THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS (US - 2018) Directed by Eli Roth. Written by Eric Kripke. Cast: Jack Black, Cate Blanchett, Kyle MacLachlan, Owen Vaccaro, Renee Elise Goldsberry, Colleen Camp, Sunny Suljic, Lorenza Izzo, Braxton Bjerkin, Vanessa Anne Williams. (PG, 105 mins) Based on the popular 1973 YA fantasy/mystery novel by John Bellairs and illustrated by Edward Gorey, THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS makes its nostalgic intent clear from the start with an old-school Universal logo. Produced by Amblin Entertainment, HOUSE has the retro look, feel, and charm of any number of Steven Spielberg productions of the 1980s, so much so that it almost feels like you've gone back to 1985 to see the latest Joe Dante, Robert Zemekis, or Richard Donner movie. But the film is directed by Eli Roth, best known for his more extreme horrors of the first two HOSTEL films and the Italian cannibal homage THE GREEN INFERNO, and who just had the remake of DEATH WISH in theaters six months ago. The notion of splatter and grindhouse superfan Roth directing a kid-friendly, PG-rated Spielberg throwback might've seemed unthinkable at one point, but he creates an effectively foreboding atmosphere in its old, dark house setting and doesn't skimp on age-appropriate scares and some comical but still disturbing imagery. It got a good reaction from the few kids at a sparsely-attended matinee. I don't often see kids movies in the theater, but judging from the fact that they kept quiet, paid attention, laughed at things that were funny, said "Ew, gross!" at things that were gross, and applauded at the end, it seems Roth's efforts connected with the target audience, though it's also nostalgic fun for children of the '80s as well.
In 1955, orphaned misfit Lewis Barnavelt (Owen Vaccaro) is sent to the fictional Michigan town of New Zebedee to live with his eccentric uncle Jonathan (Jack Black) following his parents' tragic death in a car accident. Jonathan wears a fez and a kimono, allows Lewis all manner of freedoms (no bedtime, he can come and go as he pleases, and he can have cookies for dinner if he so chooses) and lives in a mysterious mansion referred to as "the slaughterhouse" by the kids at school. The only rule: there's a locked room from which Lewis is forbidden. The house and everything in it seem to be "alive," which Uncle Jonathan can't keep from Lewis for very long. He soon reveals that he's a "good" warlock, with a platonic, mutually chops-busting friendship with his neighbor and purple-loving fellow witch Florence Zimmerman (Cate Blanchett), who feels a kinship to young Lewis as she also lost her family in a horrific way in Europe during WWII. Lewis expresses interest in learning his uncle's warlock ways, and in an effort to bond with his one friend, lets young jock Tarby Corrigan (Sunny Suljic of THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER) into the forbidden room where he removes a book of demonic spells from a locked cabinet. This resurrects Isaac Izard (Kyle MacLachlan under extensive makeup that makes him look like a zombie David McCallum), a master warlock and Jonathan's former mentor who died under mysterious circumstances a year earlier, after which Jonathan moved into his house. For the subsequent year, Izard has been tormenting Jonathan from the grave with a powerful clock hidden somewhere in the walls of the house that he intended to use for a diabolical plot to align the "magical world" with the real world, and the only thing keeping that from happening was Jonathan ensuring that Izard's book remained under lock and key.
From the Norman Rockwell-esque period detail of New Zebedee to the obligatory grouchy, busybody neighbor Mrs. Hanchett (Colleen Camp, riffing on Polly Holliday's Mrs. Deagle from GREMLINS) to a roomful of extremely living dolls to its elaborately detailed production design, THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS is enjoyable fun from beginning to end, with Vaccaro, Black, and Blanchett making an immensely likable trio of evil-fighting oddballs. Blanchett in particular seems to be having a good time, and it's not every day that you see a two-time Oscar winner head-butting a vomiting, demonic pumpkin that's been brought to life by the diabolical Izard. The script by Eric Kripke (creator of SUPERNATURAL, which sits right alongside GREY'S ANATOMY as the TV series most likely to make you say "Huh? What? That's still on?!" whenever someone mentions it) goes for some cheap laughs on occasion--Jonathan's garden has a scene-stealing, living topiary griffin with a problem controlling its bowels, and when Izard casts a spell on Jonathan, the image of Jack Black's head on a peeing infant's body is one of 2018's most impossible to shake, and that's in the same year as things seen in ANNIHILATION and HEREDITARY--but it's a fun addition to what will certainly become a Halloween family favorite for years to come. The book was the first of a dozen Lewis Barnavelt novels so far, the first three written by Bellairs from 1973 to 1976, then by Brad Strickland, who rebooted the long-dormant series in 1993, two years after Bellairs' death.
DEATH WISH (US - 2018) Directed by Eli Roth. Written by Joe Carnahan. Cast: Bruce Willis, Vincent D'Onofrio, Elisabeth Shue, Dean Norris, Kimberly Elise, Beau Knapp, Camila Morrone, Len Cariou, Mike Epps, Wendy Crewson, Stephen McHattie, Ronnie Gene Blevins, Kirby Bliss Blanton, Jack Kesy, Ian Matthews, Stephanie Janusauskas, Luis Oliva, Moe Jeudy Lamour. (R, 107 mins) Shot in 2016 and with its release date bumped once already after the Las Vegas mass shooting last October, the long-gestating remake of the 1974 classic DEATH WISH is finally in theaters, and once again timed in close proximity to another tragedy with the horrific school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, FL. Given the frequency of mass shootings in America, it's likely that any DEATH WISH release date would coincide with one and unintenionally leave a bad aftertaste. But honestly, that's giving it too much credit. DEATH WISH '18 is empty-calorie junk-food entertainment that stacks the deck against its vigilante hero and throws red meat at the audience. It's designed to get a response, and judging from the crowd applause at key moments--like one guy getting his sciatic nerve sliced open and doused in brake fluid before a jacked-up car falls and smashes his head like a watermelon at a Gallagher show--it's mission accomplished in "Good Guy with a Gun" fantasy wish-fulfillment. This had a rocky journey from the start: in various stages of development since 2006, with Sylvester Stallone, Liam Neeson, Benicio del Toro, Frank Grillo, Russell Crowe, Will Smith, Matt Damon, and Brad Pitt either attached or approached to star, Joe Carnahan (NARC, SMOKIN' ACES, THE GREY) wrote the script and was set to direct until he departed in 2013 over the usual "creative differences." That led to the BIG BAD WOLVES team of Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado coming aboard to direct, with Bruce Willis signed on to star. They split when Willis and the producers wouldn't let them rewrite Carnahan's script, but when Eli Roth (HOSTEL) ended up getting the directing gig, the script wound up being completely overhauled by an uncredited Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, the writing team behind ED WOOD and THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT. The end result still has Carnahan receiving sole writing credit, even though he left the project three years before production even commenced.
Taking a break from his ongoing, landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series of interchangeable Lionsgate VOD releases, Bruce Willis steps into the iconic Charles Bronson role as Paul Kersey, this time a Chicago ER surgeon instead of a mild-mannered NYC architect. Where DEATH WISH '74, based on a 1972 novel by Brian Garfield, addressed the rise of urban violence and decay in a NYC that was rapidly growing scuzzier and more dangerous by the day, DEATH WISH '18 offers rudimentary commentary on Chicago being one of the most dangerous cities in America, even though the Windy City is mostly portrayed here by Montreal. Of course, that violence hits home when Dr. Kersey is called into work one evening and his wife Lucy (Elisabeth Shue) and college-bound daughter Jordan (Camila Morrone) are the victims of a home invasion by a trio of scumbags. Lucy is killed and Jordan is left in a coma, and a shell-shocked Kersey is inevitably frustrated when well-meaning but ineffectual detectives Raines (Dean Norris) and Jackson (Kimberly Elise) can't do much besides wait for a break in the case. His rage simmering to a boil, unable to sleep or focus on work, and possibly thinking of his Don't Mess with Texas father-in-law (Len Cariou), Kersey lucks into obtaining a gun when a gang-banger is brought into the ER and no one sees or hears his gun hit the floor, which Kersey stealthily stashes into his scrubs. He then tries out the gun at an abandoned warehouse and becomes a crack shot over the course of one split-screen montage set to AC/DC's "Back in Black." Donning a series of hoodies he swipes from hospital laundry, Kersey begins roaming the most dangerous areas of Chicago, blowing away thugs, drug dealers, and every shitbag he encounters, becoming a folk hero and viral video sensation dubbed "The Grim Reaper." In a development worthy of the Plot Convenience Playhouse Hall of Fame, Kersey gets a break the cops never could when a gunshot victim lands in the ER sporting the watch Lucy gave him for his birthday, one of the many expensive items stolen in the home invasion. Of course this leads to Kersey vigilantism getting "personal," with one-step-behind Raines and Jackson (who seem to be the only Chicago detectives on duty at any given time) taking way too long to put it together that Kersey is The Grim Reaper.
Roth offers frequent talking head cutaways to Chicago radio personality Mancow and Sirius XM's Sway Calloway discussing the Grim Reaper phenomenon on their morning shows, and DEATH WISH '18 makes the era-appropriate adjustments with smartphone videos and Reaper memes going viral, but this new take seems to split the difference between the grittiness and social commentary of the 1974 original and its increasingly silly sequels. Bronson's Kersey was shocked and repulsed by his own propensity for savage violence, so much so that he throws up after committing his first murder before finding catharsis in his actions. Willis' Kersey sees those actions making him a hero and smirks like Bruce Willis and starts cracking wise, which didn't happen with Bronson until the sequels (much the way A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET's ominous and evil "Fred Krueger" morphs into stand-up comic Freddy Krueger over the course of the subsequent entries). Everyone remembers Bronson's "You believe in Jesus? Well, you're gonna meet him..." from DEATH WISH II and Willis gets his version of that when powerful drug lord "The Ice Cream Man" (Moe Jeudy Lamour) asks "Who the fuck are you?" with the inevitable reply "Your last customer," and...BANG!
Willis' transformation from upper-middle class family man to John McClane circa LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD keeps DEATH WISH '18 from being anything more than a schlocky, instant gratification vigilante thriller, and it's also worth noting that Bronson's Kersey never did find the creeps who killed his wife and left his daughter in a coma, an impossible closure that this new film feels the need to provide. It isn't any better or worse than, say, 1987's DEATH WISH 4: THE CRACKDOWN, but there's some missed opportunities here, particularly one bit that speaks volumes when Kersey's ne'er-do-well brother Frank (Vincent D'Onofrio) shows up at his house when he isn't home and finds his weapons and ammo stash in the basement rec room where he's been sleeping. The entire room is filled with empties, dirty dishes, dirty clothes, and looks like a particularly nightmarish episode of HOARDERS. Surely, Kersey has gone insane to some degree as evidenced by the living conditions in his basement. At one time, Willis would've been interested in exploring that aspect, but DEATH WISH '18 is more concerned with fashioning this as a throwback Bruce Willis vehicle. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since Willis actually shows up and it's probably his best movie in several years simply by default. And for really hardcore cult movie nerds, Roth does include a cameo by Sorcery's STUNT ROCK jam "Sacrifice." It has its moments, but at the end of the day, chalk this up as another remake that's an acceptable time-killer but didn't really need to be.
When 2015's COP CAR got some festival buzz going and became a minor hit on the arthouse circuit, it was enough to bump director/co-writer Jon Watts and his writing partner Christopher Ford into megabudget circles with the upcoming reboot SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING. But long before COP CAR, Watts and Ford made their debut, the horror film CLOWN. Shot in late 2012 but kept on a shelf by the Weinstein Co. until 2016, CLOWN is a feature-length expansion of a fake trailer Watts and Ford made and posted to YouTube in 2010. The "trailer," about a demonic clown, jokingly proclaimed "From master of horror Eli Roth," which prompted a flattered Roth to meet with the pair and offer to produce an actual CLOWN movie. While Robert Rodriguez's MACHETE may have worked once--before the novelty wore off with MACHETE KILLS--CLOWN is more on the HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN end of fake trailers-turned-real movies. Leadenly-paced and feeling much longer than 99 minutes, CLOWN has dad Kent (Andy Powers) forced by a cancellation to don an old clown costume for his son Jack's (Christian Distefano) birthday party. The suit and makeup soon adhere to and fuse with his body, making it impossible to take off. After several failed and increasingly gruesome attempts to get out of the costume, a desperate Kent shoots himself in the head only to find he can't die. This drives him to madness and murder, as his wife Meg (Laura Allen) learns from Karlsson (Peter Stormare), the suit's previous owner, that it's an instrument of a demon who subsists on the sacrificing of five children a year. This leads to a repetitive series of sequences with Kent pursuing children and slowly morphing into a full-on clown demon as Meg tries to keep him from killing Jack. There's some intriguing and occasionally ballsy ideas in CLOWN--Karlsson's brother was a pediatric cancer specialist, so the pair conquered the clown curse by offering the demon terminally ill children, and when the demon offers to give Kent back for one more child, Meg isn't above leading an innocent kid to the slaughter if it means saving her family--but CLOWN just doesn't come together. It's sluggish and dull, and it needs a better actor than Powers to really feel for Kent's plight. It doesn't skimp on the gore and some occasional shock value antics, but this story is, at best, a 20-minute segment in an anthology film. (R, 99 mins)
BASKIN (Turkey/US/UK - 2016)
This Turkish import got some significant acclaim at film festivals and from the horror scenester echo chamber, which only serves as further evidence that fanboys will bestow accolades on pretty much everything. BASKIN is a tired, slow-moving splatterfest that's a veritable grab-bag of cribbed material. The crux of the plot is essentially a Turkish HELLRAISER, with a quintet of cops answering a call for backup and ending up at a long-abandoned police station off a dark country road on the middle of nowhere. There's some backstory about the father-son relationship between the in-charge Boss Remzi (Ergun Kuyucu) and young rookie Arda (Gorkem Kasal), who was more or less raised by Remzi after a traumatic childhood incident that, of course, comes into play late in the film. The dark, empty police outpost is filled with bloodied, contorted souls in a mad orgy of sex and torture, overseen by "The Father," played in a bit of FREAKS and THE SENTINEL-style stunt casting by non-actor Mehmet Cerrahoglu. The Father puts the cops through all the torture porn tropes, whether it's slowly tearing out one's intestinal tract or carving out another's eyes and tongue-kissing the socket before making him fuck a goat-masked woman from behind.
It was the eye socket moment where I finally lost my patience with BASKIN. Not because of the gore or the perverse French kissing of the eye socket--that wasn't the problem at all. Even from the start, little things started rubbing me the wrong way and I was getting grouchy without really realizing it, whether it was a restaurant scene where the cops are swapping stories and one goes into a Joe Pesci "Funny how?" routine from GOODFELLAS; or the long exploration of the dark, cavernous underbelly of the abandoned police station that just seemed a little too much like SESSION 9; or the fleeting glimpse of an obviously non-human figure darting across the frame like he was trying to find his way back to THE DESCENT. Director/co-writer Can Evrenol, expanding his 2013 short film of the same name, was wearing his love of horror movies on his sleeve, but it was just getting to be too much. Too forced. By the time The Father turns up about an hour in, talking about being "one with the cosmos" and "you always carry Hell with you," he started to sound a lot like HELLRAISER's Pinhead in the days when he was simply known as "Lead Cenobite." But then the eye socket scene happened and Evrenol lost me. He accompanies it with a prominent cue from Riz Ortolani's CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST score--including that synthy beeeeeew!--and the transparency was just too much to ignore. That's what I concluded to be the exact moment where those lauding the film tilted their heads back, closed their eyes, exhaled slowly and purred "Oh, right there. That's the spot. I'm yours, BASKIN." There's nothing here but Evrenol name-checking bits and pieces of his favorite horror movies, bringing nothing new to the table but fooling enough people into proclaiming BASKIN some triumphant new vision of horror. It's lazy, it's uninspired, and worst of all, it's not scary. At all. It's all smoke and mirrors, and once again, horror fans prove themselves to be the biggest genre pushovers in moviegoing. BASKIN is the most overrated horror film since GOODNIGHT MOMMY. One more time, gang: start being a little more discerning, and a little less concerned with making sure your free screeners and your convention credentials keep coming. (Unrated, 97 mins, also streaming on Netflix) THE INVITATION
(US - 2016)
While everyone was busy fellating BASKIN, another horror film was stealthily released around the same time that actually deserved the accolades but more or less fell off the radar even with the scenesters. A slow-burner that starts ratcheting the tension in the first scene and never lets up, THE INVITATION is a film where it's best to go in knowing as little as possible. It's also one of the best films of the year that you've probably heard nothing about. En route to a dinner party in the Hollywood Hills, Will (Logan Marshall-Green) and his girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) accidentally hit a coyote that Will is forced to put out of its misery via tire iron. That will turn out to be the least upsetting thing about the evening. The dinner party is at Will's old house, hosted by his ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and her new husband, record producer/recovering addict David (Michiel Huisman). Several of their closest friends are there and it's been two years since they've all been together, the group more or less splintering when Will and Eden's young son died and their marriage didn't survive the aftermath. Right off the bat, Will gets a strange vibe from Eden and David, the two endlessly talking about a trip to Mexico where they embraced a self-help philosophy of grief coping known as "The Invitation." Also at the party is a friend they met in Mexico, a clingy and needy young woman named Sadie (Lindsay Burdge), who almost instantly offers to sleep with Will. There's also the ominous presence of stranger named Pruitt (John Carroll Lynch), a friend of Eden's and David's who breaks the ice by showing the group a DVD of an assisted suicide they observed in Mexico. Wounds that never completely healed are torn open as Will vehemently disagrees with the way Eden has addressed her grief. He's also bothered by Pruitt and the fact that the windows have bars on them, that David has locked all the doors from the inside, and the fact that one of the guests they're still waiting on left David a voice mail two hours earlier saying he was the first one there, yet no one has seen him and he's nowhere to be found.
CABIN FEVER (US - 2016) Directed by Travis Z. Written by Eli Roth and Randy Pearlstein. Cast: Gage Golightly, Matthew Daddario, Samuel Davis, Nadine Crocker, Dustin Ingram, Louise Linton, Timothy G. Zajaros, Randy Schulman, Derrick Means, Teresa Decher. (Unrated, 98 mins)
Regardless of your stance on him and his significance to today's horror scene, there's no denying Eli Roth enthusiastically wears his love of cult horror cinema on his sleeve. Adored by horror fanboys but sometimes dismissed by purists, Roth has a tendency to let his juvenile sense of humor undermine his credibility, but his HOSTEL PART II did a great job of paying homage to '70s Italian thrillers, right down to his successfully luring both Edwige Fenech and Luc Merenda out of retirement for small roles. In addition, KNOCK KNOCK, his recent update of the 1977 home invasion sexploitationer DEATH GAME, was surprisingly engaging, and the gorefest THE GREEN INFERNO, his SJW take on the Italian cannibal films of Ruggero Deodato and Umberto Lenzi, had its positives when his dudebro humor wasn't getting in the way. But by producing and giving his seal of approval to CABIN FEVER, a not-quite-but-pretty-damn-near scene-for-scene remake of his own 2003 debut, with directing duties handed off to veteran B-movie production designer/set decorator-turned-filmmaker Travis Zariwny under his new convention-ready, cool-guy moniker "Travis Z," Roth finally, at long last, pays loving tribute to the most important and influential cult horror movie figure in his life: Eli Roth.
The cinematic equivalent of watching Roth jerk off to a mirror, CABIN FEVER '16 is a legitimate contender for the most pointless film ever (re)made, coming just 13 years after the original, and just a year and a half after its most recent sequel, CABIN FEVER: PATIENT ZERO. I could see if CABIN FEVER '03 was a foreign language film and maybe some producer thought an American remake had potential, but it's not even a decade and a half old and we've got a remake of CABIN FEVER? And not only is Roth just one of the truckload of credited producers, but the remake even uses the same script he co-wrote with Randy Pearlstein. Sure, Travis Z--a name more suited for the showboating bassist in a C-grade, circa 2002 Linkin Park knockoff that never made it beyond the club circuit--claims he whittled Roth's script down from 122 pages to 94, but somehow, the new CABIN FEVER is slower, feels much longer than 98 minutes (the exact running time of Roth's director's cut of the 2003 version), and has no sense of pacing whatsoever. Travis Z also jettisons almost all of the humor in Roth's original script, with the exception of bite-happy, "Pancakes!"-shouting Dennis, but even in Dennis' new incarnation (played by Derrick Means), his antics have been toned down significantly, and there isn't even a "Please Don't Sit Next to Dennis" sign. In an apparent concession to Generation Trigger Warning, Travis Z has also dumped the racist commentary of the general store cashier that had a legitimately funny payoff at the end. Roth and Pearlstein started writing their CABIN FEVER script when they were roommates at NYU in 1995. Though it was another seven years before they actually made the movie, the script is very much the work of young, dumb college guys who have a lot of growing up to do. CABIN FEVER '03 had a lot of problems, but it delivered the grisly gore and had enough of an oddball aura to it that it remains the one Roth film where his immaturity wasn't problematic. In nearly every way, it's an obvious first movie.
Travis Z doesn't seem to understand that. If there's one thing CABIN FEVER didn't need to be, it's stone-faced serious, which is certainly the mood established by this remake. The story of five college students whose weekend partying at a remote cabin in the woods is ruined by the rampant spreading of a flesh-eating virus, CABIN FEVER should be about gore and T&A. It still is, but in Travis Z's hands, it's a miserable slog. Not helping at all is the bombastic score by Kevin Riepl, who's not quite in the league of the coup Roth scored with CABIN FEVER '03 by getting the great Angelo Badalamenti onboard. CABIN FEVER '16 has a lot of gore (yes, the leg-shaving scene is still here), but deviates in other very minor ways: a couple of the deaths happen to different characters, and CABIN FEVER '03's doofy Deputy Winston (Giuseppe Andrews) is now a sultry blonde Deputy Winston (Louise Linton's performance is the only thing hinting at the bizarre eccentricities of the original, but she only has a couple of scenes). It's a pretty solid ballpark estimate to say 90% of CABIN FEVER '16 is identical to CABIN FEVER '03, but with even more forgettable actors (not only that, but none of them have an awesome, born-with-a-porn-actor-name like '03 star Rider Strong), much slower pacing, and a Why-So-Serious? tone that drains any possible enjoyment from the proceedings, it's an insurmountable struggle to ascertain why this thing even exists or who its intended audience might be.
I realize today's youth can't seem to get into old movies and aren't especially adept at grasping the concept of pop culture that existed prior to their lifetime, but is 2003 really that long ago? CABIN FEVER '16 offers no new perspective, unless you count an early shout-out to THE SHINING. What once remained subtext--the appearance of a mysterious hiker calling himself Grim (played in Shyamalanian fashion by Roth in the '03 film) as a harbinger of the Grim Reaper--now has to be completely sounded out real slow-like to help today's dumb and inattentive audiences make the connection (played by Timothy G. Zajaros, '16's Grim now says "Call me Grim...you know, like the Grim Reaper"), and the changes range from inconsequential at best to damaging at worst, with none making any improvements to the original--no classic, itself--in any way (and what's with the dumb, pseudo-meta scene in the middle of the end credits?). CABIN FEVER '16 looks polished and professional and Travis Z's work is sufficiently functional on a technical level, but here's my dilemma: I can't decide if this film is Roth's ultimate act of self-aggrandizement or if the whole thing is an elaborate, middle-finger punking of the horror scenester, with Roth destroying the fanboy world from within to prove that they'll blindly go along with and give a blank-check pass to anything with his name on it. I doubt that much thought and ambition went into this remake, so the only real conclusion to be drawn is that at the end of the day, no matter how much he's weighed down by sycophantic fans latched on to his nutsack, nobody loves Eli Roth more than Eli Roth.
Directed by Eli Roth. Written by Eli Roth, Nicolas Lopez and Guillermo Amoedo. Cast: Keanu Reeves, Lorenza Izzo, Ana de Armas, Aaron Burns, Ignacia Allamand, Colleen Camp. (R, 99 mins)
Just two weeks after the long-delayed Italian gutmuncher homage THE GREEN INFERNO finally hit theaters, horror fanboy patron saint Eli Roth is back with the home invasion thriller KNOCK KNOCK. A remake of the sleazy, waka-jawaka-drenched drive-in favorite DEATH GAME, aka THE SEDUCERS (shot in 1974 but not released until 1977), KNOCK KNOCK essentially follows the same plot but with required modern updatings and more of a black comedy streak. In DEATH GAME, Seymour Cassel pays dearly when his wife and kids are away for the weekend and he allows himself to be seduced by two young women (Sondra Locke, Colleen Camp) who knock on the door claiming to be lost and waiting for a ride. KNOCK KNOCK--which lists Locke, Camp, and DEATH GAME director Peter Traynor among its committee of producers, with Camp returning for a cameo--has architect Evan Webber (Keanu Reeves) home alone at his luxurious Hollywood Hills residence with the dog over Father's Day weekend so he can finish an important work project while his artist wife Karen (Ignacia Allamand) and their two kids are away at the beach. After taking a break and smoking a little weed, Evan's work plans are put on hold when a torrential downpour brings two young women, Genesis (Roth's wife Lorenza Izzo) and Bel (Ana de Armas), to his front door. Claiming to be flight attendants looking for a party but then discovering they're in the wrong neighborhood, the girls persuade Evan to let them in to use the phone. He makes them tea, lends them bathrobes while their clothes are in the dryer, and calls an Uber as his sense of unease increases over small-talk that quickly escalates to flirtation and full-on seduction, as family man Evan can't resist an impromptu threesome in the shower--during which the Uber driver gets tired of waiting and leaves--followed by an all-night fuckfest straight out of Penthouse Letters.
The next morning, Evan finds the girls making a mess in the kitchen as they try to cook breakfast. As his temper flares and his patience runs out, the girls just giggle at him. When he threatens to call the police, they drop a bombshell, saying they're actually only 15, which makes him a pedophile ("And I've still got the evidence!" Bel taunts as she points below her waist). Evan eventually calls their bluff and dials 9-1-1 anyway, at which point Genesis backs off and the girls agree to let Evan drive them home. Later that evening, investigating a noise in the kitchen, Evan discovers the girls have broken back into the house and they knock him unconscious. He wakes up tied to the bed as Bel forces him to have sex with her while she wears his daughter's clothes and calls him "Daddy." Genesis and Bel have declared themselves judge, jury, and, if things go their way, executioner, subjecting Evan to a weekend of psychological torture and sexual sadism as punishment for betraying his wife, his children, and his life of one-percenter privilege, dismantling and destroying every piece of his life, whether it's his rare vinyl collection, Karen's art and sculptures, or scrawling "Whore" on a framed picture of his daughter and "My daddy now has AIDS" on one of his son.
The class struggle element seems almost arbitrarily tossed in and dropped as soon as it's mentioned, it's never really clear why Genesis and Bel have singled out Evan, even after it's revealed that they've been spying on him for some time prior to being invited inside, and some things are groan-inducingly predictable (has there ever been a movie where a character is introduced reaching for their asthma inhaler that didn't telegraph a later scene where that same person couldn't breathe and couldn't find their inhaler?) For a while, Roth and co-writers Nicolas Lopez and Guillermo Amoedo (the three have worked in various capacities with and for one another several other US/Chilean co-productions like AFTERSHOCK, THE STRANGER, and THE GREEN INFERNO) seem to be attempting a hot-button, FATAL ATTRACTION-type water cooler movie with the ethical and moral dilemma in which Evan finds himself. Initially, he does everything he can to resist the advances of Genesis and Bel, constantly moving from one seat to another in attempt to get them off of him, but when the Uber arrives and they refuse to leave the bathroom, only to have him enter and be rendered helpless when they go down on him simultaneously ("Have you ever had two women do this at once?" Genesis coos). Evan loves his family, but he's feeling a little unappreciated--the family left him alone on Father's Day and Karen hasn't had sex with him in several weeks, and here's two much-younger women stroking his ego about how buff he is and how lucky his wife must be. He gives in to temptation in a moment of weakness but the girls lord his transgression over his head for the rest of the movie ("You're all the same," Genesis scolds him), leading to an epic Keanu freakout that's on the level of Nic Cage's A-game. Tied to a chair, possibly going deaf from a piercing noises Genesis played through a set of headphones, and with a bleeding wound from being stabbed with a fork right over a recent shoulder surgery incision, Reeves dials it up to 11 with a long monologue, shouted at the top of his lungs about how "I'm a good guy! I'm a good father! I let you in! I called you an Uber! I made you tea! You came on to me! You were just free pizza that showed up at my door! What was I supposed to do?"
There's a darkly comedic mean streak throughout the film, but any pretense at seriousness is gone by the climax, where the comedy starts leaning broad and culminates in a great social media gag (between this and THE GREEN INFERNO, Roth has made his disdain for social media loud and clear) that's the funniest Facebook-related punchline I've yet seen in a movie (the melodrama in Reeves' punctuation of it is perfect as well). There's a lot of FATAL ATTRACTION, FUNNY GAMES, and HARD CANDY in KNOCK KNOCK, and if this was getting any kind of wide theatrical release (Lionsgate is dumping it on VOD and only releasing it in a few theaters), there'd likely be thinkpieces about the feminist and/or misogynist subtext (the girls are written off as "crazy bitches" but Roth leaves no doubt that Evan's in deep shit with his wife). Roth pays lip service to such things but doesn't explore it to any serious depth. It's very accomplished from a technical standpoint, especially in the way Roth has cinematographer Antonio Quercia snake and glide the camera through the house. Though it qualifies as a hard R, it's a virtually gore-free departure for Roth, who lets his sense of humor--sometimes clever, sometimes dudebro juvenile--run a little more free here even with the intensity and cringe-inducing discomfort of the whole thing. With solid performances by Reeves, Izzo (whose penetrating glare has some serious Eva Green potential), and de Armas, KNOCK KNOCK is quite enjoyable, guilty pleasure B-movie trash.
THE GREEN INFERNO (US/Chile - 2015) Directed by Eli Roth. Written by Eli Roth and Guillermo Amoedo. Cast: Lorenza Izzo, Ariel Levy, Daryl Sabara, Kirby Bliss Blanton, Sky Ferreira, Richard Burgi, Aaron Burns, Magda Apanowicz, Ignacia Allamand, Nicolas Martinez, Matias Lopez, Ramon Llao, Antonieta Pari, Eusebio Arenas. (R, 100 mins)
For being as ubiquitous a cult horror figure as he is, Eli Roth's filmography has been surprisingly sparse. THE GREEN INFERNO is just his fourth feature film as a director, arriving eight years after his last, 2007's HOSTEL PART II, though he's produced and "presented" several others and co-starred as Sgt. Donny "The Bear Jew" Donowitz in buddy Quentin Tarantino's INGLORIOUS BASTERDS (2009). Part of the delay was beyond Roth's control: filmed back-to-back with AFTERSHOCK (co-written by and starring Roth, and utilizing most of the same cast and crew) in 2012 and shown at festivals in 2013, THE GREEN INFERNO saw its September 2014 release abruptly cancelled by Open Road Films. They sold it to High Top Films and Blumhouse offshoot BH Tilt, who have finally gotten it into theaters three years after it was completed, still sporting a 2013 copyright. A longtime pet project of Roth's, the film is homage to the most vile of Italian horror subgenres, the cannibal film, itself an offshoot of the 1960s mondo craze. The Italian cannibal film was born with Umberto Lenzi's 1972 adventure MAN FROM DEEP RIVER, a more violent ripoff of the 1970 Richard Harris hit A MAN CALLED HORSE. There were other cannibal films that followed--Ruggero Deodato's THE LAST CANNIBAL WORLD, aka JUNGLE HOLOCAUST (1977) and Sergio Martino's foul MOUNTAIN OF THE CANNIBAL GOD (1978), but it really exploded with Deodato's groundbreaking, found-footage-inspiring CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (1980), and consecutive Lenzi assaults, EATEN ALIVE (1980) and CANNIBAL FEROX, aka MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY (1981). The latter three, in particular, took the cannibal subgenre as far as it could go and even today, remain so extreme in their content that they still shock and repulse even the most jaded of uninitiated present-day gorehounds raised on post-SAW torture porn and hipster snark. I attended a midnight showing of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST about 11 or 12 years ago and the packed theater was ready for a good time. They wasted no time talking back to the screen, making fun of the dubbing, and mimicking one particularly cheesy synth cue in Riz Ortolani's score. Around 25 minutes in, something happened that quieted down the audience. The discomfort escalated over the next half hour. By the one hour mark, many were leaving. When the closing credits rolled, those who remained exited the theater in traumatized silence. 35 years after it was made, the snark-proof CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST still separates the players from the poseurs in horror fandom, and approaching it with a derisive MST3K attitude won't cushion the blow. You don't just watch CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST. You survive it.
So in that respect, Roth is to be commended for daring to bring that kind of experience to the multiplexes of today. THE GREEN INFERNO (named after a documentary film-within-a-film in CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST) stretches its R rating about as far as it can go and more often that not, Roth and co-writer Guillermo Amoedo make a concerted effort to replicate the intensity of their influences. Alas, Roth is a director who has always straddled the line between fanboy and dudebro, and those conflicting identities trip him up throughout the film. His heart is in the right place: the jungle locations in Chile are stunning, he stays with practical effects as much as possible (though one CGI ant attack is just embarrassing to watch); in one shot, he frames his heroine (wife Lorenza Izzo) in a way that very purposefully recalls a memorable image of final girl Lorraine De Selle in CANNIBAL FEROX; and the closing credits feature a list of recommended Italian cannibal movies and end with a "Per Ruggero" dedication to the still very-much-alive Deodato, clearly a huge influence on the director (he also gave Deodato a cameo as "The Italian Cannibal" in HOSTEL PART II). But Roth also can't resist the temptation to play to the lowest common denominator, with comedic detours into a grossout humor involving vomit and diarrhea and a Scooby-Doo plan of stashing a bag of weed into the corpse of a soon-to-be-eaten character in order to make the natives high and allow the heroes to escape. That one character even derisively refers to it as "a Scooby-Doo plan" doesn't get Roth off the hook, nor does the resulting attack of the munchies that thwarts the escape when the buzzed tribesmen start chowing down on one guy like he's a bag of Funyuns.
Roth takes some shots at the college culture of hashtag activism and the political correctness of Generation Trigger Warning with mixed results. College freshman Justine (Izzo), the daughter of a big-shot U.N. attorney (Richard Burgi), falls in with a group of SJW campus activists led by the charismatic Alejandro (Ariel Levy). Alejandro and his buddy Carlos (Matias Lopez) are orchestrating a trip deep into the Peruvian rain forest to chain themselves to bulldozers to prevent an evil corporation from destroying the land and displacing the indigenous people to get to the natural gas supply deep underground. After successfully shaming the construction workers and their protecting militia via a live stream online, the group's plane crashes in an even more remote part of the jungle. While some die on impact, the survivors are soon abducted by a terrifying tribe, with one being eaten alive by the natives as an example of atrocities to come. The long sequence where the crash survivors watch in horror as one of their own is devoured limb-by-limb does a very credible job of replicating the brutal intensity of Deodato and Lenzi. Roth also makes the wise decision to avoid one troubling and indefensible element of Italian cannibal films that have always dogged them and rightly so: he doesn't even flirt with the idea of depicting on-camera animal killings, either for real or by special effects. The animals in THE GREEN INFERNO are treated with dignity (the tribe's pigs are pets who actually eat human flesh as well) and reverence, as shown by the respectful attitude displayed toward a majestic, beautiful jaguar resting near the river.
But then there's the juvenile, played-for-laughs diarrhea scene, where even the native kids are holding their noses and waving their hands in front of their faces. And there's the whole "stoned natives" sequence and the subsequent munchies. And a completely baffling scene where one character has committed suicide and Alejandro responds by vigorously masturbating in front of everyone in order to keep his mind focused. The standard-bearers of the Italian cannibal genre--CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST and CANNIBAL FEROX--depict generally docile tribes goaded by cruel white interlopers into committing the horrific atrocities they do. In CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, a documentary team needs to sensationalize their film, so they burn down a village and rape a native girl, who's punished by the tribal elders by being impaled on a pole that goes through her vagina and exits her mouth. In CANNIBAL FEROX, a doctoral student (De Selle) ventures to the Amazon to once and for all disprove cannibalism, but first she encounters a fugitive, small-time NYC coke dealer (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) who also rapes a native girl and tortures another tribesman to death, and the tribe rises up to attack the white invaders and give them what's coming to them. Alejandro fills that "white villain" role to a certain extent, at least in terms of his increasingly sociopathic behavior, but in an unexpected switch that's either Roth subverting genre expectations or keeping the door open for a sequel, Alejandro never gets what's coming to him.
Like Tarantino, Roth wears his love of grindhouse trash on his sleeve and his sincerity is never in doubt. But he's neither the stylist nor the writer that Tarantino is, though of course, QT's is a unique voice in contemporary movies. Roth wants to make THE GREEN INFERNO his CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST or CANNIBAL FEROX, and while he occasionally succeeds, he too often doesn't have the courage of his convictions, whether it's his handling of Alejandro or in the way the film repeatedly brings up the subject of female genital mutilation and seems poised to present it, much like those old Italian cannibal films always had some poor schmuck getting his dick hacked off and eaten by a cannibal. Not that I'm advocating female genital mutilation, but if Roth really wanted to push the envelope like his genre heroes did, he would've crossed that line. Deodato's and Lenzi's films aren't the infamous transgressions they are for holding back in the name of good taste and a desire to treat the audience with kid gloves. All in all, THE GREEN INFERNO is...alright. It's doubtful it's going to catch on with mainstream multiplexers, but the hardcore cult aficionados who form Roth's base will eat it up, pun intended. When Roth approaches the story seriously, the film works quite well, both as a tribute and as an intense experience in horror cinema that perfectly exemplifies what Roth is about. When he doesn't, then, well, you get some smirking dudebro jerking himself off for no reason, and to a certain degree, that also exemplifies what Roth is about.
Original 2014 poster art when the film was still being handled by Open Road
ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE (UK/Germany/Greece/France - 2014)
A moody, melancholy vampire film as only Jim Jarmusch could make, ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE has almost no concern with the horror angle or any other genre trends. Jarmusch's centuries-old protagonists--Eve (Tilda Swinton) and Adam (Tom Hiddleston)--have loved one another through time and have been witness to countless historical and cultural touchstones: they knew Lord Byron and Mary Shelley, Adam worked with Nikola Tesla, ghost-composed pieces for Schubert, and was an early supporter of his friend Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. They've drifted apart, with Eve living in Tangier and Adam in Detroit. She passes her days devouring great literature and he holes up in his dilapidated Brush Park mansion with his extensive collection of guitars, recording shoegazing garage rock instrumentals. A limitlessly-wealthy shut-in, he gets his necessities from local rock club kid Ian (Anton Yelchin) and procures blood at a local hospital from hematologist Dr. Watson (Jeffrey Wright). Bored in Tangier, seemingly destined to live forever, and encouraged by her vampire mentor and blood supplier Marlowe (John Hurt), Eve flies to Detroit to rekindle her romance with Adam, but everything gets thrown in jeopardy with the arrival of her irresponsible, hard-partying sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska) from Los Angeles.
Jarmusch tells his tale with a significant amount of dark and deadpan humor that could come across as "cute" in the wrong hands but he plays it perfectly, with everything from Eve and Adam enjoying frozen bloodcicles to Adam sounding not at all like the cultured immortal he is when he expresses his everyman hate for his de-facto sister-in-law and complains that their uninvited, imposing houseguest is "drinking all the O-negative." Jarmusch makes very effective use of Detroit locations, not merely shooting there but incorporating the city's culture, blight, and wasteland-like surroundings into the story. Adam takes Eve on a tour of crumbling and decaying Detroit landmarks like the Packard Plant and the old Michigan Theater, and they serve as metaphors for relics of a long-gone day, much like Adam and Eve themselves. Unlike the misanthropic, dour Adam, Eve sees beauty in the ruins and its cultural significance ("I love Jack White!" she exclaims as Adam shows her the musician's childhood home in a now-rundown neighborhood). Swinton and Hiddleston are excellent in this very offbeat genre piece that's unlike any vampire film you've seen. Like most Jarmusch films, it's extremely slowly-paced, very much the distinct work of its maker, and mostly quite rewarding in the end. (R, 123 mins)
FADING GIGOLO (US - 2014)
An odd, low-key comedy written, directed by, and starring John Turturro, FADING GIGOLO seems like it's going for goofy and raunchy early on, but it settles into a very quiet and leisurely-paced (almost to a fault) character piece. Turturro's film is set in the kind of Brooklyn you don't see much of in the movies anymore, very nicely shot by Marco Pontecorvo, son of legendary Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo (THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS) and has a definite Woody Allen influence, which even extends to Allen co-starring in one of the rare occasions over his 50-year career that he's acting in a film he didn't write and/or direct (the last were Douglas McGrath's barely-released COMPANY MAN and Alfonso Arau's even less-seen PICKING UP THE PIECES, both back in 2000). Allen is Murray Schwartz, an aging Brooklyn bookstore owner who's closing up shop and in dire need of money. His bisexual dermatologist (Sharon Stone) happens to tell him that she and her girlfriend (Sofia Vergara) are interested in a menage-a-trois, prompting Murray to offer the services of his nice-guy florist pal Fioravante (Turturro). Before long, Fioravante becomes a sought-after Brooklyn gigolo with Murray his unlikely pimp (if this sounds like a nebbishy version of the HBO series HUNG, you're right), but things get complicated when Fioravante develops feelings for a Rabbi's widow (a de-glammed Vanessa Paradis), who's being courted by an angry Hasidic beat cop (Liev Schreiber).
The premise starts out like an R-rated sitcom and has some funny moments from Allen, coming up with would-be intimidating pimp names for himself, such as "Iceberg," and "Bookmaster Moe." But once Fioravante starts pining for the widow, the laughs get dialed down quite a bit and a somber Turturro frequently comes off like a black hole in the center of his own movie, almost like he knew Allen would steal all the scenes, so he's not even going to try. But even some of Allen's scenes don't work all that well, particularly a dreadful sequence where he's hauled off to some Hasidic kangaroo court with his lawyer (Bob Balaban). Fioravante's transformation from shy homebody to sexual dynamo seems forced, as does Turturro casting himself as someone that Brooklyn's sexiest, richest wives can't resist. FADING GIGOLO is a strange film that never settles on a tone and never really comes together, but Allen seems to be enjoying himself, even if this is just a minor footnote to his long and storied career. Allen's onscreen appearances, even in his own films, are a rarity these days and maybe if this was called FADING PIMP and focused on him, it would've been a bit more successful. This ended up being a small arthouse sleeper hit for Cannon cover band Millennium over the spring and summer of 2014, almost breaking into wide release like the company's BERNIE after landing in the top 15 on just 356 screens. (R, 90 mins)
THE SACRAMENT (US - 2014)
Ti West got a lot of attention in the cult horror scene with his impressive THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (2009), a very creepy and very methodically-paced '80s throwback that seems to have spawned a "slow-burn" movement in the genre: films where long periods of time pass with very little happening. An assured director uses this to ramp up the tension, and while it worked with THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, it failed with West's follow-up THE INNKEEPERS (2012), an inexplicably acclaimed horror film that was all slow-burn and nothing else. West, in many ways the Wes Anderson of horror, is so revered and coddled so gingerly with kid gloves by both critics and cult horror hipsters that it often seems like his career was granted by the Make-a-Wish Foundation. On the basis of THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, I want to like Ti West's films (he also directed and disowned the long-shelved CABIN FEVER 2: SPRING FEVER), but I just can't get on the bandwagon. Something's just not working for me when it comes to his films and I don't know if it's the films themselves or that everyone seems to be seeing some kind of magic that's eluding me.
Boasting the opening credit "Eli Roth Presents," which is probably the point where the target audience had seen enough to conclude that it was a new masterpiece of modern horror and the Academy should bestow its first Participation Oscar to its maker, West's latest, THE SACRAMENT, may be the most pointless film of the year. And in using the 1978 Jonestown tragedy in Guyana as the story template, I can't imagine a more dead-on metaphor for the Kool-Aid guzzling, fanboy adoration of West's work. Here we have a film specifically engineered for the uninformed or those younger genre fans who are blithely unaware of anything that happened prior to their lifetime. If you've been waiting patiently for Jonestown recreated as a found footage/faux-doc--and if you have, then you're not quite ready to run with the grownups--then THE SACRAMENT is for you. Sure, it's set in the present day and has two Vice staffers (AJ Bowen and the inevitable Joe Swanberg) tagging along to make a doc with a colleague (Kentucker Audley) whose recovering drug addict sister (Amy Seimetz) has run off with the cult. And yes, it changes the name of the cult's compound from Jonestown to Eden Parish and the messianic leader is known simply as "Father," but he's Jim Jones, right down to the folksy drawl, the black hair, and the dark glasses. Gene Jones (best known as the gas station clerk in the "friendo" coin toss scene in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN) is OK in the role, but he doesn't do anything that Powers Boothe didn't already do in the then-topical 1980 TV-movie GUYANA TRAGEDY: THE STORY OF JIM JONES or, for that matter, Stuart Whitman as "Jim Johnson" in the spectacularly trashy GUYANA: CULT OF THE DAMNED (also 1980). But everything you know about Jonestown, right down to the cult members being held captive, the brainwashing, the Kool-Aid, the sex, and the drugs, is all here. There's nothing surprising. If you know the story of Jonestown, then you know what's exactly what's going to happen in THE SACRAMENT. So who is this movie for? Why does it exist? Why retell this story now, in this fashion? If West thinks the faux-doc angle with obligatory CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST/BLAIR WITCH PROJECT dropped-camera shots justifies a rudimentary, connect-the-dots, Wikipedia retelling of the story--and even the would-be doc stuff is handled erratically and inconsistently--then I'm calling bullshit on the entire Ti West mythos. In fact, I may even take it one step further and go full ROOM 237 and say THE SACRAMENT is West's confession that he's all smoke and mirrors, that he's been punking us all along, and that there really is nothing there. (R, 99 mins)
This long-shelved horror/western hybrid is best known as the movie Wesley Snipes was working on in Namibia when he was indicted on federal tax evasion charges. Filmed mostly in 2006, GALLOWWALKERS (then without the "s" on the end) suspended production while Snipes returned to Florida to meet with attorneys and deal with his legal issues. The judge allowed him to return to Namibia to finish shooting and then there were additional reshoots in 2008. Snipes worked on three more films in the meantime (THE ART OF WAR II, BROOKLYN'S FINEST, and GAME OF DEATH), then served most of his three-year prison sentence before being released in April 2013. All the while, GALLOWWALKERS languished in a state of incompletion, with missed release dates in 2010 and 2011. It's finally out, quietly dumped on DVD seven years after most of it was shot, and it's hardly a triumphant "comeback" for Snipes. This was obviously an extremely troubled production and despite Snipes being allowed to go back to Namibia to finish his scenes, it's clear that the star's offscreen issues caused more of a disruption than the filmmakers let on. In its released state, GALLOWWALKERS is an incoherent mess, riddled with choppy editing, extended stretches where Snipes is offscreen, much voiceover narration by Snipes' character--almost always a last ditch desperation move to tie loose plot threads together, but that, coupled with Snipes not doing the narration is a good indication that the filmmakers were still frantically putting Band-Aids on this thing long after they lost access to their star. The plot has to do with Aman (Snipes), a bounty hunter in a strange desert purgatory where a curse put upon him causes those he kills to come back from the dead, forcing him to kill them again. He's on a quest of vengeance after his wife is gang-raped and killed by psychotic outlaw Kansa (Kevin Howarth) and his men, so he recruits hotshot gunfighter Fabulos (Riley Smith) to help him out after the undead Kansa and his zombified gang return.
It's hard telling what director/co-writer Andrew Goth is going for with GALLOWWALKERS. It's a hodgepodge of BLADE, UNDERWORLD, and splatter spaghetti western, with visual and dialogue shout-outs to Sergio Leone (Charles Bronson's classic "You brought two too many" line from ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST is quoted here), and some of the surreal visuals in the very slowly-paced opening hour almost bring to mind what a hypothetical "Alejandro Jodorowsky's FOR A FEW ZOMBIES MORE" might look like. Characters wander in and out of the story, Kansa and his zombies look different from scene to scene (I think there's two concurrent timelines going on here, but it's never really clear), one guy looks like the sinewy Frank from HELLRAISER and another looks like THE TOXIC AVENGER, and other than a couple of inspired action scenes that are too little, too late, the only real positive of GALLOWWALKERS is the impressive widescreen cinematography of Namibia's stunning desert landscape. Sixth-billed Patrick Bergin, once a leading man opposite Julia Roberts and now just mixed in with no-name co-stars without even the dignity of an "and Patrick Bergin" credit, shows up for five minutes as a marshal and is immediately killed (Hollywood tried to make Bergin happen from 1991-93 and he was just flatly rejected by moviegoers--was it the mustache?), and wrestling fanatics might be interested in seeing Diamond Dallas Page in a small role, but ultimately, GALLOWWALKERS is just a misfire that was probably too doomed to salvage. The notion of Snipes as a cursed gunfighter being pursued by his resurrected victims is an interesting metaphor for a man trying to outrun the ghosts of his past, but even after seven years, GALLOWWALKERS still feels thrown-together and unfinished. It's too bad, because there's some good ideas here that Goth, for a variety of reasons (many not his fault), can't bring together. (R, 92 mins)
AFTERSHOCK (US/Chile - 2013)
Taking a break from following Quentin Tarantino around and acting like Chester to QT's Spike, Eli Roth produced, co-wrote, and stars in this would-be disaster epic that was filmed back-to-back in Chile with his still-unreleased THE GREEN INFERNO, an homage to the Italian cannibal films of the late 1970s/early 1980s. A sort-of EARTHQUAKE for the extreme horror crowd, AFTERSHOCK gets off to a laborious start, spending its interminable opening 35 minutes on what plays like a dull HANGOVER knockoff, with Roth as an American partying in Valparaiso with two Chilean friends (Ariel Levy as Ed Helms and Nicolas Martinez as Zach Galifianakis). They hook up with some girls (Andrea Osvart, Natasha Yarovenko, and Lorenza Izzo) and hit some clubs. There's drawn-out attempts at character development: Roth is a single dad, Levy is still pining for his ex, Osvart and Izzo are sisters with unresolved issues, and Martinez is an inexplicable chick magnet. Finally, a massive earthquake hits and chaos reigns as Valparaiso quickly turns into hell on earth.
To his credit, co-writer/director Nicolas Lopez gets the lead out once disaster strikes and the group finds themselves on the run from a band of thrill-killing convicts from a nearby prison, and there's an admirably cruel and unpredictable randomness to the order in which the cast members are killed off. The tag line of AFTERSHOCK's poster is "The only thing more terrifying than Mother Nature is human nature," and unlike a lot of disaster films where everyone sets aside their differences and pulls together in full "triumph of the human spirit" mode, this film opts for the misanthropic "everyone is an asshole looking out for #1" route, and in that respect, in today's culture, that's probably a little more plausible. But Lopez and Roth don't really explore the psychological elements that they hint at, and it takes so long to get to the main plot that once it gets going, it feels like they're in a rush to get to the end. They get lazy (watch how the streets go from jam-packed to empty with no explanation) and a plot twist involving an additional character who joins the group doesn't really make much sense. There's some scattered moments in AFTERSHOCK that work very well on a visceral level for gorehounds (one person poking their head out of a manhole cover only to have it immediately squashed by a speeding car), and Hungarian actress Osvart seems to be trying a lot harder than any of her co-stars, but a lot of the CGI effects are weak and it feels less like a cohesive film and more like an excuse for Roth and his boys to party in Chile (and not just the boys: Selena Gomez has a pointless cameo) and shit out a movie in their spare time. Most of the same cast and crew worked on THE GREEN INFERNO, so let's hope everyone was a little more focused when they made that one. (R, 89 mins)
Directed by RZA. Written by RZA and Eli Roth. Cast: Russell Crowe, Lucy Liu, RZA, Rick Yune, Byron Mann, David Bautista, Cung Le, Jamie Chung, Pam Grier, Gordon Liu, Daniel Wu, Kuan Tai Chen, Xue Jing Yao, Zhu Zhu, Dennis Chan, Telly Liu, Gang Zhou. (R, 96 mins)
Wu-Tang Clan leader and kung-fu movie superfan RZA makes his long-planned directing debut with this martial arts homage, co-written by Eli Roth (HOSTEL) and "presented by" Quentin Tarantino. It's a strange film that careens wildly between homage, spoof, and serious martial arts, never quite gelling but providing some occasionally entertaining moments. RZA's initial rough cut is rumored to have run nearly four hours, and a lot of material is clearly missing, which probably explains why Pam Grier is in this for about eight seconds with one word of dialogue.
In the Chinese town of Jungle Village in the 19th century, the treacherous Silver Lion (Byron Mann) murders a beloved clan leader, which sets off a chain reaction of clashes that will eventually bring together three lone warriors: the dead man's vengeful son Zen Yi, aka "The X-Blade" (Rick Yune), the Jungle Village blacksmith (RZA) who unknowingly forged the weapon that was used to kill Zen Yi's father, and mysterious British mercenary Jack Knife (Russell Crowe). The blacksmith, an ex-slave who fled America after killing a racist white man in self-defense, has ambitions beyond Jungle Village and is planning to run off with Lady Silk (Jamie Chung), who works in Madam Blossom's (Lucy Liu) brothel, where much of the action and carnage takes place.
Owing as much to spaghetti westerns as it does to badly-dubbed 1970s kung-fu flicks (and arguably Jim Jarmusch's 2000 cult classic GHOST DOG: THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI, which was scored by RZA), THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS is the kind of film that's made for fans, by fans, but it rarely seems as "fun" as it should be. RZA's blacksmith and Yune's X-Blade are pretty dour throughout, leaving most of the jovial antics to an uncharacteristically amusing Crowe, who's rarely cut loose like this on screen before. Playing Jack Knife as more or less a tribute to Richard Burton and, to some extent, his GLADIATOR co-star Oliver Reed, Crowe appears to be one of the very few cast members who seems to understand what kind of movie he's in, playing a wisecracking, cognac-swilling horndog with a big gut, working three of Madam Blossom's ladies at once in some rather perverse ways (there's one quick shot involving beads and another where he's holding a phallic-shaped device and says "Let's pretend to be Catholic"). Or a scene where he's revealed to be in a dubious-looking Chinese disguise accompanied by--wait for it--the sound of a gong. Crowe was apparently only on the set for ten days and there's long stretches where his presence would liven things up a bit. It's one of his oddest roles, and he likely did the film as a favor to RZA, who had a supporting role in 2007's AMERICAN GANGSTER, during which the two became friends.
Elsewhere, Mann approaches this the same way as Crowe as the ludicrously over-the-top Silver Lion, who looks like he belongs in a bad Asian '80s hair metal band. MMA fighters David Bautista and Cung Le have supporting roles as bad guys, and genre legend Gordon Liu gets to once again don his KILL BILL Pai Mei beard to play a wise old mentor. RZA's film is obviously made out of love and respect, but it ends up being mostly forgettable. He includes a lot of in-jokes for fans, like deliberately having some shots out of focus or the camera moving erratically for no reason, which come close to taking the film into spoof territory, but sometimes it's played totally straight, and the general feeling is one of unevenness. There's a jarring sense of video-game modernity to the hyper-stylized fight scenes and the overabundance of CGI splatter. This is a case where the old-fashioned ways would've made major improvements. As it is, THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS is enjoyable enough for a discount matinee price, but even with the surprise participation of an A-lister like Crowe, the whole thing has a distinct and undeniable straight-to-DVD feel to it.
