THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT (Denmark/Sweden/France/Germany - 2018) Written and directed by Lars von Trier. Cast: Matt Dillon, Bruno Ganz, Uma Thurman, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, Sofie Grabol, Riley Keough, Jeremy Davies, Ed Speleers, Emil Thorstrup, Marijana Jankovic, Carina Skenhede, Rocco Day, Cohen Day, Osy Ikhile, Yu Ji-tae, David Bailie. (R, 151 mins) When an ill-advised joke about "understanding" and "sympathizing with" Hitler understandably failed to land, professional provocateur and arthouse troll Lars von Trier was kicked out of the Cannes Film Festival in 2011 with his MELANCHOLIA in competition. His triumphant return to the festival earlier this year with the serial killer thriller THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT led to harumphing outrage and at least 100 walkouts. In other words, Mission Accomplished. IFC Films released von Trier's unrated, uncensored, 155-minute version for a one-night theatrical run in late November prior to the VOD rollout of the R-rated cut, shortened by four minutes. I don't really see why an edited version is necessary if it's mainly going to be seen on VOD anyway, and you can tell where the cuts are--the brutal murders of two children being a key point of repulsion at Cannes, along with one graphic scene of a woman's breasts being mutilated and sliced off. But even if you could see these few bits at full strength in the cut version, THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT isn't exactly the second coming of HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER. It is a tour-de-force for an all-in Matt Dillon as Jack, an odd, antisocial, obsessive-compulsive architect-turned-serial killer based in the rural outskirts of the Pacific Northwest, recounting five random murders over a 12-year period to an initially unseen man named Verge (Bruno Ganz). Verge scoffs at Jack's boasts and claims, sardonically taunting him with "Don't believe you're going to tell me something I haven't heard before." But by the end, Verge's snide dismissals and mocking tone will give way to legitimate horror and disgust, to the point where he finally deems Jack an "Antichrist."
Jack's murderous ways seem to have started as a spur-of-the-moment impulse decision. In "Incident 1," he happens upon a woman (Uma Thurman) stranded on the side of the road with a flat tire and a broken jack (sly foreshadowing?). She's pushy and abrasive, demanding more and more of Jack's time and telling him he "looks like a serial killer." That is, until she walks it back and says he looks like too much of a wimp to be a murderer, to which Jack's knee-jerk response is to bash her head in with the jack. Independently wealthy from an inheritance, Jack owns an empty warehouse space with a massive walk-in freezer, which he puts to use by storing her corpse. Jack's first attempt at premeditated murder comes in "Incident 2," where he awkwardly and unconvincingly tries to talk his way into home of a cop's widow (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), first by pretending to be a detective ("I'd like to see a police badge," she says. "So would I," replies Jack), and then only gaining entrance by playing on her greed by saying he's there to talk about a possible increase in her late husband's pension. After killing her, he's nearly caught by a passing cop (Ed Speleers) when his OCD and his obsessive cleanliness repeatedly force him to go back into the house and double/triple/quadruple-check to make sure he didn't miss a spot of blood, repeatedly scrubbing the floors and walls over and over again ("A murderer with OCD and to top it off, a cleaning compulsion?" needles Verge). In "Incident 3," Jack is a gun nut in a red hat taking a single mom (Sofie Grabol) and her two young sons, George (Cohen Day) and Grumpy (Rocco Day), to a vacant shooting range with predictably horrific results, including a macabre picnic where he forces her to feed bites of apple pie to her two dead boys ("This has been a good day," Jack beams with pride after this "family" outing). By this point, Jack has grown more confident in his abilities as a chameleon-like killer and begins sending murder photos to the press, calling himself "Mr. Sophistication," likely a reference to the grimly sardonic emcee at Ben Gazzara's seedy burlesque club in the 1976 John Cassavetes cult classic THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE). In "Incident 4," Jack is in full-on "bad boy" mode, manipulating and psychologically abusing Jacqueline (Riley Keough) by giving her the nickname "Simple" and boasting that he's killed 60 people and "in a couple of minutes, it'll be 61." "Incident 5" has Jack abducting five random people and taking them to his freezer--now filled with years' worth of collected victims--and lining them up for a full metal jacket to rip through all of their heads with one shot, only to be stalled by the fact that the guy at the gun shop (Jeremy Davies, twitchy as ever) sold him mislabeled ammo.
Amidst the horrors on display, there's quite a bit of dark, absurdist humor throughout, like Jack leaving one victim's severed breast under the windshield wiper of the cop who earlier issued him a parking ticket, and then using the other breast to make a wallet. And almost everything out of Verge's mouth is gold, with Ganz deploying a tone so incredulously mocking of Jack that you can't help but laugh (their conversations are reminiscent of Charlotte Gainsbourg and Stellan Skarsgard's framing sequences in NYMPHOMANIAC). But the film really loses its way after the fifth incident, and when we finally see Verge onscreen near the end, the magic of Ganz's vocal performance is lost thanks to von Trier's decision to turn him into a Chuck Palahniuk plot construct. Of course, the film was never meant to exist in reality, as Jack is the most unreliable of narrators (it's even possible that "Incident 1" isn't even his first murder, since he seems so testy and preoccupied from the start), and he gets away with his acts much too easily, but at some point, THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT stops being shocking and provocative and just becomes repetitive and exhausting, with a bloated running time that borders on loitering.
A walking embodiment of the DSM-5, Jack believes that his murders constitute "art," a sentiment stemming from his disputing the differences between "architect" and "engineer" when describing his profession. This leads to endless debates with Verge about art, iconography, and the nature of "masterpieces" that play over shots of revered paintings, museum pieces, newsreel footage of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Idi Amin, various massacres and genocides, and, eventually, in a grating bit of masturbatory self-adulation, a highlight reel of clips from past von Trier films. There's some political and social commentary to be mined from this (there's no slogan on Jack's red hat in "Incident 3," but the implication is obvious), and Jack very often comes off like a pathetic incel with some major issues with women (note how it's being called a "wimp" that initially sets him off). Dillon dives into this role with fearless abandon, and von Trier crafts some undoubtedly effective and haunting images, whether it's the positioning of the victims in "Incident 3," the taxidermy method in which he preserves Grumpy's body, or something like Jack's thumb and the tip of his index finger cleaning off a single blood-drenched blade of grass, and finally, the ultimate construction of his "house." But less could've been more with THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT, and von Trier is, as usual, so self-indulgently preoccupied with poking people with sticks to get a reaction that he disappears up his own ass. Few filmmakers are more divisive than Lars von Trier, and there's moments of greatness even in his lesser films. But his need to shock and provoke for a reaction too often feels like the work of an enfant terrible making a name for himself rather than a 62-year-old who's in his fourth decade of filmmaking.
2015's UNFRIENDED had some problems (like teenagers who looked to be in their mid-20s, and a late-film collapse into cheap jump scares and tilted BLAIR WITCH camera angles), but the real-time, Skype-set fright flick was more compelling than it had any business being. Unfolding entirely on a computer screen, the inevitable sequel UNFRIENDED: DARK WEB tells a different story with a similar set-up, jettisoning the supernatural angle of its predecessor to focus on an online game night that goes horrifically off the rails. Acquiring a laptop through the dubious means of grabbing it after it was left behind at a coffee shop, Matias (John Mayer lookalike Colin Woodell) plans on joining some college friends on Skype for Cards Against Humanity. At the same time, he's trying to smooth things over with his deaf girlfriend Amaya (Stephanie Nogueras), who's tired of his lax efforts in learning to sign. The laptop, which he tells everyone he got on Craigslist, repeatedly glitches out and messages keep coming through for its rightful owner. Things escalate in a gradual fashion, with Matias finding some truly disturbing videos on the laptop as he's getting some increasingly hostile instant messages from the laptop's owner, the apparent culprit behind an abduction seen in one of the videos of a missing girl who's currently all over the local news.
UNFRIENDED: DARK WEB is grounded in relative reality, even if it glosses over the more intricate aspects of its technological capabilities and doesn't really have anything to do with social media. Without divulging spoilers, Matias and his friends--paranoid conspiracy theorist AJ (Connor Del Rio), aspiring DJ Lexx (Savira Windyani), just-engaged couple Serena (Rebecca Rittenhouse) and Nari (Blumhouse regular Betty Gabriel), and London-based Damon (Andrew Lees)--soon get in way over their heads with a cabal of superhackers intent on making them--and Amaya--pay for Matias' bad judgment. There's some forced humor and a little of Del Rio's grating AJ goes a long way, but some sly jokes land, like writer and debuting director Stephen Susco (whose past scripts include THE GRUDGE, TEXAS CHAINSAW 3D, and BEYOND THE REACH) opening with a static shot of what we soon realize are Matias' failed login attempts to his ill-gotten gain, starting with passwords like "password" and "login," and ending with desperation Hail Marys like "FeelTheBern" and "Covfefe." Like a lot of films of this sort, UNFRIENDED: DARK WEB probably only works once, but it succeeds on a base, visceral level, especially once the stakes get serious and almost inconceivably cruel, leading to a late reveal reminiscent of a great late '90s paranoia thriller that's never really gotten the respect it deserves. Four endings were shot, and some different ones apparently played in various theaters around the country. Three are presented on the Blu-ray as alternate endings, and only one is even remotely uplifting. By no means is this some modern horror classic, but co-producer Timur Bekmambetov has a knack for shepherding these kinds of things where others (like Nacho Vigalondo's OPEN WINDOWS, which couldn't wait to ditch its core premise) have fallen short. Bekmambetov would finally perfect this online scare formula with the late summer sleeper hit SEARCHING, but like UNFRIENDED, this mean and uncompromising sequel surpasses expectations. (R, 92 mins)
DOWN A DARK HALL (Spain/US - 2018)
Based on a 1974 YA novel by Lois Duncan (I Know What You Did Last Summer, Hotel for Dogs), DOWN A DARK HALL has some intriguing ideas but the story never comes together, getting bogged down in sentimentality and shot in such a murky, dimly-lit way that it's often impossible to tell what's going on. Updated to the present day with era-appropriate can't-even and "#whatever" 'tude, troubled teen Katherine "Kit" Gordy (AnnaSophia Robb) has been suspended from school, had a misdemeanor arrest, is facing an arson charge, and, as the school psychologist points out, is so disengaged from school that she got an F in gym. Kit's never gotten over the death of her beloved father when she was nine, and her mom (Kirsty Mitchell) and stepdad (Jim Sturgeon) are at a loss as to what to do with her. Dr. Sinclair (Jodhi May) recommends she be sent to the remote, isolated, and ominously gothic-looking Blackwood Boarding School, run by Madame Duret (Uma Thurman, apparently entering the "sinister boarding school headmistress" phase of her career). There's only four other students--Izzy (ORPHAN's Isabelle Fuhrman), Sierra (Rosie Day), Ashley (Taylor Russell), and pyromaniac mean girl Veronica (Victoria Moroles)--all with behavioral and psychological issues, though Madame Duret is certain she can find the artistic, creative young women within. It isn't long before aspiring painter Sierra is crafting brilliant, ambitious canvases, brainy Izzy is solving impossible mathematical equations, and Kit, who long ago abandoned her interest in music, is playing emotionally-draining and difficult pieces on the piano, almost as if a spirit has possessed each of them them and is bleeding the art out of them. And of course, they start seeing ghosts in the hallways along with other supernatural happenings, all of which are written off by the clearly up-to-something Madame Duret.
Directed by Rodrigo Cortes (BURIED, RED LIGHTS) and co-written by Chris Sparling (BURIED, ATM, THE SEA OF TREES), DOWN A DARK HALL benefits from some well-crafted, Guillermo del Toro-esque production design in the long corridors of Blackwood, but once the horror kicks in, too much of the film is spent trying to watch Kit wander around in almost total darkness until an occasional spectral jump scare appears in the frame. Robb (SOUL SURFER) is convincingly angry without coming across as too obnoxiously bratty, and Thurman has some fun with a freewheeling, all-purpose Euro accent as Madame Duret, but DOWN A DARK HALL has too many tedious stretches, and once its ghostly goings-on are explained, it doesn't really hold up to much scrutiny even by horror genre standards, especially considering that the recruitment of these "gifted" girls has been going on undetected for quite some time. It looks great when you can see what's going on, and the setting, the characters, and the climax definitely have some enjoyable shout-outs to SUSPIRIA, but even with the easy box office of YA-based horror, it's not really a mystery why Summit and Lionsgate relegated this misfire to VOD this past summer with its 2016 copyright still displayed in the credits. (PG-13, 96 mins)
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?
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)
Directed by Peter Farrelly, Steven Brill, Will Graham, Steve Carr, Griffin Dunne, James Duffy, Jonathan Van Tulleken, Elizabeth Banks, Patrik Forsberg, Brett Ratner, Rusty Cundieff, James Gunn. Cast: Dennis Quaid, Greg Kinnear, Common, Seth MacFarlane, Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Naomi Watts, Liev Schreiber, Anna Faris, Chris Pratt, J.B. Smoove, Emma Stone, Kieran Culkin, Richard Gere, Kate Bosworth, Jack McBrayer, Aasif Mandvi, Justin Long, Jason Sudeikis, Uma Thurman, Kristen Bell, Bobby Cannavale, Leslie Bibb, John Hodgman, Katrina Bowden, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Chloe Grace Moretz, Jimmy Bennett, Patrick Warburton, Matt Walsh, Seann William Scott, Johnny Knoxville, Gerard Butler, Halle Berry, Stephen Merchant, Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi, Terrence Howard, Elizabeth Banks, Josh Duhamel. (R, 94 mins)
The extremely R-rated sketch comedy MOVIE 43 boasts what might be the most overqualified cast ever assembled for the sole purpose of thoroughly embarrassing themselves. The project was headed by Peter Farrelly, who gathered eleven other directors and a total of 18 writers to put together what probably seemed like a good idea in theory: get an incredible amount of A-list movie and TV stars together for a modern take on raunchy 1970s sketch comedies like THE GROOVE TUBE (1974), IF YOU DON'T STOP...YOU'LL GO BLIND (1975), CAN I DO IT...TIL I NEED GLASSES? (1977), JOKES MY FOLKS NEVER TOLD ME (1978), and the subgenre's standard-bearer, THE KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE (1977). It's hard to believe that this much talent could be squandered so badly, but MOVIE 43 only has a couple of good ideas and a total of about five decent laughs throughout. I don't think it's being too demanding to have expected a little more than that. A joke occasionally lands and only sticks out because what's around it is so depressing and dismal. Entire segments go by where you can't help but ask yourself "What was the endgame here? What is the joke?"
Farrelly handled the main storyline, which has Dennis Quaid as a washed-up director in skinny jeans and a Justin Bieber cut barging into studio exec Greg Kinnear's office and pitching him an idea for a sketch movie. And that's the premise. So, we get Kate Winslet and Hugh Jackman on a blind date, where she discovers that he has a scrotum dangling from his neck. Things briefly pick up with an interesting idea that's one of the very few examples of MOVIE 43 doing something edgy and daring: Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber play homeschooling parents who want their teenage son to have the complete high school experience, so they regularly subject him to bullying and insults for starters, then throwing a huge party and not inviting him, culminating in Mom trying to make out with him and Dad making a pass at him, all to give him that special "awkward first time" opportunity that all teenagers should have. It's a funny idea, but the writers and segment director Will Graham don't really know where to take it, so it ultimately fizzles, but it's one of the only examples of MOVIE 43 trying to do something. Next, it's Anna Faris asking boyfriend Chris Pratt to "poop" on her (not even the great J.B. Smoove of CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM can save this one, telling Pratt to eat beefy bean burritos with guacamole to "add some color" to it). Supermarket checkout clerk Kieran Culkin and ex-girlfriend Emma Stone have an intense erotic conversation, unaware that the intercom is picking it up and it's being pumped through the store (Stone: "Do you still like fingers in your butthole?" Culkin: "I want to give you a hickey on your vagina"). Then, Richard Gere is the CEO of a company facing lawsuits over their "iBabe" music player, which is a life-sized replica of a woman, prompting teenage boys to mutilate their penises because of a cooling fan that's in the "lower quadrant." I think the joke is that none of the execs except Kate Bosworth saw that this would be a problem. Next up, Robin (Justin Long) is at a speed date when Batman (Jason Sudeikis, who has a few amusing lines) shows up to cock-block him. Kristen Bell is Supergirl, Uma Thurman is Lois Lane, and Leslie Bibb is Wonder Woman. Then there's a painfully unfunny commercial about "Machine Kids," that shows people getting mad at vending machines, ATMs, and copiers and being told that little kids are inside operating them (I don't know what the joke is, either).
Chloe Grace Moretz is at boyfriend Jimmy Bennett's house when she gets her first period, prompting Bennett, older brother Christopher Mintz-Plasse, and their dad Patrick Warburton to freak out. Then there's a Tampax commercial with a CGI'd shark eating a female swimmer (because of the blood and the...yeah, you know). Seann William Scott and Johnny Knoxville are roommates who kidnap a foul-mouthed leprechaun (Gerard Butler's face CGI'd on to a smaller body) in a segment directed by Brett Ratner (it's a cliche to bag on Ratner at this point, but when there are four people credited as "Brett Ratner's assistants" for a contribution this miniscule, he's pretty much asking for it). Things get better for a short while with Halle Berry and Stephen Merchant on a blind date that turns into an increasingly ridiculous, rude, and politically incorrect game of Truth or Dare. It's another example of a solid idea without a punchline, but there are some amusing gags and this particular segment is comic genius compared to the several that preceded it, even with Oscar winner Berry mashing guacamole with her (stunt) breast and inserting a turkey baster filled with hot sauce into her vagina. Terrence Howard is the coach of a black college basketball team in 1959, where his game plan is essentially "You're black...they're white. This ain't hockey!" It's a one-joke premise that wears out its welcome fairly quickly, but it's not awful and it's nice to see segment director Rusty Cundieff (FEAR OF A BLACK HAT, TALES FROM THE HOOD) working on the big screen again. MOVIE 43 finally ends with a laughless offering from the otherwise dependable James Gunn, with Elizabeth Banks (who directed the Moretz/period segment) battling a jealous, gay, masturbating, animated cat named Beezil for the affection of boyfriend Josh Duhamel.
Other than the Watts/Schreiber "Homeschooling" and the Berry/Merchant "Blind Date," there's not much humor to be found in MOVIE 43. It's more concerned with shock value, which can be funny, but there's just nothing for these people to work with here. If they wanted to be edgy, the filmmakers needed to bring more to the table than diarrhea, menstrual blood, and a nutsack dangling from Hugh Jackman's neck. Even something as simple as having Gere make a gerbil joke would've demonstrated that they were trying and anything was fair game. But really, 15 years after THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY and we're still getting "jizz as hair gel" jokes? Is MOVIE 43 as apocalyptically bad as many critics have said? Is it "the CITIZEN KANE of bad movies"? No, not even close. Oh, make no mistake...it's terrible, and easily one of 2013's worst films, though I'm sure it won't be the worst. I laughed a few times and it's still better than, say, any spoof movie by Friedberg & Seltzer, the Antichrists behind DATE MOVIE and MEET THE SPARTANS. No, MOVIE 43's biggest crime is amassing an IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD-sized cast (and JERSEY SHORE's Snooki) and thinking the shock and the novelty of these people making genitalia and bodily-function jokes would be enough.
MOVIE 43 was shot over a period of three years, and worked on whenever actors or directors had time in their schedules. The version released overseas omits the wraparound segments with Quaid and Kinnear and substitutes it with three teenagers scouring the internet for something called "Movie 43," reputed to be the world's filthiest film. That at least explains the title, which means nothing in the context of the US release. Two additional segments were shot but ultimately not included: one directed by Bob Odenkirk, with Julianne Moore and Tony Shalhoub as parents being interviewed about their missing daughter (funny!) and one with Anton Yelchin as a necrophiliac, which begs the question of how bad they must've been if they were deemed unworthy of MOVIE 43. I'm sure those will end up on the inevitable "Unrated and Unacceptable!" (or some such nonsense) version on DVD/Blu-ray, but for now, the biggest winners of MOVIE 43 have to be Julianne Moore, Tony Shalhoub, and Anton Yelchin.
Thanks to John Charles for the tip on the alternate version.
