Checkmate: More like a Narrative Stalemate

Chess can be a highly cinematic, deeply symbolic game in films like Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players, and Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair. In the wrong hands, it can also be shlock. Try not to think about those vastly superior films when considering this grade Z chess match-slash-hostage drama. The so-called “King’s Game” has never been dreckier than it is in Timothy Woodward Jr.’s Checkmate (trailer here), which releases today on DVD from Alchemy.

Two rather supernatural looking gents are sitting down for a friendly game of chess. Although never referred to by name in the film, the credits lists one as “Elohim,” the Hebrew and Mormon name for God, and the other as “Lu,” which could be short for any number of names, like Lucille or Lulu. To sweeten the pot, Lu suggests they play for the “Deed to Eternity.”  I kid you not. It is implied that a clumsy bank heist is being controlled by their chess moves, even though the standoff underway seems to have started well before the chess game. However, it is hard to judge with certainty considering how severely Woodward abuses flashbacks as a story telling device.

To further complicate matters, one of the hostages is the super-pregnant asthmatic wife of one the SWAT team officers. Another hostage is poor Allen, the unemployed father of a young boy in dire need of a heart transplant. To collect on his life insurance policy, Allen contracted Father Dyson, a Roman Catholic priest who doubles as a hit man, to kill him in a manner that clearly does not look like suicide. No, I’m not making this up.

Look, we dig our B movies here. We were downright bullish on the British werewolf western Blood Moon, rather indulgent regarding Isis Rising (starring Indo-American pornstar Priya Rai) and generally forgiving of other questionable Vinnie Jones vehicles like 6 Ways to Die and Age of Dragons. However, Checkmate just doesn’t have Jack Straw going on. It is a narrative jumble that looks cheap and unprofessional. For the first forty minutes or so, Woodward flails about, trying to figure out if there is anyone in his bargain basement Crash ensemble worth following for the rest of the film, but after all that exposition, he still comes up empty.

Frankly, Danny Glover’s groggy demeanor as “Elohim” suggests Woodward forced him to be in the film by abducting and drugging him. If so, that is obviously problematic, but at least it absolves Glover of responsibility for this mess. Inexplicably, Sean Astin throws away all his accrued credit with Catholics from Rudy by playing the homicidal Father Dyson. Good luck explaining that decision to Saint Peter. Fans of Eddie and the Cruisers should also be warned. They do not want to see Checkmate, because the years and scripts have not been kind to Michael Paré.

However, Mischa Barton shows better sense than most of her co-stars, because she spends the better part of the film trying to hide behind her inhaler. Only Jones really steps up and assumes any responsibility, deciding the only way out is way-the-heck-and-gone over the top. As “Lucille,” he gives us something to watch, but those scenes with Glover make absolutely no sense whatsoever.

This is just a sad, crackheaded excuse for a film. If it were the least bit competent, the Father Dyson subplot would be rather offensive, but the plodding Checkmate’s crimes against watchability are so basic and fundamental, they do not even allow for such outrage. Not recommended to anyone under any circumstance, Checkmate releases today (9/8) on DVD and VOD from Alchemy.

6 Ways to Die: Vinnie Jones Explains Them All

Lawrence Block’s Matthew Scudder knew there were eight million ways to die, but Vinnie Jones only gets six. At least he will make full use of each of them. He will not merely kill his nemesis, Sonny “Sundown” Garcia, he will target the drug lord’s reputation, money, loved ones, sentimental attachments, and his very liberty. However, narrative logic will be the first casualty of Nadeem Soumah’s 6 Ways to Die (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

“John Doe” has it in for Garcia. He has his reasons, but he is very Picard about it all, never setting foot from his old school Oldsmobuick. Somehow, he gets some of the Los Angeles underworld’s most talented to come to him. He needs their skills to torment Garcia and his valuable inside knowledge will make it worth their while. It would seem that they will succeed spectacularly, since it is all told in a bizarre flashback structure. Oh sure, there is a big reveal that changes everything, but it makes absolutely no sense.

Still, 6 Ways offers an opportunity to watch a veritable B–movie all-star team at work. For the starting line-up we have Jones, Bai Ling, Dominique Swain, Vivica A. Fox, and Tom Sizemore. Most of them have real roles to play, but Sizemore appears in a completely tangential prologue. It looks like Soumah had only one day of shooting with him, so he just improvised something on the fly. In reserve, 6 Ways also features Chris Jai Alex and Kinga Philipps, who maybe aren’t so familiar, but have volumes of imdb credits already.

There are times you have to ask just what does this movie think its doing, but not in a resentful way. You sort of have to give it credit for being a grubby striver. It is determined to impress us by riding its bike with no hands, no matter how many times it wipes out on the pavement.

With no action scenes whatsoever, Jones is completely wasted as the mystery man and his role in the big twist defies the evidence of our senses. However, Alex shows real B-movie star power as Frank Casper, the hitman. Bai Ling also adds some serious cool as high class con artist June Lee. Unfortunately, Michael Rene Walton is way too reserved and colorless for a ruthless heavy like Garcia. Fortunately, chewing the scenery is not a problem for Fox, who vamps it up something fierce as the corrupt cop, Veronica Smith.

Soumah has seen way too much Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez for his own good. The resulting product is overly clever and then some. That said, if you enjoy watching B-movie veterans doing B-movie things, 6 Ways will be a satisfying guilty pleasure when it streams on Netflix (which should be imminently). In the short term, it opens this Friday (7/31) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

Moby-Dick as Quest Fantasy: The Age of the Dragons

In her novel Ahab’s Wife, Sena Jeter Naslund tells the story of the sailor’s wife only briefly mentioned in Melville’s Moby-Dick. An intrepid band of filmmakers did her one better, introducing viewers to Rachel, Ahab’s adopted daughter-crew member, whom Melville must have surely implied, but just never got around to writing about in his great American novel. They added dragons too. Yes, Moby-Dick is reset in an epic fantasy universe. A real curiosity piece, Ryan Little’s The Age of the Dragons (trailer here) is now available from Go Digital Media Group on platforms like itunes and pay-per-view youtube.

In this world, dragons are hunted for their vitriol, a highly combustible and expensive form of fuel. Of course, Ahab is not in it for the money. He wants revenge from a great white dragon—just like the book, except not really. Ishmael, should you chose to call him that, is a dragon harpooner looking too sign onto the crew of the feared dragon hunter. He and his moody sidekick Queequeg are hired by Ahab’s adopted daughter, Rachel (presumably a nod to one of the other ships mentioned in the Melville novel). Of course, she is attractive, generating all kinds of helpful sexual tension within the crew. This most definitely includes Ishmael, but she does not seem to mind his attentions as much.

Age would probably have worked better if they had been hunting sea-dragons, because that would have given them an excuse to serve aboard a ship. Instead, the Pequod is an anachronistic armored wagon that could have been a castoff from the Jawas. Shockingly though, the dragon effects are not all that bad, but brother, Danny Glover sure is. Perhaps Ahab’s make-up is partly to blame, making Glover look as if he were simply drizzled with candle wax. However, he is so overwrought and pointlessly venomous, he single-handedly reduces the film to low camp.

As the romantic leads (in Moby-Dick?) Corey Sevier and Sofia Pernas are a bit stiff perhaps, but not to a debilitating extent. Frankly, ex-footballer turned genre movie heavy Vinnie Jones steals the show as second mate Stubb, exhibiting charisma and energy well beyond viewer expectations. Unfortunately, the film inexplicably kills off their trump card before it even reaches the third act. Still, David Morgan also adds some nice supporting seasoning as the morally ambiguous first mate Starbuck.

Age actually had a theatrical release in the UK (where it was critically pummeled), but here in America it suffered the indignity of airing as a Syfy original movie. Granted, Melville given the fantasy once-over is definitely gimmicky filmmaking in the Corman tradition, but some credible work went into it. To their credit, Little’s effects team did not skimp on the dragons. There are scads of them and they look decent by outside-of-Hollywood standards, particularly when seen flying in the distance. However, the screenplay’s contrivances make it devilishly difficult to buy into the lunacy. Still, it is hard to resist checking out such a wacky high concept. So now you know this exists. It can be found on itunes.