For the week of January 29th, Lionsgate is giving a Blu-ray release to the most notorious film in their Vestron Collector's line: Ken Russell's bugnuts Gothic. I am astonished that anyone gave Russell the money to make this film, let alone a company that specialized in schlock like Chopping Mall and C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud, but I guess I should just be glad Gothic exists in any format. The plot, as it were, concerns a meeting between Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne), Percy Bysshe Shelley (Julian Sands), Mary Shelley (Natasha Richardson) and Dr. John William Polidori (Timothy Spall), the creative minds responsible for, respectively, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Ozymandias, Frankenstein, and "The Vampyre." These four were contemporaries in real life and often congregated to discuss their work, but I doubt any of their get-togethers went as awry as what Russell imagines; to him, Byron and Co. were proto-counter-culturists looking to trip out and expand their consciousnesses, so Russell has them drop laudanum and spend a dark and stormy night hallucinating all sorts of lunacy. That's right - the whole film is a slightly more high-falutin' version of something like Roger Corman's The Trip, with Russell putting his protagonists (and us) through ever more deranged visions. To some degree, it's impossible to traditionally rate a movie like this - it's defiantly anti-narrative, and what little sympathy you feel for these people stems mainly from their drug-induced panic - but I can say that Gothic made me feel like I was on drugs watching it. I suspect Russell would take that comment as highest praise.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the film "seems to want to ply a kind of psychological thriller territory where this odd quintet, probably under the influence of various opiates, indulges in a séance and then unlocks either a real terror or imagined threats from their individual Ids. As such, the film has a lot of panicked running through halls and up and down staircases, but actual scares are few and far between (and some might argue actually non existent). Instead, in typical Russellian fashion, the film keeps darting off into tangents, often with a fairly prurient subtext in tow. [Stephen] Volk's screenplay has a lot of interesting information in it, but it's wildly overamped most of the time, leading to an almost unavoidable feeling of chaos and (at least for some) camp."
When is a sequel not a sequel? When it's Lionsgate's Class of 1999, the second Vestron titles hitting shelves this week. For many genre fans, that title should sound familiar - it looks like an update to the 1982 cult classic Class of 1984, which 1999 director Mark Lester also helmed. However, think of these first two Class of... entries as anthology titles linked only by juvenile delinquents and a high-school setting. To wit: if Class of 1984 pitted Perry King's beleaguered teacher against a vile teen gang, Class of 1999 jumps into the future (now past, hilariously) and flips the equation, as its central group of young toughs does battle against, I kid you not, a cadre of military robots-turned-teachers (John P. Ryan, Pam Grier, and Patrick Kilpatrick). We're in full-on sci-fi exploitation territory here (certainly Class of 1999 feels more deserving of the Vestron label than Gothic does), and when the film gets going, it can be a lot of fun. The psycho robots lash out in increasingly grotesque fashions (of the three, Ryan is the scene-stealer: he's having a ball vivisecting these meddling kids), although even they aren't as deranged as the great Stacy Keach - he plays the robots' human handler as a bizarre series of physical and performative affectations. Still, Class of 1999 is one of those movies that's more fun as a premise than as an actual movie. It does take a while to get going, and the teens are so bland that we have no incentive to root for them. Recall Class of 1984. King made for a sympathetic hero, sure, but Tim Van Patten's savant thug was such a hoot that you enjoyed watching him lose his mind. All Class of 1999 can offer, kid-wise, is the beyond-boring Bradley Gregg, who had a brief flirtation with teen heartthrob status before virtually vanishing off the leading-actor map. Based on his work here, I'm not surprised. He's so bland he's practically cellophane.
Jeffrey Kauffman called the film "an odd hybrid, to say the least, but it has a certain gonzo energy, not the least of which is the pairing of Stacy Keach and Malcolm McDowell, and it provides a few requisite thrills even if its underlying plot conceit is definitely on the silly side...It's all just kind of relentlessly goofy, but it kind of works on its own demented levels. The only caveat I would give is that anyone who has seen Class of 1984 and is expecting this to be a more or less straight ahead follow up is going to be in for something of a surprise. Unlike the first film, Class of 1999 treads into some almost science fiction territory, an aspect that may not meld all that successfully with Lester's attempt to continue his rather incisive social critique."
Interestingly, Lionsgate gets another sequel/not-sequel with its release of Last Flag Flying. See, director Richard Linklater (Boyhood and Dazed and Confused fame) ran into an unusual problem when adapting Darryl Ponicsan's novel: Ponicsan was revisiting characters he created in 1970's The Last Detail, which Hal Ashby turned into one of the most iconic films of the 1970s, a wry, profane (thank the maker for the Robert Towne script) drama about two Naval officers (Jack Nicholson and Otis Young) transporting a guileless kid (Randy Quaid) up the East Coast to the brig in New Hampshire. As talented as Linklater is, I can't imagine the pressure to improve on (or at least match) that earlier film, so instead he sidesteps the issue, tweaking Ponicsan's characters ever-so-slightly to escape The Last Detail. Nicholson's Billy Buddusky now becomes Bryan Cranston's Sal Nealon; Young's Richard Mulhall is now Lawrence Fishburne's Richard Mueller; Quaid's sweet, gentle Larry Meadows gives way to Steve Carell's more haunted Larry Shepherd; and now they're Vietnam vets who served together before a series of horrifying in-country catastrophes tore apart their group. Linklater finds these men in the early years of the Second Iraq War, which motivates their reunion just as Vietnam first brought them together. After learning of his son's death in action, Shepherd convinces Nealon and Mueller to help him bring the body from DC to New Hampshire. I'm reminded of Jim Broadbent's line from the great Cloud Atlas - "we cross, criss-cross and recross our old tracks like figure skaters" - so closely does the new journey reflect the previous one, but in Linklater's hands, that's mostly a good thing. No American filmmaker is more attuned to the rhythms of human conversation than Linklater is, and he lets these men honestly fumble through their discussions: only Linklater could turn a late-stage visit to a cell-phone shop into a low-key, humane comic setpiece. Granted, given his leads, Linklater has to do little more than stay out of their way. Of the trio, Cranston is definitely the hammiest, but he's got the toughest job, swapping in for Jack Freakin' Nicholson, and eventually he settles into a nice groove. I credit Fishburne, whose no-B.S. demeanor forces Cranston to drop his affectations and engage him head-on (which is often). And Carell is a revelation. The stillness he brings reminds me of Robin Williams' best performances; he has a couple of moments (viewing his son's body for the first time; quietly reflecting on his late wife) that rank among the most powerful things I've seen in 2017. Now, ultimately this is mid-tier Linklater. It doesn't have the passion of his best works, and it overstays its welcome a little bit at 124 minutes. But we need more movies like this one, however imperfect, and for that alone, I'm grateful.