norman reedus film festival: hero wanted

(2008. dir: Brian Smrz) The worst thing about Hero Wanted is its Netflix blurb, which gives away a crucial plot-twist. If you haven’t read it, don’t; if you have, know that the thing plays better than it reads. I’m not the world’s biggest Cuba Gooding Jr. fan, but he’s good here. The whole cast is. Kim Coates and Tommy Flanagan from Sons of Anarchy tear it up as bad-assed, petty crooks. Ben Cross gets the Sam Shepard role, which must be fun for him, playing at the gun-toting, grizzled veteran. Even Paul Sampson, the arrogant cat who will lead Reedus down the straight-to-hell garden path that is Night of the Templar in a few years, is well-cast and totally loathesome.

And then there’s Reedus.

I’ll be frank: towards the end of my Reedus-fest I was hitting a wall. Roles that would have inspired enthusiasm in me just weeks prior were leaving me cold. After watching so much of him in so concentrated a period, I was jaded, even blase. I had to give it a rest. Now, after four months Reedus-free (I’m not even watching the Walking Dead this season, check me out), I see him in this, as a sad-sack overgrown kid who just wants to go to the beach, for chrissake, and it all comes back to me. Even in this relatively unobtrusive role, his greatness is apparent. He can communicate the tiniest hurt, defiantly masked, by a few twitches of facial muscles. He can take weak dialogue and speak it like it’s something credible that an interesting person would actually say. And (spoiler alert) his death scenes always kill me.

Smrz is mainly a stunt-guy with a resume as long as your arm, and he and cinematographer Larry Blanford find some great camerawork, like long, zippy dollies speeding smoothly across action scenes. There's also an ambitious tracking shot in the opening, following a suspicious-looking canine into a seedy neighborhood, lifting up to detour through an apartment and back out the window to reunite with the dog, which crosses paths with one of our ne'er-do-well characters, and we attach ourselves to his journey instead. It's fabulous stuff, and although the backbone of the plot sprawls across some absurdities (the hero takes enough gunshots, burnings, savage beatings, you name it, to lay even a Clint Eastwood character in his grave, and, aside from the odd scar or burn-mark, he looks great), the whole package is tied together with sufficient moxie and conviction to carry it off.

Rating: three stars
Reedus Factor: four stars

a bad robert patrick double feature

From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money (1999. dir: Scott Spiegel) Straight off: Robert Patrick is good in everything, and I'm not just talking the ever-classic T-1000. He works hard, throws himself face-first into some outlandishly difficult roles. Things that, when he read the script, he must have thought, "This is just embarrassing." But he's one of those guys, like Walken, like McHattie, those Working Actors. The guys who never say no. You gotta hand it to them. You gotta, in fact, love 'em.

And he's good in this.

That's my preamble on the actor. Now, about the movie.

I'd say at least half, probably more, of folks who watch the first From Dusk Till Dawn come away unimpressed, even scornful. It's a tough ride, grinding away at your suspension of disbelief with its nonstop gore, fetishistic violence, and flights into absurdity. It is, at the same time, groundbreaking, not least for its dyptych shape: the first half is Natural Born Killers and Tarantino bloodlust, the second is bloodlust of the crazy Mexican vampire variety. The cast is great, and Rodriguez's intoxicating combination of mastery over detail and jubilant playfulness elevates even this ridiculously violent blood-bath into an exuberant game.

This first sequel (there are two, plus a television series) is not so lucky. The director, Spiegel, he put his back into it, I have to say. There are death sequences, like the opening in which Tiffani Thiessen is killed by a swarm of bats in an elevator, or that of the obligatory, post-coital, Mexican beauty being bat-killed in the shower, which are composed of literally thousands of quick shots. The shower scene in particular stands as a sort of gleeful tribute to Hitchcock and Psycho. It also stands as proof positive that if you haven't made us care about a story or your characters, fancy cinematic tricks will leave us totally cold.

It is certainly not devoid of friskiness and mischief, but the success of the first one has been set into formula. A criminal gang is mobilized to rob a Mexican bank, vampires (in the form of Danny Trejo and kin) intrude about about forty minutes in to "change" the murderous gang-leader, causing a domino effect until the climactic endgame involves the Mexican police-force, along with one dogged Texas ranger (Bo Hopkins) and the last human criminal (Patrick), waging an all-out war against the four criminal-vamps still inside the bank. Even its coltish exuberance takes on rote dimensions: continuous shots from inside ribcages and skulls, for instance, get old, and probably took more effort to create than was worthwhile. The conversational quirks of the criminals before they turn (discussing a porn film, for instance), have nothing of the spark and delight of the Tarantino-talk which the script is obviously trying to emulate.

Muse Watson, Hopkins, the ever-great Trejo, and, of course, Patrick, lead a decent cast, but the story sort of throws itself whole-hog into mayhem, then disappears up its own metaphorical asshole without ever, well, reappearing.

the Forgotten City (the Vivero Letter): (1999. dir: H. Gordon Boos) This is a dreadful movie, really awful, with nothing to offer outside a couple of good actors slumming and some pretty jungle scenery. It wants to be a Roger Corman B-film, but lacks that odd and irrepressible combination of whimsy, shamelessness and pragmatism which comprise the Corman je-ne-sais-quoi.

An everyman insurance guy (Patrick) is lured to Mexico by an enigmatic call from his estranged brother, and, once there, finds himself embroiled in a treasure hunt alongside a beautiful archeologist and a dying zillionaire explorer (Fred Ward). The plot makes no sense, there are a couple of gratuitous tit shots thrown awkwardly in, some explosions and gunfights, lots of dying, and an utterly ridiculous happy ending. There is no actual reason to watch it, in fact, unless you're trying to overcome a stubborn animus-fixation on Norman Reedus by watching everything that Robert Patrick has ever done. Which is crazy, and why would anyone ever do that? so forget I even mentioned it.

wolves: bad dog. no biscuit.

*SPOILER ALERT*

(2014. dir: David Hayter) Somebody started salivating over the successes of Twilight and True Blood and decided it was time to reboot Teen Wolf. Alright, fair enough. Rage and lust turn bland dreamboat quarterback BMOC (Lucas Till, a boy with a terrible sense of timing, putting pauses and stammers in all the wrong places) into a parricidal fugitive. He goes on the lam, running from himself, looking for answers, a way to exist in the world. Meanwhile, he tells us all this in really badly written narration. He finds his way to Lupine Ridge, home of... well, you know.

This doesn't remind me of other lycanthropic ventures so much as it does Renny Harlin's the Covenant. It's overstylized, particularly in the lighting, banks on its beefcake appeal, sports a badly-written and over-emphasized "we are the last of the old families" backstory, only this time it's wolves instead of witches. It's still about boys coming into their power and learning to control it, and it's still about the father issues. In this one, after eating his human parents (OK, spoiler alert! We find out in the end he didn't really; he was set up by a bad doggie. Our boy is way too nice a killer dog to do that) he seeks out his wolf-dad and they engage in to-the-death combat, ostensibly fighting over the favors of a wolf-girl. See, papa wolf wants to continue his line by mating with this last of the true wolf-girls. But, wait, our bland hero is already his son by a different, dead, true wolf-girl. That never gets addressed, though. They just start right in on killing one another. Their last name is Slaughter. Yeah, I know.

The reason to see this is for Jason Momoa, who has a killer time as Papa Bad-Dog. He and Stephen McHattie, in the obligatory avuncular role, give a good go at setting the place: the ancient hills of West Virginia. They do it with accents and strange-looking pipes. Other than that, these wolflings could be anywhere, or nowhere that exists in the real world.

Let me tell you the best parts. When Momoa's lupine uberlord undergoes his first change: we're watching him from the back as he walks forward, about to join a manhunt, and we see the supreme confidence with which he tears open his shirt, cracks his neck like he's walking onto a playing field, saunters forward. The next best part is when Hanni El Khatib sings that old New Orleans standard "You Rascal You". The best line is when our bland hero comes home half-dead and says, "I need a hospital. Or, you know, a vet or something." The other best part is when Momoa is enjoying his intended wedding night, joking around, sort of playing with his food. He's got charisma to spare, that fellow. Then there's the way all the wolfmen whimper like puppies when they take their death-blows; that's a good touch.

And fear not. It turns out, after embodying the most brutal of villains for most of the movie, on his deathbed (OK, death mud-pit) Papa Bad-Dog gives his son (who really doesn't look wolfish at all. He looks like a reject from the Lion King. No wonder dad wouldn't claim him) a song and dance about how he didn't REALLY rape lion-boy's mother; lion-boy was, in reality, a love-child. Which doesn't explain why he's spent these past two hours trying to murder the love-child. And, of course, the kid has to give the whole, anguished, "This is all your fault! You made me a monster!" rant.

To which I say wolf up, lion-boy.