After  X-Men Origins: Wolverine proved to be about as much fun as, say, The Deer Hunter, the prospect of another outing featuring the slicey-dicey, bedheaded Canuck held about as much appeal as attending a NAMBLA convention dressed like River Phoenix in the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. And yet, this is one of those rare times (such as G.I. Joe: Retaliation) when the very filmmakers themselves seem to say through their movie, “Yeah, I freaking hated the first one, too.” Because The Wolverine gets right everything the previous film whiffed. It’s not a great film, but it’s about as good as movie about an unkillable dude with metal claws deserves to be.

The Wolverine begins after the events of X-Men: The Last Stand, with Logan, aka Wolverine, in self-imposed exile in the Appalachian mountains, haunted by the events of that film: the loss of his love, Jean Grey (and, presumably, the fact he appeared in a Brett Ratner movie). Well, after a couple yay-hoos kill a bear that’s like Logan’s BFF, but before he can kill them in a local bar, he is contacted by a living anime character named Yukio (Rila Fukushima, weird-faced, but still cute). Yukio has been sent by a dying tech billionaire named Yashida to bring Logan to Japan to see him.

Yashida, you see, has a history with Logan that goes back to World War Two. As a Japanese POW Logan saved Yashida’s life when Little Boy was dropped on Nagasaki. Now, Yashida wants to repay this debt by taking from Logan the curse of immortality (because, in one of this series’ more improbable tropes, looking like a totally ripped Hugh Jackman for eternity is a terrible thing). Yashida offers to take Logan’s immortality and healing powers (I guess they can just suck them out or something), but Logan refuses. A little while later, Yashida is dead.

Yeah, an eternity looking like this would be horrible.

But it’s not that easy. Surrounding the old man is a crowd of untrustworthy characters. A thuggish son, a ninja with hidden movies (Will Yun Lee), a  serpentine, Amazonian nurse (Svetlana Khodchenkova), a corrupt politician, and a bunch of tatted-to Yakuza thugs who ambush the man’s funeral and attempt to kidnap Yashida’s hottie  granddaughter and heir, Mariko (Tao Okamato).

Logan sets off with Mariko in an attempt to get to safety, but has been injured in the melee, and those injuries, mysteriously, are not healing. What follows is a sort of Wolverine/Bourne movie as Logan tries to keep Mariko safe, while unraveling the plot against her. In the process they fall in love because, well, he’s Hugh Jackman and she’s available. Duh.

It’s a nifty, compressed story that, for once, doesn’t try to hold the entire world in the balance. Veteran craftsman director James Mangold and screenwriters Mark Bomback and Scott Frank wisely keep the story focused on this smallish stage and the result is a tight, focused story that doesn’t end up lumping around a too-large canvass.

“C’mon! Nuke me! I dare ya!”

In the meantime we get some nifty action sequences that jettison the usual superhero clichés of indestructible dudes throwing each other through walls to no effect, but instead establishes some real stakes. A fight atop a speeding bullet train, while working better in 3D, is a visually-arresting sequence, and a nighttime duel in Yashida’s estate is unusually atmospheric.

Along the way, Logan struggles with his grief over Jean and makes his own personal journey. It’s kinda rote, but what the hell. He’s Wolverine. If you’re looking for a deep and nuanced exploration of the human soul, uh…this is a comic book movie.

The last act of the movie kinda  stumbles, as the hero must (again) do battle with a super-mega-banzai beastie, but, hey, Iron Man made the same misstep, so I’ll give the movie a mulligan on that one.

Sorry, babe, the tongue’s a deal-breaker.

Additionally of note:

* The Yashida plot is basically the filmmakers acknowledgement that the opening credits of X-Men Origins: Wolverine was the only good part of it.

* Will Yun Lee’s character doesn’t make much sense. His final turn is like, “Yeah, I was onboard for the whole plan, until you actually tried to do it…”

* Rila Fukushima really has a weird face. I mean, she’s cute, but she looks like an alien.

So, if you want to take me to your ship and, like, do stuff to me, I’m totally okay with it.

* If Logan really wanted to protect Mariko, he’d feed her a couple of Big Macs. She’s scary skinny.

* For the first time in a while, Wolverine’s claws look pretty badass and not like bad CGI.

* Why is it that in Japan—a country with the strictest gun-laws pretty much anywhere—everyone seems to have a machine-pistol?

*  If Wolverine spares your life, you should really just walk away and not try and stab him in the back. That just pisses him off.

So, that’s The Wolverine. Jeez, even the title is an improvement. Now here is a clip of Hugh Jackman being very un-Wolverine (but equally impressive):

So, here we got The Canyons, the eagerly-anticipated (uh…okay, we’ll go with it) collaboration between Paul Schrader—writer of such classic films as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and director of moody, existential studies like Light Sleeper and Auto Focus—and Bret Easton Ellis, who wrote Less Than Zero and American Psycho. I don’t know any kind of a joint where these two wildly-divergent personalities would have met, but presumably it’s the kind of place where patrons watch True Blood and punch themselves in the junk every time there is a sex scene. Alas, if there is one truly eagerly-anticipated thing about The Canyons it’s the return of Lindsay Lohan to feature-film acting. How does she mix with this already-mismatched alchemy? Read on and I’ll tell you…

So in the telling, The Canyons is a fairly stock piece of L.A. anomie. We follow two couples: Christian and Tara (porn star James Deen and Lohan) and Ryan and Gina (Nolan Funk—nice name, dude—and Amanda Brooks). Christian and Tara are the jaded, dissolute couple, while Ryan and Gina are the relatively unspoiled couple. See where we’re going with this? Christian and Tara have fun by inviting strangers over to engage in kinky sex with them. Ryan and Gina have fun by, I don’t know, probably watching Top Chef or something.

Okay, that’s not true. This is a Paul Schrader movie, so nobody has fun doing anything.

The couples are entwined in ways that make power dynamics impossible, since Christian, a trust-fund brat, is producing a low-budget horror flick that Ryan is starring in. Ryan landed the gig because Gina is Christian’s personal assistant. Unknown to Christian, however, is the fact that Ryan and Tara were romantically-involved before she made the coldly mercenary decision to trade up for dudes who don’t eat Ramen noodles at least three nights a week.

As the movie unspools, these four will play a variety of power games with one another. Ryan tries to win back Tara; Christian orchestrates Ryan’s replacement on the film, forcing him to blow one of the producers to keep his job; Ryan uses his relationship with Christian’s usual booty-call to try and poison Tara against Christian; and during a pivotal foursome, Tara cajoles Christian into taking a blowjob from the other dude.

Now, all of this should, in theory, be kinda trashy fun. And it might have been if the movie was content to be a play on the moral vacuity of overprivledged L.A. millennials, and had the presence of mind to toy with the way that social networking and flexible sexual identities have impacted age-old games of sexual one-upmanship. But, ah, it doesn’t.

Ultimately, the partnering of Schrader and Ellis is a bust, as nether of them is suited for the telling of this story. Schrader, raised in a strict Calvinist home (he never even saw a movie until he was in college) is good at sketching the moral deterioration of flawed people, but has no sense joy—this is a man, remember, who made Auto Focus, the true story about Bob Crane’s sex-addiction, into the least sexy move ever. As a result the hedonism of this movie looks as tedious as anything else.

Ellis, for his part, while good at sketching vacant, rich kids (not a huge feat, that) can’t create anything like a real character. As a result, the characters who’re motivated by love—Ryan and Christian’s hookup—are simply baffling. No one in this movie has any discernible humanity to fall in love with. Watching Tara—brittle, bitchy, imperious—it’s impossible to believe she ever shared a loving relationship with anyone, never mind enchanting a man enough to lead him to try and match Christian’s personal ruthlessness.

The Canyons was funded, in part, by a Kickstarter campaign, and was made on a shoestring budget, but Schrader still manages to make a visual impression with the film. L.A. is place that veers between  gaudily-lit, unpopulated nighttimes and cheap, cruddy locales blasted by the unforgiving daylight.

Now, it would be mean-spirited fun to report that Lohan manages to self-immolate once again with this performance, but the truth is she’s no better or worse than anyone else in this movie. Like the rest of the cast, she has one note to play, and she plays it perfectly competently. As does Deen, who has garnered the lion’s share of publicity for this film. He basically just has to be “smirking asshole” for most of the story and pretty much manages it.

The movie ends on a note of mild apocalypse, suggesting that now everyone has been irredeemably corrupted, but given the fact there was never much there to corrupt, it’s hardly a gut-punch.

In the end, The Canyons is a noble failure. Schrader’s effort—to make a movie outside the traditional avenues of funding, hiring risky actors to carry it—is worthwhile, but the story he chose to tell simply wasn’t the right one.

Killing Season…um, wow. I genuinely don’t know where to begin with this film. I mean, it might just be easier to list what the film doesn’t screw up. For example, the vast majority of the film’s images are in focus. That’s something, right? Neither of the movie’s stars—in this case, Robert De Niro and John Travolta never actually break character and shout expletives at the director (though I’d bet my pancreas they did when the cameras were off), and, um…there’s an owl in it. It doesn’t do anything, but, hey…owl, right? Unfortunately, everything else about this film—the idea, the script, the direction, the acting—is just mind-blowingly horrible.

First off, do you remember the war in Bosnia back in 1998. Google it if you don’t, because it’s pretty important to this movie. De Niro plays US Army Colonel Benjamin Ford, who, as the movie begins, is leading a peacekeeping force and discovers an improvised mass-grave filled with bodies of Bosnian civilians. Ford has the Serbian military responsible for the slaughter rounded up and summarily executed, shooting one himself.

Years later, that dude, Emil Kovac, is now John Travolta sporting this weird chinstrap beard that may be the most bizarre thing committed to celluloid in a long time. Oh, and he pays some other guy for the identity of his would-be executioner and sets out to take his revenge. Which, apparently, involves dressing up like Gandolf the Grey and bumming around the Appalachian Mountains.

This may be the craziest thing John Travolta has done…think about that a minute.

See, Ford has retired into a semi-exile in the mountains and takes wildlife photos. He also cooks, eats, reads For Whom the Bell Tolls and sleeps. We know this because we follow Ford on his most-boring-day-ever routine for a ludicrously long time.  Which is great, because when I see that De Niro is in a movie I always hope we get the chance to just watch him reading a book in a comfy chair.

When Kovac finally finds Ford, he passes himself off as a wandering hunter/tourist, and Ford completely fails to recognize the dude he tried to murder, because, well shit, that beard. Anyway, they hang out for an evening, kill a bottle of Jaegermeister, and have what I’m sure the screenwriters think are deep, philosophical conversations, but are really just borderline incoherent.

If you like shades of brown and khaki, you’re gonna love this flick.

They next day, Kovac cajoles Ford into going hunting for elk, and when they do, he ambushes Ford with his bow and arrow. Ford is injured and Kovac tortures him in a truly cringe-inducing scene, demanding that he confess his crimes. Ford manages to get away, mend his injuries, and build his own bow, which he uses to horrifically injure Kovac…who he proceeds to torture, because, well, why not?

But then Kovac gets loose and gets the drop on Ford, but then Ford gets loose and gets the drop on Kovac and the movie pretty much just does this for about 45 minutes. It’s like the longest Spy vs. Spy comic ever. Finally, they just admit that, yeah, they were both pretty big dicks during that war and go their separate ways. Fin.

Hunting cap, compound bow, flannel…yeah all the ingredients for an action film

What Killing Season tries to do isn’t bad, per se. It wants to explore the corrosive effect war has on basic human morality, and paint a portrait of two men who’ve spent nearly two decades grappling with the damage to their souls. Problem is, it doesn’t explore those things at all. We have no more idea at the end of the film why these men did what they did than we had at the beginning. I mean, let’s not forget, a high-ranking officer abruptly commits a war crime (and orders his men to do the same), while a seemingly ordinary man joined a death squad and built implements of torture. We’re gonna need some explanations here. But we don’t get them.

But also:

* Okay, upfront we have to address age. De Niro would have been about 50 during the Bosnian War. Is this really the first guy they’d send into a combat operation?

* The second thing we have to address is language. As Kovac, John Travolta speaks with an accent that sounds like he’s imitating Walter Koenig doing Mr. Chekov. Additionally, he speaks English perfectly—not just fluently. He has a command of sentence structure, syntax, idioms, and even the abstract. I find it hard to believe that a guy who hasn’t lived for years in the US would be able to describe his homeland as a place “with in an invisible layer of blood encrusted upon its surface.”

* The beard. Holy shit, the beard.

It’s just…what the hell is that?

* Ford tortures Kovac with a pitcher of lemonade mixed with salt. We see him squeezing the lemons, but…a full pitcher? That would take, like, at least an hour to make. Why would he do that when he could just pout the salt in a pitcher of water?

* Ford might be southern. He also might be a New Yorker, depending upon what accent De Niro chooses to use at any given point in the movie.

* The beard…I’m sorry, I just can’t make my brain understand it.

* This movie has what has to be the longest discussion of the liabilities of fiberglass ever put on film.

* It also blatantly rips of The Hunted in its use of a Johnny Cash song to thwap us upside the head with its symbolism.

* Ford explains that he ordered the execution, because he knew that the Serbian death squad would just be dumped in a POW camp and then set free at the end of hostilities. Um…Colonel haven’t you ever at least heard of war crimes tribunals? I mean, that was a big reason NATO got involved in Bosnia.

* Ford sterilizes his leg injury by pissing on it. Now, I’m not sure if this is a real method of emergency first aid, and I’m sure not going to Google it (I don’t feel like wading through all those R. Kelly sites), but shown on screen it just looks like an old man pissing himself.

* Ford says, “I’ve fought in a lot of wars,” which is somewhat specious, since at his age he would have seen, what? Vietnam, maybe. Desert Storm. And uh…Panama?

* Then he says, “Bosnia was the worst. That one really got inside me.” Again, WTF?!?

* You know, when you get down to it, this movie is just a lot of scenes of two late-middle age dudes trying to beat each other up. Yeah, it’s about as exciting as it sounds.

Wow! You almost had me, Uwe Boll. You almost had me believing that maybe you’d gotten a bad rap all these years for the likes of the Dungeon Siege epics and Alone in the Dark. I’m not saying they perhaps had levels that went unappreciated by the general public, or that Postal was, in fact, a trenchant commentary on our increasingly abrasive culture—I mean, I don’t think there’s that much PCP in the world to effect that kind of turnaround. But with Assault on Wall Street, I wondered if perhaps Boll had grown a bit as a filmmaker and had it in him to make a one-note, yet still effectively angry screed. And for two-thirds of the movie he did exactly that. But then, Boll had to give in to his worst instincts (i.e. the ones he relies on for 99% of his filmmaking oeuvre) and says, “Fuck it, let’s just shoot a bunch of people.”

Okay, so the good part of Assault on Wall Street follows the financial and emotional ruin of a decent blue-collar joe named Jim Baxford (a very good Dominic Purcell). Jim has a decent job working for a security company as an armored car driver, yet is still treading water financially due to his wife’s expensive medical treatments. Okay, at no point did I say this movie was subtle.

This is actually about as subtle as it gets…

Much of the film—quite a lot, really—is spent watching Jim’s financial situation go from bad, to terrible, to Seventh-Ring-of-Hell during the brutal year of 2008. First, his insurance won’t cover the full cost of his wife’s treatments, so he has to run up his credit card bills. Then, his investments become frozen as his brokerage firm his indicted for some shady dealings. In short order, Jim defaults on his mortgage, is neck-deep in debt, and loses his job (since having a guy up to his ass in hock may be somewhat of a liability safeguarding money).

Every step of the way, Jim seems to deal only with self-interested profiteers of the economic collapse. His broker—the dude that got him into this mess (a perfectly smarmy Lochlyn Monro)—insists that there was no way to anticipate this situation and that risk is part of the investments game.  Jim borrows $10,000 to hire an expensive lawyer (a hateable Eric Roberts–the best kind of Eric Roberts) to recover his investments, but the guy buries him in dispassionate legal options, then effectively does nothing. Finally, the Assistant District Attorney who might conceivably be able to free up Jim’s money blows off a meeting with him.

“derp, derp, derp, gimmie more of your money, derp, derp…”

While Jim is sliding into personal and financial ruin, we get cutaways to his brokerage house, where bigwig Jeremy Stancroft (a very effective John Heard) orders his minions to sell of their bad loans to unsuspecting dupes who’ll almost certainly get stuck holding the bag when they default. It’s basically the plot from Margin Call without any of the soul-searching.

When Jim’s wife commits suicide out of guilt for what she sees as being the root cause of all Jim’s misfortune (I said this movie wasn’t subtle), Jim strikes back in the only reasonably way: he dusts off his old Army M-4 rifle and begins killing investment bankers.

“No, I don’t have a soul. Why do you ask?”

And, yet, Assault on Wall Street still hadn’t lost me yet. I mean, I knew these murders were coming—the movie is titled Assault on Wall Street after all, and not Dude Gets Screwed Over by Wall Street and Everyone Else and then His Wife Dies. So, I pretty much knew a violent assault was coming. Plus the poster shows Dominic Purcell brandishing an M-4, so that was kind of a giveaway, too.

At first Jim simply takes out the fat cats cleanly and from a distance. However, after buying a load of weapons (to include hand grenades) from a skeevy arms dealer (a great Clint Howard, who deserves to snag an Oscar nomination for his delivery of “grenades are fun,” but probably won’t), Jim genuinely does assault Wall Street as he storms Stancroft’s firm and basically kills all the traders on the floor to the pulse-quickening sounds of awesome electronic music, and then settles things with Stancroft in the most contrived manner possible. And then swaggers away a hero.

“Slaughtered a bunch of people…maimed a few others…it’s Miller Time.”

Okay, that’s where the movie lost me.

Now, I know that Doctor Uwe Boll (yes, he’s a doctor—if he can do it, so can you, kids) has some deeply-felt opinions about the world that are also totally monkeynuts crazy (if you don’t believe me, then check out this article in The Onion AV Club). However, his rage at the players responsible for the financial meltdown of 2008 seems both well-informed and perfectly justifiable. The idea of an ordinary man driven to violence by impotent rage over the seemingly bottomless greed of the financial system and the government’s unwillingness to hold them accountable is a story that practically writes itself.

The problem is—and I can’t emphasize this enough—Jim flat-out murders people! And he gets away with it! Boll truly sees this guy as a hero. He’s like a character from a Western who tries to do things the right way, but eventually has to take up arms. Except in this movie, Shane just blows people away before they ever see him. I sat down to watch this movie anticipating we’d watch Jim robbed not simply of his money, but also of his humanity by the gears of the terrible system. As it turns out, Jim just loses his unwillingness to flat-out murder dudes.

In this movie bankers just steal money and drink wine.

Now, I can handle sympathetic characters doing unsympathetic or morally-reprehensible things, but it has to be framed correctly. I had no beef with the closing shooting spree in God Bless America (a film that shares a lot with this one) because director Bobcat Goldthwait kept a consistent tone of black comedy, while also allowing enough distance to allow the audience to respond critically to the protagonist’s violence. Boll might know enough about filmmaking to pull this off, but it’s clear from this film that he is firmly in Jim’s corner.

By being totally unrepentant about Jim’s violence, Assault on Wall Street, could have giddily daring and transgressive—maybe the revenge fantasy that flits through our find when we hear of another bank bailout—but Boll isn’t a good enough filmmaker to make the violence palatable. Mass-killings are a part of our world, and Boll does nothing to distract us from this fact. When Jim walks into that office wearing a blank, white mask, the effect isn’t galvanizing, it’s horrifying because we recognize the last moment of normalcy that existed in Columbine, Newtown, and dozens of other places made killing fields by people who also thought they had the right kill innocent people.

Our hero, folks. Not exactly Jimmy Stewart, is he?

The sad thing is that for much of its runtime, Boll was making a very good movie about the financial crisis—to date, only Margin Call holds that mantle—but his juvenile instincts overwhelm the story. In the end, like Jim, he’s too blinded by his rage to recognize the loss of his humanity. Unlike Jim, though, there’s no omniscient storyteller to rehabilitate him.

The other day Slate.com posted an article making the argument that the 1990s were one of the best–if not THE best–decade of the 20th century. This got me thinking about doing a retrospectivbe of ’90s films and what they tell us about that (apparently) great decade. But then I remembered movies like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and thought “fuck that noise.”

Unfortunately, it looks like it’ll be a while before there are any decent new films to review, so I revisited my ’90s idea, and, well, yeah I guess I’m doing that now.

So, crank the Kriss Kross, break out your garishly-colored ties, your double-breasted suits, and your ridiculously high-waisted jeans, because for the next week (or so) we are travelling back to the heady days of Bill Clinton, Arsenio Hall, Kevin Costner and Slobodan Milosevic! Woo-hoo!

First up: The Temp (1993)

So, the first installment of “Back to the ‘90s” feature (for no reason other than I had it in my iTunes rental queue) is 1993’s The Temp. If forced to come up with a reason for the significance of this film—and, um, by definition I pretty much have to—I would point to the presence of Lara Flynn Boyle. After all, this film was meant to be somewhat of a vehicle for the up-and-comer (it wasn’t), and despite it, she up and came. The 1990s were very much her decade. She was introduced to audiences in 1990’s TV series Twin Peaks, and by 2001 she was headlining in a Will Smith vehicle. Along the way, she taught American women they should want to be skinnier than is humanly possible or remotely sane. So, yeah, the ‘90s were good to ol’ LFB. And kicking it off was this…uh…well, this.

The first thing we can glean about the ‘90s from The Temp is that in 1993 people were terrified of two things: 1) women, and 2) losing their jobs. Seems reasonable enough. We were only six years out from Fatal Attraction and still well aware of the fact that ambitious women were all fucking crazy and must be killed before they totally fuck up our idyllic family lives. We were also emerging from a pretty serious recession, so there’s the psychology for you.

The Temp gives us, like, the eight-millionth take on Fatal Attraction, only this time the stakes couldn’t possibly be lower. In this film Timothy Hutton plays Peter Derns, a middle manager at a cookie company. Go ahead, read that again, it won’t change. Cookie company. Oregon-based cookie company. Well hell, I’m enthralled. As the company grapples with a restructuring necessitated by being purchased by a New York conglomerate, Peter tries to navigate the treacherous shoals of his workplace (hee hee hee…at the cookie company), and bring his product to market—an oatmeal cookie (hee hee hee) that will shore up the company’s falling shares. Yeah, you can practically hear the music from The Insider playing in the background.

Our protagonist isn’t exactly Russel Crowe, either.

When his secretary—excuse me, personal assistant (the movie invokes this phrase like it’s a line from the Necronomicon)—takes personal time after his wife gives birth, Peter is saddled with temp Kris Bolin (Boyle). Kris promptly steamrolls everything in Peter’s path and gives him a much-needed leg-up with the company’s boss (played with eye-bugging batshittery by Faye Dunaway), and helps him outflank a weasely competitor played by Oliver Platt (who, strangely enough, seems like the only person in this movie that might actually work at a cookie company and take it seriously).

Soon enough, she has secured her own position at the company (after Peter’s Personal Assistant apparently mistakes his copy of The Darwin Awards for Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and sticks his hand in a shredder to try and clear a paper jam). And things start getting real (or as real as they can get for a cookie company). Executives start dying off in mysterious ways, propelling Peter and Kris up the ladder. In the meantime, Peter’s attempts to reconcile with his wife (Maura Tierney—a genuine ‘90s gem) are thwarted by a series of mishaps that seem to have been engineered by Kris.

Just look at her! She has “crazycakes” written all over her!

Could Kris be a total psychopath, a modern-day femme fatale, who uses her sexuality and murder to eliminate anyone who stands in her way? Or could it be that Peter’s overdeveloped persecution complex (something he’s in therapy for) causing him to totally misinterpret the situation and miss the actual villain right under Peter’s nose? No, it’s the first one: crazy bitch wants to steal Peter’s job.

Yeah, this is an awful movie. It’s totally devoid of any suspense, and everything is telegraphed a good two or three scenes in advance. The ‘90s were rife with these kind of thrillers—movies in which the seemingly safe and ordinary lives of the main characters are invaded by sociopathic outsiders who worm their way into their daily lives and tear them asunder. Again, Fatal Attraction started this trend, but the relative peace and stability of the Clinton-era forced filmmakers to look to the coffeehouses and well-manicured neighborhoods to look for danger. And, of course, since there really wasn’t any, they manufactured some shit.

Like all these ‘90s films, The Temp is filled with cultural signposts of the times:

Signpost #1: Duel of the ‘dos—This movie is all about the battle of the hairstyles, floppy vs. helmet. The men all sport floppy, goofy hair that is supposed to signify male virility, but actually just make them look ineffectual and emasculated. Kris, on the other hand, lacquers her wild mane into a ball of impenetrable, follicular might. She could deflect a Katusha rocket with that hair. It’s a wonder she doesn’t just head-butt Peter to death with that hair like a rampaging rhinoceros.

The combined amount of gel/hairspray in this scene singlehandedly punched that hole in the ozone layer…

Signpost #2: Sexuality is evil—Kris wields her sexuality like a medieval mace. She openly taunts Peter, sleeps her way to the top, tells ribald stories, and sometimes lets her hair down, openly showing her sexual desireability. All of this is presented as proof of her villainy. When Peter peeps in her bedroom window and catches her masturbating, the film treats it like confirmation that she is one sick chick. Because, yeah, sexually satisfying yourself in the privacy of your own home is perverted, but watching someone do it is perfectly okay. As we learned with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, having sexual urges is wrong, gross, and certainly worth impeachment proceedings.

“She’s wearing the least-revealing bikini ever made…stone the harlot!”

Signpost #3: Steven Weber—Okay, is there anyone who more epitomizes the 1990s than Steven Weber? Okay, maybe Arsenio Hall, but it’s a close race. Weber is the essential ‘90s man—a weak, ineffectual, boy-man with seemingly no agency of his own. He glib, goofy, unthreatening, insecure, and pure smarm on a stick. He demands attention and affection like a puppy and is about as impossibly to take seriously. Is it any wonder his heyday was during the ‘90s with the TV show Wings and some forgettable TV-movies, and then promptly evaporated after 9/11? Jack Bauer probably took him out behind a warehouse someplace and shot him.

Welcome to the douche-tastic ’90s…

Signpost #4: Identity is everything—The clues that lead Peter to mistrust Kris come in the forms of her layers of deceit. She didn’t get an Ivy League degree, lies about having a husband and daughter…what isn’t she capable of? Of course today we’d just assume she was pulling a Don Draper, but in the days pre-Internet people’s inner lives were still a thing of mystery.

Signpost #5: Faye Dunaway—After her long period in the wilderness following Mommy Dearest, she worked hard to make a comeback in the ‘90s. Hollywood didn’t know what to do with her. And they never did figure it out.

She only looks normal. Any send now she’s going attack you with a hanger.

Signpost #6: Women are just evil—Say this about the misogyny evidenced by today’s pop culture: Michael Bay doesn’t even pretend to hold women as equals. I much prefer it over the understood theme of this and so many other movies of the time: any strong woman who exist in a man’s world must be crazy, damaged or both.  They are dangerously unstable and will threaten the good, wholesomeness of the men they come into contact with. Of course today, the good guys are bad and the women around them, either serve as a moral compass to keep them from being too sympathetic or have equal iron to match them in their descent. Not that this isn’t problematic, of course…

Who would want to work in the same office with THIS?

Signpost #7: Low stakes–I know I already mentioned this, but it’s worth it returning to this point. Now, there’s nothing in the script of The Temp that indicates we should at all be concerned about the fate of a cookie company. They’re small potatoes, and that’s that. What makes this attitude refreshing is how it is totally unlike any movie released recently. In 1993, a modestly-scaled, modestly-budgeted movie could still be released in theaters and be a profitable venture even before it went to video (that’s the thing all your hipster friends are watching instead of blu-rays). Today, costs of movie productions have skyrocketed, so that every theatrical release had to knock it out of the park in order to be worthwhile venture. And you know what kind of a story absolutely does not knock it out of the park? A low-stakes thriller set in a cookie company.  Nope, today the whole world must be at stake.  Why do you think Khan crashed that honkin’ big starship into San Fransico at the end of Star Trek Into Darkness or most of Metropolis was destroyed in Man of Steel? There’s no room for base hits anymore.

So, there we have The Temp. Next up, we go back to the future with Johnny Mnemonic. Maybe. Whatever.

Okay, now this film is instructive indeed. It shows us a glimpse of a very specific moment in time—1995, in fact—when the world arrived at the intersection of science and culture. It was the moment that the Internet became a looming thing, a soon-to-be fixture on our lives. We could see this tsunami curling above us, and could only marvel at how it would change our lives. With 1995’s Johnny Mnemonic, we have a window into the predictions and anxieties of the way our future would be transformed into something new. And man, were they retarded.

Johnny Mnemonic was written by William Gibson and based upon a smattering of his other works. I’m not a reader of his stuff, so I can’t say how well this represents his vision, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the script.

In the film, Keanu Reeves, fresh off his career-transforming success of 1994’s Speed, plays the titular Johnny, a high-tech courier in the far-off year of 2021. See, in that year, um…holy shit, this movie begins with an opening crawl that has more words than some Elmore Leonard novels. Basically, big Japanese corporations run everything and use yakuza thugs to enforce…um…HR policies, I guess. Also, I think the US broke or something and Newark is all that’s left. There’s also a plague that’s killing off everybody.

The Internet, ladies and gentlemen…

Anyway, data couriers in this day and age don’t simply lug around anything as ludditical as 3.5” floppies or CD-ROMS. Nopers, they just upload that date into their brains. To do this, Johnny has had to sacrifice some of his own brain (hee hee hee…the jokes just write themselves), which is too bad, but it’s not really an issue, so don’t get too bent out of shape about it. Alas, this latest job—his last before he can earn enough money to retire and buy back the missing parts of his brain (man it’s low-hanging fruit)—requires him to upload more data than he has brain space for. Actually just about the same amount as I have on this laptop. Anyway, Johnny’s brain is strainin’ from holding just a little more data than your average iPad (hee hee hee…it’s just so easy!)

Well, things go all Pete Tong almost immediately as yakuza thugs burst in and kill the clients before they can give Johnny the code to download the info. So Johnny goes on the run and hooks up with a plague-addled bodyguard (Dina Meyer), and the two of them must navigate the seedy underbelly of Newark to get the info out of Johnny’s brain, while avoiding the various factions of bad guys and whack-jobs who want to kill Johnny and freeze his head to gain the information there. This begs the question why this movie was titled Johnny Mnemonic and not the punchier They Came for Keanu’s Head.

Dina Meyer: good girlfriend material. Bodyguard, not so much.

Oh, and at the end, Johnny is saved by Ice-T and a super-intelligent dolphin. Yeah, that happens.

What Johnny Menomic teaches us about 1995 is that Hollywood had not clue one about the Internet or how we’d interact with it. In the film, people still get the majority of their info from TV and much is made of the dozens of channels and pirates hack the broadcast signals and run their own shows. As a matter of fact, for  a movie about the Internet, Johnny Mnemonic resembles nothing as much as the Max Headroom TV show from the ‘80s.  But we also have these other ‘90s signposts…

Signpost #1: The Internet is totally lame—Taking its cues (somewhat inexplicably) from 1992’s The Lawnmower Man, with everyone “jacking in” to the Internet and finding it full of primary colors and geometric shapes, and not as we know it today: full of porn and pictures of cats.

“Goddamn it, why can’t I find 4chan?”

Signpost #2: The Internet does nothing new—So, yeah, it’s a brave new world, connected by this nebulous “cyberspace.” Except people still store things on VCRs, and data must be physically transported. In reality, 320 gigs doesn’t need to be sent anywhere, just stored someplace that can be accessed. This movie doesn’t seem to understand the actual ramifications of a wired world.

Signpost #3: The Japanese are still dominant—Yep, Japanese companies tower above the world like, well, Godzillas. And the yakuza are still the pre-eminent badasses (until they run afoul of Michael Douglas, that is). Of course, even by 1995 it was clear that the yakuza couldn’t slay a decade-long recession or necrotic political system.

Signpost #4: Faxes are fucking amazing—Yeah, the MacGuffin of this movie is a fax transmission Johnny must recover from the Internet. Let that marinade a bit, and it’ll soon become clear how stupid an idea that is.

Signpost #5: Keanu Reeves—He’s just…so…terrible.

Signpost #6:  No one has a mobile device—Not even a cel phone. Except Mulder and Scully. Riddle me that one, Batman.

To access the Internet you have to wear this and act like a scarecrow.

Signpost #7: Rebellious anarchists hack the ‘net and broadcast secrets to the world—Er…okay, that was actually on-target.

Now, I realize you can’t in all fairness blame the movie for not predicting iPhones and Facebook, but surely someone should have been able to look at the concept of a globally-connected world and understand that stuff like faxes, phones, and TV’s would be radically-changed, if not eliminated.

Independent of the lousy futurism, though, this movie is horrible. It looks like one of those Canadian-produced TV shows that were big in the late ‘90s like Tek Wars and Cleopatra 2525—shoes that sought to create a Blade Runner aesthetic on a budget, so they just chucked a lot of garbage at the art-direction and used gauzy lighting in every scene.  Plus they cast Dolph Lundgren as a street preacher…because, yeah, the guy who makes Sylvester Stallone sound like John Gielgud is the first guy you want to hire to give long speeches.

The future is so dystopian Henry Rollins is a doctor.

Plus a dolphin saves the day. Yeah, I think they were just fucking with us at that point.

So, that’s Johnny Mnemonic. Man, in the ‘90s the future really sucked.

Next: We revisit the ’90s abject fear of women with The Crush…

So, we’re back on the misogyny of the 1990s—well that was quick—but it’s hard to escape, what with the decade being so rife with it and all. 1993’s The Crush was no doubt sold to studio execs as “Fatal Attraction with a teenaged girl.” And they no doubt lapped it up like a…things…that laps stuff (sorry, write myself into a corner, there). The final product, however, viewed some 20 years on is basically the story of a potential statutory rapist struggling with his urges. Well, the first half anyway. After that, it does actually become Fatal Attraction with a minor. But by that time I was already felt like showering with acetone. Because if we were anything in ‘90s, we were terrified of women, no matter their age.

So, The Crush begins with young reporter Nick (Carey Elwes) moving to a new town—dunno where, looks like maybe the Pacific Northwest—to work at a national newsmagazine that, for some reason, isn’t headquartered in New York City. He moves into the guest house of a well-to-do suburban family, and immediately catches the attention of the family’s 14 year-old daughter, Darian (Adrian in later versions, due to a lawsuit) played by soon-to-be Biggest Actress in the World Alicia Silverstone—then only about 15. Pay attention to this, because it’s gonna make things very skeezy very soon.

Chewing gum aggressively was waaay sexy in the ’90s.

See, Darian takes an immediate interest in Nick, and Nick…well…Nick doesn’t do much to deflect this attention. From early on Darian is established as fairly mature for her age—she rewrites one of his articles in much better prose than his, plays the piano like a prodigy, and generally banters with all the wit and erudition of a 40 year-old. Because teenagers like that exist.

Still, this doesn’t excuse Nick’s terrible, terrible decisions regarding her. No, he doesn’t do anything overtly sexual, but he does let her hang around his place, have long, intense conversations with him, and even takes her on a nighttime drive to the local make-out point, where she kisses him, and, um, well, he doesn’t pull away all that quickly. It’s like the guy doesn’t have that little voice in his head any normal man would that says, “You know, maybe it’s not exactly proper to let her hang out in my living room while I shower and get dressed.”

Nope. Nothing at all wrong with this…

By the time he pervs out and surreptitiously spies on her sunbathing—the camera lingering over her nubile, bikini-clad body—I was pretty sure I’d join everyone involved in the production of this film on some list the FBI no doubt has.

Well, from there things go all wrong (really? This situation? Amazing.) Darian’s titular crush becomes more intense, and Nick starts dating his work-wife (perennial ‘90s B-movie cutie Jennifer Rubin). While this helps establish the fact that, yes, Nick can relate to women his age (though it’s an even bet their role-playing involves a Girl Scout uniform being worn by one of them).

This drives Darian absolutely bitchcakes and pretty soon she’s sabotaging Rick’s career, defacing his car, and maiming his new girlfriend (“Not the bees! Not the bees!”) Before finally framing Nick for raping her. I’m not 100% on how this is supposed to win Nick’s affections, but then again, I’m not a genius-level homicidal 14 year-old girl (it’s true).

Yep, all still totally okay…

Eventually, Nick manages to clear his name by exposing the truth to world: he’s not a rapist, just the victim of your garden-variety crazy bitch.  The fact that Nick led her on, actually said to her, “If you were ten years older…” (thank Christ he never completed that thought), and peeped on her dressing while he was hiding in her closet is totally okay, because, hey, she may be a crazy bitch, but she’s hot, so what’s the big deal? And, to Nick’s credit, he doesn’t slap the ham or anything while he’s watching his underage neighbor undress, so it’s not like he did a bad thing, right?

Holy fuck, the ‘90s were really, really weird.

If the 1990s belonged to Lara Flynn Boyle, she had to share it with Alicia Silverstone—only Silverstone flew higher and disappeared more thoroughly than Boyle. She started the decade as an ingénue and soon became the Hollywood A-lister before Batman and Robin pretty much slaughtered her career like a fat, slow turkey in mid-November. But she began as a tasty bit of jailbait in this and a couple Aerosmith videos, all of which seemed to acknowledge for the first time that underage chicks were hot. Before the Internet we weren’t entirely sure about this fact.

As a ‘90s man, Elwes fares even worse. He’s perpetually outflanked and outfoxed by a teenager. Hell, just the fact that he relates to her as an adult says something about his maturity. He’s a first-rate wimp, unable to control himself or make a decent decision about anything. He also speaks in a weird, affected cadence, like he decided that being a reporter means you have to speak like you’re in a ‘40s movie.

“Damn, I’m smooth…”

The Crush was allegedly based upon an actual incident that happened to writer/director Alan Shapiro. I don’t know if this is true or not, but what is pretty much unambiguous is that Shapiro is a creepy, creepy dude. He sexualizes Darian endlessly–shooting her like she’s in the first couple minutes of a soft-core  porno film (just before Jan-Michael Vincent shows up)–and generally making it clear that she is wanton little trollop, and Nick is damn near heroic for not, you know, seducing a minor.

As for other ‘90s signposts, mostly we have fashion and technology:

Signpost #1: Nick rocks the ‘90s fashion—Whether he’s showing up to work in a suitcoat and faded jeans or just sporting pleats large enough to capture wind power, Nick is every bit the ‘90s fashion plate. Bonus points for the hideous tortoiseshell glasses.

Signpost #2: So does Jennifer Rubin—Man, the ‘90s fashion just hated female sexuality. She’s all about mom-jeans, ugly hats, and shapeless dresses. At least she escaped without any plaid…

Signpost #3: Nick’s priceless computer—It’s the finest model Wang ever made.

Signpost #4: Underage sex is okay if it’s not forced—The phrases “statutory rape,” or “underage sex” is never once mentioned. Nick’s flirtations with Darian are seen as a bad idea because they lead her on, not because they hint at a fucking felony! If this movie were made today it’d be cloaked in controversy.

Signpost #5: Amber Benson—Yay! Only five more years until Buffy!

So, yeah, safe to say the ‘90s were not a real good time to discuss underage sex or sexuality. Thankfully, today in our post-To Catch a Predator world, we know better. Right? Oh…oh shit…

Next up, we check out the spectacularly bad idea that was Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man.

So, um, who thought green-lighting this movie was a good idea? I mean, really, what was the selling point here? I just…I’m sorry, I can’t figure out why an actual movie studio—you know people whose job it is to sell things that the general public wants to see—decided to blow millions of dollars on a watery action movie starring two stars at the end of their initial peak and the beginning of their long season in the wilderness. Oh, and they gave an overly cutesy title featuring two brand names synonymous with masculinity and embodied them with one dude famous for playing punks and another who wore pastel colors for five seasons. I’m tempted to think the whole movie was an elaborate practical joke, but I can’t figure out on whom.

No, really I’m trying to understand the reason for this movie’s existence, but it seems meaningless, like the existence of those monkeys that only drink fermented juice. You just have to look at them and say, That was a bad idea. I just can’t get my brain to envision any scenario in which a couple of studio executives in 1989 are sitting down to some Tab colas, after a hard day of snorting coke off of Jay McInerney novels and one says to the other, “You know what kind of a picture we should make? We should make a modern-day Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The kids loved that picture.”

“Yeah! And we could set it in the future!”

“Too expensive.”

“Couple years in the future, say, 1996. People will have some funky clothes but all the cars and rest of the world will look the same.”

“Awesome, and we gotta have two recognizable ‘types’…like maybe a cowboy, and a biker.”

“Yes! Yes! Yes! And they get into machine gun fights!”

“Of course! Everybody’s gonna have machine guns in 1996.”

“And…wait for it…we get Mickey Rourke to play the biker! He’s surefire Oscar bait after 9 ½ Weeks, and…who’s that badass cop from a couple years ago?”

“Don Johnson as the cowboy. I am with you! I am with you! Now hang on, I just…holy crap, man, it’s like god touched my brain. You what this picture’s gonna be called? Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man. Get it? The cowboy’s the Marlboro Man and the biker’s fuckin’ Harley Davidson. Tell me that isn’t brilliant!”

“This movie is going to be bigger than 48 Hours.”

Mickey Rourke is synonymous with “150 million opening weekend.”

I guess that’s how this movie could have happened. I sure don’t know how else it could have. Basically, this movie is a doofy heist movie. Two old buddies, Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (seriously, those are their names…it’s never explained), decide to knock over an armored car belonging to a bank that’s buying out their favorite bar. Unfortunately, along with the stash, they find a large amount of a new designer drug called Crystal Dream. Now, the dealers (who are also high-powered bankers) want their product back and dispatch assassins to get it. Wackiness ensues (and it really is wacky).

So what’s the film got? Well…

* Great opening scene on the Fourth of July 1996, in which Rourke, in a darkened, cheap hotel, gets dressed while listening to a news report about the various troubles that plague Amerca, and a hooker dozes naked in the bed. Bon Jovi’s “Wanted: Dead or Alive” plays on the soundtrack. It’s noirish and vaguely sinister…and the only time the movie actually evokes a mood (it turns out not be the mood of the movie, though).

* A (then-unknown) Kelly Hu shows up in an early scene. Like bacon, Kelly Hu makes everything awesome. And by “everything” I mean her scene. I just really like Kelly Hu is what I’m saying, I guess.

There is nothing not good in this picture.

* The major good guys are named after brands of stuff that are bad for you: Marlboro Man, Virginia Slim, Jack Daniels. There’s no Colt Fortyfive, but I didn’t watch the deleted scenes, so who knows?

* Oh, and those aren’t nicknames, they’re the names people actually go by. Nope, no explanation.

* What kind of movie is this? The kind where Harley and Marlboro wear masks during the robbery, but call each other by their names in full hearing distance of the people they’re stealing from.

* The kind in which Tom Sizemore and Daniel Baldwin play aristocratic, upper-class villains. Bwahahahahahah! As if wearing turtlenecks under blazers and not using contractions would distract the world from what raging coke-heads they are…

The kind where the bad guys all dress like this

* The kind which gives Tia Carrere precisely two scenes in which she does absolutely nothing. Kind of a waste of a Tia Carrere, and you don’t come across many of those.

* What kind of movie is this? The kind where Don Johnson can wear a cowboy hat while tearing ass on a motorcycle.

* The kind where Marlboro no longer smokes and Harley had given up drinking…goddamn, the ’90s sucked.

* Vanessa Williams—one of those most beautiful women ever created (trust me on this)—has a couple of throwaway scenes as a performer at the bar and…wait, how is possible Vanessa Williams can’t dance? But there it is. I blame the ‘90s. They ruined a lot of stuff.

* Harley and Marlboro’s robbery gets all their friends killed in retribution. They don’t feel much responsibility for it.

* As I mentioned earlier, this movie is set in the “not-too-distant future” of 1996…for absolutely no reason, since everything looks the same as it did in 1991 (they mention that Burbank is now an airport, but that’s it).

In the future, all sexy hitchhikers will wear mom-jeans…

* In an homage to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , Harley and Marlboro jump off the top of a high-rise hotel into the swimming pool, because, you know, you jump from any height into a body of water eight-feet deep and totally survive unscathed.

* The deus ex machine that saves the good guys and kills the bad guys is a helicopter with an onboard minigun that just happens to pop into frame and slaughter all the bad guys. Nope, it doesn’t belong to either of our heroes, and isn’t a part of any plan they have. It just happens to be around and I guess the pilot figured what the hell. Well, that’s handy.

* This is a movie that the producers thought would be good to release the same summer as Terminator 2.

Behold the action stars of the ’90s…or not.

Yeah, this is a silly movie that pretty much drove a spike through the careers of Johnson and Rourke. Johnson acquits himself well, and reminds you that he’s actually a good actor underneath the Miami Vice stylings. I’m pleased he had a soft-landing with Nash Bridges and now enjoys a late-career comeback as a scene-stealing character actor in Machete and Eastbound and Down. As for Rourke…well, he got an Oscar nomination and then, ah, Immortals. Oh caramba…

Next we watch Jean-Claude Van Damme punch a snake (really, he does that) in Hard Target.

Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo pretty much defined a genre and re-defined action movies on a global scale. He brought an almost heretical stylization to action sequences that went beyond Sam Peckinpah’s loving slow motion and straight into semi-deification of the human form in motion. He made films that were legitimately great and that transcended cultural and language barriers.  Naturally, the logical next move was to move to Hollywood, where surely the greatness of a non-white, non-American would be recognized and prized, and where directors held complete sway over a film, never challenged by producers or stars, and where his pure, undistilled vision could be put on screen…(cough). And then, as I like to imagine it, he had a meeting with a studio exec that went more or less like the climax of Crank 2: High Voltage, in which a head in a jar just galumphs “Dorp…dorp..dorp…” and then gives him Jean-Claude Van Damme’s phone number.

Yes, in the ‘90s we openly embraced Jean-Claude Van Damme, because…Hell, I don’t know. He was a good martial artist, I suppose, and I guess after spending the ‘80s trying to decipher Stallone and Schwarzenegger, a tenuous grasp of the English language really wasn’t even close to being a deal-breaker. Besides, ol’ JCVD was at least pretty normal –looking, and he throw an impressive kick. I mean, what more really do we need from an action star?

So, in Hard Target, JCVD plays a Cajun merchant fisherman named Chance Boudreux, because why the hell not? An accent’s an accent, right? Down-on-his-luck Chance sees an opportunity to make an honest buck helping out a wide-eyed young woman named Nat Binder (Yancy Butler), who has come to Nawlins to find her missing, estranged father.

Yancy Butler is surprised by everything…

What Nat and Chance don’t know—but we have since the opening credits—is that her father is dead, hunted for sport by bored millionaires in a Most Dangerous Game scenario run by evil rich dude Emil Fouchon (the always-awesome Lance Henriksen). This leads to a surprisingly slow first half as Nat and Chance play Encyclopedia Brown and the Case of the Homeless Veterans Hunted for Sport, and the viewer screams at the screen, “It’s Lance Henriksen! What the hell else do you think he’s doing in this movie?!?”

Fortunately, the final half or so of the movie is wall-to-wall action, as Chance and Nat finally run afoul of Emil and his right-hand man, Pik van Cleef (no, really, that’s his name). Unfortunately for them, Chance is a pure force of action—a martial arts master and pretty effective at using a submachine gun while tearing ass on  a motorcycle. Because all your Cajun fishermen have the fighting skills of a Navy SEAL. And the rest of film is a series of lovingly-crafted action set-pieces, in which the first to die are the laws of physics.

All fishermen are trained on German submachine guns.

Now, Hard Target is pleasing on a pure, action-oriented level, but as an action movie it pretty much crumples and flails and goes unk! It’d be easy to hang this on JCVD and Yancy Butler, but that’s low-hanging fruit. I mean, you don’t cast JCVD for his acting chops. You cast him for his athletic prowess and to do the splits every so often (gotta give the girlfriends a little something, right?) And Butler, in the days before her battles with alcoholism, is an okay actress, but her character really only exists to make the plot to places where shit explodes.

Like so.

No, Woo’s biggest problem is Woo. He has his affectations and can’t bear to give up any of them. Action movie audiences in the US will accept a few of them, but too many simply serve to drain the scenes of any realism, and for US action movies, that’s kind of a kiss of death. Action movies in American cinema have always been about the intersection of fantastic scenes and reality. It’s why stuntmen and stunt choreographers were so important. It’s also why the action in the original Die Hard is so much more effective than in, say this year’s Die Hard and Whatever the Fuck. Watching Bruce Willis’s stuntman dangle off a skyscraper takes our breath away. Watching Bruce act opposite a massive CGI helicopter explosion is so obviously unbelievable and as a result nothing hits home. It’s also why a patently stupid movie like I Come in Peace can be so much fun.

The best movie about extra-terrestrial drug dealers ever made.

When Chance kicks a gasoline can at his enemy in slow motion and then shoots it one-handed, blowing up the bad guy, the scene looks amazing, like nothing we’ve seen before. It’s also so patently fake, we feel nothing. We don’t cheer for Chance, because he won by doing something that is purely impossible. Likewise, when Emil is blasted in the chest with a shotgun, it looks great when he skids across the ground. When he gets back up to harass Chance some more, we wonder just what the rules are in this world. There’s simply no tension.

In Woo’s defense, he’s accustomed to working with actors who are better at understanding his vision (the language barrier doesn’t help here). Chow Yun Fat can brood amid fluttering doves and sell the hell out of the scene. When Woo tries that with JCVD, he ends up with a confused-looking dude who seems to be very slowly trying to decide if he should kick one of the birds.

By some accounts, JCVD never really understood Woo and didn’t much care. This helps explain why only Henriksen—who was effusive in his praise for Woo—emerges unscathed. It’s telling that an actor who started his career illiterate, needing scripts read to him to learn his lines (at age 30), would be able to catch the visual idea and physicality Woo was looking for.

Uh-oh Lance is angry. I’ll just be in the next state…

Woo would continue in Hollywood for another fifteen years or so, before heading back to China. He made some decent movies—many of which were pretty profitable—but never found a niche here. Some of his ideas were taken and repurposed by other directors (Relentless 2 steals from him so shamelessly it’s embarrassing). Woo learned a tough lesson about a nation built on assimilation and acculturation: whether it’s breakfast burritos or chop suey, the original concept can never survive unaltered.

Next: A killer robot chases a chick around her apartment with a dildo. Oh yes, that happens…in Hardware.

In 1990’s Hardware inexplicably got a theatrical release. I’m not sure why. It was clearly made on shoestring budget with no bankable actors, but, whatever. George H. W. Bush was in the White House, the Berlin Wall had fallen…everything was up for grabs. Today, Hardware has long (well, 20 years) been considered a lost classic. Personally, I think this praise is a bit inflated. Yes, Hardware was made for a relatively low budget, and has a ‘90s industrial soundtrack, but that hardly makes it the next coming of Blade Runner. I mean, when you get right down to it, the movie’s awfully silly and the people in it are much, much sillier. You can hose down the sets with as much blood as you want and crank up the Motorhead on the soundtrack, and you’re still just talking about a traditional “Robot-meet-girl; Robot-tries-to-kill-girl; Robot-is-hopelessly-inept-at-killing-girl” story.

So, Hardware takes place in a post-apocalyptic future; one in which only cities survived. Wait, what the hell kind of nuclear apocalypse is that? They couldn’t even hit the cities? Well, anyway, the movie begins with a scavenger in the nuclear wasteland coming across the pieces of a robot. He promptly takes them back to a trading post in the nearby city to sell. The movie is already off to a weak start since, A) the scavenger is dressed like a Goth Hasidic Jew (apparently, wide-brimmed, black hats protect you in the wasteland), and B) I gotta wonder at the logic of bringing back junk from the radioactive wasteland. Wouldn’t it be, you know, radioactive?

Oh well, no sense getting bogged down in details. We got a killer robot to unleash. That happens when the robot pieces are bought by a wandering soldier named Mo (Dylan McDermott), and his buddy Shades (he wears sunglasses all the time, so his name is Shades—because he wears sunglasses…so his name is Shades…yeah, the movie is clever that way).  Mo buys the pieces as a peace offering for his girlfriend Jill (Stacy Travis), who sculpts in scrap metal. Mo keeps leaving on contracts, and Jill’s tired of it, but Mo figures bringing her a robot skull will turn up the heat in their relationship a little bit.

And it does. Next thing you know, the two of them are going at it like cyber-bunnies, while her obese, sweaty neighbor watches her through futuristic binoculars and masturbates. You know, here is where the creative process of the film really loses me. I mean, at what point does it seem reasonable to put a disgusting sex-criminal in your movie? Really, did they think that would make it more watchable? Was there one really convincing dude hanging out during the writing phase who was all like, “Know what we need more of? Need more fat, sweaty, perverted voyeur jacking off. Not enough of that in movies these days.”

Okay, so Mo gets called away by his buddy the junk dealer, who has discovered that the robot parts are pieces of an experimental killer-robot called the M.A.R.K 13. The 13 has an impressive array of weapons, from cutting tools to a psychotropic neurotoxin, but were pulled from service when it was discovered that they were susceptible to water-damage. Apparently, this contract was awarded to the aliens in Signs. Now, the junk dealer could have told Mo this over the phone along with a friendly word of advice about getting the hell out of there, but no. He gives Mo the whole “I can’t talk about this on the phone” BS, which nicely gets Mo out of the apartment when the 13 comes back to life and begins reassembling itself.

The 13 reassembles itself pretty quickly (especially since it doesn’t have any tools—not even one of those little IKEA wrenches), and promptly attacks Jill’s bed (she’s not in it). It really goes to town, too, just kills the hell out of it (so it can’t get wet and attacks beds…who bought this weapons system? Why? Did they get a free hat with it or something?) Jill misses the whole bed-attacking incident, but does notice that the power is pretty much scotched to the whole apartment  (the 13 is powering up), but before she can investigate further, the pervert voyeur from next door shows up. I think he meant to rape her, but instead he helps get her power back online (say this for him, he’s a helpful pervert/rapist). After he does, the 13 smashes through a window and rams his metal, robot-fingers through the dudes eyes (get it? Irony!) then 13 disembowels him with what can only be described as a spinning dildo. (Okay, it breaks when it gets wet, attacks a bed, and is armed with a spinning dildo…seriously, who bought this thing? Where did they find it? Was it on sale at Toys in Babeland?) The handy pervert is promptly ripped apart in a tsunami of stage blood. Yeah, it’s a money shot if there ever was.

From here, Hardware turns into the cat-and-mouse game it promised all along as Jill must fend off the 13 in time for Mo, Shades, and some other dudes to try and break in and save her. The movie picks up steam at this point, but doesn’t get a whole lot smarter. They kill the robot, like, seven times before it’s fully dead (and I’ll let you guess what finally does it in), and it slaughters a bunch more people. We do get to see the neurotoxin at work, and it apparently causes the victim to see in a fisheye lens and hear choral music on the soundtrack.  Jill and Mo even work out their couples issues as Mo tearfully admits that he’s been kicked out of the military (and given the way he responds to a threat by firing a shotgun indiscriminately in all directions, you can kinda see why). The scene would be a bit more touching if it didn’t take place about five feet away from three or four grotesquely mutilated corpses.

Hardware was written and directed by music-video director Richard Stanley, and he approaches this movie from a visual-heavy perspective. The story is slight enough, but whenever Stanley feels the inertia slipping, he throws in some random video clips from the TV (including one of GWAR—guess they survived the apocalypse). As a result, Hardware is heavy on style over substance—even if the budget doesn’t really allow that style to be fully realized. The movie gives us an ecologically-devastated landscape, which results in a 120+ degree heat wave. It makes for great red-filtered shots to convey the heat, but then why does everyone wear overcoats or leather jackets? According to the news, the government is pushing an ominous population-control bill, but wouldn’t under-population be a bigger concern? Maybe, but that’s just not sexy-dystopian enough.

And if the Earth is wrecked, where does everyone get so much hair product? So, GWAR and hair product are the big winners in the post-nuclear holocaust future? That’s kind of depressing.

[Sidebar: Okay, really...how did the sales pitch for this weapons system go?

SALES GUY: So here is the M.A.R.K 13 killer robot. It's got a bunch of arms and head shaped like a skull!

MILITARY GUY: I love the skull idea!

SALES GUY: Yeah, and it's armed with an array of blades and saws on the arms...

MILITARY GUY: Right! And guns and rockets and stuff? Maybe a flame-thrower?

SALES GUY: Ah, well, no...it might carry a gun...oh, no it's fingers are too big. But hey, it's got a neurotoxin it injects in your target. Makes them trip balls while they die! Cool, huh?

MILITARY GUY: Toxin...injects...why would we need that on the battlefield? We need something that can kill a lot of people at once!

SALES GUY: Well, hey, it's got a drilling tool that disembowels people, too.

MILITARY GUY: Lemme say again: rockets, missiles, bullets, long-range devastating weapons you can use against an army...

SALES GUY: The drill is shaped like a dildo.

MILITARY GUY: Okay, I think we're done here.

SALES GUY: You can't get it wet. It breaks if it gets wet.

MILITARY GUY: Please leave now.]

Here is a little-seen gem of an action movie. 1990’s I Come in Peace (released internationally as Dark Angel) didn’t make much of a splash when it was released in theaters (it was actually released in theaters—the kind with seats and popcorn an everything—I shit you not), but it’s enjoyed a well-earned re-visiting in recent years. The Bad Movie Fiends podcasters rated it a “5 Jox” movie (that’s good), and after falling off the map after it’s VHS incarnation, has even gotten a Blu-Ray release (probably because of the BMFCasters full-throated endorsement—I mean, I can’t think of any other reason for it). While I Come in Peace may have been released at the cusp of the decade, but in many ways it foresaw the dominant trends in society and film that would dominate for a good part of the decade. Are you old enough to remember the ‘90s? No? Then trust me; everything I say is totally true.

To understand the cultural relevance of I Come in Peace, we must first go back a few years to the 1980s. Crack cocaine exploded on the scene, and pretty soon the entire nation was gripped in its, uh, rocky claws. The inner cities were being decimated. Children were born mutated creatures that fed on the flesh of the overworld-dwellers, and rival drug gangs battled for territory with arsenals that rivaled those of most Third World dictatorships. Ever seen Class of Nuke’em High? Yeah, it was totally like that.

So, yeah, we were pretty anxious about drugs, which is why it makes perfect sense that I Come in Peace would be about an alien drug-smuggler and the cops that were out to nail him. Fulbright scholar Dolph Lundgren plays Detective Jack Caine, a tough cop on the mean streets of Houston, who isn’t about to let some six-foot six albino alien suck the endorphins out of the heads of the kind folks in his city. Only he isn’t going to use his doctorate in engineering to take on this perp. Nope, he uses his 9mm H&K and his martial arts training to destroy anyone who gets in his way.

Apropos of nothing, all mechanics wore lingerie in the ’90s.

Teaming up with Caine is Brian Benben as Larry Smith, a straight-arrow FBI agent, who brings a stiff professionalism to this job, but must learn to question the rules and culture of the FBI in order to take this guy down. In the end, he comes into his own by using a space machine-pistol to lay waste to pretty much everything (in fairness to Benben, he’s not the imposing of presences, so he kinda needs the space gun).

But how does I Come in Peace predict American culture in the ‘90s, you ask? Here we go:

Questioning the FBI: The ‘90s would see a series of high-profile failures for the Bureau—Ruby Ridge, Waco, the lost goes on. Similarly, Smith comes to the ugly realization that his supervisor at the FBI doesn’t care about this case beyond what alien technology they can steal. When he balks at this, his supervisor tries to kill him. Which I don’t think the Bureau actually did in the ‘90s (maybe the ‘60s, though).

Compact discs are lethal (okay, if you don’t know what a CD is just Google it. I’m not gonna explain): every seen someone killed by a CD? Well, watch this movie and you. Compact discs were a relatively new technology in 1990, but they would soon take over the music industry, and their ability to segmentize and individualize songs would effectively kill the concept of the album, which was predicated on songs being played in a particular order in order to tell a story. So, yeah, CDs are lethal. Just not necessarily launched from an alien’s gauntlet, but that’s what they call metaphor. See? This shit’s deep.

White Boys: Yeah, that’s the name of the evil drug gang Caine is trying to smash as the movie begins. It’s run and peopled by MBAs in business suits who wield submachine guns. While this could be seen as a holdover from the yuppie-obsessed days of the ‘80s, it could also be seen as a metaphor (check it out, another one!) for the increasing corporatization of urban centers of the ‘90s. Most notably, Disney’s takeover of Times Square under the Giuliani administration. Because do you doubt that Disney has dudes in suits with MP-5Ks ready to shoot holes in everything? I’m pretty sure they do. Hell I would if I ran that outfit.

“Here’s your golden parachute, bitch!”

The Cultured cop: Sure, Caine is a tough-ass man-mountain who likes to do his thinking at strip clubs. But consider, this cop is played by easily the smartest action star ever to kick someone in the head. On top of that, when he retires home to his tastefully-appointed apartment, he likes to unwind with a glass of red wine and some jazz. In the ‘80s we liked our cops be-mulleted and wearing blue jeans. But with the newfound prosperity of the ‘90s, we were looking for something slightly classier from the dudes entrusted to punch aliens in the face.

“I like to unwind with a little John Coltrane after I drive a Crown Vic through a shopping mall.”

Aliens: Did cops actually shoot it out with aliens during the ‘90s? Um, maybe. Could happen, I suppose. But I do know that in 1994 The X-Files­ premiered, and for ten seasons Mulder and Scully chased aliens all around the US. They never blew any away, but that’s because Mulder was always kind of a puss.

Fans: I Come in Peace opens with a stylish shot of a large, ventilation fan. We really liked fans in our movies in the 1990s. I’m not really sure what that means, but we sure did like fans.

Alien vs. Alien: In the ‘90s American military and intelligence services, scrambling for relevance in a post-Cold War world, would work more extensively with unusual and unconventional allies. The most notable example is the massive manhunt for Pablo Escobar. In I Come in Peace, Caine and Smith must work with an alien cop to blow up an alien drug dealer. Hell, it’s practically the same thing. I don’t know why Mark Bowden didn’t sue.

Cali cartel hitman or alien drug dealer? Tough to tell, isn’t it?

Practical stunts: Man, action movies were so much more awesome before CGI.

So that’s I Come in Peace, possibly the most prescient movie made in the ‘90s.

Elysium is the latest sci-fi adventure-cum-social commentary by Neill Blomkamp and his follow-up to the surprise hit District 9. Even more than that movie, Elysium is shot through with a healthy dose of indignation, and points an accusing finger not simply at a racist social system (now defunct), but at a world that tolerates gross inequality. You know, before we get to the “blowing shit up” parts. Now, with two major releases under his belt, it’s safe to say that Blomkamp has a keen imagination for world-building and creating sci-fi tales that move out naturally from our world. And then setting loose killer robots to blow it all up.

In Elysium, Blomkamp envisions an Earth so poisoned and overpopulated that the wealthy have basically said, “fuck this noise” and constructed a great space station called Elysium. For the haves, Elysium perfectly-manicured lawns, big houses, and, best of all, magical medical pods that cure anything from cancer to old age to a grenade in the face. It’s basically what progressives imagine a world run by Barack Obama would become. Earth is one massive failed-state—a polluted, dilapidated slum, overrun with tatted-up Latino toughs. Basically what Republicans imagine a world run by Barack Obama would become.

Why does LA always suck in the future?

Matt Damon plays Max, a denizen of the Cursed Earth, who grew up in an orphanage run by Spanish nuns, and where he promised his sweetheart Frey that one day he’d take her to Elysium. Fast-forward a couple years and Max is a reformed thief working a crappy factory job and Frey (now played by Alice Braga) is a nurse with a sickly daughter. When an accident at work gives Max a lethal dose of radiation, he teams up with his old criminal contact, Spider (yes, that’s his name) to steal some data from an Elysium-dwelling bigwig who runs Max’s factory. If he succeeds, Spider promises to smuggle him into Elysium. To help him out, Spider bolts a robotic exo-skeleton on Max giving him sooper—strength.

“Just lemme download Angry Birds, and…done!”

Alas, something is rotten in the state of Elysium, as the eeevil Defense Secretary Delacourt (Jodie Foster with a weird accent) is tired of the President’s “don’t blow up illegal immigrants” policy and is attempting to stage a coup. This somehow requires the main computer to be rebooted, and the only guy who can do that is corporate billionaire John Carlyle (William Fichtner—awesome as ever), the target of Max’s data heist.

So Max stumbles into a bad situation, as Delacourt has dispatched her main tool of destruction to recover Carlyle. That tool of destruction is a mainline psychopath/security contractor named Kruger (Sharlto Copley), and when he arrives too late to save Carlyle, his next mission is to do anything to recover the info that’s been downloaded into Max’s brain.

I suspect this might be the bad guy…

Long story short, Kruger and Max blow a lot of shit up on Earth, then make their way to Elysium. Once there everything goes to hell, when Kruger goes off-the-rails insane and decides to stage his own coup—pretty much for fun as near as I can tell. Meanwhile Max is trying to use his head-data to allow the Morlocks on Earth to be able to access Elysium’s magic medical technology.

Elysium is a solid, exciting action movie that moves at a nice clip, and presents a lot of familiar sci-fi staples. The tech, the spaceships, weapons, and especially Elysium itself are all well-realized. Blomkamp nicely thinks outward from our own overly-militarized world. The soldiers and their toys all look like something we could see in a couple years deployed in some (probably Middle Eastern) country.

Exclusive Elysium, where you have a view of…the other part of Elysium.

No, the look and action of Elysium aren’t the problem. The problems crop up in the concept and the story. The movie seems like Blomkamp spent a couple days watching leftie documentaries and then banged out a screenplay. Sci-fi can be forgiven for being unambiguous in its worldview—hell, look at Star Wars—but when that world breaks down under basic scrutiny like a Jenga tower built by wasted frat dudes, well, then you have a problem. What do I mean? Okay:

* No two ways about it: the medical tech here is magic. Hell, even Star Trek medicine had its limitations (they couldn’t regrow Picard’s hair or reign in Kirk’s waistline after all), but this shit just makes you damn near immortal. Now, wouldn’t this tech logically expand to other stuff? Like, say, fixing the Earth’s environment?

* On that point, Elysium’s First World/Third World allegory is woefully off-base. Countries do not end up failed states because they lack technology or resources, but do to a complex web of social factors. Jordan is a resource-poor country that is nonetheless pretty affluent and stable. Almost all of West Africa is absurdly rich in resources but there isn’t a stable country in the region. Sure, technology and  would help, but it’s not a magic bullet.

“Konichiwa, bitches!”

* How does Elysium work? How does it run? What do people do when they’re not holding garden parties? I sure don’t know, since we never see life on Elysium except for the aforementioned garden parties and some generic-looking control rooms. Hell, we never even see more than a handful of residents and they’re mostly extras.

* This movie thinks that a knife wound to the abdomen is something you be cured (on Earth and not in a magic medical pod), as Frey stitches up Max and he’s good to go. No problems due to blood-loss, and he doesn’t even re-open hiss wound during any of the many subsequent fights he has.

It’s like if RoboCop was made by Honda.

* This movie only works because no one is particularly smart: Delacourt relies on a (diagnosed) insane, violent merc; Kruger tries to kill Max, then uses Frey as a hostage, rather than just dealing for the info in his head; Carlyle is richer than god but still tools around Earth in an unarmored, wildly extravagent shuttle with only one robot guard. Shit, Spider’s the only dude who knows that he’s doing in this movie.

Well, we finally have flying cars…and they’re lame.

* How does bringing the medical technology to Earth present a huge triumph? I mean, yay! Everyone’s heathy! That, uh, that doesn’t fix the overpopulation problem. Kind of the opposite, really.

* And how does Elysium not face a crippling overpopulation problem of its own? They mention that people are having children, but if everyone’s living a hella long time…well, you see where I’m going with this.

Well, Earth still has CrossFit, it seems.

* How does Kruger shoot down a shuttle that is within visual-distance of Elysium with a shoulder-mounted rocket? How fast does that thing go? What kind of fuel is it running on?

* Elysium is described as having “suburban areas.” Does that mean it has cities? Are they polluted, too? Or crowded?

* Carlyle’s business is said to be facing financial difficulties. Why? They make robots, and as we see robots run everything on Earth.

* As a kid, Max is told by one of the nuns at the orphanage that he was “meant to do something important.” Because in sci-fi and fantasy everyone has a destiny or is The Chosen One or some such twaddle.

“You have a destiny…to punch another cyborg in the face.”

* How many movies have featured characters called “Spider?” Has anyone gone by that name? Ever?

* Wait a minute! Kruger takes a grenade to the face, but they can fix him because he has normal brain activity? How the hell is it possible his brain wasn’t pureed by the same blast that took off half his skull?

* I have no idea what the movie is trying to say with the hippo story.

Anyway, that’s Elysium. Guess we should have included that public option in Obamacare, huh?

Poor Ryan Reynolds. He’s a capable enough actor with solid comedic chops and a ‘40s matinee-idol face and hair. He’s already famous, yet can’t seem to catch a break when it comes to movies. And with RIPD, he, um, he still hasn’t caught one. As a matter of fact, he’s managed to find himself in the center of a gigantic suck to rival that of Green Lantern. I’m beginning to think that Ryan Reynolds is to massive flops what trailer parks are to tornadoes—they don’t cause them, but they sure as hell manage to be in the same proximity of them an awful lot.

So, RIPD…well, have you seen Men in Black? Okay, then you’ve seen this movie. Done? No? I gotta go into more detail? Damn it…okay, well, Reynolds plays a Boston cop named Nick Walker, who is basically a very good dude with a cute starter house and an a cute starter wife named Julia (Stephanie Szostak). Ah, but Nick is hiding a secret: he and his partner, Bobby Hayes (Kevin Bacon) stole some gold statutes from a drug dealer. As drug dealers are prone to have. But, hey, don’t worry. This movie isn’t gonna try and make Reynolds play an anti-hero—heh, let’s not push this guy too far out of his comfort zone. He decides he’s going to book the gold into evidence. Bobby seems totally cool with this, so naturally, first chance he gets, Bobby kills Nick and makes it look like he was killed in a drug bust gone bad. Because, duh.

“Don’t worry. I’m totally not a bad guy. Just wear something bright-colored today, okay?”

Nick ascends, but doesn’t end up in any kind of heaven we’d expect for Ryan Reynolds (I imagine it involves a lot of styling product and exfoliates), but instead finds himself in a supernatural police precinct, reporting to a dryer-than-burnt-toast police supervisor named Proctor (Mary-Louise Parker, who is probably the best thing about this movie). Seems some cops who aren’t good enough to  make it heaven but still not bad enough to go to hell are impressed into service in the Rest in Peace Department. Their job is to hunt down undead spirits who refuse to leave earth. RIPD call these monsters Deados (I should warn you, creativity is not this movie’s strong suit).

Hm…huge, weird police station…nope nothing derivative about that.

As a rookie cop, Nick is partnered with an old pro, an ornery cowboy named Roy Pulsipher (a very funny Jeff Bridges). Roy doesn’t cotton to his newbie podna, but shows him the ropes anyway. In Earth, you see, they appear as avatars. Roy’s is a supermodel, and Nick’s is James Hong. Because James Hong is always funny, even when he’s being menaced by Roy Batty.

Well, the origin story can only take up so much time, so Roy and Nick handily find themselves unearthing a major plot to open the gates of the afterlife to the dead. And wouldn’t you know it, this just so happens to intersect with Nick’s murder. Much wackiness ensues.

Mismatched partners wielding strange, metallic guns…uh, not ringing a bell…

So, yeah, RIPD is basically the same movie as Men in Black, and yes, I know it was based on a comic book, but that doesn’t change the fact that director Robert Schwentke seems to have tried to be as derivative as possible. The premise, creatures, action setpieces, and production design all look aas of they were lifted straight from a direct-to-DVD MiB sequel that couldn’t lure back Tommy Lee Jones or Will Smith.

But the almost staggering lack of creativity doesn’t end there. Neither Schwentke, nor seemingly any of the six (Jesus, six?!?) screenwriters seem to know how to make the movie clever. The avatar joke is spent the moment it’s introduced. The RIPD is populated by cops from throughout history, but they barely register. The movie could have had a blast serving up fedora-wearing James Ellroy types alongside snappily-dressed Serpico refugees and maybe Crockett and Tubbs stand-ins, but, uh, nope. Likewise Roy and Nick’s clichéd “mismatched cops learn to work together” arc is played totally straight. This movie could have taken decades of cop-movie clichés and given them a supernatural spin, but, again, that just seems like too much work. Hell, Roy and Nick crack the case while they’re on suspension—like any good cops from an ‘80s action movie—but RIPD is too lazy to be self-aware.

“What? I took the job because I wanted to buy a Tesla. They’re good for the environment.”

The headliners all do their best. Bridges is funny, but clearly phoning in a variation on his incarnation of Rooster Cogburn. Parker is drolly funny, but it’s a one-note character and performance. And poor Reynolds works himself into a lather trying to make this movie take flight, but he’s stuck once again in a boat-anchor of a movie.

On top of that, for a movie that cost 130 million the effects are pretty sub-par. I mean, doesn’t that kind of coin at least buy you some convincing CGI?

“Oh shit. I just learned Bridges only took the role to buy a Tesla. I am so boned…”

You can’t fault Reynolds for taking these trainwrecks. Comic book movies are practically a license to print money, yet somehow he manages to choose the ones that doom themselves to ignominious oblivion.

Anyway, that’s RIPD. Apparently, Hollywood thinks we’ll just watch any old crap. Thankfully, audiences proved them very, very wrong. Not me, personally, but, like, everyone else. So that’s good.

You know Hollywood is deep in the Dead Horse Seas of creative bankruptcy when they remake a movie like 1985’s Fright Night. I mean, it’s not like the movie was any kind of a high water mark of ‘80s cinema. But it has a vampire in it, which you know tripped some producer’s cultural IFF, and, apparently while they were at it, someone said, “Hey why don’t we shoot this thing in 3D so we can squeeze a couple extra bucks out of the Twilight fans and goth kids who see this movie.” And yet, despite the eminently cynical calculations that borne it, the remake of Fright Night manages to be just as charming and understated as the original.

Anton Yelchin plays Charley Brewster, a high school senior, who has suddenly found himself living the high school dream: he’s popular, has a slammin’ girlfriend (Imogen Poots—never thought I’d type that name more than once), and well, what more do you really need? Sure, he doesn’t have a dad, but his mom is hot (she’s played by Toni Collette all filled with MILFy goodness). But Charley’s idyll is disrupted when a former friend of his named Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, really getting too filled-out to keep playing the nerd role) tries to enlist his aid in his quest to prove that Charley’s neighbor is responsible for all the disappearances lately.

Charley doesn’t believe him—who would—after all, the town is filled with people losing their homes and their jobs, or working nights on the strip. Besides, Charley soon meets his neighbor and he turns out to be a hunkaaay construction worker named Jerry Dandridge(Colin Farrell). Vampires, Charley reasons, are not named Jerry.

But when Ed disappears, Charley gets suspicious. And when he watches out his window as Jerry’s date with a local piece of eye-candy turns into something ominous, he realizes the truth: his neighbor is a vampire named Jerry, and Jerry kind of has the hots for his mom. Knowing he needs help, Charley reaches out to Criss Angel-like Vegas showman, Peter Vincent (David Tenant, aka the best Doctor Who ever). Well, Peter Vincent turns out to be a fraud and sort of a douchebag—at least initially—but events soon conspire to convince him to help Charley (and by “events” I mean “vampires attack.”) So, Charley must protect his mom and girlfriend from the increasingly-dangerous Jerry while relying on a dubious ally to help him destroy the vampire next door.

Which was pretty much the plot of the first one, too, except the kid’s ally was played by the significantly less awesome Roddy McDowell.

The original was notable for a couple things. One was introducing the world to a pre-Herman’s Head William Ragsdale (remember that show? Ever heard of it? You’re not missing much), and a pre-lesbian Amanda Bearse. Okay, neither one of those things is really notable per se. I just thought they were interesting to mention. No, what Fright Night did that was unique was to take vampires out their traditional settings and drop them in the middle of Reagan’s cloistered suburbia in all its banal glory. In this it was of a kind with A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Blue Velvet in finding the dark side of the Promised Land that lie at the end of white flight. Of course, it wasn’t as good as either of those other two movies, but what hell. It was a fun premise that basically asked, what if they yuppie next door was a vampire?

The remake doesn’t eschew this premise, and indeed even trades on it as solidly as the original did. Where the original brought us to the suburbia of Reagan’s Morning in America, the current film takes us to a spiritually-empty landscape of a boom-time suburb in the desert outskirts of Las Vegas. Director Craig Gillespie perfectly and economically sets up this generation’s suburban nightmare with an overhead shot of a square plot of identical, bubble-era houses before cutting to a street-level view which shows all the realty signs in the front yards. Throughout the film much is made of the fact that this is a place people move away from, and not settle in.

Gillespie (and, I suspect, screenwriter and former Buffy scribe Marti Noxon), uses this setting for a bildungsroman of a sort, positing Charley on the cusp of manhood. And while Charley is hardly irresponsible, the movie makes clear he is ill-prepared for some of the harder truths of the adult world. Indeed, Jerry’s sexuality is nakedly predatory, and, in one scene he toys with Charley by telling him he needs to look out for his women. Farrell plays the scene beautifully, claiming to share some fatherly (or big-brotherly) advice while not even hiding his lasciviousness—Charley’s mom, he claims, “gives off a scent,” while his girlfriend is “ripe.” Against this all Charley can do is writhe impotently–a high school virgin in the presence of a sexual elder. And not only is Charley outclassed by his neighbor, but seems genuinely surprised when Peter Vincent turns out to be (mostly) all a sham. How anyone could watch his vegas show and buy him for a moment is a further testament to Charley’s teenaged naivete.

The filmmakers also make the interesting decision to keep the vampires out of context. Aside from a few tossed off lines, Jerry the Vampire is simply a force of nature, “the shark from Jaws,” as Ed describes him. There is no tortured history or elaborate back story. Jerry is just a blue-collar mope who likes to watch bad reality TV after a good meal (of a stripper). This vacuum falls nicely into line with the rest of the vibe given off by the ersatz neighborhood. The vampire has no lineage, because neither does anyone else. The neighborhood has no past, no history, no lore. There is no character to it. Charley’s rite of manhood takes place within this element: a cultural wasteland filled with garbage TV and homes newly built for buyers who now can’t afford them. It makes the urgency of his mission even more pressing as he’s forced to be the lone sign of integrity in a world where no one else has any.

Of course, the story’s subtexts wouldn’t work if the performances didn’t pop. Fortunately, Gilespie has some ringers at his disposal. Yelchin is rapidly becoming an amazing actor, rising to whatever challenge is thrown at him—whether it’s Mel Gibson’s estranged son in The Beaver or Ensign Chekov. Collete is good in anything and has been for the past decade, so no surprise there, and Poots brings a groundedness that makes even her underwritten character believable. Tenant is the real breakout, though. He jolts every scene he appears in, at first seeming to ape Russell Brand, but then settling into a performance that’s more complicated and enjoyable. He even manages to elicit laughs out of some fairly threadbare eBay jokes.

But it’s Farrell who is the real standout here. His Jerry isn’t freighted with the usual (non-Twilight-influenced) vampire lore, but is instead simply atavistic and dangerous with, as he puts it “400 years of survival instinct.” When Charley tangles with him, he can’t help but be dickish in an older brother type of way…provided your older brother killed strippers. Farrell could have simply phoned in this performance (it’s a summer vampire flick, after all, why break a sweat?), but instead turns in a remarkably complicated performance. He plays Jerry as a kind of null-space–a culmination of the spiritual emptiness that infuses the rest of the film. His Jerry the Vampire exists to do little more than eat and watch trash TV. Farrell seems to have distilled the darkest elements from the rancid contemporary male culture—the predatory sexuality, the sexual territoriality, the desire for immediate gratification—to bring a vivid banality to his vampire evil.

Of course nowadays vampires are all over suburbia—when they’re not glittering, they’re being staked by Buffy (though, unfortunately, not at the same time)—but holding the vampire super-saturation of pop culture against this movie isn’t very fair. Likewise, the bad decision to film a movie that mostly takes place at night in 3D, and thus ensure that many scenes are too dark to completely make out, is also one you can’t put on the shoulders of the creative team.

Fright Night may have been a calculated effort to part people with their money, but—much like Peter Vincent—turns out to have a great deal of heart beneath its mercenary exterior.

Going into Fright Night 2: The New Blood, I wasn’t exactly optimistic. After all, it’s a non-theatrical release sequel which has none of the same actors as the major theatrical release original. Nothing good can come from this situation. Except that this movie stars Jaime Murray, and she’s not only hot, but also tends to get naked a lot. Like in everything she does. So, I figured what the hell, and watched it anyway. Look, I don’t always make very good decisions, and this one was no exception.

So, first thing that happens is that, apropos of nothing, a motorist in France is attacked by a weirdly werewolf-like vampire while she’s getting gas at a filling station. I mean, this is basically a feral animal that attacks her—and here I wondered if maybe this movie was going to follow in the footsteps of the ‘80s sequel to that Fright Night and throw some werewolves in the mix. Ah, nope, this is just a white-trash vampire or a ‘roid-rage vampire or something. Anyway, the motorist reacts to the attack by setting her car on fire (is this really the best Plan A? It seems like there’s probably a few stops on the use of force continuum before “blow up car.”) Anyway, the vampire eats her anyway, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of the film, but only exists because I guess the filmmakers decided we needed to be told we were watching a vampire movie. Given that this is the sequel to a vampire movie, it’s safe to say the filmmakers don’t have a very high opinion of us.

These are our heroes–that’s how little the movie likes us.

Once the movie proper starts, we find ourselves in Romania, and holy shit, that’s never a good thing. Movies shot in Romania basically announce to the audience, “Our budget is so low that we couldn’t even shoot in some backwater in a Red State where the local High School has a class devoted to shooting targets drawn to look like Barak Obama. You should adjust your expectations accordingly.” Or sometimes: “We really wanted to make a horror movie, but the only backers we could find are the Russian mafia gangs too dumb to leave Eastern Europe.” And even sometimes, “Hey, that money’s not gonna launder itself.” What it never says is, “Awesome movie coming up.”

And then Fright Night begins.

No, not the sequel. The original movie, because this (*cough*) sequel is just a remake of the 2011 and 1985 original. I shit you not. This movie tells the exact same story! And not in a Hangover 2 way, in which the characters find themselves in the same situation once again. Oh, no. This movie proceeds as if the first film never happened, with the same characters going through the same paces. Only here, Charlie Brewster has gone on a study-abroad trip to Romania, and it is his hawt art professor (Murray) who is the vampire whose nocturnal activities he watches from the window.

Or from his classroom…this movie doesn’t try very hard.

Murray plays Gerri Dandridge (her first name is the only sign of wit in this movie), who is also, I guess, Elizabeth Bathory or something. This movie never quite figures out what it’s doing with Murray (except letting her slink around). She has to bathe in the blood of virgins to remain young, which is weird and sort of non-vampirey. But then she also needs the blood of a virgin born in the full moon for…something I’m not too clear on. And she’s still sucking her victim’s blood like any super-powerful vampire, so I’m not sure what the rules are supposed to be. It’s kind of like they assembled her character out of an edition of those poetry refrigerator magnets that were sold in an occult bookshop. The script is pretty much an afterthought. I’m not sure what the beforethought was, though.

Peter Vincent, now with 100% more douchebaggery.

The rest of the movie hits the same marks as the original Fright Nights, with Charlie’s friend “Evil” Ed being vampirized, and his only hope being horror-movie host Peter Vincent. Only in this case Vincent is the host of a Ghost Hunters-type “reality” TV show. Aside from that it is the same goddamn thing, just with worse actors and effects. Imagine if The Empire Strikes Back was about Luke Skywalker discovering his destiny as a Jedi and blowing up the Death Star, only it was shot in Romania and all the actors were played by the dudes who were Imperial commanders in the first movie. Oh, and Roger Corman produced it. Yep, that’s pretty much how this movie goes down.

And Jaime Murray never gets naked. She’s more than happy to do a soft-core lesbian scene with Lucy Lawless in Spartacus, but this movie is beneath her. Yeah, that’s pretty telling.

Start spanking, this is as good as it gets.

But we also have:

* Murray’s class begins with a choreographed light show more elaborate that a Pussycat Dolls concert. Because college is like that in Romania, apparently.

* In one scene, one of Murray’s intended victims is undressed by Murray’s shadow. It’s a neat idea, except they can’t get the shadow to line up right with the victim’s clothing. So shadow-fingers diddle with the women’s ear, while her bra gets unclasped by magic.

* This film has one fake-out scare every fifteen minutes. It’s annoying as hell.

* When Evil Ed turns into a vampire, the actor can’t talk through his false teeth. His impassioned monologue is all like, “Yur a prawd, Peher Visen! Yuh duh stah fuh anyteh..glrdb, sehsh sesh.” It loses some dramatic power.

“Mumble mumble mumble…”

* In one of the more batshit-crazy scenes, Peter Vincent fights off Evil Ed by pulling him in for a hug and forcing Ed’s face against the big cross tattooed on his chest. The camera angle abruptly changes to inside his body looking through a plexiglass chest wall where Ed’s face is smooshed against it like a dog who didn’t realize the patio door was closed. It’s…it’s just fucking lunacy.

* All the roles are played by Brits playing Americans (with the exception of Murray). I genuinely don’t know what’s happening with that.

*   Needless to say every one of the recast roles is a disappointment. The guy playing Charlie looks like a cut-rate Matthew Modine (let that sink a minute), and David Tennant should only ever be replaced by Matt Smith. Hell, even the makers of Broadchurch know that.

* This movie uses ridonkulous amounts of strobe-light effects. Because boring us with a lackluster sequel/remake wasn’t enough, the filmmakers also wanted to induce epileptic seizures.

So that’s Fright Night 2: The New Blood. I assume they just forgot to put “New” in quotes.

Well, this is a surprise. No, don’t get all excited—Earth vs. the Spider is not a good movie. It’s actually a pretty ridiculous one in most ways. Still, it’s always refreshing when you stumble across what should be a grade-Z schlockfest, which has, inexplicably, a good deal more on its mind than the titular monster. Such is the case with this film, which takes the title-says-it-all premise of a giant mutated spider attack and turns it into a ruminative neo-noir about modern urban alienation and the pathos of comic book culture. I kid you not.

Somewhere in the unnamed Big City—a city, which, it seems, is suspended sometime between 1958 and 2001—a lovable but hapless young man named Quentin Kemmer (Devon Gummersall—taking a break from pining over Angela Chase) finds his life changed when he injects himself with a secret drug cocktail produced by Biochemco—the company where he works as a security guard.

“Okay, can you stop talking about this Angela girl for, like, five minutes?”

See, despite being a decent enough guy, Quentin feels ground down by the world. His low-paying job has him living paycheck to paycheck in a cruddy apartment. His feelings of inadequacy paralyze him from making a move on Stephanie (Amelia Heinle), the cute nursing student who lives on his floor, and he can’t even scare off the bullies (laughably looking like beatniks) who harass her, since Biochemco only arms him with pepper-spray. When a break-in at Biochemco goes bad, leaving the thieves, a couple cops, and Quentin’s fellow security guard and father-figure dead, he decides he has to make a major change. Hence shooting up with the super-juice.

And that goes about the way you’d expect.

Quentin has a serious hero complex, having grown up on a steady diet of comic books, with his favorite being The Arachnid Avenger (a transparent Spider-Man parody), whose exploits he recounts with euphoric glee to his friend Han (John Cho), the owner of a comic book shop called Hero Worship. With this secret drug cocktail, Quentin believes he will acquire super powers and finally be the hero he so wants to be.

At first he is. He’s less and less vulnerable to pain. His senses are boosted, and he can spray webs out of his abdomen. At first it’s great, as he saves Amelia from being raped by a serial predator. Yay! He’s a hero. But things start to go sideways when, well, his body beings to change. And not in good ways—in mandibles sprouting from his mouth ways.

So, Claire Danes won an Emmy for Homeland. How’re you doing, Devon?

Running parallel to this storyline, is that of Detective Jack Grillo (Dan Aykroyd)—a formerly hardboiled dick who has been unmanned by a recent bust which left his partner dead. Grillo’s self-doubt has driven his drunken floozy of a wife (Theresa Russell) away and into the arms of whatever cop happens to be near. Grillo was on the case of the serial killer who tried to rape Amelia and now find himself on the trail of a very peculiar vigilante.

What’s notable for Earth vs. the Spider is just how melancholy the film is. Rather than simply give us Syfy channel-worthy crapfest about a kid turning into a giant spider, this film is shot through with palpable loneliness and sadness. In the face of a tough city full of criminals, hoods, and late-night watering holes frequented by the heartbroken, it seems natural for Quentin to slowly lose his humanity and descend into atavism.

“You’re not gonna try and upside-down kiss me like Kirsten Dunst, are you?”

In this Earth vs. the Spider feels more like a spiritual successor to King Kong than the 1958 drive-in feature it’s based upon. Additionally, the  movie is filled with some very good performances. Gummersall puts all that leftover My So-Called Life angst to good use, and manages to sell his scenes, even through increasing amounts of prosthetics. For his part, Aykroyd puts in his best performance in a long time, playing a variation on his Joe Friday role from the Dragnet movie. His Jack Grillo is like what Joe Friday would become after a couple of hard knocks and busted marriage—a man betrayed by everything he drew support from.

Earth vs. the Spider was a part of a series of five films made for Cinemax that year, which utilized old American International Pictures properties and let Stan Winston’s Creature Effects studio have at them as a sort of last hurrah before CGI would take over the world. The other four films in the series are all pretty dire, making this one even more remarkable by comparison. Just the fact it chose to sample and implicitly criticize Spider-Man—with the 2002 Toby Maguire version well into post-production by then—shows that the folks involved had some chutzpah.

I guess a costume is pretty redundant at this point, huh?

But we also have:

* I really enjoyed the movie’s weird time frame. It has a poppy, retro jazz score, most of cars are vintage, no one has a cel phone, but it still name-checks Desert Storm and contemporary geek culture. It’s a neat homage to the ‘50s monster movies.

* John Cho is hilarious as Han, at one point responding to a burglar in his shop with a toy lightsaber that he’s thoughtfully remembered to light up.

* Gummersall and Heinle’s final conversation through a locked door is downright heartbreaking.

* In keeping with the hoods’ retro sensibilities, one of them pulls a switchblade (favored weapon of the ‘50s juvenile delinquent).

* The film’s coda is a sweet touch.

Yeah, Earth vs. the Spider. It’s pretty good. Weird, that.

Is this happening? Am I really reviewing a movie called Midnight Meat Train? Really? How can this possibly end any other way than the expected one? Dear reader, do you honestly expect me to say “Midnight Meat Train is a triumph of American filmmaking that will make you forget The Godfather?”  Why am I even forced to watch, let alone review, a movie called Midnight Meat Train? What horrible choices did I make in life to bring me to this place? I’m serious. You don’t really see the darkness of the road you’ve chosen until you see the words Midnight Meat Train appear on an iPPad screen and you realize, “Holy shit, there’s a movie attached to this!”

And so there is. Lucky us. Oh, happy day. All right, let’s get this over with.

Leon Kauffman (Bradley Cooper) is a freelance photographer, chasing down accidents and crimes and snapping away with what looks to be the cheapest camera known to man (I’m not a photag, but shouldn’t cameras have flashes?) If he’d just stuck to that, we’d all be a lot happier in the end, but noooooooo… Anyway, Leon lives with his girlfriend Maya (Leslie Bibb), who manages to get him a meeting with some hoity-toity gallery owner (Brooke Shields), who basically tells Leon that his pictures suck and they need to be grittier. So Leon takes to the streets at night to capture the “real” city. One night in an empty subway station he comes upon a young woman (Erika Sakaki) about to be raped by some thugs. Leon snaps pics until the lead thug tries to force the girl to fellate him at knifepoint. Then he scares them off by pointing out the station’s security camera. They’re not very smart thugs.  The girl thanks Leon, then gets on a train, where she’s attacked by a huge guy in a nondescript suit with a dumb haircut who konks her on the head.

Hate to break it to you, but women who look like this do not ride the subway.

When Leon reads about the girl’s disappearance in the paper, he brings his photos to the cops. Hadley (Barbara Lyn Harris), the detective working Missing Persons, is unimpressed and seems to think Leon was somehow involved. Poor Leon. Later, he notices the big guy in one of his last photos of the girl, and he sets about finding him. Which, improbably, he does. Leon follows the guy around the city, to the fleapit hotel where he lives, to the meatpacking plant where he works. In his urban wanderings, Leon gets some great shots of the city’s gritty underbelly. The gallery owner is so impressed that she gives Leon his own showing. Leon is so happy he visits Maya at the diner where she works after closing (good for a cheap scare) and gives her a ring—not an engagement ring, he explains, “We’re engaged to be engaged. Until I have enough money to buy you a decent ring.” (Awwww…) He then further sentimentalizes the moment by sodomizing her over the diner’s counter (Awwww…)

So things are good for Leon. Trouble is, he’s becoming obsessed with following the butcher (meat packer? What’s the difference between a meat packer and butcher, anyway? I should Google that). He starts acting strangely; an avowed vegetarian, Leon begins eating meat, and he becomes more and more remote and anti-social. Maya attempts to cheer him up by letting him take naked pictures of her (Awwww…), but they both end up in tears. Leon’s fevered pursuit unearths missing-persons cases involving butchers that go back a hundred years. Finally, Leon ends up in the late-night train with the butcher in a separate car and watches as the butcher beats a couple riders to death and drags them into a rear car of the train. Leon watches and snaps pictures while the butcher strips them, shaves their bodies, rips out their teeth and nails and hangs them on meathooks in the train car. The butcher sees Leon and attacks him, knocking him unconscious. He briefly comes to when weird, alien hands fondle him (not making this up), then regains consciousness in the train station.

Seriously, dude, my phone has a better camera on it than that.

Leon staggers home, where he tells Maya about what he’s seen. Problem is, he lost his camera, which he needs to convince the police of what’s happening and he can’t go after it because that night is his opening. So, he goes to the opening, while Maya and her friend Jurgis (Roger Bart) break into the butcher’s apartment (okay, wait a minute…they know what building he lives in, but how do they know the room?) Anyway, in the room they find all sorts of big, steel knives and saws and nasty implements. Of course, the butcher comes home and catches them. Maya escapes, but Jurgis doesn’t. She runs to the cops, but Detective Hadley accuses Maya of breaking and entering. Maya decides to go after the butcher, so she goes back to the diner and steals the gun they keep under the counter. Outside the diner, Maya runs into Detective Hadley whom she intuits knows more about the case than she’s telling. Hadley tell her which platform to go to. “First train after two AM.” Okay, hang on…2:00 is not midnight. The movie is not Two A.M. Meat Train. I realize that doesn’t have the same consonance, but goddamn it, you can’t just go making shit up. If the title says Midnight Meat Train, there damn well oughta be a meat train at midnight, too.

“I’m the Jugg–oh wait, I’m screwing up the wrong movie there.”

Okay, moving on: while this is happening, Leon is freaking out at his gallery and announces “I have a train to catch” before he races out into the night. He goes to the meatpacking company where the butcher works his day job and collects a metal apron and various knives, which he straps to his belt. It’s like the scene in every ‘80s action movie where the good guy loads his weapons. Only even stupider. So, he ends up on the (sigh) meat train as the butcher and Maya go mano a mano. Leon and the butcher face off, and it’s directed like a showdown. Cut to their weapons, cut to their squinty eyes, all that’s needed is Ennio Morricone’s score for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in the background (do-do-do-do-dooo-Wah WAH wah). And they fight, meat-hammer vs. carving knife, amid the hanging corpses in the train. Maya is knocked unconscious, but the butcher is thrown from the train shortly before it pulls into its final station: a massive, eerily-lit cavern. As Leon tries to figure what’s going on, the conductor comes out of his little control-room thingee and delivers what has to be the best line of the movie. “Please,” he says genially, “step away from the meat.” How awesome is that? That’s going to be my new e-mail signature.

And then the monsters come out (they look sort of like the carnivores in The Descent). Leon drags Maya out of the train as the monsters begin to eat the bodies. Suddenly the butcher shows up (gasp!), and he’s wielding a knife. Fortunately, the cavern is littered with mounds and piles of bones, which come in pretty handy. So, after a little bone-fu, Leon gets the better of the butcher and finally decisively kills him. Then the conductor helpfully explains that they’ve been feeding people to the monsters for centuries to “keep the balance.” Then he rips out Leon’s tongue and cuts out Maya’s heart and offers it to Leon. “Now you will serve…without question.” The movie ends with Leon wearing the same nondescript grey suit and crappy haircut as the butcher, getting a train schedule from Detective Hadley, and getting aboard the train. Anyone not see that coming? Anyone?

Don’t sweat it, Brad, I felt the same way after seeing “Limitless.”

Midnight Meat Train raises a lot of questions. Questions such as how it is the butcher and conductor are seemingly immortal? Are they aliens? Monsters? Does it have something to do with eating Maya’s heart? Because if it’s that one, I have to drop the bullshit flag. If eating someone’s heart made you immortal Idi Amin would still be with us. And while we’re at it, precisely how many people need to be fed to the subterranean monsters? Does one subway car full of corpses tide them over for a few weeks, or do they need one nightly? If it’s nightly, that’s a lot of people. Figure there were about ten in the subway car when they arrived at the cavern. Surely someone would notice if 3000 people vanished every year. What about Detective Hadley? Is she immortal, too? Is she in it alone, or are more cops involved—you’d think at some point, some supervisor would realize that the Missing Persons Bureau never finds anyone. And why is it necessary for the butchers to wear the suit and have the dumbass haircut? How does that make the process any easier?

The movie is based on a short story of the same title by Clive Barker, and I have no doubt the story works better compressed and on the page than it does bloated to 100 minutes and up there on the big screen. Where you, you know, actually have to see the meat train. And the monsters. It’s a nifty story concept, and writers going back to Hawthorne have played with the idea of cities—the seeming symbols of community and civilization–functioning in barter with evil, atavistic forces. Likewise, director Ryuhei Kitamura shows a genuine visual flair (the scene wherein Ted Raimi’s eyeballs pop out of his head is actually quite arresting), and unlike most directors working today, his action sequences have a sense of space and proximity. It’s just in the service and very, very dumb movie.

I just watched Haunter, and came away thinking , hey—another movie that doesn’t totally suck. Is it my birthday? No, it can’t be that. Is karma repaying me for something good that I did? I can’t think of what that would be (I suggested to a co-worker that she should use her weekend to get a pedicure, but that doesn’t seem karma-worthy…she really was sporting a Wolverine-esque set of talons down there). Well, whatever, I’m not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth. I mean, sooner or later I’m gonna end up watching Midnight Meat Train 2: Meatier and Trainier, so I might as well just enjoy this while it lasts.

Haunter is about a teenager named Lisa (Abigail Breslin) who has a really big problem. See, it’s the day before her birthday in 1985, and , no, neither of those things is her problem. Not her birthday (you get swag for being born) or the fact that it’s 1985 (dude, Rambo and Commando came out that year–that year was awesome). No, Lisa’s problem is that it’s the day before her birthday. It’s always the day before her birthday. She will go to bed that night, and when she wakes up the next morning, it’ll be the day before her birthday again.

This is not a new revelation for Lisa. She’s well-aware that she is stuck in some sort of purgatory, and she spends her time alternately going through the motions with the sullen resignation of the alt-kid she is, and imploring the rest of her family to understand they’re stuck in time. But then things start getting hinky.

See, she starts hearing noises and seeing flickers of another girl in her house. Also, the daily routine starts getting interrupted in little ways. Her kindly father (Peter Outerbridge), who is perpetually fixing the car starts talking to himself, and sometimes raging at his family before returning to his genial self. Sometimes he’s another person altogether, with a different face. When Lisa goes shack-happy and rides her bike into the oppressive fog that has seemingly cut the house off from civilization, she ends up back in her garage.

Slowly, it dawns on Lisa that she and her family are actually dead. Oh sorry, did I spoil it? Ha! No, I did not. This isn’t Static after all. Nope, this big reveal is just the beginning, as one day (same day) a man from the telephone company arrives at their door. A couple things are off about him. First off, he’s wearing sunglasses despite the thick fog. Second, he’s played by Stephen McHattie, who can exude malevolence just by smiling. He gives Lisa a stern warning: don’t try anything. Don’t contact the spectral figures. Don’t try to alert your family to the situation. Don’t rock the boat. If she does, he promises, she’ll suffer in ways she can’t imagine.

Well, Lisa’s not the type to bend to authority, so she the natural thing. She upsets the apple cart. And then the horror begins.

Now, Haunter is not a really scary movie per se. But it is creepy and very watchable. I wasn’t scared during its economical run time, but I was intrigued enough to want to see the plot puzzle itself out. When it does, it almost makes sense. There are some gaps in logic that you tend to get with a supernatural thriller, but it’s narrative MacGuffin is a solid and chilling one. And, refreshingly, one that doesn’t treat the supernatural elements like a sci-fi trope.

Of course the story would be pretty inert without some solid performances, and Haunter has them in spades. Anchoring the story, Breslin shows that she has grown into a gifted actress, and one whose unconventional looks work to her advantage. They help sell her as an awkward teenager and not a 20-something model pretending to be 15. They make her seem just a bit unreliable, which helps gives the movie it’s edge of instability. And McHattie, well, the guy’s awesome. Did you see him in Pontypool? No? Then watch Pontypool. Like, now, just go watch it. This review will still be here—it’s the freakin’ Internet, where’s it gonna go? In a million years, after the fall of man you’ll still be able to take time out of fighting giant Them-style ants for the last Twinkies to read this review.

Did you watch it? Good, then you know what I mean. McHattie is great, and gives great villain. He is supremely menacing in this role, playing a monster more innately evil than any sharp-object-wielding maniac ever could.

But even the supporting characters help promote the overall feeling of dread. Outerbridge tinges his genial manner with just the slightest hint of otherness, depriving us of an emotional anchor. And David Hewlitt as alterna-dad plays his character as a sort of befuddled time-bomb. He wants to go off, he just doesn’t know why.

So, yeah, check out Haunter. It’s in theaters now, but I’d recommend plunking down seven bucks to catch it on iTunes. I mean, what’s seven bucks get you these days in the US? A venti latte at Starbucks? A pack of cigarettes? I really don’t know—I don’t live in the US anymore. But the movie is really good.

I’m going to apologize in advance for this post, since it’s a bit, er…adult in nature and not the family-friendly G-rated (maybe PG…like 1980s PG) norm of this blog. So think of this post as Gunmonkey After Dark. And imagine me lounging in a silk smoking jacket cradling a snifter of brandy (if it helps, I look like a cross between Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig, so now you don’t have to wonder). See, this post concerns the remake of 1995’s Embrace of the Vampire—a movie that answered the question that burned in the minds of most guys (and some women, I imagine) who came of age in the ‘80s: What does Alyssa Milano look like naked? And that answer was, pretty damn amazing! Okay if you’re looking for a modicum of taste, you might as well check out right here. Anybody still here? Great, now let’s talk about the remake…

Embrace of the Vampire became famous for precisely one reason: it features a lot of Alyssa Milano nudity. Anyway, now, 18 years later, we have a remake of Embrace, only without Alyssa (probably for the best—she’d have a tough time pulling off the college freshman thing), and, amazingly enough, it even surpasses the original. I mean, on the original’s merits that is. Which means a lot of nude, nubile women (the original didn’t have many merits). 

This new Embrace of the Vampire differs a bit from the original, as that film was basically about a creepazoid stalker-vampire who lusts after Alyssa’s virginal self, but can’t bring himself to approach her. He’s like 90% of the high school Bauhaus fans who ever lived and manages to be even more lame than Edward Cullen. Yes, such of thing is possible, but it could have only happened in the ‘90s, and I don’t recommend you look directly at it.

“C’mon, baby! I have the new Joy Division album.”

The new Embrace puts a little more meat on its bones, establishing our main characters as being somewhat off. Charlotte Hawthorn (Shannon Hinnendael—hot, but no Alyssa Milano) is an orphan just starting college at a small liberal arts college that looks like a it was constructed whole out of the contents of an IKEA catalog in the mountains of…someplace that has mountains. Charlotte is fresh out of a sheltered Catholic girls school (please, please tell me this film is getting a prequel!), and has only been admitted to IKEA U. on a fencing scholarship. So, despite being super-hawt, she’s kind of a misfit.

All this was constructed with a single hex wrench.

Timid and standoffish, we follow Charlotte as she tries to fit in at college, all while being plagued by nightmarish visions that mostly include blood. Also, people start getting dead around the place. See, like the original Embrace, there is a vampire waiting in the wings. This time, however, he isn’t skulking around in the shadows like a teenage Morissey fan at a pep rally, but instead is manipulating events for his nefarious scheme.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of nudity.

Yeah, sorry, but 1995’s Embrace wasn’t scary, and neither is this one. But the 1995 film was pure, trashy fun, using a overheated, underdeveloped plot to showcase a lot of Alyssa Milano skin. I mean, it was basically one Tanya Roberts cameo away from being a Jim Wynorski direct-to-video sleazefest (instead, it was someone else’s direct-to-video sleazefest). Only while that film pretty much flatlined once Alyssa has a semi-nude makeout scene with Charlotte Lewis’ 30 year-old freshman photography student (admittedly, the movie would have had a tough time topping that), this movie actually keeps delivering. Delivering naked chicks, that is. Look, I didn’t say I had a refined film-palate.

I don’t know how this got overlooked at Oscar time.

In the new film’s most bravura moment, Charlotte undergoes a vaguely BDSM hazing for her fencing team, as her bitchy team captain makes the new members slam shots, get undressed and spanks them with a foil when they can’t answer her trivia questions. Naturally it ends as it only can: with Charlotte and another girl hooking up. Unfortunately, Charlotte blows off her new biggest fan the next day, which is too bad, because the movie could have just abandoned the whole vampire plot right there and concentrated on the fencing team. I mean, vampire movie are a dime-a-dozen, but how many movies are there about Sapphic fencing teams? None that I know of. Do you know of any? Please tell me if you do.

“Seriously. We finish all our practices with a lingerie tickle-fight. It builds agility.”

Finally, the vampire makes his move, and he turns out to be Charlotte’s pervy fencing coach who needs her blood to become human again because of…history and curses and bloodlines and whatever. The important thing is that the movie keeps giving us nudity through to its final act—which is important if you’re making a sleazy direct-to-streaming movie.

So, yeah, that’s Embrace of the vampire. As a horror movie, no, it is not scary, creepy, or surprising. As an exercise in soft-core vampire erotica, man it knocked it out of the park. Want another brandy? It sometimes helps.