Tag: USA

The Stolen Valley

  By

★★½
“Topples over into earnestness”

This feels like a modern Western. I think it was shot up on the borders of Utah and Arizona, since I recognized scenes shot at the Buckskin Tavern, in that area. While contemporary, with relatively minor tweaks, it could easily take place a century or more ago, back when robber land barons were a thing in the Old West. Lupe (Covarrubias) is in desperate straits, with her mother Adamina (Miranda) in need of money to pay for medical treatment she can’t afford. There’s another shock: the father, Carl (Fitzgerald), who Lupe long believed dead, is actually alive, and might be the last chance of getting the necessary funds. So she decides to make the journey to see him.

Barely is she under way – she’s seeking to pawn jewellery to raise a little cash – when she encounters Maddie (Hethcoat). And when I say “encounters”, she comes out of the back of the pawn-shop, guns blazing. For Maddie has a sizable debt too, to some unpleasant people, and now they perceive Lupe as her accomplice. The two young women decide Carl could solve both of their problems, only to find him engaged in a dubious scheme to sell off land, which actually belongs to Adamina, to an oil company, having convinced them Adamina is dead. It’s a move which will result in the indigenous people being thrown off the property, and Lupe’s unexpected presence clearly represents a threat to  the deal. 

This does a lot of things right. Most obviously, it takes place in some gorgeous locations, and the photography does them justice. The performances are generally effective as well, with Hethcoat in particular a lot of fun to watch. She cuts a striking figure with her blonde hair, cowboy hat, and a take no prisoners attitude. Maddie is in sharp contrast to Lupe, who has been brought up “the right way”, and they make for an amusing pairing as they play off each other. Although scenes like the gratuitous flamenco dancing may not move the plot forward, they are still amusing to watch, and they build the character. Indeed, they might be fun precisely because they are separate from the plot. 

Because that’s the film’s problem. It’s a script where far too much happens because the story needs it. Why did Adamina leave without taking the property deed, clearly her most precious asset? Why did Carl hang on, not just to the deed, but also the letter Adamina wrote to her own mother, for over twenty years? And don’t even start me on the remarkable coincidence of Maddie’s background. Add in a not-so subtle subtext of “Men are bad, and white men – they’re the worst“, and it all begins to topple over under the weight of its own moral superiority. I’ve no doubt Edwards’ heart is in the right place. However, the message here too often gets in the way of the movie. 

Dir: Jesse Edwards
Star: Briza Covarrubias, Allee Sutton Hethcoat, Micah Fitzgerald, Paula Miranda

Redhead

  By

★★
“Better dead than redhead.”

Written, directed by, and starring husband and wife team Sam and Johnna Hodge, this is the kind of film it would be easy to deride as poverty-row garbage from the bottom drawer. There’s precious little plot, some of the performances are painfully amateur, and it seems to exist mostly as a show-reel for spraying around corn syrup with red food colouring in it. And yet… If Chris and I made a movie – something we have discussed – it might well end up being not too dissimilar to this. On the other hand, if we had a spare $55,000 lying around – the budget here, according to the IMDb – we’d probably go on a nice holiday instead. 

Autumn Blacksmith (Hodge) survived being abducted and tortured by infamous psychopath Oscar Sawyer (Stinnett), finally escaping after killing him. However, the experience left her severely traumatized, and the slightest unfortunate interaction with any man is sufficient to push her over the edge into a murderous rage. Cue the corn syrup. Rinse, repeat for 90-odd minutes, until the end credits roll. Occasional hallucinations of Sawyer returning from the grave to haunt her, and a brief attempt by her therapist (Holland) to check in, offer a small touch of variety. The West Virginia cops, led by Detective Rogers (Robinson), are not exactly Sherlock Holmes. Then again, locals are remarkably chill about Autumn’s spree. The bartender where she kills her first victim says of him, “He was always an asshole.”

I was reminded of Michael and Anne Paul, another husband and wife film-making duo. They made Roman’s Bride, where the red-headed wife also goes on a killing spree. I think that worked a bit better, because its lead actress had an innocence about her, that provided an interesting contrast to her savagery. Here, Autumn is more blatantly mad, to the point you wonder why any man would try to chat her up. As a viewer, you’re never brought along on the journey into insanity. The way some of the local community end up assisting with, or even active participants in, her murders could have been used to provide another twist to the narrative. Nah. Open another bottle of Karo instead. 

Technically, it’s okay: the camera gets pointed in the right direction, it doesn’t succumb to underlit scenes, and the audio is fine. The soundtrack, also by Sam Hodge (not a surprise), has a nice throwback vibe, sounding like it was ripped off an eighties video nasty. But there is no real sense of progression or development, and the ending feels particularly sudden, going to the end credits immediately after she has disembowelled her final victim, a peeping Tom. We’re very little forward from where we were after her first murder. A sequel is in production though, so it appears there was enough of a market for this kind of thing. Will I watch it? [Sighs heavily] Yeah. I suspect I probably will.

Dir:Johnna Hodge, Sam Hodge
Star: Johnna Hodge, Ashley Stinnett, Will A. Holland, Travis Robinson

Dead of Winter

  By

★★★½
“Old, bold and cold.”

Thompson seems to be having a second wind, making her first appearance on this site at the age of sixty-six. That’s a decade more than Liam Neeson was when he became an action star with Taken, and probably makes Thompson the oldest debutante here. This comes on the heels of series Down Cemetery Road which, while not quite qualifying here, certainly was more brisk than expected. At this rate, I might even have to forgive her for throwing shade at Audrey Hepburn. No question about the credentials of Winter for this site, since it plays like a cross between Fargo and Taken. There’s not a lot of fat here, certainly. Things kick off just a few minutes in, and barely stop thereafter.

Barb (Thompson) is on the way to a lake in Minnesota – a part played by Finland – for some ice fishing. She gets turned around, and stops at a remote cabin to ask for directions. There she meets an odd man (Menchaca), and notices some blood on the ground. Then, at the lake, she sees the man chasing after and recapturing a young woman (Marsden), so realizes she has stumbled into the middle of a kidnapping plot. After the obligatory “no signal” scene, Barb realizes she is the victim’s only hope. But the man may not be her biggest problem. His wife (Greer) is the real brains behind the operation, very highly motivated, and prepared to go to any lengths to stop Barb from interfering in the grim plan.

I will say, it does take a bit of getting used to, hearing Thompson going full Marge Gunderson, eh? This is no comment on the accuracy of the accent, a topic on which I am not qualified to speak. It’s just odd. However, this is not a particularly dialogue-heavy movie, with Barb spending much of it alone and in the wilderness. We never find out either of the antagonists’ names, incidentally, the end credits just calling them Purple Lady and Camo Jacket. The film focuses increasingly on the two women. Purple has nothing left to lose, generally having the edge in firepower and ruthlessness – as is demonstrated after Barb is able to reach help through a CB radio. But Barb has motivation of her own. 

This comes out in rather clunky flashbacks to the early days of her relationship with her husband. Truth be told, I didn’t feel these added particularly much; the same information could have been provided more efficiently, and in ways which didn’t derail the tension of the current situation. Though I did like how the young Barb is played by Thompson’s real-life daughter, Gaia Wise, I found myself impatient for the film to return to the one-on-one battle, which you know is going to end badly for someone. Or someones. The film doesn’t disappoint there, with a brutal struggle in the middle of a frozen lake, good enough to make me forget the combatants have a combined age of 116. 

Dir: Brian Kirk
Star: Emma Thompson, Judy Greer, Marc Menchaca, Laurel Marsden

Paradox Effect

  By

★★½
“Not much effect on me.”

I’m always down for an Olga Kurylenko film. She’s been in some good entries on the site previously, including Sentinelle and High Heat. Her track record gets her the benefit of the doubt, for an entry like this, which might be a bit marginal if it starred another actress. Though American, it takes place in Bari, Italy where recovering junkie Karina (Kurylenko) is putting her life back together, and looking forward to the arrival of her young daughter, Lucy (Astons).  However, on the way home from a late-night shift at the bakery where she works, she stumbles into a murder commited by mob courier Covek (Trevena), which becomes a car-chase, ending in a fiery crash.

The problem is, this  burned up the drugs Covek was supposed to be delivering to Silvio (Keitel). He “recruits” – quotes used advisedly – Karina to acquire a replacement stash, a process which drags them both through the Italian underworld over the course of the night. Matters are not helped by a couple of factors. Silvio has Covek’s son as a hostage, so noncompliance is not an option. Oh, and did I mention that Covek is actually an Interpol agent, who will go to any lengths to make sure Silvio faces justice? On the other side, Karina will go to any lengths to make sure her own daughter is not harmed. But the trail of destruction being left in the wake of her and Covek’s hunt for heroin is not exactly subtle. 

I wanted to like this more than I ended up doing. It feels as if Karina needs to be more central than she is. She ends up spending too much time either doing Covek’s bidding, or following him around, and that’s not what I wanted to see. Kurylenko > Trevena, except the film doesn’t seem to realize it.  Keitel, another actor I like, is also underused. To the point where, up until the very end, I half-wondered if he filmed all his scenes somewhere else, and was then spliced into the movie during the editing stage. That turns out not to be the case. But the mere fact it seems possible is another illustration of the wobbly execution. 

Even basic stuff like the film’s title, which is both strikingly generic and never explained, is maddening. Opening with a quote from Nietzche sets intellectual aspirations the rest of the movie isn’t able to sustain. I will say, it is technically decent: I appreciated little things, like them deciding to blow up a genuine car, rather than faking it with CGI. When given the chance, Kurylenko does well in the action, though quite why Karina has these skills is never explained. It would have been improved by being the film depicted in the poster (I must have missed Kurylenko’s pleather suit), simply having Karina trying to get the replacement drugs herself. In that scenario, Covek becomes surplus to the film’s requirements. A win-win, I’d say. 

Dir: Scott Weintrob
Star: Olga Kurylenko, Oliver Trevena, Harvey Keitel, Alice Astons

Killing Mary Sue

  By

★½
“Death becomes her.”

Is there anything worse than a comedy which doesn’t land? I get that humour is subjective, but this action-comedy manages to be spectacularly unfunny, to a degree I have to wonder how it got made. There are some well-known people in the cast: actors who I know have talent (to the list below, you can add Martin Kove and Jake Busey), and whose work I have previously enjoyed. What did they see in the script here, which made them think, “Yes, this is something I want to do”? For this is the cinematic equivalent of nails being dragged across a chalkboard for an hour and a half. You don’t watch this, so much as endure it.  

To be fair, I think the characters being so repellent is a conscious, deliberate choice. You have sleazy politician Bradley Weiner (Mulroney), and his problematic step-daughter, Mary Sue (McCormick). She’s an utter brat, with no interest in anything except partying hard. With a key election looming, and Weiner trailing in the polls, he and his campaign adviser (Busey) decide to bump Mary Sue off, both to end her scandals, and for a sympathy bump in the polls. However, she proves remarkably hard to terminate: there is eventually an explanation for this, though it’s more of the “Wait a minute…” variety, than anything convincing. Still, Mary Sue’s survival forces her father to up the ante, and repeatedly send nastier assassins to try and finish the job. 

The first chunk of this is energetically devoted to demonstrating how terrible everyone is. The problem might be, it’s too damn successful. They never recover: for Weiner, it’s fair enough, since he is the nominal “bad guy.” But for Mary Sue, this is a problem, since you want your heroine to have some redeeming qualities. I genuinely couldn’t find any. Indeed, I was beginning to sympathize with her father, since in her position, putting her down like the mad dog she is, feels almost like responsible parenting. [Our teenage daughter wasn’t exactly a saint; yet she’s Mother freakin’ Teresa beside Mary Sue] This is all lazily blamed on daddy issues, her biological father being murdered in front of her, when he was robbing a convenience store. 

The concept of her being a real-life Mary Sue is potentially amusing, except that’s as far as it goes. Simply repeating a cliché of bad writing, doesn’t stop it from being a cliché, and writer-director Sunshine does nothing more. Have her slowly and gracelessly roll away from a hail of bullets, or mentioning video-game auto-aiming capabilities, simply isn’t enough. Especially when Mary Sue shows no sign of a character arc, and remains resolutely unlikable until her sudden, thoroughly unconvincing and revelatory change at the end. Sort of. I’m not even going to get into the lumpen and turgid whacks at unsubtle political satire: guys, the Russian are interfering in ‘Merican politics! If you find that intrinsically amusing, you know where to find this film. 

Dir: James Sunshine
Star: Sierra McCormick, Dermot Mulroney, Sean Patrick Flanery, Jason Mewes

Playground

  By

★★★
“Further education.”

I’m a little surprised I hadn’t heard of this, considering it is based on a concept by Luc Besson. What we have here, though, is a feature-length version of what was originally a ten-episode web series. I presume it was intended for distribution on something like Quibi (remember that?), but I’ve not been able to find out where it previously appeared, if anywhere. Anyway, it recently popped up on Tubi, looking like a “proper” film, though still with the chapter headings. While touted as “an original idea” by Luc Besson, let’s be honest: if you chucked Nikita, Leon and Hanna into a blender, the resulting violence smoothie might well end up tasting not dissimilar to this.

Amy Seely (Holm) is a teen orphan in New York (though the series was made in France), whose father murdered her mother, then killed himself, and is not having a good time in the foster system. She is more than happy to take the route out offered to her by Father (Abkarian), even though that means attending The Courtyard, a school for teenage assassins. There, life is certainly cheap, with the mysterious powers that be who run it, taking advantage of the fact that nobody basically suspects children of being killers. However, Amy becomes privy to disturbing information, which suggests that the Courtyard might have been involved in her parents’ deaths, and begins to rebel against her own conditioning. Not helping matters: the facility is attacked, and the order comes from above to shut it all down.

After an impressive opening, where Amy ambushes a group of four thugs, by pretending to be the target’s daughter, this is… merely alright. It feels a bit too “young adult’ for my tastes, and spends an excessive amount of time within the Courtyard, dealing with what I am inclined to describe as Teen Soap-Opera Bullshit. For example, there’s a bitchy girl who takes an instant dislike to Amy, a cute boy that she kinda likes, and so on. Therefore, when her first mission goes awry because somebody sabotaged her gun, it leads to an additional helping of unnecessary TS-OB. I’d have preferred to see more of them operating in the real world, and suspect the webisode budget acted as a constraint there.

The structure is also a little odd as a result, because rather than building to an obvious climax, you have ten mini-climaxes, corresponding to the end of each episode. In some ways, this pacing has more in common with a golden era serial. I was quite impressed with Holm, who has potential, although it was a little odd having her first mission involving a paedophile, considering Besson’s own… um, very “European” history in the area of teenage attraction. It’s also eye-rollingly fortuitous how that mission provides her with the first evidence that the Courtyard may not be as beneficent as they claim. Still, it’s probably no worse than anything Besson has done in the past decade. 

Dir: Olivier Schneider and Pascal Sid
Star: Amalia Holm, Simon Abkarian, Melina Matthews, Ann Skelly

Inheritance

  By

★★★
“The family that spies together, lies together.”

Or, um, something, I guess. Maya (Dynevor) is at her mother’s funeral, when she gets a surprise, in the appearance of her long estranged father, Sam (Ifans). He wants to reconnect with her, and to this end, offers her a job with his real-estate company in Cairo. Despite qualms, Maya accepts, but not long after her arrival, Sam is kidnapped. To obtain his release, the kidnappers order her to recover a package and deliver it to them. Things turn out to be more complex than that, naturally, and the resulting trail takes Maya first to India, then on to South Korea, with various parties keenly interested in the outcome. She discovers the murky truth about her father’s business activities too.

While that likely won’t surprise anyone who has seen this kind of film, it does a good job of capturing the escalating sense of paranoia felt by the heroine. What is going on? Is her father a good guy or not? Who can she trust? [For the last, it’s unsurprising, and not really a spoiler, if you go with “nobody at all” there] The whole film was shot on an iPhone which is kinda impressive, because it looks surprisingly decent. It does add a hand-held immediacy to proceedings, and this helps in some sequences, such as when she is being pursued through the streets of Mumbai. Or is it Delhi? I’ll admit, it hard to keep track sometimes.

On the other hand, I tend to feel this should only be one trick in the cinematic locker, and because it’s used for the entirety here, its impact does tend to diminish. Fortunately, it’s considerably more stable than I expected, so I presume this wasn’t just the director waving it around by hand. Dynevor has to carry the film with her performance, and I did like the character arc. Maya starts off as a fairly nondescript party girl, who basically flings herself into hedonistic excess after the death of her mother, for whom she had been sole carer of late. But by the end, she has become hard-bitten and cynical, deception now coming as easily as breathing to her.

In its hand-held energy and globe-trotting shenanigans, it feels like it might inhabit a small, extremely cheap corner of the Bourne universe. However, I would definitely not expect any significant action set-pieces commensurate with that. While Maya does qualify here – she’s absolutely left to sink or swim based on her own abilities to escape perilous situations – it’s her instinctual smarts which are key to survival. You may be able to see where this will end up. In particular, there was one line which was absolutely an “Ah-hah!” moment for me in this regard. I wouldn’t say that destroys the film, since this is one where the journey is more interesting than the destination. This iPhone technique isn’t somewhere I’d like to live, yet it was an interesting place to visit. 

Dir: Neil Burger
Star: Phoebe Dynevor, Rhys Ifans, Necar Zadegan, Kersti Bryan

Girls In Prison

  By

★★½
“Better poster than a movie.”

This came out the same year as Swamp Women, with the Corman production beating this to the screen by a couple of months. Given the similarities in the plot, I have to wonder if the concept of the “mockbuster” pre-dates The Asylum. Though it’s not as if this is exactly a top of the line, Hollywood production, being distributed by AIP. You can probably tell from that gorgeous poster, which is a true work of art and, sadly, considerably more exciting than what this mostly pedestrian film has to offer. It begins with Anne Carson (Taylor) being sent to prison as an accomplice in an armed robbery, though she protests her innocence, and prison chaplain Rev. Fulton (Denning) believes her.

Key in the case against Anne was the unexplained disappearance of $38,000 in loot, which she says she simply walked away from. Needless to say, as soon as details of her conviction become known on the inside, a lot of people want to become her “friends”, not least queen bee Jenny (Jergens) and another cellmate, Melanee (Gilbert). After an earthquake hits the prison and throws everything into chaos, Jenny and Melanee make a break for freedom, dragging an unwilling Anne with them. On the outside, the other participant in the robbery, Paul, is equally keen to recover the proceeds, and is applying the screws to Anne’s father, using his as leverage so she will spill the truth to him.

Made in 1956, you can seem some of the standard women-in-prison tropes present, albeit inevitably in a diluted format given the time – the Hays code was still firmly in effect. Hence, the jail personnel are all nice, rather than abusive: the warden’s belief that Anne is not as innocent as she claims, is about as harsh as it gets (and, she’s not wrong…). There’s no nudity, naturally; any lesbian undertones are extremely implied; and the violence is limited to a couple of cat-fights. Though one does manage, with unerring accuracy, to make its way into a nearby puddle of mud. The main problem is pacing: while it starts and ends well enough, after the concept is established, little happens until the convenient tremor show up.

Certainly, nothing resembling the tag-lines takes place. I never did learn “what happens to girls without men”, not least because these are hardly girls, e.g. Jergens was aged 38 when this was released. The one man, presumably the Rev. Fulton, is not “against” the women, regardless of quantity, and even by mid-fifties standards, there’s little here to shock. Okay, expecting truth in advertising from an AIP movie is likely a stretch. But Swamp Women was rather more entertaining, realizing that it had to keep things moving forward to engage the audience. This knows the story has to go from Point A to Point B. It just doesn’t know how to make the journey more than marginally interesting, and to be honest, rarely makes much of an effort.

Dir: Edward L. Cahn
Star: Joan Taylor, Adele Jergens, Richard Denning, Helen Gilbert 

Torment

  By

★½
“Car trouble.”

I’m tempted to be very snarky, say something like “The torment here is entirely on the viewer’s end” and make that the totality of the review. However, that’s a dangerous precedent, one I don’t want to set. Before long, I’d be phoning it in, and churning out nothing but single sentence reviews. I would instead spend my time sitting on the couch, eating Doritos and scrolling idly on my phone, before dying prematurely of a heart attack, and turning Chris into a grieving cat lady. Do you want that to happen, Torment? Do you, really? However, it probably does say something that such morbid speculation is still considerably more fun than either watching or writing about this. 

It’s one of those films where the time-line is jumbled up. This kind of script requires a lot of writing rigour to work, and Leone doesn’t have it at all. Though I already had a sinking feeling with an opening title sequence which looks like it was made on Windows Movie Maker. And not a current version, either. We begin with a woman picking up another women off the side of the road, and the title card. We then get a woman leaving her apartment, walking down to the car-park, getting in her vehicle. She drives around. Fills it up with petrol. Drives around some more. Parks in a different parking structure. We’re eight minutes into a 73-minute film, and I am already checking out.

Turns out there’s someone locked in the trunk. Though do not make the mistake of thinking it’s the woman picked up at the beginning. Dear me, no. That sequence turns out to be the opener for the final part of the film, a bit of stalking of the hitch-hiker through the woods. It gives the strong impression of having been tacked on as emergency filler, after the sudden realization they had done with the main plot, and only had 55 minutes of material. That is mostly to do with the woman in the trunk, who is radio host Elaine Margo (Bird). She has been kidnapped by the mysterious driver (Cay), because… Uncertain. Elaine obviously has murderous secrets of her own, but how they impact her abductor is never adequately explained.

Instead, there’s a lot of driving. Which I get. it’s clear there wasn’t much money here, so the makers went with a concept that requires few locations, and a very small cast. But it doesn’t help that the two leads are similar in appearance, so when we get scenes outside the car, it’s often unclear who is involved in them. This is just another misstep in a movie which seems compulsively drawn to making them. You’ll reach the end – which is really the beginning – and will likely feel nothing more than bemused irritation at best. It almost made a nihilist out of me, because I was left questioning the point of this film’s existence, as well as my own.

Dir: Anthony Leone
Star: Amy Cay, Paisley Bird, Isabella Giardini, JD Isabelle

Zero Hour

  By

★½
“It’s certainly an hour.”

Not to be confused, in any way, with Zero Hour!, the 1957 Canadian film which was spoofed mercilessly in Airplane! This unfolds mostly over one night in a high-rise, where Ida (Hoover) is the last person left in the building, having taken over from best friend Katrina (Dumont). She finds herself being harassed by a pair of masked figures, and simultaneously receiving messages on her phone and computer from her husband, Isaac (Groetsch). Which is perhaps even more disturbing to her, because Isaac was killed in the home invasion which opens the movie. So what’s going on? Has he become a ghost in the machine? Do they have cellphones in the afterlife? Or is there a more prosaic explanation?

According to what Isaac tells her, the people hunting her through the building are also those responsible for his death. The obvious question is why, and it’s in providing the answers that the script (also by Groetsch) falls apart. After the heroine has been chased through the building, eventually ending up in a roof-top confrontation, we get the first of a number of twists, and… Put it this way: I have questions. Lots of questions. Out of respect for the film-makers, I won’t spoiler it, because this is clearly a big part of the film. However, I don’t feel it makes very much sense, because the conspiracy required would need to extend far further than the handful of people shown as involved.

While you are still going, “Hang on, what about…” there, the film lobs another twist at you, then a third as we flashback to Ida and Katrina’s earlier conversation in a bar, which brings in Allison (Durham). After the credits, there’s even another scene which could be a fourth twist, I dunno. Or it might be Groetsch simply wanting to get in another drone shot. I remember my first drone shot. It was in a movie called Berkshire County in 2014, and was amazing at the time. Now? It’s very easy to overuse them, and Groetsch does just that here. He’s clearly going for a fluid style of camera, with it always on the move. But there has to be a point to them. Here, not so much.

This barely runs an hour between opening and closing credits (or, perhaps more accurately, opening and closing drone shots). That’s likely a wise decision, considering how much of this is Ida staring at her phone – and Goetsch needs to learn how to shoot text messages. I will say, I didn’t hate Hoover, who is fairly sympathetic, and does what she can with material which feels more like a rough draft of an idea, and in great need of external critical input. According to his IMDb, Groetsch has no fewer than eleven other films in various stages of pre-production (though some haven’t been updated since 2017 or earlier). The only way to get better is to make more movies. I hope he does.

Dir: Justin Groetsch
Star: Mikaela Hoover, Sarah Dumont, Justin Groetsch, Carrington Brooke Durham