Movieline Online

Although he laid a big radioactive goose egg with Godzilla (2014), director Gareth Edwards debut feature, Monsters (2010), was a clever character piece set amidst a laconic alien invasion as oversized creatures mysteriously stomped across every nation on Earth. It worked for several reasons: solid acting, believable writing and convincing special effects. But it didn’t scream for a sequel. Few movies ever do. Yet Monsters: Dark Continent struggles to be a worthy successor, ambitiously combining the pathos of a modern war film with leftover herds of marauding aliens. It’s failure isn’t due so much to artistic overreaching, just misjudgment about who fans of the original film were in the first place. Opening with a tight-knit squad of Detroit homies who ship out together to the Middle East, the film establishes itself as a metaphor for the Iraq / Afghanistan conflicts from frame one. In fact, with the creatures relegated to so much background noise, a few digital tweaks would t...

The silent, stoic western hero is part and parcel of the genre’s mythology. Which essentially just means a hard land breeds hard men. But most of the traditional western stories – popularized by John Ford and Howard Hawks - spent a great amount of effort attempting to civilize those men; teaching them table manners, dance steps and how to treat a lady. Whether the end result was successful or not, usually the subject was agreeable to learn . In Hombre (1967) Paul Newman plays John Russell, a former Apache captive who returns to the dying tribe of his own free will, unable to stomach the hypocrisy of white society. Here is a man who had a chance to return to civilization and spat right in its face. As the film begins, Russell has yet another chance to put himself on “the winning side” when his adopted white father dies and leaves an inheritance for him to collect in the town of Sweetmary. Spurning his chance to earn an easy living – and some romantic chemistry with Jessie (D...

We’ve had space westerns, horror westerns, comedy westerns, existential westerns and some that combined all of the above (1972’s El Topo ). As a genre, it’s had to be malleable to survive. But Man, Pride and Vengeance (1967) might be the only western based on an opera – or more specifically a novel better known as an opera. Starring Franco Nero, one of the most iconic European gunslingers, paired with a filmmaking team that included cinematographer Vittorio Storaro ( Apocalypse Now ), the film never breaks into song, but manages carry Prosper Merimee’s story of Carmen in its saddlebags with unexpected eloquence. Don Jose (Nero), a dutiful soldier, is duped by a charming peasant girl, Carmen (Tina Aumont), who winds up throwing his career into disgrace. Her mental and emotional manipulations drive Jose mad with passion to the point where he kills a superior officer in a fit of jealousy, forcing him to become an outlaw to survive. Committed to his life of crime – as long as he c...

It’s getting tedious re-introducing director Mario Bava for each new Blu-ray that arrives (and we’ve had a lot lately). So consider this fair warning: if don’t know who Bava is by now, do your own research while the rest of us celebrate the release of Evil Eye (1963) and its original Italian-language version The Girl Who Knew Too Much. While much of the director’s catalog consists of gothic terror and straight-faced suspense, his sense of humor is much more evident here...although it depends on which version you watch first. Distributed by AIP, Evil Eye is Bava’s first foray in the Italian genre he was credited with inventing: the gialli, mystery-thrillers that in later years became famous for mixing sex, blood and perversity. This first go-round however is much more innocent in its execution and leans more toward classic whodunits with case of the “cutes.” Nora Davis (Leticia Roman) is an avid reader of lurid crime-thrillers who witnesses a murder while vacationing in Rome. Or maybe n...

Despite its popularity and a wealth of material to draw from, Hollywood has a hard time adapting modern pulp fiction to the screen. There’ve been some exceptional exceptions: Elmore Leonard hit the bulls eye with Out of Sight and Get Short y while the prolific Donald Westlake’s most faithful flick was way back in 1973 with The Outfit . Filled with villains who can be downright depraved and heroes who are often morally questionable themselves, it’s a genre that requires courage to even attempt…and balls to do right! Based on the first Hoke Moseley novel by noir novelist Charles Willeford and written / directed by George Armitage, Miami Blues (1990) is as close to perfect as a you can get. It’s pulp fiction without the Tarantino pretension, stripped down to its raw criminal brutality but balanced with a worldview so pessimistic you can’t help but laugh. That it even exists should probably be credited to producer Jonathan Demme, who created a similar offbeat style with Something...

Most of the Clint Eastwood copycats during the heyday of the “Spaghetti Western” were Europeans passing themselves off as unshaven outlaws of the American West. Since all the dialogue was dubbed in post-production and the film locations were anonymous enough, audiences usually were none the wiser. But Tony Anthony was the real McCoy. A West Virginia native who found himself in Italy just as Sergio Leone’s Dollar films were breaking box office records, the actor co-financed and starred in A Stranger in Town, playing the lead role of a scruffy bounty hunter with a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The clothes, style and skills were all a dead ringer for Eastwood’s “Man With No Name,” but Anthony brought a loose, playful feel that matched his hangdog looks and the character’s less polished abilities. Not that “The Stranger” is a slouch with a six-gun. The first film is an almost dialogue-free exercise in shootouts, but slow-paced and fairly predictable in term...

Writers, performers and directors have been “reworking” the words of William Shakespeare probably just a few years after they debuted on the stage, whether to make the stories more contemporary, more marketable or more easily digestible for a new generation. They rarely make them better , but in most instances one would suppose that isn’t the goal. Very likely it’s the artistic ambition to reinterpret what made the story so great in the first place…along with a personal desire to “pay it forward,” so to speak, to the man who inspired so many. So seems to be the case with Ian McKellen’s take on Richard III , which, although it would be unfair to discount director Richard Loncraine’s visual contribution to the film, is the very definition of a tour de force performance by an actor who dredges up every last sociopathic tendency in one of the Bard’s most memorable characters. Dear desperate high school students: this is a movie that wipes it bum with your Cliff’s Notes! Set in an uns...

Ancient Egyptian culture has been fodder for horror stories since King Tut was discovered in 1922. Early tabloid journalists reported that the “Curse of the Pharaohs” was responsible for the deaths of several archeologists and moneymen behind the dig. And by the time Boris Karloff came shambling onto movie screens ten years later wrapped in moldy rags, the iconography of The Mummy was set in stone, just like spooky hieroglyphics. The Pyramid (2014) seems to have stumbled onto yet another good use of the “found-footage” gimmick. At the very least, it makes logical sense that archeologists would capture their work on film…so the documentary team that tags along is really just overkill. Geeked about their discovery of a structure buried “under” the sand, our team sneaks inside to rescue their stranded robotic-rover before riots in the capital force them out of the country. Horror films revolve around bad ideas. And this is the first of many. Director Gregory Levasseur has all...