HINDSIGHT IS 2020: COLOR OUT OF SPACE (2020) **

After being fired from the much-maligned Island of Dr. Moreau, Richard Stanley gets another crack at adapting a beloved work of horror fiction with this Nicolas Cage-starring sci-fi/horror flick based on a tale by H.P. Lovecraft.  The story was also the basis of the 1987 shitfest, The Curse.  While Color Out of Space is leagues better than that dung heap, it still never quite kicks into overdrive. 

Cage stars as a family man who lives on an alpaca farm with his wife and three kids.  One night, a meteor crash lands in their yard, and pretty soon things start getting mighty peculiar down on the farm.  Before long, the meteor shit gets into the water and it starts having strange effects on the family members.  Cage admirably tries to keep the family together, even when the family starts… uh… coming together.

Stanley takes his time unfurling the premise.  This would be okay if he was merely building suspense, but there are a few too many unnecessary characters and subplots that sort of prevent the film from really getting into gear.  The stuff with the water-testing scientist (Elliot Knight) and the hippie freeloader (Tommy Chong) causes the first act to stall.  As David Keith did with The Curse, Stanley overdoes it with all the close-ups of the glasses of water to hammer home the fact that the water is no bueno. 

Once the colors (mainly pink and purple) start lighting up the farmhouse, Color Out of Space starts to settle into a decent rhythm.  The briefly seen monster effects are reminiscent of both The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness, and there’s a gooey sequence that will probably remind you of The Fly 2 as well.  I know Stanley was trying to show restraint here, but he really should’ve cranked up the weird monster shit to balance out the slow beginning.

The same goes for Cage.  Whenever he’s the upstanding father and husband, he just acts like your average guy.  Once the meteor shit hits the fan, he occasionally will step on the gas and hightail it to Cageland.  However, there isn’t quite enough Caginess to salvage the picture.  Then again, only a guy like Cage could take a line like, “It’s time to milk the alpacas!” and turn it into poetry.

Just when it looks like it’s ramping up, the film fizzles out just before it reaches the homestretch.  The fact that it runs nearly two hours certainly didn’t do it any favors either.  The colors are spiffy and all, but the movie itself ain’t very bright.

HINDSIGHT IS 2020: YOU SHOULD HAVE LEFT (2020) **

Kevin Bacon stars as a rich dude with a shady past who needs to get away from it all.  He gets his much younger actress girlfriend (Amanda Seyfried) to book an airbnb in Wales, far away from prying eyes before she goes off to shoot her next movie.  Eventually he comes to realize the place has obvious plans for him, or as the creepy storekeeper in town says, “You don’t choose the house.  The house chooses you.”

You Should Have Left would’ve probably made a good Twilight Zone episode.  At ninety-three minutes, the premise is stretched out awfully thin.  In fact, it only starts to pick up steam in the third act, which is too little too late.  I mean, slow burn horror flicks can work if the script is strong.  This one isn’t bad.  It just doesn’t help matters when the first two acts test your patience and the finale is pretty much a foregone conclusion. 

The good performances help keep you invested throughout the picture, but honestly, writer-director David Koepp delivers more fizzle than sizzle, especially when it comes to the predictable ending.  I’m a huge fan of Bacon and Koepp’s previous collaboration, the unsung classic Stir of Echoes, and I was hoping this would be a reunion to remember.  However, the film hews closer to Koepp’s muddled Stephen King adaptation Secret Window in terms of quality.  You Should Have Left contains a lot of thematic elements that Koepp already mined rather thoroughly in those aforementioned films, and it’s a shame he couldn’t find something new to say.

The real star is the house.  Filled with long ominous hallways, a foreboding atmosphere, and an ever-changing geography, it certainly is one of the more original looking haunted houses in recent horror films.  Even though the two leads give solid performances, it’s the house who steals the show.  Too bad the lights are on, but no one’s home. 

HINDSIGHT IS 2020: NOTZILLA (2020) * ½

I’m a huge Godzilla fan.  I also like a good spoof as much as anybody.  The G-Man and the entire kaiju genre is certainly ripe for parody, given their low budgets, cheesy special effects, and shoddy dubbing.  Because of that, I was kind of looking forward to Notzilla.  Unfortunately, the film is just flat-out unfunny.  It’s a shame when the straight-up Godzilla movies offer more laughs. 

A Japanese scientist (Frederic Eng-Li) accidentally loses a dinosaur egg down an airplane toilet.  It lands in the Ohio River where it is found by a blowhard scientist named… uh… Dr. Blowheart (Tim Bensch).  One night, he gets drunk in his lab and decides to pour beer on the egg.  Much to his surprise, the egg hatches, and a baby dinosaur emerges.  The cute critter soon develops a taste for alcohol, and drinks more beer, which causes him to grow to enormous proportions.  Before long, the monster begins to wreak havoc on Cincinnati, and it’s up to the bumbling scientists to stop him. 

The set-up is promising as the badly dubbed (on purpose) Japan-set scenes are kind of funny.  Too bad things fall apart once the action switches over to America.  The gags are frequently unfunny and the ones that cause an occasional smirk are repeated way too often and/or are immediately run into the ground. 

Like most kaiju movies, the stuff with the monster is more entertaining that the human scenes, albeit only slightly in this case.  The creature is cute and all, but the filmmakers try way too hard to make him funny.  It would’ve made for a better movie had the creature been menacing in some way, and not an out-and-out goofball. 

The use of obvious toys and models during the monster mashing scenes is a nice touch.  The best gag comes when the jets are called in to stop Notzilla and he takes them out by simply cutting the strings that are holding the model planes up.  The movie really needed more of these fun touches if it was going to work though.

Overall, Notzilla might’ve been a good three-or-four-minute fake trailer, but at seventy-eight minutes it’s something of a chore to get through.  You would think that seventy-eight minutes would be just the right length for this sort of thing.  However, the gags are just too spread out to cut it as a feature.  

Bambi Meets Godzilla was more entertaining. 

SANTA VISITS THE MAGIC LAND OF MOTHER GOOSE (1967) * ½

If you thought Barry Mahon’s Christmas-themed kid’s movies were bad, wait till you get a load of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Santa Visits the Magic Land of Mother Goose!  Lewis basically sat a camera down and filmed a children’s stage, fantasy, and magic show and called it a movie.  That “film” was released as The Magic Land of Mother Goose, but when Christmas rolled around, Lewis added bookend scenes of Santa in there to sucker the kids into seeing it again.  

Santa reads a book of Mother Goose nursery rhymes and falls asleep.  He then dreams about a high school-level stage production where Mother Goose’s characters come out of a giant book.  First, Old King Cole struts out.  He has a bit of trouble with the uncooperative Raggedy Ann and calls on his buddy Merlin to perform a series of magic tricks to set her ass straight.  More and more characters float in and out until the Wicked Witch bursts onto the scene and freezes everyone.  Except for Merlin, who puts her in a box and, in the film’s lone badass scene, burns her alive on stage!  Eventually, Mother Goose appears to wrangle the characters back into the book. 

The magic tricks are standard stuff, save for the great burning witch gag (which includes a close-up of her skeleton’s smoldering crotch).  The scenes of Merlin making a handkerchief dance, levitating Sleeping Beauty, and cutting Jack Sprat in half eat up a lot of screen time.  At least they’re more tolerable than the amateur hour high school theater-level performances by the storybook characters.  (The magic trick sequences also serve as kind of a warm-up to Lewis’s classic, The Wizard of Gore.)

Lewis is mostly known for his gore films, but he also did biker, sexploitation, and hicksploitation movies too.  Incredibly enough, as bad as Santa Visits the Magic Land of Mother Goose is, it’s far from his worst.  The burning witch scene alone saves it from being a One Star flick.  Also, the stuff with the freaky bargain bin Raggedy Ann doll is pure nightmare fuel.  So, if you are a Lewis completist, have a soft spot for chintzy ‘60s kid’s movies, or like to see vintage filmed magic acts, you might want to pay a visit to this magic land too.

AKA:  The Magic Land of Mother Goose.

HINDSIGHT IS 2020: SURVIVE THE NIGHT (2020) ***

Survive the Night is another one of those DTV movies Bruce Willis made for Emmett/Furla.  I watched it hot on the heels of their other 2020 collaboration, Hard Kill.  After sitting through that thoroughly forgettable actioner, I had my expectations way low for this one, seeing as it was also from the same director (Matt Eskandari).  That was for the best too, because as it turns out, it is one of Willis’ best latter-day DTV efforts.  It also happens (by default) to be one of the best movies of the year.  Hey, in 2020, you take what you can get.

Chad Michael (One Tree Hill) Murray stars as a disgraced doctor who is forced to move his family back in with his folks.  His grumpy father (Willis) is upset with the way he’s conducted himself lately and the two are barely on speaking terms.  When a thief (Tyler Jon Olson, who’s also in Hard Kill) is wounded during a liquor store robbery, his hotheaded brother (Shea Buckner) is desperate to get him medical attention.  They follow Murray home from his new job at a walk-in clinic, break into the house, hold everyone hostage, and force him to perform emergency surgery at gunpoint. 

Survive the Night is a bit of a throwback movie.  The Desperate Hours-type scenario has been around for ages.  The use of one primary location also helps to disguise the low budget.  Contrast the dark house in the middle of nowhere to Hard Kill’s ugly abandoned factory setting.  It’s a much more organic and believable situation.  It also isn’t as noticeable that the filmmakers are trying to conveniently shoot around Bruce’s schedule this time out, which helps a bit too. 

While it feels more like a real movie than many of Willis’ cobbled-together efforts, it is still far from perfect.  The set-up is slow to build momentum and there is a LOT of exposition regarding Murray’s shady past.  It also gets a little repetitive as it comes down the home stretch as there are probably one too many escape-recapture-escape sequences. 

Since I’m a fan of the home invasion thriller subgenre, I was probably a bit more forgiving of Survive the Night’s shortcomings.  Those shortcomings are small potatoes compared to many of Willis’ recent outings though.  The film is surprisingly effective, reasonably efficient, and solidly entertaining.  Heck, it almost seems like Die Hard next to the completely underwhelming Hard Kill.

Murray does a better than anticipated job in the hero role, and he and Willis make for a fairly solid team.  Willis nicely plays a character a bit older than he is, and imbues him with a sliver bit more grizzled swagger than I was expecting.  This is the kind of “Old Man” role Robert Duvall used to play.  It will be interesting to see if Willis is able to turn a corner in his career if and when he eventually embraces his age and takes on more of these types of roles.  If anything, Survive the Night certainly proves there’s a bit more life in him than many give him credit for.  

HINDSIGHT IS 2020: HARD KILL (2020) * ½

During the opening credits, there are glimpses of our hero Derek (Jesse Metcalfe) having flashbacks to fighting in the Middle East.  As we all know, this is action movie shorthand for Hero Who Has Seen Some Shit.  Hard Kill is the kind of movie that doesn’t trust its audience to accept the obvious.  Because of that, after the opening credits, we see our hero having MORE war flashbacks, PLUS close-ups of his back tattoos AND back scars… all of which suggest… you guessed it… Hero Who Has Seen Some Shit.  It’s one thing to state the obvious.  It’s another thing to beat a dead horse for the first five minutes of the flick.

Anyway, Derek steps into the limo of his new employer, a billionaire named Chalmers (Bruce Willis) who hires him and his military team to serve as protection.  It seems Derek’s old nemesis, a terrorist known as “The Pardoner” (Sergio Rizzuto) has stolen Chalmer’s new A.I. technology AND kidnapped his daughter (Lala Kent).  To make matters worse, the place he agreed to make the exchange is a crumbling old factory that is almost impossible for Derek’s team to fortify.

Bruce Willis makes these Emmett/Furla movies on a weekly basis it seems.  He makes so many of them that you have to wonder if the early scenes with Bruce in the limo were filmed while he was on his way to the set of another Emmett/Furla movie.  Like many of these Willis/Emmett/Furla ventures, he isn’t really the star.  Instead, the heavy lifting this time out goes to Jesse Metcalfe.  In previous Emmett/Furla productions, Willis was paired with the likes of Thomas Jane, Frank Grillo, Michael Chiklis, and Christopher Meloni.  Not bad co-stars if you can get them.  However, most times he plays alongside co-stars such as Cole Hauser, Kellan Lutz, Chad Michael Murray, and Mark-Paul Gosselaar. 

Guess which category Jesse Metcalfe belongs to.

Hard Kill (which was probably titled to trick older folk with memory problems into thinking it was Die Hard) is a joyless, uneventful, and dull slog.  It mostly takes place in one ugly location, the supporting cast are all forgettable, and the villain (who looks like a Bradley Cooper stunt double) is blander than bland.  The action suffers from too much slow motion (again, to remind the audience that our Hero Has Seen Some Shit) and the various shootouts are rudimentary at best.

Willis doesn’t exactly phone it in, but he seems itching to use the speed dial.  The problem is, he isn’t given much to work with and he usually has a sidekick around to handle the exposition-heavy stuff while he stands around looking glum.  The way they get around overworking Willis is pretty funny though as Metcalfe and his team lock him in a room and forget about him for a good twenty minutes of screen time. 

In short, Hard Kill is hard to watch.

HINDSIGHT IS 2020: AVA (2020) **

Ava is a perfectly acceptable, instantly forgettable variation on the hitman genre.  Instead, you know, this time it’s a hitwoman.  The good news is, it’s not one of those “One Last Job” plotlines.  The bad news is, we’d be better off if it was one of those “One Last Job” plotlines. 

Jessica Chastain stars as the titular hitwoman.  Lately, she’s been having a bad habit of talking to the targets in an effort to see if they really “deserve” what’s coming to them.  When her latest hit goes south, Ava’s boss, Duke (John Malkovich) suggests she take a leave of absence.  Ava then returns home to patch things up with her estranged family and former flame (Common).  Meanwhile, Simon (Colin Farrell), Duke’s top protégée and eventual successor, deems Ava a liability and becomes determined to take her out himself. 

The hitwoman plot works well enough.  The various shootouts and fight scenes are adequately handled by director Tate Taylor (who also directed Chastain in The Help).  There aren’t any particular action beats that will wow you, but at least the quick-cutting and shaky-cam stuff is kept to an absolute minimum.   

The performances help to give the movie a boost too.  Chastain makes for a likeable lead and she has a lot of chemistry with Malkovich, who delivers an eccentric performance in what otherwise could’ve been a thankless role.  Farrell also does a lot with a limited role and screen time.  I especially liked the way he always seemed a bit hurt and jealous of Malkovich’s affection for Chastain. 

The problem is the movie more or less grinds to a halt during the second act when Ava returns home to Boston to sort out her family shit.  Other than a catty performance by Geena Davis as Ava’s mother, these scenes fall flat with a sometimes-painful thud.  The love triangle stuff between Ava, her sister, and her ex-boyfriend just feels like it belongs in a different film altogether.  Some may appreciate that fact, but things get awfully clunky during the subplot with her ex getting in deep to a local underworld figure.  While I’m glad to see Joan Chen with a decent-sized role again, it’s kind of disheartening to see her playing what is essentially a softened spin on the stereotypical dragon lady character. 

Had Ava (the character) put her past fully behind her from the get-go, Ava (the movie) might’ve clicked.  I’m not saying it would’ve been a classic or anything, but it certainly would’ve improved things dramatically.  Because of the unnecessary subplots and family drama, it winds up missing the mark.