Three Films Make A Post: No man left behind.

Life After Fighting (2024): Lead actor/martial artist/director/producer Bren Foster’s directorial debut climaxes in forty minutes or so of incredibly impressive martial arts madness of the naturalistic, bone-crunching style, presented in a direct and visceral way. To get there, you have to work your way through eighty minutes or so of much too slow build-up, pointless side-plots, and scenes that – in classic indie tradition - never seem to want to end when they really should have ended minutes ago.

I do appreciate Foster’s willingness to go slow and actually ground his character emotionally – this certainly beats the “egomaniac martial arts asshole” you always fear in this kind of project – but there’s providing the ground for things, and then there’s scenes crawling by at a snail’s pace for no good reason.

The Heroin Busters aka La via della droga (1977): This Enzo G. Castellari joint with Fabio Testi (playing a character named Fabio in case he forgets) and David Hemmings as cops (well, Hemmings is playing an Interpol agent) on a rampage starts out pretty slow as well, but it doesn’t take more than half of its running time to gather its speed. Once it dies get going, there’s no holding its series of probably highly dangerous to stunt people action sequences back for even a second. There’s a manic, dangerous energy to Castellari’s action at its best, and here, he holds that level for the whole last act of the film, while doing much less feet-dragging than Foster’s movie before.

Land of Bad (2024): Despite the military-based version of the action film being my least favourite type – I dislike some of the sub-genre’s inherent assumptions even less so than those of vigilante films – it is difficult to find fault with the way William Eubank and a game bunch of actors (several Hemsworths, Ricky Whittle and Milo Ventimiglia in an actually good performance, as well Russell Crowe chewing scenery delightfully as the Man in the Chair) present a series of theoretically tired old clichés. In a style I find by now typical of Eubank, he leaves no cent of the budget not visible on screen, so there’s an always entertaining series of gunplay, explosions, unarmed combat and more explosions shown off in the most effective manner possible.

The character bits are clichéd but also just work, so there’s enough emotional backing to the violence. If you squint and look at the film in the right light, you might also see it as a mild critique of the detached ways of modern technological warfare in some scenes, of course in between the film milking modern technological warfare for the funnest possible action.

The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)

1987. Gabriele Amorth (Russell Crowe), the Vatican’s very own exorcist, is in some troubles with church politics. A young career cardinal has made himself the speaker of people who find the whole exorcism thing rather problematic in the modern world, and tries to push Amorth out of office, making a pretty grumpy – when he’s not winking at nuns - old man even grumpier. The Pope (Franco Nero, logically cast as the Polish pope in a movie where Russell Crowe is supposed to be Italian) is on our rebel establishment hero’s side, though, so it’s clear right from the start of the movie that nothing will come out of this for Amorth. Why the sub plot is in the movie anyway, only god or the pope will know.

Anyway, once that business is pushed aside, the Pope sends Amorth to Spain. There, an American widow (Alex Essoe, again wasted in a plot point role, alas) and her teenage kids (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney and Laurel Marsden) have moved into an old abbey her husband has mysteriously bequeathed to her, and are soon in rather dire possession troubles. The abbey, it appears, harbours a particularly dark secret, that will need all of Amorth’s experience to uncover. Things are so dangerous, even the Pope will be affected.

As regular readers of my diatribes and vague ideas here will know, I’m not much of a fan of Western possession horror; I don’t even like The Exorcist. There’s just something about the sub-genre as it is practiced in American and British movies that sticks in my atheist craw, even though I’m usually perfectly capable of appreciating religious art and sometimes even thought. All too often, I find this sort of affair comical rather than horrific, even when it is not sprinkled with problematic moralizing like the Conjuring films (which to me stand in the direct tradition of things like The Exorcist).

Julius Avery’s The Pope’s Exorcist certainly is not the exorcism movie to convert me – or anyone else for that matter – to exorcism movies as a serious or effective horror sub-genre (I hope), but I found myself having one hell of a time with it. Though, it has to be said, probably not for the reasons the filmmakers wanted.

It is clear from the very start that this is a Very Serious Movie that goes for an overblown, turned up to Eleven tone, Big Dramatic Flashbacks, and Deep Dark Secrets (capitalization probably in the script this way) – it really is pompous as all that. What makes the film so amusing is that this pomposity is in the service of a story that may start as a drab, overly plotted exorcism-by-the-numbers tale but increasingly drifts off into the realm of extremely pulpy nonsense with gates to hell in abbey cellars, possession double play and blood-puking popes which rub against the self-serious nature of the storytelling in ways that can’t help but be incredibly entertaining. The film’s final act gets absolutely bonkers with this stuff in a way that I’d call absolutely gleeful, if the film’s general air didn’t suggest it’s simply not intelligent enough to actually be this way on purpose. Which does not make it any less entertaining, of course.

Watching an over-emoting, unkindly aged Russell Crowe with a terrible Italian accent throw himself into this nonsense with the full force of his old star personality is pretty great, as well; I’m not quite sure he’s buying into the absurdity or does mean his performance seriously, but I do salute his effort to make (weird) decisions and go with whatever is thrown at him; mostly it’s blood, as a matter of fact.

The Pope’s Exorcist gets special bonus points for an ending that desperately wants to open up the possibility of a Pope’s-Exorcistiverse, with potentially 199 other films. Personally, I hope for The Pope’s Exorcist vs Sadako next.

Virtuosity (1995)

Welcome to the weird and wacky near future of yesterday. Former cop Parker Barnes (Denzel Washington) is serving a lengthy prison term for not only killing the terrorist and gang who had just murdered his wife and child but accidentally blowing away a couple of reporters too – and all this while missing an arm. I mention the arm so you don’t forget he now has a bionic arm he alas never uses like the Six Million Dollar Man did, but which will come in handy when the film’s climax needs to handwave away a bomb. Also, so you fully understand we are in the times of extra badass Denzel Washington here. Take that, Bruce Willis.

Anyway, Barnes has made a deal to shorten his sentence which results in him getting strapped into a VR machine thingy for some SCIENCE(!) business. In the VR world, he is pitted against evil AI SID 6.7 (Russell Crowe). SID isn’t just a sharp dresser in primary colours, we will later learn that his virtual brain is also fashioned after a couple hundred of history’s greatest mass murders and serial killers. Would you believe the guy who killed Barnes’s family is one of them? Now, you might ask yourself: what’s the point of the experiment at all? Why purposefully create an AI that’s basically The Joker? I don’t know, and I’m pretty sure the film doesn’t know either.

But I digress into the realm of logic and sanity. At the same time, in the world of the movie, SID convinces his creator (I think, again, I’m not sure the film knows) to trick a hapless tech geek into building SID a body made of nanites so he can escape from Planet VR into the real world. Poor tech geek believes he is helping create a body for the sexy virtual chess program he is rather, ahem, fond of, by the way.

Obviously, SID really gets a body and manages to escape and goes on a bit of a rampage, composing a sampler symphony out of the screams of his victims. This is not a metaphor. Clearly, Barnes is the only one who can stop SID. Why? I have no idea, and neither has the script. Be that as it may, Barnes, for reasons unknown teamed up with psychologist Madison Carter (Kelly Lynch), is indeed promised his freedom if he manages to find and destroy SID.

Quickly, the film decides that it’s best that SID starts fixating on Barnes because the personality of the guy who killed Barnes’s family surfaces, and a duel of wits (I kid), guns and explosions ensues. There’s also a particularly idiotic subplot where SID successfully frames Barnes for murder, kidnapped children, and other assorted nonsense to witness.

Nominally, Brett Leonard’s Virtuosity wasn’t written by a drunken monkey, but looking at this assortment of plot holes so gigantic they are basically their own movie trilogy, ideas so stupid you’d be embarrassed to have come up with them, and a plot so plain idiotic I’m suddenly feeling rather good about myself, it’s probably best to pretend it actually was. Now, I love to go and on about the craziness of the Italian exploitation movie factories in the 70s and 80s, but Virtuosity is another proof that batshit crazy ideas were alive and well in mid-90s US mainstream action and (sort of) SF cinema, too.

In fact, Virtuosity’s sheer bizarre dumbness, the total insistence on having not a single scene or character that does make even a lick of sense during the whole course of this thing, would get it a proud place in the pantheon of Italian bullshit filmmaking. Only that comparable Italian productions would never have had the obvious nice and cosy budget this one cam throw at the screen, or been able to afford young Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, just on the cusp of biggest stardom.

Speaking of Washington, one of the best, and actually most insane, elements of the film is how much the man treats the whole mess of noise and nonsense surrounding him with utmost seriousness, apparently approaching this thing with the same sense of professionalism and style he’d use on a film with an actual script parsable by humans. There’s certainly no phoning in from Washington, which makes a delicious contrast to the total wackiness of his surroundings. Which nicely brings us to Crowe, also not phoning it in but actually chewing the scenery, the script and probably the air itself in a version of cartoonish evil murderous villainy that really would have suggested the man as a pretty great Joker for a Batman movie. It’s really a joy to watch these guys doing their very contrasting respective things, putting effort into every dumb thing the script throws at them.

They are assisted in this effort by a cast of a dozen or so character actors and cult film favourites like Lynch, William Forsythe, Louise Fletcher, William Fichtner, and so on and so forth, all of whom are of course game for any stupid shit.


So, despite being dumber than a rock, Virtuosity is just great fun to watch, its wacky and wrong ideas flying at you without pause, with a good handful of highly professionally and effectively realized action sequences adding even more joy to the affair. It’s always very clear the film did have a decent budget, too, so its misguided and improbable ideas about the near future, humanity, the way anything in real life works, and life itself, are realized in lovely sharp colours, shot with style and edited with verve. And of course, the contrast between the batshit craziness of it all and the slickness of its surface adds another layer of charm to Virtuosity, turning this into quite the experience.

The Mummy (2017)

Warning: this one’s gonna be particularly grumpy, snarky, and perhaps even downright rude!

I have to say, before watching this abomination, I felt a little for poor Universal. After all, the company is so late out of the gate for its own movie universe (which is called “Dark Universe” for good reason, seeing as how much the film at hand disapproves of using colours or light), all the good talent in front and behind the camera willing to invest their time and abilities into a concept this corporate has already been grabbed by the competition, so seemingly the only creatives still for hire are those without the talent or conviction to make anything of their own or to get hired by anyone but Universal. Apologies to the people involved who weren’t actually responsible because they were mind-controlled by alien wasps or something in that line.

That’s at least how I explain The Mummy to myself; it is definitely not explicable as anything the people involved put even a tiny bit of their hearts and minds in, resulting in a film as bland and drab as this sort of blockbuster can possibly get. Why, I’d even prefer a Michael Bay movie – those things are at least loud, tacky and dumb, whereas The Mummy really can’t find enough enthusiasm to even be any of that.

The writing – an effort that took at least the six credited minds, apparently – is bland, perfunctory and not just assumes the audience to be stupid but thinks we are actual zombies. How else to explain the film’s tendency to repeat certain micro flashbacks again and again, never mind it is flashing back to scenes that happened only fifteen minutes earlier, or that it’ll use the same flashbacks again in another twenty. “Remember that dagger we told you about ten minutes ago, and thirty minutes ago, and forty minutes ago, monkeys? I’m sure you don’t, so let me reiterate via micro flashback!”. It’s not just an offensive, exasperating and tedious way to tell – or rather repeatedly exposit about – a  story, it also again and again stops the film in its tracks when it threatens to actually start going.

Then there’s of course the little problem that the script is supposedly about a charming rogue finding redemption through an act of sacrifice but never actually manages to establish him as anything but an asshole, or rather, believes that giving a woman in a crashing plane a parachute is a clear sign of his buried humanity, or that falling in love is. Cough, Eva Braun, cough. Let’s not even talk about that self-sacrifice which isn’t even one, or about the way the romantic triangle is written. Or rather, not written. Or about the weird plot omissions, the rather important plot elements a film this exposition heavy somehow still doesn’t explain (probably because it’s too concerned with repeating crap even a Hollywood director would understand four or five times for its oh so stupid audience).

On the side of just strange – instead of mind-numbingly bad – things about the script, there is a bunch of borrowings, throw-backs or downright idea theft (depending on a viewer’s tolerance for this sort of thing) from other, much superior, movies, particularly Tobe Hooper’s wonderful Lifeforce and John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London. I have no idea what to make of that; but then, I have no idea how anyone involved in the movie can have thought anything about it was a good idea.

Not that there’s much spectacle going around to distract one from the script’s failings, either. The big action set pieces lack any imagination, are indifferently staged, blandly directed by Alex Kurtzmann (whom I now have under suspicion of being a robot, so mechanical is his work here, though the rumour mill suggests Tom Cruise steamrolled him with good old fashioned box office magnet power and is in fact responsible for this crap), and edited with a nearly absurd lack of style and enthusiasm. Given the budget involved, you’d at least expect a visible degree of craftsmanship, but there’s little sign of where the 125 to 150 million dollar budget actually went. Even the lighting and the music are bland and drab like ugly, grey little table cloths.


Well, a not inconsiderable part of the budget certainly went into the pockets of Tom Cruise, giving his worst performance of the last ten years or so. Cruise’s outing consists of GIF-worthy grimaces, wooden dialogue delivery (admittedly, the dialogue is pretty wretched anyway, so even an actor couldn’t have improved on it much), and an astonishing lack of screen presence. Cruise also doesn’t have the tiniest bit of chemistry with his female co-actors, which is a bit of a problem that’s supposed to be some sort of supernatural love triangle. To be fair to the old man, Annabelle Wallis’s performance is nearly as bad as Cruise’s – she’s just not grimacing as much – just barely less wooden as whatever it was Bryce Dallas Howard did in Jurassic World. Russell Crowe (as Jekyll and Hyde) for his part waddles through his scenes clearly in search of his pay check so that he can finally leave the set. The only thespian on screen who is actually putting effort in is Sofia Boutella as our titular mummy but she suffers from the fact that the film as a whole doesn’t really seem to have much of an idea what to do with her, and the need to interact with the living void Cruise. She’s a good villain in desperate search of a better film, or really, any film at all.

Three Films Make A Post: Mary's Evil is Beyond Legend

The Dead Next Door (1989): For people with sympathy and tolerance for microbudget horror, and even though this one’s budget actually wasn’t quite as micro as you’d assume, J.R. Bookwalter’s film is one of the pioneering efforts of this particular type of indie horror. Not just because this is one of the early films of its kind, but because Bookwalter operates on a comparatively epic scale, with ambitious scenes and a plot that actually takes place in more than just a living room and someone’s garden. The script about the misadventures of the curiously accident-prone “Zombie Squad” in early post-zombie-apocalyptic Ohio (and a bit of Washington, D.C.) is certainly goofy and a bit silly, but the writing comes over as so good-natured and likeable these things become some of the film’s true virtues, as is pacing that doesn’t waste the audience’s time. The actors were overdubbed in post-processing, giving the affair a certain Italian genre movie vibe, while action and special effects are some of the best semi-professional work I’ve ever set eyes on.

It’s also certainly the best-looking film ever shot on Super-8.

The Nice Guys (2016): Rather on the other side of the budget divide dwells this Shane Black action comedy taking place in a fever dream version of the 70s. It’s a bit too nasty to its characters for my general taste in comedy (cruelty is only very seldom funny unless you’re a bully or a serial killer) but I do admire the way Black from time to time manages to move his – really rather well acted – lead caricatures Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling into some actually human emotional beats and scenes without breaking a sweat. And even soft-hearted old me can’t deny how well the film manages to create its world. Now if it were only populated by people I – or the film – cared about.


Mr. Right (2015): Paco Cabezas’s film does work better for me than Black’s does. It’s still full of the old comical ultra-violence but I find the black humour warmer, the characters definitely more likeable in their amorality. The way the film mixes the general absurdities of action movies with killers as heroes and your run of the mill romantic comedy is rather effective – and very funny – too, Sam Rockwell and Anna Kendrick making for a pleasantly odd couple. And who wouldn’t root for one of those, right? Particularly when they have to kill their way through a bunch of lovingly caricatured gangsters and Tim Roth looking to have a lot of fun doing his particular villain with a dash of tragedy. Why, even RZA brings his best acting game.