Running from the law with belly laughs

THE WRONG GUY (1997)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

It is an amazing endeavor to find a lost treasure. Sometimes there is a movie that has either been forgotten or left out to sea with no appeal of rediscovery. "The Wrong Guy" is such a movie - a hilarious Canadian comedy by the hapless, silly-minded Dave Foley of "Kids in the Hall" and "Newsradio" fame. When you consider the studio either had faith in it or not and that it went direct-to-DVD a mere five years after it was filmed, you'd rightfully expect a disaster. Most comedies of the late 90's into the 2000 and 2010 era have been of the gross-out variety, packed with fecal or other bodily fluid gags. Not this movie. I also have not laughed so consistently at a movie comedy from this era in quite some time so to discover "The Wrong Guy," thanks to my wife who bought a copy of the film and laughed along with me, is tantamount to a miracle. A miracle of laughs and proof that Dave Foley is a comic treasure.

Dave Foley is the perfect hapless, naive dummy in a slew of predicaments. He is Nelson Hibbert, who says hello to every employee at an office building, reminding himself and everyone it is a big day. Nelson expects a promotion as president of am unnamed company, and is passed over because as the boss who is exiting reminds him, "You married my other daughter, who is a great disappointment to me!" Nelson is so upset he has a crying fit and confronts the boss who he discovers is murdered. Nelson has another crying fit, grabs the bloody knife and takes off. Right from the start, "The Wrong Guy" could easily fall apart with either too much black humor and not enough whimsy, or too much whimsy laced with too little black humor. The surprise is that "The Wrong Guy" actually aims for belly laughs laced with a cartoonish, wacky tone. This works in favor of Dave Foley who so perfectly encapsulates naivete and fallibility with honest-to-goodness charm that nobody else could've been an improvement. He's got the expert comic timing and the body language of a wiggly clown with no common sense.

There are so many terrific comic set pieces that I laugh at myself just thinking about them. The frequency of silliness is admirable, whether it is Nelson trying to avoid police by pretending he has an extensive nosebleed or wearing a towel over his head, or how he is ready to hotwire a jeep that has keys in the ignition. His habit of running from side to side down a road shows off a certain Buster Keaton tomfoolery, not to mention jumping onto an open train car and landing on the other side of the tracks! Adding to the tomfoolery is Colm Feore as a clever hitman who is the real killer of Nelson's boss, and he sidesteps the police easily but never seems to catch up with Nelson whom he believes is an FBI agent! There is also Jennifer Tilly who suffers from narcolepsy and falls in love with Nelson rather quickly but, hey, this is a 96 minute comedy. Also worth noting is the hilarious shenanigans of Detective Arlen (David Anthony Higgins), who finds that an FBI expense account allows him to frequent Broadway shows and get Asian blonde escorts rather than using the resources to catch the killer.
 
I laughed so much at "The Wrong Guy" that I even surprised myself at how often I was doubled over with laughter. As co-written by "The Simpsons" writer Jay Kogen and Dave Foley not to mention David Anthony Higgins, the film mixes homages to Hitchcock's thrillers of mistaken identity with a wink, especially "North by Northwest" and "Sabotage." In fact, this film is a huge improvement over Mel Brooks' own occasionally funny Hitchcockian homage spoof, "High Anxiety," in that it stays true to the hapless nature of its central character (I am sure I spotted a few "The Fugitive" nods as well). You can't help but root for Foley's Nelson. "The Wrong Guy" is exceptional comedy gold.  

Tall Man's last infernal outing

PHANTASM: RAVAGER (2016)

Reviewed By Jerry Saravia

Watching "Phantasm: Ravager" is like watching a series of rhythm-less outtakes cobbled together without any refinement or elegance. Unless you have seen the previous four "Phantasm" films, nothing here will make a lick of sense. I have seen them all and I still can't fathom what they were attempting here, though I have my suspicions.

Reggie (Reggie Bannister) is the main character as he is out on dusty roads leading to nowhere, holding a shotgun and ready to destroy the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm). Sometimes Reggie is at a remote farm with hopes of bedding a redhead young female, other times he wakes up as an aged patient in a hospital suffering from dementia, or he is out on the road in his beaten up Plymouth Barracuda and entering an alternate dimension where the Tall Man resides in what looks like Dante's Inferno with giant spheres populating the red sky. We still get the freakishly monstrous dwarves who appear at the mausoleum, and we get scenes where Mike (A. Michael Baldwin, who has been in all the films except number 2) appears and reappears without a whole lot of consistency - he has a golden sphere in his head though details are never forthcoming. The killer spheres reappear as well yet I was more interested in the blimp-sized spheres which we learn little to nothing about them. There is a brief appearance by Mike's dead brother, Jody (Bill Thornbury), though I thought he was a sphere himself in previous sequels. The film ends with a stunning hellish cityscape shot that opens the door for another sequel, or maybe this movie should've started with that final shot instead!

The "Phantasm" movies are cinematic puzzle pieces that never come together, but sometimes they came close. The trouble is that it is hard to get a handle on what is happening other than some otherworldly chase picture where we lose sight of who is being chased and why, and what sort of definitive closure we are supposed to get. Reggie is willing to settle his differences with the Tall Man as long as he gets his family back. He seems to, at one point, and yet the repetitive chase goes on with a group of gun-toting rebels who are rendered anonymous at best. Rocky (Gloria-Lynne-Henry), Reggie's love interest from Part III, returns so briefly and delivers so much charisma, you kinda wish the filmmakers opted to have her on the road with Reggie from the start.

"Phantasm: Ravager" is fair as far as umpteenth horror movie sequels go, thanks to the entertaining Reggie Bannister who has to carry the movie on his shoulders. The late Angus Scrimm is still terrifying though the hellish landscape of the 4K digital dimension looks like an ad for a video game, not a movie. I'd prefer this sequel over the endless, monotonous "Oblivion" but do not expect the surreal aspects of the first three films. 

Stranger Things in Upstate N.Y.

A QUIET PLACE (2018)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

My favorite kind of horror film usually has locations in isolated, sometimes uninhabited areas, specifically the woods ("Evil Dead" and its brethren usually come to mind). So "A Quiet Place" already had me at the forest with a farm somewhere in the middle of it. Of course, the threat are giant creatures with tentacle-like legs and arms and an acute sense of hearing (they bare a resemblance to the monsters in "Stranger Things"), so if you drop a lantern in your farmhouse, these creatures speed through the horizon of corn stalks and trees like speed demons and arrive to destroy whoever caused the noise. Sounds like a B, C or Z-grade schlock yet with director John Krasinski involved, it is classy A horror dependent on the unexpected and finding the humanity in a tight-knit survivalist family at the center of chaos or, basically, silence to prevent chaos.

Krasinski plays the father, Emily Blunt the pregnant mother, and they have two children (one of them is deaf, played by real-life deaf girl Millicent Simmonds, and one other is killed in an alarming early sequence). They all communicate by sign language because any sound of verbal communication can cause these killer creatures to emerge (I am amazed that they can't whisper, wouldn't that sound be in line with walking barefoot on sand?) Actually any sound is problematic - dinner is served on lettuce leafs, footstep markers exist on stairs and floors where no creaky wood noise will ring, and sand footpaths are laid out, between their domicile leading to the bridge and the local uninhabited stores. This family is not completely alone - others live by and also have to live by silence. The real suspense kicks in when we know Emily Blunt will have to give a natural birth, and she may have to scream in agony!

Krasinski as a director and actor kept me on my toes throughout "A Quiet Place." The movie is an unnerving, shivering, truly nail-biting experience at just barely 1 and 27 minutes. It is probably the right length for an old-fashioned chiller and there are enough intimate family moments for everything to fall in place - a family we sympathize with and we hope this predicament is resolved. How it is resolved is one of the film's neatest surprises - all I can say is that it has to do with an improved hearing aid.

As a pure exercise in terror (especially the dynamic sound design and abbreviated uses of silence), "A Quiet Place" fills the bill. I don't know if it will become a classic but it will stand as one of the niftiest scare surprises of the 2010 era. Watch out for that protruding nail on the basements steps!

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