10. “Winchester”
For dorky kids with an interest in the occult and the arcane (and if you were never one of those, what on earth are you doing hanging out here?) the Winchester Mystery House is prime horror-film fodder. The 160-room folly is a mansion in San Jose, California that was built by Sarah Winchester, the widow of rifle manufacturer Winchester, so the legend goes, to house the many restless ghosts of people killed by the company’s guns. The Spierig brothers, who directed “Jigsaw” (boo) but also the underseen “Predestination” (yay) developed a plausibly spooky storyline involving a doctor sent by the Winchester company to declare Sarah insane so she can be removed from the board. They assembled a dream cast, toplined by Helen Mirren in thick-veiled widow’s weeds and Jason Clarke as the opiate-addled doctor. And they got to shoot in the actual house, with all its stairways to nowhere and higgledy-piggledy chambers. And despite all that, they made a honking bore, a 100-minute film that seems to last 100 years, in which the small store of spookiness laboriously built up over a chronically uneventful first half gives way to crushingly predictable jump scares en route to a noisily incoherent finale. Doors creak, bells toll, zombie-ghosts shuffle, a creepy little boy sings nursery rhymes and wanders around with a bag on his head, and Mirren, bless her Damehood, is somehow worst of all, not helped by a pantomime script that has her constantly chattering about “13 nails!” “13 hooks!” “A wickedness that follows like a shadow!” Even the potentially timely gun-control message, which should have at least given “Winchester” the honor of being the anti -“Death Wish” on this list, is inadvertently undercut by, you know, all the shooting.
https://twitter.com/ThePlaylist/status/948987943309512704
9. “Death Wish”
NYT critic Vincent Canby described 1974’s “Death Wish” as “a despicable movie… that raises complex questions in order to offer bigoted, frivolous, oversimplified answers.” Eli Roth’s thuddunkingly ill-timed remake doesn’t even bother with the complex questions. Take the emblematically awful montage which split-screens the reassembly of a Glock with the laying out of surgical instruments, and the removal of a bullet from a wound by libtard-cuck-surgeon Paul Kersey (Bruce Willis) with the chambering of a bullet into a clip. Whatever intrigue such juxtapositions might conjure is crushed under the exultant weight of AC/DC‘s “Back in Black” that literally screams the message that in picking up a gun and turning vigilante following the murder of his wife (Elizabeth Shue, u ok hon?), Kersey is not only doing the right thing, he’s rediscovering some primal idea of manhood: He’s “back.” That the film is a multiple NRA-gasm is to be expected, as is the Roth-mandated grisliness that rears and then splatters its head a couple of times. But it’s the knuckle-dragging coding of law-abiding modern men as emasculated “pussies” that really induces eye-rolls and reveals Roth and writer Joe Carnahan for the dinosaurs they are. We know Dean Norris‘ cop is incompetent by the gluten-free protein bars he eats — defeat crime? This guy can’t even defeat wheat, amirite? And throughout, the wife’s murder and daughter’s hospitalization are explicitly things that happened not to them, but to Paul: an assault on his stuff that he has the Charlton-Heston-Charles-Bronson-and-God-given masculine right, nay, duty, to defend by any means necessary. Bitch, please. [our review]
https://twitter.com/ThePlaylist/status/892835458811482112
8. “The Predator”
This one stings more than most on this list because it’s a film we were legitimately looking forward to. Sure, every ‘Predator‘ movie since the first is awful, but if anyone could make a decent one, you’d think it would be Shane Black, who’s been on a serious roll since his return with “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” and who has a long history with the franchise, having been a victim of the trophy-hunting alien beastie in John McTiernan’s original. And there’s actually a pretty good idea for a movie — a sort of Dirty Dozen of PTSD-suffering veterans taking on a Predator — buried in here somewhere. Unfortunately, it’s included alongside half a dozen other ideas for movies, all of which are tonally jarring with each other, and which are spliced together with the skill of a teenage fan using iMovie for the first time to put together a montage of their favorite couple from “The Vampire Diaries” (Black’s decision to cast a friend of his who was a convicted sexual predator in a small role is definitely his worst decision here, but not by as wide a margin as you might hope). Appearing to be shot in the same goddamn Vancouver forest where Fox shoot all their big-budget movies, it’s a movie that is utterly incoherent, depressingly unfunny, mean-spirited, and with only a single redeeming feature – Sterling K. Brown genuinely giving one of my favorite performances of the year with a piece of prime-rib ’80s action-movie villainy. If only the movie everyone else was making was as good as the one Brown’s in. [our review]
https://twitter.com/ThePlaylist/status/1011607038424576000
7. “Show Dogs”
“Nobody makes talking dog movies anymore” says one of the talking dogs in talking dog movie “Show Dogs” a skull-numbing example of exactly why this blight on humanity, bar this one terrifying flare-up, has been eradicated like smallpox. It’s not like director Raja Gosnell, a dog-movie auteur with “Scooby Doo” and “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” to his name, or his writers had anything new to woof: the plot is a beat-for-beat rehash of “Miss Congeniality” only Sandra Bullock‘s role is taken by a streetsmart police Rottweiler called Max and voiced, somehow inevitably, by Ludacris. On the trail of a CG panda presumably stolen from its happy home in a verdant uncanny valley, Max goes undercover at a dog show at which the vastly overqualified likes of RuPaul, Alan Cumming, Shaquille O’Neal and Stanley Tucci lend their voices, accents and lisps to the primped pooches, while, less convincingly, live action leads Will Arnett and Natasha Lyonne caper about looking for their paychecks, scarcely able to meet each other’s eyes. Depressingly “breedist” for a film aimed at dog lovers (mastiffs have a “bad attitude”; labradoodles are sissies), it is even too lazy to establish its own rules, so while the dogs mouths are inelegantly animated in a way that seems to have technologically regressed since 1995’s “Babe,” we’re apparently meant to assume the humans just hear barking, which does make one wonder how Max can have risen to his maverick position within the NYPD–oh God, I have given “Show Dogs” way, way too much thought. Apparently a dog-waxing scene had to be cut as it was seen to normalize inappropriate touching; surely there’s some code that protects kids from face-melting inanity that can get every other scene binned too.
https://twitter.com/ThePlaylist/status/999704594614636545
6. “Dark Crimes”
There’s “gritty” and then there’s where “Dark Crimes” ends up, which is where gritty goes to bootcamp when it feels it’s losing ground to “seedy,” “grimy,” and “downright unpleasant.” A bearded and precariously accented Jim Carrey inexplicably plays Tadek, “the last honest cop in Poland,” committing to the role’s astonishing dourness with the grim intent of a man joylessly masturbating in a gas station toilet. Martin Csokas plays Koslov, a celebrated author whose latest novel, in amongst all the intricate descriptions of sexual violence, seems to very accurately describe the circumstances of a cold-case murder Tadek is investigating. And Charlotte Gainsbourg plays Koslov’s sex-worker girlfriend because if you’re casting a lugubrious character whose bruised body is frequently naked and who projects an ambivalent attitude toward domination, submission and the erotic value of a good thwacking, that’s really the first call you make. The story is loosely based on a piece of reportage done by David Grann, which means “Dark Crimes” is only one degree of separation from “The Lost City of Z” which is sort of mind-blowing, and is set in Krakow, but not in such a way that any of the pretty bits are ever visible. Instead, this relentlessly bleak and thrill-less thriller is largely composed of gray shots of Tadek chewing on his breakfast bacon listening to recordings detailing the rape, degradation, and torture of women while his wife, who seems unhappy for some reason, sits wordlessly across from him, or Tadek glumly parked in his car while nearby somebody does unspeakable things of dubious consensuality to Charlotte Gainsbourg. Which is as naught in the ickiness stakes, to be honest, compared to the opening credits, during which bound, naked women are groped and fondled by black-clad men in a dungeon-y sex club, while the name of Brett Ratner‘s production company flashes up briefly. I’m off for a shower, see you in a week.
https://twitter.com/ThePlaylist/status/984142060675452929
