Three Films Make A Displeased Post: Get Loaded

Children of the Sea (2019): I’ve read decent things about Ayumu Watanabe’s anime adaptation of Daisuke Igarashi’s manga, but I can’t say I ever warmed to the film watching it. The storytelling often feels needlessly vague, with character motivations that might actually make a viewer interested in these personality-less ciphers kept even more so, and a plot that never actually seems to want to get anywhere, spouting half-baked philosophy that really needed much stronger visuals to convince. From time to time, the film’s depiction of lights in the sky and underwater worlds is at least rather pretty, but the animation often has surprising problems with the anime standard of using digital technology to still create a movie that has a hand-drawn feel to it, sometimes looking as if it were made ten years ago when anime filmmakers weren’t sure how to do this.

Guns Akimbo (2019): If you’re in the market for a film that wastes Daniel Radcliffe (who was better when playing a highly practical corpse than here) and Samara Weaving on a combination of flat social media satire, only the most obvious and least funny jokes, and action scenes that lack choreography and imagination, do I have the film for you here! If you’re into films with a loud and obnoxious tone, as if made by people trying to hipster up the Neveldine-Taylor formula (if you can imagine that), all the better! If not, well, then take my advice and avoid this thing like the plague. I certainly wish I had.

All the Bright Places (2019): Speaking of films that waste perfectly good actors, Brett Haley’s Netflix teen drama romance thing with Elle Fanning and Justice Smith is the perfect note to end this entry on. On paper, this might be a perfectly good example of the hopeful teen indie movie, but structurally, this is a catastrophe, a film seemingly so badly in love with the idea of emotionally investing its audience in the hopefulness of its tale it forgets to actually portray the grief and pain of these teens properly before the inspirational music starts tweeting and all the postcard pretty pictures start flashing. Turns out that speaking about living after pain is not terribly convincing when you’re not actually acknowledging the pain itself properly and only treat it as something to kitsch away from as fast as possible.


Not helping is terrible dialogue that may or may not have been written by robots who like to quote Virginia Wolfe, pretending this sort of thing signals a teenager as worthy of an audience’s time, instead of writing characters who are.

Term Life (2016)

Nick Barrow (Vince Vaughan) works as a planner for all sorts of heists, though he doesn’t involve himself in crimes where people get killed or actually hurt. His last plan for stealing quite a bit of money being held as evidence doesn’t work out terribly well, though. Someone murders the group that were his clients, which makes the father of their leader rather unhappy. Unfortunately, Viktor (Jordi Mollà), as the man is called, is a big Mexican cartel boss, so he’s bound to seek someone – like a certain planner he just might suspect to have sold his plan to two groups at the same time – to blame for the death of his son and do nasty things to him.

The first little talk between Viktor and Nick ends with the cartel boss leaving Nick in the hands of his goons to go and fetch Nick’s estranged teenage daughter Cate (Hailee Steinfeld) as a tool of persuasion. Fortunately, Nick escapes and grabs a rather unwilling Cate before Viktor can get his hands on her and goes on the lam with her. It’s really a rather awkward way for a father and a daughter to reconnect, particularly since Nick’s actual plan right now isn’t to find a way to get Viktor off his back so much than it is to keep Cate and himself alive until a freshly signed life insurance policy comes into effect and Nick can die with a good conscience.

Exacerbating the problem of survival is the fact that the people who actually killed Viktor’s son and his gang, a group of corrupt policemen lead by Joe Keenan (Bill Paxton), are on Nick’s and Cate’s trail too; and let’s not even speak of the father-daughter trouble ahead.

Peter Billingsley’s crime thriller and father-daughter (sort of) road movie Term Life certainly is not an original film: it’s full of well-worn character types going through well-worn plot points until things finish on a bit too much of a happy end. It is, however, also a well-directed film chock full of fine actors breathing life into their stock characters. There are not just Vince Vaughn and professional teenager (who is actually really good at playing this sort of role while feeling real and not becoming annoying) Hailee Steinfeld. This is the sort of film that can cast Annabeth Gish for what amounts to a single shot of a telephone conversation with Steinfeld, just happens to include guys like Shea Whigham or Mike Epps among Bill Paxton’s gang, and adds Jonathan Banks and Terrence Howard for supporting roles. Basically, it’s a bit of a dream cast for this sort of thing, and elevates what could be a film going through the motions into something at least much more lively.

When there’s action, Billingsley does stage it well, if not spectacularly; I couldn’t shake the feeling spectacle wasn’t really in the budget.

Billingsley does have a nice, straightforward directing style that works well when it comes to supporting actors doing their thing, and isn’t interesting in wowing the audience with style. Rather, it’s the kind of direction that puts itself in the service of characters and plot and prepares room for them to breathe. Which is just the right sort of approach for this sort of film, if you ask me.


The script might not be original but it features quite a few good scenes and no bad ones (which makes it a good film in a Howard Hawks sense as well as in my book) with particularly the father-daughter conflict feeling believable enough to make me root for the two to patch things up and survive. In general, most scenes here have a moment, a line or a dialogue exchange that feel more real, more interesting, or just more alive than usual in this particular sub-genre. It’s not enough to start mumbling about this being a future classic but most certainly enough to turn Term Life into a satisfying genre film that puts more effort in than it strictly needs to.

Three Films Make A Post: For Howard, things are about to get R'lyeh crazy.

Thir13en Ghosts (2001): The title is program in this attempt by Steve Beck to remake one of William Castle’s weakest films. I don’t know why you’d want to remake that one, but here it is.

Becks’s film is not very good, featuring music video-style ghosts not doing terribly much beyond hunting the main characters through corridors. To be fair, these are rather better looking corridors than usual in corridor runners but the decision to keep the body count low in a film that features nothing else beyond the ghost effects to keep the audience awake seems rather dubious to me. There’s really not much else to say here: Academy Award winner F. Murray Abraham doesn’t put any effort into his villainous turn, the rest of the cast is okay, and there’s nothing memorable at all going on.

Goldstone (2016): Ivan Sen’s sequel to his Australian rural crime movie Mystery Road on the other hand is just brilliant, again telling much of its story through the landscape it takes place in (which is also part of its philosophical argument), letting Aaron Pedersen say very much through saying very little, and again talking about the way little corruptions turn into big ones, the price of looking away, and why one might want to despair at the world but perhaps shouldn’t. It also happens to get close to breaking my heart in the process. Sen displays a keen sense of the way people tell themselves stories about the world and their places in it to justify any petty, evil act they commit but also some hard-won hope.

There’s some great filmmaking, great writing, and great acting (besides Pedersen, there are fine turns by among others Jacki Weaver, Cheng Pei-Pei and Alex Russell) on display here, too.

Shadows of the Dead (2016): John Ross’s film about a bunch of teens and their struggle against a shadow demon thing, is the sort of undemanding streaming service queue/SyFy Channel fodder one can watch with a mild degree of enjoyment on a day when one feels very undemanding oneself. Thus one can feel very mildly entertained by it and then forget about it completely. With a bit of work, this could have been a more interesting film: sharper characterisation of the protagonists, or a monster with less random powers, or hallucinations of the characters’ greatest fear with a bit more heft and thought to them are all things that come to mind immediately that could have made the film less bland.

In short: The Purge: Election Year (2016)

Welcome to the third round of misadventures in a near-future USA ruled by a cabal whose rhetoric sounds a bit too much as if they’d fit right in with the actual near-future president of that particular country. There’s still the yearly Purge Night going on, where said twelve hours see all crime legal, leaving a lot of (mostly poor) people dead. Senator Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell) wants to change that and abolish Purge Night if she becomes president – she even has a change to win the coming election.

In fact, the senator’s chances are so good, the Purge-loving establishment of the New Founding Fathers decides to make good use of the coming Purge Night and get rid of their enemy while acquiring a particularly pleasant human sacrifice for their not-so-secret ceremonies. Fortunately, Roan’s security chief is Leo Barnes (Frank Grillo). You might remember Leo as a rather lethal and effective kind of guy from The Purge: Anarchy, so the senator still has a good chance for survival even when members of her staff betray her.

Roan and Leo end up being chased through the streets by purgers and the mercs hired to kill her alike, but rather sooner than later they find allies in form of corner shop owner Joe (Mykelti Williamson), his employee and friend Marcos (Joseph Julian Soria), and Laney Rucker (Betty Gabriel) who drives an underground triage truck on Purge Nights to make up for the bad shit she once did when she herself went purging.

Clearly, after the somewhat misguided home invasion movie that began it all, the Purge series had found its sweet spot with the near-future action of Anarchy, and writer/director/producer James DeMonaco continues with Election Year in the tone he left off with. So, the third Purge movie again offers blunt politics that suddenly look uncomfortably close to the spirit of the times, street level action in the spirit of Escape from New York, and about half a dozen warmed-up action movie clichés done well enough I don’t particularly mind how often I’ve seen them already.

While the film has some moments of semi-surrealist weirdness – mainly through many a mood-building vignette by the wayside of our protagonists’ path and a finale featuring fascist cultists who aren’t hiding their love for human sacrifices – its action tends to the more earthbound type. While calling it realistic would be absurd, the violence here does not go in for flying people (or cars) or big slow motion fests. As in the last film, DeMonaco is rather effective using this approach, so there’s a pleasant flow of diverse violence committed by a cast whose ethnic make-up puts the film’s money where its mouth is.

As an old leftie, I can’t disagree with the film’s politics much, either, even if it’s the sledgehammer version of a part of leftist thought sold to us by Universal, an irony that should probably bother me more than it actually does.

Three Films Make A Post: For 500 years the secret lay dormant... Until now!

Ghost Town (1988): There’s a lot about Richard Governor’s only film (as finished by its DP Mac Ahlberg) Ghost Town that should make it an easy recommendation: the charm of its ghost town, how courageously it aims for the dream-like and the ambiguous, and more than one clever idea. But all that gets buried by a film that never actually finishes anything it starts, a plot that meanders all over the place without rhyme or reason, a big bad who never can shut up spouting his horrible, pseudo-creepy monologues and the damn one-liners, and a lot of the wrong kind of tedium.

Spooky, Spooky (1988): Tedium isn’t something happening in this Sammo Hung-directed horror comedy from Hong Kong, on the other hand. If you’re familiar with the genre, you know what to expect: characters with the emotional life of children, slapstick, martial arts, some mildly icky stuff, Chinese folklore, utter weirdness, a whole load of blue light, and a film philosophically and ethically set against being boring. This one actually starts a bit slow, but once it gets going, Spooky Spooky doesn’t stop anymore until it’s time for the credits to roll. On the way, Hung also somehow manages to include slapstick and martial arts based suspense scenes that are as tight as the ones in more earnest-minded films would be and teaches us the best use for a watermelon.

Creepozoids (1987): But let’s not end this post on too much of a high note. So who better to come to my help there than David DeCoteau, carrying an early epic about some non-entities played by non-entities and Linnea Quigley’s breasts wandering through a warehouse for fifty minutes or so. There’s some business about a virus that makes you allergic to food in the worst possible way, an adorable giant rat, and more tedium than you can expect from three movies of this sort. Why, even the big finale is a long slog. A long slog, that is, until the film’s horrid monster suit births a monster baby. Then, it’s ten minutes of hilarity during which one guy (seriously, using actor and character names would suggest an individuality that’s just not on screen) pretends to get attacked by the monster baby thing by shaking the doll around, repeated as often as necessary to get this thing on sort of feature length.