Featuring the Likes of Colors, Theaters, Dinosaur Skeletons, and Animal Heads

Independent Film Review: Asylum Seekers (2009 / DVD 2011)
Summary: Six people on the verge of a breakdown decide to check themselves into an insane asylum, only to discover there is just room for one.
Spoilers: none

Asylum Seekers: These terms make us think of refugees and the delightful conditions of third-world countries run by dictators where those fleeing from them must canoe across muddy-watered borders in hopes of escape. Not exactly the setting for a traditional horror movie, for which reason we readjust our focus to insane asylums.

Now what do we think? How about straightjackets and electroshock therapy conducted on restrained subjects? Better. The torture
of naked, helpless patients is almost a cardinal pillar in a whole sub-genre of horrors and horror comedies, and I like the sound of it from the start. Does that sound good to you, too? Well, you’ll get none of that here.

Unfortunately, appeal in name is nearly all of what the 2009 independent film Asylum Seekers has to offer. Other than a totally mesmerizing use of its low-budget imagery to convey emotional shifts to give a fit and finish far above what we would expect, Asylum Seekers is a disjointed misadventure of six mental cases that long to be accepted into an asylum for the mentally insane—all we need in the world is a movie about crazies where they think life in an asylum is something to shoot for as a goal!

The group has it in their heads that their lives will be better in a nut house. The problem is that only one bed remains, which is why they must compete to find out who the luckiest crazy among them happens to be. This competition is the movie as it unfolds before its audiences with intricate colors, theaters, dinosaur skeletons propped up on shoulders, and animal head masks.

“Huh?” you say. Well, it gets worse.

We have “Alan” (Bill Dawes) a wannabe rapper who seems to have some sexual identity issues and “Alice” (Stella Maeve) who has a fetish for electrical shocks. “Paul” (Lee Wilkof) is like a commando who takes solace in bunkers and weapons, but is too whacko for his own schemes. “Maud” (Pepper Binkley) is being pushed by her husband to have twins, but she doesn’t want twins or kids. She spends her time assembling things by tens. “Dr. Raby” (Daniel Irazarry) is a twitchy virgin who has done a good job taking on the bald look and being neurotic.

Since none of the other critics apparently have the courage to call this one out (due to that subconscious nagging fear of being ridiculed for knocking a “work of art” that might just be over their heads), I’ll go ahead and make the point that everyone who has seen the movie is itching to see in print online: Asylum Seekers offers us nothing of what we want or expect in a film about mental institutions. Its full-on escape into surrealism makes it not so much a psychological analysis, but a ridiculous waste of film and time.

Not everything that is symbolic or artistic is brilliant. Some directors forget that. The film’s sexual overtones are strong – and in more than a few places, a welcome relief to the pointlessness we find ourselves enduring – but as with everything here, the project is crushed underneath a mother-load of artful and color-based bombardment, giving us a film with no real meaning about anything.

There is no story. It isn’t funny or insightful, though what’s really unfunny is a director with this much highly charged knack for visual creativity wasting his talent in the vessel of a poorly told story such as this. What we have here is an artful and tasteful assemblage of colors, props, and themes, with eccentric characters that revel in their insanity while the producers somehow think this will entertain us. Wrong. The movie is more insane that the people in it.

(JH)

Grade: D+ (1 ½ stars)
Rated: No MPAA rating
Director: Rania Ajami
Starring: “Maud” (Pepper Binkley), “Alan” (Bill Dawes), “Nurse Milly” (Judith Hawking), “Samantha” (Julie Leedes)
Genre: Comedy / Fantasy
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Nazi Doctors Ruin Lives

Movie Review: The Debt (2011)
Summary: Three retired Mossad agents struggle with a hidden event in their past that involves the extraction of a former Nazi wartime doctor.
Spoilers: none

The Debt is an espionage thriller about three Mossad infiltrators who collaborate to bring justice to a Nazi wartime doctor for Holocaust crimes.

The 1966 mission undergone by the young agents, "Rachel Singer" (Jessica Chastain), "Stephen Gold" (Marton Csokas), and "David Peretz" (Sam Worthington), comes at great potential loss. They must identify and extract "Bernhardt Vogel" (Jesper Christensen), avoiding the Russians, while delivering
their target safely into US hands. But when the turn of events is less than favorable and the team finds themselves handling matters in the throws of confusion, doubt, and the feeling of being deserted, a fateful decision is made.

Years later, in 1997 (where the film actually begins), years have passed and our three heroes (played by Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson, and Ciarán Hinds) have aged, had families, and had books written about them, having become known for what are considered heroic actions. But the three are holding a deep, dark secret—the events described in the narratives of what happened are not entirely true.

The film is broken up into brief segments from 1997 and 1966 where we are given glimpses of the story told with great focus on the personal lives of the characters. The initially withdrawn and contrastingly on-edge behaviors reflect for us an impulse-prone trio of youngsters who have lots of training but little idea as to what they have gotten themselves into with their mission.

The jarring, suspenseful story at first seems to be set back by the long sequences of dialog in German with no subtitles, but these have a purpose to the plot. The acting, which improves as the film moves forward, may not line the walls of its stars with awards, but will remind us again and again of the moral challenges of living with a lie.

With an impassioned cast and performances strong enough to be memorable -- with a series of big and small twists that further intensify viewing -- The Debt reminds us of what it means to be human and heroic in a meaningful and exciting narrative.

(JH)

Grade: B+ (3 ½ stars)
Rated: R (for gore, violence, language, and adult situations)
Director: John Madden
Starring: "Rachel" (Helen Mirren), "Stefan" (Tom Wilkinson) "David" (Ciarán Hinds), "Rachel" (Jessica Chastain), "Stefan" (Marton Csokas), "David" (Sam Worthington), "Bernhardt Vogel" (Jesper Christensen)
Genre: Thriller / Drama
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License Plates. Tin Cans. College Pricks.

Movie Review: Shark Night 3D (2011)
Summary: A weekend at a lake house in the Louisiana Gulf turns into a nightmare for seven vacationers as they are subjected to fresh-water shark attacks.
Spoilers: none

There are at least three things I’d like cheap shark thrillers to quit doing.

1) The Intro Kill: This is where we learn the very bloody lesson that the poor fools in the movie are going to have a shark problem on their hands.

2) The Surprise Boyfriend Charm: This is where, waiting for the initial intro shark kill, we see the girlfriend get grabbed and romantically coddled after an initial scare.

3) Plans for an Insane Party: After the initial gory kill, the stage is set for much more bloody disaster to occur at a huge party on a lake somewhere.

Besides these things, we aren’t asking for too much. We don’t expect another Jaws, but in the spirit of mutual decency, let’s quit trying stupid stuff. No director wants his/her film to be like the Shark Attack series.

I mean, the more intelligent viewers (if they go in at all) are going in knowing that at best, shark movie x will never be what Jaws was. At worst, it won’t be very scary (probably not at all), but more than likely just cornball-ish viewing for late high school to early college aged viewers. Can we please raise the bar just a little?

Well, what can we expect from a movie called Shark Night 3D? Come on, now; it’s called “Shark Night 3D.” It involves college kids who go to celebrate their good grades at the Bayou where they face…sharks. No surprises there.

“Sara” (Sara Paxton) lives on an island and mostly keeps to herself with her dog. This is after a bad experience with a handsome young man she was dating named “Dennis” (Chris Carmack). The two part ways, but Sara finds it in herself to open her house for a weekend party for friends.

“Nick” (Dustin Milligan), “Maya” (Alyssa Diaz), “Malik” (Sinqua Walls), and “Gordon” (Joel David Moore) among others, meet for what promises to be a blast of a good time. This is until super-fast-swimming, predatory fresh-water sharks (among other predator fish) begin taking them apart one by one.

There is a story here, however hard-pressed it may be against observations from reality. Sharks and predatory fish going out of their ways to chase skiers and swimmers over extended distances is exactly the kind of bizarre, desperate-for-thrills crap that the smarter among us have no problem going without.

But there are surprises in the way writers Will Hayes and Jesse Studenberg lay out the movie’s framework. Occasionally, we almost get interested in what goes on. And while it’s common for a movie to kill off its cast going from least to most likable, in this film, the writers have no problem axing even those we’ve come to like, or else not dislike as much.

As is found by the ardent “3D for thrills” seekers out there, the film’s affects do not at all benefit from the 3D. The story is a little hard to swallow, and not just because these water predators are so damn determined to kill absolutely everyone—even in extremely shallow waters.

Because they are on an island, the kids can’t call EMS when one of them gets hurt. I’m “on board” with that, but can someone please tell me why cell phones and landlines mysteriously will not work?

It’s for cheap thrill-seekers only. Nothing remarkable here, and not as tolerable as last year’s Pirahna, which at least boasted better star power, with its surprises rooted in humor.

(JH)

Grade: D+ (1 ½ stars)
Rated: PG-13 (for violence and terror, disturbing images, sexual references, partial nudity, language, and thematic material)
Director: David R Ellis
Starring: “Sara” (Sara Paxton), “Nick” (Dustin Milligan), “Dennis” (Chris Carmack), “Beth” (Katharine McPhee), “Blake” (Chris Zylka), “Maya” (Alyssa Diaz), “Gordon” (Joel David Moore), “Malik” (Sinqua Walls), “Sabin” (Donal Logue), “Red” (Joshua Leonard)
Genre: Horror / Thriller
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Porn Star Meets Zombie Apocalypse

Independent Film Review: Bloodlust Zombies (DVD 2011)

Summary: A military weapons manufacturer creates a chemical weapon that causes victims to become blood-lusting killers.

Spoilers: none

I’m convinced that there may literally never be an end to movies in the zombie apocalypse genre, at least not one I can see coming. Nowhere else is this more true than in the world of direct-to-DVD releases. But while examples of zombie slop are abundant, a bit less so are cheap, poorly produced zombie movies featuring porn stars. Bloodlust Zombies darn near breaks the mould.

Directed by Dan Lantz, our star is “Alexis Texas,” a blonde beauty who has appeared skyclad in hundreds
of adult films. She, among other topless girls, bare their goods for us. Sounds like Lantz figures he’ll grab some extra viewers and get bunches more to be counted among the gore-hounds with Alexis in the picture. He’s not wrong. 

Bloodlust Zombies is about a weapons contracting firm called Zlantoff Industries and a team of researchers who create a new chemical called VC-42C that is designed to infect with rage enemy combatants of the United States. The drug is tested on cats and is a success. The go-ahead is then given to engineer the substance to help American troops win in battle. But an accident happens in the lab, which leads to a building lock-down to try and contain the contamination. This is where the movie takes place.

Now things don’t get truly, truly bad until the first few lines of the film are uttered—no, wait, it’s when we consider why the accident happened. The director of the research lab, “Bobby Lee” (Robert Heath) has sort of a loose office conduct policy. Whether or not it applies to everyone else is unknown, but he applies it to himself—he bangs his hot blonde little cowgirl (Texas) over the intercom, bringing grins and laughs as an office-full of dorks and techies sip champagne and giggle.

The film may have nothing going for it in the conventional sense (not counting that it is hilariously bad), but at least the plot component that involves zombies is to be commended. The chaos-causing chemical is intended to make troops of enemy soldiers go berserk on each other. This is something we don’t see in so many movies where zombie gangs choose to work together and chase down the non-infected only. 

The performances in this slimy, sleazy, slacker of a super-sucker are as badly conceived as they are acted, with the breast-baring partial exception of Alexis, who, along with “Judy Miller” (Janice Marie), are the only two characters we don’t relish hating. Judy is like a grief-stricken Michele Bachmann and she totes her gun around the office in memory of her fallen husband who died in the army.

To annoy us beyond words is “Darren” (Adam Danoff), the nerdy office jerk whose nasty commentary and mere presence is an obnoxious assault on the sensibilities of the entire world. You have to look pretty hard to find a self-serving, unmotivated, cliché-using sex perv of a comic relief character that sinks this low. Studies show that Jay and Silent Bob and Peewee Herman actually come out way ahead of this guy on likeability tests. 

Security guards fretting about their underpaying jobs (Lantz himself plays the office security guard who does most of the yapping), arguing with each other, and telling each other to eat bags of dicks is only a small piece of this excrement pie. So many lines of characters are repeated unnecessarily, and many times with long strings of expletives sandwiched in between. Even junior high kids first discovering profanity couldn’t be any more creative in their mixing up of swears. Many of these are in attempts to sound forceful or intimidating, making it not just sad, but sad and funny.

The script is so sloppy that these laughably standout-ish characters, in their sometimes-somber-sometimes-comical-sometimes-clueless tirades will communicate the drama of terror situations in such a way that any camcorder home movie would offer better performances. People are so easily killed/disarmed/snuck up upon that I don’t think anyone will ever deny that the film fulfills its comedy aspect, and the horror aspect only makes this better—or worse. 

The top-up female nudity is an ambitious attempt at trying to raise the bar, but the gore is a stand-alone riot by itself. More than once, these zombies manage to bite necks in a particular place of the victims, causing blood to shoot through the air as if shot out by a power sprayer.

So many zombie flicks have come and gone, but this one is THE ONE to stand out in sheer, unrepentant badness. I laughed so hard I cried, watching for more through the credits. My F might as well be an A+. It’s hard to top this stuff. Even Uwe Boll’s god-awful House of the Dead (2003) doesn’t bat in this league. Troll 2, look out!

(JH)

Grade: F (0 stars)

Rated: No MPAA rating

Director: Dan Lantz

Starring: “Bobby Lee” (Robert Heath), “Judy Miller” (Janice Marie), “Andrea” (Alexis Texas), “Darren” (Adam Danoff), “Office Security Guard” (Dan Lantz)

Genre: Horror / Comedy

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There Was a Reason We Didn’t Go Back to the Moon. It Just Doesn’t Make Sense.

Movie Review: Apollo 18 (2011)
Summary: Three astronauts arrive on the moon and find that they are not alone.
Spoilers: none

It has become somewhat fashionable in the movie industry for film-makers to create documentaries about fictitious characters and events. These are often called “mockumentaries” and they are usually designed to spin these phantoms into conspiracy theories where “secret tapes” get found or are leaked to the media.

Apollo 18 is one such film, a mockumentary of a top-secret trip to the moon carried out from 1972-74. The movie, with only 3 uncredited cast
members appearing entirely in spliced-together “found footage,” has been compared to a space-based Blair Witch Project (1999) or Event Horizon (1997) made over documentary style. These comparisons are fair, but lest that be interpreted as praise, let’s clarify.

The three astronauts – “Walker,” “Anderson,” and “Grey” (Lloyd Owen, Warren Christie, and Ryan Robbins) – are charming and fresh faces on screen. They’ve even been given well-engrained senses of humor that fit what we’ve come to find in NASA’s most envied sojourners who liven up childhood dreams.

These men answer their country’s call of duty and leave behind their families to go to the moon. They are supposed to be family men making big sacrifices, but that point is never successfully driven home to us. Anderson takes with him a tape recording of his son playing while his wife’s voice can be heard in the background. Despite the film’s every effort, we never really care too much for the men or their families.

When they land, expecting to carry out ordinary exploration, they begin to suspect that they are not alone. With the beeps and blipped-over small-talk and jokes between the crewmen with the persistent (and sometimes grading) whines from the instrument panels, we have stage-setting for what is to come. The film gets credit for successfully building up to its extraterrestrial revelation—well, some credit.

The slow-build, high-suspense approach would have worked had our director known how to orchestrate things to a climax that matches the films 88-minute runtime, but instead, we get choppy mini-revelations of moving spider rocks seen through flickering cameras, accompanied by unexplained noises on the communication channels that, frankly, begin to annoy the hell out of us.

When these problems don’t go away but get worse, we have the discovery of a Russian vessel on the moon. But there appears to be foul play, with at least one cosmonaut dead and blood everywhere. And from there, we start to see the alien hostility we’ve been waiting for.

Our astronauts are supposed to be smart men, and to their credit, they draw the only conclusion that logic in their circumstances could warrant. When their equipment has been smashed and they can find no asteroid debris and the US flag has been shredded to pieces, the best they can think of is that some crazed second cosmonaut is out there stirring up hate.

But then, because of the writing behind the movie, we really should sympathize with these boys; barring asteroids, the crazy cosmonaut theory is way more believable than the alien-life-on-the-moon theory; there is no atmosphere up there, which means any sunlight that hits you cooks you like a steak while you freeze on your backside. There might be water for life, though not much of it, and certainly no sources of food to sustain any ecosystem whatever.

When our men fight to keep from becoming victims of these apparently very intelligent beings who have somehow survived on a dead, radioactive world of waste for who knows how long, we really start to ask questions, like: How – why – would any life on the moon be hostile to men wearing 300 pounds of very expensive gear?

These are some interesting predators; they’re intelligent and somehow have an instinct and appetite to infiltrate the bodies of aliens (we’re assuming they want to eat us and not just be malicious). And we should upgrade the question “how do we know they would like to eat us?” to “what have they been eating for the ceaseless eons before we arrived?”

The film has only a production value appreciation for science, but never tries to make us feel like any of this could actually happen, although its handling of the physics and mechanics of space flight and landing on the lunar surface are carefully handled. Everything from the way the light makes impressions on tape down to the camera angles, are well chosen.

Unfortunately, these chances are blown all to hell with a script that, despite its “bits n’ pieces” style of delivery, fails to stay the course, but gives itself away well before the end. When we already know the terrors we’re facing, we have nothing more than a space alien cheap excuse for a sci-fi without much respect for itself or its audience. Exquisite screams in a vain attempt at being memorable or scary only dig the hole deeper.

Even the film’s tagline gets it absolutely wrong—hostile alien life found on the moon would not keep mankind away; indeed, it would bring us back in mission after mission to seize and study it!

(JH)

Grade: D+ (1 ½ stars)
Rated: PG-13 (for language, violence, and gore)
Director: Gonzalo López-Gallego
Starring: “Walker” (Lloyd Owen), “Anderson” (Warren Christie), “Grey” (Ryan Robbins)
Genre: Horror / Sci-fi / Thriller
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“I Want to Be a Killer. Can You Help?”

Movie Review: Columbiana (2011)
Summary: A young girl becomes an assassin to hunt down the crime lords who murdered her parents.
Spoilers: none

Nine-year-old “Cataleya” (Amandla Stenberg) was born into a mob family in Bogota, Columbia. Having witnessed a rival crime family murder her father (Jesse Borrego) and mother (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), this extremely cute but tough-as-nails little kid would rather not hide in foster homes in witness protection, sobbing and crying in efforts to repress life-shattering memories. This little girl is stone-cold made for the kind of action that makes movies about payback and brutality so darn fun!

After escaping with her life and making it to America, she jumps off the grid and heads to Chicago where she finds a home with her uncle "Emilio" (Cliff Curtis) and grandmother (Ofelia Medina). When she is enrolled in school, all she can think about is her future as an assassin.

“I Want to Be a Killer. Can You Help?” she asks her uncle. How do you reply to a young girl who looks like she should be holding a teddy bear while shooting text-speak messages to her BFFs on a school playground, but has a heart like Clint Eastwood’s William Munny from Unforgiven who can kill and and move on without so much as a bad night’s sleep? “Sure,” uncle replies.

Raised, trained, and tempered by her uncle who – like his deceased brother, knows well the family business – we find Cataleya years later as an adult (Zoe Saldana). She’s made good on that sweet childhood dream of becoming an ice-cold assassin. She’s on a mission—to hunt down and kill, like slovenly dogs, the kingpins who slaughtered her family those many years ago.

I’d put Cataleya up against any of the big action heroes. This girl would give Jason Bourne, James Bond, or Jack Bauer a sweat-breaking run for their money. Her plotting, tactics, and second-to-none cunning make her more than just lethal—she’s a glimmer in the night, a flash her enemies won’t see until it’s too late.

And Cataleya has a calling card based on a necklace given to her by her father just before he died—the South American Cataleya flower. When she finishes off her opponents, she leaves messages with the flower written on their corpses.

But in the business of sending messages via dead bodies, you don’t have to wait long until you find yourself on the receiving end. With the law and the mob hot on her trail and her adoptive family in danger by her actions, Cataleya’s survival skills will be put to the ultimate test.

But perhaps more regrettably, our sweet-looking assassin is missing out on a lot of life. She doesn't smile once in the film. The closest she gets to a social relationship is with an artist, “Danny“ (Michael Vartan) who digs her, but can’t figure out why she won’t open up to him. She knows that the path she has chosen to walk has horrific consequences, but in a movie like this, that’s not the bad part; the bad part is that it isn’t always clear that Cataleya is fully aware of the consequences of her actions as they affect others.

The characters we are given may not be original. A few of them may even lack dimension, but it’s what is done with these characters that so freely allows the movie to succeed in its gruff-but-satisfying goal. Young Amandla is a star waiting to shine. Saldana could be the new, hot moving target in action films.

The no-nonsense construction of the film is undeniably entertaining and will give audiences just what they want. This is especially true with regard to more old-fashioned viewers. We have no time loops, no misdirection, nothing that tends to frustrate audiences—just a beautiful criminal who knows her trade well.

The frustration comes with the use of one very popular myth that literally thousands of action movies have fallen prey to: The police need more than 30 seconds to trace a call. Utter bullshit (as anyone who has ever prank-called 911 knows). And at the film’s conclusion, we have one small plot-hole that does the most damage. It involves the final kill and is a bit of a stretch to imagine.

But all in all, Columbiana does exactly what it aims to do—provide audiences with a knee-knocking, adrenaline-pumping good time at the movies with a special knack for making execution-style murders exciting.

Brought to you by the writers of 2008’s flawed but memorable Taken with Liam Neeson, Columbiana is a fun payback picture where you happily ride with the action in wonder of what’s coming next. It doesn’t have to be a polished piece of perfection to be one of the coolest films I’ve seen all year.

(JH)

Grade: B- (3 stars)
Rated: R (for strong violence and language)
Director: Olivier Megaton
Starring: “Cataleya” (Zoe Saldana), “Marco” (Jordi Mollà), “Ross” (Lennie James), “Cataleya, age 9” (Amandla Stenberg), “Danny Delanay” (Michael Vartan), “Emilio Restrepo” (Cliff Curtis), “Don Luis” (Beto Benites), Fabio” (Jesse Borrego), “Alicia” (Cynthia Addai-Robinson)
Genre: Action / Thriller / Crime
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God, Indiana, and Whirlwinds

Just about two weeks after the stage collapse in Indiana, we found ourselves facing a hurricane – Hurricane Irene – a tool of vengeance that the god of the bible has historically loved and used to punish iniquity.

“For they have sown the wind, they shall reap the whirlwind.” (Hosea 8:7) 

“As the whirlwind passeth, so is the wicked no more: but the righteous is an everlasting foundation.” (Proverbs 10:25)

Witness 70-mile-per-hour winds with the ominous sky backdrop and the devastation that follows. When you watch the collapse, think of the screams, the horrors, the shock on everyone’s faces…it is events like these that, sadly, are needed to bring out the best in humanity. Look at how many of the on-looking crowds come to render aid.