The Acolytes: Underground Horror from Down Under

Part serial killer thriller, part good teens gone bad, Australian indie “Acolytes” is the kind of horror movie they should be making more of. I’m pretty hard to please when it comes to this genre, and I was pleasantly surprised by this one.

Mark (Seb Gregory) wanders into the woods one day and spies a man burying something. He and his friends James (Josh Payne) and Chasely (Hannah Morgan Lawrence) decide to unearth the buried treasure, but instead of money, they discover the body of a young woman.

Here’s where the movie takes a turn for the “Kids do the darndest things when they find a body”, and I start wondering if I ever really want to procreate. Instead of reporting the body to the police, Mark and James cook up a scheme to find the murderer and blackmail him into killing an evil scumbag kiddie rapist (Michael Dorman) who has recently been released from prison. Schemes like this in thrillers never play out as planned, so things go from bad to worse pretty quickly for Mark, James, and Hannah.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 91 minutes

Directed by: Jon Hewitt

Written by: Shayne Armstrong, Shane Krause

Starring: Sebastian Gregory, Joshua Payne, Hannah Mangan Lawrence

Theatrical Release: 05/15/08

DVD Release: 07/28/09

Production Budget: $4 million

Domestic Gross: N/A

Metacritic Score: N/A

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 83%

With a small budget of only four million dollars, “Acolytes” has a great visual style and excellent performances by the cast, especially considering their age. Unlike most teen horror flicks, the characters in “Acolytes” are handled as real people instead of hash marks on a killer’s bed post.

You’ve probably seen movies that have one twist too many. The theatrical release of this movie has four or five too many- so many twists piled on top of one another is overkill and takes away from the overall impact. The ending is a bit of a cliché for a thriller, which is the biggest let down of all. (The DVD features two alternate endings.)

Overall, “Acolytes” is a movie I would certainly recommend to fans of the horror/thriller genre. It’s dark and disturbing and has just the right kind of jump-out-of-your-seat tension. The DVD became available in the U.S. today.

The Burrowers: Digging Up Another Straight to DVD Gem

Add yet another movie to the long list of recent feature films inexplicably reduced to straight to DVD affairs.  J.T. Petty’s “The Burrowers” really saw no theatrical release outside of playing at a handful of film festivals last fall.

The movie combines an old West adventure with horror, drawing pretty equally from both genres.  The opening scene features a family being attacked by some unseen entity.  When Fergus Coffey (Karl Geary) arrives on the scene to find his fiancée among those missing, he quickly launches a search party.  Just like that, the movie takes to the road on horseback – cowboys riding through the prairie in search of missing folks and mysterious monsters.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 96 minutes

Directed by: J.T. Petty

Written by: J.T. Petty

Starring: Clancy Brown, Karl Geary, William Mapother

Theatrical Release: N/A

DVD Release: 04/21/09

Production Budget: $7 million

Domestic Gross: $0

Metacritic Score: N/A

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 67%

The lush green atmosphere and Western sensibility really separate this from your average teen horror fare straight away.  Your run-of-the-mall horror movie rarely even pretends to care about its characters, and horror teens, in particular, are always disposable.  Often annoying already, their deaths are so meaningless that they may as well be bags of meat for a maniac to hack away at with an ax.  In this semi-proper Western universe populated more by adults than teens, though, the characters are treated with a little more reverence.  Consequently, the deaths still pack some surprise, still carry some weight with the audience.  Like “The Descent,” (though not quite as good) this is horror made for adults.

Fans of ABC’s “Lost” will recognize several faces here:  actors William Mapother, Doug Hutchison and Clancy Brown (our famously despised pick for Sandor Clegane) all play major roles in “The Burrowers” and had significant parts on the island as well.  (Fun fact:  Hutchison, AKA Horace the Dharma leader on “Lost,” got one of his big acting breaks as the super creepy Eugene Victor Tooms on “The X-Files.”)  The entire cast does a nice job pulling off the critical juxtaposition of the old West -  stuffy, formal, almost Victorian aspects of speech and mannerisms mixing with the rough and grimey demeanor of hardened men that work ranches all day.  As always, this combo is good for several laughs.

The movie does have its flaws, though – from the opening scene on, the audience stays one step (or more) ahead of the characters.  That certainly doesn’t help build suspense or an aura of mystery.  I also thought a fight scene toward the end went on way too long.  Even if we do sort of feel like we know what’s ultimately coming, though, some of the particulars of the details still make the end satisfying, and there are a few twists along the way as well.

Perhaps its biggest strength – “The Burrowers” shows some restraint in not letting us see the actual creatures too much, which I think usually works better than the alternative.  (This isn’t Freddy or Chuckie making wise cracks as they kill.  What might lurk in the shadows is always scariest.)  All told, it’s an effective and entertaining movie, especially considering its modest budget.  Just 900 and some odd votes on IMDB? Horror fans should seek this out on DVD.

Powder Blue: The Jessica Biel Stripper Movie

How does a movie starring Oscar winner Forest Whitaker, Jessica Biel, Lisa Kudrow, Patrick Swayze and Ray Liotta go straight to DVD?

That is apparently the case for “Powder Blue,” which hits the DVD shelves May 26th, roughly 20 months after filming wrapped and without ever seeing a legit theatrical release.  So what happened?  All we really have in way of explanation is the film itself.

“Powder Blue” weaves a web of several loosely connected storylines in the same style as “Crash” or “Magnolia.”  The holidays draw near, and four LA residents close in on personal crises as well.  Rose Johnny (Biel) strips to pay the medical bills of her comatose 7 year old son.  She also appears to have a coke problem, though to what extent remains unclear.  Somewhere across town, Charlie (Whitaker) offers strangers $50,000 cash to shoot him “in the heart.”  He’s desperate and in pain but, as the film quickly explains, is a religious man and can’t risk killing himself for fear of eternal hellfire.  Elsewhere, scrawny Qwerty Doolittle (Eddie Redmayne) receives a rejection on his loan as his father ran up some bad debt for their mortuary business.  He’s never had a real girlfriend, and when he attempts to attend a dating function, he passes out from nerves.  Jack Doheny (Liotta) is an ex-con dying of cancer. Allegedly, he’s “just passing through” town, though we know right away that something more is going on.

TV Casualties Rating:

Run Time: 106 minutes

Directed by: Timothy Linh Bui

Written by: Timothy Linh Bui

Starring: Jessica Biel, Forest Whitaker, Ray Liotta, Lisa Kudrow

Theatrical Release: 05/08/09

DVD Release: 05/26/09

Production Budget: N/A

Domestic Gross: N/A

Metacritic Score: N/A

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: N/A

This ambitious setup shows some promise.  Early on, a spark of energy catapults the action as the film jumps back and forth to the different strands of story.  At spots where the movie leans toward quirky rather than intense, it actually works really well.  Lisa Kudrow was especially funny as a neurotic waitress.  As the bigger picture comes into focus, and the direction of each story fully takes shape, unfortunately, that energy seems to drain away in a hurry – the spark extinguished by cold, blue snow.

“Powder Blue” doesn’t have deep enough characters to work as a character study, and it similarly fails to deliver a twisty or surprising enough plot to carry the film. There are unintentionally laughable lines of dialogue at crucial moments, and similar missteps of tone throughout the last half of the movie – some of the love scenes come off awkwardly, and some of the over the top “sad scenes” with swelling music seem to misjudge (by a lot) how connected (or not) the audience feels to certain characters and their predicaments.  There didn’t seem to be a clear storytelling vision behind this.  Despite the openly derivative elements, it doesn’t manipulate as well as “Crash” or give us the cast of rich characters like “Magnolia.”  It failed to rip off either one all that well.

The gravest sin?  The tragic elements here, like Rose’s drug problem and Charlie’s suicidal tendencies, while intriguing at first, stay on a very surface level.  The pain here is flat, superficial – a  mere plot device.  It doesn’t resonate.  I feel like writer/director Timothy Linh Bui couldn’t decide if he wanted the movie to be clever or pack an emotional haymaker, and as a result it does neither, ultimately trying to force each storyline into paying off with a sentimental cheesefest.

Oh well.  Years from now “Powder Blue” will simply be remembered as the “Jessica Biel stripper movie,” if it’s remembered at all.  She does splash hot candle wax all over her boobs… in case you were wondering.  That actually does sound like a lot of straight to DVD movies, now that I think about it.