MANDY...

Nicolas Cage has given up. That's how it seems in Mandy, a sluggish piece of artsy drivel that has him avenging the death of his beloved girlfriend  after she's killed by an evil cult leader. Cage, who has become known for his over the top performances, doesn't even seem to be having fun.

There's a scene at the end where Cage, covered in blood so all we can see are the whites of his eyes, grins insanely into the camera. It's as if he's saying, Look what happened to me. I was supposed to be the great actor of my generation, not Sean Penn or Daniel Day-Lewis. But here I am in this piece of crap...

Gushers of blood spewing from mouths, giant phallic symbols used as weapons, a chainsaw fight, and several scenes of cartoonish violence, all contribute to this mindless dreck.

Viewers know they're in trouble early when Cage has a scene with his beloved Mandy (Andrea Riseborough). They're lying together after, we assume, a bit of the old in and out. "What's your favorite planet?" he asks. She tells him Jupiter, and explains that the storms on the planet's surface could swallow up Earth. "That's wild," Cage says. And they gaze into each other's eyes, as if their love connection is unbreakable. Ugh.

The watered down Death Wish plot has the idyllic couple - they live together in a mansion in the woods (Did they build it? Are they squatters?) - being ambushed and taken away by a religious sect. The Charles Mansonish leader, an androgynous rock star wannabe named Jeremiah (Linus Roache), wants Mandy for his own puzzling needs. He even conjures a trio of demons to help with the abduction.

Of course, the idea of a religious cult being able to whip up demons has potential, and the demons are plenty hideous - one of them has a penis that turns into a big sword - but in this movie the demons aren't especially effective. And neither, apparently, is Jeremiah. When he can't get aroused during some weird sex ritual, Mandy crosses a line by laughing at him. The lesson we learn here is to never mock a cult leader. Jeremiah responds by burning her alive in front of Cage.

Tied up in barbed wire - A Christlike image, I suppose - Cage manages to escape and hunt down the cult members. To carry out the mission, he arms himself with a high powered bow and arrow, and forges a giant battle ax that looks like the grill off an old Chevy.

A gun might have been better, and certainly lighter to carry, but writer/director Panos Cosmatos obviously wanted to set Cage loose like a Norse berserker.

The movie is visually daring  - Cosmatos and cinematographer Benjamin Loeb have created something that looks like an old issue of Heavy Metal come to life, with nods to fantasy artists  like Frank Frazetta and Boris Vellejo - but Cosmatos' is clueless about action and narrative; he slows everything down to a crawl. The film's stupor is not helped by the hammering dirges of King Crimson on the soundtrack. Cosmatos may think he's putting viewers into a sort of drug haze, but the effect is more like a long, uncomfortable nap.

Cage, looking burly and grizzled, isn't allowed to act much here. He does a lot of grunting and sneering, though he does have a remarkable scene where he downs a bottle of vodka and wails in sadness at the loss of his love. It looks silly at first - he's in his underwear - but partway through he seems to  tap into something primal; the grief is, for a moment, painfully real. Unfortunately, we never cared much about Mandy, so we're not feeling anything. She was just some dippy woman in a Black Sabbath T-shirt.

On a side note, Mandy is set in 1983. What was Cage doing that year? He was appearing in Valley Girl as an ersatz punk rocker. That was a charming movie. Remember it? Now we get Mandy, a silly thing.

BOOKS: THE OUTSIDER (by Stephen King)

Suffer The Little Children

The Master of Horror Mails Another One In

 By Don Stradley

Stephen King is still at it - his latest horror opus is a 560 pager with references to psychic vampires, Bram Stoker, body snatchers, shape shifters, Edgar Allen Poe, and Mexican superstitions,  not to mention the every day horrors of skin cancer, snake bites, suicide, and the American legal system - but he's lost a bit off his fastball. This isn't a knock on him; like a veteran pitcher, he can still take the mound and get guys out with nothing but junk pitches and guile. In this case, he sets up a plot where a beloved little league coach is arrested for killing and defiling a child, even though there are plenty of witnesses that saw him miles away at the time of the boy's murder. Hell, he's even caught on film at a teacher's conference. Yet, the coach's fingerprints and DNA are all over the murder scene. How could this fellow be in two places at once? That's the premise of The Outsider, a dirge-like police procedural with a few supernatural flourishes. It's not terrible, but King's intriguing set up dissolves into a routine rehash of his favorite tropes; it's old hat. It marches slowly to a dreary, predictable climax. 

Late in The Outsider, we're told: "Reality is thin ice, but most people skate on it their whole lives and never fall through until the very end." In this novel, which seems written with a mini-series in mind, such bromides are dropped by characters with grating  regularity. It's a strange world, we're told over and over again, with all kinds of weird stuff in it. Every character we meet seems to have an eerie story from the past, some unexplained event that still gives them the heebie jeebies. If not, they've seen a weird movie or read a weird story. And of course, there are the skeptics who don't believe such nonsense. Gradually, the non-believers are convinced, and off everyone goes to kill the monster. This is only after a few hundred pages of conversations about DNA samples. King works hard to get his details right, but much of The Outsider reads like a dummy's guide to forensics.

In many ways,  it's the same story King has been writing since The Stand and Salem's Lot and It. There's a creepy villain who does some terrible things, and a bunch of good citizens rally together to track him down. This time, the menace is an otherworldly bogie who can turn itself into anyone, provided it makes some physical contact and draws some blood. He, or it, is a nasty thing, feeding off of pain and sadness, hiding out in caves while it morphs into its next identity. It can project itself into your dreams, or get into your mind, a bit like Freddy Krueger without the lame jokes. He enlists a seedy detective named Jack Hoskins to do his grunt work while he hibernates;  Hoskins is a reasonable version of Renfield doing the bidding of this third rate Dracula wannabe, but it's not enough. The novel is short on chills and long on bum dialog.

King brings back Holly Gibney, a character from his recent novels. She's his Miss Marple, a spinsterish solver of mysteries. Middle-aged, prim, highly medicated, occasionally depressed, Holly appears halfway into the book to assist the band of merry men on the hunt for this evil creature who kills children. She's not King's greatest creation, but her appearance in The Outsider draws attention to the blandness of the other characters. The various Howies and Ralphies who populate the story are interchangeable and forgettable; Holly, at least, has some memorable quirks, whether it's her love of old movies, her loyalty to Walmart, or the way she can make a blackjack out of a sweat sock. From King, one expected more out of these characters and their dark adversary. The good guys sleepily go about their business of finding this demon, and when he's found, he barely puts up a fight. Holly squares off with him at the climax. Yes, scrawny little Holly. It's enough to make you wonder why  King is so smitten with this woman. Is it her underdog quality? Is it her stunted personality? Regardless, not even she can redeem this tired, plodding novel, of which the best writing is reserved for a quick description of one character's sciatic pain, how "it cinched her like a thorny manacle." This bit, which lasts only a few paragraphs, and the poor woman's inability to sleep, was a lot scarier than the stupid spook in the cave. 

TERRIFIER...

With Halloween upon us, you owe it to yourself to meet Art the Clown.

As far as murderous clowns go, Art is sui generis. In Terrifier, the most recent bloodbath from director Damien Leone, Art is on a rampage that rivals his feature debut in All Hallows' Eve (2013). 

Here, Art slashes, chokes, and shoots his way across the splatterzone. He cuts off heads and sets them on fire; he slits a woman in half; he wallows in blood in ways we haven't seen since Herschell Gordon Lewis' Wizard of Gore. 

Yeah, he's a jerk.

Still, his utter remorselessness is what makes him so fascinating. Few maniacs have had so much fun while stomping a victim's face in.

Terrifier, in fact, could've been called Art The Clown Having a Good Time. 

This time, Art wanders into a pizza joint where he sees a couple of young ladies coming home from a costume party. One makes the mistake of taking a selfie with him. She winds up in his warehouse, hanging by the ankles.

The plot? There's not much of one. It's basically about people coming into Art's radar and being destroyed, defiled, and demolished.

Even a seasoned horror buff like me flinches at some of the violence here. But why? Is it because we don't think Art can possibly top himself, and then he does?

It's not that the gore is realistic. At one point Art decapitates a fellow and kicks his head across the floor; the head sounds hollow, like a volleyball. This, perhaps, is the secret to Leone's success. Other directors work hard to capture reality; he makes a case for obvious fakery. I think of the Grand Guignol in Paris during the 1800s. Audiences knew what they were seeing wasn't real, yet they kept that place in business for years.

In Art the Clown, Leone has created an entity of pure meanness. I think the fake heads and unreal blood are acceptable because Art's meanness is so tangible.

What I like best about Art the Clown is that he just merrily trots from one murder to the next. Other filmmakers might try to  give him a backstory, but frankly, I'm tired of hearing how sharks are angry because of global warming, or how the aliens want our DNA because our species might die out. All filmmakers can learn from Leone; just get to the good stuff and let 'er rip. 

Sadly, Leone is less assured when working with conventional plots and dialog. His recent Frankenstein Vs The Mummy was a talky dirge that was overlong by 20 minutes. He's better off in the smash and grab style of his Art the Clown movies. He directs these the way an evil six year-old might direct a film, one horrific tableau after another. 

Beyond the sickening violence, Terrifier benefits from the cinematography of George Steuber, a regular Leone collaborator who gives this movie the sheen of an old amusement park postcard, mingled with a 1970s Italian horror flick. For a movie that looks like it was shot in a bus station toilet, it's surprisingly artful. At times Leone frames Art so lovingly and carefully, you'd think he was Josef von Sternberg working with Marlene Dietrich.

At the center of this grim cartoon is  David Howard Thornton as the clown. He's the second actor to play Art (the character was first played by Mike Gianelli) and he's fine at portraying the clown's  goofy, masturbatory glee. 

Leone also toys with our expectations. At one point a woman caresses the clown's face and says, "Have you never felt a mother's love?" Art begins sucking his thumb and curls into a fetal position. Then he scalps her. With that, Leone gives us a tremendous treat; we are relieved to see Art show vulnerability, and then doubly relieved to see that he's still a monster. 

Leone's movies tend to appear at horror film festivals, and then go straight to DVD. The unbridled sadism is probably too much for mainstream distributors,  which is a shame. Leone has a fine director's eye and he can ratchet up the madness as few directors can.

Still, I don't know how much more Leone can do with Art the Clown. Maybe, after two movies, the character is used up. If so, that's fine. I loved this guy from the moment I saw him. I loved his jaunty little hat, his enormous clown shoes, and his nasty black lips. Mostly, I loved his ruthlessness. With Art, there's  no clowning around.

THE PREDATOR...

At its best, The Predator recalls some of the great sci-fi adventure films of the past.

At its worst, it's just a loud, clunky piece of modern filmmaking, loaded with dumb jokes, dizzying cliffhangers, and mile-high explosions.

This is the sixth entry of a series that began in 1987, and since none of the first five were memorable, this one had  a good chance to stand out. I'm not sure if it's better than the others, but it feels slick and potent; Twentieth Century Fox pounded it down our throats with advertising, so the company obviously hopes to reignite a franchise that never meant much in the first place.

What the series has in its favor is a cool looking monster, a strutting space warrior with a nasty attitude. Yes, his helmet looks like an inverted bedpan, but he's a  tough critter. Sadly, he has to share the screen with a lot of lame humans. 

Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) is a military assassin who encounters a predator during a  maneuver in Mexico. He's promptly sent to a psyche ward (but not before stripping a dead alien's armor off and mailing it home). On the bus to the clinic, he meets a bunch of lovable losers (known as "The Loonies") who will assist him in fending off another round of predators from space. Conveniently, all of the loonies had backgrounds as weapons experts and chopper pilots.

McKenna's son, however, (Jacob Tremblay) inadvertently receives the predator's armor in the mail and turns it into an ersatz Halloween costume. He's a shy little kid, not only autistic but also a genius on many levels. He's the proverbial magic child often found in these movies, and you just know he'll figure deeply in the story.

Soon, another predator is on our planet searching for the first one. Not only is he bigger,  meaner, and uglier than previous predators, but he brought a couple of "space dogs" with him. They look like giant bull mastiffs if designed by H.R. Giger. 

Eventually, the movie is awash with predators, snipers, space dogs, loonies, scientists, and two-faced government agents. The action is bloody, and blindingly fast, but lacks wit and imagination. Men are sliced in half as casually as being punched in the face.

Midway through The Predator  we realize all of the characters have been introduced, the plot has been laid out, and that it's not going to get any better. Your choice is to either walk out, or hang in there and enjoy the noise and spectacle. Maybe you'll like Tom Jane as the loony with Tourettes; he twitches and says a lot of dirty words.

Or you can wait for the Predator. He's not hidden away; he's in many scenes, and at one point he even speaks. It turns out he's collecting human DNA  because he wants to create some kind of predator-human hybrid. There's some babbling about the human race coming to an end because of global warming, but I can't imagine the predators being improved with our puny DNA in their systems.

All I can figure is writer/director Shane Black likes those alien conspiracy programs on the History channel. 

Black acted in the first Predator  31 years ago. He went on to write several successful screenplays, including the first two Lethal Weapon movies. He specializes in a kind of goofy action slapstick that doesn't really fit in a space adventure. It's like smearing relish on a banana split.

Oddly enough, the first half of the movie was surprisingly entertaining. There were visual nods to some great old movies of the 1950s - This Island Earth, Forbidden Planet, and even The Thing - that made me think The Predator might actually succeed. The space ships were lithe and menacing, the crash landings were exciting, and the cinematography by Larry Fong was pristine.Weapons glistened; intestines oozed; the space creatures were breathtaking.

Then it morphed into a generic modern movie where problems are resolved by kickboxing and blowing things up. Even Olivia Munn, who appears as a scientist, becomes an action hero of sorts, leaping around and brawling like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.

We can almost imagine the pitch meeting, with Black telling the Fox executives, "It will be like One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest meets Predator." The execs, after googling One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, gave him the green light, as long as the second half featured a lot of fireballs and exploding nonsense.

THE NUN...

Are nuns scary?

The Nun, which is an offshoot of The Conjuring franchise, wants us to think so. An earlier entry (The Conjuring II)  introduced this character of a menacing nun. She was fine in a cameo, but it's hard to believe anyone thought she deserved her own feature.

The Conjuring movies have good casts and, despite rehashes of effects that seemed lifted from Poltergeist, occasional scary moments. The Nun, however, is all noise, no finesse. 

She doesn't even have a ruler to smack you on the knuckles.

The gist is simple enough. In 1952, a nun commits suicide in a Romanian abbey. A priest who investigates such things, a so-called "miracle hunter," and young Sister Irene, are soon on the way to Romania to look into the matter. Along the way they meet a young local named "Frenchie." He knows the area, and actually saw the dead nun's body swinging from a rope, her face eaten by birds.

The trio spend a lot of time wandering around the abbey in the dark, and are perplexed by the usual haunted house stuff: radios coming on unexpectedly, shadowy figures appearing and disappearing, mysterious bloodstains, that sort of dross.

Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) has yet to take her vows, which makes her seem vulnerable as she nervously explores the old place with a lantern. Meanwhile, the priest (Demian Bicher)   wears a fedora so we think he's an Indiana Jones type, but he's not much of an adventurer. He can't seem to avoid falling into open graves, and he's harboring some guilt feelings after an exorcism gone wrong in his younger days.

As for Frenchie (Jonas Blochet), he seems to be there because the producers thought the film should have a young man in it. For a French-Canadian in 1952, his dialogue and mannerisms are suspiciously modern.

There's a mildly interesting backstory where we learn the abbey was built by a worshiper of Satan, who was  vanquished by members of the Knights Templar (armed, thankfully, with a vial containing the blood of Jesus). Since that time, the evil forces have been kept in check by a team of nuns praying constantly over a crack in the abbey's floor.

Why did a man build an abbey just to raise demonic forces? And once he was killed by the knights, couldn't the place be torn down or blown up? Why keep it standing? Were good abbeys hard to find in those days?

There aren't many answers to be found in The Nun. Just hackneyed special effects, and a lot of hands reaching out to grab people. That's the motif here: hands reaching out of graves, out of mirrors, out of walls, out of closets; hands, hands, hands, everywhere.

The maker of the film, Corin Hardy, seems to have a phobia about being touched.

The rest of the screenplay is bulging with cliches, everything from being buried alive, to snakes, to skeletons, and severed limbs. Ravens, too. Lots of ravens, and nuns babbling in Latin, and ominous choral music.

The most menacing nun, with her cloudy grey eyes and pointed teeth, is creepy enough, but she doesn't have any purpose. She appears to have super powers - she can knock Frenchie halfway to the moon just by hissing at him - yet in her climactic showdown with Sister Irene, who is just a skinny little thing, she struggles.

The problem with so many contemporary, mainstream horror movies is that the filmmakers can't really scare anybody, so they try to blow us away with carnage and windstorms and sinkholes. Despite the sound and fury, and the massive publicity campaign that resulted in a strong opening weekend, The Nun fails as part of The Conjuring series, or as a stand-alone movie.

The Nun also fails in that it's a bit like that older brother who keeps jumping out at you in the dark. There are so many levels of the human mind to tap, but all this movie wants to do is put you in a headlock and give you a noogie.

BLACKkKLANSMAN

I knew what  Blackkklansman was going to be like before I even saw it.

I knew it would be highly stylized, and since it was set in the 1970s, the soundtrack would include plenty of old soul hits. And I knew it would be loaded with stereotypes and cliches. The African Americans would be beautiful and dignified; the Klansmen would be hideous.

That's how it is in Spike Lee's universe. Reality and subtlety have always been sideswiped by a lot of fist pumping and posturing, and Lee's white villains  crumble like the Wicked Witch of the West after Dorothy throws water on her.

But that doesn't mean Lee's movies aren't entertaining. They often have the sweep and grandeur of an old WPA post office mural, and the visceral punch of wartime propaganda posters. 

The new one, based on a supposedly true story, concerns Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), a rookie cop trying to infiltrate a Colorado chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Since Stallworth is black, he enlists the help of Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) a Jewish detective, to actually get up close to the local racists and learn their plans. Zimmerman is game, but he insists his work is merely a job, not a  crusade, as it appears to be for Stallworth.

The highlight of the movie is watching Stallworth and Zimmerman work together as they prepare to get behind KKK lines. As in the best cop dramas, they grow to respect each other and work well together.

Stallworth  even gets chummy with KKK grand dragon David Duke (played with noxious glee by Topher Grace), while Zimmerman adapts a redneck manner, and is soon a card carrying member of America's most notorious hate group.

It's not an easy job, though. One of the local Klansmen is suspicious of Zimmerman from the start. Meanwhile, Stallworth is falling in love with the sassy president of a nearby student union, an Angela Davis wannabe who suspects Stallworth might be a cop. (Or, in the colorful parlance of the day, a "pig.")

This is all based on a memoir published in 2014 by Stallworth, but sometimes it's a bit much to swallow. The episodes depicted in Blackkklansman tie together too neatly, with too many coincidences, too many hairpin escapes.

Lee worked on the adaptation of Stallworth's book with three other screenwriters, and sometimes it all feels too much like an old episode of Starsky & Hutch. Plus, I seriously doubt that every young black person in 1970s Colorado was decked out in formfitting  leather, with perfectly coiffed "naturals." Sorry, I'm not buying it.

Still, the movie has a nice momentum. The Klan members are just menacing enough that we fear Zimmerman will eventually be exposed. A Klansman named Felix, played by Finnish actor Jasper Pääkkönen, has a thousand mile stare that threatens to burn right through Zimmerman's face.

Unfortunately, Lee doesn't reign Pääkkönen in, and the staring grows monotonous. That's the main problem with the movie. The KKK is portrayed as a bunch of cartoon psychos. We know the KKK is a cruel, loveless lot, but did Lee really need to show them sitting around watching D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, practically choking on their own laughter? I doubt the Klan needs old movies as fuel. 

I also question a scene involving Pääkkönen and his wife in bed, giggling like children at the prospect of killing some African Americans. There's no way Stallworth, whose book this is based on, could've known this scene took place. Why are we shown it?

Another example of Lee's heavyhanded approach is in a scene where the leader of the Black Panthers is speaking at a college gathering. Lee pans across several dreamy black faces, mostly female. The work of cinematographer Chayze Irvin is impressive, but the effect is numbing. If Lee's image of the KKK is a cartoon, his image of young African Americans is as posed and contrived as an old cover of Life.

Ultimately, Lee's movie is surprisingly tame and conventional, with some cute blaxploitation riffs, and a feel-good sub-theme of black and white cops working together. It's like any Spike Lee movie, at times inspired, at times sophomoric.

Some have  accused Lee of portraying the Colorado Springs cops as too likeable, and of making Stallworth into a more heroic character than he may have actually been. But if his movie is a bit soft in the middle, Lee makes up for it by including some closing clips of recent  white supremacist rallies that grew violently out of hand. These clips show what really happens when you try to match hate with hate, fear with fear. Nothing in Lee's movie can match the ugliness of reality.