On DVD/Blu-ray/Netflix streaming: ROOM 237 (2013) and SIMON KILLER (2013)

ROOM 237
(US - 2013)

Stanley Kubrick's THE SHINING opened largely to critical derision in the summer of 1980, with many complaining that it deviated too much from Stephen King's 1977 novel.  It was still a box office hit, thanks largely to Jack Nicholson's instantly iconic performance.  Seeing it at the drive-in with my parents that summer (they probably figured I'd just fall asleep), I was instantly hypnotized by it.  Of course, I'd seen movies before (I was seven), but nothing like this.  Not just in plot content but from a visual standpoint.  This just didn't look like any movie I'd seen up to that point.  THE SHINING is probably the movie that got me into movies.  It's my favorite film and the one I've seen more than any other (I stopped counting around the 75th viewing, and that was about 20 years ago).  THE SHINING has had a profound effect on many cinephiles, as evidenced by Rodney Ascher's often astonishing, frequently bonkers documentary/visual essay ROOM 237, which examines not just the phenomenon of THE SHINING as an enduring classic, but the various theories about the "deeper meaning" Kubrick was trying to convey.  Five theorists, heard but never seen, explain their positions on what Kubrick, arguably cinema's greatest filmmaker and most obsessively detailed, was attempting with THE SHINING.  These range from the Native American artwork in the Overlook Hotel and the Calumet baking powder in its kitchen being symbolic of American Indian genocide; the recurring number "42" (a "42" on one of Danny's shirts, Wendy and Danny watching SUMMER OF '42 on TV, the total of 2x3x7 equaling 42) being representative of the Holocaust (conceived and implemented in 1942); an examination of sexual deviance via subliminal erections and phallic imagery in carpet patterns and other interior décor.  There's also an examination of the perceptual shifts, spatial disorientations, and constructive inconsistencies in the Overlook, using detailed maps of what the hotel would look like in reality (the mention of the numerous "impossible" windows, rooms, and hallways and the presumably intentional continuity errors aren't unique to ROOM 237; check out some of "analysist" Rob Iger's "Collative Learning" videos on YouTube).  Some of the theories are surprisingly persuasive, but the more some of these people talk, the more crackpot their opinions start to sound.  When one subject starts angrily rambling on about how THE SHINING is Kubrick's confession to his complicity in faking the Apollo 11 moon landing (or, rather, insisting that while we did put a man on the moon, the footage was actually shot by Kubrick on a soundstage ahead of time), you realize the guy's gone from a largely reasonable potential interpretation of a film's subtext into a full-on tinfoil hat meltdown.

The mysteries of THE SHINING are endless--what is up with the scowling looks from hotel manager Ullman's assistant Bill Watson?   Does he represent the sinister forces of the Overlook while Ullman is just the smiling, glad-handing guy out front? Why is Jack reading an issue of Playgirl in the lobby of the Overlook?--and a brief foray into the "SHINING Forwards and Backwards" presentation (a piece of visual art that actually played in several cities after ROOM 237's release) opens up a whole new can of worms.  Sometimes the interview subjects are just flat-out wrong and simply talking out of their asses, with one saying that Kubrick had actor Barry Nelson (as Ullman) wear a toupee that made him look like JFK, when in fact, it was the same style of toupee that Nelson always wore as he got older. Nevertheless, ROOM 237 is one of the best films about a film you'll ever see, regardless of how much you buy into the things being said.  As many times as I've seen THE SHINING, I still find something new every time I watch it, and if you have anything approaching the affection for it that I do, ROOM 237 is required viewing.  (Unrated, 103 mins)


SIMON KILLER
(US - 2013)

Some of the creative personnel from 2011's acclaimed MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE were involved in this enigmatic and equally intriguing character piece that didn't get nearly as much attention in the indie scene.  After earning his graduate degree in neuroscience studies, Simon (Brady Corbet) goes on a trip to Paris where he's trying to get over a painful ending to a long relationship.  Prowling the red-light district, Simon goes to a sex club and meets Victoria (Mati Diop).  After paying for sex a few times, Simon ends up crashing at her apartment and a real relationship seems to blossom.  Little by little, writer/director Antonio Campos (with story contributions from Corbet and Diop) shows the increasingly complex layers of Simon's personality and before long, it's apparent that he's at best an unreliable narrator.  The title might be an indication where things could head, but we realize something's not right when Simon intentionally drags his knuckles across a concrete wall and tells Victoria that he was attacked in the street by some punks.  He gets increasingly clingy with Victoria and even manages to rope her into a foolish blackmail plot involving her clients.  Simon is the kind of guy who says "I'm gonna need some money because I'd like to buy you something" and somehow gets away with it.

SIMON KILLER is one of those films with a vague resolution that's intentionally left open-ended.  Opening with a stunning panoramic shot of Paris, it's beautifully shot throughout, augmented by one of the year's best soundtracks.  I really liked the overwhelming sense of loneliness and isolation that Campos conveys in the early-going with Simon, ear buds in place, lost in his own world and everyone around him staring blankly at their smartphones.  Campos really captures the decadent, "after dark" feel of some sections of Paris that the city's tourism board doesn't promote, and his frequent strobey dissolves between scenes create a chilling feel that comes off like a restrained Gaspar Noe.  Corbet and Diop are terrific in this cold, standoff-ish, and often unsettling film, filled with uncomfortable confrontations and some surprisingly explicit sex scenes.  It's a film that's definitely not for everyone, but if you're open to it and give it some time and space, it's one that slowly and surely gets under your skin. (Unrated, 105 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray/Netflix streaming: ANTIVIRAL (2013) and MY AMITYVILLE HORROR (2013)

ANTIVIRAL
(Canada/France - 2012; 2013 US release)

You'd be able to spot the David Cronenberg influence on ANTIVIRAL even without the knowledge that it's the writing/directing debut of his son Brandon.  It's a good thing to say the apple doesn't fall far from the tree here.  ANTIVIRAL juggles a lot of concepts--too many, in fact--but despite its minor flaws, it's one of the most original and disturbing films to come down the pike in a while, a scathing indictment of vapid celebrity culture fused with the "body horror" elements that figured so prominently in the elder Cronenberg's trail-blazing early work.  In a near-future, dystopian Toronto, celebrity worship has grown so huge that bored people with too much time and money on their hands now pay to be infected with viruses harvested directly from their favorite tabloid and entertainment magazine fixtures, as a way to be "closer" to them and be "part of them."  Lucas Clinic sales rep Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) spends his days selling celebrity sicknesses to pathetic customers and his nights selling those same viruses on the black market using equipment stolen from his employers at the clinic.  His most lucrative supply comes from beloved celebrity Hannah Geist (Sarah Gadon)--and it's never really specified what Hannah does--she's just always in the news.  He pays her a visit to draw some blood during her latest illness (he's previously sold her various flus and even her cold sore virus to a guy who wanted to feel like he'd kissed her and contracted it).  When he injects himself with the virus in order to sneak it on to the black market, he becomes violently ill and quickly realizes that something is very wrong with Hannah. 

Growing increasingly horrific but not in the ways you expect, ANTIVIRAL is the kind of bleak film that really gets under your skin.  While Brandon's story ideas and scripting are an inventive outgrowth of today's culture, he utilizes the clinical methodology of his father's early work.  So many images recall the elder Cronenberg: the presence of THE BROOD and THE DEAD ZONE co-star Nicholas Campbell as the head of the Lucas Clinic; the cold, desolate look of Toronto, brilliantly captured by cinematographer Karim Hussain, is reminiscent of everything from SHIVERS to VIDEODROME to CRASH (there's also a lot of CRASH in the shots of endless lines of cars speeding along the freeway); Syd's black-market hustling and his business arrangement with disease dealer Arvid (Joe Pingue), who grows the viruses supplied by Syd into meat patties to sell to his customers, recalls the shady Civic TV wheeling-and-dealing of Max Renn (James Woods) and his tech-geek buddy Harlan (Peter Dvorsky) in VIDEODROME.  The increasingly sickly Syd comes across like a more introverted Max Renn, and Jones (THE LAST EXORCISM), with his pale skin and sullen demeanor, reminded me of younger, vaguely androgynous Brad Pitt.  Though it's a bit overlong and could've used some trimming in the second half, ANTIVIRAL is a bold and original work, despite the myriad of influences and references--in a way, it seems like it's doing the film a disservice to mention all the David Cronenberg callbacks, but it's impossible to not mention them.  It's almost as if Brandon Cronenberg is carving his own path while putting all the "Yes, David Cronenberg is my father" stuff on the table from the start.  For fans of the still very active Pops Cronenberg, it's reassuring to see that his legacy and the Cronenberg name will carry on at least one more generation and that his son obviously spent of lot of time observing and learning from Dad and is eager to honor that heritage.  And you can't help but smile knowing how proud the old man must've been when he first saw this.  Also with Wendy Crewson and Malcolm McDowell in small roles, ANTIVIRAL ranks right up there with Duncan Jones' MOON (2009) and Panos Cosmatos' BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW (2012) as the most promising genre debuts in recent years. It's a grim and depressing downer, but would you want anything else from a Cronenberg?  (Unrated, 108 mins)



MY AMITYVILLE HORROR
(US - 2013)

The alleged haunted house at 112 Ocean View Ave. in the Amityville neighborhood on Long Island has remained a pop culture phenomenon for nearly 40 years since the DeFeo murders took place in 1974.  The house was purchased by the Lutz family in 1975, and they left after 28 harrowing days of unexplained and relentless paranormal phenomena.  That's been the story all these years, through several books and at least ten movies, though the whole thing is largely accepted to be a hoax (none of the five occupants of the house since 1976 have reported any strange happenings).  MY AMITYVILLE HORROR is a documentary that focuses on Daniel Lutz, the oldest of the three Lutz children, who was ten years old when they lived in the house.  Now in his late 40s, Lutz is still traumatized by his experiences, and he still claims all of the paranormal occurrences really happened.  Lutz is an angry man haunted by a painful childhood.  He talks at length about his resentment of George marrying his mother Kathy (which he would only do if Kathy allowed him to legally adopt the kids as his own) and severing ties with his biological father.   Lutz portrays George as a manipulative, bad-tempered, and often abusive man with an interest in the occult, with books on paranormal phenomena, hypnosis, and various religions.  Psychologists and paranormal experts alike question the validity of Lutz's claims, saying that he may be confusing the incidents from the books and the movies and that the negative memories and unaddressed trauma of his childhood have convinced him of things that may not have happened.

Regardless of where one stands on the Amityville story, MY AMITYVILLE HORROR is a film that probably would've worked better as a 20/20 segment.  The abrasive Lutz almost seems to be playing "Daniel Lutz" at times, a character that he's seemingly based on Ed Harris from the looks of it.  Director and Amityville historian Eric Walter frequently cuts to shots of Lutz jamming and shredding on his guitar, for no apparent reason other than to kill time.  Fans of the recent THE CONJURING will be interested to see Lorraine Warren (played by Vera Farmiga in the film) meeting with Lutz.  Lorraine and her late husband Ed went through the Amityville house in 1976, during which time an image was allegedly captured of the "demon boy" reputed to be the ghost of the youngest DeFeo child, when it was actually a member of their own investigating team.  There's some interesting observations about the power of a manipulative, controlling person on the collective psyche of a family (and it's worth noting that George Lutz died in 2006 and can't defend himself) and how that impacts entire lives (Lutz's two younger siblings declined to take part in this), but MY AMITYVILLE HORROR doesn't really have enough substance to warrant being feature-length. (Unrated, 89 mins)

If This Wasn't Streaming on Netflix, Would Anyone Remember It Existed?: WHERE IS PARSIFAL? (1984)

WHERE IS PARSIFAL?
(UK - 1984)

Directed by Henri Helman.  Written by Berta Dominguez D.  Cast: Tony Curtis, Cassandra Domenica, Erik Estrada, Peter Lawford, Ron Moody, Donald Pleasence, Orson Welles, Christopher Chaplin, Vladek Sheybal, Arthur Beatty, Nancy Roberts, Jay Benedict, Anthony Dawson, Edward Burnham, Victoria Burgoyne, Ava Lazar. (PG, 82 mins)

Alexander Salkind (1921-1997) had been producing films in Europe since the early 1960s when he finally had a pair of breakout hits with THE THREE MUSKETEERS (1973) and THE FOUR MUSKETEERS (1974).  He managed to make opulent films while always keeping an eye on the bottom line, as evidenced by the cast of the MUSKETEERS films--which were shot simultaneously--suing Salkind for only paying them for one film when his plan was to release them as two all along (this flim-flammery prompted the Screen Actors Guild to create what's actually known as the "Salkind Clause," which prevents producers from extending an actor's contract for one film into two or more).  He tried the same thing a few years later with SUPERMAN (1978) and SUPERMAN II (1981), the latter being shot mostly at the same time as SUPERMAN until Salkind and his producing partner and son Ilya (born in 1947) fired director Richard Donner and replaced him with Richard Lester.  Co-star Gene Hackman, aware of Salkind's chicanery on the MUSKETEERS films, wasn't having any of it and refused to return when shooting reconvened with Lester in 1979, forcing the use of a Lex Luthor double in SUPERMAN II's Lester-shot footage (anything you see of Hackman in SUPERMAN II was actually shot in 1977-78 by Donner).  Alexander Salkind became a veritable mini-mogul thanks to the SUPERMAN films, but a string of costly bombs quickly sent things south for him.  SUPERMAN III (1983) flopped and the spinoff film SUPERGIRL (1984) and SANTA CLAUS (1985) tanked badly.  By 1987, the Salkinds were forced to sell the SUPERMAN franchise to Cannon's Golan & Globus, who produced the botched SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE.  Salkind resurfaced in 1992 when he produced CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS: THE DISCOVERY, which cost $40 million and grossed $8 million, landing a spot on the Ten Worst list of virtually every major critic that year.  Following the COLUMBUS debacle, both Salkinds left the movie business.  Alexander died in 1997, and several years later, Ilya attempted an ill-advised comeback by trying to cash in on Oliver Stone's ALEXANDER with the troubled YOUNG ALEXANDER.  Filmed in 2004, YOUNG ALEXANDER had release dates announced in 2007 and 2010, but remains shelved, possibly uncompleted, and thus far has yet to be released anywhere, bringing the once-mighty Salkind legacy to its apparent conclusion.

Maybe the Salkinds weren't cut out to be blockbuster movie producers.  Alexander seemed to be more at home with artsy and auteur-friendly European fare like Abel Gance's 1960 epic AUSTERLITZ and Orson Welles' brilliant 1962 adaptation of Franz Kafka's THE TRIAL.  But during the height of their success--or at the beginning of the fall--there was one other Alexander Salkind project, made between SUPERMAN III and SUPERGIRL, that's fallen through the cracks over time and is rarely mentioned.  WHERE IS PARSIFAL? was produced by Salkind and veteran director Terence Young (DR. NO, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, WAIT UNTIL DARK), and was conceived as a vanity project for Salkind's wife Berta Dominguez D, who wrote the script under her own name and co-starred under the pseudonym "Cassandra Domenica."  She'd written scripts before (1977's CROSSED SWORDS) and after (Alejandro Jodorowsky's 1990 misfire THE RAINBOW THIEF), and acted occasionally (her own self-financed 1982 film MAYA, and co-starring in Catherine Breillat's 1988 film 36 FILLETTE), but WHERE IS PARSIFAL? was Salkind giving his wife carte blanche to make whatever she wanted to make and he provided a generous budget to get a large cast of big names, even if many were on the downside of their storied careers.  The film is the only English-language work of French TV director Henri Helman, and considering the appearances of Young regulars like Vladek Sheybal and Anthony Dawson (both vets of early 007 films), it's possible that Young may have directed some of it. 

Little is known about WHERE IS PARSIFAL?, as it vanished shortly after being screened at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival.  Columbia submitted it to the MPAA and it got a PG rating, even with a few topless shots of Victoria Burgoyne, but they ended up shelving it.  It never received a US theatrical or home video release, and was largely unseen in the rest of the world, turning up first on VHS in Australia in the late 1980s.  Bootleg DVDs have appeared, and the film made a recent British Film Institute "75 Lost Films" list.  Well, it's lost no more:  it turned up on Netflix streaming earlier this week in what looks like a 1.33 VHS transfer, around the same time that same transfer magically appeared on YouTube (you can tell it just went up because as of this writing:  5 views).   There's a reason WHERE IS PARSIFAL? was buried under a rock and has been nowhere to be found for decades:  it's a self-indulgent, unwatchable piece of shit.

As Elba, Dominguez D/"Domenica" is the supposed star, but after an incomprehensible introduction pulling off some weird theft with sinister magician Morjack (Sheybal), she largely takes a backseat as the film is overtaken by a cast of embarrassed guest stars.  Elba's husband is financially-strapped inventor Parsifal Katzenellenbogen (Tony Curtis), an eccentric hypochondriac who's desperately trying to sell the rights to a skywriting machine.  Parsifal, or "Parsi," oversees a house full of oddballs: his depressed teenage son Ivan (Christopher Chaplin, Ilya Salkind's brother-in-law and the youngest child of Charles, who was 73 when he was born) and his older girlfriend Sheila (Ava Lazar); Elba's rollerskating lover Luke (Jay Benedict); Jasper (Arthur Beatty), a tall black Buddhist who broadcasts radio transmissions through Parsi's mansion; and alcoholic German butler Beersbohm (Ron Moody).  All of these characters mug shamelessly, shout, run from room to room, slam doors, drop things, engage in slapstick pratfalls, and spout improvised nonsense.  This goes on for some time until Parsi arranges a dinner party with some potential purchases of the skywriter:  wealthy gangster Henry Board II (Erik Estrada), who's accompanied by aging, has-been movie heartthrob Montague Chippendale (Peter Lawford); babbling, kilt-wearing Scotsman Mackintosh (Donald Pleasence), and, much later, gypsy billionaire Klingsor the 19th (Orson Welles).  What transpires is a lot of yelling, more running around, periodic bits where wacky music plays over sped-up action in an attempt to be "zany," Moody turning in the most humiliating performance of his career--at different points in the film, he's sporting bird shit and a lampshade on his head--and finally, a mawkish skywritten message from Berta Dominguez D, instructing the world to "Master Your Fate, Try Love."  People will do a lot for love, and if nothing else, the pointless, practically plotless WHERE IS PARSIFAL? proves that Alexander Salkind truly, madly, and deeply loved his wife.

You'll rarely see a cast looking more abandoned than the one spazzing out here.  Curtis, his career on a decade-plus downward spiral from which it never really recovered, was hitting bottom with alcoholism and a serious cocaine addiction that rendered him virtually unemployable in Hollywood.  He looks terrible here, and shortly after finishing PARSIFAL, he was hospitalized and went into rehab.  He got clean and sober, and was rewarded with his best role in years in Nicolas Roeg's INSIGNIFICANCE (1985), but Hollywood lost interest in him and he was still forced to resort to stuff like LOBSTER MAN FROM MARS by 1989.  This was Estrada's first movie role after the hugely popular TV series CHiPS went off the air in 1983.  His big-screen career pretty much started and ended with WHERE IS PARSIFAL? and while his TV fame didn't carry over to the big screen (his next film was the 1985 Italian action flick LIGHT BLAST), he remained busy in low-budget DTV fare and, inevitably, reality TV, and is a fan-convention fixture to this day.  It had to be disheartening for Estrada to make the leap from TV to movies and think he's hitting the big time in an Alexander Salkind project with all these big names.  Who wouldn't sign on for that?  Estrada's performance here is pretty hammy, but unlike almost everyone else, he doesn't shame himself and manages to generate some amusement with his delivery of lines like "I'm gonna kick your ass to Katmandu!"  WHERE IS PARSIFAL? was Lawford's last film (he died in late 1984) and he's essentially playing a caricature of himself.  Welles turns up about 70 minutes in and promptly takes over the film, which wasn't too difficult.  Welles died in 1985 and WHERE IS PARSIFAL? is sometimes erroneously credited as his last film.  It's his last onscreen appearance playing a character, if that counts for anything.  His final two films were posthumously released:  he was the voice of Unicron in the animated TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE (1986), and played a version of himself dispensing filmmaking and romantic advice to the insufferable Henry Jaglom in Jaglom's SOMEONE TO LOVE, shot in 1985 but unreleased until 1988.  Welles was never one to turn down an easy payday, but he probably felt some sense of gratitude to Salkind, who bankrolled THE TRIAL for him two decades earlier and, though it was a low-budget film and Salkind ran out of money before it was finished, he was one of the few producers who left Welles alone, trusted him, and let him make the film he wanted to make.

WHERE IS PARSIFAL?, allegedly a satirical look at the Salkinds' odd home life, is a thoroughly and painfully unfunny home movie disguised as a farce, broadly played to the back rows in the most grating way imaginable, trying to go for some kind of "anarchic" spirit, but it's essentially a bunch of vignettes with once-reputable and probably intoxicated pros acting like blithering idiots for a paycheck.  Curtis is at least energetic and amped up, but it was probably just the coke.  It's no surprise Berta Dominguez D's acting career never took off, considering that she manages to get crowded into a corner for the bulk of her own vanity project.  No one should have to endure WHERE IS PARSIFAL? (I almost bailed after ten minutes), but with that incredible cast, there's an undeniable train wreck fascination to it, even if it makes what should be a brief 82 minutes feel like a prison sentence.  It's one of the worst comedies of the 1980s, and maybe even one of the worst films you'll ever see and while it was smaller and more under the radar compared to expensive turkeys like SUPERMAN III, SUPERGIRL, and SANTA CLAUS, WHERE IS PARSIFAL? must share some of the culpability in the crashing and burning of the Salkind empire.

Adventures in Netflix Streaming: THE AWAKENING (2012); THE FRANKENSTEIN THEORY (2013); and OSOMBIE (2012)

THE AWAKENING
(France/UK - 2011; 2012 US release)

This atmospheric, old-fashioned ghost story is similar in style and tone to last year's nicely-done THE WOMAN IN BLACK, and very well-shot by cinematographer Eduard Grau, paying particular attention to period detail and the gray, drab look of a dour post-WWI 1921 England.  Rebecca Hall, faring much better here than in the dreadful LAY THE FAVORITE, is Florence Cathcart, a well-known author and paranormal investigator who makes a living debunking fraudulant hauntings and other alleged supernatural occurrences. A misfit who demonstrates social awkwardness that's frequently mistaken for dismissive rudeness, she's summoned by stammering, war-scarred headmaster Robert (Dominic West) to a former private mansion turned boarding school, where an asthmatic pupil cruelly dubbed "Wheezy Walter" by his classmates has died under mysterious circumstances that may involve a ghost child seen as a lingering spectre in school photos for many years.  There is indeed a hoax being perpetrated, but that's just the beginning of the story as director/co-writer Nick Murphy gathers the primary characters--there's also Imelda Staunton as the school housekeeper and Isaac Hempstead-Wright (Bran Stark on GAME OF THRONES) as an orphaned boy who stays behind during a holiday break--all damaged souls who find a strange bond in their status as lonely outsiders who never really fit in anywhere (at one point, Staunton proclaims "I don't think there's a place on Earth where people understand loneliness better than here"), and Florence starts to get an odd feeling that she's been there before.  Murphy does a commendable job in the first 2/3 with an overwhelming sense of eerie foreboding (the dollhouse scene, which essentially--and extremely creepily--recaps the film up to that point, is a small masterpiece), but like last year's RED LIGHTS, another initially solid horror film about debunking the paranormal that just completely collapses in the home stretch, THE AWAKENING doesn't seem to know where it's going.  There's too much time spent on a subplot involving the drooling groundskeeper (Joseph Mawle) that's ultimately a complete red herring, and once the twist--obligatory in post-SIXTH SENSE ghost stories--is revealed, there's too many holes and contrivances for it to withstand any serious scrutiny.  An admirable effort and a great-looking film with strong performances by its leads, THE AWAKENING just loses itself with its inability to follow through on its potential, which is a damn shame because it was well on its way to being a noteworthy sleeper.  (R, 107 mins)

THE FRANKENSTEIN THEORY
(US - 2013)

THE FRANKENSTEIN THEORY offers a found-footage take on the legendary saga, a concept that was demanded by no one but given to us anyway by a couple of producers of THE LAST EXORCISM.  Documentary filmmaker Vicky (Heather Stephens) is working on a project about her college friend Dr. John Venkenhein (Kris Lemche).  Venkenhein has a theory that's gotten him suspended from academia, branded a laughingstock, and is about to cost him his girlfriend (Christine Lakin):  Mary Shelley conceived her novel Frankenstein as a fictionalized account of true events, with Victor Frankenstein patterned after a Venkenhein ancestor.  The young Venkenhein posits that the monster's DNA and physical makeup is such that he's still alive and still wandering the remote wilderness in barren, northernmost Canada.  With a small camera crew and a crusty, surly guide (SONS OF ANARCHY's Timothy V. Murphy as Robert Shaw as Quint), Venkenhein leads the expedition to track down the factual Venkenhein monster.  Directed and co-written by Andrew Weiner, THE FRANKENSTEIN THEORY is an idea that could've worked, but its set-up is such that nothing can happen for at least an hour, so much of the running time is occupied by bickering, scientific babbling, and talk of caribou migration.  By the time the protagonists are trapped in a yurt with the howling beast outside, the film progresses in the most rote, predictable fashion possible:  destroyed snowmobiles?  Check.  Someone goes off for help and is later found murdered?  Check.  Someone drops a camera and then falls dead in front of it CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST/BLAIR WITCH-style?  Check.  Released to just a scant few theaters in early 2013 after two years on the shelf, THE FRANKENSTEIN THEORY is nothing more than the labored wheeze of a subgenre's death rattle, plodding along and leading to absolutely nothing in a finale so frustratingly, jaw-droppingly anti-climactic that it makes the found-footage fuck-you of THE DEVIL INSIDE look crowd-pleasing by comparison.  (Unrated, 87 mins)

OSOMBIE
(US - 2012)

A jokey premise in search of a movie, the Utah-shot OSOMBIE has a US Special Forces team in Afghanistan, along with a couple of sibling civilians, battling an army of Al-Qaeda undead under the command of a zombified Osama Bin Laden.  The concept had some satirical potential, but the filmmakers came up with the idea and decided that was enough, delivering yet another run-of-the-mill, otherwise utterly generic zombie apocalypse film with the expectedly shitty CGI that pales in comparison to most iPhone apps.  The characters are your stock, run-of-the-mill military cliches (including the requisite squad joker being creatively nicknamed "Joker") and the actors are terrible, including star Corey Sevier, a veteran Canadian TV actor and DTV regular whose idea of character development is finding a new and dramatic way to take off his shirt in every other scene.  Maybe it's my own fault for expecting something out of a film titled OSOMBIE, but what a pointless waste of time. It's a lot like an Asylum production, only lazier.  At least Asylum flicks have a sense of humor about themselves.  Other than Joker's constant groan-inducing witticisms ("Confucius say 'Man who fart in church must sit in own pew'"), OSOMBIE is played totally straight. If you're making a movie about a zombie Bin Laden, the notion of seriousness is already off the table and you should at least have some fun with it.  They should've just made a fake trailer and left it at that. (Unrated, 94 mins)

Adventures in Netflix Streaming, Special "Smutty British Sex Comedies" Edition: AU PAIR GIRLS (1972), THE SEX THIEF (1974), and ZETA ONE (1969)

Netflix recently added a truckload of Kino/Redemption titles to their streaming service, including several offerings from the extremely prolific British sex comedy subgenre of the 1970s.  Often playing like THE BENNY HILL SHOW with tons of nudity and smarmy double entendres and centered on people in everyday jobs stumbling and bumbling into a series of slapstick sexual misadventures, these films, like the penis-transplant classic PERCY (1971), AU PAIR GIRLS (1972), and the whole CONFESSIONS OF... series starring Robin Askwith (1974's CONFESSIONS OF A WINDOW CLEANER, 1976's CONFESSIONS OF A DRIVING INSTRUCTOR, etc), which spawned its own imitations with 1975's THE UPS AND DOWNS OF A HANDYMAN and the Barry Evans-starring ADVENTURES OF... series (1976's ADVENTURES OF A TAXI DRIVER, 1977's ADVENTURES OF A PRIVATE EYE, and 1978's ADVENTURES OF A PLUMBER'S MATE), were hugely popular with audiences (CONFESSIONS OF A WINDOW CLEANER was a cultural phenomenon at home, becoming the highest-grossing film of 1974 in the UK), loathed by critics, and were staples in US grindhouses and drive-ins.  Even the long-running CARRY ON film series, dating back to 1958, started to change with the times and up the raunch factor in films like CARRY ON GIRLS (1973), CARRY ON DICK (1974), and CARRY ON EMMANNUELLE (1978).  Many of these comedies are now forgotten by everyone except cult movie enthusiasts and most of them are rather tame by today's standards, but even in the '80s, they were raunchy enough to be in regular rotation on late-night cable in the '80s, usually on Showtime's awesome "After Hours." 


AU PAIR GIRLS
aka THE YOUNG PLAYMATES
(UK - 1972)

 

One of the best-known titles in the British sex comedy explosion of the 1970s, AU PAIR GIRLS, directed by veteran journeyman Val Guest, plays a lot like a British version of a Roger Corman/New World "Nurses" film of the same period.  Four sexy young ladies arrive in England as au pairs (actually, there's a fifth, but she disappears after the opening scene--was she cut from the film?): Swedish Anita (Astrid Frank), Danish Randi (Gabrielle Drake, German Christa (Nancie Wait), and Chinese Nan Lee (Me Me Lay), leading to a series of mostly wacky and occasionally dramatic misadventures over the course of the night and into the next morning.  Anita enchants the wealthy, lecherous Sheik El Abib (Ferdy Mayne), Randi spends the night in a barn with amiable doofus Stephen (Richard O'Sullivan) after his car gets a flat, the virginal Christa meets rock god Ricky Strange (Steve Patterson), and Nan makes a man of childlike, possibly autistic piano prodigy Rupert (Julian Barnes).  Lots of hijinks and smutty, winking one-liners (Randi: "I'm Randi!"  Stephen: "You're not the only one!"), every male is a leering horndog, and the women disrobe at every opportunity.  In short, AU PAIR GIRLS delivers exactly what it promises, but in another similarity to the New World productions, it occasionally drifts into unexpected directions, such as the surprising sympathy demonstrated by Strange's sleazy manager Buster (John Standing) when he finds out Christa was a virgin and realizes how upset she is about feeling used by Strange and even by Buster himself when he allowed himself a drunken turn with her as well, but the film sort of sidesteps the issue that Buster essentially rapes her.

Also with Geoffrey Bayldon, John Le Mesurier, Johnny Briggs, Rosalie Crutchley, and Milton Reid, cast radically against type as a silent, hulking manservant.  Me Me Lay co-starred in Umberto Lenzi's cannibal film MAN FROM DEEP RIVER the same year and would go on to be a fixture in the Italian cannibal subgenre.  O'Sullivan became a huge TV icon in the UK, starring for six seasons on the popular MAN ABOUT THE HOUSE, which was remade for US TV as THREE'S COMPANY, with O'Sullivan's Robin Tripp becoming John Ritter's Jack Tripper.  Guest (1911-2006), best known for helming the British sci-fi classics THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955) and QUATERMASS 2 (1957) and some of the 1967 Bond spoof CASINO ROYALE, saw his career get a second wind from these sex comedies and went on to direct CONFESSIONS OF A WINDOW CLEANER.  AU PAIR GIRLS was released as THE YOUNG PLAYMATES in the US by the early, pre-Golan & Globus incarnation of Cannon.   If you find the interminable opening theme song catchy, fear not...you'll only hear it 72 more times over the course of the film. (Unrated, 84 mins)



THE SEX THIEF
(UK - 1974)

Several years before finding his niche in Eurocult films by the legendary likes of Lucio Fulci and Antonio Margheriti, a shaggy-haired David Warbeck starred in this racy British comedy that originally received an X rating in the US for its vigorously explicit sex scenes.  Warbeck is second-rate paperback mystery writer Grant Henry, who supplements his income by working as a cat burglar, stealing and fencing expensive jewels and seducing the horny wives he finds sleeping alone while their husbands are away on business.  His actions leave Scotland Yard's Inspector Smith (Terence Edmond) frustrated because, while all of the recent burglaries are obviously committed by the same person, the women all give wildly varied and increasingly ridiculous descriptions of the burglar ("he's everything from a club-footed midget to a six-foot-six Russian with a hare-lip!") and all inexplicably wait several hours before calling the police.  Smith and his dim-witted partner Sgt. Plinth (co-writer Michael Armstrong, who also directed MARK OF THE DEVIL) team with accident-prone photographer Guy (Christopher Neil) and sexy, karate-expert insurance investigator Judy (Diane Keen) to set up a sting to nail the Sex Thief.

Armstrong and co-writer Tudor Gates (BARBARELLA, DANGER: DIABOLIK, THE VAMPIRE LOVERS) both hide behind the single screenwriting pseudonym "Edward Hyde" and Gates produced under the name "Teddy White."  THE SEX THIEF marked the directorial debut of Martin Campbell, who went on to direct two 007 films (1995's GOLDENEYE, and 2006's CASINO ROYALE) in addition to big Hollywood movies like THE MASK OF ZORRO (1998), VERTICAL LIMIT (2000), and, most recently, GREEN LANTERN (2011).  The film is moderately amusing, and the early scenes have some big laughs, particularly at Smith's exasperation at the ludicrous descriptions the victims give and his failure to understand how one wants the newspaper to print that the burglar didn't get all of her jewelry in the hope that he'll return and seduce her again, but it's a fairly predictable mix of slapstick antics and graphic sex, with one sped-up sequence an obvious riff on A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.  The sex scenes leave little to the imagination and are absurdly overdone, and Campbell probably could've trimmed some of them, as one has the camera lingering on a huge pimple on Warbeck's ass.  In its original form, THE SEX THIEF was released in the US in 1974 by International Amusements, then retro-fitted with body doubles in newly-shot hardcore inserts, re-edited without the involvement of any of the filmmakers or cast, and dumped on the porno circuit in 1976 as HER FAMILY JEWELS. (R, 93 mins)


ZETA ONE
aka THE LOVE FACTOR
aka ALIEN WOMEN
(UK - 1969)

It's hard to imagine a 007 spoof about a race of topless alien women being dull, but ZETA ONE is an utter disaster from start to finish.  Exhibiting a laundry list of red-flag indicators of a difficult production (obvious padding of the running time, a clumsy flashback structure valiantly attempting to explain the plot, the biggest-name actor completely disappearing from the film without explanation, and IMDb shows it's the director's first and last feature film), ZETA ONE begins with a laborious 20-minute prologue that turns out to be a wraparound segment.  Suave secret agent James Word (charisma-vacuum Robin Hawdon) returns from his latest mission to find Ann (LUST FOR A VAMPIRE stunner Yutte Stensgaard), his boss W's secretary, in his mod bachelor pad.  They play a drawn-out game of strip poker that finally leads to Word giving her the lowdown on what happened (it's interesting that Word arrives home with a fake mustache coming unglued and he removes it when Ann points it out to him--why would he wait until he got home to remove it?  Because Hawdon has a mustache in what became the flashback footage and didn't have one when he was called back for the presumably hastily-arranged reshoots).  Word got involved in an incomprehensible plot involving a clash that pits topless alien women of the planet Angvia (really?), led by Zeta (Dawn Addams, who remains clothed because she's a respectable actress), against the megalomaniacal Major Bourdon, played by an embarrassed and hopefully drunk James Robertson Justice, clearly reading cue cards like a disinterested SNL host in one of his last films before a series of strokes forced him to retire from acting.

ZETA ONE makes up in gratuitous nudity what it lacks in laughs and any sense of coherence or pacing, but even that's not enough to make this boring "comedy" worth the suffering.  Hawdon is pathetic and Addams soldiers through with a stiff upper lip but looks like she'd rather be anywhere else.  But beloved British character actor Justice doesn't even hide his contempt for the entire project, and one can hardly blame him.  Chances are he didn't even stick around, because his character vanishes from the film shortly before the climax and is never referenced again.  Director Michael Cort's IMDb page shows this and a 1972 short subject, and absolutely nothing else.  The Hawdon-Stensgaard wraparound sequences were clearly added to clarify the plot (they don't) and add some T&A (well, OK, fine), but these scenes provide about 25 minutes of superfluous padding, which means Cort initially had about an hour of useable footage.  There's probably an interesting story to be told about this obvious train wreck of a production (difficult star?  First-time director in over his head?  Unfinished script?), but anyone involved who's still with us has likely long since blocked it from their memory. The mod, swingin' '60s atmosphere of ZETA ONE had to look hopelessly dated by the time this was belatedly released in the US in 1975 as THE LOVE FACTOR (right around the time Justice died).  It later turned up on US home video in the '80s from Prism Entertainment as ALIEN WOMEN.  It's unwatchable under any title.  (R, 86 mins)

New on Netflix Streaming: THE PACT (2012) and THE ROAD (2012)

THE PACT
(US - 2012)

Bearing some thematic similitary to (and significantly better than) the recent LOVELY MOLLY, this frightening ghost story does the trendy slow-burn thing just right and rewards the viewer with several legitimately well-done jolts throughout. Motorcycle-riding loner Annie (a strong performance by Caity Lotz) wants nothing to do with her dysfunctional family, but is drawn back to her childhood home--the location of unspecified abuse--after her mother dies and her ex-junkie sister Nicole (Agnes Bruckner) mysteriously vanishes before the funeral.  Once back at the house, it doesn't take long for a ghostly presence to make itself apparent to Annie and her visiting cousin Liz (Kathleen Rose Perkins), who was taking care of Nicole's daughter Eva (Dakota Bright).  A figure appears and drags Liz into a closet that leads nowhere and Annie flees with Eva.  Annie finds a skeptical ally in local deputy Bill (a weathered-looking Casper Van Dien), who doesn't really buy her story but agrees to help her out of curiosity and fatherly concern because the troubled young woman reminds him of his estranged daughter ("She's a fucking bitch, too," he jokes).  Annie also touches base with Stevie (Haley Hudson), the weird girl from back in high school who claimed to be able to see ghosts...and it turns out she can.  One seems to be communicating with Annie via electronic devices--cell phone, laptop, etc...but this is one that's best approached knowing as little as possible.

 

Writer/director Nicholas McCarthy expanded his 11-minute short from 2011 (and replaced the lead actress) and has fashioned a genuinely scary horror sleeper that's refreshingly old-fashioned with its lack of shaky-cam, found-footage cliches and cardboard-cutout characters. Annie is one of the strongest horror heroines in a long time, and it's a star-making turn by Lotz, who plays Annie as someone who constantly shields herself from everything and has learned to live on her own and to not rely on or trust anyone. And Lotz plays her very unglamorously and very "average." No makeup and she looks a bit rough. The script is very character-driven and it just makes the situation that much more unsettlingly terrifying. People who liked THE INNKEEPERS should check out THE PACT for a ghost story where something actually happens. (R, 89 mins, also out this week on DVD/Blu-ray)

 

 

 

THE ROAD

(Philippines - 2011; 2012 US release)

 

Not to be confused with John Hillcoat's 2009 film of Cormac McCarthy's novel, this ROAD is the latest from writer/director Yam Laranas, who's sort-of the leading figure in present-day Filipino horror cinema (he's already tried to make the jump to the US with 2009's little-seen THE ECHO, a remake of his 2004 Filipino film SIGAW).  THE ROAD shows Laranas (who also functions as his own cinematographer) has a gift for shot composition and striking visuals, but man, what a stale script!  This feels like an excessively tardy Filipino take on the JU-ON/J-Horror explosion from at least a decade ago.  And the longer it goes on, the more you think "OK, they're setting it up for this twist ending, but it would be way too obvious if it played out that way, so they must be trying to cleverly mislead us.  There's no way that can be the big reveal."  But yes.  That is the big reveal.  The twist ending you dismissed at the halfway point for being too incredibly obvious?  That's the twist ending.

 

 

Laranas starts with a suicide in a parked car and a young, ambitious cop (TJ Trinidad) being made aware of a decade-old disappearance of two teenage girls.  Then the story unfolds in three sections:  in 2008, three teens go for a joyride on a gated-off, long-closed, and seemingly endless road in the middle of the night.  With no intersections or exits, they keep going in circles, passing the same tree and being passed by a driverless car.  Then ghosts start appearing on the road.  In 1998, Laranas tells the story of the two missing girls, driving down the same road, running out of gas, and meeting a strange teenage boy who takes them back to his house and they're never seen again.  In 1988, a little boy lives in that same house with his abusive mother (Carmina Villaroel) and his spineless minister father (Marvin Agustin).  The mother doesn't let the boy go outside and keeps him locked in a cabinet during her dalliances with a much-younger lover.  How these three stories tie into one another is calculated about 1/3 of the way in, and ridiculously obvious by the halfway mark.   There's almost an "everything but the kitchen sink" mentality to the plot elements, with ghosts and the supernatural, murder, child abuse, and even possession, which Laranas clumsily shoehorns in just for the "reveal" that we already see coming.  Laranas does a terrific job at establishing an eerie, dread-filled vibe, especially in the 2008 section, and the climax features some of the most beautiful cinematic rainfall this side of BLADE RUNNER, but once you see where the story's going, its holes, logic lapses, and plot conveniences are just too much to take seriously.  Laranas is an obviously gifted stylist and makes this low-budget film look frequently stunning--he just needs to let someone else do the scripting.  (R, 110 mins)

 

 

 



On DVD/Blu-ray/Netflix streaming: THE SNOWTOWN MURDERS (2011) and ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA (2011)

THE SNOWTOWN MURDERS
(Australia - 2011; 2012 US release)

This harrowing, profoundly disturbing chronicle of the worst serial killings in Australia's history is appropriately grim and bleak, but director Justin Kurzel and screenwriter Shaun Grant do assume that the viewer is already familiar with the story.  And that's to be expected for a film made for Australian audiences.  I'd strongly advise reading up on the case via Wikipedia or chances are you'll find it impossible to follow the convoluted story and keep up with who's who and how they relate to other characters.  The film centers on teenager Jamie Vlassakis (Lucas Pittaway, who looks like a cross between Heath Ledger and Andy Samberg), living a downtrodden, Aussie white trash life with his mom (Louise Harvey) and two younger siblings.  When one of the mom's potential suitors turns out to be a pedophile, a friend introduces the neighborhood to John Bunting (Daniel Henshall), who gets on everyone's good side by endlessly harassing the child molester to the point where the creep packs up and leaves town.  Bunting is alternately funny, chummy, ingratiating, aggressively pushy, and ruthlessly manipulative, and soon has everyone in this close-knit group of friends and neighbors under his thumb and ready to go along with anything he suggests.  Slowly revealing an intense dislike of not just pedophiles, but also homosexuals and anyone he deems "not right" (like drug users and the mentally challenged), Bunting and his friend Robert Taylor (Aaron Viergever) start murdering people, and with the help of dim-witted neighbor Mark Haydon (David Walker), and a traumatized Jamie (introduced to killing when Bunting bullies him into shooting his dog), dispose the bodies in acid-filled tubs and store them in the vault of an abandoned bank in nearby Snowtown.  Filled with much disturbing imagery and an almost suffocating sense of hopelessness, THE SNOWTOWN MURDERS is a grueling and upsetting experience, filled with murder, torture, drug abuse, and child molestation (Jamie is also raped by an older half-brother at one point).  But even as confusing as it often is, Pittaway and especially Henshall are so good that you can't take your eyes off of it.  Henshall brings to mind a diabolical Ricky Gervais in his portrayal of Bunting, who's currently serving ten life sentences for his crimes.  THE SNOWTOWN MURDERS is brutal and horrifying without being exploitative, though it will almost certainly leave a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach.  (Unrated, 120 mins)


ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA
(Turkey/Bosnia and Herzegovina - 2011; 2012 US release)

Fascinating, challenging film from Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (CLIMATES) is a murder mystery and police procedural that unfolds very deliberately and expects its audience to pay attention.  It's a long and demanding work that pays off for the patient viewer who takes the time to invest in the characters and their traits, the dialogue and its rhythms, and just how it all impacts the gut-punch of a finale.  Ceylan explains some things, but not all, as ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA is the kind of film with plot threads intentionally left open to interpretation.  In the dusk and eventual darkness of an evening, three police vehicles travel a total of 37 kilometers out of their jurisdiction in search of a body that's buried somewhere in the vast hills of the Anatolian steppes of Turkey (the cinematography by Gokhan Tiryaki is stunning).  In the three cars are, among others, the irate lead detective (Yilmaz Erdegan), the prosecutor from Ankara (Tanar Birsel), a local doctor (Muhammet Uzuner), and the murder suspect (Firat Tanis).  Erdegan feels Tanis is wasting their time, taking them to numerous locations before claiming he was drunk and can't remember where he buried the body.  Birsel shares a story about the sudden death of a beautiful woman with Uzuner, who seems perpelexed that the prosecutor never ordered an autopsy.  Some of the men argue about mundane subjects like yogurt and crack inappropriate jokes as a coping mechanism for the grimness of their job.  Erdegan confesses to the doctor that he'd rather spend all his time at work than deal with his autistic son.  Conversations seem to meander all over the place and some are certain to get frustrated and view this as a cinematic endurance test.  But it all has a point and it all pays off with a devastating final shot that recalls Paul Thomas Anderson's HARD EIGHT in a strange way.  Admittedly not for the casual viewer looking to kick back with a flick, but ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA is a compelling and original piece of cinema.  (Unrated, 157 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray/Netflix streaming: THE TURIN HORSE (2011)

THE TURIN HORSE
(Hungary/France/Switzerland/Germany/US - 2011; 2012 US release)

Directed by Bela Tarr, Agnes Hranitzky.  Written by Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Bela Tarr.  Cast: Erika Bok, Janos Derszi, Mihaly Kormos, Ricsi.  (Unrated, 155 mins)

Hungarian auteur Bela Tarr, best known for the seven-and-a-half hour epic SATANTANGO (1994), announced his retirement from filmmaking with THE TURIN HORSE, which runs a relatively brief 155 minutes.  THE TURIN HORSE is grim, oppressive, slow, and monotonous, but Tarr finds beauty in the bleakness, with rich, stark, black & white cinematography that reveals every detail in the harsh confines of the characters' lives. 

Using the 1889 mental breakdown of Friedrich Nietzsche as its springboard (Nietzsche allegedly lost his mind after coming to the aid of a stubborn horse being whipped by its owner), THE TURIN HORSE follows the horse's aged owner (Janos Derszi) back to his home in the middle of a barren nowhere, where he lives with his dutiful daughter (Erika Bok).  We see the repetitions of their day over the course of a week.  Getting dressed, getting water from the well, boiling potatoes for breakfast and dinner, washing clothes by hand, chopping wood, and trying to tend to the obviously dying horse, who stops eating around day 3.  The deterioration quickly spreads like a disease. The horse can't pull the cart into town.  The well goes dry, which means they can't boil potatoes.  They can't get away because of a seemingly perpetual dust storm that never ceases raging.

THE TURIN HORSE sounds a lot like the kind of depressing foreign film that THE SIMPSONS mocked when Bart prank-called a bar in Sweden and asked for someone named "Olaf Myfriendsaregay."  That joke had a punchline where the bartender realizes it's a hoax and grimly thanks Bart for "showing me the futility of human endeavor."  That quote is very applicable to THE TURIN HORSE.  I was also reminded of Chantal Akerman's JEANNE DIELMAN (1975) in the sense of showing how daily, clockwork routines and patterns get thrown off course and cause a chain reaction of increasingly dire circumstances.  The film also brought to mind Kelly Reichardt's MEEK'S CUTOFF (2011) in the way that it shows the processes of these days in seemingly real time.  There's a memorable scene in MEEK'S CUTOFF where 1840s frontier settler Michelle Williams spends about four minutes of screen time loading a shotgun...because that's how long it would really take.  Tarr and co-director Agnes Hranitzky started shooting THE TURIN HORSE in 2008, and it was a long, arduous process itself, as Tarr didn't complete the film until 2011.  As harsh and unflinchingly real as it is, THE TURIN HORSE has an almost hypnotic element to it.  Tarr's trademark long Steadicam takes are on full display, abetted by an unforgettable score by Mihaly Vig. Shots linger, sometimes in silence (there's very little dialogue) and for so long that you think you're looking at an old black & white photograph.  It's a dark, somber, and depressing film, but it's also a strangely beautiful one.

On DVD/Blu-ray/Netflix Streaming: Rock Will Never Die Double Feature: LAST DAYS HERE (2012) and HIT SO HARD (2012)

LAST DAYS HERE
(US - 2012)

There's a number of scenes that are almost too painful to watch in this harrowing documentary about Bobby Liebling, frontman for the Washington, DC cult doom metal band Pentagram.  Liebling has been an underground metal legend for 40 years, yet when filmmakers Don Argott and Demian Fenton (ROCK SCHOOL, THE ART OF THE STEAL) find him in 2007, he's 53, addicted to heroin and crack, and living in the basement of his elderly parents' Germantown, MD home (his father worked for the Defense Dept).  Liebling spends his days wallowing in drug abuse, his gauze-covered arms riddled with track marks and open sores, and he's convinced parasites are burrowing under his skin.  He has a patient ally in friend, manager, and Pentagram superfan Sean "Pellet" Pelletier, a former Relapse Records staffer who seems to be devoting his life to the resurrection of Bobby Liebling, who's tried to keep Pentagram going through the years with a constantly rotating backing band, as all the past members get fed up and quit.  The original lineup of the band was brought to NYC in 1975 to record a demo with Blue Oyster Cult producer Murray Krugman, an early supporter of Pentagram who dubbed them "a street Black Sabbath," but a stubborn Liebling clashed with Krugman in the studio and the deal never happened.  Former guitarist Victor Griffin wonders why people even bothered buying advance tickets for Pentagram shows, as there was a 50/50 chance Liebling would be unable to perform or not even show up.  Footage of a disastrous 2001 gig shows then-guitarist Joe Hasselvander letting the audience take turns at the mic when Liebling is a no-show, then when Liebling finally appears onstage during the last minute of the last song, they almost come to blows.  At a 2005 show, a catatonic Liebling has to be carried on stage and propped in front of the mic like a sick WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S homage, then he collapses into the drum set.  In short, the man is a wreck and looks to be at death's door. That comprises most of LAST DAYS HERE until Liebling finally decides to get his shit together. 

Argott and Fenton could've easily turned this into a rubbernecking freakshow, but they don't.  While not shying away from the brutal, and frequently disgusting, state of Liebling's life, they still regard him with respect and dignity.  They took breaks in filming at various points, and we catch up with Liebling some months later, and we never know if he'll be better or worse.  When he finally gets better, you'll almost feel as overcome with emotion as Pelletier does.  The filmmakers do somewhat assume the audience is at least a little familiar with the metal scene, so it may take neophytes a bit longer to get acclimated with the film and who some of the peripheral figures are, but the redemptive story of Liebling is riveting regardless of your musical tastes.  I wish the filmmakers didn't let Liebling's parents disappear from the film.  One of the best moments is a brief aside of his mother chuckling as she says "He always tells me he'll be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year or next," and we next see Liebling frantically searching for a crack rock that fell between the couch cushions.  (Unrated, 92 mins)


HIT SO HARD
(US - 2012)

An occasionally interesting but unfocused and often rambling look at former Hole drummer Patty Schemel, HIT SO HARD uses a lot of camcorder footage shot by Schemel herself while touring with Hole in the '90s.  Schemel, a recovering addict clean for six years at the time this was made, comes across as very natural, honest, and down to earth, but director P. David Ebersole can't really decide what he wants with HIT SO HARD.  For a documentary ostensibly about Patty Schemel, there's going to be a lot of Hole, and that's vital to her story, but Ebersole seems to get sidetracked with Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain, who appear quite frequently in some of Schemel's camcorder footage. He could've told Schemel's story without once again telling Cobain's, but he probably needed an excuse to use all of the exclusive footage that Schemel had, including a lot of Cobain with daughter Frances, and while it's very moving to see him as a loving, doting father goofing off with his daughter and difficult to fathom that he'd kill himself just a few months later, it doesn't really belong here.  Schemel talks of her struggles with drugs and the music business from her perspective as a female drummer and an out lesbian, and there's a very emotional segment where her mother recounts 17-year-old Patty inadvertantly coming out to her friends after an awkward pass made at one of them, but there's not enough of stuff like that.  Even the film's trailer can't stay focused on what it's supposed to be about.

HIT SO HARD finally finds some momentum once Schemel leaves Hole after being replaced in the studio by session drummer Deen Castronovo during the recording of 1998's Celebrity Skin, and goes on to become a homeless crack addict, but most of it is just the usual stories of drugs, the record biz, the rigors of touring, etc.  Featuring Love (who, of course, takes the opportunity to once again trash-talk Cobain's Nirvana bandmates Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, because that has a lot to do with the Patty Schemel story), Hole bandmates Eric Erlandson and Melissa Auf der Maur (who replaced late bassist Kristen Pfaff and seems to have been Schemel's closest ally in the band), Faith No More keyboardist Roddy Bottum, plus notable female drummers Debbi Peterson (The Bangles), Gina Schock (The Go-Gos), Nina Gordon (Veruca Salt), and Kate Schellenbach (Luscious Jackson), and, for some reason, NPR "social observer" Sarah Vowell, HIT SO HARD is probably worth seeing for any fan of the '90s alt rock explosion, but Ebersole just never really brings it all together and there's a frustrating lack of direction to the whole project.  As cool as she comes across and with nothing but respect for her kicking drugs and getting her life together, is Schemel's story really worthy of a 103-minute film?   With the way Ebersole pads the running time with concert footage and Sarah Vowell getting choked up about Kurt Cobain's death, I'd say probably not. At least with LAST DAYS HERE, covered above, there was a dramatic element to the Bobby Liebling story as the filmmakers followed him as the story unfolded.  Feeling like an overlong DVD extra, HIT SO HARD would've made a great hour-long VH-1 BEHIND THE MUSIC episode, but a feature film? (Unrated, 103 mins)

New on Netflix Streaming: THE WILD GEESE (1978) and ZULU DAWN (1979)

Some months back, Severin Films announced Blu-ray releases of three late '70s adventure epics:  THE WILD GEESE, ZULU DAWN, and ASHANTI, all previously released on DVD in disappointing presentations by the mercifully short-lived Tango Entertainment.  Release dates for the Severin upgrades have yet to be announced, but HD prints of two of the films--THE WILD GEESE and ZULU DAWN--turned up this week as Netflix streaming titles.


THE WILD GEESE
(UK/Switzerland - 1978)

This classic mercenary adventure was a big hit everywhere but the US, where distributor Allied Artists was in its final days and wasn't able to give it much of a push.  That's surprising, considering its big-name cast headed by Richard Burton, Roger Moore, Richard Harris, and Hardy Kruger.  Burton is an aging mercenary hired by powerful financial magnate Stewart Granger to rescue the imprisoned leader (Winston Ntshona) of the fictional African country of Zembela, where Granger has significant interest in the copper mining industry.  Burton assembles a crack team of expert soldiers-for-hire (Moore, Harris, Kruger, etc) and they pull off a daring rescue, only to get double-crossed by Granger and left stranded in Zembala, pursued by the rebels who were holding Ntshona, and forced to fight their way out of the country.  Directed by longtime John Wayne associate Andrew V. McLaglen (who made the MST3K favorite MITCHELL a couple years earlier), THE WILD GEESE is a terrific action film, with four enthusiastic lead performances (Burton, in particular, has a number of dryly funny lines), plus a memorable supporting turn by Jack Watson (a last-minute replacement for Stephen Boyd, who died shortly before filming began) as a foul-mouthed Sergeant Major hired by Burton to whip the troops into shape ("On your feet, you fucking abortion!" Watson yells to one exhausted soldier).  Some of the character bits haven't aged very well--especially the way a mincing, sachaying, flamboyantly gay mercenary (Kenneth Griffith) is played for comic relief--and Kruger's metamorphosis from South African racist to sympathetic nice guy happens entirely too quickly to be plausible. 

Dated, late '70s political incorrectness aside, THE WILD GEESE is a rousing, entertaining and very nicely shot large-scale actioner with suspenseful battle sequences, gratuitous bloodletting, and a cast that's impossible to dislike.  Also with Frank Finlay, Patrick Allen, Barry Foster, David Ladd, Ian Yule, Ken Gampu, Jeff Corey, and the really out of place theme song "Flight of the Wild Geese," by Joan Armatrading.  Burton was set to return for 1985's WILD GEESE II, but died before filming began and was replaced by Edward Fox.  THE WILD GEESE was successful enough in foreign markets for Antonio Margheriti to make a trilogy of German-Italian WILD GEESE ripoffs with British TV star Lewis Collins:  CODENAME: WILDGEESE (1984, released in the US in 1986), COMMANDO LEOPARD (1985), and THE COMMANDER (1988).

The Netflix print of THE WILD GEESE is HD, and framed at 1.78:1 (close enough to the original 1.85:1), and has some consistent instances of "jerky" movements, almost like it's skipping frames. The audio is never affected, and the film is perfectly watchable as a streaming title, but it's a noticeable distraction throughout, even though there are stretches where it ceases.  Also, multiple sources list the film as 134 minutes, but the Netflix print comes in at 129 minutes. (R, 129 mins).


ZULU DAWN
(UK - 1979)

The 1964 epic ZULU chronicled the British Empire's victory over the Zulus at the Battle of Rorke's Drift in the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War.  This 1979 prequel examines the Battle of Isandhlwana, which took place earlier in the day, and the results weren't so good for the British forces, numbering around 1800 and led by the overly confident Lord Chelmsford (Peter O'Toole), who doesn't take the Zulus seriously with their spears and shields.  Needless to say, the British (or more specifically, Chelmsford and his yes-men), fueled by colonial arrogance and entitlement, are blissfully ignorant of what they're up against and don't bother coming up with an effective game plan.  As a result, they're almost instantly overwhelmed by 20,000 Zulu warriors and suffer over 1300 casualties in what went down as the worst defeat ever inflicted upon a modern army by native troops (by contrast, with better leadership, the British won Rorke's Drift with just over 150 officers going against 4000 Zulu warriors).  Reportedly a troubled production, ZULU DAWN didn't get much of a release and was nowhere near ZULU's level of success.  It takes forever to get going and juggles too many characters, many of whom disappear for long stretches of the film, but it steps up where it counts with some truly stunning, expertly-choreographed battle scenes in the last half hour, with thousands of extras (this is pre-CGI, folks) filling the 2.35:1 image.

The large ensemble cast includes many familiar faces:  Simon Ward, John Mills, Nigel Davenport, Michael Jayston, Bob Hoskins, Denholm Elliott, Peter Vaughan, Christopher Cazenove, Freddie Jones, James Faulkner, Ronald Lacey, Ronald Pickup, Nicholas Clay, Dai Bradley, Ian Yule, Ken Gampu, Simon Sabela as the Zulu leader Cetshwayo, and top-billed Burt Lancaster as Col. Durnford, the nominal second-in-command, who would die alongside his fellow officers in the final battle and eventually be scapegoated for the disaster by the incompetent Chelmsford.  The performances are fine, but Lancaster's having a rare off-day here, sporting a wildly inconsistent Irish brogue that comes and goes at random.  I don't know if this is Lancaster's worst performance, but it's the only bad Lancaster performance I've seen.  Directed by Douglas Hickox (THEATER OF BLOOD) and co-written by ZULU director Cy Endfield.  The US theatrical release was cut down to 98 minutes, but this is the uncut 117 minute version.  (PG, 117 mins)