SUCKER PUNCH Capsules: ULTRAVIOLET, ELEKTRA, BLOODRAYNE, BITCH-SLAP, CIRCLE OF IRON, SO CLOSE, and AZUMI

Film is our ultimate escape, so when filmmakers decide they need to having characters dreaming alternate realities instead of living them, then it's as if they think being locked in a bathroom at the airport is the same as travelling to new destinations. Zak Snyder is to blame and SUCKER PUNCH to deliver its titular promise is his Waterloo. Dude, film already is an alternate reality! Are you anxious to cover up plot holes and suffering from the compulsive need to cram as much GGI into every frame as you can? Make it all the desperate allegedly feminist hallucination of a tortured girl in her underwear. What pleasures might be found amidst the steampunk trimmings here are too skeevy and dispiriting for words.

In the early days of horror there were producers, particularly at MGM, who felt the public wouldn't 'get' a horror film if you didn't bring it back down to logic at the end - the 'it was all a dream' or 'the vampire was a detective in disguise to catch a killer' or the monster is just a crook in an ape costume trying to frighten the next heir to the family fortune. Gradually they realized no one goes to the movies--or books for that matter--wanting to be anchored to the real--you can get weird, and we won't riot or have a nervous breakdown. Then again we also want our story to make logical sense within the context of itself, and to follow the adage: do not "show the monster in the first half-hour." If you want to have a giant samurai robot attack an orphanage, go ahead, we don't need it situated in a fantasy within a fantasy, but if you show it first thing in a movie, we'll assume we can keep talking and checking our cell phones while you get such nonsense out of your system.

THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) knew how to do it right. Sure, there it was 'a dream' but there was an interconnection between Oz and Kansas and Dorothy's unconscious, so it's a potent myth. Oz is real because Dorothy sees it as real --it's more real than Kansas. Once you use 'the power of imagination' you run up against a vein of who gives a shit that takes genuine mythopoetic heft and Jungian savvy to transcend. Fail and you just bore us, and SUCKER does. As in Nick Shager's review from Slant below:

Sucker Punch follows Baby Doll as she's committed to a grimy mental institution by her stepfather (Gerard Plunkett). The old man has locked her away because she tried to prevent him from raping her younger sister (hey, he was mad about getting cut out of his dead wife's will!), and accidentally killed the young girl instead. Once inside the facility, skeezy supervisor Blue (Oscar Isaac) shows her a common area with a stage known as the Theater, which—when coupled with the intro sight of a curtain being pulled back to reveal the action proper—is Snyder's clumsy way of conveying how the locale of Baby Doll's adventure is really the theater of the mind. And as every other character seems to blurt out in one form or another, the mind affords people the power to shape their own destiny, and the world. It's a notion that also applies to a director and his films, though Snyder's self-reflexive instincts are blunt and lifeless, and his subsequent trip down the fantasies-within-fantasies rabbit hole, replete with a fem-rock cover of "White Rabbit" to boot, primarily speaks to his confusion over notions of actualization and empowerment. (cont.)

I was really hoping SUCKER would be awesome, but after I saw the extended preview during last night's Archer, I knew it was going to go the route of so much video game-based dreck that's come before--TOMB RAIDER, RESIDENT EVIL, BALLISTIC: ECKS VS. SERVER, MAX PAYNE: "To fulfill your destiny you must seek five items..." Why not get it over with and just show a bunch of girls playing Doom IV in their underwear?

The castrative/revengeful counter-misogynist avenger girl is one that's always been popular amongst sensitive comic book readers like me, who first found the gold vein of it in the early 1980s when Frank Miller rose to fame writing and penciling a Daredevil character named Elektra. The way she wore her scarf, the way she kicked Bullseye in the face, and slashed scores of ninja with her sai, and died... tragically... we fell hard, the way we did for the Bionic Woman as kids, prompting her to come back again and again in prequels and ghost tales.

Flash forward and lazy screenwriters are opening every single film with an elaborate break-in to a compound heavily guarded and usually presided over by a bald guy in an expensive suit and sunglasses, like Frank Miller cut five ways to Sunday with B-12 and talc and sold direct to cable.  Let's meet some of SUCKER's relatives, and a mangy bunch they are to be certain:

ULTRAVIOLET 
2006 - *
Milla Jovovich as a vampiric hottie out to protect a kid everyone wants to-- yawn--kill. Worse than watching mom learn to play Duke Nukem on her Dell PC.

"For the love of ALL that is holy, do NOT see it." - Batese -- Imdb:

ELEKTRA
2005 - ***
I actually paid full price for the director's cut on DVD and I'm glad I did. This picture grows on me, namely due to Garner's doe-eyed hotness as Elektra, who has to 'yawn' protect a child everyone wants to kill. Terence Stamp is 'Stick' - the stoic blind pool hall Zen master. Elektra's douchebag 'agent' (he call's her 'Lek' and keeps his cell phone and smarm ever at the ready) and a cliche'd 'likeable single dad next door' don't detract from the moody beauty of the Pacific Northwest imagery, Garner's amazing eyes and Garner's amazing bone structure. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll believe tattoos of animals can slither to life off an Asian assassin.

"This doesn't exactly set the world on fire, but I was charmed by its old-fashioned storytelling, which is refreshingly free of archness, self-consciousness, or Kill Bill-style wisecracks. Some of the effects recall vintage Ray Harryhausen, the villains all perish in puffs of green smoke, and Garner's sincere glumness suggests Buster Crabbe in Flash Gordon." -- Jonathan Rosenbaum

BLOODRAYNE 
2005 - *1/8
Uwe Boll's SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER (would he have gone to jail if this film ended up making money?) benefits from the presence of Michelle Rodriguez and Michael Madsen even though both are apparently hungover and in need of a script. Sir Ben Kingsley plays the head vampire, badly. With no one even noticing, the film is stolen by Billy Zane as a rival head vampire. Look at poor relation Kristanna Loken (above), basically wearing Elektra's hand-me-downs and dulled sai.

"The plot of "BloodRayne" is basically "Blade" with a white chick -- set just after the invention of gunpowder but long before the invention of humor. Kristanna Loken, who played the female cyborg in the last "Terminator" film, stars as a half-human, half-vampire who must avenge the death of her mother while stopping the evil vampire Lord Kagen (Ben Kingsley, slumming like few Oscar winners before him) from ruling the Earth." -- Peter Hartlaub - SF Gate

BITCH-SLAP
2009 - **

"More of an “Austin Powers” carnival of camp with YouTube production polish, “Bitch Slap” opens with a Joseph Conrad quote and ends in a hail of bullets, leaving the midsection fairly anticlimactic and insistently silly. It’s criminal to dismiss something so utterly consumed with ample feminine assets and cross-eyed ultraviolence, but the goofball pitch of this fluff grows tiresome early in the first round, rendering the picture a splendid 10-minute short film idea stretched intolerably to 100 minutes." -- Brian Orndorff

I only got ten minutes into BITCH-SLAP before I had a whopper headache and animosity towards every character, so I agree. Word to the wise: never show clips from better films in the opening credits. And I can only shudder at how bad SUCKER-PUNCH must be if Horror.com's Staci Layne sez: Let me put it this way: having seen Sucker Punch once, I'd rather watch Bitch Slap 10 times in a row.

CIRCLE OF IRON
1978 - **1/2
Basically a Zen video game "Nothing is real - and nothing to get hung over" movie before Zen video games and hangovers were invented. A wanderer on a mystic quest learns that's 'all in his mind' with the help of mystic guru David Carradine in multiple roles (just like Scott Glenn in SUCKER - the two actors even look alike). Based on a Bruce Lee storyline, with Christopher Lee merrily embodying the mystical guardian of the sacred book, Eli Wallach sleeping through his scenes in a cauldron (above), horses and Renaissance fair merriment, beaches, and wooden flutes all coax the film towards the pretty girl of meaning like friends of the shy boy at the dance. Does our shy kid film ever get up the nerve to traverse the nonsense distance of the floor to talk to her? Many questions, grasshopper!

The finished film sits about half way between the meaningful, but still sappy brand of 'Zen Buddhism' that Lee taught in life, and the daft, everything and the kitchen sink brand of martial arts films the United States put out after the master’s death. Like Lee’s unfinished Game of Death, Circle of Iron (aka The Silent Flute) anticipates fighting style video games, but also features the afterglow of the insistently pointed philosophical films of the late 1960s. On top of its ridiculous imagery, and shaky plotting, the film acts as an unintentional (or perhaps intentional?) parody of Confucianism and Taoism. It's even sub-Yoda at some points, but it's continuously charming and even intentionally funny on several occasions. - Gabriel Powers - DVD Active

SO CLOSE
2002 - ***
Surely Qi Shu is one of the most beautiful women in the world, and good with a gun.  She must avenge her sister's death! You die! Karen Mok (GOD OF COOKERY) is the cop rival with whom Qi forms a semi-lesbian grrl-power connection, all while they kick each other through expensive corporate building parking lots. Hizillarious, though the ending is weak... like all men!

AZUMI
2003 - ***1/2
She takes on so many guys in a big climactic sword fight it's insane--and she's cute as a lil' button! It's set in the rainy days of the shoguns so prepare for bulky stiff white robes, funny hats, and scrolls. Even with its video-ish tinge the film leaves one whirling and out of breath, though all the side plotting might confuse the very buzzed.
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There you go... if, like me, you were pumped for SUCKER PUNCH and then felt like you'd actually been sucker punched when you saw the 'it's all in your mind' previews and negative viewer comments, stay home and watch SO CLOSE, or DEATH-PROOF, or SIN CITY, or NAKED KILLER, or ELEKTRA and keep your expectations low to the ground. I mean low!! LOWER! You die!

Great Acid Movies #52: THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR (1970)

The weird thing about acid (and its affiliates) is just how life-changing even one experience can be. If our mind can be likened to a big old Victorian house, most of us just live on the first floor. The basement is locked; the attic and second floor bedrooms boarded up. Who knows if rats or squatters are living there? Better not to open them up just in case. Eventually we become convinced the boarded up doors are just walls. Any attempt to open them just fills us with fear, the whole downstairs seems to quake in separation anxiety --where are you?? Come down this instant!

Then, one night, LSD comes along and kicks open the boarded doors, and unlocks the basement and attic, forcing us through the whole house on a sweeping grand tour. It turns out the rest of the rooms in the house aren't dirty and dusty and empty as we thought - but teeming with art, carpets from distant lands, incense and peppermints. Even if we never see those rooms again after we come back down the stairs, we at least know they're there. If we have a bad trip of course, he shows us the basement, where all the slimy monsters live; but there's another set of stairs there that leads down... to the attic - you come out on top, in a spiritual awakening.

Dogmatic shrinks might tell us those newly discovered rooms are all hallucinations, but honey - until you've tried it, you don't get a vote. If a hallucination seems more real than reality, it's at least worth examining, especially when quantum physics shows us just how impossible true objectivity is. I could tell you Portugal doesn't exist. After all, I've never been there. Bush ran his presidency that way and still got a second term, In fact, the appearance of matter is a hallucination anyway; if we could see the world as it really is we'd see not a chair but a frequency spectrum, vibrating waves...

THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR (1970) operates along this line of philosophy, detailing the way LSD's door-kicking habit disrupts the don't ask/don't tell dysfunctional denial-based cohabitation of the all-American middle class family at the end of the 60s. It strikes me as the sort of film where the writers started out as anti-drug 'there is nothing real beyond the first floor' types, the 'I know every inch of my house so don't ask me what's behind those locked doors because there's nothing behind them, ok? Nothing!' types. But then, in the interest of fairness and perception, the filmmaker/s took acid halfway through preparation for shooting and changed their whole attitude. The result is a film divided. It still has the look and feel of an after-school special coupled to an earthy fly-on-the-wall semi-documentary style (ala say, MEDIUM COOL or ZABRISKIE POINT) but runs a deeper, stranger game. It takes the rare arpproach of truly progressive acid movies, and judges both sides as fucked, and runs off to start a whole new thing, balanced without judgement or condemnation, just trust in one another and the ability to fucking listen to each others' true pain.

Must be we're in Canada.

Eli Wallach and Julie Harris play the Masons, high-strung suburbanite parents of acid-dealing musician Artie (Stephen McHattie) and his naive sister, Maxie (Deborah Winters). After a big fight with the family, Artie gives Maxiee her first trip and her parents later find her freaking out in an upstairs closet. Recognizing symptoms of what they've been reading about in hysteria-mongering tabloids, the whole flock rushes to counseling and then bring it all up the next time they get together with their neighbors, who are steeped in enough adulterous affairs and debauched drinking they're bred to ignore and deny--in clouds of pointless self-righteous indignation--that there's a problem, until the patient therapist finally cracks some ICE STORM-style ice and lets the sunshine in.

That said, for all its acumen, PEOPLE NEXT DOOR can't stop beating a dead horse as far as making sure we compare Wallach's sweaty angry dad constantly validating his right to drink, smoke cigarettes (these are the socially sanctioned choices of their generation) and plow pertinent wives vs. the bladerunning between rock and roll Buddahood and psych ward schizophrenia that is his children's teenage wasteland.

The best moment is at the end, when mom comes to visit Maxie in the psych ward and finally realizes her daughter is actually the sanest one in the family, just unable to let go of her bipolar schizo "act" because she's both stubborn and a bit of a showboat. By opening her mind to admit her own need for wider perspective, mom and daughter are able to reach each other at last.

In the end, THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR is not a condemnation or a celebration, perhaps in that sense it's cinema's most compassionate yet non-corny look at aberrant social behavior until William Blatty's THE NINTH CONFIGURATION (1980). The moral: LSD can be used as an excuse to avoid responsibility just like any other potentially life-affirming drug or event. Metatextually speaking, the film walks it like it talks it, refusing to go the way of many other cautionary acid tales (i.e. GO ASK ALICE) which fall back on old demonizing myths to generate suspense and pacify the establishment, even if once again the family strengthens itself by ostracizing the father, paving the way for our current plague of either gone or feminized fathers. Now more than ever... we need the 70s dad, for all his sexism and drunken mischief, to return.