Alex Winter Archives - Screen Wolf

Welcome to the January 2024 review round up. This is a new feature where I put together multiple, shorter reviews of recent releases on one page. I will still do full reviewers for larger releases, so these will mostly be smaller movies you probably haven’t even heard of, but may come across on streaming and wonder if they are worth your time. For January, I’m looking at the action movie “The Bricklayer”, the thriller “Wanted Man“, the comedy “Self Reliance” and the horror comedy “Destroy All Neighbors“. Because I’m keeping all these reviews brief, there are no major spoilers to worry about. Let’s get started!

The Bricklayer (2024)

Based on a novel by Noah Boyd, “The Bricklayer” is directed by Renny Harlin and stars Aaron Eckhart. This is the story ex-CIA operative Steve Vail (Eckhart), called back into the fold to deal with old friend, Victor Radek (Clifton Collins Jr.), who has a vendetta against the CIA. Radek has been framing the CIA for a series of assassinations. Vail is assisted by CIA agent Kate Banon (Nina Dobrev). Vail retired from the agency and became a bricklayer, hence the name of the film. You may recognise Harlin’s name as he was the director of a few classic action movies back in the day, namely: “Die Hard 2”, “Cliffhanger” and “The Long Kiss Goodnight”. Though he also directed “Cutthroat Island”, one of the most infamous movie disasters of all time and Nightmare on Elm Street 4 which was in my view the first bad Nightmare movie.

The movie is fairly true to form to Harlin’s strengths and weaknesses. The action is decent and reminiscent of late 80’s action films. That is where the good ends though. The basic premise is okay and has a bit of complexity to it due to the source novel, but it’s pretty much by the numbers and all the twists are highly predictable. The biggest problem though is the dialogue which is just painful. There is an attempt to work in a lot of action movie tropes, but they often don’t seem to quite fit in to what is going on and it makes the whole thing awkward. The relationship between Vail and Banon runs every cliché in book of buddy cops and frankly the Bricklaying gimmick and Vail’s love of Jazz is just sort of there for the sake of it, adding nothing. This is a 4/10, skip it.

Self Reliance (2024)

Directed by, written by and staring Jake Johnson, “Self Reliance” is a comedic take on the Hunting-People-TV-Show trope. (Think: “The Running Man”, or more recently”Guns Akimbo”). The twist here is that this is a character based comedy and not an action movie. “Tommy” (Johnson) is a fairly washed up loser, who lives with his mother, works a boring office job and is still pining for his ex girlfriend (Who left him for being boring). One day he is greeted by Andy Samberg in a limo who gives him an opportunity. Take part in a dark net reality TV show where people try to murder him for 30 days. The loophole is they can only kill him if he is by himself. The prize is a life changing million dollars. Feeling he can use the loophole he agrees, but it turns out not to be as easy as he thought.

This one is pretty good. The concept is an original take on an established trope and the story provides a good mixture of character based comedy and outright wackiness. There’s no real action or horror to it though. People do occasionally try and murder Tommy, but these are all firmly comedic encounters. To help his chances he writes a cryptic post on Craigslist to try and find other contestants to team up with and through this meets “Maddy” (Anna Kendrick). The pair instantly have chemistry and this brings a lot of heart to the story and helps to nudge Tommy’s character growth in the right direction, despite things not quite working out. Overall though while it may not be quite as entertaining as Guns Akimbo was, either for action or comedy moments, it is still a solid pick for a movie night. This is a narrow 6/10.

Destroy All Neighbors (2024)

Now we go right past “quirky” and all the way to “Utterly insane” with “Destroy All Neighbors”. This is a Shudder original, directed by Josh Forbes and staring Jonah Ray and Alex Winter. The story follows “William Brown” (Ray) who is an assistant engineer at a local music studio. He lives in a low cost apartment with his girlfriend Emily, surrounded by eccentric neighbors. The building manager is nice enough, but a total cheapskate when it comes to maintenance. William has been working on his prog-rock album for years, but is struggling with the ending and has become obsessed and neurotic. Into this enters “Vlad” (Winter), a beast of a man that spends his days listening to loud EDM music, lifting weights and grunting. William reaches breaking point after being fired from his job and returning home to a particularly annoying Vlad. The result is a series of accidental murders… a few zombies… and perhaps the ending to his album!

This is a true B-Movie, so don’t expect top level special effects. The gore on display is far more comedic than terrifying, but it works perfectly for the movie. On the surface this reminded me of another Alex Winter B-Movie comedy Horror “Freaked” from 1992. However a lot of the funniest moments here actually come from the films send up of Prog Rock. The movie has a fairly slow start, but when it kicks off the pace and comedy picks up rapidly and by the final scenes I was rolling around laughing. If you want a funny movie, with comical gore and musical references, this could be for you. It won’t be for everyone though. Chances are you are already swaying one way or the other and your instincts will be correct. For me, thanks to the hilarious final act I rate this as a very strong 6/10.

Wanted Man (2024)

“Wanted Man” is written, directed by and staring Dolph Lundgren. He’s actually made a few movies like this in recent years, but this is the first one I decided to check out. Dolph plays “Travis Johansen”, a veteran cop close to retirement with a very 80’s action movie cop attitude. He has a somewhat xenophobic attitude towards Mexicans, bordering on racism. It’s clear though that Travis is not actually a bad person as such, just a little ignorant. His cop and ex-cop friends though share his attitude and perhaps take it further. Johansen is sent to Mexico to look into the fatal shooting of some DEA agents, but stumbles into something far more dangerous than he was expecting. He will have to face conspiracy and betrayal while he tries to protect the last remaining witness.

This is a short, fairly straight forward story that we’ve seen similar versions of before and from far more capable actors/directors. It’s not terrible, it’s just very bare boned. Dolph was never the best actor even among 80’s action stars and while many of his peers have been able to transition to playing older, more character drama based variations on their old archetypes, this seems to be something Dolph may not be quite ready for, at least not as a self-directed lead. The ideas here though are pretty reasonable, but as I said, very familiar. Most notably it can be compared to “Gran Torino” (2008) and “Rambo: Last Blood” (2019), both far better films. Outside the character growth the plot is very straightforward, leaving little else to say about it. Not a total waste of time, especially given its short running time, but you can easily skip it. 5/10

October Challenge – Day 9

Tonight’s movie is the absolutely ridiculous “Freaked” from 1992. Ever wondered what Alex Winter did after Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey? Well, the answer is this bizarre piece of horror comedy. The movie has an all star cast including Keanue Reeves, William Sadler, Randy Quad, Megan Ward, Brooke Shields, Bobcat Goldthwait and Mr. T. This is also Alex Winter’s directorial debut, teaming up with fellow “Idiot Box” alumni Tom Stern.

This film has a freaky history. It sort of originated from “The Idiot Box”, a shorted lived sketch show on MTV staring Winter and was originally supposed to be a low budget horror staring the members of the band “The Butthole Surfers”. Somehow the film ended up being produced as a feature movie by 20th Century Fox, without the Butthole Surfers and with Winter and co-writer Stern directing (Despite neither of them having any directing experience) Fox. The studio invested $12m (Equivalent of $25m today), had a novelisation ordered, a comic book and even made action figures. Unfortunately for them though the test screenings were so bad Fox pulled it from theatres, killing it’s box office and essentially relegating it to a direct to video release.

Freak Land

Our story starts out with a framing device of the lead character, “Ricky Coogin” (Winter) being interviewed, where he tells his story. Ricky is an actor and an “American Sweetheart”, but a bit of a douche in real life. He takes an endorsement deal from a shady corporation to promote a toxic fertilizer in South America. It’s pretty clear this is a bad thing, but he doesn’t want to say no to the $5m he is offered to do it. He and his friend “Ernie” (Michael Stoyanov) fly to South America where they meet environmental activist “Julie “(Megan Ward) who they offer to give a ride to (So she can get to a protest). On the way they opt to go to see a Freak Show and this is where the story really starts.

The show is run by “Elijah C. Skuggs” who has been using this toxic fertilizer to transform people into various freaks. He captures the group and transforms them with Julie and Ernie merged together into one two headed freak and Ricky turned into an especially grotesque half freak (with the other half apparently to come when Skuggs’ get’s more of the chemical). They are then taken to where the other freaks are held captive and like the other captives forced to perform at shows. Eventually Ricky learns to like and respect the other freaks and teams up with them to escape and defeat Skuggs and the evil corporation that hired him in the first place, who were in on Skuggs’ evil deeds all along.

Freak Out

I skipped over a lot there, but none of it is really that important. The plot is fairly generic, with what makes the film unique being it’s general weirdness and of course that is never more present than in the specifics of each freak. You have a human worm, you have a wolf man (Keanue Reeves), you have a cow man (also dressed as a cowboy), you have a French diver… I mean literally just seems to be a French man in a diving suit, a man that farts fire, a human toad, eyeballs with machine guns (used as guards), Mr. T as a bearded lady (Yes, you read that right) and my personal favourite a human sock puppet, who it turns out (minor spoiler) is actually a man whose head was turned into hand, which he then wears a sock on. He is played by Bobcat Goldthwait and honestly, no one else could play him. This is the movies strength, just the absolute absurdity of it.

The film is absolute B-Movie material, but with frankly unnecessary polish. It is absolutely ludicrous and just gets sillier as it goes on. The problem is it’s only really funny on occasion and usually the humour comes from the absurdity, meaning it wears thing quickly, while the rest of the story brings little to the table and the characters have little to them outside their freak gimmick. As for the effects, well, it would be generous to describe them as cartoon like. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve effectively seen the film or at least the bits worth seeing.

Freak In

I can’t help but feel this movie actually suffered from being raised to a feature with a higher production budget. On screen the only way it really benefited was in improving the cast, but these are not roles that needed top actors and given Keanu’s relationship with Alex he would have probably done his small role anyway (Remember this is way before The Matrix moved him up to A-List status) and the other names could have been swapped out for no name actors with little problem.

Ironically a couple of years after this came out MTV started making it’s own movies and with Winter and Stern having ties with MTV I have no doubt they could have made it with them closer to their original vision (Which would have had a darker tone with more graphic violence). But alas, that didn’t happen and instead it pretty much killed off Winter’s career. Probably lucky for Keanu that his role was uncredited, indeed if not for the IMDB I wouldn’t have known it was him.

Freak Off

This is a tricky one to rate. It’s not good, but as someone that occasionally enjoys bad movies I can’t say I hated it either. It is wonderfully bizarre, it just didn’t quite work for me. Your mileage may vary with this and I can absolutely see some people getting a real kick of the movie and others saying it’s the worst thing they’ve ever seen. Anyway for me it is a 4.5/10 and falls into the category of “curiosity viewing”.

Tag: Alex Winter

Review Roundup – January 2024