UNDERWATER (US - 2020) Directed by William Eubank. Written by Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad. Cast: Kristen Stewart, Vincent Cassel, T.J. Miller, Jessica Henwick, John Gallagher Jr., Mamoudou Athie, Gunner Wright. (PG-13, 95 mins) It's not going to score any points for originality, but UNDERWATER is a surprisingly engaging throwback to the undersea creature craze of early 1989, when we got DEEPSTAR SIX, LEVIATHAN, and the Roger Corman-produced LORDS OF THE DEEP in quick succession, all in a mad rush to beat the much-anticipated August release of James Cameron's mega-budget THE ABYSS (as required by law, obligatory Eurotrash knockoffs belatedly followed, like ENDLESS DESCENT from Spain and ALIEN FROM THE DEEP from Italy). UNDERWATER also wouldn't exist without the template provided by ALIEN, but director William Eubank (whose 2014 film THE SIGNAL showed some promise) has studied his economically-minded B-movies, diving right into the action within the first five minutes and keeping the pace so relentless and the stakes so high that you don't have time to think about any logic lapses or unanswered questions that the film either forgets about or just puts there to misdirect the audience. UNDERWATER is what it is, and that's not a bad thing. There's no dumb late-film plot twist, there's no deeper meaning, and there's only as much characterization as you need. It's an always forward-moving scare machine that seems so quaintly old-fashioned in the era of the IP/franchise/sequel/reboot/remake that you might wonder how it isn't premiering on Netflix.
With a fleeting shot of a newspaper headline that shows the year being 2050 (a rather optimistic outlook for print media), UNDERWATER opens in the Mariana Trench, six miles deep in the Pacific Ocean aboard Keppler Station, a massive, multi-billion dollar drilling installation. As mechanical engineer Norah (Kristen Stewart) brushes her teeth, the sound of water dripping on the floor from the ceiling above poses an instant threat. Almost immediately, walls collapse and parts of the structure begin caving due to what's presumed to be an earthquake. She manages to escape into a closed-off area, finds fellow crew member Rodrigo (Mamoudou Athie), and in their search for a way out, encounter wisecracking Paul (T.J. Miller) buried under some rubble. The three make their way to the escape pod bay only to find Captain Lucien (Vincent Cassel) with two survivors, Emily (Jessica Henwick) and Smith (John Gallagher Jr.). Lucien has sent 22 others up to presumed safety but the remaining pods are damaged. They're the only six survivors of a 300-person crew. With radio contact cut off and left completely on their own with the clock ticking and no other options, Lucien suggests they venture a mile down in pressurized suits and hoof it another mile across the ocean floor to Roebuck Station, the nearest drilling installation (Norah: "Can you just admit we could all die?" Lucien: "Can you just admit we might live?"). A crack in a helmet causes one survivor to make an abrupt exit, as the remaning five start their dangerous trek, only to find out too late that...something is down here.
That's it. There's your set-up. It's DEEPSTAR LEVIATHAN: UNDERWATER and the closest it gets to making a statement is Emily frantically stating "We've been taking from the ocean and now it's taking back...we don't belong here." The script by Brian Duffield (THE BABYSITTER) and Adam Cozad (JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT) sticks to a formula that's proven to work in the hands of the right director. Eubank wears his love of ALIEN and a ton of other movies on his sleeve, but in the process, focuses on the sense of isolation and claustrophobia in a way that's intensely effective at times. It's a physically demanding project for the actors, crawling through muck-filled tight spaces in the early scenes before the ocean walk, where Eubank and veteran cinematographer Bojan Bazelli (who got his start in the late '80s on several Abel Ferrara films) frame them in extreme close-up, often getting inside their helmets for POV shots where they can barely see anything in the murky depths and can't escape the strange sounds of something uncomfortably close to them. Obviously, UNDERWATER is a creature feature first and foremost, and it also doesn't disappoint on that front, with some nasty monsters that we only see fleetingly for a long time until things take a turn that can best be described as "Lovecraftian."
I don't want to oversell UNDERWATER. It's too beholden to its influences to really take itself to the next level, but it serves its purpose as a well-done genre rollercoaster ride. And sometimes, when it's done right, that's sufficient (you'll also spot shout-outs to THE DESCENT, some always-unnerving garbled audio transmissions straight out of EVENT HORIZON, some Overlook-esque corridors before all hell breaks loose, and one of composer Marco Beltrami's catchier synth cues sounds a bit indebted to Vangelis' end credits theme for BLADE RUNNER). Stewart's Norah proves to be a quietly resilient graduate of the Ripley school, and the rest of the cast acquits themselves generally well, with Cassel a dutifully heroic leader, Gallagher cast radically against type as second-string John Krasinski, and Miller providing the smartass comic relief ("I'm getting dangerously close to shitting myself"). Admittedly, UNDERWATER has some red flags: it's a horror movie hitting theaters in the doomed dead zone of January after three years on the shelf, with 20th Century Fox attributing the long-delayed release to a business decision tied to their acquisition by Disney. I guess that's possible, though one can't help but wonder if maybe execs wanted to let some time lapse following T.J. Miller becoming a #MeToo poster boy when sexual assault allegations from his college days resurfaced some time after shooting wrapped in 2017, a situation that he followed with a 2018 encore that saw him reporting a fake Amtrak bomb threat after he was kicked off a train for being intoxicated (his ongoing implosion also cost him his job as the Mucinex booger, and Dreamworks also replaced him with Justin Rupple as the voice of Tuffnut Thorston for 2019's HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD). Regardless of the reason--Fox restructuring under the Disney regime or the cancellation of Miller--UNDERWATER being left in limbo for so long isn't an indication of its quality. We can always use more genre offerings like this that cut the shit and just do their thing. It probably won't do well in theaters, but this will enjoy a long and frequently-viewed life on streaming and cable.
THE BELKO EXPERIMENT (US - 2017) Directed by Greg McLean. Written by James Gunn. Cast: John Gallagher Jr, Tony Goldwyn, Adria Arjona, John C. McGinley, Melonie Diaz, Michael Rooker, Gregg Henry, Owain Yeoman, Josh Brener, Sean Gunn, Brent Sexton, James Earl, David Dastmalchian, Rusty Schwimmer, Abraham Benrubi, Stephen Blackehart, Benjamin Byron Davis, David Del Rio. (R, 89 mins) Years before hitting the big time with GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY, James Gunn wrote THE BELKO EXPERIMENT but stashed it away and made 2011's SUPER instead. He dusted the script off in 2015, gave it a polish, and handed it to WOLF CREEK director Greg McLean (THE DARKNESS) while he got to work prepping the upcoming GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL 2. Though it's the first good movie McLean has directed in the decade since the killer croc gem ROGUE, BELKO still feels more like a Gunn joint, with its dark sense of misanthropic humor and shock bits that recall his early days at Troma (he wrote 1996's TROMEO AND JULIET), plus supporting roles for Gunn fixtures like his younger brother Sean and Character Actor Hall of Famers Michael Rooker and Gregg Henry. Opening with a Spanish-language flamenco version of Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive," THE BELKO EXPERIMENT depicts one really bad day at the office for 80 employees at the Bogota, Colombia branch of the US-based Belko Industries. A government-run nonprofit that specializes in "facilitating services for American companies in South America," Belko's real purpose seems vague even to its staff, and this day starts off in an odd way when the local Bogota employees are turned away at the gate and told to go home by a new team of armed security personnel, leaving only the 80 American transfers in the high-rise located in the remote outskirts of the city. Things proceed in a relatively normal fashion until late morning, when office drone Mike Milch (John Gallagher Jr) notices the new guards going into a never-used storage building on the property. Soon after, impenetrable steel shutters are activated to cover the windows and doors, the phones and internet stop working, and a voice over the intercom informs them that they have to begin killing their co-workers in the next 30 minutes or else other measures will be taken. No one seems to take it seriously until the time expires and several random people have the back of their heads blown off--not by bullets as initially thought, but by activated tracking chips planted at the base of their skulls when they were hired, in the event any of them were kidnapped by local insurgents.
Mike is the moral center of the story, a nice, conscientious guy who refuses to kill his co-workers (he also tries and fails to slice out his tracking chip with a box cutter) but he finds some resistance, even from his girlfriend Leandra (Adria Arjona). COO Barry Norris (Tony Goldwyn) tries to keep everyone cool but soon finds his own grip on sanity loosening, especially when the voice ups the stakes by giving them two hours to kill 30 people or else 60 of them will be executed by chip detonation. Sides soon form, with Milch, security chief Evan (James Earl), HR head Vince (Brent Sexton), and a conflicted Leandra leading a group that's pursued throughout the building by Barry, an ex-Special Forces soldier who assumes control of the crazed "kill or be killed" faction, a group that includes Mike's best friend Terry (Owain Yeoman) and sleazy Wendell (John C. McGinley), who sees this an an opportunity to get even with Leandra, who's repeatedly rebuffed his aggressive advances. The clock keeps ticking and no one is safe, including strays left on their own throughout the building, like maintenance head Bud (Rooker), stoner cafeteria cook and conspiracy theorist Marty (Sean Gunn), and new hire Dany (Melonie Diaz), who picked the worst possible day to begin her career at Belko Industries.
The title of the film is pretty much a giveaway that unseen figures are at work, and it's hard not to be reminded of Stanley Milgram or the Stanford Prison Experiment as THE BELKO EXPERIMENT plays out. Essentially a lurid, splatter-filled fusion of OFFICE SPACE and BATTLE ROYALE with a record number of exploding heads, BELKO works on a visceral level as a suspense thriller but Gunn's script never really explores its satirical potential. There's little exploration of the experiment as an analogy for the cutthroat world of corporate America beyond the obvious, with the alpha male sociopaths in charge (Barry, Wendell) thinking nothing of killing everyone underneath them and the mid-level pencil-pushers (Mike, Leandra) and outsiders (Evan, Bud, Marty) looking out for each other. There's also an entire level of commentary about Belko being a US government project that goes completely unaddressed, even after the big reveal about who's actually running the experiment. Anyone is fair game and can be killed at any moment, regardless of their billing in the credits. The message, as explained by Leandra: "At the end of the day, people are out for themselves." Well, no shit. Gunn's films have never really been about the subtext, so on a strictly B-movie, genre fare level, THE BELKO EXPERIMENT accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do: put a bunch of people in an environment of High Rise Mayhem and have them kill each other in the goriest ways possible--not just exploding heads or with guns, axes, knives, and meatcleavers, but also with creative weapons like a makeshift sword fashioned from a dismantled paper cutter, plus the world's most lethal Scotch-Tape dispenser. THE BELKO EXPERIMENT is flopping pretty hard in theaters but it's a low-budget offering from Blumhouse that doesn't have to make much to turn a profit, plus it's the kind of movie that will find a cult once it hits streaming services. It's also the first wide release from the relaunched Orion Pictures, the long-defunct '80s mainstay that was resurrected as a little-used MGM subsidiary in 2013. How nice is it to see that familiar logo on a big screen again?
HUSH (US - 2016) Directed by Mike Flanagan. Written by Mike Flanagan and Kate Siegel. Cast: John Gallagher Jr, Kate Siegel, Michael Trucco, Samantha Sloyan, Emma Graves. (R, 82 mins) In an era when hardly a week goes by without some new indie horror movie being an alleged game-changer that causes The Fanboy Who Cried Classic to overhype a completely unworthy film and anoint its writer and/or director the next "Master of Horror," Mike Flanagan has very quietly become one of the very few (Adam Wingard is also a big talent to watch) who deserves the fawning accolades. After a couple of little-seen festival titles in the early 2000s and the 2011 indie fright film ABSENTIA, Flanagan broke out with the 2014 sleeper OCULUS, an imaginative supernatural horror film co-produced by Blumhouse and, of all companies, WWE Studios. While not a blockbuster, it managed to generate a nice profit for distributor Relativity Media, who picked it up for next to nothing. OCULUS has already become a cult film, and it led to Flanagan being handed OUIJA 2, the sequel to the 2014 WITCHBOARD pseudo-remake. It's probably not the best venue for his talents, but it's a major-studio movie and everybody's got bills to pay. Prior to OCULUS' release, Flanagan was already at work on two other films: BEFORE I WAKE, which was shot in late 2013 and has been left in limbo due to Relativity's financial woes, and HUSH, an ultra low-budget Blumhouse production shot in secret over three weeks in 2014. HUSH--not to be confused with the late '90s Jessica Lange/Gwyneth Paltrow bomb--generated a lot of buzz at this year's SXSW and was acquired by Netflix, where it's just premiered as a streaming exclusive.
Co-written with his wife and OCULUS co-star Kate Siegel and shot in such a stealth manner to avoid the meddling of a studio they feared would make too many demands, starting with replacing Siegel in the lead role, Flanagan conceived HUSH after a dinner conversation with Siegel where they both expressed their love for the classic 1967 thriller WAIT UNTIL DARK. Wanting to make the kind of nailbiter with a protagonist in a similar situation as Audrey Hepburn as a blind woman terrorized by three criminals led by a drug-addled and insane Alan Arkin, Flanagan and Siegel conceived a story centered on a deaf-mute woman stalked by vicious killer. On the surface, HUSH might seem like a late-to-the-party home invasion thriller that should've come out around the time of THEM (ILS) or THE STRANGERS, or at the very latest, THE PURGE, but it's the best film of its type since Adam Wingard's surprisingly great YOU'RE NEXT back in 2013. By making the target unable to hear or speak the filmmakers are able to approach things from a different perspective. As blocked mystery writer Maddie Young (Siegel) struggles to complete her second book (for which she has seven possible endings and hates all of them), Flanagan establishes several things: the layout of her house, in a secluded area well off the main road; the brief flashes of seemingly minor details, every one of which will be important by the time the end credits roll; and what it's like to be in Maddie's head. Deaf and mute since a bout of meningitis when she was 13, Maddie is a year out of a bad relationship and seemingly accepting of being alone. In a signed and subtitled Facetime chat with her sister (Emma Graves), Maddie explains "Isolation chose me." As Maddie goes about her routine, unsuccessfully trying to cook a new dish and unable to come up with the words to finish her book, Flanagan frequently lets the sound drop out to experience Maddie's world from her POV. In a way, Netflix picking this up spares viewers from watching it in theater, where idiot audiences would no doubt be gabbing away during these important, mood-establishing expository scenes, though with an attentive and appreciative audience, this would be a hell of a crowd movie.
Silence is all Maddie has come to know, and it prevents her from hearing her nearest neighbor (Samantha Sloyan) screaming for help and banging on the doors and windows while Maddie has her back turned, doing the dishes. As Maddie obliviously cleans, her neighbor is stabbed multiple times by a masked killer (10 CLOVERFIELD LANE's John Gallagher Jr), who quickly figures out that Maddie is deaf and decides to have some sadistic fun with her. He sneaks into the house while she's on her laptop, lounging on the couch. He grabs her phone from the kitchen counter and sends her text messages on her laptop consisting of photos he's just taken of her sitting on the couch. Terrified, she gets up to see the sliding door going outside is open. Getting up to close it, she sees him standing on the back patio. He shuts off the power going into the house, leaving Maddie with no wi-fi, no electricity, and no way to text or message anyone for help. With no rhyme or reason for his actions ever established--and the film works just fine without any--he has made it his mission to terrorize her. He reminds her from outside that it doesn't matter where she hides, she'll never hear him breaking in and he can come in anytime he wants. He's just gonna fuck with her by making her wait.
The hopelessness of Maddie's situation is frightening enough, but what makes HUSH work so well is that she refuses to be a victim. In what should be a star-making performance (she gets a possibly inside-jokey "introducing" credit even though she's been in several movies, including a previous one from Flanagan), Siegel immediately establishes herself as a the next-in-line to the Jamie Lee Curtis scream queen crown without even uttering a peep (except for one brief scene where she's playing out her escape options using the voice in her head). Siegel's Maddie in an instantly iconic horror heroine, one who's perhaps withdrawn from the world to an extent but finds it deep within herself to fight like hell, and the various ways she gets the edge on the killer over the course of HUSH's relentless 80 minutes are smart and plausible. Flanagan never asks the audience to make ridiculous leaps in logic or plot convenience. His mapping out of HUSH is precise and methodical and the occasional bursts of gore and splatter are practical, squishy, and wet. Even the few bits of humor are dark and merciless (watch the cruel way Flanagan has Maddie inadvertently screw up her chance to be rescued). He lays down the ground rules and sticks to them, chiefly the way much of the film plays out dialogue-free in order to experience it as Maddie does. Every bit the top-shelf nailbiter like the one that inspired it, HUSH is a terrific thriller, one of 2016's best films, and one that's going to find a huge audience on Netflix. There's too much ball-cradling sycophancy in horror fandom these days, and it's too hard to take people seriously every horror movie causes them to break out into another rendition of "Everything is Awesome!" So bestow all the accolades you want on the Eli Roths and the Ti Wests, and the V/H/Ss, THE ABCs OF DEATHs, the STARRY EYESs and the GOODNIGHT MOMMYs: Mike Flanagan is the real deal.
10 CLOVERFIELD LANE (US - 2016) Directed by Dan Trachtenberg. Written by Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken, and Damien Chazelle. Cast: John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Gallagher Jr., voice of Bradley Cooper. (PG-13, 103 mins) Filmed in secret in late 2014 under the meaningless working title VALENCIA, 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE is what producer J.J. Abrams describes as a "blood relative" and "spiritual successor" to 2008's found-footage, monster-rampage hit CLOVERFIELD. It's not a direct sequel, and as such, Abrams and the filmmakers--director Dan Trachtenberg making his feature debut, and screenwriters Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken, and WHIPLASH Oscar-nominee Damien Chazelle--have been lauded for their game-changing approach to building a franchise brand. I guess 1982's HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH, wherein producer John Carpenter and director Tommy Lee Wallace consciously set out to fashion a seasonal horror franchise that didn't involve Michael Myers or Laurie Strode, seems to have faded from everyone's memory. HALLOWEEN III was panned by everyone--critics and audiences--for the same reasons 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE is being praised, though time has been kind to the initially much-maligned HALLOWEEN non-sequel, and it's now considered a major cult movie of the 1980s.
Rather than tread down the path taken by CLOVERFIELD, 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE thankfully abandons the hand-held, found-footage approach and takes place mostly in an underground bunker where Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) wakes up in shackles after leaving her boyfriend (a phone call voice cameo by Bradley Cooper) and promptly getting into a car wreck on a pitch black stretch of road. She's being held captive by Howard (John Goodman), a survivalist/conspiracy theorist who seems quite insane, talking about how everyone is dead after an "attack," possibly nuclear or chemical, that could've either been "the Russkies or the Martians." There's a third resident, local handyman Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.), who helped Howard build the bunker and came banging on the door, begging to be let in when the attack began and the sky lit up. Michelle is skeptical of Howard's claims that it's uninhabitable outside, but Emmett corroborates the attack, and after Michelle attempts to escape but holds off on opening the last door to the outside when she sees a burning, bleeding, and blistering woman begging to be let in, Howard's story seems to hold water. While a sense of post-apocalyptic domesticity sets in--the shackles come off, they make dinner, listen to music, play board games, Howard has an extensive DVD and VHS library and watches PRETTY IN PINK--Michelle can't let go of the nagging suspicion that something is off: his constant talk of his dead daughter, his mood swings, his arbitrary rules, and the general feeling that he's not being upfront about everything that has happened or will happen.
To say anything more would involve too many spoilers, but Trachtenberg and the screenwriters really tighten the screws with 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE, filling it with a mounting, claustrophobic sense of unease and dread that comes from the use of sound and Bear McCreary's score but mostly from Howard's volatile unpredictability, going from fatherly concern to volcanic rage and back again in a heartbeat. This is absolutely essential Goodman, maybe even his best performance outside of his work for the Coen Bros, and he's matched by Winstead, who reveals herself to be a tough and fierce heroine who won't be underestimated. There are several out-of-nowhere surprises and certainly one of the most jolting shocks of the year in the second half, but then the story switches gears in ways that play into the CLOVERFIELD mythos but end up almost derailing the film. Like RATTER, another recent shocker that collapsed in the home stretch, 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE starts confusing "ambiguity" with "not revealing anything," and the psychological suspense thriller that was brewing and beginning to boil over is abandoned with an abrupt finale that, no matter how planned it was, can't help but feel like a hastily-conceived reshoot ordered by a skittish studio in order to keep IMDb from collapsing and crashing under the weight of apoplectic comments section bitching and the rage of indignant fanboys. It's worth noting that under the shepherding of Abrams, Chazelle reworked Campbell and Stuecken's original spec script, originally titled THE CELLAR, revamping it to fit into the CLOVERFIELD universe, so if it feels like two scripts stapled together, that's because it is.
There's probably all sorts of ways for really obsessive CLOVERFIELD fans--do such people exist?--to tie the movies together (Howard was in the military and worked with satellites and he the name of the road he lives on is the same as the government code word for what went down in the first film, etc, etc), and maybe Abrams has plans to oversee future installments that are blood relatives of this film. As it is, it's got the feel of an extended TWILIGHT ZONE episode that was working beautifully until it had to shoehorn in a late-breaking plot development in order to become something that it actively and purposefully spends nearly 90 minutes trying not to be. Imagine if Conal Cochran's insane Silver Shamrock plot in HALLOWEEN III was put on the backburner and the film abruptly brought Michael Myers into the story with 15 minutes to go and you'll have an idea of what 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE does--it doesn't crash into a wall, but it definitely takes a wrong turn before skidding to a halt. This is a film that will provoke divisive reactions and people will be arguing about it and sifting through the minute details for a while (there's all sorts of supplemental info about Howard's job and other background material at an online ARG, but who has time for that DEVIL INSIDE bullshit? If it's pertinent to the film, then put it in the film), but a one-viewing gut reaction says it's an expertly-acted (I can't stress enough how terrific Goodman and Winstead are here), character-driven, and intense nerve-shredder of a thriller that just randomly becomes a completely different--and inferior--movie with 15 minutes to go.
