RETALIATE IS ENOUGH

Now on VOD...

The Retaliators--Two young women in a van get a flat on a lonely forested road. If you're guessing they don't just get to fix it and be on their way, you're right.

Thus begins this horror tale, like a standard ghouls-in-the-woods nightmare, but the real theme, a la Last House on the Left, is Revenge. When the teenage daughter (Katie Kelly) of a young New Jersey pastor (Michael Lombardi) is murdered, he investigates, and eventually finds himself in a position where he must confront his own commitment to the Christian principle that vengeance is not his.

Co-directed by Samuel Gonzalez, Jr., Bridget Smith and Lombardi from a script by Darren Geare and Jeff Allen Geare, it's an extremely violent and gory shocker. But speaking as an easily frightened wimp, I must say that somehow I didn't find it very scary. It feels like it's trying too hard to be over-the-top gruesome; I couldn't take it seriously. The splatter is icky but never quite horrific on any deeper level.

The only member of the hardworking cast that I recognized was Brian O'Halloran (Dante from the Clerks movies) in a small role near the beginning, as a jerk who takes a Christmas tree away from a little girl. The hardcore killers and sickos in this movie have so little reality that I had a more visceral response to this guy's minor outrage than to their atrocities.

All that said, it must be admitted that this movie isn't predictable. Maybe because of the multiple hands behind the camera, The Retaliators takes a strange and circuitous route to its Jacobean bloodbaths. Whether it's a trip worth taking is a matter of taste, but at least it isn't a trip we've taken before.

COUNTER CULTURE

Another Fathom Events presentation; starting tonight, Tuesday, September 13 and continuing through Sunday, September 18 at select theaters...

Clerks III--28 years after their day was chronicled in Kevin Smith's 1994 indie debut feature, Dante and Randal are still working at New Jersey convenience store Quick Stop Groceries, still playing hockey on the roof, and still bickering like an old married couple. In this sequel to 2006's Clerks II, Randal (Jeff Anderson) is stricken with a heart attack. In the face of this scrape with mortality, he decides to write and direct a movie, with Dante (Brian O'Halloran) as his reluctant producer.

The subject, it need hardly be said, is his life at the counter of a New Jersey convenience store, and his encounters with the various oddballs that frequent the place, among them Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith), Christian Crypto-Currency enthusiast and clerk Elias (Trevor Fehrman) and Dante's ex-girlfriend Veronica (Marilyn Ghigliotti).

The wacky escapades, and the drama, that arise from financing and shooting the movie-within-the-movie make up the balance of the story. Smith freely mixes lowbrow schtick, pop culture chatter and celebrity cameos with religious debate and heartfelt sentiment. Some of it falls flat; some of it is delightful. The old running gags and catchphrases--"I'm not even supposed to be here today," "thirty-seven?" etc--are deployed to good effect, Rosario Dawson has a couple of sweet scenes as Dante's beloved Becky, and when Jay and Silent Bob do their little dance in front of the store, it has a certain silent-clown magic.

But the real sting in Clerks III has do with seeing these characters still going through the same '90s-style slacker paces with soulfully dissipated middle-aged faces. Despite their arrested-adolescent poses, both Anderson and (especially) O'Halloran get across a sense of having emotionally matured; they show a warmth that deepens this silly fan-service movie.