THE CHAOS EXPERIMENT -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 8/3/09

 

Val Kilmer continues to turn up in the darndest things these days. This time, he's playing a psychotic bundle of nervous tics named Jimmy Pettis, who shows up at a newspaper office in Grand Rapids, Michigan one day and calmly informs the editor-in-chief that he's just locked six people in a steambath in order to demonstrate the social chaos that will occur all over the world in 2012 because of global warming. Read that sentence again if you want--I'll wait.

During THE CHAOS EXPERIMENT, aka "The Steam Experiment" (2009), we see the inconvenient truth of how quickly societal constraints and civility break down and sheer self-centered panic takes over when you trap a group of strangers in a room and turn the heat way up. Especially when most of those people aren't very well-balanced in the first place.  

Eric Roberts, who recently had a plum role as a mob boss in THE DARK KNIGHT, plays former pro football player Grant, who must not be doing very well these days seeing that he fell for Pettis' online dating service scam. The same goes for dweeby Christopher (STARSHIP TROOPERS' Patrick Muldoon) and hotheaded Italian stallion Frank (Quinn Duffy). The three ladies involved are the gorgeous but hostile Jessie (Eve Mauro), the dangerously neurotic Margaret (Cordelia Reynolds), and a diminutive blond named Catherine (Megan Brown).

After a round of introductions, director Philippe Martinez does all the heterosexual males in the audience a huge favor by having Jessie remove her bikini top, strut across the room in slow motion, and recline invitingly on a tiled bench, all to the strains of Ravel's "Bolero." For me, the movie will never get quite that good again. Soon after, someone discovers that the door has been locked from the outside and the steam is rising. In no time a claustrophobic Frank, who's blood is already up from Jessie's teasing performance and mocking derision, goes bonkers and gets violent, and must be dealt with.

In quick succession each of the other prisoners starts to lose it big time. The weird thing about this is that we never get the impression that very much time has passed at all, or that the rising heat is particularly life-threatening. So the fact that all of these people just freak out in no time flat seems a bit extreme. I'd hate to see what would happen if they got stuck in an elevator--they'd probably start eating each other.

A couple of their escape attempts are pretty cool, especially when Grant manages to break the little window in the door and Jessie pokes her head out to see what's what. Mainly, though, the chaos erupts too soon and escalates at an unbelievable rate until we have people killing each other like wild animals or committing suicide in utter despair after what only seems to us like a couple of hours in the steamroom. Martinez has designed all of these scenes to have a washed-out yellowish hue and uses lots of slow-motion, dissolves, montages, and other effects to distance us from what's going on, as though we're watching somebody's hazy fever dream.

Meanwhile, awesomely cool method actor Armand Assante arrives at the newspaper office as Detective Mancini and makes the movie somewhat more enjoyable for us Armand Assante fans. Mancini hauls the uncooperative Pettis into the interrogation room down at the station and they face each other across a table for much of the rest of the movie. Their conversation is mostly a shaggy-dog story intercut with scenes of the unfortunate hostages, giving Assante a chance to be cool and Kilmer a chance to audition for the role of the Joker in the next Batman movie. I'll eat my terrycloth bathrobe if his performance here isn't influenced by Heath Ledger's in THE DARK KNIGHT, only without the crazed laughter or any of that demented brilliance. I like Kilmer a lot when he's being Doc Holliday, Inish Scull, the guy from HEAT, or even, yes, Batman, but in this movie he just isn't on.

The DVD is letterboxed with Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. There are no extras.

THE CHAOS EXPERIMENT is an okay time-waster that isn't horrible but, aside from that rather stimulating "Bolero" scene, isn't particularly good, either. The presence of three of my favorite actors--Assante, Roberts, and Kilmer--is a definite plus, although even they can't do much to liven up this unbelievable and often dull story. A last-minute attempt at a twist ending sends the movie off with a groan.

THE CHAOS EXPERIMENT -- DVD Review by Porfle

STREETS OF BLOOD -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 6/30/09

 

"Are we even cops anymore?"
"We're past that, brother."

Val Kilmer's character, Det. Andy Devereaux, is referring to the fact that he and his fellow cops in STREETS OF BLOOD (2009) have ventured far beyond the bounds of acceptable police procedure in their quest to stem the rising tide of drug-related crime in the hurricane-ravaged Big Easy. 

 But seeing that Kilmer, Sharon Stone, and Michael Biehn are appearing in this tacky, low-grade potboiler, the question he's answering might as well have been "Are we even movie stars anymore?"

Somehow, though, once I got past the possibility that this was going to be a classy, top-notch movie and lowered my expectations accordingly, I actually started to enjoy it. It's fast-moving, action-packed, and rather colorful in its depiction of the dark underbelly of New Orleans, with plenty of sleazy sex and violence to give it that neo-grindhouse appeal. Big names aside, it's not all that different from the cheap, direct-to-video action flicks I used to rent from hole-in-the-wall video stores back in the 80s.

Val Kilmer is an actor I like in just about anything, so I cut him some slack here even though he isn't all that successful at making me think he's from anywhere near Louisiana. As Andy Devereaux, a hardboiled narc trying to live up to his hero-cop father's legacy, he's a true blue cop even though he'll bend the hell out of the rules to make a bust.  

Curtis "Fifty Cent" Jackson plays his partner, Stan, a family man having trouble making ends meet and feeling the temptation to pocket some of the stacks of drug money they come across. Jackson seems more comfortable playing gangstas than cops, but he does a pretty good job here even though he could still use a few more acting lessons.

Andy and Stan often butt heads with Pepe (Jose Pablo Cantillo) and Barney (Brian Presley), two really out-of-control cops who like to kill bad guys, take their cash, do their drugs, and screw their girlfriends. But the two disparate duos find themselves working together when FBI agent Brown (Michael Biehn) launches an investigation that threatens to bring them all down just as they're starting to close in on the biggest drug gang in the city, the Latin Kings, run by a stone cold killer named Chamorro (Luis Rolon).

While all this is going on, a police psychologist named Nina (Sharon Stone) is conducting interviews with the main cops in order to find out why they have such a penchant for extreme violence, including Andy's four lethal shootings in three years ("I'm a good shot," he tells her). Stone comes off like a cross between Daisy Duke on 'ludes and a slow-drawlin' Mae West, with one of the worst southern accents in film history--I live about sixty miles from where this was filmed, and I don't think I've ever met anyone who talks like her. What, did she base her entire performance on a "Deputy Dawg" cartoon she saw when she was a kid? Anyway, she's just plain awful here, but it's kinda funny so that might actually be a plus.

The action scenes are somewhat artlessly staged, the photography looks like the cameramen were hopping around barefoot on a hot sidewalk, and the editing is less than exquisite. Those minor quibbles aside, however, the movie still manages to be exciting and fun to watch. Some scenes even generate a certain raw power, such as Kilmer's blow-up during an interrogation scene with Biehn and a trigger-happy exchange between Pepe and Barney and a pimpin' lowlife named Ray Delacroix (Davi Jay) who turns out to be working with the DEA. Several of the snappy dialogue scenes crackle with tension. Jose Pablo Cantillo is a standout as Pepe, and Biehn, as usual, turns in a solid performance. The post-Katrina flood sequence is atmospheric, while good use is made of locations in and around the city of Shreveport.

The DVD from Anchor Bay is bonus-less except for the film's trailer and English subtitles for the hard-of-hearing. The 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen image and Dolby Surround 5.1 are good.

Technically, STREETS OF BLOOD is a pretty slapdash affair, but that didn't keep me from enjoying it. I even watched it again and liked it better the second time because I knew what to expect and what not to expect. Even when the surprise ending was entirely unbelievable, I just accepted it as part of the film's cheapo charm. And when it was over, I almost felt like I needed to rewind the tape, pop it out of the VCR, and get it back to the mom-and-pop video store where I rented it in time to avoid a late fee. After dubbing a copy, of course.

STREETS OF BLOOD -- DVD Review by Porfle

How "Tombstone" Should Have Ended (video)

 

"Tombstone" is pretty much the perfect Western...right?

Well, maybe and maybe not. Because after much extensive research and development... 

...we have come up with a way to actually improve the ending of this classic. 

Video by Porfle Popnecker. I neither own nor claim any rights to this material.  Just having some fun with it. Thanks for watching!

How "Tombstone" Should Have Ended (video)

THE SPOILS OF BABYLON -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 2/29/16

 

Remember when one of the big, big deals on primetime TV was the mini-series?  Back when they first started, we were captivated by these serialized soap-opera-esque epics, these melodramatic cheesefests in which we could wallow in kitsch and gorge ourselves on the exaggerated antics of the immoral upper crust. 

Names like "Rich Man, Poor Man", "The Winds of War", "The Thorn Birds", and "North and South"--as well as such weekly night-time soaps as "Dallas", "Dynasty", and "Falcon Crest"--still have the power to make us cringe as we recall the eye-rolling acting and sudsy storylines that assailed us once upon a time.

Now, stepping up to give such efforts their satirical due in a world of SCARY MOVIE and other such genre-deflating spoofs is IFC's mock mini-series THE SPOILS OF BABYLON (2014).  This six-episode saga is to its target genre what "Police Squad!" was to cop shows and "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" was to regular soap operas, except for one key factor--it isn't all that funny.

In fact, this story of the Morehouse family--oil-rich patriarch Jonas Morehouse (Tim Robbins), ambitious daughter Cynthia (Kristen Wiig), and rebellious stepson Devon (Tobey Maguire), whom they found wandering along a dusty Texas road as a child--tries so hard to be deadpan funny while ladling on its curdled veneer of pseudo-sophistication that it tends toward the turgid. 

One problem is that some of the leads aren't all that adept at this kind of comedy.  Tobey Maguire, in particular, is out of his element doing straight-faced satire, especially when his character runs away from home and goes through a beatnik phase (this episode, done up like a black-and-white art film, is so far removed from the show's original premise that it seems to belong in a different series altogether). 

Tim Robbins manages some laughs as Jonas, the millionaire with the heart of a humanitarian, but familiar castmembers such as Jessica Alba and Val Kilmer seem out of place.  Kristen Wiig of "Saturday Night Live" and the first season of "The Joe Schmo Show" (I loved her as "Dr. Pat") does the best she can with the "Cynthia" character as she takes over the Morehouse empire and becomes the archetypal evil, scheming villainess who seethes with a forbidden and ultimately doomed love for stepbrother Devon. 

 

Strangely enough, it's a grown-up Haley Joel Osment (THE SIXTH SENSE, FORREST GUMP) who comes off best as Cynthia's even-more-evil son Winston, who's so evil that he plans to sell a nuclear device to a terrorist dictator.  Osment is a hoot as he inhabits this role to its fullest and gives THE SPOILS OF BABYLON many of its more watchable moments.  Elsewhere in the cast, SNL alums David Spade and Molly Shannon show up for brief cameos (Spade's character is named "Joseph Soil").

Bookending each episode are introductory segments by the show's ostensible author, Eric Jonrosh (Will Ferrell, straining to be funny), a bloated, pretentious blowhard along the lines of the later Orson Welles. 

Jonrosh identifies himself as "Author, Producer, Actor, Writer, Director, Raconteur, Bon Vivant, Legend, Fabulist, Birdwatcher" and boasts of how his magnum opus, which he wrote, produced, directed, financed, and guest-starred in, was done on 93MM film using a process known as "Breath-Take-O-Scope."

The DVD from Anchor Bay is in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen with Dolby 5.1 sound and subtitles in English and Spanish.  There are no extras.

Mildly amusing at times, THE SPOILS OF BABYLON tries everything including doubletalk dialogue, surrealism (Devon's new wife, Lady Anna, is played by an actual storefront mannequin), and sketch-level satire in the vein of "Mr. Show."  To say that the constant throwaway gags and one-liners have a 50/50 success rate would be generous.

THE SPOILS OF BABYLON -- DVD Review by Porfle