Trailer: Black Sea

Give me a solid old-school adventure like Black Sea over your latest effects-pumped Marvel superhero epic any day. Directed by Kevin Macdonald (Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland), this submarine flick is a rarity these days: a mid-budget action-thriller emphasising performances and strong character work, hinging on a tense real-world/working-class type scenario. Jude Law's accent is a bit suspect, but the film has received some encouraging reviews so far: Empire says it's a "superbly shot men-on-a-mission thriller with chest-tightening tension and a striking contemporary resonance", and Time Out London: "its blend of old-fashioned storytelling values and zeitgeisty relevance make it a worthy addition to sub-aquatic cinema's nerve-juddering legacy." We're looking to secure a couple of screenings in March - fingers crossed! In the meantime, get your palms clammy with the trailer below:

Trailer: Grand Piano

Grand Piano looks and sounds pretty absurd, but potentially absurd in that hugely entertaining way that sometimes Brian DePalma's films can be. Also I'm a sucker for a good limited-location thriller, so this looks like it'll be right up my alley. Elijah Wood stars as a stage-fright-stricken concert pianist who's targeted during his comeback performance by a psycho who tells him he will die if he plays one wrong note. Pinnacle Films will be releasing this film from Spanish director Eugenio Mira -- who interestingly, did the score to the great sci-fi indie Timecrimes! --  on October 1 on DVD and Blu-ray. Reserve it here. Watch Elijah plonk on some keys anxiously in the trailer below:

Trailer: The November Man

Perhaps inspired by the recent career paths of greying 60+ actors like Liam Neeson (Taken) and Kevin Costner (3 Days To Kill) back into action-movie bad-assery, Pierce Brosnan is getting his chance to walk away unharmed from explosions once again in Roger Donaldson's thriller The November Man. The veteran-CIA-operative-trains-young-protege dynamic here bears more than a little semblance to Donaldson's 2003 spy flick The Recruit (and countless other films), so I'm not expecting anything terribly original, but the actor's fans who miss his days as James Bond are likely to be pleased what they see in this trailer:

Recut Trailer: Dumb & Dumber

In the vein of those classic creepy-horror recuts of Mrs. Doubtfire and Mary Poppins, here's Dumb & Dumber re-imagined as an "epic drama". It's not as good as those two but still pretty good...

Trailer: Non-Stop

See what happens when you put Liam Neeson on a plane? Non-Stop re-teams the 61-year-old Taken star with his Unknown director Jaume Collet-Serra for a mid-air mishmash of anonymous text messages, ransom demands, passengers getting knocked off and Neeson getting framed for all of the above. The trailer doesn't really leave much to the imagination, and the story feels stitched from a bunch of other terror-in-the-skies-type thrillers, but damn if I don't want to see Neeson kick up a storm at 40,000 ft!

Trailer: Oldboy

Park Chan-wook's Oldboy remains one of the most electrifying, stylish and gleefully twisted revenge thrillers of the '00s. Its ingenious plotting all but guaranteed an English-language remake, but the road to getting there has been an incredibly long one, with names such as Justin Lin, Will Smith, Christian Bale and Steven Spielberg attached to and passing through the project at various points since the rights were secured. Spike Lee was finally given to the job to direct it, and though I generally do not care for most of Lee's work, I'm somewhat curious to see how different the two films are, other than the fact that the American version, understandably, will be sans the infamous octopus-eating scene of Park's. If you have not seen the original, I definitely urge you to catch it first, but subtitle-phobes will probably just want to hang out for Lee's film. Here are the trailers for both (they look pretty similar to these eyes):

Trailer: Premium Rush

David Koepp's name is more widely associated with the scripts he's penned for some ginormous blockbusters (Spider-Man, Jurassic Park), but he's also directed a couple of interesting smaller movies in his career like The Trigger Effect and Stir of Echoes where he's showed some deftness in executing an economical thriller (let's not talk about Ghost Town). His next directorial effort, Premium Rush, looks to be in the same modest scale as those films (albeit on a bigger budget), relying on smart thriller writing rather than big expensive effects to sell itself. It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a bike messenger who's carrying an envelope that bad cop Michael Shannon really wants to have. Trailer shows off some cool stunts, vibrant location shooting in New York and a brisk sense of pace that promises it'll be an adrenalin rush.

Teaser Trailer: The Grey

I like how Liam Neeson is kinda shaping up to be a version of those gruff old school old-timer leading men that Hollywood used to have in abundance; think Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Warren Oates, Charles Bronson etc. - men who look like they've been around the block but still have a little bit of fire in their engine to really kick some ass. Following Taken and Unknown, The Grey is the latest Neeson vehicle to give him some serious action chops and it looks frickin' great. Re-teaming him with The A-team director Joe Carnahan, it's a snowbound survivalist thriller pitting a plane-crash-surviving group of oil-rig workers against the Alaskan wilderness. I'm not crazy about Carnahan's Smokin' Aces nor The A-Team, but I like Narc a lot and hope perhaps The Grey will deliver something on the level of that bad cop flick. Teaser trailer here.. how cool is that makeshift Wolverine claw thing Neeson is sporting??

VHS Vortex #21: Deadly Strangers (1974)

If you're wondering why it's #21 of a column that has never appeared on this blog before, you have reason to, but here's why: for nearly two years, VHS Vortex was a monthly wee thing I wrote for Real Groove magazine, who sad to say, went under a couple of weeks ago (must-read eulogies here and here). It was a bit of an unusual column in a sense that it wasn't tied to anything commercial, it wasn't promoting any current product - it was pure indulgence on my part (thanks Duncan!), a reason to go through my VHS stash which otherwise would have remained unwatched for years. But it also gave me a chance to shed some on light on interesting, rare, off-the-radar, offbeat movies, yet unavailable on DVD, that would've gone unnoticed.

So I thought I'd share my last column, which was to appear in November's issue, here. I don't think I'll ever get paid for watching VHS ever again (though I'd be more than happy to...), but I've been thinking about possibly continuing the column here. Anywho we'll see. Copy + paste, final VHS Vortex:

By the time Hayley Mills dropped her top for Sidney Hayers’ 1974 road thriller Deadly Strangers, she was well into her attempts at scrubbing away her career-defining squeaky-clean image as Disney’s top child actor of the ‘60s. She’d already done non-family-friendly psycho-thrillers like Twisted Nerve (’68) and Endless Night (’72), and with this trashy, sleazy film, Mills couldn’t be further away from her Pollyanna days.

She plays Belle Adams, a twenty-something beauty who accepts a lift from a trucker when her car breaks down. Not long into their journey, the man stops the truck and proceeds to rape her (“I thought we’d settle the fare”), but she makes a run for it and catches a ride from another passing stranger, Stephen Slade (Simon Ward), who’s a tad friendlier, more dashing, but a little disconcertingly drunk. Meanwhile, there’s a murderous psychopath on the loose in the countryside…

Not a lot of what happens here is remotely plausible, and it’s not difficult to guess the outcome, but Deadly Strangers is fast-paced, well-acted and rousing enough to forgive its rougher edges.

The film basically amalgamates two genres: on one hand, it dabbles in the psycho-sexual themes of films like Psycho and Peeping Tom, and on the other, exploits our fears of thumbin’ a ride a la The Hitch-Hiker, Road Games et al. To be sure, the psychological stuff doesn’t rise above exploitation, delivered none-too-subtly via standard horror-trauma flashbacks into the characters’ pasts: Slade has trouble in the sack with his wife due to his love of dirty mags, Adams haunted by a traumatic past where her parents died in a car accident and she’s forced to live with a creepy uncle.

But the rapport the pair build during the film, by turns jovial, sexually tense, and off-kilter, is engrossing and suspenseful (their best scenes are played out in simple passenger/driver-conversing shots), and veteran TV director Hayers, clearly not working with a particularly large budget, makes the most of the depressing, soggy Midlands landscape to drench the film in atmosphere. There’s also an oddball, goofy appearance by Sterling Hayden as a heavy-bearded, jalopy-driving old-timer that adds an element of welcome quirkiness to the mainly sombre drama.

Deadly Strangers was released on VHS in the US by Paragon Video Productions in the ‘80s – apparently cut – and an English-language DVD has yet to surface yet. It’s no forgotten classic, but if you like this kind of thing, it’s worth hunting down.

Polanski Free + NZFF: The Ghost Writer

So Roman Polanski was declared a free man yesterday... without getting into the thorny moral/ethical issues that come up every time he gets mentioned, I'm just relieved this whole circus over. To echo Anne Thompson's sentiments, I'm a fan of his films, I'm not a fan of what he did. I want to see the guy make more films before he croaks it. Does that make me an "apologist"? I don't think so. Anyway, this is all kind of a long-winded way to say you should go see his latest thriller The Ghost Writer which is playing the New Zealand Film Festival tonight at the Civic in Auckland. It's a sleek, elegantly made, and surprisingly witty old-school political thriller that shows Polanski, at his ripe old age, still has what it takes to deliver a solid paranoid suspenser. Here's the trailer:

Trailer: (500) Days of Summer: Thriller Version

Another day, another mash-up. This one turns quirky rom-com (500) Days of Summer into a psycho-thriller...