Jacob's Ladder (2019 remake)

 

Jacob’s Ladder (remake) (2019)

Dir. David M. Rosenthal

Written by Jeff Buhler, Sarah Thorpe, “story by” Jake Wade Wall, Jeff Buhler, based on a screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin

Starring Michael Ealy, Jesse Williams, Nicole Beharie

 

 

Since the original JACOB'S LADDER is one of my very favorite horror movies of all time, I can't say I approached this (loose) remake with a lot of optimism; more like morbid curiosity. Unfortunately it doesn't even offer much to be morbidly curious about. It's not bad so much as it fails to ever be even a little good, and the ways in which it fails to be good are mostly pretty boring. It's rarely outright incompetent, but at the same time there's just no evidence whatsoever that anybody involved wanted to be here or had any clear idea why it would be worth telling this story other than to ride the coattails of a more famous movie which still isn't even that famous.

 

That is, anyway, the only reason I can think of that this would be called JACOB’s LADDER. It vaguely echoes some plot elements of the original –the titular Jacob (Michael Ealy, MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA) is an American soldier back home after a foreign war (Afghanistan rather than Vietnam) and gets mixed up with an experimental drug that leads him into a paranoid, hallucinatory journey. Similar enough that you’d probably notice, but not specific enough that they’d have to worry about lawsuits if they just ripped it off. But let’s be honest here, it’s not like someone came up with a brilliant story and just later realized it kind of superficially resembled the scenario for a cult flick from 1990. Obviously somebody picked up the rights to the remake, grabbed some gigging writer (Jeff Buhler, already responsible for THE GRUDGE REMAKE [2020] and PET SEMETARY REMAKE and the screenplay for MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN and THE PRODIGY and recently STUDIO 666) and said “write a story we can title JACOB’S LADDER so that a small percentage of people will watch it thinking it’s the good version, and a handful of horror die-hards will check it out due to a sense of morbid curiosity.” And then when they needed re-writes and the original guy didn’t want to bother, they handed it to a personal trainer or niece or somebody that the producer knew (Sarah Thorpe, no other credits) and just said “try and cut out the stuff that sounds expensive.”

 

This is not the type of scenario that one could reasonably expect to produce great art. But it could still probably be better than this. Mostly the movie as a whole is just sort of drab and pointless, but I guess the script is maybe weak enough to qualify as outright bad, although in a bland way rather than an exotic one. The story itself is built around a pretty tepid mindfuck (and pretty nonsensical should you be inclined to try and ask pissy questions like "wait, if that's what was happening, what have I been watching up til now?") though at least it's a different mindfuck than the original. (I said "different," not "better" although I'll readily admit that the twist in the original is the worst thing about it). The fact that it's very stupid is a problem for a movie this relentlessly dour, but the bigger problem is more fundamental: it fails to ever establish a convincing baseline reality --starting with Jacob and his wife’s (Nicole Beharie, SHAME) pristine, antiseptic home with its demure, compliant newborn (!) who cries exactly once and never while anyone is sleeping-- which renders its later attempts at surrealism a dismal nonstarter. Can't disrupt reality if I never for one second believe in these characters even at their status quo.

 

And it doesn't get more convincing as the situation escalates. Early on, Jacob watches as his brother Isaac (Jesse Williams, CABIN IN THE WOODS --yes, their names are Jacob and Isaac) dies in front of him. Years later, Isaac turns up alive, apparently within walking distance of Jacob's house! And Jacob's response is... mild surprise and annoyance? He basically just drops him off at his house and goes about his business. At no point does he or his wife freak out or seem to find this shocking and inexplicable and demanding of answers. He mumbles something that the paperwork must have gotten mixed up and that's that. And Ealy (who I consider to be a terrific actor, but obviously needed a little more direction here) doesn't help matters with his disappointingly tepid performance. Very quickly, this guy is experiencing totally insane shit, and his reaction never seems to rise above "mildly perturbed." I'm sorry, but putting a five-o'clock shadow on Michael Ealy does not make him look tormented, it just makes him look hotter. And he's already borderline too hot to take seriously in the first place.

 

So yeah, it's a bad script, but it's at least committed to its dumb twist, and could, maybe, have been salvaged by some real directorial flair. But if any director was going to be able to pull that off, David M. Rosenthal --who must be a real charming guy, considering how often in his career he's been able to pull amazingly overqualified casts for completely anonymous DTV genre fare-- ain't the one to do it. The original JACOB'S LADDER is a masterclass in gritty, nightmare-fueled paranoia; this has a perfunctory sort of visual slickness that makes it feel like a gloomy car commercial, and the best it can manage in the nightmare department is that lame thing where someone's face will suddenly distort into a SCREAM mask and they’ll shout "boo!" (a trick I was already mocking as shamelessly unimaginative back when DEAD BIRDS did it like a thousand years ago). Creating a paranoid thriller is all about using the tools of cinema to create a heightened, anxious mental state, and this is just utterly, woefully unable to do it, instead drifting between hacky jump-scare scenes and languid, clunky backstory which is so rigidly built to service the goofy twist that the movie can barely even pretend to be a straight horror movie. Its problem isn't really that it's a lunkheaded cash-in trading on the good name of a classic; it's that it's just kind of boring.

 

Props for the scene near the end where he has sex with the Angel of Death, though. If the whole thing were that eccentric and melodramatic, we might actually have something here.

The Secret of Sinchanee

The Secret Of Sinchanee (2021)

Dir. and written by Steven Grayhm

Starring Steven Grayhm, Tamara Austin, Nate Boyer

 

I watched THE SECRET OF SINCHANEE as a Hail-Mary style random Tubi pick, based entirely on "hey, looks like there's some kind of monster or a giant bird or something on the poster." I knew nothing about it, had no reason to assume it was good, and much reason to assume it was probably garbage. Inadvisable, certainly; self-destructive, probably. But it is the kind of utter recklessness which is my legal right during Half-O-Ween, that magical time of the year when you can watch stuff you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole even in October.

And despite the consistent level of shocking doggerel that I post about here, there are movies even I wouldn’t bother with, and this would normally be one of them. It belongs to a broad category of about nine hundred million indie horror flicks which were seemingly released direct to the internet without a word starting in the late ‘naughts. They all look reasonably professional --mostly since cameras and sound equipment have evolved so much that it doesn't take a tremendous amount of skill to shoot a movie which looks basically competent-- they all have perfectly professional acting…* and not one of them has anything even the least bit interesting in it. Unlike the raucous, anything-goes zero-budget hokum of yesteryear, they feel respectable and responsible and crisply professional, movies that were made at the behest of career councilors, rather than fevered nightmares forced onto the screen by delusion madmen with delusions of grandeur. All of them, I assume, were cranked out by the self-reinforcing cycle whereby streaming services require content --a volume business wherein it doesn't particularly matter what content-- and consequently there's always money available for a first-time filmmaker looking to pad their resume to crank out a bland, mercenary horror flick about whatever, just to prove they can handle bringing a shoot in on time and under budget, and hopefully use it as a springboard to move on to more interesting things. You sell the result to Netflix or Tubi or somebody who buys 'em in bulk, sight-unseen, then they slap a generic title like THE UNDERNEATH or DEMON HOUSE or something on the cover along with a gloomy-looking picture of a scared lady cowering in an all-grey abandoned house, and presto, chango, content has been created. An algorithm has been fed. And there it is popping up when you search for "horror" on Tubi, adding quantity but no actual value to your lengthy selection process. Unless, of course, you take the plunge and just click anyway, at which point, well, you can't say they didn't warn you.

THE SECRET OF SINCHANEE doesn't exactly buck the stereotype, but it does feel at least a little more committed than I was expecting. Far from a mercenary effort to churn out content, it's almost a vanity project, a showpiece for producer-writer-director-star Steven Grayhm ("Russ -- Party Boy" in WHITE CHICKS), one of those longtime working actors who has had a perfectly successful 20-year career without ever quite hitting the big times. The surprise here is that his big Orson Welles moment reveals him to be a more-than-capable director, producing something with an unflashy but effective atmosphere, generally strong performances, and steady, intentional pace. It has an old-fashioned vibe, a serious-minded movie for adults without being pretentious or insisting it's about anything other than the pleasure of a good spooky story. With its snowy New England milieu (the lived-in, real-world locations help immensely to give it some weight and texture) and stately, slow-burning paranoid vibe, it kind of reminds me of a low-concept X-Files monster-of-the-week episode, which I consider a good thing. Or of the recent, grievously under-valued THE EMPTY MAN.

Unfortunately, the sturdy direction ends up being in service of a script that never takes off. The plot is one of those simultaneously undernourished and overbuilt things which can be summed up in a single sentence, or summed up in five paragraphs, and nothing in-between will quite work. Suffice to say, then, that it’s about this dude Will Stark (Grayhm, solid enough in a role which mostly just requires him to silently look uneasy) who is forced to move into his recently-deceased fathers’ house, and quickly begins to get mind whammy’d by the sinister forces which were also presumably behind a horrific tragedy from his youth. Grayhm approaches this bedrock-simple setup with a bizarre, almost lackadaisical indirectness, however. The movie maintains a holding pattern, circling becoming a possession movie without actually doing it, for a surprisingly long time, and in the process drawing in two detective characters (Tamara Austin [The Walking Dead] and Nate Boyer [former Seattle Seahawk and US Army Green Beret, DEN OF THEIVES]—both doing unusually fine work to make their characters feels worth investing in), who have a complicated, somewhat resentful relationship but still manage to work together while they gradually, um… It’s a little hard to explain from here. There’s like, this whole thing where someone Will used to know as a child has been murdered, and for some reason the detectives think Will is the killer and he acts sort of suspicious even though we know he’s innocent (unless he isn’t and it’s just not very clear?) and it all relates to this cult who worship an ancient American Indian spirit of death, except that actually they’re the descendants of colonial Satan-worshippers, and they want to kill the last members of a magical (and fictional**) Indian tribe called the Sinchanee, who are described as “a peaceful mixed-race tribe discovered to have a unique immunity to diseases brought to the new world” who were “liberated” when “at the turn of the 18th century, French and Native forces attacked an English Settlement at Deerfield, Massachusetts.” For some reason, this resulted in a situation where “for years, locals have reported unusual paranormal phenomena that to this day…. remain unexplained.” And that scans because everyone keeps getting haunted by this evil little ballerina girl, except that I think she’s Will’s sister who was horribly murdered when he was a child? And also there’s an evil mirror? And a haunted piano?

I honestly have no idea what’s up with any of that, and it’s the main problem with the film: it’s well-directed and well-acted, but this story is a complete mess, cluttered up beyond belief with characters it doesn’t need (the two detective characters contribute literally nothing to the plot, are not even present at the climax, and everything in the movie would have worked out exactly the same if they had not been there) and a jumbled backstory it is completely incapable of making use of (despite the four impenetrable paragraphs of explanatory text at the start of the movie, which are then basically reiterated verbatim by another character in the final act, none of the stuff about the Sinchanee being invulnerable to smallpox or an 18th-century French-and-Indian raid or a secret pagan cult actually end up mattering all that much. There is definitely a cult hanging around, I guess, but I was never clear on exactly what their deal was or why they would want to possess this one dude instead of just killing him. And it never ends up meaningfully altering the basic possession narrative at work here anyway. It would pretty much be exactly the same story if he was just haunted by the ghost of his crazy dad or something. Although at least the masks are pretty boss. Might get back into organized religion if they started handing out badass skull-faced masks on major holidays.).

 And even if you can get past all the clutter, it kind of bungles the structure, puttering about, skirting the edges of a possession story and framing it as a mystery for so long you keep assuming there's gotta be some kind of twist -- but there isn't, it's all bedrock-standard possession stuff, it’s just bedrock-standard possession stuff buried in a haphazard pile of all sorts of mostly irrelevant bric-à-brac, none of which adds enough texture to be worth it. For a while it seems kind of interesting to have two parallel stories, one about this nice guy getting haunted, and the other about the detectives who wrongly think he's a killer, but you'd need them to eventually intersect for that to have any kind of payoff, and since that doesn't really happen, it's all for naught. Instead the whole thing just feels fatty and dawdling, floundering around and throwing out characters and worldbuilding without a clear idea of how any of it could be constructively woven together into a satisfying narrative. It sort of feels like it was originally meant to be a TV mini-series --complete with all the meandering subplots and side characters and time-wasting that format entails in this current cultural moment-- all edited down into one way over-burdened movie, but also not edited down quite enough, because the flippin' thing is damn near two hours long. And there's just not enough payoff here, in terms of whammy or in terms of simple imagination, to justify 115 extremely unhurried minutes.

Still, it’s trying, and for a good half of the movie --when it was still unclear that all this was going absolutely nowhere interesting-- I was pretty into it. If it’s a swing and a miss, at least there was a swing, and that's about the best case scenario for a Tubi blind watch, so I'm inclined to be generous.  

And speaking of generosity, the movie ends with text saying it's part of a project to employ veterans and their families? So even if doesn't land as a horror classic, at least it succeeds as a New Deal-esque WPA project. Homies gettin' paid and all that. Maybe that's the real Secret of Sinchanee?

*One of the great mysteries of our time is the utter vanishment from this earth of that great 80's and 90's style bad acting that was full of enthusiastically alien line readings and brisk energetic nonsense. What happened? Where did it go? Did the dour seriousness of the torture-porn years just kill off our capacity for frivolous artifice? Is this the next step in human evolution, that we're just all gloomy and sober all the time?

** Grayhm is descended from the Weskarini Algonquin on his father's side, according to IMDB, so I'll try not to get too weirded out about his making up a new tribe who are vaguely implied to be magic, I guess? Anyway, at least they're the good guys, and the colonialists are the bad guys, or so the dialogue says although none of that ever really plays out in the story itself.

SGT [sic] PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (1978)

 

SGT [sic] PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (1978)

Dir. Michael Schultz

Written by Henry Edwards

Starring Peter Frampton, The Bee Gees, George Burns, Steve Martin, Donald Pleasance, Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, Earth Wind and Fire, Carel Struycken

There should be a law.

Once upon a time, some rich asshole bought the rights to 29 Beatles songs from Sgt. Pepper and Abby Road for an off-Broadway jukebox musical, which apparently was a thing people did back then (in fact, this particular asshole, one Robert Stigwood by name, had already done something similar with 1977's SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER). And of course, when he discovered that the docile US population was unwisely willing to tolerate this kind of chicanery, he decided that while he had the rights, he might as well grind out a movie, too. It would tell the classic story of Sgt [sic] Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a four-piece brass band who became beloved during their stint in World War I, and who returned to their hometown of Heartland, USA, to remain popular through the decades until they died in 1958. Then, although the movie is not explicit on this point, it appears their bodies were stuffed and displayed in the local museum along with their magical instruments(?), which is where the story picks up with the grandson of the band's leader, Peter Frampton (The Simpson Season 7 Episode 24), who dresses like the Lawnmower man and has the Bee Gees as a backing band.

If it seems weird to you that a filmmaker would start a movie called SGT [sic] PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND by introducing a WWI-era band of that name, only to immediately kill them and skip ahead to 1978, strap in, kid, because that will seem like airtight narrative efficiency by the time we get to a British comedian who lives in a van with two robot gimps and obeys the commands of a psychedelic video screen which will ultimately task him with stealing the beloved magical instruments of the original Sgt [sic] Pepper's band, as part of a dastardly plan by a mysterious secret society to utilize the instruments' magical powers to transform the world's youth into mind-controlled automatons in boy-scout uniforms. Meanwhile, the Peter Frampton ensemble must experience a meteoric rise to fame and be tempted by rock and roll excess before the movie forgets about that entirely and they have to go and recover the magical instruments from the secret society's various colorful henchmen.

Or, at least, I'm pretty sure that's the gist of what happens; parts of this story are directly explained via the narration of George Burns (!), (playing a "Mr. Kite," and yes, they will literally play a Benefit For Mr. Kite before the credits roll) but when he's not explicitly describing what's happening on-screen, good luck figuring out what the fuck any of this is supposed to mean. You see, Burns speaks the only actual dialogue in the film; everything else in the story is communicated entirely via the medium of Beatles covers. Which could, in theory, be made to make some sense, I suppose; I don't recall Julie Taymor's 2007 all-Beatles musical ACROSS THE UNIVERSE struggling with basic comprehensibility. But the problem here is that these particular Beatles songs are, by and large, a selection of the band's most specific and direct storytelling, and they are absolutely and unequivocally not telling this particular story. Not one of these songs is, even in the most vague, elliptical way, about battling the evil henchmen of a brainwashing robot cult to regain a suite of magical brass instruments, and yet they are our only means of trying to discern the basic plot of a movie which is, to the extent which it can be meaningfully said to be about anything, about battling the evil henchmen of a brainwashing robot cult to regain a suite of magical brass instruments. 

We are often faced, then, with songs in which only the title or a few tossed-off lines have anything at all to do with what we're actually seeing; witness the bizarre dissociative fugue that occurs as Steve Martin (!) speak-sings his way through "Maxwell's Silver Hammer." It is true that he is playing a character named "Maxwell Edison," and he does appear to incidentally own a silver hammer, but otherwise not a single word from the rest of the song --and everyone in the movie always sings the whole song-- has a single goddamn thing to do with what we're actually watching. The lyrics are our only window into what the story is supposed to be --remember, there's no dialogue whatsover outside of the very occasional Burns narration-- so there's no way to just ignore them, and yet he's singing "Maxwell Edison majoring in medicine / Calls her on the phone / Can I take you out to the pictures, Joan?" despite the fact that there is no Joan, no phone, and not one goddamn thing he's talking about has anything to do with the movie we're watching.

There is a character called "Strawberry Fields," and never mind what a fucking insane name that is for a human, the real problem is that she sings the song "Strawberry Fields Forever". You know, the one which begins, "Let me take you down, 'Cause I'm going to / strawberry fields." I'm, I'm! As in, “I am!” First person singular! Never mind that the rest of the song is meaningless gibberish in this context anyway, you know what character would make more sense singing "I'm going to strawberry fields"? LITERALLY ANYONE NOT ACTUALLY NAMED "STRAWBERRY FIELDS." Good Lord, people, just fucking think about this for just two goddamn seconds before you start shooting it!*

And then, above and beyond all that, there's the crippling issue that the production is set, for no reason in particular, in America, despite the soundtrack of what might be the most aggressively British pop songs in the history of music. The lyrics are constantly talking about Lancashire, "ten-bob" notes, lorrys, getting sacked, and what have you --hell, both Frampton and the Bee Gees are British!**-- and yet the movie absolutely insists that this is a home-grown American affair. It's madness! The movie offers absolutely no explanation about why this at-a-minimum third-generation American band is suddenly singing about Lancashire, and doesn't even appear to notice that it's odd. 

(For the record, though, the funniest mismatch between screen and lyrics is when Barry Gibb, singing "A Day In The Life," looks at the camera and solemnly narrates that he "Woke up / got out of bed/ dragged a comb across my head." He looked like this at the time: 

Yeah, uh, Barry, I think there was probably a little more to it than that.)

Very occasionally, the movie's baseline idiocy bleeds into outright psychosis in a way which is at least visually interesting; a scene where devilish (?) Label boss Donald Pleasence (!!) speak-sings his way through "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" while seducing our boys into signing a record contract*** gradually degenerates into a opulent nightmare Nicolas Roeg would be proud of (the film was shot by five-time Academy-Award nominee Owen Roizman, of THE FRENCH CONNECTION and THE EXORCIST fame!). The gaudy, tasteless overkill of it all sporadically brushes up against some kind of giddy camp, although it can also seem weirdly chintzy and small-scale for something so obviously hoping to overwhelm with excess. Still, a few sequences feel frisky and odd enough to entertain; Martin's rendition of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" at least has the benefit of some energetic choreography which the film almost entirely lacks (Patricia Birch, of GREASE [but also GREASE 2] is credited, but the songs are mostly performed by rockers who don't dance). And I guess I'm incapable of not being charmed by seeing Alice Cooper (!) as the head of some kind of mustachio'd brainwashing cult, however little actually comes of it.

Mostly, though, this is a literally unbelievable trainwreck of incomprehensible madness, and rarely even eccentric enough at that to be fun. Mostly it's just exhausting. Even the covers are so strikingly similar to the originals as to hardly feel exotic; every now and then they get a little bold, as when the band gradually twists "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" into some kind of weirdo disco workout, but mostly the result of Frampton and the Bee Gees covering this material is simply faithful reconstructions of the originals**** with distinctly wussier vocals. And the Beatles weren't exactly Pig Destroyer to begin with, so when I say these covers are wussier, you can believe me that you're going to notice. After a while, suffering through George Burns, Alice Cooper, Steve Martin, and Donald Pleasence speak-singing actually becomes a bit of a relief. 

Before the film's release, Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees announced: "There is no such thing as the Beatles now. They don't exist as a band and never performed Sgt Pepper live in any case. When ours comes out, it will be, in effect, as if theirs never existed." Fortunately that did not turn out to be the case; if anything, the opposite is true. Still, despite its relatively low profile in modern times, there's no getting around it: SGT [sic] PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND THE MOVIE does exist, and we just have to reckon with that fact. And it is a sobering one. This must surely be the most sobering film to ever be made by people who were most emphatically not sober. 

But lest you start to pity the film for its dizzying ineptitude, remember: it made that Aerosmith cover of "Come Together" a hit. So however much it suffered, it deserved much worse. 

* Also, Earth Wind and Fire are on hand to perform "Got to Get You into My Life." But here's the thing: they're not actually a part of the plot or anything. At one point, our heroes just go to an Earth Wind and Fire show, and hear that one song. I'm not complaining though; at least Earth Wind and Fire get to walk away with their dignity marginally intact, and besides, stopping everything to go to an Earth Wind and Fire show is the only action Frampton and Co. take in the entire film that makes these jokers seem in any way relatable or sympathetic.

**The Bee Gees were all born in Manchester, although they rose to fame after moving to Australia in their teens.

*** Which, uh, they want to sign, and in fact came here to sign, and never regret signing, so I don't know what's up with the sinister tone here.

**** Original Beatles producer George Martin is on board here in the same capacity, presumably just for the opportunity to spite his old band by exactly recreating the lush production they were so hostile to.