VFW (US/UK - 2020) Directed by Joe Begos. Written by Max Brallier and Matthew McArdle. Cast: Stephen Lang, William Sadler, Fred Williamson, Martin Kove, George Wendt, David Patrick Kelly, Sierra McCormick, Tom Williamson, Travis Hammer, Dora Madison, Josh Ethier, Graham Skipper, Linnea Wilson. (Unrated, 91 mins) Since his micro-budgeted 2014 debut ALMOST HUMAN, indie horror filmmaker Joe Begos hasn't exactly been subtle in his worship of the VHS glory days. Even his production company is named "Channel 83," a loud shout-out to David Cronenberg's VIDEODROME. Like a lot of today's young genre figures, Begos has a particular affinity for the work of John Carpenter, and if VFW was any more fanatical in its obsessive devotion, Carpenter would have to get a restraining order. In an era where the Carpenter influence is all over modern horror and cult fare, VFW is arguably the most slobbering tribute yet, with a hard-on for the legendary director that's as relentlessly throbbing as the incessant synth score by Zombi's Steve Moore. It's done out of unabashed love, and since Carpenter appears to have moved on from filmmaking, spot-on replicas like VFW are likely as close as we're gonna get to experiencing new ones. That's fine if they're done right, which VFW is for the most part (the mood is set with PRINCE OF DARKNESS-inspired opening credits that play out over the first 12 minutes). Begos followed ALMOST HUMAN with THE MIND'S EYE and the recent BLISS, but VFW is his first time working from a script he didn't write, which may help explain why it's his most accomplished directing effort to date.
It also helps that he's been gifted with a great cast of Character Actor Hall of Famers, recruiting a supergroup of grizzled old B-movie vets and some familiar TV faces for what's basically ASSAULT ON VFW POST 13 with the ferocity of GREEN ROOM. It's set in a near-future urban dystopia that could be two weeks from now, where the opioid epidemic has completely spiraled out of control and major cities have become war zones where cops don't even bother to go, and the new drug on the streets is Hype. Addicts known as "Hypers" wander the ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK-like terrain in a strung-out daze, all looking for the next dose provided by ruthless dealer and crime lord Boz (Travis Hammer), who operates out of an abandoned six-screen multiplex. When Boz throws a vial of Hype off a balcony and convinces sore-covered junkie Lucy (Linnea Wilson) to go after it--jumping to her splattery death below--her enraged sister Lizard (Sierra McCormick) makes off with the remainder of his Hype inventory and hides out at the dilapidated VFW post across the road. It's there where gruff bartender Fred (Stephen Lang, also one of a truckload of producers), his Vietnam buddies Walter Reed (William Sadler), Doug (David Patrick Kelly), Zabriski (George Wendt), and slick used car salesman Lou (Martin Kove), along with elderly Korean War vet Abe (Fred Williamson) and young Shawn (Tom Williamson, no relation), who's just back from Afghanistan, are celebrating Fred's birthday and planning on closing early to take him to a nearby strip joint. Boz knows Lizard is in the bar and sends a couple of goons after her, led by his younger brother Roadie (Graham Skipper), who instantly takes a shotgun blast from Fred in one of the more exuberant exploding head kills that cinema has offered of late. But Doug also takes a machete in his shoulder, and his arm is barely hanging on. And now with two of Boz's guys dead, the stage is set for a "survive the night" gorefest with the mostly geriatric VFW regulars using their long-dormant but innate military skills ("We set a perimeter...we make our stand!") to fashion makeshift weapons out of nail-spiked barstool legs and pool cues, barricading themselves in the bar as Boz's gang tries to get in, kill everyone, and recover the Hype.
It's too bad this is getting banished to VOD, because it's a terrific rowdy crowd movie. The siege scenario is the major trope in the Carpenter playbook, one he borrowed time and again from his favorite movie, the classic 1959 western RIO BRAVO. VFW gets far gorier than anything Carpenter ever did--heads are blown apart, skulls are stomped into raw hamburger, throats are slit, people are disemboweled, offed by axe, machete, circular saw, pool cue through the mouth and out the back of the head. It's the kind of movie where gunshot wounds and opened arteries are hastily bandaged with duct tape. It's also aware that it's not exactly original (has there ever been an instance in a siege or hostage scenario in a movie where someone doesn't go Full Ellis, fancying themselves a skilled negotiator and saying something like "Relax, trust me, I can handle these guys" and actually makes it to the next scene alive?), but it also has fun with it (of course George Wendt is seated at the corner of the bar). The one big detriment of VFW is that once the power gets cut, many of the scenes take place in almost total darkness, and coupled with an occasional indulgence of quick-cut shaky-cam, some of the mayhem gets a little hard to discern on a handful of occasions.
But holy shit, what a cast of great character actors! Lang! Sadler! Luther from THE WARRIORS! Asshole Cobra Kai sensei Kreese! NORM! And 81-year-old Fred Williamson can still kick your ass (don't miss a wild-eyed Hammer breaking open a brick of Hype and snorting it by the fistful to make himself impervious to pain before the final showdown). Most pre-fab cult films of this sort--even some directed by Joe Begos--are too self-consciously hip and fall victim to becoming an endless series of snarky references and knowing winks--not quite the SHARKNADO element but certainly in the ballpark. The closest VFW gets to that is Wendt's corner seat at the bar, but Begos doesn't even draw attention to it. He doesn't have Kove say something like "Fear does not exist in this VFW post." He doesn't have Kelly screech "Hyyyyperrrrs...come out to plaaaaaay!" Dumber filmmakers couldn't have stopped themselves, but Begos plays it a little smarter with VFW. Yes, the gore is absurdly over-the-top, but it's otherwise played completely straight and the cast of veteran pros gives it much in the way of credibility and gravitas. Props to Begos for realizing that making them a joke would negatively impact the film.
THE GRUDGE (US - 2020) Written and directed by Nicolas Pesce. Cast: Andrea Riseborough, Demian Bichir, John Cho, Jacki Weaver, Lin Shaye, Betty Gilpin, Frankie Faison, William Sadler, Tara Westwood, Dave Brown, John Hansen, Zoe Fish, Junko Bailey. (R, 94 mins) Going back over the last decade and change in the grand tradition of the US remake of ONE MISSED CALL, THE DEVIL INSIDE, DEVIL'S DUE, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES, THE FOREST, and THE BYE BYE MAN, THE GRUDGE continues Hollywood's seemingly annual ritual of kicking off the new year by bilking genre fans out of some multiplex gift cards with a horror movie that's forgettable at best and a contemptible piece of shit at worst. A reboot of the US franchise that was itself based on a Japanese franchise (got that?), THE GRUDGE 2020's biggest problem is its utter pointlessness. It's a step up to the major studio big leagues for writer/director Nicolas Pesce, who established some indie horror cred with 2016's THE EYES OF MY MOTHER and 2019's PIERCING. I'm not saying Pesce is an auteur, and I haven't seen PIERCING, but THE EYES OF MY MOTHER, while flawed, had some genuinely unsettling elements that showed Pesce was a promising new talent in the horror genre. But the kind of style and potential that got him the GRUDGE job in the first place is rendered moot when it's all just loud and predictable jolts and a tired story that could've been directed by anyone. GRUDGE 2020 is the kind of bland, by-the-numbers, one-note jump-scare machine that doesn't really even require a talented filmmaker as much as it needs a competent manager, someone handed a checklist and able to work through it without rocking the boat and making sure that all the same shit you've seen in dozens of other horror movies over the last several years is dutifully repeated--and instantly forgotten--yet again.
Counting Sam Raimi among its dozen or so producers, GRUDGE 2020 employs the non-linear structure used by director Takashi Shimizu in the 2004 GRUDGE and its Japanese antecedents in the original JU-ON series which, along with the likes of Hideo Nakata's RINGU films and Takashi Miike's original ONE MISSED CALL, helped establish the iconic "J-Horror" movement of the early 2000s. Set from 2004 to 2006, GRUDGE 2020 is both a reboot and an offshoot, opening in 2004 with American nurse Fiona Landers (Tara Westwood) leaving the Japanese house seen in the previous GRUDGEs, where someone was once killed in a fit of uncontrolled rage and their spirit cannot rest, forever haunting those who move into the cursed residence. But the Grudge (Junko Bailey in a brief appearance as the franchise's crawling, croaking spectre, thus sparing Japanese actress and JU-ON and GRUDGE vet Takako Fuji the indignity of embarking on the "Will Play Kayako for Food" phase of her career) also attaches itself to Fiona, following her to her home in the fictional Pennsylvania suburb of Cross River, where she's ultimately driven to murder her husband Sam (Dave Brown) and young daughter Melinda (Zoe Fish). Cut to 2006, as recently-widowed Detective Muldoon (MANDY's Andrea Riseborough, looking ready to crush her audition for the lead in THE CARRIE SNODGRESS STORY) has just transferred to quiet Cross River with her young son Burke (John Hanson), hoping for a change of scenery after losing her husband to cancer three months earlier. She's paired with weary, chain-smoking Detective Goodman (Demian Bichir) and they immediately catch a case where the charred remains of a woman are found in a car in an isolated stretch of woods on the outskirts of town. The dead woman is Lorna Moody (Jacki Weaver), an assisted suicide counselor who had been staying at 44 Rayburn Dr., the home of the Mathesons--William (Frankie Faison) and Faith (Lin Shaye, whose presence in these post-Blumhouse-era horror movies appears to be required by law)--to evaluate the terminally ill Faith's decision to end her life. Goodman wants nothing more to do with the case after hearing the address, so Muldoon goes there alone and finds a delirious Faith with her fingers hacked off and the rotting corpse of William sitting in the living room chair.
Then it cuts back to 2005, when married realtors Peter (John Cho) and Nina Spencer (Betty Gilpin) have the Landers house--at 44 Rayburn Dr--on the market, soon to be purchased by the Mathesons. In all the instances--Peter spending time at the house, Muldoon looking into the death of Lorna Moody, and Goodman's old partner Wilson (William Sadler) investigating the Landers killings in 2004 and ending up in a mental institution after blowing his face off in a failed suicide attempt (and allowing Sadler to wear what appears to be leftover remnants of Gary Oldman's Mason Verger prosthetics from HANNIBAL)--the "grudge" attaches itself to anyone who walks in the house, resulting in recurring instances of flickering lights, garbled phone calls, and out-of-nowhere appearances by little Melinda, who essentially serves as the new creepy, croaking, grudge ghost. Pesce rewrote an earlier draft penned by Jeff Buhler, who scripted last year's underrated THE PRODIGY but is also responsible for writing the recent dismal remakes of PET SEMATARY and JACOB'S LADDER. I'm willing to bet that Buhler is a big fan of Mario Bava's SHOCK, aka BEYOND THE DOOR 2, whose famous hallway jump scare was recreated in THE PRODIGY by director Nicholas McCarthy and is trotted out again here, to much lesser effect thanks to Pesce's bungled staging of it.
It's not that THE GRUDGE 2020 is an overtly terrible movie, though it does start to get pretty dumb near the end when Muldoon inexplicably takes her son--who Pesce leaves offscreen for so long at one point that you might start wondering if he's a Shyamalanian figment of her imagination--with her to 44 Rayburn Dr in the middle of the night and tells him "I want you to be safe!" and to...wait in the car, as if he's really going to listen to her (also, why is everyone driving beater cars from the late '70s and early '80s in a film that's explicitly set from 2004-2006? I don't know what small-town detectives make, but they should be able to get something newer than a primer-colored 1981 Caprice Classic). It's not an offensively bad movie, it's just an unbelievably routine one that does nothing to justify its existence or, at the very least, explain why it's opening on 2400 screens instead of premiering at your nearest Redbox. It not only squanders an overqualified cast (Bichir and Weaver have three Oscar nominations between them), but it takes the time to set up new metaphorical implications for the Grudge and doesn't even bother to explore them. With Muldoon's late husband and the cancer-stricken Faith, along with mention that Goodman's mother recently succumbed to cancer and pregnant Nina learning that her unborn child has the brain disorder ALD, THE GRUDGE 2020 seems poised to make some statement about the effect that terminal illnesses and grief have on caregivers and survivors, but it never does anything to work those ideas into the Grudge mythos, instead falling back on more ominous burps and croaks and jump scares you'll see coming a mile away. So why even bring them up and use them to develop the characters if nothing's going to be done with them? Maybe there was something more here and the studio whittled it down. Who knows? There is one telling moment that could almost be interpreted as a cry for help from Pesce. Faison's William gives a long speech about how all we really have is hope and love and we gotta hold on and be there for each other every day as the sentimental music cue swells and Pesce just abruptly cuts it off and goes to a shot of Riseborough in another location, and it's accompanied by the faint sound of a needle dragging across vinyl. It's a jarring cut that doesn't really have any artistic purpose unless you consider it an in-film auto-critique from Pesce, possibly incredulous that things have gotten so far off course that veteran character actor Frankie Faison is being forced to embody the archaic "Magical Negro" trope in the first goddamn movie of 2020.
THE HIGHWAYMEN (US - 2019) Directed by John Lee Hancock. Written by John Fusco. Cast: Kevin Costner, Woody Harrelson, Kathy Bates, John Carroll Lynch, Thomas Mann, Kim Dickens, W. Earl Brown, William Sadler, David Furr, Joshua Caras, Dean Denton, Jason Davis, David Born, Brian F. Durkin, Jake Ethan Dashnaw, Emily Brobst, Edward Bossert. (R, 132 mins) Chronicling the notorious Depression-era Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow killing spree from the law enforcement side, the Netflix Original film THE HIGHWAYMEN centers on legendary retired Texas Ranger Frank Hamer (1884-1955), played by Denver Pyle in Arthur Penn's trailblazing 1967 classic BONNIE AND CLYDE. As great as that film is, it played a little fast and loose with the facts, most egregiously when it came to its depiction of Hamer, so much so that his widow filed a defamation of character lawsuit and won an out-of-court settlement in 1971. Hamer is presented as a bit of a buffoonish, walrus-mustached punchline in BONNIE AND CLYDE, particularly when he's captured and humiliated by the title duo. In truth, Hamer never saw Bonnie and Clyde in person until the moment he and his posse ambushed them on the side of a rural Louisiana country road and took them down in a hail of bullets. That's the Hamer portrayed here by Kevin Costner, who's introduced in 1934 barely tolerating a mostly forced retirement after the Texas Rangers were disbanded years earlier for their often lawless tactics. When Texas' "lady governor" Miriam "Ma" Ferguson (Kathy Bates) exhausts all other options for bringing Bonnie and Clyde down, she reluctantly agrees, at the suggestion of Marshal Lee Simmons (John Carroll Lynch), to make Hamer a special "highway agent" assigned to essentially hunt down and exterminate the pair.
Joining Hamer is his old partner Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson), now an unemployed drunk living in a foreclosed home with his daughter and grandson. Both men are haunted by the violence of their past and dealing with it in their own ways, and Hamer is hobbled by chronic pain from an estimated 16 bullets still remaining in his body from various skirmishes over the years. Their biggest obstacle in the pursuit is dealing with the movie star-like following that Bonnie and Clyde have with the general public, excited by their Robin Hood tactics of robbing banks at a time when everyone is in dire financial straits, but they seem to turn a blind eye to their brutality and the dead bodies left in their wake. It's even strongly suggested that one naive young deputy helping them (Thomas Mann), a childhood friend of the pair, may have even tipped them off about a plot to nab them at the home of Clyde's father (William Sadler).
Right down to its slightly overlong 132-minute length, THE HIGHWAYMEN has the leisurely feel and pace of a post-UNFORGIVEN Clint Eastwood film, which isn't surprising considering that director John Lee Hancock (THE BLIND SIDE) scripted two Eastwood works from that era (1993's A PERFECT WORLD, which starred Costner, and 1997's MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL). As written by John Fusco (YOUNG GUNS, YOUNG GUNS II, THUNDERHEART), THE HIGHWAYMEN has the comfortable, familiar feel of the kind of uncomplicated procedural that your dad would enjoy, and I mean that in a good way. Aside from setting the record straight on the distinguished career of Hamer and paying lip service to the idea of fawning over dubious celebrities (America's women make Bonnie an inadvertent fashionista by copying her clothing and hairstyle, while 20,000 people attended the pair's funerals, mourning them like heroes), THE HIGHWAYMEN is content with familiarity of well-worn cliches and character arcs, like Hamer's devoted wife (Kim Dickens) just wishing he'd stay home and paint the kitchen but acknowledging "I knew what you were when I married you," Hamer flagrantly disregarding Ma's "stay in Texas" orders and heading out of his jurisdiction, a haggard Gault seeing the pursuit of Bonnie and Clyde as the standard-issue One Last Shot at Redemption, and the usual banjos-and-fiddle soundtrack that's required by law for any crime drama set during the Great Depression or in Dust Bowl migrant towns. The most unexpected decision that Hancock and Fusco make is keeping the faces of the villains largely offscreen, with Clyde (Edward Bossert) seen fleetingly during speeding getaways and Bonnie (Emily Brobst) represented mostly by her dragging, injured left leg.
In some ways, Hamer and Gault almost feel like castoffs from THE WILD BUNCH, stuck in a modern era they don't quite understand and don't want to. Hamer has adapted better than Gault, who has no idea that the FBI can wiretap party lines, which becomes an amusing running gag throughout the film. Obviously, THE HIGHWAYMEN isn't on the level of BONNIE AND CLYDE, but it's reasonably entertaining and the stars are terrific together. It's easy to see Costner's Hamer as a morose, older version of his earnest, "Let's do some good!" Eliot Ness way back in 1987's THE UNTOUCHABLES, and looking past the actor's ill-fated hubris years that gave us WATERWORLD and THE POSTMAN, it's been a pleasure to watch him age into a top-notch character actor in his 60s, where he's carved himself a niche as the Robert Duvall of his generation.
Directed by Robert Rodriguez. Written by Kyle Ward. Cast: Danny Trejo, Michelle Rodriguez, Mel Gibson, Demian Bichir, Sofia Vergara, Amber Heard, Antonio Banderas, Lady Gaga, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Walton Goggins, Vanessa Hudgens, Jessica Alba, Alexa Vega, William Sadler, Tom Savini, Julio Oscar Mechoso, Marko Zaror, Electra Avellan, Elise Avellan, Marci Madison, and introducing Carlos Estevez. (R, 107 mins)
Originating as one of the fake trailers in Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's GRINDHOUSE (2007), MACHETE was spun off into its own film in 2010, finally giving the great Danny Trejo the spotlight in his own project. The resulting film, parodying the same grindhouse aura of GRINDHOUSE, was gleefully over-the-top trash with everyone from Steven Seagal, Jeff Fahey, Lindsay Lohan, and Robert De Niro on hand to make fun of themselves. MACHETE KILLS is more of the same, only sillier, if that's even possible. Rodriguez isn't so much emulating '70s grindhouse trash anymore as much as he's just making a ludicrous parody of action movies. There's a good amount of laughs and some even more self-deprecating casting, but it's all just too much. Running a gaseous 107 minutes, Rodriguez gets pretty self-indulgent with MACHETE KILLS, and it probably would've been better if it had been 20-30 minutes shorter, making it more in line with what it's supposed to be riffing.
After seeing his partner and lover Sartana (Jessica Alba) killed while on a covert government mission, Machete is summoned to the White House and assigned by President Rathcock ("introducing Carlos Estevez") to go into Mexico and kill Mendez (Demian Bichir), a revolutionary with a split personality who has a nuclear missle aimed at Washington, DC that's wired to his heart and will launch if his heart stops beating. During their confrontation, Mendez's evil personality pulls the pin on the heart device, giving Machete 24 hours to dismantle it, which requires the two of them crossing the border into the US (as the film briefly turns into an "...if they don't kill each other first! mismatched-buddy movie) to find the only man who can do it: megalomaniacal multi-billionaire weapons manufacturer and global terrorist Luther Voz (Mel Gibson). Voz designed the detonator and has even bigger plans beyond nuking Washington: he's got a space station hovering above the planet and will be populating it with the richest of the rich after starting a series of global catastrophes. With crazed, gun-barrel-breasted madam Desdemona (a scenery-chewing Sofia Vergara) and elusive assassin La Chamaleon (alternately played by Walton Goggins, Cuba Gooding Jr, Lady Gaga, and Antonio Banderas) in hot pursuit, Machete gets help from sexy undercover agent Miss San Antonio (Amber Heard), and his old cohort Luz (Michelle Rodriguez) to thwart Voz's nefarious plan of taking over the galaxy.
Filled with intentionally dubious-looking CGI and ridiculous levels of violence and gore, MACHETE KILLS is dumb fun, which is the whole point. But there's no denying that it starts to drag after a while and you wonder if maybe this should've been left as a trailer. A lot of it is repetitious and could've been trimmed down, like the whole subplot with William Sadler as a racist sheriff on the Arizona border, who keeps calling Machete "Taco." The character of "La Chamaleon" is funny, but Rodriguez and screenwriter Kyle Ward don't do much with it other than put increasingly unlikely actors in the role for a scene before they disappear. Only Trejo appears throughout the film, and it's obvious that everyone else dropped by as their schedule allowed ("Carlos Estevez" never interacts with any other cast members--he and Trejo are never in the same shot together--and he actually looks CGI'd in his final scene). Stone-faced Trejo is still a badass Machete and his emotionless delivery of lines like "Machete don't Tweet" are never not funny. Between this and his role as the main villain in the upcoming THE EXPENDABLES 3, it's clear that the far-beyond-damage control Gibson is throwing in the towel and diving right into the self-parody phase of his career, probably because there's no other offers coming his way, but still, it's amusing seeing him on a huge set straight out of MOONRAKER and wearing a Darth Vader-like space cape. Thanks to Trejo and some stars checking their egos at the door, MACHETE KILLS is enjoyable and the actors are having a blast, but there's just too much of it. It overstays its welcome and simply doesn't know when to quit. Hopefully, Rodriguez can rein it in a little and keep it to more sensible 85-90 minutes if and when he gets around to the promised third entry whose trailer is featured at the beginning of the film: MACHETE KILLS AGAIN...IN SPACE!
