HORSEMEN
(Review)

“And when he had opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth beast say, ‘Come and see.’”
-- Revelation 6:7


There are certain recurring elements that seem to be thrown at the viewer when the standard serial killer thriller/procedural is on hand: among them, some Bible bits, and a slew of disturbingly gruesome kills.
Se7en did it.
Millennium did it. A lot.
So it is that it takes quite a lot for me to get worked up over a serial killer thriller/procedural these days.
Now we’ve got Jonas Åkerlund’s Horsemen, which, admittedly, attempts to take the sub-genre a little further than it’s traveled before.


I’ve been following Horsemen’s trail for quite awhile now, tuning into the project after it looked like Jaume Balaguero was going to direct it for Platinum Dunes.
That ultimately didn’t work out though, and Horsemen instead fell into the lap of Åkerlund, whose last feature was the frenetic entry in the canons of drug cinema, Spun.
I rather liked Spun, so when news broke that Åkerlund was in the director’s chair, I was still determined to check out Horsemen.
And now that I have seen it, I must admit that while some of it works, some of it doesn’t.


Det. Aidan Breslin (Dennis Quaid) is a troubled cop whose specialty—forensic odontology—brings him to the fore of a case that quickly reveals itself as one where the perpetrators display a distinct fixation on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Cue Biblical bits (complete with expository chat with the neighbourhood priest, played by Paul Dooley) and disturbingly gruesome kills (courtesy of the awesome K.N.B. EFX).
Those aspects, and the view we get of Breslin’s struggles on the homefront, particularly his fractured relationship with teen son Alex (Southland Tales’ Lou Taylor Pucci), are what work in Horsemen.
There’s also an attempt to portray a complicated plan that’s compromised by the very human nature of its perpetrators; we eventually see where the scheme buckles, despite the intentions of its mastermind.


Where Horsemen doesn’t work though is in its underutilization of some very capable actors (among them, Clifton Collins, Jr. and Peter Stormare).
We get a fine performance from Patrick Fugit (who’d previously worked with Åkerlund on Spun), but it’s limited to a short portion of the film, playing almost like a vignette in the context of the entire narrative.
In fact, there are elements of the script (by Dave Callaham, who’s also written the script for Michael Cuesta’s Tell-Tale) that just don’t seem to reach any manner of resolution, among them, the subplot that involves Zhang Ziyi.
Then there’s that ending, which plays like such a Hollywood copout, the sort of ending that isn’t earned at all, but somehow feels tacked on.


Granted, the perpetrators have a point to make, motivations that transcend the usual psychopathology of your average movie serial killer, but in the end, Horsemen just doesn’t cohere as well as I’d hoped.
Disappointing, considering my fondness for Spun.
At any rate, Callaham’s script showed a certain level of ambition, so I can only hope that his screenplay for Tell-Tale (a contemporary update of Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Tell-Tale Heart") will likewise strive for something more than your average Hollywood horror thrills.


Parting shot: With Cuesta at the helm of Tell-Tale, my hopes for it rise even higher…

(Horsemen OS courtesy of impawards.com; images courtesy of bad-taste-it.)

THE OBJECTIVE
(Review)

“My name is Benjamin Keynes. I work for the Directorate of Operations within the Central Intelligence Agency.
“Three days after 9/11, reconnaissance satellites picked up a radioactive heat signature in a remote tribal region of Afghanistan.
“The Agency feared that Al-Qaeda may have finally gotten their hands on a nuclear weapon. However, I was told by a local source with a high degree of confidence that it may be something much more powerful.”

After the disappointment that was Solstice (review in Archive), I put a lot of stock on The Objective as a film that would turn me around on Daniel Myrick.
I’m glad to report that it does.


We open in Ghazni Province, the date, November 2001.
Benjamin Keynes (The Killing of John Lennon’s Jonas Ball) has been tasked by the CIA to lead Special Forces Team 392 on a mission deep into Afghanistan to find one Mohammed Aban, a cleric considered by the locals to be the “spiritual force that helped the Mujahadeen defeat the Soviets.”
All else is on a need-to-know basis, and it’s this veil of military secrecy that fuels the mystery of The Objective.

Co-writing the script with Mark A. Patton and Wesley Clark, Jr., Myrick successfully captures the feeling of a squad of soldiers in enemy territory, off on a trek whose exact nature is kept from them by the Powers That Be (of which Keynes is the on-the-ground representative).
Assisted by DP Stephanie Martin, Myrick conjures the harsh beauty of the inhospitable terrain of this foreign country, effectively utilizing Morocco as locale stand-in, while Kays Al-Atrakchi’s music drapes the film’s soundscape with a disturbing score that heightens the scenario’s unsettling strangeness.
It’s these elements more than anything else—elements certainly more potent than your average Hollywood thriller’s over-dependence on CGI and epileptic editing—that make The Objective such a noteworthy triumph.


There’s also a good cast here, made up of unfamiliar faces, who deliver largely natural, straight-forward performances, which is, in the end, the key to keeping the audience involved while the weird sh!t gradually asserts itself over the film’s goings-on.
Do they reek the Hollywood hardcase Special Forces air we’ve come to expect from the movies and television? Perhaps not, but they do come across as real people, and that’s a big plus for a film like this.

Beyond that, I really shouldn’t say much more, other than that The Objective is ultimately about a government’s hunger for power, and how all else falls by the wayside in light of that all-encompassing yearning for the upper hand.
And while this isn’t the sort of film where everything’s neatly underlined and explained—the atmosphere and tantalizing bits are the tools for the audience to piece together the big picture—this is a solid cinematic experience which plays much better than The Blair Witch Project (which Myrick co-directed with Eduardo Sánchez), and is decidedly light years better than Solstice.
Now, I’m most definitely looking forward to Myrick’s next film.


Parting shot: Aside from containing a review of Solstice, the Archive also houses a review of Eduardo Sánchez’s Altered.

(The Objective OS courtesy of shocktillyoudrop.com and images courtesy of availableimages.com.)

A Rundown of the 13 Best, Most Recent Horror Movies I’ve Seen
[6 of 13]
BUG (May 2007)


Along with David Lynch’s Inland Empire, Bug is one of the most unsettling films I’ve seen in recent memory, the sort of cinematic experience that leaves a residue.

Read the entire review here.

(Bug OS courtesy of empiremovies.com.)

FEAR ITSELF
Season 1 Episode 3
“Family Man”
Written by Daniel Knauf
Directed by Ronny Yu

Now this is more like it. I guess it is true, that the third time’s the charm.


“Family Man” follows the travails of Dennis Mahoney (Eureka’s Colin Ferguson), a church-going, successful bank VP, with everything going for him, including a loving, doting family, who, after a near-fatal accident, finds that he’s switched bodies with Richard Brodigan (Capote’s Clifton Collins, Jr.), the infamous serial killer known as “the Family Man.”


What I feel is the strongest aspect of “Family Man” is the fact that this is a well-written, excellently-acted entry that I don’t think I would have seen on Masters of Horror.
“Family Man” is a psychological thriller that, while admittedly being disturbing and having spots of violence, also succeeds in delving into areas of the genre that don’t rely on on-screen gore or bizarre creature effects to elicit audience reactions.
If Fear Itself means to carve out its own identity removed from MoH, this is definitely a step in the right direction.


And while the body switch is another tried-and-tested notion, what makes “Family Man” work like gangbusters is the noteworthy acting by Collins and Ferguson.
Since I had already been impressed by Collins’ amazing work on Bennett Miller’s Capote, I expected much from him, and wasn’t disappointed.
The pleasant surprise here was Ferguson, as I wasn’t quite sure if he’d be up to the task. Eureka, after all (and no offense meant), isn’t a vehicle that particularly asks much of its actors.
In “Family Man,” Ferguson plays Brodigan-in-Mahoney’s body as the unstable, potentially abusive spouse, the dinner scene a decidedly unsettling sequence.
I’d perhaps first need to watch all 26 MoH episodes again before making a definitive pronouncement, but I think it’s safe to say “Family Man” boasts some of the best acting in the history of the show (“the show” being Masters of Horror/Fear Itself).


Written by Daniel Knauf (who’s written for Carnivale and Supernatural) and directed by Ronny Yu (whose Bride of Chucky was a thoroughly enjoyable entry in the Child’s Play franchise), “Family Man” is the Fear Itself installment I’ve been waiting for, the one that says this is a show worth your time, a series capable of showcasing horror effectively on the small screen.
And if the show continues on this winning trajectory, it may just serve the cause of horror more potently than MoH’s spotty record did.

(Images courtesy of nbc.com.)

IRON MAN
(Review)

Jon Favreau’s Iron Man has the distinction of achieving a number of firsts.
It was the first major hit of the 2008 summer (at the time of this review’s posting, the film is the third highest grosser of the year thus far, in the wake of The Dark Knight and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull); it was the first film to be produced by Marvel Studios; it was the first in what looks to be another successful Hollywood franchise; it was the first Marvel comic film since Bryan Singer’s X2 that left me nearly completely satisfied, an agreeable taste of popcorn cinema that had just enough substance informing its four-colour antics to make it soar right over the heads of recent muddled and murky Marvel entries.
And, just like Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, it found a franchise star in the unlikeliest of Hollywood actors.


But the truth is, a large part of why Iron Man works is due to Robert Downey, Jr., whose Tony Stark is the lovable billionaire industrialist cad, who is made to suddenly face the brutal reality of his company’s weapons manufacturing.
Downey nails not just the all-consuming obsessive quality of the driven genius, but also the heartfelt sense of atonement Stark adopts after a weapons field test in Afghanistan turns into a three-month long imprisonment.
Understanding that the fruits of his company have been subverted and used against both innocents and the young American soldiers whose lives he’s been trying to safeguard on the battlefield, Stark takes it upon himself to once again wrestle with the conundrum of building a weapon of war to uphold the peace.


But this time, the weapon is solely under his control, in the hands of this flawed individual, whose call to heroism is fueled by the need to right the wrongs committed with the products of his industry, with the leavings of his genius (a theme ironically magnified in the film through the subplot which sees the development of the Iron Monger, the titular hero’s mechanical nemesis, his automated Other).
Downey manages to put this all up on the screen, while still keeping the rakish Stark a jaunty presence; unlike another troubled billionaire playboy, Stark isn’t the brooding type.
And yet, the sense of a burdened soul intent on making things right is still clearly evident.


This humour and humanity amidst the combination of Iron Man’s high-tech comic book world and the nearly pinpoint marriage of physical effects and CGI on-screen goes a long way in making this a summer Hollywood tentpole that’s about more than just the explosions and the adrenaline.
And in that particular corner, Downey is helped along by Gwyneth Paltrow (who plays Stark’s ever loyal girl Friday, Pepper Potts) and Jeff Bridges (as Obadiah Stane, Tony’s erstwhile right hand at Stark Industries). The performances from the trio suggest casual, comfortable relationships, grounding the movie’s fantastic goings-on in a realistic milieu.
I might have added Terrence Howard as well, but his James Rhodes doesn’t get much screen time, and seems to be in the film primarily for the purposes of introducing the character to this potential new franchise; in the comic books, Rhodes eventually dons a variation of the Iron Man armour as War Machine.


A more interesting introduction made in the film though, is that of the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division, which comic geeks will know as S.H.I.E.L.D.
This particular introduction of course, bleeds into that post-credits bit with Sam Jackson, which then bleeds into the Tony Stark cameo in Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk.
And that’s probably another Iron Man first: it’s potentially the first in a long line of interconnected Marvel Studios films.

Immediately (and to my mind at least, rather prematurely) following the box office success of Iron Man, Marvel Studios announced a whole slate of subsequent films, which included adaptations of Thor and Captain America, all leading up to a proposed Avengers movie.
They had the 2010 and 2011 release dates down pat, and they had logos for the film’s titles too. Of course, they had no scripts, no casts, no directors.
But that didn’t stop them from locking themselves into very specific release dates.

It’s this annoying tendency of Marvel to shoot themselves in the foot just when they’re getting it right that always bugs me.
As I mentioned in my review of The Incredible Hulk (see Archive), Marvel needs to cultivate a little more circumspection.
Just because their bad—or otherwise terribly flawed—adaptations (see any Marvel comic book film between X2 and Iron Man) make money, doesn’t mean they’re worth the celluloid they’re shot on.


There needs to be integrity, substance, and humanity in a comic book film to serve as solid testaments to a fact that we comic geeks have known for a very long time: that the comic book is a valid medium of artistic expression, that it’s about more than just fistfights and spandex, and that it certainly isn’t just for kids.
I’m happy to say that Iron Man is one from Marvel that makes that grade.
Here’s hoping they keep their eye on that more valuable, lasting prize.

Parting shot: For the record (and to paradoxically showcase that other, more readily apparent prize), as of August 10, 2008, Iron Man has a worldwide gross of $568,178,682, while The Dark Knight clocks in at a whopping $645,241,000 in only 24 days of release. (As a point of comparison, Iron Man has been in theatres for 101 days.)
Meanwhile, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has raked in $744,839,965 in 81 days of release.

(Iron Man OS courtesy of impawards.com [design by BLT & Associates]; images courtesy of guardian.co.uk, cinematical.com, ew.com, latimes.com, and wired.com.)

BUG

(Review)

Like many a horror geek, William Friedkin’s The Exorcist is on my list of all-time best horror movies. And while The Guardian (the 1990 horror movie with Jenny Seagrove, not the recent Costner-Kutcher starrer) was a passable effort, it certainly wasn’t an Exorcist. Then there was Friedkin’s collaboration with Joe Eszterhas on the erotic thriller Jade, which was a big let-down (though it was cool hearing Loreena McKennitt during a key scene).
Despite all that post-Exorcist disappointment though, I was nonetheless looking forward to Bug, initially knowing nothing beyond that it was directed by Friedkin, had Ashley Judd and Harry Connick, Jr. in the cast, and boasted a kick-a$$ one-sheet.
Now that I’ve seen it, I can safely say it’s a nasty little number by Friedkin, and though I did find it a disturbingly riveting piece of cinema, it also clearly isn’t for everyone.


The film’s basic set-up is standard: lonely woman (Judd as waitress Agnes White) meets a mysterious drifter (Michael Shannon as Peter Evans), who enters her life, with tumultuous results. Where Friedkin and screenwriter Tracy Letts take Bug though, is hardly “standard.” I can’t really say any more than that, lest I spoil the film for those who haven’t seen it.
I can say that Friedkin takes Letts’ script (adapted from his own critically-acclaimed and Obie Award-winning play), and with a controlled and confident hand, presents us with a taut exercise in conspiracy and paranoia, a chilling portrait of love and personal disintegration with fantastic performances by Judd and Shannon.
Judd’s always struck me as not just a pretty face, but as a capable and talented actress as well. Here, she takes one of those terribly unglamorous roles (working class, accent, drug use, no make up) and embraces the character, inhabiting Agnes White.
Shannon, who starred in Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky and Alex Turner‘s Dead Birds, does no less. His Peter is one of those tightly wound, internal performances, like Heath Ledger’s Ennis Del Mar from Brokeback Mountain; the sort of character you can sense has vast, uncharted depths beyond the nondescript façade, depths that we see begin to leak out as the film gradually unspools. (Of course, Shannon already nailed the part of Peter in London and off-Broadway, and though that may give him an unfair advantage, let’s not hold that against him.)


For all my praise though, given what Bug is ultimately about, and the manner in which the narrative unfolds, this is definitely the sort of film that will leave some with the impression that nothing’s happening beyond two people yakking in a motel room.
But there is something here, beneath the celluloid skin. Along with David Lynch’s Inland Empire, Bug is one of the most unsettling films I’ve seen in recent memory, the sort of cinematic experience that leaves a residue.
If you’re adventurous with your cinema, or are a Friedkin or Judd fan, or want to see a fearless performance by Shannon, then you may well want to check this out.
If however you like your movies safe and Hollywood-engineered, then Bug may not be the film for you.


(Bug OS courtesy of impawards.com; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com; images courtesy of Lionsgate and indiewire.com.)