Worth Mentioning - Rollin' It Down the Line

 We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Thrillers, alien invasion, and summer camp.

THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME (2020)

I have yet to read anything written by author Donald Ray Pollock, but I think I have just became fascinated by his work. An adaptation of his novel The Devil All the Time has been released on the Netflix streaming service, and I was blown away by the twisted "Midwestern Gothic" story (or stories, really) Pollock crafted here, and the captivating way director Antonio Campos brought it to the screen.

Scripted by Campos and his brother Paulo, The Devil All the Time takes place over a period of around twenty years, the 1940s into the '60s, and follows multiple characters who are connected to the towns of Knockemstiff, Ohio and/or Coal Creek, West Virginia. These characters are played by an incredible cast, including Tom Holland, Bill Skarsgard, Riley Keough, Jason Clarke, Sebastian Stan, Eliza Scanlen, Robert Pattinson, Haley Bennett, and Mia Wasikowska, and nearly every one of them is deeply disturbed in some way. Skarsgard plays Willard Russell, a man haunted by the horrors he saw in battle during World War II; Holland plays Willard's son Arvin at age seventeen, his view on the world shaped by horrific experiences in his childhood; Keough and Clarke are serial killer couple Sandy and Carl; Stan is Sandy's brother, who happens to be a police officer; Robert Pattinson plays a sleazy preacher who has inappropriate relations with members of his congregation. In fact, Pattinson's Reverend Preston Teagardin is just one of several characters who use their religion in the worst possible way.

The story feels like it has a wide scope, and there's a lot to it - the movie has a running time of 138 minutes - but everything is actually very tightly tied together, and it's really fascinating when stories start crossing over and characters we've been following separately interact with each other.

The film really drew me in because it's sort of set in a world I know - like Pollock, I spent many years of my life in Ohio - and yet it's not a reflection of my reality at all, which I am thankful for. This movie is packed with awful people I wouldn't want anything to do with, and it's unfortunate that Arvin has to bump into them. It's also packed with awful events; it's the sort of movie where you expect the worst to happen at any moment, making you wonder, "What terrible thing is going to happen to this person now?"

Campos had Pollock provide a narration for the film, and the author has a great voice for the job. Due to the crazy events and the narration, there were times when The Devil All the Time almost felt like a Coen Brothers movie, which is a very good thing.

Now I am very interested to learn more about Pollock's writing.

DOUBLE CROSS (1994)

If you spent a lot of time watching cable television in the early '90s, director Michael Keusch's 1994 film Double Cross will seem very familiar to you, even if you didn't happen to see it at the time. The tone of the film, the look of it, it's pure '90s cable and will instantly transport you back to that era. 

Written by Henry C. Parke, the film stars Patrick Bergin as Jack Conealy, a fellow from New York who has moved out to a small Nevada town so he can open a video store - so yes, he has some shadiness in his past that he's running away from. He meets Vera Blanchard (Kelly Preston) when they have a minor fender bender at an empty gas station in the middle of nowhere. She's at fault for the accident, but she gets Jack to call her father Mr. Cody (Kevin Tighe), who asks him to tell his insurance company that he was in the vehicle instead of Vera. Jack agrees... so Vera rewards him with a one night stand at a nearby hotel. Unfortunately for Jack, that's not the last time he'll see Vera. Turns out that she and Mr. Cody are residents of the same town he has just moved to, and they're up to some shadiness of their own. That's why they wanted Jack to lie about who was driving the car.

With a determined insurance fraud investigator played by Matt Craven snooping around, the authorities being antagonistic, and his association with Vera and Mr. Cody making him seem very suspicious, Jack feels the world closing in on him. It could be that the only person he can trust is his pal Melissa (Jennifer Tilly) - who has such a crush on Jack that she quits her job at a hair salon (where her co-worker is played by Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan's Sharlene Martin) and takes a job at the video store for little pay, even though she barely knows the guy.

Double Cross is a solid thriller that was pretty well crafted. The story takes twists and turns that keep it intriguing throughout, even if some aspects of it are quite predictable for anyone who has watched enough of this sort of movie. The lead character is the least interesting person in the movie; Bergin does fine as Jack, but the guy is bland. The supporting actors get better roles to work with; Preston is a great femme fatale, Craven is equally threatening and skeezy, Tighe is always terrific as a creep, and Tilly is fun to watch as Melissa.

This is a good one to seek out, as not only does it give you an enjoyable thriller to watch, it also serves as a time machine to the early '90s for 91 minutes.

ATTACK OF THE UNKNOWN (2020)

An alien invasion sci-fi/horror/action flick, Attack of the Unknown didn't have a budget anywhere near that of the typical blockbuster, but I admire the fact that it never lets that hold it back from acting like it's a blockbuster. The first half of this movie plays out on an impressive scale and includes a big shootout, massive explosions, and a huge alien ship hovering over Los Angeles. The muzzle flares on the guns during the shootout were clearly added in post and the CG explosions aren't always convincing (though sometimes they are), but that didn't stop the movie from featuring a lengthy shootout and multiple explosions. Written (from a story crafted by producers Michael and Sonny Mahal) and directed by Brandon Slagle, the film also boasts some slick cinematography courtesy of Michael Su that's in line with its blockbuster ambitions.

Viewers who don't take note of the alien FX credit in the title sequence may be caught off guard when the alien action kicks in, as the film starts off looking like it's going to be a rather straightforward and down-to-earth, but action-packed, crime thriller. We're introduced to a SWAT team just as they're about to bust up a meeting between the heads of some major crime syndicates, the most prominent criminal of the bunch being a guy called Hades, played by Robert LaSardo. Hades is taken into custody, and anyone could predict that the SWAT team will be running into him again before the movie is over, but the twist here is that there are aliens in the mix the next time their paths cross.

Richard Grieco plays SWAT team member Vernon, and does a good job of playing a beaten down hero who keeps getting blindsided with bad news. Within the span of two days he gets served with divorce papers, participates in a gun battle, gets diagnosed with blood cancer, then has to face an alien invasion. There are several members of the SWAT team that end up fighting aliens, some notable characters among them including Jolene Andersen as Hannah, Paul Gunn as Kai, and Douglas Tait - who I'll always primarily think of as Jason Voorhees, since he was the one who carried Freddy's head out of the lake at the end of Freddy vs. Jason - as Maddox, who gets to deliver cinema's most-used line, "Let's get out of here," on several occasions. He even says it twice in one scene.

After some moments that are reminiscent of Independence Day when the alien ships first move in, Attack of the Unknown settles down into a more contained story that brings to mind Assault on Precinct 13 in its second half. The SWAT team is tasked with transferring Hades to a different jail, and before they can get him back into a cell the aliens are messing up L.A. big time - and when the SWAT team and Hades get inside the police department, aliens infiltrate the building in a quest for human blood.

The only hint (other than the FX credit) in the first 20 minutes that this is going to involve aliens comes in artwork drawn by Hades' young son. We'll find out that Hades, like the local girl in Predator, has prior knowledge of these space invaders. Hades was raised on the story of a time, in the days of his great-great grandfather, when blood-harvesting aliens attacked a group of settlers, and we even get to see a flashback to this attack, which allows Tara Reid to make a cameo in old timey clothing.

The concept of blood-harvesting aliens is a cool one, and I might have liked it even better if it had been brought to the screen in a film where the aliens took a more subtle, scarier approach to the harvest, without the Independence Day lead-in. Designed by Vincent J. Guastini, the aliens also look pretty awesome, with their ugly mugs and bulbous heads, and I was left wanting to see them pick off victims in something smaller and darker.

Attack of the Unknown is a decent action movie, and there were elements to it that I really liked. My main issue with it is the running time, as I felt that some dead air could have been whittled out of its 103 minutes. The action in the police department in the second half could have moved along a bit quicker. There were times when the movie started to drag for me, it just felt like it was going on and on. That took my overall enjoyment down a couple notches.

The review of Attack of the Unknown originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com

LITTLE DARLINGS (1980)

If not handled correctly, the 1980 coming-of-age film Little Darlings could have come off as being incredibly sleazy and inappropriate. The story takes place at an all-girls summer camp where two particular campers in their mid-teens, Tatum O'Neal as rich girl Ferris and Kristy McNichol as the lower class Angel, agree to compete against each other in a contest to see which one can lose their virginity first. Thankfully, while the characters do some inappropriate things, the film was handled as tastefully as possible - and it helps that the script was written by two women, Kimi Peck and Dalene Young, who clearly did not intend this to be an exploitation film. And director Ronald F. Maxwell didn't bring the story to the screen as an exploitation film. Despite the basic plot, the film has a sort of sweet, heartwarming tone.

While their fellow campers make bets on who they think will be the first to have sex, Ferris and Angel pursue their potential lovers - Ferris picks adult counselor Callahan (Armand Assante), with her behavior and comments toward him being the most inappropriate part of the movie, while Angel sets her sights on a more age appropriate potential lover, a teen named Randy (Matt Dillon) who's staying at the nearby all-boys camp. Through everything that happens, the film clearly cares about its characters and keeps things respectable, and there is a sense that Peck, Young, and Maxwell were striving for realism.

Although I did find it hard to believe that the girls could steal one of the camp buses for a trip to town (to steal a condom dispenser from a public restroom) without suffering any consequences, or even being caught.

As a Friday the 13th fan, I got some extra enjoyment from the fact that this movie was shot at the same camp that Jason Voorhees stalked and slashed his way through in Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI six years later. I watched the movie with blog contributor Priscilla and she recognized the camp immediately. It also put a smile on my face when - for some reason - the music playing on a radio the campers are listening to is the theme from The Warriors.

O'Neal, McNichol, Assante, and Dillon all did well in their roles, with Krista Errickson also turning in a memorable performance as Cinder, a child actress whose parents have sent her to camp because she's already engaged and they're hoping her time away will cool off her relationship. It seems to work, since her eye wanders to other guys during the summer. It's also interesting to see a young Cynthia Nixon in the role of a hippie camper called Sunshine.

Little Darlings is a well-made, surprisingly good movie that's definitely worth checking out. It still works, forty years after its initial release.