For a long time, THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES was shaping up to be the DAY THE CLOWN CRIED of found-footage. Filmed in 2007 and screened at that year's Tribeca Film Festival, the film was abruptly yanked from the schedule by MGM just a week before its planned February 8, 2008 release date (for some perspective on how long ago this was, that weekend's other major releases were FOOL'S GOLD, WELCOME HOME ROSCOE JENKINS, VINCE VAUGHN'S WILD WEST COMEDY SHOW, and IN BRUGES), even though a trailer had been out and multiplexes had promo material on display for several weeks. The found-footage genre was still in its post-BLAIR WITCH PROJECT era in 2008, and THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES would've preceded the next wave brought in by PARANORMAL ACTIVITY by over a year and a half had MGM released it on schedule. While no explanation was ever given for why the studio buried this like a dark family secret, the filmmakers--writer/director John Erick Dowdle and his producer brother Drew--had a hit later the same year with QUARANTINE, a remake of the Spanish found-footage horror phenomenon [REC], before going on to make the 2010 M. Night Shyamalan production DEVIL, the 2014 Paris catacombs-set found-footage opus AS ABOVE, SO BELOW, and the 2015 Owen Wilson thriller NO ESCAPE. The Dowdles got QUARANTINE on the basis of THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES, and while none of their subsequent films were blockbusters, their moderate success still wasn't enough to free POUGHKEEPSIE from the MGM shelf. It eventually got a stealth release on DirecTV in 2014, but just as word got around to horror fans that it was available, MGM pulled it once more without warning. Only now, in the fall of 2017, has the now-decade old film been made widely available, with Shout! Factory's Blu-ray and DVD release rescuing it from oblivion and finally giving it, for all intents and purposes, it's first actual, widespread exhibition.
You'd assume this must be a terrible movie, but the end result is quite surprising. It's unfortunate that the found-footage genre has played itself into overexposed irrelevance, because THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES is one of the best of its kind. There's no jump scares to be had and the gore is minimal, but its violence and intensity are such that it's quite dark, disturbing, and sometimes difficult to watch. It's hard telling if that's why MGM got skittish about releasing it, but the closest comparison I can draw to illustrate just how utterly real and horrifying this film can be is the sad and heartbreaking Australian found-footage outing LAKE MUNGO. Set up as a faux talking-head documentary, THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES chronicles the exploits of the east coast serial killer The Water Street Butcher, tracing his murders back to 1991 via a vast collection of homemade snuff videos found in his house in 1996. The madness begins with the abduction and murder of a little girl right from her front yard, escalates to a couple being kidnapped on their way home to Poughkeepsie from Pittsburgh, and soon, he's very intricately crafting the murder sites to deliberately mislead the investigators and misdirect the profilers when the FBI is called in. To throw them off even more, he changes his M.O. and kidnaps 19-year-old Cheryl Dempsey (Stacy Chbosky), holding her captive as a sex-and-torture slave in his basement. He even shows up at Cheryl's house and films himself talking to her mother, laughing and taunting her ("If there's anything I can do...") before running away once the mom realizes she's looking right at the man who kidnapped her daughter. The murders go on, with the killer deliberately leaving DNA behind as if he's trying to get captured, and that's when things take an unexpected and even more horrific turn, with Dowdle even working in 9/11 in a plausible, non-exploitative fashion.
THE POUGHKEEPSIE TAPES takes full advantage of one of the unsung ringers of modern-era horror: blurry video and garbled audio, which always gets under your skin if done right. This film excels at it, even if you have to cut them some slack that all of the VHS tapes are somehow 1.78:1. The unpredictable patterns of the murders, the rawness of the tapes that make them look like genuine snuff films, the intelligence and the patience of the killer, and the horrific conditions in which he leaves the victims (the couple is found with the man decapitated, his head surgically implanted into the woman's stomach with his face protruding like some demented tribute to TOTAL RECALL's Cuato) are the stuff of nightmares straight from the Hannibal Lecter or SE7EN playbooks. The same goes for the notes read by the investigating agents ("His genitals were removed and placed in the sock drawer of the master bedroom"), and one absolutely chilling scene that rivals the cell phone discovery in LAKE MUNGO, when an exhaustive study of the now-dead Pittsburgh-to-Poughkeepsie couple on surveillance footage from a gas station gives police their first look at the killer, a blurry image of a figure standing on the far edge of the frame, seemingly communicating to the camera in sign language in so subtle a fashion that it takes them a while to figure out that he's telling them where they'll find the bodies. There's a bit of a logic lapse later on involving the killer's fate, but it's a minor quibble in a very effective film that's so bleak and unflinching that it probably wouldn't have done well in theaters. This is grim, bleak shit that makes SE7EN look like the feel-good movie of the year. Maybe that's why MGM had no idea what to do with it. (R, 81 mins)
ARMED RESPONSE (US - 2017)
Fusing elements of a PREDATOR-type actioner with EVENT HORIZON, THE KEEP, and the short-lived, late '80s "haunted prison" craze (DESTROYER, PRISON, SLAUGHTERHOUSE ROCK, THE CHAIR) had some potential for some batshit craziness, but ARMED RESPONSE is a lethargic, drably-shot, ploddingly-paced bore that only comes alive in the last five minutes, by which point it's way too late to care. It's probably going for slow burn, but there's no tension, no suspense, and about 90% of the running time consists of people either walking down dark corridors with flashlights and military weapons at the ready, staring at rows of monitors, or arguing with one another. Gabriel (BROTHERS & SISTERS' Dave Annable) is still in shock over the death of his young daughter (some backstory that has no payoff) when he's visited by Isaac (Wesley Snipes), his old commander in Afghanistan. Isaac needs him to investigate some strange occurrences at "The Temple," a secret compound inside an abandoned prison. The Temple is the next stage in the evolution of the war on terror: a sentient, AI lifeforce whose technological capabilities to weed out the truth trumps all lie detectors and "enhanced interrogation" techniques. Gabriel is a former MIT whiz kid who designed the security system inside The Temple, and he may be needed to get Isaac and his team, among them no-nonsense Riley (Anne Heche) and hothead Brett (WWE star Seth Rollins), in and out of the facility. It seems the last team stationed at The Temple were slaughtered when The Temple went rogue. Security footage shows the team being attacked by unseen and apparently supernatural forces, and soon those forces start coming for them. The Temple is able to detect wrongdoings and buried secrets, and like the last crew, Isaac and his officers committed swept-under-the-rug war crimes in Afghanistan and The Temple intends to make them pay, as illustrated by such dialogue as "There's a presence in the code!" and "The Temple has judged us deserving of punishment!" and "The Temple has reached a tipping point." So will most viewers by that time.
There's potential for some insightful, layered commentary here, but ARMED RESPONSE goes the generic route, offering a bunch of cliched military hardasses in lieu of characters or interesting ideas. The whole idea behind "The Temple" is half-baked and never really clearly expressed, and it only gets remotely interesting when Gabriel has to reboot the system and The Temple slowly regains its power, with its cinder block walls coming to life and reaching out to unlucky victims, yanking their arms out of their sockets. That kind of craziness would've been helpful in the 85 minutes up to that point, but director John Stockwell, a former actor (CHRISTINE, MY SCIENCE PROJECT, TOP GUN) who made some successful movies (CRAZY/BEAUTIFUL, BLUE CRUSH, INTO THE BLUE) before his post-2011 slide into the world of VOD/DTV (CAT RUN, IN THE BLOOD, KICKBOXER: VENGEANCE) just seems to be coasting through, and the end result looks like an updated and slightly higher-end version of something Roger Corman's Concorde would've released in 1989. Snipes and Heche are the big names here, and while they're in the whole movie and don't pull any Bruce Willis or Steven Seagal phone-ins, they're definitely sidelined in favor of the bland Annable. The film was produced by WWE Studios (hence, Rollins' involvement) and upstart Erebus Pictures, a production company formed by none other than KISS icon and NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DIE villain Gene Simmons, who also briefly appears in either a bald cap or sans wig (looking a lot like late-career Michael Ansara) in a flashback as a suspected terrorist. Simmons is also all over the accompanying making-of featurette, and if you watch that beforehand, you might think that he's the star of the movie. (R, 94 mins)
OPEN WATER 3: CAGE DIVE (Australia - 2017)
After a ten-year hiatus, Lionsgate dusts off the OPEN WATER franchise for another go by taking an Australian shark attack movie called CAGE DIVE and slapping the "OPEN WATER 3" prefix on it. It's very similar to what they did with 2007's OPEN WATER 2: ADRIFT, where they took a sharkless German film called ADRIFT, with a bunch of people stranded in the ocean, unable to get back on a yacht after they all jumped off and no one pulled the ladder down. Neither in-name-only "sequel" has anything to do with Chris Kentis 2004 micro-budget indie hit OPEN WATER, and CAGE DIVE, is more or less a remake, with some added melodrama and the requisite found footage angle, taking advantage of the Trend That Wouldn't Die. Probably hastily prepped for VOD after the surprise success of the long-shelved Weinstein castoff 47 METERS DOWN, CAGE DIVE opens with the remains of a digital video camera found on the ocean floor, its memory card still intact. Faster than you can say "I wonder who the real sharks are," we're watching shaky, handheld footage of Americans--siblings Jeff (Joel Hogan) and Josh (Josh Potthoff), and Jeff's girlfriend Megan (Megan Peta Hill)--traveling to Australia to visit Jeff and Josh's Sydney-born cousin (Pete Valley) before heading off to a cage dive, digital camera in tow since Jeff wants to get them all on a daredevil reality show. They head out on a group excursion, and while the three of them are in the cage, a freak tidal wave appears out of nowhere, capsizes the boat, and the few survivors who weren't killed in the impact are soon eaten by great white sharks until only Jeff, Josh, and Megan remain, treading water. Of course Jeff never stops filming, even as hypothermia and delirium set in, and writer/director Gerald Rascionato (also credited with producing, photographing, editing, and casting) also makes time for turgid melodrama with Jeff finding out what the audience already knows from his camera being left on earlier: Megan is cheating on him with Josh, which really puts a damper on his plans to propose to her on the trip. OPEN WATER 3: CAGE DIVE has some convincing shark action, but relies too heavily on characters doing stupid things (luck sends a lifeboat drifting their way, so of course Megan sets it ablaze when she freaks out and mishandles a flare) to the point where you'll eventually start rooting for the sharks, in which case, you'll get a happy ending. (R, 81 mins)
ROSEWATER, a chronicle of Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari's 118 days of interrogation and torture at Tehran's Evin Prison, is the big-screen writing and directing debut of THE DAILY SHOW's Jon Stewart--viewers will recall John Oliver hosting over the summer of 2013 while Stewart made this pet project that has a direct tie to the show. A resident of London, Bahari (played here by Gael Garcia Bernal) was in Tehran covering the 2009 Iran presidential election for Newsweek and staying with his mother Moloojoon (Shohreh Aghdashloo) when he was arrested and held in solitary confinement. Initially, Bahari thinks he was arrested for filming some protests over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's questionable victory. But his interrogator (Kim Bodnia), referred to as "Rosewater" by the constantly blindfolded Bahari, who never saw his face but recognized the rosewater scent of his perfume, informs him that he's been arrested for being a spy. The proof? Bahari was interviewed in a DAILY SHOW segment by Jason Jones (playing himself), who was pretending to be an American spy incognito as a reporter.
Stewart occasionally flirts with black comedy but always pulls back, which is too bad, since he would seem to be a natural for exploring the absurdity of the situation with some satirical bite (early on, Iranian authorities label Bahari's DVD collection, with things like THE SOPRANOS and Pasolini's TEOREMA, as "porn"). Instead, Stewart fashions ROSEWATER as a reverent, inspiring, triumph-of-the-human-spirit saga that just never catches fire. There's little suspense or tension in Bahari's situation--not because we know the outcome that he gets released after 118 days and will be OK, but because Stewart tackles the subject in such a perfunctory and by-the-numbers fashion. Perhaps he wanted to be taken seriously as a filmmaker and be respectful of his subject but he erred too much on the side of caution, ending up with a film that's dull, plodding, and predictable. None of Stewart's personality comes through in a creative way and his voice is nowhere to be heard (and THE DAILY SHOW is never even referenced by name) and when he starts showing Bahari having imaginary conversations with and getting "hang in there!" pep talks from the ghosts of his late father (Haluk Bilginer) and sister (Golshifteh Farahani), ROSEWATER starts to look like something any hired gun director could've put together. In Stewart's defense, these conversations with his dead father and sister, both political prisoners, are in Bahari's memoir Then They Came for Me, and while it may have worked on the page and he wanted to remain faithful to Bahari's writing, it's a mawkish, eye-rolling cliche when put on the screen. Given his status as both a comedy figure and an astute political junkie, as well as his own indirect involvement with the situation, there's so many other approaches Stewart could've taken with ROSEWATER rather than going for superficial, transparent awards-bait. Open Road didn't really know what to do with the dry, tedious ROSEWATER, only putting it on 371 screens at its widest release for a gross of $3 million. It's doubtful it would've even gotten that without Stewart's name attached to it. There was a lot of potential here and the intentions are nothing but sincere, but all things considered, this is a major disappointment. (R, 103 mins)
PIONEER (Norway/Germany/Sweden/Finland/France - 2013; US release 2014)
Set in the late 1970s and looking like it was made then as well, the nautical conspiracy thriller PIONEER is a throwback in every way, right down to an on-set mishap that looks like something out of the original GONE IN 60 SECONDS. Star Aksel Hennie's (HEADHUNTERS) character is being chased in his Jeep, and the actor insisted on doing his own driving. He lost control of the Jeep, flipping twice, windows shattering and top torn off before the Jeep lands upright, Hennie clearly visible in the driver's seat and looking terrified. Even as it happens in the film, it's attention-getting simply for the spontaneous and awkward way it happens...like a real car wreck would rather than one precisely engineered by stunt coordinators or pulled off with CGI. Hennie emerged uninjured but quite shaken, and even in a DVD special feature called "The Crash," he still gets emotional recounting it. It's left in the film as it happened, taking a rather humdrum car chase and making it unforgettable. The film itself has origins in fact, dealing with the installation of an oil pipeline along the floor of the North Sea off the coast of Norway. The job requires training professional divers to do the work and the project is a joint Norwegian-American venture, with the Norwegian divers, headed by Petter (Hennie) and his brother Knut (Andre Eriksen) at odds with the arrogant American divers, represented by Mike (a scowling Wes Bentley). Tragedy strikes when Petter blacks out on a dive, failing to close a valve that results in Knut's death. Aside from losing his younger brother, something doesn't feel right about what happened, and the more he presses for answers, the less anyone around him wants to talk. He begins to suspect that someone tampered with his oxygen supply. Anyone with answers turns up missing or dead, the videotape documenting the accident is nowhere to be found, the perpetually surly Mike speeds up behind Petter and tries to run him off the road, and the bottom-line-watching American oil company rep Ferris (Stephen Lang) is running out of patience with Petter's refusal to let it go.
Director/co-writer Erik Skjoldbjaerg, who helmed the original Norwegian INSOMNIA and came to Hollywood for his mandatory Horrible Harvey Weinstein experience--pretty much a rite of passage for foreign filmmakers at this point--with the four-years-on-the-shelf PROZAC NATION, really gets a solid '70s paranoia vibe throughout, helped a lot by the short, balding Hennie looking nothing like your conventional leading man. He really does look like an average, blue collar guy getting in way over his head with powerful people, but still bulldozing forward, not giving it up--even his widowed sister-in-law (Stephanie Sigman) seems content to take Ferris' fat settlement offer--and it's admirable that Skjoldbjaerg and the screenwriters aren't always concerned with making Petter appealing. Indeed, there's times when he's a bellicose prick. There's a doomy, palpable tension as the screws tighten and Petter realizes that somebody's hiding something and it could cost him his life, but Skjoldbjaerg shows his cards too soon and it's too obvious that the Americans are shady and untrustworthy. Bentley's Mike is a completely unlikable asshole, glaring, seething and yelling at the Norwegians from the moment he first appears, for no real reason. And it makes no sense when he stops someone from torturing Petter in a pressurized chamber ("I didn't sign on to kill anyone," he protests), only to resume the torture as soon as the other guy leaves the room. We've also seen Stephen Lang in enough movies to know that if he's acting altruistic and sympathetic, it's because his character is anything but. PIONEER has its glaring flaws and plot holes, and its ambiguities are such that they lead to an unsatisfying ending, but its positives still outweigh its negatives, generating significant suspense and establishing an effectively bleak, gray atmosphere, which gets an immense push from an occasionally Tangerine Dream-ish score by Air. (R, 111 mins)
BLACK NOVEMBER (Nigeria/US - 2015)
BLACK NOVEMBER is a bad movie, but at least it's a bad movie with noble intentions. A feature-length lecture on the evils of Big Oil and government corruption, BLACK NOVEMBER opens with text explaining that Nigeria is the world's fifth largest oil supplier, while neglecting to mention that their top export is deposed princes who just need your checking account and social security numbers. A group of Nigerian terrorists led by Opuwei (Akon) and Timi (Wyclef Jean) are holding Western Oil CEO Tom Hudson (Mickey Rourke, looking embalmed) hostage in the 2nd Street Tunnel in Los Angeles. Unlike their needlessly complex plan of orchestrating a massive rush hour traffic jam, their demand is simple: arrange the release of activist Ebiere (a convincing Mbong Amata), currently in a Warri prison in the Niger Delta, where she's about to be executed. Flashbacks reveal that Ebiere attended college in America on a Western Oil scholarship, and Hudson would use her to settle disputes between Nigerians (irate that their land has been ruined by constant oil spills) and the corrupt military that acts at the behest of the oil company, frequently going over the line into atrocities like murder and gang-rape. In time, Ebiere is driven to a shocking act of violence when she realizes she's been set up by Hudson and the whole thing was a ploy to get the protesters arrested. Shockingly, the unscrupulous Hudson is one of those billionaire CEOs who cares more about profits than people, and back in L.A., he's about to pay for his misdeeds if he can't convince the Nigerian government to spare Ebiere's life.
Very sporadically enlivened by bits of action and some inexcusably crummy CGI explosions, BLACK NOVEMBER is essentially a 96-minute public service announcement disguised as a commercial movie. Characters don't speak naturally but rather, in hackneyed, exposition-heavy proclamations, almost like the script is just a bullet-pointed outline (Hudson's model-like daughter, just before he's abducted from his limo: "You always get nervous before you fly to Nigeria."). It's terrible, but that's only because Nigerian writer/director Jeta Amata (Mbong's husband--it's a family affair with Amatas everywhere in the credits, with Mbong being much more talented than the other Amatas in the cast) is more concerned with shouting his points than telling a story with any subtlety or nuance. It's too sincere in its intent to be dismissed as a mere vanity project (though Amata calling his production company "Jeta Amata Concepts" doesn't bode well), but that doesn't give it a pass. The backstory of BLACK NOVEMBER is much more interesting than the film itself. Amata took his shelved 2011 film BLACK GOLD--produced by Nigerian oil baron Captain Hosa Wells Okunbo--dumped roughly half of it and shot additional footage to restructure it into its current form as BLACK NOVEMBER. BLACK GOLD starred Mbong Amata as Ebiere, along with a veritable Who's Who of Redbox All-Stars including Tom Sizemore, Michael Madsen, and Billy Zane, the latter three nowhere to be seen in BLACK NOVEMBER. Conversely, Rourke, Kim Basinger (as intrepid reporter Kristy Ames, covering the L.A. hostage situation), Anne Heche (a virtual walk-on with maybe two lines of dialogue as an FBI agent), Jean, and Akon did not appear in BLACK GOLD. Footage of Vivica A. Fox as a US government official and former WALKING DEAD star Sarah Wayne Callies as a crusading cable news reporter comes from BLACK GOLD, as do most of Mbong Amata's scenes that take place in the Niger Delta (she looks noticeably different in NOVEMBER-shot footage with Rourke). Amata has a confused mess on his hands, but with the help of four credited editors, he almost makes the whole thing hang together, with the seams only slightly showing when Callies picks up a ringing phone in BLACK GOLD and it's BLACK NOVEMBER's Basinger on the other end of the line, and when Fox is seen at a command center that seemingly belongs in another movie, that's because it does. Jean and Akon put up some of the financing for Amata to transform BLACK GOLD into BLACK NOVEMBER, which was completed way back in 2012 and shelved after being screened for events at the Kennedy Center and the United Nations before getting its belated commercial release in early 2015. Regardless of its good intentions, BLACK NOVEMBER is still junky, cobbled-together DTV material (it's too bad the original cut of BLACK GOLD isn't included as a bonus feature for the masochistically-inclined), with Rourke, Basinger, and Heche looking especially perplexed over exactly how they ended up being Raymond Burr'd into a Nigerian protest drama. (Unrated, 97 mins)
