Tag: home invasion

Avarice

  By

★★★
“An arrow-ing experience.”

I’m not 100% sure, but I suspect this may be the first film I’ve tagged as both in the “sport” and “home invasion” genres. It’s not a crossover you see every day. However, it is fair comment in this case, even if takes its own sweet time to get there. Kate Matthews (Alexy) has various bits of static in her life. Her husband, Ash (Ford), spends too much time at his Very Important job in high finance, rather than on their relationship. Daughter Susan is being a teenager. Kate just lost an archery tournament. Oh, and their house has been invaded by Reed (Nell) and her band of thugs, who are now intent on forcing Ash to transfer thirty million dollars into their offshore bank-accounts.

The early stages of this are more than a bit wobbly. We’re given no particular reason to side with Kate, whose issues seem very much of the type typically deserving the hashtag, #FirstWorldProblems. Having helped raise a teenage daughter myself, Susan’s behaviour is very much at the mild end. You have never truly parented, until you get a phone call in the middle of the night, telling you your offspring has been arrested. Slight sullenness isn’t cause for sympathy. On the other side of the coin, the villains seem to be hired for their muscles rather than their brains. More than once Kate is tied up and manages to free herself, which should surely be covered in Henching 1.0.1.

Reed is an honourable exception, being both competent and extremely ruthless: let’s just say, Kate’s family gatherings will not be the same size after this event. Once she begins to take charge, the movie shifts up a gear, and this is also around the point at which Kate’s pastime of choice begins to become relevant. To be clear, it does take about an hour for the first arrow to be fired in anger, and I was wondering, given the cover, whether this was going to be another case of archery teasing: all show and no bow. The final third does make an energetic attempt to make up for this earlier shortfall, and to quite satisfactory effect. Some of the subsequent pointy violence is rather effective.

This is especially the case when Kate, for justifiable reasons (again: think smaller family gatherings…) decides to take the fight to the invaders, and goes into the warehouse from which they are operating. While a bit contrived, this provides a fine location for a spot of stalk ‘n’ shoot, as she picks off the minions one at a time. If you’re hoping this is going eventually to lead to a battle between her and Reed, you will not be disappointed, and it goes to prove that a bow and arrow can be just as effective in close combat, if you are prepared to adapt. Mind you, I’d have dumped Ash’s sorry ass, since he proves to be less than useless. That’s just me though.

Dir: John V. Soto
Star: Gillian Alexy, Luke Ford, Alexandra Nell, Ryan Panizza

Terror on the Prairie

  By

★★★
“Prairie dog pest control.”

I keep hoping Carano will deliver an action film reaching the quality of her debut, Haywire. Results since then have been… well, let’s be charitable and call them uneven. The reasons for her departure from “traditional” Hollywood aren’t something I want to get into: but this, produced by conservative outlet The Daily Wire, does show the book isn’t closed on her yet. The Wire have put out a few films we’ve covered here, though again, the quality has been mixed: the last, Shut In, was not good. This is a similarly simple story, yet does a bit more with it. The pacing is too languid for my tastes, yet there were sufficient quirks to keep me adequately interested.

It takes place on the Montana plains, some years after the end of the Civil War, where Hattie McAllister (Carano) and her husband, Jeb (Cerrone), are trying to make a life for themselves and their two kids. Hattie has just about had enough, and wants to head back to her home-town of St. Louis. Before any decision can be made, life is interrupted by the arrival of a former Confederate officer, the Captain (Searcy), and his band of men. While he initially seems charming, the scalps tied to his saddle tell another story, and it’s quickly clear he has a specific agenda, rather than randomly passing through. With Jeb away in town, it’s up to Hattie to fend off the ensuing siege until her husband can return. Considering she is depicted as unable to kill a rattlesnake that entered their cabin, she’s going to need new-found resilience.

It’s a straightforward tale, brought down by too many unnecessary pauses: we really do not care what Jen is getting up to, for example. These derail the film’s reasonable efforts to build tension, bolstered by some surprisingly graphic gore (one throat-slitting in particular), and Searcy’s good performance as a thoroughly villainous antagonist, whose word can’t be trusted, despite his quoting of scripture. It might have made more sense to have Hattie depicted as competent and brave from the get-go. Instead, it leaves the Captain and his men seeming incompetent, although some of this is their initial reluctance to take her seriously, e.g. he addresses her 9-year-old son as the “man of the house.” 

A novel wrinkle is the director’s decision not to accompany the action with a musical score of any kind. It certainly keeps you in the moment, yet there is also reason why Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack is so key to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns being undisputed classics. The action, if generally restrained, is competent, and it’s probably for the best the film did not try to turn Hattie into some kind of Western MMA goddess. I did worry the return of Jeb was going to push his spouse off to the sidelines in the final reel; while it teetered on the edge for a while, the film pulled back. If not breaking any boundaries, this is worth a look, especially if you’re a fan of the genre.

Dir: Michael Polish
Star: Gina Carano, Nick Searcy, Donald Cerrone. Tyler Fischer

See For Me

  By

★★★
“Wait Until After Dark”

Yeah, as the above might suggest, this owes a rather large debt to Wait Until Dark, with its central theme of an attractive, blind protagonist threatened by home invaders. It is not the first to have gone down that road (see also In Darkness), and I must say, the concepts here are considerably more contrived. However, the film does just about enough to sell them, to make for an entertaining end product. The heroine Sophie (Davenport) was a promising skier until a degenerative eye condition ended her career, leaving her almost totally blind. Now, she’s rather grumpy, frequently berating her mother (Brown), and picking up occasional house-sitting gigs, engaging in small-scale larceny against her employers to fatten the paycheck. 

Her latest such position turns unpleasant when a trio of thugs, under the direction of Rico (Coates), enter the house, seeking a large stash of cash hidden behind a panel. They are as surprised by Sophie’s presence, as she is by theirs. You’d think this would be a quick, one-sided struggle. But Sophie has an ally, in the form of the titular app. It connects her with a seeing helper, typically for assistance with humdrum daily tasks, and the helper in this case is former army member Kelly (Kennedy). Between her military training and fondness for first-person shooters, she knows a thing or two about creeping stealthily around a house, and taking out enemy targets – skills she’s happy to use to assist Sophie. 

What’s at least somewhat interesting, is that Davenport is legally blind. This seems an ongoing trend. While it makes sense, considering Hollywood’s recent obsession with “authenticity” in things like gender identity, I’m always reminded of the famous story about Dustin Hoffman and Lawrence Olivier from Marathon Man – “Why don’t you just try acting?” It’s also notable that she’s not your typical heroine. Indeed, she arguably borders on the unlikable, between her abrasive attitude and petty thievery. Though some other reviews I’ve read suggest that severely weakens the film, I can’t say I minded too much. My bigger concern was a plot that teetered almost forever on the edge of implausibility, e.g. the way Sophie’s phone battery went from 20% to zero in a couple of minutes. While there was nothing utterly outrageous, all these micro-implausibilities added up over the course of proceedings. 

Within those constraints the film still had some successes. The best sequence probably had a police officer show up, with Sophie trying desperately to get the cop to go away. This screwed the tension level up considerably, with the officer insisting there was more going on than Sophie would admit. Thereafter, it does degenerate somewhat into lots of creeping around dark corridors. Or, at least, the level of dark corridors movies tend to have, which are just enough well-lit for a camera, and thus the audience. If the ending abandons the film’s titular concept, and probably provides the cherry of implausibility, the cake as a whole remains adequately edible. 

Dir: Randall Okita
Star: Skyler Davenport, Jessica Parker Kennedy, Kim Coates, Natalie Brown

Shut In

  By

★★
“Woman who talks through doors”

After Run Hide Fight, this is another film produced by political outlet The Daily Wire. This inevitably leads to reviews which are as much concerned with the leanings of the production company, which is annoying, albeit understandable. If the Huffington Post got into the movie business, I imagine the same thing would happen. But it also ignores the fact that you would have to look hard here, to find much indication of a political agenda. A considerably bigger issue is that it’s quite dull, with a heroine who spends much of the time living up to her apparent Native American name given above. Certainly, I hoped for more from this synopsis: “When a young mother is barricaded inside a pantry by her violent ex-boyfriend, she must use ingenuity to protect her two small children from escalating danger while finding an escape.”

The mom in question is Jessica (Qualley, the daughter of Andie McDowell), a recovering drug addict who is preparing to get out of town, and start a new life with adorable little moppet, Lainey (VanDette), and her toddler, Mason. Unfortunately, her plans are derailed by a troublesome door, and the arrival of her skeevy ex-boyfriend and father of Lainey, Rob (Horowitz), who is still very much under the control of his meth habit. Dodgier still is his skeevier pal, Sammy (Gallo, making his return to features after close to a decade), who has a very poor reputation, to put it mildly. An argument with Rob leads to Jessica being nailed inside the pantry, with her two children outside, Rob storming off promising to return when she has learned her lesson. Worse follows, with Sammy sleazing his way back. As a storm erupts, he poses an unspeakable threat to Lainey, who now also has to take care of Mason, under Jessica’s increasingly fraught instruction.

Especially in the first half, this means a lot of Jessica shouting through a door, and Lainey whining “I am hungry/am scared/need the toilet” in repetitive order. It gets old very quickly. Even though Gallo certainly makes for a slimy villain, the reality is that the film has locked itself in a confined space, along with its lead character. Neither of them are going anywhere for about the first hour. Caruso attempts to ramp up the tension by having everything threatening happen out of sight of both his heroine and the audience, but I never felt particularly concerned. This is a case where it felt like we needed a more direct approach to the threat. There’s also a weird religious subtext, which is neither prominent enough to be significant or objectionable. So I was left wondering what the point of it was.

Things do pick up, at least somewhat, for the final reel, where things are allowed out of the closet. Had the script worked on that basis from the start, this might have had a chance. Instead, it’s the very definition of “too little, too late.”

Dir: D.J. Caruso
Star: Rainey Qualley, Jake Horowitz, Luciana VanDette, Vincent Gallo

The Assault

  By

★★★★
“Assault on Shelter 13”

This was a very pleasant surprise. I wasn’t expecting much from this, especially after seeing Wynorski’s name – let’s be honest, he is best known for bargain basement soft-port. That said, he does occasionally hit one out of the park, such as the sublime Deathstalker II. This is definitely one of his better entries, even if it is, by and large, a low-budget version of Assault on Precinct 13.

Lisa Wilks (Ryan) witnesses the murder of her boyfriend by mob boss Blade, but is too scared to testify. Stacie (Randall), a detective on the force. is told to take care of her, and when Lisa says she’s too scared to go home, takes her to an isolated women’s shelter run by Stacie’s sister, Cindy (Dobro). However, Blade is intent on making sure Lisa doesn’t change her mind and sends his minions to storm the shelter and terminate the threat. However, he reckons without the pluck and resilience of the residents, bolstered by Stacie, as well as ex-army maintenance man, Mike (McCoy).

This has its share of questionable moments. The firing of a good twenty bullets from a hand-gun without reloading would be one, and then’s there’s the supposed two-minute countdown to the climactic explosion, which takes closer to six minutes to happen [I know, because I rewound and timed it]. But there’s a breezy energy which I found highly enjoyable, and the characters, if briefly sketched, are effectively drawn. For example, Toni (co-writer Melissa Brasselle) plays a Latina with a grudge against Stacie, for putting her boyfriend in jail. Or there’s Sandahl Bergman from Conan the Barbarian, as a paranoid schizophrenic, convinced the government is out to get her.

These are simple traits, yet prove entirely usable for plot purposes. We don’t need or want much more than this – it’d only get in the way of the action. There’s certainly no shortage of that, with wave upon wave of faceless minions storming the house, as the inhabitants try to board it up and repel any who make it through their barricades. At points, it feels almost like Night of the Living Debbies, with the thugs playing the role of the zombies. This being a Wynorski movie, there is the contractually obligated strip-club scene. However, showing unexpected restraint to keep its PG-13 certificate, the employees go no further than their undies, and are even strippers necessary to the plot, as that’s where we first meet Stacie, working undercover to expose a protection scam.

You do have to take as read the casual approach for the authorities, the first hour spent dispatching a apparently procession of cop cars into the area, who then either fail to notice anything, or vanish off the grid – because they’ve been mown down. Blade’s tactics, too, seem a bit questionable, especially considering how out-gunned the women are. But as a PG-13 actioner, I found this thoroughly entertaining, moving relentlessly forward, and making the very most of its limited resources.

Dir: Jim Wynorski
Star: Stacie Randall, Matt McCoy, Carrie Dobro, Leslie Ryan

Masquerade

  By

★½
“Home confusion.”

It’s never a good sign, when the first thing we do at the end of a movie, is go straight to the Internet and try to find out what happened. That’s what we needd to do here, after a “twist” left us both thoroughly confused as hell about what had happened. After 15-20 minutes of both Chris and I googling, I think we eventually achieved some kind of consensus. But it was far from satisfying, and we are definitely not happy about it. I admire the attempt made to up-end everything the audience has seen over the previous 75 minutes. Unfortunately, when the execution is as wretched as here, I wish writer-director Taylor hadn’t bothered. 

After Girl and Chick Fight, it seems to be part of Bella Thorne’s attempts to re-invent herself as an action heroine, rather than the wussy Disney Channel girl. But this appears to have mutated more into a race to the bottom, between her and Ruby Rose as to who can select the worse projects. While both actresses have potential, neither of them have found material which is decent. This definitely ranks among the crappiest, even before reaching the ending. It’s about the burglary of a mansion belonging to married art brokers, Olivia (Monroe) and Daniel, by a masked man and a woman (Samuels). The couple’s young daughter, Casey (Lind) hides after the babysitter is brutally bludgeoned to death, while waitress Rose (Thorne), who is driving the couple home, appears to be in cahoots with the home invaders. Key word: appears.

The burglars turn the power off, for no particular reason – it’s established they had already disabled the alarm. Which means that the bulk of the movie has everyone involved creeping around the house in near darkness. I don’t know why film-makers persist in doing this. I stopped being scared of the dark when was 11, and now it’s just an irritant. Not helping matters, the criminals demonstrate absolutely no sense of urgency, moving at the most languid pace possible, when you would think it would behoove them to get in and out as quickly as possible. Of course, these actions are so that the movie can happen, with Casey crawling around the attic space, desperately trying to avoid capture, as Rose looms ever closer.

Lind is probably the best thing about this, balancing nicely between being brave and resourceful, without toppling over into Hit Girl-like excess. But even here there are problems – such as, why she didn’t get her parents’ gun earlier, or make any effort to call for help, leave the house, etc. It all adds up to one of the most woefully inept scripts I’ve had the misfortune to view in a long time. I should have seen the warning signs on the poster: when the thing you want to tout most is the producers’ previous credits, you have a very weak hand. Still better than Twilight though. Albeit, only just.

Dir: Shane Dax Taylor
Star: Bella Thorne, Alyvia Alyn Lind, Skyler Samuels, Mircea Monroe

Babysitter Must Die

  By

★★★½
“The babysitter, murders”

Josie (Scott) is a babysitter, though her real interest is her work as a leader in the Girl Guide-like “Mustard Seed” summer camp. In this she mentors young girls, and accumulates some nifty skills of her own. This is relevant, due to her current situation.  She’s taking care of Sophie (Hazen), the youngest daughter of the Castillo family. The father is a rich music mogul, and they live in a remote mansion, deep in the Utah mountains. The family come back early, but before Josie can leave – she’s playing hide and seek with Sophie – there’s a home invasion by three people, under the leadership of The Woman (Yeaman). They’re no regular burglars, but members of a Satanic cult, intent on retrieving artifacts hidden in the house by its previous owners. These can then be used to sacrifice the inhabitants, and open a portal for… something not very nice to enter our world. 

It’s quickly made clear that the new arrivals have no problems with killing anyone who attempts to interfere with their mission. But they don’t initially know about Josie’s presence. You can probably work out how the rest of the movie goes from there – and you’ll be more or less right. Josie gets caught, escapes and taps into her inner warrioress, to ensure at least Sophie survives the night. She picks off the intruders, one by one, before eventually facing off against The Woman. 

While there’s not an enormous amount new or special in the execution, there are enough wrinkles to lift this above average for the “home invasion” sub-genre. Firstly the heroine is unusual enough to be interesting. She’s a quiet, understated type, who’d rather spend the night babysitting, than go to a party with her friends. Her background in the Mustard Seeds provides a justification for some of her abilities, though it’s an angle I’d like to have seen used more. Maybe, given the Christmas setting,  thrown in some Home Alone-style improvised defenses? The other main strength is the antagonist being a woman too, and Yeaman delivers the necessary level of intensity to pull off the role. The apocalyptic motivation is also a fresh one, and there’s enough background dropped in over the course of proceedings, to give this more depth than “because cultists”.

There are some holes in the plot. For example, at one point when Josie is fighting one of the cultists, things get a bit noisy – but the other two seem completely oblivious. There are also points where Josie’s actions seem illogical, or at least where her motivation is unclear. However, Glass keeps things moving forward with sufficient energy to overcome any issues. Credit is also due to cinematographer Neil Fernandez, who does a good job of capturing the isolation, from the opening shot as Josie drives up with her Mom to the mansion. An early game of hide-and-seek both foreshadows subsequent events, and gives us a good look at the home’s interior. For a small-scale, relatively low-budget production this was a pleasant surprise. At 76 minutes, it does what it needs to, and in a lean, efficient way.

Dir: Kohl Glass
Star: Riley Scott, Melinda Yeaman, Nic Fitzgerald, Scarlett Hazen

The Trip

  By

★★★½
“One bad trip – but in a good way.”

This is a nasty, mean-spirited piece of work. But I mean that as a compliment, for it’s clearly intended as such. The European Queen of Action Heroines Rapace (I must get round to giving her, her own tag!)  stars as soap actress Lisa, whose marriage to her director there, Lars (Hennie), is on severely shaky ground. So shaky, in fact, that Lars plans to use their upcoming weekend getaway to his father’s cabin to kill Lisa, cut up the body and dispose of it in a nearby lake, while saying she vanished on a solo hike. Except, just as he’s about to enact the plan, it turns out Lisa also intends to kill him in a “hunting accident”, and she gets the jump on her spouse. But before she can enact her plan, an accomplice of his shows up. Then three escaped convicts (literally) drop in to the cottage, with bad intentions of their own.

In some ways, it’s reminiscent of a hyperviolent version of seventies theatrical farce, something with a title like Run For Your Wife. Plot twist is piled upon twist, the characters furiously reacting to every additional complication and new arrival as best they can, in the hope of finding a way out of the mess.  The original Norwegian title translates as “For worse” – as in “For better or…”, and that’s probably a better one than the highly-generic name Netflix tacked on. You will need a strong stomach, to be sure. Wirkola’s previous work has often been in the horror genre, such as Nazi zombie movie Dead Snow and it’s sequal, and that informs a lot of the brutality here. But he also directed What Happened to Monday, also starring Rapace, and this re-union is another good effort. Not all the shots land as they should – there’s what feels like a painfully extended sequence of one of the prisoners going to the toilet on the attic floor, which frankly, I could have done without.

However, the bulk of it works well, if you’re in the mood for brutal black comedy. Having a couple who genuinely want to kill each other, and forcing them to team up against a greater, external threat, is a concept full of potential, and it’s mined with energy and enthusiasm. I particularly loved Lars’s geriatric father, who leaves his nursing home and turns up with a zero-tolerance approach to everyone. But Rapace’s character is the focus, cutting and stabbing her way through proceedings with the best (or worst) of them, while taking no small amount of damage – as the picture (top) suggests. This may not be the sort of film I want to re-visit on a regular basis; not knowing what was coming up certainly felt a significant part of the fun. However, as a bloody good time, with the emphasis on “bloody,” it delivered everything I was hoping, and a little more.

Dir: Tommy Wirkola
Star: Noomi Rapace, Aksel Hennie, Atle Antonsen, Christian Rubeck
a.k.a. I onde dager 

Till Death

  By

★★½
“Women don’t sweat, they glisten.”

I kinda agonized, for far longer than I should have, over whether this was a 3-star or 2½-star film. It’s probably 2¾. Or perhaps 2 5/8. No, 2 11/16. In the end though, it doesn’t matter. It’s just another in Megan Fox’s attempts to become the next Angelina Jolie, following in the footsteps of the similarly okay but not exactly memorable Rogue. Indeed, I initially thought this was by the same director, but turns out it’s a different director who uses initials in lieu of a first name. Anyway, with this one now available on Netflix, it will likely raise Fox’s action-actress profile. In terms of current rankings, she probably moves ahead of Ruby Rose in the rankings. Though that’s not exactly difficult.

The problems here are mostly pacing, with the movie being too slow to get to the main course. Emma (Fox) is unhappily married to Mark (Macken), an over-controlling lawyer, and is having an affair with one of Mark’s colleagues. After an excess of scenes belabouring these points, e.g. Mark orders her dessert after she has declined it (what a bastard!), on their 10th anniversary, Mark takes her out to a remote lakehouse. She wakes the next morning to find herself handcuffed to him, and Mark then blows his brains out. Turns out, his life was about to fall apart, but he has a plan to wreck Emma’s life from beyond the grave. This involves sending two thugs (Mulvey and Roth) to the house, one of whom has a beef with her, due to Emma having cost him his eye.

Our heroine, therefore, has to elude the home invaders while chained to a 180-lb (literal) dead weight, in a house from which all sharp objects have been carefully removed. This is kinda distracting, as I found myself figuring out alternative methods of separation, such as slamming the corpse’s wrist repeatedly in a car-door. But that’s perhaps for the best, as a distraction from too many shots of Emma dragging Mark’s body around the house, using her wedding-dress as a tarp (I’ll take “Over-obvious symbolism” for $400, please, Alex). Naturally, this unwanted connection lasts only until the plot decides it needs to be discarded, when it becomes a more standard home-invasion thriller.

It does perk up on the arrival of the villains, and there are some reasonably clever twists thereafter. To be honest, Mark’s warped imagination was almost impressive. Though if I was going to such lengths to extract revenge, I’d probably want to be there to see it. Where’s the fun otherwise? Fox does put in the effort, even if as Chris noted, Emma remains remarkably shevelled (as opposed to dishevelled) over the course of proceedings. Her hair and lipstick remain almost pristine despite crawling across grubby floors and snowy landscapes. I’m reminded of the old line quoted at the top; if you can still look hawt when drenched in blood and brains, your make-up artist deserves some kind of award.

Dir: S.K. Dale
Star: Megan Fox, Callan Mulvey, Jack Roth, Eoin Macken

Knock Knock

  By

★★★½
“I can only apologize, darling…”

This is the kind of film which makes for very uncomfortable date night viewing, simply because the situation presented is likely to lead to awkward conversations. Happily married architect Evan Webber (Reeves) has the house to himself for the weekend, his wife having gone with their two kids to the seaside, leaving him free to work on a project. A stormy night ensues, until a knock at the door, and he finds two lost young women, Genesis (Izzo) and Bel (de Armas), shivering on the doorstep. He can hardly make them stay there, so lets them in. Almost immediately, something is wrong, though initially this falls into the “Too good to be true” category. For they are nymphomaniac flight attendants, and inevitably – though after a credible struggle – Evan succumbs to their relentless charms.

The next morning, however, the reality proves less pleasant, and it’s all downhill from there. For the pair are avenging angels, honey-trapping married men, then savagely punishing them for their infidelity, and Evan is not their first victim. This development should be no real surprise if you’ve seen Roth’s other films, where bad things almost inevitably tend to result from good. A nice trip to Europe became kidnapping, torture and murder in Hostel. Social activism turned into cannibalistic dismemberment in Green Inferno. So the first half of this was largely an exercise in waiting for things to go wrong, along with strenuously assuring Chris that, in similar circumstances, my assistance would strictly be limited to passing them towels through the letter-box. I highly recommend not deviating from this answer, under any circumstances. For she was firmly convinced, whatever happened to Evan in the second half was well-deserved.

The resulting punishment is certainly not pleasant, with his home-life wrecked, both literally and figuratively. Though there were a couple of ways it could have been improved. Firstly, even with some straggly facial hair, he’s still Keanu Reeves, not exactly your average guy. He likely has to beat off real nymphomaniac flight attendants with a stick, on an everyday basis. It’d have been more effective with a more homely leading man, to whom the audience could relate. And I’d rather have seen Genesis and Bel evaporate like smoke in the night, leaving no evidence of their presence, save their impact on Evan. A little more subtlety, and less scrawling of “DADDY’S LITTLE WHORE” on the family portraits would have gone a long way here, I feel.

Still, Roth is not exactly known for his delicate approach to cinema, and as a blunt instrument illustrating in female form the perils of infidelity, this works well enough. It’s also a rare entry in the “home invasion” field where the invaders are entirely women. À l’interieur (Inside) is one of the few predecessors there, and it’s no shame this doesn’t quite reach the same heights of sheer insanity – very few movies do. It’s still a cautionary tale which had me shifting uncomfortably in my seat often enough to justify its existence, as well as casting wary glances over at Chris.

Dir: Eli Roth
Star: Keanu Reeves, Ana de Armas, Lorenza Izzo, Aaron Burns