Pound of Flesh

Pound_of_FLESH_VAN_DAMMEJean Claude Van Damme might be the only guy on earth unaware that waking up in an ice-filled bathtub isn’t a case of “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” but a very popular urban legend about kidney theft.

In Pound of Flesh, upon waking up in his apartment, the tub scenario isn’t enough to key him in, but his curiosity is finally piqued by the blood on the sheets.

Manilla is the setting for this moody 2013 thriller as Asia’s where you go to film when you’re no longer a box office draw. And that’s a shame because Van Damme still brings the goods. He’s a fine Cabernet to Steven Seagal’s two-buck chuck. His later career choices are surprisingly solid while Seagal’s movies are as cringe-worthy as a drunken wedding toast (though often not as well-written). [Check out our podcast, Episode 72, of Seagal and Stone Cold Steve Austin in Maximum Conviction].

JCVD is Deacon (gotta love the guy’s various anglo character names) who beats up a pimp beating up a girl, takes the girl to a nightclub then to his apartment, and wakes up one organ short of a full slate.

“I want it back,” he says. Of course.

The perps leave him all the meds he’ll need to convalesce, as well as a strange clue in the form of an Ace of Spades on the shelf (RIP, Lemmy from Motorhead).

The narrative is told in flashbacks like some kind of black market organ version of The Hangover. And Deacon starts to put things together with the help of friends and his brother, a professor fluent in Tagalog. And this “Deacon” offers some righteous beatings! In one bar scene, he clubs a thug over the top of the head and spears another one’s eye out with The Holy Book. Goddamn Van Damme!

Pound-of-Flesh
Not so nice, ice baby.

The fight scenes are pretty badass, despite some ridiculous CG blood. As we said, JCVD still delivers. And unlike other action flicks, people here start recording things on their phones when fists fly.

While he lays waste to the Filipino underworld he offers up choice action-y zingers like, “If you lie to me, I’ll come back. And I’ll be in a bad mood.”

Don’t call it a come back! JCVD never left.

*** (out of 5)

[JCVD fans, check out our Double Impact podcast] 

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-british-quad-posterOn the medal podium when it comes to Olympian remakes, Invasion of the Body Snatchers also happens to be one of the greatest horror films of all time in its own right.

A master class in moody paranoia, Invasion is basically a realized representation of the psychological disorder, Capgras Syndrome, the irrational belief that a familiar person or place has been replaced with an exact duplicate.

Tiny parasitic flowers begin dotting the San Francisco cityscape. Department of Public Health employee and amateur horticulturalist Elizabeth brings one of the unusual tiny pods home.

Soon some locals including her boyfriend Geoffrey are behaving strangely, performing rote, automaton behaviors while displaying easily agitated, behavior usually associated with dementia.

Elizabeth takes a day off work and follows him around for the day and spots Geoffrey marching mechanically, meeting strange people and handing off mysterious packages.

Colleague Matthew Bennell (the incredible Donald Sutherland, whose role could go to Jesse Eisenberg if this were to be remade again) is concerned. Bennell suggests that Elizabeth chat with his friend Dr. Kibner (Leonard Nimoy), a kind of Wayne Dyer-type, a psychiatrist and pop self help guru who’s hosting a book launch. Mid-event, Elizabeth overhears a random hysterical attendee who charges the doc claiming to be her husband is not her husband but some kind of replicant.

Donald-Sutherland_Body_SnatchersA jealous writer attending the launch, Jack, (the terrific Jeff Goldblum) becomes sucked into the mystery when he and his wife Nancy, who co-own a spa, find a gooey pod person on the premises of their business.

Suspicion once again falls on the strange, and as we see later, throbbing, pulsating flowers with bursting stamens.

It’s through Jack and his wife we get some of the most spirited exchanges as to the flowers’ provenance:

Jack: What are you talking about? A space flower?
Nancy: Well why not a space flower? Why do we always expect metal ships?
Jack: I’ve NEVER expected metal ships.

The striking physical similarity between Bennell and the pod person puts the public servant front and center, helping his three friends to get to the bottom of the doppelganger mystery.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the 1956 version) is often seen as having McCarthyism subtext, paranoid finger-pointing literally reproduced in the meme-image, above.

However, that film and its remake could just as easily be seen the opposite way as well: a cautionary tale of creeping statism and the abnegation of individualism found in places like China or Cuba (the source material was, after all, by way of libertarian sci fi author Jack Finney).

It could be read any number of ways. Is it an addiction parable? An indictment of psychiatry? Are the pod people religious zealots looking for converts?

Few horror films, other than the very finest virus or zombie films, cast authority figures in such a negative light.

Either way you slice it, Invasion of the Body Snatchers offers much more than a typical zombie contagion movie: the enemy here is just like us, rather than the shuffling, frothing-at-the-mouth, and after a time, interchangeable undead. And it’s much scarier as a result.

****1/2 (out of 5)