Despite being directed by a guy with the first name Nimrod, 2007’s Vacancy, a thriller about the dangers of leaving the comfortable asphalt confines of the
interstate, managed to locate some primal,
gut-level reactions to darkness, jarring noise, faceless killers and
the like. Its straight-to-DVD sequel jumps back to the beginning of the bare-bones mythology laid out in that film, sketching out another stalking tale of very bad acts at a desolate hotel — this time in the form of some peeping Toms who catch a psychotic killer in the act, and then decide to enter into a black-market snuff film pact with him.

At the end of the first film, authorities shut down the remote Pinewood Motel after discovering over 200 videotaped murders on the premises. Vacancy 2: The First Cut charts how the grisly terror began, fleshing out a tale that’s three parts barbarism to one part unlikely opportunism. Suspecting only a night of hard beds and tacky decor, Caleb (Trevor
Wright), his sexy new fiancée Jessica (Agnes Bruckner) and his
sarcastic best friend Tanner (Arjay Smith, very much the token black
guy), the ultimate strange third wheel, check into a rundown rural inn. They have no idea that it’s not
just another lonely motel, but in fact a horrific trap where guests are
brutally tortured and murdered while the sadistic Smith (Scott G. Anderson, reprising his homicidal character from the original movie) and his greedy accomplices, Gordon and Reece (David Moscow and Brian Klugman), film the grisly slayings for profit. Caught in
a deadly game of cat and mouse, the three young friends now must fight
to survive. Can they outwit the deranged killers and escape the roadside trap by morning, or will their fate be forever sealed on video cassette?

Vacancy 2 works in a couple good, or at least good-ish, head feints, including an elongated set-up that introduces a just-wed couple who don’t get axed. Gordon and Reece, you see, are at first just into taping sex acts of randy travelers passing through; it’s Smith who whets their appetite for artery-severing mayhem, after they catch him in the fact of murdering a prostitute. While narratively improbable, I give the movie some credit for piecing things together in a way that interestingly fits with the original film. There’s also some decent performances here, considering the laid track of the script. Still, it remains undeniable that certain character combinations and actions make no sense, be it a honeymooning couple who lay over on a whim or the fact that Tanner is even around in the first place. Also, director Eric Bross (Restaurant, Ten Benny), while slipping in a few moments of downbeat menace, can’t fully resist the impulse to cram in a couple thunderously stupid scene cappers — one early sequence ends with a character menacingly stabbed a dart onto a nearby countertop, and intoning, in chilly fashion, “Let’s get to work.” I mean… really? Do killers, or even those who have yet to kill, say stuff like that?

Housed in a regular Amray plastic case, Vacancy 2: The First Cut is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen. Owing to its whopping slate of Dolby digital 5.1 audio tracks — six different languages, plus a group commentary track — the DVD is fairly slow to navigate, unfortunately. And that grates. Subtitles in seven languages are also available, so if you speak only Thai but still really like stalking American horror pictures of contained space, then by all means this is right up your alley.

In addition to a collection of deleted scenes, two making-of featurettes are included, including a 13-minute general-interest/behind-the-scenes piece and a stand-alone seven-minute bit that examines the construction of the movie’s exterior inn location. The most engaging supplemental inclusion, however, might be a feature-length group audio commentary track consisting of actors Moscow and Bruckner, director Bross, executive producer Brian Paschal and producer Hal Lieberman. Sharing anecdotes of rampant poison oak outbreaks amongst cast and crew, this lively chat-fest covers a lot of ground. It’s perhaps a bit eyeroll-inducing when Bross starts talking about the “continually shifting balance of power between the antagonists,” the contrast in visual levels, and how certain framing (in the door jamb of a car, for instance) is designed to evoke a “V,” for the movie’s title. Still, there’s some fun, engaging stuff here; it’s not all just empty back-patting. For the movie’s trailer, click here; to purchase the DVD via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. C (Movie) B- (Disc)

A screwball-style, Hollywood-tweaking romantic comedy starring William H. Macy and Meg Ryan, version 2.0, The Deal is a movie that overcomes one of the most terribly obvious PhotoShopped covers of recent memory, as well as a back cover that misspells the name of one of its main characters. In addition to affording screen capture enthusiasts more opportunities to gawk at Macy’s bare ass, the film gives its talented multi-hyphenate a fun chance to play roguish and oblivious. Put it on the front end of a double bill with a Chinese takeout buffet and David Mamet’s State and Main, also starring Macy, and you have yourself a pleasant little evening.

Adapted by Macy and director Steven Schachter from Peter Lefcourt’s book of the same name, The Deal opens with despondent, washed-up Hollywood producer Charlie Berns (Macy) trying to off himself, only to be interrupted by his nephew Lionel (Jason Ritter), an idealistic screenwriter who’s penned a script about former British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli. Seizing on the touted desires of Bobby Mason (LL Cool J, standing in for, oh, Vin Diesel, let’s say), a meatheaded action star and recent convert to Judiasm, to delve into more Jewish-centric material, Berns gets it in his head to take Lionel’s earnest, wholly uncommercial script and turn it into a wildly reimagined, thunderously stupid “freedom fighter” biopic. Wheeling and dealing, planting bogus stories of a bidding war in the trades, Charlie gets a hit-hungry studio desperate to get onboard a Mason picture to snap up the screenplay, and he then shrewdly taps Mason’s manager for rewrite duties. Along the way, Charlie becomes enamored with Deidre Hearn (Ryan), the slightly stuffy, self-serious development executive assigned to fast track the project.

Beginning with the second act, The Deal pivots to South Africa (where it was actually entirely filmed), chronicling the making of Berns and Hearn’s movie, where all sorts of various emergencies flare up, from a temperamental director to a nervous star. With cost-conscious studio execs already circling, Mason gets kidnapped by Muslim extremists. Things look bleak, but an emboldened Deidre finally comes around to Charlie’s damn-the-consequences style, and convinces him to take part in an on-the-fly refashioning of the movie as a legitimate arthouse endeavor.

The Deal‘s dialogue has a nice, ’30s-style patter to it, whether in incidental, passing fancy (“Good job, Hun,” says Charlie, walking past a costumed marauder on the studio lot) or the many scenes in which Charlie tries (and eventually succeeds in) getting into Deidre’s power-suit pants. Not everything works. In fact, the whole kidnapped-movie-star bit was much more effectively played out in last summer’s Tropic Thunder; here it’s just a throwaway gag — albeit a big, plot-shifting one — and then we’re off and running in another direction, never to actually see Mason’s character again. If that sort of abrupt, tacks-underneath-the-tires narrative switcheroo — where you think you’re headed one way, narratively speaking, only to be suddenly thrust in another direction — seems a bit like the storytelling equivalent of sand in the eyes during a playground fight, in the end it doesn’t much matter. Wry and dirty-minded, Macy absolutely steamrolls scenes, and if there’s a big tonal misstep midway through that unnecessarily tries to bring shading to his character — a maudlin sequence where Charlie finds out about the marriage of his adult daughter — most of the movie is content to just let Macy hoodwink folks, like a shrugging, devil-may-care loafer. That’s a plenty good deal, it turns out.

Housed in a regular plastic Amray case with a deep-set, single circular nesting notch, The Deal comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, with Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound and 2.0 stereo audio tracks. Apart from the theatrical trailer for the movie, the only other bonus feature is a 17-minute making-of featurette. It’s chock full of interviews from all the major players, both on screen and off, but Macy holds forth with many of the best ruminations, positing that Hollywood is for the most part a microcosm of society, and also that a writer watching a movie get made from his book is a bit like watching someone make love to one’s wife. “What are they supposed to say,” Macy jokes. “‘Good job?'” There’s also a digital download copy of the film included on the disc, for rip-and-play portability. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) C+ (Disc)

Written by Tom Malloy (who also co-stars in the film), The Alphabet Killer is a decently gripping psychological thriller loosely based on the still-unsolved “double initial” murders that shocked the citizens of Rochester, New York in the early 1970s. The details of the true story? From 1970 to 1973, three girls in and around Rochester were brutally raped and strangled, their bodies dumped in neighboring villages that bore the same first initial as their names. All three victims’ — young girls, aged 10 to 12 — first and last names also had matching initials. Despite the questioning of more than 800 suspects and the combined police resources of several communities, the case remains unsolved to this day.



In the film, Eliza Dushku stars Megan Paige, a police investigator whose commitment to the job borders on obsession. Megan and her partner, Lt. Ken Shine (Cary Elwes), are assigned to investigate the murder of a young girl named Carla Castillo, whose body is found in the nearby town of Churchville. Despite Megan’s considerable efforts, her inability to catch the killer leads to a nervous breakdown, eventually causing her to lose her fiancée, her career in law enforcement career, and her grip on reality.

Two years later, Megan is back at the police department, albeit in a demoted position. With the help of a mental illness support group headed by Richard Ledge (Timothy Hutton), Megan is slowly getting her life back on track. But when two more young girls are murdered with the same “alphabet” modus operandi, Megan becomes convinced the same serial killer has resurfaced. Battling hallucinations of the dead girls — as well as distrust from her colleagues — Megan dives back into the case, determined to bring the culprit to justice. With few leads and fewer concrete suspects, can she catch the “Alphabet Killer” before another victim is found?

There are hints of Flesh and Bone to this thriller, believe it or not, as well as some unreliable narrator/Insomnia-type shiftiness that Malloy craftily works in. (In this regard, the movie earns its stripes as part of a perfectly nutty Dushku double-dip, alongside the recent Nobel Son.) Director Rob Schmidt, who previously worked with Dushku on the thriller Wrong Turn, shoots the affair in a fairly straightforward fashion, but also has a nice sense of when to slow-play things to string along the tension. Dushku, who’s set to return to the small screen next month in the upcoming Fox series Dollhouse, does a fairly decent job overall, but also leans on a few mannered, TV acting tics that help keep her performance from being more of a naturalistic, rooted thing. If there’s a codifying strength here, other than the creepy fact that this is a speculative thriller, rooted in fact, it’s the movie’s superb supporting cast — the aforementioned bit players, plus Tom Noonan, recent Oscar nominee Melissa Leo, Larry Hankin, Bill Moseley, Jack McGee and Michael Ironside. They help give the film a sense of depth, and genuineness, that eludes a lot of straight-to-video crime dramas.

Housed in a regular plastic Amray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover with matching art, The Alphabet Killer is presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 audio track. Two audio commentaries highlight the DVD’s special features. The first is with producer Isen Robbins and director Schmidt (Crime + Punishment in Suburbia, the “Masters of Horror” series hour-long flick Right to Die), the latter of whom talks some about his cameo in the film as a cop who discovers a body in a rock quarry. Also, somewhat uncomfortably and hilariously, Schmidt picks the exact moment of Dushku’s brief topless scene to say “It felt like the right time for her to play a woman.” The audio commentary track with writer-producer-actor Malloy is thankfully much more interesting and engaging. In breathless fashion, Malloy drops mad anecdotes and mundane details alike (Elwes wearing his BlueTooth in a scene), as well as pointing out his mother’s filing secretary cameo. In more substantive monologues, he expounds upon the themes of “man versus self” (or woman, really) in the movie; he also drops an amusing sideways crack on Ralph Fiennes when he touts co-star Noonan’s work in Manhunter.

Finally, wrapping up the slate of bonus material is a three-minute, time-coded, alternate version of the movie’s opening scene — an investigatory traipse through the woods by Dushku and Elwes — and a completely pointless six-minute featurette that strings together a bunch of behind-the-scenes footage under music. Some of the latter material looks interesting on the surface, but without some context or linking interviews, however, this tells us nothing of substance about the movie. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) C+ (Disc)

His life in shambles, despondent Henry Poole (Luke Wilson)
buys an abode in the same suburban, tract-house Los Angeles neighborhood where he
somewhat unhappily grew up, amidst the constant din of his parents’ arguments. Quietly withdrawn, Henry just wants to stew in his own juices, and be left alone, but one of his new neighbors, the slightly nosy
but well-meaning Esperanza (Babel‘s Adriana Barraza), happens upon a stain on his newly painted, outdoor stucco wall that she believes is the face of Christ, and thus imbued with special powers. Henry regards this as a bunch of silliness, but more interactions with those around him — including divorcée Dawn (Radha Mitchell), whose eight-year-old daughter, Millie (Morgan Lily) has stopped speaking ever since her parents’ break-up — slowly draw him out of his insular shell.

Henry Poole Is Here is directed by Mark Pellington, a filmmaker with a deep music video catalogue (including Pearl Jam’s groundbreaking “Jeremy” clip) who’s always been a master of atmosphere and mood, most notably with The Mothman Prophecies. Here, though, he rolls the dice on a much more personal story, and succeeds in crafting what is overall a fairly affecting movie about emotional waywardness and the heavy psychological lifting of substantive interpersonal reflection. The target is smaller, but Pellington’s extraordinary skill at marrying artful image and emotional content help Henry Poole
avoid a lot of treacly downward drag, and elevate the emotional punch
of debut screenwriter Albert Torres’ script, which is enough of a blank
canvas to allow one to project onto it their own feelings of
forlornness. The only nagging demerit? There’s a plummy, surface quality to Wilson’s moroseness and sullenness; watching the movie, one thinks about the deeper reservoirs of swallowed sadness that someone like Ryan Gosling could have conveyed with this role, and how those extra pangs of despair would have provided an even greater catharsis.

Housed in a regular plastic Amray case in turn stored in a flat-faced (i.e., no raised text) cardboard slipcover, Henry Poole Is Here allows viewers the option of a full-frame or 2.40:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation, the latter of which obviously preserves the aspect ratio of its original theatrical exhibition. A Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound track anchors the audio options, and optional Spanish and English SDH subtitles are also included. A feature-length audio commentary track with Pellington and Torres underscores the deeply felt personal pull of the material for each man; they talk about the slight changes and tweaks from inception to actualization, and their feelings both about the collaboration in general and the themes the movie explores. Pellington is an especially intelligent and persuasive advocate for the work — smart and passionate, but not given to pointy-headed intellectual diatribes. He opens up a bit about his heartrending offscreen loss (his wife died suddenly, leaving him a widower and the single father of a three-year-old girl), and how therapeutic the movie was for him.

Further personal testimonials come in a solidly produced, 16-minute making-of featurette, which includes interviews with all of the primary cast and crew. Other special features include theatrical trailers for Henry Poole and three other Anchor Bay DVD releases, as well as two short music videos — one for James Grundler’s “All Roads Lead Home,” and another, directed by Pellington, for MySpace.com theme song contest winner Ron Irizarry. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B- (Movie) B (Disc)

A slickly packaged yet ultimately unpersuasive political action thriller, Eagle Eye
collapses under the weight of various story incongruities, in large
part because its sprawling, conspiratorial plot — approaching almost two hours — and supercharged, empty-dialogue mode of
storytelling don’t ever quite fully align. As a re-teaming of Disturbia director D.J. Caruso and star Shia LaBeouf,
the movie’s theatrical release last autumn represented a crucial test of commercial leading man viability
for the young actor, coming on the heels of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It was a test he passed, to the tune of a $178 million worldwide gross, with almost 60 percent of that haul coming Stateside.

Set in and around Washington D.C., the movie’s story
centers on a piecemeal terrorist plot, with different “cells” being
activated against their will. Disaffected copy shop employee Jerry Shaw
(LaBeouf) finds his life turned upside down when his twin brother
mysteriously dies. Returning from the funeral, he discovers his
apartment crammed with bomb-making supplies. A strange woman calls his
cell phone and orders him to flee, but Jerry is captured, and
questioned by FBI Agent Thomas Morgan (Billy Bob Thornton).

Simultaneously, single mother Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan)
sends her 8-year-old son off on a school field trip, only to get a call
from the same woman threatening to derail his train if Rachel doesn’t
obey her orders. The voice on the phone is soon revealed to be a rogue,
omnipotent government defense computer system, who brings together
strangers Jerry and Rachel and parcels out instructions that
unwittingly lead the pair into complicity in a scheme to eliminate most
of the United States’ elected government. In pursuit of the on-the-lam
duo, along with Morgan, is Air Force investigator Zoe Perez (Rosario Dawson).

Hatched several years ago by executive producer Steven Spielberg as a techno-phobic thriller, Eagle Eye shows the wear of much tinkering by many writers — a credited group that includes John Glenn, Travis Adam Wright, Hillary Seitz and Dan McDermott. The
wildly preposterous plot hinges on governmental vigilance and hyper-competence at a
time when, especially at the time of its theatrical release, all evidence in the real world points to the contrary,
and isn’t aided by brawny sequences that paint a colorful picture of
the super-computer’s god-like abilities, which stand in stark contrast
to the third-act messiness it spawns in trying to concoct an intelligent ruse that
will eventually frame Jerry and Rachel.

Furthermore, there’s a
baffling, poorly conceived scene mid-film — nakedly designed to pull
the audience along, and distract from narrative potholes — in which the
computer summons Jerry and Rachel to a consumer electronics store and
reveals a portion of their mission. This sequence defies credibility, even within the heightened world of the movie’s own construction; it would be akin to the Man
Behind the Curtain outing himself halfway through The Wizard of Oz, just for shits and giggles.

Former television director Caruso has proven himself a stylish shooter of genre fare, and Eagle Eye
is his biggest outing to date. From a technical point-of-view, the film
is fairly well put together, though a first act car chase sequence is
choppily edited, and lacks spatial clarity. Unfortunately, the method of conveyance doesn’t match the degree to which the story is steeped in paranoia and invasion of privacy.
A grittier treatment or more futuristic setting would have been more in
keeping with the story’s themes. Or a compelling case could be made for
a tone of polished, heightened absurdity similar to this summer’s
international hit Wanted. By spurning either of these more stylized visual approaches, however, Eagle Eye feels trapped between two very different, unconnected worlds.

For its Blu-ray release, Eagle Eye is presented in superb 1080p high definition, in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, with the AVC MPEG-4. Blacks are deep and consistent, and the English 5.1 Dolby TrueHD audio track solidly captures the various and sundry mechanical swirls used to frequent, brawny effect in the movie’s many chaotic chase sequences. Other audio options includes French and Spanish language 5.1
Dolby digital surround sound tracks; optional English SDH, French, Spanish and Portuguese subtitles are also included.

The disc’s bonus material is all presented in high definition, save a bonus photo gallery, and is kickstarted with a 25-minute making-of featurette that includes interviews with LaBeouf and Caruso, as well as other on-screen and behind-the-scenes players. While there’s definitely a strong EPK-type feel to some of this material, they thankfully delve further into the development history of the project than most of your average, self-congratulatory featurettes, and there’s also a nice split-screen comparison of raw footage and finished, assembled product, which has the effect of underscoring some of the difficulties of directing not frequently discussed or acknowledged.

Next up is a clutch of four deleted scenes, running just under five minutes, followed by a quartet of shorter featurettes, running between three and nine minutes. Two are somewhat interchangeable, detailing location shooting in Washington, D.C., and at the Library of Congress; more interesting are a thumbnail investigation of the current state electronic surveillance and a chat between Caruso and one of his mentors, filmmaker John Badham. The professional connection between the two is Badham’s War Games, on which Caruso served as a second unit director, and it’s interesting to see them reconnect and dissect how computers and technology in general have changed with respect to their portrayal on the big screen. Rounding things out are the movie’s theatrical trailer and a seven-minute gag reel which spotlights flubbed lines galore, and showcases Thornton cutting loose. To purchase the Blu-ray disc via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) B (Disc)

Written and directed by Jonathan Levine, The Wackness is a slang-laden, b-boy-style coming-of-age dramedy set against the backdrop of Brooklyn, summer 1994. The story centers around Luke Shapiro (the heavy-lidded Josh Drake), a 17-year-old
recent high school graduate who befriends a misguided, pot-smoking
therapist, Dr. Squires (Ben Kingsley), by trading weed for therapy. A somewhat socially awkward “technical” virgin, Luke also tumbles into
love with the therapist’s sarcastic, mature-beyond-her-years
stepdaughter, Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby). Housing his marijuana in an
antiquated ice cart, Luke escapes from an unhappy home life and the
pressures of any impending college decision by wheeling and dealing around the
sweltering city. In the process, he comes into contact with a colorful
coterie of characters — from hippies and hip-hoppers to drug pushers
and prostitutes, the colorful fringe-dwellers of the salad days of pre-Giuliani gentrification — and falls into a weird friend/mentorship with Dr.
Squires, even as his burgeoning relationship with Stephanie seems primed to fall apart.

Owing largely to its outrageous drugs-for-therapy conceit but also a twisted, marble-mouthed adolescent poetry present in some of the film’s dialogue, The Wackness won the Audience Award at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. And it’s a fun movie that doesn’t entirely abandon some of the gritty realities of teenagedom. Mostly, though, it’s nicely shot, and imagined. (At one point, after a lip-lock with Stephanie, Luke leaves and dances down the street, the sidewalk squares lighting up like a certain music video of yesteryear.) If Peck’s performance is a bit hit-and-miss, he’s still intriguing, and the scenes with he and a loopy Kingsley are amusing to watch.

Housed in a regular plastic Amray case, and presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen with optional French and Spanish subtitles, The Wackness comes anchored with a feature-length audio commentary track with Levine and Peck. Props are dished all around, naturally (especially since production designer Annie Spitz is Levine’s girlfriend, too), but there’s a hearteningly solid division between anecdote, thematic discussion and snarky asides.

Four deleted scenes run a bit over five minutes, and offer no new wild revelations, per se. There’s also a 17-minute making-of featurette with cast and crew interviews in which Levine confesses to smoking weed, and Kingsley jokes about taking a comedic pass at the character of Gandhi, and says that he and Peck are “the new Laurel and Hardy.” Even more interesting is the eight-minute featurette “Keeping it Real: A Day in the Life of Jonathan Levine,” in which a camera
follows the filmmaker through a day of interviews and other commitments (including a taped sit-down with his costars and Ben Lyons, who comes across as slightly doofy) prior to the movie’s premiere at the Los Angeles
Film Festival. It’s amusing to see Levine so stoked about a promotional chocolate boom box for the movie — a goodie he eventually offers up to an audience member at a post-screening Q&A. Two tossed-off minutes-long “episodes” of Luke Shapiro’s Dope Show, a mock cable access show in which Peck, in character, strikes poses and trades high-fives with his deejaying doorman, are passingly amusing, but one-joke, quick-watch things. Along with five separate trailers for the film are a slate of previews for Synecdoche, New York, Brick Lane, Ashes of Time Redux, Elegy and other Sony titles. For an interview with Levine, click here. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. B (Movie) B+ (Disc)