UPGRADE (US/Australia - 2018) Written and directed by Leigh Whannell. Cast: Logan Marshall-Green, Betty Gabriel, Harrison Gilbertson, Melanie Vallejo, Benedict Hardie, Linda Cropper, Richard Cawthorne, Christopher Kirby, Clayton Jacobson, voice of Simon Maiden. (R, 100 mins)
An imaginative take on the revenge thriller, the high-concept UPGRADE wouldn't have been out of place as Vidmark Entertainment title in the new release section of your favorite video store in the early '90s. That's meant as a compliment, as it's a fast, mean, and cynical indictment of our reliance on technology that has a message but doesn't take itself so seriously that it forgets to be entertaining. In other words, it's a B-movie like they used to make. In a vaguely-defined near-future America with self-driving cars, omnipresent surveillance drones, and MINORITY REPORT touch-screens everywhere, proudly blue-collar and stubbornly Luddite mechanic Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) is a man out of his time. He hates technology, still listens to music on vinyl, drinks Budweiser, and refuses to use his wife Asha's (Melanie Vallejo) self-driving, autonomous car. Asha's the primary breadwinner, working for a robotics corporation called Cobalt, but Grey makes some decent money restoring old muscle cars for rich guys with money to burn. Asha is stunned to learn that Grey's latest client is Eron Keen (Harrison Gilbertson), a brilliant and reclusive young tech mogul who owns Vessel, a groundbreaking company whose achievements have far surpassed Cobalt. On the way home from delivering Keen's car, Asha's malfunctions and goes offline, speeding up and crashing until a rescue unit arrives and proceeds to kill Asha and shoot Grey in the back of the neck, leaving him to die.
Awakening after a three-month coma to find he's paralyzed from the neck down, Grey has no interest in being taken care of by machines or his mother (Linda Cropper), which leads to an attempted painkiller overdose. While recovering in the hospital, Grey is visited by Eron, who offers to make him a test subject in a secret experiment involving "STEM," his latest biomechanical creation. It's a small, insect-sized implant that will fuse with his spine and serve as the missing "bridge" between his brain and body, allowing him to walk again. The catch: it's still experimental and top-secret, so when he's not alone, he still has to be in the wheelchair and appear to be quadriplegic to everyone, including his mother. Once he learns to walk again, Grey is in for another surprise: STEM is alive, existing as a HAL 9000-like voice (Simon Maiden) that only he can hear. STEM not only assists in Grey's mobility but also with the investigation into Asha's murder, which is at a dead-end with Cortez (Betty Gabriel), the lone wolf cop who caught the case. Watching drone surveillance footage through Grey's eyes, STEM is able to identify one of the killers--all of whom have surgically implanted shotguns embedded in their arms that fire out of the palms of their hands--and directs Grey to his address. A scuffle ensues and Grey is getting his ass handed to him, at which point STEM informs him "I need your permission to operate independently." With permission granted, Grey becomes a one-man killing machine, reborn and unstoppable thanks to STEM's all-knowing, all-seeing technology, especially once STEM warns him that a concerned Eron is trying to take him offline and has him visit a hacker with specific directions to override its creator's capabilities.
Written and directed by SAW and INSIDIOUS writer/co-star Leigh Whannell, UPGRADE has its share of jokey, crowd-pleasing moments, with some insanely over-the-top splatter kills and one very nicely-done car chase. Whannell's script does let Grey's transformation from "everyman who can't fathom ending someone's life" to "wisecracking vigilante smartass" happen a little too abruptly, as he's only offing the second guy responsible for Asha's death before he's already dropping bon mots like "Don't you know I'm a fucking ninja?" The technophobic chip on Grey's shoulder is a little overplayed early on, with Whannell working too hard to present him as a working class hero of the future, but the message gets less ham-fisted the more UPGRADE goes on, with a pair of late revelations and an unexpected ending that's downbeat enough that you have to wonder if Whannell had to fight to keep it. It's a potentially star-making role for Marshall-Green (PROMETHEUS, THE INVITATION), whose performance is both gritty and funny, whether he's interacting with the voice of STEM to create a back-and-forth buddy movie that exists only in his head, or in some of his inspired, Buster Keaton-like physical acting when Grey cedes control of himself to STEM, pulling off the effect that his entire body is a puppet on a hardwired string. And after making a memorable impression in the second and best PURGE installment, her unforgettable work as Georgina in GET OUT, and with her tough, incredulous Cortez here, it's time for Gabriel to be rewarded with her own movie. Goofy, fast-moving, and ultraviolent, UPGRADE pulls off a lot with a pretty low budget. There's definitely some word-of-mouth sleeper hit potential, not to mention a very probable cult following once it hits streaming and then lands in cable rotation for the next few decades.
Directed by Oliver Stone. Written by Kieran Fitzgerald and Oliver Stone. Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Shailene Woodley, Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson, Nicolas Cage, Rhys Ifans, Scott Eastwood, Logan Marshall-Green, Timothy Olyphant, Ben Schnetzer, Lakeith Lee Stanfield, Joely Richardson, Ben Chaplin, Nicholas Rowe, Basker Patel, Edward Snowden. (R, 134 mins) It would be nice if Oscar-winning filmmaker and tinfoil-hat fashionista Oliver Stone was back in provocateur mode with SNOWDEN, but the message is lost in the auteur's didactic execution. Told with myopic tunnelvision and with nothing but gushing admiration for its subject, SNOWDEN lumbers along with little in the way of nuance or subtlety, and nothing in the way of questioning the ex-CIA/NSA whistleblower. It's canonizing hagiography of the most one-sided order, with Edward Snowden the sole voice of morality in a world of evil big government surveillance that exists only to piss on the freedoms of Americans and can't possibly have any positive purpose whatsoever. This should be a nailbiting thriller but Stone is so distracted by his Snowden man-crush that it never has a chance to reach the heights of his in-his-prime conspiracy/paranoia triumphs like JFK or NIXON. It's more in line with the hokey, neutered simplicity of something like WORLD TRADE CENTER. Snowden is a complex, complicated figure, but you wouldn't know it by watching SNOWDEN. Stone isn't interesting in getting in Snowden's head, so you're better off checking out Laura Poitras' Oscar-winning 2014 Snowden documentary CITIZENFOUR instead.
That said, Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a terrific job of capturing Snowden's voice and mannerisms with uncanny accuracy. The film opens in 2013 as an on-the-run Snowden is holed up in a Hong Kong hotel preparing to leak secret CIA and NSA files to documentary filmmaker Poitras (Melissa Leo) and Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) and Ewen MacAskill (Tom Wilkinson). Jumping back and forth from 2004 to 2013, we follow Snowden through a short stint in the Army, where his goal of joining the Special Forces is stalled by brittle bones and a pair of fragile legs that get him a discharge. Told by his doctor that there's other ways to serve his country, the conservative, Ayn Rand-admiring Snowden is admitted into The Hill, the CIA training facility in Virginia where he becomes the top prospect of (fictional) instructor Corbin O'Brian (a vampiric Rhys Ifans). He also falls in love with liberal Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley), who joins him when his new CIA job takes him to places like Switzerland and Japan, where his focus is cybersecurity and designing programs that are ostensibly used to monitor post-9/11 terrorist activities. He leaves the CIA but works for them on a contractual basis later on, and is disturbed to find that much of the US government's surveillance focus is spying on its own citizens and that one of his programs is used for drone strikes in the Middle East. Growing increasingly concerned about the nature of his work and how far the surveillance goes (he's informed at one point that his suspicions about Lindsay having an affair are unfounded, proof that the omnipresent They are watching her and monitoring her computer and phone activity), he decides to blow the whistle, stealing thousands of secret files and fleeing the country before reaching out to activist filmmaker Poitras.
How heavy-handed is SNOWDEN? The surveillance program is called "Prism," and when invoking it, Stone feels the need to frame shots with a prism effect that's also used when epileptic Snowden has seizures. It actually caused snickering in the audience about the 10th or 12th time it's used. How unsubtle is SNOWDEN? Ifans has been directed to play O'Brian in the most ominously sinister fashion possible, making it difficult to tell if he's a top CIA official or the Antichrist. Watch when he's shown speaking with Snowden in a conference room, Snowden physically there, but O'Brian on a giant, theater-sized screen as Ifans' looming, side-eyed visage takes up the entire display, just in case the whole "Big Brother is watching" concept wasn't already clear. The performances are generally solid, though Nicolas Cage is squandered in an intriguing but tiny role as a benched analyst curating antiquated espionage equipment, his sole purpose being to unknowingly supply the Rubik's Cube that Snowden will use years later to stash the SD card with all the files. But it's Ifans' bizarre portrayal that really sticks out, bringing to mind what might happen if PHANTASM's The Tall Man worked for the CIA. There's a nerve-shredding, Alan J. Pakula-type paranoia thriller to made about Snowden's exploits, and less preachy filmmakers could've done wonders with the subject. Remember that incredible Donald Sutherland exposition drop in JFK? That Oliver Stone could've done something with SNOWDEN. So could Michael Mann in INSIDER mode or David Fincher channeling ZODIAC. There's also a nice Mann vibe in some of Anthony Dod Mantle's digital cinematography in locations all over the world that recalls last year's criminally underrated hacker thriller BLACKHAT. Unfortunately, Stone the filmmaker defers to Dr. Stone the lecturing activist with an agenda. The film completely flies off the rails in a catastrophic climax that recalls Professor Steven Seagal's speech at the end of ON DEADLY GROUND, as Gordon-Levitt actually exits the film and Snowden takes over, playing himself being interviewed via internet from Russia, basking in the standing ovation he gets at a TEDTalk event. This drawn-out finale--more like a tacked-on Snowden infomercial--concludes with an inspirational, manipulative score crescendoing as a pensive Snowden finishes the interview, closes his laptop and turns away, in profile, triumphantly staring out the window of his Russian apartment and smiling, looking like he's waiting for Stone to cue up Foo Fighters' "My Hero" for the closing credits.
When 2015's COP CAR got some festival buzz going and became a minor hit on the arthouse circuit, it was enough to bump director/co-writer Jon Watts and his writing partner Christopher Ford into megabudget circles with the upcoming reboot SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING. But long before COP CAR, Watts and Ford made their debut, the horror film CLOWN. Shot in late 2012 but kept on a shelf by the Weinstein Co. until 2016, CLOWN is a feature-length expansion of a fake trailer Watts and Ford made and posted to YouTube in 2010. The "trailer," about a demonic clown, jokingly proclaimed "From master of horror Eli Roth," which prompted a flattered Roth to meet with the pair and offer to produce an actual CLOWN movie. While Robert Rodriguez's MACHETE may have worked once--before the novelty wore off with MACHETE KILLS--CLOWN is more on the HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN end of fake trailers-turned-real movies. Leadenly-paced and feeling much longer than 99 minutes, CLOWN has dad Kent (Andy Powers) forced by a cancellation to don an old clown costume for his son Jack's (Christian Distefano) birthday party. The suit and makeup soon adhere to and fuse with his body, making it impossible to take off. After several failed and increasingly gruesome attempts to get out of the costume, a desperate Kent shoots himself in the head only to find he can't die. This drives him to madness and murder, as his wife Meg (Laura Allen) learns from Karlsson (Peter Stormare), the suit's previous owner, that it's an instrument of a demon who subsists on the sacrificing of five children a year. This leads to a repetitive series of sequences with Kent pursuing children and slowly morphing into a full-on clown demon as Meg tries to keep him from killing Jack. There's some intriguing and occasionally ballsy ideas in CLOWN--Karlsson's brother was a pediatric cancer specialist, so the pair conquered the clown curse by offering the demon terminally ill children, and when the demon offers to give Kent back for one more child, Meg isn't above leading an innocent kid to the slaughter if it means saving her family--but CLOWN just doesn't come together. It's sluggish and dull, and it needs a better actor than Powers to really feel for Kent's plight. It doesn't skimp on the gore and some occasional shock value antics, but this story is, at best, a 20-minute segment in an anthology film. (R, 99 mins)
BASKIN (Turkey/US/UK - 2016)
This Turkish import got some significant acclaim at film festivals and from the horror scenester echo chamber, which only serves as further evidence that fanboys will bestow accolades on pretty much everything. BASKIN is a tired, slow-moving splatterfest that's a veritable grab-bag of cribbed material. The crux of the plot is essentially a Turkish HELLRAISER, with a quintet of cops answering a call for backup and ending up at a long-abandoned police station off a dark country road on the middle of nowhere. There's some backstory about the father-son relationship between the in-charge Boss Remzi (Ergun Kuyucu) and young rookie Arda (Gorkem Kasal), who was more or less raised by Remzi after a traumatic childhood incident that, of course, comes into play late in the film. The dark, empty police outpost is filled with bloodied, contorted souls in a mad orgy of sex and torture, overseen by "The Father," played in a bit of FREAKS and THE SENTINEL-style stunt casting by non-actor Mehmet Cerrahoglu. The Father puts the cops through all the torture porn tropes, whether it's slowly tearing out one's intestinal tract or carving out another's eyes and tongue-kissing the socket before making him fuck a goat-masked woman from behind.
It was the eye socket moment where I finally lost my patience with BASKIN. Not because of the gore or the perverse French kissing of the eye socket--that wasn't the problem at all. Even from the start, little things started rubbing me the wrong way and I was getting grouchy without really realizing it, whether it was a restaurant scene where the cops are swapping stories and one goes into a Joe Pesci "Funny how?" routine from GOODFELLAS; or the long exploration of the dark, cavernous underbelly of the abandoned police station that just seemed a little too much like SESSION 9; or the fleeting glimpse of an obviously non-human figure darting across the frame like he was trying to find his way back to THE DESCENT. Director/co-writer Can Evrenol, expanding his 2013 short film of the same name, was wearing his love of horror movies on his sleeve, but it was just getting to be too much. Too forced. By the time The Father turns up about an hour in, talking about being "one with the cosmos" and "you always carry Hell with you," he started to sound a lot like HELLRAISER's Pinhead in the days when he was simply known as "Lead Cenobite." But then the eye socket scene happened and Evrenol lost me. He accompanies it with a prominent cue from Riz Ortolani's CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST score--including that synthy beeeeeew!--and the transparency was just too much to ignore. That's what I concluded to be the exact moment where those lauding the film tilted their heads back, closed their eyes, exhaled slowly and purred "Oh, right there. That's the spot. I'm yours, BASKIN." There's nothing here but Evrenol name-checking bits and pieces of his favorite horror movies, bringing nothing new to the table but fooling enough people into proclaiming BASKIN some triumphant new vision of horror. It's lazy, it's uninspired, and worst of all, it's not scary. At all. It's all smoke and mirrors, and once again, horror fans prove themselves to be the biggest genre pushovers in moviegoing. BASKIN is the most overrated horror film since GOODNIGHT MOMMY. One more time, gang: start being a little more discerning, and a little less concerned with making sure your free screeners and your convention credentials keep coming. (Unrated, 97 mins, also streaming on Netflix) THE INVITATION
(US - 2016)
While everyone was busy fellating BASKIN, another horror film was stealthily released around the same time that actually deserved the accolades but more or less fell off the radar even with the scenesters. A slow-burner that starts ratcheting the tension in the first scene and never lets up, THE INVITATION is a film where it's best to go in knowing as little as possible. It's also one of the best films of the year that you've probably heard nothing about. En route to a dinner party in the Hollywood Hills, Will (Logan Marshall-Green) and his girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) accidentally hit a coyote that Will is forced to put out of its misery via tire iron. That will turn out to be the least upsetting thing about the evening. The dinner party is at Will's old house, hosted by his ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and her new husband, record producer/recovering addict David (Michiel Huisman). Several of their closest friends are there and it's been two years since they've all been together, the group more or less splintering when Will and Eden's young son died and their marriage didn't survive the aftermath. Right off the bat, Will gets a strange vibe from Eden and David, the two endlessly talking about a trip to Mexico where they embraced a self-help philosophy of grief coping known as "The Invitation." Also at the party is a friend they met in Mexico, a clingy and needy young woman named Sadie (Lindsay Burdge), who almost instantly offers to sleep with Will. There's also the ominous presence of stranger named Pruitt (John Carroll Lynch), a friend of Eden's and David's who breaks the ice by showing the group a DVD of an assisted suicide they observed in Mexico. Wounds that never completely healed are torn open as Will vehemently disagrees with the way Eden has addressed her grief. He's also bothered by Pruitt and the fact that the windows have bars on them, that David has locked all the doors from the inside, and the fact that one of the guests they're still waiting on left David a voice mail two hours earlier saying he was the first one there, yet no one has seen him and he's nowhere to be found.
