Tag Archives: Hope Madden

Pollinator and Predator

The Wasp

by Hope Madden

There’s something about a two person show.

Yes, there are more actors in The Wasp than just Natalie Dormer and Naomie Harris, and each one of them—Olivia Juno Cleverly, Leah Mondesir-Simmonds, Dominic Allburn—does a fine job. But Guillem Morales’s thriller is more than anything a suspenseful showcase for two remarkable talents.

Harris plays Heather, an elegant, wealthy, unhappily married woman. Carla (Dormer)—pregnant with her fourth child, married to a gambler, making ends meet with a cashier gig and whatever other cash she can pick up—is suspicious and reluctant but desperate enough for cash to agree to meet with her old classmate. Not that she and Heather were friends back at school.

Heather has a proposition. You may be able to guess what that is even if you haven’t seen the trailer. You can also guess that there’s more to it than meets the eye. Indeed, there’s a chance you’ll figure out the twists as they come up. Maybe not. Either way, Harris and Dormer will draw you in and leave you marked.

Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s screenplay plays with expectations in a number of ways, obscuring the label of protagonist and antagonist. The ground shifts beneath you as frequently as it does the characters. And it wouldn’t work, you wouldn’t buy it as easily as you do, were it not for these performances.

Harris, and Oscar nominee for 2016’s Moonlight, delivers a nuanced, brittle performance that keeps you off center. Dormer is a revelation. Angry, apathetic, vulnerable, desperate—in her hands, Carla is a survivor more resigned than resilient. She’s less afraid to hope than she is pissed off about it.

Dormer also finds moments of humor to humanize the character, moments Morales uses to let the audience breathe. Whatever its dramatic contrivances, and there are a few, the success of The Wasp boils down to riveting, believable performances that command your attention.

Feeding Frenzy

Out Come the Wolves

by Hope Madden

Predator and prey. Alpha and beta. Necessary and expendable. Writer/director Adam MacDonald puts these ideas into perspective with his latest thriller, Out Come the Wolves.

MacDonald returns to the woods, where he’s long wrought havoc (Pyewacket, Backcountry). In this forest, Sophie (MacDonald’s regular collaborator Missy Peregrym) is hoping her childhood best friend Kyle (Joris Jarsky) can teach her big city boyfriend Nolan (Damon Runyan) how to hunt.

Nolan’s a writer planning an article on the experience, but he’s also eager to meet Sophie’s dear friend to get acquainted and maybe gauge the competition.

MacDonald’s cinematic bread and butter has been the small cast, big woods, test of the survival instinct. In Backcountry it was a bear; in Pyewacket, a demon. The title here probably gives away the antagonist this go-round, but MacDonald has more in store for us than just a couple of hungry wolves.

Though small cast plus limited location generally equals low budget, Out Come the Wolves boasts impressive production values. Interiors, though slightly hokey and sometimes obvious, develop tension with claustrophobic close ups. MacDonald also takes this first (mainly interior) act to set up the gender politics at work, something he plays off of well in the coming outdoor adventure.

Jarsky delivers the most believable performance, one fraught with roiling emotions and conflicting goals. Runyan is slightly hamstrung by the underwritten “big city guy” role, but he finds a nice balance between smug and vulnerable, insecure and earnest.

Peregrym’s third act makes her first act easier to stomach. She’s saddled early on with a bad dance scene and unrealistic levels of emotional ignorance. It’s not Peregrym’s fault—the writing team (MacDonal and Jarsky along with Enuka Okuma) unable to craft a realistic character is to blame. And Peregrym does what she can, but it’s not until the final third of the film that she gets any opportunity to shine.

It’s still not a very convincing character, but the performance elevates the script.

Out Come the Wolves has some obvious ideas on its mind. It takes those ideas in tense, often interesting directions buoyed by Jarsky’s performance, in particular.

Fright Club: The Alien Franchise

We’re making a bit of a departure for this episode. The latest in the Alien franchise had us—like everyone else—doing a bit of ranking.

1. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979)

2. Aliens (James Cameron, 1986)

3. Alien Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997)

4. Alien: Romulus (Fede Alvarez, 2024)

5. Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012)

6. Alien 3 (David Fincher, 1992)

7. Alien: Covenant (Ridley Scott, 2017)

8. Alien vs. Predator (Paul W. S. Anderson, 2004)

9. Alien vs. Predator: Requiem (Colin Strause, Greg Strause, 2007)

But we thought it would be fun to catch up with a couple of other big Alien nerds and hash it out. What worked with Alien: Romulus? What didn’t? Where does it fit within the pantheon and why? Is Alien 3 an underrated masterpiece? Is Alien Resurrection actually any good? And why were there so many vaginas in Romulus? So, so many.

We welcome two great friends of the podcast, filmmaker Timothy Troy and MaddWolf contributor and Schlocketeer, Daniel Baldwin. Beware: spoilers ahead! We’re going to pull this apart a bit, so if you haven’t seen Alien: Romulus (or any of the others, for that matter), be warned.

Fantasy Island

Blink Twice

by Hope Madden

Zoë Kravitz is pissed off.

Nice.

In her directorial debut, Kravitz—working from a script she co-wrote with E.T. Feigenbaum—delivers an intoxicating and haunting thriller about privilege.

Naomi Ackie (Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody) is Frida, a waitress with a huge crush on disgraced-but-apologetic billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum). When he invites her and her best friend Jess (the always welcome Alia Shawkat) to his private island, both accept without a second thought.

It’s all rich guys and delicious food, pools and cocktails, drugs and sun. What Frida can’t quite figure out is why Slater never seems to make a move.

What transpires feels influenced by the classic The Stepford Wives, as well asJulia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty and Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling. The ideas are less borrowed than repeatedly, historically true and Kravitz reconsiders these timeless notions with an unerringly contemporary sensibility and a mean spirit that’s earned.

Ackie’s solid in a role that asks a lot. She’s surrounded by lively, creepy performances that perfectly animate the superficial, manufactured joy of the story being told. Adria Arjona impresses in a role with more arc than most. Meanwhile, both Christian Slater and Red Rocket’s Simon Rex steal scenes left and right.

Still, it’s Tatum who effortlessly bridges horror fantasy with “damn, this could really happen.” His morally blurry turn, charmingly evil, has such authenticity to it that the island horror feels more like a reflection of reality than it should.

Should you board an airplane for a tropical island with a bunch of wildly rich people you’ve never met before? Good lord, no. Nothing good could possibly come of that.  Kravitz’s horror story could easily have become a cautionary tale in less skilled hands, but that is not the story she’s telling.

Blink Twice, which was originally titled Pussy Island, covers really horrible territory, but again, thanks to nimble and respectful direction, there’s not a gratuitous moment. What Kravitz delivers instead is a seductive, tense, satisfying thriller.

A Sloppy Mess

The Clean Up Crew

by Hope Madden

Jon Keeyes has made a lot of movies, none of them very good. Generally, his films star two actors you’ve heard of and wish were in better films. Sometimes, only one of those two have talent.

The Clean Up Crew stars a couple of Keeyes veterans—the always fun Antonio Banderas (who was in Cult Killer from the same director earlier this year) and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who seemed to have talent at one time and also starred in Keeyes’s 2021 effort The Survivalist.

Plus, we get a bonus actor who should be getting better roles, Oscar winner Melissa Leo. Leo and Meyers play one half of a crime scene clean-up crew, alongside drug addled PTSD sufferer Chuck (Swen Temmel), and Meagan (Ekaterina Baker), who’s hoping a sudden windfall will mean that she and Alex (Meyers) can get married.

That windfall is the briefcase full of cash that was left behind at the crime scene they’ve been hired to clean up. It belongs to crime lord Gabriel (Banderas), and he wants it back.

The script by Keeyes’s longtime collaborator Matthew Rogers delivers a solid enough premise and bursts of humor, but nothing holds together. The Clean Up Crew feels like several different movies nonsensically stapled together.

The nonexistent rapport among the characters goes a long way to emphasize the disjointed narrative. At no point do you believe any one of these humans has feelings for any of the others, certainly not that one would risk life and limb for another. It’s not that they don’t seem to like each other as much as they don’t seem to know each other well enough to not hello at Kroger’s.

Meyers may as well be in an entirely different film. Banderas—who likely filmed his scenes over a weekend in a single location far from everyone else—basically is in a different film. His is more fun because, to his credit, the actor seems to be doing what he can to enjoy himself.

Leo struggles mightily with her curious Irish brogue, and no one scene predicts the next in any logical way. Keeyes can’t decide whether or not to treat the violence as comedy, but it certainly appears from nowhere and builds to a showdown no one really wants that delivers no type of narrative satisfaction.

The Clean Up Crew is a comedy that’s not funny, a thriller with no thrills, and a flat action flick sutured together into a dizzyingly incoherent paycheck for a few actors who deserve better, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

Half and Half

Close to You

by Hope Madden

“You were not worried about me when I was not OK.”

The quote is exactly the kind of lived-in epiphany you might expect from filmmaker Dominic Savage, whose work leans toward intimate improvisational dramas. In his latest, a young man, Sam (Elliot Page), returns home for the first time in four years—the first time since his transition. And though his family is supportive—almost giddily so—he dreads the trip because no matter who you are, your family is still on about their same shit.

So, Sam’s older sister’s concern about his job and his apartment and the stress he’s putting on his parents by staying away and how they’re all worried about him evokes a response that rings true no matter who your family is or how well you get along.

In these moments, Savage and Page, who gets a co-writing credit, unveil something so authentic that it’s impossible not to see both the uniqueness and the universality of their story. And Page is excellent, bringing an emotional depth and integrity to the character that reveals itself in scene after scene.

Close to You never wallows in tragedy or grief or pain, but in its best moments, it allows that sadness to singe its edges. The family drama builds relentlessly and honestly to something cathartic and difficult. Unfortunately, this is not really the story the filmmakers are telling. Savage balances the family drama with a romance. On the train in from Toronto, Sam runs into Katherine (Hillary Baack).

The two have history and a love story attempts to bloom, but it lacks all of the authenticity, detail and depth of the family drama. Nothing rings true, and the unstructured feel that gave the family’s storyline depth emphasizes emptiness in scenes between Page and Baack. Every time the film cuts away from the family to spend time in the budding relationship, you long to return to the unpleasantness of home.

When Savage finally abandons the family drama altogether in favor of the romance, the loose narrative feel becomes almost unbearable. Where early scenes spilled over with unspoken tensions and crackled with anxiety, later scenes meander and stall.

A stitched together whole of two unequal parts, Close to You leaves you wanting.

Trail Snacks

Consumed

by Hope Madden

The Wendigo is a presence that has proven hard to create on film. Ravenous—Antonia Bird’s 1999 small miracle of Western horror—conjures the spirit of the beast and comes off best. In her hands, the flesh consuming monster equates to the horrors of war.

For director Michael Altieri, working from a script by David Calbert, the mythical creature is a stand-in for cancer. It’s a great conceit, honestly, and one I wish had been executed a little more successfully.

Courtney Halverson plays Beth, who heads into the deep woods with her husband, Jay (Mark Famiglietti) to celebrate one year of remission. But the two are stalked by something terrifying and eventually fall into the hands of another person (Devon Sawa)—friend or foe, they can’t quite tell—as they plot their escape from the forest.

Altieri—formerly half of the Butcher Brothers (The Hamiltons, A Beginner’s Guide to Snuff, The Violent Kind), this time directing solo—soaks much production value from his two or three locations. A clear pro with limited means, Altieri makes the most of just three performers, generating dread and analogizing well.

The performers range in skill. Genre veteran Sawa convinces as the hunter with a past and an agenda and Famiglietti fares well enough as the supportive husband, although there’s not a lot to the role.

Most of the weight of the film lands on Halverson’s shoulders and she struggles early on, the layers of her conflicted emotions never taking authentic shape. She’s on more solid ground once Beth goes full badass, but without an early emotional hook for her character and relationship with her husband, you’re less invested in their survival.

More problematic is the presentation of the beast itself. Here the budget really makes itself known. Altieri oscillates between smoky swirls of digital FX and the shadowy presence of practical FX, but the combination is far from seamless. The film would have benefitted from sticking with practical and taking a less-is-more approach to what it showed.

It doesn’t entirely sink the production, but it does slow whatever momentum Consumed builds every time the beast arrives. Given its other setbacks, that’s enough to lessen the overall satisfaction the movie offers.

Odd Bird

My Penguin Friend

by Hope Madden

An old fisherman who’s never recovered from an unendurable loss saves the life of a little penguin. They become best friends. It’s a true story that was clearly designed by the movie gods, but luckily it fell into the hands of director David Schurmann, whose work may lean crowd-pleasing but never glossy or self-indulgent.

My Penguin Friend doesn’t need it. Though Act 1, introducing the tragedy that will haunt Joao (Jean Reno, a heartbreaking delight), does go a bit over the top in its cinematic tendencies, Schurmann and team settle into a more natural rhythm by the beginning of the second act.

Reno’s a broken, sunken old man who doesn’t go into town and hasn’t talked with his old fisherman friends in so long they barely remember. His wife Maria (Adriana Barraza, underused but as nuanced and authentic as ever) co-exists but the emptiness of their home is its own character.

Schurmann doesn’t rely on an imposing score or even a seasoned cast to manipulate our emotions, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t do it. It’s what he does not show in Act 1 that haunts Reno’s eyes and the surface of the ocean outside Joao and Maria’s window. Schurmann reminds us of what none of us could bear to see just often enough to make your breath catch for the fear that Joao might have to live through the heartbreak again.

Which would be unbearable if the film didn’t also offer the levity, goofiness and undeniable cuteness of this penguin who befriends Joao, baffles scientists, and swims 5000 miles from Argentina to Brazil every year or so to hang out and watch TV on the sofa with his buddy.

It’s about the dearest thing you’re ever going to see, which just about makes up for the fact that most of the ensemble has never acted and it shows. Any stretch of narrative without Reno feels twice as long as it is, but there is no denying the heartbreaking charm whenever he and Barraza are onscreen.

There are plenty of flaws that keep My Penguin Friend from really singing, but it’s not enough to dampen the joy to be found with this odd couple.