Peter Sellers (1925-1980) was renowned as a gifted comedic genius, but it was also no secret that he was notoriously difficult on a movie set. His behavior during the making of the 17th century pirate comedy GHOST IN THE NOONDAY SUN in 1973 nearly destroyed the career of promising director Peter Medak, who at the time was riding high on the worldwide critical acclaim of 1972's THE RULING CLASS. The nightmare production of NOONDAY SUN haunted Medak so much over the years that he made the documentary THE GHOST OF PETER SELLERS as a sort-of therapeutic, closure-seeking exorcism. From 2016 to 2018, the now-82-year-old Medak and screenwriter friend Simon van der Borgh (IN TRANZIT) traveled across the US, Europe, and to the still-standing locations on Cyprus, interviewing some of the very few surviving actors and various others with connections--Sellers' personal assistant, co-writer/co-star Spike Milligan's agent, co-star Anthony Franciosa's widow, among others--to share their memories of a project that began with such promise and enthusiasm and quickly devolved into a miserable catastrophe thanks to Sellers' erratic and unpredictable behavior. Sellers pursued Medak for the project, and even though Sellers was in a major slump at the time prior to the PINK PANTHER series starting up again in 1975, the director jumped at the opportunity since "he was the greatest comic actor in the world." It was a big-budget production backed by Columbia and was being shot on location on Cyprus, but Medak sensed something was wrong before shooting even began. He met with Sellers to go over the script and it quickly became apparent that the star still hadn't even read it, and he was later distracted on the phone by an argument with girlfriend Liza Minnelli. Sellers then arrived on Cyprus "catatonically depressed" after breaking up with Minnelli the day before. Within a few days, Sellers somehow fired the producers and tried to talk Medak into quitting. Shortly after that, a long, complex exterior tracking shot was ruined when Sellers, already living with chronic cardiac issues after several mild heart attacks dating back to 1964, collapsed, screaming in agony, suffering another apparent heart attack. He was airlifted to a hospital as production was briefly halted while they waited for word on the star's condition. A few days later, Medak opened a Cyprus newspaper and saw a paparazzi shot of Sellers in London, out on the town with Princess Margaret. "Who fakes a heart attack when they already have a heart condition?" Medak wondered. "And how did he even get off the island?"
Sellers and Medak on the chaotic set of
the doomed GHOST IN THE NOONDAY SUN
Sellers returned to Cyprus two days after that with a fake doctor's note saying he couldn't work, and it became obvious to Medak that Sellers was deliberately trying to get out of the movie and was willing to sabotage it to do so. Columbia execs and producer John Heyman started sending telegrams to Medak threatening to fire him if he couldn't get his act together (Medak: "Tell fucking Heyman to get down here and try to control Peter!"). Sellers had a heated confrontation with Franciosa and refused to be in the same shots with him going forward (cue a scene with the two of them from NOONDAY SUN and it's glaringly obvious they weren't there at the same time). Shooting fell weeks behind schedule (Medak's handwritten notes: "Sellers pissed off," "Sellers refused to work," "Sellers being impossible again," and typed production notes documenting Sellers' numerous absences or needing to leave the set early because he was "seasick"). Sellers tried to organize a rebellion among the crew and called for a "no confidence" vote in Medak in an attempt to get him fired, then he threatened to quit unless Medak allowed his longtime friend Milligan to completely rewrite the script. In doing so, Milligan also gave himself a prominent and shamelessly mugging supporting role, but because so much time was lost, entire key scenes were never shot and when Columbia saw what Medak was barely able to cobble together, they refused to release the movie and shelved it. It's both darkly humorous and heartbreaking watching Medak relive these memories--the time and distance make him able to see the sheer absurdity in the way the film crashed and burned, but at the same time, it clearly had a profound effect on him. He gets quite emotional at times (Milligan's agent grabs him by the hand and tells him "You are more than this...you need to let it go"), though you see him finding some catharsis and much-needed closure during the process. And with his still-pronounced Hungarian accent, Medak's narration and observations bring to mind Werner Herzog, and THE GHOST OF PETER SELLERS has numerous similarities to Herzog's 1999 documentary MY BEST FIEND, about his tumultuous collaborations with the maniacal Klaus Kinski.
There's also some priceless home movie footage of Milligan cracking himself up reading his own script (it's interesting that not one clip of GHOST IN THE NOONDAY SUN shown here is even remotely funny in or out of context), or Medak having a sitdown with Sellers' CASINO ROYALE and THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN director Joseph McGrath and his FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU director Piers Haggard as they share some Peter Sellers horror stories (McGrath: "It was never fun working with him"). Medak never became the auteur that THE RULING CLASS hinted he might be, but he went on to a busy journeyman career in film and TV, with projects ranging from excellent (1980's THE CHANGELING) to not (1986's THE MEN'S CLUB and 1998's SPECIES II), and he enjoyed a brief resurgence in the early '90s with a trio of acclaimed crime thrillers: 1990's THE KRAYS, 1991's LET HIM HAVE IT, and 1994's ROMEO IS BLEEDING. GHOST IN THE NOONDAY SUN remained unreleased for years before it surfaced in Canada in 1984 as THE PINK PIRATE (!) and eventually turning up on home video and syndicated TV in the US not long after. Medak gets a little meandering and veers off course at times, particularly during a long segue where Sellers talked him into directing a Benson & Hedges commercial during production. But it's a must for Sellers fans and a worthy addition to the "nightmare clusterfuck movie shoots" documentary subgenre along with the likes of BURDEN OF DREAMS, HEARTS OF DARKNESS, and LOST IN LA MANCHA. It's a fascinating look at a production gone horribly awry and a filmmaker who's been haunted by the traumatic experience for decades. As an emotional, teary-eyed Medak states at the end when he thinks of Sellers: "He was a fucking genius. And it was a great to be there for just a second, whatever pain it caused." (Unrated, 93 mins)
PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE (France - 2019)
One of last year's most acclaimed arthouse titles, French filmmaker Celine Sciamma's slow-burning period piece PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE got a brief Oscar qualifying run in NYC and L.A. in December 2019, but the COVID-19 coronavirus ended up shutting down its early 2020 rollout and relegating it to VOD. In late 17th century France, artist Marianne (Noemie Merlant) is hired by a Countess (Valeria Golino) to journey to an isolated island off the coast of Brittany. She is to paint a portrait of the Countess' daughter Heloise (Adele Haenel), who was recently whisked away from a convent to fulfill an arranged matrimonial contract with the son of a prominent Milanese family after the death of her older sister. "Did disease take her?" Marianne asks servant girl Sophie (Luana Bajrami), who replies with a curt, loaded "No." A previous painter was unable to complete a portrait of Heloise because she refused to sit for him. "She refuses this marriage," the Countess explains. Tasked with painting Heloise without her knowing it, Marianne agrees to the cover story of being hired as a companion for her walks, committing the details of her face to memory for the painting and serving as a deterrent should Heloise impulsively decide to commit suicide like her sister. The standoffish Heloise eventually opens up and the pair bond to the point where Marianne feels she must explain her true purpose for being there. Heloise sees the resulting portrait and dislikes it, prompting Marianne to destroy it. The Countess is about to dismiss Marianne until Heloise agrees to sit, with her mother announcing that she's going away for five days and she expects the work to be finished upon her return.
That Marianne and Heloise will fall into a forbidden romance is a given, but PORTRAIT has a lot to say about patriarchal society and the role of women within it, while drawing extensively from the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Both Heloise and Sophie have a difficult time grasping the relative freedom Marianne enjoys. She has no plans of being married and is set to take over her father's business upon his retirement or death. In a world where women like Sophie exist to serve others and Heloise is forced into an arranged marriage as a replacement for her dead sister because, well, a deal's a deal (in her last letter to Heloise, her sister gave a vague apology, the meaning of which became unfortunately clear to her in the aftermath), Marianne's independence is an anomaly. With its ornate production design and some BARRY LYNDON-style natural lighting in its early sequences, PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE is exquisitely detailed almost to the point of Kubrickian detachment for a while, but around the time of the bonfire sequence, you realize just how much it's pulled you in and it really becomes an emotional wrecking ball in its closing minutes (and while there are fleeting erotic elements, we're not talking BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR here). The camera adores Haenel and her haunting, expressive eyes--she and Sciamma were a couple in the years prior to making this though they remain friends and professional collaborators--and this probably would've been a hit on the arthouse circuit had a pandemic not occurred. (R, 121 mins)
WASP NETWORK (France/Spain/Belgium - 2020) Written and directed by Olivier Assayas. Cast: Penelope Cruz, Edgar Ramirez, Gael Garcia Bernal, Ana de Armas, Wagner Moura, Leonardo Sbaraglia, Tony Plana, Nolan Guerra Fernandez, Osdeymi Pastrama Miranda, Julian Flynn, Anel Perdomo, Julio Gabay, Amada Morado, Carolina Paraza Matamoros, Omar Ali, Carlos Leal. (Unrated, 128 mins) French auteur Olivier Assayas has dabbled in a bit of everything over his acclaimed career, from 1996's filmmaking satire IRMA VEP to the corporate espionage of 2002's DEMONLOVER and 2007's BOARDING GATE to heartfelt interpersonal pieces like 2008's SUMMER HOURS and 2019's NON-FICTION (both with frequent star Juliette Binoche), and a pair of dramas where he found a muse in Kristen Stewart, with 2014's CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (also with Binoche) and 2016's PERSONAL SHOPPER. His latest film, the Netflix-acquired WASP NETWORK, finds Assayas mining tangentially similar territory as 2010's CARLOS, his epic, five-and-a-half hour chronicle of terrorist Carlos the Jackal, made as a miniseries for French TV but acquired for the US by IFC in both its unedited version on the festival circuit and a truncated 166-minute cut for its brief US theatrical run and VOD (the Criterion Blu-ray edition only has the long version). Based on the true story of the "Cuban Five," WASP NETWORK details--and not always in the most coherent fashion--a Cuban espionage ring that set up shop in Miami in the early '90s, posing as dissidents and defectors fed up with Castro's communist regime having expecting things to change after the fall of the Soviet Union. In fact, they were staunch Castro loyalists looking to infiltrate well-funded Cuban revolutionary groups based in Florida that were often working in conjunction with the FBI, and report their gathered intel back to government officials in Cuba.
The opening hour of WASP NETWORK follows two of the Cuban agents as they make their way to the US and settle in Miami. The first is pilot Rene Gonzalez (Edgar Ramirez, reteaming with Assayas after his career-best performance in CARLOS), who spends three months plotting the theft of a plane and flies under the radar all the way into Miami in 1990, leaving his wife Olga (Penelope Cruz) and their daughter Irma (Carolina Paraza Matamoros as a 6-year-old, then Osdeymi Pastrama Miranda as a teenager) behind in Havana. He doesn't need to worry about being granted asylum, since he was born in Chicago and his family returned to Cuba when he was a child. In 1992, Juan Pablo Roque (ELITE SQUAD and NARCOS star Wagner Moura, the Brazilian Mark Ruffalo) is a revered Cuban Air Force pilot who swims all the way to Guantanamo Bay to declare his intent to defect. He's an instant celebrity with TV interviews, a book deal, and glad-handing from the anti-Castro groups in Miami, and a whirlwind romance with Cuban-born divorcee Ana Margarita (Ana de Armas), who doesn't take long to realize something's up with all of his secrets, his expensive jewelry, and his $2000 suits. Rene keeps trying to get Olga to move to Miami, but his assignment was so top secret that she's still under the impression that he's a traitor and that his skills as a pilot are being used for drug trafficking.
Assayas jumps around quite a bit, and many of the details of the maddeningly confusing--apparently by design--first hour don't become clear until some extensive "get you caught up" narration by Carlos Leal, an abrupt "Four Years Earlier" card, and the midpoint introduction of Manuel Viramontez, aka "Gerardo Hernandez" (Gael Garcia Bernal), the spymaster behind the whole operation, which is codenamed "Wasp Network." The timeline is never really crystal clear--we just know some years have passed when Irma is played by an older kid--and much of the second half gets sidetracked with the machinations of rogue CIA agent and anti-Castro terrorist mastermind Luis Posada Carriles (Tony Plana), and a string of Cuban hotel bombings committed by Cruz Leon (Nolan Guerra Fernandez) that keep Cruz, Ramirez, and Garcia Bernal offscreen for long stretches, the latter two mostly confined to clandestine lunch meetings at Miami restaurants.
WASP NETWORK isn't really able to gain any momentum since Assayas lets scenes end abruptly and goes for frequent and seemingly random fade-outs, almost as if this was cut down from a longer, CARLOS-type project that was intended for TV at some point. Indeed, it more often than not feels like the two-hour Cliff Notes version of a ten-hour miniseries. Such a format might've been more beneficial, considering the amount of time the main stars aren't around and that both Moura and de Armas abruptly exit during the second act. Assayas also indulges in a little Scorsese worship with a brief "last half hour of GOODFELLAS" vibe when de Armas' Ana gets wise and realizes too late that her husband was leading a double life and her world starts falling apart and all that's really missing in Nilsson's "Jump Into the Fire." WASP NETWORK has a fascinating story to tell, but there's simply too much going on here for a two-hour movie to sufficiently handle and effectively tie all of its disparate plot and historical elements together. Months and years go by an in instant, characters appear and disappear, like Jose Basulto (Leonardo Sbraglia), the head of the Cuban exile outfit Brothers to the Rescue, who's set up as a major character but then doesn't really figure in at all. And can anyone explain the FBI agent played by an actor who has no idea how to pronounce the word "alias?"
7500 (Germany/Austria/US/France - 2020) Directed by Patrick Vollrath. Written by Patrick Vollrath and Senad Halibasic. Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Omid Memar, Aylin Tezel, Carlo Kitzlinger, Murathan Muslu, Paul Wollin, Passar Hariky, Aurelie Thepaut, Denis Schmidt, Max Schimmelpfennig. (R, 93 mins) In the first half of the 2010s, it seemed like Joseph Gordon-Levitt was everywhere with huge Christopher Nolan blockbusters like INCEPTION and THE DARK KNIGHT RISES, Rian Johnson's LOOPER, Steven Spielberg's LINCOLN, and Robert Zemeckis' THE WALK. He even had enough star power going to direct his own acclaimed 2013 pet project DON JON. Aside from some voice work (including a phone cameo in Johnson's KNIVES OUT), he's been offscreen since Oliver Stone's shameless 2016 hagiography SNOWDEN, but is back with the European-made, real-time hijacking thriller 7500, which was shot back in late 2017 but is only now surfacing on Amazon Prime after the coronavirus nixed a planned theatrical release. 7500--not to be confused with Takashi Shimizu's atrocious 2016 airborne horror film FLIGHT 7500, which was originally titled 7500--is named for the flight term for a hijacking, and feels a bit past its sell-by date as far as post 9/11 thrillers go, but it's a tense, textbook nail-biter, thanks in large part to director/co-writer Patrick Vollrath--the filmmaker with a surname most likely to double as the name of a Viking metal band--playing it smart with his feature debut by keeping the action confined to one location, leaving the audience knowing just as much as the hero about what's going on outside his immediate view.
Gordon-Levitt is Tobias Ellis, the co-pilot on a routine flight from Berlin to Paris. An American expat, Ellis lives in Germany with his half-Turkish/half-German flight attendant girlfriend Gokce (Aylin Tezel) and their two-year-old son. She's on the flight, and though they keep it professional, affable pilot Capt. Michael Lutzmann (Carlo Kitzlinger) is quick to pick up on their connection. Vollrath spends the first 15 minutes of the film moving the camera around the cockpit as the characters are established and the pilots go through the details of their pre-flight checklist. Shortly after takeoff, a quartet of Muslim hijackers attempt to storm the cockpit, with one, Kenan (Murathan Muslu) getting in and stabbing Lutzmann numerous times with a makeshift knife made of glass. Ellis manages to keep the others out and lock the cockpit door, but not before sustaining a serious, gushing wound that immobilizes his left arm. He knocks Kenan unconscious and painstakingly manages to restrain him with his one functioning hand as the captain succumbs to his injuries, forcing Ellis to handle the escalating situation on his own. He notifies air traffic control of the incident and the plane is diverted for an emergency landing in Hanover as he tries to work with an open, nerve-damaging injury and with the other terrorists banging on the cockpit door, which Ellis dutifully refuses to open even after he looks on the monitor and sees the leader, Daniel (Paul Wollin) about to murder one of the passengers by slashing his throat.
Ellis spots a weakness in their group with young Vedat (Omid Memar), who speaks English and is seen on the monitor trying to stop Daniel from killing other people. The hijacking--the terrorists have no demands and only want to crash the plane in a major city--really only takes up the first hour, with the remaining 30 minutes essentially being a two-character piece once Ellis lets a terrified Vedat into the cockpit to save him from his own cohorts. Vollrath walks a fine line in humanizing Vedat as a naive, impressionable 18-year-old who's been goaded by religious extremism into a tragic situation he lacks the maturity to fully comprehend (he even calls his mother to tell her he was a fool to believe them and he just wants to go home). It's essentially CAPTAIN PHILLIPS in a cockpit, but Vollrath's claustrophobic handling of the action and keeping it in such a confined space gives the first hour an effective anxiety attack intensity that does dissipate somewhat once Ellis and Vedat start telling each other about themselves. 7500 also gets a lot from an excellent Gordon-Levitt in a strong and physically demanding performance that quickly makes you forget how he has that pre-INCEPTION Di Caprio thing going on where he still looks like a kid even though he's in his late 30s (his youthful appearance is even worked into the story as Capt. Lutzmann, meeting Ellis for the first time, can't believe he's been flying for ten years). Vollrath also doesn't pull any punches with who he's willing to kill off, which only adds to the nightmarish scenario when Ellis is put in a position to choose between what's best for him versus what's best for the passengers. 7500 probably would've been more "hot button" timely a decade and a half ago, but it's a solid single-set suspense piece with one of Gordon-Levitt's best performances.
With the release of the eighth (!) film in the SNIPER franchise (not counting a fake one starring Steven Seagal), I realized I somehow missed the seventh, 2017's SNIPER: ULTIMATE KILL. Somehow, I was still able to follow SNIPER: ASSASSIN'S END, which is mostly standard-issue DTV fare, but it does try a couple of different things of interest. Director Kaare Andrews, a former Marvel writer and artist who dabbled in horror movies on the side (CABIN FEVER: PATIENT ZERO and a segment of THE ABCs OF DEATH), occasionally brings a budget-priced Michael Mann aura to this installment, opening with a strikingly-shot assassination and an effective Tangerine Dream-ish cue, and one later three-way sniper standoff framed as a top-to-bottom split screen. As director John Hyams showed with those later UNIVERSAL SOLDIER entries, one can do some unpredictable and adventurous things several films deep in a franchise when nobody's really paying any attention except for the die-hards, but aside from those few stylish touches, Andrews sticks to business-as-usual for the bulk of SNIPER: ASSASSIN'S END. In the fictional Central American country of Costa Verde, the president is taken out by a bullet from a sniper positioned over a mile away. The sniper is Japanese assassin "Lady Death" (Sayaka Akimoto), who plants a strand of hair as DNA evidence linking Sgt. Brandon Beckett (Chad Michael Collins, who's been headlining these since the 2011 reboot SNIPER: RELOADED) to the killing. He's apprehended and taken to a safe house for interrogation before Lady Death--working in the employ of someone else--has the chance to finish her assignment by killing him and staging it as a suicide. While CIA agent Franklin (Lochlyn Munro) bloviates to his underlings and sets out to nail Beckett's balls to the wall, Homeland Security agent Zeke "Zero" Rosenberg (Ryan Robbins) isn't buying that Beckett is guilty, and starts uncovering evidence linking a Vancouver pharmaceutical company to the murder of the Costa Verde president after he threatened to pull out of a trade agreement with the US.
Meanwhile, Beckett escapes from a military transport after Lady Death manages to take out everyone from afar but him, and he eventually makes his way to a remote, secluded forest outside Aberdeen, WA, where his dad--Thomas Beckett (original SNIPER star Tom Berenger, who sat out the fourth and sixth installments), the most lethal sniper in the US military--has been living off the grid. Of course, Pops Sniper will team up with Sniper Jr. to prove the latter's innocence, but if that plot trajectory sounds familiar, then you'll figure out that the filmmakers have also seen ANGEL HAS FALLEN. A sleepwalking Berenger is no match for a grumbling, madman-bearded Nick Nolte, but something else SNIPER: ASSASSIN'S END does is establish several new characters--along with a stinger before the closing credits hinting at the plot of the inevitable ninth SNIPER--in a blatant attempt at fashioning some kind of SNIPER Cinematic Universe in the vein of THE AVENGERS, and with Lady Death working for a nefarious villain named Drake Phoenix (Michael Jonsson), it might even get as ridiculous as the FAST & FURIOUS franchise. We're probably no more than two SNIPERs away from seeing Tom Berenger and Chad Michael Collins in space. (R, 95 mins)
GREED (US/UK - 2020)
Prolific journeyman British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom is probably best known for his numerous collaborations with Steve Coogan, going back to 2002's 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE. It's been a generally can't-miss prospect when these two get together, whether it's the TRIP BBC series or its three spinoff features, and 2006's hysterical TRISTRAM SHANDY: A COCK AND BULL STORY. It was inevitable that they'd hit a wall at some point, and they have indeed with GREED, a timely but shockingly unfunny would-be takedown of the obscenely wealthy. Coogan is Sir Richard McReadie, a hybrid of British retail billionaire Sir Philip Green and multi-millionaire fashion retailer-turned-UK restaurant chain magnate Richard Caring, and there's a little Donald Trump in there as well. McCreadie is known as "The Mozart of Retail," "The Da Vinci of Dealmaking," and "The Monet of Money," but his financial legend is mainly tied to his wealthy wife Samantha (Isla Fisher) and his ability to bully his way through handshake deals and having the magic touch to bankrupt his own companies while walking away with huge paydays. He's being investigated by a government commission but he's mainly preoccupied with a huge 60th birthday party being thrown at his lavish Greek beach house, where a Bulgarian construction crew is slowly erecting a Roman amphitheater specifically for his GLADIATOR-themed bash. He's pestered by dweeby biographer Nick (David Mitchell), doesn't seem to care that Samantha has a much younger lover, and is oblivious to his son Finn (Asa Butterfield) having Oedipal designs on his mother, an issue not helped by McCreadie constantly blowing off his attempts at father-son bonding.
In short, McCreadie is a real asshole, and GREED had potential. Sony even planned to expand it nationwide in March 2020 after a limited rollout in February, but it never happened due to the coronavirus. Coogan can usually play this kind of obnoxious prick in his sleep, but McCreadie is just a loud, bloviating version of Alan Partridge who's oblivious to any kind of tact and decorum, and he and Winterbottom think it's sufficiently funny to just have him yell "twat" and "cunt" a lot when he's berating everyone around him. There are entirely too many characters wandering in and out of the story, cutaways and flashbacks with jokes that don't land (a self-deprecating cameo by "You're Beautiful" one-hit wonder James Blunt), and even a subplot about the British media canceling McCreadie (once again) after he kicks some Syrian refugees off the public beach adjoining his property--leading to all of the celebrity guests bailing after he's paid them to attend (there are some Skype'd in cameos by Chris Martin, Ben Stiller, Colin Firth, and Keira Knightley)--falls flat. McCreadie's handlers try to rectify the situation by hiring professional lookalikes of Adele, Rod Stewart, Simon Cowell, Kylie Minogue, and George Michael, and the payoff to that entire laborious set-up is a furious McCreadie reminding them that George Michael is dead. Winterbottom also wrote the script, but there's an "additional material" credit for Sean Gray, who logged some time in the Armando Iannucci-verse with THE THICK OF IT and VEEP, and to that end, GREED really feels like cold Iannucci leftovers. It just gets worse by the end, when Winterbottom goes full ON DEADLY GROUND with (another) subplot about the working conditions at one of McCreadie's Sri Lanka sweatshops, and the closing credits have several minutes of statistics about the economic disparity between the women who work grueling days in these sweatshops for next-to-nothing and the billions their work generates for rich men like McCreadie. That's a valid conversation to have, and it's a perfect subject for Winterbottom to explore in one of his serious, WELCOME TO SARAJEVO or THE ROAD TO GUANTANAMO moods. But for a comedy where Steve Coogan's spent an hour and half acting a fool, being a cringe comedy dickhead, and calling everyone a "twat" and a "cunt," it comes off as tone-deaf, hectoring, and spectacularly heavy-handed. A total misfire. (R, 104 mins)
DA 5 BLOODS (US - 2020) Directed by Spike Lee. Written by Danny Bilson, Paul DeMeo, Kevin Willmott and Spike Lee. Cast: Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis, Isiah Whitlock Jr, Chadwick Boseman, Jean Reno, Melanie Thierry, Paul Walter Hauser, Jasper Paakkonen, Johnny Tri Nguyen, Le Y Lan, Nguyen Ngoc Lam, Sandy Huong Pham, Van Veronica Ngo. (R, 155 mins) His 2018 film BLACKkKLANSMAN reflected a still-open wound with its release timed to the one-year anniversary of the Charlottesville tragedy, but DA 5 BLOODS finds Spike Lee making a film boiling with such rage over systemic racism that it could've been shot in the last two weeks. Of course, that systemic racism is there and always has been, but no film in recent memory has felt more "of the moment" than this, a sprawling and ambitious epic that does, on a few occasions, get too uneven and too unwieldy for its good. Lee and BLACKkKLANSMAN co-writer Kevin Willmott extensively reworked an existing script called THE LAST TOUR, written in 2013 by the team of Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo, who got their start in the '80s writing cult sci-fi B movies like TRANCERS and ELIMINATORS for Charles Band's Empire Pictures. They soon moved up to THE ROCKETEER for Disney and into TV with the CBS series THE FLASH (DA 5 BLOODS also marks the final writing credit for DeMeo, who died in 2018 and gets a special acknowledgement in the end credits). Bilson and DeMeo have always had an affinity for men-on-a-mission wartime scenarios, from 1986's ZONE TROOPERS all the way to 2013's DTV video-game spinoff THE COMPANY OF HEROES and it's their LAST TOUR script that provides the foundation for DA 5 BLOODS, as four aging vets go back to Vietnam of the present day, ostensibly to retrieve the remains of their fallen friend, but with a second, off-the-record reason: to retrieve a chest of CIA gold they retrieved from a plane crash in 1971 and buried.
That B-movie premise has Bilson's and DeMeo's fingerprints all over it--one can imagine them saying "It's THE DEER HUNTER meets KELLY'S HEROES!"--but Lee goes bigger. He's mining superficially similar territory here with the African-American POV of his 2008 WWII film MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA, but DA 5 BLOODS tracks the fury of '60s activism (clips of Malcolm X, MLK, Kwame Ture) all the way through to the advent of Black Lives Matter and the Age of Trump, whose presence is felt here even beyond being referred to as "President Fake Bone Spurs." The four vets are Otis (Clarke Peters), Melvin (Isiah Whitlock Jr), Eddie (Norm Lewis), and Paul (Delroy Lindo), and though an ensemble piece for the most part, it's Paul who becomes the emotional center of the film. Still suffering from PTSD, short-tempered, paranoid, and with an ever-present chip on his shoulder and looking for confrontation everywhere, staunch conservative Paul is a ticking time bomb waiting to go off even before he starts parroting Trump talking points about immigrants, fake news, and "building the wall," plus other derogatory terms for the Vietnamese people. All of the men are haunted by the death of their unit leader and friend "Stormin' Norman" (Chadwick Boseman in flashbacks), killed in action back in 1971 just after they retrieved and buried the gold, but Paul has been unable to move on. That extends to his fractured relationship with his son David (Jonathan Majors), a liberal Black Studies instructor at Morehouse who's earned nothing but scornful derision from his father ("You've been an anchor around my neck since the day you were born"). Though there's no affection between them, David shows up at their Saigon hotel unexpectedly out of concern for his dad and insists on tagging along, telling him "You've been acting more crazy than usual."
Through wealthy investment broker Tien (Le Y Lan), a former prostitute that Otis knew during what the Vietnamese call "The American War," they meet with Desroche (Jean Reno), a French money launderer who agrees to convert the gold to cash for a 22% share (it was only 20%, but Paul starts getting belligerent about Normandy and how America had to "save France's ass" during WWII). With a map provided by guide Vinh (Johnny Tri Nguyen), they head back into the jungles of 'Nam in search of the gold and the burial spot of Stormin' Norman, with Paul sporting a red MAGA hat to everyone's disdain. The journey begins with a slow boat ride accompanied by Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries," which isn't the only APOCALYPSE NOW reference over the course of the film. There's even an APOCALYPSE NOW banner in a nightclub in downtown Saigon, where neon signs for McDonalds, Pizza Hut, and KFC illustrate how things have changed in the nearly 50 years since they were last there. There's also an invocation of "We don't need no stinkin' badges!" from THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, and the references, shout-outs and the loose, freewheeling nature--with occasional cutaways to North Vietnamese radio propagandist Hanoi Hannah (Van Veronica Ngo)-- make this feel like a Quentin Tarantino film at times, not in terms of any revisionist history (Melvin does take the time to mock the '80s "free the POW" movies of Sylvester Stallone and "Walker, Texas Ranger"), but in a more enraged and politically substantive manner. Unlike what Bilson and DeMeo wrote for THE LAST TOUR, DA 5 BLOODS explores in depth the experience of the black soldier in Vietnam (Hanoi Hannah reminding them "Black G.I., is it fair that Negroes make up 11% of the US population but among American troops, you are 32%?) in ways that Hollywood typically hasn't focused on, aside from the mid '90s films DEAD PRESIDENTS and the virtually forgotten THE WALKING DEAD.
DA 5 BLOODS doesn't always feel cohesive as far as how the Bilson/DeMeo material meshes with what was written later by Lee and Willmott. At times, it's a straight-up treasure-hunt adventure once some Vietnamese adversaries led by the embittered Quan (Nguyen Ngoc Lam) enter the picture. It's also prone to some hard-to-swallow contrivances, like the discovery of the gold and Stormin' Norman's remains, as well as a trio of activists (Melanie Thierry, Paul Walter Hauser, and Jasper Paakkonen) who go into war zones to find and defuse land mines showing up exactly when their services are needed. Terence Blanchard's otherwise fine score seems a little intrusive and overbearing in the flashbacks, which Lee frames in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, with the jungle sequences at 1.85 and the Saigon scenes at 2.35. And as welcome as it might be, the anti-Trump sentiment feels occasionally wedged in, especially in an earlier scene where David has a conversation with the three activists at a Saigon bar. Lee also takes a big risk in having Lindo, Peters, Lewis, and Whitlock play their characters in the flashbacks minus any IRISHMAN-like CGI de-aging, but it works because they're presented in a kind-of stream-of-consciousness fashion and he mainly keeps the four of them in shadows or in the background as the focus is on Boseman. All in all, DA 5 BLOODS is a powerful film with a startling resonance to things happening right now. It also boasts a career-best performance by an absolutely riveting Lindo, who's alternately despicable, heartbreaking, and utterly devastating as Paul, whose story and the source of his Vietnam anguish, and the reasons he's been such an asshole to his son, don't fully come into view until late in the film, though you'll probably figure some of it out before then. Be sure to watch through the very end of the closing credits to catch a fun stinger for Isiah Whitlock Jr superfans.
With all the fumbling clumsiness of a 16-year-old losing his virginity, WE SUMMON THE DARKNESS shoots its load way too quickly, starting with the sight of a crazed, grassroots televangelist on a gas station TV when the girls stop for snacks. We know this televangelist must be vital to the story and has to turn up later since he's played by Johnny Knoxville, whose name and visage are prominently displayed on the poster. And once back at the house, the girls reveal their master plan way too quickly, thus killing any element of suspense or surprise in the script by Alan Trezza (the abysmal BURYING THE EX, which also co-starred Daddario). Of course, just as expected, Knoxville does reappear much later and you'll figure out who he is long before the movie thinks you will, just in time for director Marc Meyers (MY FRIEND DAHMER) to stage most of the climax in the new trend of complete and total darkness, thus making the film's title a de facto mission statement. WE SUMMON THE DARKNESS makes some half-assed overtures to metal cred by name-dropping legends like Randy Rhoads and Dio, and having characters argue that Metallica was never the same post-Dave Mustaine, but considering Mustaine was fired after a couple of demos and was gone before the band even recorded their debut album, this sounds like either a) something concocted by a writer who doesn't really know much about Metallica, but is aware that Dave Mustaine was in the band at one time, or b) Dave Mustaine has a secret side gig as a script doctor. The characters are all obnoxious and unlikable, the period detail is nil beyond the mullets and Val's hairspray, and for a heavy metal horror movie, they could've tried to use more appropriate '80s tunes than T'Pau's "Heart and Soul" and a virtually identical remake of "Heaven is a Place on Earth" credited to a group called Cover Sauce, since Belinda Carlisle must be more expensive to license than T'Pau. Nice try, guys. Stick with TRICK OR TREAT, or even BLACK ROSES or the collected works of Jon Mikl Thor. WE SUMMON THE DARKNESS is for poseurs. (R, 91 mins) 1BR (US - 2020)
For more effective and worthy of your time than WE SUMMON THE DARKNESS is 1BR. An auspicious feature debut for writer/director David Marmor, 1BR will remind you of various movies throughout but it generally remains its own visceral experience that, logic lapses be damned, will have you in a vise-like grip not unlike the one in which its heroine finds herself at her new apartment complex. Running from the Midwest after her mother dies of cancer (and there's some unspoken "issues" with her father that hint at other deep-rooted trauma), aspiring dress designer Sarah (Nicole Brydon Bloom) impulsively moves to L.A. and lucks into a nice apartment at a nice complex in a nice neighborhood with plenty of security cameras on site. The other residents are kind and welcoming, and soft-spoken landlord Jerry (early '90s Whit Stillman regular Taylor Nichols) prides himself on the building's sense of community and getting to know your neighbors. She flirts with guy-next-door Brian (Giles Matthey) and befriends elderly and declining Edith Stanhope (Susan Davis), a long-retired B-movie actress who starred in things like NIGHT OF THE SKULL CREATURE. Her living situation immediately heads south with loud plumbing and persistent clanging in the walls that only happens in the middle of the night. She smuggled her cat into the apartment and gets a nasty note calling her a "selfish bitch" and reminding her that there's no pets allowed. She hears a noise after getting into bed and finds her front door ajar. Things escalate past the point of no return when she's awoken by a smoke alarm and finds her cat baking in the oven.
In case it wasn't already apparent that this is not a good place for Sarah to be, she's then put through a torturous, Gitmo-like "program" by her neighbors that's designed to break her (this also includes the incessant playing of the '60s pop favorite "Happy Heart" at deafening levels). They know all about her. They've cut off all her ties to the outside world--her job, credit cards, her father, her only L.A. friend (Celeste Sully). "We are your family now," Jerry informs her. It really wouldn't be fair to say anything more about the plot or where it goes, but you'll see elements of Roman Polanski's "Apartment Trilogy" of REPULSION, ROSEMARY'S BABY, and THE TENANT, Karyn Kusama's THE INVITATION, and Ari Aster's MIDSOMMAR to name a few, plus there's a definite Synanon and Charles Manson element given the California setting. But Marmor has some tricks up his sleeve, and even after Sarah breaks and gives herself over to her new life, there's a look in her eyes that makes you wonder whether she's really onboard with it or just biding her time. If she isn't, then Sarah has a great poker face with the ways her predicament escalates in wildly unpredictable and frequently mortifying ways that play out like an unsettling, nightmarish version of a cringe comedy (Bloom does a really nice job conveying the way Sarah maintains her composure as she realizes the extent of her situation). One reason it works so well is because you keep waiting for Marmor to drop the ball and he never really does, even with an ending reveal that explains away some logic concerns but also puts the entire thing in a new realm, but even then, it's probably best not to think about it too much. Acquired by Dark Sky Films, 1BR was going straight-to-VOD even if theaters weren't closed due to the pandemic, but it's the kind of intense nailbiter that once upon a time, could've become a word-of-mouth sleeper hit. One interesting note: veteran actress Constance Towers (SHOCK CORRIDOR, THE NAKED KISS), and her late husband, PSYCHO co-star John Gavin (he died in 2018) are thanked in the closing credits. (Unrated, 90 mins)
TEN LITTLE INDIANS (US - 1989) Directed by Alan Birkinshaw. Written by Jackson Hunsicker and Gerry O'Hara. Cast: Donald Pleasence, Brenda Vaccaro, Frank Stallone, Herbert Lom, Paul L. Smith, Moira Lister, Sarah Maur Thorp, Warren Berlinger, Yehuda Efroni, Neil McCarthy. (PG, 100 mins) Veteran producer Harry Alan Towers (1920-2009) already had two previous big-screen adaptations of Agatha Christie's 1939 novel And Then There Were None to his credit, with both 1965 and 1974 versions titled TEN LITTLE INDIANS, but only his 1989 version cites Christie's 1943 play Ten Little Indians as its basis. The difference is negligible, as the play had a more upbeat ending than the novel, but none of Towers' three versions stuck with the novel's bleak ending anyway. The 1989 version was the last and by far the least of Towers' takes on the material, with 1965 (directed by longtime David Lean assistant George Pollock) generally considered the best, though the 1974 (directed by Peter Collinson) has aged very well, and with its unique setting in a luxury Iranian hotel, its Bruno Nicolai score, and some surprisingly stylish murder sequences, it almost plays in retrospect like an Agatha Christie giallo. Despite Towers' obvious affinity for the material (he also scripted the 1965 and 1974 versions under his pseudonym "Peter Welbeck"), Rene Clair's 1945 version AND THEN THERE WERE NONE is still considered the definitive adaptation of this Christie work.
But this TEN LITTLE INDIANS, released by Cannon in November 1989 as they were transitioning into their life support years, is mostly lethargic and uninspired, blandly directed with little style or suspense by Alan Birkinshaw. A career D-lister who was usually brought in to clean up other people's messes, Birkinshaw replaced two fired directors on the 1984 killer Santa outing DON'T OPEN TILL CHRISTMAS, and he handled extensive uncredited reshoots on Cannon's 1985 Christie adaptation ORDEAL BY INNOCENCE when Desmond Davis (CLASH OF THE TITANS) was handed his walking papers after a disastrous Cannes screening. Birkinshaw's 1978 UK video nasty KILLER'S MOON has its admirers, but he never distinguished himself elsewhere. By 1989, he was finding steady employment with Towers, though TEN LITTLE INDIANS was the only one of their collaborations to make it into theaters: he also helmed two entries in the ill-advised Poesploitation craze of the era--THE HOUSE OF USHER and THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH--both shot in 1989 but released straight-to-video in 1991.
Like a lot of Cannon productions from this period, TEN LITTLE INDIANS '89 (like Birkinshaw's two Poesploitation movies, which were handled by Menahem Golan's post-Cannon outfit 21st Century) was shot in Towers' then-stomping grounds of apartheid-era South Africa, where production costs were low, and even though it was frowned upon by Hollywood, many actors who needed the work had to go where the work was, regardless of the ethical dilemmas inherent in such journeyman assignments (Michael Dudikoff expressed regret after shooting three Cannon films in South Africa, opting to sit out AMERICAN NINJA 3 and only returning for AMERICAN NINJA 4 after they agreed to move the production to Lesotho). Shooting in South Africa also allowed TEN LITTLE INDIANS '89 to take advantage of its location for a safari setting, and the cast of mostly familiar faces corralled by Towers is a veritable Who's Who of "Apartheid? Never heard of it!" The set-up is the same: a group of strangers have been invited to a remote location--this time an African safari in the 1930s--by a mystery host named "U.N. Owen." They have no known ties to one another, aside from all of them having a secret known only by Owen: they're all directly or indirectly culpable for at least one death, and Owen is making them pay, exposing the skeletons in their closet and offing them one by one. In no particular order, there's rugged safari guide Capt. Lombard (Frank Stallone); Judge Wargrave (Donald Pleasence); dementia-addled General Romensky (Herbert Lom, also in the 1974 version, but in a different role); boozy actress Marion Marshall (Brenda Vaccaro); former governess Vera Claythorne (Sarah Maur Thorp); Dr. Werner (Yehuda Efroni); dashing Anthony Marston (Neil McCarthy); private eye Blore (Warren Berlinger), who's been hired sight unseen by Owen to keep an eye on everyone; and Mr. and Mrs. Rodgers (Paul L. Smith, Moira Lister), who claim to have won a contest to be on the safari under the stipulation that they play a recording of Owen listing the crimes of those he's gathered.
TEN LITTLE INDIANS opening in Toledo, OH on 1/5/1990
Christie's novel is pretty much the gold standard in classic mysteries, one that's so good that it's difficult to screw it up, but TEN LITTLE INDIANS '89 is like lukewarm leftovers. The setting is unique in theory but doesn't make sense in execution, since they're at a small, cramped camp and it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that the killer can move about undetected in such a limited space. And of course, the more people are bumped off, the more the remaining survivors continue to split up instead of stick together. No one here is at their career pinnacle (well, except for maybe Maur Thorp, whose entire film career consisted of three Towers productions--this, EDGE OF SANITY, and RIVER OF DEATH--all released in 1989), but most of them seem to be acting with a sense of apathy rather than urgency. They're all suspects at one time or another and of the ensemble, Lom has a couple of Commissioner Dreyfus-esque harumphs and seems like the only one who brought his almost-A-game, but he's taken out fairly early. Vaccaro looks like a past Oscar-nominee who knows this is junk. Berlinger does a lot of Charles Durning/Brian Dennehy blustering but little else. Pleasence can always be relied upon to ham it up but he seems uncharacteristically bored and half-asleep (though the goofy grin on his face during a croquet scene is amusing). Smith does the same stink-eye squint that he perfected in MIDNIGHT EXPRESS, PIECES, and however many others, but it just seems stale here. And Stallone is just terrible. Just out on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber (because physical media is dead), TEN LITTLE INDIANS '89 has some beautiful exteriors when you get to see them, but this third time out for Towers just drags along and is of little interest to anyone but the most die-hard Cannon completists or Frank Stallone stalkers. Birkinshaw also worked with Pleasence on THE HOUSE OF USHER, and with Stallone, Vaccaro, and Lom on THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, and I'm surprised neither of those have surfaced on Blu-ray yet.
THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME (US - 2020) Directed by Olivier Megaton. Written by Karl Gajdusek. Cast: Edgar Ramirez, Michael Carmen Pitt, Anna Brewster, Sharlto Copley, Patrick Bergin, Brandon Auret, Tamer Burjaq, James Richard Marshall, Terence Maynard, Sean Cameron Michael, Nathan Lynn, Neels Clasen, Leandie Du Randt Bosch, Johann Vermaak, Tiyler Kriel, Johnny Pienaar, Robert Hobbs, Daniel Fox. (Unrated, 148 mins) Despite having the most bomb-ass name in action movies, French director Olivier Megaton can't quite back it up. After helming a passable Luc Besson ripoff with 2002's RED SIREN, he was recruited by Besson himself, but most of Megaton's products that rolled off the EuropaCorp assembly line were among its least memorable, including TRANSPORTER 3 and TAKEN 3, the worst films in their respective franchises. Megaton split from his mentor and has been MIA for the six years since TAKEN 3, but he's back with the Netflix Original film THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME, written by Karl Gajdusek (OBLIVION, THE NOVEMBER MAN) and based on a 2009 graphic novel by Rick Remender and Greg Tocchini. Megaton appears to have abandoned his shaky-cam/quick-cut style that made some of his Besson films so difficult to watch, but unfortunately, LAST DAYS is boring, derivative, hopelessly muddled, and punishingly overlong at a thoroughly unjustified 148 (!) minutes. There's absolutely no credible reason on God's Green Earth for this to be two minutes longer than GOODFELLAS and still somehow feel like huge chunks of it are missing, plus it even has to rely on early (and quickly-abandoned) narration to help clear up loose ends and move things along and it can't even do that. The kind of film that thinks simply acknowledging its plot holes and narrative inconsistencies is sufficient enough to excuse them, THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME is a pointlessly bloated fiasco that can't decide what it is, what it's doing, or who it's even for.
Set in 2025 Detroit (the Motor City played--quite unconvincingly--by Johannesburg, South Africa), THE LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN CRIME deals with just that: America has become a dystopian, crime-infested hellhole, with jackbooted cops patrolling the streets with military hardware and shooting criminals on sight. It's five days until the government unveils, through its so-called American Peace Initiative, the "API signal," which alerts a synaptic blocker in the human brain that produces a high-pitched signal designed to incapacitate people and prevent them from committing acts they know to be unlawful. Crime will be instantly wiped out and unnecessary police departments will fall under government control, and advocates of civil liberties are making a run for the Canadian border, where the US military stands guard and shoots those trying to cross. Career criminal Graham Bricke (Edgar Ramirez) is recruited by scuzzy Kevin Cash (Michael Pitt, billed as "Michael Carmen Pitt," and doing a feature-length Jason Mewes impression) and his seductive fiancee Shelby Dupree (Anna Brewster, straight out of a Besson film) to become a partner in a planned heist of $1 billion from the US government's "Money Factory" currency facility (stationed right by the Canadian border, for some reason). The idea is to get in and have ace hacker Shelby jam the ATI signal just as it goes live at midnight, thus giving them several minutes free of the piercing "brain rape" and allow them time to get out and get to the border. Cash manipulates Bricke into taking part because he's knows he's got an ax to grind with the government: he was in prison with Bricke's younger brother, who allegedly committed suicide but Cash reveals that the inmates were being used in ATI signal test runs (which happened to Bricke on a bank robbery a year earlier) that eventually caused his brother's death. Cash has his own reasons for the heist--he's the black sheep son of powerful Detroit crime boss Rossi Dumois (Patrick Bergin sighting!), and he wants to create his own legacy by pulling off the last crime in American history. And Shelby may not be who she claims to be, as she's periodically hassled by a pair of corrupt FBI agents (James Richard Marshall, Terence Maynard) who have kidnapped her little sister (Tiyler Kriel) to ensure her cooperation with whatever it is they need her to do.
BECKY (US - 2020) Directed by Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott. Written by Ruckus Skye, Lane Skye and Nick Morris. Cast: Lulu Wilson, Kevin James, Joel McHale, Amanda Brugel, Robert Maillet, Ryan McDonald, James McDougal, Isaiah Rockcliffe. (R, 93 mins) From Quiver Distribution, the company that brought you John Travolta's (for better or worse) unforgettable turn in last year's THE FANATIC, comes another exercise in stunt casting with BECKY. A Plan B when Simon Pegg backed out during pre-production--and perhaps inspired by his buddy Adam Sandler's stretch with UNCUT GEMS--the unlikely Kevin James goes full "like you've never seen him before" as Dominick, the leader of a quartet of psycho neo-Nazis who've escaped custody during a botched prison transport. With his shaved head and huge beard, and with a swastika on the back of his dome, James looks not unlike an alternate universe, white supremacist DJ Khaled, orchestrating a DESPERATE HOURS home invasion at a family's lake house where things are already fraught with suffocating tension. 13-year-old Becky (Lulu Wilson of Netflix's THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE) is acting out, having a hard time coping with her mother's death from cancer a year earlier. She walks all over her patient, nice-guy dad Jeff (Joel McHale), who tries to arrange a weekend getaway at the family vacation house. But things go south when his girlfriend Kayla (Amanda Brugel) arrives with her young son Ty (Isaiah Rockcliffe) and Jeff ambushes Becky with the announcement that they're getting married. Becky runs off, leaving the three of them in the house and that's when Dominick comes knocking, along with Cole (Ryan McDonald), Hammond (James McDougal), and hulking brute-turned-morally conflicted gentle giant Apex (Robert Maillet).
It takes about five seconds for Dominick to invoke the German term for "pure bloodlines" and offer his unsolicited thoughts about the dangers of "mating with other breeds" when he sees Jeff and Kayla are an interracial couple. For reasons that are never explained, Dominick is obsessed with finding a specific key--one with the three-triangled Valknut symbol--that he believes is hidden somewhere in the house, and starting with one of the family dogs, they're willing to kill to obtain it. Dominick and his crew quickly realize there's a fourth member of the family and it doesn't take long for them to learn the hard way that they picked the wrong day to fuck with a rebellious teenager who's already pissed off at the whole goddamn world. Becky uses her wits and ingenuity to set traps and make weapons out of simple items--pencils, pieces of wood, some fishing wire--and improvises with others (an outboard motor, for instance) and starts taking out the neo-Nazi shitbags one by one in a variety of over-the-top, splattery ways.
BECKY is directed by Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott, the same team behind the the 2017 militia-invasion cult item BUSHWICK. They utilize some interesting editing and cross-cutting techniques that give BECKY some stylish visual flair in the early going, and as far as high concept pitches go, "HOME ALONE-meets-GREEN ROOM" could work. Plus there's some hard-R mayhem here that will make even the sturdiest gorehound cringe (seeing James take a pencil to the eye and try to cut off his own dangling eyeball is probably not something most KING OF QUEENS or PAUL BLART fans are prepared to witness), but BECKY doesn't quite stick the landing. To his credit, James is the easily best thing here and he's playing it completely straight, creating a credibly menacing and thoroughly repugnant character. Likewise, Wilson does a nice job of conveying grief manifesting itself as seething rage being fired in all directions, but we don't really learn enough about her (other than her ability to shoplift gummy worms from a convenience store) to buy that she's suddenly able to Kevin McAllister a bunch of booby traps in the woods. The generally serious lead performances then, are in service to a splatter film that just gets sillier as it goes along, with Dominick's eventual comeuppance seeming more appropriate for a goofy Troma movie. The Valknut key is a MacGuffin that vaguely hints at some kind of supernatural power by the time the coda rolls around, with an ambiguous final shot that ends things on a frustrating (read: dumb) note. Of course, it has an aggressively "Carpenter-esque" synth-throb of a score, which we're apparently not done doing yet despite that particular homage being way past its sell-by date, and the climactic showdown between Becky and Dominick plays out in almost total darkness, illuminated only by the flames of a small campfire, making it extremely difficult to see what's going on. BECKY certainly isn't dull and it's worth a look as an impulse Redbox rental or eventual Netflix stream, but I never thought I'd find myself wishing a movie put forth greater effort to get itself on Kevin James' level.
WHITE FIRE (Turkey/UK/France - 1984; US release 1985) Directed by Jean-Marie Pallardy. Written by Edward John Francis. Cast: Robert Ginty, Fred Williamson, Belinda Mayne, Jess Hahn, Mirella Banti, Diana Goodman, Gordon Mitchell, Benito Stefanelli, Jean-Marie Pallardy. (Unrated, 102 mins) You know you're in for something special when you're watching a Turkish co-production and an establishing shot caption can't even spell "Istanbul" correctly. I must've looked at the box for the 1984 actioner WHITE FIRE a thousand times at the video store back in the day and never pulled the trigger on renting it. It's just been released on Blu-ray by Arrow (because physical media is dead) and in these unprecedented times of great uncertainty, it actually warms my heart to discover a small miracle like WHITE FIRE exists and to realize that there are still some movies out there that have the ability to leave me awestruck with wonder, mouth agape, asking questions like "What the fuck is this?" "Am I imagining this movie, because it can't possibly be happening, can it?" and "Was this made by human beings from planet Earth?" Also, for reasons that will become clear, any mention of "White Fire" in any capacity will henceforth be immediately followed with a italicized "White Fi-yaaa!" You can make a drinking game out of how many times someone in WHITE FIRE (WHITE FI-YAAA!) declares "White Fire," and instantly follows it with an exclamatory "White Fire!" ("Look! It's White Fire. White Fire!"). And the same thing happens in the chorus of the insanely catchy earworm of a theme song by NWOBHM-turned-AOR band Limelight that plays approximately 650 times over the course of WHITE FIRE (WHITE FI-YAAA!).
Directed by French soft-and-hardcore porn vet Jean-Marie Pallardy, WHITE FIRE (WHITE FI-YAAA!) has a plot that defies all logic, plausibility, and reality, but here goes: Boris, aka "Bo" (THE EXTERMINATOR's Robert Ginty) and Ingrid (KRULL's Belinda Mayne, daughter of cult actor Ferdy Mayne) are siblings who were orphaned as children and taken in by Sam (a profusely sweating Jess Hahn as George Kennedy). Cut to 20 years later in "Istambul" where Ingrid is employed by a high-tech diamond mine that looks like the repurposed set of a Turkish STAR WARS ripoff, complete with security personnel in full SPACEBALLS/Dark Helmet head gear and attire. Her boss (Gordon Mitchell) and the staff all wear weird red jumpsuits like staffers in a Bond villain's secret underground lair. Bo and Ingrid have remained inseparable into adulthood, and still live with Sam and his wife, but they also have a side gig: Ingrid has been secretly stealing diamonds from the mine and fencing them with Bo and Sam. The siblings are abducted by Italian criminals Sophia (TENEBRE's Mirella Banti) and Barbossa (Benito Stefanelli, looking like Terry Gilliam's stunt double), who know what they're up to and want a piece of the action. Around the same time, a mine employee informs the boss that they've excavated the legendary "White Fire" (White Fi-yaaa!), a massive, radioactive, million-year-old diamond with magical powers long thought to be a myth. Word of White Fire (White Fi-yaaa!) gets out and Sophia and Barbossa want Ingrid to obtain it for them. The siblings refuse to play along, and Ingrid is killed during an attempted kidnapping. A devastated Bo goes to a bar to drown his sorrows and he meets Olga (Diana Goodman), a near dead-ringer for Ingrid. Sam is the man with a plan: pay Olga $50,000 to undergo plastic surgery to turn her into Ingrid, convince her boss that reports of her death have been greatly exaggerated, and get her back in the mine to steal White Fire (White Fi-yaaa!). Another benefit: Bo is falling for Olga and it would be super-cool for him if she looked exactly like Ingrid, because he really, really wanted to bang his sister.
Oh yeah, Bo's got it bad for Ingrid. It's not every day that you see a vaguely futuristic diamond heist movie filled with catchy AOR jams, bad guys in crazy future-onesies with security dressed like Darth Vader, Robert Ginty picking up a random chainsaw on a loading dock and slicing through a bunch of goons PIECES-style, the villains graphically bisecting some unlucky putz with a band saw, the mine having an easily accessible torture chamber (!) for staffers caught making off with merchandise, and a female plastic surgeon who operates out of an exotic fortress filled with stunningly beautiful women like some Sapphic Playboy Mansion, with all of it blanketed in an overt incest fetish with VERTIGO undertones. Look no further than the bizarre and downright creepy scene where Bo watches a skinny-dipping Ingrid and they can't take their eyes off one another as Bo flirtatiously plays keep-away with a completely nude Ingrid's towel ("You know, it's a pity you're my sister," purrs a bedroom-eyed, feathered-haired Ginty). Then Fred Williamson (who had just co-starred with Ginty in the Italian ROAD WARRIOR knockoff WARRIOR OF THE LOST WORLD) shows up about an hour in as Noah, a hired gun pimp/mercenary leading a team of Borat cosplayers searching for the missing Olga, who's apparently the AWOL mistress of his powerful boss. All get involved in the search and all parties eventually converge as the plot to steal White Fire (White Fi-yaaa!) intensifies. That is, when Bo and Olga/New Ingrid (played post-surgery by Mayne) aren't too busy fucking.
WHITE FIRE (WHITE FI-YAAA!) really has to be seen to believed. It wastes no time establishing itself as a jaw-dropper of the highest order less than five minutes in, with one of the most reckless and shockingly irresponsible stunts ever captured on film. During the prologue, we see Bo and Ingrid's parents murdered, and her father is hit with a flamethrower, which completely engulfs the unprotected stuntman in flames from head to toe--his hair briefly ablaze--as he does a stop, drop & roll to put out the fire. The sight of this is incredible enough to make even an '80s Indonesian action director have an anxiety attack, but what takes it to next level insanity is that it wasn't a stuntman--it was Pallardy himself, playing their father and doing the stunt on his own, making WHITE FIRE (WHITE FI-YAAA!) very likely the only film where a director lets himself be set on fire on camera to capture the perfect shot.
The behind-the-scenes personnel involved is just as bugfuck insane. In addition to Pallardy venturing outside his erotica comfort zone (except for the whole sister-screwing subplot), WHITE FIRE (WHITE FI-YAAA!) had a weird combination of financial backing from some unexpected places. A Turkish-British-French co-production, it was executive produced by Sedat Akdemir and Ugor Terzioglu, the Turkish team who briefly dabbled in the Italian exploitation industry with a pair of Antonio Margheriti projects (1983's YOR: THE HUNTER FROM THE FUTURE and 1984's THE ARK OF THE SUN GOD). Also involved were John L. Coletta and Alan G. Rainer, who had ties to Deep Purple's inner circle when they produced 1977's THE BUTTERFLY BALL, a concert film of Purple bassist Roger Glover's 1974 rock opera The Grasshopper's Feast and the Butterfly Ball. Furthering that association was WHITE FIRE (WHITE FI-YAAA!)'s soundtrack being overseen by legendary Deep Purple keyboardist Jon Lord, who composed the score and produced the songs by Limelight (in addition to the "White Fire" (White Fi-yaaa!) title track, there's the love ballad "One Day at a Time," the unintended anthem for incestuous siblings everywhere). To no one's surprise, WHITE FIRE (WHITE FI-YAAA!) skipped US theaters, getting a straight-to-video release courtesy of Trans-World Entertainment in 1985, its artwork and tag line ("EXTERMINATION is the reward for the world's richest prize") making an unmistakable reference to Ginty's EXTERMINATOR fame, though the jury's still out on whether his character's idea of the world's richest prize is White Fire (White Fi-yaaa!) or finally finding a way to bone his sister without everyone thinking he's a creep.
