On DVD/Blu-ray: TWIXT (2012) and TRANCE (2013)

TWIXT
(US - 2012)

Since taking a decade-long sabbatical from directing and returning with 2007's YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH and 2009's TETRO, the legendary Francis Ford Coppola has essentially abandoned Hollywood and the mainstream and made it a stated point that he's only making personal films for himself.  While the commercial appeal of the ponderous YOUTH and the intermittently-interesting TETRO were limited, they admirably avoided the self-indulgence that normally accompanies such endeavors, and while both are little more than interesting curios by a fabled filmmaker, the uneven TWIXT is Coppola's most satisfying effort of this post-comeback "experimental" phase.  Recalling the low-budget B-movies Coppola cut his teeth on as an assistant to Roger Corman back in the early 1960s, TWIXT more often than not feels like an old-school horror movie that you used to find on late-night TV, at least until it starts taking esoteric, art-house detours as it goes on.  In his best role in years, Val Kilmer stars as hard-drinking horror novelist Hall Baltimore, once hailed as a fresh, next-big-thing literary talent but now "the bargain-basement Stephen King," reduced to holding unattended book signings in small-town carry-outs.  He finds a fan in gregarious Swann Valley sheriff Bobby LaGrange (an enjoyably hammy Bruce Dern), who wants to collaborate with him on a book where they solve a series of brutal stakings that LaGrange believes are the work of some goth kids who hang out across the lake.  Initially apprehensive, but with mounting debt, his wife (Kilmer's ex-wife Joanne Whalley) threatening to sell his priceless, bound-by-Walt Whitman-himself copy of Leaves of Grass, and needing to move on from the recent death of his 14-year-old daughter in a boating accident, Baltimore pitches the idea to his publisher (David Paymer) and gets an advance...that he conveniently keeps secret from LaGrange.  Meanwhile, Baltimore is visited by a strange girl named V (Elle Fanning) that no one else sees, and while out wandering through the Swann Valley woods, he nearly falls off a rope bridge but is rescued by the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe (Ben Chaplin), who takes him under his wing and shows him the dark secrets of the town.  As Baltimore struggles with the book, he comes to terms with the guilt over his daughter's death and with Poe's help, starts uncovering the truth about what happened to V and how it ties into the serial stakings that are occupying the sheriff's time.

Coppola financed TWIXT out of his own pocket and when it failed to land a US distributor, he ended up arranging a scant few screenings himself before setting up a VOD distribution deal.  Look, I realize the commercial prospects for an artsy endeavor like this are limited, but can someone explain to me what kind of bullshit state of cinema we're in where Francis Ford Fucking Coppola has to personally schlep his latest movie to individual theaters?  He even shot a couple of sequences in 3-D!  Some may find TWIXT meandering and obfuscating, but it feels a lot like an old Corman or William Castle flick, or sometimes like a TWILIGHT ZONE episode, especially since a good chunk of it is shot in black & white.  It its more accessible sections, it occasionally feels--perhaps because of the presence of THE 'BURBS and THE HOLE co-star Dern--like the kind of throwback film that Joe Dante might make.  Coppola's script never really ties everything together all that securely and the ending is a bit too abrupt, but it really captures the feeling of those old low-budget movies without doing so ironically.  Coppola keeps it legit because he came from that school.  He's not a young filmmaker paying ironic homage to it--he was actually there.  That's just part of the personal touch Coppola brings to TWIXT.  Baltimore's overwhelming grief over the loss of a child is something Coppola knows all too well: he lost his 22-year-old son Gio in a 1986 boating accident that's identically recreated in the way Baltimore's daughter is killed.  Gio's wife was pregnant at the time of his death, and their daughter Gia worked on TWIXT with her grandfather.  Knowing the story behind TWIXT and how it brings together a grandfather who lost his son and a granddaughter who never got to meet her father adds a powerful subtext to the film. 

And it's great to see guys like Kilmer and Dern getting meaty, starring roles for a change.  Kilmer's performance as Doc Holliday in 1993's TOMBSTONE is one of the most beloved and oft-quoted in modern cinema, but he's spent much of the last decade in a stunning career free-fall that found him starring in some of the worst of the worst in the world of DTV with unwatchable garbage like MOSCOW ZERO, THE CHAOS EXPERIMENT, PLAYED (where his character's repeated "You are not gonna taco!" failed to become the new "I'm your Huckleberry") and several ill-advised collaborations with 50 Cent.  Kilmer is an eccentric actor who's frequently been labeled difficult (THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU director John Frankenheimer: "Will Rogers never met Val Kilmer") and has a tendency to run amok in some of these DTV films where he's only on the set for a couple of days and is given room to riff and improv.  Coppola successfully reins him in here, but does give him some leeway in an amusing scene where an increasingly intoxicated Baltimore struggles to get a single sentence written, allowing Kilmer to once more bust out his famous Marlon Brando impression in addition to an impeccable James Mason.  I've long maintained that Kilmer still has some real work and maybe even an Oscar left in him, and it was an admirable and perhaps conscious decision on Coppola's part to give Kilmer--a guy who can probably relate to the sorry state of Hall Baltimore's career--the lead role in this project.  These three most recent Coppola films probably won't even make his career highlight reel, and of course I don't mean to imply that it's on the level of THE GODFATHER or its first sequel, or APOCALYPSE NOW, or THE CONVERSATION, but for a more thorough understanding of him as a filmmaker and as a still-grieving father, there's a strong argument that TWIXT is essential Coppola.  (R, 88 mins)


TRANCE
(France/US/UK - 2013)

Even after the crowd-pleasing Best Picture Oscar winner SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (2008), the grueling Best Picture Oscar nominee 127 HOURS (2010), and supervising the razzle-dazzle of the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony, TRANCE, the latest from director Danny Boyle, didn't inspire much confidence from distributor Fox, who only rolled it out on 443 screens at its widest release.  It's easy to say TRANCE, a remake of a 2001 British TV-movie, is Boyle's attempt at a Christopher Nolan mindfuck, but the head games here seem too contrived and complicated just for its own sake, eventually devolving into trying-too-hard misdirection and incoherence.  Boyle's direction is as stylish as ever, but the plot's intriguing twists and turns and the eventual revelation that what you thought the film was about isn't what it's about at all probably seemed clever on the page, but it grows tiresome on the screen.

 

 

Working with screenwriter John Hodge (SHALLOW GRAVE, TRAINSPOTTING, A LIFE LESS ORDINARY) for the first time since 2000's THE BEACH, Boyle's TRANCE gives us mid-level London art auctioneer Simon (James McAvoy), who takes a nasty blow to the head during a museum theft where a priceless Goya is ripped off by Franck (Vincent Cassel) and his crew.  Franck discovers the canvas has been sliced from the frame and once Simon, hailed as a hero by the media, is released from the hospital, he and his gang endlessly hassle and torture him, believing he stashed the painting somewhere.  But Simon is suffering from amnesia, and can't remember anything during the robbery itself.  Franck sends Simon to hypnotherapist Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson), hoping she can put him in a trance and extract the information from wherever it is in his memories.  Elizabeth figures out what's going on and wants a percentage of the take.  Then a love triangle develops.  And then things get really twisty.  The thing is, the more twists that Boyle and Hodge pile on, the more absurd TRANCE becomes, though I'm sure it's some kind of snickering joke on their part that a major element of the plot hinges on Dawson's shaved bush (the actress does some nudity here that leaves nothing to the imagination and should make her a frontrunner at the next Mr. Skin's Anatomy Awards).  By the end, when all the pieces are (I think) in place, the reaction is less "Whoa!" and more "Really?!  All that for this?" Some of those pieces have to get forced in place for the puzzle to be complete, and even in a film with this many acceptable implausibilities, it's asking a lot for an audience to buy a body decomposing in the trunk of a car for months and no one--least of all the people riding in the backseat--realizing it.  TRANCE is never dull or uninteresting and McAvoy and Cassel are good, but Dawson feels a little miscast, despite her instantly legendary nude scene. Initial reaction might be mild disappointment, but something about this feels like it might be one of those movies that play better when viewed again in a year or two. (R, 101 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: UPSIDE DOWN (2013); PUSHER (2012); and HANSEL & GRETEL GET BAKED (2013)

UPSIDE DOWN
(Canada/France - 2013)

This $60 million sci-fi epic sat on the shelf for over two years before getting a 39-screen US release, grossing just over $100,000.  Sporting the kind of concept that completely collapses under any serious scrutiny, UPSIDE DOWN is easily the dumbest sci-fi film since BRANDED, and sets a land-speed record for a movie bailing on its own established rules, already contradicting itself approximately five minutes in.  The film is set on twin planets with "double gravity" orbiting around the same sun, where the rich and privileged live "Up Top" and the poor and disenfranchised "Down Below."  Contact between worlds is forbidden and Each world has its own gravity and its own concept of matter--for instance, "inverse matter" taken from one world to another combusts after a short period.  Adam (Jim Sturgess) from Down Below has loved Eden (Kirsten Dunst) from Up Top since they were children and their forbidden relationship was broken apart by the authorities.  Eden was shot in the dust-up and suffers from varying degrees of amnesia.  Years later, Adam finds out she works for Trans World, a Big Brother-type corporation whose skyscraper headquarters exists in both worlds, with floor zero being the point where Up Top and Down Below people can co-exist, even though the Up Top people are upside-down.  Adam gets a job at Trans World, trying to sell his aunt's flying pink pancake mix as an expensive beauty product, when in fact it's a secret formula to negate the gravity of both worlds.  By stealing various metals from Up Top, Adam is able to fashion a temporary protective under-armor to buy him some time appearing normal in Up Top (though he has to spray his mop-top down to keep it from floating up) before he inevitably starts to ignite.  Because of her amnesia, Eden doesn't remember Adam, who will stop at nothing, dueling gravities or plot logic be damned, to be with his one true love.

Is there any wonder why this barely got released?  It's fascinatingly stupid.  Writer/director Juan Solanas obviously concentrated so much on the visual element that he never really mapped out the logistics of the concept.  Even then, for a film this expensive, the CGI visuals are pretty second-rate, oversaturated, and unconvincing.  The interiors and the exteriors frequently look like a cheap fusion of Orson Welles' THE TRIAL (1962), Luc Besson's THE FIFTH ELEMENT (1997), and a prog-metal album cover.  Even if the visual effects were up to par and Dunst and Sturgess weren't the dullest cinematic romantic pairing in years, the rampant lack of logic would be too much for UPSIDE DOWN to overcome.  The story ignores its own basic rules when it's convenient for the plot or can provide a nice visual, and constantly backs itself into a corner only to simply make something up to explain it away.  The only jaw-dropping thing about UPSIDE DOWN is the astonishing number of emergency dei ex machina that Solanas has stored up his ass.  (PG-13, 108 mins)


PUSHER
(France/UK - 2012)

DRIVE director Nicolas Winding Refn commissioned this London-set remake of his 1996 Danish breakthrough about one week in the life of a low-level drug dealer who has to come up with some fast cash to get out of trouble with a powerful crime boss.  While PUSHER 2012 is fast-moving and highly watchable, the biggest question is "Why?"  Unless you're a complete subtitle-phobe or have an intense dislike of the sound of the Danish language, there's not really any need to see this almost carbon-copy redux, which goes so far as to cast the same actor (Zlatko Buric) as the pusher's main antagonist.  Ambitious but small-time London coke dealer Frank (Richard Coyle) sets up a potentially lucrative deal with heroin borrowed from Serbian drug lord Milo (Buric).  When cops bust the deal, Frank dumps the dope in a lake and is on the hook to Milo for its value plus money already borrowed, plus a tacked-on fee that Milo imposes simply because he's pissed off.  Frank spends the rest of the film pursuing debts from his clients and setting up additional deals that inevitably fall through, all to keep Milo and his goons off his back.  Director Luis Prieto goes for a hypnotic, flashy sort-of Danny Boyle meets Guy Ritchie look, all set to a throbbing, driving score by Orbital, and it's not a bad film at all, just an unnecessary and overly familiar one.  It doesn't add anything to Winding Refn's original (which was successful enough to spawn two sequels), and everything about it seems like you've seen it all before, because you have...if not in the earlier PUSHER, then in any number of other British crime thrillers over the last 15 years.  Coyle is solid in the lead and Buric is very entertaining as the outwardly gregarious ("Easy peasy lemon squeezy!") but thoroughly ruthless Milo, but PUSHER's biggest problem is its complete lack of a reason to exist. (R, 89 mins)

HANSEL & GRETEL GET BAKED
(US - 2013)

Coming soon after the lackluster HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS and neither the HAROLD & KUMAR comedy nor the shitty Asylum knockoff that the title would indicate, HANSEL & GRETEL GET BAKED is a blood-splattered and at times engagingly silly horror movie that gets a lot of mileage from a campy and self-deprecating performance by Lara Flynn Boyle as Agnes, a "little old lady from Pasadena" who's a weed-dealing witch getting younger with each stoner customer she kills and eats.  Hansel (Michael Welch, one of the TWILIGHT guys who's not Robert Pattinson or Taylor Lautner) and Gretel (CASTLE's Molly Quinn) are siblings with the house to themselves for the weekend (their folks "went to visit the Stiltskins") only to end up searching for Gretel's boyfriend (Andrew James Allen) who went to buy weed from Agnes and never returned.  Agnes also tangles with gang leader Carlos (Reynaldo Gallegos) who wants a cut of her sales since she's stealing all of his customers who are never heard from again.  Directed by Duane Journey and written by co-star David Tillman, HANSEL & GRETEL GET BAKED is a essentially a one-joke idea played surprisingly straight, with some welcome and plentiful old-school gore courtesy of makeup effects veteran Vincent Guastini.  It's no great shakes, but it's well-made, doesn't fall into the trap of repetitive and annoying stoner humor and Boyle, who hasn't been seen in much since the 2005-2006 season of the NBC series LAS VEGAS, really gets a chance to cut loose here and have some fun, even if her performance is more than a little inspired by Heath Ledger's work in THE DARK KNIGHT.  Also with Yancy Butler (looking much better than she has in recent SyFy movies) and Lochlyn Munro as cops, and an unrecognizable Cary Elwes in a cameo as a schlubby meter reader with Coke-bottle glasses. (Unrated, 87 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: ABSOLUTE DECEPTION (2013); HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS (2013); and ECSTASY (2012)

ABSOLUTE DECEPTION
(Australia/Canada - 2013)

Midway through Cuba Gooding Jr.'s latest straight-to-DVD thriller, the Oscar-winning actor, playing FBI agent Nelson, confronts smug villain Osterberg (Chris Betts, who looks like Australian Bob Gunton) at his beach house as the two demonstrate their fluency in speaking Cliché:

Osterberg: "Welllll...Agent Nelson!"

Nelson: "You'll be exchanging this view for an 8 x 10 cell soon enough."

Osterberg: "Don't be making predictions above your pay grade, Agent Nelson.  Care to stay for lunch?"

Nelson: "I'd care to kick your ass!"

ABSOLUTE DECEPTION pretty much stays at that level throughout, with Gooding sleepwalking through a paid Australian vacation as Agent Nelson investigates the murder of an American named Archer (Ty Hungerford) at the hands of hitmen in the employ of Australian media mogul Osterberg, who may have been involved in some convoluted Ponzi scheme with the dead man.  Archer also led a mysterious double life, as Rebecca (Emmanuelle Vaugier), his crusading journalist wife back in NYC, believes she's a widow whose husband died two years earlier.  Nelson and Rebecca team up, facing obstacles from Osterberg and the Gold Coast police all the way. 

The film plods along under the clock-punching direction of Ozploitation icon Brian Trenchard-Smith, who's mainly doing Lifetime and cable movies these days, in addition to directing episodes of the Skinemax series CHEMISTRY.  Trenchard-Smith gets a lifetime pass thanks to his cult-movie glory days of THE MAN FROM HONG KONG (1975), STUNT ROCK (1978), ESCAPE 2000 (1982), BMX BANDITS (1983), DEAD-END DRIVE-IN (1986), THE SIEGE OF FIREBASE GLORIA (1989), and numerous others, but he hasn't made a noteworthy genre film in almost 20 years and it's really sad to see him slumming with forgettable junk like this.  The kind of movie that has an establishing shot of the NYC skyline with the caption "New York, USA," ABSOLUTE DECEPTION showcases dubiously crummy visual FX, from the de rigeur CGI splatter to a yacht explosion that looks like it was achieved courtesy of an app on Trenchard-Smith's smartphone (check it out in the trailer above), and from the video-burned credits on, it looks more like an episode of CSI: MIAMI than an actual movie.  With the easily-removable digital blood and the surprising lack of profanity (at one point, Vaugier calls someone "a miserable puke"), it almost looks like it was shot under the presumption that it might go directly to broadcast TV.  Gooding's performance is passable--he obviously doesn't give a shit--but Vaugier, sporting some incredibly unflattering penciled-on eyebrows that make her look a decade older than she is, is just awful.  (R, 92 mins)



HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS
(US/Germany - 2013)

Obviously meant to be a campy, tongue-in-cheek take on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, HANSEL & GRETEL: WITCH HUNTERS starts off enjoyably enough, but quickly turns tedious and repetitive.  As children, orphaned Hansel and Gretel defeated an evil witch and burned her alive, and as adults, played by Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton, they're mercenary witch hunters-for-hire, bringing along their arsenal of high-tech weaponry that's intentionally anachronistic (along with dialogue like "You gotta be fuckin' kidding me!") to rid of a village of a witch (Famke Janssen) who's been abducting children.  It's admirable that writer/director Tommy Wirkola (the overrated Nazi zombie cult flick DEAD SNOW) aimed this at adults and went for a hard-R rating, but the only other surprise about WITCH HUNTERS is how boring it is.  There's some tell-tale signs of a troubled production--several delayed release dates leading to two years on the shelf, choppy editing, and a noticeably truncated running time (the closing credits start rolling at the 80-minute mark, not typical of a $50 million movie).  Arterton seems to be having some fun playing a badass Gretel, but Renner, who shot this before working on THE AVENGERS and THE BOURNE LEGACY, just looks bored silly, a sentiment he didn't even try to conceal during the contractually-obligated media blitz when the film was finally released in January 2013, often appearing to be in physical pain trying to sound enthusiastic about it.  The film did well enough for a sequel to be announced, though I can't imagine anyone--starting with Renner--wanting one.  Then again, we got a sequel to G.I. JOE, so what do I know?  (R, 88 mins)

ECSTASY
(Canada - 2012)

Despite its good intentions, it's hard for ECSTASY to not feel like an inferior TRAINSPOTTING knockoff that's been frozen in ice since the late '90s and just now thawed out.  Like Danny Boyle's 1996 hit, ECSTASY is based on an Irvine Welsh work, in this case the novella "The Undefeated" from his 1996 collection Ecstasy, and deals with similarly drug-addled characters in Edinburgh.  This time, however, the drug of choice is Ecstasy, and the central character, Lloyd (Adam Sinclair) owes money to local crime boss Solo (Carlo Rota), who doesn't approve of Lloyd and his pals Woodsy (Billy Boyd) and Ally (Keram Malicki-Sanchez) making money from raves and dealing and cutting him out of his percentage.  These guys are too old to be living the wild lifestyles they are, and even Ally asks Lloyd at one point, "You ever notice we're the oldest punters in the club?"  Lloyd regularly runs drugs from Amsterdam to Edinburgh for Solo, and attempts to do the proverbial "one last job" after he falls in love with Canadian Heather (Kristin Kreuk), who recently left her cheating Scottish husband Hugh (Dean McDermott).  TRAINSPOTTING succeeded because of the lightning-in-a-bottle collaboration between Boyle and several promising newcomers turning in star-marking performances (I still can't see Robert Carlyle and not think of Begbie).  ECSTASY director/co-writer Rob Heydon isn't Boyle, and his cast simply isn't as compelling.  It doesn't help matters that it's a Canadian production and other than Scotsmen Sinclair, Boyd, and WHOSE LINE IS IT ANYWAY?'s Colin Mochrie (as a priest), the cast is mostly Canadians attempting unconvincing Scottish accents, with Rota (doing nothing more than a Scottish variation of the mob boss he played in THE BOONDOCK SAINTS) and Stephen McHattie (as Lloyd's alcoholic dad) really struggling.  Other than the unexpected casting of Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson in a small role as a doctor in a rehab clinic trying to help Woodsy get clean, there's nothing of note in the bland and predictable ECSTASY.  It's not a terrible movie by any means, but all it really succeeds in doing is making you wish you were watching TRAINSPOTTING again instead.  (Unrated, 104 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

On DVD/Blu-ray: IT'S A DISASTER (2013); CHARLIE ZONE (2013); and THE BIG BAD (2012)

IT'S A DISASTER
(US - 2013)

Beating the all-star THIS IS THE END to theaters by a couple of months, this indie apocalypse comedy continues the end-of-the-world depictions of recent films like MELANCHOLIA, TAKE SHELTER, 4:44: LAST DAY ON EARTH, and SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD.  Featuring several members of the improv comedy outfit The Vacationeers, writer-director Todd Berger's IT'S A DISASTER has four couples meeting for Sunday brunch at the home of the about-to-divorce Pete (Blaise Miller) and Emma (Erinn Hayes), only to find out that a series of dirty bombs have gone off and that an incredibly toxic, lethal nerve gas has enveloped the city and possibly beyond.  Petty bickering and long-held grudges boil over as the couples are trapped inside the house, and it works when it's played for some squirm-inducing comedy of discomfort, a specialty of David Cross, who plays Glenn, the newcomer to the group on his third date with Tracy (Julia Stiles).  But mainly, it's a lot of ennui and whining among the eight characters.  There's also the six-years-engaged Hedy (America Ferrera) and Shane (Jeff Grace), who's preoccupied with an eBay auction for a rare X-Men comic, and swingers Lexi (Rachel Boston) and Buck (Kevin M. Brennan, who reminded me of a young Nicolas Cage), who try to goad Glenn into a threesome.  Some of it is cleverly-written, dark, and well-delivered, particularly Stiles coldly refusing to let a perpetually tardy fifth couple in the house after they arrive late and clearly infected with the nerve gas ("Maybe you should learn to show up to things on time, huh?") and getting emotional over the things she's never done: "I never went to Europe.  I never even went to Montreal...that's almost like Europe. I never went scuba-diving.  I never went to the ballet.  I've never been in love.  I never even watched THE WIRE!" to which Cross replies "All of those things are overrated.  Well, except for THE WIRE.  That was really good.  Maybe not the last season, but..."  But these characters generally aren't very interesting despite some laughs throughout, and a late-film revelation of a previously unseen side of someone does result in the term "Johnny Crazyballs" being introduced into the lexicon.  IT'S A DISASTER has some good moments, the closing scene is very funny (the cut to the credits is perfect), and it's still recommended, but there's just not quite enough here to sustain feature length.  (R, 90 mins)

 

 

 

 

CHARLIE ZONE

(Canada - 2013)

 

Shot in 2011, this wildly uneven and frequently heavy-handed Canadian thriller runs the gamut from sincere drama to sleazy exploitation and is effective and trite in almost equal doses.   Set in and around Halifax, Nova Scotia, the film finds disgraced First Nations boxer and ex-con Avery (Glen Gould) hired by Ava (Jennie Raymond) to rescue her younger, junkie half-sister Jan (Amanda Crew) from the clutches of a pair of drug pushers.  Avery quickly infiltrates their drug den in the seedy "Charlie Zone" slums and rescues Jan, but gets more than he bargained for when people show up to kill her.  The people Ava represents are indeed not Jan's "parents" at all but a pair of contract killers hired by Ava to make Jan, and Avery by association, disappear for reasons that will form a bond between the two outcasts as Jan tries to start her life over and Avery finds protecting her as a path to redemption. 

 

 

Like most of the cast, Gould (who projects a very Danny Trejo persona here) has logged a lot of time on various Canadian TV shows (only Crew seems to have cracked the US market extensively, co-starring in SEX DRIVE, THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT, and CHARLIE ST. CLOUD) and handles himself well when the material permits it.  Plausibility isn't one of CHARLIE ZONE's strong suits (what exactly is it about his past as a boxer that makes Avery an ideal undercover bounty hunter?), and you'll realize Avery is being duped long before he does.  It's structured very much like a TV-movie throughout, only with copious F-bombs and hard-R violence, and the too-tidy climax feels like the wrap-up of a LAW & ORDER: SVU episode.  CHARLIE ZONE is an odd little film, almost like director/co-writer Michael Melski couldn't find a specific focus and threw in a little of everything:  we spend a lot of time with the drug den shitbags long after they're no longer pertinent to the story, and there's a rush to cram in elements of Avery's past when we meet his grandfather (Agumeuay Nakanakis) and ex-girlfriend (Cindy Sampson) that he walked out on years ago. There's also some embarrassing dialogue along the lines of Avery telling Jan "You've got me in your corner now."  CHARLIE ZONE tries to accomplish too much, can't settle on a tone, glosses over some seemingly important details, and could've benefitted from more sure-handed direction, but Gould and Crew do some good work throughout.  (R, 103 mins)

 

 

THE BIG BAD

(US - 2012)

 

This very low-budget Long Island-shot indie horror film was somehow picked up for VOD release by Phase 4 last year, though it's hard to believe this ever made it beyond the festival circuit.  A dreary, ugly, and molasses-paced revenge thriller/werewolf movie, THE BIG BAD draws obvious parallels to "Little Red Riding Hood," but transplanted to a modern setting, largely in a dive bar called The Big Bad.  Red-headed Frankie (screenwriter Jessi Gotta) is after an elusive werewolf named Fenton Bailey (Timothy McCown Reynolds), who slaughtered her family and happens to be her ex-stepfather.  Frankie loses an eye in the process, allowing Gotta and director Bryan Enk to pay homage to THRILLER: A CRUEL PICTURE (there's also a JAWS-inspired scene with Gotta and lesbian lycanthrope Jessica Savage comparing scars), and eventually has her showdown with the big bad wolf, but man, what a tedious movie.  It's shot through the kind of hazy filter that ABC uses on Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer, and Enk is far too reliant on pointless shaky/jump edits that try to make it seem "edgy" or "grindhousey" but instead make it look like a VHS tape with tracking issues.  The werewolf makeup is surprisingly OK, but otherwise, THE BIG BAD isn't particularly clever, well-written, or original, the performances are community theater-level at best, it feels hours longer than it is, and it isn't the least bit enjoyable as a thriller, a horror movie, or an homage. It looks like a bunch of friends got together and had all the equipment and software necessary to make a professional-looking home movie.  I'm sure Gotta and Enk are nice kids and everyone has to start somewhere, but this is just terrible.  (R, 78 mins, also available on Netflix streaming)

 

 

 

On DVD/Blu-ray: THE ABCs OF DEATH (2013); NEIGHBORING SOUNDS (2012); and WASTED ON THE YOUNG (2013)

THE ABCs OF DEATH
(US - 2013)

There's an interesting concept behind the anthology horror film THE ABCs OF DEATH:  producers gave a letter of the alphabet to 27 cult horror filmmakers (the letter "O" is handled by the two-person team behind the giallo throwback AMER), giving each $5000 and complete artistic freedom to do what they want with their letter and make a four-to-five-minute short film that must culminate in death.  As with any anthology, it's a wildly inconsistent mixed bag with several standouts and quite a few duds.  There's a tendency toward transgression and almost-childish shock value--look no further than the fact that three of the 26 segments prominently feature a toilet, and another has a guy getting his face dunked in a diarrhea-filled bedpan--but there's a few surprising winners spread throughout, often from unexpected sources.  The standout is probably "D is for Dogfight," by DEADGIRL co-director Marcel Sarmiento, a genuinely shocking, misanthropic piece about an underground fight club that pits man against dog (among the slobbering onlookers is a cheering toddler wearing just a diaper) with a surprising twist. "Q is for Quack" is a brilliantly-conceived meta piece where director Adam Wingard (A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE) plays himself, bitching about being picked last for the project ("even after Nacho Vigalondo," his buddy reminds him) and being stuck with the letter Q.   "O is for Orgasm" is a color-drenched piece from AMER creators Helene Cattet & Bruno Forzani.  Music video animator Lee Hardcastle's claymation "T is for Toilet" presents a truly horrific potty-training incident that avoids the scatological direction of the other toilet-centric stories.  FRONTIER(S) director Xavier Gens' "X is for XXL" is a horrifying look at an obese woman who decides to take an electric carving knife to her body fat.  "M is for Miscarriage" is the shortest of the segments at around two minutes, but it packs a sick and jaw-droppingly dark wallop and again proves that hipster would-be horror wunderkind Ti West (THE INNKEEPERS) is best when taken in small doses. 

There's a lot of DOA material throughout--you can pretty much skip letters F-through-L (starting with Noboru Iguchi's useless "F is for Fart" up to Timi Tjahjanto's semen-drenched "L is for Libido"), and Simon Rumley's "P is for Pressure" is a real disappointment considering how great his extraordinarily unsettling RED, WHITE & BLUE was.  ABCs stumbles to its conclusion with a pair of late-in-the-game low points with Joe Schnepp's "W is for WTF?" and Yoshihiro Nishimura's "Z is for Zetsumetsu," but the unlikely Jason Eisener (the terrible prefab cult movie HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN) gives the closing stretch a lift with the revenge tale "Y is for Youngbuck," which gets a hugely catchy soundtrack with "Vengeance" by the synth-rock outfit Powerglove.  Other directors include Srdjan Spasojevic (A SERBIAN FILM), MAY star Angela Bettis, Ben Wheatley (KILL LIST), Andrew Traucki (THE REEF), and Jorge Michel Grau (WE ARE WHAT WE ARE).  There's some good stuff in THE ABCs OF DEATH, but you have to get around a lot of shit--and other byproducts of the human body--to appreciate it.  (Unrated, 129 mins)


NEIGHBORING SOUNDS
(Brazil - 2012)

NEIGHBORING SOUNDS, the first narrative feature by Brazilian documentarian and former film critic Kleber Mendonca Filho, is the kind of long and slow-moving film that demands patience and attention but the diligence pays off by the end.  The film looks at an ensemble of residents in a changing neighborhood of tower blocks in Recife.  One high-rise after another has been constructed as the upper-middle class has moved in, literally looking down upon the lower class at the street level, who will soon be displaced to make room for more towers.  Crime is on the increase, prompting Clodoaldo (Irandhir Santos) and a few friends to collect money from the residents and function as the neighborhood's self-appointed security crew.  As they establish more of a presence, it becomes clear that Clodoaldo has set up shop here for a reason.  We also meet old Francisco (W.J. Solha), a former sugar plantation owner who used to own all of the buildings but has made himself a fortune selling the properties to developers.  There's also Francisco's grandson Joao (Gustavo Jahn), who works as the area's leasing agent; his maybe-girlfriend Sofia (Irma Brown), who grew up in a house that Francisco now owns and has just sold to be demolished; Joao's cousin Dinho (Yuri Holanda), the resident car stereo thief; and stay-at-home mom Bia (Maeve Jinkings), who spends her days devising ways to quiet a neighbor's incessantly barking dog in addition to alleviating the boredom by getting high or rubbing herself against the dryer when it's on spin-cycle.  Even when very little is happening, the constant presence of Clodoaldo and his "security" team, coupled with the way Filho uses sound, usually coming from just outside the frame, succeeds in creating a profound sense of unease and tension throughout NEIGHBORING SOUNDS (with one shot that provides more of a jolt than any recent horror movie).  In a way, this is a very angry film in the way it presents the upper-middle class as living above and being better than those who live beneath and serve them, blithely dismissing them as they live among them in this endless, bitter class struggle, a fact that something Clodoaldo is clearly itching to remind them (and demonstrated in the way a parking attendant keys the car of a rude resident).  Almost willfully obfuscating and evasive at times, it isn't until the very end of the film (the next-to-last scene, in fact) that Filho lays all the cards on the table.  While some of the plot threads don't really go anywhere (Bia and the dog, for example), they do provide some character shading and a general "feel" for this particular place.  Slow but never dull, the beautifully-shot NEIGHBORING SOUNDS very gradually pulls you in, maintaining a very mysterious aura all the way to its surprise ending that expects you to have been paying attention from the film's very first images. (Unrated, 131 mins, also available on Netflix streaming)

WASTED ON THE YOUNG
(Australia - 2011; 2013 US release)

This visually arresting and occasionally ambitious debut from writer/director Ben C. Lucas starts as an Australian LESS THAN ZERO with a touch of Larry Clark's BULLY and also flirts with the revenge thriller genre.  With its total absence of adults in any capacity (there's no parents or teachers to be found), it functions more as a parable than a plausible narrative (at one point, against an obviously fake greenscreen sky, one character says "This place isn't real, anyway") and contains enough fantasy imagery of school shootings that it's easy to see why this only got a very limited US theatrical and VOD release two years after it made the rounds in Australia.  Despicable swim-team god Zack (CHRONICLE's Alex Russell) lords over the students of a posh private school ("When you're above people, you don't have to explain yourself to anyone, for anything") and keeps his bookish, introverted stepbrother Darren (Oliver Ackland) under this thumb, allowing him on the swim team but making him do all of his school assignments.  When Zack and his jock buddies see Darren and cute, brainy Xandrie (Adelaide Clemens) hitting it off, they decide to invite her to a party where Xandrie is drugged, raped, and left unconscious on a nearby beach.  Darren, under the impression that Xandrie left the party, is unaware of what happened until he tries calling her the next day and finds her phone buried between couch cushions in the basement.  When Xandrie reappears at school several days later, Zack and his crew have made sure that her reputation is ruined, that everyone knows she was "asking for it," and that she's just making up stories about Zack because "she regrets sleeping with him."

Lucas' use of color (there's a very striking shot of Xandrie appearing at the top of a staircase that looks like it belongs in an Italian giallo), framing, and creative editing techniques (this mostly unfolds in a linear fashion, but there are some interesting instances of back-and-forth cross-cutting between past, present, and future) are very well-managed by the first-time filmmaker, who gets strong performances from his three leads, even if 31-year-old Ackland, whose perpetual five-o'clock shadow frequently makes him look like he should be Russell's stepfather rather than his younger stepbrother, is a decade too old for his role.  Russell manages to make the cocky, smirking Zack truly hateful without resorting to cliches, and the promising Clemens (the Michelle Williams lookalike who's become a bit of a new scream queen with SILENT HILL: REVELATION and NO ONE LIVES) is very good as Xandrie.  Sometimes the intentional unreality is distracting from a storytelling perspective (when Darren is caught downloading video files from the laptop of one of Zack's asshole buddies, Zack's blase non-reaction reeks of plot convenience), and the climax gets a little too tech-geeky and ham-fisted in its messaging of social media and the sense of disconnect, but overall, despite a couple of minor rookie mistakes, WASTED ON THE YOUNG is a solid debut from a filmmaker with obvious potential. (R, 97 mins, also available on Netflix streaming).

On DVD/Blu-ray: TEXAS CHAINSAW (2013); TOMORROW YOU'RE GONE (2013); and HELLGATE (2012)

TEXAS CHAINSAW
(US - 2013)

The latest TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE reboot pretends none of the original's three sequels or the mid-2000s Michael Bay-produced remake and prequel happened, and opens as a direct sequel to the 1974 film, picking up right where it left off for a ten-minute prologue.  In it, the deranged, cannibalistic Sawyer clan are all killed in a fire started by a vigilante mob.  A childless couple among the vigilantes takes a Sawyer infant to raise as their own.  Then it jumps to the present day, with 20-ish Heather (Alexandra Daddario), that grown child, getting news that her biological grandmother has left her a mansion in Texas.  Off she goes with her friends, who are eventually killed one by one by the black sheep still locked in the basement:  Leatherface (Dan Yaeger), who it turns out is Heather's cousin.  TEXAS CHAINSAW gets off to a surprisingly OK start before constructive sloppiness by director John Luessenhop and the screenwriters (JASON GOES TO HELL: THE FINAL FRIDAY director Adam Marcus among them) starts becoming too much of a distraction.  These college-age kids should be in their late 30s at least, as the film takes place 39 years after the 1973-set events of the first film and this film's own prologue.  Yet, Heather and her friends look to be in their early 20s...but the film can't be taking place in the mid-1990s because people are using smartphones.  Maybe that's being nitpicky, but there's other issues, like stacking the deck with a cartoonishly evil Texas he-man mayor (Paul Rae) who's such an asshole that it's easy for the filmmakers to make Leatherface the hero.  And they can't even keep track of their own characters, as a sheriff's deputy played by Scott Eastwood (Clint's lookalike son), a fairly important element of the story, completely vanishes during the climax.  This TEXAS CHAINSAW (even the shorthand title comes across as half-assed), produced by Cannon cover band Millennium/NuImage, is stupid but it isn't completely terrible--it's almost good compared to the Bay productions--but it exerts the bare minimum to get by and does nothing to justify its existence.  Just stick with the first two films that Tobe Hooper directed.  The rest are irrelevant, as are the cred-begging cameos by past CHAINSAW vets Gunnar Hansen, Bill Moseley, John Dugan, and Marilyn Burns.  (R, 92 mins)

TOMORROW YOU'RE GONE
(US - 2013)

Is a movie doomed the moment Stephen Dorff is cast in the lead?  That's not to say that Dorff is a bad actor, because he's not, and his bad movies are rarely if ever his fault.  He gave the performance of his career in Sofia Coppola's SOMEWHERE (2010), but that's just it: nobody saw it, and the film wasn't as good as he was in it.  Dorff puts forth effort in serious indies that play to crickets and tumbleweed, but then gets a reputation as a washout hack when he does a random DTV thriller or pitches e-cigs to pay the bills.  The guy had some momentum going in the '90s, but hasn't been able to catch a break since Leonardo DiCaprio started getting all of his roles.  He's turned in some good performances and maybe some day, luck will finally be on his side but, unfortunately for Dorff and the viewer, TOMORROW YOU'RE GONE is not that day.  It's hard to say where the Cleveland-shot TOMORROW went wrong, but it's never a good sign when a film is held in limbo for a couple of years because the filmmakers are filing lawsuits.  Matthew F. Jones adapted his novel Boot Straps, but was so appalled at the end result that he sued the producers and director David Jacobson (2006's DOWN IN THE VALLEY) and tried to prevent it from being released.  It eventually got a token limited release in April 2013 before being dumped on DVD and Blu-ray six weeks later, with no extras whatsoever, unless you count "Scene Selection."  It seems everyone associated with TOMORROW YOU'RE GONE has actively distanced themselves from it.

I haven't read Jones' novel, so I can't compare the book and the film, but Jacobson seems to be going for some blatant David Lynch worship here--I should clarify "Lynch when his films were still coherent"--specifically WILD AT HEART and some of the more grounded-in-reality portions of LOST HIGHWAY.  Dorff is ex-con Charlie, assigned by crime boss The Buddha (Willem Dafoe, who was in WILD AT HEART) to whack someone.  Charlie kills the guy but botches the job by leaving a witness, and then hits the road with bewitching part-time porn actress Florence Jane (Michelle Monaghan--why isn't she getting better roles?) and then...well, not much else. There's a lot of mumbling about trying to find and kill the Buddha.  For a while, Jacobson flirts with the idea that Florence Jane is a figment of Charlie's imagination, and she wears a blonde Marilyn Monroe wig at one point for no apparent reason.  After a potentially intriguing, modern noir set-up (with opening credits accompanied by Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Hear Voices"), Jacobson plants his mouth firmly on Lynch's nutbag and acts like his work is done, stumbling into coast-mode and stranding the audience with two uninteresting characters, lots of open road, and no shortage of Angelo Badalamenti/TWIN PEAKS-styled vibrato in Peter Salett's highly derivative score.  With the game Monaghan providing its only spark, TOMORROW YOU'RE GONE isn't the worst film of 2013 (though it tries to be), but it may very well be the dullest. (Unrated, 92 mins)


HELLGATE
(US/Thailand - 2012)

This tired snoozer of a horror movie has some nice location shooting in Thailand but not much else to recommend.  After barely surviving a Bangkok car crash that kills his wife and son, Cary Elwes starts having visions of the usual quick-cut, herky-jerky ghosts and demons.  His nurse (Ploy Jindachot) conveniently has an aunt who knows all there is to know about the Thai spirit world, and she directs him to aging American surfer dude/ghostbuster William Hurt.  Hurt, of course speaking from experience, tells Elwes that the souls of his wife and son are not at rest (Elwes was in a coma for five weeks after the accident and was unable to say goodbye to them) and it's that vulnerability that makes him a magnet for other malevolent spirits that Elwes now has the power to see.  Naturally, Elwes must go on a journey deep into the haunted jungles of Thailand to give these souls closure.  Predictable and ploddingly-paced, with J-horror cliches and embarrassing CGI, HELLGATE squanders a potentially interesting setting with the most rote, cliched story imaginable.  The bland Elwes has demonstrated comic chops in the past, but he's really never been an interesting dramatic actor and that doesn't change here, while Oscar-winner and four-time nominee Hurt is obviously just onboard for the free Thailand vacation.  In a more inspired fright flick, Hurt's character could've been a real hammy crowd-pleaser (the bit where he's just suddenly standing there with a surfboard is amusing and feels like it was improvised by the actor), but everyone from the actors to writer-director John Penney just seem to be taking this far too seriously, as if it's the first horror film to ever deal with the subject of tortured spirits in some purgatorial limbo.  Penney, whose infamous ZYZZYX ROAD made headlines for its $30 box office gross back in 2006, has been involved in enjoyable horror films in the past--he co-wrote the cult favorite THE KINDRED (1987) and scripted RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3 (1994) and worked with Hurt before, scripting the underrated B-movie CONTAMINATED MAN (2000), which is still in regular night-owl rotation on cable--but HELLGATE, originally titled SHADOWS when it was shot in 2010, is just dead on arrival.  (Unrated, 93 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

On DVD/Blu-ray: NOT FADE AWAY (2012), THE DETAILS (2012), plus bonus Netflix Instant exclusive PERCENTAGE (2013)

NOT FADE AWAY
(US - 2012)

Several SOPRANOS alumni, including creator David Chase, reunited for this semi-autobiographical period piece about one of countless 1960s rock bands that didn't make it.  Chase, who wrote and directed, seems to approach his first feature film as if it's an entire season of an HBO show whittled down to two hours.  The story isn't exactly cohesive and it's probably not meant to be.  It makes sure to mention all the expected '60s touchstones--opening with JFK's assassination, then the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, Vietnam, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights, free love, LSD, Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Jimi Hendrix, Bobby Kennedy--as we watch a small-time Jersey band build a following, squabble, and try to audition for a record label all while dealing with life in a tumultuous decade.  The focus is on drummer Douglas (John Magaro) who's invited into a local cover band by guitarist/singer Eugene (Jack Huston).  Douglas, Eugene, and Wells (Will Brill) form the core of the unnamed band and tensions flare when 4/5 of the band thinks that Douglas is a better singer and Eugene should just play guitar.  Eugene is also reluctant to write original songs and would prefer to play covers.  Meanwhile, Douglas falls in love with rich girl Grace (Bella Heathcote) and drops out of college, much to the disgust of his bitter, blue collar father (James Gandolfini) who doesn't approve of his shaggy hair and his clothes that make him look like he "just got off the boat."  This formula repeats for the entire film:  the band plays, squabbles, pulls it together, Douglas and Grace make big plans about music and film projects, Eugene acts like a jealous dick, and Douglas goes home for the holidays and fights with his dad. 

Magaro is very good, and Chase does a great job with period detail, but his construction of the film is frustrating.  The narrative jumps all over the place, sometimes skipping months and years at a time (indicated by how increasingly big Douglas' hair gets), and established subplots get cast aside with an almost willful disregard.  We never really get to know the large cast of characters (I don't even recall hearing the names of the other two guys in the band), and I don't know why we spend so much time dealing with Grace's troubled older sister (Dominique McElligott).  And if you hated the last scene of THE SOPRANOS' final episode, then wait until you see what Chase does here.  His fondness for the era is undeniable (I got a big laugh out of Grace dragging Douglas to see Antonioni's BLOW-UP, where he complains "What kind of movie is this?  Nothing happens!"), but in the end, it misses the mark and has surprisingly little to say.  Produced by Steven Van Zandt, who also served as music supervisor.  The song selection is probably the film's strongest attribute.  (R, 112 mins)


THE DETAILS
(US - 2012)

THE DETAILS is one of those twisty nightmare comedies where one single infraction by an everyman protagonist spirals into out-of-control doom.  It's the kind of dark comedy that wants to be FARGO-era Coen Bros., but its frequent moments of excellence never really coalesce into anything all that special by the pat, predictable conclusion.  Mild-mannered, nice-guy Seattle doctor Tobey Maguire, who's initially so benignly unthreatening that he spells out his curse words, decides to add a room on to his house without obtaining a city permit, and through an individually plausible but collectively absurd set of circumstances, sees his entire life fall to pieces.  He and wife Elizabeth Banks haven't had sex in six months, but they generally get along, and he spends his spare time jerking off to internet porn and battling raccoons who keep digging up his lawn in the wee hours.  After an argument, his frustrations boil over and he sleeps with his married med school friend Kerry Washington, who confesses the indiscretion to her husband Ray Liotta, who then threatens to tell Banks unless Maguire pays him $100,000.  Meanwhile, Maguire has to contend with crazy cat-lady neighbor Laura Linney after her cat dies ingesting some poison left out for the raccoons.  Before Maguire realizes what's going on, he and Linney have a fast and frenzied sexual encounter in her living room and she ends up pregnant.  The only good thing going on in Maguire's life is his friendship with Dennis Haysbert, an almost-basketball pro who fell on hard times and needs a kidney transplant.  But Maguire's chaotic existence even spills over into Haysbert's, who decides to help his new friend in the worst way possible.

Written and directed by Jacob Aaron Estes, who's been MIA since his acclaimed 2004 debut MEAN CREEK, THE DETAILS has a lot of outstanding moments and killer supporting performances, but it turns into a case where the parts are greater than the whole.  Shot in 2009, it's a better film than three years on the shelf and a 73-screen release would lead you to believe.  Maguire is good, but it's Linney, Haysbert, and Liotta who steal the film.  Liotta, in particular, has an amazing scene where he confronts Maguire on a bridge that features some of the best and most profane acting of his career.  And his comedic timing and delivery of bizarrely funny dialogue is spot-on ("I taught you how to make pesto and you sleep with my wife?!").  Linney throws herself into her role, turning in a fearless performance as a character that a more vain actress wouldn't even consider portraying (straddling Maguire, she shrieks "I can feel you getting bigger!").  It's an odd little film that never quite finds the tone it's looking for, careening from near-slapstick with the raccoon business to some really dark, bleak turns in the closing act.  Flawed and inconsistent and probably hard to market, but worth a look.  (R, 101 mins)


PERCENTAGE
(US - 2013)

Two weeks after the unwatchable HOUSE OF BODIES, Netflix drops another Queen Latifah-produced bomb as a streaming exclusive...no theatrical release, no trailer, no publicity, nothing.  Like BODIES, the gangsta thriller PERCENTAGE was directed by the astonishingly inept Alex Merkin, who's obviously gunning to be the Albert Pyun of his generation.  As terrible and as dated as it is (playing a lot like one of those countless DTV, post-I'M 'BOUT IT Master P joints from the late '90s), PERCENTAGE is at least a technical improvement over BODIES and, if nothing else, almost looks like a real movie instead of cobbled-together cell phone footage.  But the praise ends there as we follow unscrupulous NYC thug Ant (rapper Cam'ron, who also "co-wrote" the "script") and his buddy Carter (Omar Gooding, Cuba Jr's brother) fleeing a shootout with the Russian mob and heading to Miami to lay low.  Instead, they team up with Carter's cousin Flaco (Antwon Tanner) on a half-assed credit card scam that can't possibly be as easy to pull off in real life as the film presents it.  They live large, buying expensive watches, lighting blunts with Benjamins and hangin' at the club, all until Miami crime boss Mama Cash (Macy Gray) and her cowboy enforcer Porter (Ving Rhames) want their cut.  The eastern European mob also figures, as per the rules of straight-to-DVD dogshit.  Merkin actually tries to go for some style here by clumsily ripping off John Woo (birds!) and Steven Soderbergh (when Ant meets Malinda Williams' Cass at the club, their conversation is intercut with footage of them in bed later on, much like George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in the hotel bar in OUT OF SIGHT), and there's repeat invocations of "The world is yours" from both versions of SCARFACE.  But proving he's seen good movies by better directors doesn't give Merkin any credibility, especially in a gaffe-filled montage with Ant's narration ("The terminals was hacked...to place a trace on each card swiped") repeated over two consecutive scenes.  Really?  Nobody noticed that?  Gray is awful and Rhames is phoning it in (though at 66:30, watch what appears to be his impromptu impression of Bela Lugosi in FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN), and Queen Latifah really should be using her celebrity and her name on more worthwhile projects.  What can you say about a movie that's so bad that it's even beneath Omar Gooding?  (Unrated, 83 mins, currently available only on Netflix streaming)

On DVD/Blu-ray: WOMB (2012) and THE SORCERER AND THE WHITE SNAKE (2013)

WOMB
(Germany/Hungary/France - 2010; 2012 US release)

Unbearable grief and crushing loneliness lead to fateful decisions and actions in this thoughtful, intelligent and unsettling sci-fi drama that admittedly may be too uncomfortable for mainstream consumption.  Rebecca and Tommy meet as children in a small seaside community where she's temporarily staying with her grandfather.  As quickly as they bond and become one another's first love, she's off to Tokyo where her mother has a new job.  12 years later, Rebecca (Eva Green) returns looking for Tommy (Matt Smith) and the two pick up where they left off.  Happiness proves to be short-lived as Tommy is hit by a car and killed.  Blaming herself for his death, Rebecca, against the wishes of Tommy's mother (Lesley Manville), but with the blessing of his father (Peter Wight) is artificially inseminated with Tommy's DNA in a now-commonly-practiced human cloning procedure.  She moves away and gives birth to Tommy.  Years go by and Tommy (played as a child by Tristan Christopher) has noticed the frequent sexual tension between him and his spinster mother and her efforts to keep him as isolated as possible after his friends' mothers refuse to let their kids associate with a clone.  Tommy tries to be a regular boy, vaguely aware that something is odd but not fully understanding that it's his mother's intention not to have a son, but to have an eventual lover.  When Tommy reaches adulthood (again played by Smith), he goes off to college and brings his girlfriend (Hannah Murray) home and things get complicated, to say the least.

Hungarian writer/director Benedek Fliegauf lets the story unfold very deliberately (and in hindsight, the final reveal is there in the opening scene if you're paying attention), and makes outstanding use of the North Frisian island of Sylt, off the coast of Germany.  It's a visually striking location, and the gray, chilly atmosphere coupled with Peter Szatmari's cinematography, in which Fliegauf makes use of the entire 2.35:1 aspect ratio and frequently relies on expansive horizons to emphasize the distance and the isolation, makes quite an impression.  It's a difficult and downbeat film, maybe even offensive for some, and its central character remains cold and likely crazy throughout, but Fliegauf and his actors deserve credit for keeping it serious when it easily could've devolved into ludicrous camp.  Released elsewhere in 2010, WOMB was belatedly released in the US in 2012, possibly to capitalize on Eleventh Doctor Smith's DOCTOR WHO notoriety, achieved after he worked on this film.  (Unrated, 112 mins)



THE SORCERER AND THE WHITE SNAKE
(China - 2011; 2013 US release)

Another plodding, lifeless, overly-stylized Chinese CGI extravaganza, THE SORCERER AND THE WHITE SNAKE is the latest from A CHINESE GHOST STORY director Ching Siu-Tung, using his occasional Anglicized Tony Ching pseudonym.  A decade back, in the midst of that incredible wuxia renaissance that gave us such classics as Ang Lee's CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON, and the Zhang Yimou films HERO, HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS, and CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER to name just a few, this type of period Asian fantasy epic was almost always guaranteed to be great entertainment.  But in the years since, with the over-reliance on dubious CGI to the point where the films now look completely animated, and badly at that, these have have become a chore to sit through.  I've spent some time away from the genre, and this drop-by didn't change my opinion.  If anything, these things are getting worse.  Yet, they remain hugely popular in China.

THE SORCERER AND THE WHITE SNAKE can't decide what it wants to be, and as a result, it succeeds at nothing.  With a story that manages to be both overstuffed and flimsy, SORCERER deals with young herbal healer Xu Xian (Raymond Lam), who nearly drowns but is rescued by Susu (Eva Huang), a snake goddess capable of disguising herself as a human.  Susu is sympathetic, unlike her malevolent companion Qingqing (Charlene Choi), who befriends Neng Ren (Zhang Wen), an apprentice monk who's been bitten by a bat demon and wakes up with fangs and pointed ears.  Meanwhile, Neng Ren's sorcerer monk mentor Fa Hai (a visibly bored Jet Li) isn't fooled by any of these snake demons in human form and gives Susu a chance to leave Xu Xian since he respects her kind-heartedness.  When she refuses, Fa Hai declares war on the snake goddesses, killing Susu, who's later brought back to life by some talking spirit herbs.  The snake demons are also assisted in their battle by an army of mice, led by a particularly sassy rodent with a child's voice.  Oh, and there's also a nervous talking chicken, a grumpy old tortoise, and portals to other dimensions.  There's enough heaping helpings of outright lunacy in this film that should automatically make it fun, so it boggles the mind how incredibly dull this film is.  How can you go wrong with a grouchy tortoise?  SORCERER can't figure out if it's an action epic, a demonic horror film, or a kiddie movie.  It never finds a tone, and the effect of the endless CGI is just numbing.  Like most of these types of films these days, it's stylized to a fault and has no characters, no humanity, and no feeling.  It's a just an assembled product and Li, who's absent for long stretches, isn't even masking his obvious lack of interest.  Completely DOA.  (PG-13, 94 mins)

Adventures in Netflix Streaming: THE AWAKENING (2012); THE FRANKENSTEIN THEORY (2013); and OSOMBIE (2012)

THE AWAKENING
(France/UK - 2011; 2012 US release)

This atmospheric, old-fashioned ghost story is similar in style and tone to last year's nicely-done THE WOMAN IN BLACK, and very well-shot by cinematographer Eduard Grau, paying particular attention to period detail and the gray, drab look of a dour post-WWI 1921 England.  Rebecca Hall, faring much better here than in the dreadful LAY THE FAVORITE, is Florence Cathcart, a well-known author and paranormal investigator who makes a living debunking fraudulant hauntings and other alleged supernatural occurrences. A misfit who demonstrates social awkwardness that's frequently mistaken for dismissive rudeness, she's summoned by stammering, war-scarred headmaster Robert (Dominic West) to a former private mansion turned boarding school, where an asthmatic pupil cruelly dubbed "Wheezy Walter" by his classmates has died under mysterious circumstances that may involve a ghost child seen as a lingering spectre in school photos for many years.  There is indeed a hoax being perpetrated, but that's just the beginning of the story as director/co-writer Nick Murphy gathers the primary characters--there's also Imelda Staunton as the school housekeeper and Isaac Hempstead-Wright (Bran Stark on GAME OF THRONES) as an orphaned boy who stays behind during a holiday break--all damaged souls who find a strange bond in their status as lonely outsiders who never really fit in anywhere (at one point, Staunton proclaims "I don't think there's a place on Earth where people understand loneliness better than here"), and Florence starts to get an odd feeling that she's been there before.  Murphy does a commendable job in the first 2/3 with an overwhelming sense of eerie foreboding (the dollhouse scene, which essentially--and extremely creepily--recaps the film up to that point, is a small masterpiece), but like last year's RED LIGHTS, another initially solid horror film about debunking the paranormal that just completely collapses in the home stretch, THE AWAKENING doesn't seem to know where it's going.  There's too much time spent on a subplot involving the drooling groundskeeper (Joseph Mawle) that's ultimately a complete red herring, and once the twist--obligatory in post-SIXTH SENSE ghost stories--is revealed, there's too many holes and contrivances for it to withstand any serious scrutiny.  An admirable effort and a great-looking film with strong performances by its leads, THE AWAKENING just loses itself with its inability to follow through on its potential, which is a damn shame because it was well on its way to being a noteworthy sleeper.  (R, 107 mins)

THE FRANKENSTEIN THEORY
(US - 2013)

THE FRANKENSTEIN THEORY offers a found-footage take on the legendary saga, a concept that was demanded by no one but given to us anyway by a couple of producers of THE LAST EXORCISM.  Documentary filmmaker Vicky (Heather Stephens) is working on a project about her college friend Dr. John Venkenhein (Kris Lemche).  Venkenhein has a theory that's gotten him suspended from academia, branded a laughingstock, and is about to cost him his girlfriend (Christine Lakin):  Mary Shelley conceived her novel Frankenstein as a fictionalized account of true events, with Victor Frankenstein patterned after a Venkenhein ancestor.  The young Venkenhein posits that the monster's DNA and physical makeup is such that he's still alive and still wandering the remote wilderness in barren, northernmost Canada.  With a small camera crew and a crusty, surly guide (SONS OF ANARCHY's Timothy V. Murphy as Robert Shaw as Quint), Venkenhein leads the expedition to track down the factual Venkenhein monster.  Directed and co-written by Andrew Weiner, THE FRANKENSTEIN THEORY is an idea that could've worked, but its set-up is such that nothing can happen for at least an hour, so much of the running time is occupied by bickering, scientific babbling, and talk of caribou migration.  By the time the protagonists are trapped in a yurt with the howling beast outside, the film progresses in the most rote, predictable fashion possible:  destroyed snowmobiles?  Check.  Someone goes off for help and is later found murdered?  Check.  Someone drops a camera and then falls dead in front of it CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST/BLAIR WITCH-style?  Check.  Released to just a scant few theaters in early 2013 after two years on the shelf, THE FRANKENSTEIN THEORY is nothing more than the labored wheeze of a subgenre's death rattle, plodding along and leading to absolutely nothing in a finale so frustratingly, jaw-droppingly anti-climactic that it makes the found-footage fuck-you of THE DEVIL INSIDE look crowd-pleasing by comparison.  (Unrated, 87 mins)

OSOMBIE
(US - 2012)

A jokey premise in search of a movie, the Utah-shot OSOMBIE has a US Special Forces team in Afghanistan, along with a couple of sibling civilians, battling an army of Al-Qaeda undead under the command of a zombified Osama Bin Laden.  The concept had some satirical potential, but the filmmakers came up with the idea and decided that was enough, delivering yet another run-of-the-mill, otherwise utterly generic zombie apocalypse film with the expectedly shitty CGI that pales in comparison to most iPhone apps.  The characters are your stock, run-of-the-mill military cliches (including the requisite squad joker being creatively nicknamed "Joker") and the actors are terrible, including star Corey Sevier, a veteran Canadian TV actor and DTV regular whose idea of character development is finding a new and dramatic way to take off his shirt in every other scene.  Maybe it's my own fault for expecting something out of a film titled OSOMBIE, but what a pointless waste of time. It's a lot like an Asylum production, only lazier.  At least Asylum flicks have a sense of humor about themselves.  Other than Joker's constant groan-inducing witticisms ("Confucius say 'Man who fart in church must sit in own pew'"), OSOMBIE is played totally straight. If you're making a movie about a zombie Bin Laden, the notion of seriousness is already off the table and you should at least have some fun with it.  They should've just made a fake trailer and left it at that. (Unrated, 94 mins)