Haiti's history meets teen romance in Bertrand Bonello's nitwit flick, ZOMBI CHILD

I've been a fan of the films of Bertrand Bonello (shown below) for years now -- Nocturama and Saint Laurent are my favorites -- so it gives me no pleasure to report that his latest, ZOMBI CHILD, is an embarrassing, unadulterated piece of crap. Unless M. Bonello is simply having us on? If so, he's managed to con most of our critical establishment, no great achievement considering the current state of movie criticism. It is not that his film has no real scares, suspense or thrills, as do most films with the word zombie (or, as here, zombi) in the title. Nor that instead of those usual attributes, a filmmaker has skewed his work toward intelligence and politics, economics, and history. Robin Campillo managed all that just about perfectly in his zombie movie, They Came Back (Les Revenants).

Here, the history of Haiti, colonization, teenage infatuation, zombie love and other subjects bounce off each other repeatedly without ever making much of a connection -- intellectually or emotionally. It takes over an hour before that connection finally arrives. And once it does, the movie just grows stupider.

TrustMovies is sorry, but it is simply not enough to toss in everything you think you know about these subjects and then expect this to somehow coalesce. You've got to make your tale resonate in an edifying manner so that your characters seem at least a tad important, maybe even believable. Bonello utterely fails at this. Plus, he's unusually sloppy (our Haitian zombie forgets to move slowly, once he's washing himself in the river).

The movie, despite its intellectual pretensions, does not even qualify as subtle or smart, for it is simply exposition piled upon more exposition, until it arrives dead on its feet -- in a way that puts to shame its own zombies.

Toggling back and forth between Haiti in the 1960s -- as one of those zombies is created to join others in the sugar-cane work force -- and an elite girls' school in present-day France, where the entitled white students form cliques and discuss boys, music and sorority nonsense, deciding whether or not to allow a new black student to join, Zombi Child moves along at the pace of the old-fashioned undead. To and fro we go, from Haiti to France, with things occasionally broken up by a nightmare or a flesh-eating fantasy. Come on, Bonello, we know you can do better than this.

Even the film's minimal special effects are cheesy -- black eyeballs yet?! -- while the finale offers up the most embarrassing use of Rodgers & Hammerstein's You'll Never Walk Alone to ever hit the screen. It makes even the ending of the movie Priest seem unduly reticent.

I am tempted to call this film a piece of intentional camp. But, no, I know in my heart that the camp here in unintentional. More's the pity.

From Film Movement and running 103 very long minutes, Zombi Child hits DVD and digital today, Tuesday, May 19 -- for purchase and, I would guess, rental. Your move.

Lovers of unintentional camp, rejoice! RUSSIAN DOLL (A Thriller) hits DVD

The box art for RUSSIAN DOLL explains (or maybe proclaims) the movie to be, via its subtitle description, (A Thriller) -- in parentheses, yet, in case, I guess, we might want to consider this as parenthetical. Indeed there is not a single thrill to be found here. There is, however, a whole lot of genuine laughs, most of these completely unintentional, I fear.

Which means that this movie takes its place among those hallowed few films that rise, completely of their own accord, into the realm of unintentional camp.

As written and directed by Ed Gaffney (shown at right, whose earlier work as screenwriter, The Perfect Wedding, this reviewer thoroughly enjoyed), Russian Doll begins and ends with a genuine surprise. The first of these turns what has initially looked just slightly off-kilter into something that makes perfect sense. The final surprise has to do with identity, and I admit that I did not at all expect it. So I applaud. Very good, Mr. Gaffney!

The problem, however, is that between these two surprises, almost everything else seems bat-shit crazy, including the performances of much of the cast, especially our leading lady, Melanie Brockmann Gaffney (I suspect she is the filmmaker's wife), who, whatever other talents she possesses, acting is not among them, and Jason T. Gaffney (the filmmaker's son?), who was so very good in his rom-com role in The Perfect Wedding, but here plays a villain (shown below with his victim, played by Aly Trasher) who keeps making us laugh. Unintentionally, I admit. But that's not what villains are supposed to do.

The plot has to do with a theatrical play, the authorship of which may have been stolen; a sudden kidnapping (that actually makes very little sense overall); and a theatrical production of said play (named Russian Doll) that is occurring simultaneously with the kidnapping and a budding romance between our heroine, a police detective (Ms Gaffney, at left on poster, top) and a very pretty, sexy young woman with whom the detective's mom (Kristine Sutherland, below) has set her up.

All comes together in as clunky a manner as the above description sounds, with the kidnapper and his kidnapee especially hilarious, as the latter keeps escaping and the former keeps telling her that he's going to kill her if she keeps this up. She does, of course, and he doesn't. Somewhere along the way, the filmmaker inserts a song, the lyrics of which prove as awful (and as funny) as everything else on display. (We happened to have the English subtitles on as we watched and so got a double dose, aural and visual.)

At one point or another, my spouse and I began laughing aloud at the increasingly silly goings-on and, as can happen with this kind of laughter, it simply grew and grew until we were actually having a pretty good time. Add to this the automatic corrective that a truly awful movie can provide to just about everything else you've seen, mediocre on downward. Russian Doll managed this, and I am grateful. Now I truly understand what bad looks like. (That's the other leading lady, played by Marem Hassler, above, right, and Sarah Hollis, below, right, as our heroine's police partner, who tries to be smart and sassy but is defeated at every turn by the script.)

Distributed by Wolfe Video and running at least a short 82 minutes, the movie hits the street on DVD tomorrow, Tuesday, April 17 -- for purchase and/or maybe rental. To all of you -- performers, filmmakers, audiences -- good luck!

In Steven Soderbergh's UNSANE, nitwittery hits a ripe new height

You've got to hand it to Steven Soderbergh. When he's good (as in last year's Logan Lucky), he's very good, and when he fails, he does it big-time: no halfway-there for this guy! His new movie, UNSANE, is as ripe a piece of unintentional camp silliness that we've seen in, well, let's just say it makes that recent Halle Berry thriller Kidnap look like a classic of the genre. Word has it that Unsane was filmed entirely via cell phone (see shot of the director, below).

If so, congratulations --  though the film is nowhere as good as either King Kelly or Tangerine, both of which were "cell-phone" precursors of this overlong, let's-toss-believability-out-the-window mess.

The mess is less due to Mr. Soderbergh, who at least knows how to move things along, than to its writers -- Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer -- who take a smart, timely idea (a rehab center that entraps its clients and then won't let them go until their insurance payments have expired) and then fills it with such stupid and nitwit details (male and female patients sleep in the same room?) and ridiculous coincidence that all credibility is soon left for dead.

The film stars Claire Foy (above), who is onscreen for practically the entire movie and does a yeoman job of "trying." But her character is so thoroughly manufacturer-to-fit-the-bill that, again, any credence or caring is lost to behavior that is rather unlike any seen either on screen or in the world as we know it. (The character is repeatedly warned what her violent behavior will bring her, and so she engages in it like there's no tomorrow.)

This makes her rather the equal of the film's villain, played with enough relish to fill three movies (and a whole lot of hot dogs) by Joshua Leonard, above, who has been quite good elsewhere (Humpday), and I'm sure will rise again.

For a short while (this is the most believable section of the film), we are meant to wonder if our girl is sane or not so, but it soon becomes clear that she's the victim. Subsidiary characters are the equal, in terms of believability, of the leads: There's the unhelpful matron, played by Polly McKie (above, left) and another patient, limned by the always-fun Juno Temple (below), who exists simply and only to annoy our heroine.

The most interesting character, a patient who is really an investigative reporter planning to "out" this rehab center, is played by Jay Pharoah (below, right), but what this fellow can so easily accomplish (rather obviously yet without anyone noticing) just adds to the film's foolishness.

Yes, we also get that scene of running down totally unpopulated hallways (this is yet another "thriller" in which a medical facility seems to have lost its entire staff), and a heroine who can stab the bad guy but then forgets to do it again so he is incapacitated. And on and on it goes.

In retrospect, I think this may be the perfect movie for our Trump era -- in which everybody (on both sides of the screen) is either sleazy or stupid. Good luck to us all.

From Bleecker Street and running a too-long 97 minutes the movie opens (pretty much nationwide, I believe) this Friday, March 23. Click here then scroll down to find the theater(s) nearest you.

Oh, lordy! Timothy Woodward, Jr.'s jaw-dropping CHECKMATE make its DVDebut

If you've a mind (and the patience or maybe courage) to discover what bottom-of-the-barrel currently looks and sounds like, movie-wise, by all means watch CHECKMATE. This brain-boggling, jaw-dropping piece of nonsense features a bunch of actors who've all seen better days and now make utterly disposable films -- the least of which may be this one, which occasionally comes very close to entering the realm of unintentional camp. It's almost bad enough to be good.

Why is Checkmate so terrible? The director/co-producer, Timothy Woodward, Jr., shown below, hasn't a clue to most anything from pacing to action, and he is saddled with one of the worst screenplays imaginable, credited to Calvin Cox, Jr., Jennifer Lynch and Henry Mitchell, who are, according to the IMDB, neophytes all.

These writers' objective, it soon appears, is to discover how many times they can cram the word "fuck" (and its many variations) into a single full-length film. If you start tallying from the beginning, Ill bet you'll be well into the triple digits before the movie ends. Their one remotely original idea (perhaps only because this particular reviewer has not seen it done previously) is to make one of their characters a priest who doubles as a paid assassin.

In any case, the bank robbery around which the film revolves is embarrassingly staged, as are the actions of the police on hand. There's lots of over-acting on view, to be expected when the script is this bad. And, perhaps because the filmmaker is a Southern boy who wants to toss a bone to Christian fundamentalists, we get a simultaneous sub-plot involving God and the devil in a chess match. But the filmmaker clearly doesn't know chess well enough to allow us to see any of the moves being played. So this, too, fizzles out. Whew.

Films like Checkmate do serve a purpose. They act as a kind of touchstone for all else you might view. After this one, just about anything you watch will appear to have some merit. The movie hits the street this Tuesday, September 8, on DVD.

Michael Patrick Kelly & Kathleen Kiley's ISN'T IT DELICIOUS boasts a star-studded New York cast

Wow. Kathleen Chalfant, Alice Ripley, Mia Dillon, Robert Lupone, and Malachy McCourt. How's that for a sturdy line-up of New York legitimate theater actors? Plus Keir Dullea (whom we don't get to see in that many new movie roles) and a handful of younger talent. Their vehicle is the new film, ISN'T IT DELICIOUS, directed by Michael Patrick Kelly from a screenplay by Kathleen Kiley. The venue here in New York City is the Quad Cinema, a theater I bring up only because it also hosted the premiere of another movie quite reminiscent of this one: The Abduction of Zack Butterfield. Though never reaching the hilarious level of unintentional camp achieved by the Butterfield abduction (except perhaps in its final WTF moments), Isn't It Delicious may be the most embarrassing film I've seen since that earlier "classic." (And that was in the spring of 2011.)

If you follow my reviews much at all, you already know that I don't enjoy ripping apart a new film, into which has usually gone the heart and soul of the filmmaker and/or screenwriter. So, as much fun as it might be to tear into this one, I am really going to try to hold back a bit -- and just explain semi-rationally what went wrong. Director and co-writer Kelly (shown at right) appears to have had a real fondness for the screenplay submitted to him by Ms Kiley. Since I can only go by what emerged from this collaboration onto the screen, I must say that the Kiley/Kelly combo offers up way too much of a not-very-good thing.

Isn't It Delicious (and, yes, no question mark adheres to this title) is a film about death and dying and family and fighting. And if you already suspect that the family here is dysfunctional to the max, you'd be right on the mark. Pay attention to what's on screen and to the dialog you hear for even a few minutes, and you will want to shriek at the cancerous character played by Ms Chalfant (shown above and below, with Mr. Dullea as her hubby), as my spouse did at one fraught point, "So, die already!"

This is because the storied Ms Chalfant, who possesses bona fides aplenty, takes the dialog given her -- often obvious and overdone to begin with -- and tears into it like a rabid mastiff. But, then, this whole family is so constantly annoying and overwrought that watching them awhile could make willing bachelors and old maids out of any audience. This is a truly dreadful screenplay: underscoring, repeating, and saying the obvious in any case (live life while you can). If the dialog were written with more of an eye for humor (there's some, but it surfaces far too seldom), this might have helped.

But, no, Delicious -- beginning with one funeral (above) and ending with another (at bottom) -- is chock-a-block with life lessons that we damn well better learn. If only Kelly/Kiley had given us more scenes like that in the automobile in which Chalfant notices a stop sign with a line of graffiti scrawled across it. This makes for a very funny, astute moment, one of the few not batted home with a shovel.

Characters seems to exist mostly to teach us, and while certain scenes work better than others (the one featuring a limo driver played by the excellent Ger Duany is among the best), they're all there to educate.
The actors playing Chalfant's children -- Ms Ripley (above), Nick Stevenson (as the older son, below), and Jonah Young (two photos below) as the younger male fare little better than the oldsters because they, too, are asked to constantly bicker and fight till they bore us silly.

I lost count, but I know that we hear the line "I want you to be happy" far too many times. And when the title line is finally spoken, it comes -- oy! -- with a resounding thud.

I suspect that someone here -- writer, director, maybe both -- subscribes to the Buddhist religion. Certainly this figures heavily into the story, and it may account for the final scene, which ends the movie on a high or low note, depending on your idea of what constitutes unintentional camp. Woody Allen once created a scene like this (in Everyone Says I Love You), which worked because it was playful, silly and very funny, as well as making its obvious point. Here, it is embarrassing, almost beyond belief.

Isn't It Delicious opens in Los Angeles this Thursday, December 11, at the NoHo 7; in New York City (at the Quad) and in Chicago (at the Logan Theatre) on Friday, December 12. In addition, the film will have a one-night-only screening on Friday, Dec. 12, at the Palace Theater in Syracuse, New York.

The Lancaster/Ryder ABDUCTION OF ZACK BUTTERFIELD: so wrong it's camp

What can one say? Maybe, "Whew!"

It's been several years since I have seen what would appear a provocative and interesting story idea made into a movie as insufficiently imagined and over-the-top misguided as THE ABDUCTION OF ZACK BUTTERFIELD, which was co-written by its director Rick Lancaster (shown below) and Stephen M. Ryder.  The latter is credited as a co-writer of L.I.E., though this current work ought to make us even more grateful for the contributions of Michael Cuesta, as director and co-writer of that earlier and groundbreaking  film.

This film's title tells you its story, while its poster (above) lets you see that abduction coming. Our protagonist, Zack, is the jogger and his antagonist is one, April McKenna -- played by newcomer Brett Helsham (shown below). April, a veteran of our current wartime follies in both Afghanistan and Iraq, is one terrifically troubled young woman who has some major problems with men. And so she has decided to kidnap a teenage boy, hold him captive and slowly turn him into the man of her dreams. Makes sense, right?

If I tell you that my six-year-old granddaughter would make an equally believable war veteran/nutcase as the version Ms Helsham gives us, this should provide a hint as to how ridiculous this whole enterprise quickly becomes. I don't mean to demean the actress, who might very well go on to become a gifted rom-com comedienne. But she -- like everyone associated with this fiasco -- is way out of her depth.

From the "action sequence" of the kidnapping scene to April's dressing up as a seductress (above), this is a high-school-level performance. I would say this, too, about her co-star TJ Plunkett, below, except that he is in high school. Wearing one expression throughout the film, and sounding exactly the same whether he is simply having a conversation with his captor or trying to "put one over" on her, he runs the gamut of emotions from A to, well, A.

Much of this must be attributable to Mr. Lancaster, as co-writer and director and his associate Mr. Ryder -- who see fit not to have the abductee bother to ask his abductor "Why am I here and why are you doing this?" until the movie is more than half-over. The filmmaker allows a huge chunk of exposition -- April's past history -- to be doled out in one long, boring barf that practically puts us, not to mention her captive, to sleep. One of the more interesting characters in the movie (played by Walter Masterson, below) comes off needlessly confusing: Is this guy a little slow, or was he simply directed to act unduly goofy?

Even the card game between teen-age friends that take place early in the movie, shown at bottom, while relatively well-written, is staged without an accompanying sense of reality. Didn't anybody on set, or during the rushes, notice how silly this all looked? Or were they all just hoping for a miracle? The big "sex scene," during which the camera pans politely away, 'natch, is scored to the strains of -- oh, god, no -- Swan Lake. I never thought I'd ask for this, but, please, bring back Black Swan!

The supporting cast members do a bit better in their roles, especially Zack's mom and dad, played respectively by Lisa Gunn (above, right) and Aaron Letrick (left). But other than the glossy, infomercial-level cinematography (by Aric Jacobson), this is amateur night at the movies -- so bad that it becomes that much-sought-after but rarely discovered joy: unintentional camp.

The Abduction of Zack Butterfield (91 minutes) opens this Friday, May 27, in New York City at the Quad Cinema and in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Sunset 5. Go, I say, and giggle away!

Doris Yeung's MOTHERLAND opens at the Quad Cinema in New York. Ouch!

Criticizing a movie like MOTHERLAND -- about a adult daughter, estran-ged from her mother, who suddenly must travel to San Francisco to pick up the pieces when she learns that mom has been murdered -- is more difficult than usual. This is because, according to the press materials, the film is a reaction by the writer/director Doris Yeung to her own mother's violent murder. That's certainly a heavy burden for any filmmaker to bear. And knowing about this makes it more difficult for a critic to approach the film fairly. At least it certainly proved so for TrustMovies. Yet Motherland is, for the most part, a dreadful piece of film-making. Not knowing Ms Yeung nor her work (this is her first film of any kind, full-length or short, narrative or documentary), nor the actual details of her life, TM can only guess that this tyro filmmaker is too close to her material to do it any kind of justice.

Did Ms Yeung, shown at right, try to stay too exacting about the real details, or did she err in the opposite direction by creating a "fiction" tale brimming with money, murder, jealousy and betrayal. (Maybe the real details were just so: a melodramatic hash of M, M, J & B.) Whatever: I can say that what hits the screen starts off bearably, if a little shakily, in Mexico, where our heroine lives happily enough and in very nice quarters until she receives a middle-of-the-night phone call. Once she returns to San Francisco and we meet her friends and relatives, and the plot, as they say, thickens, the movie goes alarmingly downhill. Performances grow increasingly wobbly, as the actors are forced into actions that appear less and less likely or real; the writing degenerates badly (one scene between a cop and our heroine is among the most inane in movie history); even some of the transitions (a visit to the dead mom's apartment) seem almost nonsensical. Somewhere around the middle of this 93-minute film, it hits home that you're attending amateur night at the movies.

Yeung has certainly cast her film with some pros, whose resumes reach down to your knees. This does not help. The beautiful French-Canadian/Chinese actress Françoise Yip (above, whose first theatrical movie was Jackie Chan's Rumble in the Bronx) is wooden, at best.

As Yip's naughty dad, 72-year-old Hong Kong actor Kenneth Tsang (above, who boasts nearly 150 credits) overdoes things considerably.

And Byron Mann (above), as an old friend of the family who turns over so many new leaves you expect him to sprout branches, tends to raise his eyebrows and look happily confused. Well, he's working, right, so what's not to be happy about?

As a filmmaker, Yeung seems to favor extreme close-ups, which are interesting until plot and characters go to pieces. Then those same close-ups have the effect of making us start to snicker. (There's a scene in which the heroine listens to a conversation she's not meant to hear, which can only be occurring because the two men she overhears have zero peripheral vision. She's right there in plain sight, for god's sake! Why don't they see her?) One of the few good things Yeung manages is to make her heroine a lesbian -- without also making a big deal of it. The situation is treated as natural as anything else we see (though we also suspect that it accounts for the rupture between mother and daughter).

The themes the filmmaker addresses are all worthwhile: justice, honor and culture clash: the immigrant experience after arrival in the new land. But to get us to pay attention to these, Yeung has got to do better than slap in some symbolic pigeons (below) and then hand us at the climax a scene so ridiculous, silly and melodramatic that it immediately becomes near-classic camp. Well, there is always next time. Unless perhaps, by telling her story, Ms Yeung has gotten the past out of her system -- which may be enough for her.  If not, and she makes another movie, I promise to watch it with no preconceived notions and a hope for the best.

Meanwhile, Motherland -- not to be confused with that fine documentary of the same name from 2009 -- opens this Friday, March 18, in New York City at the Quad Cinema.