Alright, the Bruce Willis space movie. Breach (aka AntiLife) isn’t terrible, it’s just not super inspired or original and if you go in with your nose already turned up at it, well that’s on you bud, you silly cinephile you. However, if you’re a periodically undemanding moviegoer who enjoys a nice schlocktastic cheapie once in a while you may just get a kick out of it. This thing riffs on everything from Doom to The Thing to Pandorum and if you don’t have expectations higher than Bruce Willis and Johnny Messner clearly got while filming their scenes then you’ll have just as much fun as the two of them clearly did. So it’s sometime in the future and earth has been all but decimated by a plague, the remnants of humanity are packed into a giant space station and hurtled towards a distant exoplanet called ‘New Earth’ under the stern, hambone stewardship of The Admiral (Thomas Jane). Most of the passengers slumber in tranquil cryogenic sleep save for a barebones maintenance crew managed by Willis’s once great colonel turned disgraced alcoholic janitor. They’re watched like a hawk by a military man (Timothy V. Murphy) that Willis literally refers to as a ‘space Nazi’ (to his face), but somehow a doomsday zealot manages to smuggle some freaky alien parasite onboard which quickly begins infecting the crew and turning them into ink spewing, putrefied space zombies. Willis and his team that includes Cody Kearsely, Corey Large, Callab Mulvey, Continuum’s Rachel Nichols and scene stealing Messner are stuck fighting off legions of what I suppose would count as the undead in a way but they’re more like a hive minded organism, really. Willis is cool here and actually looks like he’s having a modicum of fun compared to other B flicks he’s recently done. He also plays against type as kind of a reverse action hero and I never thought I’d see the day he plays a character that gets referred to as a ‘lover, not a fighter.’ Jane only has a few atypical military A-hole scenes but he fires off his lines with glib, cavalier flair and I find it hysterical how intensely he insists on wearing his pitch dark tinted aviator shades *indoors*, in a dimly lit spaceship no less. Look, it’s junk, I won’t call pretend it’s a great film, but as an avid lover of cinematic junk food it did the trick for me, and I had fun with it.
I doubt you’ll see a more gruesome, harrowing, WTF horror film this year than Shawn Linden’s Hunter Hunter, a sly deconstruction of several sub-genres including the wilderness creature feature, breathless survival thriller and serial killer suspense tale. It’s orchestrated around a simple premise that evolves into something not so simple until the final act takes a battering ram to the audience’s nerves and expectations alike and you sit there as the credits roll frantically looking for your heart pills before you slide off the couch in full coronary. Somewhere out in the bush a man (Devon Sawa), his wife (Camille Sullivan) and their daughter (Summer H. Howell) live a rugged, simple life as off the grid fur trapper survivalists. One year a rogue wolf returns to their line and threatens to eat both them and their livelihood unless they can track, hunt and kill it before it does the same to them. Only thing is, there’s something way worse than wolves out in those woods, something each family member will come face to face with in a series of white knuckle horror sequences that generate true suspense thanks to nervy, close quarters editing, tension soaked acting from all especially Sullivan and a spooky, atmospherically earthy score by Kevin Cronin. Most of the film is a clever blend of chills, dark humour, scenery and mystery… until that ending rolls around and it goes completely berserk, hog-wild, deranged and etches a fucked up, primally violent conclusion into the viewer’s psyche. Not many films have the big ol’ nuts to pull an ending like this off, but this one does it with grinding, cheerless yet stylish confidence set to a soundtrack song I can’t find on google, but it’s a cool one. Director Linden is responsible for one of my favourite hidden gem films, a metaphysical, Dark City-esque noir from circa 2007 called Nobody, and I always wondered what he’d follow it up with, if ever. Hunter is a lean, mean, bleak, pitilessly cruel picture in all the best ways, and quite the effective, aesthetically pleasing horror film. Just bring your barf bag and your anxiety meds and you’re all set.
To properly absorb the fascinating, highly emotional, metaphysically challenging piece of introspection that is Tara Miele’s Wander Darkly you’ll have to literally turn off the part of your brain that processes films in a linear, logical and systematic fashion. That’s not to say it’s some super abstract art installation on celluloid like some filmmakers traffic in, this is a discernible story simply refracted through a prism of unconsciousness, largely taking place in a realm different from ours, and the way that one observes it should be adjusted accordingly. I hate to use comparison all the time but it does help a bit in understanding the journey you’re about to embark on so picture something like Michel Gondry by way of Terence Malick and you’ll have some notion but, as always, this is a singular piece all its own and one of the most impressive, affecting films I’ve seen all year, starting with a performance from Sienna Miller that redefines the idea of acting for camera itself. Her and Diego Luna play a thirty something couple who have just had a newborn baby and are looking forward to their lives ahead.. until a brutal car accident changes everything all in one moment. Moment is the key word for how the film progresses after this even because the only way I can describe the narrative flow employed here is a series of ‘moments’ untethered from any sort of structure or beats. Most of the film takes place in a sort of purgatorial realm between worlds where we wonder if she’s dead, or he’s dead, maybe both of them are or perhaps they’re just stuck in the gauzy limbo between life and death. In any case they find themselves thrown into an elemental algorithm of shifting memories, hazy recollections and free flowing subconscious experience, revisiting keystone moments along the path of their relationship involving their issues as a couple, the baby coming into the world, her fight against mental illness, their stormy relationship with her parents (Beth Grant and Brett Rice, both superb) and a whole nebulous cluster of defining events in their lives distilled into moments, here one second and gone the next. It’s a disorienting, waking-dream experiment and I’ve never ever seen a story told quite like this on film, I promise you what they’ve done here is utterly unique and singular. There are transitions between scene to scene that happen with the kind of surreal fluidity where I didn’t even notice there *was* a transition until halfway through the next moment because it just felt so… elemental. Sienna Miller gives an award worthy performance here and then some, she bares all in an emotionally naked, psychologically raw and disarmingly vulnerable piece of performance that I’m still thinking about days later. Director Miele uses aforementioned transitions, an angelic score by Alex Weston and intuitively placed editing to make this something simultaneously out of this world yet also so human, so relatable and so down to earth despite being lost in the clouds of non-traditional storytelling and profound ambitions. One of the best films of the year.
A lot can go wrong on a vacation to the tropics and in David Twohy’s ruthlessly taut, excellently warped, deliriously irrepressible shocker A Perfect Getaway a lot of it does thanks to a crazy Bonnie & Clyde pair of serial killer haunting on a chain of less touristy Hawaiian islands. The hook is that we’re presented three sets of couples and not told until the final act which ones are the nutcases. There’s Milla Jovovich and Steve Zahn as the California yuppies out of their depth in the rugged natural world juxtaposed by Timothy Olyphant and Kiele Sanchez as the lower middle class adventurous couple with a military background. There’s also Chris Hemsworth and Marley Shelton as your stereotypical beach hippie types with just as many eccentricities as dysfunctions (they got married in the produce section of a grocery store) but they kinda hover in the background to a lesser extent. Anywho, one of these couples are crack piping mass murderers and although if you objectively look at the narrative structure and character development throughout it’s not hard to tell who, we must remember that in the case of any trip.. it’s the journey, not the destination, and what a fun journey this film is. What makes it most engaging is Twohy’s wonderfully meta, cheekily self aware and rapid fire script that riffs on the art of Hollywood screenwriting deftly and lets the actors, Olyphant in particular, fire on all cylinders and really whip the rug out from underneath the audience quite frequently. It’s a vicious, savage piece too and when the final act rolls around there are some queasy body horror FX, terrific pursuit scenes and some real mean mugging from the two actors that are revealed to be certifiably fucking bonkers. Thing is, you see a trailer or poster for this and it could be read as kind of generic at first glance, but it’s really anything but on a script level, there’s so much juicy dialogue, bizarre character idiosyncrasies and dark humour woven into the overall thriller plot that it becomes instantly, unavoidably memorable. Great film.
If your pull any fifty random genre films out of the hat between now and like 1984, chances are Tommy ‘Tiny’ Lister Jr is in at least ten of them. With a knockout double threat career that began in professional wrestling and continued on to an epic film career after his debut alongside Eric Roberts in Runaway Train, Tiny had a run that any aspiring character actor would be jealous of. He was a tough guy, a magnetic performer onscreen and distinct presence who I will greatly miss in cinema, and here are my top ten performances of his!
10. Prisoner #2 in Austin Powers in Goldmember
It’s a quick bit part in a hectic prison sequence where Dr. Evil and Mini Me film a demented rap video and he’s only onscreen for a second and a half but he literally gets to feel Mike Myers to his face that “I’ve heard guys on crack make more sense than you” and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used that line in situations since I first saw Goldmember.
9. Monday in Walter Hill’s Extreme Prejudice
A hulking henchman for Powers Boothe’s mythical drug emperor in this overlooked modern western, this guy is called Monday because he used to play football until circumstance set him down the path of illegal drug trade. It’s a tiny role but I relish the wry moment he informs Nick Nolte’s Texas Ranger the reason he qui football is “he hurt his knee”, to which Nick cheekily replies, “looks like you hurt your head.” The look Tiny gives him, man..
8. Tillaver in Jack Sholder’s Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies
One of the most ill fated corrections officers in cinema’s penal system, Tillaver makes the unwitting mistake of mounting off to Andrew Divoff’s evil Djinn and pays a hefty price for it; his soul. It’s a quick, exuberant cameo and Tiny may be the only actor ever who can claim he told an iconic horror movie boogeyman to their face that he wants to “slow dance with them, Compton style.”
7. Philbert Slowlove in The Boondocks
You can’t enjoy this deranged animated series without being able to laugh at gloriously anti-PC jokes and Lister’s episode is a case in point. He plays a hulking weirdo who pretends to be mentally handicapped to collect charity money and maniacally utters the phrase “strawberry milk!!” repetitively as some kind of warped mantra. It’s always fun for actors to cut loose with voice work in animated stuff and Tiny clearly had a gift for it.
6. Cassius in Little Nicky
This is a hog wild bizarre movie and actually one of my favourite Adam Sandler comedies, Tiny is a memorable part of an incredibly eclectic cast playing one of the Devil’s kids and Nicky’s older brother. Cassius and other no good brother Adrian (Rhys Ifans) escape hell and rampage throw NYC in a hedonistic blast of scenery chewing and blissful theatricality, it’s one of the most fun roles he’s played.
5. Deebo in F. Gary Gray’s Friday
The meanest gangbanger on the block, Deebo is Billy, petty thief, woman beater and all around piece of shot played to the hilt by Lister, until he gets what’s coming to him in an epic Mortal Kombat worthy smackdown fight against Ice Cube. I think this is probably the role he was most known for in many circles and he’s definitely one hell of a memorable and intimidating villain.
4. Finnick in Disney’s Zootopia
More voice work yay! Finnick is a tiny, adorable yet bad tempered Fennec Fox and partner in crime to Jason Bateman’s con artist Nick Wilde. It’s so cool seeing Tiny in a Disney animated flick because it’s kind of a departure from his mostly rough n’ tumble career. Finnick is hilarious and it’s something else to hear Lister’s booming baritone coming out of a fluffy little tyke the size of a tennis ball.
3. Winston in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown
One half and co-owner of a bail bondsman business alongside Robert Forster’s iconic Mac Cherry, Winston doesn’t even show up until about three quarters of the way into the story but when he does he fits right into the Tarantino-verse with charm, ease and gruff capability.
2. Tattooed Prisoner in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight
Tiny achieves the kind of gravitas and magnetism here in one 60 second scene that some actors struggle to find their whole career. In a tricky, times sensitive terrorist scenario orchestrated by Heath Ledger’s Joker, Lister’s quiet but commanding convict finds the moral high ground, courage and fortitude to make an impossibly tough decision when no one else will. It’s brilliant acting work, out quite simply.
1. President Lindbergh in Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element
Jovial, impatient and eccentric, Lindbergh is my favourite President of the United States in cinema and Lister makes him perhaps the most playful incarnation of America’s top dog, the position given a futuristic refurbish, snazzy purple vapour-wave style wardrobe and snappy, gung-ho attitude. Such a great character.
A handful of seasoned Hollywood action stars got their chance to fight terrorists on a plane including Bruce Willis, Chuck Norris, Kurt Russell, Harrison Ford, Liam Neeson, Samuel L. Jackson (snakes count as terrorists, right?) and in Passenger 57 Wesley Snipes gets to as well in a kind of Coors Lite version of the aesthetic that is a bit more low-key when compared to the others but still fun. The real standout here is underrated Bruce Payne as some sort of super hyper mega terrorist, an ice cold aristocratic mad dog limey bastard who is being transported to execution IN FRIGGIN COACH and only guarded by one ignoramus cop. Why the rampant negligence in the face of such obvious nefariousness? Why, Wesley’s intrepid Air Marshal can step in to beat seven shades shades of shit out of Payne and all his varied cohorts of course, played by everyone from Elizabeth Hurley to Michael ‘Deputy Hawk’ Horse, how’s that for unintentionally eclectic casting. Throw in a reliably twitchy Tom Sizemore as Snipes’s best bud boss and Bruce Greenwood as a smarmy Airline CEO and you’ve got quite the roster. But how’s the action? Decent, yet nothings a standout and even the final villain death feels a tiny bit overwhelming like air being sucked out of the room (mild spoiler). Snipes is always a badass though and holds his own, I just feel like this would have been more impressive with a bigger budget, a longer runtime and some more chutzpah, bells and whistles and over the top carnage in the fashion of.. well what’s an airplane set action film I haven’t mentioned yet… Con Air? That’s a benchmark and hard to top. Anyways this one is a decent distraction while doing chores or whatnot.
Gregory Hoblit’s Untraceable is one of those rare Hollywood serial killer thrillers that manages to walk a tightrope between being super intense and over the top gruesome yet sill smart and believable in its story. Set in chilly, rainy Portland, Diane Lane plays a gruff FBI agent pursuing a particularly nasty mass murderer who kidnaps people, kills them and broadcasts the filmed footage all over the internet, and the more viewers who sign on, the faster they die. You would think that this would come across purely as torture porn or at the very least too gratuitous but they somehow manage to make the thing feel genuine and stylish without tipping into overboard horror territory. This is mainly thanks to the fact that there is a genuinely fascinating reason as to why the killer is doing what he’s doing, down to the very details of his methodology and victim selection. He *is* a cuckoo bananas fucking nut-job but he’s not just some wild sadist off the chain killing at random and only for enjoyment, which the criminal behavioural profiler in me appreciated. The film is incredibly suspenseful and some of the elaborate murder set pieces orchestrate a terrific amount of race against the clock tension, while an ambient score by Christopher Young, solid and engaging lead performance from the always awesome Lane and rain-streaked Pacific Northwest cinematography go a long way. Director Hoblit is responsible for some of my favourite high concept genre thriller including Frequency and Fallen, and I’d now add this one strongly among them. Very good film.
Exit Wounds is one action flick in an unofficial yet unmistakable early 2000’s trilogy together with Romeo Must Die and Cradle 2 The Grave. What do they have in common, you may ask, that I’ve dubbed them a trilogy? Besides all three being directed by lo-fi action guru Andrej Bartkowiak and sharing many of the same cast members in a sort of recognizable posse, they just have this intangible time capsule vibe backed by hip hop music of the times from folks like Aaliyah and DMX, the presence of standup comedians in supporting roles, ridiculous plots built around endless set pieces and are just so totally ‘of their time’ that I love them on sheer novelty value alone. One day I’ll have to do a longer, more comprehensive piece on all three as a whole but I just rewatched Wounds for the first time in a while and it’s just as goddamn silly yet awesome as I remember it being when I was a teenager. It does feature Steven Seagal in a comeback of sorts, purged of his ponytailed zen phase and ready for some inner city urban destruction. He’s actually really dope as rogue detective Orin Boyd, a tough but reckless cop that no precinct seems to want as he has this uncanny knack for sniffing out and laying the hammer down on department corruption. After being fired by his former sergeant (Bruce McGill turning up the ham) for excessive force he’s assigned to a precinct elsewhere in Detroit under the command of a tough as nails CO played by the lovely Jill Hennessy. It isn’t long before he finds trouble again, tangles with mysterious drug runner DMX and uncovers a cabal of dirty officers doing no good shit headed up by Michael Jai White who is welcome in any film in my book. I can’t say the same for Tom Arnold though, who has to be one of *the most* irritating onscreen presences and I’m not sure why they keep letting him be in stuff but life is full of mysteries I guess. Anthony Anderson shows up as he does in all three in this trilogy and there’s appearances from Isaiah Washington m, Bill Duke and a very young Eva Mendes. This film only really has a plot to service action set pieces, which are all well done and exciting if you can get over the fact that there ain’t much else it has to offer. Seagal is good though and does some impressive stunt work like doing a fucking Olympic long jump thing over a car that’s speeding towards him. Fun stuff, but I’d recommend the other two in the trilogy first.
I admire ghost stories that set their story around an already troubled region of period of conflict because it raises the stakes unbearably high. If a haunting occurs in tranquil North American suburbia it’s bad enough but can be dealt with on its own terms, but let’s say a ghost or demon shows up during an especially stressful time, in the case of Babak Anvari’s Under The Shadow the Iraq/Iran conflict of the 1980’s, there is an extra level of horror the protagonists must go through on top of their already considerable suffering and it can be incredibly effective in getting you to invest paramount interest and sympathy in the story. In war-torn Tehran, young mother Shideh (Narges Rashidi) struggles when her husband (Bobby Naderi) is drafted in the military and she’s left alone with her young daughter (Avin Mashadi) in a creaky tenement building as air raid sirens signal incoming bomb threats and the mounting tensions get closer to home. One day an actual literal bomb does drop in through the roof of the apartment complex and although doesn’t detonate, sits there like some ugly reminder of the potential violence just outside their walls. Her daughter is convinced that something else came along with it though, something evil and supernatural that rode the same winds that carried the bomb to them and is now tormenting her with night terrors, waking visions and feverish apparitions. There are some flat out terrifying scares in this film, the acting is all terrific and the mythology surrounding the ghost is utterly fascinating. What really makes it a winner though is the atmosphere that Anvari conjures up, a suffocating cloak of wartime dread and bleak apprehension that is completely immersive and will root you to your couch. I love films that start off with a brief written summary on black background like “The year is 1980. Conflict rages across so and so, as one family struggles etc etc.” It’s an incredibly powerful way to begin your story if you choose the right music and lead-in to follow and this film is darkly captivating from the moment those words show up on screen and the first scene fades in. This is streaming on Netflix (at least here in Canada, anyway) and I highly recommend it for fans of chilling atmospheric horror with a grounded human core.
Want something *really* weird? The Caller is an old Empire Pictures flick starring Madolyn Smith as a young woman alone in some forest cabin and Malcolm McDowell as a sinister stranger who knocks at her door asking to use the phone. This film is so rare you couldn’t even find it on VHS or DVD for decades until boutique, niche distribution label Vinegar Syndrome recently did a Blu Ray. The transfer looks terrific, McDowell and Smith handle the strange, talky, stage-play esque roles given to them by the script as best they can but the film overall is a monotonous, repetitive drag.. until the final five minutes when it goes so thoroughly and dementedly off the rails you just have to sit up straight on the couch after being lulled into a coma by the first eighty minutes and go “what even in the fuck?” The film is structured around a Hitchcockian premise where these two are strangers, alone together in the wilderness and both them and us aren’t sure who might be the potentially dangerous one, but their dialogue and interactions are so inane, random and bizarre we get a sense of neither backstory, character traits or motives for either. It’s simply a brain melting extended vignette of two people talking in circles about nothing until the certifiably bonkers ending that although is flashy, shocking and out of left field, does little to explain the hefty, dense several acres of tin drum dialogue that preceded it. This is an Indiana Jones artifact of sorts for me as a DVD collector, I’m a huge Malcolm McDowell fan and this has always been somewhat out of my reach so I’m glad I finally nabbed it but I wouldn’t really recommend this to casual viewers, it’s too unwieldy and inconsistent. Empire Pictures was momentarily famous for grainy, low-fi retro science fiction horror like the Trancers franchise, and this one only fits that mold in the final few minutes when it goes ape shit, while the rest is chamber piece drivel that desperately needed story and structure that the script just couldn’t provide it with.
Podcasting Them Softly 