"CATCH YOU FUCKERS AT A BAD TIME?"

Abduction (2019)

As I might’ve mentioned once or twice before, Scott Adkins has really been on a roll in his recent movies with director Jesse V. Johnson. But let’s not get too comfortable. He’s got a new one coming to DVD tomorrow called ABDUCTION. It’s not of similar quality, but I had fun with it, and it’s something different for him. The cover just shows him with a big gun, so I assumed it was a COMMANDO deal with him rescuing his daughter from kidnappers. Yeah, pretty much, but the kidnappers are aliens! Or inter-dimensional beings? I think inter-dimensional beings. Forgive my ignorance.

So no, it’s not a remake of John Singleton’s 2011 movie starring Taylor Lautner. I also got it mixed up with another upcoming Adkins project called SEIZED, which I have confirmed is a different movie, an Isaac Florentine joint where a daughter and son are kidnapped, presumably by humans.

I don’t think I can say ABDUCTION is Adkins’ weirdest, because there’s always UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING, a far more atmospheric, moody and hard-hitting movie, better on every level. This one is literally a Roger Corman production and has the bland glossiness and chintzy digital effects I associate with the SyFy Channel. But it’s definitely not generic. It has a hell of an opening that immediately dunks your head in the craziness and takes its time before letting you take a breath. I was into it. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 15th, 2019 | 12 Comments »

A Vigilante

A month or two ago I saw a comedy called BOOKSMART, directed by Olivia Wilde, who I just knew as an actress from TRON: LEGACY. BOOKSMART is about two really smart, funny girls obsessed with good grades and good colleges who, on the night before graduation, try to go to a party. It’s similar to SUPERBAD in both laugh ratio and sweet emphasis on friendship, and it even stars Jonah Hill’s hilarious sister Beanie Feldstein (LADY BIRD), along with Kaitlyn Dever, who played Loretta on Justified. I really enjoyed these two characters, plus the score by Dan the Automator, and highly recommend the movie, but it’s the kind of thing I don’t really know how to write about. I don’t know how to get much mileage out of trying to explain why I think something is funny. So I just tweeted about it and left it at that, until this very paragraph.

But the same week BOOKSMART came out there was a much less jolly movie released on video starring Wilde, written and directed by first-timer Sarah Dagger-Nickson. This one is called A VIGILANTE, and she’s literally playing a vigilante. It’s an arty movie that played South by Southwest in 2018, and the title could maybe be an homage to Jacques Audiard’s A PROPHET, because that seems like sort of the category of movie they’d like to be in. But at the beginning there were logos for Emmett-Furla Productions, Saban, and Moviepass. So yeah, obviously this one I know how to write about. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 11th, 2019 | 5 Comments »

Spider-Man: Far From Home

SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME continues the charming “teen comedy, but in the Marvel Universe” vibe of 2017’s SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING, but instead of situating it on the outskirts of the MCU it’s more in the middle this time. It’s pretty much an epilogue to the whole story that culminated in AVENGERS: ENDGAME, or a bridge to the next one. It starts by making light of the fictional tragedies of that movie (a hilariously awful teen-made video tribute to fallen heroes) and pretty much addressing everything I wondered about after ENDGAME (AVENGERS that is, not HIGHLANDER) pertaining to a world where half of all teens are five years younger than their ID says.

And then it’s kind of like it should be called SPIDER-MAN IS… IRON MAN 4. Peter Parker (Tom Holland, BILLY ELLIOT THE MUSICAL LIVE) is on a school trip to Europe, and his mind is on a plan to tell M.J. (Zendaya, SUPER BUDDIES) he has a crush on her, though she seems to be spending her time with Brad (Remy Hii, CRAZY RICH ASIANS), who is somebody’s little brother who grew big and handsome while the rest of them were dusted. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 10th, 2019 | 168 Comments »

Wheels On Meals

WHEELS ON MEALS is the 1984 Hong Kong action classic starring Chinese opera bros for life Jackie Chan, Yuen Biao and Sammo Hung (also director), fresh off of WINNERS AND SINNERS and PROJECT A. Jackie and Biao star as Thomas and David, dorky cousins who live together in Barcelona, sharing a bedroom that has separate doors right next to each other for no reason other than a visual gag. In the opening we see them getting up, working out and practicing on kung fu dummies, so that when they’re amazing fighters through the rest of it there’s a foundation for it. (But we never see them practice again.)

Sammo plays a guy named Moby, who’s introduced sporting shades and a perm that almost looks like jheri curls. He’s working (without pay) for a sleazy p.i. (Herb Edelman, a.k.a. Dorothy’s ex-husband Stanley on Golden Girls) who leaves town to hide from a gambling debt and leaves Moby in charge, causing him to strut around town dressed like he’s in the “Smooth Criminal” video, whisper-bragging to everyone that he’s “Acting Chairman of Matt’s Detective Agency.” He also takes a case to find a woman from an old photograph (oh my god this could turn into THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO) and it seems like all he really knows how to do is look for some guy named Fatso to ask him about it. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 9th, 2019 | 37 Comments »

Midsommar

MIDSOMMAR is the new one from HEREDITARY writer/director Ari Aster. It’s about a group of drugged out (and in some cases horny) young people running into some craziness during a summer vacation, so hopefully nobody will pretend it’s not a horror movie.

It’s very much in the vein of Aster’s first one, because it has weird and ridiculously detailed cult rituals, meticulously designed sets and camera moves, slow ominous dread building to big/crazy/gory payoffs uncharacteristic of modern arthouse horror, superb acting performances, an emphasis on tense relationships and heavy emotions, and an undercurrent of dark, uncomfortable humor that got a bunch of big laughs in the audience I saw it with (though, if HEREDITARY is any indication, people will tell me I imagined that). So it’s a similar template, but a very different palette, because there’s nothing supernatural and there’s not much darkness. It takes place in an old-timey village in Sweden where everyone wears white, it’s sunny all day, and the nights are short and never get all the way dark. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 8th, 2019 | 180 Comments »

The Dead Don’t Die

Jim Jarmusch’s zombie comedy THE DEAD DON’T DIE is… I mean, it’s a zombie comedy by Jim Jarmusch. Which is unexpected. When the trailer came out I couldn’t tell if they were trying to mislead us or if Jarmusch had made something totally different from his other movies. The answer is in the middle, leaning toward the first one. It feels closer to normal Jarmusch than to, like, SHAUN OF THE DEAD. It’s high on oddness and quirk, low on concept, plot structure or traditional resolution. Compared to ZOMBIELAND or TUCKER AND DALE or something the humor is bone dry and the pace is molasses slow.

But by LIMITS OF CONTROL standards it’s an action packed thrill-o-rama. It has a whole bunch of zombies digging out of graves like Thriller or RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD, pulling out people’s intestines for a snack, and getting their heads chopped or blown off. They’re respectable zombies, too – o.g. slow shambling style, some personality to them, one played by Iggy Pop (DEAD MAN, THE CROW: CITY OF ANGELS). There’s one pretty distinctive touch in that they emit puffs of dust from their wounds. I imagine Jarmusch worked with more FX people on this than on all his other movies combined. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 3rd, 2019 | 18 Comments »

Mom and Dad

Brian Taylor is the former camera operator and guy who played “Young Man” in THE MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN who, with partner Mark Neveldine, wrote and directed CRANK, CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE, GAMER and GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE. The CRANKs are beloved by many, and feature some fun ideas and a game Jason Statham, but when I watched them a decade ago I could not abide their intentionally obnoxious why-are-you-hitting-yourself-why-are-you-hitting-yourself stylistic and comedic fart-in-the-face. GAMER I despised even more because it tried harder to work as a high concept action movie and tried less to make it possible to have any clue what you are ever even looking at. And GHOST RIDER I don’t think they were happy with and it’s not very good but I liked some of what they did.

But in 2017 Taylor made his solo directing debut with MOM AND DAD and for my money this is his best movie. (He has subsequently done two seasons of a SyFy series called Happy! which I’ve heard some good things about.) It’s not like he’s changed what he’s about. He’s still using gimmicky camera moves, cheeky needle drops and spastic cutaways, and you better believe he’s gonna repeatedly slap you across the face with bursts of rockin guitars and blip bloopin dubstep electro-burps (score by Australian DJ/producer Mr. Bill). But it feels more under his control, more like a storyteller strategically employing chaos in service of a story, less like a dude with no pants on blowing two airhorns in your face and uncontrollably giggling about how funny it is that he’s doing it. (read the rest of this shit…)

July 2nd, 2019 | 8 Comments »

Gunmen

GUNMEN is a simple but appealing little buddy movie with goofy humor and a little more style than you expect, or at least I’m guessing it does from what you can see on the shitty cropped DVD. It takes place in the modern world with mercs in sweat-stained gear and machine guns slung over their shoulders flying around South America in helicopters, but it’s pretty much a western, even opening with its buffoonish anti-hero Dani (Christopher Lambert around the time of KNIGHT MOVES) sitting in a dirty jail cell watching a fly land on his face when Cole Parker (Mario Van Peebles around the time of FULL ECLIPSE) blows up the wall to bust him out.

“Oh my god, I’m so happy to see you!” Dani says as he jumps into Cole’s Jeep. “Who are you?” (read the rest of this shit…)

July 1st, 2019 | 11 Comments »

Climax

I’m not too well-versed in the films of Gaspar Noe. I still haven’t seen his early films like I STAND ALONE and IRREVERSIBLE that gained him a following and a reputation as a nihilistic wipe-your-nose-in-it gloom merchant. I have seen ENTER THE VOID, which taught me that he’s also a great stylist with incredible technical mastery in the area of long takes and seemingly impossible camera moves. I knew this one also had dancing, so I checked it out.

Here’s my pitch: STEP UP 3 meets mother! on acid. Literally on acid – it’s about a French dance troupe having a party in an empty school building and realizing somebody dosed the sangria. Everybody gradually goes from joyfully celebrating their progress on a new routine to getting paranoid, agitated and violent. The few who didn’t drink it are suspected of spiking it, and become targets for the others. Everybody is trying to fuck everybody else while also trying not to be fucked by everybody else. It turns into a dark, horny fever dream where the rooms keeping getting darker and redder and the camera more disorienting, eventually even upside down (shout out to the massage parlor robbery scene in TOO MANY WAYS TO BE NO. 1). I noticed that there was a whole lot of screaming and wigging out, but actually didn’t catch that 42 minutes of it was one unbroken take. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 26th, 2019 | 24 Comments »

Raising Heroes

June is Pride Month, of course, and I hope it’s been a good one for anybody who it means anything to. I never really knew a way to honor the occasion before, but that’s because I hadn’t yet stumbled across this 1996 gay-themed independent drama that shows two guys with guns on the cover – in fact the tagline is “THIS TIME THE GAY GUY’S GOT THE GUN!” – and mentions John Woo on the back.

RAISING HEROES is about a couple, Josh (Troy Sostillio) and Paul (Henry White), in the midst of a custody battle. Paul’s best friend died of cancer and wanted the two to raise her young son Nicky, but the kid’s grandmother and homophobic case workers are trying to stop that from happening. Then, a few days before a crucial hearing, Josh witnesses a mobster named Victor (Edmond Sorel, also co-writer) executing a guy in a convenience store, and various gangsters spend the next few days following and trying to eliminate him. (read the rest of this shit…)

June 25th, 2019 | 9 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
  • Hey bud, thanks for reading.

    Don't feel obligated, but here are some

  • WAYS YOU CAN SUPPORT THE SHIT OUT OF VERN & OUTLAWVERN.COM

    if that's your thing:

  • 1. Patreon

    Toss me a couple bucks a month, support the good shit, also get access to a bunch of exclusive writing. This is my primary source of writing money that has allowed me to cut down to part time at the day job. Thank you!

  • 2. Buy my books from your local bookseller or somebody

    click here for my Amazon author page

    (NOTE: My ten year contract has passed on the Titan books, so I don't get residuals on them like I do WORM ON A HOOK and NIKETOWN, but I would love for you to read them because I'm proud of them)

    EXTRA CREDIT: Review them on Amazon! That would really help me out. Unless you didn't like them, in which case forget I said anything.

  • 3. If you ever buy from Amazon, go through my links or search engines



    (you pay the same amount you were gonna pay anyway they cut me a little slice)

  • I also have an Amazon UK one:

    (I can't get the search box widget to work anymore, so click on MOONWALKER and then search for what you want.)

  • 4. My exciting line of fashion and leisure products

    (I get a couple bucks per item, you get a cool t-shirt, mug or lifestyle item)

  • 5. Spread the word

    Tell your friends about my reviews and my books and everything. Only cool people though please, we don't need a bunch of suckers and/or chumps around here.

    THANKS EVERYBODY. YOUR FRIEND, VERN

    * * * *

  • Recent commentary and jibber-jabber

    • pegsman on A Working Man: “How cool wouldn’t UNDER SIEGE have been if Ryback was just a cook…” Apr 12, 22:14
    • CJ Holden on Blade of the 47 Ronin: “Randomly watched it today and while it isn’t a DTV all-timer, I had quite fun with it. It really felt…” Apr 12, 13:14
    • Acid Burn on A Working Man: “Honestly, I wouldn’t question it.” Apr 11, 08:35
    • CJ Holden on Prayer of the Rollerboys: “RE: Mel Brooks producing SOLARBABIES. Sadly they don’t mention it in the excellent HBO documentary about Brooks, but somewhere else…” Apr 11, 07:45
    • Curt on Prayer of the Rollerboys: “Maybe a triple feature with GLEAMING THE CUBE, the Christian Slater skateboarding movie with a sci-fi-sounding title.” Apr 11, 05:48
    • Mr. Majestyk on Prayer of the Rollerboys: “Yeah, any hack can think up a fake movie about rollerblading punks, but you really gotta give a shit to…” Apr 11, 05:19
    • CJ Holden on Prayer of the Rollerboys: “I kinda spent the last day marveling over this title. This is something that sounds like a made up movie,…” Apr 10, 21:53
    • Acid Burn on The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas: “It’s very funny to me that Vern’s above-linked RI¢HIE RI¢H review also bemoans the film’s disastrous mistake of omitting Irona.…” Apr 10, 21:23
    • Mr. Majestyk on A Working Man: ““How badass is he?” speech and it’s just “He worked a double shift at a Waffle House Memorial Day weekend.…” Apr 10, 19:27
    • Acid Burn on A Working Man: “I do love the “they were in the military” trope Vern mentions, films seemingly existing in a world where day…” Apr 10, 18:40
    • Acid Burn on Jurassic World: Rebirth: “…for a contractually obligated three-week window before hitting [remaining streaming service TBD]” Apr 10, 17:58
    • Acid Burn on Jurassic World: Rebirth: “I don’t want to fan the flames in here any higher, but it’s been reported by various scoopers lately that…” Apr 10, 17:53
    • Alex R on The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas: “@daniel– I didn’t do Richie Rich and honestly wasn’t even aware Hanna-Barbera did that cartoon, but as a proponent of…” Apr 10, 10:54
    • CJ Holden on The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas: “@daniel There is indeed a RI¢HIE RI¢H review here https://outlawvern.com/2019/05/08/richie-rich/” Apr 10, 08:39
    • daniel on The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas: “@VERN “is it weird that she reminded me of Emma Stone here?” That’s gotta be their voice, right? “His larger…” Apr 10, 07:13

  • Recent Commented on Posts

  • Most Comments