KONG: SKULL ISLAND - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Saved By Great Monsters, John C. Reilly

John C. Reilly: The only thing resembling a human being.

Kong: Skull Island (2017)
Dir. Jordan Vogt-Roberts
Scr. Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein, Derek Connolly
Sty: John Gatins
Starring: Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson,
John Goodman, Brie Larson, John C. Reilly

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Why it took four writers to come up with the lame, dull Kong: Skull Island screenplay is beyond me. Then again, given the sheer emptiness of most studio pictures these days, it shouldn't surprise anyone since it takes a whole lotta boneheads to generate a whole lotta stupid. An American President called Donald Trump is proof of that.

If truth be told, I can almost even forgive inept imbecility. What I can't forgive is tedium and this mostly horrendous reboot of the Kong franchise is nothing if not mind-numbingly boring for most of its interminable 118-minute length. Much of what makes the movie dull are the missed opportunities it took four writers to conjure up.

Things begin promisingly enough with the pre-credit sequence. It's WWII and two soldiers - one American, the other Japanese - crash on the remote Skull Island. Ah, tantalizing! Perhaps we will be afforded a lovely action-packed nod to John Boorman's Hell in the Pacific? But, no. We're handed two dull anonymous actors - no Lee Marvin or Toshiro Mifune here. Jesus, I'd have even settled for something resembling Peter Sellers/Burt Kwouk Pink Panther martial arts slap-schtick shenanigans. That, however, would be too politically incorrect by contemporary standards (and sadly, the movie's endlessly shoe-horned P.C. sensibilities are another big problem with the picture). So instead, we get a dull sprint up a mountain and our warring soldiers meet with a far more formidable enemy - Yup, you guessed it, King Kong, the big hairy ape. (But don't worry, ain't nothing too Eugene O'Neill about this hirsute monkey.)

Our movie launches into an annoyingly wham-bam credit sequence detailing American history from the last Great War and eventually leading up to the turbulence of the 1970s. Thank God it stops here - a real decade. Alas, the period detail, in virtually every respect, is woefully inadequate - most annoyingly with the contemporary-speak of the dialogue and the decidedly 2017 timbre of the delivery of said dialogue.

Of course, this being 2017, in spite of the movie being set in the 1970s, we don't get to meet a cool adventurer seeking passage to Skull Island, say along the lines of showman Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong in the 1933 version, Jack Black in Peter Jackson's 2005 entry) or even a delectably sleazy oilman like Fred Wilson (Charles Grodin in 1976). What we get is the supremely unimaginative, ineffectual government hack Bill Randa (John Goodman) and his earnestly plucky African-American geologist Houston Brooks (Corey Hawkins). Randa is such a useless schmo that it takes his right-hand Houston to convince a Senator to bankroll the expedition.

Welcome to 2017. And not that I have a problem with this smooth young Black male weaselling dough out of the Senator instead of boss man Whitey, but it might have been far more interesting to have a character like Randa, written-for and played by someone with some balls, like Laurence Fishburne for example. The role of this character, or character-type, requires - Nay, demands someone in his august years (or at least in the case of 1976's Grodin, one of those 30-something guys who feels like he's in his 50s or 60s) and more importantly, someone who has the smarts to squeeze oil out of an empty drum.

But, I remind you - it took four writers to generate this screenplay.

Can't go too wrong with a cute prehistoric muskox.

So, off to Skull Island we go. Randa assembles a stock, boring team that includes former British Special-Ops mercenary James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston, a great actor in a nothing role), gung-ho army dude Colonel Preston Packard (Samuel L. Jackson, a great actor, but more boring than usual in this stock role), looking for more carnage now that the Vietnam War is over and perhaps most sickeningly, Mason Weaver (Brie Larson, a great actress with a completely idiotic role), a self-proclaimed "Anti-war photographer" (whatever that's supposed to mean). Of course the team is replete with other soldiers, scientists and bureaucrats in order to provide ample food for the monsters.

The movie plods through all of its uninspired machinations as our team essentially needs to get off the island as soon as they land on it - there are monsters, after all. Our leading lady is, of course, not the "beauty who killed the beast", but rather, the beauty that the beast thinks is kind of okay and not a danger to him. Our leading man is boring and does little more than argue with the gung-ho army guy and acquiesce to the madman's needs to kill monsters to avenge the deaths of his soldiers. Of course, the ineffectual adventurer Randa is so useless that we almost forget he's in the movie until he gets eaten. Then, we get to forget about him all over again.

Happily, the movie introduces us to Lieutenant Hank Marlow (John C. Reilly, playing the older version of the American soldier introduced at the beginning of the movie). Marlow has been living on the island since WWII in the protective custody of the island's indigenous Native population. Thank God! A real character with an irascible sense of humour. Reilly not only makes us laugh, but he's really the only person we care about. Stupidly, the writers have relegated Marlow's Japanese counterpart to that of a corpse - someone who is talked about fondly, but whom we don't get a chance to know. It would have been amazing to have a great veteran Asian actor quipping with Reilly and doing battle with the monsters, but you know, there were only four writers, so you can't expect creative miracles.

Even more boring than most of the film's non-characters are the island's tribesmen. What a ho-hum lot. They appear to be pseudo-Buddhist types who do little more than cast inscrutable glances every which way. This is strangely even more ethnocentric (and perhaps even downright racist) than the previous incarnations of "ignorant", "bloodthirsty" "savages" in the 1933 and 2005 versions. At least those people had something resembling "life" infused in their ooga-booga personae.

Kong looks forward to some yummy octopus tentacles.

Other than Reilly's delightful performance, the only thing else left are the monsters. I won't bother attributing any of the picture's "success" in this regard to the by-rote direction of Jordan Vogt-Roberts (his boring nods to Apocalypse Now notwithstanding), but rather, all the magnificent SFX geniuses who designed the myriad of creatures. Kong's battles with the other behemoths are pretty damn spectacular and perk things up ever-so thrillingly. There's a phenomenal aquatic cage match twixt Kong and a humungous octopus which culminates in a wonderful moment in which Kong slurps up a few tentacles. One can, I suppose, attribute this to one of the four writers. Kudos, dudes!

That said, all previous incarnations of the Kong story were a whole lot more than just the monsters. They had, uh, characters, a solid story arc and were chockfull of wonder. They were sheer magic. There's nothing like that here - just a whole lotta tedious expository (and stupid, 'natch) nonsense to setup the inevitable sequels and franchise "universe". I'm coming to hate that word. "Universe" should conjure up feelings of expanse and possibility - not more of the same.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *½ One-and-a-Half Stars

Kong: Skull Island is in wide release via Warner Brothers

10 CLOVERFIELD LANE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Predictable followup to alien thriller

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)
Dir. Dan Trachtenberg
Scr. Josh Campbell, Matthew Stuecken, Damien Chazelle
Starring: John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Gallagher Jr.

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Cloverfield by Matt Reeves and from a script by Drew Goddard, was a surprisingly effective science fiction horror thriller in the found footage shaky-cam style. Why it needed a $25 million budget was somewhat beyond me, especially when pictures with equally terrific effects and production value have been generated for a fraction of the cost. No matter, the cam-corder-captured party, followed by an alien attack and harrowing rescue effort, was a genuinely terrifying roller coaster ride - nicely directed and with some sharp writing.

The same cannot be said for 10 Cloverfield Lane. Though not a direct sequel, it's set in the aftermath of the alien invasion from the aforementioned surprise hit. Though designed as an extremely low budget horror film with a tiny cast and claustrophobic setting, one of its meagre virtues is that it has far more gloss and polish than the first sojourn into the Cloverfield world. It's shot straight-up in a classical mode, eschewing the previous picture's camcorder look.

Happily, original director (and co-writer) Damien Chazelle dropped the property like a hot potato when he received the dough he need to make the terrific Whiplash. Producer J.J. Abrams brought Dan Trachtenberg, ace director of T.V. commercials to the helm. Though this results in a great look, a shocking car accident sequence and two superb montage sequences, the picture is pretty much a snore.

When babe Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) takes off into the country to chill after breaking up with her boyfriend Ben (the voice of Bradley Cooper via a couple of telephone calls), her car goes off the road in the middle of the night. She wakes up to find herself chained in a stark basement. Soon, she's visited by Howard (John Goodman) her rescuer and host.

She's in shackles for good reason. There's been a chemical warfare attack and Howard needs to gently break the news to her. He doesn't want her to do something stupid and try to leave his fallout shelter, bringing instant death to herself and potentially letting the poisonous atmosphere inside. She eventually meets hunky local good old boy Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.) who is also a resident of the well-built shelter.

For most of the movie, Michelle is looking for ways to escape since she thinks Howard might be lying. He also creeps her out. Eventually, the tension twixt the two turns deadly and a (purportedly) scary truth indeed looms outside.

All of this can be seen from miles away.

Unlike Cloverfield's svelte 85-minute running time, this second in what Paramount Pictures hopes will be a new franchise, is a lugubrious 105 minutes. There's plenty of dialogue - some of it good enough, but most of it awful - plus a narrative so predictable that it would take a major mental deficiency to not see where the picture is headed.

Sadly, we're forced to sit through the by-rote advances in the ho-hum plot. All (and I do mean ALL) the "shocking" revelations come precisely when they should, offering little surprise.

Each beat feels like Syd Field and/or Robert McKee 101.

(By the way, I think both Field and McKee - McKee perhaps less so - have a lot to offer, but for some reason mainstream studio plot construction "geniuses" can't seem to realize that both of the aforementioned screenwriting gurus encourage the notion of breaking the rules, but ONLY once the rules have been thoroughly understood, tried, applied, then made better by spring-boarding away from them.)

The three central actors perform this dross admirably, but nothing can really save the film from being utterly, thoroughly dull. This might have not mattered so much if the ride had offered up some genuine thrills, but alas it does not. It spring-boards into tedious familiarity.

Though I'm always happy to watch the great John Goodman, it's a bit disheartening to see him get so much screen time with a role as run of the mill as this one. Howard is an ex-military survivalist nutcase and child rapist. Goodman does his best to play things straight, but the role is so poorly etched that Goodman can do little but waste screen time deflecting his character's predictability. As such, he works very hard to deliver as interesting and blessedly low-key a performance as possible.

Paramount is making much ado about nothing in their efforts to convince audiences not to "spoil" the proceedings. Sadly, the movie does a pretty good job of that, all by its lonesome. Given the running time and dullish pace, the movie also gives us plenty of time to spot all the gaping plot holes. Many of them are so Mack-truck sized, they're impossible to avoid.

Worse yet, though the movie is a mere fraction of the Cloverfield cost, there are still any number of films which have far more skill and imagination at a mere fraction of this picture's "modest" $5 million budget. Just take a gander at any film from Collingwood's Foresight Features (Ejecta, Hellmouth, The Hexecutioners, Septic Man) and you'll see superb production value for thrifty bucks and imagination galore as opposed to predictability galore. As well, the Foresight Features pictures are actually about something which 10 Cloverfield Lane ultimately, is not.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *½ One-and-a-half-stars

10 Cloverfield Lane is in wide release via Paramount Pictures.

SHARKNADO 2: THE SECOND ONE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - A Masterpiece of shark poop

YOU WILL
BELIEVE
A SHARK
CAN FLY
AND IF
YOU
BELIEVE
THAT
I'VE GOT A
BROOKLYN
BRIDGE
I CAN SELL
CHEAP!

Sharknado 2: The Second One (2014)
Dir. Anthony C. Ferrante
Starring: Ian Ziering, Tara Reid, Vivica A. Fox, Judd Hirsch, Robert Kline, Robert Hays, Billy Ray Cyrus, Perez Hilton, Kelly Ripa, Al Roker, Kari Wuhrer, Wil Wheaton

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Inclement weather hits the New York-bound flight from L.A. Never fear, though. Robert Hays (Airplane!) is the pilot. But, wait! What's that we see out the window?

Oh, Jesus! No!

SHARKS!

This is more than mere inclement weather. This is that meteorological phenomenon which hit L.A. last year. It's a sharknado - a tornado so fierce it rips thousands of sharks out of the ocean and has them whipping around within the funnels of H2O, allowing for extra propulsion to dive at their targets, jaws agape, lusting to ingest whatever their tummies desire.

Within the first ten-or-so minutes of Anthony C. Ferrante's Sharknado 2: The Second One. a passenger is decapitated by a shark (in the plane), our leading lady (Tara Reid) has her hand bitten off by a shark (in the plane) and the pilot is swallowed whole when a shark crashes into the cockpit (uh, you guessed it, in the plane), until our stalwart hero from the first Sharknado (Ian Ziering) commandeers the controls, dodging hundreds of hungry airborne sharks until he can safely crash-land the airplane.

Alas, New York is about to be hit with a shit-storm of sharks because frankly, there's not one, but two - count 'em - TWO sharknados headed for the Big Apple from opposite directions like mega, funnel-shaped Twin Towers threatening to collide with each other in the heart of Times Square. And as we watch, mouths agape, we realize we're about to participate in what might be one of the most gloriously ludicrous monster movies of all time.

The first Sharknado was happily stupid. Sharknado 2 grabs a nursing sow by the teats and begins pulling maniacally like Quasimodo the Notre Dame bell ringer. Whereas the first titty twister of a Sharknado was so awful it was good, our followup picture is so good, it's hard to believe how awful it truly is - but in all the right ways - and possibly in ways that might actually be good. At a certain point, surrealism overtakes the whole affair and your guess is as good as mine as to whether or not the picture is endowed with considerable merit (or not, or whatever, it doesn't matter). Director Ferrante and screenwriter Thunder (Surely Not His Real Name) Levin have us soiling ourselves from beginning to end, not out of fright, but because the movie is genuinely funny.

Where writer Not His Real Name excels beyond the preposterous genius and variety of tornado-propelled shark attacks are some of the finest lines of dialogue ever scribed in an awful movie. My favourite, by far is when our bland leading man visits our bland leading lady in the hospital where she's recovering from a shark biting off her hand (yes, she's the one, the lassie who gets chomped by a shark in the plane in the first ten minutes), he attempts some levity meant to cheer her up, points to her bloodied, bandaged stump and remarks:

"The next time you offer to lend a hand don’t be so literal about it."

I'm still slapping my knee over that one, good golly gee. My other knee is also sissy-boy-slapped all to hell from laughter over seeing the head of the Statue of Liberty crash into downtown Manhattan and take out an unsuspecting bystander. Will wonders never cease? No, they don't. Witness, if you dare, our dreadful leading lady retrieve her hand from the jaws of a shark to get her wedding ring back.

This, I believe, is truly worthy of a full-on sissy-boy slap-party of guffaws.

With an atrocious leading man and equally abominable leading lady, a handful of fun supporting turns (notably Judd Hirsch as a cab driver) and the most ridiculous number of cameos by American pop culture icons (Billy Ray Cyrus, Kelly Ripa, Al Roker, etc.), there's no way anyone but some high-falutin' egg head is going to not love this tasty mound of fresh, steaming shark poop. The special visual effects are undeniably atrocious, but they're so unsparing in their sheer volume, that you occasionally convince yourself how great they are. Which, of course, they are most certainly not.

That, ladies and gentlemen, takes some doing and Sharknado 2: The Second One does it real good.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

Sharknado 2: The Second One is available on an outlandishly rich Blu-Ray edition from VSC that includes 2 commentary tracks - TWO!!! - tons of behind the scenes featurettes, a genuinely fun and informative short on casting the cameos, a gag reel, extended and deleted scenes and gorgeously moronic cover art and menus. Feel free to order the movie directly via the appropriate Amazon links below and in so doing, contribute to the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner.

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GODZILLA - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Dull, humourless remake lacks powerful political context of GOJIRA

GODZILLA QUIZ: WHAT'S SCARIER?
(I) Ken Watanabe (left) at the L.A. premiere of GODZILLA
(II) Ken Watanabe (bottom right) not changing his expression in GODZILLA
(III) Mickey Rooney (top right in duplicate) in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S

Godzilla (2014) TURD FOUND BEHIND HARRY'S CHARBROIL AND DINING LOUNGE
Dir. Gareth Edwards, Script: Max Borenstein and 4 (!!!) other writers, Starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ken Watanabe, Elizabeth Olsen, Juliette Binoche, Sally Hawkins, David Strathairn, Bryan Cranston

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Who in their right mind would entrust a multi-million-dollar remake of Godzilla to a director whose only claim to fame was a precious, twee and boring no-budget indie movie called Monsters that was self-consciously arty and only really appealed to pretentious boneheads who went on at length about the film's "smart" reliance upon character in stead of carnage? Well, who do you think? A major studio (Warner Brothers) and a production company financed solely on Wall Street by rich assholes wanting a piece of the glamour-pie motion pictures can deliver (Legendary Pictures). That's who.

The results are predictable. Eschewing all manner of genuine political context and zapping out every ounce of what made the Toho Studio production of Ishirō Honda's stunning 1954 Gojira so powerful (the monster was a metaphoric representation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), Godzilla (2014) manages to make even the woeful American re-cut of Honda's original, Godzilla - King of the Monsters (featuring a bunch of useless footage of Raymond Burr as an American journalist) look like a masterpiece. Edwards is a bookish talent at best and his rendering of the tale is mostly muted with plodding, humourless moments of deep concern, punctuated by very loud moments of battle and carnage shot in a manner Edwards assumed was oh-so arty (the camera is never where it could be illogically which is a nice idea in theory, but as Edwards incompetently handles it, dramatically impractical).

There's an accent on character here, but it's strictly by-the-numbers. That's not all the fault of the director since the screenplay was cobbled together by 5 writers (some credited, others not) and we're forced to follow a tale that lumbers across two time periods and all over God's Green Earth (well, mostly America) with a clutch of cliched and throughly uninteresting cardboard cutouts.

During the pre-credit sequence it's revealed that during an atomic bomb test during the 50s in the ocean near Japan that some sort of creature appeared, but disappeared just as quickly as it was spotted. About 40-or-so years pass and two scientists (Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins) discover a super-duper humungous skeleton and a couple of egg-like pods in a Filipino strip mine. One of the eggs appears to have hatched. This inspires Ken Watanabe to display the only expression he can seem to muster for the entire picture, concern.

Meanwhile in Japan, married American nuke specialists played by Bryan Cranston and Juliette Binoche work in a Japanese nuclear power plant and discover some mega-weird seismic shit going on beneath the water's surface. The plant soon explodes and sadly, the only actor worth watching in the entire movie, Binoche 'natch, dies.

This brings us to present day. Cranston's son (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is now an explosive expert for the Navy in San Francisco where he lives with his nurse wifey (Elizabeth Olsen) and their fucking obnoxious kid. Taylor-Johnson's been away on a long tour of duty, but he's forced to leave his family when he finds out his Dad's been arrested in Japan for trespassing on the site of the nuclear accident which has been under quarantine all these decades.

Once reunited in the Land of Nippon, father and son sneak into the quarantine zone because his Dad has a bunch of data he wants to retrieve. Upon doing so, some armed soldiers find them. This time, though, no arrests are made. They're taken to a secret facility deep below the ground where we find, yee-haa, Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins examining some kind of creatures in a chrysalis form. The bugger mutates, wreaks havoc and escapes, not before killing Daddy Cranston.

David Strathairn soon enters the picture as a high-ranking military official and we find out that the military knows of Godzilla existence and has been tracking it for years. The creature that recently hatched is on its way to a nuclear waste disposal site because, it seems, the creature feeds on radiation. And guess what? That pesky pod that hatched a few years ago is also on its way to the same destination. One's a male, the other's a female and if, after a radiation buffet they decide to fuck, there's going to be the possibility of more creatures like them.

For some reason, Watanabe has been studying these creatures for nearly two decades and is revered by the military for his expertise. However, all he seems to do is register concern and appears to really not know much of anything about the creatures save for one salient detail which, ultimately, is a guess.

"Godzilla seek to maintain balance," notes Watanabe with, you guessed it, concern.

What-the-fuck-ever. We're almost an hour into this lugubrious mess and have another hour to go. In spite of some monster action, there's also endlessly dull sections and we have to keep following Taylor-Johnson as he bops from Hawaii, to Nevada and then San Francisco. At least, in fairness to Watanabe, he is able to muster one expression. The woeful Taylor-Johnson is only able to convey complete blankness. He's a dreadful actor with all the screen presence of a cipher. Elizabeth Olsen is not much better. Not only is she a complete blank slate, but her character is so stupid that she stays in the hospital to tend to all the casualties from an attack by the monsters and puts her annoying kid on a school bus that just happens to get trapped on the Golden Gate bridge in a traffic jam - just as Godzilla is heading towards it. The military has set off nukes to kill the monsters, but somehow, Watanabe convinces Strathairn to let Godzilla fight it out with the two flying creatures ready to get down and dirty to procreate. This means Taylor-Johnson must risk life and limb to defuse the nukes.

He survives. So does his wife. So does his obnoxious brat. Godzilla kills the bad monsters, but sadly dies when crushed by a skyscraper. Or does he? Nope. He's alive. Godzilla is here for AMERICA. He wanders back into the ocean where he'll remain until the sequel.

If you see this movie, your pocket will have been picked and will be picked again and again via the inevitable sequels.

For my money, I'm just going to watch the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of Gojira again.

Godzilla is playing all over the world via Warner Brothers.

SILENT RETREAT - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2013 - More promise than delivery

Silent Retreat (2013) **1/2
Dir. Tricia Lee
Starring: Chelsea Jenish, Robert Nolan, Sofia Banzhaf

Review By Greg Klymkiw

There are simply so many things wrong about this movie which, makes it especially frustrating to assess since the few elements that are right about it, are so very, very right on! Alas, those positive elements are almost buried by the film's problems - its two most woeful elements being a dreadful screenplay by Corey Brown (from a story by Brown and director Tricia Lee) and the movie's uncertain tone (which in fairness is rooted completely in the aforementioned poor writing).

On the surface, the high concept of the piece isn't bad. A mysterious juvenile detention camp for wayward teenage girls is located deep in the woods (one road in, one road out). It takes only five inmates at any one time and the rules are very simple - NO TALKING. None. Nada. Zip! Girls who are especially problematic are expelled, though in reality, they're dragged into the woods, chained to a tree and sacrificed to a monster that lives there. Hey, in theory, I've got no problem with this at all.

In practise, however, it's a completely different story. The first two-thirds of the film plays - both in story and direction like a very lame and tame young-teen-oriented thriller. This might have been acceptable if the pace and overall solitude didn't give an audience time to start asking questions (either to themselves, or most annoyingly, out loud to whomever they're watching it with). Some of the questions are eventually answered, but they come much too late in the proceedings since we've already been yanked out of the drama way too many times wondering about elements that could have been dispensed with so much earlier on.

A number of the revelations are withheld from both the audience and the characters and this is a huge mistake. In fact, the "mystery" isn't all that very interesting anyway. We know there's something really wrong with this juvie camp for girls right from the get-go. The entire movie would have worked so much better without this muddle and allowed its director to concentrate on really creeping us out and scaring the bejesus out of us right from the get-go.

And ugh, speaking of right from the get-go, there was absolutely no reason to begin the movie showing a juvie teen girl who we never meet again, chained to a tree in the woods as we hear the approaching growls of some mighty hungry-sounding creature. And ugh, there really was no reason to even begin from the beginning as Janey (Chelsea Jenish), our heroine, is brought into the camp. So much running time is boringly wasted on cliched storytelling when deep down, there's a tale - a reasonably original take on one, anyway - that's desperate for some sort of simple (as opposed to simplistic), clean and at the same time, sophisticated approach.

For example, there's a pretty okay bit of writing that's very nicely played by a wonderful character actor whom I have - to my knowledge - never seen in anything before. The character is that of the Doctor (Robert Nolan), the commandant of the camp and he lays out the ground rules for Janey. At least a third of his speech could have appeared off-camera as we were delivered some of the visuals in the opening before we join the conversation in progress. This, by the way, is where some very basic expositional information could have been slipped in for our benefit so we didn't have to be wrenched out of the drama at later junctures wondering about it.

I do so wish more young filmmakers who want to tackle genre material thought more about giving US all the information we need or want and withholding it from the protagonists so that we're never in the dark, but are, instead even more on the edges of our collective seats as the "ignorant" heroes are sucked into a spider's web that we already know is there. Like Hitchcock so often said (in a variety of ways), if a bomb is planted on a bus, it's not the explosion that will be the horrendous thing to draw out the suspense, but it's US knowing the bomb is there and where it is and following our protagonists into this horrendous situation. In any event, the screenplay for this film had so many elements like this, that unnecessarily turning them into mysteries did little to keep our interest in the story and characters' trajectories, but rather forced us into ALWAYS being in the same position of ignorance with said characters.

Another woeful element is the promise of a movie that could have really delivered big time on the perversity front. We've got a private juvie joint in the middle of nowhere that takes in a select number of "bad" girls - all of them, of course are, thankfully, babes and its run by this creepy old dude and his inbred sons who assert weird dominance therapy including hypnotism and mysterious trips into a cabin. And, of course, I have no idea the ages of the actresses in this film, but let's be frank, if they were or are all "of age", there are clearly exploitative genre tropes that are begging to be employed. In fact, employing them might have worked wonders in terms of beefing up the strange Stepford Wives indoctrination going on.

There was also a great opportunity to put a crazy, sexy spin on all the great juvie pictures of the 50s and the women in prison pictures of the 70s. Again, I reiterate - we've got five babes in a completely whacked-out juvie joint and most importantly: There are showers, there are beds and even a creepy comment from the doctor warning against sexual improprieties. Puh-leeeeeeese, don't put this potential for exploitation in our minds and NOT deliver on it.

One of the biggest disappointments is when we discover that the girls are being subjected to a barrage of propaganda on film. This too is a great idea, but the images themselves are so dullsville (and dispensed with so quickly) that instead of getting something similar (in terms of power and impact) to the images of violence Alex is forced to endure in A Clockwork Orange, or better yet, in the perverse propagandistic "test" given to prospective political assassins in Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View, we get lame, thoroughly unconvincing images. I'm not suggesting the filmmaker needed to copy these scenes, but instead, needed to find a way of selecting and presenting the images so tied more directly in with the weird group hypnosis scenes and then, on a visceral level, for them to knock us on our collective butts. This was clearly the intent, however, as the old saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions - which also seems to be something one can use to describe so much of the film and its failings.

This goes on and on - PG-rated incidents, rife with confusion and then we eventually get slammed with the final third of the film that's anything but PG or PG-13 or even R. The climactic scenes of the film are so deliciously over-the-top, really well directed and edited (by Mike Reisacher) that the filmmaker's intent to provide something very quiet and ominous in the first two-thirds could have worked so beautifully - IF, the writing had been up to the fine idea and most importantly, if the utter, sickening, creepy perversity of the situation had been amped up.

The other dreadful element is the musical score by Aaron Gilhuis - a godawful, by-the-numbers series of plodding riffs that are always leading the action rather than providing a supporting bedrock or thematic foundation to the proceedings. In fact, so much of the score could have been dispensed with entirely. Given the fact that we're in the middle of the wilderness would have lent itself to creating a rich soundscape to capture, replicate and even enhance the malevolence of the natural world as juxtaposed with the overt malevolence of the three creepy guys running this madhouse.

The biggest script problem, however, is the monster itself. We wisely don't get to see it until the final third, but I still have no idea what it is, why it's there, where it comes from and why there's only one? At first, I assumed there might have been a bigfoot angle or maybe a bunch of genetic inbred mutants suffering the effects of a nuclear power plant meltdown or something. (Northern Ontario, where the film appears to be shot in and set, is full of hidden environmental crap like that.) But what we get is something that resembles the creatures in The Descent (now THAT is a great contemporary horror film) and their existence made sense within the context of caves deep beneath the earth's surface. Here, we get one such creature - not too badly designed either - but we really have no idea what it is. It's never enough that it's a monster and it's just conveniently there. It's a cheat of the most egregious kind.

So, what's on the plus side? Well, a genuinely kick-ass final third (even though the creature elements make absolutely no sense) and three tremendous leading performances. The camera adores both of the female leads in the picture and Robert Nolan is an absolute revelation. Who is this guy? Where did he come from? Why isn't he cast in every genre picture in this country? And better yet, if he was, he'd build up so much great work that we might even start seeing him in American indie and/or studio pictures. Nolan has a phenomenal look, intensity to burn and an almost puckish sense of sicko humour roiling just beneath his flesh. Alas, none of this is exploited completely here, but I'm grateful to have been introduced to him and hope to see him flex his thespian muscles in other movies. This guy is an A-1 psycho villain. That said, he's got such clearly natural chops that he needs to be cast in as many pictures as possible. (He also bears a striking enough resemblance to Leonardo Di Caprio that he'd be a natural to play the kid's Dad or Uncle or older brother.) Canada always blows it with their leading ladies and men and the country especially blows it with all the fine character actors. I'm delighted that the makers of Silent Retreat didn't follow in the footsteps of so many other Canadian filmmakers and populated it with solid actors that - and this is ALL important - the camera LOVES.

Speaking of visuals, I was also impressed with the cinematography by Christian Bielz - especially the night exteriors. As someone who lives much of his time in the middle of absolute nowhere, I was impressed with the look and lighting of these scenes. For what seems like decades now, Canadian movies always used this horrid blue gel over the lights for night exteriors - so much so, that I nastily and dismissively referred to it as "Canadian Blue". Here, though, we get that wonderful sense of pitch black, but with both dollops and swaths of a kind of gentle white light which is actually what the eye sees in deep bush. Even when it's overcast and/or the sky isn't lit up with a bright moon, the stars are so intensely bright that they do indeed cast a very cool glow over everything. And, uh, it's not blue.

Alack and alas, what is blue, though, is how I feel when I see a low budget genre film that is bursting with potential, but never goes the distance. I hope at some point, director Tricia Lee gets to work with a great script, but that also, she uses her instincts for horror to shock and scare us - not with what we DON'T know, but what we do know.

"Silent Retreat" is part of the Toronto After Dark Film Festival 2013. Visit the website HERE.

MOTHRA (aka MOSURA) - Review By Greg Klymkiw - One of the great Toho monster classics from Ishiro Honda

The Ito Sisters (aka The Peanuts)

Mothra (aka Mosura) (1961) ***
Dir. Ishiro Honda
Starring: Frankie Sakai, Kyoko Kagawa, Jerry Ito, Emy Ito, Yumy Ito, Takashi Shimura

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The threat of nuclear annihilation has always been a theme at the forefront of science fiction, but nowhere is this more profound than in the cinema of Japan. The devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki loomed large within the frontal lobes of most filmmakers from the land of Nippon, but at Toho Studios, a long-running series of fantastical pictures that began with 1954’s Gojira (aka Godzilla), took the islands of Japan by storm and crossed the waters to tantalize audiences worldwide. The director who is associated most closely with these pictures is Ishiro Honda, a visionary whose work is often ignored, neglected and/or derided by many critics.

That said, if Akira Kurosawa is to be considered the John Ford of Japanese cinema, I’d argue quite strenuously that Honda is the Nipponese Spielberg – an entertainer of the highest order, an expert stylist/craftsman and a serious film artist. Like Spielberg, Honda created a wealth of product that appealed to kids of all ages – from east to west and back again!

Sadly, in the Western world, Honda’s work was so manipulated by American distributors that his dark, thrilling morality tales of nuclear mutated monsters were often reduced to the most basic elements of the monster movie genre with much of the political subtext removed in order to remain palatable to the narrow interests of the Occidental world. With substantial re-cutting and dialogue dubbing, most Western audiences lost out on the opportunity to not only enjoy rip-roaring entertainments, but also do so with considerable food for thought.

More Peanuts Than You
Can Shake a Stick at!!!

In 1961, Honda’s Mothra was a slight change of pace from his dark horrific explorations of the effects of nuclear radiation. The message of peace is still front and centre, but the delivery of this important missive has a colourful, fantasy-infused lightness. Dappled, as it is, with this lightness of tone and touch is what gives the audience a fresh perspective and creates a creature-feature endowed with a very unique vantage point. And WHAT a vantage point we get with the delectable Peanuts.

Yes, PEANUTS!!!

When a strange island is discovered in an area spoiled by nuclear contamination, the world comes face to face with a civilization that devotes itself to worshipping the splendours of the natural world. On this island are two beautiful miniature women – fairies who sing the loveliest of melodies. When an unscrupulous promoter kidnaps and subsequently forces them to perform in his circus, a ragtag group of journalists seeks to rescue them – especially since the tuneful crooning becomes mournful and summons the awakening of the ancient monster Mothra. This snail-like behemoth eventually cocoons and transforms into a horrifying winged beast hell-bent on rescuing the fairies and wreaking major havoc upon the towns and cities of Japan - most notably, Tokyo.

The real life singing sensation twins (the Ito sisters), known to the world outside of this film as “The Peanuts”, play the lovely fairies and are imbued with a truly great screen presence and always in ever-so delightfully fine voice - so much so that one can never get enough of them. Then again, when it comes to peanuts, you can never have just one.

Blending slapstick humour with the sort of destruction one expects from Honda’s monster pictures, Mothra is a magical and supremely entertaining thrill ride. Amidst the serious thematic concerns about Western greed and exploitation the entire concoction delivers a fine homage to King Kong and a delightful mix of laughs and thrills. The humour is, thankfully, not tongue-in-cheek, but rooted in the characters and situations so that, while broad, it never renders the picture into a knowing gag-fest.

Delightful Mothra Promo
Items - Peanuts Figurines

The hallmark of Honda’s work is undoubtedly his handling of the carnage and Mothra does not disappoint in this regard. When our title monster transforms into a flying avenger, the force of its wings beating is enough to create hurricane-like winds that send cars, trucks and tanks hurtling into skyscrapers.

A considerable chunk of the running time in the first half is devoted to a debate between the forces of exploitation and those who desire a more harmonious relationship to the forces of nature. Within these debates, humour abounds – thanks mainly to the comical turns by the blustery Frankie Sakai as the rotund reporter “Bulldog” and the fiery female photographer Michi (played by the delightful Kyoko Kogawa of Tokyo Story fame). Jerry Ito is a deliciously slimy villain while fave Kurosawa thespian Takashi (Ikuru) Shimura makes a welcome appearance as the news editor who lights a flame under his writers’ butts and has them become actively involved in the proceedings.

Ultimately, lovers of Japanese monster movies will get their fair share of peace through superior firepower as the title monster must be cruel to be kind as it cuts a huge path of destruction in its instinctive, single-minded purpose to rescue the twins. It’s a terrific monster movie and one of the best from Toho Studios.

Aficionados of this fare will especially be delighted, but even for those not immersed in the canon of Nipponese behemoth pictures, the pleasures to be derived are immense indeed: great carnage, lots of laughs and a worthwhile message about peace and ecology – the latter of which is way ahead of its time.

And of course, where else are you going to find monsters and the Peanuts sharing the silver screen?

Sony’s great DVD collection is an especially worthwhile buy for anyone who worships this genre. You not only get s fantastic commentary by Honda scholars, but the transfer to DVD is gorgeous - with deep blacks to offset the vivid colours. Most importantly, the original Japanese version with English subtitles can be viewed along with the truncated, dubbed American version. The only flaw is the horrendous packaging with all three discs in the collection packed onto one spindle – each movie on top of the other and a definite accident waiting to happen. “Mothra” is available on Sony’s “Icons of Sci-Fi: Toho Collection” with two other Ishiro Honda classics “H-Man” and “Battle in Outer Space”.

PACIFIC RIM - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Better than the TRANSFORMERS movies, but it's no GODZILLA.

Pacific Rim (2013) **
Dir: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, Ron Perlman

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Guillermo del Toro is clearly a real filmmaker.

His eye is impeccable. He never cheats us with ugly, uninspired compositions, rapid fire herky-jerky camera movement, poor placement and choice of lenses, bad geography and annoying ADHD-styled editing. His action scenes (Blade II for example) are classically presented with genuine panache.

When del Toro is in the realm of suspense, his eye for the grotesque and his innate sense of just the right pacing to create creepy crawly shudders (The Devil's Backbone, Cronos) and jolts of violence and terror (Pan's Labyrinth) are impeccable.

And, lest we forget that his astounding blend of thrilling, wise-acre derring-do, horror, science fiction and all-out fantasy was on glorious display in his first plunge into the Hellboy franchise, which, in spite of its risible sequel, still stands as one of the best comic book film adaptations ever made.

And as that film proved, he's got a great sense of humour - pretty much a must for most genre pictures.

Pacific Rim is not without dollops of the aforementioned traits, but alas, it feels like a lesser effort from Mexico's master of all things macabre (and for me, an extra disappointment since it should have been, but falls severely short of being just the kind of movie I'd normally love). The biggest problem is that the silly, predictable screenplay presents a familiar tale which never allows us to connect emotionally with the characters in spite of the high stakes facing the world. We're saddled with mostly dull characters whose concerns pale in comparison to the threat of total annihilation when humungous alien sea monsters rise out of the murky depths and begin wholesale destruction of major cities on the Pacific Rim coastlines.

In retaliation, mankind develops equally humungous robots powered by actual fighting men whose minds are linked with each other and the mainframe that powers the robots. This works for awhile, but the aliens figure out how to exploit the weaknesses of man's technology. Soon, the elite command of these robots is faced with being phased out by alternate measures to stave off the attacks. To save their position as the truly ideal way to fight the threat, but frankly, to also keep the world safe, the team of military monster fighters faces their greatest challenge.

That's pretty much it. The movie has a handful of nicely directed action set pieces driven by dull characters with whom far too much time is afforded to. Since we don't connect with the humans we are forced to spend time with, the big battles have an eye-candy appeal, but little else. Basically, what we're dealing with here is a blend of Transformers and the best of the Japanese Godzilla franchise and whilst far better than the former, it never reaches the lofty levels achieved by the latter.

The mostly competent cast, acquit themselves to the task with bland professionalism, but the characters del Toro hands them give both performers and audiences very little to work with. In all fairness to Charlie Hunnam as the manly hero, love interest Rinko Kikuchi as his lithe partner in battle and Idris Elba as the hands-on commander-in-chief, I suspect all three might have been capable of moving well beyond that level of dull thespian servitude if the writing for their archetypes had been as rich as that afforded to Ron Perlman in the supporting role of a sleazy black marketeer.

For once, too, del Toro's innate sense of humour fails him since the tone of it slips far too often into tongue-in-cheek instead of coming naturally out of both character and narrative. Wise-acre humour, of course, worked so beautifully in the first Hellboy because it all derived so organically in the writing and world of the film. Here, it's never integral, but feels slathered-on.

Though the visual style and pacing of del Toro's film are generally fine, we simply don't give a damn where we're going narratively since the predictability factor in all of this is partially inherent in the overwhelming familiarity most of us have with the tropes of the genre and the story's inability to rise above this. Because del Toro has such a gifted sense of craft and style, the film remains more than watchable, but at the end of a long, hard day of monster wrasslin', Pacific Rim is state of the art, but lacking heart.

"Pacific Rim" is in wide release via Warner Brothers.