Detective Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) is being prepped for hero status after his takedown of Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), thus ending the string of crude murders that plagued the city. The only person alive to challenge Hoffman is Agent Strahm (Scott Patterson), who barely survived a Jigsaw trap and is now ready to uncover the truth behind Hoffman's clandestine activities. Chasing the clues, Strahm gets closer to the horrors of Jigsaw's legacy, while Hoffman ventures back into his own past and the events that introduced his evil ways.

Not to rock the boat here, but I consider last year's "Saw IV" to be the finest installment of the series so far, contorting itself hilariously into a shell game of a motion picture, perhaps best titled "Saw 3.5" for comfort. With a genuine actor (Patterson) slapping the film awake and director Darren Lynn Bousman taking a few minor chances with the plot, "Saw IV" was garbage, but not a hideous proposition quite like the other volumes of this rancid franchise. For "Saw V," Bousman is off to directorial purgatory, replaced by series production design vet David Hackl, who sticks uncomfortably close to the "If it ain't broke..." motto during his face time with Jigsaw.

It's actually somewhat startling to watch "Saw V" behave more like a dopey detective story than the hardcore horror extravaganza fans have come to expect. Either the mythos of Jigsaw is becoming too complicated to shoehorn in some gore sequences or perhaps the producers are finally growing weary of repeating themselves with increasingly ridiculous torture devices. Either way, "Saw V" is a sedate feature film, spending more screentime tracking Hoffman's footsteps with Strahm than snuggling up to bloody entrails. The change is refreshing, as is the loss of Bousman, but the restraint only lasts for a few breaths. After all, there's a legacy of blood to protect here.

A sophisticated Jigsaw trap subplot weaves throughout "Saw V," returning to the "Saw II" aesthetic of strangers (including Meagan Good and Julie Benz) duking it out for precious remnants of life. How it ties to the rest of the story is spoiler territory, but it's clear imagination is running low for the death set-pieces, with explosions and low-light executions replacing the splatterfest that once was.

"Saw V" feels like a transitory piece to clear a way for next year's "Saw VI." Hackl chucks in plenty of inexplicable material ready to be explored a year from now, teasing the audience with characters and props that feed the haphazardly constructed arc being assembled by the producers, who resort to time travel once again to pad out the running time to 85 minutes. Not only is "Saw" losing its taste for blood, it can't stay in the present, leaping back and forth through the sequels to shake the audience off the narrative's trail. A trail, mind you, that doesn't actually lead anywhere in "Saw V" except to absurd backstory and the chance to spend more time with Bell as Jigsaw (pass).

"You won't believe how it ends" is the official tagline for "Saw V," but the real question is, will you care? Admirers will undoubtedly fling themselves at the feet of anything the producers dream up, but more careful viewers might be starting to question the validity of this ongoing story: a five-film-too-long journey that has never felt more arbitrarily plotted than in the final 10 minutes of "Saw V."

Sent on a reporting assignment to cover the life of the average fire department facility, T.V. personality Angela (Manuela Velasco) is stuck with the mundane details of fireman life. Becoming frustrated with her botched attempts to add some spice into this monotonous story, Angela's fortunes change when a call arrives requesting emergency assistance at an apartment complex. Tagging along with the fire trucks, Angela and her cameraman Pablo head into the building, only to be quickly sealed in by faceless government officials. Now trapped with angry cops, paranoid residents, and an anxious medical professional, Angela and her roving camera discover the true reason for the quarantine...and it's hungry for flesh.

There's something beautiful in the courageous way "Rec" composes scares. The market for reality horror has become saturated, and "Rec" doesn't feature the most original concept to flop around in buckets of blood, but directors Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza challenge the expectations set for this low-budget, high-concept endeavor by weaving together a symphony of scares in increasingly inventive fashion.

I was thrilled watching "Rec" snowball into a seething siren of panic, observing Angela and her camera fight to capture the unfolding drama of the quarantine, hoping for a juicy government injustice tale, only to witness the matter go from curious to life-threatening as the bodies start to pile up with no hope for survival. Shot POV from Pablo's television camera, "Rec" can be a jittery, quaky visual affair with liberal deployment of zooming and a penchant for actors screaming their lines hysterically into the lens. A lesser filmmaker would've abuse this privilege, but Balaguero and Plaza take the first-person format to dizzying new heights.

The editing here is tremendous, hiding the necessary cuts that turn moments of fright into utter madness. Also impressive is the cast, who rarely give the gimmick away, even in a few comedic scenes included to give the viewer a needed rest. As witnessed in the aforementioned "Cloverfield" and "Diary of the Dead," conjuring reality is not an easy accomplishment, yet "Rec" stays within the sight lines of plausibility, at least in terms of acting.

The rest of the film? Dear lord, I hope it remains fiction.

I don't want to give too much away when it comes to the finer points of "Rec" (sure to be thoroughly pantsed in the goofy-looking American remake "Quarantine," coming this fall), so I'll just write simply that Angela has to battle her way through a living nightmare of body-hurling, throat-munching, night-vision horrors, with plenty of surprises leaping feverishly around the frame for good measure. I wasn't tickled with the film's climatic stab at establishing some iffy logic to the proceedings, but it's an easily forgiven blunder in a movie this brilliantly executed and insistently frightening.

Sent on an assignment to cover a night at the average Los Angeles firehouse, T.V. personality Angela (Jennifer Carpenter) is stuck reporting on the mundane details of fireman life. Becoming frustrated with her botched attempts to add some spice into this monotonous story, Angela's fortunes change when a call arrives requesting emergency assistance at an apartment complex. Tagging along with her newfound friends (including Jay Hernandez), Angela and her cameraman Scott (Steve Harris) head into the building, only to be quickly sealed in by faceless government officials. Now trapped with angry cops (Columbus Short), paranoid residents (Rade Serbedzija), and an anxious medical professional (Greg Germann), Angela and her roving camera discover the true reason for the quarantine...and it's hungry for flesh.

There's nothing broad to be found in "Quarantine" that directly separates it from "Rec." Director John Erick Dowdle (of the unreleasable "The Poughkeepsie Tapes") crafts a straightforward copy of the Spanish film, preserving the same plot and scare beats, but altering the corners of the writing to put his fat stamp on the picture. To Americanize "Rec," "Quarantine" introduces crude sexual tension between Angela and the firemen, and turns our camera-ready hostess from a frustrated lifestyle reporter to a veritable sorority pledge, with Dowdle encouraging Carpenter to play daft instead of confident, ultimately reducing Angela's role in the overall scheme of things.

The changes are minor, but they do add up, wandering away from "Rec" in all the wrong ways. The original film spent some time with the characters, "Quarantine" quickly sets up the humans as zombie food, with little development beyond differing puncture wounds. "Rec" was a multi-layered visual piece of broadcasting verisimilitude, resembling a chaotic news explosion; the remake retains an unacceptable glossy look, highlighting the already recognizable cast as humdrum actors, not frantic citizens trapped in Hell. Also, while "Rec" didn't win any awards for steady cinematography, director Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza composed carefully for maximum suspense and exposition. Dowdle just throws his camera around arbitrarily, with huge sections of the film lost to inane handheld blur and iffy technical believability. In other words, "Rec" invited the viewer to get lost in the terror. "Quarantine" can't stop reminding everyone that it's just a dopey movie.

Reviewing "Quarantine" on its own merits is a difficult challenge, since "Rec" is as close to perfection as fright films get these days. To the uninitiated, the remake will be easy enough to swallow, with plenty of cheap boo scares and hysterical Carpenter overacting to justify the price of admission. For "Rec" fans, there's no reason to return to this story, since Hollywood has drained the tension away, replacing Spanish innovation with American stupidity.

This movie helped pave the way for common practices in film as we know them today. Norman Bates was a gold mine for character study, and the infamous shower scene has become common curriculum for film classes around the world. Alfred Hitchcock is the master of mystery and suspense, but there's certainly no mystery as to why if you've seen this film.

Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is a simple woman that has a fairly complicated problem. She's been seeing Sam Loomis (John Gavin), who lives in California, and they're both madly in love and wish to marry. However, he lives on very little money and wouldn't be able to support her. He's stuck in a rut of paying alimony to his ex-wife. On top of that, he also lives in California, which is a bit of a hike from where Marion lives. They continue to see each other when they can, but they want more. They're tired of feeling like they're sneaking around, and want to make it official.

After a rendezvous with Sam during her lunch break, she heads back to work. She's given $40,000 to deposit in the bank for her employer, and she decides to take the money and use it to start the new life with Sam they've always dreamed about.

On her way to California, she stops at the Bates Motel for some much needed rest, and is welcome by owner and caretaker, Norman Bates. He's a very nice man, but reveals to Marion his life as a prisoner. He's bound to that hotel, because he takes care of his sickly mother in the house on the hill out back. It used to bother him, but the very thought of leaving his controlling mother behind fills him with guilt. After Marion finishes her increasingly awkward conversation with Norman, she retires to her room for the evening... and that's the last time anybody sees her alive.

Over the next week, Marion's sister and Sam grow increasingly worried over her sudden disappearance. Their worry is only heightened when a detective that's on the hunt for the missing forty grand starts to confirm their suspicion that Marion's dead. All signs point back to the Bates Motel, but the case is far from being solved. Despite the obvious answer as to where Marion disappeared, how, and why, are the real reasons why you must see this film if you've never done so before.

I can't say anything about Psycho that hasn't been said before. As I mentioned, it's common curriculum for film 101. So, I'm going to tell you why Psycho works so well for me, even after all the years worth of repeat viewing.

Alfred Hitchcock deceives the audience not just through mystery, but in the way the story is told. From the beginning of the film we follow the life of Marion Crane. She's set up to be the central character for the film. It's not as if she just rolls on screen and the infamous shower scene happens in the first ten minutes to set up the mystery. We get to know her, become comfortable with her, and then the shower scene happens and the game changes considerably. It's something you wouldn't expect, and I've never been able to shake the concept of how masterfully Hitchcock played this out.

Pyscho also manages to do something very few movies have ever done for me. The entirety of the film is laced with extremely intense discomfort. For one reason or another, there's always a sense of a cat and mouse game going on. Sure, the concept itself isn't revolutionary, but Hitchcock was able to work it effectively from beginning to end. Everything was crafted to create an atmosphere that kept you on the edge of your seat, from camera angles, lighting, the acting, pacing, as well as using some subliminal photography. There are numerous things Hitchcock had to fight about with the MPAA, so he relied heavily on making something as integral as the shower scene, trick you into seeing something you didn't really see. Incredible amounts of hard work and nit-picky oversight from Hitchcock made this film what it is, and it shows in every frame. I do mean every frame, too.

Some director's put every piece of their soul and being in a movie, and fail miserably. Some, work just as hard and get some very nice recognition for their work. Hitchcock's Psycho however, is an extremely rare case where its effectiveness still works just as good today, as it did back then. That's a quality that very few movies in cinematic history can boast about...

...Psycho is a masterful creation of atmosphere and suspense. This is a film that plays some very dirty tricks on the audience to continually make you sit on the edge of your seat, even after numerous repeat viewings. It's hard to imagine anyone who claims to be a film lover, not appreciating one of the most influential films of all time. Hitchcock was a perfectionist every step of the way whenever it came to any of his masterpieces, and Psycho is a film that looks as close to perfection as anything I've ever seen. I dare you to find a single frame in the film where the cinematography doesn't show the amount of effort that went in camera angling or lighting to provide a feature length amount of chills.

In a remote gold mining settlement, a line has been drawn between two terrifying gangs: the red-costumed Heike and the white-clad Genji. Into the town rides a stranger in black, known as The Gunman (Hideaki Ito), who has come to offer his services to the highest bidder. Sending the gangs into a fury, The Gunman quickly becomes invested in the plight of a widowed saloon girl (Yoshino Kimura), her traumatized son, and a grandmother (Kaori Momoi) who hides a secret past. With Heike leader Kiyomori (Koichi Sato) in a rage and Genji kingpin Yoshitsune (Yusuke Iseya) nursing a calm curiosity with this new resident, the stage is set for an explosion of violence, as the three sides declare war on each other.

Perhaps some of the inspiration for "Sukiyaki" was supplied by Quentin Tarantino, who's known for this sort of idolatry, and even cameos here as the quickdraw outlaw who kicks off the story. Miike doesn't share Tarantino's rabid fandom for big screen replication, but the details in the film are rendered with large handfuls of affection. Working the Leone vibe to more artificial ends, Miike and his production crew bathe the film in Western motifs, exaggerated widescreen lensing, Morricone-style music cues, and thoroughly utilizes a known sound effects library to a point of giddiness. Much like the titular dish, the film is an anything-goes stew of imagination, taking design cues from multiple eras to fashion an experience that overwhelms with detailed grit and eye-catching polish.

The film's potent visuals are really what "Sukiyaki" is all about. Miike is less interested in the story, which reheats "Yojimbo" twists and turns, with the film adding in more slapstick and Miike's specialty: unswerving, operatic violence. The anachronistic look of the piece is something to behold, keeping the feature involving when the story runs completely out of gas early on and the cast, performing the film in English (you haven't lived until you've heard a Japanese actor use the phrase "Whistling Dixie" in a sentence), can barely hurdle their lines. The English is a strange choice from Miike, but then again, it fits along cheerfully with the piercings, tattered punk clothes, and bullet-stopping heroics the rest of the film prides itself on.

"Sukiyaki" is a highly stylized motion picture and, while difficult to invest in, will offer a more prepared viewer a heightened, bullet-drenched good time. It's worth a look for Momoi's barnstorming performance as the dreaded "Bloody Benten," an opportunity to embrace the sorely missed profusion of spaghetti western melodrama, and to see Miike create a film that is powered solely on nostalgia and ridiculous matinee enchantment.

The Plot: Even though he is immortal, Andreas is not happy. He hates being an errand boy for local Satanist Edward Crowley, and despises the fact that his boss gets to bed the entrancing Muldavia. He's also sick and tired of looking after Crowley's pet "project" a junkie vampire named Smoke. What he wants is power, and not the kind derived from his status as a bloodsucker. No, Andreas wants the secrets to the Devil's domain, and there is just one thing stopping him from obtaining that desire – the red diamond known as the Scarlet Moon. A one time possession of a powerful Egyptian sorceress named Tara, whoever has the gem owns the key to unimaginable power. But if improperly used, the jewel can bring about the end of the world. When corpses start showing up, drained of all their blood, the government calls on their top paranormal scientist, Professor Hertz, to get to the bottom of the killings. In the meantime, Andreas plans his coup, and discovers that local vampire artist and forever flower child Satanya has the stone. But before he can get it, our paranormal peacenik heads off on a trip around with world. With Hertz hot on their trail, it's not long before the forces of good and evil clash. And if everyone's not careful, it could mean an Earth-exploding Armageddon. If Warren F. Disbrow Jr. is comparable to a genre David Lynch, then Scarlet Moon is his Dune. Dripping with ambition, dense with ideas and attempting the epic while maintaining the idiosyncratic, this determined effort at a new modern mythology works, most of the time. Sure, it trips over itself once in a while, and makes narrative leaps of world record like distance, but when all is said and done, we have another amazingly inventive effort from a true fan of the medium of film. Disbrow is like a directorial encyclopedia of horror. Watching Scarlet Moon, we see the sci-fi and fantasy elements merging with macabre to become a definitive statement of one man's love for the scary, as well as the speculative. There are obvious nods to '60s drive in classics, '70s shockers, the '80s teen slasher romps, the '90s kind of ironic eeriness – even a couple of non-horror classics get passed through the Disbrow dissecting device. The final product is a mishmash of comedy and corpses, devil worship and dumbness. There are hints at other, more mysterious goals that this film strove to achieve. But somewhere behind the dream and distribution, this director's lofty aims were squashed and stunted…and that's a shame.

Using a Clockwork Orange like narrative to start the film (our lead demon vampire hitman Andreas is a perverse Alex de Large) and throwing a whole lot of stock and travelogue footage into the mix, Disbrow is determined to make an apocalyptic comedy, simultaneously dark and daffy. In a montage filled with missing scenes (including a lot of splatter effects and the killing of kids) Andreas tells us the tale of Tara, an Egyptian witch who used her knowledge of the black arts to obtain Satan's favor. After a backwards Bible full of goofy Gospel – and some outright naughty nakedness – we end up in a kind of paranormal Pulp Fiction, with Andreas and Smoke as Jules and Vincent, and Edward Crowley as a Marcellus Wallace of the REAL underworld. There's lots of loopy dialogue, scads of references to pop culture, and a note for note replay of the classic "needle to the chest" scene from the Tarantino masterwork. But just as soon as we get comfortable with the QT take, the movie shifts seismically and we're suddenly inside Disbrow's own X-Files. Featuring his father, Warren F. Disbrow, Sr. as a Mulder like meddler in all areas of the supernatural, we get a clever cameo from Famous Monster of Movieland's Forrest Ackerman as a government bureaucrat putting Papa Disbrow's Professor Hertz back on the trail of terror.

All along the way, loose ends fly free, never even trying to connect to the reality of the plot. Michael Bruce ("of the Alice Cooper Group fame" or so the dialogue constantly reminds us) is also part of this story, since he seems to want the gemstone as well. Yet we never get closure on why this aging member of a shock rocker's backup band would even want the jewel, let alone why he's important to the film. Instead, it feels like a failed idea, or one that got sidetracked by either story, or outside issues (the bonus features sort of fill us in on the truth). Similarly, the Satanya character seems scattered and unfocused. One day she's a dithering mess, lost in her locked-in living dead dimension of the '60s. The next, she is whizzing around the world, acting like a typical gold digging tart. One scene has her serving mushroom enhanced urine to Smoke. The next has her acting like an asshole over the painting of Crowley's altar. Maybe it was Disbrow's intent to have her bouncing off the plotpoints like the portly pinball she resembles, but it's really not his fault. AnnMarie Donato makes her character a confusing chatterbox, never really delivering the performance the script mandates. She's just reading lines. She doesn't commit to her character the way Dominic Gregoria does as Andreas or Colin Reynolds does as Smoke.

When we later learn that Disbrow's original cut was nearly four hours in length, we suddenly start to see why Scarlet Moon is a lesser effort in the filmmaker's canon. When looking at something like the sensational Flesh Eaters from Outer Space or Invasion for Flesh and Blood, we can see the seat of the pants invention right up on the screen. No no-budget filmmaker gets a free financial pass when making their film, and logistics often arrive from outside the project to really louse things up. But here, we don't see the same delirious dives into surreality. Certainly, if he had simply stayed with his story of supernaturals battling it out for dark dominion over evil on Earth, he might have had a better handle on his overall production. But there are times – as when Jesus makes an appearance during a dapper vampire's story of salvation – when Disbrow could have upped the anarchic ante and really let loose with his manic inner muse. Instead of making a cameo, Christ could have become a pseudo action hero, entering into the storyline just as all 'Hell" is about to break loose to kick some Antichrist ass. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen here.

Though it's better than most of the mindless trash using the technological breakthroughs of DAT and DVD to sell their substandard wares, Scarlet Moon feels like discount Disbrow. Maybe the proposed sequel/prequel will shed some light on a few of the failings found in this film. Whatever it does, it stands a good chance of being another original offering of film fandom from someone who typically knows his way around a movie camera. Love him or loathe him, Warren F. Disbrow, Jr. represents the reason independent film continues to thrive. Outside the mindless mainstream of demographically determined moviemaking, here is a man who plays by his own arcane rules and puts his own unique stamp on even the most tired of terror tenets. And if that's not the definition of 'auteur', it's hard to imagine what is.

Final Thoughts: Truth be told, Warren F. Disbrow Jr. would have a hard time living up to the legend that is The Flesh and Blood movies. Those filmic fever dreams, with their larger-than-life ideas and balls-to-the-wall execution stand as testaments to the power inside outsider cinema. They remind us that imagination can often overcome even the most middling of production paradigms. Scarlet Moon comes close. It may be a tad disjointed at times, and fail to fulfill the perplexing promise of its mind-blowing opening, but it still exceeds the efforts of others in the homemade movie business... The film itself is an easily recommended romp, but it's the added content that provides the step up in evaluation. It's a shame that directors like Disbrow have to work without the luminescence of the limelight leading their way. Imagine what he could do with an actual mainstream budget. Of course, the fear would be that a large outlay of cash would require an equally huge amount of corporate interference. Such a situation would only strip this filmmaker of the facets that make him special. Warren F. Disbrow is indeed an auteur. Among the talent pool of pretenders to the Tinsel Town throne, he is definitely one of the most original.

That's what you'll see if, for some ungodly reason, you happen to be holding the latest Charles Band DVD. If so, put it down. Immediately.

After spending much of the past two decades churning out colorful schlock like Dollman Meets the Demonic Toys' Puppet Master Robot Attack, Mr. Band has settled down with a new outfit called "Wizard Entertainment," and if you happened to read my reviews for the first two Wizard flicks (Decadent Evil & Doll Graveyard), then you already know two things:

1. As an old fan of Band's early work, I'm actively trying to like his new stuff. Honest.

-and-

2. These movies are just all sorts of terrible. Seriously.

I was half-expecting to have a royal hoot with The Gingerdead Man, but the thing never comes close to being colorful crap or affable camp. It's just ... dingy and tiresome and painfully plagiarized from Child's Play. Only this time instead of a doll we have a cookie, instead of Brad Dourif we got Gary Busey, and instead of actors, a screenplay, and an actual three-act story structure ... we have inept amateurs, a lot of aimless blather, and a formless movie that clocks in at about 55 minutes, not including the opening and closing credits. Put together one DVD, the triple feature of Decadent Evil, Doll Graveyard, and The Gingerdead Man might be worth maybe 9 American dollars.

Frankly I'm amazed that something this low-rent and borderline-unwatchable could come from a guy who has directed over 100 movies. True, they were always low-budget and cheesy, but at least they felt like real movies! The Gingerdead Man is a few limp kill scenes, a truly moronic concept, and a whole lotta brain-damaging "cookie" puns. Not even the gimmick casting of Gary Busey can bring any color to this crummy affair.

Final Thoughts: I wish I could offer the opinion that Charles Band is back and slingin' his trademark cheeseball goodness, but the guy's 0-for-3 with his new production company, and after watching all three flicks in order ... things don't seem to be improving.

On vacation in Mexico, four college students (Shawn Ashmore, Jena Malone, Laura Ramsey, and Jonathan Tucker) meet a German tourist (Joe Anderson) looking to break away from the grind of perfect beaches and bottomless margaritas. Their adventure destination is a lost Mayan temple located in the middle of a dense jungle, and once arrived, the group tragically learns they are not welcome by the vicious locals. Trapped on top of the temple, the students quickly grasp they are not alone, finding the flowers and vines that surround them have a taste for blood. Toying with the group, the flora waits patiently as injury and madness soon settles in, leaving the hapless youngsters with no means of escape.

Adapted by Scott Smith ("A Simple Plan") from his own novel, "The Ruins" is governed by one rule: razor-sharp simplicity. There's no undercurrent of absurd social commentary, no extraneous subplots vying for screentime; "The Ruins" is a straightforward exercise in endurance and disturbing imagery. Not having personally experienced the novel, I didn't sense any gaps in the storytelling, which is a credit to Smith, who overhauled his original plot to streamline the agony. It's a triumphant piece of scripting, securing the tension to the front burners at all times and staging sequences not for their jump-scare potential, but for more gut-wrenching results that will surely leave weak-kneed audience members sprinting for the exits.

Director Carter Smith ("Bugcrush") is game to go where Smith leads and he rarely breaks the film's constant haze of dread. "Ruins" dabbles in psychological torment, yet the heart of this beast lies in old-fashioned displays of gore, with the characters digging around in their own bodies with knives in a pathetic attempt to keep the vines literally out of their system. Certainly this isn't high art, but "Ruins" is near-perfect at manipulating its audience, emphasizing physical threat and consequence, with a profound admiration for armrest-squeezing bodily harm on a level few recent horror productions would dare explore.

The acting by the young leads is better than expected, especially the work committed to the screen here by Laura Ramsey, who is the only member of the cast to reach the next level of despair as the vines attempt to find a warm home under her skin. Smith wisely keeps the actorly hysterics to a minimum, preferring visual communication of suffering that's incredibly more effective riling up the audience than bad actors allowed free reign to act badly.

It could be the steady diet of numbskull horror offerings lately, but I was with "Ruins" for the entire ride, delighting in the merciless direction and fantastical botanical twists with eyes wide open. It's one of those strap-in-and-ride-it-out experiences that are all too rare; forgoing elaborate strands of exposition to settle on more direct lunges of terror. It's a marvelous nightmare machine.

Half-man, half-demon dude goes around offing demons and laying the smackdown on possessed people who simply don't respect the bible. He's been raised by priests to fight for good, but he's also struggling with his own inner demons. (Weak pun intended.) Paired up with a chaste (yet inevitably sexy) young nun, our kinda-hero tangles with a boss demon who sweats a lot and rambles on and on to whichever undead minion happens to be within earshot.

So the concept basically sounds like Constantine meets Hellboy meets the first five minutes of Scary Movie 3, only imagine that concoction stripped of all energy, excitement, creativity, style, intensity, thrills, chills, gore, and half-decent special effects.

That's Demon Hunter in a nutshell, one of the driest, dumbest, and most consistently derivative knock-offs since that E.T. rip-off about the alien who loved McDonalds. (You know the one I mean.) What could have been a mindlessly exciting b-level retread is instead a ponderously uneventful yawnfest laden with overwhelming amounts of lengthy exposition rants, circuitous backstories, and dialogue barrages that border on the unjustifiably painful. The action bits are fairly few and far between, but you'll know 'em when you see 'em, because you won't be able to help but notice that the main characters have somehow managed to stop yammering for 11 consecutive seconds.

Not only does Demon Hunter pilfer from four or five painfully obvious sources, but it doesn't even bother to take the borrowed foundations and build something semi-creative on top of it. It's all familiar themes, endless conversations, goofy FX work, oh, and a sweaty Billy Drago in a series of hotel room scenes in which he gropes a devil-woman with glue-on horns. If this flick were just a little more awful, it'd probably be hysterical.

Don't believe me?

Screenwriter/stunt coordinator Mitch Gould and DTV hack Scott Ziehl* may go on to much bigger and better things, and I'll be here to give 'em a second shot when that happens, but what they've put together here is equal parts boring, silly, and downright stolen.

(*To be fair, Ziehl also directed Earth vs. the Spider, which is a perfectly, stupidly enjoyable b-movie, just so everyone knows I'm not just gunning for the little guys. He also did Cruel Intentions 3, which I somehow missed, and he's presently working on something called Road House 2: Last Call, which stars Jake Busey, Will Patton, William Ragsdale, and Johnathon Schaech, and which (no lie) I cannot wait to see.)

Final Thoughts: A dreary and overly familiar DTV occult thriller is, of course, nothing new. But what's interesting here is that Demon Hunter was produced by Stephen J. Cannell, a name familiar to anyone who's seen The Rockford Files, The Greatest American Hero, The A-Team, Hunter, Riptide, 21 Jump Street, Wise Guy, or The Commish. These days Mr. Cannell is producing movies called Demon Hunter, The Tooth Fairy, and It Waits, two of which I've seen, both of which are destined for the $1.99 bin by the end of 2006. Hollywood's a nutty place.

Regarding Demon Hunter -- stolen plots, stupid stories, and silly monsters I can take, but there's no damn reason a 75-minute movie should feel like 275.

Unfortunately, through the miracle of DVD technology, I'm able to see Virgin Witch in its entirety, completely uncut and commercial free. It's a pity. What might have titillated me at ten -- knowing for sure I was missing out on something good whenever there was an awkward jump cut - now becomes an unendurably rote and routine experience. Oh, there's nudity, all right. But that's about it -- and I'm not ten anymore. There's no scares, no gore, no tension, no horror - nothing. What promised to be a creepy exercise in English witchcraft seen through the exploitation lens, devolves into a third-rate Hammer knock-off, with precious little to recommend it.

Sisters Christine and Betty (Ann and Vicki Michelle) are running away from home, when they're picked up by sharpster Johnny (Keith Buckley), who takes them to stay with him in London. Christine, we learn, wants to be a model. We also learn that she has powers of ESP; this is how she picks out commercial modeling agent Sybil Waite (Patricia Haynes) from a magazine layout. Going to Waite's office, Christine is compelled by Waite to remove her clothes to "measure her for the records" (frankly, she doesn't seem that upset by the request). But Sybil has other plans for Christine that don't include modeling. Sybil fakes a phone call from a photographer, telling Christine that she's in a bind to find a model on short notice who will spend the weekend at a country estate, shooting a liquor ad. Christine readily accepts, and brings along her sister Betty for protection. But from the start of the weekend, it appears that Christine doesn't need any protection; she willingly removes her clothes for the photo shoot, and acts as if she doesn't have a care in the world. Meanwhile, Sybil keeps a sharp eye on Christine -- for personal reasons.

At the same time, sister Betty is exploring the estate, when she stumbles across a ceremony room for witches. Disturbed by this, she goes outside for some air, where she again becomes confused by the lustful stares of several men from the village. She wakes up in bed to find Dr. Amberly (Neil Hallett), the owner of the estate, comforting her while saying it's perfectly normal for a young virgin to have sexual frustrations (Mr. Smooth). After Betty confides in Christine what she has found, Christine states that all of the people at the estate are witches - and yet, she feels absolutely no fear concerning this situation. Later at dinner, Dr. Amberly freely admits that they're a coven of witches, but that they only practice white witchcraft - never Satanism. Eventually, Christine discovers her powers becoming more acute, and decides to become the next High Priestess, pushing Sybil out of the way. Will Johnny come to Betty's rescue before Christine totally loses it, and sacrifices Betty at the pagan orgy?

It's not difficult to interest me in one of those typical "there's something wrong at the English country estate this weekend" type of movie. It's such a common setting for British films and TV shows, and it can encompass many different types of film genres, from Agatha Christie-type mysteries, to horror films (Night Must Fall) to Hammer suspense films (Die! Die! My Darling!), to various Avengers and The Saint episodes. But for that type of film to work, there has to be something wrong at the estate, and after watching Virgin Witch, I couldn't figure out what the problem was. The film starts out with a montage of naked women, with one apparently being sacrificed during a pagan witch ceremony. But this is never referred to again in the film. Who's the victim? We never find out. Dr. Amberly assures Betty and Christine that his coven never practices the dark arts, and even argues about it with Sybil, demanding it stay that way. Did Sybil lose control, and sacrifice a virgin? One might think so, but the film never definitively answers that. As well, there never seems to be a credible threat to the young girls in the house; I kept waiting for someone to feel threatened, for someone to start getting that uneasy feeling that all was not right with their too-friendly and accomodating hosts. But it never happened. Christine seems to be at one with the house immediately upon her arrival, and there's no question (from either her or her hosts) that she will eventually become a witch -- and a powerful one, at that. The witches and warlocks in the house keep saying they don't want to harm anyone - and then they don't harm anyone. And Betty - poor, dim Betty - doesn't seem to comprehend anything that's going on in the house. And once she is clued in, she willing agrees to become a witch in the final ceremony, to bring back Johnny (with the help of Christine's powers). Again, no big threat is seen at the house. So...basically, we have a pallid little witchcraft movie with no internal strife, and no dramatic conflict.

And when you're left without dramatic tension or a provocative plot line, the only thing left to concentrate on is the acting. The actors are fine in Virgin Witch; Hallett and Haines do an adequate job with their "evil" witches parts, while the Michelle sisters are suitably desirable as the nubile victims. The only problem with all of these performances is that you've seen tham all a hundred times before, in better movies. There's nothing in the slightest way distinctive about Virgin Witch's story or screenplay, or its performances. The direction by TV veteran Ray Austin is, in a word, perfunctory. He seems incapable of building any kind of tension, and most of his scenes just lie there, inert. He isn't helped, either, by indifferent cinematography and editing. As for the musical score by Ted Dicks, it's derivative John Barry.

Final Thoughts: I know Halloween is coming up, and you're looking around for something new to watch - anything, anything other than Halloween or Friday the 13th for the upteenth time - but you can find something better than Virgin Witch, trust me. There's lots of Hammer collections out there that you can rent or buy on DVD. Or if you're lucky, something will come up, late at night on TV - just remember to keep the volume down or your Mom will hear. Skip it.

The Plot:
TV wunderkind Warren Piece and his American Idol like cast of critical cohorts - former A-lister Laura Wilcox and confused corrections officer David Smith - are self-centered schmoes. Together they create some of the most successful reality TV ever produced, but they are all burdened with personal issues. Smith wants to be taken seriously as part of the entertainment industry. Wilcox is working off a 'fat actress' reputation. And Piece needs to make up for a previous production disaster. When desperate network CNT puts a newbie in charge of production, the trio thinks they've found a friendly ear. All that's left is to pitch their latest project. And it's a dozy. Piece wants to find a group of photogenic, engaging 'retards, psychos, and freaks' to star in his latest reality brainstorm - Handicaps. That's right, He plans on picking individuals with differing physical and/or mental issues and force them to live together in a swanky Addams Family-like Victorian house of humors. Then he can monitor their behavior and manipulate the playback in order to discover what it's really like when mongoloids and misfits stop being polite, and start being...well, he hasn't quite gotten that far yet.

At first, it looks like Special Needs is going to be the same old sloppy spoofing. James - who wrote, directed, stars, and probably prepared the craft services - appears overly eager to roll out a combination of actual and 'artificial' human oddities and get us to laugh at what makes us nervous and uncomfortable. We expect the thwarting of convention, the tweaking of PC paradigms, and some good old fashioned vulgar funny business. It will all be in bad taste, but the current envelope pushing conceit of motion picture comedy readily supports such obvious offensiveness. Just ask the Farrelly Brothers. But believe it or not, this is not where James and his clever cast actually go. Instead, we are introduced to an engaging and intricate world of high maintenance histrionics, battling bravado, and just enough sideshow shock value to transcend the potentially tacky. Special Needs does employ the services of several handi-capable individuals, and all of them single-handedly steal the show. During an open audition for potential participants, we are introduced to a paranoid schizophrenic lounge singer, a determined deaf actor, a genial blind man, a wheelchair bond vixen and a no bullshit dwarf. Initially, they remain on the fringes. But once the callbacks come, James gives each individual their three dimensional setpiece moment to shine.

The clear breakout star here is someone called Killer P. A bad ass gansta rapper with cerebral palsy, he uses an aggressive thug life stance to shelter criticism over his obvious physical limitations. The result is a foul mouthed masterwork, a tripwire Tupac locked in an equally potent personal fortress. He's a classic character (or a great actual find) and almost instantly demands a solo feature all his own. Every moment he's on screen is worth savoring and repeating. He's gutbustingly great. He also illustrates part of Special Needs' motion picture mystery. If he was discovered by James and brought to the project, then this filmmaker has a clear eye for flawless idiosyncratic talent. On the other hand, if he's merely a handicapped actor putting on a front, then James is a genius for creating such a character, and P (real name, Keith Jones) is equally brilliant at bringing him to life. For this one element alone, Special Needs deserves unlimited praise. But there is more to what's going on here than outlandish personalities and a sly spoof of reality TV. In fact, it's safe to say that this film really isn't 'about' a potential series centering on the handicapped. Instead, it's about the individuals involved, from Piece's high-strung hubris to Laura Wilcox's self loathing meanness.

Yet none of this touches on what really makes Special Needs shine - its brave sense of humor. Allowing the handicapped actors onscreen to hold their own, to be both the brunt and providers of many of the jokes, keeps the comedy fresh and honorable. Even when Killer P is hit with the N-word, his hilarious reactions take the sting out of the sentiment. In fact, that's this film's major motion picture contribution. In recent years, off balance disasters like The Ringer have tried to temper the mentally and physically challenged with something akin to soiled saintliness. Sure, they're crude and rude, but they also have a built-in buttress against such standard human behavior that gives them a moralistic pass. Here, James simply let's them be people, and it's the everyday depiction that makes this movie so clever. By being both mired and motivated, capable and curtailed, what could easily become symbols instead turn into substantive comic characters. That James leaves the caricaturizing to the rest of the supposedly normal individuals at the center of the story makes Special Needs something extraordinary indeed. It will definitely make a considered appearance come end of the year awards/acknowledgment time.

Final Thoughts:
Special Needs is a certified cinematic homerun, an instant candidate for independent comedy of the year and another terrific title in Troma's growing collection of outsider gems. It easily earns a Highly Recommended rating. Those expecting a mean-spirited marginalizing of the disabled will be greatly disappointed, while others wanting the mindless purveyors of reality rot to really get theirs will be doubled over in sidesplitting delight. That he managed to salvage something that could have been a disaster is not Isaak James' greatest accomplishment here. No, the real revelation is his ability to thwart convention while carefully walking across all the formulaic necessities mandated to make a clever motion picture. Along with proving yet again that mainstream moviemakers have completely forgotten how to handle humor, Special Needs argues that the future of film lies somewhere beyond the fringe. Any cinephile who visits there will be wonderfully rewarded.

Walker is the story of William Walker (Ed Harris), a renaissance man who abandoned safe, lucrative jobs as a doctor and a lawyer to pursue adventure in support of a puffed-up faith in democracy. After he failed to foment a revolution in Mexico in the mid-1800s, Walker, who often referred to himself in the third person, was convinced to go down to Nicaragua to secure an overthrow of the nation's government on behalf of industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt (Peter Boyle). Vanderbilt cared nothing about democracy beyond it being a means for him to secure exclusive rights of trade through Nicaragua; that means was a tool to secure Walker's service. Such are dirty deals made in the American system.

As a character, Walker is a complex mixture of personal pain, pride, and conviction--a perfect concoction for an actor with Ed Harris' stoic intensity. His decision to take Vanderbilt's assignment comes after he loses his fiancée (Marlee Matlin) to cholera, and so jumping back into battle is as much to hide from his grief as it is a righteous cause. He also rejected God on her deathbed, so his moral posturing has lost some of its gravity. Not that he expresses any of this. A reserved man, he keeps his thoughts bottled up and conducts himself with a self-possessed rigidity. He is a walking, breathing embodiment of Manifest Destiny, strutting imperiously through gunfire and chaos without being harmed. Parts of Walker's journals are used as voiceover, often as ironic commentary to the action. He was the greatest of spin doctors, turning the bleakest situation into propaganda.

Wurlitzer and Cox establish a darkly comic tone for their satire. The filmmaking style of Walker is just shy of crossing the line into gonzo territory. Cox uses several incongruous elements to achieve a sense of irony in the picture. This notably includes former Clash-frontman Joe Strummer's peppy, Latin-flavored score, which pairs mariachi horns with slow-motion death and destruction. The most talked about incongruity, though, is the introduction of anachronistic elements. We see the wealthy businessmen of the region reading Newsweek and Walker's face on the cover of Time. At the climax, the modern world comes crashing into the old one in all of its mechanized glory, changing the fate of William Walker in one dramatic swoop.

I think you'd have to be a dunderhead to miss Cox's point: the Reagan administration's campaign to interfere in Nicaragua is part of a long history of U.S. interference in that country. In the 1850s, the people rose up and eventually kicked us out, and this was exactly what was happening again in the 1980s. America's cockiness was no match for the will of the people, and democracy did not mean foreign rule. Walker's ultimate fate is also part of a larger pattern of U.S. backed dictators that grow mad with power and get abandoned by the people who put them in its seat. In order to maintain control of the nation, William Walker betrays each of his principles one by one, and with each restraint that gets lifted, the world around him declines deeper into madness. By the end, it's beginning to look a lot like Apocalypse Now, something that was likely intentional given that Cox begins his closing credits with a clip of President Reagan insisting comparisons between Nicaragua and Vietnam to be baseless. Sarcastic juxtaposition, anyone?

Though many of today's cable news pundits would have us believe that history is vindicating Reagan in all things, more rational minds will show the advantage is Alex Cox's. Just as history will also likely not be in George W. Bush's favor for leading America into virtually the same swampy morality of greed with his campaign in Iraq.

But just because Alex Cox is right, does that make Walker any good? I'd say the answer is yes and no, but mostly yes. The film received a pretty horrendous critical drubbing in 1987, and I'd say unfairly. The film does have its faults. There are times when it feels like the director is in less control of his picture than he should be, and it comes dangerously close to veering off the edge. If you'll indulge another reference to Apocalypse Now, in much the same way the insanity of the war he was portraying infected Francis Ford Coppola, so too does it feel like Cox is getting lost in the carnage of Nicaragua. Just as William Walker couldn't keep a firm grip on his army, the final film suggests Alex Cox found Walker a slippery fish.

Even so, as I said, the answer is mostly yes, the film is mostly good. Walker remains as potent a blast of political anger twenty years later. Its reemergence on DVD for the excellent Criterion edition has come at just the right time, too. Given all the madness around us, maybe a bloody, anarchic allegory will restore a little lucidity to the arena.

One can only hope.

FINAL THOUGHTS: The Criterion Collection DVD release of Walker is a chance to fix the maligned reputation of a dangerously funny, violent political satire that didn't get its due in 1987. Alex Cox's anarchic portrayal of the cyclical nature of America's aggressive policies in Nicaragua is a blistering indictment of our country's lingering sense of Manifest Destiny. Watching it brings some laughs, a few shudders, and more than one "what the--?" moment. It's not perfect, but its heart is in the right place, and the constant forward movement of the story means you don't really have time to get bored with it. Recommended.

Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona from a screenplay by Sergio G. Sanchez, The Orphanage has a similar feel to other fright fests that have come from Spain and Latin America in recent years, most notably Alejandro Amenabar's The Others and Guillermo del Toro's Devil's Backbone. del Toro also served as a producer on The Orphanage, so it's no surprise that Bayona and Sanchez share the same love of storytelling that has made del Toro's best films such a pleasure to watch. That's right, unlike Hollywood's endless recycling of iconic horror franchises and remakes of Asian curse pictures, The Orphanage has an honest-to-goodness story. There is an art to spinning a scary yarn, and The Orphanage sucks you in with its intrigue; then once it has your tantalized, it delivers the scares.

The plot revolves around an old Spanish house that had once been an orphanage. One of its former tenants, Laura (Belen Ruede, The Sea Inside), has now returned to reclaim the place that gave her a start in life. As one of the few kids who actually got adopted and left, she now wants to open a home where she can help mentally challenged and other special needs children. She has an adopted son of her own, Simón (Roger Princep), who was born with HIV. Caring for children is almost like a crusade for her, one that her husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) sympathetically goes along with.

When the family arrived at the house, Simón had two imaginary friends. Within days of being there, he has gathered five new ones, including a strange child named Tomas who wears a raggedy burlap mask over his head. Simón plays elaborate treasure hunting games that he says his new friends set up for him and also draws pictures of these playmates. His parents believe he is in a phase that he will grow out of when the other children arrive, and he can occupy his time with some flesh and blood friends.

Only, on the day the other kids come, Simón has a tantrum and stays in his room. When Laura goes to look for him, he is gone, nowhere to be found. She is also attacked by a child dressed like Tomas. She suspects something otherworldly is going on, a conviction that grows the longer the hunt for Simón continues.

That's about all I really want to say about The Orphanage. The filmmakers have taken such great care to construct a story that reveals itself in such an inventive, seductive fashion, it seems criminal to talk about it too much. I want you to go and see the movie and have the same experience I had. There are some real chills to be found in The Orphanage, as well as some genuine shocks that will likely make you jump in your seat. It's where that whole thing about imagination comes into play. The creators of this movie know that if they can spark yours, you'll completely buy into the web they are weaving, and the more entangled you become, the more you're going to enjoy it.

Laura (Belen Rueda) and her husband (Fernando Cayo) have reopened the orphanage of her youth with grand plans of child care. Simon (Roger Princep) is their adopted son: a seven-year-old with HIV and an arsenal of imaginary friends. When spooky events start occurring around the property, Laura becomes consumed with discovering what forces are behind them. Once Simon disappears, Laura is forced to consider otherworldly possibilities, leading her to a final showdown with the orphanage.

I enjoyed "The Orphanage," but only in fits. It's a creative gothic horror piece, meticulously directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, and represents another step forward in the mainstream appeal of the Spanish genre filmmaking movement, spearheaded by del Toro. When it hunkers down with the unknown, it's a rewarding movie; Bayona is terrific with specific tension beats and the creepy echo of the titular location. I also adored how Laura's frightening journey takes her to emotional extremes where sanity is questioned and her past confronted, even involving the advice of mediums (Geraldine Chaplin). Her panic is the jewel of the film, since the audience is never quite sure if her fears are authentic or the result of a fractured mind lost to the extremes of grief.

However, the mixture of horror and tension is rarely allowed to ferment long enough. It's the feature-length directing debut for Bayona, and his inexperience with pacing shows. The film only sporadically puts the screws to the viewer, instead of drawing out the terror in an infinitely more gripping fashion. "Orphanage" is filled with delayed reactions, perhaps to extend the running time to contractual lengths or to suit egotistical notions of cinematic importance. "Orphanage" is distanced and dry when it's clearly screaming out to lunge at the viewer, as seen in the sequences in which a mysterious hooded child terrorizes Laura. Those moments are tremendous; it's too bad they are lost in a picture in need of some serious trimming and concentration.

When the suspense is lined up correctly, "Orphanage" is a decent thrill ride, excellent when it's focused solely on creeping out the room. The finale is a doozy, ditching any need for exposition and plowing ahead with scares and spirit world storytelling payoffs, and closes the film on a terrific, oddly comforting note of terror and solace.

On this particular trip, Oden gets help from inside man Lo Jin (Wee Hong Thomas), who claims that he can help track Kate and that there is the possibility she was abducted by a crime organization and sold into white slavery. This means that Oden is kept at an arms length, told he cannot meet with the informants or tag along too closely with Lo Jin, otherwise that will put them in trouble. But, as they travel through Cambodia's seedy nightlife, meeting dead ends and robbery, moving on with little tangible evidence and more money spent, Oden starts to wonder if he is being fooled.

The film is pretty basic and routine. It doesn't really simmer or thrill, mostly due to issues that one can chalk up to the limited production. The direction and setups are simple. The acting and staging is sometimes awkward. All problems that, no doubt, could have been smoothed over with more time and money. It does at least succeed with some good location footage. No doubt yawn-inducing to natives, but to Western and European eyes its is completely compelling, be it a mist covered forest, ancient temple grounds, or the dingy back alleys. Much of Morris', who looks kinda' like the guy who played Max Headroom, grumbles as an actor are forgivable considering his multitasking (and the jungle heat too). As his guide, Thomas does a fine job, dryly getting to offer the film's best one liner- after Morris' character discovers a rat in his bed, he says, "Catch it and I'll make you breakfast."

In terms of how the story unfolds, there was a little obviousness in some of the twists. One quickly realizes it not a film about the mysterious loss of a loved one and the tone (and common sense) suggests that the truth of what happened to Kate isn't going to be pretty. With some nods to problems of third world crime, the films real focus is on the possible deception of Lo Jin and mental unbalance of Oden. As the film wound to its conclusion, I was surprised to find that my assumptions about the finale were all true and that, plus some diaphanous character psycholgy, took some steam out of my enjoyment.

Conclusion: Much like another film I'm reviewing today, the Japanese indie Lost By Dead, I brace at being too harsh. Does the film entirely work? No. Last Seen at Angkor isn't horrible either . It is the kind of project that the hurdle of just getting it made with so much against it (budget, general conditions, etc) makes the final product an admirable accomplishment no matter what the little tics tremors may be.

Truer words are rarely spoken within a film than in this case. Fear House looks like it was made for next to nothing, yet its script and a creepy performance by its lead - Aleece Jones - help elevate this film into something that at least passes the time entertainingly for fans of fright house ghost flicks.

After an introductory scene - mixed in with the movie's credits - where two horny kids are dispatched within an old house in the middle of nowhere, Fear House begins with successful horror novelist Samantha Ballard (played by the aforementioned Aleece Jones) purchasing said house from an elderly agent. She views it as a great place to write her next book.

Nine months pass by and no one hears from her - or the agent for that matter. Thus, one night, Samantha's hemophiliac brother and her literary agent, along with two women including the real estate agent's daughter, arrive to check up on her. Conveniently, it's the very same night at the very same time that Samantha's estranged husband and his new lover show up to get her to sign divorce papers.

Why they all have to do this in the middle of the night is never explained. I guess it wouldn't be a horror movie otherwise.

In any case, the six characters break into the spooky old house. There, they find Samantha clearly deranged and discover that they cannot leave the house without facing their greatest fears and being killed by them. Apparently, a young girl named Anna Lisa was imprisoned by her abusive father 100 years ago at this very house, and her spirit is still causing mischief along with the spirit of Mondrique, a servant who cared for her and was killed for his troubles. Ah, but are these malevolent specters truly to blame? Time will tell - precisely 86 minutes, the runtime of this movie.

I watched Fear House wanting to like it despite its warts. Some of the acting is really over-the-top atrocious - though the two worst actors play characters who get killed straightaway so it's not a long-running nuisance. It's the lack of a special effects budget that ultimately takes away from the shocks of the film. Towards the film's climax, for example, a nearly laughable beheading scene followed by an equally shoddy looking death-by-giant-fireball really undercut the tension developed by the movie.

The script isn't bad, though, and offers a fairly standard haunted house scenario. Aleece Jones is both creepy and engaging as the prescient, haunted novelist who seems to be in sympathy with the dark forces that surround the house. The obsessive horror hounds out there who simply must see everything made in this genre could certainly do worse than spending an hour and a half with this movie.

Final Thoughts: Fear House offers a compelling spin on the haunted house genre; unfortunately, its shoestring budget hampers the effectiveness of many of its scares... A Rent It recommendation for the fright flick crowd.

The film is a tale of modern day terror, with dirty bombs set off all over Los Angeles one morning. Chaos erupts, news reports are incomplete, law enforcement is in a panic. We see all of this through the eyes of Brad (Rory Cochrane), an everyman who just moved to L.A. with his wife, Lexi (Mary McCormack) - a wife who, by the way, just left for downtown shortly before the attacks and hasn't been seen since. At first he tries to drive into town, and when his attempts are blocked, he finds himself back at home, where he finds a handyman (Tony Perez) seeking shelter from the fallout. Together, they dutifully follow government orders to seal up the house with that old standby, duct tape and plastic sheeting.

These opening minutes are a mini-masterpiece of utter horror, with writer/director Chris Gorak pushing everything forward at a manic pace, and with composers Tom Hajdu and Andy Milburn (credited under their "tomandandy" moniker) delivering a musical score that buries itself under the viewer's skin, never allowing for a second's relief. Gorak, a former production designer making his directorial debut here, brings an exceptional visual flair to the anarchy of these early scenes, and he's able to hide the film's low budget around smart, tight camera work and low-key effects that never once allow us to doubt the situation. For about twenty minutes, this is brilliant storytelling.

Then we reach the heart of the story: Lexi shows up, coughing and weezing. Brad has already sealed off the house. Should he let her in and risk infecting himself and the handyman? Should he be a good citizen and follow the authorities' orders to not let anyone inside? It's a cold, dark morality stumper, and while it's easy to criticize Brad for standing firm and refusing to help his own wife, it's also deeply, disturbingly true that many of us just might do the very thing we wouldn't dare think we would.

By this point, Gorak has hit all the points he possibly can with such a scenario. If this were a short film, he could wrap it up with one or two quick scenes, make his point, and call it a day. But he's working at feature length here, and he still has over half the movie to go. And so "Right at Your Door" runs out of steam, on a story level if not on a visceral one. The film never loses its stressful tone, and there are moments that keep the "what would you do?" fires stoked, but it also finds itself in the troublesome spot of wearing too thin too early.

Gorak does what he can to keep things moving, offering up little story cheats like bringing in a little boy (Scotty Noyd, Jr.) into the mess. Later, visits from biohazard suit-clad cops provide a quick jolt of paranoia and fear, but these scenes tend to hit all wall of redundancy; like the frequent arguments between Lexi and Brad, the arguments between Brad and the cops devolve into a back-and-forth yelling match that are too repetitive for their own good.

Then comes the finale. With a story like this, one that's all premise, Gorak writes himself into a corner. No ending could possibly be satisfactory (except, perhaps, a quiet no-resolution fade out), but Gorak winds up giving us one of the weakest of his options. The ending here is too sly for its own good, a clunky attempt to remind us that authority figures don't have a clue what they're doing. It's a little bit of "see what I did there?" from the writer. This movie needs something far more low key, as opposed to this ending, which hopes to rattle us not by unnerving us, but by shaking us around while winking at us.

And yet. Ah, yes, and yet. Despite this, "Right at Your Door" remains a very good film, a prime example of mood triumphing over flawed story. Gorak's direction is tense and slick, and his cast delivers fine performances that enhance the unnerving experience. It's a testament to all involved that they manage to keep things running long after the well runs dry.

Stuck working overtime at her office, Angela (Rachael Nichols, "Alias") is in a rush to meet her family for Christmas. When her car won't start, she enlists the help of Thomas (Wes Bentley), the parking garage security officer. Seemingly affable and flirty, it turns out Thomas is a psychopath who's had his eye on Angela for some time. Kidnapping and locking her away in his office, Thomas plans a quaint holiday evening around forcing Angela to fall in love with him. When she resists, it sets off a chain of murder, torture, and revenge that ruins Christmas forever.

There's some hope offered in the opening credits of "P2" in the form of producer Alexandre Aja, the director of the magnificent "High Tension" and the "Hills Have Eyes" remake. Seeing his name attached to the screenplay immediately affirms that this throwaway horror film might not be so throwaway after all. Well...so much for the promise of screen credits.

Aja isn't the director for this exercise in parking garage havoc. That honor goes to Franck Khalfoun, a newcomer and associate of Aja's, getting his feet wet with a routine thriller that will more likely put the viewer to sleep than give them the scare of their life. Setting a thriller in a confined area isn't a bad idea, but you'd be surprised just how flavorless a parking garage can be. Khalfoun isn't accomplished enough as a filmmaker to jolt this story to life, and he lazily depends on boo scares and strange displays of fairly graphic gore to keep the crowds interested. It just isn't enough, especially when lady logic is furiously beating down the door (I never knew one could rip off a fingernail passively reaching for a cell phone on the ground) and the acting couldn't be worse if it tried.

The main offender is Wes Bentley who, after his display of cream puff badassery in this year's "Ghost Rider," should consider a career path in which he never plays a villain again. With a cheeseball Abercrombie model stare and internet-café-regular skin color, Bentley isn't the least bit menacing, and I swear to God there should be a law against actors with feminine voices taking roles that require a great deal of screaming. It's hilarious, which is most certainly not the intention of "P2."

The rest of the film is standard issue thriller "entertainment," only there's a curious lack of invention to the piece and not a drop of emotional investment. The experience is mostly watching bad talent interact interminably without ever achieving a plot point and counting how many times the movie wets down Nichols's ample cleavage. This is not horror. This is not much of a thriller either. It just stinks, and even worse, it's unbelievably boring.

It begins on a hot summer day in 1935 at the Tallis estate in England. Thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis (Saoirse Ronan), a bossy and precocious writer, is trying to corral her cousins into performing a play she's written for the evening's entertainment, as her older brother and a friend are visiting from London. But the kids are more interested in swimming. Everyone is listless and deflated, the way lazy summer afternoons often make us.

From her bedroom window, Briony sees her older sister, Cecilia (Keiry Knightley), out on the lawn, talking to Robbie Turner (James McAvoy), the housekeeper's son. Is there a flirtation there? Later Robbie asks Briony to deliver a note to Cecilia, which Briony reads and misconstrues. Briony subsequently finds Cecilia and Robbie in the library together, engaged in some rather compromising behavior. When a truly nefarious deed is committed later that evening, Briony tells the police it was Robbie. She saw him do it -- or, at least, she put two and two together and determined the answer must be four.

Joe Wright (2005's "Pride & Prejudice") directs these early scenes with great tension and energy, and just a dash of humor. Robbie does something silly while composing his note to Cecilia, and yet that small, careless act has far-reaching consequences. I marvel at the way Wright conveys both sides of it: it's a dumb thing, and it's also a hugely important thing. It's both. Life is like that, isn't it?

The story jumps ahead a few years to World War II, with Robbie fighting in northern France and going a bit nutty from the war. Cecilia, a nurse, has never forgiven Briony for her false accusations all those years earlier. Briony (now played by Romola Garai) is in training to be a nurse herself, and she longs to undo the terrible wrongs she committed. But is it too late? And whom does she really want to placate anyway -- those she harmed, or her own conscience?

With gorgeous photography by Seamus McGarvey ("The Hours") and a beautifully emotive musical score by Dario Marianelli ("Pride & Prejudice") -- not to mention the lovely period costumes and all the other accoutrements of tragic romances -- "Atonement" strikes almost all of the right chords. Furthermore, an astounding 5 1/2-minute scene on the beach of Dunkirk, all captured in one shot, cements Wright's status as a director with marvelous technical proficiency.

It is a very good movie, if not a great one. James McAvoy, overshadowed in "The Last King of Scotland" by Forrest Whitaker's more noticeable performance, should get more attention here, as his Robbie is the real protagonist of the film, and an expressive and sensitive character to boot. On the other hand, Keira Knightley, though no slouch in the acting department, is curiously unremarkable as Cecilia. The character is consigned to a fate worse than death for movie heroines: waiting and pining for the man she loves.

It's England on the brink of WWII, and on an isolated estate young Briony (Saoirse Ronan) is nursing a crush on the maid's son, Robbie (James McAvoy). A literate, inventive pre-teen, Briony is flattened when she discovers Robbie is attracted to her older sister, Cecilia (Keira Knightley), a stately woman who returns the affection tenfold. With her heart broken, Briony bears false witness against Robbie during an unusual sexual situation, punishing the young man to prison and soon the front lines of the war. Years later, Briony, now a nurse (played by Romola Garai), finds the burden of guilt overwhelming and seeks out the separated lovers to make amends.

In 2005's "Pride and Prejudice," director Wright injected an exhilarating verve back into the dead zone of British costume dramas. It was a divine affair, marked by a fascination with nature and Wright's ability to challenge the material past its corset-tight demands. "Atonement" is an even stronger picture, with Wright demonstrating the confidence of a seasoned pro, shuffling through this twisted tale of deception and anguish with tip-top timing and shattering displays of directorial ingenuity.

Where "Pride" was a Vaseline-smeared romantic fable, "Atonement" is a dirge for love. Through the application of constantly rotating POVs and disorientating time-jumps, Wright captures the story from different angles, presenting the viewer the blossoming romance between Robbie and Cecelia; at the same time, focusing on the pursed-lip, prepubescent rage of Briony (she's Patty McCormack with a cutthroat accent) as she fails to contain herself when the opportunity for Robbie's banishment arrives. There's little in the way of tenderness here; "Atonement" is directed more toward a procedural structure, detonating a dramatic bomb and counting all the casualties.

Using Kubrickian camera constructs, "Atonement" is a far more stunningly crafted film than "Pride." It's certainly chillier as well, playing with ideas of icy visual symmetry, nearly reaching exhilarating rock opera proportions. Since the story is simple in terms of character arcs, Wright spends enormous amounts of time dreaming up a rich visual scheme for the film, eventually stumbling into bravura one-take experimentations. One standout captures the massive evacuation of Dunkirk in a five-minute single shot that snipers the film's energy, but nonetheless remains a searing portrait of drunken war-time insanity, sharply echoing the mental deterioration of Robbie as his hopes for safe passage from combat are quickly ripped from his hands through a crushing display of disarray and madness.

Once the elder Briony steps back into the picture, "Atonement" slides comfortably into dreamy passages, addressing her guilt and desire to mend bridges with Cecilia and Robbie. This, of course, is punctuated with a sucker punch of a conclusion that rattles the senses. It's the dollop of heartache on top of a luxurious cinematic cake, furthering Wright's position as one of the more exciting young filmmakers out there today.

I'm actually not going to spend much time critiquing the plot. The poorly translated subs on the print make the storytelling nearly critique-proof. Its pretty difficult to accurately assess the films story when you have such puzzlers as, "We fear natural disturbate. We no longer take on learners." to decipher as well as the word "folks" dropped about twenty times when referring to someone who is a friend, clan member, etc. However, dialog debacle aside, awkward transitions do reveal that meaty plotting wasn't exactly the first thing on their minds. Its really all about the ninja razzle dazzle.

Taoist Yu is a good man, providing medical herbs and general medical care for the poor townspeople and a good dose of ninja training to his gaggle of students. Trained in ninja techniques related to the major elements, Wind, Fire, Water, Wood, and Metal, he discourages them from getting too involved in the warlord feuding that dominates the land.

But, an ambitious General Suen-Chak is making waves and Taoist Yu's students get involved, at first training some rebels, then actually taking part in assassination attempts. After Taosit Yu is killed, they all marshal their talents to seek revenge. However, the duo that infiltrates Suen-Chak's inner circle begin to feel sympathetic to the warlord, throwing a wrench in the five element ninja's thirst for revenge.

Ninja in Ancient China is interesting mainly due to its quaintness. When it was made, the modern, stunt crazy martial film and the John Woo bullet ballet gangster/crime flick (two genres that usurped the old school kung fu flick) were still all the rage, plus, the wire fu, heavily stylized martial films were just starting to take off.

Though it obviously riffs on his hallmark Chinese Super Ninjas, Ninja in Ancient China is decidedly seeped in the old school, largely lacking even the outlandishness of Chang Cheh films like 9 Demons and Heaven and Hell. Of course, it is grounded due to budgetary restrictions, and in place of those theatrics he does get to play out in the open air and make use of natural locales, an area where the Shaw's usually left their directors confined to the studios outer lots and interior sets. Different, sure, but I don't think its an equal trade off by any means. Give me the interior sets and more elaborate choreography and fx of the studiobound Chang Cheh any day.

The film has no shortage of action, nice sets, colorful costuming, a good crew of performers, and the final third delivers with some entertaining fight scenes. But, as a hardcore fan, you still get the sense that, removed from his comfort zone, removed from the era in which he flourished, Chang Cheh wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders. An old workhorse, still plugging along, still proving he could deliver, but detached from the wellspring (and support) that made him great.

Reviewer's Bias
Loves: Ridiculous movies Likes: Clive Owens, Paul Giamatti, Monica Bellucci Dislikes: Gore Hates:

There's something very freeing about watching a movie with nearly no redeeming social value. You can simply shut off your brain and experience it on a very primal level, which quickly reveals whether it's entertaining or not. Shoot 'em Up, which should win an award for truth in advertising, is just such a film. There's nothing more to it than a bunch of action scenes strung together on a thin strand of plot, all shot with style and energy. It's as if the creators sat around saying "Wouldn't it be cool if you had a scene with X?" where X is a ridiculously over-the-top set piece out of the John Woo book of filmmaking.

The result is the story of Mr. Smith (Clive Owen), a mysterious loner who gets drawn into a complicated conspiracy when he sees a pregnant woman chased by a thug with a gun. Helping deliver the baby in the midst of a gunfight (the first of several milestones in the movie), he becomes the newborn's protector, against his better judgment, and with the help of DQ (Monica Bellucci,) a prostitute with a unique dairy-based specialty. Why the baby needs protection from the attacks from Mr. Hertz (Paul Giamatti) and his army of hired killers is revealed as the film unfolds, and it's just as over-the-top as the rest of the film.

Does the baby's backstory really matter? Not really. Will you care? Not really. How could you, when you've got shoot-outs during sessions of lovemaking, shoot-outs while falling out of planes and shoot-outs with people with no fingers. It's indulgent filmmaking at its finest, all conducted with gusto by director Michael Davis, whose previous work wouldn't suggest he's capable of helming such beautiful chaos. But here it is, for us to enjoy, borrowing from old cartoon violence (especially when it comes to Mr. Smith's ever-present carrot and Mr. Hertz' signature ring tone) and the complexity of Rube Goldberg devices (which Mr. Smith can MacGyver in any situation.)

The excessive nature of the film helps make it fun, but the three lead performances make it good, starting with Owen, who further defines his status as an action hero. His look is perfect, making even the most unbelievable maneuver somewhat realistic, and his ability to deliver even the cheesiest dialogue with grim seriousness raises Mr. Smith above the B-movie trappings of the rest of the film. The same doesn't go for Bellucci's milk maiden, but if she was real, she wouldn't be nearly as fun as she is here, since it feels like she got lost on the way to a '60s Italian spy movie. A thick accent, sexy body and halting delivery take her to the edge of cartoon and into the realm of just right for this film.

The same goes for Giamatti, who gets to leave his acting ability at the door and turn on the ham as an angry yet erudite assassin struggling with his family life as he hunts down his infant prey. It's the kind of unhinged performance you need in a genre film, but with a disturbingly dark sense of humor that's frequently missing from such characters, resulting in flat, one-dimensional bad guys. Here, thanks to Giamatti, Mr. Hertz is practically likable, despite being a complete psychopath-the mark of a quality villain.

There's so much going on in this film, that you'll be surprised how long it feels, despite barely cracking the 80-minute mark. That's not to say it drags in any way or that you'll be bored at any point. The film just crams so much into its run-time that it feels like two utterly pointless, yet undeniably enjoyable exercises in violence in one. Considering it's missing about a film's worth of plot, the padding is welcome and just what the doctor ordered.

The Bottom Line
This is the ultimate anti-film-snob movie, lacking most anything resembling substance, but loaded with tons of fun, action and style. If you can just sit back and let the excessive gun battles and violence wash over you like a wave of guilty pleasures, the film is, pardon the pun, a blast... If you want a night of mindless fun and don't mind it coated in a few gallons of blood, this is a great pick to veg out to.

Clive Owen stars as Smith, an enigmatic homeless man with a taste for carrots, who happens to be in the wrong place at the right time when a pregnant woman fleeing for her life runs past him. Unable to sit idly by as a small army of armed killers pursue the shrieking lass, Smith decides to get involved, leading to a brutal shoot-out that never quite pauses, even as Smith helps deliver the baby. Enter Paul Giamatti as Hertz, the cold-blooded leader of the killers pursuing the woman and her freshly-delivered baby and, more importantly, Elmer Fudd to Owen's Bugs Bunny. Hertz even calls Smith a "wascally wabbit," and understanding that Giamatti is Elmer Fudd and Owen is Bugs Bunny is crucial to truly appreciating Shoot 'Em Up.

When the nameless mother catches a stray bullet in the head, Smith is left to his own devices as he takes off running from Hertz. Enlisting the aid of DQ (Monica Bellucci), a hooker with a heart of gold, Smith cuts a bloody swath through a never-ending roster of expendable henchmen as he tries to figure out who wants the baby dead, and why. With every bit of eye-rollingly silly exposition that takes the audience once step closer to figuring out the absurd plot, there thankfully comes another bit of violent action that goes further over the top, surpassing anything served up by other films of this nature. Between the shooting and the killing and the killing and the shooting, the plot reveals a sinister scheme involving a baby factory and a conspiracy theory that is just plain laughable. But that's okay, because you are supposed to laugh--as well as cheer--as Shoot 'Em Up delivers one check-your-brain-at-the-door action sequence after another. Just when you think the you've seen it all as Smith throws a hump into DQ while laying waste to a team of gunmen, you realize that was just foreplay for when Smith gets in a gun battle with another small army, while parachuting from a plane.

Although I was initially disappointed when Clive Owen was not cast as James Bond, his work in films like Shoot 'Em Up and Children of Men are making sure his talents are not going to waste. A role like this in a film like this requires a serious actor who does not take himself too seriously. Owen pulls it off wonderfully, never tipping his hand that this is as much a comedy as it is an action thriller. The real comedy is left to Giamatti, who hams it up and really seems to appreciate the opportunity to play a sadistic villain. Both actors deliver performances that run the risk of being under-appreciated in a film that can easily be distracting.

With the first 15 minutes of Shoot 'Em Up unfolding with the sort of ludicrous action usually reserved solely for Hong Kong cinema, it is hard to believe that the film could go anywhere but down from there. Instead Davis manages to take his film ever-higher, reaching a point of over-the-top that few filmmakers would ever dare approach, for fear that audiences just won't be able to process everything. And while Davis' film never comes close to something like John Woo's seminal Hard Boiled, Shoot 'Em Up is one of the few movies that seems to really understand that particular language of action and violence, creating a cartoonish cavalcade of carnage.

If you are, man oh man, "Shoot" is the perfect little film for you. If you've read the above paragraph and felt the all-too-familiar wave of bad movie nausea, than you're much like me. There's a time for ultra-hip, self-aware, over-the-top pretense, and then there's "Shoot 'Em Up:" a creatively bankrupt aria of stupid ideas stupidly assembled with a desire to register even more stupidly than human intelligence will comprehend. Get it? It's supposed to stupid. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

For the last year or so, director Michael Davis (the man behind such duds as "100 Girls," "Monster Man," and "Eight Days a Week") has been proclaiming his love for action movies, yet "Shoot" is almost a slap in the face of the genre. The film comes from the same cesspool that germinated several other adrenaline-milking features of the last few years, including the excretal "Crank" and the vile "Running Scared." These are snot-slicked creations intended to ride the audience hard with a smug orgy of violence, only to undercut the horror with creamy black comedy so nobody goes home with a grudge. Parody is the lazy man's game, and Davis plays "Shoot" like a guy cashing in his last favors in Hollywood.

Taking Wooesque gunplay theatrics to a "Looney Tunes" level (a reference Davis crudely underlines at every turn), the film is nothing short of an orgasm of banal brutality, with bullets flying, limbs torn off, and babies put in harm's way for cheap effect. Love him or hate him, at least Woo played his cards straight, brazenly walking towards absurdity with a straight face and more squinty conviction than a spelling bee champ. He believed in his mayhem and fought to sustain his funhouse of violence, even when, at times, it was all a little too much. Hell, even caloric escapism like "The Transporter" imagines a loose reality for itself.

Davis isn't nearly that brave, and turns "Shoot" into a reckless wild comedy that scraps even the faintest hint of realism and dignity to become a flashpoint of lunacy; an acidic cartoon for those with a more inebriated sense of humor and tolerance for nincompoop direction. If previous cinematic efforts didn't already covered this ground repeatedly, perhaps "Shoot" wouldn't seem like a death row meal of dry toast and warm water. It craves the Woo seal of approval with wickedly-mounted sequences of bullet-whizzing combat, but it's afraid of facing such bold style head-on, cowardly snickering at itself time and again with a kind of ghastly self-deprecation that would make Kevin Smith wince. The film literally begs the viewer to scoff at the preposterous nature of it all, leaving nothing to root for but a hollow exercise in masturbatory filmmaking. Yay?

Oh, there's a plot somewhere inside "Shoot," but one holds the feeling, as the film steamrolls over anything in its path, that the storyline was an afterthought following the years Davis spent choreographing the action beats. Somehow he tricked Monica Bellucci (Heaven's second greatest gift to the planet) into starring as Mr. Smith's lactating hooker/pal (don't ask), permitted Paul Giamatti to slip into his earsplitting overact zone (an era I thought was finally over with "Sideways"), and looks to sneak a mutated message on gun control inside the exhaustively winky, persistently-crinkled script. That is, when he's not spinelessly backpedaling on the cardboard characters, trying, in the film's only infinitesimal moments of sincerity, to embellish their haunted souls as if anyone is going to give a flying fig how these characters earned their "life stinks" badges. Either you put the time and effort into emotional resonance or you imagine berserk gunfights occurring mid-penetration. There's no room for both.

Of course I realize that by taking the dreadfulness of "Shoot" so personally, I'm playing directly into Davis's sweaty, calloused hands, potentially revealing my critic heart to be black and shriveled when it comes to exclusionary geek-treehouse entertainment such as this. I'll take the risk, since "Shoot" is one smothering, viciously unfunny spanking machine to sit through. Last spring's "Hot Fuzz" tangoed on a similar reverential terrain, mimicking action movies to create an action movie, but it had, gasp, genuine wit to support its homages and parodies. It used, gasp gasp, actual care, concentration, and thought when serving up a hot plate of havoc rooted in established genre entertainment.

The bottom line is: "Hot Fuzz" had skill. "Shoot" has noise and a debilitating reliance on the absurd to power it through scenes of gag repetition (yeah, we get it: Mr. Smith uses carrots as a weapon), high-school-dropout screenwriting, and numbing usage of ironic cock-rock music to stroke off Davis's less perceptive audience members. If there's a Hell, an honest-to-God place of eternal torment, "Shoot 'Em Up" would make the ideal introductory video, promising a lifetime of anguish to come.

For those of you who found The Transporter too subtle*, or if you've decided that The Boondock Saints is the Godfather of the millennial generation, then it's quite possible that you will see in Shoot 'Em Up what I so clearly did not. My thesaurus doesn't have enough synonyms for the word "bad" to adequately get me through this review. I was squirming in agony for just about every frame of this awful, awful movie, and having to relive it just to write this is causing me to shudder the way one normally shudders when imagining having a prostate exam or passing kidney stones.

Here's the skinny: Clive Owen is the hero. He's in the wrong place at the wrong time for living a quiet life, but the right place at the right time when it comes to saving a pregnant woman from thugs that multiply faster than Madrox the Multiple Man. These leather jacket-wearing dudes are lead by the maniacal genius Paul Giamatti, who likes cracking bad jokes in between showing off how smart he is. Clive delivers the woman's baby before she takes one in the head, and manages to get away with the wee bairn in a hail of bullets and impossible stunts.

I was actually ready to go with Shoot 'Em Up at that point, because I kept expecting the fourth wall to break. Surely, this wasn't really the movie I was watching. Clive Owen is playing a bad actor in a bad action movie, and the reveal is just around the corner. Someone's going to shout "Cut!" and like Bugs Bunny, whom he clearly emulates, Clive's going to turn to his audience and say, "Gee, ain't I a stinker?" Right?

Well, kind of. Clive Owen is performing badly in a bad action movie, but it really is Shoot 'Em Up and there is no breaking away from it. Strap in, because it's all downhill.

In order to save this little baby, Clive enlists a lactating hooker played by Monica Bellucci, and Giamatti chases them all over town, moving from one ludicrous situation to another. There is no point dissecting the plot, because it is intended to be ludicrous. I get that. Michael Davis, who directed as well as wrote this garbage fest, even wants us to think he's being clever by constructing multiple gags to let us know he's in on the joke. He's not just making a bad action movie, he's making fun of bad action movies. Shoot 'Em Up is Kiss Kiss Bang Bang for people who huff paint, laced with left-over hipster irony that went out of style when those guys realized the elephant ears they stretched their lobes into weren't going to snap back into their original shapes.

The thing is, I'm just not buying what Davis is selling. In order to play at that kind of satire, your movie has to be smart, and Shoot 'Em Up is not smart. It has no class, nor does it have any real wit. It's dumb, dumb, and then dumb some more. What it has instead of brains is a solid rock of meanness. Shoot 'Em Up is a vicious movie, escalating its graphic violence and cruel jokes until the screams of sadism become a cacophony of torture, women debasing themselves (and being debased--how many dead pregnant women is too much?), and dislodged eyeballs. This film is a comedy in the way Hostel II and Captivity were movies about relationships. By the final bloodbath, Clive Owen isn't even trying for groaning one-liners anymore. There's no point. If the movie has done its job, we'll be drowning in our own drool, unable to laugh for all the gasping for air. Hours later, I'm still trying to wash the sickness off of me.

It's not that I'm offended by Shoot 'Em Up. One, I'm not namby pamby enough where I'm offended all that easy. Two, being offensive requires that you also be clever, something I've already noted this movie is not. If I'm anything, I'm insulted that the people involved in putting this atrocity together decided that we should all be so easy to please that they tried so little. Most of the work was done when they put the cast together, and all anyone had to do was deliver on the promise of the title. When it comes down to it, though, the action isn't even that good. Davis constructs several sequences that are like old Jackie Chan routines with a touch of Rube Goldberg, but rather than actually pulling them off with real stunts and complicated set designs, all of the running and jumping gunplay is done with computers and editing trickery. He's robbed us of the visceral thrill he promised us when he named his movie Shoot 'Em Up. I know a lot of people will likely compare this to a video game, but I don't want to blame the poor gamers for this waste of time. Besides, those guys at least know you have to actually be involved in what's happening for it to be fun.

I could go on and on ranting about how much I hated this movie, and probably take up more of your time than you would have to spend watching it for yourself (though, I'll at least not charge you for the dishonor). Instead, I'll leave you with a snippet of one of my favorite film reviews of all time. It's by Harlan Ellison, and I have it in front of me, contained in a book of his film criticism called Harlan Ellison's Watching. It's Harlan's take on Robocop**, and he gives that movie many thrusts of his dagger, but the one that has always stuck with me is his labeling it as "wetwork," which he then defines as, "the 'intelligence community's' currently fashionable doublespeak for the dirtiest of deeds, the act of assassination, termination with extreme unction, or whatever."

Such a label could also be applied to Shoot 'Em Up. "Or whatever" indeed. As Harlan told his readers in relation to Robocop, "Stay away from this one at all costs."

* And for the record, I actually enjoyed The Transporter quite a bit. Make of that what you will.

** Also for the record, I pretty much agree with Ellison's feelings on Robocop, though my reaction softened in the twenty years between viewing it at the theatre and on DVD. Maybe in 2027, I'll be okay with Shoot 'Em Up, too.

Fiona Gordon plays a sort of distaff version of the Richard Dreyfuss character in Encounters, who, after having gotten herself locked in a walk-in freezer at work overnight, develops a somewhat unhealthy obsession with cold and an iceberg she has envisioned. She doesn't sculpt anything in mashed potatoes, thankfully, but she does make icebergs with various household items like sheets, finally graduating to drawing a picture and enlisting the aid of a sailor (piloting a little skiff suitably named Le Titanique) to help her find the giant ice cube of her dreams.

This may sound slight, and it admittedly is. It is filmed and performed with such loving care, however, and with so many wonderfully outrageous moments of physical comedy, that its lightness and lack of "message" are two of its central winning attributes, not liabilities. Featuring langorous Tati-inspired shots of several unedited minutes punctuated by unexpected pratfalls or other non-verbal punchlines, the film rarely wavers from its sweet (sometimes bittersweet) course.

Written and directed by its three stars, Dominique Abel, Bruno Romy and Gordon, the film is a seamless interweaving of buffoonery and heart, a very rare combination that serves to point out the relative paucity of ideas coming from a lot of American comedies these days.

Parental Warning: There are two brief shots of fairly gratuitous full frontal nudity (the male version has a very funny punchline, the female, none).

Final Thoughts: If you are a fan of French farce, particularly of the Tati Hulot variety, you are going to love this film. Beyond that core group, though, for anyone tired of the crass joke every two minute, leering tone of so many current American comedies, this simple and effective virtual mime performance is a non pareil experience to treasure. I predict this film is going to have a very large cult audience that will only grow over time.

Basically a boat-bound rendition of your standard cat & mouse thriller, Cámara oscura (Deadly Cargo) is hardly the flashiest or most startlingly unique import chiller out there, but there's more than enough here to warrant a visit from the horror fans who aren't afraid of the subtitles.

Despite his stable of familiar characters and "why didn't they just...?" plot-holes, Mr. Freixas keeps the plot churning forward with few slow spots, amping up the tension quite admirably at key moments, and doling out a few nasty surprises prior to the (admittedly rather predictable) finalé.

The stalkees are a generally generic lot with the exception of Spanish star Silke Klein as an intrepid journalist who just stumbled into one horrifying scoop. On the villainous side of the spectrum, Freixas brings together a suitably unseemly collection of thugs, weirdos, and troublemakers. It's not exactly a waterlogged Spanish take on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, despite what my plot synopses sound like, but Cámara oscura is a fairly effective chase-thriller all the same.

Final Thoughts: Well-shot and crisply edited, Cámara oscura overcomes a pedestrian screenplay and manages to work just well enough for a 90-minute investment. There's very little here that the genre fans haven't seen before, but the flick still stands as a familiar story, re-told with some color and style.

As much about the crippling obsession that gripped those searching for the Zodiac killer that terrorized Southern California in the late Sixties and much of the Seventies as it is gruesome sequences of stylized terror, Fincher's film defies the conditioning foisted upon American audiences who flock to crime dramas (whether they be films or TV series) that promise pat resolutions and clearly defined good and evil. Zodiac disturbs and fascinates because it does not wrap up cleanly - there is no triumphant climax where our shades-of-grey heroes capture the ruthless murderer. The investigation, which spanned decades, never produced anything other than very suggestive evidence that a particular individual committed the brutal Zodiac killings; it remains an absorbing, harrowing and deeply unsettling tale of true crime.

Based on the novel by former San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith (played by Jake Gyllenhaal), Zodiac traces the investigation, as conducted by Detectives Dave Toschi (an astonishing Mark Ruffalo) and Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards). False hope and dead-end leads pile up as the two men struggle to connect the dots and end the Zodiac's surreal reign of terror. Graysmith, at first on the periphery of the proceedings, finds himself allied with fellow Chronicle writer Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr.) in an effort to piece together the sprawling puzzle. Years slip away and while the police and Graysmith come tantalizingly close to pinning the crimes on suspect Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch), the men can never deliver any damning evidence that unequivocally proves Allen's guilt.

Fincher, working from a dense, nimble James Vanderbilt screenplay (reportedly, Fincher, Vanderbilt and producer Brad Fischer spent nearly two years conducting an investigation of their own - essentially dusting off the case files and checking the facts all over again), manages to make all of the procedural elements feel vital and engaging. What could've been a very dull, dry and lifeless affair (think "Law & Order") is compelling and, at times, mesmerizing; it doesn't hurt that Fincher's knack for visually stimulating films is in full effect, although to his credit, the director doesn't overplay his hand. There are a few truly stunning sequences, but the flashy camerawork that marred Panic Room, for example, is scarce here. Ultimately, Zodiac is a satisfyingly frustrating experience, a film that defies convention and plays out with the messy urgency of real life. Murderers go free, questions go unanswered and closure fails to materialize - all bitter truths and ones that bubble just beneath the surface of this masterful work of art.

"Sentinel" premiered on the Sci-Fi Channel in May this year, although it appears to not have been made expressly for the network. Which may explain why it's slightly sharper than most of that channel's infamous schlock - but only slightly. It still suffers the same fate as most of the Sci-Fi output: shaky, undercooked story; one-dimensional characters; thrills that barely arrive on time, if ever.

Don Wilson (no longer being credited as "The Dragon") stars as Tallis, a genetically- and cybernetically-enhanced super-soldier, raised from childhood to be a warrior. We first meet him in the post-war ruins of a city (actually a Universal back lot with two wrecked cars and some litter) that lies shattered after police robots called "drones" overthrew their human masters. Tallis wanders the streets as a scavenger, content to barely survive, so long as he avoids the remaining battles that trickle in from time to time.

His only companion is a talking gun named Angel (Dawnn Lewis), an intriguing concept. Granted, Angel exists mainly to toss exposition our way - her opening lines sound like narration, not dialogue, and later, she's constantly updating Tallis on historical information he already knows (but we don't). But it's still a nifty concept, giving the picture something of a "Boy and His Dog" vibe. And Wilson, who is starting to reach cragginess of Eastwoodian proportions as he ages, displays the right kind of world-weariness for the role of a soldier without a platoon. Sure, the character borrows liberally from a dozen other flicks (even those as mediocre as the Kurt Russell flop "Soldier"), but hey, the B-movie feel and the lost-soul tone make up for the theft.

The plot (such as it is) kicks into gear when a battle between drones and human rebels blasts across Tallis' path. A rough, unnamed female soldier (Katee Sackoff) is left for dead in the aftermath, and Tallis takes her to his hideout, bringing her back to life. As they spend time together, Tallis realizes it's time to stop hiding and start fighting, and he agrees to join her in her plans to infiltrate and destroy enemy headquarters. But first, of course, she must be trained. (Montage alert!) And then, of course, there must be a love scene. And so on.

It's all ably acted - the appearance of Bokeen Woodbine and Keith David in flashbacks (David also voices another talking gun) help round out a thoroughly watchable cast - and writer/director Jesse Johnson displays a knack for handling large scale action sequences on a tight budget. (His previous effort, "Pit Fighter," has become a minor cult favorite for its ably crafted action, although I have not seen it.) Even when the plot grows far too tiresome, Johnson keeps the energy high throughout.

But it remains very difficult to stay tuned in to the adventure. Johnson overloads us with battles - flashbacks pile up so high they weigh down the entire project, seemingly unending gunfights and military maneuvers. And guns. Sweet lordy, the guns. "Sentinel" is gun porn, with all its attention given to the oversized, tricked-out weaponry on display. Of course the guns talk; they're the most fleshed-out characters in the movie. They're the centerpiece.

And they're boring. Johnson may crank up the energy, but the rest is overkill. The movie is 95% shoot-out. And ultimately, that's about 85% too much.

Final Thoughts: Hardcore action fans with an admiration for low budget thrills should Rent It as they're sure to get a kick out of the battle sequences, although a heavy thumb on the fast forward button will surely help you along.

Deep in the heart of Northern California five martial arts students devoted to their training in Wing Lam kung fu. One of these students Todd Roy in the late nineties managed to come out of the DOT COM boom with a tidy sum of cash. Feeling the inspiration from his training and the enjoyment of his compatriots, Roy joined with his friends at the Lam KWOON School to produce a different kind of martial arts film.

KWOON is a series of short independent films with currently three episodes produced and more in the making. This DVD feature houses the first three episodes of the series. Though the episodes were filmed in descending order with the idea as more were accomplished, they'd all be better at it by the time they reached the pilot episode. However what does that say for the later episodes, which were the initial episodes? Isn't a series supposed to get better as time goes on? Not worse? Just an odd logic to go by, well I guess it works.

Anyways moving along in the review, this feature doesn't really house a streamline story from episode to episode, but rather each episode revolves around the KWOON students getting themselves in and out of all sorts of mythological trouble by means of kung fu.

In episode 2: Death Vs. Kung Fu Car Wash the five students Onassis Sweeps (Onassis Parungao), Nathan Blocks (Nathan Decker), Todd Gar (Todd Roy), Jimmy Chops (Jimmy Lam), and Chuck Numb (Chuck Becker) are working very hard to earn enough money to get sent off to a martial arts tournament by having a car wash. However things go sour as Nate takes a little too much trips to the grocery store with the car wash funds. Needless to say their efforts were naught as they've completed the day with a total of eight dollars. Moving along on the way home Onassis seems to get a little lost in the maze like Californian suburbs. They end up on a construct site where an accident takes place and the car they're in gets crushed by a large beam. Luckily the quintuplet evades death and leaves the accident without a scratch. Unfortunately this evasion gets caught by the ministry of death and they send their newly appointed field agent Mort Ision (Cung Le) to extract their lives. So join the KWOON kids as they face death with their kung fu and crack a few jokes in the process.

In episode 3: Collection Agency mobster Jack Tortorelli (Jack Dougherty) and his bodyguard Don Killjoy (Don Hambey) have hired a small army of martial arts trained experts in the ways of killing to be the muscle in his latest acts of illegitimate business undertakings. Unfortunately for Jack and Don their weapons didn't make it through the airport. Needing them fully armed for action Jack under the guidance of some supernatural power seems to pick the KWOON School to replenish his crew's weapon stock. After four weeks go by, the KWOON School still hasn't received payment from Tortorelli. Onassis's sifu sends him along with Chuck and Todd to act like a collection agency to get the 435 dollars that Tortorelli owes the school. After a lovely 300 mile drive to Fresno and enduring Todd's annoying habits, Onassis and Chuck find themselves fighting for their lives as Tortorelli decides to kill them inside of paying. Check it out as Onassis, Todd, and Chuck fight for their lives against a number of highly trained martial artists.

In episode 4: Mummy Dearest Onassis and Todd accompany Nate to a museum so Nate can work on his history homework. Hear they find themselves at the opening premiere of a long lost Egyptian king lays with a curse to give to any one who dares speak ill of the mummified individual. Unknown to the KWOON kids, they crack jokes and speak of the mummy's bad odors. Well not too long after Todd finds himself at the mercy of the mummy, located in one of the worst places to be found, pants down on the toilet. Poor Todd. Todd eventually gets away from the mummy but finds himself in other trouble. Meanwhile Onassis and Nate have their run in with the mummy, but the mummy steals Onassis's martial arts knowledge from him and forces Nate to take on the oddly blue-eyed demon alone. The story moves along, what will happen to the trio? Can Todd get out of his dilemma? Will Onassis ever learn to fight again? Can Nate protect Onassis from the Mummy and most importantly finish his homework?

Final Thoughts: There are a couple things about this feature I'm trying understand. For one there's an inside joke with Todd receiving bloody nipples in each episode, which doesn't really seem humorous to me, but if I knew the tale behind it... perhaps things would be different?

One of the slogan used for the series is "It's Like Porno but with Kung Fu instead of Sex". From this interpretation we see that most people watch porno for sex and the analogy holds as most people will check out KWOON to see kung fu. Similar to porno, KWOON houses both bad acting and bad plots, but the real meat of each is respectively sex and kung fu. So while I concur with this notion that both features in the porno genre and KWOON won't be receiving Oscar nominations any time soon, I have to say that while I find the slogan funny, I disagree with the underlying concept of it.

I found that the plot of each episode of KWOON to be pretty bad and the acting wasn't terribly great, but the combination of the two is what makes it enjoyable. Of course add in several ill humored and poorly timed jokes with a talented martial arts cast and you've got yourself KWOON.

So if you asked me a few words to state my opinion about this feature, I'd say it's a delightful mix of martial arts and bad jokes perfect for the youth of society. Anyways I am recommending this title for purchase as it is quite entertaining...

The Plot: For the residents of this secluded Northern New Jersey suburb, the local Bullion Family is quite notorious. Led by the overbearing patriarch Papa Elvis, and featuring stunted brothers Butternut and Hubcap, snotty cousin Sno Cakes, and brutish big sister Beefteena, this craven clan lives a scandal filled existence filled with rumors of murder and inferences of incest. Of course, the addled adult children don't mind. They're too busy brutalizing each other and playing unnatural sex games to care. But local law enforcement does worry, and they believe the brood is responsible for the disappearance of several citizens over the years. When Sheriff Brogan investigates, he learns the awful truth - as does anyone who gets in the Bullions' way. Mess with this merry band of maniacs and it's a knife to the throat, a hatchet to the head, and a trip the The Blood Shed - and no one has ever lived to tell about what happens there.

The Film: Imagine if David Lynch and Rob Zombie had a baby, gave said malformed infant to John Waters to wet nurse, and on weekends, all three allowed Kenneth Anger and the Kuchar Brothers to come over and babysit. With Tobe Hooper and Jack Hill as the godparents and Edith Massey as thrift store style consultant, the results would begin to resemble something similar to the wonderfully weird brain damaged b-movie The Blood Shed. The conceptual offspring of couture auteur Alan Rowe Kelly, this tasty take on the entire Texas Chainmail Massacre trip is one of the year's best unknown independent movies. Striking an intriguing balance between scares, surrealism, and satire, this eager exploitation experiment is a joy to behold. It takes all the archetypal elements of a Deliverance level hillbilly hoedown, macerates it in a cinematic concoction of kitsch, creeps, and dollar store perfume and paints a perverted patina over every last piece of lunatic fringe. The result is a delirious, dangerous example of old school schlock infused with a post-modern knowledge of the genre's long term effectiveness. It's the cinematic equivalent of swallowing a few tabs of Jean Nate soaked acid and tripping the blight fantastic.

At the center of this freak show firestorm is writer/director/actor/muse Kelly. Braving ridicule and his/her typical model-esque appearance, the star gained 50 lbs to play the oppressive Beefteena, and the transformation is frightening. Like the Bad Seed blown up with an air hose, or Evil Ethel regressed to an arrested adolescence, this elephantine entity with the mentality of a peanut is one deranged dame. Playing with her pet road kill and taunting the neighbors with a combination of courtesy and cruelty, she makes an intriguing center to this story. She's the least cartoonish of the characters, and offers the most lingering bang for your slice and dice buck. While the other actors do an excellent job with the material - including Terry West as Papa, Susan Adriensen as Sno Cakes, Mike Lane as Hubcap, and Joshua Nelson as Butternut - this is a true tour de force for Kelly. He balances the gore and the goofiness with expertise, and there's never a time when we feel overpowered by an obvious camp conceit. Still, it's not an entirely flawless ideal. Kelly does rely a little too much on the Coen Brothers School of Screaming to end his movie. The casts' nonstop screeching during the last ten minutes is enough to give hearing impaired and aurally sensitive viewers auditory nightmares for weeks. It remains, however, a minor complaint in what is, otherwise, an intriguing off the wall effort.

Even better, The Blood Shed avoids the standard clichés we've come to expect from the entire wicked family formula. Sure, it may steal just a skoosh from 1988's American Gothic (which also contained a heifer sized character guiding its batsh*t brood storyline) and frequently gives itself over to glamour fits of outrageous pointlessness, this is still one helluva horror comedy ride. It's riotously inventive, strangely satisfying, and completely out of its gourd. It's also a flawless illustration of how using one's brains - instead of buckets of blood - can lead to true cinematic greatness. This won't be everyone's style or sensibility, especially since Kelly never once lets on that there may be a man underneath all those baby doll dresses and grue-spattered crinoline. And anyone wanting more gore for their good time will probably wonder where the funk's at. Such criticisms really don't matter, however. The Blood Shed is a heaping helping of quirk-filled fabulousness, a movie with a surprise around every corner, and a corpse in every closet. From the oddball chase between the sheriff and the two Bullion boys (each one dressed in a different animal costume), to the hilarious photo shoot where Beefteena dreams of being America's Next Top Model, this is memorable, manic stuff. It doesn't deserve to be scoffed it. Indeed, this is the kind of film that needs to be celebrated - and savored.

Final Thoughts: One of the pleasures in this otherwise oppressive practice of film criticism is finding something that strives to differentiate itself from the rest of the pack. Whether it's the psychedelic spaghetti western wackiness of The Legend of God's Gun to the mock doc slasher stylings of Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, a single undiscovered gem can make slogging through hundreds of amateur efforts all the more rewarding. [This movie] is above reproach. Easily earning a Highly Recommended rating, The Blood Shed is the kind of labor of love that reinvigorates your faith in underground creativity. Hats (and heads) off to Alan Rowe Kelly for defying expectations to produce something that's legitimately unique and massively entertaining. This is one family outing that retains its delightful dysfunction all the way through.

Bored in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, Ben (Joel David Moore, "Grandma's Boy") decides to ditch his friends and partake in a haunted swamp boat ride. Led by a captain (Parry Shen) of dubious knowledge, the boat sets off with a ragtag collection of tourists, all in search of answers to the mysteries of the bayou. When the boat crashes and sinks to the bottom of the swamp, the group is forced to walk back to the city, but first they must fight to survive as local legend, the deformed beast Victor Crowley (Kane Hodder), commences a night of vicious killing.

With little money and no vision for casting, writer/director Adam Green is attempting to fashion a return to Freddy/Jason/Leatherface heyday of classic screen monsters. As any crafty, burgeoning horror filmmaker knows, an iconic, unstoppable villain will often make low budgets and laughable directorial choices melt away in the eyes of the faithful. People just love a larger-than-life bad guy regardless of a movie's quality, which is why Dee Snider still fields questions about "Strangeland" to this very day.

Far be it from me to proclaim Victor Crowley a bust in the legend department (I'll leave judgment on that to the legion of pushover, overeager horror websites), but "Hatchet" is a robotic exercise in genre milking, absent the sort of epic introduction of evil that traditionally takes these small potato creations and gives them forceful geek legs. Green is more thirsty for cheap thrills than maintaining tension, and his use of Crowley is isolated to moments that need a limb or head ripped off, not any sort of narrative purpose.

The rest of "Hatchet" is actually something more of a comedy than a horror experience. Playing the tour group shenanigans for laughs, yet squirting blood all over the swampland in other scenes, it's difficult to tell what response Green wants from his audience. "Hatchet" isn't funny (don't look at me, I didn't cast Moore, Joel Murray, and Deon "Bud" Richmond in the comedy parts), it certainly isn't frightening, and Will Barratt's absurdly murky cinematography hurts the gore money shots that have the faint outline of some terrific work from John Carl Buechler and his team of artists.

Implausibly sent to the theaters when DVD is its rightful home, "Hatchet" is best suited for outrageously low expectations.

Andrea Arnold's Red Road is just such a movie. I hesitate to call it a thriller, because there aren't really shocks or frights lurking around any of the tower block corners where the film takes place. Yet, there is a mystery here, and the more you learn, the more the story will surprise and haunt you.

Jackie (Kate Dickie) works as a CCTV operator, watching a bank of television sets that pick up signals from the cameras placed all around the Scottish neighborhood she lives in. One of a cadre of such officers, she calls in any trouble she sees so policemen can be dispatched to take care of it. We are told very little about Jackie. Arnold avoids scenes of detailed exposition. We know she is lonely, because we see her in her tiny apartment. We know she is estranged from her family, because a hand-scrawled note on the bottom of a wedding invitation tells us so. From conversation, we learn that she has been married before and that something happened to her husband. Whatever that was, it's what has led her down this solitary path, a voyeur of other people's lives, participating in their day-to-day dramas more than she is active in her own.

One day, while Jackie is keeping her eye on a girl she thinks may be a runaway, she sees the face of a man she recognizes. We can tell this discovery chills her, but we don't learn much right away. His name is Clyde (Tony Curran, The Good German), he's been in prison, and he's out earlier than Jackie expected, but what did he do? We're not privy to any of this when Jackie starts stalking him, slowly working her way into his life, and seducing him.

And Red Road is all the better for keeping us in the dark. It's one of those weird films to write about, because I don't want to give anything away. I could have never guessed what Jackie was up to. The resolution of Red Road actually defies my expectations for a standard thriller. If I lay too much out for you, you'll know what to look for, and then all the careful planning Andrea Arnold put into her movie would be for nothing.

There is a dry, somber tone to Red Road. As much as it is a movie about a mystery, about what has happened between these two people, it's also a movie about grief. The past is informing Jackie's present. The hand-held camerawork and the choice to shoot on location with close-to-natural lighting lend that present a real immediacy for the audience. Rather than causing us to feel like we are working toward a neat and clean finale, Red Road gives the viewer the sensation that it's all happening in front of us, even as, from a storytelling standpoint, it keeps us at arm's length. Where others might seduce us with dark shadows or sinister music, Arnold's best resource is our own curiosity. By making us feel like we are watching Jackie without her knowing it, much the way she watches the denizens of Glasgow with her cameras, the director keeps us invested in how it's all going to turn out. It's almost like Neorealist Hitchcock.

Most mysteries these days don't require us to be patient. They don't just give the game away early on, they often do it in the trailer, before we can even buy a ticket. Red Road succeeds by withholding everything, saving each morsel until it will have the most effect, and only then giving us just enough to keep us on the hook until the next surprise. It's quiet and sometimes demanding, but it's oh so worth it when we get where we're going.

Our story follows Sarah (Jennifer Connelly), a 15 year-old whose intense love for fantasy worlds overshadows her increasing responsibility at home. Sentenced to baby-sit her brother Toby while her father and stepmother enjoy an evening out, Sarah becomes increasingly annoyed with this rude interruption of her blossoming imagination. Determined to rid herself of such adult responsibilities, the young girl wishes for the Goblin King (David Bowie)---a character in her favorite book, "Labyrinth"---to take the child away to his faraway kingdom.

Unfortunately, it works.

The resulting tale takes Sarah to the world of the Goblin King, whose labyrinth must be solved in 13 hours if she wants to rescue her brother. Immediately regretful of her immature wish, Sarah begins her quest to the center of the maze, past Goblin City to the King's castle. As with most tales of fantasy (from The Wizard of Oz to Pan's Labyrinth), unusual characters are met along the way and everything is not always what it seems. Hidden passageways are as common as talking worms and gravity-defying staircases. Watching from the comfort of the castle is the Goblin King (named Jareth), who occasionally interferes with Sarah's progress while nursing a certain level of respect and affection for the girl.

The goal of returning home with her brother is almost pushed to the background; more than anything else, Labyrinth is about the journey, not the destination. Along the way, she learns how to accept help from others and when to trust her own instincts. We receive not-so-subtle hints about her feelings for Jareth, especially during a dream-like trance after Sarah eats a mysterious piece of fruit. In one particularly clever sequence, she's tempted with the promises of toys and memories from her childhood if she agrees to stop looking for the maze's center.

Musical numbers are also commonplace during Labyrinth (penned and often performed by Bowie), but it's only here---as well as during a few visual effects shots---that the film shows a bit of age. Aside from these small instances, the tale of Labyrinth is practically timeless: as a young woman slowly makes her way to adulthood, the challenge of staying focused and determined is often overcome by her own imagination. As evidenced by the film's celebratory ending, though, keeping such colorful dreams alive---even during our later years---is still an important balance.

Creative, colorful and almost timeless, Jim Henson's Labyrinth stands tall as an entertaining fantasy film that families can still enjoy together. This light coming-of-age tale is supported nicely by a strong atmosphere and memorable characters; while the performances of David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly aren't necessarily perfect, they're good enough to carry the weight. Firmly Recommended for the young at heart.

Henson's flirtation with darker material and his curiosity with the thorns of invented mythology found a cozy home in "Crystal." It's a film intended for those who beg for a sense of adventure to their cinema, who revel in the joy of a filmmaker taking a risk and questing vigilantly to raise the art form a few needed notches. "Crystal" is a miraculous rush of innovation and storytelling patience, and, in the last 25 years, the film has grown from a 1982 misfire, to a cult wonder, to a bona-fide classic that's timeless in stature and masterful in execution.

When I write about the film now, I do so from a cradle of absolute reverence. However, ask my opinion when I was a wee lad, and "Crystal" was probably the scariest ride in town. While Henson adored his young audience, he was never one to pander to the nose-pickers, preferring to challenge their eyes with visions of evil and the restorative effects of good; the ultimate battle of destiny between the kindly Mystics (or urRu) and the wicked Skeksis.

What's exhilarating about "Crystal" is that Henson and his collaborators (including co-director Frank Oz) were manufacturing a fairy tale from their own creative well. While influenced by the great fantasy works of the world, Henson paved his own road here; he made certain every corner of the frame was bestowed with a mysterious creature or laborious design effort that created a consuming three-dimensional depth. Honestly, I've never seen such extraordinary effort placed into a feature-film before, and the way Henson and Oz take their time to let the details marry the film's glacial, dreamy pace is endlessly impressive. It's a directorial job of pure faith, and a design accomplishment (courtesy of wizard Brian Froud) that's heart-stopping every inch of the way.

Sure, we have glossy cinematic juggernauts today like Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, yet "Crystal" is a film you can nearly reach out and caress; blessed with unmistakable attention placed to the weathered fabrics and wrinkled skin of the characters, not to mention Oswald Morris's luxurious cinematography, which wields splendid coloring like a lethal weapon - I've never viewed a more menacing shade of purple in my life.

Of course, all this is in service of the puppetry, which, at the time (and still is today), was an outrageous advancement in the field; Henson pushed his team to new limits of expression and sheer character size in the roles. With the vulture-like Skeksis, the performers sell the rancid, decaying regality of the species marvelously: a collection of vile beings in full-on panic and deception mode after learning their existence is drawing to a leisurely, painful close. The Mystics are the counter argument: kindly creatures who move with Zen-like grace and march willingly to their fate. Characters like astronomer Aughra and stilt-creations The Landstriders reveal their own lovable novelty, but the blockbuster accomplishments of the film are the Gelflings Jen and Kira, and the exquisiteness of their reactions. They invite a striking level of sympathy for what is essentially a ball of felt with glass eyes and perfectly coiffed hair.

I supposed what "Dark Crystal" boils down to is a mosaic of bravery. It's brave of the production to seek out their own legends and invent their own cocktail of spirituality for a small assembly of puppets. It's brave of the film to demand performers search within themselves to lend invaluable reality to their characters, even if it meant unbearably stifling hours stapled to a partner under layers of wool and rubber. And it's brave of Henson to submit to his loyal audience a demanding piece of storytelling and visual complexity that's miles away from Miss Piggy, Fozzie, and our pal Kermit. There's not a day that goes by where I don't appreciate this monumental leap of filmmaking faith.

FINAL THOUGHTS: Yes, "The Dark Crystal" is a perfect film, and as new generations grow to understand its exquisiteness, the more precious an experience the motion picture becomes. I could watch the film a hundred times and still discover new corners that I've never noticed before, or sly performance quirks that register differently now than they did when I was a child. The picture is a snowballing creation of pure imagination and remains Henson's professional crown jewel. 25 years later, the film hasn't lost a step as a crucial fantasy touchstone, and, in a wonderful twist of fate, continues to amaze people of all ages to this day.

Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver remains one of the finest cinematic achievements of the 1970s and even now, three decades plus since it was made, the film has lost none of its power or relevancy. If anything, given the current political climate of the United States at the time of this writing, the film is just as poignant now as it has ever been. Not only is the film an allegorical piece on the issues that those returning from military service may or may not have to deal with but it also remains an interesting portrait of a socially ostracized and dangerous human being, something we've unfortunately never had any shortage of in the 'real world.'

For the three of you out there who haven't seen Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle, a Viet Nam vet living in New York City who takes a job driving a cab at night. Travis is a loner, he's out there a bit as far as social skills are concerned and he just doesn't relate to the masses. He also sees the New York City he lives and works in as a cesspool, a sewer full of the worst that humanity has to offer. His occupation does nothing but reinforce this for him, as he is routinely forced to deal with junkies, whores and assholes - it's all part of the job.

Things look up for Travis when, seemingly by chance, he meets a beautiful woman named Betsy (Cybill Shepherd long before Moonlighting) who works for presidential hopeful, Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris). He's instantly attracted to her but their courtship soon becomes sour when they can't relate to one another. After Travis takes her to a 42nd St. porno theater on a date, she decides she wants nothing to do with him and the screws start to come loose upstairs for our hero. Shortly after, he runs into an underage prostitute named Iris (a young Jodie Foster) and they develop a strange relationship. Travis, after learning of her plight, takes it upon himself to do what he can to clean up the seedy side of the city, and American Cinema forever changed.

Mick Jagger once sang 'Go ahead, bite the Big Apple, don't mind the maggots.' Unfortunately not everyone can be as selective with their diet as Mick, and Taxi Driver is very much a movie for those people. Anyone who has ever spent a large portion of their time in the heart of an urban metropolis, be it New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or even Toronto, has no doubt been witness to criminal activity. Whether it's drug dealing, prostitution or theft, crime and violence is to a certain extent a way of life in any major metropolitan area. De Niro, as Travis Bickle, represents that side of us that gets fed up with things. Granted, he's far from healthy - he is quite insane when it all comes down to it - but part of what gives Taxi Driver its power is that Travis Bickle lies inside so many normal, every day citizens.

Bickle is far from a model citizen. His obsession with pornography is probably quite unhealthy and it could very well be part of the reason he's unable to relate to women on what many of us would consider a normal level. He's obviously got a bit of a temper, which we see erupt by the time that the film finishes and there are moments in the film where it's made perfectly clear to us that Travis just 'doesn't get it' as far as other people are concerned. That said, despite what happens in the last twenty-minutes of the picture, is he really the bad guy? Is Travis completely at fault for what happens or is society? Has he been pushed too far? Is he a complete psychopath or, as he says, is he simply someone who stood up?

One of the most remarkable aspects of the picture is how completely alienated Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader were able to make De Niro's Bickle. While De Niro no doubt deserves much of the credit for his portrayal of the character, Scorsese was the one who ensured that the picture was cut the way that it was cut and who did such a phenomenal job of surrounding Bickle with the lowest of the low, the worst that society had to offer. As such, while we may not necessarily agree with Bickle's philosophy or his methods, we can at least to a certain extent understand why he does what he does, particularly after he meets Iris even if their introduction is under rather unusual circumstances.

Schrader, on the other hand, infuses so much of himself and where he was at during a certain point in his life that Bickle is, frighteningly enough, an extension of himself as he is anything else. What makes the character and the circumstances so believable is the fact that so many of us have been there - who hasn't had their heart broken? Who hasn't been attracted and subsequently dismissed by someone who just didn't click? We don't always choose the people in life that we meet, nor do we choose whom we're attracted to. Genetics and biology play a large part in that, a much bigger part than free will does. Can we blame Travis for falling for Betsy? She is quite beautiful, she's interesting and smart and funny and charming. Is it his fault that he's completely incompatible with her? Or is it simply fate, one of life's many injustices?

That said, as deeply personal as the script is and as very much infused with the pissed off enthusiasm of a young Scorsese the film is, De Niro (fresh off of his Academy Award winning performance from The Godfather II) really does make Travis Bickle the instantly recognizable cinematic icon that he is. According to Schrader, a few of the more infamous scenes, the mirror speech for example, where at least partially improvised by De Niro during the production and while he may have gone on to garbage like Meet The Fockers he will always deserve our respect and admiration for the challenging roles that made him the respected actor that he is, Taxi Driver being up there alongside other Scorsese collaborations such as Raging Bull, Mean Streets, Goodfellas and Casino.

On top of the absorbing script, the stellar lead performance and the tense and precise direction is the cinematography courtesy of director of photography Michael Chapman. The man has done everything from Michael Jackson videos to Scorsese films to Steve Martin comedies but Taxi Driver remains such a perfectly photographed picture that it's hard to imagine that this is not the film he'll be forever remembered for (and yes, in terms of cinematography, Taxi Driver is above Raging Bull which Chapman also shot). It's been said, and rightfully so, that New York City is as important a character in the film as any of the people who show up in front of the camera and that's very true. Chapman more or less just let his camera go, capturing the reality of the New York of the era, and as such what we're left with is a very realistic feeling picture that gives us a fly-on-the-wall look at the flat out scuzziness of the area where Bickle works his beat. This, in turn, makes Bickle's inevitable downward spiral all the more understandable.

With big names like De Niro, Scorsese and Schrader dominating the credits, it would be easy to look past the supporting cast that makes Taxi Driver the masterpiece that it is. Cybill Shepherd is absolutely beautiful as Betsy, she's as charming as she should be and her character exudes a certain unattainable sexiness that someone like Travis Bickle will never be able to acquire, lending her character enough unattainable sex appeal to work. It's obvious that Travis and Betsey are from two very different worlds, and it's even more obvious that despite his best intentions, they don't have a chance at making it work despite her honest intentions at the beginning of their brief relationship. Throw the smart-ass Tom, as played perfectly by the smug Albert Brooks, into the mix and you can see that when Bickle tries to enter Betsey's world he's really just jumping into a deep end he'll never be able to swim out of. Travis' knowledge of politics and world events is blunt (see the quote below) and far too obvious for the politicos he's found himself interacting with to ever really understand. He represents the every man while they represent an administration more interested in conquest than problem solving.

Other supporting actors - like the late, great Peter Boyle, who plays Wizard, and even director Scorsese himself, who plays the disgruntled husband with the gun in the back of Bickle's cab - all deserve credit for joining together to assemble a fantastic cast of bit part players who simply add to the realistic nihilism of the film. Harvey Keitel, as Iris' pimp, Sport, stands out in his all too brief appearance while Foster turns in a fantastic and freakishly believable turn as the underage hooker who changes Bickle's stance on action versus complacency.

Last but not least, mention needs to be made of Bernard Herrmann's completely eerie score. The instrumental parts of the picture that fade in and out over various aspects of Bickle's story add an otherworldly tone to the picture. The music not only accentuates the more poignant aspects of the film as any good soundtrack should, but it also enhances the opening sequence and sets the tone right from the get-go.

More than three decades since it was made, Taxi Driver remains one of the most powerful and important pieces of filmed art to emerge out of American cinema of the 1970s. Its impact is still felt, the people who worked on it have gone on to become some of the most respected filmmakers in the land, and most importantly the film still packs one hell of a punch. New York might have been sanitized since the film was made but the story could easily be transplanted to whatever part of the world where there is strife and social unrest that you'd care to name. As such, the story remains timeless and the film still hits you like a punch in the gut. Odds are, that will never change making the picture as important and justifiably pissed off now and in the future as it ever has been.

Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver remains one of the finest cinematic achievements of the 1970s and even now, three decades plus since it was made, the film has lost none of its power or relevancy. If anything, given the current political climate of the United States at the time of this writing, the film is just as poignant now as it has ever been. Not only is the film an allegorical piece on the issues that those returning from military service may or may not have to deal with but it also remains an interesting portrait of a socially ostracized and dangerous human being, something we've unfortunately never had any shortage of in the 'real world.'

For the three of you out there who haven't seen Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle, a Viet Nam vet living in New York City who takes a job driving a cab at night. Travis is a loner, he's out there a bit as far as social skills are concerned and he just doesn't relate to the masses. He also sees the New York City he lives and works in as a cesspool, a sewer full of the worst that humanity has to offer. His occupation does nothing but reinforce this for him, as he is routinely forced to deal with junkies, whores and assholes - it's all part of the job.

Things look up for Travis when, seemingly by chance, he meets a beautiful woman named Betsy (Cybill Shepherd long before Moonlighting) who works for presidential hopeful, Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris). He's instantly attracted to her but their courtship soon becomes sour when they can't relate to one another. After Travis takes her to a 42nd St. porno theater on a date, she decides she wants nothing to do with him and the screws start to come loose upstairs for our hero. Shortly after, he runs into an underage prostitute named Iris (a young Jodie Foster) and they develop a strange relationship. Travis, after learning of her plight, takes it upon himself to do what he can to clean up the seedy side of the city, and American Cinema forever changed.

Mick Jagger once sang 'Go ahead, bite the Big Apple, don't mind the maggots.' Unfortunately not everyone can be as selective with their diet as Mick, and Taxi Driver is very much a movie for those people. Anyone who has ever spent a large portion of their time in the heart of an urban metropolis, be it New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or even Toronto, has no doubt been witness to criminal activity. Whether it's drug dealing, prostitution or theft, crime and violence is to a certain extent a way of life in any major metropolitan area. De Niro, as Travis Bickle, represents that side of us that gets fed up with things. Granted, he's far from healthy - he is quite insane when it all comes down to it - but part of what gives Taxi Driver its power is that Travis Bickle lies inside so many normal, every day citizens.

Bickle is far from a model citizen. His obsession with pornography is probably quite unhealthy and it could very well be part of the reason he's unable to relate to women on what many of us would consider a normal level. He's obviously got a bit of a temper, which we see erupt by the time that the film finishes and there are moments in the film where it's made perfectly clear to us that Travis just 'doesn't get it' as far as other people are concerned. That said, despite what happens in the last twenty-minutes of the picture, is he really the bad guy? Is Travis completely at fault for what happens or is society? Has he been pushed too far? Is he a complete psychopath or, as he says, is he simply someone who stood up?

One of the most remarkable aspects of the picture is how completely alienated Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader were able to make De Niro's Bickle. While De Niro no doubt deserves much of the credit for his portrayal of the character, Scorsese was the one who ensured that the picture was cut the way that it was cut and who did such a phenomenal job of surrounding Bickle with the lowest of the low, the worst that society had to offer. As such, while we may not necessarily agree with Bickle's philosophy or his methods, we can at least to a certain extent understand why he does what he does, particularly after he meets Iris even if their introduction is under rather unusual circumstances.

Schrader, on the other hand, infuses so much of himself and where he was at during a certain point in his life that Bickle is, frighteningly enough, an extension of himself as he is anything else. What makes the character and the circumstances so believable is the fact that so many of us have been there - who hasn't had their heart broken? Who hasn't been attracted and subsequently dismissed by someone who just didn't click? We don't always choose the people in life that we meet, nor do we choose whom we're attracted to. Genetics and biology play a large part in that, a much bigger part than free will does. Can we blame Travis for falling for Betsy? She is quite beautiful, she's interesting and smart and funny and charming. Is it his fault that he's completely incompatible with her? Or is it simply fate, one of life's many injustices?

That said, as deeply personal as the script is and as very much infused with the pissed off enthusiasm of a young Scorsese the film is, De Niro (fresh off of his Academy Award winning performance from The Godfather II) really does make Travis Bickle the instantly recognizable cinematic icon that he is. According to Schrader, a few of the more infamous scenes, the mirror speech for example, where at least partially improvised by De Niro during the production and while he may have gone on to garbage like Meet The Fockers he will always deserve our respect and admiration for the challenging roles that made him the respected actor that he is, Taxi Driver being up there alongside other Scorsese collaborations such as Raging Bull, Mean Streets, Goodfellas and Casino.

On top of the absorbing script, the stellar lead performance and the tense and precise direction is the cinematography courtesy of director of photography Michael Chapman. The man has done everything from Michael Jackson videos to Scorsese films to Steve Martin comedies but Taxi Driver remains such a perfectly photographed picture that it's hard to imagine that this is not the film he'll be forever remembered for (and yes, in terms of cinematography, Taxi Driver is above Raging Bull which Chapman also shot). It's been said, and rightfully so, that New York City is as important a character in the film as any of the people who show up in front of the camera and that's very true. Chapman more or less just let his camera go, capturing the reality of the New York of the era, and as such what we're left with is a very realistic feeling picture that gives us a fly-on-the-wall look at the flat out scuzziness of the area where Bickle works his beat. This, in turn, makes Bickle's inevitable downward spiral all the more understandable.

With big names like De Niro, Scorsese and Schrader dominating the credits, it would be easy to look past the supporting cast that makes Taxi Driver the masterpiece that it is. Cybill Shepherd is absolutely beautiful as Betsy, she's as charming as she should be and her character exudes a certain unattainable sexiness that someone like Travis Bickle will never be able to acquire, lending her character enough unattainable sex appeal to work. It's obvious that Travis and Betsey are from two very different worlds, and it's even more obvious that despite his best intentions, they don't have a chance at making it work despite her honest intentions at the beginning of their brief relationship. Throw the smart-ass Tom, as played perfectly by the smug Albert Brooks, into the mix and you can see that when Bickle tries to enter Betsey's world he's really just jumping into a deep end he'll never be able to swim out of. Travis' knowledge of politics and world events is blunt (see the quote below) and far too obvious for the politicos he's found himself interacting with to ever really understand. He represents the every man while they represent an administration more interested in conquest than problem solving.

Other supporting actors - like the late, great Peter Boyle, who plays Wizard, and even director Scorsese himself, who plays the disgruntled husband with the gun in the back of Bickle's cab - all deserve credit for joining together to assemble a fantastic cast of bit part players who simply add to the realistic nihilism of the film. Harvey Keitel, as Iris' pimp, Sport, stands out in his all too brief appearance while Foster turns in a fantastic and freakishly believable turn as the underage hooker who changes Bickle's stance on action versus complacency.

Last but not least, mention needs to be made of Bernard Herrmann's completely eerie score. The instrumental parts of the picture that fade in and out over various aspects of Bickle's story add an otherworldly tone to the picture. The music not only accentuates the more poignant aspects of the film as any good soundtrack should, but it also enhances the opening sequence and sets the tone right from the get-go.

More than three decades since it was made, Taxi Driver remains one of the most powerful and important pieces of filmed art to emerge out of American cinema of the 1970s. Its impact is still felt, the people who worked on it have gone on to become some of the most respected filmmakers in the land, and most importantly the film still packs one hell of a punch. New York might have been sanitized since the film was made but the story could easily be transplanted to whatever part of the world where there is strife and social unrest that you'd care to name. As such, the story remains timeless and the film still hits you like a punch in the gut. Odds are, that will never change making the picture as important and justifiably pissed off now and in the future as it ever has been.

The movie: Our adventure begins with an admonition... "The CHAINSAWS used in this motion picture are REAL and DANGEROUS! They are handled here by seasoned PROFESSIONALS. The makers of this motion picture advise strongly against anyone attempting to perform these stunts at home. Especially if you are naked and about to engage in strenuous SEX." Attaboy, Fred. It's easy to get caught up in the jiggling lingerie and whirring chainsaws, but at its festering little heart, this B-genre gem is really a private eye flick and Jack Chandler (Jay Richardson) is the gumshoe on the case. As we learn through his fantastically cornball voiceovers, it's when trying to track down a beautiful runaway (Quigley) that Chandler accidently stumbles across an evil cult of chainsaw-worshiping prostitutes and their malevolent gore guru The Stranger (Hansen) who stalk the dingy motels of Los Angeles and gleefully turn Johns into cold cuts. In fact, the gal he's looking for is in cahoots with the Cuisinart cultists, which unfortunately lands Jack flat on his back on a sacrificial alter as the main course for the Feast of the Dead. But not before Linnea emerges from a coffin and slinks the immortal Virgin Dance of the Double Chainsaws. It's the stuff of B-legend. CineSchlockers undoubtedly know Mr. Hansen also brandished a saw in Mosquito (1995), which he both co-wrote and starred in.

Notables: 12 breasts. Four corpses. Sucker head butt. Spitting. Fire breathing. Gratuitous David Letterman references. Nekkid dancing. Private dick jokes. Finger stealing. Decorative body paint.

Quotables: Jack Chandler is skeptical of the chainsaw cult, "What do you do, pray to Black and Decker?!" and knows what he likes in a dame, "The kid talked like a Frosted Flake, but she had the nicest set of knockers that I'd seen in a long time." The Stranger scolds Jack for yelping as a knife carves his flesh, "Please Mr. Chandler. Think of the neighbors. They're trying to sleep." Mercedes (Ms. Bauer) doesn't take no sass, "Shut your face, HEATHEN!" Drunken whores chant incoherently, "KILL IT TO HIM!!! KILL IT TO HIM!!!"

Time codes: Mercedes covers her Elvis shrine in plastic before setting to work (9:40). Amateur pornographer with a baseball fetish (24:45). Linnea joins the picture (32:10). Can you spot Grace Jones in this set piece? (58:00). Ms. Quigley makes cinematic history (1:02:40)...

Final thought: Easily one of the top genre releases of the year, and the addition of "Night Owl Theater" really creates the sort of atmosphere in which a picture of this ilk should be viewed. Highly Recommended.

Reviewer's Bias
Loves: Visually inventive films, Clerks
Likes: Tasteful nudity, short films
Dislikes: Service industry jobs
Hates: Awful strippers

The Movie
As I sat down to watch Cashback, I started to think about all the good films that have come from taking a short film and expanding on it. La Jetee became 12 Monkeys, Peluca begat Napoleon Dynamite, while Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade gave up a few words to be adapted into Sling Blade. I'm sure there have to be a few bad movies that were adapted from shorts (Joe's Apartment jumps to mind), but it seems like a short is a good starting point, considering you have at least something of a proven concept. Same goes for Cashback, though it goes one step further and actually includes the whole short inside the feature film, instead of just stretching it out to feature length.

That Cashback manages to take the utterly fascinating 18-minute short and fold it into a solid overall feature, without repeating itself or seeming like a shoehorned bit of material, is possibly the most impressive thing about it. That's saying something, as this is one of the most original films I've seen in some time, using a creative visual concept and making it part of the story instead of a gimmick. Admittedly, the story, which focuses on Ben, an art student suffering from insomnia, thanks to a bad break-up, isn't the most novel to hit screens, but the way it's told makes this an entertaining flick. After all, it's the first time I've seen the Everyguy hero freeze time and strip the women around him, in order to draw them in the nude.

Though Ben's late-night shenanigans (and the copious nudity that accompanies them) will always be the most memorable part of this film, thus earning the starring role on the poster and cover, the movie is no one-trick pony. As he spends his sleepless nights working at a grocery store, using his imagination to help the hours pass, a blossoming relationship with fellow clerk Sharon helps him cope with his sleep disorder. More exploration of Ben's frozen world would have been appreciated, especially when it's teased at one point that Ben might not be alone there. But instead we get a pair of Dumb & Dumber deli workers and an egomaniacal boss, as the film slips into a rather traditional boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-goes-after-girl plotline.

As traditional as the film becomes as it moves forward, the movie's transitions from the present to the past keep it energized, as the flashbacks reveal much about Ben's view of beauty and explain his obsessions. Director Sean Ellis shows a solid ability to pick and choose his spots where he lets loose with the camera, resulting in some truly gorgeous moments, while other times he lets the actors do their thing. For a film that's such an artistic vision, it's a bit odd that there are many diversions into pure comedy, including a predictable and pointless soccer game and a silly "getting ready" montage. These don't work as well as the quicker gags, like the running joke about Ben's horny pal and his luck with the ladies, and, as a result, the film loses a bit of the sense of artistry it had, but it's all still done so well, that these sins are forgivable.

The cast, unlikely to be recognizable to American audiences, is uniformly good, starting with Sean Biggerstaff (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) as Ben. A young man with soulful eyes and the kind of laconic, world-weary delivery that makes sense for the character, he allows the audience to believe that he hasn't slept in weeks, while not overselling the idea. He's perfectly matched in Emilia Fox's Sharon, who shares the same sense of oppressed hope, and whose understated beauty makes Ben's artistic interest in her all the more real (and makes his fantasy vision of her a sight to behold.) The rest of the cast does well with what are essentially one-note parts, though Michael Dixon and Michael Lambourne, as the aforementioned goofball co-workers, are unavoidably noticeable.

It's tempting to label this film as uneven, as it tries to do a few too many disparate things, but I'd rather give it an A for effort than dismiss its indulgences, as the beautiful scenes and intriguing filmmaking will stick with you long after the sillier scenes pass by. The somewhat heavy-handed message about appreciating the world around you and the time you have doesn't distract thankfully, and results in an ending that's appropriate for what's akin to a modern-day fairy tale.

The Bottom Line
Cashback is undeniably the work of an artist, with a look, feel and story that embraces the concept of beauty in a big bear hug and refuses to let go til the very end. While there are sections that are uneven, as the film tries to balance the pathos and the comedy, the stunning visuals and engaging storyline make this an entertaining and smart concoction, likely to appeal most to fans of directors like David Fincher and Tom Twyker, though the blue-collar laughs could work for the Clerks crowd just as easily. The ample nudity won't hurt its appeal. If you want to see the traditional good guy romantic comedy told with over-the-top style, this is a great choice.

A nefarious laboratory run by the American military dumps a load of toxic chemicals into the Han River in South Korea, resulting in the emergence of a massive monster that starts chowing down on the locals and generally just wreaking havoc. Oddly enough, the beast steals away a young girl named Hyun-seo who he doesn't harm but who he squirrels away in the sewer. The army is called in to deal with the problem, and soon word gets out that not only is the monster a flat out nasty creature but he's also carrying a lethal virus. As such, the military is forced to quarantine any citizens who have had any contact with the monster - one of whom is the abducted girl's father, Park Gang-du.

Shortly after he's been locked up, Gang-du, with some help from a few other family members, manages to break out of the quarantine and he heads deep into the sewers to try and find his daughter. What he doesn't know is that not only is she still down there, alive, but she's found and started to care for a young boy whose own father was killed by the monster. When the military finds out that the father has escaped, the make it their priority to bring him back in... an odd choice considering that the monster is still at large, leading one to wonder if maybe there's something going on that the general population has not been made aware of...

The Host isn't reinventing the wheel - in fact, it sticks to standard monster movie conventions fairly rigidly. That said, the film does a good job establishing the characters and making us care about them enough that what happens to them at least resonates with the viewer a bit. Throw in a bit of political satire and social commentary, some surprisingly effective moments of both humor and human drama and some absolutely fantastic monster scenes and you wind up with a bit of a mish-mash, but certainly a very enjoyable one.

The opening scene sets the film up nicely. After we meet the characters briefly we're immediately beaten over the head with the monster's grand entrance. Though it initially appears to be played for laughs, we soon learn that this creature is to be feared as he sends the people lounging around the park into a massive panic. It's a scene that sticks with you for a while as it blindsides you to a certain extent, tricking you into thinking that you're going to be watching a rather satirical take on the monster movie before getting down to business and delivering a very intense creature attack. Thankfully the film is able to keep up this method of deliberately toying with audience expectations throughout, meaning that the opening salvo isn't the only memorable or remarkable moment that you'll take away with you once the end credits roll.

Performances are strong across the board (as long as you watch the film in its native Korean... the dubbed version definitely hurts things) with Ah-sung Ko, who plays Hyun-seo, stealing the show. Her emotive expressions and serious delivery really hammer home what her character is going through and for a younger actress she certainly shows a lot of genuine talent in this performance. The effects, most of which are handled by way of some effective CGI, are surprisingly realistic and don't feel nearly as cold and flat out digital as so much computer work tends to. When it moves, it looks like an amphibian, and when it attacks, it is frightening. Adding to that is that the effects team has made sure that the environment in which this creature exists reacts to his movements and his actions.

While there are a few moments that are a tad melodramatic and a couple of plot holes that could have been avoided, The Host is a slightly schizophrenic but completely enjoyable film. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and you'll jump out of your seat - but most importantly, you'll stay entertained.

Final Thoughts: The Host borrows bits and pieces from other, better movies but the end result is a movie that takes it self seriously enough to work but not so seriously that the end result isn't a whole lot of fun. Monster move fans should get a real kick out of this one and despite a few problems in the story, this is a very entertaining film.