Last Days

By Anderson Jones

There's not a single scene of anyone shooting up in Last Days, which director Gus Van Sant calls fictional, but is really a thinly veiled look at the last, tortured days of Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain. Still the malaise and dinginess of heroin stains every frame of celluloid. In a big, empty, damp Seattle mansion, Days' characters (Lukas Haas, Asia Argento, and Harmony Korine among them) slouch, make-out, and drag their feet across hardwood floors. Meanwhile, Michael Pitt's mumbled, fumbled, haggard performance (although his perfectly eerie wardrobe could have come direct from Cobain's closet) seems a touch deranged, but when he suddenly (loudly) plucks out a rocker's dirge on an electric guitar, it's so eloquent and so unnerving that he's clearly flirting with some kind of genius -- not unlike his character's inspiration, perhaps. It's unclear why Van Sant, a longtime Seattle resident, and once a daring, original voice in independent film before it was cool (My Own Private Idaho), has decided to revisit (and recreate) real-events with his still keen eye. But this new vein of work surely began with 2002's Gerry (a fascinatingly boring examination of a friendship coming to an end in the middle of nowhere) where events seem to, well, ooze together instead of happening. Like last year's Elephant, a meditation on Columbine, Days has a creepy, random, voyeuristic feel. When Haas begins foreplay with a another boy in an upstairs bedroom, the camera is perched just a tad behind the headboard and doesn't move. We feel at once titillated and naughty. Scenes unfold in a loosely linear way -- they are only connected by our hazy recollections of how things went down more than 10 years ago: Kurt, or in this case, Blake, escapes the asylum, wanders home, gets fucked-up, avoids his friends, record label, band mates, and pushy girlfriend, then shoots himself in the greenhouse with a shotgun. But Days does literally fill in the blanks. And even if the complete picture exists only in Van Sant's head, it's no less harrowing or tragic as the one we saw with our own mind's eye the first time around.

The Devil's Rejects

By Michael Wood

Rob Zombie's latest horror-thriller-comedy Ô70s-set road movie looks like a tried and true sample of that ultra-violent era in cinema -- and that's a compliment. There is a rock Ôn' roll mentality to the violence in The Devil's Rejects and the spaghetti western style mixes disturbingly well with its twisted sense of humor and the requisite T & A amidst the carnage. Rejects is reminiscent of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with a dash of Deliverance, and even a good measure of Easy Rider.

Heading the cast and reprising their roles from Zombie's first fright flick (House of 1000 Corpses) are Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, and Sheri Moon Zombie as Captain Spaulding, Otis, and Baby respectively. As members of the Firefly family, their characters are less cartoonish here and a hundred times more frightening. Get past the idea that Zombie's real-life wife is simply too hot to be a member of this beauty and hygiene-challenged clan of demented devil's rejects, and you can go along for the wild ride with little regret.

It all begins with a gunfight at the Firefly ranch where Sheriff Wydell (William Forsythe) and his men stage a raid to shoot and smoke out the sadistic Firefly family once and for all. The attack sends the rejects on the run -- to nowhere in particular -- but it gives them good cause to kill anyone who they happen across. It may be paper thin on plot, but Rejects is high on horrifying. And scariest of all is the fact that you might find yourself rooting for the ruthless and dysfunctional Firefly family to escape the vigilante sheriff.

Without MTV-style cuts or loud booms in the Dolby to jolt the audience, Rejects scares for real -- psychological, under-the-skin, in-the-brain scary. It's also in-your-face, disturbing and unapologetic, so be forewarned. There's also a brilliant little bit where Zombie brings an oafish movie critic into the mix as the police investigate matters. Poke fun at us he does, but Zombie has the last laugh because while he knows many Roepers and Eberts might dismiss Rejects as revolting, appalling, and ultra-violent (it's all three), it's also so much better than so many so-called horror films or thrillers today. It's about time a horror film came out that had the balls to actually be horrifying. Zombie's got the balls and so does Rejects.

Fantastic Four

By Matt Dalton

The only positive thing I have to say about Fantastic Four is it's slightly better than last year's Catwoman. A lame-brained and utterly unconvincing adaptation of one of the longest-running comic book series in America, Fantastic Four is obviously a soulless ploy by studio executives to lure teenaged boys into theaters, but based on the film's virtual lack of excitement and action, the fanboys will be leaving unhappy and flocking back to the much superior Batman Begins.

The film centers on a group of astronaut scientists who are exposed to a radioactive space cloud and are transformed into super-humans once back on Earth. These scientists include Dr. Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd), his ex-girlfriend and all-around babe, Susan Storm (Jessica Alba), her obnoxious, Jackass-ish brother, Johnny Storm (Chris Evans), mechanic Ben Grimm (Michael Chiklis), and billionaire Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon).

Their powers range from stretching to inhuman lengths to invisibility, but their personalities are one that is idiotic -- it's hard to get worked up over a bunch of one-dimensional characters who don't seem smart enough to screw in a light bulb let alone create a machine that will reverse their powers. And when Doom begins to mutate into a half-man, half-metallic evil-doer, you have to wonder why his world-domination aspirations aren't bigger than simply dispatching the Fantastic Four, all of whom pose absolutely no threat to him or anyone else.

Directed by Tim Story (the filmmaker responsible for such other masterpieces as Barbershop and Taxi), Fantastic Four limps from one inane set piece to the next, many of which overflow with cheesy, almost transparent special F/X and an overbearing sense that Story, along with screenwriters Michael France and Mark Frost, have almost no physical sense of who Jack Kirby's and Stan Lee's original comic characters are. And after such recent and wonderful comic book films like Spider-Man 2 and X-Men United, that is just depressing.