On Blu-ray/DVD: SPEED KILLS (2018) and THE CAR: ROAD TO REVENGE (2019)

SPEED KILLS
(US/UK - 2018)

Remember last summer when everyone had a good laugh over how terrible GOTTI was? Who knew that it was just John Travolta's warm-up act for SPEED KILLS?  Well, congratulations, BATTLEFIELD EARTH, because you're no longer Travolta's worst movie. Another true crime saga that might as well be comprised of GOTTI outtakes, SPEED KILLS stars the two-time Oscar-nominee and former actor--also one of 42 credited producers and wearing what appears to be his GOTTI rug after it was left out in the rain and he tried to dry it in the microwave--as Ben Aronoff, a thinly-veiled and likely legally-mandated rechristening of Don Aronow, a champion speedboat racer and the head of powerboat manufacturer Cigarette Racing, who was killed in a Miami mob hit in 1987. The film then flashes back to his beginnings in 1962, after he made fortune as a New Jersey construction magnate and moved to Florida to pursue an interest in speedboat racing, quickly falling into a "business arrangement" with famed mobster Meyer Lansky (James Remar). His racing and his business soon take precedence over his family, much to the chagrin of his devoted wife Kathy (Jennifer Esposito) and their eldest son (Charlie Gillespie), who winds up paralyzed in a boating accident trying to emulate his superstar father. This dramatic turn is conveyed in narration from beyond the grave by Aronoff, who says "While I was winning championships, I was losing something far more important." He gets over that pretty quickly and is soon hooked up with Emily (Katheryn Winnick), the girlfriend of Jordan's King Hussein (Prashant Shah), who's one of Aronoff's clients. Through the years--it's often difficult to tell because the period detail is atrocious and no one looks any different from 1962 to 1987--Aronoff's speedboats are the transport of choice for South American drug smugglers, who come to him to buy in bulk as he willingly provides false registrations. This catches the attention of FBI Agent Lopez (Amaury Nolasco), who sports the same shaved head and perfectly manscaped stubble in scenes set from the late 1960s to 1987. Tied to Lansky's outfit even after the aging gangster's death, Aronoff tries to make some side deals, including massive government contracts manufacturing boats for both the DEA and the Coast Guard, which comes about after he sells a Blue Thunder speedboat to Vice President George H.W. Bush (Matthew Modine). This doesn't sit will with Jules Bergman (Jordi Molla), the Lansky organization's man in Miami, or with Robbie Reemer (an embarrassingly bad Kellan Lutz), Lansky's hotheaded nephew who wants his cut of Aronoff's action.

Like GOTTI, SPEED KILLS is a collection of scenes in search of a coherent story. It's no wonder director John Luessenhop (TEXAS CHAINSAW) took his name off the finished film, with credit going to apparent Alan Smithee protegee "Jodi Scurfield." It's hard telling how this gets from one point to another, even as you're watching it. Aronoff expresses an interest in speedboat racing, and the next thing you know, he's a speedboat legend with deep mob ties and a completely new family. Esposito just disappears from the film, as does another Aronoff girlfriend (Moran Atias), when he sees Emily, sleeps with her, then in the very next scene, they've got a toddler son whose name we never even hear. There's no dramatic tension, no logical timeline of events, and no reason at all to care. It's like Travolta saw Tom Cruise in AMERICAN MADE and decided to make his own home movie version of it. It's unacceptably sloppy, from the rudimentary, Playstation 1-level CGI during a boat race in a massive storm to a close-up of a subpoena with a misspelled "SUBPEONA" on it. A film so ineptly-made and irredeemably awful that you'll feel sorry for Tom Sizemore being in it, SPEED KILLS is Travolta hitting absolute bottom. When the camera focuses on Aronoff dying after being shot multiple times in his car (of course, there's a close-up of his watch stopping as he takes his last breath, for maximum hackneyed dramatic effect), Travolta's strangely cryptic narration intones "I was on top of the world!" So, who exactly are we talking about here? (R, 102 mins)

The makers of SPEED KILLS don't give a shit. Why should you? 

THE CAR: ROAD TO REVENGE
(US - 2019)

It was demanded by no one, but 42 years after the 1977 demonic car-from-Hell cult classic THE CAR, Universal decided to bestow upon us a DTV sequel from DEATH RACE 2050 director G.J. Echternkamp, who's not exactly shaping up to be the next Roel Reine. It's really a reboot at best, and actually feels more like a ripoff of the 1986 sci-fi thriller THE WRAITH. Shot on barely-dressed sets that make it look like BLADE RUNNER on a Bulgarian backlot, the dreary THE CAR: ROAD TO REVENGE is set in a dystopian future where James Caddock (BATTLESTAR GALACTICA's Jamie Bamber), an ambitious, unscrupulous district attorney, is going all out to ensure the conviction and execution of the city's criminal element. He's got a data chip containing a ton of incriminating evidence against Talen (Martin Hancock), a megalomaniacal scientist and crime lord who's created an army of genetically-enhanced street punks who look like they wandered in from a Thunderdome cosplay convention. Talen's goons break into Caddock's office, torture him, and toss him out of his office window, sending him crashing through the roof of his high-tech sports car. This causes a melding of sorts, Caddock's spirit fusing with the car to become an instrument of driverless revenge. Meanwhile, hard-nosed cop Reiner (DEFIANCE's Grant Bowler) tracks down Caddock's ex-girlfriend Daria (Kathleen Munroe), who was seen with him the night he was murdered and is now being pursued by Talen, the assumption being that he stashed the data chip with her.

What does any of this have to do with THE CAR? Jack shit, that's what. Universal's press release sees fit to mention Ronny Cox "returning as The Mechanic," but considering he played not a mechanic but sheriff James Brolin's deputy in the 1977 film, it begs the question, "Has anyone in Universal's 1440 DTV division even seen THE CAR?" Cox turns up about 65 minutes in and exits five minutes later as a junkyard owner who finds Caddock's damaged car and switches its parts with an old relic that's identical to the customized 1971 Lincoln Continental used in the original, after which it repays the favor by running him over and killing him. Cox is never shown with any other cast members and it's doubtful they flew him all the way to Bulgaria for a two-scene cameo that looks exactly like something hastily-added in post to get someone from the original film onboard after James Brolin repeatedly let their calls to go voice mail. Filled with janky CGI, over-the-top gore, badly-dubbed Bulgarian bit players, and a bunch of shitty, dated nu-metal on the soundtrack (including a 2012 song by ex-Queensryche guitarist Kelly Gray and Queensryche drummer Scott Rockenfield sporting the prophetic title "No Redemption"), THE CAR: ROAD TO REVENGE is one of the most cynical scams perpetrated by a major studio in a quite a while. It's a sequel in name only, a reboot in the vaguest sense, and entertaining in no conceivable way. (Unrated, 89 mins)

In Theaters/On VOD: THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER (2017)

THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER
(US/Canada - 2017)

Written and directed by Osgood Perkins. Cast: Emma Roberts, Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton, James Remar, Lauren Holly, Greg Ellwand, Elena Krausz, Heather Tod Mitchell, Peter James Haworth, Emma Holzer. (R, 94 mins)

Filmed in early 2015 and screened at that year's Toronto Film Festival under its original title FEBRUARY, THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER has been held up in distribution limbo by A24, who bounced it all over the release schedule from late 2015 and throughout 2016 before pushing it to spring 2017, where it's now bowed on VOD and received a limited theatrical run. While BLACKCOAT gathered dust on the shelf, debuting writer/director Osgood Perkins (son of legendary PSYCHO star Anthony) made another film, the Netflix Original slow-burner I AM THE PRETTY THING THAT LIVES IN THE HOUSE, which ended up being released first. PRETTY THING remains a love-hate proposition: moving at roughly the speed of plate tectonics, it's the absolute slowest of the crop of post-Ti West slow-burner fright flicks over the last several years, and while I appreciated what Perkins was going for, its almost experimental austerity set a land-speed record for going from intriguing to off-putting. Watching BLACKCOAT does enhance PRETTY THING to an extent, but what's odd is that though he made it first, BLACKCOAT feels like the kind of polished and assured sophomore effort of a young director who's gained significant confidence after getting the experience of a flawed debut under their belt. That's not to say PRETTY THING is a step back per se, but it's a step somewhere, a detour in an unexpected direction. There's enough similarities and thematic and stylistic overlap that the films could easily be examined as flip sides of the same coin, but it's PRETTY THING that, in retrospect, ends up coming across like the not-quite-there-yet test run for THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER. They're unquestionably the work of the same filmmaker but watching them in the order of release rather than the order they were produced actually seems like the more naturally progressive flow.

That doesn't mean THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER is a multiplex-ready commercial horror flick for the mainstream masses. It's only slight less slow-going than PRETTY THING, but with more characters and more story, so it doesn't have quite the "still life with narration" aura that's a natural byproduct of a movie with essentially two characters with one who's senile and pretty much catatonic. BLACKCOAT is also the most unsettling example of supernatural horror that the genre has offered since THE WITCH from a year ago, which could explain why shared distributor A24 might've wanted some distance between the two. Like PRETTY THING, BLACKCOAT's central characters are female and there are two stories (that element is more pronounced here) that eventually coalesce. At Bramford, an isolated Catholic girls school in upstate New York, the students are leaving for winter break at the end of February. Naive freshman Kat's (MAD MEN's Kiernan Shipka) parents are supposed to pick her up but are nowhere to be found. Older, cynical Rose (Lucy Boynton) deliberately told her parents to pick her up on the wrong day later in the week so she can deal with an unwanted pregnancy. They're the only two girls left at school, and headmaster Mr. Gordon (Peter James Haworth) tells them to stay out of trouble and check in with two prim, proper custodians, Ms. Prescott (Elena Krausz) and Ms. Drake (Heather Tod Mitchell) if they need anything, but otherwise, Rose is instructed to keep an eye on the younger Kat. Rose puts Kat through a bit of a hazing ritual, telling her a creepy fictional story of a girl who was killed on the school grounds when she discovered the Bramford nuns were part of a cult of devil worshipers. Rose sneaks out and spends the evening with her boyfriend but returns to find Kat trance-like in the basement, kneeling before the boiler, an event Kat writes off as sleepwalking.

In the first of what becomes a series of cutaways to a separate storyline, Joan (Emma Roberts) is a young woman who gets off a bus several towns away. She's wearing a hospital bracelet that she quickly removes. Seeing Joan walking along the road, kindly Bill (James Remar) and his cold, stand-offish wife Linda (Lauren Holly), pull over and offer her a ride. She tells them she's going to Portsmith, which is the town right after their destination--Bramford--where they're going to pick their daughter up at school for winter break. While Linda wants nothing to do with Joan, Bill tells her that they've been tested and they find God in the little things that happen--"the little coincidences"--and that she reminds him of someone he knew a long time ago. Meanwhile, back at Bramford, Kat believes her parents are dead and are never coming to get her. Her behavior grows increasingly erratic, with a concerned Rose asking if there's anything she can do. "No," Kat replies. "You had your chance."

It's hard to discuss THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER's story any further without spoiling it or divulging too much information about exactly how these two seemingly unrelated plot threads come together. Perkins cleverly misdirects you into thinking one thing, but it's all a distraction from what he's really setting up (it's the kind of film where you immediately want to watch it again to see how you were tricked and manipulated). Aside from one well-crafted jump scare where the staging has a striking similarity to the staircase murder of private eye Arbogast in PSYCHO (an affectionate nod to the filmmaker's father), Perkins is more concerned with establishing a mood, slowly and methodically tightening the screws and ratcheting up the tension with a lot of help from a persistently droning, rumbling, ambient score by his brother Elvis Perkins, whose haunting "Blackcoat's Daughter" lullaby will chill you and make your hair stand on end. All of this, in conjunction with the slow pace, makes the sense of dread and doom not just unsettling but downright suffocating. Joan, Kat, and Rose are extremely well-rounded and thoroughly fleshed-out characters whose arcs go in completely the opposite direction than you expect as you get to know them after their initial intros: mean girl Rose ends up being the most sympathetic, especially after completely underestimating Kat, who's not the naive innocent she seems. And Joan...well, you'll just have to see.

Perkins has constructed THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER in such a way that everything you think you know is up-ended with each shift from Kat & Rose back to Joan, Bill & Linda. Each revelation ends up altering your perspective on everything that happened in the early stages. There's some terrifying moments here and with rare exception, they're the kind that sneak up on you, unease turning to discomfort before escalating to anxiety and terror. THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER will rattle even the most jaded, seen-it-all horror fan (one character picking up a phone to hear a gurgling voice ordering "Kill all the cunts" is particularly unnerving). Like a lot of genre fans, I'm old enough and I've seen enough over the last 40 years that, aside from an occasional WITCH, BABADOOK, or IT FOLLOWS to cite just three recent examples, it's hard to be surprised in a big way by new horror films anymore. But when this got firing on all cylinders and the pieces began falling into place, it was really getting under my skin and by its emotional end, left me shaken in a way that I haven't experienced with a horror movie in a long time. Possibly the scariest film to take place at a girls school since Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA, THE BLACKCOAT'S DAUGHTER is that most welcome of surprises--a disturbing, stomach-in-knots fright flick that quietly burrows its way into your head and will fuck you up for days after seeing it. Well done, Perkins. Your dad would be proud.

On DVD/Blu-ray: USS INDIANAPOLIS: MEN OF COURAGE (2016) and THE HOLLOW POINT (2016)

USS INDIANAPOLIS: MEN OF COURAGE
(US - 2016)

The story of the USS Indianapolis is familiar to anyone who's seen JAWS, where Robert Shaw delivers arguably the greatest monologue in film history as salty shark hunter Quint recounts his experiences on the doomed ship near the end of WWII. After completing orders to deliver the materials for the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima, the Indianapolis, without sonar and with no customary escort due to the top-secret, classified nature of the mission, was torpedoed by the Japanese submarine I-58 between Tinian and Okinawa. It sank within 12 minutes, as Captain Charles Butler McVay ordered the crew to abandon ship, leaving them stranded for five days in shark-infested waters. Of the 1196 on board, nearly 300 died in the initial attack. Of the remaining 900 left in the water, only 317 survived, the rest dying from dehydration, saltwater poisoning, drowning, and, as JAWS fans know, shark attacks.  It's a horrific tragedy that deserves a more dignified presentation than USS INDIANAPOLIS: MEN OF COURAGE. The 1991 CBS TV-movie MISSION OF THE SHARK, with Stacy Keach as McVay, did a better job with the limited expectations of being a made-for-TV movie. This film, starring Nicolas Cage as McVay, is undoubtedly sincere in its intentions but can't overcome a trite, cliched script and rock-bottom visual effects that makes it look like an Asylum production debuting on Syfy. The explosions are laughable and the CGI sharks jump out of the water looking like deleted SHARKNADO files e-mailed to director Mario Van Peebles.

The film is divided into three sections, with the interminable opening act devoted to the camaraderie and ballbusting among an interchangeable and impossibly dull group of sailors, focusing on two--wholesome, all-American Bama (Matt Lanter) and gregarious D'Antonio (Adam Scott Miller), who does everything short of yell "Hey, you's boys wanna play some stickball?" to let you know he's from Brooklyn--who fall in love with the same woman (Emily Tennant). The second is the sinking of the ship and the five days stranded in the water, where Van Peebles turns the film into a cheap jump-scare shark attack horror movie, and third is a courtroom drama when the Navy, looking for someone to scapegoat for their failure to answer multiple distress calls (they thought it was the Japanese trying to deceive them), decides to court-martial McVay, saying he could've "zig-zagged" the ship to avoid the torpedoes. McVay's story is a sad one--he committed suicide in 1968 after over two decades of harassment and death threats by the families of the dead sailors even though he was fully supported by the survivors as well as by I-58 commander Mochitsura Hashimoto (Yutaka Takeuchi), who testified that there was no way McVay could've avoided the torpedoes. McVay and the men aboard the USS Indianapolis deserved something a little more polished and professional-looking than a WWII movie that looks like it was directed by Anthony C. Ferrante. The writing isn't much better--try not to laugh at the torpedoes hitting the ship a nanosecond after a guy playing dice in the mess hall rolls snake eyes. Or at decisions being made in darkened and ominous film noir-lit rooms filled with cigar-sucking fat cats ("War's good for business, and business is good for America!"). Or at McWhorter, the Chief Petty Officer played by Tom Sizemore in what's apparently an extended tribute to William Bendix (and of course, McWhorter's wife just had a baby that he describes as "nine pounds of rompin' stompin' dynamite!" which is code for "McWhorter's never going to meet his kid"). There are scattered moments where USS INDIANAPOLIS rises above its schlocky, Redbox-ready nature: Thomas Jane does some nice work in a small role as Lt. Adrian Marks, the pilot who disobeyed orders and made a daring water landing to rescue as many survivors as he could, and Cage, who's subdued and surprisingly restrained throughout, shares a scene with Takeuchi very late in the film where both actors are demonstrating such raw emotion that they almost convince you that they're in a better movie. With more money, a better script, a supporting cast of actors that you could actually tell apart, more directorial flair (Van Peebles' heart may be in the right place, but his bland direction is pure clock-punching and irrefutable proof that his NEW JACK CITY and POSSE days of being a filmmaker of note are long gone), and a time machine to go back to around 2000 when Nicolas Cage movies were still major events, the well-meaning USS INDIANAPOLIS could've been a strong WWII movie instead of what has to be the cheapest-looking $40 million movie ever, looking like total amateur hour despite having 30 credited producers and the participation of RESERVOIR DOGS and PULP FICTION cinematographer Andrzej Sekula. (R, 130 mins)


THE HOLLOW POINT
(US - 2016)

There's absolutely no reason why this shouldn't be a nifty little desert noir B-movie in the vein of '90s video store mainstays like RED ROCK WEST and BLACK DAY BLUE NIGHT, but the barely-released THE HOLLOW POINT just never gets its shit together. Content to churn out a nearly decade-too-late ripoff of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego (APOLLO 18, OPEN GRAVE) and first-time screenwriter Nils Lyew waste an inspired and entertaining performance by the great Ian McShane in total Al Swearengen mode as Leland Kilbaught, a gruff, grubby, hard-drinking, burned-out sheriff of Los Reyes County, right along the Arizona-Mexico border. Kilbaught's got a reputation among the locals for not really caring much about the rules, and after he shoots Clive Mercy (Nathan Stevens) in the head during a traffic stop, he's relieved of his duties and new sheriff Wallace (Patrick Wilson) is sent in to replace him. Kilbaught knows what Clive was up to--running armor-piercing ammo into Mexico as a flunky for a cartel operation. Clive's equally hapless loser brother Ken (David Stevens) ends up killing a mid-level cartel figure after a botched ammunition run before skating back to Los Reyes County and hiding out. Complicating matters is that Wallace, who's from the area and couldn't wait to get away, knows his ex-wife Marla (Lynn Collins) is hooked up with Ken, which puts her at serious risk when the cartel sends unstoppable killing machine assassin Atticus (John Leguizamo as Javier Bardem) to find Ken and kill anyone who knows him, including Marla and sleazy used car dealer Shep Diaz (Jim Belushi), who also has connections to the cartel.

Other than a truly startling moment when Atticus hacks off Wallace's right hand with a machete, the only thing THE HOLLOW POINT has going for it is McShane, who single-handedly saves it from total oblivion. Lyew's script is an incoherent mess, Lopez-Gallego, who also serves as his own editor, couldn't generate any dramatic momentum if his career depended on it, occasionally resorting to stupid POV shots like the one from inside a spinning washing machine at a laundromat. The entire film is so sloppily-constructed that we never get a full grasp of who's who or why they're even in danger. Leguizamo is just Anton Chigurh with a better haircut and Belushi, sporting a cheap suit and a hideous combover, can play this kind of obnoxious shitbag in his sleep. But McShane valiantly tries to save the day, with his gravelly line readings and snide deliveries of mellifluously poetic bon mots like "You are not an unfortunate man...you're an auspicious parasite!" and "Buenos Diaz!" He seems to be having a blast playing this character, making it almost criminal that his efforts are squandered on such an uninspired and otherwise completely forgettable project. (R, 97 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: STARRY EYES (2014); EXISTS (2014); and HORNS (2014)

STARRY EYES
(US/Belgium - 2014)

In horror circles, STARRY EYES was hailed as an instant cult classic almost immediately after it played the festival circuit and hit the VOD rounds last fall. I always get a little skeptical when today's horror fans latch on to something, because that's when you get conned by things like The Legend of Ti West and the absurd notion that THE INNKEEPERS is a good movie, or that Alexandre Aja's PIRANHA is "like, totally old-school exploitation!" Mind you, there's a great idea at the heart of STARRY EYES, and there's some cutting observations about the culture of Hollywood, the pretentiousness and the catty one-upmanship and those would-be stars working mundane day jobs when they aren't trying to catch a break at an audition. It also sports a supporting cast filled with minor cult figures like SOMEONE'S KNOCKING AT THE DOOR and DEADGIRL's Noah Segan, RED, WHITE & BLUE stars Amanda Fuller and Marc Senter, COMPLIANCE prank caller Pat Healy, and a KISS Kameo by professional wealthy offspring Nick Simmons.  But in its execution, STARRY EYES is impossibly heavy-handed, making its points in the most suffocatingly ham-fisted and overly literal ways imaginable, and it just gets dumb and dumber as it goes along. In an undeniably strong and demanding performance that hints at deeper issues haunting the character, Alexandra Essoe is Sarah Walker, a Big Taters waitress struggling to make it as an actress. She gets an audition for a horror film called THE SILVER SCREAM, produced by Astraeus Pictures, a once-notable studio now sort-of on the skids. It's an unusual audition held by a pair of eccentrics, but she gets a callback that consists of a lot of flash photos in a dark room. She's then called to meet with the producer (Louis Dezseran), an aging Roger Corman-type who unsubtly tries to get her on the casting couch. Initially rejecting but having a change of heart after she quits her job and sees her roommates and friends going nowhere in their own acting and filmmaking pursuits, she caves to the producer's demands that she "show" how dedicated she is and that she make the appropriate "sacrifice."

Of course, there's something more sinister afoot, as the writing/directing team of Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer have shown the producer with a pentagram burned into his hand and his assistant (Maria Olsen, fast becoming the Michael Berryman of today's DIY hipster horror scene) wearing a pentagram necklace. Yes, they're all Satanists, and their cult is fame, the central conceit of STARRY EYES being a literal death and rebirth as your old self dies--the sacrifice--and a star is born. After fellating the producer, Sarah's body starts breaking down in Cronenbergian fashion, and also in ways very similar to the awful slut-shaming body-horror film CONTRACTED. There's a cynical message here that all Hollywood success stories are rooted in evil, soulless vanity, but that shouldn't surprise anyone after ALL ABOUT EVE. By the time Sarah vomits maggots and starts offing her friends in ways that will even have the most seen-it-all gorehounds flinching, the filmmakers have her literally stabbing one in the back in order to make sure you're getting the message that she's not the same old Sarah. It's all rather obvious and while Kolsch and Widmyer take the L.A. scenester-types to task early on, the notion of "breaking through the gate" and achieving fame and fortune by selling your soul to Satan isn't exactly a high concept if you've ever heard of Faust. This has its moments, augmented by a very John Carpenter-esque synth score by Jonathan Snipes, but I'm really at a loss as to what movie everyone saw when they got on the STARRY EYES love train and declared it a modern horror classic. (Unrated, 96 mins)


EXISTS
(US - 2014)

After co-directing the 1999 phenomenon THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, Eduardo Sanchez has stayed busy with DTV or limited theatrical release horror titles like ALTERED (2006), SEVENTH MOON (2009), and the critically-acclaimed LOVELY MOLLY (2012). Sanchez has never had the accolades nor the success that BLAIR WITCH brought him, so now, 15 years later, he's back sucking from the faux-doc/found footage teet with EXISTS, just as the subgenre he helped make mainstream is falling out of favor with fans. Obviously, Sanchez is an old pro at this kind of thing, and EXISTS has a handful of well-done set pieces, but you have to wade through an hour of dudebro dialogue, idiotic characters, several long sequences in night-vision or almost total darkness, and plenty of time to ponder the age-old question in this type of horror film: why are you still filming? Five dumbasses (two couples and the obligatory comic-relief fifth wheel who does all the filming) head to a remote cabin in the woods (owned by the uncle of two of the dudes, who actually are bros) for a weekend of beer, weed, and doing generally EXTREME! shit, all to be documented in its entirety on their GoPro cameras. Their SUV hits something, and only a blurred figure is seen on the playback, but once they're at the cabin, a howling in the woods convinces the goof of the group (Chris Osborn) that they're dealing with Bigfoot. Even if EXISTS wasn't rendered moot arriving so soon after Bobcat Goldthwait's Bigfoot-themed WILLOW CREEK, one of the better recent found-footage offerings, it can't overcome a deadly first half with some of the most irritating characters the subgenre has ever offered. Most of the dialogue is along the lines of "What the fuck was that, bro?" or "What the fuck's goin' on here, bro," and "You killed my friend, motherfucker!" as one fires a shotgun blindly in the dark, which of course attracts the creature and promptly gets the trigger-happy bro's head bashed in. To his credit, Sanchez does get some serious momentum going as the five get whittled down to three and they try to venture through the woods to find the highway. Naturally, one's surefire shortcut results in them getting lost, but Sanchez knows how to do this right. He gets that climactic BLAIR WITCH vibe going in the last 20 or so minutes with the sprinting creature's relentless pursuit (one sudden appearance through a cloud of fireworks smoke is a good example of a jump scare done right), but it's still not enough to counter the damage caused by such a shitty script, penned by Sanchez's usual post-BLAIR WITCH writing partner Jamie Nash. It's maybe worth a Netflix stream on a really slow night if you're still a found-footage completist, but in returning to the woods to recapture some of his dwindling mojo, Sanchez remains doomed to spend the rest of his career in BLAIR WITCH's shadow. (R, 81 mins)

HORNS
(US - 2014)

Anything would be a step up for French horror director Alexandre Aja after his smug and miserable fakesploitation 2010 remake of PIRANHA, and while it's not always successful, HORNS is certainly ambitious. Based on Joe Hill's novel, the very busy HORNS crams a lot of story into two hours and even though plot points are rushed through or not fully fleshed-out, it still feels overlong, like it either needed to lose 20 or so minutes or just be extended to a cable miniseries. Letting the story breathe might've done a lot to smooth over the rough tonal shifts as HORNS careens from love story to murder mystery to dark satire to CGI-heavy supernatural horror in ways that probably read a lot better on the page than they play on the screen. That doesn't mean there aren't pleasures to be had in HORNS, which has its moments before collapsing into contrivance, convenience, and stupidity in its third act. Radio station DJ Ig Perrish (Daniel Radcliffe) is besieged by media and outraged citizens of his small town when his longtime girlfriend Merrin (Juno Temple) is found brutally murdered in the woods. Nobody believes he's innocent except his older brother Terry (Joe Anderson) and his lawyer best friend Lee (Max Minghella). The town thinks Ig is the devil, and it doesn't help his case that he sprouts a pair of horns out of his forehead overnight--horns that not everyone can see, but when they do, they feel compelled to confess their deepest secrets and their most bluntly honest thoughts. It's this portion of HORNS that works best, as Aja wrings much dark humor out of a mom openly admitting she hates her screaming child, a bartender crowing about his dogfighting ring and how his dream is to torch his bar and collect the insurance money, or Ig being hassled by two bullying cops who casually admit they'd rather be sucking each other off. It also generates some well-handled drama as Ig's mom (Kathleen Quinlan) and dad (James Remar) admit they think he's guilty and would rather never see him again ("I don't want you to be my son anymore, sweetheart," his mother explains). People of genuinely good character--like Lee and Merrin's grieving father (David Morse)--can't see the horns, and over time, Ig learns to use their power to his advantage, with a highlight being one hilarious sequence where he's followed by a small army of reporters and uses the horns to convince them to beat the living shit out of one another, with the winner getting an exclusive, tell-all interview (there's a great callback to this scene much later, as reporters are all outside a courthouse with cuts, bruises, and bandages). Flashbacks to their childhood fill in the blanks of how Ig and Merrin got together, the effect it had on Ig's relationship with his buddies, and what exactly led to his being accused of her murder.

Admirably gory and going all-in with hard-R glee, HORNS works best in its periodic black comedy phases. No matter how silly a film's premise, it can always work if it follows its own rules, which HORNS doesn't always do. The more it goes on, the more uneven it becomes, as Aja and screenwriter Keith Bunin (the HBO series IN TREATMENT) juggle elements of DONNIE DARKO, TWIN PEAKS, HELLBOY, GHOST RIDER, early Peter Jackson splatter comedy and, in a possible shout-out to Joe Hill's dad Stephen King, STAND BY ME and THE DEAD ZONE until they just drop the balls and let them scatter. It's entirely too easy to figure out who the real killer is and once it's revealed, there's still over 40 minutes to go as Aja embarks on a Peter Jackson climax spree and can't seem to decide where the movie should end. Even with all the plot, it still loses track of several major characters (Kelli Garner as the no-self-esteem, self-described "town whore" who's carried a torch for Ig since childhood, seems especially shortchanged), and Merrin's dad's eventual sympathizing with Ig feels rushed and unconvincing. It's definitely worth seeing once, as Radcliffe is quite good and the film is really firing on all cylinders when it's being funny--Heather Graham has a great bit as a diner waitress giving false info about Ig to the police in the hopes that it makes her the star witness at the eventual trial ("I'm gonna release my own sex tape and have a reality show and be on the cover of Us Magazine!" she squeals with wild-eyed glee)--but the more it goes on, the more of a unwieldy, undisciplined mess it becomes. (R, 120 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)

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)