For the week of August 17th, Screen Media is bringing Rod Lurie's war drama The Outpost to Blu-ray. If ever a film got a boost from the pandemic, it's this one. Upon its VOD (and limited theatrical) release last month, The Outpost received near-universal praise. 92% from Rotten Tomatoes! 71% from Metacritic! If this summer has anything close to a sleeper hit, it's this picture, which is utterly baffling. I do not deny that the film, which is based on Jake Tapper's (quite good) nonfiction book The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor, has a great hook: Tapper recounted a real-life siege from 2009, when 53 U.S. soldiers fought back waves of Afghani insurgents attacking their frightfully exposed Combat Outpost Keating. Certainly Lurie knows this stuff is the goods. He devotes much of the film's second hour to the battle, which unfolds in long, jittery slices of chaos. Yet The Outpost feels like the Asylum Films version of Lone Survivor or Black Hawk Down. From the opening scene, which finds Staff Sergeant Romesha (Scott Eastwood, son of Clint) getting a ride from the most obviously CGI-ed helicopter I've seen since the halcyon days of PS2, we're getting the bargain-basement version of this story. Lurie shoots everything with flat, obviously digital cameras, giving the proceedings the flair of a mid-budget network show. Even when the fit hits the shan in the second half, he's far too content to rely on pixelated smoke and explosion effects (largely to stitch together some of the longer takes, I think). And almost to a person, his actors respond in kind, delivering affected, unconvincing turns that only seem to distance us further from the action. In the closest thing The Outpost has to a conventional hero, Eastwood tries - and fails - to be as cool as his iconic father, but at least he's more physically persuasive than the likes of Jack Kesy, Milo Gibson, Will Attenborough, Jacob Scipio, and a terrible Orlando Bloom, all of whom recall the Summer Stock version of a war-movie platoon. Only Caleb Landry Jones creates something close to a real human being. I've often dinged Jones for being too mannered (he is the only awful element of the otherwise brilliant Get Out), but here, his tics and Method-y flourishes serve as a welcome distraction. Yes, it helps that his Specialist Carter has the best-written part on the page (Carter is a widely loathed grump who overcomes his anxieties to rescue a wounded confederate), but Jones also seems alert to the world around him in ways his peers are not. When Jones is onscreen, you almost forget the wooden theatrics and DTV-Seagal-ready effects. Almost.
Far more dramatically persuasive is Lionsgate's set of the AMC horror series The Terror: Infamy. What started as a limited series has turned into AMC's high-toned equivalent of American Horror Story. Each season keeps only the "Terror" moniker before lighting off to different periods in world history and exploiting them for supernatural menace. Season one was a fairly straightforward adaptation of Dan Simmons' 2007 novel, which turned Captain John Franklin's doomed British Naval expedition into a thrilling meld of Master and Commander and John Carpenter's The Thing, whereas Infamy looks to more recent events in American history. The season opens in December 1941 on Terminal Island, a Japanese-American community outside of Los Angeles, and tensions are already high. Anti-Japanese sentiment is creeping into the air (largely in the form of Teach Grant's drunken, belligerent fisherman), and Terminal Island's inhabitants are struggling to reach some baseline normalcy. The suicide of a local fisherman's wife (the brutal, unnerving staging of which provides the show's cold open) seems to embody all of the unease that Terminal Island's inhabitants feel...and then Pearl Harbor happens, activating the U.S. government's decision to intern Japanese-American citizens in camps along the West Coast. These moments prove more horrifying than anything in Season One's comparatively simple monster-movie saga. New-season showrunners Alexander Woo and Max Borenstein are unsparing into their depiction of the dehumanization process foisted upon their protagonists (including George Takei, Shingo Usami, Naoko Mori, Miki Ishikawa, and a terrific Derek Mio). The squalor of the internment locations (first the stables at the Santa Ana race track, and then an Oregon compound that resembles a POW or concentration camp) exist alongside government rendition reminiscent of Guantanamo Bay, all of which eats away at our heroes until they're turning on one another or choosing the wartime carnage of the Pacific Theater as some horrid means of escape. These historical atrocities are so vivid that they end up unmooring the central conceit of the series. To wit, we almost don't need the other threat stalking the camps: Yuko (Kiki Sukezane), a spectral beauty that likely isn't human and has taken an murderous interest in any and all connected to Mio's family. Yuko's scenes thrust Infamy into the realm of something like Ringu or Dark Water (even a lot of the iconography is the same), and while these moments are creepy, we've seen them before. Even more than that, though, they pale when compared to the all-too terrestrial - and realistic - terrors that one human being can perpetrate against another. Still, the images offered up in the internment sequences are so strong that they make Infamy vital, if imperfect viewing. As Susan Sontag wrote in her great Regarding the Pain of Others, "such images cannot be more than an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers." That type of suffering haunt us longer than any ghost can.
Finally, from Arrow Films comes a new, 4K pressing of the 1980 superhero-sci-fi adventure Flash Gordon. As someone who was relatively unfamiliar with the Flash Gordon legacy (barring a few, choice pop-culture lifts) until just a few days ago, I totally get the rabid cult that's bolstered the film over the years. I went into this expecting a fairly standard comic-book adaptation: maybe something pitched somewhere between John Carter and Dick Tracy, perhaps. What I got was a delirious freak-out. If producer Dino De Laurentiis gave Studio 54 $27 million to make Star Wars, the end result would look a lot like Flash Gordon. For all the film's epic scope and reliance on pulp tropes - this is a movie that travels from Earth to the furthest reaches of space, that has alien overlords and winged sky warriors and laser-gun fights - it conducts the proceedings with the same kind of smirking camp you might find in a John Waters movie. Director Mike Hodges (of Get Carter fame) once described Flash Gordon as "the only improvised $27 million movie ever made," but I see that quality as a feature, not a bug. One moment, Flash (the beyond-wooden Sam Jones) is using his football skills to mow through a squadron of alien guards while his love interest (Melody Anderson) cheerleads from the sidelines; the next, friggin' Topol from Fiddler on the Roof is having his memories of the Holocaust removed by alien scientists (yes, this is a real thing that happens in Flash Gordon). The film's sexual politics are all over the place, yet in a way that weirdly doesn't seem offensive. Both Anderson and Ornella Muti's characters are largely exploited for their sexualities, but the male characters are, with one exception, so sexless and chaste that you almost wonder if Hodges and screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. are mounting some weird parody of late '70s gender mores. And then there's that exception: Max von Sydow's wonderful Ming the Merciless, who looks like he walked on set straight from the pages of a Flash Gordon comic and is so leering and gross that you never take him too seriously. Vide the wonderful wedding sequence at the end, where Ming gets so visibly pissy at the traditional "…until death do us part" vows that the priest (a very funny Philip Stone) switches tacks with a hasty "...or, at least until you tire of her and have her shot into space." This movie is so wild that its final sequence includes both a freeze-frame on Flash as he jumps for joy and an ominous end title reading "The End?" Universal was banking on a sequel that never materialized because of course it didn't. But in a lot of ways, this one Flash Gordon is enough. It's a veritable bounty of lunacy.
In his Blu-ray review, Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that he "actually enjoyed Flash Gordon a good deal more than I did when I watched it last many years ago in preparation for writing the review of the Universal release. It's still a mixed bag, to be sure, and it never quite attains the fun it seems to be aiming for, but this new version offers a riot of color and detail that I had never noticed in previous home video releases. As tends to be the case with Arrow, the supplemental package is outstanding and some of the non-disc swag in this Limited Edition is very enjoyable. This augurs well for Arrow and 4K UHD, and I'm excited to see what other films the label may decide to give this deluxe treatment."