SUMMER OF BLOOD: MEN WHO HATE WOMEN

You tell me how I was supposed to pass this one up: 1982's Visiting Hours is one of just two wholly Canadian-made films to make the British Department of Public Prosecution's legendary Video Nasties list,* and the only one of those starring Canada's favorite son, William Shatner. It's catnip to the right kind of viewer, which makes it all the more disappointing that Visiting Hours isn't terribly exciting as a Nasty or a Shatner vehicle. It's not terribly exciting as anything, in fact, though it's one of the most unusual, off-kilter slasher films that I have ever seen, so even when it's completely failing to work, at least it's interesting. Or distinctive, anyway.

Here's what I mean by "distinctive": it's a slasher film that wants to present a serious consideration of the social ill of violence against women. I'm certainly not going to be cocksure enough to insist that there's absolutely no way that a dedicated feminist filmmaker could take the basic model of a slasher and turn into a successful and persuasive feminist statement, though I certainly lack the imagination to guess what such a thing might look like. Hint: it definitely wouldn't look like Visiting Hours, which doesn't just possess the baked-in misogyny pretty much endemic to '80s horror films, but even doubles down on it somewhat.

It's a commonplace observation among sociological critics of the slasher genre that, as a rule, men in these films die in abrupt shock scenes, where women are stalked first before they're killed. It's not a hard and fast truism (for example, the mid-period Friday the 13th films have such inflated body counts that if they wanted to attach a lengthy stalking sequence to every dead female, the running times would be around three hours), but it's a convenient way to think about the way the films are structured, while underlining the basic reality that these are films whose presumptive viewer is a young male, and young males as a class are interested in looking at women. Basic male gaze stuff, and while I don't always hold with running every single movie through the steam press of theory, slasher films are positively aching to be described using the framework of the gaze.

This matters because Visiting Hours, to a remarkably comprehensive degree, is nothing but stalk scenes. Its narrative is founded on the very idea of stalking; if you were to jot down even a one-sentence plot summary, you'd have to use the word "stalk", or a direct synonym. Here, for example, is my one-sentence summary:

A crusading TV journalist named Deborah Ballin (Lee Grant) is grilling the prosecuting attorney of a recent case she believes to have been hideously mishandled - a woman shot and crippled her husband, claiming self-defense from domestic abuse, but the prosecution argued that she could easily have thrown herself down the stairs to bruise herself, thus creating an alibi for a premeditated crime - and this footage, prior to airing, is seen by a most unsavory man, Colt Hawker (Michael Ironside), who is driven to murderous rage by this uppity fee-male talking about how men, like, don't have the right to be abusive to their wives in peace, and so he sneaks into Deborah's house to lay a trap for her; but she manages to stay just far enough ahead of him that she's only suffered some deep gashes to the arms by the time that the police arrive and take her to the hospital, where's she's attended by the overworked single mother and great admirer of her crusading feminist credentials, Sheila Munroe (Linda Purl), who makes safeguarding Deborah her utmost priority; but she doesn't realise just how much safeguarding it's actually going to take, when Colt arrives at the hospital to finish the job he started and slake his rampant misogynistic bloodlust.

Here, for example, is my actual one-sentence summary: a woman-hating serial killer hunts through a hospital to kill the victim that escaped his clutches. See? "Hunt". A more menacing word for "stalk".

I don't know. You'd think that a hospital would be a terrific setting for a slasher movie, yet between this picture and 1981's Halloween II, the evidence seems to firmly support the opposite conclusion. Visiting Hours isn't without its compensations, and the mere spectacle of a film made in an inherently sexist style telling an exceptionally sexist version of a stock narrative attempting to subvert itself, while hardly a "compensation", is reason all by itself for the morbidly curious to give the film a peak. But whatever worth it has, being a terribly good horror film is not on the list. Partially, this is because the film's anxiousness to be seen as a message movie leaves it with a guilty conscience about the things it's depicting (scene after scene of one female character or another being followed, unawares, by Colt, mostly), and even though it lacks the propriety to, for example, not depict those things, it still holds back from depicting them with the enthusiasm and scale of a film that actually wants to be a slasher film. Thus the lack of nudity (just about the only saving grace the film has from being completely and irredeemably hypocritical), and thus the more damaging lack of convincing death scenes or much of any gore; the only card that movies of this sort have to play is that they can make up their impact in sheer visceral nastiness what they can't scrounge up in compelling characters or narrative situations, and Visiting Hours only thinks that it has enough of those latter qualities to get away with being demure in terms of its horror.

There's a greater problem even than that, though: Brian Taggert's script, which is structurally broken in a way that it either doesn't realise, or couldn't fix. Both one-sentence summaries I included make the same suggestion: Colt attacks Deborah, Deborah goes to the hospital, Colt stalks Deborah at the hospital. The exact plot that Halloween II had, before it started upping the body count with spurious narrative threads. Except it's not what happens in Visiting Hours at all: Colt goes to the hospital chasing Deborah, finds her, leaves, and then we get a whole act of subplots, character study nonsense (turns out that Colt has a Traumatic Past that cemented his hatred of women), Shatner's largely pointless role as Deborah's producer, and undue pain and misery meted out to basically all the women of any age or personality who cross Colt's path. Finally, he returns, having gotten tired of helping to pad out a remarkably long movie (105 minutes at a time and in a subgenre where nobody would have blinked an eye if it were 80), and the movie can actually pick up its conflict where it left off, if it's still possible to care. Personally, I was too busy wondering why Deborah spent apparently several days in a hospital, including major surgery, for what the film suggests is nothing but a particularly deep gash on her hand.

The other great problem is that Taggert and director Jean-Claude Lord obviously believed in their movie, and wanted to make a truly meaningful, compelling story of deviant male psychology and the impact it has one women, convincing honest-to-God actors to hop on board, but failing to actually make the characters any more nuanced or rich than the horny teens and revenge-stoked psychos of any random "killer at summer camp" movie. Worse, even, since it's easier to forgive an unformed personality in the case of a teenager than in the professional adults who make up the entirety of Visiting Hours' cast. It's hard to say with certainty how much of this is the writing, and how much of this is the cast: Ironside is so good at playing a staring, rage-filled psycho that he's miles away from where the character needs to be during his backstory scenes, while Oscar winner and four-time nominee Grant budges not one inch from the hammy, loud, gaudy acting of her B-movie phase that included such greats as Damien: Omen II and Airport '77, worst of the Airports. It says all that needs to be said that Shatner gives the most effectively restrained and cleverly nuanced performance in the film.

Yet, even if the film is a washout, it's still massively intriguing to see the filmmakers and actors grapple with it, trying to will it to become something nobler and more intelligently-considered than was ever going to be the case. Most slashers and slasher-adjacent movies, even the great ones, simply do not care about the sociological ramifications of what they're doing, and that Visiting Hours joins the immensely tiny company of films attempting to call the industry and the audience's attention to the sordidness of the whole edifice of '80s horror is an admirable thing; that it does this on top of trying to ground its story in adult situations and responses to violence makes it, to my knowledge, one-of-a-kind. It fails at this, and that's ultimately what counts the most, but given the choice between a bad movie that's pandering to its audience and a bad movie that's challenging that same audience, I'd go with the latter every time. Assuming that a good movie is completely off the table, as it probably is given the genre in question.

Body Count: 6, though ironically, the most disturbing and violent attack is on a character who doesn't die (and I'm not referring to Deborah).

Nastiness Rating: 0/5- DPP, don't be such an asshole. No doubt in my mind that it's the most chaste Nasty I've ever seen, to the degree that I couldn't even figure out what might have triggered its arrival on the list in a secondhand-rumor sort of way. That history agrees with me is attested to by the fact that it was the first Nasty to screen on British television, and it did so uncut.

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DISNEY SEQUELS: A TINKER'S DAMN

When John Lasseter was appointed Chief Creative Officer for all animated productions released by the Walt Disney Company in 2006, he inherited a pair of movies that were reasonably far along in their development that he found to be so completely unacceptable in all ways that he could enumerate, he demanded they be essentially scrapped and rebuilt from the start, both of them still managing to come out by their targeted release dates in 2008. One of these was the Walt Disney Feature Animation project American Dog, which was released, one scrapped director later, as Bolt, and it is largely held to be a thoroughly satisfying, not at all world-changing film, though some of us still long to know what the original film, under the guiding hand of Chris Sanders, was going to look like. The other was the direct-to-video DisneyToon Studios film Tinker Bell, about which I can only say: golly Moses, if this is the fixed version...

I am not sure what to call this: a prequel to Peter Pan? A spin-off? The Japanese word gaiden would be perfect, but Peter Pan Gaiden is a title that implies something far more awesome, and probably steampunk-oriented, than Tinker Bell. This is a non-issue, of course; it only matters if we allow that Tinker Bell is a thoughtfully made expansion to the mythology of J.M. Barrie's play and novel, or the Disney films based thereon, and it is of course not that. It's a marketing ploy - an unusually straightforward one, at that. Disney had done spectacularly well with its Disney Princess line of toys and clothes and God knows what all, and once you've plastered those characters on the side of every plastic object that can possibly be sold to a little girl, you start to get itchy for a new horizon to pursue. In this case, the solution was found in the Disney Fairies line, in which Tinker Bell would be teamed with a whole bunch of color-coded pixies with their own carefully modulated personalities, and by starting the series off in the form of early reader books, the company could earnestly promise that it was promoting literacy. But not so much literacy that a series of Fairies movies (which, as much I understand it - and that is not well - take place in a totally different continuity) couldn't be snuck in there. Not to mention the "dress your daughter like a fairy" kiosks at the Disney theme parks.

Considering how soulless its genesis, the shocking thing is that Tinker Bell ends up being kind of fine. On the generic side, but not in a particularly unpleasant way, and the massive separation between it and any iteration of the Pan universe actually makes it easier to think about it without grousing on its failures as a "prequel", which it is only under the narrowest and least definition. Outside of the design and the shape of the island on which things take place, it's connection to Peter Pan is superficial at best, for the scenario that plays out here, and even the character of Tinker Bell herself, are frankly incompatible with anything that went before.

What replaces it is, on its own terms, not completely successful - there are conceptual holes that certainly would not matter to the film's target audience of little girls with disinterested parents, but I'm not in the least ashamed to admit that they mattered to me - and it's miserably over-familiar as a life lessons movie, while presenting characters who are carefully and expertly leeched of any appealing personality. But it's not insulting, and the message is considerably more pragmatic and reasonable than so, so, so much of what Disney wants to communicate to children. Why, the last time we peeked at a Disney video preying on the innocence of little girls, with Disney Princess Enchanted Tales: Follow Your Dreams, it was in service to the timeless message "being a princess is hard, which is why princesses are better than you". Next to that, the Tinker Bell theme that sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you won't be able to succeed at certain things, but it's still possible to be your very best at other things is freakishly universal and downright radical, even if there's just a whisper of "stay in your place, peon" elitism looking in on the edges.

Anyway, the film is an origin story for the title character, voiced by Mae Whitman - yes, her, but with four more of these to go, I don't want to belabor that reference yet. I'd hate to shoot my wad on what's supposed to be a dry run - who is born when a baby laughs its first laugh, as Barrie explained way back in the Edwardian era, where Tinker Bell is at least notionally set. The laugh, embodied as a whisp of seed, travels through time and space to Never Land, where it alights in the corner of that country known as Pixie Hollow, and Queen Clarion (Anjelica Huston, the most overqualified voice actor in the history of Disney's direct-to-video program) of the fairies welcomes the new little girlfairy into the world. Here, a choosing ceremony assigns her to the company of the tinker fairies, and that's how she takes her name. Not that, following Disney's original film (but not Barrie), Tinker Bell is often referred to as merely "Tink", which makes no goddamn sense if everyone around her is also a tinker. Though it does not appear to be part of anybody else's name, which must be really depressing for her.

Over the course of a rather plot-thin hour and a quarter, Tinker Bell will decide that she really doesn't want to be a tinker fairy at all, and would rather be one of the nature fairies who travel to the Mainland - our world - to help change the seasons (making this as much a Fantasia sequel as Peter Pan prequel). The Mainland, incidentally, pretty clearly refers to absolutely nothing but London, so it's not clear if the Never Land fairies are strictly those who are born of London baby laughs, or what; it's all very hollow and banal in expression, and gives us no sense of how the world works, but that's so far away from what Tinker Bell is even pretending to be interested in that I don't know why I brought it up.

Anyway, Tink's four friends - ditzy (and ambiguously sapphic) water fairy Silvermist (Lucy Liu), nervous light fairy Iridessa (Raven-Symoné), kindly animal fairy Fawn (America Ferrera), and sensible garden fairy Rosetta (Kristin Chenoweth) - all try to help train her in the ways of season-fairying, but none of it works, and eventually Vidia (Pamela Adlon), a snide and bullying speed-flying fairy (this is a thing, in this film's narrative universe) tricks Tinker Bell into inadvertently ruining spring. But at long last, the implication the film has been leaning on all along, that her unmatched talent for tinkering can create inventions never before imagined, comes into play, and Tinker Bell revolutionises the fairy season-making process, so that a process that ordinarily takes weeks can be wrapped up in less than a full night.

That's barely even a single episode of television worth of content, though the "let's learn about Pixie Hollow" material at least means that the film never feels like it's tarrying, looking for content. Structurally and mechanically, all of this is perfectly serviceable, workmanlike children's entertainment: it tells a story briskly and efficiently and makes the lesson of that story clear without being tedious. The flaw - the giant flaw - is that it does this through the medium of some deeply boring characters; one-note personality types voiced by one-note performers whose marquee value (such as it is) far outweighs the impact of their vocal performance. Not one of the five central fairies sounds like anything besides an exceptionally chirpy and annoying American twenty-something (even Chenoweth and Liu, who were edging up to 40 at the time), and their inner lives go exactly as far as what is minimally required to keep scenes from hanging together. One supporting character, played by Jesse McCartney, drifts in and out of the plot so fast that the fact the movie obviously expects us to take an immediate liking to him offends me on every aesthetic level I have.

Really, the only distinctive characters are Tinker Bell's two colleagues, Bobble (Rob Paulsen) and Clank (Jeff Bennett); not at all coincidentally, the only two played by professional voice actors, who prove it by indulging in really broad, splashy accents that start out grating and get worse. I said "distinctive", not "good".

They're also the only two who look like much of anything; generally speaking, character design is something that Tinker Bell has a rough time with, though. It was the first fully-rendered computer-animated film made by DisneyToon Studios, and the learning curve is remarkably similar to what Disney proper had to go through with Chicken Little: there's an unlikable sameness to the characters, they have faces which yield only with great reluctance to accommodate changes of emotion, and there's the omnipresent, eye-watering feeling that they're made of molded vinyl, not flesh. It is disquieting in a way that you can't really define what's the problem it's more like an all-encompassing eldritch wrongness.

Credit where it's due: the non-character visuals are drop-dead gorgeous. The film's soft color palette does it plenty of favors, and in the many wide shots, it feels very much like the kind of oil paintings treasured by people with only limited taste in art, but a real love of beautiful landscapes and evocative lighting. In fact, the wide shots are probably the single best thing about Tinker Bell, a movie that has very little personality, as befits its status as a feature-length commercial for brand name (which is somehow even worse than a feature-length commercial for toys), and cannot be praised more readily than, "this is emphatically harmless in every possible way". But harmless and pretty? Okay, you've got something there. I'm willing to admit that.

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TONY SCOTT: BEVERLY HILLS COP II (1987)

NB: At this point in this retrospective, I should be turning to the 1986 film Top Gun, but I have already reviewed it, and have nothing substantial to add to what I said at that time.

The 1980s were a sequel-mad decade nearly on par with the present day, so it is no surprise at all that the action-comedy Beverly Hills Cop, the highest-grossing film of 1984 (for there were also some ways in which the '80s were very different) should end up with a sequel. And while Beverly Hills Cop II didn't explode the Zeitgeist like its predecessor did, it still managed to end up the third-highest-grossing film of 1987, behind only Three Men and a Baby and Fatal Attraction (for there where also some ways in which the '80s were fucking unrecognisable).

Better yet, BHC II is, as sequels go, not a terribly pointless one. Beverly Hills Cop is already not a cinematic masterpiece without peer or precedent, serving mostly as an excuse to watch Eddie Murphy doing what he does (that is to say; what he did, back in the mid-'80s when his career was fresh and he hadn't spent so many years making unforgivably pandering family movies that he'd become incapable of doing anything else), being sassy, foul-mouthed, and just assertive enough about being a black man that he could score some points, without necessarily making anybody uncomfortable about that. BHC II is basically, the same thing, though compared the first movie, it skews a bit more heavily to comedy than to action, which is not to its benefit as a narrative, or a character drama or anything, really, except a delivery system for Murphy. But Murphy in those days was appealing enough that this proves to be very nearly sufficient.

Indeed, the fact that Murphy himself helped to shape the story helps cement the impression that this film is not terribly invested in its own criminal narrative, but in being a star vehicle, and it's that subtle shift away from BHC the first that still marks the sequel out as, well, a sequel, and one from an age when making a sequel was more about giving a fresh coat of paint to the same situations than expanding the first film's narrative universe, so it's not exactly like BHC II was ever going to be in a position to tell a story of unnatural richness and fascination.

The story is, anyway, that in Beverly Hills, California - helpfully identified by onscreen titles twice, in case we were still buying popcorn the first time, or something - police officers Andrew Bogomil (Ronny Cox), Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold), and John Taggart (John Ashton) are all working on the case of the Alphabet Criminal, a series of robberies named for their obnoxious "hey cops, betcha can't find me" clue-filled letters. Already, we find out what kind of movie this intends to be when Bogomil, Rosewood, and Taggart are introduced, and presented throughout the film, really, as people we already know and love, which was probably a lot more fair in '87 than it is now; God bless it, but Beverly Hills Cop hasn't maintained the full flush of its cachet over more than a quarter of a century. And besides, I don't suppose anybody really did give a shit about any of them: the real point of interest is of course Murphy's Axel Foley, a Detroit detective working undercover to crack a fake credit card ring.

The Alphabet case goes bad, and Bogomil ends up in the hospital, with Rosewood and Taggart bumped down to traffic duty, and when Foley sees this on the news (because the non-fatal injury of a Southern California policeman would plainly be of vital interest to the Detroit media market), he immediately pulls some of his quick-talking magic to skip off to Beverly Hills, to avenge his friend Bogomil and complete that man's mission to crack the case. It is also assumed that we know who Foley is and how he came to be so close to the Beverly Hills PD; but at a certain point, you have to accept that if you're watching a movie with II in the title, you better have done the appropriate research.

But anyway, it's not like the series' mythology is so dense and nuanced that there's any real chance of missing out on what's happening. The film serves one purpose: to put Axel Foley in positions where he can launch into con-man patter to trick somebody into helping him, or confuse the villains into messing up. Even Axel Foley himself matters only as a vessel for the actor playing him; there's nothing about the character separate from Murphy that's terribly memorable or interesting.

None of this is a flaw, exactly: the movie entirely succeeds at its singularly modest goals. It's not, at any turn, as good as the earlier film, and maybe that is a flaw: the jokes are busier but less clever, the plot is less focused and when Axel cracks the case, there's so little reason to care what the case has actually been, given how blandly convoluted it is and how run-of the-mill its antagonist (even with the ever-colorful Jürgen Prochnow playing him). The film is so focused on delivering what it thinks we want in the form of its central character, that it never builds up any stakes or context for him to seem as savvy as cop as he did in the first film. Though all things being equal, I'd rather have such a sequel err on the side of not enough plot than do like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and try to paper over its shallowness with a really big, sprawling, messy plot.

Anyway, we are gathered here today not to hash out the merits of a generation-old action comedy that's remarkably light on action and boasts less comedy than it might, but to note its importance in the career of director Tony Scott. And this is something that's honestly a bit hard to do. Scott was picked for the job by producers Don Simpson & Jerry Bruckheimer based on the massive success of their previous collaboration together, Top Gun, which was the director's second feature and one that largely anticipates everything that would later become distinctively his; it is shiny, it is immensely loud, it is captivated by men working with machines, it is unabashedly militaristic. BHC II is absolutely none of these things; in fact, it's only real point of aesthetic interest at all is that it is assembled to an unusual degree out of individual shots that feel weirdly isolated within scenes, rather than based in traditional continuity. When this character or that is in close-up, that close-up often as not feels like it's severing them from the rest of the movie; there is a gap between locations and the actions that take place there. It's an interestingly materialistic way of shooting a movie of this sort, almost ironic in a way, but it ends up providing little other than an interesting thing to notice, and it anyway is not really characteristic of Scott as a director at all. Even the cinematography, by Top Gun DP Jeffrey Kimball, lacks that film's TV commercial sexiness about staging events to look particularly sleek and glamorous.

The whole thing, really, seems to work largely on the level of, "do pretty much what you did before", with none of the actors pushing very hard, and the Harold Faltermeyer score largely reiterating the iconic theme music from the first movie in marginally different orchestrations. If the point of all this, from the director's point of view, was to prove that he could be a good, obedient hack, doing right by a franchise he came into late, then it worked, I guess; but that never pays off elsewhere in his career, and love him or hate him, the one thing you absolutely can't say of Tony Scott is that he was ever been much for anonymous hackwork.

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ZOMBIES OF THE WORLD UNITE

The first thing to admit is that World War Z is better than I assumed it would have any reason to be, if only because the very phrase "PG-13 zombie movie" is enough to make any True Genre Fan start dry-heaving. On the other hand, World War Z also fails to be as good as it easily could have been, given that it's basically a hybrid of 28 Days Later and Contagion, and all it should have taken was to slavishly replicate the things that those movies did well. Instead, WWZ goes about, contentedly making its own mistakes and failing to learn from its most immediately obvious forebears.

With that lineage, it should be immediately obvious what kind of movie we're looking at: a plague thriller in which the plague makes zombies. The rage virus kind of zombies that a purist might reasonably grouse are no kind of zombies at all - in WWZ, they're not even cannibals, but are wholly content to call it a day once their poison bites have passed on the disorder - though since much is made of the fact that the victims are in fact reanimated dead bodies, and the very word "zombie" even shows up, dodging the somewhat tedious recent tendency to do all sorts of coy dances around naming names (sometimes a flesh-eating revenant is just a flesh-eating revenant), I think it's fair to wave the film right on through.

I have not read Max Brooks's source novel, but I am given to understand that it's a collage of after-the-fact eyewitness accounts of What Happened During the Zombie Apocalypse. That's something that could work as a movie - it is, in fact, not unlike the structure of Contagion itself - but unfathomably expensive summer tentpole movies need a bit more of a sure thing, and that's how a rotating all-star cast of writers perhaps better noted for their marquee value than their consistent quality - J. Michael Straczynski, Damon Lindelof, and Drew Goddard are among those credited - ended up shaping the material into a globe-trotting adventure centered around Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt, who doubles as producer), a former United Nations employee called back into action. What, exactly, Gerry did that so impressed UN Deputy Secretary-General Thierry Umutoni (Fana Mokoena) is left a bit muddy; the best I can come up with is that he's a professional survivalist. And in that capacity, he's assigned to be the guide in a field of hostile human monsters for Dr. Andrew Fassbach (Elyes Gabel), a virologist hoping to track the spread of the zombie disease in the hopes of stamping it out while there's still a humanity left to save.

But that doesn't happen right away. First, Gerry and his wife Karin (Mireille Enos), and their daughters (Sterling Jerins and Abigail Hargrove) find themselves stuck in an unusually appalling bout of Philly traffic on their way to the airport, and this turns out to be caused by a sudden explosion in homicidal biting, as urban centers across the industrial West start toppling all in the span of a single terrible day (and if you imagine that the film prods at the Post 9/11 NYC wound with a stick, you have imagined correctly). The Lanes are able to escape to Newark, NJ, devastated by rioting, looting, and a general sense of broken-down terror (there's no indication why New Jersey hasn't been affected by the zombie outbreak), and here they acquire a terrified Latino boy, Tomas (Fabrizio Zacharee Guido), whose parents, for unknowable reasons, would rather send him off with the kindly gringos than go themselves. Anyway, at this point, Gerry's UN contacts are able to send a helicopter to pick him and his family up in the barest nick of time, and it's only after he has them safely aboard a remote aircraft carrier that he learns the cost: nobody gets to take up space on that ship unless they're being useful. Nobody, nor their families. So how would you like to plunge back into the well of a global war against toxic corpses?

That takes us a good quarter-way through the movie (WWZ is a blissful 116 minutes, an elegant throwback to the day when tentpole movie had to earn it if they wanted to break the two-hour mark), and it already showcases what might be the biggest problem out of many small ones: WWZ never does solve that problem of crafting a single unified narrative out of the bits and pieces of Brooks's novel, but ends up like a series of mini-movies, all of them starring Pitt's Gerry Lane. There's the Philadelphia Escape, there's the Incident in South Korea, there's the Siege of Jerusalem, where Gerry picks up an Israeli soldier, Segen (Daniella Kertez) to be his kick-ass, one-handed Gal Friday for the remainder of the picture, and there's the Haunted House Thriller, in which Gerry, thinking he might just about have cracked this whole disease, but has to sneak through the zombie-wracked halls of a World Health Organization facility in Cardiff, Wales in order to find a vial of bacteria. This last sequence of the movie, incidentally, is by far the best part, and it may or may not be the result of massive production traumas that led to a very costly Russian finale to be scrapped and replaced by a new ending; my interests in the case haven't led me to do too much research into exactly what got added at what point. There are those who have observed that the end is sudden, and largely unresolved, which is sort of true; but it mostly tells me that not enough critics have the proper appreciation of Italian zombie films. That's where you get properly abrupt endings.

The point being: it's beyond episodic, and it is best when it's the most scaled-back; though I have to credit director Marc Forster with having evolved so tremendously well in his ability to handle big action sequences from the eye-melting awfulness of Quantum of Solace, that out of respect, I shan't even link his name to the Dramatic Chipmunk, as is my custom. In fact, the action in WWZ is pretty solid, all things considered: the Philadelphia material far more so than the Jerusalem scenes, largely because it has a much higher sense of confusion and chaos.

The unresolved issue, though, is that however successful it is as an action thriller, WWZ is a damnably unsteady story with totally uninteresting characters and too many narrative leaps of faith. It's probably just because Contagion exists, and is awesome, that I think this, but it almost certainly would have worked better if Gerry were at least three different characters, and his story broken up rather than told in neat little discrete geographic chunks, like an Indiana Jones zombie-fighting movie (which I know, sounds awesome - but that's not at all what WWZ is, just how it's structured).

Technically, the film is solid if not quite exceptional: Ben Seresin's cinematography probably didn't need to be quite as flat and bleached of color, and Roger Barton & Matt Chesse's editing surely could have slowed down quite a bit in the faster parts of action scenes, and Marco Beltrami's score could have had a bit more personality to go along with his excellent opening credits theme. But it gets the job done, all of it, assuming "the job" was to keep us reliably perked up by the scenes of mass devastation, and creeped out a little bit at the slow-burn tension of the final sequence.

It is not a good zombie film. It's barely a zombie film at all, in fact: more of a bio-thriller in which zombies are symptomatic of a killer disease. And I'm certainly not going to pretend that I wasn't totally disappointed by that development. But in a summer where the splashy action films have been weaker-kneed than I'd prefer, it's entirely satisfying at the level of popcorn spectacle, and it's fully aware that the best thing is to never be boring, and let issues like story and character hold off for some more serious and probing tale of the undead taking over the world. Aye, there could be a much better version of this scenario; but there just as easily could be, and have been, versions that are incomparably worse.

7/10
6/10?
That Man of Steel 6/10 is really clipping my wings here.
Let's go with a rare decimal point:

6.5/10

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TIM AT TFE: THE DESIRING-IMAGE

This week's essay: I interview occasional contributor to The Film Experience and Friend of Antagony & Ecstasy Nick Davis, on the event of the the publication of his first book, The Desiring-Image: Gilles Deleuze and Contemporary Queer Cinema.

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FOR WHICH OF MY BAD PARTS DIDST THOU FIRST FALL IN LOVE WITH ME?

It's an open question whether Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing really deserves to exist at all. Made during post-production on the writer-director's mammoth effects extravaganza The Avengers, and specifically intended to clear his head and wash the taste of green screens and Disney/Marvel's omnipresence out of his mouth, the film is populated with a host of actors from his various TV projects, all goofing around in Whedon's huge (and honestly, sort of fussy) Santa Monica house and yard. Apparently, "let's do a Shakespeare reading!" parties have been a fixture of the Whedon home for some time now, and for once, he decided to fully stage and film it. So what we've basically got here is a home movie of a bunch of friends and colleagues putting on a show, and as sweet as it is, it never quite shakes off the feeling that the world would not be manifestly worse off if Whedon just made a present of it to all the collaborators, never to share it with any outsider, as when Steven Soderbergh made a private gift of The Last Time I Saw Michael Gregg to its cast, the ensemble of a stage play he was directing at the time.

All of this is moot, of course. We do have the Whedon Much Ado out in the world for ever and always, and as much as it's a visibly rough, DIY sort of thing, it's not at all without its charms; indeed, the DIY quality is very much part of what makes it charming, and makes it possible to agree to overlook some of the dodgier missteps of acting or staging (there are surprisingly few of the latter, perhaps because the director knew the location as intimately as one conceivably could). It is, for better or worse, a film that is plainly not taking itself at all seriously in any regard, which discourages us from taking it seriously either. If the result is less tony, polished, conceptually sound, and admirable than the 1993 Much Ado spearheaded by Kenneth Branagh (still the best filmed adaptation of a Shakespeare comedy, which is admittedly not a terribly competitive achievement), it makes up for it by being funnier, and given the imposing cultural barriers involved, making a filmed Shakespearean comedy consistently and genuinely funny is certainly no mean feat.

Bumping the material up to the present day, Whedon's thoroughly faithful realization of the text is not particularly thought-through - why do all these people meandering around in what could not be any other place than Southern California keep using Italian place-names? - and besides "because the director had easy access to it, and it is ludicrously photogenic", there's never an entirely satisfactory answer to why this story has to take place in this setting (it becomes especially weird when the action shifts to a child's bedroom, demanding that we confront who among any of the characters onscreen could possibly have children).

But again, a certain shagginess isn't just built in to this adaptation, it's driving it, and what simply dropping Much Ado into the 2010s without self-consciously showing us how he's worked through all of the details, as in William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, Whedon manages to knock quite a lot of fustiness out of the film, thus staying clear of one of the biggest traps that every Shakespeare movie has to be aware of. "Just enjoy the ride", implies the occasionally off-kilter staging, and boy, if the rest of the film isn't dedicated to making that possible: the breezy line deliveries that do their damnedest to bury the metrical rhythms of the writing, the coolly jazzy score (composed by Whedon himself), the too-sharp, fashion-magazine glossy black and white cinematography by Jay Hunter.

It's a relentelessly casual, modern Shakespearean comedy, then, one buoyed up some terrific physical comedy in the staging (and Whedon is fantastic at coaxing goofy reaction shots out of his actors), and served fairly well by a cast that treats it all as so much screwball sex farce banter. And that's kind of the problem as well: Much Ado '12 Edition is fizzy and shallow by design, and it glosses over all the sharp edges and insights that make the play work (though at the same time, rendering this play, with its central bickering lovers, as a conventional romantic comedy pays off better than the same approach would with the more complex Twelfth Night or As You Like It). The cast is uniformly better than I'd expected, though the only generally flawless performance is Clark Gregg's Leonato; outside of him (and Nathan Fillion as Dogberry, a one-note comic figure that the actor plays with unmodulated gusto), not a single major player escapes from the movie without a few lines where it's clear that they don't quite have a handle on what the words they're saying mean, with Alexis Denisof in particular, as Benedick, appearing to never have quite managed to convince himself that using archaic language in the context of Whedon's palatial home is a defensible idea.

But some infelicities of language aside, the actors have pretty solid chemistry, and Amy Acker's Beatrice is an effectively sardonic, modern-tastes expansion of a character who is, outside of AYLI's Rosalind, already the most contemporary-feeling woman in a Shakespearean comedy (weirdly, the lines that give Acker the most trouble aren't the most obscure ones; I get the impression that iambic pentameter was a bigger stumbling block for her than Elizabethan syntax). Like the rest of the movie, she trades in shadings of character for momentary effect: the underlying bitterness that can (but doesn't have to be) a component of Beatrice's personality is present but awfully muted, and she's too willing to play the part on the surface; but that's what fits the performances around her, and the movie itself.

The whole thing is a trifle, pretty clearly, and on that level it works. Much Ado requires less work than many of Shakespeare's plays to begin with, even among the comedies, and by transmitting it more or less directly as a stylish but simple comedy of sophisticated people spouting witty imprecations at each other, Whedon humanises the material and situates it in an easy-to-watch register. There are moments of cleverness (the climactic use of a smart phone is one of the best modern-day Shakespeare touches I've ever seen), and moments of inspired comic staging, and very little probing insight, either cinematic or literary. But it proves better than any other modernised adaptions of Shakespeare that I can name that there's a way to freshen up the feeling of the plays without attempting to subvert them in any way, making an overfamiliar classic seem bright and fresh. One for the groundlings, perhaps; but they were always the biggest part of Shakespeare's audience.

7/10

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: WHO LET THE TROGS OUT

The operating theory behind this year's Summer of Blood is there's a certain something that Canadian horror films have that their southerly neighbors just can't match: that pound for pound, the idiotic, disposable junk made by Canucks is just better than the idiotic, disposable junk made by Yanks - more mature, more psychologically astute. Every broad assumption has its debilitating holes, though and we've come to the first one: The Pit, a Canadian monster movie (from the horror annus mirabilis of 1981, no less) that's just really fucking dumb. Hugely enjoyably dumb, I should hasten to clarify, but there's no argument that I can perceive that makes The Pit a legitimately effective motion picture. Its deranged tone, bizarre characters, and a loopy structure that makes the 97-minute running time seem every bit of 20 minutes longer than the filmmakers were ready for all contribute to make certain of that.

"Loopy structure" refers to a couple of things, but one crops up in the very first scene: on Halloween night, a teen boy dressed as a pirate (Paul Grisham) and his girlfriend, dressed as a ballerina (Wendy Schmidt) are approached by a younger boy in the classic "sheet with eyeholes" ghost costume (Sammy Snyders). The boy in the sheet, Jamie, invites the other two to follow him into the woods to look for a bag of jewelry he found there, and while this is happening, the audience is hit by a speeding truck and splattered all over the road. By which I mean, we hop back in time to the moment that the older boy punched Jamie square in the face, but it's inserted at a totally random moment, and accompanied by a jarring shift in the soundtrack that feels like a sound editor was never even called in as a consultant, and coupled with the fact that all three of the characters have been either in makeup or beneath a sheet, there's no reason to assume that this scene has anything to do with the initial action, and good reason, in fact, to assume the opposite.

But no, the point is that Jamie is about to get his revenge on the teen bully, Freddy, and he does it by bringing him to a secluded clearing where a bag of what looks rather more like costume jewelry than the real stuff is right at the edge of... A Pit. Here, Freddy starts enthusiastically hunting through the loot, nd just when his attention is fully diverted, Jame appears behind him to push him bodily into... The Pit. We can just barely see some kind of movement deep within... The Pit... and it's this over this image that the film's title appears, before we launch into-

And that, not the aggressively awful flashback, is the actual loopy structure I had in mind. See, for a long time, nobody mentions the missing bully, and God knows what happens to the ballerina. It seemed like shitty storytelling, then it seemed like a poor attempt to goose the film into starting by opening with a shock scene that had nothing to do with the rest of the film, but by a certain point it becomes clear that the film opens with a flash-forward, and at almost exactly the 60-minute mark, we'll see the whole scene we just saw play out again. The. Whole. Scene. With the addition of Christina the ballerina's really strange death, in which she literally swoons and Jamie coos sorrowful things at her while struggling badly to lift her and roll her into... The Pit. That the filmmakers couldn't even slightly condense the scene that we'd already watched - that they included the exact same random shots of trick-or-treating children having a food fight - tells me that even more than this opening was meant to give The Pit a rollicking opening, it was desperately trying to inflate its running time; if you took out everything that was just awful padding, the film would barely scrape over 80 minutes, and while that might be a reasonable length for a 1981 horror movie, The Pit's makers had more ambitious aims, or something like that.

However, I don't want to hide the fact that, without this opening, The Pit wouldn't have its first kill until 52 minutes in. So it's a really pandering gesture from every angle.

With the film proper about to begin, I need to preface the plot by saying that Ian A. Stuart's script and the film that director Lew Lehman made are not the same thing, in one unspeakably important regard. For Stuart, Jamie was around 9 years old and the monsters in... The Pit... were projections of his fragile imagination. Lehman's revisions made him 12 (and Snyders appears to have a solid year or two up on that), and the monsters are very much real. For the most part, the graft holds pretty well - the weird confluence of a 12-year-old who acts immature and looks too mature fits the film's creepy sexual element - but one of the driving elements of the plot, and the source of the film's alternate title, Teddy, is Jamie's teddy bear, who whispers (in Jamie's own voice) horrifying, psychopathic advice. A plot element far too major to be ignored, but it makes far less sense if the boy isn't "actually" killing the people he feeds to his "Trolologs", or however it is that we're meant to understand the inconsistently-pronounced name he's come up with for his monsters.

Anyway, Jamie is just kicking on puberty's door, and he's doing it badly: stealing the copy of Creative Nude Photography and bringing it to school, because in whatever nebulously North American community where this takes place (it was shot in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin), they stock erotica in public libraries. Worse still, he has just about everybody in the neighborhood concerned about his aberrant behavior, so when his parents leave on a trip to Seattle, they're obliged to hire a child psychology major to babysit and watch the house, Sandy (Jeannie Elias). Having a young lady in the full bloom of womanhood right under his roof is terrible for Jamie's already overheated sex drive, and he spends an enormous amount of energy trying to spy on Sandy in various states of undress and feed meat to the troglodytes in... The Pit... that seemingly nobody else has ever heard of, despite it being just barely in the woods outside a farmer's cow pasture.

And that is all the movie we get for an awfully long hour, until Jamie runs out of money to feed the trogs, Sandy has wised up to his stealing money from her purse, and Teddy advises that the boy start throwing "bad people" to the monsters. Being a young child, those bad people consist of the various authority figures, irritating peers, and sexual rivals that he doesn't like, and I have to be at least ironically admiring of a film whose very first victim - accompanied by jaunty, "ain't this all wacky?" music - is Abergail (Andrea Swartz), a bullying little girl of about 10, nor is she the only child to be torn apart (demurely - this is a surpassingly violence-free movie) by the trogs.

While waiting for that to happen, we find that The Pit is one hell of a warped bad movie, splitting its time between utterly tormented expository dialogue (sample, from the awful little girl: "Why don't you go back where you came from, funny person? If I see you near my bike again, I'll tell your father, and it'll be too bad for you. They'll take you away."), minimally threatening moments where Teddy murmurs evil, and a remarkable prominence of totally gratuitous boobage (it is from a 12-year-old's POV), including a scene where Jamie - not having altered his voice in the least - is able to convince his librarian lust object, Miss Livingstone (Laura Hollingsworth) to strip down in front of her window, by alleging that he kidnapped her niece (the selfsame Abergail). It's all a bit tedious, even with the comically absurd excuses for nudity, and mind-numbingly repetitive.

But when the monsters start chomping down on Jamie's enemy list, then the movie takes off into the bad movie stratosphere. Part of it is because they're so abysmally-executed, rubber suits with an unfortunately porcine cast (when Sandy sensibly suggests that the creatures she's just barely seen are pigs, the film even seems to own this bit of ineffective design) and no ability to flex. Part of it is because of the desperation with which the film starts funneling victims Jamie's way. Most of it is the jaw-dropping shift in focus the movie makes with about 20 minutes left to go, with Jamie having left a rope down to let the troglodytes out of... The Pit... (he has no more enemies, so he won't keep murdering for them), and it suddenly becomes about the police hunt to stop the wild animals ravaging people up and down the countryside, with Jamie's own story having been completely dropped except for a final scene that doesn't end up fitting with anything. Insofar as the story has been able to find any kind of focus behind the immature, psychotic Jamie and the sexually obsessed Jamie, two protagonists sharing a single body and a completely disparate set of horror movie tropes, it stops pretending for a good long time to be about either of its initial strands; it feels like not just a different plot but a different genre altogether has infiltrated the movie, and it's so strange and totally ineffective that I want to jump up and down and tell Lew Lehman that it's a sin against bad cinema that he was only able to direct one film, if this was the kind of Ed Woodian disregard for story logic that he felt was "fixing" Stuart's screenplay.

The one thing that unites all of the disparate threads of the movie - the incompatible Jamies, the leaden opening hour and the giddy final third, the boob obsession and the terrible monsters - is that all of it is impeccably stupid. There's really nothing in The Pit that's anything but terrible, and its attempts at building a preteen psycho protagonist are impressive particularly for being totally devoid of any decent observation about how preteens are (Snyder's freakishly mannered performance doesn't help). It is all deranged and dreadful and divorced from human behavior, and God bless it for being so committed to its world that it never stops and asks the question, "does anything here make a lick of sense?" For if it had realised that the answer was now, we'd have been deprived of a heck of a ludicrous So Bad It's Good movie.

Body Count: 11, and though they are largely clustered into just two spree killings, that's an impressive pile of corpses indeed for something in this generic wheelhouse. I am only counting Freddy the pirate once, though we see him die twice. Also, four trogodods, or whatever they're called.

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