Drably-shot and about as polished as someone's first DIY effort funded by successfully talking their dad into cashing out his 401k, the dreary, amateurish, and cheap-looking BEYOND THE LAW marks a reunion of sorts for Steven Seagal and DMX, the duo previously headlining 2001's EXIT WOUNDS, one of Seagal's last gasps of box office success. "Reunion" might be stretching it, since they don't have any scenes together here, making it quite possible that Seagal has no idea that DMX--or for that matter, Steven Seagal--is even in BEYOND THE LAW. Both have supporting roles, with the real star being Johnny Messner (returning for more Seagal duty after 2016's THE PERFECT WEAPON) as Frank Wilson, an alcoholic ex-cop who we can assume played by his own rules. He goes on a rampage of revenge after his son falls in with the wrong crowd and is killed by Desmond Packard (one-time Uwe Boll semi-regular Zack Ward, further away than ever from A CHRISTMAS STORY's Scut Farkus), the sniveling, dirtbag son of former crime boss-turned-legit businessman--and lemme check and make sure I get this name right--Augustino Finn Adair, played by a cigar-sucking Seagal with his usual N'awlins accent and total indifference to the proceedings. BEYOND THE LAW then turns into a DIPSHIT JOHN WICK--only with a slovenly drunk as its vigilante killing machine--as Wilson goes after Desmond, who's also mounting a challenge to topple his father and restart his old criminal empire (and we know Desmond is intense because he constantly flicks his Zippo while glaring menacingly), a plan probably egged on by his old man trying to tell him to straight up his act and muttering "I feel like I'm talking to a retarded child."
In his first film since spending a year in prison for tax fraud, DMX periodically turns up as Munce, the detective supposedly investigating the murder of Wilson's son (of course admonishing the enraged father with "Look, you're not a cop anymore!") but secretly on Desmond's payroll before he gets the clumsiest death scene since Michael Madsen in BLOODRAYNE. Written by DTV vet Chad Law (DRIVE HARD, CLOSE RANGE, JARHEAD 3) and director James Cullen Bressack (13/13/13 and some other very low-budget Asylum and Unearthed Films horror indies), who also throws in some incongruous jump scares when Wilson keeps imagining seeing his dead son, BEYOND THE LAW leaves no cliche untouched. You get B-movie drinking game staples like Wilson yelling "This ends tonight!" and Munce telling Wilson "You're not an easy man to find," to which Wilson mutters "Sometimes when you can't find a man, it's because he don't wanna be found," a philosophy that must explain Johnny Messner continuing to appear in modern-era Steven Seagal movies. But there's also some real head-scratchers, like Munce getting angry with Desmond because he's never seen GREMLINS ("It's a classic!") and--again, lemme make sure I get this name right--Augustino Finn Adair mumbling to his chief flunky that a meeting with a new "supplier" has to be postponed a day because "I gotta clean up my house." The kind of movie where someone in a bar orders a vodka shot and gets it in a regular-sized red plastic Solo cup because real shot glasses apparently weren't in the budget, BEYOND THE LAW might succeed in fooling some casual Seagal fans who haven't seen anything he's done since HALF PAST DEAD into thinking it's a belated sequel to ABOVE THE LAW upon a cursory glance at the Redbox kiosk. It also shamefully wastes veteran character actor Bill Cobbs as Wilson's fatherly friend, and DEATH WARRANT's Patrick Kilpatrick appears in a thankless role as a bouncer. (Unrated, 90 mins)
I SEE YOU (UK/US/UAE - 2019)
It's surprising that Saban Films didn't give I SEE YOU any kind of a push beyond an ambivalent VOD release. Maybe it's a little too much of a slow-burner for the multiplex, but it's filled with so many twists and turns and rugs being pulled out from under the viewer that you just know it's desperately hoping you don't question its implausibilities until it's over. It's best to go into this knowing as little as possible, but the basic set-up goes like this: in a greater Cleveland suburb, two young boys have gone missing in the woods, with the opening scene showing the second kid seemingly yanked off his bike by an unseen force. The focus shifts to an upper-class neighborhood and the Harpers, a well-to-do family fraught with the kind of simmering tension we haven't seen since HEREDITARY. Therapist mom Jackie (Helen Hunt) is popping pills and trying to repair the damage caused by a brief recent affair. Teenage son Connor (Judah Lewis) is bitter and resentful and wants nothing to do with her, and husband Greg (Jon Tenney) is dividing his time between the couch and the guest room and isn't quite ready to forgive her. Greg's preoccupied, however, since he's the lead detective in the disappearance of the two kids. Evidence is found in the woods that indicates a copycat of a case several years earlier where local boys were targeted by a now-incarcerated pedophile whose victims described him living in "a magic house that disappears." Strange things have been happening in the Harper house: the TV turns itself on, all of their silverware disappears, photos are missing from frames, and when Jackie returns home to find a repairman in the house, he claims a very polite young girl let him in.
At just around the midpoint, director Adam Randall (the British Netflix acquisition iBOY) and first-time screenwriter Devon Graye (an actor probably best known for playing the teenage DEXTER in flashbacks during the show's first two seasons and was later The Trickster on The CW's THE FLASH) deploy their first major twist, and from then on, you never know what to expect with I SEE YOU. It seems like it's not going to stand up under scrutiny, but there's always something happening that shifts your loyalties or puts things in a new perspective that you never saw coming. Yeah, maybe that one bit hinges on a garage door taking an improbably long time to close, but these are hiccups that you just have to roll with, because every time Randall and Graye make a decision that seems like too big of a leap, they manage to steady the ship, almost like they sense your incredulity and are saying "No, wait...just hear us out!" I SEE YOU doesn't go for jump scares and its bigger concern is a slowly mounting sense of eerie dread and unease, but at the same time, it's surprising that Saban didn't even try to sell it. It might've had potential to be a small word-of-mouth sleeper hit like SEARCHING, and it's got an Oscar-winning headliner in Hunt. I SEE YOU is a film that has to be taken on its own terms, and no matter how preposterous it gets on occasion, it's surprisingly effective and often genuinely chilling. (R, 98 mins)
THE COURIER (US/UK - 2019)
THE COURIER is the kind of dumb thriller that feels the need to accompany an aerial shot of an illuminated Tower Bridge at night with the caption "London, United Kingdom," and soon follows it with an establishing shot of the Washington Monument with the caption "Washington D.C." The opening credits play over quick shots of newspaper headlines that can't settle on whether its main villain is named "Manning" or "Mannings." It's also apparently the kind of movie that Gary Oldman does now, despite winning an Oscar for 2017's DARKEST HOUR, a title that, in retrospect, seems depressingly prophetic considering his 2019 had him in the unwatchable "support group for assassins" comedy KILLERS ANONYMOUS, the possessed yacht horror trifle MARY, and now THE COURIER, a straight-to-VOD DIPSHIT DIE HARD IN A PARKING GARAGE. Sporting a scarred face and an eye-patch like he took a wrong turn on his way to playing the bad guy in a JOHNNY ENGLISH sequel, Oldman puts in a couple of days work as powerful and bizarrely-accented NYC real estate mogul Ezekial Manning(s), who's under house arrest in his luxury penthouse overlooking Central Park while facing charges of fraud and murder, the latter witnessed by lowly office worker Nick Murch (Amit Shah) during Manning(s)'s last trip to London. Murch is under Interpol witness protection and en route to a secret location in London to give video testimony to a hearing in DC when the independently-contracted courier (Olga Kurylenko) hired to deliver the video link is ambushed by the agents, who are secretly on Manning(s)'s payroll with a plot to kill Murch and frame The Courier.
Or, make that "Courier? COUUURRRRRIIIIERRRR?!!!" as psycho Interpol agent Bryant (THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA's William Moseley, who's matured into an unbelievably terrible actor) keeps tauntingly calling her Luther-from-THE WARRIORS-style, adding other creative bon mots like "Run, rabbit, run!," "Come out, come out, wherever you are!" and "FFFFUUUUUUUCCK!" when the Courier gets the upper hand and takes it upon herself to keep Murch alive and take out the rogue agents one by one in a closed-off parking structure (it somehow took four screenwriters to come up with this shit), forcing Bryant to repeatedly call Manning(s) and inform him the job still isn't done. THE COURIER is just dull, predictable, and brain-dead from the start, and Kurylenko is a capable action star who deserves better material than the leftover table scraps of Milla Jovovich and Noomi Rapace. Dermot Mulroney also pulls some Bruce Willis duty, glowering and pacing around an office as a CIA honcho who may or may not be trustworthy (SPOILER: he's not). And then there's Oldman, who spends almost all of his screen time in one or two rooms of Manning(s)'s posh apartment, ordering the hapless Bryant to "Finish this!" while periodically doing some PROFESSIONAL-inspired shouting at his Ivanka-like daughter (Calli Taylor) and looking at his phone, perhaps waiting for his agent to call with something better than THE COURIER. (R, 100 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.
TRUTH (US/Australia - 2015) Written and directed by James Vanderbilt. Cast: Cate Blanchett, Robert Redford, Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace, Elisabeth Moss, Bruce Greenwood, Stacy Keach, Dermot Mulroney, John Benjamin Hickey, David Lyons, Rachael Blake, Andrew McFarlane, Lewis Fitz-Gerald, Natalie Saleeba, Noni Hazelhurst, Nicholas Hope, Philip Quast. (R, 125 mins)
This chronicle of the 2004 events that led to the dismissal of 60 MINUTES II producer Mary Mapes and the end of Dan Rather's tenure at CBS suffers from being based on Mapes' own memoir. As a result, it constantly straddles the fine line between dramatization and Mapes hagiography. Writer/director James Vanderbilt's intent seems to be to make Mapes (played here by Cate Blanchett) a martyr for the dying profession of journalism, when it was primarily corner-cutting, sloppy fact-checking, and a rush to get on the air that undermined the explosiveness of the story itself. And whether it's her past accomplishments and her reputation as a tough ballbuster (she also broke the Abu Ghraib story), her upbringing at the hands of an abusive father, her need to challenge bullying power structures, or allowing herself to be duped for the sake of a big story, Vanderbilt seems to hold everyone but Mapes accountable for Mapes' questionable judgment.
Mapes was fired for the bungled report, whereas Rather (Robert Redford) was granted the dignity of resigning on his own terms. With the Swift Boat smear campaign of John Kerry in full force as he's in a dead heat with incumbent George W. Bush in the run up to the 2004 presidential election, Mapes gets word that retired Lt. Col. Bill Burkett (Stacy Keach) has documents that show Bush got special treatment to get into the National Guard and went AWOL and never reported for duty when stationed in Alabama in 1973. Burkett won't reveal his sources, and while Mapes and her team--freelance journalist Michael Smith (Topher Grace), researcher Lucy Scott (Elisabeth Moss), and retired Lt. Col. Roger Charles (Dennis Quaid)--follow the paper trail and assemble the story, they're unable to get complete confirmation that Burkett's photocopied documents are authentic. Two of four experts deem them authentic enough, and with Rather onboard, they run with it, putting the entire piece together in just five days in early October 2004 since 60 MINUTES II will be off the air until after the election to clear space for a Billy Graham crusade and a prime-time Dr. Phil special. Almost immediately after the report airs, discrepancies are brought to their attention and sources start recanting their original statements: Burkett lied about how he got the documents, the Times New Roman font in the documents is 100% consistent to how it looks when typed out on a computer, and the "th" superscript was very uncommon on typewriters of 1973. Additionally, one of the brass prominently mentioned in the documents wasn't even in a position of authority on the base in Alabama at the time the documents were supposedly written.
Eventually, Rather had to issue an on-air apology for what was referred to as "Memogate" and "Rathergate," and it brought his long and iconic run at CBS to an end. It was Mapes whose career took the biggest hit, and Vanderbilt makes sure we all realize it. Blanchett is one of our great actresses, but her Mapes is some pretty blatant Oscar-baiting. She's a little BLUE JASMINE and a little Faye Dunaway as she flips her hair and guzzles chardonnay and pops Xanax (the film also makes an effort to introduce her via a knitting pastime, which she's never seen doing again), and it's her against the world with the future of journalism at stake, but she's got father figure Rather to offer sage advice. Even the other characters marvel at her, as when Charles tells Smith that Mapes wanted to pursue Bush's alleged Guard misconduct in 2000, but her mother died and she dropped the story. "If her mother hadn't died...Al Gore would be the president," Quaid is forced to say with a straight face. The supporting characters, including Mapes' journalist husband Mark Wrolstad (John Benjamin Hickey), have precious little to do and exist only to prop up Mapes and repeatedly tell her some variation of "You're doing the right thing" or to break some bad news (you could make a drinking game out of how many times Quaid, Grace, or Moss enter a scene and say "It gets worse..."), or to passionately exclaim "This is what we do!" when she's feeling pangs of self-doubt. Journalism 101 turns to Cliche 101 throughout, right down to some truly terrible exposition when Grace's Smith is introduced to the rest of the team, and they all immediately do one of those LAW & ORDER: SVU info drops where everyone finishes everyone else's sentence as the camera zings from person to person, with Smith somehow completely up to speed on an investigation he's been a part of for about 30 seconds.
Dan Rather and Mary Mapes visiting the set of TRUTH during filming.
The presence of Redford is both the film's strongest aspect and its biggest distraction. Like Christopher Plummer's interpretation of 60 MINUTES' Mike Wallace in Michael Mann's THE INSIDER (1999), Redford wisely makes no attempt to look or sound like Rather, instead opting to nail down his speech patterns and his general persona. A legend portraying a legend, Redford walks off with every scene he's in, but seeing him is a constant reminder of his Bob Woodward and Dustin Hoffman's Carl Bernstein in 1976's ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN, the gold standard of the admittedly limited "investigative reporters bringing down a President" subgenre. TRUTH pales in comparison to that masterpiece, and it's indicative of just how much David Fincher had to do with the greatness of 2007's ZODIAC--scripted by Vanderbilt and with a major ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN influence in its structure and narrative. TRUTH marks Vanderbilt's debut as a director, but ZODIAC stands out as the anomaly among his screenwriting credits, which are littered with fun-but-lunkheaded fare like THE RUNDOWN (2003), THE LOSERS (2010) and WHITE HOUSE DOWN (2013). TRUTH has a powderkeg of a story at its core, but loses itself by constantly presenting Mapes as the crucified savior of real TV news reporting, the last bastion of integrity sacrificed at the altar of corporate business interests, with even Rather lamenting the death of the format once they're all forced out. Regardless of the truth--Bush's Guard record was quite dubious--Mapes, Rather, and their team dropped the ball and failed to get all their ducks in a row, which the film admits but stresses "that's not what it's about," a notion that only gave substance to the right-wing blogosphere's claim that the bombshell report was politically motivated. It is what it's about, and in making the presentation of the whole unfortunate saga so one-sided and myopic, Vanderbilt ends up making the same mistakes as his protagonists.
Shot in 2008 under the title SHELTER, it took five years for the newly-christened 6 SOULS to get a 54-screen US release courtesy of Radius TWC, the B-movie arm of The Weinstein Company. Like many of today's horror films, it gets off to an interesting start before collapsing under the weight of its own silliness. In what will be nothing more than a minor footnote to her career, a decidedly overqualified Julianne Moore stars as Dr. Cara Harding, a widowed psychologist whose dismissal of multiple personality theory as an excuse used by guilty killers to plead insanity gets tested when her father/mentor (Jeffrey DeMunn) has her observe his latest patient, Adam (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Adam's second personality is the paralyzed David, and while on an outing with "David," Cara is introduced to Wes, a third personality. After some investigating, Cara figures out that all of Adam's personalities--and Adam himself--are murder victims who may have been sacrificed by a backwoods cult that practices "sheltering," or sucking out the soul via the mouth, and filling it with dirt to deny the soul future re-entry. But who is this man claiming to be Adam, David, and Wes, and, eventually, Cara's late husband Charles, who had his throat slashed on Christmas Eve?
6 SOULS has more plot holes than scares, starting with the way Adam, confined to a mental institution, is free to roam about wherever he pleases, even showing up at Cara's daughter's (Brooklynn Proulx) school in his "Charles" guise. Are there no guards at this hospital? DeMunn's character has to be one of the most unprofessional medical figures in recent cinema, basically smirking with glee whenever Cara figures out another traumatic layer to "Adam"'s and her own story, reveling in the fact that she now must be forced to believe in multiple personalities. He acts less like her father and colleague and more like J. Walter Weatherman on ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT. And, excuse me, but does the internet exist in this film's world? I realize it was on the shelf for five years, but none of this would've happened if DeMunn's idiotic character had bothered to do a Google search or even checked with the police, hospital, or public records or the DMV in regards to Adam/David/Wes before he opts to just blithely put his entire family in danger. And who still goes to a musty old library to research old high school yearbooks to get to the bottom of something? Shots of medical files in the movie indicate that it's set in 2008, and the characters use cell phones, but their research methods and everything else feel more like it's 1978, right down to DeMunn's boat of a car. Yeah, it's a supernatural horror flick and there has to be some suspension of disbelief, but the implausible things in 6 SOULS reek of laziness courtesy of IDENTITY screenwriter (and, more importantly, the killer snowman classic JACK FROST writer/director) Michael Cooney and the Swedish directing team of Mans Marlind & Bjorn Stein, who would go on to bury the UNDERWORLD franchise with the pathetic UNDERWORLD: AWAKENING. 6 SOULS has some interesting ideas and Moore soldiers through it and gives it some credibility because she's a pro, but it's just not good. (R, 112 mins, also available on Netflix streaming)
Don't try to make sense of this surreal road movie/horror film from writer/director Calvin Lee Reeder, one of the contributors to the overrated V/H/S anthology. THE RAMBLER is an impossible film to love and an easy one to hate (I wish I could've seen this in a theater just to see how many people walked out), but if you like unconventional cinema and can just roll with it, it'll certainly keep your attention even if you can't make heads or tails of it. A well-cast Dermot Mulroney, who doesn't get many starring roles these days, plays a man-of-few-words drifter who's just been paroled after four years in the joint. He immediately leaves his annoying girlfriend (Natasha Lyonne) and quits his job at a pawn shop when he decides to thumb his way through the small towns and desolate back roads of the southwest to go work for his brother. He's followed on his journey by a mystery girl (Lindsay Pulsipher) who may not be real but turns up wherever he goes. He gets duped into some cage-style fighting against an opponent with a literal left hook. Then he encounters a mad scientist (James Cady) with a machine that reads people's dreams and records them on a VHS tape (hipster cred!) but inevitably causes their heads to explode. The scientist also has a collection of mummies and keeps his grown daughter--who has an extended vomiting episode all over Mulroney that immediately takes its place among cinema's all-time great puking scenes--chained to a stake in the yard. Mulroney also meets a FRANKENSTEIN-obsessed taxi driver, has periodic visions of a naked, slime-covered figure slithering across the floor and repeatedly sees Pulsipher killed only to have her turn up in the next town. All the while, he's hearing strange, garbled radio transmissions and spots surveillance satellites that seem to be following him, blipping through the sky.
Reeder borrows quite a bit from other filmmakers: for a while, the film plays a lot like a weird, dark-humored fusion of Rob Zombie and PARIS, TEXAS-era Wim Wenders before we get some Alejandro Jodorowsky imagery, a little Polanski, some gratuitous David Lynch tributes (the naked slithering thing's first appearance is in a scene that could've come straight from TWIN PEAKS), and some Troma-style over-the-top splatter. I'm not gonna lie: this is an abrasive, frequently off-putting movie that's bound to alienate a lot of people. But even with the ending that you'll see coming, it's hard to write off the sheer lunatic feel that Reeder brings to it, almost like he's afraid he might never get another shot and is just throwing every homage and every idea he's ever had into this one project. Without question the strangest thing Mulroney's ever done, and perhaps 2013's most unapologetically bizarre movie, THE RAMBLER isn't something I can wholeheartedly recommend to a casual moviegoer or someone who sees Dermot Mulroney and thinks "Oh, MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING!" but I can honestly say I've never seen anything like it, and that has to count for something. (R, 99 mins)
