Thriller

The Protégé

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  • Title: The Protégé
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The Protégé movie reviewFor having a single writer and no directorial or production upheaval, The Protégé is one hell of a schizophrenic film. I don’t know if director Martin Campbell and screenwriter Richard Wenk had conflicting takes on what the film should be or if The Protégé is simply an example of the final result being far less than the sum of its parts. The action-thriller stars Maggie Q as a bookshop owner/assassin saved as a child from violence in Vietnam by a professional killer (Samuel L. Jackson) who raised and trained her to be his, wait for it, protégé.

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Big Doll House

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  • Title: Big Doll House
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Big Doll House movie reviewThrowback Tuesday takes us back to 1971’s Big Doll House. Produced by B-movie legend Roger Corman, the film kicked-off a jungle subset of the women-in-prison genre starring Judith Brown, Roberta Collins, Pam Grier, Brooke Mills, Pat Woodell, and Gina Stuart as inmates in a prison of an unnamed tropical country run by an evil warden (Christiane Schmidtmer) and overseen by the Nazi-like torturer Lucien (Kathryn Loder). Collins, Grier, and Brown would all return for the similarly themed Women in Cages released the same year.

Pushing the boundaries of what was allowed in the loosened ratings of the time, the independent film follows the basic format of the exploitation genre putting the women in various compromising positions guaranteed to get their clothes off such as strip searches, group shower scenes, catfights (one even in mud), lesbian and bondage scenes, and torture. We also get a revolution and escape plot, which would become part of the sub-genre, culminating in the group’s attempt to escape the prison during the movie’s climax. Although not the main character, the film is notable for launching Grier’s career in this genre and blaxploitation films.

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The Courier

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  • Title: The Courier (2020)
  • IMDb: link

The Courier movie reviewBased on true events, director Dominic Cooke‘s The Courier offers a solid period thriller surrounding Soviet scientist Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze) and British salesman Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) who becomes a vital piece in Cold War espionage by smuggling Soviet secrets out Moscow for Penkovsky and into the waiting arms of MI6 and the CIA in the months leading up the the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Penned by Tom O’Connor (The Hitman’s Bodyguard), The Courier fits easily into its genre. The structure of the film, following events from beginning to end in chronological fashion, does offer a rather large shift in The Courier‘s final half-hour which may have been avoided by more imaginative editing and structure. Cumberbatch and Ninidze will gather the most interest here. The women of the story don’t fare as well. The film has a lesser interest in Wynne’s wife (Jessie Buckley) and almost no interest in Penkovsky’s family. Even Rachel Brosnahan as the CIA agent who brings the case to MI6’s attention and pressures them to make good on their promises, isn’t given anything all that interesting to do.

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Vicious

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  • Title: Vicious
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Vicious DVD reviewRecently released on home video, Vicious is nearly unwatchable. The film, if it can be called that, answers the question of what a TBS attempt to recreate a Cinemax After Dark movie might look like. Written and directed by Jason Rosenblatt, Vicious stars Angela Nordeng as law student Belle White who pays her bills by stripping under the stage name of Roxy. The film primarily focuses on a pair of customers who frighten Belle, one overtly by stalking her, and the other passive-aggressively by consistently odd behavior hoping to convince Roxy to quit the business.

The film is presented as a thriller of our protagonist falling into despair and fighting back. The result is far less interesting. Troubled by low production cost, inconsistent cinematography, questionable acting and dialogue, and a meandering plot, Vicious is a mess. For a thriller, it’s far from thrilling. For a film about strippers, it’s far from titillating. For a drama, it’s far from dramatic. Because the film is hyper-serious about its content, this dog of movie can’t even make it into the realm of cheesy fun. About the only thing the film is good for is a cure for insomnia.

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Possessor

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  • Title: Possessor
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Possessor Blu-ray reviewWriter/director Brandon Cronenberg‘s Possessor is a gory techno-thriller set in a world not unlike our own where a company has devised a method to enter a person’s mind and take control of their body. Rather than use the technology for good, it sells it for profit by making assassins out of anyone they can get their hands on. Andrea Riseborough stars as agent Tasya Vos, although mostly we see other actors playing the bodies she has been given control. As the film opens we can already begin to see the effect of the body swapping on Tasya both in detachment to her real life and during her job which foreshadows larger problems to come.

Possessor is at times a brutal film, and Cronenberg never shies away from gore (even going so far to hold scenes longer than necessary to illicit a response from his audience). Jennifer Jason Leigh also stars as Tasya’s handler, whose team scrambles when something goes wrong with the latest assignment leaving her agent trapped in another body.

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