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Review by Daniel Lima  Not even a week ago, I was at the local independent movie theater watching a midnight showing of the Yukiihiko Tsutsumi’s Egg. An esoteric, wholly unique mix of comedy, psychological horror, and kaiju cinema shot on a shoestring budget, the film was conceived of, written and shot in the span of a month, all because a larger project had fallen through, and the crew had already been assembled with studio space rented. I couldn’t help but think about that movie as I struggled through Undertone, an indie horror film made under clear budgetary and logistical constraints, but utterly fails to achieve anything commendable even with that in mind. The film, set entirely in one house, follows a young woman taking care of her elderly, bedridden mother as she nears death’s door. At night, she records an investigative supernatural podcast with a remote partner, the skeptic to his believer. After receiving a mysterious email with ten audio files attached, the pair begin to listen and record their reactions live, revealing a terror so foul and pervasive even the skeptic cannot ignore it. At least, that’s the intent. Within a couple scenes, it is obvious what this is: yet another horror movie that withholds all the actual scares for the finale, nominally because it’s building tension up to that final release, practically because the budget is limited and their shooting in the director’s home and they want to avoid ruining it for a movie. Exacerbating this is that the recording of the podcast episode takes multiple nights, with the days spent on the podcaster’s personal drama. These scenes telegraph that there will be no attempt at even a cheap jump scare for the audience, and after the first few pump fakes any semblance of tension is irrevocably broken. If those headphones are on, you can relax. Through the daytime scenes, Undertone develops its themes, or rather pantomimes doing so. There are threads about the woman’s relationship with her dying mother, her deadbeat boyfriend, her co-host that may have a thing for her; she has an aversion to all the Catholic imagery around the house; she has a history of drinking. The bifurcated narrative and the limited setting and cast doesn’t allow for any of these ideas to be developed in a meaningful way, and they only tangentially relate to the audio she’s subjecting herself to. It gives the impression that all this is present simply to get an idea more befitting a short film to feature length, with none of these disparate elements coalescing into a greater whole.  Not that there’s much going on at night either. It seems the kernel of an idea here is to find horror in the soundscape, to conjure in the mind of the audience a nightmare more terrifying than the budget would allow to be shown. The narrative structure immediately undermines this; had the entire film taken place in one night, there would be no telling when things would escalate beyond a demonic voice or a strange noise. As it’s broken up over multiple days, you know nothing is going to happen that would force this woman to leave until the very end.
That besides, Undertone is strangely uninterested in leaning into the premise. Much of the attempts at horror and tension come not from the audio, but the visuals: the camera lingering on a dark corner of the room, a bathroom cabinet swinging open as if there will be a jump scare as soon as it closes, even a disarming use of telephoto lenses to give the house a certain depth. The actual recordings are bog standard spooky fare, a young couple seemingly dealing with demonic possession, and there is little to distinguish it from any use of creepy sounds in any other horror movie. Even in Dolby Cinema, the effect is no different from watching a Blumhouse movie with your eyes closed. It’s certainly every bit as exciting. It could be argued that all this is a casualty of being produced for under half a million dollars, not a lot of money by the standards of a theatrically released feature. You don’t have overhead for a long post-production process, or to redress the set after complicated practical effects, or to secure the rights to licensed music. That’s why the use of audio is rote in spite of its central focus, nothing actually threatens the characters until the very end, and so much time is spent on the spine-tingling malevolence of listening to public domain nursery rhymes backwards (when the co-host starts dramatically retelling the sordid history of “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” I thought about walking out). Is it not admirable that these filmmakers got a project like this to the finish line at all? No. Making a movie is certainly a gargantuan undertaking, one that can be quite materially costly, and compromising of some elements here and there is perfectly understandable. There is no budget, however, on the mind’s eye, the initial vision of an artist that then must be negotiated with to bring some semblance of it to life. Egg proves that, Skinamarink proves that, The Evil Dead proves that. There are many issues in the craft of Undertone, but the most fundamental flaw is conceptual: there is simply not enough here to support a story of any length. Undertone escapes into theaters March 13. Rating: 1/5
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Review by Daniel Lima  There was a time when the direct-to-video market was a place where low-budget action cinema flourished. The resources were meager compared to the big Hollywood productions, but they were just enough to offer a space for stuntpeople, action choreographers, and martial artists to ply their trade without the expectations that come with a big studio project. As recently as a decade ago, veteran director Isaac Florentine could deliver a solid enough action-thriller while operating in this realm; today, he can only manage Hellfire, a mere vestige of what he used to deliver. Set in the 1980s, the film follows Stephen Lang as a lone drifter who wanders into a small town infested with corruption. Both sides of the law are controlled by one man, and he’s been putting the squeeze on the townsfolk for years, forcing them to participate in his criminal operations. It just so happens that Lang has a particular set of skills that may turn the tide against this parochial tyrant. It’s no secret that the DTV market has dried up, or at least the financing for it has. These days, just about every production is working with a fraction of the budget they could command in decades past, and expected to deliver a finished product in a fraction of the time. Obviously, this isn’t an ideal way to make any film, but considering the care that needs to be taken to safely produce the brand of action Florentine had built his reputation on, the lack of time and money is felt throughout the film. Hellfire is meant to be a pseudo-Western, transplanting those familiar tropes to a more contemporary context, something Florentine has done plenty of times before. The style that he’s going for here, indebted especially to the stylish spaghetti westerns of old, depends heavily on the mise-en-scene, conjuring a sense of atmosphere, the oppressive air of a community that has turned into a desiccated husk as it caters to the whims of a cruel despot. That is largely absent, with much of the film set in a small handful of chintzy rooms, each one feeling every bit the cheap plastic set it undoubtedly is. This is the kind of movie that would greatly benefit from being shot on film, a format that would immediately lend even these staid, empty spaces some visual texture. Sadly, there’s no way a production like this would justify that expense. That’s a shame, because it’s not as if the story is holding anyone’s attention. The lack of character in the setting is reflected in the ensemble, with the town fleshed out by a pair of sympathetic bar owners, Dolph Lundgren as the feckless sheriff, a myriad of nameless citizens who appear in one scene, and Stephen Lang sleepwalking through all the dialogue. The ultimate villain stays cloistered in his mansion; his most trusted lieutenants don’t square off against Lang until the finale. That means most of the runtime is just pointless exposition reestablishing the stakes, or action scenes featuring Stephen Lang killing what amounts to the help. There are no narrative twists, no character work to speak of, simply treading water until the climax. How can the climax be exciting if there’s no emotional foundation to build off? It isn’t.  The sole bright spot this film has to offer is the action set pieces, and even that is pretty dim. Florentine comes from a classical, tactile mode of action filmmaking, famously getting his start directing the action in Power Rangers and moving on to the likes of the Undisputed sequels and the Ninja films. He likes his squibs filling the air with particulates, mixing wides in his fight scenes with close ups to emphasize certain hits, seeing his stuntmen take nasty falls from just low enough that he can shoot the start and the landing in a single shot. He is one of the few Western directors that has proven that he truly understands the language of action in cinema.
You can only do so much, however, when you’ve got a week or two at most to shoot and your budget is whatever your financiers could find under their couch cushions. The lack of breathing room in time and money mean compromises need to be made in both the action design and in the actual performances; you can’t plan out crazy choreography knowing you won’t get multiple takes to nail it, and sometimes you’ll have to settle for assembling action in post. This means even with an old master at the helm, there’s a definite ceiling for most DTV actioners these days. With that in mind, it might be a small miracle that what’s here is even serviceable. Stephen Lang performs just about as well as you can expect from a septuagenarian, and there’s some elegantly done doubling work for the myriad of things he cannot do. The shootouts boast horribly comped in muzzle flashes and a lack of bullet impacts kicking up detritus, both of which make the action feel weightless, but at least Florentine knows to use the geography of a space to its fullest extent. The fights are all decent, if a bit restrained due to the Lang’s age, and there’s some solid falls. All things considered, this is some of the best action at this level you’ll find today. What a low bar to clear. Hellfire is a victim of the modern cinematic landscape, and this corner of it has been particularly toxic to anyone attempting to make anything with a personal stamp. As disappointing as this film is, it’s hard to fault someone with a proven pedigree like Isaac Florentine, knowing how restrictive the direct-to-video industry has become. We’ll always have Undisputed III: Redemption. Hellfire is now available on digital. Rating: 2.5/5 Review by Daniel Lima  As long as I can remember, people here in the United States have brushed off any attempt at dialogue about the brutality the Palestinians face as “too complicated” to discuss; these days, numerous polls show a decline in the American public’s sympathy for Israel in the face of blatant crimes against humanity. It is appropriate, then, for a historical epic like Palestine 36 to debut, providing a context for the roots of the conflict and an unwavering assertion of the rights of these people. It is an effort not without its flaws, but even those compliment the noble goal of offering a perspective that has historically been ignored, at least in the West. The film chronicles the Arab revolt against British colonial government that began in 1936, a time where British authority disadvantaged the ingenious population in favor of Jewish refugees escaping persecution in Europe. Utilizing multiple perspectives, from sympathetic officials to fence-riding Arabs to the rural Palestinians facing attacks from both settlers and the British soldiers protecting them, a broad tapestry of the roots of current occupation and ethnic cleansing is drawn. No surprise that Palestine 36 is uncompromising and highly focused in its vision of the uprising, and how it informs what Palestine faces today. Colonialism is positioned as the root of all the violence; even the Zionist settlers are mere beneficiaries of an extractive government that fundamentally does not respect the rights of the people who call the land their home. The middle-class Palestinians that rush to placate that foreign authority are naive opportunists, insulated from the plight of their people by their own privilege, while those that take up arms do so because there is no legal recourse in a system that treats them as voiceless. The clarity of this perspective is undeniably refreshing today, when the Israeli government and its Western allies do their best to demonize those in the West Bank and Gaza, and pretend the barbarism we see today is the latest in an unending cycle of violence with no end, no beginning, and no culprit. It will undoubtedly chafe some people that this film offers little nuance in its depiction of the era. Though the film gives the character with the ugliest moral outlook all the pro-Zionist dialogue, the decision to fixate on the British role in the conflict avoids contending with thornier questions about the rights of the Zionist settlers, and by extension sidesteps a conversation about the Zionist cause. Even if one is sympathetic to the struggle for Palestinian freedom, it does bear mentioning that the justification for their present-day oppression is often filtered through the lens of Zionism, ignoring the conditions that brought the state of Israel to being (namely, the apparent need for a Jewish state in the face of persecution balanced against the lack of Palestinian self-determination). Similarly, there are few hints of animosity against the Jewish settlers among the Arabs, a massaging of historical truth that allows the resistance to be seen as valiant freedom fighters against the colonial government and nothing more. It is true that this tale lacks the moral complexity of the likes of The Battle of Algiers, which managed to avoid any accusation of bothsiderism in an anti-colonial war for independence without sanding away the moral dimensions of that conflict. That being said, the same calls for nuance are heard plenty in real life, for years it has been the de facto establishment-friendly response in the West to any questioning of the Israeli occupation. That this is a mainstream movie, following the template of nationalist epics the world over, but rooting it from the perspective of a nation whose very existence still remains unrecognized by nearly a quarter of the world’s governments, means that even this uncomplicated narrative provides some measure of balance. In any case, falling short of one of the greatest anti-imperialist works in cinema is no great failure.  If the narrative goals of Palestine 36 can be excused, however, the same cannot be said of their execution. The film’s multi-pronged approach to its depiction of the uprising affords it a large cast of characters, representing the social strata of Palestine at the time. Unfortunately, this expansive ensemble precludes examining any of them in great depth, leaving them defined more by their archetypical role in the story than by their personalities. All the actors do what they can to lend these characters a sense of history beyond the script (the British performers in particular relish their villainous roles), but they can only do so much.
Production of this film began in Palestine, moved to Jordan for a year after the October 7th attacks and the subsequent upscaling of Israeli violence in Gaza, and then continued in Palestine in stops and starts. Considering those difficulties, it’s surprising to see how solidly crafted the end result is. The stately, pristine cinematography captures the majesty of the country’s landscapes, and the location shooting lends the film a great sense of place. All the period details, the crisp British uniforms against the traditional Arab fashion of the farmers against the Western attire of the urbane elites, the bombast of the action set pieces, all of these elements show the same level of polish as any nationalist wartime epic of today. For a movie shot in the midst of a warzone to be comparable to the likes of expensive productions from global superpowers, the likes of India’s 120 Bahadur and China’s Dead to Rights, is certainly impressive. That is something of a double-edged sword. As technically proficient as those films are, they boast few idiosyncrasies, personal touches that would make them more than self-aggrandizing monuments to their nation’s glory. Their slickness and precision naturally preclude any aesthetic flourish that might clash with the expectations of a general audience, limiting the chance that any of these movies would stand out from one another. That same aversion is present here, and coupled with the streamlined narrative that forgoes both complicated characters and themes, it makes for a rather conventional, safe kind of prestige movie. Putting aside the context that it is a Palestinian film shot in Palestine, there is little here to differentiate it from any number of jingoistic blockbusters. Yet there is something commendable in even that. Every year, there is a deluge of chest-thumping nationalist screeds from America, India, China, powerful nations whose sovereignty goes unquestioned yet feel the need to produce epics portraying them as scrappy underdogs fighting against tyranny. Palestine 36 takes on the uncompromising affect of those films, but in the service of a people who have not had the right of self-determination for nearly a millennium. In adopting the tack of nationalist cinema the world over, this film asserts that the Palestinian people exist, that their culture endures in spite of inhumane restrictions, and they are as deserving of empathy and respect as any other. Palestine 36 is now in theaters. Rating: 3/5 Review by Daniel Lima  It’s hard being a Ric Roman Waugh auteurist. You spend years championing his particular brand machismo-melodrama, slow burns about men attempting to leave a violent past behind, or otherwise living on the fringes of society with only the faintest grasp on their morality. You see the glimpses of something great, but none of his projects fully succeed in delivering on the promise of a methodical action-thriller. You see he has a new film starring Jason Statham, one of the most reliable leads working in action cinema today, capable of elevating the most humdrum programmer into something at least passable. Then you sit through Shelter and despair, because you’ve run out of excuses to make for such shoddy, dull work. Statham is a man with a mysterious past, living alone in an isolated lighthouse, who finds himself taking care of an injured teenage girl. Unfortunately, sleeping dogs never lie, and so the two find themselves on the run. The grizzled man desperately trying to keep the girl safe while figuring out who exactly is after him. One would expect that a movie like this would move at a breakneck pace, introducing Statham’s man of few words with only the most economical storytelling before throwing him into a constant barrage of violence. Shelter studiously ignores the impulse to be that crowd pleaser, instead taking on the air of a contemplative, po-faced drama, more Michael Mann than David Ayer. The film slowly builds out the banality of Statham’s life before the girl is thrust into his care, then labors through her slow recovery process. The spy thriller B-plot is handed with a cold remove, lots of people in barren rooms spouting dry exposition about “assets” and “national security risks”. Even the action is pared down from the usual fare, slow moving car chases and minute-long fistfights.  For the Ric Roman Waugh defender, this is par the course. All his films tend to take on this dreary affect, reflected not only through narrative, dialogue, and visual aesthetic, but how any given scene moves. This one is no different, replete with agonizingly long silences, shot-reverse shots of people looking very seriously at each other, characters repeating actions and lines in a way that seems calculated to artificially inflate the runtime. In a roundabout way, this muted approach almost achieves the same kind of delayed gratification one gets when watching Jeanne Dielman; even the lamest half-quip out of Statham is like a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart, every bit exciting as a middle-aged woman that forgets to do a household chore.
The problem is the bones of Shelter lack the nuances and thematic richness of a Jeanne Dielman, or a Heat, or even a The Beekeeper. This film is structured like any number of generic, skull-brained action-thrillers about gruff, shadowy men who learn to open their hearts to some innocent soul. The dialogue is filled with nothing but cliches, particularly in the scenes away from Statham, which seem to only be there out of obligation to what is expect of these kinds of stories. The deepening relationship between Statham and his young charge is an informed trait, as they two lack any chemistry and the film skips over any emotional intimacy the two share before the bullets start flying. None of this is an issue in a lean, muscular action B-movie, the kind that Statham can elevate even when everyone else is asleep at the wheel. When a film begs to be taken as seriously as this one, however, it is impossible to reconcile the stupidity of these individual elements with the attempt at dramatic gravity. The latter undermines the former, and the former sucks all the charming camp of the latter. The end result is a grueling, taxing chimeric beast, satisfying to neither the audience looking for a meat-and-potatoes slugfest nor someone looking for more elevated fare. I’d like to say that Waugh still has a great film in him. Even within this rather poor outing, I can see an artist attempting to do something novel, just with material that is ill-suited for the experiment. After enduring the likes of Shelter, however, I am walking into the next attempt with great trepidation. Shelter releases in theaters January 30. Rating: 1.5/5 Review by Daniel Lima  There’s no way around it: I’m a big fan of Doug Liman’s 2014 film Edge of Tomorrow, a sci-fi action blockbuster whose status as a modern genre classic belies its financial disappointment. I was aware that it was an adaptation of a Japanese light novel with a much cooler name. One might assume that the new animated film from Japan that actually shares that name, All You Need Is Kill, is the more faithful adaptation. Surprisingly, it reinterprets key elements of the original novel that the American studio film held true to. Even more surprising, it’s rather underwhelming as a result. Where the original story followed a pair of soldiers repeating a single day in a losing war humanity is fighting with an alien invader, this adaptation recontextualizes the pair as part of a research team, investigating an alien structure that had appeared on Earth a year prior. On the day that strange creatures emerge from the structure and begin their assault, the pair find themselves awakening every time they perish. They then attempt to work together to break the loop, and give humanity a fighting chance. This is a Studio 4°C production, a studio known for an idiosyncratic blend of animation styles. This film relies heavily on computer-generated animation mixed with traditional animation, yet the former evokes the latter so well that looking for the seams outside of the action set pieces is a challenge. The art style contrasts with both the original light novel and the Hollywood adaptation, eschewing the grim militaristic look in favor of a bright, colorful palette that accentuates the strange extraterrestrial nature of the threat. Moments of surreal imagery that breaks from reality abound, and the CG animation allows for a fluidity of motion that can lead to some exciting action. That said, the visual aesthetic is not groundbreaking in the same way something like Mind Game was received. As impressive as it all is, it comes across as another example of this kind of action anime; even for someone not particularly well-versed in the medium, I couldn’t help but think of the work of Mamoru Hosada, or shows like Chainsaw Man. That’s not to say that it’s bad, just that it’s not revolutionary.  Of course, most films are not revolutionary. The issue is that the visuals of All You Need Is Kill are not enough to paper over the narrative weaknesses. At barely over eighty minutes, there is precious little time to do all the legwork necessary to an audience to emotionally invested in the story.
The protagonist Rita is a decidedly generic, emotionally withdrawn loner; sidekick Kenji is more fleshed out on paper, but so much of the film is devoted to the time loop machinations that not much is spent exploring who he is. The others working at their organization, their supposed compatriots who they are forced to see live and die again and again, get even less than that. That’s in keeping with who the pair being self-imposed social outcasts, but it also fails to flesh out the world that is under threat. That leaves Rita and Kenji’s goal of breaking the loop to feel more about themselves than about humanity, and they are too thinly written for that to be compelling. That said, even the scant time spent on characterization is a large chunk of a movie that is already so short. Inherent to all time loop narratives is the struggle to find meaning in an unceasing deluge of monotony, in this case tinged with fatalism. What’s the point of getting out of bed when the day is going to be just a repeat of the last, filled with pain and misery and death? To nail this particular emotional beat, a story needs to in some way capture that sense of tedium. This film does not achieve that, partly because the lack of narrative runway, but also because the poppy visuals and dynamic animation fail to conjure the oppressively monotonous atmosphere that is required. It might be a bit rich for the American to claim the superiority of an American adaptation targeting an American audience, but Edge of Tomorrow avoided all these missteps. The film is just long enough to give the character work time to breath, the two leads have real depth, it takes care to establish the supporting ensemble if only to give more emotional stake to the protagonist, the gritty mil-tech aesthetic sells the draining repetition of the loop. For all the strength of its visual flourishes, All You Need Is Kill is frustratingly unmoored from any sense of gravity. All You Need Is Kill is now in theaters. Rating: 3/5 |