Hobo with a Shotgun

Directed by: Jason Eisener
Written by: John Davies
Full credits at IMDb

Adapted from the winner of Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse trailers contest, Hobo with a Shotgun is the second feature, after Machete, based on the phony previews that split Rodriguez's and Tarantino's films in theaters. This one's a pathological valentine to movies, and a disgusted rebuke of non-cinematic showmanship and spectacle. Dressed like a retired mailman, Rutger Hauer stars as the title character, who alights a freight train one sunny, overexposed morning and enters Hopetown, renamed Scumtown on its welcome sign by a wit with a Sharpie. There, street fights, thieving, kidnapping, pedophilia, pimping and prostitution run rampant in broad daylight. What's to blame: failed social policy? Crumbling infrastructure and a lack of investment? Nope: a gangster straight out of Dick Tracy—"The Drake" (Brian Downey)—and his douchebully, Delorean-driving, Bret Easton Ellis-looking sons. "When life gives you razor blades," The Drake says in one scene, "you make a baseball bat covered in razor blades"—a weapon he then uses to eviscerate a man hitherto hung upside-down and treated like a piñata by a few topless ladies.

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Sympathy for Delicious

Directed by: Mark Ruffalo
Written by: Christopher Thornton
Full credits at IMDb

A cautionary tale against mixing church and rock n' roll, Mark Ruffalo's directorial debut, Sympathy for Delicious, concerns paraplegic DJ Delicious Dean (Christopher Thornton, who also wrote the screenplay and has a broken back in real life), gifted not just in his legendary scratching skills but in his divine healing abilities—a single touch can cure anything from gout to blindness. With hands like those, who needs legs? Still, pity the poor, angst-ridden Dean: he's in a wheelchair, but mean club owners don't sympathize; he's living out of his car, but people steal his shit. And his curative touch, which he doesn't even want, comes with a cruel cosmic catch: he cannot heal himself.

Sympathy was written by an actor, and directed by another, though practitioners of that craft are not typically known for their storytelling skills. (Or, apparently, for the ability to rent a tripod...)

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Blackthorn

Directed by: Mateo Gil
Written by: Miguel Barros
Full credits at IMDb

Nothing strips the romance from a Western quite like Butch Cassidy showing up at a bank to make a withdrawal from his savings account. That's one of the earliest scenes in the weary, melancholic and elegiac Blackthorn, which revisits the Cassidy and Sundance myth and rewrites a new last act for George Roy Hill's classic: instead of meeting their ends at the hands of the Bolivian Army in 1908, the outlaws live on. This movie finds Butch in 1927: grizzled, calling himself by the alias of the title, and raising horses on a ranch in the rugged mountains of Bolivia—the American West's erstwhile wild terrain rediscovered South of the equator.

Blackthorn revises the revisions, embracing many facets of the mythos rejected by most modern, progressive-minded Westerns...

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine


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The Bleeding House

Written & Directed by: Philip Gelatt
Full credits at IMDb

Would-be thriller The Bleeding House centers on a peculiar family, The Smiths, who bear spooky suggestions of bygone infamy: their knife drawer is padlocked; they have a strict, panic-provoking rule against pets; and, when the father sees his wife in an apron splashed with red stains, he freaks. "It's just paint," she assures him. This is a family haunted by its tragedy-marked past—denied, like other American lives, that coveted second act. Too bad this compellingly cryptic imagery is neutralized by writer-director Philip Gelatt's on-the-nose dialogue, delivered by a cast seemingly recruited from a regional theater company in the boondocks in which the movie was shot.

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine


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Grave Encounters

Written & Directed by: The Vicious Brothers
Full credits at IMDb

The abandoned mental institution-compound that provides the setting for Grave Encounters, a haunted hospital horror head-scratcher, is not merely possessed in the traditional sense. Yes, monstrous spirits do eventually appear, terrorizing and picking off our cast of heroes. But the buildings themselves seem alive—the characters become trapped in a living maze, where floor plans adjust by the moment, obeying only nightmare illogic.

The movie takes its name from the fictional television-program-within-the-movie, a reality show vaguely similar to Syfy's Ghost Hunters, in which a crew visits haunted properties around America and films the paranormal happenings therein. They are skeptical showmen who get their comeuppance at the Cropsey-like facility they choose for episode six, where the ghosts are as real as the deaths they cause.

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine


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The Trip

Directed by: Michael Winterbottom
Full credits at IMDb

Many of director Michael Winterbottom's movies blur the line between the fictional and the real; those that do can be divided into two categories: politically charged, human-scaled dramas about the Middle East (The Road to Guantanamo, In This World, A Mighty Heart) and artsy larks with Steve Coogan (24 Hour Party People, Tristram Shandy). Winterbottom's latest, The Trip, adapted from a six-part BBC series, falls firmly into the second camp: regardless of how much of it is "real," it's a conspicuous vanity project for Coogan, highlighting the actor's discontent with his failed personal relationships and hamstrung Hollywood career.

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Rabies

Written & Directed by: Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushado
Full credits at IMDb

The first horror movie out of Israel, Rabies (Kalevet) feels like a typical slasher with one teensy twist—its baddie is neutralized within the first few minutes. That psychokiller, setting traps in the woods to snag his mortal quarry, is shot with a tranquilizer, and spends the rest of the film asleep on the forest floor. While he naps, more mayhem unfolds than he could have wreaked in his wettest dreams, as his would've-been victims accidentally assume his murderous mantle.

Several groups—randy teens; a campground assessor and his dog; a salacious cop and his sad sack partner; a bloodied brother and his kidnapped sister-lover—cross paths in a mine-ridden timberland, with disastrous results for each: if the booby traps don't get them (bear traps!), their fellow citizens will...

Keep reading this dispatch from the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine


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Stake Land

Directed by: Jim Mickle
Written by: Nick Damici & Jim Mickle
Full credits at IMDb

Strangely libertarian and pro-Canada, horror-road movie Stake Land boasts the stock archetypes and mythic aspirations common to comic books, but filtered through the unsmiling misery of realism—a glaring tonal disconnect that makes the movie silly, but witless. It's set in a post-apocalyptic America overrun with vampires, except the bloodsuckers are feral and monster-faced, more like zombies than the debonair living dead to which storytellers from Anne Rice through Stephanie Meyer have accustomed us. It may be a vampire movie, but Stake Land comes via George Romero; unfortunately, in its lameness, it has more in common with Survival of the Dead than Dawn.

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Wrecked

Directed by: Michael Greenspan
Written by: Christopher Dodd

Trapping a character in one place is a challenge for so mobile a medium as movies. Danny Boyle met it recently with kinetic frenzy, swamping 127 Hours' pinned protagonist with flashbacks, fantasies and videocam confessions. In Rodrigo Cortés' Buried, Ryan Reynolds awakes in a coffin with nothing but a lighter, a cell phone, and a high-stakes kidnapping mystery to solve; the movie overcomes its formal limitations with narrative urgency. In contrast, the first 30 minutes of Wrecked, a near-dialogueless anti-thriller directed by Michael Greenspan, sport no such bourgeois trappings as excitement or exigency: a bloody Adrien Brody wakes up in a totaled car, his leg caught under the dash, his head addled with amnesia. He cries. He mutters. He moans. He has a dream—about being stuck in the same car, in the same stretch of woods.

OK, so eventually a mystery emerges for him to sort out, but its stakes don't readily reveal themselves...

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Insidious

Directed by: James Wan
Written by: Leigh Whannell

The writer and director of the original Saw and the producing team behind Paranormal Activity make strange bedfellows: in 2004, the former introduced the buckets-of-blood aesthetic that would define horror for the rest of the decade; the latter represent the most successful rejection of that trend, scaring audiences with little more than flickering shadows and rustling bed sheets. Their collaboration, Insidious, a traditional haunted house movie with contemporary twists, finds director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell longing to prove themselves, to evince their understanding of horror movie history, to demonstrate they are no mere fanboys but dedicated students of the genre—to rescue reputations sullied after seven Saws and infinite imitators.

To some extent, they succeed...

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