Forget ‘Genisys’; we need ‘Terminator: Exodus’

By all rights, “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” should have been the end of the line. The machine apocalypse had been averted, the loop in time had been closed and the audience was left, quite unexpectedly, with a happy ending.

But if there’s one thing the Hollywood studios hate more than reasonable copyright laws, it’s happy endings. Leaving the audience wanting more is the same as leaving money on the table, and that just won’t do. So we got seven “Saw” movies in as many years. Hollywood will dish it out until you’re sick of it, and then some.

That’s why, despite the fact “Terminator 2” left no room for a sequel, 2003 brought us director Jonathan Mostow’s “Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,” which was all about that thing “Terminator 2” prevented happening. And that was just where the trouble started.

You might think Arnold Schwarzenegger taking time away to play the Governator of California would spare us yet another unnecessary “Terminator” installment, but you’d be wrong. The franchise hit its lowest point yet in 2009 with “Terminator: Salvation,” directed by “Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle’s” McG and starring “Avatar’s” charisma-challenged leading man Sam Worthington at the height of his inexplicable rise to fame.

With Schwarzenegger back to making movies, yet another “Terminator” sequel was inevitable. So we now have “Terminator: Genisys,” directed by Alan Taylor, whose other credits include “Game of Thrones” and Marvel’s most disappointing movie to date, “Thor: The Dark World.”

The good news is “Terminator: Genisys” is better than its two immediate predecessors. The bad news is that’s still not nearly good enough to justify its existence.

“Genisys” starts with the events leading up to James Cameron’s original “The Terminator.” That means we get to see John Conner (Jason Clarke) send his father Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back in time to save his mother Sarah Conner (“Game of Thrones’ ” Emilia Clarke) from Schwarzenegger’s T-800 so that John can be born and lead humanity to victory over the machines.

Only this time when Reese arrives in 1984 Los Angeles, he doesn’t find the past we know. Instead he finds a Sarah who is prepared for both him and the T-800, as well as a second T-800 that was sent back to an even earlier point in time and programmed to protect Sarah. And that’s before the shape-shifting T-1000 (Byung-hun Lee) from “Terminator 2” arrives — 11 years ahead of schedule.

It’s a premise that requires a lot of mostly nonsensical plot exposition. Unfortunately, there are few things more awkward than Schwarzenegger portraying a robot tasked by the script with explaining quantum physics and temporal paradoxes. Such things are better left to eccentric Time Lords.

Speaking of which, Matt Smith (“Doctor Who”) has what amounts to a cameo, no doubt meant to set up a larger role for his character in future unnecessary sequels.

Basically, humans and Terminators have jumped through time so many times they’ve managed to break time itself, which is as good a metaphor as any for what all this time hopping has done to the “Terminator” franchise. In other hands, “Terminator: Genisys” could have been a sly, tongue-in-cheek commentary on Hollywood’s financial dependence on sequels and remakes, always repeating itself with minor variations. But screenwriters Patrick Lussier and Laeta Kalogridis play it all depressingly straight, littering their script with callbacks to the other “Terminator” entries without a hint of irony.

The result is “Terminator: Genisys” plays like a greatest hits album, only the hits are all performed by cover bands. We’ve heard them before, and they were better the first time. Nothing in “Genisys” tops “Terminator 2’s” stunts, while Clarke and Courtney have the impossible task of following in the footsteps of Linda Hamilton and Michael Biehn, and doing so with inferior material.

The lesson here is if time travel ever is invented, it’s probably too dangerous to use. But if we do use it, we should send someone to the past to stop all these unnecessary “Terminator” sequels. With any luck, the Terminator won’t be back.

Mad Max goes to Frogtown

With its minimal plot and intricately staged mayhem, George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road” is an action movie made into a Las Vegas hotel’s resident show. Think of it as Cirque du Apocalypse.

Cars, motorcycles and tanker trucks — all outfitted for war — spin, jump and collide as they speed across a landscape rendered cinematic by nuclear holocaust. This goes on for roughly two hours.

Miller’s return to the world he last visited in 1985’s “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome” is a feature-length car chase executed with uncommon visual flair. At age 70, Miller retains his sense of style.

Also, an estimated budget of $150 million will buy you a lot of crashes and explosions.

The lavish praise most critics have heaped upon “Fury Road” is understandable, as is the moviegoing public’s relative indifference. Any action movie that isn’t in the style of Michael Bay’s poorly shot, badly edited and generally incoherent mode of filmmaking is a welcome respite. Critics have rewarded Miller accordingly, with a 98 percent fresh score on the Rotten Tomatoes meter.

Most moviegoers, however, seem content with the usual Bayhem, and they aren’t much interested in a film franchise that went dormant before most of them were born.

That doesn’t bode well for those of us who’d rather Hollywood bankroll a better class of action movie, which is what “Mad Max: Fury Road” is — a better class of action movie.

It isn’t just that Miller is a better action director than virtually anyone else handed a $150 million budget nowadays. It’s that his deceptively simple story leaves us with a lot of ideas to unpack.

Max, played by Tom Hardy, is a supporting character in his own film. With his story already told in the three previous installments starring Mel Gibson, Max is now our entry point for other characters’ stories. In “Fury Road,” those other characters are Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa and the women she is helping to escape lives as sex slaves and broodmares to monstrous cult leader Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne).

“Fury Road” will seem familiar to aficionados of post-apocalyptic cinema. The film’s plot is a reworking of 1987’s “Hell Comes to Frogtown,” starring pro wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper (“They Live”). Both movies feature a reluctant hero forced by circumstance to help women escape from a hideous mutant’s harem, and both wear their sexual politics on their sleeves.

While “Hell Comes to Frogtown” plays the war between the sexes for laughs, “Fury Road” plays it straight, which can be jarring for a movie in which so much else is deliberately absurd.

Immortan Joe and his followers are cartoon characters. Wearing a face mask that renders his speech a bellowing mumble, Immortan Joe might well be a parody of Hardy’s Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises.” Joe and his “war pups” ride into battle spurred on by thundering drums and a screaming electric guitar — a leather-and-chains update of the fife and snare that led 18th century armies into battle. It’s a send-up of hyper-masculinity, contrasted with the earnest feminism of Furiosa and the other escapees.

“Fury Road’s” feminism is unavoidable. It’s in the title and in Furiosa’s name, which both recall the Furies of Greek myth — female spirits of vengeance.

Yet the feminism of “Fury Road” isn’t the feminism currently in fashion in academia or at websites such as Jezebel. “Fury Road” takes as given innate differences between men and woman that can’t be explained by alleged patriarchal social conditioning. In “Fury Road,” men are naturally more aggressive and women naturally more nurturing. Furiosa has shaved her head and become more physically masculine to survive, but she seeks to escape to the matriarchal paradise of her childhood, where women safeguard seeds and hope to restore life to the barren wasteland.

The movie’s climax then adds another wrinkle. Matriarchy ends up being just as much an illusion as patriarchy. In the end, men and women work together, and women redeem the civilization men have already started to rebuild from the rubble of the one they destroyed.

Action movies this simple yet this layered are rare. “Fury Road” is a film to be emulated, not a road less traveled.

Miyazaki rises for his final bow

An apocryphal story about Wernher von Braun claims that when the first of his V-2s struck London, the pioneering German rocket scientist said to his colleagues, “The rocket worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet.”

Whether true or not, two things are not in doubt. The first is the strength of von Braun’s obsession with building rockets that one day could reach the stars. The second is the price others — mostly civilians — paid for his wartime work. Americans may be forgiving, given that von Braun helped us win the space race. But Londoners who survived the Nazis’ hundreds of V-2s are probably less inclined to forgive and forget.

Von Braun comes to mind when watching “The Wind Rises” the final film — assuming his latest pledge of retirement sticks — of 74-year-old Oscar-winning animator Hayao Miyazaki (“Spirited Away”). 

“The Wind Rises” (Blu-ray and DVD) is a fictionalized biography of aircraft designer Jiro Horikoshi (1903-1982), who dreamed of making beautiful aircraft and who, like von Braun, saw his dreams perverted by war. The film follows Horikoshi from his youth, surviving the great earthquake of 1923, through marriage and on through World War II.

Horikoshi’s planes were marvels of design. When introduced, his Mitsubishi A6M Zero was unmatched in the skies above the Pacific. It was just made for the wrong purpose.

The dreamer whose dreams become the stuff of others’ nightmares is just the sort of dramatic tension that moves Miyazaki to do his best work. In his earlier movies, Miyazaki often focused on the tension between civilization and the natural world, between urban and rural. Such themes run beneath the surface of Miyazaki’s most beloved film, “My Neighbor Totoro,” and swell to the fore in his more mature work, such as “Princess Mononoke.”

In “Princess Mononoke,” Miyazaki’s heart clearly is with nature and the magical creatures lurking in its shadows. Yet he is aware enough and honest enough to show the smoke-belching factories of the city helping the poor and the outcast better their lives. Life is trade-offs.

In his more recent works, Miyazaki has turned from questions of ecology to matters of war and peace. A product of Japan’s postwar pacifism, Miyazaki now finds himself in a Japan more willing to use its military than at any time since World War II, and not just for self defense but for multinational operations abroad.

For Miyazaki, who was born in 1941, this must seem the slippery slope leading back to the Imperial Japan that ended in cities filled with death and ruin. One wonders if that’s why he finds it so difficult to stay retired. It’s not just his art calling to him, but fear of what Japan could again become. Miyazaki has spoken out against attempts to remove the anti-war Article 9 of Japan’s constitution.

In Miyazaki’s “Howl’s Moving Castle,” based on a novel by Diana Wynne Jones, the hero, Howl, is a magician who is, to put it bluntly, a draft dodger, going from place to place in his moving castle to avoid being caught up in other people’s wars.

In “The Wind Rises’ ” Horikoshi, Miyazaki finds a kindred spirit — an artist and a dreamer. Some of the most beautiful scenes in “The Wind Rises” — a film full of gorgeous images —  take place in Horikoshi’s dreams, where he meets his idol, Italian airplane designer Giovanni Caproni, who also saw the planes he designed sent off to war, most never to return.

Disney’s English-language dubbing, as usual, takes advantage of name actors, some of whom seem stiff behind the microphone. But there are a few pleasant surprises, Stanley Tucci’s Caproni among them. But it’s German director Werner Herzog as a German pacifist who steals the show.

Like all of Miyazaki’s works, “The Wind Rises” is a visual symphony, where the silence between the notes is as important as the notes themselves. While not his greatest film, it is a great film and a fitting capstone to a career touched by genius.

Artificial intelligence: threat or menace?

The great thing about the British tabloids is they never let a strict adherence to the truth get in the way of a headline. Take this one from The Daily Mail: "Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk sign open letter warning of a robot uprising." Pretty ominous, huh?

Artificial intelligence has loomed as a threat to humanity ever since Victor Frankenstein reanimated his first corpse. A.I. dooms us all, whether on Earth ("Terminator" and its sequels) or out in space ("Battlestar Galactica"). If we're lucky, we'll just end up ruled by a despotic supercomputer, as in Joseph Sargent's 1970 thriller "Colossus: The Forbin Project." If we're not lucky — boom.

Two movies now in theaters take different approaches to the A.I. menace. In "Avengers: Age of Ultron," A.I. is the latest threat confronting Marvel's cinematic superheroes. "Ex Machina," meanwhile, confronts us with just how thin the line between intelligence and artificial intelligence really is.

The curious thing about Marvel's movies is they're action movies where the action is typically the least interesting part. The Shaw Brothers, Marvel is not. And "Avengers: Age of Ultron" has a lot of action. It starts with a raid on a Hydra base — Hydra being the bad guys from the Captain America movies and TV's "Agents of SHIELD" — and ends, like the first "Avengers" movie, with a huge battle involving our heroes vs. an army of disposable drones. And no, that's not a metaphor for the United States' preferred form of modern warfare. In his second outing for Marvel, Joss Whedon still directs action scenes as if they bore him, and they probably do. They're just this thing he has to do because they're expected, and his disinterest is contagious.

The one action set piece that isn't a snooze is the much-promoted heavyweight bout between the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo's CGI stand-in) and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) wearing his just-for-the-occasion "Hulkbuster" Iron Man suit. One-on-one combat, punctuated by clever quips, beats Michael Bay-style melees every time.

The big bad is an insane robot named Ultron, voiced with malevolent glee by James Spader. Spader needs only his voice to rank with Tom Hiddleston's Loki among Marvel's best villains.

One of Stark's science projects gone awry, Ultron is supposed to protect humanity. Then Ultron decides the best way to do that is by making humanity evolve, and nothing speeds along evolution better than a global extinction event. Oops.

It makes one long for the more modest aims of Gene Hackman's Lex Luthor, plotting to dump California's coastline into the Pacific to further a real estate scheme.

Whedon, who also wrote the script, is on more comfortable turf dealing with characters, and "Age of Ultron" gives him plenty. Joining the previous film's team are "Godzilla's" Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen as Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, while Paul Bettany, Stark's helpful A.I. Jarvis in four earlier movies, finally shows up in the flesh as the Vision.

The verbal sparring between Stark, Captain America (Chris Evans) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth), along with the budding romance between Ruffalo's Banner and Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow, keep lively what otherwise, like "Iron Man 2," feels more like a warm-up than the main act.

"Ex Machina" is definitely a main act, and it's a brilliant one. Screenwriter Alex Garland ("28 Days Later") steps behind the camera for an impressive directorial debut.

Billionaire tech mogul Nathan (Oscar Isaac) invites one of his programmers, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), to his secluded home for an experiment. The experiment is to test whether Nathan's android Ava (Alicia Vikander) has achieved artificial intelligence. But when Ava tells Caleb that Nathan cannot be trusted, it kicks off a battle of wits that leaves us to ponder not only what it means to be human, but whether the real danger of artificial intelligence isn't a lack of humanity, but too much of it.

Garland has crafted a first-class sci-fi thriller, with so many twists and red herrings that the ones you see blind you to the ones you don't.

"Ex Machina" may be the smaller film about A.I., but it leaves the bigger impression.

'The Babadook' doesn't live up to the hype

"The Babadook" arrives on home video riding an outsized wave of hype. This small, Australian movie, partly funded via a Kickstarter campaign, has been dubbed the next big thing in horror. "Exorcist" director William Friedkin has proclaimed it even scarier than his seminal work.

That leaves one to wonder: When was the last time Friedkin saw "The Exorcist," anyway?

As a depiction of a family's trauma, "The Babadook" almost works, but as a horror movie it's a major letdown.

Arriving simultaneously on Blu-ray, DVD and Netflix streaming, "The Babadook" is another spin on that tried and true horror trope, the haunted object. In this case, the object is a children's pop-up book with no author and no publication information, just a title — "The Babadook."

Single mother Amelia (Essie Davis of"Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries") is surrounded by death. She works in a nursing home, tending to the aged and running their weekly bingo game, not that many of them seem to notice. Most of her charges have already passed on, mentally if not physically. It's the sort of work that can sap the life out of you, if you're not careful.

At the end of the day, Amelia comes home to her 6-year-old son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman). And Samuel, as they say, is a handful. He is always in trouble at school, where the administrators are inclined to drug him, ship him off to therapy, or preferably both.

Samuel is also without a male role model, his dad having died in an auto accident while driving Amelia to the hospital to give birth to him. So, if you think Amelia sees in Samuel a subconscious reminder of her husband's death, you got it in one.

Precocious but over-imaginative, Samuel insists his mother check the closet and peek under the bed for monsters each night. He constructs "Home Alone"-style booby traps for any boogeymen she might miss. You can bet that's the sort of detail that will be important later.

After yet another parent/teacher conference, Amelia yanks Samuel out of class until she can find a school that will treat him as something more than a problem to be managed. In the meantime, mother and son have an opportunity for quality time at home. This cannot possibly go wrong.

One night, Samuel asks to pick the book for his nightly bedtime story, and he picks one Amelia has never seen before. It's "The Babadook," and it's about a boogeyman.

There's little here we haven't seen before. The Babadook comes to life to torment Samuel and Amelia, the book returns no matter how many times Amelia disposes of it, the usual stuff.

While the plot isn't compelling, the family dynamics are. One need not be Sigmund Freud to see the Babadook as representing Amelia's suppressed resentments, and the ambivalent way the movie deals with them is a nice surprise. Without giving it away, the ending is the one thing about "The Babadook" that works beautifully. It's just that getting there is a slog.

Writer/director Jennifer Kent, helming her first feature, doesn't yet have the knack for horror. "The Babadook" is lacking in both atmosphere and suspense. It doesn't help that the book within the movie telegraphs almost every potential fright. Even the most experienced horror directors have trouble ginning up terror when the audience knows what's coming next.

Making matters worse, it's hard to care about either Amelia or Samuel. Both are shrill and unlikable, although not without cause. And while that may work in a different context, here it's a nearly fatal flaw. We should care whether Amelia and Samuel live or die, but we don't. There's only so much high-pitched screaming you can endure before you want it silenced. As most of Kent's screen credits are for acting, I can only guess these are the performances she wanted.

"The Babadook" is not a total loss. The ending becomes more unsettling the more you think about it, and the little nod to Italian horror director Mario Bava shows Kent's heart is in the right place. With more experience, she probably has a good horror movie in her. "The Babadook" just isn't it.

Culture Shock 04.23.15: Documentary digs up Atari's past

Before Xbox, PlayStation and Wii, there was Atari, once America's dominant video game maker.

Today, Atari is a logo on retro-styled T-shirts but little else, and Atari's rise and fall are the subjects of Zak Penn's documentary "Atari: Game Over," now streaming on Netflix.

Full disclosure: The only home video game console I've ever owned is the Atari 2600, released in 1977. My time as a gamer ended around 1983. But for a while, I was obsessed: playing video games, reading magazines about video games, calling telephone hot lines to get the latest news and release dates for video games — you name it.

Two of my favorite Atari 2600 games, "Yar's Revenge" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark," were designed by the same programmer, Howard Scott Warshaw. When I finally beat "Raiders," I chalked it up as a significant accomplishment. Warshaw's games were tough but fair. Little did I — or anyone else  — suspect that Warshaw and his next game were destined to become scapegoats for the collapse of not only Atari but the entire first wave of home video gaming.

Warshaw's next game was "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial," based on the movie, obviously. Rushed into stores for Christmas 1982, "E.T." sold roughly 1.5 million units, but it failed to meet Atari's stratospheric expectations. Millions more cartridges remained unsold.

In 1983, the home video game market crashed, doing in Atari and most of its rivals. "E.T.," which would go on to earn an unfair reputation as the "worst video game ever," took a lot of the blame. And from that, an urban legend arose: that Atari, in the dead of night, buried its millions of unsold "E.T." cartridges in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

The landfill legend is the hook for Penn's documentary. Penn introduces us to Joe Lewandowski, waste disposal expert and amateur archaeologist. Lewandowski believes the legend is true, and he has a good idea where in the landfill the lost "E.T." games are buried.

So the question is, is this "Raiders of the Lost Ark" with a prize waiting at the end, or is this Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone's "vault" and finding only a couple of broken bottles?

While large earth movers excavate a trash heap in search of Atari's shame, Penn takes us back to the glory days of Atari, interviewing Warshaw and company executives. On the campus of what was once Atari's headquarters, Warshaw describes a high-tech Shangri-La. Ideas and pot smoke were heavy in the air, dress codes were lax and met sales quotas were rewarded with keggers. Atari was every Silicon Valley stereotype turned up to 11.

The business side of the story is the most interesting and deserves more time and attention than Penn devotes. He digs deep into the New Mexico desert, but he barely scratches the surface of the 1980s home console bust. Going by Penn's account, one would think Atari existed in a vacuum. He gives us no hint of the other consoles on the market at the time, such as ColecoVision, Intellivision and Atari's designated 2600 successor, the Atari 5200. The crash of 1983 left a dark age of video gaming, the scale of which Penn loses with his myopic focus on the 2600. For two years, it seemed as if home video games had been just a fad. Then the Nintendo Entertainment System arrived in the U.S., and America has been a nation of gamers ever since.

Penn is far more interested in the New Mexico dig, and that's no surprise. He previously directed a mockumentary about another legend, "Incident at Loch Ness," aided and abetted by — of all people — Werner Herzog. Unfortunately, the off-putting persona Penn showcased in "Incident" is still on display. He interrupts the workers digging in the landfill to ask stupid questions just so he can film their incredulous responses. Whether staged or real, it adds nothing but irritation.

Yet for all the missteps and wasted opportunities, "Atari: Game Over" has its moments. Warshaw is a fascinating figure who has never gotten his due, and we get to watch as he comes to terms with seeing his past unearthed in a landfill. It's a powerful scene, and one that deserves a better movie.

Culture Shock 04.09.15: 'It Follows' is relentlessly suspenseful

It's rare in this era of blockbusters and Oscar pretenders, but sometimes a movie can still sneak up and surprise you. "It Follows" does exactly that.

"It Follows" is a nearly flawless horror movie. But more, it's the best movie of 2015 thus far. With his second feature, writer/director David Robert Mitchell ("The Myth of the American Sleepover") has made what likely will be a career-defining film. "It Follows" is relentlessly suspenseful, even for jaded horror fans. You're relieved when the end credits roll, but you're soon ready to see it again. "It Follows" is that good. It hooks us with its opening scene — a single long take of a girl who appears to be running from nothing — and never lets go.

There's a bit of John Carpenter's "Halloween" in its DNA. The Carpenter vibe comes through especially in Mike Gioulakis' fluid cinematography and the unnerving electronic score by Rich Vreeland (credited as Disasterpeace).

Yet "It Follows" is not another winking, nostalgia-fueled love letter to horror flicks of decades past. Drew Goddard's "Cabin in the Woods" has taken that approach as far as it can go — for now, anyway. Instead, "It Follows" plays it straight, and the result is refreshingly modern.

What most sets "It Follows" apart is the extent to which Mitchell leaves events and motivations open to interpretation. We piece together the mystery just as his characters do. Mitchell's confidence in his audience makes the experience more rewarding and, strangely, more unsettling.

Mitchell starts with a clichéd premise and makes it seem new. A group of young friends find themselves stalked by a supernatural force passed around through sex. One could describe most "Friday the 13th" movies the same way. But from there, Mitchell plays off the greatest fears of youth, which are anything but supernatural: isolation and rejection.

Jay (Maika Monroe) is a pretty college student whose date with the new guy in the neighborhood (Jake Weary) goes wrong when he tells her he's given her a curse: a creature only she can see. The creature can appear to her either as a stranger or as someone she knows. Regardless, it will pursue her as far and as long as it takes to kill her — unless she passes it on by having sex with someone else. No matter how much distance she puts between herself and the monster, it will always follow her.

Jay turns to her sister and friends for help, and while they are naturally skeptical, they become her Scooby gang, helping her stay one step ahead of the creature while trying to find a permanent solution, if there is one to be found.

Mitchell has an ear for how teens speak. Jay and her friends sound like real young people, not hip thirty-somethings steeped in pop trivia and skilled in snarky comebacks. It helps, too, that they're played by a talented cast of relative unknowns, the most familiar of whom is Keir Gilchrist ("United States of Tara") as Paul, the awkward guy nursing an unrequited crush on Jay. (In this case, the "friend zone" is the safest place to be.) Mitchell's naturalistic approach makes the characters' predicament seem more real, too, which ratchets up the tension even more.

Monroe delivers a star-making performance. She hits all the high notes that come with being a "scream queen" then gives Jay a depth that pulls us close and makes us feel for her. By the time she considers passing the curse to an unsuspecting stranger, we're invested. We sympathize even if we don't approve because we suspect we'd act similarly.

Mitchell shot "It Follows" in the hollowed-out ruins of post-industrial Detroit. Parents, the police and other authority figures are mostly absent. Jay and her friends can stay on their folks' health insurance until they're 26, but otherwise they're on their own. No one is looking out for them.

It happens to everyone. Eventually, you have to grow up and face the world — a world that includes bad sex, bad decisions and the realization death is slowly creeping up on you. One day you're young and invincible, the next you're an adult and everything aches. The real horror is knowing it's coming.

Culture Shock 03.19.15: 'Vampire's Kiss' brings us peak Nicolas Cage

Nicolas Cage in "Vampire's Kiss."

If you've ever seen a YouTube montage of Nicolas Cage's most over-the-top performances, you've already seen many of the choice cuts from "Vampire's Kiss," Cage's 1988 dark comedy directed by Robert Bierman and written by Joseph Minion.

Stripped from its context, Cage's performance is unreal. In context, it's almost equally so.

With any other actor in the lead role, Bierman and Minion's film likely would be, at best, forgettable or, at worst, a confused misfire. With Cage at his most bug-eyed and manic, "Vampire's Kiss" is impossible to turn off. Like the vampires of myth, it's almost hypnotic.

Shout Factory now brings "Vampire's Kiss" to Blu-ray as part of a comic horror double feature, paired with Neil Jordan's 1988 supernatural rom-com "High Spirits," starring the equally '80s pairing of Steve Guttenberg and Daryl Hannah.

In "Vampire's Kiss," Cage plays Peter Loew, a womanizing publishing executive who spends his nights cruising clubs and his afternoons confessing his feelings of ennui to his therapist (Elizabeth Ashley). In between he spends most of his time at the office making life miserable for his put-upon secretary, Alva ("The Running Man's" Maria Conchita Alonso).

During one night of carousing, Peter picks up a gorgeous woman named Rachel (Jennifer Beals of "Flashdance") who, in the middle of their passionate encounter, bites him on the neck.

From there, Peter, who already was an eccentric, becomes more and more unhinged as he comes to the conclusion that he is turning into a vampire.

At first we think Rachel might really be a vampire and Peter might really be her victim, slowly transforming into a creature of the night. But it's soon clear all this is Peter's delusion and he is descending into madness. And madness is where Cage excels.

In Victorian vampire literature, such as Bram Stoker's "Dracula" and Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla," vampirism represents a release from one's inhibitions. The proper Victorian heroines of Stoker's novel become depraved temptresses after they're bitten by Dracula. In "Carmilla," virginal women succumb to lesbianism. Vampirism in 19th century literature is, more than anything else, an assault on propriety.

When we meet Peter, he's already a jerk and more than a little odd. Even before the  "transformation," Cage gives Peter a strange, unplaceable accent. But after Rachel bites him, Peter ascends to a whole new level of weird. Cage breaks free of his inhibitions and any sense of propriety, and the audience comes out the winner.

Cage's Peter rants, he moans, he twitches — all the while, his mood swings between existential despair and a kind of malevolent glee. When the "vampirized" Peter really gets his freak on, he resembles a comic version of Max Schreck's ratlike Count Orlok in the 1922 version of "Nosferatu." We laugh at Peter, but we wouldn't want to run into him alone in a dark alley.

Vampires in folk tales display obsessive behavior, and so does Peter. He becomes obsessed with a client's contract, which has disappeared from the office files. The notion that something could simply be misfiled makes no sense to him: You put the contract in the file where it belongs. Simple, right?

The missing contract leads to two of Cage's most delirious rants, one to Peter's therapist and the other to Alva, who by this time has become the primary target of Peter's now overt hostility.

Alonso is Cage's perfect foil. Her Alva is every bit as grounded as his Peter is extravagant. Seen from her point of view, "Vampire's Kiss" isn't a dark comedy at all, but a straight-up horror movie about a woman terrorized by a boss whose behavior becomes increasingly erratic until he finally becomes a danger to her. Alva's perspective keeps us grounded, too, lest we buy into Peter's fantasy.

Cage's filmography is filled with off-the-wall roles, from Werner Herzog's "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans" to the 2006 remake of "The Wicker Man." But none of them is quite as outrageous as Cage is in "Vampire's Kiss." This is where we reach peak Nicolas Cage.

Culture Shock 03.12.15: 'Whiplash' is a horror story

A famous tale in jazz circles involves a young Charlie Parker screwing up during a performance with Count Basie Orchestra drummer Jo Jones and Jones becoming so incensed he throws a cymbal at him. In the more flamboyant versions of the story, Jones "nearly decapitates" the young saxophonist.

It is a transformative moment for Parker. Afterward, he practices. He hones his skills. A few years later, the legend of Charlie "Bird" Parker, one of the greatest sax players ever, is born.

It's a good, strong story, and one we hear repeated throughout writer/director Damien Chazelle's "Whiplash." Yet even within jazz, Bird's story is an outlier, a kind of origin myth.

Bird's story isn't Thelonious Monk's story nor John Coltrane's story nor Miles Davis' story.

Before long, we realize Bird's is the only story Chazelle knows, and "Whiplash," for all its virtuosity, is simply variations on a theme. Chazelle turns it into a campfire tale to frighten children.

One supposes Chazelle thinks he's making a movie about music, drive and the correct ratio of inspiration to perspiration needed to create an artistic genius. What he has made is something more primal — a monster movie for performing arts school students.

Watching "Whiplash" is an intense, even harrowing experience, insofar as watching any movie can be said to be "harrowing." It's an experience I'm happy to have had but not one I'm eager to repeat, and it all comes down to the monster that Chazelle and J.K. Simmons create, for which Simmons claimed a deserved Best Supporting Actor Oscar.

And there is no doubt Simmons' jazz instructor Terence Fletcher is a monster. He stalks his prey like a vampire, seduces with manufactured charm and sweet lies, then destroys. To say Simmons delivers a literally mesmerizing performance is only a minor abuse of the world "literally." There is a bit of Svengali here in both the Fletcher character and Simmons' portrayal.

Seen another way, Fletcher is an abusive spouse, although he never claims he will change or do better. He is too subtle for that. With a smile, a laugh and that Charlie Parker story, he lures his victims into giving him just one more chance without ever asking for it. It's seduction at its most insidious.

Fletcher's perfect mark arrives in the form of first-year student Andrew Neimann (Miles Teller), a green recruit with more ambition than sense, aspiring to be the next Buddy Rich and to avoid the fate of his father (Paul Reiser), a failed writer who has settled into a life of domesticated mediocrity.

Neimann's instrument of choice is the drums, and his quest to master jazz drumming reduces to more speed and greater technique. You can't get soul out of the drums the way a talented musician conjures the soul of a trumpet or sax or piano. The drums seem like a lark, or, at most, Neimann's all-too-blunt method of taking out his frustrations. That makes it all the more difficult to believe Neimann's motives are pure. Does he want to be a great drummer, or does he want just not to be his father? Fletcher probably senses what we do when he quizzes Neimann early on and learns no one else in Neimann's family has any musical inclinations. But for Fletcher's purposes, any motivation will do as long as it becomes an obsession. Taunting Neimann about his dad is just one of Fletcher's strategies. Fletcher doles out psychological and physical abuse so extreme it's impossible to believe it could fly under the radar today at any real fine arts school.

But we must remember: "Whiplash" is a fantasy, and the school is the monster's hunting ground.

One can't overstate what an imposing presence Simmons is. The 60-year-old actor makes Fletcher  all muscle and sinew, powered by rage. Neimann never stands a chance. Each time he seems to take initiative or notch a victory, Fletcher is there to end it. Even when we finally reach the Screenwriting 101 happy ending, we can't take it at face value.

Thanks to Simmons, Chazelle has made a great if hard-to-watch movie, just probably not the one he thought he was making. If there were still video stores, "Whiplash" would belong in the horror aisle.

Culture Shock 02.26.15: 'Predestination' raises bar for time travel

Hollywood has never done right by Robert A. Heinlein.

Heinlein (1907-1988) may have been the "dean of science fiction writers" and the first of science fiction's "grand masters," but you'd never know it from the movies based on his works. "Destination Moon" (1950), which Heinlein helped adapt, was the first science fiction movie to attempt some semblance of scientific accuracy, but that's about all it has going for it. "The Puppet Masters" (1994), with Donald Sutherland, is forgettable. And Paul Verhoeven's "Starship Troopers" (1997) is a misguided satire that fails on almost every level, especially as anything like a faithful adaptation of Heinlein's novel.

Leave it to the Aussies to get Heinlein right. Written and directed by German-born Australian filmmakers Michael and Peter Spierig ("Daybreakers"), "Predestination" is more than just the best Heinlein adaptation to date. It's arguably the best time travel movie to date, and it's certainly the best SF film of the past several years. Nearly flawless in execution, "Predestination" surpasses such lauded but flawed spectacles as "Interstellar" and "Gravity."

It's clichéd but true: "Predestination" is just too good, and probably too smart, for theatrical wide release in the U.S. But now, with the relentless hype of Hollywood's awards season finally subsided, this sleeper production arrives inconspicuously on Blu-ray and DVD.

"Predestination" is adapted — and expanded — from Heinlein's 1959 short story "All You Zombies," which thankfully has nothing to do with zombies (another played-out Hollywood favorite).

Ethan Hawke ("Boyhood") portrays a man identified in the credits as "The Barkeep." We know him to be a temporal agent — a time cop, charged with making sure history unfolds as it should.

But he's also a barkeep, and one day a man walks into his bar. It's the classic setup for a joke, only it isn't a joke. It does pack a heck of a punch line, though.

The man (Sarah Snook) was born with both male and female parts, and until giving birth to a baby girl, thought he — or, at the time, she — was a woman, if a somewhat atypical one, named Jane.

Jane has a rough childhood but grows up, as girls do, and even falls in love. Then the man she loves abandons her, and only then does she realize she is pregnant with his child.

After childbirth ruins her female parts, Jane transitions to a man, but being a father is no more in the cards than being a mother. A mysterious man slips into the hospital nursery and steals Jane's baby.

Robbed of both identity and daughter, the man who was Jane wants nothing more than revenge on the man who loved her and left her. And that's when the barkeep makes the man an offer.

That is probably the most misleading and incomplete plot synopsis I've ever written, because to tell you much more about "Predestination" would spoil the experience. I will say the story also involves time travel to four different periods and a hunt across the years to stop a terrorist known as the Fizzle Bomber. Yet even that doesn't tell you what the film is really about.

"Predestination" is a head-spinning experiment in paradox, and it's an ambitious, ambiguous meditation on what it means to be anybody. It's science fiction that does what only science fiction can do: lay bare the human condition. Yet it's also a twist-filled thriller that demands your full attention.

Working with a fraction of a Hollywood blockbuster's budget, the Spierig brothers have to be inventive. The result is some clever time travel effects that do more with off-screen leaf blowers than most directors do with millions of dollars in CGI.

Hawke gives an affecting performance as the time agent, but even his emotionally charged work is overshadowed by Snook's sensational turn in her dual-gendered role. We'll be seeing her in bigger films soon. Snook already has lined up a role in Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs biopic.

Whether or not the future is set in stone, "Predestination" seems primed to attain a cult following while other, higher profile SF movies slowly recede into obscurity.

Culture Shock 02.19.15: 'Fifty Shades,' 'Kingsman' both wish fulfillment

Dakota Johnson in "Fifty Shades of Grey."

Released the same weekend, "Fifty Shades of Grey" and "Kingsman: The Secret Service" look like a classic case of counter-programming. One is a romance — of sorts — that appeals to a largely female audience. The other is a violent, explosion-filled action movie taking dead aim at a young, male and testosterone-charged demographic.

It's like a TV network putting figure skating up against the competition's pro football broadcast.

But looks are deceiving, and "Fifty Shades" and "Kingsman" are as much alike as they are different.

Both movies are wish-fulfillment fantasies. To judge either as a straightforward drama is absurd. Critics realize as much when it comes to "Kingsman," but many do not when it comes to "Fifty Shades." It's an easy mistake to make, because "Fifty Shades of Grey" takes itself far too seriously, which is why it fails to satisfy the way "Kingsman" does.

"Fifty Shades" director Sam Taylor-Johnson has her hands tied. She must, above all else, please a core audience of "Fifty Shades of Grey" readers as well as the book's author, E.L. James, with whom Taylor-Johnson reportedly clashed, if the Hollywood trades are to be believed.

At times, we can see Taylor-Johnson struggling against her constraints. An early scene in which leading man Christian Grey (Jamie Dornan) surprises our heroine, Anastasia Steele (Dakota Johnson), in the hardware store where she works is funny and playful. It's also the one scene where Dornan and Johnson display any real chemistry. It gives us false hope. Otherwise, the only scene where either character feels like a real person is when Ana is partying with her friends — far away from Christian. (Naturally, Christian shows up to ruin the moment.)

If "Fifty Shades" is too serious to succeed as entertainment, it's too tame to succeed as erotica. The average HBO or Showtime series is more daring. The MPAA's habit of branding a commercially crippling NC-17 on virtually any movie that takes sex seriously guarantees that most movies — and especially wide-release films — won't. Anyone hoping "Fifty Shades" will rival Steven Shainberg's enchanting "Secretary" or Adrian Lyne's "Nine ½ Weeks" — or even Zalman King's feature-length fragrance commercial "Wild Orchid" — is in for a disappointment.

The best one can say for "Fifty Shades of Grey" is it dispenses with James' terrible prose. The play-by-play from Ana's "inner goddess" would have rendered the movie an unintentional farce.

The much-publicized scenes of R-rated bondage and discipline are beside the point. "Fifty Shades" isn't about kinky sex. That's window dressing. "Fifty Shades" is a more domesticated fantasy, one in which an ordinary woman tries to heal a damaged man with her love.

"Kingsman's" wish fulfillment is slightly less far-fetched. It's the fantasy of the boy of modest means plucked from the slums and given a life of gentlemanly excitement and adventure, along with beautiful women falling at his feet.

Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is the clever, good-hearted street tough recruited by Colin Firth's agent Galahad to join a secret organization of super spies who jet around the world looking fabulous, drinking fine Scotch and bedding the occasional femme fatale, all in the service of queen and country.

In this case, it means facing off against a technology tycoon and environmentalist crackpot played hilariously against type by a lisping, blood-averse Samuel L. Jackson.

Like "Fifty Shades," "Kingsman" improves upon its source material. For the second time, "Kick-Ass" director Matthew Vaughn has taken a grubby, unpleasant comic book written by enfant terrible Mark Millar and turned it into a joyously subversive movie. The result is a love letter to the Roger Moore era of Bond movies, mixed with gleefully cartoonish violence and garnished with a raised middle finger pointed at the capital-E Establishment. (How many movies dare imply President Obama is in league with a supervillain?)

"Kingsman" works because it embraces the fantasy "Fifty Shades" merely flirts with. Audiences deserve a movie that goes all the way.

Culture Shock 02.12.15: 'Jupiter Ascending' is pure pop art

The Wachowski siblings' latest sci-fi epic, "Jupiter Ascending," did anything but ascend at the box office last weekend. More than anything else, that seems like a testament to the ill will audiences still harbor toward "The Matrix Reloaded" and "The Matrix Revolutions."

When it comes to building up a fanatical following only to alienate it, Lana and Andy Wachowski have outdone even George Lucas. They're closing in on M. Night Shyamalan territory.

Unlike Shyamalan, however, the Wachowskis are still capable of making an entertaining movie.

"Jupiter Ascending" is exactly that, disastrous returns aside. Like the Wachowskis' underrated 2008 adaptation of the kitschy 1960s import "Speed Racer," "Jupiter Ascending" is a dazzling if somewhat uneven display of pure, unadulterated pop art. Unlike most of their peers, the Wachowskis still on occasion show us things we haven't seen before — at least not in a live-action movie.

You don't just watch "Jupiter Ascending." You become immersed in it. Seeing the movie unfold is like watching 60 years of science fiction paperback art come alive and envelop you with all the speed and urgency one experiences in Japanese animation. "Speed Racer's" box office failure didn't exhaust the Wachowskis' appreciation for anime, and with "Jupiter Ascending" the Wachowskis draw upon sci-fi traditions from both East and West, creating a fusion that bears an unmistakable Wachowski stamp.

There is more than a little bit borrowed from "Dune," too, both the book and David Lynch's 1984 adaptation. The score by Michael Giacchino often recalls Toto's for "Dune." And like Lynch's "Dune," the Wachowskis' "Jupiter Ascending" may have to wait to find its audience.

Mila Kunis plays our heroine with the pulp-magazine-hero name, Jupiter Jones. Jupiter's amateur-astronomer dad died before she was born, and she grew up in Chicago, raised by her mom (Maria Doyle Kennedy) and aunt, and living with an extended family of Russian immigrant stereotypes.

Despite her smarts and the fact she looks like Mila Kunis, Jupiter is forced to help her family scrape by, tagging along with her mom to dust the picture frames and clean the toilets of the well-to-do.

What Jupiter doesn't yet know is she's the genetic reincarnation of interstellar royalty, specifically the late matriarch of the Abrasax family, which owns most of the known universe, including Earth. That makes Jupiter the rightful heir to a lot of real estate. So, now the matriarch's three bickering children — Balem (Oscar nominee Eddie Redmayne, barely speaking above a whisper), Titus (Douglas Booth) and Kalique (Tuppence Middleton) — are scheming against one another, each trying to get to Jupiter, and her share of the universe, first.

Fortunately, before you can say "Cinderella" — and someone does, just in case you miss the obvious similarities — a dashing hero, although not a prince, swoops in to save the day.

Caine Wise (Channing Tatum) is a genetically engineered bounty hunter — a human gene-spliced with a wolf, making him an expert tracker — sent by one of the Abrasax siblings to bring in Jupiter. But he's not the only bounty hunter on Jupiter's trail, and after a few firefights and chases, Caine and his old friend Stinger (Sean Bean), end up taking Jupiter to claim her inheritance. And that sets up more chases and more firefights. The repetition would be too much if it weren't all so gorgeous. Space battles have never looked so good, and the scenes of Caine "skating" across the sky propelled by his anti-gravity boots put the flying scenes in most superhero movies to shame.

Sadly, it isn't all pretty explosions. This being a Wachowski joint, "Jupiter Ascending" is probably 20 minutes too long, with brief lapses into pop-Marxist flame throwing aimed at a "capitalist" straw man. The Wachowskis also try their hands, unsuccessfully, at comic relief, with a detour lifted from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

"Jupiter Ascending" isn't deep. Its story isn't original. It won't make people rethink their lives, and it won't revolutionize filmmaking, sci-fi or otherwise. But for a couple of hours, it'll take you on a ride that raises the standard for "eye candy." That's not to be underestimated.

Culture Shock 02.05.15: 'Annabelle' is another prequel misfire

Creepy-looking dolls, in the right light and given the right atmosphere, can be frightening in small doses. Think Talky Tina from that episode of "The Twilight Zone" or the clown doll from "Poltergeist."

When it comes to maintaining the chills for an entire feature, however, there's 1978's "Magic" starring Anthony Hopkins — and then there's not much else.

So, "Annabelle" arrives on Blu-ray and DVD with two strikes already against it. First, it's a movie about a creepy-looking doll, and second it's a prequel, detailing events that occur before James Wan's superior 2013 movie "The Conjuring," which at least wrings a few scares out of its hackneyed premise.

Director John R. Leonetti ("The Butterfly Effect 2") unfortunately can't wring much from Gary Dauberman's "Annabelle" script, which follows virtually every scary-doll cliché until it pivots, finally, to its cop-out ending. Doll rocking in a rocking chair when no one is looking? Check. Doll tossed in the garbage only to reappear with no logical explanation? You betcha.

Still, as with most genre movies, which we approach expecting — if not demanding — they adhere to some sort of formula, all this would be forgivable if only "Annabelle" gave us something else to cling to. Good direction or cinematography, engaging performances or a sense of humor can go a long way toward redeeming the formulaic.

Dauberman's screenplay flirts with some ideas, interesting and otherwise, only to abandon them. Set shortly after the Manson Family murders of 1969, "Annabelle" looks at first as if it might be a throwback to horror films of the early 1970s, where, in the shadow of teen rebellion and Roe v. Wade, horror often took the form of demonic children and pregnancy became a kind of body horror. Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby" gave birth to Larry Cohen's "It's Alive," and so on.

Mia (Annabelle Wallis) and John (Ward Horton) are expecting their first child when their neighbors' teenage daughter Annabelle, who had run off to join a Manson-like cult, returns home and murders her parents. She then wanders into Mia and John's house, where she discovers Mia's doll collection, taking a liking to one doll in particular before killing herself.

Naturally, the doll, which was spooky enough to begin with, is now possessed.

Thus starts the familiar litany: strange noises, bumps in the night, inanimate objects that take on a life of their own. This being a 1969-70 period piece, Mia soon finds herself under assault from appliances that seem chosen just for their retro stylishness: a sewing machine, a record turntable, an out-of-control stove top that ignites a pan of Jiffy Pop.

Just when we think we know what kind of movie we're in for, "Annabelle" switches gears. We go from pregnant woman under assault to mother defending her baby. Dauberman's script burns quickly through the clichés of not just one but two horror subgenres. One might think that would at least keep "Annabelle" from being boring, but it does the opposite. We're assaulted by horror tropes more often than Mia is assaulted by items listed in the Sears catalog. It becomes numbing.

Even more, we're assaulted by Leonetti's roving camera, which swirls so violently Leonetti seems to be overcompensating for his lack of anything interesting to show us.

Give "Annabelle" credit in one department, though. Everyone believes Mia's outlandish story about her doll being possessed, which spares us the additional tedium of watching Mia shout at everyone about how she's not crazy. Her husband believes her, the friendly parish priest (Tony Amendola) believes her, and the woman who owns the book shop with the useful occult section believes her (Alfre Woodard).

With its colorless performances and unimaginative story, everything about "Annabelle" feels inauthentic. It's a cynical bid to milk more cash from the audience that made "The Conjuring" a hit.

That's the studio's prerogative. But if "The Conjuring" is your thing, you're better off waiting for a proper sequel to come along. It's scheduled for release next year.

Culture Shock 01.22.15: 'Wonder Women' perfect movie riffing material

Say what you will about the Philippines under martial law, it was a great place to make a movie on a shoestring.

President Ferdinand Marcos was a kleptocrat with expensive tastes and a high-maintenance wife, so for relatively small sums by Hollywood standards, he gave budget-conscious filmmakers the run of the islands. So it happened that the early 1970s produced such Philippine-lensed classics as "The Big Doll House," "The Big Bird Cage" and "Women in Cages," among a host of other inexpensively made, quickly shot and fondly remembered movies of the drive-in era. Pam Grier owes her stardom in no small part to Marcos' willingness to do whatever it took to keep Imelda in Prada.

Grier returned to the U.S. as the women-in-prison genre's breakout star and began top-lining movies stateside such as "Coffy" and "Foxy Brown." But back in Philippines, directors were still churning out exploitation flicks to ship back to the States. One of them was 1973's "Wonder Women."

Now "Wonder Women" is one of the latest video-on-demand offerings from Rifftrax.com, the current movie-mocking venture from "Mystery Science Theater 3000" alums Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett.

The Rifftrax guys have been on a roll with their recent VOD titles, from 1987's "ROTOR" (think "RoboCop" by way of "Paul Blart: Mall Cop" with the budget of a senior class play) to the infamous 1951 how-to-survive-a-nuclear-blast short "Duck and Cover." And "Wonder Women" is no exception. Nelson, Murphy and Corbett are at the top of their game, riffing with a confidence that takes viewers back the glory days of MST3K. There's no point now in MiSTies wishing for "Mystery Science Theater" to return; for all practical purposes, Rifftax is MST3K's second coming.

Apart from some brief poolside nudity that wouldn't have gotten past basic cable's standards and practices department back in the day, "Wonder Women" is exactly the sort of movie MST3K used to do best: entertaining schlock on its own, but comedy gold once the riffs start flying.

First of all, "Wonder Women" is not to be confused with Wonder Woman, although it's entirely possible the movie's distributor welcomed such confusion as long as it put butts in seats.

Tough-guy actor Ross Hagen (familiar to MST3K viewers from "The Sidehackers" and "The Hellcats") stars as Mike Harber, a safari-jacketed super spy soldier of fortune insurance investigator, or something, who takes an assignment to track down a criminal organization that's kidnapping star athletes and selling their organs.

Said criminal organization is run by Dr. Tsu, played by a bored-looking Nancy Kwan ("The World of Suzie Wong"). From her secret lair in the financially advantageous Philippines, Dr. Tsu oversees our titular all-women army, including exploitation mainstay Roberta Collins ("Caged Heat") and Maria De Aragon, who definitely didn't shoot first as Greedo in the original "Star Wars." (Seriously.)

Other supporting players include frequent Pam Grier co-star Sid Haig ("The Devil's Rejects"), as Dr. Tsu's financial go-between, and Philippine Peter Lorre look-alike Vic Diaz, who must have been contractually obligated to appear in every U.S. movie shot in the Philippines in the 1970s.

The plot is paper thin and serves mostly to provide Hagen reasons to shoot things and/or get beat up by various wonder women, which, when you throw in a free trip to the Far East, seems like nice work if you can get it. But insubstantial as it is, "Wonder Women" provides more than enough material for Mike, Kevin and Bill to work with. The seemingly endless chase scene through a Manila market district is one of the high points in the history of talking back to movies.

Exploitation fans will appreciate seeing "Wonder Women" in a new context, while for newcomers the Rifftrax VOD (available for $9.99 at Rifftrax.com) is the safest way to ease into the world of Philippine-shot exploitation flicks. Interested viewers can move on to Mark Hartley's fun 2010 documentary about the '70s Philippine exploitation boom, "Machete Maidens Unleashed!"

Culture Shock 01.08.15: Nicolas Cage gets 'Left Behind'

There was a point in his career when one could have bought Nicolas Cage as a man going through a crisis of faith during a time of global turmoil. But not this point in his career, and not in this movie.

In and out of theaters in the twinkling of an eye, Cage's end times snoozer "Left Behind" has landed on DVD at a rental kiosk near your, where it sits side-by-side with the Syfy original movies it resembles.

Based on the first volume of Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins' best-selling "Left Behind" series, the movie follows those "left behind" after the rapture of the Christian faithful to heaven, in accordance with premillennialist interpretations of the Bible. As such, it's one of many recent low-budget movies aimed primarily at an evangelical Christian audience. But Cage's participation sets this one apart. Despite a recent string of bad movies, Cage still qualifies as A-list talent, which makes his name above the "Left Behind" title a novelty, to say the least.

It's certainly a step up in star power from the first time someone adapted "Left Behind" for the screen, the 2000 version starring former child actor and would-be Christmas savior Kirk Cameron.

Yet novelty aside, Cage brings nothing to the screen that can salvage this "Left Behind." As Christian outreach, it's tepid at best, falling back on canned platitudes about why God allows bad things to happen to good people. And as an apocalyptic thriller, it's light on both apocalypse and thrills.

Even viewers looking for unintentional camp value will be sorely disappointed. For once, Cage's performance is restrained. His histrionics, which enliven such dire fare as "Ghost Rider" and "The Wicker Man," are nowhere to be found. Cage says he made "Left Behind" in part at the behest of his brother, pastor and radio disc jockey Marc Coppola. But in playing the role of commercial pilot Rayford Steele straight, Cage may have succeeded in pleasing only his brother.

One problem with "Left Behind" is screenwriters/producers Paul Lalonde and John Patus think too small.

Say what you will about LaHaye and Jenkins' book, one thing it has is an epic scope. Owing both to budget and time constraints, the movie limits its action mostly to Steele's airplane, which is in midair halfway across the Atlantic when millions of people — including the copilot and several passengers — disappear from the face of the Earth. When we're not with Rayford and his troubled jetliner, the action shifts to his daughter (Cassi Thomson) back on the ground, where she dodges falling planes and driverless cars. For most of the film, she's the "Left Behind" version of Kim Bauer.

As Rayford's devout wife Irene, Lea Thompson ("Back to the Future") vanishes after just a couple of scenes, making her one of the lucky ones. Stuck with Cage is Chad Michael Murray ("One Tree Hill") as unfortunately-named cable news reporter Buck Williams.

Missing from the film is everything that distinguishes premillennialist sci-fi, such as the previous "Left Behind" and "The Omega Code," from run-of-the-mill disaster movies. There's no hint here of LaHaye and Jenkins' antichrist figure, Nicolae Carpathia.

Also missing is any sense of internal logic. After the rapture, Rayford is unable to make radio contact with the outside world, as if everyone with a radio were among the spirited away.

What remains is a bargain-basement "Airport" knockoff, shellacked with a coat of premillennialist theology so thin no one even uses the term "rapture." The target audience must have sensed the watered-down message and stayed away from the theatrical run in droves. "Left Behind" grossed just $19.7 million worldwide, while another preaching-to-the-choir movie from the same distributor, "God's Not Dead," did $60 million in domestic business alone.

For everyone else, "Left Behind" is weak tea even when compared to other end times movies, never mind when compared to secular disaster flicks. Its characters exist in a world of PG-13 explosions and G-rated language. Worst of all, "Left Behind" is the one thing you'd least expect of a Nicolas Cage movie about the end of days: It's just plain boring.

Culture Shock 12.11.14: Nolan's 'Interstellar' doesn't trust its audience

Christopher Nolan aims so high, and does so with such skill, that often it's only as we're leaving the theater that we realize he's pulled another fast one on us.

Yet as Nolan becomes more confident in his craft, he becomes less confident in his audience. He is a smart filmmaker who treats his audience as if we're a bunch of dummies. More and more, his movies condescend to us. And the more they do so, the more they spoil the illusions essential to moviemaking.

Nolan's latest film, "Interstellar," is mesmerizing in every sense of the word. It's visually and emotionally gripping as it deals with Great Big Ideas. It wants very much to be the kind of science fiction that went out of vogue after "Star Wars," and which is seeing a kind of mini-renaissance now. Ideally, given how its plot unfolds, a better title for "Interstellar" would have been "Gravity." But that name was taken.

I've argued that "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" is underrated because almost no one sees it for what it is: a humanist retort to "2001: A Space Odyssey." But there is no mistaking the fact Nolan and his co-screenwriter brother, Jonathan, mean to boldly go down the same path. "Interstellar" is about humanity taking the next step in its evolution, yet while retaining its essential humanity. It is anti-"2001" even as it updates that film's aesthetic for the 21st century.

When it comes to inspiration, Nolan looks not just to Stanley Kubrick's sterile masterpiece but also to its overlooked sequel, Peter Hyams' "2010," borrowing a few of its ideas and one of its stars, the reliable and reassuring John Lithgow.

"Interstellar" begins in our near future, where a blight is wiping out grain crops one by one, threatening the world with starvation and worse. Much of the population is implied to have died already, and all resources are marshaled toward food production, to the point that even the world's armies have been disbanded, which seems the opposite of likely. Otherwise, apart from a jab at American science education, the Nolans are deliberately vague about the political and economic circumstances of their near-future America, which is for the best. It saves them further embarrassment, and it's all merely the backdrop for the premise: The Earth is dying, and humanity needs a new home.

Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), an astronaut-turned-farmer, ends up in the pilot seat for the mission to save humanity, which involves a breathtaking trip through a wormhole to another galaxy, where three planets orbiting the same star are the best candidates for a new world.

The trip, however, means leaving behind his children, son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), who, thanks to the laws of physics, age into Casey Affleck and Jessica Chastain while Cooper stays the same age. (One suspects the irony would be lost on McConaughey's "Dazed and Confused" character.)

Rounding out the cast are Anne Hathaway (Audrey Hepburn in space), Michael Caine (her scientist father), David Gyasi (another astronaut) and Topher Grace (adult Murph's colleague).

As the movie goes on, the Nolans begin to over-explain everything. To the movie's detriment, the characters start to sound like Wikipedia articles on general relativity and evolutionary psychology.

On a practical level, "Interstellar" is a plea for more NASA funding to safeguard mankind's future. But such pleadings seem myopic when we're on the cusp of an explosion in space travel. NASA and the Soviets no longer monopolize space. It's open to all, from the European Space Agency to the Japanese to too many private concerns to name. People are already making space happen.

On a deeper level, "Interstellar" is about the resilience of the human spirit and the enduring power of love, even against the cold equations of relativity and the savage demands of Darwinian survival. Love, it turns out, is also a survival instinct.

Unfortunately, the Nolans don't trust us to figure this out on our own. Instead, they reduce everything to New Age gibberish no actor can portray convincingly and no one but Deepak Chopra can take seriously. "Interstellar" suffers for it, and so do we.

Culture Shock 12.04.14: 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture' turns 35

Kirk inspects the newly remodeled Enterprise in "Star Trek: The Motion Picture."
Director Robert Wise added the reflected Enterprise to this shot for his 2001
"director's edition" of the film.

Thirty-five years on, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" remains one of the Trek franchise's most under-appreciated and misunderstood entries.

That's understandable. "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" — or "TMP," from here on out — was rushed into production, with a script that rehashes Season 2's "The Changeling." As released in theaters and aired on television, TMP seems only partly finished. In truth, that's because it was only partly finished.

Robert Wise's "director's edition," released on DVD in 2001, improves the pacing and completes some effects shots that remained rough in the race to meet TMP's locked-in Dec. 7, 1979, release date.

Yet with or without Wise's touch-ups, TMP deserves reappraisal.

Wise's operatic approach to "Star Trek" makes Alan Dean Foster's story more than "The Changeling, Part 2." In Wise's hands, TMP becomes a humanistic retort to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey."

In "2001" humanity has lost its sense of wonder, and in the process, its humanity. The most fully realized character is HAL (Douglas Rain), a self-aware computer, who becomes neurotic, then murderous. Emotions, when combined with big brains, are bad news.

While HAL is excited by the prospect of scientific discovery, the humans in "2001" are bored by space. It's simply where they work, as mundane and uninteresting to them as an office cubicle is to us.

Wise's TMP, building on Gene Roddenberry's hopeful vision of the future, flips Kubrick on his head. Harold Michelson's production design has much the same cool, antiseptic look as the production design of "2001," but here it's a setting where humans are still human, even when they're extraterrestrials.

In "2001," Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) naps during his trip to the moon. In TMP, the Enterprise crew stare wide-eyed and mouths agape at the immense living starship V'Ger. Wise drives his point home with an extended scene of the Enterprise flying through the energy cloud that surrounds V'Ger, our point of view shifting between the breathtakingly rendered alien craft and the crew's awestruck faces.

Eventually, the crew learn the ship is, like HAL, a living machine. But unlike HAL, V'Ger is cold, emotionless and searching. Without feelings, V'Ger can find no meaning, even after having traveled the length and breadth of the known universe.

Emotion is at the heart of TMP. The first familiar character we see is Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy), who has returned to his home on Vulcan to undergo a ritual that purges all remaining emotions. But he forgoes the ritual in order to join the Enterprise for its rendezvous with V'Ger, whose powerful consciousness Spock senses across the light years. Later on, Spock, having learned to accept his human half, weeps for the barren V'Ger as he would for a lost brother.

Decker and Ilia finally unite, and in a literal sense, when Decker becomes one
with the living machine V'Ger.

When Admiral Kirk (William Shatner) first sees the newly refurbished USS Enterprise, it's like lovers spying one another from across a crowded room. Everyone and everything else disappears.

The scene depicting Kirk's approach to the Enterprise is the film's emotional high point, and Wise milks every second of it, accented by Jerry Goldsmith's sweeping score, making it the science fiction equivalent of the Bernard Herrmann-scored love scene in Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo."

For Kirk, TMP is a love story that sees him reunited with his one true love. For two new characters, however, TMP is a slightly more conventional romance.

Decker (Stephen Collins) and Ilia (Persis Khambatta) are star-crossed lovers who come together at the end only when Decker volunteers to join with V'Ger, giving V'Ger the emotional capacity it lacks. V'Ger, Decker and Ilia become one, and the emotions that were HAL's undoing become V'Ger's salvation. Love conquers all, and humanity prevails because of its humanity.

V'Ger, like Spock, learns to feel, and the crew of the Enterprise help give birth to a new life form, one that seems far more hopeful than the creepy, ambiguous "star child" at the end of "2001."

Thanks to some "foolish human emotions," the human adventure is still just beginning.

Culture Shock 09.25.14: Scarlett Johansson is a different black widow

It's Cold War paranoia distilled into one feverish scene: Actor Kevin McCarthy running through the streets — stopping traffic, banging on windows, yelling at anyone who will listen, as well as those who won't.

"They're not human! They're here already! You're next!"

But no one ever listens, not until it's too late. And it's always too late.

"Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956) appeared at the height of the Red Scare, with aliens as stand-ins for communist infiltrators. But the fear of being subverted and replaced by outsiders is universal. Few political issues ignite passions like immigration does, because immigration strikes at things more primal than mere pocketbook concerns. People fear waking up to find they're suddenly in a culture not their own. Every new ethnic restaurant becomes a beachhead for the "invasion."

No wonder "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" has spawned three remakes so far: "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1978), "Body Snatchers" (1993) and "The Invasion" (2007). And that's not counting thematically similar movies, such as 1994's "The Puppet Masters," based on Robert A. Heinlein's 1951 novel, or 1998's "The Faculty."

With "Under the Skin," now on Blu-ray and DVD, director Jonathan Glazer ("Sexy Beast") flips the invasion narrative on its head, telling it from the invader's viewpoint.

The invader is question is Scarlett Johansson, taking time out from playing the Marvel franchise's Black Widow, but still acting out the black widow role by luring unwary young men to their doom.

She's the spearhead of what seems to be an alien invasion, although we're never entirely sure. "Under the Skin" is not exactly upfront about its intentions, rather like what you'd expect of a stealth operation.

Johansson's femme fatale tools around Scotland in a minivan, giving her as unthreatening a cover as one can imagine. She goes from the streets of Glasgow to the cloud-covered, picture postcard Highlands, pretending to be lost and asking young, lonely-seeming men for directions. She strikes up conversations, flatters her would-be rescuers, and so it goes. How many red-blooded, heterosexual males can resist an invitation from a woman who looks like Scarlett Johansson?

Back at her place, these men enter a world that can appropriately be called alien. Then they disappear, never to be seen again — not as themselves, anyway. As the title implies, it's what's under the skin that counts.

McCarthy's voice echoes across the decades: "They're here already! You're next!"

Soon enough, Johansson is back on the road, looking for the next lonely guy.

Without leaving her front seat, Scarlett has a good view of humanity: people walking, people in traffic, men, women, children, families. She sees people living, loving and laughing. She sees us at our best and our worst. One wonders what she was told to expect, if anything.

Are we people to her or cattle? Or are we as much a mystery to her as she is to us?

Glazer makes "Under the Skin" deliberately disorienting, aided and abetted by the menacing drone of Mica Levi's ambient score. When Johansson's alien crosses into our world or her victims cross into hers, there is a sense that they've crossed barriers not meant to be breached.

Neither side is hospitable to inhabitants of the other.

It's not an optimistic assessment, whether you think of it in terms of immigrants getting along with natives, men getting along with women, or simply people getting along with one another.

Glazer entrusts his film to Johansson, and she rewards him with a performance that's subtle and beguiling. This is Johansson at her best.

Her performance is as enigmatic as the movie. We're not sure what "Under the Skin" is all about. As in life, we're left to make up our own meaning.

Culture Shock 09.18.14: Hipster vampires make immortality a drag

At first it seems as though we're meant to identify with Adam and Eve, the couple at the center of Jim Jarmusch's latest film, "Only Lovers Left Alive," new to DVD and Blu-ray.

If nothing else, we're to envy their glamorous lifestyle. They're beautiful, civilized and have impeccable taste. They've traveled the world, met famous people and done things the rest of us can only dream of. And their love is eternal.

Adam and Eve, you see, are vampires.

Many movies tell us immortality is boring, but Jarmusch's "Only Lovers Left Alive" is the first to make the audience really experience it. Putting up with Adam and Eve, played by Tom Hiddleston ("Thor") and Tilda Swinton ("Snowpiercer"), is enough to test anyone's patience.

The movies have given us goth vampires and punk vampires. They've even — heaven help us — given us WASP vampires. But Adam and Eve may be the first hipster vampires.

Eve is the literary type. When packing for a trip, she fills her luggage with a little light reading, such as the late David Foster Wallace's critically lauded doorstop, "Infinite Jest."

Adam is a musician, and a good one, too, with a growing following on the underground music scene, nurtured by his reclusiveness and refusal to perform live. Not that he wants to be popular. Far from it. Adam regards popularity as a "drag." He was a fan of himself before he was cool.

He'd much rather hole up in his home, surrounded by analog technology and vintage recordings of musicians you've probably never heard of.

Adam is also a fan of scientists, which gives him cause to vent about how humanity keeps ignoring or persecuting them. He grumbles that people still haven't come to grips with Charles Darwin, and he powers his off-the-grid house, located in an especially bleak part of bleakest Detroit, with one of Nikola Tesla's "free energy" generators. Just when you think our hipster vampire can't be any more cliché, he dabbles in steampunk.

Both Adam and Eve have plenty of money, although neither seems to have a way of earning it. Maybe they have rich vampire parents somewhere? But money means nothing to them, except when it buys vintage musical instruments or the best all-natural, free-range, organically farmed, preservative-free blood. Eve's connection for the "good stuff" is Elizabethan playwright-turned-vampire Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), who claims to have written the works attributed to Shakespeare, although I'm not sure he's trustworthy. Adam's source is a Dr. Watson (Jeffrey Wright), if that is his real name.

Stalking victims and sucking them dry is played out. After all, you don't know where they've been or what they've been eating.

Eva and Adam, we're told, are passionately in love, but passion seems the farthest thing from either of them. What they are is comfortable, like Adam's centuries-old dressing gown.

The film finally livens up when Eve's wild-child sister, Ava (a marvelous Mia Wasikowska), drops in and makes things uncomfortable. Ava is a mess, but she is the only one who sees Adam and Eve for what they are: "condescending snobs."

As far as Adam and Eve are concerned, we're the problem: you, me and the rest of humanity, whom they dismiss as "zombies." It recalls the words of the original hipster, Henry David Thoreau, who wrote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."

Adam and Eve read the right books and listen to the right music, always on vinyl. When Ava asks if she can have a download of one of Adam's songs, his contempt is palpable.

Jarmusch fills the screen with pretty pictures, and Swinton and Hiddleston are charismatic enough to command our attention, even if their characters do nothing to deserve it. It's only at the end, the final shot, that we see Jarmusch has played a joke on his lovers, and perhaps, unintentionally, himself.

Driven by hunger and desperation, Adam and Eve revert to the old ways. Their masks of refinement drop, and the vampires are just zombies, too. It's a good punch line, but it's not worth the set-up.

Culture Shock 09.11.14: 'Without Warning' pits alien against Oscar winners

Future Oscar winner Jack Palance and future Oscar winner Martin Landau probably weren't thinking Academy Awards when they agreed to appear in "Without Warning." But I'll take "Without Warning" over "Ordinary People" any day.

Released the same year that "Friday the 13th" kicked the slasher genre into high gear, "Without Warning" wastes no time putting a different spin on the soon-to-be-cliched formula of teenagers venturing into the woods where an unstoppable killer awaits to pick them off one by one.

This time, the killer is not of this Earth.

Greydon Clark directs this pre-"Predator" sci-fi movie about an eggplant-headed alien who comes to Earth to hunt "the most dangerous game." Only instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Ventura and Carl Weathers, the alien targets Palance, Landau and a young David Caruso (in his first role, unless you count an uncredited bellboy in an episode of "Ryan's Hope," and who does?).

Cult movie label Shout! Factory brings this 1980 drive-in classic to home video with a shiny Blu-ray/DVD combo set that includes interviews with the crew and an audio commentary with the director.

The movie starts with two young couples (including Caruso) heading to the woods for a day of fun and relaxation, probably because it's 1980 and YouTube cat videos haven't been invented yet.

Surprisingly, they think this whole going-to-the-woods thing is a good idea despite the scary warning they get from the creepy taxidermy enthusiast who runs the gas station (Palance) and the foreboding graffiti scrawled on the station's restroom walls.

Technically, that makes the movie's title a lie. Clearly there is a warning. Just because you ignore the warning doesn't mean there isn't one. That's just logic, plain and simple.

Anyway, by the time our young victims get to the crystal-clear lake in the middle of the woods, our extraterrestrial Elmer Fudd has already declared hunting season on Golden Age TV actors.

Cameron Mitchell ("The High Chaparral") plays a hunter, Darby Hinton (Daniel Boone's son on "Daniel Boone") plays his son, and Larry Storch ("F Troop") plays the world's worst scoutmaster.

Maybe Clark has a fetish for typecasting actors based on their most famous roles.

Ralph Meeker, who portrayed Mike Hammer in Robert Aldrich's brilliant 1955 film noir "Kiss Me Deadly," has a small role as a bar patron.

Classic television informs more than just Clark's casting choices. The alien (Kevin Hall), looks like he just walked in from the set of "The Outer Limits." And speaking of typecasting, Hall went on to portray the extraterrestrial big game hunters in "Predator" and "Predator 2."

The alien's preferred method of attack it to throw small, star-shaped aliens — blood-sucking little critters that vaguely resemble the face-huggers from "Alien" — at his intended victims. This makes for some pretty cool and squishy kill scenes.

But the real stars of the show are Landau and Palance. Both still more than a decade away from their Oscar triumphs, these old pros can chew scenery with the best of them, and they do.

Landau plays a Vietnam vet who came back from the war a little funny in the head. He's been convinced aliens are invading for years, so when they actually are, no one believes him. Not that they would have believed him anyway, what with him being funny in the head.

Meanwhile, Palance's trophy-hunter character naturally is the first to realize what the alien's game is and think up a way to fight back. Palance delivers the gasping, wheezing, snarling performance that always made him a terrifying bad guy and, on rare occasions, an even more terrifying hero.

Clark helmed two movies that ended up targets of a good-natured "Mystery Science Theater 3000" ribbing: "Angels Revenge" (aka "Angels' Brigade") and the Joe Don Baker vehicle "Final Justice." But "Without Warning" — like some other Clark movies, such as "Satan's Cheerleaders" and the arcade-culture sex comedy "Joysticks" — is plenty of fun without anyone talking over it.