Bill's Video Vault
Random films from my physical media collection that I happen to particularly like, or simply feel inclined to write about.
Luc Besson is best known for gritty-yet-kinetic 90s thrillers such as La Femme Nikita and Leon: The Professional, and has spent the better part of the 21st-century overseeing a prolific factory of Euro-flavored (and often Asian-seasoned) B-movies in the action genre (including, most notably, the Transporter and Taken franchises). But there remains a certain subsect of cinephiles (myself included) who remain most drawn to The Fifth Element, Besson’s punch-drunk 1997 sci-fi extravaganza, and held out hope he’d one day return to re-tap that particular creative vein. That wish was granted two decades later with spiritual successor Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, an adaptation of the popular, long-running French comic by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières that Besson independently financed to the tune of 180-million. Of course, the film fizzled at the box office - as so much idiosyncratic science-fiction with an auteur’s touch tends to do these days (look no further than the current performance of Mickey 17) - so this particular sandbox would appear emphatically shut down until further notice… though the fact the movie even exists in the first place feels like a minor miracle.
Set in the year 2740, the film follows Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and his partner/sort-of-girlfriend Laureline (Cara Delevingne) - agents who work for the United Human Federation, whose remit is never really defined beyond “world-saving galactic space adventure.” Initially tasked with intercepting a priceless power converter, they end up on Alpha - the titular “City of a Thousand Planets” - and what an ecstatic reminder it is of the near limitless potential of pure imagination fused with hundred-million popcorn moviemaking. Originating as the International Space Station (in an opening credit sequence scored to David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”), the facility started rapidly expanding once humans began to make contact with various extraterrestrial races… eventually reaching the point that it threatened the Earth’s gravitational mass and subsequently relocated to deep space, where - by the 28th century - it’s an entire world unto itself, teeming with thousands upon thousands of unique civilizations. When Commander Arün Filitt (Clive Owen) is abducted during an interspecies summit by a mysterious faction that appears to be connected to an irradiation emanating from the station’s center, Valerian and Laureline take it upon themselves to investigate. Never mind all that jazz. The actual plot - which is connected to the tragic destruction of an ethereal, peace-loving race and their idyllic home world years earlier - proves paper cut thin. But Besson compensates by cramming every inch of the frame with visual wonder… as if he were wielding a laser pointer, deliberately drawing our feline-like attention wherever he chooses. He’s one of the few filmmakers who feels as if his creative batteries are still drawing juice through jumper cables hooked directly to the works of George Lucas. The opening sequence, in which Valerian and Laureline must infiltrate a sprawling marketplace that exists in an alternate dimension, is a mind-melting feat of staging and spatial logistics. This is the sort of bananas moviemaking in which Laureline is captured by a primitive tribe whose chief intends to crack open her head like a soft-boiled egg during a lavish banquet… and the only way Valerian can save her (without causing an international incident - although he sort of does anyway) is by recruiting a shape-shifting cabaret performer who happens to be played by pop starlet Rihanna. Besson keeps the proceedings unapologetically whacky - he displays almost none of James Cameron’s mythic self-seriousness, though there’s plenty of Avatar’s digital DNA in the movie’s circulatory system. It’s not always for the better - the film adopts Lucas’s tendency towards crudely rendered and culturally inappropriate alien beings (a trio of nebbish, snout-nosed “information brokers” give off the same whiff of antisemitic caricature as Watto did in The Phantom Menace). But the sense of escapism Besson conjures comes largely fused with an appreciable sense of childlike wonder, free of self-referential irony. It would be a stretch to call it an 80s throwback, but the spirit of that decade’s moviemaking frequently ripples across the screen. It’s impressive the film works as well as it does, given that one could easily argue that both leads are dreadfully miscast. DeHaan had early success playing emo creeps and troubled misfits in projects such as Chronicle, Kill Your Darlings, and The Cure For Wellness (he was particularly good as an angry, gay adopted teen in the third season of In Treatment), but where Besson got the idea that he could pull off a roguishly charismatic hero in the Han Solo mold is anyone’s guess. DeHaan’s physical stature is seriously lacking - he always looks like the slightest actor on-screen, slouched over like a petulant high school slacker - and his decision to essentially play the role as some winking Keanu Reeves impersonation is jarring (albeit semi-amusing, once one acclimates to the choice). Delevingne fares somewhat better, but she’s a mostly charmless performer and this is a mostly charmless performance. She comes across as what she basically is - a supermodel who wandered into acting and feels somewhat ambivalent about it. There’s a haughty detachment that seems baked into her features - her glower feels staunchly immune to the film’s robust sense of spectacle. To say the duo has minimal romantic chemistry would be an understatement. And yet… the film somehow manages not to falter. This is likely because Besson maintains forward momentum at all times. Valerian is a film in perpetual motion - both horizontally and vertically - literalized by a sequence in which the title character builds up a head of steam and bulldozes his way through a cross-section of the station, breaching one eye-popping ecosystem after another. It’s the cinematic equivalent of racked pool balls moments after the break - ricocheting off the rails and each other in a pleasing dance of chaos. Initially it felt as if the best way to approach The City of a Thousand Planets was to take one’s enjoyment level of The Fifth Element and decrease it by maybe thirty percent… but I’d be lying if I said the movie hasn’t sparked a little more for me with each rewatch. That number now feels a lot closer to fifteen percent.
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8/23/2024 0 Comments terrifier 2 It’s difficult to articulate what exactly Terrifier’s deal is. Damien Leone’s cult horror series is, if nothing else, a marvel of micro-budget moviemaking. The 2016 original (passable, but artlessly tissue-thin) was made for about fifty-grand, while its considerably more ambitious 2022 follow-up was still realized to the modest tune of just a quarter-million. What Leone and his team manage to accomplish production-wise on glorified duct tape and gum wrappers is rather remarkable… and gorehounds are no doubt attracted to the envelope-pushing brutality and emphasis on old-school practical effects. But Leone’s larger narrative ambitions - beyond basic slasher/splatter formula - remain elusive. For a film that’s so flagrantly zealous in scope (the runtime is a jaw-dropping 140 minutes), you’d think Terrifier 2 would be slightly more pointed in purpose.
Series antagonist Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) returns to Miles County on Halloween night one year later and, for reasons only vaguely established, ends up on a collision course with intrepid teen Sienna (Lauren LaVera) and her younger brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullham). Art is some sort of demonic serial killer in clown form (Leone himself seems fuzzy on the exact details) who intersperses wanton cruelty with fitfully amusing miming/mugging - he falls somewhere on the spectrum between Pennywise and Rob Zombie’s Captain Spaulding. It’s not difficult to see why some roll their eyes at his shtick, as is the case with most modern attempts to will a neo slasher icon into reality… but there’s no denying the physical quality of Thornton’s portrayal. Visually, the character is an evocative presence, with his lanky frame and licorice-ringed mouth that feels as if it has twice as many teeth as it should (it’s hard not to love the miniature hat he wears at a cockeyed angle), even if he appears to exist for no purpose beyond unimaginative evil. Art - who never speaks, offering pure bodily expression instead - is the sort of villain who somehow feels both thrillingly unique and tiresomely one-note… which, perhaps, reflects the contradictory emotions of the series itself. The difference with the first Terrifier is that this time Leone actually provides Art with a worthy counterpart. In the hallowed pantheon of Final Girls, Lauren LaVera’s performance is an absolute juggernaut. The smartest move Leone makes is literalizing Sienna’s badassery; she spends the entire second half of the film dressed as a winged valkyrie, to frequently stunning visual effect (Leone flirts with a deeper mythology, with the siblings’ late father filling his sketchbook with images of Art and Sienna’s battle armor, as if he presaged their impending clash of good and evil… but this is never much more than a kernel of a kernel of an idea). But it would be deeply diminishing to imply LaVera’s triumph comes down to her ability to fill out an iron bustier - her performance has serious teeth. Fierce yet vulnerable, empathetic and emotionally relatable, she’s given a level of agency that horror heroines typically lack… they clap back in the final reel, but rarely with this level of uncaged fury. A literal blood-soaked, sword-wielding angel of vengeance by the climax, Sienna feels instantly iconic. And in a genre frequently slathered in ironic detachment, LaVera plays her with the utmost sincerity. It’s a star-making performance. Still, for all the bells and whistles, it’s hard to see Terrifier 2 as much more than a steroidal slasher. The film (borderline plotless) does little to justify its swollen length - it’s one of the more indulgently paced motion pictures in recent memory. The gore, while fabulously executed, frequently tries one’s patience (it’s the sort of film in which someone gets stabbed in the crotch while taking a leak, and Leone throws in a frenzy of additional blade thrusts in graphic close-up for good measure). The centerpiece of the film is Art’s systematic mutilation of Sienna’s best friend Allie and the sadism is so relentlessly over-the-top, it can’t even be categorized as shock value… it cuts straight to exhaustion (by the time Art prances back in with the bleach and table salt, you might be seriously questioning your life choices). Extreme horror or not, there’s something a bit desperate about this level of ostentatious barbarity, as if the film knows deep down it has no other arrows in its quiver to nock. And yet, Leone strikes the bullseye with the film’s stunning synth-pop score - augmented by tracks such as The Midnight’s The Equaliser (Not Alone) and IndiGhost’s Pastel Sunset - which power washes the film’s grubby grindhouse aesthetic and frequently elevates the production into rapturous dreamlike fantasy and surrealism. If it’s not already clear, Terrifier 2 elicits frustratingly mixed emotions. Certain elements are, frankly, too bitchin' to simply dismiss the film as scuzzy dross… and yet an abundance of it is, well - scuzzy dross. The end result is too much of an endurance test to warrant any sort of good-faith recommendation… and yet Leone’s sick spell proves difficult to shake. 6/30/2024 0 Comments Dr. giggles It was Thoreau who once declared “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” though it’s doubtful he was referring to an evening spent watching Dr. Giggles when he said it. Anyone who was a comic book fan in 1992 likely has an indelible recollection of this movie - you couldn’t so much as leaf through a random issue without seeing full-page ads for it plastered from front to back (it was effective marketing, but more than a little misguided - courting a demographic whose attentions were easily won, but couldn’t actually see R-rated movies in the theater). The film had a marvelous collection of goofy taglines - “The doctor is in… SANE” and “The doctor is out… OF HIS MIND,” in addition to its signature nursery rhyme “If you’re from Moorehigh and you get sick, fall on your knees and pray you die quick.” Dr. Giggles remains a distinct oddity - one of those movies that almost everyone knows, but few have actually seen.
Which begs the question… is it any good? Dr. Giggles emerged from the heart of that aggressively peculiar era of early-90s horror that spawned the likes of The Lawnmower Man, Brainscan, Body Parts, Candyman, Innocent Blood, Man’s Best Friend, and The People Under the Stairs - generally regarded as a scattershot nadir for the genre, but one that also displayed a rather inimitable flair for warped creativity. Larry Drake - at a career apex after winning multiple Emmys for LA Law and playing henchman Durant in Sam Raimi’s Darkman - inhabits the title character and he was a stellar casting choice. With his fleshy, Muppet-like features and ham hock-sized frame, he stands out as an amusingly inimitable slasher presence via his singular portrayal of Dr. Evan Rendell… who escapes from a mental asylum and returns to the town of Moorehigh, where his father was once a respected family physician - until his wife took ill and he completely lost his marbles (and absorbed his own son into his madness - folie à deux). Setting up shop in his family’s long abandoned mansion/clinic, Rendell - who, true to his nickname, is prone to fits of grotesque, high-pitched laughter - begins killing indiscriminately, peppering his murders with groan-inducing medical zingers such as “If you think that’s bad, wait until you get my bill”… until his attention is drawn towards the teenage Jennifer (an extremely young, pre-Charmed Holly Marie Combs), and he becomes fixated on “correcting” her heart defect. Dr. Giggles rates as a mostly serviceable horror/black comedy, which flashes the occasional burst of morbid wit (one victim is smothered by a comically oversized bandage; another’s ice cream binge leads to a graphic encounter with a liposuction pump). But the film grinds through its 95-minute runtime like a dull chainsaw operating at a single speed… its narrative momentum is more akin to the sluggishly steady blip of a cardiac monitor. Director Manny Coto (probably better known as a writer on shows such as Enterprise, Dexter, and American Horror Story, though he did helm the Dolph Lundgren pic Cover-Up, for what that’s worth) has a few worthwhile tricks up his sleeve (he directs the snot out of the sequence in the carnival funhouse, which is ripe with visual pizzazz), but they only go so far… the movie has a certain kooky 90s grandeur, but it only hints at the sort of unbridled dementedness that was truly required (one scene in particular arguably achieves it - if you’ve seen the film, you probably know which one). Combs is fresh-faced, but has little screen presence (and almost feels like she’s there under duress). The movie could have used an actress more capable of going toe-to-toe with Drake, who decimates the rest of the cast (both literally and figuratively). Whenever he's not on-screen, the movie flounders. Still, whatever its shortcomings, Dr. Giggles is a name that continues to resonate in horror circles. Put some respect on it. 4/5/2024 0 Comments showgirls In the quarter-century (and counting) since its release, Showgirls has fractured critical opinion into disparate camps - misunderstood masterpiece, camp classic, guilty pleasure, irredeemable turkey. None of these outlooks are necessarily right, and none of them are necessarily wrong. The film has become a cinematic Rorschach test, of sorts; a multifaceted prism in which opinion tends to be shaped by which edges happen to catch the light. It’s a fascinating legacy for a movie that - let’s be honest - amounts to little more narratively than All About Eve dragged through the glitter-strewn Las Vegas gutter. But its claws cut deeper than one might think… it’s easy to snicker at the heightened burlesque lunacy and general cattiness of the plot, but if you aren’t careful you might just find blood trickling down your arm once it’s over.
Director Paul Verhoeven (reteaming with screenwriter Joe Eszterhas following their hugely successful erotic thriller Basic Instinct) has almost certainly benefitted from an overzealous aggrandizement of his artistic intentions in recent years… but there’s no denying his pointed vision of Vegas as a toxic playground of wish fulfillment, in which dreams are granted in the blink of an eye and snuffed out just as easily. It’s a lesson that Nomi Malone (Elizabeth Berkley) learns the hard way, literally within minutes of arriving in town. She wins a small fortune playing the slots, then gambles it all away just as quickly. She thinks the rockabilly who picked her up hitchhiking might be able to hook her up with a job, but instead he turns out to be a conman who rips her off. Nomi dreams of one day becoming a showgirl, the city’s reigning class of glamour goddesses, but beneath the lustrous facade it’s really not all that different from the nude pole dancing she does at the Cheetah Club - a seedy cesspit in which the sweaty lust all but bleeds from the walls. She eventually lands a spot in the chorus line for “Goddess” (some lavishly produced pageant of volcanic pablum) at the Stardust Casino, but quickly locks horns with Cristal Connors (Gina Gershon), the swaggering star of the show, and plots to take her throne - the Vegas equivalent of regicide. So much of the vitriol surrounding the film’s release in 1995 was directed at Berkley, whose casting made waves… mainly due to her association with the wholesome teen series Saved By The Bell (on which she ironically played the straight-A feminist Jessie Spano). Berkley’s acting isn’t exactly good, but it also isn’t exactly bad. It’s more like she’s a vessel, channeling the movie’s hyperbolic, jacked up essence through the atoms of her very soul - you can’t say she isn’t physically or spiritually committed to the cause. As a character, Nomi has little impulse control, and neither does the performance - Berkley plays her like a feral cat whose hackles are permanently raised (“She’s all pelvic thrust. I mean, she *prowls*”). But she has a legitimate, statuesque screen presence that feels almost startling revisiting it now… it makes one wonder what might have been if the film didn’t effectively tank her future prospects. Her interactions with Gershon (“You don’t want to piss me off darlin’, now that we’re friends”) are a bitchy, backbiting delight. With the exception of Bound, this might be the signature role of Gershon’s career - she plays Cristal with a seductive contemptuousness, a Cheshire sneer that’s almost impossible to imagine another actress replicating. In arguably the film’s best scene, Cristal coerces Nomi into giving a lap dance to Zack (Kyle MacLachlan), the Stardust’s entertainment director, but he’s little more than an eager bystander; the real dance takes place between the two women, an unspoken battle of wills in which sexual desire is wielded with the bluntness of a cudgel, Nomi’s full-throttle gyrations bordering on physical assault. Even though Nomi eventually sends Cristal on a dramatic swan dive down the stairs, the venomous undercurrent of their interactions never quite feels truly dangerous… maybe that’s because Cristal comes across more as a cat toying with her food, while Nomi’s incisor-bared combativeness simply seems hardwired into her personality (you grow a bit numb to it after a while). Many have tried to claim the film is arch satire, but what exactly is it satirizing? It’s more like a mirrored lens that Verhoeven uses to distort the very cultural fabric of America into a heightened, grotesque extreme (leave it to a Dutchman to have the audacity). Not everything works, of course. Verhoeven’s bombastic craft is often at odds with the unhinged hackery of Eszterhas’s script (Eszterhas, ironically, was getting paid more and more money even though his writing got worse and worse - this is a movie that has actual lines like “First I get you used to the money, then I make you swallow” - though to be fair, the Versace gag, among others, is genuinely funny). It frankly wouldn’t have been imprudent to scrap the entire subplot featuring Glen Plummer as James, an Alvin Ailey-trained bouncer who wants to do some “serious dancing” with Nomi, but mostly just tries to get in her pants (the payoff is a somewhat poignant reminder that the side of the road is littered with former dreams, but it’s not worth the screentime it takes to get there). MacLachlan, Robert Davi, and Alan Rachins spend the movie practically tripping over one another in a bid to prove who can create the skeeziest caricature. Verhoeven’s showmanship is frequently astounding (the movie, if nothing else, is a reminder that even the most high-profile failures in the 90s still tended to look like a million bucks), but he makes one major misstep near the climax - he stages the moment all of Nomi’s fantasies triumphantly converge as high-gloss fairy tale… while juxtaposing it against her friend Molly (Gina Ravera) being brutally gang-raped. Even for a director who pushes the envelope so hard it’s usually in the mail and halfway to Europe, it’s shockingly ugly. The film’s camp attraction shrivels in an instant. Nomi unleashes righteous retribution, and it’s cathartic, but it’s a little disappointing that Showgirls ultimately amounts to the same old showbiz observation… that stardom comes down to how much of yourself you’re willing to sacrifice (even a recent movie like Pleasure, about a young Swede who arrives in LA hellbent on becoming a porn starlet, for all its unflinching “rawness” ends up peddling the same trite message). Nomi departs Vegas as abruptly as she arrived and as she leaves the camera lingers on a billboard trumpeting her as the new star of Goddess - a symbol of how she came, conquered, and left her indelible mark. Love it or hate it, one can’t deny that Showgirls has a similar legacy. It won’t ever be forgotten. 2/29/2024 0 Comments life Life was released in 2017 to a mostly collective shrug and hasn’t garnered much enthusiasm in the years since. It’s not entirely difficult to see why. The story is a pretty basic riff on the shopworn Alien formula - a confined haunted house nerve jangler specially retrofitted for deep space. In this case, the six-man crew aboard the International Space Station (Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ariyon Bakare, Olga Dihovichnaya, and Ryan Reynolds) manage to pluck a solitary cell from the Martian soil and watch in awe as it rapidly evolves into a complex organism dubbed “Calvin.” Scientific amazement quickly gives way to consternation and then outright terror, however, as Calvin’s formidable survival instincts are triggered (it latches onto the hand of Bakare’s exobiologist and leaves it looking as if it got mangled in a hydraulic press), eventually leading to a breach of the laboratory firewall. Xenomorphic chaos ensues.
Life offers only nominal punch in terms of character, but it has a serious vicious streak - the sort that comes with serrated teeth. Director Daniel Espinosa deliberately keeps the film as lean and propulsive as possible (Reynolds falls back on his usual brand of snark, while Gyllenhaal’s lead performance is curiously slight, never quite asserting itself; Ferguson, not surprisingly, leaves the strongest stamp). Calvin is quite marvelous in conception. Alien’s iconic HR Giger creation was like something straight out of biomechanical nightmare, but Life’s antagonistic organism begins as a cousin of sorts to the delicately undulating woodsprites in Avatar, eventually evolving into more of a gelatinous, squid-like entity… terrifying in its biological efficiency. Some might argue it lacks personality, but that’s precisely the point. This is creature/creator myth at its most primal… scientists revive a single dormant cell that, with a swift and ruthless inevitability, becomes the architect of their destruction. There’s a layer of plausibility here that’s uncommon for a subgenre that typically traffics in baroque fantasy. Calvin feels uncomfortably tethered to our own cosmos. As with many science-fiction films of this nature, Espinosa does an effective job juxtaposing the existential vastness of outer space with the punishing claustrophobia of the sort of vessels required to inhabit it. He can’t transcend the more familiar beats of the genre, however - there’s a spacewalk sequence (because there’s always a spacewalk sequence) and the usual calamities involving malfunctioning life support systems and misaligned orbits. The ISS is a striking setting, with its maze of tubular corridors and angled solar arrays, but it’s also a limited one. There’s only so many places for Espinosa’s camera to go, only so many ways to dramatize bodies propelling themselves from one end of the station to the other in zero-g. Perhaps that’s why the movie struggled to capture the imagination (remember when people were initially convinced that it was a stealth Venom origin pic? It was a fun theory, if nothing else). Nonetheless, the savagely nihilistic ending absolutely rips - it stands alongside the likes of The Thing and The Mist in terms of sheer apocalyptic despair. The title may seem generic, yet it’s absolutely fitting. Life begets death and death begets life. 2/27/2024 0 Comments dredd Peach Trees… this is Ma-Ma. Somewhere in this block are two judges. I want them dead. Until I get what I want, the block is locked down. All clans, every level… hunt the judges down. Everyone else clear the corridors and stay the fuck out of our way until the shooting stops. If I hear of anyone helping the judges, I will kill them and the next generation of their family. As for the judges… sit tight, or run. Makes no difference. You’re mine.
So says Ma-Ma (a genuinely frightening Lena Headey), the sliced-up ex-hooker turned gang warlord who rules over Peach Trees, a 200-story concrete apartment tower in the heart of Mega City One. Opposing her is Judge Dredd (Karl Urban) - the living, mythic embodiment of the law, his sense of justice as rigid as his perpetually clenched jawline - and his overmatched rookie partner Cassandra Anderson (Olivia Thirlby). Their presence threatens Ma-Ma’s manufacture and distribution of a deadly new narcotic called Slo-Mo, which, suffice to say, is a problem. Locking down the entire building and bringing two-hundred floors worth of heavily armed muscle down on their heads is the solution. Dredd was a box office disappointment in 2012, but the film has built a devoted cult following in the years since and it’s not hard to see why. Karl Urban lacks the implacable physical stature of Sylvester Stallone (who was born to play the part, but whose 1995 version was an overproduced and tonally cross-wired slag heap), but he captures the unyielding, tempered steel essence of the character - more symbol than man, which is why he never, ever removes his helmet (take notes, Sly). The film mostly ignores the satirical edge that the comics were known for (and some might argue that scrapping the social commentary defeats the whole point), but the tone is lean, mean and vicious. The Slo-Mo scenes (in which the brain perceives events at 1% their normal speed) have a distinctively surreal, otherworldly visual kick - as if the hypersaturated colors are are about to sear straight through the film stock. When Dredd and Anderson barge in on a drug den and a shootout ensues, we watch as bullets deliberately furrow through flesh, spatters of blood and brain matter suspended in midair like a Pollack pastiche. Earlier, Ma-Ma orders a trio of rogue dealers to be thrown from the 200th floor - but a hit of Slo-Mo as a parting gift ensures their descent to the atrium below literally feels like hours. The film was directed by Pete Travis, but tends to be associated more strongly with Alex Garland, who wrote the screenplay. The premise has the endorphin-fueled quality of an addictive video game loop - no choice but to fight straight to the top, floor by floor, enemy by enemy, until the end boss (Ma-Ma) is finally reached - which is probably why it was blatantly lifted from the Indonesian action flick The Raid: Redemption (though Garland has strenuously denied this). Urban is well-paired with Thirlby, who, in a fascinating twist, is actually a cadet of mediocre standing - only in the running to become a judge because of her unprecedented psychic abilities. A psychic’s natural empathy is seemingly at odds with a judge’s cold-blooded “judge, jury and executioner” remit - and Thirlby plays this confliction well. Attempts to pigeonhole Urban as a generic action star now seem, in retrospect, a failure of imagination; his subsequent performances as Bones in the Star Trek reboot and Billy Butcher on The Boys have shown what a terrific actor he is. But you can tell he’s having fun. By the time Ma-Ma summons a quartet of corrupt judges to finish the job, you can almost hear his back molars cracking with righteous indignation (his snarled line readings sound like they were filtered through a double helping of gravel). The film is pure, muscular pulp - a triumph of visceral exploitation, endlessly watchable. And as the climax nears, the Peach Trees battleground in flames, Dredd patches into the complex’s intercom system and finally offers his official rebuttal to Ma-Ma’s opening salvo. In case you people have forgotten, this block operates under the same rules as the rest of the city. Ma-Ma is not the law… I’m the law. Ma-Ma is a common criminal - guilty of murder, guilty of the manufacture and distribution of the narcotic known as Slo-Mo, and as of now under sentence of death. Any who obstruct me in carrying out my duty will be treated as an accessory to her crimes… you have been warned. And as for you Ma-Ma… judgment time. |
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