The Flood: Gators Attack

Alligator really does taste a bit like chicken. It is chewier, but delicious when prepared well. Unfortunately, gators think people also taste like chicken and they are bigger, faster, and hungrier. During a hurricane-flash flood, an isolated group of cops and convicts find themselves on the menu in Brandon Slagle’s The Flood, which opens Friday in New York.

A Katrina-like storm is surging around Sheriff Jo Newman’s station, so she reluctantly agrees to put up a detoured prison transport for the night. That means Rafe Calderon’s plans also change. His gang’s former getaway driver, Russell Cody was convicted of the cop-killings during their last job, but not before he hid the money.

Cody is less than thrilled to see his old comrades, but everyone will have to work together when a pack of angry alligators swims into the flooded station. Of course, they won’t, but Cody consistently throws his chips in with Sheriff Newman, rather than Calderon’s crew or his fellow convicts.

The Flood is sort of Rio Bravo with gators, which is a reasonably promising premise to start with. Slagle certainly does not over-complicate it. It is a crying shame the soundtrack totally lacks any jazz, blues, or zydeco selections, but it still feels like a Louisiana kind of film—even though it was shot abroad, presumably for economic reasons.

Casper Van Dien, Nicky Whelan, and Louis Mandylor are all pros at this kind of unfussy action filmmaking by now, so they credibly get down to business as Cody, Newman, and Calderon. As in Slagle’s Battle for Saipan, Eoin O’Brien is the surprise standout, doing a not-half-bad Cajun accent as the other reasonable prisoner, “Big Jim” Pruett.

Mad Heidi

Switzerland has gone fascist. Maybe it was funded by some of those Swiss accounts looted during WWII, the last time the Swiss were showing some fascist tendencies. Cheese is the instrument of control for President (for life) Meili. It makes the Swiss people docile and stupid. Consumption is mandatory and lactose intolerance has been criminalized. However, Meili’s storm-troopers pick the wrong mountain lass to mess with in Johannes Hartmann & (“co-director”) Sandro Klopfstein’s Mad Heidi, which has a special nationwide Fathom Events screening this coming Wednesday.

It is still relatively peaceful up in the Swiss Alps, where the orphaned Heidi lives with her grandfather Alpohl, a former revolutionary, when she isn’t rolling in the hayloft with Goat Peter, a (not so lonely) goatherd and underground fromager. Unfortunately, there will be no mercy when Kommandant Knorr busts Goat Peter for illegal cheese trafficking. After his summary execution, she is sent to a women’s prison clearly inspired by nazisploitation movies, such as Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS.

Being behind bars with predatory body-building women will make Heidi stronger, instead of breaking her. However, she will need help from the spirits of Helvetian warriors to reach her full battle potential.

If you believe Troma represents the pinnacle of cinematic accomplishment than Mad Heidi will be your kind of movie. Yet, the truth is: it is a little too much like Hobo with a Shotgun. The gory mayhem is often more mean-spirited than humorous. It is the sort of mash-up than requires the ambience of a rowdy late-night theater audience to distract from its shortcomings (and the relentless cruelty it depicts). It certainly makes sense for Fathom to screen it as a special one-off, which is the only way anyone should consider seeing it.

Daughter, Starring Casper Van Dien

Four years ago, the menacing unnamed “Father,” who refuses to allow his family outside their modest country home, would have been considered abusive and borderline psychotic. Then, for two and a half years, the media would have considered him a model parent. Now, hopefully he is back to being a sinister creep. Regardless, kidnaping his improvised family would have always been illegal, but it is questionable whether he would be prosecuted in the current Bragg-Gascon-Boudin era. Indeed, his latest abductee is pretty much on her own in Corey Deshon’s Daughter, which releases today in theaters and on VOD.

We see what happened to “Sister’s” predecessor when she tried to run away. It isn’t pretty. Of course, Father guilt trips “Mother” for not preventing it, because he is a stone-cold manipulator. To replace her, he abducts the a new “Daughter,” to act as the “Sister” to “Brother,” whose well-being seems to be Father’s motivation for everything.

Apparently, the sickly Brother has been brainwashed into believing some kind of disaster has rendered the outside atmosphere unbreathable. For some reason, Father is raising Brother to believe he is the only hope for saving the world. However, he is sickly and therefore requires the sheltering attention new Sister will help provide. Brother is a little off too, but not in a menacing way. He is not likely to deliberately betray her, but Daughter just cannot trust Mother, a long-term captive resigned to her circumstances, despite their shared heritage and Vietnamese fluency.

Battle for Saipan

Five Americans were awarded the Medal of Honor for their service at Saipan, all of them posthumously. A campaign was launched to upgrade Guy Gabaldon’s Navy Cross to the MOH, which still continues after his death. Such valor testifies to the battle’s high stakes and brutal conditions endured by tens of thousands of American soldiers, including my grandfather. The attack on an American field hospital in this film is fictional, but it is consistent with the Imperial army’s scorched earth “banzai” charge. A handful of soldiers and medical personnel must stand against several Japanese platoons in screenwriter-director Brandon Slagle’s Battle for Saipan, which opens tomorrow.

Like Gabaldon (who was raised in a Japanese-speaking family), Maj. William Porter speaks some of the local lingo, but it is never explained how he picked it up. Regardless, he overhears plans of an attack on the nearby U.S. Army field hospital while dodging a Japanese patrol. He finds a rag-tag facility lacking proper supplies for the many patients they have. Porter even brought another—the only other survivor of his scouting party. Vic, the lead surgeon, never expected to fight, but he completed basic like any other serviceman, so he and Porter will have to spearhead their defense.

There are a few reasonably colorful characters in the hospital, particularly, the demoted commanding officer, Gen. Jake Carroll, but the narrative still boils down to: the Japanese attack and the Americans defend. It is simple, unfussy, and pretty effective for what it is. This is hardly Hell to Eternity (based on Gabaldon’s story), but lead thesp Casper Van Dien bears some resemblance to Jeffrey Hunter.

The Most Dangerous Game—Again, but More Traditional

Richard Connell was a highly successful writer during his lifetime, but he looks like a one-hit wonder today, because his only work still widely read is his famous man-hunting-man short story. It has been modernized, riffed-on, and ripped-off dozens of times by genre and exploitation filmmakers. For that reason, screenwriter-director Justin Lee earns some points for staying relatively faithful to Connell’s story for a new, period adaptation of The Most Dangerous Game, which opens tomorrow in theaters.

Big-game hunter Marcus Rainsford has dragged his son Sanger along on his latest hunt, as an ill-conceived attempt to treat his PTSD stemming from the younger man’s service as a WWII sniper. Unfortunately, their steamer crashes on the reef off Baron von Wolf’s private island reserve, with the help of one of his mines.

Initially, the Baron is thrilled to host an esteemed hunter like Rainsford’s father, but when he refuses to participate in von Wolf’s literal man-hunt, the mad man kills him in front of his son’s eyes. Then Rainsford fils is forced to become the prey, along with a pair of brother-sister captives. For Rainsford, von Wolf is especially repellent, because he is a senior German military, who disappeared after the war.

Although Connell’s original story was set in the 1920s, the post-WWII era is still somewhat traditional, matching that of the second film adaptation, Robert Wise’s A Game of Death. Despite the frequent revamps and reboots, the story still works better in a period setting, when transcontinental travel necessarily resulting in long periods without outside communication.

Unlike possibly every other film adaptation, Lee’s screenplay reverts to Connell’s original name for his protagonist: “Sanger.” Some changes have been made to the hunting action, but Sanger Rainsford’s method of escape in the story is instead used to explain the presence of a survivor, living guerilla-style in the jungle, so the film still feels consistent to its roots.

Mark Dacascos’s Showdown in Manila

Maybe Trump shouldn’t have asked for so many encores from Duterte, the Mindinaoan Fog. Ordinarily, you would think when an American FBI agent is gunned down on the beach of the Philippines’ most exclusive tourist hotels, the cops would be slightly keyed up to catch the killers. Unfortunately, his widow will have to retain the services of an unlikely private investigator, Russian Nick Peyton, a former Manila copper and his American sex addict partner, Charlie Benz, in Mark Dacascos’s Showdown in Manila (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in Los Angeles.

How did a Russian stiff like Peyton get on the Manila force in the first place? Apparently, it was his fast-and-loose approach to due process and that kind of stuff. These days, he mainly works divorce cases and his partner Benz causes them. Mark Wells’ new widow is a bit frustrated with the local cops. Everyone knows he was gunned down by the notorious drug lord Aldric Cole and his men. She can even whip up a portrait of him, since she is a former police sketch artist.

The problem isn’t identifying Cole, it’s finding him. Fortunately, Peyton will be able to track him down by laying a beating on several of his known associates. While they are at it, Peyton and Cole will also rescue Kiki, a lapsed recovering teen addict they both seem to take a creepy fatherly interest in.

Thank Heavens, Cynthia Rothrock, Don “The Dragon” Lee, and Olivier Gruner all show up to save the film’s bacon when it is time to launch an assault on Cole’s jungle hideout-meth lab. They are also old colleagues from the Manila SWAT team, or whatever. In any case, when they are shooting the living the snot out of Cole’s men, Showdown is pure 1980s gold.

Unfortunately, it takes about an hour to get to that point. Still, Alexander Nevsky (the actor, not the Thirteenth Century Russian Prince) and Casper Van Dien are tolerably chummy as Peyton and Benz. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Matthias Hues chew plenty of scenery as Cole and his chief henchman, Dorn. Philippine teen idol Hazel Faith Dela Cruz has some screen presence, but as Kiki, she looks totally out of place in this ostensibly gritty story. Of course, Rothrock, Lee, and Gruner do their thing as Haines, Dillon, and Ford, basically the cavalry. However, Dacascos kills himself off too early as Wells, because he definitely still has the moves. As a bonus, that really is Tia Carrere as Mrs. Wells.

Dacascos helms the big action scenes with the sort of lucid professionalism fans prefer. We’ll take the clarity of Isaac Florentine over the shaky-cam of Paul Greenglass every time. Everybody seems to enjoy the big smack down with Rothrock and company, like a sort of mini-b-movie Expendables featurette, for good reason. Indeed, a little less talking, a little less Nevsky, a little more action, and a little more Dacascos and this film would have really been getting somewhere. Worth catching on VOD as a nostalgia trip, Showdown in Manila opens tomorrow (1/19) in LA, at the Laemmle Music Hall.

Beyond the Edge: Interstellar Cabin Fever

Two astronauts are going where no man has ever gone before, but it might not count for much if they have gone insane by the time they get there. They might be losing their handle on reality, but reality is maybe also turning against them in Thomas Zellen’s Beyond the Edge (trailer here), which is now available on VOD.

You might wonder why a marine biologist like Dr. Abe Anderson was chosen for this mission. Granted, he keeps a tank full of electric eels, but the bee colony ought to be somewhat outside his field of expertise. At least giving up his disappointing personal life was not such a sacrifice. Conversely, Lt. Col. Harold Richards looks like a logical choice to pilot the mission, but he will probably never see his tightly-knit family again as a result. He has Anderson for company, but that will be cold comfort when they both go nuts and he maybe dies (don’t worry, its not permanent, or maybe it is).

As their ship approaches the “edge” of the universe, time and reality start to fragment and reshuffle. Incidents seem to replay out of sequence and alternate realities start to intrude on the ostensive real one—or so we might surmise. The frustrating thing about Edge is that Zellen clearly has a lot of heady ideas, but he doesn’t always get them over on-screen. His ambition is noble, but his fractured narrative can be trying.

Nevertheless, Casper Van Dien (still best known for Starship Troopers) really is terrific as Lt. Col. Richards. He truly looks the part of a ramrod-straight military man—and it is surprisingly poignant to watch him cling to structure and routine as he starts to understand how profoundly they have lost control of their mission. However, Sean Maher is so annoyingly obnoxious as Anderson, we’d really just assume Richards put the hurt on him.

Zellen nicely works within his budget constraints, rendering a highly credible looking interstellar space drama. It is also cool to see the legendary Adrienne Barbeau pop-up in flashbacks (or not), as the mission director. We’d like to be more enthusiastic about Beyond the Edge, because it is really going for something out there, but he just doesn’t quite pull it off. Recommended for those who want to support a bold attempt, Beyond the Edge is now available on VOD platforms, including iTunes.