Retro Review: BLOOD BATH (1966)

OPERATION TITIAN
(Yugoslavia - 1963)

Directed by Rados Novakovic. Written by Vlasta Radavanovic. Cast: William Campbell, Rade Markovic, Patrick Magee, Miha Baloh, Vjekoslav Afric, Irena Prosen, Manja Golec. (Unrated, 95 mins)

PORTRAIT IN TERROR
(US - 1965)

Directed by Michael Roy (Rados Novakovic and Stephanie Rothman). Written by Vic Webber (Vlasta Radavanovic and Stephanie Rothman). Cast: William Campbell, Anna Pavane (Irina Prosen), Patrick Magee, Kerry Anderson (Manja Golec), Dante Gerino (Rade Markovic), Mike Astin (Miha Baloh), Al Astar (Vjekoslav Afric). (Unrated, 81 mins)

BLOOD BATH
(US - 1966) 

Written and directed by Jack Hill and Stephanie Rothman. Cast: William Campbell, Marissa Mathes, Linda Saunders, Sandra Knight, Carl Schanzer, Sid Haig, Jonathan Haze, Biff Elliot, Patrick Magee. (Unrated, 62 mins)

TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE
(US - 1966)

Written and directed by Jack Hill and Stephanie Rothman. Cast: William Campbell, Marissa Mathes, Linda Saunders, Sandra Knight, Patrick Magee, Carl Schanzer, Sid Haig, Jonathan Haze, Biff Elliot, Manja Golec. (Unrated, 79 mins)

Out now in what's likely a contender for the Blu-ray restoration/box set of the year, the low-budget 1966 cult horror movie BLOOD BATH is part of a quartet of films with one of the most complex and labyrinthine backstories in all of cinema. At the center is the legendary Roger Corman, who was attending a film festival in Adriatic coastal city of Dubrovnik when he was approached by representatives from Avala Film, one of Yugoslavia's state-run film organizations, about the possibility of co-productions and distribution deals. Looking to test the waters of the Eastern European film industry, Corman agreed to be a silent partner on the Yugoslav crime thriller OPERATION TITIAN, under two conditions: the movie would be in English and some of his people had to be involved to make it an easier sell in the US. Corman sent American actor William Campbell and Irish actor Patrick Magee--both of whom had just been in the Corman-produced DEMENTIA 13 and the Corman-directed THE YOUNG RACERS--to Dubrovnik to star in OPERATION TITIAN, with young protege and DEMENTIA 13 director Francis Ford Coppola tagging along as a production supervisor to observe director Rados Novakovic's crew and make sure Corman's money wasn't being wasted. 

OPERATION TITIAN is a lethargic and draggy thriller about the heist of a priceless Titian painting and the murder of its owner, Ugo Bonacic (Vjekoslav Afric), by duplicitous Italian doctor Maurizio (Magee). Maurizio is working in cahoots with Bonacic's nephew Toni (Campbell), who believes the Bonacics are connected to the legendary Sordi family of artists. Toni is also pining for Vera (Irina Prosen), who's engaged to reporter Dzoni (Miha Baloh), who's working the Bonacic murder case with detective Miha (Rade Markovic). Novakovic stages several stylish sequences that owe more than a passing debt to both the German krimis of the era as well as Carol Reed's THE THIRD MAN and the directorial work of Orson Welles. OPERATION TITIAN is an intriguing-looking and visually interesting film that too often gets bogged down by its confusing storyline and lugubrious pacing (its 95 minutes feel like three hours), with Novakovic far too willing to let too many sequences play like he's making a Dubrovnik travelogue. Corman wasn't happy with the resulting film and saw no potential for it whatsoever on the drive-in circuit, so he shelved it until early 1964, when he found two uses for it. One involved having in-house production and editing assistant Stephanie Rothman rework TITIAN into PORTRAIT IN TERROR, an overhauled version of the film that trimmed a lot of the fat from the clunky early scenes that go nowhere, streamlined some of the meandering story, rearranged some scenes, and replaced the TITIAN score with AIP library cues. Other than Campbell and Magee (his name misspelled "Patrick McGee" in the new credits), everyone else was hidden by Americanized pseudonyms and revoiced. Miha is now "Miho" and Dzoni "Donny," and one key character's offscreen murder is now seen in almost real-time detail in a new L.A.-shot sequence clumsily edited into the Yugoslav footage, with doubles who look nothing like the people they're supposed to be (the victim has a completely different hairstyle to obscure her face in the new footage). This murder takes place in broad daylight with the killer carrying the body for what seems like a mile and leaving a trail of blood behind before rowing it out to sea and dumping it in the Adriatic. Rothman's work was enough for Corman to declare OPERATION TITIAN salvaged, and with director credit going to the non-existent "Michael Roy," PORTRAIT IN TERROR went straight to US television in 1965 as part of an AIP syndication package deal. 

While Rothman was working on PORTRAIT, Corman was determined to get his money's worth out of his botched Dubrovnik investment. Having taken bits and pieces of Soviet sci-fi films and working in new American footage in the past (like 1962's BATTLE BEYOND THE SUN being a reworking of a 1959 Russian film; Corman would also use Soviet sci-fi footage in 1965's VOYAGE TO THE PREHISTORIC PLANET and 1966's QUEEN OF BLOOD, both featuring Basil Rathbone in the new scenes, wearing the same wardrobe on the same sets in scenes shot in a day), the thrifty auteur decided to use the same approach with OPERATION TITIAN. In early 1964, he commissioned Jack Hill, who was called in for cleanup duty to shoot some gory axe murders when Corman wasn't happy with Coppola's cut of DEMENTIA 13, to take 30 minutes of footage from OPERATION TITIAN and create a horror movie around it. A production assistant looking to get into directing, Hill enthusiastically saw this bizarre assignment as a challenge, and TITIAN had enough stark Eastern European location work and imposing old-world architecture that it just might work. Hill came up with BLOOD BATH, and he would need Campbell to shoot additional scenes in Venice, CA. Campbell thought turning TITIAN into a horror movie was a terrible idea, so he made exorbitant salary demands on Corman than the producer reluctantly agreed to since he needed Campbell to match the TITIAN footage. In Hill's BLOOD BATH (handling sound on the BLOOD BATH crew was a young Gary Kurtz, who would go on to be George Lucas' Lucasfilm partner and producer of STAR WARS), Campbell was now playing Antonio Sordi, a crazed Venice Beach artist driven to kill his models and preserve their bodies in wax (an idea Hill got from the fate of Magee's Maurizio in TITIAN). None of the primary Yugoslav TITIAN cast--Markovic, Baloh, Afric, and Prosen--appear in BLOOD BATH. Hill pulls off one legitimately stunning, Antonioni-esque shot in the California desert and has some surprisingly bloody murders throughout (more proof that it was Hill, and not Coppola, who was behind some of DEMENTIA 13's more memorable moments). There's also some Cormanian callbacks to A BUCKET OF BLOOD with some beatniks played by LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS' Jonathan Haze and a young Sid Haig, but for whatever reason--Corman off shooting THE SECRET INVASION is usually the cited one--Hill's BLOOD BATH got lost in the shuffle and was shelved by Corman...for the time being. 

In 1966, Corman took another look at BLOOD BATH and while he still didn't like it, he wasn't done tinkering with it or squeezing every last nickel he could out of OPERATION TITIAN. Hill moved on to other projects (like the cult classic SPIDER BABY), so Corman assigned the BLOOD BATH revamp to Stephanie Rothman, who wrote and directed new scenes that now have Campbell's Antonio Sordi not only being a homicidal maniac artist, but also---wait for it---a vampire. An uncredited actor plays Sordi in the scenes where he metamorphoses into a bloodsucker, not for artistic reasons but because Campbell refused to do any more reshoots related to the now-two-year-old BLOOD BATH and even filed a grievance with the Screen Actors Guild against Corman for repeatedly reusing old footage of him in new movies and not compensating him for it (he lost, due to a loophole involving the source film--OPERATION TITIAN--being a foreign production outside of SAG jurisdiction). Combining footage from TITIAN and Hill's aborted BLOOD BATH with new footage of actors from Hill's shoot--Haze, Haig, Carl Schanzer as a Sordi rival, and Linda Saunders as a Sordi victim--plus scenes involving a new character, created by Rothman and played by THE TERROR's Sandra Knight, and a silhouetted double filling in for Sordi in a non-vampire scene, the revamped BLOOD BATH has Hill and Rothman sharing writing and directing credit, though they never collaborated and Hill has had nothing positive to say about Rothman's contributions. Considering it's a mash-up of three different productions dating back to 1963, it's amazing that it holds together at all, though it's sure to delight fans of rampant continuity errors. 

BLOOD BATH was released by American International in 1966 on a double bill with Curtis Harrington's QUEEN OF BLOOD, where new and quickly-shot footage of John Saxon, Dennis Hopper, and Basil Rathbone was mixed in with scenes from the 1962 Soviet sci-fi epic A DREAM COME TRUE. Unusual for 1966, BLOOD BATH was in black & white since it still had to match OPERATION TITIAN, and it ran barely over an hour at just 62 minutes. When it came time to package the film in a syndication deal, AIP realized the film was too short. As a result, it was tweaked yet again, this time as TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE, with some scenes dropped and new footage added by Rothman, including two of the most blatant examples of pointless filler you'll ever see: a long and profoundly unsuspenseful foot chase, and an almost comically belabored five-minute interpretive dance sequence on a beach, with Saunders unconvincingly doubled by someone else. When that didn't add enough time, an entire subplot involving Magee's and Manja Golec's TITIAN characters is introduced in the final act, only with Magee badly redubbed to make it appear that he's a jealous husband convinced his wife (Golec) is having an affair with Sordi. These additional scenes got the film to 79 minutes, making TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE long enough to fit in a 90-minute time slot with commercials. Unlike Campbell, Magee was never called back for reshoots on any incarnation of BLOOD BATH (the future CLOCKWORK ORANGE co-star is uncredited in BLOOD BATH and TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE, and though he has a sizable role with the introduction of more TITIAN footage in TRACK, his appearance in BLOOD BATH is limited to one brief shot as a wax figure in Sordi's workshop), so it's not known how he felt about not being paid for three additional movies (four if you count Hill's never-released first cut of BLOOD BATH) or if he was even aware of it. TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE has enough deviations from BLOOD BATH that it should be regarded as its own stand-alone work as opposed to simply "the TV version of BLOOD BATH." Some of the shocking-for-the-time violence is toned down for TRACK, especially in the early murder of the character played by June 1962 Playmate of the Month Marissa Mathes. It's not really any better or worse than BLOOD BATH, though the interpretive dance scene, which rivals any extended MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE driving scenes, has to be seen to be believed.

Though BLOOD BATH has a bit of a cult following and one of the more colorfully lurid one-sheet designs of the 1960s, neither it nor its three distantly-related cousins OPERATION TITIAN, PORTRAIT IN MURDER, and TRACK OF THE VAMPIRE are very good. Nevertheless, for any true cult horror fanatic, Arrow's Blu-ray box set is absolutely essential as the most thorough archiving of the complicated history of this particular Roger Corman project. The bonus features include interviews with Hill and Haig, but the big selling point is film historian and Video Watchdog big dog Tim Lucas' video essay "The Trouble with Titian," an 81-minute look at Corman in the early '60s and everything that went into the making of OPERATION TITIAN and its variant offshoots. BLOOD BATH is a Blu-ray package that's not really designed for the casual horror fan but rather, the hardcore obsessive who likely won't mind that the tangled and fascinating behind-the-scenes chronicle of the four films proves to be more interesting than the four films themselves.

On DVD/Blu-ray: SEE NO EVIL 2 (2014); LIFE AFTER BETH (2014); and PERSECUTED (2014)

SEE NO EVIL 2
(US - 2014)

It's hard to name the bigger mystery: why we're getting a sequel to the completely forgettable 2006 torture porn slasher SEE NO EVIL in 2014 or why the acclaimed Jen & Sylvia Soska--the "Twisted Twins"--are directing it. The Canadian siblings and Eli Roth protegees earned significant acclaim even from outside the usual horror circles with last year's body modification film AMERICAN MARY. It was a colorful and stylish, but ultimately empty and overrated film that nevertheless has found a major cult following thanks to the Soskas and GINGER SNAPS star Katharine Isabelle. The Soskas probably viewed the Lionsgate/WWE production SEE NO EVIL 2 as a stepping stone into the majors, but other than one inspired death scene and an admittedly clever "Directed by" credit placed over the sisters playing corpses in a morgue, the film is completely and utterly ordinary in every way. It's dimly shot, it's not scary, and neither the protagonists nor the killer are the least bit interesting. Even the idea of subverting audience expectation over the "final girl" isn't exactly new, so what we're left with is yet another rote slasher movie with an unstoppable killing machine working his way through a cast of soon-to-be dead meat.

SEE NO EVIL, directed by former porn auteur Gregory Dark (who previously made a slew of early '90s DTV erotic thrillers under variations of the name "Alexander Gregory Hippolyte" and a couple of action movies as "Gregory Brown"), had hulking murderer Jacob Goodnight (7 ft. tall WWE star Kane, real name Glenn Jacobs), aka "the God's Hand Killer," gouging out the eyes of a bunch of unlikable dickheads in an abandoned hotel as some obscure vengeance against his domineering, insane mother. He was killed at the end, and the Soskas' sequel opens with Goodnight (again played by Kane) being brought to the morgue during the graveyard shift, overseen by wheelchair-bound Holden (Michael Eklund) and his on-duty staff, Seth (Kaj-Erik Eriksen) and birthday girl Amy (convention circuit scream queen Danielle Harris). Holden lets Amy's friends in to party and things go south when the dead Goodnight inexplicably reanimates while serial-killer-obsessed Tamara (Isabelle) and Carter (Lee Majdoub) are screwing on a slab next to him. Soon enough, Kane slaughters the revelers one-by-one as they run through the endless corridors of the morgue, which starts to resemble Freddy Krueger's boiler room and has roughly the same square footage as a typical Costco, not to mention an alarming lack of exit doors. There is one well-executed kill that would get an audience wound up had this actually been released in theaters instead of VOD four days before its Blu-ray/DVD release, and it's more of a straightforward slasher film than its uglier and more SAW-inspired predecessor, but there's nothing here to get excited about. The fanboy/fangirl hype surrounding SEE NO EVIL 2 is more about the Soskas than anything in the film or any demand for the further slice-and-dice misadventures of Jacob Goodnight, and it's again indicative of the too sycophantic environment of horror fandom. Thanks to conventions and social media, horror filmmakers are without question the most accessible and fan-friendly of any genre. And they almost always seem like cool people who would be awesome to hang with and watch movies. That sometimes makes people maybe praise the movies more than they would if the people who worked on it weren't their "friends." The Soskas obviously have talent and the potential to be unique voices in cult horror cinema. They're smart, funny, and extremely charming in the "Twisted Twins" bonus feature. You'll totally want to hang out with them. I know I do. But AMERICAN MARY didn't work its magic on me and SEE NO EVIL 2, written not by the Soskas but by first-timers Nathan Brookes and Bobby Lee Darby, looks and plays like the director(s)-for-hire gig that it is, and if it didn't boast the novelty of the can't-miss selling point of hip, cool twin sisters behind the camera, there's a good chance nobody would give even give a shit about SEE NO EVIL 2. (R, 90 mins)


LIFE AFTER BETH
(US - 2014)

Are we done with zombies yet? I HEART HUCKABEE'S co-writer Jeff Baena apparently doesn't think so, as he returns from a decade-long absence to make his directorial debut with the bland and mostly unfunny zom-com LIFE AFTER BETH. Grieving emo-kid Zach (Dane DeHaan) can't get over the snakebite death of his girlfriend Beth (Aubrey Plaza) and isn't getting much sympathy from his parents (Paul Reiser, Cheryl Hines) or his asshole older brother (Matthew Gray Gubler). Things get worse when Beth's parents (John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon) seem to be avoiding him, but Zach soon finds out why: Beth has crawled out of her grave and returned home, completely unaware that she's dead. Her parents are overjoyed to have her back, and like Zach, they don't seem to mind that she's irrational, prone to banshee-howling, that she gradually starts physically deteriorating, and eventually develops a taste for human flesh, and perhaps most shockingly, smooth jazz. All the while, a zombie outbreak happens all over town, which leads to one of the film's few funny scenes when Zach's dead grandpa (Garry Marshall) returns home, along with the the zombified previous owners of Zach's parents' house. Most of LIFE AFTER BETH deals with Zach deluding himself into thinking a relationship with Zombie Beth is possible, and it's a one-joke premise that gets stretched entirely too thin before Baena just gives up, opting to go for cheap laughs with easy-listening tunes (Benny Mardones' "Into the Night" and Chuck Mangione's "Feels So Good"), and offering nothing but generic zombie apocalypse mayhem. A good cast is wasted (Anna Kendrick plays a potential new--and alive--girlfriend for Zach, and ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT's Alia Shawkat is still in the credits even though she was cut from the film), 30-year-old Plaza and 27-year-old DeHaan are too old for roles that seem like they were written with much younger actors in mind, and the film's tone veers around so wildly that it's hard to gauge exactly what Baena had in mind when he concocted this thing. Co-produced by Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope for some reason, LIFE AFTER BETH debuted on VOD in July before getting a 30-screen theatrical release in September, grossing just $88,000. (R, 89 mins)

PERSECUTED
(US - 2014)

From the annual Fox News hysteria over the "War on Christmas" to this year's earlier surprise hit GOD'S NOT DEAD, you'd think Christianity was under attack despite between 73-76% of Americans surveyed identifying themselves as Christians. The makers of PERSECUTED feed into that notion of victimization with a sort of faithsploitation version of THE FUGITIVE. Former alcoholic and drug addict and born-again family man John Luther (James Remar), the head of the hugely popular ministry Truth, steadfastly refuses to endorse the Faith and Fairness Act, a bill proposed by (presumably liberal, though the film pretends it's not playing politics) Sen. Donald Harrison (Bruce Davison) that would effectively force the inclusion and acceptance of all religions, equal across the board under the law. Harrison says it's "the most crucial piece of legislation since the Bill of Rights," but the influential Luther ("You reach more people than the evening news!" he's told at one point) refuses to get behind anything that would diminish Christianity. With Luther refusing to play ball, Harrison, working in cahoots with a vaguely Bill Clinton-esque president (James R. Higgins), dispatches a ruthless Secret Service assassin (Raoul Trujillo) to drug Luther and frame him for the murder of a scantily-clad young woman. Luther wakes up and goes on the run, giving proof of his innocence to his priest father (Fred Dalton Thompson), who's almost immediately killed by scary Secret Service hit men. Meanwhile, Luther's second-in-charge, Pastor Ryan Morris (conservative stand-up comic Brad Stine), is playing all sides in his quest to generate more revenue and tax breaks for Truth, and in the quest to clear his name, Luther realizes he's just a pawn in the game of politics and sets the record straight with top cable news host Diana Lucas, played in a real stretch by Fox News' Gretchen Carlson.

Unlike most "bus 'em in," preaching-to-the-converted evangelical titles, PERSECUTED is at least professionally-assembled and looks like a real movie (former Francis Ford Coppola associate Gray Frederickson is one of the producers). Other than being reduced to faithsploitation (where else will Remar get to play a big-screen lead these days?), the actors don't really embarrass themselves, but writer/director Daniel Lusko can't seem to figure out who the villains of the piece really are. As a result, the film more or less comes off as paranoid about everything, which is probably why your right-wing, talk-radio listening uncle will be recommending it to everyone at Thanksgiving. Even the board of directors for Luther's own ministry (including a frail-looking Dean Stockwell) are revealed to be a bunch of unscrupulous assholes quick to hang the heroic Luther out to dry, and when Harrison's true nefarious intentions are revealed and we learn just how unfathomably evil he is, he doesn't sound any different than any conservative politician you'd find if you turn on any random cable news show. And of course, the idea of a Clinton-like Commander-in-Chief dispatching hit men is just pure Viagra for the far-right conspiracy theorists to get their Vince Foster boner on. While PERSECUTED looks like a real movie, the script is laughable, with hilarious contrivances like a group of people hanging out in some bushes who just happen to film the frame-up of Luther, and the way Luther (who, if you recall, reaches more people than the evening news) can move about undetected--even blending in with the crowd at a major, televised Harrison speech--even though he's all over the news as the country's most wanted--and persecuted!--fugitive. Lusko demonstrates zero ability to lay out exposition in a remotely plausible way, as Luther's dad drops this humdinger while talking to his son about Harrison: "That's your friend...the Senator...the majority leader of the United States Senate." Really?  Who talks like that? Wouldn't Luther already know that Harrison is the majority leader? Couldn't Lusko have found a less cumbersome way to pass that info to the audience?  Critiques--like secular audiences--be damned, PERSECUTED's hysterical fantasies play to the most frothing Newsmax junkie but it at least gives some past-their-prime actors something to do while waiting for a LAW & ORDER: SVU guest spot. (PG-13, 91 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: MERCENARIES (2014); PALO ALTO (2014); and SWELTER (2014)

MERCENARIES
(US - 2014)

One of the very few titles from The Asylum to actually be released in theaters (not counting one-off crowd-participation SHARKNADO screenings for people who think SHARKNADO is a cult movie), MERCENARIES is a little more straight-faced than the typical pre-fab cult movie nonsense to roll off the company's mockbuster assembly line. Whether it's cheesy monster movies along the lines of the SHARKNADO phenomenon, MEGA SHARK VS. GIANT OCTOPUS and MEGA PYTHON VS. GATOROID, or shameless no-budget knockoffs like I AM OMEGA, TRANSMORPHERS, SUNDAY SCHOOL MUSICAL, STREET RACER, and TITANIC II, The Asylum has become synonymous with self-aware shittiness. MERCENARIES is their EXPENDABLES mockbuster, given a limited release on a handful of screens and VOD a week before THE EXPENDABLES 3, and the twist is that the heroes are all ass-kicking women in a bid to beat Sylvester Stallone's proposed EXPENDABELLES spinoff to screens (which probably isn't going to happen anyway). MERCENARIES has what probably passes for witty, self-referential dialogue, at least as much as screenwriter Edward DeRuiter is capable of pulling off, but it generally plays it straight and keeps the winking snark to a minimum. It's obvious The Asylum was taking this one a little more seriously than most of their productions and were using it to see if they could compete with the big dogs at the multiplex.  Alas, they can't. The opening credits are video-burned and the explosions all look like they were done with the Action Movie FX app on director Christopher Douglas-Olen Ray's iPhone. Ray is the son of veteran hack Fred Olen Ray, who's cranked out around 150 action and exploitation films under various names since the late '70s. The elder Ray almost had a real career at one point in the late '80s when he was giving prominent roles to aging, past-their-prime actors years before Quentin Tarantino made it trendy, but now he and Jim Wynorski pretty much have the market cornered on helming the kind of no-budget Skinemax films that run on cable at 3:00 am or terrible kiddie movies that have their world premieres on Netflix Instant. Christopher proves that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, as he's found consistent work as one of the in-house Asylum guys, and there's a few fleeting moments where MERCENARIES looks like a perfectly acceptable DTV-level actioner like his old man used to make, at least until the crappy CGI and digital blood start derailing it. MERCENARIES' biggest sin is that it's just boring, with an endless, talky mid-section that brings the whole thing to a standstill.

The film has a game cast, headed by DEATH PROOF's Zoe Bell, TERMINATOR 3 star and Uwe Boll regular Kristanna Loken, KILL BILL star-turned-TV fixture Vivica A. Fox, and BRING IT ON's Nicole Bilderback as a team of disgraced military and CIA washouts sprung from prison by NSA head Kendall ('90s DTV action star Cynthia Rothrock) when the President's daughter (Tiffany Panhilason) is abducted by international terrorist Ulrika (Stallone ex-wife and RED SONJA herself, Brigitte Nielsen). Their job: rescue the First Daughter and bring Ulrika in alive and get full pardons for their past offenses. Bell fares better here than in the unwatchable RAZE, and the others seem to be enjoying themselves, but MERCENARIES isn't nearly as fun as it should be. Some instances of ridiculous dialogue provide some occasional amusement--Rothrock describing Nielsen as "an Amazonian she-bitch in the backwoods of Shitholistan" and Fox declaring "Hell, I might even fuck George Clooney...with a strap-on!"--and segues between scenes being depicted as comic book panels show that Ray and The Asylum have the right idea, but MERCENARIES needs a better director, a better script, and a bigger budget. The action scenes are mostly competently-staged but unexciting and for every quotable zinger we get, there's ten than clang to the ground ("I don't know who's the bigger bitch...you or her" and Bell replying to "So what's the plan?" with "We go PMS From Hell on this place!"). The title quartet is fine, Rothrock is funny, and Nielsen attacks her role with gusto, so on one hand, being that it's an Asylum joint, MERCENARIES is marginally better than you might expect, but as far as theatrical releases go, they still aren't ready for the big leagues. The cast came ready to party--it's too bad the material didn't match their enthusiasm. (Unrated, 89 mins)


PALO ALTO
(US - 2014)

James Franco produced and co-stars in this adaptation of his short story collection Palo Alto Stories, a film that marks the writing and directing debut of Gia Coppola, granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola and niece of Sofia Coppola. Gia inspired and helped shape her grandfather's most recent film, the personal  TWIXT (2012), and the pair have always shared a special and tragic bond: Gia's father Gio Coppola was killed in a speedboat accident in 1986, seven months before she was born. There's no doubt Grandfather Francis takes extra pride in seeing Gia represent the next generation in the Coppola legacy.  PALO ALTO isn't a particularly distinguished debut--some good performances carry it through but the storylines have a too-familiar feel to them. We've seen too many films like this before and PALO ALTO has nothing new to say. Nevertheless, it's well-made and it's nice to see the sense of genuine love and support of Coppola family members putting in appearances in support of the first-time director. Franco's book and Coppola's film follow a loosely-connected narrative of teen angst and excess. Adults are difficult to find in this world, and the ones that are around are ineffective and irresponsible. Virginal nice-girl April (Emma Roberts) is on the soccer team and has a crush on affable stoner Teddy (a debuting Jack Kilmer, Val's lookalike son). Teddy constantly falls victim to the bad influence of his obnoxious buddy Fred (Nat Wolff of THE NAKED BROTHERS BAND), who's using April's promiscuous friend Emily (Zoe Levin). April also finds herself drawn to Mr. B (Franco), her soccer coach and a single dad who frequently has her babysit his young son. Not nearly as caustic and abrasive as Larry Clark's 1995 "wake-up call to the world" KIDS, PALO ALTO is cut from the same cloth as hard-R post-KIDS teen dramas like THIRTEEN (2003), HAVOC (2005) and TWELVE (2010), which also co-starred Roberts. It's perfectly watchable but fairly standard-issue and forgettable, though Roberts is good and young Kilmer shows promise. The large cast of familiar faces also includes Val Kilmer as April's stoner stepdad, Chris Messina, Colleen Camp, Marshall Bell, Janet Jones Gretzky, Don Novello, Margaret Qualley (THE LEFTOVERS), Christian Madsen (son of Michael), Ana Bogdanovich (Peter's sister), and Coppola family members Talia Shire, Jacqui Getty (Gia's mom), and the voice of Francis as a judge sentencing Teddy to community service after a DUI hit and run. (R, 100 mins)

SWELTER
(US - 2014)

Meeting a demand that doesn't exist, SWELTER arrives in 2014 looking and feeling a lot like any number of Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez knockoffs that were taking up space on video store shelves in the late 1990s. It's got a quartet of criminals in matching black suits to remind you of RESERVOIR DOGS. It's got a shitkicker bar to remind you of FROM DUSK TILL DAWN. It's got hip pop culture dissertations and references to people like Joey Bishop and Jayne Mansfield to remind you of other possible waiters and waitresses at Jack Rabbit Slim's in PULP FICTION. And it also wears its western influences--Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, in particular--on its sleeve. But writer/director Keith Parmer doesn't come close to emulating the style, pace, and filmmaking skills of Tarantino or an in-his-prime Rodriguez, and despite some potential and one standout supporting performance, SWELTER is a draggy, dreary, and dull endurance test of a thriller. After ten years in prison for a Vegas casino heist they pulled off while wearing Rat Pack masks that look nothing like the members of the Rat Pack, a crew of vengeful criminals have arrived in the "middle of fucking nowhere" Death Valley town of Baker in the midst of a record-shattering heat wave. There's leader Cole (Grant Bowler of the SyFy series DEFIANCE) and his psychotic younger brother Kane (co-producer Daniele Favilli), who are in no way characters influenced by the Gecko brothers in FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, along with hot-tempered Boyd (Josh Henderson) and the calm, reserved Stillman (Jean-Claude Van Damme in some offbeat and ultimately squandered casting). They're in Baker looking for Sheriff Bishop (busy TV actor Lennie James), who suffers from amnesia and can't remember the events that brought him to Baker a decade earlier. It turns out he used to be known as Pike (also, "Pike Bishop" being the name of William Holden's character in THE WILD BUNCH) and was the fifth member of Cole's Rat Pack crew. Bishop/Pike made off with the $10 million but suffered a head injury in the escape and can't remember what he did with the loot. That's not a good enough excuse for Cole, who wants his money and Bishop's girlfriend (MARIA FULL OF GRACE Oscar nominee Catalina Sandino Moreno)--his ex--back.

It's clear that Parmer is a fan of old westerns and running that through a late '90s indie crime thriller filter isn't a bad idea in theory, but nothing in SWELTER works. The pace is extremely slow, the characters are cardboard cutouts, and only a slumming Alfred Molina as the drunk town doc manages to hold your attention, but he's not in it nearly enough. It's nice to see British actor James getting the lead role in a feature, but he's been better-utilized elsewhere. Parmer's biggest blunder is wasting an opportunity to let Van Damme show his range. Van Damme appearing in character actor mode is a significant departure from the norm for him, so I'm utterly bewildered as to why he's saddled with the thankless role of Grant Bowler's sidekick. Bowler's OK in a third-string Sean Bean kind-of way, but not having Van Damme play the chief villain is an absolutely boneheaded decision on everyone's part. Subplots about Bishop's girlfriend's daughter (Freya Tingley) and the town preacher (Arie Verveen) only exist to pad the running time until the final showdown between Bishop and Cole, complete with a background windmill making the same creaking noise as the one in the opening sequence of a ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. The references are nice and Parmer is obviously a movie nerd who knows his shit, but you have to bring more to the table than that. Giving Van Damme a reason to be in the movie other than serving as the most prominently displayed cast member in the DVD cover art would've been a good first step. At one point, Van Damme groans "I'm getting too old for this shit." Indeed you are, sir. (R, 100 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: TWIXT (2012) and TRANCE (2013)

TWIXT
(US - 2012)

Since taking a decade-long sabbatical from directing and returning with 2007's YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH and 2009's TETRO, the legendary Francis Ford Coppola has essentially abandoned Hollywood and the mainstream and made it a stated point that he's only making personal films for himself.  While the commercial appeal of the ponderous YOUTH and the intermittently-interesting TETRO were limited, they admirably avoided the self-indulgence that normally accompanies such endeavors, and while both are little more than interesting curios by a fabled filmmaker, the uneven TWIXT is Coppola's most satisfying effort of this post-comeback "experimental" phase.  Recalling the low-budget B-movies Coppola cut his teeth on as an assistant to Roger Corman back in the early 1960s, TWIXT more often than not feels like an old-school horror movie that you used to find on late-night TV, at least until it starts taking esoteric, art-house detours as it goes on.  In his best role in years, Val Kilmer stars as hard-drinking horror novelist Hall Baltimore, once hailed as a fresh, next-big-thing literary talent but now "the bargain-basement Stephen King," reduced to holding unattended book signings in small-town carry-outs.  He finds a fan in gregarious Swann Valley sheriff Bobby LaGrange (an enjoyably hammy Bruce Dern), who wants to collaborate with him on a book where they solve a series of brutal stakings that LaGrange believes are the work of some goth kids who hang out across the lake.  Initially apprehensive, but with mounting debt, his wife (Kilmer's ex-wife Joanne Whalley) threatening to sell his priceless, bound-by-Walt Whitman-himself copy of Leaves of Grass, and needing to move on from the recent death of his 14-year-old daughter in a boating accident, Baltimore pitches the idea to his publisher (David Paymer) and gets an advance...that he conveniently keeps secret from LaGrange.  Meanwhile, Baltimore is visited by a strange girl named V (Elle Fanning) that no one else sees, and while out wandering through the Swann Valley woods, he nearly falls off a rope bridge but is rescued by the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe (Ben Chaplin), who takes him under his wing and shows him the dark secrets of the town.  As Baltimore struggles with the book, he comes to terms with the guilt over his daughter's death and with Poe's help, starts uncovering the truth about what happened to V and how it ties into the serial stakings that are occupying the sheriff's time.

Coppola financed TWIXT out of his own pocket and when it failed to land a US distributor, he ended up arranging a scant few screenings himself before setting up a VOD distribution deal.  Look, I realize the commercial prospects for an artsy endeavor like this are limited, but can someone explain to me what kind of bullshit state of cinema we're in where Francis Ford Fucking Coppola has to personally schlep his latest movie to individual theaters?  He even shot a couple of sequences in 3-D!  Some may find TWIXT meandering and obfuscating, but it feels a lot like an old Corman or William Castle flick, or sometimes like a TWILIGHT ZONE episode, especially since a good chunk of it is shot in black & white.  It its more accessible sections, it occasionally feels--perhaps because of the presence of THE 'BURBS and THE HOLE co-star Dern--like the kind of throwback film that Joe Dante might make.  Coppola's script never really ties everything together all that securely and the ending is a bit too abrupt, but it really captures the feeling of those old low-budget movies without doing so ironically.  Coppola keeps it legit because he came from that school.  He's not a young filmmaker paying ironic homage to it--he was actually there.  That's just part of the personal touch Coppola brings to TWIXT.  Baltimore's overwhelming grief over the loss of a child is something Coppola knows all too well: he lost his 22-year-old son Gio in a 1986 boating accident that's identically recreated in the way Baltimore's daughter is killed.  Gio's wife was pregnant at the time of his death, and their daughter Gia worked on TWIXT with her grandfather.  Knowing the story behind TWIXT and how it brings together a grandfather who lost his son and a granddaughter who never got to meet her father adds a powerful subtext to the film. 

And it's great to see guys like Kilmer and Dern getting meaty, starring roles for a change.  Kilmer's performance as Doc Holliday in 1993's TOMBSTONE is one of the most beloved and oft-quoted in modern cinema, but he's spent much of the last decade in a stunning career free-fall that found him starring in some of the worst of the worst in the world of DTV with unwatchable garbage like MOSCOW ZERO, THE CHAOS EXPERIMENT, PLAYED (where his character's repeated "You are not gonna taco!" failed to become the new "I'm your Huckleberry") and several ill-advised collaborations with 50 Cent.  Kilmer is an eccentric actor who's frequently been labeled difficult (THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU director John Frankenheimer: "Will Rogers never met Val Kilmer") and has a tendency to run amok in some of these DTV films where he's only on the set for a couple of days and is given room to riff and improv.  Coppola successfully reins him in here, but does give him some leeway in an amusing scene where an increasingly intoxicated Baltimore struggles to get a single sentence written, allowing Kilmer to once more bust out his famous Marlon Brando impression in addition to an impeccable James Mason.  I've long maintained that Kilmer still has some real work and maybe even an Oscar left in him, and it was an admirable and perhaps conscious decision on Coppola's part to give Kilmer--a guy who can probably relate to the sorry state of Hall Baltimore's career--the lead role in this project.  These three most recent Coppola films probably won't even make his career highlight reel, and of course I don't mean to imply that it's on the level of THE GODFATHER or its first sequel, or APOCALYPSE NOW, or THE CONVERSATION, but for a more thorough understanding of him as a filmmaker and as a still-grieving father, there's a strong argument that TWIXT is essential Coppola.  (R, 88 mins)


TRANCE
(France/US/UK - 2013)

Even after the crowd-pleasing Best Picture Oscar winner SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (2008), the grueling Best Picture Oscar nominee 127 HOURS (2010), and supervising the razzle-dazzle of the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony, TRANCE, the latest from director Danny Boyle, didn't inspire much confidence from distributor Fox, who only rolled it out on 443 screens at its widest release.  It's easy to say TRANCE, a remake of a 2001 British TV-movie, is Boyle's attempt at a Christopher Nolan mindfuck, but the head games here seem too contrived and complicated just for its own sake, eventually devolving into trying-too-hard misdirection and incoherence.  Boyle's direction is as stylish as ever, but the plot's intriguing twists and turns and the eventual revelation that what you thought the film was about isn't what it's about at all probably seemed clever on the page, but it grows tiresome on the screen.

 

 

Working with screenwriter John Hodge (SHALLOW GRAVE, TRAINSPOTTING, A LIFE LESS ORDINARY) for the first time since 2000's THE BEACH, Boyle's TRANCE gives us mid-level London art auctioneer Simon (James McAvoy), who takes a nasty blow to the head during a museum theft where a priceless Goya is ripped off by Franck (Vincent Cassel) and his crew.  Franck discovers the canvas has been sliced from the frame and once Simon, hailed as a hero by the media, is released from the hospital, he and his gang endlessly hassle and torture him, believing he stashed the painting somewhere.  But Simon is suffering from amnesia, and can't remember anything during the robbery itself.  Franck sends Simon to hypnotherapist Elizabeth Lamb (Rosario Dawson), hoping she can put him in a trance and extract the information from wherever it is in his memories.  Elizabeth figures out what's going on and wants a percentage of the take.  Then a love triangle develops.  And then things get really twisty.  The thing is, the more twists that Boyle and Hodge pile on, the more absurd TRANCE becomes, though I'm sure it's some kind of snickering joke on their part that a major element of the plot hinges on Dawson's shaved bush (the actress does some nudity here that leaves nothing to the imagination and should make her a frontrunner at the next Mr. Skin's Anatomy Awards).  By the end, when all the pieces are (I think) in place, the reaction is less "Whoa!" and more "Really?!  All that for this?" Some of those pieces have to get forced in place for the puzzle to be complete, and even in a film with this many acceptable implausibilities, it's asking a lot for an audience to buy a body decomposing in the trunk of a car for months and no one--least of all the people riding in the backseat--realizing it.  TRANCE is never dull or uninteresting and McAvoy and Cassel are good, but Dawson feels a little miscast, despite her instantly legendary nude scene. Initial reaction might be mild disappointment, but something about this feels like it might be one of those movies that play better when viewed again in a year or two. (R, 101 mins)