PICKS OF THE WEEK
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (A)
U.S.; John Huston, 1948, Warner Bros.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, based on the 20th century classic novel by "B. Traven," is a 20th century classic movie as well, and, along with The Maltese Falcon, The Asphalt Jungle and The Man Who Would Be King, the best argument against critics who low-rate writer-director (and here for the first time, actor) John Huston. It's a superb movie, an inarguable classic, one of the great westerns, one of the best-ever literary adaptations, and one of the great Humphrey Bogart pictures: a lacerating, mesmerizing, eye-opening, pin-you-to-seat portrayal of greed and its consequences, hard as nails and warm as flesh.
Bogart plays one of his all-time best roles: Fred C. Dobbs, a down and out American in 1925 Tampico, who hooks up with two other Yanks, the tough but decent Bob Curtin (played by Tim Holt) and the grizzled prospecting expert Howard (John's father Walter Huston, in his all-time best role and Oscar-winner), to form a trio of treasure hunters in the Sierra Madre mountains (hilly, stony, sun-drenched peaks beautifully shot on location by Huston and cinematographer Ted McCord.) The three strike gold, but they also hit a vein of darkness: the paranoia, discord and violence that sudden riches often bring. Walter is wise and savvy, but he can't warn his younger comrades. Curtin is a good guy but he's powerless to stop fate. "Dobbsy" is an okay guy too, but gold and greed turn him into a monster.
There's another, far more unabashed monster here too: Alfonso Bedoya as the bandit leader Gold Hat, who snarls at Dobbs those memorable lines "Badges? We ain't got no badges! We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you my stinking badges!" He's a classic killer, and so is the movie.
Don Siegel once said that he wanted to make The Treasure of the Sierra Madre more than any property he ever read, but that he couldn't possibly have made as good a film as Huston's, because he would have let the producers talk him into shooting it in a studio, and Huston wouldn't. That' s why John Huston is a great filmmaker. He read well, chose wisely and never betrayed his material. He knew where the gold was in Treasure of Sierra Madre, and he got it. He also knew how to lay back and get the best in his dad and in his pal Bogie and all the others. He got that too.
I saw Sierra Madre last year in a brand-new 35 mm print at Grauman's Chinese Theater in the AMC Classic Film Festival, with Anjelica and Danny Huston representing their dad on stage -- and I was stunned at how great it was, how ageless, how superb the actors all were (including Bruce Bennett as the smart interloper and Barton MacLane as the exploitive thug of a boss, and especially Bogie and Walter), at how the movie just jumped off the screen at you and hooked you good, and left you with eyes open and brain sharp and heart chilled and racing.
It's a cliché of sorts, but it's true: They just don't make movies like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre any more. Or guys like Bogie and John and Walter Huston. Or maybe they do, and we just don't treasure them enough. (Extras: Commentary by Eric Lax; documentaries on John Huston and the film; radio version of Treasure with the original stars; and a Warner Night at the Movies package, with Leonard Maltin intro, vintage newsreel, comedy short, classic Looney Tunes, and Warners trailers.).
DisneyNature: Oceans (A)
France-U.S.; Jacques Perrin/Jacques Cluzaud, 2009, Disney
A real gem, from France. Made by Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, the two French directors of the magnificent birds-in-flight documentary Winged Migration, here's an equally magnificent doc about the ocean and its denizens. Fantastic music. Incredible cinematography. Good narration: Done by Perrin himself (who once acted the part of the young reporter in Z) in the French original, here in this DisneyNature version, it's by a non-Bonded Pierce Brosnan.
DisneyNature's 2009 Earth, fashioned from the Alastair Fothergill-David Attenborough masterpiece Planet Earth, was a real movie event last year, though I prefer the original. And this is easily one of the best pictures I've seen all this year -- the kind of thing movies can do better than any other art form. If you skip it, you ought to have your head examined. Or eaten by a humpback whale.
The Exorcist: Extended Director's Cut and Original Theatrical Edition (A-)
U.S.: William Friedkin, 1973 and 2010, Warner Bros., Blu-Ray
The Devil gets into Regan (Linda Blair), the daughter of movie star Chris McNeill (Ellen Burstyn), and raises all kinds of old-fashioned special effects hell, while two priest-exorcists (older, wiser Max Von Sydow and younger, tormented Jason Miller) and a movie-loving cop (Lee J. Cob), try to exorcize it. Based by screenwriter William Peter Blatty on his best-selling novel, and directed with edgy realism by William Friedkin, this one scared the public silly back in the Nixon era. And still does. (Extras: Commentaries (on the original) by Friedkin and Blatty and (on the director's cut) by Friedkin; documentaries; intro by Friedkin (on the original); interview gallery; original ending.)
BOX SET PICK OF THE WEEK
The Films of Nikita Mikhalkov (A)
Russia/U.S.S.R.; Nikita Mikhalkov, 1976-1994, Kino
Film comes easily to Nikita Mikhalkov: the master Russian moviemaker -- maker of Dark Eyes, 12, Close to Eden and Burnt by the Sun, and the subject of this superb and sometimes surprising five-disc box set from Kino. Mikhalkov is a phenomenon, a first-rank, much-praised, much-prized, and highly versatile artist of the screen, as craftsmanlike and affecting a screenwriter as he is strong and innovative a producer, as excellent a director of actors as he is brilliant and dynamic a visual stylist. He's an inspiring filmmaker whose work is always entertaining and deeply engaging, and who constantly enhances and ignites the talents and best instincts of his coworkers -- including his ingenious production designer and sometimes co-writer and actor, Alexander Adabashyan, his lyrical composer Eduard Artemyev and his virtuosic cinematographer Pavel Lebeshev.
To top it off, Mikhalkov is also one of the best movie actors in Russia. Mikhalkov's older brother, the equally talented and much-awarded moviemaker Andrei Konchalovsky (director of Siberiade and The Odyssey, and Andrei Tarkovsky's co-writer on Andrei Roublev and Ivan's Childhood) has said that his sibling is "the Russian Jack Nicholson." And despite an understandable familial bias on Andrei's part, it's not really an exaggeration. As an actor, Mikhalkov has all of Nicholson's (and Gene Hackman's ) earthy magnetism and charisma, if maybe not all of Jack's hair-trigger pugnacity. (Nikita and Andrei are the children of an amazing artistic couple; Andrei took the last name of their mother, a famous painter, and Nikita took the surname of their father, a renowned poet, and the lyricist who wrote the words to the old Soviet national anthem.)
Kino's five-film set, packed with extras, gathers together two of Mikhalkov's most internationally famous films, two brilliant, lush period pieces that display all his manifold gifts, the Oscar-winning 1994's Burnt by the Sun (in which Mikhalkov also, unforgettably, plays the lead role) and the great movie that made his name as a director, 1976's A Slave of Love (in which the co-scenarist was brother Andrei), together with a less well-known (in the West) and less-screened, but no less accomplished masterpiece of literary adaptation, 1980's Oblomov
Also in the package are two more neglected (in the West) works, 1979's Five Evenings and 1983's Without Witness: both more contemporary, more economically shot, done with much more limited means, but very ingeniously planned and designed within those limits. These two movies, based on plays by two major Russian playwrights, Alexander Volodin and Sofia Prokofyeva, both still very popular in Russia but little-screened here (I'd never encountered either before), are true actors' showcases. Like the three films above, they brilliantly display the gifts of some of Russia's best stage and film actors.
Mikhalkov's recurrent theme is the plight of volatile or sensitive people trapped in constraining or changing, even chaotic social conditions -- whether the rigid aristocracy of 19th century Russia (Oblomov), the world of make-believe and moviemaking in the throes of the Russian Revolution (A Slave of Love), the vise of Stalinism closing in on an erstwhile Revolutionary military hero (Burnt by the Sun) or the banal conformity, over-crowded communal apartments and paranoid repression of the Khruschev-era U.S.S.R. (Five Evenings).
Mikhalkov has directed relatively little since his world-wide critical hit Burnt by the Sun in 1994 Reportedly, he was angry that he got beaten for the Palme d'Or that year at Cannes by Quentin Tarantino and Pulp Fiction (Mikhalkov did win Cannes' runner-up award, the Jury Prize, for Sun), as well as depressed by the current ongoing turmoil, breakup and social collapse in Russia. But last year, Mikhalkov released 12, an adaptation and rephrasing of the 1957 American classic Twelve Angry Men, originally made by one of his favorite directors, Sidney Lumet, and he is now at work on Burnt by the Sun 2, one sequel I look forward to.
This marvelous five-film set reminds us what a great film artist he is, how rich and beautiful and exciting his best movies are, what fascinating cinematic worlds he opens up on the screen, and, most of all, how much Nikita Mikhalkov loves people and the actors who play them. All films are Russian film productions, in Russian and other languages, with English subtitles. (Extras: Interviews with Mikhalkov, Adabashyan, Artemyev and Kupchenko; documentary Vera on Vera Kholodnaya; filmographies; photo albums. Note: You can see Vera Kholodnaya silent movies -- she died young, at 25, in 1919 -- on the Milestone set devoted to early Russian silents, and on Milestone's Mad Love: The Films of Evgeni Bauer.)
Includes:
A Slave of Love (A)
U.S.S.R.; 1976
Set during the turbulence of the Revolution, kept temporarily at bay at a lush film shoot location, this is one of the best portrayals ever of the silent film era: energetic, romantic, poetic, funny, bursting with life and beauty. With Yelena Solovey as Olga, a silent film goddess inspired by the legendary real life, tragic movie actress Vera Kholodnaya. Also with Rodion Nakhapetov and Alexander Kalyagin, and co-written, in one of their rare collaborations, by the brothers Konchalovsky, plus Fridrikh Gorenshtein. This is my favorite Mikhalkov.
Five Evenings (A-)
U.S.S.R.; 1979
Tamara and Alexander (Lyudmila Gurchenko and Stanislav Lyubshin), a couple long separated after their World War II affair, meet again 17 years later in the cold war Khruschev era, rekindling sparks and resentments, unearthing old secrets and lies. Based on Alexander Volodin's play, designed and co-scripted by Alexander Adabashyan, who also plays the hero's (or maybe anti-hero's) reserved, reluctant, mustached friend. A gem, and also a real feat of filmmaking virtuosity. Mikhalkov, the actors and his Oblomov crew, shot it in 25 days, during a brief break in the shooting of that complex period production.
Oblomov (A)
U.S.S.R.; 1980
A wonderful adaptation of the great Ivan Goncharov novel, about an unambitious, somnolent mama's boy of an aristocrat named Oblomov (Oleg Tabakov, in a near-perfect performance) who, after retiring from civil service at 30, likes to sleep all the time, tended by his shabby drunken valet. Oblomov, a recluse in a world whirling out of his control, inherits his family's lands in the country, and falls in love, sleepily and ineptly, with a beauty in the nearby mansion (Yelena Solovey), a girl who is also attracted to Oblomov's best friend. Beautiful, funny, heartbreaking; like Chekhov on a more epic scale, with more obvious comedy.
Without Witness (A-)
U.S.S.R.; 1983
A quiet woman and her sadistic ex-husband, still embroiled in a turbulent relationship, spend a night of fury, anguish and remembrance together in her apartment, which becomes a battleground. An explosive chamber drama, in the fiery style and inwardly melancholy mood of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The couple are played by Irina Kupchenko and Mikhail Ulyanov, and they're both tremendous.
Burnt by the Sun
Russia; 1994
Colonel Sergei Kotov, a war hero of the Soviet Revolution (Mikhalkov, in his most famous role), goes to his lovely, halcyon country retreat for a brief summer vacation, joining his family and some surprise guests -- including agents of Stalin's secret police, who are no respecters of laws, heroes or humanity. Costarring Oleg Menchikov and Nadya Mikhalkov, Mikhalkov's daughter, who here plays his screen daughter. Winner of the best foreign language film Oscar, and the 1994 Cannes Grand Jury Prize, Burnt by the Sun is usually considered Mikhalkov's masterpiece. It probably is.
OTHER NEW OR RECENT RELEASES
Predators (D+)
U.S.; Nimrod Antal, 2010, 20th Century Fox
I'd be less than honest if I didn't inform you that Predators -- a horror movie about a Dirty Half-Dozen or so of mercenaries parachuted down onto a planetful of monsters -- isn't a piece of god-awful shit. I would however be borrowing, and maybe putting to better use, one of the two words most often employed by screenwriters Alex Litvak and Michael Finch in their flabbergastingly bad dialogue. And I don't mean "god-awful."
This is a picture oddly hailed in some critical corners as an effective shocker and a return to the cinematic glories of the original 1987 Predator. Effective? Shocker? Glories? Actually, the original Predator was no great shakes as a movie either, even though it provided a showcase for two future United States governors, star commando Arnold Schwarzenegger (California) and backup heavy Jesse Ventura (Minnesota) -- and even though it has a dubious rep as a cult show. A heavy-duty, high-concept action movie in which growling, scowling macho mercenaries lost in the South American jungle, battled a monster from outer space, it was basically just as dumb and just as badly written (by Jim and John, the Thomas Brothers) as this one, though it benefited some from John McTiernan super-slick, Die Hard-era direction.
The first Predator was mostly just another witless high concept marketing-hook movie from that witless, high concept marketing-hook movie decade, the god-awful Eighties. I guess you had to be a movie going kid of 12 or so to appreciate them, or to get nostalgic for stuff like Commando, Rambo or Top Gun. I don't have a clue why producer Robert Rodriguez, a moviemaker I usually like, was so hot on breathing life back into Predator-land, especially after those rotten "Alien/Predator" match-ups had almost deservedly wiped it out. Or why producer Rodriguez talked the gifted Hungarian-American director Nimrod Antal (Control, Vacancy), into staging this sort-of-sequel, not to mention recruiting a cast that boasts talents like Adrien Brody, Laurence Fishburne, Alice Braga, and Topher Grace, but who here (except for Fishburne, getting what these writers probably regarded as an aria) are put to work, dreaming up new ways to slog through the forest, dodge stampeding monsters, spray automatic gunfire and inflect the words "s--t" and "f--k."
The basic premise actually isn't bad. In fact, a lot of it comes straight from one of the movies' all-time adventure-suspense classics not the bloated bloody Predator but that ingenious, and endlessly imitated '30s gem, from King Kong co-director Ernest Schoedsack (and original author Richard Connell) The Most Dangerous Game. In that knockout 1932 movie, Joel McCrea and Fay Wray were turned into beasts of prey, hunted through an island jungle by the elegant Hitchockian psychopath Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks). It's old, it's black-and white, and it has old-fashioned effects and stagier dialogue. But, if you walk out of Predators, as you probably should, and rent and take home The Most Dangerous Game instead, I can almost guarantee you'll have a better time.
Then again, maybe Predators really does understand its audience. (A sobering thought.) The new movie starts out with a bang: eight glum mercenaries -- or actually seven mercenaries and one dork of a doctor (Topher Grace as the movie's "odd man in") -- parachute into a huge jungle forest on what turns out to be an alien world where the sun never moves, there are several moons in the sky, and herds of terrible multi-horned, spiked, armored, savage beasts, modeled on the original Predator, begin repeatedly charging at them and trying to kill them.
The eight's de facto leader is Adrien Brody as hardcase gunman Royce, who was in the middle of a battle somewhere when suddenly everything went white and he found him self falling, falling into Predators. Royce is accompanied by a group of gun-packing strangers who all seem to have dropped in from other battles or other movies: Danny Trejo as the perpetually glowering Cuchillo, Goggins Walton as the Joe Pantolian-ian wise-ass whiner Stans, Braga as the fetching Israeli commando Isabelle, Grace as token doofus Edwin, Louis Ozawa Changchien as the samurai-yakuza hybrid Hanzo, and Mahershalalhashbaz Ali (whose name probably won't become a household word) as the African warlord Mombasa. All of them except Edwin and Stans are heavily armed, strong, silent types -- though, for my money, not strong or silent enough.
Soon, Royce has it all figured out. (Nothing fazes this guy, not even the viscuous glop leaking out of the Predators.) It seems they've all been swooped up and dropped onto the planet as sport prey for the Predss -- whom we later learn (from Laurence Fishburne as scavenger-veteran Noland, chatting in his cave) are divided into two classes: incredibly mean and murderous Predators or just sort-of-mean and not-quite-as-murderous Predators. Or "Wolves" and "Dogs." (No "Puppy" Predators here, but Rodriguez probably didn't go after Pixar.) So, while Royce hatches plots to get them out of this mess, hell keeps breaking loose. The Predators keep attacking. The mercenaries keep blasting and swearing. Horrible traps keep getting sprung. Viscous glop keeps dropping. Isabelle keeps trying to soften up Royce, a thankless but probably not impossible task. (After all, she is Sonia Braga's niece.)
This planet and its various monsters, meanwhile, turn out to be truly bizarre and outrageous. As Roger Ebert has pointed out, the Predators have so many horns and spears around their mouths and so many spikes on their bodies, it's probably impossible for them to either eat or copulate, which means they would have died off long ago. And the planet has so immobile a sun and so many moons, it probably would have long ago burned up, or drowned in the tides.
But I'm sure the moviemakers have an answer for all this. Maybe there's improved global warming technology on the planet, financed by the Predator Leaders with the proceeds from their hunts. Maybe the Predators have hinges on their horns, or inhale sustenance though their noses or feet. Or maybe they have retractable penises and little trap doors in their stomachs which open up to reveal ravenous, evil little elves who pop out to make sperm bank deposits and also to gather herbs, mushrooms, and Puppy Predators and then pop back in. Or maybe these monsters just die off every week and the producers order a brand new bunch of Predators from Idiotic Cliché-land.
In the midst of all this viscuous glop comes the movie's real Achilles' Heel -- or should we say its Achilles s--t-heel. The dialogue. Aaarrrgh! I'm not kidding when I say that if Predators had better dialogue, and the richer characters and humor that reaaly good badinage and byplay spring from -- or even if it just got rid of all the junk-talk it has now and replaced it with moans, screeches and quizzical grunts -- it might have been a more bearable movie, even perhaps a good one. But here the empty cross-talk, except for Fishburne's aria (which, maybe remembering happier times, he seems to be trying to play as if it were one of Brando's Apocalypse Now monologues), is just minimalist four-letter-word-drenched cliché-macho horse manure. Or should we say predator-poop?
I didn't write it down, but, as I remember, some of the speeches went like this. "F--k you!" "F--k Me!" "F--k all of you!" "What the f--k is going on around here?" "What the f--k is this s--t?" (Or maybe it was "What the s--t is this f--k?") One of the juicier speeches, hysterically delivered by Walton: "We killed it! We killed it! We f--kin' killed it! We killed it! We killed it! We f--kin' killed it! Now what do you think of that?" And the movie's would-be "Make-my-Day" piece de resistance: "Let's find a way off this f--kin' planet!" Amen, brother.
Please Give (C+)
U.S.; Nicole Holofcener, 2010, Sony Pictures Classics
In the smart but somewhat off-putting comedy Please Give, writer-director Nicole Holofcener tackles an offbeat, half-promising subject: a group of upscale Manhattanites who feel guilty about having it so good, or feel miffed because they don't have it even better.
I can laugh, but I can't commiserate. (It's clear that Holofcener wants us to do both.) Many people have it so much worse than the self-absorbed, smart but somewhat off-putting middle-class city-dwellers we see here that it's hard to feel sympathy for them -- the couple played by Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt who buy bargain furniture at rock bottom prices from bereaved relatives at estate sales and resell it at their pricey "antique" store (and who are waiting for the 91-year-old neighbor to die so they can take over her apartment); that same old lady's gorgeous mean granddaughter (Amanda Peet), a facial cosmetician who makes fun of her grandma, trashes or condescends to everybody else, seduces Platt's Alex and stalks the new girlfriend of her ex; the couple's overweight, zit-faced daughter (Sarah Steele), who keeps throwing snit-fits and demanding attention, and thinks a pair of 200 dollar designer jeans will solve all her problems; the antique shop's gullible sucker-sellers and customers; and, unhappily enough, even the 91-year-old neighbor lady (Ann Guilbert), unappreciative of the daily efforts of her one good, helpful granddaughter.
You know what? The hell with these people. They should feel guilty.
The problem here is that most of them apparently don't -- except for Keener's Kate, remorseful because she and her hubby are exploiting misery, who therefore runs around trying to volunteer at various local community organizations (but finds they depress her too much), and dispenses twenty-dollar bills to homeless panhandlers (to the film's, but not my, amusement), mistakenly showering some of her largesse on a restaurant patron waiting on the sidewalk just because he's black. Kate's behavior may be foolish, excessive and misdirected. But the impulse is justified. Come to think of it, old neighbor lady Andra's misanthropy may be justified too.
Of course, if I'm reacting this way, this personally, it's because Holofcener and her cast have drawn these characters so fully and well, that they've taken on some life of their own, and become capable of being morally measured or judged. Kate is foolishly good, just as Alex is roguishly but entertainingly bad. She's an idealist who suffers at the thought that they may be profiting from pain. He's a realist who to some degree, accepts pain and cheating as part of life, and thinks that a good joke can always straighten things out -- but, in the end, is more affected by Kate's idealism, maybe wants to be the husband she probably deserves.
Keener and Platt play this pair with enough casual naturalism (Platt) or wounded sensitivity (Keener) that we can relate to their basically unlikable lot. As for their daughter Abby, Sarah Steele plays her observantly and utterly without any actor's vanity -- though the last familial love scene between loving Mom, penitent Pop and jeans-crazy Daughter made me cringe.
More moral measurement. Rebecca, the empathetic radio technology tech who administers mammograms, and cheerfully visits Andra, even when she gets nothing but sourpuss cracks in return, is clearly a relatively good, caring person. And her sister Mary, who does facials at a spa, is clearly a relatively bad, selfish one -- though Holofcener eventually showers generosity on them both. Is this the "Everyone has their reasons" grand compassion of a Jean Renoir? It often seems closer to the "Let's all get along" tolerance of the average family diplomat.
It's suggestive that several of the film's critics, describing these two sisters, have called Mary a beauty and Rebecca a "plain jane." Yet how could a stunner like Rebecca Hall, even without a stylish get-up or make-up, possibly be described as plain? Is it because we're conditioned to find snappish, cruel, well-dressed, smart-asses like Mary as sexy? And people like Rebecca as schnooks and doormats? Is it because too many of us would rather be Marys than be Rebeccas, even if Mary is a s--t? I ask; I do not know.
Ann Guilbert as Andra has potentially the best role in the movie, and she plays it with just the right weariness and droll bite. But she's been cheated -- and so are we -- by the fact that Holofcener writes this role so darkly and basically unsympathetically, because the filmmaker so strenuously tries to avoid the obvious sentimentality we'd feel toward an elderly woman in what are probably her last days.
At one point, when Kate, Alex, Mary, Rebecca and Andra all get together, Mary starts talking about Andra and the disposition of her apartment after she's dead, as if Andra weren't even there. I was reminded of the memorably callous treatment of the children toward their economically strapped parents in Leo McCarey's poignant/funny masterpiece Make Way for Tomorrow -- a movie that would probably inspire Kate to tears, Alex to irony, Mary to contempt/discomfort and Rebecca to thoughtfulness -- and a film that Holofcener should definitely make a point of watching some day, if she hasn't already.
There's actually great potential in that Please Give get-together scene -- if only Holofcener would grant Andra, amid her acerbic complaints, moments of more sympathy, lightness, connection, humanity. But she doesn't. And it's hard to understand why. The press book tells us that Please Give is based on real life, on a real old lady and her younger neighbors/landlords, who all became friends. Friends? Did reality seem too sappy for a biting Manhattan comedy about guilt and privilege?
Holofcener (Lovely and Amazing) makes dryly funny, compassionate, realistic, verbally agile comedies with an urban setting. She once worked for Woody Allen (on Hannah and Her Sisters) and she's clearly mining his territory, though with less wit and style. Please Give is a pretty good movie, and a notably well-acted one. But it's been somewhat over-praised by some Manhattanphile critics, who perhaps recognize the characters too quickly as part of their own milieu, or the milieu they want to be near.
I confess I'd like Please Give a lot better if the pathos were deeper, and/or the jokes funnier. After all, Alex has a point. So does Kate. So does Rebecca. So does Mary and even pimply daughter Abby. So does Andra, God bless her. As Renoir said, "Tout le monde a ses raisons." And as Woody Allen said, "I can't keep up that level of charm. I'd have a heart attack."
Night of the Demons (D)
U. S.; Adam Gieraschi, 2009, Eone
Seven horny young hunks, druggies and babes, left behind when a Halloween party at a spooky old mansion is broken up by the cops, discover that a bunch of demons (fiends so bad they were expelled from Hell) are trying to get at them, turn them into demons, and take over the world unless they and we all go though a dumb, far more expensive knock-off of The Evil Dead. Bad writing, bad acting, bad direction -- but surprisingly good cinematography (by Yaron Levy). Sample dialogue: "You worked at Taco Bell? That's awesome!" "What are you, a liar or an idiot?" /An idiot." This one sometimes makes Predators look like The Exorcist. With Shannon Elizabeth and Edward Furlong. (Extras: Commentary by Gieraschi and others, featurette.)