Frat boys run amok in Daniel Robbins and Zack Weiner's riveting and scary thriller, PLEDGE

I can't prove that the connection between Capitalism and very bad fraternity behavior was foremost in the mind of the writer and/or the director of the new horror/thriller PLEDGE, but by the end of this gruelling but somehow satisfying, if ugly, movie, that connection has been made in spades. The writer, Zack Weiner, is also one of the stars of the film, and while Pledge gives his character some decent dialog and amusingly awful situations to endure, Mr. Weiner (pictured below, left) has actually given the center of attention and interest to a character we rarely see as central or heroic: the fat boy in the trio of friends who make up the movie's "group hero."

That rotund and generally affable fellow is played exceedingly well by Zachery Byrd (above, center), who relatively quickly comes to seem like the voice of reason of the three pals, all of whom want fairly desperately to be able to join a fraternity on their college campus. How they're enticed to cast their lot with the very unusual group, whose simple insignia grows more horrifying as the movie progresses, takes up maybe the first third of this short, dark and dirty little genre movie that succeeds mightily where a number of other naughty-frat-boy films have not. Pledge knows what's it's up to, dives in and proceeds to its finale with devastating focus and force.

The director, Daniel Robbins (at right) has paced things very well: offering up a slow, sure and crisp beginning followed by a middle and end in which we're barely allowed to draw a breath. Best of all, thanks to Weiner's screenplay and Robbins' handling of it, there are quite a few genuine surprises along the way, most of these coming, thankfully, toward the end.

These are not merely "plot" surprises, either; instead they often involve character. Though our roly-poly is the best defined of the group, almost all of the subsidiary characters, victims or villains, are given enough interesting characteristics for us to easily differentiate, as well as care for or detest them appropriately.

The "hosts" of the very oddball fraternity to which our boys want to attach are played with lip-smacking delight by several good actors, including Cameron Cowperthwaite (above) and Aaron Dalla Villa (below).

The young women seen here are used for mostly decorative purposes and as an enticement to and reason for our less-than-intrepid heroes to come aboard. No, the subject at hand is the American male, Alpha variety, and all the wonders he can get up (and down) to.

Mr. Robbins knows just how far to dish out the blood, gore and vomit (more is smartly imagined/suggested than actually seen, but what is suggested/seen is plenty). This combination of smart, if very unappealing, subject matter -- brought to life via good writing, direction and performance -- turns what might have been just another fairly standard horror/thriller into a nastily memorable genre piece.

From IFC Midnight, Pledge opens theatrically in New York City (at the IFC Center) this Friday, January 11, and in Los Angeles (at the Arena Cinelounge) the following Friday, January 18. If you reside elsewhere than either coast, fear not: the movie hits VOD this Friday, January 11, as well.

Can Mexico get any worse, movie-wise? View Amat Escalante's HELI and then we'll discuss....

If Oliver Stone's glossily over-the-top (and-up-through-the-asshole) Savages, followed by the more recent every-single-character-is-a-fucking-philosopher The Counselor didn't quell your desire for a visit to Mexico, then by all means take a chance on HELI, the new film from Amat Escalante (he's a Spaniard, actually), which has one scene of such shocking power and torture-porn possibili-ties that I think I can safely say you'll have seen nothing like it in either an arthouse or mainstream movie.

While this scene singles out the film for a queasy remembrance, Señor Escalante, shown at left, offers a tale of a poor and relatively uneducated family residing in the Mexican stix and characters who seem only marginally acquainted with the place in which they live and the people -- including their family, co-workers and friends (if they have any, that is) who live there, too. Perhaps this is exactly how it is in this area of Mexico. Still, at times, the movie's main character, the eponymous Heli, seems woefully unintelligent, at other moments, he's sharper than you'd expect. Ditto everyone around him, from his wife, his father, his younger sister, her older (but still a child) policeman-in-training boyfriend, and the police officers who "investigate" the slaughter that soon occurs.

You either, I think, accept all this and move on with the film, or you simply shut down as you wonder why you should pay attention to characters this dumb. You want to care for Heli (Armando Espitia, above) and his crew, but Escalante makes it more than a little difficult. His movie raises again the question: How do you make the lower classes real without seeming slow and/or boring? Ah -- just toss in a little uber-violence!

Do these folk know what cocaine is? Of course they do. Do they know about the drug cartels and the power these have. Most certainly. So why do they behave so stupidly, first to last? And why does not the cartel kill Heli when it has the opportunity? Well, then there would be no movie -- which, in the shape it's in, lasts too long by maybe fifteen minutes. I'd have been willing to sit even longer, though, had Escalante given me more genuine specifics.

As for the venal and corrupt police officers, at least the female of the two seems to want sex more than money, which is a switch of sorts -- while allowing us to view some very appealing cleavage, fully exposed: This filmmaker knows well what will sell his film. Despite his heavy-duty nods to the marketplace, I suspect Escalante is trying to be truthful to the behavior of someone like his main character, and so does not give him much of a backstory filled with undue exposition. Unfortunately, he doesn't give him much of a current story, either.

We're made privy to very little here -- not the younger sister's conversa-tions with her school mates, in which the boyfriend and cocaine tale would certainly come out and she'd be thoroughly warned about him and his actions. (If I know that local police officers and drug cartels are connected, I'd wager these kids do, too.) Likewise, Heli seems to have no friends at all -- on the job or elsewhere -- with which he'd share parts of his life.

So we go from event to event, most of them damned huge and life-changing (or ending). We're shocked, certainly, disgusted and frightened, and end up feeling, as we usually do, that Mexico is one of the larger cesspools of the world, for which there's no clean-up scheduled (or even possible) anytime soon. The cast, made up of mostly newcomers, achieves as good a likeness to reality as possible under these circumstances. (One of the investigating cops is played by the film's co-writer, Gabriel Reyes.)

From Outsider Pictrures, Heli -- which won the Best Director prize at last year's Cannes Film Fest and was nominated for the Palme d'Or -- opens this Friday, June 13, in New York City (at the Cinema Village), Los Angeles (at Laemmle's Playhouse 7 and Noho 7), and San Diego (at the Digital Gym Cinema). In the weeks to come it will hit Seattle, Chicago and San Francisco. To see all scheduled playdates, click here and then click on Now in Cinemas near the top of the screen.

Camilo Vila's 186 DOLLARS TO FREEDOM, Peruvian prison movie, opens in NY & L.A.

We've had naive, young Americans hauled off to a Turkish prison in 1978's Midnight Express, a Chilean prison (1982's Missing), a prison in Thailand (1999's Brokedown Palace) and now a Peruvian prison in the badly-named 186 DOLLARS TO FREEDOM. There have probably been a number of other Americans-in-foreign-prison films, but these four jump quickly to mind, the last because it just opened this past Friday here in New York City and will open this coming Friday in Los Angeles, the other three because they boasted big-name stars and/or were somewhat-to-very successful.

Formerly (and much more interestingly) titled City of Gardens, the new Dollars/Freedom film, based (and ain't they all) on real-life events, tracks Wayne, a young American surfer/
teacher riding waves and working in Peru, who is arrested one sunny day for little or no reason and then imprisoned on trumped-up drug charges. As co-written (with Monty Fisher) and directed by Camilo Vila (shown at left), the film is part romantic drama (mostly via flashbacks), part political
/cultural treatise, and part torture porn. As you might surmise these parts do not work together well to provide an edifying whole.

The problem is not so much that the parts could not coalesce as that they simply don't. The flashbacks are used in clunky fashion, the expository treatise sections are explained to our imprisoned hero with i's dotted and t's crossed ("I had no idea there was so much suffering here," he then exclaims), and the torture porn (above), when it finally arrives, has our naked hunk trussed up and bled like a pig. And then suddenly -- spoiler just ahead -- he's seen sprinting off to freedom when, by all rights, he ought to be bleeding to death. Filmmakers, please: If you insist on feeding us this sugared crap, would you at least try to make it a tad believable.

On the plus side, the cast assembled for the movie is certainly watchable. In the lead role is one, John Robinson (above). Remem-ber that platinum blond kid from nearly a decade ago in Gus van Sant's Elephant and Lords of Dogtown? He's grown up some and here sports a nice body, on display a lot. Facially, he looks like he could easily play Patrick Wilson's younger brother. His acting? Acceptable, if not inspired. However, his character is way beyond the adjective naive. (In the movie, Wayne calls himself stubborn, yet in these particular circumstances it registers more like stupid.)

In prison Wayne makes both a good friend and a bad enemy -- played respectively by Johnny Lewis (above) and Alex Meraz (below). The former has a secret rooftop garden that makes the movie's former title even more pertinent.

The seen-mostly-in-hot-flashbacks lady in Wayne's life is played by the very beautiful Anahí de Cárdenas (below), who brings a hint of passion -- not something we get much of from Mr. Robinson -- to the proceedings.

Probably the best-known performer, film-wise, would be Deborah Kara Unger (below), as the glacial and exceedingly unhelpful representative from the American consul.

The award for weirdest role/performance goes to Grant Bowler (below), who plays Jesus Christ. Mr Christ, an inmate rather than the original (though the latter might have proven more original) comes onto the scene out of the blue (or the murk) and quite late in the film, and from that point on, things move from hairy to hairier, culminating in a whirlwind of carnage and idiocy, followed by the ususal title cards that advise us what happened -- to Peru and to our hero. If this movie is based on fact, then somebody, as a certain Señor Ricardo used to say, has some further 'splainin' to do.

186 Dollars to Freedom -- from Four Fish Films LLC, and running around 100 minutes -- opened this past Friday in New York City at the Quad Cinema and will open on Friday, September 28, in Los Angeles area at Laemmle's Monica 4-Plex.

Robert Lieberman's THE TORTURED per-fectly describes the audience experience.

The kind of movie they call "torture porn," THE TORTURED isn't actually good enough to rate as "porn." It might serve best as a kind of canary-in-the-coal-mine: If the guy (or gal) you're watching this with gets at all aroused by the movie, head for the hills--for both artistic and safety reasons. Directed by Robert Lieberman (often an artisan for Disney and shown below) and written by the Czechoslovakian-born Marek Posival (though it was filmed in Canada, the movie does have a grungy Eastern European feel), it tells the tale of a husband and wife who, after their little boy is kidnapped and murdered and the murderer not given the kind of justice they deem correct, decide to kidnap that felon and torture him to death. Which they do. Almost.

There is one surprise in the movie, and it is indeed a big one, though in retrospect, it doesn't make much sense; nor does some of the other plotting and behavior shown. The screenplay is rife with characters who need to explain what they're feeling and doing -- and why -- which comes across as far too expository. And because the movie was made two years ago and is only now being foisted upon us, at a time in which the country's most famous missing-child case since the Lindbergh baby has been back in the news for months, only makes the movie more difficult to watch, while simultaneously calling attention to the motives behind the release of a film this unnecessary and crummy.

The biggest credibilty problem for the film is that, once the parents decide on their course of action, everything seems too easy. Up to this point (the kidnapping itself is filmed skillfully), the movie maintains a certain force and thrust, with performances at least as good as the script allows them to be. Mom (Erika Christensen) and Dad (Jesse Metcalfe) are hot, young actors who get to emote and undress enough to please their fans (they're shown above, in the de rigueur morgue scene with dead son, and below, with their own victim; and that's Ms Christensen in the bath, at bottom).

There's little reason to say more about this movie, which has a small but probably ever-committed audience, who knows what it wants and will seek out movies such as this one to satisfy. If you are going for torture films, however, a much better one in every way -- also Canadian -- can be found in Seven Days.

Meanwhile, The Tortured (unrated, from IFC FIlms) opens (barely) at one theater here in NYC (the IFC Center) but for a single midnight screening. Better check the theater schedule, however, because some days it does not appear to play at all, and others -- this coming Tuesday, for instance -- it shows once, and only in the afternoon....

The photos above are from the film itself, 

except for that of Mr. Lieberman, 

which comes courtesy of Getty Images.

Srdjan Spasojevic's A SERBIAN FILM hits DVD and Blu-ray; Netflix decides to pass

Anyone who believes in the concept of karma might easily see A SERBIAN FILM as payback to (and from) the country who gave us the ugly, elongated and unnecessary Serbo-Croatian war of the 1990s. Film-wise (and culture-wise), is this how Serbia wants to be remembered? OK, you got it! Ah, but this might be the simplistic view. Let's instead look for another way to think about this film. You've heard, I imagine, that porn stars are severely taken-advantage-of in terms of career, money earned and status conferred. So think of this movie, written and directed by Srdjan Spasojevic (his first), as a remarkably bracing workout of the idea that porn stars get hopelessly fucked -- literally and metaphorically.

You could also take the film as a severe indictment of Serbia -- familial, political, economic, sexual and cultural.  Or as a fabulous excuse to maximize sex, violence, blood and gore. (To the credit of Mr. Spasojevic -- pictured at right -- there is not a single explosion, car chase or crash to be seen.) So what is A Serbian Film? It's all of the above, the result of which is in no manner the least bit edifying.

This is not to say that the movie is empty of anything good. The lead perfor-mance, in fact, is quite good. It comes from Srdjan Todorovic, in action below, playing the country's leading male porn star, reminiscent of our own John Holmes: a quite unprepossessing type -- until he takes off his pants. Mr. Todorovic proves just fine in that department, too -- at half mast, at least: I suspect the erections that we see are prosthetically enhanced (Mr. Holmes' were the real thing).

The photography, too, is fine (it's just the subject matter that's a downer.) Further, the Blu-ray transfer I watched was absolutely first-rate in terms of sharpness, color, and all the rest. The filmmaker knows his way around believable dialog and his pacing, framing, and clever use of fantasy vs reality all work well. (The cinematography is by Nemanja Jovanov and the editing by newcomer Darko Simic.)

The tale, such as it is, concerns the famous and now retired porn star being called back into action to make some sort of "art/porno" movie for an amount of money so vast that we never actually hear it spoken (he whispers it into the ear of his wife -- who immediately gives him the go-ahead). His producer/director, played with maniacal glee and a bit of smarts by Sergej Trifunovic (above) is soon revealed as a nutcase extraordinaire, and yet our hero never asks for any of that cash upfront. Silly boy. As it flows along and corrodes, the film becomes a kind of mystery as to what happened and why. All will be revealed, and will be every bit as awful as you could have imagined.

The first sex scene actually serves up a smattering of The Parallax View, and the first half of the movie -- which is being marketed, with the help of most critics, as something ground-breakingly over-the-top -- seems, well, not so horrible, after all. Then things get worse. And by worse, I mean that it appears that our filmmaker and his friends sat around in bull sessions, thinking up the very worst things imaginable that could happen to a family man/porn star -- and then wrote them and filmed them.

Consequently, any legitimate, resonant subjects buried within A Serbian Film are finally no more than an excuse for upping the ante on the usual blood, violence, sex and gore plus incest, necrophilia, pedophilia and (so far as I know) the brand new entrant in the envelope-pushing sweepstakes, "newborn porn." Is all this degrading? Yessiree -- to its creators and to us viewers. And certainly to Sony, which company I hope did not pay for the very obvious product placement that comes midway into things.

The movie is finally about as ugly, nasty and cynical as seems humanly possible to grind into 102 minutes (the DVD and Blu-ray offer a lengthier cut that was shown in Britain ). And if this sounds like a recommendation, be my guest.

From Invincible Pictures, the DVD/Blu-ray hit streets this past Tuesday, October 25. With Netflix -- who initially offered the film in its Saved section of your queue -- suddenly deciding not to carry the film, I am uncertain where it can be rented. But I understand that a streaming option is also now available from FlixFling.com.

Tom Six's THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE is the crap of the year -- in so many ways. Breaking News: Update on the Sequel!

The first thing that needs to be said about Dutch filmmaker Tom Six's "controversial" horror film, as the PR push would have it, is that THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE constitutes poor movie-making on almost any level you might want to address -- beginning with plot, pace, and simple logic. The performances are as good as the film allows, and the visuals get the job done. And that's about it for minor praise.  The first half hour is tiresome, repetitive and boring; the second is standard horror movie stuff; and the third is so filled with ridiculous, unbelievable, over-the-top nonsense (and I am not even referring to the nitwit "title" character) that I should think any real sci-fi/fan-
tasy/horror buff will be rolling his or her eyes in utter contempt.

The only good reviews I have seen -- such as that in this week's Village Voice, which gave the garbage an entire page (this, when movie coverage is dwindling so badly!) -- talk about the film in terms usually reserved for Godard and Antonioni.  Which would be fine, if the movie got its basics even close to correct.  But how can you discuss a film in a hi-falutin' manner when the filmmaker first bores you to near-death and then offers characters so stupid that they won't use the phone that's right in front of them to try to call for help, or later, when they've been "monster-ized" don't try to attack their torturer when the opportunities seem evident and many.  The capper, however (spoiler ahead, though there really isn't much to spoil in a movie where the "idea" of the monster is the only thing that makes it remotely special): once the worm turns and the victim attacks, he wounds rather than kills, so that, you know, Freddy, Jason, Leatherface (or in this case, Centipede's minor-league monster creator) can rise again.  And what about those dumber-than-you've-ever-seen policemen?  Don't ask.

Of course, all this is not the point in a movie with a premise that wants to out-disgust even Salo.  Yet Pasolini, at least, made sure we wallowed in the shit.  The Human Centipede is very nearly pristine.  Once we get the idea of what's going on, our fevered brains can make all the nasty connections.  In fact, the "Centipede" itself, once you get past its shared digestive tract, is a rather cute little concoction.  The big question is: Why would any mad scientist worth his salt want to come up with this?

TrustMovies never says "never" about watching another movie from even those filmmakers whose work he has loathed the most.  A few years back Mr. Six, shown at left, made a movie called Gay (known over here as Gay in Amsterdam) which, as the press material for Centipede informs us, was also controversial and starred "a lot of famous Dutch actors."  Maybe we'll rent that one -- which Netflix members have rated not quite up to the "didn't like it" level, while IMDB viewers gave it between two and three stars (out of a possible ten) before we tackle the Centipede's sequel, which is, we are told, already in production.

About the performances: that doctor (above) does his best Udo Kier imitation, the two girls (below) babble brightly and then scream loudly, the Japanese fellow (at bottom) gets in touch with the heritage of his culture of shame, and the cops are macho dumbos.  No one rises above a script empty of characterization,
wit and suspense.

So how did this third-trimester film abortion come about?  It is likely that Mr. Six simply stumbled upon an envelope-pushing idea for the torture-porn genre and then ran with it, having not a modicum of the necessary skills with which to flesh out this idea.   (For an ex-
ample of great premise and super follow-through in the thriller genre, see Wes Craven/Carl Ellsworth's Red Eye.)  I guess Six's envelope "push" left certain critics free to gush about the "ideas" on display, even if they do pretty much create these ideas out of whole cloth.

The Human Centipede begins its theatrical run concurrent with its On-Demand availability on Friday, April 30, in New York City at the IFC Center. For the where and how of On-Demand, click here. 

JUST BREAKING!  

Here's the first still from the promised and forthcoming sequel  

The Human Centipede II: Full Sequence:

Just kidding. This shot, under the heading Giant Caterpillar Found in University Dorm Room arrived yesterday via those folk who circulate "humor" over the web.  I must admit, it's funnier than anything in Mr Six's movie. Maybe it'll inspire him in a new direction....

Sundance On-Demand debuts with grizzly but intelligent, French-Canadian 7 DAYS

If you could catch and then torture for a week the man who raped and killed your little girl, how would you spend those  
7 DAYS? That's the not-necessarily-provocative ques-
tion asked by the French-Canadian film of the same name, directed by Daniel Grou and adapted from his own novel by Patrick Senécal.   The answer provi-
ded by Messieurs Grou and Senécal, while bringing to mind the phrase "torture porn," manages a good deal more than that -- though there are couple of scenes that demand a strong stomach. (If you're a doctor/surgeon, you probably know well the ways to make your victim suffer, and that is what happens here.)

Director Grou (here billed as Podz) keeps his camera quietly roving
(there's little jump cutting and flashy editing) and his color palette drained of anything bright: It's mostly gray, dark green and blue, with a little brown
now and then.

The father of the kidnap victim (Claude Legault below, left) is strong, silent, taciturn -- until he explodes via phone to his wife. His victim (Martin Dubreuil below, right) lies, defies, begs, confes-
ses, whimpers, pleads and tries all the tricks in the book but remains mostly a victim for whom we can feel little.

As the detective in charge, well-known Quebec actor Rémy Girard (shown below) does wonders with his highly constricted role (making him a victim of a killer -- he lost his wife that way -- is a bit too neat, but we'll let that pass). The two major female roles are aptly handled by Fanny Mallette (shown at bottom, left) and Pascale Delhaes, with Rose-Marie Coallier properly sweet and fragile as the victim.

If 7 Days dealt only or mostly with the inflicting of pain, justified or not, we could indeed wave it away as torture porn. But that is not the case. For one thing, the film doubles as a pretty good police procedural; for another, it probes -- under the most trying circumstances -- love, guilt, retribution, penance, and sheer unending frustration. This easily lifts it above most others in the genre, which, for all their occasional dialog babble about morality, etc., end up being nothing more than sleazy entertainment.

7 Days manages to hold out interest and our concern -- without demeaning us in the process. It's an intelligent, difficult film. Sure, it could be better. But it could also be a hell of a lot worse.

So, how does one get to view it? The movie made its debut last Friday at the Sundance Film Festival as part of the Park City at Midnight program.  It is also part of the new Sundance Selects theatrical and video-on-demand film label, in which three films of very different style and content from this year's festival are making their debut simultaneously On-Demand from most major cable systems, including Comcast, Cablevision, Cox, Time Warner and satellite provider Direct TV.

Each film will be available for 30 days on the cable systems' main movies-on-demand channel. TrustMovies hopes to cover the other two soon: the Michael Winterbottom/Mat Whitecross version of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine and the Safdie Brothers' Daddy Longlegs.