In short: Dragged Across Concrete (2018)

Having been filmed applying a lot of foot to a drug dealer’s head, veteran – the sort of veteran without any chance of promotion, really – cop Brett Ridgeman (Mel Gibson) and his somewhat younger partner Anthony Lurasetti (Vince Vaughn), are suspended for six weeks (which seems to put the film into the realm of total fantasy, but hey). This does hit both of them financially quite hard, and Brett, with a wife suffering from MS and a daughter who seems to be a favourite object of bullying and assault in the predominantly black and poor neighbourhood the family live in, decides he is owed more than what he’s getting from life, so why not try and steal some drug money?

At the same time, the film also looks in on small time criminal Henry Johns (Tory Kittles), who has just come out of jail, with little prospect of taking care of his wheelchair-bound son or his own junkie mother who has started turning tricks to survive. The only way for Henry and his family to stay afloat will be a return to the criminal life.

Both of these plotlines will converge in a violent bank robbery and the following grab for the loot.

I’ve seen various reviews tut-tutting at S. Craig Zahler’s Dragged Across Concrete for being some kind of Conservative (which appears to be the word Americans use when they mean “fascist”) apologia for police violence, and if I had seen only the first twenty minutes or so of the movie, I might even have concurred. But Zahler’s – his actual political opinions don’t terribly matter here – too interesting a director to actually go this boring and unpleasant route. The film’s conscious parallel construction between the - very similar if you strip away some of the concessions of class and race - lives of Brett and Henry (even though it does spend more time on the former than the latter) in practice really rather reads like a subtle critique of the system and the forces that push people like these two into corners they can only fight their way out by becoming objectively worse men, leaving somewhat more naturally decent men bleeding out by the wayside.

Mainly, though, the film is interested in understanding its characters, the place they come from and the places they go to, using the pretty traditional genre tale it tells to explore characters rather than issues, and in the end, when it has to decide between making a point about issues or staying true to these characters, always comes down on the side of the latter.


Formally, this is a slow, long film, with scenes and shots that go on much longer than has ever been en vogue in movies (even in the 70s, when something akin to this sort of approach was rather more common). At first glance, this might suggest a bit of an inability to edit things down to something tighter and more functional, but it’s really another way the film focuses on its characters, exploring them slowly and methodically, putting the need to understand them far above any pressures of making them move. The way Zahler does it, it really works out brilliantly, too, trading in speed for precision, and outward drama for intimate understanding.

In short: Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (2018)

So, it turns out that, if you put the Puppet Master franchise in the hands of people with actual talent, namely here S. Craig Zahler for the script and Sonny Laguna and Tommy Wiklund the direction, and let them make as hog-wild an exploitation movie as they have a mind to make, you actually get that most curious of things – a highly entertaining Puppet Master film. Not surprising in a Fangoria production, this isn’t a film for everyone, but really made for an audience with a love for gory horror and the old-fashioned exploitation values of gore, tits, and wit. Good taste certainly wasn’t invited, instead we get more or less large appearances by the great Barbara Crampton, the Udo Kier, Michael Paré, Matthias Hues (soon to be controlled by Baby Hitler), and so on. Also, a score by Fabio Frizzi.

Puppet and kill-wise, this is much more packed full with incident and murder, also incidents of murder, than most other Puppet Master films, with a small army of the darn little Nazis (and in this version they are definitely Nazis, giving the the film a nice opportunity to have a more diverse cast to kill as well as saying goodbye to any tragic backstory some of the older films had for the master and his puppets) killing people in increasingly outrageous fashion. Apart from Baby Hitler Hues, one of the high points is a completely shameless killing of a pregnant woman and her unborn. Or one of the low points, if you are of a higher moral fibre than I am, probably. That particular scene is the moment that divides the people for whom this film was made from those for whom it wasn’t. If you’re me and find the whole thing funny (if “holy crap, did they just do that?” outrageous), than you’ll enjoy the rest of the film, too, if not, there’s really no shame in missing the rest of this.


Speaking of the film’s humour, this is very much a throwback to fun 80s and 90s style gore where everyone involved doesn’t take things terribly seriously but isn’t really interested in the post-Scream plague of “irony”, instead providing said fun by skirting (and overstepping) various lines. I would call it dumb fun, but there’s also so much obvious intelligence in the film’s staging, and so much energy and love put into propping up minor characters with neat details before killing them off in Zahler’s script, the “dumb” word doesn’t really apply.

Bone Tomahawk (2015)

The old West. A pair of drifters and murderers (David Arquette and good old Sid Haig) accidentally desecrate the burial ground belonging to a group of cannibalistic troglodytes. Sid Haig gets himself murdered right quick, but Arquette’s character manages to escape to a nearby town where he raises the interest of local Sheriff Franklin Hunt (Kurt Russell) enough to get himself shot in the leg.

Hunt calls in Samantha O’Dwyer (Lili Simmons), the unofficial yet highly competent actual town doctor without a degree - not to be confused with the alcoholic official town doctor we never get to see. The sheriff leaves her to tend to the prisoner under the care of his deputy, and calls it a night. The next morning, he finds a stable boy dead, and Lili, the deputy, the drifter and a bunch of horses gone. The murderers and abductors were of course the troglodytes the drifter accidentally led into town; at first, the Sheriff suggests it must have been an Indian attack, but as a quickly called in Native American diagnoses in a scene that feels a lot like the film holding up a placard with “See, we’re not racist against Native Americans” written on it, these weren’t actual Indians but members of a tribe of a degenerate and cannibalistic monster people dwelling in caves, though they might look like Indians to the unenlightened white people. See, it’s totally okay the film’s not going to give these guys even a single human trait, because the Indian said it’s alright.

Anyway, the Sheriff, his elderly reserve deputy Chicory (Richard Jenkins), so racist even the Old West characters around him don’t approve John Brooder (Matthew Fox), and Lili’s husband Arthur (Patrick Wilson), who is suffering from a pretty debilitating leg wound since falling from a roof trying to be manly, are all the posse this town gets together to follow the troglodytes to their lair to save the abducted. Things won’t exactly go to plan.

So, did anyone ever really miss the cannibal movie? 2015 finally brought us the return of films about inhuman brown people eating white people nobody asked for, though at least without the real animal violence, because that really wouldn’t cut it today. I very much hope one day one of them will get around to perhaps do at least as much as Cannibal Holocaust did when examining its own assumptions – or, you know, just replace their cannibals with actual monsters and be done with it.

S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk isn’t that film; it is, in fact, not interested in facing the problem at the core of this particular sub-genre head on at all, therefore we get the scene described above, which really seems like an attempt at creating an easy out to me. On the other hand, the scene also suggests the film isn’t really interested in this sort of discussion of race at all and really rather sees its cannibals as representations of the dark heart of humanity, dehumanizing violence and so on and so forth. That’s of course problematic in contemporary parlance, but I’m generally trying to take on films on their own terms, and so am willing to appreciate the film is actually quite clear about its terms early on, giving me the opportunity to take them or leave them. Given how adept the film is at what it actually wants to do, I took them.

Once and if you do, you might just be surprised by the first one and a half hours of film you actually get, because while the troglodytes are introduced early on, for the longest time the film belongs to the calm and unhurried kind of modern western, with dialogue that at first seems to be a bit too indebted to Quentin Tarantino but then turns out to carry a different kind of emphasis and emotional weight that seems specific to Zahler (at least when you’ve read some of the man’s novels which I can highly recommend), and some spectacularly moody landscape shots that stand in strong contrast to the somewhat bland looking scenes taking place in town. There’s very little – though just enough – plot in these first two thirds of the film. Instead, Zahler puts all his considerable talent into creating a sense of a place and its dislocating brutality yet also into making the characters feel deeply human and complicated, even Fox’s vile racist whom most films would turn into an easy target for their audience’s hatred or give a too easy shot at redemption. There’s an honesty to the characterisation that feels special and personal, rooted in certain genre conventions but given space to breathe and live by dialogue that only seems self-indulgent on first contact, and based on a bunch of excellent acting performances.

This does of course make things emotionally harder to stomach when the film finally gets its cannibal movie on; I at least had grown rather fond of the characters and didn’t really want to see them getting ripped to pieces in horrible ways. So in that regard, the film too is quite the success, with one or two scenes that leave you squirming not just because they are unpleasant to watch but because they actually mean something.


Combine that with how uncomfortable I still am with the whole not-really-native-American cannibals, and you have, well, a film I find effective, moving, and meaningful yet also find myself struggling with loving unreservedly not because it’s a bad movie – it is indeed a very fine one – but because I wish it were different in a single aspect I found difficult to overlook in a film made today (well, or 2015).