THE WILD WORLD OF TED V. MIKELS (2008) ***

The Wild World of Ted V. Mikels is a fast-moving and fun documentary on the legendary B movie director.  Narrated by none other than John Waters, it gives us all the basic biography stuff you’d expect.  Mikels starts out in show business as a magician before trying his hand at directing.  When no Hollywood jobs are available, Ted brings Hollywood to him and independently makes his first movie, Strike Me Deadly.  Thus, a long and lucrative career is born.

The movie does a good job tackling Mikels’ work film by film (although his early skin flicks are noticeably absent) in a short span of time (it’s just over an hour long).  This isn’t a revolutionary approach or anything, but it makes for a nice overview of his career.  It helps that Mikels himself is a good interview subject.  With his finely waxed mustache, he has an engaging presence, and it’s easy to see how his offscreen personality transfers into his work.  I especially loved the stories revolving around his castle, which housed a revolving door of babes who kept him company for decades.  How many directors do you know of had a floating harem like that?  

The biggest attraction is seeing a lot of footage from Mikels’ movies.  There are trailer snippets from Strike Me Deadly, The Astro-Zombies, The Corpse Grinders, The Doll Squad, and Angel of Vengeance, and whole scenes from The Black Klansman, The Girl in Gold Boots (“I had a pretty mind!”), Blood Orgy of the She-Devils, Alex Joseph and His Wives, Ten Violent Women, and Mission:  Killfast.  His shoddy, latter-day, shot-on-video films like Mark of the Astro-Zombies, Dimension in Fear, The Corpse Grinders 2, and Demon Haunt are also well-represented, which is good to see, if only from a completist’s standpoint.

Mikels offers up some great anecdotes along the way.  Among them, having to cut Peter Falk out of The Astro-Zombies because he thought his performance was too hammy.  Mikels also states that Aaron Spelling attended the premiere of The Doll Squad and claims that Spelling’s Charlie’s Angels (which premiered four years later) is a complete rip off of his film.  (He’s right, too.)  He also talks about coming up with gimmicks (like inviting theater patrons to create their own corpse grinding machine) for The Corpse Grinders. The interviews with Mikels’ leading ladies, such as Tura Satana, Francine York, and Shanti are insightful too.

I can’t say this is the definitive documentary on Mikels.  It’s probably as good as we’re likely to get though.  If you’re unfamiliar with Mikels’ work, this should make a great primer.  

DERBY (1970) **

I grew up watching roller derby on television and really loved it as a kid.  I even try to catch it whenever it periodically gets revived through the years.  There’s just something about seeing people beating the crap out of each other while roller skating that appeals to me.

Derby is a documentary on the sport.  It follows a guy named Mike Snell who’s trying break into the business.  Mike seems like a regular guy, but there’s something a bit sneaky about him.  We never seen without his shades, which make him look kind of like a beatnik.  (He claims they’re prescription.)  Maybe it’s the fact that we can’t see his eyes that makes him seem like he’s not on the up-and-up.

We also spend time with Charlie O’Connell, the star of the circuit.  He’s an older, wiser, and more experienced skater.  He’s also not a whole lot of fun.  Although O’Connell has a degree of charisma when he’s on the track and while he’s holding court in the locker room among the other players, he comes off as stiff and uncomfortable in his interview segments.  It’s easy to see why the director wanted to focus more on Mike.  I mean he’s not exactly likeable, but it makes for a better interview subject.

Derby is at its most involving when the women jammers are on track.  Like Skinamax movies, roller derby is more interesting when the women are front and center.  Too bad they’re barely featured.  Later filmmakers realized the women skaters were infinitely more interesting when they made the fictionalized women’s roller derby classics The Unholy Rollers, Kansas City Bomber, and Whip It.  I guess the genre was still finding its footing here.

The roller derby action is captured well enough.  However, the scenes where the camera is in thick of the action is obviously staged.  I mean the players wouldn’t be allowed to have camera on the track during regulation play. 

The biggest problem is that the movie has no real drive.  It just kind of ambles along; sometimes taking weird detours leading to dead end scenes that only act as padding.  (The love triangle between some go-go dancers and Mike’s long talk with a soldier just home from Vietnam particularly stick out like sore thumbs.)  Overall, Derby only occasionally comes to life when the jammers are doing their thing on the track.  Mostly though, it just goes around in circles 

AKA:  Roller Derby.

WELCOME TO THE PUNCH (2013) **

James McAvoy stars as an obsessed cop who will stop at nothing to bring down bank robber Mark Strong.  McAvoy is wounded in an unsuccessful attempt to apprehend him and Strong completely disappears off the face of the earth.  Three years later, Strong’s son winds up getting in a serious jam, forcing him out of hiding.  It’s then up to McAvoy to catch him before his very narrow window of opportunity closes.

Welcome to the Punch is a slick looking police procedural that benefits from some crisp cinematography, but it’s also curiously empty and surprisingly uninvolving.  It often feels like a BBC cop show with a couple of F-Bombs tossed in there to secure an R rating.  The various shootouts occur at a random clip and are staged efficiently enough.  It’s just that they don’t add up to a whole lot when you care very little about what’s going on around them.  

I’m a fan of both leads, and they do what they can with the material.  Ultimately, the weak script never gives them much of an opportunity to flesh out their thin characters.  The predictable plot, while well-paced, never stops long enough to make them into people you really care about either.  They wind up feeling more like cogs in the wheels of the plot machinery than actual human beings.  Andrea (Mandy) Riseborough fares the best as McAvoy’s spunky partner.  She comes the closest to creating someone approaching a three-dimensional character, but unfortunately, she doesn’t stick around long enough for that to happen.

Welcome to the Punch isn’t necessarily a bad movie.  It’s just a predictable and forgettable one.  It’s competently crafted and well-acted, I’ll give it that.  Overall, it doesn’t pack much of a punch.

AKA:  Punch 119.  AKA:  Betrayer.  

SPENSER CONFIDENTIAL (2020) ***

As a fan of detective novels, I’m almost ashamed to say I’ve never read any of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser books.  I did, however, watch the awesome show Spenser for Hire starring the one and only Robert Urich with my old man back in the day.  This new adaptation of the character (which went straight to Netflix) doesn’t quite have the same feel to it, but it is nevertheless a solid Marky Mark movie.

Marky Mark stars as Spenser, a cop who goes to prison for beating up a corrupt superior.  On the day he gets out of jail, the dude he turned into a human punching bag gets murdered.  When a good cop confesses to the crime and commits suicide, Spenser smells a rat.  He then teams up with his new roommate Hawk (Winston Duke) to weave through the web of corruption that involves dirty cops, the Irish Mob, and machete-wielding gang members to clear the good cop’s name.  

The first half hour or so of Spenser Confidential is a little rough as it takes an inordinate amount of time to set up the plot and characters. Although the first act is kind of belabored, once we get to know the characters and the writing hits its stride, it becomes quite fun.  (It kind of reminded me of a television pilot in that respect.)  It also suffers from way too many irritating needle-drops on classic rock tunes during transition scenes.

I wasn’t sure how to feel about Marky Mark as Spenser.  He doesn’t really click until the murder plot kicks in.  From then on, he becomes as good of a Spenser as you could hope for.  He has a good rapport with Duke, who is probably the best thing about the movie.  There’s enough chemistry between the two for me to hope for a sequel, now that the cumbersome origin story is out of the way.  

The supporting players are expertly cast too and help give the picture a little more life and spark than you’d expect.  Alan Arkin is quite funny as Spenser’s crochety mentor, who practically steals the show, and Marc Maron makes a welcome turn as a nosy reporter (although you kind of wish his part was bigger).  I also enjoyed seeing Colleen Camp popping up as a trucker.

Director Peter Berg probably will never regain the heights of his directorial debut, Very Bad Things, but he does a decent job with this.  He lets the small character moments play out unrushed and keeps the camera still during the various fight scenes and shootouts.  While I wish the film overall was a bit tighter, I have to admit that by the time Spenser was bearing down on the bad guys in a jet-black semi-truck, I was having fun.

MIDNIGHT SPECIAL (2016) ****

Jeff Nichols’ Midnight Special is a quiet, patient, and powerful movie.  It doesn’t insult the audience’s intelligence by spelling everything out for them.  It unfolds like a fine novel, offering the viewer warm characterizations, uplifting moments, and genuine surprises along the way.  

Taken at face value, it is an amalgam of John Carpenter’s Starman, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Mark L. Lester’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Firestarter.  There are moments here that freely borrows elements from all three pictures, but Nichols distills their best qualities into one package, and skillfully weaves them together into a wholly unique tapestry of road picture, family drama, and sci-fi wonderment.  

The set-up is simple.  Michael Shannon enlists the help of Joel Edgerton to rescue his son (Jaeden Lieberher) from the clutches of a cult who believes the boy is the ticket to their salvation.  Shannon knows of his son’s special gifts and is desperately trying to reunite him with his mother, played by Kirsten Dunst.  Meanwhile, the FBI is after them and the cult members are also in hot pursuit.  

Like Nichols’ previous collaborations with Shannon, Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter, Midnight Special is a movie about the power of belief and the courage to follow your convictions, even if it borders on fanatism.  I loved how driven both Shannon and Edgerton were that the kid is special and worth risking their lives for.  You don’t even necessarily have to show what makes him so special (although they don’t waste much time doing so) because Shannon and Edgerton believe it so much that you immediately find yourself believing as well.  You instantly get swept up with the characters and are rooting for them every step of the way.  

This is kind of a perfect movie.  The fact that it failed to find an audience at the box office goes to show that.  I can easily imagine someone stumbling upon it on cable and getting hooked into it.  You don’t find great movies.  Great movies find you.  Midnight Special is going to stick with me for a long, long time.

HAPPY DEATH DAY 2U (2019) * ½

There’s a scene about halfway through Happy Death Day 2U where the heroine Tree (Jessica Rothe) says, “I am so done with this shit.”  After watching this back to back with the original, I was starting to feel the same way. 

It begins with a minor character from Happy Death Day finding himself experiencing the same time loop that Tree was stuck inside.  After a lot of longwinded exposition and boring scenes of characters spouting unending scientific gobbledygook about alternate dimensions and multiverses, Tree winds up stuck in a parallel universe that almost (but not quite) resembles her own.  Unfortunately, that means she is still stuck in a perpetual loop where gets killed on a daily basis.  It’s then up to her boyfriend and his team of science nerds to send Tree back to her own time before the psycho in the baby mask finishes her for good.    

The first thing you notice about Happy Death Day 2U is that Rothe looks considerably older than she did in the first movie.  I don’t know if this was done on purpose.  I guess it makes sense since she’s literally been through Hell dozens of times.  My guess is that you can only make a thirtysomething actress look like a college student for so long.

Like its predecessor, Happy Death Day 2U rips off Groundhog Day once again.  This time, it’s even more blatant, especially in the scene where Tree kills herself over and over again.  (Right down to the bathtub suicide.)  At least these moments have some blood (like the woodchipper scene), unlike the bone-dry original.  The movie doesn’t stop at ripping off Groundhog Day.  It also borrows from Halloween 2, lifts the killer reveal from Scream, and the score blatantly steals from Back to the Future. 

Overall, Happy Death Day 2U is more chaotic and less cohesive than the first movie.  Clocking in at a whopping 100 minutes, it’s also overlong to boot.  Still, I’d say it’s slightly better than the original, if only because the scenes of Tree reconnecting with her dead mother hit an emotional chord that was sorely missing the first time around.  It doesn’t completely redeem the character of Tree (who’s just as annoying as she was in Part 1), but it does show that Rothe has a bit more range than you might have originally thought.

AKA:  Happy Birthdead 2 You.

HAPPY DEATH DAY (2017) *

Happy Death Day is a slasher version of Groundhog Day.  That premise is so idiotic and yet so simple that you can imagine a creatively bankrupt Hollywood exec hearing the pitch and then greenlighting it immediately.  The problem is, it’s all pitch and no movie.  

A thoroughly annoying college student (Jessica Rothe) wakes up on her birthday and is killed by a stalker wearing a baby mask.  She then wakes up on the same day and is forced to relive her murder again and again.  Each time she tries to outrun her destiny, the jackass baby face is still is somehow able to kill her.

I can’t believe this became a big hit and spawned a sequel.  Like I said, it’s so idiotic and simple that it just stands to reason that it would clean up with the teenage bubblegum crowd that wouldn’t know a real horror movie if it bit them.  I guess the premise could’ve been tolerated if the gore factor was jacked up or there was a bunch of nudity.  As it is, it’s another one of those watered-down PG-13 deals, so the kills (which almost always revolve around Rothe) are bloodless and weak, and the only nude scene is shown from the back.  

Much of the problem is due to Rothe, who kind of resembles an off-brand Bella Thorne.  Her character is so unlikeable, you’re actually rooting for her to get offed.  Unfortunately, the movie can’t even deliver on that because the kills are like something out of a CW show.  

I mean, her character’s name is “Tree” for fuck’s sake.  At first, I thought it was a nickname.  Like she was an ecology nut.  Or perhaps it was short for something, but no.  Her name is fucking Tree.  I think the moment that cemented my hatred of her came when the characters discuss Groundhog Day and she has no clue what they’re talking about.  She deserved a gruesome death just for that.  

I’m not saying ripping off Groundhog Day is the worst idea in the world.  Remember when Edge of Tomorrow did the same thing?  In that instance, it was all good because that movie took the inspiration and did something novel with it.  No such luck with Happy Death Day.  The filmmakers take an already slim idea and then do absolutely jack shit with it.  There’s even a scene where the filmmakers try to redeem Tree by having her do good deeds for the people she sees every single day, but it comes off less as a moment of character redemption and more like, “Hey, what part of Groundhog Day haven’t we ripped off yet?  Oh yeah, that part where Bill Murray starts doing good deeds.”  The ending is also painfully predictable, which only adds to the feeling of interminable agitation.

AKA:  Happy Birthdead.  AKA:  Half to Death.