Everything would seem to have fallen into place for gorgeous bride Grace (Samara Weaving), who as the movie opens is tying the knot with rich and handsome board game heir Alex (Mark O’Brien) and, in addition to marrying into opulence, faces a major change as she stands to join “a real, permanent family”. The Le Domas dynasty, however, is “big on tradition”, and one of those traditions is a “weird family ritual” according to which the bride is obligated to play a randomly selected game on her wedding night. Unfortunately for Grace, the game she picks is “hide and seek”, which for viewers means yet another iteration of The Most Dangerous Game, with Alex’s insane relatives and servants chasing his new wife around their estate with an assortment of vintage weapons. Visually alluring and adequately thrill-packed, Ready or Not is more or less the dose of feminist poison I was expecting, but not too shabby as the escape-from-patriarchy thriller subgenre goes. This is probably the ultimate in-laws-from-hell story.
4 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Ready or Not is:
Drug-ambivalent. Cocaine offers an instant boost of confidence and energy, but fails to improve marksmanship. One character, more likable than most of the others in the film, is an alcoholic. Grace, however, prefers a cathartic cigarette at the end of her ordeal.
Class-conscious, having fun with the popular notion of a satanic elite. The Le Domas family owes its fortune to an occult benefactor called Le Bail, whose name may be intended to suggest Beelzebub. The Le Domas family believes that if they fail to uphold their game play tradition, they will suffer the supernatural wrath of Le Bail – all implying that people can only become successful in life through foul deeds. “It’s true what they say. The rich really are different,” Ready or Not confirms for viewers. Ethical living, in this movie’s moral universe, requires resistance to the avatars of caste, tradition, and family, which are equated with evil. The Le Domas clan represents a fairly WASP-ish version of the predatory ultra-wealthy, with the notable exception of Alex’s brother Daniel, played by Adam Brody. Significantly, this character is one of the few in the family to have moral reservations about Le Bail’s game. “We all deserve to die,” he laments.
Anti-marriage and anti-family. Marriage could literally kill you! In one emblematic moment, Grace angrily rips at her cumbersome wedding gown as she transforms it into active wear for the fight ahead. In another scene, a young boy shoots her through the palm before she manages to strike him – a foreshadowing of the crucifixion of motherhood, a symbolic value stressed again when a nail goes through the wound in Grace’s hand shortly thereafter. To be a good person in Ready or Not is to question the validity of family bonds and tradition. “I realized you’ll do pretty much anything if your family says it’s okay,” Alex reflects disapprovingly. Better be a good bad girl and do what Hollywood says instead.
Joe Begos’s VFW is a satisfying action-horror exploitation homage to the work of John Carpenter and bears an undisguised resemblance to that director’s excellent Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). In a similar siege scenario, the trouble starts when a girl named Lizard (Sierra McCormick) steals a backpack’s worth of dope from spikes-and-leather-clad local kingpin Boz (Travis Hammer) and takes refuge in a VFW post. Zombie-like addicts known as “hypers” soon descend on the unsuspecting veterans in the bar, throwing them back into action and forcing them to draw on their military experience in order to stave off the psychotic horde. (“An army of braindead animals is still an army,” one of the characters remarks – almost as if commenting on current events.) The cool “old but still runnin’” cast includes Stephen Lang as barman Fred; William Sadler as titty enthusiast Walter; Martin Kove as used car salesman Lou; David Patrick Kelly as Doug; and the always likable Fred Williamson as Abe. Cheers fans will also appreciate getting to see George Wendt perched at a bar again in his brief role as Zabriski. VFW’s pacing is brisk; the atmospheric look of the film is on point; and Steve Moore’s electronic score capably captures the Carpenterian evocation of the impending. The earthy screenplay, with its lines like “‘Sorry’ don’t feed the bulldog” and “What in the cocksucking fuck just went on in here?”, is nothing special; but admirers of the 80s action and horror genres and VHS culture will appreciate moments like the weapons preparation montage and the nocturnal excitement of it all.
4 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that VFW is:
[WARNING: SPOILERS]
War-ambivalent or disingenuously antiwar. Fred has a serious moment in which he laments all the comrades he saw die in Indochinese mud, but some of the messaging as well as the mostly flippant ultraviolence of the proceedings – with guns, axes, bats, and a circular saw employed to dispatch disposable antagonists, not to mention the scene in which a musclebound brute uses a drug addict’s head as a battering ram – undermine earnest consideration of the human costs of war. There is arguably, too, a neoconservative content to the sequence in which Lou seeks to negotiate with the narco-terrorists and is killed for his trouble. The screenplay leaves it to a villain to describe soldiering as glorified “murder”.
Midly anti-capitalistic. Lou, as a used car dealer, stands as an unflattering avatar of the business mindset.
Drug-ambivalent. An info-blurb at the front of the movie mentions the current opioid epidemic, and early on a dead-ender jumps to her death. Other substances receive more favorable or at least ambiguous treatment, however. Fred drinks and drives without comment during the exposition, though later Lizard snatches a bottle from his hand, telling him, “This is bullshit” and calling him a “pussy” for boozing when things get tough. Sadler smokes “shitty cigarettes” while Doug smokes “science weed”. Abe calls marijuana “poison” and sticks to liquor until, just before the final battle, he snorts a fistful of the bad guys’ dope to give himself a martial edge.
Civic nationalist. Veterans in the film regard each other as worthy comrades regardless of race. “They gonna feel the might of the American military!” Williamson declares, and one of the hypers even gets a flagpole shoved down the gullet.
This campy and stupid but fun mid-budget entry in the based-on-a-video-game zombie subgenre serves as a decent geriatric Dolph Lundgren vehicle. Here he leads a team of “dead triggers” – losers and outcasts recruited by the government to take on suicide missions in zombie-infested warzones – into post-apocalyptic Terminal City, “Ground Zero” of a plague that for years has enriched monolithic arms-and-pharmaceuticals conglomerate Cyglobe. There’s nothing here that people haven’t seen before, but fans of the genre will probably like it, bad CGI and all.
3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Dead Trigger is:
[WARNING SPOILERS]
Retro-feminist, introducing not one but several tough-girl ass-kickers of the supermodels-in-tight-outfits variety. “My father wanted me to join the military, but I always wanted to be a scientist.” Yawn. If this movie were really progressive, the representatives of womanly resourcefulness would be fat, heavily tattooed, pierced, and/or trans.
Euthanasist. People have a “right to die”, and “the more we kill, the more we set free.”
Anti-Christian. A preacher (James Chalke) is depicted as a drunkard, and a zombie outbreak in his church serves as an excuse to show Lundgren slaughtering his parishioners. Probably in an ass-covering move, this scene is then revealed to be a sequence from virtual-reality gameplay.
Anti-corporate. Cyglobe has purposefully prolonged the zombie war to profiteer. Any anti-war posturing one might discern in this movie is, however, wholly insincere. “You know, I realized something,” says Tara (Autumn Reeser). “What’s really left of our humanity. It’s us – the humans left to fight. Because despite everything, we still care.” “Humans”, as far as Saban Films is concerned, are those still willing to fight Israel’s wars.
Obama-ambivalent.Dead Trigger was released by Israeli-American Democrat megadonor Haim Saban; and, just as there was a vacillation in Saban’s attitude toward Barack Obama and his Middle East policy, so there is an ambiguity to Dead Trigger’s characters needing to reach and cross the zombie-besieged and curiously named “Obama Bridge” to make their way to safety and escape Terminal City.
Anti-Russian. Dead trigger vet Martinov (UFC fighter Oleg Taktarov) of course turns out to be a traitor who sells out his team to Cyglobe.
Neoconservative – but also playfully conspiracist, perhaps even straying into Revelation of the Method. “Ground Zero”, the designation for Terminal City, where the zombie outbreak (and hence the interminable zombie war) started, immediately calls 9/11 to mind. Linking the zombies with Muslims – rather like World War Z – one scene occurs in a zombie strip club with Arabic architectural motifs; and, again recalling 9/11, Captain Rockstock (Isaiah Washington) tells one zombie, “Have a nice flight”, before throwing it from a balcony. “Ground Zero” is said to contain secrets that could lead to a cure for the plague. In a possibly related development, two zombie-hunting characters known as the “Twins” (Alyona Chekhova and Seira Kagami) are revealed before they are killed to have been in the employ of Cyglobe all along, thus evoking the concept of the “inside job” in conjunction with potentially 9/11-relevant “Twins”. Immediately following this moment is a scene in which dead trigger Naomi (Natali Yura) recounts an Alice in Wonderland fantasy and her desire to lose herself down the “rabbit hole”.
After enduring a brutal seven years of imprisonment and learning of his mother’s death from cancer, “hardened, rusty nail” Cain Burgess (Scott Adkins) breaks out and seeks his vengeance against those responsible for his torments. At the top of his list is his loan shark brother Lincoln (Craig Fairbrass); but before arriving at the climactic confrontation, the viewer is treated to a series of nasty flashbacks to prison brawls, police beatings, and other fuming catalysts for Burgess’s hate. This British film is surprisingly violent and bloody and ought to satisfy those looking for something tough, dumb, and full of broken beer bottles and spite.
3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Avengement is:
5. Anti-police. Police and prison guards are mean, insensitive, corrupt, or resort to unnecessary brutality.
4. Reformist. Cain, despite having no prior criminal record, is thrown into prison with extremely violent convicts after botching a robbery. He emerges as a hardened killer, the film seeming to suggest that the criminal justice system only breeds more dangerous menaces.
3. Racially suspect. Lincoln’s black accountant, Stokes (Terence Maynard), is a family man, listens to classical music, and would be classic exemplar of Africanus cinematicus if not for also being described as a “crooked fucker”. The overwhelming majority of the rowdies Cain has to fight in prison are white, with only a couple being black, and no racial self-segregation into gangs seems to occur in this apparently postracial penal institution. An impersonal board of officials responsible for Cain spending longer behind bars, however, is multiracial, with a “fuckin’ ponce” of East Indian origin presiding. It must be said that the sight of a row of brown bureaucrats casually signing off on punitive extensions of the white protagonist’s sentence hardly presents the new, globalized Britain in the most positive light. A gangster (Nick Moran) also has this to say about Mexican justice: “In Mexico, you know what happens to people that behave like that? They string ’em up under a bridge, cut off their dick, and shove it down their mouths […] you know, they’re savages.” This statement is left unchallenged, but the general savagery displayed by Britons throughout the film may be intended to serve as an implied and relativistic rebuttal.
2. Anti-usury. Cain gets back at his loan shark brother by redistributing the money in his bank accounts to those he has victimized. Lest this idea of debt forgiveness be interpreted as somehow even vaguely skirting the edges of crypto-anti-Semitism, however, the screenplay makes sure to mention that one of those whose lives were ruined by the predatory loans is named Silverman.
1.Pro-family. Cain loves his mother and, living up to his name, goes after his brother only after being betrayed. Lincoln’s sin, meanwhile, is prioritizing his business interests over family ties. Never believe a bent copper over your own flesh and blood!
S. Craig Zahler (Bone Tomahawk) is back with a solid and satisfyingly rough follow-up to the jaw-dropping Brawl in Cell Block 99, reuniting with Vince Vaughn and teaming him up with Mel Gibson in a literally gut-ripping, downbeat buddy cop brutalizer. Seasoned detective Brett Ridgeman (Gibson) and partner Anthony Lurasetti (Vaughn) are caught on video using excessive force in the apprehension of a Hispanic drug dealer, creating a scandal for their police department, and get suspended without pay by their superior (Don Johnson). Both men need money – Lurasetti because he plans to propose marriage to his girlfriend, and Ridgeman because his daughter is no longer safe in their ghettoized neighborhood and the family needs to get out. At the extent of his tether, Ridgeman hatches a half-baked plan to rip off a heroin dealer that winds up with him and his partner pitted against a gang of formidable paramilitary bank heisters. A career highlight for Gibson equal to his over-the-hill hero roles in Edge of Darkness and Blood Father, and yet another impressive entry in Vaughn’s growing résumé of scary tough guy characters after True Detective and Brawl in Cell Block 99.
4.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Dragged Across Concrete is:
8. Anti-drug. Tory Kittles plays ex-con Henry Johns, whose stint in prison illustrates a very possible outcome for a dealer. His mother, a heroin addict, has turned to prostitution. It is also mentioned that the dealer Ridgeman mistreats has been selling drugs to children, undermining any potential audience sympathy for the criminal.
7. Ableist! Lurasetti compares a hearing-impaired woman’s speech to a dolphin’s.
6. Anti-Semitic! Writer-director Zahler, as Soiled Sinema’s Ty E. puts it, is an artist who seems to have “transcended his Jewishness”, which may account for the brief and harmless but stereotype-oozing portrayal of the friendly jeweler Feinbaum, who says his wife has two brothers who are therapists and three sisters who are lawyers.
5. Homophobic! Henry dismisses his “cocksuckin’ father” as “a yesterday who ain’t worth words.” Disapprovingly, Ridgeman fails to see “much of a difference these days” between men and women, and also mocks Lurasetti’s “gay hair shit” disguise.
4. Media-critical. Chief Lieutenant Calvert (Johnson) derides the anti-police bias of “the entertainment industry formally known as ‘the news’”, which “needs villains” and fabricates them if necessary.
3. Natalist, i.e., sexist! Unexpectedly, the movie features a tender (albeit offbeat) portrait of a new mother, Kelly Summer (Jennifer Carpenter), desperately trying to avoid going back to work after using up her maternity leave. The necessity of keeping a job seems cruel and absurd now that she has a baby. Her proper place, she realizes, is at home with her child, and her boss, Mr. Edmington (Fred Melamed) describes her as a “radiant vision of maternity”. The section of Dragged Across Concrete that follows Kelly is even more affecting on a second viewing.
2. Class-conscious. “My job [in a bank] is so stupid,” Kelly laments. “I go there and I sell chunks of my life for a paycheck so that rich people I’ve never even met can put money in places I’ve never even seen.” Henry’s little brother Ethan, meanwhile, sees big game hunting as “rich white people shit”. There is also the suggestion that those with wealth have the means to elude the law, as Ridgeman at some point in the past allowed the son of businessman Friedrich (Udo Kier) to escape punishment for an unnamed crime in exchange for a future favor from the well-connected father. Ridgeman no longer believes in a meritocratic American dream. “I don’t politick and I don’t change with the times and turns that that shit’s more important than good, honest work,” he tells his partner, determining: “We have the skills and the right to acquire proper compensation” for thankless years of public service.
1.Race-realist – with exceptions. “They’re so cute before they get big,” says Ridgeman’s daughter Sara (Jordyn Ashley Olson) – ostensibly with reference to lion cubs, but subtextually referring to the black boys who harass her when she walks home from school. “This fucking neighborhood, it just keeps getting worse and worse,” frets Mrs. Ridgeman (Laurie Holden). “You know I never thought I was a racist before living in this area. I’m about as liberal as any ex-cop could ever be, but now,” she demands, “we really need to move” or else, “someday, you and me,” she tells her husband, “we are in a hospital room with our daughter talking to a rape counselor.”
Ridgeman and his partner are both depicted as casual racists. “I’m not racist,” Lurasetti jokes: “Every Martin Luther King Day I order a cup of dark roast.” In a twenty-first century world in which “digital eyes are everywhere”, however, old-school law-and-order enforcers like Ridgeman and Lurasetti are living on borrowed time. “Like cell phones, and just as annoying, politics are everywhere,” Calvert observes. “Being branded a racist in today’s public forum is like being accused of communism in the fifties. Whether it’s a possibly offensive remark made in a private phone call or the indelicate treatment of a minority who sells drugs to children […] It’s bullshit – but it’s reality.”
Softening Dragged Across Concrete’s racial edge is the presence of Henry, the conspicuous specimen of Africanus cinematicus played by Tory Kittles. This ghetto thug with the soul of a poet is given to saying things like, “Before I consider that kind of vocation, I need to get myself acclimated” and is at all times depicted as being more astute than those around him. His little brother Ethan, too, is portrayed as an underprivileged but bright lad of great potential. The case can be made that Dragged Across Concrete makes examples of its most prominent bigots by punishing them while rewarding Henry in the end. Ridgeman, who has refused to change with the times, is taught the important lesson that he “should have trusted a nigger.”
This is an okay Afrikaans-language thriller about a schoolteacher, Emma (Leandie du Randt), whose car breaks down in South Africa’s arid Karoo region on her way to her father’s home for a holiday visit. Compounding misfortunes, Emma is witness to a drug-related execution and must flee for her life through the desert whilst pursued by a gang of criminals. Unfortunately for the bad guys – led by the icy Bosman (Neels van Jaarsveld), who comes across like a cross between Gian Maria Volonté and Bono – it turns out that the resourceful Emma was trained in military survival skills by her ex-Recce father. Will the direness of her situation be enough to goad Emma to finally dispense with her philosophy of nonviolence? Furthermore, will she ever learn to shoot straight? Finding out makes for a fun hundred minutes.
3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Hunting Emma is:
4.Family-ambivalent. Emma’s father (Tertius Meintjes) is depicted as a devoted parent whose lessons stand his daughter in good stead in the face of a challenge. Emma, however, displays a distaste for domesticity, and teaching seems to fulfill whatever impulse she has toward motherhood.
3.Class-conscious. One of the crooks is a rich, recreational criminal.
2.Feminist. “My favorite kind of kitchen work – ironing,” martial arts expert Emma declares after tediously dispatching a sexist gang member with an iron. This fight, significantly, takes place in an abandoned home.
1.Anti-white. Leave it to South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry, the agency responsible for Black Economic Empowerment, to facilitate the production of a film in which the threat to a woman traveling alone through the “Rainbow Nation” is a pack of white rapists and drug dealers. Emma’s mocha-colored students, meanwhile, give a glimpse of the country’s non-white future.
This enjoyable Australian outback adventure stars Gareth Rickards as Buzz, a rugged “rover” hired by a group of eco-activist weenies to get them across a difficult, mountainous terrain and to the site of a new American mining venture where they plan to film a documentary on the project’s environmental impact – and the sense of urgency to their mission gets ratcheted up a notch when Buzz realizes the group is being pursued by the relentless and enigmatic “Ranger” (Jono Cheal). The characters, though never developed too deeply, are likable enough, and the movie’s rapid pacing and wilderness setting prevent it from ever getting boring. Frizzy-haired slob Sam Glissan deserves a special mention, as well, for his supporting role as the salty and indomitable Scraps.
3.5 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Rough Stuff is:
[WARNING: SPOILERS]
5. Abo-empowering. While whites are allowed to play the heroic roles, a bit of ethnomasochism does creep into the film at the end when Buzz, having discovered the site of a cache of gold, abstains from seizing the booty so as to let an elderly abo have it, the implication being that he is somehow more entitled to it for having a more organic and intimate connection to the earth. It is interesting to note, however, that Buzz nearly drives himself off of a cliff after virtue-signaling.
4. Green-ambivalent.Rough Stuff stops short of discrediting environmentalism altogether, but does suggest that those activist types drawn to such causes are frequently naïve, poorly informed, fanatical, or possessed of ulterior motives.
3. Anti-feminist. The comic supporting character Skye (Katie Garfield) represents feminists as obnoxious and unnecessarily combative. Not content to keep her viewpoints to herself, she more than once attempts to infect her more feminine comrade Tori (Hayley Sullivan) with her corrosive ideology, encouraging her to be more sexually assertive and insisting that the patriarchy has conditioned Tori to deny her true wants and needs. Skye’s militancy is revealed to be hollow, however, when – after stubbornly refusing to allow a man to carry her across a stream – she finds herself stuck and petulantly cries out for help. Her pampered stupidity, too, comes out when it suddenly dawns on her that there will be no ladies’ rooms available in the outback. Women can talk tough or even shoot guns, but ultimately require rescue.
2. Anti-corporate. The eco-activist group’s leader, Eric (Jamie Kristian), turns out to be plotting a terror attack on the mining concern – which plot in turn is revealed to be a scheme of the mining multinational to discredit conservationists. The corporation, in addition to staging a series of eco-terror false flags around the world and lobbying the Australian government for special privileges, is also skirting government regulations by initiating the exploitation of a new region before securing public permission.
1.Populist.Rough Stuff gives audiences a masculine, self-reliant, working-class hero in Buzz, and the movie evinces a healthy distrust of both left-utopian activism and nihilistic, big-business concerns. Traditional sex roles are reinforced, as is the dignity of the rustic Australian as opposed to globalizing and cosmopolitan forces.
Star-Lord (Chris Pratt) is reluctantly recruited by ex-girlfriend Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard) to rescue as many species of dinosaurs as they can from Isla Nublar before the island’s volcano erupts. The enterprise is being bankrolled by a mysterious philanthropist (Rafe Spall) – but is his offer what it appears to be? Most importantly, can the unfossilized and feral creatures be contained after they are transported to safety? Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom delivers the mayhem fans are expecting and more, with the volcano’s explosion providing the perfect pretext to fill the screen with giant reptiles of every variety as they scurry and stomp for their lives.
4 out of 5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is:
[WARNING SPOILERS]
4. Feminist and pro-miscegenation. Representing the Coalition of the Fringes are a tattooed Latina man-hater (Daniella Pineda) and a nebbishy mulatto computer whiz (Justice Smith).
3. Anti-white,anti-gun, and animal-rights-militant. Ted Levine appears as a “great white [sic] hunter” whose hobby of assembling necklaces from the teeth of endangered species earns him a dinosaur jaw’s worth of trouble. Guns, in addition to being unreliable, are problematic in the possession of trigger-happy white men in particular.
2. Disingenuouslyantiwar but actually anti-Slav and neoconservative. The dinosaur rescue operation turns out to be a nefarious military-industrial plot – what? social justice hijacked for capitalist plunder? I’m shocked! – and the movie climaxes at an auction at which arms procurers from around the world bid on weaponizable reptiles. Present at the auction are representatives from Russia, Slovenia, and Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation. “Too many red lines have been crossed,” as well – ostensibly with regard to Frankenstein genetic science, but probably also in reference to Syria.
1.Racist! Bookending the film are testimonies from learned elder of science Jeff Goldblum, who warns that humanity, by saving the dinosaurs, is risking its own extinction. Underlying the film is the West’s anxiety about the acceptance of “refugee” populations from the Third World. The dinosaurs, as savage, prehistoric animals – rather like Africans, the film seems to imply – are objects of both amazement and civilizational trepidation. Indicative of the mingled fear and excitement experienced by mentally ill social justice warriors in the presence of rapefugees is an unsettling scene in which a dark-colored dinosaur creeps into a little girl’s room and hovers over her in her bed, extending a claw to caress her. This same child’s decision at the end of the film to release the dinosaurs into the modern world can be read either as a parody or a celebration of naïve Europeans’ – and particularly women’s – childishness and erotic retardation in ushering in their own racial and cultural annihilation. She makes her momentous choice after discovering that she is a clone and not the person she thinks she is – which is to say, after having her sense of identity undermined.
Alternatively, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom can be read as an allegory about the danger inherent in providing succor to Jews. After rescuing the dinosaur-Jews from the volcano-Holocaust, western man is faced with the problem of how to survive with these troublesome creatures in his midst – an interpretation bolstered by an attempt to exterminate the dinosaurs with cyanide gas at the end of the film and which, furthermore, would put a somewhat different and perhaps self-revelatory spin on the aforementioned scene of the giant lizard in the little girl’s bedroom.
By the early 1970s, Americans had begun to notice a change in their big cities. After the Civil Rights movement and the 1965 Immigration Act, the multiracial rot – the inevitable by-product of the Left’s ascendancy in the West – began to set in. Cities that were once clean, safe, and orderly became much less so in fairly short order. Americans were not complaining about muggings, rapes, and murders as much in 1960 as they were a decade and a half later. They also didn’t feel as if they were entering another country every time they walked three blocks to buy groceries.
The original Death Wish film, released in 1974, was, on one hand, a way to capitalize on these newfound feelings of insecurity and alienation which were perplexing the lives of millions of white Americans at the time. On the other, it did give legitimate, if somewhat oblique, expression to these feelings, so much so that the film quickly became iconic despite mostly poor reviews, and spawned four sequels over the following twenty years, as well as a big-budget remake that was recently released. The plot is straightforward: A solid citizen discovers that thugs have murdered his wife and raped his daughter in his New York apartment, and he then acquires a gun to take revenge on the streets as a vigilante. Given the film’s success at the box office, it is safe to conclude that many Americans, especially the white ones who fondly remembered a better past, strongly identified with such a character.
John McTiernan, director of Hollywood blockbusters Predator (1987), Die Hard (1988), and The Hunt for Red October (1990), began his movie career rather more humbly with the flawed and eccentric but nonetheless entertaining debut Nomads(1986). Notable as McTiernan’s only credit as a screenwriter, Nomads was eviscerated by the critics when first released, and still has only a 13% green splat at Rotten Tomatoes. “Was there any sense in it?” asks leading lady Lesley-Anne Down in an interview included on the Nomads Blu-ray. “I don’t think there was very much sense in it at all for anybody.” Is Down correct in dismissing the film as a shallowly offbeat curio – and were the critics who panned the movie motivated only by an objective assessment of its merits?
Nomads stars Pierce Brosnan as a French anthropologist, Jean Charles Pommier, who in the opening sequence dies in the care of Down’s character, Dr. Eileen Flax, in a Los
Lesley-Anne Down freaks out in John McTiernan’s Nomads.
Angeles hospital. He appears in a beaten, bloodied, and seemingly insane state, and his enigmatic last words initiate what will be a strange paranormal ordeal for Flax, who over the course of the film will both investigate and experience what befell Pommier, with most of the story told in flashback. The anthropologist and his wife (Anna Maria Monticelli) had only recently moved to the U.S. and purchased a house that, as it turns out, has a horrible history attached to it. Soon after moving in, the Pommiers discover Mansonesque graffiti on the garage door and more graffiti inside: “Gutman’s a Hero”. The home, they learn, was the site of a horrific child murder, and a band of elusive antisocial misfits who live out of a van have adopted the house as a holy site.
Pommier, being an anthropologist, follows the titular “nomads” around Los Angeles with the intention of documenting and studying them in order to gain a better idea of the threat he faces and to understand “what kind of people could think of a murder as some sort of shrine.” He determines that none of them have employment and watches them from a distance as they laze at the beach, party, and generally terrorize people. The nomads become aware of Pommier’s surveillance after he witnesses them murder a man and put the body in a dumpster. After first being pursued by them and escaping, Pommier again works his way into proximity with the group – at which point they seem to accept his presence and stage an impromptu photo shoot, with one of them, Mary, played by Mary Woronov, doing an exotic dance. When Pommier develops the film, however, he finds that none of the nomads appear in the exposures, which invites a comparison with vampires – although the nomads, who have no problem frolicking in the daylight, are clearly not vampires at least as conventionally depicted.
These quasi-vampires – vampire lore comprising a traditional understanding of the eternal Jew – are nomads, or what Pommier, drawing on Eskimo legends, describes as an urban variety of Innuat. As related in the film, “It has to do with wandering the desert. […] It’s all the same. Nomads live in deserts, whether it’s a desert of ice or sand or whatever doesn’t make a difference. […] They were supposedly hostile spirits. According to the myth, they were capable of assuming a human form” and traveled from place to place, bringing ruin and madness with them wherever they went. As Pommier tells his wife:
None of this may mean anything. None of it at all. […] But I may have found people who are living outside – outside any structure. They do not participate. No exchange, no constraints. They resort to violence with no provocation and then get away with it. It is as if to the official world they did not exist.
All of this rootlessness, in combination with the confluence of ritual, child murder, the reverence for a killer with the Jewish name Gutman, as well as the general depravity and destructiveness, contributes to an accumulation of clues that the nomads may be the Jews. Curiously, composer Bill Conti mentions during his Blu-ray interview that the soundtrack includes what he describes as a “Middle Eastern sound” – though to this reviewer’s untrained ear such a flavoring is difficult to detect in the synth-and-guitars music cues.
Adam Ant portrays the leader of the titular band of roving marauders.
“You must not try to fight them,” a sinister nun (Blue Velvet’s Frances Bay) tells Pommier. This encounter takes place in a dilapidated cathedral where, in a sequence of nightmarish phantasmagoria, a flock of satanic women in habits is seen running through the halls in masks, one of them flashing her bare breasts at Pommier – all of which points to a faith corrupted. Dancing Mary, the nomad portrayed by Mary Woronov, wears a cross that glints in the sun, and later, when she is seen at night, she wears an even larger crucifix so that the viewer can hardly help but notice it as she cavorts like a stripper. Are these Christian elements ironic and indicative of cultural subversion, or have these been added as fig leaves to hide the almost naked Jewishness of the menace? Woronov’s features, it must be noted, are rather evil and arguably Semitic-looking.
In a key moment toward the end of the film, Pommier says to his wife with an air of wistfulness as they survey the Los Angeles skyline from a rooftop, “We are so very far from home, you know. All of us.” He laments his “bourgeois” life in a “civilized” world – in short, bemoans his condition of rootless cosmopolitanism. Both he and his kindred spirit the doctor, another childless middle-aged professional in the process of moving into a new and foreign home, have agricultural surnames, Pommier (“apple tree”) and Flax, that betray their simple origins and relatedness to the earth – Flax also connoting blonde and distinctively northern European looks – that set them apart from the dark, mysterious wanderers who move in their midst. Pommier’s polyglot cosmopolitanism, peripatetic ways, and sophistication nevertheless present a thematic parallel with the lifestyle of the nomads, so that it comes as no surprise when Pommier finally succumbs to them. The horror of Nomads is loss of a sense of belonging to a place and one’s own native culture – the horror of an alienated world in which, for instance, Dr. Flax’s colleague Cassie Miller (Jeannie Elias) complains about the “meshuggenah lunatics” who people the city. Whatever the meaning of the film, it may be worth observing that it is set in the entertainment capital of the world and that the final nomad antagonist Dr. Flax encounters is unable to pursue her beyond the California state line.
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