Bloodbath in every sense of the word

 EVIL DEAD RISE (2023)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

There are bloodbaths and then there are literal bloodbaths. "Evil Dead Rise," not unlike its 2013 predecessor, has its victims literally bathed in blood up to their necks. Blood fills the screen and spurts and spurts to the point of having its victims drenched in blood with perfectly bloodied faces. In terms of graphic disembowelment, stabbings, eating glass and eye gouges, the 2013 "Evil Dead" fit the bill more closely though that movie was a numbing bore. "Evil Dead Rise" is actually entertaining and has a very thrilling climax but you may want to take a shower after seeing it. Use some good bacterial soap to get those heavy blood stains off.

Alyssa Sutherland is a memorably wicked Deadite mommie who is so vicious and so psychologically torturous to her kids that you want to see her eviscerated. She is Ellie, a single mom raising three kids, one of whom discovers the Book of the Dead and a couple of cryptic LP's in the parking garage of their high-rise apartment building (this is after a brief earthquake that creates a hole in the garage). This building is the kind of creepy place where the hallways are barely lit and all I could think of is that someone needs to pay the electric bill or install more lights. Anyway, Ellie's DJ-aspiring son finds and plays the records and the incantations are read from the Book of the Dead and the usual demonic spirits are unleashed. 

Ellie is the first to get possessed and Sutherland makes her into a scary, demonic hellbreaker spirit - she is not someone you want to invite for a get-together. Aside from the kids who are scared beyond their wits, there is Ellie's visiting pregnant sister, Beth (Lily Sullivan), who is more than a little concerned about her sister's contorted body and ability to float and avoid blinking when a fly walks on her eyeball. We feel great sympathy for the family and for Ellie and I hoped Ellie was going to get this demon out of her body - no spoiler but, um, no chance.

"Evil Dead Rise" is quite a horrific ride and its new residential setting for evil spirits (which may bring up unwanted memories of the high-rise in "Poltergeist III") does work in the story's favor rather than the traditional log cabin of previous films. The movie is still a little too blood-soaked and I do miss the wicked humor of the original trilogy and the long-chinned star of Bruce Campbell. Still, this movie is in capable hands and it works right up to its last feverishly sweat-inducing last scene. I do recommend antifungal antibacterial soap after sitting through it. 

God's Children are not for sale

 SOUND OF FREEDOM (2023)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Tim Ballard sounds like someone I should trust if I want my child found. Jim Caviezel plays Tim as he's played most other roles since the heyday of playing Jesus in Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ," a beatific and saintly figure in repose. Never mind that Tim is not a saint or sinner - he is a man on a mission to save "God's children" from child traffickers. "Sound of Freedom" almost sounds like a Mel Gibson movie yet Gibson might have made a ticking time bomb of a movie with urgency felt in your veins while watching it. "Sound of Freedom" is a low-key, somber affair yet somewhat indistinguishable from any movie that might play on TV on the same subject.

Caviezel's Tim works for Homeland Security as a Special Agent assigned to arresting pedophiles who make their presence known on the Internet. Tim finds and arrests many of them, but what about the kids who are kidnapped, bought and sold into sex slavery. This is a fascinating premise in a sense - can we ever find the missing kids (and adults) sold into these elaborate, profitable trafficking schemes? Since Homeland Security is not keen on finding the kids, viewed as an impossible task, Tim becomes the founder of Operation Underground Railroad, O.U.R., an anti-trafficking non-profit rescue organization.  One of their first goals is to find the sister of "Teddy Bear," a recently found Mexican kid who was found at the Mexican border. There is a short bit here where one of their mission is to convince these traffickers that they can bring children to a wealthy guy's island. Later on, there is far more dangerous terrain in a remote part of the Amazon jungle in Colombia where a rebel enclave exists and Teddy Bear's sister is possibly being held there.

I can hardly dismiss "Sound of Freedom" and the movie does have an understated power in its best moments, especially seeing one older man carrying a drink as he's ready to take advantage of that little girl, closing the red blinds as we know what unspeakable act is about to take place. Yet the movie plays it so low-key, the outrage is so muted and so softly rendered that you only feel a modicum of anger when you hear Mexican songs sung by child-like voices. "Sound of Freedom" never gives you a rush of adrenaline or intensity with regards to such disturbing subject matter. It assumes Tim's righteousness is enough, or least the tears on Jim Caviezel's beatific face.  

I'll Be Watching You

 EAGLE EYE (2008)
Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

"Eagle Eye" is basically Shia LaBeouf running down one busy street after another with an intelligent woman in tow. They run, they hide, they drive, they run again and hide. All this time a female computer-generated voice is calling Shia's cell phone repeatedly, telling him where to go and where to be. If he doesn't answer his phone, the voice sends messages through visual bulletin boards or on highway signs, etc. "RUN" or "GO TO GATE 17" - you know, basic commands from the old days of BASIC computer language. 

How is this happening? The computer voice yields from a new surveillance system straight from the Pentagon that has gone haywire. How haywire? It not only deposits money in Shia's bank account to the tune of 750,000 dollars, in addition to sending him tons of guns and bombs in his apartment which he never gets to use, it also wants to assassinate top officials in the government starting with The President of the U.S. Now if this computer has such top-notch surveillance across all 50 states and can even kill someone by somehow cutting live power lines (!) then why does it need Shia or a poor, single mother (Michelle Monaghan) at all when it can accomplish its own dastardly methods?

This supercomputer is known as ARIIA and it is the most evil computer since HAL 9000 yet not the most challenging - how exactly did this evil technology suddenly became automated is not clear. While watching the movie's hyperkinetic Hitchcockian turns courtesy of director D.J. Caruso (who helmed the underwhelming "Disturbia," a knock-off of "Rear Window"), "Eagle Eye" is run-of-the-mill running and jumping and copious car-crashes that are at best generic with not enough of a visual eye. Headache-inducing with whirlwind use of hand-held camera moves and Michael Bay millisecond cuts, "Eagle Eye" is never believable and feels like a more high-tech version of "Enemy of the State" though any stimulating questions about government surveillance are zapped by the movie's falsely urgent explosive action scenes. You might get exhausted by the end but you'll come up empty.

Joyless Tolkien mixed with Star Wars clone

WILLOW (1988)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Sword-and-sorcery swashbuckling, epic battles on horses with spears thrown, giant castles too high to scale, revolting witches, beautiful princesses, chivalrous heroes, boar-like creatures - geez, what's not to like? "Willow" has an assembly line of all the expected tropes of such fanciful tales of yore yet there is no real sense of fun or magic. Sure, a few thrills but nothing you haven't seen done before and better. It's "Princess Bride" mixed with some "Star Wars" and that is no surprise the latter comparison, considering "Willow" is a story conceived by George Lucas.

Warwick Davis is Willow, a little person in a village full of them. His prospects are not high but he is married and, one day, finds a baby on a raft floating on the water. The villagers and some Merlin-like wizard (Billy Barty), whose tricks are not always up to snuff, decide that Willow along with another villager should take the baby back to the Kingdom of Daikini after being attacked by those aforementioned man-eating boars! Now mind you, they should be aware that Daikini is where the baby came from in the first place, and there is a cruel Queen Bavmorda (Jean Marsh) who kills mothers that send their babies out of the kingdom! Didn't anybody from this village read the Daikini Gazette? 

Along the perilous journey, Willow (who can assume wizard-like powers summoned with a stick) meets a Big Person named Madmartigan (Val Kilmer), a Han Solo-like warrior, who can be clumsy and has a sense of humor (he wears a full female costume after being caught committing adultery). Along the way we also meet a couple of Lilliputian-like people who even tie up our heroes (Gulliver's Travels, anyone?) They are known as Brownies! And you Star Wars fans went psychotically nuts when Lucas went into his midichlorians phase in "Phantom Menace"?

As you can tell, I came in late to this mediocre cinematic 1988 offering clearly pilfering from the J.R.R. Tolkien bible. There is plenty of clanging sword action, an extended battle climax with one character wearing a Skeletor-like mask and a few chase scenes that do work, but the joy is not quite there. Kilmer and Warwick Davis are up to the task and they give animated performances but the movie directed by Ron Howard never quite takes a real flight of imagination. Aside from a fire-breathing two-headed dragon, nothing in "Willow" will surprise or delight you with sights and sounds you haven't seen or heard before.   

Man Version of Events

 PRISONER'S DAUGHTER (2022)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

If it wasn't for the magnetic, ironclad presence of Brian Cox, it might be easy to turn away from this oft-told story of a rough prisoner with a horrible, criminal past who is returning home to rekindle what he lost. Yet Cox is not the only one on board; there is also Kate Beckinsale in an almost unrecognizable turn as this prisoner's troubled daughter and Christopher Convery as her intelligent, bullied son that gives this movie a higher pedigree and a few rich layers in its characterizations.

Cox is Max, a cancer-stricken prisoner who is being let out of jail to stay with his daughter since he only has a few months to live. Beckinsale is Maxine, who begrudgingly lets her dad stay with her and her smart-alecky son prone to epileptic seizures, Ezra (Christopher Convery). Naturally, this will not be a smooth transition and Max and Maxine's troubled history involving Maxine's drug-addled, suicidal, long gone mother is brimming to the surface. Max has an ankle monitor so he can't venture far from his home, and Maxine wants her son to believe he is his "uncle and not blood related." Ezra catches on fast that his uncle is his grandfather. Meanwhile, Maxine has her own problems including trouble holding down a job and dealing with Ezra's drug-addicted drummer of a dad. Ezra is being bullied at school yet it takes Max to teach his grandson how to fight back, thanks to Max's past days as an amateur boxer.

"Prisoner's Daughter" is nothing new and will not score points on originality (though I was shocked by the brutal ending) but I don't go to see movies like this for original plots. The purpose of "Prisoner's Daughter," keenly observed by director Catherine Hardwicke ("Thirteen"), is to illustrate a complicated, unsentimentally portrayed family dynamic and that is where the movie really sings. Brian Cox is absolutely credible as a prisoner with a hinted barbaric past and a desperate need to belong to a family again despite being out of the picture for 12 years. Kate Beckinsale proves what an astute actress she is, displaying calm and muted rage with knowing touches of humor to show she can recognize how awry her present situation is - her scene with Cox where she tearily mentions the parental neglect that made her into an adult is impactful. Kudos also go to Christopher Convery who conveys the weaknesses and the intelligence of a 12-year-old readying for adulthood, seeing beneath the surface of everything and always wanting to hear the "man" version of unfolding events.

Most of "Prisoner's Daughter" can be predicted yet I never felt as if I was travelling the same old waters of an aging man learning to pick up the pieces of a tough life. The actors give it enough dramatic pull and emotional honesty to make it seem new all over again.   

DISAVOWED, again and again

 MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION (2015)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

After the grandly entertaining and furiously intense "Ghost Protocol," I came in with higher expectations for "Rogue Nation," the fifth in the "Mission: Impossible" movies. I rank it higher than the first three in the series but it is not nearly as explosive as "Ghost Protocol." Still, I imagine you will not leave wanting more after it is over but you might still want more depth.

As "Rogue Nation," the crazy Tom Cruise plays the equally insane Ethan Hunt, a daredevil of an IMF agent, who has to get a "package" inside an airbus. How does he do it? He grabs onto the outside of a plane as it takes off and is waiting for his computer hacker agent, Benji (Simon Pegg, always animated and comical fun) to deactivate the door to enter. This is an astounding sequence to marvel at and you almost assume Cruise must have had a safety wire attached to him (apparently, he did not) but it is not nearly as hair-raising as the Burj Khalifa tower climbing scene from "Ghost Protocol." Nevertheless, this erratic sequel begins and eventually IMF is dissolved by a disapproving Senate committee and a blustery CIA Director Alan Hunley (Alec Baldwin) due to the IMF agents embroiled (though not responsible for) the Kremlin bombing last seen in "Ghost Protocol." Meanwhile, Ethan is nearly tortured to death before being saved by a possibly duplicitous undercover MI6 Agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) - she has been "disavowed." Hunt is a wanted man and IMF no longer has any function. "He is a man without a country," a quote I've heard many times in other similar movies but I don't go to hear original lines of dialogue in a "Mission: Impossible" movie. Everyone is always getting "disavowed" in these movies. 

"Rogue Nation" is fast becoming a nerve-jangling James Bond-type series with impossible, improbable stunts, shootings, elongated fistfights, and vehicle chases in cars and motorcycles at impossibly fast speeds. There is also an underwater sequence that almost made my heart stop. A "Turandot" opera sequence involving an assassination attempt brings up memories of Hitchcock and Puccini, both I love so I am good with seeing both. The ending is a little underwhelming which involves Britain's Prime Minister and the whole business of a data file with the identities of "The Syndicate," operatives who may have been MI6 agents, is not the most interesting MacGuffin since these movies always feature discs or encrypted data files. Of course, it all comes down to money, money, money, hence why I found it less than an enthusiastic finish.

As I said, I don't care too much about the MacGuffins but I still wanted to know more about Ethan Hunt and, after five movies, we don't know much at all. Since he is a superspy to a degree, I guess the enigma makes sense. I don't think he goes home much. 

Quarantine and aliens in an unreal town

 ASTEROID CITY (2023)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

I love reading and watching anything involving the 1950's, a time that had an implied turbulence about it without making itself manifest. There were atomic bomb testings in the desert, racism was sky high, economy was booming yet the Red Scare was full-throttle and the Roswell alleged alien ship crash was the government conspiracy of the day. Watching Wes Anderson's "Asteroid City" reminded me of the implications of an era when all seemed well, but really wasn't. Here we have people arriving at a pastel colored desert landscape spot whose only reason for existence is the novelty of an enormous impact crater. When "Asteroid City" focuses on the desert landscape, I was enthralled. When director Anderson switches to the black-and-white footage of a teleplay in progress titled "Asteroid City," I felt lost despite its clever meta narrative which is all too familiar at this point.

The fictional Southwest desert town of Asteroid City is phenomenally presented. We see the gas station, the cafe, the rock formations that look like papier mache constructs, and the various bungalows for rent. It is an astounding sequence, beautifully filmed in one take by Wes Anderson and his imaginative frequent cinematographer Robert Yeoman. Once we are set up with the characters, they are a quirky bunch that includes Jason Schwartzman as Augie Steenbeck, a war photographer who has brought along his "brainiac" son, his three daughters, and his wife's ashes in a Tupperware container; Scarlett Johansson as a movie star actress, Midge Campbell, who covers up her eye bruises with her sunglasses; General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright) who opens the Stargazer Awards ceremonies with spun tales that sound like newspaper headlines; Tom Hanks as the grandfather of Steenbeck's kids who senses serenity in this town, and Tilda Swinton as a scientist at the observatory. 

There is also Bryan Cranston as a TV host of the play "Asteroid City" though I was left aghast at the inclusion of this box-within-the box ploy. When Anderson switches to a 1.37: 1 aspect ratio of the black-and-white play and the semi-documentary about the play, I was confused and simply bewildered. What is the point of such scenes that are rather flat despite a cast that includes Willem Dafoe, Adrien Brody, Edward Norton, Margot Robbie and others. These scenes have none of the spark of inspiration from the pastel colored hues of the town itself and are rather dull. Nothing compares to the buoyancy and whimsical nature of Asteroid City and its inhabitants (one of the renters of the bungalows has to settle for a tent due to an electrical fire). In fact, many of the jokes and visual puns really work and made me laugh like the addition of several vending machines, one of which can be used to buy a small plot of land that won't be worth much for 50 years, and an alien that shows up at the crater and steals the small asteroid. I also adore the smart, alert teenagers who love science and create contraptions that could almost disintegrate someone. To top it all off, there is a military quarantine order thanks to that googly-eyed alien.

"Asteroid City" is a decent, marginally entertaining Wes Anderson flick and you'll admire its originality and its audacity. Still, the constant switches to its teleplay origins will leave you with a headache. If we are to think that this fictional city is just a construct, isn't that obvious from its placid, prefab-looking, pastel-colored setting that makes you feel like drinking a glass of orange juice or the cartoonish critter that runs through the sole road that cuts through this town? These unreal, colorful and dramatic scenes already look like a Warner Brothers cartoon. I don't need Bryan Cranston to remind me.