THE RITUAL (UK - 2017; US release 2018) Directed by David Bruckner. Written by Joe Barton. Cast: Rafe Spall, Arsher Ali, Robert James-Collier, Sam Troughton, Paul Reid, Matthew Needham, Jacob James Beswick, Maria Erwolter, Hilary Reeves, Peter Liddell, Francesca Mula. (Unrated, 94 mins) You can count on zero fingers the number of times "Let's just take the shortcut" ends well in a horror movie, and therein lies the primary dilemma with the Netflix Original film THE RITUAL: you've seen all of it before. Based on a 2011 novel of the same name by Adam Nevill and adapted by Joe Barton (iBOY), the British-made THE RITUAL is the first feature-length film by American director David Bruckner, best known for his contributions to the indie anthologies THE SIGNAL (2007), V/H/S (2012), and SOUTHBOUND (2016). Six months after their buddy Robert (Paul Reid) was killed after walking into a liquor store robbery, four old college friends--Luke (Rafe Spall), Phil (Arsher Ali), Hutch (Robert James-Collier), and Dom (Sam Troughton)--decide to follow-through on Robert's idea for their annual trip by going hiking through the wilderness of Sweden (played here by Romania). It's the usual male-bonding and ballbusting until Dom twists his ankle and they decide to veer from the mapped mountain path and take a shortcut through a dense forest. They quickly stumble on an abandoned VW ("Odd place to park," one of them quips), then trees with strange symbols carved into them, and finally a disemboweled elk carcass perched in the trees. Deciding they've gone too far to turn back and with Dom's ankle getting more difficult to walk on, they forge ahead. Of course, they get lost and a short trip turns into two nights of strange sounds, ominous visions, the discovery of a cabin with items strongly hinting at witchcraft, and other assorted tropes from the BLAIR WITCH manual. Hutch wakes up soaked in his own piss, Phil wanders off and can't remember why, and Luke finds the tree symbols painted on his chest. He's also haunted by a debilitating case of survivor's guilt: he's the one who wanted to buy more booze when the others wanted to call it a night, and he's the one who dragged Robert into the liquor store and then scurried to hide behind a display fixture while his friend was getting his head bashed in.
Though it's based on a relatively recent novel, there's no denying the initial surface similarities, starting with the title, to the 1978 Canadian survivalist cult classic RITUALS, where five doctor friends (led by Hal Holbrook and Lawrence Dane) go on an annual hiking excursion only to be stalked and killed one-by-one by a feral mountain man. Like RITUALS, THE RITUAL has the predicament bringing up long-festering resentments among the old friends, with Luke facing the gradual realization that the others more or less blame him for Robert's death (Dom does so outright). They also fulfill basic archetypes, among them Luke being--at least until Robert's tragic end--the party animal who never really grew up and Dom now the uptight family man who keeps whining that they should've gone to Vegas and is probably exaggerating his ankle injury. But THE RITUAL ultimately takes a more supernatural bent than RITUALS, with the men being stalked by some kind of demonic, horned creature (Bruckner stages a couple of creepily effective bits where the guys are walking through the forest and the creature is camouflaged at the edge of the frame or very deep into the shot) that's worshiped by some deep woods pagans who look like members of a Bucharest community theater troupe that just finished a re-enactment of SOUTHERN COMFORT and are beginning rehearsals for their interpretation of THE WITCH. There's also some WICKER MAN sacrificesploitation that was done to death long before Ben Wheatley ripped it off for KILL LIST. The actors aren't required to do much more than fill stock character roles, though Spall (PROMETHEUS), who resembles a worrisome Ryan Reynolds, seems convincingly anguished and guilt-ridden. Bruckner does a decent job establishing a foreboding sense of dread, but the familiarity, the plodding pacing and the predictable developments all lead to a blandly ho-hum conclusion.
Comparisons to JOHN WICK are inevitable, but ACCIDENT MAN's origins lie in a short-lived comic strip by Pat Mills that ran in the UK publication Toxic! in 1991, with Dark Horse Comics running another series of stories in 1993. All these years later, the film adaptation is a pet project of DTV action star Scott Adkins, who also produced and co-wrote the script with his buddy Stu Small. 41-year-old Adkins is a guy who's been paying his dues for years, building up a fan base the old-fashioned way by working his ass off as one of the most prolific actors around, whether it's in his own low-budget B-movies (the UNDISPUTED sequels, two NINJAs, HARD TARGET 2) or by taking smaller supporting roles in A-list fare like ZERO DARK THIRTY, DOCTOR STRANGE, and AMERICAN ASSASSIN. Adkins is long overdue for break, and in a perfect world, ACCIDENT MAN would be the #1 movie in the country for at least a week and Scott Adkins the next major action star. There's no denying it's got a JOHN WICK-if-directed-by-Matthew Vaughn (KICK-ASS, KINGSMAN) thing going on, and its irreverent humor recalls DEADPOOL (one can imagine a Hollywood studio getting this and relegating Adkins to a supporting role while Ryan Reynolds or maybe Chris Pratt get the lead) and the kind of vintage style and attitude of Vaughn's one-time creative partner Guy Ritchie, a point brought home by the presence of LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS star Nick Moran as a scheming lawyer. ACCIDENT MAN is a mash-up of numerous styles and influences, and though it's been relegated to the world of straight-to-DVD, an audience would have a blast with it in a packed theater.
Adkins is Mike Fallon, a deadly assassin known to his colleagues as the "Accident Man," as he stages all of his kills to look like accidents or suicides. He hangs out with fellow killers at a secret assassin bar in London called The Oasis (shades of JOHN WICK's luxury hotel-for-killers The Continental), run by their boss and retired "death merchant" Big Ray (Ray Stevenson). Among the Oasis' regulars are Special Forces badasses Mick (Michael Jai White) and Mac (Ray Park); unhinged Jane the Ripper (Amy Johnston); Finicky Fred (Perry Benson), who's always experimenting with new methods of death; axe-murderer Carnage Cliff (Ross O'Hennessey); and the nearly-feral Poison Pete (Stephen Donald), described by Fallon as so hated by his parents that "his only bath-time toy was a toaster." Fallon's still bitter over his environmental activist ex Beth (Brooke Johnston) leaving him for Charlie, who turned out to be a woman (Ashley Greene), but when Charlie reaches out to him after Beth is raped and murdered by a pair of crackhead burglars, he correctly concludes that things aren't adding up. He uncovers a labyrinthine conspiracy involving a powerful oil company whose illegal dealings Beth was about to expose, prompting the company's attorney (Moran) to reach out to Milton (David Paymer), the contractor for Fallon and his fellow death merchants. When Fallon realizes that Beth was killed by someone close to him, both he and Charlie's lives are in danger as Milton and Big Ray are forced to put out a hit on Fallon because, as it's often said among those at The Oasis, "it's just business." Directed by DTV vet Jesse V. Johnson (who worked with Adkins on the recent SAVAGE DOG), ACCIDENT MAN is filled with quotable dialogue, over-the-top violence (having Stevenson here is a nice nod to PUNISHER: WAR ZONE), and some incredible fight sequences. It looks like a big-budget Hollywood movie and its only real misstep is a long flashback to Fallon's bullied teen years when he first encountered mentor Big Ray that's dropped right in the middle of the film and really kills the momentum. It takes a little time to recover from that stumble, but it finishes big and despite its after-the-fact similarities to JOHN WICK that don't do it any favors, it's a really fun movie and one of the best and most-polished DTV titles to come down the pike in some time. When the time comes, dare I suggest Scott Adkins as the next 007? (R, 105 mins)
24 HOURS TO LIVE (China/US - 2017)
A fusion of JOHN WICK, a globetrotting BOURNE thriller, SAFE HOUSE, and the old noir classic D.O.A. with a hint of ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, 24 HOURS TO LIVE takes 30 minutes to get to the crux of its premise but then never really exploits it to its goofy potential. Travis Conrad (Ethan Hawke) is an assassin for a shadowy contracting outfit called Red Mountain, which handles all of the government's dirty work around the world. He's been "on hiatus" for a year following the deaths of his wife and son, but he's pulled back in by colleague and old buddy Jim (Paul Anderson). Red Mountain needs Conrad to kill Keith Zera (Tyrone Keogh), an ex-operative-turned-whistleblower who's about to give a deposition to a UN panel investigating the true purpose of Red Mountain. Zera's in the protective custody of Interpol agent Lin (Xu Qing), who's ambushed in Namibia and plants Zera in a safe house in Cape Town. Conrad's assignment is to get to Lin in order to find Zera. He does so by staging a meet-cute in an airport bar and somehow using his smartphone to hack into the airport computer system to make her believe her flight's canceled. They spend the night together, and while she's in the shower, he searches through her belongings and finds where she's got Zera, but opts to leave without killing her. She chases him outside, a shootout ensues, and Conrad is killed instantly when she fires point blank in his chest.
But not so fast. Conrad wakes up in an undisclosed location in South Africa. It seems Red Mountain has been working on an experimental and classified procedure to bring its operatives back from the dead and Conrad, killed before he was able to divulge Zera's whereabouts, is the perfect guinea pig. Once Jim and Red Mountain CEO Wetzler (a harumphing Liam Cunningham) get what they need, they order the plug pulled on Conrad (of course, they simply leave the room and just assume everything went according to plan). Conrad manages to escape, but is informed by a doctor that the procedure has a fail-safe and if his body and faculties don't decline fast enough, they'll shut down and he'll be permanently dead in 24 hours. Missing his wife and son and feeling guilty about all the people he's killed, Conrad decides use his remaining time to take on Red Mountain when they go after Lin and her ten-year-old son. Director Brian Smrz is a veteran stuntman and there's no shortage of well-choreographed JOHN WICK-ish action scenes, but a lot of 24 HOURS TO KILL is a slog. Conrad will be dead in 24 hours, but what's the point of such a procedure? Do enough Red Mountain assassins get killed just before delivering vital info that they'd need to spend billions developing this capability? And why did they take the time to surgically implant a Snake Plissken countdown timer in his arm if they were going to re-kill him instantly anyway once they got the info they needed? Is it there just in case he manages to kill the medical staff and escape and know just how much time he has to exact his revenge on his employers? At least the deadlines in D.O.A. and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK have some logical foundation. In the end, it's more or less JOHN WICK meets a less-horror-centric DEAD HEAT, the '80s cult movie where Treat Williams played a cop brought back from the dead. 24 HOURS TO KILL wisely doesn't turn Hawke--whose character may as well be named Wick Plissken--into a zombie assassin, but still, the four-time Oscar nominee is in total coast mode here as he usually is when he stars in a junky action movie (like the terrible 2013 car chase thriller GETAWAY), and was probably more intrigued by a paid vacation to exotic locations in South Africa and Australia. Rutger Hauer has a small role as a fatherly buddy of Conrad's and while he's underused and barely in it, Smrz at least has the sense to let him shotgun some bad guys near the end. (R, 94 mins)
STRATTON (UK/Germany - 2017; US release 2018)
Filmed in 2015, the first big-screen adaptation of British author Duncan Falconer's Stratton novels was a flop in the UK after two years on the shelf and only managed a straight-to-VOD release in the US in the first weekend of 2018. Falconer, a retired veteran of the UK's Special Boat Service, has written eight novels centered on heroic SBS badass John Stratton, but STRATTON looks like the beginning and end of the movie franchise. Henry Cavill dropped out less than a week before filming began, with his last-minute replacement being the elfin Dominic Cooper, one of those actors who stays busy and turns up in a lot of things but just doesn't have the charisma or screen presence to carry a movie on his own (though he did get some praise for the little seen THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE several years ago). STRATTON is watchable but about as generic and forgettable as they come, as Stratton and the rest of his SBS team are compromised on a botched mission to wipe out a terrorist cell in Iran, resulting in the death of their US Navy colleague Marty (Tyler Hoechlin). The culprit is rogue Russian FSB agent and international terrorist Gregor Barofsky (Thomas Kretschmann), who's resurfaced 20 years after his supposed death. Barofsky's master plan is to detonate a dirty bomb and unleash a deadly chemical gas called "Satan's Snow" throughout London. As expected, Stratton is on the case, with new American recruit Hank (Austin Stowell) joining the team, which also consists of Aggy (Gemma Chan), Spinks (Jack Fairbrother), and MI-6 point man Cummings (Tom Felton), with Stratton's boss Sumner (Connie Nielsen) usually watching with other tech personnel on the requisite rows of monitors in the obligatory Jason Bourne crisis suite.
Director Simon West still seems to be coasting on the recognition of his past Hollywood hits like CON AIR, THE GENERAL'S DAUGHTER, and LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER, and while he did helm the decent Jason Statham remake of THE MECHANIC and the best EXPENDABLES movie (the second one), he's in total clock-punch mode here. It's fast-moving and never dull but it evaporates from your memory while you're watching it, and it relies on every cliche imaginable. Of course, there's a traitorous mole in Stratton's unit, and the actor in question has a terrible poker face, introduced shiftily darting his eyes around and instantly looking suspicious. And of course, being a lone wolf hero, Stratton lives on a messy houseboat with what looks like one chair and a lamp with a low-wattage bulb, and it's littered with half-empty liquor bottles. Derek Jacobi's effortless charm provides a couple of nice scenes as Stratton's fatherly neighbor and drinking buddy, but STRATTON does nothing to elevate itself from the utterly average. (R, 95 mins)
THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX (US - 2018) Directed by Julius Onah. Written by Oren Uziel. Cast: Gugu Mbatha-Raw, David Oyelowo, Daniel Bruhl, John Ortiz, Chris O'Dowd, Aksel Hennie, Zhang Ziyi, Elizabeth Debicki, Roger Davies, Clover Nee, Donal Logue, Suzanne Cryer, voices of Ken Olin, Simon Pegg, Greg Grunberg. (Unrated, 102 mins) Though word began leaking online before it was official, Netflix pulled off one of the more ingenious marketing events in recent memory by running a trailer for THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX during the Super Bowl and then making it available to stream immediately following the game. Whether this release strategy is the "game changer" that many were inclined to call it remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX is not. Shot two years ago under the title GOD PARTICLE, and turned into a CLOVERFIELD movie by producer J.J. Abrams very late in production--a move that necessitated rewrites and reshoots (2016's 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE was also a pre-existing script retrofitted into the tenuous CLOVERFIELD universe)--THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX (also called CLOVERFIELD STATION at one time) was originally set to be released in February 2017, but Paramount kept shuffling it around, unable to settle on a date. It was first moved to fall 2017, then February 2018, and finally April 2018, but in recent weeks, the studio canceled the theatrical release and decided to sell it to Netflix, a move very similar to the release plan for Alex Garland's upcoming ANNIHILATION, which is debuting on Netflix everywhere in the world except North America and China later in February. Paramount said that test audiences found ANNIHILATION "too intellectual," so perhaps they're skittish about losing money on it, but no such excuse was given for THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX. No, the reason they pawned this off is obvious: it's just terrible.
The film opens on Earth as scientist Ava Hamilton (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, from the BLACK MIRROR episode "San Junipero") and her husband Michael (Roger Davies) are still grieving the loss of their two children in a fire. The world is in the midst of an energy crisis and Ava has a chance to be part of a several-year mission aboard the Cloverfield space station to ignite the Shepard particle accelerator which, if successful, will replenish the planet's energy supply. Michael encourages her to go and the film cuts to two years later. British Ava is aboard the station with an international crew: American commander Kiel (David Oyelowo), German Schmidt (Daniel Bruhl), Russian Volkov (Aksel Hennie), Irish Mundy (Chris O'Dowd), Brazilian Acosta (John Ortiz), and Chinese Tam (Zhang Ziyi), who speaks only in subtitled Mandarin but is perfectly understood by the English-speaking crew in one of the more cumbersome concessions to the lucrative Asian market you'll see this year. Tensions at home between Germany and Russia are reflected in a throwdown between Schmidt and anger management case Volkov, but that gets sidelined after a systems overload causes them to lose contact with Earth. Strange things start to occur: a stowaway named Jensen (Elizabeth Debicki) is found behind a panel with the electrical wiring fused with her body and the volatile Volkov barfs a geyser of worms and dies. Jensen claims to be a member of the crew even though no one knows her. She even says she knows Ava from the academy and that Ava is currently a civilian coordinator working at the command center on Earth, and warns them all "Don't trust Schmidt." Physicist Schmidt concludes that they've entered another dimension and they're currently traversing what he calls "two distinct realities fighting to occupy the same space, creating chaos," a perfect metaphor for trying to shoehorn CLOVERFIELD into an existing script. In one reality, Ava is part of the Cloverfield crew and in another, she's on Earth and her kids are still alive. Both realities are duking it out and things get even more complicated when they enter a third reality, and I haven't even mentioned Mundy's arm being severed and dragging itself around the ship like something out of an old horror movie, even writing cryptic warnings like "Cut open Volkov," after which they find the ship's missing gyroscope hidden in his stomach.
THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX sounds insane enough to be entertaining, but it's an absolute mess. Mbatha-Raw turns in a solid performance, but she can't overcome the obstacles working against her. There's no dramatic momentum, it's excruciatingly dull, plot threads are unexplored or abandoned (there's a lot of time spent cutting to Michael on Earth, where he's rescued a little girl and seems to be taking refuge in John Goodman's 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE bunker), Mundy's comic relief falls flat ("What are ya talkin' about, arm?" he pleads with his severed arm), and at some point, Jensen becomes the villain but the hows and whys are maddeningly vague. Writer Oren Uziel (22 JUMP STREET, SHIMMER LAKE) and director Julius Onah spend most of the film fashioning a throwback to space movies of the late '90s and early-to-mid '00s like EVENT HORIZON, SUNSHINE, HELLRAISER: BLOODLINE and the VHS obscurity THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, with a tacked-on "Hey, let's make it a CLOVERFIELD movie!" ending that looks like it was lifted directly from last year's LIFE. The stowaway saboteur element with Debicki's Jensen plays exactly like Peter Facinelli's villain in the megabomb SUPERNOVA, and speaking of, the infamously troubled SUPERNOVA is probably a better and more coherent movie than THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX. The abrupt ending and final shot seem arbitrary, with no real rhyme or reason to what makes up the CLOVERFIELD universe (the thought process behind these movies is the same as when Dimension wedged Pinhead into a bunch of existing scripts to make all those DTV HELLRAISER sequels a decade and a half ago), and while it tries to tie in the events of the first film from way back in the halcyon days of found footage in 2008, it doesn't seem to be following its own internal history. There's no master plan to the CLOVERFIELD franchise--they're just movies that become CLOVERFIELD movies at some point near the end of production. Abrams could just throw a random giant monster into the very last shot of PHANTOM THREAD and call it CLOVERFIELD THREAD and it would be just as valid an entry into the series as PARADOX. With over a year's worth of delayed release dates resulting in a surprise Netflix dumping advertised during one of the most-watched television events of the year, there's no denying the smart salesmanship behind the unveiling of THE CLOVERFIELD PARADOX. At the same time, there's also no denying that Paramount clearly knew they stepped in a pile of shit and didn't want to be the ones standing there when everyone started to notice the stench.
WINCHESTER (US/Australia - 2018) Directed by The Spierig Brothers. Written by Tom Vaughan and The Spierig Brothers. Cast: Helen Mirren, Jason Clarke, Sarah Snook, Angus Sampson, Eamon Farren, Bruce Spence, Finn Scicluna-O'Prey, Tyler Coppin, Laura Brent, Alice Chaston. (PG-13, 99 mins) Located in San Jose, CA and now a popular tourist attraction, the Winchester Mystery House is an ideal setting for a haunted house horror movie. It was purchased in 1884 by Sarah Winchester, the heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, in which she inherited a 50% stake upon the death of her husband William Wirt Winchester in 1881. Legend has it that the widow Winchester was insane, believing that she was forever cursed by the tortured spirits of those killed by the rifles and firearms manufactured by her late husband's company. She spent the rest of her life adding rooms and levels to the house, turning it into a memorial for those victims, and ordering more construction with news of every life ended by a Winchester product. The two-story home eventually became a maze-like seven stories by the time construction finally ceased upon Mrs. Winchester's death in 1922. It's filled with endless hallways, hidden rooms, secret passages, and stairways that lead nowhere. Building was said to have gone on non-stop, 24/7 for the 38 years between Mrs. Winchester's purchase of the house until her death. While construction did go on for 38 years, often at all hours of the day and night, historians now suggest that she sent the workers away for weeks or months at a time and the work wasn't quite literally non-stop from 1884 to 1922.
So, of course, the resulting movie is basically INSIDIOUS: WINCHESTER MYSTERY HOUSE. Directed and co-written by twin Australian siblings Michael and Peter Spierig, who first made their mark with the 2003 micro-budget zombie indie UNDEAD, followed by 2010's stylish vampire film DAYBREAKERS, 2015's acclaimed PREDESTINATION, and last year's SAW reboot JIGSAW, WINCHESTER benefits from some terrific production and set design, utilizing a few San Jose exteriors but largely recreating large portions of the Winchester house on sets in Australia. They also secured a ringer with the legendary Helen Mirren as Sarah Winchester, instantly giving an incalculable amount of class and credibility to a mostly rote, predictable, and by-the-numbers Blumhouse-era horror programmer that requires very little strain or effort on her part. In the 1960s, this sort of project would be Mirren's foray into the post-WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? "horror hag" subgenre that carved a lucrative niche for Hollywood greats like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Olivia de Havilland after they hit their 50s and the studios had little else to offer them. In April 1906, Mrs. Winchester is being evaluated by visiting Dr. Eric Price (Jason Clarke), a widower and hard-drinking laudanum addict hired by the Winchester board of directors in the hopes that he'll declare her insane and allow them to seize complete control of the company. Mrs. Winchester lives with her niece Marion Marriott (PREDESTINATION's Sarah Snook), a young widow with a seven-year-old son, Henry (Finn Scicluna-O'Prey, a front-runner for 2018's Best Newcomer Name), who's still troubled by his father's death and prone to putting a potato sack on his head and sleepwalking through the labyrinthine house.
Mrs. Winchester believes the house is cursed and doesn't care what Dr. Price thinks. It doesn't take him long to turn into a believer thanks to various ghosts and scary faces jump-scaring into the frame and the fact that young Henry is clearly possessed, often displaying milky white eyes and trying to shotgun blast his great aunt at one point. It's here where the "inspired by true events" takes hold, as the rest of the film just takes a standard-issue possession/haunting story and dumps it into the Winchester house. Some of its early jolts are nicely-done (especially the first one, where the Spierigs delay the jump-scare well past the point of when a trained viewer expects it), but they soon grow loud and repetitive, jettisoning any sense of THE HAUNTING or THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE subtlety that the film's very 1970s title card might've suggested. The third act devolves into chaos and confusion as Price and Mrs. Winchester barricade themselves in an attic to hold off an onslaught of the ghosts of Winchester victims who've escaped from their boarded-up rooms in the house. It's hardly Mirren's finest moment when she goes milky-eyed and starts talking in a demon voice while malevolent spirits hurl her against the wall, but maybe she thought doing a junky horror movie would be a fun change-of-pace. At the end of the day, WINCHESTER isn't bad. It's well-made, the sets are meticulously-detailed, and Mirren, Clarke, and Snook are all quite good (ROAD WARRIOR fans will also like seeing Bruce Spence--aka The Gyro Captain--in a prominent supporting role as the Mrs. Winchester's chief butler), but you've seen it all before, and the allegorical allusions to today's gun control debate seem clumsy and ham-fisted.
PANIC (Italy/Spain - 1982) Directed by Anthony Richmond (Tonino Ricci). Written by Jaime Comas and Victor A. Catena. Cast: David Warbeck, Janet Agren, Franco Ressel, Roberto Ricci, Jose R. Lifante, Miguel Herrera, Eugenio Benito, Ovidio Taito, Jose Maria Labernie, Ilaria Maria Bianchi, Fabian Conde, Vittorio Calo, Goffredo Unger. (Unrated, 93 mins) "What you have seen might really happen...perhaps it already has!" - PANIC closing credits
Sent straight to late-night TV as part of a Cinema Shares syndication package, PANIC is an instantly recognizable staple of the 1980s video store glory days thanks to its gross cover art on the big Gorgon Video clamshell cover box. All these years later, it's still not very good and its minimal charms lie almost exclusively in sentimentality for a bygone era. Nevertheless, I'm all in favor of any obscure horror movie resurrected on Blu-ray, and Code Red's recent release is a huge step up from the dogshit VHS print that's been recycled on several budget "50 Horror Classics" public domain sets from Brentwood and Mill Creek. Despite the upgrade to HD and full color correction that makes it so you can actually see what's going on, PANIC remains a largely terrible movie, but it's the kind of junky, barely competent Eurocult flick that keeps fans of such stuff (like this guy--hey, I make no apologies; if you're reading this, you understand that this is the life we've chosen) always coming back for more.
Set in London but shot mostly in Spain and Italy (in this film's internal geography, there's an awful lot of dirt roads just around the corner from Buckingham Palace), PANIC borrows some of George A. Romero's THE CRAZIES and Umberto Lenzi's NIGHTMARE CITY with its accidentally leaked contagion, created by a pharmaceutical company cleverly called "Chemicale." They claim to manufacture aspirin and antibiotics, but they've been conducting secret experiments in biological and chemical warfare for the British government. A lab mishap makes some rats go insane and turns Professor Adams (Roberto Ricci) into an oozing, monstrous, murderous madman on a citywide rampage. The government is desperate to contain the situation, and Chemicale CEO Milton (Franco Ressel) tries to keep a lid on it, but Adams' altruistic assistant Jane (frequent Ricci star Janet Agren) refuses to play along, teaming with special agent Captain Kirk (David Warbeck) to boldly go where no man has gone before to find Adams. Meanwhile, the government is so concerned with keeping this quiet that they're willing to resort to "Plan Q," which is to basically drop a nuke on London. The film never specifies why Plans A-through-P wouldn't be sufficient.
PANIC is a film too dumb to explore the politically-charged DR. STRANGELOVE and FAIL-SAFE implications of its plot and little is made of a Prime Minister willing to obliterate an entire city to kill one contaminated scientist. Adams doesn't even appear to be contagious, since none of the people he encounters become infected. He even gets into a physical fight with both Kirk and London cop O'Brien (Jose R. Lifante), and nothing happens to them. PANIC also can't even keep track of its own subplots, with mention of an escaped guinea pig also being infected like Adams and growing to the size of a dog, but we never see the poor animal. Sure, there's a nice amount of gore (mostly missing from the Gorgon VHS, which was culled from a butchered TV print), the monster makeup on Roberto Ricci is appropriately icky, and all the usual suspects are on the dubbing crew (Warbeck's voice has been revoiced by the dulcet tones of the great Ted Rusoff), but PANIC, despite its video store ubiquity in those long ago days, isn't exactly a classic in need of reappraisal. The story is all over the place, plot threads are underdeveloped or abandoned entirely, the stock footage of London is haphazardly shoehorned-in, and despite a Variety announcement of its production commencing in the fall of 1981, it looks like it was shot several years earlier with its older cars and peculiarly outdated fashions with no indication that it's intended to be a period setting (of course, as sloppy as this film is, maybe that was the intent at some point). Indeed, many sources list PANIC's year of release as 1976 and one would almost be inclined to believe it, but the Variety announcement gels with a computer screen in the movie showing a 1981 date, and there's the fact that New Zealand native and Eurocult legend Warbeck stated in many interviews and convention appearances near the end of his too-short life (he died of cancer in 1997 at just 55) that Antonio Margheriti's 1980 Namsploitation classic THE LAST HUNTER was his first foray into Italian exploitation. PANIC was written by Spanish journeymen Jaime Comas and Victor A. Catena, both of whom have been involved in better or at least more reputable movies (they had a hand in the screenplay for A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and are given story credit on the 1980 Charles Bronson CASABLANCA knockoff CABO BLANCO), and it's directed with a minimum of style or suspense by perennial Italian D-lister Tonino Ricci, under the pseudonym "Anthony Richmond."
Ricci (1927-2014) had a career that spanned several decades, beginning in the early 1960s with assistant director gigs on films like Mario Bava's ERIK THE CONQUEROR, and by the end of the decade, he started directing his own movies until 1998 without ever making a very good one. He dabbled in various genres with typically undistinguished results, like the 1969 macaroni combat outing SALT IN THE WOUND, the 1971 giallo CROSS CURRENT, the 1973 GODFATHER ripoff THE BIG FAMILY, 1974's bizarrely-titled ROBIN HOOD, ARROWS, BEANS AND KARATE, and a pair of interchangeable, late '70s Bermuda Triangle adventures with CAVE OF THE SHARKS and ENCOUNTERS IN THE DEEP. In the '80s, Ricci teamed with non-star-in-the-making "Conrad Nichols" (real name Bruno Minitti) on several films, including the 1983 CONAN knockoff THOR THE CONQUEROR, and a pair of post-nuke ROAD WARRIOR imitations with 1983's RUSH and and 1984's A MAN CALLED RAGE. The most high-profile film Ricci made--probably by default--is 1988's NIGHT OF THE SHARKS, one of the very few times he managed to secure a real Hollywood actor in the form of Treat Williams. Williams wasn't that far removed from ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA and an acclaimed turn in the indie SMOOTH TALK when he was somehow cajoled into appearing in a Tonino Ricci joint, but even with his presence, the dull SHARKS only managed a straight-to-video release in 1990. Ricci retired from filmmaking after the 1998 family adventure BUCK AND THE MAGIC BRACELET, with vacationing American actors like the POLICE ACADEMY franchise's replacement Guttenberg and oblivious HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE husband Matt McCoy and '60s and '70s TV fixture Abby Dalton mixing it up with DEMONS legend Bobby Rhodes and perennial Ricci bestie "Conrad Nichols."
Variety ad on 10/24/1981 with the breaking news
alerting the world to the existence of PANIC
(photo provided by William Wilson)
LAST FLAG FLYING, the latest film from director Richard Linklater, is a "spiritual sequel" to Hal Ashby's 1973 classic THE LAST DETAIL, the common denominator between both films being novelist and screenwriter Darryl Ponicsan (whose other credits include CINDERELLA LIBERTY, TAPS, and VISION QUEST). Ponicsan adapted his own 1970 novel The Last Detail for Ashby, and in 2005, published a sequel with Last Flag Flying, showing the same characters 30-plus years later. In adapting Flying for the screen, Ponicsan (his first screenwriting credit since 1999's RANDOM HEARTS) and Linklater changed the names of the characters and switched them from ex-Navy to ex-Marines. As a result, the non-sequel sequel LAST FLAG FLYING functions as a standalone film but anyone who knows the backstory and is a fan of THE LAST DETAIL will clearly recognize the three protagonists as the same guys several decades on. Set in 2003 in an America where the wounds of 9/11 are still open and raw, mild-mannered Larry "Doc" Shepherd (Steve Carell, formerly Randy Quaid as Lawrence "Larry" Meadows) is a recent widower who's just been informed his son was killed in action in Iraq and will be buried in Arlington. A despondent Doc then seeks out two old Vietnam buddies--crass, crude bar owner Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston, formerly Jack Nicholson as Billy "Badass" Buddusky) and recovering wildman alcoholic and now-devoutly religious pastor Richard "Mauler" Mueller (Laurence Fishburne, formerly Otis Young as Richard "Mule" Mulhall)--to accompany him to receive his son's body.
Along the way, they argue, bond, reminisce, bust each others' chops, and confront long-suppressed demons from Vietnam that have quietly haunted them. It starts fine but more or less plateaus once they learn that Doc's son's death didn't go down like the Marines claim and they decide to transport his body back home themselves. This results in an uneven mix of gut-wrenching drama and goofy comedy that's equal parts somber character study, GRUMPY OLD MEN, and PLANES, TRAINS & AUTOMOBILES. Carell does some of his best dramatic work yet and really looks like a guy who's endured just about all he can handle after losing his wife to cancer and his son to war in quick succession, but Linklater really needed to rein in Cranston a little. A little of Cranston goes a long way here, and he's trying way too hard to emulate Jack Nicholson, not by doing a hacky Nicholson impression but by playing most of the film so broadly that his late shift from smartass to serious never rings true. Fishburne provides a nice balance to compensate for Cranston's playing to the cheap seats with his obnoxious behavior and routine invocations of "Hey, I got your (noun) danglin' right here!" bit. Cranston is a national treasure, but his work here is both broken and bad as he turns Badass Buddusky into Dumbass Sal. 93-year-old Cicely Tyson has a nice cameo as the mother of one of their other buddies who was killed in Vietnam, and LAST FLAG FLYING does display some genuine heart on occasion and shows a bit of a cynical streak in terms of the way the government and the military aren't above manufacturing fiction when it comes to telling families that a loved one has paid the ultimate price for their country, but it's kind of all over the place. Carell, Cranston, and Fishburne are great actors, but it doesn't seem like Linklater has them on the same page, and the entire film feels like it's arrived a decade too late, assuming THE LAST DETAIL needed a "spiritual sequel" in the first place. Amazon and Lionsgate gave this a big promotional push in the early fall as an awards season contender but ultimately backed off, canceling its expanded rollout and stalling it on just 110 screens at its widest release, for a gross of $965,000. Obviously they weren't feeling it either. (R, 125 mins)
THE SQUARE (Sweden/Germany/France/US/Denmark - 2017)
"The Square" is an exhibit at a renowned Swedish art museum where a plaque declares it "a sanctuary of trust and caring," and adds "Within its boundaries, we all share equal rights and obligations." THE SQUARE is writer/director Ruben Ostlund's follow-up to his wildly overpraised FORCE MAJEURE. It was awarded the Palme d'Or at last year's Cannes Film Festival and is currently an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, even though a good chunk of it is in English. There's often a sense of groupthink when it comes to critical praise and it's a problem that's only gotten worse in the era of Rotten Tomatoes. In short, I can't recall the last time I've felt this disconnected from what critics are saying about a film and my reaction to it as it unfolds. The most insufferable Palme d'Or winner since UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES, THE SQUARE focuses on museum curator Christian (Claes Bang, whose name is the best thing about this) and a series of distractions that begin with him being conned in the street and having his phone, wallet and cuff links lifted off of him and ends with an ill-advised marketing scheme that shows a little girl being blown up by a bomb while standing at The Square. Christian also has a one-night stand with an American TV news reporter (Elisabeth Moss) that results in a potentially messy tug-of-war with a used condom, and a black-tie museum gala flies off the rails when human exhibit Oleg Rogozjin (Terry Notary) mimics an ape, rampaging through the dining area, attacking an artist (Dominic West) and nearly sexually assaulting a woman while everyone idly watches the "art" unfold.
What does it all mean? Who knows? Who cares? Seen too late to be included on my Worst of 2017 list, THE SQUARE is the kind of movie mainstream subtitle-phobes think of when they hear someone say "It's a subtitled art film." Like the equally overrated and oppressively long TONI ERDMANN, just because something's mostly subtitled and has a couple of mildly transgressive scenes doesn't make it an instant classic. It's allegedly a comedy, though I don't recall laughing once, even at various cringeworthy situations. The much-ballyhooed tug-of-war with the condom was described by hyperventilating critics as nothing short of a brilliant, tour-de-force comedic set piece. Was it a Blake Edwards-esque display of game-changing genius that forever altered our perception of comedy? No, it was over after a couple of tugs in about ten seconds. After watching, I looked at some reviews to try and understand what it was that I was missing, and a reviewer for Vox wrote "One moment, in which a chef hollers for a stampede of museum donors to stop moving so he can meekly tell them the buffet's offerings, is one of the funniest things I've seen in a movie." Really? Surely, you can't be serious? THE SQUARE lazily takes aim at fish-in-a-barrel targets: pretentious art exhibits (including one that's a room filled with piles of debris and a neon light flashing "You Have Nothing," and a creaking stack of chairs that seems ready to collapse at any moment), vacuous benefactors, unqualified people in charge, the Ice Bucket Challenge, the Comic Sans font, people with Tourette's, and cynical marketing strategies just to name a few. Christian is ultimately in a no-win situation after the public outcry over the terrorism-inspired marketing ploy goes viral, but he's then pilloried by purists for caving to censorship. Also, Moss' character has a large chimpanzee roommate with a moderate level of artistic talent. which is just something we're supposed to roll with because apparently it's clever and not at all stupid when there's subtitles. I'm assuming the joke here is that even a monkey can create the kind of art that's met with enthusiastic accolades by those in the scene--so wait, is Ostlund actually proving that with THE SQUARE? Maybe the possibility exists that this whole thing is a total stunt but it speaks to Ostlund's stunning lack of focus with this aimless, tedious film that after it screened at Cannes at 142 minutes, he decided to tweak and tighten it and it ended up running nine minutes longer when he was finished. The general message is that while The Square promotes the idea of altruism and empathy among society, everyone around it is a self-absorbed hypocrite. Pretty insightful stuff. Maybe for Ostlund's next film, he can explore and deconstruct the satirical implications of poseur Von Triers and bargain-basement Bunuels and the pitfalls of believing your own hype. (R, 151 mins)
THE WITCHES (Italy/France - 1967; US release 1969) Directed by Luchino Visconti, Mauro Bolognini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Rossi and Vittorio De Sica. Written by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, Cesare Zavattini, Age-Scarpelli, Bernardino Zapponi, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Fabio Capri and Enzo Muzzi. Cast: Silvana Mangano, Clint Eastwood, Alberto Sordi, Toto, Annie Girardot, Francisco Rabal, Massimo Girotti, Ninetto Davoli, Veronique Vendell, Elsa Albani, Leslie French, Clara Calamai, Marilu Tolo, Dino Mele, Helmut Berger, Laura Betti. (Unrated, 111 mins; US version 104 mins)
Whether it was horror films like TALES OF TERROR, BLACK SABBATH, and DR. TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS or international non-horror offerings like BOCCACCIO '70, YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW, WOMAN TIMES SEVEN, and SPIRITS OF THE DEAD, anthology films were popular box office draws throughout the 1960s. The concept was enthusiastically embraced by Italian and French directors, and these projects would often be a summit of legendary filmmaking talent: BOCCACCIO '70 featured segments from Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, and Mario Monicelli, ROGOPAG assembled Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and relative historical footnote Ugo Gregoretti, while SPIRITS OF THE DEAD drew Fellini, Louis Malle, and Roger Vadim. De Sica was a particular fan of the format, directing all three segments of the Oscar-winning YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW and all seven stories in the Shirley MacLaine-starring WOMAN TIMES SEVEN. Along with Visconti, Pasolini, Mauro Bolognini, and Franco Rossi, De Sica was also involved in the five-part anthology THE WITCHES, a Dino De Laurentiis production designed as a showcase for his wife, Italian actress Silvana Mangano. Making her mark when she was just 19 years old in Giuseppe De Santis' 1949 neo-realist classic BITTER RICE, Mangano was one of Italy's busiest actresses throughout the '50s and '60s, but she never broke out into international stardom like perceived rival Sophia Loren, the wife of Carlo Ponti, another big-time Italian mogul. Mangano starred in major Italian productions like 1959's TEMPEST and 1961's BARABBAS, but despite being married to one of the biggest producers in the world, she never appeared in a Hollywood movie until she emerged from a decade-long retirement in 1984 to play Reverend Mother Ramallo in David Lynch's DUNE.
THE WITCHES gives Mangano plenty of opportunities to show her range but ultimately, it's a disastrous vanity project with very little to recommend it, with the segments ranging from tolerable at best to excruciating endurance tests at worst. Visconti directs the first segment, "The Witch Burned Alive," a shrill and grating look at the trials and tribulations of stardom with Mangano as Gloria, a famous actress attending the ten-year anniversary party of her friend Valeria (Annie Girardot) and her philandering husband Paolo (Francisco Rabal). She gets drunk as the other partygoers revel in her embarrassing predicament, removing her makeup and some of her clothing while she's passed out and when she comes to, she's nearly seduced by Paolo before getting into an argument with her agent on the phone. Taking up an unacceptably indulgent 40 minutes (Visconti clashed with De Laurentiis over the segment and wanted to expand it to feature length), "The Witch Burned Alive" might be trying to say something about the sycophancy of fandom and the eagerness to take down celebrities, and as such, it's a potentially interesting precursor to the era of message boards and social media, but the execution is just painful. Bolognini directs the second segment, "Civic Spirit," with Mangano stuck in a traffic jam because of a car crash and offering to take the injured and profusely bleeding accident victim (Alberto Sordi) to the hospital. She passes several hospitals and clinics along the way and ultimately drops him off in the middle of the street when she arrives at her destination, having simply used him as an excuse to get where she was going a little quicker. The segment runs just five minutes and feels like a half-baked SNL skit, but it's amusing in a CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM sort of way, reminiscent of the episode where Larry picks up a prostitute in order to have the bare minimum number of passengers in his car to use the faster-moving carpool lane.
Even worse than Visconti's segment is Pasolini's "The Earth Seen From the Moon," with Mangano as a green-haired, deaf-mute beauty named Absurdity who becomes the object of affection for widower Ciancicato Miao (beloved Italian comic Toto in a Larry Fine wig/bald cap combo) and his orange-pompadoured son Baciu (Pasolini regular Ninetto Davoli). Ciancicato and Absurdity eventually marry and he carries her off to his shack in the dilapidated shantytown he calls home. Pasolini seems to be going for a garish Fellini vibe here, but there's also a pronounced element of slapstick, with some sped-up Benny Hill-type running, the generally clownish performances and endless, shameless mugging of Toto and Davoli, along with a framed portrait of Chaplin that foreshadows Davoli's homage to the Little Tramp in Pasolini's 1972 film THE CANTERBURY TALES. Regardless of the intent, "The Earth Seen From the Moon" is Pasolini at his most insufferably self-indulgent. Things pick up with Rossi's "The Sicilian Belle," where Mangano has her heart broken, setting off a chain reaction of escalating revenge and shotgun deaths in her small village. It's basically a bunch of guys getting blown away, but like Bolognini's story, it benefits from running around five minutes, thus rendering it incapable of wearing out its welcome.
THE WITCHES was shot in late 1965 and early 1966 but wasn't released in Italy until 1967, and it would be another two years before it was picked up by United Artists, dubbed in English, and relegated to their short-lived foreign acquisition division Lopert for a very brief NYC run in the spring of 1969. It was quickly withdrawn and didn't resurface until 1979, when UA included the shortened English-dubbed version (104 minutes compared to the 111-minute European cut) in a late-night TV syndication package, but even then, it wasn't in regular rotation and remained extremely difficult to see. The only reason THE WITCHES is ever mentioned today is thanks to the unlikely appearance of Clint Eastwood in the final segment, the De Sica-directed "An Evening Like the Others." Eastwood is Carlo ("Charlie" in the US version), the buttoned-down, conservative bank executive husband of Mangano's bored housewife Giovanna. He's preoccupied with work and doesn't pay attention to her like he once did, and would rather stay in and go to sleep than take her to a movie. Giovanna drifts into Fellini-esque fantasy worlds where she's desired by other men and makes Carlo pay for not appreciating her. In the fantasy side of the segment, she ultimately leads a mob of men to a massive arena in Rome, where she does a striptease to emasculate a hapless Carlo. Other than the novelty of seeing Eastwood in such an unusual setting in the most obscure film of his career, the closing segment is another dud. Mangano is fine, but broad comedy is not Eastwood's specialty and he appears to be in physical pain stuck in a suit and black-rimmed reading glasses that serve as an unintentional early look at one of his FIREFOX disguises. Eastwood, who was paid $20,000 with a Ferrari thrown in, shot his segment in between FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE and THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY. At this time, he was a major star in Europe, but when THE WITCHES was filmed, A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS was still over a year away from its belated 1967 US release. Eastwood was still a relative nobody stateside, best known as a TV star thanks to his time on RAWHIDE, which was cancelled in 1965. In Italy, however, he was already an established pop culture phenomenon, with De Sica poking fun at his "Man With No Name" image by having Carlo in gunslinger garb in one of Giovanna's fantasies and then sighing in disinterest at the meta notion of taking Giovanna to see A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS.
Silvana Mangano (1930-1989)
Over 1967 and 1968, United Artists distributed all three of Eastwood's Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns in the States, as well as HANG 'EM HIGH, his American debut as a lead on the big screen. All were smash hits, and as a result, UA effectively (and understandably) buried THE WITCHES despite showing Eastwood in a cowboy hat on the US poster art. Eastwood doesn't even appear until around 80 minutes in, but as bad as this is is, at least the final segment serves as required viewing for Clint completists. Just out on Blu-ray from Arrow Video's "Arrow Academy" prestige line (with both the Italian-language European cut and the English-dubbed US version), THE WITCHES flopped hard in Italy, but that didn't deter De Laurentiis from producing another Mangano-focused anthology film--with returning directors Bolognini and Pasolini, and cast members Toto and Davoli joined by Italian comics Franco and Ciccio--with 1968's CAPRICCIO ALL'ITALIANA, which was an even bigger box office bomb, and without a Clint Eastwood onboard, was never even released in America. THE WITCHES and CAPRICCIO ALL'ITALIANA failed to make Mangano the international star that Sophia Loren was, and the colossal failure of both films effectively ended her career as a leading lady. Mangano stayed busy in supporting roles in Visconti's DEATH IN VENICE, LUDWIG, and CONVERSATION PIECE, but after ending her acting sabbatical with DUNE, she only appeared in one more film, the 1987 Marcello Mastroianni drama DARK EYES. She and De Laurentiis divorced in 1988 after he became involved with longtime producing partner Martha Schumacher (FIRESTARTER, CAT'S EYE, MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE). The grandmother of popular celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis, Mangano was only 59 when she died of lung cancer in 1989, an iconic figure in Italian cinema who just never managed to find success outside of her homeland like the Sophia Lorens, the Gina Lollobrigidas, or the Claudia Cardinales of her day.
