THE OUTSIDER aka LE MARGINAL (France - 1983) Directed by Jacques Deray. Written by Jacques Deray and Jean Herman. Cast: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Henry Silva, Carlos Sotto Mayor, Pierre Vernier, Maurice Barrier, Claude Brosset, Tcheky Karyo, Jacques Maury, Roger Dumas, Gabriel Gattand, Michel Robin, Jacques David, Jean-Louis Richard, Didier Sauvegrain, Stephane Ferrara (Unrated, 102 mins) Though he's renowned by fans of world cinema for being one of the major faces of the French New Wave in films like 1960's BREATHLESS and 1965's PIERROT LE FOU for Jean-Luc Godard, and 1964's LEON MORIN, PRIEST for Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean-Paul Belmondo is equally well-known in France for his many action movies from the early 1970s through the mid-1980s. Belmondo never really made any attempts to crack the American market despite being courted by the Hollywood studios (the closest he came was a cameo in the 1967 James Bond spoof CASINO ROYALE, and he was enough of a known celebrity then that Than Wyenn played a spy named "Paul John Mondebello" on a 1967 episode of GET SMART), but his commercial action films certainly had a mainstream appeal that managed to get a couple of them distributed stateside (1975's THE NIGHT CALLER actually got an English-dubbed wide release in the US by Columbia). While Belmondo's action films made him a megastar at home and one of France's top box office draws, French critics who admired his early, "serious" work lamented his decision to focus on mainstream popcorn movies. Born in 1933, Belmondo's persona during this career phase was that of a man's man. He did his own often jaw-droppingly dangerous stunts, dated gorgeous actresses (he was romantically linked for several years to Ursula Andress in the '60s and then Laura Antonelli in the '70s), and as the '70s went on, he became the French equivalent of a Steve McQueen, a Burt Reynolds, or a Clint Eastwood. The 1983 cop thriller THE OUTSIDER (French title: LE MARGINAL) came late in the Belmondo action cycle and is rather typical of what French audiences expected when they went to see one of his movies.
At times, it almost feels like a French version of an Italian poliziotteschi, for several reasons: Belmondo repeatedly walking into a bar or a cafe or wherever and cracking skulls like serial bitch-slapper Maurizio Merli; some ridiculous action sequences with Belmondo risking life and limb; a catchy score by Ennio Morricone, some of which would be recycled and tweaked for Roman Polanski's 1988 Paris-set thriller FRANTIC; and the presence of American guest star and polizia fixture Henry Silva as the chief villain. Belmondo is hot-headed Commissioner Philippe Jordan, a cop who--you guessed it--plays by his own rules. He's been transferred from Paris to Marseille to help bust up an extensive drug trafficking operation that's bringing the product into France. After making a splash by commandeering a chopper and jumping from it onto a speedboat (yes, Belmondo does it for real, and it's pretty hair-raising) and destroying a heroin shipment intended for distribution by powerful Paris crime boss Sauveur Meccacci (Silva), Jordan apparently ruffles enough feathers with his actions that he's threatened with being framed for the murder of a Marseille cop unless he takes a demotion and goes back to Paris. Busted down to vice (is this LE MACHINE DE SHARKY?), Jordan pisses off his new boss and most of his new colleagues by persisting in his efforts to take down Meccacci, who's got enough corrupt cops, lawyers, and judges on his payroll and under his thumb that he's completely untouchable.
When he isn't making life miserable for Meccacci's flunkies, Jordan finds other situations where he can start some trouble, like going after a pair of Turkish pimps who beat up Livia Maria Dolores (22-year-old Brazilian pop star Carlos Sotto Mayor, the 50-year-old Belmondo's girlfriend at the time), a lovely young prostitute with whom he's gotten involved; searching for an ousted gay underling of Meccacci's in a leather bar straight out of CRUISING in a scene that would probably get Belmondo cancelled today; or raiding a shithole Rue de Lyon drug den to rescue the smack-addicted teenage daughter of a perp (Maurice Barrier) he sent to prison four years earlier. THE OUTSIDER opens with a terrific foot chase down and across a busy Marseille highway, with Belmondo hopping on and off semi trucks and dodging cars like a live-action version of Frogger, and there's also one terrific Remy Julienne car chase late in the film, where an enraged Jordan caps it off by slamming his Mustang into the other car, then backing up and plowing into it again several more times to make sure Meccacci's guys are dead and their bloodied bodies crushed beyond recognition, with onlookers standing there horrified at his brutality as he just exits his car and walks away. That's how Belmondo gets it done!
Directed and co-written by Jacques Deray (BORSALINO, THE OUTSIDE MAN), THE OUTSIDER was never shown theatrically or on home video in the US until Kino's new Blu-ray (because physical media is dead), release in conjunction with Georges Lautner's THE PROFESSIONAL, another Belmondo actioner from 1981 that's been more widely available in the States. A fandub version of THE OUTSIDER has been available on the bootleg and torrent circuit for years, but the Blu-ray is in French with English subtitles (Silva spoke English on set, but he's been dubbed by a French actor, and his voice wasn't on the bootleg dub, either). Belmondo made a few more action movies, along with the 1985 bank robbery comedy HOLD-UP, which was remade by Bill Murray as 1990's QUICK CHANGE, then decided to be "serious" again in the late '80s, first by returning to the stage and then starring in a 1990 take on CYRANO DE BERGERAC and Claude Lelouch's revisionist, WWII-set LES MISERABLES in 1995. He continued acting until he suffered a stroke in 2001 and went into unofficial retirement, though he made a one-off return to the screen with 2009's little-seen A MAN AND HIS DOG, a loose remake of Vittorio De Sica's 1952 neo-realist classic UMBERTO D. Though his retirement now appears to be permanent, the 86-year-old Belmondo is still a highly visible celebrity in France, where he and old friend Alain Delon were recently brought together for an interview and photo shoot with Paris Match, to the delight of fans who've followed the iconic screen legends for the last 60 years.
Belmondo and Alain Delon in a June 2019 issue of Paris Match
The third entry in the ESCAPE PLAN franchise, ESCAPE PLAN: THE EXTRACTORS was already completed when ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES went straight-to-DVD exactly one year ago, and it seems to inherently realize that everyone would hate it. That includes star Sylvester Stallone, who hyped ESCAPE PLAN: THE EXTRACTORS in a recent interview by declaring ESCAPE PLAN 2 the worst movie he's ever made. An interesting approach to plugging your latest project, but at the same time, he's not wrong. More or less pretending the dreadful ESCAPE PLAN 2 never happened before anyone even had a chance to see it, THE EXTRACTORS abandons the high-tech, borderline sci-fi of the first sequel and instead expands on a storyline from the 2013 original, which only did modest business stateside but was a blockbuster hit in China, thus leading to these two cheaply-made and largely China-targeted sequels. Chinese tech giant Zhang Innovations is looking to set up shop at an abandoned factory in Mansfield, OH. But the delegation, headed by Daya Zhang (Malese Jow), is ambushed at the local airport by a heavily-armed crew of mercenaries led by Lester Clark Jr (Devon Sawa), and whisked away to Devil's Station, a black site, hellhole prison in Latvia (but played by the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, as seen in THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION), with Clark demanding a ransom of $700 million and all of Zhang Innovations' secrets from its CEO, Daya's father Wu Zhang (Russell Wong). En route to Latvia, Clark also abducts Abigail Ross (Jaime King), the girlfriend of prison security expert Ray Breslin (Stallone), in a calculated effort to kill two birds with one stone: Clark Jr's missing-and-presumed dead father was once Breslin's corrupt business partner (played by Vincent D'Onofrio in the first film) and he had a side deal going with Wu Zhang that didn't end well. Obsessed with avenging his father, Clark Jr has devised a way to exact vengeance on both Wu Zhang and Breslin by kidnapping the most precious things in their lives. Of course, this means Breslin assembles his team to attempt an extraction, including Trent (Dave Bautista) and Hush (Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson), and they're joined by Daya's disgraced current bodyguard Bao (Harry Shum Jr.) and her former bodyguard and ex-lover Shen (Max Zhang, who also teamed with Bautista in this year's earlier Chinese import MASTER Z: IP MAN LEGACY)
Boasting a ludicrous 52 credited producers (shockingly, Stallone isn't one of them), ESCAPE PLAN: THE EXTRACTORS is as by-the-numbers as it gets, though at the very least, it's an improvement over the miserable ESCAPE PLAN 2. Bautista probably put in two, maybe three days work ("I'm gonna go check it out," Trent says as he splits from the rest of the group, disappearing for long stretches as Bautista likely headed to straight to the set of AVENGERS: ENDGAME), and I'd be surprised if 50 Cent was there for more than one. But Stallone gets a bit more to do here, and has a well-choreographed and quite brutal climactic throwdown with Sawa, the now-40-year-old FINAL DESTINATION star surprisingly convincing as the bad guy. Stallone can't possibly need this gig, he but seems to be somewhat more invested in the proceedings, perhaps because his buddy John Herzfeld (2 DAYS IN THE VALLEY, 15 MINUTES) is at the helm rather than ESCAPE PLAN 2's DTV/VOD hack Steven C. Miller, the helmer of many of Lionsgate's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series (Stallone and Herzfeld previously collaborated on 2014's ill-advised, barely-released REACH ME, the IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD of inspirational self-help dramas). The bottom line: it's utterly inessential Stallone, but it's got a couple of nicely-done fights (including one with Max Zhang and Daniel Bernhardt, as Clark Jr's chief henchman), it isn't afraid to kill off characters you least expect, and it doesn't overstay its welcome, with the super-slow closing credits rolling at the 78-minute mark, and that's counting the first two minutes of the film being nine straight production company logos. (R, 87 mins) DAUGHTER OF THE WOLF (Canada/US/UK - 2019)
Steven Soderbergh's 2012 action thriller HAYWIRE was supposed to make a star of former MMA fighter Gina Carano. It didn't quite pan out that way, but she's had supporting roles in FAST & FURIOUS 6 and DEADPOOL while keeping busy starring in several straight-to-VOD titles like IN THE BLOOD, EXTRACTION (one installment in Lionsgate's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series), SCORCHED EARTH, and now DAUGHTER OF THE WOLF. Carano is Clair Hamilton, a career military vet with an estranged son named Charlie (Anton Gillis-Adelman), who's been living in the Pacific Northwest with her father. But when her dad dies, and with Charlie's father out of the picture (killed in an IED blast in Afghanistan when Charlie was an infant), Clair has no choice but to be the parent and repair the fractured relationship with her son. Her plan hits a snag when Charlie is kidnapped and the ransom demand is exactly the substantial inheritance left to her by her wealthy father. She hands over the money as instructed, but two of the three kidnappers try to kill her anyway. She returns fire, killing two and seriously injuring the third, Larsen (Brendan Fehr), forcing him to take her to her son, who's being held by the plan's mastermind, "Father" (Richard Dreyfuss). Father, a grizzled mountain man unencumbered by the law, has a longstanding history of abducting boys and either taking them in as pseudo-adopted sons or selling them off to potential buyers, which is his intent for Charlie as his ultimate vengeance against Clair's dad for an unpaid loan from years earlier. Human trafficking seems like a rather extreme way to get back at a dead guy, plus Father--whose living conditions don't seem to gel with his inexplicable financial security--didn't count on Clair using all of her extensive military training and survival skills to take them on in the brutal cold of the snowy, treacherous mountain terrain.
Directed by David Hackl (SAW V, INTO THE GRIZZLY MAZE, and the John Travolta lineman dud LIFE ON THE LINE), DAUGHTER OF THE WOLF is a pretty dull and tedious affair, plodding along at a slow pace as Carano and Fehr do little but trudge through the snow on their long journey to Father's hideout. There aren't any Oscars in Carano's future, but HAYWIRE proved she's capable of headlining a well-made action vehicle, but that's not what she gets here with its predictable plot, clumsily-staged shootouts, primitive CGI splatter, and phone-app-level explosions. Speaking of Oscars, the only real point of interest here is a slumming Dreyfuss, who's become quite the hammy VOD fixture of late between this, BAYOU CAVIAR, ASHER, and the Netflix movies THE LAST LAUGH and POLAR. He's embarrassingly bad here, playing this supposed criminal mastermind as the deranged love child of Walter Brennan and Strother Martin. The character isn't threatening or scary in any way and half of his dialogue is unintelligible, but Dreyfuss at least seems to be enjoying himself, which is more than can be said for anyone watching DAUGHTER OF THE WOLF. (R, 88 mins)
MIDSOMMAR (US/Sweden - 2019) Written and directed by Ari Aster. Cast: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, Will Poulter, William Jackson Harper, Vilhelm Blomgren, Ellora Torchia, Archie Madekwe, Isabelle Grill, Hampus Hallberg, Gunnel Fred, Liv Mjones, Bjorn Andresen, Lennart R. Svensson, Anders Beckman, Anders Back, Levente Puczko-Smith. (R, 147 mins) With last year's shattering HEREDITARY, writer/director Ari Aster immediately established himself as one of the top figures in so-called "elevated horror," a term given to the thinking person's horror films that earn significant mainstream praise, much to the consternation of the genre's fanboys, gatekeepers, and assorted too-cool-for-school edgelords who usually wait 8-12 months to watch said films so they can flippantly dismiss them long after the hype has died down. Aside from Toni Collette turning in one of the best performances in any movie in recent memory, HEREDITARY has quite a bit going on and is the kind of film where each subsequent rewatch has you noticing things you didn't catch before. It was a film about the supernatural, family, dysfunction, legacies passed down, and unimaginable grief. MIDSOMMAR, Aster's follow-up effort, is a different beast than HEREDITARY in many ways, but it's cut from the same cloth and in it, you see patterns and obsessions beginning to develop. Again, we have the element of the supernatural. Again, the main character struggles to cope with an indescribable family tragedy. And again, there's a mysterious group of people who have plans for that character and those around her, but this time, it's even more strangely sinister in the way it's used almost as running interference in service of a much grander design. After a genuinely shocking 12-minute pre-credits sequence, MIDSOMMAR is strangely lacking in overt scares, instead opting for a very methodical slow burn that's relentlessly unsettling, with a suffocating sense of dread, tension, and doom that finally explodes into all-out madness in the last half hour.
After facing that aforementioned family tragedy, college student Dani Ardor (Florence Pugh) is virtually paralyzed with grief. She relies on the support of her boyfriend of just over four years ("three and a half," he says before she has to correct him), grad student Christian (Chris Pratt-alike Jack Reynor), who was on the verge of breaking up with her but decided to hold off because the timing wasn't right, given her fragile psychological state. His grad student buddies--Mark (Will Poulter, who co-starred with Reynor in Kathryn Bigelow's underrated DETROIT), Josh (William Jackson Harper), and Swedish Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren)--have been looking forward to a long-planned summer trip to Sweden organized by Pelle, but as it draws closer after Dani's grieving and depressed state goes through winter and spring, Christian has yet to mention the trip to her until she hears the guys talking about it being two weeks away. Ignoring their advice to dump Dani, who they found clingy and needy even before the tragedy that sent her off the deep end ("Get rid of her and find someone who actually likes sex," Mark crassly advises), Christian instead invites her along on the trip, where they'll be heading to a remote, rural area of northern Sweden to visit "Harga," the commune where orphaned Pelle grew up after losing his parents in a fire, to observe their unique solstice celebration that occurs once every 90 years.
At this point, it almost has to be mentioned that, yes, THE WICKER MAN is an obvious influence, but Aster has described MIDSOMMAR as "a breakup movie." It was initially conceived as a more straightforward horror film but fleshed out signifcantly when Aster went through a particularly unpleasant breakup. Dani and Christian's relationship is already on precariously thin ice, and while Christian is there for her and says all the things a supportive boyfriend is supposed to say, Aster proceeds to demonstrate a variety of initially subtle and gradually more overt ways that he's kind of a selfish prick, both with Dani and with his friends. The fact that Aster clearly identifies and empathizes with Dani throughout could be a statement on where Aster feels the blame for that breakup may ultimately lie, but regardless, things never seem completely right among the Harga. At first, Aster presents them as harmless, pagan-esque hippie types but a series of strange occurrences--abetted by the way they indulge their guests with various hallucinogens--have the four Americans plus two Brits, Simon (Archie Madekwe) and Connie (Ellora Torchia), brought to the commune by Pelle's brother Ingmar (Hampus Hallberg), growing more concerned about their safety by the day. Things get dicey when they observe a ritual of exactly how the Harga deal with their elderly, but the red flags are seemingly endless: bizarre dining rituals, a caged bear on the edge of the property, strange symbols painted on walls and carved into rocks, a pyramid-shaped yellow house that they're forbidden to enter, an elder boasting that the Harga "observe the incest taboo" of modern society, and a young Harga woman (Isabelle Grill) flirting with Christian, first from afar but soon in increasingly aggressive ways, including baking her pubic hair into a pie. It isn't until Mark, serving as the Ugly American who's only along on the trip to get drunk, high, and laid, relieves himself on a sacred tree that the Harga stop playing nice and start putting their true plans into action.
MIDSOMMAR isn't an easy film, nor will it do much for the Swedish travel industry. It's extremely ambitious and displays an even higher level of confidence than HEREDITARY, from the Kubrickian shot compositions and edits (there's two great bits that invoke that legendary "bone-to-spaceship" cut in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY), to the obsessively-detailed production design. Important details are inferred rather than specifically spelled-out, both in the artwork and carved symbols spotted in the background throughout and in something as simple as a quick shot of Dani's Ativan prescription, showing that she's already dealing with serious anxiety issues. Aster perhaps tries to juggle too many ideas and story threads (the whole bit with the Harga's deformed oracle is never quite sufficiently explored), but he succeeds in creating a profoundly unsettling atmosphere in what's maybe the darkest and most downbeat film to ever take place almost completely in bright sunlight. Like Collette's work in HEREDITARY, the promising Pugh (LADY MACBETH, OUTLAW KING, FIGHTING WITH MY FAMILY) fearlessly dives into this with a devastating performance of exhausting anguish that just builds to the insane climax, which is where those still onboard will find to be a make-or-break proposition. In the end, it's almost like a Swedish cousin to HEREDITARY. There's a cult, there's a family, there's triumph over grief and a moving forward that's like a weight off Dani's shoulders while at the same time a harrowing descent into uncontrolled hysteria. MIDSOMMAR is distributed by A24, and even by their standards of giving wide releases to defiantly non-commercial fare that frequently results in audience hostility (THE WITCH, IT COMES AT NIGHT, GOOD TIME, and even HEREDITARY to an extent), it might be a bridge too far to ask a mainstream, multiplex audience to go along with a two-and-a-half hour art-house horror film that's a symbol-heavy breakup metaphor given a big summer opening on a long 4th of July holiday weekend. That said, a move of such pure balls is absolutely the A24 we know and love.
HUSSY (UK - 1980) Written and directed by Matthew Chapman. Cast: Helen Mirren, John Shea, Paul Angelis, Murray Salem, Jenny Runacre, Marika Rivera, Patti Boulaye, Daniel Chasin, Charles Yates, Jill Melford, Hal Gallili, William Hootkins, Rupert Frazer, Sandy Ratcliff, April Olrich, Ric Young. (R, 95 mins)
A deep dive into the seedy underbelly of late '70s London, 1980's HUSSY was in regular rotation on Showtime's late-night "After Hours" in the early '80s, thus lumping it in with other legendary softcore staples like THE STUD (1978) and THE BITCH (1979). It's got a decent amount of skin but it isn't as relentlessly tawdry as those two Joan Collins potboilers. It isn't even the trashiest 1980 movie to star Helen Mirren, as she also had CALIGULA in theaters that same year. 1980 also found her co-starring in the British gangster classic THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY, and while the similarities pretty much begin and end with the presence of Mirren, HUSSY more or less abandons the T&A around the midpoint as things take a decidedly darker turn with sketchy criminals and clandestine drug deals. Mirren is Beaty Simons, a high-class London prostitute who works out of a cabaret called The Baron Club. She catches the eye of Emory (John Shea), an American expat who works sound and lights for the club, and on his night off, he makes arrangements for her services despite her insistence that "You're broke and I'm expensive." Though she makes good money, she has dreams of getting out of the life, moving to the country, and owning an antique shop, all part of a plan of establishing a more respectable existence and regaining permanent custody of her ten-year-old son Billy (Daniel Chasin). Emory is running from his own past as well--he's widower whose wife died under mysterious circumstances involving poisoned berries, for which he blames himself for letting her eat. It's a story so heartbreaking that Beaty's immediate response when he tells her in a parked car is, in true softcore fashion, "Make love to me. Right here."
As their relationship grows and Emory bonds with Billy on his Sunday visits and, predictably, has a hard time handling the realities of her job as she comes home smelling of booze and men, their plan of starting a new life runs into a couple of snags. Max (Murray Salem), Emory's shady, flamboyantly gay friend from the States, is in town to set up a lucrative drug deal and wants Emory to be a part of it; and Alex (a terrifying Paul Angelis), an unstable, anger-management case ex from Beaty's past, reappears to pick up where they left off after a stint in either prison or a mental hospital (his story keeps changing and asking for clarification only provokes him). Alex crashes with the two of them at Emory's place and refuses to leave, and even informs Beaty of his intention to kill Emory rather than let her be with him. Realizing that Max is only inviting him along on the drug deal because he needs a fall guy in case it all goes to shit, Emory decides to bring Alex in on it as well, which goes about as smoothly as you'd expect, especially when the perpetually obnoxious Max keeps aggravating and insulting an already volatile Alex.
It's around the halfway-point that HUSSY finally introduces its dual antagonists in Max and Alex. Until then, it focuses on Beaty and Emory, thus confining the "After Hours"-worthy content to the first 45 or so minutes. Mirren classes it up quite a bit and, as in CALIGULA, she isn't shy about disrobing and showing everything. It's too bad she more or less becomes a secondary character once the drug deal takes center stage, but she manages to create a somewhat complex character in Beaty, a woman with a dark past and self-destructive, self-sabotaging tendencies but who's a good person deep down. An acclaimed Broadway actor--he originated the role of Avigdor in the 1975 stage production of YENTL that would be played by Mandy Patinkin in Barbra Streisand's 1983 film--Shea did some TV work (most notably playing Joseph in the 1978 TV movie THE NATIVITY) before making his big-screen debut in HUSSY. He would go on to co-star with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek in Costa-Gavras' 1982 film MISSING, but is perhaps best known these days for his stint as Lex Luthor on the 1993-1997 ABC series LOIS & CLARK: THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN. Cleveland native Salem had small roles in the 1977 TV miniseries JESUS OF NAZARETH and the same year's 007 outing THE SPY WHO LOVED ME. He would abandon acting soon after HUSSY to focus on screenwriting, selling several scripts to Hollywood studios but only seeing one of them produced--the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy KINDERGARTEN COP--before succumbing to AIDS at just 47 in 1998.
HUSSY also marked the debut of British writer/director Matthew Chapman, whose directing career never really took off (his only other notable effort being the 1988 Jennifer Jason Leigh psychological thriller HEART OF MIDNIGHT), but he found some steady work as a screenwriter on projects as varied as the 1992 wife-swapping thriller CONSENTING ADULTS, 1994's gonzo COLOR OF NIGHT, the 2001 Martin Lawrence/Danny DeVito comedy WHAT'S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN? and the 2003 John Grisham adaptation RUNAWAY JURY. Just out on Blu-ray from Twilight Time (because physical media is dead), HUSSY suffers from a seriously abrupt ending, and while "After Hours" insomniacs and pre-pubescent boys probably didn't find it as consistently trashy as THE STUD or THE BITCH (sorry, Mirren doesn't go for a spin on the Joan Collins fuck swing), it does do an effective job of capturing a snapshot of a distinct time and place. The sordid atmosphere of The Baron Club and the denizens it hosts in its own way conveys that vivid sense of empty melancholy that permeated the sweaty, smoke-filled confines of Fontaine Khaled's posh disco Hobo in THE STUD.
This review is dedicated to film historian and Twilight Time founder Nick Redman.
THE BORDER (US - 1982) Directed by Tony Richardson. Written by Deric Washburn, Walon Green and David Freeman. Cast: Jack Nicholson, Harvey Keitel, Valerie Perrine, Warren Oates, Elpidia Carrillo, Shannon Wilcox, Manuel Viescas, Jeff Morris, Dirk Blocker, Mike Gomez, Lonny Chapman, Stacey Pickren, Floyd Levine, James Jeter, Alan Fudge, William Russ, Gary Grubbs, Lupe Ontiveros. (R, 108 mins) Released in late January 1982, THE BORDER is a film that remains somewhat prescient today given the immigration debate, endless talk of a US/Mexico border wall, and the ongoing humanitarian crisis with family separation and migrant children being held in detention centers. It was one of a cluster of similarly-themed films released in the early 1980s that dealt with immigration issues (with varying degrees of seriousness, if you consider Cheech & Chong's 1985 Springsteen-spoofing hit single "Born in East L.A." leading to Cheech Marin's fashionably late 1987 movie of the same name), including the 1980 thriller BORDERLINE with Charles Bronson as a border patrol officer going undercover as an illegal alien to search for a killer (Ed Harris in one of his earliest roles) targeting border-crossing immigrants; the little-seen 1980 public domain staple BORDER COP, with Telly Savalas as a border patrol officer taking on corrupt colleagues; and the acclaimed 1983 drama EL NORTE, an unforgettable and deeply moving saga of the immigrant experience. BORDER COP (also known as BLOOD BARRIER) skipped theaters and debuted on CBS in 1988 and shares some surface similarities with THE BORDER, which was shot in the summer and fall of 1980 but underwent reshoots in 1981 when test audiences disliked the downbeat ending. It was an unusual project for British filmmaker Tony Richardson, best known for the angry young man classics LOOK BANK IN ANGER (1959) and THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE RUNNER (1962) and Albert Finney's 1963 breakout TOM JONES. With a script co-written by Walon Green (THE WILD BUNCH), the presence of Warren Oates in the cast, a score by Ry Cooder, and its gritty subject matter, THE BORDER seems like something tailor-made for a Sam Peckinpah or a Walter Hill rather than Richardson, who hadn't made a Hollywood movie since the 1965 satire THE LOVED ONE, not counting the 1975 Diana Ross vehicle MAHOGANY, which he started before being fired early in production by producer Berry Gordy, who ended up directing it himself.
In one of his more restrained performances that recalls his character driven, pre-CUCKOO'S NEST work of the early 1970s and foreshadows 2001's underrated THE PLEDGE, Jack Nicholson is Charlie Smith, a bored, coasting immigration officer in L.A. He's got a nice arrangement going with local sweatshops, who let him pick some illegal laborers to haul in every now and then without incident. Charlie's wife Marcy (Valerie Perrine) is tired of living in their double wide and wants more, specifically a duplex in El Paso that they'd share with her high school friend Savannah (Shannon Wilcox), whose husband Cat (Harvey Keitel) is a border patrol officer. Charlie transfers to El Paso and finds patrolling the Rio Grande at the Texas/Mexico border proves to be far more dangerous work: his first night on the job, his partner Hawker (Alan Fudge) is killed by gunfire in a skirmish with coyotes leading migrants across the border. Cat tries to let him in on a lucrative side deal involving human trafficking he has going on with other officers and their gruff boss Red (Oates), but it's a line Charlie won't cross. That is, until Marcy's free spending and department store charge account--she gets a new waterbed, furniture, and a pool to create a "dream house" that Charlie can't afford--cause him to reconsider. He eventually rights himself on the path to redemption when Manuel (Mike Gomez), a sleazy coyote on Red's and Cat's payroll, steals a baby belonging to detained illegal Maria (Elpidia Carrillo)--a regular fixture in roundups and sent back across the border--and sells it to an American couple for $25,000.
Much closer to the low-key, Bob Rafelson-style character pieces that helped establish Nicholson as a star a decade or so earlier, THE BORDER--which also counts DEER HUNTER Oscar-winner Deric Washburn and David Freeman (STREET SMART) among its writers--found a certain degree of studio interference when Universal demanded a new ending be shot after screening poorly with test audiences. The revised ending offers an abrupt shift in tone from character piece to revenge thriller, with Charlie retrieving the baby and making a daring run across the border into Mexico to return it to Maria, but not before a couple of wild shootouts that feature one of the bad guys accidentally blasting his own face off with a shotgun. The entire climax--with Keitel's Cat and Oates' Red setting a trap for Charlie--seems every bit the rushed and truncated compromise that it is, culminating in a happy ending that's freeze-framed like the conclusion of a TV show. It's still a solid film with good supporting performances, particularly Keitel and Carrillo, but one gets the feeling that if it was made even a few years earlier, the original downbeat ending--with Charlie killing his corrupt colleagues and going to prison--would've been left intact.
Warren Oates (1928-1982)
Nicholson is excellent, and in a move that almost seems designed to placate his fans after THE SHINING, is afforded one vintage "Jack" moment when he gets so enraged during a cookout that Marcy insisted on hosting--where his drunk co-workers start a food fight, wasting everything he's purchased--that he wheels the grill with flaming kebabs into the pool, declaring "Soup's on!" Just out on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber (because physical media is dead), THE BORDER is a sincere film diminished somewhat by studio-mandated changes. It didn't do well at the box office in 1982 and while it stayed on TV and cable and was represented on home video enough in the ensuing years to keep it from fading into obscurity, it's a film that's rarely referenced in discussions of the careers of Nicholson or Richardson. It was also the last work that Warren Oates would see released in his lifetime: the grizzled screen veteran and Peckinpah bestie (BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA) died of a heart attack on April 3, 1982, just two months after THE BORDER hit theaters, with years of hard living making the 53-year-old actor look a decade older. A workhorse to the end, Oates, who got a bit of a late career bump displaying his comedic slow burn chops as the no-nonsense Sgt. Hulka in the 1981 Bill Murray smash hit STRIPES, had four projects in the can when he died: the CBS miniseries THE BLUE AND THE GRAY aired in November 1982, while the feature films BLUE THUNDER and TOUGH ENOUGH would bow in the summer of 1983. He also starred in an episode of the syndicated Roald Dahl anthology series TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED that was shot shortly before his death but didn't air until 1985.
First up is Brugues' "The Thing in the Woods," where Samantha (Sarah Withers) sees herself in what appears to be the climax of a slasher film as she's relentlessly pursued by a shielded maniac known as "The Welder." It starts out as a winking riff on body count thrillers with a wicked sense of humor (a blood-soaked Samantha seeking refuge in a house and screaming "It's not my blood...it's Lizzie's, Maggie's, Tony's, Carl's, Jamie's, Ron's, Stephanie's..."), but soon switches gears and becomes something else entirely. It's wildly unpredictable, genuinely inspired, and the strongest segment overall. The best thing Dante's done in quite some time, "Mirari" finds insecure Anna (Zarah Mahler), self-conscious about a facial scar she got in a car accident when she was two years old, being talked into cosmetic surgery by her seemingly well-meaning fiance David (Mark Grossman). He takes her to Mirari, an exclusive facility run by renowned miracle worker Dr. Leneer (Richard Chamberlain), who allegedly did wonders with work on David's mother. Kitamura's "Mashit" isn't a complete success, but it's a well-crafted homage to a specific type of Italian horror film, blending elements of Lucio Fulci's early '80s gothic horrors and Bruno Mattei's THE OTHER HELL. It's set at a Catholic boarding school where a priest with some dark secrets (longtime GENERAL HOSPITAL star Maurice Benard) and a nun (Mariela Garriga) with whom he's having a secret fling face a reckoning in the form of a demonic entity called "Mashit," who possesses the children and drives them to suicide. It doesn't quite come together in the end, but it has some vividly Fulci-esque vibe (tears of blood a la CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD) and a score by Aldo Shllaku that's seriously indebted to Goblin and Fabio Frizzi.
Slade's "This Way To Egress" details the psychological meltdown of Helen (Elizabeth Reaser), as she waits for an appointment with her shrink (Adam Godley) while dealing with the fallout of being left by her husband (a phoned-in voice cameo by Patrick Wilson). It's a black & white descent into madness as the shrink's office opens portals to a disturbing, disorienting netherworld that looks like something not unlike ERASERHEAD meets PAN'S LABYRINTH. Like "Mashit," "Egress" has some interesting ideas (and an intense, powerful performance by Reaser) and some startling imagery, but never quite coalesces into a complete piece. Last and unquestionably least is Garris' "Dead," with teenage piano prodigy Riley (Faly Rakotohavana) shot and left for dead after a carjacker (Orson Chaplin, the son of SUPERMAN producer Ilya Salkind and Charlie Chaplin's daughter Jane) kills his parents (Annabeth Gish, Daryl C. Brown) and flees the scene. A hospitalized Riley starts seeing dead people as their souls wanders the hospital halls. He not only has to contend with the spirit of his mother encouraging him to let go and join her in the afterlife, but there's also the carjacker, who keeps showing up at the hospital to finish what he started. Alternately riffing on THE SIXTH SENSE and VISITING HOURS, "Dead" is exactly that, and anyone assembling a horror anthology knows you don't put the weakest story last. Clearly, "The Thing in the Woods" would've been the ideal closer, but hey, I guess project leader Mick Garris thought long and hard about it and concluded that contributing director Mick Garris' segment was the best choice. I'd be shocked if Rourke worked more than a day on this (he doesn't even appear until 45 minutes in, appropriately introduced after the conclusion of Dante's plastic surgery segment), but true to form, NIGHTMARE CINEMA is ultimately a mixed bag: there's one great story, then a very good one, then two flawed but interesting offerings before "Dead" lands with a resounding thud. You can't help but think the whole movie would seem better by the end if the order of the stories was completely reversed.
ANNA (France - 2019) Written and directed by Luc Besson. Cast: Sasha Luss, Helen Mirren, Cillian Murphy, Luke Evans, Lera Abova, Eric Godon, Andrew Howard, Jean-Baptiste Puech, Sasha Petrov, Adrian Can, Jan Oliver Schroder, Eric Lampaert. (R, 119 mins) Managing to emerge generally unscathed from sexual assault allegations by a total of nine accusers after Paris prosecutors dropped charges in February 2019 stemming from Dutch writer and comedian Sand Van Roy's claims that he repeatedly raped her, French auteur Luc Besson is back with the throwback espionage thriller ANNA. The allegations against Besson broke just after ANNA finished production, and while watching it, it's hard not to think of the disconnect between the accusations and his recurrent theme of strong, ass-kicking women going back to 1990's highly influential LA FEMME NIKITA. ANNA is largely another retread of the same story, one that seems especially played out considering recent films like ATOMIC BLONDE and RED SPARROW, both inspired to some degree by LA FEMME NIKITA and mining very similar territory in the waning days of the Cold War. The star is Russian supermodel Sasha Luss, who had a small, motion-capturesupporting role in Besson's megabudget 2017 sci-fi epic VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS. Luss' Anna is cut from the same cloth as Besson's first wife Anne Parillaud's title character in LA FEMME NIKITA and the kind of cult favorite badasses that his third wife Milla Jovovich played in the RESIDENT EVIL series and other actioners after achieving stardom in his 1997 film THE FIFTH ELEMENT. Luss has a similar background and career path as Jovovich and even resembles her at times, which only adds to the feeling of familiarity and wheel-spinning with ANNA.
Opening with a prologue where nine CIA operatives are killed in Moscow in 1985 and their decapitated heads sent back home to their boss Leonard Miller (Cillian Murphy), ANNA repeatedly jumps back and forth to various points from 1987 to 1990. In 1990, Anna Poliatova (Luss) is selling Russian dolls at a Moscow marketplace when she's spotted by a French modeling agent (Jean-Baptiste Puech) and whisked away to Paris. Her star soon rises and she gets involved with wealthy Russian Oleg (Andrew Howard), who deals arms to Syria and Libya. Just as they're about to consummate their relationship, she pulls out a gun and shoots him in the head. Cut back to 1987, when an orphaned, junkie Anna was recruited by KGB agent Alex Tchenkov (Luke Evans) and put under the stern tutelage of ruthless, unsympathetic, chain-smoking spymaster Olga (Helen Mirren, looking like Fran Lebowitz's stunt double). Under the guise of an up-and-coming supermodel, Anna is given assignments of escalating importance, rubbing out whoever Olga, Tchenkov, and KGB chief Vassiliev (Eric Godon) say, until the assassination of Oleg puts her on Miller's radar.
The time jumps and the twists and turns grow increasingly absurd and it gets more difficult to keep track of what is taking place when, though Besson does put it to clever use as all the pieces--eventually, finally--start falling into place. At this point, it's hard to take any thriller seriously when it uses chess as a metaphor (cue Anna gravely intoning "Checkmate!" as she blows someone's brains out), and Besson almost seems to be glibly winking at the audience, whether it's a long modeling-and-murder montage set to INXS' "Need You Tonight" or constant anachronisms that have to be intentional, like laptops and wi-fi in Anna's shithole Moscow apartment in 1987, and flash drives and cell phones in 1990. But then he strangely tosses in an era-appropriate pager for Miller near the end of the film, which seems peculiarly antiquated considering all the advanced technology everyone's been shown using to that point. Murphy and Evans are fine as flip sides of the same coin, both in their careers and in their simultaneous hot-and-heavy relationships with Anna, while Mirren is under no illusion that this is John Le Carre material and enjoyably hams it up for an easy paycheck. The statuesque Luss handles herself well in the action scenes, particularly where she takes on an entire restaurant full of goons in pursuit of a target, but she's a terrible actress otherwise, never once convincing you that she's capable of manipulating the KGB and the CIA. In the end, ANNA is nothing you haven't seen before and Besson is more or less ripping himself off. It's utterly insignificant but it's never boring and goes down like harmless junk food from Besson's EuropaCorp action assembly line, the kind of movie you'll stop on and end up watching on a lazy weekend afternoon a year from now when it starts running on cable in perpetuity for the rest of your life.
