[NOTE: This is a repost. For a spirited defense of the film, please read the comments below my original post here.]

Well, I guess it’s that time again. The stars lined up, or the Druids did a ritual, or perhaps it was foretold in ancient texts. Whatever the case, Kevin Costner has returned to once again to remind us that he’s not dead. Of course, anyone who suffered through Mr. Brooks knows that it has been a long, self-inflicted fall from his glory days of The Untouchables and Bull Durham. Hell, by the time his latest crapfest, The New Daughter, ends in a blaze of shameless stealing from better movies, Costner was probably even longing for his more hubristic days of drinking his own pee in Waterworld.

In The New Daughter, Costner plays a novelist and single-dad named John James who has moved his family–he has a nine year-old son and a 15-ish year-old daughter–to a secluded South Carolina town in the wake of a nasty divorce. Now “John James” may make him sound like a Revolutionary War hero, but Costner is thoroughly emasculated in this movie, padding around in a V-neck sweater (the male equivalent of mom jeans) with a pair of reading glasses hanging around his neck. It’s never revealed what kind of novels John writes, but we can be pretty sure his main competitor isn’t James Ellroy. Probably closer to Nicholas Sparks.

The ouitfit says, “I’m okay with the fact my readership consists of menopausal housewives.”

The kids have very different attitudes toward the move. His son Sam is okay with it, but his daughter Louisa (Ivana Baquero from Pan’s Labyrinth) hates it, hates the house, hates her life, hates him, and hates the beef jerky John gives them for dinner their first night in their new home. Actually that last one is kind of understandable. Anyway, they go for a walk in the woods and find a big-ass burial mound, which Louisa and John think is cool, but Sam stays away from. When the nine year-old kid is the voice of reason in your film, you know you’ve got a long slog ahead of you.

They go about settling into their new digs, and director Luis Berdejo makes good and certain that we know things aren’t copacetic. Eerie music plays. The camera stalks around the house like a jungle cat. At night Louisa is menaced by strange noises. Really, badly-done, cheap strange noises. They sound like something out of the .midi catalog from a Windows 95 upgrade. Kind of like “eee…ooo…growl-growl-growl” Okay, that didn’t work, but trust me: they’re crappy.

“Creepy woods. Eerie noises at night. Nothing can go wrong with this plan.”

Aside from that, Louisa begins spending more and more time outside and coming home covered in dirt and mud. She begins acting strangely, too. She’s bitter and sulky one minute, remote and detached the next. John tries to reach out to her, but no dice. The other adults he goes to for advice–including his son’s hawt teacher (Samantha Mathis)–basically tell him, “Eh, she’s a teenager. Also she’s starting to get her period, so, you know, there’s that.” Wow, thanks folks.

[And let me just pause here to say there is no way--none!--that Samantha Mathis can now be old enough to play Kevin Costner's love-interest. Back in the '90s, I and almost every other 20-something had a huge crush on her and wished she was the chick who lived in our dorm. She is not/not old enough to play Costner's girlfriend! Liar! Liar!]

In our hearts you will remain…in 1996.

Okay, so where was I? Right, so some other crap happens along these lines–the cat gets eaten, Louisa maims a mean girl at school, and pretty soon it’s clear that something is not right with Louisa. John looks into the house’s history and discovers that it has a bit of a history. The previous woman who lives there with her daughter locked the daughter in her room and beat feet. John tracks down the girl’s grandfather who describes his granddaughter going through a transformation like Louisa’s before he finally set fire to his house with the girl in it. He’s awfully cavalier about confessing to arson/murder, but I guess you get more laid back about felonies when you get older Then he warns Costner, “You can’t save her! And you’ll do the same thing!” Or words to that effect.

Well, things go from bad to worse here, since while John was chatting with the family-annihilator, he left the kids with a baby-sitter.  You know, when you leave a psycho-offspring with a sitter who’s not a hot, nubile teenager, bad things are going to happen. And they do. Louisa locks the sitter outside and the bad-sound-effect creatures come for her. We don’t see them, but we hear the sitter scream a lot, so that obviously didn’t end well.

“The Postman was a great movie! People will appreciate it one day! You’ll see!”

John decides to destroy the mound, but a couple of mound experts from the nearby University show up and beg him to stop. It’s a great archeological find, they argue. Then they barf up some unnecessary exposition to pretty much explain the whole movie. Seems burial mounds were usually built not for humans, but for alien creatures they refer to as “moundwalkers” (really doc? Moundwalkers? Um, exactly where did you get your degree again?) Anyway, the moundwalkers came to the surface to mate with human women to repopulate their species, since they were all male and they needed a queen to, um, lay eggs (seriously doc, did you have to print out a .pdf copy of your diploma before you could hang it on your wall?) John tries to go ahead with destroying the mound, but gets stymied when they unearthed the remains of the babysitter. Isn’t that always the way? Try to do a little landscaping, make the yard look nice, and whamo! Babysitter corpse.

Rowr!

Well, this buys the moundwalkers enough time to stage a nighttime assault on the house, aided by a murderous Louisa. John fights them off with a double-barreled shotgun, and while it would seem that a two-shot weapon wouldn’t be the most effective thing to have in a siege situation, the moundwalkers are considerate enough to attack in ones and twos. Apparently they’re kin to the dumbass aliens from Signs who launch an invasion of Earth, but can’t figure out how to work a doorknob.

[An aside: how did the Signs invaders fare in urban centers? I bet they landed in New York and then got stopped in their tracks at the first subway station when they couldn't figure out whether they wanted the Unlimited Ride Metrocard or the weekly pass.]

“Two shots? I’m fine. There probably won’t be more monsters than that.”

Anyway, John loads up and chases Louisa into the mound, which empties into a massive underground chamber. He fights off some moundwalkers and drags Louisa to the surface, only to confront a lone moundwalker which…doesn’t really do anything. Well, this is enough to best John and he lights off some AmFo, blowing up the mound in a massive conflagration. The movie ends with Sam looking at the burning mound for any sign of his father, while moundwalkers close in on him. Nice job, Superdad, got any other kids you wanna leave to a horrible death?

So that’s The New Daughter, a movie which can’t decide whether it wants to rip off Signs or The Descent. Costner does his best–he practically knocks himself out trying show he’s acting…real…hard! Yeah, it doesn’t work, and what does it say about his own assessment of his career that he tales a role in which he’s such an abject failure of a man that he can’t save his kids from some real lame-o monsters? Maybe he’s being realistic.

Of course if it had been my dad, none of this would have ever happened. You’d get one scene of the mound, some creepy music, then, “Goddamit, Gunmonkey, stop screwing around and help me clean the gutters!” And the credits would roll.

October Spooktacular 2013 comes to a close with a monster I like so much it adorns this very site: The Creature from the Black Lagoon (that’s him up there on the left). The creature is one of Universal Studios more famous monsters—rightly so, too—and his premiere outing is a highly enjoyable, technically proficient piece of storytelling. Like The Thing, and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, The Creature from the Black Lagoon harkens back to a time when even a light sci-fi/horror diversion wasn’t regarded as disposable, nor were they cheap, stupid or lazy.

The Creature from the Black Lagoon tells the classic story of a beautiful woman and the two men and one prehistoric man-fish that love her. Deep in the jungles of the Amazon, a paleontologist finds the fossilized hand of what would appear to be a fish-man that dates back to the Devonian Era. He reaches out to a colleague; an ichthyologist named David Reed (Richard Carlson—remember him?), and asks him to mount an expedition into the Amazon to find further evidence of this creature. David does so, but the expedition is bankrolled by an institute run by Mark Williams (Richard Dennings), a blond-haired, blue-eyed slab of man-meat with deep pockets and a nonfunctional moral compass. Mark brings along one of his own scientists, Kay Lawrence (Julia Adams), whom David is dating, but Mark has the hots for. Things are already sizzling in the Amazon and the creature hasn’t even shown up yet.

In the ’50s this was like wearing a thong bikini…

But he does soon enough. The merry band of eggheads takes a tramp steamer down the Amazon to the original dig site, only to find the camp destroyed and all the personnel dead. Chalking it up to local fauna, they continue down the river to the drainage point—the “black lagoon” as the locals have dubbed it—to sift for fossils. There, the expedition is attacked by the very pissed-off creature. At this point, the movie shifts gears as the tension between David and Mark increases. David wants to bring back proof of the creature’s existence and study its ramifications on evolutionary theory as we know it. Mark wants to stick it in a cage and charge admission. David goes after it with an underwater camera; Mark brings a speargun.

You can pretty much guess how this going to play out. The two men puff out their chests in front of Kay and clash over how to deal with this incredible find, while the creature picks them off one by one. He doesn’t seem malevolent, just kind of annoyed by them. By the end of the film, it’s pretty clear that the creature has the upper hand in the jungle primeval, and the expedition may never make out alive—with photos or a taxidermied gill-man.

Oh, and Kay’s pretty dishy, so naturally the creature develops a crush on her, so now Mark and David even more competition for her affections. And this guy has gills. I don’t know how you top that.

“‘Sup.”

The creature himself is one of Hollywood’s signature creations and major kudos go to Jack Kevan and especially Chris Mueller Jr. who designed the head sculpt. Compared to the green-velour-jumpsuit men of Invaders from Mars or the eyestalk-Hefty-bag of It Came from Outer Space, the creature’s design is nothing short of brilliant. Underwater, its gills ripple in a fairly-realistic approximation of fish gills. On land, it sucks air like a bullfrog. The suit is rendered realistically enough that it manages to mimic the movement style of marine life during many of the underwater scenes. I mean, this dude just has charisma. Just how much thought went into the creation of this monster? Well, director Jack Arnold didn’t want any breathing apparatus used under the mask, since it would produce bubbles and gills don’t bubble. Consequently, Ricou Browning—who donned the suit for the underwater sequences—had to hold is breath for minutes at a time.

This was probably the most provocative movie scene ’50s audiences had seen all year…

The story is pretty well-constructed, too. It’s a straightforward monster movie, but it creates fairly vivid characters and establishes some nice inter-personal conflicts to fill out the scenes when the creature isn’t around. The struggle between David and Mark—between science and the commercialization of science—is familiar, but still engaging. It helps that Carlson brings some of the same sad-sack qualities to this role that he did in It Came from Outer Space and it cements his underdog status that his rival is a bronzed Adonis (I’m talking about Mark, not the creature).

In the ’50s, it was totally okay to roofie chicks.

Even Kay has a subplot establishing her divided loyalties. She’s obviously in love with David, but feels professionally obligated to Mark. This sense of obligation takes on more weight when you consider how remarkable a position she’s been given for a woman in the 1950s. The anguish she feels at giving that up becomes all the more palpable. It’s like an episode of Man Men. With a gill-man attacking Sterling-Cooper.

“Look, Joan, if you want to be a partner you have to do some things…”

So, just as the creature sinks into the murky depths at the end of this movie, so too does this year’s October Spooktacular fade into memory. Now I’ll go back to reviewing…well, pretty much the same kinds of movies. 

Oh swell, there’s a new Thor movie. I have to ask, did we need this? I mean, the first Thor was basically just a means to set him up for The Avengers. It was so when he appeared in that movie audiences wouldn’t wonder if they were suddenly watching a gay orgy. The story was pretty uninvolving with almost no stakes, per se, except for a tiny New Mexico town, or if you happened to care about Thor’s home town of pipe-organland. Alas, Marvell isn’t done taking our money and has to set up a separate film franchise, so we get Thor: Dark World.

So, this Thor begins by setting up the bad guy. Seems back when the Universe was new and all Thor’s people fought a war against some creatures called simply “the Dark Elves” (and yet aren’t members of a high school metal band). The Grand Pooba of the Dark Elves,  Malekith (Christopher Eccleston) wanted to bring darkness over the Universe, because, well, why not. To this end, he tried to use something called the Aether, which is another one of those glowey MacGuffins like the Rubik’s Cube of Unlimited Power from Captain America. Only this one is red and it makes you—I don’t know—like invulnerable or something. Except not really. But it actually does when the plot needs it to.

This is a real waste of a Doctor Who.

Whatever. Point is, Thor’s people repelled the Dark Elves and Malekith escaped. Flash forward to current times, and we find Thor and his merry band of Dungeons & Dragons characters dealing with the fallout from the first movie. You may recall that in that film the gay-pride bridge that the, uh, Thorians use to travel between worlds (they call them “realms” here, because, well, it seems more Norse) was destroyed. This stranded Thor and his ilk on their home planet (except, you know, when it doesn’t). So, when this movie begins they’ve rebuilt the bridge and are now reasserting their control over the realms (yeah, they say they’re “restoring order” but that’s a PR euphemism if I ever heard one).

Meanwhile, down on Earth, Thor’s estranged gf, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), and her droll assistant Darcy (Kat Dennings) have just discovered a weird anomaly in a London slum. Jane falls into one and discovers the Aether, which had been hidden in a big rock someplace. Well, Thor hears about this through his buddy Heimdall—who’s like the Thorian’s answer to NSA in that he just watches over the nine realms, and, apparently, peeps on Jane to keep Thor up to date on her activities. Yeah, it’s just that creepy.

“Yeah, sorry for kinda blowing you off last time I was on Earth.”

So Thor rushes to Earth, only to discover that Jane has been infested with the Aether. He whisks her to his home of Pipe Organ City to try and treat her. Unfortunately, the Aether has also woken up Malekith, who was racked out in his surviving dreadnought. Naturally, he’s a bit pissed off, so he makes a beeline to Thor’s kingdom and promptly launches a devastating attack. Tons of people get killed in the battle, and everyone gets real somber, proving that the filmmakers have at least seen both Star Trek Into Darkness and Skyfall.

Thor teams up with his imprisoned brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston—who’s fast become the breakout star of these movies) to draw out Malekith by using Jane as bait. Thor and his posse commit treason, defying King Odin, in order to bring Jane to another realm where they can square off against Malekith without fear of collateral damage and innocent casualties. So, yeah, just Skyfall.

Well, all this ties into the dimensional anomalies in London because of…um…a planetary alignment, which, uh, makes the Aether….do something. Something bad. Okay, I’m not going down this rabbit hole. I haven’t a clue what’s supposed to be happening with the sci-fi in this movie. It reminds of one of those subpar Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes where they have no plotline except some technobabble crisis, so instead of having a real story, we end up follow Geordi around while he dings around in the engine room. Suffice it to say, all it does it set up a big fight between Thor and Malekith.

For Dark Elves they’re actually kind of shiny.

I didn’t love the first Thor, since it was pretty clear the movie was just a placeholder until we got to The Avengers. Now that we’ve had that movie, this one feels even more pointless. Additionally, the first had a fish-out-of-water plotline, which was goofy fun and grounded the movie nicely. This movie eschews anything fun and asks us to take all those weird names and funny hats and pseudo-science deathly seriously.

Along with that, Thor: The Dark World, to me, just felt tedious. I’ve generally been a fan of Marvel’s movie canon, but they’re starting to get repetitive. You can only see CGI creatures fight CGI superheroes so many times before it loses its novelty and with this movie, they may well have hit the tipping point. This summer’s Iron Man 3 at least tried to tweak the formula a bit by allowing Shane Black to make it into a stealth Lethal Weapon movie. Thor: The Dark World, unfortunately, doesn’t try anything fresh.

Add to that:

* Okay, Thor’s mother gets a scene in which she battles Malekith’s (before he runs away). Okay, filmmakers? When your villain gets his ass handed to him by the hero’s mom, well, you have a problem with your villain.

* Malekith’s army attacks with fighter ships and laser-rifles. The Thorians use, uh, swords and spears. Really? Millions or billions of years later, and the Thorians never even tried gunpowder? No advaces in weaponry at all? Are you sure we’re supposed to root for these guys?

* Watching Dark Elf ships attack Pipe Organ City gave me Phantom Menace flashbacks. Man, that’s never what you want your movie to evoke.

* Odin doesn’t approve of Jane and tries to push Thor toward the comely Sif (Jaime Alexander) in a scene in which he basically says, “dude, she’s so much hotter…and she lives a real long time.” It’s one of the most awkward father/son conversations ever.

Take a good look. It’s about the only thing you see Sif do.

* For comic relief we get a frequently nuts and naked Stellan Skarsgard. Someone decided that Natalie Portman and Kat Dennings shouldn’t wear anything even remotely flattering, but we needed to see Stellan Skarsgard pantsless. That’s like the definition of a bad decision.

* Man, there are whole scenes when characters throw around sci-fi jargon and comic book names that literally sounds like they’re speaking a foreign language.

* One chyron identifies a location simply as “Svartheim.” You can’t just put on the screen like it makes sense!

* Chris Hemsworth’s voice gets all husky and mumbly for the last third of the movie. No idea why.

Oh swell. We get to see Thor’s O-face.

* The inter-credits sequence with Benicio Del Toro dressed up like TV’s Frank from MST3K hits new heights of WTF?-ism. These movies are increasingly becoming a comic book-readers-only club. 

So that’s Thor: The Dark World. It’s kind of amazing how much money and talent can be expended to produce so little of note.

The answer is no, none at all.

Sorry, but I have to assume that the first question coming from any vertebrate upon seeing a review of the new theatrical remake of Carrie has to be, “is there any reason to remake this?” And you have your answer. Look, Carrie is a justifiably classic movie—maybe not the scariest movie ever made, but it’s a straightforward enough story and a film that has aged well. So no, you’re probably not going to improve upon it. But you know Hollywood: new ideas are, like, way hard. And they might not work. Why not just make it easy on everybody and remake something that already worked? I mean, it’s not like we’re getting paid to be creative or anything. And besides, kids today won’t watch anything made before 1993. Right? Well, that’s the logic, anyway. The crappy, crappy logic that gave us this.

Okay, so Carrie…wait, have you seen the 1976 version? Okay, then you’ve seen this movie. No, I’m not kidding—it’s not basically the same movie, it’s the same freaking movie! Except there’s an iPhone in it. That’s pretty much the major change. Carrie White (Chloe Grace Moretz) is the weird girl who lives with her religious nutjob mother (Julianne Moore) and develops telekinesis. Her classmates make the real big mistake of humiliating her at prom, and she goes totally bitchcakes and kills pretty much everyone. Fin.

Well, if the movie doesn’t make any substantive changes to the story, then what are we left with? Well, we’re left with some very good actors (Moretz, Moore, Judy Greer as the kindly gym teacher) putting in committed performances in a vast wasteland of tedium, and director Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry) comparing poorly in the suspense department to Brian De Palma.

“Lesbian Gym Teacher” looks good on her

That’s too bad, too. I mean, as a story Carrie doesn’t have a lot of meat on its bones—basically it’s a long build to the final, cathartic conflagration—but it’s very rare that a major studio movie has a woman directing a cast almost totally comprised of women (the men are few and largely inconsequential). Yet, the male screenwriters haven’t given Peirce or her cast to do anything new or different, so what’s the damn point?

On top of that, damn near everyone is criminally miscast. Moore and Moretz are both extremely talented actresses, but both too Hollywood beautiful for their roles. The original made good use of Sissy Spacek’s unconventional looks—basically a long, beanpole of southwestern earnestness—and Piper Laurie’s brilliantly campy/gothic tendencies. Moore can’t tamp down her natural intelligence for the role. As Carrie, Moretz is far too attractive for the part, and the filmmakers don’t seem to want to make her ugly, plain, or unsympathetic.

Ugh. Go back to your cave, freak!

Additionally, the sting of Carrie gets lost in a post-post-Columbine world. I mean, nowadays alienated teenagers don’t need telekinetic powers to sow chaos and bloodshed and have nviolent revenge on their classmates. They just need a parent with a really accessable firearm.

Peirce made a legitimately great film with Boys Don’t Cry (aided in no small part by a brilliant performance by Hilary Swank), but that wasn’t a genre film. It was a blistering meditation on the casual brutality of Midwestern provincialism as it intersected gender identity. The new Carrie gives Piece nothing like that to chew on. It’s a screenplay designed for a different filmmaker, and, unsurprisingly, Peirce doesn’t know what to do with it (though, to be fair, there’s so little new, I’m not sure who wouldn’t make a wan retread).

But the movie makes some other, more basic mistakes. Carrie’s final fury doesn’t play out like an uncontrolled explosion of fury, but instead has Moretz waving her arms like Yoda showing Luke how to raise his X-Wing, begging the question why she wasn’t more selective in who she killed. I mean, some of those people she just met at the dance.

Really, mass killings in high schools wish they looked this good.

Likewise, bullying has become a hot topic in American culture as a whole and high schools specifically. I mean, shit, kids are being arrested for putting nasty stuff online. Would any high school in 2013 just shrug off the torments Carrie White endures with a couple of wind sprints?

The intersection of fundamentalist religion and corporal punishment has also become a subject of much examination. Carrie, however, just imports the originals somewhat generic Bible-thumping whackadooism. This article on Slate is more horrifying than any scene of Moore banging her head against a cupboard.

The scariest part is that she could still make a credible Republican party candidate.

So…long answer is still No. No, there is no reason to remake Carrie. Short answer is just no.

The Counselor has earned a level of infamy for one particular scene—the one in which Cameron Diaz does the splits on Javier Bardem’s Ferrari and rubs her cooch against the windshield—and that’s really too bad, because, that scene aside, the movie is actually pretty dull. Yet still, there is that scene, and I guess it tells us something about the film. An award-winning novelist wrote a scene in which a woman has sex with a car (“sure, that happens,” he obviously thought), an Academy Award-nominated director filmed a woman having sex with a car (“yeah, I can shoot that,” he obviously thought), and one of the most famous actresses working agreed to simulate (I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt) having sex with a car (“yeah, that’ll bolster my career,” she obviously thought). This particular scene tells us a lot about The Counselor: namely, that this movie exists because very talented people can have very bad judgment.

The Counselor comes to us courtesy of novelist Cormac McCarthy, who has decided to try his hand at screenwriting after the success of the Coen brothers’ adaptation of his novel No Country for Old Men. Directing the movie is Ridley Scott, who, having earned the ire of sci-fi fans the world over with the 120-minute WTF? that was Prometheus has now retreated solidly to Earth with a modern-day noir-cum-drug-tale. It’s a project which should play to the strengths of both men, which makes it even more mysterious why the film is so listless.

The titular counselor (the only name he’s given in the film) is played by Michael Fassbender. He is a wealthy attorney who, as the film begins, has decided upon two courses of action: 1) to marry his angelic girlfriend, Laura (Penelope Cruz), and 2) to buy into a drug deal with an urban cowboy named Westray (Brad Pitt).

“Don’t mind me, I’m lobbying for the lead in that big-screen ‘Matt Houston’ treatment.”

Also involved in this business (though damned if I can figure out how) is a wealthy drug…guy (dealer? Smuggler? I’ve no freakin’ clue) named Reiner, who is played by Javier Bardem sporting a hairstyle and wardrobe so flamboyant that his character from Skyfall would tell him to tone it down a bit. Reiner has a girlfriend named Malkina (Diaz), who keeps pet leopards and occasionally feeds them rabbits for fun.

Well, naturally the drug deal goes bad, because well, why wouldn’t it? Has a drug deal ever been successful in a movie? If it’s not being hijacked, one of the guys involved turns out to be Don Johnson. This causes the counselor’s world to fall apart as the cartel holds him responsible. Wanna bet who makes it out alive by the end of the movie? It’s not hard.

A multi-million dollar deal with this guy…what could wrong with that?

Yeah, and that’s basically the movie. A lot of the things happen, but the leads don’t actually do anything. The drug shipment is hijacked by some dudes we don’t know. They’re ambushed by cartel members we don’t know. In the meantime, Bardem, Pitt, Diaz and Cruz just talk to one another. Seriously, the titular character of this movie does absolutely nothing but sit in rooms and have conversations. Sometimes he sits in cars and has conversations. That’s a pretty big development in this movie’s world.

McCarthy seems to want to follow up on the themes of No Country with civilized men facing the brute atavism of the Mexican drug cartels, but while that movie made its point using Bardem as a manifestation of the inexorable viciousness of the cartels, The Counselor just has characters tell Fassbender about it. Again and again. And again and again.

Additionally, McCarthy’s views on choice and consequences are made by some of the longest, most improbable conversations ever, as when one character says, “I suspect that we are ill-formed for the path we have chosen. Ill-formed and ill-prepared. We would like to draw a veil over all the blood and terror that have brought us to this place. It is our faintness of heart that would close our eyes to all of that, but in so doing it makes of it our destiny. But nothing is crueler than a coward, and the slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining.” Okay, no one has ever dropped that in a conversation ever, since language was invented.

“Do you get the symbolism of my tattoo? If not, I can explain it for five script pages.”

Likewise, McCarthy and Scott aren’t afraid to punch us in the face with their symbolism. The cocaine is transported in a septic truck (these characters have literally pinned their dreams and destiny to shit). Malkina sports an expanse of leopard-spot tattoos up her back to show that she’s a predator! In the film’s first scene the counselor canoodles with Laura under immaculate, white sheets, because she’s innocent! The preferred tool of assassination in this movie is a device that automatically garrotes its victim to symbolize the noose around our protagonists tightening! Malkina humps an Italian sports car to show…

Okay, that one has me stumped.

There. Now you don’t have to see the movie.

So, that’s The Counselor. You know, from now on every movie that doesn’t feature sex with a luxury item will seem like a bit of a letdown.

(Readers, what luxury item would you have sex with? feel free to share in the comments section. For me, it would probably be my Bren Ten Marksman Special .45 automatic. I don’t know exactly how that would work, but I assume there’s probably some apparatus you can buy to facilitate things. Probably something from Japan.) 

If you dislike winter as much as I do—heralding as I do from a place that transforms into a frozen wasteland seven month out of the year where the wind howls like a soul in purgatory over a landscape of desolate snowdrifts—then the environmental cataclysm that forms the backdrop of the quirky new sci-fi parable Snowpiercer will likely strike a chord. If you’re one of those fortunate people who’ve never experienced sensation of feeling your hair freeze or don’t understand why you’d need to let your car run for a half an hour before driving it into the unforgiving elements…well, then Snowpiercer’s tale of social injustice will probably hook you. Because no matter what climate you were brought up in, no one wants a schoolmarmish Tilda Swinton lecturing you day in and day out.

Snowpiercer begins 17 years after a bold plan to reverse global warming caused the world to freeze (um, whoops?) and eradicated all life on Earth. Humanity survives only aboard a massive, super-sophisticated train which travels on a track around the world, traversing the globe once per year. Yeah, it’s pretty outlandish, but the movie never takes the concept all that seriously, so just go with it.

The train has been separated into two distinct classes—the upper crust, who live in the front of the train in hedonistic luxury, wanting for nothing, and the morlocky underclass who live in squalor in the rear. The upper crust are ticket-holders or their descendants. The Morlocks are descended from stowaways who clamored onboard to keep from becoming corpsicles.

Life for the underclass really sucks, as they live in cramped, filthy quarters, and eat naught but slimy protein bars. When they get out of line, thuggish security forces club them into submission and sometimes force them to stick a limb outside of the train until it freezes solid. To top it off, an officious functionary named Mason (Swinton) delivers classest, haranguing speeches about knowing one’s place in the tone of an exasperated headmistress. All in all, life sucks for the underclass.

As the film begins, the Morlocks are about to stage a revolution that, they hope, will carry them to the front of the train–the engine–where they can gain control of the train and possibly confront the train’s operator and builder, a man named Winston who is regarded in messianic terms by the train’s passengers.

Leading the revolution is Curtis (Chris Evans), a smart, tough survivor of the cataclysm, whose plan relies on springing the train’s security engineer from prison—an addict named Nam (Kanh-ho Song, from most of director Joon-ho Bong’s earlier films). Nam agrees to do so for a dose of the drug for every door he opens. Oh yeah, and he has his teenage daughter (also an addict) in tow.

Guiding Curtis along the way is a sage old man named Gilliam (John Hurt, showing up here after winning the Time War), a double amputee who has a history with Winston. It’s left unclear how the plan came about, but it’s been helped along by mysterious notes smuggled too Curtis in the slime bars. Who sent the notes and why is one of the mysteries Snowpiercer expertly sets up and answers.

The movie establishes all this with surprising speed and economy before hurtling us headlong into the action. From here the movie plays out like a glorious potpourri of The Raid: Redemption, Metropolis, and a little Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory thrown in for good measure. Curtis and his Morlocks must fight past the security forces through car after increasingly-surreal car of the great train.

As with Bong’s earlier films (Memories of Murder, The Host, Mother), Snowpiercer’s tone is all over the place. The violence is stark and brutal—especially the omnipresent class-based repression, while Swinton and Engineer dude manage to be broadly comedic, yet also thoroughly effective in their roles. Similarly, the increasing surrealism of the train as the Morlocks move forward through it also feels like a part of Bong’s larger vision of social inequality up until the final, shattering reveal. Snowpiercer is a movie that always leaves you wondering if you’re supposed to be laughing along with it or not. Especially in scenes like the one where Curtis delivers a soul-baring speech that includes the line, “I hate myself because I know what people taste like.”

So, yeah, Snowpiercer is a weird movie, and not one that goes down easily. But it does hold you rapt with its great action choreography, distinctive characters, and imaginative visuals. It’s a genuinely creative, original movie—a rare thing in this movie climate when we just saw Thor do pretty much the same thing as damn near every other comic superhero we’ve been watching for the past decade. It’s a great genre entry, and one that deserves what I hope will be a wide audience.

So here we are taking another trip to the Hobbit-hole, because A) MGM isn’t done  squeezing money out of J.R.R. Tokien’s works, and B) nothing else was playing. Seriously. This movie took over Southeast Asia more thoroughly than the Imperial Japanese Army in the late 1930s. I didn’t much love the first one, but, hey, this one has a dragon. Dragons make everything better, right? I mean, except for those lazy-ass dragons from D-Wars which didn’t even have wings, dragons are always cool. And this one is played by Benedict Cumberbatch who, if he doesn’t exactly have a dragon’s physique, has one of the best voices in the biz.  Hey, that’s worth sitting through what seems like twelve hours of padding, right? Plus the seats were really comfy. Anyway, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug is better than its predecessor, but still suffers from the same patently obvious bloat. Oh well…

Desolation begins where the last movie left off with our band of dwarves—joined by Bilbo Baggins and Gandolf—heading the fabled dwarf city in the mountains, where Smaug the dragon is Scrooge McDucking all over their vast treasure (by the looks of it, Dwarf-land was the Abu Dhabi of Middle Earth). But first they have to do a bunch of stuff that will give the film its requisite three-hour runtime. To wit:

* They find a were-bear. He doesn’t factor into the plot, so don’t get too excited.

* They fight giant spiders in a creepy woods, and holy shit those spiders are creepy as hell. What’s even more creepy is when the dwarves rip all the legs off one of them. I mean…Jesus, I’m all for killing giant spider,s but that’s just messed up. These guys are supposed to be the heroes, right? Maybe in the next movie they’ll necklace some orcs.

“And now to kill this is the most horrific way possible…”

* Gandolf tries to uncover the evil that’s afoot in Middle Earth. As it turns out, Sauron has returned…which is kinda the opposite of a surprise. It’s actually a lot like those Star Wars prequels where George Lucas tried to wring suspense out of the identity of the villain, while everyone in the audience shouted at the screen, “It’s Palpatine! We saw the original movies!”

* They end up in an Elf kingdom that’s kind of a Jonestown/biodome cross, where they meet Legolas and a hawt Elf-chick. Peter Jackson seems totally unaware of the hit Orlando Jones’ reputation has taken since the Lord of the Rings movies, so we’re supposed to still think he’s a badass. To this end, we see Legolas do all sorts of OTT action scenes that only exist inside a computer hard drive.

So, uh, how did “Elizabethtown” work out for you?

* The hawt elf-chick develops a thing for the handsome dwarf who’s played by the guy from Being Human. He’s the only dwarf that’s normal-looking, begging the question: are there two subspecies of dwarves? Are they like Klingons, where there are the original series normal-human-looking ones and the movie/new series ones that look they have lobsters on their heads?

* There’s a Venice-like canal town, where everyone is poor and starving, because they apparently forgot that fish live the water and can be eaten. Luke Evans is the stalwart hero who is set up to kill the dragon in the next movie (the movie all but states this, explicitly).

* The orcs hang around, but don’t do much. The maimed uber-Orc from the last movie that has a personal beef with the dwarves gets reassigned. Seriously. It’s like if Darth Vader got pulled off the hunt for Luke Skywalker after the assault on Hoth so he could oversee stormtrooper-gear procurement someplace.

“Yeah, I was gonna kill some dwarves, but then I had this thing I had take care of with payroll, so…”

* Bilbo finally gets to search for the headpiece of the staff of Ra or some such that the dwarves need. It’s still unclear why he has to find it and not one of the dwarves, considering he’s searching in a cavernous hall.

* And finally, the fight with Benedict Cumber-Smaug.

“I hope we get to do “The Curse of the Speckled Band” this season on “Sherlock.” Think we will?

Desolation is a more interesting movie than The Hobbit if only because it raises the stakes and gives us more dangerous and menacing threats than the ballchinians and retarded goblins from the last one. Still, the movie suffers from terminal bloat. There is a lot of extraneous material, and the action scenes go on way too long. Jackson can’t be blamed for this—he didn’t want to make the book into a nine-hour, multi-year event—but he can’t quite overcome that liability, either.

Created for the movie. Because we gotta get the teenage fanboys in the theater somehow.

He also can’t overcome the problem of having 15 protagonists, none of whom seem to be expendable enough to give the story any real stakes. After the second or third action sequence that our heroes come through totally unscathed it really becomes difficult to takes things seriously.

The confrontation with Smaug, however, is well worth the price of admission. The dragon is brilliantly-realized—the best on screen since Vermithrax Pejorative from Dragonslayer back in 1983—and Cumberbatch’s silky tones make it seem far more urbane and insidious than any mere beast. It’s also great to see Morgan Freeman playing opposite his Sherlock costar, even if it is mostly ADR.

Unfortunately, the confrontation—like everything else—goes on too long. Bilbo dodges the dragon’s wrath, and then the dwarves get in on the action, and it just goes on and on until the big climax when the dwarves, uh, try and drown it in melted caramel, I think. It’s built as the triumphant climax, except Smaug lives to fight the good fight in the next movie, so, yeah, that was kind of a half-hour of dragon-fighting that didn’t mean anything. And still no dwarves die.

So anyway, Desolation is an okay distraction, but this trilogy is never going to be LOTR.

The hell does “desolation” mean  in this context, anyway?

As the studios continue to smother us with crappy sequels, crappy remakes, crappy Adam Sandler movies, and inevitable Transformers sequels, it’s only natural to want to root for the scrappy independent filmmaker who meticulously crafts his little film out of tin foil and crazy glue, on a shoestring budget. It’s exciting to see singular vision that’s not been corrupted by studio interference and focus-grouped into oatmeal. Evan Glodell’s 2011 movie Bellflower has just such a pedigree attached to it. In addition to writing, directing, and starring in it, Glodell also modified his own cameras and built the film’s central effect—a battle wagon for an apocalyptic wasteland. Now that is talent to spare. Alas, it gives me no joy to say that Bellflower is no Primer. It’s grim, ugly, and tedious—a mumblecore Taxi Driver that leaves you hoping against hope that the next scene will feature an LAPD SWAT team blowing the door and ending the film in a merciful hail of gunfire.

Bellflower follows the timeless plotline of boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-slips-into-psychotic-fugue-state-and-maybe-perpetrates-horrible-violent-retribution. The title comes from a city in Los Angeles county where two 20-something transplants from Wisconsin have settled. Woodrow (Glodell) and Aiden (Tyler Dawson) have been friends since childhood, when they were heavily influenced by The Road Warrior to such an extent that the only long-term goal they seem to have is to build an armored, flame-spewing battle wagon to use in the wasteland. Rather than wanting to be taciturn Max, however, they idolize the hulking, be-hockeymasked villain of the piece, Lord Humongous (though, really, when your choices of role model are A) Future Apocalyptic Warlord and B) Mel Gibson, it’s kinda hard to pick a horse).

Still a better role model than R. Kelly.

Things kick into gear when Woodrow meets Millie (Jessie Wiseman) at a dive bar so grungy it’d be condemned in Tijuana while they’re competing in a cricket-eating contest for a grand prize of 50 bucks. The way all great romances do. Woodrow and Millie are instantly attracted, and connect over their shared inability to complete a coherent sentence. After a mega-date, when Woodrow takes her to another dive bar (in Texas), they fall into a relationship.

Unfortunately, this bliss doesn’t last, as Millie loses interest fast—a fact that finally becomes clear to Woodrow when he walks in on her getting absolutely plowed by her roommate Mike. Woodrow speeds off on his motorcycle, blows a stop sign, and promptly gets splattered on the hood of an oncoming car.

Released from the hospital some time later, we learn that he’s actually been pretty badly injured, with a skull-fracture and brain-swelling. Bruised emotionally and physically, Woodrow begins a downward spiral into obsession and destruction.

Oh, and Aiden has built a flamethrower for their wasteland adventures. So, yeah, now Woodrow has a broken heart, brain damage and a flamethrower. So that’s not going anyplace good.

The NRA just did a little happy dance…

He begins a relationship with Millie’s best friend Courtney (Rebekah Brandes), despite the fact Aiden was crushing on her. He torches Millie’s stuff in her backyard with the flamethrower (you know, introduce a flamethrower in the first act…), and generally kicks off a cycle of violence and retribution between him and Millie and Mike.

Things hit a suitably apocalyptic climax after Millie has him kidnapped and tattooed with a mustache and beard (I don’t know, just go with it), and in revenge, Woodrow quasi-rapes Millie, and stabs her a  few times. Understandably upset by this, Courtney blows her brains out. Yep, everything’s gone to shit. No cops get called, though, despite numerous acts of violence and home-invasion in broad daylight.

Except it may not have. We flash back to the second act, and find that everything after the accident might have just been a fevered fantasy in Woodrow’s (probably damaged) brain. But while this ending doesn’t end with flamethrower action, it’s no less grim as Woodrow and Aiden grapple with the fact that they have cruddy lives, live in a dingy apartment, and have basically no social network. Aiden holds out the option of hitting the road with a trunk full of equipment and drugs, stopping off at hole-in-the-wall bars and blowing people’s minds with their souped-up deathmobile. These are hard protagonists to like.

The first thing you need to understand about Bellflower is that everything about it is unpleasant. Glodell may have built some pretty nifty cameras, but he films everything in a palate of infected-pus yellow and keeps his lenses grime-spattered to emphasize the squalor of these people’s lives. After about twenty minutes it just becomes oppressive.

It’s like someone filmed a migraine…

These are also really, really fucking annoying characters. I have no idea how I’m supposed to feel about them. Aiden and Woodrow begin the movie agreeably enough, but hard to get behind. They’re a pair of stunted adolescents with no interests beyond a plan they cooked up as children. I can’t tell if they have jobs—we never seen them working, but they gotta be affording the rent and their car projects somehow. Maybe their parents are supporting them. I know I’d sure pay to keep them out of my home.

Millie and Courtney are interchangeably trashy blondes, with seemingly no real scruples. We never get a sense of why Millie loses interest in Woodrow, only one scene of her regarding him with disgust before she’s caught with Mike. Now, we’ve known since the beginning of the film that she has a male roommate, but the nature of their relationship—when it became sexual if it wasn’t from the outset—is left unknown. Courtney, for her part, is little more than a plot point with a bad perm.

And I gotta admit that I’m just not a fan of mumblecore. Listening to overly-sensitive 20-somethings carry on conversations composed mostly of “dude” and “fuck” and galumphing laughter between shit-eating grins just makes me want to scream “Use your words, Forrest, before I pistol-whip you!”

Wait…does it turn you to stone? Medusa didn’t breathe fire…I don’t get this.

Ultimately, though, this is a movie right out of the Taxi Driver playbook of frustrated male entitlement (hint: the flamethrower is a penis). Not only has that idea been mined pretty much dry (see my “Angry White Male Roundup” post), but it’s hard to be sympathetic to a couple of young, white males whose problems stem from the fact that they’re stunted, slacker dumbasses.

It’s not as if the movie doesn’t share their worldview. Millie is little more than a two-timing bitch, and Courtney doesn’t seem to care who she sleeps with. They don’t have jobs or inner lives or designs beyond screwing over Woodrow.  If, say, we saw Millie growing tired of Woodrow’s juvenile fantasies while she struggles to finish her degree or something, we’d get a nice three-dimensional view of these people, but Glodell isn’t interested in that.

In the end, the movie’s themes are summed up in the male-fantasy scenario articulated by Aiden when he explains why Woodrow needs to become Lord Humongous—he takes his women, subjugates them, and they love him for it, he doesn’t ask about their feelings, if it was good for them etc (basically, they want to be Goreans). Woodrow and Aiden are too stunted and unformed to interact like mature adults, so they choose to pursue an identity rooted in adolescent power fantasies.  I’m not sure the movie realizes how pathetic that is.

Here’s hoping Glodell’s next film is a little more mature.

Wait, what is this? An entry in the “Criminally Overlooked” category that’s not only still in theaters, but has only been released this week? What madness is this, you’d be forgiven for asking. Now, I want you to be calm and stay with me here. Doubtless, you’re probably feeling some anxiety and confusion, but before you go breaking open the emergency stockpile of assault rifles you started hoarding when it was clear Obama was going to win the election, be assured I have a good reason for this. By all accounts, 47 Ronin has not only lost the holiday weekend, but has left the field, gone home and is now drinking cheap beer and weeping. How bad is it? Well, a 175 million dollar movie has barely grossed 10 mil at the time of this writing. And that’s really too bad, since 47 Ronin is actually a nice little ($175,000,000) adventure movie. Hey, and Keanu Reeves isn’t even in it that much. Yay!

47 Ronin tells the classic Japanese story of a group of Ronin (47 of them, to be exact) who avenge the death of their master via treachery in 18^th century Japan. First-time director Carl Rinsch gives the tale the 300 treatment by including heavy doses of fantasy (though not as much homoeroticism), weaving in a slinky witch (a marvelous Rinko Kikuchi), some mystical beasts, and demons.

Simply bewitching (heh heh heh…)

As the basic story goes, an orphaned biracial boy named Kai is found and taken in by a kindly landowner named Kira (Tadanobu Asano). Kai grows to be Keanu Reeves, who serves as a tracker for Kira and his Samurai, including his son Oishi (Hiroyuki Sanada). As a “half-breed,” Kai is only barely tolerated by the rest of the community, with the exception of Kira’s daughter, Mika (Ko Shibasaki). Of course their love is not meant to be, but that’s okay, since they’ll soon have bigger problems.

While being visited by the local shogun, a rival landowner, Lord Asano (Min Tanaka) uses his witch/girlfriend (Kikuchi) to engineer a series of humiliations, which ultimately force Kira to commit ritual seppuku. The Shogun allows the Ronin to live, but banishes them from the land and orders Mika to be married to Asano in one year (you know, after a suitable period of mourning).

“And then I said, ‘Whoa!’ And then he was all like, ‘No way man,” and I was all like…”

After being imprisoned in a pit for a few months, Oishi, too, is banished. But he has other plans—namely, getting the band back together and killing Asano before he can marry Mika and take over Kira’s lands. To do this, however, he needs Kai…for some reason. Fortunately, he is able to track him down to a Dutch-controlled island where he is fighting arena matches against enormous troll-like beasts that I guess they have in the Netherlands (I was at the Amsterdam airport once, but I didn’t see any—maybe they’re extinct now).

This is what happens when you legalize pot…

Once again together (and having put their truly distressing and xenophobic treatment of Kai behind them), the Ronin set about their task. And…it’s pretty cool. Rinsch may be a tyro with lousy control over his budget, but he’s a pretty good director with a keen visual sense. His feudal Japan looks great (despite the fact it was filmed largely in Budapest and London), with a slightly otherworldly quality that he ramps up every time Kikuchi and her tentacle-hair is on screen, or as in the scene when the group look for weapons in the cursed forest Reeves escaped from, populated by the ghosts of castaway elderly and unwanted infants (and populated by owl people).

“Keep talking. I’m just going to eat a couple of mice.”

The mostly-Japanese cast also acquits themselves well, with Reeves’ usual inwardly-focused performance working well for a character conditioned by a lifetime of alienation (and mostly distracts from the fact that, at 49, he’s too old for the role). But it’s Kikuchi who steals the show, gliding with a gleeful malevolence, her hair swirling about and acting like Doctor Octopus’s tentacles. She sinks her dainty teeth into the villainess role and seems to have a blast playing her witch as a slithering, condescending deity, toying with her prey.

Let’s just look at Rinko again.

The movie had an infamously troubled production (I say again, $175,000,000), with starts and stops and two abandoned release dates. Some of this shows up on screen, as several action sequences seem truncated. The final battle between Kai and Kikuchi, in particular, is pretty damn underwhelming. It’s got some great moments, but it’s not the knockdown between two supernatural combat styles we expect.

Still, 47 Ronin is a solid action/adventure movie. It’s got great action scenes, vivid and gorgeous scenery, and a story that remains true to its concept and ideals right to its final scene. So, yeah, it’s too bad this movie is going to go down as one of 2013’s most notorious flops. In a year that gave us Grown Ups 2, and RIPD, it’ sad to see a genuinely good movie get buried. Ah well…

Welcome back to “From the Mists of Time,” and boy, do we have a doozy today. It’s a strange, largely unknown little gem from 1981 called Looker. Why review this movie, you ask? Well, kinda because I created this while FTMOT subcategory and I feel like I should populate it with something, so it doesn’t end up like my “What Went Wrong” category (with five years before a second installment).  Besides, this movie is a great time capsule of the ‘80s. It’s got that ubiquitous SoCal setting (usually some producer or other’s beachfront pad that he’d just shooed the underage hookers out of), totally unnecessary sports cars, plastic surgery, and vapid, Barbie doll blondes. Hell, throw in a hot tub and some blow, and you pretty much have the early ‘80s in a nutshell.

So, the most notable thing about Looker is that it was written and directed by Michael Crichton during the phase when he went to Hollywood and before he just wrote nigh-perfect airport novels and let Hollywood come to him. Now, when praising Crichton, critics usually point to his novels and riding the bleeding edge of science and portending a future just a few moments from now. And sure enough, today, only a few years after his death, we live in a world in which most of us ride our stegosauruses to our slave-wage jobs at Japanese corporations that have totally subjugated the American economy where we must pteronandon-joust for our Yakuza masters’ amusement. Oh, and we also have nano-technology that controls the weather.

Pictured: the 1996 Presidential election.

Right, so basically Crichton was less of a “futurist,” and more of “guy who stole some sci-fi technology concepts from Star Trek and packaged them in mediocre thrillers.” But in Looker, he actually does portend a few things which are coming to pass today. He doesn’t quite get the application right, but it’s still kinda cool.

Looker stars Albert Finney as a hotshot L.A. plastic surgeon—no read that sentence again; it says what you thought it says. See, the late -70s/early-‘80s was a strange time in the lifespan of the relationship between Hollywood and Albert Finney. This was when the bigwigs in tinsel town regarded this potato-faced, lumpy-bodied Briton with the white-dude-‘fro and said, “Fuck yeah. This dude says New Yorker better than anyone else on screen.” For more on this, check him out as a hardboiled NYPD cop in Wolfen (though I should warn you, the sight of Finney in his nuthugger jogging pants and topknot may actually make you sterile—and if it doesn’t, the sight of a nude Edward James Olmos pretending to be a wolf likely will).

“I’m what they call ’80s handsome.”

Where was I? Oh yeah, so Finney’s a plastic surgeon whose life is thrown into turmoil when two of his patients commit suicide. Poking around a bit –as everyone who’s not a detective was wont to in the ‘80s—Finney finds a shady advertising agency hired both of the girls.  That same company is also using another of his patients, played by LA Law’s Susan Dey, who Finney has the hots for, so he kills two birds with one stone by banging her and using her as an entry into this new agency.

In the future Susan Dey will live in all our electronic devices…

And he finds is…well, some computer stuff. Yeah, this is where it gets a bit convoluted, so if you need a second drink or something now’s a good time. Okay, so Cyberdyne (or whatever their called) is using a computer to create 3D computer avatars of these actresses to use their likenesses in dopey commercials. So far so good, since we kinda already do this, except we do it for larger stunts and effects sequences, but okay, Mike, good call on that one.

In reality, we use computers to recreate young Sean Connery. Because we really want to see that “Zardoz” sequel.

But insipid laundry commercials alone aren’t enough. No, they’re also using the avatars to send hypnotic messages via their glowing eyes to control the minds of the viewers. Uh…that’s a bit farfetched, there, Mike. Oh, and they also weaponized the technology by making a hypno-gun, which puts its victims into a mini-trance, allowing the user to get close and punch the victim in the face with impunity. Uh…again, maybe a bit too far, Mike.

I’m just drowing in the futurism right now…

Anyway, the rest of the movie is your basic corporate thriller, which ends, as they all do, with a nameless killer chasing the hero with a machine gun, and the corporation being outed to the public (they chose their big PR event as the location and time to break out the MAC-10s). And Finney exposes their nefarious deeds and walks into the SoCal sunset to bang Susan Dey some more. There was probably at least one Olivia Newton-John song and lots of amyl nitrate poppers involved.

“You will buy parachute pants…parachute pants…”

Looker is kind of weird. I mean, it feels and plays like a made-for-TV movie, but it has nude Susan Dey in it, so it must have been a theatrical release. Yeah, I know you probably think of the ‘80s and you just assume it was one big party, full of cocaine and orgies, but as one who was almost ten when this movie came out I can assure you, this era wasn’t all sex in hot tubs with unwaxed chicks who look like Lita Ford. Yeah, that was happening—probably in, like, every home in the US—but when it came to TV, man, folks were Puritanical as hell. I mean, Catherine Bach invented Daisy Duke short-shorts, and several cities went up in flames as people rioted. I’m pretty sure. I seem to remember something like that.

This poster cost the lives of so many Spencer’s Gifts employees…

So, yeah, Looker. I don’t know why anyone would think anyone would want to pay to watch this movie in the theater. But, then again, we hadn’t invented the Internet yet, so I suppose there was just less to do back then.

There is a lot to thank the UK for—James Bond, Doctor Who, Thandie Newton—but their most recent contribution to the Western world has to be the revival of the totally-unironic tough-cop genre. TV shows like Luther and movies like Welcome to the Punch feature totally absurd action setpieces and the hoariest of cop-movie clichés, all played totally straight. It’s as if the British crime thriller has finally caught up to Tango and Cash. These stories aren’t good by any stretch of the imagination, but they do have a retro charm—something on full display with Punch.

The movie begins in situ, as Mark Strong’s icy criminal Jacob Sternwood and his gang have just pulled off a daring late-night robbery that entailed smoke business suits, smoke grenades, and a getaway on crotch-rockets. Ah, but hot on their trail is loose-cannon detective (inspector? constable? I’m not really sure about position titles in the Metropolitan Police Department)  Max Lewinsky (James McAvoy), and he tears through the completely-empty streets of London in his BMW. Lewinsky’s supervisors are screaming over the radio for him to break off pursuit, but those aren’t the rules Max Lewinsky plays by, baby. Unfortunately, when he confronts Sternwood he finds himself hopelessly outclassed—by which I mean that Lewinsky is armed with a pipe and Sternwood has a Beretta, which he uses to shoot out one of Lewinsky’s legs and get away.

Policing looks classier in England.

Flash-forward three years and Sternwood’s son, suffering from a gunshot wound, makes a frantic call to his father, now living in exile in Iceland. The son is handily apprehended, and Sternwood heads back to London to help his son. This news of great interest to Lewinsky, who is still a detective, but now nurses a bum leg he must drain daily and isn’t quite 100% For that matter, neither is Lewinsky who has become a burned-out shell of his former self after the humiliation of losing Sternwood.

The prospect of nailing Sternwood reanimates Lewinsky and stokes the fires of hatred in his heart. While his partner, Hawks (Andrea Riseborough), tries to pull him from the brink of self-destruction, Lewinsky is set on plowing ahead and using Sternwood’s now-hospitalized son as bait in a trap. Lewinsky’s hothead ways aren’t much appreciated by his precinct captain (leftenant?), but the commissioner (superintendent? Brigadier?) Thomas Geiger (David Morrissey) indulges his hothead ways.

“Now, when you shoot him you’re going to need a good catch phrase to say after you do it. Or before.”

That, however, is just setup. Reconnecting with his underworld pals, Sternwood discovers that his son’s shooting was random, but is connected to the fatal killing of another young man, whose death is making headlines as an emblem of the rising gun violence in London. This issue is central to Geiger’s election campaign (for, uh, Mayor? Duke? Emperor?) one of the campaign promises is the matter of arming all police officers in London. Sternwood and Lewinsky follow up on their respective investigations, until they ultimately dovetail, and cop and criminal must join forces to confront a larger evil.

It’s like every one of my family’s Thanksgiving ever…

The above synopsis, though, doesn’t give Welcome to the Punch is due as an over-the-top action movie. For that you need to get a load of McAvoy’s performance as a “don’t-give-a-shit” cop, bent on revenge (which, it should be pointed out, seems somewhat disproportionate to the incident—Sternwood shot him in the leg, not the wife), limping with furious purpose, tackling people in hospitals, and delivering lines like, “I’m gonna put you in jail, and the whole world is going to watch me!” as if it’s ever normal or natural to say something like that. It’s like he based his whole performance on Martin Riggs in the first scene of Lethal Weapon.

See? Guns are great. That’s why we give them to our cops.

You need to carefully consider the number of machine-gun fights that take place in the heart of London—not really firearms-saturated place—including the final knockdown, when a half dozen random, nameless lackeys show up purely so that the heroes have more people to shoot it out with. You also have to appreciate the way that Lewinsky figured out who the bad guy is, not by any actual, you know, detective work, but because, like us, he realizes that he’s run out of cast members to be suspects.

“Eat hot death! Damn, I’m bad at this…”

But while Welcome isn’t a good movie, it sure is an entertaining one. I mean, you have some great talent in the cast—Strong, in particular, comes off like Stanley Tucci’s tougher older brother–and while story is overheated, it’s pretty compelling, and pays attention to some interesting social issues facing contemporary London.

Tremble before my steely gaze!

Additionally, Welcome to the Punch is a gorgeously-shot movie, with writer/director Eran Creevy taking great pains to set as many scenes as possible in visually-rich environments—city rooftops overlooking the skyline, beneath the aurora borealis in Iceland, an empty nightclub, a modernist hotel room. The cinematography is lovely, and a nice-looking film can compensate for a lot of storytelling issues (Ridley Scott has made a career off this truism).

So, that’s Welcome to the Punch. Thank you, England, for making the world safe for melodramatic action movies again. That and Freema Agyemon.

Ugh.

Sorry,  I wanted to build  to that, but with Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, it’s just too hard to hide my disdain. I think we can all agree that the Paranormal Activity series pretty much passed up its “use by” date, well, after the first one. With 2012’s fourth installment, the series finally ran out of ways to milk horror from shoddy camerawork, and now they’ve followed up with what can be charitably described as, Paranormal Activity: The Univision Version. Because this movie can barely be bothered to disguise the fact it’s little more than a reheated version of the previous installments with a location change to draw a Latino audience. Surprisingly, it’s not as offensive as you’d expect. Unsurprisingly, it’s pretty terrible.

You know the nice thing about these movies is that you don’t have to do a lot of heavy-lifting for the plot summary. Some knucklehead gets a camera, films really boring stuff, then catches weird stuff happening, eventually a demon kills them and their family. And this movie is no different.

Well, it’s actually different in a couple ways. First off, rather than follow an insufferably-dull suburban couple, we follow some aggravatingly-dumb Latino teenagers living in a cramped tenement in Oxnard California. Second, the demon doesn’t start dicking around with them in quite the same way as the previous films—you know: bumps in the night, weird symbols being burned into the walls, domestic homicide. The usual.

Pictured: something “scary”

Nope, this time around, one of our teenage dumbasses, Jesse, is, ah, “infected” with a demon by the block’s local witch (because those ethnic types always have black magic and stuff going on). Of course Jesse and his even-more-knuckleheaded buddy, Hector, are pretty much just screwing around on summer break when the local witch is killed by the school valedictorian. Weird-ass stuff, right?

After that, Jesse notices two things: 1) he has a weird bite mark on his arm, and 2) he has super powers. So, then this movie turns into a rehash of Chronicle, because, yeah, we needed another one of those movies. And we watch as Jessie becomes Super-Dick and grows more and more alienated from his family and friends.

Pictured: something else “scary”

The movie then dives head-first into the growing mythology of the Paranormal Activity movies, which involves demons and witch covens, and all serves to drain much of the horror from the movie. Because once you name your demon Toby, and then throw in chanting, middle-ages witches, you might as well just pack it in.

The movie ends with a totally WTF moment that doesn’t make any sense, and only serves to link this movie to the other and to remind us that, yes, Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat are still around and not-terribly-employable.

Even more “terror”

Believe it or not, that encapsulation is probably more exciting than the actual movie, because this is easily the most listless of these movies. The PA movies have always have fairly pokey first acts before the unsettling stuff kicks in, but this movie never gets going—even when the important stuff is supposed to be happening. Writer/Director Christopher Landon (son of Michael) with his second film, shows he really doesn’t have the chops to make images on a screen scary. Even the simple things the PA movies did—just something out-of-place in the domestic space—is beyond him. Remember in the first one, when Katie sleep-stands over the bed for hours? It’s unsettling as hell, and didn’t require anything particularly complicated, but Landon can’t even pull off something that simple. Instead, on several occasions he goes for action sequences, which, as we know by now, are really not the strong suit of the found-footage genre.

Stop. My heart can only take so much “horror.”

It was probably inevitable that the PA series would run out of steam, It was always a thin premise to hang a series on, and the found-footage genre has exploded since the first Paranormal Activity, making it harder and harder to make these movies seem fresh or clever.

Still, they didn’t need to give us a movie this bad…

Here’s a strange little number. It’s a movie that could just as easily fit in the “Criminally Overlooked” category as “From the Mists of Time,” since it’s actually quite a good movie, which never garnered the cult status it deserved. Even now I’m hesitant to wholeheartedly endorse it, since it’s the product of a more innocent time, which now takes on the dimension of a nightmare. Still, there’s no getting around the fact it’s a solidly-built thriller with more than ample amounts of ‘80s cheese, all served atop a hearty helping of Rutger Hauer. Okay, that metaphor went wrong, but you get the point: Rutger Hauer, sawed-off shotgun, terrorists in L.A. Need I say more? Of course not, but I will…

So, 1987’s Wanted Dead or Alive is supposedly a film sequel to the 1958 series which starred Steve McQueen, but outside of a shared last name (Randall) and some lip-service this really isn’t a thing. No, this Randall is former CIA operative turned professional bounty hunter Nick Randall, and unlike Dog the Bounty Hunter, he’s armed with more than racial epithets and pepper-spray. No, Nick likes to tote around a sawed-off, stockless pump-shotgun (itself a nod to McQueen’s cut-down Winchester rifle) which is inexplicably fitted with a laser sight–because when you’re doing precision shooting, a short-barreled shotgun is the first weapon you grab for.

As the movie begins, Randall is just minding his own business, apprehending a cop-killer (and by “apprehending” I mean blasting a Vietnamese grocery store until the guy gives up), and handing him over to his buddy LAPD Detective Jerry Quintz (William Russ at the apex of his 1980s William Rustiness), when something unusual happens. Gene Simmons arrives in LA dressed as Hasidic Jew. Now, maybe that’s not weird in real life—Simmons might actually do that, I don’t know—but in this film he plays Yemeni terrorist Malak Al Rahim, and he wastes no time getting up to evil.

First, Rahim blows up a movie theater—pointedly showing Rambo: First Blood Part 2—and announces his presence to the news.  This brings Randall’s old CIA colleagues a-calling, since Randall once worked a mission to kill Rahim and some of his terrorist buddies. Only problem is, Randall never got Rahim. Now the CIA offers him a $250,000 bounty (plus $50,000 on top if Rahim is delivered alive) to hunt him down within a week. Of course it’s not as simple as that, as they’re actually using Randall as bait to draw Rahim out.

…a plan that simply cannot backfire in any way.

The movie is a tense cat-and-mouse game that’s a lot smarter than an ‘80s B-movie has the right to be. The various sides all work their vaarious angles, while Rahim ups the ante, setting off dozens of car bombs in L.A. as a brutal diversion from his final scheme—setting off a chain reaction at a chemical plant to create a toxic cloud over the greater Los Angeles area (so you can see why the movie is a tad more queasy-making today than it was in 1987).

But putting aside the entirely-plausible nightmare scenario it posits, we have to acknowledge the movie’s B-movie genre charms. To wit:

* Rutger Hauer: In the 1980s, Hauer was the eminent terrifying force of nature. He’d already been Roy Batty and The Hitcher, and even playing a good guy he brings with him the uncanny ability to instill sheer terror. It helps that all of his scenes look as if he’s tripping balls, grinning tauntingly for no reason, ice-blue eyes staring into middle distance as if seeing obscure Dutch demons that have pursued him form The Netherlands.

Any given weekend for Rutger Hauer…

* Rutger Hauer’s hair: Okay, don’t get your hopes up—it’s not Peter Weller-caliber hair (what force in all of Cristendom could compare with that?). Still, he rocks an amazing mullet. It’s the kind of hair that says, “This dude carries a sawed-off shotgun everywhere. And also he will taunt you like a cat with an errant cockroach before he ends you. And then eats your soul.” This hair says that.

* William Russ’s hair: Not as epic, but…man, check out that pompadour. He sported it in Miami Vice, Crime Story, Wiseguy, and Manhunter. That hair…I’m pretty sure it created global warming.

He’s firing two machine guns, but all you can look at is the pompadour…

* The supporting players: Look at who we have: Gerry Hardin, Mel Harris (before she got all bourgeois-annoying in Thirtysomething), the aforementioned Russ, and Robert Guillaume as Randall’s oldest buddy in the CIA. Guillaume especially reminds us why he was such a great actor in the ‘70s and ‘80s and is superb in a rare dramatic role. He delivers the line, “Lipton, the next time you decide to fuck me, kiss me first” is a classic.

* Randall’s pad: Think Rutger Hauer lives in an apartment  tastefully-appointed with IKEA furniture? Of course not. This place is pretty much what a 15 year-old action movie buff imagines a cool grown pad to be: a warehouse loft with motorcycles, a computer setup, fitness equipment, a massive arsenal, and, oh yeah, a freaking gun range! How Randall hasn’t does of lead poisoning is anyone’s guess. From the perspective of adulthood, we see this as less “cool guy” and more “anti-social weirdo who probably has an FBI file.” Still, in ‘80s movies this was what cool guys did (it was a different time, kids).

Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person who doesn’t have a gunshelf in his living room.

* Gene Simmons: the KISS frontman makes a surprisingly-good bad guy, glowering malevolently and never losing his cool. And in this film, at least, he settles on a gender. What’s more disturbing is how entirely realistic the plan is–it should be since it was based on an actual disaster that occurred in Bhopal India. No stolen nukes, dirty bombs or the like. If the CIA didn’t screen this movie after 9/11 they certainly should have.

* Randall’s confrontation with Rahim: It’s a doozy, and it’s capped off with a great coda. I won’t ruin it.

So, that’s Wanted Dead or Alive. It’s better than it has any right to be and better than history has treated it.   

The little-seen 2002 horror film Below almost became an entry in “Criminally Overlooked,” except that, well, it’s really not a big deal if you miss it. Unlike some of the other entries in that category, Below isn’t required viewing, and really doesn’t bring much to the medium. Probably the only distinction it can claim is that it’s the best technical portrayal of a World War II sub on film. Still, it’s an effective little thriller that’s never boring, and at times genuinely creepy.

Below begins efficiently enough with a small life raft adrift in the Atlantic being spotted by a PBY Catalina search-and-rescue plane. Low on fuel, the plane transmits the raft’s coordinates to the nearest ship in the area, a Gato-class attack sub the USS Tiger Shark. Receiving the message, the CO Lieutenant Brice (Bruce Greenwood), and his XO Lieutenant Loomis (Holt McCallany) are none-too-pleased with having to go back for them (put a pin in that).

Just a couple of dudes submarining…

Recovering the raft, Brice and Co. find three survivors from a hospital ship. One’s just a tweedy British dude in one of those chunky sweaters they like so much. Don’t worry too much about him. It’s the other two that are problematic: a German POW and a British nurse (Olivia Williams). Now, you would think that a bunch of guys stuck in a steel tube for months on end would be thrilled to have a woman aboard—especially Olivia Williams—but sailors are a superstitious lot, and think women on a ship are bad luck. Sailors are weird.

SCORE!

Ah, but maybe Williams is bad luck, as a German destroyer has detected them and promptly starts nuking them with depth charges. If you know anything about World War II submarine warfare, then you understand this is about as bad a situation as you can have. However, once they find a nice cold spot in the water to hide (cold water deflects sonar), a phonograph begins blaring Benny Goodman, effectively announcing their location to the Krauts. But who would be so stupid as to play a record at full blast while hiding from a destroyer?

That, however, is just the beginning of the weirdness. It soon becomes clear to the hapless rescuees that something is seriously amiss with this sub. For starters, Brice may be the Commanding Officer, but he’s not a the skipper. The sub’s commander was killed in an accident following a successful attack on a German sub-tender a few days prior. And with the exception of Ensign Odell (Matthew Davis), the officers seem suspicious and withholding.

“On a scale of 0 to India, how worried to I have to be of being raped?”

Pretty soon, things begin to go mainline haywire, as the Tiger Shark becomes, essentially, a submersible haunted house. The crew hears voices, see blurry reflections of faces, and the ship experiences increasingly serious and inexplicable malfunctions, as if the sub itself is trying to commit suicide. Clearly the sub has a secret, and the officers know more than they’re telling.

As a horror film, Below sputters out at about the halfway mark. It’s not hard to discern what the big secret is, and, unfortunately, it doesn’t have any other narrative tricks up its sleeve. As a supernatural thriller, however, the film works exceptionally well. Below was written and directed by David Twohy (with an assist by Darren Aronofsky, though it’s hard to find his fingerprints on the story), and Twohy, while never quite becoming a great filmmaker, can sometimes be a good one with a solid, if unexceptional style.

“I don’t suppose that little woman from Poltergeist is aboard?”

With Below, Twohy manages to sustain a pervasive sense of eeriness in the sub—which is a bigger feat that it might seem when you consider the claustrophobic tight quarters of such a boat. He uses dim lighting and ambient noises like whale songs in the distance and seaweed caressing the hull to build a sense otherness in this world everyone is trapped within.

Twohy also masterfully establishes the spatial reality of the sub and its confines with some neat directorial tricks. He introduces us to the location early on with an unbroken steadicam shot which glides from the conning tower through the length of sub to the aft torpedo room. He also uses quick cuts from character to character to emphasize both the close confines as well as the crew’s interdependence on one another to run the sub.

“Well, this just gets better and better…”

Twohy gets a major assist from his cast, which is populated for the most part by character actors who all solidly fill their roles. McCallany is one of the few who looks like he might have stepped out of a WW2 bond-seller, and his mad skilz with a yo-yo are a nice period touch. Greenwood is always good, and here he infuses his everyman-hero persona with a disorienting smarminess that peers out every so often to keep the viewer off base.

Supporting them we have Jason Flemyng donning a credible American accent and a pre-stardom Zack Galifianakis as “Weird Walt,” the Tiger Shark’s resident expert on supernatural phenomena (informing himself with dime-novels and copies of Weird Tales magazines).

It’s too bad Below didn’t have a punchier—or more clever—denouement, as it could have been a horror classic. As it is, though, Below is still an effective little movie. It just could have been an effective big one.

After more than a decade hiatus, CIA analyst Jack Ryan–Tom Clancy’s signature creation—is back on the screen. First embodied by Alec Baldwin nearly 25 years ago in a career-making (and, perversely enough, career-derailing) performance in The Hunt for Red October, the role then went to the more appropriate, but less interesting Harrison Ford in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. An attempt to reboot the character was made in 2002 when Ben Affleck stepped into the role in The Sum of All Fears, and that went about as well as everything else Affleck did in the 2000s. Now, Hollywood as decided to reboot the reboot with Chris Pine stepping in to retcon the character yet again in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. This time, however, the results are far more positive.

The movie begins by revising Ryan’s backstory—keeping the helicopter crash which nearly crippled him—but updating it by making his military service and subsequent injury occur as a result of his decision to drop out of the London School of Economics as a reaction to the attacks of September 11^th. While struggling to regain his ability to walk at Walter Reed Hospital, Jack falls in love with Cathy (Keira Knightly), his pretty physical therapist. He’s also recruited into the CIA by an agent named Harper (Kevin Costner, whose presence is a bit of an irony as he passed on the Jack Ryan role in Red October).

“I made ‘Dances With Wolves’ instead. Turned out to be a good move.”

That is all set up in an economical pre-credits sequence before we fast-forward to present day, when Jack is undercover at a Wall Street investment firm, keeping tabs on global finances and living with Cathy. When a series of strange transactions made by a Russian firm partnered with his catches Jack’s attention, the CIA sends him to Moscow to meet with the firm’s president, Viktor Cherevin (a reptilian Kenneth Branaugh, who also directed).

In short order Jack discovers a plot by Cheverin to deflate US currency in the wake of a terrorist attack he is planning, and subsequently collapse the economies of the US and China in one fell swoop. Caught up in this whirlwind of plots, Ryan is activated as a field operative and must thwart Cheverin’s plan.

“Yeah, directing a new film…yeah better than ‘Thor.’ No stupid hats.”

Complicating factors is the fact that Cathy has grown suspicious of Jack’s evasions and has decided to surprise him in Moscow. With no other choice, Jack and Harper clue her into the truth of the matter and utilize her as an asset to help take on Cheverin.

If all this seems a bit thin, well it is. The surprising thing about Jack Ryan is that despite its gorgeous location shoots and elaborate character-building, it actually tells a fairly modest story by the standards set by its predecessors. Its story doesn’t even stack up against the dodgier Mission: Impossible movies, having only three somewhat tame action sequences. That having been said, the movie works as a breathless thriller, largely due to its compact plot and ambitions.

“BOO!”

In large part, this is due to timing. History was the major blow to Affleck’s outing, as the movie dealt with neo-Nazi terrorists, who had been changed from the source materials Arabs. This, coming less than a year after 9/11 marked the Hollywood thriller factory as hopelessly floundering to tell modern-day political thrillers in a time when the world had profoundly changed.  Even the inclusion of a dirty bomb (something we were really scared of in 2002), couldn’t make the movie seem prescient.

In 2014 it would be dangerous to make a CIA thriller too complicated, lest the movie wade into dangerous waters. Jack Ryan—and indeed Clancy’s whole industry—is one of unambiguous American righteousness. This was easier to get away with in the ‘80s and ‘90s when the CIA was a little-seen entity for most Americans. Today, well, that’s a whole different kettle of fish. Jack Ryan lands a glancing recognition of the CIA’s controversial past decade when, upon being offered the CIA gig, Ryan tells Harper that they don’t have the best of reputations, what with the renditions and waterboarding and all. “Not my department,” Harper says, and you’re half-expecting him to continue, “They’re, like, on a whole different floor. I don’t go there.” And that is that.

“Plus the CIA has a great cafeteria. No, you gotta see it…”

But Ryan works because of Ryan—that is, Chris Pine. Clancy’s Jack Ryan was always a bit of a cipher, a blandly generic Boy Scout whose personality boiled down to, “good analyst, good father, loving husband, becomes President.” Baldwin’s portrayal infused him with some life, but Ford’s stolid screen presence simply washed the character out. Pine, having honed his action hero bona fides with the Star Trek movies, slips easily into role, making his Jack Ryan a man of action, not ideology.

He can karate-run with the best of them…

Pine is probably too pretty an actor to get the credit that he’s due, but he really does a very good job in the role. Along with the action work, he’s credible in his romantic scenes with Knightly—particularly their early courtship when he’s flirtatious without being smug—and does a good job of selling his post-killing freak-out almost as well as Daniel Craig did in Casino Royale.

One significant improvement this film makes over its predecessors is the inclusion of Ryan’s wife in the action. Granted, no one wants to see Anne Archer running around with an Uzi, but the previous movies could have done something more with her than simply making her a token presence existing to be put in jeopardy, or simply to be a symbol of Jack’s middle-class white perfection.  Knightley’s Cathy is more believably smart and canny than any female character in quite a while.

It’s an unusual time for a new Tom Clancy property, and if you read my “No American 007” post you understand why (if you didn’t read, I understand…we’re cool), so it’s probably to be expected that the movie plays like a fairly generic thriller, playing upon our fears of economic crisis rather than of terror. It’s an ideological cheat, but what the hell. That’s what Hollywood does.

You know, I’m not a person who can’t appreciate it when a movie decides to be a little unconventional—I mean, hey, the more you deviate from the Hollywood system the better, IMHO (you know, just don’t take it too far—I don’t want to end up watching a movie about a Dutch kid and his pet clump of dirt or something…). Still, I believe that certain movies make a promise to the audience, and when you have a movie called Devil’s Due and it concerns the spawn of Satan, well, I better goddamn well see a baby with a spiked tail. Horns are optional, but the long, spiked tail is a must. Reader, Devil’s Due has no such be-tailed baby. And that’s just one of its many, many flaws.

Okay, so this movie…(sigh), right, let’s get this over with. So, we got this couple, Zach and Samantha (Zach Gilford and Allison Miller) who get married despite Zach’s douchey desire to record seemingly every minute of their lives together for posterity (because I’m sure their kids are going to want to watch mom and dad sorting the mail). On their honeymoon to the Dominican Republic they make the truly Mensa-level decision to agree to go to a party recommended by their skeezy cab driver. Sure. Nothing can go wrong with that plan. The party is in the underground cavern beneath a couple of abandoned buildings in one of the more impoverished parts of town (yep, still some good decision-making, there).

As we see form the footage (unwatched by Zach until late in the film), the party soon turns into a Satanic mass (as parties in Third World countries are wont to do), but our two dunderheaded newlyweds don’t remember a thing. Well, no sooner are they back in the land of the Big PX, than they discover that Samantha is pregnant. Think the Satanic mass has anything to do with that? Yes, yes you do.

Well, the pregnancy is hinky and hinky stuff happens, like Samantha wolfing down raw hamburger in a grocery store, weird noises in the house,  a priest keeling over in the middle of a First Communion  ceremony…hey, know what? Why don’t you just make a list of all the usual scares you get with any given possession movie, you’ll pretty much have the middle third of this movie.

Pretty soon the cabbie and some other creepy dudes show up and begin shadowing Zach and Samantha (and wiring their home with more cameras to add footage to the whole “found footage” concept). Whatever could they be doing? Here, lemme save you the trouble: they’re a cult overseeing the birth of a Satan baby, currently slow-cooking in Samantha’s belly.

Did you guess that? Of course you did, because nothing in this movie is original! The filmmakers– Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (members of the filmmaking collective Radio Silence)—seem to think you build suspense by having things happen that you know damn well are going to happen. With one or two exceptions, nothing that occurs in this movie is even remotely mysterious or original.

Now, I’m not going to rattle the gates and argue that the found-footage genre is dead, and needs to be retired. However, with approximately a zillion of these movies being released every year, filmmakers really need to step up their game. The usual ways to wring terror out of  static, shaky camera view have mostly been done to death, so if filmmakers want to make a successful found footage horror movie they need to start being creative. The Schulmans were pretty successful at this with their oscillating fan sequence in Paranormal Activity 3, but no one else has managed anything comparable.

The other thing they have to understand is that only certain stories can be told this way! To back to the mouth of river, The Blair Witch Project worked because that story could only be told through the fragments of recovered footage. The movie isn’t a straight narrative, rather it’s the visual clues to a mystery that has no answer. Making a straight narrative-driven film with found footage plays to the conventions weaknesses—and this film is a perfect example of that fact. See, this movie has been made before. It was called Rosemary’s Baby, and it’s a horror classic, largely because it filled in the narrative gaps you get with the found footage convention.

And no damn tail! The baby didn’t have a tail! Hell, you could barely see the thing! What a massive rip-off!

Bottom line: this movie sucks. If you want a decent found footage movie, check out V/H/S or its sequel. They’re hit-and-miss, bit at least they get the job done some of the time.

Probably the best way to watch I, Frankenstein  is after huffing a zeppelin-worth of spray paint. It won’t make the movie any better, or the dialogue sound like it was written by professionals and not, say ADD-afflicted spider monkeys, but you’ll care about it less.

Oh, this is dire. I mean, it’s just…look, halfway during this film—I think it was the part when Bill Nighy proclaims, “I am a demon prince! I heard the rational part of my brain—the part that keeps me from losing my keys and forgetting my name and stuff—and actually shout at the rest of my brain, “Wait, is this happening? This is a joke, right? No, seriously, this has gotta be joke.”

 I, Frankenstein, begins with the titular monster—played by Aaron Eckhart, because, I assume, he lost a bet—giving a quick recap of that story. “So, this scientist built me, but I’m all grody and he tries to kill me, so I kill his wife—because, hey, monster—and then he chases me to the Arctic, but he freezes to death and I don’t—again, monster—and here I am interning his body at the family crypt, and…hey, what’s the deal with all those demons?”

The is just how Mary Shelley envisioned a sequel would be…

Yes, this is a movie about a war between demons and gargoyles.  Did you feel brain cells just die? I assure you, they did.

Yeah, so essentially, demons are around doing…demon stuff, I guess. But holding them in check are gargoyles, which aalternate between looking like badly-rendered CGI monsters and a bunch of 300 cosplayers. Leading the gargoyles is Lenore (Miranda Otto, having, I assume, lost the same bet as Aaron Eckhart), who wishes to recruit the monster—who she dubs Adam—into their army for no clear reason. Opposing this decision is her angry lieutenant, Gideon (Jai Courtney, the human/lemur hybrid last seen screwing up A Good Day to Die Hard), because Gideon is toolbag.

He looks like he should curled up in a tree  in Madagascar.

Meanwhile, the demons are led by demon-prince Naberies (the aforementioned Bill Nighy, who I think is just screwing with us now), who wants to get his hands…claws, paws, whetever…on Adam and/or Victor Frankenstein’s journals so his hawt scientist Terra (Yvonne Strahovsky) can figure out how to reanimate the dead and bolster his army.

And then they fight. And that’s more or less it.

Mary Shelley wrote extensively about the monster’s chiseled abs.

This is really less of a movie and more a collection of scenes that seem to have been cut from Constatine and, especially, the Underworld movies. Except that the Underworld movies at least built a world around their story—granted it was a retarded world, but at least they understood they needed to, like, do stuff besides have monsters fight. It should be damning enough just to say that those movies look like the Godfather trilogy compared to this. I mean, that’s like being a bad knockoff of a Yugo. I guess even when you scrape bottom there’s always the chance you’ll find the Mariana Trench.

“Have we ripped off the Matrix yet? No? Best get on that.”

I mean, why are these beasties at war? Because shut up and eat your popcorn, that’s why. Why should we care about this when neither set of monsters interacts or show any interest in normal human beings? Because shut and watch the CGI fights, that’s why. Where the hell does this movie even take place, what with its massive population of gargoyles? Somewhere else, that’s where. See how lazy this movie is?

They pretty much swiped the whole screenplay from the doodles on the back of a 13 year-old’s notebook.

The story of Frankenstein is one of the most prescient in Western culture, because it so perfectly got at the terror inherent in science—the divide between knowledge and wisdom. It’s a story that has seeped into the very fabric of our civilization. Using it as a setup for a silly monster mash is a bit like using Atticus Finch as the hero of a new detective show and giving him a sass-talking toucan as a partner. It doesn’t simply disrespect the source material; it treats it the way Genghis Khan treated any given peasant village.

On top of that, the effects are simply atrocious. It’s dead heat which looks worse: the cartoonish-looking demons or the demons, which are just latex masks that look they were slapped together during one of the earlier challenges on Face/Off.

Behold! The culmination of 120 years of special effects evolution…

Aw c’mon, Hollywood! Look, I realize that it is presently January, and that according to whatever pact you made with Cthulu, or the Council of the Lizard People, or whatever, you must dump your industry’s direst offerings until spring (because all of stuck here in the horse latitudes of the post-holiday weeks with nothing to look forward to except seeing if it can be even more oppressively cold and grey and depressing next week than it was this week certainly don’t want to, say, escape our dismal lives or anything like that). But that does not give you license to just crap out any old dreck and  slap it up on an IMAX screen. There have to be standards. You have to at least go through the motions and pretend like you’re making a real movie.

So, Hollywood, if you’re listening, next time just punch me in junk. It’ll be a lot faster, and I’ll feel marginally more dignified afterward.

Lest there be any confusion about this, the movie I’m reviewing is a Canadio/Spanish production called The Return. It should not be confused with the French TV series also titled The Return (Les Revenants in France), showing on the Sundance Channel. The two works are completely different entities. The film The Return is about the dead coming back to life—whoops…okay, they sort of have that in common. But The Return is not a zombie flick, per se, but instead grapples with the impact of those events (aw, dammit). Okay, they sound alike on paper, but they really couldn’t be more different. Trust me on this…

So, The Return is being sold as a zombie movie…of a sort. But look closer, and you’ll notice the poster’s tagline: “Neither zombie nor human,” and that’s a pretty good encapsulation of what kind of movie this is—a movie that’s more defined by what it’s not. If that seems like a criticism, I assure you it’s not intended to be. But The Return is a movie that constantly teases at a standard genre movie going on just beyond the present scene, but instead tells a very different, though not unattached, story.

The movie takes place shortly after the second great zombie outbreak, and yet we’re not living in Walking Dead land—you know where everyone is armed to the teeth and no one sleeps or bathes. Instead, society is, well pretty much okay. We learn that after the first outbreak, scientists isolated the zombie virus and managed to create a protein blocker for it. If administered quickly enough upon exposure (and, you know, assuming the patient’s brain hasn’t been eaten yet), the zombie-fication can be prevented. As long as the patient takes his dose of the vaccine every day, he’ll be just fine. Miss a dose, however, and it’s zombie time. These patients are called the Returned.

The story covers a few fraught days in the life of a Canadian couple, Alex and Kate (Kris Holden-Ried and Emily Hampshire). Kris is an MD who specializes in the Returned, and times are tough for her. A growing segment of society isn’t terribly comfortable living alongside folks one injection away from eating them for lunch, and a militant anti-Returned group has become bolder in their resistance.

Alex is a rumpled, vaguely-boho guitar teacher at the local school. He’s also Returned himself. Kate and Alex have been keeping this fact a secret in order to protect Alex, and Kate has been buying doses of the drug under the table to supplement the doses Alex gets from the government. As the film begins, Alex decides he wants to reveal his secret to their friends Jacob and Amber (Shawn Doyle and Claudia Bassols). It all goes well, and the four of them begin to band together against the increasing-tension in society aimed at the Returned.

Things are hitting a critical mass, since stocks of the vaccine are running low. The key ingredient must be harvested from the spinal fluid of dead zombies, and society has just about run out of hosts. The government has been racing to come up with a synthetic substitute, but it’s an open question whether they’ll be able to do so before a lot of people start zombie-ing out.

This has led the militant anti-Returned groups to become more violent in their efforts. Early on, we see vandalism and graffiti, and a news report covers the lynching of several Returned. Soon, however, they hit the hospital, slaughtering the newly Returned, and, in an unbearably-tense scene, threaten to kill Kate and her staff. They also steal the medical records containing the names of all the Returned.

Soon afterwards, the government begins quarantining all the Returned, sending police house to house to round them up. Soon, Kate, Alex, Jacob, and Amber find themselves dodging these various fronts, while trying to decide their next move. What is dreadfully-clear, however, is the fact that there is no long game to be played here. Alex has only a few months’ worth of the vaccine. The rest of film puts these characters through their paces, as they must make a series of impossible choices.

If you’re waiting for a zombie apocalypse on par with something like 28 Weeks Later, you’ll be disappointed. We see only a few zombies, and they’re largely inconsequential to the plot. Instead, the movie is about those impossible choices the characters must make, and how far they’re willing to go to protect themselves.

It’s to the credit of filmmakers Manuel Carballo (who directed), and Hatem Kraiche (who wrote), that none of the characters emerge morally-uncompromised. Alex comes off best, refusing to give into pure survival, but everyone finds themselves driven to greater and greater acts of desperation.

The world of The Returned touches on a number of social anxieties such as the frailty of our social fabric in the face of disaster, the limitations of government to address massive public-health matters, and the specter of violence lurking behind passionate (and, it should be noted, well-meaning) political movements. Interestingly, the film has a lighter touch when it comes to the government’s martial response to the looming vaccine shortage. There are a few scenes that glance upon some Gestapo imagery, but the filmmakers never grab for the low-hanging fruit.

The most striking plot element, though, is the portrayal of life with an incurable and potentially-dangerous medical condition. If the era of AIDS brought us body-horror in the form of The Thing and numerous outbreak movies (and probably planted the seeds for the resurgence of the zombie genre), The Returned is the first genre film I’ve seen that deals with life in the controllable-HIV era. Alex’s condition quietly alienates him from society, and bonds him to others with the same secret.

Bottom line, The Returned is an interesting, sometimes-gripping, movie. It represents a maturity usually not found in genre movies. It’s not interested in the monsters in the dark, but instead what we might well become when the threat of those monsters loom—not monsters ourselves, but flawed, desperate, and heartbreakingly human.

Lord, I miss the movies of the ‘80s. And when I say that, I mean the pre-blockbuster days of the early-‘80s. When the decade still had a contact high from the ‘70s—still batshit crazy, but less violent and despondent.  That moment when we, as a society went from “We’re in the midst of a bad recession and gas shortage, so let’s smoke some pot and have an orgy,” to “Yay! Reagan said that it’s morning in America! Let’s all do coke and have an orgy!” Because, gentle reader only that era of innocence could bring us a big-budget Tarzan movie that basically serves as nudity-delivery vehicle for Bo Derek. And with that, let us dive into 1981’s Tarzan the Ape Man.

The story of Tarzan the Ape Man is really nothing new: girl meets boy raised by monkeys, boy…no, that’s basically it. In this version, Jane (she of “Me Tarzan, you Jane” fame) is played by the aforementioned Bo Derek. Jane has ventured in darkest Africa in search of her father, James Parker (a possibly-unhinged Richard Harris), a world-famous explorer and adventurer.

This explains a great deal.

Jane finds dad set up on a river bank with his expedition, and he is absolutely nuts.  I mean, like, break out the butterfly nets and the rubber room nuts. He greets the arrival of the tramp steamer carrying Jane by doing a jig on the river bank wearing only boots and a nightshirt. Because, I guess the best to whet your audience’s appetite for some nubile Bo Derek flesh is to show Richard Harris hanging brain.

Well, the family reunion isn’t exactly a joyous one, as Jane is really cheesed off at dad for basically abandoning her mother to romp around Africa, and James is obsessed with how beautiful Jane is and how much she resembles her mother. Oh yeah, it gets real incesty real fast, as Parker spends many scenes staring longingly at Jane. This is as good a time as any to point out that pretty much everyone in the movie throws rapey looks at Jane–from the crew of the steamer, to her dad to, well…the elephant might have, it’s hard to tell with elephants. Also: you’re probably going want to take a shower after seeing this movie.

This pretty much sums it up…

James launches the next phase of his expedition which entails climbing a massive cliff face into unexplored Africa where there is rumored to be a great inland sea. And also, a great white ape, whose familiar call they often hear in the distance.

Finally, the movie picks up some steam as members of the expedition go missing, and James attributes it to the great white ape, who, he promises, he will kill and mount on the wall of his club back in England (he’s very insistent about the whole “mounting on the club wall” thing; it’s kinda weird). Soon enough they reach the inland sea  (newsflash, Africa had an ocean in the middle of it back in the 1800s). during a moment alone, when Jane frolics in the waves, the great, white ape himself makes an appearance to rescue her from an errant lion. Only the ape is actually a chiseled slab of man-candy played by Miles O’Keefe.

The only reason women went to this movie…

Well, James runs him off, but later, Tarzan—having liked what he saw of Jane in the ocean (he saw a lot of her) snatches her from the expedition and takes her back to his, uh, home on the beach with his extended family of an apes, lions, and elephants. There he and Jane, well, they basically get each other all hot and bothered, while Jane delivers some of the worst-written lines in cinematic history. There are Cinemax softcore thrillers about vampires stalking strippers that sound like The Thin Man next to this dialogue.

Tarzan’s one smoove operator.

Well, Jane is rescued from her almost-deflowering by James and she rejoins the expedition. Unfortunately, they’re all promptly captured by mud people (uh…I mean, a tribe that slathers themselves in mud, not a racist observation—goddamn it, now Klanwatch is gonna have my blog bookmarked).

Well, the mud…ah, tribe ties everyone up except Jane, who a bunch of the female members give a sexy, sexy bath. Then they slather her with white paint (because Jane’s status as the white goddess in the dark continent wasn’t established thoroughly enough already), and offer her to their massive, mohawked chieftan.

Look, they’re people who wear mud, not…ah, dammit!

Aha! But moments before the white virgin can be despoiled by the savage, Tarzan rides in with a herd of elephants and promptly breaks the dude’s neck after some homoerotic wrestling. James is killed and Jane goes off to live with Tarzan, and the two have a lot of bam-chika-wah-wah—the movie makes this absolutely clear—and we get plenty of totally gratuitous nude scenes by Bo and even a couple of heart-wipes before the movie ends.

But this mere description barely gets at the craziness of Tarzan the Ape Man. To understand it, you have to understand 1981 Bo Derek—a woman at the pinnacle of her desirability. This is no mean feat, as her turn in 1979’s 10 set movie theaters on fire. The scenes of her running along a Mexican beach, cornrows dancing in the breeze single-handedly ended that whole “malaise” thing Jimmy Carter talked about. And this movie was all about getting her naked.

“Our long, national nightmare is finally over! A really hot chick just showed up”

Director John Derek—Bo’s husband—spent much of the early ‘80s making damn sure everyone who watched movies knew exactly how sexy his wife was. In this, pretty much every other scene in Tarzan was John Derek telling the audience, “I’m totally boning her!” Which also explains why everyone in the movie also wants to Bone Bo. You can’t even complain about the racial politics of the movie, because as far as Derek is concerned pretty much everyone is the same—they all want to see Bo Derek naked.

I could go on and on, but this blog post is plenty sleazy already. And that’s what I miss about those early ‘80s movies—the fact that Hollywood decided to make an R-rated Tarzan movie in all seriousness. Eighteen years later, Tarzan returned as a Disney animated feature. I haven’t seen it, but I think it’s safe to say there was a lot less nudity in it. Man, I miss the ‘80s.

Friends, Romans, Cinephiles, lend me your ears (figuratively, of course; this is a blog). I watched Terminal Velocity with naught but the intention to roundly eviscerate it and score some cheap laughs at Charlie Sheen’s expense. This is, after all, an all-but-forgotten 1994 thriller that was all-but-forgotten by…well, a month later in 1994. It would be easy to say that this movie went splat like one of the hapless skydivers that the plot centers around, but that would imply the movie had some weight. In fact, this movie more blew away in the wind like one of those skydivers—if they were full of helium (shit, that started so good). Alas, gentle reader, I come here today not to bury Terminal Velocity, but to praise it, for this movie is utterly brainless, totally improbable, and a lot of fun.

So, Terminal Velocity is basically a spiritual successor to the Z-grade Coleman Francis flick The Skydivers, in that both films were made, I can only assume, because one producer said, “I have some money!” and another said, “I have access to some professional skydivers!” and a screenwriter said, “I can make a movie around those things!” And it was done.

Charlie Sheen on any given Tuesday.

The movie begins with Nastassja Kinski’s woman-of-mystery Chris Morrow on a stakeout in the desert, where she watches a mysterious 747 land. She hurries back to her apartment were she makes some panicked phone calls and is then roughed up by a sinister Christopher MacDonald (sporting a very ‘90s frosted ‘do). She is clearly scared.

Enter professional skydiver Ditch Brodie, who Chris approaches for skydiving lessons. He takes her up for her first jump (after much, much, much painful Sheen-flirting—it’s supposed to be annoying, but still, it’s like watching a monkey fuck a football—no fun for us and exasperating for the monkey). Ditch turns away for a moment, and when he turns back, Chris is gone—apparently having fallen out of the plane.

I can only assume this is Charlie’s version of foreplay.

Ditch jumps after her, and here we have the first example of why this movie is so fun: the aerial sequences are boss as hell. In the pre-CGI days, it was mostly done with actual stuntmen and it looks and feels exhilarating in a way that no movie released this year can match.

Okay, so Ditch loses her, and she goes splat. Sucks, right? What a waste of a Nastassja Kinski. She didn’t even get naked (spoiler: she never does) or turn into a panther (she never does that, either). And Ditch is understandably traumatized. He also can’t figure out why she fell out of the plane.

“Curse you, Red Baron!”

A little amateur sleuthing on his part lands him smack-dab in the middle of a deadly plot involving a very-much-alive Chris, some former KGB goons, that mysterious 747, and a lot of skydiving. Seems Chris, frosty-headed MacDonald, and a bunch of other people are laid-off KGB agents who stumbled into a scheme that fast spiraled out of control, and now some of them are willing to kill to see it through.

“Nah, you’d never see me doing TV…”

Of course, with one or two exceptions, every action sequence involves skydiving, but that doesn’t count as a knock, since the sequences are just so good, with each one upping the ante, until it climaxes with Ditch clinging to a car, plummeting from a cargo plane, trying to free Chris from the trunk. And it gets crazier from there. But we also have…

* James Gandolfini! Yay! We get young(ish) Gandolfini, who, predictably, steals every scene he’s in.

*Wait, these people were laid off from the KGB? Apparently, Hollywood hadn’t learned about the FSB yet.

* Ditch’s plan to seduce Chris ends with, “And be home in time for Leno.” Really? You’re going rush sex with Nastassja Kinski in order to watch late-night TV? And Leno, at that? Okay, younger readers: even in 1994, no one liked Leno that much.

* The movie makes good use of weird locations and people in the desert outside Tucson, including an eccentric gearhead who builds a rocket-sled. It’s the kind of local weirdness that makes even a small movie distinctive.

“Look, Cat People has layers most people just don’t get.”

* Some of the dialogue is pretty horrible: “This woman is to bullshit what Stonehenge is to rocks.” Uh…it’s in a circle? It was in Spinal Tap? I’m not tracking.

* There are a lot of ‘90s time capsules here: the fact Ditch seems to know nothing about foreign countries, Leno, people constantly need to use payphones, one dude needs a calling card to call long-distance, etc.

* More awesomeness can be summed up in two words: wind farm.

* This movie holds the seeds of Charlie Sheen’s meltdown almost 20 years later, but his performance here, for the most part, is pretty likable and he even gets in some pretty funny physical comedy.

* Ditch’s backstory includes, improbably enough, the fact he was a teenage gymnast who qualified for the 1980 Olympics. It’s an odd touch that actually gets a callback in the end.

* More bad dialogue: “KGB? Isn’t it the KG used to B?” (sigh) Why don’t you let other people talk, Charlie.

So, yeah, Terminal Velocity. It’s got a big 14% on Rotten Tomatoes. Check it out.