Stag Night (2008) – Four friends out for a NYC bachelor party, plus two standoffish strippers from the last club they were kicked out of, accidentally end up on a long-abandoned subway platform, and from there become prey to feral cannibals living in the tunnels.
If you’re thinking “The Hills Have Eyes meets C.H.U.D.“, you’re exactly right, with the emphasis squarely on the brutality of the former rather than the camp of the latter. As such, it doesn’t break any new ground, but it holds up admirably and pulls no punches. And the sets (which do NOT look like something constructed in Romania even though they were) are perfectly gritty and grungy, letting the story play out against an immersive visual background as fully post-civilized as anything in a Mad Max movie.
(The fifteen years since it was released means that it looks completely contemporary EXCEPT for the flip-phones everyone uses.)
Mystery Men (1999) – Why have I taken so long to see a movie for which I am the bull’s-eyed target audience? Well, probably because Ben Stiller is an iffy performer for me. He’s not a sucking hole of anti-comedy like so-called “comedians” Will Farrell and Adam Sandler, but he’s still just as likely to annoy me like a groin rash as to make me chuckle. But here… oh jeez. The antics of z-grade superhero wanna-bes when the top-billed (and top-grossing) superhero disappears is simply a delight. [chef’s kiss]
Dig Two Graves (2014) – When a teenager dies by accident in 1977, his younger sister, burdened by guilt, is approached by mysterious backwoods men who claim to be able to bring him back. But the grandfather, the local sheriff, suspects that he’s really the target of a revenge plot for something that happened thirty years ago.
Writer-director Hunter Adams brought himself a fine understated script and then translated it to the screen with a subtle hand; I’m very surprised that the only credit he’s had since is for a short.
All of the performances are fine, but Ted Levin especially shows his acting chops, playing Sheriff Waterhouse in both timeframes; the makeup aging him in 1977 and de-aging him in 1947 is only an aid to a well-crafted performance separating the two versions of the same character.
In fact, the only flaw is the title… which is from a line of dialogue in the last two minutes. I hate that.
Abandoned movies:
Derailed (2002) – We’re well into this Van Damme movie — with TV-movie-level cinematography punctuated by an interminable car chase — before we realize that we’re ready to start the real story. Or not, because that’s when I bailed.
Ninja Commando (2018) – Within the first ten minutes, this French movie (set in Los Angeles) has self-consciously aped at least three Schwarzenegger movies. It’s ostensibly a comedy; I think that word might mean something different in French.
One thing about a disappointing Van Damme movie: your expectations are never too high when you start it.
And yet it still failed to meet them.
As Matt Groening once noted in one of his Life In Hell comics, there’s an old cinematic paradox that’s been baffling movie critics from the start:
Comedy is funny.
Sex is funny.
The French are funny.
Yet no French sex comedies are funny.
That’s because the French are funny as objects of comedy, not creators of it.
.
Amen on Mystery Men. I’m overdue to show it to my kids.