A longtime pet project of John Travolta's (and we know those always turn out great), the dismal GOTTI was set to be released directly to VOD in December 2017 until Lionsgate abruptly whacked it and sold it back to the producers, who were hoping for a wide release with another distributor. It didn't quite pan out that way, with Vertical Entertainment and MoviePass teaming up to get it on 500 screens, with 40% of the people who saw it theatrically being MoviePass subscribers. Couple that with some obvious juicing of the moviegoer ratings and reviews on Rotten Tomatoes (where a suspicious number of glowing GOTTI reviews were written by people who just joined the site and reviewed nothing but GOTTI), and one might assume GOTTI is not very good. And they'd be right. It's quite terrible, actually, and you know from the start that it'll be something special when two consecutively-placed credits read "Emmett Furla Oasis Films" and "Emmet (sic) Furla Oasis Films." Travolta, one of 57 (!) credited producers, spent years getting this project off the ground, but it looks just like any other straight-to-VOD, Redbox-ready clunker, with NYC mostly unconvincingly played by Cincinnati. GOTTI, a film that makes KILL THE IRISHMAN look like GOODFELLAS, isn't very interested in telling a story as much as it is fashioning a John Gotti hagiography, being quite open in its admiration of "The Teflon Don" and his family, as if they were just hardworking, everyday folks getting a bum rap from the government. It plays like a long "Previously on..." recap from a mercifully non-existent TV series, with no drive or momentum to its narrative and instead going for a Cliffs Notes recap of major events in Gotti's life, with constant mentions of rats, respect, and "fuckin' cocksuckas!" It actually opens with Travolta in full Gotti makeup, breaking the fourth wall, standing with his back to the NYC skyline and addressing the viewer from beyond the grave like he's hosting a TV special: "This is New York City...MY fuckin' city!"
Somehow, it gets worse. A framing device of a terminally ill Gotti (Travolta plays these scenes sans wig) being visited in prison by his son John A. Gotti, aka "Junior" (Spencer Lofranco) comes back around only sporadically. Gotti's rise in the ranks of the Gambino crime family, mentored by underboss Neil Dellacroce (Stacy Keach), is represented by one hit in an empty bar and Carlo Gambino (Michael Cipiti) is never seen or mentioned again; there's a lot of talk about dissension in the ranks that results in the infamous Gotti-ordered 1985 assassination of boss Paul Castellano (Donald Volpenhein) outside a Manhattan steakhouse, but Castellano is seen on one or two occasions and has no dialogue, so we're never really sure what the beef is. The relationship between Gotti and his right-hand man Sammy "The Bull" Gravano (William DeMeo) is so glossed over that when Gravano eventually rats on him, the dramatic tension fails to resonate in any way. Most of the scenes of Gotti's home life involve him yelling at wife Victoria (Travolta's wife Kelly Preston) to get out of bed, as she's fallen into a deep depression after the 1980 death of their son Frankie when a neighbor accidentally hit him with his car. Like the script for GOTTI, that neighbor soon vanished and was never seen again. Given the loss of their own son Jett in 2009, there is some undeniably raw emotion in the way Preston and Travolta play the initial reaction to Frankie Gotti's death, and it's maybe the only moment in GOTTI that comes across as genuine and real.
Years jump by and back again (yet through it all, Lofranco looks exactly the same, with no effort to make him look 15-20 years older in the later scenes), and as a result, director Kevin Connolly (best known from his days co-starring on ENTOURAGE) basically comes off as Dipshit Scorsese. He never gets any kind of pacing or rhythm going, and seems more interested in what songs he can get on the soundtrack, whether it's some incongruously contemporary songs by Pitbull, or ridiculously irrelevant needle-drops, like the theme from SHAFT when Gotti whacks someone in the early '70s, the Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian" when he's strutting out of the courthouse, the Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls" when Gotti underling Frank DeCicco (Chris Mulkey) is blown up in his car (why is that song in that scene?), Duran Duran's "Come Undone" when Junior's house is raided and the Feds bring him in, or The Animals' "House of the Rising Sun" during archival footage of the real Gotti's funeral, as if Scorsese's CASINO never happened. The screenplay is credited to occasional Steven Soderbergh collaborator Lem Dobbs (KAFKA, THE LIMEY, HAYWIRE) and co-star Leo Rossi, though there's little evidence that any of it was used in the finished product. GOTTI doles out its exposition in casual asides (with no previous mention of the brain cancer that would ultimately kill him, Dellacroce stops in mid-sentence, rubs his forehead and mutters "Oh, this cancer!" and goes back to what he was saying) and info dumps treat both the characters and the audience like idiots. The worst example of this comes after Gotti tells Dellacroce of his planned power play to take control of the families, and Stacy Keach, a professional actor with over 50 years in the business, is actually required to say "But only if you have the support of the other Five Boroughs...Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Staten Island, the Bronx." Are we really supposed to believe that middle-aged, lifelong New Yorker John Gotti doesn't know what the Five Boroughs are and needs to have them specifically spelled out for him? (R, 104 mins) DEATH RACE: BEYOND ANARCHY (US - 2018)
The long-delayed fourth entry in the DEATH RACE franchise was shot two years ago and shelved while Universal instead opted to first release the offshoot DEATH RACE 2050, a direct sequel to 1975's DEATH RACE 2000. Whether or not there's two competing DEATH RACE franchises remains to be seen, but Paul W.S. Anderson's big-screen DEATH RACE with Jason Statham in 2008 gave way to a surprisingly decent pair of DTV sequels, both well-directed by Roel Reine, who succeeded in accomplishing much with drastically reduced budgets and has consistently displayed a knack for making his DTV sequel assignments (he's also directed THE SCORPION KING 3, THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS 2, and HARD TARGET 2) look much more polished and professional than most of their ilk. Reine is out for DEATH RACE: BEYOND ANARCHY, and in his place is another DTV sequel specialist in Don Michael Paul, whose credits include JARHEAD 2, KINDERGARTEN COP 2, a fourth LAKE PLACID, a fifth and sixth TREMORS, and a fifth and sixth SNIPER. BEYOND ANARCHY is less a sequel to its three predecessors and more a response to MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, as the hero driver "Frankenstein" is now a faceless villain who hides behind a mask (played by stuntman Velislav Pavlov and voiced by Nolan North). He essentially serves as the film's Immortan Joe, a ruthless driver in the now-illegal Death Race, which is still held inside a walled city called The Sprawl that serves as America's prison, a concept in no way reminiscent of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. Frankenstein finds new competition in Snake Plis--er, I mean, Connor Gibson (Zach McGowan), a new convict who falls in with Baltimore Bob (Danny Glover) and the ubiquitous Lists (series mainstay Fred Koehler), who's basically the Joe Patroni of the DEATH RACE franchise. Bob and Lists are running Death Race, broadcasting to 54 million viewers on the dark web (some "dark web"), and after an hour of fight-to-the-death battles, Gibson passes his tests and gets in the final race, teamed with tough-as-nails navigator Bexie (Cassie Clare), and it's pretty much business as usual.
Shooting in Bulgaria, Paul makes effective use of abandoned warehouses and factories to help establish The Sprawl as an apocalyptic hellhole, but the action sequences are done in a headache-inducing, quick-cut, shaky-zoom style, there's too many annoying supporting characters (like Lucy Aarden's Carley, Frankenstein's porn star girlfriend and de facto Grace Pander by way of TMZ, a clever idea that falls flat), there's too much dated, blaring, aggro nu-metal (including too many appearances by what looks like a Bulgarian knockoff of Coal Chamber, obviously riffing on FURY ROAD's beloved Doof Warrior), and it's entirely too long at an exhausting 111 minutes. Danny Trejo returns from the second and third installments as Goldberg, who's now running a gambling den in Mexico and watching Death Race on TV, obviously knocking out his scenes in a day and never interacting with any of the other cast members. TV vet McGowan (THE 100, BLACK SAILS, AGENTS OF S.H.I.E.L.D., THE WALKING DEAD) is a dull hero (he and Paul reteamed for the upcoming fifth SCORPION KING), Glover is collecting a paycheck, and Koehler is apparently waiting around in hopes that someone will write him a Lists origin story prequel. DEATH RACE: BEYOND ANARCHY is by far the goriest of the bunch and has a surprising amount of skin, but despite the set-up for yet another sequel, this series is starting to run on fumes. (Unrated, 111 mins) TALES FROM THE HOOD 2 (US - 2018)
A belated DTV sequel to the 1995 cult horror anthology, TALES FROM THE HOOD 2 is occasionally heavy-handed, cheaply made, and could use some more polished actors, but it gets a big boost from the return of the core creative personnel--the writing/directing team of Rusty Cundieff and Darin Scott, and producer Spike Lee--which helps make it more than a mere nostalgic, brand-name cash-in. With bona fides in horror (Scott produced 1987's THE OFFSPRING and 1989's STEPFATHER II) and as important black filmmakers in the early '90s (Scott produced The Hughes Brothers' MENACE II SOCIETY, while Cundieff was a protege of Lee's who co-starred in SCHOOL DAZE and wrote and directed the hip-hop mockumentary FEAR OF A BLACK HAT), Cundieff and Scott have picked the right time for a TALES FROM THE HOOD sequel, with at least two of the segments being overt responses to the Age of Trump, and another that couldn't possibly be any more timely, right down to a powerful conservative declaring "Boys will be boys" and sympathizing with a pair of male sexual predators after they're given a grisly comeuppance. A mix of humor and horror, TALES FROM THE HOOD 2 has some serious statements to make and there are times when it's a little too goofy and thus softens the blow somewhat, but it's better than it has any business being, closing big with a segment that's bold in concept and incendiary in execution.
The hokey wraparound segment, "Robo Hell" has storyteller Diomedes Simms (the great Keith David, stepping in for Clarence Williams III's Portifoy Simms) meeting with ultra-conservative weapons manufacturer, private prison magnate, and aspiring politico Dumass Beach (Bill Martin Williams as Robert John Burke as Mike Pence). Overtly racist ("Your brothers and sisters make up a lot of my profits," he sneers to Simms) and constantly groping his female assistant, Beach has overseen the development of a security robot called RoboPatriot, and needs to fill its database with stories and tales to aid in its ability to perceive and judge threats and criminal acts...from a black perspective because, of course, he thinks they're all criminals. The first segment is "Good Golly," where two clueless college girls visit a roadside "Museum of Negrosity" because one collects golliwogs and gets offended when the angry owner doesn't think they appreciate the gravity of the slave experience. The second and most comedic is "The Medium," where a reformed pimp-turned-community activist is confronted by former gang cohorts over the location of a stash of money. When he's accidentally killed before they get the information, they invade the home of a phony TV psychic (Bryan Batt) and force him to channel his spirit. "Date Night" doesn't really fit the "hood" motif, but is instead a Tinder hookup gone awry, as two dudebros meet a pair of sexy young ladies and decide to roofie their drinks and film their exploits once they're unconscious ("They probably like what we're about to do to them!" one says) only to get the tables turned on them in a way they never saw coming. The fourth and final segment, "The Sacrifice," is the standout and the only one that's played completely straight. Kendrick Cross stars as Henry Bradley, a black Republican who's the campaign manager for a white, race-baiting, "Take Mississippi back" far-right gubernatorial candidate. Henry's white, pregnant wife (Jillian Batherson) fears that some angry supernatural presence is affecting their unborn child. That presence soon reveals itself to be the ghost of 1950s teenage lynching victim Emmitt Till (Christopher Paul Horne), retconning Henry's life of oblivious privilege among wealthy white Southerners (he lives in a old, restored mansion that was once a notorious slave plantation) and making him experience the racism and violence that cost him his life and the lives of others like MLK, Medgar Evers, and the Four Little Girls. Horror anthologies have to end big, and "The Sacrifice," compared to the relative silliness of the rest, packs as sobering, audacious, and thought-provoking a punch as any top-tier BLACK MIRROR episode. Genre vet David (THE THING, THEY LIVE) has fun chewing the scenery, and Cross turns in a solid performance, and while TALES FROM THE HOOD 2 could use some better--or at least, better-known--actors, it's surprisingly decent as far as extremely tardy DTV sequels go. (R, 110 mins)
For years, Don Cheadle has been talking about his wish to make a film about jazz legend Miles Davis. He finally got the chance with this partially crowd-funded indie that also marks his debut as a writer and director. For something that he had bouncing around in his head all these years, MILES AHEAD is an almost total missed opportunity. Cheadle wanted to avoid the pratfalls of a standard-issue biopic, which is commendable, but he more or less just drops a character named "Miles Davis" into a rote buddy movie with occasional car chases and action sequences. Set primarily during Davis' reclusive late 1970s period of self-imposed exile in his Upper West Side NYC apartment, MILES AHEAD pairs him with a fictional Rolling Stone journalist named Dave Braden (Ewan McGregor), who's desperate to grab an exclusive with him. Davis is currently butting heads with Columbia Records execs who have been waiting several years for his latest record. Columbia A&R douchebag Harper Hamilton (a reptilian Michael Stuhlbarg) and his Davis-like, Next Big Thing signing Junior (LaKeith Lee Stanfield) steal the sole copy of Davis' latest recording, prompting the embittered, burned-out, drug-addled trumpeter and his befuddled sidekick Braden to turn NYC (actually, Cincinnati, where this was shot) upside-down in pursuit of it. All the while, Davis periodically reflects on his career triumphs (and, of course, sees himself in the young ingenue Junior) and his failed marriage to dancer Frances (Emayatzy Corinealdi), pondering Where It All Went Wrong.
The flashbacks to the 1950s to the mid 1960s seem like Cheadle giving himself some opportunity to portray Davis in a straightforward fashion rather than the showy, coke-snorting jazz version of Howard Hughes he's playing in the late 1970s sections of the film. Cheadle is a dead ringer for Davis and it's a terrific performance that's completely let down by Cheadle the filmmaker. Cheadle is a gifted actor who could've brought much substance and complexity to a serious chronicle of the ups and downs of Davis' life. Why he--and Davis' family, who gave him their blessing--opted for a completely fictional scenario is a mystery. McGregor doesn't have much to do other than to look perplexed over Davis' wildly unpredictable behavior (like firing a gun in the Columbia offices), while Corinealdi does some good work in the more serious side of the film, even though she's tasked with little other than raging at a selfish, serially philandering Davis when he repeatedly treats her like a doormat. If Davis' family was OK with showing him in a negative light in these scenes, then why not make an honest film about him instead of this dumb movie that tries to have one foot in the arthouse and the other in the multiplex? Cheadle makes a great Miles Davis...it's just lost in a mediocre misfire of his own making. (R, 101 mins)
ELVIS & NIXON (US - 2016)
Elvis Presley and President Richard Nixon had a meeting in the Oval Office on December 21, 1970, with the resulting photo of the two cited as the most requested in the National Archives. ELVIS & NIXON purports to tell "the true story" of what went down at that secret meeting. Troubled by the direction of Vietnam-era youth--their malaise, their drug use, their music--Elvis is obsessed with the idea of working undercover for the Federal Narcotics Bureau as a "Federal Agent-at-Large," and requests a meeting with Nixon to make it happen. This story was covered before in Allan Arkush's little-seen 1997 cable movie ELVIS MEETS NIXON, with Rick Peters as Elvis and Bob Gunton as Nixon, but ELVIS & NIXON, co-written by actor Cary Elwes and directed by Liza Johnson (HATESHIP LOVESHIP), has two bigger names onboard, with Michael Shannon as Elvis and Kevin Spacey as Nixon. These are brilliant actors, and while neither does an SNL caricature, Spacey does a good job of nailing Nixon's mannerisms in the face of Elvis' increasingly absurd behavior, like an impromptu karate demonstration near the end of their afternoon together. Nixon sees being an Elvis pal as a way of appealing to America's youth, and while he's initially dismissive of the idea, the meeting puts a spring in Nixon's step--watch the way he enthusiastically asks aides Egil Krogh (Colin Hanks) and Dwight Chapin (Evan Peters) "Am I Mr. Cool?"--and Spacey does a very nice job with it. Shannon is a versatile actor but he just can't pull off Elvis. It makes sense that he wants to play Elvis as a person rather than the "Elvis" of his public image, but he never comes off as anything but Michael Shannon in an Elvis costume. He meets two impersonators early on and they demonstrate more life than he does. Shannon's Elvis is among the most quiet and soft-spoken in pop culture. It would've helped a little to maybe sound or act like him--Shannon is about as plausible an Elvis as Chevy Chase was a Gerald Ford. While Spacey doesn't cartoonishly mimic Nixon, he at least conveys a Nixonian presence. Shannon seems like an Elvis impersonator who's off the clock but still hasn't changed into his own clothes. And who cares about his buddy Jerry Schilling (Alex Pettyfer) who's preoccupied with getting back to Hollywood to propose to his girlfriend (Sky Ferreira)? The closing credits roll at 80 minutes and they still have to pad the running time with a subplot about Jerry and his girlfriend? Also featuring Johnny Knoxville for some reason, ELVIS & NIXON finds some genuine laughs in the very late-going, but for the most part, it's low-key to the point of catatonia, never recovering from a miscast Shannon's inert (though some critics really liked it) interpretation of the King. If you want an Elvis performance that's funny and heartfelt and relatively real, stick with Bruce Campbell in BUBBA HO-TEP. (R, 86 mins)
ANDRON (Italy/UK - 2016)
From the 1960s through the 1980s, it was common to find Hollywood actors who were aging or in a career slump slumming in B-grade European knockoffs of popular American movies. To that end, there's a brief sense of nostalgia to be enjoyed with ANDRON, an incoherent Italian ripoff of THE HUNGER GAMES and THE MAZE RUNNER that somehow prominently features a visibly inconvenienced Alec Baldwin as Adam, the nefarious master of--wait for it--"The Redemption Games." It's some survival game being broadcast to a post-apocalyptic, dystopian society in the year 2154, years after "The Big Catastrophe" nuked the planet, killing billions of people and leading to The Nine Corporations assuming control of the world. Ten strangers wake up to find themselves forced contestants in The Redemption Games, which is being beamed to members of an enslaved society who have placed bets where the winners earn their freedom. You expect to see Danny Glover in something like this--he plays "The Chancellor," some Nine Corporations leader--but isn't this a little beneath Alec Baldwin? Sure, hosting a rebooted MATCH GAME is probably a fun lark, but how exactly did this script get to him? Did he see an easy payday and assumed the resulting mess would never be released? ANDRON was filmed in 2014, around the same time Baldwin had a supporting role in the fifth entry in Santiago Segura's popular Spanish-made TORRENTE action/comedy franchise, TORRENTE 5: OPERACION EUROVEGAS (the first was made in 1998 and they've turned up streaming on Amazon), so he likely did the Malta-shot ANDRON on the same trip to Europe. But why? His appearances throughout are almost Bruce Willisian in their laziness and disconnect from the rest of the movie (the DVD's making-of shows a VFX shot of Baldwin's head being CGI'd onto a stand-in's body for a scene where his character appears with Glover). He probably didn't spend any more than a day or two on the set, probably coming off like a mercurial prick at least once and maybe trying to lighten the mood by entertaining the crew by dropping some GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS bon mots or the MALICE "I am God" speech. His role primarily consists of sitting at a desk, watching The Redemption Games on a hologram and occasionally engaging in some MINORITY REPORT pantomiming as he manipulates and moves things around on a holographic screen. When the first contestant is killed, a smirking Baldwin purrs "Ten little Indians standing in a line, one toddled home and then there were nine." Other observational witticisms from behind his desk include:
"Now things get interesting."
"Let's liven things up a little."
"Let's give them something else to think about."
"That's my girl."
"Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends!"
"Let's shuffle this deck."
"What the hell is that?"
"Get them back on the grid!"
"Shit!"
Written and directed by Francesco Cinquemani, ANDRON is so muddled and incomprehensible that it feels like you're watching the fourth or fifth installment in a franchise where the previous installments were never made. Opening in medias res is one thing, but not knowing who anyone is or what's going on or why we should even care makes for a frustrating experience. Never mind the atrocious CGI and greenscreen work--it seems entirely possible that Baldwin is completely unaware of this film and his appearance in it is actually a CGI hologram--the story isn't even remotely engaging and what little you can figure out is blatantly and shamelessly cribbed from THE HUNGER GAMES, THE MAZE RUNNER, and even the cult classic CUBE. The nominal lead is Leo Howard, the star of the Disney Channel's KICKIN' IT, and Skunk Anansie vocalist Skin plays a Milla Jovovich-like badass who's been implanted with someone's memories or some such nonsense. ANDRON is a complete botch that has the audacity to leave the door open for a sequel, and if Z-grade '70s hack Alfonso Brescia/"Al Bradley" was still alive and making Italian ripoffs, he probably would've made this. As it is, it's hopefully as close to an Uwe Boll joint as Baldwin will ever get. Did he owe Stephen a favor and do this movie for him? Did Mitch & Murray send him to Malta on a mission of mercy? (R, 96 mins)
RABID DOGS
(France/Canada - 2015; US release 2016)
Mario Bava's RABID DOGS was shot in the summer of 1974 but went unseen for 23 years after being caught up in a bankruptcy quagmire involving producer Roberto Loyola. A departure for horror icon Bava, RABID DOGS (also seen in the inferior alternate cut KIDNAPPED, with scenes added two decades later by Bava's son Lamberto) was a crime thriller that crammed all of its characters into a getaway vehicle commandeered by a trio of robbers, with a hostage, and the carjacking victim who's trying to get his sick kid to a hospital. Now that the long-lost RABID DOGS has been readily available in the home video age (unfortunately, only the KIDNAPPED cut is currently on Blu-ray in the US), fans of Bava and Eurocrime have had a chance to see one of the director's strongest efforts from the latter days of his career. Directed and co-written by Eric Hannezo (THE HORDE director Yannick Dahan also co-wrote, and Oscar-winning ARTIST star Jean Dujardin is one of the producers), the remake of RABID DOGS follows the same basic concept but consistently displays a fundamental misunderstanding of what made Bava's film work so well. Sure, RABID DOGS '15 is a lot more flashy and stylish than Bava's minimalist thriller, but that only goes so far. Hannezo spends much more time on the robbery and the getaway, and makes some incidental changes: here, it's not a random flunky who gets killed, but the ringleader (Laurent Lucas), leaving his protege Sabri (Guillaume Gouix) in charge of two volatile hotheads, Vincent (Francois Arnaud) and Manu (Franck Gastambide). During a badly-staged shootout at a mall and a standoff in the underground parking garage, they take an innocent bystander (Virginie Ledoyen) hostage and eventually carjack a father (Lambert Wilson), who only has a few hours to get his gravely ill daughter to a hospital for a kidney transplant.
That's more or less how Bava's film starts, minus the remake's specificity of the child's illness and the gaudy visual flourishes. Bava got his characters in the car a lot quicker than Hannezo does, and unlike Bava, he can't wait to keep getting them out of the car, never establishing the sweaty tension and increasing claustrophobia that makes RABID DOGS '74 so intense and nerve-wracking. No, Hannezo insists on giving us backstories of the bank robbers--who gives a shit that Manu is participating in the bank robbery to get enough money to get to see his estranged son? It doesn't humanize him at all, and it doesn't make him as dangerous as Aldo Caponi's comparable Bisturi in Bava's film. All we knew about the bad guys in Bava's film is that George Eastman's psychotic "32" had a huge dick. Hannezo's characters encounter various obstacles along the way, with a traffic jam of almost Godard/WEEKEND proportions slowing them down, and when they stop so the father can change a flat tire, the film completely falls apart. Even though the clock's ticking on the transplant, they take time to bullshit in the woods, share some smokes, and talk about themselves, as Hannezo cuts to a flashback of Vincent and Manu in some FIGHT CLUB-type activities in a garishly-lit red hallway seemingly on loan from Gaspar Noe. Later on, they get stuck in a WICKER MAN situation, with a town of gun-toting weirdos celebrating "The Feast of the Bear," which shuts the whole area down, preventing them from getting through or back out. The filmmakers do keep the devastating twist ending from the Bava film, but don't pull it off nearly as effectively. There's a few good moments that come mostly early on, though a later one, in the Bear town where an elderly, mute woman paralyzed by a stroke recognizes Manu from TV news reports and keeps incessantly ringing her little bell for help that never comes, is a memorable little set piece of which RABID DOGS '15 doesn't have nearly enough. There's some nice scenery in the Quebec location shooting (even though it takes place in France), but Hannezo is too focused on style over suspense here, as when he stops the climax cold for a slo-mo scene of everyone in the car bathed in more Gaspar Noe lighting schemes to the tune of Scala & Kolacny Brothers' cover of Radiohead's "Creep," featured prominently in the trailer for THE SOCIAL NETWORK. Why? Who knows? Who cares? On one hand, it's nice to see an obscure Bava film getting props from a fan who must love the movie (there's even a music cue that recalls Stelvio Cipriani's score for the 1974 film), but on the other, if he loves it so much, it's too bad Hannezo didn't do better by it. Then again, revisiting Bava's RABID DOGS right before watching the remake probably didn't do it any favors. (Unrated, 94 mins, also streaming on Netflix).
GRIDLOCKED (Canada - 2016)
When you wade through enough DTV B-movie swill, you're bound to accidentally find a pleasant surprise every now and again. The NYC-set, Canadian-made GRIDLOCKED is an unabashed homage to the late '80s-to-mid '90s heyday of action producer Joel Silver, though the chief influence, according to director/co-writer Allan Ungar, was John Badham's THE HARD WAY (1991), with James Woods as an angry cop forced to chaperone a spoiled movie star (Michael J. Fox) who's riding along with him to prep for an upcoming role. Ungar goes so far as to have HARD WAY villain Stephen Lang play the bad guy here, but the whole movie is an affectionate mash-up of Silver-produced classics like LETHAL WEAPON, DIE HARD, and THE LAST BOY SCOUT, with a big nod to John Carpenter's ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 to cap it off. When Canadian-born child actor-turned-Hollywood bad boy Brody Walker (Canadian karate champ Cody Hackman) has yet another public meltdown when he punches a cameraman for a TMZ-like tabloid show and gets the latest in a string of DUIs, his foul-mouthed agent Marty (Saul Rubinek, cast radically against type as "Saul Rubinek") tells him his next mega-budget, pre-packaged blockbuster will be canceled if he doesn't get his shit together. Brody's lawyer plea bargains a cushy deal for him: community service in the form a ride-along with a local cop. The cop turns out to be Hendrix (Dominic Purcell), a badass SWAT legend busted down to patrol duty after a botched raid that resulted in too many casualties. The stoical, humorless Hendrix isn't excited about the assignment and resists any attempt by Brody to bond, sighing in disgust as the pampered Hollywood brat takes selfies with perps and generally makes an ass of himself.
Wanting to visit his old pals, Hendrix takes Brody on a late-night tour of his old Strategic Response outpost and armory about 40 miles outside of Manhattan, where the staff includes elderly Sully on desk duty, running the check-in. That Sully is a) near retirement, and b) played by LETHAL WEAPON star Danny Glover, it should come as no surprise that he ends up dead not long after declaring that he's gettin' too old for this shit. A dull and quiet night comes to an abrupt end when disgraced former SRT commander Korver (Lang) leads a team of mercenaries in an attempt to raid the facility, which the government has been using to covertly store assets seized both legally and illegally. Korver is after several hundred thousand dollars in bonds acquired from a raid involving a Central American drug lord, and he's not about to let his old buddy Hendrix stand in his way. Of course, the SWAT team on duty, plus Hendrix and Brody, have to work together--if they don't kill each other first!--to survive the night and keep Korver's guys (Vinnie Jones among them, as a corrupt and improbably Cockney, fookin' 'ell, mate!-accented NYC cop) from getting in. Purcell is an actor who has specialized in the unwatchable since PRISON BREAK went off the air, and relative to 98% of his headlining filmography, GRIDLOCKED is pretty damn good, right up there with his surprisingly solid boxing drama A FIGHTING MAN. He's perfectly cast and a great seething foil for the snotty Brody, who's obviously meant to be Justin Bieber several years from now (strangely, the film never makes use of Hackman's martial arts skills). GRIDLOCKED doesn't have an original thought in its head, but it wears its love of a specific era of action cinema on its sleeve and replicates it quite convincingly in a John Badham/Richard Donner/Walter Hill kind-of way, from the glossy production values to the smartass buddy action comedy bickering, and it's punctuated with some occasionally shocking, stomach-turning violence. Against all odds, this is definitely one of the better straight-to-DVD titles to come down the pike in quite a while, even if it's several years too late: had Purcell had this in theaters with some major studio backing right after PRISON BREAK ended, he would've never returned Uwe Boll's phone calls. (R, 113 mins) THE ABANDONED
(US - 2016)
Not to be confused with Nacho Cerda's 2006 Lucio Fulci homage with the same title, THE ABANDONED (shot in 2013 under the title THE CONFINES) is an intermittently effective chiller with some terrific atmosphere but it's saddled with a story derived from a hodgepodge of influences ranging from THE ORPHANAGE to SESSION 9 to CROPSEY to the jump-scares of Blumhouse to the facepalm-worthy twists of M. Night Shyamalan. Julia, aka "Streak" (Louisa Krause) is a troubled single mom in danger of losing her daughter if she screws up one more time. Her last chance is a gig as an overnight security guard at a posh, abandoned NYC apartment building. Her co-worker is bitter, wheelchair-bound Cooper (Jason Patric), who mans the control room and watches the monitors as Streak patrols the premises. They get off to a rocky start, with Cooper tired of breaking in newbies only to have them flake out after a week over the tedious nature of the job (though it could be that he's just an unpleasant asshole) and not even masking his contempt for Streak. She doesn't win him over by breaking the rules on her first night by letting a homeless man (Mark Margolis) and his dog stay in one of the rooms. It gets worse when she finds a bolted door blocking off a section of the building that Cooper claims was unfinished. Of course, Streak unlocks the door and finds that it leads to a series of dark, ominous underground tunnels branching off of the basement, along with the requisite checklist of things you find in dark, ominous underground tunnels, like hidden rooms with filthy mattresses, creepy childrens' drawings on the walls, and occasional taunting whispers and banging on doors. Of course, this used to be a secret orphanage from decades back, used to stash away deformed or mentally and physically challenged children of parents too poor to care for them or too embarrassed to acknowledge them at all, and of course, their vengeful spirits still haunt the premises. Or do they?
Making his feature directing debut, Eytan Rockaway has a good eye for chill-inducing atmosphere with his use of darkness, light, and shadows. But the script by Ido Fluk seems like the end result of a particularly wild weekend video roulette binge with his DVD collection. As messy as THE ABANDONED's story is, it's a film that's obviously trying hard. Maybe too hard, as if its makers weren't confident they'd ever corral the cash to make another movie, so they're cramming everything they've got into this one. They had to be happy to get access to even a faded star like Patric, who helps the young filmmakers out by turning in a surprisingly strong performance and giving this low-budget affair what little commercial value he can (it still took three years to get released). The final twist packs a punch, but at the same time renders much of what's happened before meaningless. THE ABANDONED falls apart by the end, but it's not fair to bag on it too much--Rockaway and Fluk give it their best shot, and even when you're shaking your head as the plot collapses and the cliches abound, it looks too good to just dismiss. He's not quite there yet, but if Rockaway can find a script that's up to par with his command of the camera and his staging of set pieces, he might go places. (PG-13, 87 mins, also streaming on Netflix)
Bernard Rose's ongoing freefall into absolute irrelevance continues with this aggressively awful, straight-to-DVD/Blu-ray modern updating of Mary Shelley's classic novel, co-produced by Avi Lerner and Cannon cover band NuImage. Rose, who established his horror bona fides with 1989's PAPERHOUSE and 1992's CANDYMAN, hasn't made a good film since the late '90s (his most recent efforts include the found-footage SX_TAPE and the atrocious Paganini biopic THE DEVIL'S VIOLINIST) and for a while, his take on FRANKENSTEIN is promising enough that it starts looking very much like a comeback. Accordingly, since everything Rose has touched for nearly the last 20 years turns to shit, so goes FRANKENSTEIN. Set in present-day Los Angeles, the film finds Victor Frankenstein (Danny Huston) and his wife Elizabeth (Carrie-Anne Moss) conducting top-secret experiments at a high-tech research facility. Using digital technology, they've created "Adam" (Xavier Samuel), who's essentially a baby in the body of an adult. Elizabeth bottle-feeds him and Adam learns to say "Mama," but the experiment is deemed a failure when boils start developing all over his body. An attempt at euthanizing him fails when the presumed-dead Adam jerks awake as his skull is being sawed open. He escapes from the facility and creates havoc all over Los Angeles, with the strength of ten men and seemingly impervious to bullets. When he's arrested and the cops find Elizabeth's work ID in Adam's possession, they call her in but Adam goes berserk when she claims to have never seen him before. Rejected by his "mother," the increasingly monstrous-looking Adam escapes police custody and is befriended by homeless, guitar-strumming blind man Eddie (Rose's CANDYMAN star Tony Todd), who dubs him "Monster" and hooks him up with Wanda (Maya Erskine), an area streetwalker-with-a-heart-of-gold who takes him to a fleabag motel and doesn't seem to mind that he's starting to resemble The Toxic Avenger.
Until Adam escapes from Frankenstein's research lab, FRANKENSTEIN is actually OK. Samuel's performance was credible and there seemed to be enough clever ideas that this was shaping up to be a promising reinterpretation and Rose's best film in a long time (particularly memorable is a ghoulishly macabre bit where Adam gets the upper hand on the Frankenstein associate--named Dr. Pretorius, of course--conducting his autopsy). But once Adam is out of the lab and on the streets, FRANKENSTEIN just crashes and burns on an almost LEGION level. It's not really conveyed in a proper time element how Adam goes from having the cognitive and motor skills of an infant to learning how to shower, being coordinated enough to take on a couple of gang members, and eventually programming a GPS on a dead hooker's smart phone to find out where the Frankensteins live, possibly the dumbest tech-based plot development in a horror movie since Simon Callow faxed his own ejaculate in 2009's unwatchable CROWLEY. Approaching FRANKENSTEIN with the apparent goal of turning it into MARY SHELLEY'S TIME OUT OF MIND, the second half of the film focuses on the friendship between Adam and Eddie, in a tired and obvious revamping of the blind hermit segment in James Whale's THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, moved to the mean streets of L.A. Rose throws in embarrassingly ham-fisted commentary on bad L.A. cops (one is played an overacting Jeff Hilliard in the world's worst tribute to Bill Paxton-as-Hudson-in-ALIENS), and even resorts to a philosophical Eddie invoking Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's "Free at last!" in reference to Adam. Rest assured, Rose is taking this completely seriously, but you may be distracted when your mind wanders off to questions like "Who thought this was a good idea?" and "Does this take place in a world where Frankenstein movies have never existed?" and "At what point do Rose's loved ones stage an intervention?" He tweaks elements of both the novel and the early FRANKENSTEIN films that starred Boris Karloff, and yes, there's even a climactic funeral pyre, where CGI flames engulf both the monster and what's left of Rose's credibility as a filmmaker. (R, 90 mins)
DIABLO
(US - 2016)
Scott Eastwood looks and sounds a lot like his legendary dad Clint, and that was probably all the makers of DIABLO felt they needed to make it work. It also borrows core ideas from THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES and UNFORGIVEN and enough of a particular 1973 western that one could sarcastically dub this HIGH PLAINS POSEUR. The setting is Colorado in 1872, and Eastwood is Jackson, a Civil War vet whose farm is set ablaze by a gang of Mexicans who take off with his new bride Alexsandra (Camilla Belle). Following the trail south to Mexico, Jackson sets off on a vigilante mission to rescue his wife and kill her abductors. He's hindered in his efforts by the mysterious Ezra (THE HATEFUL EIGHT's Walton Goggins), an overtly Mephistophelian figure who keeps appearing on the trail saying things like "Your soul is the toll," and "You're on my road, you pay my price." It's some pretty obvious soul-sellling, "Road to Hell" symbolism that probably seems like deep stuff to screenwriter Carlos De Los Rios, whose credits include several Asylum mockbusters like THE DA VINCI TREASURE and PIRATES OF TREASURE ISLAND. Unfortunately, De Los Rios and director Lawrence Roeck (who has a tenuous connection to Clint; he was a camera operator on THE EASTWOOD FACTOR, one of former Time film critic and full-time Clint BFF Richard Schickel's shamelessly slurping documentaries on the iconic actor) aren't done yet, as DIABLO goes along on an unspectacular but inoffensive path until about 50 minutes in, with a total bullshit plot twist that's the hoariest cliche this side of waking up and finding that it was all a dream. You can't even hint at what it involves without completely giving it away, but let's say the twist is similar to a certain beloved 1999 film with an unreliable narrator. The twist completely derails Eastwood's performance which, while not great, was decent enough to that point to carry a small, low-key western that inexplicably feels the need to switch gears and become a horror movie midway though. There's some really beautiful cinematography by the veteran Dean Cundey and brief appearances by jobbing pros like Danny Glover, Adam Beach, and Joaquim de Almeida, but by the time the asinine finale rolls around, DIABLO only succeeds in shooting itself in the foot. (R, 83 mins)
DIRTY GRANDPA (US - 2016) Directed by Dan Mazer. Written by John Phillips. Cast: Robert De Niro, Zac Efron, Dermot Mulroney, Aubrey Plaza, Zoey Deutch, Julianne Hough, Jason Mantzoukas, Danny Glover, Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman, Adam Pally, Brandon Mychal Smith, Jake Picking, Michael Hudson, Mo Collins, Henry Zebrowski. (R, 102 mins) The worst thing to happen to Robert De Niro since prostate cancer, DIRTY GRANDPA is about as unwatchable as modern comedy can get, existing almost on the same plane of laziness, incompetence, and flat-out contempt as any atrocious Friedberg/Seltzer spoof. The film imagines itself some kind of edgy, "did they just go there?" envelope-pusher, but there's nothing here beyond the shock value of a living legend like De Niro working blue and saying some of the filthiest things ever heard in a mainstream movie. But "shock" doesn't mean "funny." Raunch humor can kill--in-their-prime Farrelly Brothers and Judd Apatow and AMERICAN PIE have shown that. And the great BAD SANTA (2003) expertly mixed raunchy shock with smart writing and funny performances. DIRTY GRANDPA skips the humor component, demonstrating absolutely no restraint as it guns it straight for the raunch and nothing but. As decreed in the Burgess Meredith Amendment set forth upon the release of 1993's GRUMPY OLD MEN, Hollywood seems to think there's nothing funnier than old people saying really nasty shit. After 102 minutes of watching De Niro--arguably the greatest actor of all time--jerk off; talk about donkey-punches, creampies, chugging horsecock, and Queen Latifah taking a shit in his mouth; call his grandson "Jack Dicklaus" and "Michelle Wies-in-my-mouth" while golfing; call his grandson's fiancee's pink car "a giant labia" and "a giant tampon"; stick his cock and balls in his grandson's face; make racist and homophobic cracks to a gay black man; harangue the same grandson for cockblocking him and calling him "Cocky McBlockerson"; and bellow ad nauseum that he wants to "fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck till my dick falls off!" while dropping more F-bombs than in all of his Scorsese films combined, you'll long for the tact and grace of Meredith cackling about "taking the skin boat to Tuna Town!" in GRUMPY OLD MEN. De Niro isn't so much a dirty grandpa as he is a geriatric 2 Live Crew.
Dick (De Niro) convinces his grandson to take him
to Daytona Beach by making him an offer he can't
refuse in DIRTY GRANDPA
It has a plot that's similar to the not-quite-as-godawful-but-close Robert Duvall vehicle A NIGHT IN OLD MEXICO. The day after the funeral of his wife of 40 years, who succumbed to a long battle with cancer, grieving Dick Kelly (De Niro) convinces his uptight, straight-arrow lawyer grandson Jason (Zak Efron) to take him from Atlanta to his vacation home in Boca Raton where he and his wife spent their summers. When Jason picks Dick up and catches him jerking off to porn ("You caught me takin' a #3!"), it's a harbinger of things to come. After 40 years of being a faithful husband and 15 years of celibacy due to his wife's lengthy illness, Dick needs to blow off some steam. Jason really wants no part of it, as he's got a big case at his dad's (Dermot Mulroney) law firm and he's getting married to Jewish bridezilla Meredith (Julianne Hough) in a week, but Dick nevertheless cajoles his square grandson into taking him to Daytona for spring break. Dick keeps getting on Jason about why he abandoned his passion for photography to join his dad's law firm, and why he's marrying a control-freak shrew like Meredith, but his real focus is getting laid, and after they run into a trio of spring breakers, Dick sees the perfect opportunity to achieve his dream of unprotected sex with a college girl. Pretending to be a professor, Dick catches the attention of hard-partying Lenore (Aubrey Plaza), who has a fantasy about screwing an elderly prof, wooing Dick with come-ons like "How about you knock your balls in my vagina?" and "I want you to tsunami all over my face!" and "I want you to eat me out and blow your last breath in my pussy." Simply by default of nothing else in the film being even remotely amusing, Plaza is the sole source of anything resembling actual comedy in DIRTY GRANDPA, but her only funny lines (like "I want you to tell me you watch Fox News!") are probably ad-libbed and, perhaps most tellingly, are the ones that aren't X-rated.
Dick (De Niro) asks "You talkin' to me?"
after Lenore tells him to tsunami on her face and
blow his last breath in her pussy in DIRTY GRANDPA
Elsewhere, DIRTY GRANDPA is absolute misery. In the right hands, Jason accidentally smoking crack and being busted for pedophilia and threatened with prison rape and putting on semen-encrusted pants and Facetiming his Jewish fiancee and her Rabbi while unknowingly sporting a swastika of penises drawn on his forehead and having De Niro's stunt junk resting on his face might've been funny. The same goes for De Niro doing rap poses doing a karaoke version of Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day." But in the hands of first-time screenwriter John Phillips (his next project is BAD SANTA 2, so scratch any hope for that one) and director Dan Mazer, a past Sacha Baron Cohen collaborator who helped write DA ALI G SHOW, BORAT, and BRUNO (after DIRTY GRANDPA, it's obvious who was carrying who in that partnership), nothing works and the entire purpose of the project seems to be how far down to the bottom De Niro will let them take him. Mazer's direction is an amateur-night abomination, lacking even a basic understanding of blocking and cutting, starting early on when Dick and Jason leave for their road trip and Dick cracks "Let's get in the giant labia you pulled up in." Mind you, Dick hasn't seen the car because he was too busy "taking a #3" in his man-cave when Jason walked in on him. And how does it make any sense that Jason, several years out of law school, would've been a photo lab partner of Lenore's friend Shadia (Zoey Deutch, daughter of Lea Thompson and a potentially charming actress if she can find the right movie) in college? And Shadia, Lenore, and their gay black friend Bradley (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman) are graduating from college in a week, but they're on spring break now? Does Phillips know the concept of semesters? His script tries to get all maudlin and sappy at various points, with a completely out-of-nowhere about-face by Dick, who spends the first half of the film derisively mocking the stereotypically flamboyant Bradley only to turn into a beacon of progressive acceptance later on. The filmmakers also awkwardly mix the sentimental and the tasteless, as in a heartfelt speech Dick has about how much his wife meant to him, while tossing in as an aside "We tried anal once every five years." There's no consistency and a lot of points are sloppily thrown in--Jason dreamed of being a photographer for Time, which isn't really known for its photos (was Phillips thinking of Life, perhaps? Did De Niro care enough to clarify? Does Efron know what a magazine is?), and Dick was secretly a Special Forces badass who spent his career fighting terrorism, which explains how he's able to take on a quintet of guys 50 years younger than him in a fight. Attempts to humanize Dick amidst his scatological and gynecological insults and one-liners that would make old-school Andrew Dice Clay blush come off as forced and phony. BAD SANTA turned its misanthropic anti-hero around, but that film provided Billy Bob Thornton with a real character to play, with a real progression and arc, and surrounded him with ringers like late greats Bernie Mac and John Ritter. De Niro gets Efron, who's frankly in over his head in pretty much anything, and even gets to mimic his co-star's familiar facial expressions at one point, which might've been funny had he not already done it for the De Niro party in NEIGHBORS.
Dick (De Niro) isn't afraid to take on some younger troublemakers in DIRTY GRANDPA
De Niro's career took an unexpected turn into comedy the late '90s and into the '00s with ANALYZE THIS and MEET THE PARENTS and both of their sequels. But in those, he was essentially parodying his own serious image. It's not that De Niro can't do comedy--after all, 1988's buddy action comedy MIDNIGHT RUN is a classic--but he needs well-written comedy, or at least a comedically-gifted co-star to bounce off of, like he had with Charles Grodin in MIDNIGHT RUN. It goes without saying that Efron is no Grodin, and while De Niro has nothing to work with here, it's still no excuse for the revolting mess in which he's gotten himself. The two-time Oscar-winner has taken a lot of shit over the last decade and a half or so for taking easy gigs that were beneath him (FREELANCERS, THE BIG WEDDING, THE BAG MAN), with constant cries from fans that he's tarnishing his legacy. But there have been some excellent performances from this much-maligned period--the barely-seen STONE and BEING FLYNN and his Oscar-nominated turn in SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK come to mind. I get that working actors have to work, and De Niro likes to stay busy. While I'm sure he enjoys the big paychecks as well, it's easy to see where he's coming from--how many 72-year-old actors are still getting leads in major movies these days? We bag on De Niro but forget someone like Harrison Ford, who's been coasting and phoning it for years but that's all forgiven now that he's Han Solo again. Ford doesn't even mask his cynical disdain for what he does for a living, but you have to give De Niro some credit--he actually seems to be enjoying himself with DIRTY GRANDPA. He approaches the role with an enthusiastic gusto that gets increasingly desperate as the movie flop-sweats its way through one depressingly unfunny set piece after another. After some dubious career choices in recent years, De Niro has hit bottom and there's nowhere to go now but up, as DIRTY GRANDPA is an unequivocally soul-crushing endurance test of a comedy, easily the worst film he's done in a career now in its sixth decade. It's really hard to sufficiently convey just how incredibly devoid of laughs DIRTY GRANDPA is, but in the De Niro comedy canon, it's gotta rank dead last, with nothing in it nearly as hilarious as Travis Bickle's rescue of Iris in TAXI DRIVER or the Russian Roulette scenes in THE DEER HUNTER.
Veteran stuntman, stunt coordinator, and second-unit director Nicholas Powell makes his directing debut with this completely generic historical epic that might've made for harmlessly diverting entertainment of the IRONCLAD sort were it not for the sleepwalking performance of Hayden Christensen. Christensen's been offscreen since 2011's abysmal VANISHING ON 7TH STREET (you didn't even notice, did you?) and is still the vacant, charisma-starved presence he was a decade ago as Anakin Skywalker. Christensen's delivered exactly one good performance, in 2003's SHATTERED GLASS, where his blank persona and complete lack of screen presence were actually integral to the ultimate unraveling of his character, New Republic fabulist Stephen Glass. But even in his own film, lucking into the most perfect role he'll ever have and owning it, he managed to be upstaged by Peter Sarsgaard (as his increasingly incredulous editor Chuck Lane) in one of the best performances of the last 15 years that didn't get a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. Here, the perpetually miscast Christensen is Jacob, an opium-addled 12th century warrior, burned out and beaten down by his experiences in the Crusades. He ends up finding his shot at redemption when a Chinese king (Shi Liang) is murdered by his treacherous eldest son Shing (Andy On), who's furious about being passed over in favor of his younger brother Zhao (Bill Su Jiahang). The king has already sent Zhao and his sister Lian (Liu Yifei) off to safety when Shing publicly announces Zhao is the murderer and leads his Black Guards in pursuit. Zhao and Lian eventually cross paths with Jacob, who reluctantly (would there be any other way?) agrees to guide them and provide protection from the duplicitous Shing along the way.
Eventually, they meet up with Jacob's former mentor Gaillan, known as "The White Ghost," and played by Nicolas Cage in what might be the dumbest role of his career thus far. Sporting a samurai wig and a ridiculous British accent and playing Gaillan as blind in one eye, Cage is in prime form for some epic future Nic Cage YouTube highlights, but he isn't really in the film long enough to make an impact for his legion of Cageaholics. Cage is strictly a big-name guest star in a slightly extended cameo here, appearing fleetingly in a couple of flashbacks and not properly introduced until the one-hour mark, then he's gone 20 minutes later. Had Cage had a larger role or played Christensen's part, it's likely OUTCAST would still be terrible but probably not the stultifying bore that it is. For all his experience in big-budget stunt work--his credits include BATMAN, BRAVEHEART, and GLADIATOR--Powell's direction and action choreography are pedestrian at best, with everything shown in quick-cut succession and the requisite unstable shaky-cam. The script by James Dormer (a regular writer on Cinemax's STRIKE BACK) brings nothing new to the table and relies on every rote cliche and stereotype imaginable. OUTCAST took three countries and 23 credited producers to get made--it's not a cheap film and even the CGI is marginally better than you'd expect--but there's just no passion or energy in its presentation, running only 98 minutes but feeling about as long as The Crusades themselves. There could've been some fun in comparing Cage's and Christensen's dueling horrendous British accents, but even that's for naught since Christensen can't even be consistent about it (Cage's is laughable, but he at least commits to it). When "the CGI is marginally better than you'd expect" is the best praise you can offer, you know you're really reaching to find something positive to say, and OUTCAST just reeks of total shrugging ambivalence on the part of everyone involved. Why was it made? How can a movie with Nicolas Cage wearing a hilarious ZATOICHI wig, playing partially blind and crutching on a bizarre British accent be this dour and miserable? And while I'm sure he's a nice guy, Christensen's sabbatical did nothing to sharpen his skills. How many more times do we have to see the same corpse-like performance before producers stop trying to make him happen? (R, 98 mins)
OUT OF THE DARK (Spain/Colombia - 2015)
American couple Sarah (Julia Stiles) and Paul Holden (Scott Speedman), and their Cockney-accented daughter Hannah (the amazingly-named Pixie Davies) move from London to a village outside Bogota, Colombia, where Sarah is taking over the management duties of the Harriman paper factory, owned by her father Jordan Harriman (Stephen Rea). Harriman sets them up in a long-vacant house where it doesn't take long for supernatural shenanigans to break out. Of course, the audience is expecting it since the film opens with a prologue where a man (Elkin Diaz) is killed by a group of ghostly children in that very house. Hannah becomes ill and develops a severe skin rash before being whisked away by the same ghost kids. The ghosts are believed to be the spirits of all the village's children who disappeared 20 years earlier in what the superstitious locals accepted as retribution for conquistadors abducting children and burning them alive in a temple centuries earlier. Or maybe it has something to with why Harriman closed his old paper mill 20 years ago and built a new one on the opposite end of the village. There are no scares or original ideas in the script by Javier Gullon (ENEMY, KING OF THE HILL), and Alex & David Pastor (the little-seen and worthwhile CARRIERS), and the direction by first-time Lluis Quilez is bland and perfunctory, relying on things slamming shut, pointless shrieks, and dead-end jump-scares that go absolutely nowhere. Most of the film takes place in almost total darkness, with approximately 75% of the screen time devoted to Stiles and Speedman wandering around with flashlights screaming "Hannah!" in a fruitless attempt to keep the audience--or perhaps themselves--awake. I hope Stiles, Speedman, and Rea enjoyed their free vacation to Bogota, because they're the only ones who got anything out of this. (R, 94 mins)
DEATH SQUAD (Italy - 2014; US release 2015)
Released in Italy under the oddly Bruno Mattei-esque title 2047: SIGHTS OF DEATH, DEATH SQUAD is a rare present-day return to a distant era of slumming name actors turning up in cheesy, C-grade Italian exploitation. That mystique is legitimized by the involvement of director Alessandro Capone, who earned some acclaim with the 2009 Isabelle Huppert/Greta Scacchi drama HIDDEN LOVE, but cut his teeth on screenwriting credits for things like Ruggero Deodato's 1986 slasher film BODY COUNT in the waning days of the '80s Italian horror explosion. Capone went on to direct several EXTRALARGE vehicles with Bud Spencer, but with DEATH SQUAD, he's got his most eclectic and bizarre cast yet for a post-apocalyptic shoot 'em up set in a world controlled by a totalitarian regime known as The Confederation. In a not-too-subtle metaphor, they've made the rich safe and secure while the rest of the world and its lesser citizens are prisoners in a bombed-out, radioactive wasteland. An eco-terrorist organization known as Greenwar dispatches military-trained Willburn (Stephen Baldwin) to infiltrate a forbidden zone to find a stash of "anti-rad" solution that helps combat and prevent the effects of radiation poisoning. Determined to stop the mission is the deranged Col. Asimov (Rutger Hauer), who's in cahoots with sleazy mercenary Lobo (Michael Madsen) as both turn the tables on Asimov's driven, dutiful second-in-command Maj. Anderson (Daryl Hannah) to go ahead with their rogue mission to intercept and make off with the anti-rad. Anderson eventually sees the light and sides with Greenwar, an organization devoted to exposing The Confederation's war crimes, and led by Sponge (top-billed Danny Glover), who remains in constant radio contact with Willburn. Willburn, meanwhile, finds a survivor in nomadic female warrior Tuag (Neva Leoni), and they team up to take on Asimov and Lobo as the various cast members wander around an abandoned factory in Rome for the better part of 90 minutes.
Name actors schlepping their way through Italian exploitation hasn't really been a thing since the late '80s and I don't know about you, but the fact that it's 2015 and a guy like Danny Glover is turning up in a low-budget Italian post-apocalypse potboiler playing someone named "Sponge" just puts a smile on my face. There's an awful lot of skidding talent on display in DEATH SQUAD, but the actors are surprisingly engaged, particularly Hauer, doing his best Klaus Kinski in a mostly-improvised performance that finds him doing anything he can think of to keep it interesting, whether it's going wildly off script in almost every scene (often encouraging Madsen to do the same), making funny faces at everyone, or even slowly and melodramatically brushing his teeth while being debriefed on a situation in his command center. Capone obviously gave Hauer the Marlon Brando "Eh, fuck it, just let him do what he wants" treatment, with Madsen (who gets an introduction that's memorable, to say the least) following suit, while Baldwin and Hannah actually seem to be taking this thing seriously (do you think the crew was expressly forbidden to ask Hannah and Hauer any questions about BLADE RUNNER? Or Hannah and Madsen about KILL BILL?). In an apparent homage to Bruce Willis' contributions to the world of VOD, Glover never leaves his desk and is never seen with any of the other cast members, but the other once-vital heavy hitters don't do the customary one-day-on-the-set driveby while the lesser-known Italian actors carry the load. Nope...like Richard Harris in STRIKE COMMANDO 2 and Brian Dennehy in INDIO, they're the stars and they're in the whole movie. DEATH SQUAD isn't very good (it's quite bad, actually) and with all the walking around and arguing, it gets pretty tedious at times, almost like it's crying out for a car chase or some Antonio Margheriti miniature explosions. But with the unexpected cast, Hauer's bonkers performance, some gratuitous splatter, Capone's connection to the golden era of Italian B-movies, a legitimately interesting but poorly-executed plot twist near the end, and Madsen being skeezy, connoisseurs of vintage Eurotrash will find that there's a strange retro charm to DEATH SQUAD that doesn't exist in your typical DTV programmer of this sort. With just a little more ambition on Capone's part, it could've flirted with "guilty pleasure" status. (Unrated, 90 mins, also available on Netflix Instant)
Almost as if his potentially career-reviving turn in JOE never happened--which it feels like anyway considering how Lionsgate seemingly went out of their way to ensure nobody knew about it--Nicolas Cage is back with another phoned-in actioner ready-made for one of those random eight-movie "Action Marathon" sets you find in the $5 bin at Wal-Mart. By now, Cage has racked up almost enough of these DTV-quality programmers to make an entire set of his own--anyone remember TRESPASS, SEEKING JUSTICE or STOLEN? Of his recent work, only JOE and the surprisingly engaging and similarly distributor-abandoned THE FROZEN GROUND have given Cage the quality projects he's still clearly capable of doing. RAGE is every bit as generic as its title suggests, at least until a legitimately unpredictable twist ending that's undermined by a pointless coda that plays along with the closing credits. Cage is Paul Maguire, a successful building developer who's managed to bury his criminal past with the Irish mob. He went legit years earlier when his wife died of cancer and someone needed to be around for their daughter Caitlin (Aubrey Peeples). Now married to the much younger Vanessa (Rachel Nichols), Paul is a loving but stern father who wants the best for his little girl. While Paul and Vanessa are out at a business dinner, Vanessa has some friends over but the party comes to an abrupt end during a home invasion by three gunmen who abduct her. When the cops find Caitlin dead, Paul knows his past has come back to haunt him: years earlier (Cage's son Weston plays Paul in flashbacks), he and his buddies Danny (Michael McGrady) and Kane (Max Ryan) robbed and killed the younger brother of Russian mob chief Chernov (Pasha D. Lychnikoff) and got away with it. Believing Chernov knows their secret and is finally exacting his vengeance, Paul and his still-connected pals embark on a citywide rampage taking out Chernov's crew, despite the warnings of weary, dogged detective St. John (a weary, dogged-looking Danny Glover, who finally does look too old for this shit) and aging, wheelchair-bound old mob boss Francis O'Connell, played by Swedish Peter Stormare using a vague and inexplicable Eastern European accent as if the filmmakers neglected to inform him that he was supposed to be Irish.
Director Paco Cabezas stages a couple of interesting action sequences, like Paul taking out a bunch of Russian mob flunkies while armed only with a hunting knife, but then blows it with a tiresome shaky-cam foot chase that ends in--where else?--an abandoned warehouse. Other than the intriguing twist that unfortunately doesn't deliver for those expecting an explosive finish, the script by Jim Agnew and Sean Keller (the writers of Dario Argento's Adrien Brody/Byron Deidra buddy movie GIALLO) is just a cut-and-paste job from hundreds of other such revenge thrillers. Not even 20 minutes in, and we've already heard Cage declare "I'm out of the game...you know that!", McGrady bellow "Knock knock, asshole!" while barging through a door, and someone asking Cage "How deep do you wanna take this?" to which he growls "How deep is Hell?" Of course, Nichols, who has nothing to do, pleads "Talk to me! Please don't shut me out!" and Glover warns "You can't go around tearin' up the city!" Sporting what looks like a vintage 1970 Christopher Lee hairpiece, Cage mostly goes through the motions here but indulges in a couple of classic Nic Cage meltdowns, presumably to keep himself awake ("You're a rat! RAT! RAT! RAAAAT!"), and in one ridiculous scene, smashes a guy's head into the ground ten times, empties an entire clip into him, then kicks his head again, all while screaming at the top of his lungs. Such histrionics indicate not only that Cage knows this is garbage, but also that he's fully aware of what his fans want and is just giving them more material for future "Nic Cage Freaks Out!" clips on YouTube. It's passably entertaining and never boring, but if you've seen JOE, it's depressing all the same, and the future doesn't look promising with the upcoming LEFT BEHIND reboot. RAGE isn't good and it isn't bad. It just is. Watch JOE or THE FROZEN GROUND instead. (R, 98 mins)
LOCKE (US/UK - 2014)
Steven Knight is best known for his Oscar-nominated script for 2002's DIRTY PRETTY THINGS as well as writing David Cronenberg's 2007 drama EASTERN PROMISES. These were the first two films in a loose trilogy of London's exploited and downtrodden that also includes Jason Statham's 2013 departure vehicle REDEMPTION, which marked Knight's directing debut. Knight, also the creator of the original British version of WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE, took six years off between EASTERN PROMISES and REDEMPTION, and has been a veritable workaholic since. He wrote last year's flop legal thriller CLOSED CIRCUIT and the current THE HUNDRED-YEAR JOURNEY, and was recently hired to script the sequel to WORLD WAR Z. He's also written and directed LOCKE, his most ambitious project yet. It's difficult to put a guy in a car taking phone calls during a real-time 80-minute road trip and not just adhering to the premise, but also making it compelling, and Knight and star Tom Hardy pull it off. Obviously dealing with a badly-timed cold that was worked into the story as the film was shot over eight consecutive nights, Hardy is Ivan Locke, a prominent and successful Birmingham builder who's got the biggest, most expensive concrete pour of his career taking place bright and early the next morning, a 55-story, $100 million skyscraper commissioned by a corporation based in Chicago. But he's delegating it to an underling and making a late-night drive to London to be with Bethan (voiced by Olivia Colman on speakerphone), who's about to give birth to his child. The problem is, Locke has been married to Katrina (Ruth Wilson) for 15 years and they have two sons. Locke had a drunken one-nighter with the older Olivia, a lonely, socially awkward woman who'd given up on happiness. He has no interest in being with her, but he feels that being there for the birth and being a presence in the child's life is the right thing to do, much like overseeing the final details of the concrete pour as he speeds down the highway, fielding a constant barrage of phone calls from Bethan, Katrina, his oblivious sons giving him football updates, his frazzled second-in-command who's picked the wrong time to get drunk, an irate boss, and overseers in Chicago who want him fired.
In the rare moments he isn't taking or making calls, Locke, symbolically enough, looks to the rearview mirror to address his unseen and long-dead father, a deadbeat dad who walked out on him and was never there. That's the past Locke's speeding away from as he careens to his future, however bleak it might be considering how he's jeopardized his marriage and his career. Sniffling his way through the film in the best real-cold-written-into-the-film bit since John Malkovich's one day on the set in JENNIFER 8 (1992), Hardy is dynamic as the beleaguered Locke, trying to keep his cool as he faces the consequences of one mistake that's causing his entire life to collapse. Knight's a little heavy-handed with the metaphors (yes, Locke constructs sturdy buildings but his own is a shambles with crumbling foundation!), and some of the actors on speakerphone, particularly Wilson as Katrina, sound a little too rehearsed (Locke: "This only happened once." Katrina: "The difference between once and never is everything!"), but he does a marvelous job of wringing suspense and tension from something as simple as an incoming call notification. In the end, it's still a gimmick, but unlike stunts of this sort, it sticks to its established rules and doesn't cut any corners, and the real time element indeed feels real. The problem most filmmakers run into when they have a premise like "He's in the car for the whole movie!" is that they can't wait to get him out of the car, and Knight admirably avoids that trap. (R, 85 mins)
PROXY (US - 2014)
The obfuscation and misdirection start immediately in PROXY with the introduction of the very pregnant Esther Woodhouse (Alexia Rasmussen), whose surname would seem to indicate that she's in store for a ROSEMARY'S BABY predicament, but that would be too easy. Director/co-writer Zack Parker has other things in mind when Esther is violently assaulted two weeks before her due date. The baby dies and Esther, a loner who used an anonymous sperm donor, has no family or friends and finds herself hanging around in hospital waiting rooms to find some sense of security. Things look up for her when she starts attending a support group for grieving mothers and meets Melanie (Alexa Havins), and PROXY is the kind of film where revealing any further plot details would be a disservice to a potential viewer. What I've described here is approximately the opening 15 minutes, and this is a film best seen knowing as little as possible other than the essentials: it's not for everyone, it's often extraordinarily uncomfortable, it's absolutely riveting, and you won't soon forget it. It's an audacious and chilling psychological thriller that begins as a painful examination of grief before a focused and assured Parker sends it into increasingly unpredictable and, for the most part, plausible directions. Every time you think you know where PROXY is going, Parker has something wholly unexpected in store for you. It only stumbles with a couple of contrivances that reek of plot convenience, but it recovers nicely for its terrific finish. PROXY is populated by complex and extremely damaged characters with equally complex motivations whose lives of secrets, deception, and neuroses intersect in tragic and shocking ways. Parker even manages to pull off a Hitchcock trick at one point and not have it blow up in his face, but he also throws in little bits of Kubrick (fans of THE SHINING will spot one obvious homage), and one long sequence in a department store that's total De Palma, right down to the Newton Brothers' blatantly Pino Donaggio-esque score. Some scenes of domestic discord have a Cassavetes-level of emotional rawness to them. One stunning sequence resorts to a jaw-dropping, over-the-top fusion of Argento splatter and Peckinpah bloodletting. Rasmussen and Havins are remarkable in very difficult roles (Rasmussen's in particular), and they get solid support from Kristina Klebe as someone who figures into the story in a major way (again, anything is a spoiler here). Of the four leads, only DIY indie auteur Joe Swanberg doesn't really work, and it's largely because he just doesn't have the dramatic chops (he's fine as the comically arrogant blowhard in YOU'RE NEXT) to pull off the arc his character endures. You've never seen anything quite like PROXY, one of the boldest and most unusual films of the year, and perhaps the most impressive breakout genre offering since Nicholas McCarthy's THE PACT. This is going to become a major cult movie. (Unrated, 122 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)
