The Raven: Poe’s Final Days

Unlike Universal's 1935 film and Roger Corman’s 1963 film, this Raven does not pretend to be an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s work. It is not as much fun either, but how can you beat Lugosi, Karloff, Price, Lorre, Corman, or Hazel Court? You sure can’t do it with John Cusack. Still, if you crank down your expectations, the atmosphere is reasonably entertaining in John McTeigue’s The Raven, which airs on ThisTV.

These will be the last days of Poe’s life and true to form, they start with bar brawl. He hopes to marry his well-heeled secret lover, Emily Hamilton, but her father, Captain Charles isn’t having any of that. The serial killer terrorizing Baltimore will be a more serious obstacle when he kidnaps her.

As Baltimore Police Detective Fields sleuths out, each of his killings were inspired by Poe’s stories. In an early act of “toxic fandom,” the mystery man demands Poe write new stories inspired by his crime scenes, or else Hamilton dies.

The idea of Poe as a detective holds plenty of promise (it was gripping as heck in Marc Olden’s supernatural novel, Poe Must Die). The problem is many of the killer’s Poe homages are awkwardly forced. In one case, Poe even says so himself. The locked-room crime scene makes sense as a “Rue Morgue” reference—so much so that Fields recognizes it as such—and the pendulum murder of Poe’s real-life nemesis Rufus Wilmot Griswold is possibly the film’s high point for Poe fans, but from there, screenwriters Hannah Shakespeare and Ben Livingston really start grasping at straws.

Weirdly, John Cusack turns out to be a decent fit for Poe, thanks to his whiny, snarky nebbishness. Viewing The Raven in retrospect, we can also draw parallels between the disgraced and dissolute Poe and Cusack’s own career, which subsequently took a nose-dive into VOD purgatory. Regardless, Cusack plays up Poe’s jerkishness without alienating the audience.

Utopia, from Gillian Flynn & Amazon

So many people are asked “where is Utopia” in this series. At least one of them should have said Utopia doesn’t exist. It is a false temptation that inevitably leads to totalitarianism. Seriously, “Erewhon” is nowhere spelled backwards (almost). However, in this case, Utopia is a thing and maybe something more. It is the sequel to an underground graphic novel titled Dystopia that many geeky conspiracy theorists believe holds portents of an impending apocalypse. Unfortunately, these motley nerds are more right than wrong in the eight-episode Utopia, created by Gillian “Gone Girl” Flynn (adapting Dennis Kelly’s UK series of the same name), which premieres today on Amazon Prime.

A young couple finds what looks like page proofs of a bizarrely baroque allegorical dystopian comic book. Through a little bit of internet research, they determine it is the mysterious, long-awaited sequel to Dystopia, a cult phenomenon with a rabid fanbase—so it is probably worth something. They decide to auction it off at a local comic convention. Wilson Wilson and his fellow Utopia chatroom friends will have to be there, so they can bid, pooling their resources. It will also be there first opportunity to meet in real life.

The last part will be the part for the fellow fans. There is definitely a budding romantically attraction between the sweet-tempered (but ailing) Becky and the nebbish Ian. Wilson is also duly impressed to discover Samantha’s obsessive interpretations of Dystopia rival his own in their wild paranoia. However, they have yet to discover their fifth member, Grant is actually a tough street kid.

Unfortunately, the get-together takes a dark turn when a creepy duo of killers starts snuffing out everyone at the convention who had contact with the pages of Utopia. Suddenly, the fans are on the run from a shadowy cabal, very much like the one in the pages of Dystopia/Utopia. Things really get surreal when they are forced to make an alliance with an unstable but highly lethal young woman who claims to be Jessica Hyde, the hero of the fateful comics, who has her own reasons for wanting Utopia.

Meanwhile, Bill Gates-like Big Pharma tycoon Dr. Kevin Christie is bedeviled by media speculation his new synthetic meat has caused a deadly viral outbreak among school children. Mild-mannered academic Dr. Michael Stearns suspects it might be the rare bat virus he discovered in Peru. What do these characters have in common? Surely, it is all explained in the pages of Utopia.

So, who’s in the mood for an apocalyptic viral thriller? Obviously, there are plenty parallels between the crisis facing the world in Utopia and the real-life pandemic that is still persistently hanging around. However, the real point of the show is its geeky meta-ness. The in-film reality blends and overlaps with the comic duology’s mythology in ways that are often quite clever. Flynn relentlessly raises the stakes with each episode, which she invariably ends with a wicked cliffhanger.

It is easy to get hooked by Utopia, even though you might not always enjoy watching it. This series and its characters have some serious mean streaks. Frankly, there is more stone-cold cruelty depicted in Utopia than nine out of ten randomly selected slasher horror movies. The violence can be overwhelming and counter-productive. Early in the series, a major character does something so egregious, it is hard to sympathize with them later, even though we are clearly intended to.

River Runs Red: The Judge Turns Jury and Executioner

If a conservative is a liberal who got mugged, what happens when a liberal judge’s son is killed by cops? Apparently, he turns vigilante. Frankly, we will be much better without cops who are this rock-stupid. Of course, they are racist too, or at least the really obnoxious, loud-mouthed one is. Alas, this movie is not so bright either. Any resemblance to logic or reality is purely a coincidence in Wes Miller’s River Runs Red (trailer here), which opens today in New Jersey.

C.J. Coleman, Jr was driving to his first day at the Police Academy, where he hoped to follow in the footsteps of his father, Judge Charles Coleman, a former cop, after having spent the last six months caring for lepers in Mother Theresa’s former Kolkata mission. Okay, we made the last part up. Regardless, it is pretty hard to believe two of the biggest meathead cops you ever laid eyes on could get away with planting a gun on the police cadet son of a sitting judge, after blowing him away in a hail of bullets during a completely gratuitous traffic stop, but that is what happens. In our world, they would be crucified by the media and politicians, but in Miller’s alternate universe, the city’s African American mayor circles the wagons around them.

Frustrated with the perfunctory investigation, Coleman turns to his former partner, Horace, a hardboiled undercover cop, who did a stint in Internal Affairs. He digs up the shooters’ dirty history, which leads the Judge to Javier Garcia, another grieving father. Initially, Coleman approaches him with a half-baked notion of suing the city, but they eventually agree on a more direct and Biblical course of action.

RRR is a strange mishmash of a film that seems carefully calibrated to alienate everyone and appeal to nobody. Black Lives Matter-style polemics sit uneasily side-by-side with cathartic payback in the tradition of Death Wish. Taye Diggs is actually rather intense and brooding as Judge Coleman, but he does not have five consecutive minutes of screen time in which his character’s behavior and decisions ring true. George Lopez looks alarmingly old and out of shape as Garcia, but at least he maybe deserves credit for De Niro-ing-up to play the schlubby, soul-sick father.

Surprisingly, the most interesting character is John Cusack’s Cassandra-like Horace, who powerlessly watches the all the tragedy go down. Arguably, it just might be Cusack’s best work since The Numbers Station, for whatever that dubious claim might be worth. In contrast, the two trigger cops are mirror image stereotypes: Luke Hemsworth portrays the guilt-ridden basket case, while Gianni Capaldi plays the abrasive, unrepentant racist.

Clearly, Miller desperately wants the right people to take RRR seriously, but he also tried to maintain its commercial appeal to mainstream, big-box-store-shopping consumers. That strategy is nearly always doomed to fail—and this is no exception. There are some nice performances in here that will make open-minded viewers root for the film to eventually pull its act together, but it just doesn’t happen. Not recommended, River Runs Red opens today (11/9) in the Tri-State Area, at the AMC Loews Jersey Gardens.

Blood Money: John Cusack Wants His Money Back

Judging from this film, one of the two credited co-screenwriters must have had one nasty breakup recently, because their protagonist is no mere femme fatale. She is a stone-cold mercenary viper. At least she sot of makes things interesting. Plus, for extra added VODness, there is John Cusack playing the whiny, motivationally challenged villain in Lucky McKee’s Blood Money (trailer here), which releases today on DVD.

Late in their senior year, Lynn briefly hooked up with her torch-carrying, dirt-poor platonic guy pal, Victor, but she has recently been seeing her other high school bestie dude, Jeff. While she is home from college, the trio decided to take a rafting trip together, because doesn’t that just sound like a super-fun time? Victor was already getting sick of it, before Lynn found eight million dollars stuffed in matching duffel bags. Of course, she wants to keep it and Jeff is too spineless to argue, but Victor wants to turn it over to the cops. Evidently, he is the only one of them who has seen A Simple Plan.

As you would expect, the man who packed that luggage wants it back. That would be Miller, a white collar D.B. Cooper wannabe, trying to set himself up off-the-grid, in style. Unfortunately, he will have to pry her cold, grubby hands off it.

Supposedly, Blood Money was intended as a loose riff on Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but that’s just crazy talk.  Frankly, this is a complete car crash of a movie, for many reasons, not the least being the ostensive villain spends the first half of the film laying on a picnic table, pining for a cigarette. By the time old Miller starts dispensing 1970s psycho-babble relationship advice to an oblivious Victor, we know this train is hurtling off the bridge. The only question is how much hang-time will it record. Unfortunately, stuff doesn’t really start to happen until about the fifty-minute mark, so that means we have to wait an interminably long time, while the characters just sit around, awkwardly looking at each other.

Forget what critics said about The Paperboy. John Cusack was terrible as the bad guy in that film, just like he looks completely out of place as Miller, the antagonist-heavy, but the character is such a nebbish villain, he is perversely suited to it. Admittedly, Willa Fitzgerald is all kinds of fierce as Lynn. She came to play, that’s for sure. On the other hand, Ellar Coltrane and Jacob Artist give Victor and Jeff personalities of cardboard, and co-screenwriters Jared Butler and Lars Norberg endowed them the intuition of damp lint.

Still, you have to feel for Butler or Norberg, because one of them most of had his heart eviscerated. That’s the only way to write a character like Lynn. What can we say? Love stinks, yeah, yeah. In this case, it takes a ponderous excuse for a wilderness survival thriller and gives it an elephant syringe full of adrenaline through the breastplate in the final twenty-minutes. That is something, but it is baffling how a notable horror-genre helmer like McKee could let the film wallow in lethargy for so long.

Blood Money is a perfect example of why more critics should review B-movies, because its dubious decisions deserve our bemused attention. Not really recommended, in any way, shape, or form, Blood Money is still exponentially more interesting than Singularity, so maybe we can consider it a rebound for Cusack, if we grade on a generous curve. Blood Money releases today on DVD, so have fun sports fans.