In short: Last Looks (2021)

Former cop with a conscience – therefore the “former” - Charlie Waldo (Charlie “Yawn” Hunnam) is roped back into the crime solving life when his ex-wife Lorena (Morena Baccarin) disappears just after trying to convince him to help her exonerate British ham actor Alastair Pinch (Mel Gibson) for the murder of his wife. All, so that Shakespearean Pinch can continue his work playing a Southern judge on TV. Charlie’s soon up to his neck (and repeatedly knocked out, as is the tradition) in the case. This also involves a sexy kindergarten teacher (Lucy Fry), a producer with a particularly weird looking head (Rupert Friend), a drug dealer who wants his “mem” (Jacob Scipio), and several old enemies from the police force (among them Clancy Brown).

It might have been better if our protagonist had stayed in his trailer in the woods.

It’s pretty obvious that Tim Kirkby’s movie really, really wants to be a throwback to idiosyncratic 70s private eye movies, aka a kind of movie I like rather a lot. Alas, it suffers from various problems that get in the way of these ambitions again and again.

For one, Kirkby’s personality-free direction is as far from Robert Altman – or Peter Hyams, for that matter – as you can get while still making movies in this particular niche of the genre. Then, Charlie Hunnam most certainly is no Elliott Gould (or Walter Matthau, or James Garner, etc), but in fact still one of the most boring and personality-free actors to put on a stupid beard and not emote into a camera you can encounter. Though, to be fair, the only actors on screen here who seem to have come awake and willing to put even a minimum amount of work in are Fry, Gibson (whose acting has improved as much as his private personality has gotten worse over the years, ironically enough) and Brown. Everybody else seems to suffer from a bad case of “what the hell am I doing here”, or, as in our lead’s case, have never been terribly good to begin with.

The script – by sitcom writer/producer Howard Michael Gould, apparently adapting his own novel, badly, unless it’s a bad novel – meanders from one scene to the next, going through jokes bad, tired, and seldom surprisingly funny, while never getting the point of why those 70s crime movies were strangely paced and meandering, or what would be needed to get away with this today.

The Mortuary Collection (2019)

Montgomery Dark (Clancy Brown, very much made up as an elderly Angus Scrimm), the somewhat creepy owner of the mortuary of one of those horror movie typical US small towns – in the 80s, I believe – looks somewhat surprised when a young woman named Sam (Caitlin Custer) enters his mansion/mortuary to answer the “help wanted” sign hanging outside. While introducing Sam to the innards of the house and the peculiarities of the – highly peculiar – business, he tells her that he is also a collector of the stories of the dead he is taking care of. The house is indeed full of books of these stories, suggesting that Dark is even older than he looks. Because this is a horror anthology movie, Sam wants to hear some of these stories. Each one is going to take place in a different decade.

The first one is a short ditty about a female thief, a bathroom, and why you shouldn’t open every door you see, unless you’re really into tentacles. A rather nonplussed Sam is then told segment number two, about a frat boy (Jacob Elordi) with dubious ideas about consent experiencing the joys of pregnancy in form of some spectacularly icky effects.

This is followed by the sad tale of one Wendell Owens (Barak Hardley) who is slowly despairing at taking care of his comatose wife Carol (Sarah Hay). She’s never going to come to, apparently, so Wendell’s compassionate doctor prescribes some medication for Carol that is very easily overdosed and apparently not leaving any traces in the body. What starts as an attempt to end a loved one’s suffering turns into a bloody series of darkly humorous events.

The final segment concerns Sam herself. It’s the age old tale of a babysitter, an escaped mental patient with a history of murdering baby sitters and the sitted, and a slasher movie named “The Babysitter Murders” playing on TV.

Having barely made it through the flabby and blandly directed nonsense of that new Books of Blood anthology movie, one could despair at the sad fate of US-style horror anthologies (British style ones have been dead for decades, so). Fortunately, along comes The Mortuary Collection as directed and written by Ryan Spindell, a film that isn’t only a very convincing anthology movie in the American style, but a loving homage to all things horror (the slasher in the final segment being named after the initial version of Carpenter’s Halloween script is most certainly not a fluke), as well as a playful commentary on genre tropes and audience expectations.

Unlike other meta horror projects, this one actually does something more interesting than just point and laugh at tropes and clichés. Indeed, while there’s a large streak of often very gory humour running through the film, pointing and laughing at genre isn’t at all its game. Instead, the film embraces genre conventions to then give them wonderful little twists that satisfy any horror lover’s joy at tradition well repeated but also changes and enhances these conventions to give them new life and breath, criticising implicitly but using this criticism to achieve the same effects the traditional tropes had in more contemporary ways, embracing the tradition while changing it. The best example of this is the way the final segment plays without our expectations about how the babysitter versus killer game has to play out, but that’s so cleverly made and well-timed, I can’t bring myself to spoil it here.

There’s so much that is clever in the best possible meaning of the word here, like the way the stories increase in complexity (on a plot as well as an emotional and thematic level) and length as the film goes on, the film completely avoiding the flabby middle of many anthology movies by escalating like you’d do in a film with a single story. Or take the way how the framing story here is actually a worthwhile and important part of the movie, really not just introducing the tales but turning them into parts of a whole.

Turning meta commentary into actual tales is only one of the film’s virtues. Spindell’s simply great at playing things straightforward, too, making the film a fun horror film as well as a fiendishly clever one. Spindell’s wonderful at timing, be it of suspense and the gorier moments, or of the sometimes broad, sometimes subtle dark humour. The actors are playing Spindell’s game wonderfully, too. Brown (always a well-liked guy around these parts) in particular recommends himself for all kinds of future horror roles of the sort I haven’t seen him do before through a lovely combination of traditional horror overacting, and wry humour. But everyone else really seems to be fully on the film’s wavelength too, in the quiet as well as in the loud moments.

Just as praiseworthy are the technical aspects of the production, all of them fully in the spirit of horror traditions but never ending up just copying for no good reason. Indeed, many of the myriad of little nods and homages to horror of all kinds and all ages in the production design, the colour scheme, even the camera angles turn out to be surprisingly meaningful for the film at hand once one thinks about them, the film doing the same on the visual level it does in its script, all the while also just working as a deeply satisfying, and very, very fun, horror film.

In my book (tee-hee), The Mortuary Collection is one for the pantheon.

In short: Hellbenders (2012)

The Augustine Interfaith Order of Hellbound Saints is the final option in exorcism. When nothing else helps, these holy men and one woman (embodied by the wonderful acting ensemble of Clifton Collins Jr., Clancy Brown, Andre Royo, Robyn Rikoon, Macon Blair and Dan Fogler) are prepared to invite a demon into their souls, commit suicide and drag it with them to hell. Of course, to actually be able to drag anyone to hell, you need to be hell-bound, so when the Hellbound Saints aren’t exorcising, they are sinning left and right (and clearly also in even more sinful directions). Name a debauchery, and they’ve done it.

Right now, the Hellbound Saints are the only thing standing between old Norse god eater Surtr who is bound to burn the world to cinders and destroy humanity and their god(s) in the process. Not surprisingly, things get rather messy, particular when Opus Dei (boo!) decides to shut the embarrassing group of debauchers down.

Despite my admiration for J.T. Petty’s small but excellent body of work, I wasn’t too sure about Hellbenders going in. It was not just my usual doubt about horror comedy as a genre (and the humungous number of horror comedies that just plain suck), but a fear that the film would just blow up a single one-note joke at too much length.

I shouldn’t have doubted Petty (not sure about Jesus), though, for Hellbenders not just uses this one joke as a basis for a dozen other jokes, much funny cursing (talk dirty to us, Clancy Brown!), and other shenanigans but also treats it as the basis for some clever as well as funny worldbuilding. It’s the sort of film that takes a ridiculous idea and then begins to actually think it through, heaping excellent absurdity on excellent absurdity to make sense of the last absurdity until the combined absurdities become somewhat logical; also, very funny.

Hellbenders does not really lend itself to any kind of tight plotting, so its rhythm is more like the exhausted (professional sinning is tiring) stumbling gait its protagonists prefer, the plot meandering through outbreaks of violence, blasphemy, and swearing. I didn’t mind, though, because said outbreaks are generally very funny, and funny, people tell me, is what comedies are supposed to be.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,comedy,j.t. petty,clifton collins jr.,clancy brown,andre royo,robyn rikoon

Nothing Left to Fear (2013)

Warning: structural spoilers ahead

Pastor Dan (James Tupper), his wife Wendy (Anne Heche), and their children Rebecca (Rebekah Brandes continuing the tradition of people nearing their 30s playing teenagers, which certainly makes for better acting but also leads to a curious gap between the visible adultness of the actor and the not quite as adult behaviour of the character), Mary (Jennifer Stone), and Christopher (Carter Cabassa) are moving into a small Midwestern town so that Dan can take over the job of the place's old pastor, Kingsman (Clancy Brown).

While their parents are taking to the country like ducks to water, the teenage (cough) girls aren't too happy having to leave the city, idyllic as their new home may be. Rebecca can at least console herself with a blossoming romance to local boy Noah (Ethan Peck). Something, however, is off with the town and its inhabitants, and it's not just Noah's at times curiously elusive behaviour, or Rebecca's equally strange nightmares. The audience realizes quite early what the characters will only find out when it might be too late - that they have been invited into town for a rather different role than taking over a parish.

Anthony Leonardi III's Nothing Left to Fear is a bit of a slow-burner, taking its time to build up a mood of slowly increasing wrongness, insinuating much before starting to show anything, and introducing its audience to the cast with perhaps more care than the not very complicated characters need. Mostly though, the film's early slowness looks like concentration to me, the carefully built base the film needs to increase audience expectations of the horrors to come. At least for the film's first two thirds, this approach pays off well through a feeling of true suspense.

Once the horrible creature crawls out of its hole, the film suffers a bit from a rather too conventional threat and escape structure that makes its ideas of big-lettered EVIL feel less overwhelming than its philosophical underpinnings suggest. The "creature's" design also follows the visual style of contemporary US supernatural horror (think Insidious) a bit too much for my tastes. It's certainly effective enough, but feels a bit too familiar for what it is supposed to be, particularly after having been built up so well while off-screen.

Despite this weakness, Nothing Left to Fear does get around to packing a bit of a punch in the end, breaking one of the bigger taboos in horror movies (at least horror movies with mainstream actresses like Anne Heche in them) before turning what would feel like one of those annoying kicker endings into something that fits the film's ideas about ritual cycles well and is just rather horrible.

Like Cabin in the Woods - of which it reminds me more than just a little in its willingness to go for cosmological consistence rather than affirmation of its audience's hopes in the end -  Nothing Left to Fear is a film rather easily read as allegory on politics or religion. Where Cabin in the Woods sees its system of unfair and cruel sacrifice breaking down in the end to ironically dire consequences (I can't help but read this as "if the price for saving the world is this high, the world might deserve what it gets"), Nothing Left to Fear's system is still holding. The film even shows the final victim of its system of oppression becoming complicit in it, which is probably a pretty realistic outcome, and most certainly one befitting a horror film.

Obviously, I really rather enjoyed Nothing Left to Fear, what with its emphasis on mood, its story about what amounts to a rural cult a bit like a very faint American echo of The Wicker Man, its cosmology that contains supernatural evil only held back by ways just as bad as the cosmic evil itself, if on a smaller scale, and its willingness to see things through to the worst possible ending. Clearly, everyone will agree with me there, and there will be no IMDB reviews titled "Boring!".

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,horror,reviews,anthony leonardi iii,clancy brown,rebekah brandes,anne heche,ethan peck

Cowboys & Aliens (2011)

The Old West. A man (Daniel Craig) with a pretty strange wound, a futuristic looking bracelet around one of his arms and not a clue who he is and how he got there wakes up somewhere in the desert. After proving his alpha male badassitude on some ruffians and demonstrating why men with tiny little heads shouldn't wear hats, he reaches the nearest town, where he eventually learns that he is a wanted robber and possible murderer named Jake Lonergan. His trip to a federal jail is cut short when aliens attack the town and, as aliens are wont to do, abduct some of its inhabitants (among them a badly underused Keith Carradine). Fortunately, Jake's fine little bracelet turns out to be some sort of blaster, which doesn't save everyone from abduction but is rather helpful in pushing the rude aliens back to wherever they came from. For now.

Lonergan (still wearing hats though he shouldn't) becomes part of a posse of townsfolk trying to rescue the abductees. Among the (obviously rag-tag) bunch are the local sadistic torturer and potentate with a hidden heart of gold Woodrow Dollarhyde (Harrison Ford, better at wearing a cowboy hat) and his kinda-sorta Apache adoptive son (Adam Beach), the mysterious Ella (Olivia Wilde, much better at wearing a cowboy hat than Craig), a shotgun-toting preacher (Clancy Brown in a too small role), a wasted-on-his non-role Sam Rockwell (he's the mild-mannered shop keeper learning to be A MAN, you know), a goddamn orphan boy and his stupid dog and various other alien fodder characters.

Later developments will see the group team up with some bandits and a small tribe of Apaches as the only hope to save Earth from the scouts of an alien invasion. Because no alien baddies ever follow up on their lost scouts.

Wasted as a bunch of great to competent actors are in it, I did find Cowboys & Aliens much easier going than the full-grown catastrophe its critical reception let me expect. Sure, it's a film full of tired old cliché characters doing tired old cliché things, but it's also a film actually willing to use the oldest tropes in the writing book (and by the way, why are scriptwriters Orczi, Kurtzman and Lindelof so much less intelligent when they write for the movies than when they write for TV?) to entertain an audience in an adequately old-fashioned style. There are some moments of the dreaded "wink-wink, nudge-nudge, we know how silly this all is", but more often than not, Cowboys & Aliens plays its silly nonsense straight, which of course is the way silly nonsense has to be played to be any fun at all.

For me, more problematic than the clichés alone ever could be is the film's length in combination with these clichés. There's really no reason for a concoction about cowboys (and Native Americans and bandits) fighting off an alien invasion to be one-hundred and thirty minutes long when ninety would lead to a faster, punchier and less bloated feeling movie; I don't think Cowboys & Aliens would have lost anything by cutting thirty minutes of character bits (and the orphan and his dog), especially not when all the character bits are taken from the handbook for blockbuster writer beginners and are below actors like Rockwell, Brown, Beach, Carradine and Wilde (see how I cleverly not mention Craig and Ford?).

And here I go again making a film sound much worse than I actually feel about it. For most of the time, Cowboys & Aliens is utterly serviceable - if dumb - entertainment that may be completely forgettable, but is at least mildly exciting while it lasts. Which, sadly enough, makes it much better than your average blockbuster shat out by Hollywood these days.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,jon favreau,daniel craig,harrison ford,olivia wilde,sam rockwell,clancy brown,sf,western,reviews