After a bank closes on Easter Saturday, three men burst in to clean out the safe. To help ensure a scot-free getaway, the trio locks the bank manager (Colin Gordon, The Pink Panther) and his cashier (Ann Lynn, A Shot in the Dark) in the vault.
Because the vault is airtight, the looters risk their simple robbery being upgraded to a double murder. One of the thieves (Derren Nesbitt, The Playbirds) has enough of a heart and soul to return to the scene of the crime to free the employees before they run out of oxygen. Through a series of extraordinary circumstances best left to your discovery, that proves easier said than done.
All of 80 minutes, Strongroom qualifies as a ticking-clock thriller, even though director Vernon Sewell (The Blood Beast Terror) approaches the material with a low-key manner typical of the British film industry’s buttoned-up B pictures of the era. In the second half, it even takes something of a sojourn into pavement-pounding detective work to allow a police sergeant (John Dearth, ITV’s The Adventures of Robin Hood) to assemble the puzzle. It’s confidently taut without breaking a sweat.
None of that is to be taken as a weakness. But if you’re looking for one, allow me to point you to the bank manager unwilling to dial or answer a telephone on his own, because that’s what women were for. Anyway, Stronghold: economic storytelling without surrendering anything in return, as one hell of an ending coldly corroborates. —Rod Lott
Italy is neither the first nor fifth country that comes to mind for exporting martial-arts movies, yet that’s hardly stopped director/co-writer Gabriele Mainetti (They Call Me Jeeg) from crafting an epic one with The Forbidden City.
From China, Mei (Yaxi Liu, 2024’s Second Life) arrives in Rome to look for her missing sister, potentially forced into a prostitution ring. Her search puts restaurant cook Marcello (Enrico Borello, Netflix’s Supersex) on her radar. Not coincidentally, Marcello’s father also has disappeared. The setup for — and connections among — each runs deeper than your patience would have for print, so just know this: Mei tells Marcello, “I must have revenge.”
And boy, does she possess the skills to back that up. In lightning-fast skirmishes with gangsters from two crime bosses, Mei uses feet, fists and anything else that catches her fancy: cheese graters, floral arrangements, boiling noodles, market-fresh fish and music CDs cracked into jagged halves. Liu’s main career as a stunt performer makes all the difference in presenting Mei as an imposing threat.
Mainetti could stand some restraint; at 138 minutes, The Forbidden City starts wearing thin. But at no time does his film not look like the proverbial million bucks, applying his country’s bold giallo coloring to the backdrops of Liu’s lively feats of acrobatics. Providing excellent support are The Great Beauty’s Sabrina Ferilli, ACAB’s Marco Giallini and iRobot’s Roomba. —Rod Lott
Where trust exists, scammers scurry ’round to exploit it. Case in point, as Ben McKenzie proves several times over in his first feature as writer and director: crypto. The erstwhile star of Fox’s The O.C. and Gotham turns “undercover econ nerd” with Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, a highly engaging plunge into Bitcoin and all its suspect siblings.
“This is a film about a thing called cryptocurrency,” he says straight to camera in the prologue. “It’s pretty stupid.”
He means the topic, of course, not the documentary (based on his 2024 book with Jacob Silverman, Easy Money). When an investment tip from a college friend leads him down the crypto rabbit hole, McKenzie doesn’t like what he finds. In fact, he smells a scam — a Ponzi scheme, to be clear — and possibly a cult. His investigation into what’s legit and what’s bluster begins in El Salvador’s much-ballyhooed “Bitcoin City” and ends with him testifying before Congress in Washington, D.C.
In between, we get glimpses of his home life with wife Morena Baccarin — must be rough. In London, he visits her on the set of Greenland 2, where Gerard Butler shares crypto has served his wallet well. It’s the only scene I wish he’d left out, because it’s staged for laughs.
If this acting thing doesn’t pan out, McKenzie’s side hustle as a Michael Moore-style documentarian — but with GQ looks — is now all but assured. He more than holds his own interviewing Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky and FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. That both men since have become convicted fraudsters is not a spoiler for the film, but a testament to McKenzie’s bullshit detector, shoe-leather reporting and, yes, bravery.
Who knew this former teen idol was going to be one of this year’s American heroes? Great job, Ben. Now do AI! —Rod Lott
At 17, the cute and comely village gas station attendant Carol (Janet Lynn, In the Devil’s Garden) is desperate to move to London to parlay her recent beauty contest victory into a modeling career. Her bored friend, the butcher’s assistant Joe (Robin Askwith, Queen Kong) seizes the moment, lies about having a big job lined up there, invites her and off they go!
I forgot to mention Carol’s also an exhibitionist. They fuck on the train.
Livin’ it up in London, they quickly run out of cash and begin to starve — nothing a quick dip into sex work can’t fix! Joe becomes her de facto pimp as “just this once” soon snowballs into a not 100% consensual train ride of another kind: five guys, some with unruly eyebrows thicker than my thumb. Luckily offscreen, the encounter is icky … and then possibly worse when the depressed, defeated Carol makes Joe the caboose after he professes his love to her minutes later. Dude, read the room.
As odd as this sounds — and as nude as Lynn often is — the sexploitation aspect of Pete Walker’s film seemed secondary to me. I got really invested in these two crazy kids. Both are likable, even with every stupid step they take.
Cool It Carol! captures Askwith just before he became a huge UK box-office draw with the four-flick Confessions series of sex comedies. This is the first time I’ve seen him in action. I was prepared to hate him based on his atrocious haircut alone, but I gotta admit, he had something. His face suggests Mick Jagger shagged Matt Damon. No telling from whom he inherited the hairy ass. —Rod Lott
If Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Darkdidn’t make it clear enough, take it from Paul W.S. Anderson: You really don’t need eyes to see. At least, you don’t need them after you take the scenic route through an interdimensional version of hell, courtesy of the titular spacecraft in the grimdark, sci-fi schlock-fest, Event Horizon.
In 2040, the Event Horizon, a massive ship designed for high-volume space travel and colonization, vanished during its first cruise. Seven years later, it re-emerges. Capt. Miller (Laurence Fishburne, The Matrix), Dr. Weir (Sam Neill, Possession) and a handful of other unfortunate crew members fly out to investigate it aboard the Lewis and Clark, a vessel about one-hundredth of the Event Horizon’s size.
The Lewis and Clark crew discover the Event Horizon abandoned, save for a few eviscerated corpses. A few audio logs and one horrific recording later, Capt. Miller resolves to abandon ship. That’s easier said than done, however, as the seemingly possessed craft reactivates its warp drive, trapping the crew of the Lewis and Clark aboard. The survivors race to execute a desperate backup plan as the demonic presence that seized the ship slowly digs its way into their psyches.
Hellraiser: Bloodlinewishes it were Event Horizon. Not that the bar for sacrilegious sci-fi horror is super-high, but for his film, Anderson (the Resident Evil franchise) brings tight cohesion, a genuinely intriguing setting and a quality of acting that leaves the rest of the genre in shambles. Fishburne and Neill transition from contentious comrades to cosmic nemeses believably enough, and the sparse comic relief from Richard T. Jones (2014’s Godzilla) doesn’t feel terribly forced despite being cheesy as — appropriately — hell.
While some may call Alien’s Nostromo the quintessential haunted house in space, Event Horizon’s lead spacecraft may actually exceed it. No, it doesn’t feature cramped quarters and an acid-bleeding Xenomorph, but it is actually haunted by the impression of an ineffable, chaotic dimension. Unlike the versions of space hell seen in Warhammer 40,000 or Doom, however, Event Horizon is less concerned with socketing in demons to make itself a half-baked creature feature. Instead, its terror is predicated largely on just the idea of hell.
Leaning on the concept as a source of horror instead of an overly manifested version of it (like the aforementioned Hellraiser sequel) likewise helps push the film’s theme. Event Horizon centers on a civilization that has pushed too far. It wasn’t good enough for us to get to another planet in a few days; we had to go faster than light itself, and in doing so, we didn’t just travel beyond humanity’s physical limitations, but the psychological ones as well.
Dr. Weir’s transformation into essentially a cenobite at the climax undermines this idea a bit, but otherwise, the crew of the Lewis and Clark aren’t fighting ghosts or demons. They’re fighting their own minds as punishment for not just fucking around and finding out once, but twice. This isn’t necessarily anything new in sci-fi, but using hell as an allegory for what little we know about space is still clever. (And maybe just a little heavy-handed.)
If anything, Event Horizon is worth the price of admission to catch the 30-or-so seconds of the sadomasochistic slaughter orgy captured on the recording the Lewis and Clark crew recover. This includes a follow-up line from Fishburne that is timed so well, it’s sort of baffling Anderson didn’t use it as the film’s tagline: “We’re leaving.” You should stay for the movie’s entirety, of course, even if it means disobeying a directly order from Laurence Fishburne. He’ll probably understand. —Daniel Bokemper
