TAU (US/Luxembourg - 2018) Directed by Federico D'Alessandro. Written by Noga Landau. Cast: Maika Monroe, Ed Skrein, Fiston Barek, Ivana Zivkovic, voice of Gary Oldman. (R, 97 mins) After WHAT HAPPENED TO MONDAY, THE TITAN, and ANON, it seems like Netflix's apparent criteria for acquiring sci-fi films to stream as original movies begins and ends with "Could this pass for a middling feature-length episode of BLACK MIRROR?" Such is the case with TAU, the directing debut of Federico D'Alessandro, a veteran storyboard artist and animatics supervisor who's been buried in the closing credits of many a Marvel blockbuster. Given D'Alessandro's experience with the visuals of films in their planning stages, it's no surprise that TAU, set largely inside an expansive, high-tech house, looks terrific. Its early exterior scenes have that sort of rainy neon that's been de rigueur for the sci-fi genre since BLADE RUNNER, but it's a look that rarely gets old. TAU's inspirations come from other sources, mostly video store fixtures from a generation ago, like Richard Stanley's 1990 cult classic HARDWARE, Stephen Norrington's 1995 HARDWARE-esque DEATH MACHINE, and the same kind of dystopian atmosphere of 1993's CYBORG 2, not to mention an imposing, AI-controlled robot called Aries that looks like the ED-209 from ROBOCOP's significantly less graceful cousin. Factoring out some expectedly janky CGI explosions and destruction in the climax and TAU probably could pass for a straight-to-VHS Vidmark Entertainment title from 1995. Scraping by fencing stolen watches and credit cards acquired at clubs, wrong-side-of-the-tracks Julia (Maika Monroe of IT FOLLOWS) has dreams of going to music school and lives in the usual drab apartment with the light from an exterior neon sign constantly flashing into her bedroom. She's knocked out and abducted and wakes up in a cell wearing a Hannibal Lecter-type mask made of rubber. There's two other captives, who reluctantly tag along when Julia plans an escape. The other two are killed almost instantly while the more resourceful Julia survives and meets her captor: brilliant and deranged scientist Thomas Alexander "Alex" Upton (Ed Skrein).
Alex is hard at work on a billion dollar project for a mysterious tech firm, and he's using unwitting test subjects to create the perfect "memory algorithm" for use in "Tau," a sentient artificial intelligence that he's designing. His massive home is run by a prototype of Tau, who follows every command and also controls security robot Aries and numerous baseball-sized "drones" that can do all the chores around the house, including cooking and cleaning. From the start, it's clear that Julia (or "Subject 3") is smarter than other test subjects, so in time, she's granted a bit more freedom around the locked-down house as long as she completes her tests administered daily by Tau while Alex is at the office. It isn't long before Tau--voiced by Gary Oldman, presumably before his recent Oscar win--grows fond of Julia in a friendly way and becomes eager to explore its human side that cruel Alex has kept in the dark. Of course, none of this would occur were it not for Skrein's Alex being one of the dumbest villains ever. Even after she manages to nearly escape numerous times, and even after he concludes Julia is more intelligent and perceptive than he anticipated, he provides her with enough expository info to foreshadow his own downfall. "You control the information, you control the behavior!" he says of Tau, adding "Tau doesn't know about the outside world...and he never will!"
Naturally, as soon as he leaves Julia alone with the childlike and inquisitive Tau, she's reading it books about classical music, art, and poetry from Alex's massive library ("I'm not allowed to read the books," Tau explains), teaching it independent thought and action. It also works in Julia's favor that dumbass Alex designed Tau as the most easily-manipulated AI in sci-fi history, so much so that you could make a drinking game out of how many times Tau emphatically declares "I am not permitted!" before immediately folding like a card table when Julia asks it to do something it's not allowed to do a second time. The production design in Alex's house is first-rate, the few exteriors are appropriately gloomy and despairing (this was shot in Serbia, though the unseen Oldman probably phoned his lines in over a DARKEST HOUR lunch break while in full Winston Churchill makeup), and the score by Bear McCreary is decent. TAU is maybe worth a stream on a slow night or if you're an Oldman completist. It's completely disposable and forgettable, but on the Netflix Original grading curve, there's been much worse.
SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO (US - 2018) Directed by Stefano Sollima. Written by Taylor Sheridan. Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, Catherine Keener, Isabela Moner, Jeffrey Donovan, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Matthew Modine, Shea Whigham, Elijah Rodriguez, Bruno Bichir, Graham Beckel, Raoul Trujillo, David Castaneda, Faysal Ahmed. (R, 122 mins) The tough and uncompromising SICARIO opened to much acclaim in the fall of 2015, but it didn't end on a note that left anyone demanding a sequel. SICARIO director Denis Villeneuve and star Emily Blunt are out, but co-stars Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, and Jeffrey Donovan are back, along with writer Taylor Sheridan (HELL OR HIGH WATER, WIND RIVER, and, since he continues to pretend it doesn't exist, VILE). Italian director Stefano Sollima (the son of legendary Eurocult director Sergio Sollima, best known for THE BIG GUNDOWN and VIOLENT CITY) makes his US debut and does a solid job of adhering to the style set by Villeneuve, with a particular affinity for those overhead shots of fast-moving military caravans that were so memorable the first time around. Though Del Toro's contracted agent Alejandro is the titular sicario, or assassin, it was Blunt's rookie FBI agent who served as the core of the story and the connection to the audience as she barreled headlong into a situation far more violent and dangerous than she ever anticipated. The shift in focus to Del Toro isn't a surprise considering it began about 3/4 of the way through SICARIO, when Blunt's agent was relegated to the sideline while Villeneuve and Sheridan concentrated on Alejandro's quest for revenge against a cartel underboss who killed his family.
It takes a little while for Alejandro to show up in SICARIO: DAY OF THE SOLDADO (which was titled SICARIO 2: SOLDADO when the first trailer appeared), as the globetrotting intro jumps from migrants being stopped at the US/Mexico border to an ISIS suicide bombing in a Kansas City supermarket to CIA agent Matt Graver (Brolin) in Djibouti before being sent to Somalia to interrogate a pirate and terror suspect who knows the connection between the seemingly unrelated incidents. It turns out that the Mexican cartels have found a lucrative side gig in smuggling people over the US border, including Islamic terrorists. To combat this unforeseen front in the war on terror, the Secretary of Defense (Matthew Modine) and CIA chief Cynthia Foards (Catherine Keener) assign Graver to a top-secret mission to start a war between the cartels and hope they all wipe each other out, of course with the stipulation that the government will deny any knowledge and Graver is on his own if the truth leaks out. Assembling his usual crew, including bespectacled right-hand man Steve Forsing (Donovan) and the elusive Alejandro, with the caveat "No rules this time" (were there rules last time?), Graver oversees the assassination of the top lawyer of a major cartel boss and orchestrates the abduction of 16-year-old Isabela Reyes (Isabala Moner), the daughter of Carlos Reyes, another top cartel honcho. This starts the war they intended as Graver and Alejandro stash the girl at a safe house in Texas, but when they try to get her back into Mexico, the entire plan goes to shit. Graver and the crew end up back in the States while Alejandro and Isabela are left on their own in Mexico, as the President, the Secretary of Defense, and Foards scramble to explain why CIA and US military were engaged in a firefight in Mexico, ordering Graver to clean up the mess, including any trace of Alejandro.
SICARIO worked fine on its own, and SOLDADO is sufficiently entertaining if completely superfluous. Brolin is fun as Graver, who often seems like what might happen if The Dude was ever in the CIA. But Del Toro is the primary focus this time, and the film wants to further humanize Alejandro, with Isabela essentially serving as the surrogate daughter to replace the one he lost under the orders of her own father. Isabella's father, seemingly an important figure, is never seen, and there's a lot of time devoted to a tenuously-connected subplot involving Miguel (Elijah Rodriguez), a Mexican-American teenager in McAllen, TX just over the border. Impressionable Miguel has a passport and gets roped by his older cousin into working as a mule for cartel flunky Gallo (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo). Miguel and Alejandro have a passing encounter in a mall parking lot that will come into play much later, but when it does, it still feels forced and hackneyed. It's indicative of the indecisive nature of Sheridan's script. The political implications of the story muddled enough as it is (how exactly does the Secretary of Defense think it will emerge from this half-baked plan unscathed?), but between the Alejandro/Graver/Isabela and the Miguel storylines, SOLDADO feels like two ideas Sheridan couldn't flesh out, so he tried to cram them into one. Indeed, by the time we get to the abrupt and unsatisfying conclusion, which leaves several threads dangling and the door wide open for a third installment, the realization sets in that SOLDADO plays like the two-hour premiere of a SICARIO TV series that's cleverly disguised as a feature film. A hypothetical SICARIO: THE SERIES on Netflix sounds like a better idea than the strange determination to turn the Alejandro story into a big-screen franchise.
2013's ESCAPE PLAN was an enjoyable prison-break pairing of aging '80s action icons Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger that failed to generate much interest and flopped at the box office. Like some other underperformers, it proved to be a huge hit in China, which explains the existence of the needlessly convoluted, partially Chinese-financed ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES, the first of two sequels shot back-to-back for DTV release in the States and a theatrical rollout in Asia. Schwarzenegger is out and top-billed Stallone is back, albeit in largely a supporting role, but the nominal lead is popular Chinese actor and singer Huang Xiaoming as Shu, the newest member of security expert Ray Breslin's (Stallone) Atlanta-based team. After a botched extraction from a Chechen prison results in the death of a hostage, Breslin fires one of his men, Kimbral (Wes Chatham), for deviating from their set routine. A year later, Shu is in Thailand visiting his tech mogul cousin Yusheng Ma (Chen Tang) when both are abducted and thrown into Hades, a super high-tech prison nine stories underground that holds regular fighting showdowns (that's original) in "The Zoo," where the victor earns time in "The Sanctuary," a room with virtual reality imagery that provides a brief respite for the prisoners. Jake (Jesse Metcalfe), another Breslin staffer, goes rogue and tries to investigate Shu's disappearance on his own only to end up in Hades himself, where he and Shu encounter an incarcerated Kimbral. It then becomes clear--to them but perhaps not to the viewer--that it's all a set-up against Breslin as revenge for him escaping from "The Tomb" in the previous film, which means one thing: Breslin must do what he does best and get himself thrown into Hades, essentially breaking in to find a way to get his guys out.
Though Stallone is playing the same character, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson is back as his right-hand man Hush, and co-writer Miles Chapman also returns, ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES seems like it takes place in a different world than its predecessor. It's got such heavy futuristic sci-fi leanings that it could almost pass as a FORTRESS or CUBE reboot, and at the rate this franchise is going, ESCAPE PLAN 3 could very well be set in space. Director Steven C. Miller, who's helmed several chapters of Lionsgate's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series, churned this out in an undistinguished fashion, with constantly jittery cinematography and motion-sickness inducing shaky-cam in the action scenes, and some of the most unacceptably shoddy CGI in recent memory (a couple of iPhone-app-level explosions and Stallone administering a CGI neckbreak that's just atrocious). Huang is a dull hero, though to his credit, he's not acting in his first language. Half-asleep and sporting a terrible rug, Stallone is largely relegated to the sideline, almost-but-not-quite-Willis-style (Breslin actually leaves his office), until he ends up in Hades about an hour in and more or less becomes the focus. Dave Bautista has little to do but manages a couple of laughs as a fixer colleague of Breslin's who gathers intel for their search for Shu, strong-arming assistance from a hacker played by Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz (and speaking of pointless cameos, Atlanta Falcons RB Devonta Freeman can briefly be glimpsed as a Hades inmate). ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES is lazy, cheap-looking, and laughably cliched, right down to its (ostensibly) chief villain, evil warden "The Zookeeper," played by Titus Welliver. A reliable ringer when it comes to character roles, a glowering Welliver looks like he's in physical pain being forced to gravely intone lines like "I know everything about my animals...I'm the Zookeeper," while one inmate helpfully waxes poetic with "That's why they call it The Zoo...we're all animals here...survival of the fittest." Between these hastily-shot sequels that were only made to satisfy the demand of the Asian market and the apparently ill-advised direction CREED 2 seems to be headed from the sound of things (why is Ivan Drago back?), it looks like Stallone is completely squandering the serious cred he got from that CREED Oscar nomination. Had he won it like he should have, we might've been spared ESCAPE PLAN 2: HADES. Or at least Miller could've rewritten the script to keep Breslin completely confined to his office so Bruce Willis could've stepped in and taken over the role. (R, 93 mins) CHINA SALESMAN (China - 2017; US release 2018)
It's pretty clear from the moment CHINA SALESMAN begins that it's gonna be something special. There's an opening certification stating that it's commissioned by the Chinese government, one of the 16 (!) production companies is represented by a typo ("Gloden" God Video & Culture), there's 72 (!!) credited producers, and former action star and current sleeper agent Steven Seagal is listed as "Steve Segal" in the opening credits. A $20 million epic that tanked in China a year ago, CHINA SALESMAN was picked up for the US by Cleopatra Entertainment, the company that gave us the Kazakh shitshow DIAMOND CARTEL, and prominently features Seagal and Mike Tyson in its advertising, making it a veritable Who's Who of #MeToo. But, like ESCAPE PLAN 2, the Hollywood guest stars have relatively minor roles, with the focus on Li Dongxue as Yan Jian, an ambitious representative from Chinese tech company DH Telecom, who's in Uganda trying to negotiate a lucrative contract to establish 3G wireless communication at newly-constructed cell phone towers in the civil war-torn country. Pretty scintillating stuff, with a lot of screen time devoted to captivating meetings and boardroom backstabbing as Yan Jian and his associate Ruan Ling (Li Ai) are in constant danger of being railroaded by duplicitous Eurotrash shitbag Michael Duchamp (Clovis Fouin), who's also trying to close the deal for his company and seems to be on the good side of Susanna (Janicke Askevold), the head of the independent committee charged with deciding the victor in the 3G bidding war. But Susanna eventually sides with Yan Jian, who's heroically depicted as the only person who can save Uganda, right down to a patently ridiculous scene where he risks life and limb to plant a Chinese flag, which he and Susanna then passionately wave as they drive past cheering Ugandan soldiers.
Tyson, who relooped his dialogue but still can't match his own lip movements, plays Kabbah, a religious mercenary from an unnamed African country who ends up as a flunky for Duchamp. Seagal has little more than a cameo as Lauder, an expat bar owner ("Of all the gin joints in the world...") and arms dealer on the side who, for some reason, has a framed action still of Steven Seagal on his desk. CHINA SALESMAN shows its only signs of life in the first ten minutes during an out-of-nowhere bar brawl between Tyson and Seagal's double, which starts when Kabbah refuses a drink for religious reasons, prompting Lauder to have one of his goons piss in a mug and try to force him to drink it. There's an admittedly amusing moment when Seagal('s double) flicks Tyson's ear in a way that has to be an Evander Holyfield dig, but what perfectly caps the scene is an enraged Kabbah shouting "You serve me pee...YOU DIE!" Beyond that, CHINA SALESMAN is an oppressively overlong bore, filled with the kind of crummy greenscreen and CGI that only Chinese visual effects teams can pull off, and populated by actors so stiff and uncomfortable with English (even Tyson) that Seagal ends up looking like a world-class orator by default. (Unrated, 111 mins)
THE ESCAPE OF PRISONER 614 (US - 2018)
It's rare that you encounter a movie that has no reason to exist. One of the most self-defeating films of 2018, THE ESCAPE OF PRISONER 614 initially appears to be a B-grade, Redbox-ready take on HELL OR HIGH WATER by way of the Coen Bros., with nitwit sheriff's deputies Jim Doyle (FREAKS AND GEEKS' Martin Starr) and Thurman Hayford (Jake McDorman of CBS' LIMITLESS spinoff) idling their days away in the sleepy and sparsely-populated rural town of Shandaken in upstate New York in the late 1960s. They have little to do but play cops & robbers in the woods and get on-the-house pie at the local diner, and without a single arrest in the last year, the stern, no-nonsense sheriff (Ron Perlman) comes down from Albany to fire them. But they find a way to regain their jobs when they get word of an escaped convict known only as Prisoner 614 (George Sample III) on foot and headed their way. They hike deep into the woods--idiotically wasting all their bullets in a pissing contest where neither of them can shoot a beer can at ten paces--finding 614 and taking him into custody. 614 is wanted for killing a deputy from a neighboring county, but insists he's innocent and that the deputy died of a heart attack, and as time goes on, Jim and Thurman believe him. Once they get back to Shandaken, they can't convince the sheriff, even with a sworn statement from a witness that the obese deputy had a heart attack while 614 was simply standing near him. Their actions get Jim and Thurman rehired, but then they risk it all by going against the sheriff and aiding and abetting a fugitive to get 614 to freedom in Canada.
It's hard telling who this movie is even for. Nothing sums up its utter futility like having a character unknowingly guzzle Ipecac in a set-up for what must be a showstopping comedic projectile vomiting set piece, but then it has that very character drop dead of a heart attack before the Ipecac kicks in. Is that like making a porno where two people are about to fuck and then just watch TV? THE ESCAPE OF PRISONER 614 subverts your expectations to the point where the entire movie just feels like one long dick move. Is it a comedy without laughs or a thriller without suspense? And is it that way by design? Starr and McDornan seem like they'll be playing affable goofballs but then just seem to wander aimlessly through the movie with no real character arcs or progression, while Sample has even less to do, even when writer/director Zach Golden throws in a cursory mention of the charges against him being racially-motivated. Perlman pops up here and there to slow burn at the deputies and basically be "Ron Perlman," but Golden doesn't seem to know what kind of movie he was trying to make, so he plays it too safe and makes what amounts to a movie about nothing that goes nowhere. The period detail is atrocious, and you can only gauge that it's 1967 or thereabouts from Jim mentioning that he recently saw COOL HAND LUKE (you should probably do the same). There's a few old cars and people chain-smoking indoors, but no one looks or sounds like they're in the late '60s. Speaking of sounds, if this is upstate New York in the Catskills, why is everyone breaking out overbaked Southern drawls like they're auditioning for a community theater version of IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT? (PG-13, 97 mins)
The kind of glossy thriller that would've starred Michael Douglas and been the #1 movie at the box office for at least two weeks 20 years ago, SPINNING MAN instead went straight to VOD with the best cast that 2002 had to offer. It's pretty good most of the way, with college philosophy/linguistics prof Evan Birch (Guy Pearce) being mercilessly hounded by persistent detective Malloy (Pierce Brosnan), when a young college student named Joyce (Odeya Rush) goes missing. Joyce was last seen working at a kayak rental stand at the lake and a witness saw her talking to an older man in a car that looks just like Birch's. Malloy's investigation reopens old wounds for Birch's wife Ellen (Minnie Driver) who has some understandable trust issues with her husband after a scandalous affair with a student forced him out of another university five years ago. Malloy has done all the research on his suspect's lecherous past, and Birch still can't save himself from his inner entitled horndog, whether he's smugly accepting an apology from a student fling from last semester (Alexandra Shipp) when she blames herself for letting things get out of hand, or drifting off in the checkout line of a hardware store when he starts fantasizing about the college-aged cashier. Then Birch finds himself in a hole that keeps getting deeper: he can't keep his story straight, he can't explain why he was 40 minutes late picking up his daughter (Eliza Pryor) from a school event the day Joyce vanished; lip gloss that isn't Ellen's is found in his car, and Malloy has forensics impound his car and finds several strands of hair on the backseat that are a DNA match with Joyce.
So far, so good, with director Simon Kaijser and COCO screenwriter Matthew Aldrich (working from a 2003 novel by George Harrar) going with the bold decision to make Pearce's Birch kind of a prick, especially with the smirking self-satisfaction on his face when he sits there and lets a naive student blame herself for their affair (you'll want to punch him when he pauses and says "Well...I accept your apology"). At first, Driver's Ellen seems like a harping stereotype, but the more time you spend with Birch, the more you sympathize with her because he's a serial adulterer who can't stop lying and she's just trying to hold it together for her family (they also have a five-year-old son, played by Noah Salsbury Lipson). Best of all is Brosnan, who really sinks his teeth into a de facto Columbo character as Malloy, who turns up at the most inopportune times and clearly relishes being a pain in Birch's ass. Brosnan conducts a master class in passive-aggression the way his aging, seen-it-all cop cuts his prey down to size and asks "Excuse my ignorance...but what does a philosopher do?" and the way he offers his cutting critique of Birch's most recent book ("Thick!"). Clark Gregg even scores a few points in small role as Birch's cynical attorney buddy ("Cops don't ask questions, they plant landmines!"), and Jamie Kennedy has a small role as one of Birch's colleagues, for some reason. But just as it's reaching the final act, SPINNING MAN spins out of control and can't recover. It might've worked on the page (many Goodreads posts about Harrar's novel seem to indicate that it didn't) but it definitely doesn't on the screen. It wants to be abstract and philosophical but instead ends up coming off as a lazy deus ex machina that plays more like an ill-advised acknowledgment of Christopher Nolan's 2001 breakthrough MEMENTO, simply because Guy Pearce heads the cast. It's a shame, because it's an intriguing film that's a must-see for Brosnan fans until its weak and unsatisfying cop-out of an ending. (R, 101 mins)
TERMINAL (US/UK/Ireland - 2018)
Until it goes bonkers in its closing 15 minutes, TERMINAL could've saved a lot of time by just having debuting writer/director Vaughn Stein post pics of his Blu-ray collection on Instagram. A veteran assistant director on films like SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN and WORLD WAR Z, Stein displays some undeniable style with TERMINAL's neon, rain-soaked cityscapes that look like BLADE RUNNER crossed with an MGM musical. But the script is a tired retread of influential 1990s touchstones like Quentin Tarantino, Guy Ritchie, and THE USUAL SUSPECTS. Enigmatic mystery woman Annie (Margot Robbie, who also produced) encounters suicidal, terminally-ill schoolteacher Bill (Simon Pegg) at an empty train station while she works the graveyard shift at its bar, called the End of the Line Cafe. While they discuss ways for him to end his life, she tells a story that goes back three weeks where she crosses paths with two hit men, Vince (Dexter Fletcher) and Alfred (Max Irons), at a bar called The Rabbit Hole, and they're all in the employ of the ominous and unseen "Mr. Franklyn," who lords over the city's crime operation behind a voice scrambler in large control room.
There's a lot of yakking amongst the actors in that '90s Tarantino way, but instead of hip and funny pop culture references, everyone's dropping quotes from Alice in Wonderland. Yes, at a pivotal moment, someone actually declares "We are through the looking glass!" and "We've tumbled down the rabbit hole!" almost as if Stein has no idea that 2010's barely-released MALICE IN WONDERLAND already tried updating Lewis Carroll into a postmodern Guy Ritchie-inspired scenario with equally unsuccessful results. The Ritchie worship extends to the presence of LOCK, STOCK AND TWO SMOKING BARRELS stars Fletcher and Nick Moran in a small role, and there's even a PULP FICTION POV shot from inside the trunk of a car as its opened, looking up at Fletcher and Irons, who still doesn't appear to be any closer to happening despite his busy schedule and being sired by Jeremy. Though TERMINAL looks great, Stein's direction is a lot of Dutch-angled self-indulgence and his shamelessly derivative script goes full USUAL SUSPECTS by setting up "Mr. Franklyn" as a Dipshit Keyser Soze. This was already in the can by the time Robbie got an Oscar nomination for I, TONYA, but who knows what she or anyone else saw in Stein's script, other than a chance for her to recycle some of her grinning, crazy-eyed Harley Quinn schtick? The impressive production design isn't enough to maintain interest while the actors are babbling incessantly, and it's always a good rule with movies of this sort to keep your eyes on any prominently-billed name actor who doesn't appear to have much to do with anything that's happening. Also with Mike Myers, in his first big-screen role since 2009's INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, under some aging makeup as a limping and perpetually "Danny Boy"-whistling janitor who occasionally pops up on the story's periphery and likethat...he's gone! Is Stein really making it that obvious? (Unrated, 96 mins)
HUMAN EXPERIMENTS (US - 1979) Directed by Gregory Goodell. Written by Richard Rothstein. Cast: Linda Haynes, Geoffrey Lewis, Ellen Travolta, Aldo Ray, Mercedes Shirley, Darlene Craviotto, Lurene Tuttle, Jackie Coogan, Marie O'Henry, Wesley Marie Tackitt, Caroline Davies, Cherie Franklin, Bobby Porter, James O'Connell, Teda Bracci. (R, 85 mins) There's a welcome drive-in grunginess to HUMAN EXPERIMENTS, a forgotten women-in-prison/psychological thriller mash-up that's just been rescued from obscurity thanks to a new Blu-ray release from Scorpion. It's not surprising that it looks and feels a lot like a TV-movie, as director Gregory Goodell went on to spend the rest of his career largely on teleplay duty for movie-of-the-week offerings like the 1986 Martin Sheen alcoholism drama SHATTERED SPIRITS for ABC and the 1992 Patty Duke supernatural thriller GRAVE SECRETS: THE LEGACY OF HILLTOP DRIVE for CBS, among numerous others. An early screenwriting credit for Richard Rothstein, who went on to create the HBO anthology series THE HITCHHIKER and co-write 1992's franchise-spawning UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, HUMAN EXPERIMENTS is Goodell's only feature film to date and he took the opportunity to revel in some hard-R sleaze with some skin and some gutter talk (including 1950s Hollywood vet Aldo Ray dropping a C-bomb), and a really grim downer of a scene where the heroine masturbates after moistening her fingers with her own tears. Despite the potential, it isn't nearly as over-the-top as a lot of films with a similar setting behind bars, but it still somehow ended up on the UK's infamous Video Nasties list (to lump the comparatively tame HUMAN EXPERIMENTS in with the likes of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST and FACES OF DEATH shows how absurd the whole situation was). While its fusion of genres never quite gels and the villain's master gaslighting plan doesn't make a whole lot of sense, the whole project is offbeat enough, and demonstrates a well-deployed since of bitter irony in its denouement that it ends up an interesting curio even if it's not entirely successful.
HUMAN EXPERIMENTS is carried almost entirely by a go-for-broke performance by cult actress Linda Haynes as Rachel Foster, a small-time country music singer from Florida who's driving cross-country on the back roads, picking up gigs in dive bars in podunk towns along the way. At one stop in a California desert town, she's cheated out of a good chunk of her promised $50 by creep bar owner Matt Tibbs (Ray) and doesn't get any help from the asshole sheriff (Jackie Coogan!), who happens to be Tibbs' big brother. On her way out of town, she wrecks her car swerving to avoid hitting a bloodied, shell-shocked young woman in the middle of the road, and when she finds the nearest house to call the police, she walks into an in-progress massacre with an entire family being shotgunned to death by their teenage son. Rachel kills the son in self defense, but when Sheriff Tibbs arrives, he sees her holding a gun and decides to close the case immediately, with circumstantial evidence apparently all that's required to get her a life sentence for murder. She doesn't adjust well to life inside the oddly small facility, where the warden (Mercedes Shirley) is allowing prison psychiatrist Dr. Hans Kline (Geoffrey Lewis) to conduct secret brainwashing experiments on unwilling inmates in a perversion of rehabilitation where their minds snap and they come to believe they're someone completely different, a method that leads not so much to rehabilitation but "rebirth." Rachel soon begins questioning her sanity after she sees new friend Pam (Caroline Davies) hanging in a cell only to have the body disappear and be told she was paroled. There's other subtle examples of Kline playing mind games with her, like buying the car that was owned by the family she was convicted of killing and driving it past her on the prison grounds, and purchasing a painting found at Tibbs' scuzzy motel and hanging it in the prison rec room.
Kline's ultimate motive is still a little foggy even after it's explained, but he's the clear villain in that he's not above killing a test subject if he doesn't get the desired results. To that end, HUMAN EXPERIMENTS is somewhat of a precursor to the much trashier 1985 WIP potboiler HELLHOLE. It doesn't have the merciless scenery chewing of a heroin-addicted Ray Sharkey, but it does have a committed performance by Haynes in what was her only top-billed headlining gig. She's an absolute trooper in this, especially in one horrific scene where she's locked in solitary and cockroaches, spiders, and other insects are poured directly on her through a grate in the ceiling in an attempt to get her to break and let go of "Rachel" and become what Kline wants her to be. Born in 1947, Haynes had a short run in Hollywood in the 1970s, with a handful of feature films and several TV credits. Her most notable roles were as the love interests to dour and paranoid mob flunky Jason Miller in 1975's underrated THE NICKEL RIDE and to unravelling, vengeance-obsessed Vietnam vet William Devane in 1977's ROLLING THUNDER. Haynes had a quality that was hard to pin down, one that can best be described as "the cute girl next door who hit some rough patches and had a habit for falling for the wrong men but wants to get her shit together and settle down." This made her a very natural and unaffected presence in most of her films but Hollywood simply didn't know what to do with her. According to Goodell on the Blu-ray commentary, even the producers of an exploitation grinder like HUMAN EXPERIMENTS tried to talk him out of casting Haynes because she "wasn't glamorous enough." That's precisely why she's perfect for the role of a loner musician with no family or friends disappearing down the back roads of America, barely scraping by with pick-up gigs in shitty dive bars. You don't need to know what it is to know that she's running away from something, which, for better or worse, makes HUMAN EXPERIMENTS the perfect starring vehicle for Linda Haynes. The film was in and out of American drive-ins and grindhouses in a week, but it--or more specifically, Haynes--found some acclaim in Europe, where Haynes won the Best Actress award at the 1981 Sitges Film Festival in Spain, which focuses on the fantasy and horror genres. HUMAN EXPERIMENTS ended up being her penultimate big-screen project, as she would abruptly retire from acting in 1980 at just 33 after supporting roles in the Robert Redford prison drama BRUBAKER and the Emmy-winning miniseries GUYANA TRAGEDY: THE STORY OF JIM JONES.
A publicity shot of Linda Haynes
from the mid-1970s
She vanished without a trace until journalist and Haynes superfan Tom Graves began searching for her in the mid-1990s. He chronicled his quest in the piece "Blonde Shadow: The Brief Career and Mysterious Disappearance of Linda Haynes." She had no agent, no ties to the industry, left no personal or forwarding info with SAG and seemed to be off the grid by choice. After some time, Graves managed to get her phone number from an assistant of Quentin Tarantino's. Also a Haynes fan, Tarantino named his short-lived Miramax-owned cult distribution label Rolling Thunder Pictures after ROLLING THUNDER, and unsuccessfully attempted to lure Haynes out of retirement to play Sherry Stringfield's mother in a 1995 episode of ER that he was directing. Haynes turned him down--having been out of the industry for a decade and a half and with little interest in movies, she had no idea who Tarantino was and was completely unaware of the cultural impact of RESERVOIR DOGS and PULP FICTION. But the elusive actress consented to an interview with Graves, telling him that in the 15 years since her self-imposed exile, he and Tarantino were the only two who ever tracked her down to discuss her acting career. In Graves' interviews, Haynes revealed that she was developing a serious drinking problem around the time of HUMAN EXPERIMENTS and it was really becoming an issue while shooting GUYANA TRAGEDY. Her marriage was falling apart, she was growing increasingly depressed and having suicidal thoughts, and she decided she needed to get away and clear her head. After a stint in rehab and a divorce, she found that she lost interest in Hollywood and was afraid going back would perpetuate the cycle of alcoholism and depression once again. So she walked away. She moved to an isolated area of Vermont and, eventually to Miami, where most of her family resided. She went to college, got a degree, and began a new career as a legal aid. With the advent of the DVD revolution, Blu-ray bonus features, fan conventions, and social media, the now-70-year-old Haynes has found that her acting career, just a decade in duration, has not been forgotten. She remains one of the best actresses of her era who never quite made it (she's just perfect in ROLLING THUNDER), and even a scuzzy B-movie like HUMAN EXPERIMENTS, made at a time when her personal life was beginning a downward spiral, gives you a good look at what made Linda Haynes such a unique figure in '70s cinema.
JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM (US - 2018) Directed by J.A. Bayona. Written by Derek Connolly and Colin Trevorrow. Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rafe Spall, Justice Smith, Daniella Pineda, Jeff Goldblum, James Cromwell, Toby Jones, Ted Levine, BD Wong, Geraldine Chaplin, Isabella Sermon, Peter Jason, Robert Emms, Charlie Rawes, Kevin Layne, John Schwab. (PG-13, 128 mins) Five films into a 25-year-old blockbuster franchise--let's count this all as one series--and it's understandable that coming up with fresh ideas might be a little difficult. JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM, the follow-up to the 2015 reboot/sequel JURASSIC WORLD, recognizes this, and while it includes numerous visual callbacks and shout-outs to previous installments (including the brief return of an iconic fan favorite), it basically opts for the insane route, with a second-half shift into territory that's so illogical and ludicrous that it can't help but make itself oddly endearing. There's enough sly moments throughout--Bryce Dallas Howard's introduction begins with a close-up of her high heels that's so blatant that it can't be anything but a middle finger to everyone still bitching about her footwear from JURASSIC WORLD--that I'm actually willing to give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt. Feel free to argue the plot holes and inconsistencies all you want, but I think they're well aware that they've made what will probably be the dumbest movie of 2018. I can't recall another director harangued more for getting a lucky break than Colin Trevorrow was with JURASSIC WORLD three years ago. Though the directorial reins have been handed off to Guillermo del Toro protege J.A. Bayona (THE ORPHANAGE, THE IMPOSSIBLE, A MONSTER CALLS), Trevorrow remains onboard as a producer and co-writer. With that in mind, it's very much Bayona's film, especially with its improbable second-half location change, but the director seems more than willing to help his franchise predecessor troll the trolls with bits like that high-heel intro, and a later shot where Howard's character arrives on an island and Bayona is sure to spend more time than necessary showing the audience that she's wearing boots.
When a raging volcano threatens the dinosaurs still living on Isla Nublar, the home of the ruins of Jurassic World, Congress must decide whether to intervene and rescue them or allow them to perish once again. Arguing in favor of letting them go extinct is Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), who briefly appears at a congressional hearing to repeat the same arguments he leveled at spare-no-expense multi-billionaire John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) a quarter century ago. Congress eventually decides the US will not intervene, but then former Jurassic World PR head and current dinosaur conservationist Claire Dearing (Howard) is summoned to the northern California mansion of Hammond's previously unmentioned business partner Benjamin Lockwood (James Cromwell). Lockwood is dying and the day-to-day operation of his empire is left largely in the hands of his right-hand man Eli Mills (Rafe Spall), who hires Claire and two of her staffers--paleoveterinarian Zia Rodriguez (Daniella Pineda) and dweeby IT expert Franklin Mills (Justice Smith)--to join a covert operation to rescue numerous dinosaur species and move them to a protected island sanctuary. Also necessary to the team is dino-whisperer Owen Grady (Chris Pratt), who reluctantly goes along since one of the creatures they want to rescue is Blue the Velociraptor, with whom he's shared an emotional bond since it was born. Of course, once they're there, they realize they've been tricked (who saw that coming, other than anyone who's seen a previous JURASSIC movie?) and that, unbeknownst to the benevolent Lockwood, Mills' team of contracted mercenaries led by Wheatley (Ted Levine) aren't there to save the dinosaurs, but to gather the most valuable ones to sell to the highest bidder as part of a moneymaking scheme engineered by Mills and wealthy asshole Eversol (Toby Jones). Wheatley's job is to return the dinosaurs not to Lockwood's island sanctuary but to his estate, where a three-story, military-industrial-sized bunker exists underneath to house both the new captures as well as other hybrids, like the new "Indoraptor," engineered by original Jurassic Park scientist-turned-improbable supervillain Dr. Wu (BD Wong). Wu stole some DNA samples from Jurassic World with the intent of selling the newly-created creatures as military weapons, an idea first suggested by Vincent D'Onofrio's character in the previous film.
Once the story moves back to the Lockwood estate, JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM more or less becomes THE OLD JURASSIC HOUSE, with Mills and Eversol holding a dinosaur auction for stock types like Slovenian arms dealers and hulking Russian mobsters, presumably taking a break from buying abducted girls from underground human traffickers before running afoul of Liam Neeson. But instead of Neeson, they're forced to contend with dinosaurs who escape from the holding area on one of the lower bunker levels and proceed to rampage through the mansion. Lockwood's precocious granddaughter Maisie (Isabella Sermon) ends up teaming with Owen and Claire, who are being held captive but break out with the help of a Stegosaur in the adjacent cell as the Indoraptor prototype wreaks havoc and pursues everyone through the mansion. This allows Bayona to showcase his gothic horror/del Toro influence and somehow turn JURASSIC WORLD into an "old dark house" throwback.
There's also a completely batshit revelation about Maisie that goes nowhere and must be a set-up for the inevitable sixth film in the franchise. JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM is a spectacularly dumb movie with dumb people making spectacularly dumb decisions (we've already established that the Indoraptor is super-intelligent and ready for military use, but yeah Wheatley, sneak into its paddock to yank out a tooth for a trophy while it's unconscious--there's no way it's playing possum with you; and why would Jurassic World have been built on an island with a such a large and dangerous active volcano?), but amidst the idiocy, Bayona still brings his own sense of style and a personal touch. There's the gothic interiors of the Lockwood estate, Maisie being a young girl with no friends and largely left to use her vivid imagination (young Sermon recalls both Ana Torrent in THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE and CRIA CUERVOS, and Ivana Baquero in PAN'S LABYRINTH), and the presence of Geraldine Chaplin--a Bayona regular and fixture in Spanish art cinema since her professional collaboration and romantic relationship with filmmaker Carlos Saura in the 1970s--as Iris, Lockwood's nurse and Maisie's nanny. Given his past films and his experience, Bayona has more of a knack for this kind of genre fare than Trevorrow (whose only feature film prior to JURASSIC WORLD was the 2012 Aubrey Plaza indie comedy SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED) demonstrated and despite being an idiotic franchise installment, it still ends up coming across like a film by its director rather than an assembly-line product and audience obligation. JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM is so stupid that it has to be by design, but it seems hesitant to fully commit to its own lunacy or go far enough in fashioning itself as an auto-critique. Sure, Trevorrow and Bayona call out the tireless keyboard warriors with the Howard shoe shots, but they also drop the ball a few times. As much as Maisie sneaks around the labyrinthine Lockwood manor in the dumbwaiter, you'd think it would foreshadow an inevitable moment where a smaller dinosaur hides in it and attacks someone trying to use it to get away. I was all ready for JURASSIC WORLD: DINOS IN THE DUMBWAITER but it failed to transpire. It would've fit right in with a movie that has all manner of dino species milling about inside a loading dock patiently waiting for a door to open so they can get out. I don't think anyone who made this film took it seriously. This is supposed to be a comedy, right?
ALIEN PREDATORS aka THE FALLING aka ALIEN PREDATOR (US/Spain - 1987) Written and directed by Deran Sarafian. Cast: Dennis Christopher, Martin Hewitt, Lynn-Holly Johnson, Luis Prendes, J.O. Bosso, Yousaf Bokhari, Yolanda Palomo. (R, 90 mins)
The vault pickings must be getting slim for Shout! Factory if ALIEN PREDATORS is out on Blu-ray. Shot in 1984 and released overseas under its original title THE FALLING, the US/Spanish co-production was rechristened ALIEN PREDATORS for its belated 1987 US release through Trans World Entertainment and subsequently became a fixture in every video store in America. It's the directing debut of then-26-year-old Deran Sarafian, the son of veteran director Richard C. Sarafian (VANISHING POINT), and a sometime actor (he had a bit part as a murder victim in 10 TO MIDNIGHT) who spent most of the '80s working in Europe. In addition to ALIEN PREDATORS, he also directed the late-period Italian post-nuke INTERZONE and starred in 1988's unintended Lucio Fulci/Bruno Mattei collaboration ZOMBI 3. Sarafian returned to the States and quickly established himself as a competent journeyman with 1989's vampire film TO DIE FOR, 1990's Van Damme prison brawler DEATH WARRANT, and a pair of 1994 actioners with GUNMEN and the A-list Charlie Sheen vehicle TERMINAL VELOCITY. Now 60, Sarafian hasn't directed a feature film since 1995's straight-to-video THE ROAD KILLERS, but has since stayed very busy as a go-to hired gun for TV over the last 20-plus years, piling up directing credits for shows like NASH BRIDGES, CSI, CSI: MIAMI, COLD CASE, LOST, HOUSE, FRINGE, HEMLOCK GROVE, HELL ON WHEELS, and BLUE BLOODS. While he'll never be mistaken for a visionary auteur, Sarafian's career is a success just in terms of the sheer volume of TV gigs he gets, but if ALIEN PREDATORS accomplishes nothing else (and rest assured, it doesn't), it proves the old saying that everybody's gotta start somewhere.
Sarafian's script has an intriguing idea at its core, dealing with the 1979 falling of Skylab back into Earth's orbit. In actuality, the space station, launched in 1973, crashed near Perth, Australia but for the purposes of Spanish producer Carlos Aured (who directed several Paul Naschy films in the 1970s), the location has been moved to Duarte, Spain. It also didn't have a parasitic virus of sorts onboard that turned the entire population of a nearby town into INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS rejects. Three American tourists--Damon (Dennis Christopher), Michael (Martin Hewitt), and their platonic female friend Sam (Lynn-Holly Johnson)--are passing through Duarte in an RV with a dune buggy on a trailer en route to Madrid when the mayhem breaks out. "Breaks out" is a term used loosely, as there only appears to be three people who live in Duarte, and most of our time is spent focused on the trio of annoying tourists, with Damon and Michael in a competition over Sam, followed by the eventual jealousy of Damon once she clearly chooses Michael. One can hardly blame her, considering how broadly Christopher plays the obnoxious Damon, who busts out terrible impressions of James Cagney, Elmer Fudd, and Robert Duvall from APOCALYPSE NOW (Christopher's gift for mimicry was put to much better use in the 1980 slasher film FADE TO BLACK). They're eventually joined by rogue NASA scientist Dr. Tracer (Luis Prendes, sleepwalking and mumbling his way through the film with an expression that seems to say "I'm almost Fernando Rey"), who informs them that Skylab brought back an alien life form that inhabits and takes over both humans and animals, and at the rate it's going, all of Europe will be wiped out in a matter of three weeks.
THE FALLING is actually a more appropriate title, and that's what's on the print used for Shout's Blu-ray (it also occasionally runs on MGM HD and Comet under this title). It barely even qualifies as an ALIEN ripoff except for one faceburster scene at the very end, which is the first time we even get a clear look at a creature. Mostly, we see the gory after-effects of a cow being taken over, a corpse with an alien fetus bulging out of his neck, and one local with his face shredded. The creature effects are sparse but deliver the splattery goods when Sarafian gets around to them. But in the end, ALIEN PREDATORS is a total slog, with far too much time spent on an uninteresting love triangle that doesn't even seem interesting to the three actors, who got a nice vacation out of the deal but probably had to question how their promising careers led them to a cheap Spanish horror movie in such a short amount of time. At the time of filming, Christopher was only a few years removed from his breakout role in 1979's coming-of-age classic BREAKING AWAY and 1981's CHARIOTS OF FIRE; professional figure skater Johnson was nominated for a Golden Globe for the 1978 hit ICE CASTLES and was a Bond girl in 1981's FOR YOUR EYES ONLY; and Hewitt co-starred with Brooke Shields in 1981's popular but multiple Razzie-nominated ENDLESS LOVE, and was part of the ensemble of the 1983 Monty Python offshoot YELLOWBEARD.
ALIEN PREDATORS did nothing to further their careers by the time of its eventual 1987 release: Johnson and Hewitt both logged time in the world of DTV (Johnson in Cirio H. Santiago's 1988 Filipino post-nuke THE SISTERHOOD before retiring from acting in the late '90s to focus on her family, Hewitt in several early '90s erotic thrillers like SECRET GAMES and NIGHT RHYTHMS, his last credit to date being a guest spot on a 2003 episode of ER), while Christopher was already reduced to playing the title hero's sidekick in 1986's JAKE SPEED, Hollywood's one-and-done attempt to make Wayne Crawford a big-screen action star. Christopher did play the adult Eddie Kaspbrak in the 1990 TV mini-series version of IT and was a regular presence on TV throughout the '90s and '00s, but it wasn't until 2012 that he had another prominent role, as the attorney for Leonardo DiCaprio's nefarious Calvin Candie in Quentin Tarantino's DJANGO UNCHAINED. Christopher's place in film history is secure thanks to the beloved BREAKING AWAY, but bottom-of-the-barrel duds like ALIEN PREDATORS only succeeded in killing any momentum he had going. Sarafian would certainly go on to make better movies (am I the world's only GUNMEN fan?), and while I totally get the feeling of nostalgia for the 1980s VHS glory days, there can't possibly be a cult around ALIEN PREDATORS, can there? Sarafian's on a commentary track on the Blu-ray, and judging from the long periods of dead air and the fact that he basically pulls a peace-out and calls it a day five minutes before the movie's over are pretty solid indicators that even he doesn't have much affinity for it.
