Green Room (2016)

Director: Jeremy Saulnier
Writer(s): Saulnier
Starring: Anton Yelchin, Joe Cole, Alia Shawkat, Imogen Poots, and Patrick Stewart

I do not get excited for theatrical releases very often, especially when I am disappointed by a director’s previous release, but the hype level was through the roof for me concerning Jeremy Saulnier’s follow-up to Blue Ruin.  Why, you may ask?  Because, while I was a little letdown by his debut revenge thriller, I still saw loads of potential in Saulnier, calling him a “promising filmmaker” and even declaring that “I’m still eagerly looking forward to his future releases.”  Crazily enough, it was during research for that review (which I just realized is part of my unpublished backlog, so you’ll just have to take my word for it) that I stumbled on the trailer for this, caught some positive pre-release buzz, and saw that it would be premiering in my city about two months from then.  I made sure to put it on the calendar; to put that into perspective, it would be just the second time in the past two years that I went to a theater to see a movie—and the only other time was two nights ago, when my wife and I went to a second-rate theater to see a movie that we received free tickets for.

Just as Saulnier took the revenge thriller and stripped it down to its most basic parts in his previous film, he imbues Green Room with a little twist of its own: all of the people involved, on either side, are not complete idiots.  Thus, the showdown that ensues between a punk band in unfamiliar territory and a group of neo-Nazi skinheads feature both sides calculating their options and slowly raising the stakes.  Of course, the skinheads hold a distinct advantage, knowing the building inside and out, but the longer the band stays alive, the more their momentum grows.  Watching it all unfold is very similar to watching a chess match, as both sides are constantly formulating new plans as the situations change.  Obviously, not all of them succeed, much in the same way that our decisions in real-life can have life-altering (or even “ending”) consequences, but these are mostly intelligent people who, on the punk side, are in a desperate situation to stay alive, and for the skinheads, are in a desperate situation to avoid death and/or jail-time, and for the most part, there’s a convincing level of believability to their pre-scripted decisions.

It all starts with “The Ain’t Rights”, the punk band in question, heading to Seaside, Oregon to record an interview for a radio show.  When the band, who is made up of members Sam, Reece, Pat, and Tiger, asks when they can expect their piece to air, the interviewer, Tad, reveals that he had his radio segment revoked, so he’s not sure when, or even if, it ever will.  Rightfully pissed off that they traveled all that way for nothing (and are so broke they even had to siphon gas to make it that far), Tad sets them up with a show at a punk café as a favor. Unfortunately for him, that digs him in even deeper: turnout is so low, that even after giving the band his own cut of the proceeds, their total haul still only comes out to a little over $6 per bandmember.  Still fuming over the situation, they eventually decide to cut their losses and return home, something they soon wish they would have done.  Because before you know it, Tad is placing a call to his cousin for a guaranteed show the following day just outside Portland.  The catch?  It’s at a bar run by, and populated with, white supremacists.  Relatively unfazed, but more desperate, the band accepts Tad’s offer, and head for the venue in time to make it for their afternoon show.

Once they get there, they have only a few minutes before their matinee set begins.  As a joke, the lead vocalist, Tiger, suggest that they kick things off with a cover of the Dead Kennedy’s “Nazi Punks Fuck Off”, an “inspired” choice given their surroundings.  Not surprisingly, it doesn’t go over too well; Pat, the guitarist, seems visibly shaken by the crowd’s hostile reaction.  I guess contrary to popular belief, skinheads do not have strong senses of humor after all.  Despite the rocky start, the rest of the gig seems to go off without a hitch, and right after their set they are quickly ushered out of the bar to make room for the next act.  Well, that’s what was supposed to happen, anyway; in all of the commotion and hustling, Sam (Alia Shawkat, from “Arrested Development” fame) realizes that she forgot her phone in the “green room” (a term used for the waiting room of a venue where performing acts hang out before taking the stage), which Pat offers to retrieve for her.  What should be a simple task gets blown out of proportion when he stumbles on Emily, a dead girl with a knife in her head.  Hovering over her are Werm (an evil-looking man) and Amber, Emily’s friend. 

News of a murder must travel fast, because two of the bar’s bouncers, Gabe and Justin, quicky catch wind of the situation, and force “The Ain’t Rights” back into the green room.  Justin hangs in there and holds everyone at gunpoint while Gabe runs off to call the police, and also notifies the bar’s owner, Darcy (a fiendish Patrick Stewart), of the unfolding events.  Darcy is a quietly terrifying man, the type that never raises his voice, yet who knows no limits to his depravity or thirst for blood.  As he shows up to try to handle the situation, the band wrestles the gun away from Justin and hold him at gunpoint.  Meanwhile, Amber joins the band’s side, distressed over the murder of her friend, which has still come under mysterious circumstances.  Darcy tries negotiating through the door for the gun; at the last second Amber sees that Darcy is not alone, as he has assured them, so she calls a trap…and so begins an intense, exhausting standoff, filled with some of the most devastating acts of simulated violence ever captured on film.

And it’s the way Green Room handles its bloodshed that might just be its most triumphant aspect: It’s presented in sharp, shocking bursts that are repellently graphic and hard-to-stomach, even for a genre aficionado like me.  This isn’t a film that revels in it for the sake of entertainment, but rather one that rubs our noses in its ugliness, as if attempting to undo years of playful desensitizing at the hands of the Freddy’s and the Jason’s, and trying to re-convince us of the real-life finality and brutality that can accompany us in life’s final moments.  It's largely effective in this mission, though an early scene involving a box-cutter that is so over-the-top it becomes laughable, prevents it from achieving near-perfection.

Unfortunately, there are some cheap narrative cushions that Saulnier just can’t seem to resist—or are they included at the insistence of the studio/distributor?  One thing that I cannot stand are the moments when otherwise-serious movies feel the need to throw in humor during violent situations; there are a couple one-liners after kills that cheapen the effect, and feel a little hypocritical for a movie trying to portray its murders in such an ugly light.  Green Room also has a chance to end on a heart-wrenching moment of perfect and genuinely unexpected poignancy, but goes on for thirty more seconds just so it can deliver a final, predictable punchline to an ongoing series of jokes that were never funny to begin with.  These may be relatively minor annoyances, but again, in a film that prides itself on its intelligence and audacity, the pointlessness of their inclusion is thoroughly magnified.

In spite of these shortcomings, Green Room is still highly recommended to strong-stomached fans of the horror genre.  I was curious to see how Saulnier would follow up Blue Ruin, and he did so by making an even better film; now I’m really looking forward to seeing whether his next film can continue on his rapidly-rising career trajectory, and if he sticks with his two-word “[color] [noun or verb]” formula that he’s been using lately to name his next picture.

RECAP: Intense as all hell, with unsettling and graphic violence to boot, Green Room is a sharp step forward for writer/director Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin), which turns the horror genre on its ear by presenting characters that aren’t completely stupid (gasp!)  Patrick Stewart is, as you’ve heard everywhere else, excellent in his villainous role as the eerily calm, yet unspeakably evil bar owner Darcy, while the rest of the cast also deliver high-quality performances.  Once it gets going, and it doesn’t take long, it puts the pedal to the metal and never lets up, making it one of the more effective horror films I’ve seen in a while.

RATING: 8/10 

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Director: Quentin Tarantino
Writer(s): Tarantino, from a story by Tarantino and Roger Avery
Starring: John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Uma Thurman

What can you say about Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction that hasn’t been already said by thousands of critics and moviegoers?  It launched the career of Tarantino, rejuvenated John Travolta’s, and raised the stock of Samuel L. Jackson, Tim Roth, and Bruce Willis tenfold.  It’s a crime caper, featuring an anthology of loosely-connected stories that was considered ingenious and daring during its release.  But now that the dust has settled, and we have had 21 years to acclimate ourselves with this talky action classic, does it still hold up as well as it used to?

Before we get to that, let’s just run through the plot.  This will be a mere formality, as dozens of other articles will go into it more in depth, and analyze it down to the most minute of details, if that’s what you’re looking for; likewise, if you’re actually planning on watching it, and have never seen it before, the less you know about it, the better.  Pulp Fiction begins with two petty criminals (Amanda Plummer and Tim Roth) in a restaurant; together, on a whim, they come up with an idea to rob the restaurant, figuring no one would be expecting that.

After this, we meet Vincent Vega (Travolta) and Jules Winnfield (Jackson), two hitmen who are discussing the differences between European and American fast food establishments, on their way to a hit.  Afterwards, Vincent is tasked with taking out a young lady, Mia Wallace, who happens to be the boss’ wife.  Then, we meet Butch (Bruce Willis), an aging boxer who makes an agreement with Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames, and the aforementioned boss) to take a dive in the first round of his next boxing match—but things go awry when Butch reneges on his agreement, instead winning by KO...and killing his opponent.  These stories go much farther and deeper into detail, but the movie contains so many surprises and twists that I wouldn’t want to ruin it by accidentally giving something away—this should nevertheless get you through the first hour, or so, and then things get really interesting.

Pulp Fiction gained most of its fame from the way it was shot—these stories are told in fragmented bits and parts, with the chronology jumping all over the place.  So, for example, after one character is killed, he still may reappear in a later segment alive, because the story has jumped backwards in time.  It sounds confusing, and though the unconventional approach might be a little disorienting at first, most people will get accustomed to the constant jumping around within a few scenes.  Some of the stories are loosely intertwined, with characters appearing in the story arcs of another, and the whole restaurant intro comes back at the end to bring everything full circle…it’s a genius narrative gimmick that was mind-blowing in its day, and still holds up fairly well today, even though a spate of copycats over the years have somewhat diminished its potency.

Aside from Quentin Tarantino’s questionable (and completely unnecessary) decision to put himself in the role of Jimmie, where he looks terribly out of place, the acting is almost flawless across the board.  This is definitely a good thing, because if the acting wasn’t up to snuff, then the film’s long-winded ramblings would have come across as pompous and egotistical.  Somehow, the actors take them and make them not only believable, but entertaining, which couldn’t have been an easy feat.

I could probably ramble on about the cinematography, or the special effects, or the interesting story behind its production, or how Tarantino was said to have modeled the multi-tiered “anthology” premise of his story off of none other than legendary Italian horror director Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (my favorite horror film of all time), but all of these things have been examined in greater detail, by writers far more talented than I.  All I know is, this is a movie worthy of its praise, and while the years have slightly diminished the strength and originality of its fragmented storytelling, there is no denying the influence that Tarantino’s movie continues to exert on modern films.  While I’m not sure I would consider it one of my favorite movies of all time, it’s required viewing simply for the rags-to-riches story—how one man, armed with a camera, endless determination, and with a little luck—could go on to make the highest-grossing independent film of its time, and change the face of cinema in the process.

RECAP: Pulp Fiction is one of the rare movies that deserves just about all of the praise that it gets.  Despite its 152-minute run time, it remains fascinating throughout, mainly due to the narrative structuring, as well as its willingness to wallow in unpredictability.  Aside from Tarantino’s terrible performance, the rest of the actors bring their “A” game, which help to give character to most of the constant monologues and quirky dialogue.  Say what you want about it, or Tarantino in general (his modern interviews are so egotistical that they come off as cringe-worthy), there’s no denying that his independent feature helped to change the face of mainstream cinema.

RATING: 9/10

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Cop Rock S1, E8: Potts Don't Fail Me Now

Starring:
Anne Bobby as Off. Vicki Quinn
Barbara Bosson as Mayor Louise Plank
Vondie Curtis-Hall as Det. Warren Osborne
Ronny Cox as Chief Roger Kendrick
David Gianopoulos as Off. Andy Campo
Larry Joshua as Capt. John Hollander
James McDaniel as Off. Franklin Rose
Ron McLarty as Ralph Ruskin
Mick Murray as Det. Joseph Gaines
Peter Onorati as Det. Vincent LaRusso
Jeffrey Alan Chandler as Ray Rodbart
Teri Austin as Trish Vaughn

Written by: William M. Finkelstein and Stephen Bochco and Michael Graham and John Romano

Directed by: Brad Silberling

Let’s get things started this week with something that I have largely been ignoring, that also plays a big role in the conflicting emotions this series toys with, and that’s the episode titles, which tend to be puns involving the characters played to comedic effect.  While this week’s title is a pretty terrible pun (it’s a takeoff of “Feets, don’t fail me now”, which I had to look up to understand), it has a history that is actually befitting of this episode.  It was attributed to several African-American performers in the 1920s who went by names like Stepin Fetchit, or Sleep ‘n Eat…in other words, black performers who catered to the stereotype of the lazy Negro.  It is perhaps unsurprising that both of them went on to be two of the most famous black actors of their day, though it came at the cost of belittling their own race and heritage.

I noted that the last episode started dealing with topics of racism and homophobia--this episode continues that trend by sticking mostly to racism.  Ironically, though, it all begins with some white people drama: Ralph confronts Vicki and encourages her to find another partner, which she refuses to do, simply because she won‘t allow her husband to bully her.  It seems like a scene like this is now required in every episode going forward; it’s quickly becoming the least interesting plotline of the entire series.  This scene also leads to the pre-theme song, in which Vicki and some friends sing “Why Can’t a Man Be More Like a Woman?” in the ladies’ locker room.  Pretty painful stuff.

"WHY CAN'T A MAN BE MORE LIKE A WOMAN?"

But this isn’t the only time it rears its ugly head: later on, at a bar, Campo (Vicki’s partner for those not in the know) approaches Ralph, hoping to find a way to set aside their differences.  Ralph assures him there is a way to do that, and then proceeds to punch him in the face.  A fight ensues, but is quickly broken up by other bar patrons.  This leads to a visit to the captain’s office, who encourages them to settle their differences amongst themselves, because if Captain Hollander has to do it for them, they won’t like the consequences.

To round out this plot development, at least as far as this episode is concerned, Vicki visits Ralph at the office and encourages him to go to counseling with her.  He is reluctant, but he strikes up a compromise: if he goes to counseling to help save their marriage, she has to get another partner.  I have a feeling Ralph will end up doing further damage to his marriage in some way, thus pushing Vicki right into Campo’s arms at some point in the near future…we’ll see if I’m right!

Moving onto the race aspects, which dominate almost all the other storylines for the week: The white cops assigned to watch the Potts residence (reminder: Potts is the black cop scheduled to testify against is white partner, Detective LaRusso, who shot and killed a known cop-killer for no reason) “capture” three men on Potts’ lawn who are attempting to speak to him.  One of whom, Omar, is played by Tony Todd, who you may remember as either Ben from the Night of the Living Dead remake, or as the Candyman in the eponymous film (or any one of his other 192 film and television credits)!  The cops play their tough guy routine, but Potts wants to hear what the men, who are from a Muslim organization, have to say.  They are concerned that he has white officers watching him and his family, and offer their protection, believing that blacks would better protect one of their own.  He denies this and sends them on their way.

Continuing on with Potts, who gets a lot of screen time in this one, he is “pre-screened” by Sidney Weitz and Trish Vaughn, who as you may remember are the attorneys for Detective LaRusso.  They just want to know roughly how he is going to respond to the questions on the stand, to see if he will make a good witness for them; he answers the questions truthfully, and then gets his words twisted around by Trish, which frustrates him and causes him to storm out of the room.

For a second opinion, Potts goes to a black lawyer who either seems to specialize in, or merely has a lot of experience with, police cases.  The lawyer tells him to support LaRusso’s claim, much to Potts’ shock, with the explanation that if he testifies against him, as he is planning to do, all the white cops on the force will see LaRusso as a martyr, while they’ll see him as a rat, and want to make life hell for him.  This leads Potts to have a change of heart, so he goes to tell Captain Hollander that he’s changed his mind, and that he is not going to testify.  This disappoints Hollander, mainly because he wants to see LaRusso behind bars, but there’s really nothing he can do about it.  At the end of the episode, he is approached by Commander Warren Osborne, also a black man and the right-hand man of the Chief of Police, who tells him that his fellow officers already see him as a traitor, and that they’re going to give him a tough time even if he steps down, so he might as well do the right thing.  This gives him some food for thought for the next ep.

In the other racially-tinged plotline, a six-year-old African-American child is gunned down, by accident, after getting caught in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting.  He is the only casualty.  For dramatic effect, there’s the required scene that the mother, who seems to always have to be a larger black woman, runs out screaming and crying that her baby has been taken from her.  Of course, “Cop Rock” can take it one step further, and they do, by giving her a song, with lyrics such as: “Why God must the innocent suffer, Lord? How many must die, Lord, before we know why, Lord?”  It’s an admirable attempt, I suppose, but the minimalist music and bland lyrics do in what could have been a much more powerful song.

"WHY LORD?"

Officer Frank Rose is disgusted by the scene of a dead six-year-old kid in a rough neighborhood, but is bothered even moreso by the lack of concern from Detective Miller, who is the white cop tasked with overseeing the investigation.  At one point, Rose approaches Miller at a bar, giving him a list of partial tags and descriptions of vehicles that were spotted at the scene.  Obviously, Rose is merely doing this out of interest in the case, but Miller sees this as a personal attack; his response is to sing a song to Rose’s partner, Joe Gaines, about how Rose can’t be trusted, simply because he’s black (“When you need a man to watch your back, blue is blue and black is black” are some example lyrics, with an emphasis on, and a look of utter contempt during, the last part).  As expected, an unswayed Gaines calls him a “jerk” and leaves.

Later on, Rose follows up on the case again with Miller, who storms into the Captain’s office and tells him that if the Captain won’t “take care” of Rose, then he will.  This doesn’t seem to sit too well with Cap’n Hollander, but things go south even quicker when, later on, Miller tells Rose that he sees black-on-black crime merely as a “thinning of the herd”.  Officers are quick to hold back both Rose and Miller, thus preventing a black-on-white crime, but he’s immediately called to Hollander’s office, where he is essentially told to either retire, or he’ll eventually be fired.

In yet another racist-tinged narrative, Chief Kendrick comes under fire at the courthouse that will be hearing the Vincent LaRusso case: he goes on a tirade to the media about how just the fact that LaRusso is being tried makes him sick to his stomach, and that the only people that are questioning his character are “rich west side leftists, negro con merchants“, and the “entertainment industry”, which he feels is mostly made up of “drug addicts, crybabies, and homosexuals who are intent on tearing down all our traditional American values.”  As if this wasn’t enough, he calls LaRusso’s own lawyer “one smart Jew.”  The journalists there couldn’t get to their computers quickly enough after being bombarded with all those sound bytes.

In her only appearance in this episode, Louise Plank chastises him for his behavior, while he thinks that the only people that were angered by his comments, were those that already hated him.  She counters that, as the mayor, she will be called upon to answer to any uproar that this may cause, and that they need to enact some immediate “damage control” to prevent the whole thing from becoming a political liability.  The scene is kind of lost when, despite her impassioned speech just two seconds ago, she still says she wants to have sex with him.  Thankfully, Kendrick isn’t in the mood, and leaves her office.

And to wrap everything up, Captain Hollander runs into trouble of his own when he gets caught up in work and is late to his son’s piano recital; so late, in fact, that he completely missed his son’s turn.  His wife angry, this turns into the clichéd, obligatory cop show storyline where she reprimands him for making promises to his son that he can’t keep, while Captain Hollander defends himself by saying he’s so busy, things are bound to slip through the cracks.  He then goes into his sleeping son’s room and sings a song about how he wants to be there for him, or some such trite nonsense.

All-in-all, this was yet another episode that didn’t completely suck.  While a lot of it is understandably bland--understandable because this aired on network television in the early ‘90s, so it can only push the envelope so far--the scene in which the black lawyer tells him why he should back away is sadly logical, and no doubt genuine, from a society that still can’t accept humans at face value.

EPISODE RATING: 5.5/10

FULL EPISODE

Hush (2016)

Director: Mike Flanagan
Writer(s): Flanagan and Kate Siegel
Starring: Kate Siegel, John Gallagher Jr., Michael Trucco, and Samantha Sloyan

Hush proves that no matter what disability you give your main character, a shitty home invasion movie is still a shitty home invasion movie.  It also proves just how easy it is to trick critics into thinking you’ve made something special: throw in a heroine that doesn’t lay down and play submissive at the first sign of trouble, and watch them all rush to crown your work the next horror masterpiece.  Just excuse the fact that she’s one of the stupidest characters to grace a horror film in a long time; her only saving grace is that the man who randomly decides he wants to kill her is somehow even stupider.  Also, ignore that the story is nothing but standard genre fare…in other words, take the idea of a tough, deaf woman out of the picture, and what you’re left with is a terrible, lazy excuse for a film that no one would have even batted a lash at.

Kate Siegel (also one of the co-writers) plays Maddie Young, a deaf writer who logically lives all by herself in a secluded cottage buried deep in the woods.  Without a gun or any manner of weaponry for self-defense.  Now, I understand that real-life writers often quarantine themselves away from others when writing, but isn’t that usually to get a little peace and quiet?  At the expense of sounding rude, isn’t that all that Maddie hears to begin with?  All half-joking aside, it’s kind of an idiotic set-up already, as her friends constantly worry about her and her safety, but hey, it’s a horror movie!  Let’s just bare with it…

Hush begins by quickly establishing her lifestyle: she talks on the phone to a couple friends (via videophone and sign language), ignores a call from her ex-boyfriend Craig, decides to FaceTime Craig but backs down at the last second, then ignores him again when he calls back, FaceTime’s her sister, and in between all this, sits herself down to write her next novel.  Also, to spoon-feed us every little tidbit of information that we might possibly need to understand this complex plot, her friend, Sarah, from a nearby house that always remains unseen, stops by to give Maddie a glowing review of her first novel, and to return her copy of it.  They spend a couple hours chatting on her front porch, conveniently taking us from daylight to dusk, before Sarah heads home.  Only, she never makes it.

While Maddie is in the kitchen, preparing dinner, Sarah runs up to her side door, which is conveniently all glass.  She screams, begging for help, furiously pounding on the glass door before a masked killer comes up and finishes her off.  This is concerning because it also shows us another sense that Maddie apparently lacks, and that’s peripheral vision: even though this whole attack lasts over a minute, literally FEET away from her, and even though she spends a good amount of this time facing forward, at an angle where the furious flash of colors and motion would have captured the attention of even a blind person, she goes about obliviously continuing to go about her task.  Hold on, it gets worse.

The killer, who by now has already figured out that she cannot hear, opens her front door and stands mere feet away from behind her as she tries writing her novel on the couch.  It’s chilly out, something we know because not five minutes of screen time later, she opens the very same front door and shudders.  Yet she can’t feel the draft of the open door as she cluelessly types away, nor can she feel the presence of an intruder staring at her while brandishing a knife?  She is finally clued in that something is amiss a little later, when her previously-missing phone turns up with photos of her sitting in the house, including one snapped mere seconds earlier.  Now she realizes that something is wrong; the man soon appears on her front porch brandishing a crossbow, and one of the most asinine “hunter” vs. “hunted” films ever made is underway.

Actually, it doesn’t feel so much a game of cat-and-mouse as it does a case of writers trying to pad a twenty-minute movie into a space four times greater than that.  There are countless shots of the killer walking around her house, trying to see her through the windows, to taunt her some more.  Only, these pack no suspense whatsoever, because he clearly states at the beginning that he won’t come in there until she wants to die.  Now, this could have been a nice little lie that could have lead to some suspense, if all of a sudden she looked and the door was open and he was somewhere inside, but it's pretty obvious from the way he keeps pacing around outside that he's that one rare killer who's a man of his word.  Since there’s no direct threat of him entering the house, which seems to be made up of 90% windows, then that pretty much removes a very large dose of tension.

Maddie also happens to be completely oblivious to common sense: if you are deaf and under attack, I would think logic would dictate that you stay in a room with as few windows, and ways to gain entrance, as possible.  So her first thought is to stay on the first floor, in a bedroom with two windows, and sit between the two windows facing the bedroom door.  Gee, I don’t know how that could go wrong.  In no time at all she’s lured out by the killer using her dead friend to knock on the window, something she doesn’t have to acknowledge or answer, but of course does.  It’s literally not until about half-hour into the confrontation that Maddie seems to even remember that she has an upstairs flat; there’s only one way in from the inside (walking up the steps) and the only way in from the killer’s perspective would require him to climb up to the roof and break a window.  But instead of wisely arming herself with a sharp object and guarding the two entrances, she makes another genius decision: climb out the upstairs window herself, and walk around on the roof, where one misstep would clearly cost her her life.  She tries creating a diversion by throwing her flashlight into the woods.  The killer hears the flashlight land, sees it shining on the ground, obviously not being manned by anyone, and clearly having been thrown there by someone desperately trying to escape, and still goes to check it out.  Jesus, it’s like Dumb & Dumber in horror form.

In another case of blind stupidity, the killer sees Maddie on the roof, climbs up to get her, and somehow doesn’t even brace for the possibility that she’s waiting to attack him when he reaches the top rung.  Because, you know, people on ladders aren’t vulnerable in the least.  So it completely catches him off guard when she hits him in the face with a blunt object, sending him falling to the ground below.  Come on there, menacing killer, that’s some Home Alone shit right there, and probably the first thing you should plan for when climbing up anything to confront someone desperate for survival.

What attracted me to this was the assurance that it tramples over well-worn home-invasion stereotypes; it doesn’t even have the intelligence (or gall) to do that.  There are brief snippets where the sound cuts out for a few seconds—obviously so that we can hear what she hears—but it’s only a few times during the whole movie, and only once during the “attack”.  How hard would it have been to show some scenes from her POV, complete with the sound removed?  That wouldn’t have added anything to the budget, and would have instantly established a claustrophobic atmosphere, while giving us a specific example of just how detrimental her lack of hearing is, and how much more difficult it makes her situation.  Truthfully, there were any number of ways that the filmmakers could have really toyed with either her handicap, or the whole tired home-invasion idea, but they seem dedicated to following the path well-traveled, delivering a film that has the appearance of wanting to try something new, without actually doing it.

I'm not even going to get myself started on the ending, which is so laughably atrocious that it defies all logic.  I really can't mention anything without giving it away, but the difficulties a fully-grown, relatively healthy, and mentally capable adult male has in dispatching a weak female who is slowly bleeding to death, is truly mind-boggling.  If I'm coming off as misogynistic, I'm really not meaning to be: I literally mean the woman is so bad-off that just looking at her wrong could kill her, and yet this injured-yet-able-bodied adult male, with the full ability to move and carry things, basically has to go out of his way to give her a fighting chance, and does so, to infuriating results.

To try to end this on a somewhat positive note, it's competently made, and the acting is okay.  I mean, as with a lot of such films, "acting" boils down to simply crying for long stretches (the victim), and taunting said crying girl (the killer), but both leads are at least adept at sticking to their established roles.  And hey, in a movie this bad, even something mediocre is a resounding win!

If you like your horror movies to be slow, predictable slogs through genre conventions, then set aside some time for Hush.  If you want something more than that, I can only apologize on its behalf.

RECAP: Hush is nothing more than overhyped trash; the cat-and-mouse game that comprises most of the narrative is a wash thanks to the stupidity of the two main characters, who frequently make such ignorant decisions, you would swear they were suicidal.  This basically plays out like a twenty-minute short blown up to four times that size; it feels like it was padded with endless shots of the killer walking around the house, and constantly looking into windows.  Don't be surprised if, by the end, you're torn between who you think deserves to die more: the killer, because he blows trillions of chances to finish off his victim, or the deaf woman, because her death would serve as the immediate end to the movie, and thus, your suffering.

RATING: 2/10    

TRAILER

Cop Rock S1, E7: Cop-a-Felliac

Starring:
Anne Bobby as Off. Vicki Quinn
Barbara Bosson as Mayor Louise Plank
Vondie Curtis-Hall as Det. Warren Osborne
Ronny Cox as Chief Roger Kendrick
David Gianopoulos as Off. Andy Campo
Larry Joshua as Capt. John Hollander
James McDaniel as Off. Franklin Rose
Ron McLarty as Ralph Ruskin
Mick Murray as Det. Joseph Gaines
Peter Onorati as Det. Vincent LaRusso
Jeffrey Alan Chandler as Ray Rodbart
Teri Austin as Trish Vaughn

Written by: William M. Finkelstein and Stephen Bochco and Michael Graham and John Romano

Directed by: Arlene Sanford

Once again we have a lot on the docket in this week’s episode of “Cop Rock”, and no time for formalities, so let’s get going right away.

It starts in a meeting room, something we haven’t seen too often in this show, if at all before.  This intro was actually the best one yet, with the lead officer (haven’t seen him before, to my knowledge, and couldn’t locate him in the credits; he might be Mike Finnegan, playing a Lt. Kellogg) running through a list of all the current topics.  The sequence is lighthearted, and overall pretty dumb, but it exhibits a playfulness that tends to be sorely missing from many of the episodes up through this point.  But, as is required, it’s pretty much ruined when he breaks into song, singing “Let’s Be Careful Out There”, which is obviously about the perils they face on a nightly basis.

"LET'S BE CAREFUL OUT THERE"

I’ve mentioned this many times before, but I’m going to do it again: Randy Newman’s theme song is godawful.  It’s really a piece of garbage masquerading as music, and it becomes an even greater annoyance given the show’s formula of always having a song before the opening credits.  This means we’re always bombarded with two back-to-back songs, one from the show, which then leads right into Newman’s staggeringly awful theme song attempt that, may I remind you lest you forget about the incompetence of the selection process behind major award shows, won a fucking Emmy.  Gimme a break.

The show finally steps up to deal with some real heavy-hitting issues here, and no I’m not being facetious: Right from the outset, we get Donnie Potts going to his captain with a newspaper clipping with the headline “LaRusso Partner to Testify”.  Next to that, Potts’ photo is “X”-ed out in red marker with the words “Die Nigger” scrawled underneath.  That’s some pretty hefty stuff for network television in the early ‘90s, so I kind of have to applaud it for that.  The captain assures Potts that they will guard his house around the clock to make sure nothing happens to him or his family, but things take a little racist turn when Potts points out the way he’s treated in the office, to which the captain responds: “Well that part we got to expect”, before telling him that he’s just “going to have to tough it out.”  I’m not going to hold the political-correctness against the show, though, simply because that may have been the mindset in the early ‘90s--hell, it's no doubt the same mindset even today.

This storyline comes to a head when two out of the three officers assigned to patrol Potts’ house leave to investigate a suspicious vehicle, and in that time whoever’s behind the threats has time to light a cross on fire on their lawn (the third officer is the one tasked with guarding the back, so he doesn't see the perpetrators).  Potts’ wife and kids come out on the lawn, followed up by all the other blacks in the neighborhood, as the wife sings “But It's Not Going to Happen Here”, a pretty effective song about racism that persists, but how they won’t let it get to them.  One of the better songs of the entire series so far, and one of the most powerful.

"BUT IT'S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN HERE"

To round out this section of the storyline, LaRusso hears about the threat to Potts and his family, and pays a visit to tell Potts that he’ll take care of anyone that threatens him.  Potts is not happy to hear this, though, (rightfully) claiming that LaRusso murdering Tyrone Powers is the thing that put a target on him in the first place.  LaRusso still sticks to his tough-guy shtick: when Potts asks him why in the world he would ever call him, LaRusso responds with, “Because you know I’m the only guy that will get things done,” before coolly walking off the way characters always do in movies when their words are supposed to stick with you.

Speaking of LaRusso, his storyline begins when he freely admits to his legal team that he killed Tyrone Powers without any cause whatsoever.  The only fallout from this, is that it turns on Trish Vaughn, the attorney that he’s banging, who comes onto him at a local bar, but who refuses to go home with him.  Something’s pretty fishy about this one, so we’ll see if she has some ulterior motives that will eventually come out in future episodes. (She does brutally turn down Officer Gaines, who asks her out, right before he loses his car in a 9-story parking garage and spends the whole time he’s looking singing a song about how nothing’s going right for him, which wins the prestigious “Most Pointless Scene of the Week” award).

Not dissuaded by his admittance in guilt, his legal team tries setting him up to be a hero, by staging an event that he would be in on, like stopping a robbery, or saving a child in a deep hole, that would get the public on his side.  He angrily turns down these options, but accepts an opportunity to speak to a gathering of bail bondsmen.  In a surprise, an all-girl band (named, and I am not kidding, “Brenda and the Bus Monsters”) opens for him, which I think was just a way for them to hit their five-song quota.  During his ensuing speech, he basically admits to murdering Tyrone Powers to the packed room, but their standing ovation clearly shows that he has their support.

"I'M OK" (complete w/ lyrics in description...they're kinda bad)

Meanwhile, the whole “love triangle” between Andy Campo, his partner Vicki Quinn, and her overweight, middle-aged husband (and forensic expert) Ralph Ruskin comes to a head.  You will remember that Quinn was shot while trying to diffuse a hostile situation at a bank, which Ralph blames Andy for allowing to happen.  Things don’t get any easier for him to take when he overhears Andy singing to her while she’s in the hospital, essentially about how much he loves her; not something that’s going to ease the mind of a jealous husband.

Well now is her first day back on the force after recovering from the injury, and Ralph is not happy about that.  So he does what any fellow cop would do, and follows them while they’re patrolling the streets on active duty.  When they stop at a hotel and enter a room, he panics, and as he goes to confront them, pulls out his gun before kicking the door in.  Of course, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to guess that they are merely on a call--one that apparently involves a dead man in a bra and women’s underwear (again, no joke), but a call nonetheless.  Furious, Quinn confronts him, to which he apologizes, while she assures him that she still loves him and that there’s nothing between her and Andy.  Ralph tells her that if she can look him in the eye and tell him that, he’ll believe her; she does, but he still accuses her of lying before storming off.  Well that’s not a good look there, Ralph.  Obviously, he’s doing more harm than good to the relationship, and will more than likely end up pushing her away.  I will say he does actually have something to worry about, because they do seem to be a little closer than just partners, but the show is probably allowing Ralph to ruin the relationship himself so that viewers can cheer Andy and Vicki finally getting together.

In the second bit of hard-hitting topics, Mayor Louise Plank is having a one-on-one meeting with her trusty assistant, Ray Rodbart.  Ray is turning in his resignation, because he has gotten word that a local reporter is going to write an article “outing” him as gay; Ray doesn’t want the potentially-negative publicity to affect his job, or Louise, and sees this as the only option.  Louise, however, won’t have any of it, claiming that she has his back and that they will go through whatever happens together.  This is one of the few scenes of the entire series that is genuinely strong, without any melodramatic overtones--it probably also helps that no song comes out of it.

Upset by the notion of this article, the Mayor arranges a meeting with Lyle Barry, the reporter breaking the story on Ray.  In a kind of surprising twist (at least to me), Lyle is gay himself, and so the article is not meant to be an attack on Ray, but rather an inspirational piece to show the gay community that there are plenty of other gay role models in the city.  Yet still, the fact that Ray doesn’t want to be “outed” is still a valid point of contention, and one that Louise uses to ask Lyle to leave him out of the story.  At first, Lyle is insistent on continuing with the article, at which point the Mayor reveals some dirty info she has on Mr. Barry: namely that his partner of eight years is an illegal immigrant with no green card.  Lyle accuses her of blackmail, to which she agrees that’s what it is, to which he stupidly retorts something along the lines of, “You have no right to dig up stuff about me,” leaving her wide open to declare that he also has no right to do the same to Ray.  This scene ratchets up the melodramatic quotient a little bit, but it’s still an effective scene, one that’s made even moreso when you realize that, in the early ‘90s when this show was released, gays weren’t nearly as accepted as they are now.  For the show to take a strong, pro-gay angle at that time was a pretty gutsy decision; the fact that the scenes are actually well done make them all the more effective.

I have to say that, while this episode still had its fair share of awful (the main culprits once again being, surprise!, the music), it’s been the closest thing we’ve seen yet to a step in the right direction.  The themes are getting meatier, by focusing on a couple that remain strong and relevant even today (racism and homophobia), and while the songs remain largely unnecessary and forgettable, the “Burning Cross” number is one of the best ones the show has produced.  Unlike most of the musical moments from the series, this one doesn’t seem to be forcing itself upon the viewer, instead letting the heavy message speak for itself.  Sure, the song doesn‘t really have much to say that you haven‘t heard before, but the minimalist music underneath is a smart decision, which allows the vocals and lyrics to take center stage, as they should.

To say that I’m looking forward to watching the next one is still a huge overstatement, but knowing that this show is actually capable of being even “average” is a small victory in and of itself.  Oh, and I have to admit that I have zero ideas what the title is a play-on-words for, so if anyone else might know, feel free to toss it out there and make me look stupid (hemophiliac comes to mind, but that's spelled very differently, and this episode has nothing to do with blood; searching "felliac" in Google comes up only with this episode title, so no help there, either).

EPISODE RATING: 5/10

FULL EPISODE