On Blu-ray/DVD: INCIDENT IN A GHOSTLAND (2018); KINGS (2018); and THE CON IS ON (2018)

INCIDENT IN A GHOSTLAND
(Canada/France - 2018)

Pascal Laugier's 2008 film MARTYRS was pretty much the last word in France's "extreme horror" craze that gave us Alexandre Aja's HIGH TENSION, Xavier Gens' FRONTIER(S), and Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury's INSIDE, among others. It was an impossible film to top, so Laugier didn't even try, instead following it up with the creepy and comparatively restrained 2012 Jessica Biel thriller THE TALL MAN. For his first film in six years, Laugier revisits some less extreme but still quite disturbing MARTYRS-esque themes with INCIDENT IN A GHOSTLAND. Upon a cursory glance, it's easy to dismiss GHOSTLAND as a torture porn throwback, but it's got more on its mind, and weaves its story in such an intricately constructed way that you'll never see how it's planning to pull the rug out from under you. In an extended flashback, single mom Pauline (legendary French singer Mylene Farmer) is traveling with her two teenage daughters--elder and bratty Vera (Taylor Hickson) and younger and bookish Beth (Emilia Jones)--to the rural Canadian home of a late aunt who left her middle-of-nowhere home to them. They're passed on a deserted country road by an ominous, barreling ice cream truck en route, which means it won't surprise any seasoned horror fan to learn that the two people in the truck are the ones behind a home invasion later that night. Despite being brutally terrorized and beaten, Pauline manages to get the upper hand and kills both of the attackers. Cut to 16 years later, and Beth (now played by Crystal Reed) has followed her dream of becoming a writer and is now a bestselling horror novelist with a husband and young son. Her latest book Incident in a Ghostland is earning rave reviews with its semi-autobiographical depiction of what happened to her family that night. After an hysterical phone call from Vera (Anastasia Phillips), Beth returns to her mother's home to find a volatile situation: Pauline drinks too much and she's forced to keep the dangerously unstable Vera in the basement with padded walls, still haunted by the events of the past, prone to meltdowns and lunatic rants about how "they're still here."

Indeed, the nightmare is not over, and to say any more would involve significant spoilers, but rest assured, INCIDENT IN A GHOSTLAND isn't going where that synopsis would lead you to believe. What transpires is alternately intense, terrifying, and often upsetting, not on the "next level of existence" where MARTYRS went, but certainly just as bleak and harrowing in its own way. Laugier's depictions of the horrors his characters endure is unflinching and fearlessly acted by his stars, and as a result, like MARTYRS, GHOSTLAND isn't going to be for everyone. It's an unsettling examination of abuse, trauma, and coping mechanisms that isn't afraid to go to some very dark places. This is Laugier's fourth feature film, and all have been excellent, and even though INCIDENT IN A GHOSTLAND will inevitably acquire a cult following, it'll likely be overshadowed by an on-set accident involving Hickson. Laugier was directing her to pound her fists on a glass door and he kept telling her to pound harder when the glass shattered and she fell forward. A piece of glass caught her cheek as she fell and opened a huge gash on the left side of her face that required 70 stitches, leaving her permanently scarred. She subsequently sued the producers for negligence and failure to provide a safe working environment, and the case is still pending at this time. That aside--and no movie is worth what Hickson has gone through--INCIDENT IN A GHOSTLAND is an excellent horror film that's worth a look. (Unrated, 91 mins)



KINGS
(China/US/France/Belgium - 2018)

Shot in Los Angeles, KINGS is the first English-language work from Turkish-born, France-based filmmaker Deniz Gamze Erguven, and it's the kind of misguided, laughably contrived, embarrassingly tone-deaf disaster that almost always sends an acclaimed foreign auteur on the first flight back home, never to try their luck with the US market again. Erguven won a significant amount of acclaim with her debut, 2015's MUSTANG, which earned an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. With KINGS, Erguven takes a look at the 1992 L.A. riots in the wake of the Rodney King verdict, trying to go for a hard-hitting immediacy by mixing in archival footage from the time but also never settling on a tone. The film is an impossibly awkward mishmash of social commentary, arthouse pretension, and slapstick comedy, culminating in a climax that cuts back and forth between the tragedy of a supporting character bleeding to death in the backseat of a car while two others engage in Three Stooges-style antics to free themselves from the parking lot light post to which they've been handcuffed. Who is this film's intended audience?

KINGS got a toxic response at last year's Toronto Film Festival and only made it to 215 screens in the US, despite having a pair of A-listers heading its cast. Oscar-winner Halle Berry pulls her wig from THE CALL out of storage to play Millie, a single South Central woman with eight foster kids, while Daniel Craig has arguably the most ill-advised role of his career as Obie, her cranky and improbably British neighbor who seems to have wandered in from the set of an early Guy Ritchie movie. Frankly, I'd like to know how Obie ended up living in this neighborhood. I'd also appreciate an explanation for his behavior. He hangs out by his window naked, goes to the liquor store in his bathrobe, drives a nice SUV, listens to opera at full blast, throws his furniture off his balcony, and randomly fires a shotgun out of his bathroom window when he's feeling really irritable. He yells at Millie's younger kids one moment, then he's got them in his apartment, ordering pizza and dancing with them to his Motown records the next. Craig is saddled with an absolutely unplayable, incomprehensible character, while Berry valiantly tries to give it her best and most sincere shot. Both are offscreen for long stretches as Erguven focuses on Jesse (Lamar Johnson), one of Millie's older foster kids. As an impressionable and level-headed young man entering adulthood, it would make sense for the events that unfold to be seen through Jesse's eyes. Instead, Erguven has him distracted by and smitten with Nicole (Rachel Hilson), because apparently she thought KINGS needed its own Manic Pixie Dream Girl (© Nathan Rabin) to mouth off to cops and gang members and sleep with William (Kalaan "KR" Walker), another Millie foster kid. Indeed, Jesse's indignation that sets him on a third act path to violence isn't because he's caught up in the outrage over the cops being acquitted in the beating of King but rather, walking on in Nicole and William having sex. Because yeah, that's what the L.A. riots need to be boiled down to. With its art film flourishes and character arcs that range from simplistic to nonsensical, KINGS feels like a bizarro interpretation of 1992 South Central. The minimalist score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis is out of place, the ludicrous dream scene where Millie erotically fantasizes about being seduced by Obie looks like a dated Fellini parody, and one scene where a Burger King manager desperately tries to negotiate with some rioters and talk them out of burning down the restaurant has a darkly comedic, sketch comedy absurdism to it. It's funny, but why is it in this movie?  (R, 87 mins)



THE CON IS ON
(US/Canada - 2018)

A legitimate contender for the worst film of 2018, THE CON IS ON is a would-be screwball comedy put through a '90s post-Tarantino filter complete with QT vets Uma Thurman and Tim Roth heading the cast. Dumped on VOD by Lionsgate after three years on the shelf, THE CON IS ON (shot as THE BRITS ARE COMING) manages to go its entire miserable 95 minute duration without anything even resembling humor, leaving an overqualified cast mugging shamelessly as they feebly try to make something out of nothing. Married British con artists Harriet (Thurman) and Peter Fox (Roth) have made off with a fortune belonging to lethal international assassin Irina (Maggie Q). They make their way to L.A. and stage an accident to get a free room at the Chateau Marmont, where they get the idea to swipe a priceless ring from Peter's ex-wife Jackie (Alice Eve), whose pretentious film director husband Gabriel (Crispin Glover) is having affairs with both his clingy personal assistant Gina (Parker Posey) and terrible actress Vivien (Sofia Vergara), the sultry star of his latest film LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR. Throw in a subplot with Harriet posing as a "dog whisperer" and Stephen Fry as a pedophile priest and opium smuggler and you get...well, nothing.

Directed and co-written by James Haslam, whose previous film THE DEVIL YOU KNOW was shelved for eight (!) years before its 2013 release and only resurfaced because it featured an unknown-in-2005 Jennifer Lawrence in a supporting role (also, should it have been a premonition that he's the stepson of Jimmy Haslam, the owner of the perpetually hapless Cleveland Browns?), THE CON IS ON abandons its stars in one unfunny situation after another, leaving them little to do but fall back on various vulgarities or, in Posey's case, flail around and generally embarrass herself. It's apparently supposed to be funny that Harriet and Peter are such unrepentant misanthropes, but isn't it key to any kind of screwball comedy that the central characters have some element of charm? Thurman is glamorous enough but Roth looks genuinely defeated by the futility of the whole endeavor, and it's the kind of film that thinks an establishing shot of an Asian dry cleaning establishment should be accompanied by the sound of a gong, a punchline that was past its sell-by date roughly around the time of THE FIENDISH PLOT OF DR. FU MANCHU. Considering the quality of its cast, THE CON IS ON is shockingly bad. The only reason this is going to get any attention at all once it hits streaming services is for a brief and largely-implied but admittedly surprising sex scene that features a topless Thurman and a salad-tossing Maggie Q, but it's hardly worth enduring the entire film. There's also a brief Melissa Sue Anderson sighting, if any LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE or HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME superfans give a shit. (R, 95 mins)

In Theaters: HELL OR HIGH WATER (2016)

HELL OR HIGH WATER
(US - 2016)

Directed by David Mackenzie. Written by Taylor Sheridan. Cast: Jeff Bridges, Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gil Birmingham, Marin Ireland, Katy Mixon, Dale Dickey, Kevin Rankin, John-Paul Howard, Margaret Bowman, Taylor Sheridan. (R, 102 mins)

A strong, character-driven thriller that emerged as a summer sleeper after being rolled out the old-fashioned way--limited release over a few weeks and expanding nationally with strong word-of-mouth--HELL OR HIGH WATER is a timely drama about family, duty, poverty, and getting revenge on the system. It does get a little ham-fisted on occasion, with characters required to give a florid speech every now and again as they look at a bank and vent their anger at everything it represents, but director David Mackenzie (YOUNG ADAM, MISTER FOE) and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan (SICARIO) excel at creating very real people that the audience comes to know thoroughly over the course of the film. Unemployed gas driller Toby Howard (Chris Pine) and his bank-robbing, ex-con older brother Tanner (Ben Foster) are hitting the small-town branches of the regional Texas Midlands Bank, usually before open as an employee arrives and never taking packs of money, only the loose bills in the tills. They get away, bury the car, and move on to the next town. Meanwhile, wily old Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) is looking at forced retirement but wants to nail the robbers first ("I may have one hunt left in me"), following their criminal path with his Mexican/Native American partner Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham). As they make their way across the state toward Oklahoma, the Howard brothers are almost undone by Tanner's impulsive behavior that includes a reckless, spur-of-the-moment robbery while Toby is picking up the check at a diner across the street. Hamilton is stymied in his pursuit by behind-the-times Texas Midlands, with two of the targeted branches not having an electronic surveillance system, instead relying on a VHS recorder that's not even working. The robberies are masterminded by Toby, with Tanner tagging along because he's experienced. Their mother recently passed away and Texas Midlands was threatening foreclosure even as she quickly withered away from terminal cancer. Toby's ultimate plan for the stolen cash is an inventive one, and he does it with the best intentions--to provide his two sons with his bitter ex-wife Debbie (Marin Ireland) the kind of life he and Tanner never had. He's breaking the law to break the cycle of poverty that, as is the case with so many others in these desolate nether regions of rural America, has been passed on from generation to generation.

HELL OR HIGH WATER recognizes the noble reasoning behind Toby's actions but never makes him or Tanner heroes, even though the locals questioned by Hamilton and Parker are all too happy to see Texas Midlands get screwed. The only clear villains of the piece are those in the financial sector, who are treated with scorn and condescension by everyone, even Hamilton, who arrives at one crime scene, sees a well-dressed manager and gruffly intones "Well, let's talk to this guy here, he looks like someone who can foreclose on a home." Pine and Foster are excellent as the sibling bank robbers, and even a trigger-happy loose cannon like Tanner is humanized to some degree and not played as a stock psycho by Foster.  But HELL OR HIGH WATER's biggest joys are provided by the national treasure that is Jeff Bridges. It's another Oscar-caliber performance, on the same level of burned-out melancholy as Tommy Lee Jones' Ed Tom Bell in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN but given a more gregarious manner in his rapport with Parker. Indeed, the testy ballbusting between Hamilton and Parker is hands-down the bromance of the year, so much so that you could easily watch an entire movie of Bridges and Birmingham in character, just sitting around dogging on each other. Whether it's Parker getting on Hamilton about his age ("You gonna do somethin' or just relax and let Alzheimer's run its course?") or Hamilton's constant razzing about Parker's dual ethnicities ("I haven't even gotten to my Mexican insults yet. I'm still on the Indian ones."), these two have an unspoken respect and dedication to one another ("You're gonna miss me pickin' on you," Hamilton tells Parker), an ironclad bond that makes events that transpire utterly heartbreaking.

Like other recent indie films that have addressed foreclosure and those doomed to struggle in a vicious cycle of being screwed and marginalized by the system (SUNLIGHT JR and 99 HOMES come to mind), HELL OR HIGH WATER is filmed in areas that have been hit hard, augmented by a downbeat score courtesy of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. Abandoned houses and boarded-up businesses line the streets. Old-timers are embittered, beaten-down, and done giving a shit (the "What don't ya want?" T-Bone waitress played by Margaret Bowman is a real crowd-pleaser) and young people just cruise around looking for fights (watch Toby handle the two meatheads blasting aggro-metal and waving a gun at Tanner at a gas station). Sheridan was best known as the ill-fated Deputy Hale on SONS OF ANARCHY before he switched careers to screenwriting with SICARIO. In between, he directed VILE, one of the worst horror films ever made, and one that was mentioned a lot on his Facebook page but mysteriously vanished from his IMDb profile and reappeared as the sole credit on another as soon as SICARIO started getting some positive buzz (c'mon, man--if James Cameron can own up to PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING, you can admit to VILE). His hapless attempts at scrubbing his past aside, Sheridan has proven himself adept at creating believable, fully-rounded characters but it sometimes comes off as a little too scripted and "messagey." It's not enough to be a huge issue, but some more subtlety would've been a good thing in these fleeting moments. In the end, HELL OR HIGH WATER is one of 2016's best, a film that doesn't let anyone off the hook, one filled with nail-biting tension when it counts most and genuine, devastating emotion when you least expect it.

In Theaters: LAWLESS (2012)

LAWLESS
(US - 2012)

Directed by John Hillcoat.  Written by Nick Cave.  Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Guy Pearce, Jessica Chastain, Mia Wasikowska, Jason Clarke, Dane DeHaan, Noah Taylor, Lew Temple, Bill Camp, Tim Tolin.  (R, 116 mins)

Director John Hillcoat and musician/screenwriter Nick Cave previously collaborated on the viscerally brutal 2006 western THE PROPOSITION and reunite for this adaptation of Matt Bondurant's novel The Wettest County in the World.  Bondurant's book was loosely based on the Prohibition-era bootlegging experiences of his grandfather Jack and his two great-uncles Howard and Forrest Bondurant, who ran a major moonshine operation in Franklin County, Virginia.  LAWLESS has a lot of the same grim, stomach-turning violence that made THE PROPOSITION so memorable, but as a whole, it's not quite as good.  It wants to be a 1930s gangster version of THE PROPOSITION, but it has commercial obligations to fulfill, and it's not as well-constructed, with a propensity for corny one-liners and implausible characterization, and a villain who's ultimately too over-the-top for his own good.   It's certainly an entertaining film, but it often feels like its issues stemmed more from the editing and not the writing.  THE PROPOSITION was a great film, while LAWLESS is merely a good one.

Tom Hardy and Shia LaBeouf as
two of the Bondurant brothers

In 1930-31 Franklin County, the moonshining Bondurant brothers--Howard (Jason Clarke), the oldest; Forrest (Tom Hardy), the middle brother and the leader/brains of the operation; and Jack (Shia LaBeouf), the youngest and most eager to make his mark--are doing well until the local prosecutor brings in Charlie Rakes (Guy Pearce), a Chicago-based "Special Deputy" who's not there to clean up the operation, merely to help himself and the prosecutor profit from it.  They want their cut and the Bondurants aren't going to budge.  In between the war with the corrupt lawmen, Forrest gets involved with Maggie (Jessica Chastain), a former Chicago dance-hall girl who needed to get away to a quiet life and lands a job at the Bondurants' general store, and Jack courts local Amish girl Bertha (Mia Wasikowska).  One of the film's biggest problems is the paper-thin characterization of the women.  Yes, it's a film about men and their guns, but whether by Cave's scripting or the assembling of the film, Maggie and Bertha are both very ill-defined and not very believable.  Wasikowska, especially, is saddled with a character that just never seems real: the flirty, sassy Amish girl "who always had a rebellious streak in her," according to Jack.

Guy Pearce as the evil Charlie Rakes

Hardy's performance is strange but effective.  He plays Forrest as a very quiet, withdrawn type who's prone to bursts of savage violence when pushed, and he seems a lot like Nick Nolte, but with more grunting.  LaBeouf, who often comes off as, well, a total douche both onscreen and off, does some of his best work and it's a case of Hillcoat using LaBeouf's persona and/or limitations to the film's advantage.  Jack is a cocky, inexperienced, and occasionally arrogant whippersnapper who often seems in over his head, and LaBeouf embodies that perfectly.  It's similar to how everyone said Josh Hartnett was too bland a leading man for THE BLACK DAHLIA, when in fact, it as an inspired move by Brian De Palma where the character's flaws and weaknesses matched the audience's perception of the actor (Hartnett's casting was one of the few successful things about that film).  I haven't been a fan of LaBeouf in the past, but with LAWLESS and his recent casting in Lars Von Trier's next project, he seems to be taking steps toward being Taken Seriously, and he does a very solid, credible job here.  Gary Oldman has a small role as dapper big-city mobster Floyd Banner, who forms an uneasy alliance with Jack when it means taking on Rakes.  Which brings us to Guy Pearce as Charlie Rakes.  With his jet-black hair slicked back and his eyebrows shaved, sporting a bow-tie and dress gloves, too much cologne, and a broad Chicago accent through pursed lips, the prissy, sneering Rakes gives Pearce the kind of despicable, over-the-top bad guy that actors love to sink their teeth into.  Make no mistake, Pearce makes Rakes a memorably sadistic villain, but ultimately, it's the kind of villain that doesn't really belong in this movie, and by the end, he's too much of a cartoon, spouting the kind of snarky one-liners that seem more akin to a blockbuster action movie than a 1930s period piece.  This doesn't make it a bad movie, but no matter how much fun Pearce is to watch here--and he is a blast--these issues keep it from rising to the level of THE PROPOSITION.  I guess it's an issue of finding the right tone and staying consistent, and neither Hillcoat nor Cave are as disciplined on this project as they were on their last one.

Gary Oldman as big-time gangster Floyd Banner

THE PROPOSITION is known for its often shocking violence, and Hillcoat and Cave certainly maintain consistency in that area.  Whether it's Jack getting a savage beating from Rakes, or various throat slicings, bullets through flesh, shovels to the head, or Rakes getting a gift-wrapped package containing the severed testicles of one of his flunkies, LAWLESS has no shortage of wince-inducing violence and gore.  Also returning from the previous Hillcoat/Cave collaboration is cinematographer Benoit Delhomme, who brings the same kind of visually stunning beauty to drab, dusty surroundings, with the imagery matched perfectly to the rustic score by Cave and Warren Ellis, with vocal contributions from Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, and Mark Lanegan.  LAWLESS is not without problems, and it falls short of being a new classic of gangster cinema, but it's well-made, looks great, has good performances, and is much better than most of the studio product that normally gets dumped in theaters around Labor Day.