Outtakes

This Week’s Countdown: Time Traveling Out of January

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Her came out this week, and it’s awesome. August: Osage County, also new in theaters, is worth a peek. But that’s probably it for a while. January is the beginning of the long winter movie wasteland, littered with films that were not deemed good competition for holiday movies, not likely award winners – just not that great. The kind of thing you hang on to until it’s bleak and dreary and people have lost the will to live so, why not watch Ride Along?

I, Frankenstein? I vomit.

Seriously, you know it’s bad when you’re holding out for the Hercules movie starring The Rock.

It’s too bad we don’t have a time machine to just jump past the dismal winter movie months. But we don’t. What we do have – which is almost as good – are time machine movies. Here are our 8 favorites. Why eight? January’s a long month and five might not be enough. Use them to fill the void of good flicks at the theater.

8. Twelve Monkeys

Madman Terry Gilliam creates a fascinating shell-world of the future, in which penal colony worker Bruce Willis agrees to travel back to the Nineties to sleuth out the cause of the apocalypse. The SciFi business is intricate and delicate and works surprisingly well, but it’s Gilliam’s particular genius for ruminating on the nature of insanity that keeps this one fascinating. That, along with fun performances from Willis and Oscar nominated (thought, let’s be honest, maybe he didn’t deserve that one) Brad Pitt.

7. Time Bandits

What? More Terry Gilliam? Yes, this guy has a real jones for time travel and, in this case, dwarfs. In 1981 Gilliam was still working with his Monty Python cohorts, ensuring that this bit of lunacy (for wherever Gilliam creates, lunacy follows) takes on a far more comical air than 12 Monkeys. Imaginative and hilarious, it’s no Brazil, but that film couldn’t have existed without this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd4DBq8a2y0

 

6. The Terminator

Computers become self aware. They build super sized, thickly accented, human-ish cyborgs (the role Schwarzenegger was born to play) to infiltrate the few remaining warriors and end the human race. But one scrappy lad sends his dad back to knock up his mom, ensuring the future of the species. Which begs the question: is the survival of the human race reason enough to entertain the idea of your parents doing it?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHz95RYUbik

 

5. Planet of the Apes

The film’s 45 years old at this point. We hope we’re not giving up any spoilers by including it on the time travel countdown. But it’s a fascinating thought – maybe it’s not the machines that will enslave us. Maybe it’ll be those damn, dirty apes! Oh Charlton Heston, with your granite jaw and loin cloth, how you suffer when you find out!

4. Timecrimes

This one is nutty, and absolutely required viewing for anyone who enjoys time space continuum conundrums. So much can go wrong when you travel just one hour back in time. An always clever experiment in science fiction and irony, Timecrimes is a spare, unique and wild ride.

3. Back to the Future

The most beloved of all time travel films, Back to the Future has charm to spare. Inventive and endearing, and yet Marty McFly almost makes out with his own mom. Ewww. (We love you, George McFly!)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVuQWf9M700

2. Primer

Made for $7000, this film is, in itself, an act of science fiction. Writer/director Shane Carruth (who would go on to make the best sic fi film of 2013, Upstream Color,) finds all new ways to consider what havoc a time machine could wreak. It would be the most streamlined, absorbing and ingenious film of its kind if there were other films of its kind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CC60HJvZRE

1. Looper

An ingenious look at personal destiny wrapped inside a mind bending time travel thriller, the film watches Joe (Joseph Gordon Levitt) try to kill the older version of himself (Bruce Willis) whose been sent back to him from the future for a mob hit. Breathlessly entertaining, wildly clever and incredibly well crafted, it’s among the very best SciFi  film of a generation.

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Pass the Salt…Bitch!

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by George Wolf

 

So, how was your family get-together over the Holidays?

If secrets and dinner plates weren’t tossed about like a salad dressed with obscenities, you’ve got nothing on the Westons, the dysfunctional brood at the heart of August:  Osage County.

Screenwriter Tracy Letts adapts his own Pulitzer Prize-winning play, and the sublime wordplay in his dark, rich comedy is brought to life via an exceptional ensemble cast. Only tentative direction from John Wells holds the film back from its full potential.

Meryl Streep rules the roost as family matriarch Violet Weston, who..ahem…”welcomes” her children, siblings and assorted other team members back home after a family crisis.

There isn’t much time spent on niceties before the barbs start flying. Old wounds are exposed, and new secrets are uncovered as the family struggles to deal with the effect their past has on their present.

At the heart of the conflict is Barbara, the oldest Weston daughter, fully realized by Julia Roberts in, hands down, the performance of her career.

Barbara’s contempt for her mother is on hilariously full display, while bubbling underneath is the fear of becoming her mother, a fear she tries to hide through angry outbursts. Stealing a movie from Meryl Streep is no easy feat, but damned if Roberts doesn’t do it.

In fact, the film is wall to wall with fine performers, including Chris Cooper, Sam Shepard, Juliette Lewis, Ewan McGregor, and Margo Martindale (who shows a fantastic chemistry with Streep, giving their scenes together an added air of mischief).

The problem is, director John Wells seems a bit intimidated by who, and what, he’s working with. The characters are too often on their own island, as when a soap opera cuts from a close up of one deep sigh to a completely different storyline.

These characters are under one roof for much of the movie, yet we don’t feel the cohesiveness of any shared connections, just a series of histrionics often left swinging in the venomous breeze.

It’s not the material. Letts also wrote Bug and Killer Joe, both adapted into brilliant movies by the skills of legendary director William Friedkin. Wells, a veteran TV director, doesn’t provide the nuance needed to make a successful cinematic leap.

August:  Osage County boasts all the ingredients, and is certainly entertaining, but ultimately feels like a missed opportunity for something special.

 

Verdict-3-0-Stars

 

 

 

 

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Is the Viewer who is Watching Confused?

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Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?

by Hope Madden

There are some who would take an interview with Noam Chomsky – philosopher, cognitive scientist, linguist, all around smartypants – and try to simplify it, make it easier for the audience to understand.

Not Michel Gondry. The French filmmaker best known for the wonderful Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind pairs Chomsky interviews with his own wildly abstract, hand-drawn animation with a purpose that is certainly not clarity.

In his documentary Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, Gondry invites the audience to puzzle through the words of the genius who believes the world is a mystery and that we are all the better for it. The director, therefore, goes out of his way to ensure that we are befuddled, because, according to Chomsky, that’s the only way to go through life. If we believe we understand, then we don’t probe, question, challenge.

So, Gondry creates a challenge. Indeed, the obstacles to comprehensibility are either alarming or hilarious. Abstract animation can be tough to understand. So can Gondry’s thick French accent. So can Chomsky. Gondry piles on with intentionally distracting camera noise and, on occasion, the obscuring volume of background music.

If all this seems frustrating, strangely enough, that’s not the effect Gondry achieves. Eventually, the filmmaker’s wonder and the subject’s challenges to puzzle out what’s happening wash over you, and you let go of your own instinct to predict what comes next in order to comprehend what is happening. You achieve your own sense of wonder at the befuddlement of it all.

The secret is Gondry himself, who is trying and failing to keep up. It’s endearing, but it’s also a relief. You’re not the only one.

People looking for an informative document of Chomsky’s life will be wildly disappointed. This film is not about what you want to see. It’s about what Gondry always wanted to ask Noam Chomsky if he ever got the chance. Plus cartoons!

 

Verdict-3-5-Stars

 

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Imagination + Love = Her

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Her

by Hope Madden

Is Spike Jonze the most imaginative American filmmaker working today?

Yes. Need proof?

This is the guy who turned the beloved, 10-sentence children’s book Where the Wild Things Are into the most heartbreaking and wondrous film of 2009. The guy who could make the act of adapting existing work into the most original film of 2002 (Adaptation).

Hell, it’s the man who made his directorial debut telling the tale of a filing clerk who sells tickets into John Malkovich’s head. And the quality of his output has only improved, taking on a depth and beauty since he began writing his projects as well.

With Her, the first film Jonze has written entirely on his own, he’s crafted the year’s most poignant love story.

It sounds like the lead-in to a joke: A man falls in love with his computer operating system. Who, besides Jonze, could take a premise like and turn it into a masterful image of our times?

Joaquin Phoenix plays the lonely and emotionally bruised Theodore, in the not-too-distant-future Los Angeles. Still reeling from a break up, Theodore shies away from traditional intimacy, but finds himself attracted to the newest update in operating systems: the OS that evolves to meet every need.

Credit Jonze for sidestepping every imaginable cliché – and there are plenty – and instead exploring society’s current trajectory with surprising tenderness, perhaps even optimism. Yes, he notes the superficiality of relationships in the technological age, and the tendency toward isolation. But it’s not like he believes the machines are going to rise up and enslave us.

Not that he exactly rules that out.

What he does instead is almost magical. He introduces us to the very picture of humanity in Samantha, the operating system. Scarlett Johansson voices the character, and enough cannot be said of her performance. It’s easy to undervalue voice talent, but Johansson shows what can be done with nothing else to rely on – no facial expressions, no setting, no gestures. Her performance is an absolute wonder.

Likewise, Phoenix is magnificent, falling in love on screen with no physical being to perform against. His work is vulnerable and touching enough to take your breath.

A sparkling supporting group, including Amy Adams, Olivia Wilde, a very funny Chris Pratt, fills out the cast, each making the utmost of the environment Jonze has created.

The film looks and feels amazing, with every detail of set design and script enhancing and deepening the impact of the love story. It’s a beautiful, imaginative, relevant image of love in the modern world.

Verdict-4-5-Stars

 

 

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Just Keeping It Real

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by George Wolf

 

From the opening moments of Lone Survivor, it’s clear writer/director Peter Berg kept one goal above all others: honor the Navy SEALS at the heart of this harrowing true life tale.

By most accounts he’s done that, and his adaptation of the 2007 memoir by SEAL Marcus Luttrell emerges as a single-minded war movie of both power and intensity.

In 2005, “Operation Red Wings” sent a four man SEAL team into Afghanistan to eliminate a  senior Taliban leader. The mission was compromised, a firefight ensued and an attempt to rescue the team turned tragic. Only Luttrell was left alive.

It’s a riveting tale, and Berg (Friday Night Lights/The Kingdom) anchors it with the brotherhood among the men involved, and the unflinching devotion to their duty. We don’t get intimate profiles of any of the characters, but we get enough to feel we know them, and more importantly, we see how deeply they identify with each other, with their team, and with their respective places in it.

Though Mark Wahlberg stars as Luttrell, Berg wisely does not tilt the screen time in his favor, and we fear for each member of his team equally, even though we already know what the eventual outcome will be. Credit Wahlberg, and co-stars Taylor Kitsch, Ben Foster, and Emile Hirsch with solid performances that are able to resonate collectively, yet still illustrate the anguish of a fallen comrade.

Berg’s touch with the battle scenes is equally focused, filming with an intentional frenzy full of gut-wrenching stunt work.  Keeping these sequences nearly absent of background music or superfluous pageantry, the unmistakable aim is to present this hellish scenario as the men themselves knew it.

Of course, as a war film, Lone Survivor carries instant baggage, seemingly destined to be labeled either jingoistic, un-American or misinformed. Clearly looking to avoid the “that’s not how it’s done” barbs slung at Zero Dark Thirty, Berg spent a month embedded with a SEAL team in Iraq, and his film offers no apologies for its abundant machismo or respectful salute.

The catch-22 is, this approach works at the expense of a layered dramatic narrative that makes movies such as Zero Dark Thirty so compelling.

To be fair, though, Lone Survivor never aims that high. It is a film that mainly wants us to understand what it takes to do a job that most of us can’t even fathom.

Consider that mission accomplished.

 

 

Verdict-3-0-Stars

 

 

 

For Your Queue

For Your Queue: Best Documentary of 2013

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Available today on DVD and Blu-ray is the most breathtaking, mind boggling documentary of this or perhaps any year, The Act of Killing. Director Joshua Oppenheimer, along with dozens of filmmakers who remain anonymous for their own safety, work with the people who slaughtered more than a million Indonesians in 1965 to reenact their own crimes – or heroics, as they see it. The result is absolutely unlike anything you have ever seen. A jaw dropping act of discovery, the film is a masterpiece, a brave and confrontational effort, and essential viewing.

We usually pair new releases with backlist titles that match up well, but honestly, there is nothing on earth quite like The Act of Killing. The best we can do is to recommend Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991). The documentary looks at the making of Coppola’s extraordinary film, detailing the unsavory chaos on set and the madness of the shoot – another peek inside insanity.

Outtakes

Countdown: Winter Weather Lunchtime Options

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Some people eat sauerkraut to begin the New Year, but if weather predictions hold true, we may be looking at snowbound isolation, even power outages. How long will your provisions hold out?! After enough time homebound and desperate, you might find yourself contemplating roasting a leg of neighbor over an open fire.

Should you find yourself in such a state, here are a few films you can think of as how-to’s.

7. Motel Hell (1980)

Super cheese director Kevin Connor teamed up with low rent 80s staple Nancy Parsons and 50s heartthrob Rory Calhoun – not to mention Elaine Joyce and John Ratzenberger – to create one of the best bad horror films ever made. So gloriously bad! Farmer Vincent (Calhoun) makes the county’s tastiest sausage, and runs the Motel Hello as well. Now if swingers (note: cannibals are always eating swingers) keep disappearing from the motel, and mysterious, bubbly moans are coming from those sacks out back, that does not necessarily mean anything is amiss. Motel Hell is a deeply disturbed, inspired little low budget jewel.

It takes all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent’s fritters.

6. Eating Raoul (1982)

This bone-dry black comedy plays like an early John Waters film made with less money and more irony. The sexually repressed Mary and Paul Bland need to generate capital to open a restaurant and get away from the customers, patients, and neighbors constantly trying to have sex with them. They team up with a scam artist and thief named Raoul, played with almost shocking aptitude, considering the film itself, by Robert Beltran. Together the threesome knock off perverts and swingers, rob them, and sell their bodies for dog food. But when Raoul gets a little too ambitious, not to mention lucky with Mary, well, the couple is forced to eat him. And live happily ever after.

It’s amazing what you can do with a cheap piece of meat if you know how to treat it.

5. Soylent Green (1973)

Soylent Green may not be the most famous of Charlton Heston’s sci-fi cult classics, but his granite-jawed overacting is so perfect for this melodramatic examination of human nature, greed and desperation that it is still an amusing genre study.  Heston is a cop in this urban nightmare of an overpopulated future where the elderly are wooed into euthanasia by the same company that produces the only food available. You do the math. You’ll undoubtedly do it faster than Heston does, but that doesn’t undermine the fun.

You’ve got to tell them!  Soylent Green is people!

 

4. Titus (1999)

Director Julie Taymor glories in the spectacle of Shakespeare’s bloodiest play. Considered a pot boiler when it was written, it compares favorably in this century’s ultra-violent landscape. Titus, (Anthony Hopkins, perennial man eater), returns victorious from war, but the violence he wrought revisits him when he becomes entangled with a diabolical widow/war spoil (the ever-luminous Jessica Lange). Cannibalism, incest, rape, mutilation, infanticide, and an enormity of assorted carnage take on a surreal beauty under Taymor’s artistic direction.

Hark, villains, I shall grind your bones to dust, and of your blood I shall make a paste.

3. Delicatessen (1991)

Equal parts Eraserhead, Motel Hell and Amelie, Delicatessen is a weird, wild film. Set in the apartment building around a macabre butcher shop in a surreal, post-apocalyptic France, the film addresses the same cannibalism catalyst explored in many films: a human race that destroys everything required to sustain life and must turn to the only nourishment left. The carnival funhouse approach to cinematography predicts the absurdly funny take this black comedy has on humanity and its future.

Answer me meathead.

 

2. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

The action in this granddaddy of all cult films turns on one dinner scene. (Now you yell “Meatloaf again?!”) Creator Richard O’Brien’s raucous, once-controversial film about a sweet transvestite, a slut, an asshole and a couple of domestics who sing, time warp, throw rice, animate monsters, swap partners, and finally put on a show is still as much fun as it ever was. Once a subversive take on the classic musicals and sci-fi films of the 30s and 40s, Rocky Horror is now a high-camp icon of its own.

I’m afraid you’ve touched on a rather tender subject there, Dr. Scott. Another slice, anyone?

1. Silence of The Lambs (1991)

Why miss any opportunity to watch one of the most perfect horror films ever made? The fact that a movie about a man who eats human flesh tracking down a man who wears human flesh could win all five major Academy awards is itself a testament to how impeccably this film is put together. From the muted colors, haunting score, and meticulous cinematography to the shockingly authentic performances from Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster and Ted Levine, Silence of the Lambs is a stunning achievement in any film genre.

I do wish we could chat longer but I’m having an old friend for dinner.

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Covens: Less Fun than TV Suggests

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Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones

by Hope Madden

Covens are fun! Not to join – that would just be poor decision making on your part – but for sheer entertainment value, they make fine fodder. Just ask Jessica Lange.

And so it was with cautious optimism that I approached the 5th installment in the Paranormal Activity franchise, The Marked Ones.

What do we know so far? There’s a demon. It likes Katie. It hates Micah (who doesn’t?!). It and Katie took Hunter. Back in the day, that demon knew the very wee Katie and her sister Kristi because of a coven. Back to present time, Katie and a weird little boy move in next door to a family, who meet the coven. (It doesn’t go well for family.) What next?

We now leave the inner Katie/Kristi/Hunter circle for a moment because the demon is casting a wider net, with the mysterious coven’s help. That net has nabbed Electronic Simon Game enthusiast Jesse (Andrew Jacobs).

Longtime PA screenwriter (and son of Highway to Heaven star) Christopher Landon takes on directing duties this go-round. Thanks to his writing beginning with the first sequel, the series has taken on a reasonable franchise narrative. Unfortunately, he is still saddled with the found footage gimmick that made the original so effective.

Jesse gets a camera for his high school graduation, and he and his BFF Hector (Jorge Diaz) film a lot of crap. While dancing with Jesse’s dog, they notice some nutty sounds coming from the downstairs apartment – where the witch lives. They investigate. Bad plan.

Landon evokes some decent scares, and has fun with the handheld while Jesse first learns of the otherworldly visitor who is much less fun than he originally seems. Bursting with the misguided belief in their own indestructibility, both Jesse and Hector seem realistically teenaged and their terrible choices actually feel relatively honest given the fact that kids are stupid.

The film takes some time to get rolling, and it saves too many of its scares for the third act – at which point the handheld camera becomes a real distraction because most people would put down the camera and flee.

Note to regular PA fans:  there’s no point waiting through the credits on this one, as there is no extra scene. That, coupled with the full circle aspect of the ending, suggests that PA5 might just put a ribbon on the franchise. Not likely – the series will release another installment in October.

Slow in spots and hardly groundbreaking, The Marked Ones still manages to entertain and startle.

It’s January. This may be the best we do for a while.

 

Verdict-2-5-Stars

 

 

Outtakes

And the 2013 COFCA Award Winners Are….

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Gravity pulls in top prize at 12th annual Central Ohio Film Critics Association awards

 

(Columbus, January 2, 2014) Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity has been named Best Film in the Central Ohio Film Critics Association’s 12th annual awards, which recognize excellence in the film industry for 2013.  The film also claimed two other awards.  Cuarón was honored as Best Director.  Director of Photography Emmanuel Lubezki won for Best Cinematography.

 

Columbus-area critics recognized these screen performers: Best Actor Chiwetel Ejiofor (12 Years a Slave); Best Actress and Breakthrough Film Artist Adèle Exarchopolous [Blue is the Warmest Color (La vie d’Adèle)]; Best Supporting Actor James Franco (Spring Breakers); Best Supporting Actress Jennifer Lawrence (American Hustle); and Actor of the Year Matthew McConaughey for his exemplary body of work in Dallas Buyers Club, Mud, and The Wolf of Wall Street.

 

Other winners include: American Hustle for Best Ensemble; The Wolf of Wall Street’s Terence Winter for Best Adapted Screenplay; Her’s Spike Jonze for Best Original Screenplay and Arcade Fire for Best Score; Best Documentary The Act of Killing; Best Foreign Language Film and Best Animated Film The Wind Rises (Kaze tachinu); and Short Term 12 as Best Overlooked Film.

 

Repeat COFCA winners include: Jennifer Lawrence (2012 Best Actress for Silver Linings Playbook); Matthrew McConaughey (2012 Actor of the Year for Bernie, Killer Joe, Magic Mike, and The Paperboy); James Franco (2010 Best Actor for 127 Hours); and Emmanuel Lubezki (2011 Best Cinematography for The Tree of Life).

 

Founded in 2002, the Central Ohio Film Critics Association is comprised of film critics based in Columbus, Ohio and the surrounding areas. Its membership consists of 20 print, radio, television, and internet critics. COFCA’s official website at www.cofca.org contains links to member reviews and past award winners.

 

Winners were announced at a private party on January 2.

 

Complete list of awards:

 

Best Film

1. Gravity

2. Her

3. American Hustle

4. Frances Ha

5. The Wolf of Wall Street

6. 12 Years a Slave

7. Inside Llewyn Davis

8. Before Midnight

9. Upstream Color

10. Nebraska

 

Best Director

-Alfonso Cuarón, Gravity

-Runner-up: Spike Jonze, Her

 

Best Actor

-Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave

-Runner-up: Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club

 

Best Actress

-Adèle Exarchopolous, Blue is the Warmest Color (La vie d’Adèle)

-Runner-up: Brie Larson, Short Term 12

 

Best Supporting Actor

-James Franco, Spring Breakers

-Runner-up: Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club

 

Best Supporting Actress

-Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle

-Runner-up: Lupita Nyong’o, 12 Years a Slave

 

Best Ensemble

-American Hustle

-Runner-up: The Wolf of Wall Street

 

Actor of the Year (for an exemplary body of work)

-Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club, Mud, and The Wolf of Wall Street

-Runner-up: Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle and The Hunger Games: Catching Fire

 

Breakthrough Film Artist

-Adèle Exarchopolous, Blue is the Warmest Color (La vie d’Adèle) (for acting)

-Runner-up: Brie Larson, Don Jon, Short Term 12, and The Spectacular Now (for acting)

 

Best Cinematography

-Emmanuel Lubezki, Gravity

-Runner-up: Hoyte Van Hoytema, Her

 

Best Adapted Screenplay

-Terence Winter, The Wolf of Wall Street

-Runner-up: John Ridley, 12 Years a Slave

 

Best Original Screenplay

-Spike Jonze, Her

-Runner-up: Destin Daniel Cretton, Short Term 12

 

Best Score

-Arcade Fire, Her

-Runner-up: Steven Price, Gravity

 

Best Documentary

-The Act of Killing

-Runner-up: Stories We Tell

 

Best Foreign Language Film

-The Wind Rises (Kaze tachinu)

-Runner-up: Blue is the Warmest Color (La vie d’Adèle)

 

Best Animated Film

-The Wind Rises (Kaze tachinu)

-Runner-up: Frozen

 

Best Overlooked Film

-Short Term 12

-Runner-up: Mud

 

COFCA offers its congratulations to the winners.

 

Previous Best Film winners:

 

2002:  Punch-Drunk Love

2003:    Lost in Translation

2004:    Million Dollar Baby

2005:    A History of Violence

2006:    Children of Men

2007:  No Country for Old Men

2008:  WALL·E

2009:  Up in the Air

2010:  Inception

2011:  Drive

2012:  Moonrise Kingdom

 

For more information about the Central Ohio Film Critics Association, please visit www.cofca.org or e-mail info@cofca.org.

 

The complete list of members and their affiliations:

 

Richard Ades (Columbus Free Press); Kevin Carr (www.7mpictures.com, FilmSchoolRejects.com); Bill Clark (www.fromthebalcony.com); John DeSando (90.5 WCBE); Frank Gabrenya (The Columbus Dispatch); James Hansen (Out 1 Film Journal); Nicholas Herum (Columbus Underground; Movies Hate You Too); Brad Keefe (Columbus Alive); Kristin Dreyer Kramer (NightsAndWeekends.com, 90.5 WCBE); Joyce Long (Freelance); Rico Long (Freelance); Hope Madden (Columbus Underground and MaddWolf.com); Paul Markoff (WOCC-TV3; Otterbein TV); David Medsker (Bullz-Eye.com); Lori Pearson (Kids-in-Mind.com, critics.com); Mark Pfeiffer (Reel Times: Reflections on Cinema; WOCC-TV3; Otterbein TV); Melissa Starker (Columbus Alive, The Columbus Dispatch); George Wolf (Columbus Radio Group and MaddWolf.com); Jason Zingale (Bullz-Eye.com); Nathan Zoebl (PictureShowPundits.com).

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Intriguing and Surprising…Until It’s Not

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Open Grave

by Hope Madden

The film Open Grave immediately brings to mind Adrien Brody’s underseen 2010 flick Wrecked. In it, Brody wakes from a car crash in a daunting patch of geography with no memory of who he is or how he got there, but evidence suggests that maybe he’s not the film’s good guy. We spend the next 90 minutes with him as he pieces together clues to his identity and situation and tries to survive pretty inhospitable circumstances.

Likewise, in Open Grave, Sharlto Copley awakens with no memory. He’s not in a car, though. He finds himself deep in a pit atop a heap of dead bodies.

The trajectory is similar, but director Gonzalo Lopez-Gallego does not have a tense man-against-nature thriller in mind. He throws a lot of clues at Sharlto’s confused Jonah, all of them tinged with enough blood and barbed wire that our protagonist doesn’t just believe he may not be a good guy. He knows he may be a very, very bad man.

Jonah is not alone, though. In the house not far from the body pit is a rattled group of amnesiac survivors, all of whom are trying to puzzle their way through the gory evidence to figure out what the hell is happening to them.

There is one other film that clearly inspired Open Grave, but to mention it by name would be to give away too much because the grim clues, anxious sleuthing and varying possibilities keep this film suspenseful and queasyingly entertaining.

Copley, whose career has been an act of diminishing returns since his magnificent feature film debut in District 9, offers a solid, grounded turn here. His characterization evolves as his character’s experiences demand, and Copley conveys the proper instincts at each point in Jonah’s quest for survival.

Screenwriters Chris and Eddie Borey take the cabin in the woods premise and layer it with numerous additional horror tropes to pull together a surprisingly engaging picture. It’s full of grim twists and imaginative surprises….until it isn’t.

Lopez-Gallego keeps his storytelling one step ahead of the audience for most of the journey, but when we catch up and are given the big reveal, the film has too little left to offer. It then falls back on nothing more than standard horror fare, providing an unfittingly clichéd ending to what had been a clever braiding of familiar threads.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

Hope Madden and George Wolf … get it?