THE HUMANOID (1979) ** ½

Was Message from Space too sophisticated for your tastes?  Did you find Starcrash to be needlessly intellectual?  Did the philosophical underpinnings of The Ice Pirates grind your gears?  Well then, try The Humanoid!   It’s one of the cheapest, weirdest, WTF Star Wars rip-offs ever! 

Richard Kiel stars as a space pirate named Golob who has a cute pet robot dog.  His Moonraker co-star, Corrine Clery plays Barbara, a woman marked for death by the evil Lord Graal (Ivan Rassimov).  Luckily for her, she’s the caretaker of a psychic kid named Tom Tom (Marco Yeh) who uses his powers to get her out of one jam after the other.  Kiel’s The Spy Who Loved Me co-star Barbara Bach is Lady Agatha, a diabolical space queen who is in league with Lord Graal and in her spare time, puts naked virgins into a futuristic iron maiden and drains their blood to keep herself looking eternally young.  Graal’s chief scientist (Arthur Kennedy) uses an experimental formula that turns Golob into a mindless “humanoid” (it basically just shaves his beard off) with the intention of creating an entire race of humanoids that Graal can use as his own personal army.  Tom Tom uses his powers to turn Golob friendly again and they join forces with a space renegade (Leonard Mann) to rescue Barbara from the clutches of Graal.

The Humanoid is dumber than a donut, but it is pretty entertaining from start to finish.  That is mostly due to the incredible talent behind the camera.  Aldo (Short Night of Glass Dolls) Lado directed the heck out of this thing in collaboration with Enzo G. (The Last Shark) Castelleri, who filmed the opening sequence and served as assistant director.  The laughable (but fun) special effects were handled by director Antonio (Yor, Hunter from the Future) Margheriti (the spaceships alternately look like LEGOs, model kits, and smoke detectors), and the score was done by none other than the maestro himself, Ennio Morricone. 

The Humanoid rips off Star Wars way too much to properly catalogue.  (For example, Graal looks like a Darth Vader cosplayer who forgot his mask at home and wore a black jock strap over his face instead.)  What makes it interesting is when it does its own thing… and by that, I mean it rips off movies other than Star Wars.  (Ennio’s score is closer to the classical music found in 2001 than John Williams’ space opera themes.)  I mean how many films have you seen that feature Countess Bathory reimagined as a space queen? 

The casting alone will ensure that James Bond fans will want to check it out.  Let’s face it:  Starcrash just had one Bond alum.  This one has three!

Is The Humanoid a good movie?  No.  Absolutely not.  Is it fun?  Yeah, kinda.  Any fan of ‘70s Grade Z Star Wars rip-offs worth their salt needs to see it at least once.

THE DEATH TRAIN (1978) ***

An insurance investigator named Morrow (Hugh Keays-Byrne) travels to the small Australian hamlet of Clematis to get to the bottom of a mysterious death before his company will shill out a payoff and close the case.  He quickly realizes nearly everyone in town is a quirky old fart as he has bizarre encounter after bizarre encounter with the citizens of Clematis.  To make matters worse, everybody Morrow talks to seems convinced the death was caused by the local superstition, a ghost train.  Surely, a loco locomotive can’t be the reason behind all this… can it?

This set-up is similar to The Wicker Man with an outsider making his way around a small, strange community.  It’s also a bit like Twin Peaks and/or U-Turn as just about everyone in town is a weirdie.  Are they acting odd because they’re hiding something, or are they just naturally nutty? 

If you only know Hugh Keayes-Byrne from his villainous roles in the Mad Max movies, you might be taken aback by his comedic chops here.  He has a Chaplinesque quality to him as he bumbles and stumbles around town having strange interludes with the wacky locals.  While the film sometimes strains a bit to be off-the-wall and quirky, Keayes-Byrne takes to the Monty Python-style gags like a duck to water.  (I liked the bit where he rents an apartment that has an oversized bathroom.)

This was made for Australian TV, and it suffers from some pacing issues that are inherent in the medium.  Your mileage may vary when it comes to some of the townsfolk’s loopy behavior, but the atmosphere is genuinely bizarre and memorable.  The premise is solid, the mystery is engaging, and it’s lots of fun, which means you should definitely grab a ticket and climb aboard The Death Train!

RINGU 0 (2000) * ½

Ringu 0 is a prequel to The Ring that shows the origin of the ghostly girl Sadako.  If you’re hoping to find the typical Ring shit, you might be disappointed as there is very little of the usual Sadako shenanigans.   In fact, the origins were covered pretty well in the original movie, so what we are left with feels a lot like an entirely different story that was retrofitted to be a Ring prequel. 

The meek and shy Sadako (Yukie Nakama) attends a drama school as a form of therapy.  Shortly after her arrival, she becomes an understudy for the star actress in the school’s play.  When she dies from mysterious circumstances, Sadako becomes the new leading lady.  This immediately makes her classmates suspicious of her, especially since she already acts so weird and introverted.  When their director is killed, the cast members rise up to get rid of Sadako once and for all. 

The stuff at the drama school plays like Fame meets The Sixth Sense, with a bit of Carrie thrown in there.  That is to say, it doesn’t feel like a Ring movie.  At all. 

Although the origin story isn’t all that great, it’s certainly more watchable than the Ring sequels or the American versions.  That’s mostly because it does its own thing for much of the running time.  That said, it’s rather slight, unmemorable, and low on atmosphere and scary imagery.  Things get even worse once they start trying to connect the plot back to the first Ring.  The unnecessary additions of ludicrous subplots such as Sadako’s Christ-like powers and the appearance of an evil doppelganger just makes the whole thing feel like it’s grasping at straws.  It’s a shame too because the set-up had potential.  By the time the climax rolls around, Ringu 0 is already circling the drain.

AKA:  Ring 0:  Birthday.  AKA:  The Ring 0.

HINDSIGHT IS 2020: SHIRLEY (2020) ** ½

Right from the opening scene you can tell Shirley won’t be just another ordinary biopic.  When Rose (Odessa Young, from the new TV version of The Stand) reads Shirley Jackson’s macabre short story “The Lottery” on a train, it gets her so hot and bothered that she just has to bang her boyfriend (Logan Lerman) in an empty car.  Now, if you’ve ever read “The Lottery”, you know that it isn’t exactly a Harlequin romance novel. 

Anyway, the couple go to stay with Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) and her snobby intellectual husband (Michael Stuhlbarg) on the condition Rose becomes their housemaid.  At first, they get on like oil and water, but eventually Shirley takes a shine to Rose, slowly letting her in on her darker nature that she hides from the world.  However, not only is Shirley using her for the model of the main character in her first novel; she is also making her the target of psychological warfare, which her husband is all too eager to engage in as well. 

Moss is locked in.  She’s much more effective here than she was in grossly overrated The Invisible Man as she dials down her usual hysterics and turns in an unpredictable and edgy performance.  Imagine a crazy cat lady meets Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and that sort of paints the picture.  She makes for a good foil for Young, whose character is tempted by Shirley’s outsider qualities.  The scene where Shirley gleefully invites her to eat possibly poisonous mushrooms is especially memorable. 

Produced by Martin Scorsese, Shirley is ultimately one of those movies that is more marinade than meat.  It offers a snapshot of Jackson’s life and shows that she probably had a screw or two loose.  It also spends as much time glorifying her eccentricities as it does pointing out her contradictions. 

The problem is the movie runs in all sorts of directions at once and never really settles on one approach.  The forbidden love story angle between Rose and Shirley works the best.  The scenes where the screenplay tries to infuse the picture with the same gothic horror touch Jackson gave her work are less effective.  The blurring of fact and fiction is a good idea, but it’s just another narrative trick for the film to juggle, and it’s frankly one it can’t quite handle. 

There’s also an intriguing subplot of Jackson treating her new housekeeper and lover as a character in her own book, bending her and breaking her just because she can.  However, it never truly commits to making Shirley an out-and-out villain, and because of that, the final act winds up being sort of muddled.  The performances are strong enough to keep you watching, but the film itself is far from haunting.

HOT PURSUIT (2015) **

Reese Witherspoon stars as an enthusiastic but dim-witted cop who gets the plum job of escorting a drug dealer’s wife (Sofia Vergara) into the Witness Protection Program.  Naturally, it’s all a set-up and the two barely escape with their lives.  Now, the dirty cops frame them for murder and the duo have to hit the road in order to clear their names. 

On paper, this should’ve been just as bad, if not worse than The Spy Who Dumped Me.  On the plus side, the filmmakers waste no time getting the show on the road.  There is also very little fat on the movie either as Witherspoon and Vergara find themselves in a shootout, chase scene, compromising situation, or sitcom scenario every five minutes or so.  There’s even an occasional laugh or two sprinkled throughout.  I thought it was funny when the usually squeaky-clean Witherspoon inadvertently inhaled a mess of cocaine.  Granted, it’s nowhere near as funny as the similar scene in the legendary Corky Romano, but then again, what could compete with that masterclass of comedic gold? 

The big stumbling block is the two leading ladies are playing essentially shrill and annoying characters.  That doesn’t necessarily prevent them from being likeable, but their grating characterizations keep them at arm’s length from the audience much of the time.  I mean usually when you do these kind of mismatched buddy pictures (even with two women in the leads), they should be… you know… mismatched.  Having both of them being loud and obnoxious borders on overkill.

However, there are a few moments that save it from being totally forgettable.  My favorite bit comes when the ladies have to engage in an impromptu lesbian lovemaking session to distract a farmer brandishing a shotgun.  Even if it is played for laughs, this moment at least helps elevate Hot Pursuit from being merely tepid.

THE SPY WHO DUMPED ME (2018) *

Mila Kunis stars as a woman who gets dumped by her boyfriend (Justin Theroux) who just so happens to be a spy… if you already didn’t infer that from the title.  After he is killed, she comes into possession of a flash drive that several interested parties want for themselves.  It’s then up to Mila and her goofball gal pal (Kate McKinnon) to avoid a bevy of hired assassins and enemy agents to return the info to her ex’s boss (Gillian Anderson). 

The Spy Who Dumped Me has a sitcom premise and a one-joke set-up.  Even then, there aren’t enough laughs to fill a half-hour TV show.  (Heck, there aren’t any laughs to be had at all.)  You would even be pushing it to have a ninety-minute comedy with this sort of plot.  As it stands, the movie clocks in at nearly two hours, much of which is filled with unfunny situations and desperate gags.  Many scenes are needlessly dragged out way too long and don’t really forward the plot.  It sometimes almost feels like you’re watching an assembly cut where every blessed thing that was shot was tossed in there without any consideration whatsoever.    

I usually enjoy Kunis’ work, but she is sorely miscast as the everywoman who is suddenly thrust into a world of international intrigue and must go from Plain Jane to Jane Bond.  Even the reliably hilarious McKinnon fails to generate any laughs as Kunis’ bestie who tags along for the ride.  Since she wasn’t given much to work with, she just resorts to a lot of unfunny mugging, which is often painful to sit through.  Theroux is ideally cast as the secret agent, although he isn’t around long enough to leave much of an impression one way or another. 

Maybe the problem is that the action stuff hews closer to the Jason Bourne movies than the James Bond franchise.  I mean there was a spy series that knew how to balance laughs and thrills.  The Bourne-style action scenes don’t mesh at all with the lame humor and McKinnon’s shenanigans, and even when they do introduce some Bond-inspired gadgets, it’s too little, too late.  It would be one thing if the movie swung for the fences and went for gross-out gags the way The Brothers Grimsby did.  Unfortunately, this just feels like The Heat with a license to kill.

AKA:  Bad Spies. 

HINDSIGHT IS 2020: THE OUTPOST (2020) ***

The Outpost tells the true story of heroic soldiers stationed in an outpost in Afghanistan.  Despite the fact the place is a logistical nightmare and nearly impossible to defend, the grunts stick to their mission of easing tensions with the locals.  When the Taliban finally attacks, the soldiers rise to the occasion and fight back against unbeatable odds to hold their position. 

On the surface, The Outpost looks like it’s going to be one of those generic DTV war movies that your grandfather would watch.  I was a bit worried in the beginning as the character introductions were done in the form of title cards with their names on it.  I usually hate this form of shorthand, but it made sense since there are so many characters on the base, and it’s a little hard to keep track of everyone.  

I was also concerned by the fact that the cast was mostly comprised of sons of much better-known actors.  The offspring of Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson, and Mick Jagger are in this movie, which was enough to make me kind of wish their respective fathers had made a similar film together forty years earlier.  We even get the grandsons of Richard Attenborough and Alan Alda in there as well.  This rampant nepotism gave me the feeling this was going to be a modern-day version of those old DTV action movies in which sons and brothers of more famous movie stars were passed off as real actors.  I mean the biggest name in the cast is The Lord of the Rings’ Orlando Bloom, who gets the “And” billing on the poster, so you can probably guess what happens to him early on.

The first half is kind of ambling and episodic, which didn’t do much for my confidence.  Also, the ham-fisted dialogue like, “We can’t argue and fight” that’s supposed to be profound, comes off as clunky.  Once the proverbial shit hits the fan, the movie, like the soldiers it honors, digs deep and goes above and beyond the call of duty.

I guess I shouldn’t have doubted director Rod Lurie.  I’m a big fan of The Last Castle and I appreciated his Straw Dogs remake more than most.  Although the early sequences are a tad scattershot, he does a fine job at creating suspenseful battle sequences once the film goes all-in on the action.  His “You are There” camerawork heightens the suspense without resorting to the typical shaky-cam stuff that ruins most movies.  I can’t quite put it on the same pedestal as Saving Private Ryan, but there are certainly some harrowing moments that echo that classic.

Once the attack begins, the movie really kicks into overdrive.  The characters who at this point were a bit interchangeable, come into focus.  This is the kind of film I like where the characters are defined by their actions and not dialogue.  The performances are all fine, with Scott Eastwood being a standout and delivering a bit of his old man’s squinty-eyed charm. 

At its heart, The Outpost is a memorial to the men who served.  Mostly though it plays like a modernized B war picture.  I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way, either.  I’m talking about the kind that Sam Fuller used to make (there’s even a character named “Griff”), when men were men, and the film was as tough as the soldiers it depicted.  It’s fine tribute to the men that fell in battle while simultaneously being a compelling war movie.