I like where Stuart Gordon is coming from. Always thought of as a horror director because of REANIMATOR and FROM BEYOND, now he’s just this low profile indie director, doing his own thing, making little movies with playwrights and obscure writers, usually with gore and dark undertones but not really horror anymore. Not that he has disowned the genre – he’s still trying to do another REANIMATOR sequel.
And this new one, STUCK, is an interesting idea. It’s inspired by that horrible case you may remember reading about a few years ago where a nurse’s aide was driving under the influence, ran over a homeless guy, and parked the car in her garage with him still stuck in the windshield. She left him there to die (it was originally reported as taking two days, which is how it’s portrayed in the movie, but from what I’ve read it was actually 2 hours).
Stephen Rea – who would’ve seemed like a casting coup if he hadn’t recently played the corrupt cop villain in the Van Damme movie UNTIL DEATH – plays the homeless guy, and for his character it’s basically DIE HARD in a garage. There’s a very sympathetic setup of his character, you see how he gets kicked out of his apartment after being laid off, his application gets lost at the employment services office, a cop kicks him out of the park at night, and he happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Then he spends the rest of the movie trying to get off this windshield, trying to honk the horn or grab the cell phone or get out and rig up support for his broken leg. Then he has to fight off the people trying to dispose of him. And somehow a gun appears. I always wanted to see “DIE HARD in the trunk of a car,” this might be as close as I get.
But most of the movie is from the point of view of Mena Suvari’s character and man, I don’t know. I think she’s supposed to be partly likable. The first thing you see her do is clean shit off of an old man and not complain about it, which shows strength of character. Unlike the woman in the real case she almost drops her victim off at the hospital. But she takes off when somebody might see her because she can’t jeopardize the promotion she’s up for. (more…)
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Stuart Gordon’s ROBOT JOX is the timeless story of some Robot Jox. It’s a post-apocalyptic world where the surviving factions of humanity fight over territories in sanctioned robot-on-robot battles. During the time of this story the Americans and Russians are fighting over Alaska. So this is the story of those robot battles and of the jox that jock the robots.
