COMPANION (2025) ****

First time writer/director Drew Hancock comes right out of the gate with a certified all-time banger with the twisty, razor sharp, ferociously funny, and just plain damned entertaining Companion.  Do yourself a favor and avoid all the trailers and go in as cold and as fresh and possible.  The less you know, the better off you are as the way Hancock slowly parcels out his story beats is one of the many joys of the film. 

I’ll paint the set-up in the broadest of strokes.  Josh (Jack Quaid) brings his girlfriend Iris (Sophie Thatcher) to a secluded house in the woods for a weekend getaway with some friends.  She’s afraid they won’t like her.  He assures her everything will be fine.  Iris soon proves to be a perfect houseguest and a perfect girlfriend.  Maybe too perfect. 

I’ll stop right there.  The way Hancock pulls the strings is masterful not only in terms of story structure, but also in the way he doles out the various plot twists and character arcs.  The writing is so good that you may overlook some of his directorial flairs too.  One thing is for sure, he is capable of delivering some genuine shocks.  We’ve seen a lot of “Cabin in the Woods” scenarios in horror films before, but nothing quite like this. 

The acting is aces all around.  Thatcher has been slowly but steadily become a horror It Girl to watch, and she solidifies her standing with a knockout performance.  You truly feel for Iris every step of the way as she displays a rollercoaster of emotions and then some.  Needless to say, when she finally turns the tables on her tormentors, it’s standing ovation time.  Quaid is equally excellent as her boyfriend who starts out as bland and vanilla as you can get.  However, it seems like every time he opens his mouth, he reveals himself to be more and more of an unlikeable douche.  It’s quite a marriage of clever scripting and intuitive performance as his gradual departure from decency is one of the best things about the movie.  What We Do in the Shadows’ Harvey Guillen rounds out the cast as a lovable gregarious houseguest who may have a secret or two of his own. 

In short, Companion is a modern classic. 

THE BEST MAN (2023) **

Luke Wilson stars as Cal, a former Special Forces soldier who is about to marry Brook (Nicky Whelan).  He asks his second in command, Bradley (Brendan Fehr) to be his best man and invites his crotchety team member Anders (Dolph Lundgren) to the wedding as well.  The big day arrives, and the guests gather at a luxurious mountain resort.  Too bad a team of mercenaries show up, crash the wedding, and take the father of the bride hostage.  It’s then up to Cal, Bradley, and Anders to save the date… er… day. 

So, it’s basically Die Hard at a wedding. 

The ascension of Luke Wilson as a DTV action movie stalwart has been an odd thing to witness in the past few years.  He was so funny and charming in all those early Wes Anderson movies.  Nowadays, he’s making by the numbers stuff like this.  He still has a slight, quirky air about him, but it’s not enough to inject life into the movie.  Fehr fares decently enough as the title character.  He looks so much like Wilson that I’m surprised they just didn’t go ahead and make them brothers.  Scout Taylor-Compton (from the Rob Zombie Halloween movies) is also pretty good as Whelan’s sister and maid of honor, who essentially has the Erika Eleniak/Under Siege role of the hot chick who follows the hero around. 

Dolph manages to make the most of his screen time.  Whether he’s getting sloshed with the father of the bride or flirting with the heavily tattooed piano player, his charm is front and center.  He does however seem to be limping throughout (which was even more noticeable in A Wanted Man) and used an obvious double for at least one of his major fight scenes. 

As far as Die Hard clones go, I’d say this is about middle of the pack.  It does have a novel location for this sort of thing, although it never really takes advantage of it.  While the set-up is briskly handled, the follow-through is generic and a tad plodding for the most part.  The action also leaves something to be desired as the various shootouts and fight scenes are brief and mostly relegated to the third act.  I’m also not sure why it’s called “The Best Man” because Wilson, Fehr, and Lundgren are essentially co-leads and do an equal share of the heavy lifting.  

While it’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination, if you’re looking for an entertaining Die Hard rip-off, you can do a lot better than The Best Man. 

DISCLOSURE (1994) **

Disclosure was the third installment of a loose trilogy of films where Michael Douglas gets in trouble by thinking with his dick.  (Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct being the other two.)  At least in this one he does his best not to think with the little head.  Even though he tries to resist his basic instincts, he still winds up in hot water. 

Douglas plays Tom, a worker at a tech company who is passed over for a promotion.  His boss (Donald Sutherland) gives the job to the young and sexy Meredith (Demi Moore).  Since she and Tom used to be an item, Meredith invites him up to her office after hours for some wine to celebrate and catch up on old times.  She tries her best to seduce him, and when Tom rebuffs her advances, Meredith claims he sexually assaulted her and sets out to ruin his life. 

This was based on a novel by Michael Crichton, and it was made at a time when Hollywood was busy adapting a lot of his stuff.  (Jurassic Park just came out the year before.)  I never read the book, but as far as the movie goes, it’s more convincing when it’s focusing on the backstabbing politics of tech companies than portraying how men and women really interact.  Even by ‘94’s standards the whole “shoe is on the other foot” argument of women being predators in the workplace felt hollow and gimmicky.  Barry Levinson’s slick but mundane direction also helps to keep the audience at length from the material. 

A fine movie on the subject of sexual harassment in the workplace could’ve been made with this cast and director.  Sadly, it just becomes a jumping off point to a lame corporate intrigue plot line, one that gets kind of loopy the longer it goes on.  The dated high-tech concepts of virtual reality and email are good for some laughs now though.  The scene where Douglas is in a VR version of cyberspace and is menaced by a hilariously awful looking digitized avatar of Moore is ten pounds of stupid in a five-pound bag.  Even funnier is the moments where there is a shot of a computer and the score slides into this computer-y “Boop, Beep, Boop” sort of noise as if to say, “TECHNOLOGY!”  (It’s kind of sad that the music was by none other than Ennio Morricone!)

Moore is good as the icy cold temptress, but I honestly have to say Douglas has been better.  Some of his dialogue scenes are reminiscent of a Lifetime movie, and you just never really buy him as a victim.  Maybe a put upon Everyman just isn’t in his wheelhouse.  This was also made at the time when Dennis Miller was popping up in every movie.  Unfortunately, he seems reined in here as he doesn’t get to go off on any of his patented pop culture-fueled rants. 

65 (2023) ** ½

Adam Driver stars as a spaceman whose ship crash lands on an uncharted planet.  We soon learn that the mysterious planet is none other than our own and that the time is 65 million B.C.  That means in order to survive, Adam has to fight off dinosaurs using space guns and shit. 

An eight-year-old probably could’ve written 65.  In fact, I’m sure that several thousand eight-year-olds have drawn pictures of spacemen fighting dinosaurs on the back of IHOP placemats in the midst of a sugar rush fueled by chocolate chip pancakes and Mountain Dew over the years.  These drawings probably could’ve been used as storyboards for the movie.  Sure, large portions of the film are pretty dumb, but that’s part of the charm.  It speaks to the eight-year-old in all of us. 

65 starts off like gangbusters, but it loses a little something when Driver finds a young girl (Ariana Greenblatt) he must protect from the prehistoric beasts.  It’s here where it starts putting out After Earth kinds of vibes.  That’s not a harsh criticism or anything because I don’t exactly hate that dorky movie.  It’s just that the film worked better when Driver was… ahem… solo. 

Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the team who wrote A Quiet Place, 65 never quite lives up to the potential that lies within its premise.  (It needed one or two more dino battles for my tastes.)  I will say it’s a big improvement over their previous directorial effort, the lame Haunt.  It was also produced by none other than Sam Raimi.  In fact, you almost wish he had helmed the film as Beck and Woods’ direction is competent but lacking pizzazz.  To their credit, they keep the action moving and the breezy ninety-two-minute running time flies by.  Driver is also to be commended for taking the potentially ridiculous premise as seriously as one could expect as he admirably sells his character’s predicament. 

TWISTERS (2024) **

Twister was one of those movies that played like gangbusters opening night in the theater with a packed house that didn’t hold up to close scrutiny at home on the small screen.  Maybe that’s why it took Hollywood… (pulls out my abacus) … 28 years to come up with a sequel.  Now, I didn’t get a chance to see Twisters in theaters this summer.  Since it plays just about as well at home as the original did (which is to say it’s merely okay), I can only surmise it must’ve been a real corker on the big screen. 

Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) invents a doodad that causes tornadoes to evaporate.  However, when she tests it out, something goes wrong and her whole team winds up dead.  Suffering from PTSD (Post Twister Stress Disorder), she quits storm chasing for a desk job at a meteorological center.  Five years later, her former colleague Javi (Anthony Ramos from Transformers:  Rise of the Beasts) lures her back into the tornado chasing game.  Kate soon realizes they are working for a bunch of greedy corporate fat cats and then decides to throw in with Glen (Top Gun:  Maverick) Powell, a hotshot rival tornado “wrangler” and YouTuber to stop an impending storm. 

The lamest part about this sequel is the fact that Edgar-Jones has a sixth sense sort of deal where she can feel tornadoes forming better than any weather map.  That’s basically a lazy screenwriting way of having your main character always be right.  Edgar-Jones is fine in the role, but she isn’t exactly memorable either.  The same can be said for Ramos as her second in command whose main character trait is to cheer her on.  (Suggested Drinking Game:  Take a shot every time he tells her, “You got this”.)  At least Powell injects the proceedings with a little bit of swagger. 

The fatal flaw of the film (like the original) is that bad weather doesn’t exactly make for a good villain.  I know the old man vs. nature trope is as old as time, but there are only so many scenes of people running from tornadoes you can take.  (For a movie about so-called “storm chasers” they sure do spend a lot of the time running the other way.)  As in the original, it mostly fails because the characters are wafer thin and the drama is nominal.  I did like the part where people took shelter in an old theater playing the original Frankenstein though.

THE DEAD DON’T DIE (2019) *** ½

When Jim Jarmusch makes a zombie movie you know you’re in for something special.  Well, “special” might not be quite the right word for it, but it’s definitely unique.  Well… unique, as in it’s just like every other Jim Jarmusch movie, except… you know… with zombies. 

The Earth shifts on its axis, causing the dead to rise from their graves.   Small town sheriff Bill Murray and his deputy Adam Driver are more perplexed by the chain of events more than anything.  Eventually, they have to contend with the ever-increasing zombie outbreak. 

Jarmusch didn’t reinvent the wheel or anything, but his deadpan handling of the material and idiosyncratic dialogue is enough to breathe new life into a rather (un)dead subgenre.  Unlike his other foray into horror, the uneven vampire flick Only Lovers Left Alive, he seems to be embracing the conventions of the genre instead of resisting them, and the result is a damn good time. 

It also helps that he assembled an amazing cast.  I didn’t know I needed to see Iggy Pop as a coffee-drinking zombie.  Or Tilda Swinton as a samurai mortician.  Or RZA as a wisdom-spouting UPS driver.  Or Steve Buscemi as a redneck MAGAt.  There’s also Tom Waits as a grizzled mountain man, Chloe Sevigny as a deputy, Danny Glover as a world-weary local, indie horror mainstay Larry Fessenden as a motel owner, Rosie Perez as a newscaster, and Selena Gomez and Austin Butler as victims. 

It’s Murray and Driver who really make it work.  Their nonplussed reactions and nonchalant acceptance of the situation provides the film with some of its biggest laughs.  (I also like how they casually let the audience know that they know they’re stuck in a movie.)

Sure, not all of it clicks.  The stuff with the juvenile delinquents in a detention facility kind of falls flat and never really intersects with the main plot.  The CGI is a little wonky in spots too.  (Dust spews out of the zombies when they are killed rather than blood.)  Fortunately, whenever Murray and Driver are front and center, The Dead Don’t Die really comes to life. 

PLAY DEAD (2009) **

Chris (Street Fighter:  The Legend of Chun-Li) Klein stars as Ronnie Reno, the washed-up star of a Power Rangers-style TV show who bombs an audition and then heads out into the desert to clear his head.  When his car breaks down, a creepy dude named Ledge (Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst) gives him a ride.  Almost immediately, he becomes mixed up with Ledge’s drug lord brother in-law (Paul Francis).  He orders Ledge to kill Ronnie, but he convinces the slowwitted Ledge that his old show is real, and he can call in the other stars to help stop the bad guys. 

This is the kind of movie where you want to criticize it because of what it doesn’t do.  Had Klein brought in his friends, and they were dressed as their pseudo-Power Rangers to fight crime, it might have been fun.  Think a low-rent version of Three Amigos. 

Sadly, that’s not what happens.  Instead, what happens is that when Klein’s two actor friends show up, they basically just pose as DEA agents (badly), which causes the plan to go south in a hurry.  The potential was there for this to be something more than your average low budget crime flick, but that’s unfortunately all it winds up being.  It’s not bad or anything as it remains watchable throughout.  It just doesn’t really find its footing or know when to get things in gear. 

Klein fares well in the lead.  You can easily buy him as an actor who just isn’t quite good enough to pull off his charade.  It’s odd seeing Durst in this.  With his salt and pepper beard, scraggly hair, and buck teeth he seems to be doing a direct-to-video version of Billy Bob Thornton in A Simple Plan.  While he doesn’t quite make the character believable, he is definitely the most memorable thing about the movie, so I certainly give him points for trying.  We also have Jake Busey on hand, but he’s really nothing more than the bad guy’s right-hand man and he isn’t ever given anything worthwhile to do.  Likewise, Michael Beach is left high and dry as Klein’s co-star who has now become a soap opera actor and is ill-equipped to tangle with drug dealers.