P.O.W.: THE ESCAPE (US - 1986) Directed by Gideon Amir. Written by Jeremy Lipp, James Bruner, Malcolm Barbour and John Langley. Cast: David Carradine, Mako, Charles R. Floyd, Steve James, Phil Brock, Daniel Demorest, Tony Pierce, Steve Freedman, James Acheson, Rudy Daniels, Ken Metcalfe, Kenneth Weaver, Jim Gaines, Eric Hahn, Henry Strzlkowski. (R, 89 mins) "He's got one rule that's never been broken: everybody goes home!" Released by Cannon in the spring of 1986, the Namsploitation outing P.O.W.: THE ESCAPE isn't a MISSING IN ACTION sequel but it might as well be. It shares one MISSING IN ACTION co-writer and its plot has quite a few surface similarities with MISSING IN ACTION 2: THE BEGINNING, but instead of Chuck Norris as Col. James Braddock, we get David Carradine as Col. Jim Cooper, a military legend and Pentagon strategist who volunteers for One Last Mission. It's 1973 Vietnam, five days before the cease fire, and the US is launching a last hurrah raid on a known POW camp out of concern that the men will be forgotten after the cease fire and declared MIA. Cooper's rule is "Everybody goes home!" but that's not the case when the small unit accompanying him is wiped out in a chopper explosion waiting for Cooper, who went back to save the injured young Teague (Kenneth Weaver), whose fate was sealed the moment he kissed a cross on his necklace and declared "I got my own insurance right here." Instead of freeing the men, Cooper ends up captured with them in a camp run by the ruthless Capt. Vinh (THE SAND PEBBLES Oscar-nominee Mako). Vinh is informed that Cooper is now the highest-ranking American in captivity and his commanders want him taken to Hanoi for a sham trial before being executed, but Vinh has another idea: he wants Cooper to take him to Saigon, where Vinh will renounce his allegiance to North Vietnam and defect to the US to join relatives in Miami.
Of course, Vinh has ulterior motives, mostly involving an ever-growing stash of gold and jewelry he's confiscated from American POWs over the years that he intends to cash in once he's in America, but for the time being Cooper agrees to the plan, with one caveat: the POWs go with them, because everybody goes home. Complicating matters is loose cannon POW Sparks (Charles R. Floyd), who attempts one failed escape before constantly putting everyone in jeopardy looking out for #1, basically functioning as this film's "Waingro from HEAT" before the filmmakers grant him an unlikely redemption in the end. Just out on Blu-ray from Scorpion (because physical media is dead), P.O.W.: THE ESCAPE was the directing debut of Gideon Amir, who logged some time in the trenches for Cannon, doing first AD and second unit work on films like THE AMBASSADOR and MISSING IN ACTION, and co-writing AMERICAN NINJA before Menahem Golan gave him a shot at making his own movie. Amir does a serviceable job and keeps the film moving, but there's a couple of hiccups, namely a bizarre moment when a nighttime Jeep chase just abruptly ends and cuts to the next morning. Amir has only directed one other movie to date--1989's ACCIDENTS--but remains active in cable and streaming TV shows, most recently as a producer on Amazon Prime's CARNIVAL ROW and DC Universe's DOOM PATROL.
Shot mostly in the Philippines (as evidenced by the presence of Cirio H. Santiago regulars like Ken Metcalfe, Jim Gaines, Eric Hahn, and Henry Strzalkowski in bit parts), with some obvious reshoots in L.A. (the scenery's different and Carradine's hair is longer in some shots), P.O.W. utilized much of AMERICAN NINJA's crew and, most notably, co-star Steve James, again relegated to sidekick duty as Jonston, a POW who becomes Cooper's closest confidant en route to Saigon. It's always great to see James, a terrific actor with top-notch action skills who succumbed to pancreatic cancer in 1994 at just 41, and one who was always cited as a genuinely great guy by everyone who worked with him. Cannon gave James a lot of work, but they never used him to his full potential. Even when he finally secured top billing in 1989's Michael Dudikoff-less AMERICAN NINJA 3: BLOOD HUNT, he was still saddled playing second fiddle to new American Ninja David Bradley, when simply handing the franchise over to James would've been a much smarter decision. P.O.W. seems more interested in making a star of "Charles R. Floyd," who had appeared on the last few years of the long-running daytime soap THE EDGE OF NIGHT under the name "Charles Grant," and who, according to Amir in a newly-shot interview on the Blu-ray, was seen by Golan as "a new James Dean." Not quite. Not helping Floyd/Grant--either an aspiring actor or the least cooperative person in witness protection--was the fact that he acted in three different Cannon films under three different names. He's "Charles R. Floyd" here, he was "Charles Floye" in THE DELTA FORCE, and he was credited in RAPPIN' as "Charles Flohe." Following P.O.W., he found consistent work on more daytime soaps like ANOTHER WORLD, SANTA BARBARA, and THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL, reverting back to his "Charles Grant" name.
P.O.W.: THE ESCAPE would be one of the last times Carradine headlined a relatively wide theatrical release, even though he never stopped working until his death in 2009, and he was so prolific that he still turned up in over a dozen movies you've never heard of that were trickling out as late as 2013. He was still getting high-profile TV gigs like the miniseries NORTH AND SOUTH and NORTH AND SOUTH BOOK II around the time of P.O.W., but he would soon embark on a long stretch of mostly crummy B-movies and D-list straight-to-video titles. A supporting role as the villain in the 1990 Mel Gibson/Goldie Hawn comedy BIRD ON A WIRE was his only dalliance with the A-list until Quentin Tarantino gave him a brief respite with the KILL BILL films in 2003 and 2004. That got him some better TV guest spots in the short term, but the resurgence that everyone was expecting never happened, and he was soon back to garbage movies, and that includes his supporting turn as "Poon Dong" in 2009's unwatchable CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE. He's a solid hero in P.O.W.: THE ESCAPE, and definitely brings more of a loose screen presence to the proceedings than the more stoical Norris did to the MISSING IN ACTION films. He even goes one step further with the blatant "America! Fuck yeah!" jingoism by spending most of the climactic battle literally draped in the American flag as he blows away VC commies before one of the guys leads them all in a "Proud Mary" sing-along. Suck on that, Chuck!
P.O.W.: THE ESCAPE opening in Toledo, OH on 4/4/1986
THE PAINTED BIRD (Czech Republic/Ukraine/Slovakia - 2020) Written and directed by Vaclav Marhoul. Cast: Petr Kotlar, Udo Kier, Stellan Skarsgard, Harvey Keitel, Julian Sands, Julia Valentova Vidrnakova, Aleksey Kravchenko, Barry Pepper, Petr Vanek, Nina Shunevych, Alla Sokolova, Michaela Dolezalova, Zdenek Pecha, Lech Dyblik, Jitka Cvankarova, Milan Simacek, Petr Klimes, Andrej Polak, Filip Kankovsky. (Unrated, 170 mins) Based on the 1965 novel by Being There author Jerzy Kosinski, THE PAINTED BIRD is an unrelentingly grim, grueling, three-hour journey into the abyss, seen through the eyes of a young, nameless Jewish orphan (Petr Kotlar) left on his own in the rural hellscape of Eastern Europe during WWII. You know Czech writer/director Vaclav Marhoul isn't pulling any punches when it's barely three minutes in and the boy is attacked and beaten by other children, who then set his ferret on fire and watch it burn. His parents presumably perished in a concentration camp, he's been sent to live with his elderly Aunt Marta (Nina Shunevych), though he's left on his own once again when she dies and he's so startled by the discovery of her body that he drops a lantern, igniting a fire that quickly engulfs their small house. He makes his way to a gypsy camp where he's beaten by villagers who blame him for "bewitching the cows" and "summoning evil," and he's bought by a superstitious old crone (Alla Sokolova), who thinks he's a vampire. He escapes on a small raft and is found by the hired hand (Zdenek Pecha) of a bad-tempered miller (Udo Kier), who regularly beats his wife (Michaela Dolezalova) for making eye contact with the male help. The boy is off again after the miller, in a drunken rage, attacks the hired hand and gouges his eyes out with a spoon.
The horrific displays of cruelty, brutality and depravity never stop. He witnesses promiscuous temptress Ludmila (Jitka Cvankarova) being attacked by a group of mothers enraged over her corruption of their sons as they beat her to a pulp and violate her with a glass bottle. He encounters fields of dead Jews, some of their bodies charred and still smoldering, as their surviving brethren steal the clothes off of the unburned corpses. A German soldier shoots a crying Jewish baby point blank, the bullet also going through its mother, killing them both. The boy is captured by the residents of one village who turn him over to a German unit in a display of appeasement. The commander orders his execution, prompting one conscientious officer (Stellan Skarsgard) to volunteer for the task, waiting until they're far enough away from the camp to fire his rifle in the air and mercifully tell the boy to run away. He's captured by another German unit, but his life is spared when he's handed over to a Catholic priest (Harvey Keitel), who later sends the boy to live with distiller Garbos (Julian Sands), a devout parishioner who turns out to be a monstrous pedophile who rapes him nightly.
Shot in stark, monochromatic black-and-white, THE PAINTED BIRD is an undeniably tough sell even beyond its graphic content (it's unrated but well past the NC-17 threshold). It's just under three hours long, there's minimal dialogue, and it's spoken in the constructed Interslavic--an Esperanto-esque mix of various Slavic languages and dialects--with some incidental German and Russian, all with English subtitles. The most obvious influence here would be Elem Klimov's 1985 Soviet anti-war classic COME AND SEE, a film notorious for the ceaseless horrors faced by its young main character, played by a then-teenage Aleksey Kravchenko, who appears here as a Russian officer. Visually, THE PAINTED BIRD owes a lot to the works of Bela Tarr, particularly SATANTANGO and THE TURIN HORSE, and Aleksei German's mother-of-all-endurance-tests HARD TO BE A GOD. And with its numerous shocking wartime transgressions, one is reminded of Pier Paolo Pasolini's SALO, Volker Schlondorff's THE TIN DRUM, Liliana Cavani's LA PELLE/THE SKIN, and Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900, with one shot of the boy lying on the tracks as a train speeds over him coming straight from that 1977 pro-communism epic.
One might also think of Lars von Trier, especially with the presence of Kier and Skarsgard. But where von Trier would revel in getting as explicit as possible just to poke the viewer with a stick, Marhoul generally handles such incidents with a certain degree of tact, though even the most jaded connoisseur of arthouse transgression might get the wind knocked out of them a little during the vignette where the boy shacks up with a widowed nymphomaniac (Julia Valentova Vidrnakova). She teaches him how to perform oral sex on her but then loses interest when, still being a little boy, he's unable to perform when they attempt intercourse (Kotlar has two credited adult body doubles). Her resulting cold-shoulder treatment ("You're useless!") eventually sends him into a jealous rage when he catches her having sex with a goat. Young Kotlar, a non-professional in his first film, says very little over the course of THE PAINTED BIRD, with Marhoul letting his star's eyes and face do most of the emoting. The film was shot in several phases with some breaks over the 16-month period from March 2017 to July 2018, and a fortuitous growth spurt allows you to see Kotlar, nine years old when shooting began, visibly change over the course of the time depicted. Not just in height and build, but also the increasingly dead look in his eyes as the boy has conditioned himself to feel nothing.
Despite the non-stop horrors on display, THE PAINTED BIRD is a staggeringly beautiful film, where every shot could serve as a perfectly-framed still image. Cinematographer Vladimir Smutny vividly captures the desolate, barren wasteland of war-ravaged Eastern Europe in ways that are breathtaking. The known names in the cast have little more than cameos, but all of them leave impressions in their limited screen time--particularly Keitel as the tragically oblivious priest, who finally realizes what's going on when he pays a visit to Garbos and can sense the tension and see the abuse in the boy's eyes--though it is admittedly distracting having Keitel, Kier, and Sands dubbed in Interslavic by voices that sound nothing like theirs, plus Barry Pepper speaking in dubbed Russian (Skarsgard has no dialogue), as is one action sequence appearing out of nowhere with one too-loudly-mixed Wilhelm Scream. THE PAINTED BIRD is bold, unflinching, and upsetting, and even with moments of light in its perpetual darkness (and a late glimmer of hope), it's the It's Not For Everybody/Feel-Bad Hit of the Summer, and regardless of how well-made it is--there were inevitable walkouts when it played the festival circuit last year--or how highly you regard it, you probably won't watch it a second time.
Director Vaclav Marhoul and star Petr Kotlar
on the set of THE PAINTED BIRD
I've stated several times in past reviews that, while the sentiment is appreciated, it's time for today's filmmakers to move on from the John Carpenter homages, but we have to give BACURAU a pass. The latest from Brazil's Kleber Mendonca Filho (NEIGHBORING SOUNDS), who co-wrote and co-directed with Juliano Dornelles, BACURAU is a hypnotic, wildly unpredictable, savagely violent, and brazenly original genre-bender whose release on the arthouse circuit was shut down by the pandemic, leading to US distributor Kino Lorber making it the inaugural entry in their online "virtual cinema" partnership with independent theaters across the country. Opening with a shot of Earth seen from a satellite hovering in space and set "a few years from now," giving it a vaguely-established sci-fi angle, BACURAU immediately shifts to the title location, a fictional, impoverished town in the western Pernambuco area of Brazil. Teresa (Barbara Colen) arrives for the funeral of her 94-year-old grandmother, a beloved figure who's considered the "matriarch" of Bacurau. She brings the residents some medical supplies and vaccines, which have been in short supply since Bacurau's water and essentials have been cut off by a dam project and a water rights dispute overseen by the loathed Tony Jr. (Thardelly Lima), the self-appointed mayor of the nearby Serra Verde. He also makes cosmetic attempts at olive-branching by donating expired canned goods and so-called "painkillers" that Bacurau's alcoholic doctor Domingas (Sonia Braga) warns is nothing more than a black market mood inhibitor in suppository form. The town is forced to rely on water being delivered in a tanker by affable truck driver Erivaldo (Rubens Santos), but when that week's supply is lost when his truck is riddled with bullets from unseen snipers on the way into town, the residents, under the leadership of Teresa and political insurgent Acacio (Thomas Aquino) sense something is...off. They start getting the feeling that they're under siege, especially when two nervous strangers on trail bikes (Antonio Saboia, Karine Teles) happen to pass through town, and one secretly plants a signal jammer under a table in the local bar.
It's best to stop there with a plot synopsis, as things really start to get wild and the filmmakers go all-in on an "anything goes" approach with the intricately-detailed madness that unfolds. Flying saucer-shaped drones start appearing in the sky, Bacurau disappears from GPS and satellite imagery, phones and electricity go out, mind-altering substances are consumed, and things intensify with the deployment of some wonderful Brian De Palma split-diopter shots, and that's before legendary cult actor Udo Kier shows up as Michael, a mysterious German who's leading a group of racist, trigger-happy American mercenaries on some secret mission in the desert between Serra Verde and Bacurau. Mendonca Filho and Dornelles create a deliriously inspired mash-up of Carpenter and Alejandro Jodorowsky, with some bonus influence courtesy of Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, and REPO MAN-era Alex Cox, augmented by some effective needle-drops, including Carpenter's "Night," an inspired synthgasm from his 2015 album Lost Themes, plus an improbable appearance by Spandau Ballet's "True." In an era of prefab cult movies and things like THE ROOM and BIRDEMIC, it's refreshing to see something like BACURAU come along in 2020. It's a real deal, instant cult classic for the midnight movie crowd, and seeing it for the first time is probably the closest we'll get in the present day to experiencing something like EL TOPO in the early '70s. It's the kind of movie where you truly have no idea what's going to happen next, and props to the filmmakers for giving veterans like Braga and Kier their best roles in years. Highly recommended. (Unrated, 131 mins) BODY CAM (US - 2020)
Paramount had BODY CAM set for theaters in May 2019 before bumping it seven months to December, and somewhere in the interim--likely due to last fall's tangentially similar body-cam-themed "bad cop" thriller BLACK AND BLUE--it disappeared from the release schedule altogether. They quietly dumped it on VOD in May 2020, a week before a Memorial Day weekend that ended with the horrific murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. It certainly wasn't intended to exploit a tragedy, but perhaps Paramount should've read the room a little better in releasing this on Blu-ray/DVD now at a time when tensions are still running high, given its subject matter involving the ghost of an unarmed black teenager seeking revenge on the cops who murdered him. BODY CAM is topical, but it doesn't do anything substantive with the issue. Just off suspension after video of a physical altercation with a civilian went viral and led to a citywide uproar, cop Renee Lomito (Mary J. Blige, not really capitalizing on her MUDBOUND Oscar nomination) is still trying to get over the drowning death of her young son, and sees work as a necessary distraction. She's partnered with rookie Danny Holledge (Nat Wolff) and on their first night together, they find the horribly mutilated body of another cop who never reported back after a traffic stop. His dashcam video shows him stopping a woman in a van before he's lifted into the air by an unseen force and dropped on the hood of his cruiser. When her bosses look at the dashcam footage, there's nothing there. An improbable clue leads Lomito and Holledge to the dilapidated home of nurse Taneesha Branz (DREAMGIRLS' Anika Noni Rose), whose teenage son was found murdered months earlier while walking home after doing volunteer work for a church. Two more cops are killed in inexplicable supernatural encounters and again, surveillance video is mysteriously wiped after only Lomito sees it and before she can show anyone else. The fusion of dirty cops and Blumhouse jump scares is clunky and never really gels, though director Malik Vitthal does manage to pull off one really good scare set piece when Lomito and Holledge search Taneesha's house. Richmond Riedel's script was extensively reworked by THE PACT and THE PRODIGY director Nicholas McCarthy, probably brought in to punch up some of the horror elements, and it also has some uncredited contributions from 12 YEARS A SLAVE Oscar-winner John Ridley. There was certainly potential for some incendiary social commentary here, but after a generally effective first act, BODY CAM sort-of sputters out into rote, predictable genre cliches, giving its serious concept a rather shallow treatment. Not bad as these kinds of generic horror outings go, but it's easy to see why Paramount couldn't muster much enthusiasm over it. (R, 97 mins)
NIGHT VISITOR (US - 1989) Directed by Rupert Hitzig. Written by Randal Viscovich. Cast: Elliott Gould, Allen Garfield, Michael J. Pollard, Shannon Tweed, Richard Roundtree, Derek Rydall, Brooke Bundy, Teresa Vander Woude, Scott Fults, Kathleen Bailey, Teri Weigel, Henry Gibson, Bruce Kimmel, Ann Dane. (R, 93 mins) A ludicrous "Satanic Panic" riff on the '80s horror favorite favorite FRIGHT NIGHT with a bit of Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW, 1989's NIGHT VISITOR (just out on Blu-ray from Scorpion because physical media is dead), was pretty much swept under the rug by MGM/UA, who only got it on a handful of screens in a very limited release before it turned up in every video store in America. Horndog high school prankster and bullshit artist Billy Colton (Derek Rydall) gets pretty excited when sultry tease Lisa (Shannon Tweed) moves in next door. His mom sends him over with a gift basket and he gets a peck on the cheek goodbye as Lisa welcomes an older gentlemen friend at the door. His bedroom window happens to face hers, so he digs out a long-unused telescope and watches her having sex with the man, and from her look toward his window with a smile and wink, she seems perfectly OK with his newfound interest in voyeurism. When another guy stops over the next night, Billy is convinced she's a high-class prostitute but his dork buddy Loomis (Scott Fults) and platonic crush Kelly (Teresa Vander Woude) think he's full of shit. Determined to convince them of his hunch, Billy gets a ladder and takes a camera up to Lisa's roof to peep in her candle-illuminated bedroom window to get proof. Of course, it's the exact moment when a screaming Lisa, handcuffed to the bed, is stabbed to death by a robed figure wearing a horned goat mask as part of a Satanic sex ritual. Billy is attacked through the window by the killer and manages to snap some shots in the process before ripping off the goat mask. And wouldn't you know it? The killer is Billy's asshole history teacher Mr. Willard (Allen Garfield), who just had him suspended for excessive tardies and setting off an explosive whoopee cushion in class, which was actually dumbass Loomis' doing.
Capt. Crane (Richard Roundtree as yet another irate police captain in a late '80s B-movie) seems skeptical of Billy's story, especially with his history of pranks and dog-ate-my-homework lies, the fact that there's no photos of the killer since he forgot to take off the lens cap, and that he was on Lisa's roof peeping in the first place. But Crane is dealing with a series of serial ritual-style murders of prostitutes, with Lisa the latest victim, so he visits Willard's house and finds him and his half-wit brother Stanley (Michael J. Pollard, cast radically against type as "Michael J. Pollard") weird enough to consider Willard a person of interest. As well he should, since Willard permits Stanley to keep a hooker (Teri Weigel) chained up and ball-gagged in the basement as a human toy, and Willard starts threatening Billy over the phone and after class (cutting off a snip of his hair for a future ritual) since he knows his secret. With no one to turn to, Billy reaches out to his late father's buddy--alcoholic, retired forensics cop Devereaux (Elliott Gould)--to help prove Willard's guilt.
Cranked out in two-and-a-half weeks by debuting director and former producer (ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE, WOLFEN, JAWS 3-D) Rupert Hitzig, NIGHT VISITOR never takes itself too seriously. Or rather, the legitimate actors working through a career slump because they've got bills to pay never take it too seriously, with Pollard in particular grinning and smirking throughout and looking openly contemptuous of the material. Top-billed Gould doesn't even appear until halfway through and doesn't really look like he wants to be there, even though a hilarious climactic showdown pitting a shotgun-toting Gould against a chainsaw-wielding Pollard is almost worth the price of admission. NIGHT VISITOR might've worked more effectively if Garfield (also Gould's nemesis in Peter Hyams' amazing BUSTING) and Pollard weren't goofing off like a comedy team most of the time. From Mr. Willard's first appearance being a fussy, irritable prick to his students, a toupeed Garfield--a Character Actor Hall of Famer in the news a few months ago as one of the first Hollywood figures to succumb to COVID-19, contracted in a nursing home where he was living after a massive stroke in 2004--plays the character like a comical creep, coming off less like a malevolent threat along the lines of Chris Sarandon's vampire in FRIGHT NIGHT and more like a Satanist George Costanza.
As played by Garfield and Pollard, there's no way a pair of clowns like Willard and Stanley could get away with these murders for as long as they do. The name actors probably got onboard because they knew Hitzig from his producing days, which would explain Henry Gibson's improbable casting as a police department psychologist (Gibson, Garfield, and Gould were all in Robert Altman's NASHVILLE in better days). The best part of NIGHT VISITOR is Tweed, who's killed off rather early but is an absolute charmer in her brief screen time (the wink and the goofy grin she gives Billy as he spies on her from his bedroom feels like something she came up with on her own), and was always a better actress than her prolific career in countless unrated DTV erotic thrillers in the '90s would indicate. This also marked the beginning of Rydall's very short-lived career as a horror star, following this with the title role in the same year's PHANTOM OF THE MALL: ERIC'S REVENGE and the 1991 cult favorite POPCORN before quitting acting to become a writer, scripting several episodes of POWER RANGERS WILD FORCE and the sixth BEETHOVEN movie.
3:15 (US - 1986) Directed by Larry Gross. Written by Sam Bernard and Michael Jacobs. Cast: Adam Baldwin, Deborah Foreman, Scott McGinnis, Danny De La Paz, Ed Lauter, Rene Auberjonois, Wayne Crawford, John Scott Clough, Mario Van Peebles, Wings Hauser, Jesse Aragon, Bradford Bancroft, Jeb Ellis-Brown, Panchito Gomez, Wendy Barry, Joseph Brutsman, Lori Eastside, Nancy Locke Hauser, Dean Devlin, John Doe, Roy London, Van Quattro, Gina Gershon, Rusty Cundieff. (R, 85 mins) If you had cable in the late '80s, then you probably caught at least some of 3:15, a minor entry in the "high school gangs run amok" subgenre that, quality-wise, falls somewhere right in the middle between the exemplary CLASS OF 1984 and the ridiculous TUFF TURF. Of course, there were many others during this period from 1982 to 1987--SAVAGE STREETS, YOUNG WARRIORS, THE NEW KIDS, DANGEROUSLY CLOSE, UNDER COVER, THE PRINCIPAL, and the largely comedic cult favorite THREE O'CLOCK HIGH to name a few--so it was easy for 3:15 to get lost in the shuffle. It got only sporadic play in theaters in the spring of 1986 after two years on the shelf, when it was finally picked up by the apparently one-and-done Dakota Entertainment Corporation, though in nearly every way, it's got an undeniable Cannon aura about it, starting with the score by Gary Chang (52 PICK-UP, FIREWALKER). It also had a confusing marketing campaign where it was hard to ascertain what the movie was even called. The official one-sheet has it as 3:15: THE MOMENT OF TRUTH, but when it opened in Toledo, OH in April 1986, it was advertised as the clunky SHOWDOWN AT LINCOLN HIGH AT 3:15, while the fine print in the ad called it 3:15 - MOMENT OF TRUTH, and the theater listings had it as SHOWDOWN AT LINCOLN HIGH. The actual title on the film is simply 3:15, which is what's stuck. To date, it's the only feature film directed by Larry Gross, a veteran screenwriter and occasional back-in-the-day Walter Hill collaborator who co-wrote 48 HRS, STREETS OF FIRE, and GERONIMO: AN AMERICAN LEGEND, with other writing credits ranging from Wayne Wang's CHINESE BOX to Clint Eastwood's TRUE CRIME to the doomed movie version of PROZAC NATION.
Just out on Blu-ray from Scorpion (because physical media is dead), 3:15 is essentially a face-off between two actors who were best known at the time for their presence in other movies that dealt with tangentially-related subjects. Hero Adam Baldwin was the title character in 1980's MY BODYGUARD, protecting scrawny Chris Makepeace from the relentless bullying of Matt Dillon, while villain Danny De La Paz was best known as Chuco in 1979's BOULEVARD NIGHTS, one of several entries in a short-lived gang craze from that year, including THE WANDERERS, OVER THE EDGE, WALK PROUD, and the classic THE WARRIORS. It doesn't help the credibility of 3:15 when, at the time of filming in 1984, Baldwin was 22 and looked older, while De La Paz was 27, and both were still playing high school students, but all of the kids here look way too old, with several extras in a few shots who appear to be within striking distance of 40. Baldwin is Jeff, who was once a member of the Cobras but walked away when leader Cinco (De La Paz) killed a guy for no reason. A year later, Jeff is a tough but straight-arrow kid with a nice girlfriend in Sherry (VALLEY GIRL's Deborah Foreman, who had MY CHAUFFEUR and APRIL FOOL'S DAY in theaters around the same time), but his past inevitably comes back to haunt him. The school is overrun with drugs and crime, and cowardly principal Horner (Rene Auberjonois)--introduced shouting "These kids are so high on dope that they might as well be zombies!"--turns to cynical cop Moran (Ed Lauter), who organizes a raid targeting Cinco and his gang. A frantic Cinco asks Jeff to stash some drugs for him for old times' sake, and when he refuses and Cinco is arrested, the gang leader vows revenge. Since Cinco managed to dump the drugs before being apprehended, Moran can only hold him for 48 hours, and the whole school knows shit's going down in two days, at 3:15, when Cinco and the Cobras intend to deal with Jeff once and for all.
3:15 opening in Toledo, OH on 4/18/1986, advertised
as SHOWDOWN AT LINCOLN HIGH
Rarely in the "high school gangs run amok" craze have the adults in charge been more useless than they are here. Horner tries to talk Jeff into testifying against Cinco, and when he won't, Horner does what any dedicated education leader does: leaves the school until the showdown is over, right around the time Moran and the cops finally show up, even though Cinco and the Cobras have basically been standing at street corners shouting that Jeff is dead meat at 3:15. There's certainly some subtext in the way the script by Sam Bernard (RAD, WARLOCK: THE ARMAGEDDON) and Michael Jacobs (CERTAIN FURY, HALLOWEEN 5: THE REVENGE OF MICHAEL MYERS) lays out the conflict between Jeff and Cinco like it's an ugly breakup, with Cinco the jilted spouse who just can't let Jeff go. It's not an unsung classic of its kind, but 3:15 is entertaining B-movie trash, even if it doesn't utilize some of its established plot elements to their full potential: why introduce a high-school gang of Asian martial arts experts if they never come into play? Cannon sure as shit wouldn't have passed up that opportunity. Gross does manage to pull off one memorably stylish sequence with the raid on the school and the pursuit of Cinco and the Cobras set to a very effectively-used "Lined Up" by Shriekback. It also has an oddball supporting cast with some cult favorites like Foreman, Lauter, Auberjonois, Wayne Crawford (JAKE SPEED) as a concerned teacher ("Goddammit Jeff, will ya listen to me?"), John Doe as a drunk guy trying to get into a club, and the great Wings Hauser getting one scene as Sherry's Jeff-hating dad (Wings' wife Nancy plays her mom). You also get some famous names-to-be like Mario Van Peebles as the leader of the M-16s, the school's black gang (like the kung-fu gang, they never factor into the proceedings), Gina Gershon as a Cobra babe, future FEAR OF A BLACK HAT and TALES FROM THE HOOD director Rusty Cundieff as an M-16, and Dean Devlin as "Gum Chewer," years before turning to screenwriting and partnering with director Roland Emmerich on hits like UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, STARGATE, INDEPENDENCE DAY, and THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW.
Does anyone know what this movie is called?
The ad says one thing but the credits say
another. Is "at 3:15" part of the title or is there just one showing at 3:15?
BLACK RAINBOW (UK - 1989; US release 1991) Written and directed by Mike Hodges. Cast: Rosanna Arquette, Jason Robards, Tom Hulce, Mark Joy, Ron Rosenthal, John Bennes, Linda Pierce, Olek Krupa, Marty Terry, Ed L. Grady, Rick Warner, Jon Thompson, Helen Baldwin, Ed Lillard, Darla N. Warner, Muse Watson. (R, 103 mins) "If you knew for certain that there was nothing after death, that you only had one shot...maybe if we didn't indulge in the arrogance of thinking we go on forever, we'd be better people while we were alive." A film that adamantly refuses to adhere to genre labels or even be clear about exactly what it's up to, BLACK RAINBOW has a deceptively straightforward narrative but still comes off at the end like a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma. It feels like the kind of ambiguous, "elevated horror" slow-burner that A24 would release to critical acclaim and mainstream derision today. Harvey Weinstein certainly didn't know what to with it back in 1989, when Miramax acquired the British-financed film and promptly shelved it for two years. They eventually sold it to Showtime, where it debuted as one of the cable network's original movies in August 1991 before turning up in video stores in 1992. It was a labor of love for Mike Hodges, best known for 1971's GET CARTER and 1980's FLASH GORDON. Hodges' career had been on a downturn throughout the '80s, and he cited BLACK RAINBOW as the first project in a long time where he was given complete freedom to make exactly the film he wanted to make. It's always intriguing and compelling, and the location work in rural North Carolina offers the kind of unique perspective of small-town America that can often only be achieved when seen through the lens of an outsider such as the British Hodges, much like two other British films made at roughly the same time: Donald Cammell's disturbing, Arizona-shot WHITE OF THE EYE and Philip Ridley's Canadian-shot, Idaho-set THE REFLECTING SKIN. But Hodges seems to be biting off more than he can chew, taking the clairvoyant elements similar to what was seen in Italian gialli like Dario Argento's DEEP RED and Lucio Fulci's THE PSYCHIC and weaving them into a supernatural ELMER GANTRY, while at the same time shoehorning in subplots about industrial corruption, hired killers, and NORMA RAE-esque concerns about safety issues in blue-collar workplaces, all bookended by wraparound story that could very well be taking place inside The Shimmer from ANNIHILATION. It's a unique and unconventional chiller that might have more going on that it needs, but it refuses to hold your hand and expects you to pay attention. It's the kind of film where even a local yokel's seemingly throwaway line about kudzu vines is there for a reason.
BLACK RAINBOW opens with journalist Gary Wallace (Tom Hulce) traveling to a small backwoods town in search of Martha Travis (Rosanna Arquette), described by the townsfolk as a "ghost." She's lived in the outskirts of town in a dilapidated house for a decade but no one's ever actually seen her. Wallace sees her, taking some photos from a distance before knocking on the door demanding to know what happened ten years ago on the night her father died and remarking "Your eyes, Martha. They look like they've seen too much." She slams the door in his face and there's a hard cut to a decade earlier. Martha is a renowned medium who travels throughout the small towns of the South with her alcoholic father and manager Walter (Jason Robards), conning Bible Belt rubes with their "contact your dead loved ones" act at local churches. At a stop at an industrial town in nowhere North Carolina, Martha is visibly shaken when she's struck with a legitimate contact from beyond from a woman's dead husband. She terrifies the woman by vividly describing the violent manner in which her husband was murdered.
The problem is, he's not dead. He's very much alive and at home watching TV. He's killed two hours later in a hail of gunfire by an assassin (Mark Joy) in exactly the way Martha described. In her vision, she also saw the killer, and it turns out that the victim (Olek Krupa) worked for Silas Chemical, the plant that employs most of the town, and was about to blow the whistle on rampant safety violations, prompting evil, Mr. Burns-ish owner Ted Silas (John Bennes) to hire a hit man to take him out. The corrupt police chief (Ron Rosenthal) notifies Silas that "we've got a problem" since Martha claims to have seen the killer. The Travises move on to their next gig, with local reporter Wallace following along, convinced Martha's act is a scam but gradually buying into her newfound ability to be contacted by spirits of the dead in the hours shortly before they actually die. He wants to break the story on the killer's identity but soon becomes a believer after Martha's next show has her contacted by a dozen dead souls of people who are all alive then but then perish in a fuel plant explosion the next morning.
It's an eerie premise that Hodges handles very effectively in the contact scenes, which are well-performed by a never-better Arquette. She's matched by Robards, who imbues Walter with the kind of weary, raspy cynicism at which the actor so excelled. They have, to say the least, a complicated relationship with deep-seated family dysfunction. He sees her as a reminder of his now-deceased "bitch" wife who walked out on them years ago. There's also a subtle implication that there's been some patterns of abuse on his part, especially with Martha secretly hooking up with strangers at each of their stops while Walter drinks himself into a stupor in his room down the hall. She resents being pulled into his con act and living a life on the back roads of America with no friends or roots of any kind. That would be enough foundation for BLACK RAINBOW, but it spends too much time on the extraneous shenanigans involving Silas and the hit man, and the unsafe working conditions at plants and factories in the towns that the Travises pass through.
One big mistake Hodges makes is filling the supporting cast almost entirely with regional actors from North Carolina and Virginia. They range from functional to embarrassingly bad, and while Hodges no doubt thought they would add some down-home legitimacy and a strong sense of local color, most of them simply can't cut the mustard acting with seasoned pros like Arquette, Hulce and two-time Oscar-winner Robards (interestingly, Robards and Hulce went straight from this to playing father and son in Ron Howard's smash hit PARENTHOOD). It's particularly noticeable with the characters of Silas and the hit man, both of whom should've been played by established character actors who could've done more with the roles than make them the one-dimensional caricatures they end up being. Knowing in the first scene that Walter is killed ten years earlier does undermine the proto-Shyamalanian twist at the end, but I don't think the plot twist was Hodges' chief concern. I'm not even sure what Hodges' chief concern was given what transpires in the ruthlessly ambiguous closing scenes, but he creates a cultural and religious portrait of red-state America that remains shockingly prescient today. While BLACK RAINBOW was issued on DVD with no fanfare in a subpar, cropped transfer on the budget Trinity label in the early 2000s, it's been somewhat difficult to see in the years after its ubiquitous video store presence in the '90s. As a result, it's found a decent-sized cult following over time and has just been given a pristine HD restoration on the new Blu-ray release from Arrow, because physical media is dead.
THE OLD GUARD (US - 2020) Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood. Written by Greg Rucka. Cast: Charlize Theron, KiKi Layne, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Matthias Schoenaerts, Marwan Kenzari, Luca Marinelli, Harry Melling, Van Veronica Ngo, Anamaria Marinca, Joey Ansah, Natacha Karam, Mette Towley, Michael Ward, Shala Nyx. (R, 125 mins) Based on the comic book by Greg Rucka (Whiteout) and Leandro Fernandez, the Netflix Original film THE OLD GUARD is a high-concept superhero saga, an origin story of sorts that, at the end of the day, feels like a two-hour pilot for a streaming series. Charlize Theron is Andy, the leader of a quartet of mercenaries that includes Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), Joe (Marwan Kenzari), and Nicky (Luca Marinelli). They're contacted by ex-CIA official Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) for an assignment in South Sudan rescuing a group of young girls who have been abducted. They arrive to pull off the job only to find there are no kidnapped girls and it's a set-up. They're ambushed and all four are mowed down in a hail of machine gun fire. But wait...it takes a minute or two, but the bullets begin to pop out, the wounds begin to close, and they regain consciousness, catching their killers off guard and massacring the whole lot. Yes, there's the hook: they're immortal and they've been there at crucial moments throughout history, often silently saving humankind in the process.
At the same time, US Marine Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne of IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK) is part of a unit in Afghanistan apprehending a wanted insurgent who proceeds to slash her throat. She's presumed dead but by the next day, is fine and there isn't even a scratch on her neck. She's shunned by everyone at the base and she's given transfer orders to be observed at a hospital in Germany. As she's waiting to leave, she's apprehended by Andy who, along with others, sensed her newfound immortality in their dreams. It happens suddenly, without warning, and they've all experienced the process. Booker was the last one, and he joined the team shortly after the War of 1812. Joe and Nicky hail from the Crusades, and Andy, once revered as Andromache of Scythia, is in the ballpark of 6000 years old. There have been others over time, most notably Quynh (Van Veronica Ngo), who formed a bond with Andy as their immortality led to accusations of witchcraft, resulting in Quynh being chained up, locked in an iron maiden and dropped to the bottom of the ocean, where she's remained, alive and trapped, for 500 years. Their superpowers have a limit--they can live centuries upon centuries and their wounds will heal, but they can't escape a situation such as that if captured. Even the immortality has its limits: Andy's wounds and injuries are starting to take longer to heal, and while they may live thousands and thousands of years, they still won't live "forever."
A lot of THE OLD GUARD is dedicated to establishing the rules and the extent of their immortality (Booker: "Just because we keep living doesn't mean we stop hurting"), and to Andy becoming a reluctant mentor to stubborn Nile, who takes a long time to accept her new reality. The villain is Merrick (Harry Melling, best known as Dudley Dursley in the HARRY POTTER films), a dickish, Martin Shkreli-like pharma bro CEO who wants to capture The Old Guard and run tests to crack their genetic code so he can unlock the key to immortality. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood (LOVE AND BASKETBALL) keeps things moving at a fast clip, and there's plenty of well-crafted action sequences, but at the same time, its essential story structure doesn't really differ from what's really just a slightly tweaked X-MEN formula at its core. Where THE OLD GUARD does stand out from the crowd is that it's the first comic book movie of its kind to be directed by a black woman, and that Joe and Nicky are a couple, some welcome and refreshingly nonchalant inclusivity that would've caused a shitstorm of outrage even as recently as even a decade ago. Those factors aside, it's pretty standard-issue stuff. Seemingly arbitrary factors keep coming into play, and characters are prone to barking things like "This is what we do!" and "This is who you are now!" Of course, one of The Old Guard will betray the group, though the reasoning and the outcome are different than what you expect. The actors are fine, and Theron is always solid in MAD MAX: FURY ROAD and ATOMIC BLONDE action mode. THE OLD GUARD is fine, I guess. It's an enjoyable enough Netflix stream if you're sitting inside with the AC on an oppressively hot day or just avoiding the general public since there's too many dumbshits walking around without masks.
