DEN OF THIEVES (2018) ***

Den of Thieves plays like a low rent version of Heat.  It has lofty, ambitious aims that sometimes act as a hindrance.  (There’s no reason this thing needed to be nearly two and a half hours.)  However, when it hits the sweet spot between trashy potboiler and well-oiled thriller, the results are often electric. 

Gerard Butler is the disheveled and slimy head of the Los Angeles Major Crimes Unit who is trying to nab a crew of elite bank robbers.  He’s able to get to O’Shea Jackson, the gang’s getaway driver, and force him to turn stoolie.  Meanwhile, the head of the gang (Pablo Schreiber) is setting his sights on robbing the Federal Reserve.  It’s then up to Butler and his crew to take them down. 

The film sometimes feels like an assembly cut as there are subplots and scenes that really don’t need to be there (like the scene where 50 Cent uses the crew to intimidate his daughter’s prom date and/or all the stuff with Butler’s messy personal life).  I’m not saying these scenes are bad or anything, but they get in the way of the cops and robbers hijinks.  That said, there still are plenty of good individual scenes in the midst of the action.  I especially liked the part where Butler and Schreiber silently intimidate one another while at a shooting range. 

Butler is a lot of fun to watch as he goes all in on the character’s grimy persona.  Jackson fares well too as the young criminal in over his head.  Schreiber kind of looks like Matthew Fox’s evil twin and delivers a strong turn as the ringleader of the gang.  50 Cent isn’t given a whole lot to do as Schreiber’s second in command, but his presence alone gives the film a boost. 

The final robbery and shootout scenes are solid.  The big Keyser Soze twist is maybe less so.  However, nitpicks aside, Den of Thieves is a winner. 

AKA:  Criminal Squad.

FIGHT OR FLIGHT (2025) ****

The Hartnettaissance is upon us.  Even though the movie as a whole was a misfire, his performance in Trap showed that there was more to Josh Hartnett than previously thought.  Now, with the enormously entertaining action comedy, Fight or Flight he doubles down on the near Nicolas Cage levels of thespian hijinks and turns in a career-best performance in one of the best movies of the year. 

Hartnett stars as a disgraced Secret Service agent (his backstory is the same as Bruce Willis’ in Last Boy Scout) drinking himself to death in Bangkok who is offered a shot of redemption if he can board a plane to San Francisco, find a passenger who is a most wanted hacker, and bring them to justice.  The only problem is that nearly everyone on the plane is an assassin who also happens to be looking for the hacker.  And Hartnett. 

Fight or Flight is kind of like Bullet Train on a plane.  Or maybe Snakes on a Plane but with assassins instead of snakes.  It builds slowly and sprinkles in occasional dollops of crazy fight sequences here and there while keeping a relatively straight face.  (I’m thinking of the scene where a heavily drugged Hartnett battles Marko Zaror in the bathroom.)  Things get increasingly looney as they go along, to the point that when three women dressed like killers from a ‘70s Shaw Brothers movie show up, no one blinks an eye.  The gore is solid too, with a champagne flute to the eyeball being an especially gnarly bit of carnage. 

Things quickly escalate in the third act.  It’s here where Hartnett inadvertently takes a mess of toad venom, begins tripping balls, and proceeds to carve up trained assassins with a chainsaw all the while Elvis Costello sings “Pump It Up” on the soundtrack. 

In a word, cinema. 

Hartnett was really good in the first two acts, but it’s here during this prolonged sequence where he really endeared himself to me.  It was almost as if the toad venom acted like the mushroom in Super Mario Bros. and turned him into Super Hartnett.  If he can bring that same level of demented glee to his next few pictures, I’ll be sure to check them out. 

What separates the film from so many others of its ilk is its sly sense of humor and the crispness of the fight choreography.  The camerawork is excellent during the close-quarters battles, and the editing is concise and effective.  The dialogue has some real howlers too.  My favorite line comes when Zaror tries to drug Hartnett and it doesn’t quite work, leading Josh to quip, “I guess you can’t pickle a pickle!”

ANOTHER SON OF SAM (1977) *

The film kicks off with a century’s worth of data about mass murders.  The dates and kill totals of everyone from Jack the Ripper to Son of Sam are splashed on the screen before the opening titles.  Then our story begins. 

A psycho kills an orderly and assaults his doctor before escaping to a nearby college campus.  It doesn’t take long before the nutzo is terrorizing college co-eds.  A detective, who also happens to be the boyfriend of the injured headshrinker, sets out to capture the escaped looney. 

Another Son of Sam is only seventy-two minutes long, but it is often a chore to sit through as it feels much longer than the seemingly brief running time suggests.  It contains way too many freeze frames, unnecessary slow-motion shots, POV scenes of the killer lumbering around the campus, and close-ups of his bugged-out eyeballs.  In addition to the pre-title crime statistics, the film is also padded with a long and unintentionally hilarious lounge singer act.  (“Johnny Charro”.)  It should be said that this is the only real “so bad, it’s good” moment as the rest is the movie is just “so bad, it’s… well… bad”. 

Directed by former stuntman David A. (Grizzly) Adams, Another Son of Sam is shockingly low on chills, thrills, or basic competency.  I mean, sure it’s low budget and all, but it could’ve at least been… you know… entertaining.  The body count is low too (there’s a throwaway line about it being Spring Break as the reason why there’s only three girls in the entire college) and the kills are weak. 

Another sticking point:  The killer is just some escaped mental patient with a mother fixation.  He really isn’t “another” Son of Sam.  Because of that, some true crime fans will be angered at the bait and switch title.  Besides, it’s one thing to produce a movie that exploits real life violence to turn a buck.  It’s another when the filmmakers don’t even attempt to live up to the title.  I mean, if you’re going to exploit something, made a God’s honest exploitation flick and deliver on the sex, blood, and violence fans of that sort of thing expect.  Don’t turn it into a painfully dull and woefully inept police procedural. 

AKA:  Son of Sam.

MALEVOLENCE (2004) ***

Bank robbers go on the lam after a heist leaves some of their crew dead.  The loose cannon of the group takes a mom and her little leaguer hostage and holes up in an abandoned farmhouse.  Before long they are confronted by a knife wielding slasher.  When the rest of the crew shows up to split the loot, the killer begins stalking them too. 

This almost has kind of a Charles B. Pierce feel.  It starts off as sort of a true crime sort of deal before the killer shows up.  His appearance certainly seems inspired by Pierce’s The Town That Dreaded Sundown too. 

Likewise, the scenes with the thieves have the flavor of one of those Tarantino knockoffs from the late ‘90s, especially when they argue about who gets to wear what mask to the heist.  The lone woman on the team bitches, “I wanted to be Snow White!” and the leader scolds, “You’re the Wolf Man!”  In fact, the sudden switchover from crime flick to horror is reminiscent of From Dusk Till Dawn now that I think about it. 

This ultimately winds up being closer to Pierce than Tarantino.  Like Pierce’s ‘70s output, there are long lulls in between the good stuff.  When the good stuff finally does come around, it’s a bit restrained, albeit reasonably well executed.  Writer/director Stevan Mena does a fine job in the third act when he begins pouring on the slasher cliches.  (He delivers at least one solid jump scare too.)  The score is quite good as it is clearly reminiscent of the slasher movies of old, especially Halloween and Friday the 13th.  (The killer bears a more than passing resemblance to Jason in Part 2.)

For something that’s essentially a low budget genre mash-up, Malevolence works more often than not.  Any time you put two different genres together, the results are bound to be uneven.  Fortunately, it remains watchable throughout, even if Mena never quite hits it out of the park.  (It also runs on about ten minutes too long to boot.)

Two sequels followed. 

UNDER SIEGE (1980) ***

A gang of thieves pull off a daring heist in a casino and the chief Inspector (Stuart Whitman) sends police Captain Sylvester (Hugo Stiglitz) to go after them.  While they’re on the lam, the thieves split up and go their separate ways.  One group is killed by the cops, and the other breaks into the house of a wealthy family and takes them hostage.  They demand a plane to make to their getaway, and the Inspector eventually relents.  Predictably, things don’t go as planned. 

Not to be confused with the Steven Seagal flick of the same name, this surprisingly sturdy action thriller from Mexico’s master of exploitation, Rene (Night of 1000 Cats) Cardona, Jr. sort of plays like a South of the Border variation on Desperate Hours.  It’s one of those movies that’s a bit better than expected at every turn.  Cardona gives us lots of scenes of controlled chaos as there are tons of shootouts (including a brief gun battle in a movie theater) and foot, car, boat, and plane chases aplenty.  The scenes inside the home are appropriately suspenseful, and the interactions between the thieves and the hostages are legitimately tense.  The finale is equally strong as the film sort of morphs into a mini-disaster movie when one of the family members is forced to land the plane when the pilot gets shot by the kidnappers. 

Whitman spends most of his screen time sitting behind a desk smoking a stogie and barking orders while Stiglitz does a lot of the heavy lifting.  Hugo even gets his own Dirty Harry rip-off scene where he jumps aboard a hijacked school bus.  The gory way the hijacker gets dispatched in this sequence was worth an extra Half Star in my book.  Both stars are quite good and Francesco (Sorcerer) Rabal, Marisa (Diabolik) Mell (who has a couple of brief nude scenes), and Antonella (The Gates of Hell) Interlenghi, who play members of the kidnapped family, do fine work too. 

Whitman starred in the awful Guyana:  Cult of the Damned for Cardona the previous year. 

AKA: Panic Makers. AKA: Hostages!

BEAKS (1987) **

Michelle (Waxwork) Johnson is a reporter who is tired of getting shitty assignments.  Along with her cameraman boyfriend (The Blue Lagoon’s Christopher Atkins), she goes to Spain to cover a story about chickens who turned on their owner.  They soon learn it is but one of a series of bird attacks that have been happening around the globe.  While they try to figure out why the birds have gone cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, the birds attack a vacationing family and a kid’s birthday party. 

Director Rene Cardona Jr. delivers a solid opening sequence where some eagles attack a couple of hang gliders.  If anything, it’s impressive from a staging standpoint.  I’m not sure how long it took the eagle wrangler to get the birds in the same shot as the hang gliders, but I respect that it was done for real.  Nowadays, they would’ve used CGI for that shit.  That doesn’t mean it’s particularly exciting or suspenseful as Cardona uses way too much slow-motion.  Not to mention the fact that I’m pretty sure PETA would have something to say about the way the bird was dispatched. 

Such scenes of cruelty to birds (often shown in slow motion) mean it won’t take long before you start rooting against the humans.  That may have been Cardona’s point all along, but he makes his points much too crudely for it to work as a social message.  Still, the bird attacks manage to have a kick to them as the close-ups of eyes gouged out and faced being pecked are nice and juicy.  Because of that, Beaks very nearly skates by thanks to those scenes alone. 

This was a multinational film production.  You can tell from all the countries listed in the credits and by the fact that every time it cuts back and forth from Spain to Italy to Peru to Mexico, there’s a little title card where the action is taking place.  I don’t think that was so much for the benefit of the plot, but to impress the audience how far and wide the film was filmed. 

Honestly, there was just too much filler in between the good stuff to make it worthwhile.  Cardona also relies way too heavily on slow motion.  In fact, the film probably could’ve been a good fifteen to twenty minutes shorter had he allowed those scenes to play at normal speed. 

Atkins looks like he may have been drunk or high (or both) but Johnson (who used an obvious body double for her nude scenes) is pretty good.  I can’t fault either performer as a trip to travel around the globe must’ve been pretty tempting, even if they had to star in a crappy killer bird movie in order to do so.  Gabrielle Tinti also pops up as a survivor of a bird attack, unfortunately without his usual co-star (and wife) Laura Gemser by his side. 

If there’s middle ground between The Birds and Birdemic, this is it.  As trashy and overlong (100 minutes) as it is, it’s still better than The Birds 2.  (Coincidentally, this was sold in some markets as The Birds 2.)  Or Zombie 5:  Killing Birds, for that matter

Suggested Drinking Game:  Take a shot every time you see a flock of birds take to the skies in slow motion.  (You’ll get drunk pretty quickly as this movie has more shots of doves flying in slow motion than John Woo’s entire filmography.)

AKA:  Beaks:  The Movie.  AKA:  Birds of Prey.  AKA:  Evil Birds.  AKA:  Beaks:  The Birds 2.

APARTMENT 7A (2024) ***

Apartment 7A is a prequel to Rosemary’s Baby.  I like that when Paramount decides to fiddle with a classic of that stature, they confine it to television (which is more than I can say for Warner Bros. and their uneven string of theatrically released Exorcist sequels).  First, there was the dreadful Made for TV sequel, Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby (starring Patty Duke!) and then the miniseries remake (which I still haven’t seen).  Now comes this, which went straight to Paramount+. 

Julia (The Wolf Man) Garner stars as Terry, a dancer who breaks her ankle and struggles to find work on Broadway. The Castevets (Dianne Wiest and Kevin McNally) are a kindly old couple who help her get back on her feet by letting her stay in their spare apartment.  One night, Terry has drinks with the producer of the show (Jim Sturgess) and wakes up pregnant.  Pretty soon, she begins getting everything she wants, including the lead in a Broadway show.  She eventually realizes the devilish plans the seemingly benign couple has in store for her. 

The dancer Garner portrays is a minor character from Rosemary’s Baby.  If you’re familiar with that film, you probably already know she comes to a gruesome end.  Garner is fine in the lead, but it’s Dianne Wiest who steals the show.  She is a hoot in the role originated by Ruth Gordon, who won an Oscar for her work in the original.  She sinks her teeth into the scenery like a pit bull and devours everything in sight. 

Director Natalie Erika James is smart enough not to try to ape Roman Polanski’s style.  She does a good job at playing within the beats of Rosemary's Baby and letting the movie do its own thing within the confines of that film’s structure, without exactly replicating it.  I’m thinking specifically of the scene where Rosemary is drugged and impregnated.  Since Garner is a dancer in this one, the dream morphs into a Satanic Busby Berkeley dance sequence, and I must say, it is one of the best Satanic Busby Berkeley dance sequences on record. 

As far as 2024 prequels to horror classics go, it’s not a patch on The First Omen, but it works surprisingly well.  As with that film, the director is using the bones of a durable horror franchise to make statements about women’s rights, and the mix of social commentary and chills works more often than not.  While the pace threatens to peter out in the third act, the finale is decent enough to make up for the wait.  Thanks to James’ efforts, Apartment 7A feels like a genuine continuation of the original, and not just a typical made-for-streaming cash grab.