Cinematic Feature Survey: 2018 (2024)

1. Favorites
2. Eximious
3. Good
4. Mediocre
5. Appalling

Favorites

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)

Written and directed by John Cassavetes
Produced by Al Ruban, Phil Burton
Starring Ben Gazzara, Timothy Carey, Seymour Cassel, Robert Phillips, Morgan Woodward, John Kullers, Al Ruban, Azizi Johari, Virginia Carrington, Meade Roberts, Alice Friedland, Donna Gordon, Haji, Carol Warren, Kathalina Veniero, Yvette Morris, Jack Ackerman, David Rowlands, Trisha Pelham, Sonny Aprile, Gene Darcy, Vincent Barbi, Val Avery, Elizabeth Deering, Soto Joe Hugh

"The great function of conflict is that it arouses consciousness."

--James MacGregor Burns

Synopsis

Almost as soon as he's liquidated a pricey debt incurred while gambling, the cordial, debonair presenter and proprietor of a burlesque club (Gazzara) stakes a cumulative $23K on losing hands. The mobsters (Woodward, Cassel, Phillips, Kullers) to whom it's owed expect his arrears paid in full only by the prompt assassination of a bookmaker (Hugh), but they never expected their cool, compassionate debtor to be so tough, canny, or unlucky.

Script

Crime dramas don't come much more reflective or humane than Cassavetes's condemnation of ruinous rats, here opposed to a protagonist who's as magnanimous as formidable. Conundra consequent of vice and ungenerosity are anatomized in toto, untainted by the delusion that nobility absolves. American cinema's first fully independent auteur here plies Kuosawa's burden: the moral man straining in an immoral world.

Direction

In intimate close-ups or at immobile, tracking and panning distances, we spy every expressive and gestural shading of Cassavetes's dramatis personae, captured as graphically as his sparing, impelling violence. Like Altman's contemporary output, this segues from dispassionate to personal observation without tonal incongruity or bathos.

Cinematography

Grainy gloom, glares of electric and solar sources, and both contrasting are lensed by Mitchell Breit and co-producer/co-star Al Ruban, who beautify bright, often gaudy hues.

Histrionics

Every lusty gust, desperate glance, loving stare, amiable assurance, indignant scowl or snarl, and smile radiant or hateful was felt as much as acted: Gazzara poured his essence into Cosmo Vitelli to vivify his director's charismatic self-conception. As a stripper in his employ who jealously adores him, Johari exudes as much discontent as nubility. Seething, hissing Carey is no less intense as an intimidating heavy who foists by force the unlikely hitman's unwanted felony. In a subtler approach, ordinarily avuncular Cassel insinuates more menace with a simple grin than most uttered threats. The club's flamboyant host (Roberts) and ecdysiasts (Johari, Carrington, Friedland, Gordon, Haji, Warren, Veniero) credibly incorporate seedy, working-class entertainers.

Score

Some melodic themes by Bo Harwood are heard within, and briefly outside Vitelli's club.

Highlights

Preparation for and execution of the titular hit are realistically riveting. Johari's jaundiced stripper attacks a waitress (Pelham) during her rehearsal. In the aftermath of his settlement, Vitelli eludes killers, confronts the mother (Carrington) of his favorite employee, then encourages his sulking staff with a deliberative dispensation of wisdom. What a week!

Conclusion

No single chef-d'oeuvre from Cassavetes's string during the '70s is readily selected as the best, but this would be a tenable pick.

Recommended for a double feature paired with California Split or Saint Jack.

Eximious

Revanche (2008)

Written and directed by Götz Spielmann
Produced by Sandra Bohle, Mathias Forberg, Götz Spielmann, Heinz Stussak, Thomas Feldkircher
Starring Johannes Krisch, Ursula Strauss, Irina Potapenko, Andreas Lust, Johannes Thanheiser, Hanno Pöschl

"Between grief and nothing I will take grief."

--William Faulkner, The Wild Palms

Synopsis

Ardent, amoral lovers hope to discharge her debt, realize his prospective enterprise, and eluctate from their employment as a whor*house's enforcer (Krisch) and star hooker (Potapenko) by a bank heist, which proceeds swimmingly until her tender heart is stopped by one of a few rounds misaimed by a hapless policeman (Lust). The brokenhearted ex-con sublimates his crushing grief with rural toil at the farm of his elderly grandfather (Thanheiser), and soon discovers that his dulcinea's killer resides with his wife (Strauss) nearby.

Script

A redemptive tenor implied by its bisemic title is fulfilled in Spielmann's unadorned, fatalistic feature, in which impulsive and carnal phases of dolor, disgruntlement, dissatisfaction, and frustration are gracefully, naturally enacted, and neither muddled nor belied by any pronounced plethora.

Direction

Emphatic pans and seemingly simple still shots maximize every scene's dramatic import. Spielmann's style is spartan, but not minimalist, intimating forebodings and reverberations.

Histrionics

Alone and interacting, Krisch vehemently represents his felon's facets: frolicly erotic with and sympathetically solicitous for Potapenko's unsettled, traumatically battered inamorata; as taciturn as the aged widower who's revived by his grandson's subvention; inimically wounded in response to friendly visits by Strauss's housewife; simmering with tristesse and wrath against Lust's guilt, both men tortured by the same quietus to a climax comprehending a confrontational conversation. Attuned to their director's instinct for passionate predication, this cast's excellence obscures their script's formidable challenges.

Conclusion

Spielmann's objective observation of human nature relates moral themes with an austerity unmatched even by great contemporaries such as Farhadi or Kore-eda. Many dramas discourse on loss, sorrow, and remorse with the realistic reserve of his masterwork, but only a handful are so profoundly poignant.

Upstream Color (2013)

Written and directed by Shane Carruth
Produced by Shane Carruth, Casey Gooden, Ben LeClair, Meredith Burke, Toby Halbrooks, Scott Douglass, Brent Goodman
Starring Amy Seimetz, Shane Carruth, Andrew Sensenig, Thiago Martins

Synopsis

From shoat to stream to orchid to larva unto man, an elusive parasite's life cycle in triplex stages is exploited by punctilious criminals (Sensenig, Martins) to defraud victims whose ingestion of it renders them supremely suggestible by dint of biochemical hypnosis. Two such dupes (Seimetz, Carruth) whose lives were so ruined clairvoyantly explore their traumatic repercussions together as they gradually realize what's befallen them, and unravel its mystery by tracing cycle to source.

Script

Primer's Gordian anachrony confounds comprehension during a first or second viewing, but here writer/producer/director/DP/cameraman/co-editor/composer/co-star Carruth masterfully balances oracularity and lucidity with direct yet disordered disclosure. He also nimbly juggles two balls so often fumbled by other authors of science fiction by inseparably mingling his story's personal and fantastic aspects.

Direction

For his painterly eye, Carruth's every slow zoom, brisk pan and still close-up is memorably picturesque. Striking shots from mundane, hydrous and subcutaneous settings graphically illustrate events best left unspoken.

Cinematography

Luminous photography that alternates between beautiful vividity and slight desaturation with a faint, milky haze catches the eye in every carefully framed shot. The organism's phases are pictured with actual and simulated microphotography. Carruth utilizes digital cameras with an expertise excelling that of many DPs who've far more experience with that nearly nascent technology.

Editing

Contemplative shots of this picture linger meaningfully, but during its procedural and ritualistic scenes, editorial rapidity effectively propels pace. To exemplify telegnostic nexus of empathy, action, and location, Carruth and co-editor David Lowery intricately cut hundreds of correspondent shots together with a rhythm that's as engaging as demonstrative. Much of Seimetz's and Carruth's conversational dialogue may initially seem haphazardly sequenced during lengthy montages, but it expresses their mutual fascination and frustration as they struggle to probe one another and determine whose memories are whose.

Histrionics

Carruth's all but playing himself, and his cast assume his sober, saturnine deportment. After a string of roles as battered and amatory characters in genre fare such as Bitter Feast, A Horrible Way to Die, The Off Hours, Silver Bullets, Autoerotic, You're Next, et cetera, Seimetz seems to effortlessly underplay her harrowed protagonist. How much of her quietly uneasy intimacy with Carruth was genuine at this early stage isn't publicly known, but their blossoming chemistry, with its enamored ebullitions, is essential to the cryptaesthetic sympathy that their lovers share.

Score

Sampled strings, piano, gong, and resonating, droning, arpeggiated, beeping, buzzing, warbling, echoed samples and synthesizers harmonize mesmerizingly in Carruth's music to amplify without ever diverting from his onscreen activity.

Highlights

Every stage of the vermicious organism's life is engrossingly depicted in speciously imaginative, often gruesome detail. Likewise, routines assigned to distract each hypnotized host, and the habitudes that they subsequently inspire, are ingeniously conceived. Lucid dreams of obverse scenes that transpire in austere offices and bathrooms include a revelational and retributive climax not to be forgotten.

Flaws

At 8:33, Martins faintly uptalks a line. How dismaying it is to hear a masterpiece momentarily marred by millennialism!

Conclusion

Would that more filmmakers understood their medium's power to convey by ephemeral images rather than graceless exposition, or trusted their audience's capacity for inference. Carruth's science fiction is truly sui generis: an elegant tale presenting simple, novel concepts in a complex idiom that's no less challenging for its accessibility. His retirement and troubles that have worsened in public view represent a great loss to an independent American cinema that needs its few finest talents more than ever. Even if the Texan auteur's second movie proves to be his last, it's perhaps the best of the 21st century to so penetratingly straddle convention and experiment.

The Wind Rises (2013)

Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
Written by Tatsuo Hori, Hayao Miyazaki
Produced by Toshio Suzuki, Seiji Okuda, Naoya Fujimaki, Ryoichi f*ckuyama, Koji Hoshino, Nobuo Kawakami
Starring Hideaki Anno, Hidetoshi Nishijima, Miori Takimoto, Masahiko Nishimura, Mansai Nomura, Jun Kunimura, Hrvoje Klecz, Mirai Shida, Shinobu Otake, Morio Kazama, Keiko Takesh*ta, Mayu Iino, Kaichi Kaburagi, Maki Shinta

"If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes."

--Charles Lindbergh

Synopsis

Volant mechanical grace takes flight from his afflatus and unceasing trials during the decadal apex of myopic aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi (Anno), when he dreams as since his childhood of fantastic, lofted colloquy with aviatic pioneer Giovanni Battista Caproni (Nomura), courts his ailing ladylove Naoko (Takimoto), designs Mitsubishi's innovative A5M, A6M "Zero," J2M "Thunderbolt," and A7M "Strong Gale" fighters, and privately reprehends his empire's needless poverty and senselessly self-destructive bellicism.

Script

Aeronautic preoccupations are observable in many of Miyazaki's past pictures (Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Castle in the Sky, Porco Rosso, Imaginary Flying Machines), culminating in this animation of his eponymous manga, in which professional accounts from Horikoshi's memoir Eagles of Mitsubishi are integrated with the semi-autobiographical, romantic tragedy of Tatsuo Hori's The Wind Has Risen, and the director's plentiful, personal, fanciful contrivances as a singular fictionalization. Horikoshi's requited devotion to his craft and lover alike radiate fervently in word, deed, intimation, and aeolian metaphor, despite the tribulations and formal restraint of his age.

Direction, animation, designs

Hundreds of painted backgrounds, thousands of cels in and without motion, and largely inconspicuous CG were created with physiurgic, bodily, often diagrammatic detail so meticulous whether minute or massive that every shot bears and merits scrutiny. Environments, architecture, vesture, and vehicles of Japan in the late Taisho and early Showa eras, and of the NSDAP's hostile, industrially superior Germany are depictured with an unmatched fidelity. Across peaceful, windswept countrysides, over cities burning from bombardment or earthquake, in bustling offices, and bedrooms still and somber, Miyazaki's conventional compositions mesh well with others daring, as in stunningly animated volitations and crashes of winged prototypes, the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, and Horikoshi's imaginary dreams and reveries.

Vocalizations

Not a word's misspoken by a suitable cast consisting of headliners and seiyuu. Anno voices Horikoshi with humility and humanity inevident in his own output since the early '90s, or whenever addressing his fans or critics. Spoken by Takimoto, his gentle, gracious sweetheart's sweetness affects achingly. Ears needn't be keen to recognize the voice of Mitsubishi's chief engineer as that of old Kunimura, or of Horikoshi's closest schoolmate, then colleague as dashing leading man Nishijima. Both Horikoshi's ambitious sister and dwarfish manager are spunkily vocalized by Nishimura and Shida, respectively.

Conclusion

Like those of its allies and enemies during World War II, Japan's history in the 21st century is marked by thitherto unimagined advancement and catastrophes. Miyazaki is hardly the first to recount in this setting how war despoiled and deferred the technological promise of modernity, or how true love steels against hardship, but few movies have expounded with such ardor the conception of the airplane as mensural and mathematical compromises, fastidious draftsmanship, volatile curvilinearity, harmony of airborne beauty and function. By merging some of the great aeronautic achievements of an ill-advised war with a celebrated prewar novel's genteel pathos, Ghibli's master again lays bare the powers of the mind and the heart.

Recommended for a double feature paired with Porco Rosso.

The Witch: A New-England Folktale (2015)

Written and directed by Robert Eggers
Produced by Brian Campbell, Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen, Jodi Redmond, Daniel Bekerman, Rodrigo Teixeira, Lourenço Sant'Anna, Sophie Mas, Michael Sackler, Julia Godzinskaya, Chris Columbus, Eleanor Columbus, Alex Sagalchik, Alexandra Johnes, Jonathan Bronfman, Thomas Benski, Lucas Ochoa, Joel Burch, Rosalie Chilelli, Lauren Haber, Mark Gingras, Ethan Lazar, Lon Molnar
Starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Charlie, Ellie Grainger, Lucas Dawson, Bathsheba Garnett, Sarah Stephens

"It is not actually a sign of spiritual eminence to be moral in the Puritan sense; it is simply a sign of docility, of lack of enterprise and originality, of cowardice."

--H. L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy

Synopsis

There was a farmstead by forest where a family relocated from their Puritan settlement for the galled initiative of its patriarch (Ineson), after his firstborn daughter (Taylor-Joy) was accused of witchery. Falling to hunger, pestilence and paranoia, madness from misfortunes, sorcery and sin, no one of their attrited party remained to bear testimony after they were by woods devoured before 1630 ended.

Script

A postscript inserted into this movie's end credits concedes derivation of folklore and historical reports adapted to its events and dialogue, but a true afflatus guided Eggers's percipient portrayal of the Puritan ethos, and of faunal happenings interpreted as Satanic signs and witchcraft. Harsh ironies are peppered for and underpin the self-fulfilling prophecy that drives his period piece, as how expectations of providence beget delusion, despair follows the uncertainty of salvation, iniquity's often an unintended accompaniment of righteous response, the neuroticism intrinsic to their Abrahamic faith renders these hardy settlers as psychically unfit to contend with imagined or veridic black magic as they are ill-equipped to farm or hunt in the wilds of the New World, and that sin in their belief is so comprehensively defined that frivolity is indistinguishable from atrocity.

Direction

Eggers amenaged his first feature with a veteran's virtuosity and no needless flourishes. Painterly static shots inspired by Renaissant and Baroque portraiture and still lifes example the refinement of his manner, which is handsomely actualized by Craig Lathrop's agricultural production design.

Cinematography

By daylight, moonlight feigned, and candlelight supplemented, Jarin Blaschke imaged scenes in 1.66 : 1 to display sylvestrian immensity and indoor confinement, a method equiparable to those of Tarkovsky and Teshigahara for their retention of the Academy ratio well after the latter's industry had roundly adopted widescreen formats. Many daily exteriors are grayed by grading to convey New England's overcast weather, in contrast to the lambency of rooms lit by flames.

Editing

Only a few operative abruptnesses call attention to Louise Ford's improminently polished cut.

Histrionics

Taylor-Joy's is this picture's fair face, delicately radiating by broad Celtic eyes and cupid's bow a vulnerability shared but unsurpassed by her co-stars. Reaffirming their reputations for versatility, gravelly Ineson and shrill Dickie counterpoise his forbearing stoicism against her mounting hysteria in expression of the same fatal desperation. Nearly everyone here -- including young Scrimshaw as a doubting, then hexed younger brother, and bratty little twins Grainger and Dawson -- performs plausibly in King's English with prodigious vim. Sable, sportive billy goat Charlie is the most natural of them all, his steady stare implying the subtlest maleficence.

Score

Pendereckian strings and Ligetan chorus as horrific disharmony are nothing novel, but Mark Korven's distinctly selected nyckelharpa, waterphone, hurdy gurdy, and jouhikko sound dissonantly with viols and cello for his eerily angular score.

Flaws

Candles weren't affordable in such abundance to impoverished, colonial families. Formal "you" and informal "thou" are uttered carelessly for each other.

Conclusion

Antipathetic, archetypal Puritans and witches have peopled tiresome, lowbrow filmic fayre athwart the Atlantic, but Eggers's rigorously researched, powerfully played tragedy chills to the bone with admirable rarety and ambiguity, focused on the failings of piety before grue indelible.

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Synopsis

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Direction

Cinematography

Editing

Histrionics

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Highlights

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Conclusion

Recommended for a double feature paired with .

Good

The Accomplices (1983)

Written and directed by Francis Veber
Produced by Francis Veber, Gérard Depardieu, Pierre Richard
Starring Pierre Richard, Gérard Depardieu, Stéphane Bierry, Anny Duperey, Michel Aumont, Philippe Khorsand, Jean-Jacques Scheffer, Maurice Barrier, Roland Blanche, Patrick Blondel, Jacques Maury, Florence Moreau, Gisèle Pascal, Florence Mancini

Bioparental incertitude often ensues youthful promiscuity, so when the mother (Duperey) of a runaway teenager (Bierry) enlists the aid of two bygone lovers -- a pugnacious, profligate pressman (Depardieu), and a sensitively suicidal schoolteacher (Richard) -- to track and retrieve him in Nice, both are convinced by her falsehoods professing their particular paternities. She couldn't foresee that they'd meet and seek their sham son together, tailed by two greasy gangsters (Khorsand, Scheffer) whose boss isn't a fan of the aggressive journalist's celebrated exposés. Two of his three preferent leading men make the most of Veber's featherweight farce with coactive comical esprit, running, stumbling, bickering, brawling, and pratfalling through his mishaps, horseplay, and situational clichés. Depardieu and Richard should've co-starred in more pictures as an antic duo, but neither they nor anything else here are as memorable as the wackily whistled main theme of Vladimir Cosma's score. Most of Veber's movies were Americanized, this as the witlessly piddling Fathers' Day.

Recommended for a double or triple feature with The She-goat and/or The Fugitives.

Brother 2 (2000)

Written and directed by Aleksey Balabanov
Produced by Sergey Selyanov, Timothy E. Sabo, Valerie Gobos
Starring Sergey Bodrov, Viktor Sukhorukov, Sergey Makovetskiy, Darya Yurgens, Alexander Diachenko, Kirill Pirogov, Aleksandr Naumov, Ray Toler, Gary Houston, Lisa Jeffrey, Irina Saltykova, Aleksandr Karamnov, Konstantin Murzenko, Konstantin Zheldin, Tatyana Zakharova

Synopsis

In Moscow, opportunity knocks repeatedly as vice at the door of casual hitman Danila (Bodrov), who beds a pop star (Saltykova, playing herself), then with his maniacal, boozing brother Viktor (Sukhorukov) evades and combats gangsters charged by a laundering banker (Makovetskiy) while investigating the dispossession of a fellow Army veteran's twin brother (both Diachenko), an NFL player for the Chicago Blackhawks. These siblings separate in the United States: Danila experiences cross-cultural shock in Brighton Beach of NYC where he buys CDs at a secondhand shop and a lemon of a Cadillac, befriends another chummy trucker (Toler) and feasts on a colossal cheeseburger en route to Chicago, seduces a cutely toothy, leggy news reporter (Jeffrey), takes a beating from before ambuscading a pimp and his thugs to rescue a Russian streetwalker (Yurgens) from her meretricious rut, and slowly tracks down the underhanded Chicagoan investor (Houston) who's mulcting his buddy's brother; meanwhile, Viktor parties, whor*s, and outmaneuvers moronic Ukrainian mobsters from whom he's drawing fire. What a vacation!

Script

Most of his characterizations are broad and stereotypical in contradistinction to Bodrov's righteous, ruthless, ruminant hero, but the binational ambition manifest in Balabanov's sequel is undeniable. Danila espouses and exhibits integrity, initiative and invention as the exemplary New Russian braving two maliferous cities, who reprobates a glutted superpower in decline sharded with broken dreams. According with popular Russian attitudes, this movie is explicitly, conditionally anti-black, anti-American, and anti-Ukrainian (it's been banned in the world's most extortionate puppet state since 2015!). Bodrov's famous line paraphrases Nevsky: "strength is in truth" -- a repudiation of aggrandized avarice denouncing a deranged empire fueled by war and debt.

Direction

His prowess for shooting stunts and procedures improved significantly in a few years, redounding to Balabanov's sharper style.

Cinematography

Comparably, Sergey Astakhov's photography isn't so dingy the second time around; figures therein are saliently silhouetted against urban backgrounds.

Histrionics

Ingenuously charming, troglodytically handsome, born to wear cozy sweaters, Bodrov was post-Soviet Russia's unheralded answer to Belmondo, and dourly epitomized his generation's masculinity. He's both foil and lead by underplaying his noble assassin, and no one's more entertaining than Sukhorukov as his dissolute, flagitious big brother. For her harsh lineaments and harsher demeanor, shaved Yurgens's whorish portrayal is uncomfortably on the mark. No such praise can be paid to Saltykova, who's here by her stardom. Most of the Americans are amusingly hammy, particularly Jeffrey, who's as lankily toothsome as Toler is earthily benignant.

Score

Only one song (in two versions) by Nautilus Pompilius is heard on this soundtrack, which is nevertheless bountiful with catchy tracks by Bi-2, Vyacheslav Butusov, Saltykova, Okean Elzy, Sergei Bobunets, Zemfira, Chicherina, AuktsYon, Smyslovyye gallyutsinatsii, Splin, Agata Kristi, Vadim Samoylov, Tantsy Minus, Krematoriy, Masha i medvedi, Sleeping for Sunrise, and La Mansh. Enjoyment of these contributions is wholly dependent on any listener's taste for popular music from Russia and some of its former Soviet satellites.

Highlights

• An automotive chase and firefight through backroads of Moscow is ably staged.
• A montage of Danila's trip from New York to Illinois relays his introduction to American culture.
• At a construction site, Danila fashions a firearm from whittled wood, sawn pipes, and matchsticks.
• A rampage is superbly shot from Danila's point of view as an homage to first-person shooters.
• Confabulation between Russian compatriots verbalizes Russocentric consensus, asperities that enmire expatriates, and a bit of wisdom.

Conclusion

Sequels that sate are rare enough, but this droll, exciting, smartly plotted continuation of his epochal crime drama proves that Balabanov had enough gimmicks and intercultural insights to please his audience again on a trim budget.

Recommended for a double feature paired with The American Friend, Rainy Dog, or Brother.

Courier (1986)

Directed by Karen Shakhnazarov
Written by Karen Shakhnazarov, Aleksandr Borodyanskiy
Starring Fyodor Dunayevsky, Anastasiya Nemolyaeva, Oleg Basilashvili, Inna Churikova, Svetlana Kryuchkova, Aleksandr Pankratov-Chyornyy, Vladimir Menshov, Aleftina Evdokimova, Yevdokiya Urusova, Vladimir Smirnov, Andrei Vertogradov

In the backwash of his parents' divorce, a sullen, straying, flippant, pseudophilic messenger (Dunayevsky) for a periodical shirks work, pranks adults, dreams of imparlance with a mausoleum's bust of his distant father (Vertogradov) and tribesmen with whom he fraternizes in Africa, frivols with the lovely daughter (Nemolyaeva) of a prominent preceptor (Basilashvili) who can't abide him, and awaits conscription and the grim possibility of deployment to Afghanistan. As much and often as its protagonist does Shakhnazarov's hit dither from cavalier comedy to broody rumination, delineating divisions of reciprocally uncomprehending generations and classes (that latter a novelty in late Soviet society) with a subtlety unobserved in John Hughes's coeval teen fiction. The zeitgeist of the U.S.S.R.'s final years perfused for preservation a handful of Mosfilm's movies, but this is a cut above most for a cast who unerringly hit their marks, Nikolay Nemolyaev's exceptional cinematography, and percussive electropop tunes by Eduard Artemyev more memorable than his ambient passages sounded by woodwinds and guitar. Many topics constitute the confluent core of Shakhnazarov's adaptation from his novel: familial disintegration, the irreverent impulse to overstep boundaries during adolescence that redounds to a confusion between admiring mimicry and mockery, and phenomena insinuated and illustrated without comment, as public faith faltering for the once-indomitable Red Army, burgeoning anomie to soon metastasize in the first years of the sequent Federation, and symptoms of foreign influences circumventing a rusting, sagging iron curtain -- fashionable magazines riffled by snotty shkolnitsi, Tomisaburo Wakayama pummeling combatants on television, teenagers breakdancing throughout Moscow. All of these designate salient facets of Russian ethos as it was and would become.

Recommended for a double feature paired with Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears.

Gregory's Girl (1980)

Written and directed by Bill Forsyth
Produced by Davina Belling, Clive Parsons
Starring John Gordon Sinclair, Robert Buchanan, Graham Thompson, Billy Greenlees, Dee Hepburn, Jake D'Arcy, Clare Grogan, Alan Love, Caroline Guthrie, Carol Macartney, Douglas Sannachan, Allison Forster, Chic Murray, John Bett, Alex Norton, Dave Anderson

Synopsis

His unrequited crush on his secondary school's sportive star striker (Hepburn) prepossesses a zanily ungainly student (Sinclair) who's more girl-crazy than his eccentric friends (Buchanan, Greenlees, Thompson), but too clueless to find romance without help from his sagacious sister (Forster) and female peers (Guthrie, Macartney, Grogan), who've a clearer perspective than he of his prospects.

Script

Quirks of characters and consequences constitute most of Forsyth's affable humor throughout his gentle yet earthy charmer, which is slimly plotted but so entertaining that most won't mind or notice.

Direction

Forsyth sets his shots with commonplace skill, but draws eye and attention with panning and tracking shots, as one oscillating to follow Sinclair and Forster revolving on a playground's carousel.

Cinematography

Rich and restrained colors mesh through Michael Coulter's lenses, even during a few fuzzy shots.

Editing

Most of John Gow's splices are inconspicuously sensible, but some conversations are overcut to insinuate a certain dubiety regarding Forsyth's blocking.

Histrionics

As goofy, gawky, gangly Gregory, naturalistically twitchy Sinclair secured a funny footnote in the annals of British cinema. Dully pretty Hepburn, toothily exuberant Buchanan and sardonic Greenlees are fun foils to their lovable leading man. Murray understatedly steals a couple of scenes when his stern headmaster indulges cibarious and pianistic passions.

Score

Colin Tully's saxy, reedy instrumentation is typical of MOR in the '70s and '80s, and his upbeat music is of a sort that most probably prefer to Muzak when waiting on hold.

Highlights

A contrast between precocious, enterprising preteens (such as Forster's junior sibling) and the oversexed, excitable teenagers who they jeer produces some hilarious incidents. Anecdotes of his sexual adventures are recounted by a young window washer (Sannachan) to admiring upperclassmen. Buchanan repeatedly, ridiculously fails to chat with schoolmates of the opposite sex by reciting revolting factoids.

Flaws

Only a few half-flubbed lines and excessively edited scenes are noticeable.

Conclusion

Forsyth's popular comedic classic is satisfyingly silly and sentimental, a sweetly simple fiction of awkward adolescence in all its bubbly, breathless glory. Scotland's rightly renowned for its provincial humor and proud of movies like this, in which it's enjoyably exhibited.

Into the Night (1985)

Directed by John Landis
Written by Ron Koslow
Produced by George Folsey Jr., Ron Koslow
Starring Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Pfeiffer, David Bowie, Kathryn Harrold, Paul Mazursky, Bruce McGill, Clu Gulager, John Landis, Michael Zand, Hadi Sadjadi, Beruce Gramian, Carl Perkins, Jake Steinfeld, Irene Papas, Roger Vadim, Richard Farnsworth, Vera Miles, Stacey Pickren, Domingo Ambriz, Dan Aykroyd, Carmen Argenziano, Reid Smith

Synopsis

Boredom and frustration quietly distress a cuckolded, insomniac aerospace engineer (Goldblum) until he's swept into the caper of a smuggler (Pfeiffer) pursued by a bloodlusty, Iranian quartet (Landis, Zand, Sadjadi, Gramian), a British hitman (Bowie), and his nefarious French employer (Vadim), who're all voracious for emeralds from the Iranian shah's defunct fisc that she's conveyed from Switzerland. Limitless danger harries them across Los Angeles in their search for a safe recipient.

Script

Violence and comedy are shrewdly balanced in Koslow's story, the former of which is almost too harsh to be countered by the latter. Packed with action, slapstick, sight gags, compelling characters, and soundly shared exposition, it's an ideal screenplay for....

Direction

....Landis, who directed this whilst charged with five counts of involuntary manslaughter for his part in the lethal disaster that plagued production of his segment in Twilight Zone: The Movie. His uncompromised craftsmanship is visible in plenteously pulchritudinous close-ups, and satisfying shots of palatial exteriors and sumptuous interiors in swanky locations through Ellay, or in a terrific opening shot descending to a runway at LAX shot from the undercarriage of a landing airplane.

Cinematography

Robert Paynter's photography is rich in detail and color, especially its eye-popping reds.

Editing

Cuts by Malcolm Campbell are inevident, except those slickly brisking every accelerated chase.

Histrionics

Miscast Goldblum and Pfeiffer personably play off of each other as a refreshingly pre-romantic couple. As much appeal and nuance was conferred by Goldblum as Koslow to his nice nerd, an inadequate vessel for his famous peculiarities; Landis's subsequent star Chevy Chase would've been shallower but funnier. Ice queen Pfeiffer thawed charmingly to abnegate her usual glamor, but her flighty conspiratress would've fit Kathleen Turner or Jennifer Jason Leigh like a glove....were the latter not a plaintiff in one of numerous wrongful death suits against Landis, Warner Bros., et al. during production.
A few supporting players swipe specific scenes: resurgent Bowie's smarmily squirrelly when menacing the protagonists, a covetous federal agent is risibly rendered by perennially grumpy Gulagher as irately as McGill's fraternal Elvis impersonator, and lanky Landis flails feistily as the clumsiest of the wantonly destructive Persians. Mazursky finally learned how to act in the '70s, and he's in his element as a lecherous movie producer lusting for one of his shapely supernumeraries (Harrold). Dissimilarly uncomfortable Vadim's charisma can't quite overcome a lingual barrier that stilts his delivery. Aykroyd, Ambriz, Farnsworth, Miles, and Papas animate passing yet pivotal people.
As in his contemporaneous Spies Like Us, Landis affordably, efficiently peopled nearly every scene with more fellow filmmakers (David Cronenberg, Jim Henson, Richard Franklin, Lawrence Kasdan, Jonathan Demme, Amy Heckerling, Don Siegel, Paul Bartel, Jack Arnold, Andrew Marton, Daniel Petrie), more musicians (Carl Perkins, Lou Marini), screenwriters (Waldo Salt, Carl Gottlieb, Colin Higgins), members of his crew (DP Paynter, assistant director David Sosna, camera operator Christopher Dunn George, sound mixer William B. Kaplan, stunt coordinator Eddy Donno, costumer Sue Dugan, makeup artist Wes Dawn, unit publicist Saul Kahan), and others (makeup wizard Rick Baker, fitness guru Jake Steinfeld, Pfeiffer's sister Dedee) in congruous cameos for the observant cinephile.

Score

Orchestrations by Alf Clausen contribute to a greater depth in Ira Newborn's score than that heard in his music for John Hughes's pictures. It was composed to complement three good but gratingly misproduced tracks by B.B. King.

Conclusion

This odd flop from Landis's fertile heyday is one among plenty of good, half-forgotten, mid-budgeted movies churned out by major studios in the '80s that deserve reassessment, if only for its dash, sensational sites, and superabundant notables.

Recommended for a double feature paired with Spies Like Us or Romancing the Stone.

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The Night Porter (1974)

Directed by Liliana Cavani
Written by Liliana Cavani, Barbara Alberti, Amedeo Pagani, Italo Moscati, Charlotte Rampling, Dirk Bogarde, Anthony Forwood
Produced by Esa De Simone, Robert Gordon Edwards, Paola Tallarigo, Joseph E. Levine
Starring Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling, Amedeo Amodio, Philippe Leroy, Gabriele Ferzetti, Giuseppe Addobbati, Isa Miranda, Ugo Cardea, Nino Bignamini, Geoffrey Copleston, Marino Masé, Piero Vida, Manfred Freyberger, Hilda Gunther, Nora Ricci

One postwar perk indulged by an erstwhile Sturmbannfuehrer and Viennese hotel's furtive porter (Bogarde) in 1957 eventuates from a fortuitous encounter with the wife (Rampling) of an orchestra's conductor (Masé), with whom he resumes the kinkily abusive affair in which they reveled when she was imprisoned at a concentration camp where he was stationed during the war. Their recrudescent amor isn't appreciated by restive, fastidious, fellow former SS officers (Leroy, Ferzetti, Amodio, Copleston, Freyberger) whose expiring patience is contiguate to their determination for disposal. Cavani's gloomy, lethally perverted drama is hardly as shocking or salacious as it seemed a semicentury ago, but it's nathless retained its erotic edge sharpened on the grindstone of her directorial focus evinced by angles and actors alike. Her handsome, creepily charismatic leads are as unforgettable for the tense potency of downcast aspects and lingering stares as for the incandescence of their (mostly extemporized) sadomasoch*stic amation, much of which is shown and suggested in consistently corresponding and contrasting cutbacks to her sexualized incarceration that interchange precisely for Franco Arcalli's exacting edits. Rigorous supporting players all but meet their eclipsing leads, especially Amodio in his role of a pitiful ballerino manqué. Periodic trappings comprised of Piero Tosi's costumes and sets dressed by Osvaldo Desideri in Rome -- which mesh seamlessly with gray, gallant locations shot in Vienna -- complete this picture's midcentury simulation. Contemporaneous, stateside critics brainlessly loathed Cavani's deviance and grantedly exploitative, ahistorical liberties, but also what they wouldn't admit: that she'd dared to craft fiction beyond the historiographically orthodox ambit encompassing the National Socialists' holocaust, and even further, wouldn't counterdistinguish its doomed lovers' coadoration from their transgressive carnality. That traumatic relation between love and depravity, incarnate as an unacknowledged, macabre pact, burns as ardently and ephemerally as a vesuvian under rainfall.

Recommended for a double feature paired with The Conformist.

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Spectre (1977)

Directed by Clive Donner
Written by Gene Roddenberry, Samuel A. Peeples
Produced by Gordon Scott, Danny Steinmann, Gene Roddenberry
Starring Robert Culp, Gig Young, John Hurt, Ann Bell, Gordon Jackson, James Villiers, Majel Barrett, Jenny Runacre, Angela Grant

Synopsis

Wealth and clout accrue preternaturally to a debauched financier (Villiers), whose distressed sister (Bell) commissions an accomplished criminologist and occultist (Culp) to investigate whether her sibling's success transcends nature. Reunited with a bibulous physician (Young), the supercilious spiritist jets tempestuously to England to hazard traps, enticements and demonomagy, and verify what's been released upon the estate of his suspect's renovated abbey.

Script

Of his numerous pilots that failed to father a televised series in the '70s, this is undoubtedly the best penned and produced by Roddenberry antedating the theatrical resurgence of Star Trek. Their intent to hitch a ride on Kolchak's coattails moved he and Peeples to present mythologic and thaumaturgic fantasy as criminal procedural, which works well for anyone who's inclined to brook or relish his theurgic, often lecherous situations. Their story's brisk as exhibition of its Holmesian protagonist's interdisciplinary expertise and snappy chaff chirped with its Watsonian deuteragonist, which is never misplaced....even if it all leads to another showdown with another rubbery, biped lizard.

Histrionics

With steely, flamboyant aplomb did Culp throw himself into his conceited mystic, and he's as magnetic when exchanging persiflage with Young (or, for that matter, everyone else) as when spouting incantations or flourishingly performing other apotropaic rituals. His skeptic foil isn't at all dwarfed, as Young handily holds his own despite some boozy moments that necessitated an attribution of alcoholism to his character at the 13th hour. Hurt's in characteristically fine form as a gifted, genial junior brother to imperious Villiers and dowdy Bell, as is invariably reliable Jackson playing a chief inspector whose own enquiry creeps miles behind that of his civilian colleagues. Roddenberry's spousal mainstay Barrett remotely rounds out this cast in the part of Culp's magical maid. This production would be nothing of note without a cast who brought to it a sophisticated charisma, even in the course of its silliest kitsch.

Conclusion

It might've been the gloriously campy series that revived Culp's career as a leading man, but instead this dated curio was relegated to a few unnoticed telecasts. Nonetheless, it's required viewing for fans of the chinny Scotach, Young, Hurt, Jackson, or Roddenberry -- especially come Halloween.

Super Dark Times (2017)

Directed by Kevin Phillips
Written by Ben Collins, Luke Piotrowski
Produced by Edward Parks, Richard Peete, Jett Steiger, Traci Carlson, Rachel Ward, Lana Kim, Keith Marlin, Andrew Banks, Niraj Bhatia, Dan Burks, Ben Collins, William Hall, Cameron Lamb, Luke Piotrowski
Starring Owen Campbell, Charlie Tahan, Elizabeth Cappuccino, Amy Hargreaves, Max Talisman, Sawyer Barth, Adea Lennox, Ethan Botwick, Philip H. Ashley, Anni Krueger, Justin Rose, Kortnee Simmons, Samantha Jones, Hayden Oliver, Dario Saraceno

Synopsis

A squabble proximal to bladed horseplay occasions the bloody manslaughter of a hyperactive, obnoxious teenager (Talisman) at the foible of a stainless steel katana, which is secreted near his body in the forest where he took his final running steps. Their friendship is uncoupled for an understood pact of secrecy, but the sorrow and stress sustained by one sensitive witness (Campbell) is alien to the unstable culprit (Tahan) whose pathology is unleashed by his crime and disaffection.

Script

If you were born between '77 and '83, and raised in a small, sleepy town, you probably skipped school to play pranks and hang out, attended a party where supposedly everyone partook, and toed every other line that you knew you shouldn't cross, unless you did. Maybe you read about it on the second or third page of the local weekly, or it happened three or four houses down -- unless you saw it yourself. Anyone who was a middle-class adolescent in the '90s will recognize themselves, friends, or acquaintances in Collins's and Piotrowski's verisimilous characters, whose edgy pretensions and bawdy badinage both bare and beshroud hormonal maelstroms of concupiscence, insecurity, resentment, and frustration. That zeitgeist eradiates crepuscular from their ethopoetic temperaments and treatment of their pivotal accident.

Direction

Directorial debuts seldom show such acumen for atmosphere or stylistic dash as inform Phillips's every establishing landscape, fevered close-up, and solitary figure.

Cinematography

In silhouette and shadow, DP Eli Born beautified every frame with misty vividness and lifelike contrast rare to digital cinematography.

Editing

It's conspicuous in consummation of interstitial and recollective montages comprising shots spanning split-seconds, but Ed Yonaitis's edit also exactly rotates subjects to subtly stress suggestions spoken and silent.

Histrionics

Without the tired crutches of gaping maw or squirrelly sputter, goggling Campbell convincingly evinces his innocent's conflict, sweat, and quiet adoration for a cute classmate (Cappuccino). He's exceeded by Tahan, whose twitchy, seethingly petulant volatility uncannily incarnates emerging, monstrous madness with a wholly human face.

Score

Panic and calamity are aurally amplified by Ben Frost's pitched, minimalist tones, noise, and percussion.

Highlights

Most of the first act is farced by hysterical confabulation between Campbell, Tahan, and Talisman. Conversely, Campbell's and Cappuccino's chemistry as inchoate sweethearts brightens the glow of their tender affections. Post-traumatic anxieties, guilt, and amatorial propensions symbolically immingle in surreal nightmares dreamt by the haunted schoolboy. Tahan fixates in his every shot as sarcastic delinquent, then furtive creep, as unsettling for his mercurial miens and perturbing peculiarities as for the unpredictability of a psychotic who's excited to know what he'll do.

Flaws

Hargreaves would satisfy in her relaxed, warm-hearted part as Campbell's single mom, but that she neither looks nor sounds like any Boomer who ever kept a nest.

Conclusion

Furnished by costume designer Stephani Lewis and set dressers Katie Lobel, Evan Schafer, and Joseph Visconti with an understatement as believable as its players, this townish crime drama succeeds as both a portrait of death's psychological tolls and a household snapshot of the United States' supremely luxurious sociocultural hangover.

That Man from Rio (1964)

Directed by Philippe de Broca
Written by Philippe de Broca, Daniel Boulanger, Ariane Mnouchkine, Jean-Paul Rappeneau
Produced by Georges Dancigers, Alexandre Mnouchkine
Starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Françoise Dorléac, Jean Servais, Milton Ribeiro, Sabu Do Brasil, Adolfo Celi, Ubiracy De Oliveira, Simone Renant, Daniel Ceccaldi, Christian Bagot, Roger Dumas

Across the Atlantic from gray, refined Paris to squalid, sunny Rio de Janeiro, then developing new capital Brasilia, and beyond into Brazil's riotous rainforests comes a tricksy, tireless, two-fisted French soldier (Belmondo) who runs, swims, rows, flies, skydives, funambulates, bicycles, motorcycles, shams, cajoles, and fistfights in pursuit of the thugs (Ribeiro, Brasil, et al.) who abducted his bratty, scatterbrained girlfriend (Dorléac) and an archaeologist (Servais) who unearthed with her father a priceless Amazonian statue of a trio to be reunited, which they've purloined from his museum. De Broca's wry, romantic, binational adventure is probably the best of Belmondo's early vehicles, showcasing the Italo-French star's abounding appeal and derring-do in performance of no few hazardous stunts as his indefatigable private. He's paired well with gorgeous, grating Dorléac, with whom he has scarcely a spare minute to cultivate their chemistry. Boldly pinguid Celi is cunningly cast as a lusty industrialist who's indispensable to the pivotal twist of the movie's midpoint. At his best, De Broca's cameras cannily dolly, zoom, and soar through memorably massive long shots at varied altitudes, but he handily helms tightly framed action cut punctiliously by Françoise Javet. One needn't be a fan of pug-lovely Belmondo to enjoy his expeditious escapade....but you should.

Recommended for a double feature paired with Le Sauvage or Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Trollhunter (2010)

Written and directed by André Øvredal
Produced by Trond G. Lockertsen, Sveinung Golimo, John M. Jacobsen, Lars L. Marøy, Marcus B. Brodersen
Starring Otto Jespersen, Glenn Erland Tosterud, Johanna Mørck, Tomas Alf Larsen, Urmila Berg-Domaas, Hans Morten Hansen

All tongues onscreen remain buccally lodged in found footage purported to contain the adventures of collegiate documentarians (Tosterud, Mørck, Larsen) seeking a presumed poacher, who's actually a rugged hunter (Jespersen) of trolls sanctioned and stintingly subsidized by the Norwegian government to track and eliminate the mindless, mammoth, mucilaginous, multifarious monstrosities with singular ways and weapons. Most demythologization is dull, but Øvredal's blackly comic, quasi-extemporal modernization of Norse fairy tales succeeds for graphic SFX of enormous proportions, cryptozoological quirks, an involvingly inconstant pace, and felicitous characters created believably -- particularly the huntsman whose wryly brusque temperament Jespersen perfectly portrays. Videorecorded in Norway's magnificent forests and mountains, this northland's model of the monster movie delves a vast compass that isn't bound by its economy.

Voyeur (2017)

Directed by Myles Kane, Josh Koury
Produced by Trisha Koury, Jenny Raskin, Linda Carlson, Dan Cogan, Steven H. Cohen, Adam Del Deo, Geralyn White Dreyfous, Paula M. Froehle, Lisa Nishimura, Julie Parker Benello, Ken Pelletier, Jason Spingarn-Koff, Angus Wall, Jeremy Yaches, Jeremiah Zagar, Tessa Treadway
Starring Gay Talese, Gerald Foos, Anita Foos, Susan Morrison, Jamison Stoltz, Morgan Entrekin, Pamela Talese, Nan Talese; Edward Akrout, Mike Funk, Edward Sabol, Sacha Storto, Shelby Welinder

For perhaps three decades, guests at the Manor House Motel in Aurora, CO were surveilled, thoroughly documented, and secretly sexualized by its manager Gerald Foos, who constructed a platform beneath his motel's pitched roof on which he conducted observational research and satisfied his onanism through louvered vents. This whilom motelier's and obsessive collector's friendship with Gay Talese began in 1980, when he invited the dandyish cynosure of New Journalism to his establishment to verify his pastime with an understanding of its potential publication after Foos's administration and certain statutes of limitations expired. Both men's disclosive ambitions were finally realized years later when Talese's The Voyeur's Motel was published excerpted in The New Yorker and complete as a hardback by Grove Atlantic, but a wave of negative publicity ensuing the peeper's perverse proclivities, and a revelatory whammy at the 13th hour of the book's publication resulting from Foos's obscurantism and Talese's elementary investigative neglect besmirched his career, and both men's credibility. In an idiom likely inspired by that of Errol Morris's documentaries, directors/editors Kane and Koury gradually present the lives and legacies of two quirky, intelligent, octogenarian narcissists through summations of their lifestyles and histories in their own words; interviews with Talese and Foos, their respective wives Nan and Anita, and pertinent editors of The New Yorker (Morrison) and Grove Atlantic (Stoltz); umbratile reenactments; Talese's conclusive interviews with Foos; immediate, firsthand reactions to the trials that strained their relations with each other and the filmmakers. Shot well and edited alike despite sporadic immoderacy for effect, this documentary is admirable for its objectivity, understatement concerning the similitude of Talese's and Foos's characteristically meticulous modes of scrutiny, and relatively unexploitative nature -- by contemporary Columbian standards. It's also one of Netflix's few worthwhile productions, which tells a sleazy story only as surely as it may have happened, from the loud mouths and elegant pen of a monomaniacal deviant and the scrupulous, coxcomical prose stylist who failed to account for his unreliable subject's every omission.

Recommended for a double feature paired with F for Fake.

Wake in Fright (A.K.A. Outback) (1971)

Directed by Ted Kotcheff
Written by Kenneth Cook, Evan Jones, Ted Kotcheff
Produced by George Willoughby, Maurice Singer, Howard G. Barnes, Bill Harmon
Starring Gary Bond, Donald Pleasence, Chips Rafferty, Sylvia Kay, Jack Thompson, Peter Whittle, Al Thomas, John Meillon, John Armstrong, Slim DeGrey, Buster Fiddess, Tex Foote, Nancy Knudsen, Dawn Lake, Harry Lawrence

"When you stop drinking, you have to deal with this marvelous personality that started you drinking in the first place."

--Jimmy Breslin, Table Money

Synopsis

Disdain to doubt to delight to discomfiture, then distraction eventuate from drink, wagers won and lost in two-up, drink, carom billiards in the society of a Freemason (Thomas), drink, aborted intercourse on his daughter (Kay), drink, loathsome lodging in the shack of an alcoholic general practitioner (Pleasence), drink, sunlit and spotlit roo hunts with the aforementioned doc and raucous co*ckroaches (Thompson, Whittle) in a battered Cadillac, drink, vagation, drink, and drink, and drink, and drink that upend the holiday of a snobbish schoolteacher (Bond), who's circ*mstantially stranded in a remote mining town of New South Wales on his way to Sydney and his fiancee (Knudsen) there. Within a week, this conflux of intemperate pleasures and miseries drive as straight, swift, and sure to his nervous breakdown as bullet to bullseye.

Direction & editing

Many memorable shots are peppered through Kotcheff's sweaty, blackly, brutally funny and flurrying flop, for which his style's distanced, occasionally panoramic in its views of the vast, sun-scorched outback, and imposing in zooms and close-ups of subjects predatory and victimized alike. The outsider's drunken disorientation and derangement flicker subjectively in rapid-fire montages cut as well by Anthony Buckley as disturbing scenes of abuse encompassing footage from an actual, licensed hunt, which aren't for the squeamish.

Histrionics

Baritone Bond created his patronizing pedagogue with pungent and plausible exudation of contempt spoken and silent, wretchedness, disgust, social sadism, and terror at himself and his acquaintances in a part that might've elevated him to stardom. Equally enthralling is top-billed Pleasence, who thieves scenes by casual emphases of his roughnecked physician's peculiarities, lascivity, and insight. In backgrounds or with their stars, everyone else here acts naturally; iconic Aussie Rafferty's peremptorily friendly sheriff is counterposed to Thompson's and Whittle's brawling, boisterous poachers, all of whom feel uncomfortably real.

Conclusion

Lost and unseen for decades, Oz's celebrated sleeper adapted from Cook's novel is as gripping a psychodrama as a fictionalization of a crude yet efficient working-class subculture, wherein a leap from civility to savagery is but a score of swills away.

Recommended for a double feature paired with Withnail and I or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Welcome to New York (2014)

Directed by Abel Ferrara
Written by Abel Ferrara, Chris Zois
Produced by Ged Dickersin, Adam Folk, Michael Corso, Anthony Gudas, Shanyn Leigh
Starring Gérard Depardieu, Jacqueline Bisset, Marie Mouté, JD Taylor, James Heaphy, Louis Zaneri, Pamela Afesi, Joe Lawless, Norm Golden, Nikki James, Stephen Reich, John Patrick Barry, Brian McCabe, José Ramón Rosario, Emmanuelle Vill, Spelman M. Beaubrun, Ronald Guttman, Chris Zois, Paul Calderon, Paul Hipp, Raquel Nave, Natasha Romanova, Kathryn Lill, Caroline Huet, Lucy Campbell, Larry Davis Jr., Paul Mitchell, Tony Armstrong, Tania Santiago

"In this age, when it is said of a man, 'He knows how to live,' it may be implied he is not very honest."

--Marquess of Halifax, Of Cunning and Knavery

Now, anything is possible: pigs may fly, time may stop, dinosaurs may naturally revive, the sun may rise in the west and set in the east, for Abel Ferrara made a good movie. After over twenty features and nearly forty years, New York's grimy grandmaster of smartly shot schlock hits the mark with his fictionalization of Dominique Strauss-Kahn's criminal case attending allegations that the glib, bloated, Franco-Jewish economist, politician, and womanizer sexually assaulted an obese, pockmarked Guinean chambermaid in his suite at the Sofitel New York hotel, which cost him his position as Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund and presidential candidacy in France's socialist party. To this repugnant role, Depardieu gifted greater girth and personality than those of its subject while: greeted at his suite by jovial whor*s (Lill, Huet, Campbell, Nave, Romanova) and procurers (Calderon, Hipp); essaying to coerce oral sex from an employee (Afesi) of housekeeping staff; lunching with his abashed daughter (Mouté) and her fawning, ingenuous boyfriend (Taylor); arrested by the port authority's police (Barry, McCabe) after boarding a plane to Paris; immured by investigating detectives (Heaphy, Zaneri) of the NYPD; standing at an arraignment where his bail's denied; jailed, printed, snapped for his mugshot, and strip searched by surly corrections officers (Davis, Mitchell); bailed by his wealthy wife (Bisset) for $1M at a second hearing; confined to house arrest at a pricily leased, rectilinearly hideous rowhome in lower Manhattan, where they argue awkwardly, he meditates on the demise of his idealism, and petulantly extenuates his crimes and excesses as prerogatives due. Behind reflective windows, in close-ups intimate and intrusive, before drifting medium shots all stark through DP Ken Kelsch's warm and cool vividities and high contrast, humming, grunting, snorting Depardieu (himself no stranger to sexual improprieties) luxuriates in his habitual corruption, emanates grim anxiety when processed, and with remarkably plausible vacuity, trades barbs and recriminations with snappish Bisset, who's again outstanding as the doting wife exhausted and embittered by a spouse who's squandered countless opportunities at her expense, for the satisfaction of his libido. Even in prescission of its topic's Jewish aspect, Ferrara's effective direction and cast do justice to his and Zois's gutsy, trenchant script.
Upon this movie's release, Strauss-Kahn stupidly, sputteringly threatened a libel lawsuit against Ferrara that would've been quashed upon cursory acknowledgment of its characters' names and a comprehensively, craftily phrased disclaimer presented in its opening title card. As efficiently as they resolved his legal settlement stateside, Strauss-Kahn's pan-Atlantic kin temporarily set aside their dedication to feminism to defend him and loudly boycott the picture in France, to no especial concern. In all verity, it probably is aspersive: Strauss-Kahn is odious but not a likely rapist, and his accuser was proven by his defense to be mendacious and calculating. However, consensual lasciviousness between two fat, ugly people wouldn't so powerfully initiate this scathing portrait of a globalist Eurocrat's gross carnal appetites, post-Marxist cynicism, and petty entitlement complex. In neoliberal finance and politics -- and especially Eurocracy -- satiety is as absent as integrity.

whor*s' Glory (2011)

Written and directed by Michael Glawogger
Produced by Alfred Deutsch, Erich Lackner, Peter Wirthensohn, Thomas Pridnig, Pepe Danquart, Mirjam Quinte, Anne Even, Klaus Hipfl, Chris Lowenstein

Synopsis

In daily exhibitions that are at least as compartmentalized as their lives, flashy doxies of an orderly bordello in Bangkok christened The Fishtank are presented in a vitreous booth, and selected by assigned numbers. No such civility or organization can be found in Faridpur's sickeningly shabby City of Joy, where bawds brutish and benevolent wrangle reluctant and embittered cocottes patronized mostly by mannered, working-class men. In contrast to this impoverishment, The Zone in Reynosa -- where ribalds cruise suites to browse flirty filles de joie -- seems almost paradisical, but sex there is as strictly transactional as it is comprehensive, notwithstanding some of its harlots' fantastically morbid, syncretic prayers.

Direction

Sweepingly wide and overhead exteriors as well as panoramic interiors immersively introduce these settings, preparing viewers for interviews that elicited funny, grisly, lustful, piteous accounts of meretricious comedy and tragedy. Glawogger's veracious views are painstakingly positioned, but tinged with subjectivity, as when rueful and immiserated interviewees are shot at distances emphasizing their isolation or desolation, or when the perfunctory vigor of Mexican aco*koinonia is unmistakably framed in close medium shots.

Cinematography

Even squalid scenes benefit from Wolfgang Thaler's high contrast and saturation.

Music

Whether one can enjoy or at all tolerate admittedly apropos songs by PJ Harvey or CocoRosie will determine how one adjudges this movie's soundtrack.

Highlights

Before their shifts begin, Thai trulls pray at shrines for good fortune, and are then titivated by make-up artists and hairstylists. They dine, shop, and ironically overspend on bar boys at host clubs together during their off-hours, discussing prospects of second jobs, how an inexhaustible glut of hustlers has diminished profits, and why Malaysian, African and Indian johns are so detestable. Barking dogs copulate shamelessly by The Fishtank's entrance; within, a politic attendant refuses to haggle with an elderly customer.
A natty barber who frequents the City of Joy explicates its sociosexual necessity.
Two carloads of raunchy Mexican buddies fixated on anal sodomy prate on preferred prostitutes and perversions. In no less detail, an erstwhile cyprian dilates her numerous techniques. Another tells of an unreciprocally enamored client's misfortune.

Lowlights

An oily American tourist dallies doltishly with one of The Fishtank's toothier tarts.
Over the cost of a young wench that she's delivered, a procurer chaffers with a madam. Elsewhere, an obnoxious trollop touts herself to the annoyance of peers and passersby. Most tragic of these tramps is one fat, aging, and harried by her brothel's landlord for failing to pay what she can no longer earn.
With casual candor, a Mestiza moll relates how pimps allure or coerce guileless villagers into prostitution. Two others descant their relationships with Lady Death while smoking crack.

Flaws

Transitionary wipes between segments are as bathetically stupid as miffing musical selections that detract rather than complement.

Conclusion

Produced late in Glawogger's life and career, his penetrative, comparative exposure of whor*dom in undeveloped and developing societies graphically uncovers the rankest repercussions of sex sold for sport, succor, and survival. Unfortunately, either he or his producers were convinced that its music had to be as trashy as his worst subjects.

Why Not? (1981)

Directed by Shohei Imamura
Written by Shohei Imamura, Ken Miyamoto
Produced by Shohei Imamura, Shoichi Ozawa, Shigemi Sugisaki, Jiro Tomoda
Starring Kaori Momoi, Shigeru Izumiya, Shigeru Tsuyuguchi, Masao Kusakari, Mitsuko Baisho, Ken Ogata, Kibaji Tankobo, Shohei Hino, Jiro Yabuki, Yuko Tanaka, Taiji Tonoyama, Shoichi Ozawa, Ako, Junzaburo Ban, Shino Ikenami, Etsuko Ikuta, Hiroshi Inuzuka, Choichiro Kawarasaki, Kazuo Kitamura, Nenji Kobayashi, Yasuaki Kurata, Norihei Miki, Sansho Shinsui, Kazuko Shirakawa, Minori Terada

Society's roiled and culture concordantly flares about the crumbling shogunate during the Edo period's tumultuous penultimate year, when adventurous enemies, friends, and lovers in Ryogoku and Yokohama strive to survive and succeed. Upon his repair from the United States as a citizen of that republic, a circ*mstantial trader, translator, farmer, and recidivist (Izumiya) is unhappily reunited with his boozing, bed-hopping wife (Momoi), a showgirl and sometime strumpet; their professions, perpetrations, and prurience bring them into acquaintance with her quondam madam (Baisho), one tall, taciturn, amphibious Ryukyuan (Kusakari) and a disgraced ronin (Ogata) who've both mortal scores to settle, and thieves and rioters (Hino, Tankobo, Yabuki) in the employ of a despicable merchant (Tsuyuguchi) who manipulates them all in east Ryogoku, as does his elderly, conniving counterpart (Tonoyama) in the city's west, on behalf of both the incompetent shogunate and perfidious clans of samurai eager for a putsch. Tributed to his mentor and collaborator Yuzo Kawashima, Imamura deftly juggled six plots(!) relating malfeasance at its most entrenched, gains and reverberations from corruption, condign revenge, the perpetuation of meretricious trade, and the endurance of love, scored as quirkily as ever by Shinichiro Ikebe. His scope here is greater than usual, particularly in smooth, striking master and tracking shots on land and water. Spunky Momoi and Izumiya, newcomer Tanaka, and toweringly lanky model Kusakari interacted well with the director's regulars (co-producer Ozawa, Tsuyuguchi, Baisho, Kitamura, Ogata, et al.), and all of these sensitive players excel in criminal scenes, horizontal rutting, faux freakshows, and flagrant extravaganzas, such as a chaotic, climactic, celebratory parade that springs from spiritual fervor in Ryogoku's east, then proceeds by bridge and boat across the Sumida River to its west, whipped into a riot to fatal penalty. His typically objective presentation of colorfully characterized (though uncaricatured) peasants, whor*s, artisans, entertainers, and outsiders can't stay Imamura's syntheses and contrasts of ribald and absurdist hilarity with devastating tragedy in the historical context of a climacteric during which unfortunates could expect meager mercy or prosperity. From this, he and Miyamoto contrived a festivous, eleutheromaniacal exultation, hemmed between the moribundity of an isolationist military autocracy, and the brutal, ulterior vim of a renascent empire.

Recommended for a double feature paired with Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate or Zegen.

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Directed by
Written by
Produced by
Starring

Synopsis

Script

Direction

Cinematography

Editing

Histrionics

Score

Highlights

Flaws

Conclusion

Recommended for a double feature paired with .

Mediocre

After Midnight (1989)

Written and directed by Jim and Ken Wheat
Produced by Michael Bennett, Richard Arlook, Peter Greene, Jim Wheat, Ken Wheat, Allan Dennis, Barry J. Hirsch
Starring Jillian McWhirter, Pamela Segall, Ramy Zada, Ed Monaghan, Patty Avery, Kent Burden, Richard Gabai, Kerry Remsen; Marc McClure, Nadine Van der Velde; Judie Aronson, Monique Salcido, Penelope Sudrow, Tracy Wells, Luis Contreras; Marg Helgenberger, Alan Rosenberg, Jordana Capra, Loyda Ramos, Billy Ray Sharkey

Neither academic ethics nor professional scruples constrain a professor of psychology (devilishly handsome Zada) from terrorizing his students to instruct them on the nature of fear; when his university's administration bids him to adopt a conventional curriculum, he invites students (McWhirter, Segall, Avery, Burden, Gabai, Remsen) to his home, where they share spooky, secondhand stories.On the eve of his birthday, punctured tires strand a timid everyman (McClure) and his unshrinking wife (Van der Velde) near The Old Dark House, where macabre murders that recurred years before seem to anticipate impending death.A Night on the Town is perilously passed by a quartet of teenage girls (Aronson, Salcido, Sudrow, Wells), who are carded and rejected from a nightclub before they venture into a seedy packing district, where they run afoul of a feculent, lecherous lunatic (Contreras) and his vicious, unrelenting dogs.Her broken leg ruined the vacation of an All Night Operator (Helgenberger), and hobbles her during a nightly shift at an obsolescent answering service, where she fields calls from a maniac (Rosenberg) who's morbidly obsessed with a soap opera's star (Capra).Deficient distribution of their anthology to fewer than 230 theaters grossed $76K against its budget of $3.5M, which effectively ended the directorial (though not auctorial), conjoint career of the Wheat brothers, whose positively policeless, predictable, pedestrian horror is bereft of scares. These recycled banalities are invigorated by a palatably hammy cast (esp. Zada, Van der Velde, and spouses Helgenberger and Rosenberg), Phedon Papamichael's rich, dusky cinematography, and a late-'80s flavor that's likely to gratify nostalgists who'll overlook its triteness.

Born of Fire (1987)

Directed by Jamil Dehlavi
Written by Jamil Dehlavi, Rafiq Abdullah
Produced by Jamil Dehlavi, Thérèse Pickard. Stewart Richards
Starring Peter Firth, Suzan Crowley, Stefan Kalipha, Nabil Shaban, Orla Pederson

Synopsis

Unusual solar prominences and a volcanic eruption presage a clash of elements invoked by musical magic. In the wake of his mother's death, a virtuoso flutist (Firth) finds amative solace with an astronomer (Crowley) who's correlated these omens before they meet in Turkey, where he's guided by a muezzin (Kalipha) and aided by a fearful stigmatic (Shaban) to repugn a polymorphous, pyrogenous demon (Pederson) who designs to devastate Earth by empyrosis. Can his woodwind's hydrokinetic apotropaism extinguish the root of an impendent global conflagration?

Script

Barely plotted and profuse with portents, Dehlavi's and Abdullah's story is one of too few to properly portray west Asian folklore in modernity. At its most effective, dreamy flashbacks foreshadow and interpenetrate present drama with cyclic implications. Much of Abdullah's dialogue is footling, thrice bathetic; Kalipha is granted the best of it in poetic monitions.

Direction

Fine framing by Dehlavi of picturesque prospects atmospherically exploits his stunning settings: an opulent English recital hall, Lucullan domiciliary interiors, ruggedly grand Turkish mountains, caverns, cascades, Roman ruins, ancient and abandoned mosques and churches, and the famed travertine pools in the hills of Pamukkale. He leaves his performers to their own devices, seldom prioritizing them above absorbing locational and faunal imagery.

Cinematography

Vibrancies of a feeding mosquito, creeping lizard, slithering snake, weltering lava, waters turquoise in travertine terraces, and more are preserved in sightly contrast by DP Bruce McGowan.

Histrionics

At this point a practiced expresser of glowering disconcertion and determination, Firth was well-cast as the protagonal lead. His carnal chemistry with Crowley is fleetingly intense, but her tremendous screen presence and steady delivery don't always offset her hammy visages. Forbidding djinn and mournful lusus naturae are personated with speechless vehemence by Pederson and Shaban. Kalipha grimly grounds his scenes in contrast to his co-stars' dynamism.

Score

Thrumming basslines, Turkish twangs, soprano shrieks, and hisses against deep drones by Colin Towns melodically and cacophonously complement Dehlavi's visuals. Firth feigns performance of mellisonant standards by Poulenc, Debussy, and Mayer played by James Galway.

Conclusion

Long dismissed as an exotic curiosity, Dehlavi's quasi-surrealistic spiritual fantasy marked by Muslim piety and a dash of horror deserves reappraisal, if only for its unique beauty. From concert hall to Cotton Castles, its sorcerous intrigues are strangely semihypnotic, relaxing, and refreshing. Those willing to ignore a few misdeliveries, a meandering narrative, some low-grade SFX, and Firth's faux facial hair (when playing his soloist's father) may enjoy its agrestic Orientality.

The Boy (2016)

Directed by William Brent Bell
Written by Stacey Menear
Produced by Matt Berenson, Roy Lee, Gary Lucchesi, Tom Rosenberg, Jim Wedaa, Richard S. Wright, Oren Aviv, Adam Fogelson, David Kern, John Powers Middleton, Eric Reid, Jackie Shenoo, Robert Simonds, Donald Tang, Zhongjun Wang, Zhonglei Wang
Starring Lauren Cohan, Rupert Evans, Jim Norton, Diana Hardcastle, James Russell, Ben Robson

Before they take leave on holiday from their magnificent estate, a wealthy, elderly English couple (Norton, Hardcastle) consign the care of a doll fashioned in the likeness of a little boy to its new American nanny (Cohan), who's naturally puzzled by the atypical ease and absurdity of her daily duties to habilitate and edify with literature and music her unmoving charge. Within the walls of the manor where she's lodged resides the mystery of unexplainable incidents in reaction to her initial dereliction, to the surprise of the confounded caretaker and a friended, local grocer (Evans). Whoever can disregard or accept its inherent silliness will probably enjoy Bell's workmanly thriller, which for his operative direction, Menear's compelling scenario, cultivated tensions, and passable performances may lure even those who've guessed its secret within its first half-hour. Dingy by immoderate coloration, the high contrast and clarity of Daniel Pearl's cinematography still embellishes every shot of these photogenic players and British Columbia's exquisite, extravagantly appointed Craigdarroch Castle. Alas, common jump scares and exposition -- most embarrassingly yabbered by Cohan on the move during a revelational and eventful third act -- remind those watching of how goofy this gets.

Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever (2009)

Directed by Ti West
Written by Ti West, Randy Pearlstein, Joshua Malkin
Produced by Mike Crawford, Josef Lieck, Patrick Durham, Jonathan Sachar, Lauren Vilchik, Mary Aloe, Deborah Davis, Sam Froelich, Dan Griffin, Chandler Foster, Jason Hewitt, Susan Jackson, Jerry Kroll, Corey Large, Tre Lovell, Christopher Rutter, Maxwell Sinovoi, Alan Pao, Kyle Dean Jackson
Starring Noah Segan, Rusty Kelley, Alexi Wasser, Giuseppe Andrews, Marc Senter, Mark Borchardt, Michael Bowen, Judah Friedlander, Amanda Jelks, Thomas Blake Jr., Angela Brown, Taylor Kowalski, Alexander Isaiah Thomas, Michael L. Nesbitt, Lindsey Axelsson, Lila Lucchetti, Caitlin Coons, Andrea Powell, Regan Deal, Gabrielle Tuite

Synopsis

To prom, or not to prom? That is The Question for a brainy senior (Segan) who's for years yearned for a schoolfriend (Wasser), despite intimidation by her scummily abusive boyfriend (Senter). Whether or not he attends with his podgy best friend (Kelley), The Question is belittled by the virulent spread of that ravenous necrotizing fasciitis, which contaminates a bottled batch from a lousy, local brand of water delivered to his school. Sloppily sanguine, suppurating, sphacelating symptoms catch every student who cuts a rug on the dance floor by surprise -- as does the arrival of a heavily armed, gumbooted hazmat team intent on quarantining the school with lethal force.

Script

Not until his overestimated, oversold X would West attempt anything quite this sleazy again, but it's his funniest flick: with Pearlstein and screenwriter Malkin, he farced these ribald, repulsive developments with enough immature one-liners to hit the mark more often than not.

Direction

Incongruities between surpassing spectacles shot by a directing auteur, and prosaic footage canned after his dismission at the behest of a peeved producer are as glaring now in certain genre pictures as they were in the heyday of Old Hollywood. Even in his worst offerings, West flaunts his grandmastery of the camera's creep by zoom lens, dolly, and Steadicam; his establishing and perspective shots here catch the eye and prefigure his idiomatic apogee, twice consummated in following years. It clashes with shots ineptly set and staged by whoever was hired to hack out another reel's worth for post-producers Pao and Jackson.

Editing

Moreover, Janice Hampton's shamefully slapdash theatrical cut hardly reflects her score of experience, and baffles in light of West's editorial aptitude. Lionsgate's productional parasites probably would've saved time and money for a better product if they'd accommodated Glass Eye's wunderkind with carte blanche. Instead, their messy patchwork was shelved for nearly two years between production and release.

Histrionics

Playing the straight man to chubbily waggish Kelley, Segan (who resembled Elon Musk before he grew into his looks) lends personality to an embattled dweeb, but his BFF enjoys the lion's share of zingers. In a subplot where he investigates the epidemic, covers his tracks, and absquatulates with his like-minded cousin (Borchardt), Andrews is actually more laughable as the nasally Rabelaisian police deputy than he was in Eli Roth's horror. Everyone else is cast condignly as caricatures: crudely handsome Senter energizes his bully frenziedly; Axelsson screeches the whinily egomaniacal prom queen's protest against attention paid to others; Bowen looks as dense as his principal acts. As so often before and since, West's mentor Larry Fessenden appears in a fatally spraying cameo as the plague's first public victim.

Score

Half of Ryan Shore's score sounds like Angelo Badalamenti's themes for Fire Walk with Me; the other half blends orchestral samples and sequenced percussion as tackily as those of any other composed in Hollywood. Just as Patrick Hernandez's Eurodisco hit Born To Be Alive is better than the preparatory montage that it accompanies, Prom Night's disco song Tonight It's Prom Night, All Night is utilized to greater effect here than in the shlock for which Paul Zaza and Carl Zitter wrote it. Tracks by Sparks, Sarah Burton, Alex T. and Bob Stone are acceptable, but torturously unfunny Minimal Compact's Inner Station -- which still sounds like the worst collaboration between David Bowie and the Deal sisters that thankfully never happened -- is a great reason to mute the end credits.

Highlights

• Contiguous from Cabin Fever's conclusion, the deteriorating vacationer played by Rider Strong (who's unexplainably top-billed) finds his way from a fouled river through forest to a highway, where he's splattered by a school bus.
• Quantum Creation FX's practical prosthetic and makeup effects revoltingly realize mortified losses of teeth, fingernails, flesh, digits, etc.
• Prom king Blake wins a wager with friends by popping obese Jelks's cherry in the school's pool, and its waters run red for her necrosis and his misstep.
• Before and after the virus imbrues the auditorium where it's held from hundreds of orifices, the prom itself is pretty lively.
• Furious after an umpteenth injustice, Segan's geek castigates Wasser's objet d'amour for both her devotion to a crazed, cheating cad, and oblivion of his affection for her -- a tirade to which any outsider who's ever been taken with That Girl can relate.
• An impromptu amputation and cauterization are performed in wood shop with surprising ease!

Flaws

• Music muffles speech oftentimes in this movie's horribly mixed soundtrack.
• For viewers who've an ape's attention span, a montage of shots from both movies illustrates how Andrews's deputy connects the dots.
• Mildly amusing animated segments and overlong credits pad a runtime that should be ten minutes shorter.

Conclusion

West's sequel has so much to love -- raunch, sticky gore, '70s flavor, pitch-black comicality -- but it's still a shambles more deserving of a director's cut than most degraded in post-production. Despite his disavowal of this project, it's still more entertaining than anything he's done in the past decade.

Recommended for a double feature paired with Cabin Fever or Thank God it's Friday.

Cam (2018)

Directed by Daniel Goldhaber
Written by Isa Mazzei, Daniel Goldhaber, Isabelle Link-Levy
Produced by Christa Boarini, Greg Gilreath, Adam Hendricks, John H. Lang, Isabelle Link-Levy, Daniel Garber, Floris Bauer, Michael Joe, Isa Mazzei, Couper Samuelson, Beatriz Sequeira
Starring Madeline Brewer, Melora Walters, Devin Druid, Patch Darragh, Michael Dempsey, Flora Diaz, Samantha Robinson, Imani Hakim, Quei Tann, Jessica Parker Kennedy

Synopsis

In an alternate dimension where mods and admins don't exist, a camgirl (Brewer) obsessed with her status on a livestreaming site performs salacious and shocking stunts less for profit than popularity, both solo and in association with friendly peers (Diaz, Tann, et aliae), until her account and online identity are usurped by a doppelganger whose allurement and resulting rank exceed her own.

Script

To their credit, quondam cammer Mazzei with co-scripters Goldhaber and Link-Levy schemed some succulent scenarios to beset her protagonist by depicting reciprocal exploitation and ineludible deceits peculiar to sexualized parasociality with a frankness unseen in most genre pictures about slu*tty streamers. Viewers of this parable might be reasonably expected to suspend their disbelief when either her flirty fille or identical impostor are neither suspended nor banned for public lewdness and self-abuse both simulated and substantial, or to overlook the question of possible malversation and its legal consequences in her favor. Alas, Mazzei's treatment of her themes is vainly observational, opting for smutty spectacle over insight. A rider in Brewer's contract provisioning her discretion regarding nudity in concordance with her comfort in any given scene may have been an effective conducement to a more involved performance, but it exudes the pissant puritanism preserved in corporate Anglo-feminism, and it's a concession meditated to distract attention from what is ultimately a cynically manipulative production.

Direction

His slow zooms, and encircling and tracking shots probably penetrate his target demographic for desired reactions, but Goldhaber's techniques are as bromidically nondescript as those seen in anything else churned out for streaming consumption.

Editing

More accreditation is due to Daniel Garber for his engrossing editorial expedition, meticulously made to hasten rate and optimize impacts.

Histrionics

Shapely yet witchly Brewer tackles her emotionally exhausting lead role with elan, physically repellent Darragh and Dempsey are aptly cast as two subscribers who she's unfortunate to meet, and Walters welcomely ballasts a few scenes as Brewer's mother....but everyone is flagrantly acting in compliance with overwrought Millennial norms. Robinson's so cartoonish as a cruel online rival that she reminds all watching of these characters' uniform shallowness.

Score

Like Garber's editing, the soothing synth pads and percussive crescendos of Gavin Brivik's largely sequenced, sampled, and synthesized score impart more impression than Goldhaber's direction.

Conclusion

To the usual critical credulity, this was tacitly touted by Mazzei and Goldhaber as something transcending the habitual techno-thriller. If you believe that blather, you might miss a movie that occupyingly shoulders the weight of their pretensions.

Cassandra (1987)

Directed by Colin Eggleston
Written by Colin Eggleston, John Ruane, Christopher Fitchett
Produced by Trevor Lucas, Steve Amezdroz, Mikael Borglund, Phil Gerlach
Starring Tessa Humphries, Briony Behets, Lee James, Shane Briant, Kit Taylor, Susan Barling, Tim Burns, Dylan O'Neill, Tegan Charles, Jeff Watson, Jeff Truman, Natalie McCurry, Kate Carruthers

Violent visions of current deaths through their murderer's eyes and nightmares of a suicide years preremote haunt a young woman (Humphries), who clairvoyantly watches without comprehending the contraction of her personal circle spiraling serially to her as his ultimate victim. Evocatively enthralling, sometimes misleading POV shots, a few exquisite interiors, soapily familial arcana, and bountifully disposable red herrings are among the highlights of Eggleston's penultimate picture, which benefits from his dynamic direction and sightly photography by DP Garry Wapshott, cut with painstaking care to jarring effect by Josephine Cook. Regrettably, their efforts are misspent on mustily miserable SFX, a third act comprised entirely of clichés, and the worst of histrionics that vary at any given minute from good to goofy. Natheless, this oddity is bound to satisfy enthusiasts of grisly, offbeat pulp.

Recommended for a double feature paired with the superior Eyes of Laura Mars, or coetaneous, similarly stylish and flawed White of the Eye.

The Cheating Pact (2013)

Directed by Doug Campbell
Written by Ken Sanders, Barbara Kymlicka, Doug Campbell
Produced by Marianne C. Wunch, Ken Sanders, Robert Ballo, Timothy O. Johnson
Starring Daniela Bobadilla, Laura Ashley Samuels, Laura Wiggins, Max Carver, Cynthia Gibb, Paula Trickey, Pancho Demmings, David Rees Snell, Jamie Luner, Cory Kahane, Ruben Garfias, Charles Hoyes, Randon Davitt, Bruce Thomas, Tyler Sellers, Damon K. Sperber, D. Elliot Woods, Christopher Kriesa, Samantha Gros

How to Sensationalize a Scandal for Audiences of Middle-aged Women and Online Riffers

1. Select a scandal -- in this instance, that of realty developer Sam Eshaghoff, who while attending Emory University repeatedly, successfully scored high marks on the SAT and ACT in the steads of students who paid him $1,500-$3,600 for his proxied prowess.
2. Fictionalize Eshaghoff's story extensively:
   1. Transpose the story's setting from university to high school.
   2. Accordingly, the tests taken are CLTs (here termed CETs).
   3. Change Eshaghoff's character from a blandly enterprising guy into a gawky girl (Wiggins, whose big glasses bespeak her nerdiness).
   4. Instead of simple greed, her sympathetic motivation is now the expense of physical therapy for her inspecifically ailing brother (Davitt).
   5. Interject that indispensable homicide as the culmination of tortuous intrigues.
   6. The deceased's prettier friend and colluder (Bobadilla) must be the protagonist opposite her antagonistic co-conspirators (unpleasantly attractive Samuels, apishly handsome Carver).
   7. Despite the extravagant costs of these crimes and a death resulting from their complications, don't bother to mention any aptitudes or aspirations relevant to matriculation at Wittendale -- the collegiate equivalent to Dorsia oft-mentioned in Campbell's movies.
   8. Police detectives (Demmings, Snell) must be consistently present and probing during the third act, but never directly involved until its final 10 minutes.
3. Task collaborative genre hacks Kymlicka and Campbell to copen a script that downplays those most absurd aforestated alterations, and prolongs the story's conflict to approximately 90 minutes.
4. Assign dependable Campbell to direct their script, so to grant your production a professional veneer.
5. Cast veteran supporting actresses as the protagonist's mom (Gibb) and tutorial counselor (Luner), partly to counteract their junior co-stars' obvious inexperience, and partly to evoke nostalgia in your GenX viewers.
6. Intersperse illustrative flashbacks throughout the third act for those thickest viewers who need more than the abovesaid exposition.

What dreadfully superficial lives lead these well-to-do coastal suburbanites, who reside in extraordinarily sprawling, ugly homes, and impress on their neglected children the unnegotiable desideratum of tertiary education. How else will their daughters become wretched, licentious, alcoholic careerists who'll only ignore their offspring, on the vanishing odds that they have any at all?

Class (1983)

Directed by Lewis John Carlino
Written by Jim Kouf, David Greenwalt
Produced by Martin Ransohoff, Jim Kouf, David Greenwalt, Jill Chadwick, Cathleen Summers
Starring Andrew McCarthy, Jacqueline Bisset, Rob Lowe, Cliff Robertson, John Cusack, Alan Ruck, Rodney Pearson, Stuart Margolin, Remak Ramsay, Virginia Madsen, Deborah Thalberg, Fern Persons, Casey Siemaszko, Aaron Douglas, Anna Maria Horsford, Hal Frank, Dick Cusack, William Visteen, James D. O'Reilly, Caitlin Hart, Virginia Morris, Stewart Figa, Paula Clarendon, Joan Cusack, John Kapelos

Few can foreknow a motherf*cker, certainly no one in the acquaintance of a bright, green, gawky, gullible preppie (McCarthy) who pursues an affair with a quadragenarious alcoholic (Bisset) before both realize that she's the mother of his prankish, privileged, popular roommate (Lowe). Screenwriters/co-producers Kouf and Greenwalt proposed to pen a picture that's equal parts touching coming of age and scabrous collegial comedy in the manner and on the coattails of Animal House, and the result succeeds as neither, despite some funny horseplay and facetiae, and drama deftly delivered by a rock-solid cast. It's best as a showcase for that last: Bisset's in goatish good form; Robertson and Margolin are severally, suitably cast as Lowe's stern dad and a misunderstood investigator of Illinois' attorney general; charismatic pretty boys McCarthy and Lowe buoy these proceedings as the archetypes in which they'd be typecast for a decade: sensitive sweetheart and jocular bad boy. Observant fans of genre cinema in the '80s will spot other prominent players aplenty in future hits -- Ruck, Madsen, Siemaszko, the Cusack sibs, et al. Were the duds among its comedic moments excised along with the worst score of Elmer Bernstein's otherwise recherche renascence, the dramatic interaction compressed, and twenty minutes so shorn, this could've been a very good movie.

Recommended for a double feature paired with Don't Laugh at My Romance.

Creep 2 (2017)

Directed by Patrick Brice
Written by Patrick Brice, Mark Duplass
Produced by Carolyn Craddock, Jason Blum, Josh Braun, Christopher Donlon, Mark Duplass, Mel Eslyn
Starring Mark Duplass, Desiree Akhavan

Synopsis

Another day, another night, another hire, another murder....right? Her serial exposing the lonely men behind craigslist personals is an unmitigated flop on YouTube, so a frustrated, exploitative videographer (Akhavan) leaps at the opportunity to interview an oddball (Duplass) mired in a midlife crisis, who professes to be a serial killer. He's thus far her only riveting subject; unlike his anterior victims, she's unflinching and provocative. Who's luring who?

Script

The first video was a microbudgeted marvel: cunningly contrived, well-acted, disquieting and hilarious with disregard to any distinction between horror and comedy, and possibly the only good movie that Blumhouse has ever produced. Brice and Duplass are deservedly praised for developing this sequel from a variant perspective that generates a few instances of silent and suggested suspense, and almost as many laughs, but this time the scares are stingy. Choice characterizations can't sustain a script that loses momentum during the movie's final fifteen minutes.

Direction

As before, all shots are either stationary or hand-held by the spontaneous stars, to whom Brice's direction is largely overshadowed and subordinated.

Cinematography

Akhavan and Brice keep glare or shade from spoiling any shots.

Editing

Concatenating and condensing cuts are as adroitly effectuated by Christopher Donlon here as in the preceding pic.

Histrionics

Tensions and a commoving congeniality between its headliners form the nucleus of this production, interplayed by Duplass and Akhavan in outstanding, unnerving verisimilitude. Ever a comedic actor, Duplass inhabits his self-obsessed, homicidal lunatic with the ebullient enticement, dread despondence and manic outbursts that made his character unforgettable. Not merely a foil behind the camera, Akhavan renders her documentarian manqué's desperation, ambition, doubt and fear just as believably, and with teeth -- this could just as well be titled Creeps.

Score

Spanning not five minutes, two percussive, synthesized tracks by Julian Wass are as listenable as anything he's recorded for the Duplass brothers' other projects.

Highlights

Nearly half of the runtime consists of Duplass's spoken exposition; this wouldn't work, but his locution of these monologues mesmerize, as does the contrast of his wolfish insinuations and effusive ingratiation. Akhavan counters him with a tough skepticism that's never inordinately bitchy or self-conscious.

Flaws

First blood spilt during an otherwise fun prologue is observably digital. After an hour of discussion and misdirection, a protracted, uninspired anticlimax at Donlon's only bad splice fordoes the story, and isn't redeemed by a clever end.

Conclusion

Nobody reasonably expected this to match its predecessor (which loses much of its power after it's first seen), but Brice and Duplass couldn't land that last punch, or replicate the affright that made it great. As a result, this is that most disappointing of mediocrities that falls short of the considerable talent invested. Remakes, ripoffs and unimaginative franchises for bottom-feeders are Blumhouse's lifeblood, but we expect more from these two. Feel free to blame Jason Blum.

Crimes of the Future (1970)

Written, produced, and directed by David Cronenberg
Starring Ronald Mlodzik, Jon Lidolt, Tania Zolty, Paul Mulholland, Jack Messinger, Iain Ewing, William Haslam, Raymond Woodley, Stefan Czernecki, Rafe Macpherson, Willem Poolman, Don Owen, Udo Kasemets, Bruce Martin, Brian Linehan, Leland Richard, Stephen Zeifman, Norman Snider, William Wine, Kaspars Dzeguze, Sheldon Cohen, George Gibbins, Aus von Blicke

Synopsis

Humanity depopulates in anomic, semifuturistic 1997 for a gynocidal epidemic effected by toxic cosmetics. His interns frolic in their ruinate dermatological clinic as its dour director (Mlodzik) pines for his wacko, presumably deceased mentor and predecessor, and occupies metaphysical positions at satiric corporations, institutes, and foundations before consorting with a pedophilic sect therefrom, who purpose to induce premature puberty in and fertilize an abducted gamine (Zolty) to perpetuate the species.

Script

Its protagonist's fey, flatulent narration exposits wordless activity of Cronenberg's abstrusely aberrant second feature, which thematically anticipates his future movies as overtly as Stereo before it. Fixating for some and flat for others, it's undeniably as challenging as repugnant in its exploratory degeneracy.

Direction/cinematography/editing

On the postmodern premises of Massey College at the University of Toronto, and the newly opened, neobrutalist Ontario Science Centre, Cronenberg shot, then cut this in cointense color and contrast with a notable professionality that betokens his later mastery. Its languor reflects that of the moping, adventuresome teledermatologist, and among punctuating wickednesses soothes as sleazy counterbalance.

Histrionics

Present in Cronenberg's early pictures through Rabid, Mlodzik communicates with creepily cool countenance as much about his depraved dermatologist as the ambagious voice-over. His castmates were recruited from Cronenberg's circle (Woodley was then the filmmaker's brother-in-law; Lidolt designed the movie's titles), and they're all sufficiently strange (if scarcely acting) as maniacs, mutants and murderers.

Soundtrack

As in Stereo, noises are substituted for music, and the loudest blare during those futurable felonies. Some of these are recognizable as aqueous dissonance or birdsong.

Conclusion

Limited resources, a strepitent film camera, and its auteur's idiosyncrasies necessitated the experimental style of his early pictures, which are as esoteric as one could expect. If nothing else, they're a speculative window into immorality unique to the impartially amoral.

Recommended for a double feature paired with Stereo, The Brood, Coma, or Beyond the Black Rainbow.

Cube 2: Hypercube (2002)

Directed by Andrzej Sekula
Written by Sean Hood, Ernie Barbarash, Lauren McLaughlin
Produced by Ernie Barbarash, Suzanne Colvin, Peter Block, Mehra Meh, Betty Orr, Michael Paseornek
Starring Kari Matchett, Geraint Wyn Davies, Grace Lynn Kung, Neil Crone, Matthew Ferguson, Barbara Gordon, Lindsey Connell, Bruce Gray, Greer Kent

Sporadic traps, and translocational, transpositional, and transtemporal conditions assail a squabbling septet (Matchett, Davies, Kung, Crone, Ferguson, Gordon, Connell) trapped in a tesseractic labyrinth, to which all of them bear secret connections. His full and fascinating fictionalization of interdimensional abstractions doesn't rescue Hood's misscripted story, nor his, Barbarash's, and McLaughlin's contentiously callow characters, who are so dretchingly melodramatized by this ghastly cast that one longs for the comparative courtliness conveyed by six strips of bacon starring in Vincenzo Natali's cult classic. The quality of numerous digital SFX and DP/director Sekula's superintendence vary from scene to scene; he couldn't or wouldn't wrangle his players, but some of his shots are cleverly set. Just as dangers posed by shifting space, time, gravity, and direction don't contribute to suspense as Natali's, Bijelic's, and Manson's flagrant, acidic, gaseous, electromechanical hazards did, neither do these cantankerous chatterers interact intriguingly as did those of the first movie based on distinct psychosocial types. Had it half as much prattle, voiced by adept actors as mature adults, this ambitious sequel might've been good.

Recommended for a double feature paired with Cube or Beyond the Black Rainbow.

The Dead Pool (1988)

Directed by Buddy Van Horn
Written by Steve Sharon, Durk Pearson, Sandy Shaw
Produced by David Valdes
Starring Clint Eastwood, Patricia Clarkson, Liam Neeson, Evan C. Kim, David Hunt, Michael Currie, Jim Carrey, Michael Goodwin, Ronnie Claire Edwards, Darwin Gillett, Anthony Charnota, Diego Chairs, Victoria Bastel, Christopher P. Beale, John Vick, Louis Giambalvo, Nicholas Love, Maureen McVerry, Glenn Wright, Shawn Elliott, Ren Reynolds, Bill Wattenburg, Peter Anthony Jacobs, Lloyd Nelson, John Frederick Jones

Synopsis

When he isn't arguing with his department's head of public relations (Goodwin) or dodging continual attempts of assassination ordered by a mob boss (Charnota) whose conviction was secured by his testimony, Lt. Harry Callahan (Eastwood) investigates with a new partner (Kim) serial murders by varied methods of a rock star (Carrey), film critic (Edwards), talk show's host (Wattenburg), et al. itemized on the publicized dead pool of a choleric, co*cksure filmmaker (Neeson) of schlocky, cinematic horrors. Her dogged coverage of his exploits brings the graying, leathertough detective into conflict, then bed with a televised news reporter (Clarkson) whose tenacity nearly matches his own.

Script

Sharon, Pearson, and Shaw imparted devices and situations of interest to a story that was atrociously scripted by Sharon, whose cheesily unfunny dialog, social commentary as subtle as Callahan's chambered caliber, and recurring imbecilities* stultify this movie every 10 to 15 minutes.

Histrionics

In light of their characters' one-dimensional crudeness, only so much blame can be imputed to this cast for their unavoidable hamminess. Neeson and Carrey amusingly colored their parts just beyond tasteful lines, and while rock-solid Eastwood and charmingly chilly Clarkson (whose resemblance to Sondra Locke can't be ignored) interplay swimmingly, they've neither heat nor a single smooch between them.

Score

Composed and programmed for synthesizers, chamber orchestra, and jazz-rock ensemble, Lalo Schifrin's score is among the worst of his career. Most of it sounds like a third-rate composer's music for a trifling, telecast crime drama, as when the elegiacal end theme of Dirty Harry is brassily quoted in its own.

Highlights and notable *imbecilities

• On the set of a macabre music video, Carrey skulkingly lip-syncs Welcome to the Jungle in a low point of both his career and the lives of everyone who's watched this scene.
• Guns n' Roses are present in two cameos, possibly because market research evidenced that lightweight metalheads patronized both co*ck rock and action movies.
• By chop-socky does Kim (performing his own stunts) subdue one violent wrongdoer because, you see, his character is Chinese.
• Days later, he almost asphyxiates under the pressure of his weight bar while Eastwood ogles a fantastically sultry, sweaty female cop in the department's gym when he should be spotting.
• Among the killer's many means of murder is an RC car laden with C4, which pursues Eastwood and Kim in the movie's centerpiece, an impossible yet uniquely arresting automotive chase that's adeptly shot and scrupulously cut by editor Ron Spang.
• Nobody asked Dirty Harry to harpoon his franchise's last lawbreaker.

Conclusion

Before and during Warner Brothers's bids to compete with the outrageous, cartoonish violence and villainy of Golan-Globus's successful properties (Cobra, The Delta Force, sequels to Death Wish, et cetera), every sequel of Don Siegel's classic was progressively sillier than that anteceding, culminating in the preposterousness of this fifth, final film. Its skilled guidance by Van Horn, Eastwood's preferred stunt coordinator, stunt double, and thrice-selected director, is unobjectionable, but can't overcome its screenplay's stupidest scenes.

Devil in the Flesh 2 (A.K.A. Teacher's Pet) (2000)

Directed by Marcus Spiegel
Written by Richard Brandes
Produced by Betsy Mackey, Richard Brandes, Alicia Reilly Larson, Robert E. Baruc, Marc Forby
Starring Jodi Lyn O'Keefe, Jsu Garcia, Katherine Kendall, Jeanette Brox, Christiana Frank, Todd Robert Anderson, Bill Gratton, Sarah Lancaster, Rel Hunt, Todd McKee, Alex McArthur, Wendy Worthington

Synopsis

Within a week, a pretty mental patient and aspiring poet (O'Keefe) murders a sad*stically perverted nurse (Worthington) and the psychiatrist (McArthur) with whom she was obsessed, escapes from her psychiatric hospital, assumes the identity of a rich, dead collegian (Lancaster) who she resembles, flouts and outfoxes her dorm's dictatorial, prematurely frumpy housemother (Frank), befriends and beautifies her nerdy roommate (Brox), seduces a studly professor (Garcia) of creative writing, undermines his unlikable fiancée (Kendall), and excels in his class by penning passionate poetry. Can the local sheriff (Gratton) and his dimwitted deputy and son (Anderson) apprehend this overachiever?

Script

With his former co-producer Kurt Anderson and a quartet of screenwriters, producer/second assistant director/author Brandes is credited for the previous picture's story. He reputedly wrote this goofier, glossier subsequence alone as camp invested with improved, precipitate plotting and snappier dialogue.

Direction & cinematography

Only a few ostentatiously skillful close-ups (some of which are in deep focus) draw attention to Spiegel's otherwise ordinary oversight and M. David Mullen's toasty photography.

Histrionics

Brandes reserved all of his best insults, retorts, witticisms and felonies for strutting, orally contorting O'Keefe, who hits her marks a step over the top with hysterically hammy panache. While Rose McGowan played a high school senior as a blithe vicenarian slow to slay, O'Keefe's bouncy, butcherly bedlamite seems like a freshman of high school, not college. Among others, remarkably handsome Garcia and gawky Brox (a poor girl's Clea DuVall) are fair foils who embody their archetypes as palatably as their castmates. Alex McArthur's cameo corresponds to his unwilling objet du désir in the first movie.

Score

For a quarter-century, Steve Gurevitch's music has primarily supplied tonal emphasis, as here. Some of his programmed percussion occupies.

Highlights

O'Keefe nails all of her rejoinders as amusively as she seethes spitting demented invective. Moments after this lovely, lovelorn lunatic screams, "Where the hell is my Prince Charming?!," Lancaster's spoiled brat accidentally kills herself with priceless inelegance.

Flaws

Not two minutes prior to her untimely demise, Lancaster spies coitus between disgusting hicks. Evidently superhuman hearing empowers O'Keefe to surveil her unwitting inamorato.

Conclusion

Its sex, criminalities, and gallows humor outshines that of this melodrama's predecessor, and it was destined, sanitized, and almost too good for telecast via Lifetime.

Djinn (2013)

Directed by Tobe Hooper
Written by David Tully
Produced by Tim Smythe, Daniela Tully, Tim Andrew, Robert Crippen, Jaye Gazeley
Starring Razane Jammal, Khalid Laith, Aiysha Hart, Abdullah Al-Jenaibi, Carol Abboud, May Calamawy, Militzia Radmilovic, Kristina co*ker, Ahd, Malik McCall, Paul Luebke, Saoud Al Kaabi, Ahmed Abdullah, Soumaya Akaaboune

Constructional codes are, unsurprisingly, as lax in the UAE as in nearly any other locale of a horror movie in disregard of demonical phenomena, which is how a de luxe, residential high-rise was raised on the site of a town deserted decades before in the aftermath of a filial, apotropaic tragedy that befell a feminine jinni (Radmilovic, co*ker, Ahd). Its first occupants are bereaved Emirati spouses (Jammal, Laith) who've repaired from NYC to exploit an occupational opportunity and recover from the loss of their newborn, but that aggrieved, antecedent numen darkens their first day domiciled. Don't expect the gritty vision or frantic focus that begat his best early works from Hooper, who oversaw his final, jejune, overedited, otherwise unobjectionable production with the perfunctory professionalism common to his career's final quarter-century. Affected by Penélope Cruz syndrome, his attractive cast talk naturally in Arabic, but stiffly speak English dialog likely stipulated by distributive demands. Arab folklore and Muslim myth are rich, largely untapped sources of fictive horror granted summary treatment in this filmic trinket that's easy on the eyes and nerves alike, and probably the front of a terrific tax shelter.

Instead, watch Born of Fire.

5x2 (2004)

Directed by François Ozon
Written by François Ozon, Emmanuèle Bernheim
Produced by Olivier Delbosc, Marc Missonnier, Philippe Dugay
Starring Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Stéphane Freiss, Françoise Fabian, Michael Lonsdale, Géraldine Pailhas, Antoine Chappey, Marc Ruchmann, Jason Tavassoli, Yannis Belkacem

Synopsis

In counter-chronology, a quintet of momentous episodes scratch the surface of a failed marriage's bitter divorce, advoutry confessed and concealed, triste parturition, rapturous wedding and its racy reception, and transitional inception at a waterside Italian resort.

Script

As usual, Ozon's superficiality is betrayed by his lascivious emphases, but his tendentious portrayal of this movie's two-dimensional characters and their respective turpitudes is especially galling. In the most blatantly partial example, a longsuffering wife (Bruni-Tedeschi) quietly endures chagrin while her husband (Freiss) narrates his participation in an orgy to his brother (Chappey) and his boyfriend (Ruchmann); on their wedding night, her fling with a handsome American (Tavassoli) is treated as an erotically condonable caprice. Ozon weirdly, habitually abstracts to denigrate heterosexuality, but his worst misdeed here is to peddle nullity as arcana. Discordant from the tenderness with which he treats his son and wife, Freiss's cullion is elsewise unaccountably desperate, abusive, petty, remiss, and craven in contrived contradistinction to his better half. No causation can be clearly charged to his quasi-rape contiguous to the finalization of their divorce, anguished absence during his son's birth, or wanton harassment of his wife. His demonization of straight men demonstrates this filmmaker's inability to concoct substance behind semblance of obscenity, much less dredge insights therein. By the pen and lens of a Rohmer, Aurel, Blier or Téchiné, such a quintipartite narrative would yield fruit of a sort that he hasn't the depth or humanity to pick.

Direction

None of the reprehension above pertains to Ozon's perfectly professional direction, whereby his handsome cast is framed in potent foci that don't detract from palpable ambiences in ordinary and idyllic settings. That doltish gimmickry that impairs his sequent efforts was years forthcoming, as were innumerable posts to fora by fans who agonize to extenuate or rationalize it.

Cinematography

As for other movies by Ozon and Olivier Assayas, Yorick Le Saux here works his verve for high contrast abounding in pitch blacks, and coordination of cool and brilliant colors.

Editing

Her contributions are smoothly unnoticeable until Monica Coleman's abrupt cuts powerfully, proximately communicate intervallic omissions.

Histrionics

Not one false note vitiates rigorous performances by Bruni-Tedeschi, Freiss and most of their co-stars, who commit to their parts with a subtle mimesis that indues verisimility even to Ozon's weakest codswallop. Coarsely compulsive Fabian and Lonsdale are almost wasted playing the spatting parents of Bruni-Tedeschi's wife and mother. Tavassoli's painfully stiff delivery is the sole exception to this concerted merit.

Score

Like the aforementioned acting, two moving, lushly orchestrated themes courtesy of Philippe Rombi are too good for this picture, as are other musical selections by Paolo Conte, Bobby Solo, Wilma Goich, Luigi Tenco, Nico Fidenco and Gino Paoli that predominate on its soundrack.

Highlights

Nicely registered reactions between lines may be the best reason to view this. A beautifully conclusive wide shot of the Mediterranean offing from a Sardinian strand fades to black upon sundown, patefying how this Parisian shoots with a grace that he can't write.

Flaws

Aside from Ozon's cheap characterizations and vacuous foundation, both Chappey's and Ruchmann's, and Lonsdale's and Fabian's pairs are more intriguing than the protagonistic spouses.

Conclusion

This is what Téchiné, Pialat, Breillat, or the Dardenne brothers would've produced were they as shallow as Michael Bay. Ozon wears his influences on his sleeve, but his well-crafted ersatz is immediately discernable from a complete story about complete people.

Instead, watch We Won't Grow Old Together.

The Frontier (2015)

Directed by Oren Shai
Written by Oren Shai, Webb Wilcoxen
Produced by Dana Lustig, Mark Smirnoff, Tal Fiala, Elric Kane, Stephen Harrison, Moshe Barkat, Pirchia Rechter, Dari Shai, Haim slu*tzky, Dustin Cook
Starring Jocelin Donahue, Kelly Lynch, A.J. Bowen, Jamie Harris, Izabella Miko, Jim Beaver, Liam Aiken

Synopsis

She's yet to put enough miles between herself and a homicide in Flagstaff when a drifter (Donahue) stops at a rundown diner and motel for a meal and overnight lodging, only to find that its proprietress (Lynch) and patrons (Harris, Miko, Beaver, Aiken) are soon to be recipients of over $1.7M in cash laundered from a recent heist. Their mercenary commonalities and continual visits by an obtrusive policeman (Bowen) complicate her designs on the money and a clean escape.

Script

Motivations are stultified and their promising story's second act is bogged by Shai's and Wilcoxen's drippy, dispensable exposition, which temporarily reduces a hard-boiled crime thriller to a cheap costume drama. Had so much background been alluded rather than dilated, and the plot enhanced with twice as many twists, they would've written a winner.

Direction

His conduct is slick if unambitious: Shai shoots action and dramatics with equal facility, and prudently interposes between both direful, often speechless close-ups and slow zooms, mostly of Donahue.

Cinematography

If at all, Jay Keitel may be known to viewers of independent cinema as Amy Seimetz's preferred DP. Diurnal scenes are gorgeously enriched though his lucent lenses, but by night, he's manifestly affected by a nyctophobia plaguing so many in his trade. No harvest moon's as fulgent as this movie's nocturnal lighting.

Production design

Worn postwar furnishings and appliances salvaged and fabricated for Taylor Jean's and Steve Morden's set design, Yasmine Abraham's perfectly selected and lightly distressed costumery, hairstyling courtesy of Emilio Uribe, and every other artifact of Lindsey Moran's production design -- driver's licenses, matchbooks, photographs, suitcases, purses, bottles, mugs and more -- replicate the mass-produced fashions of the '70s. Irrespective of budget, few pictures set during this era look so verisimilar, largely because the aforementioned grasp its grime.

Histrionics

Hers could be the face and presence in a thousand last known photos of doomed and endangered beauties circa '72-'84, so the niche that Donahue's occupied since The House of the Devil is scarcely shared. She makes the best of her sly miss with chilly charm, unostentatiously easy expressivity, and a sensitivity which may convince your amygdala that she's really rolling with so many punches. By contrast, indie regular Bowen (her assailant in House) has defied typecasting in a sweep of roles to varied results; here, he looks a southwestern part that he plays well, but his inauthenticity's betrayed by a gentle voice. Harris enlivens most of his scenes as a friendly fop in his father's footsteps, but Miko doesn't flesh his bleached, bubbleheaded wife with such gratification. Perhaps the worst personation of Lynch's career can be witnessed here, as she gratuitously overacts her every single line, mien and motion. Beaver's brutish career criminal and Aiken's antsy abettor are shallow figures energetically realized by their seasoned character actors.

Score

At its barest instrumentation in a minor key -- guitar, horns, underlying strings -- Ali Helnwein's score is resonant of its place and period. It turns mushy with the inclusion of flutes, then musty when electric guitars and staccato strings are employed.

Highlights

Donahue's pitch- and picture-perfect in every scene, whether evincing trauma and trouble, or trading pleasantries with Harris.

Nadir

Pick one:

1. The movie's midpoint slows to crawl through tawdry tales of woe involving Jack Warner worsened by Lynch's awful acting.
2. In a regressive episode immediate to bloody gunplay, Lynch's bygone starlet recites lines from an unrealized production à la Norma Desmond to embarrass everyone watching.

Conclusion

If this were as good as it looks or as exciting as its promotional campaign implied, it would probably be some sort of cult classic by now. Regrettably, too much is said and too little done in an expertly staged but underwhelming production.

Harlequin: Another Woman (1994)

Directed by Alan Smythe
Written by Margot Dalton, Jim Henshaw, Lee Langley, Lyle Slack
Produced by Ian McDougall, Jean Desormeaux, Jim Henshaw, Caird Urquhart
Starring Justine Bateman, Peter Outerbridge, Amy Stewart, Jackie Richardson, Kenneth Welsh, James Purcell, Elizabeth Lennie, Diana Belshaw, Meg Hogarth

Synopsis

Retrograde amnesia comes of concussion inflicted by thuggish muggers to suppress the memories and clear the choler of a rancorous restaurateur (Bateman), whose re-emergent geniality affords her an opportunity to rectify spoiled kinships with her handsome husband (Outerbridge) and teenage sister-in-law (Stewart). However, she's stalked by a greasy acquaintance (Purcell) who in murderous malice targets her marriage.

Script

Dalton's drama is typical of Harlequin's formulaic fare, and translates well to these 92 minutes. Cozily romantic locales and circ*mstances, and the divulgence of a tragic secret, supplement her slightly skimpy story.

Cinematography

Excepting some dreamt cutbacks uglified by selective decolorization in post-production, the bland warmth of Michael Storey's photography becomes Smythe's adequate composition.

Histrionics

Ordinarily obnoxiously oafish in Family Ties and dreck like The Night We Never Met, Bateman actually radiates a hesitant amenity as the amiable amnesiac, despite her plodding gait. Outerbridge has buttoned-down charm to spare, which largely offsets the leads' lack of steam. Among the satisfactorily subsidiary players, Welsh is avuncularly appealing as Bateman's suave psychiatrist.

Score

Emotive, synthesized strings, smooth jazz and portentous tones are all comprised to be liminally heard in David Blamires's score.

Highlights

Her gradual recovery, recollections, reconciliations, and romance in Bateman's severally palatial and rustic houses are ingratiating.

Flaws

Amatorian scenes of Bateman's and Outerbridge's spouses set early in their relationship star a couple who bear no resemblance to them. Two assaults are presented in blurrily unsightly slow motion.

Conclusion

Anyone familiar with Harlequin's lightweight novels or televised features knows what to expect from any of either: lovers live happily ever after, but their trip is more important than its inevitable destination. Mike Nichols's and J.J. Abrams's situationally similar, unbearably saccharine Regarding Henry was produced on a tenfold budget a few years prior, but it's laughably inferior to this modest trifle.

Harlequin: The Awakening (1995)

Directed by George Bloomfield
Written by Patricia Coughlin, Maria Nation
Produced by Norman Denver, Jean Desormeaux, Noreen Halpern
Starring Cynthia Geary, David Beecroft, Sheila McCarthy, Maurice Godin, David Ferry, Miguel Fernandes, David Gardner

Her preceding lodger (Ferry) is a trafficker of antiquities, who flees at the neighboring accommodation of a studly bounty hunter (Beecroft) determined to apprehend him and secure a recently unearthed panel on behalf of Greece's government. Their lonely hostess (Geary) insistently tags along with the rootless mercenary, away from her pianistic tutorship, familial Mainer's home, its mortgage, and singledom, toward anfractuous and amatory adventure in Miami. From newly concluded Northern Exposure, goofily gratifying Geary capably carried with bantering Beecroft Nation's satisfactory, specially silly adaptation of Coughlin's novel from the Harlequin imprint, both of which are earmarked for the wistfully middle-aged. Those accustomed to this series' steamiest and sedate features may be disappointed by these leads' tame amation and plentiful pleasantries, but that farcicalness is geared to please a target demographic. Editor Susan Shipton intersplices stock and main footage well, though a few of her cuts are sloppily sudden. Portioned interpersonal development, eroticism, and excitement suffice the light passage of 91 minutes, but don't be surprised when this one waxes daffy.

Harlequin: Diamond Girl (1998)

Directed by Timothy Bond
Written by Diana Palmer, Charles Lazer
Produced by Randall Torno, David Wicht, Kevin Lafferty, Jennifer Black, Susan Minas
Starring Joely Collins, Jonathan Cake, Kevin Otto, Blair Slater, Dyan Cannon, Denise Virieux, Royston Stoffels, Stacey Sacks, Paddy Canavan

Her consistent competency sustains the San Franciscan office of a coltishly irresponsible attorney (Otto), but That Magical, Material Makeover (on which so many romantic dramas and comedies hinge) of a frumpily pretty paralegal (Collins) may well lure her employer away from his girlfriend (Virieux), who's greedy to broker the purchase of his family's Californian winery and estate on behalf of a French investor (Stoffels). That's the ploy of his pushy, peppery elder brother (Cake), another lawyer who's angling with the paper-pusher's freshened tresses, dresses, and cosmetics for a better deal....but his own inceptive intimacy with the newly beautified legal assistant confronts him with his noncommitment to kin, home, and love. Clunky dialog, credible characterizations, and transactional intrigues from Palmer's novel are crisply histrionized by vivacious, good-looking players. Otto resembles a fusion of Greg Kinnear and Bob Saget, as does Cake one of Alex Stein and Christian Bale; both eventually cocreate enough heat while semi-clothed with cutie-pie Collins to stay the prurient preoccupancy of ladies as likely to watch as read the most safe and staid of all Harlequin's publications adapted for two telecast hours. Spry Cannon cheerfully clothes the brothers' widowed mother with sweet gentility. Toronto and Cape Town are imperfectly but suitably substituted for San Francisco (which is only actually seen in establishing exteriors), as are South African ruralities for Napa Valley. Drama doesn't come much fluffier, nor its erotism milder.

Home Invasion (2012)

Directed by Doug Campbell
Written by Michal Shipman, Ken Sanders, Christine Conradt, Doug Campbell
Produced by David Japka, Robert Ballo, Ken Sanders, Douglas Howell, Tosca Musk, Christine Conradt, Timothy O. Johnson
Starring Lisa Sheridan, Haylie Duff, Jason Brooks, C. Thomas Howell, Kyla Dang, Al Sapienza, Barbara Niven, Taymour Ghazi, Jason Stuart

Synopsis

In the commission of a botched burglary, a career criminal (Ghazi) is greased by the restaurateur (Sheridan) whose home he's invaded. His partner (Howell) is afterward walloped and left for dead in the wild by the deceased's girlfriend (Duff), who then locates her burglarious beau's killer, joins her support group, and exacts revenge by assault, arson, contamination of pine nut salad dressing, and swimming lessons for her target's lubberly foster daughter (Dang).

Script

Shipman's and Sanders's story is formulaically fabricated to sequentially press every relevant button in the psyches of the alcoholic housewives, careerists, and cashiers of dollar stores addicted to Lifetime's crime dramas. It's a notch above most of its type simply because it's less silly, notwithstanding the spoken surplusage of Conradt's and Campbell's screenplay. Naturally, this is all but a fantasy: intraracial crime committed by white Americans rarely involves breaking and entering.

Direction

Probably the most successful director in the stable of Johnson/Shadowland, Campbell heads this as procedurally as he has his hits in series such as ...at 17 and Stalked By My Doctor. Expect nothing approaching experimentation or innovation from his workmanlike manner, and he'll never disappoint you.

Histrionics

More often the victim than villainess in televised and direct-to-video productions, pouty Duff can twist her smile sweet to sinful at the drop of a hat, but she's too cute to convince as a verisimilitudinous vehicle of vengeance. Good old C. Thomas chews his scenery as spicily as ever in his limited time onscreen, which is a treat for some nostalgists, who might notice that he's at least 10 years too old for his role. He's almost as entertaining when Stuart's fruity chef peckishly reproves his crew. Everyone else is as unremarkably able as their director. Sheridan bears a striking similitude to Margot Kidder in her youth, but she hasn't her personality, or personality disorders.

Score

This reviewer is all but sure that most or all of Michael Burns's and Steve Gurevitch's percussion, pianism and syntheszised synthpads are algorithmically generated.

Highlights

Spoiler: C. Thomas's hapless lout resorts to squatting, survivalism, and subsistence on dog food through the first and second acts, yet he's smoked straightaway early in the third by Duff's schemer. A quick, requisite catfight between Sheridan and Duff precedes a sanguinary ending.

Flaws

Fulsome flashbacks and moronically explanatory dialogue are provided for viewers whose attention spans are so deficient, they could almost be diagnosed with anterograde amnesia. After trekking through miles of wilderness, C. Thomas's pristinely white sneakers are clearly brand-new.

Conclusion

Neither will these trespasses view themselves, nor those boxes of plonk drink themselves. Enjoy, ladies.

Hostel: Part II (2007)

Written and directed by Eli Roth
Produced by Eli Roth, Chris Briggs, Mike Fleiss, Gabriel Roth, Daniel Frisch, Philip Waley, Mark Bakunas, Finni Johannsson, Eythor Gudjonsson, Leifur B. Dagfinnsson, Scott Spiegel, Quentin Tarantino, Boaz Yakin
Starring Lauren German, Roger Bart, Heather Matarazzo, Bijou Phillips, Richard Burgi, Vera Jordanova, Jordan Ladd, Milan Knazko, Stanislav Yanevski, Patrik Zigo, Zuzana Geislerová, Jay Hernandez, Monika Malácová, Milda Jedi Havlas, Petr Vancura, Roman Janecka

Synopsis

Pernicious pastimes plague three American students (German, Matarazzo, Phillips) lured by a model (Jordanova) who poses for their Roman art class to a quaint Slovakian village that subsists on the patronage of its soothing hot springs, animated, Autumnal dozynki, and a repurposed, fortified factory where a ring of moneyed sad*sts and phonomaniacs bid for, rack, and slay auctioned kidnappees. Flight from this organization is nigh-impossible, but negotiation is an option for all visitors with particularly deep pockets.

Script & direction

He was mindlessly criticized for his shrewd refusal to attempt replication of Hostel's sustained suspense in a lean script that deals out as much unstanched morbidity and humor black and blue as Roth's fans expected. His directorial indistinction distracts from neither extremities connoting gallons of blood shed, nor a crucial commercial comment late in the third act that celebrates the sinister and salvational potentialities of lucre in a hypertransactional black market.

Cinematography

Many scenes are blemished by crummy chromatic grading, a metier of defunct Pacific Title & Art Studio that's all but stipulated in post-production. Where it's lightly applied, interiors grand and grimy alike are attractively displayed in DP Milan Chadima's high contrast.

Histrionics

Typecasting is the best casting for many genre flicks, so slu*ttish party girl and sappy nerd are respectively, fittingly fleshed by trashily pretty Phillips and famously hideous Matarazzo. German undertakes for most of the stingily shared thespian depth as the sensible scion of a familial fortune, as does Bart in the role of a reluctant nebbish accompanying Burgi's jockish millionaire to participate in their expensively arranged abominations. Cameos are more cleverly cast this time around, as when enduringly gorgeous Edwige Fenech instructs a class of artists, or Ruggero Deodato relishes an anthropophagic atrocity.

Music

Another of Nathan Barr's worthless, uncreative scores can't compete with sprightly folk songs performed by Czech ensemble Varmuzova cimbálová muzika, which should've been this soundtrack's primary nondiegetic music.

Conclusion

His stratified peers could learn a lot from the economical, unpretentious approach by which Roth produced his early entertainments. Naturally, they won't.

Recommended for a double feature after Hostel, or paired with any feature of the Guinea Pig series.

Margot at the Wedding (2007)

Written and directed by Noah Baumbach
Produced by Scott Rudin, Blair Breard
Starring Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Zane Pais, Jack Black, Ciarán Hinds, Flora Cross, John Turturro, Halley Feiffer, Matthew Arkin, Seth Barrish, Michael Cullen, Enid Graham, Justin Roth, Brian Kelley

One might anticipate that a movie titled as though it's one in a series of Comedies and Proverbs by a man who styled his son Rohmer and cast his wife in the part of one Pauline might be some breezily reflective exercise in penetrating loquacity, but Baumbach's chatty farce works a talented cast to inconsequence, and can't compare to prefigurative pictures by this epigone's influences. Neurotic insecurities, infidelities, and needless miffs are the orders of every day during the sojourn of an overcritical, passive-aggressive authoress (Kidman) and her effeminate son (Pais) at her childhood home for the impendent wedding of her resentful sister (Leigh) to an aimless, depressive, huffily hypersensitive jackass (Black), which is at best tense before it's disrupted by her unannounced but mansuete husband (Turturro), a historical novelist (Hinds) with whom she's collaborating and sleeping, his slu*ttishly obnoxious daughter (Feiffer), and surly, trashy neighbors (Cullen, Graham). His script only wades calf-deep for the superficiality of Baumbach's dramatis personae, represented nicely by a superlative cast who adroitly juggle his cunning, if unsteady vacillations between comedy and drama. Amusing contretemps, faux pas, familial gossip, and smash cuts tightly edited by Carol Littleton outshine illuminative insinuations and arguments that haven't meat so memorable as the histrionics by which they're actualized. Harris Savides's deliberately drab cinematography is eventually as wearisome as underplots that fizzle funnily when they could've been substantively developed, or caricatures such as Feiffer's floozy, Black's bumbling layabout, and rednecks personated by Cullen and Graham, who goyishly manhandle a ponderous, porcine carcass in their bathroom that they later barbecue in their backyard before a flown American flag. The limits of Baumbach's integrity and intelligence were bared earlier this year by his coactive infusion of third-wave agitprop into a feature advertisem*nt for Barbie's brand with the corrupted '83 for whom he traded in his gifted '62, which won't surprise anyone who's studied how he rigorously put two durable leading ladies and their co-stars through their paces for such paltry results.

Instead, watch The Odd Couple, Claire's Knee, Scenes from a Marriage, Hannah and her Sisters, Boyfriend of My Girlfriend, September, A Tale of Springtime, Husbands and Wives, A Serious Man, or The Overnight.

Miami Hustle (A.K.A. Hello, She Lied) (1996)

Directed by Lawrence Lanoff
Written by Phillips Collins, Daniel Miller
Produced by Douglas Bruce, R. Ben Efraim, Danny Dimbort, Avi Lerner, Trevor Short, Terry Simmons
Starring Kathy Ireland, Audie England, Richard C. Sarafian, John Enos III, Eduardo Yáñez, Allan Rich, Larry Weber, Ed Amatrudo, Shareef Malnik

Petty profit and restitution for her troubled brother's debt to his sleazy creditor (Sarafian) motivate a leggy griftress (Ireland), who chances upon amity and amour with her latest marks -- a successful designer of video games (Enos) and a strip's club's shapely shot girl (England), the unwitting heritor of an impending windfall. England and Ireland accord better than their national namesakes, both reliant on beauty and screen presence to offset histrionic limitations shared by most of their co-stars. They're also fashionably underweight, diametrical to bewigged, corpulent Sarafian, who's not as impressive before as behind the camera. Its few crafty twists differentiate Collins's and Miller's story from those of most libidinous, cablecast crime dramas, but its fundamental aim remains: pretty leads simulating steamily stylized sex; as Ireland's congress was evidently cut, England's typecast as the sole lustily stripped vixen. Luxuriantly modern homes and Kevin Sepe's goofy music are more rememberable than most else in Showtime's vehicle for Ireland, a frippery best reserved for her fans. For everyone else, superior films on fleecers abound.

Instead, watch The Hustler, Paper Moon, The Sting, Harry in Your Pocket, The Color of Money, or The Swindle.

Missing at 17 (2013)

Directed by Doug Campbell
Written by Christine Conradt
Produced by Marianne C. Wunch, Robert Ballo, Ken Sanders, Tom Berry, Christine Conradt, Pierre David
Starring Ayla Kell, Tricia O'Kelley, Ben Gavin, Alex Carter, Micah Alberti, Marin Hinkle, Gary Hudson, Jonathan Camp, Jacob Hopkins, Brandi Glanville, Brittany Beery, Ramon Camacho, Connor Clayton, Lucas Durham, Cali Fredrichs, Paul Zies

Shadowland's kindliest of many perils at 17 is a modest diversion by director Campbell and his frequent collaborators (co-producer/screenwriter Conradt, co-producer/DP Ballo, composer Steve Gurevitch, et al.), who've but one surprise: no annoyances! The shocking patefaction of her adoption incites a brainish runaway (Kell) to expand her social circle during two unauthorized, extemporaneous excursions, when she's romanced by a hunky hoodlum (Gavin) who hires a private investigator (Hudson) to locate her debilitatedly drunken mother (Hinkle) and upright brother (Alberti). While her divorced, adoptive parents (O'Kelley, Carter) seek, then stanch the temperamental teen whenever she's around, her new boyfriend is plied by his recidivous cousin (Camp) and an accomplice (Camacho) to participate as the getaway driver of their upcoming larceny. Decent production values, relatively subdued goofiness, and feisty Kell's tickling overperformance broaden the appeal of another felonous and familial drama beyond the horizon of Lifetime's tipsy, post-menopausal audience. Rident and logically undemanding couples may make a nice evening of it.

Mortal Thoughts (1991)

Directed by Alan Rudolph
Written by William Reilly, Claude Kerven
Produced by Joseph M. Caracciolo Jr., John Fiedler, Mark Tarlov, Demi Moore, Stuart Benjamin, Taylor Hackford
Starring Demi Moore, Glenne Headly, Harvey Keitel, Bruce Willis, John Pankow, Billie Neal, Kelly Cinnante, Frank Vincent, Christopher Scotellaro, Karen Shallo, Crystal Field, Larry Attile, Roger Shamas, Star Jasper, Julie Garfield, John Descano

Who slew the lewd, abusive, loutish, co*ke-crazed husband (Willis) of a hairdresser (Headly)? The chief suspects interrogated by two detectives (Keitel, Neal) are the sleazy deceased's widow and her best friend and employee (Moore), whose account of what might've been manslaughter seems to consort with the facts....to a point. Moore poured herself into the lead of her productional foray, and she's viscerally believable at the head of a mostly solid cast, maugre a few overacted moments by Keitel and Headley, whose part might've been better assigned to Keitel's girlfriend Lorraine Bracco, or Illeana Douglas. Rudolph's direction is more polished than for his pictures in the '80s, and complemented by Elliot Davis's richly balanced photography, which seems wasted on dumpy localities in the Garden State. Convolutions of Reilly's and Kerven's plot are cleverly kinked in cutbacks, but for their indulgent superfluity and frequent slo-mo, this runs 15 minutes overlong. A modest success for its stars' conjoint celebrity, it was too sordid a project for Moore and Willis at the height of their marriage and careers.

The Overnight (2015)

Written and directed by Patrick Brice
Produced by Naomi Scott, Maya Ferrara, Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass, Adam Scott
Starring Adam Scott, Taylor Schilling, Jason Schwartzman, Judith Godrèche, R.J. Hermes, Max Moritt

Synopsis

A budding friendship between their sons (Hermes, Moritt) introduces a married pair (Scott, Schilling) anxiously resettled in Los Angeles to another (Schwartzman, Godrèche) warm, wealthy and weird who invite the transplants to their home. After their kids are abed, the commonplace couple discover just how bizarrely talented, generous and uninhibited their hosts are, and they're paradoxically pushed to party beyond their zones of comfort, and into new ones.

Script

Penned from the perspective of Scott's and Schilling's spouses, Brice's story is among the most benignly bawdy you're likely to see, sweet in intention if too Rabelaisian for some viewers. For everyone else, his raveling, disrobing revelations underscored by gamey tiffs and coquetry are flurryingly fun.

Direction

As evidenced in Creep and Creep 2, Brice skillfully supervises his productions on tight budgets and schedules, helming this one over the course of 12 days (and nights), largely at Adam Carolla's ritzy house. His workmanship is respectably transparent in service to his cast.

Cinematography

Photic balance and colorful splashes amid otherwise muted tones distinguish John Guleserian's camerawork.

Editing

Christopher Donlon times alternations of shots with conversational flow, if twice or thrice too often.

Histrionics

Schwartzman's eccentric entrepreneur (who would've been a fit role for either of the co-producing Duplass brothers) is easy to overplay, but his effervescence is kept in confident check. As protean as any thalian thespian working, Scott interprets his insecure husband as an interchangeably restless and relaxed complement to Schilling's adoring wife, who betrays little lusts and ruffles with droll niceties. Now an old hand as an inveterate flirt, Godrèche tempers her sensuality with a warmth shared by her co-stars.

Score

As in other projects by the Duplasses, Julian Wass has a perkily synthesized tune for nearly every tone.

Highlights

Brice's highlights are surprises that would be undone by explication, one of which is foretokened by an acrylically painted motif and some of the movie's posters.

Flaws

Scott and Schilling seem stiltedly self-conscious in their second scene together.

Conclusion

If most bagatelles were written and acted this well, many of us would never leave our couches.

Recommended for a double feature paired with Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.

Prom Night IV: Deliver Us from Evil (1991)

Directed by Clay Borris
Written by Richard Beattie
Produced by Ray Sager, Peter R. Simpson
Starring Nicole de Boer, J.H. Wyman, Joy Tanner, Alle Ghadban, James Carver, Brock Simpson, Fab Filippo, Kenneth McGregor, Krista Bulmer, Phil Morrison, Colin D. Simpson, Bill Jay, Deni DeLory

So incensed is a diabolically preserved, stigmatic, meshuga monk (Carver) by inveterate hanky-panky that after escaping from a church's dungeon where he's been immured for decades, he must terrorize two couples (De Boer, Wyman; Tanner, Ghadban) who've forgone their senior prom for a libidinous weekend at a luxe, renovated summer house, which was once his monastery. Marginal mediocrity raises above anterior duds (from a shoddy series of valedictory slashers) this third, snowy sequel, which Borris sillily invigorated with a running zoom, sweeping pans, and Dutch angles. All of the unconvincingly pseudo-adolescent vicenarians play pleasingly: Canadian screen staple De Boer is charmfully chaste to offset butterfaced Tanner's slu*ttish schoolfriend, while Wyman and Ghadban tickle as their lunkily hunky beaus. By sulky manduction of scenery, Carver stalks, slays, and crank calls in observance of a strangely sanguineous scriptural interpretation. Are you seeking a gory, agreeably cheesy B-horror to watch during a wintry evening? Look no further, and expect no meaning.

Psycho Brother In-Law (A.K.A. Blood Brothers) (2017)

Directed by Jose Montesinos
Written by Jose Montesinos, Delondra Mesa
Produced by Kristopher Wynne, David Michael Latt, Paul Bales, David Rimawi
Starring Brittany Falardeau, Zack Gold, Mike Duff, Megan Ashley Brown, Samantha Bowling, Billy Meade, Lanett Tachel, Mitch McCoy, Marc Herrmann, Elaina Garrity, Jordan Morgan

Any assumption that a psycho-thriller produced by The Asylum and distributed by Lifetime might be pleasingly preposterous pulp is reasonable but wrong; director/editor/co-screenwriter Montesinos doles out stinted suspense in his soapy crime drama, which may not even appease the average post-menopausal swiller of plonk. To the coastal home of an ergocentric tech entrepreneur (Duff) comes his bananas baby brother (Gold), who charms his neglected sister-in-law (Falardeau) and nerdy niece (Brown) before they cognize their insinuated, avuncular visitant's history of and capacity for deadly violence. Aside from a few incidents of such, some foreshadowing innuendo, and a well-tiled, balneal set, this concatenation of clichés is as timeworn as tiring, and inhabited by players who don't mind their motions. Tachel's presence as a detective satisfies gendered and racial quotas while eroding plausibility. Is this movie's somniferous efficacy when taken with wine intended? Probably.

Some Voices (2000)

Directed by Simon Cellan Jones
Written by Joe Penhall
Produced by Damian Jones, Graham Broadbent
Starring Daniel Craig, Kelly Macdonald, David Morrissey, Julie Graham, Peter McDonald

Solid theatricals and David Odd's vibrant cinematography buoy these 101 adequate minutes concerning an irresponsible, mischievous schizophrenic (Craig), whose denial of his medications provokes shadowy symptoms straining both his flowering romance with a cute, gravid Glaswegian (Macdonald), and cohabitation with and employment by his brother (Morrissey), chef and traiteur of a small eatery in west London. Neither particularly prosaic nor profound is Penhall's picture of schizophrenia, but his story is agreeable, even if he can't severalize his cute from cutesy vignettes. This is vital viewing for none save fans of its stars, who'll sate their expectations. It may be confused with Strange Voices, another treatment of the same psychopathology.

The War Between Men and Women (1972)

Directed by Melville Shavelson
Written by Danny Arnold, Melville Shavelson, James Thurber
Produced by Danny Arnold, Jack Lemmon
Starring Jack Lemmon, Barbara Harris, Jason Robards, Herb Edelman, Lisa Gerritsen, Moosie Drier, Severn Darden, Lisa Eilbacher, Lucille Meredith

Among several subjects belabored by New Hollywood on its deathbed were the cartoons and essays of James Thurber, some of which inspired this story of a slobbish, myopic, misanthropic, misogynistic cartoonist (Lemmon), who can't help but mutually adore unto matrimony a bookstore's clerk and mother (Harris) of three (astonishingly ugly Gerritsen, cute Drier, foxy Eilbacher) while contending with his deteriorating eyesight, his neurotic agent (Edelman), and her ex-husband, a manly and obtrusive photographer (Robards). If more than a third of the stale situations that Arnold and Shavelson dusted off and strung together were as amusing as the facetiae glibly traded by their matchless leads or integrated, often parabolic animation in the idiom of Thurber's doodles, they might've had a hit. As for many other box-office bombs, the dramatic poise and comic timing of Lemmon and Harris lend to this feature more wit and appeal than its script.

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Synopsis

Script

Direction

Cinematography

Editing

Histrionics

Score

Highlights

Flaws

Conclusion

Recommended for a double feature paired with .

Appalling

Bogus (1996)

Directed by Norman Jewison
Written by Jeff Rothberg, Francis X. McCarthy, Alvin Sargent
Produced by Jeff Rothberg, Arnon Milchan, Norman Jewison, Michael Jewison, Gayle Fraser-Baigelman, Patrick Markey, Michael G. Nathanson
Starring Haley Joel Osment, Whoopi Goldberg, Gerard Depardieu, Andrea Martin, Denis Mercier, Nancy Travis, Kevin Jackson, Ute Lemper, Sheryl Lee Ralph, Barbara Hamilton, Elizabeth Harpur, Richard Portnow, Don Francks

Zoom comes the automotive crash that kills a magician's assistant and single mom (Travis), whose will commends to the custody of her whilom foster sister, an unmotherly wholesaler (Goldberg), her impolite, prestidigitating son (Osment), whose occasionally dangerous schizophrenic episodes materialize a hulking, Gallic, imaginary friend (Depardieu) dispensing sensible, ignored advice. Jewison's requisite kiddiesh*t in the '90s is a handsome, mushy, pointless, plotless picture that treads water in a succession of stodgy, stock situations concerning a brat's fantastic delinquency, a few of which are as asinine as Depardieu's slouchy, affected waddle. Co-author and producer Rothberg squandered, laundered, or sheltered Warner Brothers's money by financing a production that's perfect for kids who delight in crushing tedium.

The Children (1980)

Directed by Max Kalmanowicz
Written by Carlton J. Albright, Edward Terry
Produced by Carlton J. Albright, Max Kalmanowicz, Edward Terry
Starring Gil Rogers, Martin Shakar, Gale Garnett, Shannon Bolin, Joy Glaccum, Tracy Griswold, Jessie Abrams, Jeptha Evans, Clara Evans, Sarah Albright, Nathanael Albright, Julie Carrier, Michelle La Mothe, Edward Terry, Peter Maloney, Rita Montone, John P. Codiglia, Martin Brennan, June Berry, Suzanne Barnes

Synopsis

Symptoms suffered by schoolchildren (Evans siblings, Albright siblings, Carrier) who've been zombified by radioactive smoke fumed from a nuclear power plant include lethargy, periorbital dark circles, blackened fingernails, homicidomania, and a deadly touch. When these juvenile undead terrorize a tidy town in New England's countryside, a sociable sheriff (Rogers) and a whiny wimp (Shakar) trace a trail of scorched corpses.

Script

As in so many other B-movies, the heroes of Albright's and Terry's dragging story could twig and resolve their disaster if they'd average IQs. They don't, so 40 minutes of plot is extended to 93 that are largely dilatory, containing scant surprises and no suspense.

Direction

Kalmanowicz helmed this with slightly more skill than that observed in the usual fodder for double bills at drive-ins.

Cinematography

Some scenes are dingily defaced due to substandard stock or storage, but Barry Abrams's photography is otherwise as vibrantly attractive here as it was coterminously in Friday the 13th.

Editing

Perhaps Nikki Wessling wasn't judicious to apply a magnifying glass and paper guillotine in lieu of a flatbed editor.

Histrionics

Rogers is likably wild-eyed in his authoritatively folksy lead role. As hammy Shakar's gaumless, expectant wife, Garnett voices her idiocy with lumpen intonation. Glaccum, La Mothe and Montone are easy on the eyes, but only flirt and die horribly. Neither is much comic relief rendered by goatish, deputized local yokels played by co-producer and co-screenwriter Terry, and Maloney, a prolifically versatile ancillary who wasn't above slumming in low-budget fluff between prominent roles in classics like A Little Romance, Breaking Away, and The Thing. Those titular kids (two of whom are the offspring of producer/screenwriter Albright) seemed to be enjoying themselves. Brennan reportedly dealt copious cocaine to the cast and crew, which clarifies his fruitily catty connection to Montone's heedless hussy, and quite a lot else.

Score

Equally synthesized and orchestral, Harry Manfredini's score isn't as memorable as that composed concurrently (again!) for Friday the 13th, and encompasses his perennial plagiarization of Bernard Herrmann's music (specifically, themes and cues from Psycho.)

Highlights

In the third act, several malevolent tykes are shot at point blank range and dismembered. That's the most you can expect from this movie: minors assaulted with firearms and killed with an o-wakizashi.

Flaws

Until and after the abovementioned child abuse occurs, this is boring and unfunny. An unspeakably lame, final "shock" can be foreseen at least an hour in advance.

Conclusion

Death and pablum are easy. Craft and parenting are hard.

Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (1992)

Directed by David Price
Written by A. L. Katz, Gilbert Adler
Produced by Scott A. Stone, David G. Stanley, Bill Froehlich, Lawrence Mortorff
Starring Terence Knox, Paul Scherrer, Ryan Bollman, Christie Clark, Rosalind Allen, Ned Romero, Ed Grady, John Bennes, Wallace Merck, Joe Inscoe, Kellie Bennett, Robert C. Treveiler, Leon Pridgen, Marty Terry, Ted Travelstead, Sean Bridgers, Aubrey Dollar, Kristy Angell, David Hains

Synopsis

Mass murder in an agrarian, Nebraskan town that was clearly committed by a syncretic cult composed of minors attracts the professional attention of a tabloid's lunky reporter (Knox), who investigates several succeeding deaths and other local intrigues in a nearby community where the unmistakably sinister kids have been transferred and welcomed by its obtuse residents. His snottily hostile teenage son (Scherrer) accompanies him to pad the duration of this garbage by romancing a fetching blond townie (Clark).

Script

Genre hacks Katz and Adler contemporaneously co-scripted episodes of Freddy's Nightmares and Tales from the Crypt, but their screenplay for this sequel to the middling adaptation of Stephen King's short story doesn't even meet the low standards of those series. Amorous interludes, messy invultuation, and an underplot concerning environmental crime were interjected into their rehash of King's physitheistic creeper because they haven't the imagination to elaborate on his concepts or craft a compelling story. Every character is a stock archetype or rural stereotype who utter shopworn, schmaltzy dialogue suited to diurnal soap operas. Very little is so mortifying as coddled boomers raised in an immanently neurotic Abrahamic faith who slavishly satirize the toothless faithful of another.

Direction

His zooms and crane shots are the most wearyingly routine images in Price's dull presentation. He couldn't even execute the movie's sole jump scare competently.

Cinematography

Notwithstanding noctilucence that's absurdly overlit, Levie Isaacks's colorful photography is easy on the eyes, and one of this movie's few assets.

Histrionics

Most of these actors either woodenly recite or gnaw the very fabric of spacetime to enact Katz's and Adler's simplistic characters. Clark and Allen are tolerable, but haven't much to do other than posture prettily and shriek when imperiled.

Score

Daniel Licht's assemblage of choral and orchestral clichés serves the same function as ambient music without any soothing effect. His minatory variation of London Bridge is Falling Down sung by brats is exquisitely abashing.

Flaws

Every tritely slain victim could easily escape if they'd a survival instinct or average IQ. Purblind provincials unwittingly waiting to die aren't terribly interesting either. Dismal digital effects that have aged horribly are twice implemented. Sweaty sex shammed by Allen and pudgily misshapen Knox is starkly sickening, even more vile than the coitus between Joe Don Baker and Linda Evans in Mitchell. Demonic possession and talentlessness cause Bollman's heresiarch to speak with a peculiarly peeving cadence.

Conclusion

This is the very lowest grade of sequel: unfunny, vapid, gutless, hokey, tired, tedious trash contextualized in a faintly subversive pretense. Avoid it.

Christmas Wedding Planner (2017)

Directed by Justin G. Dyck
Written by Stacy Connelly, Keith Cooper, Rebecca Lamarche
Produced by Patrick McBrearty, Stan Hum, Beth Stevenson
Starring Jocelyn Hudon, Stephen Huszar, Kelly Rutherford, Eric Hicks, Rebecca Dalton, Joey Fatone, Taylor David, Melinda Shankar, Meghan Heffern, Ted Atherton, Celeste Desjardins, Joseph Cannata, Mélanie St-Pierre, Severn Thompson, David Jack, Hattie Kragten

Somehow, the duties of one cute, cutesily chafing planner (Hudon) employed by her adoptive aunt (Rutherford) to oversee the forthcoming nuptials of her cousin (Dalton) implicate surveillance of the suspiciously rat-faced bridegroom (Hicks) with the bride's ex-boyfriend, an oafishly good-looking private investigator (Huszar). Predictably contrived conflict, asides, and romance ensue. Before the fatuous influence of Gilmore Girls and Joss Whedon's precious dreck contaminated the comportment of characters in genre pap, festal froth like this wasn't so aggravatingly hyperacted by chirping, canting, piping, prating players who gibber unpalatably witless quips and stale raillery, plastered with makeup and rigged out in unseasonably ill-tailored apparel on sets resembling showrooms. Hudon's almost as pretty as peeving playing the purblind protagonist of Connelly's adapted Harlequin novel Once Upon A Wedding, which teases its readers with a secret that only a dumb child couldn't guess. You aren't a dumb child, are you?

Contamination (A.K.A. Alien Contamination) (1980)

Directed by Luigi Cozzi
Written by Luigi Cozzi, Erich Tomek
Produced by Claudio Mancini, Ugo Valenti, Karl Spiehs
Starring Louise Marleau, Marino Masé, Ian McCulloch, Siegfried Rauch, Gisela Hahn, Carlo De Mejo, Carlo Monni, Mike Morris, Brigitte Wagner

Synopsis

Intercepted en route to New York City, a freighter contains a crew of corses, and gooey, thermoreactive eggs filled with bacterial silicon that induces the internal explosion of any organism it splatters. They're tracked by the colonel (Marleau) of a clandestine governmental agency to a Colombian coffee plantation and exporter, where she's headed with a police detective (Masé) and former astronaut (McCulloch) to exterminate their source.

Script

Apparently enthralled by Alien, Cozzi (ill-)conceived his first draft of this script as a sequel to the classic horror, then revised it in accordance with budgetary limitations. This schlocky, successful ride on those long coattails is less irksome for its derivation than his insufferably immature trio, who are as emotionally incontinent as addled adolescents.

Direction

Besides some excessive close-ups and zooms thereto, Cozzi's direction is fair. He's credited once again under his preposterous pseudonym, Lewis Coates.

Editing

Perhaps once or twice a smidge too sudden, neither can any other complaint be lodged against Nino Baragli's theatrical cut.

Histrionics

As simply scripted, everyone plays their puerile parts broadly or blandly, but only the leads rankle. Late Masé's spunk is gratingly unfunny, McCulloch's querulousness miffingly melodramatic. Marleau has all the allure and presence of a dead fish; Cozzi wrote her part for luscious Caroline Munro, which is why everyone's so taken with this frump.

Score

Some quirky riffs by Goblin are expectedly catchy, though hardly their best work.

Highlights

Opening aerial shots of NYC focusing on the Chrysler Building, World Trade Towers and Statue of Liberty are directly arresting. In slow motion, fulminations of eggs, then polluted people entertain. A climactic confrontation with the picture's final boss, a massive, slimy, cyclopic extraterrestrial, and his thrall (Rauch) is gruesomely goofy to behold.

Flaws

Who can fathom the measure of Marleau's colonel?! She's sanctioned to command strike forces domestically, but not abroad. The stipulations by which she performs her mission furnish incentive, but make no sense. Her hunt for the alien scourge is intrepid until she's locked in a bathroom with one of its eggs, whereupon she panics like a halfwit rather than forcing open its visibly flimsy door. In one inexplicable scene, Masé avows his enduring affection and yearning for Marleau, but they've known each other for three days. When he finally stops whining and seizes the day, McCulloch's hero is a relief from his annoying allies.

Conclusion

It's not scary in the slightest, but this Italo-German production is too irritating to view without an expert riff.

Instead, watch Lily C.A.T..

Creature (A.K.A. The Titan Find) (1985)

Directed by William Malone
Written by William Malone, Alan Reed
Produced by William G. Dunn, William Malone, Don Stern, Moshe Diamant, Ronnie Hadar
Starring Stan Ivar, Wendy Schaal, Lyman Ward, Klaus Kinski, Robert Jaffe, Marie Laurin, Diane Salinger, Annette McCarthy

Synopsis

Clumsy, cretinous, corporate cosmonauts examining specimens in an ancient laboratory excavated under the surface of saturnal moon Titan stupidly breach a capsule containing a roused carnivore with a knack for reanimation, which messily terminates them, then researchers dispatched from a West German(!) conglomerate. Next on the menu: a Columbian crew (Ivar, Schaal, Jaffe, McCarthy, Laurin), their mission's commander (Ward), and security officer (Salinger).

Script

This Alien-alike is distinguishable for its monster's undead thralls, an electrocutional stratagem lifted from The Thing from Another World, and the undiluted indiscretion, tactical stupidity, and brain-dead gullibility that impairs all of Malone's and Reed's characters, from which senseless evagation and death arise.

Direction

Malone's middling management excites neither dread nor fright.

Histrionics

Unsurprisingly, the American spaceship's cargo embraces ham (Ivar, Schaal, McCarthy), lumber (Jaffe, Salinger, Laurin), and Ward, whose unflappable, fatherly authoritarianism clashes well with creepy Kinski's insouciance. Laurin is so wooden that one can scarcely differentiate her vital from zombified states. She's miscast as a navigator and technician, but cutely bubbleheaded Schaal clicks with captain/helmsman Ivar, an appealing, cut-price Robert Urich (who in turn is an appealing, cut-price Robert Wagner).

Score

Their brassy, trilling, pounding, orchestral score sounds like Alex North's output in the '70s; whether Thomas Chase and Steve Rucker composed it together, or for this picture, is anyone's guess.

Highlights

See 5. and 7. below.

Flaws

The following are by no means comprehensive:

1. Space helmets worn by Americans are obvious counterfeits of those seen in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
2. Quality props and paraphernalia seem incongruous in underdesigned, often flimsy sets that are probably the handiwork of a rushed and underfunded art department.
3. Francine Agapoff's costumes were also cheaply thrown together.
4. Creature creator Michael McCracken's beast resembles H. R. Giger's xenomorph, were it in dire need of exercise.
5. Lunching Klaus munches his way through one dumb discussion.
6. Both Ivar's and Schaal's fumbling incompetents briefly survive exposure to Titan's nitrogenous atmosphere and approximate climatic temperature of -290 degrees Fahrenheit without suffering frostbite or severe trauma.
7. While they're spacesuited and ranging the moon's terrain, infamous sex pest and occasional rapist Klaus grabs hatchet-faced Salinger's derriere in an unscripted moment portending Malone's liberality toward his German star.
8. Opening doors emit reports of blasters from Star Wars.
9. No protocols for any given activity are observed during this interplanetary mission to retrieve invaluable artifacts.

Conclusion

This crap is less trying than Event Horizon, Alien from the Deep, or Xtro's sequels, but not so diverting as Lifeforce or Contamination.

Instead, watch Alien, Leviathan, or Lily C.A.T..

Desecrated (2015)

Directed by Rob Garcia
Written by Cecil Chambers
Produced by Cecil Chambers, E. Dylan Costa, Chris Nassif, John Atterberry, John Boggs
Starring Gonzalo Menendez, Haylie Duff, Gib Gerard, Paul James, Heather Sossaman, Michael Ironside, Wilmer Calderon, Vera Rosada, Jack Rain, Kayla Shaughnessy, Mary LeGault

Synopsis

Six dumb collegianers (Duff, Gerard, James, Sossaman, Calderon, Rosada) cavort at an isolated summer house during spring break, and by trespassing on his home aggravate its domineering groundskeeper (Menendez), an insane ex-Marine who deviously dispatches them with a purpose and a plan.

Script

Little occurs in this story until its third act, and its ratio of discussion to action is proximately 10:1, which might be excusable if that predominant class wasn't brainless banter and iterated confusion. Co-producer Chambers recycles devices established in classic thrillers sans a spark of suspense.

Direction

Fortunately, a good script wasn't squandered on Garcia's sloppy, amateurish direction.

Cinematography

Whether accomplished DP and FX specialist Bruce Logan contributed to this flick for charity or necessity is unknown to this reviewer, but his splendent (days for) nights are almost as artificially unattractive as scenes darkened by drab tinctures, for which he's responsible as its DI colorist.

Editing

Neither am I aware if co-producer E. Dylan Costa, Robert A. Ferretti, or both were ripped on stimulants when they feverishly butchered Garcia's footage, or if they did so to conceal even more of its shortcomings. Their ASL is 2 seconds.

Histrionics

Overlooking one fluffed line, the lesser Duff sister is a passable leading lady. Menendez treats his villainy with brio, as would reliable old Ironside were he accorded a meatier part. As one of those raunchy, obnoxious stoners who infest fraternities and later middle management, Calderon's portentously pestilent. Everyone else verbally treads water until dead.

Score

Joe Faraci's chintzy score is redolent of those heard in features broadcast from Lifetime's limitless landfill.

Highlights

Some mild amusem*nt's to be had when Menendez upbraids and menaces these vexing vacationers. Scenery's satisfyingly nibbled by Ironside in the role of Duff's dad, who isn't evil enough to provide sufficient grist for the grizzled Canadian's mill.

Flaws

Even including its superfluous backstory, this half-hour of plot makes a mingy 70+ minutes. Thirty-one minutes after Menendez's outdoorsman informs James's pseudo-nerd that he hosts hikes and hunts, the latter discovers this from online advertisem*nts and testimonials. Only Menendez and Ironside don't play certifiable clots.

Conclusion

This offal insults one's intelligence as much as studio-grade chum. If you can view it freely, mellow Ironside's worth watching during his 10 minutes onscreen, shot to satisfy financiers unfamiliar with Duff.

Instead, watch Deliverance or Cabin Fever.

Devil in the Flesh (1998)

Directed by Steve Cohen
Written by Kurt Anderson, Richard Brandes, Michael Michaud, Kelly Carlin, Robert McCall, Steve Cohen
Produced by Kurt Anderson, Richard Brandes, Marc Forby, Alicia Reilly Larson, Betsy Mackey, Robert E. Baruc, John Fremes
Starring Rose McGowan, Alex McArthur, Peg Shirley, Phil Morris, Robert Silver, J.C. Brandy, Sherrie Rose, Ryan Bittle, Julia Nickson, Krissy Carlson, Schultz, Wendy Robie, Philip Boyd, Milton James

Synopsis

Logophilic police detectives (Morris, Silver) conduct an inquirendo into a possible arson that killed her mother and teacher while a sultry student (McGowan) chafes at residency with her abusive, overbearing, fundamentalist grandmother (Shirley), and attendance at a new high school where her crush on a handsome teacher (McArthur) turns erotomaniacal. Corpses accrue.

Script

Their residual capitalization on the sleeper's success of Poison Ivy and its sequels (themselves variations on Fatal Attraction's scenario) isn't without wit, but Anderson and Brandes should've held their four screenwriters to one standard of black humor, and weeded this flick's shooting script of some badly barbed lines.

Editing

Michael Thibault's final cut would be unexceptionable but for excessive and successive dissolves, and some intolerably interpolated whoosh cuts, none of which evoke fond nostalgia for the '90s.

Histrionics

Her bitchy chill was honed for years in compulsive trash like The Doom Generation and Lewis & Clark & George, and McGowan's as fetchingly flirty here as in any of her other vehicles, if less interesting than certain co-stars. Morris and Silver play their cross-quizzing inspectors with pleasantly understated comic timing, and Faheyish McArthur emanates charisma as the object of her sensual seductress. Oddly, not too much of this this devil's flesh is on display, despite McGowan's penchant for onscreen nudity. Sherrie Rose is instead twice in the buff during sexy scenes with McArthur, and while her figure is easy on the eyes, the absence of McGowan's gymnomania may have disappointed purchasers of this video.

Score

From their first of many collaborations, Michael Burns's and Steve Gurevitch's music tugs the ear, unlike the tones-by-numbers that they've since been turning out for scores of Lifetime's features.

Highlights

Darling schnauzer Schultz charms as the pet of Shirley's loathsome beldame. Whether this satisfies is largely incident to its audience's sexual orientation; McGowan was so stunning in her prime that she's sure to transfix anyone tending to the slightest interest in the fairer sex.

Flaws

Painfully lame quips during and after several homicides (two of which are frankly justifiable) aren't meliorated by McGowan's cutesy delivery.

Conclusion

For McGowan's longsuffering, remaining fans -- who might've noticed that she's only half this crazy in reality -- this is essential viewing. Addicts of Johnson/Shadowland's sordid crime dramas may deplore this as extreme, but it's likely a touch too tame for aficionados of erotic thrillers.

Diary of a Sex Addict (2001)

Directed by Joseph Brutsman
Written by Tony Peck, Joseph Brutsman
Produced by Mark Burg, Glenn S. Gainor, Oren Koules, Tony Peck, Lyndall Hobbs, Dave Duce, Boaz Davidson, Danny Dimbort, Avi Lerner, Trevor Short
Starring Michael Des Barres, Rosanna Arquette, Nastassja Kinski, Joey House, Eva Jenickova, Troy Winbush, Alexandra Paul, Aviva Gale, Rachelle Carson-Begley, Daniella Rich, Cole Sprouse, Dylan Sprouse, Ed Begley Jr., Terri Apple, Adrienne Janic, Tangie Ambrose, Anna de Cardi, Maria del Mar, Heidi Jo Markel, Jimmy Flynt, M.C. Gainey, T.C. Warner, A.J. Benza, Simona Williams, Shannan Leigh, Shirly Brener, Nancy Linehan Charles

"Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex."

--Hunter S. Thompson

Synopsis

As penitent to shrift father, an incessantly erotomaniacal master chef, restaurateur, and devoted family man (Des Barres) confesses to his new psychotherapist (Kinski) of recent misadventures involving patronization of a peep show and a strip club, an altercation with a cinema's ticket taker (Winbush), his telephonic vulgarities directed at an innocent woman (Williams), and frenzied fornication with a nurse (Carson-Begley), a salesgirl (Janic) of lingerie, the aforementioned strip club's bartender (Apple), a cook (Gale) of his restaurant, his sister-in-law (Paul), and a parade of weathered wenches (Jenickova, House, Ambrose, Leigh, et aliae). When this aging rakehell isn't dick-deep in cyprian quim, he delights in wholesome hobbies with his mutually adoring wife (Arquette) and son (Sprouse twins), but a few harrowing scrapes portend an end to the lucky streak for which these lifestyles have coexisted.

Script

Their script plays like softcore p*rn were it written for community theater, but in all fairness, Peck's and Brutsman's dialogue is hilarious in intentional and unintentional variation. Lascivious behavior and its consequences are supererogatorily portrayed and analyzed, but neither the video's runtime nor the interest of goatish, middle-aged Boomers to whom it was marketed admit of psychological causation.

Cinematography

Evidently, DP Nathan Hope couldn't or didn't care to remedy the flat, dull, cheap appearance of Diary's relatively early HD video, essentially shot on a high-grade camcorder. Richard Cassel's cool coloration compounds the hideosity of some scenes.

Editing

Given the material at his disposal, one could almost forgive Greg Tillman for his overabounding jump and smash cuts, and contradictory continuity, but the editor's sequential fast dissolves are intolerable.

Histrionics

Similarly, Brutsman's cast acquitted themselves surprisingly well for the lubricous bosh with which they were encumbered; that everyone kept a straight face is itself extraordinary. Leathery, expatriated Anglo-Angeleno Des Barres created his compulsive rip with furious feistiness and unexpected charm, and Kinski's staid, passive-aggressive counterpoise is as apropos as symptomatic of ex-whor*'s syndrome. All of the trollops are played into the stratosphere as cuckoo caricatures, but their john's warmhearted wife and family doctor are serviceably plausible by Arquette's and Begley's exclusive sedation. Televised parasite A.J. Benza stiffly misrecites his few lines in the part of a vice detective.

Highlights

• All of Des Barre's filthy, clamorous couplings and crank calls are hysterical.
• An interview of the concupiscent chef conducted by a local news reporter (Markel) is calamitously curtailed before his nutty flirtation with her.

Flaws

• Every shot looks terrible.
• A subplot wherein Winbush's disemployed tough stalks our prurient protagonist yields a few funny moments, but it's only filler.
• Glimpses of the cheffy stallion's underwhelming visits with his infirm, uncommunicative mother (Charles) also amount to naught.

Conclusion

To no surprise for anyone who noticed Davidson and Lerner among its producers, this umpteenth erotic drama shot and issued on sh*teo is by no means the worst or most audacious of its kind, but it's one of the funniest.

For whoever can stomach them, recommended for a (venereally vomitous) double feature paired with Virtual Desire or Private Obsession.

Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill! (2006)

Written and directed by Chad Ferrin
Produced by John Santos, Trent Haaga, Giuseppe Asaro, C.W. Ferrin
Starring Timothy Muskatell, Charlotte Marie, Ricardo Gray, Granny, David Z. Stamp, Jose I. Lopez, Marina Blumenthal, Amy Szychowski, Kele Ward, Trent Haaga, Ernesto Redarta

Synopsis

While working her nursing night shift, a sonsie single mother (Marie) intrusts her retarded, adolescent son (Gray) to the care of her boyfriend, a sordidly psychotic career criminal (Muskatell) who invites a bloated, crippled drug dealer (Stamp) and a pair of putrid prostitutes (Szychowski, Ward) to party at her residence. Neither they nor other lurking malfeasants (Lopez, Blumenthal, Redarta) are safe from a stealthy, resourceful murderer who's observing Easter behind a leporine mask.

Script

With repulsive prolongations and domestic disputes, Troma alumnus Ferrin stretches 25 minutes of story to occupy 90 minutes of running time forming his trashy, inane, admittedly fun farcical horror, which piques a lot of laughs but no scares for anyone beyond their pubertal years. Its comic crudity is as stupidly amusing as one could hope for.

Direction

His claustrophobic close-ups, zooms, full-figure and drifting shots (no few of which shamelessly blazon busty Marie's considerable cleavage) are all framed with calculated carelessness, but Ferrin has a knack for capturing his players' most unflatteringly, goofily humorous angles.

Cinematography

Most of this flick's interiors are lit like begrimed bedrooms from which camgirls stream, and the lurid hues clothing Giuseppe Asaro's sh*teo beseem its sleazy cheese.

Editing

Jahad Ferif hacked Ferrin's footage together with occasional flair, though this reviewer can't readily tell how many of his overzealous cuts are imputable to ineptitude or imitation of B-schlock.

Histrionics

In adherence to Ferrin's style, everyone onscreen overplays their one-dimensional roles by yards over the top to some risible effect. As the fat, flagitious felon, Muskatell seems lucky to swagger and fume through the movie without suffering cardiac arrest. Only Granny, a plumply precious rabbit cast as the pet of Gray's peevish peabrain, performs naturally.

Score

Synthesized noodlings and tacky, often funky prog rock courtesy of Goblinishly epigonic duo The Giallos Flame is crummily fun, like most else here.

Highlights

Marie's buxom mother alternates between indulgence and violent discipline while voicing minced oaths; the piggish pervert portrayed by Stamp is gleefully aroused by a chance to prey on a mentally disabled teenager; every exchange and murder is in some way funny.

Flaws

True to his roots, Ferrin created a video that's as embarrassingly edgy and intensely ugly as it is legitimately laughable. Every shot is shoddy, and all presagements patent. One predictable twist is explained with a fatuous flashback.

Conclusion

This is less like exploitation movies from the '70s than how Xers and early Millennials would like to remember them. If you've an appetite for raunch and gore, and absolutely nothing better to do, it's a tickling way to pass 1.5 of your overtly disposable hours.

Ghostwatch (1992)

Directed by Lesley Manning
Written by Stephen Volk
Produced by Ruth Baumgarten, Derek Nelson, Richard Broke
Starring Michael Parkinson, Gillian Bevan, Sarah Greene, Mike Smith, Craig Charles, Brid Brennan, Michelle Wesson, Cherise Wesson, Chris Miller, Mike Aiton, Mark Lewis, Colin Stinton, Linda Broughton, Katherine Stark, Derek Smee, Roger Tebb, Keith Ferrari

If its execution met its ambition, this unauthentic exposé might've warranted its unjustifiably popular overestimation. It's surpassingly stagy and stodgy in its enactment of a remote news crew (Greene, Charles, Miller, Aiton, Lewis) who report their investigation of a suburban poltergeist (Ferrari) that's persecuting a single mother (Brennan) and her daughters (Wesson sisters) to the program's presenters (Parkinson, Smith) and a co-hosting parapsychologist (Bevan). No small tedium proceeds from the constant garrulity of idle, internal blatherskite, telephonic hoaxes, interviews with witnesses (Broughton, Stark), a spiritualist (Smee), and an American skeptic (Stinton), interrupted only by unconvincingly hoary, ghostly manifestations. Most of these actors range from dull to dismal, but the late, household Parkinson is in good, routine form, almost counterbalancing Bevan's tiresomely tetchy researcher. Dupable British viewers were somehow spooked by this preposterous presentation's premiere, verifying that the BBC's audience was unfit for horror. Howbeit flat and footling, this is more endurable than Paranormal Activity or its sequels.

Gregory's Two Girls (1999)

Written and directed by Bill Forsyth
Produced by Alan J. Wands, Christopher Young
Starring John Gordon Sinclair, Carly McKinnon, Dougray Scott, Maria Doyle Kennedy, Martin Schwab, Rebel, John Murtagh, Kevin Anderson, Fiona Bell, Hugh McCue, Alexander Morton, Dawn Steele, Gary Lewis, Matt Costello, Jane Stabler, Anne Marie Timoney

Synopsis

Nineteen years later, once-lovable Gregory occasionally teaches English at his secondary school to charges exasperated by his ceaseless sociopolitical bromides, parrots leftist fallacies and half-truths propagated by the likes of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, fantasizes pruriently about an unpleasantly pretty pupil (McKinnon) while evading the advances of a comelier coworker (Kennedy) who inexplicably adores him, consorts with a human rights activist (Schwab) of importuningly indeterminate provenance, investigates a past schoolmate and womanizing industrialist (Scott) whose company manufactures and donates electronics in concern of two students' allegations that it's constructing torturous apparati, and makes an arrant ass of himself during every waking minute.

Script

They aren't deliberately hinting at its commercial failure when daft defenders of Forsyth's fortunately final feature correctly argue that it isn't a lucrative retread of its antecessor; such a revisitation might've rekindled its humor or attractiveness, which are here absent. Instead, this vexatiously vapid, ill-imagined sequel reinvents him as a sententious twit who imbibes and regurgitates adulterated, post-Marxist contentions, and never so agonizingly as in dopey discussion with his obnoxious, hypocritical, culturally condescending, American brother-in-law (Anderson). Consistently unfunny scenes garrulously drag on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on without any mitigation, certainly not from depressing references to Forsyth's hit from 1980. His audience is supposed to like an impressionable man-child whose infatuation with a thick, testy teenager leads him to forgo first a toward opportunity, then his livelihood, and ruin his life by commiting unlawful entry, trespassing, grand larceny, and coastal pollution, based on an accusation derived from inconclusive evidence.

Histrionics

As a kid, Sinclair was irrepressibly ingratiating; in his adultness, jerky, mincing, yammering, undersexed, gormless Gregory is a chore to watch, though decidedly more tolerable than McKinnon, whose schoolgirl's single dimension is represented with the empty empathy, sneering sarcasm, and callous fatuity that forms her personality. Only skeezy Scott and canine tagalong Rebel are at all personable.
WARNING: to observe Sinclair's simulated sexuality is to risk overwhelming, possibly emetic nausea.

Score

Michael Gibbs composed his score in abidance with the utmost treacly conventions.

Conclusion

That titular Two disrupts what might've been memorable annomination, and it's spoilage suited to Forsyth's confusedly lightweight incroachment into Ken Loach's territory. If he still wrote as well as he directed at this late date, his godawful last hurrah would be unrecognizable, if it ever existed at all.

Instead, watch if.... or Gregory's Girl (again).

Julie Darling (1982)

Directed by Paul Nicholas
Written by Paul Nicholas, Maurice Smith
Produced by Maurice Smith, Monica Teuber, John G. Pozhke, Ernst Ritter von Theumer
Starring Isabelle Mejias, Anthony Franciosa, Sybil Danning, Paul Hubbard, Cindy Girling, Reinhard Kolldehoff, Michael Tregor, Natascha Rybakowski, Benjamin Schmoll, Elizabeth Paddon, Terrea Smith

Synopsis

No deed is too dirty to insure her monopolization of her father (Franciosa), so a patrimaniacal teenager (Mejias) is content to stand idly by when a handsome, goatish goon (Hubbard) accidentally kills her shrilly vindictive mother (Girling). Thereafter, a succeeding stepmother (Danning) and her son (Schmoll) are targeted by the cold-blooded cutie.

Script

Its sinuosity may retain the attention of any audience who can stomach the sheer sordidness plotted by director Nicholas and co-producer Smith.

Histrionics

Planklike, photogenic Mejias could've uplifted her femme fatale if her histrionism matched her screen presence. Playing her only friendly, present peer, Rybakowski is enjoyably worse, though possibly dubbed. Franciosa and Danning radiate likable urbanity as overaffected dad and his marital replacement. As Mathesonian creeps come, Hubbard is distinctly distasteful.

Highlights

Mejias's pouting plotter twice plays chess with a lavishly clinquant set.

Flaws

Many of Nicholas's establishing shots are crudely amateurish.

Conclusion

As a vehicle for Mejias at her loveliest in a rare lead, this is a mildly diverting time capsule. For a good thriller, look elsewhere.

Killing Me Softly (2002)

Directed by Kaige Chen
Written by Sean French and Nicci Gerrard, Kara Lindstrom
Produced by Donna Grey, Michael Chinich, Joe Medjuck, Lynda Myles, Anna Chi, Daniel Goldberg, Tom Pollock, Ivan Reitman
Starring Heather Graham, Joseph Fiennes, Natascha McElhone, Jason Hughes, Amy Robbins, Kika Markham, Ian Hart, Ulrich Thomsen, Yasmin Bannerman, Rebecca Palmer, Ronan Vibert

"I'm so bored," is the hypergamous knell by which any given (usu. white) attractive, western woman verbalizes her capricious intent to wreck her life with a macho maniac, as when a corporate web designer (Graham) is prompted by a salacious spleen at first glance to dump her drearily reliable, homely boyfriend (Hughes) for a dashing, heroic, aggressive, exhaustingly venturesome mountaineer (Fiennes), with whom she leaps dizzyingly from their fervid fling into matrimony before anonymous, obliquely monitory letters move her to probe his mysterious past. His string of picturesque, often sublime period dramas during the '80s and '90s culminated in the flawed yet opulently staged and unprecedentedly expensive The Emperor and the Assassin, after which Chen's first picture of the new millennium was this melodramatically erotic thriller set in London, in which nearly everything is ridiculously riotous: rushing manual and dollied shots; dissolved freeze-frames; a frantically fluctuating tone; oddly overlit exteriors and interiors; ugly costumery (esp. Fiennes's vast pants); goofily glaring dubbed dialog and foley; Patrick Doyle's fruitily mincing score; at least three incongruently individual sets integrated as the home of Fiennes's complete climber; zanily overexpressive dramatic flourishes; stereotypes wackily enacted over the highest mountainous peaks. Maybe the greatest misstep of his career was spurred by Chen's libidinous flight from the (rather judicious) sexual restrictions imposed on Chinese movies, which probably prevented the repeated sight of Gong Li in the explicitly lush buff as are here his gorgeous, gratifying leads, who feigned crisp copulation before cameras for over a week in scenes that were foreshortened and deleted. This is what happens when a Chinese director entranced by sexy, extroverted white people in a liberal culture pretermits nearly all of his well-honed instincts: one of the funniest inadvertent comedies ever to emulate Lifetime's and Cinemax's formulae with higher production values and popular stars.

Recommended for a double feature and laugh riot paired with Fifty Shades of Grey.

Let's Be Evil (2016)

Directed by Martin Owen
Written by Jonathan Willis, Martin Owen, Elizabeth Morris
Produced by Nicki Perkins, Elizabeth Morris, Martin Owen, Weena Wijitkhuankhan, Matt Williams, Harry Willis, Jonathan Willis, Tom Willis, Mario Tafur, Martin Barnes, David Bostock, Vincent Bull, Mark Clenshaw, John Cruse, Pratima Desai, Dave Ellor, Chris Furness, John Harrison, Mike Harrison, Michael Holmes, Trevor Howard, Simon James, Robin Kayser, Jonathan Kendall, Mike Norris, Bill Roberts, David Ronaldson, Amandeep Sandhu, Brandon Smith, Alan Thompson, Carl Welham, Dave Yeates, Laura Yeates
Starring Elizabeth Morris, Kara Tointon, Elliot James Langridge, Isabelle Allen, Natasha Moore, Jamie Bernadette

Synopsis

Three Californian attendants (Morris, Tointon, Langridge) of juvenile prodigies are escorted by a personalized, interactive program (Moore/Bernadette) in an underground level where the entrusted tykes are subjected to exhaustive educational evaluation and lucubration. When these small children revolt, nobody present has the sense or mettle to chasten them.

Script

Exceptionally stupid titles often forecast exceptionally stupid stories, so you've been doubly warned. Willis's "original concept" contained a favorable germ dissipated in Owen's and Morris's heinous screenplay. Anyone equipped with flashlights and corporal punishment could squash straightway their silly sedition, but these hellions (and the storyline) rely on adults who childishly panic during emergencies without conferring or compassing -- an honest, bothersome depiction of Americans and Britons. "Are you really that stupid?" asks an insurgent gamine of Morris's minder, as might you during the anteceding hour. Occasionally turgid dialogue unintentionally miswritten in English vernacular is sprinkled with artificial Americanisms. Half of what occurs makes no sense until a conclusive revelation defies prevision by virtue of its lazily fabricated inanity.

Direction

Shot primarily from perspectives of computerized glasses worn by the custodians, Owen's unsuspenseful devices are as overworked as antiquated farm tools.

Histrionics

Morris emotes with all the passion of bound timber, while Tointon and Langridge nigglingly nip scenery with American accents as audibly inauthentic as their lines. A prefatory interview designating the dehumanization of globalized capitalist imperatives is so abominably acted by Brooke Johnston and James McNeill that's it's sure to be savored by schlockmongers.

Flaws

• Old PCs, telephones, filing cabinets, and other appurtenances common to offices in the late 20th century affect no nostalgia as the only interesting articles seen in Melissa Spratt's dreary production design.
• Late in the third act, scrawny Langridge is subdued and suffocated by a gaggle of tots who are gently prehending his clothes.
• Sinks in the facility's bathrooms feature dual faucets, which most Columbians haven't suffered for nearly a century.
• At no time does anyone propose the possibility of self-defense.

Conclusion

A few spineless simpletons couldn't babysit a dozen chairborne, prepubescent nerds.

Instead, watch Miri (from Star Trek's first season), Logan's Run, or Beyond the Black Rainbow.

Nightbeast (1982)

Written and directed by Don Dohler
Produced by Ted A. Bohus, Don Dohler, Dave Ellis, Pete Garey, Richard Geiwitz, Tom Griffith, Tony Malanowski, Larry Reichman, George Stover
Starring Tom Griffith, Jamie Zemarel, Karin Kardian, George Stover, Don Leifert, Anne Frith, Eleanor Herman, Richard Dyszel, Christopher Gummer, Dennis McGeehan, John Dods, Monica Neff, Richard Ruxton, Richard Geiwitz, Greg Dohler, Kim Dohler, Bumb Roberts, Glenn Barnes, Rose Wolfe, Don Dohler, David W. Donoho, Larry Reichman, Dace Parson, Richard Nelson

However one may adjudge Don Dohler, King Schlockmeister of Maryland, they can't truthfully allege that any paucity of logic, talent, or competence ever stayed him from generating some of the most vigorously entertaining B-movies ever telecast in the wee hours and peddled by fourth-rate home video brands. His third feature hardly challenges the intellect by presenting how a hideous, bulletproof, bipedal extraterrestrial (Gummer, McGeehan, its designer Dods) attired in a disco jumpsuit crashes in a small town in New England, immediately seeks out humans to gorily eliminate, and defends itself against the municipality's sheriff (Griffith), his deputies (Kardian, Zemarel, Geiwitz), and townsfolk with a ray gun that atomizes humans and automobiles. Dohler misdirected and overedited from his zany, childish, gratuitous script, which is acted horrendously by his regulars, investors, and family....but there's no denying the raw energy and bracing sport that he educed from his crude story's eccentricity and blistering impetus.

Highlights/flaws

• Dohler's canoodling brother (Barnes) is disemboweled minutes before his kids (Greg and Kim) are disintegrated; as one son of a sharpshooting farmer (Roberts), the director's also laid low by death rays shortly thereafter.
• Locals aren't deterred from shooting the impetuous alien with unlimited, unreloaded rounds before and after realizing that it's impervious to gunfire.
• Abovementioned exchange of fire is protracted by the inaccuracy of both the beast and its human combatants.
• So to prevent confusion, medical examiners (Stover, Frith) wear their white lab coats more often than not, even outdoors when sifting human remains.
• Unprovoked slaughter of his citizenry can't postpone a pool party thrown by the town's irresponsible mayor (Dyszel) and his senseless, sonsie secretary (Herman), to which the governor (Ruxton) is invited.
• Neither Dohler nor anyone with whom he was associated could afford a broken door, so production assistants tossed cheap, splintered wood down a staircase to indicate that the creature's smashing through one.
• A subplot's affair between Zemarel's deputy and the mistress (Neff, accomplished cameraman Rick's nubile wife) of contumacious biker Drago (Leifert) amounts only to her nudity (to the satisfaction of Dohler's backers and distributor), and a fight between her boyfriends, who clobber each other into fresher duds in the midst of their scrap.
• At the insistence of heinously permed Griffith, Dohler reluctantly shot a nude love scene starring the co-producer/financier/leading man and Kardian (hairdresser to Dohler's aunt), which is nauseating for the faux lawman's hair and physique.
• Only the most peculiarly pestful perpetrator would grease his girlfriend and leave her carcass in his house hours after accosting her in concern of her infidelity, then wantonly attack a deputy before attempting to murder her sheriff. Drago is that perpetrator.
• Abysmal SFX and foley, theatricals wooden and wild, and myriad, simple errors make every other shot desipiently diverting.

Conclusion

For those who enjoy their movies bad, brisk, and bloody, Dohler delivers with a slipshod, idiomatic lure. Some garbage can be relished.

Officer Downe (2016)

Directed by Shawn Crahan
Written by Joe Casey, Chris Burnham
Produced by Roger M. Mayer, Joe Casey, Mark Neveldine, Cole Payne, Skip Williamson, Cory Brennan, Glenn D. Feig
Starring Kim Coates, Tyler Ross, Luna Lauren Velez, Sona Eyambe, Reno Wilson, Bruno Gunn, Tracy Vilar, Meadow Williams, Sam Witwer, Shawn Crahan, Lindsay Pulsipher, Chris Fehn, Alison Lohman, Corey Taylor, Glenn Howerton, Cody Renee Cameron, Kaylee Sapieha

Synopsis

Attritional and funerary expenses are for the LAPD greatly obviated by countless telekinetic resurrections of a dedicated police officer (Coates) who tears a bloody swath through the operations of a narcotics chemist (Taylor), nuns (Williams, Lohman, et aliae) who traffic arms from their convent, and the disciples of a mincing, master martial artist (Eyambe), all of whom are occupied by anthropomorphic crime lords (Crahan, Pulsipher, Fehn). Meanwhile, a useless recruit (Ross) joins the frequently reanimated cop's redundant backup detail (Wilson, Gunn, Vilar).

Script

Every single line of Casey's diffuse dialogue and cartoonish titles is either staggeringly stupid, clichéd to semantic satiation, or both. His worst misstep in adapting his and Burnham's graphic novel was to pad 40 minutes of story to 90 by concentrating on Ross's whining greenhorn, who does little more than participate in paltry, expositive, and sentimental discourse with his colleagues and chief (Velez). Most quality pulp favors action over chat, and the verbosity of this screenplay sinks it as surely as its asininity.

Direction & editing

Thousands of jump and smash cuts trimmed by Meg Ramsay can't conceal the clunkiness of Crahan's off-kilter, oft-tilted direction. This picture is so overshot and overcut that its impetuous impact is dulled by overelaboration, a repercussion heretofore demonstrated by the likes of Michael Bay on larger budgets. Ramsay affronts discriminating taste by cutting from one recited clause to the next: standard procedure for horrible editors.

Cinematography

Just as no poundage of maquillage can beautify an orangutan, neither can all the world's garish grading bestow depth to Gerardo Madrazo's photography.

Histrionics

One can't in good faith blame most of these players for over- or underacting such hoarily one-dimensional characters, but Velez and especially Ross are onerous to watch by the second act. He's miscast (and less testosteronic than a petite schoolgirl) in what should've been a peripheral role seen for no more than ten minutes. Coates absorbs abuse serviceably in the Dreddishly lumbering lead with deadpan repose. As a favor to her husband (co-producer Neveldine), perennially adorable Lohman is wooden and mildly dispiriting as one of the gunrunning nuns.

Music

No recent movie's glut of heavy metal is of interest unless it's directed by Joe Begos.

Conclusion

How are pulpy sex and violence this humdrum?! Without the comic book's Giraudish artwork, this is mitigated by nothing for its tedious excesses.

Instead, watch RoboCop 2, Sin City, Yakuza Apocalypse, Brawl in Cell Block 99, Hobo With a Shotgun, Zebraman, the trailer for Bio-Cop....

Raw Nerve (1991)

Directed by David A. Prior
Written by David A. Prior, Lawrence L. Simeone, Jason Coleman
Produced by Ruta K. Aras, Robert Willoughby, David Winters, Marc Winters
Starring Ted Prior, Sandahl Bergman, Jan-Michael Vincent, Glenn Ford, Randall 'Tex' Cobb, Traci Lords, Red West, Graham Timbes, Jerry Douglas Simms, Yvonne Stancil, Doris Hearn, Trevor Hale, Brian J. Scott, Jim Ayco*ck, Donna Willard, Mary Willard

Synopsis

Bankings of dirt tracks aren't easily navigated by a troubled stock-car racer (Prior) while he sustains lancinate headaches that accompany presumably clairvoyant visions of a serial killer's murders. His slovenly uncle and mechanic (Cobb), and a news reporter (Bergman) whose bed he shares afford him more credence than a police detective (Vincent) and his superordinate captain (Ford).

Script

Their story's derivative of a couple classics, but Prior's, Simeone's, and Coleman's comedy inadvertently resides in its dialogue. Lines like, "We're leaving the country, and I'll explain on the plane, OK?" are funnier than their co*ckamamie chaff.

Direction

Few oeuvres reflect quantity over quality as that of the extraordinarily fertile Prior, whose clumsy composition persisted through his career. Half of his shots appear to be set by a director possessing a fraction of his experience.

Cinematography

So many B-pics from the mid-'80s through the early '90s are lensed in the barely blurred mode of DP Andrew Parke.

Editing

Tony Malanowski's acceptable assembly of Prior's reels is almost better than they deserve.

Histrionics

Prior plods hunkily through yet another of his big brother's many movies by hitting his marks, but only unveils his inner Corey Feldman during his last 10 minutes onscreen. Bleached, leggy venereal vector Lords gifts his sister with a flirtatious feistiness absent in her future overacting, but she hasn't the mannish magnetism of sinewy Bergman, who's an auntly agreeable love interest. That plentitude of personality somewhat compensates for stiff Vincent's permanent reliance on his screen presence. He's best cast as a menacing miscreant, so canine Cobb copes erratically with a misfitting role. Ford is top-billed for seniority and celebrity, and brings a cozily gruff gravitas to his penultimate performance that's pleasing, if misplaced.

Score

His orchestrations forebode with greater resonance than tracks that Greg Turner sounded with a Yamaha DX7.

Highlights

A decent car chase through Mobile concludes with the spectacular crash of a pickup truck from the top story of a parking garage, the legality of which would be unfeasible in most other American cities.

Flaws

Most of his cast can't act, and Prior directs as Korean women drive. Junkers striving in a motor rally during the first act are plainly proceeding at approximately 35 mph, probably because Prior didn't know how to film them at a competitive velocity. If you enjoy schlock of this strain, you won't mind. RiffTrax is no stranger to Prior's features, and may well tackle this; every tenth shot could qualify as one of MST3K's stingers.

Conclusion

This is recommended only for fans of its whilom A- and B-listers, or armchair riffers acquainted with Prior's violent filmography.

Instead, watch Eyes of Laura Mars.

Return of the Living Dead II (1988)

Written and directed by Ken Wiederhorn
Produced by Tom Fox, William S. Gilmore, Eugene C. Cashman
Starring Michael Kenworthy, James Karen, Thom Mathews, Dana Ashbrook, Marsha Dietlein, Suzanne Snyder, Philip Bruns, Thor Van Lingen, Jonathan Terry, Jason Hogan, Sally Smythe, Don Maxwell

Ken Wiederhorn's vocal distaste for horror movies presumptively correlates with the inferiority of his contributions to that genre, such as this sufferingly stupid, substandard sequel to Dan O'Bannon's riotous, repellent trash classic. Juvenile delinquents (Lingen, Hogan) from a cluster development open another misplaced Army barrel containing a rotting zombie and that insidiously zombifying gas, which reanimates a graveyard's interred so that they can rise to feast on locals. Wiederhorn's guidance is at best indifferent, which is more than can be said of his idiotic script populated by nonsensical numskulls. Bawling Karen and Mathews again eke some comedy playing graverobbers, and perennially animate Ashbrook optimizes a heroic installer of cable TV. Don Calfa would've done likewise in the dispensable part of a local physician, had he not been rejected in favor of bugging Bruns, who's not quite so rankling as strident Snyder in her assault on eardrums as Mathews's whining girlfriend. Terry reprises his curt colonel to little effect, because he's pointlessly foreshortened. Every reference to the previous feature falls flat, often reminding one of its more realistic and effective SFX. Why did Tom Fox employ a man who was fully and admittedly unsuited to oversee a sequel of commercial promise? For his apathy, Wiederhorn was rightly resented by a cast and crew who mostly outshone him. As often as not, association trumps ability on the west coast -- hence the wasteful existence of this trash.

Instead, watch Dawn of the Dead, Return of the Living Dead, Day of the Dead, 28 Days Later, or The Battery.

The Rift: Dark Side of the Moon (2016)

Directed by Dejan Zecevic
Written by Dejan Zecevic, Dimitrije Vojnov, Milan Konjevic, Barry Keating
Produced by Marko Jocic, Milan Todorovic, Ken Foree, Peter Chung, T.J. Chung, Slobodan Cica, Goran Djikic, Slobodan Jocic, Ivan Pribicevic
Starring Katarina Cas, Ken Foree, Monte Markham, Dragan Micanovic, Denis Muric, Ratko Turcinovic, Miroljub Leso, Sonja Vukicevic

Synopsis

Two reactivated field agents (Cas, Foree), an ailing physicist (Markham), and a Serbian military attaché (Micanovic) are dispatched to recover data from the remains of a downed satellite in the countryside north of Belgrade; what they find instead are a hostile, elderly couple (Leso, Vukicevic) who've a roaming, resurrected son (Muric), and an astronaut who vanished during a lunar landing in 1976 in their cellar.

Script

Zecevic, Konjevic and Keating badly expanded the director's fascinating, science fictional ideas into a half-baked plot crammed with cretinous chatter, and prolonged by its characters' garrulity, tactical idiocies, and incapability to report key, immediate events -- the most exasperating and surest signs of hackery.

Direction

Aside from some clumsy, hand-held shots, Zecevic's supervision is no more objectionable than good.

Histrionics

Foree's career is all but defined by his engaging elevation of stock roles in B- to Z-movies, and he here endues his officious agent with more appeal than he's worth. He's her senior by nearly thirty years, but looks healthier than haggard Cas, who with Micanovic passably handles dumb dialogue. For his genteel, faintly porky formality, overproductive Markham's still fun to see. Deathless hack Mick Garris can't act in the slightest in a cameo where he delivers not ten lines with gross incompetence.

Music

It's as irritating as inapposite to any given scene when it's heard, but Nikola Jeremic's score is thankfully eclipsed by songs of varying quality by Omega, The Anix, Carved Souls, Real Life, Nik Turner, Leather Strip, Damon Edge, Nektar, Le Seul Element, Rick Wakeman, Brainticket, Chrome, Guru Freakout/Guru Guru (Grove Band), Het Droste Effect, Oranssi Pazuzu, and White Manna.

Highlights

See below.

Flaws

Lunary scenes are cutely rendered in CG fit for AAA cut scenes or one of George Lucas's prequels.

Conclusion

Had they hired a screenwriter who can actually tell a story rather than temporize, this movie's Serbian and South Korean producers might've made rather than wasted money.

Instead, watch Capricorn One or The Ninth Configuration.

Santa's Summer House/A Talking Cat!?! (2012/2013)

Directed by David DeCoteau
Written by Andrew Helm
Produced by Marco Colombo, Kathy Logan, Gregg Martin
Starring Cynthia Rothrock, Daniel Bernhardt, Christopher Mitchum, Gary Daniels, Kathy Long, Jessica Morris, Rachel Rosenstein, Elijah Adams, Yung Woo Hwang; Johnny Whitaker, Kristine DeBell, Justin Cone, Janis Valdez, Alison Sieke, Daniel Dannas, Squeaky, Eric Roberts

Synopsis

With Christmas magic in June, Kris Kringle routes a vanful of vacationists to quarter at Santa's Summer House, where St. Nick and his wife (Mitchum, Rothrock) minister miserable careerists (Daniels, Long) and their dweeby son (Adams), catering sisters (Morris, Rosenstein), and a prickish rocket scientist (Bernhardt), who patch and plant relational bonds as secret Santas. Subsequent shifts of A Talking Cat (Squeaky, vocalized by Roberts) introduce a lunky, retired programmer (Whitaker) and his timorously bookish son (Cone) to a caterer (DeBell), her ambitious daughter (Valdez), and aimless son (Dannas) as he counsels most of them.

Script

During his time here on Planet Earth, Helm has developed a rudimentary understanding of intraspecific human relationships and interactions, those interspecific with lower mammals, the English language, and technology in industrial societies. Alas, the limits of his knowledge are exposed by his characters' unaccountably abnormal disorientation, behavior, vernacular, and idioms thereof. As hashes of terrestrial fiction, these are terrible screenplays, but actual humans have written worse.

Direction

No living filmmaker so personifies quantity over quality as DeCoteau, a cloddish, tireless cheapjack of gore and hom*oeroticism who's currently churning out dreary domestic depravities for Lifetime. This pudgy perpetrator of pap perfunctorily forayed these family-friendly features: many shots simply dolly or zoom in, then out, those latter often jerkily. Even in scenes that are competently shot, his casts are clearly on their own when grappling with Helm's bewildering scripts.

Cinematography

By reducing its brightness, boosting its contrast, and bluing his video, DeCoteau produced the most unconvincing day for night simulated in post-production since that seen in Deliverance.

Histrionics

No combat happens in the Summer House, despite its occupancy of four martial artists. They owe little longevity to dramatic talent, so what can one expect from screen shellbacks Rothrock, Mitchum, Bernhardt, Whitaker, and DeBell when they're saddled with screenplays that read like poor translations of Soviet comedies spoofing American society? Fat feline Squeaky lazily upstages his bipedal peers. Roberts sounds plastered while literally phoning in his lines, but who can tell?

Score

He's lifted from better music for decades, so Harry Manfredini was prepared to quote classic Christmas songs for a score that would've been better suited to a studio's holiday comedy in the '80s than this barely-budgeted video. For Talking Cat, he composed the best tunes for a circus's clown act, theme park's ride, and animatronic mariachi that you've yet to hear from the preprogrammed song bank of a consumer-grade Casio keyboard.

Highlights

Fans of Roberts are sure to enjoy his specially slurring, swaggering anthropomorphism of Squeaky's vagrant quadruped. Every actor under 30 in these movies is quite attractive; one can only hope that Adams, Cone, and Dannas knew better than to fraternize alone with DeCoteau.

Flaws

Cloudy, sylvan, littoral, and residential B-roll (and especially establishing shots thereof) are glaringly recurrent in these pictures, constituting perhaps a fifth of both. A laser guiding Squeaky is thrice visible. DeBell's chef removes a baking pan filled with cheese balls from a hot oven with her bare hands less than a minute before its tangency scorches those of Whitaker's bumbler. An interminable croquet match at the Summer House drags on and on. Every scene contains some baffling incoherence or other.

Conclusion

Both of these videos are inoffensively horrendous, shot successively at a hideously furnished mansion where p*rnographic productions were staged. If you must watch these, do so with the commentaries of professional masoch*sts.

Silent Night, Deadly Night/Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (1984/1987)

Directed by Charles E. Sellier Jr.; Lee Harry
Written by Paul Caimi, Michael Hickey; Lee Harry, Joseph H. Earle, Dennis Patterson, Lawrence Appelbaum
Produced by Ira Barmak, Scott Schneid, Dennis Whitehead; Lawrence Appelbaum, Joseph H. Earle, Eric A. Gage
Starring Robert Brian Wilson, Lilyan Chauvin, Gilmer McCormick, Britt Leach, Toni Nero, Randy Stumpf, Nancy Borgenicht, Danny Wagner, H.E.D. Redford, Linnea Quigley, Leo Geter, Jonathan Best, Will Hare, Tara Buckman, Geoff Hansen, Charles Dierkop, Max Robinson, Eric Hart, A. Madeline Smith, Amy Styvesant; Eric Freeman, James Newman, Elizabeth Kaitan, Jean Miller, Darrel Guilbeau, Brian Michael Henley, Corrine Gelfan, Michael Combatti, Ken Weichert, Ron Moriarty, Frank Novak, Randall Boffman, Joanne White

Synopsis

Accumulated traumas create a killer from an orphan (Best, Wagner, Wilson) whose parents are slain by a homicidal nut (Dierkop) costumed as Santa on Christmas Eve, after formative years of sexual suppression and chastisem*nt inflicted by his orphanage's abusive, obtusely injudicious Mother Superior (Chauvin), then harassment from a odious coworker (Stumpf). This toy store's stockboy finally snaps when selected by his boss (Leach) to entertain children as Santa, and paints his town red with its locals' blood.
In Part 2, his younger brother (Freeman) recounts his slaughterous sibling's exploits, then his own to a psychiatrist (Newman) in the mental ward where he's imprisoned, before he escapes to confront his Final Boss: Mother Superior!! (Miller)

Script

The first Silent Night is a pedestrian slasher that slogs through its vapid vignettes with perfunctory predictability. In spite of its superabundant cutbacks, the sequel's bloodletting is more engaging and incoherent.

Histrionics

All others in these casts rate from mediocre to abominable, but Freeman elevates Part 2 to delightful camp by interpreting the junior murderer miles over the top with malicious zest and waggling eyebrows.

Score

Perry Botkin's score would be unlistenable were it as pestilential as Morgan Ames's and Doug Thiele's doo-wop ditty, Santa's Watching.

Highlights

Killing sprees perpetrated by Freeman's bloodthirsty psychopath are hysterical for his wacky diction and idiosyncrasies. A famous moment therein was memed years ago, but it's best witnessed in its entirety.

Flaws

• Best, Wagner, and Wilson respectively embody the deathmonger at ages 5, 8, and 18, but ugly Wagner doesn't resemble his photogenic counterparts at all.
• Linnea Quigley's newly enlarged breasts are nauseating.
• Wilson irrupts through Quigley's front door, which is clearly constructed from the flimsiest plywood.
• Every "shock" can be prevised by 1-30 minutes.
• The sequel's first 40 minutes is a clip show derived from the first feature's footage, which Freeman's narration barely enlivens.
• Four men are credited for this incomplete story.
• In the absence of a production designer or set designer, an office is poorly dressed as a tiny cinema patronized by the superciliating slayer and his girlfriend (Kaitan).

Conclusion

After a profitable opening weekend, Silent Night was picketed by activists during their ample spare time, who successfully pressured Tri-Star to withdraw it from theaters a fortnight following its premiere. Without zany Freeman, these otherwise unremarkably cheap horrors would have no cult, and transient remembrance.

Instead, watch Black Christmas.

Tag (2015)

Directed by Sion Sono
Written by Yusuke Yamada, Sion Sono
Produced by Ryuichiro Inagaki, Takahiro Ono, Masayuki Tanishima
Starring Reina Triendl, Mariko Shinoda, Erina Mano, Yuki Sakurai, Aki Hiraoka, Ami Tomite, Mao Aso, Sayaka Isoyama, Mao Mita, Takumi Saito, Maryjun Takahashi

"Graphic," "provocative," and "controversial" are the euphemistic catchwords invariably employed by distributors' copywriters to describe Sion Sono's movies, because "inane," "obnoxious," and "Americanized" won't fill seats or shift units so operatively. His edgily puerile style stains the travails of a cute student (Triendl) who evades dangers eolian, pedagogic, nuptial, etc. whilst wandering through alternate, distaff realities and identities (Shinoda/Mano) with the support of a friend (Sakurai). Ingenuities of Yamada's novel are mishandled for Sono's overedited, compositionally clumsy treatment, which pads these conceptions with wearisomely overabounding screams, godawful digital SFX, and maladroitly choreographed action. Delicately comely Triendl and her counterparts acquit themselves well amidst this cheesy chaos, which can't be said for their loudest co-stars. Forestial exteriors of certain scenes are as pretty to behold as most of Sono's actresses, at least a few of whom probably prostituted themselves to the infamously dirty director in exchange for prominence in his farce. Filmic conventions in Japan have been defied (and in turn, occasionally established) by playful auteurs like Suzuki, Obayashi, Miike, Tsukamoto, et al. to fulfill whimsies or aesthetic and thematic purposes; in contrast, Sono's rebellion against them is as cornily, calculatedly hollow as poorly executed. Even lowly dealers in genre fodder like Yugo Sakamoto have some comedy and skill to recommend them, which is quite beyond Sono's sentimental, substandard spectacles.

Trust (2010)

Directed by David Schwimmer
Written by David Schwimmer, Andy Bellin, Robert Festinger
Produced by David Schwimmer, Tom Hodges, Dana Golomb, Ed Cathell III, Robert Greenhut, Heidi Jo Markel, Avi Lerner, Boaz Davidson, Danny Dimbort, Trevor Short, John Thompson, Will French, Stephen Roberts
Starring Liana Liberato, Clive Owen, Catherine Keener, Chris Henry Coffey, Viola Davis, Jason Clarke, Spencer Curnutt, Aislinn DeButch, Noah Emmerich, Olivia Wickline, Zoe Levin, Zanny Laird, Yolanda Mendoza, Shenell Randall, Tristan Peach, Ruth Crawford, Marty Bufalini, Inga R. Wilson, Jennifer Kincer, Milica Govich, Joseph Sikora, Julia Glander, Lauren Hirte, Cassaundra Fitch, Laura Niemi, Miles Robinson, Garrett Ryan, Noah Crawford

Most civilized people would agree that adult men oughtn't debauch teenage girls for cheap, lewd, transitory gratification, and if sincere denunciation of such transgressions was the intention of Schwimmer and his co-producing tribesmen Lerner and Davidson (who hail from our world's most murderous, parasitic, triumphalist, genocidal, rightly detested, second-world apartheid state) when distributing the former Friend's Lifetime movie theatrically, it might not have flopped spectacularly to their loss of $4M. In accordance with the North American mass media complex's fixation on illicit relations between adults and adolescents, this was purposed less to profit than to advertise Apple's flimsy, overpriced electronics, heroize grossly corrupt federal law enforcement agencies, malign straight (esp. white) men, further ambiguate the concept of sexual consent, and conflate ephebophilia with pedophilia, so to divert the masses from flagrant, unpunished, pedophilic crimes rampant among the entire repugnant, largely kosher ruling class, and especially its entertainment industry. Ergo, Schwimmer's story of a pretty, guileless, unsupervised girl (Liberato) of fourteen who's seduced online, then deflowered by a pudgy pedagogue and family man (Coffey) for whom she expresses overt revulsion upon their first meeting, may be taken with a metric ton of salt. Suburban teenage girls who are unreceptive to the advances of older men are among the most sensibly guarded and ruthlessly discriminating, so this almost singly delicate demoiselle's submission to, then deluded defense of an unattractive and blandishing pervert skirts logic and probability to implant more neurotic trepidation of a usually innocuous demographic, and broaden impressions of actionable rape, permission, and even volition itself in the minds of gullible proles, just as legal inhibitions of her irate father (Owen) imposed by friendly representatives of the FBI (Clarke, Robinson) reminds parents everywhere that justice is the exclusive domain of our unregenerate justice system and federal agencies. Seven years of development during which Schwimmer's story was the subject of fifty drafts(!) created a slapdash screenplay of a grade that hacks inditing telecast productions routinely churn out in a fortnight, complete with their hilariously distinctive, technologically and psychologically errorful clichés:

• While gifting his daughter a laptop in 2010, dad mentions the 4GB of its hard drive's capacity, not RAM.
• Because he uses burner phones and proxies, a serial predator who grooms his targets exclusively online for months is all but untraceable, and laboriously hunted by the FBI as though he's an international master spy.
• Prepossessed by his daughter's rape, Owen's previously inattentive father (essentially a vehicle for Schwimmer's impotent, cultivated indignation and chimerae) loses his mind and repeatedly makes a swollen ass of himself:
• Pappy's daydreams of the crime include hysterical close-ups of a ribbed dild* and expressed lubricant.
• In another reverie, he breaks into the home of a greasy sex offender in his neighborhood, who he's surveilled in his unexplained spare time, to viciously attack and murder him.
• Daddy-o is an executive of a PR firm representing a fictionalized brand based on American Apparel (and therefore an unconscious proponent of statutory rape, you see); at one of his client's parties, he hoarily hallucinates that his daughter's among their scantily clad models.
• In the fever pitch of his lunacy, pops steals inexplicably printed and bound transcripts of his offspring's hot and horny texts that are even more inexplicably carried among the paperwork of Clarke's unbrushed special agent, so to present them to his wife at a house on the market that she's about to show, and obsess over his little girl's raunchy rhetoric; according to Schwimmer, Bellin, and Festinger, federal personnel just tote evidential printouts around with them for no comprehensible reason, which they leave publicly unsecured whilst relieving themselves.
• Almost as absurdly, father poses as an oversexed preteen in a chat room to blindly entrap potential predators.
• At a retailer of a type indeterminate for Schwimmer's calculatedly cramped shots, daddy contemplates purchasing a firearm from a preposterously overstocked and unlocked array -- so to remind all the good goys progressives that guns are inherently bad, and only mean men privately own and use them.
• After all this frankly unhinged and obsessive misbehavior, dad actually purchases another cell phone for his daughter -- who was successfully baited for rape online -- after neither he nor the FBI confiscated the one that was involved in an interstate felony.
• More inconclusive sensationalism is effected when he interrupts his recovering daughter's volleyball game by pommeling another player's father, who he may have mistaken for the aforementioned sex offender, and who instantly, emphatically, suspiciously pardons this assault.
• At a familial Halloween party, idiotic Grampa (Bufalini) deprecates Barack Obama as a "socialist" -- a typical Republican't's misapprehension of every American baizuo's favorite whor*son and political puppet, in one of the few ironically believable moments of the entire movie.
• Oddly, nobody's concordant on whether the ravishment in question occurred in a hotel or motel because neither Schwimmer nor his screenwriters can check simple, salient details for consistency.
• One Lifetime-grade commonplace is recycled when Liberato's phiz is photoshopped into p*rnographic photos that are posted online....
• ....as is another when she undertakes a suicide while snapping a selfie to maximize her attention in her household's bathtub.

Mauger the pathological rarity of her character, Liberato's much-lauded portrayal justifies its hype by credibly registering her abused sylph's credulity, vulnerability, and trauma, but her, Owen's, and Keener's histrionical verve is misspent on not a lie but a dramatization of infinitesimally infrequent incidents meditated to further erode interpersonal, intraracial, and societal fraternity, and to distract gentiles from far worse and common dangers promoted and perpetuated en masse by kinsfolk of this propaganda's moneyed producers and apish director, who monomaniacally espouses a ludicrously vicenarian age of consent nationwide without a word for so many actual children regularly raped by those in circles from whom he's not four degrees removed. Only his exhortation for parents to monitor and counsel their online children is valid, as the hackneyed theriac with which his poison goes down smoothly.

Up Your Teddy Bear (A.K.A. Seduction of a Nerd) (1970)

Written and directed by Don Joslyn
Produced by Don Joslyn, Andrew Herbert
Starring Victor Buono, Wally Cox, Julie Newmar, Claire Kelly, Angelique Pettyjohn, Thordis Brandt

To boost sales, the sultry, sordid, splenetic chief executive (Newmar) of a corporate toy manufacturer schemes to exploit the talent of a slovenly little toymaker and stalking girlwatcher (Cox) whose puppets pique childrens' imaginations. Her likeness to his censorious mother precludes her potential to seduce the diminutive craftsman, so the fetching miser tasks her obese subaltern (Buono) to procure any of several prostitutes (Kelly, Pettyjohn, Brandt) who might secure his contractual signature. Its stars were prominent in high-grade camp during the '60s, so to see them slumming in Joslyn's crudely conceived, scripted, shot, and cut trough of the phenomenon was probably disheartening for those few of their fans who deigned to watch it. A few funny tics and gags (as when rotund Buono struggles to squeeze himself into a minicompact convertible coupe) can't compensate for the tedium of so many that flop in an idiom that was already as outdated as Quincy Jones's score by '70. From such a farce, one can learn what he might from no few Italian sex comedies: salacity and juvenile comedy are an unseemly mix.

Instead, watch Batman: The Movie.

Web Cam Girls (2017)

Directed by Doug Campbell
Written by Stephen Romano
Produced by Hank Grover, Ken Sanders, Sheri Reeves, Noël A. Zanitsch, Sebastian Battro, Tom Berry, Pierre David
Starring Sedona Legge, Arianne Zucker, Stephen Graybill, Jon Briddell, Lauren Swickard, Liam McKanna, Joe Hackett, Tonya Kay, Elimu Nelson, Maxine Bahns, John Dinan, Taylor Snook, Barbara King, Jacqueline Vené, Rolonda Watts, Kendra Andrews

Lucre comes easily in many niche markets, as to an instructor of literature (Graybill) who kidnaps camgirls to torment them with light abuse and an imposition of housework before performatively executing them, all while reaping illicit gains from his videorecorded felonies. When his M.O. befalls the ambitiously camslu*tty cousin (Swickard) of one (ogrish Legge) among his students, she tracks him with the succor of a dweebish, fresh-faced cracker (McKanna), her trashy uncle (Briddell) and aviatically careerist mom (Zucker), a subletting stripper (Kay), and certainly not the inept detectives (Nelson, Bahns) assigned to investigate the disappearance. Campbell's characteristic competence at the helm mitigates some absurdities of Romano's story, but not his incredibly, expositorily, often hilariously artificial dialogue (best pronounced by Graybill and Kay at their hammiest), or the cheapness of this cablecast thriller's B-roll, costumery, and ludicrous computer graphics. What's remarkable here is a relatively positive, almost heroic portrayal of gun-toting, hillbillyish vigilantes contrasted against incapable law represented by POCs -- a true rarity on mainstream television -- and the incomparably spacious, spick-and-span double-wide where Briddell's redneck is domiciled. When feeding on smutty drama from Lifetime's trough, one can always expect sheer silliness and a disinclination to honestly depict any beyond the tamest kinks in consonance with its target audience's threshold for onscreen salacity.

Instead, watch Cam.

While the Children Sleep (A.K.A. The Sitter) (2007)

Directed by Russell Mulcahy
Written by Stephen Niver
Produced by Lincoln Lageson, Randy Pope, Kevin Bocarde, Nick Lombardo, Michael Moran, Robert A. Halmi, Larry Levinson
Starring Mariana Klaveno, Gail O'Grady, William R. Moses, Madison Davenport, Tristan Lake Leabu, Stacy Haiduk, Joanne Baron, Jon Lindstrom, Thomas Curtis, Alan Blumenfeld, Andrew Masset, Kim Delgado, Nancy Bell

Their kids (Davenport, Leabu) love her, now well-behaved under her gentle discipline, and all of her chores are performed satisfactorily. Would that a pretty nanny (Klaveno) employed by working parents (O'Grady, Moses) wasn't a bloodguilty erotomaniac whose fixation on father actuates her to transform unavoidable obstacles -- her imaginary inamorato's lewd law partner (Lindstrom), a snooping shrew (Baron), mom's suspicious workmate (Haiduk) -- into cumulatively conspicuous corpses. Prolific Mulcahy is renowned for the successes of Highlander and bounteous music videos, and his contemporaneous administration of a sequel in the Resident Evil series hardly diverted him from this televised triviality. If anything, his shots by dolly and crane are a shade extravagant for this production, and zooms on glowering Klaveno that foretoken her murders are as silly as jerkily manual shots of her violent, obligatory tantrum. In one dimension, performances are perforce perfunctorily dry; creepily comely Klaveno relies more on screen presence than talent, though she wasn't parceled substance beyond that of her co-stars. For its plodding pace, a few too many characters, and the monotonous pianistic motifs and synth strings of Elia Cmiral's music, this flat, featherweight Hand That Rocks the Clichés underwhelms, only differentiable by its telegenic leading lady from other imitations-by-numbers.

Instead, watch The Hand that Rocks the Cradle or Emilie.

Xtra Credit (2009)

Directed by Martin Jay Weiss
Written by Anthony Jaswinski
Produced by Brian Martinez, Erik Olson, Larry Levinson, Robert A. Halmi
Starring Micah Alberti, Marina Black, Pooch Hall, Melissa Ordway, Nina Siemaszko, John Littlefield, Garrison Koch, Mitch Pileggi, Dawn Olivieri

Synopsis

In neglect of his gorgeous, goodhearted girlfriend (Ordway), a boneheaded burglar reformed as a zookeeper and collegian is senselessly seduced by his professor of sociology (Black) shortly before he's framed for the murder of her husband (Pileggi).

Script

It's so timeworn that Jaswinski's script may as well be conglomerated, completed Mad Libs treating of erotic thrillers. Those few turns of his plot that can't be foretold are farcically ill-conceived, and its criminal machinations are exhaustively elucidated in numerous conversations and cutbacks, not one of which is necessary. His sexual situations play out like softcore p*rno. Our protagonist is unstable, unfaithful, unlikable, wantonly pugnacious, completely corruptible, and as thick as molasses. Only his sweetheart is at all gratifying.

Direction & editing

Weiss could've achieved mediocrity if his every single scene wasn't twofold to sixfold overshot, and attendantly overcut. Worse, Jennifer Jean Cacavas afflicted every transition and telephonic discourse with dopey wipes and split screens of double, triple, and quadruple juxtapositions to laborious and embarrassing effect.

Cinematography

Nobody would notice Todd Barron's stock photography if subwindows of those split screens weren't hideously colorized.

Histrionics

To be fair, this cast can't be faulted for their burdenous material. Lumberingly handsome Alberti doesn't quite seem mentally disabled, and Hall amuses occasionally as his gaudily garbed, rebarbative roommate. One can only wonder why charmless, leathery, nascently haggard Black was cast as a seductress, especially when her inferiority to adoring, adorable Ordway belies their cheater's impetus. Chunky Siemaszko hams risibly with smirks weirdly twisted, possibly symptomatic of palsy.

Score

Steven Burton's music by numbers is less chafing than that of DJsNeverEndingStory, which in turn is marginally more bearable than numerous cuts by negligible puss* rock bands.

Conclusion

Obviously, this is atrocious, if more watchable than the past decade's waves of woke programming. Bottom feeders never had so many options.

Zephyr Springs (A.K.A. Deadly Spa, A.K.A. A Deadly Game) (2013)

Directed by Marita Grabiak
Written by Kraig Wenman
Produced by Michael M. McGuire, Sage Scroope, Johnny Whitworth, Timothy O. Johnson, Kraig Wenman
Starring Amy Pietz, Tracey Fairaway, Johnny Whitworth, Charles Fathy, Kelly Curran, Jonathan Decker, Mauricio Mendoza, Sonia Darmei Lopes, Melissa Nearman

Routine activities conducted by a cloistered, comfortable, cheaply appointed therapeutic resort's owner and host (Whitworth), his enforcer (Fathy), and manager (Curran) seem demanding: hikes, meditations, archery, seminars, soirees, pernicious programming of patrons to ease their cozenage, and occasional murders of wayward staff and guests who can't appreciate the self-help guru's least enlightened agenda. At a second glance, this docket's difficulty is decreased by the dumb trust of certain gulls, such as a single mother (Pietz) who's entranced by the unctuous therapist's blandishments during a pricey trip to his sinister spa with her prematurely dowdy daughter (Fairaway), who chances upon malfeasance beneath the operation's lofty veneer. Not so noxious as much of the other wastewater piped by Johnson Production Group to Lifetime's sewer, this underwhelming psycho-thriller suffers from Grabiak's inconsistent continuity and senselessly skewed establishing shots, editor Tyler MacIntyre's surplus cuts, and amusing, abundant absurdities in Wenman's screenplay. Maternally and filially typecast Pietz and Fairaway shriekingly tread water opposite mumbly Whitworth, who's decidedly unimpressive as either a seducer of cougars or a malevolent mastermind. Only the most tippled of bibulous yogamoms may unironically like this.

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Produced by
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Synopsis

Script

Direction

Cinematography

Editing

Histrionics

Score

Highlights

Flaws

Conclusion

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