Netflixable? Keira and Ben Whishaw try to survive London’s “Wick World” of “Black Doves”

Posted on December 12, 2024 by Roger Moore

The one hard and fast rule of streaming action series these days is that they have to be page-turners. The plot has to not just lure us in, but repeatedly add wrinkles to drag the viewer into that next episode.

Cliffhangers are optional, but cast and crew have to give us the fun and the promise of more to come, many times per episode.

“Black Doves” embodies this streaming comic thriller serial model to a T.

Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw star and more or less convince us they’d be credible professional spies and assassins. Sure, one’s no more or less willowy than the other. But just go with it.

This Joe Barton creation — “Giri/Haji” and “The Lazarus Project” were his — is derivative as all get-out, with “Red Sparrow,” “La Femme Nikita,” “The Americans,” “Killing Eve” and “The Night Manager” as merely its most obvious antecedents, a high stakes mystery a set in a John Wick underworld of killers, hitman “codes,” “information” thieves and moles.

Cops? They don’t figure. “Logic” is optional, as many a “decision” makes little rational sense, as our various rivals shoot up London and generate more gun murders in the days just before Christmas than all of Britain experiences in your average year.

They carry out all this mayhem without disguising their appearances or hiding their faces in the CCTV surveillance capital of Europe, galavanting about in a notably “ostentatious” ’80s vintage shark-faced BMW seven series.

The plot’s so convoluted that the anti-climactic sixth episode is mostly spent “explaining” much of what came before.

But forget all that, or try to. Because it’s fun. When Wishaw, playing semi-retired “triggerman” Sam who’s been summoned back and is confronted by next generation female triggerwomen, he shoots, respects and mocks.

“Polly Pocket” he calls Eleanor, and even mop-topped actress Gabrielle Creevy has to admit “That’s a fair cop.” The aged, chain-smoking, mob-connected “contract” go-between (Kathryn Hunter) confronts Sam/Whishaw and the viewer with the obvious when they meet.

“You’re a little skinny, aren’t you?”

Knightley’s “Black Dove” agent is in so deep she’s married to the Defense Minister (Andrew Buchan), and she’s not inclined to take comically-detailed phone threats against her and her family seriously, or pitch in on that chat among killers and spies about each’s favorite Christmas movie. “Love Actually” never comes up.

Enlisting fellow hit-women in a suicide mission just starts an argument between Sam, Eleanor and Williams (Ella Lily Hyland).

“You want a percentage chance of success? I’d put it at 20-80 against.”

“That’s not a percentage. That’s a fraction!” “It’s a ratio! And not a good one!”

Even funnier? Everybody involved gets a face full of blood splatter at one time or another, sort of a cast initiation ritual.

The story is about a killing spree that rattles geopolitics, gets a Chinese ambassador killed and his daughter kidnapped in London. Three people curiously “linked” to that are whacked the same night. One of them is Black Dove agent Helen’s (Knightley) paramour (Andrew Koji), the guy she’s been cheating with.

When she tries to find out what happened, she’s ambushed by fake-cops and rescued by her long absent mentor, the guy who trained her in the deadly arts, Sam. Both are under the ostensible supervision of control agent Reed (Sarah Lancashire of TV’s “Happy Valley”), who runs the “sale to the highest bidder” information-stealing Black Doves.

But Sam’s past includes an unfinished “job” for the contract-arranging Lenny Lines (Hunter). And with the Chinese threatening war over how their ambassador died and the cover-up that follows, Helen’s husband is in this deeper than she or even he knows.

Helen wants revenge, Reed and Lenny want “loose ends” tidied-up and a lot of British and American agencies want to prevent WWIII.

The script cooked-up by creator Barton is amusingly Byzantine and sometimes clumsily obvious. No complexity can be so complex that it can’t withstand newer complications. No apartment with a sliding glass door balcony can be entered without somebody — somebodies — thrown or diving through it and off it.

The series has flashbacks woven throughout, telling us how everybody met everybody else, including Sam’s ex-lover (Omari Douglas) and Reed’s many manipulations of meetings and relationships. As folks don’t change their hairstyles much in the UK, this can be confusing.

The absence of police in the midst of an all-out off-the-books war on the streets is most keenly felt as we see the little “training” our Black Dove and triggerman got, and see them “investigating” their way towards a resolution to the mystery that Scotland Yard would have trouble solving.

Knightley handles the fight choreography reasonably well, especially in the “cat fights” with assorted female foes. Wishaw broods and manages to give the droll put-downs a hint of his turn as James Bond’s “Q.” Lancashire oozes self-serving menace, and Hunter, Creevy, Hyland and Isabella Wei (as that kidnapped ambassador’s daughter) provide most of the laughs.

It’s juicy and puzzling and John-Wick-glib as all get out.

But entertaining? You bet. Even if that includes shouting at the screen at this eye-rolling situation, that inhuman reaction (Hitmen and hitwomen don’t mind dying, as long as it’s by “the code?”) or whatever fresh far-fetched twist Barton & Co. have cooked up.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, nudity

Cast: Keira Knightley, Ben Whishaw, Sarah Lancashire, Andrew Buchan, Ella Lily Hyland, Gabrielle Creevy, Kathryn Hunter, Omari Douglas, Isabella Wei and Tracey Ullman

Credits: Created and written by Joe Barton. A Netflix release.

Running time: Six episodes @ :55 minutes each

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Classic Film Review: Hitchcock Close-ups and Cuts at their Most “Notorious”

Posted on December 11, 2024 by Roger Moore

A purloined key, handed-off and hidden, then “returned” with dire consequences, bottles of wine whose “vintage” sticker earns a lot of attention, a party’s champagne bucket, emptying steadily and suspensefully and the look of doom in a great actress’s ready-for-my-closeup face, all are pivotal pieces of the brilliant visual puzzle of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious.”

“Psycho” may have the most notoriety in the canon of the Master of Suspense. “Vertigo” remains his flashiest film. And Hitchcock’s other frothy, fast and fun color spectacles of the 1950s — “Rear Window,” “To Catch a Thief” and North by Northwest” — may dominate the ranks of fan favorites among his work.

But “Notorious” is indisputably his masterpiece. It’s built on a sneering, witty and the snare-drum tight script by Oscar-winner Ben Hecht (“Scarface,” “Spellbound”) — one of the best Hitchcock ever adapted. “Notorious” stars two of the enduring legends in motion picture history, Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, and earned an Oscar nomination for one of the great character actors of his era, Berman’s “Casablanca” co-star Claude Rains.

It’s a textbook on suspense — how to build it through montage, manipulating the simplest images into edge-of-your-seat excitement and fear for our badly flawed, conflicted heroine. The framing of shots, the production design, even the many obvious rear projection effects that put characters in a careening car or on a street in Rio de Janiero, are all impeccable.

The performances are subtle, the manipulative “love/hate” relationship at its heart utterly believable.

This is the movie to see if you want to find out what all the generations of fuss about Alfred Hitchock have been about. And this is the classic you come back to, again and again, when you consider the decades of failed, passable, good-to-decent and terrific thrillers that followed it.

“Notorious” is everything a romantic thriller should be.

Bergman, costumed to the nines (by Edith Head) and inutterably gorgeous in every shot, is Alicia, daughter of a German-born naturalized American freshly convicted of treason.

It’s 1946, and modern viewers can’t help but note the traitor’s rant about the “next time” he and his kind will try to overthrow America to a judge in the South District Federal courthouse in Miami. No, the judge isn’t female and wasn’t appointed by a traitor. So this time, justice is served.

The beautiful Alicia Huberman is hounded by the press afterwards. She’s an infamous party girl who sets out to drink and party this disaster right out of her life. A mysterious stranger, not a party crasher, just sits quietly and drinks her in. He’s handsome and polished enough to earn her “I LIKE you” without actually doing anything.

Although, one could suppose letting her “I’m liable to blow up the Panama Canal at any moment” wisecrack slide counts for something.

Devlin (Grant) is a rakish and sinister. And when the party’s wound down and she’s talked him into a drunken drive down Florida’s coast, the ticket and arrest she escapes gives away his game. He’s a “cop,” a Fed. And it turns out, he wants her for a “job.”

She’d infiltrate a South American cabal of unrepentent Nazis working for the notoriuous German conglomerate IG Farben. Who knows what they’re up to? It can’t be anything good.

But “patriotism” isn’t enough to turn Alicia into “a stool pigeon.”

“No thank-you. I don’t go for ‘patriotism.'”

Still, the handsome stranger would be her “handler.” OK, then. Maybe she’ll even sober up. For him.

Rains plays the mark, Alex, a rich and connected member of this industrial scale war crime cabal. He was sweet on Alicia, back when her father was free to engage in Nazi activities in an unsuspecting America. She can cozy up to him, get names and find out what these creeps are planning in post-war Brazil and the rest of the Americas.

The script sets up a great clash of wills, with Grant’s Devlin rarely letting us love and concern entering his side of the bargain. Bergman’s Alicia sees through some of his lies, and doubts his attraction.

“This is a very strange love affair.”

“Why?”

“The fact that you don’t love me...”

But once she’s in the middle of all this, with murderous scientists, businessmen and heavies all around her, she clings to Devlin like life itself, reminding him constantly of the risks she’s taking for “love.” He’s still hiding his cards.

“A man doesn’t tell a woman what to do. She tells herself.”

The genius twist to this script is the deft way Hecht — adapting a John Tainter Foote short story — folds in more than one point of view. The spy pokes around, imposes herself in conversations, listens and takes names. The handler reveals his cynicism is a “cover” when he defends her to his boss (Louis Calhern) and superiors.

And then Alex the villain, after courting and then marrying the most beautiful woman in their hemisphere, realizes he’s been rooked. We follow his machinations as he tries to extricate himself from her and the deadly jam she’s put him in.

“We are protected by the enormity of your stupidity, for a time,” is Alex’s mother’s (Leopoldine Konstantin) acidic suggestion of their way “out.”

The suspense Hitchcock mastered in his films of the ’30s becomes excruciating here as we watch the various threads unravel into a deadly finale.

A party with those mysterious vintage wines, that shrinking supply of champagne and a room full of Nazis and Nazi sympathisizers may be the climax.But nothing that follows is anti-climactic.

You listen to the bitter wit of the dialogue, savor the clockword brilliance of the plot and admire the polished perfection of “Notorious” today and it’s hard to take things like “awards season” seriously.

Sure, it was nominated for a couple of Oscars (Hecht and Rains). And sure, it came out the same year as “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “The Yearling,” “Children of Paradise” and “Brief Encounter.”. When none of them could compete with the sentimental, war-just-ended melodrama “The Best Years of Our Lives,” which I’d say is showing its age more than any of those classics, there really is no “justice” in honoring great films.

At least Hitchcock, like Jimmy Stewart (“Wonderful Life”), Jane Wyman (“The Yearling”) and all the other also-rans won the consolation prize. Their films are the classics generations return to, and none of those works are held in higher esteem than “Notorious,” the thriller-lover’s thriller, the Bergman fan’s touchstone and the Cary Grant movie where he kept his cards closest to the chest, making this heroic villain or villainous hero the romantic matinee idol’s greatest dramatic achievement.

star

Rating: “approved,” TV-14, alcohol abuse

Cast: Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, Claude Rains, Leopoldine Konstantin, Ivan Triesault and Louis Calhern.

Credits: Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, scripted by Ben Hecht, based on a short story by John Tainter Foote. An RKO release on Tubi, other streamers

Running time: 1:4

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Movie Review: Luca Guadagnino and Daniel Craig bring Burroughs’ “Queer” to the screen

Posted on December 10, 2024 by Roger Moore

There have been worthy big screen interpretations of the Beat Generation icon William S. Burroughs over the years.

Kieffer Sutherland played him in “Beat.” Peter Weller took on Burroughs’ alter ego (and pen name) “Bill Lee” in David Cronenberg’s celebrated adaptation of “Naked Lunch,” and Viggo Mortensen’s crusty, mercurial “Old Bull Lee” interpretation was a highlight of the film based on Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.”

Being as “post modern” as they come — gender fluid, an addict prone to violence and notorious in his own right — of course Burroughs played offbeat old men characters (versions of his curmudgeonly self) in a film or two, most famously in “Drugstore Cowboy.”

But Daniel Craig’s take on the guy, playing the lead in the Luca Guadagnino’s film of Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical novel “Queer,” feels “definitive.” His Bill Lee is lonely and lovelorn, struggling to understand his sexuality. He’s a junky, shooting up when he isn’t drinking Mexico City dry.

And he’s dangerous. “Queer” or not, introverted and writerly and lovesick (in this story) he may be. But that snub nose revolver on his hip suggests he’s ready to meet violence with violence. “Paranoid?” Maybe. The “accidental” shooting of his wife and “shooting as art” on paintings would come later.

Craig’s version of Burroughs’ Bill Lee veers between brooding loner and tries-too-hard chatterbox, a bisexual Hemingway, holding forth at assorted bars — “queer” and otherwise — in the Mexico City of about 1950.

Bill Lee ponders his sexual “monster” status as a homosexual in a world that didn’t tolerate people like him in the least. And he knocks back shots and tests out his gaydar on new talent rolling into town. Lots of American men took their G.I. Bill money, inheritances, savings and the like and went south to Mexico and beyond, where homosexuality wasn’t any more illegal than hard drugs — cocaine and heroin.

Bill cruises the bars and parties, chats up amusing, cruising friends like Joe Guidry (Jason Schwartzman, padded, bearded and hilarious), who is forever letting hook-ups steal from him — cameras, his typewriter — and rivals/frenemies like the swanning Virginian John Dumé (Drew Droege of TV’s “The Great North”).

And then Lee finally meets “the one.” This young Navy vet is tall, lean, bespectacled and elusive. Bill’s never been comfortable asking straight out “Are you queer?” His friends know this. Bill’s aware of a telltale “look” to keep in mind, but he’s as wrong as often as he’s right. He’s uncertain enough to never quite know when he’s supposed to pay for the sex he just had in a local hotel room, or if it was a mutually consensual pickup, no strings or pesos attached.

He’s never learned to take rejection well, either.

How’s Bill Lee supposed to figure out the almost-teasing Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey)? He watches the guy play chess with a lady friend, almost nightly, and puts himself in Eugene’s field of view until they start to hang out, and the hanging-out leads to something more. Eventually.

Lee is over the moon, a weepy drunk and clingy suitor. But he’s pursuing this first great love without compromise. Bill Lee still likes his drink, likes his coke and loves his needle. It takes a bribe — an offer to take Eugene, all expenses paid, “to South America” (Panama and beyond) — for our hero to live his dream, with a traveling partner in tow.

He’s read a “magazine article” about this new herbal discovery, “iliana,” and its supposed telepathic properties. He leads his relatively sober and somewhat indifferent “love” on a mad jungle quest to visit the one scientist (Lesley Manville) “researching” this, outside of the KGB.

“Challengers” screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes’ narrative lets us believe that Bill Lee believes this trip, quest and drug could be transcendent in ways that make this love affair with a much younger man permanent.

And with this source material, that screenwriter and the director of “Call Me By Your Name” and the “Suspiria” remake behind the camera, we know to expect hallucinogenic dreams and explicit non-binary sex.

The period piece nature of “Queer” makes this Guadagnino’s most accessible film, with even the anachronistic modern pop and grunge rock (“All Apologies”) of the soundtrack seeming to suit a story from an age when homosexuality was “the love that dare not speak its name.”

Manville is earthy, bluff and earthly wise as that pistol-packing “researcher” in the jungle. Schwartzman makes every pick-up-gone-wrong tale a hoot. Starkey masters a sort of passivity that makes his character a cipher, an object Bill Lee can impose his lover-of-my-dreams hopes on him. We, like Bill Lee, never quite know what’s going on with this chap.

But Craig is a vision of indulgence and semi-serious self-destruction as Lee, a born teller of tales even if Craig loses the New Orleans accent of his “Knives Out” gay detective Benoit Blanc.

“A curse,” he says of his sexuality, over-explaining to Eugene in his leap of faith moment. “Been in my father’s family for generations.”

The tropes of a gay “journey of discovery” are suggested here, but by and large eschewed, aside from Lee’s complaints of his life “of grotesque misery and humiliation.”

The best thing about Craig’s take on Burroughs is all the things he’s not — the gun-slinging hellion, indulgent junkie, or the weary, seen-and-done-it-all old man familiar from interviews and chat shows, often folded into versions of Burroughs on the screen.

The narrative may dawdle, the anachronistic music contributes to a disorienting disconnect and there may be too much of a suggestion that “love” is one-sided thing, first to last. Guadagnino’s ” romances”seem to lean that way.

But Craig’s performance more than compensates for those shortcomings, a 50ish gay man “liberated” in an alien city far from his own, a Nirvana where “Queer” gringos could be themselves, find true love or something they can hope will measure up, and where addicts could “discover” new interior frontiers, or indulge themselves to death, if their misery or lack of willpower so ordained it.

Rating: R, drug abuse, sex, nudity, smoking, profanity

Cast: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman and Lesley Manville.

Credits: Directed by Luca Guadagnino, scripted by Justin Kuritzkes, based on the novel by William S. Burroughs. An A24 release.

Running Time: 2:17

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Movie Review: Irish Hitman tries to retire in 1990s NYC — “The Mick and the Trick”

Posted on December 10, 2024 by Roger Moore

The accents are cartoonish, the performances broad, the situations silly and the blood and bullets are everywhere in “The Mick and the Trick,” a lunkheaded action comedy about a hitman’s “retirement plan.”

Actor turned writer-director Tom DeNucci doesn’t shake his C-movies-straining-to-be-Bs status with his latest, which is no step up from “Self Storage,””Saving Christmas” or “Johnny & Clyde,” just a few of the titles viewers have complained about on his IMDb page.

DeNucci’s idea of a period piece is a Good Friday Peace Agreement era story of a grizzled Irish-American hitman Patrick (Peter Greene) of 20 years standing carrying out that one New York murder that puts him over the edge.

“The war’s OVER. I’m spent! Get me out, across the pond,” he demands of his best customer, Irish mobster Finn (Fred Sullivan).

Shoooore, “have a pint, talk some treason,” Finn assures him. But noooo, “not every day is Paddy’s day.” Things have “changed,” over there. But he’ll make some calls.

It’s just that “The Mick” represents “loose ends” to mobsters like Finn, his Big Boss (John Fiore) and their Cuban rival Carlos (Robert J. Morgalo). Next thing The Mick knows, multiple assassins are coming for him.

That sniper who thought he killed him and did a little Irish jig, to diddley aye music, on a New York rooftop ends up tumbling off that roof with his quarry. And that’s how “Paddy, the Mick” ends up with Sugar (Jazz Vilá), the Latina transgender “trick.”

This is the sort of B-movie (being generous) where hit men pause in the middle of a job to “have a drink” with each other in admiration, where transgender hookers pick up a battered mobster lying next to a dead mobster in an alley to nurse the survivor back to health.

Sugar’s accent is “Seinfeld” gay bully broad and thick, every bit as exaggerated and dated as the Irish and Cuban intonations we’ve already heard, and the “What’s he doing in ’90s New York?” Cajun parody to come.

A dirty cop (Federica Castelluccio) is on their trail, along with other mob lieutenants. And a good cop (Darlene Tejeiro) is on the dirty cop’s tail.

Sugar and The Mick must team-up to avoid capture, and to get revenge, a quest that will require more hookers, hitman training, robbing the mob and getting along.

“We all need someone sometimes,” Sugar counsels, and The Mick listens.

I like the way “Pulp Fiction” alumna Greene sucks on his cigarettes so hard you’d swear his cheeks knocked out all his molars. Vilá makes the most of a character who’s more of a caricature. And as dated as the ethnic and gender stereotypes are here, there’s little that reaches the level of offensive.

But “‘The Mick and the Trick” is just tired, played-out and tone deaf, a C-movie that barely qualifies as a B, and a title that verifies Finn’s ever-so-Irish warning about it all.

“Not every day is Paddy’s day.”

Rating: TV-16+, bloody violence, drug abuse, smoking, profanity

Cast: Peter Greene, Jazz Vilá, Darlene Tejeiro, Federico Castelluccio, Robert J. Morgalo, Richard Kline and Fred Sullivan

Credits: Directed by Tom DeNucci, scripted by Ozz Gomez and Robert J. Morgalo. An Ammo Content release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:36

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Movie Review: Baldwin, Terrence Howard and Esai Morales are trapped in the quagmire of “Crescent City”

Posted on December 10, 2024 by Roger Moore

A suspect is getting grilled by three cops, played by movie stars.

At one point, the biggest star of them all, Alec Baldwin, blurts out “Need I remind you you’re under OATH?”

No, the director didn’t shout “Cut!” No, the writer didn’t correct this, because he almost certainly wrote that blunder into his seriously under-researched screenplay.

And no, the hapless bit player being grilled didn’t have the temerity to say, “Excuse me, this is an interrogation, not a COURT of law. What ‘oath?'”

Terrence Howard, Esai Morales, Nicky Whelan and Baldwin star in the Little Rock-set “Crescent City,” a sordid, sloppy and over-sexed thriller that’s an embarrassment for all concerned.

Screenwriter Rich Ronat — he co-wrote the Nic Cage bomb “Grand Isle” — apparently watched an episode or two of “Blue Bloods” as his research. And dozed off between the commercial breaks. But while he can be blamed for some of the head-scratchingly stupid blunders and eye-rolling “twists” that constantly trip up this script, there’s little he can do about a filmmaker who casts the dullest actor available to play a preacher, or the quirk of injecting an attractive Aussie (Nicky Whelan of “The Flood, “Man eater” and “The Nana Project”) into the narrative.

Whelan plays a thick-accented blonde bombshell of a cop who “transferred from Tulsa.” Um, okay. But Tulsa’s in another jurisdiction, another city and another STATE. How’d she “transfer?”

Stupid stumbles like that pile up like headless corpses in this serial killer thriller where the connection might be a church Sex Addicts Anonymous group, or somebody with a beef with one or more of the detectives investigating the case, or someone who works in a manikin factory.

Because that’s one of the trademarks of this trail of entrails killer — leaving a fake head at the scene of the crime.

Howard plays a family man, a churchgoer and a cop so haunted by earlier cases he’s having blackouts. Morales plays an impulsive, unfiltered, hard-drinking train wreck of a partner who lets his misogyny and other personal issues slip out mid-interrogation, mid-bar pickup and elsewhere.

And Baldwin’s the captain who’s got city hall “up my” you-know-what about this case and its rising body count.

We see one killing being committed, early on, but that doesn’t appear to be by an actual suspect, not going by the finale.

The murderer could be one of the people ID’d as a person of interest, a psychotically jealous spouse or one of the cops, each of whom has “secrets” that could implicate them in some way or other.

My money’s on Vlad, the coroner, who greets a widow standing over a sheet-covered slab with “Here’s the body!”

This RJ Collins film — he did “Don’t Suck,” and ignored his own advice — is notable for the attempts at kink and generally degrading sex scenes. I was a little shocked we didn’t visit a Little Rock strip club, as hard as this picture leans into “sordid” and producers usually insist on such scenes, just so they have an excuse to visit the set.

But no.

All three of the leading men have checkered personal histories and stains on their resumes, and “Crescent City” won’t be the film that chases away thoughts of their on-set accidents and off-set public moral (and legal) failings. But it is humbling to one and all, if that’s any consolation to those with “issues” with them.

Rating: R, graphic violence, explicit sex, profanity

Cast: Terrence Howard, Nicky Whelan, Esai Morales and Alec Baldwin

Credits: Directed by RJ Collins, scripted by Rich Ronat. A Lionsgate release on Tubi.

Running time: 1:43

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Movie Review: Murderous thieves hunt “pedos” — “Filthy Animals”

Posted on December 10, 2024 by Roger Moore

There may be a point to James T. North’s “Filthy Animals,” a tale of pedophile-hunting vigilantism and exploited employee revenge in the San Pedro, Lomita corner of Greater Los Angeles. If there is, North makes it ham-fistedly and in an almost wholly unsatisfying way.

“Animals” is a picture that stumbles through its narrative, grafting two unpleasant and aimless tales together and struggling to stay on task as pointless scenes get in the way of that “point” North’s supposedly making.

Taking a line from a fake movie seen in “Home Alone” as its title, “Filthy Animals” is meant to play as a dark comedy about a couple of murderous stoner-surfers who read “articles” on the Internet to ID pedophiles so that they can “go hunting” and do what “the cops” couldn’t.

It’s not funny, not ever. Repellent? You bet.

Austan Wheeler makes his feature film debut as Lawrence, aka “Lars,” a coke-snorting strip-club addict with a real thing for “pedos.” His ex-con pal Freddy (Ryan Patrick Brown) wears out the weights in his granny’s garage, stuffs himself on muscle bulk supplements and most anything else edible, and follows Lars into battle.

“I seek justice on those who hurt innocent children!”

The film opens with a suspect (Peter Larney) talking to an apparently kidnapped and muzzled child on Christmas Eve. But before that, the guys have to trick and bluff their way in to visit ex-con sex offender Lester (screen veteran Raymond J. Barry) at his chic, well-decorated house, interrupting the guy’s operatic-listening bliss.

To get in, the duo cross paths with florist Bella (Mena Elizabeth Santos), who chafes under the yoke of her greedy boss (Corinne Chooey) and a childhood that we suspect included its share of bullying and racism. Lars notes this and offers to “help her out” by making that boss go away — “buried alive, with fresh flowers” planted on top of her.

Bella lets us think she’s sorely tempted.

There are three principal crimes committed in this narrative, that first home invasion and assault and another in the finale, and the “crime” Bella is willing to commit to get some justice from her job.

They don’t tie together in any expected or for that matter meaningful way.

The two surfer/louts take time to hit that strip club, to remember “Freddy Cakes”‘ father visiting him in prison and for him to spend time with his Croatian Baba (granny), who loves Westerns.

North, making his feature debut, burns up screen time showing us a student-film-quality black and white Western that Baba and grandson watch. We see a lot of joints smoked and rolled, with Bella’s “rebellion” extending to using pages from a Bible (Romans 3:8, “Let us do evil that good may result”) as her latest blunt.

Ridiculing that is the point of the film. But North puts so much effort into making his vigilantes as “evil” as the people they “hunt” that he loses the plot. He shoehorns in the whole “Baba” bit to “explain” Freddy’s Old West roid-head persona, which is a cumbersome distraction. Clues as to Lars’ motivations go nowhere.

And the opening assault, which could have been the whole movie, with our victim pleading and arguing vehemently that he’s paid his price to society and morality, so “Who are you to judge?” gets lost.

Whatever Bella is up to is evil on a different level, and just as clumsily handled. Frankly, her whole corner of the story has no reason for being here, aside from that one Biblical blunt moment.

A dark comedy without much in the way of laughs, “Filthy Animals” serves up a string of characters, each repellent in this way or several others, no one to root for, no “message” to take to heart and with an ending so unsatisfying as to leave one slack-jawed and muttering one question.

What the hell was THAT all about?

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug abuse, strip club stripping

Cast: Austan Wheeler, Ryan Patrick Brown,
Mena Elizabeth Santos, Corinne Chooey, Peter Larney and Raymond J. Barry.

Credits: Scripted and directed by James T. North. A Freestyle release.

Running time: 1:36

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Movie Review: A Clumsy Whodunit within a Whodunit stuck in a “Glass Casa”

Posted on December 9, 2024 by Roger Moore

A killer “Glass House” location and pretty much nothing else recommend “Glass Casa.” It’s a comic thriller whose clumsy structure, limp performances and forgettable dialogue do nothing to separate it from the pack of similar movies that trap a bunch of young people — stoned bridesmaids in this case — in a house with a body, a drawling, literary-minded “hobo,” and perhaps even the “spirits” of cartel killers who used to own the joint.

But they loved “Glass Casa” in San Diego, where it was filmed and where it took a prize at a local film festival. And all involved seem to have done their best to “game” the Internet Movie Database’s “audience rating.” Bless their hearts.

Harley Bronwyn stars as a screenwriter/bride-to-be whose business-suited sister Drew (Alison Iles), abrasive bestie Bianca (Nicole Clifford) and nurse bud Evie (Geri Courtney-Austein) join her for a bachelorette weekend in a borrowed modernist mansion that’s been on the market for a while.

It’s one of those electronic trap houses you mostly find in movies (better ones) like this. The only way you can operate stuff or get in and out is via an app.

Charlie the squatter (Justin Michael Terry) is already there. But he seems harmless enough to allow to stick around, if only to show them how to operate that app. Sure.

And that stripper (Jon Huybrecht) whom Evie arranged, and who is also Evie’s “side piece?” He’s in for more than just a performance for the stoned bridesmaids and a performance by Evie in the sack. He winds up dead.

Was it an accident? If not, whodunit?

The conceit here is that Jamie starts wondering if this whole scenerio is one she’s written, with tiwsts and turns she recognizes and possible suspects based on people she knows — aka, her friends, her groom-to-be (Travis Laughlin) or um, “Lamey Jamie,” a buck-toothed and bespectacled version of her teen self.

“We should split up” to hunt for clues (some of them notes in Spanish), one friend offers.

“When my characters split up is when they start getting picked off,” Jamie protests. Because she and literally every other horror/thriller screenwriter on Earth has scripted that “twist.”

Needless to say, the conceit doesn’t come off. Nobody’s that convincingly “stoned.” The mystery isn’t that mysterious. The killings are not novel, even though her friends note how this house offers all sorts of “cool” places for a killing to take place.

The cinema used to be more a gatekeeper-directed business, with self-financed movies earning notice at film festival(s) and then picked-up by distributors because they see a little profit in them.

This cast of forgettable unknowns in a movie that didn’t move any needle outside of San Diego is indicative of a new business model. When everybody else says “No,” just put it out there — on Amazon and other streamers. Try to build buzz, find “your” audience” and/or make money.

But here’s what the distributors who “passed” on “Glass Casa” may have been too tactless to tell writer-director Laa Marcus & Co. This weak tea indie has nothing going for it. At all. It’s not cleverly plotted, cast or well-acted.

It’s lifeless and witless. About the best one can say for it is “Better luck next time.” And that yes, that sea-view hillside “Casa” in San Diego makes one helluva location.

Rating: unrated, violence, drugs, sex

Cast: Harley Bronwyn, Nicole Clifford, Geri Courtney-Austein, Alison Iles, Justin Michael Terry, Jon Huybrecht and Travis Laughlin

Credits: Scripted and directed by Laa Marcus. Self-distributed, streaming Dec. 17 on Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:44

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Documentary Preview: A Peek into the Man behind the other “Bond” — “From Roger Moore, with Love”

Posted on December 9, 2024 by Roger Moore

Some good “gets” for interview subjects in this documentary portrait of the long-serving James Bond, once and always “Saint,” Roger Moore.

Pierce Brosnan, Joan Collins, Christopher Walken, Jane Seymour, David Walliams and Dick Cavett. No Michael Caine? Pity. They were great chums.

That sounds like Roger Moore fanboy Steve Coogan attempting to impersonate Moore, although Coogan’s “Roger Moore” was better than this, if memory serves. Coogan was a big Roger Moore fan, which made him a delight to interview. No, he never delivered his “dream” project, a Big Screen version of “The Persuaders,” which Coogan in the Roger Moore role and Ben Stiller (perhaps) in the Tony Curtis part.

Sir Roger was self-effacing and droll, something his many Hollywood friends would play up in their anecdotes when an entertainment journalist named “Roger Moore” was interviewing. Robert Goulet, Stefanie Powers and RJ Wagner and Michael Caine all had “This one time I was with Roger” stories, and all of them were funny.

I even got to meet the retired Bond in his UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador years. What a delight.

This hits the UK in December, and may reach US cinemas and streamers shortly.

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Classic Film Review: John Ford takes the rep company, and no “stars,” to Monument Valley for “Wagon Master” (1950)

Posted on December 9, 2024 by Roger Moore

“Wagon Master” was perhaps the truest test of the concept of “star director” of John Ford’s career.

The iconic Irishman who came to America and made Westerns was finishing up his “cavalry trilogy (“Fort Apache,” “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” and “Rio Grande”) and was over a decade into the fame and studio leverage that “The Informer,” “Young Mr. Lincoln” and “Stagecoach” gave him. So he went back to the “Stagecoach” ensemble model for “Wagon Master,” an action comedy built around character actors, mostly from his repertory company.

There were “names” but no stars in this cast, mostly players who made their character actor reps in earlier Ford Westerns. And the leading men were two Ford creations, the great stunt-riders Ben Johnson and Harrey Carey Jr., the latter the son of a silent era Western star Ford began his Hollywood career with way back in 1917.

But the director, his style and his favorite setting (Monument Valley, Moab and environs) were the real stars.

“Wagon Master” is a corny, jokey, sagebrush saga filled with tropes and adorned with trail tunes sung by the Sons of the Pioneers all over the soundtrack. But realizing that, Ford, working from a story he conceived (and writer Frank S. Nugent and Ford son Patrick Ford scripted) didn’t pause for any over-familiar moments as he gave Western fans more of less everything they expected out of a movie.

This wagon train trek, with a couple of veteran horse traders (Johnson and Carey) leading a Conestoga Wagon-riding party of Mormon settlers to their new home, would have river crossings and Native (Navajo) encounters, a tangle with bad hombres and a tag-along by a literal “snake oil salesman” (Ford fave Alan Mowbray) and two blowsy female hustlers (Joanne Dru of of “Red River” And “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” and silent cinema vetran Ruth Clifford).

There is horse play and gun play, with Johnson and Carey simply dazzling as they perform their own dangerous stunts.

But there’ll no pause to underline the Stations of the Horse Opera Cross here. Every Western cliche is trotted out, but none are underlined. It’s a “give the fans what they want” but “don’t make a big deal out of it” production.

Ford lets us know this right from the start, with a simple, abrupt and violent prologue introducing the murderous Clegg clan, headed by Charles Kemper — nobody’s idea of Walter Brennan, and including the then-unknown James Arness (TV’s “Gunsmoke”) and Ford regular Hank Worden. The opening credits then roll, the singing starts and we know we’ll be seeing more of these thugs as our amusing cowpoke “types” show up, prank the local marshal and comically mix-it-up with Mormon horse traders (Russell Simpson and Ford’s older brother, actor Francis Ford).

The one Mormon who won’t be hustled is Elder Wiggs, played at full bluster by Ford rep company member Ward Bond.

“Now look here, don’t you be ‘grandpa-ing’ me, you young whippersnapper! I’ll bull you off that fence and fan your britches for you! Goddarn…”

Elder Wiggs is a good Mormon, minding his language. But that’s done nothing for his temper.

Wiggs talks the horse dealers into leading his colony of settles to the San Juan River Valley. Travis (Johnson) and Sandy (Carey) have been there, and have an idea of the best route — with water, and wagon-tolerating terrain — to get them there. A big cash offer and a few pretty women in the retinue convince them to sign on. Well, Sandy is the first convinced. It isn’t until the more sober-minded Travis meets the stranded snake out trio that he is smitten enough to see a future named Denver (Dru) in this trek.

The cry “Wagon’s West!” prompts a song (sometimes the cast carries the tune).

Ford plays up the fractious nature of this congregation by convenience, mostly for comic effect. Here’s Jane Darwell (“The Grapes of Wrath”), a Mormon summoned to “blow your horn” to get everybody back on task. There are hotheads in the ranks, reminding viewers that Mormons were discriminated against, with Elder Wiggs joking that he has “more wives than King Solomon” and wears a hit “to hide my horns.“

The Navajo encounter is rendered peaceful by a heaping helping of pacifist common sense with jokes about how all “white men are thieves,” but Mormons not-so-much, in the eyes of the natives. Look for sports legend Jim Thorpe at the “Squaw Dance” that meeting inspires.

Johnson is dry and funny, with Ford treating him like a John Wayne in-the-making. He never really was. Carey is rambunctious and quicker with a punch line. No Mormon’s going to tell Sandy he can’t cuss.

“‘Hell’ ain’t cussin’! It’s GEOGRAPHY!”

The whole riding, river-crossing, armed desperado-confronting shooting match just ambles along, a picture with just enough pace and wit, confidently and almost effortlessly delivered to RKO and to cinemas by a master filmmaker at his peak, with Ford barely breaking a sweat.

“Wagon Master” inspired the Western TV series “Wagon Train” (1957-61), a rolling, rotating ensemble saga built around Ward Bond and a legion of mostly-unknowns.

Some careers glimpsed here were winding down, and other players never would transcend their association with Ford, with Johnson the lone member of this cast to go on to win an Oscar (“The Last Picture Show”).

In five years, Ford would set off for these same locations to make his Western masterpiece, “The Searchers,” with John Wayne, Bond, Carey, Worden and an on-set accordion player in tow.

But one reason Ford always referred to “Wagon Master” as one of his personal favorites had to be the working experience, a surehanded director, a familiar setting, a cast and crew who knew what they were doing, on foot and on horseback, an ease and comfort by one and all that shows up in every frame of this, one of the corniest but most comforting of the greatest Western director’s great Westerns.

Rating: TV-PG, violence

Cast: Ben Johson, Ward Bond, Joanne Dru, Harrey Carey, Jr., Alan Mowbray, Jane Darwell, James Arness, Hank Worden, Ruth Clifford and Charles Kemper

Credits: Directed by John Ford, scripted by Frank S. Nugent and Patrick Ford. An RKO release on Tubi, et al.

Running time: 1:40

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Movie Review: A Doc Dad figures out that “Devils Stay” with Transplanted Organs

Posted on December 8, 2024 by Roger Moore

“Devils Stay” is an occasionally chilling genre thriller primarily of interest for depicting a Korean Catholic exorcism and its aftermath.

A teen girl wrenched about violently, floating in the air as Latin rites and expulsion prayers are said over her, a “Devil” possessing the child and assaulting a handsome young priest, the clash of medicine and superstition, the tropes of this corner of horror cinema are trotted out, one by one.

But this time the fighting priest is also a martial artist.

We open on the aftermath of an exorcism. A teen girl (Lee Re) has died, and her father (Park Shin-yang) is distraught.

It turns out her dad is a heart transplant surgeon. Shockingly, young So-mi was “not the same” after surgery he carried out that saved her life. His colleagues whisper that they shouldn’t be saying this, as “we’re doctors,” after all. But that child is “possessed.”

We accept that even as we see that her doting dad, convinced that “she moved,” “she cried,” and “I heard her” seems like the possessed one. He’s done everything he can — perhaps taking shortcuts — to save her life. Now he refuses to accept her “death.”

But is she really gone? The scratched and battered young priest, Father Ban (Lee Min-ki) seems to think so, and that further efforts will only bring the Devil’s spawn to life.

The narrative jumps back and forth between the fictive present and earlier events — the priest’s prep, Dad’s star-gazing with So-mi, and their shared love of the star Polaris — with the “mystery” of how all this came to pass slowly unraveling.

There’s not a lot here that this horror sub-genre hasn’t shown us before, but Park takes this father figure over-the-top in ways not often seen. And a priest who kicks (and punches) ass? That’s kind of new.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence

Cast: Park Shin-yang, Lee Min-ki and Lee Re

Credits: Directed by Hyun Moon-Seop, scripted by Kim Kyoung-Taek. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:35

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