Prime Time: Year One (2009)

Some films you just watch once and immediately forget about. Some films become firm favourites. Some films require a few viewings for you to really clarify your thoughts. And some films you end up watching a few times simply because you keep forgetting about it almost as soon as the end credits roll. Year One is in that latter category. This is my third time seeing it, and it is a film that really doesn’t warrant repeat viewings. The fact that I also own it is neither here nor there (it was cheap and I have a retail-based obsessive nature).

Jack Black and Michael Cera play Zed and Oh, respectively, two men from ancient times who end up banished from their tribe and encountering a bunch of famous biblical characters. One of them is famous brother-killer Cain (David Cross), one of them is famous son-sacrificer Abraham (Hank Azaria), and there are a whole lot of citizens of Sodom to deal with. That is all you need to know, although the men are also interested in romantically pursuing two female members of their tribe (played by June Diane Raphael and Juno Temple) and there are cameo roles for the likes of Xander Berkeley, Olivia Wilde, Vinnie Jones, Oliver Platt, and quite a few others.

I like Jack Black, despite the fact that many of his best-known movie roles are based around him doing his usual Jack Black schtick. I like Michael Cera, also not really known for his range. They just don’t work here though, feeling wrong in their lead roles and having no decent chemistry with one another. So that has the film starting off with a major disadvantage.

Director Harold Ramis (this was, sadly, the last feature he directed before his passing) seems to think that the script, co-written by himself, Lee Eisenberg, and Gene Stupnitsky, is full of chuckles that will be improved by the performers. He couldn’t be more wrong. The highlights come about despite the writing, many of the jokes are disappointingly obvious, and there are a few too many instances of toilet humour that feel all the worse for being inserted in between the few scenes that have actual wit. The best thing here is the ongoing story strand that allows Cain to remain a central character, but even that is slightly undermined by the fact that his first scenes are so good that it ends up going downhill from there.

As you might have guessed from that last sentence, Cross is a lot of fun in his role here, and arguably steals the movie. Aside from Black and Cera, the rest of the cast often try their best with weak material they are unable to greatly improve. Jones comes onscreen to be tough Vinnie Jones, Azaria is amusing enough for his few minutes, Berkeley had to sit around and look regal, which he does, and Wilde is a potential “fair maiden” alongside Raphael and Temple, with none of them getting to do more than look pretty enough to motivate our leads. Although you can question the choices made in his performance, it’s Oliver Platt who almost rivals Cross for the added comedy value provided, playing his character as a lusty hedonist who takes a fancy to Oh.

Not entirely without entertainment value, Year One is just a huge missed opportunity. What should have been a rapid-fire cavalcade of jokes, be they new, old, smart, or silly, just settles for being a vehicle built around two sorely miscast leads. It is telling that every decent laugh in the film comes from moments not focusing on the main characters.

3/10

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Shudder Saturday: The Dark And The Wicked (2020)

Written and directed by Bryan Bertino, this just shows that the dismal Mockingbird was a momentary blip from someone able to keep delivering the goods for horror genre fans. With this and his last film, The Monster, Bertino has provided two equally impressive, yet very different, horror movies.

The Dark And The Wicked has Louise (Marin Ireland) and her brother, Michael (Michael Abbott Jr.) returning to the family farm in Texas because of a very ill father. It's not long until their mother (Julie Oliver-Touchstone) harms herself and then dies, which leads to both Louise and Michael then starting to feel a strong presence taking over the area. It seems to want to wish harm open them, and upon anyone else who associates with them.

Although made with a decent amount of skill and polish, The Dark And The Wicked is not a film for those who just want some safe, mainstream, horror. It's not too bothered about making sure you get a full explanation for the unfolding events, for example, and there's a sense of puzzlement about the whole thing that simply adds to the horror. As has been said many times before, and by many writers better than myself, a strange killer without any obvious motivation is much scarier than a killer with a very specific agenda. This is, in many ways, an interesting companion piece to Bertino's first film, The Strangers, with the random acts of evil this time around perpetuated by a supernatural force, as opposed to a group of psychopathic strangers.

Ireland and Abbott Jr. are decent leads, and they’re also happy to not really be the focus of the film. Although Ireland gets a few more scenes that let her get her teeth into some more emotional content, this is a film about a pervasive evil. It’s almost a non-stop walk under a cloudy and portentous sky. Too Nowicki also does good work, and has a memorable encounter just as the third act starts to build towards the very end of everything, and Xander Berkeley is excellent as a priest who stops by to visit the farm. And it should be said that all of the visuals are accompanied by a superb, menacing score from Tom Schrader, providing music so good that it almost feels like the embodiment of the dark force at the heart of the movie.

Blending some occasional gore moments with some superb scares, The Dark And The Wicked is highly recommended. Bertino has a knack for keeping viewers on edge, even during scenes in which nothing much seems to be happening, and it's great to see his filmography expanding in a way that both highlights his strengths and also shows him happily moving between various sub-genres. Let's just hope he never decides to try another found footage horror and we're all good.

8/10

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June-Claude Van Damme: Universal Soldier: The Return (1999)

Is Universal Soldier: The Return a good movie? Not really. It's the weakest of the Universal Soldier movies that star Van Damme and it wastes a couple of the main stars. Having said that, it's a lot better than the other Universal Soldier movies that were developed with the idea of turning the brand into a viable TV mini-series. It's also a lot better than other Van Damme movies you can pick from this time.

Van Damme returns as Luc, now a normal man after having all of the UniSol implants and tech removed from his body. He works for the company, training new soldiers and keeping an eye on things. One of those soldiers is a mean badass played by Bill Goldberg, and he doesn't like Luc all that much. That wouldn't be a problem, if only the supercomputer running things (SETH, voiced by Michael Jai White, who also plays him in humanoid form in the second half of the movie) wasn't about to turn all super-evil and turn the soldiers against the puny humans around them.

As of today, this is the only film directed by Mic Rodgers (who has carved himself quite a career in the realm of stunt work). That's a bit of a shame, because Rodgers does just fine in the big chair. There's a lot of goodwill to claw back after the previous entries in the series, films that are justifiably ignored by the script (written by John Fasano and William Malone), and there aren't enough action sequences to detract from the relatively low budget, but this isn't a bad way to get things back on track and return some value to the brand name.

Van Damme does just fine in his lead role here, it's a character he is comfortable with and the premise doesn't ask him to do anything too difficult (like emote or convince viewers that he has a degree in bioengineering), and both Goldberg and White bring solid physicality to their antagonists. Kiana Tom has a sizable role, sizable in comparison to other female roles in JCVD movies anyway, and does well enough, and there are supporting turns from the ever-dependable Xander Berkeley and Daniel Von Bargen.

I know that people often go on about the next two films in this series. They say that they're a marked step up and usually recommend people just diving straight in (because they are pretty much standalone action films making use of the UniSol idea). There's no doubt that they're better. That doesn't make this one bad though. It's just . . . not really good.

5/10

This is a good way to own the series.
Americans can go for this mix.

The Guardian (1990)

Throughout the history of the horror genre, there haven't ever been too many terrifying trees. Oh, there have been some (that nasty bunch of pervy perennials in The Evil Dead movies and that twisted old thing in Poltergeist to name the only two I can think of off the top of my head), but by and large, trees don't instil a sense of fear and dread. Unless you're a huge Marc Bolan fan.

The Guardian is a story all about a deadly tree. Jenny Seagrove plays Camilla, a beautiful young woman who ends up being employed by Phil (Dwier Brown) and Kate (Carey Lowell) to look after their new-born son. What the new parents don't know, however, is that Camilla is a bit of a spooky Druid witchy woooooo type and she seeks out new-born children to sacrifice to a big tree. Yes, it's a standard "wolf in sheep's clothing" thriller wearing a cloak of magic.

Just what those involved were thinking is beyond me. Based on a novel by Dan Greenburg, Stephen Volk was the poor guy who tried to turn the laughable premise (which may have worked much better in the book, I don't know) into a decent horror film. With William Friedkin in the director's chair I'm sure that there was always some hope, however slim, of it all turning out well. Sadly, that wasn't the case.

It remains an entertaining movie, but for all the wrong reasons. Viewers can laugh as someone gets decapitated by a deadly branch or ogle the attractive Jenny Seagrove in the many scenes involving her not wearing that much clothing, if any. Dwier Brown and Carey Lowell (who obviously wanted a hit after Licence To Kill to save her from the fate of being "just another Bond girl) try their best, but by the time everything starts getting out of control it's hard to believe that both didn't have any earlier suspicions about the new, perfect nanny. Brad Hall is that thriller staple - the friendly face who stumbles on to the bad secret before the leads - and he's treated pretty badly by the script. Miguel Ferrer has a small role, Xander Berkeley pops up in the last reel in a small role and Theresa Randle has, you guessed it, a small role as one of the potential nanny candidates before Seagrove ensures her own placement in that position.

It's not dull, though it's not very lively either, and none of the set-pieces have the impact that they were obviously supposed to have, but it's not without its charm and I found myself enjoying it a lot more than I had any right to. I recommend that others give it a try, if only to allow me to continue maintaining the fantasy that I'm not the only one who sometimes enjoys such nonsense.

5/10

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Poison Ivy II: Lily (1996)

I knew that I was risking seeing something awful by watching the sequels to Poison Ivy but I didn't think that the dip in quality would be so quick and so steep. I should have known, after my experience with the other films in the Wild Things series, but I remain ever the optimist.

Things were looking bad from the very beginning. The movie starts off with a bit of raunchiness. Now I like to see a bit of raunchiness and I'm all for plenty of nudity in the right context but when a movie opens with such shenanigans then it either goes one of two ways. A) You can have a movie chock full of sex and nudity and fun or B) You can have a movie that has very little going for it and puts a sex scene right at the start of the film to capture unwary, casual viewers. This movie definitely went with option B.

Alyssa Milano stars as Lily Leonetti, a reserved young girl who has arrived at a California college to study art. Her teacher (played by Xander Berkeley) takes quite a shine to her. Art is created, passions rise and Lily transforms herself, helped by a box that she finds containing the diary of a girl called Ivy. Other people are involved, there is some nudity here and there and everything is just so crushingly dull that I can barely stay awake to write the end of this review.

It's a horrible, inept movie that replaces the psychological tricks and dramas of the first film with poor character changes and a cast of folk that audiences will struggle to sympathise with. Sara Gilbert was the focus in the first movie, even as she was (and also BECAUSE she was) being overshadowed by Drew Barrymore. In this sequel, we just have Alyssa Milano acting quite foolishly, Xander Berkeley being pretty unpleasant and Johnathon Schaech being moody.

The script by Chloe King is dire, more in line with her work on "The Red Shoe Diaries" than the preceding movie, and the direction by Anne Goursaud shows the same attitude and approach to the material. An awful soundtrack is the cherry on top.

Undemanding viewers may enjoy watching this for the fleeting moments in which Alyssa Milano get partially nude but everyone else would do best to just avoid it altogether.

3/10.

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