Brad Pitt in World War Z.

Zombie movies are so many light-years away from everything I care about that I faced World War Z with the kind of dread usually reserved for colonoscopies and root canals. But I am pleased to tell you that as zombie flicks go, this one goes down with fewer laughs and more artistry than most. The star is Brad Pitt, who also produced it, so high expectations are justified. He’s an actor with intelligence, skill, craft, integrity and a real feel for how motion pictures should look and move. So to say that World War Z has both brains and action is putting it mildly. It has serious flaws, too. But they have more to do with the impossible task of morphing Max Brooks’s classic but episodic futuristic novel into a coherent narrative that retains the book’s literary style than they do with sustaining interest for nearly two hours in a zombie epic that gets critical respect and also makes money. The good news is that it succeeds on almost every level.

An apocalyptic thriller, it’s a cross between arty pandemic warnings like Steven Soderbergh’s tedious, talky Contagion and a George Romero creature feature. As in Night of the Living Dead, the world is again overrun by wandering herds of the maggot-infested, glassy-eyed undead, but the horror clocks in slowly, interrupting the happy morning ritual of blueberry pancakes in the Philadelphia home of retired U.N. investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt), his wife Karin (an excellent Mireille Enos) and their two daughters. Sifted into the morning news shows, between clips of atmospheric changes and eco-terrorist threats of martial law, the anchormen report disturbing warnings about a virus that is turning people into zombies in 12 countries. Outside, in typical morning gridlock, the Lanes meet panic head-on as cars explode and the entire population of Pennsylvania is running through the streets and crowding bridges, looking for exits, while monsters infected with a rabies virus smash their heads through windshields. The best way to tell a horror story with elements of hysteria is to do it in bursts of interconnected, fast-moving action. As the Lanes head for New York, where Gerry’s old friends from the U.N. promise government aid, shoppers are attacked in supermarket aisles searching for supplies and customers in gas stations are attacked while waiting for fuel. Corpses litter the roads, and gun lobbies rally to blow the oozing zombies to kingdom come with an arsenal of power weapons. This movie is off and running.

Mirelle Enos also stars.

The Lanes get as far as Newark, where they take shelter in the apartment of a family that is decimated by the invading doomsday killing machines, then they score space in a helicopter heading for safe harbor on a military base in the Atlantic, 200 miles from New York City. In record time, the scientists searching for the origin of the virus in order to identify it and develop a vaccine recruit Gerry to head a group of Navy SEALs heading into the unknown. While his terrified family remains aboard the quarantined rescue ship at sea, Gerry and his crackerjack team discover one nightmare after another. Washington, D.C., is dark. The president is dead. Clues provided by a CIA agent (David Morse), now in custody for selling arms to North  Korea, direct them on a global chase to Korea, Jerusalem, Budapest, Malta and Scotland. In Israel, where the Jews have decades of experience building walls, one of the film’s most awesome and effective scenes literally detonates before your eyes as thousands of frothing, foaming zombies form a human ladder, scale the barriers and leap into the populace below while the ancient streets fill with a tidal wave of snarling, biting people. In another vital scene, Mr. Pitt hurls a hand grenade into a commercial jet where the virus has turned the passengers and crew into snarling carnivores, exploding on impact over the landscape like debris. This film will undoubtedly provoke diverse reactions, but nobody can say it’s dull.

Nearing an incendiary finale close to the two-hour mark, World War Z finally turns preposterous when Brad Pitt invades a World Health Organization research facility in Cardiff, Wales, where the pathogens needed to make a zombie vaccine are stored in a sealed-off wing of the facility that has been overtaken by the creatures. It’s his task to travel through the passages full of zombies that connect the two wings, avoid snapping fangs, and retrieve samples of the world’s deadliest diseases, bravely injecting himself with a vial of something lethal to test his theory that with the right vaccine, infected victims can become invisible to zombies.

There’s more, but this is one movie that only works if the ending remains a secret. The hokey 3-D gimmicks (bodies falling from rooftops, helicopters from reverse angles and zombies galore pouncing from every doorway) don’t always pay off, though the end credits for prosthetic devices, zombie makeup and digital effects are still running after the audience has left the cinema. Meanwhile, in an effort to soften the book’s doomsday cynicism, the impact is compromised by a finale in which a number of nice people survive.

Don’t let that deter you. This is not a movie about acting, but Mr. Pitt miraculously manages to survive every obstacle with heroic resolve. And no matter how many changes they made in the Max Brooks novel, the nonstop action packs in the thrills. A lot has been written about how director Marc Forster was repeatedly forced to alter the original book, eliminate whole sequences (including one elaborate section of the movie set in Russia) and dilute the collision of zombies and politics into a movie that would not harm international box office (it is still banned in China). But the third-act message in a film so nihilistic that it would make Friedrich Nietzsche cheer: “Be prepared for anything. Our war has just begun.” Robustly mounted, magnificently photographed and bone-crunchingly terrifying, World War Z towers above every other alleged summer blockbuster. It’s the real deal.

rreed@observer.com

WORLD WAR Z

Written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, Drew Goddard and Damon Lindelof

Directed by Marc Forster

Starring Brad Pitt, Mireille Enos and James Badge Dale

Running time: 116 mins.

Gemma Arterton in Unfinished Song.

In the feel-good-with-a-tear-in-your-eye tradition of such polished, sentimental British films for grownups as Calendar Girls, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Quartet, along comes the polished, predictable but endearing Unfinished Song, a touching and joyous movie with the rare benefit of featuring Vanessa Redgrave and Terence Stamp at the top of their game. It’s about facing the inevitable consequences of age with dignity and grace, but the atmosphere is so relentlessly pleasant and life-affirming, even in life’s cruel third act, that the film is never depressing or maudlin, and sometimes it even makes you laugh.

Mr. Stamp gets his juiciest role in years as Arthur, a grouchy, awkward and difficult old pensioner in the North of England who takes care of his beloved, terminally ill wife Marion (a relentlessly perky Ms. Redgrave). Arthur, who rarely finds anything to smile about, is generally annoyed by just about everything—but especially when cheerful, optimistic Marion joins a choir group for senior citizens at the local community center conducted by warm, freckle-faced music teacher Elizabeth (talented Gemma Arterton). A far cry from old folks at church picnics singing “Greensleeves,” this choir is giving retirement new vigor, trying out an expansive repertoire that includes rock, rap and hip-hop tunes like Salt-n-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby.” Arthur listens in disgust, and at first I didn’t blame him. Vanessa Redgrave, in a knit cap to cover the tragic results of chemotherapy, singing Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” out of tune, in a key that hasn’t been invented yet, is a new definition of agony. When her condition worsens and the entire choir turns up on the lawn at the crack of dawn singing Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” Arthur kicks them off the property in a rage, and I was siding with him all the way.

But singing has a restorative effect on Marion that is hard to ignore. When the choir enters a national singing competition, she rehearses and prepares to travel with the others, disregarding Arthur’s concern that she lacks the physical stamina to participate, but fate has other plans. Ridiculous, frivolous, a waste of time—all of Arthur’s objections to Marion’s singing lessons when she had only a few months to live force him, after her death, to rethink his position. Struggling to cope with loneliness, loss and anger, he finds hope in music. Will he accept the choral director’s invitation to take his wife’s place in the choir, adjust to speed-metal dissonance like Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades,” adapt to a new social environment that might save his life, learn something about growing old with courage and at the same time find a way to reunite with the estranged son (Christopher Eccleston) who is the only family he has left? Just guess.

The resolutions to his bitterness are hardly fresh, and some of the scenes—such as the one in which choir mistress Elizabeth arrives unexpectedly in the middle of the night and pours out her troubles to a man old enough to be her father—are clumsy and unconvincing. In the end, director Paul Andrew Williams fails to resist sentimentality, but classy acting and distinguished production values never sink to the level of soap opera. Unfinished Song moves too slowly for its own good (mourning is doubly taxing in a country where it’s always raining), but it’s a great showcase for Terence Stamp. His transitions are inspired. When resistance gives way to resignation, the surrender in his eyes tells volumes about what’s going on in his heart. The movie wraps you tenderly in a cashmere blanket. And I liked the message that what makes a song beautiful is not always the quality of the voice singing it but the heart and soul behind it.

rreed@observer.com

UNFINISHED SONG

Written by Paul Andrew Williams

Directed by Paul Andrew Williams

Starring Gemma Arterton, Christopher Eccleston, Terence Stamp and Vanessa Redgrave

Running time: 93 mins.

3/4 stars

Elijah Wood in Maniac.

As trashy, pointless slice-and-dicers go, a grotesque chamber of horrors called Maniac has arty production values and features a creepy but sincere central performance by Elijah Wood (best known as Frodo in the Lord of the Rings cycle). But eventually it collapses in a gore fest of nauseating brutality that makes you wonder why they bothered at all.

In a perpetually dark, sinister and virtually deserted Los Angeles that looks like a foreign planet, there’s a serial killer on the loose, stalking girls to their homes, cutting off their electricity, driving an assortment of straight-blade razors and butcher knives through their jugulars, then scalping them. This fiend is freaky, blue-eyed Elijah Wood, a baby-faced actor who thinks all you have to do to play a homicidal maniac is stop shaving. He is a restorer of storefront dummies who lives in a combination bedroom-warehouse and mannequin shop among the severed heads and amputated limbs of his victims. There is never a sense of any other people around. The parking garages, subways and streets where he traps and tortures his future mannequins are always deserted. The focus is on him and his need to kill screaming women begging for mercy and turn them into his own personal wax museum.

Then he meets a girl named Anna whose career focus is photographing mannequins for a bizarre art gallery opening. She thinks he’s got talent and he thinks he has found a soul mate at last. But you can’t keep a good maniac in milk and cookies forever. As soon as she shows the first sign of suspicion, he arrives at her studio with a new collection of designer cutlery, batters her manly, protective neighbor into steak tartare with a baseball bat, and turns her into the prize possession of his collection. No spoilers, but this movie is just gearing up for a wild finale that makes Psycho look like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

Director Franck Khalfoun obviously has ambitions beyond limited showings on Midnight Madness programs. He even names his maniac Frank. Whatever motivation this killer has for drawing and quartering women you have to piece together in flashbacks to his childhood, watching his nymphomaniac mother entertain multiple sex partners. Drawing its inspiration from Silence of the Lambs, which was also about a fiend with a mother complex and a fondness for skinning women alive, Maniac is shot at odd angles from the killer’s viewpoint, his face reflected in glass windows, rearview mirrors and hubcaps. Elijah Wood looks strange, myopic and mentally unhinged, and there is some indication that newcomer Nora Arnezeder, who plays Anna, might have a future as soon as she changes her name into something that will fit on a marquee. Unfortunately, with only the bare outline of a script, no acting is required. The structure of the film is 89 minutes of brutality with a college degree. This is a warning, not a recommendation.

rreed@observer.com

MANIAC

Written by Alexandre Aja, Grégory Levasseur, C.A. Rosenberg and Joe Spinell

Directed by Franck Khalfoun

Starring Elijah Wood, America Olivo and Liane Balaban

Running time: 89 mins.

1/4 stars

Vehicle 19

From South Africa, a better-than-average action thriller called Vehicle 19 pits blue-eyed, charismatic Paul Walker, star of the noisy, ridiculous Fast and Furious programmers (he’s currently leapfrogging this movie with Fast and Furious 6) against another car. The car loses, but only by a fender.

It opens with a police chase going the wrong way in traffic, then flashes back to show why. What happens should be the stuff of solid nail-biting suspense, but the writing and direction by somebody named Mukunda Michael Dewil is too sluggish for its own good, and the fact that the entire movie takes place inside the car adds a relentless claustrophobia factor that is hard to defeat. Mr. Walker, however, meets the challenge of doing all of his emoting behind a steering wheel and strapped to a seat belt with an intensity that is nothing less than riveting.

He plays Michael Woods, recently released from prison and already breaking his parole to fly to Johannesburg, see his ex-wife who works at the American Embassy, convince her he’s given up drinking and persuade her to give him a second chance. Arriving sleepless and behind schedule after a grueling flight from America, he picks up the wrong rental car at the airport (a minivan instead of the sedan he ordered), but he’s in too much of a race against time to sort it out, so he drives away. Frustrated in the continual traffic jam that follows, he finds an automatic weapon under the seat, a cellphone in the glove compartment connected to a hostile detective, and a female prosecutor tied up in the trunk who was on her way to testify in the corruption trial of a powerful police chief accused of human sex trafficking.

Already stressed enough to implode, Michael is pursued by an entire police force that will stop at nothing to prevent his passenger from reaching the courthouse. Fatally wounded in the ensuing pursuit, the woman leaves a taped record of her testimony in Michael’s possession. His only crime is being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But he’s impaled on the horns of a dilemma—if he turns the testimony in to the judge, he will surely end up back in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. If he runs, his own wife’s life is at risk, and he’ll pay the penalty for parole violation anyway. As an American fugitive in a foreign country driving a stolen vehicle, his only chance to survive is to clear his name. But when the judge he’s seeking finally reaches him on the phone, the battery in his cellphone goes dead. What happens next contains a novel twist guaranteed to keep your adrenal glands working overtime.

The trajectory consists of one damn thing after another, with the able Mr. Walker giving it all he’s got without getting out of the vehicle to catch his breath. It is never clear how Mr. Walker manages to negotiate the traffic in an African city as foreign as an African jungle, and the car chases are not entirely plausible, including one in which the van crashes through the plate-glass window of a supermarket and plunges down the aisles with both doors open. Still, the passing parade outside the windows shows you more of South Africa than most films in the same overpopulated urban setting ever do, and as a man working against the clock while trapped in a vehicle out of control, Paul Walker never wastes his time—or yours.

rreed@observer.com

VEHICLE 19

Written by Mukunda Michael Dewil

Directed by Mukunda Michael Dewil

Starring Paul Walker, Naima McLean and Gys de Villiers

Running time: 85 mins.

2.5/4 stars

Rhys Wakefield in The Purge.

As a nauseating variation on the home-invasion theme, The Purge is as sickening as it is dreary. The year is too close for comfort (2022, to be exact) but the events are not as far-out as they seem. America has reached the saturation point of immortality, violence and destruction, and the government has passed a Purge law declaring one night a year as a national holiday. For 12 hours, from curfew until the whistle blows declaring a return to normal, all crimes are legal and anything goes. It’s the American way of the future. If you want to rape a child, behead an adversary, beat your wife or blow up a schoolhouse, now’s your chance, or you’ll have to wait another year for a second try.

As the hour approaches at the upscale gated-community home of wealthy James Sandin (Ethan Hawke), his wife Mary (Lena Headey) and their two kids, they bolt and lock the doors, turn on the television guard monitors and reach for the automatic weapons before announcing “Time for lockdown!” There is no point to this movie, but the point of the Purge is an excuse to release all the prejudice, carnality, rage and suppressed aggression that American citizens have been storing up all year. The results are impressive. Crime is down, the economy is flourishing and Wall Street has never been healthier. Criminologists and psychiatrists have replaced rock stars as the most popular go-to talk show guests, debating the pros and cons of a holiday that is bigger than Sadie Hawkins Day in Dogpatch.

The Sandins are ready for popcorn and a movie, until Junior takes pity on a bloody, terrified black man approaching the house screaming for help and lets him in, opening a floodgate of mayhem. The mob of vengeful kids chasing the victim, wearing hideous Halloween masks and carrying weapons, assault the house and threaten to kill everyone inside.

The next hour devotes itself to spectacular nonstop bouts of wholesale slaughter. The brutality is so brainless and contrived that, at the screening I attended, the audience roared with laughter. A movie with the premise that killing is good for what ails you has its own built-in tension, but before it can make much of a statement about man’s growing inhumanity, The Purge collapses in a virulent travesty of the profanity it pretends to be questioning. “Violate and annihilate” is everyone’s motto, and they do it with machetes, machine guns, hatchets and pistols, watching a Times Square rally thanking all of the people who sacrifice their lives in a “reborn America” on Purge night to “make the world a better place.”

Writer-director James DeMonaco clearly hopes to make a significant moral statement on the level of Shirley Jackson’s literary masterpiece The Lottery. Alas, his aim at political conservatives who support the gun lobby falls flat before he can pull the trigger. The movie is better when it takes occasional comic swipes at the creepy Sandin family by making them look like out-takes from The Donna Reed Show. For a family homemaker with no qualms about homicide, the mother proudly serves up her culinary skills at dinner, bragging “Not one carb!” Then, as soon as the dishes are done, she folds her apron and turns into Zombie Island Massacre. Anyone for blood pudding?

rreed@observer.com

THE PURGE

Written by James DeMonaco

Directed by James DeMonaco

Starring Ethan Hawke, Lena Headey and Max Burkholder

Running time: 85 mins.

1/4 stars

Henry Cavill and Amy Adams in Man of Steel.

Just what we need now. Another movie about Superman. Man of Steel qualifies as one of those bloated, Byzantine summer blockbusters that is here today, gone by Labor Day. Now that I’ve seen it, clocking in at just under two and a half hours, I can file it under movies I never have to see again. Color it exhausting.

Here is an overproduced $225 million comic book with delusions of grandeur that was better made in 1978 and a lot more fun. Although he came from another planet, Christopher Reeve was a suave, all-American crusader for apple pie, the American Way and the good of man. In the reboot, Britain’s Henry Cavill is an impossibly handsome, camera-ready hunk of beefcake milking camera angles for marketing ploys. He’s no Brandon Routh in Superman Returns or Eric Bana in The Hulk. He’s from TV’s The Tudors, he looks like a Playgirl centerfold and he can probably act too, but you won’t find out here. Upstaged in every scene by flying puppets and computer graphics, he’s at the mercy of cornball writing, indifferent directing and the shadow of pretentiousness cast over the proceedings from start to finish by Christopher Nolan. Mr. Nolan already ruined Batman. Now he incinerates the innocence and humor of the Man of Steel, who registers more like a Model of Marzipan.

In all fairness, Mr. Nolan is only the producer, but hack director Zack Snyder is so under the influence of his dedication to style over substance that he seems to be receiving directions through a wire in his ear. Despite an obscene budget that could have made a giant stride in the cure for cancer, there isn’t much originality, and the whole endeavor appears to be the work of grown men who never outgrew puberty.

The first hour is exposition. You know the drill. The doomed planet Krypton has depleted its natural resources and is in danger of being taken over in a military coup by the evil General Zod (Michael Shannon, trying to look sinister with a furrowed brow). Before he is tried and sentenced to death by the degenerate Zod, the wise and beloved political leader Jor-El (Russell Crowe) ships his baby son Kal-El to the planet Earth, where he lands in Smallville, Kansas, on the farm of surrogate parents Jonathan and Martha Kent (Kevin Costner and Diane Lane), who name him Clark. They know he’s got superhuman powers but fear for his safety if the bad guys find out. “You have to keep this part of you a secret,” warns Costner. “You’re the answer to ‘Are we alone in the universe?’”

This is tough advice when you’re targeted by bullies at your job washing dishes at the local IHOP. But you can’t keep a virile comic book hero down for long. Clark saves a school bus full of drowning children by lifting it off of a river bottom with his bare hands—a miracle that raises the suspicions of intrepid journalist Lois Lane while she’s on assignment in Canada to inspect an object trapped in ice for 18,000 years, which may or may not be the spaceship that houses the remains of the demented Zod. No longer depicted as a ditzy girl reporter who is always being saved by Superman, Lois is now a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, played by Amy Adams in the first mediocre and clueless performance of her career. The fun of never knowing who Superman really is has been squelched. Lois knows his identity from the start. Clark Kent is no longer a mild-mannered fellow reporter at the Daily Planet who ducks into conveniently located phone booths to change into bright blue tights in time to save the endangered citizens of Metropolis. Two-fisted editor Perry White is now Laurence Fishburne, and you can forget about photographer Jimmy Olsen altogether.

The indefatigable Zod arrives looking for Kal-El. “Surrender in 24 hours or watch this world suffer the consequences!” he bellows. It’s disheartening to watch a serious actor like Michael Shannon pretend he knows what he’s saying. Kevin Costner gets sucked into a Kansas tornado right out of The Wizard of Oz. Diane Lane’s wrinkles and liver spots are right out of the MGM makeup department files on Greer Garson in Madame Curie. The ghost of Clark Kent’s father Jor-El constantly reappears to offer counsel, but Russell Crowe is no Marlon Brando, who played the part in the 1978 version, although he acts like he thinks he is. The secret to survival is inside the vessel in which Kal-El arrived, now hidden in the storm cellar in Diane Lane’s farmhouse. From here, the movie goes haywire, falling into preposterous plot twists as Lois flies through space in a jet-propelled pea pod, crashing into a cornfield. For the final hour of seemingly interminable drivel, Kansas is overrun with alien combat forces that blow up Sears.

You pass the time pondering weightier questions like, “Will this thing break summer box-office records for kids on vacation who will sit through anything as long as the projectors keep running?” and “Does Henry Cavill have legs, or will he go the way of fellow hunk Taylor Kitsch, star of the ill-fated bomb John Carter?” Meanwhile you learn vital things, like what the “S” on the Superman costume stands for. Redundant, unnecessary and a colossal waste of talent and money, you can pretty much sum up Man of Steel in the scene in which a lady police officer watches with her mouth wide open as Superman tosses aside tanks like Tinker Toys. “What are you smiling about, captain?” asks another cop. “Nothing, sir—I just think he’s hot.”

rreed@observer.com

MAN OF STEEL

Written by David S. Goyer and Christopher Nolan

Directed by Zack Snyder

Starring Henry Cavill, Amy Adams and Michael Shannon

Running time: 143 mins.

2/4 stars

The Prey

The Prey is a busy French thriller that hits the ground running. With more action than one of the Jason Bourne programmers, it’s a strenuous stew of violent surprises and expeditious plot twists that force you to pay attention and stay glued to subtitles that move so fast you will undoubtedly feel a strong need to watch it with your hand on the pause button.

Director Eric Valette has been accused by French critics of mixing too many metaphors in switching gears from prison escape drama to gritty police procedural to breathless manhunt, but there is no denying he knows how to keep a handful of balls in the air at the same time without a fumble. Basic plot: while a bank robber named Franck Adrient (played by rugged Albert Dupontel with a face like fried batter) awaits parole to get his hands on hidden money from a heist, everyone around him strives to beat him to the punch. His wife barely has enough to pay the grocery bill, not to mention their mute daughter’s speech therapist. His newly acquitted cellmate Maurel (Stephane Debac), a convicted pedophile who convinces the police he is innocent, owes him his life. The other prisoners, aided by the corrupt guards, try to torture the location of the buried treasure out of him by driving a screwdriver through his eardrum. Did I mention that The Prey is unbearably (sometimes unwatchably) violent?

When Franck discovers he’s been betrayed on the outside by former cellmate and trusted friend Maurel, who turns out to be a serial killer, he orchestrates an elaborate escape, and the film changes tempos. Maurel frames Franck for his own crimes by stealing the DNA from his comb, steals his money, murders his wife and kidnaps his daughter, and the cops, led by Claire Linne (played by Alice Taglioni as the French version of Mariska Hargitay on Law & Order: SVU), turn Franck into the most wanted man in France. The action is intense to the point of exhaustion, and the hero’s harrowing survivals are next door to preposterous, yet the movie keeps you going, freezes your breath and never flags. Scaling bridges, escaping from impossible heights onto crowded freeways, jumping aboard speeding trains, Franck is a cross between James Bond and Spider-Man.  The plot thickens into a bouillabaisse of narrative detours. Franck’s only ally is a former gendarme (Sergi Lopez, best known as the psychopath from Pan’s Labyrinth) whose own life has been destroyed by the sinister Maurel. One by one, everyone who believed in his innocence is eliminated, and Franck ends up on his own, tracked and pursued by myriad elements while he tries to outsmart the real villain and rescue his 5-year-old daughter from a maniac. There’s no time for the mind to wander.

Okay, The Prey is ridiculous hokum that proves the French can make overwrought Hollywood thrillers with the same indefatigable energy and implausible realism as anyone else. It is also a slick, suspenseful adrenalin rush disguised as unexpected, nerve-wracking fun.

rreed@observer.com

Written by Laurent Turner and Luc Bossi

Directed by Eric Valette

Starring Albert Dupontel, Alice Taglioni and Stéphane Debac

Running time: 102 mins.

Rating: 3/4 stars

Alexis Bledel and Saoirse Ronan in Violet and Daisy.

Two years ago, when a pretentious, lunkheaded little thriller without thrills called Violet & Daisy premiered at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival, the wags were dragging out the old Jean-Luc Godard quote that all you need to make a movie is a girl and gun. This movie has two girls—and an arsenal of weapons that add nothing to a poorly directed, moribund script except a lot of noise.

You could write the plot on the head of a pin. Violet (Alexis Bledel) and Daisy (the excellent Saoirse Ronan with the unpronounceable name, from Atonement and The Lovely Bones) are teenage assassins who carry out their blood-splattered assignments with the same grim, grotesque deadpan reserved for washing a load of soiled panties at the Laundromat. In the first scene, they dress like nuns and kill off a battalion of thugs by firing a round of .38 caliber bullets through pizza boxes. None of this is explained. We don’t know whom they are working for or why. But after they spend their take on a shopping spree, they need a new job. This one promises to be tidy, until they take a shine to their next victim—a pathetic sad sack who is dying of pancreatic cancer, played by James Gandolfini. This is a new kind of target who covers them with a blanket when he catches them taking a nap and offers them oatmeal cookies. They break all the rules by engaging him in conversation, with dialogue like this: “Is this an interview or a hit?”  “I don’t know. You got any milk?”

It gets dopier. And uglier. After one massacre, they jump up and down on the corpses to a rock ’n’ roll beat while the blood spurts out of the victims’ mouths. After piling four bodies into Mr. Gandolfini’s bathtub, Violet insists they finish off Mr. Gandolfini too. (He has no name in the film.) Then Daisy has a humanity attack and they help the victim write a goodbye letter to his estranged daughter. I mean, this guy makes great cookies, and he’s going to die anyway. Like girls who have spent entirely too much time watching Law & Order marathons, they drone on about forensics, ballistics and the risk of looking unprofessional. When everything else fails, they resort to dream sequences in which they kill off half of Brooklyn to a soundtrack stuffed with everything from Ravel’s “Pavane pour une infante défunte” to Nat King Cole singing “Answer Me, My Love.”

This disoriented drivel was written by—and marks the directing debut of—Geoffrey Fletcher, who won an Academy Award for writing Precious. It’s weird, but not in a good way. It’s violent, but not in any way you could call exhilarating. Mostly it’s just living proof that the movie business today is run by an inexhaustible supply of dilettantes. Win an Oscar and all of the rotten, rejected scripts you’ve been hiding in your desk suddenly get produced whether anybody ever sees them or not—and they even let you direct, no previous experience necessary. The result, in the case of Violet & Daisy, is artsy-fartsy gibberish executed with a staggering incoherence that smacks of desperation. In one dream sequence, Daisy meets up with a secret agent sucking a lollipop (the distinguished Marianne Jean-Baptiste) who is late for her ballet class. “Do you know what I wanted to be when I was your age?” “No.” “I don’t either.” That’s the kind of pointless bilge this movie spouts without blinking.

I saw this artificial dirge with a group of friends who indulged me by trying to watch it with me. Thirty minutes on, one of them said, “Does anybody have any idea what this thing is about?” The rest of us gave up without a struggle.

 rreed@observer.com

VIOLET & DAISY

Written by Geoffrey Fletcher

Directed by Geoffrey Fletcher

Starring Saoirse Ronan, Alexis Bledel and Tatiana Maslany

Running time: 88 mins.

Rating: 1/4 stars

Kelli O’Hara and Nancy Anderson in Far From Heaven.

Turning the great 2002 film Far From Heaven, Todd Haynes’s magnificent satire of Hollywood’s “women’s pictures” from the sanitized, repressed 1950s, into a stylized musical at Playwrights Horizons in liberated 2013 is a risky gambit. Despite the formidable talents involved, it turns out to be a big, flat disappointment. This is unsurprising. Dramatic movies that morph into splashy stage musicals usually fail to live up to the standards that made them memorable in the first place. Stage history is littered with the musically mutilated, critically autopsied cadavers of On the Waterfront, East of Eden, A Raisin in the Sun, The Member of the Wedding and on and on. Adding Far From Heaven to the ghost parade is especially disheartening, because it had so much potential and seemed like such a sure thing. It retained the bright colors, lavish settings and intense camera movements that were trademarks of those lush, ripe, Technicolor Douglas Sirk soap operas like Magnificent Obsession, Imitation of Life and Written on the Wind. But Mr. Haynes was not interested in remakes; using the glamour-glazed heartbreak of one weepie in particular—a glossy 1955 hit called All That Heaven Allows—as a template, he constructed a revisionist arc beyond the perimeters of melodrama to reveal the dark shadows lurking behind the organdy curtains of perfect white-bread Hartford, Conn., in the Eisenhower era. To discuss the failures of the new stage musical, it is necessary to take a second look at what Mr. Haynes accomplished in the acclaimed 2002 film of the same name.

In All That Heaven Allows, affluent suburban widow Cathy Whitaker (valentine-faced Jane Wyman) scandalized her friends, her college-age children and the snobs in her Connecticut country club when she fell in love with a much younger hunk (Rock Hudson) who also happened to be (holy hairspray!) her flannel-shirted and perennially tanned gardener. A laughable conflict now, but a cause for much heavy breathing in 1955 among frustrated housewives (Mr. Hudson, in retrospect, was a heady alternative to the Betty Crocker cookbook) and sexually confused teenage girls and boys (some of whom did not, at the time, know why).  So along comes the gifted and precocious Mr. Haynes, who offered a tantalizing second look at a naïve period in our national conscience when the man brought home the bacon and the little woman fried it, between perfecting home economics, helping the kids with homework, doing good works for charity, arranging cocktail parties, perfecting seven different ways to serve Velveeta and trying to live up to the values of Ozzie and Harriet. But, Far From Heaven asked, what if Ozzie was secretly gay, and the gardener Harriet fell for was black?

Homosexuality, prejudice, interracial relations—subjects forbidden on the screen in the gray-on-gray ’50s—could fuel real hatred and gossip, and setting his film in the same time frame turned the concept for All That Heaven Allows into something very Far From Heaven indeed.

With direction by Michael Greif and a score by Scott Frankel and lyricist Michael Korie—the creative team responsible for the sensational Grey Gardens—and a revised book by the prolific Richard Greenberg, the yellow leaves fall while Kelli O’Hara (lacking the pathos of both Jane Wyman and her 2002 equivalent, Julianne Moore) sings about “Autumn in Connecticut” while her handsome husband Frank (Steven Pasquale, bravely failing to muster even a fraction of Dennis Quaid’s unforgettable portrait of tortured manhood in the film) is arrested for loitering in front of a gay bar. The period clothes, the matching shoes and handbags, the dry martinis, the Lana Turner hair that never moves even in a windstorm—the trappings are there in Allen Moyer’s antiseptic sets and Catherine Zuber’s re-creation of Edith Head costumes. But despite the style, there is no substance. Kelli O’Hara sings like a dream, but what she’s singing is mere lip service to the thorny subtext that is tearing her life apart. She plans menus and plants zinnias while her husband drinks too many vodka stingers, hiding the fact that their perfect lives are festering. But the literal playing-out of the narrative ends up as superficial as the plastic values Todd Haynes was trying to expose on film in the first place. Watching the story unfold out of context, it’s just another story—and not a very interesting one at that. And as an ordinary, unexceptional story dramatized in 2013, it lacks relevance. What’s so shocking about a woman who embraces the only man she can talk to, who happens to be black, or a man who discovers he’s gay? In fact, when his shrink prescribes electroshock aversion therapy to achieve “full heterosexual conversion,” the audience at the performance I attended burst out laughing.

In opposition to the fine work they did in Grey Gardens, the songs Mr. Frankel and Mr. Korie have written here are mock-operatic, Sondheim-derivative and embarrassingly banal. After Ms. O’Hara catches her husband in the arms of another man, she is actually forced to sing, “Maybe there’s a book or pamphlet ... a tip sheet I can read ... practical advice and pointers ... to be the wife you need.” To prove he’s not your typical black servant, the gardener (Isaiah Johnson, in fine voice) actually sings a talky aria about the painter Miró. But the worst of it lands in the larynx of the valiant Mr. Pascal as the straight-and-narrow husband whose path takes a cruel detour. When he finally leaves Cathy for a boy half his age, he croons, “I thought I could get well and be a normal human being ... But when I lost my heart I found it when I fell ... I never meant to hurt the kids or you ... I only know how much I never knew.” The ultimate irony is that Cathy, the centrifugal force behind every other life in the play, is left with no life of her own, trapped in her own hell with no skills and no prospects, alone with her meatloaf, her waxed floors and the responsibilities of a single mother. Nothing like that ever happened to Barbara Stanwyck. In this respect, the musical is true to the Todd Haynes film, but you see the impact without feeling it.

Musically, there’s nothing to write home about either. Everyone in the cast is forced to hit notes that aren’t always comfortable to sing or listen to. Worst of all, the sets turn into revolving cages, to the audience’s continual annoyance. Obviously the cages are metaphors for souls behind bars. For people who try to look beyond the surface of things and end up paying a terrible price, the characters in Far From Heaven are cardboard paper dolls. They make music, but there’s no music in the sound.

 rreed@observer.com

American Mary.

Touted as the Next Big Thing in horror, the creepy Soska sisters, Jen and Sylvia, are the writing-directing team that polluted the ozone with a numbing low-budget cult favorite called Dead Hooker in a Trunk. Their new shlockfest is American Mary, the sole purpose of which is to storm the barriers of public decency to see how much nausea and pain an audience can take. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, this freak show delves into the poisonous subculture of unconventional body-modification addiction to test the limits of your tolerance for gore and push the envelope of perversion to see just how far a filmmaker can go without being taken into custody. In the case of the teeth-crunching, lip-licking Soskas, the answer is: “Further than you might think, outside of an insane asylum.” They are not called “The Twisted Twins” for nothing.

No boring, stumbling zombies or goggle-eyed teenage vampires here. The terror is the unspeakable carnage human beings inflict on each other in the name of money and science. American Mary is a medical thriller that follows the bloody footprints of a beautiful but seriously demented psycho named Mary Mason, a medical student who answers adult classified ads to earn extra money for med school. Her career begins in an underground sex club, sewing up what’s left of the mutilated body of a client who has been tortured unconscious. The pay is good, and who cares if the corpses mount? That’s what dumpsters are for. So in record time, without skills, insurance, an operating room or proper surgical instruments, Mary turns into a female Jack the Ripper, replete with her own website. Think Dr. Mengele with a cell phone. One plastic surgery addict pays her $10,000 to remove her sex organs so she can resemble a perfect Barbie doll instead of a human sex object. Another male customer opts for a new penis, ignoring warnings of the life-altering consequences of masturbation. With no time to sleep, she continues to make her rounds as a hospital intern. “I’m very impressed, Mary,” says one of her instructors. “I can’t wait to see how you perform when you start cutting into people. You’re going to be a great slasher. The adrenaline rush you get from slicing into human beings will help you through your most sleep-deprived days.” The other doctors are shocked, but Mary just smiles. After all, she’s doing it all already in her off-hours, answering ads you never see on Craigslist.

Up to this point, the movie is a campy hoot. But after she is drugged and raped by two of her faculty advisors, Mary drops out of med school and devotes her talents to full-time revenge. Beginning with 14 hours of hard-core tongue splitting, the audience is forced to witness teeth filing, genital modification, involuntary amputation, and a double mastectomy. As the torsos of Mary’s decapitated victims hang from meat hooks in the cellar rooms of the sex club where she proves equally adept at lap-dancing, our heroine reaches the zenith of her achievement—turning a pair of lesbian sisters into Siamese twins. Wielding foot-long hypodermic syringes in one hand and a whirring buzz saw in the other, arms fall away like tree limbs. “Don’t ever devalue what you do, Mary,” says the sex club bouncer. “Just make sure they deserve it, and don’t waste a minute of your time thinking about them after you’re done.”

The same must be said about the movie, although there are already 96 rave reviews of American Mary posted on the Internet (none from reputable critics). One reader comment I read praised the cinematography—a major puzzlement, since most of the movie is so dark it looks it was filmed in a blackout. The acting is uniformly dreadful. The level of incompetence in both writing and direction is a scream. The entire movie was made in Vancouver in 15 days and looks it. Mary is played in blood-splattered butcher aprons worn over black lace panties by Katharine Isabelle, who developed her own fan base after starring in a unique horror flick called Ginger Snaps. The Soska sisters, who appear in cameos as the lesbian lovers Mary conjoins into Siamese twins, look like Goth vampires and speak with incomprehensible accents that sound like Bela Lugosi on Halloween night movie marathons. Whether the whole thing is intended as a sick joke—or a warning about the perverted direction in which the once-honorable tradition of horror movies is now heading—is anybody’s guess. The Soska sisters did do some impressive research. Google the growing body-mod business and you’ll be shocked to discover that the number of freaks seeking missing noses and genital piercings is growing. But does anybody care? With American Mary as an example, their secret is safe with me.

rreed@observer.com

AMERICAN MARY

Written by Jen Soska and Sylvia Soska

Directed by Jen Soska and Sylvia Soska

Starring Katharine Isabelle, Antonio Cupo and Tristan Risk

Running time: 103 mins.

Rating: 0/4 stars