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The Mouse That Roared

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Marty Supreme

by George Wolf

It’s been six years now, have we recovered from the panic and palpitations brought on by Josh Safdie’s Uncut Gems?

Better towel off and grab hold of something, because Marty Supreme serves up another harried drama set at a breakneck pace.

Served up, see what I did there? Marty “The Mouse” Mauser is a table tennis phenom looking to cement his name as the best in the world.

But when we first meet him, Marty (an absolutely electric Timothée Chalamet) is working in a shoe store in 1950s New York. He’s a born salesman, but makes it clear he’s only there to make enough money to finance his next trip to a big tournament. And in that opening few minutes, Safdie and Chalamet gives us a clear glimpse into the Marty Mauser worldview that will grab us by the throat for the next two and a half hours.

Everyone and everything is a means to an end. And Marty is relentless.

It could be an adoring young woman who’s already married (Odessa A’zion), a rich ink pen tycoon (Shark Tank‘s Kevin O’Leary in another bit of Safdie stunt casting) or his bored actress wife (a terrific Gwyneth Paltrow), or even a man out to find his lost dog. It doesn’t matter, Marty will size you up and instantly start working the angle he thinks is most likely to make you an asset.

The entire film, loosely based on Jewish-American table tennis champ Marty Reisman, is a fascinating character study and Chalamet is in mesmerizing, career-best form. Safdie (co-writing again with Ronald Bronstein) might as well just shoot Marty out of a cannon when he leaves that shoe store, and Chalamet makes you afraid to miss anything by looking away.

Like everything else here, the table tennis action is fast, furious and intense, and after an early loss to an unknown, Marty’s singular mission becomes avenging that upset and proving his greatness. But Marty Supreme could be about any type of American unafraid to dream big. It’s another intoxicating ride from Josh Safdie, with an award-worthy Chalamet digging soul deep into a man’s journey toward finding something he values more than himself.

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The Old Familiar Sting

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Until Dawn

by Hope Madden

Watching the 2011 genre classic Cabin in the Woods when it came out, you couldn’t help but think it would make a great video game. Each new level could bring on a different one of those beasties from the elevator, and you’d have to try to survive them all to win. Fun!

Until Dawn, the new horror flick from David F. Sandberg (Lights Out, Annabelle: Creation), follows exactly this logic. It’s as if someone did make that video game, then turned that game into a movie. Which is kind of what happened.

Sandberg and writers Blair Butler (The Invitation, Hell Fest) and Gary Dauberman (the Annabelle, Nun, and It franchises, among others) retool the popular Until Dawn survival game to give it more of a cinematic structure. Five friends, out on a road trip to remember a pal who’s been missing for a year, stumble upon a long-abandoned welcome center.

They spy their missing friend’s name in the register. It’s in there 13 times.

Next thing you know, time loop horror overtakes the friends as one malevolent force after another descends upon the welcome center. As soon as all five friends are dead, an hourglass resets, they revive, and the next wave of horror hits.

Peter Stormare lends his effortless creepiness to the proceedings, which benefit from his performance as well as work from an ensemble that’s better than the script demands. Belmont Cameli and Hellraiser’s Odessa A’zion are particularly effective, but all five friends break free of the tropiness of their roles to find familiar, human centers.

It had to have been hard, as their characters continually make the dumbest decisions possible.

The film feels terribly confined by its premise. Rather than the gleeful celebration of all things monstrous that made Cabin in the Woods such a joy, Until Dawn lacks inspiration. The set design never rises above a seasonal haunt aesthetic, the creature design lacks imagination, and the repetitive nature of the time loop grows tedious.

It shouldn’t come as a great surprise, given the filmmakers. Dauberman’s hit big a couple of times, but his fare is mainly middling. Sandberg’s genre films are exclusively mediocre, and Butler’s work rarely reaches that height.

But Until Dawnis not a complete waste of time. Sandberg doesn’t skimp on bloodshed, and the cast really elevates the material. It’s no classic, but it offers a bit of bloody fun.

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Pins and Needles

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Hellraiser

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

Did you know that this is the 11th film in the Hellraiser franchise? There are 10 others, most of them terrible, a couple unwatchable. Why? How could it be so hard to create fresh horror from Clive Barker’s kinky treasure trove?

It appears David Bruckner (The Ritual, The Night House) wonders the same thing. He and screenwriters Ben Collins, Luke Piotrowski and David S. Goyer had no trouble peeling the flesh from this franchise and exposing something raw and pulsing.

Oh yes, and gay, but if you didn’t pick up on any of the gay themes in out-and-proud Barker’s series before they cast a trans woman to play The Priest aka “Pinhead,” you missed a lot.

Jamie Clayton, with a massive thanks to makeup and costume, offers a glorious new image of pain. In fact, the creature design in this film surpasses anything we’ve seen in the previous ten installments, including Barker’s original. Each is a malevolent vision of elegance, gore and suffering, their attire seemingly made of their own flayed flesh.

There’s also a story, and a decent one at that. Bruckner’s core themes replace the S&M leanings with trauma and addiction, following a young addict named Riley (Odessa A’zion) as she ruins everyone and everything she touches.

Riley’s boyfriend Trevor (Drew Starkey) has some inside info on where rich people stash their valuables, but when the two break open a safe… there’s only that strange puzzle box inside. 

And what a magnificent puzzler it is.

Like everything about the film’s visual design, there’s new richness and lethal detail to the box. It hides complicated new configurations, and Bruckner – whose horror cred is now firmly established – reveals them in intriguing tandem with the slippery rewards offered by the Cenobites.

Fans of the original classic may have been understandably wary of a rebranding, but this new vision overcomes a slightly bloated buildup for a more than satisfying crescendo. The kinks may be gone, but the chains are still chilling, in a darkly beautiful world full of sensual, bloody delights to show you.