Film Review: Sunset (dir by Jamison M. LoCascio)

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

What do you get when you mix sanctimonious liberalism with the type of production values that one would normally associate with an evangelical-produced film about the rapture?

The 2018 film, Sunset, opens with a birthday party and it’s all downhill from there. Elderly Henry (Liam Mitchell) may have just wanted to celebrate the fact that his wife Patricia (Barbara Bleier) had managed to survive another year despite being in poor health and almost constant pain but he made the mistake of inviting Julian (Austin Pendleton, who always seems to get cast in roles like this) to the party and all Julian wants to do is talk politics.

Julian is concerned that the United States has been carpet-bombing the Middle East. Henry thinks that the Middle East is getting what they deserve because a group of terrorists set off a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles and apparently destroyed the West Coast. Julian isn’t so sure that the destruction of Los Angeles justified the destruction of the rest of the world. (Take that, City of Angels.) Fortunately, before things can get too intense, Chris (David Johnson) says, “Let’s get this party started!” and all of the political talk is abandoned.

However, the next morning, everyone wakes up to discover that missiles will soon be hitting the East Coast! (This movie made me happy to live in the middle of the country.) Everyone is making plans to evacuate the coasts and move to the red states, where they’ll presumably demand a state income tax and a Wawa on every street corner. (To quote the Texas waitress in Hell or High Water, “Some asshole from New York ordered a trout. We ain’t got no goddamned trout.”) However, Patricia refuses to leave her house because she’s old and in constant pain and she wants to end her life on her own terms. Of course, since Patricia refuses to leave, that means that Henry is now obligated to stay there with her and die as well, despite the fact that he has a sister in Missouri who would probably take him in. Way to go, Patricia.

While Patricia is getting ready to kill her husband, the other people who were at her party are making plans as well. Chris uploads a YouTube video where he talks about how scared he is about the end of the world. Ayden (Juri Henley-Cohn) and Breyanna (Suzette Gunn) do a Google search on the effects of nuclear war and they decide that they don’t want any part of that. (I wouldn’t want any part of it either. Nuclear war sounds gross.) Smarmy little Julian pops up occasionally and basically spouts the type of boomer political blather that makes Stephen King’s twitter feed so tedious. Every few minutes, someone turns on a radio or television and we hear a reporter talking about how the world is about to end. This is a low-budget film so we don’t actually see any of those reporters, we just hear their voices.

Usually, this is where I would point out that the film at least has good intentions regardless of its aesthetic shortcomings but …. eh. Good intentions can only go so far and the aesthetic short comings here are dramatic. This is one of those films where people are dealing with a huge, emotional event but everyone seems to spend their time speaking as if they were a Wikipedia article come to life. Add to that the fact that Patricia’s desire to die in her house seems more selfish than noble and you’ve got a film that really doesn’t work.

That said, I did like the final five minutes of the film and not just because they indicated that the film was almost over. Those final five minutes do give the film a much-needed sense of grace. One gets the feeling that the entire film was made so that the director could have those final five minutes and, regardless of how bad the rest of the movie may be, the ending does have an isolated impact. If you just saw those five minutes (and not the 80 minutes that came before them), you would be sincerely moved.

Anyway, as far as films about the end of the world go, Sunset didn’t end it quickly enough for me.

Here’s The Trailer For Blackbird!

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

I had totally forgotten that this film was coming out so I’m glad that this trailer dropped today and reminded me. This film has got an amazing cast and a story that, if told correctly, should generate a lot of tears.

Here’s the trailer for Blackbird, which is due to be released on September 18th.

Here’s The Trailer For The Secrets We Keep!

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Noomi Rapace, the original Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (and the only who really matters), stars in this upcoming film about a woman living in 1950s suburbia who abducts a man who she believes is a fugitive war criminal.

The Secrets We Keep is scheduled to get a limited release in September, followed by VOD release in October. (Oh, you want exact dates? Okay — September 16th and October 16th.) I have no idea whether the film is going to live up to its potential. Watching the trailer, I kind of feel like it could go either way. But Noomi Rapace is a fantastic performer who deserves to be better known and I hope this movie will be a good vehicle for her talents.

Here’s the trailer:

The TSL’s Grindhouse: Private Wars (dir by John Weidner)

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1993 action film, Private Wars, tells the story of a neighborhood, a big evil businessman, and one drunk private investigator who likes to shoot things.

The big evil businessman is Alexander Winters (played by Stuart Whitman). Winters is so evil that he probably spends at least three hours every night practicing his smirk. He’s the type who will plot someone’s death and then laugh about it just to make sure that it’s understood that he’s totally evil. Winters wants to build a new business complex but there’s a neighborhood sitting on the land that he wants to use and no one’s willing to move.

However, Winters has a plan to bring about change. If the people in the neighborhood won’t move voluntarily, he’ll just make them flee for their lives. Winters pays off some local gangs to create trouble in the neighborhood. Soon, stores are exploding and windows are getting broken and obscene graffiti is showing up on walls. Everyone in the neighborhood keeps going to the community center and debating what to do. You have to wonder why the gangs are wasting their time vandalizing storefronts when they could have just blown up the community center and taken out every who was in their way.

Eventually, the community decides to hire someone to teach them how to defend themselves. After auditioning a series of ninjas and other wannabe soldiers of fortune, the community hires Jack Manning (Steve Railsback). Why do they hire Jack Manning? Well, he’s a friend of one of the community leaders. He’s also an alcoholic who shoots his car whenever the engine starts giving him trouble. How exactly anyone could look at Jack — who is not only almost always drunk but also a bit on the short and scrawny side — and think that he could protect the neighborhood is an interesting question that the film doesn’t really explore.

Anyway, the community is soon fighting back, which turns out to be a lot easier than anyone imagined. Eventually, Jack ends up in jail as a result of Winters’s corruption but fortunately, it’s while in jail that Jack meets a few guys who all have mullets and who all come back to the neighborhood to help Jack out when a bunch of ninjas try to take over the streets. Winters may have ninjas but Jack has a bunch of petty criminals who look they’re all heading to a hockey game in Toronto. It’s a fair fight.

To be honest, the main thing that I will always remember about Private Wars was just how unnecessary Jack eventually turned out to be. For all the money that he was apparently being paid, he really doesn’t do much. I guess he does teach people in the neighborhood the techniques of self-defense but the film is so haphazardly edited that it’s hard to be sure of that. It’s entirely possible that everyone already knew how to fight but they were just hoping Jack would do it for them. Watching the film, it’s easy to get the feeling that the folks in the community center took one look at Jack and said, “Well, shit …. I guess we gotta do this ourselves.” Even the final confrontation between Jack and Winters is resolved by a third character. Imagine Roadhouse if Patrick Swayze spent the whole movie sitting at the bar and you have an idea what Private Wars is like.

Private Wars is really silly but, possibly for that very reason, it’s also occasionally fun in its own stupid way. If nothing else, Stuart Whitman and Steve Railsback appeared to be enjoying themselves. The movie’s on YouTube. I watched it last Monday as a part of the #MondayActionMovie live tweet and I enjoyed myself.

Film Review: Shelter (dir by Wrion Bowling and Adam C. Caudill)

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 2012 film, Shelter, opens in an ominous and sterile-looking room. There are bunk beds. There are shelves that appear to be full of supplies. There’s a table where people could possibly sit down and talk or play cards. There’s a shower stall, with a shower curtain providing a little bit of privacy.

There are also several people in the room. One woman is asking what they’re going to do. In the shower, another woman is crying. We can tell by looking at the inhabitants of the room that they’ve been in the room for a while and that they’re all losing whatever grip they once had on sanity.

And really, even though we don’t know what’s going on, we can all relate. We can probably relate better in 2020 than audiences could in 2012. Most of us have, in one way or another, been sheltered in place since at least March and — surprise! — it turns out that all of those “We’re all in this together” commercials didn’t make anyone feel any better about the idea of not even being able to go outside without having to first put on a mask. It’s not just the feeling of claustrophobia or humanity’s natural inclination to resent being ordered around. It’s also that it’s hard to be happy when you don’t have the freedom to live your own life. When someone is continually told that what they want isn’t important and that their fate is in the hands of some unseen regulator, who can blame them for going a little crazy? That certainly would appear to be the situation in which the characters in Shelter have found themselves.

The film flashes back to the day that five strangers first found themselves locked away in the shelter. They entered the room because an alarm went off. None of them knew what the room was but, shortly after entering, they heard an explosion and felt the ground shake. On a monitor, they saw a bright flash of light apparently vaporize the city above them. They also found a note that explained that the room was designed to provide safety from a nuclear attack. According to the note, they had enough food to last for several years. Of course, the note also stated that the shelter was built and stocked with two inhabitants in mind, as opposed to five.

We follow the five survivors as they get to know each other and as they adjust to life in the shelter. It doesn’t take long for them to settle into their new routine. There’s really nothing else for them to do but accept the situation. The room is locked and the doors are not going to open until a computerized system determines that it’s safe for the inhabitants to leave. They’re stuck together so they might as well play cards and just wait it out.

Of course, things don’t work that smoothly. The hours turn into days and the days turn into months and soon, petty annoyances become major disagreements. Some of the survivors seem to be content with the idea of staying in the shelter forever while others think about escape. Some start to wonder if there’s even actually been a war….

Shelter is a good thriller about human nature and just how much isolation and claustrophobia someone can take before they snap. The characters are all well-defined and well-acted and the film made good use of its low-budget, with that sterile bunker ultimately becoming as much of a character as the people trapped inside of it. The film ends with a twist that, while not completely unexpected, was still satisfying nonetheless.

Shelter‘s on Prime so watch it the next time you’re feeling trapped.

Film Review: Miracle Mile (dir by Steve De Jarnatt)

Posted on August 16, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Last night, as I was watching the 1988 film, Miracle Mile, I found myself thinking about the fact that this film literally could not be made today.

No, it’s not because the film itself is about the treat of nuclear war. Though nuclear war may no longer be as much of a cultural obsession as it apparently was back in the 80s, the fact of the matter is that the U.S., Russia, the UK, France, and China all still have nuclear weapons. Pakistan, India, and North Korea all claim to have nuclear weapons. It’s believed that Israel also has a few. Iran is apparently working on developing an arsenal. It’s estimated that there are currently 13,865 nuclear weapons in existence, 90% of which are divided between the U.S. and Russia. That’s not even counting the threat of a terrorist group setting off a nuclear device. In short, the threat of nuclear war is still very much a real one.

Instead, what truly makes Miracle Mile stand out as a film of its time, is the fact that almost the entire plot revolves around the character of Harry (played by Anthony Edwards) answering a Los Angeles pay phone at four in the morning.

Why is Harry answering a pay phone at 4 in the morning? It’s because, earlier, he met Julie (Mare Winningham) at the La Brea Tar Pits and they fell instantly in love. After spending most of the afternoon together, they made a date to meet at the local diner where Julie worked as a waitress. Julie’s shift ended at midnight. Harry went home to get a quick nap before picking her up. Unfortunately, a power failure — one that was largely caused by Harry carelessly tossing away a cigarette — resulted in Harry’s alarm not going off. At midnight, while Julie was standing outside the diner, Harry was asleep.

Harry doesn’t wake up until well-past 3 a.m. After hastily getting dressed, Harry drives down to the diner. When he arrives, he bumps into a tree and three rats fall off the branches and land on his car, which is a bit of an ominous omen. (After watching the movie, I did a Google search and discovered that it’s actually not uncommon for rats to hang out in palm trees after dark. I had no idea. I’m glad I don’t live near any palm trees.)

By the time Harry arrives, Julie’s already gone. From the payphone outside the diner, Harry calls Julie and leaves an apologetic message on her answering machine. (Julie sleeps through it.) Within minutes of Harry hanging up, the pay phone rings again. Harry answers it, expecting to speak to Julie. Instead, he finds himself talking to a panicked soldier who was trying to call his father but who dialed the wrong area code. The soldier says that a war is about to break out and that everyone is going to die. Suddenly, Harry hears what sounds like a gunshot. Another voice gets on the phone and tells Harry to go back to sleep and forget about the call.

Of course, the reason why this story couldn’t take place in 2020 is pretty obvious to see. No one uses pay phones anymore. If the movie were made today. Harry would have just Julie on his own phone and then waited for her to call him back. The soldier would never have misdialed his father’s area code. Harry never would have gotten the message that the world was about to end and most of the subsequent events in Miracle Mile never would have happened. Harry would have just sat in the diner and had a cup of coffee and waited for Julie to call until the inevitable happened. In 2020, that would have been the movie.

So, let’s be happy that this film was made in 1988. during the time when pay phones were everywhere, because Miracle Mile is an excellent film. Miracle Mile starts out as a romantic comedy, with Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham making for an incredibly adorable couple. Then, after Harry answers that pay phone, the movie grows increasingly grim as Harry desperately tries to make his way to Julie and arrange for the two of them to board a plane that a mysterious woman (Denise Crosby) has charted for Antarctica. The problem, of course, is that in order to reach Julie, Harry is going to need the help of the type of people who are typically up and wandering around at 4 in the morning in Los Angeles. Several people die as Harry tries to make it to Julie and, smartly, the film doesn’t just shrug off their deaths. For the majority of the film, Harry isn’t even sure if there’s actually going to be an attack and it’s possible that he’s not only panicking over nothing but that he’s causing others to panic as well. People are dying because of that phone call and Harry doesn’t even know whether it was real or not. Even when full scale rioting breaks out, Harry doesn’t know if it’s because the world’s ending or because of a bad joke that he took seriously. Transitioning from romantic comedy to dark comedy, Miracle Mile eventually becomes a nightmare as it becomes obvious that, even if Harry does reach Julie, escaping the city is not going to be easy. The sun is rising and the truth is about that phone call is about to revealed….

Miracle Mile is a film that will get your heart racing. On the one hand, Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham have such a wonderful chemistry and they’re both just so damn likable that you want them to find each other and stay together. Even if it means running the risk of being incinerated in a nuclear explosion, you want Harry and Julie to be with each other. At the same time, you watch the movie with the knowledge that, even if they do manage to reunite, it might not matter because the world’s going to end. Remarkably, almost everyone who Harry talks to about the phone call believes him when he says that a war is about break out. Almost all of them have a plan to escape and, as a viewer, you get so wrapped up in the film that it’s only later that you realize that none of their plans made any sense. Hiding out in Antarctica? How exactly is that going to work? Antarctica’s not exactly a place to which you impulsively move. If there is truly no way to escape the inevitable, perhaps we should just be happy that Julie and Harry found love, even if it was right before the apocalypse.

Film Review: Massive Retaliation (dir by Thomas A. Cohen)

Posted on August 15, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The 1984 film, Massive Retaliation, was made before I was even born but I still feel as if it was specifically designed to annoy me.

Consider this:

The movie begins with an endless folk song playing over the opening credits. It’s one of those peace and love folks songs that goes on forever. I recently did some research on the folk music of the 50s, 60s, and 70s and what I discovered is that folk singers were (and are) essentially the most self-important people on the planet. (Pete Seeger apparently went to his grave convinced that he was single-handedly responsible for getting Lyndon B. Johnson to withdraw from the 1968 presidential election.) When a film about nuclear war opens with a folk song, it’s never a good sign.

The film then cuts from the folk singers to a bunch of screaming kids in a van. I mean, seriously …. AGCK! The kids are on a road trip and the van is being driven by their older brother, Eric (Jason Gedrick). Eric tries to keep the kids quiet but it doesn’t work, mostly because Eric is kind of a wimp. Unfortunately, Eric picked the wrong time to go on a road trip because it looks like a nuclear war is about to break out and his parents and their friends are all heading up to a compound that they built up in the hills.

(It’s supposed to be a secret compound but it’s sitting right out in the open and there’s a paved road leading up to it so ….. yeah. Good job.)

Anyway, the first half of the movie is divided between scenes of the adults and the kids heading to the compound. This leads to the two groups encountering a lot of other people who are reacting to the threat of war. This also leads to a lot of half-baked monologues about war and human nature. The rednecks are excited about the prospect of the world ending. Eric’s dad (Peter Donat) is looking forward to restarting civilization in the compound. Every old person who shows up in the movie says something like, “There’s always been a war.” The film tries way too hard to be profound, which is always an annoying trait.

Eventually, Bobcat Goldthwait shows up as a member of an evil redneck crew who wants to steal some gasoline. Despite the fact that this is meant to be a serious film, Goldthwait uses a variation of his Bobcat voice in the role and it creates a weird effect. Perhaps that’s the message of the film. When society collapses, comedians will become warlords….

Anyway, Massive Retaliation is one of those self-righteously liberal and largely humorless films has a lot that it wants to say about war and humanity and society but …. eh. Who cares? I mean, I guess if I wanted to, I could make the argument that there are parallels to the film’s depiction of society collapsing over the possibility of war to the way some people are reacting to the COVID-19 pandemic but that would just be me trying to make this film sound more interesting than it actually is. To be honest, the best thing about the film is the poster below, which looks like it was made for a different, better movie:

Massive Retaliation is nowhere as fun as this poster. Instead, it’s a film that begins with folk music and ends with children forming a circle of peace. Seriously, was this film just made to give me a migraine?

Film Review: Countdown to Looking Glass (dir by Fred Barzyk)

Posted on August 14, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“The world’s ending! Let’s watch the news!”

That, in a nutshell, is the main theme of the 1984 film, Countdown to Looking Glass. It’s a film that imagines the events leading up to an atomic war between the United States and Russia. It’s designed to look like a newscast. A distinguished anchorman named Dan Tobin (played by a real-life anchorman named Patrick Watson) gravely discusses the conflict between the two countries. Another reporter (played, somewhat jarringly given the film’s attempt to come across as authentic, by Scott Glenn) reports from an aircraft carrier. We see a lot of stock footage of planes taking off and world leaders meeting and people fleeing from cities.

There are a few scenes that take place outside of the newscast. They involve a reporter named Dorian Waldorf (Helen Shaver) and her boyfriend Bob Calhoun (Michael Muprhy). (If your name was Dorian Waldorf, you would kind of have to become a television news reporter, wouldn’t you?) Bob works for the government and has evidence that the world is a lot closer to ending than anyone realizes. Dorian tries to put the evidence on air but Dan tells her that they can’t run a story like that with just one source. It would be irresponsible…. when was this film made? I guess 1984 was a lot different from 2020 because I can guarantee you that CNN, Fox, and MSNBC would have had no problem running Dorian’s story and creating a mass panic.

(If Dan Tobin’s ethics didn’t already make this film seem dated, just watch the scene where Tobin announces that, because of the growing crisis, the networks will now be airing the news for 24 hours a day. From the way its announced, it’s obvious that this must have been a radical and new idea in 1984.)

Still, despite those dramatic asides, Countdown to Looking Glass is largely set up to look like a real newscast. We get stories about people naively singing up to serve in the army because they think war will be fun. We get interviews with a group of experts playing themselves. (The only one who I recognized was Newt Gingrich.) Everyone discusses the dangers of nuclear war and also whether or not humanity could survive an exchange of nuclear weapons. No one sounds particularly hopeful. Dan Tobin says that he always believed that nuclear war was inevitable but that the sight of all of the destruction would cause the combatants to come to their senses. That sounds a bit optimistic to me and the film suggests that Dan has no idea what he’s talking about.

In the end, Countdown to Looking Glass is a victim of its format. The newscast itself is rather dull, as most newscasts tend to be. Even the scenes that take place outside of the newscast tend to feel rather awkward, as if Murphy and Shaver were recruited for their roles at the last minute. In the end, Countdown to Looking Glass works best as a historical artifact. This is what a news report about the end of the world would have looked like in 1984. Watch it and compare it to how the news is covered in 2020.

Speaking of watching it …. well, it’s not easy. It’s never been released on video but you can watch it on YouTube. The upload’s not great but that’s pretty much your only option.

Film Review: Wargames (dir by John Badham)

Posted on August 13, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

If you thought Tom Cruise nearly started a war in Top Gun, you should see what Matthew Broderick did three years earlier in Wargames!

In Wargames, Broderick plays David Lighter, a dorky but likable teenager who loves to play video games and who spends his spare time hacking into other computer systems. (Of course, since this movie was made in 1983, all the computers are these gigantic, boxy monstrosities.) Sometimes, he puts his skills to good use. For instance, when both he and Jennifer (Ally Sheedy) are running the risk of failing their biology class, he hacks into the school and changes their grades. (At first, Jennifer demands that he change her grade back but then, a day later, she asks him to change it again. It’s kind of a sweet moment and it’s also probably the way I would have reacted if someone had done that for me in high school.) Sometime, David’s skills get him into trouble. For instance, he nearly destroys the world.

Now, keep in mind, David really didn’t know what he was doing. He was just looking for games to play online. He didn’t realize that he had hacked into NORAD and that Global Thermonuclear War was actually a program set up to allow a gigantic computer named WOPR to figure out how to properly wage a thermonuclear war. David also doesn’t know that, because humans have proven themselves to be too hesitant to launch nuclear missiles, WOPR has, more or less, been given complete control over America’s nuclear arsenal.

(Wargames actually starts out with a chilling little mini-movie, in which John Spencer and Michael Madsen play two missile technicians who go from joking around to pulling guns on each other during a drill. Of course, Madsen’s the one ready to destroy the world.)

Of course, the military folks at NORAD freak out when it suddenly appears as if the Russians have launched a nuclear strike against Las Vegas and Seattle. (Not Vegas! Though really, who could blame anyone for wanting to nuke Seattle?) In fact, the only thing that prevents them from launching a retaliatory strike is David’s father demanding that David turn off his computer and take out the trash. However, WOPR is determined to play through its simulation, which pushes the world closer and closer to war. (One of the more clever — and disturbing — aspects of the film is that, even after the military learns that the Russians aren’t planning the attack them, they still can’t go off alert because the Russians themselves are now on alert. Once the war starts, it can’t be stopped even if everyone knows that the whole thing was the result of a mistake.)

With the FBI looking for him, David tries to track down the man who created WOPR, Dr. Stephen Falken (John Wood). However, Falken is not easy to find and not as enthusiastic about saving the world as one might hope….

Watching Wargames was an interesting experience. On the one hand, it’s definitely a dated film. (Again, just look at the computers.) At the same time, its story still feels relevant. In Wargames, the problem really isn’t that WOPR wants to play a game. It’s that men like Dr. John McKittrick (well-played by Dabney Coleman) have attempted to remove the human element and have instead put all of their faith in machines. The appeal of a machine like WOPR is that it has no self-doubt and does whatever needs to be done without worrying about the cost. But that’s also the reason why human beings are necessary because the world cannot be run on just algorithms and cold logic. That’s a theme that’s probably even more relevant today than it was in 1983.

Wargames is also an exceptionally likable film. In fact, it’s probably about as likable as any film about nuclear war could be. On the one hand, you’ve got everyone at NORAD panicking about incoming missiles and then, on the other hand, you’ve got David and Jennifer having fun on his computer and trading flirty and silly quips. Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy are both likable in the two main roles. Broderick brings a lot of vulnerability to the role of David. (David Lightner is a far more believable teenager than Ferris Bueller.) He handles the comedic scenes well but he’s even better as David grows increasingly desperate in his attempts to get the stubborn adults around him to actually listen to what he has to say. When it appears the only way to save the world is to swim across a bay, David is forced to admit that he’s never learned how to swim because he always figured there would be time in the future. Yes, it’s a funny scene but the way Broderick delivers the line, you understand that David has finally figured out that there’s probably not going to be a future. It’s not that he doesn’t know how to swim. It’s that he’ll never get the chance to learn or do anything else for that matter.

Wargames is definitely a film of its time but its themes are universal enough that it’s a film of our time as well.

4 Shots From 4 Films: Special Alfred Hitchcock Edition

Posted on August 13, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!

121 years ago today, the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, was born!

In honor of the most influential director all time, here are….

4 Shots From 4 Films