Worth Mentioning - Think You're Quick Enough?

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. 

Some action, some comedy, some horror, some Raimi.

STUBER (2019)

Guardians of the Galaxy co-stars Dave Bautista and Karen Gillan are reunited in director Michael Dowse's Stuber as LAPD detectives Vic Manning and Sara Morris, who are out to bust drug runner Oka Tedjo... and unfortunately, since Tedjo is played by Iko Uwais of The Raid and The Night Comes for Us, Morris doesn't survive the film's opening sequence and the villain gets away.

Six months later, Manning has a shot at bringing Tedjo to justice - but he happens to get a major lead on the same day he has gotten LASIK surgery to improve the short-sightedness that hindered him on the night Tedjo killed Morris. Unable to drive himself around Los Angeles, Manning has to hire an Uber driver to take him from place to place, chasing down information on Tedjo and getting into violent confrontations. Uber driver Stu Prasad (Kumail Nanjiani) is a nebbishy fellow who desperately wants to end his time with Manning so he can hook up with the friend he has a huge crush on, Betty Gilpin as Becca.

So there we have the makings of a very entertaining, fast-paced, and amusing action comedy, as the intense Manning bashes his way through the situation, despite not being able to see very well, while Stu freaks out and delivers a steady stream of humorous lines. There are a ton of "odd couple" action flicks like this (Dowse has even made another one, Coffee & Kareem), and sometimes spending 90 minutes taking in this sort of mindless fun is exactly what you need to get through the day.

Scripted by Die Hart creator Tripper Clancy, Stuber is pleasantly amusing throughout, and there are moments where it achieves hilarity. For me, the best laughs came when Manning and Stu stop by the store Stu works at when he's not driving for his money, and when Stu tries to re-enact the ending of Jaws with some bad guys.

CHILLER (1985)

The third time was not the charm when it came to TV movies directed by Wes Craven. His first TV movie, Summer of Fear, had actually been quite good. Invitation to Hell, his second TV movie, wasn't on that same level, but it still had its charms that made it worth watching. Unfortunately, his third TV movie, Chiller, turned out to be a bit of a slog to sit through. This is especially disappointing because it stars Michael Beck, who was so cool in The Warriors that I wish he had a better career overall.

Scripted by J.D. Feigelson, who wrote the much better TV movie Dark Night of the Scarecrow earlier in the '80s, Chiller casts Beck in the role of Miles Creighton, a wealthy young man who was cryogenically frozen when he was dying of cancer ten years earlier. Miles returns to the land of the living when his cryogenic chamber fails, so he has to be thawed out and given a life-saving surgery that wasn't possible a decade earlier. Problem is, he's not the same person he used to be, as Chiller asks the question, "What if cryogenically frozen people return without their souls?" After dragging Miles's resurrection out forever - 32 minutes have gone by before Miles is conscious and able to speak - Chiller starts to give the answer to the question, which is that "They would act like total jerks."

Miles displays no empathy for or emotional connection to anyone in his life, he kills his beloved dog because it can sense there's something off about him, he starts running his family's company in a ruthless manner. He gets up to some bad stuff, but it's not very interesting to watch. Meanwhile, characters played by Beatrice Straight, Paul Sorvino, and Jill Schoelen have to figure out how to handle living with this new Miles.

Chiller didn't work for me very well, the pace was too slow and the story too dull for my liking. I would only recommend this one to fans who want to see everything Craven ever made.

MOONSTALKER (1989)

Written and directed by Michael S. O'Rourke, Moonstalker was a late addition to the '80s slasher boom, but if you're a slasher fan who hasn't heard of or seen this one before, you shouldn't feel too bad about missing it. This isn't the best representative of the sub-genre, this is the kind of movie you eventually stumble across when you're running low on '80s slashers and desperately searching for more.

The story begins with a family four struggling to get any enjoyment out of their miserably cold camping vacation. Why the dad thought it'd be fun to park their camper amid drifts of snow is beyond me. They get company in their camping spot when Pop (Tom Hamil) shows up, pulling a camper of his own behind his car. Pop seems like a nice guy, and while they sit around the campfire he tells them a story about his devoted son Bernie. Sadly, that story ends with Bernie having a mental breakdown.

Pop seems like a nice old man and it looked like he bonded with the family, but that's not the case. He has Bernie (Blake Gibbons) straitjacketed and chained inside his camper, and when night falls he sets Bernie loose to murder the family. Bernie will gladly do this, he has a vendetta again people who camp, and Pop will benefit because he'll be able to steal the microwave the family has in their camper.

Pop never gets to enjoy that microwave, because he drops dead of a heart attack while his son is going after the family members. That means Bernie is now free, on his own in the wilderness... and there happens to be more campers nearby, a group of young adults who have gathered together to receive some wilderness training. They conduct themselves like young adults in slasher movies usually do, and Bernie sets out to kill them one-by-one. It's pretty standard stuff, and there's really nothing about this movie that makes it stand out from the slasher crowd. It would have been more memorable if Bernie had kept his straitjacket and mask on for the duration, but instead he ditches that get-up as soon as he's away from his dad and replaces it with regular clothes. So then there's nothing interesting about his appearance. The characters aren't very interesting, either, aside from the "female Rambo" approach a woman takes to seducing the wilderness training instructor.

If you love slasher movies, you'll probably get some entertainment out of watching Moonstalker. I wouldn't recommend this to a casual slasher fan, though. This is the type of movie you get around to when you've already watched a ton of movies of this type and you're desperate for more.

THE QUICK AND THE DEAD (1995)

Sam Raimi has worked in a variety of genres over the course of his career. Horror, superhero action, thriller, drama, comedy, sports, family friendly adventure, he packed it all in there... and the movie of his that draws me in the least of everything he has ever done is one that sounds like it should be a winner without question. In 1995, Raimi tried his hand at directing a Western with The Quick and the Dead, a film with a staggering cast: Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman, Russell Crowe, Leonardo DiCaprio, Lance Henriksen, Gary Sinise, Tobin Bell, Roberts Blossom, Kevin Conway, Keith David, Pat Hingle, Mark Boone Junior, Woody Strode, etc. And yet I've always found this film to be a struggle to sit through.

The most interesting thing about The Quick and the Dead to me is that Raimi was hired at the suggestion of Stone, because she had been impressed by his work on Army of Darkness. The thought of Stone watching Army of Darkness and thinking to herself "I need to work with that director" is pretty awesome.

Scripted by Simon Moore, the film stars Stone as The Lady, intended to be a tribute to Clint Eastwood's The Man with No Name from Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. She's introduced as she rides into the town of Redemption, which is run by Hackman's John Herod, who collects fifty cents of every dollar earned there. Herod's idea of a good time is to host a quick draw competition where participants will have to compete in one-on-one gun drawing duels - resulting in either surrender or death - until the last person standing is awarded the prize of $123,000. The Lady takes part in the contest, as do the characters played by most of the actors previously mentioned. 

It should be a lot of fun to watch this cast draw guns on each other and shoot at each other, but for some reason it's... not. Despite Raimi's stylistic flourishes, and he certainly did direct the hell out of this thing, it ends up feeling dull and hollow. Raimi himself has said this movie "didn't quite work", and that's a good way to put it. Somehow it didn't turn out to be as entertaining as it should be. Somehow the characters were so uninteresting that not even this cast could make them worth paying attention to. Raimi felt that the issue came down to the script, that it needed a rewrite. John Sayles did do a polish, but his work was thrown out because it would have resulted in a 150 minute movie (the finished film is 105 minutes). Joss Whedon was also brought in to help with the ending, but that's the only part of the film he worked on. So apparently an underwhelming script was brought to the screen, resulting in an underwhelming movie.

But it's still cool that Sam Raimi made a Western. And that Sharon Stone enjoyed Army of Darkness.