Three Films Make A Post: Some mysteries should not be unlocked

Not of This Earth (1988): This Roger Corman-produced remake of a Corman joint is directed by the dread Jim Wynorski pretty early in his career of tits and boredom, so it is indeed full of female nudity (though not quite as much as in later Wynorski epics, you gotta decide for yourself if that’s for better or worse) and a metric crapton of boredom (just as much as in later stage Wynorski).

The film’s main feature is the copious amount of footage taken from a load of other Corman productions, usually used for no good reason but to get the film up to length, of course, a far cry from the clever secondary usage in something from Corman’s glory days like Targets, but comparing Bogdanovich and Wynorski is really rather unfair of me. Otherwise, poor Traci Lords seems to be the only person on screen even vaguely conscious of that thing known as “acting”, little happens, horrible jokes of a sort that makes Scary Movie look funny are made, and my eyes are getting heavy just thinking about this one again.

The Body Tree (2017): Following a Wynorski film that doesn’t even seem to have the ambition to entertain, this Russian-Spanish-US coproduction directed by Thomas Dunn about a group of young horror movie characters travelling to Siberia to take part in a ritual meant to calm the spirit of a murdered friend but alas provoking a demon feels like pure cinematic gold. At least, it clearly has ambitions to be a bit more than the spam in a cabin movie you’d expect from the set-up.

Unfortunately, the film’s attempts at psychological depth come up against writing that’s just not sharp and insightful enough to sustain many, many scenes of characters arguing, and arguing, and then arguing some more, performances that mostly can’t cope with these attempts at psychological depth, and the plain fact that about half of these characters are such unpleasant assholes I just didn’t want to hear them shouting at one another for what felt like hours. But at least The Body Tree fails while actually trying.

Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (2003): Let’s finish this on a high note, though, with Andrew Douglas’s attempt at capturing something like the heart of the weird, white American South in a sort of road trip following singer-songwriter and, ahem, “eccentric” Jim White through poverty, bars, various examples of what looks like horrifying religious mania to my atheist eyes, and sometimes awkwardly staged encounters with various alt.Country musicians from David Eugene Edwards, over Lee Sexton, over the Handsome Family, to Johnny Dowd (ironically, about half of these musicians were probably better known here in Germany than in the US at the time the film was made). The great writer Harry Crews pops in for a bit too.


I’m not terribly sure anyone will understand this South any better after watching the film, but it surely should convince one to try.

Three Films Make A Post: Her clothes torn away, screaming in terror!

Ant-Man (2015): Peyton Reed’s film is the clever little caper comedy superhero movie with bouts of perfectly appropriate sentimentality the Marvel film universe was looking for, and I, for one, am quite happy with and about it, and am now waiting with bated breathe on DC and Warner making the appropriate move. Ha, who am I kidding?

Anyway, I found this one a rather joyful experience that on one hand keeps with the Marvel idea of heroism, and on the other hand knows how to vary the formula, while making a lot of jokes I actually found funny.

Chopping Mall aka Killbots (1986): Keeping in mind the awful, boring tit-fests most of director Jim Wynorski’s movies are, this one’s a little oasis of quality. Things being relative and all, that doesn’t actually mean this slasher/survivalist killer robot epic is all that great, it just means its generally watchable, doesn’t break down under a cornucopia of unfunny jokes, and does entertain in its cheap and stupid way without anyone having to work to get through watching it. That’s faint praise indeed, but being perfectly watchable and generally entertaining, if not spectacularly exciting, makes this one of Wynorski’s best.

The Diabolical (2015): At first, Alistair Legrand’s film pretends to be another piece of Insidious-style mainstream horror, but it quickly turns into something more interesting, and not just through its much more controlled approach to jump scares. No, this is a film whose last act plot reveals actually make sense in the context of what came before and are in fact actual parts of the film’s narrative, and that does try to mix up various things we’ve seen before in ways we don’t necessarily have. Having said that – and also giving a friendly nod to some more than decent acting performances by people like Ali Larter and Arjun Gupta – I never truly warmed the film.

I think that has a lot to do with the overload approach it takes to its plot and characters, where nobody can’t just have a single problem, and no probably supernatural manifestation ever comes alone, which might give the film variety but also robs it of the focus it would need to actually make me care about its characters or its plot. Still, at least its interesting and trying to be more than just dross.

Agent Red (2000)

For security reasons the Russians want to return a dangerous US-developed virus the Soviets once stole from its rightful, mass-murdering creators. Because that’s the way you do this sort of thing, a US submarine commanded by a skipper on his last mission before retirement is to transport the virus to US shores. Alas, a group of terrorists have infiltrated the sub, murder the crew, and are planning to release the virus on New York via the sub’s missiles, all as part of their protest against weapons of mass destruction. Seriously.

Fortunately, two Americans have survived the attack, and now it is up to them – marine badass Captain Matt Hendricks (Dolph “What, I’m not playing a Russian!?” Lundgren) and his ex-and-soon-to-be-non-ex-again fiancée Lt. Dr. Linda Christian (Meilani Paul who is, to say it politely, the worst actor in a film full of horrible performances) – to save the day. Well, at least Matt’s carrying a rather convenient antidote to the horrible, horrible virus nobody actually understands (or so the film says) around.

Well, sort of beloved Swedish scientist and actor Dolph Lundgren has been in quite a few crap films, but among connoisseurs, this one is generally taken to be the absolute low point in his career, which says something given some of the films he put an appearance in. I mean, that means worse than the The Expendables films, after all.

Going by what the Internet tells me, the original state Agent Red was in when director Damian Lee delivered it was so bad, even producer Andrew Stevens wasn’t willing to put that one out, so, after some useless attempts by one Steve Latshaw to rescue the film without having to do any reshoots, he hired that well-known artist, Jim Wynorski for three days of hasty reshoots that resulted – if I can believe what I read – in 40 minutes of new footage. To nobody’s surprise this, as well as the film’s now rather humungous use of footage taken from slightly higher budget productions Stevens could cannibalize (in a way even I see the continuity errors, like the incredibly shrinking Dolph early on), does not for a very good, or even only a basically coherent film make. Indeed, even by the standards of cheap direct-to-video action the film makes little sense with its lack of coherence even when it comes to very basic things like the way the virus it is all about works on human beings. Needless to say, characterization and plot are rote, yet where other action movies of this type make up for that kind of deficiency with crazy ideas and fun nonsense, Agent Red drags its feet.

Sure, there is the large, large, absurdly large number of dumb one-liners, and sexual innuendo of the most painful type (example: “Ow!” – “That’s what you said the last time I put it in.”), and that’s good for a laugh now and then, but the film commits the most horrible sin a movie of its type can commit: it is just plain boring, with minute upon minute of guys in uniform just talking nonsense at each other, surprisingly little happening for something supposedly being an action film, and little in it that’s actually enjoyable.

What there is of actual action scenes is pretty bad too, thanks to the awesome directorial decision (probably one by Lee, not by Wynorski, who is bad and most probably hates his audience but isn’t quite this stupid a director) to film the action exclusively in shots so close to the actors you see as little of what is going on as if the film were shot in shaky-cam and lightning edit mode. It’s impressive in a way, if impressive means a horribly bad idea executed terribly. Sure, it’s probably an attempt to disguise that the interior of the submarine doesn’t look at all like the interior of a submarine but rather like that one badly lit warehouse set 99 percent of all cheap action movies are shot on, but you know what? It doesn’t work and makes the film a chore to watch, so one can’t say the attempt was successful.

 

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