FILM REVIEW OF ''THE BOY NEXT DOOR" (2015)

Jennifer Lopez isn’t a bad actress, but she is so miscast so miserably as a high school English teacher in “The Boy Next Door” (* OUT OF ****) that not even a seasoned Hollywood helmer like Rob Cohen can salvage this substandard stalker saga.  Although he has directed hits like “The Fast and the Furious” and “xXx” as well as above-average epics like “Daylight,” “Stealth,” and “Alex Cross,” Cohen appears appallingly out of his element with this formulaic fiasco.  Not only does the tawdry “The Boy Next Door” miscast Lopez, but also it makes Ryan Guzman, John Corbett, and Hill Harper look just as inapt.  Whatever Lopez and the other twelve producers on this picture admired about rookie writer Barbara Curry’s screenplay must have been either altered or didn’t survive the final cut.  Although she received an MFA in scriptwriting from UCLA, Curry should have kept her old day job.  She spent ten years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles where she toiled in the Major Violent Crimes Unit and handled federal cases involving murder-for-hire, prison murder, racketeering, arson, kidnapping, and bank robbery.  Reportedly, Curry taught criminal procedure at FBI Headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, and pushed for trial advocacy at the U.S Justice Department in Washington, D.C.  In time perhaps, Curry might brush up on her storytelling skills and become a  better writer.  “The Boy Next Door” is neither suspenseful nor surprising, unless you’ve never seen a single stalker movie.  Quite often, our sexy heroine, her oblivious colleagues, and her unsuspecting kin do some really stupid moves that make this movie appear more like a comedy than a drama.  The best thing about this predictable pabulum is that it clocks in at a minimal 91 minutes.  Meanwhile, “The Boy Next Door” has sold enough tickets to qualify as a “hit.”  Produced for a paltry $ 4 million, this mediocre crime melodrama has coined more than $20 million at the box office box, an amount sufficient to pay off its budget as well as its advertising.

Lopez plays English teacher Claire Peterson who teaches classic literature, specifically “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad,” at a California state public high school.  Our heroine looks far too incendiary for her own good.  Mind you, I’m not saying high school English teachers cannot look stunning, but Lopez strains credibility with some of her wardrobe.  As the action unfolds, Claire has separated from her philandering husband, Garrett Peterson (John Corbett of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”), who careens around in muscle cars and had an affair with his secretary.  Since you never get a glimpse of the other gal, you have to wonder how she compared with Claire.  Presumably, Garrett was probably taking advantage of his lowly employee because she was younger than Claire.  Meantime, Claire’s teenage son, Kevin (Ian Nelson of “The Hunger Games”), suffers from asthma and allergies when bullies aren’t badgering him.  The senior citizen next door to Claire (Jack Wallace of “Boogie Nights”) has just taken in his handsome, but orphaned, 19-year nephew, Noah Sandborn (an improbable 27-year old Ryan Guzman of “Step Up Revolution”), whose own dad died in a mysterious car crash.  Hint, hint! Claire encounters this charming Abercrombie & Fitch pin-up boy while she is wrestling with a cranky garage door.  One weekend, while Garrett and Kevin are away on a fishing trip, Claire accompanies her best friend and colleague, High School Vice Principal Vicky Lansing (Kristin Chenoweth of “Strange Magic”), on a blind date from Hell.  The well-meaning Vicky has set Claire up with a gruff anti-intellectual guy.  After she walks out on this loser, our distressed heroine finds herself face to face with charismatic Noah.  During a vulnerable moment, Claire abandons her morals as easily as Noah disposes of her lingerie.  Lopez displays little more than her shapely thighs while Guzman keeps her breasts discreetly covered with his groping paws.  The morning after when he awakens her with orange juice and coffee, Noah cannot imagine why Claire would be racked with recriminations.  Complicating matters even more, Noah is a transfer student who has enrolled in classes at the same high school where Claire teaches.  Lusting after her, Noah decides to pursue Claire, but she rebuffs his advances.  Eventually, Noah turns psychotic.  Initially, he hacks into Claire’s e-mail account and obtains permission from Principal Edward Warren (Hill Harper of CBS-TV’s “CSI: New York”) to enroll in her class with her apparent approval.  Similarly, Noah befriends Kevin, teaches him how to box, and tries to turn him against Garrett who wants desperately to patch up his marriage with Claire.  In a burst of rage, Noah pulverizes one of Kevin’s bullies, and Vicky expels Noah.  Meantime, Vicky uncovers some disturbing information about Noah, and she finds herself on the wrong end of his rage.  Ultimately, Noah horrifies Claire with news that he made a video of their sex act and threatens to expose her!  At this point, you’re liable to laugh your head hysterically off rather than gnaw your fingernails in dread.

Comparatively, “The Boy Next Door” reminded me of “Fatal Attraction,” “Single White Female,” “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” “Swimfan,” and “Basic Instinct.”  In a “Cosmopolitan” magazine interview, Curry said she drew inspiration from a real-life incident involving a high school teacher who had seduced one of her underage students.  Sadly, the relationship between Claire and Noah, especially their voyeur episodes, is so outrageous that you cannot take the drama seriously.  Cohen claims he wanted to craft the ultimate erotic thriller along the lines of those previously mentioned movies, but he embroiders clichés.  Some of the action scenes, particularly a runaway car episode, provide only a momentary relief from the Harlequin-like soap opera shenanigans.  Cohen generates a modicum of suspense in the tradition of “Rear Window” when Claire searches Noah’s man cave for the sex video.  Most of the time, however, you’ll felt insulted by the idiotic antics of these clueless cretins.  “The Boy Next Door” isn’t a third as exciting as last year’s “No Good Deed.”

FILM REVIEW OF ''HORRIBLE BOSSES" (2011)

“Horrible Bosses” (*** OUT OF ****) is hilarious hokum from fade-in to fade-out.  Of course, this imaginative but complicated, R-rated comedy of errors about premeditated murder is not for everybody.  If you can tolerate neither profanity nor homicide, then this laugh-fest may not be appropriate fare.  Conversely, if you have or have had a boss who deserved a slow but tortuous death, “Horrible Bosses” could make your laugh rather than wallow in homicidal fantasies.  The biggest joke of “Horrible Bosses,” which lives up to its title, is that the heroes are hopelessly clueless.  Imagine a parody of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train,” except the wannabe killers lack the nerve to go for the jugular.  At the same time, most Hollywood thrillers feature one chief villain, but “Horrible Bosses” boasts three.  Two are male, but one is female, while our protagonists are all men.  Nick Hendricks (Jason Bateman of “Juno”), Dale Arbus (Charlie Day of “Pacific Rim”), and Kurt Buckman (Jason Sudeikis of “Hall Pass”) suffer the agonies of the damned as they tangle hopelessly with their respective bosses, Dave Harkin (Kevin Spacey of “Superman Returns”), Dr. Julia Harris, D.D.S. (Jennifer Aniston of “Rock Star”), and Bobby Pellitt (Colin Farrell of “Miami Vice”).  Clearly the worst of the three, Harkin qualifies as a venomous sadist with a streak of misanthropy.  He takes special pleasure in ridiculing everybody without mercy.  At one point, he tells Nick, “Life is a marathon, and you cannot win a marathon without putting a few band-aids on your nipples, right?” Nick confides in his friends that working for Harken is like working for the Antichrist.  When he isn’t terrorizing poor Nick, Harken believes that his wife Rhonda (Julie Bowen of “Amy's Orgasm”) is having sex with everybody but him.  Incidentally, Rhonda is probably cuckolding Harken because she has bathroom sex with Kurt during Harken’s surprise birthday party.   

While Harken represents one kind of ignoble boss, Julia Harris embodies another version.  Aniston plays a sexy but unscrupulous dentist who takes advantage of her male dental assistant, Dale, because he is a sex offender.  Talk about weird stuff.  Dale was arrested while he was urinating on a playground in the middle of the night so he has to register himself as a sex offender.  Finding a job proved difficult for him until he entered Julia’s naughty world where she could dominate him.  She takes advantage of him repeatedly.  Initially, when he was a patient, she took incriminating photos of him in sexual positions with her while he was still under the effects of medication.  She uses these photos to blackmail him into becoming her sexual slave and he has to put up with her unwanted advances.  Meanwhile, Sudeikis deals with a total swine of a boss who is a cokehead.  Colin Farrell stretches the most as an actor here because he looks nothing like evil Bobby Pellitt.  Bobby hasn’t liked Kurt from the start because Kurt and Bobby’s father, Jack (Donald Sutherland of “M.A.S.H.”), were such close friends.  Jack had planned to pass the family business onto Kurt, but Jack died unexpectedly from a heart attack so Bobby inherited the business and drives Kurt up the wall. Bobby is such a cheapskate that he kept his father desk plate but put his name over his father's name!

After our woebegone protagonists have put up with far too much abuse from their horrid superiors, they find an African-American, Dean 'MF' Jones (Jamie Fox of “Miami Vice”), who is on parole.  One of the running jokes is the use of Dean’s profane nickname that our heroes use without a qualm. .Anyway, ‘MF’ refuses to commit the killings for them, but he agrees to serve as their murder consultant for $5000.  At the time, our foolish protagonists believed that ‘MF’ spent 10 years in the big house for murder.  One of the surprises of “Horrible Bosses” is that Dean wasn’t a murderer.  He went to a jail because the authorities caught him in a movie theater with a video camera recording a film!  Nevertheless, ‘MR’ tells our hapless trio: “Most killers are first-timers.  You wanna pull off a brilliant murder; you gotta act like it’s an accident.  Failed brakes, gas leaks, suicide.  You do it right, you ain’t even gotta be there when it goes down.”  Sounds like ‘MR’ saw the Charles Bronson hitman movie “The Mechanic” because the Bronson character staged each hit as if it were an accident.  Hendricks remains skeptical about MR’s advice: “Sounds like Scooby-Doo.  How are we supposed to fake three accidents?”  Our heroes are naturally disappointed by ‘MF’s lack of participation.  According to ‘MF,’ they must “stalk their prey.”  Second, he continues: “Gotta be smart.  Find out where they live, find out their habits.  What’s their hobbies?”  Nevertheless, ‘MR’ warns them if they have motives that the ‘popo’ will find them.  Nick points out, “We all have clear motives for killing our bosses, . . .so this is not gonna work.  This is garbage.”  ‘MF’ suggests they “kill each other’s bosses.”  This is when Kurt alludes to Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train.”  Dale hasn’t seen “Strangers on a Train,” but he has seen the Danny DeVito movie “Throw Momma from a Train.”  “We kill each other’s bosses, there’s no link to us,”  Kurt observes.  During this part of the process, comedy galore ensues, particularly while Hendricks and Buckman are in Dave Harken’s house, and dimwitted Dale sits parked outside the house, acting at their look-out.  Harken surprises the unsuspecting Dale after the latter has littered on his street and reprimands him for littering until he catches a whiff of the peanuts.  Harken collapses like a sack of potatoes, unconscious on the pavement.  Dale saves Dave’s life without realizing who Dave is.  Dave’s wife Rhonda happens to come along and rejoices at Dale’s timely intervention.  Naturally, the suspicious Harken suspects that Dale and Rhonda had arranged to meet each other for an exchange of sexual favors.  One of the funniest surprises involves the connection between Harken and Pellitt.  While Nick is maintaining surveillance at Pellitt’s residence, Harken shows up and shoots Pellitt several times and leaves without spotting Nick.  

Altogether, “Horrible Bosses” never stops spouting jokes. Indeed, things are a little extreme, but that is to be expected for a comedy.  Jason Bateman gets to play another schmuck and he is a past master at playing schmuck.  He wears a straight face and never lets on that he is in on the joke.  Meantime, each of the villains receives their just comeuppance.  Director Seth Gordon and his scenarists do an exemplary job of foreshadowing what occurs later.  Donald Sutherland’s cameo as Kurt's boss is too brief but it fits in with the timeline.  One other character, who appears to be around simply as a sick one-note joke, Kenny Sommerfeld (P.J. Bryne of “29 Palms”), actually figures prominently in Julia’s comeuppance.  The ending with Nick—as president of the company--meeting his new boss, Mr. Sherman (Bob Newhart), in the parking lot, is hysterically funny. “Horrible Bosses” is a funny movie.

FILM REVIEW OF ''CARRIE'' (1976)

“Scarface” director Brian De Palma had made about ten feature-length films and several shorts when he made his first classic horror chiller “Carrie” with Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, John Travolta, William Katt, Amy Irving, Nancy Allen, and P.J. Soles.  If you look closely, you’ll spot “Miami Vice” regular Michael Talbot, who played Detective Stan Switek, cast as Travolta’s accomplice.  This was author Stephen King’s first novel that Hollywood adapted, and he approved of De Palma and “Ghost Story” scenarist Lawrence D. Cohen’s adaptation.  Performances are uniformly top-notch, with Spacek garnering an Oscar nomination for Best Actress while Laurie received a nomination for Best Supporting Actress.  These two make a convincing daughter and mother combination.  Spacek is a revelation when she goes full-tilt telekinetic in the final quarter hour, devastating friends and foe alike. She walked off with the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress.  Amy Irving and Betty Buckley are sympathetic as Carrie’s friend and mentor.  Nancy Allen and John Travolta play a villainous who orchestrated an evening of mayhem with pig’s blood galore. “Carrie” is all about the terrible effects of bullying.

Our poor, disadvantaged heroine grows up with a tyrannical mother whose husband abandoned her and turns into a radical Christian who sees sin in her innocent daughter.  Furthermore, Carrie is an outsider at Bates High School, and her only friend is her gym teacher, Miss Collins (Betty Buckley of “Wyatt Earp”), who struggles to help.  Things get off to quick start after gym class one day when Carrie has her first period in the locker room shower.  Virtually everybody ridicules Carrie’s ignorance and they sling a storm of tampons and feminine napkins at her.  Honestly, Carrie has no idea what is happening because her prudish, repressed mother has told her anything about growing up and the changes that occur with puberty.  Miss Collins reprimands the girls and threatens to revoke their prom privileges if they don’t spend time after classes with her performing calisthenics.   Sue Snell (Amy Irving) regrets her behavior and arranges a prom date between her handsome football hero boyfriend, Tommy Ross (William Katt of “Butch & Sundance: The Early Years”), who reluctantly goes along with her best intentions scheme.  Meanwhile, Sue’s class mate Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen of “RoboCop”) smolders with rage from the treatment that Miss Collins accords her.  Only in the 1970s could a high school teacher assault a student by slapping her face in front of her peers and getting away with no repressions.  Secretly, Chris plots revenge with her class mate Norma (P.J. Soles of “Halloween”) and boyfriend Billy Nolan (John Travolta of “The Devil’s Rain”) and Billy’s buddy Freddy (Michael Talbot) to fix the prom vote so Carrie and Tommy will win.  At the moment that Carrie receives her flower, Chris plans to tip a bucket of swine blood so that Carrie is drenched from head to toe in the gore.  

What nobody knocks is that with the onset of her period, Carrie has developed telekinetic powers.  We see some foreshadowing of this awesome power early in the shower scene and later in the principal’s office when Mr. Morton (Stefan Gierasch of “High Plains Drifter”) mispronounces Carrie’s name as Cassie and the cigarette ashtray fragments.  Later, at home with her warped mother, Carrie shatters a mirror with an etching of Jesus in the background.  Tommy has to harass Carrie before she accepts his invitation to go to the prom with him.  Predictably, Carrie’s mother is dead set against her daughter donning a dress that will prominently display her ‘dirty pillows’ and plans some retribution of her own.  Meanwhile, Miss Collins suspects initially that Sue and Tommy are up no good with Sue’s decision to skip prom and her insistence that Tommy take Carrie.  The night before all Hell breaks loose, Chris, Billy, and Freddy place the bucket of pig’s blood directly over the stage.  Freddy and Norma decide to fix the prom couple vote without anybody knowing any better. 

Naturally, things go smoothly for the evil villains, but they are in no way prepared for the electrifying outcome.  After she is covered in the hog’s blood, Carrie unleashes all her telekinetic powers and all but burns down the auditorium where the prom occurred.  She walks out of these fireworks.  When Chris and Billy try to run her down with his car, she turns her powers on them, their car rolls several times, ignites in a fireball explosion and incinerates them.  Talk about a spectacular way to die!  At home, Carrie washes off all the swine blood and seeks her mother’s loving arms for comfortable only to scream when mom buries a knife in her back.  Carrie has another telekinetic bout and skewers her mom with seven kitchen utensils.  Suddenly, Carrie’s small white house collapses around him, and the sole survivor of this nightmare is Sue.  Sue goes to the flat, level site of Carrie’s house to put flowers on the for sale sign and an arm from Hell soars up from the rocks to seize her, and she awakens to find her own mother consoling her after experiencing a nightmare.  The ending will startle you because this is the last thing that you expect.  Four years later, Sean S. Cunningham appropriated the shocker of a finale in his gruesome but seminal slasher “Friday the 13^th” with a small boy exploding from the calm surface of a lake to stab at a girl after the heroine had taken refuge in a boat to escape the villainess at Camp Crystal Lake.

Director Brian De Palma never wears out his welcome with this 98-minute melodrama about a young girl and her supernatural powers and went on to exploit it in his next film “The Fury.”  “The Fury,” however, was not the memorable experience that “Carrie.”  A belated, a non-related sequel, “The Rage: Carrie 2” (1999), followed along with a 2002 television remake in 2002 that never became  a weekly series, and more recently Kimberly Peirce’s remake based on Cohen’s screenplay hit theaters with Chloë Grace Moretz as the eponymous and Julianne Moore as her disturbed mother.  Incredibly, the “Carrie” remake surpass De Palma’s classic while it updates the action.  For example, during the shower scene, Chris shoots a video of Carrie groveling in the shower while the girl rain down tampons on her as they chant “Plug it up!”