BECKY (2020)
"Kevin James wasn't funny at all in that" would usually be a diss, but that's not the case with directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion thriller Becky, in which James plays a threatening neo-Nazi convict namd Dominick. James was not going for laughs here, and there is no hint of humor in his performance as this man, who leads a group of fellow escaped convicts - Ryan McDonald as Cole, James McDougall as Hammond, and 6'10" Robert Maillet as Dominick's right hand man Apex - on a home invasion that goes terribly wrong for them.
For reasons that aren't explained and don't really matter within the film, Dominick is looking for a key that he hid in a house that now belongs to widower Jeff (Joel McHale) and his 13 year old daughter Becky (Lulu Wilson). The convicts raid the house on an afternoon when Jeff was trying to introduce Becky to his new girlfriend Kayla (Amanda Brugel) and her young son Ty (Isaiah Rockcliffe). Jeff, Kayla, and Ty are taken captive, but Becky manages to hide in her fort out in the woods behind the house - and when the convicts get violent, Becky retaliates with violence of her own.
The directors have described the story written by Nick Morris, Ruckus Skye, and Lane Skye as an "ultra violent Home Alone", and it's a fitting description, as Becky turns into a little killing machine who uses any items she can get her hands on to make a bloody mess of the bad guys. I wasn't always pleased with the way Milott and Murnion shot the action, sometimes the camera was so close to characters it was tough to see exactly what was going on, but I was always pleased by the outcome of Becky's attacks on the villains.
There are some nice moments of gore in this movie, and some nice characters moments. The people in peril aren't the only ones who have depth, as the writers also wrote some good scenes for the villains - especially Dominick and Apex - to perform as well.
Blog contributor Priscilla and I both thoroughly enjoyed Becky, and were left hoping that Wilson will be back for a sequel.
"Kevin James wasn't funny at all in that" would usually be a diss, but that's not the case with directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion thriller Becky, in which James plays a threatening neo-Nazi convict namd Dominick. James was not going for laughs here, and there is no hint of humor in his performance as this man, who leads a group of fellow escaped convicts - Ryan McDonald as Cole, James McDougall as Hammond, and 6'10" Robert Maillet as Dominick's right hand man Apex - on a home invasion that goes terribly wrong for them.
For reasons that aren't explained and don't really matter within the film, Dominick is looking for a key that he hid in a house that now belongs to widower Jeff (Joel McHale) and his 13 year old daughter Becky (Lulu Wilson). The convicts raid the house on an afternoon when Jeff was trying to introduce Becky to his new girlfriend Kayla (Amanda Brugel) and her young son Ty (Isaiah Rockcliffe). Jeff, Kayla, and Ty are taken captive, but Becky manages to hide in her fort out in the woods behind the house - and when the convicts get violent, Becky retaliates with violence of her own.
The directors have described the story written by Nick Morris, Ruckus Skye, and Lane Skye as an "ultra violent Home Alone", and it's a fitting description, as Becky turns into a little killing machine who uses any items she can get her hands on to make a bloody mess of the bad guys. I wasn't always pleased with the way Milott and Murnion shot the action, sometimes the camera was so close to characters it was tough to see exactly what was going on, but I was always pleased by the outcome of Becky's attacks on the villains.
There are some nice moments of gore in this movie, and some nice characters moments. The people in peril aren't the only ones who have depth, as the writers also wrote some good scenes for the villains - especially Dominick and Apex - to perform as well.
Blog contributor Priscilla and I both thoroughly enjoyed Becky, and were left hoping that Wilson will be back for a sequel.
THE DINNER PARTY (2020)
Writer/director Miles Doleac's The Dinner Party begins with playwright Jeff Duncan (Mike Mayhall) and his wife Haley (Alli Hart) arriving for the titular event at the mansion of surgeon Carmine Braun (Bill Sage) and discussing the fact that being invited to this party is a huge opportunity for Jeff because the other people who will be attending have been responsible for financing three of a fellow playwright's plays and sending them to Broadway. It's interesting that Doleac and co-writer Michael Donovan Horn chose to make the lead character a playwright, because for a large portion of The Dinner Party's overly long 115 minute running time I was thinking that the story would have been better off if it had been told as a play rather than a feature film.
The story of The Dinner Party takes place almost entirely within Carmine's home and on his property, and it mostly deals with a group of seven people having conversations - including a 30 minute stretch of them sitting at the dinner table, with several of those minutes being dedicated to characters discussing opera, which to me is one of the least interesting topics there is. This was practically begging to be performed on stage rather than filmed and sold as a horror movie. As this interminable sequence went on, I began to wonder when the horror would ever kick in... and then finally, at around the 55 minute mark, it finally did. Something finally happened.
When this movie does start earning its place in the horror genre, it does so with murder, cannibalism, necrophilia, and even a very unexpected supernatural element. It's deeply twisted and frequently disgusting, while also still being quite chatty. As it turns out, Carmine and his fellow wealthy elites - Sebastian (Sawandi Wilson), Sadie (Lindsay Anne Williams), Agatha (Kamille McCuin), and Vincent (Doleac) - have invited Jeff and Haley to the mansion with bad intentions in mind for them, and Carmine and each of his friends get some personal time with their prey. Which mostly means there's a lot more talking to sit through, but at least there's something violent or gross happening during the chat this time.
I tend to like dialogue-heavy films, but I just could not connect with The Dinner Party, and it's largely because I didn't care very much about the characters. Carmine and his cohorts are unlikeable from the first moment we meet them, so why should I be interested in what they have to say to each other? (Especially when they're talking about opera.) Jeff isn't a likeable person, either, and there's something off about Haley that makes her tough to root for at first. Eventually I started to warm up to her, after she reveals a tragic back story and gets trapped in a horrific situation, but she's still not likely to land on anyone's list of favorite "final girls".
There were only maybe 15 minutes of this movie, the minutes most of the violence was packed into, when I was really enjoying what The Dinner Party had to show me. The movie waits too long to have something interesting happen, and is too long overall. If it were trimmed down closer to the 90 minute mark, it would probably provide a more satisfying viewing experience. After watching this movie for 115 minutes, I was left wishing I hadn't spent so much time with these characters.
While the characters are off-putting, all of the actors did well in their roles, they brought these unpleasant people to life in a way that made me believe them and dislike them. In addition to the actors mentioned, there's also Ritchie Montgomery as a police officer and an appearance by Jeremy London. Fans of Party of Five and Mallrats shouldn't seek this out expecting to see London do much in it, though. I didn't even realize he played the role he did until the end credits were rolling.
This movie was not for me. The scenes of violent horror were welcome, but they were overwhelmed by the scenes of unlikeable characters having uninteresting conversations.
The review of The Dinner Party originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
INTO THE DARK: CRAWLERS (2020)
I fully expected the March entry in the first season of Hulu and Blumhouse's holiday-themed anthology series to be set on St. Patrick's Day, but instead the March movie (titled Treehouse) was apparently inspired by the Ides of March, even though the Ides of March is never mentioned in it. For the second season, the March entry did go with a St. Patrick's Day theme, and director Brandon Zuck and writers Catherine Wignall and Mike Gan made sure we'd know this story takes place on St. Patrick's Day.
Set in the college town of Emerald Springs, Crawlers gets its title from the fact that the lead characters are introduced while in the midst of an all-night pub crawl. Giorgia Whigham stars as Shauna, a drug dealing conspiracy theorist who comes to realize that Emerald Springs is being overrun by flesh-eating, shapeshifting alien creatures that could easily be confused with zombies. Neither aliens or zombies are typically associated with St. Patrick's Day, but these creatures do bleed green goo, so at least that's holiday appropriate.
Wignall and Gan clearly wrote the script with the intention of making the story as fast and fun as possible, and Zuck brought the story to the screen with a lot of energy and style... style which I wasn't always on board with. Shauna provides narration through a video she's recording one year after the alien invasion, and Zuck will often freeze frame the action for a few seconds so Shauna can add in some information or make snarky comments. This storytelling device got real old real quick for me, as I found it much more annoying than amusing.
With the help of a few college students (including Pepi Sonuga of Ash vs. Evil Dead and Leprechaun Returns), Shauna sets out to bring the alien invasion to an end, a mission that involves raiding their nest with some weapons they gather during a visit to Shauna's mom. Her mom believes the aliens first arrived in Emerald Springs on a meteor that landed in the town in the '70s, and has spent decades researching alien sightings. She's so prepared for this event, she even has some C4 on hand to deal with it.
Although I occasionally found Crawlers to be irritating when it was trying to be entertaining, I thought it was a decent movie overall and didn't mind spending 81 minutes watching it.
MR. MERCEDES: SEASON ONE (2017)
In 2014, Scribner published the Stephen King novel Mr. Mercedes, which the author described as his "first hard-boiled detective book" - and given the popularity of television crime procedurals, it's no surprise at all that the Audience Network (which no longer exists by the time I'm writing this) then chose to turn Mr. Mercedes into a TV show. I was kind of surprised to see that the show was developed by David E. Kelley, who's primarily known for courtroom dramas and Ally McBeal, a comedy about a lawyer. Not only is this show different from most of the output Kelley is known for, it's also a much harsher show than his most popular work, because Audience allowed Mr. Mercedes to be just as hard edged as any R rated movie; language, sexual content, and violence included.
The story centers on Bill Hodges (Brendan Gleeson), a man who left his native Ireland as a teenager and became a cop in Bridgton, Ohio - surprisingly, this isn't set in Maine, like many other King stories are. After thirty-one years of service, Hodges is now retired. He's divorced, he's estranged from his troubled daughter, he drinks too much, he has urinary issues, and he's haunted by a crime he wasn't able to solve before he retired. In 2009, someone stole a Mercedes and used it to drive into a crowd of people waiting for the doors to open at a job fair. Sixteen people were killed.
Two years after the murders, the killer decides to reach out to Hodges online, hacking sites and sending him videos that keep his identity obscured but contain taunting, horrific messages. This killer, "Mr. Mercedes", doesn't believe Hodges will be able to catch him, but what he has done is pull the detective out of retirement (unofficially) and make him determined to finally solve this case, no matter what it takes. He doesn't have anything else to do, and he doesn't have anything to lose.
Long before Hodges can ever figure out his name, we're shown that "Mr. Mercedes" is Brady Hartsfield (Harry Treadaway), a strange, weaselly fellow who works in an electronics store, creates hi-tech gadgets in his mom's basement, and has a very inappropriate relationship with his alcoholic mother Deborah. Deborah is played by Kelly Lynch, and it's shocking to see just how gross Patrick Swayze's love interest from Road House can be when she sets her mind to it.
Treadaway did an incredible, thoroughly believable job of playing Brady, an off-balance, despicable sleazeball we spend a lot of time with. The time we spend with him doesn't make him endearing, we only root for Hodges to catch up with him and bring him to justice more and more as the show goes on.
Gleeson also did strong work in his role. Hodges is a great character, and someone I enjoyed watching as he pushes back at the killer who's playing cat and mouse with him. Gleeson also managed to make me chuckle quite a few times with the way he has Hodges drop exasperated vulgarity on a regular basis. Hodges has a fantastic support team that consists of his next door neighbor Ida (Holland Taylor), an elderly woman who makes sexual advances toward him; Mary-Louise Parker as Janey, the sister of the Mercedes owner, who Brady drove to suicide after the job fair murders; Jharrel Jerome as Jerome, the teenager who mows Hodges' yard but also proves to be very knowledgeable about computers; and Justine Lupe as Holly, Janey's cousin. Holly is in her early thirties but comes off like she's a teenager. She's on the autism spectrum and has a very overbearing mother, but the more time she spends around Hodges and Jerome, the more she starts to realize that she might be able to start living her own life, away from her mom. I liked the work Taylor, Parker, and Jerome did in their roles, but the way Lupe plays Holly made her my favorite of the group. Hodges also has some interesting interactions with Pete (Scott Lawrence), a longtime friend from the police force.
In addition to Lynch as Deborah, Brady's supporting cast includes Robert Stanton as his boss Robi, who considers himself to be something of a mentor to Brady but couldn't be more wrong, and Breeda Wool as his co-worker Lou, who I quickly grew to like. Lou is not dragged down by her association with this maniac.
I found this to be a captivating show. I was drawn in by the characters and invested in seeing Hodges take Brady down. I actually watched this season of the show before I read King's novel, and when I got around to the book I discovered that this series is a rare adaptation in that it enhances the original story. It's a reasonably faithful telling of the book from beginning to end, but since Kelley and his writers - including author Dennis Lehane - were able to draw the story out over ten hour-long episodes, they were able to dig even deeper into the characters and situations than King had in the 400+ page novel. The majority of the episodes were directed by Jack Bender, who was at the helm of some of the best episodes of Lost.
The first season of Mr. Mercedes is very impressive, and it all builds up to a rather exciting and satisfying conclusion.
No comments:
Post a Comment