From The Parallax Review Vaults / The Movie Defender: Broken Lizard’s Club Dread (2004)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of Broken Lizard’s Club Dread was for the “Movie Defender” column of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

If you’ve ever stumbled across a notorious critical and commercial bomb on cable and thought, Hey, this isn’t so bad, this is the column for you. Each month, we’ll examine a new failed film that’s worth a second look.

It’s so dreadful you want to bash its disagreeably unfunny characters with a club. — David Germain, Associated Press

Broken Lizard’s Club Dread, a horror spoof set on a tropical island, is about as funny as malaria. — Desson Thomson, Washington Post

…the film lays out its standard wares with the weariness of an overworked street vendor: a topless female here, a scatological gag there, a hip movie reference somewhere else. — Dave Kehr, New York Times

The naïveté with which the Broken Lizard comedy troupe approached Club Dread, the followup to their surprise sleeper hit Super Troopers, is almost endearing. Apparently unaware that audiences and critics expected more of the same good-natured hijinks of that film, they went in a completely different direction. Not only did they choose to do a film that was neither a straight slasher film nor a spoof, each member of the troupe changed their personas to play a character that was a complete 180-degree turn from their characters in Super Troopers. The result was a film that was funny without going for the obvious jokes that the Scary Movie franchise had already poached numerous times over. But critics bashed its straight-faced approach to comedy and audiences stayed away in droves, turned off by bad word-of-mouth that the film was just as much a horror film as it was a comedy.

The film is set on Pleasure Island, a resort near Costa Rica owned by Coconut Pete (Bill Paxton). Pete is a burned-out, Jimmy Buffet-style rock star from the ’70s whose music glorified drug use, booze, and a relaxed island lifestyle. Cashing in on his famously hedonistic lifestyle (one of the better recurring gags in the film are his album and song titles like “Seas Shanties and Wet Panties”), Pete has created a resort where people can come to get drunk, laid, and stoned with no one to judge them.

Operating as the staff are the members of the Broken Lizard troupe. Lars (Kevin Heffernan) is the new masseur, a rabid Coconut Pete fan who is so skilled with his hands he can make people urinate by touching them with one finger. Sam (Erik Stolhanske), is the “fun police” — a glorified activities director who walks around with a super-soaker filled with tequila. Putman (Jay Chandrasekhar) is a dweeby tennis instructor with a forced British accent and ridiculous dreadlocks. Dave (Paul Soter) is the DJ, which means he’s also in charge of the drug supply for the island. Juan (Steve Lemme) is the perpetually shirtless diving instructor who butchers the English language with his inability to pronounce a soft G.

In addition to the usual suspects are Jenny (Brittany Daniel), the fitness instructor, and Yu (Lindsay Price), whose job is ill-defined, marking her as one of the potential early victims when a killer, dressed in a poncho and wearing an ancient Mayan mask, starts hacking up background staff members with a machete. Or could Yu be not a victim, but the killer?

That’s the kind of movie that Club Dread is. It understands the clichés of the slasher genre, acknowledges them in a manner that’s less-than-winking, and sometimes follows through on them, while veering wildly from the norm in other instances. While the film is more concerned with mining the territory for comedy, it is still an effective game of whodunit, with the answer actually surprising me, but leaving me satisfied because the script and direction never cheats — something many straight slasher flicks can’t claim.

Interestingly, though the film does base much of its humor in slasher stereotypes, it refreshingly draws just as many laughs from character moments. A scary campfire story that doubles as exposition finds an unexpected visual punchline with the idiotic Putman stealing Dave’s thunder. Sam deciding to take the “fun” out of his fun police title and become the face of law and order during the murders, is far funnier than it should be. Pete’s simmering resentment towards his fans that is just barely held down by his constant inebriation finds him lashing out at a girl who asks him to sing “Margaritaville.” In one of the best lines in the film, he refers to Jimmy Buffet as a “Son of a son of a bitch!”

Obviously, the comedy is helped along by the fact that the troupe has great chemistry together and write to their personalities. But the supporting cast is full of ringers that know how to sell a joke. Paxton predictably mugs for the camera as the over-the-top Pete, but his paranoia as the film becomes increasingly violent is played seriously. Daniel brings a knowing smirk to the promiscuous Jenny that makes her thankless straight-woman role more entertaining than it should be. Between Club Dread and her recurring role as a transsexual on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, I really don’t understand why she doesn’t get more comedic work. Even Jordan Ladd, M.C. Gainey, and Samm Levine score big laughs as potential suspects in minimum screen time.

But beyond just functioning as joke delivery vessels, the Broken Lizard members show a surprising amount of versatility when compared to what they did in Super Troopers. In that film, with the exception of Heffernan’s over-the-top turn as the precinct jerk, all the members of the troupe shared the same laid-back, jovial personality. In Club Dread, they each create completely different characters with their own personalities. Even more impressive is the fact that, except for Chandrasekhar’s ridiculous Putman, each actor plays their character as fully-formed human beings. Even Lemme’s potentially offensive Latino stereotype comes across as a sweet, decent guy who just so happens to harbor some dark secrets about his past. Surprisingly, Heffernan displays a leading-man quality that belies his doughy physique and silly introduction. This ability to play their characters straight while still garnering laughs lends the film a surprising amount of verisimilitude.

I think this focus on creating unique, individual characters speaks to the troupe’s desire to create a “real” movie, and not just another slasher spoof. Unfortunately, coming after the end of the Scream trilogy and in the middle of the execrable Scary Movie series, they were late to the party. Even worse, they refused to play the genre trappings for the most obvious jokes. Whether critics and audiences went into the film expecting signs to be held up announcing where the jokes were and what they were gently spoofing, or the terrible marketing, Club Dread tanked. It’s a true shame because it’s funnier than all the Scary Movies put together (not to damn the film with faint praise) and a more effective skewering of genre expectations than the Scream sequels. It’s a film that never fails to entertain, something that’s definitely worth rediscovering.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults / The Movie Defender: I Know Who Killed Me (2007)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of I Know Who Killed Me was for the “Movie Defender” column of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

If you’ve ever stumbled across a notorious critical and commercial bomb on cable and thought, Hey, this isn’t so bad, this is the column for you. Each month, we’ll examine a new failed film that’s worth a second look.

…Sleazy, inept and worthless piece of torture porn… — Lou Lumenick, New York Post

…Place any other actress in the part and it’s just another straight-to-DVD release — Christy Lemire, Associated Press

Many will speculate about Lohan’s state of mind in agreeing to appear in this claptrap horror piece… — Steve Davis, Austin Chronicle

It’s incredibly easy to see the flaws in a movie like I Know Who Killed Me. The script by Jeff Hammond is ludicrous, riddled with plot holes, bad dialogue and leaden attempts at psychological trickery. The lead performance by Lindsay Lohan in a dual role is shaky at best, leading to some bad line readings that only highlight the worst of the inept dialogue. But what is interesting to me about reviews of the film is that not only did critics spend most of their time wagging their fingers in misplaced fits of moral outrage at Lohan’s off-screen behavior, they turned a blind eye to the fact that, in the middle of a summer blockbuster season, a studio film made an honest attempt to stand out from the crowd. While it’s easy to consider it an overall failure, the over-the-top, anything-goes tone the film achieves puts it in the good company of so trashy they’re entertaining films like Wild Things and Basic Instinct. Don’t get me wrong — the film is not a misunderstood classic, but there’s plenty about it to recommend if you can look past the obvious flaws.

The plot is simple. A serial killer is kidnapping and killing teenage girls by severing their limbs. Aubrey (Lohan), the perfect teenage daughter every parent wishes for, goes missing. Days later, she turns up, barely alive and minus a few limbs. But the twist comes when she claims her name is Dakota, a streetwise stripper who wants nothing to do with Aubrey’s parents or the police. Eventually, Dakota takes it upon herself to solve the killings and has a showdown with the most obvious choice for a serial killer in cinematic history. Like I said, simple.

If it sounds like I’m mocking a film that I’m supposed to be defending, that’s because the film does invite its share of legitimate criticism. Simply put, sometimes its attempts at sincerity come across as pure cheese. But the filmmakers’ willingness to look silly and blur the line between playing like an honest thriller and a straight-faced spoof makes it a memorable film. Granted, there are parts of the film I’d like to forget. Chief among those would be Lohan’s clunky portrayal of the brainy, goody two-shoes Aubrey. Even if her performance as Dakota was only marginally better, at the very least, her whiskey-and-cigarettes voice was a better fit for a world-weary stripper who just woke up from a coma, missing a leg. But for every cringe-worthy moment, director Chris Sivertson pulls off an audacious trick that shouldn’t work, but does, and all is forgiven.

Speaking of Sivertson, let’s talk about what he brings to the film. Despite his inexperience when it came to studio productions (I Know Who Killed Me was his first studio film after his indie debut, The Lost), Sivertson attacked the dog of a script he was given as though he were directing a brilliant epic that shone a new light on the human condition. Granted, his enthusiasm was sorely misplaced, but his direction — best described as what would happen if a Dario Argento film geek on meth were given a modest budget and a long-lost Joe Eszterhas script — distracts from the ridiculousness of the story and patches over some of Lohan’s less-inspired acting moments. These same stylistic choices also lend the film a strange Grimm’s fairy-tale quality that helps gloss over some of the more obvious plot holes.

The downside of Sivertson’s attempts to pull off an Argento-inspired thriller is two-fold. First, when you direct with such flashiness, the odds are that the occasional visual flourish will not work and bring the movie to a crashing halt. Such was the case with Sivertson’s overloading on red and blue filters, which represent the dual nature of Aubrey and Dakota in the least subtle possible way. The second problem is that his extreme style, even when it does work, pushes the film into territory that goes beyond what critics and mainstream audiences were willing to accept. While he succeeded in creating a unique film out of what was supposed to be a simple exploitation movie, he also set the movie up for failure. If critics weren’t already determined to hate the film because of Lohan’s involvement, the graphic violence, leering sexuality of the strip club sequences and overly stylized visuals would have pushed them in that direction.

I Know Who Killed Me is the type of film that should have a long life on DVD and cable, gathering a cult following. As time goes on, its flaws look less damning and its strengths shine through. Sadly, the one flawed aspect it may never overcome is Lohan’s presence. It’s not that she is terrible. She just lacks the star power or serious acting chops to deliver the silly dialogue she is given. Even with Sivertson propping her up with a solid supporting cast that includes Neal McDonough, Gregory Itzin, Julia Ormond, and Brian Geraghty, she still fails when it comes to carrying her share of the load.

The prevailing view is that I Know Who Killed Me will be remembered as the final deathblow to a once promising performer’s career. It would be a shame if that turned out to be the case. Even if it’s leading lady seems intent on proving that she may not deserve a second chance, the film deserves a better fate.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults / The Movie Defender: Hudson Hawk (1991)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of Hudson Hawk was for the “Movie Defender” column of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

If you’ve ever stumbled across a notorious critical and commercial bomb on cable and thought, Hey, this isn’t so bad, this is the column for you. Each month, we’ll examine a new failed film that’s worth a second look.

Right up front, let me get this out of the way: Hudson Hawk is not a good movie. In fact, it’s a spectacularly stupid movie featuring a mess of a story riddled with plot holes and silly one-liners. Like many of the films we will feature on The Movie Defender, it’s easy to understand why critics would beat up on the film. But Hudson Hawk is not an attempt to create high art. It’s a Joel Silver production starring Bruce Willis. The only thing that matters when we are talking about a film of that pedigree is the answer to the question: Is it entertaining? And it is with this quality that the film redeems itself, clocking in a surprisingly high number of laughs per minute.

It’s certainly entertaining to imagine the conversation that led to Hudson Hawk becoming a reality. I like to believe it went something like this:

Note: The following dialogue exchange was written with D.B. Bates, the Editor-In-Chief of The Parallax Review.

INT. MEGA-PRODUCER JOEL SILVER’S OFFICE – DAY

Large. Danish modern décor. Posters for Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, and Road House adorn the walls. JOEL SILVER sits at a huge oak desk, silhouetted against the smoggy Los Angeles sky visible through the large windows behind him. He talks on the phone, staring wistfully at a Scarface-esque mound of cocaine on his blotter.

SILVER

…yeah, Jerry, it’ll be great. We’re gonna call it The Adventures of Ford Fairlane.

(beat)

What do you mean “creatively bankrupt”? That’s rich, coming from Mr. Beverly Hills Cop II. How many times are people gonna fall for that banana-in-the-tailpipe —

BRUCE WILLIS bursts into the office, a bundle of manic energy. He plays an uptempo whitebread blues song on a harmonica as he strides across the office.

SILVER

I gotta go, Jer.

WILLIS

Joel! Hey, how ya doin’, buddy?

SILVER

Bruce, my golden boy of the moment! What can I do for you? Do you need some money? Blow? Hookers?

WILLIS

No, no. It’s not what you can do for me, it’s what I can do for you.

Silver’s face falls as he prepares himself for the worst. Just as quickly, he puts a happy face back on and feigns ignorance.

SILVER

I don’t think I follow.

WILLIS

I’m here to pitch you a story — you know what? Not just a story. It’s the greatest story ever told.

SILVER

You wanna remake the Jesus picture?

WILLIS

No. Even better. I wanna tell the story of Hudson Hawk.

SILVER

Hudson who?

WILLIS

Hudson Hawk. The greatest cat burglar/safe-cracker/lady’s man to ever live.

Silver covers his mouth with his hand, trying to muffle the audible groan that escapes from his lips.

SILVER

Is he a real guy?

WILLIS

Nah, I just made him up. Great name, huh?

SILVER

Yeah, terrific. Very alliterative.

WILLIS

No, he can read.

SILVER

That’s not what I — You know what, why don’t you tell me more about the story?

WILLIS

Well, you know, I’d play a wisecracking thief with a heart of gold and then we can just wing it.

SILVER

Wing it?

WILLIS

Yeah, you know, I can just ad lib all of my lines. I did that a lot for Look Who’s Talking.

SILVER

Right, the talking baby movie. You know, I’ve been meaning to have a talk with you about taking the long view of things. At least where your career is concerned.

Caught up in the momentum of pitching his story, Willis ignores Silver and starts pacing the room as he brainstorms.

WILLIS

But I’ll need a sidekick, someone to feed me set-ups for the hilarious zingers I will undoubtedly come up with on the spot.

SILVER

Right, right. A straight man. I think Carl Weathers is available.

WILLIS

No, I was thinkin’ more along the lines of Danny Aiello.

SILVER

The middle-aged Italian guy from Do the Right Thing?

WILLIS

Yeah, I think he’d be perfect.

SILVER

Has he ever done comedy?

WILLIS

It doesn’t matter. I’m gonna be bringing the laughs and the thrills.

SILVER

Gee, I don’t know, Bruce. That’s a lot for you to take on.

Willis gets a steely glint in his eye.

WILLIS

Joel, just out of curiosity, how much did the two Die Hard movies take in?

SILVER

Around 275 million?

WILLIS

$380,799,050 worldwide.

SILVER

Can you start preproduction tomorrow?

Without a doubt, this film was Willis’s ego run rampant. At the time of its production, he was arguably the biggest box office draw in America, if not the world. So it’s not surprising that Silver would toss him a bone, agreeing to help make his silly comedy/heist/musical a reality. But in probably the most notorious case of a film skyrocketing over its initial budget since Heaven’s Gate managed to all but sink United Artists, Willis’s vision of the film being shot on location in Italy, with explosions worthy of a Joel Silver production, pushed what should have been a comedy budgeted at a modest $20-$30 million into a then astronomical $65 million plus.

In a shrewd move, Silver brought on Michael Lehmann as director. Hot off his success with the brilliant black comedy Heathers, Lehmann seemed poised to bring the perfect mix of edginess and cartoon-hijinks to wrangle Willis’s pet project to the screen. But even with his Heathers writer, Daniel Waters, taking on co-scripting duties, the film turned out to be not much more than Willis’s sense of humor and ego run rampant over two continents.

The plot is impossible to recount in less than a thousand words, so let’s just say that it involves Leonardo da Vinci, alchemy, mobsters from New Jersey, CIA agents named after candy bars, exploding auctioneers, megalomaniacal corporation owners, two-way radio crucifixes, a lethal butler, decapitations, The Vatican, a folksy narrator, singing, and dancing. Not necessarily in that order.

As the title character, Willis spends most of his time smirking. It seems to be the lone trait he brings to the character. His performance quickly becomes the weakest aspect of the film. Had he played him with a bit of a more hangdog attitude, he might have been a more sympathetic character. Much more suited to the material are Danny Aiello and James Coburn. Aiello spends most of his time on screen opposite Willis and manages to counteract Willis’s incessant smirk with a performance that’s sympathetic and fun. He gets more laughs than his thin material deserves. Coburn is the film’s secret weapon. With his resonant voice, he lends authority to his scenes as a CIA agent who may or may not be crooked. He also rips off some of the film’s best pieces of dialogue. His wistful remembrance of Rome as the sight of his first barehanded strangulation still manages to draw laugh-out-loud responses.

The rest of the cast does not fare as well. Andie MacDowell and Sandra Bernhard, in particular, reach career nadirs with their awful performances. MacDowell may never live down her scenes in the third act when she talks like a dolphin. It’s a horrifying moment where everything about the scene was miscalculated and it still somehow made its way into the final cut.

But even with these complaints, the fact remains that Hudson Hawk never fails to make me laugh. Between the good one-liners, the groan-worthy one-liners, the good performances, the bad performances, the cartoon sound effects, and the self-referential mocking of the required happy ending, the film finds the good-natured tone of an early Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker production. It only exists to entertain and needle the action audience that recoiled at its manic comedic energy. What’s not to like about that?

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From The Parallax Review Vaults / The Movie Defender : Silent Hill (2006)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of Silent Hill was for the “Movie Defender” column of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

If you’ve ever stumbled across a notorious critical and commercial bomb on cable and thought, Hey, this isn’t so bad, this is the column for you. Each month, we’ll examine a new failed film that’s worth a second look.

I had a nice conversation with seven or eight people coming down on the escalator after we all saw Silent Hill. They wanted me to explain it to them. I said I didn’t have a clue. — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

A few of the images are startling, but as Radha Mitchell (a good actress) wanders through a ghost town, searching for her lost daughter as though she was touring an abandoned movie set, Silent Hill is mostly paralyzing in its vagueness. — Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

From first frame to last, not a second of the film has a grip on reality. Structured around a series of blackouts and gross-outs, it is one long free fall through icky surrealism and underlighted nightmares. It takes us to the sort of world where hell is round the corner, secret doors abound and faux-blond policewomen outfit themselves in skin-tight leather. — Nathan Lee, New York Times

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that all movies based on video games suck.

Sorry, I don’t mean to paraphrase, but I have the feeling that if most film critics had their way, that last bit would have been added to the Declaration of Independence. Of course, snarkiness aside, I will admit that most films based on video games do indeed, reek of a quick money grab with no thought given to artistic or even entertainment value. Unfortunately, this pigeonholing of an entire genre can lead to good films being unfairly thought of as the cinematic equivalent of something you find on the sidewalk when the spring thaw melts away several months worth of snow.

Silent Hill actually did decent business when factoring in the worldwide numbers, so it technically doesn’t meet all of the requirements of a traditional Movie Defender write up, but it did take a whipping from the critics, currently sitting at a 29% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. At the same time, its IMDB user rating is a respectable 6.5. Obviously, this wouldn’t be the first time that a film is embraced by the public while being trashed by the critical community. And, as I’ve often pointed out, in most of those cases, the critics are right (yes, I realize this makes me sound like a snob, but I can live with it). But Silent Hill is one of those rare cases where the general moviegoing public is right and critics missed the boat.

Rose (Radha Mitchell) and Christopher (Sean Bean) are parents to an adopted daughter named Sharon (Jodelle Ferland). Sharon has the bad habit of sleepwalking and crying out, “Silent Hill!” in hysterical fits during these sleepwalking episodes. Determined to get to the bottom of the apparent psychological trauma that causes her daughter’s problems, Rose does some research to find that Silent Hill is a deserted town in West Virginia. It seems it was a coal-mining community that suffered a terrible tragedy when a fire started in the mines underneath the town, killing many of the residents. Knowing nothing about Sharon’s life before the adoption, Rose guesses that she must have some connection to the town and decides to take her there as a form of therapy. She does this over Christopher’s wishes, leaving without telling him.

Admittedly, so far, so cheesy. The plot setup plays like clichés from any number of bad horror films and Rose comes off as a terrible mother attempting some form of shock therapy for her daughter instead of getting her professional help. But then director Christophe Gans and writer Roger Avary start piling on the weird and outright freakish imagery and twists.

A motorcycle cop named Cybil (Laurie Holden) tries to pull Rose over. When Rose floors it for the offramp to Silent Hill, Cybil gives chase and finds herself trapped in the abandoned town with Rose, both of them searching for the suddenly missing Sharon. As they drift through the deserted town, ash falling from the sky, apparently from the coal fires that still burn underground, they encounter any number of terrifying and grotesque creatures and deformed people that attack through such varied means as spitting acid and tearing people’s skin from their bodies. In the midst of this cavalcade of horrors, they find a religious cult living in the town that call people they don’t understand witches and that may be the key to understanding the mystery of Sharon’s connection to Silent Hill.

Once the plot of the film kicks into high gear, I was surprised at how much the film had snuck up on me. The dialogue may be stiff and unnatural, but the pacing and imagery lend themselves to a surprising amount of suspense that Gans brilliantly exploits. By basically unmooring the film from any semblance of reality, Gans is able to steer audience expectations away from the routine mainstream movie world to an insane land where horrible things happen to well-meaning people. That twist in itself wouldn’t be so unusual, but Gans shows a complete lack of sympathy for the audience by never allowing the camera to turn away as these terrible things happen. The resulting horror the audience feels is made that much more powerful.

If there is a glaring problem with the film (beyond Avary’s stilted dialogue), it’s in a subplot that finds Christopher searching for Rose and Sharon. Cutting to his search every fifteen minutes or so, it feels as though Gans is following the orders of producers who want every penny of the money that they spent on casting Sean Bean to translate into extra screen time. I have nothing against Sean Bean and find him to be a solid, reliable actor, but Christopher’s subplot is unneeded. The only purpose it serves is to show more clearly that Rose and Sharon are in some sort of alternate dimension, since his explorations of Silent Hill show a markedly different town — one still deserted, but not filtered through falling ash and cut off from the outside world. But even that nugget of information feels like over-explanation. At just over two hours, the film does feel a bit long. Cutting most of this subplot would have tightened up the running time and increased the tension in the main plot.

But really, that is a minor complaint when it comes to a horror film that actually horrifies. I haven’t played the game upon which Silent Hill is based, so I don’t know how many of the truly freaky, scary creatures and plot twists have been made up by the Gans and Avary, and what was carried over from the game. I do know that they made my skin crawl, which is the mark of a good filmmaker, especially when it comes to upsetting a jaded horror fan like myself. By the time that the film’s climax becomes a bloody, gory, over-the-top exercise in grand guignol that I imagine is what The Crucible would look like if directed by Clive Barker, my jaw was hanging open in shock at the audacity of what Gans pulled off.

I don’t wish to mislead anyone, Silent Hill is not a perfect movie. There’s the problems I had with the Christopher subplot and the dialogue. But there’s also the fact that Gans is never able to completely cover up the film’s video game origins. The plot moves forward as a series of tasks that must be overcome and mysteries that have to be unraveled with conveniently placed clues.

But the sense of suffocating horror and malevolence that invades every frame is a stunning achievement. I’m willing to overlook some flaws to feel something resembling the type of fear I used to have when watching horror movies as a child. Essentially, that’s what Silent Hill boils down to. It’s the type of extreme vision you expected from those horror films you were never allowed to watch as a child. You can argue with the plot, but you can’t argue with the nerves it touches.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults / The Movie Defender: Doomsday (2008)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of Doomsday was for the “Movie Defender” column of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

If you’ve ever stumbled across a notorious critical and commercial bomb on cable and thought, Hey, this isn’t so bad, this is the column for you. Each month, we’ll examine a new failed film that’s worth a second look.

And imagine the first serious competition to the Deutsche dummkopf Uwe Boll as “worst director” working today, thanks to this mad and maddening mash-up genre picture. — Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel

In 2006, director Neil Marshall scored with The Descent, a fast, jolty cave-zombie freakfest. So why’s he following it up with this sci-fi action trash? — Gregory Kirschling, Entertainment Weekly

But if you can accept this farrago of nonsense, and enjoy simulated beheadings and lopped-off hands and massive spurts and splashes of blood, this may be the movie for you. — Phillip Marchand, Toronto Star

Film critics are often accused of being snobs. When we collectively bash a mainstream studio picture that seemingly everyone else just loves, we are seen as being stuffy and out of touch with people who just want to be entertained. More often than not, this is untrue. When a film gets a collective beatdown by the critical community, it’s usually for a very good reason. Let’s face it, if mass popularity was the yardstick by which quality was measured, the Scary Movie films would be considered classic works of art. It’s for this reason that we have critics. We often act as the vocal minority explaining why the latest Twilight movie isn’t the greatest use of film since Orson Welles uttered, “Rosebud.” But very occasionally — I stress the words “very occasionally” — film critics are snobs.

Such was the case with Doomsday. While Rogue Pictures didn’t do the film any favors by giving it a barely-there marketing push and refusing to screen it for the critics, perhaps the biggest problem was the fact that writer/director Neil Marshall was viewed by many in the critical community as “slumming it.” Coming off the critical and commercial success of the terrifying horror film The Descent, Marshall refused to meet the expectations of another smart, challenging genre film. Instead, he embraced his inner twelve-year-old and crafted a ridiculously violent mash up of horror, action, sci-fi, and comedy that was big, loud, and incredibly stupid. Yes, Marshall was slumming it, but fortunately, his slum was an extremely fun place to visit.

The film opens with a prologue narrated by Malcolm McDowell. It’s seven minutes of exposition that lays out how Scotland was decimated by the “Reaper Virus” in 2008. A sort of supercharged ebola virus that killed anyone who contracted it, the British government was unable to find a cure. Faced with the possible infection of the entire nation, the decision was made to construct a giant wall along the site of the original Hadrian’s Wall, sealing off Scotland, condemning those left behind to die. In the mad rush to escape as the last gate is closing, a little girl is rescued by some British soldiers. In the pandemonium, she is shot, losing her right eye.

The film then jumps to “the present day” — in this case, the year 2035. The little girl has grown up to become Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra). Equipped with a robotic eye in place of her missing one, she is now an ass-kicking Major for the U.K. State Police. When the “Reaper Virus” is discovered in a drug-infested London ghetto, Prime Minister Hatcher (Alexander Siddig) and his right hand man Canaris (David O’Hara) spring the news on the police chief/Eden’s surrogate father figure (Bob Hoskins) that satellite photos have discovered survivors in Glasgow. Assuming that survivors might mean the possibility of a cure, they send in a small military team headed by Eden to track down Kane (McDowell), a doctor who was working in Glasgow to cure the virus when the gates were closed.

All of this plot setup is just a reason for Marshall to indulge in over-the-top action and horror sequences that borrow (steal) liberally from John Carpenter’s Escape from New York, George A. Romero’s Dead series, and George Miller’s Mad Max films. Yes, it’s all incredibly derivative, and no, Marshall does not improve on the classic films he’s ripping off, but at least he steals from the best and uses the disparate parts to craft a slick action flick that is purely entertaining. In this day and age of action films with portentous tones and dour heroes, Doomsday is a refreshing alternative. Marshall plants his tongue firmly in cheek and offers up one kinetic display of action after another, dropping in just enough scenes of exposition to keep it from being completely nonsensical.

But Marshall knows the audience for this film isn’t interested in story. They want to see car chases, brutal hand-to-hand combat, shocking scenes of carnage, and severed heads flying at the camera while still screaming. He serves all of these ingredients up with gusto. Even better, in a batshit crazy turn of events, he suddenly plunges the film into a medieval side trip as the team discovers Kane living like a King in an old castle that was turned into a tourist trap at some point in the past (the sign for the gift shop still hangs on the wall). This leads to a riff on films like Gladiator and Braveheart that plays more like a straight spoof than homage. It’s a tonally bizarre twenty minutes, but it’s always entertaining.

If not for the excellent production values, technical skills of the crew, and Marshall’s eye for visual flair, Doomsday could be an ’80s Cannon film. The script, with its derivative plot, barely sketched characters, and dependence on catering to the lowest common denominator, certainly fits the bill. As does the cartoonish, loopy, anything-goes tone that is gleefully pushed well into the realms of bad taste (a cute bunny rabbit gets blown to smithereens by a robotic sentry, a man is cooked on a giant spit and devoured).

I don’t necessarily disagree with my fellow critics about the movie being stupid. The difference is that Marshall intentionally made it out to be a stupid exercise in violent, over-the-top excess. That he received such a big budget for his vision and pulled it off may be why the film failed both critically and commercially. It’s trashy and definitely not art, but comparing Doomsday to the work of Uwe Boll is beyond ridiculous. Even worse, it’s just plain snobby.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults / The Movie Defender: The Box (2009)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of The Box was for the “Movie Defender” column of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

If you’ve ever stumbled across a notorious critical and commercial bomb on cable and thought, Hey, this isn’t so bad, this is the column for you. Each month, we’ll examine a new failed film that’s worth a second look.

Instead of sweeping you along, The Box just sits there like something unclaimed at lost and found. — Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Rather than a provocative spiritual allegory, The Box arrives on our doorsteps as a sophomorically obvious sermon about greed and altruism. — Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

Worst among the foolish lot is Cameron Diaz, who plays Norma Lewis, a wife and mother who also is an English teacher. In a heavy-handed bit of symbolism, she is also a fan of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. And as the movie edges toward two hours, we’re yearning to paraphrase its line “Hell is other people” to “Hell is this movie.” — Claudia Puig, USA Today

When people ask me about writer-director Richard Kelly’s films, my advice is unfailingly consistent: Donnie Darko is a masterpiece, Southland Tales is to be avoided at all costs, and The Box takes an insanely unfair amount of scorn for a film that creates such a brilliantly realized tone of inevitable doom. Often, the person asking the question nods to my assessment of the first two films as I have obviously just backed-up what they had already heard. And then they look at me like I might be insane for defending The Box. Even though they never saw it, they have heard unforgivable things about the film from their friends who never saw a Cameron Diaz film they didn’t love…until she hooked up with Richard Kelly.

The critical reaction to The Box really amused me. Coming on the heels of the sorely miscalculated Southland Tales, many critics assumed that Kelly would be on his best behavior. After all, he had to prove that he was more than just a cult filmmaker. He had to show that he could deliver a mainstream, commercial success to keep his career from sinking, right? Working from the short story “Button, Button” by revered sci-fi author Richard Matheson, it seemed that Kelly was going to deliver the straightforward genre piece that the critics and Warner Bros. expected of him. Oh, the fools.

Set in 1976 Richmond, Virginia, The Box tells the story of the Lewis family, a normal suburban household who live just beyond their modest means. Arthur (James Marsden) is a technician working for NASA at the Langley Research Center. Smart, driven, and level-headed, he is fast on his way to joining the astronaut training program. His wife Norma (Cameron Diaz) is an English teacher at a private school. Due to a childhood accident, she lost four of the toes on one of her feet and needs additional surgery that promises to be expensive. Their son Walter (Sam Oz Stone) is bright and inquisitive, but they can’t afford his tuition to Norma’s school without her faculty discount. That’s when Arlington Steward (Frank Langella) enters their lives.

Steward is a man of elegance and impeccable manners. These characteristics are trumped by the fact that the left side of his face is practically nonexistent due to his being hit by lightning. He presents Arthur and Norma with a box that contains a button. If they choose to press the button, two things will happen:

1. They will receive one million dollars, tax free.
2. Someone they don’t know will die.

Driven by the sudden revocation of Norma’s faculty tuition discount and Arthur’s unexpected rejection from the astronaut-training program, Norma presses the button.

For the first act of the film, Kelly follows Matheson’s simple morality tale very closely. Aside from some sinister touches involving nosebleeds and strangers acting oddly when they come into contact with Norma or Arthur, Kelly seems to be offering the mainstream film expected of him.

Then the rest of the film happens.

Arthur and Norma pitch themselves headfirst into an ever-expanding conspiracy that springs from an experiment being conducted by Steward at the behest of “those who control the lightning.” This experiment may or may not include the NSA, the NASA Mars Viking probe that Arthur worked on, and hundreds of zombie-like people who keep an eye on the couple at all times. Their friends and family may be among the watchers, lending an increased sense of paranoia.

As was to be predicted, critics and general audiences balked, complaining about the labyrinthine plot, the subtle-as-a-sledgehammer references to Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, and Diaz’s atrocious southern belle accent. I don’t mean to sound smug when I claim that I didn’t find the plot too dense to understand. It has several surreal twists and turns, and Arthur and Norma’s investigation leads to several dead ends, but most everything is explained by the film’s end. In Kelly’s view, any loose threads that are not tied up are just not worth exploring. I tend to agree with him.

Even if the film had been as confusing to me as it apparently was to other people, I still would have found much in it to recommend. Kelly once again shows himself to be a master at creating a claustrophobic mood of inescapable doom. Once Norma pushes the button, the film is drenched in an atmosphere of dangerous paranoia that is not that far removed from the classic conspiracy films of the ’70s that Kelly is trying to emulate. The fact that he set the film in that decade is no accident.

By combining the paranoia of films like All the President’s Men and The Parallax View with the metaphysical sci-fi of his own Donnie Darko, Kelly creates an expensive art film that seriously approaches topics like greed versus altruism, how far people will go to protect someone they love, and morality in relation to the promise of an afterlife. The film sometimes loses focus on the plot as scenes and characters are dropped in to discuss these ideas. While these moments drag on the film’s forward momentum, I was grateful for their inclusion. Even if the ideas discussed aren’t new or particularly revelatory, at least they’re intelligent questions being raised in a studio film. I will never fault a film for trying to be too smart.

The film is also extraordinarily effective at getting under the viewer’s skin. The zombie-like watchers are disturbing and used to chilling effect. As is the score by Win Butler, Régine Chassagne, and Owen Pallet. Alternating between icy minimalism and over-the-top bombast, the score constantly keeps the viewer on edge, even during the early scenes before the characters are presented with the box. Through these elements — along with the off-kilter use of slow dolly shots — Kelly earns a greater sense of creeping dread than many recent horror films put together.

While I agree with many critics that Diaz goes over-the-top with her accent, I found her to be far stronger in this film than anything else she has done. There is a vulnerability to her performance that provides truth to Norma’s lifetime of living with a painful limp. Marsden is also appealing as Arthur. He has to be the steady leading man that the film relies on the viewer to follow through the twists and turns. It’s not a showy role, but he is likable, and I really found myself rooting for him to discover a way to escape their predicament. Langella manages to steal the movie. His gently authoritative voice lends believability to some of the more outlandish explanations that Steward gives for his experiment. In addition to his wonderful voice, he is able, through just the slightest change in facial expression, to project menace or sympathy. He is the boogeyman and the comforting parent all wrapped in one.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults / The Movie Defender: The Cell (2000)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of The Cell was for the “Movie Defender” column of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

If you’ve ever stumbled across a notorious critical and commercial bomb on cable and thought, Hey, this isn’t so bad, this is the column for you. Each month, we’ll examine a new failed film that’s worth a second look.

Glossy images of studied, surrealistic beauty vie with those of mutilation, disembowelment, corpses and captive, tortured women. Either way, it is mind-numbing. — Bob Graham, San Francisco Chronicle

The major problem is that The Cell continuously echoes The Silence of the Lambs, only minus the intricate character interplay, Jonathan Demme’s direction and the taut storyline. — Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

I know people who hate it, finding it pretentious or unrestrained; I think it’s one of the best films of the year. — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The Cell is the type of movie I should hate. The regular criticism against it is that it relies on its astounding visuals to cover up a deficient story that was cobbled together from bits and pieces of other films. This is mostly true. But the visuals on display are so intricate they — and the surprisingly good performances by the cast — elevate the film beyond its derivative story to something resembling an art film by way of a serial killer thriller.

Carl Stargher (Vincent D’Onofrio) is a very bad man. As a serial killer, his kinks make Hannibal Lecter seem like the picture of psychological health. Carl kidnaps young women, keeps them for forty hours, drowns them, cleans them, makes them up to look like dolls, then disposes of the bodies. When the film opens, he has killed his seventh victim. When he makes a mistake while dumping the latest victim, FBI agents Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) and Gordon Ramsey (Jake Weber) quickly track him to his house. Unfortunately, Carl suffers a seizure as the result of a rare form of schizophrenia. The seizure leaves him catatonic which is a problem because Julia Hickson (Tara Subkoff), his latest victim, is in a tank somewhere waiting for the water to fill it up and drown her.

Desperate for any way to find Julia, Peter and Gordon take Stargher to an experimental clinic where child psychiatrist Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez) is able to enter the subconscious of her catatonic patients and try to help them to rejoin the waking world. But once in Stargher’s subconscious, Catherine finds his personality split into three parts. One is a little boy who relives all of Stargher’s childhood abuse. The second is Stargher as an adult who realizes he has become a monster and is powerless to stop himself. The third is an idealized version of Stargher that is a god in his mind — a merciless, frightening monster of a man who terrorizes Catherine to the point where she risks not being able to understand the difference between Stargher’s mind and reality.

Needless to say, that’s a hell of a lot of setup for the first 45 minutes of the film. This leads to a near record amount of exposition that finds the characters in very clichéd scenes as they talk out the points that the audience needs to know in order to understand what’s happening. This is where the excellent casting comes into play. Veteran character actors like Weber, Dylan Baker, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Dean Norris, James Gammon, and Pruitt Taylor Vince, all make the necessary plot and character explanations go down with ease. While I would have preferred for the script by Mark Protosevich to have found a clever way to get across the needed nuts-and-bolts information of the story’s somewhat complicated sci-fi elements, I was willing to let this quibble slide because of the fascinating visuals and the quite good performances by Lopez and Vaughn.

It’s become fashionable in the post-Gigli world to bash Jennifer Lopez, no matter the role or the movie. To be fair, she has courted much of this criticism through bad script choices (Monster-in-Law, The Back-up Plan) and relying on a rigid set of expressions in place of actual acting. But it’s easy to forget that she was once a promising leading lady with appealing turns in Out of Sight and Selena. As Catherine, Lopez plays the stock crusading psychiatrist role with a disarming vulnerability. She’s no damsel-in-distress, but she never talks a tough game or puts on a false front of bravado that she’s unable to back up. She’s what the movie needs her to be: a passionate, sympathetic heroine who gets in over her head.

Likewise, Vaughn really surprised me in the film. Until he hit a rough streak that started with Fred Claus, I was a fan of his comedic work, but his attempts at being a dramatic leading man always left me cold. Here he finds a new take on the standard role of the obsessed FBI agent. Sporting a look of repressed anger and guilt that comes across as spookily real, his performance gives the impression of a man haunted by a past that he can barely bring himself to talk about. He even takes one of the most poorly written monologues I’ve ever heard, and turns it into a lament for his rapidly deteriorating sanity.

But despite the impressive acting on display, this is Tarsem Singh’s show all the way. A veteran commercial and music video director, he’s best known for the creepy and pretentious video to R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion.” Actually, creepy and pretentious is a good way to describe The Cell. Singh supplies an abundance of images both horrific and oddly beautiful (backed by a spectacular Howard Shore score), turning Stargher’s mind into a playground to trot out every trick he picked up in his commercial and music video days. That he uses these tricks is where the source of much of the film’s criticism lies. If Singh hadn’t used these techniques to such astounding effect, I would have been first in line to complain. But much like Moulin Rouge, another movie I was surprised to find that I loved, The Cell transcends its visual extravagances and emerges as a compelling argument for style over substance. At least, every now and then.

Where I don’t feel the film gets enough credit is in its superior third act. Buried beneath the expansive visuals that take up so much of the second act, the story gains momentum, becoming surprisingly compelling as it races to a breathless climax. Singh has always been credited as a dazzling stylist, but not much of a storyteller. After watching The Cell, I feel that is an unfair complaint. Besides easily hitting every story and character beat (admittedly, not always smoothly), he skillfully uses a terrific crosscutting structure during the climax that goes between Catherine battling the Stargher god and Peter racing to save Julia from drowning. It’s an exciting sequence that made me realize how the suspense portion of the film had really snuck up on me.

Considering the film wasn’t a traditional mainstream thriller, The Cell did surprisingly well at the box office. But the taint of some vicious reviews has left the mistaken impression that it failed on all fronts. While not the best film of the year as Roger Ebert enthused, it is a superior thriller that found a promising director (a promise that was fulfilled with one of 2008’s best films, The Fall) and good cast overcoming a weak script to create something unique. That’s always worth celebrating.

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From The Parallax Review Vaults / The Movie Defender: Domino (2005)

The following review originally was written for The Parallax Review, a film review site of which I was the co-founder and managing editor. I have decided to collect the writings I did for The Parallax Review and preserve them here. I will be posting a few of these older pieces every week. My review of Domino was for the “Movie Defender” column of The Parallax Review.

by Matt Wedge, Managing Editor

If you’ve ever stumbled across a notorious critical and commercial bomb on cable and thought, Hey, this isn’t so bad, this is the column for you. Each month, we’ll examine a new failed film that’s worth a second look.

Domino, directed by Tony Scott, is a movie that wears its ultraviolence and fashionista grunge, its Oliver Stone-makes-a-Harley-Davidson-commercial visuals, and its fake-nervy aggression like a very ugly but expensive tattoo.
— Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

The experience of the movie is like having someone hit you on the side of the head with a brick for two hours.
— William Arnold, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Scott is a cynic with bad taste in style.
— Wesley Morris, Boston Globe

Over the years, critics have complained that Tony Scott makes the same movie over and over. This is essentially true. He always values style over story. His films often end with a violent shootout between several characters. His editing and shooting style seems to be inspired by the ADD-riddled mind of a twelve-year-old boy. Still, I find it difficult to fault a filmmaker for having a consistency of vision. Scott’s vision may be excessively silly and mainstream, but you always know when he has directed a film. This is something you cannot say about other mainstream, studio filmmakers (with the possible exception of Michael Bay). It’s for this reason that I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Scott’s films. No matter the subject matter, they are always an experience and usually entertaining. Such is the case with Domino.

The film tells a highly fictionalized version of Domino Harvey’s life story. The daughter of veteran actor Laurence Harvey (best known for his terrific work in The Manchurian Candidate), Domino (Keira Knightley) grew up barely knowing her father because she was born so late in his life. Saddled with a mother (Jacqueline Bisset) who was more concerned with her social standing than her daughter, Domino rebelled in a big way. She turned her back on her modeling career and became a bounty hunter, joining forces with Ed Moseby (Mickey Rourke) and Choco (Edgar Ramirez), a pair of hard-edged bounty hunters.

This is the aspect of Domino’s life in which Scott is most interested. He frames the movie with scenes of a bloody and bruised Domino being interrogated by an FBI agent (Lucy Liu) in the aftermath of an armored car heist. While the film does answer the central question of what Domino has to do with the heist and whether or not she goes to prison, it takes a very circuitous route to get to that ending, and that is where the fun is to be found.

The film features opening titles that declare that it is “based on a true story…sort of.” I personally find it refreshing to watch a biopic that is honest and upfront about the fact that the filmmakers are playing fast and loose with the truth. The screenplay by Richard Kelly, the genius/madman behind Donnie Darko, is a collection of adolescent boy fantasies sparked by the description of a former fashion model turned bounty hunter. If he had tried to script the film as a straight biopic, it would have undoubtedly turned into a leaden attempt to find meaning and psychological depth in Domino’s life choices. Just typing that description makes my eyes glaze over. By turning Domino into a kick-ass babe and plugging her into an over-the-top action film, Scott and Kelly cut right to the heart of the unique dichotomy that was Domino Harvey. The fact that the character of Domino bears little to no resemblance to the real Domino is not important.

That idea is reinforced with the casting of Knightley in the title role. The real Domino was an androgynous lesbian with drug problems. In the film, Knightley plays her like a sexy tomboy who harbors an unrequited crush on Choco. The movie version of Domino is never shown coming within a mile of an illicit substance until she is tricked into drinking mescaline-laced coffee late in the film. This divorcing of the movie Domino from the real Domino helped free the film to go off on bizarre, often hilarious tangents.

The most obvious and entertaining of these side stories involves Christopher Walken as a reality-TV show producer who signs Domino, Ed, and Choco to star in a program called Bounty Squad. This allows Scott to not only engage in some surprisingly well-done satire of the reality-TV trend (Beverly Hills, 90210 cast members Brian Austin Green and Ian Ziering seem to have a ball playing ridiculous versions of themselves hosting the show), but also to take a shot at himself. Walken might as well be portraying Scott. He’s a Hollywood player who is obsessed with getting the most sensationalistic footage, no matter the cost. He is also described as having “the attention span of a ferret on crystal meth.” I’ve never met Tony Scott, but after watching his films for the last twenty-five years, I have to believe that is a description aimed just as much at self-parody as it is to describe Walken’s character.

What critics really balked at in the film was Scott’s super-stylized direction. Not only does he play different comedic tones in nearly every scene, he also goes for maudlin melodrama and cringe-inducing violence in the blink of an eye. Not all of the tonal shifts work, leaving Scott reaching too far for a point that remains elusive and known only to him. But for the most part, I found this unconventional approach to be entertaining, if not energizing.

He matches the schizophrenic nature of the story and tones with a visual style that seems to have sprung from the mind of an acid freak. Saturated colors blend with grainy film stocks and rapid editing to create a hallucinatory state for much of the film’s running time. While the style is flashy, it fits the film’s over-the-top aesthetic. It also helps accept the more random moments in the film: a shot of a Sam Kinison monument in Needles, California (complete with Kinison’s signature screams blaring on the soundtrack), an arm being amputated via sawed-off shotgun, a cameo by Tom Waits as a wandering desert preacher. This is the type of outlandish weirdness that annoys me in the hands of less experienced filmmakers. From Scott, it just makes sense. He’s spent an entire career thumbing his nose at the critical establishment. This freedom has allowed him to hone his techniques to such a point that he can get away with the surreal moments that make up such a huge part of Domino.

While Scott did not make a film that lets the audience understand Domino Harvey as a person (she probably never will be understood — the real Domino Harvey died of a drug overdose during post-production.), he took the enigma of her life and created a violent, semi-psychotic experience that celebrated the rebelliousness at her core. In its own twisted way, Domino honors the real-life Domino by never letting reality get in the way of telling a good lie.

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The Movie Defender: Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)

Yet redundant as it might sound for a project that showcases good ol’ 2-D cell animation, for the most part, “Looney Tunes” comes across as flat as Wile E. Coyote after a boulder lands on him, unable to sustain the merriment better encapsulated in a six-minute cartoon format. — Brian Lowry, Variety

Dante is surely right to let his visual imagination run riot, but the scattershot Looney Tunes style doesn’t easily stretch to feature length, and neither Daffy nor his human co-stars generate much sympathy… -- Time Out London

If the movie, which opens nationally today, has loads of nerve, its ambitious fusion of cartoons and live-action comedy is only fitfully amusing. At every turn, you can sense the director Joe Dante’s jitters as he packs more and more extraneous stuff into each scene. And the density of jokes and references piled into Larry Doyle’s screenplay smacks of nervous overkill. – Stephen Holden, New York Times

When a big budget studio film bombs—and I mean bombs—heads roll. Usually fingers are pointed at the head of development, the junior development executives who pushed the film forward, and sometimes even the head of the studio. With a few exceptions, the stars escape a lot of blame. They may be considered to be “not a draw” and have trouble getting leading parts after the film, but they keep working in supporting roles. But the director’s career is often harmed irrevocably. Think about how Michael Cimino was cast into the wilderness after the Heaven’s Gate debacle. Sure he continued to work intermittently in the independent arena into the ‘90s, but he had to scrape and beg for every nickel to get films going. And he never again enjoyed the kind of creative freedom he had in the late ’70s. Such is the case with Joe Dante in the decade since Looney Tunes: Back in Action landed in theaters with a thud.

It is possible to spin the film as not such a financial catastrophe. But look past the face-saving numbers that Warner Bros. has put out for public consumption and you can see just how crushing this box office defeat was. For one thing, Back in Action was a follow-up to the financially successful (though dreadfully executed) Space Jam. That movie was a solid hit for the studio and gave the folks in charge the idea that their long-neglected Looney Tunes characters could be turned into a profitable franchise of films combining animation and live action. This optimism raised expectations far beyond what would probably have been expected for a film featuring a bunch of cartoon characters who had receded in popularity for the previous three decades, if not longer.

The second thing that Warner Bros. would claim is that the film turned in a worldwide gross of almost 70 million dollars against a reported budget of 80 million. Sure that’s a loss, but with home video sales, sales to ancillary markets, and merchandising figured in, the film would eventually make a small profit. The problem with this thinking is that the 80 million dollar figure is almost surely an under-estimate of what the film actually cost. Most reports had the budget in excess of a hundred million, even before figuring in prints and marketing which more than likely ballooned the budget to more than 150 million.

While industry observers widely reported the crushing financial defeat of Back in Action, the critical reaction was not much than a shrug of the shoulders. Positive reviews were tepid in their endorsements and negative reviews were polite in pointing out what failed to work for the reviewer. With negative press swirling around the film due to the budget, lackluster reviews, and a lifeless marketing campaign, the film was dumped in November where it was unable to compete in the awards season marketplace. In the opinion of many people, Joe Dante’s career died with the film. I’m here to explain why the film and, by extension, its director deserve a second chance.

The film is stuffed to the gills with plot. Of course, most of it doesn’t matter and only exists as a reason for the animated Looney Tunes gang to pull off numerous verbal and physical gags. But since some context is needed for what I am about to sell as a defense, I’ll give you a quick setup.

Daffy Duck, enraged at always being forced to play second fiddle to Bugs Bunny in the studio’s cartoons, demands new scripts be written with him as the lead. Much to his horror and Bugs’ chagrin, Daffy is fired by Kate (Jenna Elfman), the humorless vice president of comedy at Warner Bros. In the process of being ejected from the studio by a security guard named DJ (Brendan Fraser), Daffy causes an insane amount of chaos that ends with half of the Warner Bros. backlot destroyed and DJ also being fired.

Daffy tags along with DJ back to his home where it is revealed that DJ’s father is Damien Drake (a game Timothy Dalton), the studio’s biggest action star. It turns out Damien doesn’t just play a spy in the movies, he actually is one and has been kidnapped by the Chairman (Steve Martin) of the evil Acme Corporation. Before you can say MacGuffin, DJ, Daffy, Bugs, and Kate are wrapped up in a search for a mysterious gemstone called the “Blue Monkey” that the Chairman also seeks. As you can probably guess, hijinks ensue.

The reason Space Jam was, quite frankly, an awful movie is that it not only had to serve as a Looney Tunes cartoon, but it also was intended to build on the brand name that Michael Jordan had become. Jordan, along with almost all the NBA stars he brought into the film, is a terrible actor. Not only that, but the film required the Looney Tunes characters to take on personas that were out of line with what they had become known for. This added up to a high-concept comedy with stale gags buoyed by the novelty of seeing Looney Tunes characters get the Roger Rabbit treatment of live-action interacting with animation. The results were dreadful.

Dante and screenwriter Larry Doyle seem to recognize where that film went wrong and immediately avoid any scenario where the cartoon characters are forced to do something out of character. They also make the cartoons the focal point of the story with Daffy’s bruised ego and manic energy perfectly countered by Bugs and his cocky reassurance that everything will be alright in the end. At the same time, Bugs gently suggests to the powers-that-be that his shtick doesn’t work without Daffy as a worthy adversary. It’s an acknowledgement that a protagonist is really only as interesting as his antagonist.

If this all sounds a little, well, heady for a movie called Looney Tunes: Back in Action, rest assured that the film is very, very funny. Sporting a high hit-to-miss gag ratio, Dante pumps up the energy and relentlessness of the film as our heroes veer across continents, through paintings in The Louvre, and eventually into outer space. Along the way they encounter practically every member of the Looney Tunes universe, several of them operating as extensions of Acme’s villainous reach (Yosemite Sam, Wile E. Coyote, Marvin the Martian). These sequences allow every character to showcase a bit that has them doing what they do best. Not only is there a measure of nostalgia when these characters appear, their individual gags are often extremely funny—the sequence that finds poor Wile E. Coyote once again cursed with faulty Acme equipment is inspired.

While the portions of the film that do deal with the human characters feel like more of an afterthought, Dante, ever the subversive filmmaker, uses these scenes to mock mainstream studio films. Taking down targets like bloated superhero pictures, blatant product placement, romantic comedy clichés, and talky characters who exist only to spout exposition, the Dante who skewered his biggest hit and the merchandising it inspired with Gremlins 2 is fully on display. With his love of irreverent humor, cartoonish slapstick and sound effects, and obvious affection for the Looney Tunes characters, he was creatively the perfect pick for the film.

But Dante’s creative abilities come with the sensibilities of a snarky movie nerd. I mean that in the most positive, loving way. By the time Looney Tunes: Back in Action went into production, Dante was long past his days as the man behind hit low-budget horror films (Piranha, The Howling) who transitioned into the assured director of profitable mainstream genre fare in the ‘80s (Gremlins, Innerspace). In the fifteen years leading up to Back in Action, Dante’s career was marked by personal movies and TV shows that had built up cult audiences (The ‘Burbs, Matinee, Eerie, Indiana) while failing to attract mainstream crowds. Even a seemingly sure thing like the brilliant Gremlins 2 (which shares the same anarchic spirit of the Looney Tunes universe) was considered a financial disappointment. Given that track record going into production, it’s hard to believe Warner Bros. actually handed him the reins of such a big-budget production.

The film turned out exactly as you would expect a Looney Tunes movie directed by Joe Dante to be (complete with cameos by Dick Miller, Mary Woronov, Roger Corman, Kevin McCarthy, and Robert Picardo) and Warner Bros. did not know how to handle it, eventually dumping the film and publicly shifting the blame of a massive financial misfire to the director.

But why were critics so lukewarm to the finished product and why was word-of-mouth among audiences so poor? Perhaps the film was too much in keeping with the spirit of the Looney Tunes shorts? It is often chaotic, breathlessly-paced, and only interested in telling as many jokes as is humanly possible in its running time, damn the plot or character development. But I consider these traits to be a good thing when making a film featuring cartoon characters.

Granted, it’s not a perfect film. Martin is too over-the-top as the villain, failing to realize that the jokes are happening all around him and he does not need to supply additional clowning around. Some of the gags involving the human characters are too broad or obvious (DJ complaining that Brendan Fraser got him fired as his stunt double from The Mummy). And the integration of the animation with the actors and sets is not nearly as seamless as it was in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? But most of these problems aren’t much more than nitpicking. They are far outweighed by what Dante gets right.

The fallout for the film’s failure quickly fell on Dante. In the years since, he has increasingly turned to television as a director for hire on episodes of CSI:NY and Hawaii Five-O. He worked on a web series with Roger Corman for FEARnet called Splatter and directed Homecoming and The Screwfly Solution, two well-regarded installments of the Masters of Horror series. Only after dipping his toe back in the feature filmmaking waters by directing the wraparound segments of the anthology film Trapped Ashes did he finally get another full-length film off the ground in The Hole. While that film opened in foreign territories as far back as 2010, it sat on the shelf in the United States for over two years before getting a handful of theatrical screenings the week before its home video release.

While Dante seems to be slowly working his way out of the woods, it’s doubtful he will ever be handed the reins to a studio film again. Projects like The Hole point a direction back to the independent film days of his youth at Corman’s New World Pictures. While that road may afford him the opportunity to work in a more creatively friendly environment, the distribution models have changed so drastically in the last 35 years, he likely may never see another of his films receive a true theatrical release. And that’s a damn shame.

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The Movie Defender: Death to Smoochy (2002)

Only enormously talented people could have made Death to Smoochy. Those with lesser gifts would have lacked the nerve to make a film so bad, so miscalculated, so lacking any connection with any possible audience. To make a film this awful, you have to have enormous ambition and confidence, and dream big dreams. -- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

There are a few laughs, but I’m not sure that a comedy is supposed to make you recoil, which is what Smoochy does. — Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times

You can feel desperation buzzing around Danny DeVito’s Death to Smoochy like flies around a corpse, and there are few things less funny than desperate comedy. — Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com

I first came up with the idea for The Movie Defender at some point in late 2008 or early 2009–I can’t remember which.  I sat on the idea for quite a while, kicking around thoughts of starting up either a blog or a web site dedicated only to this one column.  But I’m lazy and the column never really progressed beyond the idea stage until D.B. started to develop what would become The Parallax Review.  At one point, while discussing the philosophy behind the site, D.B. casually mentioned to me that it could be a home for The Movie Defender, if I wanted.  I jumped at the chance and the rest is very short-lived–but noble–history.

I tell you this because when I first thought of The Movie Defender, I had three movies at the front of my mind: I Know Who Killed Me, Doomsday, and Death to Smoochy.

All three films flopped financially and were savaged by critics, but I felt they were all unjustly maligned.  I Know Who Killed Me became the inaugural subject of the column because it was the most infamous and had a pseudo-relevance due to Lindsay Lohan’s ongoing legal troubles.  After a few months, I got around to writing up a defense of Neil Marshall’s Doomsday after D.B. viciously attacked Marshall’s Centurion, a film I eventually saw, enjoyed, and–in a rare moment of contention–argued forcefully in favor of during an episode of The Parallax Podcast.  But I never got around to writing up Death to Smoochy because I feared that it wasn’t as good as I remembered it being.

This was a real fear for every Movie Defender subject that I took on.  Occasionally, I would watch a film that didn’t live up to my memories of it and I’d have to scrap plans to write it up, but that was a rarity.  But for some reason, I had the nagging fear that Death to Smoochy, which I had not seen in nearly ten years, was actually the awful train-wreck that everyone accused it of being.  When I decided to resurrect The Movie Defender, I felt it was time to finally take another look at the film.  I’m glad I did.

Robin Williams plays Rainbow Randolph, a foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, cynical son-of-a-bitch.  He also happens to be the host of the number one daytime children’s program in the country.  When he gets busted for taking bribes from undercover agents posing as parents to get their child on his show, he loses his job, his money, and his reason for living.

Desperate to find a squeaky clean replacement for Rainbow Randolph, network executives Stokes (Jon Stewart, sporting a ridiculously bad haircut) and Nora (Catherine Keener) turn to Sheldon Mopes (Edward Norton).

Sheldon is a politically correct do-gooder of the highest order.  He’s a vegan who eats tofu hotdogs on gluten-free buns.  He volunteers at a methadone clinic, singing songs about the evils of drugs to near-catatonic heroin addicts.  He is also unfailingly polite to everyone he comes into contact with, never swears, drinks alcohol, or raises his voice in anger.  In short, he is the perfect replacement for Rainbow Randolph and an instant headache for Nora who has to school him in the cutthroat ways of network television.

Sheldon has created a character named Smoochy the Rhino to base his show around.  Smoochy is a hideous, purple monstrosity that still allows Sheldon’s goofy, grinning face to show through to the audience.  As Smoochy, Sheldon performs songs like “My Stepdad’s Not Mean, He’s Just Adjusting” and encourages kids to avoid sugary treats in favor of organic fruits and vegetables.

Much to the shock of everyone at the network, Smoochy is a hit.  But with ratings success comes trouble for Sheldon.  He takes on a shady agent (Danny DeVito) who negotiates a lucrative deal for Sheldon that gives him control of all Smoochy merchandising.  When Sheldon refuses to play ball with the network and create sugary Smoochy cereals and cheap plastic Smoochy toys, he finds his stock falling with Stokes while Nora slowly comes to respect his sincerity.  But Sheldon’s biggest problems come in the form of a Mafia outfit that makes money off the ice shows that Rainbow Randolph used to put on.  The head of the Mafia (Harvey Fierstein) expects Sheldon to go along with the racket and promises unpleasant violence if he doesn’t come around.

And then there’s Rainbow Randolph.  Randolph has been forced to live in the streets, shamed for what he’s done and blaming Sheldon for his problems.  As he grows more deluded and angry, Randolph begins plotting ways to disgrace Sheldon and get his old life back.

This is a hell of a lot of plot for a first act and that’s without even getting into the Irish Mafia outfit that takes a special interest in Sheldon’s continued success and well-being.  Admittedly, the film teeters on the edge of a cliff, ready to fall into the abyss of satirical overkill before something unexpected happens: Sheldon grows from a one-note hippie joke into a character worth rooting for.  In the midst of the aggressive cynicism and heavy-handed satirical jokes, Sheldon becomes a likable, somewhat too earnest protagonist whose quest to improve the world goes from being mocked to encouraged, a surprising turn for a movie directed by the ever-subversive Danny DeVito.

The fact that Sheldon turns out to be such a sweet, gullible character gives Death to Smoochy the moral center needed to ground DeVito’s bleak view of network television politics and merchandising aimed at children.  Sheldon also stands as the rebuttal to many critical complaints that the film is strictly an ugly exercise in cynicism without a heart or connection to recognizable humanity.  He may be a little too over-the-top at points (his fallback phrase of “How do you like that?” becomes annoying by the hour mark), but Sheldon is the perfect straight man for some acerbic one-liners delivered with perfect timing by DeVito, Keener, and Williams.

The film also works as a reminder of Norton’s talent and Williams’s nimble ways with profanity.

Norton takes a character in Sheldon who could have been beyond annoying and gives him a childlike enthusiasm that is genuine and infectious.  Seemingly doing his best Woody Harrelson impression from Cheers, he makes naïveté an endearing trait and never once breaks his nerdy persona to engage in vain leading man posturing.  It’s a forgotten great performance by one of the best screen actors of the last fifteen years.

Much was made in reviews of Williams paying penance for family friendly schmaltz like Flubber and Patch Adams by taking on the supporting role of Rainbow Randolph.  Maybe this is true because the Robin Williams on display in Death to Smoochy is a desperate man–funny and profane–but also hanging on by a thread; a self-loathing loser incapable of carrying out revenge or getting on with his life.

I never particularly cared for Williams’s manic brand of stand up and many of his comedic film roles unfortunately played off that persona, but occasionally he was able to put his decent acting chops to use in bizarre dark comedies that have been all but forgotten (The Survivors, Cadillac Man, The Best of Times).  Death to Smoochy seems to fall in line with those films in that it barely registers on his filmography.  But the film might be the best example of Williams being able to modulate his usual manic persona into the cry of desperation it actually is.  Rainbow Randolph is a man who is scared to death of being ignored and forgotten.  Considering his omnipresence in television and film for the past thirty years, no matter how awful the project (Old Dogs, anyone?), I think Williams has the same fear, making him perfectly cast here.  He also has the world’s best delivery of profanity, something easily forgotten through his years as a family friendly entertainer.

Death to Smoochy was written by Adam Resnick.  Resnick is a writer with a very schizophrenic output.  On the positive side, he did stellar work on Late Night with David Letterman, The Larry Sanders Show, and the short-lived Chris Elliot sitcom Get a Life.  On the negative end of the spectrum, he wrote for the God-awful 1994-95 season of Saturday Night Live, the miscalculated John Travolta comedy Lucky Numbers, and the brilliant or idiotic–depending on your point of view–Cabin Boy.

Death to Smoochy embraces the off-kilter tone and sense of humor that run through all of those projects.  Fortunately, the solid work by the cast and DeVito’s stylish and energetic direction are enough to bring the film down on the positive side of Resnick’s filmography.

Admittedly, the satirical elements of the film are obvious.  The insider’s jaded and misanthropic view of children’s programming has been effectively skewered by The Simpsons through Krusty the Clown for over twenty years but Matt Groening and company were always restrained by network censors.  It’s doubtful they could have ever pulled off something as raunchy (but still funny) as Death to Smoochy’’s cookie scene or introduce an even more debauched former children’s show host (Vincent Schiavelli) who is strung out on heroin and apologizes for smelling like urine.  Perhaps DeVito and Resnick take these jokes too far, but I appreciated their willingness to cross that line in pursuit of a laugh.

In an era of homogenized studio films that all look and sound alike, Death to Smoochy is jarring, obnoxious, dirty minded, and yes, funny.  In spite of the obvious jokes and the too-busy first act, I laughed a lot during the film.  That’s a reaction I can’t ignore, no matter how many respected critics say otherwise.

Here’s an awful trailer that turns Rainbow Randolph into the protagonist.  Once again, terrible marketing helps sink a good movie.

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