“Deadly Justice” is a C or D movie thriller so badly scripted, amateurishly-acted and stridently-scored that you wonder where the money to make it, or make it all better, went?
There are a couple of pseudo Southern accents, all of them from the locals brought on board as supporting cast in a tale of a judge in jail, “revenge” on the prosecutor and police chief who put him there and who might be behind it.
Actor Corin Nemec scripted this story about Deep South “justice” and a true crime TV interview series whose host tries to “gotcha” his way into getting that case reopened. It’s riddled with ludicrous plot twists, hilariously tone-deaf reactions to crimes and lunk-headed attempts at humor.
The players, even the professionals in the cast, can’t fix it. The amateurish bit players? They didn’t have a prayer.
Kelly Sullivan plays Holly, the former DA now entering private practice who makes the mistake of showing up on Dale Jones’ (Brian Krause) “Real Crimes” expose show. A judge went to prison for stalking and murdering his wife, a case so notorious a TV movie (sampled here, a film even worse than the “real” movie) was made from it.
“Real Crime” seems to think Holly and her retired police chief Dad (Marco St. John) railroaded that judge.
The show doesn’t go well, and as a bonus, the creep host asks Holly out afterwards. Worse still, when she gets home, somebody tases her and leaves a note telling her it’s “Your turn to lose someone.”
Holly, the ex-DA, doesn’t report this assault to the police. “Logic” goes out the window, never to return, as we’re treated to a mad taserer who comes for Holly’s assistant (Christiana Leucas), her Dad and others.
That new guy in town, the second man to hit on Holly the first time he meets her? Maybe over-concerned Theo (screenwriter and “Stargate” veteran Nemec) is involved. Maybe the “Duck Dynasty” looking judge (Billy Miller) is pulling strings from inside the penitentiary.
As more things happen to Holly, we kind of hope she eventually calls the cops, or that Dad does. Not that we expect that to help.
Aaron Eckhart throws himself and some mid-fight grace notes at “The Bricklayer,” another CIA agent brought back in to “fix” a screw-up run amok within and without The Agency.
It’s not “The Beekeeper,” but Eckhart commits to the part and he and the fights in it are some compensation for a pretty silly plot and clumsy “Will this never end?” story structure.
It’s the latest B-movie by Renny Harlin, who once filmed a “Die Hard” sequel way back in the last millenium.
Eckhart plays a meticulous retired agent who brought his detail-oriented skills back to his pre-CIA profession — bricklaying. But somebody agent Steve Vail used to “run” when he was stationed in Greece has gone rogue. His former boss (Tim Blake Nelson) and the agent (Nina Dobrev) who discovered that the assassin Victor Radek isn’t dead are the ones who track Vail down.
“This is your f–k-up,” bossman barks. “And you need to fix it.”
Clifton Collins, Jr. plays the most conspicuous professional assassin in screen history as Radek — black outfits, black turtleneck, Homberg hat. He’s an aged hipster hitman, standing out in every crowd in sunny, touristy Greece.
These days, Radek is luring journalists with some sort of “doomsday file” that could expose decades of CIA misbehavior. He then kills them and makes it look like The Agency did it.
But back in the day, Vail and Radek were pals. Flashbacks show us a family, sailing vacations along the Greek coast, the promise of identity-changed “retirement” in Pine-something-or-other Montana.
Now, Radek wants blackmail money or he’ll keep killing journalists and creating anti-CIA/anti-American headlines all over Europe.
There’s nothing for it but for Vail to go back to Greece, dragging Agent Bannon (Dobrev) along as he reconnects with his “outfitter” (Oliver Trevena), his CIA station-chief ex-girlfriend (Ilfenesh Hadera) and invents a new “cover” as he tracks his old friend.
Bannon will pretend to be “my wife.” “You’re too old to be my girlfriend,” he explains.
He quotes Miles Davis whenever she catches him in contradictions.
“If you understood everything I said, you’d be me.”
And Balkan men?
“They never really die. They just smell that way.”
“Sting” is a solid no-big-stars B-picture thriller about an itsy bitsy spider who gets chatty, then awfully big as it tears through a New York apartment building in the middle of a blizzard.
Naturally, it was filmed in Australia. The magic of the movies, amIright?
A meteor shower that coincides with a storm is our “How this happened.” A child obsessed with sneaking through the airvents into other apartments has a thing for tiny arachnids. But one that doubles in size, night by night?
Bugger that.
Alya Browne plays Charlotte, a tween living with her architect mom Heather (Penelope Mitchell of “Star Trek: Picard” and the recent “Hellboy” remake) and trying to bond with her comic book illustrator stepdad (Ryan Corr of “The Water Diviner” and “Ladies in Black”).
They’re sort-of collaborating on a spidery comic that is set to go into production. But he’s got to draw that in his spare time. Stepdad Ethan is also the building super in an old apartment house owned by the two elderly sisters upstairs (Noni Hazelhurst and Robyn Nevin), with the one suffering from dementia Heather’s grandmother.
They have a new baby in the house and a lot of things tugging the adults in different directions. No wonder young Charlotte is out crawling through the air ducts, finding things and that unusual spider.
She loves “The Hobbit,” so “Sting” shall be the spider’s new name. Not “Shelob?” Maybe she hasn’t gotten to “The Lord of the Rings” yet.
Feeding Sting roaches helps the spider grow big and fast and strong. The clicking noises Sting makes tell Charlotte she’s hungry, or that she sees her in the room.
It isn’t until Charlotte tries to buy an extra aquarium out of the experiments-obsessed biology student (Danny Kim) upstairs that she gets a clue.
“Charlotte, spiders don’t have vocal chords.”
The opening scene has us watching a hapless exterminator (Jermaine Fowler of “Sorry to Bother You” and “Coming 2 America”) staring death in the face upon first encountering Sting. We know how bad things will get. The movie is about getting us there.
One rarely channel surfs past “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” when it pops up on broadcast or cable TV. Renewing your acquiantance with the funniest movie of 1975 and probably the silliest movie ever made is a guilty pleasure few fans turn down.
I hadn’t seen it in a theater since what I think was its last “anniversary” or “new DVD/BluRay” re-release back around 2004. With an “Evening with John Cleese” and “The Holy Grail” rolling round, I relished the chance to see it on the big screen again.
Some sight gags and wacky-phonetic/Saxon English opening credits jokes you expect to play better in a theater, and with an audience. But what struck me the most this time around is how cheap it doesn’t look.
Sure, the film stock isn’t the best, the effects primitive enough to point out as a punch line.
“It’s only a model!”
But Hazel Pethig’s costumes seem period perfect, even if the “chain mail” was loops of wool. And Roy Forge Smith’s production design, with input from Python cartoonist turned co-director Terry Gilliam, looks positively archeological.
I don’t know if it’s the nearly perpetually gray skies over the primitive Scottish locations, the fake fog or the very real mud that permeates many a scene, especially early ones. But the entire affair looks like a documentary-real absurdist farce by Samuel Beckett acted-out by the greatest British clowns of their day.
If you know the film you’ve heard the stories — repeated by Cleese at that screening — of the way it was filmed for a pittance, that the “coconuts” were an exceptionally clever way of avoiding the expense of renting horses, teaching the cast to ride them and the like.
But by the time Tim the Enchanter (one of several characters played by Cleese) is pointing his fire-breathing staff and setting off explosions late in the third act, I was muttering “Wow, this is something to see.”
Cliffs and caves and castles and mud-mired villages and sylvan forests ruined by assorted rival “knights” who challenge King Arthur and his motley crew at every turn are so inviting — save for the mud — that they impact Scottish tourism and one particular castle location to this very day.
The story — Arthur, played by Graham Chapman at his straight-man sternest, and his faithful servant/coconut-clacking pack mule Patsy (Gilliam, REALLY into the part) make their way across this corner of Britain, trying to convince the locals that A) he really is king, B) they really are Britons and C) that his authority was ordained by God and “The Lady in the Lake” who handed him the sword Excalibur.
“Listen, strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”
Knights such as Sir Bedevere (Co-director Terry Jones), Sir Lancelot (Cleese again), Sir Galahad the Pure (Michael Palin, of course) and the “not so brave” Sir Robin (Eric Idle) join the traveling retinue, which avoids Camelot and its Round Table as “a silly place,” as Arthur accepts a quest from the Almighty, that he and they seek the Holy Grail.
The many set-pieces here, sketches built around Arthur or this or that knight’s encounters with figures prosaic and mythic, still induce giggles — from the randy sisters of Castle Anthrax, led by twins Zoot and Dingo (Python’s go-to laugh lady Carol Cleveland) who long to corrupt “pure” Sir Galahad, the quest for “shrubbery,” the hilariously dim-witted witch trial featuring Cleese’s then-wife and future “Fawlty Towers” collaborator Connie Booth to a “damsel” rescue Lancelot slaughters his way to, only to realize a sissy Prince Herbert (Jones again) is the one who requires rescuing.
Cleese’s glorious bit of French-accented taunting from castle battlements may offer the most quotable lines in this most quotably hilarious cult comedy.
“You don’t frighten us, English peeg-dogs. Go and boil yourrrrr bottoms, you sons of a seeelly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called ‘Arthur King,’ you and all your silly English Kuh-niggets!”
Cleese’s many comic creations — the stubborn Black Knight who will not yield, calling each limb lost in a duel with Arthur “a flesh wound,” Tim the wild-eyed wizard — make him the stand-out in the picture, amusing in every guise.
But from the first time I saw it until now, it’s been obvious to me that Chapman carries it. His self-serious Arthur, under-reacting, reacting and over-reacting to the “silly” going on all around him, was pitch perfect here, and in the later “Life of Brian.”
Chapman’s Arthur is a version of his conservative man/military man stentorian figures who’d march into a sketch or a shot with an officious, “Right. Damned silly. That’ll be enough of that” variations, the serious man taken aback by the lunacy going on around him on the TV series.
The gay member of the troupe was its best straight man. He is the contrast to the absurdism, arguing about how coconuts could have journeyed to Britain, trying to get the attention of a “French” castle, in England over 100 years before the Norman Conquest.
“Go and tell your master that we have been charged by God with a sacred quest. If he will give us food and shelter for the night, he can join us in our quest for the Holy Grail!”
The production design is the buy-in. Cleese, Palin, and to a lesser degree Jones and Idle, bring the surrealism. But Chapman, with the perfect voice for a stern, schoolmaster lecture on the Dark Ages, pre-history Britain and the Arthurian legend, is the credibility.
Add them together and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” remains one of the great see-it-with-an-audience cult comedies, riotously funny at times, grimly goofy at others, and muddy and bloody almost all the way through.
And sparrows to catapults, coconuts to killer rabbits, “Bring out yer dead” to “Run away!” the “Grail” almost never looks like the comic-thrills-made-on-the-cheap classic that it is.
Rating: PG, a little innuendo, comically bloody violence, profanity
Cast: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam, with Carol Cleveland, Connie Booth, John Young, Rita Davies, Bee Duffell and Neil Innes.
Credits: Directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, scripted by Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam.
Running time: 1:31
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Eighty-four years old, sharp as a tack and still damned funny, John Cleese charmed, tickled and regaled a packed house at Greater Orlando’s Enzian Theater last night as a special event for this year’s Florida Film Festival.
He talked about “creativity,” the subject of his latest book, as it relates to comedy and screenwriting, reminded everyone of the low budget and discomfort one and all — especially he — suffered making “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” in soggy early ’70s Scotland.
He griped about “uncreative” executives — calling out ex-Disney boss Nina Jacobson by name for trying to dumb down a script Cleese co-wrote based on a Roald Dahl book. Cleese broke down the particular talents of his assorted Python-mates — with Michael Palin “gifted at creating unforgottable characters,” his late writing partner Graham Chapman “our best litmus test” as to whether something was funny or not and Eric Idle’s clever way with lyrics.
And he expressed amusement with the American right’s obsession with “drag,” something “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” was pivotal (along with Uncle Milty and Flip “Geraldine” Wilson) in bringing into the nation’s living rooms via TV. He laid the blame for it at the foot of America lacking “our long history of pantos (Pantomime Shows),” where generation after English generation has been delighted by plays put on with women playing men and boys and men playing women.
Maybe conservatives wouldn’t feel so threatened if they’d grown up with something like that, Cleese suggested.
He talked about his fond friendship with Steve Martin, with America’s comic philosopher an unerring sounding board for “A Fish Called Wanda,” his amused frustration at Michael Palin’s decades of “boring” travel documentary series, his appreciation for “the two Terrys,” Jones and Gilliam, who co-directed “Holy Grail” and who made it look so muddily authentic, despite the presence of coconuts.
The evening’s best joke might have been a question from the audience, about where “It’s true” that Cleese didn’t accept a knighthood because “the Queen didn’t know how to (or refused to) pronounce k-nigget?”
And another member of the audience asked about the big moment that changed his relationship with his pathologically depressed mother — making a threatening joke (as an adult, on the phone) about knowing somebody who could come over and “help” grant her wish to just end it all. Cracked her up every time he brought it up from then onwards.
Aside from some vertigo and hearing loss, one of the funniest men alive was none the worst for wear and tear, quick to run with an idea or jokingly ridicule a rambling question, try his hand at a fake pratful or grouse about “cancel culture” and its impact on creativity and creative freedom.
Lovely man. I’ve been a fan since the records of their live performances came out @1979-80, catching the second wave of Python mania that blew up around the time “Life of Brian” became a global phenomenon.
That gives one the pleasure of bingeing on their many series, including the pre Python ones featuring the sextet before they teamed up, and catching up on their movies and later work.
Thanks to Cameron Meier for the two-shot, here. With all one has to keep up with re: introductions, questions, audience moderation and the like, I didn’t get around to getting a selfie or two-shot with Our Lord J.C. The venue didn’t photograph the event, at Mr. Cleese’s request.
Anybody else among the scores of folks who I saw snapping away get a decent shot or two-shot? Feel free to send my way. I’ll give you credit.
Decades of co-starring human actors with CGI animated ones in kiddie comedies haven’t exactly produced a new golden age for children’s entertainment. A hit here and there, but nothing you can imagine kids embracing, generation after generation, has been the result.
Efforts starring Scooby-Doo and Marmaduke and Sonic the Hedgehog are joined by “Woody Woodpecker Goes to Camp,” a lackluster revival of the 1940s vintage intellectual property cartoon character.
The title tells you everything that’s important about this picture. The rascal Woody is in it. He needs to go to “camp” to learn “teamwork” instead of being the self-serving, pileated and pecking menace he’s always been.
Struggling “STEAM” (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) Camp Woo-hoo is where Woody seeks a “teamwork” badge to get back into the national forest he was expelled from. It’s run by Mary-Louise Parker, and the funniest thing about the film must have been the conversation between the “Weeds” star and the agent who talked her into this.
There’s a rival Camp Hoo-Rah, all dressed in camo and run by and for bullies (Josh Lawson plays the camp chief). An ex-con buzzard helps the bad guys (not all that bad) compete with Camp Woo-hoo in The Wilderness Games, which are officiated by a park ranger, played by a CGI walrus.
It’s childish and slapshticky, with Woody commenting on everything and anything, including a flashback to the old prospector who bought the land that it was founded on.
“Too bad this flashback wasn’t in color,” Woody quips. “It could’ve popped.”
The jokes are feeble, even the puns. Toss Woody in the camp kitchen freezer to “chill out.” He’ll “be the coolest kid in camp! NAILED it!”
“You KNOW those weren’t funny!”
No, Woody’s trademark laugh isn’t as amusing as it once once. And no, Woody’s promise back in the first act is never fulfilled.
“Never mind. Come back to me. I’ll think of something funnier.”
It’s all harmless enough, with its diverse cast of nerd “types” and “mean girls” and the like.
The messaging is Kid Comedy Screenwriting 101 worthy.
“You can’t hide from the bullies of this world your whole life.”
But there’s barely enough going on here to distract children into sticking with Woody all the way to the finish. The anarchy is mild-mannered, the sight gags limp and the human interactions produce no laughs and little in the way of charm, either.
Still, I would’ve loved to hear that agent’s call to Emmy-winner Mary-Louise P. Provided it didn’t smack of desperation on either end of the line.
Rating: TV-PG, cartoon mayhem
Cast: The voices of Eric Bauza, Tom Kenny and Kevin Michael Richardson, with Chloe De Los Santos, Savannah La Rain, Esther Son, Josh Lawson and Mary Louis Parker.
Credits: Directed by Jonathan A. Rosenbaum, scripted by Cory Edwards, Jim Martin and Stephen Mazur. A Universal release on Netflix
John Cleese’s latest stop on his North American “Catch me while you still can” tour is at the Florida Film Festival, at the Enzian Theater in Maitland (North Orlando).
Packed house, festival director Matthew Curtis says — he’s the one not dressed for prom night — but there are still. A few tix left. I’m moderating the Q&A after the movie This should be a fun evening of memories and taunting and flesh wounded knights.
This is a regular feature of Gosling appearances on “Saturday Night Live.” He cracks up and the seasoned cast joins in. This time he lost it in almost every sketch. Yes, it’s funny to people watching it, but one wonders about the memos and/or staff meeting about this to come.
Some of its power to shock and repel still clings to “Hardcore,” the debut feature by “Taxi Driver” writer turned writer-director Paul Schrader.
But as it travels from the conservative Rust Belt just before Reagan and the “Rust” set in, into the strip clubs, sex shops, lap dance “arcades” and porn film industry of the Southern California of 1979, it can feel almost quaint as it exposes a mostly-naive Middle America to variations of “The World’s Oldest Profession.”
It’s a quest thriller, loosely based on the classic John Wayne/John Ford Western “The Searchers,” about a Grand Rapids, Michigan father hunting for a teen daughter when went missing on a trip to church camp in California, and somehow wound up in the sordid, dangerous porn film/sex-worker underworld of Van Nuys and environs, a landscape later surveyed in Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic “Boogie Nights.”
George C. Scott gives us shades of guilt-ridden concern, shock and his trademark enraged histrionics as Jake VanDorn, owner of his family’s venerated furniture manufacturing concern. We’re immersed in their world, first, a snowy Christmas with the whole clan gathered, singing carols, dutifully attending their Dutch Reformed (Calvinist) Church and enjoying the bountiful fruits of lives their belief system tells them they were predestined to receive.
When Jake says grace before the whole family that evening, he finishes with “keep up safe from harm and danger, if it be thy will.” Remember that.
In “Hardcore,” that faith is discussed and those values are tested when Jake gets a call that his daughter disappeared on a field trip from California church camp to the Knotts Berry Farm theme park. His support system is such that his brother-in-law (Dick Sargent of “Bewitched”) thinks nothing of saying he’ll book the flights and go with him out West to find Kristen (Ilah Davis) or at least get some answers.
Sitting with a not-particularly comforting cop (Larry Block), seeing a wall of teen girls and boys “missing persons” posters and fliers around him makes Jake despair. But on the cop’s recommendation, he hires “the best” private investigator for this sort of case in that corner of Southern California.
Peter Boyle has one of his best roles and runs with it as Andy Mast, a sleazy guy in a sleazy business doing a sleazy job of hunting through a world of sleaze. Mast’s bluntly sexual questions about the missing teen and his salty language offend VanDorn.
“You wanna hire a choir boy, go back to Grand Rapids.” But he assures Jake he’ll find her in “a week or two, a month at the most.” He doesn’t.
But as seasons change Mast shows up in Grand Rapids, takes Jake to a seedy 8mm peep show porn theater where he shows what he did find. Kristen is working in “Hardcore” porn.
That and rising impatience with how long this is taking launches Jake’s odyssey, a conservative man in conservative suits wandering the mean and sordid streets, showing pictures of his daughter in that dirty movie to sex workers and porn shop operators (Tracey Walter plays one, naturally), roughing up Mast in his righteous wrath over his child’s fate and the private eye’s “methods,” which include bedding porn actresses on VanDorn’s dime “for information.”
Eventually, our hero will have to descend to everyone else’s level, pose as an “investor” with a porn producer (Leonard Gaines, in a definitive portrayal of a “type”) in order to trace his child’s journey, determine her fate and perhaps accept his role in it.
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