JOKER (US/Canada - 2019) Directed by Todd Phillips. Written by Todd Phillips and Scott Silver. Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen, Shea Whigham, Bill Camp, Marc Maron, Brian Tyree Henry, Glenn Fleshler, Leigh Gill, Josh Pais, Rocco Luna, April Grace, Sondra James, Murphy Guyer, Douglas Hodge, Dante Pereira-Olson, Sharon Washington, Chris Redd, Hannah Gross. (R, 121 mins) After a month of thinkpieces and endless debate, praise, hand-wringing, and outrage following its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival, the revisionist origin story JOKER is, at this point, pretty much a scorching hot take that happens to be accompanied by the incidental release of a movie. Certain to provoke divisive reactions and possibly more, the film has admirable aspirations of being a loving homage to the gritty NYC of old, particularly two Martin Scorsese classics in 1976's TAXI DRIVER and 1983's THE KING OF COMEDY. It gets it right for a while, starting with the old-school 1970s Warner Bros. logo and various pop culture indicators (BLOW OUT and ZORRO, THE GAY BLADE on a theater marquee, and posters for WOLFEN, EXCALIBUR, ARTHUR, and DRAGONSLAYER) placing the setting in 1981 and, for the most part, successfully nailing the period detail. While partially indebted to the classic 1988 Alan Moore/Brian Bolland graphic novel Batman: The Killing Joke, JOKER's title character as a cackling, chain-smoking amalgam of TAXI DRIVER's Travis Bickle and THE KING OF COMEDY's Rupert Pupkin, with a bit of DEATH WISH's Paul Kersey and the infamous 1984 Bernhard Goetz NYC subway shooting, an incident reminiscent of a sequence in DEATH WISH a decade earlier.
All that aside, the whole show here is Joaquin Phoenix as the eventual title character, a mentally-disturbed clown-for-hire named Arthur Fleck, who lives in a rundown Gotham tenement with his gravely ill mother Penny (Frances Conroy) and is generally treated like a punching bag by the entire world. On seven different medications that aren't helping, and often making others uncomfortable with a neurological, Tourette's-like condition that causes screeching laughter at inappropriate moments, Arthur is doomed to be a loner ("God's lonely man," as Travis Bickle might say), but he has visions of getting organizized and being a stand-up comedian ("Don't you have to be funny for that?" his mother asks). But bad luck follows Arthur like a fly on shit: he's rolled by a group of teens who viciously beat him and steal a sign he was waving on a job, and his boss threatens to take the cost of the sign out of his paycheck; he's given a gun by co-worker Randall (Glenn Fleshler), only to have it fall out of his pants while entertaining some kids in a children's hospital, after which Randall throws him under the bus and gets him fired; and that same day, he's taunted again on the way home by three Wall Street douchebags who start beating him, causing Arthur to snap, shooting and killing all three of them in an act of self-defense that turns into cold-blooded murder. All the while, a class war is brewing in the garbage-strewn streets of Gotham, with the city's downtrodden growing tired of the gutting of social services ("How do I get my medication?" Arthur asks his social worker when she says her department's funding has been cut and she's being let go) and of being overlooked by the city's wealthy movers and shakers, represented by billionaire Wayne Enterprises CEO Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), who's just announced a mayoral run because he's "the only one" who can fix Gotham.
Like everything in JOKER, the "I alone can fix it" Donald Trump comparisons aren't subtle, but what happens in Gotham is tantamount to a revolution when word gets out that a guy in a clown costume killed three rich assholes on the subway. Soon, protesters flood the streets dressed as clowns, intent on taking the city back by any means necessary. Though his identity remains a mystery, Arthur has started a movement, and finally, people are starting to notice him. That includes attractive, single mom neighbor Sophie (Zazie Beetz), who lives down the hall, as well as a leaked videotape of a nervous, cackling Arthur bombing at Gotham comedy club open-mic night, with the humiliating footage making its way to TV courtesy of LIVE WITH MURRAY FRANKLIN, a late-night talk show hosted by Arthur's Johnny Carson-like idol and fantasy father figure Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro, looking embalmed). De Niro's presence is the most overt example of the Scorsese worship on the part of director/co-writer Todd Phillips (the HANGOVER trilogy), and while it's obvious Phillips loves vintage Scorsese movies and is trying to stretch beyond his bro comedy filmography that also includes ROAD TRIP and OLD SCHOOL, he doesn't quite have the knack of pulling one off himself. JOKER works very well for a while, but after about Phoenix's 26th or 27th laughing fit with accompanying dancing and pirouetting, it starts to become clear that the story is secondary to indulging the star's extreme Method tendencies. Make no mistake, an emaciated Phoenix gives this everything, but it grows tiresome no matter how remarkable it is at times, and starts to resemble a hammy version of his ultimately stronger performances in films like THE MASTER and YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE.
While it gets off to a good start as the most transgressive, depressing, and unrelentingly bleak comic book movie ever made, it's a safe bet that, despite the incessant media coverage, a lot of mainstream multiplexers are still bound to go into this expecting a Batman movie and are seriously going to hate it (you could also envision it as a comic book movie made by Abel Ferrara at his KING OF NEW YORK/BAD LIEUTENANT pinnacle). Augmented by a suffocatingly downbeat Hildur Guonadottir score that's beyond oppressive, JOKER begins to work at cross purposes in the markedly inferior final act. Part of this stems from the disastrous way that Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver (8 MILE, THE FIGHTER) handle Beetz's character, but also in the way the messaging becomes so heavy-handed once Arthur--by now a deranged murderer going around in full Joker makeup--finally appears as a guest on Murray Franklin's show, where he gives a rambling speech that sounds like a love letter to be quoted as a enraged rallying cry by self-pitying incels everywhere.
THE KING OF COMEDY did a brilliant job of conveying reality's blurred lines with the delusions of the hapless Rupert Pupkin, but Phillips--again, no Marty Scorsese and probably not the right director for this--either lacks the finesse to communicate that or doesn't trust the audience to figure it out, perhaps a combination of the two, though there's certainly an argument to be made that the entire film is just a figment of Arthur Fleck's imagination. The casting of De Niro is a missed opportunity, and not just because of his limited screen time. While Scorsese superfans and hardcore movie nerds will get some amusement out of seeing the one-time unstoppable dreamer Pupkin aged into Jerry Lewis' cynical Jerry Langford, De Niro seems indifferent to the material, much the way he did in his stumbling, cue-card-flubbing appearances as Robert Mueller on the last couple seasons of SNL. While functioning as a standalone film, JOKER does tie into the Batman mythos by the end and is an interesting major-studio experiment that's worth seeing once. But barring any real-life tragedy that keeps it in the news, the buzz on this is likely to quiet down quickly once initial curiosity about Phoenix's performance is satiated (Heath Ledger's DARK KNIGHT Joker still retains the crown) and word of mouth gets around.
Hot on the heels of gems like THE CAR: ROAD TO REVENGE and BACKDRAFT 2, Spike Lee's hit 2006 bank heist thriller INSIDE MAN becomes the latest unlikely Universal catalog title to be belatedly sequelized by their "1440" DTV division (bring on Scott Eastwood in HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER 2!) with the South Africa-lensed INSIDE MAN: MOST WANTED. Of course, no one from INSIDE MAN--Lee, Denzel Washington, Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, etc--is back, though some characters are mentioned. And you can't help but admire not only how the production designers try to pass Johannesburg off as NYC (at least it's more convincing than Bulgaria) but also the way a character exclaims "It's a copycat heist!" to justify more or less remaking INSIDE MAN with a cast of cable and streaming actors with varying degrees of recognizability. BETTER CALL SAUL's Rhea Seehorn will probably be the most familiar face as hard-nosed FBI agent Brynn Stewart, summoned to work point on a robbery taking place at the Federal Reserve in NYC. She's joined by NYPD hostage negotiator Remy Darbonne (SENSE8's Aml Ameen) as they try to meet the rigid demands of the robbery team's masked leader, who calls herself "Most Wanted" (Roxanne McKee, who's logged time on GAME OF THRONES, DOMINION, and STRIKE BACK). She's after a stash of gold hidden in a secret vault, and both Stewart and Darbonne notice (not quickly enough) that Most Wanted's methodology mirrors that of Dalton Russell, the brains behind the now-infamous "Nazi diamond heist" depicted in Lee's film (and played there by Owen, whose photo is seen numerous times throughout). So instead of diamonds, we've got gold bars, and instead of Plummer's aging Nazi sympathizer--who's passed on in the interim--we get that character's pissed-off son (Greg Kriek) pulling the strings because he wants the rest of his late dad's riches.
There's been flimsier foundations for a sequel, and INSIDE MAN: MOST WANTED is hardly the worst of these 1440 titles. Busy TV director MJ Bassett (ASH VS. EVIL DEAD, STRIKE BACK, ALTERED CARBON) began her career as a second-string Neil Marshall with 2002's supernatural WWI chiller DEATHWATCH and 2007's underseen gem of a survivalist thriller WILDERNESS before going on to SOLOMON KANE and SILENT HILL: REVELATION, and she keeps things moving briskly. Seehorn and McKee turn in solid performances, and British Ameel does a decent job of masking his accent by spending the whole movie doing a two-for-one impression of Will Smith and Kevin Hart. The South African supporting actors fare much worse, none of them even remotely convincing as New Yorkers and all of them sounding like Leonardo DiCaprio in BLOOD DIAMOND. INSIDE MAN: MOST WANTED is completely forgettable, but maybe worth a half-attentive glance if you liked Seehorn on BETTER CALL SAUL or have enjoyed Bassett's earlier work (definitely seek out WILDERNESS). Just don't think too hard about it, or else you'll be asking questions like "If the original Nazi diamond heist is such a legendary case in law enforcement, and they know it's a copycat case, then why don't they see any of the same shit coming long before it happens?" (R, 106 mins) JARHEAD: LAW OF RETURN (US - 2019)
Hey, remember that 2005 Jake Gyllenhaal movie JARHEAD? Did you know it's spawned three DTV sequels so far courtesy of Universal's 1440 division? There's no real connection between any of the films, though Dennis Haysbert's JARHEAD character made a brief appearance in 2016's JARHEAD 3: THE SIEGE. The only sense of continuity offered by the latest stand-alone installment, JARHEAD: LAW OF RETURN, is the return of JARHEAD 2: FIELD OF FIRE writer/director Don Michael Paul, a former B-movie supporting actor-turned-DTV specialist, whose other credits include three TREMORS sequels, two SNIPER sequels, LAKE PLACID: THE FINAL CHAPTER, KINDERGARTEN COP 2, DEATH RACE: BEYOND ANARCHY, THE SCORPION KING: BOOK OF SOULS, and the upcoming BULLETPROOF 2, a sequel to the 1996 Damon Wayans/Adam Sandler action comedy BULLETPROOF that will not in any way involve Damon Wayans or Adam Sandler. Like JARHEADs 2 and 3, JARHEAD 4 is more Bulgaria-shot jingoistic military porn, just more forgettable than usual. JARHEAD 3 at least had Scott Adkins. This offers PRISON BREAK's Amaury Nolasco as Sgt. Flores, a career Marine who's a month away from retirement (uh-oh) when he ends up in a covert mission to extract pilot Ronan Johnson (Devon Sawa) when he's shot down and taken prisoner by a Syrian terror outfit headed by the nefarious "The Ghost" (George Zlatarev). The catch: Johnson is the son of a Catholic US senator (Robert Patrick) and a Jewish mother. He married an Israeli woman (Shanti Ashanti) five years ago, obtained dual Israeli citizenship, and joined that country's military via Law of Return, which gives all Jews the right to come to Israel and become Israeli citizens. The Israeli government declares "He's ours!" and assigns the rescue operation to a Mossad agent (Yael Eitan), but a bloviating American general (Ben Cross) yells "This is Benghazi all over again!" to get your Hillary-hating uncle all riled up, and demands US military special ops be involved because of the political ramifications involving the package's father.
What follows are a bunch of dull firefights and a lot of hardass Marine bro-downs, filled with witty dialogue like "Fuckface? He called me a fuckface! Hey, I'd fuck your face!" and "This ain't our first time swingin' at the pinata, lady!" when the female Mossad agent in charge gives a final run-through of the assignment. Because, you know, this is...what they do. Also note how some stock news footage early on shows Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaking English, followed by some footage of Iran's prime minister with an English translator speaking over him, yet the slightly-accented translator's words are accompanied by subtitles like it's all pops and buzzes and we can't understand a word with these people. JARHEAD: LAW OF RETURN: come for the formulaic, by-the-numbers action, stay for the bonus One America News Network-pandering xenophobia. (R, 103 mins) Note: Universal 1440 also released the DTV sequel DOOM: ANNIHILATION this week, directed by Tony Giglio (writer of the three Universal 1440 DEATH RACE sequels), but life's too short.
THE WAX MASK (Italy/France - 1997; US release 2000) Directed by Sergio Stivaletti. Written by Lucio Fulci and Daniele Stroppa. Cast: Robert Hossein, Romina Mondello, Riccardo Serventi Longhi, Gabriella Giorgelli, Aldo Massasso, Umberto Balli, Valery Valmond, Gianni Franco, Antonello Murru, Daniele Auber, Massimo Vanni, Omero Capanna, Goffredo Unger. (Unrated, 98 mins) 1997's THE WAX MASK began life as a heavily-hyped collaboration between Italian horror legends Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, the latter ailing and inactive since 1991's little-seen DOOR TO SILENCE, and far removed from his furiously prolific 1979-1984 glory days that gave us the likes of ZOMBIE, CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, and THE BEYOND among others. After scrapping plans to make a new version of THE MUMMY, producer Argento and director Fulci settled on THE WAX MASK, a new take on the 1953 classic HOUSE OF WAX, itself a remake of 1933's MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM, with some elements of Gaston Leroux's short story "The Waxworks Museum." The writing process and pre-production--delayed while Argento finished THE STENDHAL SYNDROME--brought numerous disagreements, with Fulci unexpectedly wanting to go for atmosphere, while Argento wanted more splatter, since that's what established Fulci's fame, but Fulci's already precarious health took another downturn and before filming could even begin, the Godfather of Gore died on March 13, 1996 of complications from his long battle with diabetes. With the script already written, Argento pressed forward as a tribute to Maestro Fulci, assigning directing duties to renowned makeup effects wizard Sergio Stivaletti, whose trailblazing work was a highlight of latter-day Italian horror classics like Argento's PHENOMENA, Lamberto Bava's DEMONS and DEMONS 2, and Michele Soavi's THE CHURCH, THE SECT, and CEMETERY MAN. Making his directing debut, Stivaletti was given some wide latitude by Argento to tailor the project to his own vision. As a result, he significantly reworked Fulci's initial script--written with Daniele Stroppa, with some uncredited contributions from Argento--and the end result is a bizarre hodgepodge of giallo, gothic horror, and steampunk, almost like HOUSE OF WAX and Mario Bava's BARON BLOOD mashed up with a looney tunes third act that veers unexpectedly into sci-fi territory.
It's not very good, but it's better than anything else Fulci made after 1988 and it's better than Argento's next project, his career nadir THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, for which THE WAX MASK occasionally feels like a stylistic test run. In Paris in 1900, a little girl witnesses a black-clad figure murder her parents, with police determining that her father's heart was ripped out with a claw-like instrument. Cut to Rome in 1912, and the girl has grown up into Sonia (Romina Mondello, later seen as Rachel McAdams' obnoxious friend in Terrence Malick's TO THE WONDER), who went to live with her blind Aunt Francesca (Gabriella Giorgielli) after being orphaned. Shy Sonia gets a job as a costume designer at a new wax museum operated by Boris Volkoff (Robert Hossein), whose villainy should be obvious the moment you hear that he's named "Boris Volkoff," and has not one but two super-creepy assistants (Umberto Balli, Antonello Murru). The wax museum has made news before it's even opened, as a local man took a bet that he could spend the night in it and ended up dying of a fright-induced heart attack over something he saw (that's the plot of the Leroux short story). Volkoff is very protective of his exhibits and refuses to allow them to be photographed, and while a pestering reporter (Riccado Serventi Longhi) investigates the local man's death while also trying to make time with Sonia, the body count increases along with the number of Volkoff's exhibits, as a black-clad figure in a hat murders various people--mostly prostitutes from a nearby brothel--and transforms their corpses into new wax museum figures.
Anyone who's seen MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM and HOUSE OF WAX knows who's responsible, especially once a new exhibit echoes the Paris 1900 murder scene, triggering traumatic memories for Sonia (Volkoff doesn't initially know who she is) while attracting the attention of French detective Lanvin (Aldo Massasso), who's been obsessively chasing clues for the last 12 years and is especially interested in Volkoff's Paris 1900 exhibit since it includes details of the murder scene that were never made public. It's at about this point where Stivaletti steers THE WAX MASK to Crazytown in ways that are best discovered by going in cold, but even then, it still won't make a whole lot of sense. Veteran French actor/director and RIFIFI co-star Hossein--whose career dates back to 1948 and is still working today at 91--is appropriately sinister without hamming it up, though one wishes he would cut loose a little more, especially considering how batshit things get by the end.
Then again, it's really difficult to judge anyone's performance in this if you watch the English dub, which is absolutely atrocious, filled with florid line readings like Balli's character telling Sonia about his childhood abuse: "My father beat me until I bled...my skin carries the scars and my heart carries the hate which I shall always bear." Though venerable dubbing stalwarts like Carolynn de Fonseca and Ted Rusoff are briefly heard voicing some minor characters, most of that old gang had died or moved on by this point, leaving relative amateurs to do much of the heavy lifting, and anyone who watches enough of these Eurocult movies will instantly hear that the dubs on these later Italian genre titles just don't have the charm, the chops, or any sense of quality control. While there is some striking production design and some eye-popping colors, the entire film has a television feel to it, starting with the video-burned title and some stagy interiors. The climactic fire at the wax museum tries to emulate the exteriors of the witch houses burning at the end of Argento's SUSPIRIA and INFERNO, but Stivaletti can't pull it off with primitive CGI that already looked dated even by late '90s standards. THE WAX MASK opened in Italy in April 1997, just over a year after Fulci's death (he gets a dedication at beginning of the opening credits, which is a nice touch). As expected, it skipped US theaters and went straight-to-DVD courtesy of Image Entertainment in September 2000 in a non-anamorphic, early-days-of-DVD transfer that left much to be desired. While the dubious One-7 Movies released it on Blu-ray in 2016, Severin's new extras-packed Blu-ray set (because physical media is dead) is a huge improvement if you've only seen the Image DVD. Plus it offers an Italian track with English subtitles, though Hossein spoke French on set and is still dubbed in Italian, and everyone else speaking Italian sounds dubbed as well.
KILLER CROCODILE (Italy - 1989) Directed by Larry Ludman (Fabrizio De Angelis). Written by David Parker Jr. (Dardano Sacchetti) and Larry Ludman (Fabrizio De Angelis). Cast: Anthony Crenna, Ann Douglas, Thomas Moore (Ennio Girolami), Van Johnson, Wohrman Williams (Bill Wohrman), Sherrie Rose, Julian Hampton (Pietro Genuardi), John Harper, Gray Jordan, Marte Amilcar. (Unrated, 92 mins) A very late-to-the-party "Nature Run Amok" Italian JAWS ripoff shot in the Dominican Republic, 1989's KILLER CROCODILE was never too hard to find even back in the VHS bootleg heyday prior to the circa-2000 Eurocult explosion on DVD. But for whatever reason, it's never been officially released in the US until now, courtesy of Severin's new Blu-ray (because physical media is dead). Directed and co-written by veteran producer (THE BEYOND, THE HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, 1990: THE BRONX WARRIORS)-turned-exploitation knockoff specialist (the Rambo-inspired THUNDER WARRIOR trilogy, the Namsploitation OPERATION: NAM, aka COBRA MISSION) Fabrizio De Angelis under his trusty "Larry Ludman" pseudonym, KILLER CROCODILE doesn't waste any time, showing the titular beast front and center about 40 seconds into the film. Taking a page from 1980's ALLIGATOR, the croc here is an oversized mutant thanks to chemical contamination, in this case radioactive waste in barrels clandestinely dumped in a river surrounding an impoverished Caribbean island. A team of environmental activists led by Kevin (Anthony Crenna, son of the late, great Character Actor Hall-of-Famer Richard Crenna) are journeying along the river to find and expose the illegal waste disposal that's been orchestrated by corporate hatchet man Foley (Florida-based regional actor Bill Wohrman--credited as "Wohrman Williams"--who had a small role as a cop in PORKY'S and PORKY'S II: THE NEXT DAY), who keeps getting away with it because he's got a flunky with the corrupt local judge (Van Johnson--a long way from THE CAINE MUTINY--as Murray Hamilton) who represents the law on the island.
When one of the activists disappears, the judge blows off the concerns of her friends, and when her mutilated body is later found with clear evidence of crocodile chomping, the judge and Foley go full "Fake News" and accuse Kevin and the others of killing her. That lasts about a minute and a half until the massive croc destroys a dock and kills a few locals in the process. With the judge nervous about his corruption being made public and Foley threatening to "reveal who you really are," in a pointless attempt at throwing in a red herring (unless he's the croc wearing a Van Johnson disguise), Kevin and the activists team with wily local crocodile expert Joe (Ennio Girolami as Robert Shaw) to hunt down the beast and expose Foley's nefarious actions. De Angelis throws in a good amount of gore and dismemberment in the croc attacks, and there's no shortage of nonsensical bits that connoisseurs of Italian ripoffs know and love, such as the repeated mention of a big reveal about the judge not being much at all (he's a fugitive ex-con...big deal); dubious dubbing; Riz Ortolani's score being little more than barely tweaked John Williams/JAWS cues; members of Kevin's group swimming around in contaminated water and deciding to make camp right by a shore lined with visible barrels stamped "Radioactive," ample proof that Foley and the judge are doing a pretty shitty job of keeping their activities buried, and a riotous outboard-motor-in-the-mouth demise for the croc at the hands of a crazed Kevin.
The most ridiculous character is Joe the Crocodile Whisperer, with his good luck hat that he tosses to Kevin for inspiration in an incredible scene that begins with Joe riding the Giannetto De Rossi-designed croc like the redressed immobile surfboard that it likely is, and earlier sensing the croc is near and talking to it from the boat, calling it a "pollywog" and advising Kevin that "They get really crazy when you insult them." It's not quite the USS Indianapolis monologue, but you get what you pay for, and it's good enough for KILLER CROCODILE. It's not quite Henry Fonda in TENTACLES or Richard Harris in STRIKE COMMANDO 2, but it's still strange seeing a beloved figure from Hollywood's Golden Age like Johnson doing some late-career slumming here, but work's work, and he was appearing in quite of few of these Italian exploitation obscurities during this period, including Stelvio Massi's never-completed slasher film TAXI KILLER, Ettore Pasculli's post-apocalyptic sci-fi FLIGHT FROM PARADISE, and Pierluigi Ciriaci's DELTA FORCE COMMANDO 2. KILLER CROCODILE never even made it to US video stores and didn't even make much of an impression in Italy, but that didn't stop De Angelis from releasing the immediate sequel KILLER CROCODILE 2 the next year, shot back-to-back with its predecessor.
KILLER CROCODILE 2 (Italy - 1990) Directed by Giannetto De Rossi. Written by David Parker Jr. (Dardano Sacchetti), Larry Ludman (Fabrizio De Angelis) and Giannetto De Rossi. Cast: Anthony Crenna, Debra Karr, Thomas Moore (Ennio Girolami), Terry Baer, Hector Alvarez, Alan Bult, Paul Summers, Tony De Noia, Peter Schreiber, Franco Fantasia. (Unrated, 87 mins) Now available as part of a limited-edition two-disc Blu-ray set with KILLER CROCODILE, the even lesser-seen 1990 sequel KILLER CROCODILE 2 was cranked out so cheaply and so quickly that it doesn't even bother roping in a past-his-prime, "and with"-worthy name actor to pull Van Johnson special appearance duty. Fabrizio De Angelis farmed out directing chores to veteran Italian makeup effects designer Giannetto De Rossi, best known to genre fans for his trailblazing splatter work on Lucio Fulci gorefests like ZOMBIE and THE BEYOND. De Rossi designed the croc in KILLER CROCODILE, and constructs a bigger and even more ridiculous one here. An offspring of the first film's title monster, Killer Crocodile Jr. proves to be a huge disruption to the development of a tourist resort that's certain to boost the economy of the impoverished area, which somehow hasn't become a huge cancer cluster with all the barrels of radioactive waste being dumped in the area. The potential contamination is why NYC reporter Liza Post (Debra Karr) is sent to investigate only to spend much of her time fighting off leering locals in addition to the rampaging croc. It's first seen devouring a vacationing couple, then attacking two boats filled with schoolkids and their nun chaperones, followed by an insane scene where it plows into a hut in what looks like the world's worst Kool-Aid Man impression. Once Liza confirms the existence of radioactive waste, her boss calls in ace environmentalist Kevin (a returning Anthony Crenna, now dubbed by Ted Rusoff), who seeks out his old buddy Joe the Crocodile Whisperer (Ennio Girolami, dubbed by Robert Spafford), left hobbled and even more crazy after his fateful encounter with the first toxic monstrosity, resulting in him behaving less like JAWS' Quint and more like an Obi-Wan Kenobi-like Jedi master ("I feel something," he says, looking out at still water).
Starting with using the same Riz Ortolani score, KILLER CROCODILE 2 has all the tell-tale signs of a quickie sequel. While the crocodile set pieces are more over-the-top in terms of execution and splatter--with a climactic battle between Kevin and the croc that features an Anthony Crenna action figure attached to a toy croc in some shots that not even Antonio Margheriti would deem acceptable--the rest is padded with stock footage from the first film (including recycling the same initial appearance of the crocodile, which is just flipped) and absurdly longer-than-necessary establishing shots of buildings, people walking into offices, Crenna and Girolami on the boat, pans across the river, etc. It has to resort to these tactics just to make it to 87 minutes, yet somehow, top-billed Crenna doesn't even appear until around 40 minutes in. The actor is on hand for an interview in the KILLER CROCODILE extras (he now goes by "Richard Anthony Crenna") and explains that he went to Rome in the late '80s when his dad was working on a movie (most likely LEVIATHAN) and decided to test the waters of the Italian film industry since he wasn't catching any breaks in Hollywood. He quickly nabbed the KILLER CROCODILE gig, probably on the basis of his known surname, and recalls it being a fun shoot in Santo Domingo even though there were language barriers, the production got caught in a hurricane, and he contracted dysentery at one point. He returned for the sequel, which again took him to Santo Domingo, but when De Angelis offered him the lead in De Rossi's TERMINATOR ripoff CY WARRIOR immediately following the back-to-back KILLER CROCODILEs (and again scheduled to shoot in Santo Domingo), he turned it down because he was ready to return home, with the part eventually going to Frank Zagarino. Crenna's only notable acting job came with a recurring role on ROSWELL a decade later, as things ultimately didn't pan out for him like they did for his father. As with John Wayne's youngest son Ethan Wayne in 1985's THE MANHUNT and 1987's OPERATION: NAM, De Angelis did his best to make Anthony Crenna happen, but the young actor probably would've found more success in the Italian B-movie industry if he made the move a few years earlier. By 1989-90, the entire Italian genre scene was on life support aside from whatever Dario Argento or Michele Soavi were doing, as evidenced by neither KILLER CROCODILE film finding any US home video distribution.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON (UK/US - 2019) Directed by Jim Mickle. Written by Gregory Weidman and Geoffrey Tock. Cast: Boyd Holbrook, Cleopatra Coleman, Michael C. Hall, Bokeem Woodbine, Rudi Dharmalingam, Rachel Keller, Sarah Dugdale, Quincy Kirkwood, Philippa Domville, Tony Nappo, Al Maini, Julia Knope, Colton Royce. (Unrated, 115 mins) After a trio of films that were well-received in indie horror scenester circles (2007's MULBERRY ST, 2011's STAKE LAND, and 2013's WE ARE WHAT WE ARE, a remake of a 2010 Spanish film), director Jim Mickle delivered an instant cult classic with 2014's East Texas noir COLD IN JULY, adapted from a Joe R. Lansdale novel. Following that, he devoted his energies to the three-season run of the Lansdale-based Amazon series HAP AND LEONARD. Now, Mickle--working for the first time from a script by others and not with writing partner Nick Damici, though Damici is one of the producers--returns to features for his most ambitious effort yet with the Netflix Original film IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON. Written by TV vets Gregory Weidman and Geoffrey Tock (both worked on the CBS series LIMITLESS and ZOO), the film has a doozy of a high concept involving a time-traveling serial killer hitting Philadelphia once every nine years beginning in 1988, on a fateful night that will forever affect the future of young patrolman Thomas "Locke" Lockhart (Boyd Holbrook). With a pregnant wife (Rachel Keller) due to give birth at any moment, Locke heads out for another night on the graveyard shift with his partner Maddox (Bokeem Woodbine) when the entire department ends up in a state of chaos over a string of identical deaths--a sort-of hemorrhage where the victims' brains seemingly melt out of their eyes, ears, nose, and mouth--simultaneously taking place miles apart across the entire city. The victims all have puncture wounds on the backs of their necks made by some kind of undetermined weapon, and witnesses mention a black female in a blue hoodie fleeing a club where the weapon was used on a young woman, who soon dies in the same manner while she's giving a statement to police.
After hitching themselves to the investigation against the wishes of Capt. Holt (Michael C. Hall, Mickle's COLD IN JULY star), who also happens to be Locke's brother-in-law, Locke and Maddox manage to catch up to the blue-hoodied killer, a young, shaven-headed woman named Rya (Cleopatra Coleman) after cornering her on a subway platform. Rya breaks Maddox's leg and gets into a violent scuffle with Locke, who injures her with her own strange weapon, causing her to stagger off the platform into the path of a speeding train, killing her instantly. Cut to 1997, Locke and Maddox are now detectives who made their names on the events of nine years ago, which has come to be known as the "Market Street Murders," though the department managed to get away with never divulging the identity of the killer and keeping many of the details secret. But on this day, his daughter's ninth birthday, a string of copycat killings take place, with Locke eventually coming face-to-face once more with Rya, who was splattered into pieces nine years ago but is somehow back to pick up where she left off with the killings.
To say anymore would involve significant spoilers, but this will pattern of Rya returning will repeat in 2006, 2015, and into 2024 over the course of the film, a time frame that finds Locke growing more obsessed and disheveled over time, at the expense of his job and his relationship with his daughter (played by Quincy Kirkwood at 9 and then Sarah Dugdale at 18 and older). The story is a wild mash-up of THE TERMINATOR, TIMECOP, DEJA VU, ZODIAC, LOOPER, and TRUE DETECTIVE among others, all wrapped into what plays like a feature-length episode of BLACK MIRROR with some incendiary present-day social commentary that's actually pretty ballsy in what it's trying to accomplish. But the more it goes on, the more muddled it becomes and the realization sets in that Mickle and the writers are simply trying to do too much in the timeframe they've been allotted. That's especially true in the deployment of about ten minutes worth of voiceover narration in lieu of a climax, which feels last a last-ditch Hail Mary because there's too many loose ends and no other way to resolve them while keeping it under two hours. It's still very much worth a watch, and the opening 35 minutes stands as a terrific extended suspense/chase set piece, but IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON is ultimately a film whose incredibly lofty thematic ambitions would've perhaps been better served as a two or maybe three-part Netflix limited series.
10 MINUTES GONE (US - 2019) Directed by Brian A. Miller. Written by Kelvin Mao and Jeff Jingle. Cast: Michael Chiklis, Bruce Willis, Meadow Williams, Kyle Schmid, Lydia Hull, Lala Kent, Texas Battle, Swen Temmel, John Hickman, Sergio Rizzuto, Tyler Jon Olson, Geoff Reeves, Tanya Mityushima, Megan Neuringer. (R, 88 mins) The latest installment in Lionsgate's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series, 10 MINUTES GONE also marks his fourth collaboration--more like chance encounters--with director Brian A. Miller, following the triumphant trio of THE PRINCE, VICE, and REPRISAL (it's OK if you don't remember those, because Willis doesn't either). An accurate description of the amount of time Bruno probably spent on set, 10 MINUTES GONE is a day trip to Cincinnati, OH for the former actor, who appears sporadically as Rex, a go-between who organizes heist crews for wealthy benefactors requiring distance. He has his usual crew but brings in a couple of outsiders for this latest job--veteran safecracker Frank (Michael Chiklis)--"the best lock man outside of New York," according to Rex--and Frank's younger brother Joe (Tyler Jon Olson), who worked on a Rex job once before but got pinched. Joe's got a bad rep as a result ("Even when he worked all the angles, the chips never fell his way," someone says about him) and the more reliable Frank tags along to vouch for him. Of course, the job--a bank robbery where Frank has to get into the vault to retrieve a mysterious case--goes south when Rex's crew--Griffin (Kyle Schmid), Baxter (Swen Temmel, also one of 25 credited producers), and Marshall (Sergio Rizzuto, also one of 25 credited producers)--are nowhere to be found after an alarm gets pulled. Frank and Joe use a secondary exit only to have Frank get bonked on the head in an alley during their getaway. He comes to ten minutes later to find Joe dead, the case missing, and no clue what went down in the time he was out cold. Convinced he's been set up, Frank teams with Joe's bartender girlfriend Claire (Meadow Williams, also one of 25 credited producers) and hunts down the other three members of Rex's crew of Reservoir Assclowns. Meanwhile, an irate Rex--from the confines of a nearly empty office on the top floor of a high rise overlooking downtown Cincy--sends his ruthless "fixer" Ivory (Lydia Hull, also one of 25 credited producers) to track down Frank when she isn't putting on shades and walking away from explosions as slowly as possible.
The idea of that blank ten minutes has a little in common with Miller's most recent film, the straight-to-VOD BACKTRACE, a film that inexplicably had Sylvester Stallone second-billed to Ryan "Who?" Guzman. But aside from that, 10 MINUTES GONE is so shameless in its groveling, slobbering HEAT worship that even DEN OF THIEVES is looking away in embarrassment. The clumsily-edited shootouts only succeed in making this look like the cheap, Redbox-ready ripoff that it is, but what makes 10 MINUTES GONE worse than usual for its ilk is the laughable script by first-timers Kelvin Mao and Jeff Jingle, a pair of writers who never encountered a cliche they couldn't utilize, starting with some opening narration from Chiklis explaining the rules of Three-Card Monte ("the shills conspire with the mark to cheat the dealer, when in fact, they're simply conspiring with the dealer to cheat the mark"), which still doesn't make the events that transpire any more coherent. Almost every line sounds like something David Caruso would've deemed too cheesy to utter on CSI: MIAMI. Just a random sampling:
Rex: "None of us would be here if we didn't believe in honor among thieves."
Frank: "We got a rat in the crew!"
Rex: "Who else is after this thing?"
Frank: "The heat's comin' down!"
Mysterious European benefactor: "Ze clock is ticking."
Frank, before shooting Baxter in the ankle: "Hey Baxter, ya like dancin'?"
Doctor who stitched up Griffin, who's vanished from a safe house: "Gone with the wind..."
Rex, glaring at diagrams on a clear dry-erase board: "This was planned to perfection! What happened?"
Rex, answering phone: "Talk to me!"
Rex: "Check his burner!"
Rex: "Let's load 'em up!"
Rex: "Time to clear the board! Liquidate everyone!"
But no one in 10 MINUTES GONE needs Cliche-to-English subtitles like Temmel's Baxter who, in the span of about 30 seconds, drops these turds in rapid-fire succession:
"How do I know you weren't gonna bring the Five-0?"
"We in some gnarly shit, Hoss!"
"I covered my post!"
"It was clear till things went postal!"
"We were sittin' on the guards when the fireworks started!"
"You know how he rolls! Charlie Bronson had to check it out!"
"I got the hell outta Dodge when the alarms chimed!"
Chiklis is a fine actor and obviously smart enough to know a piece of shit when he's in one, but he soldiers through like a pro because a lead role is a lead role--even if he has to carry Williams, who's a terrible actress--especially when it allows him to indulge in some ass-kicking like a beefy Jason Statham, which maybe reminded him of some glory days on THE SHIELD. As for Willis, it is what it is: another one-day gig in Cincinnati where 95% of his minimal screen time takes place in one room and you can't tell if his later annoyance is him in character over the plot developments or if it's because Willis himself has to be inconvenienced by moving to a different set for the obligatory showdown. In this case, it's a new wing of a train station that's under construction, probably the closest thing they could find to an abandoned warehouse before they ran out of time and Willis' double would have to be pressed into service. The climactic twist is about as predictable and ho-hum as it gets, so much so that it requires the surprise villain to offer this startling auto-critique of the film in progress: "Never walk into a place you don't know how to get out of. Sound familiar?" Yeah, because we've all seen HEAT.
Nicolas Cage got some of his best reviews in years with 2018's instant cult classic MANDY, but for every MANDY or MOM AND DAD or Richard Stanley's upcoming and much-anticipated THE COLOR OUT OF SPACE, there's a LOOKING GLASS, a HUMANITY BUREAU, a 211, a BETWEEN WORLDS or another utterly generic Redbox-ready clunker to effectively quash any comeback momentum he might accidentally have going. A SCORE TO SETTLE can be lumped in with a dozen other already-forgotten Cage paycheck gigs (raise your hand if you remember him dabbling in faithsploitation with the LEFT BEHIND reboot), a haplessly hokey revenge thriller with a really dumb Shyamalanian twist that anyone should be able to call less than ten minutes into the movie. Cage is Frank Carver, aka "Frankie Triggers," a low-level mob flunky who's spent nearly 20 years in prison after being set-up to take the fall on a hit that was ordered by his boss Max (Dave Kenneth MacKinnon) and carried out by his buddies Jimmy (Mohamed Karim) and Tank (Ian Tracey). Frank is getting a compassionate early release due to a terminal illness--a rare condition known as fatal insomnia that will, in time, cause his motor functions to dramatically diminish and his body to eventually shut down. He uses the time to reconnect with his estranged son Joey (Noah Le Gros, the lookalike son of veteran character actor James Le Gros) while indulging in a lavish lifestyle thanks to the recovery of a stash of Max's money that he left buried in a secret location prior to his incarceration. Widower Frank also treats himself to some fun with high-class prostitute Simone (Karolina Wydra), all the while plotting his revenge on those responsible for his two lost decades, especially once he learns that the presumed-dead Max may have faked his own death years earlier.
Directed and co-written by Shawn Ku, whose little-seen 2010 debut BEAUTIFUL BOY found some acclaim but only led to a Lifetime movie and the Crackle series SEQUESTERED, A SCORE TO SETTLE lugubriously dawdles for a good hour by setting itself up as a maudlin, manipulative man-weepie complete with some really terrible acoustic ballads, just in case you weren't sufficiently getting the feels. Once Ku drops the obvious twist about 2/3 of the way through, things finally pick up a little as Nic gets uncaged and does all sorts of crazy shit for his YouTube highlight reel: dramatically chewing on some jerky while he's interrogating Tank before blowing his head off, shooting another guy in the dick, busting out some seemingly improv impressions of Kurtwood Smith in ROBOCOP and later capping off a threat to a pimp with a Montgomery Burns "Excellent!" and, finally, coming up with several different ways to yell "BEEF?!" in the climactic showdown. The latter is truly a sight to behold, but until then, Cage (one of 22 credited producers) is just sleepily going through the motions, with one eye on the clock and the other presumably on the stack of bills he has to pay, bringing no life whatsoever to a series of awkwardly-played scenes with both Le Gros and Wydra. This is the sort of movie that has a reasonably well-known actor who gets a special "and" credit and is only seen sporadically throughout and has little to do with the plot, thus ensuring that he'll be of some "surprise!" importance later on. Also with Benjamin Bratt as one of Frank's old gangster pals who went straight, became a restaurateur, and keeps trying to talk Frank out of his plans for revenge, A SCORE TO SETTLE is the kind of by-the-numbers throwaway that's typified the bulk of Cage's output in recent years, only lately they've been looking a lot cheaper and much less polished. (R, 104 mins)
PASOLINI (France/Italy/Belgium - 2014; US release 2019)
Belatedly given a stealth summer 2019 arthouse run in the US by Kino Lorber five years after it played everywhere else in the world, Abel Ferrara's PASOLINI is a frustrating chronicle of the last day and a half in the life of controversial Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was murdered on November 2, 1975. Masterfully portrayed by Willem Dafoe--whose Oscar-nominated performance as Vincent Van Gogh in AT ETERNITY'S GATE is likely the reason this tough sell finally found a US distributor--Pasolini is introduced giving an interview as he works on post-production of his most notorious film, 1976's posthumously-released SALO, OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM. We observe Pasolini go about his day: giving interviews, working on a novel, having lunch with his loving mother (Adriana Asti), his loyal assistant (Giada Colagrande), and his close friend, actress Laura Betti (Maria de Medeiros), and later meeting frequent star and former lover Ninetto Davoli (JOHN WICK 2's Riccardo Scamarcio) for dinner. Pasolini's day is capped off with a fateful night of cruising where he picks up 17-year-old street hustler Pino Pelosi (Damiano Tamilia), drives to the beach, has sex with him, and is then beaten to death by the young man and several of his cohorts who were waiting nearby. Pelosi drove over Pasolini's mutilated corpse and would eventually be arrested several days later when he was caught riding around in the filmmaker's stolen car. Pelosi confessed to the murder and was convicted, though he recanted it nearly 30 years later.
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975)
Pasolini was an openly gay communist and outspoken cultural figure who made many political enemies, and there were numerous conspiracy theories surrounding his murder, including a possible Mafia hit or an ill-fated meeting with an extortionist after several cans of SALO footage were stolen. Ferrara (KING OF NEW YORK, BAD LIEUTENANT) doesn't go into any of that, and doesn't offer much help for anyone who's not already really up to speed on their Pasolini knowledge. It's less a narrative piece and more of a kaleidoscopic series of snapshots of random, mundane events of a day like any other, except that it turns out to be its subject's last. But with almost nothing in the way of exposition or an establishing of time or place (there's fleeting mention of the incendiary political scene in Italy at the time), there isn't much of a hook here aside from Dafoe's uncanny resemblance to Pasolini. It almost seems like Ferrara realizes this, as roughly half of the film's already brief 84-minute running time consists of scenes from Pasolini's novel as well as the script for his never-filmed intended follow-up to SALO playing out as they might have been. The novel sequences feature Roberto Zibetti as a politically ambitious, closeted bourgeois cipher serving as a Pasolini surrogate, while the scenes from the unmade screenplay have Scamarcio's Davoli as the young sidekick to an eccentric old man named Epifanio, played in an admittedly clever bit of stunt casting by the aged, white-haired Ninetto Davoli, who still has that beaming smile and Chaplin-esque screen presence he displayed in several Pasolini films decades ago. Only in the harrowing finale depicting Pasolini's brutal murder does PASOLINI start to generate any kind of dramatic momentum. Dafoe is a four-time Oscar-nominee and one of our great actors, and it's impossible for him to be uninteresting--though it is odd that his Pasolini and those interacting with him speak English while all scenes not involving Dafoe are in Italian or French. But his inspired casting isn't very well-served by a director who doesn't seem sure about what he's even trying to do with the project. (Unrated, 84 mins) JACOB'S LADDER
(US - 2019)
No one was demanding a remake of Adrian Lyne's disturbing Tim Robbins-starring mindfuck from 1990, and considering it spent three years on the shelf before debuting on DISH Network en route to VOD, no one was in a hurry to release it either. Financially-strapped LD Entertainment intended on opening it wide in theaters in February 2019 before abruptly yanking it from the release schedule and selling it to the lowly Vertical Entertainment. Even as modern-era remakes go, JACOB'S LADDER sets new standards for the perfunctory. It obviously can't replicate the kick-in-the-balls twist ending of the 1990 original, but its solution is just an ambivalent shrug. It wastes a good performance by Michael Ealy as Jacob Singer, an Iraq War vet and trauma surgeon at a VA hospital in Atlanta. He suffers from PTSD but is coping, is happily married to Samantha (Nikki Beharie), and they've recently had a baby boy. Jacob believes his brother Isaac (Jesse Williams) is dead--a casualty of the same war--but he runs into a stranger (Joseph Sikora) from Isaac's unit who informs him that his brother is alive and in Atlanta. The brothers are reunited, with Isaac dealing with paralyzing PTSD, hooked on a drug designed to control it, and still holding a grudge against Jacob since Samantha was his girlfriend first. These soap opera elements do nothing to enhance the JACOB'S LADDER experience, forcing director David M. Rosenthal (who previously worked with Ealy on THE PERFECT GUY) to resort to simply recycling all of the same shock elements from the first film as Isaac, and eventually Jacob, have hallucinatory visions of various monstrous creatures after using the experimental PTSD drug known as "The Ladder." Ealy, also one of the producers, busts his ass to make this work, especially near the end, but he's giving this pointless remake more than he can possibly get from it in return. Put it this way: JACOB's LADDER '19 is written by the guy who wrote the PET SEMATARY remake and the upcoming GRUDGE remake, and it's got a story credit for the guy who wrote the WHEN A STRANGER CALLS remake and the HITCHER remake. C'mon, man. (R, 89 mins)
