Directed by Peter Hyams. Written by Eric Bromberg & James Bromberg. Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Tom Everett Scott, Orlando Jones, Linzey Cocker, Christopher Robbie, Kris Van Damme, Zahari Baharov, Dimo Alexiev, Vladimir Mihaylov, Teodor Tzolov. (R, 85 mins)
Back in the late '80s, Jean-Claude Van Damme built his fan base and became a star the old-fashioned way: by working his ass off. As he graduated from low-budget B-movies that became surprise box-office hits (1988's BLOODSPORT, 1989's CYBORG) to bigger-budgeted A-list fare (1992's UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, 1993's HARD TARGET, 1994's TIMECOP), he became a proven player with a solid track record. By 1996, he had enough clout that Universal let him star in and direct his pet project THE QUEST, and then it all started to implode. THE QUEST bombed, followed by tabloid fodder like multiple marriages, stories of drug abuse and being labeled "difficult." In his memoir My Word is My Bond, THE QUEST villain Roger Moore offered this observation on being asked what it was like working with Van Damme: "I've always believed that if you can't say something nice about someone, don't say anything at all. So I'll say nothing at all." The movies kept tanking (1997's DOUBLE TEAM, 1998's KNOCK OFF), LEGIONNAIRE (1998) went straight to video, and the "Muscles from Brussels" was becoming something between an industry pariah and punchline. After 1999's last-ditch, desperation Hail Mary UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: THE RETURN, Van Damme's movies started bypassing theaters altogether. But then a funny thing happened: he straightened up his act, settled down, and focused on his work, and the movies were often shockingly good. Much like his earlier days, Van Damme was once more building his career by word-of-mouth: low-budget B-movies like the gritty IN HELL (2003), WAKE OF DEATH (2004), UNTIL DEATH (2007), and THE SHEPHERD (2008) are as good as, if not better, than many of the films from his theatrical heyday. The 2008 meta/mockumentary/confessional JCVD got some acclaim but didn't open any serious doors for him, and after a few more quality DTV outings like UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: REGENERATION (2009) and ASSASSINATION GAMES (2011), Van Damme was invited back to the big screen to play the villain in THE EXPENDABLES 2 (2012), and the Van Dammessaince was on. The brilliant UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (2012) managed to get raves from serious cineastes, and a recent Volvo commercial became a viral sensation. Everyone loves an underdog, and once more, after years of hard work and rebuilding his reputation, the 53-year-old Van Damme has engineered the quietest comeback in recent memory, even if some are approaching it ironically. He never went away--it's just that he managed to accomplish some of his best work when the industry dismissed him and no one was paying attention.
I've been saying for years that Van Damme would make a great Bond villain, and THE EXPENDABLES 2 did a nice job of demonstrating that. His latest film, ENEMIES CLOSER, again finds JCVD in bad-guy mode, with the initial focus on Henry Taylor (Tom Everett Scott), a ranger at a park near the US/Canada border. He's the only employee and lives in the ranger station, with only one other resident--cranky old Mr. Sanderson (Christopher Robbie)--living on the other end of the park. Taylor prefers the solitude after dealing with the emotional and physical scars of time spent in the military, serving in Afghanistan. After helping stranded hiker Kayla (Linzey Cocker), the two make a dinner date, but it's put on the backburner when Taylor is approached at gunpoint at the ranger station by Clay (Orlando Jones). Clay has a personal beef with Taylor: his younger brother was killed in Afghanistan and Taylor was his commanding officer. Taylor tries to explain that Clay's brother got separated from their group and he was given orders to leave him behind. Taylor had a breakdown and spent years blaming himself and the ranger job was as far as he could run from the world. Clay doesn't buy any of it and takes him out to the deep woods to execute him.
Meanwhile, a plane filled with a large heroin shipment has crashed in the lake surrounding the island park. Just as the skeleton crew of border patrol officers ("It's just us...they only care about the Mexican border!" one officer laments) goes to investigate, they're massacred by Xander (Van Damme), the eccentric, environmentally-conscious, vegan cartel boss who's introduced talking about his refusal to wear leather shoes and the methane in cow farts. Xander and his crew encounter Taylor and Clay just as Clay's about to kill Taylor. Shots are fired, and the hunt is on as Xander and his crew start pursuing Taylor and Clay through the massive park, forcing the two men to set aside their differences and work together...
...if they don't kill each other first!
The script by Eric and James Bromberg has a lot in the way of logic lapses--why would Taylor and Clay leave Xander's last remaining henchman merely knocked out instead of killing him like they did all the others? (this flunky is played by JCVD's son Kristopher Van Varenberg, who's now just cutting the shit and going by "Kris Van Damme"; Van Damme keeps putting his kids in his movies, and it needs to stop, though Kris is a marginally better actor than his sister Bianca Bree). Why, you ask? Well, so he can pull a surprise appearance just when he needs to, and prompt Clay to grumble "I shoulda killed you when I had the chance." YES, YOU SHOULD HAVE! The Sanderson character is absolutely pointless and there's no shortage of trite dialogue when Van Damme is offscreen (at one point, Clay says "I didn't prepare for a war," to which Taylor actually replies "This war came to us"). There's a third-act twist that you'll see coming long before Taylor and Clay do, but for all its predictability and occasional stupidity, ENEMIES CLOSER is entertaining thanks to a completely unhinged performance by Van Damme. Sporting a bizarre hairstyle that looks like Christopher Walken in a high humidity climate, mugging shamelessly, complaining that Taylor's coffee isn't fair trade, and prone to waxing rhapsodic about a childhood that included a pet goose named Edith Piaf, Van Damme sinks his teeth into this thing, devouring every bit of scenery that he can. It's a thoroughly cartoonish performance that's engineered to go over the top, and seeing Van Damme do his best "Gary Oldman-in-THE PROFESSIONAL" is impossible to resist.
This is the star's third collaboration with veteran director Peter Hyams (TIMECOP, SUDDEN DEATH), a past master of commercial genre fare, with BUSTING (1974), CAPRICORN ONE (1978), OUTLAND (1981), and RUNNING SCARED (1986) to his name. Now 70, Hyams was once respected enough in the industry to be entrusted with helming 2010, the surprisingly solid 1984 sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), but he's been skidding for well over a decade, hitting bottom with A SOUND OF THUNDER (2005), a complete disaster that was abandoned by its producers and actually released with unfinished special effects after three years on the shelf. ENEMIES CLOSER is no Hyams classic, but it's his best film since 1997's THE RELIC. He doesn't really bring any distinct touches (Hyams in his 1974-1986 prime, when he was scripting his own films, had a distinct "Hyams" feel--just check out Hal Holbrook's incredible CAPRICORN ONE monologue), other than having one character named "Spota," a name that turns up in many of his films (it's his wife's maiden name). Van Damme and Hyams obviously like one another and enjoy working together, and Van Damme has also starred in three films directed by Hyams' son John, including the instant cult classic UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING. John Hyams served as editor on ENEMIES CLOSER, and the film, shot in Bulgaria and Louisiana, feels more in line with the current crop of high-end DTV fare cranked out by the likes of John Hyams and Isaac Florentine. It's probably a good bet that a lot of that was achieved in the editing stages with John helping his old man out. Peter Hyams is more than capable of pulling off a high-intensity action flick, but in the many fight scenes, the influence of John Hyams, who's becoming a genuine action auteur in his own right, is very obvious.
It's too bad Lionsgate and After Dark Films aren't capitalizing on the Van Dammessaince and giving this a bigger rollout than a handful of theaters and VOD, but given the tepid commercial response to the recent string of quality aging action star vehicles that don't feature the word "expendables" in the title, you can't really be surprised. Sure, Van Damme doesn't have--and probably never will have--the box office pull that he once did, and nobody in 2014 is going to the multiplex to see Tom Everett Scott or Orlando Jones, but it's just a bit disheartening to see the company dump this one off but put I, FRANKENSTEIN on 3000 screens.
Conceived by writer-director Peter Hyams (CAPRICORN ONE) as an outer-space western, OUTLAND finally gets a worthwhile home video presentation on Blu-ray. The long out-of-print DVD was one of the first issued in the format and was utterly abysmal in quality. OUTLAND did generally well at the box office in 1981 and has always been held in high regard by genre fans, and despite a couple of dubious effects shots late in the film, it's aged very well. Sean Connery is O'Niel, a Federal Marshal assigned to a one-year tour heading the police force on Io, the third moon of Jupiter, where Con-Am runs a very profitable titanium ore mining facility. Sheppard (Peter Boyle), Con-Am's manager on Io, is very proud of his operation's increased productivity and profitability and politely tells O'Niel to just go with the flow. O'Niel senses something fishy when two miners have psychotic episodes resulting in their deaths. Sheppard orders the bodies sent back to the space station off Jupiter but O'Niel manages to get a blood sample from one and with the help of curmudgeonly, hard-drinking Dr. Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen), finds traces of a powerful experimental drug that allows users to stay up for days on end, thus increasing their furious work output. The side effects, Lazarus says, are that continued use can cause complete psychotic breaks after 10 or 11 months. Sheppard and some associates are running the drug operation into Io, and as long as productivity, profits, and bonuses are high, everyone, including O'Niel's deputy Montone (Hyams regular James B. Sikking), is content to look the other way. When O'Niel doesn't back down, Sheppard and Con-Am execs decide to bring in three hit men from the space station to kill him, and it's here that OUTLAND turns into essentially a post-STAR WARS variation on HIGH NOON, complete with a large digital clock in a sleazy Io bar showing the countdown to the next shuttle arrival. Like Gary Cooper's Will Kane, Connery's O'Niel is forced to face the killers alone (with a little help from Lazarus), as an entire work force of minors and even his own deputies prove unwilling to help him.
OUTLAND is a top-notch sci-fi thriller and the miniatures and matte work still look superb and are more convincing today than most CGI. The cast is terrific--Connery and Sternhagen make an unlikely and very likable team, and Boyle is memorably smug, telling Connery to "go home and polish your badge...you're dealing with grown-ups here." It's a film that's fallen through the cracks over the years, but hopefully this proper HD presentation will allow it--and Hyams, a very underrated director and wonderfully snappy writer who was unstoppable in his 1974-1990 prime--to find a new audience. Hyams provides a newly-recorded commentary that covers all elements of the production (he wanted to call it IO, but everyone kept mistaking it for 10), with a lot of interesting Connery stories (they also worked together on 1988's THE PRESIDIO). Also with Clarke Peters (THE WIRE, TREME), Steven Berkoff, and John Ratzenberger as a freaked-out miner whose head explodes in the opening scene. (R, 109 mins)
ALTERED STATES (US - 1980)
It's a testament to just how much filmmaking, marketing, and audiences have changed over the last 30 or so years when one considers that Ken Russell's surreal, philosophical, challenging, jargon-heavy, sensory-deprivation, devolution sci-fi/horror mindfuck was not only bankrolled by a major Hollywood studio (Warner Bros.) with an unknown (William Hurt in his debut) in the lead role, but it was released in theaters on Christmas Day 1980. ALTERED STATES tells the story of psych professor Eddie Jessup's (Hurt) search for the Ultimate Truth via isolation tank and a hallucinogenic mushroom-based solution concocted by an indigenous Mexican tribe that's purported to take one back to "first soul" and be "propelled into the void." The more time he spends in the tank with himself as the experiment, monitored by a colleague (Bob Balaban), an endocrinologist (Charles Haid), and later, his estranged wife (Blair Brown), the more Jessup's genetic makeup devolves with horrifying results. Written by Paddy Chayefsky (NETWORK), who fought with Russell and took his professional name off the finished film (going by his real name, Sidney Aaron), ALTERED STATES is pretty deep and heady stuff, filled with stunning (though a bit dated today) imagery and visual effects and room-shaking sound (which got an Oscar nod). As ambitious and thought-provoking film as it is, it probably ranks as one of Russell's more strangely commercial films, and the one-sheet depicting Hurt upside-down in the flotation tank immediately became an iconic image. The film (also featuring Drew Barrymore, in her first film as well, playing one of Hurt's young daughters) instantly put Hurt on the map as an actor to watch and he'd have an Oscar within five years for 1985's KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN. Hurt is so familiar as a reliable character actor in supporting roles these days that it's easy to forget he was an A-list star in the 1980s. The new HD transfer for the Blu-ray release is crystal clear and absolutely beautiful. The only extra is a trailer, but at a relatively low price, this is the best ALTERED STATES has ever looked. (R, 103 mins)
TWINS OF EVIL (UK - 1971)
Hammer's box office appeal may have been in decline by the early 1970s, but some of the studio's best films were being made in this period, as evidenced by John Hough's TWINS OF EVIL, just out on Blu-ray from Synapse Films. The third in the studio's "Karnstein" trilogy (after 1970's THE VAMPIRE LOVERS and 1971's LUST FOR A VAMPIRE), based on the works of J. Sheridan Le Fanu, TWINS OF EVIL has twin Playboy playmates Mary and Madeleine Collinson as orphans sent to live with their puritanical, cold-hearted uncle Gustav (Peter Cushing), a local witchfinder who leads a group of religious fanatics called The Brotherhood, finding presumed witches and burning them at the stake. One of the twins falls under the spell of Count Karnstein (Damien Thomas, who has a strange resemblance to Jimmy Fallon), a wealthy, well-connected Satanist whose activities have awakened undead vampire Mircalla (Katya Wyeth). Written by Tudor Gates and featuring David Warbeck and Dennis Price, TWINS OF EVIL is a highly enjoyable cult horror classic that showcases elements of the newly-explicit vampire genre (Hammer was taking advantage of the increasing demand for gore and nudity) and gave Cushing an opportunity to take part in the then-trendy "witchfinder" films popularized by 1968's THE WITCHFINDER GENERAL (with Vincent Price), 1970's THE BLOODY JUDGE (with Christopher Lee), and 1970's MARK OF THE DEVIL (with Herbert Lom). Cushing turns in one of his all-time great performances here, showing the complexities of noble intentions gone horrifically awry. Cushing's wife died unexpectedly shortly before filming began, and he's bringing a wide range of emotions to his role here as his Gustav is ultimately both terrifying and tragic. Synapse's Blu-ray transfer is absolutely impeccable, and it's loaded with bonus features, including the feature-length documentary THE FLESH AND THE FURY, which explores the works of Le Fanu, the "Karnstein" trilogy, and the making of TWINS OF EVIL, with appearances by genre luminaries and historians like Joe Dante, Kim Newman, Tim Lucas, Ted Newsom, David J. Skal, and Sir Christopher Frayling, in addition to TWINS co-star Thomas and director Hough. One of 2012's best Blu-ray releases. (Unrated, 87 mins)
