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.

NO-HIT NOVEMBER, Bomb #3: GROWN UPS 2 (2013)

All through November we take a look at box-office bombs and widely maligned turkeys, to let you know if you might have missed a classic. Or not. 


Adam Sandler's Grown Ups 2 (while not strictly a bomb) is the reason I invented the term "torturously okay." It's the worst kind of comedy: it's not completely unfunny, but there's nothing in it that warrants its existence.  It's a movie made strictly for financial reasons.  Here is a collection of some of the top comic actors working today, serving a script that... well, I doubt there even was a script.  Three talented people are credited (Sandler, Fred Wolf, and Tim Herlihy), but I think Sandler and director Dennis Dugan just concocted some rudimentary comedy film scenarios and directed their cast through them loosely.

There are allegations that the film is actually a Ponzi scheme: it cost $80 million (much of it, no doubt, from product placement) to make when it could have been made for, I dunno, 1/80 of that.  The movie looks horrible; if you ignore the gargantuan cast of all-stars, it has the look of a multicamera sitcom.  The actors--many of whom are Sandler's friends--were no doubt paid handsomely, and Sandler and crew were granted the abnormally large budget on the faith that he and the stars would grant them considerable returns at the box office.

It worked.  The movie made $133 million domestically and about $246 million worldwide, proving that the rest of the world has no right to criticize any of America's crassness.

I can understand why Sandler has chosen to do it this way.  He's the cinematic equivalent of Weezer, the iconic '90s group.  After releasing a risky, personal album for which they were harshly criticized, they retreated back into bubblegum pophood and haven't released anything good since.  Sandler flirted with the idea of being an actual respectable actor: he was terrific in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch Drunk Love, and was pretty good in Mike Binder's otherwise disposable Reign Over Me.  But lately it seems like he's been scared back into his comfort zone, content to headline dull lowest-common-denominator duds like Just Go With It and Blended.

Admittedly, I wouldn't have given a thought to watching Grown Ups 2 if not for two Kiwi gents, Tim and Guy, who started a quite entertaining podcast this year--"The Worst Idea of All Time Podcast"--for which they watch the film once a week for a year.  It sounds completely idiotic--the film is not only inane but practically contentless, with very little substance worthy of description, let alone discussion--but actually, it's brilliant.  Even necessary.  When people around the world are spending $246 million to see Grown Ups 2, something is wrong.  It's a cinematic Wolf of Wall Street; it pumped up its penny stock script with big name actors and high quantities of bodily humor, then sold.  Tim and Guy are the Kyle Chandler character, exposing the scheme.

I should reveal that I haven't seen Grown Ups 1... but really, why should I?  Grown Ups 2 isn't a Godfather Part II which fills in the blanks of its predecessor.  There's no plot; the movie's 101 minutes are loosely structured around a backyard party at Sandler's house which everyone in town attends.  With few exceptions, no character learns anything during the course of the film.  Each one of its four leading guys--Sandler, Chris Rock, Kevin James, and David Spade--leaves the film pretty much as they found it.  Sandler is a violent lout, Rock is a passive-aggressive fool, James is a punching bag, and Spade... I'll come back to him.

A look at the characters' names should give you an idea of how much real thought was put into the film: Officer Fluzoo, Principal Tardio, Mama Ronzoni, Bumpty McKenzie.  The "story" threads seem to have been purchased in bulk, partially eaten, from the sitcom factory.  Character arcs are set up and dropped.  For example:

• Rock tells us early in the film that his wife (Maya Rudolph) has forgotten their anniversary, and that this will give him capital to spend later in the marriage.  An interesting premise.  Never followed through.
• James is constantly visiting his mother because he feels he doesn't get respect at home.  His wife (Maria Bello) tries to make up for it by taking him to a cheerleader car wash, which turns out to be a male cheerleader car wash--ho, ho--and that's pretty much the end of that.
• There's some momentary stuff about Sandler being insecure about having a new baby with his wife (Salma Hayek), which is apparently resolved in the end, but I really can't figure out why.

The only part of the story that the movie follows through with is Spade's arc, in which he finds out rather suddenly that he has a child he never knew about.  The kid, Braden (Alexander Ludwig), is supposedly 16 but looks 30, and makes Spade feel uncomfortable, but the two eventually find common ground and build a relationship.  Spade, dare I say, gives the only well-thought-out performance in the film, and is the only character who changes at all during the film.  As a result, the scenes between him and Braden are kind of sweet and moving.  Ludwig has fun as the kid, though his dialogue seems to have been written for a Neanderthal type, when the actor looks more like an overgrown boy-band Kurt Cobain.

Is the movie funny?  Well, sometimes.  A few of the gags do stick, but most of the ones that work are subtle, improvised, and rapid.  Sandler compatriots Peter Dante, Jonathan Loughran, and Allen Covert give reliable background performances that contain some of the movie's best chuckles.  Jon Lovitz, as a lecherous gym janitor, has some of the funniest moments in the film, and prompts more laughs with one nonsequitur than the rest of the actors get with the movie's many painfully labored set pieces.  Most are set up for the characters to find funny: when ice cream shop owner Colin Quinn is fixing the soft serve machine and it looks like he's pooping, they all laugh and laugh and we sit silent.

Basically, anything that was intentionally put into the movie doesn't work.  The sub-plot about Kevin James's functionally illiterate son isn't funny.  A brief introduction in which a deer enters Sandler's house and pees on everyone: not funny.  The male cheerleader gag: not funny, and wasteful of cameos from several SNL alums who are doing better things now.  Nick Swardson's histrionic performance as a drugged-out school bus driver: annoying.  The many gags targeted at Spade's girlfriend, a female bodybuilder who's frequently called "he": very not funny.  In fact, none of the female performers are given much to do: not even Cheri Oteri, who appears as Sandler's ex-girlfriend of sorts and has no effect on any of the film's happenings.

The main actors, Spade excepted, are shockingly underwhelming.  Usually any of these guys and gals, Sandler included, would be a highlight of the movie he or she is in.  Imagine Chris Rock reduced to playing a schlub, Maya Rudolph as a dutiful wife who occasionally bursts with stereotypical Tyler Perry-like Mad Black Woman intensity, Kevin James as a doormat, Maria Bello barely in the film, and Tim Meadows, one of the most reliable deadpan comic character-actors working, being forced to gawk and mug in every scene.  Meadows's catchphrase is, apparently, "Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?" He uses it as a response to everything, and presents it as a key laugh line, akin to "Dyn-o-mite!" or "'eyyyyyyy." I surmise that either it was explained in the first film, or it's a private joke between Sandler and friends that the audience isn't allowed in on.

The numerous bit actors redeem the film a little bit from the boredom induced by its stars.  To say they steal the show would imply there was a show to steal.  Steve Buscemi, who is for some reason a regular in Sandler films, is good for a few laughs as a driver's ed instructor.  Shaquille O'Neal is fun to watch as an imposing but shy police officer.  Director Dugan has a brief role as a doctor examining Sandler's son; neither the premise nor the scene is funny, but his delivery is spot-on.  Rob Schneider appears nowhere in the film, and for that he deserves the most praise.

Oddly, the most laughs in the film are delivered by the least likely suspect: Taylor Lautner, who takes his role as an ornery frat kid just seriously and straight-faced enough.  The scenes in which he and his bros (who include Sandler's nephew Jared as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger's son Patrick) taunt Sandler and his crew of old farts, exchange elaborate high-fives and ridiculous handshakes, and perform rage-induced backflips work exactly in the way they're supposed to.  I never liked Lautner as the heartthrob in the Twilight movies, but he might have a future playing heavies like this.  He's very good.

** out of ****

"The Worst Idea of All Time Podcast" can be found on iTunes.

NOTE: Dennis Dugan now works, I believe, full time for Sandler, as he's primarily directed vehicles for him and his colleagues since Happy Gilmore.  As an antidote for this one I invoke his debut film, Brain Donors, an often hilarious modern Marx Brothers film, with John Turturro in the Groucho role.  It proves he knows his stuff, and may be only minimally to blame for this mess.

NO-HIT NOVEMBER, Bomb #2: DREAM HOUSE (2011)

All through November we take a look at box-office bombs and widely maligned turkeys, to let you know if you might have missed a classic. Or not. 

Sometimes good actors can save a potentially awful movie.  At other times the presence of exceptional acting in an otherwise dismal affair only worsens the experience.  With Dream House it's a little bit of both; the film isn't awful by any stretch, but it does beg the question of why it attracted such talent in the first place, when it seems to be a regular old psychological/supernatural thriller in the M. Night Shyamalan vein.

The talent in this case belongs to Daniel Craig, Rachel Weisz, Naomi Watts, and several other very good actors who grace this lackluster film with their presence.  And they're not merely taking a paycheck; they're good in the film.  Very good.  Their dedication may be attributable to the presence of Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot) behind the camera.  Or maybe it's that Craig and Weisz fell in love while making the film.  I suppose it'd be difficult to be ambivalent at that point.

The plot comes courtesy of David Loucka, who a year later would give us the unwatchable piece of junk The House at the End of the Street, with Jennifer Lawrence and Elisabeth Shue.  His script for this film is unlikely but workable, as Sheridan proves with skill that it does not deserve.

Will Atenton (Craig) leaves his city job at a publishing company to write a book at his new suburban home with his idyllic family: wife Libby (Weisz) and irrepressibly cute young daughters Trish and Dee Dee (Taylor and Claire Geare, who are terrific).  Soon strange things begin to happen.  Someone seems to be stalking the house.  Goth kids are camping out nearby and whispering about things that happened in the house years earlier.  As Will investigates, he finds some truths he wishes he'd not heard.

I won't reveal the plot twist that happens at the movie's midpoint, although it's not entirely unpredictable.  Those interested in seeing the film will want to avoid the trailer, which unceremoniously spoils it.

In a less worthy director's hands, the midpoint twist would be an early climax to the film, and it would circle the drain for its remaining 45 minutes. Rather than rely on pulling the rug out from under us, Sheridan uses it as a shift in the movie's framing device, turning it from a mystery-thriller into a Jacob's Ladder-style psychological drama which shifts back and forth between two realities, one just as genuine as the other.

Sheridan, with help of cinematographer Caleb Deschanel and production designer Carol Spier (also heavy hitters who are slumming it here), downplays inconsistencies in the script by setting the film in a constant dreamlike present.  Pay attention to the early scenes, before the big turn, and you'll realize that very little is said other than vague greetings and goodbyes.  There's no exposition.  We don't often know why what's happening is happening: only that it is.  Will's scenes opposite his family are just a little too perfect, for a reason.

It's only in the final act that Sheridan loses control.  It's an ending that was likely tacked onto the film after test audiences reportedly disapproved of Sheridan's first cut, and it becomes more ridiculous the longer you think about it.  Though it wraps up most of the movie's plot discrepancies (and explains an early out-of-nowhere appearance from Elias Koteas on a train), it does so laughably.

Still, Sheridan and the actors don't phone it in, even when the film is lost to ludicrousness.  Craig and Weisz, as well as Naomi Watts as a neighbor who may know more than she lets on, give believable performances which stay grounded even when the script messes them around.  Dream House doesn't exactly do them justice, but oddly, they're not wasted either.

** 1/2 out of ****

NO-HIT NOVEMBER, Bomb #1: DELIVER US FROM EVIL (2014)

All through November we take a look at box-office bombs and widely maligned turkeys, to let you know if you might have missed a classic. Or not. 


Movies that reaffirm faith tend to take more of a thrashing from moviegoers than others, unless they're and marketed directly and exclusively to evangelicals, like God's Not Dead or whatever Kirk Cameron happens to be starring in nowadays.  Mainstream religious movies are usually dismissed as silly.  I don't quite know why; certainly Bill Maher hasn't had such a wide influence.  M. Night Shyamalan takes a licking when his films dare to explore the notion that characters in a horror film are allowed to be redeemed rather than be allowed to fester in a rusty prison like the hapless souls in the Saw films.

Scott Derrickson has been an unabashedly religious filmmaker all along.  His first theatrical feature as director, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, was bland anti-science trash, but his later work exhibited more positive themes from a Christian point of view.  The Day the Earth Stood Still, while not the tightest film, had an admirable message about stewardship of the earth.  Sinister, one of the scariest movies I've recently seen, took a quite conservative stance on the allure of violence, and presented its slayings to be truly horrifying rather than titillating.

Deliver Us from Evil, his latest film, is also decidedly pro-faith, though it understands why its characters have lost it.  It doesn't condescend like many films of its type do, nor is its message oversimplified.

It also doesn't quite work, but it's not bad while it's not working.  Derrickson and co-writer Paul Harris Boardman put more work into this film than the usual demonic possession romp usually gets.

NYPD Officer Ralph Sarchie (Eric Bana) is known for having a "radar" that leads him to the right criminal.  When he sets upon one man and one woman who are committing strange crimes, he links them to an Iraq War veteran who may have brought something evil back to New York with him.  A local priest, Fr. Mendoza (Edgar Ramirez, of the brilliant epic Carlos), offers his help.

The film unfortunately comes bearing the dreaded "Based on a true story" disclaimer, which has doomed brave films before it, like The Conjuring.  Most "true" horror films suffer either from changing the story too much, or from trying too hard to be convincing.  Oddly enough, there really isn't much in the film I can't imagine happening.  Though there are fleeting supernatural moments, the villains are all decidedly human.  The movie does have some spooky scary boogeyman moments, and an exorcism scene that's beyond silly, but at the center it's about how real evil shows itself: through violence, hate, and vengeance.

Bana and Ramirez are solid anchors for the film, lending credibility to a screenplay that's always threatening to go cuckoo.  A late scene in which Sarchie confesses the reason for his loss of faith to Mendoza has an awfully familiar arc, but Bana and Ramirez deliver it captivatingly.  Joel McHale (yes, Joel McHale) is a welcome presence as Sarchie's streetwise partner.  Sean Harris is appropriately nasty as the perpetrator, a demon with a particular affinity for Jim Morrison. (I like that the movie never explains why the demon keeps quoting The Doors.  Maybe he just likes them.)

The movie still doesn't quite come together.  The police procedural plot is trite, and we've seen Sarchie's family sub-plot a thousand times before.  What do you want to bet that the tough cop has trouble being open and honest with his loving wife (Olivia Munn) and daughter?  What do you want to bet they'll patch things up in the end?

As with most demonic possession movies nowadays, the final exorcism is a letdown.  It's always a shame when a movie that's been pretty savvy all along descends into hysterics and shouting.  Derrickson lends the film enough nice touches that we wish it had been a more cohesive work.

** 1/2 out of ****

NOTE: The movie's final line is "Do you reject Satan and all his works?" I am disappointed that the response was not "Yes, except 'Light My Fire.'"

NO-HIT NOVEMBER, Bomb #2: IN-APP-ROPRIATE COMEDY (2013)

All through November we take a look at box-office bombs and widely maligned turkeys, to let you know if you might have missed a classic.  Or not.

 

InAPPropriate Comedy is the new "film" from writer-director Vince Offer, a.k.a. Vince Shlomi, a.k.a. the ShamWow Guy, a.k.a. the guy who punched a hooker because he claimed she tried to bite his face off. Every so often he takes the money he's made hawking kitchen junk and makes a movie. He made The Underground Comedy Movie in 1999, memorable from its prominent late night commercials and an appearance from a pre-Green Mile Michael Clarke Duncan as the "Big Black Gay Virgin."

And now comes InAPPropriate Comedy, also a Kentucky Fried Movie knockoff, also desperate to offend. It is the most unpleasant time I've ever had watching a movie.  Keep in mind that I have faithfully watched The Lonely Lady, An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, Dr. T & the Women, Wired, Cannibal Holocaust, Cruising, Corky Romano, and even The Underground Comedy Movie.  If Offer wishes to wear this as a badge of honor, then I wish him well.

The film combines a ravenous desire to offend every race, creed, sex, and sexual orientation on the planet with a profound lack of any kind of comic awareness or timing.  "Sketches" drag on without any kind of structure or focus.  There appears to have been very little writing, as most segments seem to be improvised desperately.

It's not that the movie is offensive.  It's that it tries to offend, but only succeeds by its own badness.  While The Underground Comedy Movie chose There's Something About Mary as its model and assaulted the audience with every bodily fluid it could imagine, InAPPropriate Comedy chooses Borat as its template and creates a series of faux-real-life sketches based around racism.  Offer finds racial slurs so funny that he bases pretty much all of the sketches around them.

Most of the running time is devoted to "The Amazing Racist," played by comedian Ari Shaffir, who might want to make this movie go away as quickly as he can.  He is placed in numerous situations in which he brazenly spouts racial insults at every race he can find: he's a driving instructor who hates Asians, a priest who tries to convince Jewish people to apologize for killing Christ, a vigilante who tries to deport illegals back to Mexico.  This might make for an interesting experiment, if the "victims" of his ruse weren't clearly actors who were directed to spout Jewish slurs right back at him.  And if Offer didn't allow each segment to drone on forever without a single laugh.  But he does, and keeps coming back to the character as if we'd like to see him again.

Another recurring sketch is "Blackass," featuring a team of African-Americans doing Jackass-style stunts centered around their blackness.  These sketches reach a Stepin Fetchit level of racial insensitivity.  One has a black man who enters an abortion clinic and offers his services with a coat hanger, and that's the joke.  In another, a woman introduces her two white friends to her boyfriend, who is a big black man, and that's the joke.  I felt sorry for the African-American actors, who are forced to utter unnatural-sounding ebonics as if Offer has plainly instructed them to replace every "is" with "be."

Adrien Brody turns up, as flamboyant cop "Flirty Harry," in what must have been a James Franco-style performance art piece.  These segments at least have a rock-bottom charm, as they're made up of nothing but Brody making gay puns. ("Go ahead.  Make me gay." Yep.)

The movie is far beneath the reputation of its other celebrity guest stars, who appear perpendicularly to the film, as if Offer wanted to keep at arm's length from the movie's more torturous scenes.  Rob Schneider's appearance here is akin to Cary Grant appearing in a Rob Schneider movie.  Michelle Rodriguez also appears for no real reason.  You know your movie's in trouble when its one (1) real laugh comes from Lindsay Lohan; I chortled at her little bit of paparazzi revenge near the end.

Some comedies are offensive but funny; others are simply offensive.  InAPPropriate Comedy is neither; it's simply filthy.  It isn't even made with enough skill to be disgusting.  It is a gaping black hole of comedy, with sharp white teeth that poke at you with every labored attempt to offend that falls flat.  When it's finally over, there is no real escape, for it has reminded you of what a dark, dark place the world is.

Zero stars out of ****

NO-HIT NOVEMBER, Bomb #1: THE HOST (2013)

All through November we take a look at box-office bombs and widely maligned turkeys, to let you know if you might have missed a classic.  Or not.


The Host, based on Stephenie Meyer's first non-Twilight novel, is another young-adult romance thriller where teenagers fall desperately in love even when it puts their lives in danger.  It's not as depressing as The Hunger Games, where kids were forced to kill each other, but it's in the same ballpark.  It's thankfully missing the conservative sexual politics of the Twilight series, though it does hinge on a romance between two characters of wildly varying ages, in soul if not in body.  Twilight was about a 100-year-old vampire who fell for a 17-year-old girl; The Host is about a 1000-year-old alien of indistinct sex who simultaneously falls in love with the 18-year-old girl whose body it inhabits, and one of the girl's hunky friends as well.

The alien is called Wanderer, or Wanda for short (ugh).  It comes to earth as one of many invaders, "souls," who have taken over the planet and inhabited the bodies of human beings.  Wanderer is placed in the body of Melanie Stryder (Saoirse Ronan), a dissident who is one of few humans still alive.  But something is different about Melanie: her identity stays alive inside Wanderer, talks to her, and can sometimes control her.  Wanderer, like her namesake, becomes curious about Melanie, and helps her to find her family, who are still alive in the desert somewhere.

The setup is intriguing, and the love story just unlikely enough to be interesting.  This is a movie crying out for a director like Andrei Tarkovsky, who might have honestly explored the idea of a thousand-year-old being discovering earth for the first time.  Wanderer, who has been traveling the universe for a millennium, finally finds something on earth that she hasn't before, and Ronan is a good enough actress that she portrays this believably in early scenes.

The invading race of souls, unlike those in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is not made up of faceless and emotionless pods, but of real, believable, advanced, evolved people who are merely colonizers.  They portray a society that knows it has advanced far beyond any others in the universe, and thinks nothing of eradicating the dominant species on earth.  But beyond that, they are smart, kind, courteous, and unfailingly honest, which leads to a funny car-theft scene that wouldn't have been out of place in The Invention of Lying.

The trouble is that the movie falls prey to Meyer's hokey writing, and it becomes gradually more interested in telling a teenage love story than an intergalactic emotional thriller.  Like in the Twilight films, we're asked to believe that an age-old wise traveler from beyond the stars just needed a little old school making out.  The kissy-kissy stuff grows more invasive, and the movie becomes less and less interesting.

The communication between the inner Melanie and the outer Wanderer also becomes silly, though there may not have been a non-silly way to portray it.  We hear an ambient voice-over of Melanie's thoughts as she talks from within Wanderer, but I wonder what it might have been like if we only saw and heard Wanderer, and if Melanie's influence on her were implied.  Melanie's dialogue from inside Wanderer leads to some of the movie's dumbest moments, as she's reduced to making snarky sarcastic remarks whenever Wanderer gets kissy-kissy with Ian (Jake Abel), one of the humans living with Melanie's family.

The writer and director is Andrew Niccol, whose first film, Gattaca, was as thoughtful and poignant as any sci-fi film since Solaris.  Like all of the talented directors who tried their hand at a Twilight movie, he gives it his all, but Meyer only takes the story skin-deep.  Wanderer is an intriguing character, but her schoolgirl crush on Ian doesn't build from anything and goes nowhere.  She's meant to have a growing fascination with human beings, but it's not represented as anything but a teenage fantasy.  The ending is a real cop-out.

Ronan does what she can, and there's an emotional farewell between Wanderer and Melanie that's well-made and genuine; though the writing is clunky, Ronan and Niccol play it right.  There's a setup here for a great sci-fi film, but the relationships in the film just aren't believable.  It is, like Twilight, a lot of dead space amid some interesting ideas.

** out of ****