Continued & unsettling 9/11 stuff: Eric Stacey's UNTHINKABLE: AN AIRLINE CAPTAIN'S STORY

To find the official version about Marshall Philips, a former airline pilot and 9/11 conspriacy theorist said to have murdered his two children and family dog before comitting suicide, if you Google the name, you'll need to go to Britain's Daily Mail, even though the event in question seems to have occurred in the Santa Barbara area of California. It's the unofficial version that writer/directed Eric Stacey is after in the new narrative-done-in-mostly-documentary-style movie, UNTHINKABLE: AN AIRLINE CAPTAN'S STORY.

No spring chicken, Mr. Stacey (shown at left) has directed half a dozen films over the past decade and written, produced and acted as cinematographer on five of these. He's clearly a hands-on filmmaker whose understanding of and work on both documen-taries and narrative films is put to use on Unthinkable -- but not, I have to say, to very good use. The movie is, first and last, a 9/11-themed conspiracy film, and it seems to me that when one is dealing with this sort of thing, one must go out of his way to dot one's i's and cross one's t's. Not only does this not get done, but there are times as you're watching this movie that you'll feel that the alphabet itself has been left out.

Evidently, from what we can gather from the film, ex-pilot Philips (played by Randall Paul, above) was concerned with the question of where the terrorist pilots of the 9/11 planes got the kind of flight training that would enable them to have done what they did (no easy feat), and further, how this connects to Saudi Arabian intelligence, our own government and the Bush administration.

According to the film, Philips was on the brink of getting (or maybe had just recevied) a photo and/or information that would prove his case. He's frightened for what this might mean to the security of himself and his children (that's Shannon Churchwell as his son, above).

Federal agents (above) pay a call, and later that day (or was it the next?) dad, kids and dog are dead, and the event is immediately declared a murder/suicide. Now, if even a couple of the things shown us in this film are true -- take your choice: it took 18 hours for the police to show up after calls were made to 911 (several of them), the police report got important details wrong, anything but normal proceedure was followed, the bodies were immediately cremated without permission, and on and on -- the whole thing reeks of lies and "cover-up."

Immediately after, dad's reputation is tarred and feathered with every-thing from his being paranoid and abusing drugs to being depressed because of family problems, none of which appears to have been true. The policeman involved (Drew Barrios, above) is so nasty you expect him to start twirling his mustache (except he's bald and clean shaven), while his deputy gives the dead son's schoolmates (below) a demonstration of pro-paganda that George Orwell would have understood but not appreciated.

It seems to me that all this would be fairly easy to document and build a case around. In the movie that case is made by Dad's best friend, a journalist named Madison Feeman (Dennis Fitzpatrick, below) who acts as our guide and hero, once Dad is no more. Also on board is the son of the family's best friend, Mike (played weakly by Shade Streeter) whose scene of biking away from the bad guys is the film's single attempt at action/suspense.

I wonder why all those involved did not simply choose to make a documentary about this case? Facts could have been marshaled and evidence built in a more convincing manner than is done here -- with mediocre writing and acting that moves from the acceptable range into the not so. Whatever the truth behind Philips' claims about the training of those pilots, the death of this man and his children deserve better investigation and memorial.

Unthinkable: An Airline Captain's Story -- from Movies on a Mission and running 85 minutes -- opens this Friday, April 11, in New York City at the Quad Cinema.

Matthew Avant's looney LUNOPOLIS takes conspiracy to the nth degree -- and beyond

Film buffs who double as conspiracy theorists may take a particular liking to the straight-to-DVD release LUNOPOLIS, which makes its debut this coming Tuesday, October 11. After playing at what seems like countless festivals -- Nashville , Orlando , Boston Sci-Fi, Buffalo Niagara, Roswell UFO, Shockerfest, Acadiana, Sci-Fi-London and Fantaspoa International Porto Alegre -- and even winning a few awards along the way (Best Director, 2010 Fantastic Planet Film Festival, Sydney; Best Feature Audience Award, 2010 Big Easy Film Fest; Best Sci-Fi Screenplay, 2010 International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival; Best Screenplay, 2009 Maverick Movie Awards; Future Vision Award, 2010 Glen Rose Neo-Relix Film Festival), the DVD release should at the very least turn a few heads in the direction of the film's writer/director, Matthew Avant (as in avant-garde?).

In what now seems like standard moc-doc fashion (since Blair Witch, at least), Mr. Avant, shown at right, gives us a crew of documentary filmmakers, including himself, suddenly turned on by and to a possible cover-up/ conspiracy involving everything from time travel and the space-time continuum to a race of people (an awfully lot like us) living on the moon but periodically visiting earth, to a certain Church of Lunology -- which, yes, will remind you of a certain other Church of ___ology and its brainwashed disciples, below, who look a lot like Mormons wearing sunglasses. Oh, yes -- and The Mayan Calendar and that very scary upcoming year 2012. There's more (this is a conspiracy movie, after all), but them's the basics.

Never uninteresting (not when it's covering such a lot of territory), the movie nonetheless proves too long at 98 minutes. Being no-to-very-low budget, it's generally pretty ugly to view, too, though it manages to come up with a few surprising special effects (one of these involving a car) that are fun. And for all of its comprehensive coverage, it's too repetitive. (How often must we see those threatening Church disciples -- who still mange to accomplish just about nothing?)

Yet by tackling so much -- and generally pretty intelligently -- then weaving it together with enough finesse to keep us hooked, the filmmaker and his cast/crew deliver at least half of their goods. The cast, which has evidently been cobbled together via relatives and friends, proves pretty good to so-so, with one standout: a fellow named David Potter, shown below, who plays the key character David James. This guy is a find. Oozing intelligence and senior charisma to spare, he's someone I think we'll be seeing more of -- and we'll certainly be hearing further from filmmaker Avant.

Lunopolis, via Walking Shadows and Virgil Films & Entertainment, will be available Tuesday October 11, for sale or rental.

A little "transmedia" treat called ZENITH sneaks into NYC's Cinema Purgatorio

Billed as a "retro-futuristic-steampunk thriller" (TrustMovies had to look up steampunk, as he evidently missed that sub-genre during its 80s & 90s heyday) -- and so full of attendant web links that you could, after watching the 92-minute movie, spend the rest of your day (if not your life) accessing them and following all the clues and mysteries within -- ZENITH is something else. In fact, according to the film's press kit, "Zenith invites its audience to participate in and expand the film's storyline by finding, downloading and collecting pieces of the Zenith narrative (the "tapes" that are spoken of and occasionally shown throughout the film) and then reconstructing them through active groups on social media sites." My god.

Don't plan to ever work, date, eat, sleep or fuck again. Just dedicate your life to Zenith -- in which most of those activities, along with some others, are taken care of on-screen. Ah, the brave new world of the world-wide-web!

The movie's poster tells us that this is "a film by Anonymous" (my, that guy gets around!) that the ubiquitous "they" don't want you to see. Within the film we find that it is actually credited to an "experiment supervisor and producer" (which means maybe, written and directed by?), Vladan Nikolic, a filmmaker from the former Yugoslavia who is shown at right and who, a few years back, gave us Love and Burn. Despite all the bells and whistles connected to Zenith, the movie itself must be the centerpiece here, right? Without it, without watching it, who would give a rat's ass for any of the links that stem from it?

Taken simply as a piece of narrative cinema that combines paranoid conspiracy thrillers like The Parallax View with distopian soceity scenarios (such as the recent and infinitely better Never Let Me Go), in which the power elite conspire to live longer off the backs (and other body parts) of its lesser citizens, Zenith is a pale imitation. It does manage to offer a bit of fun and surprise, along with a couple of nice moments from smart actors in very small parts (Zohra Lampert and Jay O. Sanders).

The movie opens with a "hats off" to the experi-ments of Stanley Milgram. (Where would moviemakers be without this guy? The best of this cribbing from Milgram, so far, goes to the German film, The Experiment.) Then we are clued-in to just what kind of dystopian society this is: a world of so much and such constant joy and satisfaction that what is needed and most sought after is pain. Oh, please. One intelligent look at the word's societies over history, so sheep-like are the populaces, can you imagine for a moment that people wouldn't opt for continual pleasure over anything else? So, already the movie's in big, silly trouble. And the plot, such as it is, in which two characters, whom I think are actually father and son in two different time frames, search for the key to the Zenith conspiracy (that's the name given to the power elite).

Dad Ed (Jason Robards III, above) has his set of friends, enemies and helpers, and son Jack (Peter Scanavino, below) has his. The latter's include a sexy, leggy femme (Ana Asensio, shown two photos above), who has quite the naughty father (David Thorton) in tow. I think that's all you need to know. The finale may put you in mind of  the recent and very tiresome Shutter Island, but Zenith, at least, is a good deal shorter. Overall the film barely squeaks by, reeking with coincidence after coincidence. At one point Jack (usually known, he explains, as Dumb Jack) calls our attention to a moment of déjà vu. Hello? The whole movie feels like déjà vu.

I have to say that the film does perk up a bit in the final 20 minutes -- when the déjà vu goes into different territory. We get some surprises that lead to new questions, even if these, too, seem to go around in circles. (The entire movie offer a kind of circular effect.) Once you've finished watching, if your interest is piqued, there are always those many transmedia links to hook up with and perhaps follow. Do any of us have time to spend following links and/or going to chat rooms to discuss, interact with and comment on these clues, tapes and such. If I did that I wouldn't have time for my next week's worth of reviews, but perhaps you'll fare better. If so, simply click here, get those missing  links, and maybe STOP ZENITH! you young web-schooled activists, you.

Meanwhile, the thing itself -- Zenith minus any links and further investigation -- opens for an 8-day run at New York City's Cinema Purgatorio at the Kraine Theater on East 4th Street.  You can click here -- then scroll down -- to check out other playdates and theaters around the country.