Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Father Figures / 1/2* (2017)

“Father Figures” creates a dubious curiosity for two brothers who dislike each other, involves them in a long and illogical search for answers, forces their interaction with an ensemble of talented actors caught in a heap of unfunny comic situations, and then has the nerve to lead everyone towards an ending of ponderous feel-good phoniness. Gaze at any two minutes of the film, furthermore, and you begin to sense an underlying disinterest from the actors, who have shown up to, I guess, read a few lines of dialogue and exchange semi-cohesive barbs while the writers try to figure out where the story might be going.  One wonders if the paychecks were worth it – whether the likes of Glenn Close, Christopher Walken and J.K. Simmons were comfortable, even with minimal screen time, running through these improbable scenarios with a straight face, all for the sake of securing a few extra pennies. But what of the audience who has shown up to see them? What is in it for a person who values their presence? This is the kind of movie that exists incidentally, as if concocted to only fill in empty screening rooms on light weekends, just so others might have a place to go in case the big release down the hall is already sold out.

Monday, July 16, 2018

House on the Edge of the Park / 1/2* (1980)

While most defiant ideas for films are usually seized by the underachievers, few directors ever openly admit to being conductors of substandard rip-offs. Part of me would challenge that possibility if I ever came face-to-face with Ruggero Deodato, who in 1980 made one of many “Last House on the Left” clones and, by all traditional measures, used the screen as an open admission of his failure to equal its painful austerity. Craven’s notorious debut was hardly an original commodity – famously, its premise was based off a folk legend first used by Ingmar Bergman – but it so thoroughly embodied the nerve and conviction of its creator that few who saw it found it unworthy of notice. It was a film that lived and breathed its soul-shattering horrors. A great number of would-be understudies justifiably saw it as one of the main precursors to the genre’s sharp transition from supernatural absurdity to real-life misery, and some like Deodato were compelled to replicate the measure in more direct homage. But his “House on the Edge of the Park” is not simply a paint-by-numbers exercise. That might have been a lesser offense. No, this is a movie so listless and deceptive that we don’t dare call it bad, lest that imply anyone watching cares enough to show a faint hint of loathing.

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

The Initiation / * (1984)

A group of fresh-faced 20-somethings assemble in the halls of a sorority house to pledge their loyalties during hell week. One of them, seen in the early scenes waking from a violent nightmare, is to be the primary target of a series of impending pranks; being beautiful and wealthy are traits easily exploited by the more vain and narcissistic, especially while she seems oblivious to them. Dialogue is formal but laced with underlying resentment, as if more than mere looks and prestige divide the cliques. But these are not motions to imply more secrets between them – only gestures used by novice actors who have yet to formulate a plausible manner in front of the camera. In a way they acquire that behavior both from inexperience and from the misguided endeavors of their director, who was on his first (and last) film assignment here in the months preceding “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” which was credited with adding a potent psychology to the tired dead teenager formula. His “The Initiation,” which survives in the periphery of an inexplicable cult status, is one of the last genre excursions preceding that transition, and certainly one of the dumbest: every single scene exists not to stimulate the excitement of the audience, but to suggest a sense of laughable frustration on part of individuals who have no clue as to what they are doing.

Friday, July 6, 2018

Maniac / zero stars (1980)

Quiet and eccentric Frank Zito has serious issues. Rarely occupied by conventional social interactions and often lost in the labyrinth of a self-imposed solitude, he has taken up precarious hobbies as a way of passing the hours – among them, decorating female mannequins throughout his apartment while carrying on one-sided conversations, as if they were verbal punching backs for his paralyzing insecurity. Unfortunately, one key attribute between them bypasses the notion of a foreboding gesture: they all carry the scalps of deceased women he has killed over the recent weeks, with their head of hair acting as a leftover trinket of the crimes. Who these victims are is not as thorough a detail for the audience as much as the anatomy of their demises, and in an early scene on a beach the camera spies one such victim (nameless, no less) having her throat cut so that she can bleed out on the sand. Most films would use this kind of display as a precursor to the psychological study, particularly if it involves an engaging pattern. But the obscene and detestable “Maniac” has only one focus: to fill scene after scene with relentless bloodshed while robbing us of a genuine dramatic context.

Sunday, July 1, 2018

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom / ** (2018)

Maybe it’s apropos that a fifth blockbuster about genetically engineered dinosaurs begins and ends with words from Ian Malcolm, the man whose theories have underlined the obligatory fallout of this exhausting excursion. Seen in a senate hearing about whether the U.S. government should intervene in the protection of gigantic creatures at the sight of a now-defunct theme park, he signals an ominous warning that most recognize as authentic: if you save beings that exist in violation of the natural order, you may be risking your own. All signs point to a wrap-up of that possibility as the site of Isla Nublar faces a new threat: the island’s long-dormant volcano has come back to life and will likely render the surviving species extinct, effectively undoing the experiment of scientists playing god. Alas, a movement of fierce protectors has risen in the political fringes, seeking a way to rescue the dinosaurs before such a fate is a reality. That prospect inspires the agenda of a billionaire closely linked to the park’s resources, who calls upon characters from the previous film to go in and relocate a dozen species to a nearby sanctuary island… without knowing that they intend to sell them to foreign harvesters on the black market.