Pighunt (review)

Pighunt

Directed by James Isaac

From the demented mind if James Isaac (Jason X) comes a survivalist horror / action film complete with hardcore violence, hippies, unnecessary nudity, racism, rednecks and a giant 3000 pound pig named Ripper.

The film follows John (Travis Aaron Wade), his girlfriend Brooks (Tina Huang), and his friends who voyage out to his uncle’s remote cabin in the woods for a weekend getaway of sex, drinking and hunting. Only things go wrong when some past acquaintances bearing old grudges cross paths with the group causing a quarrel to break out. Rubbing shoulders the wrong way the group of friends soon find themselves on the run and now “the hunted”, as the local redneck hillbillies drive out with murderous intentions. Led by the Tibb’s brothers along side Preacher (Les Claypool of Primus), the group chases John and company deep into the forest causing both parties to cross paths with the forest’s Gypsy inhabitants. A nudist cult of porn star like amazons who of course worship who else but Ripper. And what do they feed the pig? Do you really need to ask?

It’s an exploitation film that’s unapologetic and once the first kill takes place, it goes for the extreme and never looks back. Reminiscent of films like Grizzly, Deliverance and even The Condemned, screenwriter Robert Mailer Anderson throws every sub genre into the fire and you never really know where it’s going.

It’s difficult to review this film seriously because it’s has ridiculous as the directors former film Jason X. Definitely not everyone’s cup of tea but what saves the film is that it is never taken seriously. Issac’s only intention and care is to have as good of a time has he can on set and hopefully deliver the same feeling to its audience. Tired of working within the Hollywood system, he takes every opportunity here to do everything and anything he normally can’t do and breaks every rule.

Gore hounds and fans of old grindhouse pictures will love its gratuitous violence and supercharged action. Don’t expect a clever story, good acting or even a great score. This film gets its legs from the naked vixens and well, the wild boar.

Alex Ross

Inglorious Bastards (review)

Inglorious Bastards

(1977) Italy

Enzo G. Castellari

Inglorious Bastards also known by its original title (Quel maledetto treno blindato) is a 1977 Italian war movie directed by Enzo G. Castellari – Funny enough the title actually translates to That Damned Armored Train. The film which stars Bo Svenson, Peter Hooten, Fred Williamson, and Jackie Basehart. It’s known as the Italian cash in on the The Dirty Dozen.

Set in Europe during World War II, a group of American soldiers are in the process of being shipped off to military prison for a variety of infractions. While they are being transported, a German air attack hits the convoy, killing most of the MPs and enabling five of the prisoners to escape.

The group decides their best bet is to head to neutral Switzerland, where they can avoid the fighting and prison. As they make their way to what they think will be freedom, they end up volunteering for a commando mission to steal the new V2 equipment with help of the French Underground. Somehow the team must sneak into the most heavily guarded train in German territory, steal the Nazis' most precious military hardware, and bring it back to the Allies without getting arrested again by their own side.

Quentin Tarantino has decided that the remake to this film and it will indeed be his next project. The project which has experienced several false starts is now scheduled to begin production in October 2008 in France and Germany. So with all the remakes and sequels coming out month after month, do we really need a remake of a film no one cared for 17 years ago? My answer is why not? I am always excited when ever I hear Tarantino is cooking up a new project and if you’re going to remake a movie, it might as well be something most people are unfamiliar with.

The tag line reads “whatever the Dirty Dozen did, they do it Dirtier!” Well dirtier may be the right word to use because better is certainly not the case. One must remember that with taste like Tarantino's, not every flick he recommends is going to be a hidden gem. Inglorious Bastards is far from being a lost classic but it’s still a ton of fun. It’s a good way to kill an hour and a half of a movie night with some friends. If anything it’s a good start to a double feature with the Dirty Dozen.

As far as 1970s exploitation cinema is concerned, it has some definite entertainment value. It has more then enough action to keep you awake, some well-drawn characters, and it is beautifully photographed for such a limited budget. One scene that particularly stands out involves a good three minute long and beautiful slow motion montage of the entire train station exploding around the soldiers.

But the real attraction to the film is the cast of some of the coolest '70s action stars, like Bo Svenson and Fred Williamson. Bo Svenson plays the leader of sorts, but its Fred Williamson's who steals the show with the charisma and power to match. He's most memorable here as he ventilates Nazis left and right with a cigar jammed in his teeth Punisher style. What makes it work is that all of the soldiers all have a great personality. There’s the all American leader, the black Superfly kind of Dolemite, the racist, the kleptomaniac, and the kid who has prove himself.

The movie does have a few rough spots including a useless love story sub-plot that never goes anywhere and has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. What’s worse is the final scene and last shot which ties into this love angle. Also some of the dialogue is lost in translation with little or no subtitles.

All in all it comes highly recommended given that you keep in mind it’s a film with no heart – all guts.

Jimmy D

Tropic Thunder (review)

Tropic Thunder
2008, USA
Ben Stiller

Tropic Thunder" is the funniest movie of the year but before it even begins we’re treated with a few fake trailers that tie into the characters in the film.

The first is an ad for "Booty Sweat" energy drinks, which turns out to be the product of rapper turned actor Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson). This is followed by more priceless fake trailers of upcoming movies from "Tropic Thunder" stars. Tug Speedman (Stiller) who is a fading action star of the action series Scorcher and who tries to earn some respectability by playing a mentally handicap farm boy in his new drama "Simple Jack." Than there is the vulgar drug addict movie star Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) who stars in the “The Fatties 2”, a comedy revolving solely on toilet humor much like most lowbrow Hollywood comedies in the past decade. And finally the multiple-Oscar-winning Australian actor Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.) plays opposite to Tobey MaGuire in a forbidden-love / Gay epic as a medieval monk who tries to make the moves on Spiderman.

Tropic Thunder has not even begun yet and it’s already the funniest thing I have seen this year. Stiller wearing many hats here as Director, writer, producer and star, has some how found a way to produce the most shocking and politically incorrect hit to come out of Hollywood in years.

At the heart of the story are Robert Downey JR. and Ben Stiller who play two actors with a confusion of multiple identities and who lose themselves in their roles. The film pokes fun of Hollywood every which way possible. Everything from the greedy movie producer to the highly demanding Jerry McGuire like casting agent to the actor who becomes so big yet he gets lost in his own skin. Ben Stiller has created a savage attack on Hollywood, one whose jokes punch hard. It’s a film that takes you on a dark path deep into the heart of the blockbuster jungle where not everyone will make it out alive. Its extreme violence and extreme comedy.

If anything the film is worth seeing simply for the genius of Robert Downey Jr. who without question is the ringleader in this all star cast. Downey plays Kirk Lazarus, a “method” actor who really wants to get into his roles, so he undergoes a controversial operation to darken his skin so that he may play one of the movie’s black soldiers.

It is my new found favorite performance of the year topping that of even Heath Ledger as the Joker. Downey is a loose goose and he could just very well be the coolest black but not black man to ever hit the screen. This is surely the soon to be most talked about performance of the year and possibly his entire career.

Jack Black makes little us of his role resembling a Chris Farley–like junkie, but I will give him credit for landing the funniest moment of the film when they play parody to Saving Private Ryan. Matthew McConaughey plays the agent to Ben Stiller’s character – and he’s great with what little screen time given. Also on board with small roles is David Gordon Green’s “go to guy” Danny McBride who plays the effects wiz, Vietnam was vet Nick Nolte and first time film director Steve Coogan. All of which are great.

However it’s the show-off cameo is by Tom Cruise that’s the scene stealer. Brilliant and ballsy and it is one of the most outrageous performances in the film where Cruise plays a bald, overweight, foul mouthed Hollywood producer. He lets his character loose and never holds back with an onslaught of profanities and even some occasionally booty dancing to the music of hip hop star Ludacris.

Not since The Player has the American film industry endured such a vicious attack. But Tropic Thunder just like Pineapple Express don’t seem to care. This is the new Hollywood, where everyone grows some balls and every now and than tells the system to go fuck itself!

Jimmy D

Baghead (review)

Baghead
2008, USA
directed by Jay and Mark Duplass


At once a deconstruction of the creative process and an extended look at the mechanics of fear, Baghead is an engaging little indie that flirts with "mumblecore" drama, low-budget horror, and awkward comedy, before ultimately revealing itself as just one of them - it would qualify as a spoiler to say which, since part of the film's appeal is the uncertain manner in which it proceeds. Baghead opens with one of the funniest scenes I've seen all year, a lampoon of film festival culture that's both over-the-top and unnervingly accurate. Our protagonists - rough-hewn cool guy Matt (Ross Partridge), his on-again, off-again girlfriend Catherine (Elise Muller), doughy dogooder Chad (Steve Zissis) and party girl Michelle (Greta Girwig) are attending the premiere of an acquaintance's film, entitled We Are Naked. (There's nudity involved.) The banal question period that follows the film will delight anyone who's ever stayed after a film at a festival to hear the unwashed masses fellate questionable talent.

With all four principals being out-of-work actors, they decide they can make a better film than the one they've just been forced to sit through, so they isolate themselves in a cabin in the woods for a weekend with the aim of simply brainstorming an entire film. Their interpersonal tensions make these sessions awkward, so when Michelle has a creepy dream involving a man with a bag over his head, they leap at the chance to base a horror movie around it. Eventually, however, the Baghead starts making appearances in reality, and it must be determined whether they're being stalked from within or without the group.

If I've made it sound like a straight-up horror film, then I've done Baghead a disservice - it's a very funny film that has a handful of tense scenes, as well as a generous helping of touchingly real ones. Its characters, and nothing else, are what make the film work - Chad's pining for the flippy, inconsiderate Michelle is genuinely both sad and funny, and Matt's determination to get something - anything - completed denotes both drive and desperation, with Partridge inhabiting a space somewhere in between. Unlike many horror-themed films we've seen this year, the movie doesn't rely on any deeply illogical twists - a blessing in and of itself. While it's a slight film - as revealed by its deliberately low-key ending - Baghead succeeds on terms entirely its own.

Simon Howell

American Teen

American Teen (2008)

Nanette Burnstein

The Sundance hit "American Teen" may be a success amongst most teenagers but I would find it hard to believe anyone over the age of 16 would actually care to sit through this film. Most film critics claim it to be scripted. They have accused director Nanette Burstein of giving the documentary a sensationalized feel. Maybe that is true but by the time the credits rolled that was the least of my problems with the film. The main problem for me is that aside from one girl named Hannah, its other subjects do and say little to keep your attention. You would think out of the thousands of high school kids in Warsaw, Nanette Burstein could have found some more interesting.

Director Nanette Burstein focused too much time in selecting students who resembled characters from "The Breakfast Club." There's the Ally Sheedy like outsider Hannah who is moody and longs for life in the big city where she can study film making. Than there's the jock like basketball star Colin, the romantic geek Jake, think Anthony Michael Hall. Finally let's not forget the Molly Ringwald rich girl / mean-girl princess named Megan. Hannah struggles with her everyday fears and depression. Colin needs a basketball scholarship, Megan copes with her sister's suicide, and Jake needs a girlfriend. The problem is outside Hannah the kids don't really make me feel much except for feeling manipulated. Some can say that Werner Herzog made a career out of blurring the line between reality and a film maker's reality. Whatever the case this film was incredibly dull. Did I really need a filmmaker to show me that a teenage girl could be bitchy or that a pimple faced high school geek could have trouble finding a girlfriend?

Now put aside it's subjects and let's view it approach. In reducing hours of footage into a cohesive film, a documentarian can turn a person into a hero or an enemy. They can make you believe in someone or something and change your opinions and views. The trick to doing it right is to figure out a way to make those elements somehow seem real and organic. Observation changes that which is being observed so obviously when you put a camera in a high school, the high school looses its realism. But the crime committed here becomes clear early on. The director painfully seeking something of interest to document clearly needs to stage events in order to have something to bring to the cutting room. Filming reality is a tricky thing but in this case it is bad filmmaking and worse faut.

Jimmy D

Tropic Thunder (2008)

Tropic Thunder

2008, USA

Ben Stiller

Capping off the 2008 summer movie season is Ben Stiller's meta-action-comedy Tropic Thunder, a film so backlogged with big names, movie references and Hollywood in-jokes that you'll spend its first 15 minutes with your head spinning. By the time the movie finally settles down a bit, however, it manages to find a surprisingly agreeable comic groove, skewering nearly every facet of Hollywood filmmaking – both contemporary and historical.

The plot is actually set in motion before the film begins, with a set of fake trailers and commercials establishing the film-within-a-film's major players: Stiller's Tugg Speedman, an over-the-hill action star who made an ill-advised foray into the realm of prestige film; Jack Black's Jeff Portnoy, a self-centered drug addict with a series of obnoxious Eddie Murphy-style fat-suit comedies behind his belt; Brandon T. Johnson's Alpa Chino, an energy-drink magnate; and, most memorably, Robert Downey Jr.'s Kirk Lazarus, a self-serious Aussie method actor. They're all filming Tropic Thunder, a massive-scale war film directed by a novice (Steve Coogan, in what amounts to a blown-up cameo), based on a memoir written by a loony hook-handed war vet (Nick Nolte, in hobo mode), alongside an eager young actor named Kevin (Jay Baruchel). There's also Pineapple Express' Danny McBride and Bill Hader as, respectively, as an explosives expert and a studio exec.

Robert Downey Jr. may as well be Capn' Save-a-Blockbuster. After rescuing Iron Man from being a completely run-of-the-mill comic book movie, he single-handedly fashions the year's greatest comic creation as Lazarus. In a delightful skewering of hardcore method types like Christian Bale or Nicholas Cage circa Leaving Las Vegas, Lazarus opts for cosmetic surgery to blacken his skin in order to play an African-American character named Sgt. Osiris. Downey adopts an over-the-top caricature of "black" speech and mannerisms, much to the continual chagrin of actual black person Johnson (who plays brilliantly off of Downey's exaggerations, exuding both amusement and bemusement). It's an over-the-top concept that Downey somehow manages to pull off – mainly by communicating Lazarus' innate need to be obnoxiously, relentlessly method in his methods. "I never break character 'till I do the DVD commentary."

The blackface device is indicative of the movie's preoccupation with Hollywood's systemic racism, xenophobia and PC hypocrisy. When the actors find themselves stranded in the Vietnam wilderness and come upon a band of sinister Burmese heroin producers, nearly every old trope of Generic Primitive/Asian Otherness is trotted out, from the "outsider white man praised as deity" chestnut (here replaced with an amusingly irreverent sequence in which Stiller's Speedman dons whiteface and reprises a generally-reviled older character), to the respected child leader (see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) to the muddled use of language (the Burmese thugs don't bat an eye at Lazarus' use of Chinese) and even the PC location choice – it's the same tyranny-choked region that Stallone decimated in Rambo last year. Stiller also employs music, editing and plot cues straight out of Apocalypse Now (whose troubled filming history was certainly an inspiration), Forrest Gump (Buffalo Springfield's "That's What It's Worth") and, memorably, Saving Private Ryan's famed Omaha Beach sequence.

For all of the movie's incisive commentary on Hollywood's purity complexes (also lampooned in Lazarus' thorough explanation of the Academy's "retard rules") there are a number of elements that simply don't work. Black's Portnoy is supposed to evoke past troubled, rotund funnymen like John Candy and John Belushi, but never communicates anything beyond shallow drug-jonesing. The subplots involving Stiller's agent and studio head – played by a pair of a-listers I won't spoil – are tedious and unfunny. One of those big names is most certainly in the film in an excessive attempt at saving face after some recent embarrassments, including the use of a fat suit, and it comes across a little too clearly. All of those elements – including Black's character - could easily have been removed from the script and taken the film from its somewhat overstretched 107 minutes down to a more manageable ninety. Luckily, McBride, Coogan, Nolte and Baruchel all deliver fine, funny performances to help flesh out the interstitial scenes between big action setpieces, making the film more coherent than it has to be. That other recent exotically-titled two-word action-comedy might have a higher batting average, but Tropic Thunder logs in about ten times the pitches, and in its tireless efforts to entertain produces Hollywood's funniest film since Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

Simon Howell