Nothing to do with Nirvana, so let’s avoid any “Smells like” wisecracks.
This Max Minghella film is about an aspiring pop starlet (Elle), her mentor (Rebecca Hall) and a BIG CONTEST that can make or break her.
They’re premiering “Teen Spirit” at the Toronto Film Fest but it doesn’t open until Jan.
Regarding the college sex comedy “Frat Star,” it doesn’t really let co-directors Grant Johnson and Ippsie Jones off the hook by saying “They MEANT” to make something appalling.
They succeeded, exposing the elitist, sexist and degrading “Greek” system as it ruins a perfectly good kid with callousness, sexist humiliations, class snobbery, racist indoctrination and sexual privilege in the most explicit sense.
But it’s a “light” comedy, one that tries to have it both ways, suggesting our hero/victim was already a victim before he got there — that his “initiation” into “manhood” is both necessary and funny. Because Nick Cooper is nothing if not a “pussy,” a financially-aided Ivy League kid who thinks hard work and true love are how one finds success and happiness.
That’s not the way it works at all, and there is comic potential in those Barney-in-“How I Met Your Mother” hard lessons about sex and women and love learned while coming of age.
But this grating farce makes its satiric points so clumsily, pounds its punchlines so relentlessly and vulgarly that it only made it to Netflix for the titillation factor. Teenage boys can watch college boys having lots of sex, much of it degrading, with compliant, half-nude coeds.
Any effort to make the sorority sisters every bit as cruel, sexually calculating and selfish -“They think this is THEIR sport. It’s not. Trust us.” — is just lip service paid to equal rights in this infuriatingly Neanderthal college comedy.
Nick (Connor Lawrence, out of his depth) has all the wrong ideas about college. Pep talks about “You’re going to have truffle butter out the wazoo!” from his boorish dad (Chris Elliott, less funny than usual) don’t impress him. “That’s not me.”
That’s even his mantra when he meets his antic/manic/Old Money roommate Billy (Justin Mark, trying WAY too hard). Billy offers him a bottle, lures buxom coeds into their room with it and flips out when Nick shows how little experience or interest he has in getting it he has getting either.
“That’s not me. I’m going to orientation.”
“What do we need orientation for? We already KNOW our gender!”
Billy refuses to give up and coaches Nick relentlessly about hiding the financial aid thing, giving up on the girlfriend back home who dumped him with extreme prejudice and hitting every “rager” and keg party the frats on campus toss.
Nick may be a social media pariah, #NickCooper is a meme the ex’s colorfully-nicknamed new lover (F— Jerry) created to show how pathetic his pleading texts to the hateful Ashley (Kelley Missal) are.
Nick — “We need to talk.”
Ashley — “Who are you again?”
But dragging Nick with him into Phi Delta becomes Billy’s mission. Working class Nick is reinvented as the heir to Cooper Tires. Of COURSE he’s down with treating women as objects to be grabbed, used and tossed aside. Of COURSE he’s old money conservative.
That cute music major, Rosanna (Cathryn Dylan, barely registering)? She’s as trapped as he is. Every time they start to talk, a pushy sorority sister who calls Nick “Faggot” interrupts, or the handsome, entitled frat president (Tyler Weaks) cuts in.
The film takes a stab at showing the parallel progress of our two innocents in college — mean sorority girls trying wise-up Rosanna by bedding the one guy she has an interest in, frat boys imprinting their racism, homophobia, xenophobia and class privilege (“Work? You don’t have to WORK in college. Not if you know the right people!”(.
“Segregation kind of makes some SENSE. I mean, the reason we’ve never had any African Americans here…”
“Blacks. You can say ‘Blacks.’ There aren’t any here.”
The Chinese pledge is named “Ching Chong,” and given a racist pidgin accent. The black pledge is nicknamed “Token.”
As mean and un-PC as that is, gags like that actually brought laughs in “Animal House,” which made the same satiric points even as, like “Frat Star,” you know the WRONG message was the one the future frat boys and sorority girls took home from it. Party, copulate, cheat, lie and steal, for the adult world is all that lies beyond.
“Natural Selection,” the raving Trump Bro (Peter O’Connor) snaps.
“Get some color,” among our recruits House Manager/Pledge Leader Augustus (Max Sheldon) urges. “Mix it up. Mulatto. Maybe a mulatto…Let’s not shove it in everybody’s faces that we all drive S classes.”
The frat brothers work up a homoerotic sweat as they urge each other to “RIDE these pledges…Paddling. I want more PADDLING.”
Nick, caught up in all this, develops a complex — a preppy “conscience” who ridicules his better instincts and urges him on, to use women, slip into sorority windows and complete the steps of his initiation quest.
Nick learns to demean women, mock lesser Ivies (“Brown” jokes, of course.) and memorize the values of the fraternity leadership.
“Best band of all time?” “Uh, Coldplay? ”
“MUMFORD and Sons!”
“Best TV show of ALL time?” “Entourage.”
“Best Adjective of all time? WRONG! EPIC!”
“Best MOVIE? ‘Boondocks Saints!'”
That little bit of ridicule pays off. The rest? Lost in a sea of profanity, slurs, frantically-delivered weak lines or buried in a wildly uneven sound mix.
By the time the cocaine shows up and this debacle dives across the finish line for its very sour ending, I was beyond over it.
“Animal House” brought fraternities back from the dead in the late 70s. The one comfort we can take from “Frat Star” is that this time, appalling isn’t the least bit appealing.
MPAA Rating: TV-MA, graphic degrading sexual content, profanity
Cast: Connor Lawrence, Justin Mark, Cathryn Dylan, Chris Elliott
Credits:Directed by Grant S. Johnson and Ippsie Jones, script by Grant S. Johnson. A Gravitas release.
Running time: 1:25
The evangelist Billy Graham long had a film production company that produced movies with the same aim as his televised “Crusades” — to win converts, or at least reaffirmations of faith from believers.
These were simple, modest-budget films with varying settings but always stories about people in crisis — legal, moral, ethical — finding hope, in the third act, via a Billy Graham Crusade.
Billy Graham died earlier this year, and “Unbroken: Path to Redemption” wasn’t produced by his film company. But this low budget sequel to Angelina Jolie’s 2014 Oscar season film biography “Unbroken” follows the same formula, with the same basic ingredients, as Graham’s self-produced big screen infomercials.
There’s a soul in crisis, the Olympic runner Louis Zamperini, who survived torture in a Japanese POW camp and is so tormented by what he went through that coming home doesn’t mean his war is over. Reconnecting with family and finding love cannot stop the nightmares — drifting in a life raft for 47 days in the Pacific, surrounded by sharks, beaten and threatened with beheading by a monstrous prison guard nicknamed The Bird for years. He falls into despair and alcoholism.
And then Billy Graham comes to LA for the Crusade that would make his reputation and park him in the public eye for the next 70 years. After pushing and prodding and reaching rock bottom, the Catholic Zamperini goes, reluctantly rediscovers his faith and finds purpose.
It’s not a star-studded affair, and “Path to Redemption” was directed by the “God’s Not Dead” director — Harold Cronk — who is operating outside the Hollywood mainstream. But it shows why that formula was left unaltered by Billy Graham Worldwide Pictures, back in the day. And in some ways, it betters Jolie’s big budget Oscar bait, with its team of Oscar winning screenwriters and “name” cast.
Samuel Hunt of TV’s “Empire” and “Chicago P.D.” is Zamperini this time. He looks like the young Louis, has a runner’s build and a miler’s stride and the gaunt face of a man starved in a prisoner of war camp, unlike the Englishman (Jack O’Connell) Jolie cast in the role. If Jolie sees this she’s going to kick herself. Hunt is terrific in the part.
We meet Louis upon his return to Japan in 1950, a man in a nice suit followed by a Time Magazine photographer, searching the faces of chastened war crimes’ prisoners, questioning them and their American guards.
“Where’s Watanabe? Where’s The Bird?”
The story flashes back to Louis’s homecoming, the onetime “Torrance Tornado” welcomed back to his big, loving family who show him his fan mail and explain the shouts and waves he gets walking down Torrance streets.
“You are a hero!”
“You’ve got me confused with somebody else, Mom. I just survived.”
He endures the backslapping of his local priest, but quickly corrects the man’s embrace of the “miracle” that got him home safe.
“Miracles didn’t save my tail-feathers, Padre. Two atomic bombs had something to do with it.”
Louis declares that his experience got him over the whole God thing. Pushing that, or forcing him to listen to reminders of what he went through tends to set him off.
Aimless, he hits the local bar entirely too often. An Army shrink (Gary Cole) offers little comfort. Then the military (Bob Gunton) enlists him in in the ongoing War Bonds drive needed to pay for the very expensive conflict America just fought. As with the overwhelmed heroes of Clint Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers,” Louis finds himself immodestly retelling and reliving his ordeal, increasingly drunk while doing it, on the road from coast to coast.
Maggot-filled rice flashes before his eyes at meals, elevator rides are strafed by Japanese Zeroes and his epic grudge with the barbaric Japanese guard who assaulted him over and over grows.
Even meeting the love of his life (Merritt Patterson) and their whirlwind Miami romance doesn’t end the nightmares.
Only revenge can, or so he thinks. And then Billy G. (played by Will Graham, Billy Graham’s grandson) comes to Los Angeles.
Cronk and screenwriters Richard Friedenberg and Ken Hixon handle all of this with care. The always spotless and creased costumes (even aprons) may not look like they’ve been lived in, Graham the Younger may have little of Grandpa’s telegenic passion, charisma and magnetism. But the story moves along even as it covers familiar ground.
The courtship features a lump in the throat romantic gesture, as Cynthia (Patterson) gently rebuffs a too-hasty Zamperini proposal with “I’ll race you for it.”
A POW twelve years removed from the Olympics or not, the fellow’s still a world class runner, even on Miami Beach. Cynthia?
“I’ve been outrunning boys my whole life.”
They line up in the sand, on your mark, set, GO. He explodes out of the blocks and sprints towards a lifeguard stand only to realize she’s behind him, smiling and walking towards her future — him. That’s a “Yes,” big boy.
“Thank you for preserving the free world for silly girls like me.'”
The dialogue is sharp and generally period-correct, Zamperini’s flirtation with re-starting his running career a dozen years after his previous (very young and not triumphant) appearance at the Berlin Olympics lets us see that Hunt is more at home on the track than the previous big screen Louis.
But you don’t have to have seen Zamperini on stage with Graham, later in life, telling his story to feel that what you’re seeing is entirely too familiar. It takes nothing away from what the man endured in saying the entire arc of this telling of it is worn and robbed of surprises, with only the odd dash of pathos. Every movie with an AA meeting in it has a roughly similar testimonial, excepting the POW torture element.
We see his cynicism, his rejection of Christianity, but it never has enough heat and fury to it for us to believe it. The director and his star play these moments as pulled-punches, and they don’t land.
This material was partly covered in the original film, “Unbroken,” and there’s just not enough that’s novel or interesting about Zamperini’s odyssey through this phase of his life to warrant another movie. They just changed the emphasis to his faith.
When I was a kid, my Boy Scout troop was called in to act as ushers whenever a Billy Graham movie would play in the single screen theater in the small town where I grew up. I got to know the “formula” for these films before I knew what to call it.
“Path to Redemption” is too much like those earlier works for its own good. Message over movie, “drama” lacking drama.
It truly works on the level too many other faith-based dramas do, as comfort food for the faithful, an altar call for the already saved.
MPAA Rating:PG-13 for thematic content and related disturbing images
Cast: Samuel Hunt, Merritt Patterson, Will Graham, Gary Cole, Bob Gunton, David DeLuise
Credits:Directed by Harold Cronk, script by Richard Friedenberg, Ken Hixon based on the Laura Hillenbrand book. A PureFlix/Universal release.
Running time: 1:38
Shane Black writes the chewiest, funniest tough-guy dialogue in the movies. So having the writer-director of “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” and “The Nice Guys” in charge of “The Predator” reboot was sure to pay dividends.
He’s a born smart-ass, and lines like “It’s an alien Whoopi Goldberg” describing the dreadlocked hunter-killer from space were sure to pop up, delivered at screwball comedy speed.
A kid (Jacob Tremblay) whose dad is an Army sniper tells the blue uniformed fellow making a delivery and asking too many questions this — “He kills people so you can be a mailman.”
That dad (Boyd Holbrook) is being interrogated after his “encounter with a space alien,” and is asked, “You think you’re being railroaded?”
“I see the tracks on the floor!”
Black is also the guy who scripted “Last Action Hero,” and on “The Predator,” he thought it would be a good idea to cast an old buddy who is also a convicted sex offender, and that actress Olivia Munn would be OK with that.
So Shane Black’s also the opposite of a “smart” ass, if that’s not too subtle.
Both Blacks are on display in this, the sixth film in this spree-killing “alien Whoopi Goldberg” franchise. It’s got the same macho camaraderie as the 1987 original film, and with the Baron of Butch Banter writing zingers for Holbrook, Munn, Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Jane and Sterling K. Brown, the only question at the end would be “Which two folks in this ‘Predator’ will be the ones elected governor in 10 years?”
Or it would be if the not-smart “ass” Black hadn’t shown up about 45 minutes in, delivered a “cuddly” alien hunting dog, muddling up the non-competing agendas of the teams of humans killing each other (Sterling K. Brown plays a mysterious villain) and generally drivimg this thing into the “ENOUGH already” zone of most of the previous Predator pictures.
Holbrook, who made a very good heavy in “Logan,” plays Quinn the sniper on a stalk in Mexico when a space ship crashes right in the middle of a hostage rescue. He loses his team, but grabs alien gear on site, mails it to his old hometown where his little boy (Tremblay) and ex-wife (Yvonne Strahovski of “The Handmaid’s Tale”) are sure to get their hands on it.
Actually, it’s the savant-brilliant “on the spectrum” little boy who gets his mind around the alien tech helmet and weaponized gauntlet. Halloween is about to get VERY interesting for the bullies in little Rory’s neighborhood.
“Leave me ALONE!”
“Or what, you’ll wash your hands 500 times?”
Dad Quinn finds himself on a military “loony” prison bus filled with misfits like “Nebraska” (Trevante Rhodes of “Moonlight”) and “toughs” played by Keegan-Michael Key, Alfie Allen, Augusto Aguilera and the funniest of all — Thomas Jane as a disturbed GI with Tourette Syndrome. I’ll let you guess what he insists was “Sheesh, you’re pushy,” that he blurted out and offended the alien contact biologist (Olivia Munn) who falls in with them.
Jane and Key are so funny they could take their act on the road.
But in addition to the other un-PC gags, Black tries to wring laughs out of eviscerations, beheadings and dismemberments as aliens and humans take the measure of each other and hurl a lot of firepower into the firmament.
The body count and blood and guts gets old in an instant. And while there’s something inherently hilarious in casting Jake Busey as a lab-coated scientist, the manic combat in between the blasts of banter is wearying.
The predators are always picking people up, then killing off the bit players, letting the leads live on to fight in another scene.
These have always been movies better suited to being video games, and that may be the fate of “The Predator,” too. It’s just that video games don’t mold tough-guy images the way movies do, and nobody from a video game ever got elected governor on “I ain’t got TIME” to bleed.
MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, language throughout, and crude sexual references
Cast: Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Olivia Munn, Thomas Jane, Keegan-Michael Key, Jacob Tremblay
Credits:Directed by Shane Black, script by Fred Dekker, Shane Black. A 20th Century Fox release.
Running time: 1:47
What did the sisterhood used to say about “mini skirts?”
“If you’re old enough to have worn them the LAST time they came around, maybe they’re not for you THIS time.”
Doesn’t really apply to movies, although you could make the case that “If you were into ‘Predator,’ in 1987, maybe this isn’t for you.
Because over the course of 31 years, most people have outgrown Predators, Ayn Rand and heavy metal.
Two musclehead stars of 1987’s “Predator” went on to become governors. I am pretty sure I didn’t predict that in my review of the film for the esteemed Grand Forks Herald daily newspaper in movie-mad North Dakota.
Arnold and Jesse have moved on, but this alien gun-nut “hunter” has not. Six feature films, several video games and a couple of short movies later, the hunting goes on.
Boyd Holbrook, Olivia Munn and Keegan Michael Key are in this incarnation. More “Alien” than “Predator?” Dunno.
Review to follow shortly.
If you ever wondered where the term “Grand Guignol,” used to describe the bloody and macabre, over-the-top-horror, came from, here it is.
If you ever speculated who might have been the original “scream queen,” long before Jamie Leigh Curtis, let us meet Paula Maxa, “The Most Assassinated Woman in the World.”
This gorgeous and gory French period piece is a thriller that uses Le Theatre du Grand Guignol as its setting, and the real Paula Maxa as its stalking victim.
Director Franck Ribière, who managed some chills with the little-seen “The Oxford Murders” some years back, loses himself in milieu and menace here, He wallows in foggy, crimson-colored production design and theater history. His screenwriter invents a back-story for Maxa, a reporter interested in learning that story and how it might connect with “The Montmartre Murders” which “the fanatics” in Paris in 1932 are sure were inspired by the nightly slaughter on the stage of the former chapel in Pigalle, on the Rue Chaptal in Paris.
Anna Mouglalis (“Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky”) is the smokey-voiced Paula, who narrates (in French, with English subtitles) that she has been “beaten, martyred, sliced to bits, crushed…vaporized, drained of my blood, impaled, hung, buried alive” etc. and become “The Most Assassinated Woman in the World.”
People, the resident playwright Andre du Lorde (Michel Fau) declares, “stand outside the theater every night, just to hear her scream.”
We meet her as she acts in “Murder in the Madhouse,” in which her eye is gauged out, geysers of blood spraying the audience.
“It needs to spurt further,” Andre gripes to the prop master (Jean-Michel Balthazar), the “real” genius behind this theater of blood.
Jean (Niels Schneider) is the handsome son of a count, a reporter for Le Petit Journal, assigned to write about the Grand Guignol, to make the case that the city’s murderers go there for inspiration. Picketers harangue those attending their shows, pleading that “this den of debauchery” must be closed, “for our children, our families, for FRANCE!”
Paula is cynical, aloof, all but dismissing Jean when they meet. But he noses around her dressing room and finds a note — “I love watching you die, night after night. Soon I will kill you.”
His interviews turn into dates (he takes her to see the Michael Curtiz film “Doctor X”), and rising concern. There’s something more than theater going on in that Theatre.
The actors complain of the taste of the fake blood. Could it be…?
Fanatical fans have a little too much access to backstage.
And the threats? They start showing up at Jean’s newspaper desk as well.
One of the delights of the script is the way it blends the real history of the theatre with this fictional story. Andre du Lorde really did collaborate with with psychologist Alfred Binet to create shows that pushed viewers’ buttons, perhaps even toyed with the mental state of the actors.
They really did keep a “doctor” (fake) in the house every night to handle all the fainting.
The shows presented here blend the macabre with touches that the contemporary Luigi Pirandello (“Six Characters in Search of an Author”), whose bizarre, psychological plays prefigured the later Theatre of the Absurd, would embrace as his own.
The narrative is less interesting in a general sense, lumbering towards an “Is the real murderer the fellow so obviously tagged as that?” and “Will Paula escape or be murdered?” posited for the sake of suspense.
Meh.
Schneider and his character have a callow prettiness that brings little to the film. Jean is underdeveloped, underplayed.
But Mouglalis has a magnificent face, demeanor voice for this character, world-weary, living only for the “thea-TUH.”
“Dying on stage keeps me alive…Frightening people is as interesting as making them laugh or cry.”
The milieu that Franck Ribière so revels in features onstage guillotines, throat slittings and surgeons behaving badly, clever props and effect gimmicks ,and offstage a cellist provides musical effects as sexual shenanigans go on among cast, crew and well-heeled audience members in the wings.
Stick around through the credits as a postscript reveals a little about the “real” Guignol and its most famous star.
Just don’t expect much from the mystery or any novelty in the villain or the murders. Jason and Michael Myers and Jamie Leigh surpassed those decades ago.
MPAA Rating: TV-MA
Cast: Anna Mouglalis, Niels Schneider, Eric Godon
Credits:Directed by Franck Ribière , script by Vérane Frédiani and David Murdoch. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:42
“MDMA” is a lurid, over-sexed, drugged–out soap opera set at the tail end of the Go Go ’80s, when Reagan was King and “Molly” was his Queen.
It may pass itself off as “cautionary,” but this is exploitation, the sort of faintly alluring journey through hell that reminds us that every generation craves its “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” or “Less Than Zero.”
First-time writer-director Angie Wang didn’t attract “Zero” level A-listers for her titillating indie expose. But she got some decent players to flesh out her fleshy fandango through promiscuity and profitability, temptation and tragedy.
It was the Club Era, before Raves arrived, when most people called the hot new drug “E,” “Ecstasy,” but the science nerds know it as MDMA, 3,4 Methylenedioxymethamphetamine — “Molly” to her friends.
Angie is a college freshman chemistry major in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time to get a taste of the drug itself, and with the brains and means to make it herself and finance college, partying and even generous Big Sistering with her profits.
Former child actress Annie Q of TV’s “Are We There Yet?” and “The Leftovers” stars, and can’t really play Angie as naive, lonely and a long way from home falling under bad influences. She may weep at the father (Ron Yuan) who cannot say “I love you” back to her when she boards the bus for a cross-country trip to college in San Francisco. But when she gets there and meets her party-debutante roommate (Francesca Eastwood), she’s more than ready to knock back and few drinks and “Go find some fun.”
A fraternity party leads her to the hunky swimmer all the coeds crave (Pierson Fode). And he has these pills he’d love to share — Ecstasy.
“The club drug? HIT me!”
That puts her in his bed and in a mind to find a way to make this drug, not-yet-banned but only made in Germany, after school. A lab assistant job should do the trick. Maybe with a little help from the straight-arrow lab partner who has a crush on her (Scott Keiji Takeda).
Angie may burn through Chinese restaurant cook dad’s cash too fast and look for a quick and dirty solution to that problem. She may be promiscuous. But flashbacks show us the open warfare her parents engaged in and the rape she suffered as a younger teen.
And she’s not so rotten that she doesn’t have time to Big Sister Bree, the young daughter of a local crackhead.
The “lurid” here comes from Wang’s frenetic club scenes, lots of extreme closeups, garish lighting, dancing and snorting away, and from the broad strokes Wang and her actress (Yetide Badaki) paint the crack mom with.
The story arc is straight-up drug era parable — prodigal daughter, missing mom, a how-to primer on getting started in the drug trade (ID the right clubs and the right frat boys for distribution). Angie has no sooner growled “I know how to take care of myself,” when the ways she doesn’t start to pop up.
As the story is told in a flashback with Angie as a drug-addled cage dancer in a club in the opening scene, any notion of surprise is abandoned straight out.
Annie Q is better at the cold-hearted, calculating Angie than the “freshman” and Big Sister Angie. It’s a performance and characterization steeped in sexual experience, risky behavior and vocal fryyyyyyyyyy.
Eastwood, you-know-who’s daughter with Frances Fisher, is likewise too old for the “freshman” stuff. But if you’re making a point about drugs and booze and a bad home life that makes girls grow up too fast, 26 year-olds are the way to go. I guess.
The “Valley of the Dolls” connection is underlined with sex scenes — a threesome, of course — because if there’s one thing about Molly’s rep that resonates, it’s how she fires up the libido.
The only reason to make this a period piece is catching the drug at its pre-crackdown, any science nerd can make it birth — that, and the cheaper Frankie Goes to Hollywood music clearances for the club scenes.
Wang seems to have sincerely set out to make a cautionary tale, “inspired by true events,” with a dedication in the opening suggesting she knew a victim of MDMA. But what she’s releasing is straight-up exploitation, and a film too cautious to work on that level, too torrid to play the “Stay off drugs!” card.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, explicit sex
Cast:Francesca Eastwood, Annie Q., Pierson Fode, Scott Keiji Takeda
Credits: Written and directed by Angie Wang. A Shout! Factory release.
Running time: 1:38
It’s actor Paul Dano’s feature directing debut, this sensitive coming-of-age-in-crisis drama starring Carey Mulligan, Jake Gyllenhaal and Bill Oxenbould as the kid.
The wonderful and omnipresent Bill Camp is in “Wildlife” too, which earns limited release Oct. 19.
In Europe, they remember who the Evil Empire is, and why you don’t let them have a say in your elections.
This has a fall opening in Europe, coming soon to the US — Thomas Vinterberg (“The Celebration,” “Far from the Madding Crowd” and “Submarino” directs “Kursk,” about the infamous Russian submarine disaster, and the impressive cast includes “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” co-star Michael Nyqvist is his final role.
All the upgrades, tech advances and iPhones since “Fear.com” (2002) came out, all the variations of “Friend Request” and “Unfriended: Dark Web” in computer-streaming/cell camera/web camera murder and the formula hasn’t changed. Not much, anyway.
It’s still a lot of first-person (holding a phone camera) point-of-view, limited settings, narrow field-of-vision, a handful of people talking into a laptop or phone camera, multiple windows folded into a Skype screen and lot of screen-freezes, image-ghosting, blackouts and buffering.
In “E-Demon” friends gather for an informal online college reunion. They’re 30, each at different places in his or her life — married with kids, or broke and moved back in with the parents, richer than rich or struggling to get that first book published.
But the one thing New York author Kendra (Julia Kelly), doting Dayton dad Dwayne (John Anthony Wylliams), Seattle high-roller A.J. (Christopher Daftsios) and struggling mental health counselor Mar (Ryan Redebaugh) have held onto is “Freak Out.” That’s their name for elaborate scary pranks they play on each other.
And in the Internet age, separated by a wide continent, the gags have moved online.
But Mar stages one that most would admit, “goes too far.” He’s shown the others (walking the camera down the hall) his dotty grandmother and the younger brother who does a lot of her caregiving (Vincent Cooper).
“Gamma, tell me the story of the cursed trunk!”
So she does. Her story takes them back in family history, to a relative executed during the Salem Witch Trials, with “The cursed trunk is being kept in our attic! The end of days will come!”
Mar then goes to the attic, trots out a little Latin incantation over a mirror and a voodoo doll he finds in said trunk, and OW. OUCH. Hah! Gotcha! Scary, right?
Wait, did I mention that Mar and his family of shrinks lives in Salem, Massachusetts? Never mind. Probably not important.
Next thing you know, whatever went “KLUNK” on Mar leaves his camera (Must be attached to his head.) upside down, dragged into another room.
Mar’s sister lets a glimpse of a pentagram carved on her belly show. A.J. is acting out a simulated ritual sex act with his girlfriend. Kendra freaks out and Dwayne, drawn away to tell bedtime stories to his kids, misses the escalating weirdness happening to four people logged in to Skype.
Something wicked is downloading into their digital lives.
Writer-director Jeremy Wechter parks this picture in real-time. We’re watching a recording of events that transpired in four cities involving scores of victims on that night, a voice-distorted spokesperson for the “E Demon Resistance Network” tells us.
“We need your help!”
That lame framing device aside, “E-Demon” sticks to formula. Bad things happen, characters grow paranoid about each other even as they’re trying to reason out what’s going on, innocent bystanders — relatives, boyfriends, paramedics and cops responding to 9-11 calls made cross country — are sucked in, possessed.
“Remember my theory…cameras speed up the process.”
Oh, and then the magical “explainer” shows up to talk us and them through demonology, maybe suggest solutions. Yes, Jeremy Wechter discovered “Magical Negro” all by himself.
The violence has a certain voyeuristic immediacy — helpless people watching their screens as this character is about to be attacked — “BEHIND you!” — or that one fights off demonically possessed people within the field of view of a laptop camera.
There’s blood on the lens in one scene, a person (their camera) dragged and held under water in a tub, clever effects. Movies like this are exercises in meticulous staging. It’s like the theater equivalent of a “door slamming farce,” characters enter and exit in varying degrees of logic, not knowing what the rest of the Skypers have seen or experienced while they were gone.
It’s kind of clumsy and obvious, but it moves things along.
Wechter keeps having attackers drag their victims out of the frame, because there’s only so much room on a screen filled with other screens, side-chats and Internet research
Windows on how to fight a demon, etc. And you can’t have the hero/heroine tripping over bodies as the next attack begins.
I’ll give the film this much — it holds your interest.
That’s despite the constant reliance on formula, the generally inane dialogue, some head-scratching logic you have to avoid if you want to buy into “This is somebody’s live camera capturing that view” conceit.
The performances occasionally hit “indifferent,” in between a few genuinely fraught moments. This far removed from actual terror — a screen within a screen showing events far, far away — it’s hard to get much acting in. Kelly and Wylliams have their chances.
But the people experiencing the violence in person don’t get close-ups. The camera is sitting on the computer desk far in the foreground of the brawl going on in the background.
Close-ups make scares. Ask John Carpenter. So no, “E-Demon” isn’t particularly frightening. And that problem was fixable, Drag the fights into the camera, and not just dropped cell cameras, which hold no closeup.
“E-Demon” would make a good movie to pick apart in film school, simulating the work-shopping process Wechter & Co. could have used to add close-ups, make the traveling cameras more logical, declutter the screen a bit and find a fright or two in this now well-worn wickedness on the world wide web formula.
MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sexual content, profanity
Cast: Julia Kelly, John Anthony Wylliams, Christopher Daftsios
Credits: Written and directed by Jeremy Wechter. A Dark Cuts release.
Running time: 1:26
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