Primitive War (2025)

Warning: there will be some spoilers, but since this is all pure pulp nonsense nobody should be too afraid to read on

During the Vietnam War. Colonel Jericho (Jeremy Piven in a performance so bad you have to admire the rest of the cast can keep a straight face around him) sends Baker (Ryan Kwanten) and his “Vulture Squad” of soldiers of dubious renown but high efficiency on a somewhat vaguely defined rescue mission into a particularly deadly valley. The Green Berets our protagonists are supposed to rescue there were meant to do something about a research base hidden deep in the valley, but that’s all need to you and apparently our soldiers don’t.

Turns out the valley is full of dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes that, ahem, “fell through a wormhole in the past”. Said wormhole was created by evil experiments devised by evil Soviet general Borodin (Jeremy Lindsay Taylor) – yes, like the composer but then, there’s also a Soviet character named Tolstoy which I believe is what goes for wit in this one – who attempts to do something – presumably evil and most certainly world-threatening – with particle accelerators.

Eventually, after many an adventure with dinosaurs, heroic sacrifice, and teaming up with an Eastern German scientist and dinosaur exposition expert (Tricia Helfer, whose bad German accent attempts actually sound like very bad Russian accent attempts), our heroes will have to take the fight to Borodin’s base.

It is very difficult to argue against a film that fulfils that old childhood dream of every good nerd to see soldiers fight against dinosaurs – as long as one doesn’t expect Luke Sparke’s movie (apparently based on a novel by one Ethan Pettus, but I’ll just take the film’s word for it) to be actually a properly good movie. Fortunately, this one does fall deeply under the “it’s not a good movies, it’s a great movie” umbrella where its myriad of flaws also happen to be insanely entertaining.

Firstly and foremost, this is such a deeply stupid movie it’s actually impressive – starting with the whole dinosaurs dropped, sorry, fallen, through a wormhole (probably landing with a big whomp sound effect) by Soviet mad science during the Vietnam War business, the film’s utter inability to convince anyone this actually takes place in 1968 however much CCR plays on the soundtrack (kudos to whoever managed to get the rights for the songs), and dialogue of such deep, clichéd stupidity it becomes nearly transcendent. Personal favourites here are the scene where Baker radios in his squad’s dinosaur problems to his superiors, and one of the dumbest “big rousing” speeches I’ve ever experienced, which is certainly not helped by Sparke’s decision to loosen the tension with a fart joke. No, really.

The special effects are all over the place – turns out cheap CGI dinosaurs with feathers are even more difficult to realize than dinosaurs without them – but make up for their wavering quality by the quantity and diversity of included dinosaurs. Plus, while it isn’t always good effects work, it is still done with visible love and enthusiasm.

While deeply, unironically stupid, this love and a sense of earnestness are really why this is so fun. Someone here must actually have put thought into details like the noise T-Rex jaws barely missing a victim must make – though the resulting noise is pretty damn silly. Which makes it somewhat bizarre that nobody put the same amount of thought into plot, dialogue, pacing or narrative structure, but hey! Soldiers versus dinosaurs and every damn war movie cliché plus every damn dinosaur movie cliché in a single movie! And even some romance – between two T-Rexes, in fact.

So thanks, Australia, this was deeply stupid, but also incredible.

In short: Glorious (2022)

Warning: spoilers are somewhat unavoidable with this one!

Following the loss of, or perhaps a break-up with, his girlfriend Brenda (Sylvia Grace Crim), Wes (Ryan Kwanten), is on something of a bender of performative depression (including lots of face rubbing and even a bit of “Noooo!!!!”-screeching like a Bollywood character who has just lost his mother) and related destructive behaviour. After a bit of that and a lot of whiskey, he finds himself stranded in a public restroom out in the middle of nowhere.

A voice (J.K. Simmons) from the next stall over that comes through a large hole in the dividing wall surrounded by a picture of something eldritch is rather interested in what’s going on with Wes.

The voice, it turns out, belongs to a creature from the void calling itself Gatanothoa. Gat, as Wes will come to call it, needs something from Wes, so much so, that it’s perfectly willing to trap him and torture him with waking nightmares. It’s all in service of saving the universe and humanity, so surely, Wes will help poor Gat out, right?

I know director Rebekah McKendry mostly as a veteran podcaster involved in some of the better podcasts about horror (because of which I also can report on her teaching film). As a director, she has slowly worked herself up to this lovely little low budget indie that makes excellent use of only a couple of locations and a tiny cast, treating these things, as most good filmmakers on this budget level do, as a creative anchor for the film instead of a hindrance.

There’s an effective sense of surrealist weirdness to the proceedings, suggested mostly via lighting and appropriately freakish camera angles that pairs nicely with the simplicity of the actual plot, and some moments of fun, macabre imagination. Also of note is how the film actually manages to have a final plot twist that enhances and explains what came before. It will probably even enrich the experience on a second watch, for much what might rub a viewer the wrong way about Wes and his reactions to various revelations makes a lot more sense in hindsight, instead of the twist making a mockery of what came before like too many of these things like to do.

And how could I not love a film in which an eldritch entity speaks with as much delightful politeness as J.K. Simmons puts into his performance here? Kwanten has one of his better outings as well, and most of the bits that didn’t work for me the first time around actually work after the twist, which is the sign of a thoughtful performance.

All of which makes for a fun movie that has a bit more depth than one might at first believe.

In short: Kill Chain (2019)

A bag of diamonds makes its way through the hands of various killers and lowlifes (played by lovely actors like Enrico Colantoni or the generally okay Ryan Kwanten) until it ends up in the hands of a Woman in Red (Anabelle Acosta) – the film’s using descriptions like this for most of the characters in its credits though (or because) most of them have several names – who wanders into a decrepit hotel run by a guy with a violent past (Nicolas Cage). The Lady’s trying to outrun a, nay, The Very Bad Woman (Angie Cepeda), and the hotel manager might just be the guy to help her out.

This interesting attempt of using traditional tropes and clichés of movies and books about violent men and women to turn their well-known plots existential and archetypal as written and directed by Ken Sanzel is probably simply a bit too cheap and quickly made to quite achieve what it seems to set out to do. The pacing drags sometimes, and its self-consciousness can border on the smug (or, if you’re easier annoyed by cleverness than me, step across the line quite a bit), with some of the deep and meaningful talk not being quite as deep and meaningful as it’s supposed to sound, the dialogue straining for a gravitas it can’t quite reach.

There’s something about the movie, though. In part, I’m charmed by how its shaggy dog tale structure reminds me pleasantly of films like Winchester 73 (or eternal favourite Fish Story), even though I would have preferred if it hadn’t gone the 2010s movie road of everything in it being part of some clever plan that’s actually less plausible than mere chance. Then there’s the fact that I genuinely still enjoy the archetypes and tropes the film so clearly also adores, as I do Kill Chain’s love for scenes of people telling tales (with more than a handful of meanings to them). And even though this was clearly made on the comparatively cheap, the film features quite a bit of acting talent apparently getting into the spirit of the piece very well, Cage underplaying more than typical yet still applying himself, and everyone selling their archetypes wonderfully.


Sanzel’s pretty good at visually creating a decrepit little part of Tijuana (clearly situated more in a Mexico of pulp imagination than the real place, and meant to be there) out of some ugly buildings, cheap neon signs and a lot of grimy looking darkness, the sort of place your noir character flees to before the past catches up on them again.

Dead Silence (2007)

Poor Jamie Ashen (Ryan Kwanten doing his usual decent if frequently open-mouthed nearly acting thing). Not only does an anonymous donator send him a package containing a creepy ventriloquist dummy but when Jamie’s away buying roses and food for his wife Lisa (Laura Regan), the ventriloquist doll and a supernatural presence it brought with it murder Lisa, rip our her tongue and pose her in the marital bed. I’d say poor Lisa, too, but given everything that’ll happen after her death, she has hit the jackpot through her early departure.

The investigating Keystone Kop, Detective Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg), does of course go by the old rule of “the husband did it”, and understandably cares little about Jamie’s tales of how ventriloquist dolls are seen as a bad omen in the town he and Lisa came from, how it reminded Lisa of an old creepy children’s line about one Mary Shaw (Judith Roberts), or that Jamie heard Lisa’s voice calling him into their bedroom when she must have been already dead. Being a Keystone Kop, he does of course not follow up with a thorough investigation but will stalk and threaten Jamie for the rest of the film until he can’t escape the supernatural himself anymore. Jamie for his part brings Lisa’s body to their old home town to be buried.

There he’s attacked by various ventriloquism based horrors, and the doll-like old woman ghost of Mary Shaw herself, whom you can only fight off if you do not scream (though you seem to be allowed to shout stuff, unless it’s “noooooooo”). So Jamie will do a bit of investigating too and learn the tragic tale of an evil female ventriloquist, the search for the perfect doll, and encounter all kinds of creepy shit until the film culminates in a hilarious plot twist.

This is the film James Wan and Leigh Whannell rather seem to like to pretend doesn’t exist, which is a bit weird from the people responsible for the Saw movies, and jump scares. Consequently, as somebody who could care less about these guys’ body of work (or would like to, if only they weren’t so influential on mainstream horror), this is the one film they’re responsible for I actually think worthwhile.

It’s mostly the film’s inherent weirdness that gets me, its obsession with ventriloquist dolls, the audacity to actually use an idea as strange as a ghost ripping out her victims’ tongues and adding them to her own(!), and the rip-roaring, transcendent absurdity of its final plot twist. It’s a bit as if in mentally working their way up to the weird parts – which is to say, the good parts - of Insidious, Wan and Whannell had accidentally stumbled onto a mode of filmmaking not based on ruining weirdness with jump scare after jump scare after jump scare (after jump scare), but actually going with it, just putting one piece of weirdness after the next, not caring too much about a plot throughline as long as the as any given scene contains its quota of creepy strangeness concerning dolls, dummies and ventriloquism as living metaphors gone mad.

It’s pretty fantastic, really, with the film doing nothing at all to establish its world as anything else than a weird dream where mad women talk to stuffed ravens (while living in a town called Ravens Fair, obviously), where a US small town has a huge, now dilapidated, absurdly Gothic theatre on a lake that once belonged to a ventriloquist, and where a decade long series of murders by tongue-ripping has not made its way to any outside authorities despite the town clearly being connected to the outside world like any normal town. Visually, Wan here seems highly – and unexpectedly – influenced by Bava and Argento, keeping most of the pseudo-cool editing techniques and bullshit camera angles that made Saw so annoying in check. For once in his career, Wan successfully creates a mood of vigorous yet dream-like dread and bizarre horror and actually manages to keep it up for the whole of the film.

That the film’s narrative only makes the most basic of sense and that some of its ideas are as silly as they are strange seems neither here nor there to me when talking about Dead Silence, for making sense in this way doesn’t seem what it is aiming for at all. Instead Wan here continues the more Continental tradition of making films about the inexplicable that don’t try to keep it in check by explaining it too much. Of course, I’d not at all be surprised if the filmmakers themselves now see Dead Silence as a failed attempt at starting a Mary Shaw franchise. But then again, that’s not anything I need to care about.

Northmen – A Viking Saga (2014)

A small band of Viking outcasts surrounding young Asbjorn (Tom Hopper) were outlawed by King Harald because they “have opinions Harald doesn’t like”, or so Asbjorn tells us. Seeing as they begin the film crashing their boat against the coast of Scotland while they were actually trying to reach Lindisfarne for a bit of rape and pillaging, one might think of somewhat different reasons, but oh well.

Be that as it may, after that tiny mishap Asbjorn and his men – dude with bow, old guy, guy who doesn’t like Asbjorn very much but will come around in the end, etc (all acted well enough for what they are) – do stumble upon a group of Scottish soldiers whom they proceed to kill, acquiring a Scottish noble daughter named Inghean (Charlie Murphy) in the process. Inghean, the men think, just might be what will buy them places in the closest Viking settlement. Alas, Inghean isn’t just any noble daughter but actually the daughter of the King of Scotland himself, so soon there’s half an army on our protagonists’ tracks. Worse, they won’t even be able to trade Inghean in for their safety, because while the king “only” wants his daughter killed if necessary, his favourite mercenaries leading the hunt, Bjorn (James Norton) and Hjorr (Ed Skrein), think it’s much better politics to slaughter her in any case.

Well, at least a friendly Christian warrior monk (Ryan Kwanten, who isn’t as atrociously miscast as you might expect) is around to help the Vikings out a little while they and the increasingly friendly Inghean are looking for a way to leave Scotland.

Now, as I might have mentioned a dozen times or so before, pseudo-historical pulp action movies have an easy time with me, so it probably won’t be much of a surprise that I found myself enjoying Claudio Fäh’s German, Swiss, South African co-production with a bunch of English language actors quite a bit, despite the film’s obvious flaws.

Among these flaws are: you know which colour scheme and you can – if you want – just mentally insert my usual rant about colour films who don’t actually want to take on the visual responsibility of colour but are too chickenshit to actually be black and white here; a script I’m pretty certain if seen filmed a dozen times or so before with slightly different character names and ethnicities; characters who generally aren’t terribly well individuated beyond their names and hair styles; various wasted opportunities to add any kind of thematic weight to the film (and there’s quite a bit of weight pulp adventure can carry, if the people writing it just want it); and the fact that these Vikings and Scottish clanspeople don’t actually act according to the things we know about their cultures.

Fortunately, some of these flaws are problems that I am not exactly happy to encounter yet which still are not too problematic for the enjoyment of the film at hand – apart from the non-colour scheme that wastes quite a few clearly impressive landscape shots for no reason at all. While I naturally prefer the thematically enriched kind of pulp adventure more, there’s nothing really wrong with the more basic version presented here, where every man speaks in gruff grunts that suggest bad hormone problems or damaged vocal chords, at least when he’s not fighting, a situation that can only involve him loudly shouting “Yaaaaaaargh” while showing off his perfect, perfect, teeth, and where there’s clearly nothing at all going on in the characters’ heads. At the very least, director Fäh knows how to film these things clearly and sometimes even moodily (of course – again! – except for that darn lack of colours), and does a fine enough job pacing the series of chases and skirmishes that make up most of the film’s running time. Sure, he’s no Neil Marshall but there’s no shame in that.

While this still sounds like I’m damning the film with faint praise, I honestly quite enjoyed Northmen, its focus on being the simple pulp action piece it wants to be, the grace that comes to a film without pretensions and without the need to apologize for not having pretensions via irony or by being offensively bad (like, say, much less fun Viking movie Hammer of the Gods).

Technorati-Markierungen: swiss movies,german movies,south african movies,reviews,action,adventure,pulp,claudio fäh,tom hopper,ryan kwanten,charlie murphy

In short: Knights of Badassdom (2013)

Because Joe (Ryan Kwanten) – auto mechanic with a university degree and part-time metal singer - is suffering from a very bad case of the break-up blues from his long-time girlfriend Beth (Margarita Levieva), his friends Eric (Steve Zahn) und Hung (Peter Dinklage) drag him to a LARP weekend for distraction and entertainment. Well to be precise, it’s more like drugging and kidnapping him, but who’s counting? On the other hand, the LARP weekend is also meant as a great opportunity for Joe to get to know Gwen (Summer Glau), who, to emphasize Joe’s buddies obvious thoughts there, is played by Summer Glau in a nerd-centric movie.

Unfortunately, Eric has accidentally acquired (the Internet’s at fault, as always) an authentic old spellbook  to use as a prop. John Dee had hidden the tome away because it summoned demons instead of the angels he actually wanted to talk to, a problem I’m certain everyone can relate to. LARPing in progress, Eric summons up a succubus who takes on the form of Beth (don’t ask) and proceeds to roam the woods to sex up and murder various LARPERs.

It takes some time until our protagonists realize what’s going on, yet once they do, it will of course lie in their hands to put the situation right again. The situation might even get worse before it gets better.

Given the troubled post production history of Knights of Badassdom, I’m not really sure if what I just watched is what director Joe Lynch had in mind with the film, but at the very least, the version I watched is a coherent, basically whole movie that doesn’t give the impression of something horribly mutilated by its producers; or the producers might even have actually known what they were doing, which usually isn’t how these things go.

Anyhow, the resulting film is an often quite funny bit of horror comedy that doesn’t exactly aim high but does hit what it’s aiming at. Knights knows how to make fun of things as nerdy as LARPs and metal without ever giving the impression of looking down on them, making it basically the anti-Big Bang Theory. It does help that the film actually seems to understand the whys and wherefores of nerdism and geekery, is conscientious enough to actually list LARP consultants in its credits, and is very willing to treat its weird people just as that – people.

Apart from the sheer pleasantness of this approach, there’s also a fine and funny cast to enjoy, gratuitous SummerGlausploitation (which I’m not hypocritical enough to pretend I disapprove of), slightly more visible internal organs than I had expected, and a finale that is based on the positive power of mediocre yet sincere metal (turns out Bear McCreary does do other music than his usual minimalist semi-tribal drum based soundtracks) and an undead Peter Dinklage; also, a pretty fantastic – and deeply silly – large animatronic demon.

In combination, Knights of Badassdom offers more than enough to keep me quite, quite happy for ninety minutes; not unexpectedly, I like being kept happy.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,comedy,horror,joe lynch,peter dinklage,ryan kwanten,summer glau,steve zahn