Genuinely funny and exhaustingly brutal, Christopher Smith’s British import Severance offers a mischievous team-building exercise in horror. A handful of would-be execs for global weapons manufacturer Palisade Defense are misled and slaughtered in what they believe to be a mandatory weekend excursion in Hungary to build corporate camaraderie.
Smith and co-writer James Moran’s wickedly insightful script mocks corporate culture as Smith’s direction pays homage to the weirdest assortment of films. The result is an uproarious but no less frightening visit to an area of the world that apparently scares the shit out of us: Eastern Europe. (Think Hostel, The Human Centipede, Borat.)
An epically watchable flick, Severance boasts solid performances, well-placed bear traps and landmines, a flamethrower and an excellent balance of black humor and true horror. To say more would be to give too much away, but rest assured that with every scene Smith and crew generate palpable tension. It erupts with equally entertaining measure in either a good, solid laugh or in a horrible, disfiguring dose of horror. How awesome is that?!
That’s how one climber describes her attempt to survive K2 in The Summit, a documentary that outlines, in gripping fashion, the deadliest day in the history of the world’s second tallest peak.
Everest may reach higher, but experienced mountaineers brand K2, along the border of China and Pakistan, as the most dangerous climb there is, evidenced by a mortality rate greater than that of playing Russian roulette.
In the first two days of August 2008, eleven climbers lost their lives in a series of events that is still not fully understood. Director Nick Ryan weaves together interviews, outstanding reenactments and some thrilling archival footage to put you about as close to the danger as you’ll ever want to be.
Working with skilled doc writer Mark Monroe (The Cove/Chasing Ice), Ryan is not only able to convey the enormity of the challenge, but also the universal themes and human frailties that follow each climber.
While the drama plays out, there are inevitable clashes of risk and responsibility, of sacrifice and reward. When the survivors struggle for explanations, there are conflicting accounts and pointed accusations. As one climber explains, “only the mountain knows.”
The film does struggle with a few occasions of possible confusion, as there are frequent switches in time and location as the climb becomes more perilous.
Those moments aside, The Summit is an engrossing, often pulse-pounding experience that demands a big screen viewing.
The Fifth Estate tries to be a lot of things: a character study, an international thriller, a magnifying glass on the eternally combustible definition of journalism. Had its focus been less fragmented, a powerful film might have emerged.
Back in 2006, an Australian Internet activist launched a website with the goal of sharing classified documents globally by making it impossible to trace sources. He believed he was protecting the whistleblowers. As Oscar Wilde and Julian Assange say: Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth.
Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) was that charismatic “hacktivist”, and he soon collected a handful of loyal underlings, as well as 1.2 million classified documents.
Within months, Assange and crew were in hot water with the US government, among others, as their unfiltered version of journalism begged the question: Are there things that should not be shared with the public?
It’s a fascinating debate centered around an intriguing figure, but director Bill Condon can’t manage what David Fincher made look so easy: tell a socially relevant tale about how technology is revolutionizing our lives, anchor the story with a fascinating yet oh-so-nerdy character, and keep away from the death trap image of a guy at a keyboard. Because The Fifth Estate and The Social Network are essentially the same story.
Sure, no one died because of Facebook, but otherwise, it’s the look-alike tale of a social misfit, his zeal and brains and toxic insecurities, and the friends he hurt in the name of success. But Condon’s story contains a built-in excitement the Zuckerberg story couldn’t hope to reach.
Perhaps Condon put too much faith in screenwriter Josh Singer, a scribe primarily known for work in TV. Singer adapts two nonfiction titles on the topic, which may account for the splintered vision. His script too often tells rather than shows, relies on the most obvious kind of shorthand to explain Assange’s personal baggage, and offers ham-fisted proclamations to drive points home.
Condon doesn’t help matters with unfortunate and thematically misplaced dream sequences.
To his credit, Condon certainly cast the picture well. Cumberbatch owns the film. He is characteristically wonderful, bringing life to the ego, charisma and insecurity that mark a zealot. The yin to his yang, Daniel Bruhl offers his second excellent performance of the season (after his award-worthy turn in Rush) as the level-headed line around Assange’s chaos.
The underused but magnificent Laura Linney and Stanley Tucci also help keep the film entertaining. In fact, the strong performances are reason enough to spend some time with the film, but given the source material, the pull should be more compelling.
Rated R for “an abundance of outrageous gore,” Dead Alive is everything the early Peter Jackson did well. It’s a bright, silly, outrageously gory bloodbath.
Lionel Cosgrove (Timothy Balme) secretly loves shopkeeper Paquita Maria Sanchez (Diana Penalver), but she has eyes for someone less milquetoast. Until, that is, she’s convinced by psychic forces that Lionel is her destiny. Unfortunately, Lionel’s milquetoast-iness comes by way of decades of oppression via his overbearing sadist of a mother, who does not take well to her son’s new outside-the-home interests. Mum follows the lovebirds to a date at the zoo, where she’s bitten (pretty hilariously) by a Sumatran rat-monkey (do not mistake this dangerous creature for a rabid Muppet or misshapen lump of clay).
The bite kills her, but not before she can squeeze pus into some soup and wreak general havoc, which is nothing compared to the hell she raises once she comes back from the dead.
Mama’s boy that he is, Lionel can’t bring himself to do what he must until it is spectacularly too late. He chains up an entirely unwholesome family down the basement, which works out well enough as long as he keeps from being bitten, and keeps conniving Uncle Les (Ian Watkin) out of there.
Braindead is so gloriously over-the-top that nearly anything can be forgiven it. Jackson includes truly memorable images, takes zombies in fresh directions, and crafts characters you can root for. But more than anything, he knows where to point his hoseful of gore, and he has a keen imagination when it comes to just how much damage a lawnmower can do.
As nonsensical, potentially offensive and completely ridiculous as it is, Escape Plan does enough things right to render it more entertaining that you might expect.
Think of it as residing in the Face/Off neighborhood, where a film embraces its outlandishness so convincingly you eventually surrender under the weight of the escapist fun to be had.
Of course, that film had two of the all-time greatest hambones, John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, operating at maximus overacti. Escape Plan has Stallone and Schwarzenegger, two aging action stars trying to prove they still have box office juice.
To its credit, the film doesn’t even address the age factor, even though it is very easy to imagine stars such as Dwayne Johnson and Mark Wahlberg in the lead roles.
Sly is introduced as Ray Breslin, the leading expert in structural security. He routinely puts his skills to the test by assuming the identities of inmates in various prisons and then going full MacGuyver to expose security weaknesses by busting out with little more than toilet paper and a used carton of chocolate milk.
Breslin’s firm gets an outlandishly lucrative offer to test the limits of a…cough, cough…”off the grid,” black-ops type prison in an undisclosed location. Despite concerns from his co-workers, Breslin goes in, realizing almost immediately he’s been set up, and must enlist the help of a mysterious new friend on the inside (Arnold) to break out for reals.
Director Mikael Hafstrom (The Rite/Derailed) wisely chooses to keep matters focused on action and away from any cheesy attempts at tongue in cheek humor. Less successful are his depictions of Muslim inmates and scenes of enhanced interrogation.
Giving the film a “Blackwater” setting may have been an attempt by screenwriters Miles Chapman and Jason Keller to address a timely topic. Instead, they toss the dark realities of torture around so flippantly the film comes dangerously close to making light of the entire issue. Muslim stereotypes don’t help either.
Still, there’s action aplenty amid some clever twists, an effective supporting cast (Amy Ryan, Sam Neill, Vincent D’Onofrio and a surprisingly emotive Jim Caviezel), and Arnold, at least, seems to be having a blast getting back in the saddle.
Beatrice Dalle’s insidious performance is hard to shake. Fearless, predatory, pitiless and able to take an enormous amount of abuse, her nameless character stalks a very, very pregnant Sarah (Alysson Paradis). Sarah lost her husband in a car crash some months back, and now, on the eve of Christmas, she sits, enormous, uncomfortable, and melancholy about the whole business. She’s grown cynical and despondent, more depressed than excited about giving birth in the morning.
Alexandre Bustillo’s film seeks to change her mind, make her want that baby. Because Dalle’s lurking menace certainly wants it. Her black clad silhouette is in the back yard, smoking and stalking – and she has seriously bad plans in mind.
Bustillo and directing partner Julien Maury swing the film from intelligent white collar angst to goretastic bloodfest with ease. The sadistic humor Dalle brings to the performance adds chills, and Paradis’s realistic, handicapping size makes her vulnerability palpable.
The film goes wildly out of control, and by the third act, things are irredeemably out of hand. And yet, this is a 2/3 brilliant effort, a study in tension wherein one woman will do whatever it takes, with whatever utensils are available, to get at the baby still firmly inside another woman’s body.
Jeremy Scahill’s investigation into what the Joint Special Operations Command does while it isn’t taking down bin Laden lands in DVD queues this week. Dirty Wars offers a provocative look at the evolution of the American military from boots on the ground warriors to a management firm handling targeted assassinations. Hell, we even outsource the jobs, and the kill lists, to warlords in Somalia and elsewhere. The documentary wallows in cinematic clichés here and there, but that tweaking of tensions is needless given the bewilderingly fascinating content. It’s a scary look at the likelihood of endless war.
Another eye-opening documentary -that far too few people laid eyes on – is 2010’s Inside Job, director Charles Ferguson’s look at the deregulation, greed, and glorified pyramid schemes behind the most recent Wall Street meltdown.
Ferguson makes complicated issues clear enough to understand without a phD in economics. There are no dramatically staged confrontations, just tough questions to stammering subjects who suddenly decide the interview they’re doing wasn’t a good idea. While this is tough material with plenty of facts, figures, dates and data, Ferguson does his best to keep it from getting too dry. The only thing keeping the film from classic status is a strange decision to have narrator Matt Damon close the film with a preachy sermon by writers Chad Beck and Adam Bolt.
That stumble aside, Inside Job is essential viewing.
John Carpenter’s remake of the 1951 SciFi flick The Thing from Another World is both reverent and barrier-breaking, losing a bit of the original’s Cold War dread, but concocting a thoroughly spectacular tale of icy isolation, contamination and mutation.
A beard-tastic cast portrays the team of scientists on expedition in the Arctic who take in a dog. The dog is not a dog, though. Not really. And soon, in a cut-off wasteland with barely enough interior room to hold all the facial hair, folks are getting jumpy because there’s no knowing who’s not really himself anymore.
This is an amped up body snatcher movie benefitting from some of Carpenter’s most cinema-fluent and crafty direction: wide shots when we need to see the vastness of the unruly wilds; tight shots to remind us of the close quarters with parasitic death inside.
Rob Bottin’s FX, especially for the time, blew minds. That spider head move – woo-hoo!
The story remains taut beginning to end, and there’s rarely any telling just who is and who is not infected by the last reel. You’re as baffled and confined as the scientists.
The film was an inexplicable bomb with audiences and critics alike when it opened, but it’s gone on to become a must see.
Yes, back in ’81, tenderhearted Ash and his beloved Linda – both Michigan State fans – hopped in the old Oldsmobile Delta and headed into the Tennessee woods for a relaxing weekend with buddies Scott and Shelly, and Ash’s bitchy sister Cheryl. Oh, the fun they had…
Flash forward, and a new set of vacationers young enough to be Ash and Linda’s own kids (I mean, had Linda survived the weekend) take up the mantle and chainsaw in Evil Dead, director Fede Alvarez’s update on Raimi’s cult favorite.
What Raimi accomplished on a budget of half a shoestring can’t be understated, but Three Stooges-style splatter is not what Alvarez is after. His reboot lovingly reworks Raimi’s tale, eliminating nearly all the humor but absolutely none of the bloodletting.
The film throws a bit more story and character development at us. Still, we find two couples and one sister holed up in an old cabin, but this time David (Shiloh Fernandez, cute but disappointing), his girlfriend and his buddies are there to help his sister Mia (Jane Levy, exceptional) quit her drug habit.
Though it’s impossible to pick out the contributions of each of the screenwriters updating Raimi’s script, certain elements – like this back story – scream of Diablo Cody, who ingeniously introduces a concept that gives the film potential subtext by way of an unreliable narrator. (Did it all happen this way, or is Mia just insane and detoxing?)
Solid writing and Alvarez’s gleefully indulgent direction allow the film – not only a remake, but a remake of a film that tread the overworn ground of “cabin in the woods horror” – to remain shockingly fresh. This is thanks in part to a handful of inspired tweaks, another handful of very solid performances, and a fearless but never contemptuous- eye for carnage.
From the super-creepy opening sequence, Alverez’s update announces its fondness for the source material and his joyous aspiration to stretch that tale to its fullest, nastiest potential. He also shows a real skill for putting nail guns, machetes, hammers, electric meat slicers, hypodermics, even your standard bathroom mirror to fascinating new uses.
Yes, this is a bad film. It certainly falls into the “so bad it’s good” category, but it’s actually more than that. A seriously subversive film with blatant homosexual undertones, Sleepaway Camp is a bizarre take on the summer camp slasher. It’s also wildly entertaining.
It may be the shocking finale that gave the film its cult status, but it’s writer/director Robert Hilzik’s off-center approach to horror that makes it interesting. Dreamy flashbacks, weirdly gruesome murders, and a creepy (yet somehow refreshing) preoccupation with beefcake separate this one from the pack.
It’s not scary, certainly, but it is all manner of wrong. Aunt Martha – what kind of mad genius is this? The kill sequences are hugely imaginative, and the subversive approach to the entire film makes it hard to believe more people haven’t seen this gem.
There are sequels. They are worth skipping, although the first two boast the casting of Bruce Springsteen’s sister Pamela as the chipper sadist hatcheting her way through campers. So at least you have that.
