Capsule Reviews: CALIBER 9, CATFISH, LAST SUMMER, MACHETE; SOLITUDE OF BLOOD; RESIDENT EVIL: RESURRECTION

"We need to remember that property is theft!"

CALIBER 9 (1972) - ***
From the awesome new Fernando De Leo boxed 'crime' set comes this tough little picture, first in a crime trilogy from the robust director. Barbara Bouchet sizzles as the go-go dancing femme fatale girlfriend of pug-ugly Ugo. Fresh out of the slammer and the only one who might know where the loot is buried Ugo's instantly a target for his former crime pals, including Lionel Stander (CUL-DE-SAC) as 'The Americano" - a mob head who rehires Ugo into the crew, hoping he'll slip and reveal where the stash of cash is (all the other suspects in the theft are wiped out before the credits in a punchily-edited montage). We don't even know if Ugo took it until later, making his many beatings and denials fraught with strange tough guy ambiguity.

There's lots of De Leo's patented pro-commie dialogue (see caption) folded into the police procedural scenes, something American character actor Stander (a European exile on account of the blacklist)  no doubt approved of. Money is the root of all evil and in every close-up shot of large amounts of it being handed back and forth we're always afraid it might explode ( BOOM! eh, Ugo? The big a-fireworks, eh? HAhahha! BOOM! hahaha!). A pathetic 'party' is the setting for the big climactic gundown: a handful of lawn chairs on parched grass around an empty pool, classic De Leo. Of course it wont take canny Acidemic fans long to figure out who stole what and where, but they'll be too busy rocking out to Luis Enriqiez Bacalov's funky Ennio Morricone-wannabe score (talk about property as theft!) to give much of a good goddamn especially when the flute and crunchy electric guitars get started. Dang Dang Diggy Diggy Dang!

MACHETE (2010) - ***1/2
Could this actually be Roberto Rodriguez's best film? It actually uses everything from that GRINDHOUSE trailer - including Cheech Marin as a shotgun-toting priest saying in a magnificently flat affect: "God has mercy. I don't!" Mind-boggling. Danny Trejo shows--after centuries of playing Mexican bad guys and even being one for 11 years as a child--that he has the depth of presence to handle a lead role, no sweat. And the ladies? My notions of feminine empowerment are completely in sync with Rodriguez's, and I dig the large quotient of strong, ass-kicking hermanas.

CATFISH (2010) - ***
An eerie downer with some stray grace, CATFISH is the Blair Witch of internet romances, to the point where a violent freaky unseen ghost is as a modern ecstasy compared to the soul-snuffing truth at the end of the Facebook rainbow. The story involves a handsome slacker falling love, as we all have, with a phantom from the internet; things get weird when her kid sister does paintings of his dance photos.... and then things get really weirder when he and his buddies drive down to see her, for a surprise visit.

As someone who in the wild west days of the AOL chat rooms (mid-90's) went on many dates with sexy-voiced, able-writing sirens who turned out to be deceiving kraken-gorgon hybrids, CATFISH's documentary sense of excitement and possibility struck deep in the core of my bruised soul; all those post-date Silkwood showers and whiskey shots to wash the wan desperation from my feelers, and to no avail. Haven't we all been there? Now you can go again! Terrifying, hilarious and deeply sad, no shower is scalding enough to sear the Catfish stains off your soul.

SOLITUDE OF BLOOD (2002: Dir. Roman Prygunov) - **1/2
This Russian would-be giallo-esque nevermindbender uses amnesiac tactics to make us ever unsure what's going on in its heroine's head, the result being an underpopulated Russian pharmacological BLACK SWAN minus the dancing, with an intense green, white, and deep commie red set design, as if THE ROOM married SUSPIRIA and none of their friends showed up to the ceremony.

Ingeborga Dapkunaite (!) plays a top flight pharmaceutical researcher named Maria who's recently created a miracle drug for overcoming female infertility. Some really uninspired murders and needless crosscutting make half the events onscreen seem like a dream, but which half? One hopes our heroine is suffering from possible amnesia ala THE HEADLESS WOMAN (see my Amnesiacs in Cinema entry, here) but it's doubtful. This film made me realize a few things about how to make movies cheaply by wasting running time through meaningless easy shots:

1. A phone rings, but no one is on the other end! Or else just deep breathing or whatever:
All you need is one actress and a phone! If you don't have a phone, she can hold a banana or shoe or even just air, in a phone hand; you can add the phone later in editing.
2. Ben Nye stage blood - $40 a quart! You can pour it all over your actress as she wanders around white bathrooms for long pointless dream sequences.
3. The old J-Horror 'coughing weird things up' dream sequences.
4. Taking strange pills is a no-frills way to ensure you can let the editor run rampant with weird non-associative editing tricks.

The film has only a few stalk and kills and they're all pointlessly intercut with shots of Maria at lunch or otherwise bored or agitated, making us think she might either be involved or next on the list. She's clearly meant to be a suspect and we're never really scared for her, as we should be. And then it ends. Could be worse. At least there's a theremin!

LAST SUMMER (1969) - ****
There's ever so often I catch a fellow critic giving away that he's not seen the movie he's capsulizing, as in the Time Out Film Guide entry on LAST SUMMER, which calls it "winsome," and notes 'typical lessons are learned'?  

Whaaaat? Not eves, bra.

There's nothing winsome about LAST SUMMER, unless LORD OF THE FLIES or SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER are to be filed amongst the GIDGET and BEACH BLANKET movies. There's a rape, pot smoking, group hair washing, nonstop groping, evil-confessing, seagull torture, and other typical--but far from typical for coming-of-age beach summer movies.

My friend Max turned me onto this movie during one of our wasted summers hanging around his parent's Long Beach Island estate. We never found a Barbara Hershey for ourselves (we were too hung over to actually go to the beach during the day) but the meta-ness of it all was not lost on us in our bourbon or gin (depending on the day) fog. It was the perfect thing to watch on a rainy Sunday over hash oil pills and straight 190 proof Devil's Springs vodka. The casting is awesome, I was never into The Waltons but when John Boy raises his sadistic demonic eyebrow and the way pangs of empathy shoot across his Sataic features during his psychic threeways with Barbara Hersey and smirky Peter Norton is enough to change my mind.

Coming in later, Cathy Burns steals the show with a single, long monologue recounting the last hours of seeing her mom alive at a cocktail party that had been raging at their house for days. By the time she's done you can smell the liquor on the adult's breath, the heavy mix of cigarettes and lust tempered by drunken dissolution. It's enough to get her just far enough into the Hershey and pals clique that her later glum buzzkillery all but spurns the evil trio into their final vile action. Criminally not on DVD, but shows up on TCM from time to time. As the NY Times TV writer used to say, Pounce!

 RESIDENT EVIL: RESURRECTION (2010) - **1/2
When it comes to directing action, Paul W.S. Anderson is a great one for color contrast, slow motion rain drops, cavernous all-white spaces, and that's all. His action movies are like an expensive video game you're watching someone else play. There's such a shortness of believability or grit or guts in his uber-sterile mise-en-scene that you wonder how in the hell this hack has done so well for himself. With huge budgets and a marriage to the super sexy lead siren Milla Jovovich you know he must have some big connections. But of course they're not meant to be great, just meant to be watchable for an international audience, so any earmarks of a particular culture or time or moment are shorn away, replaced with obvious references to other movies -- DAWN OF THE DEAD meets THE MATRIX in this case. It's all the head villain can do to not use that Hugo Weaving "Mr. Andersssson" voice as he dodges slow mo air-rippling bullets in his black trenchcoat and shades. Millla meanwhile appears hung over and tired and "rocks" some weak mom bangs. The rest of the cast try their best but the most interesting character turns out to be a big lug with a black cloth over his head and a ridiculously huge ax! Go get 'em, brother! Machete don't text!

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THE FOURTH KIND: Take us to your Benzos!

"I'm having a hard time understanding what happened here!" 

--The Sheriff (Will Patton)

One of the common drawbacks of reaching adulthood is the loss of magic; the child's wide aperture for mysteries shrinks as the world is 'figured out.' Elements of life that used to baffle and intrigue are made plain, robbed of their dark aura by cold explanations in the light of middle school health class. The mysteries and horrors that can fill a child with dread and delight are to jaded adults merely nostalgia; if we get a scare in these days of torture porn and global deadening it's probably a sign we need to be on meds.

You may remember being a kid making rec room haunted houses at Halloween where you blindfolded a willing, cocktail-addled adult and made them dip their hand in a bowl of warm spaghetti, telling them it's brains. Yuck, they'd say! The adult may know it's not brains, but if they allow themselves to believe it is, the old childhood fear factor can return. It's fun, so why not? It's for the kids!

Movies like THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY, INCIDENT AT LOCH NESS, and CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, THE FOURTH KIND play off this 'brains in a bowl' idea, encouraging us to believe that what we're seeing is 'true;' that it's documentary footage, 'found' and frightening. As rational adults we may 'know' its not true, but if we relax our fearful grip on reality, the film becomes an aperture widening campfire tale. We can let ourselves get creeped out because we've opened up, pretended to believe just to get freaked out --it worked. Tell us it's true and we may not 100% believe you, but it's way scarier than 100% knowing it's not.

So why can't we live like that all the time? Spooked constantly by our own shadows? I blame science! Scientists discover a giant ghost frog that breathes fire in some remote volcanic island, but within minutes they've given the thing a name--horribilis pikelianis -- so now it's just another frog, so big deal. Science is all about making sure, in short, that no one gets to have any mystery in their lives. I mean, is it fun if that glowing weird ball in the sky is dryly explained away as "marsh gas" or "the close proximity in rotation of the planet Neptune"? Zzzzzz. But an alien visitor? Now I'm awake, even an adult skeptic can awake their gullible inner child if it will servea purpose, allow them to see life as interesting and exciting for a few hours.

In the end it makes no real difference if I truly believe in aliens or not, except to me. But there are some who are terrified of letting go: if an uptight scientist is blindfolded by the kids, for example, and subjected to the spaghetti brain experience, he might get very irate and lecture the children on the way brains actually feel, and that they need to do more research. Why can't they let it go and just go "ooooh yuck!" so the children can laugh and play? Are they.... doing things... with brains... in their secret labs?

By nearly every "irate scientist" standard, THE FOURTH KIND is a terrible film. But yet, one must admire it because it's gutsy enough to make nearly every mistake in the book - it's just like that bowl of cold noodles that's supposed to be brains. Maybe the kids got it wrong, and forgot to actually cook the noodles first, so in there all dry. You just have to laugh if that happens, as you will when you first see Milla Jovovich walking towards the camera to explain that what you are about to see is true... based on real events...too shocking to reveal til now! She'll be playing a crazy shrink hypnotizing people in Nome, Alaska to recount their being invaded orificially by owl-eyed 'things.' 

They're victims of.... alien abduction.

At first the abductees are merely scared. Then, to up the ante, they start acting like they're possessed by the space edition of the demon from THE EXORCIST. All the writhing and talking in ancient Sumerian and levitating and opening mouths wide enough to accommodate even the most acromegalous of dentists.

A bizarre mishmash of fake real footage, real fake footage, and allegedly real footage and an assortment of spoken audio from sessions that many people think is faked all congeals in THE FOURTH KIND, hiding the fact that a solid 80% of this film is just people being lying in bed or on couches, coming in and out of hypnosis and acting super scared--which is cool, but it seems like no one involved with the production has ever even met an actual hypnotist, or been to Alaska or read up on actual alien abduction cases. Nome is played I think by Vancouver and one of the Eastern bloc countries currently cheap to film in. Names have been changed to protect the innocent... and then changed yet again!

But hey, Milla has a really cozy yet gigantic home and office, her own single engine plane instead of a car, even a roaring fake fire, which is good since nearly the whole movie occurs in her den/office. And hey, Milla's still bewitching in her foxiness. But Nome must be really short of shrinks, because her character is way too familiar with her patients to maintain professional objectivity, and worse, unable to make a simple diagnosis of anxiety and prescribe meds, i.e. Xanax, even as they roll on the floor screaming in overwhelming horror for minutes at a crack. Instead she accepts help from that old pro nostril-flarer, Elias Koteas... and the work continues. Koteas has apparently never heard of benzos either.

Actually, let's fixate on this issue: that three doctors can stand around and watch a guy basically trying to tear his face off in hypnotized terror, and not one of them thinks to give him a fucking sedative, they just watch (as above). I kept shouting at the screen, "You're supposed to be a shrink, give him a Xanax! Or if you're just a therapist, give him a recommendation for a shrink who will." God forbid someone came to her with real problems like full-blown psychosis. She'd probably tell them to go just hang on for a few years while she fumbles with the tape recorder and tries to learn her job.

The plot is related to us via tape recordings: lots of shots of cassette players and spinning wheels -- and there's really no way to tell whose voice is whom's from the confusing mishmash of voices on tape. Is this a patient's voice we're hearing or the dead husband's? If the latter, is it the 'real' dead husband or the 'fake' one, i.e. the actor? Is this her own husband, or a patient? And again, is it the 'real' one or the one acted for the purpose of this film? Is this a hypnotically recovered memory of a patient listening to a tape recorder? Is this tape recorder remembered by Milla in the over-reaching taped interview with the director? Or is it live? Erich, are you under hypnosis, even now?
 

One guy who would love this film? Jean-Luc Godard! It's got accidental Brecht written all over it, misspelled of course, but I'm sure with French subtitles to add yet another layer of structural hyper-reflexivity, and a little ironic distance, THE FOURTH KIND would become as post-modern as any of Godard's 80s minimalist comedies with half the running time devoted to watching reels of tape spinning in their plastic casings. Just substitute petit bourgeois capitalism for aliens and it writes itself.

But other than its problems with criminal pharmacological neglect, I take no umbrage with the film's gross incompetence. There's good music (creepy!) set design (cozy!), and Milla's eyes (forget not her breakout role was as an alien in THE FIFTH ELEMENT!). The lame execution adds to the chilling faux-cumentary effect, especially as this kind of subject matter needs ersatz trimmings--the faker the better--for don't we deal with traumatic truths much easier when presented in laughably inept form? If you were to reach your hand into a bowl of real brains, wouldn't that somehow defeat the purpose, drain the fun? By that definition, FOURTH KIND is the truest and best bad fake real film since PLAN NINE FROM OUTER SPACE! (my praising herewith).

As we never see 'anything' of the actual aliens in THE FOURTH KIND we may as well be blindfolded and just hear it as a radio show. Science should take note of this approach, because if you try to fight Medusa through a mirror, you wont know where she is and one day you'll accidentally see her straight on and die instantly. You think by blocking the horizon line of your life with a lot of props and nonsense you can obstruct your view of her-- and when someone mentions Medusa might be real you arrest them or kick them out of your lab because you're afraid if you believe in her she will come. The alien agenda is like that, but worse-- it not only wipes away those blocks so you see your death looming past the credits, you also see the alien agenda after your death, how they're waiting even farther past for your newly separated soul to rise up towards the light so they can catch in their soul harvesting nets!

So yes, I like THE FOURTH KIND. I never want to have to see it again, but I like it for its misguided bravado and humorless self-importance, like the way you want the kid who leads you blindfolded through the haunted house to the bowl of brains to not crack up or apologize but to solemnly warn of what's to come. If we're going to get all into aliens, the filmmakers seemed to reason, let everyone overact and have a good time and we can confound the whole idea of truth and get away with saying whatever we want; we can even slip in the real truth and no one will panic because audiences will think its fiction and only the brave and bold (or just paranoid) will suspect it's not.

Send in the clown cover memories

Big plusses: Milla gets to make grave diagnoses.... Resident Evil's Alice has filled her with holy power so she can say, "Something is going on, there's something strange going on in Nome" and have it ring with menace, or "conversion phenomena is something not a lot of people understand," implying she does! She understands less as time goes on, but is still miles ahead of the spooked and reactionary sheriff... or is she? A tense stand-off and a violent knife murder seemed shuffled in to keep you from nodding off and Milla's blamed for everything! Milla's haunted eyes are beautifully lit, so we can contemplate her hybrid status as we go along, and realize yes, Virginia, aliens are among us, and some of them are very, very adorable.

Big minuses: a few under-rehearsed moments of 'family angst' such as the now cliche'd dinner table of single mom with two kids--a sweet young girl and bratty older boy who wants his daddy back-- "How'd dad die, mom?" -- you can practically set your watch to the big scene of Milla freaking to the heavens: "They took my baby!!!" Elias Koteas seems like he didn't know what kind of film this was before he signed on and is acting in a kind of counterpoint to the hysteria around him, conveniently vanishing every time a corroborating witness appears to make Milla seem less nuts. I never could learn to like Mr. Koteas who's nostril breathing creates too much hairy proximity. I won't deny he's a fine actor - but sometimes fine doesn't cut it, sometimes only a bad performance can be truly great. When in Nome....

Whether or not you believe this story, believe one thing: dogmatic crank skeptics are your enemy! The noodles really are brains! And if you have any spare benzos, please send them to the stressed out abductees of Nome, Alaska, or better yet, to me. Everyone, everywhere, keep watching! Keep watching! Keep watching the pharmacist!

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Honeymoons of Terror! EDEN LAKE (2008) and A PERFECT GETAWAY (2009)

Who loves movies about rich douchebags in love? Not us! But what if said bags take their trusting, materialistic new wives or girlfriends off to the woods or some remote beach to get away from it all, and then maybe pop the question or have a honeymoon? Nope. But what if they get chased, murdered, tortured and eaten and deprived of cellular phone service once at said remote area? Everybody loves that! Eat 'em up!

See, the thing is, these hidden woodsy places ain't like our  protagonists remembered from their privileged youths; times are always getting tougher, and poor people settle into the fissures and dead ends the rich leave as they chomp chomp up the world and leave Wal-Marts like giant droppings on the now parched with tar and concrete landscape. Soon abandoned for bigger spaces, these Wal-Marts, along with woods and isolated beaches (forgotten or not yet chomped) become infested with in-bred, torture-lovin', meth-smokin' white trash.

In their misguided bid for 'a little adventure' the protagonist couple--douchebag and trophy, if you will--find more than they bargained for, something they never found in Home Depot or Bed, Bath and Beyond. Whether they fight back or cower all the way to the grave will depend on the script God gave them, but in the meantime, man, break that champagne bottle, for a jagged champagne bottle edge is a fine weapon! And damn but I got a slow-burn smitten on the Eve Mendez-meets-Ava Gardner hottie on the left (Kiele Sanchez), who gives Milla a literal run for the money in A PERFECT GETAWAY (2009).

Timothy Olyphant and Steve Zahn co-star as the boyfriends, and there's more screwy twists and turns for both than the Union Square subway station, but its in Hawaii and the scenery looks good and om--om-shakti--you can vibe on rainbows and lush vegetation instead of the heated rush hour throngs outside the Exit sign of your own real world love, New York.

Movies are more than an escape, they are an escape without consequences! They give you a round tour of the paradise you might want to see, and leave you knowing you're better off where you are, close to the dream screen and with lots of locks on the doors. What was it Carol Clover said? Something about the land being raped by the gov'ment? So the land rapes back via its people, dirt-poor rednecks? It makes these films both much more enjoyable to forego that kind of rough business and stick to straight up killin' and maimin', as the good lord intended for His flock, rather than sexual molestations. Frankly, I loved PERFECT GETAWAY, but my expectations were rock bottom as I think I was confusing it with reviews I'd read of Turistas. So if you've never seen it, presume it lame and let it take you on its almost too "perfect" thrill-away... a horror film where characters actually make smart decisions!

 

Nothing could have prepared me, then, for the genius of EDEN LAKE (2008) an Australian shocker that aims high, clear above the usual WRONG TURN elements, and into STRAW DOGS territory, keeping a smattering of the old ultra-torture porn, with the heroes having a substantial hand in the evening's violent escalations and yet nothing getting as full-blown traumatizing as WOLF CREEK, thanks to, again, no sexual violence. Yes, the shock ending is downbeat, but not depressing, if you're worried about that sort of thing, and I was. If something's too ugly it can take me months to recover. So don't worry, it's all about family and the kids being all right, and a little burning and barbed wire as it creeps quietly out of the muck of exploitation and into the realm of social commentary so stealthily it's at your throat before you know it. And don't act like you don't got it comin', eh?

On the other hand. I love WRONG TURN too! And HILLS HAVE EYES and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW remake for that matter. I mean, why not? If you're going to order a steak dinner, don't enjoy your meal and then act shocked when you learn what people had to "do" to certain living creatures for the red flesh to reach you. If I ran the world, you'd need a special "Killer" card to eat meat, and the fee would entail two days of slaughterhouse work a year... just enough for everyone to be a little less hypocritical when they weep for the beautiful soulful eyes of a sheep, then go into a magic black-out until the bones are off the table. You'll know what I mean..  in the words of the great Bertolt Brecht: "For once you must try to face the facts / mankind is kept alive by bestial acts." And hotties, of course.

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