All
The Boys Love Mandy Lane
(2006/Anchor Bay Blu-ray)/The
Canyons (Unrated
Director's Cut/2013/MPI/IFC Blu-ray)/Mischief
Night (2013/Image
DVD)/The Seasoning House
(2012/Well Go USA Blu-ray)/Triple
Cross (1966/Warner
Archive DVD)
Picture:
B-/B-/C/B-/C Sound: B-/B-/C+/B-/C+ Extras: C-/C/C-/C-/D
Films: C-/C/D/C-/C
PLEASE
NOTE:
The Triple
Cross
DVD is only available from Warner Bros. through their Warner Archive
series and can be ordered from the link below.
Here
are some thrillers that want to be more based in reality than usual,
but that does not necessarily help them become great films...
Jonathan
Levine's All The Boys Love Mandy
Lane (2006) starts out as
the usual teen tension film with the title character (Amber Heard in
an early performance) is the gal many of the guys at school want to
be with, some of the gals are jealous of and of course, her male
friend (while not gay) is safe and not the most masculine guy. Of
course, an unlikely group gets together for a weekend that likely
will not be functionally fun, so bad things happen (and they're still
shocked?) but for the first half hour, this is well acted, well cast
and has some promise.
After
that, things become more convoluted, more bad things (expected by
everyone by the characters and makers, we surmise) happen and then,
this becomes bloody, violent and ridiculous at the halfway point.
Going into horror and even torture porn territory, the script becomes
very desperate and rather smug in its twists and turns that get so
dumb, you understand why this is being released as a curio now. Too
bad, because they had things going to begin with, but not much to
say, so this becomes a tired exploitation film when all is said and
done. The actors who had careers afterwards are lucky they did.
A
feature length audio commentary track by the director is the only
extra.
Paul
Schrader's The Canyons
(2013) is another curio with even more potential. Landing Lindsay
Lohan (acting and as co-producer) in a sex thriller with explicit
adult sex entertainment star James Deen is so obviously lurid that
the downfalls were many, but here was Schrader (who wrote Taxi
Driver and wrote &
directed the likes of American
Gigolo, Hardcore,
Light Sleeper
and other looks at the dark side of life) but this would be off of a
new screenplay by Bret Easton Ellis (Less
Than Zero, Rules
Of Attraction, American
Psycho) so you would
think their might be some synergy between the two. Schrader making
up for the vapid, empty sense of Ellis works that become almost
spoofs of themselves in that respect when they hit the big screen.
The
opening credits have a series of closed and rotting movie theaters
and cineplexes, pointing to the death of art, cinema near death and a
Hollywood that may slowly be losing its soul if not worse, so when we
join the characters and in their various relationships and in what
will be more than a few sex games, that is supposed to add up. Too
bad Less Than Zero
was already making that point 25 years ago.
Then
we meet the somewhat vapid characters, know something is going to go
wrong and bad as people who seem happy are talking in ways and on
subjects that can only bring misery, especially when the opening
conversations instantly become about propriety in relationships and
throwing that all out. As in all previous Ellis works, straight men
will suddenly have gay sex out of nowhere and other excess of sex,
drugs and potential self-destruction out of control will surface, but
again, nothing new. So what did Schrader add?
Nothing
new. The script is a repeat of everything Ellis has already penned
and instead of trying to flush out the characters and put all into a
more realistic context, we get half-baked sex scenes, everything we
have seen before, Lohan in less scenes than you might expect, Deen
actually giving somewhat of a credible acting performance and 99
minutes that just run on and on and on until they finish gong
nowhere. Any violence and sex her is not that graphic when we see it
at all and I noticed odd censorship just the same (it needs a
separate essay to address), so the Schrader and Ellis worlds land up
not cohering much at all and this becomes the disappointment I had
hoped it would not be. To give it more credibility in vain, Gus Van
Sant (we're supposed to think of My
Own Private Idaho, we
gather) has a scene as Deen's psychiatrist. That did not help either
and the script should have developed more ideas than the obvious
button-pressing moments we get too often.
A
trailer, Creating The
Canyons mini-featurettes
with no narration and a Making
Of interviews featurette
are the only extras.
Richard
Schenkman's Mischief Night
(2013) takes place on October 30, known as Devil's
Night, but that title was
likely used already, so we get a different title. The plot here
(what there is of it) is a blind gal (Noell Coet) who has become so
psychologically from a car accident is being watched by a serial
killer in a mask. From there, this is supposed to be a suspenseful
thriller, but the only suspense we get here is the beams holding up
the house she lives in and even adding Daniel Hugh Kelly (a one-time
potential leading man) and Ally Walker (from the hit X-Files
knock-off Profiler)
are supposed to add further credible tension and though they give
good performances, this script is a dud and this even seems long at
86 minutes.
Of
course, the great Brian Clemens tried the blind gal in trouble with
Mia Farrow in See No Evil
(1971, aka Blind Terror)
with mixed results and James Bond alumni Terrence Young (see below)
had spectacular results with Audrey Hepburn in the 1967 thriller Wait
Until Dark as the classic
example of how this can work. Schenkman and company are several
generations away from this working and despite some promise ands
signs of ambition, this also disappoints.
A
Behind The Scenes featurette is the only extra.
Paul
Hyett's The Seasoning
House (2012) is a
British-made thriller that takes on a far more serious topic, illegal
sex trafficking of vulnerable young women, with the title referring
to a place for soldiers in Russia to have sex with said forced
prostitutes in forced prostitution. It can get graphic, disturbing
and ugly with echoes of the Nazi's Joy Division that functioned the
same way. However, this becomes more of a horror outing with clichés
and gore on a dirty torture porn level that does nothing to forward
any important points, narrative and makes what could have been a
seriously good film an exploitation flick.
Sean
Pertwee is the angry, bad Russian head soldier who kills the mother
of young Angel (Rosie Day) who is abducted on the spot, kidnapped and
stuck against her will in the title locale. Because she has a
birthmark on her face, she becomes the personal fave of the idiot guy
running the place, but she is casing it all to survive and eventually
escape if she can. After a set of disturbing set-ups, this becomes a
formulaic thriller that quickly goes downhill and never recovers to
say the least. This is one house that should be condemned for good.
A
trailer and Making Of
featurette are the only extras.
Finally
we have Terence Young's Triple
Cross (1966), his
follow-up to his massive worldwide hot James Bond film Thunderball
(1965) and the epic war thriller he made before the already noted
Wait Until Dark.
Like Tony Scott after him, every Young project became a big film
project with name stars and great potential, but like Scott, the
realization was too often mixed as is the case here. Based on a true
WWII tale, Christopher Plummer is an expert thief who is arrested and
forced to help the Nazis, but instead of double crossing the Allies,
he is helping them, making him a triple agent and thus the title of
the film.
The
amazing supporting cast includes Yul Brynner, Gert Frobe, Romy
Schneider, Trevor Howard, Claudine Auger and uncredited turns by
Gordon Jackson and Anthony Dawson means there is no shortage of fine
acting talent here, but Young tries to play against the visual form
of his Bond films despite hiring more than a few key actors from them
and at 126 minutes gets weighted down in what it tries to do not
unlike Lewis Gilbert's The
Adventurers (1970,
reviewed twice elsewhere on this site including in Warner Archive's
DVD reissue) and has good moments mixed with almost as many that do
not work. Still, it is worth a look for what does work and is as
good as anything on this list.
There
are unfortunately no extras.
All
three Blu-rays have evenly matched performance in their 1080p 2.35 X
1 digital High Definition image transfers all offering various styled
down and even degraded visual approaches and all HD shoots, save
Mandy which combined Super 35mm and 35mm anamorphic Panavision
to get its look. Flaws and all, they look as good as they are ever
going to.
The
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on Mischief
is also styled to be dark and is much softer with the approach to the
point that it is a poor HD shoot. That leaves the anamorphically
enhanced 1.66 X 1 image on Cross
the most professional shoot on the list, shot on 35mm film and was
actually originally issues in dye-transfer, three-strip Technicolor
prints, but the transfer is soft and has its share of haloing, though
you can see how good the color must have been in many shots.
The
DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mix on the three DVDs are a tie
for the sonic best on the list, but the soundfields on all three are
lackingly inconsistent and have their quiet moments as well. The
lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 on Mischief
and lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on Cross
tie for second/last place and sound good, but the former is weaker
than expected and latter holding up better than expected for its age.
To
order Triple
Cross,
go to this link for it and many more great web-exclusive releases at:
http://www.warnerarchive.com/
-
Nicholas Sheffo