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STARFIRE MUTINY 2002
Written by Chris Hyde.
Directed by Lloyd A. Simandl.
Starring Elise Muller, Douglas Arthurs, Julius Krajewski, Maureen LaVette, Joe Lara, John Comer, Michael Lee, Martin Hub and a couple of broads who MUST have been sleeping with a producer.
Oh, sweet Mary! This movie is one shabby piece of work. Cheap production values, a script that couldn’t have taken more than 45 minutes to write and direction and cinematography that’s like a poor imitation of the old Buck Rogers TV show starring Gil Gerard.
The story concerns a future Earth that’s been turned into a desert wasteland by the disappearance of the ozone layer. Some indeterminate number of people was sent up into orbit in cryogenic suspension to wait until the proper moment when the planet could be restored. The space station Legacy, which appears to be manned by 6 whole people, is supposed to circle the Earth until there’s a solar flare that can be used in some inexplicable way with the Hubble telescope to restore the ozone layer.
Would-be dictator General Montgomery Swan (Douglas Arthurs) takes over Legacy, after he’s broken out of prison by his right-hand woman Colonel Diana Briggs (Maureen LaVette). Now, Swan’s prison was on Earth. It held many other prisoners and was staffed by several soldier…so, it’s clear that human beings can and do survive and live on the desolate planet. Why then go through the rigmarole of freezing people and shooting them into orbit? That’s one of those questions you’re not supposed to ask.
Swan wants to replace the energy of the solar flare with a nuclear explosion that destroys the part of legacy with all the frozen folks, restoring the Earth and making him its supreme leader. How exactly would he become the supreme leader when his forces consist of a hard-faced woman and three thugs who are as much comic relief as military muscle? That’s another one of those questions you’re not supposed to ask.
Opposing Swan and company are square-jawed space station commander Sam Talbot (Joe Lara), cryogenic technician and pool-playing horndog Ben Gunn (Julius Krajewski) and a small-time con woman (Elise Muller) who scammed her way on the station in place of the physicist leading the effort to fix the ozone layer. They’re joined by a couple of bimbos who get unfrozen (portrayed by “actresses” who had to have done many unpleasant things with the fat and sweaty producers who demanded they be shoehorned into the film).
Here’s what you need to know about Starfire Mutiny. Some of the actresses go almost randomly topless, there are fight scenes so poorly choreographed they might as well be outtakes from the old Saturday morning TV show Bigfoot and Wild Boy, at many points the story is moving so sluggishly it’s not clear if you’re watching the actors in slow motion or normal speed, and Douglas Arthurs apparently started this production thinking he was going to be the cool bad guy in a worthwhile film, only to realize as it went on that he was stuck in a huge piece of crap. You can literally see the moment on screen where Arthurs decided “Eff it! I’m not even going to try anymore.”
The bottom line of Starfire Mutiny is that it’s about 2 steps below those Saturday night original movies you see on the Sy Fy channel. So, if you find fare like Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus too challenging…this might be just the movie for you.
Coming Tomorrow: True Colors
MACHETE 2010
Written by Robert Rodriguez and Alvaro Rodriguez.
Directed by Ethan Maniquis and Robert Rodriguez.
Starring Danny Trejo, Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Steven Seagal, Michelle Rodriguez, Jeff Fahey, Cheech Marin, Don Johnson, Shea Whigham, Lindsay Lohan, Daryl Sabara and Tom Savini.
Machete contains a heaping dose of bloody violence, a moderate amount of nudity and waaaaaay too much sledgehammer moralizing on the issue of illegal immigration. It has some trashy thrills but becomes too bloated and blurred by Robert Rodriguez’ inability to decide if he’s making a modern version of the 70s exploitation flick, an homage to 70s exploitation flicks or a parody of the 70s exploitation flick.
Machete (Danny Trejo) is a legendary and legendarily violent Mexican cop who tried to take down a drug lord named Torrez (Steven Seagal) and lost. His family slain, Machete is exiled to America and spends the next three years as an illegal immigrant day laborer. Then one day, he’s hired by a man called Booth (Jeff Fahey) to assassinate a virulently anti-immigrant Texas State Senator (Robert De Niro). It turns out that Machete is just a patsy in a bigger and much more elaborate plot and, with the help of Immigration Agent Sartana (Jessica Alba), illegal immigrant underground leader Luz (Michelle Rodriguez) and his brother the priest (Cheech Marin), the squat and wattled Mexican juggernaut sets out to settle scores both old and new.
This film has a lot of people getting brutally killed and several attractive women getting naked. Combine that with a bluntly effective performance by Danny Trejo and you’ve got the basic ingredients for some low brow fun. Unfortunately, Rodriguez does a very poor job in mixing them together. You can ignore that for a while, but it eventually leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
To start with, there’s just too much of everything in this movie. In addition to loads of cannon fodder, it has 4 major bad guys and three sub-level bad guys. In Star Wars terminology, that’s 4 Darth Vaders and 3 Boba Fetts. Yet with all of those villains running around, Machete only manages to sort of kill one of them. In addition, one of those bad guys doesn’t get just one ironic comeuppance, he gets 4 ironic comeuppances and they all happen in the last 15 minutes of the film. No, I’m not exaggerating for effect. And Machete doesn’t just have one badass chick on his side, he’s got 3. Too much of this movie is like an old school pro wrestling battle royal, with 20 guys in the ring at once all trying to throw each other over the top rope. It sounds neat in theory but in reality, it’s just an undifferentiated mass of humanity flailing away at each other.
It also doesn’t help that this film has a very schizophrenic tone. At times, it’s played fairly seriously as though Machete were supposed to be a straight forward action flick. Then there are moments that are much more tongue in cheek, winking at the audience to let them in on the joke. But then the movie sometimes goes so over-the-top that it can’t be seen as anything more than parody. In Schwarzenegger terms, it’s like combining Eraser with Kindergarten Cop and then blending that with The Last Action Hero.
Lindsay Lohan is in Machete and she looks…well, just horrible. If you’ve ever wondered how accurate the tabloid stories are about Lohan’s life, one look at her here will resolve all doubts. It’s not only that she gives probably the worst performance in the whole cast. It’s also that she appears far more haggard and world weary than the actress who plays her mother. The phrase “rode hard and put away wet” has never been more appropriate than to describe Lohan in this motion picture.
There are some good bits to Machete but after an explosive start, it loses its zest in too many mood swings and gets weighed down by too many complications. This film began as a fake trailer in Rodriguez and Tarantino’s Grindhouse and that’s as far as it probably should have gotten. It’s not horrible, but it’s definitely not anything you need to pay theater prices to see.
Coming Tomorrow: Starfire Mutiny
LOST SOULS 2000
Written by Pierce Gardner.
Directed by Janusz Kaminski.
Starring Winona Ryder, Ben Chaplin, Philip Baker Hall, Elias Koteas, Sarah Wynter, John Hurt, John Diehl and W. Earl Brown.
How many of these crappy turn-of-the-millennia thrillers are there? From Y2K to the End of Days to even more obscure takes, there’s just a slew of films that came out around 2000 built around the idea of humanity’s time running out. Most of them stink out loud, but Lost Souls may be the worst of the bunch to come out of a major studio. This thing is overwrought, unclear, repetitious and has some of the worst pacing of any movie you’ll ever see.
To start with, you have to get about 30 minutes into the film before you get any solid idea of what and who it’s about. I don’t mean there’s some mystery keeping the viewer in suspense. I mean you spend the first half hour staring blankly at the screen and wondering “Who are these people? Why are they doing that? Okay, why am I looking at this guy now? Is he a reporter or some kind of lawyer? Wait, he’s a writer? Now why are we back with those other people? Is he the main character? Is she the main character? What the hell am I watching?”
Then the middle part of Lost Souls tells you the same thing over and over and over again, getting more and more explicit each time, but expecting you to be surprised every time it tells you the same thing. Imagine if Citizen Kane had constantly told the audience the secret of Rosebud, but kept going on as if it was still an unanswered question. That’s what the middle of Lost Souls is like, except executed with 1/1000th the talent and skill.
That brings us to the ending and a case of narrative whiplash. The first three-quarters of this film is languidly paced, dawdling along before suddenly going from 0 to stupid in 8.67 seconds. It’s as if they started out with a 350 page script and shot the first 80 pages before it occurred to anyone that they were making a 6 hour long movie, then they tried to cram everything in those last 270 pages of story into just 30 pages. It goes from feeling like a bad episode of Masterpiece Theatre to a worse episode of Pokemon.
What is Lost Souls about? Well, there’s this troubled young woman (Winona Ryder) trying to stop this guy (Ben Chaplin) from becoming the wussiest Antichrist in cinema history. The tagline for the movie poster should have been “The Omen…for Dummies.” Some stuff happens but there’s very little violence, no nudity, only a smattering of bad language and Ryder and Chaplin appear to be engaged in some sort of acting contest to see who can come up with the most different ways of looking forlorn.
The only possible value this garbage could have is as more evidence that Winona Ryder is one of the most beautiful women of all time. It’s gone amazingly unnoticed because she never became a Julia Roberts-type movie star or sought out constant media attention, but Ryder is truly incredible to look at. Actresses as a profession are more attractive than average, but even most actresses have a beauty peak. With some it’s early, with others it’s late, but there will generally be a time when an actresses’ physical appearance is at its zenith and she doesn’t look as good either before or after that period. Ryder’s not like that. She hasn’t had a beauty peak. She’s been at a beauty plateau for over 20 years. She started out as a phenomenally cute young woman and has maintained that level of visual appeal all the way to the point where she’s now getting to be almost old enough to play the mother of one of her earlier roles.
Unfortunately, as great as Ryder looks, she’s not enough on her own to make Lost Souls worth watching. You’d be better off acting out the book of Revelations with finger puppets.
Coming Tuesday: Machete
OTIS 2008
Written by Thomas Schnauz and Erik Jendrensen.
Directed by Tony Krantz.
Starring Bostin Christopher, Ashley Johnson, Illeana Douglas, Daniel Stern, Jared Krusnitz, Jere Burns and Kevin Pollack.
Otis is a dark comedy that never quite comes into focus, but sustains itself by never raising the stakes so high that it matters.
The title character (played by Bostin Christopher) is a hulking serial killer plaguing the suburbs. He kidnaps teenage girls, holds them prisoner and makes them pretend to be his girlfriend, then chops up and disposes of their bodies after he takes them to the “prom”. His latest victim is beautiful blonde Riley Lawton (Ashley Johnson), who he nabs in broad daylight as her slacker smartass brother Reed (Jared Krusnitz) walks away in the other direction.
When Otis calls the Lawsons to ask permission to “date” Riley, that brings the FBI into the case in the form of dickish diva Agent Hotchkiss. He’s supremely confident and just as clueless. With the unwitting assistance of Otis’ terminally angry and abusive brother (Kevin Pollack), Riley is able to escape. But her mom (Illeana Douglas) makes her promise not to tell the authorities anything about Otis. Mom wants to take care of things herself, no matter how much Riley’s dad (Daniel Stern) objects.
The first thing you have to know about Otis is that it’s not that scary or suspenseful. The only scene of real violence is completely undercut by some blunt humor and even as Riley is held captive and threatened by Otis, she always seems more inconvenienced than frightened. The second thing you have to know about this film is that it doesn’t matter that it’s not scary or suspenseful. It’s fairly entertaining because, not in spite, or that.
Let me explain. There’s a lot about this movie that doesn’t fit together. Riley’s family is like something out of an 80s sitcom. Agent Hotchkiss, however, resembles more absurd fair like something out of Airplane! or The Naked Gun. Otis, meanwhile, is far more serious than anything else in the story. Even the things he does that are supposed to be funny flow out of a more dramatic place. And while the film is clearly going for satire at many points, the purpose or point of the satire is often unclear. For example, there’s a slew of scenes where Otis is acting out his high school dating fantasy with Riley where it’s all played for comedic effect, but there’s no actual punch line to any of it.
Those sorts of incongruities usually doom a movie. Not it this case. The tension and energy of the story is kept pretty low and that, intentionally or not, prevents the unfitted pieces of Otis from cracking into each other. You’re able to appreciate the individual elements of the movie, even though they don’t belong together. The character of Otis and Bostin Christopher’s performance is very creepy and a little unsettling. Agent Hotchkiss is completely over the top. He’s a couple of pratfalls and an atrocious accent away from Inspector Clouseau territory. The Lawsons are corny and clichéd and when this sitcomish family is plunged into the world of torture porn, the contrast works. It’s like combining the Cosby Show with Saw.
None of that goes together and if the film were tight and energetic, you couldn’t help but notice. By keeping things loose and inexact, the edges don’t irritatingly scrape together.
Otis is amusing, intriguing and a little unformed. It’s a dark comedy that I think isn’t nearly as dark as it’s makers intended it to be, and it’s all the better for it. Torture porn fans will enjoy it as a lark…and normal folks might like it too.
Coming Tomorrow: Lost Souls
THE JACK BULL 1999
Written by Dick Cusack.
Directed by John Badham.
Starring John Cusack, Henry Ballard, Miranda Otto, John Goodman, L.Q. Jones, John C. McGinley, John Savage, Rodney A. Grant, Kurt Fuller, Rex Linn, Jay O. Sanders, Drake Bell, Nick Gillie, Duncan Fraser and Ken Pogue.
Many modern Westerns take a whack at demythologizing the frontier, but I don’t know of any other film that does it as powerfully and thoroughly as The Jack Bull. All the old, familiar themes are here, stripped of their pretense and given new and exciting life in a challenging tales that becomes more morally and ethically complex as it goes along.
In the waning days of the Wyoming Territory, a horse trader named Myrl Redding (John Cusack) gets into a dispute with a land baron named Henry Ballard (L. Q. Jones) over two stallions. Myrl left them with Ballard as collateral for a toll to pass through Ballard’s land on way to a horse auction. When Myrl returns for them, he finds his man left to mind the horses beaten and run off and the animals whipped, mistreated and worked near to death. Myrl demands the stallions be restored to the previous condition by Ballard’s own hand, something the rich man sneeringly refuses.
Myrl takes his case to the local judge (Ken Pogue), only to find him in Ballard’s pocket. He tries to petition the territorial Attorney General, only to have that request end in tragedy. Unwilling to let the wrong done him go unanswered, Myrl gathers together a gang of men and rides up to Ballard’s spread to get justice for himself. Ballard escapes, however, leaving Myrl to lead his men in search across the countryside, threatening to burn out anyone who gives aid or shelter to Ballard. This little insurrection eventually brings the conflict between Myrl and Ballard to the attention of the territorial governor (Scott Wilson), but not until people are killed and someone has to be help accountable for those deaths.
Myrl Redding deserves to stand alongside Tom Doniphon and Liberty Valance in the pantheon of Wild West cinema. All three symbolize how the sort of men who made the frontier the glorious place it was, were also the sort of men who would have no place as the frontier gave way to civilization. Make no mistake, Henry Ballard is the bad guy in this story and Redding is the good guy. But most of Ballard’s actions are legal and only slightly unethical. The crimes he does commit are of a petty nature. The awful events of The Jack Bull flow not from the greed or arrogance of Henry Ballard, but from the uncompromising pride and independence of Myrl Redding. Ballard makes only a little spark. It is Myrl who pours gasoline on that spark until it becomes a deadly fire.
Taking the law into your own hand when you’re denied justice is one of the oldest Western stories. The Jack Bull is one of the few that recognizes when you take the law into your own hands, it’s like setting yourself alone in a boat across the ocean. You have nothing but your wits and your will to deal with all the forces that come against you and decisions and actions that seem right can have disastrous consequences. A corrupt justice system fails Myrl Redding, but no justice system can withstand men who pursue their own righteous satisfaction to the exclusion of all else.
In addition to being smart and compelling, The Jack Bull has a marvelous cast. Strong performances abound, particularly Scott Wilson and John Goodman as another territorial judge who is committed to seeing justice done to its fullest extent. John Cusack is tremendously effective, never letting what Myrl Redding represents overwhelm the character’s simply humanity. And Director John Badham does an excellent job at capturing the extremes which lived side by side in the dying days of the Wild West.
The Jack Bull is an outstanding movie and is a must see of the modern Western.
HENRY FOOL 1997
Written and Directed by Hal Hartley.
Starring Thomas Jay Ryan, James Urbaniak, Parker Posey, Maria Porter, James Saito, Kevin Corrigan, Liam Aiken, Miho Kikaido, Nicholas Hope, Jan Leslie Harding and Christy Carlson Romano.
It’s pretentious and a bit too long, but writer/director Hal Hartley manages to get out of his own way enough to make Henry Fool a satisfactory excursion into the offbeat.
Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) is an alienated and nearly mute garbage man. He lives with his aimlessly slutty sister (Parker Posey) and his burnt out husk of a mother (Maria Porter). Their quietly desperate lives are upended one day when Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) takes up residence in the dingy basement apartment in the Grim family home. Henry is obscene and impulsive, debonair and contemptuous. He’s like a bipolar homeless man with a masters degree in English literature, someone who always comports himself as being much smarter than his circumstances.
Henry is a writer and claims to have written a “confession” that will roil the world with its power and insight, but he won’t let Simon read it. What Henry does do is inspire Simon to put his own thoughts to paper with the result being an epic poem of such profane beauty that everyone who encounters it must respond with either devotion or loathing. Henry guides Simon into cultivating his own talent in spite of the world’s opposition, while falling in love with his sister and revealing more of a past that turns out not to be quite as high minded as Henry likes to put on.
Eventually Simon takes on the life of Henry’s dreams. Henry, however, falls down into Simon’s old life until an act of either heroism or debauchery moves Simon to try and salvage what’s left of his one-time mentor’s existence.
This is what you call a “character drama” where what the characters do is less important to enjoying the film than how they do it. What distinguishes Henry Fool from other such work is that it’s really not much of a showcase for its cast. Thomas Jay Ryan is given a charismatic part to chew on, but the other actors either have little to do or, like James Urbaniak, they play characters of such limited scope that it never seems like they do much.
No, what makes this urban yarn of frustrating reality work is its slow unfolding of a paradox. Simon Grim is a sub-ordinary man who meets the seemingly extraordinary Henry Fool and is led to being something more than he could have ever imagined. But that same transformation of Simon shows Henry to be nothing at all like what he appears. Simon becomes what Henry always presented himself as, and Henry is forced to abandon his dreams and become what Simon was. It’s a very careful take down of intellectual pretension underscored by an admiration of real creative ability. And yes, a movie can attack pretension while being itself pretentious.
Throw in cultural observations, some amusing and some overblown, along with a prescient understanding of what the internet was going to do to the publishing business, and you’ve got a diverting but slightly taxing motion picture.
Coming Tomorrow: The Jack Bull
IN THE CUT 2003
Written by Susanna Moore and Jane Campion.
Directed by Jane Campion.
Starring Meg Ryan, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sharrieff Pugh, Mark Ruffalo, Nick Madici and Daniel T. Booth.
This could have been the greatest erotic thriller every made no one would have ever noticed because of the thrice-damned nonsense director Jane Campion does here playing around with the focus on her cameras. In The Cut being several light years away from even being a good erotic thriller only makes things worse.
Frannie Avery (Meg Ryan) is a New York City English professor. She’s the sort of repressed type who gets all quivery over snippets of passionate poetry she sees plastered up in the subway. Frannie has a screwed-up sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who’s borderline stalking a married man, and unstable ex-boyfriend (Kevin Bacon) with an ugly dog and she’s writing a book on urban slang with the help of one of her huge, black students (Sharrieff Pugh). When a woman’s severed head is found in the community garden of Frannie’s apartment building, she meets Detective Malloy (Mark Ruffalo). The cop has all the sophistication of a walking hard on, so of course he and Frannie fall into bed together. But as more dismembered women show up, Frannie begins to suspect there’s more to Malloy than his penis and cheesy mustache.
That’s about it for the plot of In The Cut. There is some more to it, but it’s the sort of willfully idiotic stuff that doesn’t hold up to a moment’s thought. It’s one of those plots where the whole shebang hangs on people not asking painfully obvious questions and avoiding saying the first things that would come to any normal person’s mind. Bascially, Frannie Avery lolls around, gets screwed, lolls around, gets screwed, lolls around, almost gets killed, fade to black.
I don’t know what bug crawled up Campion’s ass when it came time to make this film. This is one of the most annoying and aggravating movies I’ve ever watched. Not because the acting is terrible. It isn’t. And not because the writing is dreadful, even though it is. It’s not even because of the unremitting camera movement that plagues every scene and makes one of them look like it was filmed on top of a 1965 washing machine.
No, what dooms In The Cut is exasperating games Campion plays with focus. Virtually ever single shot in the whole flick is out of focus in one way or another. Sometimes things are clear in the middle of the image and the edges are fuzzy. Sometimes the focus goes in and out. Sometimes the background is out of focus, sometimes it’s the foreground and sometimes it’s the focal point of the shot. Watching this thing is like wearing eyeglasses with the wrong prescription. I’m sure Campion had some point for doing it this way but I don’t give two jerks what the reason might be because it wasn’t good enough.
This movie is also quiet to the point of distraction and so slow that you’ll feel like you’re watching it on the event horizon of a black hole. Meg Ryan does get naked and there’s a bit of fellatio that’s more graphic than anything outside The Brown Bunny, but neither will rouse you of the sleepy, weary, apathetic trance you’ll fall into after 5 minutes of In The Cut.
And don’t let Ryan’s nudity tempt you. There could be a Sapphic mosh pit in the middle of the movie with Ryan, Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledell and this piece of crap still wouldn’t be worth renting.
Coming Tomorrow: Henry Fool
THE HAUNTED WORLD OF EL SUPERBEASTO 2009
Written by Tom Papa with what is laughingly described as additional material by 6 other people.
Directed by Rob Zombie.
Starring the voices of Tom Papa, Sheri Moon Zombie, Paul Giamatti, Brian Posehn, Rosario Dawson, April Winchell, Laraine Newman, Rob Paulsen and Debra Wilson.
I already knew Rob Zombie couldn’t make a decent movie to save his life, but I thought a cartoon might be different. No such luck. This hyperactive rip off of Mike Kricfalusi, Tex Avery and Tijuana Bibles has all the wit of a 13 year old who’s been eating lead paint chips since he was 3.
The plot involves the impossibly smug and puffy luchador El Superbeasto (Tom Papa) and his adoptive sister Suzi X (Sheri Moon Zombie) teaming up to prevent the nebishly evil Dr. Satan (Paul Giamatti) from marrying the crude but pneumatically endowed Velvet Von Black (Rosario Dawson) and gaining the power to conquer the world…or something like that. It’s really all just an excuse for a high pressure stream of lame jokes, foul language, senseless violence and naked cartoon boobs.
This is really the sort of thing you’ve got to watch while stoned. That’s the only way the torrent of crassness, juvenile humor, Ren-and-Stimpy-wannabe animation and smirking attitude could be enjoyable. This is the sort of cartoon that basically unzips its fly and tries to whiz comedy all over you. Something with Nazi zombies, rat diarrhea and a horny robot should be a lot more fun than this garbage.
The Haunted World of El Superbeasto is terrible.
SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD 2009
Written and Directed by George A. Romero.
Starring Alan Van Sprang, Kenneth Welsh, Kathleen Munroe, Devon Bostick, Richard Fitzpatrick, Athena Karkanis, Stefano DiMatteo, Joris Jarsky, Eric Woolfe and Joshua Peace.
Uh…did something happen to George Romero between making Diary of the Dead and this movie? A stroke? Serious head trauma? Something had to have happened because I can’t believe the same mind is responsible for both films. Diary was clever and creative and recaptured the creepy, scary, doomed spirit of the original trilogy. Survival of the Dead has two independent yet equally decent beginnings, but drowns in sheer storytelling incompetence by the end. This is the worst zombie movie Romero has ever made.
The dual starts of this tale concern the inhabitants of Plum Island off the coast of Delaware and a band of renegade soldiers led by Sarge (Alan Van Sprang), a character first seen in Diary of the Dead.
On the island, the generational feud between the O’Flynn and Muldoon families has been given new life by the zombie apocalypse. Patrick O’Flynn (Kenneth Welsh) wants to destroy the risen dead as soon as possible. Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick) wants to keep them around out of a sense of clan loyalty to see if they can be cured, or at least domesticated. Seamus and his gunmen get the upper hand of O’Flynn and his men, exiling them from Plum Island.
Sarge and his band of fellow rogues, Tomboy (Athena Karkanis), Francisco (Stefano DiMatteo) and Kenny (Eric Woolfe), are looking out for themselves in the ruins of civilization. They hook up with a young man known only as “Boy” (Devon Bostick) and see a web video from O’Flynn promising them safety from the zombie horde on an island. After some flesh-munching, zombie-killing action. O’Flynn, Sarge and company make their way to Plum Island to square off against Muldoon in a battle to decide…well, not much of anything.
This is a bad movie. Really bad. It isn’t about the living dead. This film IS the living dead. There are so many things wrong with it that it shouldn’t possibly exist, but it keeps shambling on. The plot is a retread of previous Dead flicks spiced up with about a half dozen, half assed ideas that bang into each other without any direction or design. The characters are either clichés or non sequiturs. The dialog is a blend of bad 80s action movie and even worse 1950s TV Western. For pity’s sake, Romero even throws in a twin out of nowhere like a brain dead soap opera.
I could go on for days. The number of times a human or zombie sneaks up on someone undetected until they’re just inches away reaches the level of unintentional self-parody. The natives of Plum Island (which is off the coast of Delaware, remember?) all speak with varying degrees of Irish accent and Sarge and his crew never find that the least bit odd. There’s a subplot revolving around a large amount of money, even though the script explicitly acknowledges the uselessness of paper money in a zombie apocalypse. Romero also continues his obsession with “zombie evolution” here, though in a way that’s even more obvious and silly than Land of the Dead.
There are a couple of neat touches here and there, like snippets of a late night talk show joking about “deadheads” and some freaky underwater zombies. However, those moments are few and far between.
Romero heaps on the social commentary in Survival more than in any previous Dead movie. So much so, it all mushes together until it’s not clear what he’s trying to say about anything. And besides that, before a film can work on a second level and metaphor or allegory, it has to work on the first level as a story. Survival of the Dead is such a mess of plot holes and poor and frequently illogical characterization that it’s impossible to take any meaning from it at all.
Let me repeat, this is the worst zombie movie Romero has ever made. Saying it’s not as good as the original Night, Dawn and Day isn’t much of a criticism, but this thing sucks significantly more than Land of the Dead. It’s so terrible that if Romero makes another zombie movie, I’m not going to be that excited to see it. That’s how bad Survival of the Dead is.
Coming Tomorrow: The Haunted World of El Superbeasto
STATEN ISLAND 2009
Written and Directed by James DeMonaco.
Starring Vincent D’Onofrio, Ethan Hawke, Seymour Cassel, Julianne Nicholson, Lyn Cohen, Bill Cwikowski, Rosemary De Angelis, Dominic Fumusa, Michael Hogan, Adam Martinez, Frank Pando, Jeremy Schwartz and John Sharian.
This tale of the tangentially connected lives of three Staten Islanders is well acted, well written and well directed, but would likely have been much better as three separate films. It has three very different tones, a plot device that belongs in a sci-fi flick and an ending that makes you wonder what the point of the whole exercise was.
Parmie Tarzo (Vincent D’Onfrio) is a pudgy, bespectacled mobster who dreams of taking over the Staten Island underworld with his three thugs. He also dreams of setting the world record for holding his breath underwater and of finding the men who broke into his home and shot his elderly mother in the shoulder.
Sully Halverson (Ethan Hawke) is a septic tank cleaner who’s very self-conscious about his lack of intellect. When he and his wife decide to have a baby, Sully becomes consumed with the idea of having his kid genetically engineered to be smarter than he is and thinks he can get the money for it by breaking into Parmie’s home and stealing from his safe.
Jasper Sabiano (Seymour Cassel) is an old deaf-mute who slices meat for a living at a deli. He also plays the trifecta at the track, hoping for that one big win, is friends by Sully and cuts up the bodies brought to him by Parmie’s gang for disposal.
The stories of these three men are told in order, Parmie-Sully-Jasper, as they all intersect at the deli one day. Parmie ends up dressed like Mr. Rourke and sitting in a tree. Sully gets nabbed by the mob. Jasper winds up whimsically seeking a violent redemption for his sins. Their lives come together a final time and all of them get what they want, but only one of them survives.
There’s a lot to like about Staten Island. Unfortunately, it’s doomed as a piece of entertainment by its three incongruous storylines. Parmie’s section is clearly comedic, sometimes overtly and sometimes darkly, but never really serious. Then Sully comes in and his life is all serious, except with this over-the-top genetic redesign of his unborn son plopped into the middle of it all. I mean, come on! It’s like watching Goodfellas and having Henry Hill decide he wants to have a sex change. And then Jasper life takes over the narrative with a distinctly fairy tale quality, like a modern fable of New York City’s forgotten borough. All three separate tones are swirled together at the conclusion, but it takes like peppermint, ravioli and spinach.
It’s too bad because Vincent D’Onofrio gives another outstanding performance as a gangster who gets beyond all the clichés, even the ones he indulges. Writer/director James DeMonaco also came up with some good stuff, like the chaos at the robbery of Parmie’s home and the souvenirs Jasper takes from the corpses he dismembers. Even the rapport between Sully and his wife manages to feel real and interesting, though we see little of it.
You could any of these stories and make a movie of it. Putting them all together and giving each a dissimilar sensibility? It doesn’t really work. Staten Island certainly isn’t terrible. It’s just not good enough to deserve to be watched instead of something else.
Coming Tomorrow: Survival of the Dead
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