DEXTER
Season 2 Episode 4
‘See-Through’
Written by Scott Buck
Directed by Nick Gomez
(WARNING: SPOILERS)

It’s week 3 of the Bay Harbor Butcher investigation and Miami’s in the grip of the worst heat wave in recent memory. Oh, and Masuka’s just found something that could break the case wide open.
All that pressure gets Dex rattled enough to meet Lila on his lunch break, hoping she can do the sponsor thing and get him calm and centered. She doesn’t really help, though Dex does discover she works with “found art” (though in Lila’s case, it’s more like stolen), with pieces in her studio that are fairly disturbing, mannequins apparently eating each other and the like.
When Dex mentions to Rita that he may not be getting much help from Lila, Rita suggests that maybe Dex would be better off with an older, male sponsor, and Dex says he’ll consider it.
He eventually meets with Lila, and says the sponsorship is over.

Asking around about Masuka’s find, Dex finally gets the answer from Deb: algae found in the garbage bags. And when he gets to talk to Masuka, Dex finds out that a marine biologist is being brought in to examine the algae, which could tell them where the Butcher keeps his boat docked.
Dex doesn’t quite get it, but knows he has to do something about it. And a chance, throw-away comment by Angel tells Dex what he has to do: sabotage the freezered morgue so the bodies will quickly decompose in the heat, taking the algae with them.
He’s about to make some plans when Lila shows up at the station, asking for another chance. Lila insists there is no absolute good, and no absolute evil. Dex, wanting to just get her off his back, shows her the inside of the morgue.
Expecting her to be repulsed, Lila is instead fascinated by the corpse she is shown. When Dex asks her what she thinks of the Butcher, Lila says “whoever did this is just like you and me.” She goes on to say that everyone has both good and evil in them, making Dex realize that Lila, of all people, can see him, can see through the mask, and is apparently not revolted by what she sees.

Later that evening, Dex busts the cooling unit, making it look like it was carelessness on the garbage men’s part. The following morning, Lundy, Masuka, and the marine biologist arrive to find the bodies badly decomposed, the evidence compromised.
Dex is hopeful for the first time in weeks, when Masuka says it’s a good thing Lundy had the rocks kept apart from the bodies. Apparently, the algae was found on the rocks used to weigh down the garbage bags containing the bodies, rocks that are assumed to have been picked up in the area where the Butcher’s boat was docked. And the biologist’s taken the rocks and could have results soon.
So poor Dex could still be screwed.

Meanwhile, advise from Lundy gets Deb to chance an encounter with Gabriel (Dave Baez) from the gym, leading to some casual sex that Dex walks in on.
Another conversation with Lundy gets Deb to consider having a real relationship with Gabriel, and when they see each other in the gym again, and Gabriel suggests he wouldn’t mind hooking up once more, she suggests a real date instead. Gabriel agrees, and a date is set.

Meanwhile still, Pasquale (Jake 2.0’s Judith Scott) has a shirt from her fiancée that she wants analyzed, since she can smell another woman on it. She asks Dex first, but so as to help overload Masuka, he directs Pasquale to him. But when Masuka doesn’t give her the results she’s looking for, she has a meltdown in the middle of the station.
In the wake of this very public display, LaGuerta is put back in charge of Homicide.
Later on, in what is quite possibly the most shocking moment of the episode, we see LaGuerta in bed… with Pasquale’s fiancée! She then proceeds to dump his a$$. Now that she’s maneuvered Pasquale into a meltdown, she’s got what she needs: her job back.
Of course, it could not be as premeditated and cold-blooded as all that, but one must admit, that’s the way it looks.

Over on the Rita front, Cody (Preston Bailey) is having nightmares about the Bay Harbor Butcher, and Dex tries to assuage the little guy’s fears by telling him the Butcher only goes after bad guys and doesn’t go after kids. Still, Rita is incensed that this Butcher is giving her son nightmares and wishes only the worst to befall him.
Rita is also visited by her mother, Gail (Poltergeist’s JoBeth Williams; hurrah!!), who never really liked Paul, and has been at a distance for a long time. And though Gail casts her vote for the Butcher—who is, after all, cleaning up Miami’s streets—she tells Rita Dex is a very good actor, and that she senses he’s keeping a secret. (Hopefully, Rita will think it’s the drugs issue, though something tells me she’s going to assume it’s some sort of torrid affair with Lila…)

There are also subplots involving the investigation of a number of Butcher victims who don’t seem to have criminal records—in which Angel has to deal with a woman who claims her husband never killed anyone—and Doakes’ special ops past as a Ranger (though the latter seems an ill fit in the episode).
Despite that quibble though, this episode is a particularly good one, with developments in both Deb and LaGuerta’s lives (I mean, wow, I so bought into the whole LaGuerta standing up for a sister-in-the-force thing, but it looks like she’s really a stone-cold b!tch), while the Butcher investigation continues to get downright hairy for Dex.
And hey, I love Poltergeist and I love JoBeth Williams, the obvious chemistry between Williams and Craig T. Nelson a large part of what makes Poltergeist so special. I hope she hangs around Miami a while.

(Image courtesy of sho.com.)

MASTERS OF HORROR
Season 2 Episode 1
“The Damned Thing”
Teleplay by Richard Christian Matheson; based on the short story by Ambrose Bierce; directed by Tobe Hooper

Sheriff Kevin Reddle (Powder’s Sean Patrick Flanery, though perhaps more widely seen as TV’s Young Indiana Jones) is the law in the small town of Cloverdale, suddenly faced with the recurrence of a terror that struck 24 years ago, turning his loving father into a homicidal maniac and leaving him an orphan.
As it turns out, the titular “damned thing” is intimately connected to the Reddle family, unleashed by the Sheriff’s grandfather, a primordial entity whose coming is accompanied by flurries of violence and mayhem, perpetrated by otherwise normal everyday people.

Though “The Damned Thing” is by no means a terrible film, it still doesn’t get far beyond stretches of quiet character moments, punctuated by instances of explosive gore and bloodletting. And though director Hooper takes his time with the characters—as he did on Poltergeist—what we do see of them doesn’t make us sympathize with them enough to really care about the outcome of the story. (It is a kick though to see Sam’s brother, Ted Raimi, as Father Tulli.)
And not only is the big CGI reveal of “the damned thing” a bit of a letdown, the story’s ending also serves as a big “So what?” to cap off this season’s not-so-grand opening.

(The Damned Thing DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)

(Originally posted 031107.)

DISTURBIA
(Review)

Shia LaBeouf.
You may not know how to spell his name just yet, but chances are, if you’ve seen Transformers (review: Archive July 2007), you know this kid and you know his face. And though he’s been banging around for a while now (maybe you saw him in Constantine, or in The Greatest Game Ever Played, or in Bobby, or maybe even Disney’s Even Stevens), Steven Spielberg seems to be making a big push to crown him the first official star of Hollywood’s latest generation of actors.
After the Spielberg-produced Transformers, Shia is going to be up on the big screen with pop culture icon Indiana Jones, in the upcoming Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods.
But if there is indeed some evil Spielbergian Master Plan, that Plan starts here, in D.J. Caruso’s Disturbia.

Kale Brecht (LaBeouf) lost his father (Matt Craven) in a tragic car accident a year ago. Since then, he’s had a number of run-ins with the law. The latest ends in his house arrest, for which his mother Julie (Carrie-Anne Moss) needs to pay the state $12 a day for.
Consigned to his house and most of the front- and backyard by a “tether,” tormented by the neighbourhood kids, cut off from his Xbox and his iTunes, and suffering “chronic boredom,” Kale discovers the “reality without the television,” as he starts spying on his neighbours, particularly newcomer Ashley (Sarah Roemer, from The Grudge 2).
But Kale soon begins to suspect his neighbour, Mr. Turner (David Morse), has a murderous secret, and his house arrest quickly proves to be much more than he bargained for.

Now, if anything works in this agreeable popcorn thriller, it’s clearly LaBeouf, who anchors the audience with a credible performance of a teen-ager unsuccessfully dealing with the grief and guilt of a parent’s death.
From the opening prologue, which ends with that great reaction shot as Kale realizes his father is dead, LaBeouf presents an identifiable protagonist who, for all his subsequent fixation on Turner and his suspected crimes, is still at heart, a teen-ager with raging hormones.
LaBeouf proves up to the task, as he juggles all this, while still maintaining the charm and charisma that is speedily making him a household name.
And in Roemer, the film finds a leading lady who meets LaBeouf on the same level. Roemer’s performance may not be as solid as LaBeouf’s (we learn a lot more about Ashley from Kale’s monologue about her than what we actually see on-screen), but she holds up nonetheless.
It’s the other cast members who don’t fare quite as well.

While Carrie-Anne Moss does her best with a slightly underwritten part, Aaron Yoo (who plays Ronnie, Kale’s goofy best friend) is the stereotypical comic relief, and David Morse, is, well, David Morse. The man can do “Creepy Dude” in his sleep, and probably does. It may have been more interesting to have had an actor cast against type as Turner, instead of Mr. King Creepy Dude.

Still, despite sections terribly reminiscent of past films (The Blair Witch Project, Poltergeist, as well as the obvious and oft-mentioned Rear Window—it’s not like this is the first time anyone’s used the Rear Window gambit, after all), Disturbia does succeed in its modest aims.
As I mentioned earlier, it’s an agreeable popcorn thriller. It’s not exactly riveting, but it is engaging. But perhaps most importantly, its success at the box-office is a clear signal that LaBeouf is on the cusp of Hollywood stardom, an idea that Spielberg seems more than happy to see come to fruition.

(Disturbia OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

reVIEW (2)
THE RING TWO

The Ring Two, the English-language debut of noted Japanese director Hideo Nakata (Ringu, Kaosu), is, just to establish the verdict up front, an excellent horror movie. It isn’t perfect (there is a contrivance here, a convenience there), nor is it Nakata’s best—that honor still belongs to Honogurai mizu no soko kara (Dark Water). Nevertheless, it’s a well-crafted, atmospheric piece that serves to validate and fortify some of the lamer aspects of Gore Verbinski’s unimpressive remake of Ringu, The Ring.
And, lest you may worry that The Ring Two is merely Nakata revisiting his own Ringu 2, rest assured he doesn’t do that here; though the climactic set piece is ostensibly similar to that of Ringu 2, the films’ stories aren’t the same. (Actually, if there’s a film Nakata revisits in The Ring Two, it’s quite possibly Dark Water; but more on that later.)
Returning from The Ring are mother and son protagonists, Rachel (Naomi Watts) and Aidan Keller (David Dorfman), and evil video ghost-child Samara, who’s now interested in more than just scaring young, photogenic, pimple-free American adolescents to death. She’s more ambitious this time around, our Samara.

What Nakata achieves in The Ring Two is a creepy and effective follow-through on Verbinski’s slick though terribly flawed The Ring. This is to be expected though, given that Nakata originated the entire filmic Ringu cycle, and his presence on this production not only assures masterful horror film artistry and craftsmanship, but also apparently supplies Ehren Kruger with enough inspiration (or perhaps input) to deliver a script that is far better and more substantial than the one he slapped together for The Ring.
Here, not only is the theme of maternal love and responsibility—how far would you be willing to go for love of your child?—explored more deeply than the surface-scratching lip service we witnessed in The Ring, but the ideas of the original are studied in much closer detail, allowing the audience an increased level of scrutiny, as well as a clearer understanding of why Anna Morgan (Shannon Cochran) murdered Samara in the first place (a reason more complex than the “we-must-kill-the-bad-seed” motivation provided in The Ring). Issues of abuse, neglect, and abandonment within a mother-child relationship are also considered here.
Additionally, the larger Hollywood budget allows Nakata to push the visual elements of the tale, gracing the screen with some of the most eerie and impressive paranormal effects scenes in a movie of domestic horror since Poltergeist, incidentally, also one of the earlier proponents of the television-as-an-appliance-of-doom idea.

Naturally, Nakata’s leitmotif of water, found throughout his body of work, continues here, where we are made privy to what water means to Samara, again forming mental connections to some of the elements in The Ring, almost as if part of Nakata’s agenda was to make Verbinski’s film make more sense in retrospect.
There’s also a scene here, recalling a similar sequence in Richard Donner’s The Omen, which serves to bolster the entire equine epidemic subplot in The Ring, which, in the sole context of Verbinski’s film, was digressive and rather pointless.
If anything, The Ring Two ends up making The Ring look like an interesting prelude to the real, substantial story, as if all this time, Verbinski’s effort had actually been a prologue disguised as a feature-length film.
The Ring Two can also be seen on a certain level, to be a further explication and elaboration of some of the themes and ideas found in Nakata’s Dark Water. Which is not to say that this is a rehash; The Ring Two is still very much its own animal, a slick horror film with atmosphere and depth, a rare breed in Hollywood.

So, while we await Nakata’s next English-language project, we have the director’s successful first dip into the raging waters of American moviemaking. Here’s hoping Nakata’s Inhuman (apparently his next Hollywood project; see The Director’s Chair (1): Archive June 2007) will be another specimen of that rare breed of Hollywood horror film The Ring Two belongs to.

(The Ring Two review began life under the title “Round and Round We Go Again.”)

(The Ring Two OS courtesy of impawards.com.)