No.286 : Wild in Blue (2015)

Wild in Blue at the IMDb

Sometimes you start a film and if you weren’t writing an unread ‘W’ movies blog you’d cut your losses and watch something else. ‘Wild in Blue’ is such a film and it was a trial to sit through its nihilism, pretentiousness and jerky camera actions.

The film opens with our hero, Charlie, with a gun in his mouth. He has it in and out of there several times but, alas, decides to save us form an early night and chooses to keep on living - well if you can call it that.

Charlie is a nasty piece of work and has many fantasies which may or not be real. He has a threesome with a couple of hookers before strangling them. He offers poor old Karen Black, in what was her last role, help in fixing her car before smashing her face in with a hammer. That scene was plain nasty and if it wasn’t for the terrible makeup, I’d have been quite disturbed by it.

All the while Charlie is filming his activities and offering us his ponderous narration. He says his film  is intended to ‘help us bury the dead things inside of us’ which is very generous of him, but frankly, he shouldn’t have bothered. The film uses Charlie’s footage as part of the narrative so we get lots of static-filled VHS shots and focus that looks like the steady-cam was on a bungee rope. I’d imagine this process was to draw us into Charlie’s world and to give us a voyeur’s view of the action - well that and it’s cheap.

Charlie makes a friend who is also weird and wants to be hurt. I may have misread this but I think the friend didn’t exist except in Charlie’s mind as no one else reacts to him when he’s perving about, and Charlie acts out the friend’s fantasies. Things may look up when Charlie gets a nice girlfriend. Again I’m not clear if the sociopath is imagining things or she’s a hooker, but she is quite game for most things, usually involving strangulation.

At times it looks like Charlie will take it too far and the last elongated scene is of him filming himself strangling her with the film intercut with him being beaten up as a child by his Dad, the Stunt Man himself, Steve Railsback. Seems a strange thing for a family movie to be made of, so again it may all be playing out inside Charlie’s frazzled brain. Will the ‘why did she agree to be in this?’ girlfriend survive and will Charlie find the gun he was playing with at the start? I can help to look!

This was a God awful film that looked like some dreadful film school project - cheap and with every cut and effect filter you can imagine. Amazingly IMDb says it won some awards - must have been ‘Least Use of Focus in a Feature Presentation’. There was no attempt to engage you with the characters with scenes dragging on for an age in a clearly improvised and meandering manner.

You could see art house types lapping it up, but it just grated throughout with its industrial noises and strobing lights setting the scene for people to have rough sex with their clothes on. Prudish yet extreme is a strange mix.

The slightly upbeat ending and reveal came about 80 minutes too late for me to care and I’m just glad it’s done. Let’s never speak of it again.

Best Bit  : I love a good skirt - (way more than this stinker) 6/23

No.257 : War on Everyone (2016)

War on Everyone at the IMDb

 Well we’re back after a brief year long absence. I know the appetite for ‘W’ based movie excitement is unabated but fear not, the wait for the four of you is now over!

‘War on Everyone’ is the first American film by English director John Michael McDonagh who impressed with his last two offerings, ‘The Guard’ and ‘Calvary’ both of which starred Brendan Gleeson. I say ‘American film’ but I noticed that it was partly funded by the National Lottery despite starring two ‘B’ list Americans and being set in Albuquerque. Still if anyone likes a gamble it's them.

The film is billed as an ‘action comedy’ but the laughs were few and the action was low rent.

Michael Pena, last seen (by me) in ‘The Martian’ and Alexander Skarsgard who was Tarzan in his previous film before this, star as couple of New Mexico police detectives. They play fast and loose with the rues but can’t afford a scriptwriter to supply them with any zingers - “Where’s my X-Box?” “Do ya wanna look up my ass?” Titter you will not.

They highlight their badness by drink driving and swearing a lot but they just come across as a pair of tiresome jerks who are trying too hard to impress. The plot is lifted almost entirely form the ‘Starsky and Hutch’ movie but at least you don’t have Vince Vaughn as the baddie. Here the budget is clearly limited so you have to make do with the guy who got shit on his nose at the end of ‘The Inbetweeners’ movie. To be fair he is backed up by a guy channeling Malcolm McDowell in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ but he’s even worse and exudes the menace of a declawed kitten made out of cotton wool.

Our heroes set out on a quest to gain some drug money but soon get distracted by an exotic girlfriend who was better in ‘Westworld’ and a cute child who offered nothing, not even the intended softening of Pena’s character. The limited plot drags along with the investigation following no logical path and offering no laughs or thrills. At one point they do travel to Iceland for five minutes which seemed totally pointless and probably used up the script polishing budget as well.

The two leads were poor and didn’t gel at all. They were set out to be bad boys but you didn’t care about them at all and have nothing invested in their schemes. The direction was OK but I couldn’t help but think the director was out of his comfort zone and relied on tired old tropes rather than doing anything original. When Paul Reiser showed up as the police chief and demanded our heroes’ badges and to leave the prime suspect alone someone must have called ‘foul’.

The action sequences amounted to some low speed car crashes and a bin through a window so you can tell this isn’t exactly ‘Die Hard’. They also have the familiar trip to the strip joint where all the strippers were fully dressed. This looked like they were trying to secure a lower certificate but when they went back again it was all topless - had they went on Prudish Tuesday the first time around?

The locations were great and it did bring back memories as I too had traveled in that Albuquerque cable car. It wasn’t enough however; the film was dull and predictable and the Frankenstein’s monster of every buddy cop film that you’ve ever seen...

Best Bit : Let's check out the strip joint again...
‘W’ Rating 10/23