Eva LaRue | Through the Shattered Lens

In a magical land of dragons and fierce warriors, the evil sorcerer Kadar (Richard Lynch) attacks a peaceful group of traveling entertainers, slaughtering the majority of them and kidnapping their queen, Canary (Virginia Bryant). Canary has a magical ruby that Kadar hopes will increase his power. Canary also has two sons who are each sold separately into slavery. Years later, these muscle-bound twins, Kutchek (Peter Paul) and Gore (David Paul), will be reunited and will team up to save their mother, fight a dragon, and free the kingdom from Kadar.

An Italian-American co-production that was directed by Ruggero Deodato and distributed by Cannon, The Barbarians was a starring vehicle for the so-called Barbarian Brothers. Peter and David Paul were twin bodybuilders who appeared in a handful of films and who are today best-known for getting cut out of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. (In his director’s commentary, when explaining why their scene didn’t work, Stone said, “It was my fault.”) Peter and David Paul were not natural-born actors. They’re both pretty stiff in The Barbarians but their natural chemistry as brothers made up for a lot. They spend most of their screentime in The Barbarians bickering and yelling at each other and you get the feeling that was something they had a lot of experience with.

The Barbarians starts slow. It takes a while to get going and the plot has the ramshackle feel of many Cannon productions. Richard Lynch, as always, is a great villain and familiar faces like Michael Berryman and George Eastman have small roles. Trying to keep track of who is betraying who can require keeping a scorecard while watching the movie but The Barbarians does a good job of creating its fantasy world (and it looks really good for a film that was probably not made for much money) and once the action finally does get started, there’s enough of it to keep things entertaining. The Barbarians battle not only Kadar’s sorcery but a dragon as well and they do it all while trash talking each other. The film feels like a cross between Dungeons and Dragons and a regional wrestling production. It’s entertainingly dumb.

Chris and Lisa Mattson (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) move in to a large house in the Lakeview Terrace neighborhood of Los Angeles. It’s a good house in a good neighborhood and it’s just too bad that their neighbor, Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson), is a corrupt cop who hates interracial couples.

I remember that Lakeview Terrace caused a brief stir when it was released in 2008. It was hardly the first film about an interracial couple being harassed by a bigot but it was one of the few where the bigot in question was a black man. Abel hates white people. He says it’s because his wife was cheating on him with a white man when she was killed in a car accident. He does not appreciate Chris listening to rap music and dropping his cigarettes on the street. When Abel’s children spot Chris and Lisa having sex in their swimming pool, that’s all Abel needs to justify his dislike of the couple and his feelings that he doesn’t want this couple living next door. When Chris asks if Abel could turn off the floodlights that shine into their bedroom window, Abel refuses. When Chris tries to plant privacy trees, Abel cuts them down. What starts out as a neighborhood feud escalates as Abel orders one of his informants to break into Chris and Lisa’s house. Unfortunately, that third act twist also signals the moment that Lakeview Terrace goes from being a reasonably intelligent social satire to being a standard thriller. Neil LaBute is a director who specializes in making people uncomfortable so it is too bad that Lakeview Terrace ends in a way designed to conform to what audiences have come to expect from thrillers.

Abel’s a hateful figure but Samuel L. Jackson is just as charismatic as ever and the passive-aggressive way that he initially responds to Chris and Lisa will be familiar to anyone who has ever had a bad neighbor or who has to deal with a cop having a bad day. Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington, neither one of whom is really that interesting an actor to begin with, are both stuck in bland roles and struggle to keep up with Jackson. (Wilson and Washington even get out-acted by Ron Glass, playing Lisa’s disapproving father.) It throws the movie off-balance. At the same time, Jackson is such an actor who projects so much intelligence that it’s hard to believe that Abel would make the stupid mistakes that he makes towards the end of the movie. Lakeview Terrace starts out fairly strong but loses its way towards the end.