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.
The reviews of Boss Level and The Devil Below originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
BOSS LEVEL (2020)
Nine years have passed since director Joe Carnahan first revealed that he was planning to make a film he described as "Groundhog Day as an action movie", a project that was titled Continue at the time. Carnahan was hoping that the film would star Frank Grillo, who he had just worked with on The Grey, but in those early days he apparently ran into some resistance, since Grillo wasn't high profile enough. With roles in things like two Captain America movies, Avengers: Endgame, and two Purge movies, Grillo's star has been rising steadily over the years, so now we have Continue with Grillo in the lead, just like Carnahan wanted, except now it's called Boss Level.
Grillo plays ex-Delta Force soldier Roy Pulver, who has found himself stuck in a time loop, much like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day or Jessica Rothe in Happy Death Day or Andy Samberg in Palm Springs. In Roy's case, he's being forced to relive a day in which he is, for no apparent reason, being hunted through the city by a whole bunch of oddball assassins (shades of Carnahan's Smokin' Aces there). The attacks begin as soon as Roy opens his eyes to see man swinging a machete at him. Within seconds, a helicopter is hovering outside his window so the gunner can use a minigun to destroy his apartment. Moving through the day, Roy will encounter two women who chase him down in a car, German twins (one of them Quinton 'Rampage' Jackson from Carnahan's The A-Team), a guy whose method of murder is to drag people behind his truck, a little person who likes to plant bombs, and a sword-wielding woman who proudly lets everyone know her name is Guan Yin (played by Selina Lo).
Carnahan packed a whole lot of movie into Boss Level's 100 minutes. Roy has to live through this insane, action-packed day over two hundred times, trying to figure out how to play it perfectly so that hopefully he'll be able to escape the loop. He dies over two hundred times, and every time he dies he wakes up with that machete coming toward his head all over again. Since we see Roy go through the day again and again, that means there are a whole lot of fun action sequences to see in here... but Carnahan isn't interested in just throwing action and crazy visuals at us. Not only does Boss Level have a great sense of humor in the midst of all of this, it also has a ton of heart.
When he's not dodging bullets and bombs, Roy steals the chance to spend some heartwarming quality time with his young son Joe (played by Grillo's own son Rio), a kid he hasn't known because he was always away on Delta Force missions. Joe's mother is scientist Jemma Wells (Naomi Watts), who has been working on a mysterious project called The Osiris Spindle at a company called Dynow. Clearly the situation Roy is in has something to do with Jemma's work, but what is it? Jemma can't tell him, because she has been murdered by her boss - Mel Gibson as Colonel Clive Ventor.
Gibson doesn't have a whole lot of screen time in Boss Level, but Carnahan certainly didn't waste the time he did have with the action icon. Gibson, who plays Ventor as an arrogant dirtbag, was given a couple monologues to deliver, and he made a meal of them; the one about an experience he had in Burma in 1979 is especially fascinating. Anyone expecting an epic showdown between Grillo and Gibson should temper those expectations, the biggest fights are between Grillo and different characters, but Gibson makes for a terrific villain even if he's only directly involved with a little bit of the action.
Another action icon in the cast is Michelle Yeoh, who has a very small role as a sword fighter that Roy becomes acquainted with along the way. It's kind of surprising that Yeoh has such a small role, but it's cool to see her in this nonetheless. "Day After Day" by Badfinger is playing during much of the time Grillo and Yeoh have together, one example of the awesome soundtrack Carnahan assembled for this movie. The film also features songs from the likes of Boston, Lynyrd Skynyrd, The Chambers Brothers, Roy Orbison, The Gap Band, and Black Flag, among others.
Boss Level is a really fun movie, a treat for action fans that's filled with chases, gunfire, explosions, decapitations, laughs, touching moments, strong performances, excellent music, and general mayhem. This is the sort of movie I wish I could have watched with my late father, who I watched many a Mel Gibson action movie with over the years. Carnahan and Grillo put so much heart into this movie, including an ending dedication to Grillo's late mother, that it feels right to end this review on that sort of wistful note.
THE DEVIL BELOW (2021)
Nine years after making his feature directorial debut with Chernobyl Diaries, a creature feature about people being attacked by mutants in an abandoned town near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Brad Parker has directed a new film called The Devil Below, which is about people being attacked by strange creatures in an abandoned Appalachian mining town. Parker seems to be drawn to a certain kind of subject, but unfortunately The Devil Below doesn't make for a very good viewing experience.
The story goes back a few decades, to a time when the coal mines beneath the town of Shookum Hills caught fire, releasing poisonous gases and forcing the locals to abandon the town completely. At least, that's the official story. One theory is that Shookum Hills was abandoned after an attempt to replicate the "Well to Hell" in Russia; legend has it that a Russian team drilled a hole eight miles deep and heard the screams of the damned emanating from within. Maybe there's a hole that goes all the way to Hell in Shookum Hills, too. And maybe something horrible has emerged from it... A group of researchers are determined to find out for sure, and since Shookum Hills can't even be found on the map at this point, they hire wilderness tracker Arianne (Alicia Sanz) to help them locate the place.
A bunch of unlucky people being stalked by monsters from Hell in an abandoned mining town sounds like a cool set-up for a horror movie, but The Devil Below never lives up to its potential. There are a few good moments involving creatures that look kind of goofy, especially in a scene where we see one rowing a raft, but for the most part the attempts at creating suspense only succeed in being dull. It doesn't help that there are no interesting characters here for us to latch on to; viewers will be hard pressed to care about any one of the people who venture into Shookum Hills. Not even Will Patton, who shows up as a former Shookum Hills resident with knowledge of what's going on there, can manage to stir up interest or sympathy.
Nearly half of The Devil Below's running time has gone by, with very little going on, by the time Arianne and her crew have their first encounter with the creatures that dwell below Shookum Hills, but that doesn't open the door to an action-packed second half. The film feels like it's moving at a crawl throughout, seeming to last longer than it is.
Parker assembled a good cast for his movie, in addition to the actors mentioned above there's also Adan Canto, Zach Avery, Chinaza Uche, Jonathan Sadowski, Jesse LaTourette, and Kevin Wayne, but the screenplay by Stefan Jaworski and Eric Scherbarth just doesn't give them enough to work with, and the execution of the material is lacking. It's astounding that a film in which creatures are dispatched with explosions on multiple occasions can be this tedious.
The Devil Below is only recommended if you're experiencing a serious case of "new creature feature" desperation.
I'M DANGEROUS TONIGHT (1990)
Of all the filmmakers who are ranked among the all-time great "masters of horror", Tobe Hooper may have the most credits that are overlooked. His films The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Poltergeist, The Funhouse, Eaten Alive, and Lifeforce get varying degrees of attention, and some of his movies are known for how bad they are, but he also has some serviceable movies to his name that hardly ever get mentioned. Like his remake of The Toolbox Murders. His 1990 TV movie I'm Dangerous Tonight is another one that rarely gets referenced, even though it gave Hooper the chance to work with Madchen Amick, Anthony Hopkins, and Dee Wallace all at once, and despite the fact that it provides a "perfectly fine" viewing experience.
Scripted by Bruce Lansbury and Philip John Taylor from a short story by Cornell Woolrich, the film begins with an ancient Aztec sacrificial altar being delivered to college professor Jonas Wilson (William Berger), who is hyped to be receiving something that 20,000 people used to get sacrificed on every year. Unfortunately, when Wilson puts on the red cloak that was shut inside the altar, he turns into a homicidal maniac and soon ends up dead himself.
Then we're introduced to the film's heroine Amy, played by Amick. Amy is having a rough time in her life, and most of the people around her treat her like a doormat - which she goes along with, doing anything anyone asks her to do, no matter how inconvenient it is for her. She recently lost her parents, and since they didn't have wills written up it's not looking like Amy is going to get much of an inheritance. She lives with her aunt Martha (Mary Frann) and cousin Gloria (Daisy Hall), has to take care of her grandmother (Natalie Schafer), and her classmate Eddie (Corey Parker) has put the entire responsibility of a project they're both supposed to be working on onto her shoulders. That's because Eddie has been cast in a play, which Amy gets roped into acquiring props for. Looking for props at Wilson's estate sale, Amy gets her hands on that red cloak.
From that point, the cloak passes from character to character, and we learn that the garment acts as an "amplifier" for what's within the person wearing it. If there's evil in the person, the cloak will draw it out. It will have a lesser influence on someone who's inherently good, but it can still cause changes in them. For example, if they're sexually repressed, the cloak will make them promiscuous. As the film goes on, the cloak is repurposed into a dress that is worn in different scenes by Amy, Gloria, and a character played by Dee Wallace.
There are murders and violent attacks, and a detective played by R. Lee Ermey investigates the crimes while Amy's teacher Professor Buchanan (Anthony Perkins) lurks around and provides exposition.
Hooper's involvement and the cast he assembled makes I'm Dangerous Tonight enough of a curiosity to be worth checking out, but once the names of these people have lured you in the movie actually turns out to be a decent thriller. It has good sequences of stalk and slash suspense, and a car chase that I wasn't expecting at all. Hooper made better movies, he made worse ones. I'm Dangerous Tonight lands right in the middle, and deserves to be seen by more genre fans.
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