FILM REVIEW OF ''OCULUS" (2014)

Although it’s more fresh than original, “Oculus” (*** OUT OF ****) qualifies as a subtle but spooky supernatural saga.  This creepy, complicated, psychological horror chiller casts an ordinary, everyday piece of household furniture as the source of all Evil.  You may have one in your home, office, and/or car.  Horror thrillers have appropriated virtually everything inanimate and transformed them—houses, cars, beds, bulldozers, condoms, toys, etc.--into murderous machines.  The addition of mirrors should surprise nobody.  This notorious object has been killing people as well as their pets for centuries with nobody the wiser about it.   Actually, this isn’t the first time Hollywood has employed mirrors other than to offer the latest updates as in Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”  The Karen Black nail-biter “Mirror Mirror” (1990) represented an early example of evil mirror melodramas.  A high school teenage girl summoned ghostly energy from a mirror to deal with obnoxious girls bullying her.  Later, the Kiefer Sutherland thriller “Mirrors” (2008) appropriated mirrors with ghostly powers.  Basically, there are three kinds of evil mirror movies.  First, the owner of the mirror calls the shots.  Second, the mirror from Hell  takes everything back to Hell.  Third, the mirror adopts other corporeal characteristics.  In other words, the mirror shape-shifts into man or beast and leaves the wall where it is hanging on to create terror.   Mind you, the malevolent mirror in “Oculus” doesn’t kill its victims by shape-shifting into something larger.  Here, we have an evil as impassive as it is impersonal.   In fact, the mirror does nothing but hang on the wall.  Gaze into this wicked mirror, and you’re not going to be the same!  The mirror exerts an eerie effect on individuals.  Everything turns into something else.  After you peer into this mirror, you find it difficult to distinguish between reality and fantasy.   Nothing in “Oculus” is what it seems!

“Absentia” director Mike Flanagan and co-scenarist Jeff Howard generate more than enough dread despite their preposterous but audacious premise.  “Oculus” contains scenes that will make the hair on the nape of your neck and forearms levitate. Unmistakably, the setting and the storyline give away the film’s modest $5 million budget.  Flanagan and Howard confine the mayhem primarily to the confines of a suburban residence with some exterior jaunts to various, peripheral locations.  More importantly, Flanagan and Howard forge sympathetic characters in the crucible of this mesmerizing melodrama who maintain our interest throughout its 105 minute running time.  The leads are attractive, and we want them to succeed in their cosmic battle between Good and Evil.  Compared with mega-budgeted horror pictures, “Oculus” appears minor in many respects.  Nothing in the form of either savage beasts or exotic creatures emerges from the mirror to eviscerate our hero and heroine.  Indeed, some abhorrent things occur, but nothing that will afflict you with nightmares.  You’ll be able to sleep with your lights off after dark. This unsettling, R-rated saga doesn’t wallow in blood and gore. Flanagan creates terror in your mind without crossing the line with gutsy, gross-out, gore moments.  Make no mistake, people are slashed and bled, but “Oculus” is neither “Alien” nor “Predator.”  Ultimately, despite its small-budget, low-wattage cast, and nominal gore effects, “Oculus” makes the grade because we care about the protagonists—two siblings--who set out to expose that infamous mirror as a mass murderer!

“Oculus” combines characteristics of haunted house movies (think “The Shining” and “The Amityville Horror”) with found footage flicks, such as “The Blair Witch Project” and the “Paranormal Activity” franchise.  Most of the action occurs in a single house where two siblings, Tim Russell (Brenton Thwaites of “Blue Lagoon: The Awakening”) and Kaylie Russell (Karen Gillan of the BBC’s “Doctor Who”), grew up together and witnessed the deaths of their mother and father.  Flanagan complicates this chronicle by presenting not only a contemporary story line about the siblings as adults, but also as adolescents in an alternate flashback, so we experience what they saw in their youth.  Essentially, Tim saw his father kill his mother, Marie (Katee Sackhoff of “Riddick”) so he shot his father Alan (Rory Cochrane of “Dazed and Confused”) and killed him.  Since the incident, Tim has spent ten years in a psychiatric hospital recuperating from the nightmare.  Since he has just turned age twenty-one, Tim is released because the doctors don’t believe he constitutes a threat.  Meanwhile, Tim’s obsessive sister, Kaylie, who is two years older, has been working at an art auction house.  She picks Tim up after he is discharged, but he refuses to stay with Kaylie and her fiancé, Michael Dumont (James Lafferty of (“S. Darko”), who works with her at the auction house.  Instead, Tim prefers to chill out in a motel.  Later, Tim learns that Kaylie has obtained the opulent 400-year old mirror that once graced their father's office.  Furthermore, she has taken it back to the house where their parents died and placed it in the same room!  If this weren’t enough, Kaylie has assembled a sophisticated array of gadgetry, including video cameras, sound detection equipment, and temperature monitors.  She behaves like one of the “Ghostbusters” but with a straight face.  She is determined to prove that Evil lurks in the mirror and brought about tragic consequences not only for her family but also others, too.  In this respect, “Oculus” resembles a found footage flick.  She believes that she can expose Evil and destroy it with one striking blow.  Unfortunately, the chief problem with “Oculus” is that we never learn what prompted the antique mirror to embark on its reign of evil and what lies behind it.

The performances are good.  Karen Gillan is especially forthright in her naivety that she can defeat Evil.  Brenton Thwaites is almost as good as her cautionary little brother.  Rory Cochrane and Katee Sackhoff make a believable couple.  Incredibly enough, Annelise Basso of “The Red Road” and Garrett Ryan of “The Millers” are terrific as their adolescent counterparts. The pacing is even, but you may jump occasionally at some sudden visual revelation.  As it turns out, Flanagan expanded “Oculus” from his half-hour short film “Oculus Chapter 3: The Man with the Plan.”  “Oculus” qualifies as an above-average reflection about terror. 

FILM REVIEW OF ''PARKER" (2013)

The brawny Jason Statham crime thriller “Parker”(*** OUT OF ****) qualifies as uneven but entertaining.  Too many characters converge in this above-average revenge melodrama.  Hispanic diva Jennifer Lopez plays one of those extraneous characters in “Black Swan” scenarist John J. McLaughlin’s flawed screenplay.  Cast as a divorced, debt-ridden, real estate agent, Lopez never gets intimate with her rugged “Transporter” star.  Instead, she is stuck in a supporting role and lends only minimal sizzle to “Blood In, Blood Out” director Taylor Hackford’s otherwise high-octane actioneer.  In one scene, she strips to her undies for our suspicious protagonist to see if she is wearing a wire.  Meantime, our hero has somebody else, in an even smaller role, who attends to him after he’s been shot, stabbed and beaten up.  Nevertheless, when Lopez isn’t chauffeuring Statham around scenic Palm Beach, Florida, she is meddling with his carefully laid plans the same way Lucille Ball used to interfere with his Cuban band-leader husband’s nightclub show in the “I Love Lucy” television comedy.  This energetic R-rated epic follows the exploits of a tough-as-nails professional criminal named Parker who lives by a strict code of ethics that reflects his principles.  He doesn’t harm anybody who doesn’t ask for it, but robbery is still his bread and butter.  When an armed guard nearly succumbs to a heart attack, Parker calms him down while he steals from him.

Statham isn’t the first actor to incarnate Parker.  If you’re counting, “Parker” marks the sixth time Hollywood has adapted the late Donald E. Westlake’s crime novel that he penned under the pseudonym Richard Stark.  Initially, French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard changed the sex of the role for actress Anna Karina who played Paula in “Made in USA” in 1966.  Lee Marvin took a bullet as the same character with the name Walker in director John Boorman’s violent shoot’em up saga “Point Blank” in 1967.  Jim Brown played him as McClain in director Gordon Flemyng’s account of a hardboiled hold-up in “The Split” in 1968.  Robert Duvall landed the role as Macklin in director John Flynn’s “The Outfit” in 1973.  Finally, Mel Gibson appropriated the part as Porter in director Brian Helgeland’s gritty, bullet-riddled “Payback” (1999).  If you haven’t seen these previous adaptations hardboiled melodramas, you should put them on your wish list.  

“Parker” opens with an explosive heist at the Ohio State Fair.  Parker (Jason Statham of “Safe”) supervises an elaborate heist with four partners with whom he has no history.  This quartet masquerades as either clowns or cops, while he dons the collar of a clergyman.  They plunder the concession booth and make off with hundreds of thousands of dollars.  A case of arson designed to distract the authorities so the gang can make a quiet getaway concludes with the tragic death of an innocent bystander.  No sooner has this criminal quintet fled with their ill-gotten gains than Melander (Michael Chiklis of “The Fantastic Four”) insists Parker chip in his share of the loot so they can finance a $50-million haul in Palm Beach, Florida.  Naturally, since our hero doesn’t trust his accomplices, he refuses to join them.  Melander pulls a gun on Parker, and they careen recklessly down a public highway trying to control Parker.  Parker beats them up and then bails out the window.  He slams into the asphalt and lays there stunned.  August (Micah A. Hauptman of “S.W.A.T.: Firefight”) shoots him once and disposes of his bloody corpse into a ditch.  Miraculously, Parker survives this near-death ordeal and lucks up when a family stops to help him out.  Our hero awakens in a hospital as the police are making inquiries about him.  Cleverly, he manages to elude them despite both  the trauma and his gunshot wound.  He tracks Melander and his trigger-happy goons down to sunny Palm Beach, Florida.  Parker’s escape from the hospital and his improvised methods for boosting cars and getting cash-on-the-run are fascinating stuff.  Not long after Parker arrives in Florida, he hooks up with Lesley (Jennifer Lopez of “Enough”) and uses her to find where his ex-partners are holed up in an elite population.  “Parker” loses momentum at this juncture before it recovers with a suspense confrontation between our amoral hero and the dastardly quartet of hoods.  

Despite the alluring attraction she provides, Jennifer Lopez could have been deleted entirely from "Parker."  After all, what is the point of having a looker like Lopez if she is not the hero’s romantic interest?  Meantime, Hackford and McLaughlin confine Parker’s girlfriend Claire (Emma Booth) to the periphery with little to do aside from fleeing from his assailants and nursing our hero’s wounds.  She doesn’t have enough time to make much of an impression.  Michael Chiklis, Clifton Collins Jr., Wendell Pierce, and Micah A. Hauptman are thoroughly convincingly as ruthless criminals who leave Statham for dead on a road with a bullet in him.  Unfortunately, we don’t learn much about these thugs since Hackford and McLaughlin concentrate on the plight of Lopez’ hard luck character.  Looking way past his prime as Statham’s mentor, Nick Nolte spends most of his time growling his lines of dialogue as if he were recovering from a hangover.  One of the best close quarter’s combat scenes pits Statham against Swiss actor Daniel Bernhardt, who replaced Jean-Claude Van Damme in the “Bloodsport” franchise.  For the record, Statham and Bernhardt performed their own stunts in a knock-down, drag-out, brawl.  This bruising man-to-man knife and fistfight qualifies as one of the highlights of “Parker.”  Clocking in at just shy of two hours, “Parker” could have been leaner and meaner had either Lopez’s scenes been trimmed or the two women had been merged into one.  Nevertheless, die-hard Statham fans will enjoy the white-knuckled shenanigans in this muscular melodrama.