INCONCEIVABLE (2017) **

Brian (Nicolas Cage) and Angela (Gina Gershon) are a wealthy couple whose child was conceived by in vitro fertilization.  When Angela decides to go back to work, they hire a friend of a friend named Katie (Nicky Whelan, who has a topless scene) to be their live-in nanny.  Brian and Angela decide to try for another baby, and they ask Katie to be their surrogate.  Unbeknownst to the couple, she has an ulterior (and deadly) motive.  

Inconceivable is basically an updating of the old Nanny from Hell trope from the ‘90s.  Actually, “updating” is the wrong word because nothing has been updated.  Merely rehashed.  The big twist is also predictable, especially if you’ve seen more than one Lifetime Original Movie.

It’s good seeing Gershon and Cage together again two decades after their appearance in Face/Off.  It’s particularly nice to see Gershon in a leading role.  If you came to the party hoping the third-billed Cage partakes in his usual Cagey activities, you’re bound to be disappointed as he’s relegated to the stock “husband” role.  Faye Dunaway has some good moments though as Gershon’s meddling mother in-law, who doesn’t trust the nanny as far as she can throw her.

This was the directing debut of Jonathan Baker (who also appears in a small role).  If you’re a fan of reality shows, you’ll know he was the asshole on The Amazing Race.  I don’t know about that because I don’t watch reality shows, but he has a workmanlike style and a straightforward approach that befits the standard-issue material.  More interesting is that the screenwriter was none other than Zoe King, daughter of Red Shoe Diaries czar Zalman King, who also wrote Poison Ivy 2 back in the day.

Inconceivable is competently put together.  The actors turn in respectable performances.  It’s just all rather unremarkable.  Ultimately, Inconceivable is forgettable.  

AKA:  Unthinkable.  

SUSPIRIA (2018) **

Director Luca (Call Me By Your Name) Guadagnino’s remake of Dario Argento’s iconic Suspiria is an odd duck.  It’s almost as if Guadagnino took a look at Argento’s film and did the exact opposite.  Gone is the original’s colorful look.  The color palette here is muted, mostly with a lot of drab browns and beiges.  Goblin’s searing, pulsating score has been replaced with Thom Yorke’s somber tones.  Argento’s bloody death sequences have been traded out for some relatively bloodless scenes (well, until the end that is).

Guadagnino’s approach is closer to a Roman Polanski psychological slow burn than Argento’s poppy, brightly colored waking nightmare.  I get that Guadagnino was trying to distance his picture from Argento’s so it could stand on its own.  It’s just that it’s so different that it makes you wonder why he didn’t just make his own movie unconnected to the original.  

The basic plot is the same.  Susie (Dakota Johnson) comes to a dance school and uncovers a plot by the secret society of witches that run the place.  Having Tilda Swinton playing the headmistress was a nice touch.  It’s just the theory is better than the execution.  I mean having Swinton playing multiple roles seemed like a sure bet.  Anyone who bets enough will tell you the house wins eventually.

There’s also a heavy emphasis on dancing, which is fine.  I guess.  Even though in doing so it makes the movie feel like a David Lynch remake of A Chorus Line.  There was no goddamn reason it needed to be over two and a half hours though.  I kept asking myself, “When is something going to happen?”  When it did, it was wild enough to keep me watching (and awake).  Mostly, it’s just a slog in between the good stuff.  Oh, and did we need the Epilogue that was nothing more than an Exposition Dump to stuff that really didn’t need to be explained in the first place?  

Another problem is the character of Susie.  There is nothing wrong with Johnson’s performance as she is only working with what she was given (which wasn’t much).  It’s that her sole focus is dancing, which makes her character wafer thin.  

I wanted to love Suspiria.   Although I love the original, I was receptive and open to a reimagining.  Guadagnino’s film just never clicked for me.  The slow burn is a bit too slow and the burn is more of a fleeting spark than a sustained ember.  The ending is a bit of a letdown too and isn’t scary in the least, unless you think the sight of old women’s boobs are immediately scary.

CRASHING LAS VEGAS (1956) **

The forty-first installment in the long-running Bowery Boys franchise finds Slip (Leo Gorcey) and Sach (Huntz Hall) trying to get enough money to save Mrs. Kelly’s boarding house.  When Sach receives a huge electric shock, it gives him the inexplicable ability to predict numbers.  Slip makes him go on a game show and thanks to his uncanny gift, the boys wind up winning a trip to Las Vegas.  They then set out to win a fortune in the casino, and naturally become targets for unscrupulous gangsters.

Directed by Jean Yarborough (who directed many Abbott and Costello comedies), Crashing Las Vegas is a typical Bowery Boys entry.  It features Sach getting into fantastic misadventures while Slip rattles off a series of quips and malapropisms.  The laughs are sparse for the most part.  The best stretch comes when Sach gets mixed up with a gangster’s moll played by Mary Castle (who has sort of an Adele Jergens quality about her).  The fantasy sequence involving the Boys in prison stripes playing a game of “Musical Electric Chairs”, is amusing, but it feels like it came out of another movie.  Even though it’s consistently inconsistent, it’s nowhere near the bottom of the Bowery Boys barrel.

Unfortunately, Crashing Las Vegas is memorable for all the wrong reasons.  This was the final appearance in the series for Gorcey.  Still hurting from the recent death of his father (who also appeared in many of their movies), he apparently drowned his sorrows in drink.  He spent most of the filming drunk and was fired from the movie halfway through.  He’s clearly hammered in some scenes (most notably in the casino and hotel sequences) and slurs his dialogue, which lends a depressing pall over the film.  

Look fast for Three Stooges straight man Emil Sitka in a bit part during the game show scene.

HIGH SCHOOL U.S.A. (1983) **

Michael J. Fox stars as the class cut-up who draws the ire of the school preppie (Anthony Edwards) when he falls in love with his girlfriend (Nancy McKeon, who was in Poison Ivy with Fox two years later).  Naturally, Edwards gets jealous, and plays a prank on Fox that lands him in detention.  Michael J. then challenges him to a drag race to settle the matter once and for all.

I’m kind of a sucker for these all-star Made for TV movies, especially ones that have teenage casts chockful of ‘80s stars.  Even with my predisposition for the genre, High School U.S.A. left me a little cold.  I wanted to like it, but it’s high on clichés and low on laughs.

Still, it’s worth watching solely for the incredible cast.  I mean where else are you going to see Bob Denver and Crispin Glover playing father and son?  There’s also Tony Dow as the principal, Dawn Wells as a home economics teacher, David Nelson as the janitor and Dana Plato, Todd Bridges, and Crystal Bernard as students.  Seeing all these familiar faces in one place has its charms.  If only they had some decent material to work with.  

High School U.S.A. is sprawling and ramshackle.  It’s at its best when it’s focusing on the students, but it unwisely gets bogged down with a lot of unnecessary subplots involving the teachers.  Director Rod (The Garbage Pail Kids) Amateau sets up the gags in an obvious manner and many of the punchlines are foregone conclusions.  It may be an ‘80s movie, but most of the clichés (like the drag race finale) come straight out of the ‘50s.

It’s not all bad though.  I liked Bridges’ robot, who at one point, falls in love with a soda machine.  There’s also a scene where the girls spy on the boys in the locker room for a change.  No matter what you think of High School U.S.A., it does have a scene where Michael J. Fox saves Crispin Glover from a bully two years before he did the same thing in Back to the Future, so it has that going for it.  

A TV pilot, which featured some of the same cast members playing different characters, followed the next year.

ARMED RESPONSE (2017) *

The government covertly sets up several “temples” around the globe. These temples are high-tech rendition centers that utilize a super computer to extract information from terrorists.  (It’s kind of like a liar detector on steroids.) When one of the temples mysteriously go offline, Wesley Snipes enlists the help of its inventor (David Annable) to figure out what happened.  Snipes and his team gain access to the temple and find the temple’s security team dead.  The computer then locks Snipes and his crew inside and sets out to make them its next victims.

Director John Stockwell sets everything up economically enough, but once Snipes and company arrive at the temple, it becomes a shitty Guys with Guns Walking Around in the Dark movie.  Speaking of dark, the whole movie is so dark at times that it’s difficult to tell what the hell is going on.  (The overuse of shaky-cam footage captured from GoPro cameras attached to the soldiers’ helmets and guns gets nauseating almost instantly.)  It’s a big departure for Stockwell whose bread and butter is brightly-lit movies such as Blue Crush and Into the Blue.

The horror elements that rear their head in the second half are painfully half-assed too.  It’s sort of like a variation on those Your Worst Fear Can Kill You movies.  When you finally see what the hell it is that’s been attacking them, it’s a fucking joke.  There are a few gore scenes in the final act, but it’s too late in the game to make much of a difference.

Obscured behind a pair of big sunglasses and a low brimmed hat and speaking in an overly gravelly voice, Snipes rightfully tries to hide his face for most of the movie.  Gene Simmons is equally unrecognizable in a small role, and Anne Heche looks miserable as Snipes’ second in command.  I can’t say I blame any of them.  Since it was a WWE production, you’ve got to have a wrestler in there somewhere.  That dubious dishonor goes to Seth Rollins, who skates by from just acting like he’s still in the ring.

Stockwell is a talented filmmaker.  He recently made the Kickboxer remake, which was tons of fun.  Armed Response on the other hand, is just a dark, dreary, murky mess.  

LORNA (1964) ** ½

Lorna (Lorna Maitland) is an impossibly stacked, hopelessly bored housewife trapped in an unsatisfying relationship with Jim (James Rucker) who yearns for some excitement in her dreary life.  She gets more than she bargained for when an escaped convict (Mark Bradley) has his way with her while her hubby is at work.  At first, she tries to fight him off, but it doesn’t take long before they’re playing house together.  Predictably, it ends in tragedy when Jim comes home early and finds them in the throes of passion.

Lorna is a prototypical Russ Meyer movie.  It was a transitional film for Russ, seeing him moving away from the nudie-cuties of his early work and heading into his southern-fried gothic melodrama phase.  It doesn’t quite have all his hallmarks yet (the editing isn’t nearly as rapid-fire as it would later become), but there are certainly shades of his future greatness here.

Meyer’s eye for beautiful compositions (both of the female form and the landscapes of nature) is as strong as ever.  The cinematography is crisp, and the film is quite gorgeous to look at.  I also enjoyed the narrative device of the fire and brimstone preacher (Jim Griffith) who narrates and casts judgment upon our characters.  

Maitland is good at projecting her character’s isolation, yearning, and loneliness.  She holds her end of the film.  Bradley is sort of a bore as her husband, but Hal Hopper has his moments as Jim’s drunk co-worker.

I said earlier Lorna is a transitional film.  Like most transitions, not everything is quite worked out and fully formed.  For example, the scenes of Lorna’s cuckold husband getting made fun of at work isn’t nearly as hard-hitting and involving as the stuff with Lorna and the convict.  It all ends in a typically violent, highly moralistic Meyer fashion.  I can’t say it’s totally successful, but it’s interesting seeing Meyer forging the building blocks that would become the foundation of his entire career.

AFTERMATH (2017) ****

Roman (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is devasted by the loss of his family when they are killed in a mid-air collision.  Jake (Scoot McNairy) is the air traffic controller who was on duty when the accident took place.  Lonely, hurt, and shunned by the unsympathetic airline, Roman turns his rage on Jake and sets out to make him pay.

This sounds like a roundabout Death Wish clone, but nothing could be further from the truth.  Aftermath is not your average revenge movie.  It is a dour, grim and depressing tragedy that also happens to be quite moving and powerful.  (It was also based on a true incident.)

Roman ranks among Arnold’s best performances.  The moment we realize this isn’t going to be your typical Arnold picture is when he receives the news his family is dead, and he faints.  Now, we’ve seen Arnold knocked out, shot, melted, and even bested by Batman, but I think this is the first time we’ve seen him faint on camera.  We’ve certainly never seen him this vulnerable, ragged and wounded.  

What makes Aftermath so gripping is that Jake isn’t a bad guy.  The accident was horrible, but it really isn’t even his fault.  He just happened to be on duty when it happened.  Try telling that to Roman though. 

Both men are experiencing unfathomable grief.  One is suffering the loss of immediate loved ones.  The other is feeling responsible for a catastrophic loss of life.  Both flirt with the possibility of suicide but relent before giving themselves over to death’s embrace.  The scenes of both men contemplating suicide are powerful and goes to show how they are forever linked to the tragedy.

The real villains are the airline’s lawyers who want to sweep the incident under the rug and pay off the victims’ families.  Roman doesn’t want any of that.  He just wants them to apologize.  And maybe look at a photo of his family.  In the long run, it’s not that much to ask, especially considering what happens in the end.

Even then, the ending doesn’t go as you’d expect.  You get a sense that maybe if Roman caught up with Jake a few months sooner things, things would’ve gone differently.  That’s what makes the ending a tragedy instead of an ordinary drama. 

I have a feeling that if anyone other than Arnold was in the lead role, Aftermath would’ve probably had some awards buzz.  It’s frank, grim, and unrelenting, and an excellent showcase for his skills.  Because Arnold was in the role, it was probably dismissed for being just another action flick.  Let me tell you, this is anything but.  It’s a well-executed gut-punch of a movie.  It would also make a good Arnold double feature with Maggie as both films are about as bleak as they come. 

AKA:  478.  AKA:  Aftermath:  Impact.