Shutter Island: We Have To Go Back!

In Shutter Island, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a US Marshal investigating the disappearance of a patient and/or inmate from a remote institution for the criminally insane. Creepy noir-ish thriller-y things ensue as Daniels and his partner (Mark Ruffalo)  struggle to uncover the truth. Of course Daniels becomes more and more suspicious of the hospital staff, and of course the audience becomes more and more suspicious of Daniel’s sanity or lack thereof.

The movie looks and sounds awesome. The story, as any good thriller should, makes you wanna know what in tarnations is going on.  I liked almost everything about  Shutter Island, and I wish more big budget studio movies were as daring as it was.

My only complaint, and it’s a big one, is that very similar unraveling sanity plots have been done before, and I think done better (The Machinist and A Tale of Two Sisters, for example).   Perhaps I’d have been completely wowed if I’d seen it ten years ago or had I not seen the “big twist” coming since I saw the trailers for this movie months ago. It might have been a 5 star mind-blower of OMFG proportions.  Sadly, neither of these are true.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 138 minutes

Directed by: Martin Scorsese

Written by: Laeta Kalogridis, Dennis Lehane

Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley

Theatrical Release: 02/19/10

DVD Release: 06/08/10

Production Budget: $80 million

Domestic Gross: $127 million

Metacritic Score: 63/100

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 68%

Still, the journey is always what matters most, right?  Some of the clues to what’s really going on along the way are subtle and clever – in the opening moments, I pondered why the agent from Seattle spoke with a thick Boston accent.  Others are a bit confusing – I’m still baffled by a mental patient pantomiming drinking a glass of water with an empty hand and then setting the empty glass down in the next shot.  No idea.

There seems to be a split amongst viewers in terms of Teddy’s insanity/sanity. I interpret his final line in the way it would make the most satisfying end to his story – That he is indeed insane and over the course of the film has been made aware of this fact. He murdered his wife after she murdered their children, and rather than live with the awful truth, he is choosing to be lobotomized so that he can be at peace. So while the twist doesn’t give much bang for its buck, the ultimate resolution almost makes up for it with an emotional punch in the gut.

Shutter Island will be released on DVD and BluRay on June 8, 2010. The movie is based on the novel Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane.

31 Days of Horror – October 10th – “The Wizard of Gore”

Next up in our 31 Days of Horror countdown is “The Wizard of Gore“, a “kind of” remake of a 1970′s Herschell Gordon Lewis movie of the same name.

From a writing perspective, I think “The Wizard of Gore” could have been good- probably even great, and maybe could have cracked my top 5 horror movies, given my penchant for film noir. It’s got the mystery, the shape shifters, and to top it off, a creepy magician. Unfortunately, the directing and production are such collosal failures, the movie assumes the shape of a giant terd.

Montag the Magnificent is not your garden variety magician. When he chooses a female audience member to be part of his show, instead of making a purse disappear or pulling a scarf out of an ear, he slices them open and pulls out their innards or stuffs them inside a giant barbeque and lights it up. But at the end of the show, just as everyone’s about to flee from the theatre in horror, he says his magic words and the girls appear alive and well before the audience’s eyes. But while the girls may leave the stage unharmed (except for being hypnotized into getting naked, no biggie!), one by one they show up corpsified. Journalist Edmund Bigelow (Kip Pardue) becomes obsessed with the show and the disappearing girls.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 95 minutes

Directed by: Jeremy Kasten

Written by: Zach Chassler

Starring: Kip Pardue, Crispin Glover, Bijou Phillips

Theatrical Release: N/A

DVD Release: 08/18/08

“The Wizard of Gore” looks cheap and amateur across the board. The colored lighting and craaaaaazy camera angles are reminscent of mid 90′s MTV, and I don’t mean that as a compliment, in case it wasn’t obvious. There are odd visual flashes throughout the movie that I found confusing since they tip off the already obvious twist. If they were going to be there at all, they should have been a lot more subtle a la Fight Club. Perhaps director Kasten should focus a bit more on communicating the plot to the audience and a little less on the camera tricks.

Dourif (as a crooked herbalist) and Glover (as the aforementioned creepy magician) give good, if not over-the-top, performances. I get the sense that both actors are desperately trying to save a movie they know is destined for the crapper. Kip Pardue struggles as the lead. His lines are delivered so stiffly, it’s almost as if he’s never seen a noir film.

When I noticed the credit for the Suicide Girls in the opening, I thought, “Send in the boobs.” There should be a Countdown to Titties clock in this movie. Anytime you see a chick with tattoos, put 60 seconds on the clock. And it’s not that I’m opposed to breasts in movies, but pointless mam-shots have become so predictable for horror movies that I find it a bit annoying. Make a decent movie and then you’ve earned your tatas.

31 Days of Horror – October 9th – “Cube”

From the opening scene “Cube” thrusts the audience, along with 6 characters, directly into a booby-trapped maze of cubed rooms.  No one, neither characters nor audience, knows quite why they’re there.  But the film never lets up by leaving those claustrophobic cube chambers for a flashback or an easy explanation.  It maintains an intense focus, and the suspense just builds and builds.

This is a pretty cold open:  Six people in jumpsuits awake in a strange arrangement of connected cubes.  Each cube has a door on each of its 6 walls (including up and down.)  They quickly discover that some of the rooms are booby trapped with a variety of motion detecting traps such as poison gas, tons of slicing mechanisms, flame throwers or a face melting acid spray.  Yikes.  An early, and disturbingly painful, death shows just how high the stakes are.  Without food and water, they’ve got maybe 3 days to find their way out.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 90 minutes

Directed by: Vincenzo Natali

Written by: André Bijelic, Vincenzo Natali, Graeme Manson

Starring: David Hewlett, Nicky Guadagni, Nicole de Boer

Theatrical Release: 09/09/97

DVD Release: 01/26/99

Production Budget: N/A

Domestic Gross: $501,000

Metacritic Score: 61/100

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 58%

Tension builds as a viewer, but it builds even more for the characters.  They’re pushed to their limits, and when one snaps, it changes the group dynamic completely over the second half.

Released in Canada in 1992, “Cube” has slowly but surely found an audience on DVD.  Borrowing some from John Carpenter’s “The Thing“, the basic premise of confined characters searching for both meaning and salvation in their actions makes this more or less a blueprint for the “Saw” series without the lame Jigsaw the master puppeteer angle.  I’ll just say that “Cube” is many many times better.

Beyond being without some of the unrealistic behavior that you see in movies like “Saw“, “Cube” isn’t all contrivances and manipulations.  It’s more than just setting up twists.  It gives the audience plenty to really think about with a clear philosophical theme of chaos vs. order.  The question of why they’re here is an obvious one, and one that they can’t know without getting out, if ever.  Did someone meticulously plan this cube and specifically target them to bring them here for some grand purpose?  Or was it all a lot more random – the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing, more or less – based on the little information we have on the cube’s construction, the latter at least seems plausible.  The characters discuss it at length.  Both sides of the debate seem reasonable enough.

“Cube” engages the audience in the best way a movie can. It asks big questions. It leaves a lot to the imagination, but it makes you think. It doesn’t just present easy, digestible answers that are more about convenience than meaning. The movie does not fit into a neat little “Cube“.

31 Days of Horror – 2009 Edition

Happy Halloween, nuggets! In honor of our favorite holiday, our gift to you is a horror movie review for each day of this kickass month!

October 1st – “The Thaw”

October 2nd – “Wolf Creek“

October 3rd – “The Hills Run Red“

October 4th – “Pulse“

October 5th – “The Uninvited“

October 6th – “The Last House on the Left“

October 7th – “Dog Soldiers“

October 8th – “Giallo“

October 9th – “Cube“

October 10th – “The Wizard of Gore“

October 11th – “Doomsday“

October 12th – “The Fog”

October 13th – “Cemetery Man”

October 14th – “Pitch Black”

October 15th – “Drag Me To Hell”

October 16th – “Dead and Buried”

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.

Horsemen: Ponyloaf.

Here’s a recipe for braised bullshit movie: one 12 oz. can of David Fincher’s “Se7en” (Up), one leg of “Silence of the Lambs“, and two squirts of pure Quaid sweat. (This recipe calls for Dennis. Randy is an acquired taste. Little gamey.)

Yep. “Horsemen” is a blatant “Se7en“/”The Silence of the Lambs” copycat. Their strategy was to not merely recycle that material… but to kick it up a notch by totally sucking. Quaid (Dennis. Randy wouldn’t touch this script with Gary Sinise’s sac.) stars as Aidan Breslin, a work-obsessed homicide detective slash crappy dad. We know he’s a crappy dad because his eldest son, Alex (Lou Taylor Pucci), harps on the subject every time he’s on screen. A 16 year old boy that insists on giving his dad lectures on parenting? Science fucking fiction. It’s so heavy handed it makes Queen Latifah’s meathooks look downright dainty.

In one scene, young Alex suggests the family go to a hockey game. Daddy Breslin responds as if he’s either never heard of the sport or the notion of spending time with his offspring has never occurred to him before. Immediately cut to the family decked out in matching Red Wings gear. Huh?

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 110 minutes

Directed by: Jonas Åkerlund

Written by: Dave Callaham

Starring: Dennis Quaid, Lou Taylor Pucci, Ziyi Zhang

Theatrical Release: 03/06/09

DVD Release: 07/14/09

Production Budget: N/A

Domestic Gross: N/A

Metacritic Score: N/A

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: N/A

Similar crappisms abound in “Horsemen“. I sense severe editing going on here. Several transitions left me feeling as if a whole chunk of movie had gone missing, which is often the case with straight to DVD turds.

Even Ziyi Zhang, who I’m a fan of, struggles. She is not nearly sinister enough to pull off the gloating female temptress the movie wants her to be. Her performance comes off as silly and a little embarrassing.

Plotwise, the movie is just as blah. Detective Breslin hunts a gruesome murderer. Eventually he realizes that this is not the work of one killer, but a kill group! Four, to be exact, each one representing a horseman of the apocalypse (rather than each murder representing one of the 7 deadly sins). Spooky, no? The actual murders lack believability and the quick discovery scenes don’t seem to give them the reverence such brutality would require – even the filmmakers aren’t buying it. We’ve seen it all before in “Se7en” and the dozens of movies that have already ripped it off. The biblical details are meaningless – a catchy name and an excuse for cryptic bible passages are all it really adds up to. Which is kind of how the whole movie feels. No substance and not even much style.

“Horsemen” fails on the very basic level of establishing a connection between the audience and the characters, rendering itself suspenseless. The movie could have almost saved itself (by a pussy hair) by following through with the final twist. Instead, it limps off with the cheesy, stupidly optimistic ending. Why? Movies like “The Descent” and “Se7en” resonate because they don’t go for the “things are finally starting to look up!” Hollywood ending. In the end, “Horsemen” failed to even successfully rip off its predecessors.

Killshot: Resurrected From the Depths of the Weinstein Vaults

Yet another shelved movie comes to light on DVD this week in “Killshot.” You already know the Weinstein routine – reshoots, delayed release dates, editors removing a major character (Johnny Knoxville), producer Quentin Tarantino removing his name, and a theatrical release covering a pathetic five theaters. What’s left is a movie gutted to just 90 minutes – essentially a straight to DVD release.

Mickey Rourke plays Armand ‘The Blackbird’ Degas, a half Native American hitman for the Toronto mob. Blackbird’s first rule on the job is that you kill anyone that sees your face. (Except for Rosario Dawson because he loved her in “Rent.”)

During a job in Detroit, Blackbird manages to royally P.O. his former boss by snuffing “one of his best girls.” (Bros before Hos, gentleman. Bros before Hos.) So he runs to the sticks, where a pseudo-psychotic small-time criminal named Richie Nix (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) attempts to relieve him of his wallet and car. These two knuckleheads bond over the experience and decide to team up, Captain Planet style. Richie hatches an elaborate scheme to extort some cash from the owner of a real estate agency by – wait for it – threatening to kill him if he doesn’t pay. (Why didn’t I think of that!)

TV Casualties Rating:

Run Time: 95 minutes

Directed by: John Madden

Written by: Hossein Amini, Elmore Leonard

Starring: Mickey Rourke, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Diane Lane, Thomas Jane

Theatrical Release: 01/23/09

DVD Release: 05/26/09

Production Budget: N/A

Domestic Gross: $18,000

Metacritic Score: N/A

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: N/A

As in all pulp crime stories, the plan goes horrible awry. The two miscreants arrive at the real estate office during lunch hour (Classic mistake!) and confuse a realtor’s husband, Wayne (Thomas Jane), with the man with the deep pockets. Wayne makes short shrift of the criminals, of course, defusing their plan, saving his lovely wife and breaking pretty much every window in the building – all with one length of pipe.

Wayne and his wife Carmen (Diane Lane) made a grave error during the bungled heist, though: they looked at Blackbird’s face. (Let’s not forget Bird’s very clear “See my face – shoot your face” rule.) The couple enlist in witness protection and head to Missouri for a few bland scenes before we get to the big confrontation.

“Killshot” is more style than substance, and even the style loses its luster after 15 minutes. The characters are paper thin and boring, and even though this is a talented cast, the performances are equally dull. Gordon-Levitt plays the only character with any color, but he goes so far over the top, you’re begging Blackbird to put a cap in his face after five minutes. Rourke has solid moments but spends most of the movie talking in an annoying clipped English (to prove he’s part Indian, I guess). Similarly, Jane speaks with a ludicrous accent that I can only assume is his attempt at sounding like a Detroit-native. Instead he sounds more like the “Da Bears” skit from SNL. Despite the fact that Lane graces the posters and DVD cover, she’s the least compelling of all.

If the Weinstein’s were going to give “Killshot” such a non-existent release, why bother with all of the editing and reshoots in the first place? When a movie is stripped down for a straight to DVD release like this, I always wonder what could have been. What exactly was in the 30+ minutes they left on the cutting room floor? How would Johnny Knoxville’s character have fit into the plot? We will likely never know.

Taken: Liam Neeson Will Rip Your Damn Face Off

Who doesn’t want to spend 93 minutes watching Liam Neeson get hands on with some perps?

And hands on with the bad guys Neeson does get – early, often and hard.  He also gets feet on, knife in, electricity through and several bullets lodged within them.  Yep.  The man who played Schindler is one ruthless son of a bitch this time out.  The possibility of a Liam Neeson/Chuck Norris vehicle looks more likely than ever.

The pace in “Taken” doesn’t just sizzle, the plot itself combusts.  After a brief setup, retired spy Bryan Mills (Neeson) gets thrust into an international rescue mission.  While vacationing in Paris, his daughter (Maggie Grace) is kidnapped by Albanian mobsters that plan to sell her into prostitution.  Let the head cracking, neck breaking and face shooting begin!  Mills bashes his way toward answers with fury and speed.  93 minutes fly by.

TV Casualties Rating:

Run Time: 93 minutes

Directed by: Pierre Morel

Written by: Luc Besson, Robert Mark Kamen

Starring: Liam Neeson, Maggie Grace, Olivier Rabourdin

Theatrical Release: 01/30/09

DVD Release: 05/12/09

Production Budget: N/A

Box Office Gross: $144 million

Metacritic Score: 50/100

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 57%

I’m not easily impressed in this area, but the action sequences were executed extremely well, both in terms of choreography and cinematography.

Action means little to me, typically, but this had me on the edge of my seat several times.  A few fairly unbelievable moments popped up here and there, of course – especially during a big car chase scene – but on the whole, the action was strong, and I’m surprised this movie wasn’t a little more popular on the strength of that alone.

On that note, Neeson actually made a fine action star.  His imposing frame (6’4” according to IMDB) made this seem plausible, of course, but he has always struck me as a gentle personality.  (If I were Irish, I may even call him a bit of a puff.)  Early on, I was skeptical.  He won me over in a hurry, though, and he actually brought a believable intensity, even a hard-nosed negativity, to the role that went above and beyond what a cardboard action hero would’ve been able to muster.  This wasn’t the smirking hero with a one liner ready at all times.  Liam Neeson will rip your damn face off.

I’d go beyond the praise for Neeson to say that the whole cast did very well with what they had to work with. That said, the characterization (outside of Neeson’s fierceness) proved weak – a massive Achilles heel for what was an otherwise quality production.  I can respect that “Taken” didn’t waste much time establishing relationships and feelings and such when the movie revolved around action.  Non-existent characterization would’ve been better than the painfully cheesy “awesome dad” fantasy that this became.  The last scene proved needless and sentimental, not only highlighting this weakness but foolishly making it the final flavor in the audience’s mouth.