Jim Carrey breaks big, Christmas goes dark, footage is found, and an actor impresses.
ACE VENTURA: PET DETECTIVE (1994)
Although I had seen marketing for Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and thought the movie looked funny, I didn't have a chance to see it in the theatre when it was released in February of 1994. My parents did, though. My father was a long haul truck driver, and occasionally my mom would go meet him somewhere for an on-the-road date night. They saw Ace Ventura during one of those nights out, and reported back to me that it was good... which is sort of surprising, because my father wasn't one to watch very much comedy. He mostly stuck to action flicks.
I wasn't able to see Ace Ventura until it reached VHS later in the year, and I once I did watch it this movie made me laugh more than any I had ever seen before it in my 10 years. Jim Carrey's performance as the title character was so over-the-top ridiculous, I had never seen anything like it (I didn't watch the sketch comedy show he was on, In Living Color) and it kept me giggling throughout. Carrey had been in movies before this (the Dirty Harry movie The Dead Pool, for example), he had already been working as an actor for more than ten years by this point, but this was his major breakthrough. This is when he became a Big Deal.
Apparently the initial screenplay for this film portrayed Ace Ventura as a bumbling idiot, but that portrayal changed substantially on the way to the screen. Ace is actually very good at his job, so much so that he is quite arrogant about his skills, despite the fact that the police in the area are constantly mocking his profession. That's okay, his comebacks are better than anything his bullies can dish out. The humor of this character comes from his behavior, his line deliveries. I don't know what's going on with him, no human being acts like this. Unless they've modeled their lives after Ace Ventura. No one other than Carrey would have thought to play the character anything close to the way he played Ace. The character is so uniquely Carrey, it's hard to believe this is a job he was hired for after the project was already in development. He had to audition for this part, it wasn't built around him from the start like you might expect.
Directed by Tom Shadyac from a script he wrote with Jack Bernstein - then Jim Carrey reworked it with an uncredited Steve Oedekerk - Ace Ventura: Pet Detective isn't all nonsense, it actually manages to tell an interesting mystery story where the person solving the mystery just happens to be a total maniac. The Miami Dolphins are going to the Super Bowl, and for entertainment during the half time show they have trained a dolphin named Snowflake to do tricks in a tank on the field, including using its tail to kick a field goal. When Snowflake is stolen, Ace is hired to locate the dolphin and save the Super Bowl.
Ace's investigation leads to him digging into the history of the Miami Dolphins, butting heads with police lieutenant Lois Einhorn (Sean Young), and catching a bullet in his teeth while trying to save quarterback Dan Marino from being abducted just like Snowflake. He is assisted by Dolphins employee Melissa Robinson (Courteney Cox), and somehow, despite his incredibly bizarre behavior, even manages to seduce her along the way.
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective doesn't make me laugh today like it did when I was 10, I'm too familiar with it and some things haven't aged well. If I had seen it for the first time this year there's a chance I'd find Carrey's performance more annoying than amusing, but there are still a lot of jokes in the film that hold up as being very funny. This is a comedy classic.
INTO THE DARK: A NASTY PIECE OF WORK (2019)
It's already a given that I'm going to be watching every movie that's released as part of the Blumhouse / Hulu collaboration Into the Dark, but this year's Christmas installment A Nasty Piece of Work would have been on my list to watch whether it was part of the Into the Dark series or not. The film stars the Warlock himself, Julian Sands; it was written by Paul Soter, a member of the Broken Lizard comedy group; and it was directed by Charles Hood. Hood isn't as well known as the other two, and before this I didn't even know him as a filmmaker myself. He co-hosts a Mission: Impossible fan podcast I listen to, so I was interested in seeing what a horror movie directed by that M:I fanboy would be like.
If this film's mixture of collaborators has you similarly hyped, I would advise that you temper expectations. A Nasty Piece of Work is not a very eventful movie - nor is it what I would consider to be a horror movie, and I'm usually very lenient about what I count as horror. I would categorize this as a comedic thriller, and given that the majority of Soter's work has been in comedy, it's not surprising that it does lean very heavily into comedic territory. The characters do awful things to each other, but the movie is packed with humorous dialogue. Including an obvious reference to the comedy classic Christmas Vacation.
Sands plays Steve Essex, the boss at a private equity company called Falconheart Ventures. After announcing to his employees that they will not be getting Christmas bonuses this year (and he also won't be signing them up for a Jelly of the Month club, as some have suggested), Steve invites two of those employees over to his mansion for what they believe to be a big holiday party. Ted (Kyle Howard) has been desperately trying to impress Steve for years, but feels he's being overshadowed by a brown noser named Gavin (Dustin Milligan). As it turns out, Ted and Gavin are the only people who have been invited to Steve's place... and they're not there to party. Instead, Steve is putting them through an "unorthodox job interview" to see which of them should get a new high-level job that's about to be created at Falconheart.
A solid hour of this 78 minute movie consists of Steve, Ted, Gavin, Steve's ball-breaking wife Kiwi (Molly Hagen), Ted's wife Tatum (Angela Sarafyan), and Gavin's wife Missy (Natalie Hall) interacting in the Essex mansion. There's Christmas cheer all over the place in the set design, but there is nothing cheerful about what happens between these characters.
The majority of Into the Dark movies are actually stories that focus on a small group of characters in limited locations, and this is another to add to the list of entries that have been like that. Steve is playing a very sick game with his employees, eventually there are threats of physical violence and the rifles that hang on the walls of the den do get a fair amount of use, but for the most part A Nasty Piece of Work is a dialogue-driven film. If you're not in the mood to watch Sands and his co-stars do a whole lot of talking to each other, don't start streaming this one. I love several movies that are basically just about a small group of people talking to each other in limited locations, but even I started to get restless during this one.
A Nasty Piece of Work wasn't what I was expecting. I thought there would be more going on, and that it would be more firmly in the horror genre. But never mind expectations. Taking the film for exactly what it is, Hood and Soter did craft a fun little comedic thriller here, and Soter did write the hell out of its abundant dialogue. There are some great lines, and an excellent cast was assembled to speak those lines. There isn't a false note in any of the performances, each of the actors brought their characters to life perfectly.
The biggest problem is just that it goes on a bit too long, even with such a short running time. The concept doesn't quite sustain 78 minutes. If you go into it knowing what to expect you'll probably get some fun out of it, for a while at least.
If this film's mixture of collaborators has you similarly hyped, I would advise that you temper expectations. A Nasty Piece of Work is not a very eventful movie - nor is it what I would consider to be a horror movie, and I'm usually very lenient about what I count as horror. I would categorize this as a comedic thriller, and given that the majority of Soter's work has been in comedy, it's not surprising that it does lean very heavily into comedic territory. The characters do awful things to each other, but the movie is packed with humorous dialogue. Including an obvious reference to the comedy classic Christmas Vacation.
Sands plays Steve Essex, the boss at a private equity company called Falconheart Ventures. After announcing to his employees that they will not be getting Christmas bonuses this year (and he also won't be signing them up for a Jelly of the Month club, as some have suggested), Steve invites two of those employees over to his mansion for what they believe to be a big holiday party. Ted (Kyle Howard) has been desperately trying to impress Steve for years, but feels he's being overshadowed by a brown noser named Gavin (Dustin Milligan). As it turns out, Ted and Gavin are the only people who have been invited to Steve's place... and they're not there to party. Instead, Steve is putting them through an "unorthodox job interview" to see which of them should get a new high-level job that's about to be created at Falconheart.
A solid hour of this 78 minute movie consists of Steve, Ted, Gavin, Steve's ball-breaking wife Kiwi (Molly Hagen), Ted's wife Tatum (Angela Sarafyan), and Gavin's wife Missy (Natalie Hall) interacting in the Essex mansion. There's Christmas cheer all over the place in the set design, but there is nothing cheerful about what happens between these characters.
The majority of Into the Dark movies are actually stories that focus on a small group of characters in limited locations, and this is another to add to the list of entries that have been like that. Steve is playing a very sick game with his employees, eventually there are threats of physical violence and the rifles that hang on the walls of the den do get a fair amount of use, but for the most part A Nasty Piece of Work is a dialogue-driven film. If you're not in the mood to watch Sands and his co-stars do a whole lot of talking to each other, don't start streaming this one. I love several movies that are basically just about a small group of people talking to each other in limited locations, but even I started to get restless during this one.
A Nasty Piece of Work wasn't what I was expecting. I thought there would be more going on, and that it would be more firmly in the horror genre. But never mind expectations. Taking the film for exactly what it is, Hood and Soter did craft a fun little comedic thriller here, and Soter did write the hell out of its abundant dialogue. There are some great lines, and an excellent cast was assembled to speak those lines. There isn't a false note in any of the performances, each of the actors brought their characters to life perfectly.
The biggest problem is just that it goes on a bit too long, even with such a short running time. The concept doesn't quite sustain 78 minutes. If you go into it knowing what to expect you'll probably get some fun out of it, for a while at least.
The review of A Nasty Piece of Work originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
THE GALLOWS (2015)
The writing/directing duo of Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing basically won the lottery. They raised a small budget to shoot their own found footage style horror movie, The Gallows, then cut together a trailer and put that trailer online. Like indie filmmakers do every day. What makes Cluff and Lofing's story different from the average indie folks who put a trailer for their movie online is the fact that their trailer became so popular that it caught the attention of some major studios and production companies, including Blumhouse Productions. Blumhouse came on board the project and provided Cluff and Lofing with enough money to shoot a bigger and better version of The Gallows. One that Warner Bros. / New Line Cinema deemed worthy of giving a theatrical release in the summer of 2015.
Made on a reported budget of $100,000, The Gallows earned over $40 million at the global box office.
I'm not sure how The Gallows' test screenings went so well that New Line decided to give it a summer release. Apparently its test scores were extremely positive, but when it was released it ended up taking a beatdown from critics and audiences alike. Only 14% of the reviews collected on Rotten Tomatoes are positive, and the audience score isn't much better - 22%.
Set in Beatrice, Nebraska, The Gallows begins with video footage from an October 29, 1993 high school performance of a play called The Gallows, which does indeed feature a scene in which a character gets hanged from a gallows. The high school student playing that character is Charlie Grimille, and he is actually killed when something goes terribly wrong during the performance.
Jump ahead twenty years and the high school has made the highly questionable decision to put on another performance of The Gallows. I don't know how the community is letting them get away with that. Football player Reese (Reese Mishler) has taken a role in this production because he has a crush on lead actress Pfeifer (Pfeifer Brown), but his buddy Ryan (Ryan Shoos), the character who is always carrying a camera around so this can be a found footage movie, decides they should sabotage the set instead of going through with the play. Reese, Ryan, and their pal Cassidy (Cassidy Gifford) enter the school through a busted door that doesn't lock, and are unexpectedly followed by Pfeifer...
And then things get supernaturally horrific, as the spirit of Charlie makes its presence known by hanging these trespassing saboteurs.
A hangman spirit chasing rule-breaking teens through a dark high school is certainly a concept I can get behind, but the execution here is rather underwhelming. To the point of being dull. As is often the case, I was left with the suspicion that I would have liked this found footage movie better if it hadn't been found footage. If this had been a slasher that was shot in the traditional manner and gave Charlie more victims to hang, I would have had a lot more fun with it.
As it is, for most of the movie we're just looking at these few kids as they freak out and cry with camera light shining in their faces. Even worse than that lighting is when the cameras switch to green night vision.
The Gallows didn't work for me, I didn't find it thrilling or engaging, but I am in awe of Cluff and Lofing's success story.
THE BASEMENT (2018/II)
Written and directed by Brian M. Conley and Nathan Ives, The Basement is not the sort of movie I would usually be into. Its 89 minutes are almost entirely taken up by scenes of one man torturing another man in the titular location, cutting off his fingers, knocking out his teeth and making them eat them, and playing mind games with him. What is there to enjoy in that scenario? Not even the fact that actor Cayleb Long does a good job conveying the emotions of the victim would be enough to get me to recommend the movie... If he weren't displaying those emotions in scenes he shares with an actor who totally blew me away.
Conley and Ives got incredibly lucky when they cast Jackson Davis in the role of Bill Anderson, the madman who spends the movie tormenting Long's character Craig. Instead of the movie being disposable "torture porn", it serves as an astonishing showcase of Davis's abilities.
When Bill first abducts Craig, he's dressed up as a clown, but if you're as tired of the crazy clown thing as I am you'll be glad to know that the clown costume gets ditched very early. As the night goes on, Bill will leave the basement and then return as a completely different character. A police officer, a detective, a lawyer, a convict, a doctor, a disappointed father, a devastated mother, a prison guard, a priest. Through the scenes he forces Craig to act out with him, he tells the story of Craig being arrested for the seven murders committed by the serial killer the media is referring to as the Gemini Killer, going to court, and being sentenced to death.
The character's theatrical flare allows Davis to play around a dozen different characters, and he makes each one their own distinct person. Within one movie he got to show that he has exceptional range. I hope he'll be getting cast in a lot more movies after this, because he definitely deserves it.
We're not in the basement for every minute of the movie, there are some cutaways involving Mischa Barton as Craig's wife, Bailey Anne Borders as their friend Bianca, and a very quick cameo by Death Proof's Tracie Thoms, but it's a two-man show for the majority and Davis's acting makes The Basement a must-see for at least one viewing.
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