On Blu-ray/DVD: UNDERCOVER BROTHER 2 (2019), AMERICAN DREAMER (2019) and POLAROID (2019)

UNDERCOVER BROTHER 2
(US - 2019)

Universal's 1440 DTV division is back with another belated sequel nobody was waiting for with UNDERCOVER BROTHER 2. A modest hit in the summer of 2002, the combination blaxploitation/Bond spoof UNDERCOVER BROTHER was based on an animated internet series created by John Ridley, who also wrote the script and would go on to win an Oscar for his screenplay adaptation of 12 YEARS A SLAVE. Ridley obviously has better things to do than this sequel, as does everyone else associated with the first film--not just Dave Chappelle, a standout as Conspiracy Brother, but also stars Eddie Griffin and Chris Kattan, neither of whom have been burdened with busy schedules in recent years. UNDERCOVER BROTHER remains in regular rotation on cable, and one thing it likely had a hand in inspiring was the 2009 cult classic BLACK DYNAMITE, a pitch-perfect homage to blaxploitation that gave Michael Jai White the greatest role of his career. And that's what makes UNDERCOVER BROTHER 2's existence all the more pointless, because White has been hired to replace Griffin in the title role, and as enjoyable as UNDERCOVER BROTHER was, it's a safe bet that everyone--White included--would rather have a BLACK DYNAMITE 2 than this. Making things even worse is that Undercover Brother spends most of this sequel in a coma after he and his tag-along, dog-grooming kid brother Lionel (Vince Swann) are frozen in ice when the nefarious The Man (Barry Bostwick) triggers an avalanche after they track him down at his secret headquarters in Austria. Cut to 16 years later, and the pair are discovered by a climber due to melting ice caps. While Undercover Brother remains hospitalized, Lionel--aka "Undercover Brother's Brother"--joins the secret agency known as The B.R.O.T.H.E.R.H.O.O.D. to lead the search for the long-missing The Man, who never fulfilled his master plan of black mind control via fried chicken, menthol cigarettes, and orange soda. The Man's gay son Manson (Steven Lee Johnson) has taken over his father's organization and is using Resistance Brew, an overpriced fair trade coffee chain, as a front to flood hip, gentrified enclaves with a powerful street drug called Woke, which can cause hooked users to become petty, hypersensitive, and judgmental.

There's some undeniable potential in the script, co-written by Stephen Mazur, whose credits include other illustrious DTV sequels like WITHOUT A PADDLE: NATURE'S CALLING, JINGLE ALL THE WAY 2, and BENCHWARMERS 2: BREAKING BALLS. But UNDERCOVER BROTHER 2 is a borderline unwatchable fiasco, even by the lowered standards of a Universal 1440 sequel. Super-woke hipsters are an easy target, but this film never finds a funny way to skewer the subject or mine any real laughs from Lionel being frozen for 16 years (he can't believe Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, and Prince are dead, or that Donald Trump is president). Much of this is a direct result of the grating, shamelessly mugging Swann, who equates being loud with being funny, and whose idea of a screen persona is to be young Will Smith, RUSH HOUR-era Chris Tucker (even stealing the "Do you understand the words that are comin' outta my mouth?!" line), and the least-talented member of the Wayans family all rolled into one. The film is so sloppily directed by Leslie Small (HAIR SHOW) that no one bothered to pay any attention to the continuity of Lionel's hi-top fade, which drastically changes from scene to scene, along with his earring that appears and disappears throughout. Swann is absolutely atrocious, but nobody fares well here. Bostwick, looking like Mitt Romney as the Frankenstein monster, is saddled with the most embarrassing role of his career, at one point even spooning with a blow-up doll. But the real bullshit is leaving White sidelined for 75% of the movie, lying in a hospital bed or occasionally appearing as an apparition to guide his little brother until he eventually returns for the climactic raid on The Man's new stronghold. White gets the only amusing lines, and they sound more BLACK DYNAMITE than UNDERCOVER BROTHER ("I'd launch a full-scale investigation...into those titties"). In a perfect world, BLACK DYNAMITE would've catapulted Michael Jai White to mainstream stardom and eliminated his need to star in movies as bad as UNDERCOVER BROTHER 2, much less cynically coasting through on his status a B-movie cult hero when he only has a glorified cameo. C'mon, man. (R, 85 mins)


AMERICAN DREAMER
(US - 2019)

It's occasionally overwrought and contrived, but the grim indie AMERICAN DREAMER--shot in Norfolk, VA and partially financed by Old Dominion University--establishes a certain level of cringe-worthy intensity the more it goes on, sort of like a schlubby version of GOOD TIME. Much of that is due to a strong dramatic performance by comedian and popular late-night talk show guest Jim Gaffigan, who's doing his best sad sack Philip Seymour Hoffman misery-wallow through one of the most haphazardly-planned crimes of financial desperation this side of BEFORE THE DEVIL KNOWS YOU'RE DEAD. After losing his job and being slapped with a restraining order by his estranged wife (Tammy Blanchard), who refuses to let him see their son, unstable rage-case Cam (Gaffigan) moves into an extended-stay shithole motel and earns a meager income as a rideshare driver. He also picks up some side money by chauffeuring volatile drug dealer Mazz (Robbie Jones) on his runs. When he falls behind on his child support and his brother won't loan him any more money, Cam decides to kidnap Mazz's girlfriend Marina (Isabel Arraiza) for a $20,000 ransom. With an hour to kill after dropping off Mazz before he has to pick him up, Cam goes to Marina's house and finds their toddler son alone while Marina is out having sex with Mazz's partner Gumby (Alejandro Hernandez) to score some drugs. Cam hastily improvises by taking the kid instead and putting him in the trunk of the car. He sends a ransom text to Mazz on a burner phone he just bought at a carryout and, of course, ends up driving him around all night in pursuit of the kidnappers.

Cam's plan is extraordinarily stupid, but that's the whole idea. It goes without saying that things quickly fly off the rails as Cam has to go to extreme lengths to keep Mazz from finding out what he's done. It doesn't take long for a body count to start accumulating as Mazz assumes the kid has been taken by rivals, underlings, or even Gumby. Jones has an intimidating presence as Mazz even if his performance falls a little on the side of caricature at times, but the film is really a showcase for Gaffigan, who's quite effective as a troubled guy whose life completely went to shit because of one bad day. At the same time, director/co-writer Derrick Borte (THE JONESES) never tries to get you on Cam's side despite some attempts to show that he's not a bad guy (he gives his leftover Chinese takeout to a homeless person before picking up Mazz). The ending could use more punch, but overall, it's a solid little film with admittedly limited commercial appeal, though fans of Gaffigan, urban "survive the night" scenarios, and poorly-plotted crimes going tragically awry in every conceivable way will definitely find AMERICAN DREAMER worth a look. (R, 93 mins)


POLAROID
(US - 2019)

Set for release in theaters in August 2017 before being bumped to December and then back to November, POLAROID then vanished from the release schedule altogether when it became one of the many casualties of the Harvey Weinstein scandal that broke in October 2017. It would be another two years before the film finally resurfaced with zero publicity as a VOD dumpjob courtesy of Vertical Entertainment, with nary a mention of Weinstein or Dimension Films to be found in the credits. Even before the scandal, Dimension had to know it had a dud on its hands with POLAROID, but now had a convenient excuse to bury it. It's Norwegian filmmaker Lars Klevberg's feature debut, an expansion of his identically-titled 2015 short film, which itself seems to owe a huge debt to "Say Cheese and Die," a 1996 episode of GOOSEBUMPS that starred a young Ryan Gosling (Klevberg went on to direct this year's CHILD'S PLAY remake, which ended up getting released first). In the small town of Locust Harbor, high school loner Bird Fitcher (British actress Kathryn Prescott, 26 years old at the time of filming) is a photography enthusiast who enjoys collecting old trinkets and knick-knacks and works part-time after school in a local antique shop. Her friend Tyler (Davi Santos) gives her a vintage, still-working 1970s Polaroid SX-70 instant camera that he picked up at a garage sale. When she takes Tyler's picture, she notices a smudge lingering off to the side of the shot. That same smudge appears in several other pics she takes with some friends at a party, and almost immediately, everyone who appears in the photos starts being offed one by one by a supernatural entity (Javier Botet) whose vengeful spirit rests inside the camera.

Prescott has a striking resemblance to TEACHING MRS. TINGLE, GOSSIP, and FREDDY GOT FINGERED co-star Marisa Coughlan, and that's not the only reason this feels like it could've been made in 2003 in the waning days of the post-SCREAM era as a response to both FINAL DESTINATION and THE RING. The sense of it being a stale retread is uninspiring enough, but Klevberg and cinematographer Pal Ulvik Rokseth (22 JULY) also make the bizarre decision to shoot the entire film in almost complete darkness, making it virtually impossible to see what's going on for the majority of the feels-like-three-hours 88-minute run time. With some more sensible lighting, POLAROID could've been harmlessly average and merely forgettable, but it goes out of its way to establish itself as the year's dumbest horror movie this side of ELI. This takes place in a small town. Why then, is the revelation that Bird's dad was killed in a car accident when she was 12 and that she always wears a scarf to cover a scar on her neck a surprise to anyone? If she's in high school now, that means it happened, at the most, six years earlier. None of these kids--who have just now started calling her "Scarf Girl"--are aware of this traumatic event in the life of a classmate they've known for years? That wouldn't stay secret in a small town, nor would anyone forget it. Hell, I still remember the name of the kid in my class who shit his pants in third grade. Also, the Polaroid is discovered to have once belonged to a serial killing teacher who abducted, tortured, and murdered three Locust Harbor high school students in 1974. Wouldn't this be the major urban legend that everyone who lives in Locust Harbor would know and pass down from class to class and generation to generation? Why does Bird have to go to the archive room at the local library--a building that seems to be lit by a single 15-watt bulb that's got about 30 seconds of life remaining--to peruse old newspapers for the shocking discovery? And it's also a big plot reveal that the teacher's widow (Grace Zabriskie, second-billed for a five-minute cameo) still lives in the same house under an alias. Really? Nobody knows who she is, 40+ years running? Did all of the Locust Harbor townies just shrug and say "Hey, that weird shut-in lady who bought the crazy killer teacher's house looks a lot like his wife who just sold it!"?  How has she managed to keep her existence a secret all this time? I suppose she could order all of her necessities from Amazon but from what I can tell, Locust Harbor doesn't even have adequate electricity, let alone good wi-fi. And honestly, would Mrs. Killer Teacher not want to start her life anew somewhere else, maybe? I mean, what the fuck, POLAROID? I know you're just a dumb horror movie, but you've gotta try a little harder than that.  (PG-13, 88 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: CLOWN (2016); BASKIN (2016); and THE INVITATION (2016)

CLOWN
(US - 2016)

When 2015's COP CAR got some festival buzz going and became a minor hit on the arthouse circuit, it was enough to bump director/co-writer Jon Watts and his writing partner Christopher Ford into megabudget circles with the upcoming reboot SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING. But long before COP CAR, Watts and Ford made their debut, the horror film CLOWN. Shot in late 2012 but kept on a shelf by the Weinstein Co. until 2016, CLOWN is a feature-length expansion of a fake trailer Watts and Ford made and posted to YouTube in 2010. The "trailer," about a demonic clown, jokingly proclaimed "From master of horror Eli Roth," which prompted a flattered Roth to meet with the pair and offer to produce an actual CLOWN movie. While Robert Rodriguez's MACHETE may have worked once--before the novelty wore off with MACHETE KILLS--CLOWN is more on the HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN end of fake trailers-turned-real movies. Leadenly-paced and feeling much longer than 99 minutes, CLOWN has dad Kent (Andy Powers) forced by a cancellation to don an old clown costume for his son Jack's (Christian Distefano) birthday party. The suit and makeup soon adhere to and fuse with his body, making it impossible to take off.  After several failed and increasingly gruesome attempts to get out of the costume, a desperate Kent shoots himself in the head only to find he can't die. This drives him to madness and murder, as his wife Meg (Laura Allen) learns from Karlsson (Peter Stormare), the suit's previous owner, that it's an instrument of a demon who subsists on the sacrificing of five children a year. This leads to a repetitive series of sequences with Kent pursuing children and slowly morphing into a full-on clown demon as Meg tries to keep him from killing Jack. There's some intriguing and occasionally ballsy ideas in CLOWN--Karlsson's brother was a pediatric cancer specialist, so the pair conquered the clown curse by offering the demon terminally ill children, and when the demon offers to give Kent back for one more child, Meg isn't above leading an innocent kid to the slaughter if it means saving her family--but CLOWN just doesn't come together. It's sluggish and dull, and it needs a better actor than Powers to really feel for Kent's plight. It doesn't skimp on the gore and some occasional shock value antics, but this story is, at best, a 20-minute segment in an anthology film. (R, 99 mins)

BASKIN
(Turkey/US/UK - 2016)

This Turkish import got some significant acclaim at film festivals and from the horror scenester echo chamber, which only serves as further evidence that fanboys will bestow accolades on pretty much everything. BASKIN is a tired, slow-moving splatterfest that's a veritable grab-bag of cribbed material. The crux of the plot is essentially a Turkish HELLRAISER, with a quintet of cops answering a call for backup and ending up at a long-abandoned police station off a dark country road on the middle of nowhere. There's some backstory about the father-son relationship between the in-charge Boss Remzi (Ergun Kuyucu) and young rookie Arda (Gorkem Kasal), who was more or less raised by Remzi after a traumatic childhood incident that, of course, comes into play late in the film. The dark, empty police outpost is filled with bloodied, contorted souls in a mad orgy of sex and torture, overseen by "The Father," played in a bit of FREAKS and THE SENTINEL-style stunt casting by non-actor Mehmet Cerrahoglu. The Father puts the cops through all the torture porn tropes, whether it's slowly tearing out one's intestinal tract or carving out another's eyes and tongue-kissing the socket before making him fuck a goat-masked woman from behind.

It was the eye socket moment where I finally lost my patience with BASKIN. Not because of the gore or the perverse French kissing of the eye socket--that wasn't the problem at all. Even from the start, little things started rubbing me the wrong way and I was getting grouchy without really realizing it, whether it was a restaurant scene where the cops are swapping stories and one goes into a Joe Pesci "Funny how?" routine from GOODFELLAS; or the long exploration of the dark, cavernous underbelly of the abandoned police station that just seemed a little too much like SESSION 9; or the fleeting glimpse of an obviously non-human figure darting across the frame like he was trying to find his way back to THE DESCENT. Director/co-writer Can Evrenol, expanding his 2013 short film of the same name, was wearing his love of horror movies on his sleeve, but it was just getting to be too much. Too forced. By the time The Father turns up about an hour in, talking about being "one with the cosmos" and "you always carry Hell with you," he started to sound a lot like HELLRAISER's Pinhead in the days when he was simply known as "Lead Cenobite." But then the eye socket scene happened and Evrenol lost me. He accompanies it with a prominent cue from Riz Ortolani's CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST score--including that synthy beeeeeew!--and the transparency was just too much to ignore. That's what I concluded to be the exact moment where those lauding the film tilted their heads back, closed their eyes, exhaled slowly and purred "Oh, right there. That's the spot. I'm yours, BASKIN." There's nothing here but Evrenol name-checking bits and pieces of his favorite horror movies, bringing nothing new to the table but fooling enough people into proclaiming BASKIN some triumphant new vision of horror. It's lazy, it's uninspired, and worst of all, it's not scary. At all. It's all smoke and mirrors, and once again, horror fans prove themselves to be the biggest genre pushovers in moviegoing. BASKIN is the most overrated horror film since GOODNIGHT MOMMY. One more time, gang: start being a little more discerning, and a little less concerned with making sure your free screeners and your convention credentials keep coming. (Unrated, 97 mins, also streaming on Netflix)


THE INVITATION
(US - 2016)

While everyone was busy fellating BASKIN, another horror film was stealthily released around the same time that actually deserved the accolades but more or less fell off the radar even with the scenesters. A slow-burner that starts ratcheting the tension in the first scene and never lets up, THE INVITATION is a film where it's best to go in knowing as little as possible. It's also one of the best films of the year that you've probably heard nothing about. En route to a dinner party in the Hollywood Hills, Will (Logan Marshall-Green) and his girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) accidentally hit a coyote that Will is forced to put out of its misery via tire iron. That will turn out to be the least upsetting thing about the evening. The dinner party is at Will's old house, hosted by his ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and her new husband, record producer/recovering addict David (Michiel Huisman). Several of their closest friends are there and it's been two years since they've all been together, the group more or less splintering when Will and Eden's young son died and their marriage didn't survive the aftermath. Right off the bat, Will gets a strange vibe from Eden and David, the two endlessly talking about a trip to Mexico where they embraced a self-help philosophy of grief coping known as "The Invitation." Also at the party is a friend they met in Mexico, a clingy and needy young woman named Sadie (Lindsay Burdge), who almost instantly offers to sleep with Will. There's also the ominous presence of stranger named Pruitt (John Carroll Lynch), a friend of Eden's and David's who breaks the ice by showing the group a DVD of an assisted suicide they observed in Mexico. Wounds that never completely healed are torn open as Will vehemently disagrees with the way Eden has addressed her grief. He's also bothered by Pruitt and the fact that the windows have bars on them, that David has locked all the doors from the inside, and the fact that one of the guests they're still waiting on left David a voice mail two hours earlier saying he was the first one there, yet no one has seen him and he's nowhere to be found.

Things only get more claustrophobic and uncomfortable from there, with things boiling over into sheer terror by the end. So many films do the slow-burn approach that ends being a lot of buildup to nothing, but THE INVITATION hooks you in from the start. No matter how slow or meandering it may seem in the early going, every line, every incredulous glance, and every reaction from Will is important. Screenwriters Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi must've been sitting on this one for a while and saving it for the right occasion, because nothing else they've written--AEON FLUX, the CLASH OF THE TITANS remake, R.I.P.D., and both RIDE ALONGs--would indicate a capacity for the complexity and near anxiety-attack levels of suspense that transpire here. Nothing it as it seems and you'll never see where the story is heading with THE INVITATION. It's directed by Karyn Kusama, who established her indie cred with 2000's GIRLFIGHT but then washed out with high-profile studio projects AEON FLUX (2005) and JENNIFER'S BODY (2009). She's mainly been keeping busy directing TV (THE L WORD, CHICAGO FIRE, HALT AND CATCH FIRE), and THE INVITATION is her first feature film in seven years. It's a small masterpiece as far as modern day horror goes, a film that got some glowing reviews but very little attention from horror fans seemingly ready to call anything that gets made a classic. That's not to say THE INVITATION is an Insta-Horror Classic (© William Wilson), but it's one of the very few films of recent years, along with THE BABADOOK, IT FOLLOWS, THE WITCH, and HUSH, that deserves the kind of fawning hype that comes with today's horror offerings. (Unrated, 100 mins, also streaming on Netflix)