Review: Late Night With The Devil

Image courtesy of IFC Films.

The low-budget horror movie throwback "Late Night with the Devil" is three-quarters of a decent piece of schlock that overstays its welcome and, ultimately, ends on a note that isn't altogether satisfying. That said, this is a gimmick movie that remains compelling and has an ever-present tension that is impressively maintained for most of its running time. 

The gimmick here is that the film's story unfolds in real time during the taping of a 1977 episode of a late night talk show featuring a host who has long dreamed of making it to the big time, but that goal has always been just out of reach. The film is in color during the scenes that are live on the air and in black and white during commercial breaks as the show's crew works behind the scenes.

We get a bit of back story upfront: Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) is a rival to Johnny Carson in the 1970s but his late-night show, "Night Owls," never poses a real threat to Carson's numbers. His viewership begin to lag and his wife develops cancer, which ultimately claims her life. 

Desperate to ensure that his show survives, Delroy plans a Halloween special that is stocked with kooky characters - a psychic named Christou (Fayssal Bazzi) who gets a disturbingly strong reading from someone in the crowd, a debunker named Carmichael the Conjurer (Ian Bliss) who agrees to be on the show to explain how all of the other guests are scammers, a parapsychologist named Dr. June (Laura Gordon) who appears to be having an affair with Delroy, and her subject, a young girl named Lily (Ingrid Torelli), the only survivor of a cult's mass suicide who is alleged to be possessed by a demonic entity known as Abraxas.

To his credit, Dastmalchian is believable as the smarmy talk show host who remains on as long as the cameras are running and appears to be scheming whenever they're not. One of the film's flaws is an allusion to his possible dealings with a cult-like celebrity group that never is explained enough to be interesting or provide any insight into Delroy's character. 

The film plays like a found footage film, albeit one shot with professional cameras in front of a live audience, rather than the grainy digital types to which we've become accustomed. Much of the film involves playing to expectations - for example, Christou's bad vibes he gets in the audience obviously portend something sinister to come. There is also one prominent red herring in the film involving an audience member.

Once the focus is on Dr. June and Lily, the film takes on a much creepier tone. There's nothing here you haven't seen before in countless exorcism films, but the culmination of the demon within Lily being pestered is more sturm und drang than I was expecting. Had the film ended there, "Late Night with the Devil" might have been a tighter picture. But it continues on after the Lily melee and, as a result, it's a weaker film for it.

Even if "Late Night" doesn't quite stick the landing, there are a number of things it gets right. As mentioned, Dastmalchian does a good job with this character, even if Delroy isn't developed as much as one might have liked. The film also gets the vibe of the era, even if some of the antics on the show aren't, perhaps, in line with late night talk shows of that time period. Although far from perfect, "Late Night with the Devil" is an often amusing and brief horror movie that fans of the genre will likely want to seek out.

Review: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

Image courtesy of Sony Pictures.

As far as nostalgia-heavy sequels that bank upon the fond memories of their audiences to rake in more money go, you could do far worse than "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire," yet another attempt to cash in on the 1984 comedy classic. The film is, of course, nowhere near as good as Ivan Reitman's original picture, but as far as these things go, there's some moderate fun to be had here.

The Spengler family - who are thankfully no longer being visited by a digitally-recreated Harold Ramis - has moved from Oklahoma to New York City, where they've taken over the firehouse that serves as Ghostbusters headquarters. They continue to catch unruly spirits, but have found themselves on the wrong side of the mayor (William Atherton, whose character has gone from the condescending EPA agent to the cranky top official of New York City).

Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) finds herself booted off the team after the mayor points out that she's underage, so she's left to her own devices, which leads to her befriending a ghost (Emily Alyn Lind) who is stuck in purgatory. Without giving too much away, their friendship leads to a dangerous artifact handed to Dan Aykroyd's Ray Stantz by a character portrayed by Kumail Nanjiani - whose family was tasked with being "fire masters" to prevent an ancient demon from rising and turning everything in its path into ice - releasing the demon on the city.

It is up to the Spengler family and the older Ghostbusters (Ernie Hudson returns as Zeddemore, Annie Potts is back as sarcastic Janine, and Bill Murray has a few walk-on scenes as Venkman) to prevent the demon from releasing the thousands of ghosts that the Ghostbusters have stored in the firehouse's wall over the years and creating an undead army.

One of the problems with "Frozen Empire" is that there are too many subplots - Phoebe's friendship with the ghost could have used more screen time, while the thread involving Nanjiani's relatives could have used less, despite the actor providing many of the film's funnier quips - and entirely too many secondary characters.

On the other hand, there are a number of MVPs in this film - Rudd provides some laughs and pathos as Gary, Phoebe's science teacher who is now involved with Carrie Coons' Callie Spengler; Grace shines as Phoebe; Nanjiani is pretty funny; Patton Oswalt has a solid cameo, and Aykroyd gets the most to do of the legacy cast.

Trotting out new "Ghostbusters" sequels every so often isn't really necessary, although it's more watchable than many of the other franchises that return to the well again and again. The original 1984 film is by far the best of the bunch, the 2016 reboot was better than most people gave it credit for at the time, and all of the other sequels have been varying shades of not bad. 

This fifth entry doesn't lay into the nostalgia factor nearly as hard as the one before it, but there are still a number of call-backs - Slimer makes an appearance and there's a mini army of marshmallow men. The film doesn't really do anything new and its plot involving the demon being unleashed on the world is fairly substandard. But the film also asks us to spend time with a group of talented and likable people, and that's what makes this expensive-looking blockbuster occasionally work. As I said, you could do far worse.

Review: Love Lies Bleeding

Image courtesy of A24.

Being well made isn't necessarily the same thing as being good, and that's a distinction with which I had to wrestle when considering my feelings toward Rose Glass's "Love Lies Bleeding," a well-made movie that I admired a little more than I liked. In the end, I'd say that I could recommend the movie, which has much going for it, even if the experience of watching it wasn't always particularly pleasant.

The film is set in the late 1980s in a remote New Mexico town, where we first meet gym manager Lou (Kristen Stewart) cleaning out the nastiest cinematic toilet since "Trainspotting." It's the first of many messes she'll find herself cleaning during the course of the picture and only the first example of a scene in the film that nearly set my gag reflex in motion.

Lou meets and quickly becomes enamored with Jackie (Katy O'Brian), a newcomer to town from Oklahoma who's passing through on her way to Las Vegas, where she intends to take part in a bodybuilding competition. Jackie is jacked, partly due to her rigorous workout schedule, but also because of the steroids with which she's pumping herself. "Love Lies Bleeding" has the most evocative sound design since the recent "The Zone of Interest," in that every muscle flex or vein popping - not to mention some squishing while dealing with corpses - is reflected nauseatingly on the soundtrack.

Lou has a background that only slowly reveals itself to Jackie, who gets a job at a local gun range, which is run by the creepy Lou Sr. (Ed Harris), Lou's father, who is a local criminal extraordinaire, and whose wife's disappearance is never really explained - but, well, you can probably guess. Lou is troubled that her sister (Jena Malone) is abused by her ne'er-do-well husband JJ (Dave Franco, whose mullet is only the second worst haircut in the picture after Harris' insanely bad one), and Jackie takes note of this.

Soon, Lou and Jackie strike up a relationship, Jackie moves in, and some semi-explicit sex scenes ensue. Meanwhile, JJ takes it one step too far one night and - not to spoil anything here, but... - Jackie takes matters into her own hands, leading to another gag reflex-triggering moment. This leads to a downward spiral involving the police, another young woman who engages in sexual blackmail with Lou after witnessing her and Jackie driving JJ's car in the middle of the night, and Jackie's bodybuilding contest freakout in Las Vegas.

Glass's first film, "Saint Maud," was a religious-themed thriller that sometimes felt like a body horror movie. "Love Lies Bleeding" falls into that same category. Anyone who ever might have thought of using steroids will likely take a pass after watching this picture. Jackie's muscles flex to the point where they seem they might burst at any given moment, and her clear case of roid-rage is outright scary.

The film's eerie nighttime shots and electronic score, blended with its neo-noir trappings and neon-lit atmosphere, reminded me slightly of Nicolas Winding Refn's "Drive," although the film that seems to have inspired much of "Love Lies Bleeding" is David Lynch's freaky "Lost Highway," from the nighttime shots of the highway flying by in the darkness, the creepy scenes in the desert, and even a gruesome death-by-table sequence that feels like a shoutout to the one in Lynch's film.

There's also a similarity to Lynch's film - in which one character literally becomes another halfway through the picture - in that character's pasts and true selves are hidden within the shadows of the night, during which much of Glass's film is set.

So, while "Love Lies Bleeding" isn't a film that's always enjoyable in the traditional sense - it's grim, grimy, and occasionally visually unpleasant - it's a film with much to admire, from the performances (Stewart's Lou is tightly coiled, while O'Brian is outright explosive and Harris is the scariest I've ever seen him) to its stylish visuals and dark sense of humor. One's enjoyment might be determined by how much one can relate to characters whose behavior often veers into the sociopathic and how much one's stomach can take by the grotesque imagery, but "Love Lies Bleeding" is, if nothing else, memorable.

Review: About Dry Grasses

Image courtesy of Janus Films.

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's films are frequently long - his latest being well over three hours - and talkative dramas that examine weighty subject matter - such as good and wrongdoing (in his Palm d'Or winner "Winter Sleep") or the nature of truth (his 2012 masterpiece "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia") - through conversation.

In his latest, "About Dry Grasses," Ceylan asks us to spend more than three hours in the company of a man who is, let's face it, unpleasant and often unlikable. Thankfully, great drama does not require feeling sympathetic towards a fictional character.

The film's lead character is art teacher Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), who has been assigned to work in a remote location in east Turkey, despite wanting to live in a more metropolitan area such as Istanbul, and who wears a condescending smirk on his face most of the time. He's equally friendly with the Turkish regime - he cavorts with local military men - and the opposition, namely a left-wing woman named Nuray (Merve Dizdar), a former military woman who lost a leg in a bomb blast, whom he befriends later in the film. It is she who calls Samet out and points out the zone of moral cowardice he inhabits that involves approving when a good thing gets done, but acting as if he wants nothing to do with politics.

A conundrum involving Samet, Nuray, and Kenan (Musab Ekici), Samet's roommate and closest thing to a best friend, arises late in the picture, but an earlier bit of drama dominates the film's first half. Samet shows outsized favorable attention to a girl named Sevim (Ece Bagci) whom he believes is smarter than the other students, whom he often berates cruelly. There's nothing to suggest that Samet has done anything to overtly cause harm to this girl, but he still crosses a line.

There's a scene early in the film in which the question of lying or telling the truth - and whether it's necessary to always tell the truth when feelings are involved - is discussed among some teachers in a faculty lounge in regard to a merchant who was selling fake goods. Samet believes that one must always tell things the way they are - people's feelings be damned - and this is obvious during a particularly unkind moment when he criticizes his students and tells them they'll likely not rise above their humble existences and during another scene in which Nuray asks Samet not to tell Kenan, who obviously likes her, about a night they spent together, which Samet goes out and immediately does afterward.

The most fascinating sequence in the picture is a long, dialogue-driven scene when Nuray invites Samet and Kenan over the dinner and, for once, the former lies and fails to mention it to the latter. This is the night that will end with them sleeping together, but first the two debate politics or, rather, whether one should become involved in community advocacy. Nuray calls Samet out over his selfishness and lack of interest in getting involved in the world, arguing that he hides behind a mask of faux politeness when, in fact, he doesn't want to admit that he cares for no one other than himself.

One of the film's ironic touches are the photographs that Samet takes of the town's inhabitants in the form of tableaux vivants, which appear lovingly shot; however, it's clear that Samet cares little about the subjects in the photos and thinks of most of the people in the town as uneducated and simple. 

There's also a perplexing moment late in the picture - and immediately before Samet and Nuray sleep together - that I won't give away, but it's something akin to breaking the fourth wall. It's as if to suggest that amid all this back and forth about the nature of lies versus truth, we shouldn't forget that the entire production - a film in which actors are portraying people other than themselves - is itself a lie.

Ceylan's finest film, in my book, remains the mesmerizing "Anatolia," but "About Dry Grasses" is another strong and often fascinating look at what truth actually means, and how it should be wielded. For moviegoers of the patient variety, this film will likely cast a spell.

Review: How To Have Sex

Image courtesy of Imagine Film Distribution.

The British coming-of-age story "How to Have Sex" depicts modern teenage rites of passage - especially for young women - as a slow-motion horror show. The film begins as a story about a group of three British girls on holiday on the Greek islands and is replete with the requisite party-til-you-drop type of bacchanalia that you'd expect in any American entry in this subgenre from the past however many decades.

But a little less than halfway through the film - during a part when the girls attend a party at a nightclub where the sleazy MCs corral young men onto a stage and ask girls to do their best to make them hard - the film becomes something else entirely. Even though the boozy early scenes didn't exactly strike me as fun as they did their participants, the latter scenes take on an unambiguously unsettling air.

Tara is the lead character. Portrayed by a very good Mia McKenna Bruce, she is smaller in stature than her two friends - caring Em (Enva Lewis) and passive aggressive Skye (Lara Peake) - and displays a naivete in terms of who she trusts. Tara is a virgin, driven home by the "Angel" necklace around her neck with which she's frequently toying.

The girls meet another group rooming across the way from them. This trio consists of amiable Badger (Shaun Thomas), a heavily tattooed boy who obviously takes a shine toward Tara, as well as Paige (Laura Ambler), the film's most underdeveloped character who becomes a romantic interest for Em, and Paddy (Samuel Bottomley), an arrogant womanizer whom Tara makes the mistake of trusting.

In terms of setup and plot, "How to Have Sex" might seem simplistic. The three young women arrive at their exotic outpost, party quite a bit, meet the boys (and girl) next door, and party some more until things take a darker turn when a sexual encounter - in fact, more than one - raises questions regarding consent and a character appears stuck in a scenario that becomes increasingly tense.

The film's visual style remains interesting throughout. At first, the nighttime scenes have a hypnotic quality as the nightclubs visited by Tara, Em, and Skye are lit with glowing strobe lights. The daytime scenes show things in a bleaker, light-of-day manner, that is, until the switch in tone halfway through the picture. At that point, the nighttime - during which the characters drink heavily - takes on a more sinister tone, while the daylight offers a little reprieve.

"How to Have Sex" may not reinvent the wheel on the coming-of-age story, but it's a solid depiction of a young woman learning who she can lean on and who to avoid, while also portraying an unsettling initiation into the sexual rites of passage. Overall, this is a solid debut.

Review: Dune: Part Two

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

Director Denis Villeneuve raised some eyebrows recently when he made a comment that he primarily emphasizes the visual component of cinema and that, to paraphrase, dialogue doesn't interest him very much. He later retracted the statement, but the irony of it is that while I was watching the expensive-looking - and often visually impressive - "Dune: Part Two," I found the picture's numerous set pieces to be mostly engaging whereas the quieter moments in which the characters talk, mostly about whether Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) is a messiah figure, were less interesting.

Overall, this second film - both pictures are based on Frank Herbert's cult science fiction novel of the same name, and a third film based on "Dune Messiah" is sure to follow - is a pretty decent blockbuster film. It's about as good as the first film, which was a movie that I admired a little more than I liked. 

It's a well made film that is rich with visual detail, although the super serious discussions of messianic prophecies and a spice that rules the galaxy can be a little on the silly side, something that David Lynch recognized when making his much-maligned 1984 version of the film, to which time has been kinder than one might expect.

It's ironic also that the two films in Villeneuve's oeuvre that impressed me the most were ones that were dialogue-driven - the gripping thriller "Prisoners" and the bizarre and surreal "Enemy." I've admired his "Blade Runner" sequel, "Arrival," and the "Dune" films, but they honestly don't affect me as much as the aforementioned.

The second "Dune" movie picks up where the first left off - Atreides is in the desert with the Fremen, whom Paul will eventually inspire to take up arms against the emperor (Christopher Walken), his daughter (Florence Pugh), the sinister Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Sarsgard), and his sociopathic nephew, Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), who is this film's central villain.

Any further explanation of the plot would take up space that I'm not willing to fill and you're probably not willing to read. Needless to say, Atreides' possible messiah stature is questioned and tested - there's a great scene in which he rides one of those gigantic sand worms - and a romance buds between him and Chani (Zendaya), although this is one of the film's more undercooked subplots.

As I mentioned, there are some great set pieces - the sand worm ride, a sequence during which Paul and Chani lead a group to attack a large machine that digs up the spice and must hide in its shadows to avoid being shot, and a final battle that culminates with a fight between Feyd-Rautha and Atreides. The film leaves many plot threads open, which I'm guessing will be addressed when "Dune Messiah" inevitably gets made.

In the meantime, "Dune: Part Two" is a good example of a solid big budget studio property that isn't dumbed down for audiences and doesn't cater to the needs of all who attend. In other words, you're either a fan of this thing or you're not - those who liked the first entry will probably feel the same way about this one. This was my reaction as well. I liked the first "Dune," even if I didn't quite love it, and that's about where I stand with this second film.