Film Freak Central

Rob Roy (1995) - Blu-ray Disc

***/**** Image B Sound B
starring Liam Neeson, Jessica Lange, John Hurt, Tim Roth
screenplay by Alan Sharp
directed by Michael Caton-Jones

by Jefferson Robbins Did they name a cocktail after William Wallace? I didn't think so. In this, the later Scots hero Robert Roy MacGregor has the advantage, as he does in the film drawn from his story. Rob Roy beat Mel Gibson's Braveheart into theatres by more than a month, and it's the superior product. But what challenge could Michael Caton-Jones's courtly, well-crafted tale of swash and buckle--his only film set in his home country--mount against the bludgeoning, ass-baring, gay-defenestrating fever dream of a megastar who yearned to be stretched on the rack in imitation of his Lord?

The Butcher Boy (1998) + The Brave One (2007) - DVDs

THE BUTCHER BOY
****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Stephen Rea, Fiona Shaw, Eammon Owens, Alan Boyle
screenplay by Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe, based on the novel by McCabe
directed by Neil Jordan

THE BRAVE ONE
***½/**** Image B- Sound B Extras C+
starring Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Naveen Andrews, Nicky Katt
screenplay by Roderick Taylor & Bruce A. Taylor and Cynthia Mort
directed by Neil Jordan

THE BUTCHER BOY

by Walter Chaw Opening with a series of panels from Golden Age comics produced circa the era in which the film is set (i.e., 1962), The Butcher Boy identifies Neil Jordan as a director with a secret yen for superhero fantasies. It certainly jibes with the filmmaker's affection for protagonists who, for whatever reason, live in private worlds, in fairytale dreamscapes populated by emblems of good and emissaries of evil--worlds where the most colourful places are the interiors of churches, where the characters' fears and failings alike are assets. Jordan's films are unfailingly about transformation (though sometimes they're about the failure to transform adequately, or quickly enough) and heavy with the illness of existential introspection--the Judas strain with which the modern superhero pantheon is sick. His heroes are rendered simple by their duality, confronted by the idea that for as hollow as it is to change to fit the demands of a particular time and place, it's equally useless to try to stay the same as the world falls down. Jordan makes the movies Terry Gilliam never quite made until Tideland; far from the compassionate fare many label it, his oeuvre is comprised of harsh little ditties about the voraciousness of the social organism and the bites it takes out of individuals living perpendicular to the absolute mean. For me, all of his films, from The Crying Game to Mona Lisa, from The End of the Affair to Interview with the Vampire, are pointedly concerned with the futility of compensatory measures in the lives of deviants.

Bully (2001) - DVD

(Oy, these early reviews. -Ed.)

***½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Brad Renfro, Bijou Phillips, Rachel Miner, Michael Pitt
screenplay by Zachary Long & Roger Pullis, based on the book by Jim Schutze
directed by Larry Clark

by Bill Chambers An authority figure delivers the definitive line of dialogue of Bully, Larry Clark's quasi-sequel to his own hotly-contested Kids: "I don't know what you're up to. I don't think I want to know." Well, Clark insists on letting us know. Often accused, even with only three motion pictures under his belt, of over-sensationalizing already sensational material, he's hardly the next Oliver Stone. He may be something of an interfering observer, but he's not a conspiracy proselytizer running with scissors down the hallway. Where Stone drew slave parallels to football in Any Given Sunday by intercutting clips from Ben-Hur, Clark makes more organic shock statements. He can be tactless, sure. Can't we all?

Straw Dogs (1971) - DVD

****/**** Image B Sound B
starring Dustin Hoffman, Susan George, Peter Vaughan, T.P. McKenna
screenplay by David Zelag Goodman and Sam Peckinpah, based on the novel The Siege of Trencher's Farm by Gordon M. Williams
directed by Sam Peckinpah

by Walter Chaw Straw Dogs is about an evil man who has so divorced himself from animal logic that he's become monstrous. He's cruel to his wife, comparing her to a child when she's lonesome and an animal when she's amorous, and he blames her for his detachment from himself. She gets impatient during foreplay if he chooses to take a moment to set his alarm or remove his watch, ergo she must be a nymphomaniac of low breeding. At one point, she mischievously changes a "plus" sign on his chalkboard to a minus and he changes it back so that it looks like a crucifix: the instrument of his martyrdom, the faith of his castration--the ideology that seeks to isolate him from his bestial nature. Finally, when she wishes to run away, he loses his grip on carefully-nurtured civilization, slaps her across the face, and orders her upstairs to the bedroom in the same way that Victorian women were banished from the room upon outliving the delight provided by their servile domesticity. This monster moves to a small Cornish village, where he insists on the creature comforts of home, paid for by a grant to study mathematics, of all things. And in the village the monster ultimately finds himself amongst men of a truer nature.

Deliverance (1972) [Deluxe Edition] - DVD/(DigiBook) - Blu-ray Disc

****/****
DVD - Image B Sound C Extras B
BD - Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox
screenplay by James Dickey, based on his novel
directed by John Boorman

by Walter Chaw Deliverance is mesmerizing. Emerging fully-formed from the rich, black loam of the best period of filmmaking definitely in the United States and possibly in the history of cinema, it pistons its roots unerringly into the darkest corners of our species' memory. In the second-most memorable moment of the film (the one where kind-hearted city-slicker Drew (Ronny Cox) eases into a guitar/banjo duel with a local kid (Billy Redden)), Boorman dangles the possibility that there could be civility between the spoilers and the spoiled before retracting it for the remainder of the picture's running time. If Boorman is our pre-eminent keeper of the Arthurian legend, it's useful to wonder in this particular quest undertaken what are the dark spirits of the wood, and what is the grail? The final image of the piece, after all, suggests a corruption of the Excalibur iconography offered from some fathomless underneath. The essential Western phallus is perverted in Deliverance into the promise that the primal will never be repressed for long.

I Spit on Your Grave (1978) + I Spit On Your Grave (2010) - Blu-ray Discs

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (a.k.a. Day of the Woman)
**/**** Image A Sound B Extras B+
starring Camille Keaton, Eron Tabor, Richard Pace, Anthony Nichols
written and directed by Meir Zarchi

I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE
*/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Sarah Butler, Jeff Branson, Daniel Franzese, Andrew Howard
screenplay by Stuart Morse, based on a screenplay by Meir Zarchi
directed by Steven R. Monroe

by Bryant Frazer Rape-revenge is the basest of movie formulas. What amounts to a social contract exists with the audience: during the first half of the film, you will experience the sadistic, brutal, misogynistic sexual abuse of an innocent, probably naïve young woman at the hands of cavalier thugs. And during the second half of the film, you will see this broken woman--this survivor--pull herself together long enough to exact a terrible revenge on those who wronged her.

Night Train Murders (1975) - Blu-ray Disc

L'ultimo treno della notte
*½/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Flavio Bucci, Macha Méril, Gianfranco De Grassi, Enrico Maria Salerno
screenplay by Renato Izzo, Ettore Sanzò and Aldo Lado
directed by Aldo Lado

by Bryant Frazer It's feeding time for the monsters again in director Aldo Lado's 1974 quasi-giallo¹ Night Train Murders, which sees the young and lovely Margaret and Lisa (Irene Miracle and Laura D'Angelo, respectively, making their film debuts) cross paths with violent criminals while travelling overnight by rail from Germany through Austria to Italy. The stage is set as Pacino-esque stickup man Blackie and his harmonica-blowing sidekick Curly (Flavio Bucci and Gianfranco De Grassi) mug an alcoholic sidewalk Santa Claus in Munich's Marienplatz. Menace! With that kind of element loose in the cities, why would two girls choose to ride some skeevy midnight train into Italy instead of opting for a sensible air flight? From one mother to another, via telephone: "Planes are never on time these days."