The finale to Uwe Boll and Brendan Fletcher's RAMPAGE trilogy is the clumsiest and preachiest yet. On the positive side, Boll seems to be walking back his gushing admiration for Fletcher's insane lone-wolf domestic terrorist Bill Williamson. Where the first sequel RAMPAGE: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT felt like a love letter to mass shooters, PRESIDENT DOWN at least admits that words and actions have consequences and by the end, Bill is most certainly the villain with a lot of blood on his hands. But the road there is paved with some welcome bits of old-school Boll idiocy that's not helped by the director struggling with his lowest budget yet. His German tax shelter heyday of being able to afford the likes of Ben Kingsley, Jason Statham, and Burt Reynolds a fading memory, Boll can't even corral cheap labor on the level of past RAMPAGE co-stars like Matt Frewer or Lochlyn Munro. Boll unsuccessfully tried to crowdfund the film--originally titled RAMPAGE 3: NO MERCY--on Indiegogo and Kickstarter but failed to meet his goal, leading to an inevitable YouTube meltdown excoriating fans for giving their money to Hollywood studios while not helping out important artists like Dr. Uwe Boll. So with a lot less money at his disposal, Boll relies heavily on flashbacks and stock footage from the first two films, and mainly has Fletcher's Bill posting YouTube rants from his hiding place in the middle of nowhere, which may be the perfect metaphor for 2016 Uwe Boll.
Long thought dead after the events of the previous film, Bill emerges from hiding to assassinate the President, Vice President, and Secretary of Defense during a speech to Congress. Of course, how he manages to accomplish this is a mystery, since it happens offscreen. The FBI, vowing to get to the bottom of the assassinations, assigns two--yes, two--agents, Molokai (Steve Baran) and Jones (Ryan McDonnell) and a Bureau computer expert (Scott Patey) to run the investigation out of what looks like an underfunded police precinct. Bill manages to hack into their computer system with the help of a mole inside the FBI, and once Molokai and Jones (worst cop show title ever?) spot him on some surveillance footage outside the White House, he starts taunting them from his undisclosed location and threatening their families. Unfortunately, the agents are unable to convince their bosses that Bill is the culprit because a publicity-hogging ISIS claims responsibility for the assassinations, prompting the reactionary new Commander-in-Chief to round up all the Muslims and Syrian refugees in the US, close all the mosques, and nuke the Middle East "with the full support of Russia and China." The notion of an irrational, knee-jerk US President content with blowing up a good chunk of the world is an uncomfortably prescient notion that Boll completely sidesteps and never mentions again. There's no satire, no poking people with sticks--instead, the focus is on Molokai and Jones finding out where Bill is hiding and leading a raid where of course, Bill gets the edge on everyone, but Jones makes it easy by not even bothering to wear a bulletproof vest.
The message is muddled: Bill says he wants a world without violence in a film that opens with him shooting a random pedestrian in cold blood and concludes with him killing about a hundred FBI agents. Nothing here makes sense: why does Bill suddenly have a girlfriend (Crystal Lowe) and a kid? And how can he be presumed dead when he's actively posting videos to his YouTube channel to his legion of supporters? And when news of the assassinations of the President, VP, and Defense Secretary hits the wire, watch the only two news anchors seen in the film exclaim "Oh my God! The President is dead!" as the camera pans down to her reading the info off of a second page, as if that news a) would come over a teletype in 2016, and b) would be relegated to the second page. And are we to believe that the only two guys investigating the murder of the President, VP and Defense Secretary would exit a building and be confronted by one reporter? And it's one of the two news anchors we just saw? Boll ineptly inserts talking points about gun control and police brutality, but then he and Fletcher (they co-wrote the script together) go off on tangents about Hollywood's richest celebrities. There's jabs at Tom Cruise and Jennifer Aniston, and the murders of Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and Mark Zuckerberg among others are announced over the course of the film. These bits sound less like legitimate grievances about tabloid culture and more like a case of sour grapes from Boll and Fletcher because they aren't in the club. Canadian actor Fletcher's been around since the late '90s and was in hits like AIR BUD and FREDDY VS. JASON, and some Canadian arthouse films. He's also made eight movies with Uwe Boll. Dude, maybe that's why you're not in the club. You were in THE REVENANT (notice that Leonardo DiCaprio doesn't make Bill's Hollywood shit list). Maybe take a break from Uwe and start hanging out with Leo or Alejandro Inarritu a little more. You'll have time: Boll was so angry about the lack of fan support for the funding of RAMPAGE: PRESIDENT DOWN that he announced it would be his final film. Indeed, a post-credits stinger finds a pensive Boll tipping his hat to the camera and walking into the sunset. If that's the case, let me just say that for all your many, many faults, you were certainly never boring, Dr. Boll. Thanks for everything. I guess. (Unrated, 100 mins)
A BIGGER SPLASH (Italy/France - 2016)
The first English-language work by acclaimed Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino reunites the director with Tilda Swinton, the star of his 2009 art-house breakthough I AM LOVE. Where that film showcased the director's adoration of all things Stanley Kubrick and Alain Resnais before settling into a sort-of Luchino Visconti autopilot mode (faux-Visconti is something THE GREAT BEAUTY director Paolo Sorrentino does a lot better), A BIGGER SPLASH feels a lot like the 1990s Bernardo Bertolucci that made THE SHELTERING SKY and STEALING BEAUTY. A remake of Jacques Deray's 1969 film LA PISCINE (released in the US as THE SWIMMING POOL), A BIGGER SPLASH is essentially one of these European films where some wealthy bourgeois types get together and things escalate into a powderkeg of unresolved issues and psychosexual mind games. Aging glam rock legend Marianne Lane (Swinton) blows out her voice on tour and has to take a significant amount of time off to recover from vocal cord surgery. She can only speak at a whisper and is convalescing on Pantelleria, off the coast of Sicily with her younger lover, photographer/filmmaker Paul De Smedt (Matthias Schoenaerts). Their days are spent lounging naked by the pool, getting massages, reading, and having a lot of sex until they get an unannounced visit from Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes), Marianne's producer and ex-boyfriend, who's brought along Penelope (Dakota Johnson), the 22-year-old daughter he only recently found out he had. The boisterous, gregarious Harry brings a manic and disruptive presence to their quiet, idyllic getaway, even inviting a couple of other people--Mireille (Aurore Clement) and Sylvie (Lila McMenamy)--along, and it's clear that there's a past between these people that's still gnawing at both Harry and Paul. There's also numerous instances of Harry acting in a not-fatherly way with Penelope, and an uncomfortably close rendition of "Unforgettable" between the two at a karaoke bar creeps out Marianne enough that she confronts him, leading to Harry shouting "I'm not fucking my daughter!" in front of a bunch of people in the street. As Harry keeps professing his love for Marianne, Paul and Penelope go off exploring on their own, and anyone who's ever seen a movie before can see that things aren't going to end well.
Despite the serious subject matter, A BIGGER SPLASH is fairly lighthearted a lot of the time, right down to its slapsticky title that seems more fitting for a romantic comedy. It certainly doesn't portend the shift the story takes in the last 35 or 40 minutes, when an unexpected event occurs that gets the local police involved. A lot of this is due to a rambunctious performance by Fiennes, whose Harry is really a grating, insufferable asshole but the actor finds ways to make you like him and even feel sorry for him. Whether he's yammering on about his sexual exploits (it's suggested that Mireille and Sylvie, who may be mother and daughter, are among his conquests), humble-bragging about his uncredited contributions to the Rolling Stones' 1994 album Voodoo Lounge, or busting out the moves like Jagger while blasting their 1980 hit "Emotional Rescue" (a scene that must be seen to believed), Fiennes is the unabashed show-stealer here and even dominates the film when he's not onscreen. Working with screenwriter David Kajganich (whose credits include, of all things, the underrated 2009 horror movie BLOOD CREEK), Guadagnino leaves enough ambiguity to keep an audience discussing the events after the film is over, and manages to keep things focused even with the many changes in tone and some showboating filmmaking techniques in the early going, things that are mainly used when Fiennes is onscreen to accentuate what a loud jackass Harry can be. Guadagnino, Kajganich, Swinton, and Johnson are tentatively reuniting for the latest announced incarnation of the perpetually in-development remake of Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA. (R, 125 mins)
THE DARKNESS
(US - 2016)
With 2005's WOLF CREEK, Australian filmmaker Greg McLean seemed to be a new voice in horror, but that voice has had nothing to say for several years running. His follow-up film, the outstanding killer crocodile flick ROGUE, was buried by the Weinsteins, and McLean has yet to bounce back, with another six years passing before he resurfaced with the belated and over-the-top WOLF CREEK 2. Working with horror factory Blumhouse, THE DARKNESS is McLean's first Hollywood production and it couldn't possibly be any more predictably generic and lazy. During a family trip to the Grand Canyon, autistic Mikey Taylor (David Mazouz) finds some rocks with strange symbols and takes them as souvenirs. It isn't long before paranormal activity manifests itself back home, with Mikey talking to an unseen entity called "Jenny," and sooty handprints turning up all over the house. Dad Peter (Kevin Bacon, visibly bored) and Mom Bronny (Radha Mitchell) are too preoccupied to notice the supernatural goings-on or that their angry older daughter Stephanie (Lucy Fry) is bulimic and saving containers of her purgings under her bed as a way of acting out her resentment toward Mikey. After more shenanigans, like a possessed Mikey starting a fire and trying to kill his grandmother's cat, and all manner of standard-issue Blumhouse jump scares, Bronny discovers that some Anasazi curse has latched itself to Mikey and starts to believe this is some kind of karmic retribution over her past alcoholism (she falls off the wagon) and Peter's past infidelity (and he's tempted again by young intern at work).
Taking a page from THE EXORCIST in the way the demon enters a world in disarray, making it easy to possess Regan, McLean and co-writers S.P. Krause and Shayne Armstrong (the latter two co-wrote the Australian "sharks-in-a-supermarket" opus BAIT) toy with the idea of the demonic invasion of the home being a response to the various unspoken dysfunctions in the family. But they don't really do anything with it and everything is resolved too easily to get to the rote horror histrionics. Keeping your vomit in bags and tupperware containers under your bed is pretty odd, but hey, one visit to a therapist and moody, abrasive Stephanie is healthy and chipper. Instead, the filmmakers follow a Blumhouse checklist right down to the last-15-minutes introduction of a pair of eccentric demonology experts who do a quick drive-by exposition drop before an impromptu exorcism of the house. The film's twists and turns come straight out of Plot Convenience Playhouse. Is Paul Reiser only in this for a few scenes as Peter's fist-bumping, asshole boss just because the boss has a wife (Ming-Na Wen) who happens to have recently started pursuing an interest in Hopi Indian mythology? Well, that immediately qualifies her as an expert to advise Bronny after she figures out they're being haunted by a pissed-off Anasazi spirit. What are the odds? It's that kind of movie. THE DARKNESS plays like a Blumhouse sampler platter with a dash of INSIDIOUS and a scoop of PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, but topped off with a generous sprinkling of some old-fashioned POLTERGEIST to make a total shit sandwich of a horror movie. It's a film that doesn't even try, and it's almost perversely impressive how it manages to go an entire 90 minutes without pursuing a single original idea. Where did THE DARKNESS go wrong? Who cares? Blumhouse and Greg McLean certainly don't. (PG-13, 92 mins)
After nearly 45 years in the industry, 66-year-old Susan Sarandon has spent the last several years dealing with the unforgivable sin of being an aging woman in Hollywood essentially by staying in the game and taking whatever roles come her way. It doesn't seem like it was that long ago that she was still headlining major movies, but now she usually turns up in supporting roles as somebody's mother or grandmother. Lead roles have been few and far between for the Oscar-winning actress of late, so one can see why she might jump at something like the modestly-budgeted thriller THE CALLING. Sarandon stars as Hazel Micallef, a hard-drinking, pill-popping detective in Fort Dundas, a small town outside of Hamilton, ON. Also functioning as the de facto police chief, Hazel is confronted with a rare homicide in one of those sleepy towns where everybody knows everybody (it's fictional, though there is a Dundas, ON, where most of this was shot) when an elderly family friend is found with her throat slashed and her mouth set open in an unnatural way that the medical examiner says was staged post-mortem. A victim killed under similar circumstances is found in a nearby town, and Hazel, partner Ray Green (Gil Bellows), and big-city transfer Ben Wingate (Topher Grace) are convinced they're dealing with a serial killer after finding links between their victims and seven other unsolved murders across Canada.
THE CALLING starts falling apart about midway through, but for a while, it seems like it'll shape up to be a genuine sleeper. It's sort of like a less grim SE7EN restaged in the snowy environment of a FARGO, with a legitimately unusual set of clues that set things in motion: the killer (nicely underplayed by a well-cast Christopher Heyerdahl) has positioned the mouths of the victims in a way that forms silent words when autopsy head shots are viewed in quick succession in the order they were killed. Using the autopsy photos like a morbid flip book, the detectives are forced to sound out and decode the killer's message to them. They discover this a little too easily and it's a gimmick straight out of a CBS procedural, but it's off-the-wall enough to be intriguingly creepy. THE CALLING went straight to VOD in early August and ended up in a few theaters on the last weekend of summer with no publicity whatsoever. In the late '90s, it probably would've been a big hit but today, there's just no mainstream, multiplex market for serious, straightforward genre pictures for adults, especially one focused on a 66-year-old star, regardless of the fact that she looks a decade younger. But it's eventually all for naught, as rampant stupidity takes over, whether Hazel drives a great distance to visit a linguistics expert priest (Donald Sutherland) to get the definition of a Latin term when she could've just as easily called him or Googled it. Or when Wingate voluntarily traipses all over Canada to do some snooping and Hazel recklessly orders him into a dangerous situation with no backup that, of course, doesn't pan out well for him (this is after telling him to withhold information from neighboring police departments). THE CALLING starts out with smarts but eventually turns into the kind of thriller where the killer taunts Hazel over the phone with a "Did you get my package?" as the camera pans to an unopened package right in the middle of her desk that she's just left there untouched for just such a plot convenience. The killer's motives involve a misguided religious obsession about sacrifice and resurrection, though it eventually becomes overly concerned with Hazel's redemption at the expense of the suspense and the mystery that's been building. Hazel is a damaged and broken woman with a bad back that surgery still hasn't corrected and a tumultuous, on-and-off relationship with a married man, much to the disapproval of her concerned mother (Ellen Burstyn), with whom she lives. Granted, Sarandon looks a good bit younger than 66, and 81-year-old Burstyn (also looking younger than her age) could logistically be her mother, but the casting just doesn't work and the filmmakers (director Jason Stone and screenwriter Scott Abramovitch) give the great Burstyn absolutely nothing to do. THE CALLING gets off to a promising start but never recovers once it starts skidding, though it does give Sarandon the opportunity to deliver a priceless line of dialogue like "I think I found the stomach." (R, 108 mins)
THE SIGNAL (US - 2014)
There's style and ambition to this twisty, low-budget mind-bender that only made it to 120 screens over the summer but seems destined for cult status. Or, more accurately, director/co-writer William Eubank seems destined for bigger things. Eubank and his crew work wonders with a $4 million budget, assembling something that looks better than a lot of films that cost 25 times as much. It's too bad THE SIGNAL (not to be confused with the overrated 2008 horror film) gets bogged down with a draggy pacing (yes, this one's a slow-burner) and a twist ending that creates more questions than it answers, wanting to be Shane Carruth but ending up feeling more like M. Night Shyamalan at his most eye-rolling. There's a lot going on in THE SIGNAL that probably warrants a second viewing, but there's a lot of frustrating misdirection and time-killing as well, and the one twist prior to the big twist is entirely too easy to figure out. Three MIT students--Nic (Brenton Thwaites of OCULUS and THE GIVER), his girlfriend Haley (Olivia Cooke, one of the few positives of THE QUIET ONES), and their friend Jonah (Beau Knapp)--are road-tripping to California, where Haley is transferring to a new school. Nic was recently diagnosed with muscular dystrophy and is using forearm crutches, and is certain that Haley is using this opportunity to distance herself from him. The three were nearly expelled after a computer hacker known as "Nomad" got into the MIT servers and left evidence pointing to them. Nic and Jonah are also using the trip to track down Nomad, who they've traced to somewhere in the Nevada desert. While searching Nomad's shack of a house in the middle of nowhere, Haley is lifted into the air by an unseen force, Jonah vanishes, and Nic blacks out. He awakens in a sterile, underground government bunker with "2.3.5.41" tattooed on his arm and is interrogated by HazMat-suited scientist Wallace Damon (Laurence Fishburne), who informs Nic that the three of them encountered an EBE (Extraterrestrial Biological Entity) and may be contaminated. Damon is intentionally evasive with Nic and is constantly changing his story. Nic eventually finds Haley in another part of the facility and manages to escape, with Damon warning "I can protect you down here...I can't protect you from what's up there."
Nor can Eubank protect himself from hackneyed plot developments and other contrivances. Visually, the film has moments that recall the work of Stanley Kubrick, Douglas Trumbull, Andrei Tarkovsky, and, to cite a more recent example, Duncan Jones. While arresting visuals show that Eubank is a contender, THE SIGNAL isn't nearly as successful on the script end as its numerous cerebral, hard sci-fi influences such as 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, SILENT RUNNING, or SOLARIS. Thwaites and Cooke are engaging leads, and Fishburne is appropriately obfuscating in his demeanor, but at some point, you start to feel like you're being strung along and ultimately, the reveal isn't worth the incredibly elaborate buildup. Still, there's a lot to appreciate in THE SIGNAL. Judging from what he's done here, with a better script, there's no limit to what Eubank is capable of achieving in the sci-fi genre. He's not quite there, but he's well on his way. (PG-13, 97 mins)
RAMPAGE: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT (Canada - 2014)
A gushing love letter to mass shooters everywhere, Uwe Boll's RAMPAGE: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT is too heavy-handed to pass as satire and too dumb to even be deemed irresponsible. This sequel to Boll's RAMPAGE (2010) with thematic ties to his ASSAULT ON WALL STREET (2013) finds the filmmaker in full-on "poking people with sticks" mode as "hero" Bill Williamson (Brendan Fletcher) emerges from hiding after the first film's titular killing spree to take on American corruption and hypocrisy. He starts by sitting in an alley and picking off random pedestrians (Boll, ever ready for a sick joke, makes sure a Target location is prominently displayed in the background) before shooting up the local TV station and taking gasbag news anchor Chip Parker (Lochlyn Munro) and some staffers hostage. Bill wants Chip to play his DVD manifesto and get his message out nationwide, which basically involves Fletcher (who shares a writing credit with Boll) getting far too much self-indulgent wiggle room as Bill expresses his admiration for Julian Assange and Edward Snowden and rants about topics as varied as the Bush and Obama administrations, politicians, lawyers, global warming, Wall Street, reality TV, Hollywood actors, Steven Spielberg, Anderson Cooper, and Botox.
Like most Boll movies, RAMPAGE was terrible, but the short-statured Fletcher was well cast as a ticking time bomb with a huge chip on his shoulder. The film was little more than FALLING DOWN JR, as Bill, seething with disenfranchised white-guy rage courtesy of cable news and right-wing talk radio, stockpiled weapons and went on a killing spree throughout his city. Here, Boll and Fletcher try to turn him into a modern messiah. Boll at least seems to briefly recognize that Bill is a deranged madman and a hypocrite--witness the way Bill rails against the insipid nature of media hype while spending hostage situation downtime checking his Twitter feed--but the filmmaker clearly still likes him. Whatever valid points Boll has to make--and there are some--are drowned out by the endless repetition of Fletcher's over-the-top performance as Bill quickly becomes your most humorless and annoying Facebook friend from high school. But even beyond that, RAMPAGE: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT is sunk by stupidity and tastelessness, like Bill's babbling on about "extermination" and "cleansing," obviously more transparent Holocaust jabs that Boll loves so much. Boll and Fletcher's script is wildly inconsistent: Bill chooses Chip Parker because he's "the Voice of America," yet it's established early on that Parker is just a local news star, plus Boll himself plays the greedy and unscrupulous station manager, selling footage of the hostage situation to the networks for millions. Also, after blowing up his house, Bill gets in his car and pays a visit to the first film's bingo "centre" where he spared a group of elderly folks from his rampage because they're "already dead." The bingo centre is closed, but it leads to an interesting observation beyond Boll neglecting to disguise his Canadian locations: Bill is a fugitive responsible for the largest mass shooting in American history depicted in the first film, and judging from the opening sequences of the sequel, he seems to have been on the run by...hiding out in the same town where he's always lived. And where does he get his money to have guns and bombs and cars stationed all over town? He was working part-time and living with his parents in the first film.
But nevermind--RAMPAGE: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT isn't about logic, it's about Boll shamelessly panhandling for attention and controversy. Certainly there was a way to turn Bill into a modern-day Howard Beale without having him take pleasure in killing an untold number of innocent people. Boll's misanthropy lacks the nuance and focus of a NETWORK and instead too often comes off like a tantrum-throwing child in desperate need of a time-out. Boll and Fletcher think they're being edgy and subversive, but they really look like assholes by the end of this thing. At least with ASSAULT ON WALL STREET--however bungled it was--the audience was supposed to take some degree of cathartic pleasure in watching Dominic Purcell mow down financial industry sociopaths. What are you supposed to take from something like this? What's next for Boll and Fletcher? The Columbine massacre reimagined as a wacky buddy comedy? A dramatization of the Aurora tragedy where the victims had it coming for paying to see a Hollywood product like THE DARK KNIGHT RISES? (Unrated, 93 mins, also streaming on Netflix Instant)
IN THE NAME OF THE KING: THE LAST MISSION (Canada/Germany/Pakistan - 2014)
When the hit series PRISON BREAK ended its run in 2009, co-star Dominic Purcell dove straight into movies and seemed to have what it takes to become a tough, chiseled big screen action guy. The problem is that all of his starring vehicles are terrible. He can be alright in supporting roles (the not-as-bad-as-everyone-says STRAW DOGS remake, KILLER ELITE, and the recent THE BAG MAN), but when he's left to carry a film, he seems to be going for the "man of few words" thing, but something in his line delivery and his body language makes him come off like a lumbering oaf. Regardless, the guy's phone apparently never stops ringing and he hasn't stopped working since PRISON BREAK wrapped up. He starred in five films--almost all DTV--in 2013 and has already been in four this year, with another on the way. I suppose it was inevitable that Purcell would get sucked into the orbit of Uwe Boll. The director's latest, the in-name-only DTV sequel IN THE NAME OF THE KING: THE LAST MISSION ("Too intense for theaters!" the packaging boasts), the third entry in this improbable franchise (Purcell follows the first film's Jason Statham, and the second's Dolph Lundgren, neither of whom got along with Boll at all), is also the third pairing of Boll with his current favorite actor, after the deck-stacking histrionics of ASSAULT ON WALL STREET and the pointless remake of the Presidential assassination thriller SUDDENLY. It's a partnership that's yielded nothing worthwhile, and while they may get along just fine, it likely exists simply because Purcell works cheap, and cheap is where Boll's at as he still adjusts to his post-German tax loophole world.
Purcell, knowing he's in another Boll joint and not trying any harder than he needs to, grunts his way through this ARMY OF DARKNESS/GAME OF THRONES ripoff as Hazen Kaine, a present-day American hitman working in Sofia for Bulgarian crime boss Avaylo (Marian Valev, who looks like Bulgarian Sean Bean). Avaylo orders Kaine to kidnap the two daughters of the heir to the Bulgarian throne, and Kaine finds one of them possesses a strange medallion. The medallion matches one of Kaine's tats. Yep...he's The Chosen One. Cue the wormhole portal sucking Kaine back to medieval times as he aids two sisters, Arabella (Ralitsa Paskaleva) and Emeline (Daria Simeonova), and their uncle Tybalt (Nikolai Sotirov) in their battle against the tyrant Tervin (Valev, again) and his giant, flying, fire-breathing dragon. Boredom ensues (watch Boll pad the running time by having Purcell make an espresso and drink it in real time!), both in terms of story and Purcell's performance, but the batshit Boll of old shines through in the last 15 minutes, when Kaine and the dragon get sucked back into the wormhole and dropped in present-day Sofia. The dragon is chasing Kaine through the streets of Sofia as Kaine carjacks some Bulgarian guy, as if the dragon can't follow a car by flying over it ("Take a right!" Kaine tells the hapless driver. "Lose it!" IT'S A FLYING DRAGON! IT CAN STILL SEE YOU!). Realizing the error of his ways, Kaine, who's somehow eluded the dragon, releases the two kidnapped girls he's kept in a shipping container, while the dragon, now apparently a good guy, shows up and carries away one of Avaylo's flunkies. Kaine kills Avaylo and takes the girls back to their father, who's OK with the fact that, even though Kaine returned them unharmed, they wouldn't have been missing in the first place had Kaine not abducted them, and lets him go ("Thanks...appreciate it," Purcell mumbles). As Kaine ambles away, the dragon can be seen taking a leisurely flight through the skies over Sofia. Nope, no worries. Everything's fine. Nobody's taking cover. There's no police or emergency personnel anywhere. Everyone's just back to their business, disregarding that a fire-breathing dragon just appeared out of nowhere and destroyed half the city and is now apparently a permanent resident of Sofia, but hey, just let it fly around and do its thing, it won't bother anyone. (R, 86 mins)
VIKINGDOM: THE BLOOD ECLIPSE (Malaysia/US - 2013)
Purcell also stars in this "300 Meets THOR in Middle-Earth" would-be epic that was shot in 3D by Malaysia's KRU Studios, founded by three Halim brothers who, since 1992, also comprise that country's leading chart-topping pop group KRU when they aren't being movie moguls. Boasting embarrassingly primitive CGI and the same quality of greenscreen backdrops usually favored by local TV meteorologists, VIKINGDOM: THE BLOOD ECLIPSE was supposed to be KRU's big splash in the US (CLASH OF EMPIRES went straight to DVD in 2011), but it only made it to a few screens and VOD, and even that's a stretch considering how shoddy it looks. The visual effects, including some tame CGI splatter, aren't even on the level of a typical Asylum title, though in a few scenes, the sets have that cheap-but-charming quality that brings to mind early '80s Roger Corman productions like THE WARRIOR AND THE SORCERESS or DEATHSTALKER. But still, that's probably not what director/set designer/visual effects supervisor Yusry A. Halim (or, "Yusry KRU" in his teen idol years) was going for with a budget equaling $15 million US. Sure, that's not big bucks by today's standards, but for that amount, one should be able to say something more positive than "some of the sets come close to looking like a 30-year-old Roger Corman production." The incoherent plot has Viking leader Eirick (Purcell) killed in battle and resurrected by the ghost of his dead betrothed Freya (Tegan Moss) in order to take on an evil Thor (Conan Stevens), who's plotting some scheme to gather ancient relics for the apocalyptic "Blood Eclipse." Eirick assembles a crew of warriors, including Sven (Craig Fairbrass) and Brynna (Natassia Linn Malthe), as well as martial arts expert Yang (Jon Foo, from the ill-fated TEKKEN movie) to battle the forces of Thor, which includes a papier-mache dragon that looks like a rejected prop from a high school drama club production of THE DESOLATION OF SMAUG.
The action scenes try to copy both the speed-ramping of 300 and the choreography of wuxia, but Halim doesn't quite pull it off, and while he might be going for that graphic novel artifice in the visuals, it ends up looking like a laughably cheap, dated ripoff. If this film and IN THE NAME OF THE KING: THE LAST MISSION show us anything, it's that Dominic Purcell doesn't get your movie into theaters--he gets it a spot on a Wal-Mart DVD department planogram. Halim should've known he wasn't going to find success in the US market when his lead is Uwe Boll's go-to guy (Malthe and Fairbrass have also logged time with Dr. Boll), but even Boll's movies look better than this. VIKINGDOM's cheapness--the wigs look like mop heads, and Thor's hammer appears to be a block of silver-spray-painted packing styrofoam stuck on a broom handle-- might've had some B-movie charm if Purcell wasn't once again sleepwalking his way through the whole thing. This is easily the narcoleptic thespian's worst performance yet. He speaks in a monotone that doesn't even mask his utter boredom with the project, and with his often halting and hesitant moves in the battle scenes, he looks like someone who's nursing a recent back injury. He frequently looks confused and irritable, not even hiding that he's just in this for the free Kuala Lumpur vacation. VIKINGDOM does little other than establish Halim as the Uwe Boll of Southeast Asia, getting stilted performances from his cast of C-listers, and his staging of the action scenes is awful: it's obvious he's got about 25 extras that he unsuccessfully tries to make look like an army. Old-school directors back in the day knew how to pull that off. (Unrated, 115 mins)
Yes, this is indeed a remake of the cult classic 1954 presidential assassination thriller that was unseen for many years but is now a public domain staple. The original SUDDENLY was MIA from 1963 until the late 1980s after star Frank Sinatra erroneously believed that Lee Harvey Oswald had watched it on TV less than a month before the assassination of JFK and had the film pulled from circulation. SUDDENLY resurfaced around the same time as the Chairman resurrected another long-dormant film of his that dealt with politics and assassination--the much better-known THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962). This Canadian-made remake doesn't bring much new to the table other than F-bombs, cell phones, a Barack Obama lookalike, and the unlikely Uwe Boll in the director's chair. SUDDENLY '13 finds Boll in rare hired-gun mode, working away from his usual producing partners and assorted enablers but bringing a few old and presumably financially-strapped pals along for the ride. Ray Liotta, somehow working with Boll again after 2008's IN THE NAME OF THE KING, stars as a booze-addled deputy sheriff who ends up in the middle of a plot to assassinate the President when his motorcade's drive through the small town of Suddenly is preceded by a team of shady, professional assassins disguised as Secret Service agents. They're led by Baron (ASSAULT ON WALL STREET's Dominic Purcell, Boll's current favorite actor, also in the upcoming IN THE NAME OF THE KING 3), a disgruntled Iraq War vet with a vendetta against the US government. Liotta's character is a vet as well, and has been wallowing in an alcoholic haze since he accidentally killed his war hero best friend. Liotta now pines for his buddy's widow (Erin Karpluk, also of ASSAULT ON WALL STREET) and is a dad of sorts to her troublemaking, Bieber-coiffed son (Cole Coker), who sports the improbable nickname "Pidge," which may have been quaint and nice and wholesome in 1954 but is just asking to be bullied in 2013.
As far as Boll joints go, SUDDENLY is, relatively speaking, one of the "better" ones. It's fairly straightforward and Boll avoids his tendency to poke people with sticks to get a reaction (the closest he comes to ruffling any feathers is presenting the president as "Obama-esque," though the actor looks like an Obama who might appear in a jokey local TV spot for a used car dealer). The problem is that even though Boll got to hang out with his friends (regulars like Michael Pare and Brendan Fletcher also turn up), he isn't really into the gig here. SUDDENLY is dull and slowly-paced, rarely suspenseful, and if it weren't for the profanity, it could easily be a TV-movie. Purcell fares a bit better here than in some of his other recent films, where he's little more than a lumbering lummox, but that sort of plays to his advantage in SUDDENLY. Liotta doesn't try any harder than he needs to, but he looks pretty convincing when his character is completely hammered. Whether he was going all Method as an excuse to cope with the trauma of once again finding himself on an Uwe Boll set is anyone's guess, but he looks legitimately shitfaced throughout. Bland and forgettable, SUDDENLY shows that, if nothing else, Boll can handle generic assignments if he ever chooses to quit making a bad-movie spectacle of himself. (Unrated, 90 mins)
BREAKOUT (Canada - 2013)
Wasn't Brendan Fraser an A-lister just a few years ago? What happened? Was FURRY VENGEANCE that bad? Other than voicing the hero in the recent animated film ESCAPE FROM PLANET EARTH, his recent output is pretty dire: 2013 saw very limited theatrical runs for STAND OFF (shelved for two years) and the awful PAWN SHOP CHRONICLES, and now BREAKOUT has skipped theaters completely. BREAKOUT is written and directed by Canadian exploitation vet Damian Lee, who made 1989's FOOD OF THE GODS 2 and a bunch of DTV Jeff Wincott movies in the '90s. He worked sporadically in the '00s but has been busy the last few years with bigger actors in films that have been duds nonetheless (like A DARK TRUTH with Andy Garcia and Forest Whitaker), as they were still directed by Damian Lee. At this rate, it's only a matter of time before Fraser is hooking up with Uwe Boll, and they already have a mutual friend since busy Boll man-crush Dominic Purcell is conveniently onboard here. The idiotic BREAKOUT has fugitive Purcell on the run to Canada with his mentally-challenged brother (Ethan Suplee), when two kayaking teens (Holly Deveaux, Christian Martyn) witness Purcell killing a guy. The kids are on a camping trip with their dad's friend (Daniel Kash). Their dad is Fraser, an environmental activist who's been in prison for the last seven years after accidentally killing someone during a scuffle at a protest. Purcell kills Kash and pursues the kids through the woods. Meanwhile, their mom (Amy Price-Francis) visits Fraser to tell him what's going on, and Fraser is able to conveniently walk away from a work furlough cleaning up in the very woods where Purcell is maniacally hunting the kids. Fraser manages to quickly find the kids, proves to be a natural at operating a shotgun with one hand, and so begins a cat-and-mouse game with Purcell while the kind-hearted Suplee finds Deveaux's dropped cell phone and spends the rest of the film talking to Fraser's ex, convinced he's talking to his late mother.
It's mostly implausible nonsense with a really bad performance by Fraser, who does little more than yell "Run!," "Go!," "Gaaah!," "Aaaah!," and "Waaaah!" I've never been a huge Fraser fan but I never really had a problem with him. He was fine in his early roles like SCHOOL TIES and showed some range with GODS AND MONSTERS, and maybe it's that he's been bolstered by big budgets during that decade-or-so run in big event movies like THE MUMMY, but now, in his mid-40s, between this and PAWN SHOP CHRONICLES (I haven't seen STAND OFF), he's suddenly become an absolutely terrible actor. He's so bad here that he makes Purcell look OK, and both of them are upstaged by a surprisingly credible, sympathetic performance by Suplee, who's the only one of the three main actors who appears to be trying. Indifferently directed by Lee (check out the wrong placement of a "Seven years later" caption in the beginning; it's shown during the prologue, which is still taking place seven years before the main plot; was anyone paying attention?) and with little logic or suspense, BREAKOUT is probably a career-low for Fraser, who finds himself in the same boat as former '90s/'00s sure things Nicolas Cage and John Cusack. Did Fraser burn some bridges somewhere? Piss off the wrong studio exec? Did that Golden Globes spaz attack become a scarlet letter? Or is it just simply a slump that many actors experience? (R, 89 mins)
FRANKENSTEIN'S ARMY (US/Czech Republic/The Netherlands - 2013)
There's two things that simply need to end, and end now, when it comes to the horror genre: 1) found-footage films, and 2) prefab hipster/horror scenester cult movies. FRANKENSTEIN'S ARMY gives us both in one dull, shrill, shrieking, headache-inducing, shaky-cam package. Earning generally positive reviews and currently sporting a baffling 71% on Rotten Tomatoes, FRANKENSTEIN'S ARMY is the kind of horror flick with a seemingly irresistible premise but the filmmakers don't know what do with any of it and make one ill-advised decision after another. Since they bungle the found-footage aspect in record time (and it makes no sense that stuff supposedly shot in the 1940s would look crisp and modern and be 16:9, but I digress), director Richard Raaphorst (the abandoned zombie film WORST CASE SCENARIO) and writers Chris W. Mitchell and Miguel Tejada-Flores might've been better off just making a straightforward, old-school horror movie without all the found-footage bullshit. All we get for nearly an hour are thickly-accented Russian soldiers (speaking English, of course) behind enemy lines, walking around and yelling at each other before they encounter an abandoned warehouse where one Viktor Frankenstein (Karel Roden) is carrying on the work of his famous grandfather. Soon, the soldiers are battling Frankenstein's "zombots"--steampunk-inspired creatures pieced together from body parts and machines. How difficult would it have been to make this a fun, freewheeling horror film? It tries to go for an anarchic, early Sam Raimi/Peter Jackson vibe but doesn't give its actors anything more to do other than run around and yell, practically turning the film into a combination of a video game and a door-slamming farce by the end. It's not scary, it's not funny, and it wastes an enthusiastic performance by veteran character actor Roden, who tries hard but isn't onscreen long enough to accomplish anything. Obviously, some people liked this but I found it excruciating. THE FRANKENSTEIN THEORY might actually be better. (R, 84 mins)
When he isn't helming crummy video-game adaptations, Uwe Boll has made a habit of belatedly jumping on bandwagons that have already passed through long ago, be it torture porn horror (SEED), an end-of-days LEFT BEHIND ripoff (THE FINAL STORM) or a late '80s-style Vietnam exploitationer (1968 TUNNEL RATS). Dr. Boll is slightly more topical with his latest, ASSAULT ON WALL STREET, which boasts his best--relatively speaking--cast in years in a hysterically hyperbolic attack on big-money fat cats and assorted one-percenters while putting his "hero" through an introductory hour of deck-stacking misery. Dominic Purcell stars as armored truck guard Jim Baxford, a decent, hard-working, blue-collar guy just trying to make ends meet in the aftermath of his wife Rosie's (Erin Karpluk) battle with a brain tumor. The prognosis is good, but she still needs some expensive treatments, and Jim's reached his insurance cap. At the same time, the economy crashes and he loses his savings in some bad investments, and through some legal fine print in a real estate deal, finds he's on the hook for an additional $60,000 that he doesn't have. He borrows $10,000 from his buddy (a haggard, bleary-eyed Edward Furlong) to retain the services of a high-priced attorney (Eric Roberts), who then never takes his calls. Then the bank forecloses on his house and his boss is forced to let him go after a collection agency tries to garnish his wages. Then Rosie kills herself. Jim decides to make Wall Street pay for ruining his life and does all the textbook things that pissed-off-guys-on-rampages do in movies: wanders the streets, glowering and chain-smoking; rents a room in a fleabag hotel; has maps, newspaper headlines, magazine covers, and pics of the financial bigwigs he's targeting pinned to the wall (of course, he draws a big red "X" through their mugs after he kills them); spends hours listening to talk radio; lets his calls to go voice mail; buys some guns and ammo from a skeezy creep (Clint Howard!); and practices drawing his weapons in front of a mirror. Stopping just short of giving himself a mohawk and saying his name is Henry Krinkle, Jim arms himself to the teeth with various guns and grenades and goes after the firm that mishandled his savings.
Boll's glamorization of Jim is appalling. Of course we're supposed to hate these financial assholes, but the way it pans out--with Jim confronting callous, heartless, egotistical CEO Jeremy Stancroft (John Heard, seated at the same desk in all of his scenes, probably shot in one day) and turning the tables on him in the most improbable way imaginable--makes Jim out to be some avenging superhero of the middle class. There's supposed to be a gray area when it comes to vigilante protagonists. Movies like DEATH WISH (the first one, not the later ones), TAXI DRIVER, and ROLLING THUNDER justify the cathartic actions of the vigilante in the context of the film but stop short of legitimizing them as "heroes." Not here. It's probably just his way of again poking people with sticks, much like POSTAL's jokes about 9/11 and concentration camps, but in POSTAL's defense, it is a comedy. When Jim starts mowing down investment brokers, is the audience supposed to stand up and cheer? Boll's done ripped-from-the-headlines drama before with surprisingly competent results--his ATTACK ON DARFUR really isn't that bad--but his frothing histrionics over the Wall Street implosion and eventual bailout don't make for a credible film. It would be one thing if Boll presented this as some anarchic, absurdist, satirical fantasy but up until Jim goes on his rampage, ASSAULT is humorlessly stone-faced and serious, handled with zero subtlety (does any character name scream "rich asshole" like "Jeremy Stancroft"?), and prone to ham-fisted proclamations by the characters (Michael Pare and Keith David, as Jim's disgruntled cop buddies, almost serve as a Greek chorus, spouting dialogue like "We bust homeless people and issue citations for jaywalkin', but the real criminals are downtown, on fuckin' Wall Street, wearin' suits that cost more than we make in a year!"). Purcell doesn't help matters. This guy's a lumbering bore in everything he does, and even from the outset, Jim comes off like a ticking time bomb with a huge chip on his shoulder, so it's hard to really "like" the guy. It's also hard for a film to establish any credibility when it casts Edward Furlong as someone who has $10,000 readily available. (R, 99 mins)
BLACK ROCK (US - 2013)
Upon first glance, BLACK ROCK looks like writer/producer/mumblecore icon Mark Duplass (BAGHEAD, CYRUS, JEFF, WHO LIVES AT HOME) designed it as a vanity project for his wife Katie Aselton, who directed and co-stars. But it's actually a surprisingly effective fusion of character piece and wilderness/survivalist thriller, a sort-of chick flick version of DELIVERANCE or SOUTHERN COMFORT. Sarah (Kate Bosworth) arranges a weekend getaway with Lou (Lake Bell) and Abby (Aselton) to a distant, abandoned island they explored as children. It's also a chance for Sarah to play peacemaker for Lou and Abby, who haven't spoken in six years since Lou drunkenly slept with Abby's then-boyfriend. Tensions flare between the two and when they seem to be making progress toward a reconciliation, they find they aren't alone on the island. Henry (Will Bouvier), Derek (Jay Paulson), and Alex (Anslem Richardson) stumble upon the girls' camping area, carrying hunting rifles. They recognize Henry as the younger brother of Jimmy, a guy in their graduating class (Abby to Lou: "Didn't you blow Jimmy in high school?") and Abby invites them to hang out. Married Abby gets drunk and starts aggressively flirting with Henry, eventually luring him into the woods where they start making out while Derek tells Sarah and Lou about their dishonorable discharge from the military for a murderous act that they justify by saying "you do what you have to do." Abby tries to stop it from going to far and when Henry gets forceful, she bashes him in the head with a rock. Enraged, Derek and Alex decide to kill the women but they manage to get away, leading to an all-night pursuit through the island's dense forest.
BLACK ROCK admirably doesn't pretend to be anything more than what it is: a suspenseful B-movie. There's some clever sleight-of-hand in the way what seems like a mumblecore drama focused on three old friends having a weekend getaway quickly shifts gears and becomes a gritty, intense, brutal thriller. There's nothing particularly inventive here, but it's well-acted, fast-moving, wastes no time, and does what it does, all in the span of 80 brief minutes. The three stars have a solid chemistry and really feel like old friends in the way they read each other and know how to push one another's buttons and in the way the set aside the baggage of the past and deal with the serious shit at hand. The lean and admittedly slight BLACK ROCK isn't a threat to the supremacy of DELIVERANCE or SOUTHERN COMFORT (or even RITUALS) in this sort of genre offering and it only made it into a handful of theaters in early summer, but it's likely to find an audience on DVD, VOD, and its inevitably long life as an eventual Netflix streaming title. (R, 80 mins)
FIST OF THE REICH aka MAX SCHMELING (Germany/Croatia - 2010; US release 2012)
Directed by Uwe Boll. Written by Timo Berndt. Cast: Henry Maske, Heino Ferch, Suzanne Wuest, Vladimir Weigl, Yoan Pablo Hernandez, Arved Birnbaum, Arthur Abraham, Enad Licina. (Unrated, 123 mins)
Absurdly retitled FIST OF THE REICH for its straight-to-DVD US release, MAX SCHMELING was a longtime pet project of bad movie icon Uwe Boll, long mocked for his awful video game film adaptations (ALONE IN THE DARK, etc) and various attention-seeking publicity stunts (shit-talking his actors on commentary tracks, challenging his detractors to boxing matches) that border on performance art. After going several years without the German tax shelter loopholes that enabled him to spend large amounts of money to hire slumming name actors like Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, and Burt Reynolds (IN THE NAME OF THE KING) and Ben Kingsley (BLOODRAYNE), there's been a marked decline in not just the "entertainment" value of Boll's films, but also his budgets. Lately, Boll's idea of a big name is getting Edward Furlong or Michael Pare. These lower budgets inspired Boll for a while--1968 TUNNEL RATS and POSTAL were alright and the grim prison drama STOIC was actually, dare I say it, good. But lately, Boll hasn't even been trying: BLOODRAYNE: THE THIRD REICH was awful and the simultaneously-shot BLUBBERELLA was his career nadir, which for Uwe Boll, is really saying something. A couple of years ago, Boll got a co-production deal with a Croatian company and shot at least four films back-to-back on the same trip to Zagreb: MAX SCHMELING was his priority, but he also got BLOODRAYNE: THE THIRD REICH and BLUBBERELLA done next, and his still-unreleased-in-the-US Holocaust drama AUSCHWITZ was shot right after.
Yoan Pablo Hernandez as Joe Louis,
fighting Max Schmeling (Henry Maske)
Boll is delusional enough that he probably thought MAX SCHMELING was the kind of sincere, reverent biopic that would put him in the same league as Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese. Schmeling (1905-2005) is arguably the most famous boxer in German history, one who became a major celebrity in early 1930s Germany due to his own success as well as his marriage to popular Czech-born German movie star Anny Ondra. Schmeling came to America and fought (and befriended) the great Joe Louis (their friendship was the subject of the 2002 film JOE AND MAX) and other American boxers (Jack Sharkey, Max Baer) before retiring from boxing and serving as a paratrooper in the Luftwaffe during WWII, though he never supported Hitler or the Nazis. He attempted a comeback after WWII (when he was already over 40), but it was short-lived and after leaving boxing for good, became an executive with Coca-Cola's German office and lived out his years as boxing royalty before he died in 2005 at the age of 99.
Schmeling's life is a fascinating one and deserves more than the tired, cliche-filled treatment it gets from Boll. In a move straight out of a Bad Idea Jeans ad, Boll cast boxer and 1988 Summer Olympics East German gold medalist Henry Maske as Schmeling, which would've worked if Maske was an actor. For the sake of a film, it's probably easier to have an actor pretend to be a boxer than it is for a boxer to pretend to be an actor. Though Maske tries, he's hopelessly wooden, with a deer-in-the-headlights expression for much of the film. All of the boxers in the film are played by actual boxers, which should theoretically make the boxing sequences exciting, right? Wrong. The ring scenes in MAX SCHMELING are badly choreographed and completely inept in their execution. They're staged horribly and they're performed even worse. And these are real boxers!
Suzanne Wuest as Max's actress wife Anny Ondra
Even worse are the cheap sets for the major bouts. Regardless of where a match is taking place--Cleveland, Madison Square Garden, or Yankee Stadium--it's all obviously the same set and looks like a ring just put up in a gym somewhere. And later in the film, when Max attempts his post-war comeback, it's amazing how all of the rinky-dink venues in which he's boxing all look like--you guessed it--"Madison Square Garden" and "Yankee Stadium," which I hate to break to Dr. Boll, was never an indoor stadium. Also a distraction: the film is in German with English subtitles (the DVD has a badly-dubbed English audio track), and it's never NOT in German with English subtitles. Was Boll trying to go for a genuine 1930s feel here, where every nationality spoke the same language in movies? If you want to make a believable story, don't have the Yankee Stadium ring announcer speaking German. Why is Joe Louis speaking German? Why are American boxers and their trainers speaking German to one another? Now, I'm sure one could say the same thing about, say, Tom Cruise and a bunch of British actors speaking English while playing Nazi offers in VALKYRIE, but for some reason, it just seems very silly for Yankee Stadium officials to be speaking German in MAX SCHMELING.
Heino Ferch as trainer Max Manoch
No one in the cast really fares all that well (Vladimir Weigl as Max's cigar-chomping Jewish manager is a total boxing movie cliche, and you can't miss Boll's stick-poking by portraying this character as constantly broke, making a production out of patting his pockets when the check arrives, and waiting for Max to pay the bill). The one bright spot is provided by veteran German actor Heino Ferch (DOWNFALL, THE BAADER-MEINHOF COMPLEX) as Max's trainer Max Manoch. He not only brings some warmth and humanity to the film but he also makes a valiant effort to help the non-actor Maske. He doesn't succeed, but you can see Ferch is trying and giving this film a lot more than he's going to get in return. You can almost sense him giving up during the climax when Schmeling announces his retirement--in the middle of a bout, no less--and the script requires Ferch to lead the arena in--wait for it!--the slow clap!
Not the one used in the film, but another pic
of the real Max Schmeling, with Henry Maske.
Maybe Boll was sincere with what he wanted to accomplish with MAX SCHMELING, but it's just too predictable, too bullet-pointed in its plot structure (screenwriter Timo Berndt's research seems to have been limited to checking out Schmeling's Wikipedia page), and just too embarrassingly hokey and creaky. It's hard to pull off making an "old" movie in today's cinematic world. Spielberg did a great job of it with WAR HORSE. But Uwe Boll is Uwe Boll. And for this being such a long-planned dream project of his, is there any reasonable explanation for his bailing on the commentary 72 minutes in? I didn't listen to all of it, but the film concludes with its best shot--a poignant and moving undated photo of an aged Schmeling in conversation with none other than Maske, probably sometime in late 1980s or early 1990s. I switched over to the commentary to hear what Boll had to say about this photo. Nothing. He's not talking. I kept toggling back through the chapters. I finally heard his voice around the 60-minute mark, and after a few minutes of some typically self-aggrandizing comments about his IMDb critics, and how "I've made some really good movies!" he just says he's done and bids farewell.
What the hell? Who leaves the commentary track of their pet project just over halfway through the film? Sure, this is a guy who regularly answers his cell phone and eats cheeseburgers during commentary tracks, but this is an ostensibly serious film. Boll doesn't give a shit. Why should we? I guess we should just be thankful that he resisted the urge and waited until BLUBBERELLA to cast himself as Hitler.
"Here's what I think of sticking around for the whole commentary!"
Directed by Uwe Boll. Written by Uwe Boll, Michael Christopher, Lindsay Hollister, and William Belli. Cast: Lindsay Hollister, Brendan Fletcher, Michael Pare, Clint Howard, William Belli, Steffen Mennekes, Uwe Boll, Annett Culp. (R, 86 mins)
I've toughed out every Uwe Boll movie since 2003's HOUSE OF THE DEAD. I actually paid to see IN THE NAME OF THE KING in a theater. I applauded him when he actually made a good film with STOIC. I've stuck with him though the last few years when he no longer had German tax loopholes to rope in big names like Ben Kingsley, Jason Statham, Burt Reynolds, and Ray Liotta and all he could afford were the likes of Edward Furlong, Billy Zane, Michael Pare and Clint Howard. My point is that I know this filmmaker. I know him better than he knows himself. As the pre-eminent Bollologist of the Mobius Home Video Forum, it's my job. It's...what I do.
And that more than qualifies me to say that Uwe Boll has hit rock bottom with BLUBBERELLA.
Shot in Croatia at the same time and on the same sets as BLOODRAYNE: THE THIRD REICH and Boll's still-unreleased drama AUSCHWITZ, BLUBBERELLA feels half-assed and was probably made up as it went along. It's got numerous bits of stock footage recycled from BLOODRAYNE: THE THIRD REICH. The outtakes during the closing credits even show a clapboard with "BLOODRAYNE 3" written on it! With the exception of stars/co-writers Lindsay Hollister and William Belli, and absent BLOODRAYNE: THE THIRD REICH star Natassia Malthe, the cast and crew of both films are identical. They're even playing the same characters. Boll conceived BLUBBERELLA as a spoof of the third BLOODRAYNE film, with largely the same plot, but with an emphasis on crude humor that fails to be funny. Boll's done the shock comedy thing before with POSTAL, and that had a surprising number of legitimate laughs in it. But BLUBBERELLA is just laziness of the lowest order, bringing to mind the inane and depressingly lucrative "just making the reference is funny enough" comedies of the loathsome Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (DATE MOVIE, EPIC MOVIE, MEET THE SPARTANS, etc). How bad is BLUBBERELLA? There's probably snuff films with more laughs.
"If anyone wants to greenlight EDDIE AND THE CRUISERS III, I promise to clear my schedule."
Blubberella (Hollister) is the sizable hero, a half-human/half-vampire superhero in 1940, "in a Jew-y part of town" as a caption states. Voted most likely to marry a black man, Blubberella tries to find a nice guy on a dating site, but instead ends up taking on Nazi evil when she falls in with a crew of Resistance fighters, led by diminutive Boll regular Brendan Fletcher. All of these actors/characters are holdovers from BLOODRAYNE: THE THIRD REICH except for the flamboyantly gay Vadge (Belli), who prompts Blubberella to say "Homosayswhat?" Blubberella and crew take on a vampirized Nazi commandant (Michael Pare) and a mad doctor (Clint Howard) who have hatched a plan to make Hitler (played by Boll himself) immortal.
The humor is either outrageously offensive (Vadge spraying air freshener in a train car packed full of Jews bound for Auschwitz; Belli and Fletcher each playing a scene in blackface; jokes about rape) or intentionally anachronistic (Blubberella checking e-mail on a laptop and mentioning pilates). The Friedberg/Seltzer comparison is apt considering that the references to things as varied as AMERICAN IDOL, PRECIOUS, CITIZEN KANE, Lindsay Lohan, Mickey Rourke, Michael Jackson, Corey Haim, and Heath Ledger's Joker just to name a few, are apparently supposed to be funny in and of themselves. Now, you can make offensive jokes about race and Jews and whatnot and still have it be funny. Mel Brooks is proof of that. And even Boll made a joke about 9/11 in the opening scene of POSTAL and yes, I admit, I laughed at it. But BLUBBERELLA is a lazy, throwaway piece of work, with 11 minutes of closing credits (!) required to pad it to just 86 minutes. Nobody's trying, every joke falls with a loud thud, and really, other than Uwe Boll, was anyone clamoring for a spoof of BLOODRAYNE: THE THIRD REICH?
IN THE NAME OF THE KING: TWO WORLDS
(Canada - 2011) Directed by Uwe Boll. Written by Michael Nachoff. Cast: Dolph Lundgren, Natassia Malthe, Lochlyn Munro, Aleks Paunovic, Heather Doerksen, Natalya Gustislaya, Christina Jastrzembka, Michael Adamthwaite. 96 mins. R.
Uwe Boll's straight-to-DVD sequel to his 2008 box office bomb has a drastically reduced budget thanks to the extinction of all those great German tax loopholes that the filmmaker and part-time boxing enthusiast took advantage of in the past. As has been the case over Boll's last several films, he no longer has the cash to corral the big names he once did. So, where the first ITNOTK had Jason Statham supported by the likes of Burt Reynolds as a noble king and Ray Liotta as an evil and improbably leather-jacketed sorcerer, this has Dolph Lundgren with Boll regular Natassia Malthe (BLOODRAYNE sequels) and DTV mainstay Lochlyn Munro. ITNOTK was pretty terrible, but it was a fun terrible. The sequel is just boring, and really tough to get through without a bizarre cast of slumming and/or intoxicated big name actors to keep it interesting. With a sleepwalking Lundgren and some really subpar visual effects, ITNOTK: TWO WORLDS looks and plays like it should be debuting on a Saturday night on SyFy.
In present day Vancouver, ex-military officer and karate instructor Granger (Lundgren) is attacked in his home by a bunch of medieval ninjas in Darth Maul makeup, and transported to a world centuries past. Elianna (Natalya Gustislaya), sorceress to the King (Munro) has brought Granger back in time because he is The Chosen One, revealed by a prophecy to be the warrior from the future to help them fight the Holy Mother (Christina Jastrzembska) and her army of Dark Ones. An unimpressed Granger tells the king "You can take that prophecy and shove it up your ass." But it turns out the Holy Mother and the Dark Ones have spread a plague across the land, which killed the previous King (the character played by Statham). Now suddenly convinced of the prophecy, Granger has a change of heart: "Tell me where to find this crazy bitch."
As has happened in the past (1968 TUNNEL RATS, his version of a late '80s Vietnam movie; and THE FINAL STORM, a religious-themed thriller that came about a decade after the LEFT BEHIND/OMEGA CODE craze), Boll seems to be ripping off a film years past its sell-by date, in this case the nearly 20-year-old ARMY OF DARKNESS. There's a lot of story elements pilfered from Sam Raimi's 1993 cult classic, but there's no energy or momentum, and everyone seems catatonic. Lundgren is clearly bored, Munro starts using an Irish accent late in the film for no apparent reason, and Malthe, as a nursemaid who accompanies Granger on his quest, is simply awful. There's a plot twist 2/3 of the way through, and a badly CGI'd fire-breathing dragon makes a guest appearance, but there's virtually nothing to recommend about IN THE NAME OF THE KING: TWO WORLDS. Boll has shown occasional flashes of decency in some of his more recent films (1968 TUNNEL RATS and ATTACK ON DARFUR weren't bad; POSTAL had some genuinely hilarious moments; and the harrowing prison drama STOIC was actually good), but without name actors like Statham, Reynolds, Liotta, or Ron Perlman, or, say, BLOODRAYNE's Ben Kingsley (yes, Ben Kingsley was once in an Uwe Boll film) to raise the MST3K factor, there's little reason to watch something like IN THE NAME OF THE KING: TWO WORLDS, a cheap, shoddy piece of work that even the most die-hard Dolph Lundgren fans should avoid.
