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)

On DVD/Blu-ray: THE TALL MAN (2012), THE LETTER (2012), and APARTMENT 143 (2012)

THE TALL MAN
(Canada/France - 2012)

Writer/director Pascal Laugier made a name for himself with 2008's savage horror film MARTYRS.  His follow-up film THE TALL MAN (no connection to Don Coscarelli's PHANTASM films) goes in a different direction stylistically, with almost no gore and with the focus being more on psychological horror.  In a lot of ways, it feels like a throwback that reminded me of all those great 1970s made-for-TV horror movies (when's the last time you saw quicksand in a movie?).  THE TALL MAN has a lot of ambition and tries to cover a lot of ground, and while, like MARTYRS, it's a provocative, imaginative, and sometimes daring film, it doesn't quite hang together despite a lot of positive ingredients.  It doesn't always work, but it's an admirable effort that really tries to do something different, and succeeds a bit more than it stumbles.  In a surprisingly strong performance, Jessica Biel is a widowed mom and doctor in the poverty-stricken former mining town of Cold Rock, outside of Seattle.  The mine closed years ago and the town is a wreck, with abandoned houses and wild dogs roaming the streets.  The only thing going on in Cold Rock is a traumatic string of child abductions by a figure known locally as The Tall Man.  The Tall Man apparently lives in the forest, and local mute teen Jodelle Ferland (the little girl from SILENT HILL back in 2006) claims to have seen him.  Cold Rock sheriff William B. Davis (THE X-FILES' Cigarette-Smoking Man!) mainly hangs out at the greasy spoon being useless while big-city detective Stephen McHattie investigates.  Sure enough, Biel is awakened one night and witnesses her young son being abducted by The Tall Man, but that's only the beginning of the story.

Laugier's structuring is unpredictable in that the film's primary twist happens unusually early on, and the rest of it deals less with the What's than with the Why's and How's.  Laugier very effectively plays his cards close to the vest, relying on subtlety and atmosphere, with some really nicely-done bits of editing, cinematography, and aerial and tracking shots. The problems arise when we're expected to swallow far too many implausibilities and inconsistencies, chief among them being how 18 children can go missing in a town this small and unpopulated with no one aware of what's really going on. The ultimate reveal comes not via bombastic surprise ending, but is rather low-key, contemplative, and doesn't provide any easy answers ("Right?  Right?  Right?").  Biel shows some serious chops here, but there's admittedly not much of a mainstream audience for a film like THE TALL MAN, especially for Laugier fans expecting a blood-and-torture-filled MARTYRS retread.  It's a slow and methodical little film with some unfortunate plot holes and logic gaps and it maybe could've used another script polish and maybe some tightening, but it's also unusually thoughtful, restrained, and serious for a horror film in 2012. (R, 106 mins, also streaming on Netflix)


THE LETTER
(US - 2012)

Remember when Lionsgate tried to sell William Friedkin's BUG as a mainstream horror movie?   They must be employing the same crew of bullshit artists in their marketing department, as their artwork ("She thought she saw a devil") and trailer for THE LETTER constitute 2012's most deliberately and willfully misleading ad campaign.  They're selling it as a suspense thriller with horror elements when in fact it's unwatchable film-school drivel trying to pass itself off as artsy and serious.  NYC writer Martine (Winona Ryder) is directing what looks to be the worst play ever staged and her life begins to unravel with the arrival of co-star Tyrone (James Franco), a manipulative, perpetually-smirking dick whose demeanor rubs everyone the wrong way.  Martine's relationship with boyfriend/co-star Raymond (Josh Hamilton) gets increasingly rocky as she constantly revises the script and the lines between fiction and reality blur and blah blah blah.  Lots of banal, stream of consciousness, freeform narration from Ryder as her character may or may not be in the midst of a schizophrenic episode and she may or may not be involved a hit and run accident involving a journalist (Dagmara Dominczyk).  Written and directed by Jay Anania, Franco's NYU film professor who previously directed the actor in 2010's instantly obscure SHADOWS AND LIES.  Somewhat reminiscent of Abel Ferrara's DANGEROUS GAME (1993), THE LETTER is a 90-minute Jay Anania home movie, probably made possible by the director's friendship with a famous, Oscar-nominated student.  It's amateurishly-shot and cheap-looking, almost like it's a class project where the assignment is to re-imagine BLACK SWAN as if directed by Henry Jaglom, and it's on roughly the same entertainment level as being waterboarded.  Possibly the worst film of 2012.  Look at this clip.  MUST LOVE JAWS is a more honest trailer than this.  (R, 94 mins)

APARTMENT 143
(Spain/France - 2012)

Written and produced by BURIED director Rodrigo Cortes, APARTMENT 143 (the original Spanish title EMERGO still remains on the film itself) attempts to fuse together all of the found footage films of the last few years, but it's done POV style so we see it as it happens.  Heavily indebted to PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, the film has a team of parapsychologists led by Michael O'Keefe investigating supernatural happenings in one unit of a dilapidated apartment building in downtown Los Angeles.  They've been hired by widower Kai Lennox, who lives with his angry teenage daughter Gia Mantegna (Joe's daughter, and she looks just like him) and four-year-old son Damian Roman, to get to the bottom of strange happenings that have followed them from their previous residence, and it all started when his wife died.  Cortes can't seem to settle on what exactly is going on here, so he just rips off everything before skidding to a thoroughly unsatisfying conclusion.  O'Keefe's insistence that hauntings and ghosts aren't real and there's no such thing as supernatural events and poltergeists doesn't really gel with the fact that they all clearly see the mother's ghost appear, but promptly forget about it as mandated by the made-up-as-it-goes-along script.  And even after Mantegna becomes visibly possessed and starts speaking in her mother's voice and doing a by-the-numbers EXORCIST impression, O'Keefe still stupidly writes it off as "early onset schizophrenia," with the possibility that it's a manifestation of buried memories of child molestation.  Rooms shake, winds howl, people are hurled across the room, laptop files erase themselves, motion sensors activate, pictures turn themselves upside down, tea kettles move themselves off the stove, and Mantegna levitates, and it's all just hormones and pent-up teen rage.  Director Carles Torrens stages a couple of decent jolts, but Cortes' script somehow manages to go in twenty different directions without really going anywhere, and it's all capped off with a not-so-twist ending that proves the dumb doctor wrong anyway.  You've seen it all before, and much better. At least it's short. (R, 80 mins, also streaming on Netflix)