On Blu-ray/DVD: THE HUMANITY BUREAU (2018); JOSIE (2018); and STEPHANIE (2018)

THE HUMANITY BUREAU
(Canada/US/UK - 2018)

Nicolas Cage is in total coast mode in this lifeless and embarrassingly cheap-looking post-apocalyptic sci-fi dystopia dud. Set in a future America being rebuilt 30 years after a second Civil War, famine, and nuclear fallout wreaked nationwide destruction, THE HUMANITY BUREAU has Cage as Noah Kross, an agent with the titular government organization. They're in charge of weeding out and investigating those who aren't contributing their fair share to New America, where the rule is that you must give more than you take. These laws primarily affect the lower class, making the very concept a Fox News wet dream, but THE HUMANITY BUREAU can't be bothered to muster up any political subtext, unless you count one minor character being Photoshopped into that creepy pic of Donald Trump and Mitt Romney at dinner. Those who are deemed burdens on society are sent packing to a controlled welfare community called New Eden. Now, anyone who's seen a future dystopian sci-fi movie before will instantly figure out that New Eden is really a concentration camp set up for the genocidal extermination of the lower and underclass undesirables. It's a great concept for a film that gave a shit and maybe tried, but that's not THE HUMANITY BUREAU. Instead, glum Kross, who's shocked--shocked!--to learn what New Eden really is (watch Cage gravely intone "What have we done?" when he finds out, long after anyone watching does), decides to go against his ruthless boss Adam (Hugh Dillon as Stanley Tucci as Dean Norris) and protect single mom Rachel Weller (Sarah Lind) and her 11-year-old son Lucas (Jakob Davies) when they're deemed New Eden-worthy. They head to Canada in Kross' improbably still-functional late '70s El Camino, with Adam and comic relief agent Porter (Vicellous Shannon, who saw better days as a child actor when he starred opposite Denzel Washington in THE HURRICANE) in lukewarm pursuit.

Like Andrew Niccol's just-released Netflix film ANON, THE HUMANITY BUREAU feels like a high-concept sci-fi film that might've been something in 2001 or 2002, when Cage was still an A-lister. But with most of the budget obviously going to its star, the film never effectively conveys a post-apocalyptic atmosphere. There's a ton of scenes with Cage laughably fake driving his El Camino against an amateurishly phony digital backdrop that looks like it was done by Mattel's My First Greenscreen. There's a lot of interior scenes and the exteriors just look like remote areas of Canada, where the film was shot. People live a normal life considering how hellish it was just three decades earlier according to Rachel, who tells Kross stories of neighbors selling their children for quick cash or eating them to survive (wait--he was alive then...wouldn't he know that?). Any of that would've made a more compelling film than somber Nic Cage in his new limited edition Christopher Lee Memorial Hairpiece pretending to drive a car or bonding with an obnoxious kid. Speaking of Lucas, at one point Rachel begs Kross to delay their shipping out to New Eden because Lucas has a recital the next day for which he's been "rehearsing for months."  Kross agrees and shows up at the recital to watch. Never mind that this film doesn't even seem to exist in its own world--the recital is filled with suburban middle-class parents supposedly living in a post-nuke dystopia where water is still a scarce commodity--but the big performance? Lucas and his class singing "Amazing Grace" and Lucas getting a solo dramatic reading of...The Pledge of Allegiance? This took months of preparation? Lucas is 11 years old. These kids are in 5th or 6th grade. Is this movie even trying? No, it's not. As MOM AND DAD showed earlier this year, Cage is still capable of bringing his A-game when he gives a shit, but to say he brought his even C-game to THE HUMANITY BUREAU would be charitable. He hasn't been this disinterested and disengaged with the material since BANGKOK DANGEROUS. Screenwriter Dave Schultz appears to show some affinity for CHINATOWN by giving Cage's character a name that riffs on John Huston's despicable Noah Cross, but other than that? Forget it, Jake. It's THE HUMANITY BUREAU. (R, 94 mins)



JOSIE
(US - 2018)

It seems that much of today's film criticism consists of writers trying to out-"woke" one another by airing grievances, looking for reasons to be outraged, and listing ways in which they were offended instead of reviewing the movie itself. I consciously avoid that unless the film's offenses are so upfront and blatant that addressing them is unavoidable and thus making it impossible to separate the art from the artist. One time in which that kind of review approach was unfortunately justified was back in 2014, when I reviewed the indie horror film CONTRACTED. Click here for more about that, but in short, the film's chronicle of the degenerative body and STD-related horrors that result from a young bisexual woman's acquaintance rape at a party came across as heavy-handed and frankly gross slut-shaming on the part of director Eric England, largely because the film keeps referring to the inciting act as a "one-night stand," when it clearly isn't. I was unfamiliar with England's work at that point, but upon seeing CONTRACTED, a film that willfully refuses to differentiate rape and a one-night stand and subsequently blames its heroine for the venereal horrors that result from it, it was uncomfortably obvious that this guy seemed to have some issues with women. Cut to 2018, and just as England's latest film JOSIE was going straight to VOD and the #MeToo movement was well-established as a powerful force in the entertainment industry, allegations by his ex-girlfriend Katie Stegeman (who appeared in CONTRACTED and his earlier film MADISON COUNTY) surfaced on social media detailing several years of physical and psychological abuse. Her story is quite harrowing, and if it's true (like JOSIE, any resulting scandal pretty much vanished instantly because nobody knows or cares who Eric England is), then it's safe to infer that England is every bit the creep that CONTRACTED went out of its way to reveal him to be.

I missed England's 2017 kidnapping-gone-awry dark comedy GET THE GIRL (whose cast featured convention regulars like Noah Segan and Scout Taylor-Compton), but JOSIE is a step up, at least in terms of relative prestige, as it marks the first time England's got some well-known and reasonably big-ish names who may or may not regret being in it now. In a small, depressing California town, Hank (Dylan McDermott) is a quiet loner living in a dive motel and working as a parking monitor at the local high school, where he's derisively referred to as "Spank" by a student body who look and act like they missed a casting call for Larry Clark's BULLY. Hank goes home to his dingy room, where two turtles are his only companions, and is annoyed when his nosy neighbors won't leave him alone. Hank comes out of his shell with the arrival of Josie (GAME OF THRONES' Sophie Turner), a tattooed high-schooler from the wrong side of the tracks who's new in town and arrives alone (her mom is on her way, she claims), quickly befriending Hank as well as Marcus (Jack Kilmer, Val's son), Hank's chief tormenter at school. Josie gets Hank to open up about his dark past and what drove him to choose a life of isolation and solitude, while Hank sees--though he knows he shouldn't--the possibility for something more. It isn't long before things come to a head, with Marcus vandalizing Hank's truck and boat and Josie ditching Hank to have sex with Marcus to make Hank jealous. Anyone who's ever seen a movie with a femme fatale will figure out precisely what Josie's up to at exactly the midway point and the only suspense really comes from watching how she's got both Hank and Marcus wrapped around her finger. And around the time of the climax, as things play out in the worst way possible for lonely, hapless Hank and dense, horny Marcus, that CONTRACTED ugliness and rage and England's alleged violence against Stegeman pops into your head. In fairness, JOSIE is an accomplished and more disciplined film compared to CONTRACTED, and it gets a lot of mileage from an excellent performance by McDermott, who's often achingly sad to watch as Hank talks to his turtles, is the butt of jokes and pranks at the high school, and plays some old-school country music while he puts on his best cowboy duds and slow dances by himself as he gets ready to have dinner with Josie only to find out Marcus is already in her room, leaving him to stand outside and listen to them fuck. And if you listen closely, you can probably hear England just out of camera range muttering "Yeah...that fucking bitch." (R, 87 mins)



STEPHANIE
(US - 2018)

There has to be fascinating story about what went wrong with STEPHANIE because the signs are all there that this had to be a total clusterfuck behind the scenes. Curiously short running time, with super-slow closing credits rolling at 78 minutes? Check. Produced by profitable horror factory Blumhouse and left to gather dust on a Universal shelf for three years before getting a stealth VOD debut two weeks before hitting Blu-ray? Check. The least-finished-looking visual effects this side of A SOUND OF THUNDER? Check. Familiar names present in the IMDb cast listing (Harold Perrineau, Kenneth Choi, Alexa Mansour) but nowhere to be seen in the released film? Directed by Oscar-winning mercenary screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (A BEAUTIFUL MIND)? Check. It's all too apparent that Universal had no clue what to do with this movie, which doesn't even have a real trailer (see below--it's just one out-of-context clip), and doesn't even look finished, exhibiting an abundance of evidence that it was just abandoned and completely given up on by everyone involved. That's too bad, because it gets off to an odd and interesting start, with the entire opening half-hour being a one-girl show for young Shree Crooks (CAPTAIN FANTASTIC) in the title role. She's alone in nice-looking suburban house and seems to have been left there for a while. Food is rotting in the fridge, she's down to pretzels and slices of American cheese, and she spends her time watching TV and talking to her stuffed toy turtle Francis. She's wary of periodic appearances of "the monster," and we see occasional flickering shadows of something around a corner, but she hides in her room and it goes away. There may or may not be the dead body of her older brother Paul in his room, and TV news reports show brief snippets of catastrophic disasters all over the world. Her parents (Frank Grillo of the PURGE sequels and FRINGE's Anna Torv) finally return home from wherever they were, casting concerned glances at Stephanie and seemingly shocked that she's alive. Talk soon turns to dealing with "the monster" as STEPHANIE proceeds to move at a glacial pace while doling out details to a story that never really comes together.

Goldsman, who doesn't have a writing credit here (that's left for the team of Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, who went on to script the cult indie SUPER DARK TIMES), gives us the what but the rest--the why and the how--remain frustrating mysteries, and not in a cleverly ambiguous or thoughtfully enigmatic way. It seems to use the classic TWILIGHT ZONE episode "It's a Good Life" as a springboard but it just doesn't make sense on any narrative or logical level. Apparently, a much different cut of STEPHANIE screened at the 2017 Overlook Film Festival, containing a framing device and a ton of exposition about the setting being a dystopian 2027 (this is where Perrineau's character appeared), but that's all gone in this version. It'll be obvious to anyone who watches enough movies even without knowing that Perrineau and others have been cut from the movie that huge chunks of this thing have been hacked away seemingly willy-nilly. There's a few positives barely salvaged in the wreckage--Crooks is very good and looks so much like Torv that the two of them playing mother and daughter is inspired casting; and there's one intense bit involving a blender--but the climactic CGI display is a bush-league embarrassment and the released film (I hesitate to call it "completed") is a botched shitshow that looks like Universal said "Hey, what's going on with this?" and Jason Blum and everyone involved shouted "Not it!" and went home. (R, 86 mins)

In Theaters/On VOD: SURVIVOR (2015)

SURVIVOR
(US/Italy/UK - 2015)

Directed by James McTeigue. Written by Philip Shelby. Cast: Milla Jovovich, Pierce Brosnan, Dylan McDermott, Angela Bassett, Robert Forster, James D'Arcy, Roger Rees, Benno Furmann, Frances de la Tour, Genevieve O'Reilly, Sonya Cassidy, Alex Beckett. (PG-13, 96 mins)

Ten years ago, SURVIVOR would've opened nationwide--probably in January, April, or early September--and likely been the #1 movie in America, at least for a week. Now, it's in "select theaters" (meaning, maybe ten) and on VOD, with US distributor Alchemy not even bothering to prepare a domestic trailer. Even with the relatively low budget of $20 million, SURVIVOR should look better than it does (obviously, the money went to the cast and little else). It's a brainless but fast-moving B-movie that Cannon cover band Millennium/NuImage didn't feel had the potential to be their next OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN, despite corralling three of its cast members--Dylan McDermott, Angela Bassett, and Robert Forster--in supporting roles, which also begs the question "How is Morgan Freeman not in this?" Set mostly in London but primarily filmed in Bulgaria, SURVIVOR stars Milla Jovovich as Kate Abbott, a top-level security expert at the US Embassy (this is the kind of film that feels the need to accompany a shot of the Thames and the London Eye ferris wheel with the caption "London"). Driven in her job and haunted by memories of being in one of the WTC towers on 9/11, Kate has an almost Spidey Sense when it comes to terror threats and something seems off with Dr. Emil Balan (Roger Rees), who's trying to get a visa to visit the US to attend a pediatrics convention. Balan is really in the employ of wealthy and generically Eastern European terrorist Zafer Pavlou (Benno Furmann), who has a half-assed plot to launch an attack in Times Square on New Year's Eve in order to manipulate the global economy in his favor. Pavlou's found the perfect patsy in Balan, a grieving, vengeful man who blames the death of his ill wife on US customs' hemming and hawing about allowing her a visa to travel to the US for treatment. When Kate's persistent questioning of Balan threatens to derail the operation, Pavlou dispatches The Watchmaker (Pierce Brosnan), one of the world's deadliest and most elusive assassins ("He's had so much reconstructive surgery, nobody knows what he looks like anymore!" says one US Embassy official) to take her out.

The Watchmaker is introduced completing a complicated repair on an expensive watch to show how methodical and precise he is, but of course, he repeatedly fails at killing Kate or there wouldn't be a movie. His initial actions--which include pointlessly blowing up an entire city block where Kate and some co-workers are having dinner, when all he really had to do was sneak up on her and put a bullet in her head--end up inadvertently making Kate the prime suspect in the eyes of the US Ambassador (Bassett) and the angry M.I.5 official on the case (James D'Arcy), but her boss and vague love interest Sam Parker (McDermott) is the only person who believes that she's being set up. Directed by Wachowski protege James McTeigue (V FOR VENDETTA, NINJA ASSASSIN), SURVIVOR is a watchable if unspectacular actioner that seems ready-made for Netflix Instant. It wants to have that sort-of globetrotting BOURNE momentum to its cat-and-mouse, race-against-time plot, but it doesn't have the cash flow to pull it off.  Or, perhaps more accurately, it doesn't have the cash flowing to the right departments. Working with a significantly lower budget than he did in his days on the Wachowski payroll, McTeigue can't do much when he's saddled with the likes of the Bulgarian clown crew at Worldwide FX, whose cartoonish CGI histrionics here continue to make one appreciate the relative care and craft of the folks at The Asylum. On top of that, McTeigue and screenwriter Philip Shelby really dumb it down, not trusting their audience with anything. Needless captions are one thing ("Times Square," shown over a stock footage shot of the iconic Coca-Cola sign), but when Kate reflects on losing her friends in the World Trade Center on 9/11, was it necessary for McTeigue to cut to cable news stock footage of the second plane hitting the tower just in case anyone in the audience was unaware of what "9/11" means?

A classic case of "It is what it is," SURVIVOR is chintzy and aggressively dumb, but at least it's never boring. Jovovich is fine, but Brosnan doesn't really do much with the opportunity to dig in and play a ruthless, unstoppable killer. The Watchmaker almost seems like a distant relative to his KGB assassin in John Mackenzie's underrated and little-remembered 1987 espionage thriller THE FOURTH PROTOCOL. Granted an opportunity to play a bad guy right on the heels of his Liam Neeson "aging action guy" bid with last year's minor hit THE NOVEMBER MAN, a slumming Brosnan just looks annoyed. It doesn't help that Shelby's script introduces him as one of the most lethal assassins on the planet but has him continually presented as an incompetent fuck-up. There's some attempt at topical ISIS metaphors--almost certainly accidental--in the way that the US, in their efforts at thwarting terror, only succeeded in creating a terrorist, however hapless, in Dr. Balan. By the climax, which has The Watchmaker and Balan in Times Square trying to detonate a bomb set to go off in the ball as it drops at the stroke of midnight, all that's really left to do is marvel at SURVIVOR's almost adorable attempt to recreate New Year's Eve in Times Square on a Bulgarian backlot, with some stock footage shots inserted into the mix with maximum obviousness. And it gets better, as Kate encounters The Watchmaker on the roof of a nearby building, against a backdrop of what's supposed to be the NYC skyline. Instead, it looks like Jovovich and Brosnan fighting it out on a set against a large screen with the Troma intro on pause. Originally set to star Katharine Heigl and Clive Owen, SURVIVOR doesn't make the best use of its stars, all of whom seem above the Redbox-ready material that feels like a dusted-off and slightly updated script that executive producer Avi Lerner had sitting around from the days when Frank Zagarino was the biggest name he could afford. Even VOD seems too gala a premiere for something like this, and I recommend waiting until the right time and watching it the way it was really meant to be seen: when nothing else is on and you remember you grabbed it months earlier as an impulse buy in the $5 dump bin while waiting in a slow checkout line at Wal-Mart.

On DVD/Blu-ray: AUTOMATA (2014) and THE DAMNED (2014)

AUTOMATA
(US/Spain/Italy - 2014)

The visually striking but ponderous AUTOMATA succeeds in looking a lot more expensive than its $15 million budget, but it can't overcome an obvious, empty, and hopelessly derivative story that suggests at least a small percentage of whatever, if any, profit it makes should go to the estate of Isaac Asimov. Set in 2044 with 99.7% of Earth's population wiped out by solar storms that have turned the planet into a radioactive desert, AUTOMATA has the surviving humans corralled into covered cities after the ROC Corporation manufactures a line of Automata robots to build walls and climate-controlled clouds to create pockets of atmosphere amidst the dystopian hellscape. The robots have two protocols: 1) never harm a living thing, and 2) they are forbidden to alter themselves or other robots. When a robot is spotted working on itself and another sets itself on fire after being caught smuggling a piece of equipment out of a research facility, it's apparent to the powers that be at ROC that the robots have started to flagrantly disregard their second protocol. ROC insurance investigator Jacq Vaucan (Antonio Banderas) witnesses the robotic self-immolation and is led to cybernetics engineer Dr. Dupre (Melanie Griffith), who warns him that robot evolution is well within the realm of possibility should one of them figure out how to abandon the second protocol. Vaucan is abducted by a sex robot named Cleo (voiced by Griffith) and three others, who take him on a journey across the deadly desert to meet their leader, the Blue Robot (voiced by Javier Bardem), the robot who evolved into a semi-emotional being and began working on the others, forming a rapidly snowballing rebellion that threatens to exterminate what little is left of the human race. "Life finds a way," the Blue Robot explains to Vaucan. "Your time is coming to an end."

Co-written by director Gabe Ibanez, a protege of Alex de la Iglesia, AUTOMATA sounds like a film with heady ideas but it really comes off as silly most of the time. It's extremely convoluted and seems like a piecemeal stitching of other, better sources, with a lot of Asimov's Robot series, some Neill Blomkamp allegory (there's a definite DISTRICT 9 thing going on with humanity's shabby treatment of the robots), a bit of BLADE RUNNER in the high-tech, sleazy neon cityscapes of the protected areas, and a portion of post-apocalypse with the admittedly well-done CGI in the desert sequences, which look terrific but go on forever. Once the robots get Vaucan out there (wait a minute...isn't the desert supposed to be lethally radioactive?), the pace really slows down as too much time is spent on Vaucan haplessly demanding to be taken back to the city and Cleo replying that they "can't do that, sir," repeated multiple times over. There's a bit of a HARDWARE vibe going on as well, right down to the presence of Dylan McDermott as Wallace, a rogue, robot-hating cop hired by Vaucan's boss (Robert Forster) to venture into the desert to find him and take out the fugitive robots. A subplot involving Vaucan's very pregnant wife (Birgitte Hjort Sorensen) goes nowhere and has so little effect on everything that it feels like a more expanded plot thread that's been drastically cut. Banderas does what he can and is an engaging enough hero, and Cannon cover band Millennium gets better work than usual out of the Bulgarian clown crew at Worldwide FX. Ibanez obviously has a great eye for visual style, but with such a weak, hackneyed, cut-and-paste script, the terrific-looking but frustrating AUTOMATA can't help but feel like it's all surface and no substance. (R, 110 mins)


THE DAMNED
(Colombia/US - 2014)

Spanish-born director Victor Garcia has earned a dubious name for himself as a go-to guy for shitty DTV sequels like RETURN TO HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (2006), MIRRORS 2 (2010), and the unwatchable HELLRAISER: REVELATIONS (2011), a crass exercise in Weinstein audience contempt--so much so that Doug Bradley refused to reprise his iconic role as Pinhead--shot fast and cheap when they realized they were about to lose the rights to the franchise. Garcia has been a gun-for-hire on all of these, demonstrating none of the promise of other top-drawer DTV auteurs and seeming like a hack who only got the lowly sequel gigs that Joel Soisson turned down. Garcia finally comes into his own with THE DAMNED, which isn't the most original horror film you'll ever see, but it's done with such spirited verve and frenzied panache that it wins you over in spite of the usual gaping lapses in logic that seem to haunt these kinds of films. Widower David (Peter Facinelli) and his fiancee Lauren (Sophia Myles) arrive in Bogota to pick up his college-age daughter Jill (Nathalia Ramos). Jill has been vacationing with her journalist aunt and late mom's sister Gina (Carolina Guerra), has hooked up with Gina's cameraman Ramon (Sebastian Martinez), and hasn't been answering David's calls. David is persistent, but the quintet have to drive about four hours to another town to get Jill's passport, which she carelessly left behind. Ignoring the warnings of local cop Morales (Juan Pablo Gamboa), and traveling down a dangerous mountain road, they get caught in a flash flood, destroying Gina's truck, forcing them to find refuge at a decrepit inn run by Felipe (Gustavo Angarita). The guest register shows no one's stayed at the inn since 1978, and the skittish Felipe doesn't want them wandering around. Searching for a bathroom, Jill hears a voice crying for help.  She and Ramon find a little girl, Ana Maria (Julieta Salazar), in a secret locked cell in the basement. They free her, and all hell breaks loose. Ana Maria is the current host of "La Bruja," the spirit of a 17th century witch with the power to jump from body to body when the current host is killed. Felipe has had Ana Maria locked in the basement cell since 1978, and with a torrential downpour making escape impossible, now has an inn filled with interlopers for La Bruja to freely possess at will.

Screenwriter Richard D'Ovidio's (THE CALL) idea of an evil spirit moving from body to body isn't exactly a new concept, having been used to great effect in John Carpenter's PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1987), William Peter Blatty's THE EXORCIST III (1990), and Gregory Hoblit's FALLEN (1998) to name a few. And the notion of keeping a demonic spirit locked away owes a lot to the second-season TWILIGHT ZONE episode "The Howling Man," and Michael Mann's THE KEEP (1983). But after years of execrable swill, Garcia finally establishes himself as a legitimate talent outside the shackling expectations of bad DTV sequels. Garcia got his start working on the effects crews on several of RE-ANIMATOR producer Brian Yuzna's Spanish productions of the early 2000s, such as DAGON (2001) and WEREWOLF HUNTER (2004). A lot of those Yuzna titles dealt with travelers being trapped in a desolate place, and in that way, THE DAMNED (shot under the title GALLOWS HILL) plays a lot like something Yuzna would've shepherded a decade or so ago. Garcia is conservative with digital effects, but really seems to prefer the practical if at all possible--it's nice to see latex and wet, spurting blood in a horror movie these days. Garcia also makes terrific use of tried-and-true genre tropes like creepy dolls, a chair rocking itself, covered mirrors, and cockroaches infesting the inn. The cheap jump scares work, and there's a doomy, rainy atmosphere throughout. Sure, characters do dumb things (David: "From now on, we all stick together!" he exhorts three seconds before wandering into another room alone), but as the film morphs into one of the more highly-energized EXORCIST knockoffs (Myles, in particular, throws herself into this), there's a genuinely sinister and unsettling method to La Bruja's madness in the way it's able to see inside the souls of those around it, exposing their deepest secrets and exploiting their guilt and weakness. You've seen most of what's in THE DAMNED before, but Garcia's enthusiasm, the film's relentless pace, and the overwhelming sense of hopelessness, grief, and despair make it far more effective than it has any right to be. (R, 87 mins, also available on Netflix Instant)

On DVD/Netflix Instant: NOT SAFE FOR WORK (2014); MERCY (2014); and MOCKINGBIRD (2014)

Indie producer Jason Blum's Blumhouse Productions has achieved significant Hollywood success with a hand in such films as the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, INSIDIOUS, and THE PURGE franchises, as well as SINISTER, THE LORDS OF SALEM, DARK SKIES, and OCULUS among others. Blumhouse titles are typically budgeted between $3 million and $5 million, with name actors taking pay cuts in exchange for a percentage of the profits, which really paid off for Ethan Hawke on SINISTER and THE PURGE. However, that formula isn't working for the actors starring in several Blumhouse titles have been languishing unreleased for quite some time--as long as five years in the case of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY helmer Oren Peli's AREA 51, acquired by Paramount and still awaiting release after being completed in 2009. Joe Carnahan's STRETCH was recently released directly to VOD, and it, along with three buried Blumhouse productions set to be distributed by Universal--NOT SAFE FOR WORK, MERCY, and MOCKINGBIRD--were recently released on DVD exclusively (for now) at Walmart and just this week, began streaming on Netflix Instant. All of these films had nationwide theatrical release dates penciled in at various times, but for a variety of reasons--primarily the claim of exorbitant distribution costs--Universal opted to shelve them until quietly making them available now.


NOT SAFE FOR WORK
(US - 2014)

A sort-of Hitchcockian OFFICE SPACE, NOT SAFE FOR WORK has been on and off the release schedule since 2012. Directed by veteran journeyman Joe Johnston, no stranger to big movies (1989's HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS, 1991's THE ROCKETEER, 1995's JUMANJI, 2001's JURASSIC PARK III) and who, it should be noted, made this right after scoring another blockbuster with 2011's CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER, NOT SAFE FOR WORK is a tight and fast-moving suspense thriller that, of course, gets dumber as it goes along. Fortunately, with an unusually short 74-minute running time (probably a major reason the theatrical release was nixed), it gallops along briskly enough that its flaws don't really have time to become a problem. Lowly, ambitious paralegal Tom (Max Minghella) screws up one too many times at the pricy law firm where he's employed, and is fired by his boss Emmerich (Christian Clemenson) on the eve of a huge trial involving a pharmaceutical corporation that knowingly put a medication with lethal side effects on the market. After Emmerich sends most of the staff home for the night, Tom ends up staying behind when he notices a well-dressed mystery man (JJ Feild) hanging around the main lobby and exchanging briefcases with another stranger before getting on the elevator to the firm's floor. When the stranger kills an attorney (Molly Hagan), Tom finds his buddy Roger (Tom Gallop) working late and the pair are soon involved in a game of cat-and-mouse as the killer has their floor locked down and mercilessly pursues them through the maze-like office.

It's a refreshingly simple set-up and Johnston is enough of a pro to keep it suspenseful, getting a lot of help from some twisty, snaking camera work by Jonathan Taylor, who handled second-unit duties for Johnston on THE FIRST AVENGER. It does sometimes seem like the film is too short, with some of Roger's behavior left unexplained (why does he react so oddly to Tom telling him he's secretly dating Emmerich's assistant Anna, played by Eloise Mumford) and his potential backstabbing of Tom dropped completely (why is Roger going through Tom's desk?), and it's hard telling what drew Johnston to the project. Perhaps after so many effects-heavy films and behind-the-scenes drama (he also directed 2010's troubled THE WOLFMAN), he just wanted to make something basic and simple with a producer known for being mostly hands-off and letting his directors direct. Buoyed by a terrific performance by Feild (James Montgomery Falsworth in THE FIRST AVENGER), looking and acting like a young Clive Owen as the relentless killer, NOT SAFE FOR WORK is the very defintion of a harmless time killer, unspectacular, slight, and not very inventive, but a polished and entertaining B-movie that's over before it ever has a chance to wear out its welcome. (Unrated, 74 mins)

MERCY
(US - 2014)

Completed in early 2013, the shelving of MERCY is a bit of a surprise, considering it's based on a Stephen King short story ("Gramma," from his 1985 collection Skeleton Crew, which was made into a Harlan Ellison-scripted episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE in 1986) and stars Chandler Riggs, best known as Carl on THE WALKING DEAD. Riggs is Georgie, a sensitive boy who shares a deep bond with his loving grandmother Mercy (Shirley Knight). When Mercy is incapacitated by a massive stroke, Georgie, his older brother Buddy (Joel Courtney), and their mom Rebecca (Frances O'Connor) move into Mercy's ramshackle home to be her full-time caregivers. No one can figure out why the nursing home didn't want to deal with Mercy, but the townspeople still speak of her in hushed tones, as they have for 45 years, when, as a young mother of triplets, she watched her town drunk husband split his own head open with an axe. Mercy's moods are erratic, she's rarely lucid, and she's prone to shrieks and growls. In one of her seemingly saner moments, she convinces Georgie to replace her medication with saline, which essentially unleashes a demon from within. Screenwriter Matt Greenberg (who also scripted the King adaptation 1408) and director Peter Cornwell (THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT) mostly abandon the Lovecraftian tone of King's story to make MERCY yet another standard-issue demonic possession potboiler. It seems that young Mercy, after several heartbreaking miscarriages, was so desperate to be a mother that she disappeared into the surrounding hills for a night, making a pact with a necromancer called Hastur and returning the next morning pregnant with triplets thanks to spells in something called a "weeping book," the contents of which are invisible until the page is soaked with tears.

There's some interesting and disturbing ideas in King's story and for a while, MERCY is eerily effective and beautifully filmed, especially in some visually striking, almost painterly images of the mountains, hills, and the monstrous-looking trees with twisting branches that surround Mercy's home. Unfortunately, it soon devolves into more modern-day EXORCIST nonsense, made unique only by the bizarre sight of 77-year-old, two-time Oscar nominee Knight going through all the standard possession histrionics (including vomiting into Georgie's face) and doing the herky-jerky RINGU/JU-ON shuffle. By the end, the film just collapses into a smoldering heap of bush-league CGI and utterly incoherent plot developments and, running just a few minutes longer than NOT SAFE FOR WORK, looking very much like a strangely short film that doesn't seem to be all there (Kevin Greutert, director of the last two SAW entries, has an "additional editing" credit).  Also with mumblecore icon Mark Duplass as Georgie's alcoholic, loser uncle, Hana Hayes as "Girl Next Door," Georgie's imaginary friend/guardian angel who appears in times of trouble (shades of THE SHINING's "Tony"), Jack Carter as a nursing home resident terrified by Mercy, and Dylan McDermott, appearing in his second film titled MERCY since 2010, as a local artist/handyman still carrying a torch for Rebecca. (R, 79 mins)


MOCKINGBIRD
(US - 2014)

Writer/director Bryan Bertino made his debut with 2008's THE STRANGERS, a tense home invasion thriller that many felt heralded the arrival of a major new talent, even if it owed more than a little to the 2006 French film THEM. Then...he disappeared. Bertino probably didn't think it would be six years before his follow-up effort would be released, but MOCKINGBIRD was also shelved by Universal upon its completion in 2012. But unlike STRETCH, NOT SAFE FOR WORK, and MERCY, there's almost nothing redeeming about MOCKINGBIRD. It's sadistic, depressing, and completely derivative, with Bertino ripping off both SAW and himself by basically retro-fitting THE STRANGERS as a found-footage horror film. Set in 1995 for no reason other establishing the lack of wi-fi internet and the ubiquity of smart phones, and to indulge in some shameless pandering to VHS horror hipsters, MOCKINGBIRD has an already running camcorder left on the doorstep of two homes--one belonging to married couple Tom (Todd Stashwick) and Emmy (Audrey Marie Anderson), whose two daughters are at a sleepover with his brother's family, and the other rented by quiet college student Beth (Alexandra Lydon).  They assume it was a contest prize of some sort, and after playing around with them for a while, they notice there's no way to turn it off. Then more gifts arrive--cards telling them they can't stop filming, Polaroids of them sleeping, and a creepy VHS tape warning them that they're being watched. Meanwhile, slovenly loser Leonard (Barak Hardley) is given a package with a camcorder and instructed to don clown makeup and a costume and is sent across town on a series of JACKASS!-style pranks, of course filming himself the whole time as he comes off like an overzealous fan stalking Sid Haig at a horror con. It's obvious that these three parties will cross paths but to what end?

The puppet masters orchestrating the mayhem in MOCKINGBIRD are amazingly efficient and coordinated, creating a camera with an undying battery, sneaking in and out of Tom & Emmy's and Beth's house, breaking windows, banging on the doors, and blaring ominous classical music, all while somehow not drawing the attention of the neighbors, and still having enough time to fill Beth's garage with red balloons in the world's lamest Nena tribute. In no time at all, the film is little more than grating characters screaming and arguing, unfunny comic relief with Leonard in clown garb, and almost non-stop shaky-cam and darkness. There's no scares, because movies like this have you trained to watch the entire frame for a person to appear in the background, then immediately disappear. By the time everything wraps up, you realize that Bertino has made the sophomore slump a self-fulfilling prophecy, looking like a one-trick pony who's done nothing more than remake THE STRANGERS with one of the flimsiest excuses yet for found-footage while adding a little of SAW's impossibly elaborate gamesmanship almost as a bonus lack of inspiration. The best thing than can be said about MOCKINGBIRD--other than the fact that it does indeed, at one point, finally end--is that Bertino offers a knockout opening sequence that gets your attention and creates the impression that this one means business. It doesn't. There's nothing here. (Unrated, 82 mins)