The absurd title of writer-directors Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck’s movie — with its blend of the lewd and sweet — could be an indicator of watered-down comedic cop-out, but this romp about a group of longtime pals who decide to get horizontal with one another is the real deal, delivering amply on every level in which it chooses to engage. Powered by palpable chemistry amongst its many co-leads, an affable sense of purpose, and plenty of smart timing and whip-smart humor, this sex farce amusingly showcases both the titillation and wild discomfort of its perhaps farfetched concept.

The story centers around Eric (Saturday Night Live‘s Jason Sudeikis), an amiable thirtysomething New Yorker who doesn’t much care for his job, and instead lives for the summer, when he can repair to his father’s house in the Hamptons and throw elaborate weekend theme parties with a group of longtime friends that includes Mike (Tyler Labine, above left), Adam (Nick Kroll), Laura (Lindsay Sloane), Alison (Lake Bell), Sue (Michelle Borth), would-be musician Doug (Martin Starr) and his girlfriend Willow (Angela Sarafyan). When Eric finds out his dad (Don Johnson) is selling the house, he’s bummed out, but decides that the gang should go out with a bang — literally, in the form of a Labor Day weekend orgy.

Slowly, one by one, the friends come around to the idea, each for their own reasons — because of a recent break-up, an unresolved intra-group crush, general horniness, or the belief that lingering body issues could perhaps be set straight in a group setting. This decision comes after the summer nuptials of a pair of purposefully excluded, long-engaged friends, Glenn and Kate (Will Forte and Lucy Punch), who also have a baby together, and is eventually additionally complicated by Eric’s growing feelings for real estate agent Kelly (Leslie Bibb).

A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy, though, doesn’t morph into some weak-kneed romantic comedy wherein Eric experiences an epiphany and calls the whole act off. If it’s a goofy, ambling and loose-limbed beast throughout, the movie is also fairly honest (albeit in an exaggerated fashion) about the feelings of anxiety and uncertainty that it summons up in its characters. This makes the film — the directorial debut of former The Larry Sanders Show and King of the Hill scribes Huyck and Gregory — true-hearted and sincere, while also quite strong in the jokes department.

The cast, too, is a good match. There are faces that are more recognizable than others, certainly, but everyone seems to fit well together, and there is no sense of gamesmanship or grandstanding to any of the scenes — a too common problem in a lot of shock-oriented comedies, where whether because of star cameos or scene-chewing instincts many set pieces tilt over into the improbable, and spoil any sense of rootedness to the story. This Orgy remains true to itself — immature and embellished, but never wildly unrealistic.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy comes to DVD in a 98-minute unrated version, presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen with English and French language Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks that more than adequately handle the title’s straightforward sound design. Optional English, French and English SDH subtitles are also available. Bonus features are anchored by a chatty and amusing feature-length audio commentary track from Gregory, Huyck and Sudeikis, in which the latter points out that “the Steven Soderbergh version of this same story starts at the morning-after breakfast.” Ten deleted or trimmed scenes run a total of just over 16 minutes, and finds Borth’s character advising Punch’s character to give her husband anal sex in order to make their wedding night special. There is also a scene with another character breaking news of the orgy to her Bible study group, a subplot completely removed from the theatrical version of the movie.

A behind-the-scenes featurette runs a tad over eight minutes, but features loads of on-set production footage from the movie’s Wilmington, North Carolina, shoot, and manages to work in nice and genuinely thoughtful interview clips with the filmmakers and a broad cross-section of the cast (including some bit players, like Lin Shaye and David Koechner). The phrase “gag reel” could mean something quite different for a title like this, but it does feature flubs and improvisations run amok after all; in butt-less chaps, Forte crashes one of the orgy scenes, Labine opines about “crocodile blowjobs,” and Sudeikis threatens nut flicks, only to have his bluff called. Previews for Drive, Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, Bucky Larson: Born To Be a Star and the grim-looking third installment of the Hostel franchise round things out. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) B- (Disc)

For my latest DVD/Blu-ray column, over at ShockYa, I take a gander at the Fright Night remake, a couple documentaries, Stephen Dorff and Maria Bello’s Carjacker, Nick Di Paolo’s new stand-up comedy special, and a movie in which Bruce Willis gets to hold forth with a monologue about how much he loves pecans. Oh, and the new Blu-ray release of 1988’s cult flick Maniac Cop, starring Bruce Campbell. Again, it’s all over at ShockYa, so click here for the full read.

A kind of goofy, over-the-top, gross-out valentine to the drive-in era and the sort of cheap splatterfests that such edge-of-town establishments often featured, Chillerama is a horror anthology that offers up enough bad-taste depravity to put a curled smile of pleased enjoyment on John Waters’ face.

Adam Rifkin, Tim Sullivian, Joe Lynch and Adam Green are the four directors presiding over the mayhem here — a two-hour festival of gore, goo, guts and blithely unserious chills and thrills. The wraparound story centers on the closing of the very last drive-in theater in the United States, where owner Cecil B. Kaufman (Office Space‘s Richard Riehle) has planned the ultimate marathon of lost film prints to unleash upon his faithful patrons — four films so rare that they’ve never been exhibited publicly, until now. Sex and dismemberment stand alongside gross-out gags and puns galore, but the entire affair plays sort of like Monty Python and Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask crossed with your average, very derivative ’80s VHS horror romp, and a pinch of exploitation DNA. Production design and cinematography, nicely, reflect the scummy grindhouse roots of the material. Younger audiences may not find much enjoyment here, but genre enthusiasts will likely be clutching their stomachs for more than one reason.

Housed in a standard Amaray plastic case in turn stored in a complementary cardboard slipcover, the unrated Chillerama comes to DVD presented in a 1.78 aspect ratio, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles. Bonus features are anchored by a directors’ audio commentary track, interviews with the same quartet, and a nice spread of behind-the-scenes material, inclusive of deleted scenes and two making-of featurettes, that throw a bit of a different spotlight on each of the segments. The obligatory collection of preview trailers round things out. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Movie) B- (Disc)

If one were to ruminate on the equivalent of a Mother Teresa-type figure for the advocacy of natural animal research and wildlife conservation, it would likely be Dr. Jane Goodall, a world-famous icon known for her groundbreaking scientific field work accrued while living amongst chimpanzees in Africa. Directed by Lorenz Knauer, the documentary Jane’s Journey offers up a biographical snapshot of both the personal and professional Goodall. Inclusive of some compelling piecemeal details, it’s a film that’s hard to assail with much enthusiasm or gusto, but the truth is that it’s an awkward and generally unfocused mash-up of mixed perspectives and mission statements.

It’s hard to believe, but the British-born Goodall was in her early 20s when she first headed to Africa, lacking any formal graduate degree. She’d been enamored with animals from a young age, and seized on this quixotic idea of living alongside and studying them — nevermind that such a plan was wildly unrealistic, especially for a woman. Nevertheless, she persisted, visiting and eventually securing employment at the Kenya National Museum, and winning the confidence of its director, Louis Leakey, with a combination of otherworldly patience and extensively annotated behavioral observations. She eventually enrolled at Cambridge University in 1962, and obtained her PhD three years later.

Goodall’s pioneering research of wild chimpanzee behavior — including the first confirmation of their creation and use of tools, which required a change in the scientific definition of humankind — earned her the moniker of “Ambassador of the Apes,” and made her a superstar in environmental and animal studies subsets. More than five decades on the research still continues, under the auspices of her eponymous institute.

It’s this facet that provides Jane’s Journey with its first big hiccup. Much of the early portion of the movie trades in straight biography, charting the life events that took Goodall to Kenya, and informed her seemingly unshakable sense of purpose. Eventually, though, the film starts wandering all over the map. Its disparate areas of inquiry aren’t at all mutually exclusive, but it’s clear that Goodall submitted to a film like this in large part to push the educational agenda of her eponymous institute. Knauer, however, seems not to have gotten the memo — or at least received it too late, since the Jane Goodall Institute and its expansive, global “Roots & Chutes” program is not first mentioned until 50 minutes into the movie, and only then in an abrupt and jarring fashion that doesn’t fully elucidate its mission. Largely lacking in any sort of natural pivot points or more focused narrative cohesiveness, Knauer just throws scenes and sequences together willy-nilly.

A few celebrities (Pierce Brosnan, Angelina Jolie) familiar with Goodall’s advocacy pop up to offer testimonials to her piety, but for every moment of genuine interest or revelation, there are padded-out, trivial reactions from lecture tour attendees (even at 77 years of age, Goodall still travels more than 300 days a year, giving speeches, doing book-readings and attending conferences), or other tertiary figures. Knauer, too, fails to dig substantively into passages of conflict and difficulty in Goodall’s personal life, and peg them to attitudinal shifts (or the lack thereof) in professional behavior. When Goodall’s lone son, known as Grub, reflects on the scariness of chimpanzees from his perspective as a child, or the later friction in his adult relationship with his mother caused by his decision to go into a lobster import-export business, it hints at something deeply interesting — not only because it’s humanizing, but also because it reflects tests of Goodall’s core values. Goodall’s life and work is fascinating and worthy of praise; Jane’s Journey fitfully captures that, but also misses the mark for most of its running time.

Nevertheless, Jane’s Journey comes to DVD packaged in a regular plastic Amaray case, presented in a 16×9 aspect ratio, with a Dolby stereo audio track and optional English subtitles. Supplemental bonus features include Jolie interview footage, as well as more information about the aforementioned “Roots & Chutes” program. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C (Movie) C (Disc)

A sequel to Uwe Boll’s 2008 The Lord of the Rings rip-off/videogame adaptation In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, this only loosely related sequel finds Dolph Lundgren tripping back in time, but unfortunately unable to stably reach a point prior to his committing to do this movie.

The story centers on Granger (Lundgren), a present-day former special forces soldier, characteristically haunted by the memories of his fallen comrades, who finds himself transported back to a mystical age of sorcery and shenanigans. One day, after a karate seminar with a bunch of tykes, he’s just minding his business in his apartment when a bunch of ninjas come bursting through a vortex. A mysterious woman helps him escape, and before he knows it Granger is in the presence of a crafty young king, Raven (Lochlyn Munro), who rules over the realm of Ehb and is
looking to expand the parameters of his kingdom, perhaps through time and space.

There’s lots of talk of Granger’s appearance fulfilling a prophecy, naturally, and the king’s chief henchman, Allard (Aleks Paunovic), does that thing where he demands obsequious deference, but eventually comes to begrudgingly respect Granger. Oh, and there’s a girl, of course, this time in the form of Manhatten (a miscast Natassia Malthe). Lots of running through the woods and effects-buoyed fisticuffs ensue.

Yawning, going-through-the-motions genre fare through and through, the movie additionally suffers from its obviously rushed production, which helps render the staging for its fight scenes downright farcical in their simplicity. The acting ranges from autopilot and disengaged/disinterested to flat-out unconvincing, though Kerry Weinrauch’s costumes at least achieve a functional degree of success on an obviously constrained budget. Still, if the devil is in the details, then Boll never met the devil, as In the Name of the King 2 again exhibits his penchant for making a day’s schedule above all else. He’s surely not the first filmmaker to encounter an actress with a nose piercing having to play a period character, but he is perhaps the first to employ such slipshod make-up artists and framing choices as to make that fact readily apparent to audiences.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, In the Name of the King 2 comes to DVD presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen. Boll sits for a feature-length audio commentary track, which means plenty of his wacky anecdotes and dubious insights, inclusive of stories of his dogs on the set. A brief behind-the-scenes featurette includes a decent bit of on-set footage, and interview material with Lundgren and others. Lundgren gives it the old college try, genially talking about Boll’s indefatigable energy and vision, and says that he hadn’t done a fantasy film in a long while, which made the project intriguing to him. But then Boll shows up while they’re filming this EPK chat, and things get weird and forced, like when your idiot boss shows up at a happy hour where you’re commiserating with your colleagues. Writer Michael Nachoff also submits to an interview and gets a stand-alone six-minute featurette, wherein he praises Lundgren’s performance and also talks about his writing process and the loads of voiceover narration that were excised from his screenplay. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here; for a characteristically entertaining interview with Boll, meanwhile, click here. D (Movie) C (Disc)

For my latest DVD/Blu-ray column, over at ShockYa, I celebrate Buster Keaton’s work in Seven Chances and Andy Serkis’ work in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, examine how the Straw Dogs remake stacks up against both the original and a couple other slices of screen vengeance, get animated with Futurama and CatDog, and ponder T-Pain and the Lonely Island’s reaction to Killer Yacht Party. Again, it’s all over at ShockYa, so click here for the full read.

The differences between French cinema and Hollywood studio offerings are various and sundry, but perhaps best illustrated by something like Rapt, a sprawling and inventive kidnap drama which doesn’t so much deliver an adrenaline shot of nervy thrills as steadily ooze disquieting tension over the course of its two-hour running time. Watching this superb high-wire balancing act unfold, one is struck by the myriad ways American thrillers typically angle for car chases and other jolts of immediacy, even if it doesn’t always make sense within the confines of the narrative. So when word of a planned English-language remake of Rapt broke not long before its slotting at the City of Lights City of Angels (COLCOA) Festival in 2010, it elicited both tingles of anticipation (it’s rich material) and knowing sighs of all the misguided compromises and tweaks that would almost certainly distill the grim effectiveness of writer-director Lucas Belvaux’s morally grey film.

Nominated for four Cesar Awards in its native France, including Best Director, Best Actor and Best Film, Rapt was inspired in part by the real-life 1978 kidnapping and rescue of businessman Edouard-Jean Empain. Its story centers around Stanislas Graff (Yvan Attal, above), a wealthy, powerful and politically connected industrialist/CEO with a couple dark secrets (a mistress, an affinity for gambling) that a group of criminals may have used as leverage in their plot. On the eve of a trip abroad with the French president, Graff is kidnapped in a brilliantly executed snatch-and-grab on a city street. His kidnappers want cash, and lots of it, so they promptly cut off his middle finger to show the police and Graff’s wife Francoise (Anne Consigny) that they mean business.

While the particulars of the ransom are being hashed out, the man charged with overseeing Graff’s corporation in his absence, Andre Peyrac (Andre Marcon), tries to walk a tightrope between legitimate concern and the protection of broader, multi-national business assests. As tabloids threaten to get hold of some of the less than flattering particulars of Graff’s personal life, Peyrac worries about how it will impact the value and worth of the company. The police, meanwhile, often seemed more concerned with merely apprehending the kidnappers and holding them up as a public example than actually ensuring Graff’s physical well-being.

What’s most remarkable about Belvaux’s film is the way it habitually avoids pat judgments about its characters, while also coming up with interesting story twists and simultaneously burrowing deeper and deeper into its characters’ individual emotional states. No one gets off easy here. It spoils nothing, really, to say that Graff is separated from his kidnappers much earlier than the film’s final reel, leaving his family and others to grapple with the changes in their lives, and the fact that this act is not some discrete threat to be overcome and shelved away, but rather a stone thrown in the placid pond of their privileged existences, with ripples spreading farther and father after the fact, and in unknown directions.

Attal gives a superlative performance, morphing from cocksure captain of industry to an emaciated and ruminative victim of prey, and Marcon and the rest of the cast are similarly effective in projecting the interior monologues of their characters. It will be interesting to see who plays the role of Graff in Rapt‘s American remake, but it’s almost certain that the film will be injected with the sort of muscular, pop-out set pieces that chip away at the opportunity for the sort of unique nonverbal connection that Rapt affords. It may yet land in the right hands (witness the artful Swedish film Let the Right One In and its equally beautiful American counterpart, Let Me In, or David Fincher’s take on The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), but Rapt should definitely be given a chance by American fans of quality arthouse cinema; it’s undeniably one of the better thrillers in recent years.

Rapt comes to Blu-ray packaged in a complementary cardboard slipcover, with bold red lettering that draws a Stateside consumer’s eye to a title that perhaps holds a bit less familiar gut-punch connection than other single-word monikers for such genre product. Or maybe that’s the canny plan here — inferring a bit of canted artiness, since general audiences are going to glance at the names Yvan Attal and Lucas Belvaux and not get past those. Either way, the 2.35:1 anamorphic 1080p transfer is superb — retaining all sorts of subtle nuance in cinematographer Pierre Milon’s shadowy work, plus suffering not at all from any artifacting or edge enhancement issues — and ably complemented by a DTS-HD 5.1 master audio track. Supplemental features are unfortunately fairly spare, consisting only of a handful of trailers for other Kino Lorber titles, and a scrollable gallery of around two dozen photo stills. Such paucity seems rather criminal given the intriguing and well designed blend of thrills and character work herein, but Rapt is still enough of a sleek, smart gem that it merits a picking up, if even only for rental. For more information, visit Kino’s website; to purchase the Blu-ray via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. A- (Movie) C (Disc)

An underdog, blue-collar sports film whose atmospheric plausibility and passionate, committed performances mostly win out over plotting that can sometimes feel calculated and tedious, Warrior shines a light on the increasingly popular spectator sport of mixed martial arts, blending in a story of familial reconciliation for good measure. For co-writer/director Gavin O’Connor (Miracle), it’s a nice return to form, and for rising stars Joel Edgerton and particularly Tom Hardy, it will serve as solid career stepping stone.

Haunted by the traumas of war, AWOL Marine and former amateur wrestling prodigy Tommy Conlon (Hardy) returns home for the first time in 14 years to visit his estranged father Paddy (Nick Nolte), a reformed alcoholic. After dispatching a major mixed martial arts title contender in a local boxing club sparring match, Tommy decides to train for Sparta, a new winner-takes-all special tournament event featuring 16 fighters.

Nearby, his brother Brendan (Edgerton), a former fighter turned physics teacher, returns to the ring in a desperate attempt to scrape together much-needed money that will allow his young family to keep their house. As the brothers train and then cut respective swaths through their more well known competition, old resentments bubble up, illuminating the back story of their separation and alienation from their father.

O’Connor attempted an injection of familial discord and contention into the cop drama genre with Pride and Glory, but Warrior tracks much more closely to 2004’s Miracle, which told the story of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team’s stunning gold medal victory. It’s a movie that pushes the traditional buttons and pull the expected levers of physical competition in order to provide a surging sense of uplift and surrogate catharsis for its audience.

The particular formatting of its competition is rather ridiculous (matches on consecutive days would never be allowed), and other dramatic touches (Tommy kicking a pill-popping habit with seemingly no difficulty, for instance) come across as unnecessary flourishes. But O’Connor’s treatment of the concept is humanistic, and for every expected big story beat there are two or three moments of small, character-reflecting delight, such as the manner Brendan’s wife (Jennifer Morrison), who can’t bear to watch her husband on TV, awaits a call from him after the match.

Even less than the recent, Oscar-winning The Fighter, Warrior is less about the fighting or even the training and more about the family dynamics, though its fraternal settlement is observed at something of a remove. (Somewhat implausibly, the brothers don’t even know they are each competing in the nationally televised Sparta until they see each other the first day of the event.)

The proud, gruff performances of its leads mark Warrior as something engaging, and even memorable. Edgerton makes one believe in his deep-seeding need to keep his family intact, as his own father failed to do. Hardy, meanwhile, is brutish and intense, but also honestly recalls Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, in terms of being a bundle of barely subjugated rubbed-raw emotions. Additionally, as the friend and trainer that helps build Brendan back into shape, Frank Grillo is quite striking — easygoing and engaging, yet always believable.

For my latest DVD/Blu-ray column, over at ShockYa, I take a gander at Mr. Popper’s Penguins, Kino Lorber’s two-disc release of the documentary Great Directors, and more. It’s inclusive of a nice photo of David Lynch and an even better one of Amber Heard. Again, it’s over at ShockYa, so click here for the full read.

Its tagline (“Finally, a funny church sex scandal”) hints at something perhaps irredeemably coarse, but For Christ’s Sake is a comedy very much in the vein of Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno and the more recent A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy, which is to say that it goes to considerable lengths to counterbalance the outrageousness of its premise with a healthy dollop of heart.

After inheriting control of his parish’s top ministerial spot, much to the chagrin of rival man-of-the-cloth Carl (Matt Champagne), earnest small town priest Robert (Jed Rees) is paid a visit by his estranged, deadbeat brother Alan (Will Sasso), who tells him he’s dying of cancer. Robert makes an impulsive decision to borrow $54,000 from the church’s emergency fund, to underwrite Alan’s treatment. A couple weeks later, when the church needs some money to book John Schneider (yes, that John Schneider, playing himself) for the country fair, Robert learns that Alan is using the money to finance a porn movie, which makes him the unwitting producer.

As Carl digs around and starts to come close to discovering the truth about the money, a wildly uncomfortable Robert finds himself the unlikely hub of advice and confession for a crew and cast that includes Buster Cherry (Ike Barinholtz) and porn star Candy Walls (Sara Rue), the latter of whom develops a crush on him that it not entirely unrequited. Madcap complications ensue, naturally.

Written by Jeff Lewis and produced by Sasso, For Christ’s Sake reunites a bunch of MADtv players, including Alex Borstein and Michael Hitchcock in smaller roles. Owing to this familiarity with one another, the movie has a pleasant, jocular tone throughout, and doesn’t spin off into campy excess. The performances are engaging and well modulated with respect to each other, and if the movie doesn’t reinvent the wheel neither does it have a need to. Fans of any/all of those involved will certainly appreciate this saucy, off-the-beaten-path little comic delight.

For Christ’s Sake comes to DVD in a regular plastic Amaray case, on a region-free disc with a 5.1 surround sound audio mix that’s honestly more than a bit lacking in its deeper registers. Partitioned into 15 chapters via a static menu screen, the disc’s only bonus features consist of a five-minute photo montage scroll consisting of 98 pictures, as well as trailers for the movie and five other Cinevolve home video offerings. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) D+ (Disc)