DIRTY GRANDPA (US - 2016) Directed by Dan Mazer. Written by John Phillips. Cast: Robert De Niro, Zac Efron, Dermot Mulroney, Aubrey Plaza, Zoey Deutch, Julianne Hough, Jason Mantzoukas, Danny Glover, Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman, Adam Pally, Brandon Mychal Smith, Jake Picking, Michael Hudson, Mo Collins, Henry Zebrowski. (R, 102 mins) The worst thing to happen to Robert De Niro since prostate cancer, DIRTY GRANDPA is about as unwatchable as modern comedy can get, existing almost on the same plane of laziness, incompetence, and flat-out contempt as any atrocious Friedberg/Seltzer spoof. The film imagines itself some kind of edgy, "did they just go there?" envelope-pusher, but there's nothing here beyond the shock value of a living legend like De Niro working blue and saying some of the filthiest things ever heard in a mainstream movie. But "shock" doesn't mean "funny." Raunch humor can kill--in-their-prime Farrelly Brothers and Judd Apatow and AMERICAN PIE have shown that. And the great BAD SANTA (2003) expertly mixed raunchy shock with smart writing and funny performances. DIRTY GRANDPA skips the humor component, demonstrating absolutely no restraint as it guns it straight for the raunch and nothing but. As decreed in the Burgess Meredith Amendment set forth upon the release of 1993's GRUMPY OLD MEN, Hollywood seems to think there's nothing funnier than old people saying really nasty shit. After 102 minutes of watching De Niro--arguably the greatest actor of all time--jerk off; talk about donkey-punches, creampies, chugging horsecock, and Queen Latifah taking a shit in his mouth; call his grandson "Jack Dicklaus" and "Michelle Wies-in-my-mouth" while golfing; call his grandson's fiancee's pink car "a giant labia" and "a giant tampon"; stick his cock and balls in his grandson's face; make racist and homophobic cracks to a gay black man; harangue the same grandson for cockblocking him and calling him "Cocky McBlockerson"; and bellow ad nauseum that he wants to "fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck till my dick falls off!" while dropping more F-bombs than in all of his Scorsese films combined, you'll long for the tact and grace of Meredith cackling about "taking the skin boat to Tuna Town!" in GRUMPY OLD MEN. De Niro isn't so much a dirty grandpa as he is a geriatric 2 Live Crew.
Dick (De Niro) convinces his grandson to take him
to Daytona Beach by making him an offer he can't
refuse in DIRTY GRANDPA
It has a plot that's similar to the not-quite-as-godawful-but-close Robert Duvall vehicle A NIGHT IN OLD MEXICO. The day after the funeral of his wife of 40 years, who succumbed to a long battle with cancer, grieving Dick Kelly (De Niro) convinces his uptight, straight-arrow lawyer grandson Jason (Zak Efron) to take him from Atlanta to his vacation home in Boca Raton where he and his wife spent their summers. When Jason picks Dick up and catches him jerking off to porn ("You caught me takin' a #3!"), it's a harbinger of things to come. After 40 years of being a faithful husband and 15 years of celibacy due to his wife's lengthy illness, Dick needs to blow off some steam. Jason really wants no part of it, as he's got a big case at his dad's (Dermot Mulroney) law firm and he's getting married to Jewish bridezilla Meredith (Julianne Hough) in a week, but Dick nevertheless cajoles his square grandson into taking him to Daytona for spring break. Dick keeps getting on Jason about why he abandoned his passion for photography to join his dad's law firm, and why he's marrying a control-freak shrew like Meredith, but his real focus is getting laid, and after they run into a trio of spring breakers, Dick sees the perfect opportunity to achieve his dream of unprotected sex with a college girl. Pretending to be a professor, Dick catches the attention of hard-partying Lenore (Aubrey Plaza), who has a fantasy about screwing an elderly prof, wooing Dick with come-ons like "How about you knock your balls in my vagina?" and "I want you to tsunami all over my face!" and "I want you to eat me out and blow your last breath in my pussy." Simply by default of nothing else in the film being even remotely amusing, Plaza is the sole source of anything resembling actual comedy in DIRTY GRANDPA, but her only funny lines (like "I want you to tell me you watch Fox News!") are probably ad-libbed and, perhaps most tellingly, are the ones that aren't X-rated.
Dick (De Niro) asks "You talkin' to me?"
after Lenore tells him to tsunami on her face and
blow his last breath in her pussy in DIRTY GRANDPA
Elsewhere, DIRTY GRANDPA is absolute misery. In the right hands, Jason accidentally smoking crack and being busted for pedophilia and threatened with prison rape and putting on semen-encrusted pants and Facetiming his Jewish fiancee and her Rabbi while unknowingly sporting a swastika of penises drawn on his forehead and having De Niro's stunt junk resting on his face might've been funny. The same goes for De Niro doing rap poses doing a karaoke version of Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day." But in the hands of first-time screenwriter John Phillips (his next project is BAD SANTA 2, so scratch any hope for that one) and director Dan Mazer, a past Sacha Baron Cohen collaborator who helped write DA ALI G SHOW, BORAT, and BRUNO (after DIRTY GRANDPA, it's obvious who was carrying who in that partnership), nothing works and the entire purpose of the project seems to be how far down to the bottom De Niro will let them take him. Mazer's direction is an amateur-night abomination, lacking even a basic understanding of blocking and cutting, starting early on when Dick and Jason leave for their road trip and Dick cracks "Let's get in the giant labia you pulled up in." Mind you, Dick hasn't seen the car because he was too busy "taking a #3" in his man-cave when Jason walked in on him. And how does it make any sense that Jason, several years out of law school, would've been a photo lab partner of Lenore's friend Shadia (Zoey Deutch, daughter of Lea Thompson and a potentially charming actress if she can find the right movie) in college? And Shadia, Lenore, and their gay black friend Bradley (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman) are graduating from college in a week, but they're on spring break now? Does Phillips know the concept of semesters? His script tries to get all maudlin and sappy at various points, with a completely out-of-nowhere about-face by Dick, who spends the first half of the film derisively mocking the stereotypically flamboyant Bradley only to turn into a beacon of progressive acceptance later on. The filmmakers also awkwardly mix the sentimental and the tasteless, as in a heartfelt speech Dick has about how much his wife meant to him, while tossing in as an aside "We tried anal once every five years." There's no consistency and a lot of points are sloppily thrown in--Jason dreamed of being a photographer for Time, which isn't really known for its photos (was Phillips thinking of Life, perhaps? Did De Niro care enough to clarify? Does Efron know what a magazine is?), and Dick was secretly a Special Forces badass who spent his career fighting terrorism, which explains how he's able to take on a quintet of guys 50 years younger than him in a fight. Attempts to humanize Dick amidst his scatological and gynecological insults and one-liners that would make old-school Andrew Dice Clay blush come off as forced and phony. BAD SANTA turned its misanthropic anti-hero around, but that film provided Billy Bob Thornton with a real character to play, with a real progression and arc, and surrounded him with ringers like late greats Bernie Mac and John Ritter. De Niro gets Efron, who's frankly in over his head in pretty much anything, and even gets to mimic his co-star's familiar facial expressions at one point, which might've been funny had he not already done it for the De Niro party in NEIGHBORS.
Dick (De Niro) isn't afraid to take on some younger troublemakers in DIRTY GRANDPA
De Niro's career took an unexpected turn into comedy the late '90s and into the '00s with ANALYZE THIS and MEET THE PARENTS and both of their sequels. But in those, he was essentially parodying his own serious image. It's not that De Niro can't do comedy--after all, 1988's buddy action comedy MIDNIGHT RUN is a classic--but he needs well-written comedy, or at least a comedically-gifted co-star to bounce off of, like he had with Charles Grodin in MIDNIGHT RUN. It goes without saying that Efron is no Grodin, and while De Niro has nothing to work with here, it's still no excuse for the revolting mess in which he's gotten himself. The two-time Oscar-winner has taken a lot of shit over the last decade and a half or so for taking easy gigs that were beneath him (FREELANCERS, THE BIG WEDDING, THE BAG MAN), with constant cries from fans that he's tarnishing his legacy. But there have been some excellent performances from this much-maligned period--the barely-seen STONE and BEING FLYNN and his Oscar-nominated turn in SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK come to mind. I get that working actors have to work, and De Niro likes to stay busy. While I'm sure he enjoys the big paychecks as well, it's easy to see where he's coming from--how many 72-year-old actors are still getting leads in major movies these days? We bag on De Niro but forget someone like Harrison Ford, who's been coasting and phoning it for years but that's all forgiven now that he's Han Solo again. Ford doesn't even mask his cynical disdain for what he does for a living, but you have to give De Niro some credit--he actually seems to be enjoying himself with DIRTY GRANDPA. He approaches the role with an enthusiastic gusto that gets increasingly desperate as the movie flop-sweats its way through one depressingly unfunny set piece after another. After some dubious career choices in recent years, De Niro has hit bottom and there's nowhere to go now but up, as DIRTY GRANDPA is an unequivocally soul-crushing endurance test of a comedy, easily the worst film he's done in a career now in its sixth decade. It's really hard to sufficiently convey just how incredibly devoid of laughs DIRTY GRANDPA is, but in the De Niro comedy canon, it's gotta rank dead last, with nothing in it nearly as hilarious as Travis Bickle's rescue of Iris in TAXI DRIVER or the Russian Roulette scenes in THE DEER HUNTER.
Blumhouse, the Jason Blum-led production company behind the PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, INSIDIOUS, and PURGE films, has a serious backlog of delayed and shelved titles through various distributors. One such distributor is Universal, who released several Blumhouse titles directly to Netflix with no fanfare in late 2014. This week, the studio quietly released to Netflix another batch of Blumhouse product that's been sitting around for anywhere from one to three years. The best of the bunch is THE VEIL, written by Robert Ben Garant (JESSABELLE) and directed by the long-absent Phil Joanou (THREE O'CLOCK HIGH, STATE OF GRACE), helming his first feature film since 2006's GRIDIRON GANG. THE VEIL takes its cue from Ti West's relatively recent THE SACRAMENT in that it obviously references the 1978 Jonestown tragedy in Guyana, but goes in a different and more supernatural direction. In 1985, 47 members of the Heaven's Veil religious cult committed mass suicide by poisoning, including the cult's crazed leader, the shaggy-haired and shades-wearing Jim Jacobs (Thomas Jane). 30 years later, lone survivor Sarah Hope (Lily Rabe), who was only five years old at the time of the mass suicide, is contacted by a team of documentary filmmakers headed by Maggie Price (Jessica Alba). Maggie and her cameraman brother Chris (Jack De Sena) have also had their lives affected by the Heaven's Veil incident--their father was the lead FBI agent investigating Jacobs and the man who led the raid on the compound. It had a profound effect on him and he committed suicide three years later, his body found by young Maggie. Maggie has scoured her father's personal files on Heaven's Veil and in some photos never released to the public, there are visible movie cameras, though any film that was shot was never recovered. As desperate to confront her past as Maggie is to see what truths are to be uncovered on any lost films, Sarah accompanies the group to the ruins of the Heaven's Veil compound where they indeed discover reels of film that show Jacobs experimenting with a brain-death-inducing drug and an antidote that pulls one back from the edge of death with what he claims are newfound, otherworldly, spiritual abilities. It doesn't take long before some unlucky members of the group discover the hard way that Jacobs' spirit haunts the Heaven's Veil grounds, with the intent of procuring new vessels for his and his followers' spirits to carry on their work in the present day.
Admittedly, the early going isn't promising, starting with Jane's character being named "Jim Jacobs" (not a far leap from the real Rev. Jim Jones or Stuart Whitman's "Rev. Jim Johnson" in 1980's GUYANA: CULT OF THE DAMNED) and wearing the signature dark sunglasses (do all suicide cult leaders go to the same Sunglass Hut kiosk at the mall?). But rather than go through the pointless, found-footage Jonestown re-enactment that West did with THE SACRAMENT, Joanou and Garant at least try to do something different with the idea, even if it seems a little reminiscent of EXORCIST III or PRINCE OF DARKNESS at times. Joanou also admirably avoids going full found-footage and instead shows Maggie and the others start watching the grainy, damaged films that seamlessly become flashback sequences. It's a rudimentary technique but it at least avoids the stale, shaky-cam, tilted-angle nonsense that permeates the found-footage subgenre. There's a tremendous sense of atmosphere and chilling imagery throughout, using old-school standbys like shadows, fog, and trees with ominous branches. Dead characters revived and inhabited by the spirits of long-gone Heaven's Veil members walk together and approach their next victims in scenes where Joanou invokes Mario Bava films like the "Wurdalak" segment of BLACK SABBATH and PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES. THE VEIL doesn't break any new ground, but it's a good mix of predictable Blumhouse jump scares and a welcome throwback to horror tropes of old, with a legitimately dramatic climactic twist that leads to a downer ending that pulls no punches. The experienced Joanou (other credits include U2: RATTLE AND HUM and FINAL ANALYSIS) may seem like he's slumming in low-budget horror, but he's done his homework and knows what works, and in the end, it's really just a catchily repetitious synth score away from being a mid-level John Carpenter film. We're not talking about a new cult classic or anyone's new favorite horror flick by any stretch of the imagination, but for a movie buried by its studio and dumped straight to Netflix, THE VEIL is better than anyone would expect it to be. (R, 94 mins)
VISIONS
(US - 2016)
Completed in 2014 and hopefully the world's first and last oenosploitation horror film, VISIONS is a relentlessly dumb paranormal activity potboiler whose sole saving grace is that it isn't found-footage. A year after surviving a freak car accident that killed a baby in the other vehicle, Eveleigh Maddox (Isla Fisher) and her husband David (Anson Mount) have purchased a vineyard in Paso Robles where they plan to rebuild their lives now that Eveleigh is expecting. It's not long before she's plagued by (spoiler alert) visions, such as a bloody hand print on the wall, exploding wine bottles, an attack by a mannequin, and being stalked by a robed figure with an unseen face. A preoccupied David doesn't take Eveleigh's claims seriously and pushes hard to get her back on antidepressants with the help of her doctor (Jim Parsons--yes, that Jim Parsons), but against the advice of her new prenatal yoga pal Sadie (Gillian Jacobs). Eveleigh does some investigating and discovers that the house's previous owners abandoned it due to ghostly occurrences, and that the paranormal poppycock dates back to the late 1800s, when the home was owned by the great-grandparents of local vintner Napoli (John De Lancie), who conveniently said nothing about this early in the film when he hosted a housewarming party for the Maddoxes.
Written by Lucas Sussman, whose last screenplay credit was collaborating with Darren Aronofsky on David Twohy's impressive 2002 WWII submarine horror film BELOW with , and directed by SAW series vet Kevin Greutert, VISIONS can't decide what it wants to be and is ultimately all red herrings and no payoff. There's an entire subplot about Eveleigh thinking the neighbors are running a meth lab and it serves no purpose whatsoever. The supernatural silliness makes no sense once the twists and turns are abruptly laid out in the climax, which seems headed in a ROSEMARY'S BABY direction before it suddenly shifts gears and turns into a ripoff of the French "extreme horror" outing INSIDE, which may have been a better idea all along. It's never made clear why the paranormal activity is confined to the house or why it's doing what its doing (is it the ghost of Paul Masson, avenging the sale of a wine before its time?) and its ultimately all smoke and mirrors to cover up a really weak script that wastes an overqualified cast of TV vets and others who should have better things to do. Joanna Cassidy turns up as a wine distributor who also--gosh, wouldn't ya know it?--happens to be a medium when the plot requires one, and in easily the most frivolous role of her career, Eva Longoria in a pointless, two-scene bit part as Eveleigh's unattached and on-the-prowl friend. Being stuck on NBC's TELENOVELA is one thing, but what did the former DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES star do to get busted down to minor supporting roles in crummy horror movies where she plays the second best friend to the lead actress? Did she lose a bet with Jason Blum? (R, 83 mins)
CURVE
(US - 2016)
Shot back in 2013, CURVE is essentially a two-character piece that starts out as a HITCHER ripoff that morphs into a survivalist thriller version of 127 HOURS before wrapping up as a grisly revenge outing. It gives singer and DANCING WITH THE STARS vet Julianne Hough a chance to get gritty as Mallory, a bride-to-be taking the deserted highway route from San Francisco to Denver, where her fiance is currently working. Of course she has engine trouble but that's remedied by a convenient hiker named Christian (Teddy Sears) who happens to stroll by. She offers him a ride to the next town and things go pleasantly enough until he openly ponders if she'd be able to "deep throat his cock," which Mallory correctly interprets as a major red flag that Christian is a depraved psycho. Unable to get him out of the vehicle, Mallory instead crashes through a guard rail on a road, sending them sailing into the woods below. Christian is thrown from the passenger seat but Mallory's leg is trapped and she's unable to move, so after taunting her a little, Christian leaves. Days go by, with Christian periodically returning to the scene of the accident to hector her some more, because if he killed her, then there'd be no third act where she manages to free herself and track him down at a lodge where he's killed several other people and has a girl (Madalyn Horcher) strapped face-down on a bed.
It doesn't really score any points for intelligence or originality, but CURVE is never dull and Hough is surprisingly credible in the lead. Her fans might be surprised to hear her dropping vulgarities, eating a rat, and drinking her own urine as she's trapped in her car for days on end, but director Iain Softley (HACKERS, THE SKELETON KEY) and first-time screenwriters Kimberly Lofstrom Johnson and Lee Patterson don't offer much in the way of logic or consistency. Why would Christian leave Mallory alive in the car? And why is the highway completely deserted early on, but when Mallory gets in a position to expose Christian, you can suddenly see several cars whizzing by, including a cop (Drew Rausch) who, right on cue, becomes Christian's next victim? Sears doesn't do much as the dull antagonist besides widen his eyes and smirk. It's nice that he doesn't overplay it, but since we know nothing about the character, and what little we do know is unreliable info, it's hard for both Sears and the audience to get a handle on the hows and whys of Christian. Has he left a trail of dead bodies in his wake? Is he from the area? Is anyone after him? Who knows? For the most part, CURVE is a forgettable retread of other, better movies, but Hough does a surprisingly convincing job of stretching outside her comfort zone and really gives it everything she's got. (R, 85 mins)
