For the week of December 10th, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is bringing the action-thriller The Equalizer 2 to Blu-ray. As someone who pretty much hated the firstEqualizer, I was surprised by how much I tolerated this sequel. I don't know what it is. The same pieces are still here; once again, Denzel Washington returns as Robert McCall, former special operative-turned-working-class avenger, and once again, director Antoine Fuqua lingers too obsessively over every stab, slash, and squib hit McCall metes out in his pursuit of justice. But whereas the 2014 Equalizer wore me down, this new one is a little fleeter, a little less turgid. The Equalizer 2 runs a full eleven minutes shorter than its predecessor, and credit to editor Conrad Buff: you feel the difference. After a brief opening act casting McCall as the de facto guardian angel to a group of troubled Bostonians (including Moonlight's Ashton Sanders, who gives the best, most engaging performance in the movie), McCall learns that his former special-ops partner (Melissa Leo, furthering her curious side career as "Distinguished Woman Who Suffers Terrible Abuse in an Antoine Fuqua Movie") has died under nefarious circumstances, and we're off to the races. What I liked least about Equalizer 1 was its relentless self-importance (having Denzel read classic literature as a character trait does not a nuanced character make), and thankfully, the new movie leans hard into its Roaring Rampage of Revenge setup, even if you can guess each twist and turn thirty minutes before the movie makes it. But no one goes to these movies for originality. They want to see Denzel kicking butt and looking awesome while doing so, and in that regard, the picture delivers. Look, do I wish Washington and Fuqua would attempt something akin to their great Training Day? Absolutely. But I've made peace with the fact that movies like The Magnificent Seven and The Equalizer 2 are the New Way, so I can grade on a curve. It's violently entertaining, and inoffensively disposable.
Lionsgate Home Entertainment is giving a 4K pressing to one of the most important horror films ever made: Sam Raimi's 1987 classic Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn. Going back to the firstEvil Dead, this franchise has announced an auteur-driven voice as strong as anything the genre has produced; with the exception of the drippy romantic drama For Love of the Game, everything director Sam Raimi has done springs from the energy and imagination of these three Evil Dead shockers. And Evil Dead 2 represents the purest distillation of Raimi's aesthetic/thematic obsessions. To some degree, this is less a sequel than a stealth remake - the first seven minutes, in fact, offer a compressed version of its predecessor, with stalwart hero Ash (Bruce Campbell, in the role that would make him an icon) and his girlfriend Linda (Denise Bixler) facing a horde of angry demons loosed from the Necronomicon. Linda dies...badly, and like Evil Dead 1, Ash looks done for, too, except a miraculous contrivance saves his life and turns him into an unlikely hero. Here's the thing: we quickly realize death might be preferable, and that's the Raimi touch. Raimi so delights in tormenting Campbell's big lug that the movie mutates from horror to sadistic surrealist comedy. The high point of the film - and maybe the high point of any '80s chiller - is the extended setpiece after Ash kicks his case of demonic possession. He goes back to the cabin. He tries to calm himself down. And he loses his mind. It's a funhouse extravaganza of wild visual gags that are more Tex Avery and Chuck Jones than The Exorcist, with Campbell's manic intensity keeping us as off-balance as any of Raimi's absurdist gags. By the time Ash has to do battle with his own possessed hand, we're practically in a one-man show co-directed by Charles Addams and Salvador Dalí. To be fair, the movie never quite reaches these highs again (I always forget the thirty minutes that follow, and how Ash intersects with Sarah Berry's boring female lead and Dan Hicks' labored redneck act), but with the exception of his 1998 noir masterpiece A Simple Plan, Raimi never did, either. Just essential viewing all around.
What Evil Dead 2 proffers - and in ample quantities - is fun. The same cannot be said for William Lustig's serial-killer thriller Maniac, which Blue Underground is releasing in a new restored version. Maniac was genuinely off-putting in 1980, and it's even more transgressive today; just as horror was starting to trend towards slasher icons like Freddy and Jason, Lustig offered this grisly character study of a disturbed photographer (famed character actor Joe Spinell, in a rare lead performance) butchering young women throughout a seedy, pre-Giuliani New York. There are few cutaways and no attempts at humor: just a few days watching Spinell. Everything about his performance makes me uncomfortable. The genre has not surpassed Spinell's attacks in terms of flesh-churning brutality - the great makeup whiz Tom Savini created a host of gore effects that have a unnerving, arterial attention to detail, most notably a shotgun-blast-to-the-head made all the more horrifying through Lustig's decision to shoot it in super-slow-motion (note: I would actually recommend against viewing the theatrical trailer below - not only does it spoil much of the movie, but it also acts like an uncensored highlight reel of Maniac's violent special effects). But even when he isn't killing anyone, Spinell carries himself with a tortured desperation that would unsettle Travis Bickle. He always looks sweaty and ill (you can practically smell him through the TV), and if he isn't struggling to connect with the models he films at his day job, he's prone to psychological rages at home that drive him to...well, you'll see. Or not. It takes a strong constitution to watch Maniac: I've seen in twice, and I think that might be my limit. But Lustig gives it this odd integrity. It's hard to watch, and it should be, and Lustig never wants us to enjoy what we're seeing. He succeeded too well.
In his Blu-ray review, Svet Atanasov wrote that he has "never been a fan of Maniac. The graphic violence in it is done in a rough, non-kitschy fashion that really rubs me the wrong way and prevents me from immersing myself in its period atmosphere. And this is usually what I find attractive in these types of genre projects - the heavy atmosphere and the kitsch that they love to promote. However, I also think that there was absolutely no need to produce a well-polished remake of Bill Lustig's film because its period roughness is actually its greatest strength. (I may not like the film, but I know exactly why it works for its fans). This being said, my opinion of Maniac is only one part of my take on Blue Underground's new Blu-ray release, and believe me, there is a lot to like in it."
No one will ever say the same about Pierre Morel's Peppermint, which arrives from Universal Home Entertainment this week and ranks as an almost unqualified missed opportunity. This revenge thriller should have been a slam dunk. Step 1: bring in Pierre Morel. He made Taken, so he knows a thing or two about letting moviestars rage out in satisfying fashion. Step 2: have him apply the Taken formula to Jennifer Garner, who was the coolest person on TV after five years of Alias but has never had a film role that fully exploited her gifts for blending vulnerability with hardcore badassery. You'd think that Morel unleashing Garner on the punks that killed her husband (Jeff Hephner) and daughter (Cailey Fleming) would make for immediately compelling pulp. You would be wrong. For one, Peppermint takes way too long to get going - the first act stretches on for longer than it needs, like it thinks we care about the human drama at play (spoiler: we don't). Think about Taken: Neeson is in France by minute thirty, and the rest of the movie is wall-to-wall action. Furthermore, either Morel or his fight choreographer have lost a step or two. None of the action is particularly memorable (under-lit, too cutty, all of the above), and so Garner doesn't get the icon boost she deserves, which is a shame because she's twice the athlete that Neeson is/was. It does not help that the film traffics in some (hopefully) unintentional racial profiling against the Latinx community that would have felt tone deaf ten years ago, let alone in 2018. Such a misfire.