Author of sci-fi/fantasy, horror and adventure/thriller fiction

THE LAST EXORCISM (2010)

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I skipped over THE LAST EXORCISM (2010) for years, thinking it just another exorcism movie, and a found-footage one at that (insert raspberry noise). After reading an interesting review, though, I took a chance and boy, what a gem it turned out to be for me. THE LAST EXORCISM delivers a high level of creepiness packaged in a thoughtful, intelligent meditation on faith and skepticism.

The movie is a mockumentary in which Cotton Marcus is a minister who lost his faith after it was doctors, not God, who cured his son of a severe illness. Patrick Fabian brings real charisma, humanity, and likeability to the role, which makes the movie instantly engaging. Marcus still ministers and performs exorcisms, but for him, it’s a show, a service that helps people feel better but otherwise doesn’t mean anything. Still, after hearing about a child dying during an exorcism, he decides it’s time to throw in the towel, and agrees to do the documentary so that fewer people might believe in the power of exorcism and risk getting hurt. His last exorcism turns out to be a Louisiana farm, where Louis Sweetzer (a solid and menacing Louis Herthum) raises his teenage children Nell and Caleb in a strict religious household. Louis doesn’t believe in science because doctors failed his wife, so he’s turned to God for guidance in every aspect of his life.

What follows is something that surprises him. Nell appears to be genuinely possessed. Or is she?

THE LAST EXORCISM rolls out as both an entertaining possession story and also a meditation on God, faith, and fraud. I had one big criticism, which was the ending, which worked on one level for me but not as a whole; it could have achieved the same thing with a smaller scale. But so what. The direction and scripting are tight, the acting is terrific, the found-footage element plays as advantage and not gimmick (the two filmmakers even end up personally involved in the story), and the end result engages your head as well as your heart rate. I’m happy to recommend this as another indie gem that proves good story can make even tired old tropes feel like they’re young again.

PATIENT ZERO (2018)

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PATIENT ZERO (2018) is a zombie movie that aims for the stars but only makes it as far as the roof. There’s something strangely compelling about it, the way those old Ginzu knife infomercials used to be compelling (“if you buy now you also get…”), but like those old infomercials, in the end, you don’t buy it.

The movie starts with the remnants of humanity surviving in underground bunkers like nuclear silos. The disease is a rabies-like illness that produces violent infected called Mad Dogs (those who know my zombie fiction are probably laughing by now). In one bunker, Dr. Gina Rose (Natalie Dormer) works with Morgan (Matt Smith), the only human known to have been bitten but survived, hope to combine his blood with that of the first infected, patient zero, in the hope of making a vaccine or a cure (the movie confuses the two). With a DAY OF THE DEAD feel, they work with the military to capture infected and interrogate them in the hopes of identifying patient zero. (Morgan can somehow communicate with the infected in their language, which consists of roars and grunts.) The officer in charge of the operation (a stock villain) thinks it’s a waste of time, resulting in conflict between the scientists and military. Compounding all this is a melodramatic love triangle between Morgan and his infected wife, held in a cage in the facility, and Dr. Rose. When an infected (Stanley Tucci) infiltrates the facility showing self-control and rational thought, indicating the infected are evolving and organizing, everybody is put in danger.

This is an odd movie, stitching together interesting elements, intriguing premise, competent direction, very good acting, and strangely engaging melodrama into a hot mess with weak villains, zombies that aren’t scary, some crazy dialogue, and a flat ending. The movie tries to be and do too much, but I don’t know whether that sinks it or saves it. Overall, I have to give it a C+.

CHERRY by Nico Walker

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Banged out on a prison typewriter, Nico Walker’s CHERRY is an autobiographical novel about war, PTSD, addiction, and crime. I liked it a lot, from the staccato, brutalist prose to the depictions of combat during the occupation of Iraq.

The novel opens with a young man going nowhere fast, taking college classes, scoring and selling drugs, and working a part-time job. When he meets Emily, he falls madly in love, and marries her before shipping off to Iraq. While in Iraq, he goes out as a medic on one combat mission after another, dealing with boredom, terror, loneliness, and stupidity. On the way back, he learns about PTSD, and he and Emily end up hooked on hard drugs. As their money disappears, he turns to robbing banks.

Walker’s portrayal of his spiritually aimless and materially ambitionless protagonist is pretty compelling. There’s an almost Holden Caulfield quality to the guy and the raw honesty and explicit way he describes his screwups and the bad situations he finds himself in. However, while I appreciated it’s an autobiographical novel, some fictionalization would have been welcome because the novel, as in real life, becomes repetitious to the point of dull by the end, and there’s nothing really accomplished, learned, or tied up at the end.

Overall, I enjoyed the ride quite a bit if not the final destination. I give CHERRY an A for style and its raw freshness, B for story, C- for the last act and denouement.

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY (2018)

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BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY (2018) is a mixed-bag biographical film about Freddie Mercury, lead singer for Queen. It’s probably a pleasure for its fans, though delivering nothing particularly juicy and treating Mercury’s excesses with a light touch. For everyone else (like me, I like Queen but don’t love-love Queen), I can’t imagine it being more than “okay,” probably the worst response its creators, particularly Brian May, envisioned. Overall, though, it’s entertaining, and as a by-the-numbers biopic, I’m glad it wasn’t heavy-handed about Mercury’s personal life, that it never tried to force me as the viewer to feel anything. I like the band and its music, so for me, when the movie focused on that, it really shined.

The film broad-brushes a lot of history, starting with Mercury, an immigrant to the UK from India and being of Persian descent (which was something I enjoyed learning), chafes under his conservative father while going out to see bands at night. While checking out one band he likes, he finds out their lead singer just left, auditions on the spot, and bingo, he’s in. From there, they roar into stardom, making it all look remarkably easy, though it’s here where the movie and the portrayed Freddie (Rami Malek giving it 100%) really shine. The guy had serious balls, and everything he and the band did–from its music to on-stage performances–was over the top, in your face, and often revolutionary.

Meanwhile, Freddie comes to terms with being gay, flirts with debauchery out of loneliness, ends up snubbing his band mates only to find out he needs them to do his best work, and learns he has AIDS. This all leads the band to its legendary performance at Live Aid, where they stole the show.

The film is loving to Freddie, and very gentle, and in fact everything is treated with kid gloves. The film may be largely accurate about the essence of who Freddie was. But as with many other biopics, it doesn’t necessarily make a compelling story. I found myself looking forward to the next scene where the band comes up with the idea for a song, such as a bass riff for “Another One Bites the Dust” interrupting an in-studio argument, or the performances themselves. The Live Aid scene is a great recreation of an amazing moment in rock history, though it is punctuated with laughably saccharine “I’m loving and truly amazed by you” reaction shots by family, friends, and band mates.

So overall, I wasn’t wowed, but I was surely entertained. I give BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY a B major.

MANDY (2018)

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Directed by Panos Cosmatos, MANDY (2018) is a bizarre revenge horror film with a hallucinogenic atmosphere, gallons of blood, Nicholas Cage, a crazy haunting metal score by Jóhann Jóhannsson, and plenty of visual elements reminiscent of ’80s metal band album covers and ’70s horror flicks. The sum far exceeds its by-turns ponderous and ultra-violent parts, though it doesn’t really add up to much. Just sit back and enjoy the experience.

The film begins in 1983 with Red (Cage), a Northwestern logger, returning home to his hippie artist wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough). Their relationship is expertly drawn in quirky conversations, familiarity, and a deep, quiet connection that works well on screen. Unfortunately, Mandy catches the eye of a cult leader (Linus Roache), who summons his allies, a trio of bikers deranged and deformed by a special brew of LSD, to abduct her for him. Red escapes and for the rest of the movie rages a bloody swathe of death and destruction on the people who wrecked his life.

There are some wild set pieces in the film, such as Red fighting the demonic bikers, Mandy meeting the cult’s leader while under the influence of an exotic drug drawn from a hideous giant insect, and Red in his underwear downing an entire bottle of vodka and howling his grief, which starts off sad before plunging into the absurd and then becoming even sadder. It’s all good metal band cover fun, and Red’s revenge is a dark road trip into hell.

The film might have worked better for me, though, if the cult was more interesting, and what they worshipped was real. The cult gets a lot of dialogue, though little of it is interesting. Cosmatos seems to go out of his way to say, “Here are the stock villain cultists you’d expect in the ’80s,” which gave Cage something to fight but otherwise not much to appreciate. The bikers and their back story were far more fun. So in the end, the movie feels deep, which gives the very basic revenge story some mythic resonance, but the antagonist fails to join the party, weakening the movie for me.

In the end, I liked it and give it an A- for visuals, atmosphere, and crazy, but a B/B+ overall. Despite that overall score, I recommend it for anybody who likes horror movies, as it’s a unique experience that creates something new and somewhat powerful from our memories of the old.

OUTLAW KING (2018)

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Netflix’s OUTLAW KING is a thin but strong historical film about Robert the Bruce and his fight for an independent Scotland after the death of rebel William Wallace. It has a lot of great elements and one of the most realistic scenes of medieval combat I’ve caught on screen, but they all come together in broad brush strokes and without a moral center. Overall, I enjoyed it but couldn’t help thinking it could have been much more if they’d had more screen time, maybe done it as a miniseries.

The film begins with King Edward (Stephen Dillane, one of my favorite actors) receiving fealty from the Scottish lords in his tent after eight years of war that ended with William Wallace’s defeat. It all started when the Scottish king died without an heir, resulting in civil war and the nobles asking Edward to mediate the succession and Edward saying, “I think I’ll just take the crown myself.” After William Wallace is executed, Robert the Bruce (Chris Pine) becomes inspired to resume the war, winning the crown and Scottish independence.

The acting is top-notch, led by Chris Pine, who seems determined to play his more serious roles in a very understated way as if to downplay his looks and charisma. There’s an engaging love story in a marriage Edward arranges between Robert and his goddaughter, Elizabeth (the excellent Florence Pugh), which stems from consent and equality. As to the story itself, it’s fairly accurate historically, and that’s where things get tricky.

With BRAVEHEART, hardly any of it is historical, and what we’re given is caricaturish and over the top, but it has a very strong moral center, and we know the protagonist and his motivations very well, and we root for him. With OUTLAW KING, Robert is morally really no better than Edward, and the war seems to be about whether the Scots should pay taxes and military service to a Scottish rather than an English king. This is refreshing after hearing Mel Gibson’s Wallace yelling about freedom in the Middle Ages, but Gibson did give us a real and strong foundation on which to root for the hero aside from mere point of view. In OUTLAW KING, the war starts because the people are simply open to one in the wake of Wallace’s death, and Robert’s first attempt to unite the country behind him as king ends with him murdering a rival on hallowed ground. This is good stuff as I love the accuracy, but it would have have been nice to see Robert’s motivation go beyond naked ambition, and Pine is so understated that the only real glimpse we get into his character is through his relationship with Elizabeth, which ends up largely wasted when war erupts.

The movie ends with a battle as well done as the Battle of the Bastards in GAME OF THRONES, which is pretty amazing to watch, but the denouement falls flat. At this point, I was still feeling like I was missing something, that I’d liked what I’d seen but wanted more. If the film had been longer, or maybe even a miniseries, we could have seen more of what Robert wanted to do for his people as king, why he wanted to be king, his relationship with his very strong wife, and so on. For me, that would elevated the film from good to something truly special.

So overall, I liked OUTLAW KING a lot and considered it a rare gem for sticking with historical accuracy, but I wish the director had done more to flesh out the historical characters as people we could relate to and really root for.