THE BAXTER (2005) – coming out in the summer of THE WEDDING CRASHERS probably didn’t help Michael Showalter’s slight, romantic comedy and that’s a shame. Showalter’s directorial debut imported the gang from TV sketch comedy “The State” as well as many of the folks involved in WET, HOT AMERICAN SUMMER and it’s a charming, mild-mannered labor of love. The words “charming” and “mild-mannered” aren’t generally used as high praise, but Mr. Showalter and Co. have made a movie that embraces both of those traits with a near-religious zeal and turns them into superlatives. The Baxter of the title is the guy in rom coms who doesn’t get the girl, the one who isn’t passionate about anything, the guy who the woman almost settles for before her true love shows up at the wedding and gives a passionate speech that saves her from walking up the aisle with this piece of dry, human toast. It doesn’t generate constant laughs, but when they do come they’re surprising, original and never cheap. This is fairy tale set in a storybook New York, where everyone speaks in complete sentences and with a supernatural precision that precludes contractions. It’s also a movie about WASPs. From their fussy table settings, to their blah chic clothes, their ridiculous pronunciation of exotic locales, and their withered senses of humor this is a movie that does for the frozen Anglo-Saxon souls of the Northeast what “Annie Hall” did for the Jews. Being a romantic comedy, there’s a final chase (this one on foot from Brooklyn to Washington Heights, via Chinatown – roughly the distance of a marathon), a confession of feelings, and a happy ending, but stick around for the end credits where a final footnote reveals the eternal injustice of being a Baxter. Wherever there are two lovers, there’s always a guy who doesn’t get the girl. And that’s Mr. Showalter’s message: love hurts, but you don’t have to be so rude about it.

CRANK (2006) – written in four and a half days by two camera operators turned director, CRANK was much maligned by sniffy, humorless critics with dust for blood on its release. Problem is, it’s not an action movie (very little onscreen fighting) and it’s not a thriller (nothing very thrilling about Jason Statham), it’s a comedy. And it’s a great, raucous crowd-pleasing one that likes punching people in the mouth. The kind of movie that absolutely requires a six-pack, this story of a hitman who has to keep his adrenaline pumping or he’ll die from a toxin that’s been injected into his system starts out with four on the floor and keeps the needle in the red all the way through the closing credits. It’s go-for-broke b-list entertainment at its best, full of the kind of twitchy camera tricks that would drive you crazy if it took itself seriously for a minute. Instead, it’s a pulpy comic book of a movie with unexpected smarts in strange little places. If you invite your friends over, supply them with plenty of beer and put this movie on and you all don’t have a blast then group suicide is highly recommended because life obviously holds no more joy for you.

DARKON (2007) - There is great upheaval in the realm. The peoples of Darkon grow weary of war. To stop the relentless spread of the cruel Mordomian Empire, Bannor of Laconia faces the armies of Keldar on the field of battle. The air trembles with the clash of arms. Challenges are issued. Treachery is done. And there will be duct tape. Lots of duct tape. This excruciatingly intimate documentary about LARP-ers (Google it!) looks like it was shot through a dirty windshield, which is too bad because it’s full of majestic helicopter and crane shots, kinetic tracking shots and a symphonic soundtrack, all of it intended to make you as interested in the outcome of the battle between Mordom and Laconia (which is mostly fought on Sunday mornings on soccer fields) as you were when Frodo went to try to get rid of that nasty ring. And it works. The directors (it took two of them, for some reason) manage to keep the personal drama high while also making the game-playing interesting and the LARP-ers approach their interviews with the kind of unguarded honesty that’s downright brutal in its disregard for the lines of personal revelation that most of us would never dream of crossing. When an overweight kid stares into the camera and says “I hope that the game gives me the confidence to one day maybe, you know, go up and start talking to...*gulp*...a girl,” he’s being braver than a warrior leading a charge into a battle he knows he cannot win.
(Will have a TV premiere on November 14 on the IFC Channel)

THE DISAPPOINTMENT OR THE FORCE OF CREDULITY (2007) – like going through a junk pile of DVDs and coming across an early work by Errol Morris or Ross McElwee, THE DISAPPOINTMENT is that much more amazing because it’s so unknown. A documentary about an obsessive treasure hunter made by his son, this personal history maps a psychic landscape that’s been lost. A cave rumored to hold buried treasure. A farm owned by an early American anarchist whose diaries are missing. A mysterious rock carving. A fraudulent Indian artifact. THE DISAPPOINTMENT uses these four elements to tell an all-American story about napalm, spirit possession, Korea, Vietnam, Indian massacres, early American opera, lynching, fanatical obsessions, 200 tons of dirt and the way mothers try to protect their families from wounds that never heal. There are some serious missteps on display (not the least of which is the narrator) but this is so deeply felt and the connections it makes are so surreal and inevitable that you can’t help but call it something of a small, strange masterpiece.
(Playing at the Pioneer Two Boots Theater in NYC this October)

ETERNAL (2004) - this scrumptiously trashy flick is dominated by Elizabeth Kane, a straight-to-video looking blond who is secretly the immortal 17th Century Hungarian serial killer, Erszebet Bathory, who must bathe regularly in the blood of young ladies to keep her eternal youth. Filling up her blood bath falls on the shoulders of her hench-wench, Irina, but as the old saying goes: be careful who you kill in your quest for eternal life. Ms. Kane winds up bathing in the remains of one Ms. Pope, wife of Vice Detective Raymond Pope (Canadian kick boxer, Conrad Pla) whose brash manner, and suspiciously geometric five o’clock shadow make him catnip for the ladies. Berserk details abound, like Irina’s hobby of driving around town and biting young boys to death when she’s not stomping her foot and petulantly whining “When do I get to kill girls?” No one seems to notice the bodies piling up all over Quebec, probably because this is Canada: land of medical marijuana, same-sex marriage and general moral turpitude. Later an Italian police officer who strongly resembles Chef Boyardee guides Det. Pope to a decadent Venetian orgy that looks like a remaindered Cirque du Soleil act. The two directors (it took two!) never once catch on to how tacky this all is and god bless ‘em for it. In their ignorance, they have created a milestone in Canadian film: the first lesbian vampire erotic thriller from Quebec.

FRANKENFISH (2004) – the land of DTV horror is a scary place, far scarier than the rubber monsters, bad CGI and sub-porno acting that fills the running time of these irredeemable crap carnivals. But every now and then one very special flick floats to the surface of this swamp of stupidity like a bloated, drowned body full of gas, and FRANKENFISH is one of those. 2004 was the year of the snakehead fish from China that everyone thought would devour us all in our sleep and our little dogs too, and FRANKENFISH exploited that fear the way a St. Louis pimp works his girls. China Chow and Tory Kittles go deep into the Louisiana bayou to destroy giant snakehead fish assisted by a gallery of quirky locals living on houseboats. They are frustrated in their mission by the enormous size and utter viciousness of the snakeheads, unscrupulous drug dealers (is there any other kind?), the flammability of boats in general and bizarre incidents that generate lines like, “The house shot her? This is INSANE!” Yes, it is. It’s the only Sci Fi Network movie where you don’t have to rinse out your mouth with kerosene afterwards to get rid of the aftertaste.

HEART OF THE GAME (2006) – a cleansing shower for your soul disguised as a documentary about a girls’ basketball team, this movie will drain your tear ducts and clamp jumper cables to your heart. Full of teen pregnancies, lawsuits, revoked scholarships, vicious rivalries and rape, by the time it’s over you have to stare hard in the mirror and ask yourself: do you have the iron-hard ethics and moral character of this flick’s pizza-faced, foghorn-voiced sixteen year old girls? The answer is probably “no.”

IOWA (2006) – this crystal meth scare screed about kids hooked on the Devil’s Dandruff was the worst movie of 2006, and consequently far more entertaining than a lot of the benign timewasters that clogged the multiplexes. A modern day “Reefer Madness” made with boneheaded sincerity, its characters castrate one another with liquid nitrogen and fish dead babies out of toilets in a video version of a Jack Chick comic book tract, lacking only a concluding shot of Satan tormenting their souls in Hell and bellowing “Haw Haw!”

LEAGUE OF ORDINARY GENTLEMEN (2004) - Bowling: the sport of last resort. An athletic event where a pendulous gut doesn’t eliminate you as a contender and where the best seats in the house are at the bar. When the PBA imploded in 1997, it threw its champions into disarray and poverty but when it was resurrected in 2000 by some ex-Microsoft employees those 80’s dinosaurs came out of their caves to bowl for glory one last time. Some don’t have the right stuff anymore, some collapse under the weight of their emotional baggage, and some are heroes. Bowlers play on a team of one, and one is the loneliest number. Whether we’re watching bowler Steve Miller peck at a gourmet meal in his surgically sterile apartment, or we’re seeing disgraced Wayne Webb, out of time and out of talent, lugging his balls off into the night, we’re constantly reminded that he who bowls, bowls alone.

LITTLE FISH (2005) – “Lord of the Rings” King and Queen of Elf-land (Hugo Weaving and Cate Blanchett) retire to a sun-scorched Australian suburban hell in this pop art junkie drama. It’s usually best to steer clear of movies where actors play smack addicts, but these two justify their big paychecks as tormented, scarred souls trying to find some peace from the screaming junk monkeys on their backs. Sam Neill turns in a quiet, cameo performance as a truly menacing crime lord and also: Dustin Nguyen! It’s a straight-up shot of Aussie drama that unexpectedly, in its own oblique way, rocks.

OFF THE BLACK (2006) – never underestimate the power of Daddy. From the first sound movie, THE JAZZ SINGER, to Isabella Rossellini’s MY FATHER IS 100 YEARS OLD, father love has made more grown men cry than the Mets. Asking a man to review OFF THE BLACK is about as fair as asking Superman to taste test Kryptonite: it’s impossible to be objective because it will destroy you. Nick Nolte, sounding like he’s been marinated in lung cancer, plays an alcoholic little league umpire who takes on a troubled kid as his surrogate son. It’s not a good movie, but then again neither is “Steel Magnolias” and that made millions sob into their Kleenex. This is “Beaches” for men, a perfect testosterone tearjerker.

PRIVATE (2004) – the ultimate haunted house movie. A Palestinian family living outside one of the settlements has its home occupied by the Israeli Army. The proud, upper middle class parents refuse to abandon the place they’ve worked so hard to build and so the soldiers take the upstairs and the family are confined downstairs, locked in the living room every night for “their protection.” The first half of this flick is shrill anti-Israeli propaganda, the harrowing conclusion features a blast of Roger Waters music that’ll make even a true fan cringe, and it’s shot on video with grain so heavy that at times it looks like a bean mosaic rather than photography. That said, the second half of this movie has scenes of such nerve-wracking intensity that I would rather pick my way through a minefield than watch them again. Horror film directors should take note of just how much tension you can wring out of a family, a house and some soldiers.

REQUIEM (2006) - this German arthouse flick is best viewed cold - the less you know the stronger and stranger it becomes. But for those who like their movies unsurprising, read on. “The Exorcist” stripped of special effects and transformed into something harrowing, “Requiem” is a demonic possession flick that’s as claustrophobic and suffocating as damp wool. Excise the music, visual flash and ham-handed attempts at suspense from the horror movie and what remains is a film built in a monk’s cell: sparse and spare but possessing a near-spiritual attention to emotions. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a Zen garden.

ROLL BOUNCE (2005) - whether it’s Patrick Swayze wielding a whip in “Skatetown USA”, Olivia Newton John roller skating to Mt. Olympus in “Xanadu” or Linda Blair shaking her nylon-covered thing in “Roller Boogie”, roller disco movies are not kind to careers. So it’s with great awe that one realizes that Bow Wow (the artist formerly known as Li’l Bow Wow) has chosen to make his first teen movie a roller disco flick. Disco was not only dead, but had decayed into dust, before Bow Wow was even a gleam in his Daddy’s eye, yet here he is headlining this shaggy slice of 70’s summer loving. When you realize that the director is Malcolm D. Lee, the auteur behind “Undercover Brother”, you expect that Bow Wow can wave his career bye bye. But with a wall-to-wall disco soundtrack, a funk-tastic sense of style, and actors totally committed to rocking the Jordache jeans, Farrah flips and other fashion disasters of the era, you can’t hate on this movie. It’s too sweet.

SECUESTRO EXPRESS (2005) – this is a Venezuelan film about a kidnapping and you don’t watch it: you’re assaulted by it. Using the logic that the audience should be in the characters’ shoes, you’re so pulverized, battered, slammed, screamed at and threatened by the camera that when the credits finally roll it’s a genuine relief to find that you’re still in your seat in the theater and not in the trunk of someone’s car. Jonathan Jakubowicz shot his film on digital video and it looks like vacation footage from a summer trip to hell. Faces leer, stretch and distort, lighting comes in different shades of toxic yellow, green and red, and I have a strong suspicion that the cameraman is a speed freak. And if this doesn’t give you your fix of outrageous South American crime, then check out the documentary, FAVELA RISING, shot in the same Rio slums as CITY OF GOD. Filmed on blown-out digital video, you’re dropped right in the middle of police raids and drug deals, you see garbage choked streets, crumbling apartment houses crammed on top of one another like rotting teeth in the devil’s mouth, machine guns and pistols being casually brandished in broad daylight, cops taking bribes on camera and lifeless bodies sprawled across doorways. By the end of the documentary’s first, grueling half hour your moral faculties are so offended that they’ve blown a fuse.

TORO NEGRO (2005) - out in rural Mexico, away from the posh crowds and the slick agents and publicists, there’s a bullfighting circuit where dirt-poor matadors in threadbare costumes are worked to the bone by managers who buy them in bulk and throw them away like used condoms. This documentary is ostensibly about Fernando, one of these hand-to-mouth matadors, who drinks to find the courage to get in the ring, gets injured in the ring because he’s drunk, then drinks even more to numb the pain of his injuries before the next bullfight. But it’s really a sobering lesson in poverty that teaches us that there is no bottom. There’s always farther you can fall.

THE WICKER MAN (2006) – yes, it’s as good as the YouTube clips. Better, actually. While Tim Burton’s PLANET OF THE APES remake should inspire a chain of theme restaurants serving gorilla burgers, THE WICKER MAN should inspire producers to reunite their creative team and attempt even grander things: an I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE remake starring Nic Cage? If it’s a slab of dumbsteak this bloody ridiculous then I’m there.

By Grady Hendrix