Love, death, and cowboys.
LIFE AFTER BETH (2014)
Occasionally, multiple movies with very similar concepts happen to get made around the same time, purely by coincidence. Such was the case when Joe Dante's Burying the Ex and Jeff Baena's Life After Beth were both released in 2014, with both films telling the story of a young man whose girlfriend dies and then comes back from the dead, still in love with and devoted to him.
Baena assembled an awesome cast for his film, with Aubrey Plaza playing the Beth of the title. A twenty-one year old girl who died from being bitten by a snake while hiking, Beth rises from the grave and returns home just hours after her funeral. Her parents, played by John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon, are overjoyed to have her back, and since Beth has no memory of dying they're happy to never tell her that happened to her. They want to keep her in the house and convince her that she has a test to prepare for the next day - even though Beth isn't currently in school. Her mind doesn't function like it used to, though, so she's always concerned about the fictional test that she's always going to have to take "tomorrow."
Dane DeHaan plays Beth's boyfriend Zach, who is also happy to have her back... But Zach is also more weirded out by Beth's bizarre behavior than her parents are. He can't just go along with the fact that she now spends her time hanging out in the attic and covering the walls with mud. He gets scared during the times when she flies into unnecessary rages and uses her newfound superhuman strength to damage property or attack his childhood acquaintance Erica (Anna Kendrick) for being too friendly with him. And he has seen zombie movies, so he's afraid Beth might try to eat him at some point.
As if the increasingly erratic and needy Beth wasn't enough of a problem to deal with, soon other zombies start showing up and trying to return to their previous lives. They're just not very good at the things they used to do. For example, zombies have lost their driving skills.
Life After Beth is a fun, quirky, comedic take on the idea of the dead rising, and Plaza is really entertaining as her undead character. In addition to the actors I already mentioned, the supporting cast also includes Paul Reiser, Cheryl Hines, and Matthew Gray Gubler, with Garry Marshall dropping by to make a cameo as a zombie grandfather. They all add extra laughs into the mix along the way.
This and Burying the Ex both tell the same basic story but in their own ways, and I enjoyed both of them.
THE LAST OUTLAW (1993)
I grew up watching and enjoying Dermot Mulroney's performance as Dirty Steve in the 1988 Western Young Guns, but it wasn't until recently that I found out Mulroney had been in another star-studded Western just five years later, The Last Outlaw. It's a shame I didn't know about this movie back in the day, because I probably would have enjoyed watching Young Guns / The Last Outlaw double features in '94, when I was calling Young Guns my favorite movie.
I was still entertained by The Last Outlaw when I finally did see it in 2019. Directed by Geoff Murphy (Blind Side, Under Siege 2, and the Mulroney-less Young Guns II), the film was scripted by Eric Red, whose credits include The Hitcher, Near Dark, Cohen and Tate, Blue Steel, and Body Parts. I figured Red would be a good match for the Western style, and that proved to be the case, as he delivered a simple, violent Old West tale that is basically a 93 minute long chase.
The Last Outlaw begins with a bunch of outlaws attempting to pull off a bank robbery. These guys are former Confederate soldiers who now spend their post-Civil War days robbing Yankee banks, but this particular robbery goes so poorly that it ends with the bank being blown up with dynamite and some of the robbers getting shot - including their leader Graff, played by Mickey Rourke. Who is the rare Old West outlaw who has had plastic surgery and manscapes his eyebrows.
Graff's men are played by Mulroney (as our protagonist Eustis, the best of the bad guys), Ted Levine, John C. McGinley, Steve Buscemi, Keith David, and Daniel Quinn. The last two play characters named Lovecraft and Loomis, which I take as a nod to Red's appreciation for horror. Loomis also catches a bullet as they're riding away from the robbery gone wrong, but unlike Graff, who fixes his wound with some gunpowder like Sylvester Stallone in Rambo III, Loomis's wound affects his riding while they're heading out through a mountainous desert. Graff is about to put Loomis out of his misery... when Graff gets shot by Eustis instead.
As Graff's former followers ride on, Graff turns out to be alive, and he joins the posse that's pursuing the other outlaws. The posse wants to get the money that was stolen from the bank and score the $1000 a head bounty that has been put on the outlaws. Graff wants revenge. And he's quite successful at getting it. Over the course of several encounters that involve a whole lot of bullets flying through the air, Graff ensures that the numbers of outlaws and posse members are both gradually whittled down.
If you like Westerns that are packed with action and bloodshed but you're late to the Last Outlaw party like I was, I recommend checking it out.
WOUNDS (2019)
Writer/director Babak Anvari didn't want to make another horror film as a follow-up to his feature debut, 2016's very well received Under the Shadow. But after being shown author Nathan Ballingrud's novella The Visible Filth, he found himself drawn into making another horror movie, adapting The Visible Filth into Wounds... And after watching Anvari's second horror movie, I was left feeling that it might have been better if it hadn't been horror.
I don't know how Ballingrud's story plays out, but Wounds plays best when it's presenting itself as a low-key drama about the life of a New Orleans bartender, Armie Hammer as a character named Will. Will lives with his college student girlfriend Carrie (Dakota Johnson) and is jealous that she's always talking about a certain professor, but then again he probably wouldn't mind breaking up with her because he has a deep crush on one of the regulars at the bar, Zazie Beetz as Alicia. If only Alicia wasn't already taken by a guy Will considers to be a "little bitch". A whole lot of the movie focuses on Will's relationship issues, and I got the sense that Anvari was much more interested in the slice of life drama aspect of the film than he was in the horror element. There's much drama going on here, but little bits of horror keep popping up to disrupt it.
That said, there are some effectively unnerving moments in the movie. Anvari isn't playing the jump scare game, when horror comes into the picture he's trying to get under the viewer's skin, show them something psychologically troubling, and maybe gross them out a little with the sight of cockroaches. Horror enters Will's life in a very simple way - after a fight breaks out in the bar, he finds that one of the patrons who left to avoid the trouble forgot their phone. Rather than just set the phone aside in "lost and found" and wait for the owner to return, Will figures out how to unlock the phone, and while overstepping boundaries he becomes the new target of an evil presence the owner and some friends unleashed through a ritual involving occult books on a "translation of Wounds".
Hammer carries almost the entire movie on his shoulders and does a fine job of bringing Will to life, even though he's not a very likeable character. He receives some strong support from Beetz, whose Alicia isn't just the object of desire caught between two men. She's her own person with depth, who makes questionable decisions and then tries to make up for it. Brad William Henke shows up in a memorable role as an out-of-control bar regular who gets quite a nasty wound on his face during a barroom brawl.
I'm not quite sure why Dakota Johnson is in this movie, though. Carrie has very little to do. Will suspects that she doesn't love him anymore, and I wouldn't doubt it. Her character has so little personality, I'm not sure there's much emotion going on inside her at all, and Johnson delivers many of her lines as if the character is sleepwalking through her life. When Carrie isn't acting so subdued that you wonder if she even has a pulse, the character is being put into an actual trance by the supernatural force lingering over her and Will. Casting Johnson in this role seems like a waste, and it's not clear why she would want to do it. I'm sure she's being offered better characters than this.
Writer/director Babak Anvari didn't want to make another horror film as a follow-up to his feature debut, 2016's very well received Under the Shadow. But after being shown author Nathan Ballingrud's novella The Visible Filth, he found himself drawn into making another horror movie, adapting The Visible Filth into Wounds... And after watching Anvari's second horror movie, I was left feeling that it might have been better if it hadn't been horror.
I don't know how Ballingrud's story plays out, but Wounds plays best when it's presenting itself as a low-key drama about the life of a New Orleans bartender, Armie Hammer as a character named Will. Will lives with his college student girlfriend Carrie (Dakota Johnson) and is jealous that she's always talking about a certain professor, but then again he probably wouldn't mind breaking up with her because he has a deep crush on one of the regulars at the bar, Zazie Beetz as Alicia. If only Alicia wasn't already taken by a guy Will considers to be a "little bitch". A whole lot of the movie focuses on Will's relationship issues, and I got the sense that Anvari was much more interested in the slice of life drama aspect of the film than he was in the horror element. There's much drama going on here, but little bits of horror keep popping up to disrupt it.
That said, there are some effectively unnerving moments in the movie. Anvari isn't playing the jump scare game, when horror comes into the picture he's trying to get under the viewer's skin, show them something psychologically troubling, and maybe gross them out a little with the sight of cockroaches. Horror enters Will's life in a very simple way - after a fight breaks out in the bar, he finds that one of the patrons who left to avoid the trouble forgot their phone. Rather than just set the phone aside in "lost and found" and wait for the owner to return, Will figures out how to unlock the phone, and while overstepping boundaries he becomes the new target of an evil presence the owner and some friends unleashed through a ritual involving occult books on a "translation of Wounds".
Hammer carries almost the entire movie on his shoulders and does a fine job of bringing Will to life, even though he's not a very likeable character. He receives some strong support from Beetz, whose Alicia isn't just the object of desire caught between two men. She's her own person with depth, who makes questionable decisions and then tries to make up for it. Brad William Henke shows up in a memorable role as an out-of-control bar regular who gets quite a nasty wound on his face during a barroom brawl.
I'm not quite sure why Dakota Johnson is in this movie, though. Carrie has very little to do. Will suspects that she doesn't love him anymore, and I wouldn't doubt it. Her character has so little personality, I'm not sure there's much emotion going on inside her at all, and Johnson delivers many of her lines as if the character is sleepwalking through her life. When Carrie isn't acting so subdued that you wonder if she even has a pulse, the character is being put into an actual trance by the supernatural force lingering over her and Will. Casting Johnson in this role seems like a waste, and it's not clear why she would want to do it. I'm sure she's being offered better characters than this.
Johnson's best moment comes in my favorite scene in the film, when Will presents the idea of breaking up and then gets pissed when Carrie doesn't appear to be heartbroken by it. The fact that it's little dramatic dialogue scenes that stand out for me more than anything else about Wounds is indicative of how underwhelming the horror side of things is. There is imagery that will stick in my mind, but the horror just feels like a distraction half of the time, and when Anvari does let the horrific scenes go on in an attempt to stir up an unsettling atmosphere it mainly succeeds in being dull.
This comes off as being a horror movie that doesn't fully work because the director really wanted to make a relationship drama, and a relationship drama that doesn't fully work because the story keeps getting sidetracked into flashes of horror. Either way, it just doesn't work very well.
The Wounds review originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
DEAD CALM (1989)
In 1963, Charles Williams wrote a novel called Dead Calm, in which honeymooners taking a cruise on their yacht rescue a young man who has escaped from a sinking ship... and then find out that this young man is mentally disturbed and caused the deaths of his shipmates. Williams' novel was impressive enough to catch the attention of Orson Welles, who spent several years filming an adaptation called The Deep, almost completed it, but then never did finish it.
Jump ahead twenty years and we did get a cinematic adaptation of Williams' novel, courtesy of Mad Max creator George Miller, who produced the film, his The Road Warrior and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome co-writer Terry Hayes, who wrote the screenplay and also served as producer, and director Phillip Noyce. Dead Calm was a well-received, respected film, so I love that Noyce chose the goofy/awesome Rutger Hauer "blind swordsman" movie Blind Fury to be the next feature he directed after this one.
Dead Calm is carried entirely on the shoulders of three characters, and Noyce filled those roles with an excellent cast, even though the age of the female lead is somewhat questionable. Hayes' script gives the couple on a yacht cruise a tragic back story; they're on this cruise trying to recover from the death of their toddler son in a car crash. A crash we see in the opening of the film, including a shot of the boy's body smashing through the windshield of the car and being thrown out into the dark, rainy night. An unnerving and brutal way to get a movie started.
This couple is Navy officer John Ingram, played by Sam Neill, and his wife Rae, played by Nicole Kidman. There's a twenty year age difference between Neill and Kidman, and Kidman was just 19 for the filming of some of her scenes. She turned 20 during the six month production. I have to assume Kidman was meant to be playing older than her actual years, and she does come off as older than 20, otherwise we'd be thinking John was a late-thirties creeper impregnating a teenager.
Within the first 15 minutes of the 96 minute film, John and Rae have rescued a young man named Hughie (Billy Zane - just one year older than Kidman, if you're curious) who they find rowing a dinghy away from a sinking schooner. Hughie says he was on the schooner with five others, but they all died ten days before due to botulism, food poisoning. An expert who has spent "twenty-five years at sea", John has doubts about Hughie's story. So when Hughie falls asleep, John rows over to the schooner to check things out himself.
John was right to question Hughie, because he actually murdered the people he was with. Waking up and realizing where John is, Hughie freaks out, knocks Rae unconscious, and takes control of the yacht, leaving John behind with the dinghy and the sabotaged schooner. So with more than an hour of movie left, Rae is trapped with Hughie and has to figure out a way to survive this ordeal while John desperately tries to fix the schooner so he can use it to catch up with the yacht.
Dead Calm is a well-crafted thriller that keeps things intense even when Hughie chills out while enjoying easy listening songs like Tim O'Connor's "Who Stole the Isopropyl Alcohol". It's interesting to watch how John and Rae try to get out of this complicated situation, which can feel hopeless when they're miles away from land and any other people. There are moments when success is in their grasp and then slips away, and there's at least one turn of events that hits like a gut punch along the way. It all builds up to a very memorable, slightly goofy ending that was actually added some time after principal photography to give the film a flashier climax.
In 1963, Charles Williams wrote a novel called Dead Calm, in which honeymooners taking a cruise on their yacht rescue a young man who has escaped from a sinking ship... and then find out that this young man is mentally disturbed and caused the deaths of his shipmates. Williams' novel was impressive enough to catch the attention of Orson Welles, who spent several years filming an adaptation called The Deep, almost completed it, but then never did finish it.
Jump ahead twenty years and we did get a cinematic adaptation of Williams' novel, courtesy of Mad Max creator George Miller, who produced the film, his The Road Warrior and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome co-writer Terry Hayes, who wrote the screenplay and also served as producer, and director Phillip Noyce. Dead Calm was a well-received, respected film, so I love that Noyce chose the goofy/awesome Rutger Hauer "blind swordsman" movie Blind Fury to be the next feature he directed after this one.
Dead Calm is carried entirely on the shoulders of three characters, and Noyce filled those roles with an excellent cast, even though the age of the female lead is somewhat questionable. Hayes' script gives the couple on a yacht cruise a tragic back story; they're on this cruise trying to recover from the death of their toddler son in a car crash. A crash we see in the opening of the film, including a shot of the boy's body smashing through the windshield of the car and being thrown out into the dark, rainy night. An unnerving and brutal way to get a movie started.
This couple is Navy officer John Ingram, played by Sam Neill, and his wife Rae, played by Nicole Kidman. There's a twenty year age difference between Neill and Kidman, and Kidman was just 19 for the filming of some of her scenes. She turned 20 during the six month production. I have to assume Kidman was meant to be playing older than her actual years, and she does come off as older than 20, otherwise we'd be thinking John was a late-thirties creeper impregnating a teenager.
Within the first 15 minutes of the 96 minute film, John and Rae have rescued a young man named Hughie (Billy Zane - just one year older than Kidman, if you're curious) who they find rowing a dinghy away from a sinking schooner. Hughie says he was on the schooner with five others, but they all died ten days before due to botulism, food poisoning. An expert who has spent "twenty-five years at sea", John has doubts about Hughie's story. So when Hughie falls asleep, John rows over to the schooner to check things out himself.
John was right to question Hughie, because he actually murdered the people he was with. Waking up and realizing where John is, Hughie freaks out, knocks Rae unconscious, and takes control of the yacht, leaving John behind with the dinghy and the sabotaged schooner. So with more than an hour of movie left, Rae is trapped with Hughie and has to figure out a way to survive this ordeal while John desperately tries to fix the schooner so he can use it to catch up with the yacht.
Dead Calm is a well-crafted thriller that keeps things intense even when Hughie chills out while enjoying easy listening songs like Tim O'Connor's "Who Stole the Isopropyl Alcohol". It's interesting to watch how John and Rae try to get out of this complicated situation, which can feel hopeless when they're miles away from land and any other people. There are moments when success is in their grasp and then slips away, and there's at least one turn of events that hits like a gut punch along the way. It all builds up to a very memorable, slightly goofy ending that was actually added some time after principal photography to give the film a flashier climax.
Aubrey Plaza is underrated as an actress, she is incredible.
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