While white people steadily line up to fork a few bucks for the race-baiting Avatar: The Way of Water, a true Indigenous sci-fi flick came out a few months ago: the alien-infused, back-biting cut of Slash/Back, directed by the daring Nyla Innuksuk.
A community of wholesome-but-troublesome pre-teens are petering around their small Intuit town. Taking their father’s boat to a neighboring island, they have to fend off a snarling bear. But the animal is seemingly part of a cosmic invasion, beginning with small, cuddly scenes of true wildlife to extraterrestrial-possessed, snarling-spittle man-things.
After said bear is taken out by the girls, the aliens want revenge. Now inhibited the town’s small police force, they come after the girls — and these are no shrieking violets! They formulate a master plan: armed with a hunting rifle, harpoon and other tools of the trade, to take out the menace with extreme prejudice, all in time for the conclusion of the town’s community center dance.
A Native-twinged riff on malingering post-mortem possession along the lines on John Carpenter’s The Thing and other stalwarts, Slash/Back takes the changeling formula and breathes new life with the Innuksuk’s innovative story, set in a dying town where tradition lumbers forth and swings back with a sick crack — with, of course, an alien invasion theme.
Slash/Back’s leads — especially Tasiana Shirley and Nalajoss Ellsworth as two of the young warriors — are up to the task, quelling any incoming invasion with both their Indigenous heritage and their pop-culture breakdown, giving this movie another rung of the absolute ladder of total domination … with space monsters to boot. —Louis Fowler
M3GAN is a bit of sugar, spice and stab you twice. Housebound director Gerard Johnstone is no stranger to melding horror with humor despite his sparse filmography. And it’s not like the rogue AI is anything new, either. Between HAL 9000, Agent Smith or (my personal favorite) AM, it’s hard for a hostile ghost in the machine to get a circuit in edgewise. M3GAN doesn’t try to break new ground as much as it flosses all over it.
Violet McGraw (The Haunting of Hill House) plays Cady, a tween whose parents die in a tragic snowplow accident. She’s placed with her aunt, Gemma, played by Allison Williams (Get Out). Gemma’s career is built on AI, robotics and toys that can shit themselves. Unfortunately, the well begins to run dry as her CEO fears their company’s competitors — who announce a cheap knockoff with a reactive LED butt — will overtake the Tamagotchi-Furby monster market.
Her grieving niece and an unrealistic deadline pushes Gemma to complete M3GAN, an almost-lifelike doll portrayed in body by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis. M3GAN’s prime directive becomes protecting Cady’s physical and emotional well-being. The toy takes a few liberties — and heads — to ensure her purpose.
M3GAN is everything Lars Klevberg’s abysmal Child’s Play remake tried to be. It asks us to consider how we exploit grief and enable tech dependency without a heavy-handed, dogmatic message. Tech is comfort, and the film slices through how emotionally vulnerable it can make us with a sentiment akin to Spike Jonze’s Her. Granted, it’s not nearly as good as Her, but it ditches alarmist copouts to deliver something simple and telling.
This is also not much of a horror film. While you’ll see clear opportunities for M3GAN to be more unnerving and terrifying, the restraint is honestly appreciated. (After all, M3GAN’s eyes are unsettling enough; is there really a need to pile onto that?) Instead, it opens the door for humor. And it takes advantage of this with a surprising amount of tact.
M3GAN has a near-perfect balance of dark revelations and clever comedy. The story would fit snuggly within Black Mirror’s first and second season — you know, when the series was still pretty good. That’s not to say every joke lands, but it’s very hard to deny its wit by the time M3GAN converts Sia’s “Titanium” into a lullaby.
Unfortunately, M3GAN hits so many things right, its few weaknesses are as jarring as a Tickle Me Elmo with dying batteries. For one, in the era of Siri and Alexa, it feels outdated to lean on cheap tricks like overt voice digitization to remind us something is artificial. It wasn’t needed in Ex Machina, and it’s definitely not needed to sell M3GAN’s malice.
Second, she’s already menacing, and the implication she can cease control of electronics and infiltrate vast defense networks makes her more so. It’s just hard not to yearn for a little bit more storytelling to that end. It’s a stretch to suspect the full extent of her Wi-Fi enabled powers will probably be saved for a sequel. But that’s the double-edged sword of an emerging horror villain: You want so much of them before they’re spoiled by a half-baked franchise.
Ultimately, there’s no guarantee M3GAN will get a sequel at all. The character definitely deserves it, but if this is truly all the time we get with her, we’d be wise to cherish it. M3GAN isn’t the brand-new caboose to an ever-growing hype train. This diamond-studded droid does, in fact, slay. —Daniel Bokemper
In ’60s cinema, Italian superhero movies were 2 lire a dozen. However, only one is from the guy who would give cinema a naked Amazonian girl impaled anus-to-mouth on a spiked pole. Working under the Americanized moniker Roger Rockefeller, future Cannibal Holocaust chaos agent Ruggero Deodato wrote and directed Fenomenal and the Treasure of Tutankamen early in his career.
Mauro Parenti (Justine de Sade) stars as Guy Norton, bearded count by day, Parisian superhero by, well, day. Norton exhibits primo sartorial choices that go out the window when costumed as his crimefighting alter ego. As Fenomenal (Italian for “phenomenal,” if you haven’t guessed), he’s dressed all in black, save for his hands and belt buckle; capping the outfit are sensible shoes on his fleet feet and pantyhose over his head. Super powers are nil, but he can legibly write his name inside a briefcase to trick a thieving bandit.
Fresh from foiling a heroin ring at sea, Fenomenal is tasked with hunting for an ancient relic, the whereabouts of which are hidden in hieroglyphics on the mask of ol’ King Tut, currently on exhibition. Villainous Gregory Falco (Gordon Mitchell, White Fire) wants his hands on it. A woman named Mike (Enter the Devil’s Lucretia Love, Parenti’s soon-to-be spouse) wants her hands on Norton; she introduces herself as being the daughter of “the canned meat king.”
Because Bruno Nicolai’s score is seasoned with jaunty “ba-da-bah-bah-bah” ziggalybops, none of Treasure of Tutankamen is to be taken seriously — good to know since logic is negligible. People get double-crossed; take the pic’s word for it when you’re told. A Eurospy staple, fun is had with all kinds of transportation — cars, speedboats, yachts, helicopters, wheelchairs — but the best scene is something right out of the MattHelmpictures: Fenomenal fights a fez-wearing goon in a ladies’ sauna. As towel-torsoed women run and scream, Feno dodges thrown chairs and punches.
Phenomenal? Hardly. But it’s passable, as long as you know it’s no second coming of Danger: Diabolik. —Rod Lott
Prolific production company Mahal Empire gets Lost when an airliner bound for Puerto Rico is struck by lightning and goes down down down, in Bermuda Island. Washed up on the shore of what looks like paradise, the survivors face no food, no potable water, no aloe vera, no Wi-Fi and a band of green-hued, limb-ripping creatures on the loose and out for blood.
Looking not unlike homemade Predator costumes, these beasts treat the survivors’ tummies like your grandma does dirt when it’s time to plant petunias. Meanwhile, in hopes of saving alive, the humans split into two factions. One is led by a regular Robinson Crusoe (a fully OTT John Wells, The Penny Dreadful Picture Show) who claims to have been trapped in the Triangle for 100 years. The other, fronted by a surly ’n’ burly FBI agent (Wesley Cannon, who also produced) who just copies the other guy. And Mahal Empire regular Sarah French (Death Count) finds a reason to disrobe.
Although Bermuda Island is goofily constructed and unleashed on the cheap, first-feature director Adam Werth makes the trip a hoot. He even comes close to earning that proverbial extra half by not pretending the movie is anything other than a brainless B-level outing. With no shortage of goop and a squishy soundtrack to boot, it strongly resembles a modern-day addition to Hemisphere Pictures’ beloved Blood Islandtrilogy. Whether in daylight or the dead of night, scenes always offer clear views of carnage.
While not every actor is as comfortable on camera as French, Wells or the cameoing Tom Sizemore, who perishes before the plane crashes, several Mahal Empire players are legitimately funny in their roles. Sheri Davis makes for a commendable ever-complaining Karen type; Greg Tally is a near-riot as a pretentious Goth named Midnight; and then there’s Alexander Hauck, somehow able to tell a monster that just ripped his heart out, “I hope you get food poisoning.” —Rod Lott
Prostitution’s a tough gig, even for Santa Monica’s finest. You might contract an STD or, per The Banker, a laser-guided crossbow arrow through the noggin. Even if the film didn’t reveal right away that titular man o’ finance Spaulding Osbourne is the killer, we’d know it because he lives in a warehouse, watches a wall of 16 television sets and keeps a Little Golden Book of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on his coffee table.
On the other hand, he has one redeeming quality: no love for cocaine bros in bolo ties.
Hunting Osbourne (Duncan Regehr, The Monster Squad’s Count Dracula) is police detective Sgt. Dan Jefferson (Robert Forster, Jackie Brown). It’s only a matter of time before Osbourne targets Jefferson’s ex-wife, TV reporter Sharon (Shanna Reed, TV’s Major Dad), who’s recently ditched segments promoting the Magic Sandcastle Jamboree for on-air editorials against the murderer.
Luckily for the good guys, Osbourne leaves a calling card at each homicide: a blood pattern on the wall that looks kinda like Wilson the volleyball from Cast Away. As Jefferson tells his lieutenant (Richard Roundtree, 1971’s Shaft), “We’re looking at one strange son of a bitch!”
William Webb’s directorial follow-up to the ho-hum Party Line, The Banker hums along nicely. It certainly helps going from Leif Garrett (who cameos here) to Forster. In a variation of his role in Alligator, Forster’s Dan is likely an alcoholic and lives in a treehouse. This allows Forster to give what he was so gifted at: a gruff, no-nonsense demeanor. Dana Augustine’s screenplay aids and abets with appropriate dialogue, including the concluding anti-quip, “I’m Dan, I’m a cop and you’re fucked!”
All in all, The Banker is the type of sleaze that’s polished just enough that you don’t feel a need to shower afterward. Who could’ve guessed that in 1989, Forster was less than a decade away from a career-reviving Academy Award nomination? Or that Roundtree would end the millennium returning as the iconic cat that won’t cop out when there’s danger all about? Or that former Playboy centerfold Teri Weigel and her Tupperware breasts were about to turn to porn? Or that Jeff Conaway could still run? —Rod Lott
While white people steadily line up to fork a few bucks for the race-baiting Avatar: The Way of Water, a true Indigenous sci-fi flick came out a few months ago: the alien-infused, back-biting cut of Slash/Back, directed by the daring Nyla Innuksuk.
