NO-HIT NOVEMBER, Bomb #4: PAUL BLART: MALL COP 2 (2015)

I haven't seen the original Paul Blart: Mall Cop, though the hugely successful film has its defenders, even among critics.  Roger Ebert awarded it three stars and praised it for being "a slapstick comedy with a hero who is a nice guy," and extols star Kevin James as a combination of Jackie Gleason and Nathan Lane.

He's not wrong.  Kevin James is without a doubt a powerful comic presence and his character, Paul Blart, is certainly a nice guy.  But in the case of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, it's the movie around him that's nasty and mean-spirited.  No one in his or her right mind would wish the happenings in this movie on a person as genuine as Paul Blart.  Considering that James created the character and wrote both films alongside Nick Bakay, it looks like he's as much to blame for the movie's failure as he is for its few successes.

This sequel continues an unmistakable mean streak in the oeuvre of Adam Sandler, its producer.  Like Grown Ups 2, it's a celebration of almost caveman-like masculinity, at the expense of anything that deviates from the normative.  It's a shame, because in the slapstick scenes James makes Paul Blart into a meek, overweight Chaplin-type shlub who might have been a formidable comic hero if the movie were as sensitive as he is.

As I've said, Paul Blart is a nice guy.  That doesn't mean he's likable.  He's the kind of guy who waves to you from his front porch every morning when you get the paper, after which you nod and hurry inside before he tries to talk to you.  He's the type who's a little too talkative when he catches you arriving home from work, and doesn't take the visual cues as you slowly back away toward your front door.

It's Paul Blart's niceness that makes us pity him rather than sympathize with him, and it doesn't help that the movie is downright awful to him from moment one.  The first five minutes, honestly, had me gobsmacked.  After a brief recap of the events of the first film, it's revealed that Paul Blart's love interest (Jayma Mays) left him after six days of marriage.  It's okay, he thinks: he still has his daughter (Raini Rodriguez) and his mother (Shirley Knight).  Then his mother is hit by a milk truck.  It's one of those CGI-created "funny" hit-by-car scenes that's for some reason become common in comedies nowadays (Mean Girls, the Scary Movie films, etc.), in which everything seems perfectly pleasant and ho boy!  There goes a truck or a bus or something big.

It is inconceivable that anyone, particularly someone who's been in the business of comedy as long as James has, would think it was okay to begin any comedy this way, never mind a big-studio mainstream family-oriented PG-rated one.  I wonder if audiences were indeed rolling in the aisles as they watched Shirley Knight get bowled over.  I wonder if they're the same people who laughed as Donald Trump mocked the disabled reporter who questioned him.

As soon as Mrs. Blart is run over by the truck, the movie is dead.  No movie can recover from such a disastrous misstep.  The last 90 minutes of the movie could have been the entirety of Horse Feathers and it still would have been awful.

So when Paul Blart goes to Las Vegas to attend a security convention at which he's convinced he will be the keynote speaker, there isn't much reason to care.  His mother's death admittedly isn't written for entirely crass reasons; it's meant to lend a desperation to the character, as he becomes overly protective of his daughter Maya, who is afraid to tell him she wants to go to UCLA rather than New Jersey Community College.  While they're in Vegas, Maya stumbles upon an art heist and is kidnapped, and it's up to Paul to save her.

The bad guy, a slithery, well-dressed Wall Street type named Vincent, is played by Neal McDonough with such straight-faced dedication that he ends up delivering most of the movie's real laughs.  McDonough is one of the best conventional baddies out there, and this movie suggests he's due for a Christopher Walken-like second career as a comic foil.  Other than two no-good-very-bad scenes--one in which he conveniently blurts out the fact that he has an allergy to oatmeal, so that a character can rub some oatmeal in his face later to defeat him, and another in which he and Blart trade a series of silly lines about how crazy they both are--McDonough's performance is flawlessly smug.

Nespa?

Some of the movie's slapstick works.  I found myself laughing at a scene in which Blart is completely unable to incapacitate a villain with a stungun.  A scene in which he fights a giant peacock seems right out of nowhere, but works on a surreal level because of a completely deadpan performance from a nearby lounge pianist who witnesses the whole thing.

When the movie is in slapstick mode, it's considerably easier to take than when it attempts to be a comedy of manners.  The script is generally unkind to women, even beyond Blart's patriarchal attitude toward Maya.  When one woman (Jackie Sandler, Adam's wife) rebuffs the advances of a very drunk security officer (Nicholas Turturro), she is of course painted as a judgmental shrew.  The character who's set up as Blart's love interest, hotel manager Divina (Daniella Alonso), shows absolutely no interest in him nor any chemistry with him, but the movie dictates that she has to fall in love with him anyway... and then, when he turns her down, the movie dictates again that she needs to fall for the head of hotel security (Eduardo Verastegui).

As bad as Paul Blart: Mall Cop is, I'm interested in checking out the first film to see if it does the character right.  I can imagine a good movie being made around Paul Blart, if it's kind-spirited and knows how to treat him.  This isn't it.

* 1/2 out of ****

NO-HIT NOVEMBER, Bombs #1, 2, and 3: The Neil Breen Trilogy - DOUBLE DOWN (2005), I AM HERE....NOW (2009), and FATEFUL FINDINGS (2013)

To be mentioned in the same breath as Tommy Wiseau is probably not a crowning achievement if you're an aspiring auteur, as writer-director-producer-actor-composer-editor-costumer-caterer Neil Breen clearly is.  But seeing as his Fateful Findings is attracting the same kind of midnight-showing attention that The Room once commanded, that is Breen's destiny.

I don't know quite how he feels about that notoriety, but it is beyond his help.  He shares with Tommy Wiseau a totally earnest commitment to his ideas, as well as a complete and utter blindness to his own dearth of talent.



But make no mistake: Neil Breen has something to say and he's going to say it, even if he has to write, direct, act, and cater it himself. Fateful Findings is the work of a man who's trying to make the Great American Movie.  What's it about?  It's about everything.  Life.  Friendship.  Romance.  Danger.  Politics.  Corruption.  Addiction.  Mental health.  The Constitution.  Mysticism.  Ghosts.  And Neil Breen is the only one who understands them all.

Oops, I meant "Dylan." Breen plays Dylan, our hero, a bestselling author/computer scientist extraordinaire/extremely handsome man of action and mystery.  He heroically shrugs off calls from his publisher for a new book, turning his focus instead to hacking into "secret government and corporate secrets" (his words).  But someone in the government isn't too happy with what he's been finding...

Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.  The movie begins with Dylan being hit by a car (in an effect which is, considering the number of clumsy hit-by-car sequences that make their way into much more professional movies these days, not bad).  As he recovers in the hospital, he finds he's being visited by spirits, and may have been given special abilities...

Wait, I'm still getting ahead of the movie.  We meet Dylan as a child as he's frolicking through the forest with his best friend Leah.  They find a magic box hidden under a mushroom, with magic stones inside.  Leah moves away and a voice-over narration tells us that Dylan never sees her again... until she turns out to be his doctor after he's hit by the car.

If that made up the entirety of the movie's plot, it would be busy enough.  But Breen endeavors to make a film made up entirely of tangentially related sub-plots.  I haven't even mentioned the neighbors with the troubled sex life, their daughter who has a crush on Dylan, Dylan's wife and her pill addiction, or the two psychoanalysts who somehow play into Dylan's mystical quest.  All of the plots exist mostly to glorify Breen, who gives himself not one but two attractive love interests, and writes himself plenty of makeout scenes with both.

Virtually none of the plot threads are resolved, nor are they meant to be.  The only conclusive moment of the film comes in a third-act press conference, in front of a green-screen image of what might be the Supreme Court, in which Dylan announces to an invisible but very audibly cheering crowd that he's, indeed, been hacking into governments and corporations all over the world, and what has he found?  Greed, corruption, deception, etc.  Breen isn't even interested in telling us what kind of corruption he's found.  He simply cuts to a montage of reactions from four or five representatives of the corporate world, and what they do next is something I will leave for you to experience.  I have to admit, I was floored.

Fateful Findings is a rare bad movie that I'd recommend to everyone, not just masochists like myself.  It's truly captivating in its loopiness, and if Breen doesn't wear any of his hats particularly well--he's less a jack than a two-of-all-trades--he stacks enough themes on top of one another so that the film is never boring.  It's no surprise that he makes up most of the creative crew for the film; no one, upon seeing this script, would have agreed to collaborate with him on this.


If Breen's two previous films represent the same paranoid, self-aggrandizing vision, they unfortunately don't have the same gonzo energy.  In his debut, Double Down, he casts himself as Aaron Brand, a notorious computer hacker (Breen himself is an architect, and I can picture him delivering a Peter Cook-style monologue called "I would have rather been a hacker than an architect") who lives in the desert near Las Vegas because the government is trying to kill him.  They've already assassinated his girlfriend: a sniper takes her out while she and Aaron are both naked by his pool (with nudity awkwardly obscured).  He's visited by her spirit occasionally, so he can tell her things like "Thank you for loving me."

Double Down is, unfortunately, the most focused and professional-looking of the three.  Breen is also the superhero of this film, and the fact that Aaron Brand is essentially a domestic terrorist who threatens 9/11-style attacks on Las Vegas several times poses the question of whether Breen means for him to be an antihero, or he didn't think much about those implications.  I'd vote the latter, especially since Aaron seems to have hints of the same spiritual power that Dylan has in Fateful Findings.  If Double Down is generally more restrained than that film is, Breen restricts himself much less as an actor; while in Findings he has to remain stoic and mild-tempered, here he allows himself some wonderfully unhinged moments in which he runs through the desert screaming.


Seeing as Breen has viewed himself as infallible so far, it's only fitting that in his second film, I Am Here....Now (4-period ellipsis his), he literally plays God.  Clad in white robes, He returns to earth, looks at what man has made of it, and states clearly early in the film that he is "disappointed" in our "speechies," as he puts it.  We've ruined the planet and allowed corporations to buy our government.  Breen-God walks around Las Vegas helping the needy and meting out some Old Testament-style punishment to the wicked.

On the surface, this is an interesting premise, but overall I Am Here....Now is probably the nadir of Breen's not-exactly-illustrious three-film career.  Even though Breen has a history of writing himself into romantic relationships with seemingly much younger women (even while playing God), I Am Here....Now is the only film that reveals a truly nasty misogynist streak, in a sub-plot that follows a woman who is laid off from an unspecified job at a green energy company and has no choice but to become a hooker.  I know, I know--he's making a point about how corporations have the power to make or break us, yadda yadda yadda--but it's hard to imagine it playing this way if it were a male character.

The scenes which are meant to depict the horrors of gang violence are just as culturally illiterate.  Breen's idea of a gang culture is a bunch of dudes hanging around a condemned building, most of them carrying machine guns openly, occasionally punching each other in the face or shooting each other for no real reason.  A scene in which a character's hand is cut off, meant to be disturbing, is not far removed from Evil Dead 2.

Breen's lack of talent for storytelling is evident through all three films, since he elects mostly to dictate it to us rather than show it.  He never shows us what he's hacking into; he merely tells us about it (and then hurls some laptops around his office).  He can't show us the type of corruption being committed by corporatists; he has to have them muse at length about their crimes.  An example:

Businessman #1: "Now that we've paid off our fellow elected representatives in the legislature, that environmental solar panel development bill will fail next week."

Businessman #2: "Not to mention the cash it'll put in our pockets."

Of the three, only Fateful Findings avoids falling prey to the tell-don't-show method, and that's only because the plot is so ridiculous that it defies any explanation.

Still, Breen is an auteur.  His films all have a clear through-line about corporate greed and environmental stewardship, as well as the reawakening of adolescent romance (I'm guessing Breen had a childhood sweetheart he never reconnected with).  Strange motifs reappear with justification known only to Breen.  For instance, scenes in each film feature characters lying face down with their arms above their heads; it looks just weird enough to have been done on purpose.  As a matter of fact, that's a good summation of most of Breen's work: just weird enough to have been done on purpose.

WE HARDLY KNEW 'THEE: The Films of Alan Smithee, Part 1: HELLRAISER:BLOODLINE (1996)

When a director wants to escape his or her own movie, Alan Smithee is there to open the hatch. 

Hellraiser: Bloodline, the fourth in the series, was the first Smithee film I ever watched, when I was a teenager. Having been an avid Fangoria reader, I knew about the film's troubled production, and was an admirer of the actual director, Kevin Yagher. Yagher was a top-of-the-line animatronics and puppetry effects creator, most famous for designing the Cryptkeeper and directing the opening and closing segments of "Tales from the Crypt."

The film was taken out of his hands during production, and the script by Peter Atkins (who'd been on board the series since part II) was heavily rewritten. Whole subplots, like one featuring Kenneth Tobey of The Thing from Another World, we're dropped. Joe Chappelle, whose name was already mud among horror fans for ruining Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, was brought in to fill in the gaps. (To be fair, Chappelle has done some good things since, having directed many episodes of "Fringe" as well as the enjoyable Phantoms, in which Lawrence of Arabia teams up with Ray Donovan and the director of Argo to fight an ancient subterranean life form.)

So what's left of Hellraiser: Bloodline is a mess, but, upon recent rewatch, I was surprised to find it an entirely watchable mess. The plot is incoherent, as are the philosophical ramblings of the villainous Pinhead (Doug Bradley), who sounds like H.P. Lovecraft would if he were high at a Phish concert. But it's quickly paced and occasionally inventive in its sadism. 

We begin in space. Yep, in space.  Aboard the space station Minos, Dr. John Merchant (Bruce Ramsay) opens a puzzle box which fans of the series will find familiar.  The crew wonders what he's up to.  Explaining that he is attempting to destroy a demon, he tells the story of the construction of the puzzle box, from the distant past to the relative present and then back to the future, where the demon Pinhead is confronted.

Thanks likely to postproduction tinkering, the story structure is awkward, beginning in the 22nd century, flashing back to the 18th century, to the future again, to the 1990s, and then again to the 22nd century for the finale.  It doesn't help that the dull Ramsay appears as the protagonist in all three settings; he has the demeanor of a kinder, gentler Billy Zane, but fails to conjure any character or personality to go along with the demonic torture.

The film also shows little evidence of the talent of Adam Scott, who reportedly enjoyed working on the film but betrays none of that enjoyment on the screen.  As an 18th-century gentleman who (thinks he) enslaves a demonic princess (Valentina Vargas), the future Mr. Leslie Knope exists for a few dull scenes before he makes an inauspicious exit, though not before proudly displaying one of the Laughable Haircuts of Film History.

Not even hell on earth will stop the Catalina Wine Mixer.

The film hops on to a present-day architect (also Ramsay) who unwittingly designs a building-sized replica of the puzzle box that could be the pathway for all manner of demons. It's here that Pinhead makes his first appearance, threatening the architect's wife (the underused Kim Myers, of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2) and young son (Courtland Mead, best known as the really irritating Danny from Stephen King's miniseries of The Shining). 

Though the film is by no means a cohesive piece of anything, it's probably the best of the Hellraiser sequels so far, if we don't count Scott Derrickson's surprisingly decent Hellraiser: Inferno, which is barely related to the series at all. Bloodline's underlying pretentiousness elevates it above your usual run-of-the-mill sequel hackery. The finished product is a total disaster, but it's clear that somebody at some point had high expectations for this movie. You don't see the kind of high-minded philosophizing that spews from Pinhead's mouth in a Friday the 13th movie. 

** out of ****

30 NIGHTS OF NIGHT, Night 4: UNFRIENDED (2015)

Unfriended may not be the scariest piece of first-person-shot candy corn out there, but it is, especially for a low-budget 82-minute Blum House entry, ingeniously constructed.  It uses a premise that's almost unworkable, taking place completely within one person's computer screen and telling its story in real time via Skype, iMessage, Facebook, Spotify, and all manner of variations on the millennial self-contained social network center.  Less ambitious movies tend either to fail to make this sort of thing interesting, or to cheat and take the point of view elsewhere.  Give Unfriended credit: it never strays from the computer screen, and it held my interest long enough that I never felt like checking Facebook myself.

The first sequence is remarkable in its simplicity: an unseen computer user idly wanders toward a LiveLeak (read: banned from YouTube) link called "Laura Barns Suicide." Then, like every good Wikipedia user, we click through to what is labeled as the video that caused her suicide.  It's aptly named "LAURA BARNS KILL URSELF." We see the first few seconds--footage of the titular Laura, very drunk, talking trash about someone at a party--before a boyfriend's Skype call butts in and we're forced to pause.

This shot sets the premise for the rest of the film, which we see from the point of view of a short-attention-spanned teenager named Blaire (Shelley Hennig).  The first-person storytelling is handled brilliantly as Blaire clicks back and forth among Skype conversations, instant messages, songs, websites, et cetera, which in the hands of director Leo Gabriadze never feels inauthentic.  Blaire is joined remotely by boyfriend Mitch (Moses Storm) as well as friends Adam (Will Peltz), Jess (Renee Olstead), Ken (Jacob Wysocki), and Val (Courtney Halverson), as well as a mysterious seventh person who somehow butts into their Skype conversation, won't hang up, and taunts them with otherworldly threats.

It isn't particularly scary--the characters are crudely drawn and the plot is ridiculous--but it's surprisingly a lot of fun. The actors wisely play the whole thing straight; any winking at the audience would ruin the movie entirely. Rather than take an ironic position themselves, the filmmakers let the kids' ironic detachment play into the story, as we occasionally see first-person user Blaire type something honest, pause to think about it, then delete it and type "LOL."

In the end it doesn't quite come together, as the manifestation of the ghost is just too silly and the characters are just too unlikable. But there's real skill at work here: the makers of Unfriended tried something risky, and it paid off. 

** 1/2 out of ****