If a David Lynch acolyte with a jones for art history and a basic working knowledge of the canon of Ingmar Bergman decided to shoot a casually sleazy, cautionary tale of intellectual and sexual midlife crisis, it would likely resemble French director Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Gradiva, a flatly shot, self-serious 2006 erotic thriller that isn’t quite lurid enough to succeed as an Angel Heart-type piece of provocation, and isn’t psychologically perspicacious enough to satiate arthouse audiences.

A gothic murder mystery that the film’s DVD cover bills as “in the style of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo,” Gradiva centers around English historian John Locke (James Wilby, a sort of Gaelic cross between Matthew Modine and Timothy Hutton), who comes to Morocco to work on a study of painter Eugene Delacroix. Embarking on a search for a rare series of engravings, Locke sees a beautiful woman dressed in white wandering the narrow streets of the ancient medina, and becomes obsessed with unearthing her identity and tracking her down. Locke’s newly taken young lover, Belkis (Dany Verissimo, above), tries to warn him off both his academic search and his obsession with the mystery blonde, whom he comes to find out is named Leila (Arielle Dombasle). But Locke is convinced these elements somehow hold the key to some groundbreaking thesis work, and so it may be too late for him to escape from this dangerous labyrinth of swirling desire and intrigue.

Robbe-Grillet, director of the infamous, Oscar-nominated Last Year at Marienbad, trades in an astonishingly flat and unengaging visual style, and elicits wildly uneven, often derisible performances. (Farid Chopel is especially noteworthy in the negative sense, even in a fairly functionary role.) The filmmaker thinks nothing of casually shooting an outdoor cafe sequence where an actress has her nipple hanging out of her blouse for the entire scene, but titillation seems back-burnered with respect to the mock intrigue of the plot, which means there’s lots of wandering dusty side streets and run-ins with authority figures both real and perhaps contrived. Gradiva represents Robbe-Grillet’s final film (he passed away in 2008, at 85 years of age), and it’s a grand-scale misfire that doesn’t work as either a legitimate treatment of the themes of quixotic desperation and obsession it wishes to explore or a sex-tinged, exotically set thriller.

Housed in a red plastic Amaray case, Gradiva comes presented on a region-free disc with a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that — despite coming from a brand new striking of the negative — is sullied by a bit of grain, if no problems with edge enhancement. Audio comes in the form of a Dolby digital stereo track. The film’s original theatrical trailer is included along with extensive production notes and cast biographies, plus a seven-minute preview trailer spotlighting other Mondo Macabro releases. The chief supplemental extra, though, is a 31-minute interview with a red scarf-clad Robbe-Grillet, in which he discusses both his cinematic influences more generally (Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni and surrealist master Luis Buñuel, naturally) and the movie specifically. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D+ (Movie) B (Disc)

There are big familial shoes to fill when your last name is Romero and you’re tackling the horror genre, which is unfortunately part of the problem of outsized expectations that weighs down Staunton Hill, a thin bouillabaisse of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho and a half dozen other horror flicks, directed by Cameron Romero, son of zombie flick godhead George Romero.

Set in the autumn of 1969, for seemingly no other reason than to give its subjects the chance to talk about “the rally” in Washington, D.C., the movie centers on a group of five college-age kids hitchhiking through a remote mountainous region of Virginia. There’s Boone (Kiko Ellsworth) and Raina (Christine Carlo), Jordan (the strangely named Cristen Coppen), Cole (David Rountree, also the film’s writer) and Cole’s old crush Trish (Paula Rhodes). After hooking up with Quintin (Charlie Bodin), a nice young guy who offers to give them a ride, the group makes it a couple dozen miles deeper into the woods before Quintin’s beat-up truck breaks down. After holing up in what they think is an abandoned barn for the night, in the morning they unwittingly stumble across the Staunton family, for whom the nearby hill is named. They subsequently find themselves at the mercy of a depraved, diabolical brood (headed up by the tubby Kathy Lamkin) that will stop at nothing to rid their property of these “trespassers.” The only law on Staunton’s Hill is the law of the Stauntons, and in this case, not too surprisingly, the penalty for defying that law is death.

The work of the actors here is a bit uneven, but for the most part naturalistic and vacuumed free of histrionics, though Coppen is a late offender in this regard. Rountree’s screenplay baits a passably intriguing if somewhat familiar premise, but ignores the basic dynamics of group interaction by allowing Quintin to steer some collective decision-making. The film’s twist is tipped fairly early on by Romero’s use of affected flashbacks/flashforwards, so by the time the requisite big, lumbering, retarded guy in overalls, Buddy (B.J. Hendricks), starts dropping people with shovels to the face, one has a fairly fixed sense of where this is headed. The remaining thrills, in either gore or suspense, don’t connect enough in level of execution, and the final reel sags tremendously, including a two-minute tracking shot of a putative escape. Sans closing credits, in fact, Staunton Hill clocks in at an undernourished 81 minutes. Of note, however, is composer Jesper Kyd’s music, which is superlative.

Housed in a regular Amray case with a hollowed-out spindle area to reduce the amount of plastic used, Staunton Hill comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing. The title is divided into 12 chapters via a separate static menu screen, but there are no supplemental features, which further dents any collectible value. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) D- (Disc)

An acid-tongued, comedically inflected mystery with attitude to spare, Assassination of a High School President is a fun, engaging recasting of high school angst and adolescent friendships and liaisons, in all their white-hot heat — and not merely because of the awesome-adjacent name of its director, Brett Simon. Sharply acted and powered by some clever writing, the movie is an unblinking, straight-faced send-up of noir conventions, and the heightened stakes and skulking, fringe’s-edge energy of the best of those genre pictures meshes surprisingly well with Simon’s private school setting, and its hidden machinations.

Set at tony St. Donovan’s, the film takes as its protagonist sophomore newspaper reporter Bobby Funke (Reece Thompson, above in
background), a hard-charging quasi-outcast who is assigned by editor-in-chief Clara (Melanie Diaz) to
write a cover story on popular class president, National Merit scholar and soccer team captain Paul Moore (Patrick Taylor). After a stack of SAT tests is stolen from the office of Principal Kirkpatrick (Bruce Willis), a hard-as-nails war veteran, Bobby publishes an expose that names Paul as the prime suspect, which brings him notoriety and acclaim — and even an audience with Paul’s now ex-girlfriend, a slinky senior named Francesca (Mischa Barton) who continually (along with other characters) mispronounces Bobby’s surname.

Feeling pressure from a journalistic rival, the sniveling Tad Goltz
(Aaron Himelstein), and starting to question the motivations of erstwhile vice
president Marlon (Luke Grimes, of Brothers & Sisters), who is also Francesca’s step-brother, Bobby begins to doubt the star jock’s guilt. Something doesn’t quite add up. When further investigation uncovers a campus-wide conspiracy that threatens to take down students and teachers alike, Bobby must decide whether or not to tell the truth and risk a prestigious journalistic summer internship, or simply enjoy the social upgrade that his work has afforded him.

The feature directorial debut of Simon, Assassination of a High School President is written by Tim Calpin and Kevin Jakubowski, a pair of former production assistants on South Park. What’s right about the movie mostly starts with Thompson, so striking in the underrated Rocket Science, and a wry anchoring presence here in a filmic exercise whose hearty stylistic leanings could have otherwise tipped over into irritation quite quickly. With its canted dialogue delivery and recasting of high school as both a riddle to be solved and a dangerous, hormonally charged swamp of criminal plotting, the movie strongly recalls the imaginative Brick.

The plot, part Chinatown mystery, part The Usual Suspects shell game (both heartily copped to as influences in interview material with the writers), is a take-it-or-leave-it affair that might be too cute by half for some, but it’s mainly the involving style of the film and its barbed dialogue, along with Thompson’s engaging performance, that seduces. Sometimes bits and pieces of Bobby’s moody voiceover narration errs on the side of juvenilia (“Their alibis were like Dutch ovens — gamey, but airtight”), but the banter and other little asides smartly inform the characterizations (“I coached English for two seasons” boasts Michael Rapaport’s dimwitted instructor, also in charge of the soccer team), and hold one’s attention up through an ending that will feel familiar to anyone who chafed at the less well reasoned of high school’s rules and constraints.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Assassination of a High School President comes presented in 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen, with an English language Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track that too frequently comes across as mixed low, both in dialogue and upper register ambient noise. Extracurricular activities on the disc include 20 minutes of extended and alternate
scenes, and another seven minutes of deleted scenes, all with optional commentary from the aforementioned writers. Also included is an alternate opening sequence, part of a much longer tracking shot, which Calpin and Jakubowski explain had to be trimmed for the sake of out-of-the-gate clarity. Preview trailers for Fragments, Year One and a handful of other films are also included. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)