EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE (US - 2019) Directed by Joe Berlinger. Written by Michael Werwie. Cast: Zac Efron, Lily Collins, Kaya Scodelario, John Malkovich, Jim Parsons, Jeffrey Donovan, Angela Sarafyan, Dylan Baker, Brian Geraghty, Terry Kinney, Haley Joel Osment, James Hetfield, Grace Victoria Cox, Morgan Pyle, Ken Strunk, Justin McCombs, Ryan Wesley Gilreath, Tess Talbot, Forba Shepherd (R, 110 mins) Infamous serial killer Ted Bundy has been the subject of numerous true crime books, nearly a dozen movies, and even more TV documentaries. The 1986 NBC TV-movie THE DELIBERATE STRANGER capped off of a banner year for Mark Harmon, who received critical acclaim and a Golden Globe nomination for his performance as Bundy on top of being named that year's Sexiest Man Alive by People. Until then, the former college football star was known as a competent TV actor who was gaining some momentum on ST. ELSEWHERE as lothario Dr. Bobby Caldwell, but playing Ted Bundy unquestionably opened some doors for him and turned him into a big-screen headliner for a couple of years before returning to journeyman duty on TV, eventually finding his career role on the still-running CBS series NCIS. With his charm and good looks, Harmon was perfect casting for a truly reprehensible serial killer who didn't fit the stereotype, one of the main reasons Bundy remains such a popular topic today. The same degree of perfect casting applies to Zac Efron, who made his name as a teen superstar with Disney's incredibly popular HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL franchise. As the years have gone on, Efron has found steady work in comedies both good (NEIGHBORS) and godawful (DIRTY GRANDPA), and his attempts to branch out and be taken seriously have yielded results both interesting (ME AND ORSON WELLES) and woefully misbegotten (THE PAPERBOY). With an absurd panini beard and about ten mintues of screen time, Efron managed to steal this year's earlier THE BEACH BUM from both Matthew McConaughey and Snoop Dogg, and in playing Ted Bundy in the Netflix original film EXTREMELY WICKED, SHOCKINGLY EVIL AND VILE (a verbatim description of Bundy used by the judge who sentenced him to die in the Florida electric chair), Efron uses his persona to chilling effectiveness in a performance that matches Harmon's, but through no fault of his, the film only works in fits and starts.
That's largely due to the approach taken by director Joe Berlinger, helming his first narrative feature since 2000's little-loved BOOK OF SHADOWS: BLAIR WITCH 2. Best known for his documentaries like the PARADISE LOST trilogy detailing the saga of the West Memphis Three, and Metallica's SOME KIND OF MONSTER, Berlinger also directed this year's earlier Netflix documentary series CONVERSATIONS WITH A KILLER: THE TED BUNDY TAPES. A companion piece of sorts, EXTREMELY WICKED is based on the memoir The Phantom Prince: My Life with Ted Bundy by Elizabeth Kendall, who was romantically involved with Bundy for several years until his initial incarceration in the mid-1970s. Played here by Lily Collins, Liz Kloepfer (her maiden name) is a college student and single mom when she meets Bundy in a Seattle bar in 1969. They instantly hit it off and the film cuts to 1974, with both of them pursuing law degrees and Ted a loving father figure to Liz's daughter Molly. They maintain a long-distance relationship while Bundy is in law school in Utah, where he's picked up as a suspect in a kidnapping and eventually accused of the crime. He keeps giving Liz flimsy excuses about being set up, but when an Aspen, CO detective (Terry Kinney) starts asking questions and contacting Liz, it sets off a chain reaction of investigators in several states gradually realizing that they're all pursuing the same suspect. Despite endlessly proclaiming his innocence, it looks so dire for Bundy that even his own lawyer (Jeffrey Donovan) bails on him with an insincere "Good luck."
EXTREMELY WICKED ostensibly looks at the Bundy story from Liz Kloepfer's point-of-view, but Berlinger sort-of drops the ball on that angle, starting with a rapid jump from 1969 to 1974. We don't see much of the foundation of her relationship with Bundy, or why she sticks with him despite all the evidence against him, and the film ultimately resorts delaying a reveal in the story until it can make a dramatic impact, except that it doesn't really land. Berlinger obviously knows Efron-as-Bundy is the selling point here, so it doesn't take long to shift to that focus, whether it's his two escapes from custody (one from a courthouse and the other from an Aspen jail) and his circus of a trial in Florida (where he fled after Aspen), when he fires his public defender (Brian Geraghty) and represents himself, with prison groupies forming a Bundy fan club in the courtroom, cheering him on and often describing him as "dreamy" and admitting to reporters that they fantasize about him. Exploring that bizarre phenomenon (known as hybristophilia, with Bundy arguably the most prominent example) might've been a more interesting subject for Berlinger to explore, especially when it comes to the pathetic Carole Ann Boone (Kaya Scodelario), a former co-worker of Bundy's in Seattle who follows him to Utah and eventually to Florida, all in the hopes of getting him to fall in love with her.
We never see any of Bundy's killings, but with his tangles with the law and his antics in the courtroom where he often spars with the sardonically folksy judge (John Malkovich) and the incredulous prosecutor (Jim Parsons), all we're left with concerning Liz is her increasing dependence on booze and a hesitant relationship with her nice-guy co-worker Jerry (Haley Joel Osment), who keeps unsuccessfully trying to get her to forget Bundy and move on. This only leads to cliches, like the inevitable scene of Liz gathering all of her empty liquor bottles and throwing them in a trash can, and Berlinger resorting to Scorsese needle-drops like Bundy being hauled out of court to Emerson, Lake & Palmer's "Lucky Man," and escaping from the Aspen courthouse from a second-story window to The Box Tops' "The Letter." EXTREMELY WICKED is a serial killer thriller that wants to be different, realizes there's not enough there for what it wants to do, then tries to have it both ways, which only results in an uneven structure and a lack of focus. In other words, it's flawed but not without interest, thanks mostly to a revelatory performance by Efron and some solid supporting work from the cast, particularly Scodelario, who's good enough here that you wish the story was being told from her POV.
Kevin Smith's 2014 man-surgically-transformed-into-walrus horror film TUSK was the result of Smith talking about a prank classified ad on his podcast and his listeners tweeting "#WalrusYes" if they wanted to see a movie about it. The TUSK spinoff YOGA HOSERS (the second of Smith's planned "True North" trilogy), released on just 140 screens, has an even more flimsy foundation, a horror comedy built around two minor characters: the Colleens, eye-rolling, can't even BFFs who work at the Canadian maple syrup convenience store chain Eh-2-Zed. Smith conceived YOGA HOSERS as a movie for his daughter Harley Quinn Smith (as Colleen McKenzie) and her friend Lily-Rose Depp (as Colleen Collette), and flat-out told the crowd attending its Sundance 2016 premiere that he wasn't making movies for audiences anymore. Mission accomplished. Possibly the worst horror comedy since 1987's BLOOD DINER, YOGA HOSERS is an unwatchable Kevin Smith home movie that manages to go 88 minutes without a single humorous moment, with the once-relevant and respected writer-director having no clue how teenage girls talk and pretty much relying on punchlines about Canadian accents that wouldn't have made it past the first read-through of the STRANGE BREW script 33 years ago. Did he think just having the Colleens repeatedly say "Soo-ree boot that!" would suffice? He haplessly tries to turn things like "yoga hoser" and "This is so basic" into the new "snoochie boochies," and by the time Jason Mewes shows up as a cop (!), it's pretty clear that Smith has turned into an embarrassing dad trying too hard to be cool around his daughter and her friends. Even Colleen McKenzie shouting Dante-from-CLERKS' oft-invoked "I'm not even supposed to be here today!" only serves as a depressing reminder of what Smith used to be. Other things Smith found funny enough to include in YOGA HOSERS: every character getting a hash-tagged "InstaCam" intro accompanied by '80s video game music; Justin Long as a yoga instructor named "Yogi Bayer," who says things like "Yoga Fett, soo-ree not soo-ree!"; everyone talking about hockey and snacking on "Pucky Charms"; the Colleens singing Styx's "Babe" and making Colleen Collette's dad (Tony Hale) cry like a baby as his girlfriend (Natasha Lyonne) refers to her cleavage as a "bouncy-house"; SNL's Sasheer Zamata as their no-nonsense principal Principal Invincible; Stan Lee as a 9-1-1 operator who answers "9-1-1, eh!"; a villain who speaks in Al Pacino, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Adam West impressions; and Lily-Rose's dad Johnny Depp, under a ton of makeup, looking like a syphilitic Kurt Vonnegut and with a bizarre French-Swedish hybrid accent, reprising his not-even-remotely beloved Guy LaPointe private eye character from TUSK.
What happened to Kevin Smith? It takes a good half hour for some semblance of a plot to form, and it seems at times like it's trying to go for a YA version of Don Coscarelli's JOHN DIES AT THE END sort-of thing, minus the ambition, creativity, and comedy. The Colleens, after getting some info from LaPointe, are targeted by Satanists working with the reanimated Andronicus Arcane (Ralph Garman), a cryogenically frozen Canadian Nazi stirred awake by the sounds of GlamThrax, the Colleens' band with 35-year-old drummer Ichabod (Adam Brody), a character named as such for the sole purpose of calling him "Dickabod" immediately after his introduction. Arcane is a protege of evil Adrian Arcand (Haley Joel Osment in flashbacks), the leader of the Canadian Nazi party in WWII whose "La Solution Finale" involved putting Canadian Jews on ships in Hudson Bay and deliberately sinking them. Integral to Arcane's nonsensical scheme are the Bratzis, 12-inch-tall PUPPET MASTER-looking Nazis made of bratwurst and with concentrated sauerkraut for blood. The Bratzis attack by burrowing up the asses of their victims and out the mouth, when they exclaim things like "Wunderbar!" and "Das Boot!" The Bratzis are played via prosthetics and CGI trickery by Kevin Smith himself, and I'm done here. (PG-13, 88 mins)
ELIMINATORS
(US/UK - 2016)
Arriving not long after the entertaining sequel-but-actually-remake HARD TARGET 2, ELIMINATORS--not a remake of the 1986 Empire Pictures cult favorite--is the latest Scott Adkins actioner, casting him as Martin Parker, an American widower living in London with his young daughter Carly (Lily Ann Harland-Stubbs). Martin leads a quiet life and works a boring job as a parking garage security guard, but his mysterious past is out in the open after a home invasion leads to him killing the intruders and being placed under arrest with his face all over TV. This catches the attention of Charles Cooper (James Cosmo), a powerful arms dealer who knows Martin's true identity: he's really Thomas McKenzie, an FBI agent who infiltrated Cooper's operation and was eventually placed in witness protection and shipped off to London. Cooper heads to London and hires Bishop (WWE star Wade Barrett), the most dangerous hit man in Europe, to find Martin/McKenzie and take him out. A Universal/WWE production shot in the UK and with a plot that makes it a sort-of B-action version of A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, ELIMINATORS looks a lot more polished and big-screen-ready than most of Adkins' work for Millennium/NuImage, though director James Nunn (who previously worked with Adkins on the dismal GREEN STREET HOOLIGANS: UNDERGROUND) doesn't quite have the skills that an Isaac Florentine would've brought to the proceedings. After an engaging opening act, ELIMINATORS bogs down into one predictable plot development and contrivance after another, and for being Europe's most lethal hired assassin, Bishop sure seems to screw things up a lot and prove not very adept at getting the job done. It's pretty dumb and offers nothing new, but it's entertaining enough on a slow night as far as by-the-numbers Redbox and Netflix-ready action movies go. Adkins brings his A-game to this and once again shows he's ready for bigger things, and while he's been getting supporting roles in high-profile projects like DOCTOR STRANGE, it's really time for Hollywood to realize that its next big action star has been busting his ass in B-movies for at least a decade now. (R, 94 mins)
SIREN (US - 2016)
A feature-length expansion/spinoff of the "Amateur Night" segment of the 2012 horror anthology V/H/S, SIREN isn't always successful but proves to be more engaging than its overrated source film and its two sequels. "Amateur Night" dealt with three dudebros whose plan to get a hooker and shoot an amateur porn video in their hotel room backfires when the woman turns out to be a demonic, monstrous succubus. SIREN thankfully jettisons V/H/S's found-footage angle and has four guys on a wild bachelor party weekend for Jonah (JOHN DIES AT THE END's Chase Williamson), which leads them to a private strip club/sex dungeon in the middle-of-nowhere at the mansion of wealthy Mr. Nyx (Justin Welborn). Nyx is a collector of things supernatural, with many seductive non-human freaks imprisoned as sex workers and staying in their human form for his adventurous customers with disposable income. Of course, among his girls are "Amateur Night"'s nympho demon Lily (Hannah Fierman reprises her role). While Jonah's douchebag brother Mac (Michael Aaron Milligan) and his more laid-back buddies Rand (Hayes Mercure) and Elliott (Randy McDowell) party and fall victim to drinks laced with hallucinogenic leeches, Lily takes a shine to Jonah, who decides to be a hero and break her out of what he assumes is some kind of sexual slavery/human trafficking operation. A grateful Lily repays the favor by declaring Jonah hers with a chirpy "I like you" even as she shapeshifts, sprouts wings and lets loose a long tail that she uses for some unpleasant ass-play on the groom-to-be in a memorably twisted sex scene. Even at a brief 83 minutes, SIREN still doesn't have quite enough to justify its expansion to its own movie, but it gets a lot from Fierman going all in with an admirably fearless performance. Director/co-writer Gregg Bishop finds his voice late in the game as SIREN becomes increasingly demented and starts to take on a vintage Full Moon quality, suddenly bearing a strong resemblance to the kind of quietly unsettling horror film someone like Stuart Gordon would've made in the 1990s, like CASTLE FREAK. Not a start-to-finish winner, but SIREN gets better as it goes on, and ends up being a not-bad little horror sleeper. (Unrated, 83 mins)
TUSK (US - 2014) Written and directed by Kevin Smith. Cast: Michael Parks, Justin Long, Haley Joel Osment, Genesis Rodriguez, Guy LaPointe, Harley Quinn Smith, Lily-Rose Melody Depp, Jennifer Schwalbach. (R, 107 mins)
Since becoming one of the iconic faces of the '90s indie cinema explosion, Kevin Smith has spent the better part of the last decade trying to find a niche as a filmmaker ambling into his 40s. His 2004 film JERSEY GIRL got caught up in the post-GIGLI, "Bennifer" backlash. 2006's CLERKS II was a likable if unnecessary sequel, and 2008's ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO was accused of being a Judd Apatow ripoff. After parting ways with Harvey Weinstein and dropping his View Askew production banner, Smith helmed the laughless Bruce Willis/Tracy Morgan buddy cop comedy COP OUT (2010) and self-released the ambitious but not always successful thriller RED STATE (2011), a complete departure from his previous work that found him taking aim at the hate-mongering Westboro Baptist Church. Smith spends a lot of time on speaking engagements and his SMODCAST podcast, which led him to make his latest, the horror film TUSK. In the SMODCAST episode titled "The Walrus and the Carpenter," Smith and producer Scott Mosier were pranked by a classified ad that involved someone getting free room and board if they dressed like a walrus. They spent an hour of the "Walrus" episode batting around hypothetical ideas and at the end, Smith asked listeners to tweet "#WalrusYes" if he should make the movie and "#WalrusNo" if he shouldn't. Of course, "#WalrusYes" won out and now we have TUSK.
Shot in quickie fashion in a mere two and a half weeks in November 2013, TUSK may not have the shitty special effects of a SHARKNADO, but it's still every bit as much of a prefab cult/midnight movie and Smith should be smart enough to know that true cult movies aren't conceived as cult movies. Like any of the SyFy or Asylum silliness, TUSK would make a much better two-and-a-half minute fake trailer than an hour-and-45-minute movie. Obnoxious podcaster Wallace Bryton (Justin Long) co-hosts the raunchy and offensive THE NOT-SEE PARTY with his best friend Teddy Craft (Haley Joel Osment). Their premise is that Wallace goes around and gathers stories and conveys them to the travel-phobic Teddy, who refuses to leave Los Angeles, a podcast premise about as flimsy as that of TUSK. Anyway, Wallace is heading to Winnipeg to interview "The Kill Bill Kid," a viral video sensation who sliced off his own leg with a sword while doing half-assed martial arts moves in his garage. Wallace arrives at the guy's house only to find that his and Teddy's constant podcast mockery has driven the man to suicide. Hoping it's not a wasted trip, Wallace does some snooping around and finds a flyer advertising free room and board to anyone who listens to the homeowner's tales of seafaring adventure. The old sea salt is Howard Howe (Michael Parks), a wheelchair-bound old man who regales Wallace with tales of Hemingway and quotes from Coleridge and a long, emotional story about how his life was saved by a friendly walrus after a shipwreck. Wallace realizes too late that Howe has drugged him. When he wakes up, he's missing a leg as Howe reveals his ultimate plan: he misses his walrus friend--dubbed Mr. Tusk--so much that he's going to surgically reconfigure Wallace's body and sew him into a suit, allowing him to go "full walrus" and keep him captive in a secret basement aquarium.
The idea of a walrus-obsessed psycho going balls-out HUMAN CENTIPEDE on a self-absorbed hipster dipshit has endless possibilities for dark humor and the macabre, but Smith is plowing through this thing so quickly that there's no focus. The whole film is obviously a tossed-off goof for Smith, though admittedly, seeing Wallace's hipster mustache being used for walrus whiskers is hilarious. Smith gets a good amount of credible menace from Parks, who's enjoyed a busy cult rebirth since a Quentin Tarantino rescue mission led to his being cast as grumbly Texas Ranger Earl McGraw in the opening sequence of Robert Rodriguez's FROM DUSK TILL DAWN (1996). Now 76, Parks has an inherently off-kilter speaking and acting style that wasn't fully appreciated in his youth, but guys like Tarantino, Rodriguez, Smith, and especially Jim Mickle in the 2013 remake of WE ARE WHAT WE ARE, have made good use of him in his elder statesman years. Smith cast Parks as a deranged, Fred Phelps-inspired evangelical madman in RED STATE, and TUSK gives the veteran actor his meatiest role in years, waxing rhapsodic about the sea, whiskey, women, and yes, walruses. But a little of it goes a long way, and once Long's Wallace is surgically mutilated, his tongue removed, and the femurs in his legs shaped into walrus tusks, the film has pretty much made its point and played all of its batshit cards but still has nearly an hour to go.
Much of that second hour is devoted to, and completely derailed by, the arrival of Quebecois private eye Guy LaPointe, played by one Guy LaPointe. It's a mystery guest star, and since the cat's pretty much out of the bag and a visit to TUSK's IMDb page spoils it anyway, LaPointe is actually a cross-eyed, chain-smoking Johnny Depp, sporting a beret, a wig, a fake goatee, and the most intentionally ridiculous French accent this side of Pepe Le Pew. Looking like a homeless, meth-addled Inspector Clouseau, LaPointe assists Wallace's girlfriend Ally (Genesis Rodriguez) and Teddy in their search when Wallace manages to leave frantic voice mails for them. LaPointe has been pursuing serial killer Howe, the latest in a long line of false identities, for years, estimating that he's killed and dismembered 23 people. Depp only worked on the film for two days at the very end of the shoot, which was more than enough time for Smith to let him completely run rampant with his grab-bag of affectations, ad-libbing and rambling on endlessly, especially in a painfully tedious flashback scene where he actually meets Howe. There's been much evidence of late to suggest that audiences are getting bored with Depp and his mannered performances, and while he's only in the last 30 or so minutes of TUSK, he's a key factor in it stopping dead in its tracks. That's also on Smith, who gets a dread-filled momentum going in the relationship between Howe and the transformed Wallace and steers it straight into a ditch by being far too accommodating with Depp's worst tendencies as the increasingly hammy actor seems hellbent on fast-tracking it to the Nic Cage self-parody phase of his career.
Scenes of Howe and the walrusified Wallace swimming together, Howe singing to Wallace, and the climactic battle between Wallace and a walrus-costumed Howe set to Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk" are the kind of things that belong in a fake trailer. Character development is sketchy--we learn through periodic cutaways that Wallace is a cheating asshole who probably loves Ally but can't resist the "road head" that his travels offer--and Rodriguez has a very good scene where she delivers a long monologue, spilling her feelings about Wallace directly to the camera, but it belongs in another movie. The more TUSK goes on, the more it starts to resemble the kind of prank that inspired it in the first place, like something its maker never really thought through or didn't fully understand how to approach. An unsettling, Cronenberg-ian body-horror film could've been made here, but instead, Smith opted for a self-indulgent home movie that only he and his buddies find funny. TUSK barely hangs together and it's a coin flip whether this or COP OUT is Smith's worst film, but everyone here apparently had so much fun that they're reconvening in his action comedy YOGA HOSERS, due out next summer, with Depp unfortunately returning as Guy LaPointe, which I don't see becoming his next Jack Sparrow.
