Welcome to TBO.com. Skip directly to: our Keyword Search, Section Navigation, Content.

TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

TBO.com - Tampa Bay Online

John Allman

If you’ve ever wandered the aisles at the video store or surfed the DVR pay-per-view options and seen a bunch of movies that you’ve never heard of, chances are John has watched them. Why? He loves movies. All kinds of movies. Good, bad, so-bad-they’re good, even the truly unwatchable ones. He mostly loves horror and science-fiction and drive-in exploitation movies that most upstanding model citizens wouldn’t dare watch. Then he writes up his thoughts so you can decide - watch, don’t watch or avoid at all costs. Sometimes he even gets to talk to the cool folks who make some of your favorite films.

Blood, Violence and Babes
John Allman

Most Recent Entries

Monthly Archives

New Releases for Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2011

Posted Sep 24, 2011 by John Allman

Updated Sep 24, 2011 at 10:45 AM

What’s new in stores and on video shelves this week:

A Horrible Way to Die
Genre: Horror
Directed by: Adam Wingard
Run time: 87 minutes
Rating: R
Format: Blu-Ray

The Lowdown: That there is a fascination with murderers, killers and their evil ilk is nothing new. But rarely has there been a killer captivating enough to garner a rock star-like following.

The Menendez Brothers had their share of faithful admirers, mostly women wishing to marry them. Ted Bundy was another, so smooth and suave, yet so cold and calculating.

“A Horrible Way to Die” is a movie about the public’s fascination with serial killers. But it’s also a near-flawless case study in evil incarnate that is as mesmerizing to watch as it is chilling to contemplate. Though a work of fiction, the events depicted in director Adam Wingard’s film hardly seem farfetched, particularly to anyone who reads the news with any regularity. The characters created by writer Simon Barrett are so believable, so familiar, that the shocking twists hit home with a whallop usually not felt in a low-budget slasher.

Huge credit goes to the three leads, particularly A.J. Bowen as Garrick Turrell, the serial slayer who escapes from prison and sets out on a murder spree as he kills his way back to where his ex Sarah now lives. Bowen is really establishing himself as one of the best in the genre, and has made a living lately off playing incredibly creepy, yet unnervingly sympathetic and even likeable psychos, in fan favorites like “The Signal” and “The House of the Devil.” He’s a magnetic actor with an easy style who should become a household name for horror geeks, and his effortless, chilling performance leaves no doubt why a succession of beautiful women would fall for his fatal charms.

Amy Seimetz plays Sarah, and she is so convincingly fragile as the former girlfriend of mass murderer Garrick Turrell. Sarah is grappling with the realization that she had been duped for so long by his smooth excuses and believable lies, and aided substantially by a chemical dependency on alcohol. Sarah is now in rehab and trying to rebuild her life, staying as far off the grid as possible, cloaking herself in anonymity and rarely divulging much about her past.

In her weekly group, Sarah meets Kevin, another recovering alcoholic, who asks her out on a date. Kevin, as played by Joe Swanberg, is a goofy, good-looking, awkward guy who wants to care for Sarah, who doesn’t push her too hard or too fast, seeing how vulnerable she appears. Swanberg’s performance is possibly the best of the film, if only because he is asked to pull off a few remarkable moments late in the movie, which I won’t spoil here, and he nails it.

Wingard is a director on the up. He’s a name to watch out for, having already delivered two impressive independent features, “Home Sick” and “Pop Skull.” And Barrett is simply one of the best writers working in the genre right now. If you haven’t seen his earlier efforts, “Dead Birds,” a genuinely scary Civil War-era ghost story, or “Red Sands,” an ambitious paranormal tale set within the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, you must go out and find those films and check them out.

The duo’s next project, aptly titled “You’re Next,” is already garnering rave reviews on the festival circuit as a meta-slasher film that just might reinvent the genre, much like “Scream” did back in the mid-1990s.

But for now, go find “A Horrible Way to Die.” The events that unfold in it might be awful, but watching it is a damn good way to spend your time.

The Stuff You Care About:
Hot chicks – Yes.
Nudity – Brief.
Gore – Yes.
Drug use – No.
Bad Guys/Killers – This is a film that challenges your perception of evil and its many different shades.
Buy/Rent – Buy it.
Blu-Ray Bonus Features – Audio commentary with director Wingard and writer Barrett. Behind the scenes featurette. Theatrical trailer.

The Entitled (Anchor Bay, 92 minutes, Unrated, Blu-Ray): A smart thriller that plays like a junior version of a twisty David Mamet double-cross, “The Entitled” benefits from a few surprise moments that shouldn’t be spoiled here. This isn’t on par with superior genre offerings like “The Disappearance of Alice Creed,” but writer William Morrissey and director Aaron Woodley show their love and appreciation for taunt, precision-based kidnap and ransom flicks, and all of the actors, including B+-listers Victor Garber and Ray Liotta, play their parts with purpose, which elevates the slower moments and makes up for the few lags in plot. This one is definitely worth a rent. It’s better than most direct-to-DVD fare, and even a lot of wide releases.

Assassination Games (Sony, 101 minutes, R, DVD): Quick, name the last good Jean-Claude Van Damme movie. How about the best? To be fair, Van Damme only made three “good” movies during his heyday of the 1990s – “Double Impact,” “Universal Soldier” and “Timecop,” which is probably his best overall film to date. Throughout the 1990s and early-to-mid 2000s, Van Damme became a cautionary tale, another Steven Seagal-sized action star who went from box office to bombs to direct-to-DVD. In 2008, he scored a modest comeback with “JCVD,” a meta-action film where he played himself, allowing personal issues to become plot points. It resonated with fans and critics. He also returned to the “Universal Soldier” franchise for a third feature. Now, in 2011, it looks like JCVD’s career is experiencing a resurgence. He’s locked in to star in “The Expendables 2,” which is poised to become a significant franchise, and he’s starring in one of his best movies to date – “Assassination Games,” which some might argue is his best overall performance ever. Van Damme plays an assassin, duh, named Vincent Brazil, who teams with another assassin named Roland Flint, because both of them have been double-crossed by Interpol and a very nasty criminal overlord. The action isn’t anything that you haven’t seen before, the story isn’t anything you haven’t seen before, but Van Damme’s face, full of deep wrinkles that look as if time and excess carved a map of craggy reservoirs, really registers. His eyes glower in a way that surprises you. There’s pain in his face, the pain that hard living and regret can cause, and he puts it to excellent use. This is by far his most mature, nuanced role, and you can tell that he respects the opportunity to still do what he does.

Hanna (Universal, 111 minutes, PG-13, Blu-Ray): A friend of mine, upon watching Joe Wright’s “Hanna,” said he expected more. It was too straight-forward, he said. He liked it, but was left wanting. The only thing I wanted was the movie to continue. I thought Wright’s genre thriller disguised as highbrow art was fantastic because it was so straight forward. By keeping the action moving, always moving, and the omnipresent threat of capture a reality, Wright was able to minimize the dialogue and let the increasingly-impressive Saoirse Ronan convey so much emotion with her eyes, her mouth and her fists. Eric Bana and Cate Blanchett, doing another one of her famous accents, round out the top-tier cast. Don’t be fooled by the fact that a young girl is playing the main lead, “Hanna” breaks just as many bones, snaps just as many necks and leaves just as high a bodycount as James Bond or Jason Bourne.

X-Men: First Class (Fox, 132 minutes, PG-13, Blu-Ray): Hands down, the best X-Men movie ever made. Who knew that by stripping the story down, going back to the character’s origins and focusing on the fraternal bond between Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, aka Professor X and Magneto, that director Matthew Vaughn would obliterate the stain and stench of “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” and even make up for “X-Men: The Last Stand,” which wasn’t the total abomination that some thought it to be, but it wasn’t that great either. “First Class” does everything right from keeping the mutants easy to recognize and their powers visually cool but not so overly CGI that it just looks fake, to playing up the human element of each mutant’s situation and going deep down the rabbit hole of the relationship between Magneto and Professor X. The cast couldn’t be better either. Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy are awesome as Magneto and X. Kevin Bacon nails Sebastian Shaw. January Jones is incredibly sexy as Emma Frost. And the young mutants – Raven/Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), Beast (Nicholas Hoult), Banshee (Caleb Jones), etc. – are better utilized than in previous X-Men films because their numbers are kept small and they each get a shining moment center stage. The only knock, and I realize that it was kind of a requirement, is the lame Hugh Jackman cameo. Can we move beyond Wolverine, please? He is not the franchise. He’s not even the most interesting mutant. Rant over. Go buy this one, now.

Fringe: The Complete Third Season (Warner Bros., 1,012 minutes, Unrated, Blu-Ray): Also known as the season where J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman proudly let their freak flag fly and fully embraced the twisty, heady, frothy sci-fi that most casual viewers couldn’t make two sense of. That’s likely a big reason why the ratings plunged for “Fringe,” but kudos to Fox (and it pains me to say that) for sticking with the smartest, best-written show on TV right now. “Fringe” is a show about big scientific ideas that never forgets the human element, the most important of all. It has managed over the course of three seasons to maintain a level of consistency that is staggering. There’s rarely a dip in quality, even when the show takes a wide left turn and introduces musical numbers or alternates weekly episodes between two realities with two different but strikingly similar casts. Season 3 is notable for many things, namely the Doomsday Device storyline, the persistent presence of the Watchers trying to rectify a mistake, which sets up the upcoming Season 4, and the search to find a way to keep William Bell’s spirit alive even though his body has been blown to smithereens.

Also Available:

Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior, The Complete Series – There’s a reason this show didn’t work, and most of it is due to Forest Whitaker, who bravely tried to create something that rarely works on TV, an original character unlike any other out there. From the jump, though, CM: Suspect Behavior just didn’t jibe. And what the hell happened to Janeane Garofalo? She barely looks like herself, much less acts like herself. Kudos to the show for trying to create a brand that wasn’t cookie-cutter like CSI, but it just didn’t work.

Everything Must Go – Will Ferrell goes dramedy. I would follow this guy anywhere. He even makes alcoholism funny.

Airwolf: The Movie – Because there isn’t enough Ernest Borgnine in everybody’s day. No, there really isn’t. He’s the guy you wish could be your Grandpa.

Politics of Love – Billed as “a comedy romance inspired by the slew of publicly documented election love stories that sprung up during Obama’s presidential push.” Did I miss something? I know he inspired hope and faith and made grown men’s legs tingle, but I can’t say that I recall a single newspaper or TV story about rampant election love.

Triad Underworld – Why is crime always underground?

Police Story: Season One – Classic 1970s television series about the men and women of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Community: The Complete Second Season – One of the funniest, most creative shows on TV right now. OK, maybe ever.

Criminal Minds: The Sixth Season – Serial killer procedural keeps chugging along, and Thomas Gibson still looks constipated six years on.

The Good Wife: The Second Season – So, a show about a philandering husband ends its second season with a cliffhanger about the cheated upon “good” wife choosing another lover? I’m confused. Whatever happened to the good old swinging 70s? Can’t we just have a key party and call it a day?

The Hide – UK character study/thriller about secrets and crimes and the tragedy that such secrets can bring.

40 days and 40 nights – No, this is not the story of Noah and his Ark. It’s the story of Josh Hartnett and his, um, his, hmmm…it’s a movie about a guy who has to keep his zipper zipped for 40 days and 40 nights or else something bad happens. Wait, this is a romantic comedy. Nothing bad ever happens.

Scarface: Limited Edition Steelbook – Do you think Brian DePalma or Al Pacino feel even the slightest twinge of remorse for creating a film that has now become a cultural milestone for so many wannabe gangsters and thugs who completely missed the point that crime is bad and only chose to remember that Pacino gets a hot blonde and a mountain of coke and he kills people with chainsaws and machine guns.

Straw Dogs: Unrated Version – Maybe this whole remake craze isn’t so bad because as a result, studios keep upgrading the original films to Blu-Ray. The latest to benefit from this phenomenon is Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 mediation on violence and the modern man, which starred Dustin Hoffman as a meek and mawkish mathematician who gets crazy violent after locals terrorize him and his family.

Dressed to Kill – Killing people can be such a drag.

No Ordinary Family: The Complete First Season – You have to love the optimism of this ABC superhero/family/comedy hybrid because the DVD box art says “First Season,” not “Complete Series.” The show has been canceled, which is a shame, but not unexpected. Genre offerings rarely catch on when given very little time to flesh out characters. The whole mad rush, superpowers must be revealed in the Pilot, explained in the second episode and some crazy crisis introduced by the third hour, can be exhausting for viewers who don’t digest every media form like it was a comic book. Julie Benz is excellent here, as always. Her character keeps the show grounded, even as TV hubby Michael Chiklis falls victim to the whole ‘Look at me, I can fly’ cliché and immediately decides to go fight crime before even trying to figure out what made him superhuman.

The Office: Season Seven – The season that Steve Carrell left and NBC held its collective breath that the strong ensemble they had carefully crafted would withstand the departure. Prognosis: Good.

Not To Be Overlooked:

Bedways (Strand Releasing, 76 minutes, Unrated, DVD): Rolf Peter Kahl’s impressive “Bedways” defies description because it so nimbly moves between genres that typically don’t allow for much leeway. There’s a complicated relationship drama, a psychosexual thriller and a borderline X-rated adult feature at play. Somehow, all three mesh remarkably well in this German import that takes a similar approach to sex as “9 Songs” and “Shortbus,” meaning full-frontal nudity and intercourse is shown, but Kahl improves upon his contemporaries by exploring very rich, very real emotions and the impact that those emotions, pain, rejection and jealousy, can have on the soul.

The minimalist story is this: Nina (Miriam Mayet) is directing a film about love and loss. She asks a friend, Hans (Matthias Faust), to be in it. And she hires another actress, Marie (Lana Cooper), to play his lover. From that simple set-up, “Bedways” takes off in unexpected, wildly erotic ways. There are several scenes that, hands down, decimate any previous attempt to portray real sex on film. One scene in particular featuring Mayet at a peepshow, pleasuring herself while Hans watches, is so undeniably intense, so unbelievably hot, that it makes Hollywood’s tepid take on erotic cinema, ie “Basic Instinct” or “Body of Evidence,” seem juvenile and silly.

Few actresses would dare to take the scene as far, to actually lose control, to make it seem, whether real or not, that what is being shown is no longer acting, that it is a primal fulfillment of an ancient urge.

It’s a brilliant moment in a brave film full of fearless performances by a group of actors who obviously trust the artistic vision of their director, and are willing to bare all in order to make his statement mean that much more.