VOD Review: Wolf Mother (2017)

"The movie is a mess, but Najarra shines."

We decided to check out Wolf Mother because it's been looming out there in "Waiting For Release" land for the better part of the last year and a half, and it looked like a cool, off-beat Thriller.

And because we love the hell out of Najarra Townsend.

Having now finally seen it after so long, I have to say that it's not going to be for everybody. If you like pulpy "That dame had a pretty mug on her" kinds of flicks, and if you don't care about coherent plots as long as there are some stylish visuals and some twisted avenues are explored, then you might dig it.

Might.

Ben is a petty thief and a scumbag in general who is on the run for shooting a Cop. Zelda is a former child star turned prostitute who survives on the streets the best she can. Both of them have shameful pasts that they can't come to grips with, and both of them want to kill themselves, but can't find the courage to do so.

TWO PEAS IN A TWISTED POD.

When an 8-year-old starlet is kidnapped by a gang of Satanic pimps called The Band, the two of them form an uneasy partnership to rescue the girl, in an effort to atone for their sins, after which they will help each other commit suicide.

HOLLYWOOD ATE HER UP AND SPIT HER OUT.

On  the road to redemption, Zelda and Ben take jobs in a greasy spoon, and fight off the romantic urges that are beginning to come to life between them.

WOLF MOTHER IN ACTION.

On one hand this movie is a fun little slice of pulpy noir that has some great and twisted ideas going for it. Najarra Townsend's performance made the movie watchable for us, as she owned every second that she was on-screen. She's an Indie darling in every sense of the word, and every since we saw her in Dawning (review HERE) and Contracted (review HERE), we've wondered why she hasn't blown up more.

On the other, Wolf Mother feels like a disjointed attempt to to a pulpier version of a Tarantino film. Much of the dialogue was crude and tried way too hard to feel like it came from some hard-boiled Mike Hammer novel or something.

The plot made little sense either. The movie centers around two people who are living sinful lives who meet each other, and decide to seek redemption by rescuing a child who was kidnapped by a Satanic gang. That's all well and good, but none of it plays out in any sort of logical way. When the two decide to seek out the gang, who has fled north to San Francisco, they decide to take a job in diner in the desert to save money for the rescue... because leaving an 8-year-old girl in the clutches of a gang of Satanic child traffickers is somehow good for the child? "Sure, maybe she'll get raped over and over again, beaten, abused, and maybe even killed, but let's gets jobs for a few weeks?"

Let's not forget that they have two rotting corpses in the trunk of the stolen car that they're driving too. Because that wouldn't give them away in the scorching heat of the desert or anything.

There was a lot of potential in two characters giving chase to an evil group of guys like The Band, and I personally expected it to get all kinds of violent and twisted, but nothing really ever came of it. At the end, when they finally catch up with the gang, the girl was already found alive, and the way that they all "faced off" was clunky and made little sense.

BUT NAJARRA, SHE ROCKS IT.

Plenty of gun violence towards the beginning and end, and some rotting corpses.

WOLF MOTHER SHOOTING BITCHES.

This movie wades in the seedy side of the pool, so there's plenty of nudity and disturbing sexual elements to be had.

HNNNNNNNNNG.

Wolf Mother is a stylish, twisted movie that is definitely way more style than substance. If you're watching this one, it's because you like character studies and noirish pulp. I liked it solely because Najarra Townsend gave a hell of a performance, and we've long said that she deserves bigger roles in better movies.

For her alone, we give this one a 3 out of 5 rating. Without her, it's a 1.

C+

Wolf Mother is available now on VOD.

Najarra Townsend is a sexy bunch of untapped acting potential.

Theatrical Review: Wind River (2017)

"It's movies like this that make us love movies."

Writer/Director Taylor Sheridan is best known to us for playing Deputy Hale on a little TV show that we loved called Sons of Anarchy.

Turns out that he's also one hell of a writer too, penning scripts for the excellent Sicario, and the even more excellent Hell or High Water, which was one of the best movies that we saw last year. He also directed a Horror flick called Vile back in 2011, so as far as we're concerned, he rocks.

Wind River marks the first time that he's directed something he's written, and it's maybe the best work he's done on any front.

Cody Lambert is an agent of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. His days consists of shooting wolves and tracking hungry mountain lions, which keeps him in a bit of a somber mood. The fact that his daughter died a few years earlier, which helped destroy his marriage, probably doesn't help much either. And the bleak, snowy surroundings...

LIONS DON'T MAKE SNOW ANGELS... DO THEY?

When he finds the barefoot body of a local girl out in the wild, things get even bleaker. The girl was best friends with his daughter, and so old wounds mix with new pain to make Cody even more quiet and somber than he normally is, which even for the backwoods of Wyoming, is way too much.

HE'S SEEN SOME SHIT.

With no one knowing the local terrain better than Cody, it falls to him to help a rookie FBI agent track the killer down and bring him (her, them?) to justice. It also falls to him, by way of a promise to the dead girl's father, to kill the son of a bitch when they find him, so you just know it's all going to end with bloodshed.

LOTS OF BLOODSHED.

Where we expected Wind River to be a Serial Killer flick, we instead got a murder mystery wrapped in an emotional blanket of social relevance and heartbreak, and we couldn't be happier about it.

This is a stark and desolate movie that gives us real characters acting in ways that didn't once make them feel like they were characters in a movie. That makes the emotional weight of everything that unfolds around them that much heavier, and as the intensity grows, which it does, we couldn't help but be on the edge of our seat not only wondering what they'd find, but what would happen to them in the process.

We loved the sub-plot with the lion, and the climactic scene at the end was crazy intense, giving us a perfect resolution.

Jeremy Renner turns in what I think is an Oscar-worthy performance as a quiet, broken man who is tasked with finding the killer of a young girl, and every step of his journey shows that he's as adept at his job as he is isolated from everything else in his life. He's a bad-ass, but he's also very human, which made his badassery play even better. He killed us in this one.

Equally as good, but in a different and lesser way, was Elizabeth Olsen as the rookie FBI agent sent to find the killer in the wilds of Wyoming. She's in over her head, but she goes full bore in her pursuit of the killer, especially once she is sucked in by the emotion of the case, and the people involved.

The two of them have great on-screen chemistry, and they both shine in this one. 

LIFE IN WYOMING IS TOUGH.

 She's way too hot to be an FBI agent.

COME ON!

The statistic about Native American women shown at the end is horrifying.

“While missing person statistics are compiled for every other demographic, none exist for Native American women.”

Taylor Sheridan had two attorneys spend three month's trying to compile statistics on the subject but to no avail, because "No one knows how many there are." Shame on us.

THEY DESERVE BETTER.

The violence in this movie isn't gratuitous at all, but it's there towards the end.

WHO WOULD DARE BLOODY THAT ANGEL'S CHEEK?

Aside from a quick shot of some underwear, this in not that kind of movie.

THERE'S NO TAWDRY SEX OR NUDITY IN THIS ONE, ONLY LOVE. SWEET, TRAGIC, FORBIDDEN LOVE.

This movie is filled with some truly fantastic dialogue. The speech that Jeremy Renner gives about pain was special.

Also, "You really didn't see it, did you?" and "He went out with a whimper."

"SAY THAT SHIT AGAIN, YOU HALF-ASSED JASON BOURNE!" WAS A GOOD ONE TOO.

Calling Wind River the best movie of 2017 is a bold claim, I know, but honestly, no other movie that we've seen so far this year has affected us quite like this one did.

Wind River is an excellent movie from start to finish. Its script is air-tight, it has cold and deary atmosphere to spare, and the cast is top-notch. It's one of the most engaging thrillers that we've seen in a long time, which is saying something given how sparse and quiet it is overall.

See it on the big screen.

A+

Wind River is in theaters now.

The traumatized beauties of Wind River.

VOD Review: A Conspiracy of Faith (2016)

"The adventures of Carl Morck and Assad never disappoint."

Movies like this are why we love Scandi Thrillers so much.

The entire Department Q Trilogy has been a captivating, disturbing, and emotional journey to go on, and we're kind of sad to think that this may be the last entry for the story, and especially its characters. There are three more books in the series, but so far none of them are in development as films, and so we will hold out hope that every year or so they'll decide to give us a new adaptation to enjoy.

It's just a comfy, albeit disturbing world to explore for two hours, and we want more. 

After the events of The Absent One left him in an even more fragile mental state than usual, Carl Morck is on sick leave. The poor guy just gets closer and closer to cracking every day, and he's to the point now where he's so stressed out that he's even got the shakes. Lucky for him that his trusty partner Assad, along with their plucky assistant, Rose, are holding things down at Department Q while he's gone.

IN THIS SCENE, ASSAD SHOWS ROSE HIS FAVORITE PAGE FROM THE KAMA SUTRA. ROSE IS INTRIGUED.

When a message in a bottle washes up on the shore of a Jutland beach, Morck and Assad uncover a string of missing children that are somehow connected to a shadowy Religious Cult, which they immediately assume are Jehovah's Witnesses, because they are shadowy as fuck. We're pretty sure that it's got something to do with Pokemon Go too, but that's just a theory.

"QUICK KIDS, GET IN THE CAR... THERE'S A SQUIRTLE NEARBY!"

As always though, the truth is far more complicated than they first believe, and things get pretty dire and dark. Even Satanic. Will this be the case that finally breaks Carl Morck for good? Will Rose and Assad finally hook up? Will there ever be another movie in the Department Q series? Far be it from us to spoil anything for you here, but almost, no, and there had better be, or someone will pay!

"LOOK OUT, CARL!"

The thing about these movies is that at their core, they play pretty much like an episode of anything that bears the title of CSI or NCIS: they catch a case, there's some witty banter, things get hairy, and by the end, the killer is caught, and all is well. What keeps these movies from being as boring and routine as that type of lazy, predictable American crap though, are the lovable and complex characters, and the overall quality of storytelling that makes us genuinely care about them. Also, things get pretty disturbing and the story always seems to go to places that shake the audience up a bit, so that's a big difference too.

AND CAN WE JUST SAY THAT THE LOCATIONS ARE GORGEOUS? BECAUSE THEY ARE.

In A Conspiracy of Faith, the already hectic relationship between Assad and Morck is tested even further when Religion is brought into the picture. Where Assad is a man of faith, choosing to believe in something greater than himself, Carl doesn't believe in much of anything, and has no problem telling Assad what a fool he is because he does. The two are partners, and have become friends by this point, but that's mostly because Assad won't give up on Carl. It's ironic that the man's faith, that Carl decries at every turn, is the one thing that keeps their friendship going, and keeps the man from being totally alone and isolated. 

It's all really kind of beautiful, when you think about it.

Once again, the cast is fantastic in this one. Nikolaj Lie Kaas is more brooding and broken than ever as Carl Morck, and the man effortlessly pulled the emotion out of us with his performance. I can't believe that it took me three movies to realize that Fares Fares is also on a TV show called Tyrant that we watch every week. I'm usually quicker than that. In any case, it was great to see Assad become more of a forefront character in this one instead of just a loyal sidekick, which he kind of was in the first two movies.

ASSAD IS A RIDE OR DIE TYPE OF DUDE.

Some corpses, some stabbing, some gunshot wounds, and a particularly disturbing incident with some scissors... this one has its bloody moments.

I HOPE HE HAS SOME PEROXIDE.

There was a sex scene, but nothing salacious.

HANDS OFF THE KIDS, CREEPER!

The scene at the end in the church illustrates exactly why we've enjoyed these Department Q movies so much. We felt the emotion in a big way.

ALL THOSE FEELS.

We're so glad that we stumbled on this series of films, because they really satisfied the Scandi Noir fans inside of us. We're also really bummed because we've now watched all three of the films in the series, and have nothing new to discover in that world, at least on film. Maybe we can find some solace by reading the other three books for now...

As with its two predecessors, A Conspiracy of Faith is a solidly engaging movie that has some of the best characters that you'll likely find in films of this type, and if you haven't seen them yet, we say that you visit our VOD Release Dates Page, start at the beginning, and enjoy them all.

B+

A Conspiracy of Faith is available now on VOD.

The lovely ladies of A Conspiracy of Faith. More like A Conspiracy of Cuteness, am I right?