Here’s the September/October roundup, in alphabetical order.

Assault on Precinct 13 (1976)

written and directed by John Carpenter

Filmmaker John Carpenter‘s second feature Assault on Precinct 13 may have started life as a simple low-budget exploitation flick, but damn if it didn’t become much more than that. A police officer (Austin Stoker), assigned to supervise a Los Angeles precinct for one night before it’s decommissioned, has to team up with a convict (Darwin Joston) when a brutal gang attacks the building. This is the first of several Carpenter films to explore one of his favorite themes: A group of isolated people facing an unrelenting antagonist (see 1982’s The Thing, and 1987’s Prince of Darkness, among others). His talent for building tension was evident from the start – the camera framing, deliberate editing, and pulsating music (his own) would come back with a vengeance in Halloween (1978). Like his best films, it’s also dryly funny (“Got a smoke?“). And while the criminals are no more than cartoons, the film’s most shocking scene – the graphic shooting of a little girl (Kim Richards) in the chest – is as audacious as it is essential, establishing the bad guys as a force that will stop at nothing. Assault on Precinct 13 is vintage Carpenter and a must for any action thriller fan.

Rating: ***½ 

The Fury (1978)

written by John Farris, based on his novel

directed by Brian De Palma

Mental powers are awesome. Who wouldn’t want to have them? You can use them to fight bullies (1975’s Escape to Witch Mountain ), evade stormtroopers (1977’s Star Wars), and even, um, make someone’s head explode (I’m still scarred by 1981’s Scanners, but that’s a post for another time). Filmmaker Brian De Palma followed Carrie (1976) with The Fury, a similarly-themed horror movie about two teenagers (Amy Irving and Andrew Stevens) trying to control their unique talents. I’m not sure it makes a lot of sense, and some of it is downright silly, like the unnecessary shots of Kirk Douglas walking around shirtless and John Cassavetes hamming it up as the head of a covert government agency. But De Palma’s masterful staging and John Williams’ dramatic score keep it interesting. The insane final five minutes alone are worth the price of admission.

Rating: **½ 

El hoyo (The Platform – 2019)

written by David Desola and Pedro Rivero

from a story by David Desola

directed by Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia

Early on in the Spanish sci-fi/horror flick El hoyo (English title: The Platform), Trimagasi (Zorion Eguileor), a prisoner in a futuristic multi-level building, says there are three types of people: The ones above, the ones below, and the ones who fall. This is objectively true in the film, but it’s also a clear reference to life itself, immediately establishing El hoyo‘s moral inclinations. The movie’s big metaphor– a platform filled with food descends every day to each floor; those at the top gorge themselves while the ones at the bottom go hungry – is a bit obvious, but writers David Desola and Pedro Rivero and director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia smartly mix action and existential dread in inventive, unexpected ways.

Rating: ***

The Fugitive (1993)

written by Jeb Stuart and David Twohy

from a story by David Twohy

based on the TV series created by Roy Huggins

directed by Andrew Davis

Back in 1993, The Fugitive was the perfect model for what a contemporary action thriller could be. Thirty years later, it still pretty much is. Harrison Ford plays Richard Kimble, a doctor framed for the murder of his wife. He escapes and sets out to prove his innocence, but is relentlessly pursued by a dogged US Marshal (Tommy Lee Jones, pushing the histrionics). The film is exciting without becoming unbelievable (well, maybe Kimble surviving that jump into the dam is a bit impossible) and Ford anchors it with his patented ordinary-man-in-a-dangerous-situation decency. Three decades on, The Fugitive keeps on running.

Rating: ***

The Hunted (2003)

written by David Griffiths, Peter Griffiths, and Art Monterastelli

directed by William Friedkin

Since his passing a couple of months ago, I’ve been on a bit of a William Friedkin binge, talking to my friends about his awesome movie trifecta (1971’s The French Connection, 1973’s The Exorcist (1973), and 1977’s Sorcerer), listening to Marc Maron’s excellent interview with the filmmaker, and more. That is why I decided to revisit the director’s 2003 outing The Hunted, in which an unstable vet (Benicio del Toro) kills a couple of hunters in the woods and his former military trainer (Tommy Lee Jones) is called in to give pursuit. While this is arguably the best film of Friedkin’s fifteen-year slump that started with The Guardian (1990), that’s not saying much. Formulaic, unfocused, and self-serious, The Hunted will only make you think of better chase thrillers like The Fugitive above (and hey, Jones is in it).

Rating: **

Inferno (2016)

written by David Koepp

based on the novel by Dan Brown

directed by Ron Howard

Inferno is the third film adaptation to feature novelist Dan Brown’s history professor/symbologist/part-time sleuth Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks). I didn’t particularly like the first two, The Da Vinci Code (2006) and Angels & Demons (2009), and I didn’t particularly like this one either, a confusing thriller in which Langdon battles amnesia, escapes from assassins, and looks for clues to the whereabouts of a deadly virus named Inferno (it’s a reference to Dante’s poem of the same name). One almost wishes Nicolas Cage would show up as Dante himself, laughing hysterically, if only to liven things up a little. Yawn.

Rating: **

The Many Saints of Newark (2021)

written by David Chase and Lawrence Konner

based on The Sopranos TV show by David Chase

directed by Alan Taylor

Prequels are notoriously hard to pull off. Not only do they need to stand on their own, they somehow must build a cohesive bridge to the original content that inspired them. It took the Star Wars saga three crappy movies – The Phantom Menace (1999), Attack of the Clones (2002), and Revenge of the Sith (2005) – before they could figure out how to do a truly great one, Rogue One (2016). Similarly, the X-Men series treated us to the steaming bowl of caca that is X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), but thankfully followed it with the solid X-Men: First Class (2011). The Many Saints of Newark, the unnecessary prequel to The Sopranos (1999-2007), was probably a bad idea from the start. Going back to Tony Soprano’s teenage years, the film spends way too much time focusing on Tony’s mentor, gangster Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), rather than on Tony himself. And while it may be amusing to see younger versions of the show’s characters (Silvio, Pussy, Junior, Livia, etc.), did we really need to? Contributing little to the mighty series that inspired it, The Many Saints of Newark is a tepid origin story. Fuhgeddaboudit.

Rating: **

Méandre (Meander – 2020)

written and directed by Mathieu Turi

In Méandre (English title: Meander), a woman (Gaia Weiss) wakes up in a small room with a device attached to her wrist. A door opens and she crawls into a tunnel. This leads to other tunnels, filled with booby traps (fire, acid, moving platforms) in the style of other “choose wisely or die” movies such as Cube (1997) and Escape Room (2019). The first half of this French sci-fi/horror pic is fairly engaging, but the lack of other characters makes it feel repetitive, and the ambiguous reveal – it’s all some sort of “test” devised by aliens – left me cold. Méandre is one, um, meandering affair.

Rating: **

The Rental (2020)

written by Dave Franco and Joe Swanberg

from a story by Dave Franco, Joe Swanberg, and Mike Demski

directed by Dave Franco

Imagine renting a house for the weekend only to realize there are cameras inside and someone is watching you? This is the Airbnb nightmare that two couples find themselves in after they arrive at a remote cliffside mansion. Could’ve made for a nifty little horror flick, yet The Rental tries to be too many things – a character drama about an unlikable quartet of characters; a thriller in which someone gets accidentally killed; a slasher with a masked killer on the loose – and it’s not very convincing at any of them.

Rating: **

Carlos I. Cuevas