On the Couch

DVD review

The Horsemen
Directed by: Jonas Åkerlund
Starring: Dennis Quaid, Ziyi Zhang, Clifton Collins Jr, Chelcie Ross

Watch The Horsemen and you can honestly say that you have officially seen it all. It may be one of the last things you ever see, though, as I’m pretty sure the bible says something about a film featuring the expertise of a forensic dentist being one of the signs of the impending apocalypse.
Bizarre barrel-bottom scraping aside, there’s a lot to like about this Dennis Quaid-starring serial killer flick. Emotionally battered by the death of his wife and unable to connect meaningfully with his sons, Detective Aidan Breslin (Quaid) is called to the scene of a brutal murder that reveals itself to be the first of four symbol-laden slayings.
Like a gruff Alice in Wonderland with a background in dentistry, Breslin heads down a carefully crafted rabbit hole as the murders seem to start hinting at a greater connection between the gumshoe and the dead folk than he might have originally thought.
Covering much of the same torturous ground that se7en did, The Horsemen distinguishes itself through the strong, determined but heartbroken performance of leading man Quaid; Patrick Fugit as his eldest son and a fragile but fascinating Ziyi Zhang as the daughter of one of the murder victims.
Unfortunately the strength of performance isn’t quite met halfway by the plot which, while starting out intriguingly, descends into confusion for its final third.
Up ’til then, the trauma of the case and the agony of Breslin’s slowly dissolving family life are handled well but, as the denoument approches, director Åkerlund seems to lose the run of himself and as the pace speeds up, sense and sensiblilty seem to go out the window resulting in an ending that isn’t nearly as clever or shocking as it thinks it is.
Which is a pity because it was almost very good.

Hell ride
Directed by: Larry Bishop
Starring: Larry Bishop, Michael Madsen, Vinnie Jones, Eric Balfour

Sometimes it takes seeing the work of an avid and financially empowered fan trying to replicate a director’s style to really appreciate them.
And so it is with Larry Bishop and Quentin Tarantino. Star, writer, director and co-producer of Hell Ride, Bishop delved deep into the Kill Bill director’s playbook for his flick but ended up creating the film equivilent of a hyperactive child’s face after they’ve been left alone with mommy’s make-up bag.
Under the banner of “Quentin Tarantino Presents”, this particular messy, but enthusiastically made biker tale rides roughshod over thirty-something years of history of a biker feud between Pistolero (Bishop) and his cronies, The Gent (Madsen) and Comanche (Balfour), and the 666ers, a rival gang headed by the bizarrely tatooed Billy Wings (Vinnie Jones with a weird accent).
Unlike the rip-roaring rampage of revenge that was Kill Bill, however, Hell Ride is more like a stuttering misfire of flashbacks, bar brawls, drunken jags and the occasional orgy, littered with the odd cool musical cue, a funny line or two and a story with about as much substance as a will o’the wisp on the Atkins diet.
The influence of Tarantino’s recent genre flicks, Kill Bill and Death Proof, are obvious and, while both films were, in many cases justifiably, criticised for their flaws, the master’s work looks that much better now when seen through the lens of the student.
Even armed with a keen eye for a shot, access to Tarantino himself for production and many of the actors that populate his films, Bishop cannot produce anything more than a pale immitation of one of the director’s flicks.
In place of story telling and geek-chic that QT gets away with, Bishop has to rely on the coarse, the crass than the completely stupid. And still manages to make a boring movie.