HOT PURSUIT (1987)
Wendy Gazelle played a character I felt was undervalued in the 1988 film The In Crowd; this girl clearly had a crush on the lead character, was willing to get naked in front of him, and wanted to watch a James Bond double feature with him, but for some baffling reason he wanted to pursue the airhead from a teen dance TV show. But one year earlier, Gazelle get her due in director Steven Lisberger's teen comedy Hot Pursuit.
In this film, Gazelle plays Lori Cronenberg, a girl who is such a skilled gymnast that she practically comes off like a ninja at times; the first time we see her, she's even dressed completely in black, climbing walls and running along roofs to infiltrate the boarding school her boyfriend Dan Bartlett (John Cusack) attends. Gazelle clearly had gymnast skills herself, because throughout the movie we see her doing things like handstands and splits for no apparent reason, and at one point she even does a one-handed front cartwheel over a limbo bar while holding a drink, and she doesn't spill her drink. The majority of the film follows Dan as he goes to great lengths to join her on a Caribbean vacation, and it's completely understandable.
Dan had been invited to join Lori and her family on the vacation, but when the day arrives he finds out he has flunked a chemistry test and will have to stay at the school so he can take a make-up test. He breaks the bad news to Lori when she stops by to pick him up, then immediately after she leaves his chemistry teacher gives him a pass, because he understands that he doesn't want to disappoint his beautiful girlfriend. Dan rushes after Lori, but isn't able to catch up with her and has to take a different flight. If the characters had cell phones, this movie wouldn't exist, because then Dan has to go through the wringer trying to locate Lori in the Caribbean.
Dan takes a troubled car ride with a group of pot-smoking, laidback locals (one of them played by Keith David), gets mixed up with a mysterious seaman played by Robert Loggia, gets arrested, is busted out jail, rides shotgun in a car chase, thwarts an airplane hijacking... and that's just a precursor to the action he'll have to take part in once he finally reaches Lori, as she and her family are taken captive by some criminals played by Jerry Stiller, his son Ben Stiller, Andaluz Russell, Roberto Sneider, and veteran stuntman Ted White (who was Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter). The climax of the film unexpectedly involves machine gun fire and grenade tossing, and yes Lori's gymnastics abilities do come in handy during all of this.
The screenplay written by Lisberger, Steven Carabatsos, and an uncredited Tom Mankiewicz (who worked on a few Bond films) goes off the rails a bit, and there are times in the film when it feels like Cusack might have been miscast because he plays Dan with such intensity. But Hot Pursuit is fun to watch, and I was glad to see Gazelle get a bigger role than she had in The In Crowd.
ANOTHER STAKEOUT (1993)
This is an unpopular opinion, but I actually like Another Stakeout even better than the first Stakeout. Maybe it's because Another Stakeout was my introduction to this duology and then I went back to watch its predecessor after, but even watching the movies again all this time later, I find Another Stakeout to be the more enjoyable viewing experience.
Director John Badham, screenwriter Jim Kouf, and stars Richard Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez all returned for this one, and the fact that Estevez has more to do in this sequel is definitely not just a small part of why I prefer this one. Estevez was one of my favorite actors when I was a kid, which happened to be at the time when he was at his peak popularity, so I always appreciate it when a movie he's in has plenty of Estevez. While he was kind of observing things from the side in Stakeout, Another Stakeout puts him right in the middle of the shenanigans.
This one also benefits from book-ending sequences featuring Miguel Ferrer as a hitman. He's introduced using a septic truck to pump gasoline into the septic system of the safehouse where Luella Delano (Cathy Moriarty) is being guarded so she can testify in a trial against a Chicago mob boss. The hitman's septic trick allows him to set off a spectacular explosion; I first saw this movie right around my 10th birthday, and the safehouse explosion this movie starts with was one of the most mind-blowing cinematic sights I had ever seen up to that point. Badham and his editor made sure the production got their money's worth out of that explosion, as it's covered from multiple angles - behind the house, in front of it, inside of it, above it. There was so much coverage, they managed to make that explosion go on for almost a full minute. It's quite impressive. Then Ferrer comes back at the end of the movie to cause trouble with a revolver rifle.
Luella disappears after her safehouse blows up, but phone records show she made a call to friends in the Seattle area, Dennis Farina and Marcia Strassman as Brian and Pam O'Hara. So Seattle detectives Chris Lecce (Dreyfuss) and Bill Reimers (Estevez) are assigned to set up a stakeout to keep an eye on the O'Haras, in case Luella might show up to visit them. This time Chris and Bill are joined on their stakeout by Assistant D.A. Gina Garrett (Rosie O'Donnell), who comes up with the idea that Chris and Bill will perform the stakeout under the cover of being father and son, despite the fact that they're only 13 years apart in age. But once Estevez shaves the mustache he carried over from the previous movie, he actually does look a lot younger. Gina's cover is that she's Chris's wife and Bill's stepmom. This was one of O'Donnell's earliest film roles, and I thought she was fun in it as she regularly butts heads with Chris and Bill.
Gina brings her dog Archie along on the stakeout as well, and Archie sets a comedy of errors in motion that leads to the stakeout trio having to interact with the O'Haras to an uncomfortable degree.
When we first catch up with Chris and Bill, the sequel plays a little too close to the events of the first movie - Chris gets messy during a foot chase, this time falling into spaghetti-filled garbage instead of the fish he fell into in Stakeout, then finds out that his romantic relationship has fallen apart; in the first movie, his wife has left him, in this one he returns to his apartment to find that his girlfriend Maria (Madeleine Stowe), the woman he fell for in the previous movie, is leaving him because it's been six years and he won't marry her. But once those retread moments are out of the way, Another Stakeout becomes its own thing.
It's a nice touch that Dan Lauria returns as Chris and Bill's co-worker Coldshank, who they were not fond of in the first movie. Amusingly, in the years since the first movie Coldshank has been promoted from detective and is now their captain.
Another Stakeout has plenty of chuckles, some cool moments of action, and moves through its story at a good pace. This wasn't the critical or financial hit that Stakeout was, but it works for me.
CARNAGE PARK (2016)
When it comes to the career, so far, of director Mickey Keating, one thing I see as very positive is the fact that he's not afraid of switching up his style. His first two movies, Ritual and Pod, were sort of similar, but then he went from those - which primarily consisted of characters talking to each other - to the black and white Darling, which centered on a character who rarely spoke. With his fourth film, Carnage Park, he did something new again, making a movie that's set in 1978 and has a washed-out, almost sepia look to it and feels like a Quentin Tarantino / Rob Zombie / Coen Brothers mash-up.
The story begins with "Scorpion" Joe (James Landry Hebert) and his pal Lenny (Michael Villar) trying to pull off a bank robbery and leaving with a hostage named Vivian (Ashley Bell) in the trunk of their car and a bullet in Lenny's belly. Lenny eventually dies and Joe has to dump him in the desert, and as he continues on he ends up crossing into a plot of land owned by Wyatt Moss (Pat Healy), a maniac with a rifle who uses this property to hunt. Humans. He captures and hunts people. Joe gets his head blown off right away; a shocking turn of events, since his villainy is what carries the first 20+ minutes of the movie. But from that point on, Vivian is left to wander the desert while Wyatt stalks her.
Carnage Park is front-loaded with the stylistic touches and homages. Text at the beginning says "The film which you are about to see is perhaps the most bizarre episode in the annals of American crime", an obvious nod to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and its opening text, which begins with "The film which you are about to see" and ends talking about the discovery of "one of the most bizarre crimes in the annals of American history". Then we get a monologue from Wyatt that's like something you'd find in a Coen movie, followed by a title sequence reminiscent of a spaghetti Western. The Joe-Lenny-Vivian set-up is like Reservoir Dogs mixed with From Dusk Till Dawn, and the early death of Joe is a twist along the lines of Marion Crane making an early exit from Psycho. There are flashy edits and a lot of needledrop music, including a Terry Reid song that was used in The Devil's Rejects.
Then the film became less interesting to me as it focused on Vivian wandering around, livening up again for a moment when Jimmy Dean's song "Big Bad John" kicks in and Alan Ruck shows up as a sheriff. By the end, it's almost like Vivian and Wyatt have made their way into the tunnels from the climax of House of 1000 Corpses. It had lost me by then, but since I have been watching most of Keating's movies for the first time during a short span of time, it was cool to see him do something so different with this one.
THE PLATFORM (2019)
Although he has credits on short films going back seventeen years, the Netflix release The Platform is the feature directorial debut of Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, and it's a debut that instantly marks Gaztelu-Urrutia as a filmmaker to keep a close eye on going forward. The Platform is a stylish, engaging film built on a fascinating concept crafted by screenwriters David Desola and Pedro Rivero.
The Spanish production stars Ivan Massagué as Goreng, a man who makes the terrible decision to voluntarily enter a place called The Pit for six months, at the end of which he'll be rewarded with an accredited diploma. He sees this as a simple way to earn the diploma while quitting cigarettes cold turkey and having a chance to read Don Quixote, but he has no idea exactly how The Pit operates. That becomes clear shortly after he wakes up on level 48 of this multi-level facility, accompanied by a roommate named Trimagasi (Zorion Eguilero) who was sentenced to a stay in The Pit after accidentally killing someone. Goreng wasn't aware that The Pit is also used as a prison.
Nor was he aware of the most nightmarish aspect of The Pit, the food situation. An extravagant feast is prepared on level 0, complete with the favorite foods and drinks of the people who inhabit The Pit... but only that one spread is prepared, and placed on a platform that seems to magically descend through the facility, stopping on each level for just a couple minutes. The two people on each level have only that time to eat from what's on the table, the lower levels existing on the scraps that are left over after the people on the higher levels have gorged themselves. If someone tries to save a food item from the platform, they are punished by having their level filled with extreme heat or cold.
The idea is that if the inhabitants would work together to ration the food for each other, if each one only ate what they needed, that the food would last through the entire facility. But no one handles it that way, and down around level 130 - which may or may not be halfway or further down, we're always learning that the Pit is deeper than anyone knows - people have even been forced to resort to cannibalism.
What's going on in The Pit is obviously an allegory for greed in society, whether the viewer wants to equate it to something like the "trickle-down economics" approach to capitalism, or to something as timely as the hoarding of toilet paper and hand sanitizer that has gone on during the COVID-19 pandemic. Goreng is even accused of being a communist when he suggests there might be a better way than just having everyone grab everything they can stuff into their mouth off the platform. That is a very interesting aspect of the film, but even viewers who don't want to dig too deep into those ideas are likely to be invested in Goreng's plight for the 94 minute duration.
Inhabitants of The Pit spend one month on each level, then find themselves moved to a different level, seemingly at random. Goreng starts off at 48, but he has five more levels to endure. He has it well on some of these levels, while other levels are a hell of starvation, death, and cannibalism. During his first month, he has Trimagasi as his roommate, and Eguilero turns in a terrific performance as this oddball old man, a character who is simultaneously off-putting and delightful to watch. Knowing this was a film by a first-timer and seeing the low budget potential of the concept, I was fully prepared to just watch Goreng and Trigamasi make their way through multiple levels together - two actors on one set that's presented as several. But that's not how the film plays out. While we never venture any further outside of The Pit than to see the preparation of the food or flashbacks to Goreng's volunteer interview, The Platform actually has a larger scope than I thought it would.
Other characters we meet along the way include Antonia San Juan as Imoguiri, the woman who interviewed Goreng and later volunteers to join him in The Pit (along with her adorable dachshund); a religious man named Baharat (Emilio Buale), who joins Goreng in an endeavor to bring fairness to The Pit and send a message to the higher-ups; and Alexandra Masangkay as the killing machine Miharu, who forms something of a bond with Goreng. We're told that Miharu rides the platform in search of her child, but we're also told that there are no children in The Pit, so it's hard to tell what's true and what isn't in this twisted place. We see a lot more people in The Pit than I expected, and I certainly wasn't expecting the amount of bloody violence the film contains.
The Platform isn't going to be for everyone, some viewers may be turned away by how strange and unpleasant it is, but I was impressed and engrossed, and I look forward to seeing what Gaztelu-Urrutia does next.
The review of The Platform originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
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