VFW (2019)

Theoretically, VFW post commander Fred (Stephen Lang) was planning to spend the night of his birthday at the post, getting drunk with his vet buddies (William Sadler, Fred Williamson, Martin Kove, David Patrick Kelly, George Wendt) – well, and the young guy (Tom Williamson) who just came in returning from one of the USA’s fresher wars. However, when the hour gets a little late, a young woman we will later learn goes by the charming moniker of Lizard (Sierra McCormick) runs in, hunted by the henchpeople and drug slaves of drug lord Boz (Travis Hammer). Lizard, you understand, has stolen Boz’s stash in revenge for his murder of her sister.

The elderly vets don’t cotton to a bunch of armed freaks storming into their post trying to murder an unarmed woman, and a couple of wounded vets and dead baddies later, they find they have stumbled into your classic siege scenario, not just attacked by Boz and his actual gang but also a horde of guys and gals in thrall to the particularly nasty version of speed Boz hawks. The police don’t come to this part of town on patrol, and phones don’t work, so the men and Lizard will have to fend for themselves, at least until morning.

Joe Begos’s newest – made for nuFangoria - is very much a film in love with the magic of low budget and direct to DVD cinema of ye olden times (okay, mostly the 80s and John Carpenter’s 70s), but it’s also a film that mixes its influences inventively – sometimes even wildly - enough so that it doesn’t feel like a retro re-tread and more like a love letter. If you take your love letters with rather a lot of gorily mushed heads.

For gorily mushed heads really seem to be Begos’s thing here, with nary a noggin that isn’t smashed, mushed, caved in or otherwise made rather unattractive during the course of the movie. The action is very focused on highly messy melees with improvised weapons, the experienced troupe of actors and a consciously messy looking editing job selling everything as fun yet gruesome in exactly the kind of way old school horror and action fans will like it, often feeling more like a fever dream of near-post-apocalyptic action movies of years past than the way those films actually were.

Begos is rather good with fever dreams, as should be clear from his filmography by now, though the film at hand’s tendency to drench everything in reds and blacks isn’t as fantastically psychedelic as his work in Bliss. This one’s a looser, less deep film that’s focussed on fun violence and a bit of hero worship towards its cast.

But then, these guys are rather wonderful (obviously), and Begos knows it as well as the film’s probable audience (me included) does, so between the moments of carnage, there’s many a scene of the old dudes shooting the shit, revealing their traumata in ways that seem appropriately reticent and grumpy for men their ages, or just hanging around looking tense. And really, for a film that simply could get away with having Lang swinging an axe at punks and Fred Williams slitting throats and punching heads (always the heads!), there’s a pleasantly surprising amount of space for actual characterisation of these old soldiers as portrayed by old soldiering actors, Begos clearly preferring the looser Howard Hawks model of the siege movie to more modern sensibilities of how tight a movie is allowed to be.


VFW is a lovely effort, clearly made on the cheap, but carried by a mixture of filmmaking chops, wonderful aged character and action actors (and a couple of good young ones), and an abiding love for lethal head trauma.

In short: Braven (2018)

Logging business owner Joe Braven (Jason Momoa) quite accidentally comes up against a group of drug runners with a mostly military background and a tendency to use about thrice as much violence as is appropriate to any given situation who have stashed a lot of drugs in his family’s mountain cabin.

Fortunately, everyone in our hero’s family – except, disappointingly, for the little girl – is really rather great at killing people, so eventually, Joe axes (and shoots and so on) drug runners, his wife (Jill Wagner) shoots them with her trusty sport bow, and Joe’s dad (Stephen Lang) does quite a bit of sniping between his bouts of dementia. Moral of the story: avoid the USA, everyone there is just too murderous to comprehend.

From time to time, you can imagine this made-for-Netflix action film directed by stunt coordinator Lin Oeding to go in one or two interesting directions, either by really doubling down on its family melodrama side (the actors sure would have the chops for that), or turning into a true exploitation movie as the grungy silliness of the plot suggests. Or, you know, simply explain why the Bravens are all quite as ruthless as they are without ever seeming to feel any psychological impact from their counter-rampage, whereas even Rambo has feelings.

Alas, despite a pretty gory final act, what the film mostly turns out to be is curiously bland, never getting into the emotional bits nor into the tasteless bits with the abandon the material suggests, feeling peculiarly toothless for a film this bloody.


Despite his background, Oeding isn’t a terribly remarkable action director, seldom setting the violence or the action up to the best effect, instead giving the action the same sense of bland professionalism of the drama surrounding it. It’s one of those Netflix films that really make me miss a third option between thumbs up and thumbs down: a thumb held perfectly level in a resounding meh.

Don’t Breathe (2016)

Late teen Rocky (Jane Levy), her boyfriend Money (Daniel Zovatto), and her best friend - who’d rather like to be more than that - Alex (Dylan Minnette) try to escape the poverty of their Detroit surroundings via burglary jobs. Money’s the stupid asshole one who’ll become a proper professional criminal one day, Rocky the most desperate to get money to be able to flee her terrible home life together with her little sister, and Alex is the thoughtful one more in it for Rocky than the money.

Their next heist just might give them the break that’ll provide Rocky and Money with enough money to leave town - rather to the shock of Alex who is clearly still hoping that Rocky will drop Money and notice and reciprocate his own feelings for her. Their mark is the house of a blind war veteran living in a dilapidated house in an otherwise uninhabited street. Supposedly, he has quite a lot of money stashed away there with him. In fact it will turn out it’s even more money than the trio could ever have expected.

However, the Blind Man (Stephen Lang) is also rather more dangerous than anyone would have expected. Making the situation more dangerous for everyone involved is the little fact the he’s not just richer, but also a much worse guy than any of the teen thieves could have imagined, harbouring a terrible secret locked up in his cellar, a secret he’s all too willing to kill to protect. And despite being blind, he’s more than capable when it comes to violence. Thanks to the specific type of security his secret needs, the Blind Man’s house will be rather more difficult to break out of than it was to break into.

Fede Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe is pretty much a perfect thriller. Its set up is simple, its plot escalates beautifully, regularly snatching victory out of the characters’ hands in the worst possible way but without ever feeling too predictable in the ways it does it. Even though the character constellation sounds rather typical for this sort of affair, Alvarez makes the teen burglars (well, perhaps not Money), characters who could have been insufferable in lesser hands, three-dimensional and easy to root for without pretending they are better than they actually are, all the better for the audience to sympathize with the gauntlet of horrors they go through. At the same time, the piece’s villain does have an actual motivation, just one that drives him to deeply twisted acts compared to which a burglary truly is nothing of moral import. You get where he’s coming from, and loathe where he’s going with it.

Alvarez handles nearly everything in the film (except for some too on the nose metaphorical business about a lady bug, but that’s about a minute of film) with the same thought and care, turning even his cruder ideas effectively horrifying by not treating any of them as sleazy gimmicks, timing the sort of fake-outs that make many a thriller look too constructed and built for effect (which they of course are – a viewer shouldn’t notice that though) so well they feel incredibly exciting. The camera work goes from gliding to jittery to claustrophobic at the drop of a hat, further strengthening the intensity of the whole affair.

Additionally, the film’s final third becomes remarkably horrific not through blood and gore but because the film treats the basically grotesque truth of what the Blind Man is up to with full seriousness. Alvarez is here certainly helped selling it all through the strong performances of Levy and Lang.

It’s truly a perfect little film, one that literally (and I mean literally)  had me at the edge of my seat for much of its running time, finally turning that particular cliché into truth.

Band of the Hand (1986)

Young offenders Carlos (Danny Quinn), Ruben (Michael Carmine), J.L. (John Cameron Mitchell), Moss (Leon), and Dorcey (Al Shannon) are pressed into one of those survivalist betterment programs for young criminals movies are so very fond of, the sort of thing that’d be liable to end up with somebody dead in the real world. They’re learning the art of survival with former marine Joe (Stephen Lang), conquering race and class barriers and winning self esteem by barely not dying in the Everglades.

Unlike many other films of this ilk, Band of the Hand is very interested in what happens next, so Joe takes his boys back to Miami to live in a dilapidated house in the worst part of town; things could go well, if not for the fact that their new home belongs to the territory of mid-level drug operator Cream (Laurence Fishburne when they still called him Larry), and Cream doesn’t look fondly on people who throw junkies out of a house in his territory. In a turn of dramatic irony, Cream’s boss just happens to be a certain creep named Nestor (James Remar), also the former boss of Carlos, who has taken (and the emphasis really is on taken here) Carlos’s girlfriend Nikki (Lauren Holly) as what amounts to his sex slave.

Things turn violent when Joe decides to make a stand, and his boys decide to make that stand with him.

It’s difficult not to look at Paul Michael Glaser’s Band of the Hand as a Michael Mann film, even though Mann only (or “only”, who really knows) executive produced, for the film has Mann’s handprints all over it, from the production design to the music to the overall weirdness by way of an 80s concept of stylishness (which Mann at least in part created with Miami Vice) to the problematic character arc of its sole female character – it’s all very Mann and to me seems to have very little to do with the actor turned director whose next film was Running Man.

That’s not a bad thing at all, mind you, for who else but Mann would start a movie as a psychologically crude and weirdly moralizing survivalist adventure, have it turn into some sort of glossy (and still weird) social drama only to have it end up an improbable vigilante movie? And who else would manage to let this tonal change feel like an actual organic (or whatever more appropriate word there is replacing “organic” in Mann’s and Glaser’s highly artificial cinematic language) part of the film, thematically fitting if ethically and psychologically dubious? That dubiousness even seems to be something the film is conscious of, as it seems to have an inkling of how problematic its own treatment of female belonging as some subset of ownership issue between men is. The former knowledge lends the film’s violent end a degree of ambiguity, while the latter doesn’t really amount to much. At least, though, the film is clearly trying; if only up to a point.

Aesthetically, Band of the Hand does that curious thing Mann and Mann-inspired US 80s films loved to do where they talk about urban squalor but just can’t help themselves to stylize and aestheticize the hell out of this squalor, turning “the Ghetto” itself into as much of a part of the glossy, slick 80s as the shoulder pads, the hairspray, and the frightening, cold interior architecture. Here, this very unreal idea of the real world stands in wonderful contrast to the film’s Everglades based scenes that may still look slick but just can’t look artificial, the weird city standing against the authenticity of nature. Yet because this is a film made by city boys, it also knows that the weird city is exactly the place where people must live in the end lest they turn into hermits, and avoids the whole hippie nature as purity business. The weirdness and the hateful sides of (modern) life are unavoidable, and the film stays ambiguous about wanting it this way or not; it’s not as if its characters have as much of a choice as the script’s more survivalist moments pretend they have anyhow.

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