In short: Armed Response (2017)

The inventor (Dave Annable) of secret, weird AI mind-reading buildings doing illegal interrogations for the government called the Temple(s) is called in by his old CIA cronies (among them Wesley Snipes and Anne Heche, who are actually in the whole film and not just doing cameo biz) to help them check out what happened to the crew manning a Temple situated on US soil after all contact with them has broken off without warning. They find everyone inside the building dead. The problem won’t turn out to be something as pedestrian as terrorists attacking the building, though. There’s something more bizarre and much more sinister going on inside it, and soon, the protagonists will find themselves locked in and under a very different kind of attack.

Despite title and marketing that make it look like an action film, John Stockwell’s Armed Response is in truth a psychological horror movie about a small group of people who a supernatural force confronts with and punishes for past guilt, taking place in that most horrific place of all contemporary horror films: a series of empty corridors and boring half-industrial rooms with little sign of anything as advanced as production design. Consequently, the film has its trouble building up the proper mood of dread and doom, or believably portraying the supernatural terror the characters find themselves attacked by. The special effects are also pretty dreadful (sub-SyFy Original, I dare say), with Stockwell not showing much talent for or interest in obfuscating their crappiness.

In general Stockwell’s direction is not terribly exciting. The film may not be technically incompetent, but there are few attempts visible at smoothing over the troubles its obvious low budget and lack of visual assets cause it. That’s a bit of a shame, for there’s a core of a really interesting horror film about people building a judgemental machine and then finding themselves judged by it – the possible religious connotations don’t go further than the name of the place either – as well as one about guilt for terrible acts someone has committed and how different people deal with this guilt (or do not deal). There are certainly scenes when the film approaches the more interesting aspects of these ideas – particularly the finale has its moments there – but for every one of these, there are three of boring walking through dark corridors. Still, that’s certainly more than quite a few direct to home video/streaming films can boast of, so Armed Response isn’t a total failure.


Its problem is more how easy it is to see that better direction and a smidgen more money could have turned this into a hidden gem instead of a film that’s not as bad as it could be.

In short: 7 Seconds (2005)

Super-mega hardcore ex-Special Forces dude turned thief Jack Tuliver (Wesley “What’s a facial expression?” Snipes) has a super-mega hardcore plan to rob twenty casinos at once. Or something. Alas, things become problematic because he accidentally also steals a case with a Van Gogh painting. Soon, his gang is murdered by another gang, his favourite partner kidnapped and he’s on the run from said gang, the police, and other factions. Jack’s only ally apart from a guy named Spanky (Deobia Oparei) who just might not be an ally at all is a disturbingly orange-coloured British military cop (Tamzin Outhwaite). Why should the audience be the only ones who suffer?

Let’s start with the positives, shall we? Simon Fellows’s 7 Seconds certainly does not suffer from the bizarre phenomenon that plagues quite a few direct-to-video action films that causes so-called action films to contain as little action as possible. In fact, 7 Seconds is perfectly action packed, with nary a scene going by without a car crash, shots, explosions, or what goes for martial arts in the world of Snipes. It, therefore, should be pretty fantastic.

Unfortunately, the action direction and editing is so incompetent the film might as well not bother. Some horrifying demon must have convinced the director that there’s never any reason not to cut to a different camera angle, leading to action scenes that cut to a differently angled shot every two or three seconds – I’m not even exaggerating. Not surprisingly, for most of the time it is completely impossible to make out who is chasing whom, in which position chasee and chaser are to each other, or frankly, what is going on at all beyond “car chase”, “people shooting”, and so on.

To add insult to brain damage, about every third cut is accompanied by a whooshing noise and random camera swirling. And sometimes the film just goes completely ape-shit, like this: close up on countdown timer with the number 3 – whoosh-cut – now it’s at 2 – whoosh cut – now it’s at 1 – whoosh cut - etc. It suggests a rather peculiar idea of what words like “editing” or “direction” mean. In this context, it probably won’t surprise anyone that the film also likes to cut into tiny little flashbacks to scenes that happened five or ten minutes ago, just in case some of the viewers suffer from really bad short term memories, had a little nap, or went to the loo.

I could go on, but I really, really don’t want to.

In short: Blade II (2002)

Painfully rude and absurdly egocentric vampire hunter Blade (Wesley Snipes) has to team up with a vampire special forces group initially built to hunt him down to instead destroy a new, even worse kind of vampire strain before the vampocalypse happens. Oh my.

If you ask me, this is the lowest point of house favourite Guillermo del Toro’s career, a film about a bunch of assholes and clowns doing stuff I can’t bring myself to care about to get us to the next – mediocre – action scene. It sure doesn’t help that really everyone in the movie is an arse, Wesley Snipes’s “cool” poses never lose the air quotes, and that David Goyer’s script seems to have no idea what the characters here are even supposed to be all about.

Of course, this is still better than the other two Blade movies, but then, del Toro at his worst is still a more interesting director than anyone I’d care to mention, though nothing he does here has any emotional resonance with me; the adrenaline sure isn’t rising (because who cares about that posing assclown who wears sun glasses at night, or about Kris Kristofferson looking scruffy and using his patented voice saying nothing of interest in the most unironically self-important way imaginable), and intellectually, this isn’t exactly stimulating. In fact, on my recent re-watch I found the film even worse than the first time I saw it - when it was fresh and del Toro hadn’t even shot the first Hellboy film - for now there are just that many more del Toro films following the same obsessions and carrying the same visual signifiers but doing everything better, making spectacle that’s actually spectacular yet providing it with the heart Blade II so painfully lacks.

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In short: Gallowwalkers (2012)

Here I was starting to write my usual synopsis of Andrew Goth's Gallowwalkers but then I realized that everything I'd write would make the film at hand look at once more directly coherent and more complicated than it actually is. So let's just say this is a movie about an asshole gunman played by notorious rich asshole (is this type-casting?) Wesley Snipes trying to avenge the rape of his (now dead) girlfriend on the gang of Kansa (Kevin Howarth), with the added complication that he'd already slaughtered them once and now has to cope with their undead versions.

The way the film tells its story - and its backstory - via flashbacks and insinuations is of course as heavily inspired by the less direct Spaghetti Westerns as is the asshole nature of its central hero. When you think through everything Snipes's Aman does during the course of the movie, and the way in which he does it, he's really up there with the least pleasant anti-heroes of the genre. One of the film's failings is how little the film seems to realize this; even Aman leaving his raped girlfriend because she is pregnant is not something the film is willing to at least raise an eyebrow at. Which brings us to the film's other big failing, namely its inability to find something less clichéd as an excuse for its hero's violence.

Fortunately, neither characterization, nor motivation nor plot are really what Gallowwalkers seems actually interested in. This is an exercise in weirdness and style as substance (there is no such thing as "style over substance") as pure as anything you'd find in US western cinema. The film was shot in Namibia, and Goth uses the desert for long, starkly composed shots closely inspired by the Leone school of the Spaghetti Western, turning the spaces the characters inhabit as unreal and dream-like as they themselves are. Even the spine-rippings and skinnings (and so on) are on the more dream-like side of gore.

The film is full of curious and strange details, never explained ideas that never quite add up to a full picture but are effective at creating mood exactly because they do not add up. There are many questions connected to the films weirdnesses: why are the religious loons of Enoch's Hammer all bright blonde (yeah, we can speculate, but we cannot know it), why is being undead so bad for the skin the bad guys have to skin the living to keep looking pretty? And why the heck do they still look like themselves in their new skins, except for pigmentation and hair? What is Skullbucket's problem? Where does the film take place, in the Old West or in Namibia?

As regular readers know, I am a complete sucker for this sort of thing, the sort of person who takes Gallowwalkers's rifle-full of weirdness and only ever asks for more. Your mileage may vary.

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