Trigger Point

Nicolas Shaw is a disgraced black ops agent trying to live a quiet life in a quaint Ontario lake country village. Right, good luck with that. Inevitably, everyone he ever worked with that is still alive will come looking for him. Unfortunately, that also includes the shadowy terrorist mastermind he tried to bust in Brad Turner’s Trigger Point, which releases this Friday in theaters.

Shaw (or Lewis as the townsfolk know him) can’t quite remember what went down when the mysterious Quentin captured him, but he has been told he gave up the names of eight colleagues. Recently, the octopus-like organization unleashed a lethal assassin of their own, so his old boss, Ethan Kane, wants to reactivate Shaw. Kane also hopes Shaw will rescue his daughter Monica, a junior operative who has gotten too close to Quentin’s network.

Of course, Shaw has a major advantage, because he uses special “anti-A-Team” bullets that always hit their head-shot targets, whereas the bad guys can hardly hit the broadside of a barn. Nevertheless, Trigger Point is a reasonably professional soon-too-DVD action movie. In fact, Turner’s execution of a big shootout in a greenhouse orchard is surprisingly stylish. It also helps having interesting character thesps like Colm Feore and Carlo Rota (Morris O’Brien in 24) as Kane and his resentful subordinate. Neither of them is ever boring on-screen—and Trigger Point is not an exception.

The Curse of Buckout Road—Welcome to the Empire State

New York State is home to some pretty eerie locations, such as Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the Amityville Horror house on Oceanside Avenue, and the Dakota Building. Granted, nothing is as terrifying as our congressional representatives, but Buckout Road takes the honors for the state’s creepiest place. The infamous albino cannibals are a major reason why (that’s a true urban legend). Yet, the infernal stretch of asphalt has several more sinister myths attached to it. All the major ones will work their way into Matthew Currie Holmes’ The Curse of Buckout Road, which opens today in Brooklyn.

Troubled Aaron Powell has just returned from military academy, but his grandfather leaves him hanging at the bus station. That is par for the course for their rocky relationship, but in this case, Dr. Lawrence Powell has a good excuse. The former minister turned head-shrinker has been consulting with the police on a hideous suicide. The location: a clearing off Buckout Road.

Sadly, Det. Roy Harris will soon be returning to that area, on related police business. Being a grown-up in a horror movie, he doesn’t want to hear about his daughter Cleo’s fear that she might be next. It turns out she and the sub-literate stoner Ganzer Brothers produced a class project video, supposedly debunking the myths of Buckout Road. So much for that. Clearly, there is a malevolent power out to get her—and she can only count on Aaron Powell to stand with her.

About halfway through Curse, the film turns on a dime, going from banally blah to off-its-rocker bonkers in a matter of seconds. Essentially, that is the moment when Holmes and co-screenwriter Shahin Chandrasoma go all in on Buckout urban legends. They also add some old-time religious elements (or rather the perils of the lack thereof) as well as some old school demonic paranoia. In the process, they develop some decent Buckout lore of their own.

Danny Glover is faultlessly professional as Dr. Powell. However, it is prolific character actors Henry Czerny and Colm Feore who really shine as Det. Harris and Rev. Mike Reagan, the new pastor at Powell’s old church, who never really had faith per se, in the first place.

Mean Dreams, Starring Bill Paxton

A crooked cop and abusive father like Wayne Caraway needs someone like Dale “Hurricane” Dixon from One False Move to put a stopper in his bottle. Unfortunately, instead of a showdown between Bill Paxton characters, we will watch Paxton’s Caraway completely dominate a gawky teenager who just can’t compete. Still, it is fun to watch another vintage performance from the late, great Paxton in Nathan Morlando’s Mean Dreams (trailer here), which opens tonight in New York.

Sensitive loner Jonas Ford sure takes notice when Casey Caraway moves to town with her father, the new sheriff’s deputy. For some reason, she also takes a liking to him, even though his bipolar Church Lady mother does her best to scare her off. Of course, it’s nothing compared to what Caraway will do. Not only does he raise his hand to Casey, he also appears to have an unhealthy need to control her. 

Determined to save his new girlfriend and avoid another beating of his own, Ford happens to be skulking about when Caraway turns drug deal into a multiple murder. He rashly decides Wayne’s stash of drug cash will be their nest egg, so he grabs the girl, the money, and her loyal dog Blaise and heads off into the Badlands. Naturally, Caraway will follow hot on their trail, like the devil himself.

Sophie Nélisse and Josh Wiggins are both duller than dishwater as the teens on the run. That causes a fundamental imbalance within the film, because Paxton goes for broke as the flamboyantly evil Caraway and Colm Feore adds further villainous zest as his partner in crime, the crooked Sheriff. Frankly, the bad guys have the straight folks thoroughly outclassed. The only exception is Joe Cobden, who quietly devastates in a handful of pivotal scenes as Ford’s meek and self-loathing father Elbert.

Mean Dreams is not a bad film, but it really just reminds us how awesome Paxton was playing the country boy with a dark twist in films like One False Move, Pass the Ammo, Traveller, Near Dark, and of course Private “Game Over” Hudson in Aliens. It is not essential, but it has its (Paxton and Feore) moments. For Paxton fans, Mean Dreams opens tonight (3/17) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

Reversion: Thanks for the Memories

These days, kids will stick anything in their ears, even if it causes hearing damage or memory loss. You cannot blame the latter on earbuds. That is all Jack Clè’s doing. He has developed the Oubli, a Blue Tooth like device that vividly recalls your happiest memories. One of the so-called side effects is a generally dimming of unpleasant recollections, but opinions differ as to just how bad that really is. However, his daughter and marketing director starts to experience some rather nasty malfunctions on the eve of their product launch in Jose Nestor Marquez’s Reversion (trailer here), which opens today in New York.

Sophie Clè is not just an Oubli user. She is unhealthily dependent on it. Rather than living in the present, she constantly revisits the last happy memory she has of her late mother. Thanks to her hype and some creative regulatory evasion, Jack Clè stands to make a fortune off the Oubli, but his triumph is jeopardized the night before their big Steve Jobsian media event, when Ms. Clè is kidnapped by a disturbed woman raving about her implant. Unfortunately, she seems to fiddle with a similar implant Clè never knew she had. She manages to escape soon thereafter, but Oubli use no longer has the same soothing effect. Instead, she starts experiencing violent flashbacks of her mother’s death that seem to implicate her father.

With the help of her loyal driver-bodyguard Ayden, Clè will seek answers from the unstable Isa and her father’s estranged research director, Elizabeth. Clearly, some kind of conspiracy is afoot, but like Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, it is not clear whether she can handle the truth.

For the most part, Reversion is a slickly competent near future thriller, but rather than being cool and exciting, the implications of its new technology are quite sad and depressing. Granted, we should always remember our loved ones, but we still need to move on. That is a worthy message, but Reversion still has its strange headscratchers, like why does the bodyguard know where all the corporate secrets are tucked away?

As Sophie Clè, Aja Naomi King (How to Get Away with Murder) comes apart at the seams pretty convincingly. Of course, a smooth talking ambiguously villainous figure like Jack Clè is right in Colm Feore’s power zone. Arguably, he is the best part of the film, especially considering how he carries out the big reveal. On the other hand, Gary Dourdan’s Ayden looks like he hasn’t slept for days, which could in fact be true. Unfortunately, the tragically twitchy Isa is also rather underwhelming, while Amanda Plummer phones in her near cameo as Elizabeth.

There are worse films opening this weekend (looking at you, Knock Knock), but Marquez’s pacing is a little too slack and Dourdan is a little too vacant looking for it to really come together in a big way. Conceptually, it is an interesting little oddity, but it could have used more spring in its step. Still, you can’t argue with all the screen time it gives Feore. For King’s fans, it opens today (10/9) in New York, at the AMC Empire.