Tag Archives: Rachel Willis

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Sex and the Sitter

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Deadly Illusions

by Rachel Willis

Something I’ve learned from movies is that if you’re going to hire a nanny, expect some professional lines to be crossed.

Such is the dynamic between Mary (Kristin Davis) and Grace (Greer Grammer) in writer/director Anna Elizabeth James’s erotic thriller, Deadly Illusions.

Mary is a novelist with a series of successful murder mysteries under her belt, but she hasn’t written a new one in a while. Her publisher is desperate to bring her back to pen a new addition. Mary’s reluctant, until her husband’s serious financial blunder makes the decision for her.

But who will take care of her kids while she writes? Enter sweet, innocent nanny, Grace.

The film’s set-up is slow to get going. It’s light on the eroticism and doesn’t feel like much of a thriller. The first act plods along, dropping the pieces into place as if aware we already know where this is going to go. It’s not a very compelling watch.

Things heat up in the second act, though not by much. We’re still waiting for the water to boil. The initial relationship between Mary and Grace quickly crosses into inappropriate territory. Mary takes Grace bra shopping and enters the dressing room with her. It’s predatory, though it seems the movie wants us to feel Grace is the aggressor in the scene.

As we simmer through, Mary’s creativity begins to interfere with her reality. As she loses herself in her new novel, she fantasizes about inappropriate activities with Grace. Or do those things really happen?

Things get weirder, and several clunky red herrings are dropped into the mix. This movie wants to keep us guessing, but it’s never enticing enough to make much of an impact.

Along for the ride is Dermot Mulroney as Mary’s husband, Tom. Mulroney is a capable actor, but doesn’t have much to do here – though his contribution to the film is more than that of the children whom Grace is hired to care for. You might forget Grace is a nanny and not Mary’s personal assistant.

Davis and Grammer have some fun with their roles, and their dynamic is curious if not entirely convincing. Grammer doesn’t have the chemistry with Davis that we need to be caught up in their relationship.

There are moments of enjoyment as the situations get stranger and the mystery more absurd, but overall, Deadly Illusions inspires more tedium than thrills.

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New World Disorder

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This World Alone

by Rachel Willis

Some of the best post-apocalyptic films don’t worry about the event or events that created a dystopian world. The audience is dropped into this landscape along with the characters and expected to adapt to the new rules and challenges.

With director Jordan Noel’s film, This World Alone, there’s an attempt to balance a Before and After centered around an event only known as The Fall. From the bits and pieces we get by way of opening narration, some cataclysmic incident occurred to render certain electronics (or maybe all of them) useless. The narrator, our main character Sam (Belle Adams), lets us know that cell phones, microwaves, and the internet are now obsolete.

It’s assumed that losing cell phones drove everyone crazy (or is that just my assumption?), mankind was nearly wiped out, and the survivors live in a world where it’s everyone for themselves, food is scarce, and you don’t even want to think about having a pet pig.

The problem with trying to construct a new world in reference to the old one is that it’s easy to trap yourself in numerous logical holes. If you have a good story, it’s easy to ignore those holes. If your story isn’t so good, the holes become chasms.

Sam was born in the Before, but only remembers the After. She spends a lot of time telling us about the Before, which is unnecessary since that’s where we live. Time would have been better spent showing us how this new world operates.

The film’s dialogue is often embarrassing, and it never lets us experience things naturally. Like the narration, it tells us a lot. Sam’s mom, Connie (Carrie Walrond Hood), constantly tells her she’s not ready for the world outside their secluded home. However, if the outside world is as dangerous as Connie always implies, wouldn’t she have better prepared her daughter to fight? Rather than waiting until she’s in her 20’s to suddenly goad her about her weaknesses?

There is some beautiful cinematography, courtesy of Trisha Solyn, that helps enhance the characters’ feelings of isolation. Pointed shots help us see how nature has begun to reclaim the earth. Watching these women alone surviving in a dangerous world is interesting, but a short amount of time is given to this setup.

The cinematography and the score are the movie’s highlights, but unless the film is Koyaanisqatsi, you need more than that to carry your film off successfully.

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Dr. Feel Bad

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Antidote

by Rachel Willis

Imagine going to the hospital for a routine appendectomy and waking up in a hospital that’s a little too Hostel. That’s what happens to Sharyn (Ashlynn Yennie) in director Peter Daskaloff’s film, Antidote.

From the mysterious and gruesome opening, we’re quickly plunged into this warehouse-style hospital where patients are chained to their beds and answers to the question ‘why am I here?’ are in short supply.

We’re not given much information as Sharyn awakens to this nightmarish situation. A mysteriously polite doctor (Louis Mandylor) appears to offer her medicine for her anxiety, leading us down one alley of possible explanations. Glimpses into Sharyn’s past as she struggles to cope with her new world offer another possibility.

However, Daskaloff wants to keep us guessing with each new bit of information. As Sharyn meets her fellow patients, we learn new facets of the horrific experimentation that happens at the facility. A mysterious serum promises healing from every possible injury: amputation, burning, hanging, tongue removal. The antidote is really quite magnificent stuff.

While I was initially reminded of films like Hostel and Saw, Antidote doesn’t relish the gore quite as much. Most of the brutality happens off-screen, and the film is more interested in the tension created by the unknown. The suggestion of violence often does more to put the audience on edge than the ultra-realistic rendition.

But to work, the film must keep the audience hooked. We need to feel Sharyn’s anxiety and desperation, and this is where the film struggles. Watching Sharyn wander around the hospital (why is she allowed to do this?) is repetitive and boring. It’s easy to grow disinterested as we wait for the big reveal.

Yennie does bring an everywoman quality to her character. Sharyn’s dubious past unfolds throughout the film and is the most interesting aspect. It’s a problem when the film’s backstory is more engaging than the present action. Maybe if we’d seen a little more of that suggested violence, I’d have sat up straighter in my seat.

Playing against our everywoman, Mandylor makes Dr. Aaron Hellenbach a cool, sophisticated, sadistic madman – a bit like Hannibal Lecter only not so terrifying. He never feels like a villain, even though he appears to be the main engineer of the ‘experiments’ done on the patients.

Antidote has the elements to be intriguing, but doesn’t effectively deliver them.

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Hip to Be Square

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YouthMin

by Rachel Willis

Who needs a farcical mockumentary skewering both youth ministers and the types of kids involved in church camp? Directors Arielle Cimino and Jeff Ryan, and writer Christopher O’Connell bring you YouthMin.

Pastor David, aka “Pastor D” (Jeff Ryan), is dedicated to educating the members of his youth church organization, as well as getting them to the annual Bible camp for competition and games. So, he’s floored when the church assigns a new youth minister to his group, Rachel (Tori Hines). As we quickly see, Pastor D needs all the help he can get.

Ryan is the perfect combination of 90’s MTV reality star (he’d fit right in on early seasons of The Real World) and overenthusiastic youth minister trying too hard to connect with his flock. His attempts to educate the kids on the Bible’s tenets are both hilarious and misguided—a bottle of water becoming an amusing metaphor for sex before marriage.

The collection of kids is what you might expect. There’s a stereotypical jock-type who looks up to Pastor D, a girl who dresses very conservatively and who might have a crush on our inept pastor. Then there’s Stephen, who refuses to talk, and Deb, who dresses in dark colors but knows her Bible (especially the racier parts). There’s isn’t anyone in the group who truly stands out, but it doesn’t really matter since the best parts of the film are the ways these kids relate and react to Pastor Dave.

About two-thirds of the way through, there’s an abrupt tonal shift. The film stops making fun of its ‘subjects’ and tries for a heartwarming, root-for-the-underdog romp. It’s jarring and not nearly as entertaining as what precedes it. These aren’t characters we’ve been asked to care about, so expecting us to suddenly pull for them requires an abrupt shift in perception. Ultimately, it’s a disappointing change.

For most of the film, the comedy works. O’Connell’s writing is reminiscent of some of Christopher Guest’s funnier films. But then YouthMin forgets it’s a mockumentary. The comedy gets stale and the laughs become infrequent as the film putters to its predictable resolution.

It’s too bad this film falters so badly in its final scenes because these lackluster components overshadow the funnier material. If the filmmakers had remembered they were making fun of their characters, they would have had a solid film from start to finish.

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What Big Feet You Have

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Dawn of the Beast

by Rachel Willis

Seriously, who still thinks camping in the woods is a good idea?

There’s something about the woods that haunts us, so it’s the perfect setting for many a horror movie.

In director Bruce Wemple’s latest film, Dawn of the Beast, it’s the ideal locale for a group of cryptozoology students on the hunt for Sasquatch.

Wemple likes the creature feature – a look at his past work uncovers another film about Bigfoot (Monstrous), as well as one about the mythological Wendigo. Writer Anna Shields must also enjoy the ‘Squatch, as she not only penned Monstrous, but Dawn of the Beast as well. You’d think with two movies about Sasquatch under their belts, these two would have something new to say about Mr. Foot.

And in a way, they do, but unfortunately, what they have to say about their monster is buried beneath a run-of-the-mill ‘cabin in the woods’ horror trope.

There is some fun in Dawn of the Beast. There are a few jokes, characters you root for, as well as one or two you root against, but there’s also a lot of drudge here. You find yourself sitting through too much filler while you wait for the more interesting moments.

Shields also co-stars in the film as Lilly, but her talents seem better suited to writing. There are some genuinely creepy moments – yellow lights (are those eyes?) drawing you into the woods, one or two effective jump scares, and some funny dialogue. And what Lilly and her classmates find in the woods is a lot more terrifying than the legendary Bigfoot.

However, the film’s best aspect is – far and away – the creature effects. They add a degree of tension and fear that would be otherwise absent without such convincingly scary monsters. In some films, the addition of a monster removes the tension; seeing too much destroys the mystery. But in this case, it really works.  

It’s around the film’s third act that Dawn of the Beast begins to hit its stride, embracing the funnier elements and dropping the attempts to inject a seriousness to the film that it largely doesn’t need. A funny horror movie can still be scary, so anything too serious in this movie (a kidnapping, for example) is time wasted for the audience.

Perhaps if Wemple and Shields attempt a third Sasquatch film, it’ll be the charm that lands them a horror film that hits all the right notes.

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

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No Treat

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Dutch

by Rachel Willis

Drug kingpin Bernard “Dutch” James (Lance Gross) rules the streets of Newark, New Jersey. In co-directors Preston A. Whitmore II and David Wolfgang’s film Dutch, we watch the primary event that frames this crime thriller: Dutch is put on trial for an act of domestic terrorism.

There is some mystery when the film opens. Is Dutch truly guilty of the crime? Is he being railroaded by the system? We get a glimpse of Dutch committing a crime as a teenager, but nothing at the level of what he’s on trial for. It’s easy to wonder if this is a set-up.

Whitmore and Wolfgang don’t sustain the mystery for long. It’s quickly forgotten as we bounce between past and present. You sense a powerful theme, but the movie isn’t interested in more than a surface reference to the legal system’s injustices.

Dutch maintains a decent balance between the events of the past and the present drama. Unfortunately, the film contains quite a few dull moments. We’re forced to watch a prosecutor’s entire opening statement, which is about as boring as they are in real life. There’s a lengthy discussion about a meatball that could’ve been funny had it been delivered with more conviction by characters with a little more meat to their roles.

And the acting is sometimes painful. Gross is the best of the bunch, but Dutch never seems truly dangerous. Gross brings the right amount of charisma to the character, but there’s nothing sinister. His history, as it plays on the screen, speaks to heinous crimes, but there’s never a moment where we feel we’re in the presence of someone who is capable of that level of cruelty – even as we’re watching him commit these shocking acts.

This is the first film in a planned trilogy, but it’s hard to muster up the interest in any sequels after a painful first installment.

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Rough Around the Edges

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Sometime Other than Now

by Rachel Willis

Opening on a man sprawled on the beach, a crashed motorcycle and a wallet floating into the ocean, Sometime Other Than Now is immediately intriguing. Written and directed by Dylan McCormick, this is a quickly-paced drama that will just as quickly hook you.

The pacing of the film is the first thing that stands out. It’s faster than you might expect. Characters pop up and interact rapid fire. In the age of the slow-burn, it takes a minute to adjust. But it’s rewarding to watch as instant attractions pay off, as we come to know the characters and their situations. Not every question is answered immediately, but you’ll enjoy yourself as you wait for the solutions.

The dialogue is the next element setting this film apart from similar stories. It’s realistic, funny, no bullshit talk that draws you in and makes you care for characters you haven’t known long.

As the man on the beach, Sam, Donal Logue shows off his talent for drama. Both endearing and frustrating, you want to know where he’s been and to see where he’s going. Playing off Logue with near equal talent, Kate Walsh brings depth to her character, Kate.

The rest of the cast isn’t given same level of attention.  Characters pop up in the beginning that are given some weight, making you think they’ll come up again as a larger part of the story. While they do appear later on, they don’t receive the resolution you might expect. Everyone who plays a role in the film does a fine job, but when compared to the two main characters, they feel hollow.

McCormick is also partly responsible for the film’s score, and it pales in comparison to his writing/directing talent. There’s nothing exactly wrong with the score; it’s just not the right music for the film. Although, there is a particularly lovely song that plays over the end credits that’s worth a listen.

This is only McCormick’s second film (and his first came out 15 years ago), and it’s a bit rough around the edges – a lot like its main character. But that’s part of what gives it its charm.

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I’d Vote for Him

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My Name is Pedro

by Rachel Willis

Pedro Santana is the bright, innovative, caring teacher/school administrator that every child deserves and some desperately need.

It’s not surprising that in her first documentary feature, director Lillian LaSalle chose such a larger-than-life personality to concentrate on.

Most of LaSalle’s doc focuses on one-on-one time with Santana, but there are plenty of interviews with those who have been touched by him: students, parents, and co-workers. All have glowing praise for Santana’s inventiveness and compassion.

The film’s extraordinary subject helps hide the more mediocre elements. Apart from from Santana himself, there isn’t much that stands out. Some of the shots are distractingly blurry, and harried animation sequences detract from the spoken words. With someone as animated as Santana, why would you ever take the camera off him in favor of line-drawn cartoons?

But the audience gets to see inside struggling school systems – sadly, something already too familiar to many parents and students – and how someone like Pedro Santana can make a world of difference in a short time. The children who have been impacted by Mr. Santana over the course of his career brim with self-confidence in their interviews.

We’re also shown the dynamics of school politics at one suburban school district in upstate New York. A school board at odds with members of the community makes for heated scenes in which parents confront the board over decisions made for their children. The bulk of the board is comprised of men whose own children don’t attend the local public schools, yet in whose hands rests hiring decisions and money matters for those schools.  

These scenes make for some of the most interesting, and infuriating, moments.

But at its heart, this is a movie about the impact caring educators have on children. Santana recalls his own experience with such a teacher and how she drove him forward in life. From a stint in the Peace Corps to the Teacher’s College at Columbia University and beyond, we see how a good teacher does make a difference.

Santana’s approach to education is a good lesson for anyone who works with children. He pushes them to be their best, and the results speak to his skills in the field of education. And that’s probably because Mr. Santana is interested in more than test scores and homework. He is fundamentally invested in seeing children succeed – at school and in life.

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Far From Wonderland

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Alice Fades Away

by Rachel Willis

Watching Alice Fades Away is akin to stepping into a Flannery O’Connor short story (without the overt religiosity). The film crackles with ominous energy as a larger-than-life villain haunts the rural, isolated landscape. As a horror/thriller blend, this one hits the mark.

In his first feature, writer/director Ryan Bliss crafts a film that seamlessly blends genres: horror, drama, mystery. Set in the early 1950’s, the film is reminiscent not only of O’Connor, but films such as The Night of the Hunter. The tradition of the Southern gothic lends itself well to Bliss’s vision.

Seeking refuge on her uncle Bishop’s farm, Alice (Ashley Shelton) is on the run. She is accepted by a group of people suffering from their own terrible pasts, all taken under the wing of her generous uncle. We’re not quite sure of Alice’s story, but we’re given disturbing glimpses as past and present merge on screen.

As Alice’s past catches up with her, we’re held hostage to the increasing dread the situation conjures. The cinematography works wonders at turning the idyllic setting of Bishop’s farm into one of dreadful isolation. Its setup as the ideal hideaway melts beautifully into a desolate trap.

All of the actors in the movie are well cast, but the one to watch is Timothy Sekk as Holden. His performance, along with Bliss’s writing, adds depth to a character that could have easily been a lifeless stereotype. Sekk’s energy adds to the mounting horror of what has followed Alice.

With so many great scenes, the film’s blunders are even more obvious. It performs best when it has minimal dialogue, some lines are melodramatic while others are poorly delivered. Many themes are broached, but only a few are explored. A character disappears, leaving us scratching our heads. And what’s with the rabbits?

However, the few moments that don’t land can’t wholly detract from the film’s overall effect. Bliss knows how to invoke dread, and the moments that take us out of the film are easily ignored considering what works. You’ll care less about some of the details and more about what’s ahead.

Same goes for the filmmaker, as Alice Fades Away is a debut that will make you curious to see what Bliss does next.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBZJCLqUO6c

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Table for Three

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First Blush

by Rachel Willis

When Nena (Rachel Alig) meets Olivia (Kate Beecroft), there’s an instant spark. So even though Nena is married to Drew (Ryan Caraway), that doesn’t stop her from pursuing Olivia. In writer/director Victor Neumark’s first film, First Blush, an unconventional relationship forms as a duo becomes a trio in an exploration of a polyamorous relationship.

The best part of First Blush is that the characters seem like normal people. Save Olivia’s background as a Parisian model, the rest of the people we meet feel a lot like people we know. There were several moments that nailed the transition from single (or dating) twenty-somethings into married thirty-somethings – anxious Nena particularly reminded me of quite a few people (myself included).

Overall, these are characters who struggle with happiness, with what it means to be grown up, and with how to be brave. Nena’s resolve to say ‘yes’ more often is what leads her to pursue Olivia. While at first Drew seems simply along for the ride, Neumark makes sure to insert him (no pun intended) into the relationship as more than a bystander but an equal part.

The predictable ménage à trois montage, when it comes, is light on the sex, and more interested in illustrating the fun the three have as they fall into a relationship. The movie never stoops to voyeurism, instead it plays out as one would expect of any romantic dramedy – not to say it entirely follows a pattern, but by following a semi-predictable model, the film means to normalize the polyamorous lifestyle as a valid choice.

But the third act flounders. Following the film’s unnecessary time jump, Neumark isn’t as skillful at navigating the complications that arise within the trio. Unlike the naturalistic first and second acts, the third relies on things we’ve been told rather than shown. It would have been more interesting to see the interim time between the second and third acts, to give us a chance to watch as the tensions arise between the characters.

However, the movie never fails to engage emotionally. We’re invested in this relationship, we want to know how it will work, where it will go. While it might not be a relationship style most of us will experience, that doesn’t mean we can’t understand the appeal. You want the characters to be happy, in whatever relationship style that works best for them.