Fatal Call (2012)

This is another in the group of films Kevin at MTI Video sent me, and was probably the one I was most excited to look at.  It stars DTVC favorite Kevin Sorbo, personal favorite Danielle Harris, and a couple of other familiar faces in main star Jason London and the ubiquitous Lochlyn Munro.  Let's see if it lived up to that excitement.

Fatal Call has London as a guy with a past from rural Illinois who moves to St. Louis to start a new life after a buddy gets him a job at a law firm.  Things are looking even better when he meets Danielle Harris at a bar, and she gives him her number.  Problem is: she has a husband, and he's abusive and controlling.  Now she wants London to help her out, but when he goes to her place to pick her up, he finds her husband dead and he looks like the one who did it.  Will he make it out of this mess alive?



I liked this.  It was a pretty fun Noir-ish suspense flick, with a good cast and a decent story.  My one main complaint was that London's character vacillated between aw-shucks-schmuck and quick-thinking-resourceful-you-picked-the-wrong-guy patsy, which made the plot move unevenly.  For the most part though it hit the spots you'd want in this kind of film.  Harris was great as the Black Widow type; we had fun detectives in Munro and his partner Srikant Chellapa; Sorbo was deviously sinister; and the plot maintained a good balance between tension and action.  In fact, I loved the device of jumping us forward and back in the story, because it kept things from getting too gummed up with the plot exposition.  All in all, it's not a bad deal.

Danielle Harris was a standout for me, and I was disappointed that she wasn't used more in the film.  She seemed to understand what her character was supposed to be about, but unlike some Film Noir greats, like Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon or Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep, where we had this Black Widow character that we knew we couldn't trust, but also knew why our hero would take a chance on her and get himself in trouble, Harris's character, who's in their tradition, is woefully underutilized.  She shows up, sleeps with London, then he's in trouble and she's out.  We needed more intrigue here, with her seducing him and slowly pulling him into her web, and I know from what she did with her limited role, she could've pulled it off.  Either way, it was definitely cool to see her get a non-Scream Queen part and hit it out of the park.



We all love Sorbo here at the DTVC, in particular his two films with Saint James St. James, Poolboy and FDR American Badass, so anytime we can get him back here is a good thing.  He's the baddie, which is a great change of pace for the usual hero he plays.  I've never really thought about it, but he's a pretty big guy, and can be pretty imposing.  He's also the kind of actor that can have a lot of fun as the baddie, so it was good to see him get that chance.  Like Harris, it's good to see him in anything, but also like Harris, it's good to see him try something beyond the norm and excel at it.

With these two paragraphs focusing on Harris and Sorbo, I don't want to take anything away from London as the star, because as an actor, he was good playing both the schmuck and the quick thinker that his character called for, it just felt off for me to be going from one to the other with no real reason for the transition.  To be honest, it felt more fun to see him in the aw shucks role, and I could see myself falling for Harris's character if I were in the same circumstance, what with her batting her eyelashes and quoting Dostoevsky at him.  Unlike his character though, I'd call the cops the moment her husband showed up and assaulted me, and would've avoided all the trouble he got into.



Finally, this is London's work buddy, played by Joel Lewis.  Is this guy not the next veteran character actor Kevin Dunn?  He even plays a part that had Kevin Dunn written all over it.  Dunn has roughly 100 more imdb credits than Lewis, so Lewis has a long way to go, but if he can get to that Dunn level, I gotta say he'll have had a pretty successful career, including work with three Oscar winning directors.  Here's to you Kevin Dunn, you're one of the great ones, and hopefully you'll get there someday too Joel Lewis.

All right, enough of that.  As of this posting, Fatal Call won't be out on DVD in US markets for about a month (July 23rd).  If you see it on Netflix or RedBox, I'd give it a look, especially if you're interested in some of the actors.  A nice little Noirish suspense flick that doesn't overdo the plot, and keeps a good action and tension quotient.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2059193/

Hatchet II (2010)

When I reviewed Hatchet, and was less than impressed, a few people remarked that it was the sequel where it'd make its money back. All the issues I found in the first one were corrected, and it was an all around better film. We'll see what happens.

Hatchet II picks up right where part 1 left off, as our heroine Mary Beth, played now by Danielle Harris, is in the arms of grotesque villain Victor Crowley. She escapes, runs back to Reverend Zombie, played by Tony Todd, and he agrees to round up a posse and take her back into the swamp to kill Crowley and get her father and brother's bodies back. He has ulterior motives though, thinking if he can give Crowley the two surviving grown men who, with Mary Beth's father, killed Crowley decades ago, Crowley can finally rest in peace.



Okay, this was an improvement. The kills were better for the most part, at about the midway point it jumped into a solid forty minute stretch or so, right through to the end, of just great horror action that really worked. What killed me, as it did in the first one-- though not as much-- was a lot of wasted time, a lot of jokes that simply didn't work, and worse, didn't work and didn't know when they weren't working. For example, the first kill is fantastic: guy gets decapitated with his own intestines. Problem is, to get to it, we deal with a tedious conversation filled with a pointless avoidance of plot information just for the sake of saving it for later, which devolves into a guy yelling at Harris to leave, her saying why, and him yelling again, repeated about five times, followed by her leaving and him looking at the Girls Gone Wild guy from the first film's camera, and a joke about the girls he sees on there that also overstays its welcome. If the idea is "horror/comedy", I need enough of both, and the 45 minutes of neither is a waste of my time.

The shot launched back across my bow after this will probably be that I don't get it, which was why I made sure to include that Lloyd Kaufman cameo shot to let people know that, even if I post more action than horror on here by quite a bit, horror is as much a part of my background-- if not more. I know great horror/comedy, and I've reviewed some of them on here. I also know great 80s-style horror, considering a I grew up on it, and while this one did a better job than the first of capturing some of that, it missed enough for me too. It's like for every awesome dude banging his chick from behind after being decapitated scene-- which was awesome-- there were like three or four that were just a pile of unfunny jokes. The cookies thing wasn't funny the first time, but to keep it going? The conversation about the names Cleatus and Chad didn't work either, yet the movie was so sure it did. For the most part, other than the majority of the kills, the only good scenes were the ones with Harris and Todd, which makes sense because they were the only two solid actors, but why then try to inundate us with bad back story and worse conversation with other actors that aren't at that level. Just kill them off and get it over with, we're here for a horror movie for God's Sake!



Danielle Harris was an excellent upgrade in the heroine role. She's hot, a great actress, has a lot of experience-- though isn't that old, not even two years older than me!-- and knows the horror genre well. I don't want to give away the ending, but let's just say she really sells it. It looks like there will be a third Hatchet-- there had to be, right?-- so let's hope she's cast in it. Oh yeah, and she wears a sweet Twisted Sister T in one scene. "What're you gonna do with your liiiiiiiife?"

I did enjoy the Lloyd Kaufman cameo, though I agree with someone who commented on my review of the first film that "horror cameos don't give a film credibility". My buddy and I used to rent up all the Troma flicks we could get at the video store, and another friend of ours, who was married (and still is), hated them, and we always tried to sneak them into his VCR when we had movie nights with him and his wife. I remember one that started with the classic Troma opening, telling us it's a Lloyd Kaufman/Michael Herz production, and the moment it did, that friend freaked out. "Oh, Lloyd Kaufman? It's another one of those stupid Troma films! We're not watching this!" "But dude, it's Sgt. Kabukiman!"



I had to get a pic of the guy rockin' the Newbury Comics lid. Again, record store on Newbury Street in Boston, among other locations around New England, where I spent a lot of money growing up. Knowing that the director, Adam Green, grew up near Boston, closer than I did actually, and he uses local imagery like the Newbury Comics symbol, makes me want to like these Hatchet films that much more, but, I have to call it the way I see it.

And the way I see it is better than the first one, but not quite what I'm supposed be sold here, i.e. a throwback to great 80s horror/comedy/slasherflicks. Maybe for 40 minutes, if that much. Still, if he's getting closer, hopefully a part 3 will get it all the way right, and we'll get something worthy of greats like Bad Taste, Evil Dead, or at the very least Blood Sucking Pharaohs from Pittsburgh.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1270835/