Tag Archives: Brandon Thomas

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Wrong Place, Wrong Time

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Bad Hombres

by Brandon Thomas

Darkly funny neo-noirs hit my cinematic sweet spot more often than not. The satisfaction of laughing at outrageous bursts of violence or complex plans that go awry is second to none. And throughout these entertaining narratives are classic aesthetic tropes that give filmmakers the opportunity to lean into equally satisfying visuals.

While the plot of Bad Hombres never enters complex territory, the characters and genre beats are more than enough to make up for it. 

Felix (Diego Tinoco) has just arrived in the U.S. from Ecuador. Looking to send money home to his impoverished family, Felix and his cousin go to the local hardware store in the hopes that they can pick up work as day laborers. After his cousin is picked for a job but he isn’t, Felix is approached by a twitchy Australian (Luke Hemsworth, TV’s Westworld, Next Goal Wins) with an offer for an easy day’s work. Also on the job is gruff handyman Alfonso (Hemky Madera, Satanic Hispanics, Spider-Man: Homecoming).

Felix and Alfonso quickly realize the gig is more than basic labor after arriving to the job site to find several bodies and the Australian’s wounded partner (Paul Johansson, TV’s One Tree Hill).

Early on, Bad Hombres feels like it’s going to be your standard direct-to-streaming action thriller. The title alone doesn’t do much to dispel that initial gut reaction, either. However, once Hemsworth’s borderline lunatic character appears on screen, the dynamic shifts ever so slightly in favor of something a bit more interesting – and dare I say, chaotic. Director John Stalberg Jr. wisely paces himself and lets the crazy of Bad Hombres blossom naturally. 

While it’s fair to say that Bad Hombres is a lower budget film, that never really comes across on screen. Stalberg’s direction is methodical and focused with a strong emphasis on visual storytelling. Despite having moments of explosive action, the film mostly consists of scenes of people having conversations. Even in these more “mundane” moments, the film’s energy never drops.

Along with Stalberg’s direction, the other secret ingredient in Bad Hombres is the cast. Madera is especially notable as the unapproachable Alfonso. As the film progresses and the layers of Alfonso’s backstory is revealed, Madera’s performance becomes so much more nuanced and exciting.

Hemsworth is having a blast playing a murderous madman who likes to portray himself as more politically progressive than he probably is. Even the always reliable Thomas Jane (The Punisher, The Mist), Tyrese Gibson (Fast & the Furious series), and Nick Cassavettes (best known for directing The Notebook) pop up in supporting roles. 

Bad Hombres is a lean and mean bit of modern day neo-noir that manages to deliver well past its budget and defy expectations all at the same time.

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Violent Fantasies

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ClearMind

by Brandon Thomas

With Clear Mind, director Rebecca Eskreis and writer Seanea Kofoed craft a darkly comedic tale of revenge while also poking fun at new age therapy.

After losing her daughter in a freak drowning accident, Nora (Rebecca Creskoff) finds herself adrift in grief. Her marriage over and dropped from her friend group, Nora seeks solace in a new form of virtual reality therapy. In the virtual world, Nora gets to exact revenge against the family and friends who have wronged her. Unfortunately the violence doesn’t stay virtual. 

Despite presenting itself as a horror thriller, Clear Mind is surprising light on frights. As the carnage begins to splash across the screen later in the film, it’s only after Eskreis has subjected the audience to round after round of uncomfortable confrontations between Nora and her former friends. While the kills and gore gags might not wow horror fiends, the tension and seat-squirming anxiety created in the lead up more than makes up for it. 

Despite being high-concept, Clear Mind is not a plot heavy film. The bulk of the movie features characters simply talking to one another around a table. It’s a testament to Kofoed’s writing that while the movie is overly chatty, it’s never boring. Only when the movie stops to propel the plot forward does Clear Mind stumble.

Eskreis and Kofoed’s commentary on therapy and the people found in Nora’s friend group is so well established through character relationships that any push to highlight it through plot seems disingenuous and clunky. The genre hook of the movie feels like the part the filmmakers were the least interested in.

Despite somewhat pulling punches with its genre elements, Clear Mind is still a well written jab at pseudo-science and the people in its orbit.

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So Hot

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Everyone Will Burn

by Brandon Thomas

Ten years after her bullied son died by suicide, Maria (Macarena Gomez) looks to end her own life on a lonely bridge in the Spanish countryside. Before she can make the decision, Maria is approached by a small girl covered in soot and dirt. The girl, Lucia (Sofia Garcia) has achondroplasia, which is a form of dwarfism and also the same condition Maria’s son had. As Maria and Lucia’s bond intensifies, so does Lucia’s desire to rid the small town of the people who tormented Maria’s son and have continued to antagonize his suffering mother. 

Director David Hebrero throws a lot at the wall with Everyone Will Burn and amazingly, most of it sticks. Most prominently is the exploration of how people with certain mysterious health conditions are treated as “other” or even “evil”. It’s an ugly part of humanity we all believe to be in the past, but Hebrero puts the spotlight on how fear and misunderstanding can bring out the worst in even the most well-intentioned people. 

Hebrero’s visual language is hypnotic and often dream-like throughout. As Lucia dispatches members of the community (the highlight being the opening few minutes that leaves a policeman engulfed in flames), the nightmarish events taking place are fully realized through the expert camerawork. Similar to American filmmaker Ari Aster, Hebrero wrings a copious amount of tension out of seemingly mundane scenes around a dinner table or after a funeral. These are the scenes that left me squirming in my seat – not the ones involving carnage. 

Gomez is mesmerizing as the haunted Maria. There’s a lot of emotional weight to this performance and Gomez seamlessly transfers Maria’s grief and guilt from earlier in the movie, to wrath and righteous anger in the back half. It’s a performance so captivating that, despite Maria’s spiral into bloody vengeance, you can’t help but cheer her on. 

Everyone Will Burn starts strong and never lets its foot off of the gas pedal for the entire 2 hour running time. Visually, emotionally, and viscerally, this is a film that will stand tall and proud alongside the other excellent horror films of 2023.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi_XW8YMYMQ

Nightmares Film Festival

The Beast of Walton St.

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by Brandon Thomas

A good creature feature is hard to do on an indie budget. Many filmmakers have tried – and failed spectacularly – to bring monsters to life with little money and even worse, little imagination. The Beast of Walton Street bucks that trend by delivering thrilling monster mayhem and a steady supply of wit and heart. 

In a nameless Ohio town, a beast is roaming the Christmas decorated streets and picking off the most vulnerable: the unhoused. Friends Constance (Athena Murzda) and Sketch (Mia Jones) live on the fringes of society – barely scraping by and living in an abandoned auto repair shop. As the two notice more and more of the city’s at-risk residents disappearing, they decide to take matters into their own hands and defend their town from the ravenous beast. 

There’s a palpable level of energy that flows through the entirety of The Beast of Walton Street. Director Dusty Austen’s competency behind the camera is evident and admirable. The level of care and skill shown toward the craft of filmmaking is immediately recognizable in the editing, blocking, lighting, and shot composition. Craft is something that unfortunately falls to the wayside in many indie films, but in The Beast of Walton Street it’s on full display.

Austen is wisely economical when it comes to showing the titular beast (which is actually a werewolf). How Austen chose to shoot and edit around the beast is truly impressive. This reviewer was reminded of Ridley Scott’s Alien on more than one occasion. The ferocity of the werewolf is never lost on the viewer and so much of that is due to Austen’s confident handling of craft.

On the flip-side, the human element of Beast of Walton Street is just as impressive. While Murzda carries the film as the lead, both she and Jones have a delightfully charming chemistry that makes the beast-less scenes just as fun. While neither actor has a long resume (yet!), their comfort and flexibility in front of the camera is evident. 

The Beast of Walton Street doesn’t reinvent the werewolf wheel, but what it does is offer up an Amblin-esque punk rock creature feature, and that is more than enough for me.

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Put to Pasture

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Herd

by Brandon Thomas

To give their crumbling relationship one last shot, Jamie (Ellen Adair) and Alex (Mitzi Akaha) head into the wilderness for a weekend of camping. After a canoeing accident leaves Alex injured, the two make their way out of the woods in search of medical help. Instead, the couple finds that society in their immediate area has crumbled due to a localized outbreak. Infected people are roaming the countryside, murdering and spreading the infection. 

The idea of a zombie movie with a message feels like a drinking game at this moment in time. Take your first drink when the surprised heroes stumble upon the outbreak already in full effect. Toss back that second drink when the movie muses that – gasp – mankind might be the real monster. Then make sure you have a hangover in the morning by polishing off the six-pack when one of the main characters hides that they’ve been bitten or scratched by the infected. Movies in this subgenre are basically about checking boxes at this point, and Herd is unfortunately no different. 

The film opens promisingly enough by focusing on Jamie and Alex’s relationship. The two actors are more than up for the challenge even if the writing isn’t. Both Adair and Akaha handle the emotional tension with ease well before anything horrific begins. It’s a shame that the film becomes too preoccupied with 3 or 4 other plot threads later in the film to truly give these characters their due. 

Herd never quite knows what it wants to do other than offer up reheated ideas and sequences from better films. The drama within the human survivors is telegraphed a mile away – or longer depending on how many seasons of The Walking Dead you’ve seen. Even the zombies – or infected? – feel like a much too recent rip-off of The Last of Us. The lack of originality makes for the worst kind of horror movie: a boring one.

Director Steven Pierce does at least deliver an aesthetically pleasing film. It’s well-shot, the assembled cast is professional, and Herd even has a few decent action sequences. However, a polished exterior isn’t enough to hide a script full of incomplete thoughts. 

The one bright spot is the inclusion of rising genre favorite Jeremy Holm (The Ranger, Brooklyn 45). Holm’s presence in the film produces certain audience assumptions early on, so it’s doubly satisfying when the character ends up being one of the more morally upright in the movie. 
With a half-baked script that relies too heavily on decades-old ideas, Herd is another recent zombie movie that’s D.O.A.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GqJoi4r31E

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Work Hard, Love Hard

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Fair Play

by Brandon Thomas

Emily (Phoebe Dynever of Bridgerton) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich of Solo: A Star Wars Story) are several years into a whirlwind romance. Despite being madly in love – and newly engaged to boot – they have to be careful about how public they are with their relationship. See, Emily and Luke work for a cutthroat hedgefund firm where relationships among staff are frowned upon. After Emily earns a valued promotion in the firm – and also finds herself Luke’s boss – things between the young couple take a dramatic turn for the worse.

Workplace gender politics have been explored on film for decades and through many different lenses and genres. Films like His Girl Friday, 9 to 5, and Norma Rae all used the interplay between the sexes to craft timeless stories. Some films showed more interest than others in actually commenting on the complexities of these relationships in a place of work. Most, however, just mined it for obvious dramatic or comedic content. In more modern times, movies like Fair Play attempt to make a more complex statement on the mixing of personal life and work life and often from the perspective of female filmmakers. 

So much of Fair Play’s success or failure rides on the relationship between Dynever and Ehrenreich. Thankfully, both bring their A game and end up absolutely sizzling on the screen. There’s a lived-in element to their relationship that feels genuine and passionate. 

Equal attention must be given to writer/director Chloe Domont’s intense screenplay. Her patience as both a writer and director pays dividends in many of the film’s longer scenes – allowing the actors and the writing to shine concurrently. For most of Fair Play’s running time, the story never outpaces the characters and that’s a testament to Domont’s handling of the narrative.

While not at all flashy, Domont’s direction is specific and has an intriguing point of view. Set amongst the hustle-and-bustle of New York City, there’s never a lingering shot of Manhattan’s gorgeous skyline. The direction is often kept tight and claustrophobic – keeping scenes focused on the characters and the chaos bubbling up around them. 

It’s all the more disappointing when Fair Play stumbles late. The complex drama is jettisoned in favor of a more standard thriller that might’ve starred Michael Douglas sometime in the 1990s. The need to make one of the characters a cliched villain feels tacked on and not spiritually in line with the thoughtful nature of the film’s first two acts. 

Despite a less than thrilling conclusion, the majority of Fair Play is a taut drama that puts character before plot.

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A Time to Kill

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Aporia

by Brandon Thomas

Most time travel movies don’t get into ethical dilemmas that going into the past – or future – might cause. The plot is usually too confusing anyway so adding moral problems to the mix might send audiences screaming from the theaters. With Aporia, director Jared Moshe makes the ethics of time travel the centerpiece of the movie and to riveting results. 

It’s been 8 months since Sophie (Judy Greer of 13 Going on 30, Ant-Man, and 2018’s Halloween) lost her husband, Mal (Edi Gathegi of X-Men: First Class and Gone Baby Gone) to a drunk driver. Mal’s loss has had a devastating impact on Sophie and her daughter Riley (Faithe Herman). As the two try to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives, Mal’s close friend Jabir (Payman Maadi) confides in Sophie that he has been working on a device that could potentially bring Mal back but that it would involve killing someone else in the past. 

Aporia slowly reveals its cards, or genre trappings, if you will. Stylistically the film skews closer to an indie drama than it does sci-fi. This is also the film’s greatest strength. As Sophie and Jabir’s changes to the past take form in the present, it’s not through fancy CGI set-pieces. Clever changes in production design or the cast’s appearance are utilized to showcase the ripple effect in time. These easy gags help keep the film grounded. Moshe refuses to get lost in the complex mechanics of the story, instead leaning into the characters and the roller coaster of emotions they ride through the film. 

The deeper Aporia questions the ethics of changing time, the more interesting the film becomes. Using these characters to ask complex questions about grief and responsibility was clearly where Moshe felt most inspired when making the film. Movies use the scenario of going back in time to kill baby Hitler as the ultimate moral time travel question. Aporia theorizes that this question – and many like it – doesn’t always have simple answers or solutions.

Greer continues to show that she deserves to be seen as more than “Hey, that girl!” Her relatability and charm help keep the character lighter than the subject matter might have allowed. Like the character of Sophie herself, Greer delicately dances between emotions – sometimes in the same scene. Given the small size of the cast, the chemistry between the core three is important and both Gathegi and Maadi also bring a natural gravitas to the film. 

Aporia asks a lot of interesting and important questions but it’s the kind of film that isn’t necessarily interested in following through with answers. Here that isn’t a detriment as the journey through asking those questions makes for one of the smartest time travel films in recent memory.

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Time and Again

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Brightwood

by Brandon Thomas

We’ve all been stuck at a dinner or party with that one couple that seemingly hates one another. The snide remarks, uncomfortable body language, and icy stares create a tense environment that’s almost tangible. Now, imagine that this couple are the only two characters in a 90 minute horror movie. It would be easy to root for their eventual demise, but through clever plotting and character arcs, Brightwood manages to circumvent early assumptions. 

Things are not going well for Jen (Dana Berger) and Dan (Max Woertendyke). Dan’s embarrassed himself – and mostly Jen – at a party the night before, and the hostility between the couple is at a fever pitch. That he’s tagged along on her morning run has only made Jen all the more angry. As Dan tries to match Jen’s pace – and beg for forgiveness along the way – the two slowly realize that their surroundings keep repeating and that odd-looking – but familiar –  strangers are appearing to the both of them. 

Writer/Director Dane Elcar takes his time getting to the genre trappings in Brightwood. The deteriorating relationship between Jen and Dan takes up the bulk of the film’s first act. It’s a portion that may test a lot of viewers as the rage and desperation radiating from the couple showcases two people at their lowest. That Berger and Woertendyke are so good at selling these heightened characters only makes the latter half of the film all the better. 

Elcar keeps things character-centric even as the events around the couple get weirder. Brightwood isn’t a plot heavy film. The strange events happening to Jen and Dan are never explained. The fascinating part of the film is witnessing their arc not only in “real time”, but also through various versions of themselves that come and go.

Things get devilishly funny and violent as the film races (ahem) to its climax. What could’ve at first been a talky relationship drama ends in blood-soaked mayhem by the time the end credits begin the role. Dead Alive this movie ain’t, but Elcar doesn’t shy away from the carnage.

The tonal shifts never feel jarring or unnatural, which is a testament not only to Brightwood’s script but also the actors bringing it to life. 

Brightwood is a clever addition to the time travel subgenre. Instead of getting lost in the mechanics of paradoxes and and alternate timelines, the film wisely keeps its eye on the two characters experiencing this horrifying event.

The Screening Room

Screening Room: Meg 2, TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, Shortcomings, Final Cut, Night of the 12th & More

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TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, Meg 2 The Trench, Shortcomings, Final Cut, The Night of the 12th, Rub, Mob Land, Bad City

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Tainted Love

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Rub

by Brandon Thomas

As disheveled loner Neal (Micah Spayer) sits at his work desk scanning through dating site profiles, it’s hard not to immediately think of other cinematic losers. Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, One Hour Photo’s Seymour Parrish, and Joker’s titular character spring to mind first. However, as Christopher’s Fox feature debut Rub plays out, our expectations are slowly thrown out the window and the film unfolds into something completely different.

Neal leads an isolated life. His coworkers don’t take him seriously, his relationship with his family seems to exist only over the phone, and any attempt at a romantic relationship is dismissed. At the urging of a co-worker, Neal visits a tawdry massage parlor where he meets Perla (Jennifer Figuereo). As Neal’s humiliation at the hands of his co-workers boils over, he makes another visit to the parlor – a visit that will wind up with both Neal and Perla on the run.

The way Rub nimbly dances between sub-genres really allows it to surprise. Just when you think it’s going to become Maniac, the film veers off into Taxi Driver territory. However before Rub can fully commit to homaging Scorsese’s anarchic opus, the film takes another hard right into Badlands. Director Fox never lets his film get comfortable in any of these genre-defining areas. Instead, the tone and tenor of the film follows the characters and their journey, not the other way around.

Spayer has the flashier role of the two roles, and he handles himself quite well, but the real fireworks happen when both Spayer and Figuereo are sharing the screen. They are an unlikely pair but their vulnerability shines through to something deeper and more meaningful. Both characters have been discarded by those around them – to be used only as things of either enjoyment or ridicule. It’s a pairing that begs for a happy ending, but the mounting suspense and tension only point to one inevitable outcome.

Rub is the kind of character-centric genre outing that evokes the electric and gratifying cinema of the 1970s. Sure, it’s a low-budget film that’s rough around the edges, but any shortcomings on a purely production level are soon erased by the commitment to surprising storytelling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL–eESO_y0