The Phoenician Scheme: Droll lunacy

The Phoenician Scheme (2025) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for violence, bloody images and mild sexual material

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

Whether working with actors or animation, writer/director Wes Anderson is his own unique brand of crazy.

 

When everything clicks — as with The Grand Budapest Hotel, Isle of Dogs, Moonrise Kingdom and Fantastic Mr. Fox— the results are imaginatively marvelous.

 

Yet another in-flight assassination attempt forces Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro, left) to
take control of the plane, while Liesl (Mia Threapleton) and Bjorn (Michael Cera) watch
with mounting horror.

But when Anderson’s signature tics and mannerisms overwhelm the material — see Asteroid City, The French Dispatch and The Darjeeling Limited — we’re left with something dire and (for many viewers) utterly unwatchable.

This one’s somewhere in between.

 

For starters, it’s refreshing to see that Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola have delivered an actual plot that drives the wacky action (something sorely missed in Asteroid City). Granted, it’s a dog-nuts plot, but it makes sense, and gives the primary characters genuine motivation. 

 

Anderson also tackles some weighty concepts along the way: legacy, mortality and the final reckoning that results from one’s confrontation with God.

 

God, of course, is played by Bill Murray. Who else?

 

The art direction and production design — by Stephan O. Gessler and Adam Stockhausen, respectively — are spectacular. The latter has worked on every Anderson film since 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom, and he won a well-deserved Academy Award for The Grand Budapest Hotel.

 

The wildly distinctive look of an Anderson film has become legendary. His characters inhabit often static environments that sometimes feel like gigantic doll houses, with theatrical-style backdrops and finely tuned details that don’t quite exist in our workaday world: more like hyper-reality. Anderson favors color schemes in earth tones and soft pastels, which — in this case — occasionally are interrupted by Heaven’s blindingly white monochrome.

 

Cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel constantly plays with cockeyed camera angles and forced perspective; one early sequence is entirely a ceiling’s-eye view.

 

All of this establishes another of Anderson’s highly mannered, theater-of-the-absurd narratives: a style you’ll either embrace as cheerfully silly ... or dismiss as ludicrous.

 

The time is the 1950s. Zsa-Zsa Korda (a hilariously deadpan Benicio del Toro), a notorious plutocrat industrialist loathed throughout the world, is introduced mid-flight, as a bomb explodes in the rear of his private plane. He survives the subsequent crash: the sixth recent attempt on his life by unknown parties.

 

His gargantuan business empire also is under threat via financial scrutiny and political pressure, most particularly — at the moment — his complex “Phoenician Scheme”: an interlocking series of railway, shipping, mining and agricultural ventures designed to dominate a (fictitious) Middle Eastern country. This venture has been jeopardized by the U.S. government’s market-manipulating act to exponentially increase the cost of the “bashable rivets” necessary for all elements of Korda’s complicated plan.

 

He therefore must persuade each of his investors to accept less profit than contractually promised; each meeting becomes its own distinctive chapter.

The French Dispatch: Impenetrable language barrier

The French Dispatch (2021) • View trailer

Two stars (out of five). Rated R, for graphic nudity, profanity and sexual candor

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.29.21

Although one can only marvel, gape-jawed, at the feverish, coordinated complexity of set and backdrop movement, carefully composed and choreographed actor placement, traveling camerawork and integrated miniatures — relentlessly, as this aggressively bizarre film proceeds — all this visual razzmatazz rapidly wears out its welcome.

 

Magazine editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray, left) listens while star journalist
Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright, right) defends his turn of phrase; both are ignored
by another staffer who serves more as background decoration, given that he never
has written a word.

A classic case of the tail wagging the dog.

There’s never been any doubt that Wes Anderson, as a filmmaker, is obsessed with eccentricity and kitsch; his cinematic visions generally occupy a universe several steps beyond traditionally heightened reality. When he succeeds, the result can be a bravura work of genius, as with The Grand Budapest Hotel.

 

When he slides off the rails, as with this one, we’re left with nothing but contrived and relentlessly mannered weirdness for its own sake. Which doesn’t work.

 

Worse yet, despite all the marvelous eye candy, this film is boring. Crushingly boring.

 

It looks like half of Hollywood wanders through this self-indulgent vanity project, sometimes for no more than a minute or so. You could spend the entire film just trying to identify everybody (and, at times, that’s more interesting than trying to follow the outré storytelling).

 

In fairness, the premise and narrative gimmick are delectable. In a setting that seems 1950s-ish, The French Dispatch is a widely circulated American magazine based in the French city of Ennui-sur-Blasé, lovingly overseen by quietly cranky, Kansas-born editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray).

 

If Anderson’s vision begins to feel like a love letter to the venerable New Yorker magazine, during its 1950s and ’60s heyday, well … that’s undoubtedly intentional.

 

As the film begins, Howitzer has just died. The staff journalists — hand-picked over the years, sometimes less for their writing chops, and more for the way they lend atmosphere to the voluminous offices — assemble to draft his obituary, and prepare the magazine’s final issue. We then watch the three primary feature stories crafted, over time, by writers who embedded themselves, and became part of their assignments.

 

The generous application of flashbacks allows Murray plenty of screen time, as he fine-tunes each piece. His traditional advice, to each scribe: “Try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” (You’ve gotta love that line.)

 

We open with a brief travelogue, as Herbsaint Sazerac (Owen Wilson), the “Cycling Reporter,” takes us on a guided tour of Ennui-sur-Blasé: along the way relating the city’s history, while proudly highlighting many of the seedier neighborhoods, and their often wacky inhabitants.

 

This entertaining sequence showcases the astonishing work by production designer Adam Stockhausen, supervising art director Stéphane Cressend and cinematographer Robert D. Yeoman, who (I hope) was paid by the mile, because he must’ve been run off his feet.

No Sudden Move: Suspensefully riveting

No Sudden Move (2021) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity, violence and sexual candor

Available via: HBO Max

By Derrick Bang

Fans of slow-burn crime thrillers will love this one.

 

Scripter Ed Solomon’s noir-ish saga is given precisely the right look and atmosphere by director Steven Soderbergh and production designer Hannah Beachler. The post-WWII Detroit setting emphasizes the deplorable racial divide between cozy white neighborhoods and decaying inner-city Black districts, and the wary mistrust this prompts from both sides.

 

Having maneuvered their way up the conspiratorial food chain, Ronald (Benicio Del Toro,
left) and Curt (Don Cheadle) are startled by where they've suddenly wound up.

Soderbergh’s camera glides languidly along both sets of streets, as if perched atop a slow-moving vehicle; he frequently employs a fish-eyed lens, which distorts the image at both edges. This adds to the unsettling, overall sense of disorientation experienced by our fish-out-of-water protagonists. (As he has done before, Soderbergh “hides” behind the pseudonym “Peter Andrews,” when he handles his own cinematography.)

The year is 1954. Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle), recently released from prison, is offered a job by shady go-between Jones (Brendan Fraser). It sounds simple enough: babysit the family of low-level General Motors executive Matt Wertz (David Harbour) for a couple of hours.

 

“Babysit,” meaning “guard at gunpoint while something goes down elsewhere.”

 

Jones also recruits Ronald Russo (Benicio Del Toro), similarly down on his luck, who isn’t wild about sharing a job with, ah, someone of color. (Cheadle’s dry amusement, when the two men share the back seat of Jones’ car, is priceless.) The little gang is augmented further by Charley Barnes (Kieran Culkin), who outlines the plan.

 

Charley will “escort” Matt to his office, to retrieve a document from a certain safe. Curt and Ronald will keep Matt’s family at home: wife Mary (Amy Seimetz) and their two children, Matthew Jr. (Noah Jupe) and Peggy (Lucy Holt). The three criminals will remain masked the entire time; if everybody cooperates, everybody lives.

 

The raw intensity of the early morning home invasion is palpable, as Mary and her children are startled by the sudden appearance of these three menacing intruders. Curt’s calming words do little to ease the atmosphere of terror; Seimetz’s performance is sublime, as the terrified Mary — and we — expect something awful to happen, at any moment.

 

Sicario: Day of the Soldado — The sophomore curse strikes

Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated R, for violence, profanity and dramatic intensity
By Derrick Bang

2015’s Sicario was an impeccably self-contained story that resolved in just the right manner. Under no circumstances did it require a sequel; conceptually, that would be like demanding a sequel to Casablanca.

When unforeseen events separate them from the rest of
an American mercenary force, Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro)
wonders how best to protect Isabel (Isabela Moner) ...
and, indeed, if he should bother.

But Hollywood rarely is guided by art, when commerce stands ready to interfere. Sicario proved unexpectedly successfully, and actor-turned-writer Taylor Sheridan was on a roll, having also delivered the terrific original scripts for 2016’s Hell or High Water and last year’s Wind River.

In fairness, it perhaps could be argued that Benicio Del Toro’s mysterious Alejandro, by far the most intriguing character in Sicario, deserved another look.

Sheridan gave it a good try. At its best, Sicario: Day of the Soldado has the multi-layered, parallel storylines that made 2000’s Traffic so compelling (and which, coincidentally, brought Del Toro an Academy Award). But Sheridan’s writing isn’t nearly as tight this time; a few plot details are fuzzy, and at one point simply daft.

More conspicuously, the film stumbles its way to a thoroughly unsatisfying conclusion. The final 10 to 15 minutes feel as if director Stefano Sollima impulsively handed the reins to somebody far less qualified. Director Denis Villeneuve did a far superior job with the first film.

That said, Sheridan certainly cooks up a disturbing premise, which feels like a logical extension of our fear-driven world.

A pair of seemingly unrelated suicide bomber events — one during a foiled illegal immigrant crossing at the Mexico/Texas border, the other in a suburban Kansas big-box store laden with shoppers — leads U.S. intelligence agencies to an alarming conclusion: that Middle East terrorists are being ferried to Mexico by tanker ships “conveniently” ignored by Somali pirates, and then concealed among hopeful immigrants guided across the border by drug cartel traffickers.

Responding to demands from the (unseen) U.S. president that something be done to stop this, Secretary of Defense James Riley (Matthew Modine) summons CIA Deputy Director Cynthia Foard (Catherine Keener) and her favorite mercenary “fixer,” federal agent Matt Graver (Josh Brolin). The latter has become darker, scarier and more cynical since the case he shared with Emily Blunt’s Kate Macer, in Sicario; he now believes that a desired end justifies any means.

Trafficking has become epidemic, Matt reasons, because of greed-inspired harmony between rival Mexican cartels. Provoke a war between cartels, and that accord will cease in a violent heartbeat; the resulting chaos will put an end to terrorist trafficking. (This conclusion seems unduly optimistic.) And the best way to create an internecine cartel war lies not with killing a king, but with kidnapping a prince.

Or, as it turns out, a princess.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi — Galaxy-spanning excitement

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for intense sci-fi action and violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.15.17

The newest installment in the Star Wars franchise certainly doesn’t lack ambition.

At 152 minutes, The Last Jedi is by far the longest chapter in George Lucas’ originally conceived three-trilogy ennealogy. (I had to look that one up.)

Having been sent on a desperate mission to the obscenely opulent gambling planet of
Canto Bight, Rose (Kelly Marie Tran) and Finn (John Boyega) have decidedly different
views on how to locate their quarry.

It’s also the grimmest, with an emphasis on the word “Wars” that echoes last year’s Rogue One. The middle chapter of a trilogy inevitably is the most dire, as was established in 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. This new film’s solely credited writer/director, Rian Johnson, clearly took that precedent seriously. We hit the ground running, with few pauses for breath.

But they’re important pauses. Johnson understands the value of dramatic highs and lows, and — most crucially — of leavening dire doings with well-timed dollops of humor.

When last we left our various heroes, the Nazi-esque First Order — having risen from the ashes of the evil Galactic Empire — was eradicating the peaceful New Republic, world by world. Aside from wishing to dominate the universe, the evil Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis) employed the Darth Vader-esque Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) to seek out and destroy all traces of the Jedi order.

The plucky Rey (Daisy Ridley), imbued with the mysterious Force, has journeyed to the remote oceanic planet Ahch-To, in order to find and train with the long missing Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill). Former Stormtrooper-turned-good guy Finn (John Boyega), badly injured during a lightsaber battle with Kylo Ren, lies comatose in a medical stasis bed. Impetuous pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) and his faithful droid, BB-8, joined the Resistance forces commanded by Gen. Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher), as they celebrated the destruction of First Order’s massive Starkiller Base.

If all this seems a voluminous information dump, it’s merely the tip of the iceberg; subplots and sidebar characters reference everything back to 1977’s very first film. Four decades later, it’s extremely difficult for new viewers to jump into this saga, and even longtime fans may need an Internet refresher course.

(This being the era of binge viewing, I suppose the tried-and-true are expected to power-watch the previous seven films before embracing this one. That’s asking a bit much.)

Sicario: Bleak depiction of the failed war on drugs

Sicario (2015) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated R, for strong violence, grisly images and profanity
By Derrick Bang

Mexico probably won’t think very highly of this film.

Indeed, a formal state department complaint wouldn’t be surprising.

When Kate (Emily Blunt) demands to know more about the increasingly complicated and
morally questionable government "mission" in which she has agreed to participate, she
gets only vague answers from Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro, left) and Matt (Josh Brolin).

But first-time writer Taylor Sheridan can’t be blamed for responding to the increasingly grim headlines that keep erupting south of the border, and it’s not as if any of the events depicted in this drama exaggerate reality. The truth probably remains worse.

And Taylor’s “needs must” notion of a possible U.S. response is more than tantalizing; it feels utterly reasonable. And, frankly, scary.

Better still, Taylor has found the perfect colleague in Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, who most recently mesmerized us with 2013’s scary kidnap drama, Prisoners. Villeneuve’s films aren’t merely suspenseful; they’re nervous-making to a degree that prompts disquieting nightmares for days (weeks?) to follow.

He applies the same touch to Sicario, a ripped-from-current-events drama that paints a discouraging portrait of the escalating narcotics border war between the United States and Mexico: a war that we’re clearly losing, as portions of Mexico slide ever closer to becoming failed states. Assuming they haven’t already failed.

We meet our protagonist, Arizona FBI agent and kidnap-response team leader Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), during a raid on an outwardly ordinary suburban home in an average American neighborhood. Kate, steadfast partner/friend Reggie Wayne (Daniel Kaluuya) and their colleagues encounter resistance and gunfire: an oddly protective response, given the apparently empty house.

But it isn’t empty, as Kate soon discovers. In fact, the residence — clandestinely owned by the leader of a Mexican drug cartel — is a shocking horror.

Back at base, Kate is surprised to find herself profiled by a pair of outsiders: Matt Graver (Josh Brolin), introduced as some sort of State Department task force leader; and a quiet, shadowy individual known only as Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro). Both offer Kate the opportunity to join them in a bold operation designed to “make a statement” and truly do something about a situation that continues to escalate beyond control.

Think carefully before answering, Kate’s boss (the always reliable Victor Garber) warns her. The unspoken implication: The operation might exceed jurisdictional boundaries.

No matter. Kate’s in.

Inherent Vice: A very bad trip

Inherent Vice (2014) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity, graphic nudity, sexual content, constant drug use and occasional violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.23.15

This deranged flick is best imagined as an unholy love child spawned by Chinatown and every Sam Spade novel Dashiell Hammett never wrote.

Glimpsed through a peyote haze.

Private detective Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix, left) and maritime lawyer Sauncho
Smilax (Benicio Del Toro) watch from an oceanside restaurant as a suspicious
schooner — recently re-christened the Golden Fang — makes its way into port,
its purpose certain to be illicit.

Thomas Pynchon is challenging under the best of circumstances, which also can be said of director/scripter Paul Thomas Anderson, whose oeuvre features aggressively peculiar films such as Magnolia, There Will Be Blood and The Master. Put these two eclectic minds together, and the results are far from the best of circumstances.

At its better moments, Anderson’s take on Pynchon’s Inherent Vice is a funny pastiche of 1940s film noir atmosphere and attitude, filtered through the drug-hazed cheesecloth of 1970s hippiefied Los Angeles. The characters are manic, the dialog heightened far beyond stratospheric visibility, and the unfolding plot a crazy-quilt conspiracy that gets more flamboyantly, hilariously preposterous by the minute.

You can’t help admiring the self-indulgent audacity ... except, well, too much rapidly becomes way too much. The stoner somnambulance through which every character delivers his lines becomes trés tedious, and a tedious film wears out its welcome long before the clock winds down on its 148-minute running time.

Anderson, it should be noted, never makes short films. He should consider doing so.

Pynchon’s 2009 novel exists in the same seemingly random, psychedelic fever that was typical of Richard Brautigan’s work in the 1960s and ’70s. If so-called “free jazz” is music without melody, then Brautigan’s prose was words without context: sentences strung together solely to befuddle and amuse. Brautigan was adored by the counter-counter set, who no doubt found his books far more compelling when read aloud under the influence of LSD.

Inherent Vice is similarly haphazard, with bizarre characters wandering into our protagonist’s landscape like the pink elephants that haunt somebody enduring delirium tremens. We must consider Pynchon’s history: As we’re reminded in a delightful December analysis in the Los Angeles Times, Pynchon’s third novel, 1973’s Gravity’s Rainbow, won the National Book Award ... “and caused the Pulitzer Committee to cancel that year’s fiction prize after it found the book ‘unreadable’ and ‘obscene.’ ”

Inherent Vice is somewhat more coherent, but that’s not saying much. Indeed, it could be argued that the entire story is a marijuana-induced nightmare experienced by main character Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix): In other words, nothing that we see is real. The film dares us to imagine this from the very first scene, as Doc views the unexpected arrival of former girlfriend Shasta Fay (Katherine Wilson) with surprise, and she murmurs, almost to herself, “Thinks he’s hallucinating.”

That notion likely will make the film work better for some viewers, but it’s too easy an explanation. More complicated is the possibility that some of what we see is real ... and some isn’t.

I’ve serious doubts, for example, about the actual existence of Sortilège (Joanna Newsom), who both narrates this saga — providing indispensable linking commentary that helps us over the rough spots — and serves as Doc’s sounding board. Eventually, it seems odd that nobody else seems to interact with Sortilège, suggesting that she’s the personification of Doc arguing with himself.

Perhaps.

Guardians of the Galaxy: Droll sci-fi hijinks

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for intense sci-fi action and violence, and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.1.14

Call this one Marvel Lite.

The newest chapter in this comics-to-film universe has the playful atmosphere of Josh Whedon’s Firefly or George Lucas’ Star Wars saga, complete with a group of rag-tag sorta-heroes led by a tousled, good ol’ boy who feels like a blend between Han Solo and Indiana Jones. Although Earth-based to one significant degree, most of the action takes place in a galaxy far, far away, with a looming threat to an entire planet and its sizable population.

When it comes time to bust out of a celestial prison, our misfit heroes — clockwise from top
left, Quill (Chris Pratt), Groot, Drax (Dave Bautista), Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Rocket
Raccoon — reluctantly set aside interpersonal squabbles in order to work together. Note,
however, that working together successfully is an entirely different matter...

But the danger lies not from a Death Star-like weapon, but instead from a supremely powerful alien entity known only as Thanos, who likely will be watching next summer, when Iron Man, Captain America and the rest of the Avengers battle a Big Bad dubbed Ultron.

Meanwhile, the formidable Thanos serves here as puppet master, sending malevolent minions to do his bidding. Which they do, with cheerfully evil glee.

But that’s getting ahead of things; we first must submit to necessary back-story courtesy of scripters James Gunn (who also directs) and Nicole Perlman, who have a good sense of the scruffy, well-worn universe concocted in the 2008 comic book series by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning. Gunn and Perlman haven’t used quite all of the characters employed by Abnett and Lanning in their misfit not-quite-a-team, but the quintet on hand here certainly satisfies.

Things begin with Earth-born Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), whose presence in these distant reaches of the universe remains a mystery for another time (and the obligatory sequel). Quill, a smuggler and thief, conducts his heists while hoppin’ and boppin’ to a carefully preserved mix tape of “awesome hits” made by his mother, back before she died, and played on his carefully preserved Walkman. (Cue the first of this soundtrack’s many 1970s and ’80s rockers and power anthems. You’ll want the soundtrack.)

Quill’s current contract takes him to the dead and deserted planet of Morag, where he finds a strange metal orb also coveted by Korath (Djimon Hounsou), an associate of Ronan (Lee Pace), hired by the aforementioned Thanos. The fast-talking Quill manages to escape with his prize, only to irritate both his own boss — the blue-skinned Yondu Udonta (Michael Rooker) — and the green-skinned assassin Gamora (Zoe Saldana), another of Ronan’s emissaries, who tries to snatch the orb herself.

This skirmish takes place on the sumptuous, impeccably civilized world of Xandar, where bounty hunters Rocket and Groot are just as eager to catch Quill and collect the reward on his head. Unfortunately, the escalating fracas results in all four being arrested and sent to a massive space prison known as the Kyln.

Relations between our protagonists are tense at best. The hot-tempered Rocket — a genetically altered, cybernetically enhanced talking raccoon — wants nothing to do with these two-legged beings, unless a reward is involved; Quill just wants to escape with the orb, while Gamora has her own plans for that same device. Worse yet, The Kyln’s many prisoners include Drax (wrestling star Dave Bautista), a quiet but massive brute who blames Ronan for the death of his wife and child, and therefore yearns to rip Gamora to shreds, simply for being in the villain’s employ.

Ah, but is she actually in Ronan’s service? In truth, Gamora may have redemptive plans of her own.

The Wolfman: Bad Hair Day

The Wolfman (2010) • View trailer for The Wolfman
Three stars (out of five). Rating: R, for violence and gobs o' gore
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.18.10
Buy DVD: The Wolfman • Buy Blu-Ray: The Wolfman (2-Disc Unrated Director's Cut + Digital Copy) [Blu-ray]


Director Joe Johnston deserves credit, in his muscular remake of The Wolfman, for resurrecting the tone and atmosphere of the classic 1930s and '40s Universal Studios monster movies: the late-19th century setting; the foreboding, fog-enshrouded English moors and crumbling mansions; the superstitious townsfolk determined to blame traveling gypsies for the ferocious beast suddenly in their midst.

The film also is well cast, with Benicio Del Toro, Emily Blunt and Anthony Hopkins looking and sounding as if they belong in this time and place. (Too many Hollywood flavors-of-the-moment fail to shake their 21st century "presence" when placed in a period drama.)

Despite knowing of the curse that turns Lawrence Talbot into a raging monster
each full moon, Gwen (Emily Blunt) believes that she can calm him ... a
decision she starts to regret, once the beast starts chasing her across a foggy,
muddy moor. Where's a silver bullet when you need it?

And I smiled appreciatively when Johnston and his two writers — Andrew Kevin Walker and David Self, working from Curt Siodmak's original 1941 screenplay — opened their film with the classic Wolfman mantra:

Even a man who is pure in heart


And says his prayers by night


May become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms


And the autumn moon is bright.

You just don't find moody curses like that these days.

Alas, production values and savvy casting do not a film make, and after a solid beginning Johnston's take on The Wolfman turns silly and devolves into a gore-laden bloodbath. Some directors simply haven't learned the lesson: If they wish their films to be taken seriously, they can't pelt the audience with the eviscerated limbs, dangling intestines and decapitations that are standard fare in the Friday the 13th franchise or Rob Zombie's blood-spattered remakes of the Halloween series.

It's always the story, stupid ... and this one turns into a stupid story.

More crucially, though, the 1941 film's all-important dramatic heft is absent. Lawrence Talbot is one of cinema's great tragic figures: a good man fully aware that he becomes an uncontrollable monster one night each month, but who lacks the strength the end his own life and stop the carnage. Lon Chaney Jr., back in the day, made Talbot deeply conflicted and heart-breaking: a tortured soul with whom we identified quite strongly.

We never, ever stopped feeling sorry for him.