THE NAKED MAN (1999)
D: J. Todd Anderson. Michael Rapaport, Michael Jeter, Rachel Leigh Cook. 92 min. (Polygram)

The box cover for The Naked Man touts it as a film “from Ethan Coen, co-creator of Fargo.”  It’s true that Coen co-wrote the script with first-time director J. Todd Anderson, and it does, at times, resemble a Coen brothers film.  Unfortunately, the Coen film The Naked Man most resembles is Crimewave, their mostly-forgotten collaboration with Sam Raimi, and The Naked Man even lacks most of that film’s anything-goes pacing that made it at least an entertaining mess.
Michael Rapaport stars as a chiropractor who wrestles by night in a “visible man” costume.  After his parents and pregnant girlfriend are shot by a mean-spirited, handicapped drugstore chain owner played by Michael Jeter, he swears vengeance and unsuccessfully attempts to take him down.  He’s then locked up in an insane asylum before getting rescued by his new girlfriend, a biker chick played by a pre-She’s All That Rachel Leigh Cook.  Cook covers him in mud as he goes more determined to go after the drug kingpin, and dons his wrestling uniform again, this time as a back-cracking superhero.
Most of the Coen Bros. films create their own sense of reality and stick to the rules and characterizations they’ve created.  The Naked Man doesn’t seem to care about such coherence--characters range from down-to-earth to completely over-the-top, and none of the relationships between them ever really connect.  The film is loaded with all the trappings of a cult film that’s trying too hard to be a cult film; off-kilter angles, loud characters, silly-looking gore and even that staple of lazy indie film writing, the Elvis impersonator.  A few good jokes pop up, but the script seems more intent on building a funny atmosphere than actually delivering laughs, and without the pacing of a Coen in the director’s chair, it just doesn’t work.  The cast, especially Jeter, is fine, and there are a couple inspired moments, especially in the brief flashback sequences to the title character’s obsession with wrestling, but The Naked Man is recommended only to Coen Bros. completists and then, solely for curiosity value.

 
I have really mixed feelings about Abel Ferrara.  In my opinion, he’s directed only two good films—the classic Ms. 45 and the dirt-riddled guilty pleasure Dangerous Game.  The rest have always been good ideas sabotaged by Ferrara’s own forced visions, quickly boring or bewildering the audience before the movie’s even close to finished.  While I can’t stay away from a new Ferrara film, I know it’s bound to frustrate me.
New Rose Hotel is typical Ferrara fodder.  It’s got a great pedigree (based on a William Gibson story), a good soundtrack, nice multilingual opening credits and a fine cast to work with.  In fact, the first hour of New Rose Hotel is good enough (not captivating, but interesting) to be irritated when it all turns into, well, an Abel Ferrara film.
Walken and DaFoe are hired by a Japanese corporation to get rid of the competition (Amano) by having him deported.  They hire a prostitute (Argento, much better here than in her father’s films) to seduce the guy and carry on a relationship with him so he’ll be forced to leave his wife (Mol) and the country.  Unfortunately, DaFoe gets involved with the girl as well and Walken begins to question if that’ll affect their working relationship.
Oh, by the way, this all takes place in the near future, a plot device that, outside of a few technological gimmicks, seems pretty pointless.
All of this takes a wrong turn two-thirds of the way through the film when the duo are double-crossed and go on the run.  The last twenty minutes feature DaFoe reminiscing about the first hour of the film (who wouldn’t) and the ending is so inconclusive you wonder why they bothered writing the script at all.  What happened?  What's going on?  Why don’t we actually see any of the action?  Why have you taken an hour and a half of our time for this?
You hope all this tedium leads up to something, but it doesn’t.  Perhaps Ferrara’s trying to make a point about the hopelessness of the situation and the absence of love in society, but it all sort of falls flat.  Visually, the film is a treat, making good use of security cameras and split screens, DaFoe turns in a fine performance and Walken is lots of fun to watch, given loads of rambling dialogue and odd posturing to play with, but the end result is a big “So what?”
Recommended to Abel Ferrara fans (which, as I understand, are mostly Europeans) and Walken devoteees, who’d be advised to not bother watching any longer after their idol leaves the pic.

Dean Stockwell and Bradford Dillman were well-teamed as Leopold and Loeb in Compulsion, but few people are aware they reunited 17 years later for this Australian-produced South African-set biker flick.  Dillman and Stockwell play gypsy brothers (though Dillman’s character owns a bike shop) whose third sibling, Tam (Patrick Mower), has gotten put in prison for killing the man who raped his girlfriend, and whose escape opens the film.  The two team up with “house-dweller” Elke Sommer in order to aid in his escape.  The escaping Tam keeps having flashbacks from Dillman (“Our people aren’t meant to be caged up!  You’ll die in here”) and an older co-conspirator whose advice (“Don’t run!  Let them do the running!”) he constantly ignores.  Things go typically wrong, as Tam gets injured and fails to get to his meeting spot on time and ends up lost, the soft-spoken Stockwell gets seduced by Tam’s wife, and the law begins to close in.  It plays like an uneven mixture of typical biker road movie (Dillman and Sommer), family drama (Stockwell) and dingy Italian jungle horror flick (Tam) as things get progressively worse and, in typical proper exploitation fashion, never get better.  Dillman’s at his best (not saying much), though the typical sub-plot involving his relationship with Sommer seems terribly out-of-character for an otherwise mean-spirited, self-consumed jerk.   The films centerpiece is a 15-minute chase sequence where the three brothers ride in different directions to distract the police and crashes ensue all over the place.  Eventually, Dillman and Stockwell get captured while Tam escapes, and everyone’s pretty miserable.  While the direction’s pretty pedestrian and it gets sidetracked by sub-plots a little too often, One Away is an occasionally interesting cross-breed of genres that’s grungy and humorless enough to be worth a look, and the gypsy angle is one I hadn’t seen before.  It was filmed in South Africa, but except for the leads, all the accents are Aussies.  Director Sidney Hayes is best known for Circus of Horrors and Burn, Witch, Burn!  and was relegated to directing for TV shortly after this.

The idea of Dario Argento doing a version of Phantom of the Opera should’ve been a no-brainer.  Argento’s natural visual style should have easily overcome the fact that we’ve seen the story a million times before, and the plot inconsistancies shouldn’t have mattered.  Unfortunately, somewhere between the concept and the video store, a great idea turned rotten.
The plot is, of course, standard stuff with a couple changes.  Sands’ Phantom is no longer trapped behind a mask, for one.  He’s not disfigured—he was simply raised by rats.  This allows Argento a silly sub-plot involving the opera’s ratcatcher, who develops a rat-slicing vehicle that seems like something out of a Terry Gilliam film.
Anyway, the Phantom’s voice carries into the mind of ingenue Asia Argento, who, despite a perfectly fine suitor, becomes infatuated with the mysterious long-haired man in black that lurks beneath the opera house.  The Phantom is intent on giving his newfound love interest a leading role in the company’s production of Romeo and Juliet, and he’ll go through any lengths to see her take center stage.
Ideally, this would have been a visual feast, but the movie has a cheap feel to it no amount of gothic atmosphere can compensate for.  Everything is shot in a misty, Red Shoe Diaries-like glow, and the sets look like they were designed in an hour and a half.  Adding to this is some lame attempts at humor (stick to horror, Dario) and horribly wooden acting that comes across as though a good portion of the actors were speaking their lines phonetically.
This film does, however, have a couple moments that show what Argento does best.  In one scene a chandelier falls from the ceiling of the house, crushing a healthy amount of patrons.  However, Argento seems intent on sabotaging his own images, showing a couple of the survivors in the next scene, their faces only slightly bruised in comic effect.  What the hell?  When did Argento develop a sense of humor, and can he please give it back?
Argento doesn’t even seem all that interested in making Phantom look good.  Scenes drag, shots go on for way too long without cutting, and there’s really very little in the way of creative cinematography.  It’s hard to believe this is the man who made Suspiria.  (Side note: The Stendahl Syndrome takes three years to find distribution, but this gets picked up within a year?  Where’s the justice?)
I really wanted to be amazed by Argento’s Phantom.  It’s too good of a concept to go wrong, yet somehow, it did.  It’s more like a cheaply made BBC production than a big-budget Argento pic, and dousing it with liberal gore and nudity just makes the tragedy of the situation more obvious.   Co-writer Gerard Brach wrote Bitter Moon, Fearless Vampire Killers and The Name of the Rose, so he should know better as well.

The pull quote on the box cover calls Pusher “A Danish Trainspotting.”  It’s an especially ironic quote because, while Pusher contains a rather hefty sum of drug use, it works so well simply because it’s not like Trainspotting at all.  Where Trainspotting is a high-energy, breakneck-paced account of the lives of several drug users, Pusher is a moody, low-key tale of a week in the life of a drug dealer.  It’s a bit like comparing Barfly to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Kim Bodina (who resembles Tom Sizemore) stars as Frank, a low-ranking member of the drug dealing Danish community.  The first couple days he merely spends with his friend Tonny, wandering around, drinking and having extending conversations about the sexual habits of various female celebrities.  Things pick up on Wednesday, however, when Frank gets caught in a sting operation and ends up in the hole to his main dealer for an ever-rising sum of money.
As expected, things get worse as the week progresses.  Where Pusher is more effective than the average crime thriller is in the superior sense of reality and character development.  Frank isn’t your average movie drug dealer, he’s a real person who just happens to screw up and end up in some really bad situations.  He’s not the greatest guy in the world, but you can’t keep your eyes off of him, never quite sure how far he’s willing to go in order to hold onto the life he has.
There are only a couple moments of extreme violence in the film, and it’s their sparseness that makes them so unflinchingly shocking.  Most of the film is so much build-up (in fact, virtually nothing happens in the first third), that when something drastic does finally go down, the effects are so shattering you might just recoil in your seat.  The wandering narrative gives the film a great sense of randomness, and you're never quite sure where it's all headed, but you know it's going to be bad news.
Pusher isn’t the least bit stylized and it veers away from cheap camera tricks.  It’s a draining experience to watch, but Pusher is one of the most powerful depictions of the criminal lifestyle in years.

RAGDOLL (1999)
D: Ted Nicolaou.  Russell Richardson, Jennia Watson, Tarnell Poindexter, Bill Davis, Danny Wooten, William Johnson, Troy Medley, Frederick D. Tucker, Freda Payne.  (Full Moon/Alchemy)

In a conversation I had with David DeCoteau a couple years ago, he mentioned that one of the easiest ways to get Blockbuster to buy Full Moon films was to have black people on the cover box.  It’s only natural, then, that the already subdivision-happy company would start a line specializing in, um, “urban” horror, sci-fi and suspense. Ragdoll is the first release from Alchemy Entertainment, directed by super soul brother Ted Nicolaou from a script by urban gangsta Benjamin Carr, based on an idea that Charles Band had while he fell asleep watching Dan Curtis’ Trilogy of Terror and woke up to James Bond III’s Def By Temptation.
The plot is pretty much standard Full Moon Script #2: The Little Killer Doll Movie.  A rap band’s lead singer is pressured by drug pusher/pimp/mobster Big Pear (Big Pear?!?) to sign with them when they’ve got a deal pending with a real agent.  They go so far as to hospitalize his grandmother (singer Payne) and he feels trapped.  In order to get out of the situation, our hero makes a deal with a mystical big-eyeballed fellow named Shadowman that involves a lot of chanting.  Shadowman brings an ugly wooden doll to life in order to kill the gangsters, but the singer’s stupidity leads to the deaths of his friends as well.  Little doll runs amok, only more mumbo-jumbo can stop it.
The film starts out on a wrong note with a typical “48-years-ago” prologue involving granny as a child watching her mother destroyed by an unconvincing window dummy, or possibly a headless zombie.  The evil’s existence is punctuated by a really irritating noise that may convince you that your stereo is on the blink.  The rap band (and others on the soundtrack) performs several times during the film, an incredibly distracting effect that doesn’t fit the mood at all.  One of the gangsters is a rather silly gay stereotype, but thankfully one that does manage to get a few good licks in instead of quivering in the corner.
Despite all of these flaws, the film does have the occasional bright spot.  All the actors are competent, and director Nicolaou can pull this sort of thing off in his sleep, and even dares to move the camera sometimes.  (A welcome change of pace from most of Full Moon’s rather static output) The doll itself, while obviously inspired by Trilogy of Terror’s Karen Black stalker, is a creepy piece of work, and used sparingly enough to remain an interesting menace.  The tape, oddly enough, is letterboxed, but the sound quality on the copy I had was pretty bad.
Ragdoll is a Full Moon movie, and it shares pretty much the same character traits that all Full Moon product has despite its more “urban” bent.  It’s got that dangerous-yet-somehow-innocent quality that some find charming, others irritating as hell.  If you’re a fan, here you go.  If not, this is at least a lot better than Demonic Toys.

RAVENOUS (DVD) (1999)
D: Antonia Bird. Robert Carlyle, Guy Pearce, Jeffrey Jones, Jeremy Davies, Stephen Spinella, Neal McDonough, David Arquette, Sheila Tousey.  (FOX)
 

This hard-to-classify period/horror/western/dark comedy did a crititcal and box-office belly flop in spring, but thankfully, that hasn’t stopped Fox from giving it a solid DVD treatment.  The disc includes three additional commentary tracks, two trailers, deleted scenes (with optional audio by director Bird), and both a costume and production design gallery.
For those who’ve stayed clear of it, Ravenous is the 1847-set tale of Mexican-American War veteran Boyd (Pearce) who finds himself stationed at Fort Spencer in the Nevada mountains after his honors as a war hero are revealed to be the result of cowardice.  The fort’s life of merry outcastery is disturbed by the arrival of Colquhoun (Carlyle), a wild-eyed drifter who claims to be the sole survivor of a wagon party driven to cannibalism in order to survive.
It’s all, of course, a set-up, and from there the film turns into a Dances With Wolves variation on John Carpenter’s The Thing, as the Native American legend of the Wendigo comes alive to get a taste of the army virility.  It’s all done, however, with a fair degree of humor that manages to tread a tender line between imposed and over-the-top, complimented by a masterful score by Michael Nyman and Blur musician Damon Albarn, that sets the tone perfectly nearly every step of the way.
The commentary tracks here show exactly what works and what doesn’t with such goodies.  The first commentary track features Bird and Albarn, an odd combination, and one that leads to a slight problem—Albarn’s insistance on talking about the music frequently coincides with Bird’s talk about her direction, and Bird is often quieted by Albarn.  Still, Bird lends some fine points, such as mistakes she made (one shot that she thought was filmed turned out to have been ignored) and the dismissal of character development in favor of a better-paced film.  Bird flies solo on the deleted scenes, most of which wouldn’t have added much to film, though one moment where Neil McDonough talks to Jeffrey Jones about his blindness in the beginning of the cave sequence would have been a nice touch.
The second commentary track features Carlyle alone, and the third has Jeffrey Jones and screenwriter Ted Griffin, in which Griffin helpfully points out some glaring continuity flaws (Colquhoun’s inexplicable escape from the ropes at the cave scene, for example) and the two briefly quibble on the idea of giving commentary on scenes that haven’t come up yet.  “You’re giving it away,” Jones notes as Griffin makes allusions to a future scene.  “They’ve seen the movie,” Griffin replies, rationally assuming that those watching the film with commentary already know how it ends.  On the first commentary track, Albarn seems reluctant to assume such matters, choosing to allude quietly to future scenes, ending bits with a “Well, you’ll see.”
It’s the odd choice for commentary tracks (Director/Composer, Actor, Actor/Writer) that make me wish they’d had a bit more time to put this together.  Obviously the tracks were recorded with convenience to the speaker’s individual schedules, and thus it was impossible to have, say, a separate track for Albarn and Nyman, or Jones and Carlyle.  Still, it’s a very good presentation of one of the year’s most misunderstood films.

In many ways, Russell Mulcahy is an ideal B-movie director.  His considerable roster of films (Highlander, The Shadow, Tale of the Mummy, etc.) is such a terminally mediocre crop that they’re all pretty much ideal for an hour and a half of killing time.  You can watch, they’re not bad, and an hour later, you can only recall a few general ideas.
Like Tale of the Mummy was to the big-budget The Mummy, Resurrection, which debuted on HBO, an ideal place to something best watched with passing interest while you fold laundry, is to Seven.  A terminally mediocre Christopher Lambert stars as a relatively unmemorable police detective on the trail of a vaguely interesting serial killer intent on putting together a recreation of Christ before Easter.  “My friend here is a very clever serial killer,” says Lambert.  On the way, standard plot twists ensue, but it’s nothing that anyone who’s seen this sort of thing before won’t expect, and the killer’s identity is telegraphed a mile away.
The usual, then, complete with Lambert’s character’s cliché history (his son was killed a year ago), goofy plot jumps (a key mark in the back of a victim leads to a storage locker that contains an Australian flower, grown only in the botanical gardens, at which they find—oh no!—another victim) and some oddly frantic, Sam Raimi-esque POV shots that contribute little.  About thirty minutes before the end of the film, however, things start to pick up when the killer is let loose due to a legal technicality (no evidence), and the rest of the film is energetic, if not particularly original.  The climax is a bit more odd than shocking, and a bit too much time is spent dwelling on the patchwork Jesus once it finally makes it appearance--we've been aware it's been a work in progress for the past hour, the shock has work off.
Leland Orser (also in Alien: Resurrection) is quite good as Lambert’s partner, character vet Robert Joy is a fairly memorable villain and David Cronenberg shows up as a priest(!).  This all helps to compensate for the always marble-mouthed Lambert, who never even comes close to coming off as a hard-boiled detective, no matter how many times he yells “motherfucker.”
So Resurrection is just another serial killer flick, neither better nor worse than average direct-to-video fare.  It’s watchable, it’s bland, it’s there, it lasts a little over an hour and a half.  It’s a Russell Mulcahy film.  It’s Resurrection.
Nice box art, though.

 
I watch a lot of crap for the sake of this site.  I sit through mediocre, unoriginal movies with the same half-dozen or so cast members for the sake of you, the people.  And why?  Sometimes I wonder.  But then, a movie like The Runner comes along and restores my faith in the direct-to-video film industry.
Logically, The Runner would automatically be on my shit list for being a Blockbuster Exclusive (nnngh) and for containing David Arquette.  Arquette’s part is small, but the former problem I can’t so easily excuse.  The problem has me in utter turmoil… how do I recommend a movie that you can only get through one of my mortal enemies?
But I just can’t not recommend it.  Ron Eldard plays a gambling addict whose uncle (Mantegna—we’re assuming this is an uncle through marriage, not blood) sets him up with a job running bets for pro gambler Deepthroat (Goodman).  Deepthroat’s rules are simple—don’t gamble and don’t tell anyone his picks being the two biggies.  As expected, Eldard screws this up, though in a simple twitch of the mouth so quick you don’t even notice it happened until seconds later.  It’s an honest mistake, one that probably wouldn’t be noticed, but Eldard’s reaction ends up costing him a lot more.
Adding to Eldard’s troubles are the set-up that his uncle seems to have gotten himself into, and his budding relationship with cocktail waitress Courtney Cox.  It’s a genuinely intriguing storyline, filled with a fair share of twists that, for once, don’t seem directly copied from a book of Hollywood clichés.  Only the romance between Eldard and Cox seems a bit forced, and even that falls into place for the conclusion.  It’s also the first film I’ve ever seen to make suspenseful viewing out of digital scrolling readouts, and that’s something right there.
The Runner does have its fair share of problems, the biggest being the occasionally overbearing narration (by Eldard’s character) spouting well-worn tedium about “it’s like a cat and mouse” and that sort of thing, but it’s overcome by a strong cast and a nicely-paced script.  Goodman’s character comes off as a bit cartoonish at first, his entire performance coming from the inside of a sealed room with no other actors on the set like some lost Bond villain, but the further the movie progresses, the creepier he becomes.  When he takes off on a long monologue describing the future life of Eldard’s unborn child, it’s a genuinely skin-curdling moment, one as potent than any horror film this year.
Okay, so it leads to a somewhat silly (but somehow not disappointing) climax.  It’s a well-acted, tense thriller that’s, erm, worth waiting for other, decent video stores to buy from Blockbuster (where it’ll undoubtedly be for sale in about a month) before renting.  Meanwhile, rent Hard Eight.  (Cop out?  Ehh, bite me.)

Chris Neumer, the editor of Stumped at the Video Store, told me about this film a few months ago.  He raved about it, both in his mag and to me in person, and I had to admit, it sounded great.  Shot in real-time, Running Time is a 70-minute film starring Bruce Campbell as a ex-con who gets out of jail and immediately joins a couple cohorts on an attempt to rob the prison’s rather hefty sum of profits from their inmate-staffed laundry facility.  It’s shot in black and white, giving it a fine noir-ish atmosphere, and director Josh Becker (Thou Shall Not Kill… Except) stays true to the real-time format in the editing, even if it means long shots of Campbell wandering around the streets rather aimlessly.
Perfect, right?  A fine premise, with the format obviously inspired by Rope, right?
Yes, well, almost.
The film starts out fine, with Campbell joining his friend (Roberts) in a stolen van on the way to the robbery.  Around this point, however, the film begins to less resemble Rope and more another failed-crime movie, Killing Zoe.  While the cast is fine, and the direction is good, the editing is well-paced and the film is never boring, there’s just one little flaw.
These characters are idiots!
Okay, maybe you can overlook a few things.  So never mind the fact that Campbell and his ex-girlfriend don’t recognize each other while they’re having sex (she’s wearing a wig, but that doesn’t explain why she’s so clueless as to his identity).  Never mind that pulling a job less than an hour after getting out of jail by robbing the same place he just got out of is one of the dumbest things a person could do.  Never mind that they’re relying on a heroin addict to drive the getaway van.  Never mind that bickering at each other and calling one another by name is something that pros just don’t do.  If you can look past these things, maybe you could feel some sort of connection with the characters.
I love crime films, and I love heists-gone-wrong films.  However, I prefer to watch a team of folks that actually seem to have planned their crimes out beforehand, or those in really desperate situations forced to turn to crime, and then things can go wrong.  Running Time is an interesting exercise in film making, and, hey, it never bored me.  But the ending really only works in an “Aw, shucks” sort of way Bruce Campbell is great at pulling off, and I just can’t really care too much about a bunch of idiots too stupid to even try to plan a robbery correctly.  While Running Time is worth seeing, be prepared for some serious character bumbling.