Exit Wounds

Despite having a Polish director and a star, Steven Seagal, who was granted Russian citizenship a few years back, Exit Wounds practically counts as Canadian.

The 2001 action effort is filmed in Toronto, Hamilton and Calgary, has Jill Hennessy, and has exterior shots of the country’s national broadcaster, the CBC, and also prominent visuals of three iconic brands including favorite quick service resto, Tim Hortons. The icing on the cake? A brief discussion of the “greatest” athletes of all time, including, appropriately enough, a Canadian advocating on behalf of Wayne Gretzky, aka, The Great One.

And Exit Wounds, is good, if not great. Still, the flick represents the last, best, real movie Seagal ever made, before being banished to Euro purgatory – and not for being #meToo’ed, but for eating his way out of mainstream releases and for, by all accounts, being a pompous self-mythologizing ass-hat.

In this one, he’s a rogue cop instead of an ex-special forces op, displaying the acting range of, um…a child’s walkie-talkie if you’re familiar with his career.

Because he uses unorthodox means to save the life of the VP, and risking his own in the process, instead of some kind of medal for heroism, he’s banished to the red-headed stepchildren of Detroit police precincts, the 15th, which despite having commemorative cufflinks, is full of corrupt bad apples.

There, he has to suss out who he can trust, and to do so by being his usual Squinty McGee self. Tom Arnold, a chattering AM television personality, helps Seagal’s character gain intel about a heroin syndicate, with ties deep behind the Thin Blue Line.

But thin Seagal ain’t. This is a point of demarcation for our man Seagal, after which he never refused seconds and started to drape himself in ponchos to cover his exploding girth.

Regardless, he kicks a lot of ass here, including wiping out a multi-ethnic gang that was breaking into his ride, making unibrows black and blue and battering a bunch of ‘roided up bouncers too for good measure.

*** (out of 5)

A Classic Horror Story

A hicksploitation / folk horror mashup, A Classic Horror Story doesn’t exactly break new ground until the end, but it’s a serviceable enough tribute to both genres even if the title is wildly misleading.

The setup is familiar enough to fans of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Wrong Turn: the perils of being stranded roadside. In this case, it’s some kind of camper van rideshare. This is a bit of a confusing scenario right off the bat for North American viewers, unless you’re aware that this more impoverished part of Italy, Calabria, is international tourist-free and Mafia-ravaged and not the most accessible locale and absent the bullet trains that dot the rest of Europe.

Driver Fab reluctantly allows Bristol, England passenger Mark to take the wheel, and he swerves the vehicle into a tree to avoid what looks like a dead rabbit in the middle of the remote mountain road.

This is possibly what the title refers to as a Classic Horror Story, even if what happens next resolutely is not.

The group of travellers, which includes a disgraced doc, a young couple and a Calabria native considering an abortion, find themselves completely removed from the nearest road, despite the RV not veering too far off the path.

The film then morphs into tropes and visual cues common to folk horror – those Jägermeister logo-like masks, buzzing flies, straw effigies, bonfires, animal sacrifice, etc., most recently seen – and perhaps better executed in – the 2017 British horror, The Ritual.

The twist at the end (no spoilers), isn’t wholly a believable payoff.

A Classic Horror Story has some nice scares, particularly an eye gouging that pulls back from the brutal approach Lucio Fulci might’ve taken had this been lensed 40 years ago, via Zombie or The Beyond.

What’s particularly off-putting, however, is a virtual chat coda in which one user opines that Italians cannot make good horror movies, which unless it’s a lost-in-translation in-joke, is an unconscionable statement.

*** (out of 5)