Long Time Listener, on AMC ALLBLCK

Radio is rarely live or local anymore. Increasingly, DJs are a thing of the past. Jessica Walter wouldn’t have the opportunity to stalk Clintt Eastwood in Play Misty for Me. However, there are podcasters, who are practically begging for obsessive fans, especially considering how they mostly gab about true crime. Genesis was one of the pioneers, but her podcast is on the verge of cancelation, because it now sounds comparatively tame. However, a mystery heavy-breather will either save her show, or kill Genesis, maybe both, when he starts phoning-in as the title character of Danielle Nicolet’s Long Time Listener, which premieres today on AMC ALLBLCK.

Genesis and her producer Carter decide to take some calls as sort of an old school throwback, but they soon wish they hadn’t. It was already a tough day at the office, after Ruby, the network manager just cancelled Genesis’s show. Then “Long Time Listener” calls in. It sounds like he has a victim with him, who could possibly be her ex-girlfriend. Genesis bluffs her way through the call, belittling Long Time Listener, but deep down, she isn’t quite sure it is a hoax.

Things get real when LTL hacks the show’s socials and posts a sex-tape he (or she) recorded of Genesis and Carter (her other ex). Eventually, people start dying. Of course, nobody should be better prepared for this kind of thing than an experienced true crime podcaster, right? Indeed, she is keenly aware the stalker is most likely someone already in close proximity to her.

As directed by Nicolet, best known for her role on The Flash, who also plays Genesis’s colleague, lifestyle podcaster Elle, Long Time Listener largely has the vibe of a made-for-Lifetime movie. Nevertheless, screenwriters John Doolan and Joe Narode will probably genuinely shock the target audience with their twist ending. To give credit where its due, they dexterously use the expectations viewers have developed over time against them.

While still undeniably small in scope, Meagan Holder solidly anchors the film as the reasonably proactive Genesis. Likewise, Lyriq Bent nicely projects the proper degree of ambiguity as Carter, who must serve as potential love interest and prime suspect. Cleo Berry is usually annoyingly shticky as Genesis’s flamboyant co-host, Max, but he truly shines in pivotal third act scenes.

Alan Rudolph’s Remember My Name

Stalkers aren't just for the rich and famous, like in Play Misty for Me or The Bodyguard. In this case a recently paroled woman is stalking working-class Neil and Barbara Curry. It certainly isn’t for their money. It is personal. Yet, the real tragedy is that the original score, composed and performed by blues and jazz singer Alberta Hunter is not more widely available. The cast is pretty notable too in director-screenwriter Alan Rudolph’s 1978 drama Remember My Name, which screens at the Roxy Cinema this week.

Emily is fresh out of prison and looking to cause trouble in general, but particularly for Barbara Curry. It starts with some vandalism, but escalates rapidly. She also lurks outside her husband’s construction site, but his response is a little different. In fact, when confronted by his wife, Curry sounds rather evasive and even a bit ashamed. Definitely something transpired between them, which will somewhat shift audience sympathies as Rudolph teases it out.

Meanwhile, the television news keeps telling its viewers they should care more about an earthquake that rocked Budapest, as Hunter’s bluesy tunes (recorded in a special session produced by John Hammond) swing the soundtrack. It is perhaps fitting that Robert Altman produced Remember My Name, because Rudolph’s approach is often quite Altman-esque. That is another reason why it is so odd this film is so rarely programmed.

It is a bit ironic to see Anthony Perkins cast as a married construction worker, but he perfectly expresses Curry’s guilty squirreliness. As usual, he definitely projects a sense something is not entirely right with him, albeit not to the degree of his iconic roles. He happened to be playing opposite his real-life wife Berry Berenson, who was murdered on September 11^th, aboard American Airline Flight 11. She really is terrific as Barbara, so it is odd she only had a handful of further roles.

On the other hand, Remember My Name is fully stocked with supporting players who would later make names for themselves, including Jeff Goldblum and Alfre Woodard, as Emily’s boss and work-rival at the Woolworth-like retailer. Plus, Tim Thomerson (“Jack Deth”) briefly appears as Neil Curry’s co-worker.

Nevertheless, if this film were better remembered, Emily would probably be known as the role of Geraldine Chaplin’s career. You can definitely see how she might have influenced Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction or Jennifer Jason Leigh in Single White Female. Yet, Chaplin brings a vulnerability to her character that sets Emily apart from just about every other movie-stalker.

Of course, for those of us with good taste in music, the biggest star of Remember is Hunter’s music. Thematically, her songs are totally the blues, but they are all arranged in a swinging up-tempo jazz style, recorded with legendary jazz musicians, like Doc Cheatham on trumpet, Vic Dickenson on trombone, Budd Johnson on tenor, and Connie Kay on drums.

Assailant, on Redbox

Alexander Hamilton was born on the Caribbean Island of Nevis and Horatio Nelson was once stationed there. Now it also has this film as a claim to fame, but it is a rather dubious one. A quarreling couple has come for a last-chance vacation getaway, but a psycho-stalker interrupts their attempts to rekindle romance in Tom Paton’s Assailant, which releases today, through Redbox (kiosks and VOD).

Jason and Zoe Sellers used to have a touring business, until he made a disastrous investment that wrecked the company. To make up for it, he works compulsively, but that only drove the couple further apart. In a final attempt to save their marriage, they have returned to Nevis, where they had a spectacular honeymoon. Unfortunately, the luxury hotel has shuttered, so instead they chartered laidback Captain Henry’s yacht.

The super-chill salty dog will not be their problem. Instead, they make the mistake of talking to the deranged Michael at dinner. He has a weird Punisher-like impulse to right perceived bad behavior. Basically, he gives offenders three chances to apologize before he starts the process of menacing, hunting down, and killing them. The Sellers do not realize what kind of bear they poked, so the next day they proceed with their planned hike. That should be fun, right?

Frankly, Assailant is pretty mediocre, in predictable and manipulative ways, but the Nevis locales are lovely on-screen. It really looks nothing like Paton’s previous films, like Black Site, Black Ops, and 400 Bullets, which had a dark and grungy aesthetic, but were also a good deal of fun.

DieRy: Stalking Goes Off-Line

Being an Instagrammer is almost a profession these days. Likewise, films about social media stars with stalkers are almost a sub-genre unto themselves. This is not the movie that will make either respectable. When an unhinged admirer steals Marie Clark’s diary, it sends her life spiraling in Jennifer Gelfer’s DieRy (the combination of “die” and “diary,” don’t you see?), which releases today on VOD.

Clark (careful not to call her “Claire”) has something like 200K followers, so that is good enough to earn her some meaningful influencer sponsorships. Unfortunately, she still has to deal with creepy photographers. Yet, she continues to work on her masters in comparative religions, especially since she has the hots for her faculty advisor, Dr. Harris, a former special ops veteran.

After Clark’s diary is stolen during a party, she starts getting weird anonymous letters from someone who thinks they understand who she is. They also make references to the murders the unknown party starts committing. Somewhat logically, Clark suspects everyone in her vacuous social circle, except Harris, who refers her to Angus, a scrappy private investigator he knows from his murky days in military service.

It is hard to describe DieRy in way that does it justice. Basically, it starts out like a Lifetime original movie that utterly vilifies social media, but it evolves into an off-the-wall crackpot conspiracy thriller. In terms of tone, think of it as Showgirls, but with awkward Sumerian religious references instead of the sex and nudity (indeed, DieRy is surprisingly chaste). Throughout it all, most of the overheated ensemble act like they are auditioning for a new Melrose Place reboot.

The Fanatic: Travolta is the Moose

Typically, horror movies reflect the fears of society, but occasionally they express the peculiar anxieties of the people who make movies. Seriously, who else would be worried about obsessive fans whose fandom crosses over to the dark side of stalkerdom? It happened to Lauren Bacall in The Fan (1981), Morgan Fairchild in The Seduction, Wesley Snipes in The Fan (1996) and now it happens to the ridiculously bland object of John Travolta’s adulation in Limp Bizkit front man Fred Durst’s The Fanatic, which opens this Friday in New York.

Moose means well and he fans hard, but he is definitely on the spectrum, so he is often misunderstood. For reasons we cannot fathom, he is a big fan of Hunter Dunbar, who made his name as the star of action-driven horror movies. Unfortunately, Dumb-bar bolts from a signing event to deal with some personal issues just as Moose was about to have his turn. Of course, the socially clumsy Moose follows Dunbar out into the street, where he makes a terrible impression. Wanting to try again, the poor fan turns up at Dunbar’s home, thanks to some of the tricks of the trade he learned from Leah, a paparazzi friend. Dunbar reacts even worse than we might expect—and so the cycle of misunderstanding keeps repeating, making conflict inevitable.

In all honesty, The Fanatic is pretty mediocre in nearly every way, but Travolta really goes all in as the Moose. He even has a meltdown worthy of Nic Cage—and we mean that as a compliment. It is frankly a pretty brave performance for someone like Travolta, who is probably more used to identifying with Dunbar’s position. Regardless, he makes Moose acutely human and ultimately quite tragic.

On the other hand, it is impossible to understand why anyone would be a fan of the charisma-less Dunbar or Devon Sawa, who plays him almost entirely without any redeeming attributes. As a result, the weird upshot of The Fanatic is that it makes us sympathize with stalkers. In fact, Leah the paparazzi (nicely portrayed by Ana Golja) is probably the film’s most intriguing character, even though it leaves us wondering how she ever connected with Moose in the first place.

Durst and co-screenwriter Dave Bekerman rely on a lot of stupid decision-making to advance the plot, which is definitely problematic. However, cinematographer Conrad W. Hall gives it an impressively stylish Hollywood Boulevard-by-night look and vibe. It is nice to know Travolta can still crank it up when he wants to, but his efforts mostly go for naught here. Not recommended, The Fanatic opens this Friday (8/30) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

Never Here, Produced by Pang Ho-Cheung

Miranda Fall’s latest exhibition is so creepy, it is hailed as a work of genius by the art press. Basically, when she found a poor schmuck’s phone, she proceeded to spy on him and utterly invade his personal space. Naturally, she is rather taken aback when the exposed Arthur Anderton reacts with outrage. Doesn’t he understand privacy is out of fashion? Fall finds the shoe is on the other foot when a mystery man starts stalking her, but the situation really gets complicated when she stalks him right back in Camille Thoman’s Never Here (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New York.

Her opening was an unalloyed triumph for Fall, except for Anderton’s grouchiness. Then the chaos starts. While spending the night in her flat, Fall’s married gallerist lover Paul Stark sees an assault from her window. When he refuses to call the police, she does so in his place, much like Steve Guttenberg in Curtis Hanson’s Bedroom Window. Predictably, Fall soon finds herself floundering through line-ups, relying on Stark’s vague description. Of course, she cannot risk fingering the wrong person, but she gets serious vibes from one of the suspects, so she starts following him. Maybe he is following her too, or perhaps it is Anderton or maybe even someone else.

In the small world department, it turns out the cop assigned to the case is a former college boyfriend and the victim is the journalist who just wrote up a fawning profile of Fall. Both start to doubt her slippery account of that fateful evening. We might have our doubts too. Fall definitely has the potential to turn out to be one of those “unreliable narrator” types.

Thoman is obviously deeply steeped in Antonioni’s Blow-Up: an ostensive mystery set in the hipster art world that becomes increasingly ambiguous and hallucinatory. Regrettably, but probably predictably, Thoman falls short of that lofty target. Too often, Never Here feels like it is being obscure for obscurity’s sake, rather than as part of a grand vision. There is the possibility Fall is nuts, or maybe it is just us, but the movie itself isn’t crazy enough. Fearing commitment, it never stops playing the is-she-or-isn’t-she game, without ever over-extending itself in either direction.

Still, Mireille Enos has an intriguing screen presence that mostly works in the context of the film. However, the most memorable turn comes from the late Sam Shepard as Stark, whose surprising complexities and human messiness will be revealed over time. Nina Arianda also has some interesting moments as the unfortunate journalist.

Cinematographer Sebastian Winterø gives the film an ominously beautiful look that suits its Lynchian and Hitchcockian influences. Nonetheless, we cannot help wondering what the film could have been like if it had been helmed by producer Pang Ho-cheung, especially given the madness of his HK slasher Dream Home (there is a film that had no problems committing). Frustrating and ultimately disappointing, Never Here is only for hardcore fans of Robbe-Grillet novels and sinister-looking art films, when it opens tomorrow (10/20) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

I.T.: Pierce Brosnan’s Life Gets Hacked

Someone should warn Mike Regan the women you meet through online chats sometimes turn out to be men. The corporate jet magnate just isn’t very computer savvy. He is about to reveal his smart home passwords to his company’s new systems temp. In doing so, he will learn a perennial management lesson. Good help is definitely hard to find in John Moore’s I.T. (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Regan is about to take his firm public to raise capital for his uber-for-private-jets app. Rather embarrassingly his launch event is nearly sabotaged by technical glitches, but Ed Porter, the new socially awkward temp saves the day. Impressed by his resourcefulness and full of his own fake egalitarianism, Regan invites him over to the house to speed up the wifi and do other computer stuff. At this point, he should be writing his own ticket to full time employment and quick promotion, but his horrendous misunderstanding of boundaries ruins all his good credit. Since he continues to do creepy stuff, like showing up to cheer on the Regan’s prep school daughter in her field hockey game, his almost-mentor cans him. Feeling betrayed, Porter uses all his backdoors and Trojans to makes the Regans’ lives absolutely miserable.

For about ten minutes, I.T. gets smart when Michael Nyqvist blows into town as Henrik, the mysterious “cleaner,” who specializes in shutting down cyber menaces like Porter. Unfortunately, it soon reverts back to its previous dumb self. When it comes to stupidity in Don Kay & William Wisher’s screenplay, nobody can touch the moronic cops, who bizarrely identify immediately with the twitchy computer nerd rather than the wealthy airplane dude. At one point, Regan’s real I.T. department suggests Porter might be able to crash their planes out of the sky, but they never follow up on this potentially catastrophic plot point.

As Regan, Pierce Brosnan sort of plays his age without giving up on playing good guy-leading mean. Nyqvist is slyly droll as the Cleaner, while James Frecheville does some of his best work yet (certainly compared to Adore and Animal Kingdom, in which everyone else just overwhelmed him) as the staggeringly inappropriate Porter. However, they are just working with a screenplay that is dumber than a bag full of hammers.

Seriously, the logic of I.T.’s narrative collapses faster than Hillary Clinton on a day in the mid-eighties. In feels like a throwback to mid-1990s films like The Net that were just discovering the shenanigans that sometimes happen online. It might have gotten more benefit of the doubt then, but it just feels shopworn now. Therefore, I.T. just isn’t recommendable when it opens this Friday (9/23) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

Intruder: Wake Up and Smell the Stalker

Granted, Elizabeth is a classical symphony musician rather than a jazz improviser, but you would still expect her to be sensitive and attuned to the presence of others around her. Instead, she has the intuition of canned spam. Unfortunately, that will cost her dearly in Travis Z[ariwny]’s Intruder (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New York.

When not being sexually harassed by Vincent, her misogynistic conductor, Elizabeth (judging from the press notes, women don’t need last names in Portland. You can just refer to “Elizabeth” and people know you mean the mousy cellist) withdraws into her rather spacious duplex cocoon. However, unbeknownst to her, someone has violated her space. He creeps around spying and prying and leaving his germs in disgusting places. Clearly, escalation is steady and increasingly perilous, but the only one who tweaks to his predatory behavior is the unhelpful cat Elizabeth is sitting.

What a difference an “s” makes. Adam Schindler’s Intruders with an s, which hit theaters in January, was a subversively inventive home invasion thriller that delivers plenty of vicarious payback. In contrast, there is absolutely nothing cathartic about Intruder (singular). Frankly, Travis Z’s climax could only be considered a pay-off by stalkers and registered sex offenders, which makes you wonder what sort of target demo he had in mind.

One thing is for sure—this film isn’t much fun to watch. That is because there are no reversals of fortune or any kind of arc to it. Elizabeth’s prospects simply slide down a flat, steeply declining straight line. There isn’t even any suspense, since she is so staggeringly oblivious to her situation. Seriously, most coma patients are better attuned to their surroundings than she is.

At least Moby, the pretentious dance music guy, is absolutely convincing as the odious Vincent. For what it’s also worth, probably no one else ever worked so doggedly hard at finding ways to look in the wrong direction than Louise Linton’s Elizabeth. Of course, the invader’s identity is blindingly obvious due to the relatively few named characters. It is either the suspiciously creepy guy or the super-awkward dude.

There is really nothing going on with Intruder, but it makes one perversely curious how Travis Z pitched it: “…and then this spoilery violence happens—the end.” Not recommended, Intruder screens after midnight this Friday and Saturday (6/24 & 6/25) at the IFC Center in New York.

The Curse of Downers Grove: Most Likely to Die . . .

Thanks to the original Poltergeist film, nobody wants to build on ancient burial sites anymore. Unfortunately, Chrissie Swanson’s high school was prefabbed in the 1960s or 1970s, when they were not so particular about defiling sacred ground. As a result, a legend of a curse hangs over the student body, inevitably given credence to many by the annual untimely death of a senior during the week before graduation. Swanson is not superstitious, but a psycho-stalker gives her very real and immediate cause for concern in Derick Martini’s The Curse of Downers Grove (trailer here), co-adapted by Bret Easton Ellis, which opens this Friday in select theaters.

It is sad enough living in a burg called Downers Grove. With a name like that, suicide and depression should be even bigger problems than curses. Swanson is too level-headed for any of that. She is a defiant unbeliever, despite her periodic visions of irate Native Americans. Inexplicably, her single mom choses the notorious curse week to gallivant off with her beau for a romantic getaway. Sure, she is entitled to lead her own life, but if you live in Downers Grove, some things ought to be pretty high on your worry list.

Of course, this gives Swanson’s obnoxious younger brother and her trampy BFF Tracy an opportunity to throw a blow-out bash. However, Swanson is in no mood to party after the local college’s star quarterback tries to pull a Cosby on her at a frat mixer. Swanson manages to fight him off, but gauges an eye out in the process. Evidently, this will not help his NFL prospects much. As a result, the now one-eyed Chuck lurches into full blown psychosis. The Swanson siblings, Tracy, and Bobby, Chrissie’s sensitive auto mechanic crush, will have to hunker down and try to whether the storm.

In some ways, Downers Grove is sort of like a throwback to Kevin Williamson’s glory years, but Elis and Martini deserve surprising credit for not over-writing it. They never over-reach trying to sound hip and ironic. Frankly, the film is pretty grounded, all things considered. Although it is nowhere near as effective as David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, but both films portray the young characters’ relationships with similarly realistic complications and ambiguities.

Lead actress Bella Heathcote is not exactly Maika Monroe either, but she is still refreshingly down-to-earth and forceful. Neither a shrinking violet nor a scream queen, she shows some real screen presence and backbone. As Chuck, Kevin Zeggers goes nuts pretty effectively. On the other hand, Lucas Till feels out of place playing Bobby, as if he were afraid he might get some grease on his clothes.

Swanson’s “if I had but only known” voice-over narration is ridiculously heavy-handed, yet it sort of fits the occasion for precisely that reason. Although it is a relatively straight forward genre movie, Downers Grove is not as horrifying as The Canyons or as nihilistic as American Psycho. In fact, it is reasonably effective in a VOD kind of way, arguably representing Ellis’s best film work to date. While not a classic by any means, The Curse of Downers Grove holds a strange, somewhat guilty, retro-nostalgic late 1990s appeal for horror fans when it releases this Friday (8/21) in selected theaters and on iTunes.

Slamdance ’15: Ratter

Surely, even the most tenacious cyber-stalker has to go to work or buy groceries sometime. Somehow, the predator tapping into Emma’s life always seems to be watching. That monomaniacal focus makes it is even more unsettling to watch her through his eyes throughout Branden Kramer’s Ratter, which screens during the 2015 Slamdance Film Festival.

Obviously, we cannot see the man who has maliciously hacked Emma’s computer and assorted internet accessing devices, but he did quite a job on her. Through their web-cameras, he (and we) see just about all of her presumptively private moments. She moved to New York following a rough patch back home, but in retrospect, that seems to be a mistake. When she finally realizes she has been hacked, she immediately suspects her still bitter ex, but he seems an unlikely culprit from our perspective. Unfortunately, the cyber harassment dangerously escalates when the unknown perpetrator starts sabotaging her relationships.

Ratter is the sort of film that will scare viewers into moving a good portion of their lives off-line. Like Bobby Boermans’ more conventionally thrillerish App, it makes retro flip phones look like an idea whose time has come again (they make and receive calls, period). Kramer takes some time to set the scene and flesh out Emma’s backstory, but he steadily builds the claustrophobic tension until you want to scream at her: “get out of the apartment.”

Given its online video look and the menacing vibe, Ratter feels somewhat akin to the original V/H/S anthology film. The most notable dissimilarity—and it’s a significant one—is Ratter’s lack of fun.

In a way, Ashley Benson (of Spring Breakers and Pretty Little Liars) is too realistic as Emma. We see her make dozens of mistakes and in just about every unflattering moment imaginable, yet she always seems like a generally decent, somewhat naïve kid. She also develops some surprisingly down-to-earth flirtatious chemistry with her prospective new boyfriend Michael, also nicely played by Matt McGorry. They certainly do not deserve what befalls them.

Kramer exercises commanding control of the film’s twisted mood and psychopathic concentration, while Benson withstands the relentlessly intimate focus remarkably well. However, even mildly sensitive viewers might be disturbed at where it ends up. Recommended for luddites looking for a bitterly black thriller, Ratter screens again this Wednesday (1/28) at Treasure Mountain Inn, as part of this year’s Slamdance.

Slamdance ’14: Goldberg & Eisenberg

They sound like a law firm or an architectural partnership, but their relationship is far from collegial.  It starts with revulsion on the former’s part and obsession for the latter, but quickly goes downhill from there.  There will be plenty of stalking and assorted mind games in Oren Carmi’s Goldberg & Eisenberg (spoilery trailer here), which screened last night at the 2014 Slamdance Film Festival in Park City.

Tel Aviv is a happening city, but you would hardly know it from these two very different losers. Goldberg is exactly the sort of awkward computer programmer he looks like, who spends all of his free time getting rejected on internet dating services.  Eisenberg is just off.  The slovenly thug just seems to loiter about Meir Park all day.  When he sees Goldberg, he immediately wants to be friends, or perhaps something more. 

Goldberg wants none of that. He is definitely straight. He just isn’t very good at it. Unfortunately, rejection only makes Eisenberg more aggressive and erratic. Things will get ugly and the cops will be as useless as all the other cops in previous psycho-stalker movies. Yet, to his credit, Goldberg plugs away in his search for Ms. Right.

Given the not so ambiguous nature of Eisenberg’s interest, it is highly doubtful G&E could be produced in America, lest GLAAD be offended.  It is decidedly un-PC, but old school indie scenesters will dig its grungy 1980’s-Lower Eastside vibe.  Cinematographer Ido Bar-On gives it a murky, dirty look, befitting the tunnel vision of its characters.  Frankly, the first hour or so largely consists of standard cat-and-mouse stuff, but Carmi totally pulls the rug out from under the audience’s feet with an inspired third act.  It goes from dark to pitch black, cranking up the macabre irony.

As Goldberg, Yitzhak Laor completely looks and acts the part of a nebbish, low rent Frasier Crane.  Likewise, Yahav Gal’s Eisenberg is uncomfortably intense and clammy.  They fit their roles perfectly, but you wouldn’t want to spend much time with either of them.  On the other hand, the charismatic Ronny Dotan shines in her too brief appearances as Noa, Goldberg’s potential geekly chic girlfriend.

Initially viewers might think they have seen G&E many times before, but it is worth staying with it. While it does not have the same manic energy and sinister edge of Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushado’s Big Bad Wolves or Rabies, Carmi proves he has plenty of filmmaking potential. Indeed, it should be the perfect film to see with an appreciative Park City crowd when it screens again tomorrow (1/21) during this year’s Slamdance.