VODepths: 'Almost Paris,' 'Future '38,' 'Mustang Island'

Almost Paris (Wally Marzano-Lesnevich, Michael Sorvino, Abigail Hawk, dir. Domenica Cameron-Scorsese) You'd think that Martin Scorsese's daughter could land a better project for her feature directorial debut than micro-indie Almost Paris, but given the lack of skill on display in this movie, maybe it's better that Domenica Cameron-Scorsese didn't get a more high-profile shot. A thoroughly phony and unconvincing family dramedy, Paris follows the creaky indie template of the big-city guy returning to his small hometown and reconnecting with his roots while falling in love with a girl from his past. Here it's former financial VP Max (Wally Marzano-Lesnevich, who also wrote the script in an obvious bid to showcase himself) moving back in with his parents, plus his sister and her husband and young daughter, on Long Island. It seems like the movie takes place around 2008 or 2009, although that's not entirely clear, and the filmmakers make a clumsy attempt at social commentary about the subprime mortgage crisis that fits awkwardly with the Hallmark-level romantic storyline about Max pursuing a sweet toy-store owner (Abigail Hawk). The dialogue is stilted, the performances are stiff, the jokes fall flat, and Cameron-Scorsese's direction is bland and lifeless. Maybe she needs a few more lessons from her dad. Available on Amazon and elsewhere.

Future '38 (Nick Westrate, Betty Gilpin, Tom Riis Farrell, dir. Jamie Greenberg) Somewhere around the intersection of a Guy Maddin movie and a Saturday Night Live sketch, 1930s sci-fi pastiche Future '38 imagines a lost movie (introduced by Neil deGrasse Tyson!) from 1938, depicting a government agent (Nick Westrate) traveling into the far future of 2018 in order to retrieve a weapon that can end World War II. Of course when he arrives, he meets a dame (played by GLOW's Betty Gilpin) and falls in love, while trying to complete his mission and deal with the unfamiliarity of the future. Shot in a style meant to evoke 1930s filmmaking, the movie can't quite settle on being a parody of how people in the '30s would have envisioned the future, or a parody of modern culture through the lens of the '30s. The dialogue is full of groan-worthy puns and double entendres, but Westrate and Gilpin have great chemistry (and Gilpin is fantastic as an old-Hollywood sassy broad), and they help in getting about half of the jokes to land. It's probably better as a concept than as a feature film, but Future '38 is still a fun watch for fans of vintage Hollywood. Available on Amazon and elsewhere.

Mustang Island (Macon Blair, John Merriman, Lee Eddy, dir. Craig Elrod) Thanks to his lead role in Blue Ruin, Macon Blair became an instant indie-film star, and he made an impressive directorial debut last year with I Don't Feel at Home in This World Anymore. As the star of indie rom-com Mustang Island, though, he doesn't make nearly as strong an impression, and the movie itself feels like a leftover from the Sundance slacker-cinema boom of the '90s. Blair plays Bill, a sad-sack whiner who gets dumped by his girlfriend and drags his brother and his oddball friend to the titular location (a low-rent resort island off the Texas coast) to track her down. While there, Bill meets and falls for a local waitress (Lee Eddy, Blair's real-life wife), and various complications ensue. Director and co-writer Craig Elrod uses minimalist dialogue, abrupt transitions and black-and-white cinematography to give the movie a more distinctive style, but that doesn't enliven the pedestrian story or make the entitled, inconsiderate characters easier to invest in. The jokes are repetitive, and the minimalist style sometimes obscures seemingly important plot points and character relationships. Blair definitely has star qualities, but this movie is a poor showcase for them. Available on Netflix.

Triskaidekaphilia: '13 Dead Men' (2003)

On the 13th of each month, I write about a movie whose title contains the number 13.

I didn't keep close count, but I am almost certain there are not 13 dead men in 13 Dead Men, the title of which apparently refers to 13 death row inmates who've exhausted all their appeals and are set to be executed imminently. This is explained in a single throwaway line, and the only one of the 13 who actually appears in the movie is Malachi (Ashley Tucker), who's been convicted of killing a cop but maintains his innocence throughout the movie. I couldn't tell if he was actually innocent of the cop-killing, but he was definitely not innocent of stealing millions of dollars worth of diamonds, which the prison's warden (David Weininger) is determined to take for himself. The warden and most of the guards keep devising new ways to torture Malachi so he will tell them where the diamonds are hidden before he's scheduled to be executed.

Also looking for the diamonds are Malachi's former partners, all of whom apparently escaped arrest, led by Santos (Lorenzo Lamas). Eventually they launch some sort of half-assed plan to break Malachi out of prison, which mostly involves getting themselves into the prison and then fighting all the guards until they find Malachi. Surprisingly, this plan mostly works, because Malachi is being held in the most poorly secured and guarded prison of all time, along with barely enough other inmates to make it to the movie's titular number. Nobody's goals in this movie are particularly coherent, but the diamonds are just a flimsy excuse for director and co-writer Art Camacho to stage an endless series of listless fight scenes.

Camacho is a veteran of straight-to-video action movies and a prolific stunt performer/coordinator, but the fight choreography in this movie is absolutely terrible. The fight scenes are less believable than professional wrestling matches, with punches and kicks that clearly land nowhere near their intended targets, and characters lumbering slowly around each other. Say what you will about Lorenzo Lamas, but he knows his way around a low-budget action movie, and his fights are the only ones in the entire movie that even come close to credible. His acting is another matter, but it's not like anyone in the cast (which also includes rapper Mystikal, who joins Lamas in being billed above actual main star Tucker) gives a good performance. At least Lamas seems to be having fun as the cynical badass who gets the hot girl, which is more than can be said for the mostly flat line deliveries from the rest of the cast.

Although there isn't any nudity, there are some gratuitously misogynistic sex scenes between the warden and his wife/assistant, which go overboard in establishing him as a sadistic asshole. The women in the movie are generally just tools to further the agendas of the macho male characters, whether that's the lone female guard who's basically in love with Malachi and helps him contact his associates (only to be brutally murdered by the other guards and the warden in a faked suicide); or the female member of the robbery crew who goes from Malachi's girlfriend to Santos' to a captive of the prison guards (although she does get to kick ass eventually); or the warden's poor mistreated spouse. It's less a failing of this particular movie than just standard-issue for this kind of movie in this era; nothing about 13 Dead Men sets it apart from other cheap straight-to-video action movies of the '00s. Even Lorenzo Lamas has done better.

My top 10 non-2017 movies of 2017

I'm a little behind on getting this done, but I didn't want to miss out on one of my favorite annual traditions. This year, I made a resolution (that I stuck to more often than not) inspired by this Matt Singer ScreenCrush article to watch at least one movie a week that was released before I was born, so I probably had a wider selection to choose from than in previous years. Here are the best movies I saw for the first time in 2017 that were released in previous years.

1. The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (Nicolas Gessner, 1976) I didn't know what to expect from this movie, other than a young Jodie Foster in some sort of thriller. What I got was a fascinatingly unpredictable mix of thriller, coming-of-age drama, horror and teen romance, with one of Foster's best-ever performances (at age 13!), as a teenager trying to balance a secret life after both of her parents die, leaving her alone in a big, isolated house. Martin Sheen is wonderfully creepy as the sleazy neighbor who wants to expose (in more ways than one) the young girl's secrets, and the plot deals with serious issues of morality, maturity and consent in a frank and direct way while still telling an entertaining, twisty story.

2. Red-Headed Woman (Jack Conway, 1932) This delightfully disreputable pre-Code comedy, starring a fantastic Jean Harlow as a brazen gold-digger and home-wrecker, was my favorite film at the 2017 TCM Fest. Harlow's Lil Andrews openly declares her intent to sleep her way to the top, seducing her married boss, marrying him and then seducing an even older, richer industrialist. She never even really faces a moral reckoning, although the hapless men eventually get wise to her scheme. It's weirdly feminist in the way the anti-heroine exploits the patriarchy for her own selfish ends, and it's absolutely hilarious while she does.

3. Don't Bother to Knock (Roy Ward Baker, 1952) I've seen Marilyn Monroe in entertaining performances that play to her popular image, but this is the first time I've been truly impressed with her dramatic skills, and it's a shame that this movie isn't as well-known as her more stereotypically sexy performances. She's still sexy here, but she's also haunted and tragic as a woman whose mental instability becomes more apparent as she works as a babysitter in a hotel and flirts with a fellow guest. Richard Widmark plays the ostensible hero, who has a more sensible love interest waiting in the wings, but Monroe is the real star of this surprising, unsettling and sad movie.

4. Christmas, Again (Charles Poekel, 2014) I have a sort of love/hate relationship with Christmas movies, finding them fascinating but also mostly annoying, but it's worth watching the bad ones in order to come across gems like this, which I checked out thanks to a review from colleague Mike D'Angelo. Like Joe Swanberg's Happy Christmas, it's a micro-budget mumblecore take on the Christmas movie, starring indie stalwart Kentucker Audley as a mopey guy working at a bargain Christmas-tree lot in New York City. Audley is endearing, and the movie is full of entertaining character details, charming little moments of interaction that get at the spirit of the holidays without being sappy, and while always balancing the cheer with melancholy.

5. The Children (Tom Shankland, 2008) And speaking of Christmas movies, this was probably the nicest surprise of the series I did on Christmas horror movies at the end of 2017. It's a creepy killer-kids movie that takes advantage of the inherent stress of family togetherness during the holidays to create a tense atmosphere even before the kids start committing violence against their family members. The characters are well-defined enough that the domestic squabbles feel real, but there isn't more back story than is needed to fuel the suspense. The kids are genuinely frightening, the isolated rural estate is a great location, and the ending has just the right mix of cruelty and triumph. More in my original post.

6. Ava's Possessions (Jordan Galland, 2015) Sometimes things sit for so long in my Netflix queue that I have no idea why I wanted to see them when I finally get around to watching them, so I can't say how this random straight-to-video horror movie came across my radar, but I'm glad it did. Like a lot of the movies on this list, it's unpredictable and determined to confound expectations, starting out as a dark horror comedy with a sitcommy premise (what if there was a support group for people recovering from ... demon possession?) before veering off into darker, more twisted territory. Director Galland gives it a sort of garish, sickly neon color palette somewhere between noir, EC Comics and an '00s alt-rock video, and the plot gives Louisa Krause's title character the chance to go from victim to righteous avenger, all with a devious smile.

7. Ride Lonesome (Budd Boetticher, 1959) One of the best Western plots is "determined lawman does the technically right thing even though it will lead to his certain death and is also futile," and this movie really nails that story. It's embodied by Randolph Scott as self-destructively righteous bounty hunter Ben Brigade, who uses a wanted outlaw to bait that outlaw's brother (Lee Van Cleef) into coming after him, delivering perceived justice for both, most likely at the cost of Brigade's own life. Scott's Brigade is stoic and tragic, and the movie is, too, with its beautiful but harsh frontier vistas and a pair of opportunistic gunmen entertainingly played by James Coburn and Pernell Roberts.

8. Risky Business (Paul Brickman, 1983) I put this on expecting a light '80s teen comedy in the vein of a John Hughes movie, and I discovered something more like Ferris Bueller's Day Off meets The Graduate. Sure, everyone remembers Tom Cruise dancing in his underwear to "Old Time Rock and Roll," and this movie also features Curtis "Booger" Armstrong as the main character's crass best friend, plus a giant over-the-top house party (filled with hookers) while parents are away. But it's also surprisingly bleak and pessimistic, with an undercurrent of hopelessness about the future. Cruise's Joel Goodson discovers that his life of privilege and wealth is completely hollow, and risking it all for an alluring prostitute (played by Rebecca De Mornay at her most alluring) is more meaningful than getting into Princeton.

9. Who Can Kill a Child? (Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, 1976) And we're back to killer kids! I actually saw the remake of this movie (titled Come Out and Play) at AFI Fest in 2012 without having any knowledge of the original, and I found it slow and dull and not very scary. But (not surprisingly), the original is much better, an incredibly eerie, suspenseful and downright nasty movie about a vacationing British couple finding themselves on a Spanish island full of kids who've turned homicidal. There's a misguided prologue with real news footage of atrocities affecting children, and the movie doesn't quite support that thematic weight. After that, though, it's tense and well-acted, full of impossible situations as represented by the title question, the answer to which is always bad news.

10. The House on Telegraph Hill (Robert Wise, 1951) I had a few potential choices for this last spot and went with this one in part because like so many movies on this list, it unfolds unpredictably, at first seeming like one kind of movie and then developing into something else. The main character is a concentration-camp survivor who moves to San Francisco by adopting the identity of a fellow inmate who died, but the story isn't about her deception being uncovered. Instead it's about her uncovering deception and murder in the wealthy family into which she insinuates herself, going from one horror into another that's more devious and not as readily apparent. The shots of 1950s San Francisco are stunning, and Wise builds an atmosphere of dread that sustains all the way until the very end.

Previous lists:

• 2016
• 2015
• 2014
• 2013
• 2012
• 2011
• 2010
• 2009
• 2008