Holy Crap!* "Bug"

Well, Michael Shannon sure burst into the public consciousness in a big way with one of his first marquee roles, delusional Gulf War veteran Peter Evans in the suspenseful psychodrama from 2006, "Bug."

We didn't really notice him till his starring role in "Take Shelter" (a hit at Sundance in 2011) and then "Mud" the following year. But he was nominated for an Academy Award for a supporting role in "Revolutionary Road" in 2008. (He also had a part in the under-appreciated "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" a year earlier.) You may know him from recurring appearances on HBO's "Boardwalk Empire."

In "Bug," Shannon explodes on screen in a role he originated on stage in the mid-'90s in this spooky, claustrophobic story from Tracy Letts that takes place almost entirely inside an Oklahoma motel room between Peter and Agnes (Ashley Judd), who is hiding out from her abusive goofball ex, Jerry (Harry Connick Jr.). Poor Peter is on the lam from the VA with some serious PTSD and paranoia, convinced that the government has planted bugs in him -- actual bugs, like aphids.

A lesbian pal of Agnes brought Peter to the motel room and left him there. Agnes, in a weak moment, goes for him. Soon they are lolling around naked and picking at each other like monkeys.

The legendary William Friedkin ("The French Connection," "The Exorcist" -- back to back) flings a lot in your face, setting it up as if it's a standard metaphor for a drug-addict love story. But as Agnes gets sucked into Peter's world the narrative spirals menacingly into a crazed psychedelia. Soon suspense spins into full-blown horror.

Shannon could convince you that he's actually in need of an exorcist. His convulsions are frightening. Just when one of the other actors threatens to compete with his hysteria, Shannon immediately cranks it up another notch -- until you find yourself exclaiming "Holy crap" over and over.

The rest of the cast are perfect foils. Judd is bold and vulnerable, bringing nuance to what could easily have been a cliched role. Connick is a wonderful blend of physical humor and menace, seamlessly completing the bizarre love triangle.

Friedkin's visuals -- bodily cuts and bruises, cellular-level images of blood -- grow exponentially freakish as this spectacle builds to a stunning climax. It's an exhausting 102 minutes.

It's Shannon's show, and the juicy role of a lifetime. Friedkin knows a demon when he spots one.

GRADE: B

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here and here and here and here and here and here. 

BONUS TRACK
The trailer


  

Holy Crap!* "A Late Quartet"

I can't remember if I've ever watched a movie that took itself so seriously yet was virtually indistinguishable from a parody. "A Late Quartet" (2012), boasting a dream cast, plays like a goof on an earnest chamber drama.

A string quartet has been together 25 years, but they are endangered by a health scare -- their elder member, Peter (Cello, Christopher Walken), is exhibiting signs of early Parkinson's disease. This brings out the tension between the others. Robert (Violin II, Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Juliette (Viola, Catherine Keener) have a shaky marriage, not helped by the presence of their first violinist, Daniel (Mark Ivanir, mostly bouncing around since "Schindler's List" 20 years ago), with whom Juliette had a relationship before her marriage.

Robert likes to go jogging (perhaps Hoffman's toughest role ever) with lithe younger woman who likes to stretch a lot in front of him during their breaks from running. You know immediately that she'll somehow find Robert irresistible; maybe it's all the whining he does about how he should be first violin. (Or maybe he secretly confided to her just how puffy poor Keener looks in this role.) The movie uses the younger woman as nothing more than a plot device, immediately discarding her when she has served her purpose.

It's painful to watch Hoffman and Walken give it their all in the service of such horrible writing. The dialogue is beyond histrionic. (Newcomer Yaron Zilberman directs his own story, which he co-wrote with "reality-TV producer" Seth Grossman.) You get the sense that Hoffman and Walken got too deep into this project before it was possible to get out, so they just do their iconic shtick and hope they're not embarrassed in the end. But they're in the hands of a couple of hacks, and the result would make you cringe if it weren't so amusing in a secretly satisfying way. And I shuddered watching the actors valiantly pretend to play their instruments, ill-served by clunky cutaways to their musically skilled doubles.

Keener just doesn't bother to try here. She seems as weary here as she was in "Enough Said." I don't recall seeing Ivanir before, but it was fun to squint a bit and pretend that he was Eddie, the proprietor of the Las Vegas wedding chapel in "The Hangover." We get endless scenes of him lovingly hand-crafting bows. He also gives private lessons to Robert and Juliette's young adult daughter, Alexandra (Imogen Poots), and if you can't predict some naughtiness happening between them, then you've never seen a drama before. Alexandra also takes group lessons from poor old Peter, who is given numerous opportunities to spill pearls of wisdom about music and life.

Much of the early dialogue requires excessive exposition about string quartets and the classical music that they play. Whole swaths of the script seem lifted from Wikipedia entries. At other times, this plays like a collection of dramatic cliches from old made-for-television movies. We get a couple bickering in a cab before one of them orders the cabbie to pull over so he can get out. Poor old Peter is mourning his beloved wife, a soprano who died a year or so ago, and would you believe he sees a vision of her, in full voice, in his drawing room? Various characters watch video clips from a documentary about the quartet to help goose the back story, the epitome of lazy storytelling.

Why isn't this a total loss? First, I fast-forwarded a bunch of times, making it zip by quicker than its 106 minutes. Second, Poots brings genuine energy to the proceedings, providing a refreshing break from the overwrought bleatings of the A-listers; she actually seems like a real person rather than a narrative construct. And finally, the last 20 minutes aren't half bad. You know from the start that the whole film is building toward a final showdown onstage, and Walken finally pulls out of his tailspin and makes it at least plausible.

Most folks won't make it that far, though. This could have been another "Life Is short," but instead, I soldiered on and was rewarded with another "Holy Crap!" 

GRADE: C-minus

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here and here and here and here.

Holy Crap* - Anal Retentive

 

There's an old Cheech & Chong bit from the 1970s about a guy who takes his kid to the doctor because the kid keeps shoving things up his nose. (Turns out, I'm reminded that it trafficked in stereotypical tropes, which hadn't triggered my teenage sensitivities back then, and it ended with the vaudevillian one-liner "Keep the change." We won't link to it.) 

The point is, it being 2021, the stakes for such crude humor are much higher now -- or should we say much lower? Exhibit A is "Butt Boy," in which our anti-hero, Chip Gutchell (writer-director Tyler Cornack) has a surprisingly enjoyable experience undergoing a prostate exam and celebrates his newfound joy by grabbing anything he can find and sticking them up his butt. Yes, that's the plot of a movie in this day and age. And ol' Chip doesn't just round up the usual suspects to indulge in anal gratification. In fact, you'd be quite surprised at what he can fit up there -- not just the TV remote but also small dogs and children.

If you were to bail out right there, I wouldn't blame you. I might have been better off diving for the remote after all of that is revealed in the first 10 minutes. I could have turned it off and filed a succinct essay under the Life Is Short umbrella. And yet, I persisted. Not that I'm proud.

So, the movie jumps ahead nine years, and Chip is still stuck in a loveless marriage, and he's in Alcoholics Anonymous, where he gets recruited to serve as a sponsor to a hard-drinking police detective, Russel (a ham-chewing Tyler Rice), who pines for an ex and seems to harbor a dark secret or two of his own. The two men find their anonymous world spill out into the open when Russel is called in to investigate the disappearance of Chip's co-worker's son during take-your-kid-to-work day at the office. (It was a mistake, during a game of hide-and-seek, to hide under Chip's desk. You think you've had to deal with anal-retentive co-workers? Wait till you meet Chip!)

This whole thing is not only ridiculous but fairly disgusting. (The trail of the investigation will lead -- literally -- up Chip's ass.) So why not turn it off and brand it with an F? Because there's almost something admirable to Cornack's devotion to the absurd premise. 

It's almost as if Cornack and co-writer Ryan Koch were dying for the opportunity to make their own detective movie -- maybe they were fans of the noir classics of Phillip Marlowe or old westerns -- and some movie executive, just to be rid of these pests, concocted the stupidest plot device they could think of just to toy with them. In my imagined scenario, Cornack and Koch take that dare and they say, "A movie where the bad guy hides all the victims and evidence up his butt? I'll see your crazy idea and raise you this otherwise conventional script starring a love-starved husband and a hard-drinking detective with some secret scores to settle!"

And they did it. Aside from that inane premise which permeates the entire film, "Butt Boy" is a conventional, borderline cliched whodunnit. Replace a man's anal cavity as the stash house with, say, an old barn in the woods, and cast Ryan Gosling in the role of the brooding, boozing cop, and you might have a mainstream hit on your hands. 

To me, that's the true takeaway from this exercise. Two filmmakers had a story to tell, and they knocked out a script, raised some financing, rounded up a cast of pretty good actors, and shot it and edited it. They had a vision, and they realized it. Their vision was an incredibly stupid one, but yet ... 

They persisted. They accomplished something, rather than just sit around feeling sorry for themselves with their thumbs up their ass.

GRADE for 'BUTT BOY':  C-minus

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.

Holy Crap: 'The 11th Green'

Be afraid. Be very afraid. The truth is out there. And "The 11th Green" is way out there.

Occasional writer-director Christopher Munch digs deep into the nation's E.T. diaries and produces this cheap, bizarre and underwhelming mash-up of history and drama. Campbell Scott, rumpled up a bit to make him look a little older than his 58 years, plays Jeremy Rudd, called from his gloomy East Coast drudge work anchoring a left-wing newscast to the sunny climes of California to settle the affairs of his father, who had been neck-deep in the government's clandestine flying-saucer program.

Let's cut to the chase: One scene involves Barack Obama (never so named and played by Leith Burke) chilling in a time warp (ca. 1967) with Dwight Eisenhower (George Gerdes) and some enlightened alien dude swathed in stereotypical loose robes and groomed in Jesus chic. Just, you know, hanging in the den trying to figure out why we can't all get along.

Agnes Bruckner, 20 years Scott's junior, shows up as the father's former assistant and rocks the flowery name Laurie Larkspur. Of course, Laurie's attracted to Jeremy -- though is she part of the conspiracy and up to something? Good question.

Munch delves into arcane history dating back to Roswell in the late '40s, even the suspicious suicide of James Forrestal, the former Navy Secretary under Truman. But this is all so slapped together, and Munch can barely get his actors to look like they care. The production values and special effects reflect a scrawny B-movie budget. And just when you think this might get interesting, we get over-written dialogue or a slug to the jaw that will make you think this is a lost product of the '40s gumshoe era. Or something.

GRADE: C

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.

 

Holy Crap* - Bang the Drum All Day

 

THE TIN DRUM (1979) (B-minus) - Where to begin with this Nazi-era tale of a boy who constantly bangs on his toy drum, can shatter glass with his shrieks and has willed himself to never grow taller over the movie's course of two decades. It has one foot in the child-horror films of the 1970s and the other in the surreal mind-fucks from the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Guy Maddin. 

  

The 2-hour 42-minute epic from Volker Schloendorf, which was a Cannes favorite in 1979, centers around young Oskar, who lives with his parents in the Free City of Danzig, between Germany and Poland, and who is gifted with a child's toy drum at age 3. Oskar does not want to physically grow up, so he flings himself down the cellar stairs, which, in miraculous movie terms, stunts his growth forever. (The actor playing Oskar, David Bennent, was about 12 at the time of filming and was small for his age, though he does not track as a 3-year-old, but more like 6 or 7.)

If you can get over that major distraction, then you can hang on for the Third Reich horrors and black humor that propels this inspired narrative. The opening scene involves the conception of Oskar's mother, Agnes, when his grandmother, out harvesting potatoes in a field, stashes a Polish petty criminal under her billowing skirts to hide him from the pursuit of a pair of bumbling soldiers. It is from that improbable act of nature that all else flows.

The plot swerves all over the place. Oskar will age but not grow, so we will see him at age 16 seducing the maid that his father hired after Oskar's mother dies. Bennent was definitely placed in some awkward situations for a prepubescent actor, and that might bother some viewers. At one point Oskar catches his father screwing the maid and physically blocks his dad from pulling out before ejaculating inside her. Eventually, the child actor will be face first in the bush of a naked woman (whose husband will be accused of abusing Hitler Youth boys).

Oskar also will befriend the little people of the traveling circus, eventually showing off his glass-shattering abilities for German troops. Polish resistance forces make a valiant stand to defend a post office. The sweep of history carries through to the end of World War II, and thus a full reckoning between the Germans and Poles. All of it is seen through the wide eyes of that little boy. 

Some of the performances are key to grounding this in somewhat of a believable cinematic production. Angela Winkler is heart-breaking as Oskar's mother, who suffers from an abusive husband and longs to be with her cousin, Jan, who could be Oskar's biological father. And Katharina Thalbach has a powerful presence as Maria, the young maid who is forced to marry Oskar's father.

I will say that I might have rolled my eyes a few times and laughed in the wrong places, but I was never bored. If you swallow the central conceit and rein in your expectations, you might agree that Schloendorf created a howling anti-war tract. Oskar's refusal to grow up is rooted in his observation of the cruelty carried out by adults, in both war and domestic relations. He doesn't want to be a part of the world as it is, so he creates his own reality. He pounds away on his drum -- really a series of them, because he tends to wear them out -- to drown out the horrors around him. That's one way of coping under an autocratic rule. If you can't shriek, what can you do?

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here. 

BONUS TRACK

Our (unrelated) title track, which a local radio rascal in Chicago used to spin as his outro at the end of Friday's show (apparently it was done in L.A. too). It's an infectious improbable '80s hit from Todd Rundgren:

Holy Crap!* Fine Young Cannibals

 

BONES AND ALL (D) - Luca Guadagnino has been in a downward spiral for years now, and let's hope he has finally hit rock bottom. The man who once brought us "I Am Love" and "A Bigger Splash" -- two of the finest films of the 21st century -- has been wallowing in self-indulgent melodrama for years now.

His fascination with Timothee Chalamet -- the pouty, pretty star of the lumbering "Call Me By Your Name" -- has led him down a disastrous road. And here we have a road movie -- at least a weak attempt at one -- that is also a mess from start to finish. Hey, how about an earnest drama about two young adults coming to terms with their shared affliction -- cannibalism. 

The drama that unfolds is, too often, downright laughable -- as in accidentally funny and just weird overall. The gore -- the chomping of flesh -- is rampant. It is simply unpleasant to sit through.

Chalamet co-stars as moody Lee, a 130-pound bad-ass, who is drawn to 18-year-old Maren (Taylor Russell), who has newly set out on her own and is discovering her full powers as a cannibal. She recently learned -- from a creepy old stranger (Mark Rylance in "Cape Fear" De Niro territory) with a stereotypical southern accent -- that "eaters" can smell each other, and thus sustain some sort of noble underground railroad of freaks who crave human flesh. These outcasts literally sniff the air, as if they are floating cartoon animals hot on the scent of a freshly baked pie.

Chalamet mumbles a lot and clenches his jaw to show that he's conveying emotions. He seems to be channeling Nicolas Cage's over-the-top character in "Valley Girl" -- but as if it were being parodied, like in "Walk Hard." Russell seems talented but completely adrift in an under-defined role. I felt bad for Russell having to interact with her co-stars. She had to cuddle up with Chalamet's bony physique, and the two have zero chemistry together.  And she not only endures leers and slurs from Rylance's character, but he also lies on top of her at one point, literally drooling. Why would anyone think to put a young actress through that? There certainly is little payoff to the scenes in this unfortunate movie.

I felt bad for Mark Rylance, too. There is no salvaging his spooky hick stalker. Rylance is considered, at least in his IMDb intro, "the greatest stage actor of his generation." (I'd never seen one of his movies before. Or his stage plays, for that matter.) Here he is reduced to a stereotypical menacing simpleton.

So, as far as the lead performances go -- whether it was their fault or not -- this film has three strikes against it. That doesn't even count the wretched writing, and just the overall cravenness of the idea in the first place.

"Bones and All" fails at every attempt at allegory it might have been trying to make:  addiction; otherness; coming out; the struggles of adolescence; child abuse; parental abandonment; stalking. Any serious analysis along those lines fails as a fool's errand. Maren seeks solace in a tape recording made by her father, and those snippets start out as a clever narrative device, but the drip-drip of these mundane musings become irritating by the second half of the film.

It all reaches a silly climax.  As Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's turgid soundtrack bleats on, Chalamet utters some final lines to his co-star that are as predictable as they are unintentionally funny. From beginning to end, this is an ill-advised dud.

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.

Holy Crap!* - Brian DePalma's "Passion"

Where do we begin with Brian DePalma's cheap, hackneyed attempt to interpret a French thriller while still clinging to frayed threads that once connected him to Hitchcock.

The writing is execrable. The acting is laughable. The attempts at intrigue and tension fall flat. The plot often makes no sense. The camera work is uninspired. The colors are washed out. This is a Hitchcock effort on an Ed Wood budget.

Rachel McAdams is supposed to be a high-powered ad exec in, for some reason, Germany apparently (Berlin? But where everyone speaks English) who is scheming to get back to the big time in New York by stealing the idea of an underling played by a painfully out-of-her-depth Noomi Rapace ("The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"). McAdams is also helping her sleazy boyfriend siphon money from the agency. The boyfriend, Dirk, is played by the wooden, grimacing Paul Anderson, whose take on the villain here is about as convincing as that found in a silent film. Only Karoline Herfurth, as the stereotypical pining lesbian, escapes with her dignity intact.

At least we now know that McAdams can't carry a film. And could it be the language barrier or is Rapace just a bad actress?

It often reminded me of the old "Second City TV" sketch "Bad Acting in Hollywood." Some segue-ways will make you scratch your head. The lip-stick lesbian scenes will make you snicker.  The multiple "it was just a dream" tricks will have you rolling your eyes. DePalma's tiresome obsession with shoes and lipstick might creep you out.

This wanna-be thriller runs out of gas about two-thirds of the way through, as it disintegrates into a dull police procedural, in which folks start speaking German. To keep a semblance of a plot alive, DePalma (making "Dressed to Kill" seem like it was released centuries ago) tosses in a grab-bag of plot twists willy-nilly, desperate to entertain us.

But suffering through this low-budget laugher, you'll be hard-pressed to discern any passion either in the movie or the production.

GRADE: D

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here and here and here.

Holy Crap*: "Shame"

This 1968 apocalyptic piece from Ingmar Bergman is about as dark a slice of life as you can get.

This relentlessly bleak drama stars Liv Ulmann and Max von Sydow as a couple suffering through the indignities of a rebel war descending on their buccolic island. Eva and Jan are not the happiest couple, but they have a chemistry between them as they work their farm, off the beaten path. Jan is weak and melancholic; Eva, apparently younger, wants a child.

One day, a civil war literally descends on their doorstep. They try to escape in their rickety station wagon, to no avail. There is no escaping war; that's the message Bergman is bashing us over the head with.

Bergman shoots in verite black-and-white, as if he is re-enacting newsreels from World War II. The onslaught never lets up. The apocalypse is coming, he suggests, and it doesn't care who or what gets in its way.

Life is a humorless slog and random fate decides whether you die young or are cursed to ride it out till the end. Harrowing and fascinating.

GRADE:  B+

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.

BONUS TRACK
The trailer pretty much says it all:


  

Holy Crap!* "White God"

A revenge flick to end all revenge flicks, this mega genre mashup is a spectacle in every sense of the word. Yet it is also an old-fashioned heartbreaking tale of a girl and her dog, separated but hopeful of one day reuniting.

Her parents divorced, pouty adolescent Lili (Zsofia Psotta) gets dumped in the care of her dad while her mom bounds off to Australia for a three-month adventure. After a neighbor calls Animal Services on Lili's dog, Dad, like most fathers from rural Montana or behind the Iron Curtain, ditches the dog on the street, to the horror of Lili.

Thus begins the adventure of Hagen the dog, who will cycle through familiar horrors out on his own, including, predictably, a dog-fighting ring. The scenes of Hagen alternate with scenes of Lili, whose main gigs are playing trumpet in the school band and navigating the pitfalls of growing up. As Hagen is turned into a killing machine, Lili is hardened, too, at the hands of her bitter father and overbearing music teacher.

Hungarian director Kornel Mundruczo exhibits masterful control of a wild story (sometimes involving the choreography of more than a hundred dogs at a time), propelling the narrative forward while gobbling up and spitting out ideas from the history of movies. These are the predecessors that his spectacle brought to mind:

"Benji." "Planet of the Apes." "Rocky." "Rambo." "Amores Perros." "Starsky & Hutch." "101 Dalmatians." "Mad Max." "I Am Legend." "My So-Called Life." "Whiplash." "Ratatouille." "Cinderella." "The Great Escape." "The Wizard of Oz." "The Terminator." "West Side Story." "Lassie." "The Birds."

It's a swirling homage to nearly every genre you can imagine. As Mundruczo spins more and more plates, it's amazing that not one falls and shatters.

Psotta is a heart-tugger, swooning after an older boy, and finding tender notes from her trumpet. Hagen (played by a pair of mixed-breeds) displays incredible acting chops. In his early days on the streets he befriends a smaller Jack Russell like the one from "The Artist," and they bound about like buddy cops or mischievous hoodlums. When Hagen descends into the horrors of the dog-fighting world, it's really too much to take as a viewer. About a half hour into the film I considered bailing out (I couldn't fast-forward like I did with "Amores Perros"); but once the film emerges from that maelstrom, it rockets forward, challenging you to keep up.

Suddenly it's a revenge allegory, as Hagen meets up with a growing pack of wild dogs. There is a grand escape from a pound. Bad guys pay for their sins. Tension builds and blood spills, and all the while we hold out hope that Lili and Hagen will be reunited. Except that we're afraid he'll tear her (or her father) to shreds.

When they finally do meet up, it's magic -- with a touch of magical realism.With a spell-binding final shot that will freeze you in your seat.

At the end, my initial fears of regretting these two hours were an ancient memory, replaced by joy and wonder. What has Mundruczo pulled off here? A measured delirium. It is, in turns, funny, and touching, and odd, and disturbing. It's nearly impossible to convey in words how this improbable story comes together like a simple story and an epic saga.

GRADE: A-minus

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here and here and here and here and here. 

Holy Crap!* And Don't Call Me Shirley

 

It was with trepidation that I returned to the "Naked Gun" universe, which I first wallowed in when the Leslie Nielsen TV spoof "Police Squad" had an improbable, silly run of a mere six episodes on ABC in 1982.

 

The comedy was beyond sophomoric but the silly wordplay had a charm coming out of the mouth of Nielsen, who until then had been a journeyman serious actor. This was the brainchild of the Zucker brothers (Jerry and David) and Jim Abrahams, who started the mayhem with 1980s "Airplane!" (the source of our headline reference). Typical dialogue, after a female is apprehended, has the police captain ordering two officers to "take her away and book 'er." Then Nielsen's Frank Drebin introduces himself to the pair of officers: "Sgt. Takeraway. [Shakes hands.] Sgt. Booker." And scene. 

That's hilarious when you are a teenager with few defenses. Nielsen took the franchise to the big screen in three movies that suffered from debilitating diminishing returns. I'm pretty sure I saw only the first one -- "Nice beaver!" -- but had bailed out by the third, which was more than 30 years ago.

 

For no apparent reason, Andy Samberg's Lonely Island pal, Akiva Schaffer, and two co-writers dusted off the franchise and thought they could replicate it. Now starring Liam Neeson, as Frank Drebin Jr., the childish toilet humor falls flat on the screen. It is painful to watch. Hmm. Have I matured? Is this a shtick that just can't be replicated without Abrahams and the Zuckers? (Was it never funny? Nah, can't be.) There's actually an attempted joke in which a character confuses the word "manslaughter" with "man's laughter" -- whoa, Nelly, what a yuk! I got over that pun by fifth grade.

The execution is jaw-droppingly bad. It's not just the juvenile script that flops. Neeson is a dud playing against type as a would-be comedian. He is surrounded by painfully unfunny folks, like Pamela Anderson (standing in for Priscilla Presley and her stuffed beaver), Danny Houston and Paul Walter Hauser. Only Weird Al Yankovic manages a few laughs in an extended cameo (and the final word after the credits.) 

But every scene is a slog, and you can hear the jokes plummeting to the floor and landing like wet bags of sand. Or like turkeys dropped from a helicopter. There are 12 producers credited, including Seth MacFarlane, which might explain some of this mess. As well as the obsession with fart jokes and exploding diarrhea. Would you believe they trot out the ol' gag about scrolling through hours of lapel-camera video showing Drebin engaging in a parade of embarrassing activities? And they beat gags deep into the ground. Cops like coffee? Let's try 26 sight-gags about Drebin carrying or being handed a coffee cup. One visual involves Drebin being spied on as he hangs out with Anderson's femme fatale, and the first image is amusing -- but then the scene goes on for a full minute, repeating the same joke. Say what you will about Abraham-Zucker, but at least they had studied their Marx Brothers.

The violence is cartoonish but disturbing nonetheless; Drebin Jr. rips a man's arms off and then beats him with them. Har-dee-har. The plot is thin, even for something this ridiculous. I could go on, but ugh. It was pointless to bring this franchise back; it's just as pointless for me to go on.

GRADE for "The Naked Gun": D

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.

Holy Crap*: She's Ovine

There is certainly no shortage of horror films these days, so a smart slow burn like this absurd drama stands out. There's nothing like the unforgiving winter Icelandic landscape to ratchet up the tension.

Noomi Rapace, the original girl with the dragon tattoo, is perfectly cast as the taciturn farming wife who embraces a ewe's newborn that turns out to be part-human and part-sheep. Maria and her husband Ingvar (Hilmir Snaer Gudnason) not only embrace the baby but take it into their home and nurture it, neither one of them batting an eye at the absurdity of the miracle birth. 

The couple take everything in stride, to the consternation of Ingvar's visiting brother Petur (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson) and to the maternal vitriol of the mama who birthed the little freak with a human body and an ovine head, and with one hand and one hoof. Maria will be the one to take care of that battle of the moms, and she'll also have to convince Petur not to overreact to the situation.

Writer-director Valdimar Johannsson (working with novelist/poet/songwriter Sjon) embeds this production with a simmering foreboding, peppering the narrative with hints of backstory. Apparently Maria and Petur have a bit of history, though it's not clear if Ingvar knows about that. And Johannsson drops two pretty clear hints about why the couple are childless and despondent. 

Johannsson times this all with Swiss precision, pretty much turning a new chapter every 20 minutes (that's how long it takes for the birth scene to occur). He ratchets up the horror incrementally and without resort to the common tropes of creaking doors or sudden shocks. He knows that the viewer will understand that the premise itself is untenable and simply cannot end in a pleasant manner.

Despite the preposterous premise played for deadpan amusement, this troupe somehow wins us over into caring about the survival of this improbable family unit. And while the narrative device of the grieving young couple deserves a soft ban, "Lamb" is smart and visually compelling enough to rise above B-movie material.

Only a swerve into the realm of fantasy during a startling deus ex machina ending detracts from what otherwise is an impressively assured filmmaking debut. Rapace and her co-stars go all-in to ensure that this story can be told with a straight face. And, when you think about it, just about any ending would be at least somewhat unsatisfying. Custody battles -- even those not involving a girl with a sheep's head -- usually are quite messy.

GRADE for "LAMB": A-minus

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.

BONUS TRACK

The perfect trailer:

 And our title track, from the Easybeats:

Holy Crap!* Fiends With Benefits

 

NO HARD FEELINGS (D+) - This one starts out with a scene in which the lead character's car is getting repossessed because there is a tax lien on the house she inherited from her mother. I'm an attorney but not a tax/bankruptcy attorney, but I can't imagine a universe where someone's car would get grabbed under those circumstances. 

You see that out of the gate and you say, OK, it's going to be that kind of a movie. And it is. It is one long idiot plot, one contrivance after another. Jennifer Lawrence plays a down-on-her-luck 30-something who -- needing a replacement car -- happens to struggle across a classified ad from parents offering up a car (what a coincidence!) for a woman who will bust their son's cherry. Yep, it's that kind of movie. (It's also the kind of movie where the main character has to rollerblade everywhere and doesn't think to take the rollerblades off when she has to climb stairs -- because, then where would the comedy be without such physical humor from a glamorous actress.)

But wait, there's more. Not only does is this transaction arranged, but would you believe that Jennifer Lawrence can't close the deal with the nerd she has been assigned to? Yes, that Jennifer Lawrence, the highly attractive and charming one. In 2023, neither she nor the dweeb can manage to at least round third base, because ... well, take our word for it, they just can't bring themselves to sully themselves in such a cheap way. In 2023.

Lawrence is Maddie, one of those noble locals scraping by among rich seasonal snobs, this time in Montauk, N.J. She has a couple of fun scenes with her bitter ex, Gary (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who happens to be the tow-truck driver who snatches her car at the beginning of the movie. They have a nice exchange when she tries to sweet talk him about how much she misses him, until a wild Italian in his underwear strolls out of her house, belying her claims. Natalie Morales has little to latch onto in the script as Maddie's best friend.

Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti are amusing for their first couple of scenes as the suffocating and super-sensitive helicopter parents who have babied their son into a ball of neurotic virginity. (Their incredulity at Maddie's claim to be in her early 20s elicits a chuckle or two.) Andrew Barth Feldman is meek Percy (that name reminds you that it's that kind of movie), a dog-shelter worker who insists on needing to be in love in order to make love. Sure thing, Perce.

As this ridiculous story grinds on (for more than 100 minutes), you hate yourself more and more for enduring it and indulging the fledgling director, Gene Stupnitsky, and his co-writer, John Phillips (who has one other movie on his resume). Sitcom predicaments abound, and the shtick grows tiresome. You might be wondering if there's any actual sex in the movie or any kind of saucy content. I can save you some time. Skip to around the 35-minute mark if you want to see Lawrence fighting naked on a beach. For better or worse it's a highlight, or at least a pleasant diversion.

Whether that's worth a fast-forward on Netflix is a choice. Some intellectual workouts will make your brain hurt. "No Hard Feelings" (Get it? "Hard"!) will have your brain craving some exercise.

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.

Holy Crap!* A.M. 880

More road-trip radio ...

KHAC-AM (880) emits a powerful signal from Tse Bonito, N.M., along the state border with Arizona, across from Window Rock, Ariz., along Route 264 in Navajo territory. It was our latest road-trip discovery on the AM dial, as we returned from an arbitration hearing in Farmington up in the Four Corners down Highway 550.

And oh, my god, the station was pumping out some fascinating Christian music. No commercials, no voiceovers, a product, perhaps, of Moody Bible Radio. We stopped on 880 when we heard some wicked guitar distortion that would have made Neil Young and Crazy Horse blanch. Like Scott Biram on Adderall. No clue who the artist is or what the song was called. It sounded like it was coming from another universe. The sound quality was pretty awful. An internet search for a playlist proved fruitless.

That segued into a lovely song with much friendlier guitar picking (with slight echoes of Mark Knopfler's '80s soundtracks), from Anthony Quails, "Acres of Faith":



We were the 65th person to view that one on YouTube. Good luck, Tony.

There was power pop from a band called Foreverlin, sort of a neutered Buffalo Tom or a defeated U2, with the generic "You Remain":



As we approached Cuba, mesmerized by the striated rock formations, a dreamy song played. Shazam captured it and identified it as "New" by Headman, but now that we've traced it down online, that doesn't seem right. Well, anyway, here is the title track on the Headman EP (almost certainly not Christian techno) that also features "New," which we couldn't find, "Running Into Time." (First, the rocks.)

Did we have a religious experience during the 5 o'clock hour? Is there any way we could find that first song, the sonic guitar blast? Was that an illusion? A bleed from a nearby station?

Is there anybody out there?

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. This is our first foray into radio. Check out previous entries here.
 

Holy Crap: "Perfect Ending"

It's a soft-core porn film! It's a soap opera! It's the worst of both genres!

I can't remember the last time I saw a movie as ardently, urgently bad as "Perfect Ending," an embarrassing attempt at uplifting gay-power cinema. It is poorly acted, written with a computer program that strings together cliches, and it's shot as if by a toddler who had been handed an iPhone. It's as if 1950s sitcom actors were interpreting a '60s soap opera, all under the direction of an early '80s Cinemax hack. It's a riot.

Barbara Niven -- whose resume includes such titles as "Psycho Cop Returns," "Depraved," "Humanoids of the Deep," "Breast Men" and "Love Boat: The Next Wave" -- stars here as middle-aged Rebecca Westridge, a rich, hard-drinking, sexually deprived suburban housewife.  Rebecca's sassy lesbian pals get her to admit that she's never had an orgasm, and one of them proposes that she hire a female prostitute.  And the friend conveniently has a cousin who runs the agency and just happens to be played by Morgan Fairchild.  If the opening scenes featuring John Heard -- as the boorish husband who is such a repulsive cretin that he tells ethnic jokes! -- didn't place this squarely in 1982, then the appearance of the star of "Flamingo Road" calibrated the time machine with Swiss precision.

Oh, but Rebecca can't possibly sleep with a woman! She's straight, and married. But, alas, she relents and makes an appointment. And of course, just like when anyone hires a prostitute, a stunningly beautiful olive-skinned full-lipped model/artist half her age shows up at the door. But, no! Rebecca Westridge can't go through with it. She's too shy. It's wrong! And she sends Paris away. Oh, but this feline seductress will be back. But, no! Rebecca must resist again -- and run toward the door, dropping her purse as she fumbles with the knob, as if being pursued by Lon Chaney. This dangerous dance goes on for about an hour before Paris finally gets a clear shot at popping Rebecca's cherry.

Niven, who is no B-movie virgin, does a convincing post-coital purr. It is the only passable feat of acting in the entire film. The three actors playing her concerned grown children struggle to screw up concern over their parents' marriage and can't even convincingly pretend to worry about mom missing dinner -- she never misses dinner!, they marvel, Brady-style.

All of this is preciously presented by Nicole Conn, who's been allowed to produce these soft-focus melodramas sparingly over the past two decades.  Conn's amateurish script suffers further from her penchant for extreme pointless close-ups and the distracting habit of letting a scene's images linger while starting the dialogue from the next scene. It's confusing, not artistic.

For the piece de resistance, Conn dives full-on into movie-of-the-week mush by following up the Big O with the Big C. A character tragically gets a cancer diagnosis, but conveniently, it's the make-believe kind that doesn't involve any discernible suffering or any reduction in breast perkiness. Actors get to "play sad."  Conn, ever the fauxteur, gets to shoot a funeral as if it's a bar mitzvah.

And everyone gets to learn a valuable lesson about love, tolerance and oral sex. Heartwarming.

GRADE: F

Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films that cut a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out a previous entry here.

Holy Crap!* What in ... "Tarnation"

 

We rewatched "Tarnation," a 2004 primal scream of an autobiography from Jonathan Caouette chronicling his abusive childhood and his schizophrenic mother. This damaged man, around 30 at the time of the movie's release, was an inveterate video diarist, starting as a child. His home performance, as an adolescent, of a woman tortured by domestic abuse would be the stuff of legend if Caouette had stayed on track as a performer.

But it's the scenes with his mother, Renee, that are the most compelling and disturbing. The film overall features machine-gun editing and early-MTV flourishes and quick cuts, but the filmmaker knows when to pause and let a scene play out. He trains the camera on his mom multiple times, during various schizophrenic breakdowns and refuses to cut away. The effect is lurid but also informative. The pain behind her eyes is heartbreaking.

Caouette also spends time with Renee's parents, Adolph and Rosemary, who raised him. That's a generous term. At least they didn't lobotomize him, like they did to the young-adult Renee, crippling her for life. Caouette also tracks down his birth father, who visits both him and Renee for a dreadfully uncomfortable scene.

Throughout, Caouette is struggling to keep his own relationship together, blessed with a patient partner. But evil lurks around every corner, especially as his grandparents age and emerge as horror-movie figures.

The narrative sometimes fractures, as if to mirror his or Renee's thoughts and perspectives. The pace is frenetic, with the screen sometimes splitting and multiplying in psychedelic fashion. Connecting it all is that Jonathan character, a born performer but doomed by a lack of discipline and focus. If he had come of age 20 years later, he would be a Tik-Tok phenomenon, with no need to polish his hits and streamline them into a coherent feature film.

Bonus points for the eclectic soundtrack, dropping in samples from Bob Dylan and Marianne Faithful, as well as more recent deep cuts from Magnetic Fields. It reportedly cost Caouette only a few thousand dollars to put his collage together but a few hundred thousand dollars to secure the soundtrack.

GRADE: A-minus

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.

BONUS TRACKS

One classic tune is "After Loving You" by Jean Wells:

 And Lisa Germano's contribution is "Reptile":

Holy Crap!* I'll Replace You With Machines

A musical interlude:

What better place to see noisemakers Melt-Banana than at the quirk-hole that is Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, N.M. The band thrashed the twee venue on Election Eve with a sonic barrage that was enhanced by computer loops providing bass and drums and other skronks.

The surviving members (did the others go deaf?) Yako Onuki (vocals) and Ichiro Agata (guitar) sustained their violent speed-punk for about an hour, which was about as much as the modest crowd could handle. Even the moshers couldn't mosh fast enough to the blitz.

Onuki had a hand-held device that looked like a smart phone with a screen that had colorful circles on it (pink, blue, yellow, green), which she apparently used to control the music samples that backed her and Agata. She waved it around like a conductor's baton, and it seemed at times as if she was wielding it like she were manipulating a theremin. Hard to say.

Agata had his own assemblage of controls for tapes/loops at his feet. At one point he made his guitar sound like a gothic pipe organ. Most of the time it just sounded like a guitar turned up to 11.

Here's a good sense of the band's technique (in 2017 in, of all places, Birmingham, Alabama):

Midway through the show Melt-Banana offered a familiar concert staple -- I had heard them do it at Lounge Ax in Chicago in the mid-1990s, when they were a full co-ed band.  They offered up incredibly short bursts of songs, some lasting only a few seconds, each one followed by a quaint, perfunctory "Thank you. Our next song ..." and then launching into the next track. It was a technique that made the Minutemen seem like Yes by comparison. With her shrieks and wails throughout the night, Onuki could make Yoko Ono sound like Helen Reddy.

When she announced that they would play a cover song, I don't think anyone was prepared for the sonic assault on Devo's "Uncontrollable Urge":

There was something both comforting and exhilarating about watching these two old pals -- looking like a middle-age soccer mom and her kid brother -- body-slam a crowd for an hour.

Here is a half hour interview/concert (with a full band in 2010) from, of all places, Alabama Public Television:

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films (and now at least one concert), cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.

BONUS TRACK

Our title track, and palate-cleanser, courtesy of Guided by Voices:

Holy Crap*: 'Waves'

What if "Terms of Endearment" were a horror movie? Trey Edward Shults takes his big splash of a family drama, 2016's "Krisha," and mixes it with the dread of his water-treading last film "It Comes at Night" and he comes out with a grand stab at a masterpiece.

Shults dazzles with images and stabs at the gut emotionally with this tale of a brother and sister whose teenage lives take divergent paths as they explore romantic relationships and deal with underlying family drama. The intensity of it all can be literally breathtaking.

Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr. from last year's "Luce") is a star wrestler who is pushed to his physical limits by his demanding father, Ronald (TV star Sterling K. Brown), to the point where Tyler jeopardizes his physical well-being to succeed. A scene in which Tyler knowingly goes to the mat with a serious shoulder injury can make you jump out of your seat with frightful apprehension. Meantime, Tyler navigates a shaky romance with Alexis (Alexa Demie). As Tyler pops his dad's pain pills, he loses his grip on his senior-year responsibilities and begins to unravel.

Shults, working again with cinematographer Drew Daniels, shows great command over his surroundings and pumps up the adrenaline to alternately produce joy or pain. He plays with focus to drift into a scene or a mood. (Although he's a little too infatuated with whirling 360 shots. And most of his demerits stem from the bad habit of relying on text messages -- in small fonts -- to convey critical plot information.) A shot of Tyler and Alexis dancing together on the beach -- her neon orange fingernails splashed against his peroxided short-cropped hair -- is mesmerizing.

A bristling soundtrack -- pop and rap trading off with unnerving ambient music from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross -- perfectly captures the primal way in which teenagers bond and identify with songs. The music is pervasive but critical to the development of the story.

With a slow, onerous fade to black at the halfway mark, Tyler steps aside for his younger sister Emily (Taylor Russell), for a character study that is much more thoughtful and tender as she now enters her senior year. The testosterone feuds between Tyler and their father -- which has left the family scarred -- give way to pauses and introspection. Emily embarks on her own relationship (with a nerdy Lucas Hedges from "Manchester by the Sea"), warily but with an open mind and heart.

Recriminations are unavoidable in this second half. Tears are shed. Lots of them. I imagine that the raw display of The Feels is on a par with Brown's weepy series "This Is Us." And while there probably is at least one too many crying jags, the effusive emotion on display feels earned and effective.

If you buy into this nonstop gut-punch of a movie, you will be wrung out in the end. It's a sharp slap in the face from an earnest filmmaker who cares about your feelings but doesn't handle them very carefully. Buckle up for the ride.

GRADE: A-minus

* -- Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.

BONUS TRACKS
Kendrick Lamar's "Backseat Freestyle" presages a breakdown by Tyler:



Emily blisses out to "Bluish" by Animal Collective:


 

Holy Crap! "The Lure"

A couple of mermaids slink out of the sea to dry land in order to fulfill their dreams of being lounge singers in what looks like 1980s Poland.

Newcomer Agnieszka Smoczynska unleashes a trippy fever dream, a nostalgic horror musical with a generous amount of young female flesh, albeit mostly "smooth down there." The director creates a claustrophobic atmosphere centered around a seedy nightclub run by an old sleazeball.

In the opening scene, the mermaid girls peer from the sea uttering incantations, vowing to be as normal as possible -- which means ditching those fins, singing for a living and refraining from eating men. They mostly succeed. They grow legs on dry land, if not a complete set of anatomical parts. They flash fangs whenever they get too close to a juicy neck.

Silver (Marta Mazurek) is the randier of the two. She has quite the mischievous look in her eye, and she has her eye on the cute, shaggy-haired Leif Garrett type, Mietek (Jakub Gierszal), who plays bass in the house band. Silver so aches to partake in pure intimacy that she seeks out a bizarre bottom-half body transfer with another woman, which would make her whole.

Golden (Michalina Olszanska) is more wholesome (more of a gill-next-door type), with a Neve Campbell gleam in her eye. Her hunger for men is more of the literal type. Neither gal is shy. They frequently lounge around topless or completely naked, albeit with their genitals erased. The club owner and others don't bother to be discreet about ogling them. Some of them do pay a price, including one guy who gets a thumb bitten off.

Oddly, it is actually an old-fashioned romantic story being told here by Smoczynska. What lengths will we go for love? Or, in Golden's case, what will we sacrifice to achieve our dreams.

But "The Lure" is anything but ordinary. When the girls first appear onstage, they temporarily sprout their fins and are frolicking coquettishly in a giant replica of a champagne glass. As they shadow the lead singer with their backing vocals, they shimmy and smile like old pros. (The original title, "Corki Dancingu," translates to "The Daughter of a Dance.")

The music is pure cheese. The horror touches recall "Dark Shadows." The color palette is seductive. Mazurek and Olszanska are a dynamic duo. Smoczynska has a keen eye for detail and for period kitsch. This comes off like a screwball comedy, but it demands, improbably, to be taken seriously.

GRADE: B

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

BONUS TRACK
An early scene introduces the house band doing their version of the Donna Summer hit, "I Feel Love." Here's the original:

Here's a link to a sample of the gals in their debut at the club. The look on Golden's face (she's on the right) is priceless.

Holy Crap!* Too Little, "Too Late"

A guy named Dennis Hauck must have thought he was pretty hot shit when he scored John Hawkes to play  a smart-alecky private dick (yes, they actually make that lame dick joke in this movie) for the 2015 release "Too Late."  Thankfully, Hauck hasn't made a movie since. Do they ban directors who bomb with their debut film?

Painfully exploitative of women, this Tarantino knock-off features tough-talking guys and dames (most of the latter strippers) tripping over Hauck's "clever" dialogue. Not only are women repeatedly mocked for their looks, but most of them find the homely Hawkes irresistible. (They especially swoon when he picks up a guitar and croons his own Kristoffersonian composition.) I mean, there are multiple scenes of women walking around without pants -- in a movie where the go-to camera technique is long camera shots that conveniently follow the characters from behind. One actress, Vail Bloom (below), who plays Janet, a miserable kept woman of aging mobster Gordy Lyons (Robert Forster), does a good 10 minutes bare-assed (including a tracking shot down a loooong hallway). Your move, Julianne Moore!

The women are lovely, of course, and most of them bring serious acting chops to this chipped beef. Dichen Lachman (below) flaunts her hard body (especially, of course, the bottom half) and goes toe-to-toe with Hawkes, who dares to mock her exotic looks. Talk about noses, pal.

Hauck also lets his directorial quirks get in the way of a bad story. (Hawkes is hunting a stripper to whom he might have a special connection.) He jumbles the narrative so much that you probably won't care how to put the puzzle back together. (Really, all the movies he steals from, like "Memento," are far superior in every way.) He uses ambient music so much that it obscures dialogue. In one scene, in a projection booth at a drive-in theater (ya derivative geek), we get ambient music (a moody Hank Williams cover) and ambient noises. If that doesn't jangle you, then try the long camera takes of conversations that require the camera to swing back and forth between two people. (Hey, there's Joanna Cassidy! Whoops, there she goes away!) Then join me in guffawing as a boxing match at that drive-in (?)(!) features two men so obviously fake-boxing that you wonder, did Hauck not notice how bad they were at that or does he think he's creating a meta-moment.

Little of the above will matter, though, because most viewers will not make it through the bizarre first 20 minutes, which features a woman named Dorothy (Crystal Reed) hanging out in one of those L.A. overlook parks and having painfully long conversations with a pair of bumbling drug dealers (I say, a veritable Vladimir and Estragon!) and then a park ranger, as peril builds like creeping moss. This Movie Dorothy (yes, later (earlier?) Hawkes will utter the phrase "There's no place like home") is a wide-eyed innocent with a complicated but boring backstory. That opening scene, though, is interminable.

But this is all such a weak-armed assault on the senses that you might just stick around to see how awful it can get.

GRADE: D

* -- Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.

BONUS TRACKS

This is the kind of movie perfectly suited for a song by Joe Tex, particularly one called "You Might Be Digging the Garden (But Someone's Picking Your Plums)." Ahem. But it does boast an interesting soundtrack. We're introduced to Janet as she's slathering on her thick eyeliner to this rambunctious song, "Vibrational Match" by Marnie Stern.

Then there is the corny side of Dylan, from the '80s, with "I'll Remember You" (b/w "Emotionally Yours"):

The director gives some screen time to Sally Jaye, with a live version of "Leave You Alone":

Janet also melts down to this intense purge from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, "Nobody's Baby Now." It's a good example of the too-obvious, elbow-to-the-ribs nature of the soundtrack:

  

Holy Crap!* The Gulf Between the Sexes

 

GORGE (C-minus) - I rolled my eyes so much that it was difficult to keep focused on how embarrassed I was for Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller as they were toting guns, doing battle with alien life forms and, of course, falling in love.

 

It's also hard to write a quick synopsis with a straight face. You see, they are expert sharp-shooters, with hundreds of kills between them and the requisite guilt that piles up on the soft shoulders of these earnest millennials who are good people deep down, because they care about their dad (her) or write poetry (him), and they're cute. Teller is American Levi, and Taylor-Joy is the Russian Drasa, and they are each on a secret mission to guard opposite sides of a grand abyss that, below a layer of fog, hides deformed superhuman creatures down at the proverbial gates of hell. The critters like to scamper up the sides of the gorge, but darn it if Levi and Drasa don't pick off every one of them (sometimes just in the nick of time!). The critters, conveniently, don't scamper up the sides and try to escape during times when it's convenient for the plot -- like when Levi and Drasa have a forbidden sexy date together or drop down into the pit to do a little battle with the devil's spawn.

You can't go five minutes in this two-plus-hour technicolor yawn of a movie without enduring an absolutely implausible tick in the plot. Sigourney Weaver plays a bad-ass intelligence commander who oversees the American side of the divide, and it's hilarious to watch Weaver's much younger stand-in run for her life when all hell breaks loose at the climax. Taylor-Joy, who can't weigh much more than 92 pounds here, effortlessly wields automatic weapons that are half her size while never missing her target. Teller struggles to prove once again that he's not a lightweight himself, by spitting his lines with a bitter world-weariness and later soaping up in the shower. Right off the start, Levi would know not to engage with the other side under threat of certain personal extinction, but doggone it, the heart wants what it wants, right?

Drasa and Levi can not only read each other's cue-card-size notes across the foggy gorge, but they can often hear incidental sounds from that distance. (The ears are as sharp as the eyes!) When all hell breaks loose, nothing goes wrong for our intrepid couple -- computers improbably spring to life; a long-dormant Jeep rumbles into action at the touch of two wires (and runs great!); the pair have an unerring sense of direction, even without GPS; explosions barely mess their hair let alone separate their bodies from their limbs; and little Drasa gets dragged at 40 mph, banging her head on a fallen tree trunk along the way, and she's none worse for the wear. And, as in every movie, the bad guys (things) conveniently like to attack one at a time, so that the hero can fend them off in succession. Some things haven't changed since I watched "Batman" on TV as a child.

There is a germ of a clever idea here. Whatever is going on down below is the unintended result of a post-WWII pact among the victors, a misguided act of hubris that told Robert Oppenheimer "Hold my beer." Levi and Drasa are on one-year assignments, cut off from the rest of the world, under strict orders not to engage with the other side. (But how could they not when a cute gal is acting all flirty and is packing a hipster collection of 45-rpm records.)

Pulp director Scott Derrickson and journeyman writer Zach Dean regurgitate plot points gleaned from binge-watching every action film and horror movie they could get their hands on. They create a somewhat interesting mucky underworld, and their budget allowed for unlimited explosions. They lucked out in getting two of the hotter young actors to agree to play some combination of Maverick, Indiana Jones, Wonder Woman and American Sniper. Taylor-Joy rocks a mild Russian accent that isn't too silly. Teller broods like a child doing an imitation of Robert Mitchum or Steve McQueen.

But the idea that these two relative soft targets could even think of racing through the bowels of hell to save humanity is just too absurd to take as seriously as we are doing right now. I've seen Roadrunner cartoons where Wile E. Coyote performs more believable stunts than Levi does here. They'll greenlight anything these days to provide content to Apple TV, especially when it is needed for Valentine's Day.

* - Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.

BONUS TRACK

The schizophrenic soundtrack includes a jolt of "Blitzkrieg Bop" from the Ramones, a Bach suite, and a part-rap version of Bob Dylan's "(All Along the) Watchtower." The most on-the-nose choice is "Spitting Off the Edge of the World" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Perfume Genius: