The Dogs of War

The Dogs of War (1980)

Dir John Irvin

Written by Gary DeVore, George Malko

Starring Christopher Walken, Tom Berenger

You know how most of these 70's and early 80's painted posters have an awesome image which never even remotely happens in the movie? Not this one. 

What we got here is an interesting oddity from 1980, a kind of weird blend of mercenary action movie and war drama, but coming from a perspective which makes it a bit unique. It has all the trappings of any number of genre mercenary movies: a team of cynical, hardass character actors, a fictional African country with a sunglass-favoring dictator, a whole bunch of guns, and enough explosions to easily send a commercial tanker ship carrying nothing but cinder blocks to the moon and back a few dozen times. But unlike the sort of movie you’re immediately imagining, this one scales back on the giant muscles and outrageous stunts in favor of a focus on the planning and execution of a mercenary’s work. There’s a few big explosions at the very beginning, and then no action whatsoever until the film’s finale. In between, we get to watch as veteran merc and victim of a double girl name Jamie Shannon (Christopher Walken) goes on a recon mission, considers leaving the trade, gets contracts, and puts together a crack team to smuggle weapons, infiltrate enemy territory, and then (finally) blow up absolutely every goddamn thing in sight. Once the guns finally do come out we get a pretty spectacular light show, but the emphasis of the runtime is on the non-shooting parts of the mercenary’s life, from the loneliness of the downtime to the haggling over gun prices to the clever methods of skirting customs officers. It’s almost a mercenary procedural!

Signing 8x12 glossies for fans.

Part of the oddness of the film comes from the unusual casting. This is the sort of movie you’d expect to star Tom Berenger or somebody (which is good, because he’s in here too) but instead the lead is Walken, fresh off THE DEER HUNTER and HEAVEN’S GATE and not looking at all like your typical Hollywood image of a mercenary tough guy. He’s thin --almost emaciated-- and with his pale skin, red lips and blue eyes casts a decidedly feminine image (it also looks like he’s wearing enough makeup to qualify for a side gig as a geisha, not sure if that’s part of the character or what). We see that he’s pretty hardcore from the movie’s opening where he drives a jeep through an exploding airfield and hijacks an airplane, but the character skews realistic rather than towards the usual exaggerated ubermench trope; Walken’s Shannon is well-prepared and well-trained, but three guys attacking him at once quickly reduce him to the fetal position. He never says one-liners or looks like he’s enjoying himself very much, and in fact by the movie’s end it’s pretty obvious (without being overtly stated) that this line of work has not been good for his psyche.

Likewise, his teammates are a long way from Jesse Ventura and Carl Weathers; they’re mostly dumpy middle-aged guys, their scalps fighting a stalemate battle between greying and receding hairlines. One looks kind of like Denholm Elliott, another sort of like a nerdy Michael Ironside, a third looks like Ed O’Neill because it is him. Interestingly, you got Tom Berenger in there too, playing exactly the kind of macho tough guy you would expect Tom Berenger to play in a merc movie like this. But he’s a minor character and seems like the odd one here, maybe a guy who has watched too many of these movies himself and has a warped idea of how he should be reacting. Nobody else seems very amused by his cowboy antics, but they just seem to accept that this is how he rolls. Even though it’s the same character that is common to more outlandish versions of this same story, the context makes him seem kind of believable here, sort of a nod to real life macho assholes who might do this sort of thing for kicks. In this line of work, it’s actually realistic to have a few larger-than-life, exaggerated personalities. Just don’t expect things to work out for them as neatly as they do in the movies.

Riding dirty.

There’s an odd instinct toward realism here, which sits maybe a bit uncomfortably with the movie’s premise but also makes it kind of unique. Turns out director John Irvin might just have a leg up in the realism department over most directors, having been a cameraman in combats zones ranging from Vietnam to Algeria during the 60s. That probably explain a lot of the unusual structure of the movie and it’s interest in the minutiae of the operation, particularly since Irvin got in touch with some of his old mercenary contacts from that era to discuss the film. Moreover, writer Frederick Forsyth (author of the novel the film is based on) actually went undercover and posed as a venture capitalist attempting to finance a coup in Equatorial Guinea, allowing him to meet various mercenaries and underworld figures and ask them how this kind of thing could be done (a few years later, someone actually tried it for real). So as crazy as it sounds, I suspect this movie is not as far from reality as we might like to imagine. There are real guys out there who are probably completely capable of pulling something like this off. What’s the ratio of fact to fantasy? Well, Irvin would go on to direct HAMBURGER HILL (which an ex-Vietnam vet with a fake leg and only one eye would once tell me was the most realistic movie ever made about the Vietnam war) and the BBC TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY with Alec Guinness, another model of subtlety and realism. Of course, he also made Schwarzenneger’s RAW DEAL so there’s that side of him too.

One obvious fantasy which remains is the uncomfortable neocolonialist subtext. The U.S. action film industry was using this period to go back and win the Vietnam war (RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD PART II, THE GOOD GUYS WEAR BLACK) but Irvin, an Englishman, has a different cultural scab to pick at, so what we got here is a bunch of Europeans getting to go back and re-fight the colonial wars of independence. The new democratically elected dictator of the fictional African “republic of Zangaro” is specifically juxtaposed against the more moderate, losing candidate (a nice guy who winds up in jail for his efforts) who we’re told suggestively “wanted to maintain ties with the mother country.” A number of characters suggest, mostly subtly, that the people of Zangaro were not ready for democracy yet, and that Europe needs to step in and set things right. That sentiment might have been forgivable in the less enlightened time of AFRICA ADDIO (1966), but it’s a little less so in fucking 1980.

I guess this big grenade launcher type gun was a selling point for this movie, but I'm honestly more in love with Walken's original Grumpy Cat face.

Fortunately, the film only pushes this logic so far; it’s clear that the Europeans pushing for the coup are rapacious capitalists who are only interested in securing the mining rights from the new government, so at least they’re not pretending to be heroes. Still, it’s a pretty uncomfortable fantasy to set up a scenario where the white heroes have to re-conquer a former colony in order to secure justice. It doesn’t really help much that virtually every African we meet in the film is openly villainous, and the ones who aren’t are treated with open scorn over the their collaboration with the dictatorship.* Interestingly, though, race doesn’t seem to factor into it as much as Europe’s sensitivity to being told it isn’t needed.** The Europeans even get a fun comeuppance when they take on a troupe of African Mercenaries, who Berenger scoffs are “bush league,” but who quickly shut him up with a demonstration of their skill. Walken even gets an African potential love interest, who the film treats as intelligent and glamorous. So it’s not necessarily about black and white, it’s just about the abiding notion that everyone should stop worrying and admit that they love Europe. It’s a weird kind of subtext, I don’t think I know any other movie with one like it.

So, in some ways it’s a bit ungainly and morally suspect (although perhaps not any more so than your average mercenary action movie). But still gotta give this one credit for trying something a little different. And hey, you can’t get too mad at a movie that has the good instincts to spend it’s first 10 seconds doing this:

Short of adding the implied exclamation point, I don’t know what else they could do to announce their intention of badassery. Except maybe cast future Oscar winner Jim Broadbent as a non-speaking extra. Sorry Jim, no time for your shenanigans here. Instead, we got an simple, straightforward focus on watching a bunch of hard, amoral pros do what they do best. No time for feelings; If you’re gonna cry, cry havoc! That’s how these dogs do it. Less bark, more bite.***   

*I suppose there’s another way to read this, especially since Walken is an American: Africans= Europeans, dictator= Hitler, Mercs = Americans.

** By the way, Ghanaian actor and future STAR WARS EPISODE I THE PHANTOM MENACE side player Hugh Quarshie is an unnamed extra in this. His IMDB page says he refuses to play Othello because he finds it racist, so the fact that he appears in this must mean he thinks it’s at least less racist than Othello. And I guess he’s got no beef with Shakespeare quotes, either.   

*** In fairness, I should admit that there is a brief section near the middle which involves Walken and his ex-wife, a weird performance by JoBeth Williams. They make a big deal about her crippled father, who apparently forced her to divorce Walken's character so she could care for him. Wha? That's not a thing, is it? Not sure what they were going for with this (except maybe to emphasize Walken's increasingly precarious psychological state?) but fortunately Walken fucks her, GTFO's, and then she's never mentioned again.

Charley Varrick

Charley Varrick (1973)
Dir. Don Siegel
Written by Dean Reisner and Howard Rodman
Starring Walter Matthau, Andrew Robinson, Joe Don Baker, John Vernon

    CHARLEY VARRICK is one of those nifty little films they had in the 70s which has the trappings of a Hollywood thriller but --at its heart-- has kind of quiet oddness to it which make it feel unique. There’s nothing especially groundbreaking about this tale of a small-potatoes criminal who steals money from the wrong big-potatoes criminals, but, like its protagonist, it has an unassuming but deft knack for the details. And, like its protagonist, it benefits greatly from the low-key but undeniable charm of Walter Matthau.

    The titular Charley (Matthau) is the ostensible leader of a small band of bank robbers -- including his wife Nadine (Jacqueline Scott, DUEL) and dickish young hood Sullivan (Andrew Robinson, internationally beloved for his iconic performance as Sheriff Braddock from PUMPKINHEAD 2: BLOOD WINGS)-- who knock over a podunk country bank in bumfuck nowhere, New Mexico. In the ensuing shootout, Nadine is killed but the boys get away with the money. And it turns out to be a lot of money. $750,000 in 1973 dollars. $3,870,000 in today-dollars. Which, wow, is, uh, more than there probably should be in a podunk farmers’ bank in the middle of nowhere, huh? So now they’ve got a bag full of the Mob’s money, the cops are on their tail, they can’t trust anyone, and there’s a ruthless but folksy Mob enforcer (Joe Don Baker) hunting them. Can’t a guy catch a break?

Matthau takes a little side work as an underwear model.

The coolest thing about the film is Matthau’s Charley Varrick character. He’s a much more interesting, more unusual protagonist than you would usually get in this sort of film.* He’s a former cropduster, and a former stunt pilot (his wife would dance on the wings of his airborne plane, apparently), and unglamorous older guy who favors a mechanic’s jumpsuit and lives in a tiny trailer. He’s not exactly a loser, just a guy who hasn’t ever had much luck, who has spent his life doing shit jobs for shit money. It would be easy to say that this recent move to bankrobbing represents some kind of last-ditch shot at the good life, the American dream which has been denied him, but I think it’s not as simple as that. He treats his new bankrobbing profession like any other job, working small-time banks for small payoffs, keeping off the radar. He’s not looking for a big score to make his dreams come true -- just trying one new hustle in a long life of just barely getting by. When he finds he’s unexpectedly stumbled onto some serious money, his reaction is concern rather than joy. He’s been around long enough to know that there’s no such thing as good luck -- just false hope.

The poster gushes, “when he runs out of dumb luck, he always has genius to fall back one!” which is manifestly untrue on both counts. But Charley is smarter than people give him credit for. He’s quiet and unassuming, but there’s a vivacity in Matthau’s eyes which tells us he’s keenly aware of the world around him, constantly sizing up the forces leveled against him and looking for an escape route. With his wife dead and his partner a hotheaded lowlife, he’s got no one to discuss his plans with, and so you never know exactly what he’s up to. In some ways, his journey reminds me of Toshiro Mifune in YOJIMBO (or Clint in FISTFULL OF DOLLARS**) where you have this one guy who’s obviously smarter than everyone around him, but maybe not quite smart enough to beat the odds. Like Yojimbo (or Sanjuro) we see Charley setting up his plan, maybe working his way out of this mess or maybe just digging himself deeper. When it seems like he’s fucked himself, we’re never sure if he’s actually working the long con or if he’s just in over his head. The movie generously gives us all the details, though, so when things do come together it’s a pleasant payoff to actions which didn’t exactly make sense at first.

Not exactly James Bond's tuxedo.

Charley’s toothpick-chewing, thoughtful silence also makes him an intriguingly opaque character. His stoic reaction to his wife’s death could be read many different ways. He doesn’t cry about it, just contemplates her silently for a moment, before setting fire to her corpse to hide the evidence. What’s he thinking about? Her badass getaway driver skills (while bleeding out from a bullet wound, notch) and history as an airborne stuntwoman pegs her as a woman who’s no shrinking violet, and perhaps even more impetuous than Varrick himself. Did she, perhaps, push him into this life of crime, which he now has to navigate without her? Did they love each other, or were they more like partners in crime? Refreshingly, there’s no big monologue scene to address these questions -- Charley isn’t much of a talker and he has no one to listen anyway. It’s just there for you to contemplate. The true joy of the movie, really, is trying to figure out exactly what kind of man this Charley Varrick is. And the best part about that job is that neither Matthau nor the film is exactly trying to hide anything. They’re just not big on oversharing. It’s not a mystery, just something there’s not a pat, prepackaged answer to.

Regardless, though, we’re rooting for Charley because he’s a underdog beset by wild dogs. Chief among them is Joe Don Baker, gleefully turning his folksy badass Buford Pusser persona on his head to play a sociopathic killing machine for the mob. Named Molly. He’s still a charming, southern gentlemanly Joe Don Baker type, but now he seems more like Matthew McConaughey in KILLER JOE. He’s a smart, capable smooth operator, but there’s something inhuman and unhinged lurking somewhere below that surface of calculated congeniality. His utter glee at hunting and intimidating a guy way below his pay grade has a disturbing, almost predatory flavor to it***. He’s a great villain, and nicely complemented by oily John Vernon as his mob boss. As the two of them demonstrate the considerable resources available to seriously fucking bad people, things start to look increasingly grim for Charley and you start to really hope he knows what the fuck he’s doing. Even though you know this is a grim 70’s thriller and probably things aren’t gonna work out all that well for him.

This is why every cowboy sings a sad, sad song.

Director Don Siegel made a bunch of classics like the original INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, THE SHOOTIST, HELL IS FOR HEROS, COOGAN’s BLUFF, and DIRTY HARRY (just two years before this), but doesn’t seem like the kind of director to leave a lot of his own fingerprints on the work. Instead, he directs with a lot of the attributes of his protagonist here: a quiet, workmanlike competence that wins you over without overwhelming you. He has a knack for putting together highly effective scenes without calling attention to himself. It’s subtle, but he knows when to stage a long, slow take and when to turn on the editing tricks -- it’s resolutely unflashy, but it means when things pick up tempo, you get excited by the action instead of the editing. Imagine that, an action scene where the action itself is exciting enough that they don't have to beat us over the head with a much of editing and camera tricks.

So as a whole, CHARLEY VARRICK is admittedly unflashy, which probably explains it’s relative obscurity. Even for a 70’s crime picture, it’s a little too odd, a little unwilling to milk its simple premise for the big payoffs audiences were probably expecting. Varrick’s old cropdusting business boasts a slogan, painted on the side of his van, which Siegel apparently hoped would be the film’s title: “Charley Varrick: Last of the independents.” Neither the movie nor the main character go quite the way they’re expected to, and both of them probably suffered a bit for it. They’re too unusual for the mainstream, and a the same time not exotic enough for jaded elites looking for a challenge. But for those of us who are game to watch something truly go its own way --unglamorous, uncompromising, but maybe a little more clever than it seems at first wash-- CHARLEY VARRICK will hopefully not be the very last of the independents.

*Actually, Clint Eastwood was originally up for this part, straight off his DIRTY HARRY collaboration with director Don Siegel. He turned it down, though, and it’s just as well -- part of the film’s charm is that Matthau isn’t an alpha-male action hero. He’s much more believable as a schlub who may well be in too deep to claw himself out. With Eastwood, you’re gonna assume he’s eventually going to face down his enemies and blow them away. With Matthau, you can settle for just wanting him to escape with his life.

**But not Bruce in LAST ONE STANDING, who has that awful interior monologue where he’s constantly telling us what he’s trying to do.

***In fact, Marcellus Wallace’s line in PULP FICTION about “a pair of pliers and a blowtorch” is cribbed almost directly from this movie.

Cobra

Cobra (1986)

Dir. George P Cosmatos

Starring Sylvester Stallone, Brigitte Nielsen, Brian Thompson

A cute little ante up on the already ludicrous DIRTY HARRY films, this one takes the lone wolf action cop things to levels which could generously be described as parody. Stallone plays officer Marion “Cobra” Cobretti, the kind of guy who wears aviators inside. He’s the kind of guy who’s gonna find a way to have an explosion involved while stopping some punks from robbing a grocery store. Everyone on the force already knows not to even call him in on anything unless they’re prepared for a special effects show. He drives a muscle car. He owns his own machine guns. It’s pretty righteous.

Most things about this movie do not work very well, and it goes without saying that anything remotely interesting in the script or concept is laughably underdeveloped. The villain is Brian Thompson (the more cultured out there will remember his cartoonishly chiseled face as the Alien Bounty Hunter from The X-Files) who everyone knows is the nefarious serial killer the Night Stalker. What only Cobra suspects for no reason is that there isn’t just a single Night Stalker, he’s actually the head of a secret society of serial killers, who target poor defenseless model Bridgitte Nielsen as their next victim and will stop at nothing to kill her. Cobra’s superiors correctly point out that his theory makes no sense and has no evidence at all to support it, but they recognize that he’s pretty much the awesomest guy ever and agree that the poor defenseless model needs some security. Obviously that means Cobra is gonna get assigned to protect her, take her out to the countryside and have ten kinds of sex with her, possibly have to fight off hordes of armed maniacs on motorcycles, who knows, could be anything, you gotta be prepared for whatever in this line of work. This is all a modestly interesting idea but the script does absolutely nothing with it, barely even bothering to address why in God’s name these Night Stalker people are doing this, much less explaining it in any kind of satisfactory or intriguing way. Likewise, plot strands about Cobra’s difficulties with Internal Affairs and his romance with Nielsen are so perfunctory that they might as well just have had an intern hold the cue cards up right to the camera.

But the one thing that really matters in a movie like this ends up working just fine, and that’s Stallone’s enjoyable deadpan hyper-macho killing/sex machine. Believe it or not, apparently Stallone wrote this one as BEVERLY HILLS COP but left that project because he wanted to make a more serious action movie. Looking back, this is probably funnier. But the movie is so self-assured about how badass it is that you end up buying into it and ultimately it’s the most ludicrous parts which work the best. The script may waste its concept, characters, and themes, but at least it wastes no opportunities for big action set pieces. The finale finds Cobra combating dozens upon dozens of gun-toting generic thugs in a hotel, then a lemon grove, and finally in a steel plant. It’s pretty fun, and suitably oversized if a little generic. But weirdly, the one thing not oversized is the runtime -- the thing ends up feeling too short. At 87 minutes, there’s only time for three big action sequences and no time for anything to feel like its escalating. Still, if you’re a youngster trying to figure out what the deal is with all these larger-than-life lone-wolf cops which only appear in comedies now, this is a pretty good example of how close to parody the genre already was by 1986.

There are better George P. Cosmatos Golan/Globus productions (if you have to ask, you’re not ready to know the answer) but this is a fine mid-level one which at least won’t waste much of your time doing anything other than exploding. I think Officer Cobretti would appreciate that.

Heartless

Heartless (2009)

Dir. Philip Ridley

Starring Jim Sturgess, Joseph Mawle, with Timothy Spall and Eddie Marsan.

Now he's a movie full of great ideas which seems competently made and yet somehow manages to bungle each and every one until it ends up feeling almost completely empty. How the fuck did that happen?

The premise seems like exactly the sort of thing I'd be into. Netflix says:

Reclusive Londoner Jamie Morgan (Jim Sturgess), who bears a prominent, heart-shaped birthmark on his face yet can't seem to find love anywhere, makes a deal with a devil-like figure to get a girl [who turns out to be Harry Potter's Fleur Delacour, by the way, if you were ever interested in seeing her naked]-- but there's a deadly price to pay. After his mother is murdered, the newspapers say thugs wearing devil masks committed the crime. But Jamie soon begins to suspect that they weren't wearing masks at all.

So that sounds pretty cool, right? Guilt, disfigurement, violence, paranoia, the slippery divide between what's real and what isn't. That sounds exactly like the kind of shit I'd be all over, kinda Cronenberg-y back when he was a little more surreal, or maybe like if David Lynch made a movie with a plot. Except it doesn't play out like that at all. All those elements are in the movie, but for whatever reason the movie focuses on exactly the wrong things in the wrong order, playing up the exact least interesting things and barely touching on the promise of that premise.

For starters, the film is disappointingly literal. That dreamlike quality that I so covet in a movie like this is completely undermined by the fact that the film doesn't really tease us at all about the demons being real. It shows us one about 5 minutes in, and never backs off the idea that this is literally some supernatural shit going down. As a result, you lose the scary ambiguity AND the apocalyptic sense of a collapsing society. This would be fine if you played up the scary supernatural angle, but instead they continue shooting it as if it were a gang running around. There's nothing done to make this concept seem otherworldly or incomprehensible; Its just a bunch of skinny demons in hoodies attacking people with molotov cocktails. It's LESS scary since demons are so one-dimentional; of course they're gonna be malevolent. That's their gig. Human killers are scarier and more interesting. You got a bunch of murderous human hoodlums running around, you got to ask some uncomfortable questions about what you are capable of, how they ended up this way, etc. Demons don’t work that way; they’re scary when you see their nonhuman power and characteristics, which this film largely robs them of. So right off the bat, a huge part of what could be interesting and frightening is rendered somewhat flat and diminished.

Secondly, the whole Faustian bargain thing is ill-handled. The devilish Papa B is obviously supernatural, but they mostly avoid giving him any kind of mystery. He’s played pretty much like a mid-level thug in a Guy Ritchie movie, all muscles and mullet and exposition. There’s nothing perverse or disturbing about this guy; he seems more like a wannabe Tyler Durden than the devil incarnate. His plan is to cause chaos because suffering is eternal or some stupid trite bullshit like that. So again, you’ve got this potentially creepy, weird scenario which is just completely undercut by making everything seem very literal and overexplained. Even Papa B’s cool-looking SILENT HILL apartment looks diminished and literal. Director Ridley shoots it like he’s shooting a regular conversation in a normal apartment, and as a result it all looks sort of normal and solid, like a cool set instead of like the inside of a nightmare.

(on the other hand, I'm of the opinion that SILENT HILL didn't have enough comfy green armchairs, so this one addresses that issue nicely).

Which is not to say that it’s badly shot, either. It looks, like everything in this film, competent, professional, even a little stylish. It just doesn’t cater to the film’s strengths and as a result, nothing has the impact that it should.

There’s a ton of crap like that in here. The film somewhat boldly subverts the usual Faustian bargain business by suddenly changing the rules on our poor protagonist. It’s a cool idea which could serve to throw the audience off balance and make them feel vulnerable and out of control. But nothing particularly shocking comes out of the new scenario, and without clear rules for the universe we actually don’t know what to fear and consequently lose tension, rather than gain it.

The real dealbreaker here, though, is that the film is ultimately much more about the human drama than the horror. That would be fine, except that the human drama is laughably vapid. Jamie has to realize his true beauty was within, and there’s some insufferable crap about his father telling him that the darkest moments are the ones we learn the most from which in context doesn’t even make sense. It’s all very shallow, and worsened considerably by the fact that it’s all done with the subtlety of a shotgun blast to the face. Again, you can’t help but notice that the film focuses on the least interesting aspects of the story (and in fact, the whole demon angle ends up feeling kind of incidental. You don’t need a gang of eyeless demons to tell the story of the ugly duckling. I guess if you’re going to do a live action version of that story, adding demons is the only way to go, but fuck, kind of a waste of perfectly good demons.) All good will is ultimately killed by the end, a standard twist that you’ve probably guessed already, which pretty much makes everything before it kind of confusingly meaningless.

I know, I know, it looks cool. But trust me when I'm tell you it's the demon equivalent of big fake titties.

Which is kinda a shame, because the elements for a great film are there. The usually bland Jim Sturgess creates a surprisingly memorable, sympathetic character and very effectively sells his painful shyness. He’s a clenched up recluse, perpetually waiting for the next cruel blow to fall, and Sturgess remarkably shares his crushing internal pain with the camera. The great Timothy Spall fiercely attempts to impart some truth and conviction into his cliché-ridden flashback scenes, and Eddie Marsan has a dryly memorable cameo as the workaday administrator for Papa B. Though criminally underutilized, the production design is great, the demons are neat-looking (would have been 100 times cooler had they been masks instead of CG, but oh well) and there’s a few memorably horrific scenes (including one genuinely shocking one featuring a reanimated severed head who finds that things can get even worse).

In the end, though, this is a story of squandered potential. Fear lies in the unknown. The more you explain, the more you show us, the more you tell us what’s going on, the less darkess remains for fear to lurk in. HEARTLESS is a film so eager to make sure we understand what it means that it loses sight of the elements that make the journey worthwhile. It has its own magic tricks, but right away it wants to explain how they work, and -- even more damningly -- why the trick was done. We want to see the trick, Ridley – you can leave the rest to us.

A "flawless" "horror"... the "best" film of the year.

EDIT: SPOILERS! Oh yeah, I wanted to mention that early on there's this weird awkward exposition on TV about this crazy looking gang leader with some sort of elaborate golden claw for a hand. Inexplicably, he's named "She" (he's a beefy black guy with facial tattoos). But it's clear that (S)he is the leader of some other gang, not the demons. Well, since they made such a big deal about it you figure it's gonna come up again later, and it does. Jamie is in his place of business with his nephew, who owes money to a gang (long, pointless story) when suddenly She comes crashing in and attacks Jamie, who promptly stabs him to death. And he just goes, "oh, I guess I killed She," and runs off to be pursued by the other demon gang, never to mention it again. And that's it! What the fuck was that all about? I get that being named She is probably even worse than being named Sue, but what's with all those weird details? Maybe this thing is deeper than I gave it credit for.