Not too far into The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter suggests that Buffalo Bill’s behavior seems “desperately random.”
Director Gore Verbinski’s latest, A Cure for Wellness, feels desperately creepy – and far too random.
His film is a little bit Kubrick, a little more Cronenberg, a touch Scorsese and an awful lot Burton. Maybe that’s why it’s so long – it takes Verbinski a while to squeeze all those other people’s vision into his movie.
What’s it about? How avaricious humanity’s lost its way, how an ambitious corporate cog travels to a spa in the Swiss alps to retrieve his boss, and eels.
All of it amounts to a bunch of nothing, but man, the package is great.
Dane DeHaan plays Lockhart, relentless executive headed for the top. When the firm sends him to a “wellness center” in hopes of retrieving a missing CEO, Lockhart sees his chance for the big time. But, like Scorsese’s Shutter Island, things are not as they seem.
Verbinski hasn’t been as visually unleashed in years, and his picture is very pretty, very creepy and endlessly stylized.
Beneath that distracting layer of polish is a hodgepodge – a mainly incoherent assortment of unrelated ideas. A Cure for Wellness slides images at you, each of them meant to conjure a particular feeling, but it never lays out any cohesive narrative to bring them together.
And, my God it’s so long.
On the surface is a familiar story of a man who is not a patient at a sanitarium becoming a patient against his will. And then, of course, is the mystery he must solve concerning his CEO – unless he’s going mad in the process? Mwa ha ha ha ha….
Plus some confluence of vaguely Nazi imagery (this is the whitest film you will ever see), a bit of a creature feature, odds and ends that feel like folklore horror, flashbacks and/or dream sequences, and a dance scene that could be straight out of Harry Potter. (The fact that Lucius Malfoy – Jason Isaacs – plays the villain doesn’t hinder that notion.)
Random creepy images grow tiresome after 80 or so minutes. Unmercifully, A Cure for Wellness has another sixty minutes to go, without a coherent thread or satisfying payoff. Or any payoff, really.
Two Thomas the Tank Engine writers team up with fledgling director Caradog James to talk of witches, urban legends, estranged children and doors.
They just don’t do it very well.
Do you ever watch a horror film where a storyline leads to a jump scare, and then characters move on with their lives as if no spindly legged giant demon woman just crawled out of their closet toward them? They just go to the next scene?
Frustrating, right?
Welcome to Don’t Knock Twice.
The film follows a recovered addict turned successful sculptor (Katee Sackhoff) as she tries to regain custody of the teen daughter she gave up years ago. Chloe (Lucy Boynton – who was so good in last year’s Sing Street) wants nothing to do with her mum until buddy Danny goes missing and Chloe suspects the long dead neighborhood witch is to blame.
A mishmash of horror tropes follows as Chloe and her mother believe idiocy and do ridiculous things.
There’s a Baba Yaga – nice! Now there’s a fresh idea.
There’s also a beautiful foreigner spinning hocusy pocusy nonsense, which is straight out of every “her husband left town and something supernatural is happening” piece of garbage ever to be set to film.
Lucy Boynton has talent. Katee Sackhoff, as far as Don’t Knock Twice exposes, does not. Her flat delivery never suggests the maternal devotion meant to drive her character’s actions and her chemistry with the rest of the cast is nonexistent.
The main trouble, however, is James. He cannot create a cohesive mythology, which is especially important in supernatural horror. Very little holds together and even less holds your attention.
It’s a mystery, you see – one that routinely mentions doors without ever really doing anything with that; one that returns repeatedly to clues just to pretend they mean something different this time; one that asks you to accept that a conscious human could find a box of evidence in her own art studio and not ask, “Hey, how did this get here?!”
You’ve seen the trailers for The Great Wall, right?
It looks terrible, doesn’t it?
It’s not.
It’s not good – let’s not get crazy. But I was expecting Warcraft bad – maybe worse – and The Great Wall is a borderline-passable piece of monster-laden eye candy.
Matt Damon plays William, a bow-for-hire who travels with a band of ne’er-do-wells into China seeking the legendary black powder.
Dreams of selling this weapon in the West keeps the Irish…Scottish…what kind of accent is Damon attempting?And why does it only show up in about 25% of the film?
Anyway, William and his mercenary friend Tovar (Pedro Pascal) must eventually surrender to the color-coordinated forces within The Great Wall – who actually have better things to do.
After that, director Yimou Zhang (House of Flying Daggers, Raise the Red Lantern) does what he can to visually wow an audience and draw attention away from the leaden screenplay.
Zhang is a nearly unparalleled visual showman, and though Great Wall never approaches the style of his best efforts, the aesthetic will keep your attention and create wonder. Vivid color and rhythm drive a joyous spectacle of monster carnage once the CGI swarms come calling.
And then we’re back inside, with one-dimensional characters stumbling through obviousness about greed, trust and teamwork.
Zhang takes advantage of 3D as few filmmakers have. The approach rarely serves a larger purpose than to transport and amaze, but those who come to The Great Wall seeking a larger purpose should prepare for crushing disappointment.
The generally strong Damon struggles with more than the accent. Though glib humor enlivens several scenes with Pascal, the deadly serious tone the film takes and the broadly drawn characterizations of the Chinese warriors make chemistry or human drama impossible.
But damn, look at those hills and swirling bodies, the acrobatics of monster mayhem.
It may be that the only thing The Great Wall did right was to swap out director Edward Zwick (associated early in development with the film) for Zhang, because if you weren’t so distracted by how glorious this film looks, it might really be as bad as the trailers made it out to be.
Keanu Reeves is a cyborg. He’s seen human behavior – he just can’t replicate it very believably. It’s a reasonable theory, isn’t it?
But every once in a while he lands on a role where acting like an actual human just doesn’t matter – like the surprise 2014 hit John Wick. If you enjoyed that splashy bit of violence and canine love, you’re likely to appreciate its strangely anticipated sequel, John Wick: Chapter 2.
The Keyser Soze of international hitmen, Wick was brought out of retirement, you’ll remember, when a half-assed Russian mobster stole his dog and his car. And if you could make it through the maudlin, sentimental crap and focus just on that kickass hotel shit, it was a mildly entertaining film despite Reeves’s absence of talent.
Once out of retirement, though, Wick has a tough time getting back out of the biz.
Chapter 2 picks up right where the previous installment ended. Wick, his beloved if unnamed pit by his side, re-buries the gold coins and weapons of his trade. But Santino D’Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio) requires Wick’s services – and he’s not above doing ill-advised things to acquire his compliance.
Director Chad Stahelski and writer Derek Kolstad return, both improving on their previous effort by streamlining the story, limiting sentimentality and spending more time exploring what was cool the first time – The Continental.
Turns out there’s a mirror hotel in Rome, site of Wick’s new gig. There’s also a high-powered organization of the world’s most influential criminals as well as an armed, underground network masquerading as New York’s homeless.
Basically, 4 out of every 5 people walking the street are trained killers. Who’s paying for all this?
Stahelski ups his game with the action sequences. Wick’s movements are without ego – they are clean and efficient, which is appropriate. And he likes to shoot the knees out, so points for that. Stahelski films with flair – fascinating framing, often beautifully backlit. It’s fun.
Still, there’s the problem of Reeves’s acting. (I’m sure he’s a very nice man.) Stahelski does what he can by pairing his lead with slightly more agile actors to buoy the few scenes with dialog. The always-welcome Ian McShane returns. Peter Serafinowicz and Franco Nero make tangy appearances, along with one co-star who would have been a fun surprise had his face not been splashed all over the trailer.
Sure, there are problems – besides the dialog. Why are the bad guys all such bad shots? Where are all the witnesses? Eye-rolling contrivance follows ludicrous convenience, but these guys brought their shootin’ boots.
It’s not like you don’t know what you’re in for here.
Space – the weepy YA film’s final frontier. Hopefully.
Asa Butterfield (Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children) is Gardner, the first child born on Mars – even if it was an accident. But he’s lonely and isolated and apparently we can build a community on Mars but we can’t get them contemporary movies.
Gardner’s lonely! He’s angsty! He’s smitten with Tulsa, the bored, hardened foster kid he met online (Britt Robertson – Tomorrowland).
Wouldn’t it be dreamy if they met? Maybe fell in love? I’m sure each one of them could appreciate how deeply special the other one is, even if no one else notices it.
The Space Between Us is harmless enough. Butterfield and his big blue eyes make Gardner’s exploration of Earth sweet, and solid performances from a veteran supporting cast including Gary Oldman and Carla Gugina give what life they can to the plodding, predictable plot.
The film, which screams of adolescent literature, is actually an original piece of writing by Allen Loeb. Loeb most recently brought us the excruciating Collateral Beauty. If you haven’t seen it, don’t.
Schmaltz and emotional manipulation – these are some of the tricks employed to draw your attention away from the utterly ludicrous storyline. Unfortunately, they don’t mask the lack of chemistry between the leads.
This is a love story without sparks, a potential tragedy without an emotional pull. The payoff feels not only predetermined but unearned.
Is it as bad as If I Stay or The Fault in Our Stars? Why, no. The Space Between Us mercifully avoids the truly maudlin. But there is enough overlap in theme that it feels more like a sanitized version of those tear jerkers than it does an original idea.
Releasing a film without a pre-screening for critics is usually a bad sign. A mid-February studio release is never good.
You know what else isn’t good? Rings.
If you’re wondering whether Samara’s story disappeared with the last VCR, puzzle no longer. Sadly, it did not. Indie hipsters at a garage sale take home some vintage equipment, find an old VHS tape inside and watch it.
If you’ll recall, watching said video of freaky images condemns the viewer to death within a week. The images relate to the accursed life of, in the English language films, a little girl named Samara.
Gore Verbinski’s 2002 The Ring managed to do two remarkable things. One: it surpassed its Japanese-language original (Hideo Nakata’s Ringu) in quality. Two: it was a deeply frightening PG-13 movie.
But Verbinski has talent, as does his cast, most notably 2-time Oscar nominee Naomi Watts. Rings director F. Javier Gutiérrez is playing without those kind of all-stars.
At this film’s heart is still that Scooby-doo mystery to solve that is the foundation of nearly every ghost story – and Samara’s tale is essentially that. In this episode – which forgets 2005’s The Ring 2 ever existed – two college freshmen do the sleuthing.
The leads are, as far as I can tell, made entirely of wood or wheat toast. Matilda Lutz is Julia the Bland, devoted girlfriend and courageous ghost hunter. Her boyfriend Holt (Alex Roe – yawn) participated in a wild psychological experiment led by his professor Gabriel (Johnny Galecki) – garage sale junkie. That experiment leaves Holt with 7 days to live…and his time is almost up.
The film’s running time isn’t, though. Oh, no. Holt’s fate is revealed and we still have at least 3/4 of the movie to suffer through.
Sadly, the genuinely talented Vincent D’Onofrio gets dragged into this at a certain point, his only real contribution is to remind the audience what acting actually looks like.
Pablo Larraín is having quite a year. In theaters already with his insightful vision of grief, celebrity and politics, Jackie, the Chilean filmmaker returns with a page from his own nation’s history books – Neruda.
Again eschewing the traditional biopic structure, Neruda drops us into the life of Chile’s most beloved poet and most famous Communist as political tides are changing. Post WWII, Pablo Neruda’s outspoken support of his party puts him on the wrong side of his government.
Though Neruda (Luis Gnecco) became the voice of resistance in Chile and around the world, his own life hardly mirrored the communist principles he championed. A poet, a lover and a man of grand excess, he spoke eloquently of a struggle he refused to live himself.
A fascinating set of conundrums, Neruda is a hard man to pin down cinematically – so Larraín doesn’t exactly try.
When Chile calls for Neruda’s arrest, we follow him underground, as does Inspector Oscar Peluchonneau (Gael García Bernal – scene stealer).
Here is where Larrain, working from Guillermo Calderon’s inventive screenplay, gets a bit experimental to better serve his subject.
From Peluchonneau’s point of view, the film becomes hard-boiled detective pulp, a narrative device that allows Larraín to better explore the line between fact and fiction – and poetry.
The investigator becomes the antagonist in Neruda’s imagined persecution, allowing him the mythical martyrdom and drama he feels a man of his greatness deserves.
Gnecco’s performance hits all the right marks, creating a presence that’s simultaneously admirable, aggravating and disappointingly vain. Fine support from Mercedes Morán as Neruda’s longsuffering wife buoys the performance by articulating the effect he had on those around him.
But the fictional Peluchonneau runs away with the film. García Bernal’s oddball incompetent with his own delusions of grandeur brings color to the film as it transports the audience to a more literary landscape.
The conceit doesn’t always work. It often feels too cute. But there are several scenes where reality and fiction collide without a clear winner – one with Morán and a snowy finale, in particular – that elevate the entire project.
Pedro Almodovar brings his two most marked filmmaking styles – the one submerged in the world of women (Volver, for instance), the later of a more Hitchockian note (The Skin I Live In) – and pulls them together in his latest effort, Julieta.
The titular heroine, played at different ages by Emma Suárez and Adriana Ugarte, has a shameful secret – or two. As the film opens, Julieta (Suárez) is packing to leave Madrid for Portugal with her boyfriend, Lorenzo (Darío Grandinetti). But a chance encounter with a childhood friend of her daughter’s convinces Julieta to drop Lorenzo and stay in Madrid, moving instead to the old building where she’d lived for years with her daughter.
We then switch to the story of the younger Julieta (Ugarte), and Almodovar gets all Strangers on a Train with us – even to the point of eventually mentioning the novels of Patricia Highsmith, writer at the core of that Hitchcock classic.
Suárez capably maneuvers Julieta’s emotional landscape. She’s a woman pretending to be fine, keeping her true nature from those around her and attempting to hide it from herself. The performance is haunted, edged with remorse.
Ugarte stumbles, though. It doesn’t help that she and Suárez look so little alike, or that the flashback storyline is designed to be a thriller – an ill-fitting choice for the material.
Almodovar built the screenplay on three inter-connected shorts by Canadian writer Alice Munro, layering her words with an urgent score, suggesting dangerous thrills, and dialog-heavy close ups that feel more like daytime drama.
For all the clashing colors, discordant images and creepy housekeepers, Hitchcock and Munro just don’t fit together well.
Munro’s writing tends to lull you with quite unveilings. Julieta may be Almodovar’s attempt to spice that up by way of homage, score and framing, but it feels like a trick. His direction leads us to believe we’re watching some thriller wrought with dangerous secrets. We are not. This chicanery undercuts the power of Munro’s meditation on guilt while it all but guarantees the dissatisfaction of a misled audience.
The final result, though often gorgeous and compelling, is a bit of thematic chaos that doesn’t work.
It is that time again – the time of year where the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honors the best of the best, and we honor the worst of those best.
Yes, Skeletons in the Closet: Oscar Edition is back. It’s the day we dig around in Oscar nominee closets to find those low budget, horror bones hiding behind the fancier schmancier stuff.
And we can always find them. The great Viola Davis wasted her talent in the Rear Window/Fright Night knock-off Disturbia. The also-great Michael Shannon spent some time early in his career in the actually quite decent Dead Birds, while Ryan Gosling co-starred in the intriguingly titled Frankenstein and Me. Meanwhile, Octavia Spencer slummed it up in Pulse.
But there’s worse – and yet, somehow better – material to discuss. Here are our favorite not-good horror hiding in these A-listers’ closets.
5. Denzel Washington: The Bone Collector (1999)
Denzel! Just a year after the serial Oscar nominee and winner made the dark action thriller Fallen – not good, but not bad – he returned to the land of CSI with The Bone Collector. Must’ve had an itch to scratch.
In Phillip Noyce’s grim police procedural, Washington plays a quadriplegic homicide detective helping beat cop Angelina Jolie track down a serial killer who’s leaving grisly victims and frustrating clues.
Plus, Queen Latifah!
The film is bland, Noyce never able to focus on a physically immobile hero and still create an exciting pace. And yet, Washington commands your attention no matter how listless the scene or unlikely the rest of the casting.
4. Michelle Williams, Halloween 20: H20 (1998)
It’s been 20 years since Michael Myers escaped his confines and slaughtered all those people in Haddonfield. Thousands of miles away in a private school in Northern California, Laurie Strode and her brother come face to face again.
Who was excited? Back in 1998, we were. Jamie Lee Curtis was back, and we were allowed to forget Halloweens 3 – 6 ever happened. Plus – though he’s no John Carpenter – director Steve Minor does have a history with horror, and Curtis’s iconic mom Janet Leigh popped by.
The result was slick, and boasted a great deal more talent than the others: Alan Arkin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and 2017 Oscar nom Michelle Williams. The 4-time Oscar nominee was saddled with the one-dimensional sweetheart role, and though you’d never have known she’d one day be among the most talented performers in film, you knew she was too good for this movie.
3. Jeff Bridges: The Vanishing (1993)
In 1988, co-writer/director George Sluizer unleashed a daring, meticulous and devastating film on an unsuspecting world. Spoorloos asked you to follow a grieving boyfriend down a rabbit hole – one with no escape.
Five years later, Sluizer returned to the scene of the crime, current Oscar-nominee Jeff Bridges in tow. Bridges plays just an ordinary guy indulging a particular fantasy. Unfortunately, Bernrd-Pierre Donnadieu played the same ordinary guy to far, far more believable and therefore chilling effect back in ’88.
Worse still, the fantasy itself is gutted with an “America’s not ready for the real thing” ending that just makes you want to kick a guy. Infuriating!
2. Viggo Mortensen: The Prophecy (1995)
This is one of those bad movies that is fun to watch. Somehow the unusually talent-stacked cast doesn’t feel wasted as much as it does weirdly placed.
There is no question this film belongs to Christopher Walken – as do all films in which he graces the screen. His natural weirdness and uncanny comic timing make the film more memorable than it deserves to be, but when it comes to sinister, Oscar nominee Viggo Mortensen cuts quite a figure as Lucifer.
Unseemly, gorgeous and evil, he seethes through his few scenes and leaves the celluloid scorched.
1. Casey affleck: Soul Survivors (2001)
Good God, this one’s bad.
Writer/director Steve Carpenter – auteur behind such classics as The Dorm that Dripped Blood – somehow convinced talent to join this cast. Who? A post-American Beauty Wes Bentley, an established Luke Wilson, and pre-Oscar nominee Casey Affleck.
Affleck stars as the tragically dead (or is he?) boyfriend of Cassie (Melissa Sagemiller) an awkward runner. (Yes, it’s tangential to any reasonable conversation about the film, but she runs in nearly every scene and I have never seen a more awkward runner.)
Who’s alive? Who’s dead? What’s happening? Well, in case you’ve been lobotomized and can’t keep up, luckily Father Jude (Wilson) will literally explain everything.
This is actually the first question my friend was asked in an interview for an internship with a meat packing plant, but it’s also a good piece of self-reflection before you sit down to We Are the Flesh.
First time feature writer/director Emiliano Rocha Minter announces his presence with authority – and a lot of body fluids – in this carnal horror show.
A hellish vision if ever there was one, the film opens on a filthy man with a lot of packing tape. He’s taking different types of nastiness, taping it inside a plastic drum to ferment, and eventually turning it into a drink or a drug. Hard to tell – loud drum banging follows, as well as hallucinations and really, really deep sleep.
During that sleep we meet two siblings, a teenaged brother and sister who’ve stumbled into the abandoned building where the hermit lives.
What happens next? What doesn’t?! Incest, cannibalism, a lot of shared body fluids of every manner, rape, maybe some necrophilia – depending on your perspective – a lot of stuff, none of it pleasant.
Minter has created a fever dream as close to hell as anything we’ve seen since last year’s Turkish nightmare Baskin.
Had Minter not found an anchor for the overwhelmingly lurid imagery, his movie would have felt like little more than self-indulgent horror porn (like literally horror and porn).
Noé Hernández conjures a goblin-like image, his unblinking eyes and demonic grin permanent fixtures as he mentors his teenage charges in his repellant ways. The boy he’s dubbed Skeletor (Diego Gamaleil) resists, though his consistently surprising sister (María Evoli) is less inhibited.
There’s little chance you’ll watch this film in its entirety without diverting your eyes – whether your concern is the problematic sexuality or just the onslaught of viscous secretions, the screen is a slurry of shit you don’t really want to see.
What opens as a post-apocalyptic hellscape eventually morphs into a social comment on Mexico City’s disposable population, which is both the film’s strength and its weakness.
Unfortunately, though Minter’s movie boasts deeply unnerving ideas and compelling performances, in light of other Mexican filmmakers making social commentaries – Jorge Michel Grau’s brilliant 2010 We Are What We Are, in particular – We Are the Flesh comes up slightly lacking.
