For the week of April 25th, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is bringing the dark holiday chiller Krampus to Blu-ray. Krampus has a promising setup, with the members of a dysfunctional extended family forced to overcome their differences as they battle the titular character, a horrific anti-Santa Claus figure that punishes the unworthy on Christmas. It's a siege movie, to be sure - think Home Alone as directed by John Carpenter - and it boasts an impeccable pedigree, from the way-too talented cast (including Adam Scott, Toni Collette, David Koechner, and the wonderful Allison Tolman) to co-writer/director Michael Dougherty, who last worked his magic with the endearingly spooky-goofy Halloween horror anthology Trick 'r Treat. However, something's off here, and Krampus is ultimately as underwhelming as Trick 'r Treat is engaging. Parts of Krampus work; besides the cast, the first half-hour has a lived-in, Alexander Payne-lite sense of familial discontent as both sides of the Engel family passive-aggressively snipe at each other over various holiday inconveniences. But no one goes to a horror movie for extended, realistic depictions of family dynamics, and it's when Krampus shifts gears into creep mode that Dougherty starts letting the air out of the proceedings. It's clear he's straining for laughs - why else begin with a stylized credit sequence showing various parents engaging in slo-mo shopping frenzies? - few of which actually land, despite the presence of talented comic actors like Koechner and Scott. Rather, the "comedy" begins whenever there's a lull in the action, and as such, these moments of levity plays more as padding than anything else. However, as a horror film, Dougherty can't quite work around the restrictions of the PG-13 rating. You can sense a nastier movie straining to break free. During the film's best setpiece, the family goes to investigate a disappearance in the attic, and they end up fending off the attacks of some vicious holiday presents, including a holiday angel with dead eyes and razor-sharp claws, a plus-sized Teddy Bear sporting Great White Shark-teeth, and - worst of all - a man-sized Jack-in-the-box with a dripping, vaginal maw and a ghastly worm-like sac dragging behind it. The practical FX work here is terrifying, but Dougherty can't detail anything too bloody, so the whole scene feels neutered, especially alongside less convincing baddies like unseen snow-snakes and CGI gingerbread men, the latter of which play like an uninspired riff on the Gremlins monsters (the less said about the actual Krampus design, which is practically formidable but suffers from some hilariously immobile face articulation). In fact, Gremlins is probably the closest cultural touchstone to this one, except it's both scarier and funnier than this one is. That said, I feel bad not liking Krampus. It's an original horror property in this era of remakes, sequels, and reboots, and Dougherty's desire to chart his own course is deeply admirable. It's not all that good, though, and ultimately, quality is king.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "the movie isn't particularly frightening in a bone-chilling, spine-tingling sort of way, but it's immensely effective in a claustrophobic sort of way as the family is closed off inside the house, facing either an unknown enemy inside or a hopeless wasteland of a snowy, frigid environment outside. The film blends action and mysticism, chills and an anti-Christmas spirit that's very effective. It's well paced and engaging in all areas, in its establishing first act - the movie does a great job of efficiently introducing characters, relationship, and dynamics even through the chaos of the family get-together - its developing second, and its all-out mayhem third. It's sort of like a Christmas-themed haunted house ride."
From Shout Factory comes the long-awaited release of the cult classic Death Becomes Her. At first glance, this puckish supernatural comedy seems an odd fit for director Robert Zemeckis. Since his 1994 Oscar winner Forrest Gump, Zemeckis has made a name for himself as a high-minded auteur of prestige pictures - I'm thinking of Contact, Flight, Cast Away, The Walk, or even his all-digital farragoes like The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol, which emphasized surface flash and polish to an oft-disturbing degree - so it's hard to imagine him embracing something as nakedly rambunctious as Death Becomes Her. The film is a shotgun-broad satire of celebrity vanity, focusing on two rival actresses (Goldie Hawn and Meryl Streep) who are so obsessed with preserving their status and beauty that they become dependent on a magical elixir that extends their youth, albeit with ghoulish consequences: both women essentially become the undead, and if they don't keep mainlining the wonder drug, then their bodies warp and rot in all sorts of disgusting ways. For all intents and purposes, the film works as a live-action, extended episode of Tales from the Crypt, and that realization is key towards justifying Zemeckis' involvement. Before he went legit, Zemeckis had a yen for anarchic, anti-P.C. humor (after all, he did co-write 1941 and direct the brilliantly slobby Used Cars), and he was also an executive producer on HBO's Tales From the Crypt, where he directed three episodes. It's that Robert Zemeckis that Death Becomes Her showcases, yet the blend of Grand Guignol and Zemeckis' omnipresent aesthetic chops proves surprisingly engaging. Sure, he scores frequent, easy laughs during the Spy-vs.-Spy-type battle between Hawn and Streep, both of whom certainly aren't beyond wreaking grievous physical harm on one another to prove a point (beating one another senseless, pushing each other down marble steps, or blasting holes in each other's midsection. You know, the usual), but he can't help but innovate cinematic technique, if only a little. This is the same guy, after all, who seamlessly merged humans and cartoons in Who Framed Roger Rabbit and made Forrest Gump interact with the likes of JFK and John Lennon, and he applies then-groundbreaking CGI tricks throughout Death Becomes Her. The effect is unusual - think an EC Comic adapted by Ernst Lubitsch or Vincente Minnelli, and you'll have a better sense of the whole endeavor. Still, at this stage in his career, Zemeckis wasn't totally in the thrall of digital fakery (no Beowulf-style, dead-eyed, Uncanny Valley nonsense here), so the effects never overwhelm the talented cast. Hawn and Streep make a hilarious psychotic pair - Hawn is old hat at this kind of lunatic farce, but Streep was far less tested a comedian (at this stage in her career), and she adapts with her customary skill and precision - and even Bruce Willis scores as a simpering milquetoast. You might think that Willis would have been too image-concerned in the early 1990s, yet Zemeckis manages to undercut the Die Hard star's own vanity and action-movie image (and it's a good thing - his Ernest Menville becomes the film's unwitting moral conscience simply because he's so much schlubbier than anyone else). If Death Becomes Her isn't one of Zemeckis' very best, it's only because as fun as it is, it's still fairly slight - Zemeckis is the same guy who made Back to the Future, after all, so the bar is very high. But it's a hell of a romp just the same.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review noted that "despite [the film's] immense popularity at the time of its release, it's often been relegated to ugly stepsister status in the Zemeckis canon. The film's Faustian tale of female narcissism is an intentional snarkfest, and that may make it less of a 'touchy feely' comfort blanket for audiences who may tend to prefer the schmaltzier side of Zemeckis' work, as probably best exemplified by The Polar Express...Death Becomes Her is a bit too rushed at times, especially in its third act, but it contains a number of laugh out loud moments, and the three stars are perfectly in sync with the film's very black humor. Willis does a fantastic job of bringing an addled, paunchy middle aged schlub fully to life (watch how comedically he runs hunched over throughout the film), and Streep and Hawn have undeniable chemistry with each other as two long vying nemeses who suddenly realize they only have each other to count on. The special effects may indeed be what is most (or at least best) remembered about Death Becomes Her, but the film has some very arch and substantive comedy tucked just underneath its shiny, glistening surface."
Arrow Video is giving John Milius' crime caper Dillinger a Blu-ray showing. As the title might suggest, the film follows the criminal exploits of John Dillinger (Warren Oates), the charismatic gangster whose bank robberies provided a jolt of excitement - in both good and bad ways - to the Great Depression-era American heartland. We see Dillinger romance his former captive Billie Frechette (Michelle Phillips), trade gunfire with the law alongside such gunsels and robbers like Baby Face Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss) and Homer Van Meter (Harry Dean Stanton), and all while trying to evade the clutches of Melvin Purvis (Ben Johnson), the crack FBI operative on a J. Edgar Hoover-mandated mission to take down Dillinger. It's one breathless violent after another, and as anyone who has seen The Wind and the Lion or Conan the Barbarian can attest, Milius has a gift at dramatizing this kind of breathless pulp. At times, Dillinger plays like a trailer for a longer movie, but I suspect that rushed quality is entirely intentional; Milius wants to convey the speed and energy of Dillinger's short, violent life, so we've barely had time to process the many shootouts and robberies (the movie is only 107 minutes long) before we find Dillinger heading blithely to his doom at Chicago's Biograph Theater. As a result, Dillinger is a lot of fun, but it's hardly a definitive study of a self-destructive criminal mastermind. Milius (and the film's distributor, the exploitation specialist AIP, I'm sure) cares less about psychology than he does furthering Dillinger's legend - what we've got here is really just a bloodier version of the B-movie gangster pictures from the 1930s and 1940s, with Oates in the kind of role (and fulfilling it brilliantly, I might add) that somebody like Jimmy Cagney or Humphrey Bogart would have played in The Public Enemy or Angels with Dirty Faces. Certainly, this kind of dimestore mythologizing works as entertainment - there is no comparison between the spry, unpretentious Dillinger and Michael Mann's ponderously self-important Public Enemies, which uses Dillinger's life to try and analyze the psyche of the American character, circa the Depression. That said, I'm still waiting for a more accurate retelling of the Dillinger story. Sure, Dillinger might be a better movie than Public Enemies, but both play way too fast and loose with the historical record, and while fictionalization is a standard part of the filmmaking process, the real story behind people like Dillinger, Alvin Karpis, and Pretty Boy Floyd is so engaging - and often very funny - that it could make for the most engaging, offbeat gangster movie ever made. Read Bryan Burroughs' great nonfiction text Public Enemies (the inspiration for the Mann movie, albeit loosely) sometime, and lament that HBO hasn't snapped it up yet for a six-hour miniseries.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is bringing Christian Petzold's Phoenix to Blu-ray. Set in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the film centers on Nelly (Nina Hoss, in a stunning star performance), a Holocaust survivor who makes it back to Berlin after surviving a horrific gunshot wound. The damage is so bad that plastic surgeons have to give her a new face, one that looks just dissimilar enough from her old one so Nelly can pass anonymously through the ruined city, but that physical dislocation can't compete with what Nelly feels when she finds her ex-husband (Ronald Zehrfeld), who a) doesn't recognize her even as he b) conspires with the "new" woman to cheat the government out of his ex-wife's death benefits. You're going to read - if you haven't already - a lot about this film praising its economy and focus, and I certainly won't argue against such claims. Petzold maintains such a deliberate intensity that we don't necessarily realize what Nelly is planning until it's too late (and one could argue that Nelly is just as much in the dark as we are), yet her ultimate endgame feels both surprising and inevitable: this is one of those movies where seemingly mundane observations and character beats seed major thematic revelations in the third act. Petzold never tips his hand, and in many ways, his restraint perfectly suits his humanist aims. The visual image of a Nelly who looks both similar and completely different from her old self reflects her damaged psyche, the way she still can't quite believe she survived the death camps, and that pain elevates what might otherwise be an accomplished arthouse thriller into something more significant. Still, as formally accomplished and subtle as Phoenix is, I wanted it to be a little more florid. Petzold's control is so rigorous and controlled that the whole film starts feeling airless after a while. Here's a story that revolves around clandestine face-swaps and Nazi villains and duplicitous grifters, so you can't blame me for wanting a little more pulpy energy, and I began to imagine what someone like Brian De Palma or Steven Spielberg or Alfred Hitchcock. Before you brand me a philistine, consider the following - once Johnny begins shaping Nelly into a more "convincing" version of his ex-wife, Phoenix becomes a full-scale homage to Hitchcock's Vertigo, albeit a more cynical, socially conscious version. That Jimmy Stewart thriller shared Petzold's fascination and disgust with the limits of human morality, and it did so while also engaging viewers on a visceral level (if nothing else, I'd love to see a version of Phoenix with a Bernard Herrmann score - Petzold uses a very limited score, to his picture's detriment). By the end of Phoenix, only Hoss's incredible performance generates any kind of uncertainty or instability, and as terrific as she is, I wish the film around her also strove to be that compelling.
Svet Atanasov wrote that "this film can be engrossing, but only if one does not overanalyze a few key elements of its plot. The most vulnerable one is the fact that the husband never once finds the easiness with which his wife plays herself suspicious. There are logical questions he could ask while they are practicing together that are intentionally ignored in order to have a series of events occur later on. Another is the legal status of their marriage, before and after the time the two apparently parted ways. Depending on how one interprets some of the revelations after the woman returns to her home, one could also deconstruct the finale in a number of different ways. For example, theoretically the woman could have been betrayed by a couple of different people that knew her, but there is no question that the simplest read of the events preceding her arrest is also the most effective one (it is undoubtedly the most thought-provoking one, which is why it should be the preferred one). Phoenix is the fifth collaboration between director Christian Petzold and Hoss and it confirms that there is a special chemistry between them. In some of the most moving sequences from the film a simple look or gesture is captured by the camera in a way that reveals far more than words could. This is also done with such striking ease and calmness that viewing the film actually becomes quite the intimate experience."