For the week of June 13th, Paramount Home Media Distribution is bringing 10 Cloverfield Lane to Blu-ray. Submitted for your approval: after losing consciousness in a freak car accident, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) wakes up in the underground bunker of one Howard Stambler (John Goodman), a survivalist who claims that some kind of global catastrophe has occurred and that those locked inside (which also include John Gallagher Jr.'s sweet-but-dopey carpenter) might be the only survivors left. However, the longer Michelle spends underground, the more she grows unsure of Howard's story or his true intentions towards his fellow co-inhabitants. It's a great hook, and one of 10 Cloverfield Lane's greatest pleasures is how long it sustains the premise's inherent suspense. Don't let the title fool you - this film is mostly related to the 2008 found-footage chiller Cloverfield in the same way any given episode of The Twilight Zone is related to the episode that either precedes or follows it. The POV aesthetic is gone, with director Dan Trachtenberg electing instead to tell the story in third-person widescreen images; the sinuous, gliding way that he and cinematographer Jeff Cutter chart the space within the bunker reminds me - I kid you not - of Alfred Hitchcock. I suspect that Hitchcock connection isn't an accident. In its broad strokes, we could be looking at a riff on the Master's great Lifeboat, with the bunker standing in for the lifeboat and a vaguely apocalyptic menace replacing the WWII-era paranoia of that earlier film. Minus Michelle, we don't know who to trust once we're trapped inside, letting Trachtenberg treat 10 Cloverfield Lane as an exercise in pure suspense filmmaking. Simple actions - the three settling down for a meal, a trip to the bathroom, the need to change the air-filtration system - become nerve-wracking tests of will, and I suspect at least some of that delicious pressure-cooker flavor comes courtesy of co-screenwriter Damien Chazelle. That name should seem familiar. Chazelle wrote and directed 2014's brilliant Whiplash, and he brings that same ambiguous intensity here. As with J.K. Simmons' frightening jazz instructor in that Academy Award-winning drama, the not-knowing proves more thrilling than any concrete answers, especially given Chazelle's fondness for complicating our sympathies - early on, he suggests that Howard might be right and wrong, a combination that unsettles more than either-or. And the film's leads respond beautifully to this tension. Winstead has the same understated grit and intelligence as Sigourney Weaver in Alien, and Goodman turns in one of the best performances of his career, expertly balancing the sides of Howard that are avuncular and menacing (of the three leads, only Gallagher Jr. disappoints. He's fine in the role, but the part is underwritten on the page). For a long time, we're looking at a rarity: a film anthology series that switches from genre to genre, trading out the first Cloverfield's DIY scares for something far more psychological in nature. You get the sense that what producer J.J. Abrams is doing with these Cloverfield pictures is a more accomplished version of what John Carpenter was going for when he swapped out Michael Myers for evil toy conspiracy in the Halloween series. And had 10 Cloverfield Lane maintained that course all the way through, we'd be looking at one of the year's best genre features. However, after about ninety minutes - and here I'll try to tread lightly - Trachtenberg hops genres to something closer in line with what the first Cloverfield had to offer, and the tension starts to deflate. I'm fine with movies that shift genres (From Dusk Till Dawn is one of the great B-movie siege movies precisely because it takes a hard turn from violent noir to splatter horror), except Trachtenberg bungles the balance of elements. We either need to spend less time on the first narrative and more time on the second (something closer to 50/50, as opposed to the current 90/10 split), or we need more overt elements from the second narrative weaved throughout the first (think Night of the Living Dead or The Thing). 10 Cloverfield Lane's "new" content is fine when you're watching it, but it leaves a bad taste in your mouth: imagine someone suddenly flipping channels from one movie to another, so you lose all the narrative investment you had in the first story.
Still, I'll take 10 Cloverfield Lane any day over the next three overt sequels: Jaws 2, Jaws 3, and Jaws: The Revenge. Granted, all of these pictures are living in the not-inconsiderable shadow of director Steven Spielberg's iconic 1975 adventure. Cultural historians might take Spielberg to task for unintentionally ushering in the era of the blockbuster, but the fact remains that his Jaws is a funny, scary, deeply human movie. It's perfect. The sequels? Far less so. They illustrate the biggest problem that most inferior sequels evince - an inability to cope with the law of diminishing returns. A fellow wiser than myself put it best when he said, "How can the same s**t [keep] happen[ing] to the same guy twice?" So it goes with the Jaws movies, which increasingly struggle to justify their own existence. Jaws 2 is the most overtly repetitive entry: once again, Roy Scheider's world-weary chief of police finds himself fighting a Great White Shark during the summer season in Amity, and once again, he finds his ability to do his job threatened by greedy, short-sighted bureaucrats. The difference is, this time we're missing Richard Dreyfuss' Matt Hooper and Spielberg's virtuosic approach to such pulpy material, so the feeling of "This again?" feels all the more pronounced. That said, of the sequels, Jaws 2 is, by far, the most accomplished movie. Director Jeannot Szwarc is no Steven Spielberg, sure, but he helms with enough workmanlike competence to keep the attack scenes interesting, and Scheider is phenomenal as Chief Brody. There's a touch of Captain Ahab to his performance this time around - his experiences fighting the shark in Jaws have hardened him, made him almost as paranoid as Robert Shaw's Quint, and watching his character evolution is the foremost pleasure of this second Jaws feature. By comparison, it's much tougher to support Jaws 3. I guess director Joe Alves (who was responsible for designing the shark in the first Jaws) and screenwriters Carl Gottlieb & Richard Matheson deserve some credit for trying to up the ante in a meaningful fashion: thankfully, we don't have to watch Chief Brody battle the terrors of the deep again (that honor goes to Dennis Quaid, playing Brody's now-adult son Mike and establishing that killer great whites have some kind of fatwa against the Brody family), and we've moved from Amity to Florida's SeaWorld amusement park. But the pacing is so sluggish, and the character work so rote (worst in show goes to either Louis Gossett Jr.'s stereotypically gruff park manager or Simon MacCorkindale's irritating publicity hunter) that about the only consistent thing maintaining our interest is the "Comin' at ya" 3D photography. Still, Jaws 3 is The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly compared to Jaws: The Revenge, which is one of the worst movies ever made. And I almost mean that as a compliment: everything dumb about Jaws 2 and 3 is dialed up to eleven, from a shark that travels up and down the eastern seaboard hunting the Brody family, to the hodgepodge of broad caricatures (Mario Van Peebles' heavily accented Jamaican sidekick; Michael Caine's dashing-but-mysterious lothario), to an ending that rehashes the first Jaws nail-biting conclusion on a dramatically reduced budget. This is the film where even the small details make no sense; how else to explain how Lorraine Gary's Ellen can have flashbacks to moments in Jawswhen she was never present, or the mechanics behind Caine's character's fate: he crashes his plane into the ocean, and then the shark eats his plane, and then Caine dramatically re-emerges bone-dry? Ironically, other than bad-movie aficionados, who will have a field day with this one, Caine's the only one who comes out of this thing on top. He had to miss accepting his Academy Award for Hannah and Her Sisters because he was shooting this dog, but he famously remarked "I have never seen [the film], but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific." Silver linings abound.
Far more mixed a franchise bag is the Jeepers Creepers series, and this week, Scream Factory is bringing both a new edition of Jeepers Creepers and Jeepers Creepers II to Blu-ray. The first Jeepers Creepers remains an underrated B-movie delight, and one of its greatest pleasures is in how deftly it mixes genres. For its first thirty or so minutes, we could be watching a slightly modernized version of Steven Spielberg's Duel. We follow siblings Trish (Gina Phillips) and Darry (Justin Long) as they drive along on a cross-country road trip, only to watch their amiable bickering evaporate once they pick up the unwelcome attentions of a gnarly-looking pickup truck with the ominous license plate, "BEATNGU." The truck gets more and more aggressive, almost running the pair off the road, but they finally manage to escape its attentions...and that's when things get really messed up. In a perfect world, you could experience the film's twists and turns afresh, yet seeing as how Scream's packaging gives up the ghost (plus, this is a flick from 2001, after all), I suppose it's not spoiling too much to say that Trish and Darry's troubles are far more monstrous in nature, and that much of the feature's second third involves them fleeing a pursuer that possesses a violent appetite and all sorts of horrifying physical attributes. Writer/director Victor Salva gets maximum thrills from a meager budget (only the last act, which plays like an even more threadbare Assault on Precinct 13, betrays any budget limitations), and he pulls off a ghoulish, nicely twisted ending. Jeepers Creepers would make a neat little standalone, so of course we get a sequel. Everything is bigger this time around - Jeepers Creepers II has more action sequences, a bigger cast (this time, the villain from the first movie is terrorizing a bunch of teens on a broken-down school bus), and bigger gore effects (including a blackly comic bit involving swapped severed heads) - so we get a clinic in why bigger isn't necessarily better. Salva loses some of the original's concentrated tension, both through his reliance on his teen cast (none of whom are all that compelling) as well as through a central conceit that, while giving the great Ray Wise a rare heroic role (he plays a distraught farmer hunting "The Creeper" after his son's abduction), functions as a subpar, undercooked Moby Dick riff. Plus, Salva bungles the ending, trading in the dark power of the first Jeepers Creepers' conclusion for something far jokier. The quality drop between Jeepers Creepers II and its predecessor isn't as vast as the one between the original Jaws and the worst of its sequels (if nothing else, Jeepers Creepers II is watchable), but it's still illustrative of the fact that not all movies need sequels.
Finally, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is giving Hello, My Name Is Doris a Blu-ray showing. This charming comedy stars the great Sally Field as Doris, a sixty-something-year-old woman whose infatuation with a much younger man (New Girl's Max Greenfield) liberates her from the doldrums of her daily life and makes her an unintentional figurehead of the hipster community. Now, a word of warning: while this picture comes courtesy of The State and Wet Hot American Summer co-creator Michael Showalter, do not expect the same kind of absurdist farce. Other than some brief off-kilter gags (like the stuff with Peter Gallagher's self-help guru or Doris' passionate dreams about Greenfield's character) and some cast members who wouldn't be out of place in either universe (Kumail Nanjiani, Wendi McLendon-Covey, or Stephen Root), Showalter is making a far more mainstream comedy, one that treats its lead character's central plight with something resembling unironic sympathy. In that regard, Hello, My Name Is Doris has more in common with Showalter's underrated 2005 farce The Baxter, which also softens its high-concept hook (a rom-com set from the perspective of, say, Ralph Bellamy's character in His Girl Friday) for a wider audience. Ultimately, though, that isn't a problem. Showalter gives it a polished, confident tone (to paraphrase Roger Ebert's thoughts on Sleepless In Seattle, it's the kind of sitcom you don't feel bad watching), and Field is so good as Doris that her performance alone would merit a viewing. This whole endeavor might be a lark, but nobody told Field that; she creates a sympathetic, fully dimensional human being that we can't help but root for. Now I'd like to see Field headline one of Showalter's daffier movies - she could kill in something as outré as Stella, I think.