Whatever the cast was paid, however much the writer-director-producer got for getting “Wrong Place, Wrong Time” finished and in the hands of Uncork’d Entertainment, we can see where the real money was for this demons-and-dumdum bullets tale.
The lady or gent who had the squibs and stage-blood concession made out like a bandit. Bags and bags of the stuff gushes, spurts, vomits out and spills in this predictably dim dog of a thriller.
“Wrong Place” is the sort of C-movie where a drug kingpin growls at his “mole” inside a military-trained gang of robbers-for-hire — “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you right where you stand?”
The only proper comeback is “Dude, I’m SITTING. Which you can PLAINLY see!”
It’s a thriller where the anti-heroic, big-body count “hero” (Alex Ryan Brown) finishes up the five minute opening scene shootout/massacre of cops and FBI agents during one robbery by kneeling before a kid, covered in blood spattered on him by the dead and dying, and says “Look at me. I want you to remember this, ALL of it! Don’t run from the pain!”
Why bill the state for counseling?
And its’ the sort of thriller in which the gang, punching into a supposed safe house where there’s this key code and drive they need to recover. Instead, they find women and children tied up. A guy named Luther shows up. He calmly says “Take whatever you want” and then “please LEAVE.”
Because Luther isn’t what he seems. Actually, he’s exactly what he seems. We can see it. Even the name sounds just enough like “Lucifer” to give the game away. The prolific creator of this, Justin Price (“The Elf,””Snare,””Forsaken” etc.) isn’t exactly subtle.
Blood, gore, the dead become the undead and demons check in and boy, Special Ops training never prepared anybody for this.
If you like your horror dripping in blood, with the occasional well-turned-out-actress bathed in it, by all means, go for it.
Me? I’d give this hardcore/stupidcore horror a hard pass.
MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence and lots of it, gore
Cast: Alex Ryan Brown, Franziska Schissler, Mike Markoff, Chase Garland, Olivia Rivera and Bianca Stein.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Justin Price. An Uncork’d Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:25
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The story of how Stanley Kubrick selected his subject for the “horror movie” he wanted to make goes like this. He’d send his secretary out to book stores after work every night. And the next day she’d sit in the outside office, listening to the “thump thump thump” against his door as he’d start a book, get a page or three in, and hurl the paperback against that door.
When the thumping stopped, she poked her head in and saw him reading and making notes from Stephen King’s “The Shining.”
Actress and singer Eartha Kitt told of how she and Orson Welles would settle on a film to watch when they were dating in Paris in the ’50s. They’d buy a ticket, duck in, and bail to run off to another theater — all over town, keeping a taxi waiting — until they found something worth sitting all the way through.
Those anecdotes come to mind while trying to labor through “First Signal,” a no-budget sci-fi outing now up on assorted streaming PPV platforms. The thumping on the door never stops here, and Eartha and Orson have already taxied off into the Paris night.
It’s damned near unwatchable.
“Signal” is a top-down view of how the news that “We’re being watched” is handled, a bunch of actors playing the president, top military and civilian advisors and others, haggling over potential “ridiculous Freedom of Information Act” requests and not letting the public know that aliens have satellites and maybe observers on the planet’s surface.
Contrary to the photo above, the vast majority of the 102 minutes of run time is in a drab, generic and underpopulated “conference room” at a G7 meeting that the president (Wendy Hartman) has been yanked from to be given this momentous news.
As the film opens with a Carl Sagan quote, it’s worth pointing out how “First Signal” goes completely wrong at the moment of conception. The best films that capture that first hint that we’re “not alone” make such a scene tense and spine-tingling. Think of “Contact” or even the Charlie Sheen “alien threat” thriller “The Arrival.”
Quick show of hands — who wants to see a movie where allegedly Top Security Clearance characters have to explain away why they’re not using Power Point for this presentation? Who wants to see a meeting with a civilian advisor (Conor Timmis) dressed like a Bond villain who shops at T.J. Maxx?
And no, before you go there, “First Signal” is not so bad it’s “fun.” It just isn’t.
“Primer” and “Safety Not Guaranteed” and the Spanish “Time Crimes” are proof that you don’t need big money to make sci fi that plays.
A plot with all the potential for drama left out, deathly dull dialogue, flat performances, ugly locations, the works.
If only Eartha and Orson were here to drag me off to another movie in another cinema, another movie.
MPA Rating: unrated
Cast: Paul Noonan, Conor Timmis, Wendy Hartman
Credits: Scripted and directed by Mark Lund. A Zone 5 release on Amazon Prime, Google Play etc.
“Duty Free” is a featherlight feel-good documentary about a broke son’s efforts to give something back to his equally-broke mother when she loses her job.
Here are the heart-tugging “hooks” to this Mother’s Day gift. Rebecca Danigelis is an English immigrant, a single mom. The job she lost, the one that supported them, was cleaning hotel rooms or supervising their cleaning, for 40 years. She sent one son, Sian-Pierre Regis, to college and he became a freelance journalist for CNN and other outlets, and she supports an older son who lives in a group home with other independent but mentally-ill adults.
And when she was forced out of that job, Mom was 75.
As Rebecca lives in Boston, one of America’s most expensive cities, and her son works (mostly) for CNN, it’s not like he can just float her, write her a check to prop her up (if you know what CNN pays). He watched the way her employer found an excuse to push her out the door and sees her difficulty in lining up a new job at 75 to supplement her Social Security and wonders how he can help her “attack this next stage in life.”
His brainstorm? Crowd-fund her bucket list, all the things she never got to do or couldn’t afford to do, and then film it for a cute Mother’s Day card of a documentary.
“To be a mother, you always put your kids first,” Rebecca says. Maybe Sian-Pierre can put her first, for once.
With him wired into the media world, the fund-raising was media-assisted, as was the promoting of this film.
And as the son hears her decide what she’s always wanted to do — from the mundane and cheap (“Take a hip hop dance class.”) to the cutesy and semi-exotic (“Sky diving in Hawaii.”) — he gives the impression that he’s just learning about her first marriage, a cancer diagnosis that caused her to give up her daughter for adoption in Britain.
So we hear her explain the decision to give up that daugher, and see her tearful reunion with her daughter and the other survivors of her British family.
Every so often, our director-fundraiser-narrator lets on that what happened to his mother is not unique as she fields donations and fan letters from across America and the world (again, media-connections pay off). It’s called “ageism,” but I don’t hear the word cross his lips.
While the very existence of “Duty Free” points to the fact that hard-working American seniors are facing a retirement they can’t afford, that our “social safety net” has fallen woefully behind the rest of the world, there’s no “journalism” here about that elephant in the room either.
And how does a journalist know so little about his mother’s past? How does he mention those cold facts and leave them hanging there?
To get mean about it, our ever-smiling, self-promoting “lifestyle-and-culture” haircut-changing on-air TV host isn’t really illuminating a problem. He’s papering over it and getting a lot of free travel for himself and Mom as he does.
Ageism is a very big deal and a serious American civil rights shortcoming. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid aren’t enough to ensure a comfortable retirement. Talking about it in all the TV interviews ABOUT the film while your somewhat vapid movie all-but-ignores it doesn’t cut it.
The “happy ending” of his movie is more sobering than uplifting, and might be the only pointed-messaging in all of “Duty Free.” Mom finds another job — at 78.
That’s not to say “Duty Free” isn’t worth a look, maybe with your mother, this Mother’s Day. But maybe the broader subject needed a more journalistic second set of eyes, someone willing to ask hard questions and get answers.
MPA Rating: unrated
Cast: Rebecca Danigelis, Sian-Pierre Regis
Credits: Directed and narrated by Sian-Pierre Regis.
The rise of exercise “stars” in the ’80s appears to be the backdrop of this Rose Byrne “plucky and leotarded” dramedy. It’s coming out June 18 on Apple TV+.
As no-budget horror comedies about witchcraft go, “Bad Witch” isn’t half-bad.
The implication that it’s half-good is a hill worth dying on, so let’s see if I can make this case.
It’s about an aimless, slacker witch. Think of Xander, wryly played by Chris Kozlowski, as a Black Arts Bro. Just be sure you call him “witch.”
Oh, like a warlock! “No. A witch.”
So you’re like a wizard or something? “No. A WITCH.”
He’s bedded one willing but spoken-for woman too many and gotten punished by the torch, pitchfork and carve “WITCH” on your chest crowd. So he’s ready to give up dark magic. Time to crash on pal Henry’s (screenwriter James Hennigan) sofa, watch some TV. Maybe get a job.
“Got any experience?” “No.”
“Like working with people?” “Nope.”
Dishwasher it is, then. That’s how he meets bullied nerd Roland (Jackson Trent), gets mixed up in his love life and gets him interested in spells that will turn jocks (Jonathan Helwig) into walking zits and teen angels (Clare Lefebure) into nerd-fans.
The makeup effects include gross results of spells, and Xander’s own deterioration — fingernails falling out, etc. — which is what happens when witches “stop using.” Well done.
Xander’s flippant treatment of his special powers amuses, as does his refusal to realize his risky lifestyle “choice.”
“It’s not like I ever made the news,” he complains to Henry, his idea of “low profile.”
“This isn’t Salem,” he reminds one and all, before blowing the joke by over-explaining it. “Nobody’s gonna put us on trial for witchcraft.”
The acting in indie-film just-cute-enough, with Kozlowski bringing a fun swagger to Xander.
The one-liners could use some work, the plot and assorted scenes a bit of workshopping. “Slacker” here also refers to the story, which drifts along when it should bounce.
“Not half bad” sounds better than “half bad” But either way, it’s still better than most low-budget horror comedies.
MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence
Cast: Chris Kozlowski, Jackson Trent, Clare Lefebure, Jonathan Helwig and James Hennigan
Credits: Directed by Victor Fink and Joshua Land, script by James Hennigan. A Mind in Motion release.
There’s a grand tradition in disaster movies, one revived by “crazy” “conspiracy nut” Björn in the Swedish thriller “The Unthinkable.”
At some point, this would-be Jeremiah, who years before ran off his family with his mania, looks out over a Sweden descending into chaos, under assault by the boogeyman he always saw, and utters the words every “crank” throughout history longs to say.
“Why am I always right?”
“The Unthinkable” is a nervy paranoid thriller structured like a disaster movie. We see Björn (Jesper Barkselius) try to share his obsession with his musically-inclined teen son son, flying his small plane over tankers smuggling Russian crude through the Baltic, snapping photos. And we see the damage caused by his mercurial moods, a man never taken seriously by officialdom raging at his family, pushing them away in the process.
Years later young Alex (Christoffer Nordenrot) has become a famous experimental musician, long-estranged from his father. He’s chilly, closed-off emotionally. But a chance encounter with that first love who moved away, Anna (Lisa Henni) could change that.
It’s too bad this happens just as Sweden experiences huge terrorist attacks — on transport, then communications and you-can-guess-what-comes-next, because, dammitall, Björn did.
His long-ago military service taught him what millions of MAGAs and NRA nuts in America forgot. When bad things happen in the world, it’s usually something the Russians did. Tension over a canceled pipeline suggests that maybe “IS” or “jihadists” aren’t behind this violence.
Always neutral, always above-it-all Sweden is under assault, Crimea-style. Secret commandos, black helicopters and hell’s bell’s, the whole country has forgotten how to drive their Volvos in safety.
Is there something in air, the drinking water, the rain?
Alex, Anna and Anna’s bureaucrat mother (Pia Halvorsen) wait for answers and seek shelter in bunkers. Government has been decapitated. Cell phones are silent. The military is unprepared for this asymmetric warfare.
But Björn? His rising suspicions and actual evidence that, as even Alex has noted, “something’s up” (in Swedish with English subtitles) hasn’t made him any more convincing to eye-rolling colleagues and the authorities. He finds himself in his underground hydropower station, facing commandoes with his own brand of asymmetric warfare.
Director and co-writer Victor Danell has taken to billing himself as “Crazy Pictures,” because why should pop stars have all the fun? He’s made a thriller calculated to keep us as in the dark as everybody but Björn, puzzling over the chaos breaking out all over their orderly society. He succeeds, more often than not.
The domestic tragedy prologue and Alex/Anna melodrama that tracks through the film personalize the story, but add little as they slow it down.
Alex as a character is on-the-spectrum problematic. Working with him or carrying a torch for him seems…ALMOST unthinkable.
It’s the depictions of social breakdown, Swedish tempers exploding, soldiers questioning their priorities in an absence of orders and the action beats — Björn’s crackpot defense of the power station — that drive the narrative, punching through one Big Effect, crash or firefight right into the next.
American viewers may be grateful to catch this picture now, and not in 2018 when it was finished. Tiny Sweden forced to stand alone against Russian aggression seems a little less likely since Jan. 20.
Sure, the paranoia that makes “The Unthinkable” plausible would have worked better back then. But who’d have had time to stress over a movie about what Russian puppets would allow, when there was so much else to worry about at the time?
MPA Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Christoffer Nordenrot, Lisa Henni, Jesper Barkselius, Pia Halvorsen
Credits: Directed by Victor Danell, aka “Crazy Pictures,” scripted by Victor Danell and Christoffer Nordenrot A Magnet release (May 7).
In farm country, “We work in acres, not hours” lives are lived in small social circles on a big, underpopulated canvas. “Everybody knows everybody” is a double-edged sword, as people grow up with each other, remember failures and expectations harden into stone.
And a shrinking, aging workforce, beyond the reach of or exempted from OSHA protection, wrestles with bigger and more complex machines as “scale” becomes the only way to survive.
“Silo” is a quietly gripping “trouble in farm country” thriller wrapped in tragedy, a story of a “grain entrapment” in a corn storage silo. It’s a common occurrence wherever grain is farmed, weary old men or unwary young ones make one mistake, or a series of them, and often-futile hopes of help are the nearest volunteer fire department or another one in the next town over.
It’s a finely-detailed, sharply-observed drama from a team that made a documentary — “Silo: Edge of the Real World” — that provided their research. They’ve made a smart, layered and serious-minded melodrama where text, context and subtext collide.
Junior (Jim Parrack of “9-1-1 Lonestar” and “True Blood”) runs Adler Grain & Feed now. He’s 40ish, and took over for his aged father (Chris Ellis) who has dementia, who still lives at home. He’s got one experienced set of helping hands, and a couple of teenagers on the job, too.
Valerie (Broadway and TV actress Jill Paice) is a single-mom/nurse practitioner at the local nursing home. Her boy Cody (Jack DiFalco) dreams of heavy-metal glory, but works at Adler’s as farm jobs are all that New Hope offers to kids his age. His pal Lucha (Danny Ramirez) is also learning the ropes there.
When tragedy strikes, the last person Valerie wants to see is the convenience store owner and volunteer fire chief Frank (Jeremy Holm of “House of Cards” and “Mr. Robot”), the one man who might be able to save her son when the corn collapses around him inside a silo.
The text is the tragedy, the context is an “amber waves of grain” rural America that is emptying out, where the hard, righteous work of farming grows more dangerous by the year. And the subtext is this shrinking, aging populace, with nursing homes the only local growth industry and the only people available to grow and harvest the food are the green kids who can’t wait to get out.
Junior embodies the stoicism of an illusory sense of self-reliance. He can’t care for his father, doesn’t know where to turn for help and doesn’t really want to ask for it. Valerie’s one piece of experienced advice — “When he goes back to the past like that, let him stay there.” — is no more a solution than Junior’s declaration that “It is what it is.”
“Trust” is something Frank lost sometime back, and only the shortage of warm bodies could explain why anybody would leave him in charge of a tiny corps of first responders.
And the kids? They’re looking at the overwhelmed, weary adults, hearing a deputy mutter “I hope he ain’t drunk” when firefighter Frank shows up, and seeing a trap that isn’t limited to the on-the-job quicksand that will suck them down if any one thing goes wrong while they’re in the “Silo.”
Director Marshall Burnette maintains suspense, but is straightjacketed by the reality of such tragedies. Nothing happens fast in the boondocks. Firefighters with the proper gear are miles and miles away, real expertise is limited, but egos aren’t.
Farm belt integrity and honesty doesn’t include accepting blame when things go wrong, although the instinct to place blame is hard to fight, even among those you know well.
The acting here has a hardscrabble truth to it, with Parrack and Paice standing out.
There’s a lot to digest in this 77 minute thriller, and all this “waiting” for help leaves room for monologues that explain, calm or brace everybody involved against the harsh truths staring them in the face. They also slow it down.
But I love indie films that are “about something,” and “Silo” checks that box in several ways.
We’re pulled into the drama, moved by the melodrama and sobered by the subtexts that are right out there in the open, insights that give tragedies like this added meaning. These people aren’t just “those people,” and getting them help with the confluence of catastrophes descending on their lives will do more good than any lecture on how their politics aren’t exactly helping matters.
MPA Rating: unrated, some profanity
Cast: Jeremy Holm, Jill Paice, Jack DiFalco, Jim Parrack and Chris Ellis.
Credits: Directed by Marshall Burnette, script by Jason Williamson. An Oscilloscope Labs release (May 7).
Annette Bening plays the daughter of the murdered wife, played by Vanessa Redgrave.
Waltz? He’s a gold digger, a “charming” eye-patched hustler whose marriage to an older woman raised eyebrows right up to the moment she turned up dead.
Lot of talent in front of the camera here.
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Nah, don’t get your hopes up. He’s not playing Guiliani.
This seriously malnourished courtroom thriller, previously titled “Axis Sally,” stars Pacino and Thomas Kretschman, Lala Kent, and Meadow Williams.
Not a package deal that ensures much box office pull, and I see no release date yet. But maybe it’ll surprise. Pacino got just enough of a haircut to pass post WWII muster.
Movie Nation 