Soldiers of Fortune (2012)

This one has been on Instant for a long time now, and I've been meaning to get to it.  The cast list is prodigious to say the least: Christian Slater, Ving Rhames, Colm Meany (we always want to do films with Star Trek: The Next Generation cast members), Sean Bean, Dominic Monaghan, and James Cromwell.  How could I possibly ignore that?  And how could that possibly be bad?  Well, we'll see.  Also, our buddy Mitch at The Video Vacuum hit this one too, so you can go there to see what he thought.

Soldiers of Fortune stars Slater as a special forces guy who's dishonorably discharged after he punches a CIA agent (Colm Meany) in Afghanistan that's about to kill a member of his unit.  Poor and in need of cash, a woman comes to him with a proposition: take four billionaires into battle, bring them home alive, and the money they get will be enough for him to fix his problems and enough for her and her brother to fund the resistance to liberate the small Black Sea Island she's from from the evil regime that's terrorizing it.  And it just so happens that that regime's security head is none other than Meany, Slater's old nemesis.  Sounds like two birds with one stone if you ask me.



This one is pretty rough.  To start with, we have this construct of training billionaires to fight that bogs the story down immediately.  It's an interesting idea in theory, but in practice it's a series of bad montages with off-beat music and bad comedic asides.  From there nothing else is ever developed.  The baddies aren't developed, Slater isn't developed, the woman who recruits him isn't developed; all we get are these billionaires, who are not people we really want to know that well anyway, and because there are so many of them, we never get to see any of them developed well either.  The problem with that is, we wonder why we're here, what the point is.  If it's for the action, what we get is not all that compelling beyond a few moments here and there.  For instance, when the rebel villages is raided by Meany and his men, it's supposed to be tense and action-packed, but instead we see the woman who recruited Slater running around ducking her head like we're watching a behind the scenes featurette-- it was that unconvincing.  Between the plot that was a mess, and the action that was hit or miss, Soldiers of Fortune is a skip for me.

I don't know what we're doing with Christian Slater here either, because he was really good, but his character was so sauteed in wrong sauce it wasn't funny.  He's playing a special forces guy that saw real action in Afghanistan trying to show these rich boys that it's not really a game out there.  The thing is though, he's doing the same thing in a real life way by acting in the movie!  I like the potential message to the consumer of films like this: that what you see isn't what the real thing is, and you shouldn't delude yourself into thinking seeing a bunch of action films makes you a soldier; but by having Slater be the messenger you cut his legs out from under him as a character, plus, the movie itself isn't realistic either, it's still a movie!  I can't blame Slater for that though, he did his best with the role.  As far as I can tell, as an actor, he hasn't had a DTV dud performance, even if some of the films like this one have been.



Here we have Sarah Ann Schultz being held by the woman who recruited Slater (if you see her real name on imdb you'll understand why I don't use it here), and I wanted to use this moment to talk about how this was indicative of a much bigger problem in the film.  Schultz's character was the daughter of the colonel who runs the island, and she's introduced to us as a psychotic femme fatale, and the one real weakness of the colonel, is you can get to him through her.  So we get that introduction that they go out of their way to give us at the beginning instead of getting on with the action, yet they only use it for a quick moment at a plot point near the end.  Why bother if that's all you're going to do?  And this was the whole film, things introduced and never fleshed out, so it's like our time is wasted constantly.  The thing is, this could've been a great underpinning for a better plot: kidnap Schultz earlier, create more tension, delve deeper into the characters, and then if the action scenes are still lackluster, at least they have more purpose; and if you're not going to go in that direction, forget these big introductions that lead us to believe you will.

All right, let's try to go through this cast.  Ving Rhames plays an African arms dealer, complete with a bad accent.  Why make Ving Rhames into a goofball?  He can't do it, he's too bad ass for us to believe it.  Sauteed in wrong sauce.  Colm Meany would've been a great baddie, had he been developed.  He was great at the beginning, but he only has a few other scenes.  Again, why are you giving him to us as this awesome baddie if you're not going to use him?  Sean Bean played a metal magnate or something.  He's Sean Bean if you're wondering.  Dominic Monaghan played a video game designer who creates really violent video games.  For some reason his character has a broken leg, but it was one of those "plot convenience theater broken legs", meaning it's broken when the plot needs it to be, and not when it's more expedient.  James Cromwell plays a cell phone mogul.  I think he's supposed to be the new fangled version of the Texas oil man, but, as much as he tried, it wasn't written well enough to come off.  Finally, imdb says DTVC favorite Tim Abell is in this, but I didn't really see him.  There's one scene that's an ad for the rich people go to war camp that Slater is recruited to work for, and I thought he could have been in there, but if that's so, it's a tiny non-speaking part.  On the one hand I think it might have been for the best because this wasn't the best movie, but on the other, it would've been cool to see him in this, and cool to see him act opposite all of these great names.



Finally, I noticed this great blue bird in one of the establishing shots.  When a film is the kind of slog this one was, an avian buddy like this can be a welcomed sight.  I wish we had more birds in the film, because we really needed them.  Just a big ol' bird sanctuary for 20 minutes of film would've been great.

Okay, I have no idea what's happening here, so I might as well wrap this up.  Even with the cast, even with the quick runtime, even with the availability on Netflix, this is a skip for me.  It was like a bad City Slickers paradigm, or worse, Soldier Boyz, and between the lackluster action and the bogged down plot, I was looking for all the avian friends I could find for support.  Unfortunately they were few.  (I believe I've officially lost my mind.)

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1678051/

Howling V: The Rebirth (1989)

I went through my archives and found that it's been over four years since I last reviewed a Howling flick, that one being the one that preceded this one, Howling IV.  We've also done Howling III and the amazing Howling II if you'd like to see what we thought of those ones too.  Anyway, this one was added on Instant recently, so I figured, why not make our way through some more of the series.

Howling V takes place in Budapest, where a group of Americans and Brits are taken to a castle out in the country that's been locked up for five hundred years.  They're the first to see it since then, the only problem is they may not make it home alive to tell their friends and family about it, as someone or something is bumping them off one by one.  Who could be doing this?  Why?  And will they find out in time?



Let's try to understand this: we're talking about a werewolf flick as a who-dun-it mystery movie?  Which guest is the werewolf?  Col. Mustard Seed?  I'm not kidding, and as you can imagine, in the framework of a late 80s low-budget horror flick, it's as boring as all get out.  We don't even really get a good look at the werewolf.  Occasionally he takes someone out like a monster in a Three Stooges episode, or he bursts through a wall or a snow bank like the Kool-Aid man-- and if you're wondering, I did shout out "Oh Yeah!" each time he did that--, but for a werewolf film it's pretty scant.  Maybe with a big crew of veteran riffers you could tackle this on a bad movie night, especially with the Instant availability, but otherwise I'd skip it.

I understand that the werewolf film is tough to shake up, tough to find new ways to attack, but the problem with the way they went about this was that they didn't set it up right away as a murder mystery.  Why not cut to the chase and tell us the moment everyone gets into the castle what you're doing?  "One of you is a werewolf, and we're going to figure out who it is and kill him or her."  Boom, now we're rolling.  It wasn't just that this was a werewolf murder mystery, but the execution of the murder mystery was off.  Perhaps with better execution we might have had something new, something better than "what am I going to do when the full moon comes?  Someone help me!"  Of course we always have Howling II for a clinic on how to make the werewolf flick.



This guy above us had some potential as a real heel character, and he just seemed really awesome, but he, like everyone else, was never fully developed.  Still, he worked as just being cool, and sometimes in these bad DTV horror flicks, just being cool is enough.  We don't have enough of that kind of guy in modern films do we?  The hair, the dark suit, the power tie, the smooth, sophisticated, condescending voice.  He's in it for himself, can be a jerk, but we have to admit if he offered for us to join him for a beer, we'd be flattered and stoked.  Here's to you this guy, you were one of the good ones.

The guy whose pic I posted first is Phillip Davis, and I recognize him from a Woody Allen film, Cassandra's Dream.  He's been in plenty of other stuff too, but that's what I knew.  In that one he didn't have anywhere near as big a part as he did here, but I imagine he's more likely to put the Allen flick on his CV than Howling V.  I will say, I enjoyed Cassandra's Dream, but I would've enjoyed it much more had it been a werewolf film.  As far as I know, out of all of Woody Allen's flicks, he's yet to go werewolf.  That's too bad, but maybe on his next one he will.  "I... I... I just don't know why I'm so hairy all of a sudden... my God, next I'll have fleas... this is horrible..."



I'm thinking as far as the being born lottery goes, 1489 Budapest had to be a tough one.  I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of people not enjoying 2013, and maybe some who live in Budapest too, but on a bell curve, 1489 Budapest is probably huddled around a "man, this sucks" mean.  Maybe Budapest 1389 would've been worse?  Or maybe when the Ottomans took it over in the early 16th century that would've been worse?  Christ, considering that they made this movie there in 1989, maybe that was the worst time.  "Howling V being made here was a bigger tragedy than the Ottoman invasion!"

Okay, this is on Instant, and maybe for a werewolf film that you and your buddies can make fun of this is a decent pick, but I certainly wouldn't attack it alone, and I wouldn't attack it with amateur riffers.  It's boring, which is a death knell for any film, but especially bad for a late 80s low-budget horror flick.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097534/

Pushin' Up Daisies (2010)

Bob Wagstaff, co-writer of Pushin' Up Daisies, asked me if I would review his film.  It looked like a pretty fun deal, so I figured I'd give it a shot.  I got to watch it on the copy they uploaded to Vimeo, which was pleasantly free of any obtrusive "For Promotional Use Only" splashed across the screen, so thank you guys for that. Now, let's see how the film went.

Pushin' Up Daisies follows Darren and his buddy as they drive across country from LA to Darren's hometown in rural Georgia to make a documentary on Darren's brother Rusty's work as a flower delivery guy.  We see the film through Darren's friend, who's making a documentary of the making of Darren's documentary.  Things don't go as planned though as a zombie outbreak disrupts the proceedings, but Darren is undeterred and carries on, hoping to see his film making vision through.  Will he survive long enough to make it happen though?



I really liked the idea of this film, and the long takes were really fantastic and captured a great comedic take on the documentary and overly indulgent young film makers; but with all of these found footage/the documentary is all we have to go on type films, the cinematography eventually becomes tedious.  It's like with the old horror films when they used to hand out a barf bag to people going to see them in the theater, I could use one from all the nauseating herky jerky camerawork.  I get that that's supposed to add a level of verisimilitude, but I'm watching a zombie flick, I can ignore the use of a tripod every once in a while for the sake of my sanity.  What I really loved though was the idea that the scariest thing in the zombie apocalypse isn't the zombies, but rather the ignorant rednecks with guns using it as a license to shoot anything that staggers.  There were a lot of comedic elements like that that worked really well, and maybe you won't be as put off by the constantly moving camera as I was; in either case, I think this is worth checking out.

We've seen our share of the found footage/the raw documentary footage is all we have type of film here, whether it's a low-budget submission like this, or a DTV horror flick trying to save money and come off avant-garde at the same time.  I'm not saying I need Darren and Rusty to be sitting on the floor and talking to zombies as if it were an Ozu flick, it's just that the novelty wears off and I find I'm getting a headache.  After the third time the cameraman runs after something and all I see is what looks like the bumper from the old Batman without the Bat-logo to focus on, I needed to take a break.  Call me old fashioned, but there's something to be said for the traditional omnipotent eye, with mounted cameras and scenes cut together.



I did appreciate the success the actors had in delivering the long takes.  Again, you wouldn't need long takes if the documentary film is all we have construct was taken out, but still, that shouldn't take anything away from the actors who pulled that off, or the crew who seamlessly incorporated things like car crashes into these long takes.  The director asked a lot of them for the sake of his documentary feel, and they all came through in a way that you might not even notice if you weren't looking for it.  It's nice to see that kind of high level in a film with limited means like this, and it's the kind of inspired work that makes me really enjoy reviewing people's screeners here at the DTVC.

Their take on the zombie apocalypse was great too.  The idea that they're pretty innocuous, but it's the Georgia rednecks you need to worry about, was hilarious, and is probably the way the rest of the world would envision the zombie apocalypse going here in 'Murica.  I mean, I don't live too far from rural Maine and New Hampshire, and I could see the same thing happening here, it would be an excuse for all the gun nuts to shoot anything that staggers.  When I'm watching a lot of zombie flicks, or a lot of found footage, etc. flicks, I'm looking for something new that they bring to the table, and this was definitely it, and it was really funny.



There was one addition to the story that didn't work for me though, and that was the lynch mob who attacks Darren's friend (I can't remember his character name, and of course most of the cast doesn't have a picture on imdb, so I can't look him up), who's African American.  I don't know what that was doing in the film, but I don't find lynch mobs all that funny.  Then when we see the character next, we find out he killed the lynch mob, but due to that whole the documentary footage is all we have construct, we don't get the satisfaction of seeing it, or even know if he really did what he said he did, because he left the camera behind with Darren and ran when the lynch mob first approached.  And even his explanation of how he killed the lynch mob wasn't all that funny.  I don't know, it was an odd left turn to take the film on, but maybe as a dude from the Northeast I just don't get that kind of thing.

This is available to stream or download from Amazon.  It's definitely a unique film that had some really great and inspired moments.  You've seen the cinematic construct of the all we've got is the documentary footage before, but this does make an earnest attempt to add something new to it, and while the documentary style camera work feels like well-worn territory, the story doesn't, and that alone might make it worth a look.  I thank Bob Wagstaff again for letting me have a look at his film.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0964544/

Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan (2013)

I've had this in my Instant queue for sometime now, and last week I noticed our buddy Moe Porne on my Twitter feed talking about it. I asked him to give me his thoughts when he was done, thinking I might review it, and he told me I'd get a kick out of it, so here we are. As an aside, you can catch Moe on his Drunk on VHS podcast hosted by Couch Cutter, a fine site I used to write for from time to time. 

Axe Giant takes place in the Minnesota wilderness, where a boot camp operator takes some troubled teens to rehabilitate them in lieu of a stint in the pen.  Things go from bad to worse though when one of the little brats rips a horn off an ox skull lying on the ground.  Turns out that skull belongs to Babe the Blue Ox, and Paul Bunyan is an enormous twisted man-child with a penchant for murdering people who desecrate Babe's burial ground.  Now everyone is in for it.



This one was pretty fun, but its ending was all over the place, which betrayed the proceedings.  There was one thing I had a real issue with that I'll get into in my last paragraph because it contains spoilers.  It was definitely a low-budget schlockfest that worked both as a time killer and a good bad movie night option until that ending, when it kinda wasn't as much fun anymore.  It definitely had those great low-budget touches though, like I loved that they just took a National Forest ranger office or something, slapped new words over the sign, and passed it off as a juvenile detention center.  And Joe Estevez combined with a scant Dan Haggerty added more laughs.  Paul Bunyan himself was a great baddie, and the idea of making him a horror villain was fun too.  As someone who used to watch Maury, I also appreciated the way they made fun of the drill sergeant in the boot camp episodes.  It had a lot of elements like that that worked, and I think even with the bad ending, it might be fun enough to get you to the church on time.  On the other hand, it's not very remarkable, and with all there is to chose from on Instant, maybe not worth it.

Joe Estevez played the crazy local, and I couldn't figure out what to do with him, but the fact that he was Joe Estevez was enough I guess.  He was playing the stereotypical Southern backwoods crazy, even though he was supposed to be from Minnesota.  It's hard to tell if he was just overacting because he's a D-movie actor, or he was doing a spoof on that character from most horror films.  That's the problem with a lot of modern low-budget horror flicks, they try to have this meta-spoof quality to them that insulates them from criticism, because they can say "oh, we were making fun of that kind of thing, we weren't actually doing it."  The Asylum seems to have made a cottage industry out of that, but theirs often work better.  On the other hand, if you don't trust that Estevez was spoofing old horror flicks, and think he was overacting, you can at least make fun of him.



The Maury boot camp episode has always been the biggest crock to me, and this film really got that right-- which is a reason why I'm inclined to give them a pass on Estevez's character.  I've always seen it as these moron drill sergeants who suffer from a form of Little Man's Syndrome and get off by yelling at defenseless kids.  I remember one when a girl on the show, after being berated by the audience and the drill sergeant while her mom played the innocent victim, said "but my mom is doing drugs with her boyfriend all the time", and the drill sergeant yelled at her "this is about you, not her!"  No, really it's about you being a mental midget Mr. Drill Sergeant, and this movie nailed that with their own drill sergeant, played by Boston's own Thomas Downey.  He was a total jerk to the kids and the counselor, played by Kristina Kopf, who was sent to help the kids.  I kind of wished he'd done it even more, been like the real morons you'd see on Maury, but I guess this was good enough.

If you've been rockin' with me for sometime, you may know I enjoy hiking, and not just any hiking, I like to go up good-sized mountains, hit some steep sections, and really give myself a kick in the pants.  But I'm in good shape, and I enjoy it.  That's why it was funny to see the drill sergeant take the kids on a hike for punishment, and I had to realize that for most Americans, that would be a punishment.  Like the hike I just went on yesterday in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.  I had a great time, but it had some long steep sections that would not be a lot of people's idea of fun.  I guess one person's past time is another's punishment.



SPOILER ALERT!!!!   SPOILER ALERT!!!!   SPOILER ALERT!!!!
As I mentioned above, the end of the film was all over the place, and it started with Paul Bunyan killing one of the kids, Rosa, played by Victoria Ramos.  She's developed as an honorable and just character, who has a young daughter that she wants to regain custody of once she's out of the pen.  The kind of character we want to root for, or at the very least, don't want to see die because she has a young daughter.  Of course the film then decides to off her.  Really?  How mean-spirited can you get?  That's just bad form, and ruined an otherwise fun horror flick.  From there it gets worse, when her friend Marty, played by Cliff Williams, is killed by Joe Estevez in a fit of craziness as Estevez tries to stop everyone else from killing Paul Bunyan.  It was just weird and an out of place way to knock off another character.  It just seemed like the film couldn't figure out how to end things, and the ending is the most important part.
END SPOILER!!!!   END SPOILER!!!!   END SPOILER!!!!

So that's it, and we didn't even get into Martin Kove's son Jesse, who plays one of the kids, or Dan Haggerty as a Grizzly Adams type who runs a logging operation up there in the late 19th century.  It's all kind of hit or miss I guess, and while this has its moments, the ending ultimately kills it for me, but you might not have as much trouble with it.  At least it's on Instant, so it's not much of an investment.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1684548/

The Protector (1998)

A friend of mine hooked me up with a copy of his VHS of this flick.  The names Frank Zagarino and Matthias Hues were all I needed to hear to give it a look.  At the very least it might be so bad it's good, right?

The Protector is about a dude with amnesia, played by Steven Nijjar, who is being chased by all kinds of people, like Matthias Hues and Frank Zagarino and the NSA.  He has a disc, or knows where a disc might be, with a virus on it that could have a massive impact on the world economy.  Now Nijjar needs to stay alive, find out who he can trust, oh, and I forgot to mention, someone kidnapped his son.  Will he make it happen?



We use the term "so bad it's good" so often when dealing with these kinds of movies, but what about "so awesome it's good"?, because, while this is pretty bad, it's pretty awesomely bad.  Right away, Nijjar is in a diner which is shot up by a bunch of women who look like a cross between a hit squad and back-up dancers in a Robert Palmer video.  His feet catch on fire, he runs away-- into a body of water to extinguish the flames-- and the ladies start shooting at him with rocket launchers, which blow up the junkers at the car lot Nijjar runs through.  How amazing is that?  Even better, Nijjar's son's voice is dubbed over by a guy trying to sound like a kid.  I'm not kidding.  How much more amazing is that?  Then you have some sweet fights, especially with Zagarino, and between Hues and Zagarino-- some that are choreographed at a higher level than we usually see for a film of this grade.  Just a fun 90s DTV actioner.

Let's start with Zagarino.  He had some really nice fights, which is what you really want from him in a film like this.  He also had some great lines.  I've noticed he's at his best as an actor when he's allowed to deliver sophisticated dialog in a monotone voice.  When he yells at Nijjar "you're an asshole!", it sounds silly, but if he'd just said it calmly, it would've been perfect.  It's a difficult thing for an actor to mitigate a rough screenplay and make it sound natural, and poor Zagarino is often forced to act in films with rough screenplays, meaning he's often caught out.  That's okay if he's allowed to deliver on some good fights, and he has a couple nice ones here, especially a good strip club brawl.  Not the most memorable of Zagarino's flicks, but not horrible either.



Matthias Hues is up to his old tricks as the film's baddie.  I got the sense that most of his scenes were shot in a day, because he's not in many locations.  You get a lot of him smoking a cigar, delivering bad dialog, and either shirtless or in a leopard-print silk shirt.  Then at the end he gets after it with two fight scenes against Zagarino.  Before those scenes, he runs around quite a bit firing a couple machine guns at people off-screen.  You could tell that he's done that enough, because he posed in those shots with style.  That's what you want from a baddie, loads of style.  It would've been nice to see more fights with him though.  Like Dolph, he's one of the best pure athletes we see here at the DTVC, especially for his size, and he makes the fights exciting because of that.

I had heard of Steven Nijjar before reviewing this film, but his parts in the other movies I'd done were small (those movies were TC 2000 and Expect No Mercy).  This one he's in it quite a bit, and while he can't carry a movie the way Zagarino can as a hero or Hues can as the baddie, he's not bad.  He doesn't have many credits to his name after this, so we'll see how many more times he makes it on the DTVC.



There are two kinds of people in this world: those who hear a man speak in a high pitched voice trying to mimic the child that he's dubbing over and think "I need to go on imdb and kill this movie"; and people like me who laugh, text my girlfriend about it, and give the ol' Tiger Woods fist pump.  With over 900 of these reviews in the can at this point, it's moments like this that keep me sane; but, also, it's moments like this that I started the DTVC for, and I love that over six years and 930-plus reviews later that I can still be surprised by something I haven't seen before.

This one is not an easy find.  As of this posting, Amazon doesn't even have it.  It's worth keeping an eye out for it though, because it's a fun time.  Low-budget 90s bad action, a great way to kill 90 minutes.  So awesome it's good.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0137180/

Profile of a Killer (2012)

A couple weeks ago Jasmine Reid, producer of Profile of a Killer, came to me to see if I could review her film, and we're making it happen now.  Also, our friend Vic at Vic's Movie Den hit this one, so you can go there to see what he thought.  Now let's see what I thought.

Profile of a Killer is about a serial killer who's dumping bodies along US-61 in Minnesota.  Saul (Gabriele Angieri), a well known FBI profiler from Florida, is called in to investigate, and before he knows it, the killer kidnaps him.  The killer is a teenage boy (Joey Pollari), and he wants Saul to profile him.  Now Saul is at the mercy of this child killer and needs to use all of his skills in dealing with serial killers to stay a live.  Hot on their trail is Rachel (Emily Fradenburgh), a local detective, who takes over the case after Saul is kidnapped.  Will they be able to stop this boy and his killing spree?



This definitely had its moments, and I wouldn't call it a bad film, but it was long-- like almost 2 hours-- and there really wasn't enough material here for something that long.  I personally saw a great moment to wrap the film up around the 45-minute mark, and while I'm not saying there weren't moments after that that weren't great too, I just don't know how much I needed them.  This easily could've been a solid two-part story arc on a show like Criminal Minds, maybe like an end of the season cliff-hanger, and in that capacity it would've mitigated another area that I had a problem with: poor character development.  If this had been a two-part episode in an established crime drama, we already would've had characters we knew as a base from which to start this, and it could've hit the ground running.  Instead, we had bits and pieces of character development, but it either felt grafted in, like Rachel's moment with her fellow detective, or came at a moment when we needed to move things a long quicker, like Rachel talking to the killer's parents near the end of the film.  Again, this isn't horrible, and maybe even the length wouldn't kill you, so if you're a fan of shows like Criminal Minds this might be worth checking out if you see it at your RedBox kiosk or something.

Anyone who's been rockin' with me for a while knows that a film's length is a sticking point, and I'll tell you why.  I think it was Roger Corman who said the perfect length is 88 minutes, because it fit on 11 reels and made it cheaper to pack than a 90-minute film; but for the sake of argument we'll go with 90 minutes as the optimum length.  90 minutes gets the viewer in and out without asking for too much of an investment, yet at the same time that's ample time to tell us what you need to tell us.  Anything after 90 minutes is borrowed time, so the first 90 needs to be of such high quality that we don't realize we've been watching for that long, and as I mentioned above, the 45-minute mark looked like a great place to start wrapping things up, so by 90 we were already well onto borrowed time.  Considering we already knew who the killer was, we'd seen him kill multiple people, now all we needed to do was get to Rachel finding him, so it was only a matter of time before we were spinning our wheels in place, with all the tension dried up.  That was too bad, because there were some really great tense moments that got my heart rate up, which is what I want from a film like this, I just want them in a smaller package with less packing tape surrounding them.



Gabriele Angieri as Saul was great, and he affected that vibe of a Joe Mantegna in Criminal Minds or Anthony LaPaglia in Without a Trace, which made him a very compelling protagonist.  Again though, this is the kind of story that you drop him into after the season's previous 12 episodes where we've seen him crack however many other cases, or maybe three or four other TV movies that established his character.  I know the market is flooded with TV shows like that, which kind of puts this film and his character in a spot where we wonder "what are they bringing to the table?  Why do I need Gabriele Angieri when I can have Joe Mantegna?"  You know I don't know, I guess maybe because you've seen all the episodes of your favorite crime drama so much that you need something new but along the same lines, and in that sense, Angieri gives you that guy you're familiar with and you're looking for when you pick something like this up from RedBox.

I really liked the idea of the killer being a kid who grew up with no hardships and, as such, had no means of forming his identity.  I used to be fascinated by the Sweet Sixteen show on MTV for the same reason, watching these young girls who have never wanted for anything searching for some sense of self and validation from the outside world.  The problem though is that the character devolves into the bitter teen anon troll we see all over the Internet.  I was waiting to see him show Saul his OK Cupid page where he complains about how he's always "friendzoned".  While it's a cool idea in theory, and might work really well in that TV drama capacity I discussed above, it doesn't make for a very compelling villain, no matter how well Joey Pollari played him.  And that's another area where the run time creeps in, because we're done with this kid's anon trolling manifesting itself in killing and indulgent conversations with Saul by the 45-minute mark, and we wish we could just block him and he'll go away.



SPOILER ALERT!!!!   SPOILER ALERT!!!!   SPOILER ALERT!!!!
This character here was known only as "hooker", and she's the first victim killed by our villain while Saul is his captive.  The scene when Saul wakes up and hears through the baby monitor in his room that the killer has her in his killing station is so chilling and tense, I felt like it made up for the previous 30 minutes where not much happens.  The problem was, it let us off the hook.  It comes and goes so fast, and then we're treated to a scene the next morning where the killer shows Saul her dead body.  What a wasted opportunity.  Take us into the room, and I'm not saying you need to be too macabre, but now that you've got us, really get us and leave us wondering what he's going to do to her-- and she wonders what he's going to do to her.  Keep my heart racing, and use it as a means to really explore the killer's character organically.  Maybe she says something that sets him off.  Maybe she does something that causes him to hesitate.  Why does he react the way he does?  You can have a 2-hour movie as long as the right scenes are longer.  I can think of another where Rachel is investigating a warehouse, and instead of giving us long takes that drive up the tension of the unknown, we get quick jumpcuts and before we know it the scene is over and no action happens.  Contrast that with the scene at the end where Rachel meets the killer's parents.  We're already over an hour into the film, we know that she's going to learn a key piece of information that will get her to Saul's location, this is no time to draw things out, yet here's where the film decides to do that.  It was frustrating.
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So this is ultimately a pass for me, but I do think someone who likes the serial killer TV crime drama might enjoy this, even at the longer run time.  As far as I can tell, Amazon VOD or on DVD from them is the only way to go, so if you're a fan of shows like Criminal Minds, a $4 Amazon VOD rental might not be the worst thing for you, though if it ever ends up on RedBox or Netflix Instant, that would be better.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2387543/

7 Below aka Seven Below (2012)

I saw this was on Instant, and it had Val Kilmer and Ving Rhames in it.  That's it, oh, and it was 90 minutes long.  That helps too.  As an aside, did you know that Val Kilmer and Ving Rhames were born about seven months apart?  Both in 1959, Rhames on May 12, Kilmer on December 31.  imdb is a wonderful time waster, isn't it?

7 Below is about a house in which the family's adopted son kills them all in the early 1900s.  When a group of people in the present time, including Val Kilm and Luke Goss, take a bus trip into the Minnesota wilderness, and the bus crashes, local man Ving Rhames takes them back to his place to wait out a storm.  That place is, you guessed it, the house where the kid offed his family.



I know Val, it hurts.  I don't know what we're doing here.  Too much nothing happening.  Too much almost happening but not happening.  So many loose ends flying together near the end that I needed a pair of safety goggles.  Maybe most egregious: our heroes do nothing to figure out their own plight or how they can fix it.  They stumble around aimlessly in the dark, though we're supposed to believe they know what they're doing, but they never get close to what's happening to them, and need it revealed in the last 10 minutes.  That's lazy in my book.  There was an attempt to affect a Stephen King style secluded location creepiness, but the characters don't buy in, which means we lose it; and the Vincent Price haunted mansion style film falls flat too when, despite Rhames's best efforts, his Price-like character is written too flatly to keep us intrigued.  By the time we see a ghost in a sheet attack the hero (I'm not kidding, it was almost bad Halloween costume ghost in the sheet), I was done.  This is a pass for me.

Val honey, I know, what is your agent doing?  How did you end up in this?  Yes, if you close your eyes enough maybe it'll all be a dream and you'll be back playing Jim Morrison.  His role in this isn't as big as you'd like, and while I'm giving some of the plot away, I think it's better to warn you going in that, while he's good, he barely makes it through the first third of the film.  A surprising development?  A plot twist keeping us on our toes?  Or a Kilmer bait-and-switch?  You decide.  (Oh, and I will not make any jokes about how former Batman Kilmer looks primed to play the Penguin in the next film.)  (Didn't you just say you weren't going to make that joke?)



I don't know if this movie was trying to be original or hit us with an original concept, but it was pretty paint-by-numbers, right down to the classic White Man Will Save You trope.  Latina?  White Man will save you.  What reason do you have not to trust me?  There is not 500 years of history telling you you're making a mistake, this is a movie, and White Man is good, very good.  Yes, statistically speaking, if a woman is stranded on the side of the road with car trouble and a straight White Man pulls over to help her, things are more likely to end badly for her than good for her-- but not in Movieworld, where White Man is good and he will hug you and love and protect you from Bad Men.  Save us White Man!

Ving Rhames does his best to pull what he can from his character.  He tries to make it a cross between his own aesthetic and that old Vincent Price haunted mansion character, but there isn't much there for him to work with.  Man it was fun watching him try though.  Maybe that's why he took this role, for the challenge of pulling that off.  If you really want to think outside the box though, have the blond-haired blue-eyed hero play the Vincent Price character, and Ving Rhames be the guy that picks up the hot Latina who's having car trouble.  Now that's a plot twist for an American movie.



Among the other stars, we had Matt Barr as our hero, Bonnie Somerville as Kilmer's wife, and Rebecca Da Costa as the woman Barr picks up by the side of the road.  They all do the roles you expect them to, though Somerville as Kilmer's wife was fun when she and Kilmer were arguing early on, and it was too bad she couldn't play off him more.  Then there was Luke Goss and Barr's brother.  We've seen him in a fair amount of DTV roles, and he seems to have carved out this niche for himself playing the early-thirtysomething all-American jackass.  He has it all down, the mannerisms, the speech (though his accent does peek out from time to time) the boot-cut designer jeans with rips in all the right places, the gaudy belt buckle, the knit cap, and the four-button muscle-fit henley.  The thing is, in real life he's a fortysomething man from London.  I guess if his twin brother Matty can carve out a niche playing gigs at Caesar's Palace in Vegas, Luke can carve out a niche as the all-American jackass, and I think he being removed from it like he is, he can bring a sense of self-awareness to his rendition of the character that a real all-American jackass wouldn't have.  In that sense, Goss may have been the most consistent character, in that like the others it was so one-dimensional, but he's going for that and nailed it.

Obviously this is a pass for me.  My girlfriend told me that when she looked it up on Netflix after I told her I was reviewing it, that one of the reviewers on there asked for the ol' temporal refund-- you know, "I want my 90 minutes back."  I never demand the temporal refund, because good or bad I get a review out of it, but you might, so I'd avoid it, because we all know no one has ever been made whole on that temporal refund in the history of movies.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1988781/