THE HITMAN NEVER DIES (2017) * ½

Michael Ironside stars as a small-time kingpin who hires a recently released jailbird named Gus (Michael Eklund) to pull one last job for him.  He needs Gus to recover an incriminating videotape from a porn set before the cops get there and raid the place.  Naturally, other interested parties come looking for the tape too.  Our hero then must make an uneasy alliance with a sexy Asian assassin (Bernice Liu) to get the tape and worm his way out from under his boss’ thumb once and for all. 

This low budget crime comedy was a Chinese and Canadian co-production (you don’t get too many of those).  It tries way too hard to be a clever Tarantino riff, and it’s rarely, if ever, successful.  It’s also chockfull of cliches (a title card with the character’s name pops up on screen every time someone new is introduced, tired narration that works overtime trying to sound hardboiled, a structure that relies heavily on flashbacks inside of flashbacks, porn star characters, criminals that live by a strict code, etc.) and doesn’t  find  anything new or interesting to add to them.  Also, the title makes no damn sense, which is a little irksome. 

The flick thinks it’s hip and edgy, but many scenes are more cringeworthy than anything (like when a hitman is waving around a tentacle dildo).  In fact, there’s a lot of octopus-oriented sex talk here, which makes me ponder if the screenwriters weren’t working out some of their own fetishes here.  It would be one thing if it had a good twist or memorable characters.  However, the weak script wraps itself up way too neatly and often leaves its cast in the lurch. 

Ironside is ideally cast as the crotchety kingpin, but he’s never given much more to do other than sit behind a desk and grumble.  Lui cuts a dashing figure as the sexy assassin in short booty shorts, although she never quite becomes a real character, thanks to the flimsy script.  Both of them fare better than Eklund, who just doesn’t have the screen presence to carry the movie. 

One of Ironside’s dimwitted sons gets the best line when he says, “I think I just figured out how to uncluster this fuck!”

AKA:  Stegman is Dead. 

GLADIATOR II (2024) *** ½

I’m not sure why it took Ridley Scott two decades to come up with a sequel to Gladiator, especially when the plot is essentially “The Same Shit That Happened to Maximus Happens to His Son”, but we finally got one.  I guess Hollywood didn’t have the balls to go with that Nick Cave script where Maximus literally goes to Hell.  Oh well. 

Paul Mescal stars as Lucius, the son of Maximus, who is imprisoned by the Roman Empire and is made a slave.  He impresses slave master Macrinus (Denzel Washington) in his first fight where he battles a CGI monkey to the death.  Macrinus buys him and puts him in the Colosseum to fight for his freedom and a chance to kill the man who murdered his wife.  Problems arise when he learns his sworn enemy has married his mother (Connie Nielsen).  Eventually, Lucius learns that Macrinus is using him as a pawn in a grander scheme. 

Mescal is OK in the lead.  He registers just fine during his action scenes, but overall is kind of bland.  I’ll resist the temptation to compare him to the original’s Russell Crowe as those are some big shoes to fill.  It’s just that for a movie so wild and colorful, he kind of gets lost in the shuffle.  Pedro Pascal (doing a Mark Ruffalo impression) fares slightly better as the Roman general who has taken Lucius’ mother’s hand in marriage.  Nielsen is also quite good.  It looks like she hasn’t aged a day since her appearance in the first film. 

It’s Denzel though who steals the movie.  He’s highly entertaining and looks like he’s having a ball playing such a heel.  He stops short of chewing scenery and mustache twirling, but his sinister energy is a huge boost to the film. 

The scenes in the Colosseum are over the top and sometime borderline ridiculous.  That by the way, is not a critique.  It’s as if director Ridley Scott is nudging the audience and saying “Hey, remember the scene with the tiger in the first one?  Guess how we’re gonna top that?  How’s a pack of wild monkeys sound?  A charging rhino?  I KNOW!  What about SHARKS!?!”  Clearly, Ridley took Maximus’ maxim, “Are you not entertained?” to heart when it came up to dreaming up ludicrous bullshit for this sequel.  But what highly entertaining ludicrous bullshit it is. 

Washington gets the best line when he says, “Rage pours out of you like milk from a whore’s tit!” 

FORTY ACRE FEUD (1965) ** ½

Ron (If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do?) Ormond directed this corny country fried musical starring just about every Country and Western guest star from Hee Haw that you’d ever want to see.  In fact, Hee Haw’s Minnie Pearl also appears in a supporting role! 

The nominal plot involves an election being held in a small hick town.  Some radio bigwig thinks that's the perfect time to hold a big country music jamboree, so he plans to put on the concert and the election all in the same spot.  The two candidates are patriarchs of families that have a longstanding backwoods feud, and the election (not to mention the concert) is certain to bring tensions between the two clans to a head. 

There were about a hundred different ways this could’ve gone wrong, but Forty Acre Feud remains watchable just for the music, which contains more hits than misses as many of the artists sing some of their best-known stuff.  Even if you’re not a fan of old timey country music, you still may enjoy such acts as Bill Anderson (“Three A.M.”), Skeeter Davis (“The End of the World”), Ferlin Husky (who also appears as the slow-witted town shopkeeper), The Willis Brothers (“Six Foot Two by Four”), George Jones (“Things Have Gone to Pieces”), Ray Price (“The Other Woman”), and Loretta Lynn (“Blue Kentucky Girl”). 

Back in the day, poor folks in the south weren’t able to afford to see big country acts in concert.  However, for a quarter or two, they could see something like this or Hootenanny Hoot and watch a dozen or so bands with only the barest wisp of a plot to get in the way.  It’s not exactly great or anything, but it remains a harmless little time capsule. 

Speaking as an Ormond connoisseur, Forty Acre Feud is an agreeable middle tier entry in his filmography.  It might not have the same kick as The Monster and the Stripper or the WTF goodness of his later religious pictures, but it’s decent enough.  In fact, it feels kind of like a country music offshoot of his early burlesque movie, Varieties on Parade as it’s essentially a series of filmed performances.  The fact that he started his career making many low budget westerns also meant he probably knew a thing or two about country and western music too. 

Husky later starred in the immortal Hillbillys in a Haunted House. 

STREET TRASH (2024) ***

Street Trash wasn’t exactly the greatest cult movie to come out of the ‘80s, but the scenes of homeless people melting certainly made it one of the most memorable.  Since it was always one of those “close but no cigar” kinds of flicks, the prospect of it being remade and/or sequelized doesn’t seem all that sacrilegious.  The fact that the remake was written and directed by Ryan Kruger, the man behind the equally spotty, but highly entertaining Fried Barry, made it feel like a match made in Heaven. 

Kruger transplants the action from Skid Row Los Angeles to South Africa in the not-too distant future.  In an effort to clean up the city, the totalitarian government is cracking down on the ever-growing homeless population.  They have turned the Tenafly Viper compound into aerosol form and plan to use drones to unleash it on the bums and melt them down into pools of multicolored goo.  It’s then up to the homeless people to band together and rise up against their oppressors. 

Even though the setting has been changed, and the themes have been updated for the modern era, this is more of a sequel than remake.  Whatever you want to call it, it still delivers on what you want to see from a Street Trash movie, namely lots of scenes of homeless guys melting.  I mean a guy melts into a puddle of purple goo before the opening titles (which proudly proclaims to be “A Ryan Krueger Thing”).  Along the way, dicks are chopped off, ears fall off, faces melt off, and people explode.  You know… good shit. 

I will say that it sometimes feels like Kruger is trying a bit too hard.  It’s also less successful in the third act once it becomes a quasi-action movie.  The humor can be uneven too.  While some of the comedy bits fall flat, when Kruger finds the sweet spot between extreme gore and surreal silliness, it works.  Plus, it was also good seeing Fried Barry himself, Gary Green as a homeless man who has an imaginary friend that looks like a Smurf version of the guy from Everclear. 

TOMIE (1998) ** ½

I watched some of the later sequels in the Tomie series a while back and found them to be wild and entertaining for the most part.  When I discovered the original flick, based on the Junji Ito novel, was streaming on Shudder, I knew I had to check it out.  While It’s not nearly as crazy or memorable as some of the sequels, I have to say it definitely has its moments. 

A crazy one-eyed student keeps the mewling puking head of a girl named Tomie (Miho Kanno) in a box.  She gets better (that’s a simple way of stating she her body grows back) and goes out for revenge on the one who decapitated her.  Meanwhile a young woman named Tsukiko (Mami Nakamura) is undergoing hypnotherapy to recover repressed memories of an accident that took the life of her parents.  Little does she realize she’s the next one on Tomie’s hit list. 

Tomie grabs your attention right from the get-go with a fun opening where the dude is carrying Tomie’s head around in a bag.  Later, he upgrades to a box, and the scene where he feeds her is reminiscent of Basket Case.  Once she grows her body back, the film turns into more of a slow burn.  The stuff with the chain-smoking detective is hit and miss too. 

I did like the way the director Ataru Oikawa showed the carnage from a crime scene in such an offhand manner.  I’m specifically thinking of the way the camera casually panned to show coroners moving a guy with an umbrella shoved down his throat in the background while the detective walks around.  I also dug the way he avoided showing Tomie’s face for much of the movie.  

While Oikawa delivers a few offhand moments of occasional creepiness, he doesn’t quite know when to kick things up a notch.  The finale isn’t bad by any means, but it certainly suffers in comparison to the film’s opening moments. Still when it works it’s a reasonably effective flick.  Ultimately, the highlights are just too few and far between for me to give it a hearty recommendation.   

Oikawa later went on to direct Tomie:  Beginning and Tomie:  Revenge. 

WEREWOLVES (2024) ** ½

Werewolves is kind of like The Purge but with werewolves.  A year ago, a supermoon turned thousands of people into werewolves, causing untold destruction.  Tonight, the supermoon is back, and people have to fortify their homes and stay out of the moonlight to prevent becoming a lycanthrope.  Meanwhile, scientists led by Lou Diamond Phillips and Frank Grillo (a veteran of the Purge franchise) work round the clock in an underground bunker looking for a cure.  Naturally, something goes wrong, and their werewolf test subjects break loose. After the place is soon overrun by ferocious fur balls, Grillo has to make his way back home to protect his family. 

Werewolves is gloriously dumb, but the cast wisely plays things with a straight face, which is the secret to make it work.  It almost feels like a SyFy Channel Original from the ‘00s with a slightly higher budget, and I mean that as a compliment.  The CGI transformation effects are OK, but the practical werewolves are well done.  The gore is solid too as there are ripped out backs, clawed off faces, and a memorable bit where a werewolf pulls off another werewolf’s head with its spinal cord flapping in the breeze a la Predator. 

Most of the fun comes from watching Lou Diamond Phillips trying to keep a straight face while spouting massive amounts of exposition early on, including explaining to the audience about the benefits of “moonscreen”.  (It’s like sunscreen, except instead of protecting you from getting a sunburn, it prevents you from becoming a werewolf.)  Director Steven C. (Silent Night) Miller also shows a knack for some punchy action scenes, despite the film’s smallish budget. 

Sadly, the fun begins to dwindle around the time the third act rolls around.  The finale isn’t a complete washout or anything.  It just pales to the stuff we saw earlier in the film.  (The abrupt ending doesn’t help much either.)  Still, if you’re looking for a moderately entertaining horror romp, you can certainly do a lot worse. 

THE WATCHERS (2024) **

Dakota Fanning stars as an American girl working in a pet shop in Ireland whose car breaks down in the woods while delivering a bird.  She winds up bumping into a few other lost travelers who we learn are being watched by… uh… “The Watchers”.  These Watchers are unseen entities who live in the woods and keep people hostage in “The Coop”, which looks like a high school theater stage.  During the day, Dakota and the others are free to roam around the woods, but at night, they have to be centerstage for the Watchers’ entertainment.  Eventually, Dakota and company stage a daring escape. 

The Watchers was written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter, Ishana, who isn’t very subtle.  She gives us a lot of symbolic closeups of lizards in glass aquariums and birds in cages early on to foreshadow our heroine’s plight.  Also, the only DVD that’s in “The Coop” is a Big Brother-style reality TV show, which further hammers home the film’s themes. 

Like her old man, Shyamalan has a knack for creating an intriguing set-up.  Sadly, like her dear old dad, she doesn’t have much follow-through.  Even though the set-up is kind of original, it quickly descends into a bunch of tired cliches, including the tried-and-true scene where someone comes knocking at the door and begs the characters to let them in, causing someone to shout, “It could be one of them!  Ask it something only your husband would know!”

It doesn’t help that the Watchers themselves are kinda weak looking (they resemble the offspring of Groot and Slender Man) or that much of the lore comes courtesy of huge exposition dumps.  It might’ve worked better had Shyamalan parceled out the backstory slowly or better yet, left things up for the audience to decide.  Like her old man, she also fumbles the ball when trying to deliver a big “twist” at the end.  I will say she does orchestrate a solid jump scare about halfway through, so I will give her that. 

Fanning keeps the movie from completely falling apart around her.  She definitely has leading lady chops.  It’s just a shame the script lets her down.  Olwen Fouere, who played the Sally Hardesty in the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie, is pretty good too as the old lady who runs the Coop and knows all about the Watchers.  

While it’s marginally better than much of the senior Shyamalan’s films, ultimately, these Watchers are only worth watching once.