admitting that only the power of Christ can compel Ippolita. The bluntly religious messages throughout are a bizarre mix with some of the blasphemous imagery and graphic sexuality, not to mention the unexplored plot point that Ippolita and Filippo clearly did some messing around together when they were teenagers (Ippolita: "Remember when we were children...how you made me feel special?"). The possessed Ippolita spills the beans to Massimo ("My brother and I fucked!") and Irene has witnessed it (she also deliberately doesn't tell Ippolita about Massimo and Gretel, so she's good at keeping secrets), but it's never again addressed, unless Massimo gives them a "devil made them do it" pass. And what about Ippolita's obvious designs on her father? Here lies the difference in the culture that produced THE EXORCIST and the one to which THE ANTICHRIST was born: the Oderisi family is one that's been waiting to have its ass handed to it by a scandalous past long buried. The past Ippolita has come to collect payment for generations of Oderisi hypocrisy and bourgeois decadence, not to mention weakness, represented by Ascanio' procrastination and cowardice in addressing his niece's ordeal. But it sort-of lets them all off the hook by the end--all sins forgiven--and emerging through the plethora of perversion on display throughout THE ANTICHRIST is a film that's perhaps too rooted in centuries-old reverence and tradition when it comes to its kid-gloves treatment of both the Catholic church and Italian nobility. Improbably enough, De Martino made a film that includes a scene of a goat having its ass eaten out, yet somehow still finds a way to pull its punches.

The production design in THE ANTICHRIST is spectacular and the ornate interiors (Bishop Ascanio's office is a sight to behold) beautifully shot by Aristide Massaccesi/Joe D'Amato. The score by Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai is a piercing cacophony of screeching violins and organ music, augmented by eerie hisses, whispers, and deep gasps. It's a cut above the usual slapdash, exploitative EXORCIST ripoff, with a committed, vanity-free performance by Gravina, whose intensity comes through even though she's dubbed even prior to the possession scenes (SPEED RACER completists will be interested to know that the English dub was supervised by Peter Fernandez, who also voiced the possessed Ippolita; Ferrer, Kennedy, and Coulouris dub themselves) and would likely be taken a lot more seriously if the special effects weren't so terrible. The levitation scenes and the visual effects involving the moving furniture and Ippolita's disembodied hand strangling the faith healer are some of the most bush-league traveling mattes ever committed to celluloid. As an aside, I wonder if some of the more tawdry elements of THE ANTICHRIST were kept from the old pros in the cast (it's doubtful Ferrer and Kennedy ever envisioned reuniting on this after Fritz Lang's 1952 classic RANCHO NOTORIOUS). I can't imagine George Coulouris--the same year he co-starred in MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS--getting the script for this and thinking "OK, possession, levitation, green vomit, and uh, what? Rimjob on a goat? Well, I was in CITIZEN KANE...why not?"

THE NIGHT CHILD
(Italy - 1975; US release 1976)

Directed by Max Dallamano (Massimo Dallamano). Written by Max Dallamano (Massimo Dallamano) and Jan Hartman. Cast: Richard Johnson, Joanna Cassidy, Lila Kedrova, Evelyn Stuart (Ida Galli), Edmund Purdom, Nicole Elmi (Nicoletta Elmi), Richard Garrone, Dana Ghia, Tom Felleghy. (R, 89 mins)

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE? director Massimo Dallamano's THE NIGHT CHILD is often lumped in with the string of Italian EXORCIST knockoffs, but it's more like a DON'T LOOK NOW ripoff with subtle EXORCIST elements. That didn't stop Edward L. Montoro and Film Ventures International from selling it as such for its 1976 US release, where they really played up the success of BEYOND THE DOOR ("Beyond the door of madness..."), emphasizing the presence of that film's star Richard Johnson and even using very similar font in the one-sheet design. In fact, THE NIGHT CHILD is rather low-key and surprisingly restrained as far as these things go--it's almost more of an art film than an outright horror film--and with no child turning monstrous and no levitation or any of the standard possession histrionics on display, it had to thoroughly bore grindhouse audiences expecting another barf-happy, "Let Jesus fuck you!" EXORCIST clone. Widower BBC documentary filmmaker Michael Williams (Richard Johnson) gets into all sorts of devilish trouble when he decides to take his daughter Emily (FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN and DEEP RED's Nicoletta Elmi, the marvelously expressive, red-haired child actress who had the Creepy Kid market cornered in '70s Italian horror) and her nanny Jill (Ida Galli) to Italy with him for his latest project, a documentary entitled "Diabolical Art." His focus is a mysterious painting depicting a young girl who died 200 years earlier, and it has a profound effect on Emily, who also wears an allegedly cursed medallion that once belonged to her late mother. A local psychic (ZORBA THE GREEK Oscar-winner Lila Kedrova), senses that Emily is the reincarnation of Emilia, the girl's whose death is depicted in the painting, and that Michael's wife was killed by a hateful supernatural force with a connection to the medallion.

Also complicating matters is Michael's romance with his production manager Joanna, played by Joanna Cassidy, pulling some surprise Eurotrash duty, taking this gig after she was fired from THE STEPFORD WIVES and replaced by Paula Prentiss. Like Ippolita's fixation on Massimo, Emily is overly possessive of her father, in ways that a doctor (Edmund Purdom, with about a minute and a half of screen time) says "has all the elements of a neurosis." Like Ippolita's rage at Gretel, Emily wants nothing to do with Joanna, but THE NIGHT CHILD adds some unrequited love with the unspoken feelings Jill has for Michael. While Johnson's O-face as Cassidy disappears out of frame to go down on him is arguably as disturbing as anything in THE ANTICHRIST, you can see some similar themes developing between it and THE NIGHT CHILD: widower father, jealous daughter, reawakening of a vengeful spirit from centuries past, and useless doctors unable to do anything helpful. Both films take place in lush palazzos (though THE NIGHT CHILD makes greater use of some natural lighting in Franco Delli Colli's cinematography), both films feature characters dying in falls against amateurishly-integrated rearscreen matte work, and both films climax with the possessed females being chased out of their residence and through the streets by their desperate fathers. It's interesting that THE ANTICHRIST ends on an uplifting note thanks to divine intervention, the acceptance of God, and letting the pillars of society off the hook while things take a more agnostic turn in THE NIGHT CHILD, which doesn't feature an exorcism or even a priest, and its conclusion is downbeat, depressing, and godless. You can fuck your brother, try to kill your father, regurgitate some devil-cum, and enthusiastically toss a goat's salad in THE ANTICHRIST, but all is forgiven if you just believe and accept. There is no such salvation for the doomed protagonists of THE NIGHT CHILD.

A FANTASTIC FEAR OF EVERYTHING
(US/UK - 2012; US release 2014)

Universal buried this dismal Simon Pegg horror comedy after its disastrous UK opening in the summer of 2012, and it took another two years before indie Indomina gave it an apathetic VOD dumping in the US. Pegg is a great talent, and his performance in last year's THE WORLD'S END should've been up for some awards, but he hasn't really fared well outside of his beloved collaborations with buddies Edgar Wright and Nick Frost as well as his roles in the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE and STAR TREK franchises (does anyone remember BIG NOTHING, RUN FATBOY RUN, HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS & ALIENATE PEOPLE, or BURKE AND HARE?), but A FANTASTIC FEAR OF EVERYTHING is just the pits, with Pegg as an agoraphobic former childrens book author named Jack Nife, who's been so obsessed with writing a TV script about 19th century serial killers that he's grown paranoid that someone is trying to kill him. A disheveled-looking Pegg spends the first half of the film freaking out and puttering about in a tattered robe and dirty tighty-whities and talking to himself in his filthy, cluttered hovel of an apartment. It's essentially a one-man show until he dares to venture out to do laundry, which ultimately brings him face-to-face with both his lifelong issues (his mother abandoned him at a launderette when he was a boy) and a serial killer known as The Hanoi Handshake (the actor in this role seems so much like Frost that I wonder if the character was written with him in mind). In between, there's a meeting with his agent (HELLRAISER's Clare Higgins), an emergency phone call with his shrink Dr. Friedkin (Paul Freeman), the killer passionately defending the artistic merits of Europe's "The Final Countdown," an animation sequence featuring a hedgehog that looks like Ron Jeremy, and maybe one or two laughs over 100 tedious minutes (the bit about "The Ocular Stare" is amusing, as is an incredulous Jack Nife's reaction to meeting the killer: "The Hanoi Handshake?! That sounds like two men meeting in a public convenience!"). Directors Crispian Mills (son of Hayley and frontman of Brit rockers Kula Shaker) and Chris Hopewell channel numerous horror influences, with a particular affinity for Hitchcock's PSYCHO, plus some Tim Burton and a little Roman Polanski, and the shout-out to William Friedkin with Freeman's character, but honestly, most of the film comes off like a Larry Blamire tribute to the forgotten 1988 Whoopi Goldberg bomb THE TELEPHONE. A FANTASTIC FEAR OF EVERYTHING is unbelievably bad, though there's no denying Pegg throws himself into the role. Unfortunately, even with his usually engaging screen presence and his natural, innate likability, even the most devoted Pegg stalkers will find that a little of him goes a very long way here. (R, 100 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

WRONG COPS
(France/Russia/Portugal - 2013)

The latest from absurdist French auteur Quentin Dupieux, director of RUBBER, the world's greatest killer-tire movie, is an agonizingly unfunny collection of shock-value vignettes detailing the activities of a squad of "wacky" Los Angeles cops who would have even the Bad Lieutenant making a call to Internal Affairs. WRONG COPS is tenuously connected to Dupieux's last film WRONG with the presence of abrasive Officer Duke (Mark Burnham). Duke doesn't do much police work, instead focusing his energy on selling weed stashed in rat carcasses and dead fish and trying to find a way to get rid of the body of his mom's (Grace Zabriskie) almost-dead neighbor (SCANNER COP's Daniel Quinn) after he accidentally shoots him. He also gets blowjobs from streetwalkers and tries to molest an awkward teenage boy played by Marilyn Manson (yes, that Marilyn Manson). The other cops in the squad include one-eyed Rough (Eric Judor), who's trying to land a record deal for his synth music; Sunshine (Steve Little), a family-man desk jockey who has a secret past in gay porn; DeLuca (Eric Wareheim), who's obsessed with nabbing women on bogus charges so he can force them to show him their breasts; and Holmes (Ardin Myrin), who raids fridges when she goes on calls and tries to blackmail Sunshine about his gay porn days. There's also Ray Wise as the police chief, on his cell phone at a cop's funeral and kicking the casket into the ground when it gets stuck being lowered, Agnes Bruckner as one of DeLuca's targets, and Eric Roberts, cast radically against type as a Hollywood washout buying weed from Duke. I'm all for misanthropic, absurdist humor, but nothing is funny in WRONG COPS, especially the pointless overuse of the '70s zoom-in and the grating Burnham, who comes off like the loathsome offspring of Rainn Wilson and Billy Bob Thornton. Dupieux showed some cult movie promise with RUBBER, but WRONG felt too indebted to Michel Gondry to really work on its own. It's hard to imagine he'll ever make a film worse than the self-indulgent, unwatchable tire fire that is WRONG COPS, and the whole thing is bad enough that it's probably not too early to conclude that whatever Dupieux had to say, he said it with RUBBER. (Unrated, 82 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

IN FEAR
(France/UK - 2013; US release 2014)

The feature debut of British TV director Jeremy Lovering (MI-5, SHERLOCK), who's part of the Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg clique (he handled second unit duties on HOT FUZZ), IN FEAR has an intriguing premise that's ultimately its downfall. Working without a script (no screenwriter is credited), Lovering kept the direction of the story secret from his stars in order to get legitimate shock and surprise in their reactions. It works for a while--there are several undeniably terrifying, dread-filled moments in the much better first half--but the cracks start to show and Lovering is forced to cram in many dumb things that have to happen by the end as plot convenience and stupidity become the general rule, all the way to an unsatisfying wrap-up that only succeeds in making you realize how illogical the whole thing was in the first place. New couple Tom (AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D.'s Iain De Castecker) and Lucy (BEAUTIFUL CREATURES' Alice Englert) are on their way to a music festival when Tom surprises her by booking an overnight stay at the Kilairney House Hotel, an off-the-grid bed & breakfast in the middle of nowhere (though they have a web site). They're guided down the narrow, hedge-lined back country roads by an unseen driver in a truck, who points them down a path and goes about his business in the opposite direction. Following the signs to the hotel only leads them in circles down endless roads in an elaborate maze, their phones stop getting reception, and the GPS isn't working. A tree almost falls on them, clothes neatly laid upon the road actually belong to Lucy, and Lucy catches brief glimpses of figures, including a man in a white mask standing very near Tom as he takes a leak on the side of the road. Tensions start to rise, the fuel's getting low, night falls and the rain starts pouring, and that's when they almost run over Max (DOWNTON ABBEY's Allen Leech), who's already battered and bloodied when he climbs into their car and says "They're coming...we have to get out of here now!"

So who--or what--is coming? Does it have something to do with Tom offending some blokes at the local pub early on in an incident we don't see and about which Tom is hesitant to discuss? Does it have something to do with a brief shot of an eye in a peephole watching while Lucy was in the ladies' room? Does Max know more than he's letting on? Once Max is introduced, the collapse begins. As a thriller, it was working beautifully when it was just Tom and Lucy in the car, but once Lovering has to start putting the pieces of the story together, it becomes very obvious that he doesn't have much beyond the set-up. I don't want to go into spoilers, but this is one of those films where many people have disappeared over an extended period of time, drawn to a place of business that has a traceable online presence, and yet, no one ever puts the pieces together and no one--family, police, private investigators--ever comes to investigate. Also, if you're out of gas and go wandering in the woods after what's already been a hellish ordeal of being toyed with all night by an unseen menace and return to your car to find a full gas can waiting for you in the driver's seat, wouldn't it occur to you that this might be a trap? IN FEAR is beautifully shot and makes terrific use of locations in Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, and while a basic outline and letting your actors riff might work for, say, CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM or a Christopher Guest mockumentary populated by gifted and experienced improvisation vets, it probably isn't the best way to construct a tight suspense thriller. It's an admirable effort, the actors are fine, and Lovering's got some definite chops, but he should probably resort to a script next time. They usually help. (R, 85 mins)

TRANSCENDENCE
(US/China - 2014)

Directed by Wally Pfister. Written by Jack Paglen. Cast: Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman, Paul Bettany, Cillian Murphy, Kate Mara, Cole Hauser, Clifton Collins Jr., Josh Stewart, Lukas Haas, Cory Hardrict, Falk Hentschel, Steven Liu, Xander Berkeley, Wallace Langham. (PG-13, 119 mins)

Since his 2000 breakthrough MEMENTO, Christopher Nolan's go-to cinematographer has been Wally Pfister, who got his start working second unit camera crews on Roger Corman productions like BODY CHEMISTRY and SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE III before photographing early 1990s straight-to-video erotic thriller "classics" like SECRET GAMES and ANIMAL INSTINCTS. Pfister got an Oscar for his work on Nolan's INCEPTION, and makes his directing debut with TRANSCENDENCE, which lists Nolan as an executive producer, features several Nolan vets in the cast (Rebecca Hall, Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy, Josh Stewart, Lukas Haas), and has a very Nolan-like concept courtesy of first-time screenwriter Jack Paglen. Paglen's script is muddled, and though it's probably meant to be a gray area, there's no consistency in the characterizations or who the villain is really supposed to be. There's an argument for ambiguity but given how hopelessly convoluted and downright silly the whole film is, the answer could very well be that the filmmakers simply don't know. Considering its pedigree, TRANSCENDENCE is a misfire of catastrophic proportions, a supposedly cutting-edge vision filled with hard sci-fi techno-jargon, but it continually proclaims the most rudimentary messages that sound like Paglen's cribbing from a college freshman's Intro to Philosophy essay exam. It makes thuddingly obvious observations about the internet and our reliance on technology, with paranoid lip service paid to government surveillance and the lack of privacy in social media, tossing out buzzwords like "upload" and "off the grid" and even throws a bone to those who might still be losing sleep over Y2K. How old is this script? And how many times did it get shuffled to the bottom of Nolan's slush pile before he got sick of coming across it and punked his buddy Pfister into making it?

In a performance so somnambulant that Pfister should've just used a picture of him with a Conan O'Brien superimposed, talking mouth, Johnny Depp is Dr. Will Caster, an artificial intelligence pioneer who, with his work partner and wife Evelyn (Hall) and their associate Max (Paul Bettany), has designed PINN, a fully sentient computer system. Will is targeted by a "neo-Luddite" anti-technology terrorist group called R.I.F.T. (Revolutionary Independence from Technology) with members who have infiltrated his own research team and plotted a series of computer lab bombings across the country. After giving a speech at a university, Will is shot by one such activist (Haas), though the bullet only grazes him. The damage is done however, as he soon grows deathly ill and it's revealed the bullet was poisoned with radiation that's now in his bloodstream. Given five weeks to live, Will abandons his research until Evelyn comes up with the idea of wiring into his brain and loading his consciousness into PINN. Will dies, and soon begins communicating with Evelyn and Max through the computer system, instructing her to download "him" to the internet. Max is alarmed by the suddenly megalomaniacal Will and when he voices his objections, Evelyn sends him on his way to be abducted by R.I.F.T., and he eventually join forces with them. Meanwhile, Will, alive online and seen MAX HEADROOM-style on computer monitors, hacks into various global computer systems, clearing out Wall Street and depositing the money into an account for Evelyn to buy Brightwood, a nearly-deserted desert ghost town, converting it into their high-tech base of operations for a complete technological takeover. The virtual Will evolves at such an accelerated rate that he's able to heal the sick and disabled, who are then linked to his source code, synched with him to function as living, tangible extensions of himself. He's creating an army of Will Casters, with the government, led by FBI agent Buchanan (Murphy) and Will's old colleague Tagger (Freeman), aligned with Max and R.I.F.T. in hot pursuit.

This film is an absolute mess. What is Christopher Nolan doing shepherding what amounts to little more than a $100 million remake of THE LAWNMOWER MAN? Paglen's script is an incoherent, nonsensical jumble. The film opens in a dystopian CHILDREN OF MEN-type setting, with keyboards being used as doorstops and Max mentioning that "there might be phone service in Denver." Will's death and subsequent online reanimation happened five years earlier, and the Brightwood plotline two years after that. Brightwood was funded with money stolen by "Will" and Evelyn. When Buchanan drags Tagger to Brightwood two years later, how is it possible that he hasn't brought along the entire bureau to arrest her? Instead, she introduces them to the virtual Will and then they leave to plot a military attack, with help from R.I.F.T. What the hell is the government doing working with a domestic terror organization? Especially the one that caused all the trouble by killing Will in the first place? We learn so little about Buchanan and R.I.F.T. leader Bree (Kate Mara) that it's probable that neither Pfister nor Paglen know, either. Does anyone pay for their crimes in TRANSCENDENCE's world?

It's been said that no one sets out to make a bad movie, that sometimes they just happen. Watching TRANSCENDENCE, you can actualy see the actors wearing defeat throughout. You can see on Freeman's face and hear in his line deliveries that he knows this is a dud. While it's nice to see Depp sans the Tim Burton security blanket of white pancake makeup and silly costumes and not crutching on eccentricities and assorted Hunter S. Thompson affectations, this is probably his worst performance. It's one that reflects his utter lack of engagement with the material--and you could hardly blame him--and is not that of an actor, but rather a bored celebrity who already has more money than he'll ever spend in a lifetime. Sure, the material is stale and dated, but at least a Nolan regular like Christian Bale would've brought something to the role, like a pulse, perhaps. Hall is OK but suffers playing a sketchily-designed character, but she at least fares better than Bettany, Murphy, and Mara, who are saddled with even less. Considering that he's a cinematographer first, you'd think Pfister would at least give the film a great look, but it's not even very interesting on that level. There's a lot of long, ominous corridors and expansive labs of the antiseptic, dehumanized Kubrick variety, but they're shot very plainly by HOT FUZZ cinematographer Jess Hall. TRANSCENDENCE stumbles out of the gate and never finds its footing, and it only gets more pretentious, ponderous, and hokey as it proceeds.

Going back to the silent era, there's no shortage of great cinematographers who became accomplished filmmakers--Karl Freund, Freddie Francis (who quit directing and went back to cinematography late in his career, winning an Oscar for GLORY), Jack Cardiff, Mario Bava, Nicolas Roeg, and Jan de Bont to name just a few. Gordon Willis photographed some of the most iconic films of the 1970s (KLUTE, THE GODFATHER, THE GODFATHER PART II, THE PARALLAX VIEW, ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, ANNIE HALL, MANHATTAN) before making his directorial debut with the 1980 suspense thriller WINDOWS. It was the first major release of its year, opening to universally toxic reviews and was all but buried by its studio for over 30 years before getting an MOD DVD release. Willis was arguably the top D.P. in American cinema for a decade, got his shot at running the show and blew it. He promptly licked his wounds and returned to his old gig, keeping busy and eventually retiring in 1997. He never directed a second film. WINDOWS is a bad movie but it looks terrific. TRANSCENDENCE doesn't even have that going for it. I guess what I'm saying is this: TRANSCENDENCE is Wally Pfister's WINDOWS.

THE QUIET ONES
(US/UK - 2014)

Directed by John Pogue. Written by Craig Rosenberg, Oren Moverman, and John Pogue. Cast: Jared Harris, Sam Claflin, Olivia Cooke, Erin Richards, Rory Fleck-Byrne, Laurie Calvert, Aldo Maland. (PG-13, 98 mins)

The 2007 revival of the legendary Hammer Films was much-hyped in horror circles, but in the ensuing seven years, it's only resulted in five films and BEYOND THE RAVE, a 20-part serial that debuted on MySpace in 2008. Of those five films, LET ME IN, the 2010 remake of the Swedish vampire hit LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, and 2012's THE WOMAN IN BLACK were the undisputed standouts, with the Hilary Swank stalker thriller THE RESIDENT (which featured Hammer icon Christopher Lee in a prominent supporting role) and the subpar WAKE WOOD not doing much to herald Hammer as a force in today's horror. Two years after their last production and two years after it was shot, Hammer's latest offering, THE QUIET ONES, has finally arrived and it seems to encapsulate every doubt I've had about this new "Hammer." Specifically, it's not Hammer. Sure, it's the name "Hammer," but that's all it is. These aren't being made by the same talents that gave us all of those old classics with Lee and Peter Cushing and the rest. Of course, most of those people are no longer with us, but this new Hammer is simply coasting on nostalgia and brand recognition, much like its barely reanimated rival Amicus, which has only managed to churn out two films since its 2005 rebirth. There's no continuity or sense of tradition with the current Hammer, though THE WOMAN IN BLACK was a thoroughly enjoyable throwback chiller that has thus far come closest to being worthy of the name by replicating what a vintage Hammer production should be. THE QUIET ONES is, for lack of a better term, poseur Hammer, a film that thinks it's being old-school just because it has a British cast and is set in 1974, but it doesn't do anything with that setting. In fact, it seems to go out of its way to placate today's audiences with a 2014 assembly-line product. And unless you're part of a focus group, that's not a good thing.

Arrogant Oxford psychology prof Joseph Coupland (Jared Harris) is trying to prove that ghosts and supernatural occurrences are simply manifestations of psychological and emotional trauma. His case study is Jane (Olivia Cooke), a troubled young woman who's been shuffled from one foster home to another. Jane believes she's possessed by the spirit of a child named Evey. When the university cuts his funding, Coupland moves the study to a middle-of-nowhere country estate, taking along two student researchers, Harry (Rory Fleck-Byrne), and Krissi (Erin Richards, doing a decent job of channeling a coquettish Judy Geeson), who spend their free time having rambunctious, bed-breaking sex, as well as cameraman-for-hire Brian (Sam Claflin). Coupland blasts glam rock at high volume to keep Jane awake (Slade's "Cum on Feel the Noize" and T. Rex's "Telegram Sam" get some airplay) in the hopes that it will prompt Evey to show herself. It doesn't take Jane long to cast a spell of sorts on Brian, who finds himself not exactly falling for her, but certainly wishing to save her from the increasingly unethical "treatment" of Coupland and his assistants. Of course, it's inevitable that Evey will eventually make her presence known and her true intentions revealed, and rest assured, it's nothing you haven't seen a hundred times before.

Familiarity is the least of THE QUIET ONES' problems. It succumbs to stupidity on too many occasions (if Coupland is concerned about Jane manipulating Brian, then why does he allow Brian to sit in and film her while she's bathing?), and when Coupland's ultimate goal behind his experiment is revealed, it lands with a thud because we're just done caring about him by that point. But the film's biggest issue, and one that makes its 1974 setting nothing more than retro-cool window dressing, is that the bulk of the film is seen through the lens of Brian's camera while he's filming, a terrible decision that seems to have been made simply to appease the found-footage crowd. So, of course, a good chunk of the horror histrionics are presented in de rigeur shaky-cam, and the attached light allows for an extended sequence of running through the dark house in a 1970s approximation of night-vision. Gussying things up with a faded color palette, wide lapels, hot pants, gaudy wallpaper, and having people chain-smoking in now-inappropriate settings are only cosmetic elements. Hammer was about blazing trails, and even when they followed trends and added more sex and gore to films like THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, they were still distinctly Hammer. There's nothing Hammer here. There's no reason other than commercial pandering to set the film up in this fashion, which negates the whole sense of nostalgia that Hammer and director/co-writer John Pogue (QUARANTINE 2: TERMINAL, which oddly enough, abandoned the found-footage angle of its predecessor) are ostensibly pursuing even more than recycling the vomiting CGI ectoplasm effect from THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT, which is really where THE QUIET ONES jumps the shark. Maybe the vintage 1970s aura is something that existed in the original script by Tom De Ville, which was apparently rewritten by the committee of Pogue, Craig Rosenberg (LOST, THE UNINVITED), and the unlikely Oren Moverman, whose past credits for films like I'M NOT THERE, THE MESSENGER, and RAMPART don't exactly make him the go-to guy for Hammer horror. I can only assume that an odd credit like "Based on the original screenplay by Tom De Ville" means that none of De Ville's script made it to the completed version. The film is also "inspired by actual events," which means it was vaguely influenced by what's known as the "Phillip Experiment," where Canadian researchers tried to conjure a ghost on their own. It was ultimately revealed to be a hoax, not unlike the current incarnation of "Hammer," which will henceforth be accompanied by quote marks when referenced.

Cooke does some solid work as the haunted Jane, and in many ways reminds you of a younger Eva Green, but the best thing about THE QUIET ONES is easily the performance of Harris. The veteran character actor gets a rare lead role here and sinks his teeth into it, turning Dr. Coupland into an extended tribute to his father, the late, great Richard Harris. Jared Harris sounds so much like his old man and has inherited so many of his vocal inflections, that even though he doesn't have the strongest physical resemblance, you can absolutely see his dad in his mannerisms and hear him in his words. As the spiritual shit hits the fan later on, Harris also throws a little Oliver Reed and Patrick Magee into the mix, and whatever fun THE QUIET ONES offers largely comes from watching him. It's too bad his efforts are wasted on something so blandly unworthy. THE QUIET ONES is little more than background noise, atmospheric to an extent and filled with predictable jump scares punctuated by loud music cues. If you're looking for some legitimate chills of the old-fashioned variety in a film that doesn't feel the need to cop to stale trends that refuse to die, give OCULUS a look if hasn't already left your area theaters. That's a film set in the present day that could've been made in the 1970s. If you're watching THE QUIET ONES for some sense of 1970s eerieness, you're better off just watching any random Hammer production from 1974. Or maybe 1973's THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE. Or hell, just watch Edgar Wright's DON'T trailer. In under 90 seconds, that perfectly nails the concept of "1974 British horror" better than all 98 minutes of "Hammer"'s THE QUIET ONES.

BIG BAD WOLVES
(Israel - 2013; US release 2014)

Quentin Tarantino cited this Israeli import as his favorite film of 2013, and it's no wonder. It's not only the work of a directing team (Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado) that obviously loves movies, but it's also frequently a slobbering fan letter to Tarantino himself. Not only is there a foot chase that replicates some shots of the Marcellus/Butch chase in PULP FICTION, but the second half of the film is essentially an extended homage to the RESERVOIR DOGS torture scene. Despite no hard evidence, loose cannon cop Micki (Lior Ashkenazi) is convinced that mild-mannered schoolteacher Dror (Rotem Keinan) is the pedophile serial killer who's been raping and killing young girls, decapitating them, leaving the bodies for the cops, and burying the heads in a secret place. Micki and some thuggish cops take Dror to an abandoned warehouse to beat a confession out of him, but a kid hanging around films them and posts the video on YouTube. After he's read the riot act and busted down to traffic--burly captain Tsvika (Dvir Benedek) actually says "I'm gonna bust you down to traffic"--Micki starts tailing Dror on his own time, and is given a wink and silent approval by Tsvika to "deal with" Dror in any way he sees fit. Micki's plan is derailed by Gidi (Tzahi Grad), the enraged father of the latest victim, who has his own plans for Dror and won't let Micki get in the way. Gidi follows Micki following Dror, incapacitates both men and takes them to a house in the woods in the middle of nowhere, a house he bought for the sole purpose of taking Dror there to torture him and put him through what all of the dead girls have gone through. He agrees to split the duties with Micki, at least until Micki realizes Gidi is a madman and instead forms a shaky alliance with Dror, the man he was going to kill on his own in the first place. Then things go from bad to worse when Gidi's aging father Yoram (Dov Glickman) unexpectedly shows up.

The filmmakers want to invoke a sense of Israel's history, and the occasional appearances by an affable Arab man on horseback ("Why do you Jews always think that we all want to kill you?") pay lip service to that, but really, BIG BAD WOLVES is just another vigilante movie, complete with broken and smashed appendages, cutting and slicing, yanked fingernails and toenails, and various blowtorchings, and while it's better than most, being in Israeli with English subtitles doesn't add a layer of arthouse cred or meaningful depth. There's no denying it's a very well-made film anchored by four terrific performances, and the directors get things off to a hypnotically powerful start with a hauntingly graceful De Palma-esque sequence of kids playing hide-and-seek. There's also some amusing bits of dark humor throughout--the Arab stranger, circumstances forcing Micki to ride a kids bicycle, Tsvika and his young son ("It's take-your-child-to-work day") tearing into Micki over his initial handling of Dror (Benedek is a real scene-stealer)--and while some will decry it as little more than torture porn, it's a bit above that. I don't think there's as much substance here as the filmmakers believe there to be, but enthusiastic filmmaking, an unabashed love of cinema, top-notch performances, and many instances of genuine suspense give BIG BAD WOLVES much credibility just as a solid, straightforward thriller, albeit one that's quite wince-inducing. (Unrated, 110 mins)

A FAREWELL TO FOOLS
(US/Romania/Belgium/Germany/France - 2013; US release 2014)

Based on the novel The Death of Ipu by Titus Popovici, who scripted the original 1971 Romanian film version THEN I SENTENCED THEM ALL TO DEATH, A FAREWELL TO FOOLS is a heavy-handed WWII-set morality tale that has too many mood swings to work effectively. The grim subject matter doesn't really mesh with the frequently comic presentation, complete with a bouncy, lighthearted score that sounds a lot like the sequence in THE GODFATHER PART II when young Vito Corleone and Clemenza broke into a house to steal an expensive rug. In a relentlessly hammy performance, Gerard Depardieu is Ipu, the idiot in a Nazi-occupied Romanian village who lives with a bullet from WWI lodged in his head and is regarded as a genial goof by the rest of the citizens. Ipu farms and does fix-it jobs and spends his free time playing war with lonely, mischievous orphan Alex (Bogdan Iancu), who lives with his aunt Margherita (Laura Morante) and minister uncle Johannes (a seriously miscast Harvey Keitel). On the edges of the village, a friendly German soldier (Andrei Seusan) lets Alex ride his motorcycle, and when Alex finishes taking it for a brief spin, he finds the soldier lying dead with his throat slit. The Germans in charge demand a confession from the guilty party or ten of the village's top authority figures and their wives will be executed at 5:00 the next morning. Rather than investigate the murder, Johannes and the rest--Margherita, the mayor, the police chief, the doctor, the notary public, etc., hatch a plan to invite Ipu over for dinner, butter him up, fill him with food and drink and convince him to take the fall, even though Johannes admits "Ipu was working with me all afternoon" when the soldier was murdered.

Johannes and the others are a reprehensible lot, and it's rather amusing watching them realize that Ipu isn't as dumb as he seems, but that's another problem with the film: Depardieu has been directed to play Ipu as whatever a particular scene needs him to be: lovable oaf, mischievous scamp, shell-shocked battle vet, or sly, duplicitous manipulator. Given significant latitude by director Bogdan Dreyer, the actor is all too happy to oblige and chew the scenery throughout, and Depardieu's gregarious presence is enjoyable even when it doesn't always make sense. It's possible that Ipu has been playing them to some extent all along, but 30 years is a long time to keep a ruse going (it also doesn't help that, at just 84 minutes, the film feels like it's been hacked down). Morante does little more than shriek and act hysterical, while Keitel just looks tired, sounds hoarse, and has no business playing a Bronx-accented Romanian priest (Keitel has never been good with accents). A FAREWELL TO FOOLS isn't a bad film, it's just a confused one that never finds a balance between its wildly varying tones of downbeat drama, biting satire, and borderline slapstick. Filmed in 2011, this bombed in its European release and only made it to a few theaters and VOD during its US dumping in early 2014. (PG-13, 84 mins)

WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE
(UK/US - 2014)

An overbearing would-be satire of office politics, WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE is noteworthy only for the presence of a self-deprecating Jean-Claude Van Damme. JCVD plays Storm, a survivalist hired by an advertising CEO (Dennis Haysbert) to take the underlings in his firm to a distant island for a weekend team-building retreat in the wilderness. The pilot keels over after they land, and Storm is mauled by a tiger, which prompts a battle of wills between nice-guy Chris (Adam Brody) and asshole Phil (Rob Huebel) as the staff splits into LORD OF THE FLIES factions. Phil rechristens himself "Orco" and turns the island into an orgiastic SURVIVOR nightmare that makes the Kurtz compound in APOCALYPSE NOW look cozy and inviting, while Chris, office hottie crush Lisa (THE BLACKLIST's Megan Boone), bunny-obsessed quirky girl Brenda (Kristen Schaal), and stoner Jared (Eric Edelstein) try to figure out how to get off the island. That description sounds a lot darker than the film really is, as director Rob Meltzer and writer Jeff Kauffman consistently go for the cheapest laughs, usually involving orifices and things that come out of them. The comparisons between cut-throat world of the workplace and "the jungle" are forced and obvious, and the early office scenes play like a tired retread of HORRIBLE BOSSES or OFFICE SPACE. There's nothing here other than the novelty of seeing Van Damme in a comedy, but the movie isn't that funny and doesn't make very good use of him as he's absent for long stretches--Storm survives the tiger mauling and turns up again later, only to disappear once more until the climax--which probably has more to do with the filmmakers only having him for a limited time (of course, as per his usual package deal, he's brought along the dead weight duo of son Kristopher Van Varenberg--one of the film's 29 credited producers--and stunningly untalented daughter Bianca Bree). The Chris vs. Phil plot line is bland and predictable, and WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE feels a lot like a rambling SNL skit that won't end. (Unrated, 94 mins)

BRICK MANSIONS
(France/Canada - 2014)

Directed by Camille Delamarre. Written by Luc Besson. Cast: Paul Walker, David Belle, RZA, Gouchy Boy, Catalina Denis, Ayisha Issa, Carlo Rota, Bruce Ramsay, Andreas Apergis, Frank Fontaine, Richard Zeman, Robert Maillet, Ron Lea, Mark Camacho. (PG-13, 90 mins)

The 2004 French-language Luc Besson production BANLIEUE 13 became a blockbuster hit in Europe before its 2006 US release as DISTRICT B13 (which led to the 2009 sequel DISTRICT B13: ULTIMATUM) and succeeded in both the mainstreaming of parkour and putting Besson protege and future TAKEN director Pierre Morel on the map. Given the ubiquitousness of parkour over the subsequent years--including a memorable action sequence in 2006's 007 reboot CASINO ROYALE--it seems odd that Besson would not only fashion a belated, demanded-by-no-one English-language remake now but also that he would utilize one of BANLIEUE's stars, French parkour master David Belle, in the same role he played a decade ago. Again scripted by Besson (with regular collaborator Robert Mark Kamen credited as "artistic consultant") and directed by another in the seemingly endless line of Besson disciples--in this case, his frequent editor Camille Delamarre, making his feature directing debut--BRICK MANSIONS moves the action from the slums of Paris to a walled-off housing project in the near-future war zone of Detroit in 2018.

Brick Mansions is controlled by Tremaine (RZA), a ruthless drug lord and red pepper culinary enthusiast who's enraged over a drug shipment jacked and destroyed by Lino (Belle), a do-gooder who's lived in Brick Mansions his whole life and is sick of Tremaine and his goons running things. Brick Mansions is under constant guard by police and military personnel, all of whom are on Tremaine's payroll, which Lino finds out the hard way when he brings Tremaine to them only to be tossed in prison himself for killing a cop in the ensuing melee. Enter undercover Detroit narcotics detective Damien Collier (the late Paul Walker), who just nabbed high-ranking gangster George the Greek (Carlo Rota, the Canadian Stanley Tucci, playing yet another variation on his Yakavetta character from THE BOONDOCK SAINTS), and has had his eyes on Tremaine for a while: Collier's dad was a legendary Detroit cop killed by Tremaine during a botched raid on Brick Mansions years earlier. The mayor (Bruce Ramsay) and the top Detroit brass send Collier into Brick Mansions in classic Snake Plissken-style when Tremaine gains possession of a neutron bomb that's set to go off in ten hours. Posing as a prisoner, Collier finds himself in a transport with Lino, who's determined to rescue his ex (Catalina Denis), who's being held captive by Tremaine, who's also demanding $30 million in his Hawaiian bank account (?) to not launch the neutron bomb right at downtown Detroit. Amidst bickering and constant disagreement, Collier and Lino team up to take out Tremaine and his Brick Mansions army and stop the bomb from going off...

...if they don't kill each other first!

As far as empty calories entertainment goes, you could do a lot worse than BRICK MANSIONS. It moves fast and there's some entertaining action sequences when Delamarre can keep the camera somewhat still. Yes, most of the action is of the dizzying, quick-cut shaky-cam variety, with bonus pointless stutter zooms (even with all of Belle's by-now familiar parkour antics, the highlight is Collier's extended pursuit of George the Greek). Cliches and silliness abound: every shitbag in Detroit is a parkour expert, George the Greek acts like he's the first crime boss to use a shark tank as a ham-fisted metaphor, and it's a wonder Tremaine has any empire at all with incompetent flunkies like the hapless K2 (Gouchy Boy) and psycho-bitch Rayzah (Ayisha Issa) in his employ. Besson does take things in an unexpected--and dumber--direction than BANLIEUE in his handling of Tremaine, who faced a much different fate in the original film (that film's co-writer Bibi Naceri played the same character, then called Taha Bemamud). Here, RZA plays Tremaine as someone equally cold-blooded as Taha, but Tremaine's eleventh-hour transformation into not just a good guy (which is what happened to K2 in the original film), but a noble hero who doesn't have to pay for his crimes reeks of fast and furious post-production revision, as if Besson wanted him along for the ride in case there's a sequel. Another decision clearly made after the fact is the distracting dubbing of many of the French and Quebecois supporting players (only some second-unit establishing shots were done in Detroit; the rest of the film was shot in Montreal). The dubbing is most obvious with Belle, whose thick accent has been completely revoiced, making the constant references to his nationality--like calling him "Frenchy" or "French asshole"--meaningless. There's an unsubstantiated rumor making the rounds that it's Vin Diesel dubbing Belle, but as of this writing, nothing's been confirmed.

Paul Walker (1973-2013)

In his last completed role before his tragic death in a car crash in November 2013 (CGI and his two brothers serving as doubles will be used to finish his performance in FAST & FURIOUS 7, due out in April 2015), Walker is game for the intense action and his fans will certainly want to check this out. While it's not really a stretch for him, BRICK MANSIONS provides a better showcase for the actor than recent junk like VEHICLE 19 and the unwatchable PAWN SHOP CHRONICLES. Much like the planned English-language remake of Gareth Evans' Indonesian THE RAID, a film with which BRICK MANSIONS shares some "high-rise mayhem" similarities, there's little reason to rework a foreign-language film that's not only better but was already embraced by action enthusiasts and didn't feel the need to dub over a French lead actor's performance as a French guy to ensure that he didn't sound French, a decision that fully summarizes the inherent pointlessness of BRICK MANSIONS.

BAD COUNTRY
(US - 2014)

Fans of Troy Duffy's cult classic THE BOONDOCK SAINTS should recognize producer Chris Brinker's name. Brinker made his directing debut with this "inspired by true events" crime thriller shot in the fall of 2012 and it unfortunately proved to be his only film: the 42-year-old Brinker died unexpectedly from an aortic aneurysm in February 2013 while BAD COUNTRY was in post-production. While the film wasn't 100% finished when Brinker died, he did have it in the can and must shoulder the bulk of the blame for the utterly mediocre results. The elements are here for a solid crime thriller, but lethargic pacing, veteran actors often being outperformed by their facial hair, and some truly amateurish filmmaking, particularly in the botched climax, do it absolutely no favors. It does give Brinker a chance to work with his old BOONDOCK SAINTS pal Willem Dafoe, who turns in a typically intense performance as on-the-edge cop Bud Carter, who leads a squad of plays-by-their-own-rules badasses looking to up-end all manner of criminal lowlifes in their neck of the woods in 1983 Baton Rouge. A diamond bust results in Carter getting the name of Jesse Weiland (Matt Dillon), a jack-of-all-trades shitheel who dabbles in contract killing, drug-dealing, gun-running, and white supremacy. Weiland's got limitless connections to the Baton Rouge underworld, and he's also got a wife (Amy Smart) and a newborn son, and Carter, forced to work with an incompetent, wet-behind-the-ears FBI newbie (Chris Marquette), offers him a chance to stay out of prison and be with his family by becoming a snitch and leading them to the bigger fish, namely wealthy businessman and Ayran brotherhood crime lord Lutin Adams (Tom Berenger). Of course, loyalties are tested, lines are crossed, tables are turned, etc, etc, blah blah blah.

BAD COUNTRY features a generically predictable plot you've seen a hundred times before. Perhaps Brinker and screenwriter Jonathan Hirschbein should've kept the focus on Dafoe's Carter, a character based on the exploits of cop Don "Bud" Connor, one of the film's 23 credited producers. When Dafoe is onscreen doing his thing, BAD COUNTRY feels alive, but too much time is spent with a sulking Dillon, who can't do much with the role since we never care about the redemption of this unrepentant scumbag, and Smart is stuck with a role so woefully underwritten that she barely registers. There's sporadic appearances by other familiar faces, like IN PLAIN SIGHT's Frederick Weller; loathed Cadillac pitchman and I KNOW WHO KILLED ME/88 MINUTES/STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN-LI bomb magnet Neal McDonough, cast radically against type as an smirking, asshole lawyer; Kevin Chapman, best known as BLACK DYNAMITE's traitorous O'Leary; ARGO's Christopher Denham as Weiland's even bigger loser brother; veteran New Orleans-based character actor Don Yesso, also one of the producers; and the always-awesome Bill Duke as an irate fed, but top acting dishonors have to go to an embarrassing Berenger, who can't decide what he wants to do from word-to-word, let alone line-to-line. He'll start a sentence in his usual voice and finish it with a hammy drawl that sounds like he's playing tribute to Adam Sandler's Cajun Man by way of Alicia Bridges'"I Love the Nightlife" (listen to him say "Where did he get that information?" with "Where did he get that..." in his usual Berenger voice, but finishing the sentence with a garishly cartoonish "info-may-shaaaaawn?"). Berenger is hilariously awful throughout, but never more so than in the climax, where his one-on-one brawl with Dillon is staged so badly by Brinker that it doesn't even take coverage into consideration, with Berenger only doing some Seagal-esque closeups while his completely unconcealed double--with noticeably darker hair and his face visible--dukes it out with Dillon. And if you're expecting a reunion of PLATOON Oscar nominees Berenger and Dafoe, this ain't it: they have two brief scenes together, but they're shot in a way that the actors are never sharing the frame, making it obvious that they either weren't there at the same time or if they were, Brinker just shot it in the most awkward, cumbersome way possible. BAD COUNTRY seems like it was made with good intentions, and sure, perhaps some of its rough edges could've been smoothed over had Brinker lived to completely finish it, but what's here is just by-the-numbers stuff and the very definition of "straight-to-DVD." It's almost like the film's been released in the exact condition Brinker left it in the editing room at the time of his death. (R, 104 mins)

THE LEGEND OF HERCULES
(US - 2014)

I'm not saying Kellan Lutz is the worst Hercules ever, but he does bring something to the role that famed predecessors like Steve Reeves and Lou Ferrigno lacked. Of course, I'm talking about frosted tips. Rushed into production by Millennium Films honcho Avi Lerner in the classic fashion befitting his Cannon cover band in order to beat Dwayne Johnson's upcoming HERCULES to theaters, the origin story THE LEGEND OF HERCULES allegedly cost $70 million to produce, but you'd never know it by the shoddy results. Shot in 3D at Lerner's Sofia-based Nu Boyana Studios and loaded with CGI courtesy of his usual Bulgarian clown crew at Worldwide FX, THE LEGEND OF HERCULES is dull and plodding, and seems to have been created by people who aren't even vaguely aware of the Hercules mythos. For the most part, this is yet another 300 ripoff, filled with stop/start slo-mo and the usual speed-ramping battle scenes. There's even a BEN-HUR slave galley detour and a section that blatantly cribs from SPARTACUS and GLADIATOR, with Hercules and friend Sotiris (Liam McIntyre, who replaced the late Andy Whitfield on the Starz series SPARTACUS) forced to fight for their lives in an arena. Lutz's Hercules doesn't even get to display his strength until 75 minutes in, and even then he just swings some bricks around before a sword fight with his vengeful stepfather King Amphitryon (Scott Adkins), who's spent the entire film trying to have him killed. Other than fighting the Nemean Lion, this is pretty much a standard-issue sword-and-sandal opus about a bland pretty boy who happens to be named Hercules. They don't even bother making Chiron a centaur; here he's just a doddering but wise elder played by Rade Serbedzija. Say what you will about director Renny Harlin, but he used to make entertaining movies once upon a time. THE LEGEND OF HERCULES isn't one of them. A barely-there Harlin sets himself to hack mode and is so content to just let the FX crew and the Almost Basil Poledouris score carry the load that it doesn't take long before you're wishing Lerner sent Lutz packing to the nearest TWILIGHT convention so the overacting Adkins could play Hercules and second unit director Isaac Florentine (WHY isn't he getting better gigs?) could relieve Harlin of whatever it is he's doing. Feeling twice as long as it is and exhibiting a laziness that borders on audience contempt, THE LEGEND OF HERCULES is saddled with an unengaging story, a complete blank of a leading man, Johnathan Schaech in corn-rows, and astonishingly bad visual effects that look like an already-outdated video game, in addition to wasting great character actors like Serbedzija and Kenneth Cranham. This is probably the cheapest-looking, wide-release would-be "blockbuster" you'll see in 2014. Is there any reason that 50-year-old muscleman epics look better than THE LEGEND OF HERCULES does now? I skipped this in theaters, but I have to believe that even the most ardent CGI apologists would've had to laugh this off the screen, right? (PG-13, 99 mins)

ODD THOMAS
(US - 2014)

The first in Dean Koontz's best-selling series of novels had a tumultuous journey to its release after being shot back in 2011, with lawsuits between disputing production companies and a brief period where filming was suspended because money ran out. A labor of love for writer/producer/director Stephen Sommers, working with a relatively low--for him, at least--budget of $25 million after the bloated nothingness of 2004's reviled VAN HELSING and 2009's forgettable G.I. JOE: RISE OF THE COBRA, ODD THOMAS still has all the usual Sommers touches of whooshing camera movements and an overload of CGI. The biggest difference is that now it's all a bit less convincing and the whole film looks and plays less like a $25 million feature and more like the pilot to a CBS TV series. The story unfolds in a manner that makes it seem more at home on TV than on the big screen, which could at least partially be the reason it was practially smuggled into just a few theaters and on VOD earlier this year with absolutely no publicity. Another more likely one is that the central plot of the film's antagonists involves a mass shooting at a crowded shopping mall, which everyone involved perhaps felt was too touchy a subject. Anton Yelchin is Odd Thomas, whose first name came about because "Todd" was misspelled on his birth certificate. Odd can see dead people, and murder victims frequently come to him seeking justice against their still-free killers. Odd's gift comes in handy to small-town Pico Mundo police chief Porter (Willem Dafoe), who usually devises a way to entrap the guilty based on info provided by Odd. When Odd starts seeing "bodachs"--harbingers of evil who look like sinewy, ectoplasmic versions of H.R. Giger's ALIEN design--hovering around town, specifically around strange newcomer Fungus Bob (Shuler Hensley), he knows something horrible is about to happen that may obliterate Pico Mundo.

Yelchin is very well-cast as Odd, an affable guy who didn't ask for his "gift" but knows he must use it for the common good. He really just wants to work his simple job as a diner cook and hang out with his impossibly wholesome girlfriend Stormy (Addison Timlin), but duty frequently calls. Early on, the quaintly old-fashioned back-and-forth between the couple, Porter's head-shaking but fatherly "Oh, Odd! Why, I oughta..." admonishings, and the cozy, Spielbergian small-town atmosphere comes off as more than a little hokey, the charming Timlin is stuck with some irritatingly cutesy dialogue that seems to belong in an '80s sitcom ("That's some plan, Odd one!" she often chirps, almost pausing for the laugh track to kick in), and Sommers' script has a definite "TV show exposition" style to the plot set-up. That, coupled with the B-level visual effects, creates some hiccups and stumbles along the way, but once the main plot commences and Odd, Stormy, and Porter figure out what's going on, ODD THOMAS gets much better, leading to a legitimately surprising twist ending (if you haven't read the book) that probably would've been the first thing to go had Sommers made this for a major studio. Sommers makes some significant changes--he completely eliminates Stormy's backstory of being sexually abused by a foster father, and Little Ozzie, a major character in the book, is played by Patton Oswalt in just one scene here--but knew that the story wouldn't work without sticking with its original ending. Sommers deserves some credit for pulling off this ending and, considering most of his output, making a film that isn't terrible (though I will cop to being a big DEEP RISING fan), but ODD THOMAS is too blandly shot and just feels too much like a workmanlike television show to work as effective cinema. Put this on prime-time TV as a weekly series, and Sommers has a winner, but there's no way this is leading to a big-screen ODD THOMAS franchise. (Unrated, 97 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

CONTAMINATION
aka ALIEN CONTAMINATION
(Italy/West Germany - 1980; US release 1981)

Directed by Lewis Coates (Luigi Cozzi). Written by Lewis Coates (Luigi Cozzi) and Erich Tomek. Cast: Ian McCulloch, Louise Marleau, Marino Mase, Siegfried Rauch, Gisela Hahn, Carlo De Mejo, Carlo Monni, Martin Sorrentino, Mike Morris, Brigitte Wagner. (Unrated, 95 mins/R-rated US theatrical version, 84 mins).

Given its box-office popularity and groundbreaking special effects, it couldn't have been much of a surprise when Ridley Scott's 1979 classic ALIEN spawned its own subgenre of B-grade ripoffs over the next few years. And it's also no surprise that the Italians climbed aboard the bandwagon, even though the most prominent of the ALIEN imitations were from the US with the Roger Corman productions GALAXY OF TERROR (1981) and FORBIDDEN WORLD (1982), plus the non-Corman CREATURE (1985), and the UK, with HORROR PLANET, aka INSEMINOID (1982) finding fans in drive-ins and on late-night cable. The Italian exploitation scene inevitably got into the act, but they must've been too busy with zombie and cannibal films and getting prepped for the flood of post-nuke and barbarian ripoffs coming down the pike because they didn't contribute much to the post-ALIEN cash-in cycle other than two films from 1980: Ciro Ippolito's misleadingly-titled ALIEN 2: ON EARTH and Luigi Cozzi's CONTAMINATION. What differentiates the Italian ALIEN clones from their American and British counterparts is spelled out in the title of Ippolito's film: they primarily took place on Earth instead of space, and they only used the Scott film as a starting point for stories that went into generally different directions. ALIEN 2: ON EARTH, which came out on Blu-ray in 2011 as the first and last release of Midnight Legacy, was considered a long-lost Holy Grail of obscure Eurotrash, allegedly never given an official US release, though Cinema Shares acquired it and it's listed under the title STRANGERS in John Stanley's Revenge of the Creature Features Movie Guide, published in 1988, so it must've gotten some kind of exposure somewhere in America, either theatrically or perhaps on TV. It's a mind-numbing bore with Belinda Mayne as a psychic spelunker that has some occasional bits of inspired splatter caused by some alien rocks but is killed by a plethora of padding, with endless tracking shots inside the caves, Mayne standing at a marina while a boat docks in real time, and Ippolito's bizarre idea of how Americans hang out...with its group of heroes (among them is future CEMETERY MAN director Michele Soavi) heading to the local bowling alley to share a big can of pineapple juice. ALIEN 2: ON EARTH is worth seeing for Italian ripoff completists, but it's a chore to sit through. Fortunately, the news is better with CONTAMINATION, which is no less idiotic but is filled with some genuinely lively splatter, so much so that it landed itself a spot on the infamous British "video nasties" list in the early '80s.

CONTAMINATION was directed by genre vet and Dario Argento associate Luigi Cozzi under his usual "Lewis Coates" pseudonym. Cozzi was coming off of his highly entertaining STAR WARS ripoff STARCRASH (1979) and would go on to make two HERCULES movies with Lou Ferrigno for Cannon, who acquired CONTAMINATION in the early days of the Golan-Globus empire, cut 11 minutes out of it, and retitled it ALIEN CONTAMINATION to make sure everyone knew it was ALIEN ripoff. But Cozzi and co-writer Erich Tomek, who worked under a variety of pseudonyms and spent most of his career penning screenplays for German softcore porn films, are less interested in an alien of the H.R. Giger variety and more concerned with constantly replicating that film's unforgettable chestbursting moment. In an opening remarkably similar to Lucio Fulci's ZOMBIE (1979), a ship careens into New York Harbor, and police find the crew gruesomely slaughtered. Following one of the most awkward introductory handshakes you'll ever see, sarcastic NYPD Lt. Tony Aris (Marino Mase) and Dr. Turner (Carlo Monni) investigate the cargo hold and find countless crates of coffee filled with strange green, football-sized eggs. One of the eggs rolls under a pipe and, from the warmth, "ripens" and explodes, spraying a toxic goo all over Dr. Turner and an assistant, causing their torsos to explode. Aris flees the scene and is detained by the military, led by brittle Col. Stella Holmes (Louise Marleau), who's from "Special Division #5," and prone to barking numerically-based orders like "Put emergency plan #7 into effect!" and "Call in the Special Section, Squad 2!" Military scientists determine that the eggs are filled with an alien bacteria, and then, almost as an afterthought, Holmes remembers she headed an inquiry into a disastrous space mission to Mars two years earlier where Hubbard (Ian McCulloch) claimed he and fellow astronaut Hamilton (Siegfried Rauch, Steve McQueen's racing nemesis in the 1971 vanity project LE MANS) found a cave filled with the same mysterious eggs, with Hamilton being drawn in by a strange power and never making it back home. Hubbard was written off as a delusional madman and is now a disheveled, self-pitying, alcoholic wreck when Holmes finds him and tells him he was right all along. Hubbard joins Holmes and Aris, and they trace the ship to a Colombian coffee plantation where the presumed-dead Hamilton, taken over by an alien force known as "the Cyclops," is enacting a plan for the alien domination of Earth by spreading a chestbursting virus housed inside these Mars-based eggs that are to be distributed all over the planet. Yes, that's right--the primary side effect of the alien bacteria is that it causes your chest and gut to explode: the perfect excuse to recreate ALIEN's signature move over and over and over again.

Of course, that was enough to make gorehounds happy, and the gleefully explosive splatter throughout CONTAMINATION is what's endeared it so much to Eurotrash fans over the years even though it really drags in the middle and almost turns Rauch's Hamilton into a Bond villain at times, right down to his Blofeld suit. It also has an infectiously goofy main theme by "The Goblin" (when the band was led by Fabio Pignatelli and Agostino Marangolo and without Claudio Simonetti), which boasts a synth cue that sounds like Cozzi's hoping he doesn't land on the Whammy. CONTAMINATION was made during the period when British actor McCulloch found himself an unexpected witness to the Italian gore revolution: he had just finished shooting both Fulci's ZOMBIE and Marino Girolami's ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST, which would be infamously released in the US in 1982, with additional Roy Frumkes footage, as the legendary DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D. All three films were banned in the UK as part of the Video Nasty controversy. McCulloch didn't make any more Italian horror films after CONTAMINATION, opting instead for regular work on British TV until the mid '90s, when he seemed to retire from acting. Now 74, McCulloch appeared in the 2013 British horror spoof BEHIND THE SCENES OF TOTAL HELL, but in recent years, has found a following on the cult horror convention circuit, usually as part of Italian horror panels discussing the career of Lucio Fulci and the Video Nasty era.

CONTAMINATION found Cozzi in the prime of his filmmaking career. He co-wrote Argento's 1972 giallo FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, had a hand in his four-part 1973 Italian TV series DOOR INTO DARKNESS, and directed his own giallo with 1975's impressive THE KILLER MUST KILL AGAIN. But it was the run from STARCRASH to 1983's HERCULES for which Cozzi is best remembered and there isn't much of note after 1985's hilariously bad THE ADVENTURES OF HERCULES. Cozzi was often called upon for uncredited clean-up duty to fix the messes left by fired directors. In what must've been a purely money gig, he finished LA GEMELLA EROTICA, a 1980 hardcore porno started by BLUE MOVIE director Alberto Cavallone. He was one of five (!) directors cycled through the notoriously troubled NOSFERATU IN VENICE, the barely-released 1988 semi-sequel to Werner Herzog's NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE (1979). Producer Augusto Caminito is the credited director and helmed most of the picture, but Cozzi, Mario Caiano, and Maurizio Lucidi were onboard at various times and were either fired or driven away by the unstable nature of volatile star Klaus Kinski, who even took his own turn behind the camera. In 1986, Cozzi reunited with Lou Ferrigno and Cannon when he wrote and planned on directing SINBAD OF THE SEVEN SEAS, which was intended to be a mini-series for Italian TV. Cozzi was fired during pre-production and replaced by Enzo G. Castellari (THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS, 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS), who rewrote most of Cozzi's script. Castellari's footage was deemed unusable and Cannon shelved the entire project until 1989, when they rehired Cozzi and had him take the six hours of Castellari footage, shoot new wraparound sequences framing the plot as a thoroughly confusing bedtime story being read by a mom (Daria Nicolodi) to her daughter (Cozzi's daughter Giada) and edit it all down to a 90-minute feature. The result was understandably an incoherent hodgepodge and went straight-to-video in 1990, though Cozzi did manage to salvage John Steiner's gloriously hammy performance as evil wizard Jaffar from the wreckage.

Cozzi's career in narrative cinema has been on hold since two films he made in 1989: THE BLACK CAT, an oddity marketed as a Poe movie but really Cozzi's unofficial attempt at completing Argento's "Three Mothers" trilogy, following 1977's SUSPIRIA and 1980's INFERNO (Argento officially completed the trilogy himself with 2007's MOTHER OF TEARS), and the bizarre PAGANINI HORROR, about a possessed Paganini composition unleashing hell on an all-female rock band--whose hit singles sound suspiciously like ELO and Bon Jovi--shooting a video in an old dark manor. Cozzi made two documentaries about Argento in the 1990s and since then, has managed Profondo Rosso, the Argento and Italian horror memorabilia store and horror-fan tourist destination in Rome, named after Argento's 1975 classic DEEP RED. These days, the now-67-year-old Cozzi can usually be found behind the counter at the store, a museum curator of sorts, preserving the memory of the glory days of Italian horror and genre cinema. Like his former star McCulloch, Cozzi is also a fixture at horror conventions and has taken part in several interviews for DVD releases of his films. Never the visionary auteur that many of his contemporaries were, Cozzi was at least proactive enough to see the writing on the wall concerning the decline of Italian horror (and, it should be added, his own films), and got out early. Perhaps his mentor Argento would've been wise to follow his lead.

This 1981 Florida newspaper ad, archived by horrorpedia.com, strongly suggests that
Cannon was trying to attract fans of SCANNERS as well as ALIEN.

KING OF THE GYPSIES
(US - 1978)

Written and directed by Frank Pierson. Cast: Sterling Hayden, Shelley Winters, Susan Sarandon, Judd Hirsch, Eric Roberts, Brooke Shields, Annette O'Toole, Annie Potts, Michael V. Gazzo, Antonia Rey, Stephen Mendillo, Roy Brocksmith, Matthew Labyorteaux, Danielle Brisebois. (R, 112 mins)

It's easy to forget that there was once a time in the early 1980s when critics were routinely hailing Eric Roberts as one of the greatest actors of his generation. His performances as tragic Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten's estranged, possessive husband and eventual murderer Paul Snider in Bob Fosse's STAR 80 (1983) and as a dim-witted, small-time criminal in Stuart Rosenberg's THE POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE (1984) showed a raw, intense talent unlike any other leading men of the time, with the possible exception of his POPE co-star Mickey Rourke. Roberts wasn't generating big box office numbers but there was no denying that he was the real deal and an actor's actor. He received international acclaim for Yugoslav auteur Dusan Makavejev's offbeat comedy THE COCA-COLA KID (1985) and in just his sixth film, scored a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for Andrei Konchalovsky's RUNAWAY TRAIN (also 1985). He lost to Don Ameche in COCOON, and that Oscar nod would prove to be his career pinnacle. Word of his being "difficult" along with drug abuse and instances of assaulting a police officer and domestic violence would tarnish his image over the next decade, the same decade that saw his younger sister Julia, from whom he would soon be estranged for many years, skyrocket to the kind of worldwide fame and fan adoration that he would never receive. Roberts wasn't exactly blackballed out of Hollywood, but the accolades that culminated in a potential Oscar for RUNAWAY TRAIN led to nothing more than the little-seen romantic comedy NOBODY'S FOOL (1986), the period drama BLOOD RED (where he used his clout to get Julia a small role in her first acting job), which was filmed in 1986 and went straight-to-video three years later, and some made-for-TV movies. By 1989, Roberts was playing a replacement Tommy Chong to Cheech Marin in RUDE AWAKENING and starring in the kickboxing actioner BEST OF THE BEST, while Julia was getting her first Oscar nod for STEEL MAGNOLIAS and was about to star in PRETTY WOMAN. In just a decade, Roberts went from being the Marlon Brando of his day to the misbehaving, troublemaking older brother of America's Sweetheart and one of the signature faces of straight-to-VHS in the 1990s.

But back in 1978, 22-year-old Roberts came storming out of the gate, earning a Golden Globe nomination for Best Motion Picture Acting Debut for his performance in KING OF THE GYPSIES, written and directed by Frank Pierson. Pierson got his start writing for TV shows like HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL and NAKED CITY, and created the acclaimed but short-lived 1971 James Garner TV series NICHOLS. He received Oscar nominations for his CAT BALLOU (1965) and COOL HAND LUKE (1967) screenplays and also wrote the Sidney Lumet apartment heist favorite THE ANDERSON TAPES (1971). Pierson won a Screenplay Oscar for Lumet's DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975), which got him enough clout to tackle the 1976 remake of A STAR IS BORN with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. That was his second directing effort, the first being 1970's THE LOOKING GLASS WAR, his strangely inert adaptation of the John Le Carre spy novel that's best known for a brawl-for-the-ages between Christopher Jones and Anthony Hopkins, but stumbles badly in the second half when Pierson turns it into his own tedious version of an ennui-drenched Antonioni film. But after blockbusters like DOG DAY AFTERNOON and A STAR IS BORN, he was essentially able to make whatever he wanted, which led him to KING OF THE GYPSIES, a very loose adaptation of the non-fiction book by Serpico and The Valachi Papers author Peter Maas (the credits read "Suggested by the book..." rather than "Based on the book..."), and by "very loose," I mean "uses the title and little else." What Pierson's film does is basically take the concept of the modern-day gypsy--and all the stereotypes that come with it--and fashion it into a de facto reworking of THE GODFATHER with gypsies in place of gangsters. It's not a bad idea as far as commercial entertainment goes, but, like THE LOOKING GLASS WAR, KING OF THE GYPSIES starts out strong and and loses its way.

Shot in NYC in early 1978 in the snowy aftermath of the legendary blizzard that dumped on the midwest and moved east, KING OF THE GYPSIES tells the story of a gypsy tribe led by the fierce and ruthless King Zharko Stepanowicz (Sterling Hayden) and his wife Queen Rachel (Shelley Winters). Years earlier, Zharko abducted Rose, the teenage daughter of rival tribe leader Spiro Giorgio (Michael V. Gazzo), when Giorgio tried to back out of a deal that would've seen Rose marry Zharko's despicable son Groffo (when Giorgio justifies his actions by saying "She hates him!" old world Zharko replies "Since when did 'like' or 'not like' have anything to do with marriage?"). When a tribal council rules against Zharko, the old man refuses to be "fucked like a $3 whore" and takes what he believes is his. Eventually, Rose (Susan Sarandon) enters a loveless marriage with drunken, abusive Groffo (Judd Hirsch, right around the time TAXI was taking off) and they have a son, Dave. Growing up, young Dave assists his mother in scams and thefts as Groffo continues to be an drunken lout earning the perpetual disdain of his father, who sees in Dave everything Groffo is not. As a young adult (Roberts appears 40 minutes in), Dave gets by on insurance money he scams from staging car accidents and slip-and-falls in grocery stores, but he has bigger dreams outside of the sheltered gypsy world. He gets a job as a singing waiter in a restaurant and starts dating pretty Sharon (Annette O'Toole), but King Zharko is determined to pull him back into the family and marry Persa (Annie Potts, who gets the film's most 1978 bit of dialogue with "His family's got a Betamax!"). Zharko is dying, and recognizing that Groffo would be the Joffrey Baratheon of gypsy kings, wants Dave to be his successor. When the old man passes and Dave holds the medallion and ring signifying his kingship, Groffo is so enraged that he hires two men to kill his son. They fail, and Dave gets back at his father by attempting a daring rescue of his 12-year-old sister Tita (Brooke Shields), who Groffo's just sold for $6000 (that he's already lost at the track) in a hastily-brokered deal with another tribe leader (Roy Brocksmith) who's arranging a marriage for his own very Groffo-like son. The story then turns into an almost TAXI DRIVER redux as a shotgun-toting Dave goes full vigilante against his father.

David Grisman's score has cues that recall the work of Nino Rota, but the GODFATHER parallels throughout KING OF THE GYPSIES go beyond that: Zharko is Vito Corleone, Dave is Michael (though he's even more reluctant to get involved, he eventually fulfills that role), and Groffo displays some characteristics of Sonny, though Sonny's worst offense is that he was impulsive and bad-tempered, even though he thought he was doing the right thing for the family. Groffo puts himself first and has no redeeming qualities, whether he's selling his daughter, gambling away his money, or beating Rose, ripping her shirt off and violently shoving Dave's face against her bare breasts in some imagined Oedipal outrage. The very presence of Hayden and Gazzo is another nod, with Hayden's role as corrupt cop McCluskey in THE GODFATHER and Gazzo's Oscar-nominated performance as Frankie Pentangeli in THE GODFATHER PART II. The back end of KING OF THE GYPSIES reeks of either Pierson dropping the ball or Paramount and/or producer Dino De Laurentiis demanding a big, crowd-pleasing finale. This is a rare instance of a film that would probably be much stronger if it was an hour longer. Pierson wants this to be an epic, but once Zharko dies, it seems as if he started panicking and realized he only had 30 minutes to wrap this thing up. When Hayden exits the film, everything after feels rushed and incomplete and the ending is terrible, with Roberts' voiceover--never a good sign--not very confidently mumbling "Maybe I can lead them into the 20th century," demonstrating all the craft, forethought and emotional resonance of a "Poochie died on his way back to his home planet" quick fix. KING OF THE GYPSIES also has no idea what to do with its female characters--only Sarandon's Rose is given any significant screen time, while the rest are underwritten or simply vanish from the movie (Winters has nothing to do). Even in the case of Shields' Tita, whose fate should change the course of the story, it's like she was never even there. It's difficult to tell if this is deliberate, as in the context of this film's depiction of gypsy women as a commodity, or if Pierson simply forgot about her and assumed audiences would too as he turned Dave into a gypsy Charles Bronson. All of this goes to illustrate that Pierson was a much better screenwriter than a director. Pierson's writing in the hands of a guy like Lumet produces celluloid magic. Pierson's writing in the hands of Pierson the director seems to show him at odds with himself. By the time Pierson died in 2012 at the age of 87, he went out on top as a producer on hugely popular TV shows like THE GOOD WIFE and MAD MEN. He also served as the President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 2001 to 2005, and before that, directed acclaimed Showtime and HBO films like SOMEBODY HAS TO SHOOT THE PICTURE (1990), CITIZEN COHN (1992), TRUMAN (1995), DIRTY PICTURES (2000), and CONSPIRACY (2001). It's also worth noting that he didn't write any of those cable films, which again supports the notion that Pierson was at his best when he didn't have to make directorial decisions that undermined and compromised his own scripts.

If you've seen Roberts in enough shitty movies over the last 25 years, going back to his early days as an ambitious, rising star is a revelation. Roberts was doing the kind of acting that made Brando and James Dean legends. He has such an unusual presence in films like this, STAR 80, and THE POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE that it's easy to see why some may have found him off-putting in the era of post-JAWS, post-STAR WARS blockbusters. Young Roberts was the kind of actor who would've flourished in the late '60s and early '70s. He's terrific as the conflicted would-be king, torn between family (mainly his respect for his grandfather and his concern for his baby sister) and his own dreams ("I'd kinda like to be a surgeon, you know...help people" he haplessly tells Zharko in a scene Roberts and Hayden improvised that's almost an homage to the "I coulda been a contender!" speech in ON THE WATERFRONT). There are numerous instances where he recalls both Brando and Dean in the way he seems uncomfortable in his own skin and lashes out because of an inability to articulate his emotions, whether he just starts punching a wall or hurling multiple coffee cups across the room. He's occasionally mannered and jumpy, but it's an extremely impressive debut. A look at Roberts'IMDb page is a thoroughly depressing experience. His '90s decline still included supporting roles in hit movies like FINAL ANALYSIS (1992) and THE SPECIALIST (1994), with a good lead every now and again (1996's IT'S MY PARTY got him some acclaim but led nowhere), and in recent years, he occasionally turned up in a major film like THE DARK KNIGHT (2008) or THE EXPENDABLES (2010), but these days, apart from sporadic one-shot guest spots on TV shows like CSI, JUSTIFIED, and GLEE, Tom Six's upcoming THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE III is about as high-profile as he gets. He seems incapable of turning down an offer, resulting in bit parts in scores of films that probably won't even get released and probably shouldn't. How else does one explain Roberts having 66 credits for 2014 alone? And 42 in 2013? Those are the kinds of cameo gigs where you're on the set for half a day, tops, or where you can literally phone in your performance as the voice of A TALKING CAT!?! Roberts gave up years ago and is simply taking advantage of name recognition for quick cash (of course, he managed to squeeze in a season on CELEBRITY REHAB, and he and his wife Eliza just appeared on a CELEBRITY WIFE-SWAP episode that also served to alert the world to the continued existence of Robin Leach and Joan Severance). There's no shame in that and he knows the stuff he's doing is garbage, but it's sad that it's come to that when you see the dynamic, hungry young man in KING OF THE GYPSIES. Hollywood doesn't know what to do with unconventional actors like Roberts and Rourke. Their star vehicles bomb and execs usually have them play villains and psychos and the actors get frustrated, sometimes acting out by deliberately sabotaging themselves and their implosions become self-fulfilling prophecies. Obviously, Roberts' career didn't pan out the way he'd hoped, he's burned every bridge along the way and, like Rourke, he'd very likely squander another chance if he got it, but guys like Roberts and Rourke are survivors. Roberts is pushing 60 and shouldn't have to schlep this hard, appearing in so many Z-grade turds that a cameo in Uwe Boll's ASSAULT ON WALL STREET actually qualifies as one of his better recent assignments. Sure, he's always working and he probably lives comfortably, but there must be a serious filmmaker out there with a late-career-defining role for Eric Roberts. Everybody loves a comeback. Wouldn't it be nice to see him in the kind of WRESTLER-type triumph worthy of his talents?

THE ART OF THE STEAL
(Canada - 2013; US release 2014)

Is there anybody who doesn't like Kurt Russell? Over his 50-year career, he's managed to become a beloved movie icon without actually having many blockbusters at the box office. 1991's BACKDRAFT and 1994's STARGATE were his biggest hits, and they never broke $80 million in 1990s dollars. Russell's best films tend to cultivate their bases over time, which is a trait he shares with his old friend John Carpenter. None of their collaborations performed spectacularly on their initial theatrical releases, but 1981's ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, 1982's THE THING, and 1986's BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA are frequently cited as essential films of their decade. They found their audience on video and cable and they've remained popular over the years as they've been discovered by new generations of fans. Even TOMBSTONE wasn't that massive a hit in 1993. But it has such a fervent following today that it's hard to believe it topped out at $56 million and never got higher than third place at the box office. The typical Russell vehicle has been one that did modest business in theaters and became popular video rentals on their way to constant rotation on cable. Russell's filmography reads like TNT's and AMC's weekend schedule over the last 20 years: USED CARS, OVERBOARD, TEQUILA SUNRISE, TANGO & CASH, UNLAWFUL ENTRY, CAPTAIN RON, EXECUTIVE DECISION, ESCAPE FROM L.A., BREAKDOWN, DARK BLUE, POSEIDON, etc. Russell may be the patron saint of "Movie you end up watching until it's over if you find it while channel-surfing."

Now 63, Russell's slowed down in recent years and took a five-year break after his turn as Stuntman Mike in the DEATH PROOF half of GRINDHOUSE before returning in a supporting role as a coach in the barely-released 2012 football drama TOUCHBACK. It's no surprise that, with today's "$100 million on the opening weekend or it's a bomb" mindset, a new Kurt Russell movie only managed to get released on 60 screens for a $64,000 gross, but THE ART OF THE STEAL is a fun heist comedy that finds the man in vintage "Kurt Russell" form. Russell is Crunch Calhoun, a veteran wheelman who just spent over five years in a Polish prison after taking the fall for his younger brother Nicky (Matt Dillon) when their last job went south. Nicky is a slick con artist who's just made off with a priceless Georges Seurat painting but did so by cutting out his partner (Dax Ravina) who demands compensation from Crunch. Crunch touches base with Nicky and they reassemble the old crew--French forger Guy (Chris Diamantopoulos) and Paddy the Rolodex (Kenneth Welsh), with new additions Francie (Jay Baruchel), and Crunch's greedy wife Lola (Katheryn Winnick), on a $20 million plan to get a rare Gutenberg-printed Gospel According to James out of a Montreal customs house and smuggle it over the US border into Detroit, all with an incompetent Interpol agent (THE DAILY SHOW's Jason Jones) and a reluctant informant (Terence Stamp) on their tail. Of course, double and triple-crosses transpire and there's really nothing here plot-wise you haven't seen in a ton of other caper movies, but the Russell-led ensemble works very well together and writer/director Jonathan Sobol throws in some offbeat touches (like Ravina's brawny goon being a Seurat connoisseur), and numerous snappy exchanges and bits of quotable dialogue (Crunch and Nicky referring to lecherous Paddy as "Uncle Fucks-a-lot" and "Sloppy Balls McCarthy"; Francie putting on a fake Amish beard and telling a border officer that he's starring in a Broadway musical version of WITNESS! "with an exclamation point"). The heist itself is fairly routine and the story rather slight, but THE ART OF THE STEAL is an enjoyable little movie that doesn't overstay its welcome and gets a lot of mileage out of Russell's engaging presence and genuinely funny performance. It's the kind of film you'll stop on and end up watching if you come across it on TV some lazy Saturday afternoon--in other words, it's a quintessential Kurt Russell movie, and you can always use one of those. Also, "Crunch Calhoun" is right up there with "Snake Plissken,""R.J. MacReady,""Reno Hightower,""Jack Burton,""Gabriel Cash," and "Bull McCaffrey" on the list of Awesome Kurt Russell Character Names. (R, 90 mins)

47 RONIN
(US - 2013)

In the coming years, the long-delayed 47 RONIN is likely to be regarded less as a just a bad movie and more as a case study for meddlesome production mismanagement and apocalyptically out-to-lunch decision-making. It's not just a case of too many cooks in the kitchen--it's also a case of everyone just assuming someone else has got the cooking covered. Every problem that the production encountered got worse when simply throwing more money at it failed to magically solve anything. The legendary Japanese tale of the 47 Ronin has been told before and referenced many times in Japanese cinema: in the 18th century, 47 outcast former samurai seek to avenge the death of their master, driven to suicide after being shamed in a dispute with a rival lord who insulted him. It's a story that's influenced everything from Japanese folklore to the classic samurai films of Akira Kurosawa or Kenji Mizoguchi, who made the original 1941 version of 47 RONIN (Kon Ichikawa directed the 1994 remake). The 2013 47 RONIN may share a title and the setting, but it ends there. Why? Because the people behind the latest 47 RONIN offer what the other versions lack and they felt we've been missing all this time: a first-time director (Carl Rinsch) working with a $175 million budget; a shape-shifting witch disguising herself as a demonic fox and casting spells on samurai warriors; and absurdly inappropriate creatures like ogres, orcs, dragons, something called "the Lovecraftian Samurai," and Keanu Reeves. It's the famous story filtered through LORD OF THE RINGS and coming out as something akin to IN THE NAME OF THE RONIN. Who thought any of this was a good idea? Reeves has done some fine work over his career, but after DANGEROUS LIAISONS and BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA, how does anyone willingly cast him in a serious period piece?

Universal knew they were in trouble when they announced a writedown before the film even opened. It grossed just $38 million domestically and bombed overseas. Of course, it was Rinsch who got thrown under the bus, but things only got ridiculous when the suits didn't like the rough cut he submitted as far back as the fall of 2011. They complained that it felt like "a samurai art film" and demanded more special effects and more Reeves. Reeves plays Kai, a Japanese/British half-breed adopted by the benevolent samurai leader Lord Asano (Min Tanaka). Kai is a character invented for the film, and it constantly struggles to find a use for him. The real star is veteran Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada as Oishi, the leader of the late Lord Asano's disgraced ronin, who's plotting vengeance against Lord Kira (Tadanobu Asano), who's under the control of the aforementioned shapeshifting witch (Rinko Kikuchi). Kikuchi was added to the film after Rinsch's original cut was rejected and DRIVE screenwriter Hossein Amini was brought on to reconstruct Chris Morgan's script. Amini added the supernatural elements as well as more scenes for Reeves, whose Kai was so secondary to the crux of the plot that he initially wasn't even involved in the climax of the film. Production was delayed since they had to wait until Reeves was finished with MAN OF TAI CHI so he could return to shoot the new scenes, causing the fall 2012 release date to get bumped to over a year later, when the film finally opened on Christmas Day 2013. It already felt like Reeves was in another movie altogether, but it's never more glaring than in the climax, where Oishi and Kira fight it out while Kai battles the witch, who has shape-shifted into a snake-like, fire-breathing dragon. Not since hastily-shot footage of Eddie Murphy goofing off in a tank was shoehorned into the two-years-on-the-shelf Dudley Moore comedy BEST DEFENSE in 1984 has post-production stitching looked so cumbersome and desperate. How does a beloved, culture-defining story of the samurai code of honor end up with Keanu Reeves discovering his CROUCHING TIGER-meets-THE MATRIX flying powers while battlling a dragon?

Actual shot from 47 RONIN

You want to know the extent of the cluelessness of everyone involved? It wasn't discovered until shooting began that many of the Japanese actors weren't fluent in English and had to speak their dialogue phonetically (some of them are quite clearly dubbed or they at least looped it in post). Who was in charge here? Sure, some of this probably lies on Rinsch, but this stopped being his vision once the rough cut was shot down. From that point on, he was simply an employee on his way to becoming a convenient scapegoat. The majority of the blame should rest with the producers and studio execs who insisted on abandoning the source story with the lethal combo of Reeves and CGI monsters and let the budget bloat without ever really settling on or communicating to Rinsch exactly what it was they wanted. Sanada and Asano give it their best effort and try to bring some sense of dignity to the grease fire spreading around them, and the film would work a lot better if it stayed focused on them instead of Reeves and orcs and dragons. The visual effects are subpar for such an obscene budget and where's the sense of spirit that vital to any samurai film? These things are supposed to be rousing and alive! Where's the camaraderie among the ronin? There's 47 of them but we meet something like five, tops. This whole catastrophe might've been more palatable with the right kind of tongue-in-cheek attitude, but 47 RONIN is dour, dull, and takes itself far too seriously for a film that has little use and even less respect for its source story. Its only accomplishment is in the way it effectively demonstrates everything wrong with Hollywood in just under two hours. (PG-13, 119 mins)

I, FRANKENSTEIN
(US/Australia - 2014)

It's no surprise that I, FRANKENSTEIN looks like an UNDERWORLD sequel, as it's based on an unpublished graphic novel by UNDERWORLD co-writer and actor Kevin Grevioux and features Bill Nighy (UNDERWORLD's nefarious vampire leader Viktor) as the villain. It seems to take place in the same Vampires-and-Lycans world, but it owes just as much to THE DARK KNIGHT, right down to that film's Harvey Dent/Two-Face, Aaron Eckhart, in the title role. Relying heavily on mimicking Christian Bale's grunting Batman voice, Eckhart is Frankenstein's monster, here dubbed "Adam," and any faithfulness to Mary Shelley is buried by the four-minute mark, along with Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Aden Young), laid to rest by Adam just as he's confronted by a horde of winged demons. He's rescued by warriors in the service of Lenore (Mirando Otto), Queen of the Gargoyles, who's been locked in an eternal struggle with the army of demon prince Naberius. Cut to 200 years later, as Adam is now a globetrotting demonslayer still pursued by Naberius' minions. Naberius is passing himself off as wealthy Charles Wessex (Nighy), CEO of the Wessex Institute, where his science research is a cover for his real plot: to learn the secrets inside Dr. Frankenstein's diary in order to transfer the damned souls of descended demons into thousands of reanimated corpses stored in a secret bunker at the lab's headquarters.

Considering that Lionsgate kept this on the shelf for a year after its original planned release, only to see it gross $19 million domestically against a $65 million budget, it's not likely that I, FRANKENSTEIN will become an UNDERWORLD-like franchise (or the initially-rumored crossover film), or that there will be any future interest in actually publishing Grevioux's graphic novel. It's got a goofy enough plot that it should be campy fun, but while the dark and dour demeanor worked for THE DARK KNIGHT, it doesn't bode as well here. No film with a story this silly should be as somber and self-serious as this, though there are occasional hints at humor that manage to shine through, like Adam doing a "bad cop" interrogation of a demon and dunking his head in holy water, or the requisite speed-ramping where Adam punches a winged demon in the face. But overall, I, FRANKENSTEIN is just an eye-glazing blur of crummy CGI and graphic novel cliches. Eckhart rarely seems comfortable with the character or his idiotic dialogue, such as Adam grunting "I think your boss is a demon prince!" to Wessex's leading researcher, hot electrophysiologist Terra (Yvonne Strahovski), and Nighy is past the point where he can play this character--it's basically Viktor with a different name--in his sleep. Writer/director Stuart Beattie previously helmed the acclaimed Australian film TOMORROW, WHEN THE WAR BEGAN (2010) and wrote Michael Mann's COLLATERAL (2004), but is best known as a screenwriting mercenary on fare like PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL (2003), 30 DAYS OF NIGHT (2007), and G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA (2009). Given that resume, it's easy to see COLLATERAL as an anomaly and that Beattie's seemingly opted to instead channel his inner Len Wiseman or Stephen Sommers. Cult movie nerds will enjoy seeing Bruce Spence--THE ROAD WARRIOR's Gyro Captain--in a small role as one of Wessex's lab flunkies, but I, FRANKENSTEIN isn't a movie. It's a bland, boring, assembly-line product. (PG-13, 92 mins)

DEADLY CODE
(Italy/UK - 2013; US release 2014)

Italian filmmaker Gabriele Salvatores has worked steadily for the last 30 years but is best known for directing 1991's MEDITERRANEO, which won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, and the overrated 2003 thriller I'M NOT SCARED. Elsewhere, most of his output is forgotten or unseen outside of Italy--his 1997 virtual reality sci-fi snoozer NIRVANA was picked up by Harvey Weinstein, who shelved it until dumping it on DVD in 2005--and that seems the likely fate for DEADLY CODE, which has gone straight-to-DVD in the US with perhaps the least-appealing cover art of the year. Shot in 2011 under the title SIBERIAN EDUCATION, the tedious and cliche-filled DEADLY CODE wants to be the Russian Mafia version of THE GODFATHER, but comes off as a third-rate EASTERN PROMISES knockoff. The confusing narrative jumps around from 1985 to 1998, telling the story of two men, Kolima (Arnas Fedaravicius) and Gagarin (Vilius Tumalavicius), who--wait for it--were childhood best friends who became bitter adversaries as adults. As if that wasn't a tired enough story foundation, it's a woman who comes between them, in this case the mentally-challenged Xenja (Eleanor Tomlinson), a sweet but simple-minded young lady referred to by the locals as everything from "a special gift from God" to "retarded." Both men enter a life of crime and spend time in prison--Gagarin as a youth and Kolima as an adult--and once Kolima is released, he swears vengeance on Gagarin, who raped Xenja while he was gone and left her a catatonic shell of the vibrant, innocent woman she was, the quick culmination of a sudden conflict between the two men that, until Kolima finds out about the rape, seems to come out of nowhere.

DEADLY CODE tries and fails to address the culture of the Russian mob and its ties to the fall of the Soviet Union and its aftermath, represented in the hammiest possible fashion by John Malkovich as ruthless Siberian crime boss Grandfather Kuzia, who happens to actually be Kolima's grandfather. Malkovich gets to dust off his Teddy KGB-from-ROUNDERS accent while dispensing sage advice and hackneyed metaphors. It's hard to believe it took six screenwriters--including THE BEST OF YOUTH scribes Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli--to put together a story this cookie-cutter rote and by-the-numbers. The film was shot in English, so perhaps something got lost in the translation, especially with stilted dialogue like an enraged Gagarin yelling "I destroy everything I touch!" and "I don't follow your rules! I don't believe in anything, so I can do what I want!" Lithuanian actors Fedaravicius and Tumalavicius both debut here and aren't bad, though they're sabotaged by poor writing and a bland story. Tomlinson (JACK THE GIANT SLAYER) is stuck with an almost unplayable character about which we learn very little, so really the only entertainment value here is Malkovich, who spends a lot of time tending to his doves, showing his grandson how to properly shiv someone, and taking a steam with other underworld figures, like Ink (Peter Stormare), who's in charge of all the body art. DEADLY CODE had an opportunity to explore a unique subject, but instead opts to fall back on trite dialogue, stale genre conventions and a scenery-slurping guest turn by its American export value. (R, 103 mins)

MOBIUS
(France/Belgium/Luxembourg - 2013; US release 2014)

Quite possibly the most boring financial thriller this side of 1981's ROLLOVER, the deadening MOBIUS offers little aside from the novelty of THE ARTIST Oscar-winner Jean Dujardin in a straight-faced and completely serious role. Dujardin is Russian FSB agent Gregory Lubov, codename "Moses," caught in a complex web of lies and deception involving American financial analyst Alice Redmond (Cecile de France), who's been exiled from Wall Street after helping bring down Lehman Brothers. She's now working as a trader at the headquarters of a Monaco firm owned by billionaire Russian banking magnate Ivan Rostovski (Tim Roth), whose firm is a front for a global money laundering scheme. Alice is actually working for the CIA as a mole in Rostovski's employ in order to obtain information that will enable her to return to the US. Rostovski keeps trying to get Alice into bed, but she's more interested in Moses, who's posing as a writer and, judging from Alice's facial twitching, popped neck veins, and quivering body spasms in their sex scenes, may very well be the inventor of the female orgasm. These scenes aren't particularly explicit and de France's nudity is brief, but writer/director Eric Rochant's static, lingering close-ups of her face as Alice reaches multiple orgasms just feels like an odd decision that completely fails to come off as erotic, especially considering that, taken out of context, it looks like she could just as easily be constipated. The Monaco scenery looks beautiful, but Rochant's script is weak, especially when a folksy CIA agent (FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS' Brad Leland) has to explain the concept of the Mobius Strip to Moses in the most heavy-handed fashion imaginable. Dujardin is good and is obviously capable of anchoring a suspense thriller, but it would've worked out better if MOBIUS was even remotely suspenseful or thrilling. De France isn't exactly a convincing American, and the always-reliable Roth is horribly miscast, playing the ruthless, big-money power broker with a glum, slouched disinterest that borders on narcolepsy. Also with Emilie Dequenne as Moses' FSB associate and John Lynch, John Scurti (RESCUE ME, HOUSE OF CARDS), and Wendell Pierce (THE WIRE, TREME) as CIA honchos overseeing Alice's infiltration of Rostovski's empire, MOBIUS is a sleep-inducing, hopelessly convoluted dud of a thriller where the most versatile acting is done by Cecile de France's facial muscles. (R, 108 mins)

GODZILLA
(US - 2014)

Directed by Gareth Edwards. Written by Max Borenstein. Cast: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Bryan Cranston, David Strathairn, Elizabeth Olsen, Juliette Binoche, Sally Hawkins, Richard T. Jones, Victor Rasuk, Al Sapienza, Taylor Nichols, Carson Bolde, CJ Adams. (PG-13, 123 mins)

The second attempt at an American GODZILLA serves to commemorate the iconic monster's 60th anniversary as well as erase any lingering trauma left by Roland Emmerich's universally-despised 1998 GODZILLA. Emmerich's "Zilla" was so reviled by Godzilla purists that 2004's GODZILLA: FINAL WARS (thus far the final film in the official Toho franchise) brought Zilla onboard and, in one of the all-time great big-screen disses, had Godzilla kill it in a matter of seconds. Director Gareth Edwards previously helmed the overrated 2010 monster movie MONSTERS, which was unique in its minimalist approach but lacking overall even though it already has a devoted cult following. Edwards' affinity for Godzilla is obvious and he does a nice job of honoring its legacy as well as reshaping it for today's audiences. Edwards knows he has to eventually give the audience what it wants, but he utilizes the same kind of anticipatory buildup that young Steven Spielberg used on JAWS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, letting the tension mount and making Godzilla's entrance--about an hour into the film--a truly impressive sight to be behold. This is the biggest and most imposing Godzilla has ever been onscreen, but in finding some common ground between his low-budget MONSTERS roots and this mega-budget GODZILLA, Edwards often seems to be working at cross purposes. It wasn't uncommon in the Toho productions of old for Godzilla's appearance to be delayed, and Edwards paces his film as such that even though Godzilla doesn't make his entrance until halfway through, it still works because it's just the way this story flows to that point. Edwards also takes a page out of Spielberg's JAWS playbook by not showing too much. There are very few full-on shots of Godzilla and even that isn't a problem. The biggest mistake Edwards makes is that Godzilla simply isn't in the film enough, and it's a film that frequently seems to relegate its namesake to a minor supporting character and could just as easily have been titled ATTACK OF THE MUTOS.

The "MUTO"'s are "Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms." Opening with a prologue set in 1999, Japanese scientist Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) and his colleague Dr. Graham (Sally Hawkins) are investigating a creature skeleton found in the Philippines with evidenced of hatched eggs. At the same time, a Japanese power plant explodes, and American supervisor Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) has been tracking strange seismic shifts. The explosion, which kills several scientists including Brody's wife (Juliette Binoche), is blamed on an earthquake and the entire area is quarantined due to intense radiation. 15 years later, Brody is a raving conspiracy theorist convinced that there's no radiation in the area and that the Japanese and American military are covering something up regarding the truth behind the explosion. Of course, he's right. His Navy explosive experts son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) has to go to Japan to get his father out of jail and the two are eventually arrested for trespassing in the quarantined area. They're met by Serizawa and Graham, who are on the scene and recognize the same seismic patterns Brody was talking about 15 years earlier. It's then that the first MUTO, a winged arachnid-esque creature, appears. Serizawa deduces that it feeds on radiation and was trying to send a signal to a second MUTO that they trace to a nuclear waste site in the desert outside of Las Vegas. But the signal was also heard by another creature, an ancient god resting near the core of the earth. Known as "Godzilla," it has the power to restore balance to the natural order of things, and Serizawa is convinced that it will rise to fight the MUTOs, one of which is female and looking for a place to lay hundreds of eggs. From Japan to Hawaii to Vegas and finally to San Francisco, the monsters will wreak havoc and do battle, and oh yeah, Ford has to figure out how to get back to his wife (Elizabeth Olsen) and son (Carson Bolde) in San Francisco.

True to the Godzilla that most fans love, Edwards opts to make him a good guy here, despite his villainous, horrific kaiju origins in Ishiro Honda's 1954 classic. As those films went on and were aimed at younger and younger audiences, Godzilla eventually became a good guy who would even do victory dances after winning a kaiju battle. Godzilla is the hero here, but that doesn't mean he's any less furious. His final battle with the MUTOs culiminates in perhaps Godzilla's angriest moment in the last 60 years. It's a crowd-pleasing capper to the expected fight, but Edwards fumbles the ball a few times. I heard grumbling from the audience on a few occasions where a Godzilla/MUTO throwdown was about to happen and Edwards cuts back to whatever Ford is doing. It's one thing to subvert expectations and formula, but that's dangerously close to just being a contrarian dick. It's commendable that Edwards has no interest in turning this into a generic Michael Bay-style, quick-cut, shaky-cam, video-game, CGI blur--and the CGI on display throughout GODZILLA is top-notch and proof that it can look good when the filmmakers want it to--but why cut away from a kaiju battle? Edwards walks a fine line and mostly ends up on the right side with the film's effective pacing, less-is-more reveals, and some stunning visual effects, but when he ends up on the wrong side, it's glaring and deflating. The actors are fine, but no one cares about Ford, especially when Watanabe's Serizawa (a nice nod to the 1954 film for those in the know) is the far more interesting character (it's too bad Watanabe and Hawkins vanish for most of the last third of the film). Taylor-Johnson has little to do other than run from place to place and doesn't really have much to build on, though I suppose it's nice that Edwards and screenwriter Max Borenstein (with uncredited contributions by Frank Darabont) didn't turn him or Navy Admiral Stenz (David Strathairn) into the kind of slogan-spouting, flag-waving cartoons that most films of this sort would.

It's got some major flaws (the climactic battle is sometimes too dark and murky-looking for its own good), but overall, GODZILLA is a fun time, especially in the almost quaintly old-school way that it's made. The suspense is allowed to build, the action sequences are coherent, the CGI is done with care, and the monsters are genuinely frightening. It's as much a tribute to Spielberg as it is to Godzilla. This is once again a situation--OCULUS was another recent one--where it's a surprise that a film is made in an almost defiantly old-fashioned way and manages to stick out from the crowd simply for looking more like a movie instead of a video game. I like Edwards' Spielbergian mindset. It shows he's studied the classics, he knows what works, and he knows what doesn't need fixed. We've seen it enough times that we're maybe a little numb to its magic, but remember the first time you saw JAWS or JURASSIC PARK? Remember that feeling? Edwards goes for that here and sometimes pulls it off. Sometimes he doesn't and makes some questionable decisions that have the best intentions but seem to stem from him wanting to go too far in the opposite direction. No one needs a feature-length WWE battle, but at the same time, cutting away from kaiju throwdowns is a risky move that provoked audible frustration in the crowd. Edwards gets enough right that this is a good GODZILLA, but his missteps prevent it from being a great one. Yes, it's a classic compared to Emmerich's botch job, and while every dollar is up there on the screen and it looks fantastic, I'm still partial to the guys running around in monster suits while demolishing scale models of Tokyo.

In Theaters/On VOD: NYMPHOMANIAC: VOL I and II (2014)

In Theaters: CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER (2014)

On DVD/Blu-ray, Special "Purcellapalooza" Edition: IN THE NAME OF THE KING: THE LAST MISSION (2014) and VIKINGDOM: THE BLOOD ECLIPSE (2013)

On DVD/Blu-ray: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES (2014) and NURSE (2014)

In Theaters: THE RAID 2 (2014)

In Theaters/On VOD: JOE (2014)

In Theaters: DRAFT DAY (2014)

In Theaters: OCULUS (2014)

Cult Classics Revisited, Special "Demonic Daddy Issues" Edition: THE ANTICHRIST (1974) and bonus film THE NIGHT CHILD (1975)

On DVD/Blu-ray: A FANTASTIC FEAR OF EVERYTHING (2014), WRONG COPS (2013); and IN FEAR (2014)

In Theaters: TRANSCENDENCE (2014)

In Theaters: THE QUIET ONES (2014)

On DVD/Blu-ray: BIG BAD WOLVES (2014); A FAREWELL TO FOOLS (2014); and WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE (2014)

In Theaters: BRICK MANSIONS (2014)

On DVD/Blu-ray: BAD COUNTRY (2014); THE LEGEND OF HERCULES (2014); and ODD THOMAS (2014)

Cult Classics Revisited: CONTAMINATION (1980)

Cult Classics Revisited: KING OF THE GYPSIES (1978)

On DVD/Blu-ray: THE ART OF THE STEAL (2014) and 47 RONIN (2013)

On DVD/Blu-ray: I, FRANKENSTEIN (2014); DEADLY CODE (2014); and MOBIUS (2014)

In Theaters: GODZILLA (2014)