SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK (US/Canada/China - 2019) Directed by Andre Ovredal. Written by Dan Hageman and Kevin Hageman. Cast: Zoe Colletti, Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush, Gil Bellows, Dean Norris, Lorraine Toussaint, Austin Zajur, Natalie Ganzhorn, Austin Abrams, Kathleen Pollard, Javier Botet, Troy James, Mark Steger. (PG-13, 108 mins) Based on the beloved trilogy of YA books written by Alvin Schwartz and vividly illustrated by Stephen Gammell, SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK takes some of the series' more famous tales of terror ("The Big Toe," "The Red Spot," "Me-Tie-Dough-ty Walker!") and weaves them into a more ambitious narrative rather than going for the anthology structure. It's also got the fingerprints of producer Guillermo del Toro all over it, especially with some of the nightmarish monsters recalling The Pale Man from PAN'S LABYRINTH and the title character in the GDT-produced MAMA, who was played by Javier Botet, called upon once again by del Toro, this time to play a corpse searching for his missing toe. Though he had a hand in shaping the script in its early stages (along with Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, the duo behind the FEAST and THE COLLECTOR franchises, as well as writing SAWs IV-through-VII), del Toro farmed out directing duties to Andre Ovredal, director of the found-footage cult hit TROLLHUNTER and the terrifying THE AUTOPSY OF JANE DOE. Despite the source being a series of books written in the 1980s and being in various stages of development for several years, it's a safe assumption that SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK probably wouldn't exist in this cinematic form were it not for the massive success of both IT and the Netflix series STRANGER THINGS. Comparisons are inevitable and observing that this is kinda just a more age-appropriate IT that tweens and younger teens can get a ticket to is an argument that's not without merit, but SCARY STORIES manages to be its own beast. That's due in large part to an appealing cast of young actors and it being a rare throwback sort-of project that actually conveys genuine affection for what it's doing beyond misremembered nostalgia and the resurrection of a short-lived disaster of a reformulated soft drink that anybody who was conscious during 1985 and still of sound mind today can verify that absolutely fucking nobody liked. Nobody.
Set in 1968 in the small Pennsylvania town of Mill Valley Township with an America at war in Vietnam and in the days leading up to the election of Richard Nixon, SCARY STORIES centers on three outcast teenagers--aspiring writer and horror fanatic Stella (Zoe Colletti), lanky, sarcastic Auggie (Gabriel Rush), and goofball jokester Chuck (Austin Zajur)--who are introduced on Halloween throwing a flaming bag of shit (Chuck's, in case you were wondering) into the lap of jock bully Tommy (Austin Abrams) as he passes by them in his car. Fleeing for their lives, they end up at a drive-in showing NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and hide out in the car of Ramon (Michael Garza), an 18-year-old drifter who drove into town earlier that day. Stella talks Ramon into taking them to the shuttered and reportedly haunted Bellows mansion on the edge of town, home to the once-powerful family that built Mill Valley. Tales have been passed down for generations about Sarah Bellows, the black sheep of the family and all-purpose Mill Valley urban legend who was kept in a locked room in the house after she allegedly poisoned some local children at the turn of the 20th century. While roaming around the mansion, Stella and the others find the secret room and in it, Sarah Bellows' book of scary stories, handwritten in her own blood. Stella takes the book home, where she lives with her dad (Dean Norris) after her mom left them years earlier, the cause of some cruel rumors that still persist, and finds that a new story is writing itself--in blood--in the pages of the book. Sarah is seeking vengeance for the theft of the book by punishing all who were there when it was taken from the house--including Tommy, who followed them and spray-painted a racial slur on Ramon's car, and Chuck's older sister Ruth (Natalie Ganzhorn), who's secretly been going out with Tommy. Using this set-up, SCARY STORIES takes some of those more popular tales from Schwartz's books and uses them as comeuppances against Stella and her friends, like a local folklore-based FINAL DESTINATION that condemns all of them as Sarah Bellows will not stop until she has her revenge on them and the entire town of Mill Valley Township.
As a 46-year-old child of the '80s, SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK feels like the kind of movie I would've seen with my dad in 1984 and still have an affectionate soft spot for today. It's the kind of "crowd" movie that you don't see much of these days, where you can sense that nervous communal tittering going across the theater when everyone knows something's about to happen. Ovredal does a really good job of playing the audience, often delivering the payoff jolt right before or right after you've been conditioned to expect it. It's about as icky as a PG-13 horror film can get, but like the books, it's the kind of grossness where the eew-factor provides much dark-humored fun (a beef stew with a toe and an eyeball among the ingredients; a seriously infected spider bite that's about to explode on a girl's face), and it works all the creepy tropes (scarecrows, ghosts, long, ominous corridors in a dark basement with something approaching from the distance) in an effective fashion. The weaving in of a Vietnam subtext lends some social commentary to the proceedings (and the setting allows the use of Donovan's always-creepy "Season of the Witch"), but the attempted contemporary allegorical implication doesn't really land, even if it adds some texture to Garza's character and helps explain why the local sheriff (Gil Bellows, presumably no relation to the Mill Valley Township Bellows) is giving him such a hard time. A film that would've been better suited to hit theaters near Halloween instead of the second week of August (it's probably coming out now so it doesn't get lost in the shuffle with next month's IT sequel), SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK is a fun ride with solid scares and an engaging cast playing well-written characters, the kind of goofy horror crowd-pleaser that Joe Dante (GREMLINS), Fred Dekker (NIGHT OF THE CREEPS), or maybe Tom Holland (FRIGHT NIGHT) would've made in the mid '80s.
Originally titled KURSK, the Luc Besson-produced THE COMMAND is a strangely inert dramatization of the Kursk disaster in 2000, when two explosions--one small, followed by a second large enough to register on the Richter scale--sank a nuclear-powered Russian submarine that was part of a training exercise on the Barents Sea. Of the 118 officers onboard, 23 initially survived the explosions but all perished within the next couple of days due in large part to the inexcusably slow response of a Russian government desperate to save face and avoid national humiliation. The Russian Navy even stubbornly refused offers of rescue assistance from both England and Norway, who had ships in the vicinity that could be there in a matter of hours. The Kursk disaster was a huge embarrassment for Vladimir Putin, who became president just four months earlier and was roundly criticized for his handling of the tragedy. Adapted from Robert Moore's 2002 book A Time to Die: The Untold Story of the Kursk Tragedy by screenwriter Robert Rodat (SAVING PRIVATE RYAN), THE COMMAND doesn't have the courage of its convictions--or the 118 men who died--in its decision to make no mention of Putin at all, instead letting faulty, outdated equipment take the blame and the fictional composite Admiral Petrenko (Max von Sydow) serve as the villain, an old guard, bureaucratic company man overruling fleet commander Admiral Grudzinsky (TONI ERDMANN's Peter Simonischek), refusing help from British Commodore Russell (Colin Firth), and holding press conferences where he's forced to shout down angry wives and order them removed from the room when they start making a scene. Despite the kid-gloves treatment of Putin, it's these scenes that are the strongest in THE COMMAND, with the mutual respect between Russell and Grudzinsky tossed aside when Grudzinsky is removed from the situation after he goes rogue and takes England and Norway up on their offers to assist with a rescue. That rescue never happens because Petrenko decides Russia's honor--and the guarding any potential military secrets the rescuers might encounter--takes precedence over human lives ("They know what they signed up for," an unknown voice is heard saying over the phone). That voice is as close as THE COMMAND gets to a Putin appearance, as all scenes involving the president, reportedly a major supporting character in Rodat's script, were tossed in the shredder before shooting even began.
The submarine sequences aren't exactly the second coming of DAS BOOT, largely because we already know the outcome. There's some rudimentary characterization in the early going with a rushed wedding sequence that evokes memories of THE DEER HUNTER while showing the relative poverty of the Russian military in the way the officers make so little money that they have to pawn their watches to pay for champagne for the reception. Once on the sub, actors like Matthias Schoenaerts and August Diehl do solid work as men displaying valor and fighting to stay alive (and Schoenaerts goes above and beyond, holding his breath in a long scene underwater), but it's the scenes above water, with Schoenaerts' pregnant wife (Lea Seydoux) being coldly stonewalled at every turn in her search for news, that have a more dramatic impact. With an abundance of dodgy greenscreen and video-gamey CGI, it's clear that director Thomas Vinterberg (who worked with Schoenaerts on 2015's FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD) has ventured as far as he can from the minimalist "Dogme '95" movement he co-founded with his much more controversial friend Lars von Trier. But he still indulges in pointless wankery like the first 20 minutes of the film being in a windowboxed 1.66 aspect ratio, then opening up to 2.35 for the next 80 minutes before returning to the windowboxing for the last act. It might make artistic sense if there was a rhyme or reason to it--like one aspect ratio for the submarine scenes and another for above water--but that's not the case. Filmed in 2017, THE COMMAND also suffers from inadvertent bad timing in its eventual straight-to-VOD US release, as the harrowing HBO miniseries CHERNOBYL did an infinitely more effective job of depicting the indifference of the Russian government to the suffering of its people in a devastating tragedy. The late Michael Nyqvist (THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, JOHN WICK) succumbed to cancer during production, and while Vinterberg said the actor completed his scenes before his death and initial festival screenings mentioned him being in it, he appears to have been cut from the final release despite his name remaining at the very end of the closing credits cast crawl. (PG-13, 119 mins)
EL CHICANO (US - 2019)
Advertised as the first Latino superhero movie, EL CHICANO attracted some attention during its brief theatrical run when producer/co-writer/internet tough guy Joe Carnahan (NARC, SMOKIN' ACES, THE GREY) read some negative reviews and promptly began attacking those critics on social media. He ended up deleting his Twitter account and eventually admitted he was "punching down" to generate publicity for the movie. A dick move that's pretty much on-brand, but it didn't help, as it opened in 11th place and topped out at 605 screens, grossing just over $1 million. In the end, EL CHICANO is hardly a barrio BLACK PANTHER, as Carnahan and director/co-writer Ben Hernandez Bray (a veteran stuntman and the second unit director on several Carnahan films) don't really do anything interesting beyond setting their story in East L.A. In a prologue set 20 years ago, twins Diego and Pedro and their friend Jose witness masked avenger El Chicano brutally murder Jose's father, crime lord Shadow (Emilio Rivera). In the present day, Diego (Raul Castillo) is a dedicated cop long-estranged from Pedro, who chose a life of crime and has just committed suicide shortly after being paroled. Diego and his hothead partner Martinez (Jose Pablo Cantillo) are told by an informer (Noel Gugliemi) that Pedro didn't kill himself, but rather, was part of a massacre orchestrated by Jose, who took over his father's East L.A. empire and now goes by Shotgun (David Castaneda). Diego discovers a trail of clues that Pedro has left for him, revealing a storage unit where Pedro kept everything he needed for his plan to resurrect the long-dormant legend of "El Chicano" and rid the area of the likes of Shotgun once and for all. Unable to nail Shadow by the book and watched over by his no-bullshit captain (George Lopez), Diego is inspired to pick up with Pedro left off and become the new El Chicano, especially when Shadow partners with Mexican cartel boss El Gallo (Sal Lopez) and his son Jaws (Roberto Fabian Garcia, aka Chicano rap star Mr. Criminal, who also performs the theme song) to tighten his stranglehold on the area.
The hard-R EL CHICANO, which also counts Carnahan bro Frank Grillo as a co-producer, gets off to a decent start, but soon becomes a rote checklist of genre cliches and imagery swiped from other comic book and graphic novel films. It leans heavily on THE PUNISHER and especially THE DARK KNIGHT by the end, which sets up a sequel that looks pretty doubtful given the tepid response from critics and audiences. Castillo does a decent Christian Bale impression in his stoical performance, but Castaneda doesn't get the space to create a complex character like he did in the JCVD thriller WE DIE YOUNG. The familiar faces in the supporting cast aren't put to good use--Rivera and Gugliemi are killed off shortly after they appear, Aimee Garcia (GEORGE LOPEZ, DEXTER) is wasted in a thankless role as Diego's wife, and Mexican telenovela star and El Chapo bestie Kate del Castillo turns up at the end to set up that unlikely sequel. (R, 108 mins)
BODY AT BRIGHTON ROCK (US - 2019)
Having cut her teeth on horror anthologies starting with a producer credit on V/H/S, writer/director Roxanne Benjamin helmed one of strongest segments of SOUTHBOUND and the weakest of XX. She splits the difference with her feature-length debut BODY AT BRIGHTON ROCK, which takes a terrific premise and doesn't really do anything interesting with it. Relative newcomer Karina Fontes is well-cast as Wendy, a part-time summer guide at the fictional Brighton Rock National Park (the film was shot in Idyllwild, CA). Wendy doesn't take the job as seriously as she should--she's always late for work and is considered a lightweight "indoor kid" by her more experienced colleagues--and as the season's winding down into fall, she decides to prove to the naysayers, namely her friend Maya (Emily Althaus), that she can hack it by offering to take Maya's assignment for the day: switching out seasonal signs and postings along one of the park's rougher trails. Wendy is absent-minded and easily-distracted, so of course she misplaces her map, gets lost, and wanders off the trail. She sends a selfie to Maya from the peak of a rock formation, to which Maya replies "Who's behind you in the pic?" Wendy sees what she's talking about in a nearby ravine: a dead body. She tries to call for help but killed her phone battery taking selfies and playing '80s music (Oingo Boingo and Expose on the soundtrack) while she danced along the trails all day, and she's in a remote area where radio reception is poor. What she manages to ascertain is that it's getting dark, they don't know where she is, and she's to stand guard over what might be a crime scene until the authorities can start looking for her in the morning. Then affable but vaguely sinister hiker Red (Casey Adams) shows up.
The initial set-up of BODY AT BRIGHTON ROCK seems primed for an effective survivalist B-movie where "indoor kid" Wendy grows up and sees what she's made of. While it's no fault of Fontes, who does a good job in what's effectively a solo show after the first ten minutes (the only established cast member is veteran character actor John Getz, seen briefly as a local sheriff), Wendy's hard to root for as she makes one dumb decision after another. Offended that her co-workers think she can't handle the trail--and they're absolutely right--she proceeds to do everything possible to make her predicament worse, with the low point being when she freaks out and thinks something's behind her and ends up misting herself with capsaicin bear spray. Benjamin wrings some suspense out of shadows, breezes, and other random nature sounds and uses some effective editing techniques, but once the premise is established, BODY AT BRIGHTON ROCK just spins its wheels to an unsatisfying conclusion. (R, 87 mins)
MOON IN SCORPIO (US - 1987) Directed by Gary Graver. Written by Robert S. Aiken. Cast: Britt Ekland, John Phillip Law, William Smith, Lewis Van Bergen, April Wayne, Robert Quarry, Jillian Kesner, James Booth, Donna Kei Benz, Don Scribner, Bruno Marcotulli (R, 87 mins) "Moon in Scorpio...what does it mean?" That's the question asked by strait-jacketed heroine Linda (Britt Ekland) at the beginning of MOON IN SCORPIO, and like her, you still won't have an answer when it's over. One of the worst slasher films of the 1980s, MOON IN SCORPIO, just out on Blu-ray from Scorpion (because physical media is dead), squanders a more-than-capable B-movie cast in an amateurishly-shot and excruciatingly dull mishmash from director Gary Graver. A veteran cinematographer on drive-in and grindhouse fare going back to the 1960s--in his early days, he was part of the Al Adamson stock company, shooting SATAN'S SADISTS and DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN before moving on to some New World-era Roger Corman productions--Graver (1938-2006) would occasionally helm mainstream exploitation like the 1981 Cameron Mitchell trucker actioner TEXAS LIGHTNING and the HALLOWEEN-inspired 1982 slasher film TRICK OR TREATS, in addition to having a long career directing hardcore porn under the name "Robert McCallum." But to present-day film nerds, he's best-known for his association with Orson Welles in the 1970s, which has earned him a certain degree of cred in cineaste circles. Graver struck up a friendship with Welles after contacting him out of the blue and expressing a desire to work for him. This occurred in early 1970 when the auteur was beginning work on THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND, which wouldn't be completed and released until 2018, long after Welles, Graver, and a good chunk of the creative and acting personnel passed on. Graver was a loyal Welles inner-circler in this latter phase of Welles' life and career, serving as an assistant and uncredited co-director on 1973's F FOR FAKE and other assorted projects left in various states of completion. Happy to be an apprentice to a master and correctly assuming he wouldn't be getting paid, Graver made ends meet by taking cinematography and directing gigs where he could get them, eventually relying on the hardcore porn industry to pay the bills. At one point during THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND's on-again/off-again production that lasted until 1976, Welles gifted Graver the Oscar he won for co-writing 1941's CITIZEN KANE, which Graver held on to until he reached a financially-strapped period of his life in the 1990s and sold it for $50,000, a move that eventually led to him being sued by Welles' daughter Beatrice.
Graver with his mentor Orson Welles
Until his death, Graver was one of many people involved in the long completion process of the infamously unfinished THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND. Welles died in 1985, and Graver probably could've used his help on MOON IN SCORPIO, a dismal slasher outing co-produced by '80s B action stalwart Fred Olen Ray (ARMED RESPONSE, CYCLONE). It was released straight-to-video in late 1987 with some admittedly great artwork on the VHS box that could be found in any video store well into the '90s. As was the case with his mercurial mentor on so many of his own projects, Graver clashed with the money men--in this case Trans-World Entertainment head Moshe Diamant--during the film's production and eventually had the film taken away from him in post, which was probably a Welles-ian badge of honor. Diamant didn't like the supernatural angle of the script by Robert S. Aiken (an unsuccessful flash-in-the-pan actor briefly known as "Ford Dunhill" in the late '50s when he was being groomed as a Rock Hudson clone for about an hour and a half before appearing under his real name in a couple of Russ Meyer films a decade later), and instructed Graver to make it a straight-up slasher movie. When Graver disregarded his marching orders, Diamant recut the film in his absence, resulting in complete incoherence, though it's really hard to imagine MOON IN SCORPIO being good even under the most ideal circumstances.
The plot has Ekland's Linda in a psych ward, babbling about a ghost ship after being found alone on an abandoned yacht. She tells attending shrink Dr. Khorda (Robert Quarry) that she was on the yacht for her honeymoon with her husband Allen (John Phillip Law), who surprised her on their wedding day with...a trip on a yacht with his Vietnam buddies Burt (William Smith) and Mark (Lewis Van Bergen, looking like SNL-era Dennis Miller) and their annoying girlfriends? Linda is understandably puzzled, especially as Allen has had a fear of water since the war, and still struggles with PTSD from an incident involving Burt murdering a Vietnamese woman in cold blood. Mark's much-younger squeeze Isabel (April Wayne) constantly reminds everyone that "The moon is in Scorpio, you know," while Burt and his booze-swilling girlfriend Claire (Graver's wife Jillian Kesner, star of FIRECRACKER and RAW FORCE) seem to be lost in their own community theater version of WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? If MOON IN SCORPIO accomplishes nothing else (and trust me, it doesn't), you at least get to hear the wonderfully gravelly Smith, who constantly sounds like he's gargling glass shards, grunt to a frequently-topless Kesner, "Hey, lay off the hooch, will ya?" thus saving it from complete ruin.
It takes about 45 of the film's 87 minutes before they're even on the yacht, and eventually, they find themselves being offed one-by-one by a possible stowaway, a knife-and-harpoon-wielding maniac. Apparently, Graver's initial cut, from Aiken's script, dealt with the trip being haunted by the vengeful spirit of the dead Vietnamese woman. That's vaguely hinted at here and in the scenes with Ekland and Quarry, where she's talking about the yacht being possessed. But none of that means anything since Diamant turned it into a Namsploitation-tinged slasher movie that offers some over-the-top gore but little in the way of suspense, since it's pretty easy to figure out the killer by simple process of elimination. Ekland was never mistaken for a great actress in her prime, though she could always get by (she was in THE WICKER MAN, after all), but still, she's terrible here, and she gets no help from the laughable dialogue ("My honeymoon turned out to be a nightmare...on a death ship!"). Much of the time, MOON IN SCORPIO resembles an L.A.-shot Jess Franco film, complete with glaring gaffes (watch Kesner fill her gin glass she just filled in the previous shot and say the same line of dialogue over again, and Van Bergen's name is misspelled "Louis" in the credits), bizarre supporting characters (why are James Booth and Donna Kei Benz even in this?) and a flashback Vietnam skirmish--augmented by grainy, mismatched, decades-old documentary combat stock footage (in 19-fucking-87!)--looks like it was hastily staged in a park down the street from Graver's house. There's one big laugh that's probably intentional (a weirdo private eye played by Don Scribner is made out to be a total badass and gets harpooned about ten seconds after he's introduced), and Smith and Kesner are trying to make something out of nothing, and while MOON IN SCORPIO looks better than it has any business looking on this strong candidate for the Buyer's Remorse Blu-ray of 2019, this is decidedly not a long-buried classic that's been patiently waiting to be discovered, no matter how tight Gary Graver was with Orson Welles.
THE RED SEA DIVING RESORT (Canada/US - 2019) Written and directed by Gideon Raff. Cast: Chris Evans, Haley Bennett, Alessandro Nivola, Ben Kingsley, Greg Kinnear, Michael Kenneth Williams, Michiel Huisman, Alex Hassell, Mark Ivanir, Chris Chalk, Danny Keogh, Yossi Vasa, Thabo Bopape, Anele Matoti, Stephen Mofokeng, Karl Thaning, Reabetswe Modega. (Unrated, 130 mins) "Inspired by real events," the Netflix Original film THE RED SEA DIVING RESORT is a very generalized--all of the characters are fictitious--chronicle of Operation Brothers, a recently declassified Israeli plot to transport Ethiopian Jews to Jerusalem under the cover of an abandoned vacation resort in Sudan. The idea is concocted in 1979 by (fictional) Mossad agent Ari Levinson (Chris Evans), the kind of loose cannon who barges into the office of his boss Levin (Ben Kingsley, acting like an Israeli Frank McRae) and is read the riot act about his hot-dogging ways and how he needs to start playing by the rules. Levinson has been in contact with Kadebe (Michael Kenneth Williams), who's been tirelessly and mostly unsuccessfully working to smuggle refugees out of Ethiopia to the promised land of Israel. Levinson's plan: lease the Red Sea Diving Resort, a dilapidated and vacant seaside vacation spot, from the Sudanese government using an Israeli military shell company based in Zurich, smuggle the refugees into the resort and quickly move them out with help of the Israeli Navy, positioned a ways offshore. Levin and Mossad chief Barack Isaacs (Mark Ivanir) are initially against the idea but soon conclude that it's so crazy that it just might work. Levinson needs a team, so he puts together a crack unit of like-minded Mossad badasses, and to do that, it's gonna take a montage: Rachel Reiter (Haley Bennett), who's introduced with her own synth score like she just walked in from a Luc Besson movie; Jake Wolf (Michiel Huisman) and Max Rose (Alex Hassell), both pretty non-descript, with skills that aren't exactly clear; and Levinson's old friend Sammy Navon (Alessandro Nivola), a doctor in civilian life, and who bailed on him before over his impulsive, reckless decision-making.
After resorting to bribery with a corrupt but good-natured Sudan government official and Mr. Pibb superfan (Thabo Bopape steals every scene he's in), the crew goes about setting up their operation at the resort, but something unexpected happens: a busload of German tourists read about the Red Sea Diving Resort and arrive to check in. Knowing that refusing to accommodate them might attract unwanted attention from the Sudanese government and the ruthless general (Chris Chalk) who commands the area, they're forced to keep up the ruse that it's a functioning resort. It's here where the film more or less becomes an unlikely mash-up of MUNICH, ARGO, and the 1986 Robin Williams dud CLUB PARADISE (and Kingsley's presence is an obvious nod to SCHINDLER'S LIST), as vacationers arrive and we're treated to more montages set to the likes of Imagination's "Just an Illusion" (remember that from the closing credits of the great F/X?) and, for some reason, Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf," which Nivola's character also plays on an acoustic guitar in a scene set in 1981, when the song wasn't even a hit until early 1983.
Its heart is in the right place, and taken on its own terms of entertainment first and historical accuracy second, THE RED SEA DIVING RESORT is engrossing, despite its playing fast and loose with the facts. Kadebe (a composite of several real people) also serves as the narrator and there's certainly an argument to be made that an equally compelling story could've been told from his end, which is how it actually starts until Williams takes half the movie off after Kadebe introduces Levinson with a degree of awestruck wonder that it stops just short of declaring him a white savior (only Levinson is brave enough to rescue a little boy left behind while all the Ethiopian refugees stand there gobsmacked by his derring-do). Operation Brothers went on until 1985, and eventually, the US government--represented here by Walton Bowen (Greg Kinnear), a cynical cultural attache at the US Embassy in Sudan--sends in the Air Force in requisite "America! Fuck Yeah!" fashion. Writer/director Gideon Raff (his first feature film since 2009's awful TERROR TRAIN pseudo-remake TRAIN, but better known as the creator of the Israeli TV series PRISONERS OF WAR, which would be reworked in the US as the acclaimed HOMELAND) keeps things moving at a decent clip. It's fairly generic and predictable save for a couple of inspired moments, like Levinson bribing the Sudanese official while their meeting is constantly interrupted by the President's enemies being executed right outside. Otherwise, Evans plays his character like a Mossad LETHAL WEAPON, being reminded several times that "You're reckless and out of control!" and "You're crazy, you know that?" In a lot of ways, THE RED SEA DIVING RESORT is the ideal Netflix offering. It's a perfectly watchable time-killer that would eventually end up there anyway after nobody went to see it in theaters, just like other recent period political thrillers like BEIRUT, 7 DAYS IN ENTEBBE, and A PRIVATE WAR. The only real surprise is that Rosamund Pike isn't in it.
GRACE QUIGLEY aka THE ULTIMATE SOLUTION OF GRACE QUIGLEY (US - 1985) Directed by Anthony Harvey. Written by A. Martin Zweiback. Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Nick Nolte, Kit Le Fever, Elizabeth Wilson, Chip Zien, Christopher Murney, William Duell, Walter Abel, Frances Pole, Truman Gaige, Paula Trueman, Nicholas Kepros, Harris Laskawy, Denny Dillon. (PG, 87 mins) On the basis of its strangeness alone, the largely forgotten GRACE QUIGLEY should be better known, even if it's for the wrong reasons. It's not every day that one encounters an offbeat, dark comedy from Cannon about elder suicide that offers the unlikely buddy-movie teaming of Katharine Hepburn and Nick Nolte, with songs by The Pretenders. This was a long-gestating pet project for Hepburn going back to 1972 when, according to legend, screenwriter A. Martin Zweiback (whose credits include 1969's ME, NATALIE, notable as Al Pacino's film debut, and 1980's GORP) tossed a copy of his script over the security gate at director George Cukor's house when Hepburn (star of several Cukor classics, among them 1933's LITTLE WOMEN, 1940's THE PHILADELPHIA STORY and 1949's ADAM'S RIB) happened to be visiting. In its earliest planning stages, GRACE QUIGLEY was set to star Hepburn and Steve McQueen, with Hal Ashby directing, coming off of 1971's acclaimed HAROLD AND MAUDE. The project soon fell apart but was back in pre-production in 1979, minus McQueen but Hepburn managed to get the interest of Nolte, then the Next Big Thing. Again, it never came to be, and it was stuck in development hell until Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus came aboard and were only too eager to work with a Hollywood icon of Hepburn's stature, along with a bonus of Nolte being as bankable as ever following the blockbuster success of 1982's 48 HRS. With some pull that comes with being a living legend and following her Best Actress Oscar for 1981's ON GOLDEN POND, Hepburn got her old friend Anthony Harvey (who guided her to an Oscar for 1968's THE LION IN WINTER) to direct, and production got underway in NYC in the fall of 1983.
The initial result got a toxic response at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, where another Cannon prestige project, the all-star Agatha Christie adaptation ORDEAL BY INNOCENCE, was also crashing and burning. The bad press at Cannes prompted producers Menaham Golan and Yoram Globus to have Harvey recut the film, chopping it down from 102 to 87 minutes. No one was happy with that version either, and GRACE QUIGLEY only managed a limited release in a few major cities in the spring of 1985 before turning up in video stores a short time later. A third version exists, assembled by Zweiback (who was hoping to direct until Hepburn's friendship with Harvey nudged him out of consideration), and retitled THE ULTIMATE SOLUTION OF GRACE QUIGLEY, clocking in at 94 minutes. With some scenes reinstated and others shifted around, the ULTIMATE version played in even fewer cities than the GRACE QUIGLEY cut and is reportedly the best of the three variants, though it's only the universally-panned 87-minute version that's on Kino Lorber's new Blu-ray (because physical media is dead). A comprehensive box set with the three versions of GRACE QUIGLEY would probably overkill with little in the way of a target audience, but it would've been nice for comparison's sake, especially since anyone who's seen it seems to unanimously agree that the Zweiback-supervised cut is the way to go.
So that leaves GRACE QUIGLEY being rescued from obscurity in its least-liked but, relatively-speaking, most-seen version. In its 87-minute incarnation, the film is done in by its schizophrenic tone and choppy editing, looking every bit like the begrudging compromise that a disgruntled Harvey felt it to be (it ended up being his last big-screen directing effort). The subject matter demands that the film find the right tone, which it absolutely doesn't do. Relying solely on social security, elderly widow Grace Quigley (Hepburn) lives with her parakeet Oscar and is about to be evicted from her tiny, rent-controlled NYC apartment by her shady, shitbag landlord (Harris Laskawy). No sooner does she wish him dead than it actually happens, via a bullet to the head courtesy of neurotic hit man Seymour Flint (Nolte). Grace witnesses the hit from a park bench across the street, runs away in a panic and hides in the backseat of a parked car that happens to belong to Seymour. Despite her joy over the landlord being out of the way, Grace is still lonely and depressed (Zweiback's cut apparently mentions that she's also outlived her children in addition to being widowed), and having already survived two failed suicide attempts, offers Seymour $1000 to kill her. His lowest asking price is $2000, so she manages to talk suicidal neighbor Mr. Jenkins (William Duell) into forking over the money and making it a twofer in exchange for not turning Seymour over to the cops. Before long, all of Grace's aging friends and neighbors decide they're ready to pack it in and end it all, as she eventually talks Seymour into offing them--at a "group rate"--and making it look natural or accidental.
Director Anthony Harvey with
Hepburn and Nolte on the set
With some seriously dark shit brewing at its core, the idea behind GRACE QUIGLEY has some terrific black comedy potential, but it just never quite comes together. The more it goes on, the more chickenshit it gets, opting to tug at the heartstrings, and getting maudlin and feel-good as Grace and Seymour bond over the voids in their lives, starting with Grace encouraging Seymour to get serious with hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold Muriel (Kit Le Fever) and culminating in a painful moment where orphaned Seymour asks Grace "Can I call you 'Mom?'" It even gets off to a bizarre start with periodically freeze-framed opening credits that seem to go out of their way to be as unflattering as possible to the 76-year-old Hepburn. Though Hepburn rode Nolte pretty hard about his excessive drinking and his wild ways during the shoot, they seem to be having a good time, with Nolte sometimes visibly in awe that he's working with Katharine Hepburn (he's never said anything good about the movie, but he wrote in his memoir they got along great and he loved working with her). To Hepburn's credit, she seems game for the subject matter and is even seen at one point eschewing a stunt double and riding on the back of a motorcycle sans helmet with Nolte. But there's just no sense of consistency with this version of GRACE QUIGLEY. It's filled with weird scenes that seem to come out of nowhere, like Muriel doing a striptease for Grace's elderly friends, several laborious sessions between Seymour and his prickish, twerpy shrink (Chip Zien, soon to provide the voice of the title character in HOWARD THE DUCK), or one embarrassingly heavy-handed bit where Grace talks Seymour into going along with the "suicides" by disguising themselves as doctors and touring a decrepit nursing home filled with depressed old people. GRACE QUIGLEY isn't very good, but any movie with Katharine Hepburn involved in a climactic hearse chase and earlier crouched on the floor of the backseat of Seymour's car while he flees a crime scene to the tune of The Pretenders' "Bad Boys Get Spanked" is simply too bizarrely surreal to dismiss. GRACE QUIGLEY would prove to be Hepburn's penultimate feature film appearance. She made several TV movies throughout the '80s and early '90s before returning to the big screen for a supporting role that saw her dropping an F-bomb as Warren Beatty's aunt in 1994's LOVE AFFAIR. Her final role came in the 1994 NBC TV movie ONE CHRISTMAS before her death in 2003 at 96.
ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD (US/UK/China - 2019) Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino, Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Timothy Olyphant, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Kurt Russell, Luke Perry, Julia Butters, Damian Lewis, Mike Moh, Lorenza Izzo, Damon Herriman, Zoe Bell, Lena Dunham, Rumer Willis, Samantha Robinson, Costa Ronin, Rafel Zawierucha, Nicholas Hammond, Mikey Madison, Madisen Beaty, Maya Hawke, Michael Madsen, Clifton Collins Jr, Scoot McNairy, Rebecca Gayheart, Marco Rodriguez, Clu Gulager, James Remar, Martin Kove, Brenda Vaccaro, Daniella Pick, Harley Quinn Smith, Omar Doom, James Landry Hebert, Lew Temple. (R, 161 mins) An epic, freewheeling, kaleidoscopic wet dream for hardcore movie nerds, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD allows Quentin Tarantino to fly his geek flag like never before. What other director could get away with stopping a big-budget, wide-release summer movie cold for an impromptu lesson on the making of 1960s Italian spaghetti westerns and the Americanized pseudonyms that were often employed by their directors? A love letter to the Hollywood 50 years ago on the cusp of tumult and tragedy, HOLLYWOOD takes place in February and August of 1969 and centers on Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), an actor desperately clinging to the fading fame brought by his starring turn a decade earlier on a TV western called BOUNTY LAW. The show was cancelled when he quit to do a pair of movies that ended up bombing (and he lost out to Steve McQueen for the lead in THE GREAT ESCAPE, a role he was up for along with "the Three Georges--Peppard, Maharis, and Chakiris") and has spent the latter half of the '60s doing failed pilots and bad guy guest spots on nearly every network TV show. He's desperate enough that he's seriously considering an offer by his new agent Marvin Schwarzs (Al Pacino) to head to Rome to make easy money doing spaghetti westerns and 007 knockoffs. He's also gotten a bad rep around town for his drinking, and multiple drunk driving accidents have caused him to lose his license, forcing him to be driven everywhere by his longtime stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), who's also his errand boy, confidante, drinking buddy, and seemingly his only friend. When he isn't driving Rick around, house-sitting for him, or being a handyman around his house, Cliff lives in a broken down trailer behind the Van Nuys Drive-In with his loyal pit bull Brandy. Cliff's fortunes mirror those of Rick's: where Rick can only land quick-paycheck guest spots because of two costly big-screen flops and a troubled personal life, Cliff has become persona non grata among the Hollywood stuntman community after the mysterious death of his wife Billie (Rebecca Gayheart). It was ruled an accident but rumors still persist that he killed her and got away with it.
There's a kinship among the pair, but the laid-back Cliff tends to spend much of his time consoling the insecure and depressed Rick, who has a slight stutter offscreen and laments that he's "washed-up" and doesn't want to do "Eye-talian westerns." The third figure in the story is Rick's next-door neighbor, promising VALLEY OF THE DOLLS co-star Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), whose new husband, Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski (Rafel Zaweirucha), is the toast of the town with the huge success of ROSEMARY'S BABY. The lives of Rick, Cliff, and Tate will intersect in a variety of ways over the course of HOLLYWOOD's 161-minute running time, and while the specter of Charles Manson (played here by Australian actor Damon Herriman, also cast as Manson in the upcoming season of Netflix's MINDHUNTER) looms large over the proceedings, this is not another HELTER SKELTER chronicle of the Tate-LaBianca murders of August 9-10, 1969. Tarantino, with the help of veteran visual effects maestro John Dykstra (STAR WARS), vividly, almost obsessively, recreates 1969 Hollywood to the point where you feel immersed in the past. The period detail is often astonishing, from the cars to the movie marquees to the production design to its depiction of the counterculture and the perfect selection of needle-drops (bonus points for possibly being the first late '60s-set film involving hippies to not feature Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth"). Rick's derisive scorn toward "the goddamn hippies" signifies his being stuck in the past of his heyday, while Cliff has a more accepting, come-what-may attitude, particularly in his recurring flirtaceous encounters from afar with hitchhiking flower child Pussycat (Margaret Qualley) until one fateful day when he finally decides to give her lift. As played by Robbie, Sharon Tate is the ingenue with a heart of gold, and the scene where she goes solo to a matinee at the Bruin in downtown L.A. to see herself in the Dean Martin "Matt Helm" adventure THE WRECKING CREW ("I'm in the movie!" she cheerfully tells the girl at the ticket booth) and gets quietly overcome with joy at the audience laughing at her comedic performance and cheering her kung-fu ass-kicking of co-star Nancy Kwan is truly touching.
Countless familiar faces play figures--both real and fictional--who wander in and out of the story, sometimes in the blink of an eye. On the entertainment front, there's Timothy Olyphant as LANCER star James Stacy, who would lose his left arm and leg in a motorcycle accident in 1973; the late Luke Perry, in his last film, as LANCER co-star Wayne Maunder; Nicholas Hammond as TV director and character actor Sam Wanamaker; and Rumer Willis as Tate friend Joanna Pettet. Emile Hirsch is Tate's ex-boyfriend Jay Sebring, who still remains close to her, patiently waiting for her to leave Polanski; Damian Lewis is an uncanny Steve McQueen getting stoned at the Playboy Mansion; Mike Moh is Bruce Lee in possibly the film's funniest scene; Kurt Russell and Zoe Bell are husband-and-wife stunt coordinators on LANCER (Russell is also the film's occasional narrator and is not playing his DEATH PROOF character Stuntman Mike as some speculated); Dakota Fanning is Manson follower Squeaky Fromme; Lena Dunham, Harley Quinn Smith (Kevin's daughter), and Maya Hawke (daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman) are other Manson disciples; and in a role intended for Burt Reynolds, who attended a table read with Pitt and Fanning but died just before he was scheduled to shoot his scenes, Bruce Dern is elderly and blind George Spahn, the owner of Spahn Ranch, a long out-of-commission 55-acre movie and TV western location set that was taken over by Manson and his "family."
Tarantino treats ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD as his cinematic playground, and the more well-versed you are in obscure TV and Eurocult titles of the day, the more fun you'll have with it (I would love to see Rick Dalton and Gordon Mitchell in an Antonio Margheriti Eurospy thriller called OPERAZIONE DYN-O-MITE!). As has been the case with latter-day Tarantino (never more than in the bloated THE HATEFUL EIGHT, a story that didn't need to take 168 minutes to be told), his tendency to meander does rear its head every now and again. While it's important to the story in terms of Rick's bottoming out and eventual path to redemption, the painstakingly laborious recreation of long takes and sequences from LANCER, where Rick has a guest spot as a bad guy, is the filmmaker at his most self-indulgent. At the same time, Rick's interaction on the set of LANCER with a committed, eight-year-old method actress (Julia Butters) provides HOLLYWOOD with one of its most genuinely moving moments, along with the final scene, which actually had people in the audience applauding. As good as DiCaprio and Robbie are, the secret weapon here is Pitt, who delivers a possible career-best performance. He's at the center of one of the film's strongest sequences--a visit to the Spahn Ranch that's every bit as intense and stomach-knotting as Jake Gyllenhaal's journey into the film programmer's basement in ZODIAC--and he's the key element of a shocking climactic showdown for the ages in a startling bit of revisionist history that makes this a great companion piece to Tarantino's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS.
Luke Perry (1966-2019)
Though mournful and elegiac at times, ultimately, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD is surprisingly wistful and uplifting in its own strange way, and even though it exists in an insulated, alternate universe of make-believe (Vietnam is barely mentioned), it's indicative of an older and more reflective Tarantino. Granted, it's jaw-droppingly outrageous at times, but in the redemptive arcs of Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth in an industry that's leaving them behind, there's a certain parallel with Pam Grier's and Robert Forster's characters in JACKIE BROWN, and for all the game-changing influence that PULP FICTION had 25 years ago, it's JACKIE BROWN that's looking more and more like Tarantino's best work with each passing year. Like most Tarantino films, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD is compulsively rewatchable--maybe fast-forward through a couple of those LANCER scenes on subsequent revisits--and filled with several moments that are instantly etched in your moviegoing memory. In spite of his self-indulgent tendencies--which some believe came about after the unexpected death of his regular editor Sally Menke in 2010, but he was getting pretty tough to rein in way back around the time of KILL BILL--and his omnipresent foot fetish (he seems really taken with Robbie's and Qualley's), he's one of the few American auteurs for which each new film remains a legitimate and wildly unpredictable event, and to that end, ONCE UPON A TIME...IN HOLLYWOOD delivers the goods.
"Based on an absurd but true story," the barely-released STOCKHOLM (since retitled THE CAPTOR for its UK release) tries to take a Coen Bros. approach in chronicling the 1973 bank robbery that coined the term "Stockholm Syndrome," where hostages come to sympathize and side with their captors. Unfortunately, writer/director Robert Budreau quickly loses interest in that subject and instead goes full DIPSHIT DOG DAY AFTERNOON, focused almost exclusively on coaxing a gonzo performance out of Ethan Hawke, who previously starred in Budreau's acclaimed but little-seen 2016 Chet Baker biopic BORN TO BE BLUE. Hawke is "Lars Nystrom," a fictionalized American version of Jan-Erik Olsson, in reality a Swedish convict on a day-long furlough from prison who walked into a Stockholm branch of Kreditbanken on August 23, 1973, allowed the customers and most of the staff to leave, and kept two bank employees hostage until his demands for money, a Mustang, and the release of his imprisoned buddy Clark Olofsson (rechristened "Gunner Sorensson" here and played by Mark Strong) were met. The ordeal becomes a media circus and as time drags on, one of the hostages, Bianca (Noomi Rapace, also one of 20 credited producers) bonds with Lars, portrayed here as an incompetent goof who's in way over his head.
Considering the pop culture ubiquity of the term "Stockholm Syndrome," its origin would seem to be ripe for a riveting story, but Budreau drops the ball by diverting all of his attention to indulging Hawke and encouraging him to unleash his inner Nic Cage with reckless abandon. Sporting a wig, a stache, shades, a cowboy hat, skin-tight leather pants, a huge Steve McQueen man-crush, and jamming to Bob Dylan on his portable radio as he commandeers the bank, Hawke is obviously relishing the chance to bring this character to life. It's a performance that might've worked were it not at the expense of everything else--story, dramatic tension, characterization, substance--as Rapace, Strong, and Christopher Heyerdahl (who's terrific as the sardonic Stockholm police chief trying to contain the situation) are essentially left scrambling for crumbs after Hawke gorges himself on the scenery. Hawke has aged into one of our finest character actors, but he takes Lars from amusing to irritating in record time, and it's telling that the film's best and simultaneously most darkly hilarious and heartbreaking scene doesn't even directly involve him as Rapace's Bianca tries to explain to her nice but hapless husband (Thorbjorn Harr) how to properly fry fish for their two young children since she's being held hostage and is stuck at work. We have no understanding of why Bianca is so drawn to Lars, unless we're just supposed to infer from her frumpy fashion and her dorky, oversized 1973 eyewear that she's bored with her average husband and the off-the-chain Lars seems like a spark of excitement. But STOCKHOLM isn't interested in exploring those kinds of details. Anyone who's seen DOG DAY AFTERNOON ("Wyoming") can attest that there's a way to tell a serious true crime story with dark, absurdist humor. Budreau doesn't seem to know what he wants to do here other than let Hawke run wilder than Robin Williams on a talk show, which soon makes for a tedious hour and a half. (R, 92 mins)
ABDUCTION (China/US - 2019)
An incoherent mishmash of other, much better movies, the mostly Chinese-financed sci-fi thriller ABDUCTION is a waste of B-movie action star Scott Adkins. The hardest-working man in action movies, Adkins has been on a bit of a roll lately, especially with his outstanding AVENGEMENT from a couple months ago, but this is a huge step back and one of his worst films. Plus, he's really the second lead here despite his top billing. In a prologue, Quinn (Adkins) wakes up with a strange implant on his neck in a HOSTEL-type torture chamber where his young daughter is among many being held captive in cages. He brawls with the captors and gets thrown out of a window, when it's revealed he's in a castle and plummets to a body of water below. When he comes to the surface, he's in a water fountain in a park in present-day Ho Chi Minh City, stricken with amnesia and with an acute stutter that dissipates when he's slapped. Meanwhile, hired assassin Conner (Andy On, the star of 2002's BLACK MASK 2: CITY OF MASKS, which featured Adkins in an early role) pulls off One Last Job for Vietnamese crime boss Master Trahn (Qin Chuan) just before his wife Maya (Lili Ji) is abducted, Conner presumes, by Russian enemies of Trahn. Tranh assures him the Russians had nothing to do with it, and his dogged search for her leads him to Quinn, now in a psych ward being observed by Dr. Anna Pham (Truong Ngoc Ahn), who eventually discovers that her patient is a time traveler from 1985. Quinn, his memories jogged while under Dr. Pham's care, has told her that alien beings capable of traversing dimensions have enslaved humans as "drones" with spider-like implants on the backs of their necks, intent on harvesting a specific strand of DNA unique to certain people, such as his daughter and Conner's wife.
They're eventually pursued by a hooded alien visitor (Daniel Whyte) as much nonsensical fight scenes and terrible special effects ensue (the alien force manifesting itself into a giant CGI shitheap and declaring "You have such strong, beautiful chi!" isn't exactly a moment on par with Rutger Hauer's "Tears in Rain" BLADE RUNNER monologue in the annals of sci-fi cinema). The throwdowns, coordinated by the usually reliable Tim Mak (TRIPLE THREAT), are uninspired, the script by Syfy vet Mike MacLean (DINOCROC VS. SUPERGATOR, SHARKTOPUS, PIRANHACONDA) just cribs from Philip K. Dick, DARK CITY, THE MATRIX, and 12 MONKEYS with little understanding of any of them, and the direction by DTV vet Ernie Barbarash (who previously worked with Adkins in the not-bad 2011 JCVD vehicle ASSASSINATION GAMES) offers little in the way of style and excitement. Erstwhile '80s Cannon bad guy Aki Aleong puts in a brief appearance as Dr. Pham's mentor and is among 27 credited producers, along with Adkins and Roger Corman. Adkins has been making a convincing case for years now that he should be a big-screen action star, and if you haven't seen AVENGEMENT, it's one of the year's best films. It's commendable that he's such a tireless workhorse and stays so busy--this is his fourth film in 2019 so far, with another five (!) due out by the end of the year--but in the end, quality has to trump quantity, and drek like ABDUCTION is doing nothing to further the Adkins cause. (Unrated, 97 mins)
